Your straw model of me is indeed made of straw. It’s not obvious to me why you would ascribe the particular stupidities to me that you ascribe to straw-me, so I’m not sure how to respond to them. People don’t divided neatly into Good and Bad, obviously, and my point is exactly that what’s being hypothesized here seems to me like the sort that fictional Bad characters do and real people with real motives generally don’t.
Like, no, what’s being hypothesized here is just that the people at the organization are a part of a broader semi-authoritarian attempt to control a population, and that insofar as that is happening, they’re playing their role, which is to kind of not notice whilst also doing a reasonably good job at their part. This is pretty normal.
The truth is I’m not that confident of this interpretation of this particular ad, I could definitely learn evidence that would change my mind, it’s not that hard to get counter-evidence for such stories. But I feel like you haven’t once entertained this hypothesis and argued against it, you’ve just said “I don’t see it”, this is “obviously wrong”, and “the particular kind of deliberate meanness that you seem to be hypothesizing here seems pretty moustache-twirly”. The story we’re talking about seems to be a super common one to me throughout societies, and I guess I feel like you haven’t made an argument against it happening here other than one based on your own disbelief.[1]
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You seem most hung up on the phrase “anti-mask propaganda”, like when you say “The mask ads are produced by the MTA as part of a campaign whose overt (and, I think, real) goal is to get people to wear masks… Therefore, they are not in fact anti-mask propaganda”.
Why are the ads anti-mask propaganda? Because both ads straightforwardly make me less likely to wear a mask in a public setting or when asked to by someone else. The ad “Masks speak louder than words” suggests to me “This is a signal about what team you are on” and I detest people forcing tribal signals on me. This ad makes me care more about signaling to others that I do not care very much about mask-wearing because otherwise I feel I am being co-opted to signal in a political game. As an ad, it decreases my willingness to wear a mask. And I further think that the cognitive processes that led to these slogans being picked were picking it for tribal reasons and were happy to pick slogans that marginally reduced people’s chance of wearing masks in order to stomp on people more in a plausibly-deniable way.
It seems fairly plausible (i.e. somewhere in 10%-70%) that not one person focused their entire consciousnesses on creating anti-mask propaganda like the moustache-twirling villains you mentioned, but it seems to me quite likely that whatever sub-process ran in their brain essentially searched for an ad that gets away as looking like pro-mask propaganda while in fact just stomping on people, in a way that is functionally anti-mask propaganda.
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One line replies:
If “you’ve repeatedly avoided it” is meant to mean “I think you know what is actually going on and are going out of your way not to say it”, then I deny that charge. I may well be wrong about what is going on, but I promise I am not being insincere about it.
No, I just felt like you kept talking around it, I didn’t mean you seemed obviously insincere.
I don’t know what “Tilda Swinton’s character” is meant to convey
Alas! In my first comment upthread I referenced her character in the movie Snowpiercer and linked to a video of her giving a key tone-setting speech in the film.
An argument could look like, for example: “Here is a nearby institution that has clear markers of being pretty resistant to this sort of authoritarian stuff, which is reason to expect the MTA is too, so your story here doesn’t match my picture of the world.”
So, first of all, my apologies for missing where you said what Tilda Swinton character you had in mind. I remark that said character almost-literally is a moustache-twirling villain: in the scene you link to, we watch her smiling smugly while a man is being tortured for stepping out of his Ordained Place and going on about how she naturally belongs on top and they naturally belong trodden underfoot. All of which is consonant with (although, of course, not proof of the rightness of) my sense that the sort of thing being described here is more characteristic of Movie Bad Guys than of anything common in the real world.
I think part of what is going on here is that to me it looks like you and other-Ben are doing what Eliezer dubbed “privileging the hypothesis”. To be clear, I am sure that it seems entirely otherwise to both of you, and what is actually going here is that we have different underlying models of the world that make different hypotheses seem particularly plausible: to me, your-and-Benquo’s model looks paranoid; to you, my model looks naïve.
It’s true that I haven’t given concrete evidence against the Ben-squared interpretation; but it’s also true that neither of you has given evidence for it, so far as I can see. It’s not really the sort of thing for which concrete evidence is easy to come by. You say “it’s not that hard to get counter-evidence for such stories”, but I don’t know on what basis you say so. You give an example in a footnote of what counter-evidence might look like, but I don’t really know what “clear markers of being pretty resistant to this sort of authoritarian stuff” would look like if present, and it seems like there’s an underlying assumption here that institutions should be assumed malevolently authoritarian unless they have “clear markers of being pretty resistant”, which is part of what I am disputing. I genuinely cannot think of anything I could do that would—even conditional on my being absolutely correct about what’s going on here—take less than say two hours of work and give more than say a 25% chance of providing concrete evidence that my interpretation is better than yours.
