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Not necessarily. Moldbug might trust scientific consensus to be correct in areas where politics won't distort it.
i obviously do trust the scientific consensus, but steelmanning, there have been times when politics or culture has interfered with science in half-science half-humanities fields like anthropology. Historically, even biology has been tainted by politics at times, when it comes to sexuality. (I'm not talking about modern evolutionary biology, but historical things such as chalking up female orgasms to "hysteria" and the historical attribution of homosexual behavior in animals as "dominance displays")
That's a devil's advocate though. For the most part, I agree with you.
I predict that the liberal iteration of this movement will not gain in strength within our natural lifetimes, and will gradually peter out at some point (although maybe it won't peter out within our natural lifetimes). If for some reason it does not peter out, it will gradually become a conservative movement against the transhumanist liberals.
Historically, it hasn't been the first time lefties have done stupid things. Movements in which Lefties Do Stupid Things have tended to die away gradually (separatist feminism) or are considered crazy fringe groups today (Nation of Islam)
Also (I say this with the awareness that I run the risk of committing "no true liberal") each of these Liberals Being Stupid movements have an aspects which I instinctively associate with conservatism. Nation of Islam and Separatist Feminism favors in-groups over out-groups. Anti-GMO is largely driven by concerns about purity and keeping the status quo. If I didn't know the cultural context surrounding the green-blue affiliations, I would have labeled these to be conservative values.
The point is this: I've got some values. Some of those values pin me down as liberal. When I look at "liberals being stupid" examples, I do not see people who have taken the "liberal values" dial and turned them all the way up higher than I would like. Instead, I see people who have either turned off one or more of my liberal value dials, or added a conservative value into the mix. These people don't feel like current trends extrapolated - rather, they feel like a divergent stream.
When I think about what turning up the "liberal values" dial too high would look like, I think of things that don't hurt anyone but are nevertheless disgusting, and cannot be prevented without somehow imposing authority to restrict personal autonomy. For example, if large segments of society were to start falling into self-pleasure-stimulation feedback cycles, I can imagine a hyper-permissive liberal state which decides that they should be given the autonomy to do so.
Just imagine...the entire human race. Totally functional, with most rational faculties intact, still interacting with the outside world...but constantly in a great mood.
I'd really hate that idea. It's a world I wouldn't fit into at all. But oddly, I can already feel Cthulhu's persuasive tentacles convincing me that as long as the rational faculties do remain intact, it wouldn't be so bad if some people chose to live this way. As long as not everyone chooses it, what is the harm?
(history-politics is outside my domain and I haven't fact-checked so you shouldn't take any specific examples I give at face value)
I think the issue here is that to you progressivism is a set of very specific ideals whereas to me it is a set of general-purpose political tactics. We could argue it around in circles forever, so why not cut to the meat of the issue; what would we expect the progressive response to be like if each of us were right?
Situation A: Three nationalist groups representing their country's majority begin systemic campaigns of genocide against minority groups whom they resent for their higher social standing and perceived foreignness (in reality, both have lived there for centuries). The German NSDAP targets the Ashkenazim, the Vietnamese Viet Minh targets the Hoa, and the Hutu Akazu targets the Tutsi. What do we expect the modern sensible progressive to feel?
If this is a simple question of morality, we could expect that each case would merit strong condemnation and the failure to prevent them as an unforgivable tragedy. If on the other hand Progressivism is simple political expedience, we expect our answers to break along purely practical lines; the NSDAP was a rival and is thus condemned as strongly as possible, the Viet Minh are even now an ally and thus their actions are completely ignored, and the Akazu are of no consequence whatsoever and are thus thought of only within the context of expanding the power of allied NGOs.
Situation B: Two men lead attacks on US Federal Government buildings in an attempt to spark a race war which they believed was divinely ordained, failed, and were subsequently executed. John Brown attacked the Federal Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, while Timothy McVeigh attacked the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In both cases innocents were killed as a result of the attacks, and in both cases their actions hurt their cause in the public mind and encouraged the expansion of paramilitary police forces designed to prevent similar future strikes.
If this is a question of humanitarian ideals, you might expect that both would be repudiated for their actions; even if we hate slavery, surely a student of history should recognize that slave revolts tend to involve mass murder even when successful which means that regardless of the validity of their complaints, both were attempting to start a genocidal war. Of course, from the point of view of political expediency there is no conflict whatsoever; the neofascist terrorist is a threat and thus irredeemably evil while the radical abolitionist terrorist is a predecessor and thus an inspiring heroic figure.
Situation C: Two governments of modern first-world nations have made the deliberate descision to deny life-saving care from those seeking it for a practical purpose. The US government's Tuskegee Syphilus Experiment has denied 400 black men access to syphilus treatment so that the army can gather data on how best to treat STIs (a major readiness issue in any military), while the UK government's Liverpool Care Pathway has dehydrated and neglected 10,000(!) "dying" patients to make room for patients with better QALY returns.
If this was a case of values, we should expect universal condemnation; the TSE was nothing short of a racist massacre while the LCP crossed the line into actual mass murder. On the other hand, the US Army is a traditionally right-wing institution while the NHS is a monument to Social Democrat ideology; it would be surprising if the TSE didn't result in public shaming and calls for new boards of well-paid ethicists (read: academics) in every hospital while the LCP is met with calls for increased funding to the very organizaion which enacted it.
Obviously this isn't a perfect test of the principle; it's not particularly sporting of me to pick examples with perfect hindsight and I do apologize for that. As a rational intelligent person I know you're more than capable of stepping outside your philosophy and asking why it happens to have grown into the shape it's in, and who it's ultimately helping. As long as you've done that, as far as I'm concerned we don't disagree on anything substantive.
(Also I was hoping for your opinion on whether my explanation of the "governmental entropy" made any sense. I guess putting it in the middle of a text wall was a poor idea lol.)
Judging by the examples you give, the tactic you're attributing to progressivism is basically harsh condemnation (and often forceful suppression) of purported "human rights abuse" when the perpetrators are ideological enemies, but quiet tolerance (and sometimes even approval) of the same actions when they are perpetrated by allies or by people/groups who do not fit the "bad guy" role in the standard progressive narrative. Is this pretty much what you intended to convey, or am I missing something important?
