Hey! <retracted because I changed my mind about the sensibleness of putting personal info on the internet and more people started recognising my name than I’m happy with>
I think it’s a bit of a shame that society seems to funnel our most intelligent, logical people away from social science. I think social science is frequently much more helpful for society than, say, string theory research.
Note: I do find it plausible that doing STEM in undergrad is a good way to train oneself to think, and the best combo might be a STEM undergrad and a social science grad degree. You could do your undergrad in statistics, since statistics is key to social science, and try to become the next Andrew Gelman.
As advice for others like me, this is good. For me personally it doesn’t work too well; my A level subjects mean that I won’t be able to take a STEM subject at a good university. I can’t do statistics, because I dropped maths last year. The only STEM A level I’m taking is CompSci, and good universities require maths for CompSci degrees. I could probably get into a good degree course for Linguistics, but it isn’t a passionate adoration for linguistics that gets me up in the mornings. I adore human and social sciences.
I don’t plan to be completely devoid of STEM education; the subject I actually want to take is quite hard-science-ish for a social science. If I get in, I want to do biological anthropology and archaeology papers, which involve digging up skeletons and chemically analysing them and looking at primate behaviour and early stone tools. It would be pretty cool to do some kind of PhD involving human evolution. From what I’ve seen, if I get onto the course I want to get onto, it’ll teach me a lot of biology and evolutionary psychology and maybe some biochemistry and linguistics.
I want to do biological anthropology and archaeology papers, which involve digging up skeletons and chemically analysing them and looking at primate behaviour and early stone tools.
While archaeology certainly seems fun, do you think it will help you understand how to build a better world?
But to an extent, the biggest problems—coordination problems, how-do-we-build-a-half-decent-state problems—have been around since the very beginning.
No. The problem of building a state out of 10,000 people who’s fasted way of transport is the horse and who have no math is remarkably different from the problem of building a state of tens of millions of people in the age of the internet, cellphones fast airplanes and cars that allow people to travel fast.
The Ancient Egyptians didn’t have the math to even think about running a randomized trial to find out whether a certain policy will work.
Studying them doesn’t tell you anything about how to get our current political system to be more open to make policy based on scientific research.
Evolutionary psychology is incredibly useful for understanding our own biases and fallacies.
I think cognitive psychologists who actually did well controlled experiments were a lot more useful for learning about biases and fallacies than evolutionary psychology.
rather than just carrying my magnifying glass straight over to political science and becoming the three gazillionth and fourth person to ever look for a better more ideal way to do politics.
Most people in political science don’t do it well. I don’t know of a single student body that changed to a new political system in the last decade.
I did study at the Free University of Berlin which has a very interesting political structure that came out of 68′s. At the time there was a rejection of representative democracy and thus even through the government of Berlin wants the student bodies of universities in Berlin to be organised according to representative democracy, out university effectively isn’t.
Politics students thought really hard around 68 about how to create a more soviet style democracy and the system is still in operation today.
Compared to designing a system like that today’s politics students are slacking. The aren’t practically oriented.
I’m interested in doing work on rationality problems and cooperation problems, and looking at the origins of the problems and how our current solutions came into being over the course of human history seems worthwhile as part of understanding the problems and figuring out more/better solutions.
If you are interested in rationality problems, there the field of decision science. It’s likely more yielding then anthropology.
Having a good grasp of academic decision science would be helpful when it comes to designing political systems and likely not enough people in political science deal with that subject.
Are you aware that the American Anthropological Association dropped science from their long-range plan 5 years ago?
No, that’s not the meaning of the word soviet. Soviet translates into something like “counsel” in English.
Reducing elections to a single candidate also wouldn’t fly legally. You can’t just forbid people from being a candidate without producing a legal attack surface.
As I said, it’s actually a complex political system that need smart people to set up.
It’s like British Democracy also happens to “democracy” where there a queen and the prime minister went to Eton and Oxford and wants to introduce barrier on free communication that are is some way more totalitarian than what the Chinese government dares to do.
Democracy always get’s complicated if it comes to the details ;).
No, that’s not the meaning of the word soviet. Soviet translates into something like “counsel” in English.
In English, “Soviet” is the adjectival form of “USSR”.
Never mind the word. What is the actual structure at the Free University of Berlin that you’re referring to? And in 1968, did they believe that this was how things were done in the USSR?
In English, “Soviet” is the adjectival form of “USSR”.
Because Soviets are a central part of how the USSR was organised.
And in 1968, did they believe that this was how things were done in the USSR?
Copying on things were in the USSR wasn’t the point. The point are certain Marxist ideas about the value of Soviets for political organisation.
What is the actual structure at the Free University of Berlin (FU) that you’re referring to?
A system of of soviets, as I said above.
There a lot of ideas involved. On the left you had a split between people who believe in social democracy and people who are Marxists. The FU Asta is Marxist.
The people sitting in it are still Marxist even through the majority of the student population of the FU isn’t and they don’t have a problem with that as they don’t believe in representative democracy. They also defend their right to use their printing press to print whatever they want by not disclosing what they are printing. By law they are only allowed to print for university purposes and not for general political activism.
The problem of studying people in the first villages is not only that their problems don’t map directly to today. It’s also that it’s get’s really hard to get concrete data. It’s much easier to do good science when you have good reliable data.
With 10,000 people you can solve a lot via tribal bonds and clans. Families stick together. You can also do a bit of religion and everyone follows the wise local priest. Those solutions don’t scale well.
It seems mostly irrelevant to me though, since I am aware that rubbish social scientists exist and I just want to try and improve and be a good social scientist.
You are likely becoming like the people that surround you when you go into university. You also build relationships with them.
Going to Cambridge is good. Cambridge draws a lot of intelligent people together and also provides you with very useful contacts for a political career.
On the other hand that means that you have to go to those place in Cambridge where the relevant people are.
Find out which professors at Cambridge actually do good social science. Then go to their classes.
Just make sure that you don’t get lost and go on a career of digging up old stuff and not affecting the real world. A lot of smart people get lost in programs like that. It’s like smart people who get lost in theoretical physics.
I think cognitive psychologists who actually did well controlled experiments were a lot more useful for learning about biases and fallacies than evolutionary psychology.
I agree wholeheartedly. A field like theoretical physics is much more glamorous to large number of intelligent people. I think it’s partly signaling, but I’m not sure that explains everything.
What makes the least sense to me are people who seem to believe (or even explicitly confirm!) that they are only interested in things which have no applications. Especially when these people seem to disparage others who work in applied fields. I imagine this teasing might explain a bit of why so many smart people work in less helpful fields.
I think to an extent, physics is more intellectually satisfying to a lot of smart people. It’s much easier to prove things for definite in maths and physics. You can take a test and get right answers, and be sure of your right answers, so when you’re sufficiently smart it feels like a lot of fun to go around proving things and being sure of yourself. It feels much less satisfying to debate about which economics theories might be better.
Knowing proven facts about high level physics makes you feel like an initiate into the inner circles of secret powerful knowledge, knowing a bunch about different theories of politics (especially at first) just makes you feel confused. So if you’re really smart, ‘hard’ sciences can feel more fun. I know I certainly enjoy learning computer science and feeling the rush of vague superiority when I fix someone’s computer for them (and the rush of triumph when my code finally compiles). When I attempt to fix people’s sociological opinions for them, there’s no rush of vague superiority, just a feeling of intense frustration and a deeply felt desire to bang my head against the wall.
Then there’s the Ancient Greek cultural thing where sitting around thinking very hard is obviously superior to going out and doing things—cool people sit inside their mansions and think, leaving your house and mucking around in the real world actually doing things is for peasants—which has somehow survived to this day. The real world is dirty and messy and contains annoying things that mess up your beautiful neat theories. Making a beautiful theory of how mechanics works is very satisfying. Trying to actually use the theory to build a bridge when you have budget constraints and a really big river is frustrating. Trying to apply our built up knowledge about small things (molecules) to bigger things (cells) to even bigger things (brains) to REALLY BIG AND COMPLICATED things (lots and lots of brains together, eg a society) is really intensely frustrating. And the intense frustration and higher difficulty (more difficult to do it right, anyway) means there’s more failure and less conclusive results / slower progress, which leads some people to write off social science as a whole. The rewarding rush of success when your beautifully engineered bridge looks shiny and finished is not something you really get in the social sciences, because it will be a very long time before someone feels the rewarding rush of success that their beautiful preference-satisfying society is shiny and perfect.
I do think that the natural sciences are hopelessly lost without the social sciences, but for most super-clever people, is studying natural science more fun than doing social science? Definitely—I mean, while the politics students are busy reading books and banging their heads against walls and yelling at each other, physics students are putting liquid nitrogen in barrels of ping pong balls so that the whole thing explodes! (I loved chemistry in secondary school for years, right up until I finally caught on that coloured flames were the closest we were going to get to scorching our eyebrows off. Something about health and safety, thirteen year olds, and fire. I wish I hadn’t stopped loving chemistry, because I hear once you’re at university they do actually let you set things on fire sometimes.)
I don’t think that something being (more) mathematically rigorous explains all of what we see. Physicists at one time used to study fluid dynamics. Rayleigh, Kelvin, Stokes, Heisenberg, etc., all have published in the field. You can do quite a lot mathematically in fluids, and I have felt like part of some inner circle because of what I know about fluid dynamics.
Now the field has been basically displaced by quantum mechanics, and it’s usually not considered part of “physics” in some sense, and is less popular than I think you might expect if a subject being amenable to mathematical treatment is attractive to some folks. Physicists are generally taught only the most basic concepts in the field. My impression is that the majority of physics undergrads couldn’t identify the Navier-Stokes equations, which are the most basic equations for the movement of a fluid.
It could also be that fluids have obvious practical applications (aerodynamics, energy, etc.) and this makes the subject distasteful to pedants. That’s just speculation, however. I’m really not sure why fields like physics, etc., are so attractive to some people, though I think you’ve identified parts of it.
You do make a good point about the sense of completion being different in engineering vs. social science. I suppose the closest you could get in social science is developing some successful self-help book or changing public policy in a good way, but I think these are much harder than building things.
I think there’s also definitely a prestige/coolness factor which isn’t correlated with difficulty, applicability, or usefulness of the field.
Quantum mechanics is esoteric and alien and weird and COOL and saying you understand it whilst sliding your glasses down your nose makes you into Supergeek. Saying “I understand how wet stuff splashes” is not really so… high status. It’s the same thing that makes astrophysics higher status than microbiology even though the latter is probably more useful and saves more lives / helps more people—rockets spew fire and go to the moon, bacteria cells in a petri dish are just kind of icky and slimy. I am quite certain that, if you are smart enough to go for any field you want, there is a definite motivation / social pressure to select a “cool” subject involving rockets and quarks and lasers, rather than a less cool subject involving water and cells or… god forbid… political arguments.
And, hmm, actually, not quite true on the last point—a social scientist could develop an intervention program, like a youth education program, that decreases crime or increases youth achievement/engagement, and it would probably feel awesome and warm and fuzzy to talk to the youths whose lives were improved by it. So you could certainly get closer than “developing some successful self-help book”. It is certainly harder, though, I think, and there’s certainly a higher rate of failure for crime-preventing youth education programs than for modern bridge-building efforts.
Quantum mechanics is esoteric and alien and weird and COOL
To be honest, I found QM to be the least interesting subject of all physics which I’ve learned about.
Also, I don’t think the features you highlighted work either. Fluid dynamics has loads of counterintuitive findings, perhaps even more so than QM, e.g., streamlining can increase drag at low Reynolds numbers, increasing speed can decrease drag in certain situations (“drag crisis”). Fluids also has plenty of esoteric concepts; very few people reading the previous sentence likely know what the Reynolds number or drag crisis is.
Physicists, even astrophysicists, know little more about how rockets work than educated laymen. Rocketry is part of aerospace engineering, of which the foundation is fluid dynamics. Maybe rocketry is a counterexample, but I don’t really think so, as there are a lot more people who think rockets are interesting than who know what a de Laval nozzle is. Even that has some counterintuitive effects; the fluid accelerates in the expansion!
You make me suddenly, intensely curious to find out what a Reynolds number is and why it can make streamlining increase drag. I am also abruptly realising that I know less than I thought about STEM fields, given I just kind of assumed that astrophysicists were the official People Who Know About Space and therefore rocketry must be part of their domain. I don’t know whether I want to ask if you can recommend any good fluid dynamics introductions, or whether I don’t want to add to the several feet high pile of books next to my bed...
Okay—so why do you think quantum mechanics became more “cool” than fluid dynamics? Was there a time when fluid dynamics held the equivalent prestige and mystery that quantum mechanics has today? It clearly seems to be more useful, and something that you could easily become curious about just from everyday events like carrying a cup of tea upstairs and pondering how near-impossible it is not to spill a few drops if you’ve overfilled it.
The best non-mathematical introduction I have seen is Shape and Flow: The Fluid Dynamics of Drag. This book is fairly short; it has 186 pages, but each page is small and there are many pictures. It explains some basic concepts of fluid dynamics like the Reynolds number, what controls drag at low and high Reynolds numbers, why golf balls (or roughened spheres in general) have less drag than smooth spheres at high Reynolds number (this does not imply that roughening always reduces drag; it does not on streamlined bodies as is explained in the book), how drag can decrease as you increase speed in certain cases, how wind tunnels and other similar scale modeling works, etc.
Beyond that, the most popular undergraduate textbook by Munson is quite good. I’d suggest buying an old edition if you want to learn more; the newer editions do not add anything of value to an autodidact. I linked to the fifth edition, which is what I own.
I’ll offer a few possibilities about why fluids is generally seen as less attractive than QM, but I want to be clear that I think these ideas are all very tentative.
This study suggests that in an artificial music market, the popularity charts are only weakly influenced by the quality of the music. (Note that I haven’t read this beyond the abstract.) Social influence had a much stronger effect. One possible application of this idea to different fields is that QM became more attractive for social reasons, e.g., the Matthew effect is likely one reason.
The vast majority of the field of fluid mechanics is based on classical mechanics, i.e., F = m a is one of the fundamental equations used to derive the Navier-Stokes equations. Maybe because the field is largely based on classical effects, it’s seen as less interesting. This could be particularly compelling for physicists, as novelty is often valued over everything else.
I’ve also previously mentioned that fluid dynamics is more useful than quantum mechanics, so people who believe useless things are better might find QM more interesting.
There also is the related issue that a wide variety of physical science is lumped into the category “physics” at the high school level, so someone with a particular interest might get the mistaken impression that physics covers everything. I majored in mechanical engineering in college, and basically did it because my father did. My interest even when I was a teenager was fluids, but I hadn’t realized that physicists don’t study the subject in any depth. I was lucky to have picked the right major. I suppose this is a social effect of the type mentioned above.
(Also, to be clear, I don’t want to give the impression that more people do QM than fluids. I actually think the opposite is more likely to be true. I’m saying that QM is “cooler” than fluids.)
Fluid mechanics used to be “cooler” back in the late 1800s. Physicists like Rayleigh and Kelvin both made seminal contributions to the subject, but neither received their Nobel for fluids research. I recall reading that two very famous fluid dynamicists in the early 20th century, Prandtl and Taylor, were recommended for the prize in physics, but neither received it. These two made foundational contributions to physics in the broadest sense of the word. Taylor speculated the lack of Nobels for fluid mechanics was due to how the Nobel prize is rewarded. I also recall reading that there was indications that the committee found the mathematical approximations used to be distasteful even when they were very accurate. Unfortunately those approximations were necessary at the time, and even today we still use approximations, though they are different. Maybe the lack of Nobels contributes to fluids not being as “cool” today.
Ooh, yay, free knowledge and links! Thankyou, you’re awesome!
The linked study was a fun read. I was originally a bit skeptical—it feels like songs are sufficiently subjective that you’ll just like what your friends like or is ‘cool’, but what subjects you choose to study ought to be the topic of a little more research and numbers—but after further reflection the dynamics are probably the same, since often the reason you listen to a song at all is because your friend recommended it, and the reason you research a potential career in something is because your careers guidance counselor or your form tutor or someone told you to. And among people who’ve not encountered 80k hours or EA, career choice is often seen as a subjective thing. It’d be like with Asch’s conformity experiments where participants aren’t even aware that they’re conforming because it’s subconscious, except even worse because it’s subconscious and seen as subjective...
That seems like a very plausible explanation. There could easily be a kind of self-reinforcing loop, as well, like, “I didn’t learn fluid dynamics in school and there aren’t any fluid dynamics Nobel prize winners, therefore fluid dynamics isn’t very cool, therefore let’s not award it any prizes or put it into the curriculum...”
At its heart, this is starting to seem like a sanity-waterline problem like almost everything else. Decrease the amount that people irrationally go for novelty and specific prizes and “application is for peasants” type stuff, and increase the amount they go for saner things like the actual interest level and usefulness of the field, and prestige will start being allocated to fields in a more sensible way. Fluid dynamics sounds really really interesting, by the way.
Also perhaps worth noting that the effect within the LW subculture in particular may have to do with lots of LW users knowing a lot about ideas or disciplines where there are a lot of popular but wrong positions so they know how not to go astray. Throughout the Sequences, before you figure out how to do it right, you hear about how a bunch of other people have done it wrong: MWI, p-zombies, value theory, evolutionary biology, intellectual subcultures, etc. I don’t know that there are any sexy controversies in fluid mechanics.
Interesting points. There are controversies in fluid mechanics, and they are discussed at great length in the field, but I don’t know of any popular treatments of them.
In particular, there a large number of debates centering around turbulence modeling which actually are extremely relevant to modeling in general. The LES vs. RANS debate is interesting, and while in some sense LES has “won”, this does not mean that LES is entirely satisfactory. A lot of turbulence theory is also quite controversial. I recall reading a fair bit about isotropic turbulence decay in 2012 and I was surprised by the wide variety of results different theoretical and experimental approaches give. Isotropic turbulence decay, by the way, is the among easiest turbulence problems you could devise.
The debate in turbulence about the log law vs. power law is a waste of time, and should be recognized as such. Both basically give you the same result, so which you use is inconsequential. There are some differences in interpretation that I don’t think are important or even remember to be honest.
Thinking about it, things like QM are a fair bit easier to explain than turbulence. To actually explain these things in detail beyond what I’ve mentioned would take a considerable amount of time.
“I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic.” (Horace Lamb)
Finance is not social science. I think it’s more similar to engineering: you need to have a grasp of the underlying concepts and be able to do the math, but the real world will screw you up on a very regular basis and so you need to be able to deal with that.
Look, it may very well be that social science is low-quality. But your comments in this thread are not at all up to LW standards. You need to cite evidence for your positions and stop calling people names.
I think there may be a self-reinforcing spiral where highly logical people aren’t impressed by social science, leading them to avoid it, leading to social science being unimpressive to highly logical because it’s done by people who aren’t highly logical. But I could be wrong—maybe highly logical people are misperceiving.
It’s not just a self-reinforcing spiral. There is also a driver, namely since social science has more political implications and there is a lot of political control over science funding, social science selects for people willing to reach the “correct” conclusions even if they have to torture logic and the evidence to do so.
Well that’s a self-reinforcing spiral of a different type. In general, I see a number of forces pushing newcomers to a group towards being similar to whoever the folks already in the group are:
Self-segregation. It’s less aversive to interact with people who agree with you and are similar to you, which nudges people towards forming social circles of similar others.
Reputation effects. If Google has a reputation for having great programmers, other great programmers will want to work there so they can have great coworkers.
This is why it took someone like Snowden to expose NSA spying. The NSA was the butt of jokes in the crypto community for probably doing illicit spying long before Snowden… which meant people who cared about civil liberties didn’t apply for jobs there (who wants to work for the evil empire?) (Note: just my guess as someone outside crypto; could be totally wrong on this one.)
Edit: evaporative cooling should probably be considered related to the bullet points above.
You’re assuming that “intelligent” == “logical”. That just ain’t so and especially ain’t so in social sciences.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
I did a bit of googling, and it really surprised me. I thought the social science IQs would be lower on average than the STEM IQs, but I found a lot of conflicting stuff. Most sources seem to put physics and maths at the top of the ranks, but then there’s engineering, social science and biology and I keep seeing those three in different orders. If you split up ‘social science’ and ‘humanities’, then humanities stays at the top and social science drops a few places, presumably because law is a very attractive profession for smart people (high prestige and pay) and law is technically a humanity. I’m not very confident in any of my Google results, though—they all looked slightly dodgy—so I’m not linking to any and would love it if someone else could find some better data.
I don’t think it’s an argument for disregarding social science, even if we did find data that showed all social scientists are stupider than STEM scientists. I mean, education came last for IQ on almost all of the lists I looked up. Education. Nobody is going to say that this means we should scrap education. If education really does attract a lot of stupid people, I think that is cause to try and raise the prestige and pay of education as a profession so that more smart people do it—not to cut funding for schools. (Though the reason education is so lowly ranked for IQ could be that a lot of countries don’t require teachers to have education degrees, you get a different degree and then a teaching certificate, so you only take Education as a bachelor’s if you want to do Childhood Studies and go into social care/work.)
It’s clearly very important that our governments are advised by smart social scientists who can do experiments and tell them whether law X or policy Y will decrease the crime rate or just annoy people, or we’re just letting politicians do whatever their ideology tells them to do. So, even though the IQ of people in social sciences is lower on average than the IQ of people in physics, we shouldn’t conclude that social science is worthless—I think we should conclude that efforts must be made to get more smart people to consider becoming social scientists.
I also don’t think you necessarily need a high IQ to be a successful social scientist. Being a successful mathematician requires a lot of processing power. Being a successful social scientist requires a lot of rationality and a lot of carefulness. If you’re trying to do some problems with areas of circles, then you will not be distracted by your religious belief that pi is an evil number and cannot be the answer, nor will you have to worry about the line your circle is drawn with being a sentient line and deliberately mucking up your results. Social scientists don’t need as much processing power to throw at problems, but it takes a lot of care and ability to change one’s mind to do good social science, because you’re doing research on really complicated high-level things with sentient agents who do weird things and you were probably raised with an ideology about it. Without a good amount of rationality, you will just end up repeatedly “proving” whatever your ideology says.
To make physics worthwhile you need high IQ; without that, you’d produce awful physics. To make social science worthwhile, you need to be very very careful and ignore what your ideology is telling you in the back of your mind; without that, you produce awful social science. Unfortunately, our society’s ability to test for IQ is much better than our society’s ability to test for rationality, which could explain why more people get away with BS social science than they do with BS physics. (The other explanation is that there are both awful social science papers and awful physics papers, but awful physics papers get ignored by everyone, whereas awful social science papers are immediately picked up by whatever group whose ideology they support and linked to on facebook with accompanying comments in all-caps.)
If you’re trying to do some problems with areas of circles, then you will not be distracted by your religious belief that pi is an evil number and cannot be the answer,
Not really. Everyone agrees that calculus can be done with infinitesimals, but most mathematicians think that doing it with limits forms a better basis for going on to real analysis and epsilon-delta proofs later.
I don’t think it’s an argument for disregarding social science
It’s not an argument for disregarding social science, but it is an argument to be more sceptical of its claims.
I also don’t think you necessarily need a high IQ to be a successful social scientist.
I disagree but let me qualify that. If we define “successful” as “socially successful”, that is, e.g., you have your tenure and your papers are accepted in reasonable peer-reviewed journals, then yes, you do not need high IQ to be be successful social scientist.
However if we define “successful” as “actually advancing the state of human knowledge” then I feel fairly confident in thinking that a high IQ is even more of a necessity for a social scientists than it is for someone who does hard sciences.
Ah, I’m sorry—I actually agree with everything you just wrote. I fear I may have miscommunicated slightly in the comment you’re replying to.
You’re right, I did point that out. And I do think that it can be harder in social science to weed out the good stuff from the bad stuff, and as such, you can get reasonably far in social science terms by being well-spoken and having contacts with a similar ideology even if your science isn’t great. This is an undesirable state of affairs, of course, but I think it’s just because doing good social science is really difficult (and in order to even know what good social science looks like, you’ve gotta be smart enough to do good social science). It’s part of the reason I think I can be useful and make a difference by doing social science, if I can do good rational social science and encourage others to do more rational social science.
My point isn’t that you don’t need to be as smart to do social science; doing it well is actually harder, so you’d expect social scientists to be at least as smart as hard scientists. I think that social science and hard science require slightly different kinds of intelligence, and IQ tests better for the hard science kind rather than the social science kind.
It’s really difficult to make a formula that calculates how to get a rocket off the ground. You have to crunch a lot of numbers. However, once you’ve come up with that formula, it is easy to test it; when you fire your rocket, does it go to the moon or does it blow up in your face?
It’s really easy to come up with a social science intervention/hypothesis. You just say “people from lower classes have worse life outcomes because of their poor opportunities (so we should improve opportunities for poor people)” or “people from lower classes are in the lower class because they’re not smart, and their parents were not smart and gave them bad genes, so they have worse life outcomes because they’re not smart (so we should do nothing)” or “people from lower classes have a culture of underachievement that doesn’t teach them to work hard (so we should improve life/study skills education in poor areas)”. I mean, coming up with one of those three is way easier than designing a rocket. However, once you’ve come up with them… how do you test it? How do you design a program to get people to achieve higher? Run an intervention program involving education and improved opportunities for years, carefully guarding against all the ideological biases you might have and the mess that might be made by various confounding factors, and still not necessarily have a clear outcome? There’s not as much difficulty in hypothesis-generation or coming-up-with-solutions, but there’s a lot more difficulty in hypothesis-testing and successful-solution-implementing.
Hard science requires more raw processing power to come up with theories; social science requires more un-biased-ness and carefulness in testing your theories. They’re subtly different requirements and I think IQ is a better indicator of the former than the latter.
I mean, education came last for IQ on almost all of the lists I looked up. Education. Nobody is going to say that this means we should scrap education.
Given that teachers who have a masters in education don’t do better than teachers who haven’t, I think there a good case of scrapping the current professors in that fields from their titles.
Given this fact, it gives very good support to an argument like “we should scrap Masters programs in education”. But it could also give very good support to “we should try out a few variations on Masters programs in education to see if any of them would do better than the current one, and if we find one that actually works, we should change our current one to that thing. If and only if we try a bunch of different variations and none of them work, we should scrap Masters programs in education.”
I mean, if we could create a program that consistently made people better teachers, that would be a very worthwhile endeavour. If our current program aiming to make people better teachers is utterly failing, maybe we should scrap that particular program, but surely we should also have a go at doing a few different programs and seeing if any of those succeed?
Very true. We should task them with creating a better program, and if they don’t produce results, we should fire them and find new professors. Just the same as firing any employee who is incapable of doing their job, really.
The thing I disagree with would be if we scrapped the positions and programs entirely; I am entirely on board with the idea of firing the people currently holding the positions and running the programs, and finding new people to hold the positions and run the programs differently. I think that I now understand your position better and you’re advocating the latter, not the former, in which case I entirely agree with you.
There are many different ways to teach knowledge. Academia isn’t the only way.
You could have a education system where teachers don’t go to university to learn how to teach but where they do apprenticeships programs. They sit in the classrooms of experienced teachers and help.
Decrease the amount of time that teachers spend in the classroom to allow for time where teachers discuss with their colleagues what works best.
Different people learn in different ways. I’m really good at textbook learning and hate hands on learning (and suspect that is common among introverted intellectual people). Ideally, why not offer both a university course that qualifies you as a teacher and an apprenticeship system that qualifies you as a teacher, and allow prospective teachers to decide which best suits their learning style? We could even do cognitive assessments on the prospective teachers to recommend to them which program would be best for what their strengths seem to be.
Although, as someone who lives with a teacher—we definitely don’t need to reduce the time they spend in the classroom, we need to change the fact that they spend double that time marking and planning and doing pointless paperwork.
The job of being a teacher is not ideal for introverts. At the core teaching is about social interaction.
You can’t learn charisma through reading textbooks. Textbooks don’t teach you to be a authority in the classroom and get the children to pay attention to what you are saying.
They don’t teach empathy either. Empathy is a strong predictor for success of psychologists in therapy session and likely also useful for teachers.
“Learning styles” are a popular concept but there no good research that suggests that giving different students different training based on learning style is helpful.
Although, as someone who lives with a teacher—we definitely don’t need to reduce the time they spend in the classroom, we need to change the fact that they spend double that time marking and planning and doing pointless paperwork.
I agree. Get rid of the whole business of giving students grades outside of automatically graded tests to allow a teacher to focus on teaching.
It’s clearly very important that our governments are advised by smart social scientists who can do experiments and tell them whether law X or policy Y will decrease the crime rate or just annoy people, or we’re just letting politicians do whatever their ideology tells them to do.
Unfortunately, what is actually happening is that the politicians and beaurocrats decide which policy they prefer for ideological reasons and then fund social scientists willing to produce “science” to justify the desision.
I’m not sure this is necessarily always true. There are absolutely certainly instances of this happening, but more and more governments are adopting “evidence-led policy” policies, and I’d hope that at least sometimes those policies do what they say on the tin. The UK has this: https://www.gov.uk/what-works-network and I’m going to try and do more reading up on it to see whether it looks like it’s doing any good or just proving what people want it to prove.
It would certainly be preferable to live in a world where social scientists did good unbiased social science and then politicians listened to them. The question is, how do we change our current world into such a world? It certainly isn’t by disparaging social science or assigning it low prestige. We need to make it so that science>ideology in prestige terms, which will be really tricky.
There could be solutions to this, I’m sure, or at least ways of minimising the problems. Maybe an independent-from-current-ruling-party research institute that ran studies on all proposed laws/policies put forward by both the in-power and opposition power, which required pre-registration of studies, and then published its findings very publicly in an easy-for-public-to-read format? Then it would be very obvious which parties were saying the same things as the science and which were ignoring the science, and it would be hard for the parties to influence the social scientists to just get them to say what they want them to say.
There could be solutions to this, I’m sure, or at least ways of minimising the problems.
I’m sure there could be. It’s not an easy problem to solve—after all, right now, there are professors in social sciences, economics, and other subjects who can tell pretty quickly whether or not a given policy is at least vaguely sensible or not. But how often are they listened to?
Also, it’s not always easy to see which option is the best. If Policy A might or might not reduce crime but makes it look like everyone’s trying; Policy B will reduce crime but also reduce civil liberties; Policy C will reduce the amount of crime but increase its potential lethality… then how can one tell which policy is the best?
Having said that… there should be solutions. Your proposed institute is an improvement on the status quo, and would be a good thing to set up in many countries (assuming that they can be funded).
We need to make it so that science>ideology in prestige terms, which will be really tricky.
People tried this in the late 19th/early 20th century (look up “technocracy” if you want to learn more). That’s how we got into the mess we are in now.
My understanding is that the technocracy movement were more engineers than social scientists, and were not an influential movement anyway.
Anyway, the problem isn’t that scientists are inherently biased, its that if they mention certain hypotheses publicly they will be fired because of journalists.
Incidentally, I know neuro/cognitive scientists at a very left-wing university, and they believed in certain gender/racial cognitive differences, despite ideology.
I am learning (or have learnt and am now struggling to keep up with) Spanish, German, French, Mandarin, and Ancient Greek.
I’ve studied Spanish for some time and would be happy to converse with you. I’m not sure if you only want to converse with native speakers. I’ve been wanting to learn how to talk about LessWrongian stuff in Spanish.
I’ve been in the #lesswrong IRC channel for the past couple weeks, arguing with people and delighting in the fact that I can present my arguments without first having to explain the empiricist utilitarian framework they rely upon. It’s a wonderful feeling which is the exact opposite of the hair-tearing-out frustration I feel in Philosophy class, where the inferential distance is too great for me to really argue with my classmates (and when I retreat to the basics and attempt to close the inferential gap before addressing the issue, the teacher penalises or silences me for being off topic).
You seem legit. Also, wait, the #lesswrong IRC channel stopped being dead?
I will gladly converse with you in Russian if you want to.
Why do you want a united utopia? Don’t you think different people prefer different things? Even if assume the ultimate utopia is unform, wouldn’t we want to experiment with different things to get there?
Would you feel “dwarfed by an FAI” if you had little direct knowledge of what the FAI is up to? Imagine a relatively omniscient and omnipotent god taking care of things on some (mostly invisible) level but doesn’t ever come down to solve your homework.
I am dismayed that you were ambushed by the far right crowd, especially on the welcome thread.
My impression is that you are highly intelligent, very decent and admirably enthusiastic. I think you are a perfect example of the values that I love in this community and I very much want you on board. I’m sure that I personally would enjoy interacting with you.
Also, I am confident you will go far in life. Good dragon hunting!
I sympathize with your sentiment regarding friendship, community etc. The thing is, when everyone are friends the state is not needed at all. The state is a way of using violence or the threat of violence to resolve conflicts between people in a way which is as good as possible for all parties (in the case of egalitarian states; other states resolve conflicts in favor of the ruling class). Forcing people to obey any given system of law is already an act of coercion. Why magnify this coercion by forcing everyone to obey the same system rather than allowing any sufficiently big group of people choose their own system?
Moreover, in the search of utopia we can go down many paths. In the spirit of the empirical method, it seems reasonable to allow people to explore different paths if we are to find the best one.
I would not actually be awfully upset if the FAI did my homework for me...
I used “homework” as a figure of speech :)
Being told “you’re not smart enough to fight dragons, just sit at home and let Momma AI figure it out” would make me sad.
This might be so. However, you must consider the tradeoff between this sadness and efficiency of dragon-slaying.
So really, once superintelligence is possible and has been made, I would like to become a superintelligence.
The problem is, if you instantly go from human intelligence to far superhuman, it looks like a breach in the continuity of your identity. And such a breach might be paramount to death. After all, what makes tomorrow you the same person as today you, if not the continuity between them? I agree with Eliezer that I want to be upgraded over time, but I want it to happen slowly and gradually.
I do think that some kind of organisational cooperative structure would be needed even if everyone were friends—provided there are dragons left to slay. If people need to work together on dragonfighting, then just being friends won’t cut it—there will need to be some kind of team, and some people delegating different tasks to team members and coordinating efforts. Of course, if there aren’t dragons to slay, then there’s no need for us to work together and people can do whatever they like.
And yeah—the tradeoff would definitely need to be considered. If the AI told me, “Sorry, but I need to solve negentropy and if you try and help me you’re just going to slow me down to the point at which it becomes more likely that everyone dies”, I guess I would just have to deal with it. Making it more likely that everyone dies in the slow heat death of the universe is a terribly large price to pay for indulging my desire to fight things. It could be a tradeoff worth making, though, if it turns out that a significant number of people are aimless and unhappy unless they have a cause to fight for—we can explore the galaxy and fight negentropy and this will allow people like me to continue being motivated and fulfilled by our burning desire to fix things. It depends on whether people like me, with aforementioned burning desire, are a minority or a large majority. If a large majority of the human race feels listless and sad unless they have a quest to do, then it may be worthwhile letting us help even if it impedes the effort slightly.
And yeah—I’m not sure that just giving me more processor power and memory without changing my code counts as death, but simultaneously giving a human more processor power and more memory and not increasing their rationality sounds… silly and maybe not safe, so I guess it’ll have to be a gradual upgrade process in all of us. I quite like that idea though—it’s like having a second childhood, except this time you’re learning to remember every book in the library and fly with your jetpack-including robot feet, instead of just learning to walk and talk. I am totally up for that.
I do think that some kind of organisational cooperative structure would be needed even if everyone were friends...
We don’t need the state to organize. Look at all the private organizations out there.
It could be a tradeoff worth making, though, if it turns out that a significant number of people are aimless and unhappy unless they have a cause to fight for...
The cause might be something created artificially by the FAI. One idea I had is a universe with “pseudodeath” which doesn’t literally kill you but relocates you to another part of the universe which results in lose of connections with all people you knew. Like in Border Guards but involuntary, so that human communities have to fight with “nature” to survive.
One idea I had is a universe with “pseudodeath” which doesn’t literally kill you but relocates you to another part of the universe which results in lose of connections with all people you knew.
The following is pure speculation. But I imagine an FAI would begin its work by vastly reducing the chance of death, and then raising everyone’s intelligence and energy levels to those of John_von_Neumann. That might allow us to bootstrap ourselves to superhuman levels with minimal guidance.
I’ll then be heading off to university in September 2016, unless applications go so badly that I take a gap year and reapply next year. I am dreaming of going to Cambridge to read Human, Social and Political Sciences.
Why do you dream of doing Human, Social and Political Sciences?
Politics 1 is about democracy and how it works and whether it actually works and whether the alternatives might work.
You assume that studying politics in university tells you a good answer to that question. To me that doesn’t seem true.
If you look at a figure like Julian Assange who actually plays and make meaningful moves, Assange didn’t study politics at university.
Studying politics at Cambridge on the other hand will make it easier to become an elected politician in the UK. But that’s not necessarily because of the content of lectures but because of networking.
It quite often happens that young people don’t speak to older more experienced people when making their decisions about what to study. As your goal is making a difference in the world, it could be very useful to ask 80,000 for coaching to make that choice: https://80000hours.org/career-advice/
You might still come out of that with wanting to go to the same program in Cambridge but you will likely have better reasons for doing so and will be less naive.
Getting elected in the UK is certainly a valid move, but it comes with buying into the status quo to the extend that you hold opinions that make you fit into a major party.
And a very good way to improve in the direction of actually having decent ideas about alternatives to representative first-past-the-post democracy might be to spend a lot of time explaining those ideas to people who subsequently describe all of their flaws at length.
I think the substantial discussion about Liquid Democracy doesn’t happen inside the politics departments of universities but outside of them.
A lot of 20th century and earlier political philosophy just isn’t that important for building something new. It exists to justify the status quo and a place like Cambridge exists to justify the status quo.
Even inside Cambridge you likely want to spend time in student self-governance and it’s internal politics.
To some degree, the idea of a “Friendship and Science Party” has already been tried. The Mugwumps wanted to get scholars, scientists and learned people more involved in politics to improve its corrupt state. It sounds like a great idea on paper, but this is what happened:
So the Mugwumps believed that, by running a pipe from the limpid spring of academia to the dank sewer of American democracy, they could make the latter run clear again. What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind.
When an intellectual community is separated from political power, as the Mugwumps were for a while in the Gilded Age, it finds itself in a strange state of grace. Bad ideas and bad people exist, but good people can recognize good ideas and good people, and a nexus of sense forms. The only way for the bad to get ahead is to copy the good, and vice pays its traditional tribute to virtue. It is at least reasonable to expect sensible ideas to outcompete insane ones in this “marketplace,” because good sense is the only significant adaptive quality.
Restore the connection, and the self-serving idea, the meme with its own built-in will to power, develops a strange ability to thrive and spread. Thoughts which, if correct, provide some pretext for empowering the thinker, become remarkably adaptive. Even if they are utterly insane. As the Latin goes: vult decipi, decipiatur. Self-deception does not in any way preclude sincerity.
...
In particular, when the power loop includes science itself, science itself becomes corrupt. The crown jewel of European civilization is dragged in the gutter for another hundred million in grants, while journalism, our peeking impostor of the scales, averts her open eyes.
Science also expands to cover all areas of government policy, a task for which it is blatantly unfit. There are few controlled experiments in government. Thus, scientistic public policy, from economics (“queen of the social sciences”) on down, consists of experiments that would not meet any standard of relevance in a truly scientific field.
Bad science is a device for laundering thoughts of unknown provenance without the conscious complicity of the experimenter.
According to this account, the more contact science has with politics, the more corrupted it becomes.
I think you missed what I see as the main point in “What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind.” Not surprising, because Moldbug (the guy quoted about the Mugwumps) is terribly long-winded and given to rhetorical flourishes. So let me try to rephrase what I see as the central objection in a format more amenable to LW:
The scientific community is not a massive repository of power, nor is it packed to the gills with masters of rhetoric. The political community consists of nothing but. If you try to run your new party by listening to the scientific community without first making the scientific community far more powerful and independent, what’s likely to happen is that the political community makes a puppet of the scientific community, and then you wind up running your politics by listening to a puppet of the political community.
The more you promote “Do what the NSF says”, the more Congress is going to be interested in using some of those billions of dollars to lean on the NSF and other similar organizations so that you will be promoting “Do what Congress says” at arm’s remove. No overt dishonesty needs be involved. Just little things like hiring sympathetic scientists, discouraging controversial research, asking for a survey of a specific metric, etc.
Suppose you make a prediction that a law will decrease the crime rate. You pass the law. You wait a while and see. Did the crime rate go down? Well, how are you measuring crime rate? Which crimes are you counting? To take an example discussed on Less Wrong a while ago, if you use the murder rate as proxy for crime rate over the past few decades, you are going to severely undercount crime because of improvements in medical technology that make worse wounds more survivable.
Obviously you can fix this particular metric now that I’ve pointed it out. But can you spot and fix such issues in advance faster and better than people throwing around 30 billion dollars and with a massive vested interest in retaining policy control?
When trying to solve something like whether P=NP, you can throw more and brighter scientists at the problem and trust that the problem will remain the same. But the problem of trying to establish science-based policy, particularly when “advocating loads of funding for science”, gets harder as it gets more important and you throw more people at it. This is a Red Queen’s Race where you have to keep running just to stay in place, because you’re not dealing with a mindless question that has an objective answer floating out there, you’re dealing with an opposed social force with lots of minds and money that learns from its own mistakes and figures out how to corrupt better, and with more plausible deniability.
Thankyou—this statement of the idea was much, much clearer to me. :)
It seems like the solution—well, a possible part of one possible solution—is to make the social science research institute that everyone listens to have some funding source which is completely independent from the political party in power. That would hopefully make the scientific community more independent. We now need to make it more powerful, which is… more difficult. I think a good starting point would be to try and raise the prestige associated with a social science career (and thus the prestige given to individual social scientists and the amount of social capital they feel they have to spend on being controversial) and possibly give some rhetoric classes to the social science research institute’s spokesperson. Assuming the scientists are rational scientists, this gives them politician-power with which to persuade people of their correct conclusions. (Of course, if they have incorrect conclusions influenced by their ideologies, this is… problematic. How do we fix this? I dunno yet. But this is the very beginning of a solution, but I’ve not been thinking about the problem very long and I am just one kid with a relatively high IQ. If multiple people work together on a solution, I’m sure much more and much better stuff will be come up with.)