You quote me as saying “I don’t see it” and “obviously wrong” and “seems pretty moustache-twirly”. In contrast, you are much more focused on concrete evidence, saying that your interpretation of things “is pretty normal”[1], “seems to be super common”, that “I further think that” [reiteration of the theory], and “it seems to me quite likely that” [reiteration of the theory]”. Benquo, in the OP, mostly just states his interpretation as if it were an obvious matter of fact: “the obvious transitive implication”, “the thinly-veiled message is”, “its explicit content is”[2], “anti-mask propaganda”, etc.
[1] What you say is “pretty normal” is something weaker than what you and Benquo are claiming in the present case, something like “there is an ongoing semi-authoritarian attempt to control a population, and the people involved are kinda-unconsciously-deliberately not noticing this while doing their part to help it”.
[2] No, its explicit content isn’t, any more than saying “actions speak louder than words” and urging someone to act is a form of silencing.
It seems to me as if you and Benquo are making assertions about these people’s motives on the basis of no concrete evidence, and then complaining of my unreasonableness when I say that those assertions seem implausible to me on the basis of no concrete evidence. Shouldn’t we have a consistent standard here?
I think it’s a dirty rhetorical move to take “Ben said X and drew important conclusions from it, and you keep pointing out that the facts are not consistent with X” and express it as “you seem hung up on X”. Be that as it may, I think it is an abuse of language to call something “anti-mask propaganda” when it is intended as pro-mask propaganda merely because it has the effect of making some people less inclined to wear masks.
I remark that your paragraph beginning “It seems fairly plausible” is, stated a little differently, saying that you estimate a 30-90% chance that someone involved in the making of those ads did in fact “focus their entire consciousness on creating anti-mask propaganda like a moustache-twirling villain”. Really?
(One other remark: the contempt you hypothesize at the MTA for the people they’re aiming their ads at seems no greater than the contempt you and Benquo seem to feel for the people you’re criticizing. Maybe I should be taking this as evidence for a general “there’s a lot of contempt around” hypothesis, but in any case it feels like it’s worth drawing some attention to because something seems off to me about saying what amounts to “look how contemptible these people are, for treating other people as contemptible”.)
Like, no, what’s being hypothesized here is just that the people at the organization are a part of a broader semi-authoritarian attempt to control a population, and that insofar as that is happening, they’re playing their role, which is to kind of not notice whilst also doing a reasonably good job at their part. This is pretty normal.
The truth is I’m not that confident of this interpretation of this particular ad, I could definitely learn evidence that would change my mind, it’s not that hard to get counter-evidence for such stories. But I feel like you haven’t once entertained this hypothesis and argued against it, you’ve just said “I don’t see it”, this is “obviously wrong”, and “the particular kind of deliberate meanness that you seem to be hypothesizing here seems pretty moustache-twirly”. The story we’re talking about seems to be a super common one to me throughout societies, and I guess I feel like you haven’t made an argument against it happening here other than one based on your own disbelief.[1]
———
You seem most hung up on the phrase “anti-mask propaganda”, like when you say “The mask ads are produced by the MTA as part of a campaign whose overt (and, I think, real) goal is to get people to wear masks… Therefore, they are not in fact anti-mask propaganda”.
Why are the ads anti-mask propaganda? Because both ads straightforwardly make me less likely to wear a mask in a public setting or when asked to by someone else. The ad “Masks speak louder than words” suggests to me “This is a signal about what team you are on” and I detest people forcing tribal signals on me. This ad makes me care more about signaling to others that I do not care very much about mask-wearing because otherwise I feel I am being co-opted to signal in a political game. As an ad, it decreases my willingness to wear a mask. And I further think that the cognitive processes that led to these slogans being picked were picking it for tribal reasons and were happy to pick slogans that marginally reduced people’s chance of wearing masks in order to stomp on people more in a plausibly-deniable way.
It seems fairly plausible (i.e. somewhere in 10%-70%) that not one person focused their entire consciousnesses on creating anti-mask propaganda like the moustache-twirling villains you mentioned, but it seems to me quite likely that whatever sub-process ran in their brain essentially searched for an ad that gets away as looking like pro-mask propaganda while in fact just stomping on people, in a way that is functionally anti-mask propaganda.
