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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013
- 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.
As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.
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Comments (334)
(Not sure whether this should go here or the Open Thread.)
We frequently discuss the difference between epistemic and instrumental rationality. Most political discussions seem to be "epistemic politics" - what political beliefs to have and why. I see very little discussion of "instrumental politics" - what kind of political actions to take and why. Beyond mind-killing, this is probably the main reason I currently have no interest in politics: I don't have a good conception of what kind of political actions are available to me. How would I go about fixing this?
A while ago I was in an online discussion with someone from an East European country who was demostrating to end the current government.
I asked the person for an article that explains the evils of the government. He told me that I didn't know of an English article that explained the issue in detail.
I told him that instead of being the 10,001st person at protest it would be much more effective to write a English article that explain the evil of the government and submit it to the Guardian's Comment is Free section.
He didn't think he was qualified to write the article and instead continued to demonstrate. Writing such an article is something that doesn't need special connections or money.
On the other hand it does take courage. You might come under attack. It takes real political understanding of the situation. It takes writing abilites.
Most other effective political action involves talking to people who have influence or donating money.
This probably hardly counts as "political action", but one of the most efficient ways of voting is probably with your feet - move to a place whose policies you like.
My general policy is "Most political action is counterproductive; the silent vote is the least likely to engender resistance."
That said, I'm probably wrong on this matter. Loud political movements are frequently also effective political movements, even though they do engender high degrees of resistance. The issue is it's hard to identify quiet political movements and evaluate their influence.
Say Not Universalism, a criticism of Moldbug's position on Progressivisms ties to Christianity.
I disagree with it mildly, since I think there are features of Progressivism that are more or less uniquely attributable to its Christian heritage, but I do think Progressive like memes would have developed in a non-Christian descended implementation of what is often called The Cathedral (political belief pump associated with demotist forms of government).
It is a reminder to Reactionary readers that while the explicit justifications of modern political and social thinking obviously look weak at best and utterly mad at worst, we should take small c-conservative arguments in their favour very seriously. The abolition of many things because their "explicit justifications was crazy" turned out to be dreadful mistakes.
These are the grounds on which I provisionally support social democracy, while strongly encourage exploration of alternatives.
I think this is quite likely to be the case, since Progressivism (which one might think of as "altruism gone rampant") might actually emerge in time from the mating patterns and the resulting genetic structure of a population.
hbd* chick has built a compelling case with rather high quality scholarship over the past few years and I strongly recommend her blog. You shouldn't however neglect other forms of selection that have shaped humans recently and are relevant to the question. For example see Peter Frosts' arguments on genetic pacification and the fall of the Roman Empire.
Peter Frost thinks Christianity served as both a symptom and a cause, exasperating the trend to domestication causing decline when faced with less pacified peoples. A similar argument can be made about the fall of societies due to outbreeding which I won't touch for now... If you are familiar with hbd* chick you should also be familiar with just how darn important Christianity was rearranging mating patterns in Western Eurasia in the form of the Catholic Church reducing inbreeding. Low inbreeding also probably reduces the barrier to entry for Christianity in the first place.
So the critics of Christianity might be still right, no Christianity no Progressivism. Not because of pure memetics but because of the feedback between memetic evolution and genetic evolution. We know which one is faster.
Perhaps it would also mean no industrial revolution, but the Chinese civlization would probably have pressed forward eventually. Maybe state control would need to wane again (see The Discourses on Salt and Iron if you want to be particularly depressed about the potential of human societies to respond to reasoned argumentation and learn from history) or if perhaps particularly large invasion of relatively competent barbarians might be needed to shake things up again. It is unfortunately an unanswerable question for now whether we would see in a post-industrial alternative history China altered so, the resurgence of a progressivism quite as virulent as ours growing out of something like Mohism.
This post about jokes and attitudes the provide cover for bad social actors really caught my interest. But the blogger's position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.
The point of the blog post is that jokes about certain gender and relationship stereotypes (men are idiots, women are the ball-and-chain) allow actual abusers slide by under the radar by asserting that they are joking whenever they are publically called out on inappropriate behavior. It really resonated with me - and to be frank, it seems aimed at the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.
I object most to is what is left unsaid. For a faint second the author talks in gender balanced ways, then she drops it to spend the rest of the discussion showing how men do this thing wrong. The author could have used an additional anecdote about how women the equivalent, or a gender neutral anecdote, or an offhanded comment noting where women do it too.
But she didn't.
Instead we're left with the impression that unconscious oppression is something men perpetrate on women. It's a similar trick to what she's talking about in her post. Her post is still insightful regarding feminism, but it could have been more. Underneath the overt message I hear her saying that oppression and abuse is a male thing, and her responses in the comments reinforce that. Again, a very good post for feminism, but I had been hoping for humanism, and I left disappointed.
I thought she was saying it was a consent problem. The specific example involves a man, but I didn't see her as saying that women can't violate consent. In fact, her mocking of the January issue of Cosmo magazine includes calling out glamorizing of female-perpetrator identity theft.
More generally, can't an advocate notice that the plurality or majority of the perpetrators of this type of problem are male, even while calling for a better social dynamic for both sexes? I don't think the blogger would disagree.
I don't think the majority of the people who do this are male. I can think of half a dozen occasions just over the holidays where this was done by a woman (and I can recall only one male counterexample). She probably sees it otherwise given her politics, but I'd say it's equally split at best.
I do not expect her to make an equal opportunity blog post. However, you wanted to know why it's met with hostility by some people. The post sends out hostility towards men in an unspoken way, so it is responded to in kind.
One reason gender politics is especially "mind-killing" is that the two least interesting/statistically significant/improbable positions (males are more THIS than females, females more THAT than males) also happen to be the two positions seen as the "strongest".
You have high standards. (shrug).
It looks to me like Not-Your-True-Rejection, but it would look that way to Mindkilled-Me whether it were true or not. (shrug).
Thanks for articulating your reasoning.
I was in the past a regular reader of her blog, until an incident (inspired in large part by a rebuke authored by me, in point of fact) which is still referred to on other feminist blogs as evidence of her... unbalanced perspective, to put it politely. Holly is not a rationalist by any stretch of the imagination, and her blog is very "Our team versus their team."
You mean this? Sorry - don't agree with your position.
Potential downvoters - would you rather a long argument or a polite expression of disagreement that doesn't spawn into a huge debate?
That title looks correct, but I do not visit her blog anymore as a rule - I was asked to leave, and I won't violate that - so I'm not 100% certain. It wasn't my position in the argument; the worst apparently came after I had left, when she started attacking random commenters. AFAIK my main role in the debacle was getting her riled up. My information on what happened after I left is secondhand, however, so I can't point you at specific comments.
This may come back to haunt me re: prisoner's dilemma but- I don't respect rules that have vanishingly small chance of negative consequence if violated.
Surely she's not monitoring IP addresses to call you out in public that you visited her blog when you said you didn't? And even if she were- proxies! Google cache!
I'm an egoist, specifically of Objectivist bent; my rules exist and are followed for my sake, not hers. And I don't stay where I'm not wanted; I can go where I am wanted, and it will be both a more productive use of my time, and more emotionally healthy for me.
I think some of it is a defensive reaction to perceived possible vaguely-defined moral demands/condemnation. Here's a long comment I wrote about that in a different context.
Also simple contrarianism, though that's not much of an explanation absent a theory of why this is the thing people are contrarian against.
What are those?
More sympathetically, people might (well, I'm sure some people do) see avoiding stereotype-based jokes as a step towards there being things you can't say, and prefer some additional risk of saying harmful things to moving in that direction (possibly down a slippery slope).
On the object level, it isn't a success of rational discussion that assertions like "privilege is a social dynamic which exists" turn immediately to the defensive reaction you mentioned. Reversing the discrimination is an extreme remedy, and like all extreme remedies, it gets deserved push-back. But there's no sustained discussion of middle ground positions.
Although I may be mindkiled about this, I think that I am open to discussion of less extreme ways of reducing the pernicious effects of the privilege social dynamic. But even if one thinks that this social dynamic is not pernicious, it booggles my mind that people don't acknowledge the dynamic occurs.
I think a significant amount of that hostility isn't necessarily denying the existence of privilege, but denying that it's a useful way of framing problems.