If I'm not, then I don't see why you tie this behavior to progressivism in particular. It seems like a pretty universal human failure mode when it comes to politics. Of course, the specifics of the rhetoric employed will differ, but I'm sure I can come up with examples similar to yours that apply to conservatives, or indeed to pretty much any faction influential enough to command widespread popular allegiance and non-negligible political clout. Do you think progressives are disproportionately guilty of this kind of hypocrisy, or that this hypocrisy is more central to the success of progressivism than that of other ideologies? Or are you just using the term "progressive" in a much more encompassing sense than its usual meaning in American political discourse?
I've also got to say that I don't find your three examples of progressive hypocrisy all that compelling (even though I don't deny the existence of this sort of hypocrisy among progressives -- I just think you're wrong about degree).
On situation A: The claim that progressives completely ignored Vietnamese ethnic cleansing is false. The push for a more inclusive refugee policy in America in the wake of mass Vietnamese displacement (culminating in the Refugee Act of 1980) was spearheaded by progressives in the Congress (like Ted Kennedy) and backed by labor unions. The UNHCR (which I'm assuming Moldbug regards as a tentacle of the progressive kraken) played a major role in drawing attention to the plight of the boat people. It's true that the Viet Minh's oppression of ethnic Chinese doesn't get condemned as vociferously or routinely as the Nazi oppression of Jews, but I don't buy that this is solely or even primarily attributable to the preservation of the progressive Grand Narrative. One relevant observation is that as bad as the Viet Minh's treatment of the Ethnic Chinese was, the Nazi treatment of Jews was considerably worse.
As for the Rwandan genocide, once again your characterization of the progressive response doesn't seem apt. While it is true that America did basically nothing to stem the genocide while it was in progress, some of the harshest criticism of this American inactivity has come from progressive academics (Samantha Power is a prominent example). Also, I don't think condemnation of the Akazu has been lacking at all. In fact, the impression I get is that Rwanda is the go-to example for modern (post WWII) genocide.
On situation B: I concede that a lot of contemporary discussion of John Brown is unjustifiably reverential, and I don't consider him particularly heroic. But I do think the difference in motivation between McVeigh and him is very relevant to our evaluation of their respective actions. Also, you seem to take for granted that the Haitian revolution was, on the whole, a bad thing. If not, your claim that Brown should have been dissuaded from starting a slave rebellion by the example of Haiti would make no sense. And I disagree that the Haitian revolution was on the whole a bad thing, despite the considerable loss of life involved. Perhaps this is another instance of progressive double standards, but you'll have to make that case for me. As it stands, the argument "Haiti's slave rebellion had horrible results, so John Brown should have expected his rebellion to have horrible results, so he should be treated as someone trying to bring about horrible results" is not very convincing to me, for a number of reasons.
On situation C: I just straight-up reject your characterization of the LCP as "mass murder". While there have been reports of some patients on the LCP being dehydrated and neglected by hospital staff, the numbers do not remotely approach 10,000. That's about the total number of people on the pathway, and there is no evidence I'm aware of that more than a small fraction faced systematic mistreatment (in contravention of the actual guidelines for the LCP, I should note). There is also evidence that a number of people on the pathway received exemplary end-of-life care.
And again, your characterization of the progressive response is pretty tendentious. I guess it's technically true that there are "calls for increased funding to the very organization which enacted" the LCP, but progressives also support increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, the very organization which enacted the Tuskegee experiment (gasp!). So no hypocrisy there, then. I find neither demand particularly scandalous, since both organizations do a lot of other good stuff that warrants increased funding. As for the specific abuses of the LCP -- while they are much less common than you claim, they are troubling, and as far as I can tell, there has been no significant progressive opposition to the Neuberger review's recommendation that the LCP be phased out and replaced with something that can be more effectively enforced. I'm not British though, so I may be wrong about this.
Now, it is quite possible that I have to some extent been duped by progressive myth-making in my conception of these situations. If so, I'd appreciate evidence indicating where my beliefs are false.
I consider him extremely heroic. Not ultrarational, but there were people suffering in the darkness and crying out for help, a lot of people saying "Later", and John Brown saying "Fuck this, let's just do it." If there's a historical consensus that the Civil War could have been avoided, I have not encountered it; and that being so, might as well have the Civil War sooner rather than later.
Here's an argument. Basically, Lincoln could have acted early to keep half of the South, and a confederacy of just seven coastal states primarily dependent on the global cotton market could have been waited out, or brought to heel quickly.
To bring this to contemporary examples, do you support Operation Iraqi Freedom?
If I recall my past opinions correctly, I said at the time that while such wars were the only way to free certain countries, I did not trust the competence of the current administration to prosecute it and was strongly against the way in which it was carried out in defiance of international law.
I would say in retrospect that the resulting disaster would have been 2/3 of the way to my reasonable upper bound for disastrousness, but the full degree to which e.g. the Bush Defense department was ignoring the Bush State department was surprising and would not become known until years later. I have since adjusted my political cynicism upward, and continue to argue with various community-members about whether the US government can be expected to execute elaborate correct actions based on amazingly accurate theories about AI which they got from university professors (answer: no).
Why doesn't the same logic apply to the Civil War?
For one thing, it worked. But I wasn't there at the time, not to mention not being born at the time, so it's hard to argue about what I would have said about the Civil War.
For certain values of "worked". Slavery was abolished, similarly Saddam is no longer in power and Iraq is certainly much closer to democracy (at least by Arab standards). Also in both cases the occupation (called "reconstruction" after the civil war) met with heavy resistance and was ultimately discontinued for political reasons. Ultimately Jim Crow was instituted. It is notable that for roughly a century afterwards the civil war was regarded as a tragic mistake.
More or less; it's all about framing the debate in terms which push popular sentiment leftward. Whoever controls the null hypothesis gets to decide what the data means, and conservatives suck at statistics.
