The first one surprises me because hardly anyone on LW seems conservative (and the polls confirm this).
However, there are a few fairly common (or at least it seems so to me) opinions on LW which are distinctively un-Left: democracy is bad, there are racial differences in important traits, and women complain way too much about how men treat them. We’ll see how that last one plays out.
there are a few fairly common (or at least it seems so to me)
I think that they appear to be more common than they actually are because their proponents are much louder than everyone else.
democracy is bad, there are racial differences in important traits, and women complain way too much about how men treat them
One of those is a factual question, not a policy question. (Also, there are plenty of left-wingers who wouldn’t throw a fit at “it appears that black people and Native Americans have lower average IQ than white people, whereas East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews have higher average IQ; the differences between the group averages are comparable with the standard deviations within each group; it’s not yet fully clear how much the differences between the group averages are due to genetics and how much they are due to socio-economic conditions”, at least outside liberal arts departments.)
For the last year or so, I’ve been thinking that a “real” (read pre-WW2) democracy is not just bad but very much right-wing (see Corey Robin’s writings on libertarianism, “democratic feudalism”, etc).
Like some other nebulous concepts, e.g. multiculturalism, I see it as grafted onto the “real” corpus of Left ideas—liberty, equality, fraternity, hard-boiled egg, etc—as a consequence of political maneuvering and long-time coalitions, without due reflection. Think of it: today the more popular anti-Left/anti-progressive positions are not monarchism/neo-reaction/etc but right-wing libertarianism and fascist populism, which often invoke democratic slogans.
there are racial differences in important traits
Like Konkvistador already said a few times, eugenics started out as a left-wing/progressive movement, and many old-time progressives—including even American abolitionists—were outright racist.
They are also practically non-existent in right wing parties in the West. While being contrarian is a bad sign, getting people from all mainstream political positions to go into sputtering apoplexy with the same input can be a good sign.
I dunno, 2 and 3 seem like things I’d expect the right-wing to believe (though probably with less nuance) in America (not to say they wouldn’t go into sputtering apoplexy if you said certain formulations of those ideas out loud and there was a camera nearby). And who was calling for revolution after the recent election? (tongue somewhat in cheek there)
Derbyshire’s firing wasn’t a show for public consumption but a genuine rebuke from the National Review establishment caused by ideological differences.
Maybe. There is still undoubtedly a strong racist component to the right-wing belief melange.
But perhaps we’re arguing semantics. I meant that the belief in question is something that would be associated with the right wing (due to said component), something that would be argued, with not-insignificant frequency, covertly by public figures and publicly by private citizens of that party, not that it’s something a majority of right-wing-identified people would assent to, privately or publicly. Is that unfair?
There is still undoubtedly a strong racist component to the right-wing belief melange.
Considering that any mostly white gathering of Americans is at risk of being called racist until proven otherwise I’m not at all impressed at all by this observation. How would you differentiate the world with racism present beyond the background noise among Republicans and one where it is overrepresented?
Republicans could adopt any possible set of policy proposals they like, the opinions of their voters likewise could change to anything but as long as their voters retained the colour of their skin they would still end up being called racist at least occasionally.
But perhaps we’re arguing semantics. I meant that the belief in question is something that would be associated with the right wing (due to said component), something that would be argued, with not-insignificant frequency, covertly by public figures and publicly by private citizens of that party, not that it’s something a majority of right-wing-identified people would assent to, privately or publicly. Is that unfair?
Not really. Private citizens of the party arguing for such things publicly are generally quite rare. If the case where different why are the examples of racism among the republican base presented by the media so terribly feeble? The “racism” of say the Tea Party which was presented as this incredibly dangerous far right fringe movement, is not worth being called that at all.
I do agree some public figures probably do still in private hold such opinions.
If you assume that people of color are at least moderately competent judges of their own interests, then the Republicans not attracting people of color should at least be weak evidence that Republicans show prejudice.
It’s weak evidence because there are other possible explanations—perhaps people of color don’t like feeling so strongly outnumbered so there’s a stable situation which isn’t a result of white racism.
If you assume that people of color are at least moderately competent judges of their own interests, then the Republicans not attracting people of color should at least be weak evidence that Republicans show prejudice.
It is also weak evidence that the Democratic party is offering non-white voters benefits beyond those they offer to white voters. A model of a race preference Democratic party and a race blind Republican party works just as well as long as you assume Democrats are slightly anti-white.
It’s weak evidence because there are other possible explanations—perhaps people of color don’t like feeling so strongly outnumbered so there’s a stable situation which isn’t a result of white racism.
In 1969 and 1971, Schelling published widely cited articles dealing with racial dynamics and what he termed “a general theory of tipping”.[10] In these papers he showed that a preference that one’s neighbors be of the same color, or even a preference for a mixture “up to some limit”, could lead to total segregation, thus arguing that motives, malicious or not, were indistinguishable as to explaining the phenomenon of complete local separation of distinct groups. He used coins on graph paper to demonstrate his theory by placing pennies and nickels in different patterns on the “board” and then moving them one by one if they were in an “unhappy” situation.
Schelling’s dynamics has been cited as a way of explaining variations that are found in what are regarded as meaningful differences – gender, age, race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, and religion. Once a cycle of such change has begun, it may have a self-sustaining momentum. His 1978 book Micromotives and Macrobehaviors expanded on, and generalized, these themes[11] and is standardly cited in the literature of agent-based computational economics.
If you assume that people of color are at least moderately competent judges of their own interests, then the Republicans not attracting people of color should at least be weak evidence that Republicans show prejudice.
Or that Democrats show prejudice in the other direction and thus become more attractive… I guess many Republicans would prefer that explanation :-)
So you believe that racism is not alive and well in modern America and American politics?
You don’t think that the “birther controversy” was racist in nature? You think this whole thing is a coincidence? You think this type of thing doesn’t happen? You think this is a complete fabrication?
This seems like a complete failure of critical thinking.
If this isn’t what you’re saying, could you say plainly what it is you believe and why?
You don’t think that the “birther controversy” was racist in nature?
No.
You think this whole thing is a coincidence?
Racists do not generally like Obama because he has an African father. This is incredibly surprising? Do a google search for racist epithets and say Condoleezza Rice.
Are you really saying that if Democrats had a white candidate on election day 2016 and Republicans a black one, you wouldn’t find the appropriate slurs online?
You think this type of thing doesn’t happen?
Of course it does. Do you have evidence it happens often enough to be a concern rather than pointing out anecdotes? Also what has this got to do with Republicans rather than American society as a whole?
You think this is a complete fabrication?
No why would I? A mere two decades before that there was basically a new splinter party just on the segregation issue.
This seems like a complete failure of critical thinking.
I will say the same. You seem to have utterly failed at the principle of charity if not outright straw manned my position.
I am not an American. I’m not a Republican. Yet the examples you picked seem to target a CNN caricature of a Fox News viewer. Why did you pattern match me to that? That this post got up voted to 3 karma before my response suggests filling a post with solid partisan digs can be a good way to gain votes on LessWrong and is an indication of us suffering a lack of diversity.
If this isn’t what you’re saying, could you say plainly what it is you believe and why?
I believe most people in America and the West have on a conscious level an irrational aversion to racism two or three orders of magnitude out of proportion to the actual utilitarian damage it causes. This is partially caused by virtue signalling spirals.
Thank you for the correction! I’ve put the words in my Anki deck. English is not my native language so I often make mistakes, please if you ever spot an error don’t hesitate to comment or PM me.
If I were interested in racist epitaphs, I’m not sure I could find them on Google. Googling for “racist epitaphs” as was suggested actually mostly turns up articles on racist epithets. Googling for “racist epitaphs -epithets” also mostly turns up incorrect references to racist epithets, perhaps unsurprisingly. ”racist epitaphs -epithets tombstone” turns up a bunch of stuff unrelated to racism.
Racist do not generally like Obama because he is has an African father. This is incredibly surprising.
This seems… well, nonsensical, to be honest. Either there’s a typo somewhere in it or I’m completely failing to get the point. Would you mind clarifying?
Yeah, I’d assumed that one. Still, about the only way I can make sense of the line is if I assume you mean Afrocentric racists, and those are… well, actually not vanishingly rare (aside from some lexical quibbles on “racist”), but certainly rarer than the Eurocentric kind and pretty clearly not what was being discussed in context.
You don’t think that the “birther controversy” was racist in nature?
Yes, it’s amazing how easy it is to find evidence of racism when you’re willing to claim things are secretly motivated by racism with no evidence.
You think this whole thing is a coincidence?
Wow, there appears to be one twit a day that uses both the words “Obama” and “nigger”, and almost half of those appear to be pro-Obama twits using “nigger” ironically.
You think this type of thing doesn’t happen?
Given the correlation between race and crime, I don’t see your point.
This seems like a complete failure of critical thinking.
Since you appear to be relatively new to LW, let me point out that this kind of ad hominem is completely inappropriate on LW even if it didn’t follow laughably weak arguments.
First, the claim is incredibly unusual compared to standard political irrationality. The last time this claim occurred was against Chester Arthur (US president 1881) - and John McCain (who was born in the Panama Canal Zone, outside the sovereign territory of the US) received no challenges to his eligibility for office.
Second, the ratio of intensity to plausibility is much higher that most American political irrationality—the long form has been released, after all. This suggests there’s more than ordinary political mindkiller at play.
Why isn’t “Politics is the mindkiller” sufficient for people to believe Obama is a space alien? Or for people to believe that John McCain isn’t a natural born citizen, particularly given that he wasn’t born in the US? “Politics is the mindkiller” isn’t and shouldn’t be able to account for just any negative belief that people hold about a candidate they don’t believe in.
Also, I find the birther controversy weird because I think some laws matter a great deal more than others, and the natural born citizen rule doesn’t serve any important purpose that I can see.
I asked a birther what he expected to happen if it turned out that Obama was proven to have been born in Kenya, and he hadn’t even thought about the question, which probably implied that few if any birthers had thought about it either, or they would have been discussing it. I’m not sure this proves anything about racism, but it’s evidence that there was something weird going on.
Why isn’t “politics is the mindkiller” sufficient?
There’s a danger in this being too broad an explanation, such that it doesn’t actually explain anything. In this context, some ideas are so extreme, that simply using that explanation seems potentially insufficient. That said, while racism may be in play, there’s some evidence otherwise that what is going on here is a combination of politics is the mindkiller with people who are already less connected to reality than others. Thus, for example, this probably explains why Alan Keyes was a birther (racism seems like it isn’t likely to be relevant given that Keyes is black).
But at the same time, there’s definite evidence for something other than just politics as the mindkiller. In particular, although some on the left did pick up on the birtherism early on (for example Phillip Berg), it didn’t spread to the left-wing opponents of Obama in any substantial fashion, like it did to those on the right. In that context, the fact that Republicans in general are more racist seems robust. (For example, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to have a negative opinion of interracial marriage or think it should be outlawed 1). And the possibility of a causal relationship has to be at minimum a located hypothesis. On the other hand, there are other possible hypotheses, such as the tendencies in the last few years for self-identified conservatives and Republicans to turn to their own news sources. While this occurs on both ends of the American political spectrum, it seems especially in the context of the last election and the response to people like Nate Silver and Sam Wang, that in the last two years it has occurred more on the right-wing. Moreover, it doesn’t actually need to be more prominent on either side of the political spectrum to have had this sort of effect.
Overall, politics as mindkiller seems unsatisfactory in this context, but racism is definitely not the only possible other causal factor at work here. It seems likely that a variety of different factors are at play, and deciding how strong any given one of them is may be very tough.
There’s a danger in this being too broad an explanation, such that it doesn’t actually explain anything. In this context, some ideas are so extreme, that simply using that explanation seems potentially insufficient. That said, while racism may be in play, there’s some evidence otherwise that what is going on here is a combination of politics is the mindkiller with people who are already less connected to reality than others. Thus, for example, this probably explains why Alan Keyes was a birther (racism seems like it isn’t likely to be relevant given that Keyes is black).