I also suspect a lot of it is backlash from over-enthusiastic social justice advocates trying to shoehorn absolutely every social problem imaginable into a context of unilateral power dynamics.
I'd generalize the point more broadly to say that jokes are a good way to get things you otherwise can't say past the radar.
That's the opposite of the point being made in the post, not a generalization of it.
At least, if I've understood you correctly — you're saying that when people make jokes about coercive/irresponsible men and passive-aggressive/nagging women, they are expressing a universal truth that society refuses to hear stated. To grossly oversimplify, we could state the blurred view proposed by the jokes being referred to as "All relationships are abusive".
The post TimS links to asserts, rather, that these jokes represent a blurring of distinctions that society fails to recognize. There actually do exist relationships that are more consensual and ones that are more abusive — the distinction — but insofar as everyone pretends that all men are coercive and all women passive-aggressive, they blur this distinction.
Moreover, blurring this distinction provides cover for the actual abusers by making the good relationships out to be just as bad as the abusive ones. If everyone is required to talk about their relationships in nonconsensual/abusive terms, then the people in consensual relationships cannot distinguish themselves as such. Hence, the post: "Even though Rowdy's brother-in-law wasn't really coercing his wife into a major responsibility she didn't want, he was cheerfully playing into a story created by, and validating for, men who really would."
It's a little like Soviet-era "moral equivalence" arguments, or more generally the tu quoque fallacy, when tu don't actually do quoque!
There's a lot of truth in stereotypes. Not all women nag, but more do than men. Not all men are irresponsible, but more are than women. Since it's very difficult to make statements like that seriously in modern society - usually, you can only say it either anonymously or in groups of close friends whom you trust to not take it personally - a lot of people embed it in comedy, where the filters are lower, and where there's more reason for it to come up in the first place than just expressing bias.
It's not a harmless practice, of course, but it does provide a useful safety valve sometimes.
I seriously doubt that most people who make up jokes or stereotypes truly have enough data on hand to reasonably support even a generalization of this nature.
Stereotypes are largely consensus-based, which gives them a larger data pool than any individual would have. If a comedian starts making jokes about the foibles of a large group, and most people haven't experienced those same foibles, they're not going to find it funny. Now, smaller groups can get a lot nastier treatment, both because there's less evidence to contradict a stereotype, and because they can turn into the token butt of jokes(Newfies being the stereotypical example where I'm from - nobody actually believes the jokes, but everybody makes them just because they're the group you make dumb-people jokes about). But "women" is a far too common group to get much in the way of false stereotypes, for example.
At this point, I should also point out the dangers of stereotypes that are true only because culture forces them to be. For example, saying that women needed protection in the 19th century was basically true, but it was largely true because we didn't let women protect themselves. Feedback loops are a real danger.
I think you are discounting effects such as confirmation bias, which lead us to notice what we expect and can easily label while leading us to ignore information that contradicts our beliefs. If 99 out of 100 women don't nag and 95 out of 100 men don't nag, given a stereotype that women nag, I would expect people think of the one woman they know that nags, rather than the 5 men they know that do the same.
Frankly, without data to support the claim that:
I would find the claim highly suspect, given even a rudimentary understanding of our psychological framework.
It's a system seriously prone to false positives, of course. But I think the odds of a true stereotype getting established are sufficiently higher than the odds of a false one getting established that it still counts as positive evidence.
Yes, it's amazing how easy it is to dismiss opposing arguments when you start by "grossly oversimplifying" them into something clearly false.
I didn't think I was dismissing an opposing argument; rather, pointing out that the article TimS linked to was making the opposite of the claim that you stated as a generalization of its point: not "these jokes express unstated general truths" but rather "these jokes express false generalizations ... and thereby leave significant distinctions unstated and, indeed, more difficult to state."
This is true regardless of whether the "things you can't say" are true. Furthermore, the whole contrarian/red pill/pretty lies/uncomfortable truths meme is toxic. It's a death spiral. All opposition demonstrates your superior insight, and all agreement demonstrates your superior insight. Everything demonstrates your superior insight, which together with the normal repertoire of human biases makes it pretty much impossible to encounter any evidence that you're wrong.
There are no red pills, only blue pills with red sugar coatings.
Not quite. The joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience.
Nevertheless, I agree that the joke is no substitute for an argument. It's necessary to get society to the point where it's possible to make the argument without being declared unfit for polite company.
Nonsense. All it takes is that the audience want to believe it. Experience is not truth; a large part of people's "experience" is their own beliefs. This is just the same death spiral again. If they laugh, that proves I'm right; if they boo, that proves I'm right.
The argument for what, in the context of the original posting? That in a marriage, the natural and desirable order of things is that man shall be the absolute ruler and woman the slave, and that any other arrangement is a futile struggle against our fundamental biological nature that if pursued will bring only doom and destruction?
Heck, a large part of people's "experience" is fiction.
For instance: By the age of fifteen, if there are no doctors and nobody chronically ill in your immediate family, you've likely spent more time watching and reading fiction about doctors and medicine than you've spent discussing medicine with actual doctors. So your ideas of what doctors do are going to be based more directly on fiction than reality. One consequence of this is that there are a lot of common false beliefs promulgated by medical fiction. (Warning, TVTropes.)
For that matter, I suspect many fifteen-year-olds have heard more lawyer jokes than they have heard sentences spoken by an actual lawyer other than a politician. (Though one can hope they've taken more of an impression from Atticus Finch than from kill-all-the-lawyers jokes.)
(And yet, many fifteen-year-olds decide to become doctors ... and lawyers ... and other professions whose reputation and habits they have learned about chiefly through fiction, jokes, and stories rather than through observation.)
For that matter, the claim that "the joke is more likely to resonate with the audience if it corresponds to their experience" implies that the erstwhile popularity of jokes about Poles being stupid and impractical was good evidence that Poles actually were stupid and impractical.
Ceteris paribus yes.
This seems like heresy to me from a Bayesian perspective.
Note the difference in meaning between the two italicized phrases?
What did I say that could reasonably be interpreted this way?
(Edit: thinking about it, I think I see how you got that impression: Laughter is evidence that you're right, an extreme negative reaction is weaker evidence that you're onto something. Indifference, or a non-extreme negative reaction is thus evidence that you're wrong.)
Seriously, could you at least try not to straw-man my position?
Consider "proves" replaced by "is evidence in favour of". It doesn't change my point.
That's the other half of the pattern -- which you obligingly go on to complete:
Did you read the sentence I wrote after that one?
Yes. The whole argument's a crock.
This seems a straw man.
Maybe it's just me, but your comments here seem a bit hostile.
I don't think you should call an idea a death spiral. It is vulnerable in the way you say, but that doesn't reflect on the idea, it just means we humans have to be really careful with it.
We do have a whole sequence on how to deal with such ideas. None of the advice is "don't believe it".
Again, we have plenty of material on LW for conserving expected evidence and watching for biases.
If you are arguing that things you can't say are toxic outside LW for the untrained masses, I recommend that you spend your time convincing them to study rationality instead of convincing them to believe things for reasons other than truth.
Come on, this is a straw man. The OP was talking about abusers, not fictional extremists. Eugene had explicitly generalized to other taboo issues anyway.
There are idiots who say such things, but there are also a lot of really interesting ideas (in the sense that they are important and debateable) that don't get discussed enough because people punish anyone who brings them up. Censorship of whole topics doesn't really seem like a good way to handle a few vile idiots.
Tone is usually uninteresting, but I think it's worth noting in the case of these "red pill" ideas; The red-pill types tend to use careful argument (because they have to to be taken seriously) while the maintream responders use weak arguments and social bullying (because they are surrounded by fellow believers). This apparent difference in the power of the arguments can confuse naive open-minded people (like myself a few days ago). Please consider this when responding to dumb ideas.
I'm expressing disagreement with a common meme around here. Of course that will seem a bit hostile. But I shall not engage in any red-pill framing of that uninteresting fact.
I'm not talking about the things you can't say, but about the idea of things you can't say. That idea is a shield against reality, a mirror that makes everything behind it seem real, when it is just a distorted reflection of oneself.