“The more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process.”—James Lileks
Which of these seems like it will inevitably lead to setting up guillotines in the public square?
That thing:
The reason I want to fix the world is, well, the world contains stuff like war, and poverty, and people who buy plasma TVs for their dog’s kennel instead of donating to charity, and kids who can’t get an education because they’re busy fetching filthy water and caring for their siblings who are dying from drinking the dirty water, and people who abuse kids or rape people or blow up civilians, and malaria and cancer and dementia, and lack of funding for people who are trying to cure diseases and stop ageing, and sexism and racism and homophobia and transphobia, and preachers who help spread AIDS by trying to limit access to contraception, and all of those things make me REALLY REALLY ANGRY.
Besides, we’re talking about “more likely”, not “inevitably”.
There is historical precedent for groups advocating equality, altruism, and other humanitarian causes to do a lot of damage and start guillotining people. You would probably be horrified and step off the train before it got to that point. But it’s important to understand the failure modes of egalitarian, altruistic movements.
The French Revolution, and Russian Revolution / Soviet Union ran into these failure modes where they started killing lots of people. After slavery was abolished in the US, around one quarter of the freed slaves died.
These events were all horrible disasters from a humanitarian perspective. Yet I doubt that the original French Revolutionaries planned from the start to execute the aristocracy, and then execute many of their own factions for supposedly being counter-revolutionaries. I don’t think Marx ever intended for the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union to have a high death toll. I don’t think the original abolitionists ever expected the bloody Civil War followed by 25% of the former slaves dying.
Perhaps, once a movement for egalitarianism and altruism got started, an ideological death spiral caused so much polarization that it was impossible to stop people from going overboard and extending the movement’s mandate in a violent direction. Perhaps at first, they tried to persuade their opponents to help them towards the better new world. When persuasion failed, they tried suppression. And when suppression failed, someone proposed violence, and nobody could stop them in such a polarized environment.
Somehow, altruism can turn pathological, and well-intentioned interventions have historically resulted in disastrous side-effects or externalities. That’s why some people are cynical about altruistic political attitudes.
You yourself are unlikely to start the French Revolution, but somehow, well-intentioned people seem to get swept up in those movements. Even teachers, doctors, and charity workers can contribute to an ideological environment that goes wrong; this doesn’t mean that they started it, or that they supported it every step of the way. But they were part of it.
The French Revolution and guillotines is indeed a rarer event. But if pathological altruism can result in such large disasters, then it’s quite likely that it can also backfire in less spectacular ways that are still problematic.
As you point out, many interventions to change the world risk going wrong and making things worse, but it would be a shame to completely give on making the world a better place. So what we really want is interventions that are very well-thought out, with a lot of care towards the likely consequences, taking into account the lessons of history for similar interventions.
“So what we really want is interventions that are very well-thought out, with a lot of care towards the likely consequences, taking into account the lessons of history for similar interventions.”
That is exactly why I want to study social science. I want to do lots of experiments and research and reading and talking and thinking before I dare try and do any world-changing. That’s why I think social science is important and valuable, and we should try very hard to be rational and careful when we do social science, and then listen to the conclusions. I think interventions should be well-thought-through, evidence-based, and tried and observed on a small scale before implemented on a large scale. Thinking through your ideas about laws/policies/interventions and gathering evidence on whether they might work or not—that’s the kind of social science that I think is important and the kind I want to do.
You’re ignoring the rather large pachyderm in the room which goes by the name of Values.
Differences in politics and policies are largely driven not by disagreements over the right way to reach the goal, but by decisions which goals to pursue and what trade-offs are acceptable as the price. Most changes in the world have both costs and benefits, you need to balance them to decide whether it’s worth it, and the balancing necessarily involves deciding what is more important and what is less important.
For example, imagine a trade-off: you can decrease the economic inequality in your society by X% by paying the price of slowing down the economic growth by Y%. Science won’t tell you whether that price is acceptable—you need to ask your values about it.
Differences in politics and policies are largely driven not by disagreements over the right way to reach the goal, but by decisions which goals to pursue and what trade-offs are acceptable as the price.
Disagreements including this one? It sounds as though you are saying in a conversation such as this one, you are more focused on working to achieve your values than trying to figure out what’s true about the world… like, say, Arthur Chu. Am I reading you correctly in supporting something akin to Arthur Chu’s position, or do I misunderstand?
Given how irrational people can be about politics, I’d guess that in many cases apparent “value” differences boil down to people being mindkilled in different ways. As rationalists, the goal is to have a calm, thoughtful, evidence-based discussion and figure out what’s true. Building a map and unmindkilling one another is a collaborative project.
There are times when there is a fundamental value difference, but my feeling is that this is the possibility to be explored last. And if you do want to explore it, you should ask clarifying values questions (like “do you give the harms from a European woman who is raped and a Muslim woman who is raped equal weight?”) in order to suss out the precise nature of the value difference.
Anyway, if you do agree with Arthur Chu that the best approach is to charge ahead imposing your values, why are you on Less Wrong? There’s an entire internet out there of people having Arthur Chu style debates you could join. Less Wrong is a tiny region of the internet where we have Scott Alexander style debates, and we’d like to keep it that way.
you are more focused on working to achieve your values than trying to figure out what’s true about the world
That’s a false dichotomy. Epistemic rationality and working to achieve your values are largely orthogonal and are not opposed to each other. In fact, epistemic rationality is useful to achieving your values because of instrumental rationality.
I’d guess that in many cases apparent “value” differences boil down to people being mindkilled in different ways.
So you do not think that many people have sufficiently different and irreconcilable values?
I wonder how are you going to distinguish “true” values and “mindkill-generated” values. Take some random ISIS fighter in Iraq, what are his “true” values?
my feeling is that this is the possibility to be explored last.
I disagree, I think it’s useful to figure out value differences before spending a lot of time on figuring out whether we agree about how the world works.
...where we have...
Who’s that “we”? It is a bit ironic that you felt the need to use the pseudonymous handle to claim that you represent the views of all LW… X-)
In my (admittedly limited, I’m young) experience, people don’t disagree on whether that tradeoff is worth it. People disagree on whether the tradeoff exists. I’ve never seen people arguing about “the tradeoff is worth it” followed by “no it isn’t”. I’ve seen a lot of arguments about “We should decrease inequality with policy X!” followed by “But that will slow economic growth!” followed by “No it won’t! Inequality slows down economic growth!” followed by “Inequality is necessary for economic growth!” followed by “No it isn’t!” Like with Obamacare—I didn’t hear any Republicans saying “the tradeoff of raising my taxes in return for providing poor people with healthcare is an unacceptable tradeoff” (though I am sometimes uncharitable and think that some people are just selfish and want their taxes to stay low at any cost), I heard a lot of them saying “this policy won’t increase health and long life and happiness the way you think it will”.
“Is this tradeoff worth it?” is, indeed, a values question and not a scientific question. But scientific questions (or at least, factual questions that you could predict the answer to and be right/wrong about) could include: Will this policy actually definitely cause the X% decrease in inequality? Will this policy actually definitely cause the Y% slowdown in economic growth? Approximately how large is X? Approximately how much will a Y% slowdown affect the average household income? How high is inflation likely to be in the next few years? Taking that expected rate of inflation into account, what kind of things would the average family no longer be able to afford / not become able to afford, presuming the estimated decrease in average household income happens? What relation does income have to happiness anyway? How much unhappiness does inequality cause, and how much unhappiness do economic recessions cause? Does a third option (beyond implement this policy / don’t implement it) exist, like implementing the policy but also implementing another policy that helps speed economic growth, or implementing some other radical new idea? Is this third option feasible? Can we think up any better policies which we predict might decrease inequality without slowing economic growth? If we set a benchmark that would satisfy our values, like percentage of households able to afford Z valuable-and-life-improving item, then which policy is likely to better satisfy that benchmark—economic growth so that more people on average can afford Z, or inequality reduction so that more poor people become average enough to afford an Z?
But, of course, this is a factual question. We could resolve this by doing an experiment, maybe a survey of some kind. We could take a number of left-wing policies, and a number of right-wing policies, and survey members of the “other tribe” on “why do you disagree with this policy?” and give them options to choose between like “I think reducing inequality is more important than economic growth” and “I don’t think reducing inequality will decrease economic growth, I think it will speed it up”. I think there are a lot of issues where people disagree on facts.
Like prisons—you have people saying “prisons should be really nasty and horrid to deter people from offending”, and you have people saying “prisons should be quite nice and full of education and stuff so that prisoners are rehabilitated and become productive members of society and don’t reoffend”, and both of those people want to bring the crime rate down, but what is actually best at bringing crime rates down—nasty prisons or nice prisons? Isn’t that a factual question, and couldn’t we do some science (compare a nice prison, nasty prison, and average-kinda-prison control group, compare reoffending rates for ex-inmates of those prisons, maybe try an intervention where kids are deterred from committing crime by visiting nasty prison and seeing what it’s like versus kids who visit the nicer prison versus a control group who don’t visit a prison and then 10 years later see what percentage of each group ended up going to prison) to see who is right? And wouldn’t doing the science be way better than ideological arguments about “prisoners are evil people and deserve to suffer!” versus “making people suffer is really mean!” since what we actually all want and agree on is that we would like the crime rate to come down?
So we should ask the scientific question: “Which policies are most likely to lead to the biggest reductions in inequality and crime and the most economic growth, keep the most members of our population in good health for the longest, and provide the most cost-efficient and high-quality public services?” If we find the answer, and some of those policies seem to conflict, then we can consult our values to see what tradeoff we should make. But if we don’t do the science first, how do we even know what tradeoff we’re making? Are we sure the tradeoff is real / necessary / what we think it is?
In other words, a question of “do we try an intervention that costs £10,000 and is 100% effective, or do we do the 80% effective intervention that costs £80,000 and spend the money we saved on something else?” is a values question. But “given £10,000, what’s the most effective intervention we could try that will do the most good?” is a scientific question and one that I’d like to have good, evidence-based answers to. “Which intervention gives most improvement unit per money unit?” is a scientific question and you could argue that we should just ask that question and then do the optimal intervention.
In my (admittedly limited, I’m young) experience, people don’t disagree on whether that tradeoff is worth it. People disagree on whether the tradeoff exists.
The solution to this problem is to find smarter people to talk to.
We could resolve this by doing an experiment
Experiment? On live people? Cue in GlaDOS :-P
This was a triumph! I’m making a note here: ”Huge success!!” It’s hard to overstate My satisfaction. Aperture science: We do what me must Because we can. For the good of all of us. Except the ones who are dead. But there’s no sense crying Over every mistake. You just keep on trying Till you run out of cake. And the science gets done. And you make a neat gun For the people who are Still alive.
Surveys are not experiments and Acty is explicitly talking about science with control groups, etc. E.g.
compare a nice prison, nasty prison, and average-kinda-prison control group, compare reoffending rates for ex-inmates of those prisons, maybe try an intervention where kids are deterred from committing crime by visiting nasty prison and seeing what it’s like versus kids who visit the nicer prison versus a control group who don’t visit a prison and then 10 years later see what percentage of each group ended up going to prison
A survey can be a reasonably designed experiment that simply gives us a weaker result than lots of other kinds of experiments.
There are many questions about humans that I would expect to be correlated with the noises humans make when given a few choices and asked to answer honestly. In many cases, that correlation is complicated or not very strong. Nonetheless, it’s not nothing, and might be worth doing, especially in the absence of a more-correlated test we can do given our technology, resources, and ethics.
What I had in mind was the difference between passive observation and actively influencing the lives of subjects. I would consider “surveys” to be observation and “experiments” to be or contain active interventions. Since the context of the discussion is kinda-sorta ethical, this difference is meaningful.
I am not sure where is this question coming from. I am not suggesting any particular studies or ways of conducting them.
Maybe it’s worth going back to the post from which this subthread originated. Acty wrote:
If we set a benchmark that would satisfy our values … then which policy is likely to better satisfy that benchmark...? But, of course, this is a factual question. We could resolve this by doing an experiment, maybe a survey of some kind.
First, Acty is mistaken in thinking that a survey will settle the question of which policy will actually satisfy the value benchmark. We’re talking about real consequences of a policy and you don’t find out what they are by conducting a public poll.
And second, if you do want to find the real consequences of a policy, you do need to run an intervention (aka an experiment) -- implement the policy in some limited fashion and see what happens.
Oh, I guess I misunderstood. I read it as “We should survey to determine whether terminal values differ (e.g. ‘The tradeoff is not worth it’) or whether factual beliefs differ (e.g. ‘There is no tradeoff’)”
But if we’re talking about seeing whether policies actually work as intended, then yes, probably that would involve some kind of intervention. Then again, that kind of thing is done all the time, and properly run, can be low-impact and extremely informative.
My model is that these revolutions created a power vacuum that got filled up. Whenever a revolution creates a power vacuum, you’re kinda rolling the dice on the quality of the institutions that grow up in that power vacuum. The United States had a revolution, but it got lucky in that the institutions resulting from that revolution turned out to be pretty good, good enough that they put the US on the path to being the world’s dominant power a few centuries later. The US could have gotten unlucky if local military hero George Washington had declared himself king.
Insofar as leftist revolutions create worse outcomes, I think it’s because since the leftist creed is so anti-power, leftists don’t carefully think through the incentives for institutions to manage that power. So the stable equilibrium they tend to drift towards is a sociopathic leader who can talk the talk about egalitarianism while viciously oppressing anyone who contests their power (think Mao or Stalin). Anyone intelligent can see that the sociopathic leader is pushing cartoon egalitarianism, and that’s why these leaders are so quick to go for the throats of society’s intellectuals. Pervasive propaganda takes care of the rest of the population.
Leftism might work for a different species such as bonobos, but human avarice needs to be managed through carefully designed incentive structures. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending avarice doesn’t exist doesn’t work. Eliminating it doesn’t work because avaricious humans gain control of the elimination process. (Or, to put it another way, almost everyone who likes an idea like “let’s kill all the avaricious humans” is themselves avaricious at some level. And by trying to put this plan in to action, they’re creating a new “defect/defect” equilibrium where people compete for power through violence, and the winners in this situation tend not to be the sort of people you want in power.)
Okay, if other altruists aren’t motivated by being angry about pain and suffering and wanting to end pain and suffering, how are they motivated?
Ask them, I’m not an altruist. But I heard it may have something to do with the concept of compassion.
I genuinely don’t see how wanting to help people is correlated with ending up killing people.
Historically, it correlates quite well. You want to help the “good” people and in order to do this you need to kill the “bad” people. The issue, of course, is that definitions of “good” and “bad” in this context… can vary, and rather dramatically too.
I think setting up guillotines in the public square is much more likely if you go around saying “I’m the chosen one and I’m going to singlehandedly design a better world”.
If we take the metaphor literally, setting up guillotines in the public square was something much favoured by the French Revolution, not by Napoleon Bonaparte.
If I noticed myself causing any death or suffering I would be very sad, and sit down and have a long think about a way to stop doing that.
Bollocks. You want to change the world and change is never painless. Tearing down chunks of the existing world, chunks you don’t like, will necessarily cause suffering.
And yet he’s consistently one of the highest karma earners in the 30-day karma leaderboard. It seems to be mainly due to his heavy participation… his 80% upvote rate is not especially high. I find him incredibly frustrating to engage with (though I try not to let it show). I can’t help but think that he is driving valuable people away; having difficult people dominate the conversation can’t be a good thing.
(To clarify, I’m not trying to speak out against the perspectives people like Lumifer and VoiceOfRa offer, which I am generally sympathetic to. I think their perspectives are valuable. I just wish they would make a stronger effort to engage in civil & charitable discussion, and I think having people who don’t do this and participate heavily is likely to have pernicious effects on LW culture in the long term. In general, I agree with the view that Paul Graham has advanced re: Hacker News moderation: on a group rationality level, in an online forum context, civility & niceness end up being very important.)
To clarify, I’m not trying to speak out against the perspectives people like Lumifer and VoiceOfRa offer, which I am generally sympathetic to. I think their perspectives are valuable.
Really? Their “perspective” appears to consist in attempting to tear down any hopes, beliefs, or accomplishments someone might have, to the point of occasionally just making a dumb comment out of failure to understand substantive material.
Of course, I stated that a little too disparagingly, but see below...
In general, I agree with the view that Paul Graham has advanced re: Hacker News moderation: on a group rationality level, in an online forum context, civility & niceness end up being very important.
Not just civility and niceness, but affirmative statements. That is, if you’re trying to achieve group epistemic rationality, it is important to come out and say what one actually believes. Statistical learning from a training-set of entirely positive or entirely negative examples is known to be extraordinarily difficult, in fact, nigh impossible (modulo “blah blah Solomonoff”) to do in efficient time.
I think a good group norm is, “Even if you believe something controversial, come out and say it, because only by stating hypotheses and examining evidence can we ever update.” Fully General Critique actually induces a uniform distribution across everything, which means one knows precisely nothing.
Besides which, nobody actually has a uniform distribution built into their real expectations in everyday life. They just adopt that stance when it comes time to talk about Big Issues, because they’ve heard of how Overconfidence Is Bad without having gotten to the part where Systematic Underconfidence Makes Reasoning Nigh-Impossible.
I think that anger at the Bad and hope for the Good are kind of flip sides of the same coin. I have a vague idea of how the world should be, and when the world does not conform to that idea, it irritates me. I would like a world full of highly rational and happy people cooperating to improve one another’s lives, and I would like to see the subsequent improvements taking effect. I would like to see bright people and funding being channeled into important stuff like FAI and medicine and science, everyone working for the common good of humanity, and a lot of human effort going towards the endeavour of making everyone happy. I would like to see a human species which is virtuous enough that poverty is solved by everyone just sharing what they need, and war is solved because nobody wants to start violence. I want people to work together and be rational, basically, and I’ve already seen that work on a small scale so I have a lot of hope that we can upgrade it to a societal scale. I also have a lot of hope for things like cryonics/Alcor bringing people back to life eventually, MIRI succeeding in creating FAI, and effective altruism continuing to gain new members until we start solving problems from sheer force of numbers and funding.
But I try not to be too confident about exactly what a Good world looks like; a) I don’t have any idea what the world will look like once we start introducing crazy things like superintelligence, b) that sounds suspiciously like an ideology and I would rather do lots of experiments on what makes people happy and then implement that, and c) a Good world would have to satisfy people’s preferences and I’m not a powerful enough computer to figure out a way to satisfy 7 billion sets of preferences.
I would like a world full of highly rational and happy people cooperating to improve one another’s lives
If you can simply improve the odds of people cooperating in such a manner, then I think that you will bring the world you envision closer. And the better you can improve those odds, the better the world will be.
I want to figure out ways to improve cooperation between people and groups.
This means that the goals of the people and groups will be more effectively realised. It is world-improving if and only if the goals towards which the group works are world-improving.
A group can be expected, on the whole, to work towards goals which appear to be of benefit to the group. The best way to ensure that the goals are world-improving, then, might be to (a) ensure that the “group” in question consists of all intelligent life (and not merely, say, Brazilians) and (b) the groups’ goals are carefully considered and inspected for flaws by a significant number of people.
(b) is probably best accomplished be encouraging voluntary cooperation, as opposed to unquestioning obedience of orders. (a) simply requires ensuring that it is well-known that bigger groups are more likely to be successful, and punishing the unfair exploitation of outside groups.
On the whole, I think this is most likely a world-improving goal.
I want to do research on cultural attitudes towards altruism and ways to get more people to be altruistic/charitable
Alturism certainly sounds like a world-improving goal. Historically, there have been a few missteps in this field—mainly when one person proposes a way to get people to be more altruistic, but then someone else implements it and does so in a way that ensures that he reaps the benefit of everyone else’s largesse.
So, likely to be world-improving, but keep an eye on the people trying to implement your research. (Be careful if you implement it yourself—have someone else keep a close eye on you in that circumstance).
I want to try and get LW-style critical thinking classes introduced in schools from an early age so as to raise the sanity waterline
Critical thinking is good. However, again, take care in the implementation; simply teaching students what to write in the exam is likely to do much less good than actually teaching critical thinking. Probably the most important thing to teach students is to ask questions and to think about the answers—and the traditional exam format makes it far too easy to simply teach students to try to guess the teacher’s password.
If implemented properly, likely to be world-improving.
...that’s my thoughts on those goals. Other people will likely have different thoughts.
But I try not to be too confident about exactly what a Good world looks like; a) I don’t have any idea what the world will look like once we start introducing crazy things like superintelligence, b) that sounds suspiciously like an ideology and I would rather do lots of experiments on what makes people happy and then implement that, and c) a Good world would have to satisfy people’s preferences and I’m not a powerful enough computer to figure out a way to satisfy 7 billion sets of preferences.
And these are all very virtuous things to say, but you’re a human, not a computer. You really ought to at least lock your mind on some positive section of the nearby-possible and try to draw motivation from that (by trying to make it happen).
My intuitions say that specialism increases output, so we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say.
“Greetings, Comrade Acty. Today the Collective has decreed that you...” Do these words make your heart skip a beat in joyous anticipation, no matter how they continue?
Have you read “Brave New World”? “1984″? “With Folded Hands”? Do those depict societies you find attractive?
To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in.
Exinanition is an attractive fantasy for some, but personal fantasies are not a foundation to build a society on.
What I can do is think: a lot of aspects of the current world (war, poverty, disease etc) make me really angry and seem like they also hurt other people other than me, and if I were to absolutely annihilate those things, the world would look like a better place to me and would also better satisfy others’ preferences. So I’m going to do that.
You are clearly intelligent, but do you think? You have described the rich intellectual life at your school, but how much of that activity is of the sort that can solve a problem in the real world, rather than a facility at making complex patterns out of ideas? The visions that you have laid out here merely imagine problems solved. People will not do as you would want? Then they will be made to. How? “On pain of death.” How can the executioners be trusted? They will be tested to ensure they use the power well.
How will they be tested? Who tests them? How does this system ever come into existence? I’m sure your imagination can come up with answers to all these questions, that you can slot into a larger and larger story. But it would be an exercise in creative fiction, an exercise in invisible dragonology.
And all springing from “My intuitions say that specialism increases output.”
I’m going to pursue the elimination of suffering until the suffering stops.
Exterminate all life, then. That will stop the suffering.
I’m sure you’re really smart, and will go far. I’m concerned about the direction, though. Right now, I’m looking at an Unfriendly Natural Intelligence.
That’s why I don’t want to make such a society. I don’t want to do it. It is a crazy idea that I dreamed up by imagining all the things that I want, scaled up to 11. It is merely a demonstration of why I feel very strongly that I should not rely on the things I want
Wait a minute. You don’t want them, or you do want them but shouldn’t rely on what you want?
And I’m not just nitpicking here. This is why people are having bad reactions. On one level, you don’t want those things, and on another you do. Seriously mixed messages.
Also, if you are physically there with your foot on someone’s toe, that triggers your emotional instincts that say that you shouldn’t cause pain. If you are doing things which cause some person to get hurt in some faraway place where you can’t see it, that doesn’t. I’m sure that many of the people who decided to use terrorism as an excuse for NSA surveillance won’t step on people’s toes or hurt any cats. If anything, their desire not to hurt people makes it worse. “We have to do these things for everyone’s own good, that way nobody gets hurt!”
Currently my thought processes go something more like: “When I think about the things that make me happy, I come up with a list like meritocracy and unity and productivity and strong central authority. I don’t come up with things like freedom. Taking those things to their logical conclusion, I should propose a society designed like so… wait… Oh my god that’s terrifying, I’ve just come up with a society that the mere description of causes other people to want to run screaming, this is bad, RED ALERT, SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH MY BRAIN. I should distrust my moral intuitions. I should place increased trust in ideas like doing science to see what makes people happiest and then doing that, because clearly just listening to my moral intuitions is a terrible way to figure out what will make other people happy. In fact, before I do anything likely to significantly change anyone else’s life, I should do some research or test it on a small scale in order to check whether or not it will make them happy, because clearly just listening to what I want/like is a terrible idea.”
I’m not so sure you should distrust your intuitions here. I mean, let’s be frank, the same people who will rave about how every left-wing idea from liberal feminism to state socialism is absolutely terrible, evil, and tyrannical will, themselves, manage to reconstruct most of the same moral intuitions if left alone on their own blogs. I mean, sure, they’ll call it “neoreaction”, but it’s not actually that fundamentally different from Stalinism. On the more moderate end of the scale, you should take account of the fact that anti-state right-wing ideologies in Anglo countries right now are unusually opposed to state and hierarchy across the space of all human societies ever, including present-day ones.
POINT BEING, sometimes you should distrust your distrust of certain intuitions, and ask simply, “How far is this intuition from the mean human across history?” If it’s close, actually, then you shouldn’t treat it as, “Something [UNUSUAL] is wrong with my brain.” The intuition is often still wrong, but it’s wrong in the way most human intuitions are wrong rather than because you have some particular moral defect.
So if the “motivate yourself by thinking about a great world and working towards it” is a terrible option for me because my brain’s imagine-great-worlds function is messed up, then clearly I need to look for an alternative motivation. And “motivate yourself by thinking about clearly evil things like death and disease and suffering and then trying to eliminate them” is a good alternative.
See, the funny thing is, I can understand this sentiment, because my imagine-great-worlds function is messed-up in exactly the opposite way. When I try to imagine great worlds, I don’t imagine worlds full of disciplined workers marching boldly forth under the command of strong, wise, meritorious leadership for the Greater Good—that’s my “boring parts of Shinji and Warhammer 40k” memories.
Instead, my “sample great worlds” function outputs largely equal societies in which people relate to each-other as friends and comrades, the need to march boldly forth for anything when you don’t really want to has been long-since abolished, and people spend their time coming up with new and original ways to have fun in the happy sunlight, while also re-terraforming the Earth, colonizing the rest of the Solar System, and figuring out ways to build interstellar travel (even for digitized uploads) that can genuinely survive the interstellar void to establish colonies further-out.
I am deeply disturbed to find that a great portion of “the masses” or “the real people, outside the internet” seem to, on some level, actually feel that being oppressed and exploited makes their lives meaningful, and that freedom and happiness is value-destroying, and that this is what’s at the root of all that reactionary rhetoric about “our values” and “our traditions”… but I can’t actually bring myself to say that they ought to be destroyed for being wired that way.
I just kinda want some corner of the world to have your and my kinds of wiring, where Progress is supposed to achieve greater freedom, happiness, and entanglement over time, and we can come up with our own damn fates rather than getting terminally depressed because nobody forced one on us.
Likewise, I can imagine that a lot of these goddamn Americans are wired in such a way that “being made to do anything by anyone else, ever” seems terminally evil to them. Meh, give them a planetoid.
On some level, you do need a motivation, so it would be foolish to say that anger is a bad reason to do things. I would certainly never tell you to do only things you are indifferent about.
On another level, though, doing things out of strong anger causes you to ignore evidence, think short term, ignore collateral damage, etc. just as much as doing things because they make you happy does. You think that describing the society that will make you feel happy makes people run screaming? Describing the society that would alleviate your anger will make people run screaming too—in fact it already has made people run screaming in this very thread.
Or at least, it has a bad track record in the real world. Look at the things that people have done because they are really angry about terrorism.
My intuitions say that specialism increases output, so we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say.
To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in. Unfortunately, everyone else seems to strongly disagree.
I think there’s an implicit premise or two that you may have mentally included but failed to express, running along the lines of:
The all-controlling state is run by completely benevolent beings who are devoted to their duty and never make errors.
Sans such a premise, one lazy bureaucrat cribbing his cubicle neighbor’s allocations, or a sloppy one switching the numbers on two careers, can cause a hell of a lot of pain by assigning an inappropriate set of tasks for people to do. Zero say and the death penalty for disobedience then makes the pain practically irremediable. A lot of the reason for weak and ineffective government is trying to mitigate and limit government’s ability to do terribly terribly wicked things, because governments are often highly skilled at doing terribly terribly wicked things, and in unique positions to do so, and can do so by minor accident. You seem to have ignored the possibility of anything going wrong when following your intuition.
Moreover, there’s a second possible implicit premise:
These angels hold exactly and only the values shared by all mankind, and correct knowledge about everything.
Imagine someone with different values or beliefs in charge of that all-controlling state with the death penalty. For instance, I have previously observed that Boko Haram has a sliver of a valid point in their criticism of Western education when noting that it appears to have been a major driver in causing Western fertility rates to drop below replacement and show no sign of recovery. Obviously you can’t have a wonderful future full of happy people if humans have gone extinct, therefore the Boko Haram state bans Western education on pain of death. For those already poisoned by it, such as you, you will spend your next ten years remedially bearing and rearing children and you are henceforth forbidden access to any and all reading material beyond instructions on diaper packaging. Boko Haram is confident that this is the optimal career for you and that they’re maximizing the integral of human happiness over time, despite how much you may scream in the short term at the idea.
With such premises spelled out, I predict people wouldn’t object to your ideal world so much as they’d object to the grossly unrealistic prospect. But without such, you’re proposing a totalitarian dictatorship and triggering a hell of a lot of warning signs and heuristics and pattern-matching to slavery, tyranny, the Soviet Union, and various other terrible bad things where one party holds absolute power to tell other people how to live their life.
“But it’s a benevolent dictatorship”, I imagine you saying. Pull the other one, it has bells on. The neoreactionaries at least have a proposed incentive structure to encourage the dictator to be benevolent in their proposal to bring back monarchy. (TL;DR taxes go into the king’s purse giving the king a long planning horizon) What have you got? Remember, you are one in seven billion people, you will almost certainly not be in charge of this all-powerful state if it’s ever implemented, and when you do your safety design you should imagine it being in the hands of randoms at the least, and of enemies if you want to display caution.
If you are “procrastinate-y” you wouldn’t be able to survive this state yourself. Following a set schedule every moment for the rest of your life is very, very difficult and it is unlikely that you would be able to do it, so you would soon be dead yourself in this state.
An ideology would just bias my science and make me worse.
I don’t know you well enough to say, but it’s quite easy to pretend that one has no ideology.
For clear thinking it’s very useful to understand one’s own ideological positions.
There also a difference between doing science and scientism with is about banner wearing.
Oh, I definitely have some kind of inbuilt ideology—it’s just that right now, I’m consciously trying to suppress/ignore it. It doesn’t seem to converge with what most other humans want. I’d rather treat it as a bias, and try and compensate for it, in order to serve my higher level goals of satisfying people’s preferences and increasing happiness and decreasing suffering and doing correct true science.
we should have an all-controlling central state with specialist optimal-career-distributors and specialist psychologist day-planners who hand out schedules and to-do lists to every citizen every day which must be followed to the letter on pain of death and in which the citizens have zero say. Nobody would have property, you would just contribute towards the state of human happiness when the state told you to and then you would be assigned the goods you needed by the state. To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in
Why do you call inhabitants of such a state “citizens”? They are slaves.
To me, this seems like a happy wonderful place that I would very much like to live in
Interesting. So you would like to be a slave.
Unfortunately, everyone else seems to strongly disagree.
Don’t mind Lumifer. He’s one of our resident Anti-Spirals.
And yet he’s consistently one of the highest karma earners in the 30-day karma leaderboard. It seems to be mainly due to his heavy participation… his 80% upvote rate is not especially high. I find him incredibly frustrating to engage with (though I try not to let it show). I can’t help but think that he is driving valuable people away; having difficult people dominate the conversation can’t be a good thing. I’ve tried to talk to him about this.
Hypothesized failure mode for online forums: Online communities are disproportionately populated by disagreeable people who are driven online because they have trouble making real-life friends. They tend to “win” long discussions because they have more hours to invest in them. Bystanders generally don’t care much about long discussions because it’s an obscure and wordy debate they aren’t invested in, so for most extended discussions, there’s no referee to call out bad conversational behavior. The end result: the bulldog strategy of being the most determined person in the conversation ends up “winning” more often than not.
(To clarify, I’m not trying to speak out against the perspectives people like Lumifer and VoiceOfRa offer, which I am generally sympathetic to. I think their perspectives are valuable. I just wish they would make a stronger effort to engage in civil & charitable discussion, and I think having people who don’t do this and participate heavily is likely to have pernicious effects on LW culture in the long term. In general, I agree with the view that Paul Graham has advanced re: Hacker News moderation: on a group rationality level, in an online forum context, civility & niceness end up being very important.)
Burning fury does, and if it makes me help people… whatever works, right?
There is a price to be paid. If you use fury and anger too much, you will become a furious and angry kind of person. Embrace the Dark Side and you will become one with it :-/
I’m just a kid who wants to grow up and study social science and try and help people.
Maybe :-) The reason you’ve met a certain… lack of enthusiasm about your anger for good causes is because you’re not the first kid who wanted to help people and was furious about the injustice and the blindness of the world. And, let’s just say, it does not always lead to good outcomes.
sexism and racism and homophobia and transphobia, and preachers who help spread AIDS by trying to limit access to contraception, and all of those things make me REALLY REALLY ANGRY. If I think about them too hard I see red.
In otherwords, you’re completely mindkilled about the topics in question and thus your opinions about them are likely to be poorly thought out. For example, when you think about, most of what is called “racism/sexism/etc.” is actually perfectly valid Baysian inference (frequently leading to true conclusions that some people would prefer not to believe). As for AIDS, are you also angry at people opposing traditional morality since they also help spread AIDS?
Frankly, given your list, it looks like you merely stumbled up on the causes fashionable where you grew up and implicitly assumed that since everyone is so worked up about them they must be good causes. Consider that if you had grown up differently you would feel just as angry at anyone standing in the way of saving people’s souls.
At age 6, I quote my younger self, I wanted “to follow Jesus’ way”. I have improved away from my upbringing and the fashionable things where I grew up. I came to lefty conclusions all on my ownsies, because they make sense.
Eh, I’m not sure I’m an anything-ist. Socialist ideas make a lot of sense to me, but really I’m a read-a-few-more-books-and-go-to-university-and-then-decide-ist. If I have to stand behind any -ist, it’s going to be “scientist”. I want to do research to find out which policies most effectively make people happy, and then I want to implement those policies regardless of whether they fall in line with the ideologies that seem attractive to me.
But yeah, I do think that it is morally wrong to let people suffer and morally right to make people happy, and I think you can create a lot of utility by taking money from people who already have a lot (leaving them with enough to buy food and maybe preventing them from going on holiday / buying a nice car) and giving it to people who have nothing (meaning they have enough money for food and education so they can survive and try and change their situation). So I agree with taxing people and using the money to provide universal healthcare, housing, food, etc. Apparently that makes me a socialist.
So I agree with taxing people and using the money to provide universal healthcare, housing, food, etc. Apparently that makes me a socialist.
The correct term is social-democrat, actually. Among the different systems, social democracy has very rarely received full-throated support, but seems to have done among the best at handling the complexity of the values and value-systems that humans want to be materially represented in our societies.
(And HAHAHA!, finally I can just come out and say that without feeling the need to explain reams and reams of background material on both value-complexity and left-wing history!)
Eh, I’m not sure I’m an anything-ist. Socialist ideas make a lot of sense to me, but really I’m a read-a-few-more-books-and-go-to-university-and-then-decide-ist. If I have to stand behind any -ist, it’s going to be “scientist”. I want to do research to find out which policies most effectively make people happy, and then I want to implement those policies regardless of whether they fall in line with the ideologies that seem attractive to me.
Oh, that’s all well and good. I just tend to bring up socialism because I think that “left-wing politics” is more of a hypothesis space of political programs than a single such program (ie: the USSR), but that “bad vibes” in the West from the USSR (and lots and lots of right-wing propaganda) have tended to succeed in getting people to write off that entire hypothesis space before examining the evidence.
I do think that an ideally rational government would be “more” left-wing than right-wing, as current alignments stand, but I too think it would in fact be mixed.
Among the different systems, social democracy has very rarely received full-throated support, but seems to have done among the best at handling the complexity of the values and value-systems that humans want to be materially represented in our societies.
…among the various socio-political systems the one I prefer is the best one because it is the best… X-)
Actually, in voting and activism, I’m a full-throated socialist. Social democracy is weaksauce next to a fully-developed socialism, but we don’t have a fully-developed socialism, so you’re often stuck with the weaksauce.
And as an object-level defense: social democracy, as far as I can tell, does the best at aggregating value information about diverse domains of life and keeping any one optimization criterion from running roughshod over everything else that people happen to care about.
You know, you don’t have to jump on him and demand that he defends his socialist stance merely because he expressed it and tried to discuss it with someone else. It’s not like he’s answerable to you for being a socialist. And this is not the first time I’ve seen you and others intervene in a discussion (that otherwise didn’t involve or concern them) solely for calling out people on leftist ideas. What the hell are you doing that for?
Since he brought a downvote brigade, I’m indeed going to refrain from engaging. Those who want to know more can follow the link I posted up-thread, which goes to a leading socialist magazine to which I subscribe.
you don’t have to jump on him and demand that he defends his socialist stance merely because he expressed it
Demand? I can’t demand anything. This is an internet forum, all eli_sennesh needs to do is just ignore my comment. That seems easy enough.
solely for calling out people on leftist ideas
It’s not like it is something to be ashamed of, is it? If he says he is a “full-throated socialist” I get curious what does that mean. The last place that said it implemented a “fully-developed socialism” was USSR, but I don’t think that’s what eli_sennesh means.
But yeah, I do think that it is morally wrong to let people suffer and morally right to make people happy, and I think you can create a lot of utility by taking money from people who already have a lot (leaving them with enough to buy food and maybe preventing them from going on holiday / buying a nice car) and giving it to people who have nothing (meaning they have enough money for food and education so they can survive and try and change their situation).
That would increase utility in the very short term, agreed. Of course, it would destroy the motivation to work, thus leading to a massive drop in utility shortly there after.
Well, “providing universal healthcare and welfare will lead to a massive drop in motivation to work” is a scientific prediction. We can find out whether it is true by looking at countries where this already happens—taxes pay for good socialised healthcare and welfare programs—like the UK and the Nordics, and seeing if your prediction has come true.
The UK employment rate is 5.6%, the United States is 5.3%. Not a particularly big difference, nothing indicating that the UK’s universal free healthcare has created some kind of horrifying utility drop because there’s no motivation to work. We can take another example if you like. Healthcare in Iceland is universal, and Iceland’s unemployment rate is 4.3% (it also has the highest life expectancy in Europe).
This is not an ideological dispute. This is a dispute of scientific fact. Does taxing people and providing universal healthcare and welfare lead to a massive drop in utility by destroying the motivation to work (and meaning that people don’t work)? This experiment has already been performed—the UK and Iceland have universal healthcare and provide welfare to unemployed citizens—and, um, the results are kind of conclusive. The world hasn’t ended over here. Everyone is still motivated to work. Unemployment rates are pretty similar to those in the US where welfare etc isn’t very good and there’s not universal healthcare. Your prediction didn’t come true, so if you’re a rationalist, you have to update now.
Scandinavia and the UK are relatively ethnically homogenous, high-trust, and productive populations. Socialized policies are going to work relatively better in these populations. Northwest European populations are not an appropriate reference class to generalize about the rest of the world, and they are often different even from other parts of Europe.
Socialized policies will have poorer results in more heterogenous populations. For example, imagine that a country has multiple tribes that don’t like each other; they aren’t going to like supporting each other’s members through welfare. As another example, imagine that multiple populations in a country have very different economic productivity. The people who are higher in productivity aren’t going to enjoy their taxes being siphoned off to support other groups who aren’t pulling their weight economically. These situations are a recipe for ethnic conflict.
Icelanders may be happy with their socialized policies now, but imagine if you created a new nation with a combination of Icelanders and Greeks called Icegreekland. The Icelanders would probably be a lot more productive than the Greeks and unhappy about needing to support them through welfare. Icelanders might be more motivated to work and pay taxes if it’s creating a social safety net for their own community, but less excited about working to pay taxes to support Greeks. And who can blame them?
There is plenty of valid debate about the likely consequences of socialized policies for populations other than homogenous NW European populations. Whoever told you these issues were a matter of scientific fact was misleading you. This is an excellent example of how the siren’s call of politically attractive answers leads people to cut corners during their analysis so it goes in the desired direction, whether they are aware they are doing it or not.
Generalizing what works for one group as appropriate for another is a really common failure mode through history which hurts real people. See the whole “democracy in Iraq” thing as another example.
Well, “providing universal healthcare and welfare will lead to a massive drop in motivation to work” is a scientific prediction.
I wasn’t talking about providing people with universal healthcare. (That merely leads to a somewhat dysfunctional healthcare system). I was talking about taking so much from the “haves” that you “[prevent] them from going on holiday / buying a nice car”.
Word of advice, try actually reading what I wrote before replying next time. Yes, I realize this is hard to do while one is angry; however, that’s an argument for not using anger as your primary motivation.
Of course, I wouldn’t say that the US system is free-market, because medicine is heavily regulated. I read somewhere that only one company has a licence to produce methamphetamine for ADHD, giving them a state-enforced monopoly.
Healthcare seems to be one of the most difficult areas to run under a free market.
I would approach this from a different angle. It is fairly well known that the measurable GINI level of inequality is not primarily caused by the people who are upper-middle or reasonably wealthy but by the 1% of the 1% (so 0.01%). So why are taxes even progressive for the 99,99%? They achieve just about nothing in reducing GINI, they piss of the upper-middle who may be unable to buy a nice car, and if that whole burden (of tax rate progressivity) was shifted over to the 0,.01% they’d still be buying whole fleets of cars. So it just makes no sense.
However I also think it is because the 0.01% and their wealth is extremely mobile. The sad truth is that modern taxation is based on a flypaper principle, tax those whom you can because they stay put, and that is the upper-middle.
So why are taxes even progressive for the 99,99%? They achieve just about nothing in reducing GINI, they piss of the upper-middle who may be unable to buy a nice car...
