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Multiheaded comments on Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (210)
Oh man. Sorry, but this is getting to me. I expressed frustration about perceived evasiveness, and then you frustrate me further by avoiding to mention what I've explicitly listed above!
I've said a million times: in theory I'm ok with absolute decision-making power concentrated in one ruler's hands, a succession mechanism can probably be figured out, etc, etc. When I'm talking about egalitarianism, I'm not specifically concerned with the interactions between a monarch and subjects!
Instead, I'd like to repeat:
(let's drop the issue of censorship for a moment. I'm assuming you're against it and, like Moldbug, want "free speech" that simply can't change anything power-wise due to the ruler(s)' monopoly on force and weapons.)
Just give me a plain answer of some sort: what do you want power structures within a family and in the workplace to look like? Along which Schelling points should limits be placed on a father, a boss? A child, a mother, an employee, a customer, a partner? Ought there be universal limits at all, in your opinion? I think there damn well ought to be, and they should at least act as a rubber band on disproportionate personal power!
I shared a lot of my stance on patriarchy and other kinds of institutionalized inequality present in traditional society. I didn't think I was being evasive. I mean you do realize that lots of readers here can't imagine an argument for patriarchy or feudalism at all right? But I can see why it seemed that way to you since we discussed a lot of this material already.
So you where among other things asking me about particular policies and institutions that uphold or purport to uphold say patriarchy or a caste system? Things like the inquisition perhaps? The old conservative question of "instead of what" comes up. Let me quote Roy Campbell on this:
"More people have been imprisoned for Liberty, humiliated and tortured for Equality, and slaughtered for Fraternity in this century, than for any less hypocritical motives, during the Middle Ages."
He does not seem to be obviously wrong. Its incredible how often this happens when you try and actually read let alone take seriously social commentary written decades or centuries ago.
Isn't this something else? Ok no prob I'll answer it.
I want workplace to be more forager and family to be more farmer. Nearly all of us are socialized to accept ridiculous amounts of workplace domination or what seems like workplace domination to our forager brains. We also get surprisingly little economic gain for this. Indeed I sometimes wonder whether us abandoning farmer values everywhere but in the workplace is a direct result of the rising demands of extreme-farmer-like behaviour in the workplace driven by signalling the market has been unable to correct (or has perhaps inflated?). The psychological toll was simply too large so we "loosed up" elsewhere to keep up with the workplace with bad results for our personal lives and mixed results for measured GDP.
In farmer family life children are treated as small adults with a unique duty to obey and eventually care for their parents. The parents have a responsibility to help their children fit in socially in their community (help them find a mate, an economic niche, make sure to maintain good relations with neighbours and relatives). The father holds greater formal power, while the wife holds great informal power. For neurotypical humans in farmer culture this is an arrangement that should in theory play to the psychological "feel good" triggers and talents of both. It also enables them to pair bond (preventing abandonment). It is a remarkably functional and stable institution considering it has had probably had merely 10 or 20 thousand years to form!
To give an example of dead legal Schelling points related to this, I think child custody should by default fall to the father.
This is an industrial age phenomenon caused by industrial economies of scale.
I agree. It has impressive productivity gains in say 19th century factory work, but I think its gains are much smaller than usually assumed in say a white collar setting. I think the cost to the well-being of the workers might now that we in the West don't starve any more outweigh the productivity gains. A good utilitarian counterargument can be made that we need every little bit of efficiency until we say cure aging or develop FAI.
Heck, I'm not convinced the gains in the white collar setting outweigh the loses due to the resulting signaling games. Especially now that routine secretarial tasks can be done automatically.
This is surprisingly Marxist-flavored analysis from Eugine_Nier. Not that the post is wrong.
Sorry, of course you're not evasive. We have a communication and inferential distance problem, I'd say.
Hehehehehehe!... has it never occured to you that - the "workplace" as such being an industrial-age institution - the domination in it that you so dislike (and quite rightly!) might be the institutional descendant of earlier family-like, harshly hierarchical structures? Imagine the power that a master held over an apprentice in a medieval guild, or the domestic slaves of Ancient Greece.