I think xenophobia is at least as likely a motivation as racism, considering that his father wasn’t a U.S. national, and he spent some of his formative years in Indonesia. People accuse him of not being a natural born citizen because they’re specifically afraid that he’s too foreign.
People may easily regard people of different races from their own country as being part of their cultural in-group, where people of different countries, particularly ones like Kenya and Indonesia which aren’t Western first-world nations, are cultural outgroup members.
I feel like we are having an unintentional definitional dispute. In the US political realm, the essence of the accusation of “racism” is unjustly treating others as cultural outgroup.
I think that’s an inappropriate inflation of the term, since under that definition a person could easily be “racist” against members of their own race who have different cultural backgrounds, but not against ones who don’t. Racism is a basis for unjustly treating others as outgroup members, but it can only lower the quality of our discourse if we describe all cases of unjustly treating others as outgroup members as racism.
If I understand your distinction correctly, the irrational hostility of the Californians to Oklahomans during the 1930s Great Depression is xenophobia and not racism. I guess I’m having difficulty coming up with examples of irrational / hostile racism that isn’t xenophobic. What exactly is the goal of the distinction you are making?
Well, the narrower definition of xenophobia is a fear of people from other countries. If one interprets “a fear of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange” broadly enough, then all racism is xenophobia, but all xenophobia is certainly not racism.
The point of the distinction I’m making is to set out a class wherein people could be expected to mistrust Obama for having a Kenyan father and having spent a number of his childhood years in Indonesia, but not to mistrust or be unwilling to vote for a person of the same racial heritage who was born and raised in their own neighborhood to parents who were both American citizens.
For a broad enough definition of racism, I don’t doubt that most birthers are racists; the Implicit Association Test suggests that most people have some degree of racial bias. But I do think that the fact that Obama is half Kenyan and spent some of his time growing up in Indonesia has much more explanatory power with respect to the birther controversy than the fact that he falls into the demographic category of African American.
To clarify, I don’t think we are currently having a substantive disagreement. That is, I think we both agree that the continued strength of the birther movement is an expression of some people’s belief that Obama is outgroup and the predictable irrationality that follows from that conclusion.
That’s what most people in the US mean when they talk about the problems of racism. If I could persuade everyone to just call this process “Othering” without specific reference to race or sex or nationality or whatever, I’d consider it.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to show that colloquial usage is misleading. Better definitions can often lead to clearer analysis. You are suggesting that mis-usage of racism is confusing the analysis, but I don’t see how. Some of that impression comes from my sense that the birthers wouldn’t vote for Obama even if he were born and raised in Chicago.
“Othering” is broad enough to encapsulate the phenomenon, but also broad enough that it doesn’t narrow down the prejudice under discussion. I’ll admit to also having a kneejerk dislike of any use of the term, since I’ve read and have an abysmally low opinion of the work of the author who popularized it
I don’t doubt that birthers mostly wouldn’t vote for Obama even if he were born and raised in Chicago, but that’s because I suspect that there’s an extremely strong overlap between that level of xenophobia and people who’re socially conservative enough to not want to vote for him on a policy basis.
Birthers are probably mostly racist, by broad enough definitions of racism, and they are certainly almost all conservative, but that doesn’t mean that their racism or their conservatism are the best explanations for their being birthers.
If a person opposes a specific government policy, and another person argues “this person just opposes the policy because they’re rich,” when the person who opposes it is a rich libertarian, and the policy is opposed by almost all libertarians, but mostly not by rich people who’re not also libertarians, then “opposes the policy because they’re rich” is a bad explanation.
If a person opposes a specific government policy, and another person argues “this person just opposes the policy because they’re rich,” when the person who opposes it is a rich libertarian, and the policy is opposed by almost all libertarians, but mostly not by rich people who’re not also libertarians, then “opposes the policy because they’re rich” is a bad explanation.
I agree with all of that. I just don’t understand what non-othering irrational racism is.
Edit: Due to insufficient background, I can neither defend nor attack Said, but my sense is that Othering and irrational outgroupism are essentially the same phenomena. At the very least, irrational outgroupism is a very good steelman of Othering.
I’m not arguing that there is non-othering irrational racism, and even if there is I wouldn’t be arguing that it’s relevant to the issue under discussion (now that I think of it, there probably is in the form of self-hating racism, where the group one is prejudiced against is “us”,) but there are also non-racism forms of othering, or outgrouping, and I think that racism is not the most salient issue of prejudice in this matter.
Fair enough. I think some of the problem is that colloquial language lacks the technical vocabulary to communicate the issue precisely. For example, I think the common usage of xenophobia and racism is not a natural kind, and othering captures the insight that colloquial usage is generally aiming for when it says “racism.” Given that, I think “birtherism is racism” is about as accurate a colloquial phrase as we are likely to meet—as intended, that phrase doesn’t agree with your point, despite its imprecision.
The usage I’m suggesting helps clarify the distinction between outgroupism and the personal issues embedded in “self-hating” racism. But it is technical vocabulary that has not yet spread into common usage. I don’t think the lack of technical vocabulary indicates an unusual level of confusion on this issue.
Most importantly, pushing the point masks fundamental agreement between you and others like JoshuaZ or TorqueDrifter.
I wasn’t intending to make you feel uncomfortable. On the other hand, I don’t think dark arts require a lot of intent.
Anyway, I believe that anti-racism/some parts of current feminism are an emotionally abusive attempt to address real issues.
Most of the anti-racists here have not been abusive, but imagine a social environment where this is the dominant tone.
The emotional abuse leads to a lot of resistance and avoidance, but the issues being real has its own pull.
I’ve seen people (arguably including me) who were very unfond of the emotional abuse still come to believe that at least some of the issues are valid and worthy of being addressed. What’s more, I’m reasonably certain that at least some of those people don’t realize they’ve changed their minds.
I don’t know where you personally will end up on these issues (it wouldn’t surprise me if the discussion of gender prejudice brings in substantial amounts about racism and possibly ablism), but I expect that LW will be taken pretty far towards believing that (many) men mistreat women in ways that ought to be corrected. It wouldn’t surprise me if (this being LW) there will also be more clarity about ways that women could and should treat men better.
Lessening Inferential Distance is only the first post in a series. I’m expecting that harder issues will be brought up in later posts.
I believe that, with your linked comment getting 32 points, you are making Nancy rather uncomfortable in turn.
I’m fairly certain that we’re all suffering from the hostile media effect; e.g. you keep saying how there’s creeping censorship of right-wing ideas on LW, while I’m disturbed by such complaints getting karma and support :)
OK, I’m considering it. How does it indicate creeping censorship of right-wing ideas on LW?
I neither upvoted nor downvoted that post, so my guesses at the motivations of downvoters shouldn’t be trusted too far, but my guess is that mostly it was downvoted because, while it was ostensibly about a technique of rationality, (1) what it said about that technique was mostly very obvious, (2) a big chunk of the article was devoted to the discussion of an entirely different topic with considerable mindkilling potential, and (3) this gives some ground for suspicion that the rationality-technique discussion served largely as a pretext for airing the author’s views on that topic. (A topic that others in the past have been curiously enthusiastic to air similar views on.)
Having said all that, I’ll add that in fact I don’t think it likely that MTGandP is a racist or that s/he wrote that post in order to bolster racist ideas, and I think that if anyone downvoted that post because they wanted to discourage a nasty racist (rather than, e.g., to discourage other people who are nasty racists from posting similar stuff) then they made a mistake. But the point is that the downvotes don’t look to me like censorship of right-wing ideas; they look to me like some combination of (1) finding the post unenlightening and (2) seeing it as promoting racism.
As for the “discussion, particularly here”, again that doesn’t look to me at all like censorship of right-wing ideas, nor like people arguing for the censorship of right-wing ideas. It looks to me like one person apparently thinking that racism has gone away and other people objecting that no it bloody hasn’t. (Exception: the very first comment in the thread you linked to says, roughly, “race is a needlessly contentious thing to discuss to make your point”, which (1) is true if the point is what MTGandP says, rather than that being a pretext for talking about race, and (2) doesn’t constitute any sort of attempt at censorship, as opposed to advice that some topics are likely on the whole not to produce helpful discussion.)
Incidentally, I notice that some people in this thread are insisting that there’s nothing particularly right-wing about believing in racial intelligence differences, whereas the only thing I can see to link the downvoting of the post you linked to with “right-wing ideas” is its defence of (discussing the possibility of) racial intelligence differences. Curious.
I neither upvoted nor downvoted that post, so my guesses at the motivations of downvoters shouldn’t be trusted too far, but my guess is that mostly it was downvoted because, while it was ostensibly about a technique of rationality, (1) what it said about that technique was mostly very obvious, (2) a big chunk of the article was devoted to the discussion of an entirely different topic with considerable mindkilling potential, and (3) this gives some ground for suspicion that the rationality-technique discussion served largely as a pretext for airing the author’s views on that topic.
See my comment here for why I think the example was appropriate. Furthermore, the way you’re throwing around the term “racist ideas” suggests you are also making the mistake the post describes with respect to the example given.
As for the “discussion, particularly here”, again that doesn’t look to me at all like censorship of right-wing ideas, nor like people arguing for the censorship of right-wing ideas.
You might have missed the part where AndrewHickey says:
If you think that racism was only a problem ‘not so long ago’ rather than being an ongoing, major problem, then you probably just shouldn’t discuss race at all.
Incidentally, I notice that some people in this thread are insisting that there’s nothing particularly right-wing about believing in racial intelligence differences, whereas the only thing I can see to link the downvoting of the post you linked to with “right-wing ideas” is its defence of (discussing the possibility of) racial intelligence differences.
Depends on what you mean by “right-wing”. It’s certainly true that there are currently a number of left-wing people who believe that discussing race and intelligence is morally unacceptable.
Incidentally, I notice that some people in this thread are insisting that there’s nothing particularly right-wing about believing in racial intelligence differences, whereas the only thing I can see to link the downvoting of the post you linked to with “right-wing ideas” is its defence of (discussing the possibility of) racial intelligence differences.
Depends on what you mean by “right-wing”. It’s certainly true that there are currently a number of left-wing people who believe that discussing race and intelligence is morally unacceptable.
I think it’s interesting that you keep changing the subject from “what propositions Greens believe” to your beliefs about “what topics Blues think are morally acceptable to discuss”. It comes across that you’re trying to make some sort of deeply subtle point about what beliefs you think it is morally acceptable to believe you have about Blues.
the way you’re throwing around the term “racist ideas” suggests you are also making the mistake the post describes
Why?
You might have missed the part where [...]
No, I didn’t miss it. I don’t see any attempt at censorship there; I see someone saying: you appear to be ignorant about X, and in view of that you would do better to leave the subject alone.
Depends on what you mean by “right-wing”.
No, I don’t think it does. Because so far as I can see there is nothing else about the post, or the votes it got, or the ensuing discussion, that anyone would consider an instance of “creeping censorship of right-wing ideas”. Given that you cited it as an example of that, I can only conclude that you consider belief in racial intelligence differences to be a “right-wing idea”. My own understanding of the term “right-wing” doesn’t come into it, unless there’s something else in the post that’s distinctively right-wing; did I miss something?
the way you’re throwing around the term “racist ideas” suggests you are also making the mistake the post describes
Why?
Because you’re using “racist” as a property of an idea independent of its truth value that lets you dismiss it.
No, I didn’t miss it. I don’t see any attempt at censorship there; I see someone saying: you appear to be ignorant about X, and in view of that you would do better to leave the subject alone.
Well, especially on LW, the normal response to ignorance is to help educate the person being ignorant rather than to attempt to dismiss him as quickly as possible.
Furthermore, the statement is more like “you said something that could be stretched to imply you are don’t know X (where X is itself a highly politicized claim whose truth value is a matter of political dispute) that means you are too ignorant to even say anything about the topic”.
Because you’re using “racist” as a property of an idea independent of its truth value that lets you dismiss it.
What idea do you think I’m doing that to?
