I think the root of many political disagreements between rationalists and other groups, is that other groups look at parts of the world and see a villain-shaped hole. Eg: There’s a lot of people homeless and unable to pay rent, rent is nominally controlled by landlords, the problem must be that the landlords are behaving badly. Or: the racial demographics in some job/field/school underrepresent black and hispanic people, therefore there must be racist people creating the imbalance, therefore covert (but severe) racism is prevalent.
Having read Meditations on Moloch, and Inadequate Equilibria, though, you come to realize that what look like villain-shaped holes frequently aren’t. The people operating under a fight-the-villains model are often making things worse rather than better.
I think the key to persuading people may be to understand and empathize with the lens in which systems thinking, equilibria, and game theory are illegible, and it’s hard to tell whether an explanation coming from one of these frames is real or fake. If you think problems are driven by villainy, then it would make a lot of sense for illegible alternative explanations to be misdirection.
I think I basically disagree with this, or think that it insufficiently steelmans the other groups.
For example, the homeless vs. the landlords; when I put on my systems thinking hat, it sure looks to me like there’s a cartel, wherein a group that produces a scarce commodity is colluding to keep that commodity scarce to keep the price high. The facts on the ground are more complicated—property owners are a different group from landlords, and homelessness is caused by more factors than just housing prices—but the basic analysis that there are different classes, those classes have different interests, and those classes are fighting over government regulation as a tool in their conflict seems basically right to me. Like, it’s really not a secret that many voters are motivated by keeping property values high, politicians know this is a factor that they will be judged on.
Maybe you’re trying to condemn a narrow mistake here, where someone being an ‘enemy’ implies that they are a ‘villain’, which I agree is a mistake. But it sounds like you’re making a more generic point, which is that when people have political disagreements with the rationalists, it’s normally because they’re thinking in terms of enemy action instead of not thinking in systems. But a lot of what the thinking in systems reveals is the way in which enemies act using systemic forces!
I think this is correct as a final analysis, but ineffective as a cognitive procedure. People who start by trying to identify villains tend to land on landlords-in-general, with charging-high-rent as the significant act, rather than a small subset of mostly non-landlord homeowners, with protesting against construction as the significant act.
I wonder how accurate it is to describe the structural thinking as a recent progress. Seems to me that Marx already believed that (using my own words here, but see the source) both the rich and the poor are mere cogs in the machine, it’s just that the rich are okay with their role because the machine leaves them some autonomy, while the poor are stripped of all autonomy and their lives are made unbearable. The rich of today are not villains who designed the machine, they inherited it just like everyone else, and they cannot individually leave it just like no one else can.
Perhaps the structural thinking is too difficult to understand for most people, who will round the story to the nearest cliche they can understand, so it needs to be reintroduced once in a while.
Conflict vs mistake is definitely related, but I think it’s not exactly the same thing; the “villain-shaped hole” perspective is what it feels like to not have a model, but see things that look suspicious; this would lead you towards a conflict-theoretic explanation, but it’s a step earlier.
(Also, the Conflict vs Mistake ontology is not really capturing the whole bad-coordination-equilibrium part of explanation space, which is pretty important.)
Seems to me like an unspoken assumption that there are no hard problems / complexity / emergence, therefore if anything happened, it’s because someone quite straightforwardly made that happen.
Conflict vs mistake is not exactly the same thing; you could assume that the person who made it happen did it either by mistake, or did it on purpose to hurt someone else. It’s just when we are talking about things that obviously hurt some people, that seems to refute the innocent mistake… so the villain hypothesis is all that is left (within the model that all consequences are straightforward).
The villain hypothesis is also difficult to falsify. If you say “hey, drop the pitchforks, things are complicated...”, that sounds just like what the hypothetical villain would say in the same situation (trying to stop the momentum and introduce uncertainty).
