"Personal is Political"
I very much think the personal should not be the political. Because such a mentality when adopted by a society results in:
Thus ceteris paribus it makes life in such a society suck more.
Is politicization of the personal inevitable? My model is that there are groups of people with common personal-life interests, such as raising the status of one sub-group or another. Those who can band together to exert coordinated social pressure, win. So unless there is some friction to group formation, politicization seems inevitable.
Note that the nature of the groups that are politically relevant may change (ie the relevant group may be an extended family, an occupation, a religious sect, a social class, etc.)
But in the world we live in, there are groups that are (1) identified by persona characteristics, and (2) oppressed in some sense by the mainstream. If those groups don't conflate the personal and the political, they don't have a workable roadmap to social change.
There is no reason to expect that politics somehow inherently favors the truly oppressed. In reality, groups that are strong have inherent advantages in politicking over groups that are weak. The real oppressed have low status, few allies, and no resources.
Rule of thumb: the group that everyone agrees is the most oppressed is not actually the most oppressed - at least, not any longer. The most oppressed group doesn't have that kind of PR!
I used to have political views like this:
"Due to the diminishing marginal value of money and other factors, I expect greater total and average utility to result from greater wealth equality than is currently found in the United States."
Now I have political non-views like this:
"I expect greater total and average utility (over the next few decades) to result from greater wealth equality than is currently found in the United States, but it looks like the utility of x-risk reduction might trump basically everything else, and I doubt that "good for x-risk reduction" reliably tracks with "good for humans over the next few decades," so until I spend some serious time thinking about what political and economic policies are best for x-risk reduction, I'm not sure I have any reflectively-endorsed political views.
But somehow I never get around to thinking much about which political and economic policies are best for x-risk reduction. I wish somebody else (somebody who knows their shit) would do so.
Sure, there's the obvious stuff like "Engage in differential intellectual progress to reduce x-risk," but I'm not sure what to think about econom...
When dating women, men are (traditionally) expected pick up the check. A naïve MRA might complain that this gives women an advantage, at men’s expense. Yet economic theory tells us that that men would be just bad off if women were expected to pick up the check. How can this be?
Layperson’s explanation: If Congress suddenly mandated that all women pick up the check, men would want to date more. They’d be more eager to ask women out, and improve their value by working out or buying nice clothes. Women would be less eager to accept date requests, knowing that they’d have to foot the bill. They would be less motivated to improve their value by working out or buying nice clothes. In the new dating market, men wouldn’t have to pick up the check, but they’d be dating flabbier women with cheaper clothes. Women would get to date fitter men in nicer clothes, but they’d have to pick up the check. Overall, neither sex is better off.
Economist’s explanation: In the sexual marketplace model, the men-pick-up-the-check norm can be modeled as a tax paid by men. Tax incidence is not affected by which party pays the tax.
This argument can be generalized for any sex/courtship double standard.
Tax incidence is not affected by which party pays the tax.
In a world with no transaction costs, perfect competition and full information, this is correct.
In a world of high transaction costs, market power and information asymmetry, this is not necessarily the case.
Which world does the dating market look more like to you?
The men-pick-up-the-check norm can also be modeled as an opportunity for men to signal in a costly way. An opportunity to signal may be positive or negative or neutral, depending on the game-theoretic details (as well as side effects further removed from the immediate "game"). Removing the opportunity from one group of people and giving it to another may well increase or decrease the aggregate social welfare and/or cause a transfer from one group to another.
ETA: In case it's not clear, “working out or buying nice clothes” are not perfect signaling substitutes for paying for dinner at an expensive restaurant. Someone with good physique might have good genes, a lot of spare time, or just enjoys exercising. Nice cloths can be reused for other dates and hence can't be used to signal interest in a particular person.
My naive internal economist agrees. However, culture matters! I would guess that such a norm, with a persistent minor reminder of who is privileged to have whose company, would subtly shift the norms of which sex is higher-status.
Much depends on the presentation though - is it "payment for (highly-valued) company" or "responsibility for the less capable"?
I would like to have the capability of filtering out the moneydiggers who don't particularly feel attracted to me and are only interested in my money. These are the only people who are less likely to date me if they were going to pay for my dinner.
So would women who don't want to date a weirdo who doesn't conform to social norms (and is probably low status because of it.)
The last thread didn't fare too badly, I think; let's make it a monthly tradition.
I think it is a bad idea.
I expect such a monthly thread to be a net loss as we have reasons to suspect we are already seeing politically tinged fragmentation.
Despite my misgivings, If we already have this thread I may as well indulge in my desire to discus the fascinating and reactionary writings found in the archives of Mencius Moldbug's blog Unqualified Reservations. If you are unsure who this chap is inspect the links from here or perhaps here. I have recently read and found interesting the following:
A general theory of corruption, corruption as the difference between the formal and informal nature and function of an institution.
Be infinitely devoted to your beloved owners. I very much enjoyed the quotations from Lev Navrozov's famous book and have put it on my reading list.
Dante: Politics as Wish an essay by James Burnham. The discussion of the essay by Moldbug in the comments is interesting.
The real meaning of diversity, diversity as a tool towards political power. Commentary on use of language in ideologically uniform politicized societies.