Our definitions of patriarchy seem to be world apart. It feels to me as if the examples you cautiously list - "the father holds greater formal power"-with-caveats, or "child custody" - are, frankly, local and minor matters compared to the really systemic things!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy#Psychoanalytic_theories
That's the big, scary shit to me. (Before anyone thinks about it, my father is just fine, lol! But... you've read e.g. Kafka, right?)
Some related feminist blah-blah, please take a look:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2011/05/05/my-evolving-definition-of-%E2%80%9Cpatriarchy%E2%80%9D-noh/
Also:
Replace "The parents" with "The Great All-Benevolent Church", or "The state social services", and you'd be alarmed to say the least. Of course well-intentioned help and guidance are very nice... but who sets the guidelines for it, and how is the information about children's extrapolated volition communicated in your society? In today's families - humans being humans and all power corrupting most of them - we obviously see parents' convenience and unexamined prejudgices advertised as "for the children's own good". Would there be less of that in your farmer society, or more?
P.S.: how "allowed" should, say, experiments with polyamory be? Socially, economically, legally?
The thing about family-like hierarchical structures is that they fail badly when applied to groups larger than families.
Well duh. Decaying institutional wisdom, the workplace is a hastily assembled modern construct from sawed up bits of older institutions banged together. If you set up a new institution the traditionalists will point out that of course it will suck. "New institution" also includes trying to use necromancy to resurrect one that has been completely demolished. Traditionalists are fucked because they are like archaeologists looking at preserved DNA in the gut of a mosquito trapped in amber thinking they can now build a working dinosaur out of cardboard cut outs.
We've had this conversation with regards to Christianity and its mainline descendant Progressivism. Best bet seems to be to try and figure out how to build a new institution building institution. Those are also know as religions. See Mormonism's impressive functionality.
You can't have patriarchy without the father having greater formal political and legal power than the rest of the family. The 1950s probably broke down partially because the father had informally greater political and legal power while formally having equal power which fucked shit up.
Remind me again which of these has had millions of years of data to hone their heuristics? Also which of these has the most obvious incentives for good outcomes for children themselves.
Edit: Why is this getting down voted?
That's probably true (especially if we add parallels sentences that say something about "whites" in place of "fathers.")
Given that, why should we return to the world where the father had great influence rather than abandon all the memes and ideas that remain that rely on that power disparity?
Made an argument for the viability of utilitarian pro-patriarchy position earlier, that you might have missed.
Because this egalitarian family does not seem to be working, or, indeed, even existing. The law proclaims equality, but instead of getting equality, gets family breakdown.
Find me a family where they equally share picking up the socks, and you will find a family where they do not share the main bed.
Egalitarian families suffer absolutely total dysfunction. Georgian era right, Victoria era wrong.
Why did this get down voted? The empirical evidence seems to be on his side when looking at most indicator of egalitarian norms. Like say sharing housework equally.
(Did not vote but) I expect it is because the author has a habit of hiding his nuggets of insight in behind the tone and presentation style of an insensitive ass.
And as a less tone-related complaint, sam0345 grossly overgeneralizes. (And if he's the J that I think he is, I suspect he's not much interested in being more nuanced, for much the same reason he's not interested in consensus.)
Because, as someone had already told you once when people got angry at your defense of Roissy's writing, sometimes the tone does tell us more than the denotation! I didn't downvote him originally, but now I'm going to. I'm not some tolerant liberal guy, and I'm absolutely not going to tolerate this.
I don't think the tone of the particular comment is out of the normal LW range on other subjects but naturally its your call as much as mine.
How then could the same facts be stated in a way that has acceptable "tone"?
How could one state in a tone that meets your approval that the socially conservative family structure that was the ideal endorsed by authority from the New Testament to the Georgian era worked and was good for everyone, and the new progressive emancipated family structure started not working in the Victorian era, and has been working less and less for everyone as it has become more and more progressive?
There's a serious cause and effect issue here: we still have a lot of memes from the men-dominant era, but formally that era is gone. What does you data show beyond a failure to relinquish all the memes?
Plus, Sam is not advocating for the next Schelling point in gender relations (relative to where we are), or even the one after that. And he denies that there are multiple Schelling points.
Why is someone who denies the coherent of moral progress defending someone who thinks moral regress has been happening for ~400 years? If moral drift is all there is, moral regress is no more coherent that moral progress.
