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ArisKatsaris comments on Rationality Quotes May 2012 - Less Wrong
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And yet, it's the "Universalist" system that allows Jews to not get exterminated. I think the cognitive and epistemological flaws of "Universalism" kinda makes some people ignore the fact that it's the system that also allows the physical existence of heretics more than any other system in existence ever yet has.
Was (non-Universalist) Nazi Germany more open to accepting Jew-produced science than the "Universalist" West was? Or is the current non-Universalist Arab world more open to such? Were the previous feudal systems better at accepting atheists or Jewish people? Which non-universalist (and non-Jewish) system was actually better than "Universalism" at recognizing Jewish contributions or intelligence, that you would choose to criticize Universalism for being otherwise? Or better at not killing heretics?
Let's keep it simple -- which non-Universalist nation has ever been willing to allow as much relative influence to Jewish people as Universalist systems have?
As for Moldbug's diagnosis, I'm unimpressed with his predictive abilities: he predicted Syria would be safe from revolt, right, because it was cozying up to Iran rather than to America? He has an interesting model of the world but, much like Marxism, I'm not sure Moldbuggery has much predictive capacity.
I agree. In my mind this is its great redeeming feature and the main reason I think I still endorse universalism despite entertaining much of the criticism of it. At the end of the day I still want to live in a Western Social Democracy, just maybe one that has a libertarian (and I know this may sound odd coming from me) real multicultural bent with regards to some issues.
The same is true of the Roman and Byzantine empire. The Caliphate too. Also true of Communist regimes. Many absolute monarchies now that I think about it. Also I'm pretty sure the traditional Indian cast system could keep Jews safe as well.
If Amy Chua is right democracy (a holy word of universalism) may in the long run put market dominant minorities like the Jews more at risk than some alternatives. Introducing democracy and other universalist memes in the Middle East has likely doomed the Christian minorities there for example.
I'm not quite sure why particularly the Jewish people matter so very much to you in this example. I'm sure you aren't searching for the trivial answer (which would be "in any ancient and medieval Jewish state or nation").
If you are using Jews here as an emblem of invoking the horrors of Nazism, can't we at least throw a bone to Gypsy and Polish victims? And since we did that can we now judge Communism by the same standard? Moldbug would say that Communism is just a country getting sick with a particularly bad case of universalism.
The thing is Universalism as it exists now dosen't seem to be stable, the reason one sees all these clever (and I mean clever in the bad, overly complicating, overly contrarian sense of the word) arguing in the late 2000s against "universalism" online is because the comfortable heretic tolerating universalism of the second half of the 20th century seems to be slowly changing into something else. They have no where else to go but online. The economic benefits and comforts for most of its citizens are being dismantled, the space of acceptable opinion seems to be shrinking. As technology, that enables the surveillance of citizens and enforcement of social norms by peers, advances there dosen't seem to be any force really counteracting it. If you transgress, if you are a heretic in the 21st century, you will remain one for your entire life as your name is one google search away from your sin. As mobs organize via social media or apps become more and more a reality, a political reality, how long will such people remain physically safe? How do you explain to the people beating you that you recanted your heresy years ago? Recall how pogroms where usually the affair of angry low class peasants. You don't need the Stasi to eliminate people. The mob can work as well. You don't need a concentration camp when you have the machete. And while modern tech makes the state more powerful since surveillance is easier, it also makes the mob more powerful. Remaining under the, not just legal, but de facto, protection of the state becomes more and more vital. The room for dissent thus shrinks even if stated ideals and norms remain as they where before.
And I don't think they will remain such. While most people carrying universalist memes are wildly optimistic with "information wants to be free" liberty enhancing aspect of it, the fact remains that this new technology seems to have also massively increased the viability and reach of Anarcho-Tyranny.
The personal psychological costs of living up to universalist ideals and internalizing them seem to be rising as well. To illustrate what I mean by this, consider the practical sexual ethics of say Elizabethan England and Victorian England. On the surface and in their stated norms they don't differ much, yet the latter arguably uses up far more resources and a places a greater cognitive burden of socialization on its members to enforce them.
Now consider the various universalist standards of personal behaviour that are normative in 2012 and in 1972. They aren't that different in stated ideals, but the practical costs have arguably risen.
nykos' was the one who used the example of Jewish superior intelligence not getting acknowdged as such by Universalism. My point was that was there have been hardly any non-Universalist systems that could even tolerate Jewish equal participation, let alone acknowledged Ashkenazi superiority.
Thank you, I missed that context. Sorry.
