The passage above seems quite obviously true, indeed pretty much common sense. Do you have any specific points in it that trouble you, or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other. You quote the article as if it was obviously unreasonable on sight. I am puzzled, and would like to understand what is unreasonable about it.
Recall, for example, when the pentagon was allied with the Northern Alliance, the State Department was allied with the Taliban. The state department ordered the Northern Alliance not to enter Kabul, much as it demands that Israel give Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The Pentagon furtively indicated it was fine with the Northern Alliance entering Kabul, which resulted in something close to shooting war between the Pentagon and the State Department. The Northern alliance, contrary to orders, entered Kabul and threw the Taliban out of Kabul. In the end, the state department, and thus the Taliban, won, in that the Northern Alliance was suppressed, and replaced by a government that is is composed, like the Taliban, of Pashtun, unlike the Northern Alliance, composed, like the Taliban, of Radical Islamists, unlike much of the Northern Alliance, but nonetheless is supposedly at war with the Taliban and supposedly on our side, not withstanding its habit of burning bibles, executing Muslims who convert to Christianity, and executing Muslims who try to rationalize away the more disturbing parts of the Koran, odd behavior for a supposed ally of us and supposed enemy of the Taliban.
You may think this account of the current war is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that the State Department ordered the Northern Alliance to not enter Kabul? Is it not odder that the current government of Kabul has policies that are a lot closer to the Taliban than to the policies of the Northern alliance?
And if the US is on Israel’s side, is it not odd that its policy is that peace should be made by the stronger side yielding land and money to the weaker side?
If Mencius’s account is obviously odd, are there not a lot of even odder aspects about the conventional account?
This is not the place to argue whether his view is correct, but I would like to understand why some people find his view hard to swallow. Of course it comprehensively contradicts official history, but no one seems troubled by versions of history that contradict yesterday’s official history in a leftward direction.
The passage above seems quite obviously true, indeed pretty much common sense.
Yet you don’t offer any direct evidence. Moreover, the style of your comment is precisely the reason why political debates aren’t encouraged on LW. The problems are:
offering only one possible explanation of a selected historical event, ignoring other possible explanations and several important concerns (e.g. you have tacitly assumed that it was feasible to impose any government in Afghanistan without regard to the opinion of the Pashtuns—a dubious assumption in the least)
rhetorical questions instead of well formulated arguments (“you may think this account [...] is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that …”)
implicitly suggesting that the opponent may be biased against new ideas (“or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other”)
conspirationist-style vocabulary (“conventional wisdom ”, “comprehensively contradicts official history”) and unnecessary use of political labels (“leftward direction”); this seems to imply that there is some leftist conspiracy to cover the important facts
The points 3 and 4 are mainly a matter of style, but 1 and 2 are more important. Inference (X is odd, therefore Y must be true), where X and Y are neither exhaustive nor enough precisely specified, is a fairly typical ingredient of nowhere-leading frustrating debates. This is what we try to avoid here.
offering only one possible explanation of a selected historical event, ignoring other possible explanations and several important concerns (e.g. you have tacitly assumed that it was feasible to impose any government in Afghanistan without regard to the opinion of the Pashtuns—a dubious assumption in the least)
In any one particular case one can rationalize all sorts of excellent reasons why the US wanted to preserve the left enemy while utterly destroying the right enemy. But the point is not to argue particular cases, but that in almost every case the US sought to utterly destroy the right enemy, while preserving the left enemy.
And when the US did seek to destroy the left enemy, the State Department resisted that policy the whole way kicking and screaming.
In any one particular case one can rationalize all sorts of excellent reasons...
It was you who started arguing about one particular case. Therefore my reaction logically addressed that case.
More generally, if you offer a particular event (siege of Kabul) as evidence for a general hypothesis (the US State Department always tries to utterly destroy the right enemies and never the left enemies), you have to show that the particular example really supports the general hypothesis (here you had to show that the reason of the SD’s opposition is best explained by sympathies to Taliban). But at this moment you can’t use the general hypothesis to show that it is indeed the best explanation; that would be circular.
Well the stuff you’ve detailed about Afghanistan being a rogue puppet state brought to heel is an untroubling version of history that contradicts the official variety in a leftward direction. I see Constant was quite right to ask what I objected to in the quote, but I thought it obvious which bits were novel—that Israel is an enemy of the US and the Vietcong were not. It’s not that these are troubling, I like being troubled by heterodoxy, but I like it for the opportunity to model their thought processes.
