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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - Less Wrong
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G. K. Chesterton, attributed.
Upvoted. I would've preferred the following version:
Might someone offer an explanation of this to me?
On its own I can think of several things that these words might be uttered in order to express. A little search turns up a more extended form, with a claimed source:
Said to be by G.K. Chesterton in the New York Times Magazine of February 11, 1923, which appears to be a real thing, but one which is not online. According to this version, he is jibing at progressivism, the adulation of the latest thing because it is newer than yesterday's latest thing.
ETA: Chesterton uses the same analogy, in rather more words, here.
Note that this accentuates the relevance of a detail that might be skipped over in the original quote- that Thursday comes after Wednesday. That is, this may be intended as a dismissal of the 'all change is progress' position or the 'traditions are bad because they are traditions' position.
Not to mention the people who think accusing their opponents of being "on the wrong side of history" constitutes an argument.
So you are not going to argue that history has shown that socialism has failed?
That's using history as evidence. What I was complaining about is closer to the people who declare that all opponents of a change that they plan to implement (or at best have only implemented at most several decades ago) are "on the wrong side of history".
I think you may not be interpreting the phrase "the wrong side of history" as people who say it mean it.
There a classic saying that "
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Max Planck
Effectively there's a position that's obviously correct but there are also people who are just too hidebound and change averse to recognize it and progress can't be made until they die off. But progress will be made because the position is correct. When you tell someone they are on the wrong side of history you are reminding them they are behaving like one of the old men that Plank mentions. Put another way, what it's saying is "if you look at people who don't come from the past and don't have large status quo bias you will notice a trend".
Is this falsifiable?
Sure, just step back in time.
A bit less than two millenia ago one could have said "Effectively there's a position -- that Jesus gifted eternal life to humanity -- that's obviously correct but there are also people who are just too hidebound and change averse to recognize it and progress can't be made until they die off. But progress will be made because the position is correct."
I was actually thinking of eugenics, which was once a progressivist "obvious correct thing where we just need to wait until these luddites die off until everything will be great" thing, until it wasn't. Incidentally a counterexample to "Cthulhu always swims left" too.
It's a case where "correct", "right side of history" and "progress" dissociate from each other.
I think you could make a case for totalitarianism, too. During the interwar years, not only old-school aristocracy but also market democracy were in some sense seen as being doomed by history; fascism got a lot of its punch from being thought of as a viable alternative to state communism when the dominant ideologies of the pre-WWI scene were temporarily discredited. Now, of course, we tend to see fascism as right-wing, but I get the sense that that mostly has to do with the mainstream left's adoption of civil rights causes in the postwar era; at the time, it would have been seen (at least by its adherents) as a more syncretic position.
I don't think you can call WWII an unambiguous win for market democracy, but I do think that it ended up looking a lot more viable in 1946 than it did in, say, 1933.
Interestingly, if you press the people making that claim for what they mean by "left", their answer boils down to "whatever is in Cthulhu's forward cone".
For a more modern example, wouldn't that have been said for marijuana a few decades ago?
Everyone expected that once the older people who opposed marijuana died off and the hippies grew into positions of power, everyone would want it to be legal. That didn't work out. (The support for legalization has gone up recently, but not because of this.)
Was the forceful kind ever an obviously correct/leftist position? To my mind non-violent eugenics is still obviously the correct thing where we just need to wait until the luddites die off - it's just the association with the Nazis has given ludditery a big (but ultimately temporary) boost.
I suspect it is falsifiable. I might unpack it as the following sub claims
1 Degree of status quo bias is positively correlated to time spent in a particular status quo (my gut tells me there should be a causal link, but I bet correlation is all you could find in studies)
2 On issue X, belief that X[past] is the correct way to do X is correlated with time spent living in an X[past] regime.
2.5 Possibly a corollary to the above, but maybe a separate claim: among people who you would expect to have the least status quo bias position X[other] is favored at much higher rates than among the general population
For most issues 2 and 2.5 can probably be checked with good polling data. Point 1 is the kind of thing its possible to do studies on, so I think its in principle falsifiable, though I don’t know if such studies have actually been done.
2) is also what you would expect to see if X[past] was indeed better than X[other].
2.5) Not having status quo bias isn't equivalent to being unbiased. A large number of the people that are least likely to have status quo bias are going to be at the other end of the spectrum - chronic contrarians.
Note that which X is better may depend on circumstances (e.g. technological level).
In physics, yes. In history / political science, no.
"Slavery is wrong" isn't obviously correct?
There is obviously no one here who will disagree with it. But it is still a moral judgment, not a matter of fact.
Mencius Moldbug does argue that all moral changes after a certain point in time should be rolled back. That timeframe does include the abolition of slavery.
I don't know whether there at the moment someone on LW willing to make the argument for slavery explicitly but you might find people who do have Moldbug's position.
The last census shows a bunch of neoreactionaries.
A former poster here (known elsewhere on the net as "James A. Donald") does disagree with it. He believes that slavery is the rightful state for many people. And for what it's worth, he also believes that moral judgements are matters of fact, in the strong sense of ethical naturalism.
I find this comment particularly ironic given your chosen username.
"War is wrong" isn't obviously correct?
Considering it was the norm for several thousand years of history and many philosophers either came out in favor of it or were silent ... no, it's not obviously correct.
In which meaning do you use the word "correct"?
In politics, no position is obviously correct. Claiming that one's own position is obviously correct or that history is on our side is just a way of browbeating others instead of actually making a case.