(It seems clear to me that there are ideas that can reasonably be described as “racist ideas”. For instance, the idea that black people are fundamentally inferior to white people in abilities, character, and personal value, and that this means they should be segregated to keep them out of the way of superior white people. Or the idea that the right thing to do with people of Jewish descent is to put them into concentration camps and kill them en masse. So if you’re saying that merely using the words “racist ideas” is proof of error and confusion, I think that’s wrong. On the other hand, if there’s some actual idea you think I’m wrongly describing that way, then let’s hear what idea that is.)
the normal response to ignorance is to help educate the person being ignorant rather than to attempt to dismiss him as quickly as possible
I’ve seen both quite often.
But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that (1) Andrew Hickey was in fact intending to dismiss MTGandP as quickly as possible and to get him (note: actually I have no idea whether MTGandP is male or female; indeed the name rather suggests a collective) to drop the subject, and that (2) such behaviour is very atypical on Less Wrong. What then? How does this indicate “creeping censorship of right-wing ideas”?
The most it indicates, being as uncharitable as possible to AH, is that one person (AH) is trying to intimidate another person (MT) out of talking about an idea that AH considers racist. How do you get from “AH tries to intimidate MT out of talking about the idea that black people might have inferior intelligence” to “LW exhibits creeping censorship of right-wing ideas”? No one was censored. There was no deluge of people agreeing with AH and telling MT to shut up. The idea in question isn’t, at least according to others in this thread who appear sympathetic to “right-wing-ideas”, particularly a right-wing one anyway.
Having said all that, I’ll add that in fact I don’t think it likely that MTGandP is a racist or that s/he wrote that post in order to bolster racist ideas, and I think that if anyone downvoted that post because they wanted to discourage a nasty racist (rather than, e.g., to discourage other people who are nasty racists from posting similar stuff) then they made a mistake. But the point is that the downvotes don’t look to me like censorship of right-wing ideas; they look to me like some combination of (1) finding the post unenlightening and (2) seeing it as promoting racism.
What work is the word “racist” doing in that paragraph that couldn’t be better done by the word “wrong”?
But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that (1) Andrew Hickey was in fact intending to dismiss MTGandP as quickly as possible and to get him (note: actually I have no idea whether MTGandP is male or female; indeed the name rather suggests a collective) to drop the subject, and that (2) such behaviour is very atypical on Less Wrong. What then? How does this indicate “creeping censorship of right-wing ideas”?
The fact that MT’s post is at −7 and AH’s comment is at +4 rather than the other way around suggests the problem isn’t limited to AH.
What work is the word “racist” doing in that paragraph [...]
The word occurs several times in different contexts; I take it (from what you’ve said elsewhere here) that you’re referring to the instance where it prefixes “ideas”. The work it’s doing that couldn’t be better done by “wrong” is specifying the particular variety of allegedly-wrong ideas I’m saying I think MTGandP isn’t trying to promote.
The fact that MT’s post is at −7 and AH’s comment is at +4 [...]
… indicates that there are some other people who think MTGandP’s post wasn’t very good (which might be for many reasons), and that there are some other people who agree with AH (which also might be for many reasons).
I repeat: How does any of this amount to “creeping censorship of right-wing ideas”? What specific right-wing ideas? How are they being censored?
Like I already said a few times, nearly all the highly upvoted posts and comments that explicitly bring up ideology—like yours—appear to come from the right. Duh, you’ll say, if most of the LW stuff is implicitly liberal/progressive, then of course what’s going to stand out is (intelligently argued) contrarianism. But the disturbing thing to me is that the mainstream doesn’t seem to react to the challenge.
What I have in mind is not some isolated insightful comments e.g. criticizing moldbuggery, defending egalitarianism or feminism or something like that—they do appear—but an acknowledgement of LW’s underlying ideological non-neutrality. E.g. this post by Eliezer, or this one by Luke would’ve hardly been received well without the author and the audience sharing Enlightenment/Universalist values; both the tone and the message rely on an ideological foundation (one that I desire to analyze and add to—not deconstruct).
Yet there’s not enough acknowledgement and conscious defense of those values, so when such content is challenged from an alt-right perspective, the attacking side ends up with the last word in the discussion. So to me it feels, subjectively, as if an alien force is ripping whole chunks out of the comfortable “default” memeplex, and no-one on the “inside” is willing or able to counterattack!
The thing is right wing thinkers who end up on LessWrong and stay in the community should be comforting to you, these are the people who believe engaging in dialogue and common goals is possible. And I would argue they empower all members of the community by contributing to the explicit goal of refining human rationality or FAI design (though they might undermine some other implicit goals).
Compare this to the idea of right wing thinkers that take what they can from rationality and the alt right and then seeing they are not accepted in the nominally rationalist community leave for the world. Even as individuals that should concern you, but imagine a right wing community forming powered by the best tools from here. Somehow it seems its left wing only counterpart would be weaker.
The thing is right wing thinkers who end up on LessWrong and stay in the community should be comforting to you, these are the people who believe engaging in dialogue and common goals is possible… And I would argue they empower all members of the community by contributing to the explicit goal of refining human rationality
The question is, how much do they contribute to the “value-neutral” goals like epistemic rationality/practical knowledge/whatever, versus the disutility that I suffer by them succeeding at their values—and perhaps getting to influence the future disproportionately, if LW/SIAI achieve a lot and give leverage to all participants? Extreme right-wingers all seem to share the explicit values of institutionalized dominance, rigid hierarchy, rejection of universal ethics and the suppression of any threat to such an order.
For example, you’ve quoted Roissy around here before as a good instrumental rationalist and worthwhile writer—and, say, Hanson links to him, and Vladimir_M endorsed him—yet I think that he must’ve already caused enough misery with his blog and his personal actions, never mind whatever political impact his vile thoughts might have. I don’t think that our community should be willing to cooperate or communicate with thinkers like him. At all. And he’s small fish compared to the intellectual currents that might appear if the “Dark Enlightenment” grows some more. I have pondered where those ideas might lead, and it fills me with equal part horror and rage.
...
If this movement indeed has potential for growth, I wish for a broad cordon against it, from academic liberals like Corey Robin to far-left writers like Matthew Lyons to LW-style progressive technocrats.
You are too quick in ascribing incompatible values to people you disagree with. That’s the cheap way out; it allows you to write off their opinion without considering the fact that they might have the same terminal values as you, and arrived at their instrumental position for rational, empirical reasons. Then you’d have to actually consider whether their position is correct, instead of just writing them off.
Extreme right-wingers all seem to share the explicit values of institutionalized dominance, rigid hierarchy, rejection of universal ethics and the suppression of any threat to such an order.
This is the straw-man version you get taught about by the Universalist establishment. Don’t take it seriously as what these folks are actually thinking. Some people are just dumb and evil, and most confuse “this is instrumentally a good idea” with “this is terminally a good idea” but there’s less of them than you are taught, and there actually are good reasons for the apparent craziness.
It is perfectly possible for someone to have the same values as you and consider (the non-straw) version of those things to be instrumentally a good idea.
I have pondered where those ideas might lead, and it fills me with equal part horror and rage.
I don’t know what you are thinking but I know that feel. I had that same feel just a few months ago. I used to look at authoritarians, racists, PUAs, and such and think. “what the fuck is wrong with these people? How could they be so wrong? Are they evil?” mostly I just felt that horror and rage though.
The truth has a certain ring to it. I first noticed that truthiness with LW; “wow, these guys get thinking right”, then a while later, with MMSL (married PUA) “Wow, this stuff is totally different from what we’re taught, but it works (on my wife)”. Then with do-ocracy, and authoritarianism “wow this just works so much better for meetup organizing”. Then with HBD, when I realized that I could build an acceptable line of retreat in the case that the racists were right on the factual questions.
And then, to quote moldbug: “for a wide variety of controversial issues, it would be very, very easy for any smart young person with a few hours to spare to see what the pattern of truth and error, and its inevitable political associations, started to look like.” That is, the “Dark Enlightenment” convinced me, a former hardcore anarchist.
So please, please consider that your enemies are not evil mutants. That people might reject democracy, and accept dark enlightenment ideas for actual good reasons, not just because they have magical “incompatible values”. Please, please consider that you may not have all the facts, and that you may end up changing your mind on some of these issues.
I wish for a broad cordon against it,
Please don’t. What if you’re wrong? How will you realize your error if you put in hard blocks against certain ideas?
In response to your concerns, I ask one very specific thing of you. Please go and re-read Three Worlds Collide. Right now.
Nitpicks:
That people might reject democracy
I reject it too. So?
convinced me, a former hardcore anarchist.
Anarchist more like Bakunin or Durruti, or more like Rand? If it’s the latter, then your statement is remarkably unsurprising. So much of this is just the logical development of right-wing libertarianism.
This is the straw-man version you get taught about by the Universalist establishment.
WTF are you talking about. Just above, I was complaining how the “Universalist establishment” is silent even on the existence of the alt-right. In particular, it’s pigeonholing all opposition as either Strawman Christian Fundamentalist, Strawman Arrogant Capitalist or Strawman Racist Hick. Corey Robin’s polite and respectful, diligently researched work, The Reactionary Mind, got savaged by the NYT. If the goddamn New York Times is not the Pravda of the mainstream “Universalist establishment”, I don’t know what “establishment” we’re talking about at all.
If it’s the latter, then your statement is remarkably unsurprising. So much of this is just the logical development of right-wing libertarianism.
One possible development of right-wing libertarianism. Specifically, what happens if you attempt to coherently extrapolate libertarian maxims, forgetting the original reason for stating them.
This is actually a common general failure mode, one starts with an ethical injunction and notices that it contains a term, X, that is vaguely defined. Rather than thinking about what definition of X would make the injunction make the most sense (which is admittedly dangerous with ethical injunctions) or treating the definition as a Schelling fence, one attempts to formulate a coherent definition of X that turns out to be very different from the one in use when the injunction was being formulated. In the extreme case one might conclude that X includes everything or nothing.
For example, libertarians believe that private parties should be free to do as they wish. Moldburgians extend the definition of private parties to include governments. (Edit: Disclaimer: I have read very little of Moldburg’s writings so this might not be an accurate description of his position.)
You’re own position, if I understand it correctly, suffers from a similar mistake. Specifically, you take the maxim “It is wrong to hold someone responsible for something that’s not his fault”, and narrow the definition of “fault” until nothing is ever anyone’s fault.
Very good general point. This post by John Holbo is an examination of this “slippery slope towards absolutism” that libertarianism is in the risk of falling through. Holbo is a liberal and part of his goal is to score points against libertarianism, but I think he is on to something.
I don’t think, however, that this is an accurate description of Moldbug’s failure mode. The “family resemblance” of his doctrines with libertarianism is not through an ethical injunction of formal liberty to dispose of property, extended to governments. It is rather through a cluster of empirical and empirical-ish right-wing beliefs (government regulation is corrupt and inefficient, Austrian economics is correct and Keynesianism is nonsense, liberal policies on crime are abject failures, etc). His ultimate terminal goals seem to be social order and the minimization of conflict. These lead to the rejection of democracy and its replacement by an all-powerful absolute government as the best way to eliminate both crime and the inefficient jockeying of factions for political power; then the libertarian faith in efficient free markets provides trust that (a) a “patchwork” of such states would be enough to prevent abuses, though competition and right of exit, and (b) within each state, the government will adopt broadly libertarian policies as the way to maximize prosperity to be able to extract the Laffer maximum in taxes.
So instead of starting from libertarian values and developing them in a different direction, his system starts with a very different value and develops it in a direction at ends up close to anarcho-capitalism.
Good description, but I think that Moldbug’s ideology also has a “hidden” arational/romantic side, although it’s simultaneously a technocratic one—a Randian aesthetic of sorts, crossed with a Roman-style cult of mastery and dominance. Consider his hero-worship obituary for Steve Jobs, and compare it with Corey Robin’s enlightening examination of Joseph de Maistre. Both of them praise and admire above all competition, victory, fiercely defended supremacy, strength through ruthless adversity, control.
