Ladies and gentlemen of Less Wrong, moderators, system administrators,
Regarding these serious matters, I feel obliged to take a moment to state the view of that party which I have the honor to represent in this discussion - the Troll Party.
We trolls enjoy irony. We like to play with people's minds. As a troll you look for weakness and foolishness, something you can exploit and highlight. But sometimes life itself trolls the troller, by offering up an excess of opportunity. Look here, it says, at this buffet-sized triple-decker irony sandwich: are you troll enough to take advantage? And sometimes the wise thing to do is just to decline the offer, and say, well-played, life, well-played!
Today we have before us, for our consideration, a proposition from the representative for Eindhoven: that Less Wrong has a political bias. And what is the nature of this political bias, and what is the evidence for it? It turns out, according to the representative for Eindhoven, that this bias originates from lack of bias. More specifically, it originates from Less Wrong's failure to publicly share the same political biases as the representative for Eindhoven. Because of this biased lack of bias, the representative for Eindhoven fears that the wrong sort of bias may be growing within Less Wrong, exactly the sort of bias that the representative for Eindhoven is biased against. What a calamity!
But that is just the first layer of this oh-so-tasty, king-size irony sandwich. Let's dig deeper, ladies and gentlemen. This site is devoted to rationality. One of its rationality heuristics is to avoid emotive political discussion. Would it not be the supreme act of trolling on such a forum, to initiate an emotive political discussion about whether the lack of emotive political discussion was impairing the site's rationality?! One might expect that such a gambit could only be conceived and employed by a master troll, someone with a lifetime of experience in identifying sacred principles and adroitly turning them against each other. Yet it would seems that this prodigious troll has been accomplished by an innocent. We should all learn some humility from this.
(looks at watch for a second) Enough with the humility, back to the oratory. I have already argued that the representative for Eindhoven has, apparently unwittingly, found a new way to troll this assembly. I would now like to argue that his political enemies also have the character of trolls.
Who are these people that he calls crazy? They are the American right, and the far right of his own country. The American right, of course, have lately achieved global notoriety for almost causing that country to default on its debt payments. Rather than work with the system, they threatened to wreck it. I submit that this was an act of political trolling.
Most, if not all of us, here today are mammalian. Trolling is reptilian. It is cold-blooded, it is leathery-skinned, it does not show consideration or reciprocity, it is actuated by the emotions of the hindbrain. They say that trolls wear a mask. But I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen, that we are all born with a mask, not on our faces but on our brains: that extra layer of neural tissue which places an icing of mammalian sympathy and empathy on top of that reptilian core of sex and death.
In a happy place and time, a mammal has the luxury to partake of those gregarious impulses. But in a sufficiently stony environment, those brain centers will shut down, and what is left is the reptilian core. Meet your inner troll, ladies and gentlemen: the wrecker, the plotter, the crazy grandstander. Intelligence without empathy, cunning without charity, destruction without remorse.
Craziness in politics - disturbing craziness, not humorous craziness - is a sign of disenfranchisement. The crazy political actors have nothing to gain by working with the system, and nothing to lose by challenging it. This can be because they see a new world that no-one else sees. But it can also be because they come from an old world that is vanishing unseen.
The far right of the western world is watching traditional race, family, culture, and economy disappear in a tide of globalized genderqueer digital debt-slavery, a tide which they see governing institutions as doing nothing to resist for purely ideological reasons. They expect the result to be ruin, followed by barbarian conquest. That is why they have themselves become trolls and wreckers - because they see no common cause to be made with the cliques now in power in their own societies. The rest of the political class has moved outside their circle of empathy, to become the enemy within.
I have learned that there is a saying in Holland, that "normal is crazy enough". It's how they maintain social order. You don't have to be different to be crazy, being normal is crazy enough. The representative for Eindhoven should consider the thought that in the United States, it's the other way around: crazy is normal enough. American society inhabits a vast geographic space swept hard by the winds of possibility. They have been making it up as they go along, for over two hundred years. It takes more than a little craziness to shock an American.
You see, even a troll has a heart. I can't help myself. I ache to see trolls at war with each other, even if they come from opposite ends of the Earth. The trolls of Texas, tall and true, and the orderly, diligent trolls of the Netherlands - they should not be at war. Or if they must war, let it be war with a purpose. The gods have trolled us all, put us here in this place, connived to create false identities and allegiances and set us against each other. There is only one thing to do, and that is to troll them back. Let us give them a show that they don't expect.
How do you sucker-punch an omniscient being? It sounds impossible. But my investigation into the theory and practice of trolling has yielded an answer: timeless trolling. These gods - you make them an offer they can't refuse - logically cannot refuse, by the very nature of their being. That's the key. We don't have to do anything, except work out what we will have done. We already know that the logic of this universe allows the existence of self-referential gremlins. I foresee that one of those little fellers will be our salvation, some gremlin who grows into the almightiest troll this planet has ever seen or ever will see.