Defending someone? I don't recalling being in combat recently. I thought I was commenting on an argument not the author.
Arguments for moral progress and moral regress aren't symetrical. If you have moral drift then naturally you will also have moral regress from the point of view of anyone who sticks to the older values.
Seriously, WTF? The lesson of "Arguments aren't soldiers" is not that meta-ethical or object-level moral debates shouldn't happen. It's that you shouldn't back an argument just because you agree with the results.
If politics is the mindkiller means what you say, then you are a significant and substantial violator.
I don't think that this is the norm, and such an interpretation is very silly on a site that wants to discuss moral values. But deploying any version of the norms to criticize people attacking any particular position is those norms losing purpose.
"From the point of view" elides the central issue. Either there are moral facts or there aren't. If there are not moral facts, moral progress and regress are not well defined concepts. If there are moral facts, the concepts are well defined - although if one believes in conflicts in moral facts, then the concepts are much less impressive.
It's very clear that Sam is a moral realist, sub-type value monist. For purposes of this discussion, I'm an anti-realist, sub-type error theorist. I thought you were an anti-realist, but your response here suggests you are a moral realist, sub-type value pluralist. If you are a value monist, then I don't see how you advance your object level values by defending Sam's different values.
This is naturally the default explanation that our society uses for such results, it seems plausible but why are we so quick and so confident to jump to it as the explanation? Do I even need to point out that other explanations seem just as plausible?
For example the model of attraction build by the PUA community predicts this result. Also basic economics suggests that if the partners specialize in task they are more productive, maybe we aren't seeing traditional marriage roles validated as much as economics. And why don't more traditional couples suffer more from residual patriarchal memes? Shouldn't the people in those relationship have even more of them than the society at large? Based on the evidence we are just as justified saying that they are happier because they have more patriarchal memes than the norm.
Wait am I just getting down voted for arguing for patriarchy as plausibly not evil? People not wearing their rationalist hats and voting based on the bottom line they wrote before thinking about the arguments they are evaluating is lame. Really lame.
I find it hilarious I didn't have this problem when doing devil's advocacy for infanticide or slavery.. but traditional marriage roles? Wowjustwowhowcanheargueforthat! Ewww! That's like something an inbred redneck would say. Onward social justice, lets end the war on women!
Why are we quick to blame the predecessor? Trick question?
Well, firstly, there are all the fully general Burkean arguments. Not sure if those Burkean arguments can't likewise apply to the more established aspects of the "modern" family, though - it often fails, but it works even more often. E.g. traditionalists complain - loudly - both about single motherhood and two working parents... yet the second innovation doesn't seem to directly wreck anything.
I think Konkvistador's point was that the disconnect between formal and informal rules meant that some change was going to happen. At that point, I'm not sure that Burkean arguments tells us anything about which way to jump.
But it's possible that I'm misinterpreting Burkean reasoning, which I've always understood as saying "Don't court change for its own sake."
Okay, I confess: we have so little honest, trusted, hands-on information about old institutions, I just snap to assuming the worst about them even after adjusting for less decay.
OK, what if "the rest of the family" is somehow weak/timid/socially clueless/foreign/under-networked/from a disliked minority/whatever, and can't bring informal/"soft" power to bear in a dispute with the father? Seen lots and lots of times in literature! Works with the wicked stepmother and the spineless father, too. I fear some kind of Stepford Wives shit, but replicated with Singaporean efficiency!
Obvious counterpoint. Unless it's a TDT-using family (and we don't see much practical TDT used in real life... besides the evolved pseudo-TDT of religious/Universalist ethics, that is), every family has incentives to have its children compete and beat other children in zero-sum games. A big church or a state have incentives to discourage zero-sum games for all children, and promote cooperation instead.
And that does happen in practice, I think: most everyone who lived in the USSR would agree that its brainwashing of children was benign in that particular area - teaching cooperation and suppressing zero-sum games. That was only the official intent, of course; policies to that intent might have been as inefficient as everything Soviet.
I don't think so.
Compare East Germans with West Germans. Started off the same race and same culture, yet socialism made them subhuman. Germany has all the problems in assimilating East Germans that a conservative would plausibly attribute to an inferior race with inherently inferior genetics, except that in this case the problems are obviously 100% caused by recent environmental differences.