Now each of my examples is debatable; there are official Progressive answers to each dichotomy and they're all designed to make sense to well educated intelligent people (no-one with any sense would call the Cathedral dim). But if you look at the pattern, not just here but anywhere you look, you see double-standards which invariably favor the political Left and Demotism in general. I can't force you to see it, and I don't begrudge it if you don't, but it is there to see.
I took your explanation of "governmental entropy" to indicate a breakdown of heirarchy.
High order gov't = clear lines of heirarchy, which you could draw in a simple diagram
low order gov't = constant uncertainty about who's in charge (with the resulting insecurity resulting in violence).
So this is good, but I'm still confused.
Your examples describe a government which acts in its own interests (rather than by moral ideals) and I accept that this is in fact the case for our government, that it acts not according to ideals but in self-interest.
What I don't understand is why this is particular to progressive-ism, and not a general property of ideologically driven power structures. Or even power structures in general, for that matter - doesn't Fnarg also act in his own interests, by strengthening his allies and weakening his enemies?
Let's take India and Pakistan, and observe their positions on the Israel-Palestine scenario. Pakistan strongly sides with Palestine, probably because Palestine is the Muslim state and Israel are the Western Imperialists. Polls show India to be the most pro-Israel country in the world: despite India's strong anti-imperialist sentiment - here's a short analysis that makes sense to me.
India was chosen as an example because while many major variables are different from Western nations, I know it possesses the equivalent of what we've been calling "The Cathedral" and its conservatives are similar as well. As you might expect, India's leftists are more pro-muslim than the nation as a whole, and thus are less pro-Israel.
But I know that If a Muslim power started invading an indigenous Jewish population, left and right in India would be united in opposition. The alliance on the Right depends on the interests of the cultural in-group (which is why Pakistan supports Palestine and Indian conservatives supports not-Palestine), but the alliance of the Left doesn't seem tied to any particular culture's interest. Leftists from India to Europe to America tend to have greater support for Palestine.
So, once you subtract any moral variables, who does the leftist tend to help? One possibility is that they tend to help the underdog who wants to be autonomous from Fnargl. and thus cause the "underdog" to win. And if the underdog keeps winning, I suppose that this leads to chaos and constant revolutions.
if that's the case, it brings my back to the one useful thing said I had gleaned from reactionary thought - "World-improvement-plots should follow the heuristic of minimizing destruction to existing societal infrastructure."
That's just what I came up with, though, I'm not sure actually sure whom you meant when you said "who it's ultimately helping". Did you just mean that it acts to strengthen itself? If so, why is this unusual for a major ideology? All rapidly spreading things... Islam, English speaking, etc... can boast the same.
That's one way to look at it, but this is more about the actual responses of progressives themselves and I tried to phrase it that way (I.E. "What do we expect the modern sensible progressive to feel?").
What do you think about the Viet Minh's genocide against the Hoa? What do you even know about them? Is it anything at all like what you feel about the Holocaust?
What do you feel when you think about John Brown? Do you think about him? Is it at all like your mental image of Timmy McVeigh?
What's your response to the Liverpool Care Pathway? Is that even on your radar? How about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, I'm sure you've got a strong feeling about that one?
There is a pattern here; supposed moral concerns do not accurately predict how progressives, ordinary progressives not politicians remember, react to most issues. There are patterns of thought and behavior here and elsewhere which simply do not make sense except in the context of systematically eliminating non-aligned bases of power and expanding aligned ones. This is the absolute essence of the issue.
Me, personally? My domain is biology, and am aware that my political opinions on most issues aren't to be taken any more seriously than the average undergraduate's opinions. I suppose that makes me the "average progressive", so maybe that's a good thing:
Truthfully, none of those are on my radar, and I know nothing about the Holocaust beyond what I learned in school. As far as I'm concerned it's just one among many terrible genocides, and one that presently gets more attention than the others because it was committed against a group who currently inhabits Western nations. Slavery of African Americans is similar - one among many terrible atrocities which happen to get more attention because the group they were committed against lives among us.
The American public (which includes me) ignores the Hoa because we never see the Hoa and have no clue who they are. I've never met a Hoa. There's no Hoa organizations fighting for increased awareness. If awareness existed, people would care...but it doesn't, so they don't. This is what is meant by liberals when we say "privilege" - African Americans and Jews living in the West, as a group, have more privilege than the Hoa of Vietnam. The source of the privilege is that they were born in a Western nation.
The US Government, like most Powers, frequently supports shady, unethical groups in pursuit of its own interests. Saddam Hussein comes to mind as an example of supporting a seedy dictator which came to bite the US in the butt later. It is irrelevant that the Viet Minh and Saddam Hussein are on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum - they were both chosen on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic, to support the United State's interests at the time.
I never heard of Timmy McVeigh.before today. His wikipedia page doesn't match your description - it does not mention any "divinely ordained race war". Do I have the wrong McVeigh?
I learned about John Brown in school, he was mentioned alongside Nat Turner. I understand John Browns emotions of righteous fury. However, he was stupid to attempt such a war. Violence is only rational when the other side will see your power and back down - an all-out fight where one party (the slaves, in this case) are required to put in all their resources will result in slaughter on one or both sides. Even under the premise that you only care about your group and not the other group, a all-out war is an irrational decision. If you intrinsically value human life, the decision is even more irrational. The same applies to McVeigh. If Brown could have actually won - if he had sufficient power to force the other side to negotiate terms rather than all out slaughter, i might have supported it.
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment / Liverpool QALYs: A sacred value against a secular one. You've heard the moral dilemma where you kill 1 healthy patient and take the heart, lung, liver, etc to save 5 people? The utilitarian response seems to say "yes", and most people's hearts (including mine) say "no". In practice, I go with the sacred answer, and the excuse I make is that we need to be able to trust doctors enough to go to hospitals without fear of being killed. In the true, externality-free hypothetical, I confess to being confused.
However, I know that the logic of the Syplillis Experiment was "black people are less important so lets test it on them" and the logic of the Liverpool folks was "Let's maximize QALY's". The latter illicits my sympathies, the former does not. The Liverpool was not on my radar until this conversation, and I remain unsure about what to think of it.