Ok, I would not seriously attribute the view I described to anyone on LW. But there are people who explicitly believe in exactly that view, exactly as extremely as I portrayed it, and surround it with red-pill rhetoric. There is at least one on LW (who has not posted in this thread) who holds at least to a lesser form of men's rightful power over women, and who I confidently expect would express approval of the joke in the original article. This is not fiction; I did not make any of it up.
That is not my observation. The article linked here is a good example of red-pill performance ranting. The whole thing could just as easily be expressed as platitudes of Deep Wisdom: "ask not what other people can do for you, but what you can do for them", "to give is to receive", etc., and in other places it would be. There's not much argument there, careful or otherwise. Of course not -- it's cracked.com, that's the sort of thing that people go there for. I previously linked another example of the genre here.
Working through the Google hits for "red pill" turns up few specimens of conspicuous rationality, and to talk about "mainstream responders" is already to have yielded to the tainted insight of the red pill pusher.
This is a good point. Thanks for pointing it out to me. I've been having a crisis of faith on quite a few of those "red pill" ideas recently and I'm sure this will be useful next time I think about any of it.
That said, it seems to me that the standard cult attractor advice and conservation of expected evidence is sufficient to diffuse this effect. Do you think so, too? Or do you think we are not good enough at it such that we have to add extra caution? Or something else?
Basically what do you recommend for a well-sequenced LWer to do to entangle their beliefs with reality on these sorts of issues?
Huh. I wonder why. I don't really hang out anywhere like PUA forums or racist blogs or anything like that, so maybe I only encounter the good stuff that has enough sensibleness to it to filter into the rest of the internet? I guess then we would see the opposite on PUA forums; mostly average idiots who can't handle the is-ought distinction, and a few intelligent mainstreamers coming in and poking holes in people's tripe (I also might expect a few more troll raids from mainstreamers than there are troll raids from PUA to mainstreamer areas, though this could easily be confounded by other factors)
That article is fucking gold. Thanks for the link. Now unfortunately that was not the point you were trying to make...
I did notice (since you sent me there looking for it) that it was callous and condescending and such (even for cracked). I also noticed that I don't usually notice that kind of stuff outside LW and other "intellectual areas". If you hadn't pointed it out, I would have just filtered the crusty crap and kept the good advice at it's core. I guess it's a habit I picked up from 4chan.
I've got a better one. I summed up the whole thing with "Just Do It!". However, I don't think it's a good idea to dismiss an article because you can say the same thing without 99% of the article. Here's why:
I run into pieces of genuine good advice all the time, on LW and elsewhere, and I've noticed that I can't really learn or take advice from just a summary of it. Summaries of ideas works really well to precipitate concepts that you already have all the support for, and to convey dry facts, but not for advice and experience. See moral truth in fiction for an analogous argument. As an example, When I read truly a part of you, I was like "yeah that's cool", it wasn't until later that I figured the idea out for myself and realized "holy crap someone already told me this."
So with that said, even if you can boil down the essential idea of an article to a single sentence, it may still have substantial value as something that creates the experience required for you to actually get the idea. I think that cracked article works like this. It's a simple idea (not even 6 simple ideas), but all the added inflammatory crust create an experience the actually communicates the idea, instead of just saying it.
I can believe that that article is not written in a way that works for everyone, but I think that for some people (the target audience, for example), it's exactly what they need to hear, and anything nicer wouldn't get the point across.
I will throw in that the "come on aren't you man enough to hear the truth?" thing is toxic as a rhetorical device, as it can make otherwise worthless stuff more compelling. (because if you don't even read this then you are weak).
Like cracked.com and 4chan? Sensibleness is not the filter for popularity on the internet.
Different people respond to different forms. Some are suckers for a man in a white coat intoning "studies have shown". Some will lap up Deep Wisdom from anyone in Tibetan robes. Some will believe anyone who shouts at them loudly enough. (Makes for some interesting dynamics on PUA and NLP forums, where assertion is alpha, but both agreement and disagreement are beta.)
It's more that you can write the same content with a completely different 99%, with many completely different 99%s. Ayn Rand, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Feynman could have written the same content, in different ways. How does one determine whether one is responding to the clothing of the message, rather than the content? The red pill idea is particularly attractive to anyone who thinks they're smarter than those around them. And look where we are, LessWrong, where "contrarian" is a compliment, as if reversed consensus were intelligence.
Skilful means, as the Buddhists put it. But of those who think they learned something from that article, how many would have learned whatever message the writer might have expressed in the same style?
Or their biases, or their culturally-acquired beliefs...
I've been thinking of making a new political slogan aimed at the "thoughtcrime" crowd: "What you need is red ink, not red pills!" Meaning that there really aren't horrible truths about society that are hidden from the ignorant masses but revealed to the brave and sufficiently cynical few; most people (even the "average" ones) do actually perceive all the information they might need about the society they live in, but cannot articulate and communicate it, so on some topics only a scrambled message of discontent and anger can be heard.
Meh.
Elaborate please.
(Sorry for getting into tribal matters, but this is explicitly about tribalism:)
In particular, a long time ago I asked you and your alt-right associates: why do they think liberals are so adamantly in denial about the possiblity of racial differences in intelligence. All the alt-right/reactionary commenters everywhere seem to think that it's clear-cut: liberals hate Truth in all its forms, and "elite" liberals especially hate it, and they simply want to speed the collapse of decent society with such anti-Truth policies.
I tentatively suggested, however, 1) that there are no real contradictions between the ideology of modern liberalism/progressivism (as it is preached and written), and, say, the average Jew having higher IQ than the average European having higher IQ than average black people - and 2) that the semi-official ban on the topic in liberal academia exists because of complicated self-image and methodology issues going back to the Enlightenment era, and because of sincere, well-intentioned fear of resurgent racist oppression.
So, essentially, nobody is deliberately spreading lies, deliberately concealing truths, making up stories about a dragon in the garage, etc. Instead we have a complex, silent carpet brawl around the meta question on the proper relation of the normative and the descriptive in politics - e.g. given how much we value moral equality, should we try to justify it with facts/axioms about our environment, or with a deontological, non-disprovable position? - where neither side is even psychologically able to state the issue. That's how hard sufficient levels of reflection are.
How'd you say? (And btw, do you think that my meltdown about all this meta crap qualifies as evidence? I realize that my thinking is... not very close to "standard" liberal or right-wing thought, but might there be similar psychological tension generated in their long-standing conflicts?)
"Me and my allies."
I refuse to frame a debate in such terms for obvious reasons and am despondent you have chosen them. Honestly I think you are being mind-killed about this and are pattern matching my positions to ones I just don't hold.
You are completely correct. This was indeed indefensible and inexcusable of me, and pretty much a direct spit upon your goodwill. I was frustrated by my inability to "get even" with an opposing group that has long trumpeted its honesty and accused my views of hypocrisy. I let this primitive emotion get the better of me.
Such little things are what shits up the whole discourse. I understand and agree. I'm sorry.
Up voted. I hope you know you have no more hard feelings from me on this.
No. On the topic you mentioned they quite obviously are.
For someone who's done as much well-known and controversial stuff in his life as Gould, you're really going to have to narrow it down for me. I'm not sufficiently familiar with this debate to know what you're referring to.
See discussion related to Gould's book Mismeasure of Man in this thread.
Why do you think religious conservatives are so adamant about abortion or contraception?
I think you haven't understood the exact question. Opposition to abortion or contraception are policies; racial differences in intelligence are an entirely external fact which should only affect policy after you filter it through the lens of your ethics. A better analogy would be confronting a Catholic with a claim that allowing abortion would make for much less poverty and death in the 3rd world. And even then, a liberal confronted with race differences in intelligence would not be similarly pressured to allow e.g. apartheid, if there is an explicit and sufficiently high value for moral equality between the races in the liberal mindset, and this moral equality demands some sort of practical egalitarianism!
What I claim in this particular example is that, since the secularization of progressivism/liberalism around the Enlightenment - and its pragmatist/utilitarian posturing - it has been having trouble deriving moral equality from first principles here, and deep down there's awareness of that. So liberals desperately try to derive an egalitarian "ought" from an inconvenient "is" - even though nobody's forcing them to!
It wasn't exactly analogous, but it wasn't meant as such. If I wanted to do that I would have brought up Creationism among Protestant Americans.
