EY “Politics is the Mind Killer” sighting at Washington Examiner and Reason.com
Original at Washington Examiner
http://washingtonexaminer.com/down-with-politics/article/2508882#.UGSscI0iYZm
...
Politics makes us worse because “politics is the mindkiller,” as intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it. “Evolutionary psychology produces strange echoes in time,” he writes, “as adaptations continue to execute long after they cease to maximize fitness.” We gorge ourselves sick on sugar and fat, and we indulge our tribal hard-wiring by picking a political “team” and denouncing the “enemy.”
But our atavistic Red/Blue tribalism plays to the interests of “individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them,” Yudkowsky writes.
...
Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of “The Cult of the Presidency.”
Repost at Reason.com
http://reason.com/archive/2012/09/25/why-politics-are-bad-for-us
I imagine this is some of the fruit from this tree. I’m curious if there’s a story how EY got into the position to write that article.
(Another alternative is that journalists are finding LW through HPMOR, and of course there are others.)
I’m the editor of Cato Unbound, and I’ve been a fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s for several years. I’m fairly sure that I introduced Gene to his work as well.
There is no real story behind the article. There almost never is, with me. It’s just my job to identify interesting and talented writers, and to pay them to write for us. He was overwhelmingly qualified. I asked, and he accepted.
One thing I love about Less Wrong is these Annie Hall Marshall McLuhan moments.
Not really related, but your comment reminded me of a hilarious story about David Chalmers (of zombie fame). He tried to correct a mistake in the Wikipedia description of his views of consciousness, registering an account with his name and saying in the discussion section:
Alas, the other editor had not watched Annie Hall:
The log is here.
Yeah—I had originally typed “‘Marshall McLuhan here’ moments” and then realized I was making an obscure reference to David Chalmers referencing Annie Hall, and thought a direct Annie Hall reference was better.
Thanks for responding! Do you remember how you found EY in the first place?
Every semester I teach the Cato Institute’s intern class about elementary forms of argument, logical fallacies, and the like. Something must have clicked for one of the interns, because she asked me what I thought of EY. She recommended some of his papers.
Well. He was totally unknown to me then, but I’ve since added Less Wrong to the sites that I recommend in the talk.
I’ve lurked extensively around here for quite a while, and what disagreements I have with the community consensus are so minor as not to need bothering about. (I’m a bit more of a fatalist about the matter of my own death, for example, in that I personally doubt that I will live a longer lifespan than a typical human has so far. But anyway.)
Keep up the good work, folks. Both my husband (SRStarin) and I always come away from Less Wrong with a lot of great stuff to think and talk about.
I think libertarians probably found EY through Overcoming Bias, which they read because of Robin’s affiliation with GMU.
(Note that Reason is a libertarian magazine)
I am familiar with Cato, Reason, and GMU. Of the GMU econ professors, I don’t think Hanson is that famous among libertarians (especially compared to among transhumanists), as he writes about libertarian things far less often than, say, Bryan Caplan. (Try searching both of their names on Reason.) He’s also not a guest lecturer at IHS, like Caplan, Cowen, Coyne, Klein, Lavoie, Nye, Smith, or White.
(Amusingly, even though I had known Robin for years as one of Bryan’s gaming friends, I didn’t find Overcoming Bias until a few months after I found LW, and then connecting that to Robin took a few more months.)
My point isn’t that Robin is famous among libertarians, it’s that he’s associated with famous libertarians. When yet another GMU econ professor starts a blog, especially one Bryan Caplan routinely calls one of the sharpest thinkers he knows, libertarians are likely to at least check it out. Also note that Patri Friedman, another famous name in libertarian circles, was one of the original contributors to Overcoming Bias.
I found OB and thus EY through the mechanism I’m describing, so the availability heuristic might be at work here, but my experience at libertarian organizations suggests that I’m not alone* - I’ve dropped EY’s name or mentioned something from the sequences in conversations with libertarians and they often know what I’m talking about.
* Though admittedly, it’s been a couple years since I’ve been to an event put on by a libertarian organization.
Repeats to self: Do not say “Go Eliezer!”, do not say “Go, Eliezer!”, do not say “Go, Eliezer!”
Go Eliezer!
Oops, must be all that priming.
If I were evil, I would have people repeat Epiphany’s slogan and they would think they were practicing dutiful nonconformity while actually their brain was thinking “Go Eliezer” all the time...
Or you might pretend to be good, and push on us in nefarious ways we wouldn’t even notice so that we end up saying things like “Go Eliezer”.
I’ve heard you are in the possession of fully general mind-hacks. Just like painting asteroids and poisoning tigers, right?
Go Eliezer! Save us from the Forces of Bad. (ha ha only serious).