You know, one of the things I keep forgetting is how reasonable people tend to be over here. My flinch-instinct is still very much tuned to other corners of the internet.
Basically, everything you've said is consistent and reasonable and utterly dissimilar to most of the progressive stuff I've ever seen. My sociology prof's lectures, articles I read on Jstor, friends/family back home in my yellow dog democrat hometown, the feminist / progressive christian blogs I lurk on, politicians I follow (and often vote for. My options are bad in that sense.). Its obviously the same general pedigree, but a different breed. I'm not particularly sure what to make of it.
You have to scroll a bit; his whole plan was based on a white-supremacist novel called The Turner Diaries. It's pretty much Battlefield Earth with Psychiatry find-and-replaced with Judaism, even down to the "nuke 'em all" ending. I've never read it myself but it's supposedly very popular in those circles.
That's not exactly true; there is one particular culture which benefits very greatly from every Leftist alliance; the culture of Leftist intellectuals.
The Palestinians do not benefit from the "Peace Process" which keeps them in refugee camps, and neither does Israel or any of Israel's Arab neighbors or even the United States which keeps the scam going. But it does provide an enormous amount of jobs for smart progressive kids working in the UN and other NGOs, juicy materials for journalists and political pundits, a great laboratory for PoliSci academics connected to the State Department to test their pet theories, and the crisis itself is an excellent propaganda tool for anyone to the left of Mussolini to use on any pet issue they might have.
In other words, the Cathedral itself profits, even if (especially if) everyone else is losing money. That's not a healthy business model, in fact it's almost criminal.
but doesn't that just class "Leftist Intellectuals" as one among many groups who use power to serve their own interests, while outwardly appealing to high moral ideals?
What's different here from all the other Fnargles who seize power? Why should I take any particular notice of this particular group of Fnargles who fall under the heading "Leftist Intellectuals"? Why is this Universe worse than the Universe that would result if there were no "leftist intellectuals"?
Are "leftist intellectuals" somehow meaner and more destructive than other Fnargles? Or is it simply that this brand of Fnargle is really, really good at re-directing power to itself?
Yes and yes, and the reason for both is how they take power.
Nearly every ruler, and virtually every ruling class, in history has built their power by skimming off of the top; tithes are one of the oldest non-arbitrary forms of taxation, and the word literally means a ten percent cut. The incentive for the ruler is always to increase their personal profit by increasing the size of the pot he skims from, which means that as Machiavelli astutely pointed out a benevolent ruler and an amoral one will be indistinguishable.
The reason the modern situation is so bad is that the conditions where the Cathedral profits have nothing to do with how well it governs, and are in fact typically opposed. If Somalia stays a war zone for the next ten thousand years, that's quadrillions of aid dollars which otherwise wouldn't be spent.
Joseph Stieglitz, one of Bill Clinton's top economic advisers,made a similar point about modern corporate mismanagement. When the shares are controlled by an individual or a small number of individuals everyone has an interest in making sure that the company is running efficiently; when the shares are too widely distributed speculation rules and the Board of Directors ends up calling the shots in their own interests. The result is bad service, poor profits and a bunch of wealthy Board members.
Okay, so I came into this considering the notion that attempts at reform frequently fail plausible. 2) I also came into this believing that there isn't any good feedback mechanism to kill counterproductive charity, so it's not a stretch to apply that to reform. 3) Also, perverse incentives can sometimes perpetuate dysfunctional things.
You've helped me to connect these dots and I am considering the notion that a system of perverse incentives is fueling a large amount of counterproductive reform, at least insofar as it comes to foreign policy. I don't have the evidence to believe this is true yet, but it is a coherent notion that could well be true.
With regards to domestic policy (an area where I've got at least some evidence) I'm more skeptical. But then again, I take it the Cathedral does skim off the domestic pot, so maybe the effects cannot be observed domestically. I'm also not sure I understand the whole "the past was in many ways better" notion - I can't think of many metrics by which this is true.
So...
1) Is this different from other forms of corrupt or inefficient charity? What is specific to the Left? Could this not apply to any group who were after a cause which was not related to their own direct profit?
2) Can it be fixed by requiring more transparency and data collection to ensure that interventions are, in fact, effective? (To force the benefit to the Cathedral to be tied to how well its actions produce the results it claims to produce)...basically, can we try to hold Cthulhu accountable?
After all, revolting against Cthulhu altogether will increase entropy, and for reasons obvious to both leftists and reactionaries that is undesirable. Transparency inducing reform seems to be something that everyone generally gets behind. If it is true that the tool of the Cathedral's violence is reform, then reform seems to be the appropriate channel by which to modify it.
That's actually something I hadn't thought of. I guess my semi-conscious explanation for that was American "rugged individualism" but in retrospect that doesn't make half as much sense.
There are obvious areas of improvement, but I'm hard pressed to think of one which the Nazis or the Hapsburgs wouldn't have provided if they had modern technology. It's also not easy for me to speculate on the course of technological innovation in a monarchist or fascist world; that's more of a job for authors like Harry Turtledove. So in most of the obvious cases like life expectancy I think we can call it a wash.
In other places, we can see problems which only exist as a result of progressive ideology. The state of Africa, South America and much of Asia can be laid entirely at the feet of naive decolonization and parasitic clientism; even accounting for technology, much of the world's peoples likely led better lives as subjects of a foreign crown than they do under their "independent" nations. The mess we've made of the domestic economy, not to mention the world one, shouldn't be too much of a leap to ascribe to mismanagement. And even domestically, "liberated" women and "tolerated" minorities are consistently polled as being decreasingly happy over time, almost as if our progressive policies of equality were thrusting them into arenas they were fundamentally not fit to compete in.
The current dysgenic population shift is more ambiguous; I'd like to think that a Reactionary government could preserve or increase the value of our national stock, but there are also purely technological factors like the ease of birth control which are less amenable to regulation. Also ambiguous is Moldbug's democratic crime wave theory; his numbers show an order-of-magnitude increase in the murder rate over the last few hundred years, but the 18th century wasn't known for meticulous record keeping so that might be illusory. Yvain has some interesting posts calling the whole "Victorians were healthier!" meme into question at SlateStarCodex, so that theory has some holes also.