The purpose of progressive taxation is not to reduce the Gini coefficient; it’s to efficiently extract funding and to sound good to fairness-minded voters. With regard to the former, there’s a lot more people around the 90th percentile than the 99.99th, more of their money comes in easily-taxable forms, and they’re generally more tractable than those far above or below. They may be unable to buy a nicer car after taxes, and it may piss them off, but they’re not going to be rioting in the streets over it, and they can’t afford lobbyists or many of the more interesting tax dodges.
With regard to the latter, your average voter has never heard of Gini nor met anyone truly wealthy, but you can expect them to be acutely aware of their managers and their slightly richer neighbors. Screwing Bill Gates might make good pre-election press, but screwing Bill Lumbergh who parks his Porsche in the handicapped spots every day is viscerally satisfying and stays that way.
I don’t know why you automatically leap to assuming that I am really angry about, say, people reading studies comparing male and female IQs when what I’m actually angry about is, say, people beating LBGTQA+ individuals to death in dark alleys (which I am presuming you would not defend).
Because the former is what a lot of other people using your rhetoric mean. And assuming that you mean what a lot of other people using your rhetoric mean is a reasonable assumption.
Also, even interpreting what you said as “I am angry about people beating LBGTQA+ individuals”, it sounds like you are angry about it as long as it happens at all, regardless of its prevalence. Terrorism really happens too, but disproportionate anger against terrorism that ignores its prevalence has led to (or has been an excuse for) some pretty awful things.
How much of my rhetoric have you actually had the chance to observe?
Well, right here is a nice example:
that reveals a set of values which are kinda disturbing to me. It signals that you care about whether you can read IQ-by-race-and-gender studies more than you care about genocide and acid attacks and lynchings
Would you care to be explicit about the connection between IQ-by-race studies and genocide..?
There is no connection. I’m not trying to imply a connection. The only connection is that they are both things possibly implied by the word “racism”.
I’m trying to say that when I say “I oppose racism”, intending to signal “I oppose people beating up minorities”, and people misunderstand badly enough that they think I mean “I oppose IQ-by-race studies”, it disturbs me. If people know that “I oppose racism” could mean “I oppose genocide”, but choose to interpret it as “I oppose IQ-by-race studies”, that worries me. Those things are completely different and if you think that I’m more likely to oppose IQ-by-race studies than I am to oppose genocide, or if you think IQ-by-race studies are more important and worthy of being upset about than genocide, something has gone very wrong here.
A sentence like “I oppose racism” could mean a lot of different things. It could mean “I think genocide is wrong”, “I think lynchings are wrong”, “I think people choosing white people for jobs over black people with equivalent qualifications is wrong”, or “I think IQ by race studies should be banned”. Automatically leaping to the last one and getting very angry about it is… kind of weird, because it’s the one I’m least likely to mean, and the only one we actually disagree about. You seriously want to reply to “I oppose racism” with “but IQ by race studies are valid Bayesian inference!” and not “yes, I agree that lynching people is very wrong”? Why? Are IQ by race studies more important to your values than eliminating genocide and lynchings? Do you genuinely think that I am more likely to oppose IQ-by-race studies than I am to oppose lynchings? The answer to neither of those questions should be yes.
I’m trying to say that when I say “I oppose racism”, intending to signal “I oppose people beating up minorities”, and people misunderstand badly enough that they think I mean “I oppose IQ-by-race studies”, it disturbs me.
That’s because most people who say “I oppose racism” mean the latter, and no one except you means the former. That’s largely because most people oppose beating people up for no good reason and thus they don’t feel the need to constantly go about saying so.
Racism and sexism and transphobia and homophobia have a lot of effects. They run the gamut, from racism causing literal genocides and the murders of millions of people, to a vaguely insulting slur being used behind someone’s back
The same is true for terrorism, but if someone came here saying “I’m really angry at terrorism and we have to do something”, you’d be justified in thinking that doing what they want might not turn out well.
Can we apply the principle of charity, and establish that we agree on certain things, before we leap to yell at one another?
I’m sure we can agree that terrorism is bad, too. In fact, I’m sure we can agree that Islamic terrorism specifically is bad. So being really angry at it is likely to produce good results, right?
I am very angry about terrorism. I think terrorism is a very bad thing and we should eliminate it from the world if we can.
Being very angry about terrorism =/= thinking that a good way to solve the problem is to randomly go kill the entire population of the Middle East in the name of freedom (and oil). I hate terrorism and would prevent it if I could. In fact, I hate people killing each other so much, I think we should think rationally about the best way to eliminate it utterly (whilst causing fewer deaths than it causes) and then do that.
If you see someone else very angry about terrorism, though, wouldn’t you think there’s a good chance that they support (or can be easily led into supporting) anti-terrorism policies with bad consequences? Even if you personally can be angry at terrorism without wanting to do anything questionable, surely you recognize that is commonly not true for other people?
I think that there’s a good chance in general that most people can be led into supporting policies with bad consequences. I don’t think higher levels of idiocy are present in people who are annoyed about racism and terrorism compared with those who aren’t. The kind of people who say “on average people with black skin are slightly less smart, therefore let’s bring back slavery and apartheid” are just as stupid and evil, if not stupider and eviler, than the people who support burning down the whole Middle East in order to get rid of terrorism.
Caricatures such as describing people who disagree with you as saying “let’s bring back slavery” and supporting “burning down the whole Middle East” are not productive in political discussions.
I’m not trying to describe the people who disagree with me as wanting to bring back slavery or supporting burning down the whole Middle East; that isn’t my point and I apologise if I was unclear.
As I understood it, the argument levelled against me was that: people who say they’re really angry about terrorism are often idiots who hold idiotic beliefs, like, “let’s send loads of tanks to the Middle East and kill all the people who might be in the same social group as the terrorists and that will solve everything!” and in the same way, people who say they’re really angry about racism are the kind of people who hold idiotic beliefs like “let’s ban all science that has anything to do with race and gender!” and therefore it was reasonable of them to assume, when I stated that I was opposed to racism, that I was the latter kind of idiot.
To which my response is that many people are idiots, both people who are angry about terrorism and people who aren’t, people who are angry about racism and people who aren’t. There are high levels of idiocy in both groups. Being angry about terrorism and racism still seems perfectly appropriate and fine as an emotional arational response, since terrorism and racism are both really bad things. I think the proper response to someone saying “I hate terrorism” is “I agree, terrorism is a really bad thing”, not “But drone strikes against 18 year olds in the middle east kill grandmothers!” (even if that is a true thing) and similarly, the proper response to someone saying “I hate racism” is “I agree, genocide and lynchings are really bad”, not “But studies about race and gender are perfectly valid Bayesian inference!” (even if that is a true thing).
The kind of people who say “on average people with black skin are slightly less smart, therefore let’s bring back slavery and apartheid” are just as stupid and evil, if not stupider and eviler, than the people who support burning down the whole Middle East in order to get rid of terrorism.
That compares racists to anti-terrorists, not anti-racists to anti-terrorists.
Being very angry about terrorism =/= thinking that a good way to solve the problem is to randomly go kill the entire population of the Middle East in the name of freedom (and oil).
You do realize no one thinks that. In particular that wasn’t the position Jiro was arguing against.
I don’t know, maybe because I was randomly listing some things that I’m angry about to explain why I’m motivated to try and improve the world, not making a thorough and comprehensive list of everything I think is wrong?
Could also fit under “war”, which I listed, and “death”, which I listed.
I don’t know, maybe because I was randomly listing some things that I’m angry about to explain why
So what can I conclude from the things you found salient enough to include and the things you didn’t? Especially since it correlates a lot better with what it is currently fashionable to be angry about then with any reasonable measure of how much disutility they produce.
Racism and sexism and transphobia and homophobia have a lot of effects. They run the gamut, from racism causing literal genocides and the murders of millions of people,
False beliefs in equality are also responsible for millions of people being dead, and in fact have a muchhigherbody-count then racism.
An excellent way to stop people from being killed is to make them strong or get them protected by someone who is strong. Strong in a broad sense here, from courage to coolness under pressure etc.
Here is a problem. To be a strong protector correlates with having the kind of transphobic and so on, long list of anti-social justice stuff or bigotry, because that list reduces to either disliking weakness or distrusting difference / having strong ingroup loyalty, and there is a relationship between these (a tribal warrior would have all).
Here is a solution. Basically moderate, reciprocal bigotocracy. Accept a higher-status, somewhat elevated i.e. clearly un-equal social role of the strong protector type i.e. that of traditional men, in return for them actively protecting all the other groups from coming to serious harm. The other groups will have to accept having lower social status, and it will be hard on their pride, but will be safer. This can be made official and perhaps more palatable by conscripting straight males, everybody claiming genderqueer status getting an exemption, and also after the service expecting some kind of community protection role, in return for higher elevated social status and respect. Note: this would be the basic model of most European countries up to the most recent times, status-patriarchy and male privilege explicitly deriving from the sacrifice of conscription.
This is not easy to swallow. However there seem to be not many other options. You cannot have strong protectors who are 100% PC because then they will have no fighting spirit. Without strong protectors, all you can hope is a utopia and hoping the whole Earth adopts it or else any basic tribe with gusto will take you over.
But I think a compromise model of not 100% complete equality and providing a proctor role in return should be able to work, as this has always been the traditional civilized model. In the recent years it was abandoned due to it being oppressive, and perhaps it was, but perhaps there is a way to find a compromise inside it.
The last time I read an article on Rotherham even the Telegraph said that the officers in question were highly chauvinistic and therefore don’t really follow the usual ideal of being PC.
At the same time reading articles about Rotherham is still registers me: “This story doesn’t make sense, the facts on the ground are likely to be different than the mainstream media reports I’m reading” instincts.
Have you read the actual report about it in-depth?
(trigger warning for a bunch of things, including rape and torture)
The Rotherham scandal is very well-documented on Wikipedia. There have been multiple independent reports, and I recommend reading this summary of one of the reports by the Guardian. This event is a good case study because it is easily verifiable; it’s not just right-wing sources and tabloids here.
What we know:
Around 1,400 girls were sexually abused in Rotherham, many of them lower-class white girls, but also Pakistani girls
Most of the perpetrators were Muslim Pakistani men, though it seems like other Middle-Eastern and Roma men were also involved
The political and multiculturalist environment slowed down the reporting of this tragedy until eventually it got out
To substantiate that last claim, you can check out one of the independent reports from Rotherham’s council website:
By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so. …
The issue of race, regardless of ethnic group, should be tackled as an absolute priority if it is known to be a significant factor in the criminal activity of organised abuse in any local community. There was little evidence of such action being taken in Rotherham in the earlier years. Councillors can play an effective role in this, especially those representing the communities in question, but only if they act as facilitators of communication rather than barriers to it. One senior officer suggested that some influential Pakistani-heritage councillors in Rotherham had acted as barriers...
In her 2006 report, she stated that ‘it is believed by a number of workers that one of the difficulties that prevent this issue [CSE] being dealt with effectively is the ethnicity of the main perpetrators’.
She also reported in 2006 that young people in Rotherham believed at that time that the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of racism. This perception was echoed at the present time by some young people we met during the Inquiry, but was not supported by specific examples.
Several people interviewed expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police, rather than in individual cases. One example was given by the Risky Business project Manager (1997- 2012) who reported that she was told not to refer to the ethnic origins of perpetrators when carrying out training. Other staff in children’s social care said that when writing reports on CSE cases, they were advised by their managers to be cautious about referring to the ethnicity of the perpetrators...
Issues of ethnicity related to child sexual exploitation have been discussed in other reports, including the Home Affairs Select Committee report, and the report of the Children’s Commissioner. Within the Council, we found no evidence of children’s social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE. In the broader organisational context, however, there was a widespread perception that messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to ‘downplay’ the ethnic dimensions_ of CSE. Unsurprisingly, frontline staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as ‘racist’. From a political perspective, the approach of avoiding public discussion of the issues was ill judged.
And there you have it: concerns about racism hampered the investigation. Authorities encouraged a coverup of the ethnic dimensions of the problem. Of course, there were obviously other institutional failures here in addition to political correctness. This report is consistent with the mainstream media coverage. And this is the delicate, officially accepted report: I imagine that the true story is worse.
When a story is true, but it doesn’t “make sense,” that could be a sign that you are dealing with a corrupted map. I initially had the same reaction as you, that this can’t be true. I think that’s a very common reaction to have, the first time you encounter something that challenges the reigning political narratives. Yet upon further research, this event is not unusual or unprecedented. Following links on Wikipedia, we have the Rochdale sex gang, the Derby sex gang, the Oxford sex gang, the Bristol sex gang, and the Telford sex gang. These are all easily verifiable cases, and the perpetrators are usually people from Muslim immigrant backgrounds.
Sexual violence by Muslim immigrants is a serious social problem in the UK, and the multicultural political environment makes it hard to crack down on. Bad political ideas have real consequences which result in real people getting hurt at a large scale. These events represent a failure of the UK elites to protect rule of law. Since civilization is based on rule of law, this is a very serious problem.
No, I’m fairly confident the neoreactionaries, for whatever reason you brought them up, would happily join in the plan to strip out the objectionable bits of Pakistani culture and replace it with something better. Also, demanding more integration and acculturation from immigrants. What they probably wouldn’t listen to is the apparent contradiction of saying we don’t need to get rid of multiculturalism, but we do need to push a certain cultural message until it becomes universal.
What they probably wouldn’t listen to is the apparent contradiction of saying we don’t need to get rid of multiculturalism, but we do need to push a certain cultural message until it becomes universal.
You guys are arguing over the definition of “culture”.
I’ll like to start by backing up a bit and explaining why I brought up the example of Rotherham. You originally came here talking about your emphasis on preventing human suffering. Rotherham is a scary example of people being hurt, which was swept under the carpet. I think Rotherham is an important case study for progressives and feminists to address.
As you note, some immigrants come from cultures (usually Muslim cultures) with very sexist attitudes towards consent. Will they assimilate and change their attitudes? Well, first I want to register some skepticism for the notion that European Muslims are assimilating. Muslims are people with their own culture, not merely empty vessels to pour progressive attitudes into. Muslims in many parts of Europe are creating patrols to enforce Sharia Law. If you want something more quantitative, Muslim polls reveal that 11% of UK Muslims believe that the Charlie Hebdo magazine “deserved” to be attacked. This really doesn’t look like assimilation.
But for now, let’s pretend that they are assimilating. How long will this assimilation take?
In what morality is it remotely acceptable that thousands of European women will predictably be raped or tortured by Muslim immigrant gangs while we are waiting for them to get with the feminist program?
Feminists usually take a very hardline stance against rape. It’s supremely strange seeing them suddenly go soft on rape when the perpetrators are non-whites. It’s not enough to say “that’s wrong” after the fact, or to point out biases of the police, when these rapes were entirely preventable from the beginning. It’s also not sufficient to frame rape as purely a gender issue when there are clear racial and cultural dynamics going on. There perpetrators were mostly of particular races, and fears of being racist slowed down the investigation.
Feminists are against Christian patriarchy, but they sometimes make excuses for Muslim patriarchy, which is a strange double standard.
When individual feminists become too critical of Islam, they can get denounced as “racist” by progressives, or even by other feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was raised as a Muslim but increasingly criticized Islam’s infringement of women’s rights. She was denounced by the left and universities revoked her speaking engagements.
After seeing Rotherham and Sharia patrols harassing women, there are some tough questions we should be asking.
Could better immigration policies select for immigrants who are on board with Western ideas about consent?
Could Muslim immigrants to Europe be encouraged to assimilate faster towards Western ideas about women’s rights?
Are feminism and progressivism truly aligned in their goals? Is women’s safety compatible with importing large groups of people who have very different ideas about women’s rights?
If you found out about Rotherham from me, not from feminist or progressive sources, what else about the world have they not told you?
If you want something more quantitative, Muslim polls reveal that 11% of UK Muslims believe that the Charlie Hebdo magazine “deserved” to be attacked. This really doesn’t look like assimilation.
This doesn’t say much unless we know the corresponding fraction among Muslims worldwide is not much larger than 11%.
I think your implication is that Muslims are assimilating if their attitudes are shifting towards Western values after immigration. But assimilation isn’t just about a delta, it’s also about the end state: assimilation isn’t complete until Muslims adopt Western values.
Unfortunately, there is overlap between European and non-European Muslim attitudes towards suicide bombing based on polls. France’s Muslim population is especially radical. Even if they are slowly assimilating, their starting point is far outside Western values.
Well, Acty’s hypothesis was that they have started assimilating but still haven’t finished doing so. But thanks for the data.
(Who on Earth thought that that bulleted list of sentences in that Wikipedia article is a decent way of presenting those data, anyway? I hope I’ll have the time to make a bar chart, or at least a table. And how comes my spell checker doesn’t like either “bulleted” or “bulletted”?)
Redistributing the world’s rapists from less developed countries into more developed countries with greater law and order to imprison them? Is that really what you’re suggesting? I find this perspective truly stunning and I object to it both factually and morally.
Factually, it’s unclear that this approach would indeed reduce rape in the end. While many Muslim women are raped in Muslim countries, there are unique reasons why some Muslim men might commit sexual violence and harassment. By some Muslim standards, Western women dress like “whores” and are considered to not have bodily sovereignty. To use the feminist term, they are considered “rapable.” Additionally, if British police fail to adequately investigate rape by Muslim men, whether due to chauvinism or fear of being seen as racist, then the rapists won’t actually go to jail in a timely fashion. The Rotherham authorities couldn’t keep up with the volume of complaints. I have no idea whether the Rotherham sex gangs would have been able to operate so brazenly in a Muslim country, where they would risk violent reprisals from the fathers and brothers of their victims. So the notion of reducing rape by jailing immigrant rapists is really, really speculative, and I think it’s really careless for you to be making moral arguments based on it.
Even if spreading around the world’s rapists actually helps jail them and eventually reduce rape, it’s still morally repugnant. I’m trying to figure out what your moral framework is, but the only thing I can come up with is naive utilitarianism. In fact, I think redistributing the world’s rapists is so counter-intuitive that it highlights the problems with naive utilitarianism (or whatever your framework is). There are many lines of objection:
From a deontological perspective, or from a rule/act utilitarian perspective, inflicting a greater risk of rape upon your female neighbors would be a bad practice. It really doesn’t seem very altruistic. What about lower-class British people who don’t want their daughters to risk elevated levels of rape and don’t have the money to take flight to all-white areas? What if they aren’t on board with your plans?
Naive utilitarianism treats humans and human groups interchangeably, and lacks any concept of moral responsibility. Why should the British people be responsible for imprisoning rapists from other countries? They aren’t. They are responsible for handling their own rapists, but why should they be responsible for other people’s rapists? I really disagree that British people should view Muslim women raped in Muslim countries as equivalent to British women raped by British people. When British women are raped in Britain, that represents a failure of British socialization and rule of law, but British people don’t have control over Muslim socialization or law enforcement and shouldn’t have to pick up the pieces when those things fail.
Nations have a moral responsibility to their citizens to defend their citizens from crime and to enforce rule-of-law. If nations fail to protect their own people from crime, people may get pissed off and engage in vigilantism or voting in fascist parties. A utilitarian needs to factor in these backlash scenarios in calculating the utility of rapist redistribution. You could say “well, British people should just take it lying down instead of becoming vigilantes or fascists” but that steps into a different moral framework (like deontology or rule/act utilitarianism) where you would have to answer my previous objections.
Even from a utilitarian perspective, I am not convinced that rapist redistribution actually is good for human welfare. I don’t think it’s utility-promoting to cause members of Culture A to risk harm to fix another Culture’s B crime problems. If you take the world’s biggest problems are redistribute them, then it just turns the whole world shitty instead of just certain parts of it. Importing crime overburdens the police force, resulting in a weakening of rule-of-law, which will only be followed by general civilizational decline.
If you really want to use British law-and-order against rapists from other countries, the other solution would be to export British rule of law to those countries instead of importing immigrants from them. Britain used to try this approach, but nowadays it’s considered unpopular.
If you are going to say that it’s The White Man’s Burden to fix other nation’s problems, then at least go whole hog.
If you are trying to stop rape from a utilitarian perspective, and you want to reeducate Muslims about consent, then you should become a colonialist: export Western rule to the Muslim world, encourage feminism, punish rape, and stop female genital mutilation. What if Muslims resist this utilitarian plan? Well, what if British people resist your utilitarian plan? If you think British people should lie down and accept Muslim immigrant crime cuz utility, then it’s possible to respond that Muslim countries should lie down and accept British rule plus feminism cuz utility.
I am very stunned to see someone coming from a feminist perspective who is knowingly willing to advocate a policy that would increase the risk of rape of women in her society. I think this stance is based on very shaky factual and moral grounds, putting it at odds with any claims of being altruistic and trying to help reduce suffering. I have female relatives in England and I am very distressed by the idea of them risking elevated levels of sexual violence due to political and moral idea that I consider repugnant. If I’m interpreting you wrong then please tell me.
I think you’re being a little hard on Acty. I agree her positions aren’t super well thought out, but it feels like we should make a special effort to keep things friendly in the welcome thread.
Here’s how I would have put similar points (having only followed part of your discussion):
You’re right that the cultural transmission between Muslims and English people will be 2-way—feminists will attempt to impose their ideas on Muslims the same way Muslims will attempt to impose their ideas on feminists. But there are reasons to think that the ideas will disproportionately go the wrong way, from feminists to Muslims. For example, it’s verboten in the feminist community to criticize Muslims, but it’s not verboten in the Muslim community to criticize feminists.
It’d be great if what Acty describes could happen and the police of Britain could cut down on the Muslim rape rate. But Rothertam is a perfect demonstration that this process may not go as well as intended.
My response is the friendly version, and I think that it is actually relatively mild considering where I am coming from. I deleted one sentence, but pretty much the worst I said is to call Acty’s position “repugnant” and engage in some sarcasm. I took some pains to depersonalize my comment and address Acty’s position as much as possible. Most of the harshness in my comment stems from my vehement disagreement with her position, which I did back up with arguments. I invited Acty to correct my understanding of her position.
I think Acty is a fundamentally good person who is misled by poor moral frameworks. I do not know any way to communicate the depth of my moral disagreement without showing some level of my authentic emotional reaction (though very restrained). Being super-nice about it would fail to represent my degree of moral disagreement, and essentially slash her tires and everyone else’s. I realize that it might be tough for her to face so much criticism in a welcome thread, especially considering that some of the critics are harsher than me. But there is also potential upside: on LW, she might find higher quality debate over her ideas than she has before.
Your hypothetical response is a good start, but it fails to supply moral criticism of her stance that I consider necessary. Maybe something in between yours and mine would have been ideal. Being welcoming is a good thing, but if “welcoming” results in a pass on really perverse moral philosophy, then perhaps it’s going too far… I guess it depends on your goals.
I think locking out anyone who might be a criminal, when you have the power to potentially stop them being a criminal and their home country doesn’t, is morally negligent. (I’m your standard no-frills utilitarian; the worth of an action is decided purely by whether you satisfied people’s preferences and made them happy. Forget “state’s duty to the citizens”, the only talk of ‘duty’ I really entertain is each of our duty to our fellow humans. “The White Man’s Burden” is a really stupid idea because it’s every human’s responsibility to help out their fellow humans regardless of skin colour.) I think it doesn’t matter whether you decreased or increased crime on either side of a border, since borders are neither happiness nor preferences and mean nothing to your standard no-frills utilitarian type. I just care about whether you decrease crime in total, globally.
Let me try to briefly convince you of why there should be a state’s duty to citizens from a utilitarian perspective, also corresponding greater concern about internal than external crime:
1) A state resembles a form of corporate organization with its citizens as shareholders. It has special obligations by contract to those shareholders who got a stake on the assumption that they would have special rights in the corporation. Suddenly creating new stock and giving it to to non-shareholders, thereby creating new shareholders, would increase the utility of new shareholders and decrease the utility of old shareholders to roughly the same extent because there is the same amount of company being redistributed, but would have the additional negative effect of decreasing rule of law, and rule of law is a very very good thing because it lets people engage in long-term planning and live stable lives. (There is no such problem if the shareholders come together and decide to create and distribute new stock by agreement—and to translate back the metaphor, this means that immigration should be controlled by existing citizens, rather than borders being declared to “mean nothing” in general.)
2) A state is often an overlay on a nation. To cash those terms out: A governing entity with major features usually including a legal code and a geographically defined and sharply edged region of influence is often an overlay on a cluster of people grouped by social, cultural, biological, and other shared features. (“Nation” derives from those who shared a natus.) Different clusters of people have different clusters of utility functions, and should therefore live under differing legal codes, which should also be administrated by members of those clusters whom one can reasonably expect to have a particularly good understanding of how their fellow cluster-members will be happiest.
3) Particularly where not overlaid on nations, separate states function as testbeds for experiments in policy; the closest thing one has to large-scale controlled experiments in sociology. Redistributing populations across states would be akin to redistributing test subjects across trial arms. The utilitarian thing to do is therefore to instead copy the policies of the most successful nations to the least successful nations, then branch again on previously unexplored policy areas, which each state maintaining its own branch.
Saving the refugee kid is emotionally appealing and might work out OK in small numbers. You correctly note that there might be a threshold past which unselective immigration starts creating negative utility. I think it’s easy to make a case that Britain and France have already hit this point by examining what is going on at the object level.
European countries with large Muslim populations are moving towards anarchy:
Rule of law is declining due to events like mass rape scandals like Rotherham, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and riots. Here’s a video of a large riot which resulted in a Jewish grocery store being burned down. If you watch that video or skip around in it, you will see what looks like a science fiction movie. Muslim riots are a common feature in Europe, and so are sex gangs (established in previous comments).
Sharia Patrols are becoming increasingly common in Europe.
Muslim immigrants form insular enclaves that are dangerous for non-Muslims, or even police (aka “no-go zones” or “Sensitive Urban Zones”).
And these are only a few examples. How much more violence does there have to be before something is done?
Muslims and Europeans are not interchangeable. Muslims have distinct culture and identity, and it’s unlikely that socialization can change this on an acceptable time-scale.
The attitudes of most Muslim population on average are really scary. Muslims in Europe, especially France, have very radical attitudes that are supportive of terrorism. According to Pew Research, 28% of Muslims worldwide and 19% of US Muslims disagree that suicide bombing is never justified. The vast majority of Muslims believe that homosexuality is wrong, and that same survey shows that large percentages of Muslims believe that honor killings are morally permissible. (Note: Muslims from non-Middle Eastern, non-Muslim-ruled countries are less radical and better candidates for immigration.)
Muslim populations have extremely low support for charitable and humanitarian organizations relative to the rest of the world (first table, source is World Values Survey). Only around 3% of Muslims participate in charitable/humanitarian organizations, compared to nearly 20% of Anglos. I think this is mainly due to differences in tribalism rather than differences in wealth, but that’s another subject. Your Muslim refugee kid is not likely to be giving back very much to society.
Even if you are correct that Muslim immigrants are only say, 10% more likely to be involved in crime, that’s still a big problem if they are all hanging out with each other in poor areas and forming gangs that riot or harass women and gay people.
There are always going to be tribal conflicts between Muslims and other Muslims or their neighbors, and there are always going to be refugees. But if the West admits them in large numbers, they will bringing their tribal and religious attitudes with them, resulting in violent tribal conflicts with native Europeans and Jews. This situation isn’t remotely ethical or utilitarian. It’s only happening because leftist parties are incentivized to import voters who will be dependent on them; the thin moral justification is secondary.
Focusing on the plight of Muslim refugees obscures the violent direction of Muslim immigration to Europe. You may not be seeing this conflict yourself, and your filter bubble might not be talking about it, but lower-class Europeans certainly experience it, and Jews are writing articles with titles like “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?”. European elites need to fix these unselective immigration policies, create a preference for educated, non-radical Muslim immigrants, and encourage them to assimilate.
If you are a kid facing persecution and a high possibility of being murdered in your home country, coming to the UK and receiving an education here and going on to a career here is a massive utility gain, and if you go on to a successful and altruistic career it’s an even bigger utility gain. The disutility of the kid coming here—maybe the teacher in the local state school has to split their attention between 31 pupils instead of the original 30 - is only a very small disutility.
Um, that style of logic doesn’t work. You need to balance the (large but restricted to an individual) utility to the kid against the (small to each individual and spread out access many individuals) disutility to society. This is the kind of computation that’s impossible to do intuitively (and probably impossible to do directly at all since we have no way to directly measure utility). It is, however, easy to see what the implications of a large scale population transfer are and to see that they are negative. You assert that there exists a threshold below which immigration is positive utility. However, you have no way to calculate it’s value or show we are below it (or even show that it’s not zero), without resorting to what looks like wishful thinking.
You need to balance the (large but restricted to an individual) utility to the kid against the (small to each individual and spread out access many individuals) disutility to society.
That’s reason for Pigovian taxes, not outright bans. There are plenty of other things which have diffuse negative externalities, e.g. anything which causes air pollution, and we don’t just ban them all.
Except neither Acty nor anyone currently in politics is proposing Pigovian taxes. Also, since most of the would-be immigrants wouldn’t be able to afford them, this wouldn’t be an acceptable policy for the pro-immigration forces.
I think you have the right idea by studying more before making up your mind about open borders and immigration. It’s really hard to evaluate moral solutions without knowing the facts of the matter, and unfortunately there is a lot of political spin on all sides.
In a situation of uncertainty, any utilitarian policy that requires great sacrifices is very risky: if the anticipated benefits don’t materialize, then the result turns into a horrible mess. The advantage of deontological ethics and rule/act utilitarianism is that they provide tighter rules for how to act under uncertainty, which decreases the chance of falling into some attractive, world-saving utilitarian scheme that backfires and hurts people: some sacrifices are just considered unacceptable.
Speaking of utilitarian schemes, British colonialism to the Muslim world would cause a lot of suffering, but so does current immigration policies that bring in Muslims. Why is one type of suffering acceptable, but another isn’t? Utilitarianism can have some really perverse consequences.
What if British-ruled Pakistan of 2050 was dramatically lower in crime, lower in violence towards women in both countries, and more peaceful, such that the violence of imposing that situation is offset? What if the status quo of immigration, or an open borders scenario would lead to a bloodier future that is more oppressive to women in both countries? What if assimilation and fixing immigrant isn’t feasible on an acceptable timescale, especially given that new immigrants are constantly streaming in and reinforcing their culture?
My point about British vs. Muslim rape survivors is about responsibility, not sympathy or worthiness as a human being. As a practical matter, people who live nearer each other and have shared cultural / community ties are better positioned to stop local crime and discourage criminals. Expecting them to use their local legal system to arrest imported criminals will stretch their resources to the point of failure, like we saw in Rotherham.
It’s both impractical and unfair to expect people to clean up other people’s messes. Moral responsibility and duty is a general moral principle that’s easy to translate into rule-utilitarianism. A moral requirement to bail out other people’s crime problems would mean there is no incentive for groups to fix their own crime problems.
Borders, rule of law, and nations are obviously important for utility, happiness, and preferences, or we wouldn’t have them (see ErikM’s comment also). Historically, any nation that didn’t defend its borders would have been invaded, destroyed, or had its population replaced from the inside.
Imagine we invited to LW hundreds of people from Reddit, Jezebel, and Stormfront to educate them. The result would not be pretty, and it wouldn’t make any of these communities happier. LW enforcing borders makes it possible for this place to exist and be productive. Same thing with national borders. If you cannot have a fence on your garden, then you cannot maintain gardens, and there is no incentive to make them. Which means that people cannot benefit from gardens.
Open borders are a terrible idea because they mix together people with different cultures and crime rates, causing conflicts that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Certain elements of civilization, like women being able to walk around wearing what they want, can only occur in low-crime societies.
Historically, despite some missteps, the West has been responsible for an immense amount of medicine, science, and foreign aid due to a particular civilization based on rule of law, low crime, high trust, and yes, borders. If the West had lacked those things, it would not have been able to contribute to humanity in the past. And if those things are destroyed by unselective immigration, then the West will turn into a place like Brazil, or worse, South Africa: a world of ethnic distrust, gated communities, fascist parties and women scared to travel alone in public. That doesn’t sound like a very happy place to me.
If you are hoping that the outcome of unselective immigration and open borders would be beneficial, then you would need some pretty strong evidence, because the consequences of being wrong are really scary. You would need to be looking at current events, historical precedents, population projections, crime trends, and a lot of other stuff. The early indicators are not looking good, like Rotherham-style gangs all over England, plus Sharia Patrols, and these events should result in updating of priors.
But of course, neoreactionaries hate feminists, so I suppose they’ll all stop listening as soon as I use the word.
Do you think that anyone who is against multiculturalism is a neoreactionary?
But the problem isn’t Pakistani people, the problem is that the culture they were brought up in is sexist. We don’t need to get rid of multiculturalism; there’s a lot of evidence that second-generation and third-generation immigrants’ views shift, as the generations go by, towards egalitarian.
I.e. the immigrants adopt the culture of the host country. Are you sure you don’t mean ‘We don’t need to get rid of multiracialism’?
To some extent. Increase or decrease the rate of immigration, require criteria to be met for immigration or not, enforce speaking the native language or not, ban or allow faith schools, ban or allow child circumcision & FGM and so forth. Obviously, not all people on each side of the debate agree on which policies to pursue, but that’s true of all politics.
The author of the grandparent mentioned Moldbug not long ago; the sockpuppeteer who seems to be downvoting Acty is likely neoreactionary. Update, and then consider apologizing.
Well hairyfigment’s definition of “sockpuppet” appears to be anyone who disagrees with him, so by his definition however downvoted you wasn’t a “sockpuppet”.
So there is at least one person in this thread who has read Moldbug, and might be using sockpuppets (which is wrong, of course). Yet Acty’s comment says “they’ll all stop listening”. Plural.
Plus Acty assumes that people who have a different ideology to her hate her and will just stop reading, which isn’t very charitable when we should all be trying to avoid confirmation bias.
Yes, I think that subconsciously I have an assumption that all conservatives are either idiots or extreme neoreactionary types, based mostly on my personal experience of a) knowing lots of idiot conservatives IRL whose opinions amount to “an immigrant looked at me the wrong way once!!!11!!1!” and b) arguing really loudly with extreme neoreactionaries online. I’m not assuming you hate me, I’ve just somehow managed to subconsciously accumulate a really low prior for someone I’m arguing with being a smart normal conservative. I will update and endeavour to correct that.
I’m not sure I would class myself as a conservative, but I can understand your assumption that conservatives are idiots, in that there was a time when I would have said that anyone who is against gay rights is a fascist theocrat. Now I realise, on a more intuitive level, that just because many arguments for a position are idiotic doesn’t mean that there isn’t a somewhat intelligent argument out there.
Oddly enough, IRL I mostly meet fairly intelligent people with opinions that amount to “anyone who disagrees with my left-wing politics is evil! That person supports a right wing party, I’d like to burn their house down!”
My theory is that facebook and twitter have ruined discourse because people can’t fit opinions more complex into 140 characters.
I’ve been refreshing my page ten times a minute to check my karma hasn’t gone down any further and that is a really terrible use of my time.
You’re new here, I guess you’ll get used to the karma system in time? In the meantime, have an upvote :)
knowing lots of idiot conservatives IRL whose opinions amount to “an immigrant looked at me the wrong way once!!!11!!1!”
I seriously doubt this. Rather I suspect you’re, either intentionally or unconsciously, replacing opinions disagreeing with yours with ones that are easier for you to dismiss.
I think you and Acty each live in your own filter bubbles, constructed mostly through subconscious intent. (Beware of believing your enemies are innately evil and intentionally causing themselves to be biased.) Everyone is subconsciously inclined to read authors they agree with; it’s more pleasurable and less painful. In your filter bubble, you read thoughtful conservative thinkers, along with cherry-picked bits of poorly-reasoned liberal extremist thinking, that those conservatives tear apart. And the reverse is true for Acty.
I suspect the internet is increasing the ease of forming these sort of bubbles, which seems like a huge problem.
FWIW, I am disappointed to see political discussion drift from object-level political disagreements to person-level disagreements about who is more biased. I virtually never see a good outcome from such a discussion. I suppose it’s an occupational hazard participating in discussions on a website about bias.
You could have said something to the effect of “not all conservatives have such dumb opinions, they aren’t representative of all conservatism, and there also are liberals with even dumber opinions, and anyway it’s not a good idea to judge memeplexes from their worst members”—but no, you chose to go for James A. Donald-level asshattery—“if you say you know conservatives with dumb opinions, you’re probably lying or confabulating”. (And somehow even got seven upvotes for that.) What does make you think it’s so unlikely that Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions? Are you familiar with all groups of conservatives worldwide?
Because those vectors of argument are insufficiently patronizing, I’m guessing.
But in all seriousness, the “judging memeplexes from their worst members” issue is pretty interesting, because politicized ideologies and really any ideology that someone has a name for and integrates into their identity (“I am a conservative” or “I am a feminist” or “I am an objectivist” or whatever) are really fuzzily defined.
To use the example we’re talking about: Is conservatism about traditional values and bolstering the nuclear family? Is conservatism about defunding the government and encouraging private industry to flourish? Is conservatism about biblical literalism and establishing god’s law on earth? Is conservatism about privacy and individual liberties? Is conservatism about nationalism and purity and wariness of immigrants? I’ve encountered conservatives who care about all of these things. I’ve encountered conservatives who only care about some of them. I’ve encountered at least one conservative who has defined conservatism to me in terms of each of those things.
So when I go to my internal dictionary of terms-to-describe-ideologies, which conservatism do I pull? I know plenty of techie-libertarian-cluster people who call themselves conservatives who are atheists. I know plenty of religious people who call themselves conservatives who think that cryptography is a scary terrorist thing and should be outlawed. I know self-identified conservatives who think that the recent revelations about NSA surveillance are proof that the government is overreaching, and self-identified conservatives who think that if you have nothing to hide from the NSA then you have nothing to fear, so what’s the big deal?
I do not identify as a conservative. I can steelman lots of kinds of conservatism extremely well. Honestly I have some beliefs that some of my conservative-identifying friends would consider core conservative tenets. I still don’t know what the fuck a conservative is, because the term gets used by a ton of people who believe very strongly in its value but mean different things when they say it.
So I have no doubt that not only has Acty encountered conservatives who are stupid, but that their particular flavor of stupid are core tenets of what they consider conservatism. The problem is that this colors her beliefs about other kinds of conservatives, some of whom might only be in the same cluster in person-ideology-identity space because they use the same word. This is not an Acty-specific problem by any means. I know arguably no one who completely succeeds at not doing this, the labels are just that bad. Who gets to use the label? If I meet someone and they volunteer the information that they identify as a conservative, what conclusions should I draw about their ideological positions?
I think the problem has to stem from sticking the ideology-label onto one’s identity, because then when an individual has opinions, it’s really hard for them to separate their opinions from their ideology-identity-label, especially when they’re arguing with a standard enemy of that ideology-label, and thus can easily view themselves as standing in for the ideology itself. The conclusion I draw is that as soon as an ideology is an identity-label, it quickly becomes pretty close to useless as a bit of information by itself, and that the speed at which this happens is somewhat correlated to the popularity of the label.
I’d argue that that little one-off comment was less patronizing and more… sarcastic and mean.
Yeah, not all that productive either way. My bad. I apologize.
But I think the larger point stands about how these ideological labels are super leaky and way too schizophrenically defined by way too many people to really even be able to meaningfully say something like “That’s not a representative sample of conservatives!”, let alone “You probably haven’t met people like that, you’re just confabulating your memory of them because you hate conservatism”
“That’s not a representative sample of conservatives!”, let alone “You probably haven’t met people like that, you’re just confabulating your memory of them because you hate conservatism”
One of those statements refers to a concrete event (or series of events), the other depends on the exact definition of conservative.
What does make you think it’s so unlikely that Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions?
Well the fact that Acty has a tendency to not read/listen to what her opponents say and replace it with something easy to dismiss, as she has previously demonstrated in this very thread.
What does make you think it’s so unlikely that Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions?
What makes you think it’s so unlikely that Acty is giving an inacurate report of their arguments?
What makes you think it’s so unlikely that Acty is giving an inacurate report of their arguments?
I don’t. I think both P(Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions) and P(Acty is giving an inacurate report of their arguments) are sizeable.
I’m going to be cynical here, and say that most conservative opinions are idiotic, and most liberal opinions are idiotic. Its an instance of the ’90% of everything is shit’ principle.
We have little reason to think Journeyman is the same as Eugine Nier, who is almost certainly calling himself VoiceOfRa. Here is the puppeteer’s previous account, ending 7 April. Here is VR’s first comment on the site, jumping right into a discussion of decision theory. Here he is the same week talking about the purpose of LW/MIRI, linking an old thread in which he was active as Eugine Nier, repeating his old political views, and posting quotes as Nier was wont to do. Here is the dishonest piece of shit defector claiming I call anyone who disagrees with me a sockpuppet, rather than just him and his sockpuppets.
I downvoted your last couple of posts on the “vote down what you like to see less of” principle. I would like to see less whining and ideological witchhunts.
The downvotes will continue until the morale improves.
But the problem isn’t Pakistani people, the problem is that the culture they were brought up in is sexist. We don’t need to get rid of multiculturalism; there’s a lot of evidence that second-generation and third-generation immigrants’ views shift, as the generations go by, towards egalitarian.
And how would we define “Pakistani culture” in such a way that it doesn’t necessarily include patriarchy? Cultural evolution in response to moral imperative is a thing.
You say “immigrants” but in every case you mention it’s specifically Muslims. I’ve not heard of Hindu or Buddhist or atheist immigrants causing the same problems.
some influential Pakistani-heritage councillors in Rotherham had acted as barriers
That a sentence that poses more question than it answers. What kind of influence do those councillors have? How many councillors of Pakistani heritage does Rotherham have? How many councillors of other heritage does it have?
If a powerful politician tries to prevent friends from being persecuted that’s not what the standard concern about policemen being too PC is about. It’s straight misuse of power.
Sexual violence by immigrants is a serious social problem in the UK, and the multicultural political environment makes it hard to crack down on.
To what extend is this simply a problem of British politicians having too much power to cover up crimes and impede police work?
Following links on Wikipedia, we have the Rochdale sex gang, the Derby sex gang, the Oxford sex gang, the Bristol sex gang, and the Telford sex gang. These are all easily verifiable cases, and the perpetrators are usually people from immigrant backgrounds.