And I understand how someone can believe in the idea that the US is against Israel and for Communism, but I MM actually seems to think it’s true- he thinks the US funding of Israel is explicable in terms of wanting to see Israel destroyed, and the invasion of Vietnam in terms of curbing the anti-american tendencies of communism. And I can’t see what those explanations are.
Likewise, I can see someone interpreting America’s attitude towards Israel as being overly pro-Palestinian, but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true—there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn’t notice the world he’s describing isn’t our own.
but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true—there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn’t notice the world he’s describing isn’t our own.
That is simply false. MM explains, or perhaps rationalizes, why the Palestinian lobby does not exist: He says that the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians are a proxy of the state department. According to MM the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians do not really exist as a group capable of rationally and selfishly following their own interests.
Which might be just rationalizing away an inconvenient fact, but does explain the curious anomaly that the Palestinians don’t rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interests.
Nations are less rational and self interested than individuals, but rationality and self interest is for the most part a rough approximation, as good as a spherical cow. It is a quite good approximation for monarchies such as Qatar and the former Lichtenstein. It is a very bad approximation to Palestinian behavior.
the Palestinians do not really exist as a group capable of rationally and selfishly following their own interests.
Very few large groups are ever capable of rationally following their own interests. One of the things we learn from decision theory and voting theory is that groups, in general, might not have well-defined preferences, even if the members do. When a large group acts incoherently, no special explanation is needed.
Very few large groups are ever capable of rationally following their own interests
The evidence you produce supports the considerably weaker claim, that no group is capable of reliably and consistently rationally following their own interests, and will not always have a well defined interest.
A well run corporation, and most corporations are reasonably well run, perhaps because those that are not are apt to wind up broke, does fairly successfully follow its own interest.
The whole point of organizing a group, having a leadership, is to achieve the capability of pursuing its own interests, (unless of course, it is an astroturf organization)
If one asserts that the Israeli lobby exists and is effective, this implies that Jews organized as the state of Israel are capable of following their collective interests, or at least the interests of the state of Israel.
A corporation is usually quite capable of following the interests of shareholders.
The way a corporation accomplishes this is that there is a board, which supposedly represents the shareholders. The board is theoretically elected by shareholders, though usually it was self appointed when the company was formed, and has subsequently been self perpetuating. But despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that the elections are usually worthless, the board usually does represent the interests of shareholders.
The board appoints a CEO, and delegates all power to him, subject to the limit that they may fire him at any moment. The board is supposed to monitor what he does, but not interfere or second guess him. It is supposed to allow him enough rope to hang himself, and usually it does.
This system does enable large groups to rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interest.
The systems commonly used by governments are generally less effective, but they are not totally and completely ineffective.
And he doesn’t notice the world he’s describing isn’t our own.
The world that we think we are familiar with may be quite different from the way we think it is. We know less than we think. As you write the words above, you are (typically) in a room somewhere, looking at a monitor, surrounded by walls. You see very little of the world, just a few cubic meters of your immediate surroundings. So how do you know about the world that exists outside those four walls?
Could it be that you remember that world, that you remember having been outside these walls before entering the room and writing your forum comment? So you have an eyewitness’s memory of the world outside. Eyewitnesses, however, are notoriously unreliable (just google eyewitness reliable, you’ll find discussion about this phenomenon).
So your own personal memory of the world is unreliable. We know furthermore that your consciousness of what is in front of your eyes right now has enormous gaps. There has been a lot of interesting activity in this area. Google change blindness for example. Google invisible gorilla.
So, we know very little about what is happening right now immediately around us. We have unreliable memory of what happened to us in the past.
And now we move from our most direct sources of knowledge to indirect sources of knowledge, mostly what other people say. The unreliability of our senses, of our mind, and of our memory, must now be combined with the added unreliability of what other people tell us. This forum called “lesswrong” and its parent blog called “overcoming bias” are built in large part on the assumption that people are unreliable, often wildly unreliable.
A little humility is in order. This is not to say that Mencius Moldbug is uniquely clear-sighted. That’s not my point. My purpose is to dent, at least a little, the confidence that he must be wrong because he contradicts what we know quite well the world is like. You write:
And I can’t see what those explanations are.
That can be taken two ways. If you have great self-confidence in your knowledge of the world and in the absence of any important gaps in your reasoning, then that can be taken to mean that since you can’t see his reasons, therefore there must not be excellent reasons.