How would you tell the difference between him pretending to be good and being good, whatever you mean by good? (This is the basic question of rationality.)
That would be very hard to do in a public forum where he could read our methods of distinguish between him pretending to be good and actually being good. You could try to figure out what unconscious signals of “goodness” are, but again that’s hard through text where the person in question knows what you’re testing and can optimize the writing to score well on the test.
Or you could just go with your priors. Or message privately, though that runs into the problem of sampling people who are likely to agree with you.
in principle, you can’t.
A rational evil would pretend to be good until it didn’t matter anymore
If so he must have been using them on us in order to make his argument that such a thing is not theoretically possible so compelling. ie. Eliezer needs to be operating from outside our physical reality in order to have fully general mind-hacks and in that case the mind hacks are the least of our worries. (Unless that is what he wants us to think.)
It’s Green/Blue. Noobs.
The Reason comments are ridiculous. They might want to rename the magazine.
Content free snickering is ridiculous.
And on a website called Less Wrong, as well, oh the irony!
Comments at that kind of site tend to be not worth reading, in general. You get too many people who just make one remark and leave, so you have a lot of random blathering instead of ongoing conversations.
If we didn’t have politics, we’d raid each others’ villages and steal the women and sheep instead. Politics is a way to avoid direct bloodshed, and as such is an improvement.
What I’m saying is, Eliezer identifies the problem, but where’s the alternative?
This pretty much implies that women aren’t included in “we”—hardly the only thing wrong with the statement, but an additional irritant.
Historically raids where mostly a male thing and women where part of the expected plunder. Such things where rather common, this is why In many countries symbolical kidnapping of the bride is part of wedding celebrations.
I think that what Nancy thought problematic was not the assumption that men would raid and women would be plundered, but the assumption that “we” would raid rather than be plundered—i.e. that “we” are only men.
Exactly.
I used to see that sort of “real people are men” statement as a sort of humorous gusto in slightly poor taste, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how it’s intended. I’ve since realized that it also has an effect on availability bias.
The choice of the word “steal” instead of “kidnap” was the tipoff on the status of women.
A particular Chinese custom springs to mind:
The bride stays in a ‘fortified’ location with all her female friends The groom is supposed to round up his male friends and get past the defenders to steal away the bride. Bribes of money (in ceremonial little red envelopes) are the most common way to get past the defenders, but sneaking is also okay, and some of the male friends are supposed to ‘distract’ some of the female friends.
I’m not objecting to gender differences in who does the raiding, I’m objecting to assuming that the reader is male and then encouraging the reader to only identify with the raiders.
I actually think politics is what makes it possible to organize raids on other villages, and also what makes it possible to sometimes prevent raids from happening, but let’s try some other phrasings for h-H’s original quote.
“If we didn’t have politics, we’d have no way of stopping raids on other villages, and we’d be enduring theft, kidnapping, and rape.” (I’ve heard that there are cultures where women do the deciding and men do the fighting.)
“If men didn’t have politics, we’d be subject to raids.” (I’m having a surprisingly hard time phrasing a woman-centered version of the quote. I don’t think this is because there’s something unrealistic about it, I think it’s because a mode that’s as woman-centered as the original is male-centered is very rare.)
“Politics are the only way the human race found to avoid small-scale conflict.”
I was encouraging the reader not to identify with either raiders or victims.
Then I’m missing something. How were you doing that?
Are you sure that’s your true rejection? I think writers use “we” to denote groups that don’t literally include all of the readers all the time, but from what I’ve seen on LW readers seem to be particularly bothered by that when that group is “males”.
I agree that sometimes writers use “we” in ways that don’t include the reader.
For example, someone might say “we” of their nation, and thus include those readers which are fellow citizens, but not those readers who aren’t. What sort of examples do you have in mind?
Yeah, “we” meaning ‘Americans’ is the first example I would have thought of. But I suspect there are lots of cases where “we” (interpreting the context literally) refers to a group excluding a non-trivial fraction of the readership which I wouldn’t even consciously notice unless I was looking for them.
I am sometimes irritated when speakers use “we” to refer to heterosexuals, which happens fairly often. I just don’t usually mention the fact.
We-incl need a clearer distinction between inclusive and exclusive “we” in English. Speaking for heterosexuals, to a mixed audience or a specific listener, doesn’t bother me at all. Out of context, a sentence like “We can’t really understand same-sex attraction” could be read as either “Heterosexuals, such as I, are empathically challenged. Mind the inferential gap.” or “We can all agree that queers are weird.”.
I try to interpret ambiguity charitably, so usually when it irritates me the issue isn’t ambiguity, but actual exclusiveness.
A sentence like “We seek out mates among attractive members of the opposite sex,” for example, isn’t ambiguous at all; it simply excludes some queers from its subject.