The idea that there are people from Immigrant backgrounds isn’t what’s surprising about the story of Rotherham or even that politicians act in a way to prevent reporting of tragedy. Politicians trying to keep tragedies away from the public is a common occurrence.
The thing that’s surprising is the allegation of police inaction due to them being Muslim. Which happens something that you didn’t list in your “what we know” list. It would have to be true for the claim that PC policeman don’t do their job properly to be true.
If indeed the coverup of the ethnic dimension was directed by British politicians, we might ask, why were they trying to hide this? In a child sex abuse scandal involving actual politicians, it’s clear why they would cover it up. But why were these particular crimes so politically inconvenient? It’s clear why Pakistani council members wanted to hide it, but why did the other council members let them?
We are not privy to the exact nature of the institutional dysfunction at Rotherham. But it’s clear that the problem was occurring at multiple levels. One of my quotes does mentions that staff were nervous about being labelled racist, and that managers told them to told them to avoid mentioning the ethnic dynamics.
Here’s another quote, which shows that reports were downplayed before politicians were even involved:
Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. This had led to suggestions of cover- up. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with the issues that were identified in them.
So there are multiple kinds of institutional dysfunction here. It’s not just politicians, it’s not just police being PC. But from the quotes in my previous post, it’s obvious that political correctness was a factor. Police, social workers, and politicians, all the way up the chain know that being seen as racist could be damaging to their career.
In the UK, there is a lot of social and political pressure to support multiculturalism and avoid any perception of racism. Immigration is important for economic agendas, but also for left political agendas of importing more voters for themselves. It is not a stretch to believe that this political environment would make it difficult to address crimes involving immigrant populations.
You correctly note that there were factors beyond “PC”, but fail to address the horrific corruption. At least two councilors and a police officer face charges of sex with abuse victims.
The police officer has been also accused of passing information on to abusers in the town. A colleague of the officer has reportedly been accused of failing to take appropriate action after receiving information about the officer’s conduct. Both have been reported to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
Another police officer, seen here being white, supposedly had an extensive child pornography collection. No word on whether this was related or whether the department just attracted pedophiles for some bizarre reason.
While I didn’t predict this beforehand (nor, I think, did you) it seems both more credible, and more likely to protect the rape-gang, than does the idea of people seeing strong evidence of the crimes and somehow deciding that arresting immigrants was more likely to hurt their careers than ignoring a story which was bound to come out eventually. The “political correctness” you speak of apparently refers to people not wanting to believe their fellow police officers and council members were implausibly evil criminals.
Thanks for providing the additional details, which I hadn’t encountered. I don’t think this corruption is mutually exclusive with the theory of political correctness. The Rotherham Scandal went back to 1997, involving 1,400+ victims. There are now 300 suspects (including some council members that you pointed out), and 30 council members knew. We not know the ethnicity of the council members who are suspects.
With such a long history and large number of victims, it doesn’t seem very plausible that a top-down coverup to protect council member perpetrators is sufficient to explain this story. These people would need to be supervillains if they were the ringleaders since 1997, and the failure of investigation was just about them.
It is already established by my quotes from the report that political correctness about race was a factor in the coverup and failure of the investigation. Certainly the corruption and participation of council members and police is a disturbing addition to this story. With such a vast tragedy, it’s quite likely that the coverup was due to multiple motivations and lots of things went wrong.
With such a long history and large number of victims, it doesn’t seem very plausible that a top-down coverup to protect council member perpetrators is sufficient to explain this story.
It seems like we have a perfect control case with the pedophiles in Westminster which didn’t involve multiculturalism. They also engaged in it for a long time and managed to suppress it.
and that managers told them to told them to avoid mentioning the ethnic dynamics.
There a huge difference between persecuting someone and then not writing his race or ethnicity into an official report and avoiding to prosecute them.
It’s clear why Pakistani council members wanted to hide it, but why did the other council members let them?
From what you quoted from the report the those Pakistani council members were influential people.
Just like the politicians who covered up the child abuse in Westminster also were influential people.
In general politicians also never want that scandals and tragedy under their watch get public.
At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime.
Regarding child victims with contempt does suggest a dysfunctional police but it’s not about multiculturalism.
In general the heuristic of not trusting mainstream media reports to accurately reflect reality is well based on what I know about how it works.
Without a direction to the bias that’s a universal counterargument. I’m perfectly aware of some the biases in reporting, my heuristics say that the media is likely underreporting the extent of the problem.
Without a direction to the bias that’s a universal counterargument.
It’s a universal counterargument when a newspaper stories that don’t appear to make sense and you don’t know the facts on the ground. You shouldn’t believe those stories.
I’m perfectly aware of some the biases in reporting, my heuristics say that the media is likely underreporting the extent of the problem.
I haven’t said anything about biases of reporting. I have spoken about journalists getting stories wrong. That quite often doesn’t have anything to do with bias. Journalists in Berlin from time to time get the idea that it’s the parliament and only the parliament that passes laws in Berlin wrong. That doesn’t have anything to do with left or right bias.
Thinking in terms of bias isn’t useful. My basic sense was that the story likely involves some form of corruption that didn’t make it into the news articles I read.
Garbage in Garbage out. You can’t correct bad reporting by correcting for bias.
A police officer doesn’t simply avoid persecuting a Muslim for rape because he’s afraid of being called a racist. That simply doesn’t make sense. On the other hand corruption can prevent crimes from being persecuted.
The UK is not a country where a newspaper can freely report on a story like this. But not because of multiculturalism. You can’t sue a newspaper in the UK for that. The UK’s insane defamation laws result in articles speaking about “influential Pakistani councilors” instead of naming the individuals in question. A US newspaper would have never done this and actually named the politicians who seem to have obstructed a rape investigation if this happened in any US city.
Of course you actually need to practice critical reading to get that. If you just take the story at face value and then try to correct a systematic bias you miss the juicy bits.
Given that the newspaper is effectively censored in speaking about the real story about corruption they make up a bullshit story about how it’s multiculturalism that makes police officers afraid to go after Muslims.
That’s not to say that multiculturalism didn’t do anything in that case. It reduced the reporting of the fact that the people were Muslim, but it very likely didn’t prevent them from being persecuted.
A police officer doesn’t simply avoid persecuting a Muslim for rape because he’s afraid of being called a racist. That simply doesn’t make sense.
People make decisions at the margin, and it’s entirely possible that the additional negative effect of being accused of racism pushes him over the edge in decisionmaking.
A police officer doesn’t simply avoid persecuting a Muslim for rape because he’s afraid of being called a racist.
First of all, police officers don’t prosecute anyone, prosecutors do. As for fear of being called racist, well some police officers complained when they noticed something was happening, and were promptly sent to cultural sensitivity training.
You know what else is a good way to stop people being killed? Create a liberal democracy where people are equal. So far in history, that has kinda correlated… really strongly… with less people dying. There is both less war and less crime. Forget strength, give them equality and elections. (I don’t actually think democracy is the optimal solution, I think I advocate more of an economics-exam-based meritocratic oligarchy, but it is a really good one to put in place while we figure out what the optimal one is. And I need to read lots more books before I actually try and design an optimal society, if I’m ever qualified to try something like that.)
Being “strong” in a meaningful way, in the modern world, means being intelligent. Smart people can use better rhetoric, invent cooler weapons, and solve your problems more easily. Being well-educated and intelligent and academic actually strongly correlates with not being racist or sexist or transphobic or homophobic. Oh, and also liberal democracies seem to have much less prejudice in them.
Find me decent evidence that patriarchal societies are safer for everyone involved than liberal democracies where everyone is equal, and you’ll have a valid point. But it kind of looks to me like, as a woman, I’m much safer in the modern Western democracies that prohibit sexism than I am in the patriarchal societies where women have no rights and keep getting acid thrown in their faces for rejecting advances. You say that in the recent years it was abandoned due to being oppressive but we should try and go back and compromise with it, but… why would we want to go back to that when literally everything has been improving ever since we abandoned those social models? To entertain your delusions of being a Strong Tribal Hero Protector Guy? Sorry, no.
I also don’t see how we can’t have strong protectors who are 100% PC. I’m not straight, male, neurotypical, traditional or even an adult. I try and protect and help those around me and on many occasions I succeed. I am the one in my friendship group who takes the lead down dark alleyways, carrying all the bags, reassuring my friends that it’s safe because nobody’s going to mug us while I’m there. Why exactly am I a weak and unworthy protector? Because I’m a girl? You’re going to have to do an awful lot better than that. Put me in a physical fight with most boys of my age, and I would annihilate them. Every male who has picked a fight with me thinking that he’ll be able to beat me because he’s male has walked away rather humiliated. On exams and IQ tests I score far higher than your average male. Judging by how much I actually end up doing versus what I observe the boys around me doing, I have higher levels of inbuilt-desire-to-help-and-protect-others than the average male. (I suspect that the latter two facts at least are true of most women whom you might find on this specific website.) Why exactly does the average male, whom I can both outfight and outthink, get to protect me and not the other way around?
I think I will not discuss with you this for about 5-10 years, because you sound a lot like me when I was around 21, and I know how naive and inexperienced and entirely unrealistic I was. Ultimately you miss the experiences that would make you far more pessimistic. For example nobody talked about making Western liberal democracies like third-world hellholes, it was about making them like their former selves when crime levels were lower, violence was lower, people were politer, people were politer with women and so on. In fact, turning Western liberal democracies into third-world hellholes is actually happening, but through a different, asylum-seeking / refugee pathway, a perfectly idiotic counter-selection where instead of exercising brain drain, we drain the most damaged people and expect it to turn out good. But that is just a small part of how you probably need to get more pessimistic experience before we can discuss it meaningfully. I have no interest in engaging with angry rants, they are not able to teach me anything, they just sound like both people really sweating and trying to win something, but there is no actual prize to win. Being drunk on the idea of social progress and the improvability of human nature is just like other addictions, you really need to hit rock bottom before you see what is the issue, I think anything I would try to explain here would be pointless without such a wake-up happening. So I wish you luck and maybe re-discuss this again in 5-10 years where you maybe got influenced by more experience.
Telling your opponent that they are incapable of arguing with you until they are older is a fully general counterargument, and one of the more aggravating and toxic ones.
Even if it wasn’t a fully general counterargument, it would be fallacious because it’s ad hominem. There are plenty of people 5-10 years older than me who share my ideas, and you could as easily be arguing with one of them as you are arguing with me now; the fact that by chance you are arguing against me doesn’t affect the validity/truth of the ideas we’re talking about, and it’s very irrational to suggest that it should. Attack my arguments, not me.
As for everything being better in “their former selves”, do I seriously have to go find graphs? I have the distinct feeling that you won’t update even if I show you them, so I’m tempted not to bother. If you’ve genuinely never looked at actual graphs of crime levels and violence over time and promise to update just a little, I can go dig those up for you. (For now, you’re pattern matching to the kind of person who could benefit from reading http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ . I don’t like SSC that much, but when the man’s right, he’s right.)
(As for “people were politer with women”, my idea of polite is pretty politically correct, and I can guarantee you that political correctness doesn’t increase if we look backwards in time...)
I am not your opponent, that is where it begins. Opponent means there is something to win and people compete over that prize. There is nothing to win here except learning, and this discussion quickly turned to be not conducive to it—you got all defensive and emotional instead of trying to understand use my models and see what you can do with them. Opponentism belongs to precise that kind of tribalism you are trying to want to overcome. Interesting, isn’t it? Besides you keep being boringly solipsistic. Your strength instead of statistical strength differences, your idea of politeness instead of the social function of politeness… it seems you primarily subject you have useful information about is, well, you. Not interested. The first precondition to being interesting is to understand nobody gives a damn about you. I.e. to get out of the gravity well of the ego, to adopt viewpoints that don’t depend strongly on personal desires. I am not even saying I would expect everyone to be able to do it, I am perfectly aware of how long it took for me, how much XP, read, suffering it took, so I don’t even blame you for not having made it, it’s just that it is seriously difficult to generate information interesting for others from that source. But if you think you can, then do it, say something genuinely interesting, try to offer any sort of a model or information from this utopian-progressivist school that is genuinely different and not the same stuff the mainstream media, BuzzFeed or Tumblr pouring on day and night. The only condition of interestingness is 1) it is not about you 2) it is not “done to death” a million times by the media or blogs.
But if you think you can, then do it, say something genuinely interesting, try to offer any sort of a model or information from this utopian-progressivist school that is genuinely different and not the same stuff the mainstream media, BuzzFeed or Tumblr pouring on day and night.
If you read the list of her activities and speaking 6 languages at the age of 17 and being in the process of learning the 7th while also doing Judo to the point of being more fit than guys her age, having learned Java programming, doing filmmaking and being a DM and training other DMs she’s not the person person to read through BuzzFeed and Tumblr day and night simply copying what other people are thinking.
Yes, being 17 means that she lacks experience but she’s very capable of learning. You might not have been open to learning at 21 but you weren’t speaking 6 languages either.
You’re the one making all sorts of claims about the need for, and traits of, “strong protectors”, without any statistics. You’re the one simultaneously claiming you’d be fine with giving Acty higher status than you, and using social tactics blatantly aimed at reducing her relative status—sometimes in the same sentence.
This is a bit broader stuff than something reducible to a few stats. But on a basic common sense level, if the starting point is fewer people getting killed, the most basic solution is bodyguards and so on. So that is at least sensible as a starter instead of a Plan B rewiring everybody’s brain to not be hateful.
As for status, come on, that is something that happens between real people, while DeVliegendeHollander, Acty and hairyfigment are mere accounts. For all people know it could even be the same person behind all three accounts. Playing status with accounts one could throw away at any second and register three new ones in its place would be really, really stupid, let’s try to not accuse each other with at something that simplistic. At least if you want to assume evil, asssume a less banal kind. In fact I am thinking anyway that I should recycle DVH because it is getting too much karma and this account is developing something too much like a personality. I recycle on Reddit about every three weeks, maybe a three month or six month cycle would be good here. (The goal is of course to have ideas said by accounts that are not associated by former ideas said by accounts and thus their reception being less biased. Besides to not accumulate this completely ridiculous karma thing.)
Yup, playing status with accounts would be kinda stupid. (That’s why you should stop doing it.)
You know what would be especially stupid? If we lived in a world that accorded me higher status than you because of my general level of aggression, and I could end this entire argument with “I’m high status, you’re low status, I’m right, you’re wrong, shut up now”.
Now, wouldn’t that be a really stupid world...?
So tell me again why giving status and prestige to aggressive people is a great idea?
I won’t even argue that, it is a fact it can be changed. Bicoastal America and NW Europe managed to make a fairly large young college-ed middle class that is surprisingly docile. The issue is simply the consequences of the change and its permanence.
If you talked to any random Roman or Ancient Greek author about it, he would basically say you guys are actively trying to get decadent and expect it will work out well? To give you the most simple potential consequence: doesn’t it lead to reducing courage or motivation as well? Since this is what we precisely see in the above mentioned group: a decrease of aggressivity correlates with an increase of social anxiety, timidity, shyness i..e. low courage and with the kind of attitudes where playing videogames can be primary hobby, nay, even an identity.
Of a personal experience, as my aggression levels fluctuated, so fluctuated motivation, courage, happines, self-respect and similar things with it. Not in the sense of fluctuating between aggressive and docile behavior of course, but in the sense of needing to exercise a lot of self restraint to always stay civil vs. not needing to.
You can raise the same things about its permanence. The worst outcome is a lower-aggresion group just being taken over by a higher one. Another potential impermance comes from the fluctuation of generations. My father was a rebel (beatnik), so I had only rebellion to rebel against, and my own counter-revolutionary rebellion was approved by my grandfather :)
Finally a visual type of explanation, maybe it comes accross better. You can understand human aggressivity as riding a high energy engine towards a bad, unethical direction. Having a lot of drive to do bad things. We can do two things, steer it away into a good one or just brake and turn off the engine. Everything we seem to do in this direction seems to more like braking than steering away. For example, if we were steering, we would encourage people to put a lot of drive into creative hobbies instead of hurting each other. Therefore, we would shame the living fsck out of people who don’t build something. Yet we don’t do this: we praise people who build, but we neglect to shame the lazy gamers. Putting it differently, we “brake” kids when they do bad stuff, but we don’t kick their butts in order to do good stuff, so they end up doing nothing mostly. Every time a child or a youth would do something useful with a competitive motivation like “I’ll show those lazy fscks” we immediately apply the brake. This leads to demotivation.
So in short, negative motivation can be surpressed. The issue is, it has consequences, it is probably not permanent, and really hard to replace it with a positive one. Of course I am not talking about people like us but more like the average.
Um, I fail to see how people are making and doing less stuff than in previous generations. We’ve become obsessed with information technology, so a lot of that stuff tends to be things like “A new web application so that everyone can do X better”, but it fuels both the economy and academia, so who cares? With things like maker culture, the sheer overwhelming number of kids in their teens and 20s and 30s starting SAAS companies or whatever, and media becoming more distributed than it’s ever been in history, we have an absurd amount of productivity going on in this era, so I’m confused where you think we’re “braking”.
As for video games in particular (Which seems to be your go-to example for things characteristic of the modern era that are useless), games are just a computer-enabled medium for two kinds of things: Contests of will and media. The gamers of today are analogous in many ways to the novel-consumers or TV-consumers or mythology-consumers of yesterday and also today (Because rumors of the death of old kinds of media are often greatly exaggerated), except for the gamers that are more analogous to the sports-players or gladiators or chess-players of yesterday and also today. Also, the basically-overnight-gigantic indie game development industry is pretty analogous to other giant booms in some form of artistic expression. Video games aren’t a new human tendency, they’re a superstimulus that hijacks several (Storytelling, Artistic expression, Contests of will) and lowers entry barriers to them. Also, the advent of powerful parallel processors (GPUs), a huge part of the boom in AI research recently, has been driven primarily by the gaming industry. I think that’s a win regardless.
Basically, I just don’t buy any of your claims whatsoever. The “common sense” ideas about how society improving on measures of collaboration, nonviolence, and egalitarianism will make people lazy and complacent and stupid have pretty much never borne out on a large scale, so I’m more inclined to attribute their frequent repetition by smart people to some common human cognitive bias than some deep truth. As someone whose ancestors evolved in the same environment yours did, I too like stories of uber-competent tribal hero guys, but I don’t think that makes for a better society, given the overwhelming evidence that a more pluralistic, egalitarian, and nonviolent society tends to correlate with more life satisfaction for more people, as well as the acceleration of technology.
we praise people who build, but we neglect to shame the lazy gamers
I can’t help wondering where you got this idea. The mainstream absolutely shames lazy gamers; they’re one of the few groups that it’s socially acceptable to shame without reservation, even more so than other subcultures seen as socially unproductive (e.g. stoner, hippie, dropout) because their escape of choice still carries a childish stigma. That’s countered somewhat by an expectation of somewhat higher social class, but the “mom’s basement” stereotype is alive and well.
Even other lazy gamers often shame lazy gamers, although that’s balanced (for some value of “balance”) by a lot of back-patting; nerd culture of all stripes has a strong self-love/self-hate thing going on.
But on a basic common sense level, if the starting point is fewer people getting killed, the most basic solution is bodyguards and so on.
That assumes that the bodyguards never use violence and beat somebody to death.
Simply increasing the amount of people who can beat other people up doesn’t automatically reduce violence.
South Africa has a lot of body guards and it’s still a lot more violent then states in Europe.
Giving the government the monopoly on violence is a standard enlightenment idea that works well if your state highers enough policemen and the citizens believe in the rule of law.
Playing status with accounts one could throw away at any second and register three new ones in its place would be really, really stupid, let’s try to not accuse each other with at something that simplistic.
Status interactions are deeply ingrained in the way humans interact with each other. It not something that get’s shut down just because a discussion is online.
Opponent is a word. Here, it refers to the person advocating the opposite view to mine. If you would like, I can use a different word, but it will change very little. Arguing over semantics is not a productive way to cause each other to update. Though to be honest, I ceased having much hope that you were in this discussion for the learning and updates when you started using ad hominem and fully general counterarguments. (Saying that your opponent is defensive and emotional and “opponentist” is also a fully general counterargument and also ad hominem. “Not even blaming me” for not agreeing with you is another example with an extra dash of emotive condescension. You have a real talent.)
Quite often, people have useful information about themselves because they know themselves quite well. I’m a useful data point when I’m thinking about stuff that affects me, because I know more about myself than I know about other examples. But I could also point out other examples of women in my community who are protectors. For instance, I know a single mother who is not only a national-level athlete but had to rush each of her children to hospital for separate issues four times in the last week. Twice it was because their lives were threatened. She stays strong and protects them fiercely, keeps up with her life and her training, and is frankly astonishingly brave. She is far, far more of a “traditional strong figure” than any man I have ever met. Of course, this is still anecdata. I haven’t got big quantitative data because I can’t think of a test for protectorness that we could do on a large scale; can you suggest one?
Your idea, as I understood it, was that men can carry out protective roles and therefore they should have high social status and prestige. I think this is a pretty good example of what I’ve heard called the Worst Argument in the World. I believe that protective and self-sacrificing individuals should be accorded high prestige. I agree that protectiveness can loosely correlate with being male. But protective women exist in high numbers, and non-protective men exist in high numbers, and many women exist who are significantly better at protectiveness than the average male. According protective women low prestige because they are women, and according useless men high prestige because they are men, is an entirely lost purpose. It is irrational sexism, pure and simple. You’re doing the same thing as people who say “Gandhi was a criminal, therefore Gandhi should be dismissed and given low social status.” You’re saying that it would be good if people said, “Individual X is a male, therefore he should be accorded high prestige and conscripted. Individual Y is a female, therefore she should be given low prestige and not conscripted” even if X doesn’t fit the protective-and-strong criteria and Y does fit the protective-and-strong criteria. Forcing protective strong women to stop doing that and accept low prestige, and forcing non-protective weaker men to try and fill protective roles, just hurts everyone.
You still haven’t answered my question. You want to make a society where men get conscripted (an astonishingly rare event in a modern liberal democracy, by the way...) and protect those around them, and in return get high prestige. I know, and I presume you also know, numerous men who would be unsuitable for conscription and don’t protect those around them. Some women would be perfectly suitable for conscription, and protect those around them. Why do those women not deserve the prestige that you want to give all the men?
Can you also tell me why you think “the same stuff the mainstream media, BuzzFeed or Tumblr pouring on day and night” is necessarily uninteresting/wrong? Shouldn’t a large number of people agreeing with an ethical position usually correlate with that ethical position being correct? I mean, it’s not a perfect correlation, there are exceptions, but in general people agree that murder and rape and mugging are undesirable, and agree that happiness and friendship and knowledge are desirable. Calling a position popular or fashionable should not be an insult and I am intrigued by how you could have come up with the idea that something that is “done to death” must be bad. Has “murder is wrong” been “done to death”?
If this conversation keeps going downhill, I’m just going to disengage. It is rather low utility.
This is getting more interesting now. To sum the history of things, you had this discussion with VoiceOfRa and you stressed primarily you want to save people from getting killed. I butted in and proposed you don’t have to redesign the whole world to do that, it is possible in a traditional setup as well. Turned out we are optimizing for different things, I am trying to preserve older-time stuff while also changing them to the extent needed to address real, actual complaints of various people and work out compromises (calling it moderatism or moderate conservatism would be OK), while you are more interested in tearing things down and building them up. OK. But I think there are more interesting things here lurking under the surface.
An offer: retreat a few meta levels up, and get back to this object level later on.
IRL I discuss pretty much everything with people inside my age range (30-60), which means we rely not only on our intelligence and book knowledge (you obviously have immense amounts of both) but on our life experience as well. That is a difficult thing to convey because it is something that is not even learned in words (so there are no good books that sum it up, to my knowledge) but non-verbal pattern recognition. Yet it is pretty much this thing, this life experience that makes the difference between your meta level assumptions and mine. What can one do? I will try the impossible and try to translate it into words. Don’t expect it to go very well, but maybe a glimpse will be transmitted. Also my tone will be uncomfortably personal and subjective because it is per definition something happening inside people’s heads.
When I was 17 I assumed, expected and demanded the world to be logical and ethical. I vibrated between assuming it and angrily demanding it when I found it is not the case. University did not help—it was a very logical and sheltered environment.
When I started working (25) I had to realize how truly illogical the world is, and not because it was waiting for mr smart guy to reorganize it but because most people are plain simply idiots. I worked at implementing business software, like order processing, accounting and MRP. Still do. I had to face problems like when order processing employees did not know the price of an item, they just invoiced it at zero price. Gave away for free. The managers were no better, instead of doing something sensible (such as incentive pay or entering a price list for everything into the software and not letting the employees change them), they demanded us to make a technical solution like not allow a zero price, just give out an error message. From them on, the folks used a price of 1 currency when they did not know the correct price. The irony was really breath-taking—if there is one thing that is supposed to be efficient in this sorry world, it is corporations chasing profits: and they were incompetent at that very basic level of not giving away stuff for free. (They were selling fertilizers to farmers, in the kind of place
where paved roads are rare.)
My first reaction was rage and complaining about humanity’s idiocy. I was sort of similar to Reddit /r/atheism. Full of snark.
I would say the life experience part was not as much as learning the basic rule, namely that most folks are idiots, but really swallowing and digesting it, learning to resign myself to it, accept it, and see what can be done. That was what took long. I had to accept a Heideggerian “we are thrown into this shit and must cope, anyhow”. This is my sorry species. These zombies are my peers. If I want to help people, I need to help them on their level.
First of all, I had to accept a change in my ethics: making most people happy is an impossible goal. The best I can do is supporting ideas that prevent the dumbass majority shooting themselves in the foot in the worst ways. Give a wild guess, will the majority those types of ideas be more often classified as “liberal” or “conservative” ?
Second, I had to realize that I was a selfish ass when I was young and “liberal”. I wanted things to be logical, hence I wanted things to suit people who are logical. I wanted things to suit people like me. I wanted a world optimized for me and my folk, for intellectuals. That would be a horrible world for the vast majority of people who can’t logic. They need really foolproof and dumbed-down systems that cut with the grain of their illogical instincts, not against it.
The corollary of this all was that I should support rules and systems that I hate and I would never obey them. I had to become a hypocrite e.g. to support keeping drugs illegal (because I saw fools i.e. normal people would only get more foolish from them) while being perfectly accepting and supporting of my intellectual friends who got great philosophical insights for them. The non-hypocritical solution would have been, of course, different rules for different people. Yes, that is actually one thing liberal democracy is not so good at making, so hypocrisy was the only way to deal with it.
It was during this, my rather horrified awakening process when I came accross as really unusual book, Theodore Dalrymple’s Life At The Bottom. It is a book that probably would be classified “conservative”, but it was refreshingly non-ideological, it was about the experiences collected by decades of working as a psychiatrist treating the underclass of Birmingham, UK. I was actually living there, attracted by the manufacturing prowess of the region, was good for me career-wise, and the book was actually able to explain the high levels of WTFery I experienced every day, such as I smoke a cig outside (I have my own idiotic side as well), a mother with a small kid in a pram and with an about 9 years old boy, and the boy walks up to me and asks for a cigarette. I look at the mom completely astonished. Blank face. WTF I do now? At any rate, Dalrymple said the basic issue is that intellectuals made rules that worked very well for themselves, such as atheism, sexual liberty and similar things. He was of course atheist too. But according to him this wrecked misery amongst the low-IQ underclass, they really needed their old churches and traditions and Gods Of The Copybook Headings to restrain their impulsivity and bad choices. Rules that work well for intellectuals (“liberal” rules) don’t work well for everybody else, at all. Maybe if I wanted to offer a book that is life experience translated to words, even though it is not really possible, that is that book, I can only add it is not made up, I really saw these folks.I had to change my political and social views completely. I could no longer demand the kind of stuff that makes sense for ethical and intelligent people. I had to learn to demand stuff I
would personally dislike.
I either have to demand really dumbing things down, or maybe designing things from the assumption of stupidity up. Which means either intellectuals sacrificing their own interests and accepting a world made of stupid, or publicly supporting rules but privately wiggling out of them (Victorian era) or different rules for different people (aristocracy). Cont. below
Um, how exactly do you want to preserve older things while I want to tear everything down and build it back up again? I don’t want to tear things down. I want the trends that are happening—everything gets fairer and more liberal over time—to continue. To accelerate them if I can. (To design a whole new State if and only if it seems like it will make most people much happier, and even then I kinda accept that I’d need to talk to a whole lot of other people and do a whole lot of small scale experiments first.) None of those trends are making society end in fire. They’re just nice things, like prejudiced views becoming less common, and violence happening less. I’m trying to optimise for making people happy; if you’re optimising for something else, then I’m afraid I’m just going to have to inform you that your ethics are dumb. Sorry.
The problem with “life experience” as an argument is that people use “life experience” as a fully general counterargument. If you’re older than me, any time I say something you don’t like, you can just yell “LIFE EXPERIENCE!” and nothing I can do—no book you can suggest, nothing I can go observe—will allow me to win the argument. I cannot become older than you. This would be fine as an argument if we observed that older people were consistently right and younger people were consistently wrong, but as you’ll know if you have a grandparent who tries to use computers, this just ain’t so.
Just because you have been made jaded and cynical by your experience of the world, that doesn’t mean that jaded and cynical positions are the correct ones. For one thing, most other people of your own age who also experienced the world ended up still disagreeing with you. There’s a very good chance that I get to the age you are now, and still disagree with you. And if you observe most other people your own age with similar experiences (unless you’re old enough that you’re part of the raised-very-conservative generation) most of them will disagree with you. What is magic and special about your own specific experience that makes yours better than all those people who are the same age as you? Why should I listen to your conclusions, backed up by your “life experience”, when I could also go and listen to a lefty who’s the same age as you and their lefty conclusions backed up by their “life experience”?
Life experience can often make people a lot less logical. Traumatised people often hold illogical views—like, some victims of abuse are terrified of all men. That doesn’t mean that, because they have life experience that I don’t, I should go, ‘oh, well, I actually think all men aren’t evil, but I guess their life experience outweighs what I think’. It means that they’ve had an experience that damaged them, and we should have sympathy and try and help them, and we should even consider constructing shelters so they don’t have to interact with the people they’re terrified of, but we certainly shouldn’t start deferring to them and adopting their beliefs just because we lack their experiences. The only things we should defer to should be logical arguments and evidence.
“Life experience”, as a magical quality which you accumulate more of the more negative things happen to you, is pretty worthless. Rationalists do not believe in magical qualities.
If there is a version of the “life experience” argument that can be steelmanned, it’s “I’ve lived a long time and have observed many things which caused me to make updates towards my beliefs, and you haven’t had a chance to observe that.” But that still makes no sense because you should be able to point out the things you observed to me, or show your observations on graphs, so I can observe them too. If you observed someone being a total idiot, and that makes you jaded about the possibility of a system that requires a lot of intelligence to function, then you should be able to make up for the fact that I haven’t observed that idiocy by pulling out IQ charts or studies or other evidence that most people are idiots. If you can’t produce evidence to convince someone else, consider that your experience may be anecdata that doesn’t generalise well.
Perhaps your argument is “I’ve lived a long time and have observed very many very small pieces of evidence, and all of those small pieces of evidence caused me to make lots of very small updates, such that I cannot give you a single piece of evidence which you can consider which will make you update to my beliefs, but I think mine are right anyway.” However, even if you can’t give me a single piece of evidence that I can observe and update on, you ought to be able to produce graphs or something. Graphs are good at showing lots-of-small-bits-of-evidence-over-time stuff. If you want me to change my beliefs, you still have to produce evidence, or at least a logical argument. Appeals to “life experience” are nothing more than appeals to elder prestige.
Now, to address your actual argument. It seems to be (correct me if I misunderstand): liberal views are correct and work, but there are many stupid people in the world and liberal views don’t work well for stupid people. Stupid people need clear rules that tell them in simple terms what to do and what not to do.
But if I were going to make up a set of really clear simple rules to tell a stupid person what to do and what not to do, they would be something like: 1. Be nice to people and try not to hurt people. 2. Don’t try and prevent clever people from doing things you don’t understand. Listen to the clever people. 3. Try and be productive and contribute what you can to society.
I cannot see any evidence that adding more rules beyond those three, like, “Defer to males because male-ness is loosely correlated with prestige-wanting and protectiveness” (even though male-ness isn’t correlated with prestige-deserving, that seems about equal between genders) would do any good whatsoever. Since there are just as many stupid males as stupid females—male average IQ is actually slightly lower than female average IQ—a rule like that wouldn’t do any good, would certainly not prevent people letting young kids have cigarettes or people beating one another or anything like that, and would in fact just lead to a lot of stupid people going “oh, it must be okay to hurt and disparage females and not let them have education then” and going around hurting lots of women.
And the view of mine, that liberal views don’t hurt people and sexist/racist views do hurt people… certainly seems to fit the evidence. Liberal views are increasing over time, and crime and violence are decreasing over time. I can’t find any studies, but I predict that if we do a study, we’ll find that holding the belief “women and men are equal” is strongly correlated with being non-violent and not hurting women, and almost all of the violence and abuse cases committed against women will be by people who don’t think they are equal. Similarly, doing stupid things like giving cigarettes to children and giving away products for free will be correlated with holding conservative views—though admittedly that could just be ’cause being uneducated is correlated with holding conservative views. And because men are on average more violent and more likely to hurt people. But then, that’s a very good argument against putting them in charge, isn’t it...?
Acty, a question. What are you information sources? This is very general question—I’m not asking for citations, I’m asking on the basis of which streams of information do you form your worldview?
For example, for most people these streams would be (a) personal experiences; (b) what other people (family, friends) tell them; (c) what they absorb from the surrounding culture, mostly from mainstream media; and (d) what they were taught, e.g. in school.
You use phrases like “I cannot see any evidence” -- where cannot you see evidence? Who or what, do you think, reliably tells you what is happening in the world and how the world works?
Thanks for the extended answer. If I may make a couple of small suggestions—first, in figuring out where you views come from look at your social circle, both in meatspace and on the ’net. Bring to your mind people you like and respect, people you hope to be liked and respected by. What are their views, what kind of positions are acceptable in their social circle and what kind are not? What is cool and what is uncool?
And second, you are well aware that your views change. I will make a prediction: they will continue to change. Remember that and don’t get terribly attached to your current opinions or expect them to last forever. A flexible, open mind is a great advantage, try not to get it ossified before time :-)
but if I expected to change my mind about something in the future, surely I’d just change it now?
No, because you don’t know (now) in which direction will you change your mind (in the future).
As a general observation, you expect to learn a lot of things in the future. Hopefully, you will update your views on the basis of things you have learned—thus the change. But until you actually learn them, you can’t update.
This is also complicated by the fact that views that go out of favor tend to be characterized as not liberal regardless of whether they actually were liberal. Eugenics is one of the better known examples.
I can’t find any studies, but I predict that if we do a study, we’ll find that holding the belief “women and men are equal” is strongly correlated with being non-violent and not hurting women, and almost all of the violence and abuse cases committed against women will be by people who don’t think they are equal.
Saying “I don’t have a study, but I predict that if I do a study I will see X” is no better than just asserting X.
Also, “women and men are equal” is vague. Do you want equality of opportunity or equality of outcome?
Even “violence against women” is vague. ISIS likes to kidnap women, but they also like to kill all the men at the time they are kidnapping the women. So ISIS causes the absolute amount of violence against women to increase, but the relative amount (compared to violence against men) to decrease.
And now a bit closer to the object level of our previous discussion. Look at this mess about sex, gender, orientation and roles and whatnot. If it was about designing rules for an island where only smart people live, it would be fairly obvious: completely do away with terms like man, woman, feminine, masculine, straight, gay. Measure T levels and simply establish a hormonal gender based on that, a sliding scale, divided into maybe five quintiles or however you want to. Do away with straight or gay—people can date however they wish to, but expect that most people will choose a partner from the other end of the scale than themselves, because people naturally converge to dom-sub, top-bottom setups. Give high-T people more status because they really seem to crave it 1 while low-T people are comfortable enough with being deferential to them, in return make high-T people willing to risk their lives protecting low-T people who should have things safe and comfortable. Base everything on this—risky venture capital type stuff for the high end, predictable welfare/union job stuff for the low-end.
This would make sense, right? I must stress this hormonal scale would be independent of biological sex, social gender or orientation—those are abolished in this scenario. Why, I find it likely you would end up higher on the T-based gender scale than me although I am guy, but you seem to give out more aggressive vibes than I do (I don’t mean it in a bad way, your engines are just more fired up, that is good if you use it for good things). And of course this scenario was
made for an island populated by only smart people.
And then back to the real world. To have any chance of it working for sorry stupid species of humankind, it has to be dumbed down mercilessly. The average human’s cognitive level is about Orwell’s “two legs bad four legs good”. Of course by dumbing down we lose accuracy and efficiency. Of course by dumbing down quite some people won’t fit. Still it has to be done. And now you tell me, if you want to make it really, really primitive, if you want to dumb it down to the point where a blatantly obvious biological switch would determine if people are treated as belonging to the high end or the low end, what switch would that be? Which switch would be the
most obvious?
And then of course you end up with a system you don’t like, and most intellectuals don’t like—it is a really poor fit for intellectuals. At this point the choices are: sacrifice humankind for intellectuals? Sacrifice intellectuals for humankinds? Make the rules that fit for humankind official while let intellectuals bend the rules in private? Establish an aristocracy and make different rules for intellectuals? Archipelago?
Huh. This would be the meta arch of these things. If you still want we can return to stuff like if it is the WATW or whether a large number of people aggreeing with something makes it usually ethically correct and so on, because I would then interpret these objections in these light, but I hope I managed to resolve those with this article.
Then why do the linked researchers use it as a marker of that?
Maybe, it is about status of a different kind. Maybe this reduces to that it is not a well defined word and we always get into rather unresolvable debates because of that.
Let’s try this: there are two kinds of status, one is more like being a commanding officer or a schoolteacher towards kids, it is respect and deference and maybe a bit of fear (but does not 1:1 translate to dominance, although close), the other kind is being really popular and liked. Remember school. The difference between the teacher’s status and the really likeable kid’s status is key here. The CEO vs. the Louis CK type well liked comedian. The politician vs. the best ballet dancer.
To the linked article: being good at math does not make one liked. It makes one respected. Closer to the first type.
We don’t live in a world where low testosterone people want high testosterone people to have more power.
Yes I want policemen to have a certain kind of status but policemen don’t need to be high testosterone. Empathic policemen who are actually good at reading other people have advantages in a lot of police tasks.
Schoolteachers need respect but they don’t need to be high testosterone either. A teacher does a better job if he understands the student.
You should really think that over. For the police example, we have two conflicting requirements, first is to be so scary (or more like respect-commanding) that he rarely needs to get physical, that is always messy. The opposite requirement is the smiling, nice, service-oriented, positive community vibes stuff, like the policemen who visited me and told me I forgot to lock my car. (The reading people is more of an investigator level stuff, not street level.) The question is, which one is more important? If you have one optimal and one less optimal, which one is better? Similarly we want teachers to be kind and understanding with students with genuine difficulties, but be more scary to the kind of thuggish guys half my class was.
The point is really how pessimistic or cautious is your basic view. Do you see the police as a thin blue line separating barbarism from civilization? Do you see every generation of children as “barbarians needing to be civilized” (Hannah Arendt) Or you have a more optimistic view, seeing the vast majority of people behaving well and the vast majority of kids genuinely trying to do good work?
Furthermore—and this is even more important—would you rather get more pessimistic than things are and thus slow down progress, or more optimistic and risk systemic shocks?
I think you know my answers :) I have no problem with a slow and super-safe progress. I don’t exactly want to flee from the present or the past.
For the police example, we have two conflicting requirements, first is to be so scary
No, policemen don’t need to be scary to do their jobs.
A police that can be counted on doing a proper investigation that punishes criminals can deter crime even when the individual policmen aren’t scary.
A policemen being scary can also reduce the willingness of citizens to report crimes because they are afraid of the police. Whole minority communities don’t like to interact with police and thus try to solve conflicts on their own with violence because they don’t trust the police.
Similarly we want teachers to be kind and understanding with students with genuine difficulties
Being empathic is not simply about being “kind and understanding” it allows the teacher to have more information about the mental state of a student and more likely see when a student gets confused and react towards it. A smart student also profits when the teacher get’s that the student already understands what the teacher wants to tell him.
The point is really how pessimistic or cautious is your basic view. Do you see the police as a thin blue line separating barbarism from civilization? Do you see every generation of children as “barbarians needing to be civilized” (Hannah Arendt) Or you have a more optimistic view, seeing the vast majority of people behaving well and the vast majority of kids genuinely trying to do good work?
Neither. I rather care about the expected empiric result of a policy than about seeing people are inherently good or inherently evil. I think you think too much in categories like that and care too little about the empirical reality that we do have less crime than we had in the past.
It’s like discussing global warming not on the scientific data about temperature changes but on whether we are for the environment or for free enterprise. The nonscientific framing leads to bad thinking.
A policemen being scary can also reduce the willingness of citizens to report crimes because they are afraid of the police. Whole minority communities don’t like to interact with police and thus try to solve conflicts on their own with violence because they don’t trust the police.
It’s not clear how much of that is this and how much is them being more afraid of the kingpins of their ethnic mafias than they are of the police.
But according to him this wrecked misery amongst the low-IQ underclass, they really needed their old churches and traditions and Gods Of The Copybook Headings to restrain their impulsivity and bad choice
Have things steadily been marching in the direction of greater liberalism, though? There are a bunch of things you can no longer get away with, such as spousal abuse.
That was precisely what TD wrote they got away with all the time. Just of course not amongst educated or middle-class people. Underclass woman gets admitted to the hospital with a broken arm, docs find it unlikely it was an accident, arrange a meeting with the local psychiatrist i.e. TD. Yeah, it was the boyfriend in a fit of jealousy. Police, testimony? Nope. Why not? She’s making up all kinds of excuses for the guy. OK maybe she is scared, explain about the battered women shelter where nothing bad can come to her. Still not, and does not look scared or dependent or something. Finally the reason becomes clear: the “bad boy” is sexually exciting. And according to TD this happened all the time. 16 years old boy taken in to psychiatric treatment, suicidial. Mom’s latest boyfriend was beating the boys head in the concrete. Why mom won’t call the police? She said “he is a good shag” and rather the boy should try not be too much at home to avoid him. And so on, endless such stories. Get that book...