I fundamentally think there are very strong sacredness based feelings around this that are not based on consequences in the real world any more than other kinds of religious thinking is. There obviously are good secular conservative arguments in favour of religious thinking guiding how our society develops though.
Throughout the 19th century, there have been leftist thinkers - from moderate and "respectable" ones to hardcore radicals - who either had no problem acknowledging differences in average intelligence, or were even outright racists/white supremacists. E.g., I've read that many American abolitionists either acted xenophobic towards actual black people when they met them, believed that blacks can never match whites in ability or achievement, etc. Yet their moral and religious opposition to slavery - all men are created in God's image, and ought to be treated as such - covered the immorality of one race subjugating another. So... eh, it's contradictory and messy. But ultimately egalitarianism, like all moral emotions, need not be chained to any particular empirical belief.
This seems like an ok model to describe what his happening.
It is not at all obvious to me that any other hypothesis is needed to explain Gould. Why, he practically says that he kept telling himself "human equality is a contingent fact of history" until he believed it.
But Jared Diamond does appear to me to be deliberately concealing truths, because he is fairly careful not to outright lie (and because he used to be into human biodiversity).
To address the average racial IQ thing, I think that a big part of the left's dislike of it is cognitive dissonance, in a similar fashion to the right's reflexive denial of climate change. They're facts that tend to get used in ways that they find repulsive, and it's easier to deny the fact than it is to make a claim of "It's true, but let's not worry too much about it". In both cases, deniers tend to deny even when questioned in private in my experience(and I'm using friends as my reference group here, so I assume they'd fess up to it being tactical if it was). In both cases, there seems to be a more intellectual strain(which I'm a part of in both cases) that actually does make the "It's real, but who cares?" argument.
(Hopefully that illustrative parallel doesn't turn into an AGW flame war...)
No.
Humans are neither smart or sane enough to be likely do what they want to do with the information available to them. As a whole we have a only minuscule chance of ordering matter in the next few million years in a way likeable to our values.
We are playing in a universe set to difficulty setting without an eye for human ability. Normal people can't even predict the weather for a few days in advanced, and our entire civilization can't in principle do so for more than a few weeks, yet here we are arguing about things like the economy or a culture or governments made up of millions of human brains and algorithms running on computers that can predict the weather for several days.
You are forgetting the basic fact that most of our intelligence evolved for the purpose of winning at socialization and navigating tribal politics! Weather is weather, and huge centralized societies really are impossible to take in at a glance, and very hard to make predictions for - but there are still ansectrally familiar patterns everywhere, even where they aren't needed so much - say, ancient structures of dominance being replicated in the workplace - and human instincts can derive a lot of information from observing those patterns.
Although much of this information is going to be garbled or changed by the context, I still claim that people already have lots of "unknown knowns" about the tribal politics, families, work relations, etc that surround them - all simmering somewhere in the back on their minds - and that consciously interpreting and articulating these "unknown knowns" can, (as Zizek suggests in a few places, AFAIK), be more useful than trying a strictly positivist approach to social dynamics.
We have no reason to trust human intuitions for societies orders of magnitude beyond the Dunbar number. They are feedback as to how individual humans are going to end up feeling in any society and that is important since humans are presumably what we care about but there is very little sense in giving much weight to such heuristics as usable maps for political action or institution reform.
The fact that people have lot of "unknown knowns" in no way implies that they don't have many "unknown unknowns".
People frequently tend to think the know more than they actually do. When it comes to knowledge people are frequently overconfident.
This is, simply put, the usual rallying cry of hatred: the claim that the Enemy knows the truth but denies it; knows the good and hates it, deliberately works to corrupt it; etc. — see, e.g., Torquemada or Luther regarding Jews, Kramer and Sprenger regarding "witches", Lenin regarding kulaks; Pol Pot regarding intellectuals; and so on. It's not a factual claim based on evidence; it is a form of dark cheerleading.
(It is also not specific to a particular ideology or political faction — left, right, "Third Way", secular, religious. It is, however, a common precursor to the dark times when adherents of an ideology decide to stop arguing and start killing.)
Lets begin with this. Do you take this argument seriously? Or is it just armament? I refuse to think you don't have any clue as to how utterly devastating this argument is when applied to the left in the 20th century.
Let alone how this applies to the Dickian Gnosticism we talked about just a few days ago!
Okay, this joke's totally on you! Dick (and some earlier Gnostics) essentially made the very same suggestion on metaphysical knowledge that I entertain here about social knowledge; it's an unknown known that most people already happen to possess, but which must be brought to the forefront of consciousness via a revelation event he called "Anamnesis".
Actually you are right, here I was doing the pattern matching.
I think this is because how I see Gnostic like beliefs working out in the world. Humans being social will tend to share them and such movements spiritual or otherwise consist in a large part of an enlightened guru with special gnosis telling you what you have "forgotten" and must learn relearn.
Perhaps this is happening in the system as a whole, but I wouldn't call this a silent brawl if none of the involved know what the fight is about. And since you posit such a complex explanation...
Show me the evidence!
I said meh because meh was what I meant. I feel a very strong moralizing dimension to the post and the link that just left me shaking my head. A kind of projection of internal life to a universe, assuming it that runs on stories.
I'm used to being at least intrigued by your posts, that one proved an exception.
As a rule of thumb, I assume that anyone claiming to be only joking is lying. They are saying exactly what they think while pretending not to.
So you endorse calling them on it, ceteris paribus?
What you do about any particular instance will obviously depend on the situation. Some things are worth speaking up about. Some things are worth making non-verbal indications that their joke is bombing. Some just deserve to be ignored. You don't want to be this guy.
China and the politics of human biodiversity
Half-Sigma's probably last post on his old blog. HBD has no future?
Which road will they take on this?
Assuming HBD is correct, as the west becomes less white, it will also become less intelligent and hence less powerful, this will mean that the Chinese have less reason to care what the west thinks of them.
Why is having only one class of citizen a good idea?
Because it works well as a Schelling fence.
Good answer.
I don't think it did much for Soviet or Chinese citizens.
The Chinese don't have only one class of citizens:
1) Ethnic minorities (Tibetans, Mongols, etc.) have a legally recognized status, with affirmative action policies, (some) exemption from the one-child policy, etc.
2) More importantly, the is basically a passport/visa system inside China, and migrant workers from the countryside are pretty similar to immigrants (or worse off) in Europe or the US: they don't benefit from social services like schools (they have to send their kids back in their home province, or not have them in school, or send them to a private school), government jobs, etc. The Hukou system is also as hot a topic in China as immigration is the West.
By that standard Western countries also don't have one class of citizens.
Depends of which country you're thinking of! The US has officially designated categories, but those are pretty much illegal in France, and any official mention of one's "ethnicity" is pretty much a taboo concept (and I found it weird to have to fill in that field in all my paperwork in China).
And even the ethnic categories in the US don't seem as "legally relevant" as ethnic minority status in China; the law is (from what I understand) that you can sue if you believe you've been denied an opportunity because of your ethnic background, but that seems much more vague than having explicit ethnic categories, with different laws applying depending on which category you belong to.
(unless you were referring to to immigrants, but then they aren't citizens)
(convicts would make a better example of a "different class of citizens")
Because you don't want to have different classes of citizens to fight against each other.
You have to first make the argument that an explicit hierarchy is more violence prone than an implicit one.
Paul Gottfried’s Calm Despair
John Derbyhsire's review of a collection of essays. The chosen title speaks volumes as Derbyshire is no optimist himself. It touches not so much on the content as a readable take on the life and positions of one of the Paleoconservative intellectuals I admire most.
A response to Yvain's article An analysis of the formalist account of power relations in democratic societies.
Social Power and Utility
No. Social Power is very much tied closely to Psychological Health. That people with lots of "structural power" are on average Psychologically healthier is mostly not the result of structural power. Higher IQ, conscientiousness, low time preference and other things that correlate with functionality and thus our social construct of "health" psychological and otherwise are what enables one to accrue what you term "structural power" in the first place. I'm not saying it is the sole source of it merely that social data shows the correlation is pretty strong in the modern US.