M.M. talks about “social order” and “minimization of conflict” not just because he wants to maximize hedonic utility for humans or something generic like that. Rather, he wants a certain mode of existence, where a technocratic system—a crowdsourced monarchist AGI of sorts—will actively seek out and ruthlessly destroy every disruptive element, every irregularity, every bug—and then continuously apply economic and political coercion to prevent further disturbance. He deeply and sincerely wants the paperclips to run on time. Consider theseposts on the link between the engineer/tech-geek mindset and fundamentalism/authoritarianism/far-right radicalism.
Please believe me when I say I know how all this feels from the inside. I fear this mindset in others because my own brain can run it and I find the effects unacceptable. (I wouldn’t hesitate to proselytize for e.g. forced total wireheading or a bloody world revolution—if it was the only way to avoid this future.)
As someone who finds alt-right ideas interesting to read about and discuss, but is at the end of the day a conventional mainstream liberal, the advice I’d give you is: you should chill out.
Discussion of political topics at this site, as at Moldbug’s and other related ones, and also the vast majority of blogs and sites all over the political spectrum (with the possible but tiny exception of a handful of blogs connected to the D or R party apparatus or to insiders affecting government policy decisions) is essentially mental masturbation, something that will not affect in any way the future of humanity. It is just a way to pass the time some find interesting, as others prefer solving Sudoku puzzles or pondering Newcomblike problems.
Your feeling that a group of ideological “outsiders” who don’t share your values is growing in influence, and might take over if they are not “cordoned” and lead to some horrible catastrophe, sounds like the kind of feeling appropriate for a small hunter-gatherer tribe where if a dozen or two enemies of you join forces and take over you will have a very bad time. It is not appropriate for the objective situation of a forum with several thousand people, and much less for a country of 300 million people or a humanity of 7 billion people. The future of the world, even the future of LW, is not going to be shaped by the occasional crypto-racist (/sexist/fascist/etc) posts of a handful of people.
Sufficiently bad government can make a large difference, so it’s not irrational to oppose bad ideas. On the other hand, most bad ideas don’t get a chance to take hold. And on yet another hand, if you don’t like something, it’s very tempting to evoke the worst possible consequences and make them seem as vivid as possible.
Sure, it is reasonable to oppose bad ideas and to worry about worst-case scenarios. But when these are objectively low-probability, the reactions of “horror and rage” seem disproportionate.
Many in the rationalist community are also part of the memetic cluster of the “Dark Enlightenment”. Moldbuggians, PUAs and HBDers are noticeable and seem to be participating in good faith on this forum, making various contributions while being mostly tolerant and polite to those of differing views. I argue this kind of ideological diversity and cooperation is vital to the goals of this community.
Again your post causes me to pause in concern. We don’t see many arguments on LW calling for a wide political coalition to disband and attack The Cathedral, which I think I could make quite convincingly if I wanted to here. The way well meaning people would understand and implement your call would lead to my own exclusion and that of others such as Vladimir_M.
Should those like me be hanging out in Roissy’s comment section rather than here?
Konkvistador, you were deep in the Enemy’s counsel! Tell us what you know! Do you really believe that they are all like Derbyshire, merely doomsaying and wallowing in bitterness? Their numbers grow by the hour; they will first be encouraged by this, then emboldened, then they will gather every single forbidden idea, every scrap of dark knowledge, and put Universalism to the test.
They profess scorn of all dreams and utopias, yet they have their own desire—Pronomianism, a stable world, safe for domination and slavery, where the strong are free from restraint and convention and the weak are free from choice and autonomy. They know where they want to go, they know their enemy, they do not fear for their feelings, conscience or sanity. Mainstream Universalism has only sheer numbers and inertia against these force multipliers.
I believe that we ought to strike as soon as possible. Few on the Left are alerted and concerned yet—but people like Land probably don’t expect a counterattack until much later, and surely don’t expect it to come from outside the Cathederal. Isolate them epistemically while they’re still few, attack their values as evil and dehumanizing, drive them into a phyg-like structure that would be bad at growth. So, what else can be done?
You underestimate universalism. It has adapted before. Recall that the Cathedral is a warm body machine, a belief pump. The victory of Democracy in the age of conscription and the printing press was no fluke. So as long as human minds by the billions can be thrown into the gears of war its complete defeat is unimaginable. What you must defend is not the ideology but the strategy. So clearly in order for this strategy to be viable you have to burn the mutant, kill the xeno and purge the heretics.
I see the “dark enlightenment” as a very minor force with little potential for growth, but one that intellectually seems a necessary correction to some of the mistakes of the first “enlightenment” that have metastasised over the past two centuries.
It won’t kill Universalism or even dethrone it, it might however create the happy state of affairs where the Cathedral’s theocratic nature is recognized as such and considered legitimate but people don’t take it too seriously. Like say the Anglican Church a century or two back.
Roissy is not dispensing any advice that goes beyond what is common in sexual cultures created by well meaning universalists in the inner city and lower class. Philosophers such as Nick Land may be scary in their style and thoughts, but their inquiry is following the tradition of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Bloggers like Moldbug are fascinated by the civilized aspects and achievements of Western civilization in the past more than its hierarchy. Their more scientifically minded members as say John Derbyshire (who you consider to have a grim heart) are rather reasonable. And stepping away from their atheist mainstream to their intellectual Christian faction? Do you even have a problem with those?
I grow more and more convinced that the dark enlightenment is a reformation of universalism rather than its abolition. Recall one of their favourite memes is fighting Lies and the search for Truth, a more Christian notion could not be found.
Recall one of their favourite memes is fighting Lies and the search for Truth, a more Christian notion could not be found.
I’m not an expert on this by any means, but I always thought of that as a Christian syncretion of a Greek preoccupation. A lot of the more philosophical side of the historical Christian worldview got its start that way, and Aquinas in particular had a lot of Aristotle in him.
Yes I think this is correct, up voted. What I wanted to emphasize is that the received these particular memes almost certainly via Christianity, even if the religion wasn’t their origin. It is evidence in favor of them carrying other universalist assumptions and values from the same source.
Their more scientifically minded members as say John Derbyshire (who you consider to have a grim heart) are rather reasonable.
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If, on the other hand, group underachievement is a consequence of the laws of biology working on human populations, there is no blame to assign. The fact of group inequalities, even in societies that have striven mightily to remove them, is as natural and inevitable as individual inequality, which nobody minds very much. The only proper object of blame is Mother Nature; and she is capable of inflicting far worse things on us than mere statistical disparities between ancient inbred populations… …Under a reigning philosophy of candor and realism, each of us can strive to be the best he can be, to play as best he can the hand he’s been dealt, in liberty and equality under the law.
This might fit my definition of “reason”… but what is noble or compassionate about it? How is Derbyshire preaching acceptance of inequality and submission to Nature different from the Catholic Church preaching acceptance of death and submission to God? If you think it reasonable to loathe death, why would you not loathe the genetic lottery?
So, in defiance of this psychological difference, and in defiance of politics, let me point out that a group injustice has no existence apart from injustice to individuals It’s individuals who have brains to experience suffering. It’s individuals who deserve, and often don’t get, a fair chance at life. If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
I support Eliezer completely. Therefore I have to oppose Derbyshire unflinchingly.
The only proper object of blame is Mother Nature; and she is capable of inflicting far worse things on us than mere statistical disparities between ancient inbred populations..
This does not seem like submission to nature to me. I do not think he would object at all to say genetic engineering or eugenic programs aimed at reducing such suffering or boosting cognitive performance.
This might fit my definition of “reason”… but what is noble or compassionate about it? How is Derbyshire preaching acceptance of inequality and submission to Nature different from the Catholic Church preaching acceptance of death and submission to God? If you think it reasonable to loathe death, why would you not loathe the genetic lottery?
Derbyshire is asking us to please stop trying things that do not work and scapegoating those who aren’t responsible for misery inflicted by nature! I find it remarkable that you do not seem to grasp the moral relevance of avoiding scapegoating people at all! It is a terrible thing to look down on people and make them feel guilty and bad for something that is not their fault.
If you want to find nobility and compassion I say look here.
Under a reigning philosophy of candor and realism, each of us can strive to be the best he can be, to play as best he can the hand he’s been dealt, in liberty and equality under the law.
I hope this will be the point of view our elites will arrive at when the Standard Model has crumbled into dust. The other alternative, the one envisaged by Herrnstein and Murray, would be worse, far worse. I intend to do all I can to promote the idea that there is a sane path, a path of reason, fairness, and liberty, of “candor and realism,” between phony egalitarianism and vicious neo-racism. Follow me down that path, please.
You read the article but did not understand it. Derbyshire stands where he stands intellectually because he can not do otherwise, no more than he can convince himself that there is a God. That is something I understand and sympathize with.
I will go further and say that he fears many of the same societal outcomes that you do.
each of us can strive to be the best he can be, to play as best he can the hand he’s been dealt
But look, he demands that we accept it as a tolerable state of affairs! Eliezer says the opposite—yes, no particular person is to blame, but things are still horrible; we’re still living in a nightmare. To borrow from left-wing jargon again, I want a right to negativity here, a forceful statement that the default/normal/natural condition is awful, even with no-one to blame, and that there is an ethical imperative to ameliorate it.
Derbyshire’s article should have begun with “oughts”, his “is” statements might be true but they’re insufficient for humans. The fact that you being born e.g. black and in the slums and now you’re likely fucked and maladapted is no-one else’s fault does not mean that you are not entitled to scream, to express anguish. And dude, there’s a lot of anguish!
But look, he demands that we accept it as a tolerable state of affairs!
Taboo “tolerable”.
Eliezer says the opposite—yes, no particular person is to blame, but things are still horrible; we’re still living in a nightmare. To borrow from left-wing jargon again, I want a right to negativity here, a forceful statement that the default/normal/natural condition is awful, even with no-one to blame, and that there is an ethical imperative to ameliorate it.
What ethical system are you using to make that assertion?
Eliezer is a utilitarian. Yes, it would improve overall utility to ameliorate this particular problem, there are also hundreds of other problems whose solution would also improve utility, and frankly by any measure of urgency or returns to effort, this one really isn’t even in the top 100.
If you think it reasonable to loathe death, why would you not loathe the genetic lottery?
If God has not given intelligence in equal measure to all his children, God stands convicted of a crime against humanity, period. Skin colour has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
Do you also believe that it’s a crime against humanity for God not to have given all humans (or even any humans) AGI-level intelligence?
I believe that we ought to strike now. Isolate them epistemically while they’re still few, attack their values as evil and dehumanizing, drive them into a phyg-like structure that would be bad at growth. So, what else can be done?
Oh wow. It’s on! It’s officially on like Donkey Kong.
Created on: 01-Dec-12
Expires on: 01-Dec-14
Last Updated on: 03-Dec-12
Wonder when they’ll put up something quotable, from Land or otherwise—maybe some “watchdog” far-left blog would be interested. (BTW some New-Left-y blog that looks at the aesthetics of materialist philosophy has been covering Land; unfortunately, the university jargon there is near-impenetrable.)
But the disturbing thing to me is that the mainstream doesn’t seem to react to the challenge.
Academia and mainstream political and philosophical tradition have no reason to engage what they don’t need to engage to maintain their position. The Dark Enlightenment is far from power or influence on society. If it demonstrates the ability to grasp it I am sure something like the counter-reformation will be brought to bare by the major established institutions against it.
I took away one thing from the Dark Enlightenment link—that it’s worth being shocked that cities have districts where the local culture makes it hard for people to live with each other. I don’t know whether his claim that first world Asian cities don’t have such districts is true.
Yet there’s not enough acknowledgement and conscious defense of those values, so when such content is challenged from an alt-right perspective, the attacking side ends up with the last word in the discussion. So to me it feels, subjectively, as if an alien force is ripping whole chunks out of the comfortable “default” memeplex, and no-one on the “inside” is willing or able to counterattack!
As someone who recently realized that the default memeplex is in fact a memeplex and probably wrong, I think I have an idea for why no one on the “inside” counterattacks.
We don’t realize we are even in a memeplex that can be attacked. There’s no explicit defense of those values because they just feel like the way the world is; we don’t recognize them as values needing defending.