I see no proof of that. What economic benefits and comforts? Sure, real wages in Western countries have stopped growing around the 1970s, but e.g. where welfare programs are being cut following the current crisis, it's certainly not the liberals but economically conservative governments championing the cuts.
I don't understand. Do you mean prestigious norms like "never avoid poor neighbourhoods for your personal safety, because it's supposedly un-egalitarian", or what? What other norms like that exist that are harmful in daily life?
What's happening is, to paraphrase Thacher, that governments are running out of other people's money. Yes, conservative parties are more willing to acknowledge this fact, but liberal parties don't have any viable alternatives and it was their economic policies that lead to this state of affairs.
Hmm? And in places where fiscally conservative parties were at the helm before the crisis? What about them?
The places that are being hardest hit have been ruled by left wing parties for most of the time since at least the 1970s. Also in these places the right wing parties aren't all that right wing.
Are the Scandinavian nations among the ones hit hardest? Or, say, Poland?
You've got to make it more general, that's where it gets interesting! Speaking frankly, from the selfish viewpoint of a typical Western person, the Universalist system has been better than any other system at everything for more than a century, especially at the quality and complexity of life for the average citizen. Of course, Moldbug's adherents would argue that there's no dependency between these two unique, never-before-seen facts of civilization - universalist ideology and an explosive growth in human development for the bottom 90% of society. They'd say that both are symptoms of more rapid and thoroughly supported technological progress than elsewhere.
Let's concede that (although there are reasons to challenge it - see e.g. Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, an early argument that religion morphing into a secular quasi-theocracy is what gave the West its edge). Okay, so if both things are the results of our civilization's unique historical path... then, from an utilitarian POV, the cost of universalism is still easily worth paying! We know of no society that advanced to an industrial and then post-industrial state without universailsm, so it would be in practice impossible to alter any feature of technical and social change to exclude the dominance of universalist ideology but keep the pace of "good" progress. Then, even assuming that universalist ideology is single-handedly responsible for the entirety of the 20th century's wars and mass murder (and other evils), it is still preferable to the accumulated daily misery of the traditional pre-industrial civilization - especially so for everyone who voted "Torture" on "Torture vs Specks"! (I didn't, but here I feel differently, because it's "Horrible torture and murder" vs "Lots and lots of average torture".)
Moldbug isn't arguing we should get rid of some technology and its comfort in order to also get rid of universalism and he certainly does recognize both as major aspects of modernity, no he is saying that precisely technological progress now enables us to get rid of the parasitic aspect of modernity "universalism". One can make a case that since it inflames some biases, it is slowing down technological progress and the benefits it brings. Peter Thiel is arguably concerned precisely by this influence when he talks of a technological slowdown. Universalism not only carries opportunity costs, it has historically often broken out in Luddite strains. Consider for example something like the FDA. Recall what criticism of that institution are often heard on LW, yet aren't these same criticism when consistently applied basically hostile to the Cathedral?
Whether MM is right or wrong what you present seems like a bit of a false dilemma. You certainly are right that we haven't seen societies that advance to a post-industrial or industrial state without at least some influence of universalism but it is hard to deny that we do observe varying degrees of such penetration. Moldbug's idea is that even if we can't use technology to get rid of the memeplex in question by social manoeuvring we can still perhaps find a better trade off by not taking "universalism" so seriously. The vast majority of people, the 90% you invoke, may be significantly better of with a world where every city is Singapore than a world where every city is London.
It is no mystery which of these two is more in line with universalist ideals.
And could you please name those ideals once again? Because it's very confusing.
In the case of Singapore vs. London (implicitly including the governing structure of Britain since London isn't a city state)? A few I can think of straight away:
Democratic decision making. Therapeutic rather than punitive law enforcement. Lenient punishment of crime. Absence of censorship.
Naturally all of these aren't fully realized in London either. Britian dosen't have real free speech, yet it has much more of it than Singapore. Britain has (in my opinion) silly and draconian anti-drug laws, but it dosen't execute people for smuggling drugs. London doesn't have corporal or capital punishment. The parties in Britain are mostly the same class of people, yet at least Cerberus (Lib/Lab/Con) has three heads, you get to vote the one that promises to gnaw at you the least, Singapore is democratic in form only, and it is a very transparent cover. Only one party has a chance of victory, and it has been that way and will remain that way for some time.