Is there any reason at all to think social animals such as ourselves would derive more psychological well being from "structural" than "social" power? In a terminal sense I mean. We have strong evidence people care about social power in itself a lot. "Structural power" is something that in itself excites only non-neurotypicals. Top earners may get excited about earning even more money much like gamers get excited about a high score. It only matters to them either because of their private fixation or their social circle. Having structural power is instrumentally useful, since we can leverage it into other things the monkey brain cares about like a candy bar or sex with a very skilled escort. In conversation on IRC Athrelon noted how this relates to the well known argument of "diminishing marginal utility of money".
The dimishing marginal utility of "structural power"
The standard "liberal" position on it is approximately: "Structural power doesn't matter for happiness and well being after a certain level so we should redistribute it directly via means such as progressive taxation." Pause and think about this for a minute.
To use your example, wouldn't Donalnd Trump get depressed about being being a laughing stock and buffoon who teenage girls can beat with impunity? Perhaps not Donald Trump personally for this exact example but to give examples someone like Howard Hughes certainly could become very miserable while having all the "structural power" in the world. People kill hemselves or completely cut contact with the outside world because of a lack of "social power". Suicide for anyone above direst material poverty is usually about trying to escape this kind of suffering. Worse, the utility of those with social but not "structural" power over this individual would fundamentally derive from his misery.
Isn't there something fundamentally ugly about that? Maybe it is worth in a utilitarian sense but it is a form of Omelas and carries all the burdens of proof real implementations of such scenarios do. If social power is not a good way to redistribute "structural" power and structural power while correlating with merit and mental health does not in itself buy that much happiness the scenario very much does come down to this.
And even if it was an excellent way to do so, note how structural power is fundamentally tied to the wealth creating mechanisms of society! Maybe white married middle class men are rather good at stewarding their material resources and wealth compared to some other demographics an incredible notion I know. But if true redistributing such power results in less wealth creation. Social power today does not nor has it ever accurately matched contributions to wealth creation. Of course neither does "institutional" power perfectly match this. But there are good reasons to expect it to be a better fit, foremost of those is how it can leverage the neat information properties of markets.
Could I ask you to taboo 'deserve' in this context?
A society where extraordinary achievement due to skill or effort isn't matched by appropriately rewards is neither aesthetically pleasing nor fun to live in. We should somewhat try and shape society according to this observation.
Please be careful not to treat these as one-place functions. Consider the position of a person who is now being told that despite their and their teachers' and parents' best efforts, they simply have not accrued enough "extraordinary achievements" to make (say) medical care for their chronic pain an "appropriate reward" for them. That person may not agree that this makes society more aesthetically pleasing or fun to live in.
Nitpick: Those people would usually be considered neurotypical, unless you think they have some congenital neurological condition that causes them to enjoy high scores. Which isn't inconceivable, I suppose.
That people are not equally competent or "virtuous" is trivially true; that lacking these things means that it is less important that they have Fun is, in my experience, a common product of confused thinking. That you seem to have this as an instrumental goal of producing more total Fun is interesting; I would advise avoiding the word "deserve" to avoid confusion, though.
[Unfinished Draft for Essay which will not be published as a Discussion or Main article]
Originally part of the above comment but I've decided it fits more as an independent essay. Still in a very rough draft form.
Democratic society: A vista of horror as seen by reactionaries
We want the sum of structural power over nature, the amount of wealth a society has available to be ceteris paribus as high as possible. Isn't it interesting how Pareto Optimality while being one of the most reliably benign goals is systematically neglected in pursuit of the misfiring heuristics of our mind. The heuristics I speak of are the ones that do not understand institutional power and demand to use the same "social power" mechanism field tested and efficient only on Dunbarian scales for the distribution of resources in the large societies of civilized man. Note how this relates to a currently popular hypothesis on the origin of our intelligence as driven by the parts of the brain that deal with optimizing for social power by bending and breaking explicit rules.
It is I hope I have shown to me far more terrifying than your virtual Conservative feels it is.
!Unfinished!
tldr: Make it so that institutional power matches the virtues we claim to value rather than the ones our revealed preferences show we value in social power games. The former are mostly more conductive to civilization and the common good.
General Anti-Leftism: People are not equally competent, nor virtuous, nor do they deserve equal social power as compensation for their lack of ability at accruing institutional power (starting positions on such capital tho may best be equalized).
I should emphasise I am not at all saying the nature of institutional power in our society can't perhaps be reformed to more closely match this.
I'm a little confused by what you are saying? Do you believe the General Anti-Leftism, or oppose it?
Also, social power seems to me like a non-zero-sum thing. (possibly the amount that is non-zero-summable could be called respect.)
That part is the one I haven't finished. Check out in a few days.
Just curious... who is downvoting this post, and why? Politics is the mind killer, I know... but this regularly-occuring thread is supposed to be an accepted exception, isn't it?
What do you mean by that? Supposed on what grounds, accepted by whom and in what sense? (There's also a distinction between following a rule and agreeing with it, and there is no rule in this case.)
I was under the impression that this was an "official" thing, but it sounds like I was wrong.
People who don't want a regularly-occurring exception.
The entertaining thing from my perspective is that the discussions here have been polite, informative, and honest, and overall I'd consider them to have been productive thus far. It is of course possible that the tone or nature of these debates will change over time, but it seems on current evidence to be that a lot of people are mindkilled about whether or not politics is in fact a mindkiller. Granted, the voting system here generally encourages controversy - fifty votes yay and forty nine votes nay is better than an uninteresting post with one vote nay, after all.
Maybe the "mindkiller" business is largely a rationalization for the opposition to political discussion, and not the motivation for the opposition.
Some people like having their ideas questioned in a group, some don't. Mindkiller talk is a convenient rationalization for those who don't like it to pressure those who do like it to shut up.
Yes, I've noticed that too, which was part of why I was confused that people objected to it.
I downvoted this post because I don't want to see more attention to politics here. I don't see it as an "accepted exception" but as a recent push for more political discussions.
It can be interesting to talk about social issues, but doing this under the explicit heading "politics" header is likely to prime people into paying more attention to the political implications of the topic.
I take the debates that have occurred in these topics so far as evidence that LWers are capable of following the disclaimer. As such, unless it starts bleeding over into other topics, it seems okay. I prefer having a contained place with a disclaimer than to let arguments start getting political in other threads and either derail the thread or get cut off even though an interesting point was being made.
I disagree that one could talk about any kind of "social issues" whatsoever without it being 100% "political". Politics is what's going on in the polis.
The question isn't whether an issue is political or not (I'm not sure that's an interesting/meaningful question); the point is to avoid the problems of partisan thinking, and one way of doing that is to pay less attention to political alignment.
If you put a big banner over a discussion saying "HEY THIS IS A POLITICAL DISCUSSION", and you have people adding "AND THEREFORE, REPUBLICANS ARE RIGHT!" at the end of their posts, or reply with "OH, THAT'S A SOCIALIST ARGUMENT YOU'RE MAKING THERE", then everybody is necessarily going to pay more attention to partisan alignment. They may suspect others of trying to advance partisan points. They may be more selective in what arguments they accept. They may be less inclined points that go against their political inclination. It may degenerate into "Well you're just saying that because you're an anarcho-monarchist!".
I don't see any examples of people actually doing that, though.
Well, the first one is basically this thread, I don't think the second one happens without being downvoted to oblivion, and I think there have been a few cases where replies highlighted the political alignment of a post or comment that wasn't ostentatiously about color politics (probably in one episode of The Konkvistador And Multiheaded Show).
By "the first one" do you mean "AND THEREFORE, REPUBLICANS ARE RIGHT!"? If so, please cite examples.
I've been abstaining from LessWrong for awhile now, so I've missed a lot. Can you link me to some examples of what you mean by "The Konkvistador And Multiheaded Show"? It sounds highly entertaining.
I agree that talking about partisan labels is unlikely to lead to useful analysis (although the game-theoretic and principal-agent issues in the recent budget stand-off in the US are interesting).
But I think noting the contours of ideological movements (like socialism, feminism, or Moldbuggery) is valuable. The sentence:
Just as useful:
Some of our disagreement might be that in the US, socialist (or green or monarchist) is not a partisan label because there is no serious political party that asserts those views. Europe has more diverse active political movements.
New political position:
Reactionary Caplanism
This is not my current position but it seems reasonable assuming genuinely utilitarian ethics. I wonder why it isn't more popular.
