GLaDOS comments on What is moral foundation theory good for? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (296)
So exactly what was the point of this article? Boo conservative values, yay liberal values? I am sure we need more like this on LessConservative!
Sure, a conservative mindkilled person may fail to notice that women in conservative societies can be opressed and battered by their husbands, in the name of sacred family. Just like a liberal mindkilled person may fail to notice that some women don't mind their daughters raped by their sexy alpha boyfriends, in the name of sacred sexual freedom. What a coincidence -- biased people not noticing their biases!
However, liberal biases are OK, because liberal people say so; both here and in academy. On the other hand we should remove all topics that could offend... ahem... people other than conservatives. For example, discussions about "pick-up arts" -- their strawman versions could make women feel unwelcome. A "pick-up artist" would probably not make the same mistake as author of this article; but for our rationality, it is better if they take their evidence elsewhere. If my opinions are right, I want to believe my opinions are right; and if my opinions are wrong, I want to believe your opinions are harmful.
Seriously -- we all have many different values and opinions; but saying that some of some kinds of biases are not so harmful, and then writing and upvoting an article that more or less celebrates this attitude... that's not the LessWrong I imagine. Liberal biases are harmful for the same reasons like any other biases; they prevent us from seeing the territory correctly.
In other words -- trying to use a language a liberal might understand better -- articles like this make me feel unwelcome.
I'm also starting to feel unwelcome here.
I've been seeing more and more sings of an intellectual chilling in the past few months and a shrinking of acceptable ingroup political variation.
Things like users commenting on there being concerned about there being "insufficient liberal spin". Now obviously the no mind-killer norm kept the concern unpopular and a well worded post calling it out was written... but still what concerns me is that I don't recall things like this happening at all before.
Not cool.
Multiheaded is a delightfully unusual case with delightfully unusual posting goals, who I assumed was rather unlike any other poster here. Was your usage of the plural 'users' solely for aesthetic concerns, or are there other users who have complained about "insufficient liberal bias"?
???
To use terminology I do not wager Multiheaded would object to, he takes the threat of certain right-wing political philosophies very seriously. Perhaps goal is the not the best term, however. See here for a glimpse of what I mean.
In a nontrivial number of his posts, one could say that a specter is haunting Multiheaded, the specter of fascism. As such, a good bit of his output consists of left-wing ghost-busting.
Indeed, your terminology is OK with me. (Just one qualification: "certain modern right-wing political philosophies") However, you forgot to mention my roguish charm, my irresistable allure and my gorgeous looks.
Multiheaded is basically Barron the Green.
No way, I'm not! I mean, yes, I'm certainly mind-killed (and flattered when my mind-killedness is described in dramatic language like above, thanks!) - but at least... how to put it.. I'm mind-killed about the mind!
That is, I fret and read and (sometimes) post about social psychology and cultural processes and human ethics and stuff like that - which is, in the end, self-referential and self-fulfilling/negating to a degree.
If e.g. everyone in known history thought that economic equality was massively evil and alien and harmful and undesirable - why, societies would simply increase wealth divergence without ever worrying whether it's practical or moral to - like, in real life, we feel and act the same about starvation, even when we let its victims die in other ways.
If in 1936 or so 90% of Europeans got the idea that Hitler had unspeakably evil plans, he'd never be able to carry out those plans. {1}
Therefore, if someone, like me, fervently believes that [religion name]/[ideology name] is (in its worldview and revealed preferences, not its description of reality) an enormous priority to pursue OR avoid, more important than even lives or happiness - and that humanity is blind to that urgent matter, then they're slightly better off than someone who fervently believes that e.g. Mars has a breathable atmosphere.
The more people share the first "delusion", the less of a "delusion" it is internally and the more implementable it is in practice. Yes, of course some ev-psych facts - like selfishness, love of authority or envy - limit the phase space of working societies, but those realities can be stretched or hacked around, given how plastic our minds potentially are.
The second one remains a delusion no matter how large and committed a group tries to live up to it; a lone atheist and a million good Catholics following a papal edict would choke with equal speed on Mars. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away."
Barron might hate the universe and feel that it hates him in return; I only hate some particular, and passing, arrangements in the universe, and resent the fact that most people insist on propping up those arrangements (by e.g. thinking that material welfare is the only real measure of political systems).
{1} Yes, yes, I'm aware of the Functionalist argument and find it rather credible; that bit was just rhetorical.
So how did the Soviet Union's attempt to create the "New Soviet Man" turn out?
There was some serious work in that direction in the 1920s, but with Stalin's ascent to power, left-wing education and indoctrination were in fact stamped out, to be replaced with Russian crypto-nationalism, imperial and militarist sentiment, and most notably an Asian-style cult of the god-king.
In fact, by the end of his life Stalin had uprooted or completely subverted virtually every institution that the 1920s' Old Bolshevik leaders introduced (with the sole exception of the repression apparatus, which he expanded while purging most personnel) - from the "New Economic Policy" and legal free abortion (!) to the avant-garde artists' organizations and the Comintern.
I'm not necessarily saying that those institutions were good (although the NEP objectively worked well enough); I'm saying that, since around 1930 and until the end, Soviet leadership only paid lip service to genuine radical indoctrination/reeducation, preferring the old staples of nationalism, feudal loyalty and leader-worship.
Later, in the Brezhnev era, an official cargo cult of sorts was formed around Marxist phraseology and such, but no-one gave a shit whether, say, the "Marxism-Leninism" classes at universities were even functioning as propaganda.
In fact, it was rather counter-productive as propaganda, as people began to mock even the several objective, verified achievements that it trumpeted - like the space program or the considerable infrastructure investment. The system became too stagnant even to attempt self-replication through indoctrination.
So there. The USSR was mostly an ineffective (if somewhat orderly) conservative regime that would have shat its collective pants if a New Soviet Man suddenly appeared in flesh.
And hey, a handful did appear, more or less by accident; e.g. Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, Vasily Grossman (Socialist Realist writers!), Sakharov, the Strugatsky brothers, numerous other good people who advocated left-wing ideas and got suppressed by an ostensibly socialist system. Oh, well, for the wider Warsaw Pact, I guess Zizek also counts as a New Soviet Man :)
P.S.: lengthy quote incoming! Orwell's praise of left-wing indoctrination in Homage to Catalonia.
Hadn't NEP originally been conceived as a temporary policy for the interim when the society was going to be slowly transformed into communism, after radical immediate implementation of communist economics attempted in the first years after the revolution visibly failed?
Well, the many far left movements had a militarist element (directed against the bourgeois) to them from the very beginning. Also the nationalism didn't start going until WWII, and only after it became clear that appealing to people to fight for communist ideals wasn't working.
Do you feel that the entire article is a problem, or are there specific bits that bother you?
Just a few minor political digs in it, otherwise it is an appropriate critique of H's work. I was more concerned with the overall LW climate as I tried to show with my cited example.
Do you mean the bit about Catholics, or another bit? I think I'm going to remove that bit. [edit] I did.
(I'm asking because I would like to improve the article, not to start an argument)
(Although I didn't read that comment at the time, I am also boggled by the "liberal spin" bit, for what that's worth).