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MTGandP comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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The first one surprises me because hardly anyone on LW seems conservative (and the polls confirm this).
I'm definitely a non-libertarian, so that may be it.
Libertarians count as right-wing by most left-wing standards, even far right. And then we've got a small but vocal faction of neoreactionary/Moldbugger types, who don't fit cleanly into any modern political typologies but who tend to look extra-super right-wing++ through leftist eyes.
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.
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.
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!)
Can you please elaborate on what you meant by this? The way you said it made me feel rather uncomfortable.
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 :)
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!
They are. They just can't come up with good arguments.
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 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).
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
Konkvistador, maybe you would mention your recent... little incident? (If no, then sorry, never mind.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's also a number of people who think there are bad intelectual confusions in every race-intelligence comment they have ever seen.
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 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.)
Just in the last two or three months I remember there was one guy that accused us of being the right-wing conspiracy of multibillionaire Peter Thiel (because he has donated money to the Singularity Instittue), a few who accused the whole site of transphobia (for not banning a regular user for a bigoted joke he made on a different location, not actually in this forum), one who called us the equivalent of fascist sheep (for having more people here read Mencius Moldbug on average than I suppose is the internet forum median)...
Fanatics view tolerance of the enemy as enemy action. So, yeah, I think leftwing fanatics will view anything even tolerant of either reaction or libertarianism as their enemy -- even as they don't notice that similar tolerance is extended to positions to the left of them.