I was actually getting a weird impression from that book. The primary reason laws and institutions are indeed increasingly aware of and trying to deal with spousal abuse is not that it gets more noticed today, but because it actually does happen more than in the past where communal pressure could have worked against it. TD seems to imply that people’s behavior got worse faster than the laws or police procedures evolved, so it is a net negative.
I was actually getting a weird impression from that book. The primary reason laws and institutions are indeed increasingly aware of and trying to deal with spousal abuse is not that it gets more noticed today, but because it actually does happen more than in the past where communal pressure could have worked against it.
Casual assumptions that things were better in the past, .or that the authors favoured theories must have worked, need to be taken with some scepticism.
Second biggest city of the world’s fourth biggest economy at that time? Not really a huge conincidence IMHO. Sort of in the world top 20-30 list of places to work one one’s career. Not really in the top 20 to enjoy life though. (OK it wasn’t too bad, we had a park behind the house where bands played frequently, it turned out Caribbean takeaways are really delicious, and going to the Godskitchen was a teenage dream came true 15 years later.)
For example nobody talked about making Western liberal democracies like third-world hellholes, it was about making them like their former selves when crime levels were lower, violence was lower, people were politer, people were politer with women and so on.
Crime levels are lower in the West then they were in the past. It’s only media mentions of crime that have risen and which result in a majority of the population believing that crime rates haven’t fallen. Violence is down.
We haven’t gotten increased politeness to woman measured by factors like the number of man who open doors for woman. On the other hand we have a lot more equality than we had in the past. Feminism was never about demanding politeness.
Levels, not rates. Rates are largely about the police trying to look good in numbers. It is seriously difficult to quantify these things properly. One distinct impression I have is that violent behaviors escaped the lower classes and middle-class people stopped being so sheltered from them. Perhaps if I could find a database relating to the education level of the victims of violent crimes I could quantify that better. The 1900 to 1920′s idea of a romantic and dangerous “underworld” went away(example) ), but yet it affects middle-class people far more, from their angle of life experience life got more dangerous.
It is true that feminism is not about politeness, however politeness and preventing specifically violence as seemingly this was the core issue raised are closely related. A normal fella is not going to “please, good sir/madam” and then suddenly head-butt him/her. Formality is a way to avoid the kind of offense that gets retaliated physically, or a way to see if the other is peaceful and reliable, because if the other does not talk in a non-aggressive way then he is more likely to behave physically more aggressively and thus avoidance is advised. This is why it matters, not that relevant to feminism but relevant to safety, people being physically hurt and so on.
Levels, not rates. Rates are largely about the police trying to look good in numbers. It is seriously difficult to quantify these things properly.
There are victimization surveys that verify lower crime levels apart from amount of crime that the police deals with.
We can discuss whether it’s lead or the new clever crime fighting techniques that’s the cause for lower violence but the expert consensus on the subject is that crime is down just as the expert consensus on global warming is that temperatures are up.
but yet it affects middle-class people far more, from their angle of life experience life got more dangerous.
How do you know?
Formality is a way to avoid the kind of offense that gets retaliated physically
But it’s not the only way. I rather have a culture where people hug each other, are nice to each other and also openly speak about their concerns when that makes other people uncomfortable.
It might be that you personally prefer formality but other people don’t. Don’t project your desire for formality onto other people. It’s a right wing value and right wing values lost ;)
Right wing values losing is no reason why an idealistic youth should be pessimistic.
You know what else is a good way to stop people being killed? Create a liberal democracy where people are equal. So far in history, that has kinda correlated… really strongly… with less people dying. There is both less war and less crime.
Um, if you want a society with less crime try Singapore or places like Shanghai. Hell, even Japan have much lower crime rates despite being more patriarchal then western liberal democracies.
Being “strong” in a meaningful way, in the modern world, means being intelligent. Smart people can use better rhetoric, invent cooler weapons, and solve your problems more easily.
Yes, and that will help you so much when someone tries to punch/rob/rape you.
Believing in equality of opportunity =/= believing in equality of outcome =/= believing in communism =/= being willing to kill people to make communism happen.
Actually falsely believing in equality of ability ⇒ being willing to kill to make equality happen. The chain of reasoning goes as follows:
1) As we know all people/groups are of equal ability, but group X is more successful then other groups, thus they must be cheating in some way, we must pass laws to stop the cheating/level the playing field.
2) We passed laws to level the playing field but group X is still winning, they must be cheating in extremely subtle ways, we must pass more laws to stop/punish this.
3) Group X is still ahead, we must presume members of group X are guilty until proven innocent, etc.
If you are seriously suggesting that believing that it is wrong for people to hurt one another, so if you’re hurting someone on grounds of their race, you should stop somehow leads to wanting to have a repeat of Cambodia and kill all the educated people
No that’s not what I’m saying. In the grandparent you said:
If I say that I am opposed to racism, and someone immediately leaps to defend their right to read whatever scientific studies they like—completely ignoring all of the other things that racism refers to, like you know, genocide, which I think we can agree is a pretty bad thing—then that reveals a set of values which are kinda disturbing to me. It signals that you care about whether you can read IQ-by-race-and-gender studies more than you care about genocide and acid attacks and lynchings, and would rather yell at me about the possibility that I might oppose you reading IQ studies rather than agree with me that people murdering one another is a bad thing.
My point is that not being able to read IQ-by-race-and-gender studies is likely to lead to a repeat of Mao/Pol Pot. Thus being extremely concerned about being able to read them is a perfectly rational reaction.
I want to learn social science, do research to figure out what will make people happiest, and then do that.
Unfortunately, as we’ve just established you have very false ideas about how to go about doing that. Furthermore, since these same false ideas are currently extremely popular in academia, going there to study is unlikely to fix this.
Talking about how angry I am about them IRL gets me labelled weird, and with my family, told to shut up or I’ll be kicked out of the room/car/conversation/etc.
Where you live is more then just your immediate family.
You also assume that I oppose ‘perfectly valid Bayesian inference’, as if that’s the only thing that can be meant by opposing racism and sexism.
Well technically one could define “sexism” and “racism” however one wants; however, in practice that’s not how most people who oppose them use the words.
but a lot of people have trouble on updating on the fact that the individual they’re faced with doesn’t fit the trend.
That’s because usually the individual does fit the trend. In fact these days people tend to under update for fear of being called “racist” and/or “sexist”.
I don’t know why you automatically leap to assuming that I am really angry about, say, people reading studies comparing male and female IQs when what I’m actually angry about is,
So are you also angry about what happened to Watson?
say, people beating LBGTQA+ individuals to death in dark alleys (which I am presuming you would not defend).
Are you also angry about people beating people without those psychological issues in dark alleys? The latter is much more common. Are you angry about, say, what happened in Rotherham and the ideology that lead to it being cover up? What about all the black on black violence in inner cities that no one seems to care about and cops don’t want to stop for fear of being called “racist” when they disproportionately arrest black defendants.
Some people use a slight statistical trend indicating a small difference in X to say that all members of a minority must be completely lacking in X and therefore it’s okay to hate them.
Do you know what the word “hate” means? I’ve seen it thrown around to apply to lot’s of situations where there is no actual hate involved. Furthermore, in the rare cases where I’ve seen actual hate, well like you yourself said latter “emotion is arational” and hate is sometimes appropriate.
I’m a utilitarian.
Yet earlier you said “I’m against beatings and murder in general, really.” Do you see the contradiction here? Do you some beatings and killings [your example wasn’t murder since it was legal] even if they increase utility?
I am angry about everyone who has ever been beaten up in a dark alley. I think people should not be beaten up in dark alleys. I am angry about racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia because they seem significant causes of people being beaten up in dark alleys
I agree they “seem” that way if you only superficially read the news. If you pay closer attention one notices that (at least in the US) fear of being precised as “racist” is a much larger cause of people being beaten up in dark alleys (and occasionally in broad daylight). It is the reason why cops don’t want to police high crime (black) neighborhoods, why programs that successfully reduce crime (like stop and frisk) are terminated.
Hatred of human beings is almost never appropriate. Hatred of things is fine.
I would argue the exact opposite. Hatred and anger evolved as methods that let us pre-commit to revenge/punishment by getting around the “once the offense has happened it’s no longer in one’s interest to carry out the punishment” problem. They do this by sabotaging one’s reasoning process to keep one from noticing that carrying out the punishment is not in one’s interest. Applied against things, i.e., anything that can’t be motivated by fear of punishment, all one gets is the partially sabotaged reasoning process without any countervailing benefits.
In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to be angry at a ‘thing’ like a disease. In order to do so one must either anthropomorphize the disease or actually get angry at some people (like say those people who refuse to give enough money to research for curing it).
Hey! <retracted because I changed my mind about the sensibleness of putting personal info on the internet and more people started recognising my name than I’m happy with>
I think it’s a bit of a shame that society seems to funnel our most intelligent, logical people away from social science. I think social science is frequently much more helpful for society than, say, string theory research.
Note: I do find it plausible that doing STEM in undergrad is a good way to train oneself to think, and the best combo might be a STEM undergrad and a social science grad degree. You could do your undergrad in statistics, since statistics is key to social science, and try to become the next Andrew Gelman.
As advice for others like me, this is good. For me personally it doesn’t work too well; my A level subjects mean that I won’t be able to take a STEM subject at a good university. I can’t do statistics, because I dropped maths last year. The only STEM A level I’m taking is CompSci, and good universities require maths for CompSci degrees. I could probably get into a good degree course for Linguistics, but it isn’t a passionate adoration for linguistics that gets me up in the mornings. I adore human and social sciences.
I don’t plan to be completely devoid of STEM education; the subject I actually want to take is quite hard-science-ish for a social science. If I get in, I want to do biological anthropology and archaeology papers, which involve digging up skeletons and chemically analysing them and looking at primate behaviour and early stone tools. It would be pretty cool to do some kind of PhD involving human evolution. From what I’ve seen, if I get onto the course I want to get onto, it’ll teach me a lot of biology and evolutionary psychology and maybe some biochemistry and linguistics.
While archaeology certainly seems fun, do you think it will help you understand how to build a better world?
--
No. The problem of building a state out of 10,000 people who’s fasted way of transport is the horse and who have no math is remarkably different from the problem of building a state of tens of millions of people in the age of the internet, cellphones fast airplanes and cars that allow people to travel fast.
The Ancient Egyptians didn’t have the math to even think about running a randomized trial to find out whether a certain policy will work. Studying them doesn’t tell you anything about how to get our current political system to be more open to make policy based on scientific research.
I think cognitive psychologists who actually did well controlled experiments were a lot more useful for learning about biases and fallacies than evolutionary psychology.
Most people in political science don’t do it well. I don’t know of a single student body that changed to a new political system in the last decade.
I did study at the Free University of Berlin which has a very interesting political structure that came out of 68′s. At the time there was a rejection of representative democracy and thus even through the government of Berlin wants the student bodies of universities in Berlin to be organised according to representative democracy, out university effectively isn’t. Politics students thought really hard around 68 about how to create a more soviet style democracy and the system is still in operation today.
Compared to designing a system like that today’s politics students are slacking. The aren’t practically oriented.
If you are interested in rationality problems, there the field of decision science. It’s likely more yielding then anthropology. Having a good grasp of academic decision science would be helpful when it comes to designing political systems and likely not enough people in political science deal with that subject.
Are you aware that the American Anthropological Association dropped science from their long-range plan 5 years ago?
Is that the system where everyone can vote, but there’s only one candidate?
No, that’s not the meaning of the word soviet. Soviet translates into something like “counsel” in English.
Reducing elections to a single candidate also wouldn’t fly legally. You can’t just forbid people from being a candidate without producing a legal attack surface.
As I said, it’s actually a complex political system that need smart people to set up.
It’s like British Democracy also happens to “democracy” where there a queen and the prime minister went to Eton and Oxford and wants to introduce barrier on free communication that are is some way more totalitarian than what the Chinese government dares to do.
Democracy always get’s complicated if it comes to the details ;).
In English, “Soviet” is the adjectival form of “USSR”.
Never mind the word. What is the actual structure at the Free University of Berlin that you’re referring to? And in 1968, did they believe that this was how things were done in the USSR?
Because Soviets are a central part of how the USSR was organised.
Copying on things were in the USSR wasn’t the point. The point are certain Marxist ideas about the value of Soviets for political organisation.
A system of of soviets, as I said above. There a lot of ideas involved. On the left you had a split between people who believe in social democracy and people who are Marxists. The FU Asta is Marxist.
The people sitting in it are still Marxist even through the majority of the student population of the FU isn’t and they don’t have a problem with that as they don’t believe in representative democracy. They also defend their right to use their printing press to print whatever they want by not disclosing what they are printing. By law they are only allowed to print for university purposes and not for general political activism.
--
The problem of studying people in the first villages is not only that their problems don’t map directly to today. It’s also that it’s get’s really hard to get concrete data. It’s much easier to do good science when you have good reliable data.
With 10,000 people you can solve a lot via tribal bonds and clans. Families stick together. You can also do a bit of religion and everyone follows the wise local priest. Those solutions don’t scale well.
You are likely becoming like the people that surround you when you go into university. You also build relationships with them.
Going to Cambridge is good. Cambridge draws a lot of intelligent people together and also provides you with very useful contacts for a political career. On the other hand that means that you have to go to those place in Cambridge where the relevant people are. Find out which professors at Cambridge actually do good social science. Then go to their classes.
Just make sure that you don’t get lost and go on a career of digging up old stuff and not affecting the real world. A lot of smart people get lost in programs like that. It’s like smart people who get lost in theoretical physics.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
I agree wholeheartedly. A field like theoretical physics is much more glamorous to large number of intelligent people. I think it’s partly signaling, but I’m not sure that explains everything.
What makes the least sense to me are people who seem to believe (or even explicitly confirm!) that they are only interested in things which have no applications. Especially when these people seem to disparage others who work in applied fields. I imagine this teasing might explain a bit of why so many smart people work in less helpful fields.
I think to an extent, physics is more intellectually satisfying to a lot of smart people. It’s much easier to prove things for definite in maths and physics. You can take a test and get right answers, and be sure of your right answers, so when you’re sufficiently smart it feels like a lot of fun to go around proving things and being sure of yourself. It feels much less satisfying to debate about which economics theories might be better.
Knowing proven facts about high level physics makes you feel like an initiate into the inner circles of secret powerful knowledge, knowing a bunch about different theories of politics (especially at first) just makes you feel confused. So if you’re really smart, ‘hard’ sciences can feel more fun. I know I certainly enjoy learning computer science and feeling the rush of vague superiority when I fix someone’s computer for them (and the rush of triumph when my code finally compiles). When I attempt to fix people’s sociological opinions for them, there’s no rush of vague superiority, just a feeling of intense frustration and a deeply felt desire to bang my head against the wall.
Then there’s the Ancient Greek cultural thing where sitting around thinking very hard is obviously superior to going out and doing things—cool people sit inside their mansions and think, leaving your house and mucking around in the real world actually doing things is for peasants—which has somehow survived to this day. The real world is dirty and messy and contains annoying things that mess up your beautiful neat theories. Making a beautiful theory of how mechanics works is very satisfying. Trying to actually use the theory to build a bridge when you have budget constraints and a really big river is frustrating. Trying to apply our built up knowledge about small things (molecules) to bigger things (cells) to even bigger things (brains) to REALLY BIG AND COMPLICATED things (lots and lots of brains together, eg a society) is really intensely frustrating. And the intense frustration and higher difficulty (more difficult to do it right, anyway) means there’s more failure and less conclusive results / slower progress, which leads some people to write off social science as a whole. The rewarding rush of success when your beautifully engineered bridge looks shiny and finished is not something you really get in the social sciences, because it will be a very long time before someone feels the rewarding rush of success that their beautiful preference-satisfying society is shiny and perfect.
I do think that the natural sciences are hopelessly lost without the social sciences, but for most super-clever people, is studying natural science more fun than doing social science? Definitely—I mean, while the politics students are busy reading books and banging their heads against walls and yelling at each other, physics students are putting liquid nitrogen in barrels of ping pong balls so that the whole thing explodes! (I loved chemistry in secondary school for years, right up until I finally caught on that coloured flames were the closest we were going to get to scorching our eyebrows off. Something about health and safety, thirteen year olds, and fire. I wish I hadn’t stopped loving chemistry, because I hear once you’re at university they do actually let you set things on fire sometimes.)
I don’t think that something being (more) mathematically rigorous explains all of what we see. Physicists at one time used to study fluid dynamics. Rayleigh, Kelvin, Stokes, Heisenberg, etc., all have published in the field. You can do quite a lot mathematically in fluids, and I have felt like part of some inner circle because of what I know about fluid dynamics.
Now the field has been basically displaced by quantum mechanics, and it’s usually not considered part of “physics” in some sense, and is less popular than I think you might expect if a subject being amenable to mathematical treatment is attractive to some folks. Physicists are generally taught only the most basic concepts in the field. My impression is that the majority of physics undergrads couldn’t identify the Navier-Stokes equations, which are the most basic equations for the movement of a fluid.
It could also be that fluids have obvious practical applications (aerodynamics, energy, etc.) and this makes the subject distasteful to pedants. That’s just speculation, however. I’m really not sure why fields like physics, etc., are so attractive to some people, though I think you’ve identified parts of it.
You do make a good point about the sense of completion being different in engineering vs. social science. I suppose the closest you could get in social science is developing some successful self-help book or changing public policy in a good way, but I think these are much harder than building things.
I think there’s also definitely a prestige/coolness factor which isn’t correlated with difficulty, applicability, or usefulness of the field.
Quantum mechanics is esoteric and alien and weird and COOL and saying you understand it whilst sliding your glasses down your nose makes you into Supergeek. Saying “I understand how wet stuff splashes” is not really so… high status. It’s the same thing that makes astrophysics higher status than microbiology even though the latter is probably more useful and saves more lives / helps more people—rockets spew fire and go to the moon, bacteria cells in a petri dish are just kind of icky and slimy. I am quite certain that, if you are smart enough to go for any field you want, there is a definite motivation / social pressure to select a “cool” subject involving rockets and quarks and lasers, rather than a less cool subject involving water and cells or… god forbid… political arguments.
And, hmm, actually, not quite true on the last point—a social scientist could develop an intervention program, like a youth education program, that decreases crime or increases youth achievement/engagement, and it would probably feel awesome and warm and fuzzy to talk to the youths whose lives were improved by it. So you could certainly get closer than “developing some successful self-help book”. It is certainly harder, though, I think, and there’s certainly a higher rate of failure for crime-preventing youth education programs than for modern bridge-building efforts.
To be honest, I found QM to be the least interesting subject of all physics which I’ve learned about.
Also, I don’t think the features you highlighted work either. Fluid dynamics has loads of counterintuitive findings, perhaps even more so than QM, e.g., streamlining can increase drag at low Reynolds numbers, increasing speed can decrease drag in certain situations (“drag crisis”). Fluids also has plenty of esoteric concepts; very few people reading the previous sentence likely know what the Reynolds number or drag crisis is.
Physicists, even astrophysicists, know little more about how rockets work than educated laymen. Rocketry is part of aerospace engineering, of which the foundation is fluid dynamics. Maybe rocketry is a counterexample, but I don’t really think so, as there are a lot more people who think rockets are interesting than who know what a de Laval nozzle is. Even that has some counterintuitive effects; the fluid accelerates in the expansion!
You make me suddenly, intensely curious to find out what a Reynolds number is and why it can make streamlining increase drag. I am also abruptly realising that I know less than I thought about STEM fields, given I just kind of assumed that astrophysicists were the official People Who Know About Space and therefore rocketry must be part of their domain. I don’t know whether I want to ask if you can recommend any good fluid dynamics introductions, or whether I don’t want to add to the several feet high pile of books next to my bed...
Okay—so why do you think quantum mechanics became more “cool” than fluid dynamics? Was there a time when fluid dynamics held the equivalent prestige and mystery that quantum mechanics has today? It clearly seems to be more useful, and something that you could easily become curious about just from everyday events like carrying a cup of tea upstairs and pondering how near-impossible it is not to spill a few drops if you’ve overfilled it.
The best non-mathematical introduction I have seen is Shape and Flow: The Fluid Dynamics of Drag. This book is fairly short; it has 186 pages, but each page is small and there are many pictures. It explains some basic concepts of fluid dynamics like the Reynolds number, what controls drag at low and high Reynolds numbers, why golf balls (or roughened spheres in general) have less drag than smooth spheres at high Reynolds number (this does not imply that roughening always reduces drag; it does not on streamlined bodies as is explained in the book), how drag can decrease as you increase speed in certain cases, how wind tunnels and other similar scale modeling works, etc.
You could also watch this series of videos on drag. They were made by the same person who wrote Shape and Drag. There is also a related collection of videos on other topics in fluid dynamics.
Beyond that, the most popular undergraduate textbook by Munson is quite good. I’d suggest buying an old edition if you want to learn more; the newer editions do not add anything of value to an autodidact. I linked to the fifth edition, which is what I own.
I’ll offer a few possibilities about why fluids is generally seen as less attractive than QM, but I want to be clear that I think these ideas are all very tentative.
This study suggests that in an artificial music market, the popularity charts are only weakly influenced by the quality of the music. (Note that I haven’t read this beyond the abstract.) Social influence had a much stronger effect. One possible application of this idea to different fields is that QM became more attractive for social reasons, e.g., the Matthew effect is likely one reason.
The vast majority of the field of fluid mechanics is based on classical mechanics, i.e., F = m a is one of the fundamental equations used to derive the Navier-Stokes equations. Maybe because the field is largely based on classical effects, it’s seen as less interesting. This could be particularly compelling for physicists, as novelty is often valued over everything else.
I’ve also previously mentioned that fluid dynamics is more useful than quantum mechanics, so people who believe useless things are better might find QM more interesting.
There also is the related issue that a wide variety of physical science is lumped into the category “physics” at the high school level, so someone with a particular interest might get the mistaken impression that physics covers everything. I majored in mechanical engineering in college, and basically did it because my father did. My interest even when I was a teenager was fluids, but I hadn’t realized that physicists don’t study the subject in any depth. I was lucky to have picked the right major. I suppose this is a social effect of the type mentioned above.
(Also, to be clear, I don’t want to give the impression that more people do QM than fluids. I actually think the opposite is more likely to be true. I’m saying that QM is “cooler” than fluids.)
Fluid mechanics used to be “cooler” back in the late 1800s. Physicists like Rayleigh and Kelvin both made seminal contributions to the subject, but neither received their Nobel for fluids research. I recall reading that two very famous fluid dynamicists in the early 20th century, Prandtl and Taylor, were recommended for the prize in physics, but neither received it. These two made foundational contributions to physics in the broadest sense of the word. Taylor speculated the lack of Nobels for fluid mechanics was due to how the Nobel prize is rewarded. I also recall reading that there was indications that the committee found the mathematical approximations used to be distasteful even when they were very accurate. Unfortunately those approximations were necessary at the time, and even today we still use approximations, though they are different. Maybe the lack of Nobels contributes to fluids not being as “cool” today.
Ooh, yay, free knowledge and links! Thankyou, you’re awesome!
The linked study was a fun read. I was originally a bit skeptical—it feels like songs are sufficiently subjective that you’ll just like what your friends like or is ‘cool’, but what subjects you choose to study ought to be the topic of a little more research and numbers—but after further reflection the dynamics are probably the same, since often the reason you listen to a song at all is because your friend recommended it, and the reason you research a potential career in something is because your careers guidance counselor or your form tutor or someone told you to. And among people who’ve not encountered 80k hours or EA, career choice is often seen as a subjective thing. It’d be like with Asch’s conformity experiments where participants aren’t even aware that they’re conforming because it’s subconscious, except even worse because it’s subconscious and seen as subjective...
That seems like a very plausible explanation. There could easily be a kind of self-reinforcing loop, as well, like, “I didn’t learn fluid dynamics in school and there aren’t any fluid dynamics Nobel prize winners, therefore fluid dynamics isn’t very cool, therefore let’s not award it any prizes or put it into the curriculum...”
At its heart, this is starting to seem like a sanity-waterline problem like almost everything else. Decrease the amount that people irrationally go for novelty and specific prizes and “application is for peasants” type stuff, and increase the amount they go for saner things like the actual interest level and usefulness of the field, and prestige will start being allocated to fields in a more sensible way. Fluid dynamics sounds really really interesting, by the way.
Also perhaps worth noting that the effect within the LW subculture in particular may have to do with lots of LW users knowing a lot about ideas or disciplines where there are a lot of popular but wrong positions so they know how not to go astray. Throughout the Sequences, before you figure out how to do it right, you hear about how a bunch of other people have done it wrong: MWI, p-zombies, value theory, evolutionary biology, intellectual subcultures, etc. I don’t know that there are any sexy controversies in fluid mechanics.
Interesting points. There are controversies in fluid mechanics, and they are discussed at great length in the field, but I don’t know of any popular treatments of them.
In particular, there a large number of debates centering around turbulence modeling which actually are extremely relevant to modeling in general. The LES vs. RANS debate is interesting, and while in some sense LES has “won”, this does not mean that LES is entirely satisfactory. A lot of turbulence theory is also quite controversial. I recall reading a fair bit about isotropic turbulence decay in 2012 and I was surprised by the wide variety of results different theoretical and experimental approaches give. Isotropic turbulence decay, by the way, is the among easiest turbulence problems you could devise.
The debate in turbulence about the log law vs. power law is a waste of time, and should be recognized as such. Both basically give you the same result, so which you use is inconsequential. There are some differences in interpretation that I don’t think are important or even remember to be honest.
Thinking about it, things like QM are a fair bit easier to explain than turbulence. To actually explain these things in detail beyond what I’ve mentioned would take a considerable amount of time.
“I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic.” (Horace Lamb)
(Indeed, today quantum electrodynamics makes correct predictions within one part per billion and fluid dynamics has an open million-dollar question.)
If you consider finance a subset of social science then the U.S. puts a lot of its best and brightest there.
Hedge funds do manage to employ the best and brightest, on the other hand I’m not sure whether the same is true for the academic subject of finance.
Finance is not social science. I think it’s more similar to engineering: you need to have a grasp of the underlying concepts and be able to do the math, but the real world will screw you up on a very regular basis and so you need to be able to deal with that.
Behavioral finance is supposedly a big thing.
Taking psychology into consideration doesn’t make finance a social science any more than sociological factors make civil engineering a social science.
The bigger shame is the kind of BS that passes for humanities/social science these days.
Is that a fact? I’ve seen social scientists complain that social science is trying too hard to emulate the hard science.
Yes, most social science is cargo cult science. That’s perfectly consistent with it being BS.
Look, it may very well be that social science is low-quality. But your comments in this thread are not at all up to LW standards. You need to cite evidence for your positions and stop calling people names.
Well, to be pedantic he’s called social sciences names but AFAICT he hasn’t called social scientists names.
I think there may be a self-reinforcing spiral where highly logical people aren’t impressed by social science, leading them to avoid it, leading to social science being unimpressive to highly logical because it’s done by people who aren’t highly logical. But I could be wrong—maybe highly logical people are misperceiving.
It’s not just a self-reinforcing spiral. There is also a driver, namely since social science has more political implications and there is a lot of political control over science funding, social science selects for people willing to reach the “correct” conclusions even if they have to torture logic and the evidence to do so.
Well that’s a self-reinforcing spiral of a different type. In general, I see a number of forces pushing newcomers to a group towards being similar to whoever the folks already in the group are:
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy, insofar as it’s accurate.
Self-segregation. It’s less aversive to interact with people who agree with you and are similar to you, which nudges people towards forming social circles of similar others.
Reputation effects. If Google has a reputation for having great programmers, other great programmers will want to work there so they can have great coworkers.
This is why it took someone like Snowden to expose NSA spying. The NSA was the butt of jokes in the crypto community for probably doing illicit spying long before Snowden… which meant people who cared about civil liberties didn’t apply for jobs there (who wants to work for the evil empire?) (Note: just my guess as someone outside crypto; could be totally wrong on this one.)
Edit: evaporative cooling should probably be considered related to the bullet points above.
You’re assuming that “intelligent” == “logical”. That just ain’t so and especially ain’t so in social sciences.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Is there data about the average IQ of PHD’s or professors in the social sciences?
I did a bit of googling, and it really surprised me. I thought the social science IQs would be lower on average than the STEM IQs, but I found a lot of conflicting stuff. Most sources seem to put physics and maths at the top of the ranks, but then there’s engineering, social science and biology and I keep seeing those three in different orders. If you split up ‘social science’ and ‘humanities’, then humanities stays at the top and social science drops a few places, presumably because law is a very attractive profession for smart people (high prestige and pay) and law is technically a humanity. I’m not very confident in any of my Google results, though—they all looked slightly dodgy—so I’m not linking to any and would love it if someone else could find some better data.
I don’t think it’s an argument for disregarding social science, even if we did find data that showed all social scientists are stupider than STEM scientists. I mean, education came last for IQ on almost all of the lists I looked up. Education. Nobody is going to say that this means we should scrap education. If education really does attract a lot of stupid people, I think that is cause to try and raise the prestige and pay of education as a profession so that more smart people do it—not to cut funding for schools. (Though the reason education is so lowly ranked for IQ could be that a lot of countries don’t require teachers to have education degrees, you get a different degree and then a teaching certificate, so you only take Education as a bachelor’s if you want to do Childhood Studies and go into social care/work.)
It’s clearly very important that our governments are advised by smart social scientists who can do experiments and tell them whether law X or policy Y will decrease the crime rate or just annoy people, or we’re just letting politicians do whatever their ideology tells them to do. So, even though the IQ of people in social sciences is lower on average than the IQ of people in physics, we shouldn’t conclude that social science is worthless—I think we should conclude that efforts must be made to get more smart people to consider becoming social scientists.
I also don’t think you necessarily need a high IQ to be a successful social scientist. Being a successful mathematician requires a lot of processing power. Being a successful social scientist requires a lot of rationality and a lot of carefulness. If you’re trying to do some problems with areas of circles, then you will not be distracted by your religious belief that pi is an evil number and cannot be the answer, nor will you have to worry about the line your circle is drawn with being a sentient line and deliberately mucking up your results. Social scientists don’t need as much processing power to throw at problems, but it takes a lot of care and ability to change one’s mind to do good social science, because you’re doing research on really complicated high-level things with sentient agents who do weird things and you were probably raised with an ideology about it. Without a good amount of rationality, you will just end up repeatedly “proving” whatever your ideology says.
To make physics worthwhile you need high IQ; without that, you’d produce awful physics. To make social science worthwhile, you need to be very very careful and ignore what your ideology is telling you in the back of your mind; without that, you produce awful social science. Unfortunately, our society’s ability to test for IQ is much better than our society’s ability to test for rationality, which could explain why more people get away with BS social science than they do with BS physics. (The other explanation is that there are both awful social science papers and awful physics papers, but awful physics papers get ignored by everyone, whereas awful social science papers are immediately picked up by whatever group whose ideology they support and linked to on facebook with accompanying comments in all-caps.)
That might actually have been a problem once. Apparently the Pythagoreans had serious problems with irrational numbers...
And current mathematician have them with infinitesimally small numbers ;)
Not really. Everyone agrees that calculus can be done with infinitesimals, but most mathematicians think that doing it with limits forms a better basis for going on to real analysis and epsilon-delta proofs later.
I don’t think modern mathematicians are going to drown someone for using infinitesimally small numbers...
Non-standard analysis is perfectly fine. Most mathematicians just don’t deal with that kind of analysis.
It’s not an argument for disregarding social science, but it is an argument to be more sceptical of its claims.
I disagree but let me qualify that. If we define “successful” as “socially successful”, that is, e.g., you have your tenure and your papers are accepted in reasonable peer-reviewed journals, then yes, you do not need high IQ to be be successful social scientist.
However if we define “successful” as “actually advancing the state of human knowledge” then I feel fairly confident in thinking that a high IQ is even more of a necessity for a social scientists than it is for someone who does hard sciences.
As you pointed out yourself , hard sciences are easier :-)
Ah, I’m sorry—I actually agree with everything you just wrote. I fear I may have miscommunicated slightly in the comment you’re replying to.
You’re right, I did point that out. And I do think that it can be harder in social science to weed out the good stuff from the bad stuff, and as such, you can get reasonably far in social science terms by being well-spoken and having contacts with a similar ideology even if your science isn’t great. This is an undesirable state of affairs, of course, but I think it’s just because doing good social science is really difficult (and in order to even know what good social science looks like, you’ve gotta be smart enough to do good social science). It’s part of the reason I think I can be useful and make a difference by doing social science, if I can do good rational social science and encourage others to do more rational social science.
My point isn’t that you don’t need to be as smart to do social science; doing it well is actually harder, so you’d expect social scientists to be at least as smart as hard scientists. I think that social science and hard science require slightly different kinds of intelligence, and IQ tests better for the hard science kind rather than the social science kind.
It’s really difficult to make a formula that calculates how to get a rocket off the ground. You have to crunch a lot of numbers. However, once you’ve come up with that formula, it is easy to test it; when you fire your rocket, does it go to the moon or does it blow up in your face?
It’s really easy to come up with a social science intervention/hypothesis. You just say “people from lower classes have worse life outcomes because of their poor opportunities (so we should improve opportunities for poor people)” or “people from lower classes are in the lower class because they’re not smart, and their parents were not smart and gave them bad genes, so they have worse life outcomes because they’re not smart (so we should do nothing)” or “people from lower classes have a culture of underachievement that doesn’t teach them to work hard (so we should improve life/study skills education in poor areas)”. I mean, coming up with one of those three is way easier than designing a rocket. However, once you’ve come up with them… how do you test it? How do you design a program to get people to achieve higher? Run an intervention program involving education and improved opportunities for years, carefully guarding against all the ideological biases you might have and the mess that might be made by various confounding factors, and still not necessarily have a clear outcome? There’s not as much difficulty in hypothesis-generation or coming-up-with-solutions, but there’s a lot more difficulty in hypothesis-testing and successful-solution-implementing.
Hard science requires more raw processing power to come up with theories; social science requires more un-biased-ness and carefulness in testing your theories. They’re subtly different requirements and I think IQ is a better indicator of the former than the latter.
Given that teachers who have a masters in education don’t do better than teachers who haven’t, I think there a good case of scrapping the current professors in that fields from their titles.
Given this fact, it gives very good support to an argument like “we should scrap Masters programs in education”. But it could also give very good support to “we should try out a few variations on Masters programs in education to see if any of them would do better than the current one, and if we find one that actually works, we should change our current one to that thing. If and only if we try a bunch of different variations and none of them work, we should scrap Masters programs in education.”
I mean, if we could create a program that consistently made people better teachers, that would be a very worthwhile endeavour. If our current program aiming to make people better teachers is utterly failing, maybe we should scrap that particular program, but surely we should also have a go at doing a few different programs and seeing if any of those succeed?
Who’s responsible for creating such a program? The current professors. Given that they don’t do so, we need different people.
Very true. We should task them with creating a better program, and if they don’t produce results, we should fire them and find new professors. Just the same as firing any employee who is incapable of doing their job, really.
The thing I disagree with would be if we scrapped the positions and programs entirely; I am entirely on board with the idea of firing the people currently holding the positions and running the programs, and finding new people to hold the positions and run the programs differently. I think that I now understand your position better and you’re advocating the latter, not the former, in which case I entirely agree with you.
There are many different ways to teach knowledge. Academia isn’t the only way. You could have a education system where teachers don’t go to university to learn how to teach but where they do apprenticeships programs. They sit in the classrooms of experienced teachers and help.
Decrease the amount of time that teachers spend in the classroom to allow for time where teachers discuss with their colleagues what works best.
Different people learn in different ways. I’m really good at textbook learning and hate hands on learning (and suspect that is common among introverted intellectual people). Ideally, why not offer both a university course that qualifies you as a teacher and an apprenticeship system that qualifies you as a teacher, and allow prospective teachers to decide which best suits their learning style? We could even do cognitive assessments on the prospective teachers to recommend to them which program would be best for what their strengths seem to be.
Although, as someone who lives with a teacher—we definitely don’t need to reduce the time they spend in the classroom, we need to change the fact that they spend double that time marking and planning and doing pointless paperwork.
The job of being a teacher is not ideal for introverts. At the core teaching is about social interaction.
You can’t learn charisma through reading textbooks. Textbooks don’t teach you to be a authority in the classroom and get the children to pay attention to what you are saying.
They don’t teach empathy either. Empathy is a strong predictor for success of psychologists in therapy session and likely also useful for teachers.
“Learning styles” are a popular concept but there no good research that suggests that giving different students different training based on learning style is helpful.
I agree. Get rid of the whole business of giving students grades outside of automatically graded tests to allow a teacher to focus on teaching.
Unfortunately, what is actually happening is that the politicians and beaurocrats decide which policy they prefer for ideological reasons and then fund social scientists willing to produce “science” to justify the desision.
I’m not sure this is necessarily always true. There are absolutely certainly instances of this happening, but more and more governments are adopting “evidence-led policy” policies, and I’d hope that at least sometimes those policies do what they say on the tin. The UK has this: https://www.gov.uk/what-works-network and I’m going to try and do more reading up on it to see whether it looks like it’s doing any good or just proving what people want it to prove.
It would certainly be preferable to live in a world where social scientists did good unbiased social science and then politicians listened to them. The question is, how do we change our current world into such a world? It certainly isn’t by disparaging social science or assigning it low prestige. We need to make it so that science>ideology in prestige terms, which will be really tricky.
Yes; you’ll get some politicians who actually want to reduce the crime rate and are willing to look for advice on how to do that effectively.
They’re hard to spot, because all politicians want to look like that sort of politician, leaving the genuine ones hidden in a crowd of lookalikes...
There could be solutions to this, I’m sure, or at least ways of minimising the problems. Maybe an independent-from-current-ruling-party research institute that ran studies on all proposed laws/policies put forward by both the in-power and opposition power, which required pre-registration of studies, and then published its findings very publicly in an easy-for-public-to-read format? Then it would be very obvious which parties were saying the same things as the science and which were ignoring the science, and it would be hard for the parties to influence the social scientists to just get them to say what they want them to say.
I’m sure there could be. It’s not an easy problem to solve—after all, right now, there are professors in social sciences, economics, and other subjects who can tell pretty quickly whether or not a given policy is at least vaguely sensible or not. But how often are they listened to?
Also, it’s not always easy to see which option is the best. If Policy A might or might not reduce crime but makes it look like everyone’s trying; Policy B will reduce crime but also reduce civil liberties; Policy C will reduce the amount of crime but increase its potential lethality… then how can one tell which policy is the best?
Having said that… there should be solutions. Your proposed institute is an improvement on the status quo, and would be a good thing to set up in many countries (assuming that they can be funded).
People tried this in the late 19th/early 20th century (look up “technocracy” if you want to learn more). That’s how we got into the mess we are in now.
My understanding is that the technocracy movement were more engineers than social scientists, and were not an influential movement anyway.
Anyway, the problem isn’t that scientists are inherently biased, its that if they mention certain hypotheses publicly they will be fired because of journalists.
Incidentally, I know neuro/cognitive scientists at a very left-wing university, and they believed in certain gender/racial cognitive differences, despite ideology.
The mess where we’re wealthier, living longer, etc?
The mess that what passes for “social science” is a bunch of BS.
I’ve studied Spanish for some time and would be happy to converse with you. I’m not sure if you only want to converse with native speakers. I’ve been wanting to learn how to talk about LessWrongian stuff in Spanish.
--
You seem legit. Also, wait, the #lesswrong IRC channel stopped being dead?
--
Hi Act, welcome!
I will gladly converse with you in Russian if you want to.
Why do you want a united utopia? Don’t you think different people prefer different things? Even if assume the ultimate utopia is unform, wouldn’t we want to experiment with different things to get there?
Would you feel “dwarfed by an FAI” if you had little direct knowledge of what the FAI is up to? Imagine a relatively omniscient and omnipotent god taking care of things on some (mostly invisible) level but doesn’t ever come down to solve your homework.
--
P.S.
I am dismayed that you were ambushed by the far right crowd, especially on the welcome thread.
My impression is that you are highly intelligent, very decent and admirably enthusiastic. I think you are a perfect example of the values that I love in this community and I very much want you on board. I’m sure that I personally would enjoy interacting with you.
Also, I am confident you will go far in life. Good dragon hunting!
--
I wouldn’t call it an ambush, but in any case Acty emerged from that donnybrook in quite a good shape :-)
So pointing out flaws in someone’s position is now “ambushing” them?
Disagreeing is ok. Disagreeing is often productive. Framing your disagreement as a personal attack is not ok. Lets treat each other with respect.
I sympathize with your sentiment regarding friendship, community etc. The thing is, when everyone are friends the state is not needed at all. The state is a way of using violence or the threat of violence to resolve conflicts between people in a way which is as good as possible for all parties (in the case of egalitarian states; other states resolve conflicts in favor of the ruling class). Forcing people to obey any given system of law is already an act of coercion. Why magnify this coercion by forcing everyone to obey the same system rather than allowing any sufficiently big group of people choose their own system?
Moreover, in the search of utopia we can go down many paths. In the spirit of the empirical method, it seems reasonable to allow people to explore different paths if we are to find the best one.
I used “homework” as a figure of speech :)
This might be so. However, you must consider the tradeoff between this sadness and efficiency of dragon-slaying.
The problem is, if you instantly go from human intelligence to far superhuman, it looks like a breach in the continuity of your identity. And such a breach might be paramount to death. After all, what makes tomorrow you the same person as today you, if not the continuity between them? I agree with Eliezer that I want to be upgraded over time, but I want it to happen slowly and gradually.