But it can also be taken another way. If you are not that self-confident, then it can be an admission that you don’t know, with no implication that he is probably wrong. I, for example, can’t see what the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem could possibly be—but when I say this, I am not implying that Wiles’s proof is probably flawed. I am here admitting my own limitations, nothing more.
but I thought it obvious which bits were novel—that Israel is an enemy of the US and the Vietcong were not.
The Vietcong never existed. They were an arm of Hanoi. And Hanoi was never an enemy in the sense that the US wanted it to be overthrown or lose territory—nor in the sense that US derecognized Hanoi’s authority over large parts of North Vietnam. The US seriously undermines the very existence of Israel. It never undermined the communist regime in the North. The squabble between the US and North Vietnam was like a quarrel within a marriage, like the frequent disputes between the Pentagon and the State Department. Indeed, Mencius argues that it was a dispute between the Pentagon and the State Department. In contrast, the dispute between the US and Rhodesia was existential.
And if the US is on Israel’s side, is it not odd that its policy is that peace should be made by the stronger side yielding land and money to the weaker side?
It’s only odd if you abstract away a lot of uncontroversial and widely known facts.
The US gives quite a lot of aid to Israel, in diplomatic and financial terms. Support for Israel is a standard part of both parties’ political platforms. That US support for Israel is limited or qualified doesn’t make it nonexistent. There isn’t a Palestinian government has reliable control over any money or land to speak of. If there’s going to be any yielding of either, it’s going to have to be to the Palestinians, not from them. And most of the Israeli leadership is perfectly aware of this.
That there is such an entity as “the Palestinians” reflects the fact that Palestinians get paid for being Palestinian, paid rather a lot. There was no such entity, no such people, until the money started flowing.
And who pays them? It is remarkably difficult to find out, almost as if paying them was some sort of criminal plot.
But if you dig deep enough, it is primarily the United States and the European Union. And the supposedly European Union aid somehow winds up passing through NGOs full of graduates from the American Ivy League.
The Paris conference (who?) provided 7.7 billion in Palestinian aid over three years 2008-2010. Note that no one seems to want to have their names on these payments.
High estimates for US aid to Israel are based on such highly creative accounting as including Jewish migrants from the US to Israel as foreign aid, and international investment as foreign aid. Actual direct aid for Israel from the US in 2008 was 2.38 billion, which seems remarkably similar to western aid to Palestinians—except that aid to Israel is done with trumpets blowing, and aid to “Palestinians” is done furtively.
The passage above seems quite obviously true, indeed pretty much common sense. Do you have any specific points in it that trouble you, or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other. You quote the article as if it was obviously unreasonable on sight. I am puzzled, and would like to understand what is unreasonable about it.
Recall, for example, when the pentagon was allied with the Northern Alliance, the State Department was allied with the Taliban. The state department ordered the Northern Alliance not to enter Kabul, much as it demands that Israel give Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The Pentagon furtively indicated it was fine with the Northern Alliance entering Kabul, which resulted in something close to shooting war between the Pentagon and the State Department. The Northern alliance, contrary to orders, entered Kabul and threw the Taliban out of Kabul. In the end, the state department, and thus the Taliban, won, in that the Northern Alliance was suppressed, and replaced by a government that is is composed, like the Taliban, of Pashtun, unlike the Northern Alliance, composed, like the Taliban, of Radical Islamists, unlike much of the Northern Alliance, but nonetheless is supposedly at war with the Taliban and supposedly on our side, not withstanding its habit of burning bibles, executing Muslims who convert to Christianity, and executing Muslims who try to rationalize away the more disturbing parts of the Koran, odd behavior for a supposed ally of us and supposed enemy of the Taliban.
You may think this account of the current war is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that the State Department ordered the Northern Alliance to not enter Kabul? Is it not odder that the current government of Kabul has policies that are a lot closer to the Taliban than to the policies of the Northern alliance?
And if the US is on Israel’s side, is it not odd that its policy is that peace should be made by the stronger side yielding land and money to the weaker side?
If Mencius’s account is obviously odd, are there not a lot of even odder aspects about the conventional account?
This is not the place to argue whether his view is correct, but I would like to understand why some people find his view hard to swallow. Of course it comprehensively contradicts official history, but no one seems troubled by versions of history that contradict yesterday’s official history in a leftward direction.