The standard universalist immune response is not calibrated to the alt-right, and doesn’t recognize it as hostile. Also, some of it is recognized and flagged as “idiocy; ignore.”
If we do recognize the attack, we have no canned response. It’s hard to get original thought out of people; much easier to get zombie slogan chanting.
I just realized though, that this explanation is entirely a rationalization. It might have no connection to reality.
So to me it feels, subjectively, as if an alien force is ripping whole chunks out of the comfortable “default” memeplex, and no-one on the “inside” is willing or able to counterattack!
They are. They just can’t come up with good arguments.
They are. They just can’t come up with good arguments.
I think what is happening here is a bit more subtle than your summary suggests. First, many of the notions being proposed or discussed while in some sense “conservative″ are things like Moldbug’s ideas which while they do fall into one end, they aren’t in any way standard arguments or even issues. So people may simply not be able to raise effective arguments since they are grappling with approaches with which they haven’t had to think about before. Similarly, I suspect that all of us would have trouble making responses to arguments favoring say complete dissolution of all governments above the county level, not because such arguments are strong, but because we’re not used to thinking about them or constructing arguments against them.
Moreover, the meta-contrarian nature of Less Wrong, makes people very taken with arguments of forms that they haven’t seen before, so there may be a tendency to upvote or support an interesting contrarian argument even as one doesn’t pay as much attention to why the argument simply fails.
Finally, contrarian attitudes have an additional advantage when phrased in a political context: They aren’t as obviously political. The politics-as-mindkiller meme is very strong here, so a viewpoint that everyone recognizes as by nature political gets labeled as potential mindkilling to be avoided while arguments that don’t fit into the standard political dialogue as much don’t pattern match as closely.
Not sure about the last paragraph. People’s ideologies are part of the background to how they think, and political ideas that align with someone’s ideology can sometimes blend into that background without being registered. Contrarian ideas are less likely to blend in, and so more likely to be flagged by mainstreamers as political.
We have seen posters motivated enough to engage in karmassasination of users making right wing arguments so this seems plausible. The weight of evidence certainly seems to be on the alt-right side quite strongly on several issues and has been building ever more that way for decades.
Yet the demographics of metacontrarianism however are something we should keep in mind. Perhaps people clever enough to construct on their own novel arguments rather than just picking them up from academia or mainstream political tradition don’t yet have much to signal by doing this. If 10 or 20% of LWers where conservatives and another 10% of reactionaries perhaps they would. For now though they stay in the alternative right wing camp where the fun ideas and displays of cleverness are to be had. I’m basing that number on anti-libertarian arguments being viable in our community.
When people talk about karma assassination, what tools do they use for keeping track?
All I’ve got is the count by my name and checking back for a few pages of my comments. I would like to get information about which comments have the most recent karma changes.
And not to be paranoid, but I think I had about 14 points go away a few days ago for no apparent reason. I’m not sure whether I misremembered my total, or someone found a bunch of comments they didn’t like, or it was just spite.
I don’t know of any tools per se. I suspect that people have a track of what karma most of their recent comments had, so they can simply check by looking there. There are also some subtle signs: For example, for most people the common karma on a comment is zero. So even if you don’t remember your karma (or if you are looking at someone else’s) and there are a lot of recent comments at −1 on a variety of different subjects that don’t look obviously bad, that’s a sign.
So that certainly sounds like karma assassination to me (assuming that you remembered the number correctly before hand). In general, karma almost always is increasing if one is a user in good standing, so on any given day, the variance will for most days probably be a question of how much it goes up by more than anything else. A drop of 14 in a single day in that context seems extreme.
If I see that almost all of the last 20 comments I published before yesterday at three o’ clock have 1 point less than they used to (including apparently unobjectionable ones such as me answering a relevant question), and almost none of more recent or more ancient comments do, then I guess something fishy is going on.
However, there are a few fairly common (or at least it seems so to me) opinions on LW which are distinctively un-Left: democracy is bad, there are racial differences in important traits, and women complain way too much about how men treat them. We’ll see how that last one plays out.
I think that they appear to be more common than they actually are because their proponents are much louder than everyone else.
One of those is a factual question, not a policy question. (Also, there are plenty of left-wingers who wouldn’t throw a fit at “it appears that black people and Native Americans have lower average IQ than white people, whereas East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews have higher average IQ; the differences between the group averages are comparable with the standard deviations within each group; it’s not yet fully clear how much the differences between the group averages are due to genetics and how much they are due to socio-economic conditions”, at least outside liberal arts departments.)
For the last year or so, I’ve been thinking that a “real” (read pre-WW2) democracy is not just bad but very much right-wing (see Corey Robin’s writings on libertarianism, “democratic feudalism”, etc).
Like some other nebulous concepts, e.g. multiculturalism, I see it as grafted onto the “real” corpus of Left ideas—liberty, equality, fraternity, hard-boiled egg, etc—as a consequence of political maneuvering and long-time coalitions, without due reflection. Think of it: today the more popular anti-Left/anti-progressive positions are not monarchism/neo-reaction/etc but right-wing libertarianism and fascist populism, which often invoke democratic slogans.
Like Konkvistador already said a few times, eugenics started out as a left-wing/progressive movement, and many old-time progressives—including even American abolitionists—were outright racist.
(Metacontrarianism, hell yeah!)
They are also practically non-existent in right wing parties in the West. While being contrarian is a bad sign, getting people from all mainstream political positions to go into sputtering apoplexy with the same input can be a good sign.
I dunno, 2 and 3 seem like things I’d expect the right-wing to believe (though probably with less nuance) in America (not to say they wouldn’t go into sputtering apoplexy if you said certain formulations of those ideas out loud and there was a camera nearby). And who was calling for revolution after the recent election? (tongue somewhat in cheek there)
This might be true of 3 perhaps, but is not for 2.
I’m not sure the link proves your point.
Derbyshire’s firing wasn’t a show for public consumption but a genuine rebuke from the National Review establishment caused by ideological differences.
It was also more over the top than just claiming that race and important traits are correlated.
Maybe. There is still undoubtedly a strong racist component to the right-wing belief melange.
But perhaps we’re arguing semantics. I meant that the belief in question is something that would be associated with the right wing (due to said component), something that would be argued, with not-insignificant frequency, covertly by public figures and publicly by private citizens of that party, not that it’s something a majority of right-wing-identified people would assent to, privately or publicly. Is that unfair?
Considering that any mostly white gathering of Americans is at risk of being called racist until proven otherwise I’m not at all impressed at all by this observation. How would you differentiate the world with racism present beyond the background noise among Republicans and one where it is overrepresented?
Republicans could adopt any possible set of policy proposals they like, the opinions of their voters likewise could change to anything but as long as their voters retained the colour of their skin they would still end up being called racist at least occasionally.
Not really. Private citizens of the party arguing for such things publicly are generally quite rare. If the case where different why are the examples of racism among the republican base presented by the media so terribly feeble? The “racism” of say the Tea Party which was presented as this incredibly dangerous far right fringe movement, is not worth being called that at all.
I do agree some public figures probably do still in private hold such opinions.
If you assume that people of color are at least moderately competent judges of their own interests, then the Republicans not attracting people of color should at least be weak evidence that Republicans show prejudice.
It’s weak evidence because there are other possible explanations—perhaps people of color don’t like feeling so strongly outnumbered so there’s a stable situation which isn’t a result of white racism.
It is also weak evidence that the Democratic party is offering non-white voters benefits beyond those they offer to white voters. A model of a race preference Democratic party and a race blind Republican party works just as well as long as you assume Democrats are slightly anti-white.
See Thomas Schelling’s Models of Segregation
Or that Democrats show prejudice in the other direction and thus become more attractive… I guess many Republicans would prefer that explanation :-)
So you believe that racism is not alive and well in modern America and American politics?
You don’t think that the “birther controversy” was racist in nature? You think this whole thing is a coincidence? You think this type of thing doesn’t happen? You think this is a complete fabrication?
This seems like a complete failure of critical thinking.
If this isn’t what you’re saying, could you say plainly what it is you believe and why?
No.
Racists do not generally like Obama because he has an African father. This is incredibly surprising? Do a google search for racist epithets and say Condoleezza Rice.
Are you really saying that if Democrats had a white candidate on election day 2016 and Republicans a black one, you wouldn’t find the appropriate slurs online?
Of course it does. Do you have evidence it happens often enough to be a concern rather than pointing out anecdotes? Also what has this got to do with Republicans rather than American society as a whole?
No why would I? A mere two decades before that there was basically a new splinter party just on the segregation issue.
I will say the same. You seem to have utterly failed at the principle of charity if not outright straw manned my position.
I am not an American. I’m not a Republican. Yet the examples you picked seem to target a CNN caricature of a Fox News viewer. Why did you pattern match me to that? That this post got up voted to 3 karma before my response suggests filling a post with solid partisan digs can be a good way to gain votes on LessWrong and is an indication of us suffering a lack of diversity.
I believe most people in America and the West have on a conscious level an irrational aversion to racism two or three orders of magnitude out of proportion to the actual utilitarian damage it causes. This is partially caused by virtue signalling spirals.
The opportunity costs of this are non-trivial.
Epithets. An epitaph is something else.
Thank you for the correction! I’ve put the words in my Anki deck. English is not my native language so I often make mistakes, please if you ever spot an error don’t hesitate to comment or PM me.
If I were interested in racist epitaphs, I’m not sure I could find them on Google.
Googling for “racist epitaphs” as was suggested actually mostly turns up articles on racist epithets.
Googling for “racist epitaphs -epithets” also mostly turns up incorrect references to racist epithets, perhaps unsurprisingly.
”racist epitaphs -epithets tombstone” turns up a bunch of stuff unrelated to racism.
This seems… well, nonsensical, to be honest. Either there’s a typo somewhere in it or I’m completely failing to get the point. Would you mind clarifying?
“is” was a typo.
Yeah, I’d assumed that one. Still, about the only way I can make sense of the line is if I assume you mean Afrocentric racists, and those are… well, actually not vanishingly rare (aside from some lexical quibbles on “racist”), but certainly rarer than the Eurocentric kind and pretty clearly not what was being discussed in context.
The second sentence was sarcasm.
That would explain it.
Yes, it’s amazing how easy it is to find evidence of racism when you’re willing to claim things are secretly motivated by racism with no evidence.
Wow, there appears to be one twit a day that uses both the words “Obama” and “nigger”, and almost half of those appear to be pro-Obama twits using “nigger” ironically.
Given the correlation between race and crime, I don’t see your point.
Since you appear to be relatively new to LW, let me point out that this kind of ad hominem is completely inappropriate on LW even if it didn’t follow laughably weak arguments.
What exactly do you think motivates the birther movement? It’s pretty clearly irrational belief.
Why isn’t “politics is the mindkiller” sufficient?
First, the claim is incredibly unusual compared to standard political irrationality. The last time this claim occurred was against Chester Arthur (US president 1881) - and John McCain (who was born in the Panama Canal Zone, outside the sovereign territory of the US) received no challenges to his eligibility for office.
Second, the ratio of intensity to plausibility is much higher that most American political irrationality—the long form has been released, after all. This suggests there’s more than ordinary political mindkiller at play.
Why isn’t “Politics is the mindkiller” sufficient for people to believe Obama is a space alien? Or for people to believe that John McCain isn’t a natural born citizen, particularly given that he wasn’t born in the US? “Politics is the mindkiller” isn’t and shouldn’t be able to account for just any negative belief that people hold about a candidate they don’t believe in.
Also, I find the birther controversy weird because I think some laws matter a great deal more than others, and the natural born citizen rule doesn’t serve any important purpose that I can see.
I asked a birther what he expected to happen if it turned out that Obama was proven to have been born in Kenya, and he hadn’t even thought about the question, which probably implied that few if any birthers had thought about it either, or they would have been discussing it. I’m not sure this proves anything about racism, but it’s evidence that there was something weird going on.