Claiming that the opponents of some newly viral idea are "on the wrong side of history" is like claiming that Klingon is the language of the future based on the growth rate when the number of speakers has actually gone from zero to a few hundred.
No -- you are telling them. To remind someone of a thing is to tell them what they already know. To talk of "reminding" in this context is to presume that they already know that they are wrong but won't admit it, and is just another way of speaking in bad faith to avoid actually making a case.
One's person status quo bias is another person's Chesterton fence. The quote from which this comment tree branches is from Chesterton.
I strongly agree. It's possible that history has a side, but we can hardly know what it is in advance.
I don't think you agree. I think Eugine has a problem with the idea that just because an idea wins in history doesn't mean that's it's a good idea.
Marx replaced what Hegel called God with history. Marx idea that you don't need a God to tell you what's morally right, history will tell you. Neoreactionaries don't like that sentiment that history decides what's morally right.
There are (at least) two things wrong with "the right side of history". One is that we can't know that history has a side, or what side it might be because a tremendous amount of history hasn't happened yet, and the other error is that history might prefer worse outcomes in some sense.
I find the first sort of error so annoying that I normally don't even see the second.
My impression is that Eugene is annoyed by both sorts of error, but I hope he'll say where he stands on this.
There's a third thing wrong with it: generally, people use the phrase in order to praise one side of some historical dispute (and implicitly condemn the other) by attributing to them (in part or in whole) some historical change that is deemed beneficial by the person doing the praising. The problem with this is that usually when you go back and look at the actual goals of the groups being praised, they usually end up bearing very little relation to the changes that the praiser is trying to associate them with, if not being completely antithetical. Herbert Butterfield (who I posted about above) initially noticed this in the tendency of people to try to attribute modern notions of religious toleration to the Protestant reformation, when in fact Martin Luthor wrote songs about murdering Jews, and lobbied the local princes to violently surpress rival Protestant sects.
What's the precise sense of "attribute" in that claim? It's not obviously implausible to claim that the more groups are competing with other, the less likely it is that any one can become totally dominant, and so the more likely it is that most of them will eventually see mutual toleration as preferable to unwinnable conflict. This doesn't have to be an intended effect of the new sects to end up being an actual effect.
I hadn't even thought of the first objection, possibly because I stopped considering "what side history is on" a useful concept after noticing the second one.
I am not a neoreactionary and I think the sentiment that history decides what's morally right is a remarkably silly idea.
You have to compare it to the alternatives. Do you think it's more or less silly than the idea that there a God in the sky judging what's right or wrong?
Marx basically had the idea that you don't need God for an absolute moral system when you can pin it all on history with supposedly moves in a certain direction. You observe how history moves. Then you extrapolate. You look at the limit of that function and that limit is the perfect morality. It's what someone who got a rough idea of calculus does, but who doesn't fully understand the assumptions that go into the process.
In the US where Marx didn't have much influence as in Europe there are still a bunch of people who believe in young earth creationism. On a scale of silliness that's much worse.
Today the postmodernists rule liberal thought but there are still relicts of marxist ideas. Part of what being modern was about is having an absolute moral system. Whether or not those people are silly is also open for debate.
Sure. Let's compare it to the alternative the morality is partially biologically hardwired and partially culturally determined. By comparison the idea that "history decides what's morally right" is silly.
Yep, he had this idea. That doesn't make it a right idea. Marx had lots of ideas which didn't turn out well.
Oh, so -- keeping in mind we're on LW -- the universe tiled with paperclips might turn out to be the perfect morality? X-D
And remind me, how well does extrapolation of history work?
Do you, by any chance, believe there is a causal connection between these two observations that you jammed into a single sentence?
I think they're both quite silly. Also, the fact that many people believe in God as a source of morality, is itself a reason why history (i.e. the actions of those people) is a bad moral guide.
Surely most pre-modern philosophers also had absolute moral systems?
In general, neoreactionaries seem to have cribbed this position from Herbert Butterfield's critique of what he called the "Whig Interpretation of History". Butterfield was not himself a neoreactionary, and infact warned against the trap that many neoreactionaries fall into: that of thinking that just because Whig histories are invalid, that this somehow makes Tory histories valid.
I'm very far from being a reactionary or neoreactionary, but I also don't put much moral weight on history - that is, on what most other people come to believe.
For one thing, believing that would mean every moral reformer who predicts for themselves only a small chance of reforming society, should conclude that they are wrong about morals.
Speaking of which, let's see what history has to say about Marx. It would appear that the Marxist nations lost to a semi-religious nation. Thus apparently history has judged that the idea that history will tell you what is right to be wrong.
If you're on the winning or ascending side, you have more arguments in your favour..at this point in history,where democracy and it's twin, rational argument, reign. That doesn't add up to being right because epistemology, ie styles of persuasion, have varied . To know the right epistemology,you need...epistemology. That's why philosophy difficult.
Meaning: You can't spot a trajectory in while you're half way along it?
Meaning: You can,but it doesn't mean anything epistemologicaly?
Considering how many centuries it took humanity to get from its first curiosity about how things work to predicting the trajectory of a falling rock (the irony of your handle piles higher and higher), predicting trajectories in history is a fool's task. How many predicted the Internet? How many predicted the end of the Soviet Union? How many can predict developments in Ukraine?
"History is on our side" is not an argument, but a cudgel.
Yep. It's nothing but a minor variation on "God is on our side!" X-D
Don't use it then. :-)
Arguing about preferences (=opinions, =values) is pretty pointless.