I do think that some kind of organisational cooperative structure would be needed even if everyone were friends—provided there are dragons left to slay. If people need to work together on dragonfighting, then just being friends won’t cut it—there will need to be some kind of team, and some people delegating different tasks to team members and coordinating efforts. Of course, if there aren’t dragons to slay, then there’s no need for us to work together and people can do whatever they like.
And yeah—the tradeoff would definitely need to be considered. If the AI told me, “Sorry, but I need to solve negentropy and if you try and help me you’re just going to slow me down to the point at which it becomes more likely that everyone dies”, I guess I would just have to deal with it. Making it more likely that everyone dies in the slow heat death of the universe is a terribly large price to pay for indulging my desire to fight things. It could be a tradeoff worth making, though, if it turns out that a significant number of people are aimless and unhappy unless they have a cause to fight for—we can explore the galaxy and fight negentropy and this will allow people like me to continue being motivated and fulfilled by our burning desire to fix things. It depends on whether people like me, with aforementioned burning desire, are a minority or a large majority. If a large majority of the human race feels listless and sad unless they have a quest to do, then it may be worthwhile letting us help even if it impedes the effort slightly.
And yeah—I’m not sure that just giving me more processor power and memory without changing my code counts as death, but simultaneously giving a human more processor power and more memory and not increasing their rationality sounds… silly and maybe not safe, so I guess it’ll have to be a gradual upgrade process in all of us. I quite like that idea though—it’s like having a second childhood, except this time you’re learning to remember every book in the library and fly with your jetpack-including robot feet, instead of just learning to walk and talk. I am totally up for that.
We don’t need the state to organize. Look at all the private organizations out there.
The cause might be something created artificially by the FAI. One idea I had is a universe with “pseudodeath” which doesn’t literally kill you but relocates you to another part of the universe which results in lose of connections with all people you knew. Like in Border Guards but involuntary, so that human communities have to fight with “nature” to survive.
Sort of a cosmic witness relocation program! :).
The following is pure speculation. But I imagine an FAI would begin its work by vastly reducing the chance of death, and then raising everyone’s intelligence and energy levels to those of John_von_Neumann. That might allow us to bootstrap ourselves to superhuman levels with minimal guidance.
Why do you dream of doing Human, Social and Political Sciences?
--
To me it sounds like you’re an intense, inspired person who wants to make a great impact and has a start at a few plans for doing it. Way to go!
You assume that studying politics in university tells you a good answer to that question. To me that doesn’t seem true.
If you look at a figure like Julian Assange who actually plays and make meaningful moves, Assange didn’t study politics at university.
Studying politics at Cambridge on the other hand will make it easier to become an elected politician in the UK. But that’s not necessarily because of the content of lectures but because of networking.
It quite often happens that young people don’t speak to older more experienced people when making their decisions about what to study. As your goal is making a difference in the world, it could be very useful to ask 80,000 for coaching to make that choice: https://80000hours.org/career-advice/ You might still come out of that with wanting to go to the same program in Cambridge but you will likely have better reasons for doing so and will be less naive.
--
Getting elected in the UK is certainly a valid move, but it comes with buying into the status quo to the extend that you hold opinions that make you fit into a major party.
I think the substantial discussion about Liquid Democracy doesn’t happen inside the politics departments of universities but outside of them. A lot of 20th century and earlier political philosophy just isn’t that important for building something new. It exists to justify the status quo and a place like Cambridge exists to justify the status quo.
Even inside Cambridge you likely want to spend time in student self-governance and it’s internal politics.
--
To some degree, the idea of a “Friendship and Science Party” has already been tried. The Mugwumps wanted to get scholars, scientists and learned people more involved in politics to improve its corrupt state. It sounds like a great idea on paper, but this is what happened:
According to this account, the more contact science has with politics, the more corrupted it becomes.
--
I think you missed what I see as the main point in “What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind.” Not surprising, because Moldbug (the guy quoted about the Mugwumps) is terribly long-winded and given to rhetorical flourishes. So let me try to rephrase what I see as the central objection in a format more amenable to LW:
The scientific community is not a massive repository of power, nor is it packed to the gills with masters of rhetoric. The political community consists of nothing but. If you try to run your new party by listening to the scientific community without first making the scientific community far more powerful and independent, what’s likely to happen is that the political community makes a puppet of the scientific community, and then you wind up running your politics by listening to a puppet of the political community.
To give a concrete relatable figure: The US National Science Foundation receives about 7.5 billion dollars a year from the US Congress. (According to the NSF, they are the funding source for approximately 24 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities, which suggests 30 billion federal dollars are out there just for basic research)
The more you promote “Do what the NSF says”, the more Congress is going to be interested in using some of those billions of dollars to lean on the NSF and other similar organizations so that you will be promoting “Do what Congress says” at arm’s remove. No overt dishonesty needs be involved. Just little things like hiring sympathetic scientists, discouraging controversial research, asking for a survey of a specific metric, etc.
Suppose you make a prediction that a law will decrease the crime rate. You pass the law. You wait a while and see. Did the crime rate go down? Well, how are you measuring crime rate? Which crimes are you counting? To take an example discussed on Less Wrong a while ago, if you use the murder rate as proxy for crime rate over the past few decades, you are going to severely undercount crime because of improvements in medical technology that make worse wounds more survivable.
Obviously you can fix this particular metric now that I’ve pointed it out. But can you spot and fix such issues in advance faster and better than people throwing around 30 billion dollars and with a massive vested interest in retaining policy control?
When trying to solve something like whether P=NP, you can throw more and brighter scientists at the problem and trust that the problem will remain the same. But the problem of trying to establish science-based policy, particularly when “advocating loads of funding for science”, gets harder as it gets more important and you throw more people at it. This is a Red Queen’s Race where you have to keep running just to stay in place, because you’re not dealing with a mindless question that has an objective answer floating out there, you’re dealing with an opposed social force with lots of minds and money that learns from its own mistakes and figures out how to corrupt better, and with more plausible deniability.
Thankyou—this statement of the idea was much, much clearer to me. :)
It seems like the solution—well, a possible part of one possible solution—is to make the social science research institute that everyone listens to have some funding source which is completely independent from the political party in power. That would hopefully make the scientific community more independent. We now need to make it more powerful, which is… more difficult. I think a good starting point would be to try and raise the prestige associated with a social science career (and thus the prestige given to individual social scientists and the amount of social capital they feel they have to spend on being controversial) and possibly give some rhetoric classes to the social science research institute’s spokesperson. Assuming the scientists are rational scientists, this gives them politician-power with which to persuade people of their correct conclusions. (Of course, if they have incorrect conclusions influenced by their ideologies, this is… problematic. How do we fix this? I dunno yet. But this is the very beginning of a solution, but I’ve not been thinking about the problem very long and I am just one kid with a relatively high IQ. If multiple people work together on a solution, I’m sure much more and much better stuff will be come up with.)
“The more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process.”—James Lileks
--
That thing:
Besides, we’re talking about “more likely”, not “inevitably”.
--
There is historical precedent for groups advocating equality, altruism, and other humanitarian causes to do a lot of damage and start guillotining people. You would probably be horrified and step off the train before it got to that point. But it’s important to understand the failure modes of egalitarian, altruistic movements.
The French Revolution, and Russian Revolution / Soviet Union ran into these failure modes where they started killing lots of people. After slavery was abolished in the US, around one quarter of the freed slaves died.
These events were all horrible disasters from a humanitarian perspective. Yet I doubt that the original French Revolutionaries planned from the start to execute the aristocracy, and then execute many of their own factions for supposedly being counter-revolutionaries. I don’t think Marx ever intended for the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union to have a high death toll. I don’t think the original abolitionists ever expected the bloody Civil War followed by 25% of the former slaves dying.
Perhaps, once a movement for egalitarianism and altruism got started, an ideological death spiral caused so much polarization that it was impossible to stop people from going overboard and extending the movement’s mandate in a violent direction. Perhaps at first, they tried to persuade their opponents to help them towards the better new world. When persuasion failed, they tried suppression. And when suppression failed, someone proposed violence, and nobody could stop them in such a polarized environment.
Somehow, altruism can turn pathological, and well-intentioned interventions have historically resulted in disastrous side-effects or externalities. That’s why some people are cynical about altruistic political attitudes.
--
You yourself are unlikely to start the French Revolution, but somehow, well-intentioned people seem to get swept up in those movements. Even teachers, doctors, and charity workers can contribute to an ideological environment that goes wrong; this doesn’t mean that they started it, or that they supported it every step of the way. But they were part of it.
The French Revolution and guillotines is indeed a rarer event. But if pathological altruism can result in such large disasters, then it’s quite likely that it can also backfire in less spectacular ways that are still problematic.
As you point out, many interventions to change the world risk going wrong and making things worse, but it would be a shame to completely give on making the world a better place. So what we really want is interventions that are very well-thought out, with a lot of care towards the likely consequences, taking into account the lessons of history for similar interventions.
“So what we really want is interventions that are very well-thought out, with a lot of care towards the likely consequences, taking into account the lessons of history for similar interventions.”
That is exactly why I want to study social science. I want to do lots of experiments and research and reading and talking and thinking before I dare try and do any world-changing. That’s why I think social science is important and valuable, and we should try very hard to be rational and careful when we do social science, and then listen to the conclusions. I think interventions should be well-thought-through, evidence-based, and tried and observed on a small scale before implemented on a large scale. Thinking through your ideas about laws/policies/interventions and gathering evidence on whether they might work or not—that’s the kind of social science that I think is important and the kind I want to do.
You’re ignoring the rather large pachyderm in the room which goes by the name of Values.
Differences in politics and policies are largely driven not by disagreements over the right way to reach the goal, but by decisions which goals to pursue and what trade-offs are acceptable as the price. Most changes in the world have both costs and benefits, you need to balance them to decide whether it’s worth it, and the balancing necessarily involves deciding what is more important and what is less important.
For example, imagine a trade-off: you can decrease the economic inequality in your society by X% by paying the price of slowing down the economic growth by Y%. Science won’t tell you whether that price is acceptable—you need to ask your values about it.
Disagreements including this one? It sounds as though you are saying in a conversation such as this one, you are more focused on working to achieve your values than trying to figure out what’s true about the world… like, say, Arthur Chu. Am I reading you correctly in supporting something akin to Arthur Chu’s position, or do I misunderstand?
Given how irrational people can be about politics, I’d guess that in many cases apparent “value” differences boil down to people being mindkilled in different ways. As rationalists, the goal is to have a calm, thoughtful, evidence-based discussion and figure out what’s true. Building a map and unmindkilling one another is a collaborative project.
There are times when there is a fundamental value difference, but my feeling is that this is the possibility to be explored last. And if you do want to explore it, you should ask clarifying values questions (like “do you give the harms from a European woman who is raped and a Muslim woman who is raped equal weight?”) in order to suss out the precise nature of the value difference.
Anyway, if you do agree with Arthur Chu that the best approach is to charge ahead imposing your values, why are you on Less Wrong? There’s an entire internet out there of people having Arthur Chu style debates you could join. Less Wrong is a tiny region of the internet where we have Scott Alexander style debates, and we’d like to keep it that way.
That’s a false dichotomy. Epistemic rationality and working to achieve your values are largely orthogonal and are not opposed to each other. In fact, epistemic rationality is useful to achieving your values because of instrumental rationality.
So you do not think that many people have sufficiently different and irreconcilable values?
I wonder how are you going to distinguish “true” values and “mindkill-generated” values. Take some random ISIS fighter in Iraq, what are his “true” values?
I disagree, I think it’s useful to figure out value differences before spending a lot of time on figuring out whether we agree about how the world works.
Who’s that “we”? It is a bit ironic that you felt the need to use the pseudonymous handle to claim that you represent the views of all LW… X-)
In my (admittedly limited, I’m young) experience, people don’t disagree on whether that tradeoff is worth it. People disagree on whether the tradeoff exists. I’ve never seen people arguing about “the tradeoff is worth it” followed by “no it isn’t”. I’ve seen a lot of arguments about “We should decrease inequality with policy X!” followed by “But that will slow economic growth!” followed by “No it won’t! Inequality slows down economic growth!” followed by “Inequality is necessary for economic growth!” followed by “No it isn’t!” Like with Obamacare—I didn’t hear any Republicans saying “the tradeoff of raising my taxes in return for providing poor people with healthcare is an unacceptable tradeoff” (though I am sometimes uncharitable and think that some people are just selfish and want their taxes to stay low at any cost), I heard a lot of them saying “this policy won’t increase health and long life and happiness the way you think it will”.
“Is this tradeoff worth it?” is, indeed, a values question and not a scientific question. But scientific questions (or at least, factual questions that you could predict the answer to and be right/wrong about) could include: Will this policy actually definitely cause the X% decrease in inequality? Will this policy actually definitely cause the Y% slowdown in economic growth? Approximately how large is X? Approximately how much will a Y% slowdown affect the average household income? How high is inflation likely to be in the next few years? Taking that expected rate of inflation into account, what kind of things would the average family no longer be able to afford / not become able to afford, presuming the estimated decrease in average household income happens? What relation does income have to happiness anyway? How much unhappiness does inequality cause, and how much unhappiness do economic recessions cause? Does a third option (beyond implement this policy / don’t implement it) exist, like implementing the policy but also implementing another policy that helps speed economic growth, or implementing some other radical new idea? Is this third option feasible? Can we think up any better policies which we predict might decrease inequality without slowing economic growth? If we set a benchmark that would satisfy our values, like percentage of households able to afford Z valuable-and-life-improving item, then which policy is likely to better satisfy that benchmark—economic growth so that more people on average can afford Z, or inequality reduction so that more poor people become average enough to afford an Z?
But, of course, this is a factual question. We could resolve this by doing an experiment, maybe a survey of some kind. We could take a number of left-wing policies, and a number of right-wing policies, and survey members of the “other tribe” on “why do you disagree with this policy?” and give them options to choose between like “I think reducing inequality is more important than economic growth” and “I don’t think reducing inequality will decrease economic growth, I think it will speed it up”. I think there are a lot of issues where people disagree on facts.
Like prisons—you have people saying “prisons should be really nasty and horrid to deter people from offending”, and you have people saying “prisons should be quite nice and full of education and stuff so that prisoners are rehabilitated and become productive members of society and don’t reoffend”, and both of those people want to bring the crime rate down, but what is actually best at bringing crime rates down—nasty prisons or nice prisons? Isn’t that a factual question, and couldn’t we do some science (compare a nice prison, nasty prison, and average-kinda-prison control group, compare reoffending rates for ex-inmates of those prisons, maybe try an intervention where kids are deterred from committing crime by visiting nasty prison and seeing what it’s like versus kids who visit the nicer prison versus a control group who don’t visit a prison and then 10 years later see what percentage of each group ended up going to prison) to see who is right? And wouldn’t doing the science be way better than ideological arguments about “prisoners are evil people and deserve to suffer!” versus “making people suffer is really mean!” since what we actually all want and agree on is that we would like the crime rate to come down?
So we should ask the scientific question: “Which policies are most likely to lead to the biggest reductions in inequality and crime and the most economic growth, keep the most members of our population in good health for the longest, and provide the most cost-efficient and high-quality public services?” If we find the answer, and some of those policies seem to conflict, then we can consult our values to see what tradeoff we should make. But if we don’t do the science first, how do we even know what tradeoff we’re making? Are we sure the tradeoff is real / necessary / what we think it is?
In other words, a question of “do we try an intervention that costs £10,000 and is 100% effective, or do we do the 80% effective intervention that costs £80,000 and spend the money we saved on something else?” is a values question. But “given £10,000, what’s the most effective intervention we could try that will do the most good?” is a scientific question and one that I’d like to have good, evidence-based answers to. “Which intervention gives most improvement unit per money unit?” is a scientific question and you could argue that we should just ask that question and then do the optimal intervention.
The solution to this problem is to find smarter people to talk to.
Experiment? On live people? Cue in GlaDOS :-P
It sounded to me like she recommended a survey. Do you consider surveys problematic?
Surveys are not experiments and Acty is explicitly talking about science with control groups, etc. E.g.
According to every IRB I’ve been in contact with, they are. Here’s Cornell’s, for example.
I’m talking common sense, not IRB legalese.
According to the US Federal code, a home-made pipe bomb is a weapon of mass destruction.
A survey can be a reasonably designed experiment that simply gives us a weaker result than lots of other kinds of experiments.
There are many questions about humans that I would expect to be correlated with the noises humans make when given a few choices and asked to answer honestly. In many cases, that correlation is complicated or not very strong. Nonetheless, it’s not nothing, and might be worth doing, especially in the absence of a more-correlated test we can do given our technology, resources, and ethics.
What I had in mind was the difference between passive observation and actively influencing the lives of subjects. I would consider “surveys” to be observation and “experiments” to be or contain active interventions. Since the context of the discussion is kinda-sorta ethical, this difference is meaningful.
What intervention would you suggest to study the incidence of factual versus terminal-value disagreements in opposing sides of a policy decision?
I am not sure where is this question coming from. I am not suggesting any particular studies or ways of conducting them.
Maybe it’s worth going back to the post from which this subthread originated. Acty wrote:
First, Acty is mistaken in thinking that a survey will settle the question of which policy will actually satisfy the value benchmark. We’re talking about real consequences of a policy and you don’t find out what they are by conducting a public poll.
And second, if you do want to find the real consequences of a policy, you do need to run an intervention (aka an experiment) -- implement the policy in some limited fashion and see what happens.
Oh, I guess I misunderstood. I read it as “We should survey to determine whether terminal values differ (e.g. ‘The tradeoff is not worth it’) or whether factual beliefs differ (e.g. ‘There is no tradeoff’)”
But if we’re talking about seeing whether policies actually work as intended, then yes, probably that would involve some kind of intervention. Then again, that kind of thing is done all the time, and properly run, can be low-impact and extremely informative.
--
Yep :-) That’s why GlaDOS made an appearance in this thread :-D
Failure often comes with worse consequences than just an unchanged status quo.
My model is that these revolutions created a power vacuum that got filled up. Whenever a revolution creates a power vacuum, you’re kinda rolling the dice on the quality of the institutions that grow up in that power vacuum. The United States had a revolution, but it got lucky in that the institutions resulting from that revolution turned out to be pretty good, good enough that they put the US on the path to being the world’s dominant power a few centuries later. The US could have gotten unlucky if local military hero George Washington had declared himself king.
Insofar as leftist revolutions create worse outcomes, I think it’s because since the leftist creed is so anti-power, leftists don’t carefully think through the incentives for institutions to manage that power. So the stable equilibrium they tend to drift towards is a sociopathic leader who can talk the talk about egalitarianism while viciously oppressing anyone who contests their power (think Mao or Stalin). Anyone intelligent can see that the sociopathic leader is pushing cartoon egalitarianism, and that’s why these leaders are so quick to go for the throats of society’s intellectuals. Pervasive propaganda takes care of the rest of the population.
Leftism might work for a different species such as bonobos, but human avarice needs to be managed through carefully designed incentive structures. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending avarice doesn’t exist doesn’t work. Eliminating it doesn’t work because avaricious humans gain control of the elimination process. (Or, to put it another way, almost everyone who likes an idea like “let’s kill all the avaricious humans” is themselves avaricious at some level. And by trying to put this plan in to action, they’re creating a new “defect/defect” equilibrium where people compete for power through violence, and the winners in this situation tend not to be the sort of people you want in power.)
Ask them, I’m not an altruist. But I heard it may have something to do with the concept of compassion.
Historically, it correlates quite well. You want to help the “good” people and in order to do this you need to kill the “bad” people. The issue, of course, is that definitions of “good” and “bad” in this context… can vary, and rather dramatically too.
If we take the metaphor literally, setting up guillotines in the public square was something much favoured by the French Revolution, not by Napoleon Bonaparte.
Bollocks. You want to change the world and change is never painless. Tearing down chunks of the existing world, chunks you don’t like, will necessarily cause suffering.
--
Don’t mind Lumifer. He’s one of our resident Anti-Spirals.
But, here’s a question: if you’re angry at the Bad, why? Where’s your hope for the Good?
Of course, that’s something our culture has a hard time conceptualizing, but hey, you need to be able to do it to really get anywhere.
And yet he’s consistently one of the highest karma earners in the 30-day karma leaderboard. It seems to be mainly due to his heavy participation… his 80% upvote rate is not especially high. I find him incredibly frustrating to engage with (though I try not to let it show). I can’t help but think that he is driving valuable people away; having difficult people dominate the conversation can’t be a good thing.
(To clarify, I’m not trying to speak out against the perspectives people like Lumifer and VoiceOfRa offer, which I am generally sympathetic to. I think their perspectives are valuable. I just wish they would make a stronger effort to engage in civil & charitable discussion, and I think having people who don’t do this and participate heavily is likely to have pernicious effects on LW culture in the long term. In general, I agree with the view that Paul Graham has advanced re: Hacker News moderation: on a group rationality level, in an online forum context, civility & niceness end up being very important.)
Really? Their “perspective” appears to consist in attempting to tear down any hopes, beliefs, or accomplishments someone might have, to the point of occasionally just making a dumb comment out of failure to understand substantive material.
Of course, I stated that a little too disparagingly, but see below...
Not just civility and niceness, but affirmative statements. That is, if you’re trying to achieve group epistemic rationality, it is important to come out and say what one actually believes. Statistical learning from a training-set of entirely positive or entirely negative examples is known to be extraordinarily difficult, in fact, nigh impossible (modulo “blah blah Solomonoff”) to do in efficient time.
I think a good group norm is, “Even if you believe something controversial, come out and say it, because only by stating hypotheses and examining evidence can we ever update.” Fully General Critique actually induces a uniform distribution across everything, which means one knows precisely nothing.
Besides which, nobody actually has a uniform distribution built into their real expectations in everyday life. They just adopt that stance when it comes time to talk about Big Issues, because they’ve heard of how Overconfidence Is Bad without having gotten to the part where Systematic Underconfidence Makes Reasoning Nigh-Impossible.
I think that anger at the Bad and hope for the Good are kind of flip sides of the same coin. I have a vague idea of how the world should be, and when the world does not conform to that idea, it irritates me. I would like a world full of highly rational and happy people cooperating to improve one another’s lives, and I would like to see the subsequent improvements taking effect. I would like to see bright people and funding being channeled into important stuff like FAI and medicine and science, everyone working for the common good of humanity, and a lot of human effort going towards the endeavour of making everyone happy. I would like to see a human species which is virtuous enough that poverty is solved by everyone just sharing what they need, and war is solved because nobody wants to start violence. I want people to work together and be rational, basically, and I’ve already seen that work on a small scale so I have a lot of hope that we can upgrade it to a societal scale. I also have a lot of hope for things like cryonics/Alcor bringing people back to life eventually, MIRI succeeding in creating FAI, and effective altruism continuing to gain new members until we start solving problems from sheer force of numbers and funding.
But I try not to be too confident about exactly what a Good world looks like; a) I don’t have any idea what the world will look like once we start introducing crazy things like superintelligence, b) that sounds suspiciously like an ideology and I would rather do lots of experiments on what makes people happy and then implement that, and c) a Good world would have to satisfy people’s preferences and I’m not a powerful enough computer to figure out a way to satisfy 7 billion sets of preferences.
If you can simply improve the odds of people cooperating in such a manner, then I think that you will bring the world you envision closer. And the better you can improve those odds, the better the world will be.
--
Let us consider them, one by one.
This means that the goals of the people and groups will be more effectively realised. It is world-improving if and only if the goals towards which the group works are world-improving.
A group can be expected, on the whole, to work towards goals which appear to be of benefit to the group. The best way to ensure that the goals are world-improving, then, might be to (a) ensure that the “group” in question consists of all intelligent life (and not merely, say, Brazilians) and (b) the groups’ goals are carefully considered and inspected for flaws by a significant number of people.
(b) is probably best accomplished be encouraging voluntary cooperation, as opposed to unquestioning obedience of orders. (a) simply requires ensuring that it is well-known that bigger groups are more likely to be successful, and punishing the unfair exploitation of outside groups.
On the whole, I think this is most likely a world-improving goal.
Alturism certainly sounds like a world-improving goal. Historically, there have been a few missteps in this field—mainly when one person proposes a way to get people to be more altruistic, but then someone else implements it and does so in a way that ensures that he reaps the benefit of everyone else’s largesse.
So, likely to be world-improving, but keep an eye on the people trying to implement your research. (Be careful if you implement it yourself—have someone else keep a close eye on you in that circumstance).
Critical thinking is good. However, again, take care in the implementation; simply teaching students what to write in the exam is likely to do much less good than actually teaching critical thinking. Probably the most important thing to teach students is to ask questions and to think about the answers—and the traditional exam format makes it far too easy to simply teach students to try to guess the teacher’s password.
If implemented properly, likely to be world-improving.
...that’s my thoughts on those goals. Other people will likely have different thoughts.
And these are all very virtuous things to say, but you’re a human, not a computer. You really ought to at least lock your mind on some positive section of the nearby-possible and try to draw motivation from that (by trying to make it happen).
--
“Greetings, Comrade Acty. Today the Collective has decreed that you...” Do these words make your heart skip a beat in joyous anticipation, no matter how they continue?
Have you read “Brave New World”? “1984″? “With Folded Hands”? Do those depict societies you find attractive?
Exinanition is an attractive fantasy for some, but personal fantasies are not a foundation to build a society on.
You are clearly intelligent, but do you think? You have described the rich intellectual life at your school, but how much of that activity is of the sort that can solve a problem in the real world, rather than a facility at making complex patterns out of ideas? The visions that you have laid out here merely imagine problems solved. People will not do as you would want? Then they will be made to. How? “On pain of death.” How can the executioners be trusted? They will be tested to ensure they use the power well.
How will they be tested? Who tests them? How does this system ever come into existence? I’m sure your imagination can come up with answers to all these questions, that you can slot into a larger and larger story. But it would be an exercise in creative fiction, an exercise in invisible dragonology.
And all springing from “My intuitions say that specialism increases output.”
Exterminate all life, then. That will stop the suffering.
I’m sure you’re really smart, and will go far. I’m concerned about the direction, though. Right now, I’m looking at an Unfriendly Natural Intelligence.
--
Wait a minute. You don’t want them, or you do want them but shouldn’t rely on what you want?
And I’m not just nitpicking here. This is why people are having bad reactions. On one level, you don’t want those things, and on another you do. Seriously mixed messages.
Also, if you are physically there with your foot on someone’s toe, that triggers your emotional instincts that say that you shouldn’t cause pain. If you are doing things which cause some person to get hurt in some faraway place where you can’t see it, that doesn’t. I’m sure that many of the people who decided to use terrorism as an excuse for NSA surveillance won’t step on people’s toes or hurt any cats. If anything, their desire not to hurt people makes it worse. “We have to do these things for everyone’s own good, that way nobody gets hurt!”
--
I’m not so sure you should distrust your intuitions here. I mean, let’s be frank, the same people who will rave about how every left-wing idea from liberal feminism to state socialism is absolutely terrible, evil, and tyrannical will, themselves, manage to reconstruct most of the same moral intuitions if left alone on their own blogs. I mean, sure, they’ll call it “neoreaction”, but it’s not actually that fundamentally different from Stalinism. On the more moderate end of the scale, you should take account of the fact that anti-state right-wing ideologies in Anglo countries right now are unusually opposed to state and hierarchy across the space of all human societies ever, including present-day ones.
POINT BEING, sometimes you should distrust your distrust of certain intuitions, and ask simply, “How far is this intuition from the mean human across history?” If it’s close, actually, then you shouldn’t treat it as, “Something [UNUSUAL] is wrong with my brain.” The intuition is often still wrong, but it’s wrong in the way most human intuitions are wrong rather than because you have some particular moral defect.
See, the funny thing is, I can understand this sentiment, because my imagine-great-worlds function is messed-up in exactly the opposite way. When I try to imagine great worlds, I don’t imagine worlds full of disciplined workers marching boldly forth under the command of strong, wise, meritorious leadership for the Greater Good—that’s my “boring parts of Shinji and Warhammer 40k” memories.
Instead, my “sample great worlds” function outputs largely equal societies in which people relate to each-other as friends and comrades, the need to march boldly forth for anything when you don’t really want to has been long-since abolished, and people spend their time coming up with new and original ways to have fun in the happy sunlight, while also re-terraforming the Earth, colonizing the rest of the Solar System, and figuring out ways to build interstellar travel (even for digitized uploads) that can genuinely survive the interstellar void to establish colonies further-out.
I consider this deeply messed-up because everyone always tells me that their lives would be meaningless if not for the drudgery (which is actually what the linked post is trying to refute).
I am deeply disturbed to find that a great portion of “the masses” or “the real people, outside the internet” seem to, on some level, actually feel that being oppressed and exploited makes their lives meaningful, and that freedom and happiness is value-destroying, and that this is what’s at the root of all that reactionary rhetoric about “our values” and “our traditions”… but I can’t actually bring myself to say that they ought to be destroyed for being wired that way.
I just kinda want some corner of the world to have your and my kinds of wiring, where Progress is supposed to achieve greater freedom, happiness, and entanglement over time, and we can come up with our own damn fates rather than getting terminally depressed because nobody forced one on us.
Likewise, I can imagine that a lot of these goddamn Americans are wired in such a way that “being made to do anything by anyone else, ever” seems terminally evil to them. Meh, give them a planetoid.
On some level, you do need a motivation, so it would be foolish to say that anger is a bad reason to do things. I would certainly never tell you to do only things you are indifferent about.
On another level, though, doing things out of strong anger causes you to ignore evidence, think short term, ignore collateral damage, etc. just as much as doing things because they make you happy does. You think that describing the society that will make you feel happy makes people run screaming? Describing the society that would alleviate your anger will make people run screaming too—in fact it already has made people run screaming in this very thread.
Or at least, it has a bad track record in the real world. Look at the things that people have done because they are really angry about terrorism.
And for one level less meta, look at the terrorism that people have done because they are so angry about something.
Of course, while most people would not want to live in BNW, most characters in BNW would not want to live in our society.
I think there’s an implicit premise or two that you may have mentally included but failed to express, running along the lines of:
The all-controlling state is run by completely benevolent beings who are devoted to their duty and never make errors.
Sans such a premise, one lazy bureaucrat cribbing his cubicle neighbor’s allocations, or a sloppy one switching the numbers on two careers, can cause a hell of a lot of pain by assigning an inappropriate set of tasks for people to do. Zero say and the death penalty for disobedience then makes the pain practically irremediable. A lot of the reason for weak and ineffective government is trying to mitigate and limit government’s ability to do terribly terribly wicked things, because governments are often highly skilled at doing terribly terribly wicked things, and in unique positions to do so, and can do so by minor accident. You seem to have ignored the possibility of anything going wrong when following your intuition.
Moreover, there’s a second possible implicit premise:
These angels hold exactly and only the values shared by all mankind, and correct knowledge about everything.
Imagine someone with different values or beliefs in charge of that all-controlling state with the death penalty. For instance, I have previously observed that Boko Haram has a sliver of a valid point in their criticism of Western education when noting that it appears to have been a major driver in causing Western fertility rates to drop below replacement and show no sign of recovery. Obviously you can’t have a wonderful future full of happy people if humans have gone extinct, therefore the Boko Haram state bans Western education on pain of death. For those already poisoned by it, such as you, you will spend your next ten years remedially bearing and rearing children and you are henceforth forbidden access to any and all reading material beyond instructions on diaper packaging. Boko Haram is confident that this is the optimal career for you and that they’re maximizing the integral of human happiness over time, despite how much you may scream in the short term at the idea.
With such premises spelled out, I predict people wouldn’t object to your ideal world so much as they’d object to the grossly unrealistic prospect. But without such, you’re proposing a totalitarian dictatorship and triggering a hell of a lot of warning signs and heuristics and pattern-matching to slavery, tyranny, the Soviet Union, and various other terrible bad things where one party holds absolute power to tell other people how to live their life.
“But it’s a benevolent dictatorship”, I imagine you saying. Pull the other one, it has bells on. The neoreactionaries at least have a proposed incentive structure to encourage the dictator to be benevolent in their proposal to bring back monarchy. (TL;DR taxes go into the king’s purse giving the king a long planning horizon) What have you got? Remember, you are one in seven billion people, you will almost certainly not be in charge of this all-powerful state if it’s ever implemented, and when you do your safety design you should imagine it being in the hands of randoms at the least, and of enemies if you want to display caution.
--
There are reasons to suspect the tests would not work. “It would be nice to think that you can trust powerful people who are aware that power corrupts. But this turns out not to be the case.” (Content Note: killing, mild racism.)
If you are “procrastinate-y” you wouldn’t be able to survive this state yourself. Following a set schedule every moment for the rest of your life is very, very difficult and it is unlikely that you would be able to do it, so you would soon be dead yourself in this state.
I don’t know you well enough to say, but it’s quite easy to pretend that one has no ideology. For clear thinking it’s very useful to understand one’s own ideological positions.
There also a difference between doing science and scientism with is about banner wearing.
Oh, I definitely have some kind of inbuilt ideology—it’s just that right now, I’m consciously trying to suppress/ignore it. It doesn’t seem to converge with what most other humans want. I’d rather treat it as a bias, and try and compensate for it, in order to serve my higher level goals of satisfying people’s preferences and increasing happiness and decreasing suffering and doing correct true science.
Ignoring something and working around a bias are two different things.
Why do you call inhabitants of such a state “citizens”? They are slaves.
Interesting. So you would like to be a slave.
...and do you understand why?
--
And yet he’s consistently one of the highest karma earners in the 30-day karma leaderboard. It seems to be mainly due to his heavy participation… his 80% upvote rate is not especially high. I find him incredibly frustrating to engage with (though I try not to let it show). I can’t help but think that he is driving valuable people away; having difficult people dominate the conversation can’t be a good thing. I’ve tried to talk to him about this.
Hypothesized failure mode for online forums: Online communities are disproportionately populated by disagreeable people who are driven online because they have trouble making real-life friends. They tend to “win” long discussions because they have more hours to invest in them. Bystanders generally don’t care much about long discussions because it’s an obscure and wordy debate they aren’t invested in, so for most extended discussions, there’s no referee to call out bad conversational behavior. The end result: the bulldog strategy of being the most determined person in the conversation ends up “winning” more often than not.
(To clarify, I’m not trying to speak out against the perspectives people like Lumifer and VoiceOfRa offer, which I am generally sympathetic to. I think their perspectives are valuable. I just wish they would make a stronger effort to engage in civil & charitable discussion, and I think having people who don’t do this and participate heavily is likely to have pernicious effects on LW culture in the long term. In general, I agree with the view that Paul Graham has advanced re: Hacker News moderation: on a group rationality level, in an online forum context, civility & niceness end up being very important.)
There is a price to be paid. If you use fury and anger too much, you will become a furious and angry kind of person. Embrace the Dark Side and you will become one with it :-/
Maybe :-) The reason you’ve met a certain… lack of enthusiasm about your anger for good causes is because you’re not the first kid who wanted to help people and was furious about the injustice and the blindness of the world. And, let’s just say, it does not always lead to good outcomes.
--
If you stick around long enough, we shall see :-)
The French Revolution wanted to design a better world to the point of introducing the 10-day week. Napoleon just wanted to conquer.
In otherwords, you’re completely mindkilled about the topics in question and thus your opinions about them are likely to be poorly thought out. For example, when you think about, most of what is called “racism/sexism/etc.” is actually perfectly valid Baysian inference (frequently leading to true conclusions that some people would prefer not to believe). As for AIDS, are you also angry at people opposing traditional morality since they also help spread AIDS?
Frankly, given your list, it looks like you merely stumbled up on the causes fashionable where you grew up and implicitly assumed that since everyone is so worked up about them they must be good causes. Consider that if you had grown up differently you would feel just as angry at anyone standing in the way of saving people’s souls.
--
Ah, so you’re a socialist?
Eh, I’m not sure I’m an anything-ist. Socialist ideas make a lot of sense to me, but really I’m a read-a-few-more-books-and-go-to-university-and-then-decide-ist. If I have to stand behind any -ist, it’s going to be “scientist”. I want to do research to find out which policies most effectively make people happy, and then I want to implement those policies regardless of whether they fall in line with the ideologies that seem attractive to me.
But yeah, I do think that it is morally wrong to let people suffer and morally right to make people happy, and I think you can create a lot of utility by taking money from people who already have a lot (leaving them with enough to buy food and maybe preventing them from going on holiday / buying a nice car) and giving it to people who have nothing (meaning they have enough money for food and education so they can survive and try and change their situation). So I agree with taxing people and using the money to provide universal healthcare, housing, food, etc. Apparently that makes me a socialist.
The correct term is social-democrat, actually. Among the different systems, social democracy has very rarely received full-throated support, but seems to have done among the best at handling the complexity of the values and value-systems that humans want to be materially represented in our societies.
(And HAHAHA!, finally I can just come out and say that without feeling the need to explain reams and reams of background material on both value-complexity and left-wing history!)
Oh, that’s all well and good. I just tend to bring up socialism because I think that “left-wing politics” is more of a hypothesis space of political programs than a single such program (ie: the USSR), but that “bad vibes” in the West from the USSR (and lots and lots of right-wing propaganda) have tended to succeed in getting people to write off that entire hypothesis space before examining the evidence.
I do think that an ideally rational government would be “more” left-wing than right-wing, as current alignments stand, but I too think it would in fact be mixed.
Have some reading material!
--
Every system that works is covert or overt meritocracy. Social democracy works, so ….
Misformatted link at the end of the sentence?
…among the various socio-political systems the one I prefer is the best one because it is the best… X-)
Actually, in voting and activism, I’m a full-throated socialist. Social democracy is weaksauce next to a fully-developed socialism, but we don’t have a fully-developed socialism, so you’re often stuck with the weaksauce.
And as an object-level defense: social democracy, as far as I can tell, does the best at aggregating value information about diverse domains of life and keeping any one optimization criterion from running roughshod over everything else that people happen to care about.
For which value of the word “socialism”?
You just repeated your assertion, you didn’t provide any arguments or evidence.
You know, you don’t have to jump on him and demand that he defends his socialist stance merely because he expressed it and tried to discuss it with someone else. It’s not like he’s answerable to you for being a socialist. And this is not the first time I’ve seen you and others intervene in a discussion (that otherwise didn’t involve or concern them) solely for calling out people on leftist ideas. What the hell are you doing that for?
Since he brought a downvote brigade, I’m indeed going to refrain from engaging. Those who want to know more can follow the link I posted up-thread, which goes to a leading socialist magazine to which I subscribe.
Demand? I can’t demand anything. This is an internet forum, all eli_sennesh needs to do is just ignore my comment. That seems easy enough.
It’s not like it is something to be ashamed of, is it? If he says he is a “full-throated socialist” I get curious what does that mean. The last place that said it implemented a “fully-developed socialism” was USSR, but I don’t think that’s what eli_sennesh means.
That would increase utility in the very short term, agreed. Of course, it would destroy the motivation to work, thus leading to a massive drop in utility shortly there after.
Well, “providing universal healthcare and welfare will lead to a massive drop in motivation to work” is a scientific prediction. We can find out whether it is true by looking at countries where this already happens—taxes pay for good socialised healthcare and welfare programs—like the UK and the Nordics, and seeing if your prediction has come true.
The UK employment rate is 5.6%, the United States is 5.3%. Not a particularly big difference, nothing indicating that the UK’s universal free healthcare has created some kind of horrifying utility drop because there’s no motivation to work. We can take another example if you like. Healthcare in Iceland is universal, and Iceland’s unemployment rate is 4.3% (it also has the highest life expectancy in Europe).
This is not an ideological dispute. This is a dispute of scientific fact. Does taxing people and providing universal healthcare and welfare lead to a massive drop in utility by destroying the motivation to work (and meaning that people don’t work)? This experiment has already been performed—the UK and Iceland have universal healthcare and provide welfare to unemployed citizens—and, um, the results are kind of conclusive. The world hasn’t ended over here. Everyone is still motivated to work. Unemployment rates are pretty similar to those in the US where welfare etc isn’t very good and there’s not universal healthcare. Your prediction didn’t come true, so if you’re a rationalist, you have to update now.
Scandinavia and the UK are relatively ethnically homogenous, high-trust, and productive populations. Socialized policies are going to work relatively better in these populations. Northwest European populations are not an appropriate reference class to generalize about the rest of the world, and they are often different even from other parts of Europe.
Socialized policies will have poorer results in more heterogenous populations. For example, imagine that a country has multiple tribes that don’t like each other; they aren’t going to like supporting each other’s members through welfare. As another example, imagine that multiple populations in a country have very different economic productivity. The people who are higher in productivity aren’t going to enjoy their taxes being siphoned off to support other groups who aren’t pulling their weight economically. These situations are a recipe for ethnic conflict.
Icelanders may be happy with their socialized policies now, but imagine if you created a new nation with a combination of Icelanders and Greeks called Icegreekland. The Icelanders would probably be a lot more productive than the Greeks and unhappy about needing to support them through welfare. Icelanders might be more motivated to work and pay taxes if it’s creating a social safety net for their own community, but less excited about working to pay taxes to support Greeks. And who can blame them?
There is plenty of valid debate about the likely consequences of socialized policies for populations other than homogenous NW European populations. Whoever told you these issues were a matter of scientific fact was misleading you. This is an excellent example of how the siren’s call of politically attractive answers leads people to cut corners during their analysis so it goes in the desired direction, whether they are aware they are doing it or not.
Generalizing what works for one group as appropriate for another is a really common failure mode through history which hurts real people. See the whole “democracy in Iraq” thing as another example.
I wasn’t talking about providing people with universal healthcare. (That merely leads to a somewhat dysfunctional healthcare system). I was talking about taking so much from the “haves” that you “[prevent] them from going on holiday / buying a nice car”.
Word of advice, try actually reading what I wrote before replying next time. Yes, I realize this is hard to do while one is angry; however, that’s an argument for not using anger as your primary motivation.
And yet somehow western European healthcare systems manage to result in similar or better outcomes than the US one at less than half the cost.
Of course, I wouldn’t say that the US system is free-market, because medicine is heavily regulated. I read somewhere that only one company has a licence to produce methamphetamine for ADHD, giving them a state-enforced monopoly.
