Politics Discussion Thread September 2012

Multiheaded

The last thread didn't fare too badly, I think; let's make it a monthly tradition. (Me, I'm more interested in thinking about real-world policies or philosophies, actual and possible, rather than AI design or physics, and I suspect that many fine, non-mind-killed folks reading LW also are - but might be ashamed to admit it!)

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

I've read the last one, it's extremely typical of Moldbug IMO. He rather distinctly perceives what sort of thing is going on (yes, "diversity" is a political weapon, not so much "towards" political power as to undermine the influence of the New Left's perceived enemies; personally I am lukewarm on it) - but he engages in a lot of empty rhetoric and faux-cynical views of human psychology (it's silly and unfalsifiable - not to say invidious - to say that most ideals of the Left are merely well-internalized means to get the thrill of wielding influence!).

Meanwhile, he details nothing about how it is used as a political weapon, why it could have been picked by the post-60s Left over other kinds of weapons (the Old Left didn't care much for it), does it really further the New Left's other unspoken goals well, whether the New Left is aware of the openings this strategy provides to the Right, and so on.

I think I have acquired a pretty clear - and uncommon - understanding of those why's and how's of "diversity" and "anti-racism" (as it's commonly used, not all opposition to racism). I've been reading a lot about the Western Left throughout the 20th century over the last months. So I'm trying to write a comment about it right now - but it's necessarily a damn long one, with some background about the general left-of-center/Universalist view on means and ends of political change and how it fundamentally shifted around the 1960s (what the Old Left/New Left divide is all about!). And although a general picture is now rather easy to envision for me, it's a LOT to explain, with fairly large inferential distances to both the Alt-Right view and the politically-aware-LW-mainstream view. And it'll take me a concentrated effort.

So I'll try to write it throughout an all-nighter I'm pulling tonight, and even then I'm not promising anything. :) (and damn, I have so many other things to write for LW that no-one else is likely to post, I feel rather guilty for procrastinating)

BONUS! Something I should've linked to a lot earlier. A great article by Linda Gottfriedson, an illustrious old lady who does ev-psych like Razib Khan but gets more status for it. What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis is True? - on how there are better, more fair ways to reduce racial achievement gaps than Affirmative Action in the oft-dreaded case that group genetic differences determine individual IQ a lot. Everybody please read it.

P.S. On Lev Navrozov: definitely worth reading, but I'm still munching over it. That is, don't get caught up in the halo effect - most Soviet dissidents were indeed heroic people with uncommon clarity of vision towards their own system of repression in their own time, but that doesn't mean you would find their "general" judgment of things at all acceptable. Take Solzhenitsyn - both a mystic hostile to material concerns and a fascist of sorts. Moldbug would take issue with the former, a Universalist like me with the latter - yet he's likely among Moldbug's primary sources on the pre-war USSR.

Or - a better example - take Alexandr Zinovyev, I've read him. Emigrated to Germany, yet attacked Western individualism and was aghast at the dissolution of the USSR, saying that the Soviet regime had many good aspects like the abolition of private property, etc, and that it at least gave a proper place to old good Russian collectivist values. I hardly agree with any of his points at all, much less the way in which he makes them, but his stuff would bounce right off Moldbug's black-and-white brain!

So I'll try to write it throughout an all-nighter I'm pulling tonight, and even then I'm not promising anything. :)

I think that would be a rather cool text, so please do!

BONUS! Something I should've linked to a lot earlier. A great article by Linda Gottfriedson, an illustrious old lady who does ev-psych like Razib Khan but gets more status for it. What if the Hereditarian Hypothesis is True? - on how there are better, more fair ways to reduce racial achievement gaps than Affirmative Action in the oft-dreaded case that group genetic differences deter

... (read more)

0[anonymous]14y

I think that would be cool to read I think, so please do!

4[anonymous]14y

I recommend you read the prerequisite posts he cites since they really set the frame for these kinds of claims. [...] He sees "diversity" happening because it is an effective political weapon not because some group found it the optimal tool for their goals. If I understand his models right he thinks that even if the "New Left" didn't exist some other political or apolitical force would employ a "diversity"-like model of gaining power simply because it works so well in circumstances broadly similar to our own. This is the difference between saying sheep are tasty so wolves will eat them and saying wolves evolved to like the taste of sheep because those who didn't starved more often.