But to be honest I'm not that attached to the idea; it's interesting and more plausible than not, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was wrong either.
Freezing a liquid (or, God forbid, depositing a gas) is hard work, and the entropy does end up increasing globally, but you can do it. I think our present situation is the result of a reversible reaction, and if it is we just need the right catalysts or raw power to push it back to completion in the other direction. At least that's my hope anyway.
Edit: Wow, I really just mixed up sublimation and deposition... must be bedtime.
I actually have seen that. Check out those graphs - there's a difference between statistical significance and differences of magnitudes that actually matter. But lets suppose for a moment that the differences were of a magnitude large enough to influence policy:.
..."this makes me happier" and "I prefer this" are not the same thing. Feminist action might well have shifted happiness from women to men as a result of shifting work load from men to women, but I'm not sure why a more equitable labor and happiness distribution is a bad thing? Unless you're suggesting that it was a net loss.
I haven't seen the former...could it be attributable to the recession and wealth inequality? The latter is too large of a discussion to have.
I suppose arguing over the facts of these matters will derail somewhat. Back to the theoretical stuff...
So if I understand, this can be paraphrased as, "a government that is designed for the purpose of benefiting its people is likely to be worse than a government designed to exploit its people because the former has no concrete incentive".
If so, I still don't see why the solution isn't transparency and data collection, to give the government an incentive to make reality come out the way that the government claims it should. If the numbers come out wrong, the ruler loses power.
wait, not so fast
1) Doesn't that constitute a revolution and destruction of all existing power structures? Seems rather un-reactionary. My "transparency" solution was an attempt to work within the system, not to topple it.
2) You convinced me that it is possible that power structures designed to be non-exploitative tend to end up falling prey to perverse incentives that fuel a large amount of counterproductive action which benefits no one.
a) That's not the same as making a convincing case for the "order-chaos" thesis, where centralized power is superior to complex systems of distributed power. Thus far, I'd rather live in a random liberal democracy than a random totalitarian state, Why do you believe that a self interested and exploitative centralized power is superior to a self-interested and exploitative network made up of multiple distributed systems of power?
b) Your solution didn't even stipulate that our rulers must act in self interest. They'd still have to appease the populace. It didn't hand them any real power. Wouldn't a better solution (what I think maximizes Order and Self Interested Rulers, not what I think best maximizes utility) be to hand over all our weapons and military power to China and tell them to rule us as they see fit? Or, if we really had faith in this concept that even Fnargl would be superior, wouldn't North Korea suffice?
If me and the eminent Professor Hawking found ourselves sharing an apartment, it would be insane to distribute the labor equally between us. Comparative advantage tells us that he should use his enormously powerful mind and reputation pay a much higher share of the rent while I can use my young and increasingly muscular body to do any household chores which need doing. This turned into a slash-fic way too fast, but you get my drift here; men and women need to pursue tasks which complement their natural advantages.
This doesn't mean women should be barefoot and pregnant, there is plenty of room in the world for exceptional women and men to take each other's roles, but it does mean that in general the distribution will more closely resemble traditional societies.
I understand why avoiding it is wise, but it's not a particularly large discussion. The facts are pretty damning; the least capable elements of society are fast outbreeding the most capable, and immigration is not helping matters. The only solutions which come to mind are either very ugly or rely on the rapid maturation and implementation of technology which the Left strongly opposes.
Yup. If you want a game theoretic argument look at Stiglitz's work on the theory of information asymmetry in firms. [Edit: initial link was to overly-technical and not particularly demonstrative article; I'll look for a better one but his books might have to be sufficient]. He doesn't make the political connection, but it's a trivial one.
Hopefully this will also make the "widely distributed voting shares = bad management" point clearer as well.
(Note: I've read his conclusions in his book 'Whither Socialism?' but not the research behind them. In either case I'm not an economist or a game theory expert.)
I gave Dean Minow total control of the executive branch (a power Presidents have lacked for the better part of the century) and the ability to arbitrarily re-interpret the Constitution currently reserved for the Supreme Court. Considering we're taking about the mammoth USG here, that's more power in her hands than I can easily imagine. But of course she'd be far from my first pick for the job, just better than the current state of affairs.
China is a half-way decent choice, definitely better than the Harvard Dynasty, but still not really ideal. The Communist Party rules as a sort of semi-meritocratic natural aristocracy, very much like the old Eunuchs did really, but there is no dynastic Emperor to balance the equation. Each individual Party member is both a state employee and a shareholder in the People's Republic of China; while mild compared to the Western welfare state, graft and patronage within the Party is severe. Furthermore, any ambitious young Commie could eventually climb their way up and replace the Premier himself, which means the leadership will always be insecure and tempted towards purges as a means of stabilizing their positions.
North Korea on the other hand is a communist dictatorship out of time; even in it's relationship to the US it mirrors the USSR. We prop them up with food aid and timely blackmail payments while sympathetic liberal elements in the US systematically oppose both a definitive conclusion to the (ongoing) Korean War and any attempt to sever our economic umbilical cord with them. Even their legitimacy depends on our support; without the constant threat of an American invasion which will never come the Kims couldn't possibly hope to keep their sustaining isolationism alive. They are an obsolete form of Leftist government but leftist nonetheless.
Ideally we'd want someone more like the Saudi Royals or any of the UAE's Emirs; capable established dynasties with existing ties into the US political structure and a traditionalist-yet-irreligious worldview. They wouldn't be able to rule directly, they're too foreign for one thing, but if the House of Windsor could rule India for three centuries the House of Saud could probably manage the continental US as a suzerainty for a while.
Oh, hahahahahaha, if that ever happened in some wacky weird moldbuggy universe... that'd be like Vatican trying to grab supreme jurisdiction over all Christian denominations by proclaiming the Pope to be the spiritual heir of Martin Luther and "interpreting" Luther's theses to show how all modern-day Protestants need to forget about their minor disagreements and follow the RCC.