Healthcare seems to be one of the most difficult areas to run under a free market.
I would approach this from a different angle. It is fairly well known that the measurable GINI level of inequality is not primarily caused by the people who are upper-middle or reasonably wealthy but by the 1% of the 1% (so 0.01%). So why are taxes even progressive for the 99,99%? They achieve just about nothing in reducing GINI, they piss of the upper-middle who may be unable to buy a nice car, and if that whole burden (of tax rate progressivity) was shifted over to the 0,.01% they’d still be buying whole fleets of cars. So it just makes no sense.
However I also think it is because the 0.01% and their wealth is extremely mobile. The sad truth is that modern taxation is based on a flypaper principle, tax those whom you can because they stay put, and that is the upper-middle.
The purpose of progressive taxation is not to reduce the Gini coefficient; it’s to efficiently extract funding and to sound good to fairness-minded voters. With regard to the former, there’s a lot more people around the 90th percentile than the 99.99th, more of their money comes in easily-taxable forms, and they’re generally more tractable than those far above or below. They may be unable to buy a nicer car after taxes, and it may piss them off, but they’re not going to be rioting in the streets over it, and they can’t afford lobbyists or many of the more interesting tax dodges.
With regard to the latter, your average voter has never heard of Gini nor met anyone truly wealthy, but you can expect them to be acutely aware of their managers and their slightly richer neighbors. Screwing Bill Gates might make good pre-election press, but screwing Bill Lumbergh who parks his Porsche in the handicapped spots every day is viscerally satisfying and stays that way.
Because the former is what a lot of other people using your rhetoric mean. And assuming that you mean what a lot of other people using your rhetoric mean is a reasonable assumption.
Also, even interpreting what you said as “I am angry about people beating LBGTQA+ individuals”, it sounds like you are angry about it as long as it happens at all, regardless of its prevalence. Terrorism really happens too, but disproportionate anger against terrorism that ignores its prevalence has led to (or has been an excuse for) some pretty awful things.
--
Well, right here is a nice example:
Would you care to be explicit about the connection between IQ-by-race studies and genocide..?
There is no connection. I’m not trying to imply a connection. The only connection is that they are both things possibly implied by the word “racism”.
I’m trying to say that when I say “I oppose racism”, intending to signal “I oppose people beating up minorities”, and people misunderstand badly enough that they think I mean “I oppose IQ-by-race studies”, it disturbs me. If people know that “I oppose racism” could mean “I oppose genocide”, but choose to interpret it as “I oppose IQ-by-race studies”, that worries me. Those things are completely different and if you think that I’m more likely to oppose IQ-by-race studies than I am to oppose genocide, or if you think IQ-by-race studies are more important and worthy of being upset about than genocide, something has gone very wrong here.
A sentence like “I oppose racism” could mean a lot of different things. It could mean “I think genocide is wrong”, “I think lynchings are wrong”, “I think people choosing white people for jobs over black people with equivalent qualifications is wrong”, or “I think IQ by race studies should be banned”. Automatically leaping to the last one and getting very angry about it is… kind of weird, because it’s the one I’m least likely to mean, and the only one we actually disagree about. You seriously want to reply to “I oppose racism” with “but IQ by race studies are valid Bayesian inference!” and not “yes, I agree that lynching people is very wrong”? Why? Are IQ by race studies more important to your values than eliminating genocide and lynchings? Do you genuinely think that I am more likely to oppose IQ-by-race studies than I am to oppose lynchings? The answer to neither of those questions should be yes.
That’s because most people who say “I oppose racism” mean the latter, and no one except you means the former. That’s largely because most people oppose beating people up for no good reason and thus they don’t feel the need to constantly go about saying so.
I don’t think so.
The same is true for terrorism, but if someone came here saying “I’m really angry at terrorism and we have to do something”, you’d be justified in thinking that doing what they want might not turn out well.
I’m sure we can agree that terrorism is bad, too. In fact, I’m sure we can agree that Islamic terrorism specifically is bad. So being really angry at it is likely to produce good results, right?
I am very angry about terrorism. I think terrorism is a very bad thing and we should eliminate it from the world if we can.
Being very angry about terrorism =/= thinking that a good way to solve the problem is to randomly go kill the entire population of the Middle East in the name of freedom (and oil). I hate terrorism and would prevent it if I could. In fact, I hate people killing each other so much, I think we should think rationally about the best way to eliminate it utterly (whilst causing fewer deaths than it causes) and then do that.
If you see someone else very angry about terrorism, though, wouldn’t you think there’s a good chance that they support (or can be easily led into supporting) anti-terrorism policies with bad consequences? Even if you personally can be angry at terrorism without wanting to do anything questionable, surely you recognize that is commonly not true for other people?
It’s the same for racism.
I think that there’s a good chance in general that most people can be led into supporting policies with bad consequences. I don’t think higher levels of idiocy are present in people who are annoyed about racism and terrorism compared with those who aren’t. The kind of people who say “on average people with black skin are slightly less smart, therefore let’s bring back slavery and apartheid” are just as stupid and evil, if not stupider and eviler, than the people who support burning down the whole Middle East in order to get rid of terrorism.
Caricatures such as describing people who disagree with you as saying “let’s bring back slavery” and supporting “burning down the whole Middle East” are not productive in political discussions.
I’m not trying to describe the people who disagree with me as wanting to bring back slavery or supporting burning down the whole Middle East; that isn’t my point and I apologise if I was unclear.
As I understood it, the argument levelled against me was that: people who say they’re really angry about terrorism are often idiots who hold idiotic beliefs, like, “let’s send loads of tanks to the Middle East and kill all the people who might be in the same social group as the terrorists and that will solve everything!” and in the same way, people who say they’re really angry about racism are the kind of people who hold idiotic beliefs like “let’s ban all science that has anything to do with race and gender!” and therefore it was reasonable of them to assume, when I stated that I was opposed to racism, that I was the latter kind of idiot.
To which my response is that many people are idiots, both people who are angry about terrorism and people who aren’t, people who are angry about racism and people who aren’t. There are high levels of idiocy in both groups. Being angry about terrorism and racism still seems perfectly appropriate and fine as an emotional arational response, since terrorism and racism are both really bad things. I think the proper response to someone saying “I hate terrorism” is “I agree, terrorism is a really bad thing”, not “But drone strikes against 18 year olds in the middle east kill grandmothers!” (even if that is a true thing) and similarly, the proper response to someone saying “I hate racism” is “I agree, genocide and lynchings are really bad”, not “But studies about race and gender are perfectly valid Bayesian inference!” (even if that is a true thing).
That compares racists to anti-terrorists, not anti-racists to anti-terrorists.
You do realize no one thinks that. In particular that wasn’t the position Jiro was arguing against.
Then why wasn’t it included along with racism/sexism/etc. in your list of things your angry about in the ancestor?
I don’t know, maybe because I was randomly listing some things that I’m angry about to explain why I’m motivated to try and improve the world, not making a thorough and comprehensive list of everything I think is wrong?
Could also fit under “war”, which I listed, and “death”, which I listed.
So what can I conclude from the things you found salient enough to include and the things you didn’t? Especially since it correlates a lot better with what it is currently fashionable to be angry about then with any reasonable measure of how much disutility they produce.
False beliefs in equality are also responsible for millions of people being dead, and in fact have a much higher body-count then racism.
--
An excellent way to stop people from being killed is to make them strong or get them protected by someone who is strong. Strong in a broad sense here, from courage to coolness under pressure etc.
Here is a problem. To be a strong protector correlates with having the kind of transphobic and so on, long list of anti-social justice stuff or bigotry, because that list reduces to either disliking weakness or distrusting difference / having strong ingroup loyalty, and there is a relationship between these (a tribal warrior would have all).
Here is a solution. Basically moderate, reciprocal bigotocracy. Accept a higher-status, somewhat elevated i.e. clearly un-equal social role of the strong protector type i.e. that of traditional men, in return for them actively protecting all the other groups from coming to serious harm. The other groups will have to accept having lower social status, and it will be hard on their pride, but will be safer. This can be made official and perhaps more palatable by conscripting straight males, everybody claiming genderqueer status getting an exemption, and also after the service expecting some kind of community protection role, in return for higher elevated social status and respect. Note: this would be the basic model of most European countries up to the most recent times, status-patriarchy and male privilege explicitly deriving from the sacrifice of conscription.
This is not easy to swallow. However there seem to be not many other options. You cannot have strong protectors who are 100% PC because then they will have no fighting spirit. Without strong protectors, all you can hope is a utopia and hoping the whole Earth adopts it or else any basic tribe with gusto will take you over.
But I think a compromise model of not 100% complete equality and providing a proctor role in return should be able to work, as this has always been the traditional civilized model. In the recent years it was abandoned due to it being oppressive, and perhaps it was, but perhaps there is a way to find a compromise inside it.
Policeman don’t need fighting spirit to be able to go after violent criminals. Being PC is no problem for them.
Eh… Rotherham?
The last time I read an article on Rotherham even the Telegraph said that the officers in question were highly chauvinistic and therefore don’t really follow the usual ideal of being PC.
At the same time reading articles about Rotherham is still registers me: “This story doesn’t make sense, the facts on the ground are likely to be different than the mainstream media reports I’m reading” instincts. Have you read the actual report about it in-depth?
(trigger warning for a bunch of things, including rape and torture)
The Rotherham scandal is very well-documented on Wikipedia. There have been multiple independent reports, and I recommend reading this summary of one of the reports by the Guardian. This event is a good case study because it is easily verifiable; it’s not just right-wing sources and tabloids here.
What we know:
Around 1,400 girls were sexually abused in Rotherham, many of them lower-class white girls, but also Pakistani girls
Most of the perpetrators were Muslim Pakistani men, though it seems like other Middle-Eastern and Roma men were also involved
The political and multiculturalist environment slowed down the reporting of this tragedy until eventually it got out
To substantiate that last claim, you can check out one of the independent reports from Rotherham’s council website:
And there you have it: concerns about racism hampered the investigation. Authorities encouraged a coverup of the ethnic dimensions of the problem. Of course, there were obviously other institutional failures here in addition to political correctness. This report is consistent with the mainstream media coverage. And this is the delicate, officially accepted report: I imagine that the true story is worse.
When a story is true, but it doesn’t “make sense,” that could be a sign that you are dealing with a corrupted map. I initially had the same reaction as you, that this can’t be true. I think that’s a very common reaction to have, the first time you encounter something that challenges the reigning political narratives. Yet upon further research, this event is not unusual or unprecedented. Following links on Wikipedia, we have the Rochdale sex gang, the Derby sex gang, the Oxford sex gang, the Bristol sex gang, and the Telford sex gang. These are all easily verifiable cases, and the perpetrators are usually people from Muslim immigrant backgrounds.
Sexual violence by Muslim immigrants is a serious social problem in the UK, and the multicultural political environment makes it hard to crack down on. Bad political ideas have real consequences which result in real people getting hurt at a large scale. These events represent a failure of the UK elites to protect rule of law. Since civilization is based on rule of law, this is a very serious problem.
--
No, I’m fairly confident the neoreactionaries, for whatever reason you brought them up, would happily join in the plan to strip out the objectionable bits of Pakistani culture and replace it with something better. Also, demanding more integration and acculturation from immigrants. What they probably wouldn’t listen to is the apparent contradiction of saying we don’t need to get rid of multiculturalism, but we do need to push a certain cultural message until it becomes universal.
You guys are arguing over the definition of “culture”.
I’ll like to start by backing up a bit and explaining why I brought up the example of Rotherham. You originally came here talking about your emphasis on preventing human suffering. Rotherham is a scary example of people being hurt, which was swept under the carpet. I think Rotherham is an important case study for progressives and feminists to address.
As you note, some immigrants come from cultures (usually Muslim cultures) with very sexist attitudes towards consent. Will they assimilate and change their attitudes? Well, first I want to register some skepticism for the notion that European Muslims are assimilating. Muslims are people with their own culture, not merely empty vessels to pour progressive attitudes into. Muslims in many parts of Europe are creating patrols to enforce Sharia Law. If you want something more quantitative, Muslim polls reveal that 11% of UK Muslims believe that the Charlie Hebdo magazine “deserved” to be attacked. This really doesn’t look like assimilation.
But for now, let’s pretend that they are assimilating. How long will this assimilation take?
In what morality is it remotely acceptable that thousands of European women will predictably be raped or tortured by Muslim immigrant gangs while we are waiting for them to get with the feminist program?
Feminists usually take a very hardline stance against rape. It’s supremely strange seeing them suddenly go soft on rape when the perpetrators are non-whites. It’s not enough to say “that’s wrong” after the fact, or to point out biases of the police, when these rapes were entirely preventable from the beginning. It’s also not sufficient to frame rape as purely a gender issue when there are clear racial and cultural dynamics going on. There perpetrators were mostly of particular races, and fears of being racist slowed down the investigation.
Feminists are against Christian patriarchy, but they sometimes make excuses for Muslim patriarchy, which is a strange double standard. When individual feminists become too critical of Islam, they can get denounced as “racist” by progressives, or even by other feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was raised as a Muslim but increasingly criticized Islam’s infringement of women’s rights. She was denounced by the left and universities revoked her speaking engagements.
After seeing Rotherham and Sharia patrols harassing women, there are some tough questions we should be asking.
Could better immigration policies select for immigrants who are on board with Western ideas about consent?
Could Muslim immigrants to Europe be encouraged to assimilate faster towards Western ideas about women’s rights?
Are feminism and progressivism truly aligned in their goals? Is women’s safety compatible with importing large groups of people who have very different ideas about women’s rights?
If you found out about Rotherham from me, not from feminist or progressive sources, what else about the world have they not told you?
This doesn’t say much unless we know the corresponding fraction among Muslims worldwide is not much larger than 11%.
I think your implication is that Muslims are assimilating if their attitudes are shifting towards Western values after immigration. But assimilation isn’t just about a delta, it’s also about the end state: assimilation isn’t complete until Muslims adopt Western values.
Unfortunately, there is overlap between European and non-European Muslim attitudes towards suicide bombing based on polls. France’s Muslim population is especially radical. Even if they are slowly assimilating, their starting point is far outside Western values.
Well, Acty’s hypothesis was that they have started assimilating but still haven’t finished doing so. But thanks for the data.
(Who on Earth thought that that bulleted list of sentences in that Wikipedia article is a decent way of presenting those data, anyway? I hope I’ll have the time to make a bar chart, or at least a table. And how comes my spell checker doesn’t like either “bulleted” or “bulletted”?)
--
Redistributing the world’s rapists from less developed countries into more developed countries with greater law and order to imprison them? Is that really what you’re suggesting? I find this perspective truly stunning and I object to it both factually and morally.
Factually, it’s unclear that this approach would indeed reduce rape in the end. While many Muslim women are raped in Muslim countries, there are unique reasons why some Muslim men might commit sexual violence and harassment. By some Muslim standards, Western women dress like “whores” and are considered to not have bodily sovereignty. To use the feminist term, they are considered “rapable.” Additionally, if British police fail to adequately investigate rape by Muslim men, whether due to chauvinism or fear of being seen as racist, then the rapists won’t actually go to jail in a timely fashion. The Rotherham authorities couldn’t keep up with the volume of complaints. I have no idea whether the Rotherham sex gangs would have been able to operate so brazenly in a Muslim country, where they would risk violent reprisals from the fathers and brothers of their victims. So the notion of reducing rape by jailing immigrant rapists is really, really speculative, and I think it’s really careless for you to be making moral arguments based on it.
Even if spreading around the world’s rapists actually helps jail them and eventually reduce rape, it’s still morally repugnant. I’m trying to figure out what your moral framework is, but the only thing I can come up with is naive utilitarianism. In fact, I think redistributing the world’s rapists is so counter-intuitive that it highlights the problems with naive utilitarianism (or whatever your framework is). There are many lines of objection:
From a deontological perspective, or from a rule/act utilitarian perspective, inflicting a greater risk of rape upon your female neighbors would be a bad practice. It really doesn’t seem very altruistic. What about lower-class British people who don’t want their daughters to risk elevated levels of rape and don’t have the money to take flight to all-white areas? What if they aren’t on board with your plans?
Naive utilitarianism treats humans and human groups interchangeably, and lacks any concept of moral responsibility. Why should the British people be responsible for imprisoning rapists from other countries? They aren’t. They are responsible for handling their own rapists, but why should they be responsible for other people’s rapists? I really disagree that British people should view Muslim women raped in Muslim countries as equivalent to British women raped by British people. When British women are raped in Britain, that represents a failure of British socialization and rule of law, but British people don’t have control over Muslim socialization or law enforcement and shouldn’t have to pick up the pieces when those things fail.
Nations have a moral responsibility to their citizens to defend their citizens from crime and to enforce rule-of-law. If nations fail to protect their own people from crime, people may get pissed off and engage in vigilantism or voting in fascist parties. A utilitarian needs to factor in these backlash scenarios in calculating the utility of rapist redistribution. You could say “well, British people should just take it lying down instead of becoming vigilantes or fascists” but that steps into a different moral framework (like deontology or rule/act utilitarianism) where you would have to answer my previous objections.
Even from a utilitarian perspective, I am not convinced that rapist redistribution actually is good for human welfare. I don’t think it’s utility-promoting to cause members of Culture A to risk harm to fix another Culture’s B crime problems. If you take the world’s biggest problems are redistribute them, then it just turns the whole world shitty instead of just certain parts of it. Importing crime overburdens the police force, resulting in a weakening of rule-of-law, which will only be followed by general civilizational decline.
If you really want to use British law-and-order against rapists from other countries, the other solution would be to export British rule of law to those countries instead of importing immigrants from them. Britain used to try this approach, but nowadays it’s considered unpopular.
If you are going to say that it’s The White Man’s Burden to fix other nation’s problems, then at least go whole hog.
If you are trying to stop rape from a utilitarian perspective, and you want to reeducate Muslims about consent, then you should become a colonialist: export Western rule to the Muslim world, encourage feminism, punish rape, and stop female genital mutilation. What if Muslims resist this utilitarian plan? Well, what if British people resist your utilitarian plan? If you think British people should lie down and accept Muslim immigrant crime cuz utility, then it’s possible to respond that Muslim countries should lie down and accept British rule plus feminism cuz utility.
I am very stunned to see someone coming from a feminist perspective who is knowingly willing to advocate a policy that would increase the risk of rape of women in her society. I think this stance is based on very shaky factual and moral grounds, putting it at odds with any claims of being altruistic and trying to help reduce suffering. I have female relatives in England and I am very distressed by the idea of them risking elevated levels of sexual violence due to political and moral idea that I consider repugnant. If I’m interpreting you wrong then please tell me.
I think you’re being a little hard on Acty. I agree her positions aren’t super well thought out, but it feels like we should make a special effort to keep things friendly in the welcome thread.
Here’s how I would have put similar points (having only followed part of your discussion):
You’re right that the cultural transmission between Muslims and English people will be 2-way—feminists will attempt to impose their ideas on Muslims the same way Muslims will attempt to impose their ideas on feminists. But there are reasons to think that the ideas will disproportionately go the wrong way, from feminists to Muslims. For example, it’s verboten in the feminist community to criticize Muslims, but it’s not verboten in the Muslim community to criticize feminists.
It’d be great if what Acty describes could happen and the police of Britain could cut down on the Muslim rape rate. But Rothertam is a perfect demonstration that this process may not go as well as intended.
My response is the friendly version, and I think that it is actually relatively mild considering where I am coming from. I deleted one sentence, but pretty much the worst I said is to call Acty’s position “repugnant” and engage in some sarcasm. I took some pains to depersonalize my comment and address Acty’s position as much as possible. Most of the harshness in my comment stems from my vehement disagreement with her position, which I did back up with arguments. I invited Acty to correct my understanding of her position.
I think Acty is a fundamentally good person who is misled by poor moral frameworks. I do not know any way to communicate the depth of my moral disagreement without showing some level of my authentic emotional reaction (though very restrained). Being super-nice about it would fail to represent my degree of moral disagreement, and essentially slash her tires and everyone else’s. I realize that it might be tough for her to face so much criticism in a welcome thread, especially considering that some of the critics are harsher than me. But there is also potential upside: on LW, she might find higher quality debate over her ideas than she has before.
Your hypothetical response is a good start, but it fails to supply moral criticism of her stance that I consider necessary. Maybe something in between yours and mine would have been ideal. Being welcoming is a good thing, but if “welcoming” results in a pass on really perverse moral philosophy, then perhaps it’s going too far… I guess it depends on your goals.
--
Let me try to briefly convince you of why there should be a state’s duty to citizens from a utilitarian perspective, also corresponding greater concern about internal than external crime:
1) A state resembles a form of corporate organization with its citizens as shareholders. It has special obligations by contract to those shareholders who got a stake on the assumption that they would have special rights in the corporation. Suddenly creating new stock and giving it to to non-shareholders, thereby creating new shareholders, would increase the utility of new shareholders and decrease the utility of old shareholders to roughly the same extent because there is the same amount of company being redistributed, but would have the additional negative effect of decreasing rule of law, and rule of law is a very very good thing because it lets people engage in long-term planning and live stable lives. (There is no such problem if the shareholders come together and decide to create and distribute new stock by agreement—and to translate back the metaphor, this means that immigration should be controlled by existing citizens, rather than borders being declared to “mean nothing” in general.)
2) A state is often an overlay on a nation. To cash those terms out: A governing entity with major features usually including a legal code and a geographically defined and sharply edged region of influence is often an overlay on a cluster of people grouped by social, cultural, biological, and other shared features. (“Nation” derives from those who shared a natus.) Different clusters of people have different clusters of utility functions, and should therefore live under differing legal codes, which should also be administrated by members of those clusters whom one can reasonably expect to have a particularly good understanding of how their fellow cluster-members will be happiest.
3) Particularly where not overlaid on nations, separate states function as testbeds for experiments in policy; the closest thing one has to large-scale controlled experiments in sociology. Redistributing populations across states would be akin to redistributing test subjects across trial arms. The utilitarian thing to do is therefore to instead copy the policies of the most successful nations to the least successful nations, then branch again on previously unexplored policy areas, which each state maintaining its own branch.
--
Saving the refugee kid is emotionally appealing and might work out OK in small numbers. You correctly note that there might be a threshold past which unselective immigration starts creating negative utility. I think it’s easy to make a case that Britain and France have already hit this point by examining what is going on at the object level.
European countries with large Muslim populations are moving towards anarchy:
Rule of law is declining due to events like mass rape scandals like Rotherham, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and riots. Here’s a video of a large riot which resulted in a Jewish grocery store being burned down. If you watch that video or skip around in it, you will see what looks like a science fiction movie. Muslim riots are a common feature in Europe, and so are sex gangs (established in previous comments).
Sharia Patrols are becoming increasingly common in Europe.
Muslim immigrants form insular enclaves that are dangerous for non-Muslims, or even police (aka “no-go zones” or “Sensitive Urban Zones”).
And these are only a few examples. How much more violence does there have to be before something is done?
Muslims and Europeans are not interchangeable. Muslims have distinct culture and identity, and it’s unlikely that socialization can change this on an acceptable time-scale.
The attitudes of most Muslim population on average are really scary. Muslims in Europe, especially France, have very radical attitudes that are supportive of terrorism. According to Pew Research, 28% of Muslims worldwide and 19% of US Muslims disagree that suicide bombing is never justified. The vast majority of Muslims believe that homosexuality is wrong, and that same survey shows that large percentages of Muslims believe that honor killings are morally permissible. (Note: Muslims from non-Middle Eastern, non-Muslim-ruled countries are less radical and better candidates for immigration.)
Muslim populations have extremely low support for charitable and humanitarian organizations relative to the rest of the world (first table, source is World Values Survey). Only around 3% of Muslims participate in charitable/humanitarian organizations, compared to nearly 20% of Anglos. I think this is mainly due to differences in tribalism rather than differences in wealth, but that’s another subject. Your Muslim refugee kid is not likely to be giving back very much to society.
Even if you are correct that Muslim immigrants are only say, 10% more likely to be involved in crime, that’s still a big problem if they are all hanging out with each other in poor areas and forming gangs that riot or harass women and gay people.
There are always going to be tribal conflicts between Muslims and other Muslims or their neighbors, and there are always going to be refugees. But if the West admits them in large numbers, they will bringing their tribal and religious attitudes with them, resulting in violent tribal conflicts with native Europeans and Jews. This situation isn’t remotely ethical or utilitarian. It’s only happening because leftist parties are incentivized to import voters who will be dependent on them; the thin moral justification is secondary.
Focusing on the plight of Muslim refugees obscures the violent direction of Muslim immigration to Europe. You may not be seeing this conflict yourself, and your filter bubble might not be talking about it, but lower-class Europeans certainly experience it, and Jews are writing articles with titles like “Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?”. European elites need to fix these unselective immigration policies, create a preference for educated, non-radical Muslim immigrants, and encourage them to assimilate.
Um, that style of logic doesn’t work. You need to balance the (large but restricted to an individual) utility to the kid against the (small to each individual and spread out access many individuals) disutility to society. This is the kind of computation that’s impossible to do intuitively (and probably impossible to do directly at all since we have no way to directly measure utility). It is, however, easy to see what the implications of a large scale population transfer are and to see that they are negative. You assert that there exists a threshold below which immigration is positive utility. However, you have no way to calculate it’s value or show we are below it (or even show that it’s not zero), without resorting to what looks like wishful thinking.
That’s reason for Pigovian taxes, not outright bans. There are plenty of other things which have diffuse negative externalities, e.g. anything which causes air pollution, and we don’t just ban them all.
Except neither Acty nor anyone currently in politics is proposing Pigovian taxes. Also, since most of the would-be immigrants wouldn’t be able to afford them, this wouldn’t be an acceptable policy for the pro-immigration forces.
I think you have the right idea by studying more before making up your mind about open borders and immigration. It’s really hard to evaluate moral solutions without knowing the facts of the matter, and unfortunately there is a lot of political spin on all sides.
In a situation of uncertainty, any utilitarian policy that requires great sacrifices is very risky: if the anticipated benefits don’t materialize, then the result turns into a horrible mess. The advantage of deontological ethics and rule/act utilitarianism is that they provide tighter rules for how to act under uncertainty, which decreases the chance of falling into some attractive, world-saving utilitarian scheme that backfires and hurts people: some sacrifices are just considered unacceptable.
Speaking of utilitarian schemes, British colonialism to the Muslim world would cause a lot of suffering, but so does current immigration policies that bring in Muslims. Why is one type of suffering acceptable, but another isn’t? Utilitarianism can have some really perverse consequences.
What if British-ruled Pakistan of 2050 was dramatically lower in crime, lower in violence towards women in both countries, and more peaceful, such that the violence of imposing that situation is offset? What if the status quo of immigration, or an open borders scenario would lead to a bloodier future that is more oppressive to women in both countries? What if assimilation and fixing immigrant isn’t feasible on an acceptable timescale, especially given that new immigrants are constantly streaming in and reinforcing their culture?
My point about British vs. Muslim rape survivors is about responsibility, not sympathy or worthiness as a human being. As a practical matter, people who live nearer each other and have shared cultural / community ties are better positioned to stop local crime and discourage criminals. Expecting them to use their local legal system to arrest imported criminals will stretch their resources to the point of failure, like we saw in Rotherham.
It’s both impractical and unfair to expect people to clean up other people’s messes. Moral responsibility and duty is a general moral principle that’s easy to translate into rule-utilitarianism. A moral requirement to bail out other people’s crime problems would mean there is no incentive for groups to fix their own crime problems.
Borders, rule of law, and nations are obviously important for utility, happiness, and preferences, or we wouldn’t have them (see ErikM’s comment also). Historically, any nation that didn’t defend its borders would have been invaded, destroyed, or had its population replaced from the inside.
Imagine we invited to LW hundreds of people from Reddit, Jezebel, and Stormfront to educate them. The result would not be pretty, and it wouldn’t make any of these communities happier. LW enforcing borders makes it possible for this place to exist and be productive. Same thing with national borders. If you cannot have a fence on your garden, then you cannot maintain gardens, and there is no incentive to make them. Which means that people cannot benefit from gardens.
Open borders are a terrible idea because they mix together people with different cultures and crime rates, causing conflicts that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Certain elements of civilization, like women being able to walk around wearing what they want, can only occur in low-crime societies.
Historically, despite some missteps, the West has been responsible for an immense amount of medicine, science, and foreign aid due to a particular civilization based on rule of law, low crime, high trust, and yes, borders. If the West had lacked those things, it would not have been able to contribute to humanity in the past. And if those things are destroyed by unselective immigration, then the West will turn into a place like Brazil, or worse, South Africa: a world of ethnic distrust, gated communities, fascist parties and women scared to travel alone in public. That doesn’t sound like a very happy place to me.
If you are hoping that the outcome of unselective immigration and open borders would be beneficial, then you would need some pretty strong evidence, because the consequences of being wrong are really scary. You would need to be looking at current events, historical precedents, population projections, crime trends, and a lot of other stuff. The early indicators are not looking good, like Rotherham-style gangs all over England, plus Sharia Patrols, and these events should result in updating of priors.
And yet, they were remarkably uninterested in this story when it came out.
Do you think that anyone who is against multiculturalism is a neoreactionary?
I.e. the immigrants adopt the culture of the host country. Are you sure you don’t mean ‘We don’t need to get rid of multiracialism’?
Do you really think that proponents or opponents of “multiculturalism” are arguing over a well-defined program of action?
To some extent. Increase or decrease the rate of immigration, require criteria to be met for immigration or not, enforce speaking the native language or not, ban or allow faith schools, ban or allow child circumcision & FGM and so forth. Obviously, not all people on each side of the debate agree on which policies to pursue, but that’s true of all politics.
The author of the grandparent mentioned Moldbug not long ago; the sockpuppeteer who seems to be downvoting Acty is likely neoreactionary. Update, and then consider apologizing.
I’ve been objecting to what Acty said and I get downvoted too.
Well hairyfigment’s definition of “sockpuppet” appears to be anyone who disagrees with him, so by his definition however downvoted you wasn’t a “sockpuppet”.
So there is at least one person in this thread who has read Moldbug, and might be using sockpuppets (which is wrong, of course). Yet Acty’s comment says “they’ll all stop listening”. Plural.
Plus Acty assumes that people who have a different ideology to her hate her and will just stop reading, which isn’t very charitable when we should all be trying to avoid confirmation bias.
--
I’m not sure I would class myself as a conservative, but I can understand your assumption that conservatives are idiots, in that there was a time when I would have said that anyone who is against gay rights is a fascist theocrat. Now I realise, on a more intuitive level, that just because many arguments for a position are idiotic doesn’t mean that there isn’t a somewhat intelligent argument out there.
Oddly enough, IRL I mostly meet fairly intelligent people with opinions that amount to “anyone who disagrees with my left-wing politics is evil! That person supports a right wing party, I’d like to burn their house down!”
My theory is that facebook and twitter have ruined discourse because people can’t fit opinions more complex into 140 characters.
You’re new here, I guess you’ll get used to the karma system in time? In the meantime, have an upvote :)
I seriously doubt this. Rather I suspect you’re, either intentionally or unconsciously, replacing opinions disagreeing with yours with ones that are easier for you to dismiss.
I think you and Acty each live in your own filter bubbles, constructed mostly through subconscious intent. (Beware of believing your enemies are innately evil and intentionally causing themselves to be biased.) Everyone is subconsciously inclined to read authors they agree with; it’s more pleasurable and less painful. In your filter bubble, you read thoughtful conservative thinkers, along with cherry-picked bits of poorly-reasoned liberal extremist thinking, that those conservatives tear apart. And the reverse is true for Acty.
I suspect the internet is increasing the ease of forming these sort of bubbles, which seems like a huge problem.
FWIW, I am disappointed to see political discussion drift from object-level political disagreements to person-level disagreements about who is more biased. I virtually never see a good outcome from such a discussion. I suppose it’s an occupational hazard participating in discussions on a website about bias.
You could have said something to the effect of “not all conservatives have such dumb opinions, they aren’t representative of all conservatism, and there also are liberals with even dumber opinions, and anyway it’s not a good idea to judge memeplexes from their worst members”—but no, you chose to go for James A. Donald-level asshattery—“if you say you know conservatives with dumb opinions, you’re probably lying or confabulating”. (And somehow even got seven upvotes for that.) What does make you think it’s so unlikely that Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions? Are you familiar with all groups of conservatives worldwide?
Because those vectors of argument are insufficiently patronizing, I’m guessing.
But in all seriousness, the “judging memeplexes from their worst members” issue is pretty interesting, because politicized ideologies and really any ideology that someone has a name for and integrates into their identity (“I am a conservative” or “I am a feminist” or “I am an objectivist” or whatever) are really fuzzily defined.
To use the example we’re talking about: Is conservatism about traditional values and bolstering the nuclear family? Is conservatism about defunding the government and encouraging private industry to flourish? Is conservatism about biblical literalism and establishing god’s law on earth? Is conservatism about privacy and individual liberties? Is conservatism about nationalism and purity and wariness of immigrants? I’ve encountered conservatives who care about all of these things. I’ve encountered conservatives who only care about some of them. I’ve encountered at least one conservative who has defined conservatism to me in terms of each of those things.
So when I go to my internal dictionary of terms-to-describe-ideologies, which conservatism do I pull? I know plenty of techie-libertarian-cluster people who call themselves conservatives who are atheists. I know plenty of religious people who call themselves conservatives who think that cryptography is a scary terrorist thing and should be outlawed. I know self-identified conservatives who think that the recent revelations about NSA surveillance are proof that the government is overreaching, and self-identified conservatives who think that if you have nothing to hide from the NSA then you have nothing to fear, so what’s the big deal?
I do not identify as a conservative. I can steelman lots of kinds of conservatism extremely well. Honestly I have some beliefs that some of my conservative-identifying friends would consider core conservative tenets. I still don’t know what the fuck a conservative is, because the term gets used by a ton of people who believe very strongly in its value but mean different things when they say it.
So I have no doubt that not only has Acty encountered conservatives who are stupid, but that their particular flavor of stupid are core tenets of what they consider conservatism. The problem is that this colors her beliefs about other kinds of conservatives, some of whom might only be in the same cluster in person-ideology-identity space because they use the same word. This is not an Acty-specific problem by any means. I know arguably no one who completely succeeds at not doing this, the labels are just that bad. Who gets to use the label? If I meet someone and they volunteer the information that they identify as a conservative, what conclusions should I draw about their ideological positions?
I think the problem has to stem from sticking the ideology-label onto one’s identity, because then when an individual has opinions, it’s really hard for them to separate their opinions from their ideology-identity-label, especially when they’re arguing with a standard enemy of that ideology-label, and thus can easily view themselves as standing in for the ideology itself. The conclusion I draw is that as soon as an ideology is an identity-label, it quickly becomes pretty close to useless as a bit of information by itself, and that the speed at which this happens is somewhat correlated to the popularity of the label.
Right, it’s only OK to be patronizing to people who aren’t present to defend themselves.
I’d argue that that little one-off comment was less patronizing and more… sarcastic and mean.
Yeah, not all that productive either way. My bad. I apologize.
But I think the larger point stands about how these ideological labels are super leaky and way too schizophrenically defined by way too many people to really even be able to meaningfully say something like “That’s not a representative sample of conservatives!”, let alone “You probably haven’t met people like that, you’re just confabulating your memory of them because you hate conservatism”
One of those statements refers to a concrete event (or series of events), the other depends on the exact definition of conservative.
Well the fact that Acty has a tendency to not read/listen to what her opponents say and replace it with something easy to dismiss, as she has previously demonstrated in this very thread.
What makes you think it’s so unlikely that Acty is giving an inacurate report of their arguments?
I don’t. I think both P(Acty actually knows conservatives with dumb opinions) and P(Acty is giving an inacurate report of their arguments) are sizeable.
I’m going to be cynical here, and say that most conservative opinions are idiotic, and most liberal opinions are idiotic. Its an instance of the ’90% of everything is shit’ principle.
We have little reason to think Journeyman is the same as Eugine Nier, who is almost certainly calling himself VoiceOfRa. Here is the puppeteer’s previous account, ending 7 April. Here is VR’s first comment on the site, jumping right into a discussion of decision theory. Here he is the same week talking about the purpose of LW/MIRI, linking an old thread in which he was active as Eugine Nier, repeating his old political views, and posting quotes as Nier was wont to do. Here is the dishonest piece of shit defector claiming I call anyone who disagrees with me a sockpuppet, rather than just him and his sockpuppets.
Can we skip the middle-school drama?
I downvoted your last couple of posts on the “vote down what you like to see less of” principle. I would like to see less whining and ideological witchhunts.
The downvotes will continue until the morale improves.
A fine example of how trying to stop “politics” can serve as a political move in favor of the status quo. You’re not treating the cause.
I am not trying to stop “politics”. Evidently I was insufficiently explicit, let me quote myself, now with bolded parts:
And how would we define “Pakistani culture” in such a way that it doesn’t necessarily include patriarchy? Cultural evolution in response to moral imperative is a thing.
You say “immigrants” but in every case you mention it’s specifically Muslims. I’ve not heard of Hindu or Buddhist or atheist immigrants causing the same problems.
That’s correct; I will update my comment to be more explicit. Muslims have very different attitudes towards women and consent than Westerners.
That a sentence that poses more question than it answers. What kind of influence do those councillors have? How many councillors of Pakistani heritage does Rotherham have? How many councillors of other heritage does it have?
If a powerful politician tries to prevent friends from being persecuted that’s not what the standard concern about policemen being too PC is about. It’s straight misuse of power.
Sexual violence by British MPs seems also to be a problem: http://www.rt.com/uk/170672-uk-politicians-pedophile-ring/
To what extend is this simply a problem of British politicians having too much power to cover up crimes and impede police work?
The idea that there are people from Immigrant backgrounds isn’t what’s surprising about the story of Rotherham or even that politicians act in a way to prevent reporting of tragedy. Politicians trying to keep tragedies away from the public is a common occurrence.
The thing that’s surprising is the allegation of police inaction due to them being Muslim. Which happens something that you didn’t list in your “what we know” list.
It would have to be true for the claim that PC policeman don’t do their job properly to be true.
If indeed the coverup of the ethnic dimension was directed by British politicians, we might ask, why were they trying to hide this? In a child sex abuse scandal involving actual politicians, it’s clear why they would cover it up. But why were these particular crimes so politically inconvenient? It’s clear why Pakistani council members wanted to hide it, but why did the other council members let them?
We are not privy to the exact nature of the institutional dysfunction at Rotherham. But it’s clear that the problem was occurring at multiple levels. One of my quotes does mentions that staff were nervous about being labelled racist, and that managers told them to told them to avoid mentioning the ethnic dynamics.
Here’s another quote, which shows that reports were downplayed before politicians were even involved:
So there are multiple kinds of institutional dysfunction here. It’s not just politicians, it’s not just police being PC. But from the quotes in my previous post, it’s obvious that political correctness was a factor. Police, social workers, and politicians, all the way up the chain know that being seen as racist could be damaging to their career.
In the UK, there is a lot of social and political pressure to support multiculturalism and avoid any perception of racism. Immigration is important for economic agendas, but also for left political agendas of importing more voters for themselves. It is not a stretch to believe that this political environment would make it difficult to address crimes involving immigrant populations.
You correctly note that there were factors beyond “PC”, but fail to address the horrific corruption. At least two councilors and a police officer face charges of sex with abuse victims.
Another police officer, seen here being white, supposedly had an extensive child pornography collection. No word on whether this was related or whether the department just attracted pedophiles for some bizarre reason.
While I didn’t predict this beforehand (nor, I think, did you) it seems both more credible, and more likely to protect the rape-gang, than does the idea of people seeing strong evidence of the crimes and somehow deciding that arresting immigrants was more likely to hurt their careers than ignoring a story which was bound to come out eventually. The “political correctness” you speak of apparently refers to people not wanting to believe their fellow police officers and council members were implausibly evil criminals.
Thanks for providing the additional details, which I hadn’t encountered. I don’t think this corruption is mutually exclusive with the theory of political correctness. The Rotherham Scandal went back to 1997, involving 1,400+ victims. There are now 300 suspects (including some council members that you pointed out), and 30 council members knew. We not know the ethnicity of the council members who are suspects.
With such a long history and large number of victims, it doesn’t seem very plausible that a top-down coverup to protect council member perpetrators is sufficient to explain this story. These people would need to be supervillains if they were the ringleaders since 1997, and the failure of investigation was just about them.
It is already established by my quotes from the report that political correctness about race was a factor in the coverup and failure of the investigation. Certainly the corruption and participation of council members and police is a disturbing addition to this story. With such a vast tragedy, it’s quite likely that the coverup was due to multiple motivations and lots of things went wrong.
It seems like we have a perfect control case with the pedophiles in Westminster which didn’t involve multiculturalism. They also engaged in it for a long time and managed to suppress it.
I might add that I did speak about chauvinistic police officers as a problem and also that corruption is likely a cause over at Omnilibrium.
There a huge difference between persecuting someone and then not writing his race or ethnicity into an official report and avoiding to prosecute them.
From what you quoted from the report the those Pakistani council members were influential people. Just like the politicians who covered up the child abuse in Westminster also were influential people.
In general politicians also never want that scandals and tragedy under their watch get public.
Regarding child victims with contempt does suggest a dysfunctional police but it’s not about multiculturalism.
Have you tried updating your model to reflect reality?
In general the heuristic of not trusting mainstream media reports to accurately reflect reality is well based on what I know about how it works.
I gave enough interviews to have an idea of how what the journalist writes differs from what was said in the interview in those cases.
I frequently read reports on scientific studies that don’t match reality.
In the past I knew the background of quite a bunch of political stories in Berlin and how it differs from facts on the ground.
Without a direction to the bias that’s a universal counterargument. I’m perfectly aware of some the biases in reporting, my heuristics say that the media is likely underreporting the extent of the problem.
It’s a universal counterargument when a newspaper stories that don’t appear to make sense and you don’t know the facts on the ground. You shouldn’t believe those stories.