And, just to be clear: the speakers of such sentences are free to do so, and should be.
I bring it up only because army1987 seemed to be drawing potentially false inferences from silence: the reality is I am sometimes bothered by it.
Interesting. I saw that it was doing the “treating women as plunder” thing, but it didn’t occur to me that no women would be doing the stealing.
Back when I was studying political science at university, warfare, terrorism, etc… were explicitly considered forms of politics (“politics by other means”). At risk of sounding simplistic, the alternative to non-unanimous decision procedures (the realm of political society) is unanimous decision procedures (the realm of civil society).
Or living without using decision procedures at all, which is quite feasible in small groups under ~150 people. There will always be disagreement about “rights” and the like, but small groups can more easily hash out such disagreements through informal ethics (i.e. managed de-escalation of conflict). Political conflict persay only seems to arise in larger groups.
Can you summarize your reasons for believing that small groups don’t use decision procedures, as opposed to believing that small groups use informally specified decision procedures? My experience of decision-making in small groups is that while it can be consensual, it is more often an informal oligarchy… that is, there’s a few people who really matter, but nobody ever comes right out and says that.
Yes, but h-H and Jayson_Virissimo were talking about near-political conflicts. Even in a small group, value conflicts tend to erode this kind of loyalty to informal authorities.
Well, I agree as far as that goes, but if you also mean to suggest that a group run by informal oligarchy can’t (or isn’t likely to) persist in that structure in the face of value conflicts due to that erosion of loyalty, I disagree. IME small groups typically have all manner of internal conflicts, which admittedly serve to weaken the group’s internal cohesion, but typically not enough so to cause the group to disintegrate altogether. (Indeed, the same is true of large groups with more formal structures.)
Does this really matter? Ultimately, yes, a small group may simply trust an oligarchy to take right decisions for them, and do what the oligarchy says. But even then, I’m not sure that this qualifies as a “decision procedure” (of either the formal or informal kind) in any politically interesting sense.
If I’m a member of a small group who thinks we should do X, and you’re a member of the same group who thinks we should do Y, and the group does Y because you have more power in that group than I do (whether that power is due to greater trust or some other factor; trust is far from being the only mechanism through which informal power gets exerted in small groups), then it matters to me.
And if individuals exerting power over groups (whether through trust or other mechanisms) to cause the groups to implement the individual’s preferences isn’t politics, then I don’t know what politics is, and I’m not sure why politics is more important than whatever-that-is.
Individuals (and in some cases, families) deciding for themselves what to do is a special case of a “unanimous decision procedure”.
Taboo “politics.”
If we didn’t have strongly felt affiliations with powerful groups that gain their power from our affiliation, but are too big to actually consider our preferences when using their power, we would...
Do you think that most people would choose to define “politics” as “strongly felt affiliations with powerful groups that gain their power from our affiliation, but are too big to actually consider our preferences when using their power” ?
The purpose of tabooing words ought be to disentangle confusing connotations that the original word had. You seem to have chosen to add connotations. You may argue that politics leads to such “strongly felt affiliations” to such “powerful groups”, but damn, that’s a different thing from just defining politics to be such.
Dictionary.com lays out several definitions:
the science or art of political government.
the practice or profession of conducting political affairs.
political affairs: The advocated reforms have become embroiled in politics.
political methods or maneuvers: We could not approve of his politics in winning passage of the bill.
political principles or opinions: We avoided discussion of religion and politics. His politics are his own affair.
As well as an idiomatic definition which is closer to the way the word is often used by LW members who also read Moldbug:
I believe that definition #5 is clearly what Eliezer is talking about when he says “politics is the mind-killer.” h-H is talking about #1, #2, and possibly #3 and #4.
I’m not saying my suggested rephrasing is what most people mean by “politics.” But I don’t believe anybody is saying that the art or science of political government is the mind-killer.
FWIW, I’ve always understood the referent for “politics” in “politics is the mind-killer” to be, not political principles or opinions (which in fact get discussed here all the time, typically civilly and sometimes usefully), but tribal affiliation with powerful governmental/nationalist camps. I often refer to it as “partisan politics” for that reason, and around here I sometimes refer to it as “Blue/Green politics.” (Both formulations of which neglect the nationalist aspect, but not for any principled reason, just for convenience. If the Blue/Green teaching-story had included a neighboring nation known as the “Purples,” I might refer to it as “Blue/Green/Purple” politics.)
We would presumably find partisan religious discussion equally problematic if we didn’t already filter for alignment with a particular camp.
We do find sex/gender discussion problematic, I think for similar reasons, and would find it much more so Less Wrong didn’t filter for a particular gender.
We similarly find race/ethnicity discussion problematic, though for the most part it doesn’t come up… there’s one member who periodically talks about how some races are superior to others, and that causes a certain amount of turbulence before it dies down.