I think the root of many political disagreements between rationalists and other groups, is that other groups look at parts of the world and see a villain-shaped hole. Eg: There’s a lot of people homeless and unable to pay rent, rent is nominally controlled by landlords, the problem must be that the landlords are behaving badly. Or: the racial demographics in some job/field/school underrepresent black and hispanic people, therefore there must be racist people creating the imbalance, therefore covert (but severe) racism is prevalent.
Having read Meditations on Moloch, and Inadequate Equilibria, though, you come to realize that what look like villain-shaped holes frequently aren’t. The people operating under a fight-the-villains model are often making things worse rather than better.
I think the key to persuading people may be to understand and empathize with the lens in which systems thinking, equilibria, and game theory are illegible, and it’s hard to tell whether an explanation coming from one of these frames is real or fake. If you think problems are driven by villainy, then it would make a lot of sense for illegible alternative explanations to be misdirection.
I think I basically disagree with this, or think that it insufficiently steelmans the other groups.
For example, the homeless vs. the landlords; when I put on my systems thinking hat, it sure looks to me like there’s a cartel, wherein a group that produces a scarce commodity is colluding to keep that commodity scarce to keep the price high. The facts on the ground are more complicated—property owners are a different group from landlords, and homelessness is caused by more factors than just housing prices—but the basic analysis that there are different classes, those classes have different interests, and those classes are fighting over government regulation as a tool in their conflict seems basically right to me. Like, it’s really not a secret that many voters are motivated by keeping property values high, politicians know this is a factor that they will be judged on.
Maybe you’re trying to condemn a narrow mistake here, where someone being an ‘enemy’ implies that they are a ‘villain’, which I agree is a mistake. But it sounds like you’re making a more generic point, which is that when people have political disagreements with the rationalists, it’s normally because they’re thinking in terms of enemy action instead of not thinking in systems. But a lot of what the thinking in systems reveals is the way in which enemies act using systemic forces!
I think this is correct as a final analysis, but ineffective as a cognitive procedure. People who start by trying to identify villains tend to land on landlords-in-general, with charging-high-rent as the significant act, rather than a small subset of mostly non-landlord homeowners, with protesting against construction as the significant act.
Much of the progress in modern anti-racism has been about persuading more people to think of racism as a structural, systemic issue rather than one of individual villainy. See: https://transliberalism.substack.com/.../the-revolution...
I wonder how accurate it is to describe the structural thinking as a recent progress. Seems to me that Marx already believed that (using my own words here, but see the source) both the rich and the poor are mere cogs in the machine, it’s just that the rich are okay with their role because the machine leaves them some autonomy, while the poor are stripped of all autonomy and their lives are made unbearable. The rich of today are not villains who designed the machine, they inherited it just like everyone else, and they cannot individually leave it just like no one else can.
Perhaps the structural thinking is too difficult to understand for most people, who will round the story to the nearest cliche they can understand, so it needs to be reintroduced once in a while.
I think this would make a good top-level post.
Yep. Seems you have broadly rediscovered conflict vs mistake.
Conflict vs mistake is definitely related, but I think it’s not exactly the same thing; the “villain-shaped hole” perspective is what it feels like to not have a model, but see things that look suspicious; this would lead you towards a conflict-theoretic explanation, but it’s a step earlier.
(Also, the Conflict vs Mistake ontology is not really capturing the whole bad-coordination-equilibrium part of explanation space, which is pretty important.)
Seems to me like an unspoken assumption that there are no hard problems / complexity / emergence, therefore if anything happened, it’s because someone quite straightforwardly made that happen.
Conflict vs mistake is not exactly the same thing; you could assume that the person who made it happen did it either by mistake, or did it on purpose to hurt someone else. It’s just when we are talking about things that obviously hurt some people, that seems to refute the innocent mistake… so the villain hypothesis is all that is left (within the model that all consequences are straightforward).
The villain hypothesis is also difficult to falsify. If you say “hey, drop the pitchforks, things are complicated...”, that sounds just like what the hypothetical villain would say in the same situation (trying to stop the momentum and introduce uncertainty).