There’s a danger in this being too broad an explanation, such that it doesn’t actually explain anything. In this context, some ideas are so extreme, that simply using that explanation seems potentially insufficient. That said, while racism may be in play, there’s some evidence otherwise that what is going on here is a combination of politics is the mindkiller with people who are already less connected to reality than others. Thus, for example, this probably explains why Alan Keyes was a birther (racism seems like it isn’t likely to be relevant given that Keyes is black).
But at the same time, there’s definite evidence for something other than just politics as the mindkiller. In particular, although some on the left did pick up on the birtherism early on (for example Phillip Berg), it didn’t spread to the left-wing opponents of Obama in any substantial fashion, like it did to those on the right. In that context, the fact that Republicans in general are more racist seems robust. (For example, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to have a negative opinion of interracial marriage or think it should be outlawed 1). And the possibility of a causal relationship has to be at minimum a located hypothesis. On the other hand, there are other possible hypotheses, such as the tendencies in the last few years for self-identified conservatives and Republicans to turn to their own news sources. While this occurs on both ends of the American political spectrum, it seems especially in the context of the last election and the response to people like Nate Silver and Sam Wang, that in the last two years it has occurred more on the right-wing. Moreover, it doesn’t actually need to be more prominent on either side of the political spectrum to have had this sort of effect.
Overall, politics as mindkiller seems unsatisfactory in this context, but racism is definitely not the only possible other causal factor at work here. It seems likely that a variety of different factors are at play, and deciding how strong any given one of them is may be very tough.
I think xenophobia is at least as likely a motivation as racism, considering that his father wasn’t a U.S. national, and he spent some of his formative years in Indonesia. People accuse him of not being a natural born citizen because they’re specifically afraid that he’s too foreign.
What is the distinction you are attempting to draw between xenophobia and racism?
People may easily regard people of different races from their own country as being part of their cultural in-group, where people of different countries, particularly ones like Kenya and Indonesia which aren’t Western first-world nations, are cultural outgroup members.
I feel like we are having an unintentional definitional dispute. In the US political realm, the essence of the accusation of “racism” is unjustly treating others as cultural outgroup.
I think that’s an inappropriate inflation of the term, since under that definition a person could easily be “racist” against members of their own race who have different cultural backgrounds, but not against ones who don’t. Racism is a basis for unjustly treating others as outgroup members, but it can only lower the quality of our discourse if we describe all cases of unjustly treating others as outgroup members as racism.
If I understand your distinction correctly, the irrational hostility of the Californians to Oklahomans during the 1930s Great Depression is xenophobia and not racism. I guess I’m having difficulty coming up with examples of irrational / hostile racism that isn’t xenophobic. What exactly is the goal of the distinction you are making?
Well, the narrower definition of xenophobia is a fear of people from other countries. If one interprets “a fear of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange” broadly enough, then all racism is xenophobia, but all xenophobia is certainly not racism.
The point of the distinction I’m making is to set out a class wherein people could be expected to mistrust Obama for having a Kenyan father and having spent a number of his childhood years in Indonesia, but not to mistrust or be unwilling to vote for a person of the same racial heritage who was born and raised in their own neighborhood to parents who were both American citizens.
For a broad enough definition of racism, I don’t doubt that most birthers are racists; the Implicit Association Test suggests that most people have some degree of racial bias. But I do think that the fact that Obama is half Kenyan and spent some of his time growing up in Indonesia has much more explanatory power with respect to the birther controversy than the fact that he falls into the demographic category of African American.
To clarify, I don’t think we are currently having a substantive disagreement. That is, I think we both agree that the continued strength of the birther movement is an expression of some people’s belief that Obama is outgroup and the predictable irrationality that follows from that conclusion.
That’s what most people in the US mean when they talk about the problems of racism. If I could persuade everyone to just call this process “Othering” without specific reference to race or sex or nationality or whatever, I’d consider it.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to show that colloquial usage is misleading. Better definitions can often lead to clearer analysis. You are suggesting that mis-usage of racism is confusing the analysis, but I don’t see how. Some of that impression comes from my sense that the birthers wouldn’t vote for Obama even if he were born and raised in Chicago.
“Othering” is broad enough to encapsulate the phenomenon, but also broad enough that it doesn’t narrow down the prejudice under discussion. I’ll admit to also having a kneejerk dislike of any use of the term, since I’ve read and have an abysmally low opinion of the work of the author who popularized it
I don’t doubt that birthers mostly wouldn’t vote for Obama even if he were born and raised in Chicago, but that’s because I suspect that there’s an extremely strong overlap between that level of xenophobia and people who’re socially conservative enough to not want to vote for him on a policy basis.
Birthers are probably mostly racist, by broad enough definitions of racism, and they are certainly almost all conservative, but that doesn’t mean that their racism or their conservatism are the best explanations for their being birthers.
If a person opposes a specific government policy, and another person argues “this person just opposes the policy because they’re rich,” when the person who opposes it is a rich libertarian, and the policy is opposed by almost all libertarians, but mostly not by rich people who’re not also libertarians, then “opposes the policy because they’re rich” is a bad explanation.
I agree with all of that. I just don’t understand what non-othering irrational racism is.
Edit: Due to insufficient background, I can neither defend nor attack Said, but my sense is that Othering and irrational outgroupism are essentially the same phenomena. At the very least, irrational outgroupism is a very good steelman of Othering.
I’m not arguing that there is non-othering irrational racism, and even if there is I wouldn’t be arguing that it’s relevant to the issue under discussion (now that I think of it, there probably is in the form of self-hating racism, where the group one is prejudiced against is “us”,) but there are also non-racism forms of othering, or outgrouping, and I think that racism is not the most salient issue of prejudice in this matter.
Fair enough. I think some of the problem is that colloquial language lacks the technical vocabulary to communicate the issue precisely. For example, I think the common usage of xenophobia and racism is not a natural kind, and othering captures the insight that colloquial usage is generally aiming for when it says “racism.” Given that, I think “birtherism is racism” is about as accurate a colloquial phrase as we are likely to meet—as intended, that phrase doesn’t agree with your point, despite its imprecision.
The usage I’m suggesting helps clarify the distinction between outgroupism and the personal issues embedded in “self-hating” racism. But it is technical vocabulary that has not yet spread into common usage. I don’t think the lack of technical vocabulary indicates an unusual level of confusion on this issue.
Most importantly, pushing the point masks fundamental agreement between you and others like JoshuaZ or TorqueDrifter.
You will find very few people in mainstream right wing parties arguing for these three things too (except perhaps in a very small way the last one).
Can you please elaborate on what you meant by this? The way you said it made me feel rather uncomfortable.
I wasn’t intending to make you feel uncomfortable. On the other hand, I don’t think dark arts require a lot of intent.
Anyway, I believe that anti-racism/some parts of current feminism are an emotionally abusive attempt to address real issues.
Most of the anti-racists here have not been abusive, but imagine a social environment where this is the dominant tone.
The emotional abuse leads to a lot of resistance and avoidance, but the issues being real has its own pull.
I’ve seen people (arguably including me) who were very unfond of the emotional abuse still come to believe that at least some of the issues are valid and worthy of being addressed. What’s more, I’m reasonably certain that at least some of those people don’t realize they’ve changed their minds.
I don’t know where you personally will end up on these issues (it wouldn’t surprise me if the discussion of gender prejudice brings in substantial amounts about racism and possibly ablism), but I expect that LW will be taken pretty far towards believing that (many) men mistreat women in ways that ought to be corrected. It wouldn’t surprise me if (this being LW) there will also be more clarity about ways that women could and should treat men better.
Lessening Inferential Distance is only the first post in a series. I’m expecting that harder issues will be brought up in later posts.
I believe that, with your linked comment getting 32 points, you are making Nancy rather uncomfortable in turn.
I’m fairly certain that we’re all suffering from the hostile media effect; e.g. you keep saying how there’s creeping censorship of right-wing ideas on LW, while I’m disturbed by such complaints getting karma and support :)
Consider the way this post was down-voted, along with some of the discussion, particularly here, as exhibit A.
OK, I’m considering it. How does it indicate creeping censorship of right-wing ideas on LW?
I neither upvoted nor downvoted that post, so my guesses at the motivations of downvoters shouldn’t be trusted too far, but my guess is that mostly it was downvoted because, while it was ostensibly about a technique of rationality, (1) what it said about that technique was mostly very obvious, (2) a big chunk of the article was devoted to the discussion of an entirely different topic with considerable mindkilling potential, and (3) this gives some ground for suspicion that the rationality-technique discussion served largely as a pretext for airing the author’s views on that topic. (A topic that others in the past have been curiously enthusiastic to air similar views on.)
Having said all that, I’ll add that in fact I don’t think it likely that MTGandP is a racist or that s/he wrote that post in order to bolster racist ideas, and I think that if anyone downvoted that post because they wanted to discourage a nasty racist (rather than, e.g., to discourage other people who are nasty racists from posting similar stuff) then they made a mistake. But the point is that the downvotes don’t look to me like censorship of right-wing ideas; they look to me like some combination of (1) finding the post unenlightening and (2) seeing it as promoting racism.
As for the “discussion, particularly here”, again that doesn’t look to me at all like censorship of right-wing ideas, nor like people arguing for the censorship of right-wing ideas. It looks to me like one person apparently thinking that racism has gone away and other people objecting that no it bloody hasn’t. (Exception: the very first comment in the thread you linked to says, roughly, “race is a needlessly contentious thing to discuss to make your point”, which (1) is true if the point is what MTGandP says, rather than that being a pretext for talking about race, and (2) doesn’t constitute any sort of attempt at censorship, as opposed to advice that some topics are likely on the whole not to produce helpful discussion.)
Incidentally, I notice that some people in this thread are insisting that there’s nothing particularly right-wing about believing in racial intelligence differences, whereas the only thing I can see to link the downvoting of the post you linked to with “right-wing ideas” is its defence of (discussing the possibility of) racial intelligence differences. Curious.
See my comment here for why I think the example was appropriate. Furthermore, the way you’re throwing around the term “racist ideas” suggests you are also making the mistake the post describes with respect to the example given.
You might have missed the part where AndrewHickey says:
Depends on what you mean by “right-wing”. It’s certainly true that there are currently a number of left-wing people who believe that discussing race and intelligence is morally unacceptable.
There’s also a number of people who think there are bad intelectual confusions in every race-intelligence comment they have ever seen.
I think it’s interesting that you keep changing the subject from “what propositions Greens believe” to your beliefs about “what topics Blues think are morally acceptable to discuss”. It comes across that you’re trying to make some sort of deeply subtle point about what beliefs you think it is morally acceptable to believe you have about Blues.
I was just trying to explain what Konkvistador probably meant by that statement.
Why?
No, I didn’t miss it. I don’t see any attempt at censorship there; I see someone saying: you appear to be ignorant about X, and in view of that you would do better to leave the subject alone.
No, I don’t think it does. Because so far as I can see there is nothing else about the post, or the votes it got, or the ensuing discussion, that anyone would consider an instance of “creeping censorship of right-wing ideas”. Given that you cited it as an example of that, I can only conclude that you consider belief in racial intelligence differences to be a “right-wing idea”. My own understanding of the term “right-wing” doesn’t come into it, unless there’s something else in the post that’s distinctively right-wing; did I miss something?
Because you’re using “racist” as a property of an idea independent of its truth value that lets you dismiss it.
Well, especially on LW, the normal response to ignorance is to help educate the person being ignorant rather than to attempt to dismiss him as quickly as possible.
Furthermore, the statement is more like “you said something that could be stretched to imply you are don’t know X (where X is itself a highly politicized claim whose truth value is a matter of political dispute) that means you are too ignorant to even say anything about the topic”.
What idea do you think I’m doing that to?
(It seems clear to me that there are ideas that can reasonably be described as “racist ideas”. For instance, the idea that black people are fundamentally inferior to white people in abilities, character, and personal value, and that this means they should be segregated to keep them out of the way of superior white people. Or the idea that the right thing to do with people of Jewish descent is to put them into concentration camps and kill them en masse. So if you’re saying that merely using the words “racist ideas” is proof of error and confusion, I think that’s wrong. On the other hand, if there’s some actual idea you think I’m wrongly describing that way, then let’s hear what idea that is.)