Yet you don’t offer any direct evidence. Moreover, the style of your comment is precisely the reason why political debates aren’t encouraged on LW. The problems are:
offering only one possible explanation of a selected historical event, ignoring other possible explanations and several important concerns (e.g. you have tacitly assumed that it was feasible to impose any government in Afghanistan without regard to the opinion of the Pashtuns—a dubious assumption in the least)
rhetorical questions instead of well formulated arguments (“you may think this account [...] is odd, but if it is odd, is not it odder that …”)
implicitly suggesting that the opponent may be biased against new ideas (“or is it just that the entire thing turns conventional wisdom one end over the other”)
conspirationist-style vocabulary (“conventional wisdom ”, “comprehensively contradicts official history”) and unnecessary use of political labels (“leftward direction”); this seems to imply that there is some leftist conspiracy to cover the important facts
The points 3 and 4 are mainly a matter of style, but 1 and 2 are more important. Inference (X is odd, therefore Y must be true), where X and Y are neither exhaustive nor enough precisely specified, is a fairly typical ingredient of nowhere-leading frustrating debates. This is what we try to avoid here.
In any one particular case one can rationalize all sorts of excellent reasons why the US wanted to preserve the left enemy while utterly destroying the right enemy. But the point is not to argue particular cases, but that in almost every case the US sought to utterly destroy the right enemy, while preserving the left enemy.
And when the US did seek to destroy the left enemy, the State Department resisted that policy the whole way kicking and screaming.
It was you who started arguing about one particular case. Therefore my reaction logically addressed that case.
More generally, if you offer a particular event (siege of Kabul) as evidence for a general hypothesis (the US State Department always tries to utterly destroy the right enemies and never the left enemies), you have to show that the particular example really supports the general hypothesis (here you had to show that the reason of the SD’s opposition is best explained by sympathies to Taliban). But at this moment you can’t use the general hypothesis to show that it is indeed the best explanation; that would be circular.
Well the stuff you’ve detailed about Afghanistan being a rogue puppet state brought to heel is an untroubling version of history that contradicts the official variety in a leftward direction. I see Constant was quite right to ask what I objected to in the quote, but I thought it obvious which bits were novel—that Israel is an enemy of the US and the Vietcong were not. It’s not that these are troubling, I like being troubled by heterodoxy, but I like it for the opportunity to model their thought processes.
And I understand how someone can believe in the idea that the US is against Israel and for Communism, but I MM actually seems to think it’s true- he thinks the US funding of Israel is explicable in terms of wanting to see Israel destroyed, and the invasion of Vietnam in terms of curbing the anti-american tendencies of communism. And I can’t see what those explanations are.
Likewise, I can see someone interpreting America’s attitude towards Israel as being overly pro-Palestinian, but MM actually goes ahead and describes what the world would look like for this to be true—there would be a Palestinian lobby which dwarfs AIPAC and J-Street in size. And he doesn’t notice the world he’s describing isn’t our own.
That is simply false. MM explains, or perhaps rationalizes, why the Palestinian lobby does not exist: He says that the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians are a proxy of the state department. According to MM the Palestinian lobby does not exist, because the Palestinians do not really exist as a group capable of rationally and selfishly following their own interests.
Which might be just rationalizing away an inconvenient fact, but does explain the curious anomaly that the Palestinians don’t rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interests.
Is there any nation that “rationally and selfishly follows its collective interest”?
It is safe to say that there isn’t. The rest of us would have been left or overwhelmed within months.
Huh? Do you think that selfishness unambiguously means: dominate Earth (or what left of it) as fast as possible?
No.
Nations are less rational and self interested than individuals, but rationality and self interest is for the most part a rough approximation, as good as a spherical cow. It is a quite good approximation for monarchies such as Qatar and the former Lichtenstein. It is a very bad approximation to Palestinian behavior.
WARNING: MIND-KILLER FIELD AHEAD
Very few large groups are ever capable of rationally following their own interests. One of the things we learn from decision theory and voting theory is that groups, in general, might not have well-defined preferences, even if the members do. When a large group acts incoherently, no special explanation is needed.
The evidence you produce supports the considerably weaker claim, that no group is capable of reliably and consistently rationally following their own interests, and will not always have a well defined interest.
A well run corporation, and most corporations are reasonably well run, perhaps because those that are not are apt to wind up broke, does fairly successfully follow its own interest.
The whole point of organizing a group, having a leadership, is to achieve the capability of pursuing its own interests, (unless of course, it is an astroturf organization)
If one asserts that the Israeli lobby exists and is effective, this implies that Jews organized as the state of Israel are capable of following their collective interests, or at least the interests of the state of Israel.
A corporation is usually quite capable of following the interests of shareholders.