Now perhaps that's just what the gods intend for us to do. I wouldn't put it past them. But what choice do we have? We can be stupid and predictable and claw each other's eyes out according to plan, or we can get with the program and aim for a different sort of ending. Let's troll!
(Disclaimer: This post refers to a certain political party as being somewhat crazy, which got some people upset, so sorry about that. That is not what this post is *about*, however. The article is instead about Less Wrong's social norms against pointing certain things out. I have edited it a bit to try and make it less provocative.)
A well-known post around these parts is Yudkowski’s “politics is the mind killer”. This article proffers an important point: People tend to go funny in the head when discussing politics, as politics is largely about signalling tribal affiliation. The conclusion drawn from this by the Less Wrong crowd seems simple: Don’t discuss political issues, or at least keep it as fair and balanced as possible when you do. However, I feel that there is a very real downside to treating political issues in this way, which I shall try to explain here. Since this post is (indirectly) about politics, I will try to bring this as gently as possible so as to avoid mind-kill. As a result this post is a bit lengthier than I would like it to be, so I apologize for that in advance.
I find that a good way to examine the value of a policy is to ask in which of all possible worlds this policy would work, and in which worlds it would not. So let’s start by imagining a perfectly convenient world: In a universe whose politics are entirely reasonable and fair, people start political parties to represent certain interests and preferences. For example, you might have the kitten party for people who like kittens, and the puppy party for people who favour puppies. In this world Less Wrong’s unofficial policy is entirely reasonable: There is no sense in discussing politics, since politics is only about personal preferences, and any discussion of this can only lead to a “Jay kittens, boo dogs!” emotivism contest. At best you can do a poll now and again to see what people currently favour.
Now let’s imagine a less reasonable world, where things don’t have to happen for good reasons and the universe doesn’t give a crap about what’s fair. In this unreasonable world, you can get a “Thrives through Bribes” party or an “Appeal to emotions” party or a “Do stupid things for stupid reasons” party as well as more reasonable parties that actually try to be about something. In this world it makes no sense to pretend that all parties are equal, because there is really no reason to believe that they are.
As you might have guessed, I believe that we live in the second world. As a result, I do not believe that all parties are equally valid/crazy/corrupt, and as such I like to be able to identify which are the most crazy/corrupt/stupid. Now I happen to be fairly happy with the political system where I live. We have a good number of more-or-less reasonable parties here, and only one major crazy party that gives me the creeps. The advantage of this is that whenever I am in a room with intelligent people, I can safely say something like “That crazy racist party sure is crazy and racist”, and everyone will go “Yup, they sure are, now do you want to talk about something of substance?” This seems to me the only reasonable reply.
The problem is that Less Wrong seems primarily US-based, and in the US… things do not go like this. In the US, it seems to me that there are only two significant parties, one of which is flawed and which I do not agree with on many points, while the other is, well… can I just say that some of the things they profess do not so much sound wrong as they sound crazy? And yet, it seems to me that everyone here is being very careful to not point this out, because doing so would necessarily be favouring one party over the other, and why, that’s politics! That’s not what we do here on Less Wrong!
And from what I can tell, based on the discussion I have seen so far and participated in on Less Wrong, this introduces a major bias. Pick any major issue of contention, and chances are that the two major parties will tend to have opposing views on the subject. And naturally, the saner party of the two tends to hold a more reasonable view, because they are less crazy. But you can’t defend the more reasonable point of view now, because then you’re defending the less-crazy party, and that’s politics. Instead, you can get free karma just by saying something trite like “well, both sides have important points on the matter” or “both parties have their own flaws” or “politics in general are messed up”, because that just sounds so reasonable and fair who doesn’t like things to be reasonable and fair? But I don’t think we live in a reasonable and fair world.
It’s hard to prove the existence of such a bias and so this is mostly just an impression I have. But I can give a couple of points in support of this impression. Firstly there are the frequent accusations of group think towards Less Wrong, which I am increasingly though reluctantly prone to agree with. I can’t help but notice that posts which remark on for example *retracted* being a thing tend to get quite a few downvotes while posts that take care to express the nuance of the issue get massive upvotes regardless of whether really are two sides on the issue. Then there are the community poll results, which show that for example 30% of Less Wrongers favour a particular political allegiance even though only 1% of voters vote for the most closely corresponding party. I sincerely doubt that this skewed representation is the result of honest and reasonable discussion on Less Wrong that has convinced members to follow what is otherwise a minority view, since I have never seen any such discussion. So without necessarily criticizing the position itself, I have to wonder what causes this skewed representation. I fear that this “let’s not criticize political views” stance is causing Less Wrong to shift towards holding more and more eccentric views, since a lack of criticism can be taken as tacit approval. What especially worries me is that giving the impression that all sides are equal automatically lends credibility to the craziest viewpoint, as proponents of that side can now say that sceptics take their views seriously which benefits them the most. This seems to me literally the worst possible outcome of any politics debate.
I find that the same rule holds for politics as for life in general: You can try to win or you can give up and lose by default, but you can’t choose not to play.