I’ve seen both quite often.
But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that (1) Andrew Hickey was in fact intending to dismiss MTGandP as quickly as possible and to get him (note: actually I have no idea whether MTGandP is male or female; indeed the name rather suggests a collective) to drop the subject, and that (2) such behaviour is very atypical on Less Wrong. What then? How does this indicate “creeping censorship of right-wing ideas”?
The most it indicates, being as uncharitable as possible to AH, is that one person (AH) is trying to intimidate another person (MT) out of talking about an idea that AH considers racist. How do you get from “AH tries to intimidate MT out of talking about the idea that black people might have inferior intelligence” to “LW exhibits creeping censorship of right-wing ideas”? No one was censored. There was no deluge of people agreeing with AH and telling MT to shut up. The idea in question isn’t, at least according to others in this thread who appear sympathetic to “right-wing-ideas”, particularly a right-wing one anyway.
In the ancestor you wrote:
What work is the word “racist” doing in that paragraph that couldn’t be better done by the word “wrong”?
The fact that MT’s post is at −7 and AH’s comment is at +4 rather than the other way around suggests the problem isn’t limited to AH.
The word occurs several times in different contexts; I take it (from what you’ve said elsewhere here) that you’re referring to the instance where it prefixes “ideas”. The work it’s doing that couldn’t be better done by “wrong” is specifying the particular variety of allegedly-wrong ideas I’m saying I think MTGandP isn’t trying to promote.
… indicates that there are some other people who think MTGandP’s post wasn’t very good (which might be for many reasons), and that there are some other people who agree with AH (which also might be for many reasons).
I repeat: How does any of this amount to “creeping censorship of right-wing ideas”? What specific right-wing ideas? How are they being censored?
The comment you are referencing was written in disappointment over a discussion with hundreds of posts and a Main level article at 50+ karma.
I think this may be true to an extent, but this isn’t my perception alone, several LWers have complained about this in the past year or so.
What disturbs you about this specifically?
Like I already said a few times, nearly all the highly upvoted posts and comments that explicitly bring up ideology—like yours—appear to come from the right. Duh, you’ll say, if most of the LW stuff is implicitly liberal/progressive, then of course what’s going to stand out is (intelligently argued) contrarianism. But the disturbing thing to me is that the mainstream doesn’t seem to react to the challenge.
What I have in mind is not some isolated insightful comments e.g. criticizing moldbuggery, defending egalitarianism or feminism or something like that—they do appear—but an acknowledgement of LW’s underlying ideological non-neutrality. E.g. this post by Eliezer, or this one by Luke would’ve hardly been received well without the author and the audience sharing Enlightenment/Universalist values; both the tone and the message rely on an ideological foundation (one that I desire to analyze and add to—not deconstruct).
Yet there’s not enough acknowledgement and conscious defense of those values, so when such content is challenged from an alt-right perspective, the attacking side ends up with the last word in the discussion. So to me it feels, subjectively, as if an alien force is ripping whole chunks out of the comfortable “default” memeplex, and no-one on the “inside” is willing or able to counterattack!
The thing is right wing thinkers who end up on LessWrong and stay in the community should be comforting to you, these are the people who believe engaging in dialogue and common goals is possible. And I would argue they empower all members of the community by contributing to the explicit goal of refining human rationality or FAI design (though they might undermine some other implicit goals).
Compare this to the idea of right wing thinkers that take what they can from rationality and the alt right and then seeing they are not accepted in the nominally rationalist community leave for the world. Even as individuals that should concern you, but imagine a right wing community forming powered by the best tools from here. Somehow it seems its left wing only counterpart would be weaker.
The question is, how much do they contribute to the “value-neutral” goals like epistemic rationality/practical knowledge/whatever, versus the disutility that I suffer by them succeeding at their values—and perhaps getting to influence the future disproportionately, if LW/SIAI achieve a lot and give leverage to all participants? Extreme right-wingers all seem to share the explicit values of institutionalized dominance, rigid hierarchy, rejection of universal ethics and the suppression of any threat to such an order.
For example, you’ve quoted Roissy around here before as a good instrumental rationalist and worthwhile writer—and, say, Hanson links to him, and Vladimir_M endorsed him—yet I think that he must’ve already caused enough misery with his blog and his personal actions, never mind whatever political impact his vile thoughts might have. I don’t think that our community should be willing to cooperate or communicate with thinkers like him. At all. And he’s small fish compared to the intellectual currents that might appear if the “Dark Enlightenment” grows some more. I have pondered where those ideas might lead, and it fills me with equal part horror and rage.
...
If this movement indeed has potential for growth, I wish for a broad cordon against it, from academic liberals like Corey Robin to far-left writers like Matthew Lyons to LW-style progressive technocrats.
You are too quick in ascribing incompatible values to people you disagree with. That’s the cheap way out; it allows you to write off their opinion without considering the fact that they might have the same terminal values as you, and arrived at their instrumental position for rational, empirical reasons. Then you’d have to actually consider whether their position is correct, instead of just writing them off.
This is the straw-man version you get taught about by the Universalist establishment. Don’t take it seriously as what these folks are actually thinking. Some people are just dumb and evil, and most confuse “this is instrumentally a good idea” with “this is terminally a good idea” but there’s less of them than you are taught, and there actually are good reasons for the apparent craziness.
It is perfectly possible for someone to have the same values as you and consider (the non-straw) version of those things to be instrumentally a good idea.
I don’t know what you are thinking but I know that feel. I had that same feel just a few months ago. I used to look at authoritarians, racists, PUAs, and such and think. “what the fuck is wrong with these people? How could they be so wrong? Are they evil?” mostly I just felt that horror and rage though.
The truth has a certain ring to it. I first noticed that truthiness with LW; “wow, these guys get thinking right”, then a while later, with MMSL (married PUA) “Wow, this stuff is totally different from what we’re taught, but it works (on my wife)”. Then with do-ocracy, and authoritarianism “wow this just works so much better for meetup organizing”. Then with HBD, when I realized that I could build an acceptable line of retreat in the case that the racists were right on the factual questions.
And then, to quote moldbug: “for a wide variety of controversial issues, it would be very, very easy for any smart young person with a few hours to spare to see what the pattern of truth and error, and its inevitable political associations, started to look like.” That is, the “Dark Enlightenment” convinced me, a former hardcore anarchist.
So please, please consider that your enemies are not evil mutants. That people might reject democracy, and accept dark enlightenment ideas for actual good reasons, not just because they have magical “incompatible values”. Please, please consider that you may not have all the facts, and that you may end up changing your mind on some of these issues.
Please don’t. What if you’re wrong? How will you realize your error if you put in hard blocks against certain ideas?
In response to your concerns, I ask one very specific thing of you. Please go and re-read Three Worlds Collide. Right now.
Nitpicks:
I reject it too. So?
Anarchist more like Bakunin or Durruti, or more like Rand? If it’s the latter, then your statement is remarkably unsurprising. So much of this is just the logical development of right-wing libertarianism.
WTF are you talking about. Just above, I was complaining how the “Universalist establishment” is silent even on the existence of the alt-right. In particular, it’s pigeonholing all opposition as either Strawman Christian Fundamentalist, Strawman Arrogant Capitalist or Strawman Racist Hick. Corey Robin’s polite and respectful, diligently researched work, The Reactionary Mind, got savaged by the NYT. If the goddamn New York Times is not the Pravda of the mainstream “Universalist establishment”, I don’t know what “establishment” we’re talking about at all.
One possible development of right-wing libertarianism. Specifically, what happens if you attempt to coherently extrapolate libertarian maxims, forgetting the original reason for stating them.
This is actually a common general failure mode, one starts with an ethical injunction and notices that it contains a term, X, that is vaguely defined. Rather than thinking about what definition of X would make the injunction make the most sense (which is admittedly dangerous with ethical injunctions) or treating the definition as a Schelling fence, one attempts to formulate a coherent definition of X that turns out to be very different from the one in use when the injunction was being formulated. In the extreme case one might conclude that X includes everything or nothing.
For example, libertarians believe that private parties should be free to do as they wish. Moldburgians extend the definition of private parties to include governments. (Edit: Disclaimer: I have read very little of Moldburg’s writings so this might not be an accurate description of his position.)
You’re own position, if I understand it correctly, suffers from a similar mistake. Specifically, you take the maxim “It is wrong to hold someone responsible for something that’s not his fault”, and narrow the definition of “fault” until nothing is ever anyone’s fault.
Very good general point. This post by John Holbo is an examination of this “slippery slope towards absolutism” that libertarianism is in the risk of falling through. Holbo is a liberal and part of his goal is to score points against libertarianism, but I think he is on to something.
I don’t think, however, that this is an accurate description of Moldbug’s failure mode. The “family resemblance” of his doctrines with libertarianism is not through an ethical injunction of formal liberty to dispose of property, extended to governments. It is rather through a cluster of empirical and empirical-ish right-wing beliefs (government regulation is corrupt and inefficient, Austrian economics is correct and Keynesianism is nonsense, liberal policies on crime are abject failures, etc). His ultimate terminal goals seem to be social order and the minimization of conflict. These lead to the rejection of democracy and its replacement by an all-powerful absolute government as the best way to eliminate both crime and the inefficient jockeying of factions for political power; then the libertarian faith in efficient free markets provides trust that (a) a “patchwork” of such states would be enough to prevent abuses, though competition and right of exit, and (b) within each state, the government will adopt broadly libertarian policies as the way to maximize prosperity to be able to extract the Laffer maximum in taxes.
So instead of starting from libertarian values and developing them in a different direction, his system starts with a very different value and develops it in a direction at ends up close to anarcho-capitalism.
Good description, but I think that Moldbug’s ideology also has a “hidden” arational/romantic side, although it’s simultaneously a technocratic one—a Randian aesthetic of sorts, crossed with a Roman-style cult of mastery and dominance. Consider his hero-worship obituary for Steve Jobs, and compare it with Corey Robin’s enlightening examination of Joseph de Maistre. Both of them praise and admire above all competition, victory, fiercely defended supremacy, strength through ruthless adversity, control.
M.M. talks about “social order” and “minimization of conflict” not just because he wants to maximize hedonic utility for humans or something generic like that. Rather, he wants a certain mode of existence, where a technocratic system—a crowdsourced monarchist AGI of sorts—will actively seek out and ruthlessly destroy every disruptive element, every irregularity, every bug—and then continuously apply economic and political coercion to prevent further disturbance. He deeply and sincerely wants the paperclips to run on time. Consider these posts on the link between the engineer/tech-geek mindset and fundamentalism/authoritarianism/far-right radicalism.
Please believe me when I say I know how all this feels from the inside. I fear this mindset in others because my own brain can run it and I find the effects unacceptable. (I wouldn’t hesitate to proselytize for e.g. forced total wireheading or a bloody world revolution—if it was the only way to avoid this future.)
I read it again a few weeks ago, does that count? What are you getting at?
More like Bakunin, but I never really followed any school of thought.
I apologize for reading you out of context.
As someone who finds alt-right ideas interesting to read about and discuss, but is at the end of the day a conventional mainstream liberal, the advice I’d give you is: you should chill out.
Discussion of political topics at this site, as at Moldbug’s and other related ones, and also the vast majority of blogs and sites all over the political spectrum (with the possible but tiny exception of a handful of blogs connected to the D or R party apparatus or to insiders affecting government policy decisions) is essentially mental masturbation, something that will not affect in any way the future of humanity. It is just a way to pass the time some find interesting, as others prefer solving Sudoku puzzles or pondering Newcomblike problems.
Your feeling that a group of ideological “outsiders” who don’t share your values is growing in influence, and might take over if they are not “cordoned” and lead to some horrible catastrophe, sounds like the kind of feeling appropriate for a small hunter-gatherer tribe where if a dozen or two enemies of you join forces and take over you will have a very bad time. It is not appropriate for the objective situation of a forum with several thousand people, and much less for a country of 300 million people or a humanity of 7 billion people. The future of the world, even the future of LW, is not going to be shaped by the occasional crypto-racist (/sexist/fascist/etc) posts of a handful of people.