Which is to say... you do realize that the vast majority of serious leftists - including American leftists, and I mean people who self-identify as socialists, left-libertarians, anarchists, etc - have nothing but scorn and contempt towards the NYT? In the left-wing interpretation of the "Cathederal", the NYT is not an active weapon of the Big Bad System like in yours, but it is nonetheless viewed as a symbol of moral bankrupcy, insidious propaganda and serving as the mouthpiece of the neoliberal elite. In short, it is not a case of the NYT being not progressive enough for a few of the most zealous commies; in their (our) interpretation, it is unambiguiously an anti-Left force.
One of those is a war to stop something which is actually bad. The other isn't. That's not a trivial distinction.
That's a very good point.
We have to start being careful about terminology here. The word "liberal" (at least in the contemporary US political discourse) has two quite distinct meanings. The first (at least historically) meaning is the "classic liberal" or "traditional liberal" or even "XIX century liberal" -- a political philosophy emphasizing individual rights and liberties. Nowadays a "classic liberal" is almost a synonym for a "small-l libertarian".
The second meaning is "leftist", "progressive", "opposed to conservatism". This is the usual meaning in which the word in used in the US today.
Now, what will happen if you dial the "liberal values" to 11? Liberal/classic, not much -- you'll get much weirdness, some of it disgusting, to be sure, but overall it might look like, I don't know, say, Burning Man.
But the liberal/progressive values are a different kettle of fish. These include things like serious dislike of inequality. Or, for example, strong preference for community over individual. So turning these things to eleven gets you moving towards the Soviet Russia territory. You should start thinking about confiscatory tax regimes, limitations on property rights, etc.
I'm not sure how turning the dial to 11 works, but there seems to be a pretty glaring asymmetry in your analysis here. If turning the dial to 11 on progressivism takes you to Soviet Russia, why doesn't turning the dial to 11 on classical liberalism take you towards complete stateless anarchism, which I imagine would be considerably less congenial than Burning Man.
"But," the classical liberal might say, "we believe the state does have a role to play in protecting its citizens from violence inflicted by others, and in enforcing contracts." Yeah, and progressives believe that the market has a role to play in solving the economic calculation problem. They also have commitments to civil liberties and individual autonomy that are incompatible with a Soviet-style dictatorship. If turning the dial past 10 is sufficient to erase those commitments, maybe it's also sufficient to erase the classical liberal's commitment to a night watchman state?
This line of conversation seems to focus on the "turning the dial to 11" idea, which I take to mean "increasing the distance from the mainstream".
I think I see a couple of problems with this.
First, a political ideology is composed of not one, but several "dial settings". Correlations between them are at least partly matters of historical accident, not logical necessity. We can conceive of dialing up or down any of these somewhat independently of one another.
Why is anti-colonialism linked to opposition to private property, instead of to protecting the private property rights of oppressed people? Why is it in the interests of "big-business conservatives" today to oppose scientific education, whereas in the mid-20th century the business establishment was strongly supportive of it? Why is antisemitism today found in both the far left and far right, whereas it once was a defining characteristic of right-wing nationalist populism? Because of the formation and breakdown of specific political alliances and economic conditions over historic time — not because these views are logically linked.
Second, a political ideology often opposes what outsiders see as more extreme versions. Conservatives may say that progressivism is nothing but watered-down Stalinism, and progressives may say that conservatism is merely watered-down fascism. But conservatives have reasoned arguments against fascism, and progressives have reasoned arguments against Stalinism — and these arguments do not merely amount to "too much of a good thing".
It takes me towards, that is, in that general direction. It doesn't get there, though, because classical liberals were quite familiar with stateless anarchism and have rejected it.
Again, turning the dial to 11 moves the progressives towards Soviet Russia without necessarily getting them there.
Note my examples -- they do not mention hanging capitalists on the lampposts.
Imagine a committed (maybe even a radical) progressive finding himself in a country which taxes incomes over, say $500,000 at the 99% tax rate. Would he start to demand lower taxes on the rich? Not bloody likely, and this is a confiscatory tax regime.
By the way, the marginal income tax rate in the US on incomes over $100k was 92% in 1953, and 70% on incomes over $108k until 1981, when Reagan first started trading taxes for deficits.
Source.
From your source, in 1953 the marginal tax on ordinary income over $200K was 92% for single filers and that's $1.7m in today's dollars.
I do wonder how many people were in this tax bracket. For the rich most of their income was dividends and capital gains -- not part of ordinary income.
Sure, 92% on $1.7m/yr it's not quite 99% on $500k/yr, as in your example, but it's not too far off, and it is interesting to examine how people on different sides of the political spectrum reacted to it. I don't know if any of the "progressives" (meaning leftists?) demanded lower taxes back then.
By the way: a nice graph and an amusing fact:
The Wealth Tax Act of 1935, applied the top rate to income over $5 million and had only a single taxpayer: John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
So, what is the harm?
There isn't any "harm" - that's the entire point. It just feels wrong at a gut level. The example was specifically chosen to be something that did not upset "harm avoidance" or "egalitarianism" or "autonomy" (in the john haidt sense). I was trying to think of a world in which I might be the conservative one.
In this case, I think that the notion of a human without negative effect is hitting some sort of psychological Uncanny Valley between human and alien for me. Maybe it violates some sort of purity norm? Or perhaps it causes individuals to in some senses leave the "in-group" by becoming less similar to me?
The truth is that the strangeness would probably wear off after repeated exposure. I only had to think about the idea for a small amount of time before realizing it wasn't really as bad as it seemed at first. But I can I imagine that if I hadn't ever considered the idea in my youth, an older version of me would no longer be cognitively flexible enough to consider it as acceptable behavior.
This is probably how conservatives feel with homosexuality. (And just the same way, if you take a young conservative who doesn't take any religious scriptures literally, and you give them repeated exposure, they tend to change their mind unless religion somehow interferes).