Immigration would be much better if we approached the issue of "How much do immigrants cost us vs how much do we benefit from them" and made laws in light of this, instead of approaching it from the moral difference between "This is our home and we shouldn't let strangers in" or "Freedom means allowing anyone to join us".
I think you're implicitly making an moral statement (putting aside whether its "correct"). Your focus on "costs to us and how much do we benefit" means we downplay or eliminate any consideration of the moral question. However, ignoring the moral question has the same effect as losing the moral argument to "this is our home and we shouldn't let strangers in" -- in both cases the moral argument for "joining us" is treated as irrelevant. I'm not making an argument, just an observation i think is relevant if considering the issue.
I don't see why this treats the moral argument for joining us as any less relevant than the moral argument for not joining us. And yes, this does downplay or eliminate consideration of the moral question, which is what I was going for. Or to put it another way, the moral statement I'm trying to make is that the moral value of absolutist moral considerations is less than utilitarian concerns in regards to costs/benefits. I don't actually care about moral arguments for or against immigration that aren't consequentalist.
Look, there is no doubt an equivalency in your method in that "they should join us" is put on the backburner along with "we should penalize them." I'm simply highlighting this point.
In limiting the "consequentialist" argument to the "home country's" benefits and costs, you've by default given credence to the idea that "they should be penalized" in that you're willing to avoid penalizing them if they add value to your country -- another way of looking at it is to say those that want the immigrants to "join us" aren't benefited in any way by saying that the opposite moral argument was ignored. You've softened your statement now by using "moral value....is less," but you're actually going further than that -- you're saying that the utilitarian concerns on cost/benefits are SO GREAT relative to the moral issues that the moral issues should be ignored completely (or that's how your solution plays out). This is a bold statement, irrespective of its merits. How else would you interpret your statement?:
Your point only works if you completely ignore the moral argument. Once it matters even a little, the luxuries offered by cost/benefit analysis are thrown out the window because you now have a subjective consideration to incorporate that makes choices difficult. Again, just highlighting the consequences of your argument, don't really have an opinion on your particular argument.
Part of the problem with politics is we just say things and don't think about what they mean, since our focus is more on being right and presuming the potential certainty rather than understanding the sources and consequences of various political arguments and appreciating the inherent uncertainty that is unavoidable with any governance regime (or so I would argue).
What point are you trying to make? I'm really not sure. Completely ignoring the "Moral argument" seems obviously the correct thing to do, so I have to assume I'm misinterpreting what you mean by the moral argument.
nope, i'm just asking why you think that the moral argument should be ignored, and why that position is obvious. we're talking about a group of humans and what laws and regulations will apply to their lives, likely radically changing them. these decisions will affect their relatives, who may or may not be in similar positions themselves. when legislating about persons, it seems there is always some relevance as to how the laws will affect those people's lives, even if broader considerations (value to us/cost to us as a country) are also relevant.
to be clear, i'm NOT saying you're wrong. I'm asking you why you think you're right, particularly since its so obvious.
EDIT: i totally appreciate i jumped in mid-conversation and asked a question which is now a chain and that might come off as odd to you, so sorry -- you asked about my point -- fair question, I'm not sure I really have one other than understanding your point of view. perhaps silly, but thought you made an interesting point and wanted to see how you thought through the issue before you made it. a "non-expert" can't tell anyone they're wrong, can only try to learn why others think they are right :).
So from my point of view the moral argument is as I stated it earlier: We either should or should not allow immigrants because of moral laws. This argument is stupid because it is not based on consequences or information.
Your point seems to be that the consequentialist point of view should take into account the impact on immigrants, which is different than what I meant by the moral argument. I'm pretty sure I agree with yours. A country is made up out of people. The costs/benefits to those people are a subset of the costs/benefits to a country, and should be factored into same.
interesting, so you are dividing morality into impact on immigrants and the idea that they should be allowed to join us a a moral right, with the former included in your analysis and the latter not.
putting aside positions, from a practical perspective it seems that drawing that line will remain difficult because "impact to immigrants" likely informs the very moral arguments I think you're trying to avoid. Or in other words, putting that issue (effect on immigrants) within the costs/benefits analysis requires some of the same subjective considerations that plague the moral argument (both in terms of difficulty in resolving with certainty and the idea of avoiding morality).
Regardless, seems like the horse has been dead for hours (my fault!). Thanks for engaging with me.
Give absolute power to several UFAIs and hope that they dutifully compete for everyone's labour, and graciously don't cooperate against troublemakers? Um... have you ever read much about the history of the labour movement in the West? Have you heard, say about the labour struggles in China right now? Have you wondered what a megacorporation with a 100% secure source of rent would act like?
I hardly understand how this'd be supposed to work at all in your vision. (Or in anyone's.)
I'm no fan of rent-seeking corporations, but the actions Gazprom tends to get criticized over are in its dealings with countries which are attempting to leverage transportation monopolies against it. There aren't really any innocent parties in those exchanges.
Oh, I wasn't referring to that at all. What I had in mind was how it doesn't seem to put the vast rent it extracts to much good use in my own country. And how it (and lesser rent-extracting corps like Transneft) joins into the massive state-oligarchic system of corruption that we live under. But yeah, I wouldn't expect Western media to report much on its place in Russian economy.
Laughs I'm too ignorant on the specific matter at hand to continue this vein of conversation in any depth.
I can only comment on the general case, so I'll continue it there: I think in general Russia got screwed over in its conversion to capitalism. Not even the first time, either; a major incitement to the rise of communism was how it ended feudalism, by putting all the serfs in massive debt to their landlords to pay for "freeing" them. (Granted, their debts were discharged a few decades later, but that was less a fix than a band-aid at that point, and it's not like they got a generation's worth of payments back.)
Its modern patterns don't seem to have deviated much; take everything the state owned, effectively give it to the people who were already in charge (nominally sold to them, but it wasn't exactly like they were sold in public auctions; the auctions were pretty deliberately manipulated), and call it privatization because now they own it instead of the state, nevermind that very little has actually changed, except that all obligations that went along with their government roles were discharged in the conversion. It would be like if a corporation seized all its shareholder's shares and gave them to the board of directors.
I'm a fervent capitalist, mind. And I don't think Russia's conversion to capitalism, in the manner it was conducted, actually did Russia any favors. They should have stuck to the voucher program. I have some choice words to describe Yeltsin.
Did you ignore the disclaimer?
No, I understand this is not your current position. However, I have specifically noted that your disclaimer includes the words "seems reasonable". This felt to me like a contrast with the suggestion's apparent absurdity.
Had you not claimed that this is all supposed to relate, however tangentially, to ordinary LW-style reasoning and not just aesthetics or ideological applause lights (and I have nothing against those in moderation), I wouldn't have attacked this. I was merely confused about your intent and level of seriousness here.
the best example of a successful non-democracy in the modern world is China. Their internal party system is extremely convoluted, but basically the party internally appoints members to positions, notionally on meritocratic grounds, though corruption and manipulation is endemic. Here is a more detailed summary.
Given the seeming economic success of this model would it be sensible for other countries to adopt it?
Is it possible to introduce sufficient additional safeguards against corruption and abuse of power?
No. The gains from not being stupid about economics and not engaging in centralized planning and actually industrializing are so enormous that they compensate for even wretched leadership. Soviet Russia industrialized and grew for a long time despite having awful and wasteful leadership, and the same thing is happening to China.
The question is, can they, with their wretchedly corrupt non-democracy, reach similar per capitas as Japan and America? Or will they remain in a middle-income trap? If the former, then their government could indeed be considered something other countries might adopt; but if the latter, they will merely have demonstrated what all acknowledge: the Industrial Revolution is pretty damn awesome.
I think there's a valid alternative narrative where China's explosive growth is the result of enormous quantities of previously untapped natural resources and a previous lack of infrastructure. One could argue that prosperity was inevitable for China as soon as it eased up on its isolationism, almost regardless of what government was in place.
Previously untapped natural resources are a good thing, esp. along with a well enough educated population with a good work ethic.
Previous lack of infrastructure? I'm not sure how that can be an advantage.
One way to a have a fast growth rate is to start out very low.
