You know those people who say “you can use numbers to show anything” and “numbers lie” and “I don’t trust numbers, don’t give me numbers, God, anything but numbers”? These are the very same people who use numbers in the wrong way.
“Junior”, FIRE JOE MORGAN
Since when has the institution of slavery been a charitable one? Historically, slave-owners have payed immense costs, directly and indirectly, for the privilege of owning slaves, and done so knowingly and willingly. It is human nature to derive pleasure from holding power over others.
What those eggheads need is a good ass-kicking!
A praiseworthy sentiment.
I see no good reason to presume a correlation between a med school’s admissions criteria and total lives saved over a doctor’s career as tight as this reasoning requires. Or to presume that it is near certain that if he hadn’t lied, another liar wouldn’t have been accepted in his place.
But wouldn’t that defeat the purpose, or am I missing something? I understood the offensiveness of the specific example to be the point.
Comments that will end up being hidden by default mostly shouldn’t exist.
Then why don’t the grand-high muckity-mucks just censor the posts honestly? I do not see how that could possibly be less effective than this crowd-sourced star chamber scheme, which manages to be simultaneously opaque, unaccountable, and open to abuse by the trolls it’s supposed to be suppressing.
One could argue that they where and still are the intellectually and socially invested backbone of the community that formed around Overcoming Bias and LessWrong!
That’s the argument I wanted to make, so I think I’ll steal it. The intellectually and socially invested backbone of the community was and is distinctly right-leaning. Hence, the site is in many ways unwelcoming to people on the political left, much as was earlier claimed that the site is unwelcoming to some on the right.
They will just have to get over that though.
Right. And I think this applies equally to the right-wing readers and commenters who feel the site isn’t sufficiently sympathetic to their political views. Obviously I do not think that the political right deserves special treatment on account of somehow being innately more rational than the other tribes.
About as big as “human biodiversity” is for a leftist. I think you are severely underestimating the strength of conviction among people whose beliefs disagree with your own, or the extent to which these are moral disagreements, rather than exclusively factual.
Maybe this is because I’m European. In Slovenia calling someone far right is usually always calling that person a dangerous nationalist or even a crypto-fascist. The implied context is that they should be suppressed or arrested since we don’t have free speech. A dope smoking libertarian isn’t called Far Right but a capitalist lap dog. ;)
Yeah, that’s a very different context from the US. I don’t have much direct experience of Slovenia, but I do have some familiarity with Serbia (my Mom’s from there), so I hope you aren’t too offended if my mental model of Slovenia is a smaller, richer, much less screwed up Serbia. In the US, capitalist lap dogs are generally lumped in with dangerous nationalists and crypto-fascists. It doesn’t work the same when you’ve got some experience with really dangerous nationalists, like in 90′s former Yugoslavia.
In the lifetimes of Rand, Chesterton, and Orwell, socialist vs. anti-socialist was possibly the dividing line in the world of politics, so it’s not a minor difference. I think a slightly better translation might be “LW has traditionally been very sympathetic to non-religious anti-socialists”. I wouldn’t call it a wrong thing, because I don’t perceive this issue as having that much moral weight. I disagree on the facts with a particular assessment of site-wide political bias.
A libertarian who is also a fan of Moldbug and PUAs is in my estimation almost certain to be some way out on the non-religious branch of the right. Obviously my views are not unbiased, and I hope I have not claimed them to be. Your last paragraph is good snark, but I think it’s pretty close to how a fair portion of those on the political left would see it. Anyone who identifies as liberal is likely to see Peter Thiel and Robin Hanson as far-right nutcases (assuming they’ve heard of them). Yudkowsky, as I see it, is libertarian by upbringing but generally indifferent to politics, so he can only be far-right by association. All of his really far-out opinions are elsewhere.
Our sister site Overcoming Bias does directly link to Heartiste’s blog (under its old name of Roissy in DC) so maybe he is overrepresented in PUA discussions, but I’d argue a larger part of why he is overrepresented is that he makes a good target to straw man PUA.
He is a good target to straw man PUAs! I’m glad we found something we can agree on! Naming himself Heartiste was the greatest gift any man could give to snarky enemies of the PUA movement. But he also writes some truly messed up stuff (no links because I don’t want to vomit right now), and he is linked to by Hanson, so I don’t think criticizing him is unfair.