(If everyone did it, there might be ...not harm, but dis-utility. It wouldn't be my optimal universe, though perhaps it wouldn't be worse than the present. I think that I consider diversity of experiences intrinsically valuable, so I'd feel like something intrinsic to humanity was lost if at least some toned-down brands of negative affect weren't preserved in at least some people. A more obvious problem is that it might be boring...I'm not sure whether the fact that they wouldn't find it boring makes it better or worse. I guess I'd be happy for them, but I wouldn't identify myself, or humanity, with them as much.)
Yes... I think what bothers me most is that it is a subtraction. It's one fewer emotion on the spectrum of experience. I wouldn't mind people becoming strange and different, but I would want them to be more than human in the realm of breadth of experience, not less than human. Perhaps I wouldn't mind as much if they became more complex in other ways.
But really, that doesn't become a problem unless everyone chooses wire-heading.
(nods) Ah, I see. Gotcha.
I certainly agree that we can be squeamish about things that we don't actually judge to be wrong, whatever our ethical standards are (unless we explicitly consider squeamishness our ethical standard, of course).
That said, I don't seem to value diversity of experience enough that I'm willing to preserve suffering for the novelty/diversity value.
Tangentially, IME the stuff we class as "positive affect" is way less boring to experience than the stuff we class as "negative affect," as well as involving less suffering.
I just remembered about eliezer's post about serious stories. He thinks that all stories involve conflict, fear, or sadness, and aren't interesting otherwise.
I think he's got a point, about humans needing some sort of self-narrative, about having a need to live the sort of life you would like to read about.
After reading Eliezer's post, I put it on my to-do list as a challenge to write a good story that involves no pain or conflict. I'm hoping to substitute conflict related suspense with strangeness and wonder suspense. That said, it's true that I'm having trouble thinking of counterexamples among non-short stories I've read which stand only on positive emotions. I wouldn't even know how to start going about this feat outside the realm of sci-fi-fantasy.
Thanks for making me think about this though, because I was just shifting through my mental archive of short stories looking for one without conflict and came up with this, which illustrates what I meant about awe and wonder having dramatic effects which rival those of pain and conflict.
Idea cross posted at "serious stories"
Just to pick the obvious counterexample that comes to mind... are we considering porn to be uninteresting? To not be stories? Or do we want to claim that all porn involves conflict, fear, or sadness?
Hm.
What makes you think that?
I ask because I don't think I need to live the sort of life I'd like to read about., and I'm curious whether we're simply different that way, or whether perhaps this is a lack of self-awareness on my part.
More thought:
Our emotions are in some sense the human equivalent of "utility functions".
We don't hate the suffering of other people in some abstract way - we hate the suffering of other people because it causes us pain to think about other people suffering. We love truth because of that rush of satisfaction upon hitting upon it.
Yes, we intrinsically prefer pleasure over pain, but that's only part of the story. We also prefer the causes of satisfaction to happen, beyond preferring the feeling of satisfaction itself. We hate the causes of pain beyond the extent to which we hate the actual feeling of pain itself.
You can't really replace the more abstract negative affects with a warning signal, because the negative affect was the reason you hated, say, deception, in the first place. Replacing negative affect in response to deception would be akin to removing part of the preference against deception.
That's why sociopaths don't care about people. They don't feel guilt. You could tell them "this is where you would ordinarily feel guilty, if we hadn't removed your negative affect associated with hurting people" but they aren't going to care about the warning signal. Maybe some past version of themselves who hadn't had negative affect removed might have cared, but they will not.
Negative affect is the switch that tells the brain "don't do things that cause that'. Removing negative affect would actually remove the perception of negative utility. For simple bodily pain, who cares...but you're going to start altering values if you mess with any of the more abstract stuff.
So, when we radically alter our emotions, don't we also radically alter our "utility functions"? I'd like future-me's interests to generally align with current-me's coherent extrapolated interests.
It seems to me that I negatively value other people's suffering... I want there to be less of it.
Given the choice between reducing their suffering and reducing the pain I feel upon contemplating their suffering, it seems to me I ought to reduce their suffering.
Given the option of reducing their suffering at the cost of experiencing just as much pain when I contemplate their lack of suffering as I do now when I contemplate their suffering, it seems to me I ought to reduce their suffering.
None of that seems compatible with the idea that what I actually negatively value is the pain of thinking about other people suffering.
What I can't figure out is whether you're suggesting that I'm ethically confused... that it simply isn't true that I ought to do those things, and if I understood the world better it would stop seeming to me that I ought to do them... or if I'm simply not being correctly described by your "we" statements and you're unjustifiedly generalizing from your own experience... or whether perhaps I've altogether misunderstood you.
None of the above. I'm just trying to figure out why my intuition says that I do not want not block all negative affect and whether my intuition is wrong, and your objections are helping me to so. I've got no idea whether we're fundamentally different, or whether one of us is wrong - I'm just verbally playing with the space of ideas with you. The things I'm saying right now are exploratory thoughts and could easily be wrong - the hope is that value comes out of it.
"We" is just a placeholder for humans. I'm making the philosophical claim that negative affect is the real-life, non-theoretical thing that corresponds to the game-theory construct of negative utility, with some small connotative differences.
No, of course not. Here's what I'm suggesting: Thinking about other people's suffering causes the emotion "concern" (a negative emotion) which is in fact "negative utility". If you don't feel concern when faced with the knowledge that someone is in pain, it means that you don't experience "negative utility" in response to other people being in pain. I'm suggesting the fact that you negatively value people to be in pain is inextricably linked to the emotions you feel when people are in pain. I'm suggesting that If you remove concern (as occurs in real-world sociopathy) you won't have any intrinsic incentive to care about the pain of others anymore.
(Not "you" in particular, but animals in general.)
Basically, when modelling a real world object as an agent, we should consider whatever mechanism causes the neural circuits (or whatever the being is made of) that cause it to take action as indicative of "utility". In humans, the neural pattern "concern" causes us to take action when others suffer, so "concern" is negative utility in response to suffering. (This gets confusing when agents don't act in their interests, but if we want to nitpick about things like that we shouldn't be modelling objects as agents in the first place)
Here's a question: Do you think we have moral responsibilities to AI? Is it immoral to cause a Friendly AI to experience negative utility by fooling it into thinking bad things are happening and then killing it? I think the answer might be yes - since the FAI shares many human values, I think I consider it a person. It makes sense to treat negative utility for the FAI as analogous to human negative affect.