May be referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging ; but in general, we'd expect fast growth just from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_%28economics%29
I was thinking more in terms of transportation infrastructure, though maybe from having so little they will end up with one that doesn't reproduce a lot of past mistakes. It's just hard to launch an industrial revolution with having as little of that as they had to start with.
I thought the go-to example for a successful non-democracy was Singapore - it's a much nicer place to live in than China!
True, the standard of living in Singapore is much higher. But I didn't choose it as the example because: the transition has not been as dramatic (they had a better starting point) and there's lots of reasons to think that a system that works in Singapore won't scale well (island city state heavily dependent on trade and immigrant labour). By contrast the Chinese system has made great changes over a short period and has been applied to a much wider area and diversity of situation.
A couple of centuries ago, common wisdom was the opposite - Democracy was a nice idea but it could never work on something bigger than a city. From Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws:
See also here for more context. During the founding of the US, it wasn't expected that it would work, and then when the French revolution turned into a disaster (followed by similar disasters in Latin America), Democracy seemed less and less of a good idea. The tide only turned in Europe when the US failed to collapse, especially with the publication of Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
The U.S. may have been lucky because initially it was strung out along a seaboard which provided good transport and communication for the time, and as the U.S. spread into the interior, massive improvements in communication and transportation came along just in time, so we could have the cohesion that up til then was very hard to achieve except in a small state.
Some of the Federalist papers argued the opposite of what Montesquieu's point -- that a surplus of talented and ambitious people would tend to keep each other in check.
Anyway, Singapore poses a different question -- not whether small or large countries are best suited to democracy, but whether Singapore's (undemocratic) system could be made to work in a big country with rich and poor sections, and other wide variations of interest. Maybe Singapore, due to its nature could be administered well by one great CEO, but we haven't seen that sort of thing work well on a continental scale except maybe for short periods of time (usually followed by a traumatic succession crisis).
By the way Bryan Caplan has a blog post questioning how "undemocratic" Singapore really is.
China is playing catch-up, not innovating. When you're as far behind as China was 30 years ago, all you have to do is make yourself less awful to grow explosively. They became an economic success by emulating us somewhat, but the reverse will not hold true, because most places where they deviate from us they bias in the direction of more corruption which is hardly a good model.
Do you consider The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution a success? That's only about 50 years ago.
When you're trying to judge the performance of a system of government, some historical perspective is required.
China has been governed quite different since Mao died. I don't think it quite fair to treat pre-Mao and post-Mao China the same way.
I agree that there has been a huge difference. That's my point. The system has not demonstrated long term stability in it's methods and results.
Although I disagree with FiftyTwo's conclusions, I am nevertheless disappointed that it has received net downvotes.... it's a perfectly valid question after all, and we're not supposed to be doing downvote==disagree, right?
The original post indicates that upvotes and downvotes should be based on how convincing an argument is, so at least a bit closer to that than usual.
Let's get a bit meta. I posit that there are certain political discussions where rational debate is entirely useless, because they largely consist of choosing an axiom. Abortion is the most obvious of these - people who believe the right to life begins at conception(usually for religious reasons) are almost universally pro-life, and people who do not are almost universally pro-choice. It is not possible, even in principle, to convince either side of the other's position, because there's no argument that can change an axiom.
It's good to keep our limitations in mind.
Edit: To clarify, I don't claim that rational debate is useless at discussing issues around abortion, I claim it's useless at changing the minds of someone who has a strong position on the issue. The only people I have ever seen switch sides on this issue are politicians(who are obviously lying) and religious converts(which is in principle achievable from rationalism, but which is in practice a pretty rare result).
I don't think it's a matter of different axioms - humans aren't expert systems after all!
It's more about a tension between two systems for regulating reproductive behavior.
In system A, girls are expected to abstain from sex until marriage, girls that don't are shunned, men are discouraged from marrying "used goods", and anything promoting sexual promiscuity is dangerous. Parents are expected to have an important input into they're children's decisions, and women are expected to be mostly dependent on a man. This is what you'd get in traditional "farmer" communities, i.e. most of the civilized world in past centuries.
In system B, Marriage is about Love, which is considered kind of mysterious and spontaneous; sex is not frowned upon, though it's expected that girls will take the reasonable steps to avoid unwanted pregnancy. The law also steps in to make sure fathers take their responsibilities.
Basically, both feature ways of avoiding unwanted pregnancies, though system A is much more gung-ho about doing so; probably mostly because in a village a couple centuries ago, having a fatherless child would be one of the worse things that could happen to a girl.
But many of the norms in this are not considered as "ways to avoid unwanted pregnancies", but rather as things that are valuable of themselves (and the norms are supported by connotations in the language, common stories, etc.) - they are lost purposes. So from the point of view of someone raised mostly with System A values, abortion looks like something that reduces the bad consequences of immoral behavior, and thus encourages immoral behavior, so of course it's bad! They ignore the fact that the main reason such a behavior is considered immoral is because it leads to those consequences!
... or at least, that's one part of the story. There's also a good deal of identity conflicts involved (religion and culture more than politics), and of course it's entirely possible that overall, System A does work better than System B.
Even if we're talking about axiomatic disagreements, rational debate is still useful. Eg, we can still use rationality to help identify which axioms we're disagreeing with.
Case in point is your abortion example. I think you've messed up your lines of cause and effect there. Being anti-abortion either causes or has a common cause with believing that life begins at conception. Being pro-abortion causes or has a common cause with believing that life doesn't begin at conception.
Let me posit an axiom that causes anti-abortion. Instead of the whole 'soul' thing, lets go with "Women deserve to be punished for having sex," and that 'life-begins-at-conception' is just a rationalization. If this were true, anti-abortion should coincide with religiosity (it does) and pro-abortion should coincide with women's rights (also does). Both axioms correctly fit the existing data. How could we tell the difference... which axiom is the true axiom?
My rationalist shoes say we'd want to identify a differentiation point where these two axioms would cause different results. Have there been any occasions where "reduce number of abortions" and "punish women for having sex" come into conflict? Here's one. Turns out free access to birth control slashes the abortion rate. Less punishing women, less abortions. Cool, we've identified a point of differentiation.
Okay, so what did most of the 'pro-life' side go with? Shit, turns out they went with punishing women instead of fewer abortions and again and again and again. Well, that's not cool. For fairness' and balance's sake, I'll say that the pro-choice is probably less about integrity of body and more about wanting to fuck without consequence.
As you note, we've still got an axiomatic disagreement. In order to change the opposing side's mind we still need to shift their axiom. However, rationality has let the pro-abortion side aim their rhetorical firepower at the correct target. Instead of talking about the neural activity of fetuses, they can start making people feel more comfortable and accepting of sex. Once they're correctly targeting the true axiom, they'll have a lot more luck in shifting the opposing side's position.
Many religious objections to birth control consist of "It's actually abortion, just a bit more subtle" - preventing implantation of a fertilized embryo is the same as a surgical abortion, if you don't distinguish between a day's gestation and two months'. Most of the rest seem like generalized objections to sex - human biology being what it is, the punishment for that will inevitably fall largely on the shoulders of women. It doesn't seem like it's just a female-specific objection, though - I doubt your average religious objector would get too worked up at the thought of alimony or a shotgun marriage, and most seem to actively encourage adoption.
As for your proposed strategy, it seems like it's basically trying to do the same thing, given how liberalized sex and liberalized religion are so tightly bound in practice.
What about ways to prevent the ovum from being fertilized in the first place, e.g. condoms or vasectomy?
The objections there are mostly "It'll lead to evil nookie!", and to a lesser extent "It's not 100% reliable"(as though anything in life is...oh wait, abstinence can't lead to pregnancy, because the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down - how could I have forgotten?). They're stupid objections, but to people who literally believe that sex outside of marriage will lead to an eternity of torture, I can sort of see how they connect the dots.
If there are objections on the soul level, you should still expect to see a hierarchy based on preventing/allowing fertilization per birth control.
For example: Going by pure number of 'abortions' (counting as any termination of a fertilized ovum), there is a continuum for birth control. IIRC it's pill -> patch -> condoms -> spermicide+condoms -> shot -> implant -> IUD -> surgery. Implants and especially IUDs cause up to an order of magnitude fewer of these 'instant abortions' compared to the pill.