The way a corporation accomplishes this is that there is a board, which supposedly represents the shareholders. The board is theoretically elected by shareholders, though usually it was self appointed when the company was formed, and has subsequently been self perpetuating. But despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that the elections are usually worthless, the board usually does represent the interests of shareholders.
The board appoints a CEO, and delegates all power to him, subject to the limit that they may fire him at any moment. The board is supposed to monitor what he does, but not interfere or second guess him. It is supposed to allow him enough rope to hang himself, and usually it does.
This system does enable large groups to rationally and selfishly follow their own collective interest.
The systems commonly used by governments are generally less effective, but they are not totally and completely ineffective.
The world that we think we are familiar with may be quite different from the way we think it is. We know less than we think. As you write the words above, you are (typically) in a room somewhere, looking at a monitor, surrounded by walls. You see very little of the world, just a few cubic meters of your immediate surroundings. So how do you know about the world that exists outside those four walls?
Could it be that you remember that world, that you remember having been outside these walls before entering the room and writing your forum comment? So you have an eyewitness’s memory of the world outside. Eyewitnesses, however, are notoriously unreliable (just google eyewitness reliable, you’ll find discussion about this phenomenon).
So your own personal memory of the world is unreliable. We know furthermore that your consciousness of what is in front of your eyes right now has enormous gaps. There has been a lot of interesting activity in this area. Google change blindness for example. Google invisible gorilla.
So, we know very little about what is happening right now immediately around us. We have unreliable memory of what happened to us in the past.
And now we move from our most direct sources of knowledge to indirect sources of knowledge, mostly what other people say. The unreliability of our senses, of our mind, and of our memory, must now be combined with the added unreliability of what other people tell us. This forum called “lesswrong” and its parent blog called “overcoming bias” are built in large part on the assumption that people are unreliable, often wildly unreliable.
A little humility is in order. This is not to say that Mencius Moldbug is uniquely clear-sighted. That’s not my point. My purpose is to dent, at least a little, the confidence that he must be wrong because he contradicts what we know quite well the world is like. You write:
That can be taken two ways. If you have great self-confidence in your knowledge of the world and in the absence of any important gaps in your reasoning, then that can be taken to mean that since you can’t see his reasons, therefore there must not be excellent reasons.
But it can also be taken another way. If you are not that self-confident, then it can be an admission that you don’t know, with no implication that he is probably wrong. I, for example, can’t see what the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem could possibly be—but when I say this, I am not implying that Wiles’s proof is probably flawed. I am here admitting my own limitations, nothing more.
The Vietcong never existed. They were an arm of Hanoi. And Hanoi was never an enemy in the sense that the US wanted it to be overthrown or lose territory—nor in the sense that US derecognized Hanoi’s authority over large parts of North Vietnam. The US seriously undermines the very existence of Israel. It never undermined the communist regime in the North. The squabble between the US and North Vietnam was like a quarrel within a marriage, like the frequent disputes between the Pentagon and the State Department. Indeed, Mencius argues that it was a dispute between the Pentagon and the State Department. In contrast, the dispute between the US and Rhodesia was existential.
WARNING: MIND-KILLER FIELD AHEAD
It’s only odd if you abstract away a lot of uncontroversial and widely known facts.
The US gives quite a lot of aid to Israel, in diplomatic and financial terms. Support for Israel is a standard part of both parties’ political platforms. That US support for Israel is limited or qualified doesn’t make it nonexistent. There isn’t a Palestinian government has reliable control over any money or land to speak of. If there’s going to be any yielding of either, it’s going to have to be to the Palestinians, not from them. And most of the Israeli leadership is perfectly aware of this.
That there is such an entity as “the Palestinians” reflects the fact that Palestinians get paid for being Palestinian, paid rather a lot. There was no such entity, no such people, until the money started flowing.
And who pays them? It is remarkably difficult to find out, almost as if paying them was some sort of criminal plot.
But if you dig deep enough, it is primarily the United States and the European Union. And the supposedly European Union aid somehow winds up passing through NGOs full of graduates from the American Ivy League.
The Paris conference (who?) provided 7.7 billion in Palestinian aid over three years 2008-2010. Note that no one seems to want to have their names on these payments.
High estimates for US aid to Israel are based on such highly creative accounting as including Jewish migrants from the US to Israel as foreign aid, and international investment as foreign aid. Actual direct aid for Israel from the US in 2008 was 2.38 billion, which seems remarkably similar to western aid to Palestinians—except that aid to Israel is done with trumpets blowing, and aid to “Palestinians” is done furtively.