———
One line replies:
No, I just felt like you kept talking around it, I didn’t mean you seemed obviously insincere.
Alas! In my first comment upthread I referenced her character in the movie Snowpiercer and linked to a video of her giving a key tone-setting speech in the film.
An argument could look like, for example: “Here is a nearby institution that has clear markers of being pretty resistant to this sort of authoritarian stuff, which is reason to expect the MTA is too, so your story here doesn’t match my picture of the world.”
So, first of all, my apologies for missing where you said what Tilda Swinton character you had in mind. I remark that said character almost-literally is a moustache-twirling villain: in the scene you link to, we watch her smiling smugly while a man is being tortured for stepping out of his Ordained Place and going on about how she naturally belongs on top and they naturally belong trodden underfoot. All of which is consonant with (although, of course, not proof of the rightness of) my sense that the sort of thing being described here is more characteristic of Movie Bad Guys than of anything common in the real world.
I think part of what is going on here is that to me it looks like you and other-Ben are doing what Eliezer dubbed “privileging the hypothesis”. To be clear, I am sure that it seems entirely otherwise to both of you, and what is actually going here is that we have different underlying models of the world that make different hypotheses seem particularly plausible: to me, your-and-Benquo’s model looks paranoid; to you, my model looks naïve.
It’s true that I haven’t given concrete evidence against the Ben-squared interpretation; but it’s also true that neither of you has given evidence for it, so far as I can see. It’s not really the sort of thing for which concrete evidence is easy to come by. You say “it’s not that hard to get counter-evidence for such stories”, but I don’t know on what basis you say so. You give an example in a footnote of what counter-evidence might look like, but I don’t really know what “clear markers of being pretty resistant to this sort of authoritarian stuff” would look like if present, and it seems like there’s an underlying assumption here that institutions should be assumed malevolently authoritarian unless they have “clear markers of being pretty resistant”, which is part of what I am disputing. I genuinely cannot think of anything I could do that would—even conditional on my being absolutely correct about what’s going on here—take less than say two hours of work and give more than say a 25% chance of providing concrete evidence that my interpretation is better than yours.
You quote me as saying “I don’t see it” and “obviously wrong” and “seems pretty moustache-twirly”. In contrast, you are much more focused on concrete evidence, saying that your interpretation of things “is pretty normal”[1], “seems to be super common”, that “I further think that” [reiteration of the theory], and “it seems to me quite likely that” [reiteration of the theory]”. Benquo, in the OP, mostly just states his interpretation as if it were an obvious matter of fact: “the obvious transitive implication”, “the thinly-veiled message is”, “its explicit content is”[2], “anti-mask propaganda”, etc.
[1] What you say is “pretty normal” is something weaker than what you and Benquo are claiming in the present case, something like “there is an ongoing semi-authoritarian attempt to control a population, and the people involved are kinda-unconsciously-deliberately not noticing this while doing their part to help it”.
[2] No, its explicit content isn’t, any more than saying “actions speak louder than words” and urging someone to act is a form of silencing.
It seems to me as if you and Benquo are making assertions about these people’s motives on the basis of no concrete evidence, and then complaining of my unreasonableness when I say that those assertions seem implausible to me on the basis of no concrete evidence. Shouldn’t we have a consistent standard here?
I think it’s a dirty rhetorical move to take “Ben said X and drew important conclusions from it, and you keep pointing out that the facts are not consistent with X” and express it as “you seem hung up on X”. Be that as it may, I think it is an abuse of language to call something “anti-mask propaganda” when it is intended as pro-mask propaganda merely because it has the effect of making some people less inclined to wear masks.
I remark that your paragraph beginning “It seems fairly plausible” is, stated a little differently, saying that you estimate a 30-90% chance that someone involved in the making of those ads did in fact “focus their entire consciousness on creating anti-mask propaganda like a moustache-twirling villain”. Really?
(One other remark: the contempt you hypothesize at the MTA for the people they’re aiming their ads at seems no greater than the contempt you and Benquo seem to feel for the people you’re criticizing. Maybe I should be taking this as evidence for a general “there’s a lot of contempt around” hypothesis, but in any case it feels like it’s worth drawing some attention to because something seems off to me about saying what amounts to “look how contemptible these people are, for treating other people as contemptible”.)