We should expect to see pro-life campaigns saying "get an IUD, NOT the pill!" (Or supporting vasectomy / tubal ligation, but fat chance on those.) But again, we don't see that. Because those 99.9% effective things will lead to sin.
This isn't necessarily a good argument given that they have theological objections to birth control. This maybe indicates a general value which is an objection to technological modification of issues connected to reproduction as part of what may be a general reactionary attitude. This is consistent with for example, the early objections to IVF and the use of anesthesia in pregnancy. However, the second one of these could also be construed as a "punish women" goal, even as it has become uncommon. It might be noteworthy in this context that the IVF issue still is an issue for Catholic official doctrine but not almost any Protestants, and the objection to anesthesia in pregnancy is essentially gone completely. On the other hand, maybe looking at something more connected to male biology might help: if this is purely an objection to technical intervention in sex, then one would expect objections to Viagra and similar drugs. But they don't exist. So that's an argument against the technical intervention hypothesis.
Another possibility is that trying to understand is part of a general attempt to give broad explanations for what amounts to an attempt to modify old theology to handle modern technologies and dilemmas. Thus the exact results may be to some extent essentially stochastic. One example that might prove an interesting contrast in this context to the Christian right outlook is that of Orthodox Judaism. In some respects, Orthodox Judaism has more of an objection to birth control than it has to abortion. Fitting this sort of norm into any of the above hypotheses really seems like shoehorning.
Why do people insist on comparisons to -Viagra- when discussing birth control? Vasectomy would be a better comparison. Of course, it doesn't illustrate the same kind of point, because religious objections to vasectomy do exist (and get almost no media coverage compared to religious objections to comparable procedures in women).
Someone started a rumor last decade that a large portion of health insurers cover Viagra but not birth control. It's not true.
Given that there's no god to specify what theology you get, this just raises the question — why do they have those theological objections? You're proposing what amounts to a null hypothesis in your notion that "the exact results may be to some extent essentially stochastic".
Or the various cultures wherein are found the murder of women who have extramarital sex and other forms of "honor" violence. The differences do not seem to be described well as theological differences, since some of the same behaviors exist across different religions in some regions of the world.
It is easy for atheists to come to the conclusion that religious people do nasty things because of religion. I suspect that it would be more accurate to say that religion provides a set of powerful rationalizations for certain emotional reactions; and that which reactions a person manifests has as much to do with other elements of culture as with their theology.
Every pro-lifer I've ever met has shared two characteristics: they don't think women who have abortions should go to jail, and they think that women who have abortions are worse off than women who choose to give birth. That doesn't fit with the pregnancy-as-punishment theory.
(It does however, expose another type of misogyny: they refuse to believe a mature woman in a sound mind could ever choose abortion.)
The first characteristic, even if it doesn't fit the pregnancy-as-punishment theory terribly well, fits far worse with the abortion-as-murder theory.
"don't think women who have abortions should go to jail" I'd be open to it personally (though I think prisons have a slew of their own problems) but it makes for lousy arguments if your goal is to slowly shift public opinion. rather than being scrupulously consistent.
Funny, from my point of view this evidence suggests that pro-lifers are actually more concerned with controlling women's sex lives, than with saving unborn babies.
Can't it be both?
Your model assumes that all people believe in a position for the same reason. In my debates with different people about abortion different people seem to hold their positions for different reasons.
Thinking that all people who disagree with you are on one side and think exactly the same is a good way to prevent rational debate.
For a better example of a case where rational debate is useless, I'd take an exiled Tibetan and a Chinese Nationalist debating about the status of Tibet.
I think that's somewhat more amenable to rationality - the "Screw Tibet, free China!" bumper sticker I once saw comes to mind here. But I mostly picked abortion because it's the most prominent such example and the one I've thought most about, not because it's necessarily the best illustration.
Actually there are many more possible position in the abortion debate than pro-life and pro-choice. The fact that the position exist like this in US society is a result of the fact that the issue didn't get resolved democratically via congress but via the Supreme Court.
Different European countries have different abortion laws and it makes sense to discuss with laws around the issue are best. If you want to have a senisble discussion about the topic, don't treat it binary. You look at a bunch of different legal solutions to the abortion issue and start comparing which laws you prefer over which other laws.
Restrictions on procedures can take a lot of shades, but the basic choice of yea or nay is pretty binary. For comparison, Canada also had abortion law determined by the Supreme Court(it was legal but heavily restricted before, and now we have literally the loosest abortion law in the world - there are no restrictions whatsoever), but the issue is nowhere near as controversial. I think the difference has a lot less to do with the Supreme Court, and a lot more to do with the US level of religiosity.
Accepting that a woman, who was raped and has complications with her pregnancy that would mean that she would die if there was no abortion, is a long way from accepting that every pregnant woman in a late stage pregnancy can just decide to have an abortion.
When you start talking rationally about the shade of gray of different laws it also becomes easier to have a rational discourse about the extremes.
One exemption to anti-abortion views I've seen expressed almost universally among pro-lifers is that abortion is okay if the mother's life is at risk(because at that point, abortion isn't murder, any more than an operation that kills one Siamese twin to save the other is). A lot of people try to start blocking out other exemptions for semi-random reasons, mostly because of the hemisphere fallacy, but the arguments are usually the sort of incoherent nonsense you only hear from politicians.
That's why it makes sense to give them multiple laws that regulate abortion and ask them to rank them instead of asking them for their ideal abortion law.
They will have to give you reasons about why they prefer one exception over another even if they would reject both exceptions in a perfect world. That usually requires them to reason in a way that's more than just reiterating talking points.
Agreed, that seems like a good approach to teasing out details of a stance. (Most real people will just ignore you in various ways, of course, but if you can make them sit still long enough it's viable)
If you tell people that they are doing things wrong, they usually dont ignore you but get emotional about what you are saying.
If people just ignore you, maybe you are arguing against straw mans or otherwise not addressing the real reasons of why they acted the way they did in the past.
If someone believes something about the moral implications of conception, that is something they likely just took in as a social truth, and then later learned and crafted a rationalization for. I don't think we have moral instincts about cellular organisms.
To the extent that their in group remains constant, it would take a lot of serious moral argument to overcome that social truth. The problem with political arguments is that people don't seriously have them. They volley a couple of bumper stickers at each other, and then go off in a huff. They may do it a million times - but a million bogus arguments designed to achieve nothing individually will likely achieve nothing in the aggregate as well.
The social truth remains intact - no serious moral arguments oppose it - why would we ever expect a change?
Where you might expect a change - when one moves between social groups, or when one commits to and is capable of serious moral argument.
The social aspect is at least theoretically testable - how big are the moral shifts when people change in groups? I suspect pretty large.
And in the relatively rare ideologue class, the shifts are often pretty big too. I knew a gal who went from seminary->Leninism->WIcca/EnviroProgressivism. Lots of atheist ideologues are former fundamentalists. Conservatives who were former marxists.
Arguments work on people who engage in them. I'd guess that a changing social truth works even better on most.
This kind of stuff happens very often among people in their late teens in my home town. (Most but not all of them just support political ideologies the way they'd support football teams.)
That's it.
A small class of people care about and are interested in ideas. You can change their minds through argument. The vast majority are Green Team Blue Team, and they change their ideology if required by a change in their social affiliation.
Upvoted, beacause I agree in principle, but I don't actually see any examples of this in this thread.
In a successful democracy, there is a process for electing the members of the government that appears, based on the past track record, to work.
If China has done any things right historically, perhaps it is education, and the cultivation of a disciplined workforce, and maybe a communication system that reaches into every village, and maybe these things are really quite big, esp. when combined with good natural resources.
China seems to have reasonably responsible leaders at the top for the moment, maybe because the most extravagant examples of corruptness at that level would give competitors a lever for bringing down such officials.
What is there that can conceivably be copied? Should any country imitate their historical route, hoping that it would (eventually) lead to the current more or less "good" outcome? I can't believe anyone would think that.
The US didn't had an engineer as president since Herbert Hoover. China is currently run by Hu Jintao who studied hydraulic engineering. The president before Hu, Jiang Zemin got a degree in electrical engineering. China's current vice president studied chemical engineering.
Having more people with science and engineering backgrounds into political leadership positions seem like a good idea.
I'm not convinced.