Sufficiently bad government can make a large difference, so it’s not irrational to oppose bad ideas. On the other hand, most bad ideas don’t get a chance to take hold. And on yet another hand, if you don’t like something, it’s very tempting to evoke the worst possible consequences and make them seem as vivid as possible.
Sure, it is reasonable to oppose bad ideas and to worry about worst-case scenarios. But when these are objectively low-probability, the reactions of “horror and rage” seem disproportionate.
Konkvistador, maybe you would mention your recent… little incident? (If no, then sorry, never mind.)
Many in the rationalist community are also part of the memetic cluster of the “Dark Enlightenment”. Moldbuggians, PUAs and HBDers are noticeable and seem to be participating in good faith on this forum, making various contributions while being mostly tolerant and polite to those of differing views. I argue this kind of ideological diversity and cooperation is vital to the goals of this community.
Again your post causes me to pause in concern. We don’t see many arguments on LW calling for a wide political coalition to disband and attack The Cathedral, which I think I could make quite convincingly if I wanted to here. The way well meaning people would understand and implement your call would lead to my own exclusion and that of others such as Vladimir_M.
Should those like me be hanging out in Roissy’s comment section rather than here?
Konkvistador, you were deep in the Enemy’s counsel! Tell us what you know! Do you really believe that they are all like Derbyshire, merely doomsaying and wallowing in bitterness? Their numbers grow by the hour; they will first be encouraged by this, then emboldened, then they will gather every single forbidden idea, every scrap of dark knowledge, and put Universalism to the test.
They profess scorn of all dreams and utopias, yet they have their own desire—Pronomianism, a stable world, safe for domination and slavery, where the strong are free from restraint and convention and the weak are free from choice and autonomy. They know where they want to go, they know their enemy, they do not fear for their feelings, conscience or sanity. Mainstream Universalism has only sheer numbers and inertia against these force multipliers.
I believe that we ought to strike as soon as possible. Few on the Left are alerted and concerned yet—but people like Land probably don’t expect a counterattack until much later, and surely don’t expect it to come from outside the Cathederal. Isolate them epistemically while they’re still few, attack their values as evil and dehumanizing, drive them into a phyg-like structure that would be bad at growth. So, what else can be done?
You underestimate universalism. It has adapted before. Recall that the Cathedral is a warm body machine, a belief pump. The victory of Democracy in the age of conscription and the printing press was no fluke. So as long as human minds by the billions can be thrown into the gears of war its complete defeat is unimaginable. What you must defend is not the ideology but the strategy. So clearly in order for this strategy to be viable you have to burn the mutant, kill the xeno and purge the heretics.
For the Emperor!
I see the “dark enlightenment” as a very minor force with little potential for growth, but one that intellectually seems a necessary correction to some of the mistakes of the first “enlightenment” that have metastasised over the past two centuries.
It won’t kill Universalism or even dethrone it, it might however create the happy state of affairs where the Cathedral’s theocratic nature is recognized as such and considered legitimate but people don’t take it too seriously. Like say the Anglican Church a century or two back.
Roissy is not dispensing any advice that goes beyond what is common in sexual cultures created by well meaning universalists in the inner city and lower class. Philosophers such as Nick Land may be scary in their style and thoughts, but their inquiry is following the tradition of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Bloggers like Moldbug are fascinated by the civilized aspects and achievements of Western civilization in the past more than its hierarchy. Their more scientifically minded members as say John Derbyshire (who you consider to have a grim heart) are rather reasonable. And stepping away from their atheist mainstream to their intellectual Christian faction? Do you even have a problem with those?
I grow more and more convinced that the dark enlightenment is a reformation of universalism rather than its abolition. Recall one of their favourite memes is fighting Lies and the search for Truth, a more Christian notion could not be found.
I’m not an expert on this by any means, but I always thought of that as a Christian syncretion of a Greek preoccupation. A lot of the more philosophical side of the historical Christian worldview got its start that way, and Aquinas in particular had a lot of Aristotle in him.
Yes I think this is correct, up voted. What I wanted to emphasize is that the received these particular memes almost certainly via Christianity, even if the religion wasn’t their origin. It is evidence in favor of them carrying other universalist assumptions and values from the same source.
....
This might fit my definition of “reason”… but what is noble or compassionate about it? How is Derbyshire preaching acceptance of inequality and submission to Nature different from the Catholic Church preaching acceptance of death and submission to God? If you think it reasonable to loathe death, why would you not loathe the genetic lottery?
I support Eliezer completely. Therefore I have to oppose Derbyshire unflinchingly.
This does not seem like submission to nature to me. I do not think he would object at all to say genetic engineering or eugenic programs aimed at reducing such suffering or boosting cognitive performance.
Derbyshire is asking us to please stop trying things that do not work and scapegoating those who aren’t responsible for misery inflicted by nature! I find it remarkable that you do not seem to grasp the moral relevance of avoiding scapegoating people at all! It is a terrible thing to look down on people and make them feel guilty and bad for something that is not their fault.
If you want to find nobility and compassion I say look here.
You read the article but did not understand it. Derbyshire stands where he stands intellectually because he can not do otherwise, no more than he can convince himself that there is a God. That is something I understand and sympathize with.
I will go further and say that he fears many of the same societal outcomes that you do.
But look, he demands that we accept it as a tolerable state of affairs! Eliezer says the opposite—yes, no particular person is to blame, but things are still horrible; we’re still living in a nightmare. To borrow from left-wing jargon again, I want a right to negativity here, a forceful statement that the default/normal/natural condition is awful, even with no-one to blame, and that there is an ethical imperative to ameliorate it.
Derbyshire’s article should have begun with “oughts”, his “is” statements might be true but they’re insufficient for humans. The fact that you being born e.g. black and in the slums and now you’re likely fucked and maladapted is no-one else’s fault does not mean that you are not entitled to scream, to express anguish. And dude, there’s a lot of anguish!
Taboo “tolerable”.
What ethical system are you using to make that assertion?
Eliezer is a utilitarian. Yes, it would improve overall utility to ameliorate this particular problem, there are also hundreds of other problems whose solution would also improve utility, and frankly by any measure of urgency or returns to effort, this one really isn’t even in the top 100.
Do you also believe that it’s a crime against humanity for God not to have given all humans (or even any humans) AGI-level intelligence?
Clearly, he means we should kill anyone who deviates from the average because they devalue the rest.
As an intellectual exercise, what would the Catholic Special Containment Procedure for ultra hazardous memetic materials look like applied to reaction.
Actually why wouldn’t ultra-traditional Catholicism work in such a role?
Or maybe the hour is later than you think Multiheaded.
Oh wow. It’s on! It’s officially on like Donkey Kong.
Wonder when they’ll put up something quotable, from Land or otherwise—maybe some “watchdog” far-left blog would be interested. (BTW some New-Left-y blog that looks at the aesthetics of materialist philosophy has been covering Land; unfortunately, the university jargon there is near-impenetrable.)
Well, that’s an expected precaution.
Ha-haah! Moldburg got Defoe confused with Swift. Fail!
no
Academia and mainstream political and philosophical tradition have no reason to engage what they don’t need to engage to maintain their position. The Dark Enlightenment is far from power or influence on society. If it demonstrates the ability to grasp it I am sure something like the counter-reformation will be brought to bare by the major established institutions against it.
I took away one thing from the Dark Enlightenment link—that it’s worth being shocked that cities have districts where the local culture makes it hard for people to live with each other. I don’t know whether his claim that first world Asian cities don’t have such districts is true.
As someone who recently realized that the default memeplex is in fact a memeplex and probably wrong, I think I have an idea for why no one on the “inside” counterattacks.
We don’t realize we are even in a memeplex that can be attacked. There’s no explicit defense of those values because they just feel like the way the world is; we don’t recognize them as values needing defending.
The standard universalist immune response is not calibrated to the alt-right, and doesn’t recognize it as hostile. Also, some of it is recognized and flagged as “idiocy; ignore.”
If we do recognize the attack, we have no canned response. It’s hard to get original thought out of people; much easier to get zombie slogan chanting.
I just realized though, that this explanation is entirely a rationalization. It might have no connection to reality.
They are. They just can’t come up with good arguments.
I think what is happening here is a bit more subtle than your summary suggests. First, many of the notions being proposed or discussed while in some sense “conservative″ are things like Moldbug’s ideas which while they do fall into one end, they aren’t in any way standard arguments or even issues. So people may simply not be able to raise effective arguments since they are grappling with approaches with which they haven’t had to think about before. Similarly, I suspect that all of us would have trouble making responses to arguments favoring say complete dissolution of all governments above the county level, not because such arguments are strong, but because we’re not used to thinking about them or constructing arguments against them.
Moreover, the meta-contrarian nature of Less Wrong, makes people very taken with arguments of forms that they haven’t seen before, so there may be a tendency to upvote or support an interesting contrarian argument even as one doesn’t pay as much attention to why the argument simply fails.
Finally, contrarian attitudes have an additional advantage when phrased in a political context: They aren’t as obviously political. The politics-as-mindkiller meme is very strong here, so a viewpoint that everyone recognizes as by nature political gets labeled as potential mindkilling to be avoided while arguments that don’t fit into the standard political dialogue as much don’t pattern match as closely.
Not sure about the last paragraph. People’s ideologies are part of the background to how they think, and political ideas that align with someone’s ideology can sometimes blend into that background without being registered. Contrarian ideas are less likely to blend in, and so more likely to be flagged by mainstreamers as political.
I think him being acutely aware of this possibility is what contributes to feeling under siege by scary aliens.
The fact that I don’t have time to write essays with the historical facts that Moldbug always seems to omit does not mean that I couldn’t.
(Although talk is cheap, so this post is not really a reason for anyone else to believe that).
Generally speaking the historical facts Moldbug omits are the ones most educated readers should be familiar with anyway.
We have seen posters motivated enough to engage in karmassasination of users making right wing arguments so this seems plausible. The weight of evidence certainly seems to be on the alt-right side quite strongly on several issues and has been building ever more that way for decades.
Yet the demographics of metacontrarianism however are something we should keep in mind. Perhaps people clever enough to construct on their own novel arguments rather than just picking them up from academia or mainstream political tradition don’t yet have much to signal by doing this. If 10 or 20% of LWers where conservatives and another 10% of reactionaries perhaps they would. For now though they stay in the alternative right wing camp where the fun ideas and displays of cleverness are to be had. I’m basing that number on anti-libertarian arguments being viable in our community.
It seems possibly relevant to point out that karma assasination has been occurring in the last few days to people of a wide variety of political viewpoints. For example the recent thread on women’s experience was reported as leading to multiple incidents of karma assassination to people espousing views classically labeled as feminist.
Engagement in karma fights probably doesn’t give much data about accuracy of beliefs or peoples confidence in their own belief structures.
When people talk about karma assassination, what tools do they use for keeping track?
All I’ve got is the count by my name and checking back for a few pages of my comments. I would like to get information about which comments have the most recent karma changes.
And not to be paranoid, but I think I had about 14 points go away a few days ago for no apparent reason. I’m not sure whether I misremembered my total, or someone found a bunch of comments they didn’t like, or it was just spite.
I don’t know of any tools per se. I suspect that people have a track of what karma most of their recent comments had, so they can simply check by looking there. There are also some subtle signs: For example, for most people the common karma on a comment is zero. So even if you don’t remember your karma (or if you are looking at someone else’s) and there are a lot of recent comments at −1 on a variety of different subjects that don’t look obviously bad, that’s a sign.
Edit: Over what time span was the 14 point drop?
Less than a day.
So that certainly sounds like karma assassination to me (assuming that you remembered the number correctly before hand). In general, karma almost always is increasing if one is a user in good standing, so on any given day, the variance will for most days probably be a question of how much it goes up by more than anything else. A drop of 14 in a single day in that context seems extreme.
If I see that almost all of the last 20 comments I published before yesterday at three o’ clock have 1 point less than they used to (including apparently unobjectionable ones such as me answering a relevant question), and almost none of more recent or more ancient comments do, then I guess something fishy is going on.