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Ishaan comments on The best 15 words - Less Wrong
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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.
By “equitable” I'd mean that we each start out with half of the pie; it doesn't stop being equitable if I like crust and dislike filling and you like filling and dislike crust so we mutually agree to trade my share of filling for your share of crust (i.e. this or a quick-and-dirty informal approximation thereof).
What do you mean by “exceptional”, 20% or 0.1%?
Note also that, given larger IQ variance among men than among women, the Flynn effect means that the fraction of people above a given IQ threshold who are male has decreased with time; technological advances mean that low-IQ labour has become less useful; and anyway IQ overweighs visuospatial intelligence compared to its importance today inflating male scores (and deflating Jewish scores). Fun fact: 59.4% of the people who graduated at my university in 2012 were female.
I suppose there are differences among different parts of the present-day western world with respect to that: if I understand correctly what kind of technology you're talking about, where I come from it's the Catholic right that's opposing it.
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.