Yet despite all these infractions against stated Western ideals, life isn't measurably massively worse in Singapore than in London. And Singapore seems to work better as a multi-ethnic society than London. The world is globalizing, de facto multiculturalism is the destined future of every city from Vladivostok to Santiago so the Davos men tell us. No place like Norway or Japan in our future, but elections where we will see ethnic blocks and identity politics. I don't know about you but I prefer Lee Kuan Yew to that mess of tribal politics. Which city would deal better with a riot? Actually which city is more likely to have a riot? Recall what Lee said in his autobiography and interviews he learned from the 1960s riots. Did it work? It sure looks like it did. Also recall from what Singapore started, and where surrounding Malaysia from which it diverged is today. What is the better model to pull the global south out of poverty? What is the better model to have the worlds people live side by side? Which place will likely be safer, more liveable and more prosperous in 20 years time?
It seems in my eyes that Singapore is clearly winning in such a comparison. Yet clearly it does so precisely by ignoring several universalist ideals. Strangely they didn't seem to have needed to give up iPods and other marvels of modern technology to do it either.
Taboo "worse"!
If by life not being "worse" you mean the annual income or the quality of healthcare or the amount of street crime, maybe it's so. If one values e.g. being able to contribute to a news website without fear of fines or imprisonment (see e.g. Gibson's famous essay where he mentions that releasing information about Singapore's GDP could be punished with death), or not fearing for the life of a friend whom you smoke marijuana with, or being able to think that the government is at least a little bit afraid of you (this not necessarily being real, just a pleasant delusion to entertain, like so many others we can't live without)... in short, if one values the less concrete and material things that speak to our more complex instincts, it's not nearly so one-sided.
That's why I dislike utilitarianism; it says without qualification that a life always weighs the same, whatever psychological climate it is lived in (the differences are obvious as soon as you step off a plane, I think - see Gibson's essay again), and a death always weights the same, whether you're killed randomly by criminals (as in the West) or unjustly and with malice by the government (as in Singapore), et cetera, et cetera... It's, in the end, not very compatible with the things that liberals OR classical conservatives love and hate. Mere safety and prosperity are not the only things a society can strive for.
You seem to have an overly romantic view of criminals if you think they never kill with malice.
Heck when the government doesn't keep them in check criminal gangs operate like mini-governments that are much worse in terms of warm fuzzies then even Singapore.
In the West they operate more or less like wild animals.
Um no.
Yes. But these are incredibly important things to hundreds of millions of people alive today drowning in violence, disease and famine. What do spoiled first world preferences count against such multitudes?
And you know what, I think 70% of people alive today in the West wouldn't in practice much miss a single thing you mention, though they might currently say or think they would.
There's a threshold where violence, disease and hunger stop being disastrous in our opinion (compare e.g. post-Soviet Eastern Europe to Africa), and that threshold, as we can see, doesn't require brutal authoritarianism to maintain, or even to achieve. Poland has transitioned to a liberal democracy directly after the USSR fell, although its economy was in shambles (and it had little experience of liberalism and democracy before WW2), Turkey's leadership became softer after Ataturk achieved his primary goals of modernization, etc, etc. There's a difference between a country being a horrible hellhole and merely lagging behind in material characteristics; the latter is an acceptable cost for attempting liberal policies to me. I accept that the former might require harsh measures to overcome, but I'd rather see those measures taken by an internally liberal colonial power (like the British Empire) than a local regime.
The actual real people living there, suppose you could ask them, which do you think they would chose? And don't forget those are mere stated preferences, not revealed ones.
If you planted Singapore on their borders wouldn't they try to move there?
Sure, Singapore is much better than Africa; I never said otherwise! However, if given choice, the more intelligent Africans would probably be more attracted to a Western country, where their less tangible needs (like the need for warm fuzzies) would also be fulfilled. Not many Singaporeans probably would, but that's because the Singaporean society does at least as much brainwashing as the Western one!
Yes, and notice that unlike Mubarak and Gaddafi who both (at least partially) cozyed up to America, Assad is still in charge of Syria.
The prediction Moldbug made was "no civil war in Syria"; not that there would be a civil war but Assad would manage to endure it.
Indeed in the post I link to, Mencius Moldbug seemed to be predicting that Qaddafi would endure the civil war too; as Moldbug made said post at a point in time in which the war was turning to Qaddafi's favour, and Moldbug wrongly predicted that the West would not intervene to perform airstrikes.
So what exactly did he predict correctly?
Actually Modlbug's diagnosis does provide decent predictive power: In the West at least Whigh history shall continue. The left shall continue to win nearly all battles over what the stated values and norms of our society should be (at least outside the economic realm).
Naturally Whig history makes the same prediction of itself, but the model it uses to explain itself seems built more for a moral universe than the one we inhabit. Not only that I find the stated narrative of Whig history has some rather glaring flaws. MM's theories win in my mind simply because they seem a explanation of comparable or lower complexity in which I so far haven't found comparably problematic flaws.