Rotary management: the next big thing, a new theory of management.
A landscape of bewildering contradictions, questions if there are is a need for the theory of good government to be anything but a special case of the theory of building good organizations.
History of Wizards of the Coast as told by the founder, Dave Adkinson. One point that caught my eye is that even though he's an excellent administrator (he shepherded his company through a half a dozen or so major changes), he was eventually pushed out of the business because eventually the only thing which made sense was to sell it to Hasbro. After a while, he lost so much control that they'd squeezed out the only thing he could think of to do with the business.
I'm not worried about him-- he's going to film school, and I expect he's going to do something ...
But I'm sure he could have kept working with Magic: The Gathering, if he'd been willing to take a couple of steps down the ladder. Alternatively, he could have kept in the same position with Magic: The Gathering if he'd been willing to buy a majority of the stock.
His actual desire seems to have been to run Magic: The Gathering exactly as he wanted, but also for other people to supply the capital to enable this. I'd like other people to buy me a pony too, but I don't regard it as punishment when they don't.
Question for Liberals/Leftists and Libertarians:
I'm from the US and of the libertarian persuasion, though not so propertarian as most US libertarians.
Liberals here seem to want to help the poor and less financially fortunate.
But it seems to me that the means selected to help them always tends to be a paternalistic welfare state - more power and control for the government. I think that's just bad market economics and political economics - the regulatory state tends to hamper production and destroy wealth, and the rich are much better able to navigate and ...
I think that one of the main reasons why the US has the complicated welfare state that it does, instead of simple cash transfers, is that unconditional cash transfers to the poor are unpopular among the general public. They make a lot of people feel like they are being taken advantage of. Instead of working like we are, these people are just mooching off of us. The government is taking our hard-earned money, which we deserve, and giving it to people who don't deserve it. That feeling was one of the main motivations behind welfare reform in the 1990s (recall "welfare queens"). When the word "redistribution" does come up in American politics, it's almost always as an accusation by the right against the left (like in response to Barack Obama's "spread the wealth around" comments during the 2008 election).
If you look at the various safety net programs that the US has (alternate sources), they're designed in a way that avoids that impression that they are just giving your money to the undeserving poor. The recipient seems deserving, because the program does some combination of the following:
The problem with being poor is not being able to engage properly with the wealth-generating activities of society, and that happens for a variety of reasons.
Why should every member of a society be wealth generating? Let alone net wealth generating.
To the first approximation people want to do something about poverty because they feel sympathy for people who can't afford various worldly goods, what they however don't realize is that above some very low level (above which starvation and death from exposure aren't factors) their sympathy for the poor is rooted in the poor not being able to afford status markers that if all the poor could afford would cease to be status markers.
I have changed my mind about "Market Monetarism".
Market Monetarism is the idea that the central bank of the country should target a growing path for nominal gross domestic product or nominal wages. The growth rate is to be set at a point just a little higher than the rate of increase of Total Factor Productivity, to avoid deflation.
A few things convinced me that this way of managing the money supply is not a bad one.
There was empirical evidence presented by Evan Soltas, where maintaining a NGDP target in the past few decades would have actually...
Here's a few left-wing, subversive provocations to get you started:
It's the 21st century – why are we working so much? - again, everything by Owen Hatherley is worth reading.
The boring, bourgeois but fairly diligent Mother Jones magazine has a nice report from last year on American companies driving their sl.. employees to greater and greater feats of Productivity. Don't you want to be Productive? No?! What kind of a parasite are you?!
(Observe how the top comment on MoJo and the first comment on the Guardian both mention that crazy bearded German with his ...
80% confidence on the following:
Past economists are simply wrong about human nature. They look at humans in far mode and assume that they would agree to enjoy more leisure and de-escalate materialist status competition. In fact, humans, even wealthy humans, perceive status competition in near-mode as existential struggle. They're willing to work very hard, sacrificing leisure and quality of life, to avoid losing relative status. The fact that we continue to work hard is a fact about human nature not a fact about employee-worker power dynamics per se.
Falsfiable prediction: if a four-day work week were instated, and cultural norms shifted away from work and productivity as the primary domain of status competition, people would redirect the vast majority of their freed-up effort into status-boosting leisure activities, such as exotic travel or conspicuous altruism, much like high-school students diligently doing the "right" extracurriculars.
I'm curious if there are any good ideas on how to improve current political systems? E.g. ways to safeguard against the dark arts, encourage evidence based decisions.
I have exactly one practical idea on how we can help bring about a better alternative to today's Western liberal democracy. See those three logos on the upper right? Click the middle one, and donate :)
(My serious AND precise estimate? "History doesn't work like that." Remember, some rather experienced and high-IQ statesmen got themselves into WW1. Just try to push particular policies that you want, like more welfare or less regulation or education reform or whatever, but keep in mind that the system might always explode in an unexpected manner and in an unexpected point. And, in some places and circumstances, do stuff like killing your family.)
The last thread didn't fare too badly, I think; let's make it a monthly tradition. (Me, I'm more interested in thinking about real-world policies or philosophies, actual and possible, rather than AI design or physics, and I suspect that many fine, non-mind-killed folks reading LW also are - but might be ashamed to admit it!)
Quoth OrphanWilde:
Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.
Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.