If it's true that negative affect and negative utility are roughly synonymous, it's impossible to make a being that negatively values torture and doesn't feel bad when seeing torture.
But maybe we can work around this...maybe we can get a being which experiences positive affect from preventing torture, rather than negative affect from not preventing torture. Such a being has an incentive to prevent torture, yet doesn't feel concerned when torture happens.
Either way though - if this line of thought makes sense, you can't have a human which is constantly experiencing maximum positive affect, because that human would never have an incentive to act at all.
A rational agent makes decisions by imagining a space of hypothetical universes and picking the one it prefers using its actions. How should I choose my favorite out of these hypothetical universes? It seems to involve simulating the affective states that I would feel in each universe. But this model breaks down if I put my own brain in these universes, because then I will just pick the universe that maximize my own affective states. I've got to treat my brain as a black box. Once you start tinkering with the brain, decision theory goes all funny.
Edit: Affective states don't have to roughly correspond to utility. If you're a human, positive utility is "good". you're a paperclipper, positive utility is "paperclippy". It's just that human utility is affective states.
If you alter the affective states, you will alter behavior (and therefore you alter "utility"). This does not mean that the affective state is the thing which you value - it means that for humans the affective state is the hardware that decides what you value.
(again, not you per se. I should probably get out of the habit of using "you").
I agree with this, in general.
This suggests not only that concern implies negative utility, but that only concern implies negative utility and nothing else (or at least nothing relevant) does. Do you mean to suggest that? If so, I disagree utterly. If not, and you're just restricting the arena of discourse to utility-based-on-concern rather than utility-in-general, then OK... within that restricted context, I agree.
That said, I'm pretty sure you meant the former, and I disagree.
Maybe, but not necessarily. It depends on the specifics of the AI.
Yes, that follows. I think both claims are false.
I agree that in human minds, differential affect motivates action; if we eliminate all variation in affect we eliminate that motive for action, which either requires that we find another motivation for action, or (as you suggest) we eliminate all incentives for action.
Are there other motivations?
Are there situations under which the lack of such incentives is acceptable?
hmm...here's a better way to illustrate what I'm getting at.
Do you like to read stories that have conflict? (yes) Would you enjoy those stories if they didn't illicit emotions for you? (no)
Now imagine you are unable to feel those emotions that the sad story illicits. Do you still feel like reading the story? (no) If not, isn't that one less item on the satisfaction menu? (yes)
(In parenthesis are my answers.)
You can apply this to other stuff. Most of the arts fit nicely. Arts are important to me.
Or imagine that you feel down about some small matter, and your friend comes and makes you feel better. That whole dynamic just seems part of what it means to be human.
Maybe life would be better without negative affect. Certainly, if I were to start never feeling negative affect tomorrow, I wouldn't be bothered (by definition). But that version of me would be so different from the current version. It would disrupt continuity quite a bit..
I guess the acid test would be to go into the postiive-affect-only state temporarily, and then go back to normal. If I still wanted to keep negative affect states after the experience then maybe it wouldn't really be a disruption of continuity at all.
("disrupt continuity" here is short for: this hypothetical future being might be descended from my computations in some way, but it differs from the being that I currently am in such a way that I should now be considered partially if not wholly dead)
Sure, I expect that I'd have very different tastes in stories if my ability to experience emotion were significantly altered, and that there are stories I currently enjoy that I would stop enjoying. And, as you say, this applies to a Iot of things, not just stories.
I also expect that I'd start liking a lot of things I don't currently like.
I mean, I suppose it's possible that I'm currently at the theoretical apex of my ability to enjoy things without disrupting continuity, such that any change in my emotional profile would either disrupt continuity or narrow the range of things I can enjoy... but it doesn't seem terribly likely. I mean, what if I passed that apex point a while back, and I would actually have a wider menu of satisfaction if I increased my ability to be sad?
Heck, what if having enough to eat stripped me of a huge set of potentially satisfying experiences involving starving, or giving up my last mouthful of food so someone I love can have enough to eat? Perhaps we would have done better to live closer to the edge of starvation?
I dunno. This all sounds pretty silly to me. If it's compelling to you, I conclude we're just different in that way.
I think the reason we disagree is that you are only considering first-order preferences, which is understandable because the initial examples i provided were pretty near first order preferences. The other comment articulates my thoughts about why higher order preferences are necessarily affected when you alter emotions.
Aren't your preferences (not first order preferences, but deeper ones) part of your self-identity? Is a version of you which doesn't really feel empathetic pain still you in any meaningful sense? Would such a being care about actual torture? (I'm aware I'm switching tracks here. I'm still attempting to capture my intuition.)
Like preferring that people not suffer, and the feeling of pain at contemplating suffering?
See my reply there, then.
"Affected" is a vague enough word that I suppose I can't deny that my preferences would be affected... but then, my preferences are affected when I stay up late, or drink coffee.
It seems to me that you are equating emotions with preferences, such that altering my emotional profile is equivalent to altering my preferences.
I'm not sure that's justified, as I said there.
But, sure, there are preferences I strongly identify with, such that I would consider a being who didn't share those preferences to be not-me.
And sure, I suppose I can imagine changes to my affect that are sufficiently severe as to effect changes to those preferences, thereby disrupting continuity. I'd prefer not to do that, all things being equal.
But it seems to me you're trying to get from "there exist emotional changes so disruptive that they effectively kill the person I am" to "we shouldn't make emotional changes"... which strikes me as abuot as plausible as "there exist physiological changes so disruptive that they effectively kill the person I am" to "we shouldn't make physiological changes."
There is none, and the idea that it's at all a Left-Right issue is baffling. I personally don't like the idea on aesthetic principles but it's not the result of some Reactionist policy statement.
People being happy prosperous and free is the goal of Reaction; why would anyone bother with a philosophy which promised sadness poverty and slavery? The difference is entirely in the question of what sorts of conditions in the real world will lead to a good society, and that is a simple factual question.