My head feels funny, and I can’t tell whether I have trouble expressing my thoughts clearly or if they’re hopelessly disorganized to begin with. But I feel compelled to attempt sensible replies to your comments, so here goes(Jetzt Mit Bulletpoints!)...
mainstream conservatives feeling unwelcome
In the US context, I would take mainstream to mean religious. In that case, LW is an atheist site, which is only attractive to atheists and religious eccentrics who enjoy arguing with atheists. US demographics being what they are, LW won’t be welcoming to mainstream anyone, though the right end of the political spectrum will be most affected by this.
eclectic, eccentric, and weird right vs. far right
I think the overlap between “weird right” and “far right” (and “weird left” and “far left”) is extensive, to the point that it’s rare to have one without the other. Political intellectuals almost always espouse eclectic and eccentric views, and are almost always on the fringes compared to the political rank-and-file. A politically centrist intellectual is a politically apathetic intellectual. My point here, assuming I have one, is that “he’s weird-whatever” isn’t a rebuttal to “he’s far-whatever.”
meta-contrarianism
I agree with your general point. The difference in my take is that I think LW, especially in earlier times, has tended to express meta-contrarian views that align with the general politics of the techie-right. A rough description of what I’d consider the techie-right cluster: pro-libertarian, anti-gun-control, anti-religion, anti-environmentalist, pro-hard-sciences, pro-evopsych, pro-mainstream-economics, anti-the-rest-of-academia.
That Stalinist Guy
Uh, yeah, well...exception that proves the rule, that was central to my point, but I equivocated “few or no” etc...nah OK, you got me there. I even remembered TGP’s endorsement and still had that obvious hole in my argument. Didn’t know he had ever posted here though.
It is interesting to see Ayn Rand, Heartiste, and Chesterton as examples of “the right”. Makes me thinking what exactly does this concept mean; what exactly do these three have in common… which they don’t share with George Orwell.
Not being avowed socialists. Anyway, the fact that “the right” is an incredibly broad and imprecise category doesn’t make the concept meaningless. It is empirically true that most politically aware Americans vote unerringly for one of two parties based on their identification with a broad and imprecisely defined category, even if you think they ought not to behave that way. A private citizen’s specific policy opinions are of far less practical significance than their identification with “the right” or “the left.”
I think that you are selecting only a part of the story. For example, the official boogeyman here is the religion. (By the way, it happens to be associated with political right, at least today in USA.)
Definitely. But there are groups associated with the US political right that are non- or anti-religious. Objectivists are an obvious example. Unsurprisingly, these groups are overrepresented on the internet (though this is becoming less and less the case over the years). My impression is that LW has traditionally skewed toward this branch of the right.
Yet somehow, quotes from Chesterton often get many upvotes in “Rationality Quotes”. Does it mean that LW is secretly very sympathetic to religion? Or just that we are able to appreciate a decent quote even from people with whom we disagree on other topics? Could the second explanation possibly apply also to Heartiste or Moldbug?
Yes, but “possible” is a low bar. I do not believe it could entirely, or even in large part explain the frequency of references to Heartiste and Moldbug, or their reception. Chesterton is less famous and less respected than, say, George Orwell, but he is nonetheless a well-known and often quoted political writer in the English speaking world. Heartiste and Moldbug are not. They are so obscure that even having heard of them requires an unusual degree of familiarity with the fringes of the blogosphere.
Your description of political correctness makes it sound a lot like the “Politics is the Mindkiller” gag-rule. The Boogeyman version of political correctness is more like a hybrid of the Cheka and the Inquisition.
Disingenuous racism (“race realism” or “human biodiversity” or whatever euphemism it hides behinds currently). Libertarianism. Chest-beating displays towards right-wing boogeymen like political correctness and the media-academia complex. Multiple apparently respected posters taking “Heartiste” seriously, even though his entire shtick is gay-bashing and misogyny, and despite the fact that he’s a grown-ass man who calls himself “Heartiste.” And oh yeah, Mencius Moldbug. Is there a left-wing writer of similar obscurity and extremism so widely and approvingly quoted on LessWrong?
Religious variants of social conservatism aside, this site has traditionally been very sympathetic to the far right. There has been little or no Stalinism or Maoism advocated here, but quite a bit of the right wing equivalent. If the site becoming somewhat less welcoming to Neo-Birchers, PC-Paranoiacs, and other Reverse-Leninists upsets you, perhaps you might consider how the past political climate has been perceived by those left of center, or even those only slightly right of it.
“Accepting Breivik’s narrative” sounds even less appealing. Why give him the satisfaction? Just lock him up til he dies of old age. Whether or not the Norwegian government could legally justify his execution has little bearing on whether they’d want to execute him in the first place. I think you underestimate the amount of smug self-satisfaction derived from looking down on the “barbaric” states that still have the death penalty.
Assuming it is important to Norwegians’ self-image that they are a state without a death penalty, it’s not clear to me what compensatory benefits could be derived from executing Breivik. Appeasing foreign and domestic bubbas would definitely not be a plus for the typical Norwegian.
“Crackpot moment”? Moldbug might have lucid moments, but Bircher crackpottery is the mainstream of his political writings.
What about the never-ending meta discussions, or are you counting on those dying down soon? Because I wouldn’t, unless the new policy is either dropped, or an extensive purge of the commentariat is carried out.