Etc.
In general, if we believe there are powerful groups or entities fighting for control over large-scale decisions that affect our lives, we tend to pick a side and invest emotionally in supporting whatever positions are conventionally associated with that side, and signalling considerations start to predominate. This makes analysis difficult.
Partisan politics is too narrow—some “political concepts” become enmeshed in one’s personal identity even if they are irrelevant to whether the community organizer or the business executive should be President of the United States.
Consider how and why the “creepiness” and “feminism” discussions broke down so badly, so quickly, and so acrimoniously.
In short, Paul Graham is right when he says (essentially) “Personal identity is the mindkiller”
Yeah, I agree that we find sex/gender discussions problematic for similar reasons.
I agree. I should have said “definition #5 is clearly the closest to what Eliezer is talking about.” As my suggested tabooing phrase indicates, I think “affiliations that don’t pay rent” are the problem.
Nancy did identify a serious problem with your comment, but I’m not sure modulo that issue that your comment should be downvoted as much as it is. To some extent, the point that we have politics as a way of resolving issues without bloodshed is valid: modern politics in many ways is an improvement over the alternatives. But that doesn’t by itself make politics a good thing or make politics less of a mind-killer. To some extent, much political interaction resembles ritualized combat that occurs in many mammalian species (and sometimes in groups)- fatality is minimized, but the level of actual rational discourse is clearly still pretty low.
To some extent, it may help to see politics as the mindkiller as a statement about how political discourse can be improved. In most of the West, politics doesn’t result in people being killed often, but it still isn’t a rational way of examining disagreements and resolving them in a way that appropriately balances conflicting goals. And it is very very easy for it to become outright tribalism that doesn’t devolve into violence primarily because we have strong anti-violence taboos and respect taboos more than anything connected to the political process.
It should be. The comment fundamentally missed the point and made an irrelevant challenge to the alternative forms of competition as though it was some kind of insightful counterpoint rather than a naive trivialization.
Wedrifid, I was disappointed that Eliezer so succinctly identified the problem then mostly left it hanging.
Now, your comment fundamentally missed the point I was making, furthermore you seem to be acting out a common politician’s caricature, I don’t see you making an actual argument here & tbh I’m slightly surprised as you usually do much better than that.
Either way. in the interest of preserving the sanity waterline I’ll stop here.
“Politics” is not the problem Eliezer identified and nor is “the thing that is the alternative to raiding and pillaging”. (Never mind that the ‘politics’ that corrupts thinking applies just as much—or more—to the tribes who go around raiding and pillaging. It’s about the internal politics within the tribe and the external conflicts come in to it as just more things the individuals can argue about in order to achieve personal gain, preferably at the expense of rivals.)
Thanks for the clear reply, and I agree with your points.
IMO the fact that Politics is a moderately functional substitute for direct bloodshed means that the ‘rational’ in any ‘rational alternative’ has little to do the masses becoming more rational, as opposed to careful grooming by an informed clique capable of long term planning.
That doesn’t necessarily imply a shadowy cabal of super secret rationalists deftly maneuvering the public for it’s own good. Rather, something as simple as spreading basic rationality skills is sufficient if we emphasize ‘long term’, as we should.
But that good work has to come with a working theory of capital r ‘Rational Politics’ or LW’s knowledge base has a huge chunk missing under the ‘Practical knowledge’ heading, say an LWer of high karma by some twist or other became adviser to the Archduke of Wallachia, will the people be better off or not?
In other words, if despite the impressive body of knowledge created here the preferred way for dealing with politics is either: a. Outright tabooing the subject or b. Denouncing the masses as prone to being insane...
Then surely as a community can do better than that?
Admittedly I’m not that well versed in political studies myself, and I’m not calling for Eliezer or anyone else for that matter to focus on this, rather I believe the community is mature enough to have a theoretical discussion about politics -and yes, that includes discussion of parties, partisan positions etc- without devolving into mudslinging or shouting matches.
A curated area in LW with strict rules -default set to anonymous posting, no more than 5 posts per day etc- should solve most potential issues, the hullabaloo that happened during say, the feminist war is not impossible to contain.
The point is, it’s not at all clear whether we can do any better. The “politics as a way of managing conflict” POV elucidates several features that do set apart politics from ordinary deliberation, which is the domain LW-style rationality is most directly applicable to. (Such as concerns about fairness in political processes, a focus on adversarial argumentation even in factual matters, a need for compromise and creative open-mindedness in order to mitigate value conflicts etc.) For the record, I think that this—“can political discourse be improved along rationalist lines?”—is very much an open question; however, LW is most likely not the best forum for addressing it, given that such a focus would conflict with its well-defined goal of refining the art of rationality.