I haven’t said anything about biases of reporting. I have spoken about journalists getting stories wrong. That quite often doesn’t have anything to do with bias. Journalists in Berlin from time to time get the idea that it’s the parliament and only the parliament that passes laws in Berlin wrong. That doesn’t have anything to do with left or right bias.
Thinking in terms of bias isn’t useful. My basic sense was that the story likely involves some form of corruption that didn’t make it into the news articles I read. Garbage in Garbage out. You can’t correct bad reporting by correcting for bias.
A police officer doesn’t simply avoid persecuting a Muslim for rape because he’s afraid of being called a racist. That simply doesn’t make sense. On the other hand corruption can prevent crimes from being persecuted.
The UK is not a country where a newspaper can freely report on a story like this. But not because of multiculturalism. You can’t sue a newspaper in the UK for that. The UK’s insane defamation laws result in articles speaking about “influential Pakistani councilors” instead of naming the individuals in question. A US newspaper would have never done this and actually named the politicians who seem to have obstructed a rape investigation if this happened in any US city.
Of course you actually need to practice critical reading to get that. If you just take the story at face value and then try to correct a systematic bias you miss the juicy bits.
Given that the newspaper is effectively censored in speaking about the real story about corruption they make up a bullshit story about how it’s multiculturalism that makes police officers afraid to go after Muslims. That’s not to say that multiculturalism didn’t do anything in that case. It reduced the reporting of the fact that the people were Muslim, but it very likely didn’t prevent them from being persecuted.
People make decisions at the margin, and it’s entirely possible that the additional negative effect of being accused of racism pushes him over the edge in decisionmaking.
First of all, police officers don’t prosecute anyone, prosecutors do. As for fear of being called racist, well some police officers complained when they noticed something was happening, and were promptly sent to cultural sensitivity training.
Er.....Rotherham?
Typo fixed, thanks.
You know what else is a good way to stop people being killed? Create a liberal democracy where people are equal. So far in history, that has kinda correlated… really strongly… with less people dying. There is both less war and less crime. Forget strength, give them equality and elections. (I don’t actually think democracy is the optimal solution, I think I advocate more of an economics-exam-based meritocratic oligarchy, but it is a really good one to put in place while we figure out what the optimal one is. And I need to read lots more books before I actually try and design an optimal society, if I’m ever qualified to try something like that.)
Being “strong” in a meaningful way, in the modern world, means being intelligent. Smart people can use better rhetoric, invent cooler weapons, and solve your problems more easily. Being well-educated and intelligent and academic actually strongly correlates with not being racist or sexist or transphobic or homophobic. Oh, and also liberal democracies seem to have much less prejudice in them.
Find me decent evidence that patriarchal societies are safer for everyone involved than liberal democracies where everyone is equal, and you’ll have a valid point. But it kind of looks to me like, as a woman, I’m much safer in the modern Western democracies that prohibit sexism than I am in the patriarchal societies where women have no rights and keep getting acid thrown in their faces for rejecting advances. You say that in the recent years it was abandoned due to being oppressive but we should try and go back and compromise with it, but… why would we want to go back to that when literally everything has been improving ever since we abandoned those social models? To entertain your delusions of being a Strong Tribal Hero Protector Guy? Sorry, no.
I also don’t see how we can’t have strong protectors who are 100% PC. I’m not straight, male, neurotypical, traditional or even an adult. I try and protect and help those around me and on many occasions I succeed. I am the one in my friendship group who takes the lead down dark alleyways, carrying all the bags, reassuring my friends that it’s safe because nobody’s going to mug us while I’m there. Why exactly am I a weak and unworthy protector? Because I’m a girl? You’re going to have to do an awful lot better than that. Put me in a physical fight with most boys of my age, and I would annihilate them. Every male who has picked a fight with me thinking that he’ll be able to beat me because he’s male has walked away rather humiliated. On exams and IQ tests I score far higher than your average male. Judging by how much I actually end up doing versus what I observe the boys around me doing, I have higher levels of inbuilt-desire-to-help-and-protect-others than the average male. (I suspect that the latter two facts at least are true of most women whom you might find on this specific website.) Why exactly does the average male, whom I can both outfight and outthink, get to protect me and not the other way around?
I think I will not discuss with you this for about 5-10 years, because you sound a lot like me when I was around 21, and I know how naive and inexperienced and entirely unrealistic I was. Ultimately you miss the experiences that would make you far more pessimistic. For example nobody talked about making Western liberal democracies like third-world hellholes, it was about making them like their former selves when crime levels were lower, violence was lower, people were politer, people were politer with women and so on. In fact, turning Western liberal democracies into third-world hellholes is actually happening, but through a different, asylum-seeking / refugee pathway, a perfectly idiotic counter-selection where instead of exercising brain drain, we drain the most damaged people and expect it to turn out good. But that is just a small part of how you probably need to get more pessimistic experience before we can discuss it meaningfully. I have no interest in engaging with angry rants, they are not able to teach me anything, they just sound like both people really sweating and trying to win something, but there is no actual prize to win. Being drunk on the idea of social progress and the improvability of human nature is just like other addictions, you really need to hit rock bottom before you see what is the issue, I think anything I would try to explain here would be pointless without such a wake-up happening. So I wish you luck and maybe re-discuss this again in 5-10 years where you maybe got influenced by more experience.
Telling your opponent that they are incapable of arguing with you until they are older is a fully general counterargument, and one of the more aggravating and toxic ones.
Even if it wasn’t a fully general counterargument, it would be fallacious because it’s ad hominem. There are plenty of people 5-10 years older than me who share my ideas, and you could as easily be arguing with one of them as you are arguing with me now; the fact that by chance you are arguing against me doesn’t affect the validity/truth of the ideas we’re talking about, and it’s very irrational to suggest that it should. Attack my arguments, not me.
As for everything being better in “their former selves”, do I seriously have to go find graphs? I have the distinct feeling that you won’t update even if I show you them, so I’m tempted not to bother. If you’ve genuinely never looked at actual graphs of crime levels and violence over time and promise to update just a little, I can go dig those up for you. (For now, you’re pattern matching to the kind of person who could benefit from reading http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ . I don’t like SSC that much, but when the man’s right, he’s right.)
(As for “people were politer with women”, my idea of polite is pretty politically correct, and I can guarantee you that political correctness doesn’t increase if we look backwards in time...)
I am not your opponent, that is where it begins. Opponent means there is something to win and people compete over that prize. There is nothing to win here except learning, and this discussion quickly turned to be not conducive to it—you got all defensive and emotional instead of trying to understand use my models and see what you can do with them. Opponentism belongs to precise that kind of tribalism you are trying to want to overcome. Interesting, isn’t it? Besides you keep being boringly solipsistic. Your strength instead of statistical strength differences, your idea of politeness instead of the social function of politeness… it seems you primarily subject you have useful information about is, well, you. Not interested. The first precondition to being interesting is to understand nobody gives a damn about you. I.e. to get out of the gravity well of the ego, to adopt viewpoints that don’t depend strongly on personal desires. I am not even saying I would expect everyone to be able to do it, I am perfectly aware of how long it took for me, how much XP, read, suffering it took, so I don’t even blame you for not having made it, it’s just that it is seriously difficult to generate information interesting for others from that source. But if you think you can, then do it, say something genuinely interesting, try to offer any sort of a model or information from this utopian-progressivist school that is genuinely different and not the same stuff the mainstream media, BuzzFeed or Tumblr pouring on day and night. The only condition of interestingness is 1) it is not about you 2) it is not “done to death” a million times by the media or blogs.
If you read the list of her activities and speaking 6 languages at the age of 17 and being in the process of learning the 7th while also doing Judo to the point of being more fit than guys her age, having learned Java programming, doing filmmaking and being a DM and training other DMs she’s not the person person to read through BuzzFeed and Tumblr day and night simply copying what other people are thinking.
Yes, being 17 means that she lacks experience but she’s very capable of learning. You might not have been open to learning at 21 but you weren’t speaking 6 languages either.
You’re the one making all sorts of claims about the need for, and traits of, “strong protectors”, without any statistics. You’re the one simultaneously claiming you’d be fine with giving Acty higher status than you, and using social tactics blatantly aimed at reducing her relative status—sometimes in the same sentence.
This is a bit broader stuff than something reducible to a few stats. But on a basic common sense level, if the starting point is fewer people getting killed, the most basic solution is bodyguards and so on. So that is at least sensible as a starter instead of a Plan B rewiring everybody’s brain to not be hateful.
As for status, come on, that is something that happens between real people, while DeVliegendeHollander, Acty and hairyfigment are mere accounts. For all people know it could even be the same person behind all three accounts. Playing status with accounts one could throw away at any second and register three new ones in its place would be really, really stupid, let’s try to not accuse each other with at something that simplistic. At least if you want to assume evil, asssume a less banal kind. In fact I am thinking anyway that I should recycle DVH because it is getting too much karma and this account is developing something too much like a personality. I recycle on Reddit about every three weeks, maybe a three month or six month cycle would be good here. (The goal is of course to have ideas said by accounts that are not associated by former ideas said by accounts and thus their reception being less biased. Besides to not accumulate this completely ridiculous karma thing.)
Yup, playing status with accounts would be kinda stupid. (That’s why you should stop doing it.)
You know what would be especially stupid? If we lived in a world that accorded me higher status than you because of my general level of aggression, and I could end this entire argument with “I’m high status, you’re low status, I’m right, you’re wrong, shut up now”.
Now, wouldn’t that be a really stupid world...?
So tell me again why giving status and prestige to aggressive people is a great idea?
You keep assuming there is a fixed background level of aggression, but that is just what left wing thinkers believe can be changed.
I won’t even argue that, it is a fact it can be changed. Bicoastal America and NW Europe managed to make a fairly large young college-ed middle class that is surprisingly docile. The issue is simply the consequences of the change and its permanence.
If you talked to any random Roman or Ancient Greek author about it, he would basically say you guys are actively trying to get decadent and expect it will work out well? To give you the most simple potential consequence: doesn’t it lead to reducing courage or motivation as well? Since this is what we precisely see in the above mentioned group: a decrease of aggressivity correlates with an increase of social anxiety, timidity, shyness i..e. low courage and with the kind of attitudes where playing videogames can be primary hobby, nay, even an identity.
Of a personal experience, as my aggression levels fluctuated, so fluctuated motivation, courage, happines, self-respect and similar things with it. Not in the sense of fluctuating between aggressive and docile behavior of course, but in the sense of needing to exercise a lot of self restraint to always stay civil vs. not needing to.
You can raise the same things about its permanence. The worst outcome is a lower-aggresion group just being taken over by a higher one. Another potential impermance comes from the fluctuation of generations. My father was a rebel (beatnik), so I had only rebellion to rebel against, and my own counter-revolutionary rebellion was approved by my grandfather :)
Finally a visual type of explanation, maybe it comes accross better. You can understand human aggressivity as riding a high energy engine towards a bad, unethical direction. Having a lot of drive to do bad things. We can do two things, steer it away into a good one or just brake and turn off the engine. Everything we seem to do in this direction seems to more like braking than steering away. For example, if we were steering, we would encourage people to put a lot of drive into creative hobbies instead of hurting each other. Therefore, we would shame the living fsck out of people who don’t build something. Yet we don’t do this: we praise people who build, but we neglect to shame the lazy gamers. Putting it differently, we “brake” kids when they do bad stuff, but we don’t kick their butts in order to do good stuff, so they end up doing nothing mostly. Every time a child or a youth would do something useful with a competitive motivation like “I’ll show those lazy fscks” we immediately apply the brake. This leads to demotivation.
So in short, negative motivation can be surpressed. The issue is, it has consequences, it is probably not permanent, and really hard to replace it with a positive one. Of course I am not talking about people like us but more like the average.
Um, I fail to see how people are making and doing less stuff than in previous generations. We’ve become obsessed with information technology, so a lot of that stuff tends to be things like “A new web application so that everyone can do X better”, but it fuels both the economy and academia, so who cares? With things like maker culture, the sheer overwhelming number of kids in their teens and 20s and 30s starting SAAS companies or whatever, and media becoming more distributed than it’s ever been in history, we have an absurd amount of productivity going on in this era, so I’m confused where you think we’re “braking”.
As for video games in particular (Which seems to be your go-to example for things characteristic of the modern era that are useless), games are just a computer-enabled medium for two kinds of things: Contests of will and media. The gamers of today are analogous in many ways to the novel-consumers or TV-consumers or mythology-consumers of yesterday and also today (Because rumors of the death of old kinds of media are often greatly exaggerated), except for the gamers that are more analogous to the sports-players or gladiators or chess-players of yesterday and also today. Also, the basically-overnight-gigantic indie game development industry is pretty analogous to other giant booms in some form of artistic expression. Video games aren’t a new human tendency, they’re a superstimulus that hijacks several (Storytelling, Artistic expression, Contests of will) and lowers entry barriers to them. Also, the advent of powerful parallel processors (GPUs), a huge part of the boom in AI research recently, has been driven primarily by the gaming industry. I think that’s a win regardless.
Basically, I just don’t buy any of your claims whatsoever. The “common sense” ideas about how society improving on measures of collaboration, nonviolence, and egalitarianism will make people lazy and complacent and stupid have pretty much never borne out on a large scale, so I’m more inclined to attribute their frequent repetition by smart people to some common human cognitive bias than some deep truth. As someone whose ancestors evolved in the same environment yours did, I too like stories of uber-competent tribal hero guys, but I don’t think that makes for a better society, given the overwhelming evidence that a more pluralistic, egalitarian, and nonviolent society tends to correlate with more life satisfaction for more people, as well as the acceleration of technology.
I can’t help wondering where you got this idea. The mainstream absolutely shames lazy gamers; they’re one of the few groups that it’s socially acceptable to shame without reservation, even more so than other subcultures seen as socially unproductive (e.g. stoner, hippie, dropout) because their escape of choice still carries a childish stigma. That’s countered somewhat by an expectation of somewhat higher social class, but the “mom’s basement” stereotype is alive and well.
Even other lazy gamers often shame lazy gamers, although that’s balanced (for some value of “balance”) by a lot of back-patting; nerd culture of all stripes has a strong self-love/self-hate thing going on.
That assumes that the bodyguards never use violence and beat somebody to death. Simply increasing the amount of people who can beat other people up doesn’t automatically reduce violence. South Africa has a lot of body guards and it’s still a lot more violent then states in Europe.
Giving the government the monopoly on violence is a standard enlightenment idea that works well if your state highers enough policemen and the citizens believe in the rule of law.
Status interactions are deeply ingrained in the way humans interact with each other. It not something that get’s shut down just because a discussion is online.
Opponent is a word. Here, it refers to the person advocating the opposite view to mine. If you would like, I can use a different word, but it will change very little. Arguing over semantics is not a productive way to cause each other to update. Though to be honest, I ceased having much hope that you were in this discussion for the learning and updates when you started using ad hominem and fully general counterarguments. (Saying that your opponent is defensive and emotional and “opponentist” is also a fully general counterargument and also ad hominem. “Not even blaming me” for not agreeing with you is another example with an extra dash of emotive condescension. You have a real talent.)
Quite often, people have useful information about themselves because they know themselves quite well. I’m a useful data point when I’m thinking about stuff that affects me, because I know more about myself than I know about other examples. But I could also point out other examples of women in my community who are protectors. For instance, I know a single mother who is not only a national-level athlete but had to rush each of her children to hospital for separate issues four times in the last week. Twice it was because their lives were threatened. She stays strong and protects them fiercely, keeps up with her life and her training, and is frankly astonishingly brave. She is far, far more of a “traditional strong figure” than any man I have ever met. Of course, this is still anecdata. I haven’t got big quantitative data because I can’t think of a test for protectorness that we could do on a large scale; can you suggest one?
Your idea, as I understood it, was that men can carry out protective roles and therefore they should have high social status and prestige. I think this is a pretty good example of what I’ve heard called the Worst Argument in the World. I believe that protective and self-sacrificing individuals should be accorded high prestige. I agree that protectiveness can loosely correlate with being male. But protective women exist in high numbers, and non-protective men exist in high numbers, and many women exist who are significantly better at protectiveness than the average male. According protective women low prestige because they are women, and according useless men high prestige because they are men, is an entirely lost purpose. It is irrational sexism, pure and simple. You’re doing the same thing as people who say “Gandhi was a criminal, therefore Gandhi should be dismissed and given low social status.” You’re saying that it would be good if people said, “Individual X is a male, therefore he should be accorded high prestige and conscripted. Individual Y is a female, therefore she should be given low prestige and not conscripted” even if X doesn’t fit the protective-and-strong criteria and Y does fit the protective-and-strong criteria. Forcing protective strong women to stop doing that and accept low prestige, and forcing non-protective weaker men to try and fill protective roles, just hurts everyone.
You still haven’t answered my question. You want to make a society where men get conscripted (an astonishingly rare event in a modern liberal democracy, by the way...) and protect those around them, and in return get high prestige. I know, and I presume you also know, numerous men who would be unsuitable for conscription and don’t protect those around them. Some women would be perfectly suitable for conscription, and protect those around them. Why do those women not deserve the prestige that you want to give all the men?
Can you also tell me why you think “the same stuff the mainstream media, BuzzFeed or Tumblr pouring on day and night” is necessarily uninteresting/wrong? Shouldn’t a large number of people agreeing with an ethical position usually correlate with that ethical position being correct? I mean, it’s not a perfect correlation, there are exceptions, but in general people agree that murder and rape and mugging are undesirable, and agree that happiness and friendship and knowledge are desirable. Calling a position popular or fashionable should not be an insult and I am intrigued by how you could have come up with the idea that something that is “done to death” must be bad. Has “murder is wrong” been “done to death”?
If this conversation keeps going downhill, I’m just going to disengage. It is rather low utility.
This is getting more interesting now. To sum the history of things, you had this discussion with VoiceOfRa and you stressed primarily you want to save people from getting killed. I butted in and proposed you don’t have to redesign the whole world to do that, it is possible in a traditional setup as well. Turned out we are optimizing for different things, I am trying to preserve older-time stuff while also changing them to the extent needed to address real, actual complaints of various people and work out compromises (calling it moderatism or moderate conservatism would be OK), while you are more interested in tearing things down and building them up. OK. But I think there are more interesting things here lurking under the surface.
An offer: retreat a few meta levels up, and get back to this object level later on.
IRL I discuss pretty much everything with people inside my age range (30-60), which means we rely not only on our intelligence and book knowledge (you obviously have immense amounts of both) but on our life experience as well. That is a difficult thing to convey because it is something that is not even learned in words (so there are no good books that sum it up, to my knowledge) but non-verbal pattern recognition. Yet it is pretty much this thing, this life experience that makes the difference between your meta level assumptions and mine. What can one do? I will try the impossible and try to translate it into words. Don’t expect it to go very well, but maybe a glimpse will be transmitted. Also my tone will be uncomfortably personal and subjective because it is per definition something happening inside people’s heads.
When I was 17 I assumed, expected and demanded the world to be logical and ethical. I vibrated between assuming it and angrily demanding it when I found it is not the case. University did not help—it was a very logical and sheltered environment.
When I started working (25) I had to realize how truly illogical the world is, and not because it was waiting for mr smart guy to reorganize it but because most people are plain simply idiots. I worked at implementing business software, like order processing, accounting and MRP. Still do. I had to face problems like when order processing employees did not know the price of an item, they just invoiced it at zero price. Gave away for free. The managers were no better, instead of doing something sensible (such as incentive pay or entering a price list for everything into the software and not letting the employees change them), they demanded us to make a technical solution like not allow a zero price, just give out an error message. From them on, the folks used a price of 1 currency when they did not know the correct price. The irony was really breath-taking—if there is one thing that is supposed to be efficient in this sorry world, it is corporations chasing profits: and they were incompetent at that very basic level of not giving away stuff for free. (They were selling fertilizers to farmers, in the kind of place where paved roads are rare.)
My first reaction was rage and complaining about humanity’s idiocy. I was sort of similar to Reddit /r/atheism. Full of snark.
I would say the life experience part was not as much as learning the basic rule, namely that most folks are idiots, but really swallowing and digesting it, learning to resign myself to it, accept it, and see what can be done. That was what took long. I had to accept a Heideggerian “we are thrown into this shit and must cope, anyhow”. This is my sorry species. These zombies are my peers. If I want to help people, I need to help them on their level.
First of all, I had to accept a change in my ethics: making most people happy is an impossible goal. The best I can do is supporting ideas that prevent the dumbass majority shooting themselves in the foot in the worst ways. Give a wild guess, will the majority those types of ideas be more often classified as “liberal” or “conservative” ?
Second, I had to realize that I was a selfish ass when I was young and “liberal”. I wanted things to be logical, hence I wanted things to suit people who are logical. I wanted things to suit people like me. I wanted a world optimized for me and my folk, for intellectuals. That would be a horrible world for the vast majority of people who can’t logic. They need really foolproof and dumbed-down systems that cut with the grain of their illogical instincts, not against it.
The corollary of this all was that I should support rules and systems that I hate and I would never obey them. I had to become a hypocrite e.g. to support keeping drugs illegal (because I saw fools i.e. normal people would only get more foolish from them) while being perfectly accepting and supporting of my intellectual friends who got great philosophical insights for them. The non-hypocritical solution would have been, of course, different rules for different people. Yes, that is actually one thing liberal democracy is not so good at making, so hypocrisy was the only way to deal with it.
It was during this, my rather horrified awakening process when I came accross as really unusual book, Theodore Dalrymple’s Life At The Bottom. It is a book that probably would be classified “conservative”, but it was refreshingly non-ideological, it was about the experiences collected by decades of working as a psychiatrist treating the underclass of Birmingham, UK. I was actually living there, attracted by the manufacturing prowess of the region, was good for me career-wise, and the book was actually able to explain the high levels of WTFery I experienced every day, such as I smoke a cig outside (I have my own idiotic side as well), a mother with a small kid in a pram and with an about 9 years old boy, and the boy walks up to me and asks for a cigarette. I look at the mom completely astonished. Blank face. WTF I do now? At any rate, Dalrymple said the basic issue is that intellectuals made rules that worked very well for themselves, such as atheism, sexual liberty and similar things. He was of course atheist too. But according to him this wrecked misery amongst the low-IQ underclass, they really needed their old churches and traditions and Gods Of The Copybook Headings to restrain their impulsivity and bad choices. Rules that work well for intellectuals (“liberal” rules) don’t work well for everybody else, at all. Maybe if I wanted to offer a book that is life experience translated to words, even though it is not really possible, that is that book, I can only add it is not made up, I really saw these folks.I had to change my political and social views completely. I could no longer demand the kind of stuff that makes sense for ethical and intelligent people. I had to learn to demand stuff I would personally dislike.
I either have to demand really dumbing things down, or maybe designing things from the assumption of stupidity up. Which means either intellectuals sacrificing their own interests and accepting a world made of stupid, or publicly supporting rules but privately wiggling out of them (Victorian era) or different rules for different people (aristocracy). Cont. below
Um, how exactly do you want to preserve older things while I want to tear everything down and build it back up again? I don’t want to tear things down. I want the trends that are happening—everything gets fairer and more liberal over time—to continue. To accelerate them if I can. (To design a whole new State if and only if it seems like it will make most people much happier, and even then I kinda accept that I’d need to talk to a whole lot of other people and do a whole lot of small scale experiments first.) None of those trends are making society end in fire. They’re just nice things, like prejudiced views becoming less common, and violence happening less. I’m trying to optimise for making people happy; if you’re optimising for something else, then I’m afraid I’m just going to have to inform you that your ethics are dumb. Sorry.
The problem with “life experience” as an argument is that people use “life experience” as a fully general counterargument. If you’re older than me, any time I say something you don’t like, you can just yell “LIFE EXPERIENCE!” and nothing I can do—no book you can suggest, nothing I can go observe—will allow me to win the argument. I cannot become older than you. This would be fine as an argument if we observed that older people were consistently right and younger people were consistently wrong, but as you’ll know if you have a grandparent who tries to use computers, this just ain’t so.
Just because you have been made jaded and cynical by your experience of the world, that doesn’t mean that jaded and cynical positions are the correct ones. For one thing, most other people of your own age who also experienced the world ended up still disagreeing with you. There’s a very good chance that I get to the age you are now, and still disagree with you. And if you observe most other people your own age with similar experiences (unless you’re old enough that you’re part of the raised-very-conservative generation) most of them will disagree with you. What is magic and special about your own specific experience that makes yours better than all those people who are the same age as you? Why should I listen to your conclusions, backed up by your “life experience”, when I could also go and listen to a lefty who’s the same age as you and their lefty conclusions backed up by their “life experience”?
Life experience can often make people a lot less logical. Traumatised people often hold illogical views—like, some victims of abuse are terrified of all men. That doesn’t mean that, because they have life experience that I don’t, I should go, ‘oh, well, I actually think all men aren’t evil, but I guess their life experience outweighs what I think’. It means that they’ve had an experience that damaged them, and we should have sympathy and try and help them, and we should even consider constructing shelters so they don’t have to interact with the people they’re terrified of, but we certainly shouldn’t start deferring to them and adopting their beliefs just because we lack their experiences. The only things we should defer to should be logical arguments and evidence.
“Life experience”, as a magical quality which you accumulate more of the more negative things happen to you, is pretty worthless. Rationalists do not believe in magical qualities.
If there is a version of the “life experience” argument that can be steelmanned, it’s “I’ve lived a long time and have observed many things which caused me to make updates towards my beliefs, and you haven’t had a chance to observe that.” But that still makes no sense because you should be able to point out the things you observed to me, or show your observations on graphs, so I can observe them too. If you observed someone being a total idiot, and that makes you jaded about the possibility of a system that requires a lot of intelligence to function, then you should be able to make up for the fact that I haven’t observed that idiocy by pulling out IQ charts or studies or other evidence that most people are idiots. If you can’t produce evidence to convince someone else, consider that your experience may be anecdata that doesn’t generalise well.
Perhaps your argument is “I’ve lived a long time and have observed very many very small pieces of evidence, and all of those small pieces of evidence caused me to make lots of very small updates, such that I cannot give you a single piece of evidence which you can consider which will make you update to my beliefs, but I think mine are right anyway.” However, even if you can’t give me a single piece of evidence that I can observe and update on, you ought to be able to produce graphs or something. Graphs are good at showing lots-of-small-bits-of-evidence-over-time stuff. If you want me to change my beliefs, you still have to produce evidence, or at least a logical argument. Appeals to “life experience” are nothing more than appeals to elder prestige.
Now, to address your actual argument. It seems to be (correct me if I misunderstand): liberal views are correct and work, but there are many stupid people in the world and liberal views don’t work well for stupid people. Stupid people need clear rules that tell them in simple terms what to do and what not to do.
But if I were going to make up a set of really clear simple rules to tell a stupid person what to do and what not to do, they would be something like: 1. Be nice to people and try not to hurt people. 2. Don’t try and prevent clever people from doing things you don’t understand. Listen to the clever people. 3. Try and be productive and contribute what you can to society.
I cannot see any evidence that adding more rules beyond those three, like, “Defer to males because male-ness is loosely correlated with prestige-wanting and protectiveness” (even though male-ness isn’t correlated with prestige-deserving, that seems about equal between genders) would do any good whatsoever. Since there are just as many stupid males as stupid females—male average IQ is actually slightly lower than female average IQ—a rule like that wouldn’t do any good, would certainly not prevent people letting young kids have cigarettes or people beating one another or anything like that, and would in fact just lead to a lot of stupid people going “oh, it must be okay to hurt and disparage females and not let them have education then” and going around hurting lots of women.
And the view of mine, that liberal views don’t hurt people and sexist/racist views do hurt people… certainly seems to fit the evidence. Liberal views are increasing over time, and crime and violence are decreasing over time. I can’t find any studies, but I predict that if we do a study, we’ll find that holding the belief “women and men are equal” is strongly correlated with being non-violent and not hurting women, and almost all of the violence and abuse cases committed against women will be by people who don’t think they are equal. Similarly, doing stupid things like giving cigarettes to children and giving away products for free will be correlated with holding conservative views—though admittedly that could just be ’cause being uneducated is correlated with holding conservative views. And because men are on average more violent and more likely to hurt people. But then, that’s a very good argument against putting them in charge, isn’t it...?
Acty, a question. What are you information sources? This is very general question—I’m not asking for citations, I’m asking on the basis of which streams of information do you form your worldview?
For example, for most people these streams would be (a) personal experiences; (b) what other people (family, friends) tell them; (c) what they absorb from the surrounding culture, mostly from mainstream media; and (d) what they were taught, e.g. in school.
You use phrases like “I cannot see any evidence” -- where cannot you see evidence? Who or what, do you think, reliably tells you what is happening in the world and how the world works?
--
Thanks for the extended answer. If I may make a couple of small suggestions—first, in figuring out where you views come from look at your social circle, both in meatspace and on the ’net. Bring to your mind people you like and respect, people you hope to be liked and respected by. What are their views, what kind of positions are acceptable in their social circle and what kind are not? What is cool and what is uncool?
And second, you are well aware that your views change. I will make a prediction: they will continue to change. Remember that and don’t get terribly attached to your current opinions or expect them to last forever. A flexible, open mind is a great advantage, try not to get it ossified before time :-)
--
No, because you don’t know (now) in which direction will you change your mind (in the future).
As a general observation, you expect to learn a lot of things in the future. Hopefully, you will update your views on the basis of things you have learned—thus the change. But until you actually learn them, you can’t update.
Here’s at least one that isn’t:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/02/17/growth-chart-of-right-to-carry/
This is also complicated by the fact that views that go out of favor tend to be characterized as not liberal regardless of whether they actually were liberal. Eugenics is one of the better known examples.
Saying “I don’t have a study, but I predict that if I do a study I will see X” is no better than just asserting X.
Also, “women and men are equal” is vague. Do you want equality of opportunity or equality of outcome?
Even “violence against women” is vague. ISIS likes to kidnap women, but they also like to kill all the men at the time they are kidnapping the women. So ISIS causes the absolute amount of violence against women to increase, but the relative amount (compared to violence against men) to decrease.
Continued form above
And now a bit closer to the object level of our previous discussion. Look at this mess about sex, gender, orientation and roles and whatnot. If it was about designing rules for an island where only smart people live, it would be fairly obvious: completely do away with terms like man, woman, feminine, masculine, straight, gay. Measure T levels and simply establish a hormonal gender based on that, a sliding scale, divided into maybe five quintiles or however you want to. Do away with straight or gay—people can date however they wish to, but expect that most people will choose a partner from the other end of the scale than themselves, because people naturally converge to dom-sub, top-bottom setups. Give high-T people more status because they really seem to crave it 1 while low-T people are comfortable enough with being deferential to them, in return make high-T people willing to risk their lives protecting low-T people who should have things safe and comfortable. Base everything on this—risky venture capital type stuff for the high end, predictable welfare/union job stuff for the low-end.
This would make sense, right? I must stress this hormonal scale would be independent of biological sex, social gender or orientation—those are abolished in this scenario. Why, I find it likely you would end up higher on the T-based gender scale than me although I am guy, but you seem to give out more aggressive vibes than I do (I don’t mean it in a bad way, your engines are just more fired up, that is good if you use it for good things). And of course this scenario was made for an island populated by only smart people.
And then back to the real world. To have any chance of it working for sorry stupid species of humankind, it has to be dumbed down mercilessly. The average human’s cognitive level is about Orwell’s “two legs bad four legs good”. Of course by dumbing down we lose accuracy and efficiency. Of course by dumbing down quite some people won’t fit. Still it has to be done. And now you tell me, if you want to make it really, really primitive, if you want to dumb it down to the point where a blatantly obvious biological switch would determine if people are treated as belonging to the high end or the low end, what switch would that be? Which switch would be the most obvious?
And then of course you end up with a system you don’t like, and most intellectuals don’t like—it is a really poor fit for intellectuals. At this point the choices are: sacrifice humankind for intellectuals? Sacrifice intellectuals for humankinds? Make the rules that fit for humankind official while let intellectuals bend the rules in private? Establish an aristocracy and make different rules for intellectuals? Archipelago?
Huh. This would be the meta arch of these things. If you still want we can return to stuff like if it is the WATW or whether a large number of people aggreeing with something makes it usually ethically correct and so on, because I would then interpret these objections in these light, but I hope I managed to resolve those with this article.
Low testosterone people also want status.
Then why do the linked researchers use it as a marker of that?
Maybe, it is about status of a different kind. Maybe this reduces to that it is not a well defined word and we always get into rather unresolvable debates because of that.
Let’s try this: there are two kinds of status, one is more like being a commanding officer or a schoolteacher towards kids, it is respect and deference and maybe a bit of fear (but does not 1:1 translate to dominance, although close), the other kind is being really popular and liked. Remember school. The difference between the teacher’s status and the really likeable kid’s status is key here. The CEO vs. the Louis CK type well liked comedian. The politician vs. the best ballet dancer.
To the linked article: being good at math does not make one liked. It makes one respected. Closer to the first type.
We don’t live in a world where low testosterone people want high testosterone people to have more power.
Yes I want policemen to have a certain kind of status but policemen don’t need to be high testosterone. Empathic policemen who are actually good at reading other people have advantages in a lot of police tasks.
Schoolteachers need respect but they don’t need to be high testosterone either. A teacher does a better job if he understands the student.
--
You should really think that over. For the police example, we have two conflicting requirements, first is to be so scary (or more like respect-commanding) that he rarely needs to get physical, that is always messy. The opposite requirement is the smiling, nice, service-oriented, positive community vibes stuff, like the policemen who visited me and told me I forgot to lock my car. (The reading people is more of an investigator level stuff, not street level.) The question is, which one is more important? If you have one optimal and one less optimal, which one is better? Similarly we want teachers to be kind and understanding with students with genuine difficulties, but be more scary to the kind of thuggish guys half my class was.
The point is really how pessimistic or cautious is your basic view. Do you see the police as a thin blue line separating barbarism from civilization? Do you see every generation of children as “barbarians needing to be civilized” (Hannah Arendt) Or you have a more optimistic view, seeing the vast majority of people behaving well and the vast majority of kids genuinely trying to do good work?
Furthermore—and this is even more important—would you rather get more pessimistic than things are and thus slow down progress, or more optimistic and risk systemic shocks?
I think you know my answers :) I have no problem with a slow and super-safe progress. I don’t exactly want to flee from the present or the past.
No, policemen don’t need to be scary to do their jobs. A police that can be counted on doing a proper investigation that punishes criminals can deter crime even when the individual policmen aren’t scary.
A policemen being scary can also reduce the willingness of citizens to report crimes because they are afraid of the police. Whole minority communities don’t like to interact with police and thus try to solve conflicts on their own with violence because they don’t trust the police.
Being empathic is not simply about being “kind and understanding” it allows the teacher to have more information about the mental state of a student and more likely see when a student gets confused and react towards it. A smart student also profits when the teacher get’s that the student already understands what the teacher wants to tell him.
Neither. I rather care about the expected empiric result of a policy than about seeing people are inherently good or inherently evil. I think you think too much in categories like that and care too little about the empirical reality that we do have less crime than we had in the past.
It’s like discussing global warming not on the scientific data about temperature changes but on whether we are for the environment or for free enterprise. The nonscientific framing leads to bad thinking.
It’s not clear how much of that is this and how much is them being more afraid of the kingpins of their ethnic mafias than they are of the police.
Have things steadily been marching in the direction of greater liberalism, though? There are a bunch of things you can no longer get away with, such as spousal abuse.
That was precisely what TD wrote they got away with all the time. Just of course not amongst educated or middle-class people. Underclass woman gets admitted to the hospital with a broken arm, docs find it unlikely it was an accident, arrange a meeting with the local psychiatrist i.e. TD. Yeah, it was the boyfriend in a fit of jealousy. Police, testimony? Nope. Why not? She’s making up all kinds of excuses for the guy. OK maybe she is scared, explain about the battered women shelter where nothing bad can come to her. Still not, and does not look scared or dependent or something. Finally the reason becomes clear: the “bad boy” is sexually exciting. And according to TD this happened all the time. 16 years old boy taken in to psychiatric treatment, suicidial. Mom’s latest boyfriend was beating the boys head in the concrete. Why mom won’t call the police? She said “he is a good shag” and rather the boy should try not be too much at home to avoid him. And so on, endless such stories. Get that book...
I was actually getting a weird impression from that book. The primary reason laws and institutions are indeed increasingly aware of and trying to deal with spousal abuse is not that it gets more noticed today, but because it actually does happen more than in the past where communal pressure could have worked against it. TD seems to imply that people’s behavior got worse faster than the laws or police procedures evolved, so it is a net negative.
Is that based with figures?
Nope, TD is an essayist.
Casual assumptions that things were better in the past, .or that the authors favoured theories must have worked, need to be taken with some scepticism.
His point is not that anyone who wants to batter, can, it is that the nonzero amount left is due to collusion.
I used as well. This is getting spooky.
Second biggest city of the world’s fourth biggest economy at that time? Not really a huge conincidence IMHO. Sort of in the world top 20-30 list of places to work one one’s career. Not really in the top 20 to enjoy life though. (OK it wasn’t too bad, we had a park behind the house where bands played frequently, it turned out Caribbean takeaways are really delicious, and going to the Godskitchen was a teenage dream came true 15 years later.)
Crime levels are lower in the West then they were in the past. It’s only media mentions of crime that have risen and which result in a majority of the population believing that crime rates haven’t fallen. Violence is down.
We haven’t gotten increased politeness to woman measured by factors like the number of man who open doors for woman. On the other hand we have a lot more equality than we had in the past. Feminism was never about demanding politeness.
Levels, not rates. Rates are largely about the police trying to look good in numbers. It is seriously difficult to quantify these things properly. One distinct impression I have is that violent behaviors escaped the lower classes and middle-class people stopped being so sheltered from them. Perhaps if I could find a database relating to the education level of the victims of violent crimes I could quantify that better. The 1900 to 1920′s idea of a romantic and dangerous “underworld” went away(example) ), but yet it affects middle-class people far more, from their angle of life experience life got more dangerous.
It is true that feminism is not about politeness, however politeness and preventing specifically violence as seemingly this was the core issue raised are closely related. A normal fella is not going to “please, good sir/madam” and then suddenly head-butt him/her. Formality is a way to avoid the kind of offense that gets retaliated physically, or a way to see if the other is peaceful and reliable, because if the other does not talk in a non-aggressive way then he is more likely to behave physically more aggressively and thus avoidance is advised. This is why it matters, not that relevant to feminism but relevant to safety, people being physically hurt and so on.
There are victimization surveys that verify lower crime levels apart from amount of crime that the police deals with.
We can discuss whether it’s lead or the new clever crime fighting techniques that’s the cause for lower violence but the expert consensus on the subject is that crime is down just as the expert consensus on global warming is that temperatures are up.
How do you know?
But it’s not the only way. I rather have a culture where people hug each other, are nice to each other and also openly speak about their concerns when that makes other people uncomfortable.
It might be that you personally prefer formality but other people don’t. Don’t project your desire for formality onto other people. It’s a right wing value and right wing values lost ;) Right wing values losing is no reason why an idealistic youth should be pessimistic.
Um, if you want a society with less crime try Singapore or places like Shanghai. Hell, even Japan have much lower crime rates despite being more patriarchal then western liberal democracies.
Yes, and that will help you so much when someone tries to punch/rob/rape you.
Actually falsely believing in equality of ability ⇒ being willing to kill to make equality happen. The chain of reasoning goes as follows:
1) As we know all people/groups are of equal ability, but group X is more successful then other groups, thus they must be cheating in some way, we must pass laws to stop the cheating/level the playing field.
2) We passed laws to level the playing field but group X is still winning, they must be cheating in extremely subtle ways, we must pass more laws to stop/punish this.
3) Group X is still ahead, we must presume members of group X are guilty until proven innocent, etc.
No that’s not what I’m saying. In the grandparent you said:
My point is that not being able to read IQ-by-race-and-gender studies is likely to lead to a repeat of Mao/Pol Pot. Thus being extremely concerned about being able to read them is a perfectly rational reaction.
Unfortunately, as we’ve just established you have very false ideas about how to go about doing that. Furthermore, since these same false ideas are currently extremely popular in academia, going there to study is unlikely to fix this.
Where you live is more then just your immediate family.
Well technically one could define “sexism” and “racism” however one wants; however, in practice that’s not how most people who oppose them use the words.
That’s because usually the individual does fit the trend. In fact these days people tend to under update for fear of being called “racist” and/or “sexist”.
So are you also angry about what happened to Watson?
Are you also angry about people beating people without those psychological issues in dark alleys? The latter is much more common. Are you angry about, say, what happened in Rotherham and the ideology that lead to it being cover up? What about all the black on black violence in inner cities that no one seems to care about and cops don’t want to stop for fear of being called “racist” when they disproportionately arrest black defendants.
Do you know what the word “hate” means? I’ve seen it thrown around to apply to lot’s of situations where there is no actual hate involved. Furthermore, in the rare cases where I’ve seen actual hate, well like you yourself said latter “emotion is arational” and hate is sometimes appropriate.
Yet earlier you said “I’m against beatings and murder in general, really.” Do you see the contradiction here? Do you some beatings and killings [your example wasn’t murder since it was legal] even if they increase utility?
--
I agree they “seem” that way if you only superficially read the news. If you pay closer attention one notices that (at least in the US) fear of being precised as “racist” is a much larger cause of people being beaten up in dark alleys (and occasionally in broad daylight). It is the reason why cops don’t want to police high crime (black) neighborhoods, why programs that successfully reduce crime (like stop and frisk) are terminated.
I would argue the exact opposite. Hatred and anger evolved as methods that let us pre-commit to revenge/punishment by getting around the “once the offense has happened it’s no longer in one’s interest to carry out the punishment” problem. They do this by sabotaging one’s reasoning process to keep one from noticing that carrying out the punishment is not in one’s interest. Applied against things, i.e., anything that can’t be motivated by fear of punishment, all one gets is the partially sabotaged reasoning process without any countervailing benefits.
In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to be angry at a ‘thing’ like a disease. In order to do so one must either anthropomorphize the disease or actually get angry at some people (like say those people who refuse to give enough money to research for curing it).