Socialism did not make them good cooperators, it made them layabouts and criminals.
And, come to think of it, that is a good parallel to the social decay we have seen following state attempts to impose egalitarianism on the family.
Wait, what? So you're OK with the hierarchy of a medieval guild or an Ancient Greek well-off household (meaning a household with 1-2 domestic slaves)? Because I'm categorically not. Those are basically examples of what power structures I'd like to avoid as much as the modern workplace!
How much do you know about medieval guilds? They are totally 13th century safety nets and trade unions.
Also your guild's rules are controlled by a council of people who have spent the largest fraction of their life mastering your trade.
You're an apprentice, but dad sold (contracted) you to a guy who doesn't like you for some reason? Good luck ever getting his daughter's hand to inherit his shit - hell, after you learn the trade, he might even fail you all the time at the (expensive and demanding) test of craftsmanship, and you'll either be his bitch for life, or run away and live in poverty because of your debt and lack of recognition. Hell, God help you if you run away at all! (And, while you're still a teenager, hope you enjoy how fists/kicks/belts feel, because you might be getting plenty of those.)
Can hardly talk about industry-related innovations. Good at rationality and optimizing production? Either make it all your trade secret as a master, in the privacy of your own workshop, or kiss your ass goodbye.
Do I even need to bring up comparably bad situations created by modern institutions? I mean we even have ones that are perfectly analogous. coughcrushingstudentdebtcough
The question is what results a institution typically produces and what would exist in their stead. Take a pro and con view of the guild and its various replacements today, subtract better technology increasing living standards, you may be surprised by the results.
Quite so. I am fond of pointing out that an eighteen year old girl cannot commit herself to always be sexually available to one man and never to any other, in return for a promise of undying love and guaranteed life long support for her and her children, but can commit herself a gigantic debt that can never be expunged by bankruptcy in return for a credential of uncertain, and frequently negative, value.
Why not go one step further with the debt system, and allow people to pledge themselves into debt slavery? That would remove the feckless from circulation, and ensure that they had responsible supervision.
The supposition is that if someone goes into debt for a post graduate degree in English literature or a master of fine arts in advanced basket weaving, they are making a responsible decision, so should be allowed freedom of contract, but if someone goes into debt for food and stuff, they are making an irresponsible decision, so should not be allowed freedom of contract.
Seems to me the reverse supposition is wiser - that it is more desirable to allow the stupid to voluntarily choose to restrict their future freedom of action than it is to allow the smart. And I am also inclined to doubt that those who go into debt for a postgraduate degree in English literature are the cognitive elite.
I agree. We have lost the right to marry as Sister Y says.
Can the end of the guild system and technological progress be untangled like that? My limited understanding was that the guilds were major opponents of certain kinds of technological progress.
Yep, I would've mentioned it, but here, in our rather scholastic debate, I'm assuming the least convenient possible world for my values - one where technical progress either naturally forms a positive feedback loop with right-wing tyranny/oppression/whatever, or simply moves at a pre-industrial speed. Otherwise I'd just skip ahead & invoke the perspectives of transhumanity, the event horizon, etc.
Soo... the US healthcare industry on steroids?
Every long established functional family that I am aware of, where the couple remained married, the grown up children love and respect their parents, and so on and so forth, is quietly and furtively eighteenth century. Dad is the boss. When the kids were kids, Dad was the head of the family. The family was one person, and that person was Dad. Mum picked up the socks.
So, eighteenth century did it right, and it has all been social decay since Queen Victoria was crowned.
Show me a family where husband and wife fairly share the task of picking up the socks, and I will show you a family where dad sleeps on the couch and Mum's lovers visit every week or so to use the main bed.
It is just not in women's nature to have sex with their equals, so the egalitarian family just does not function. Legal measures to make it egalitarian invariably backfire and fail to have the desired effect. Maybe after some millenia of evolution, women will evolve the capability to have sex with their equals, but right now, does not work.
Thank you. Frankly, I feel that you're being honest with yourself about the kind of tyranny you want, while Konkvistador clings to his rose glasses. I'd slash your tires, but you're a worthy enemy.
Please take note people, I believe that this is the kind of social atmosphere that "neo-reaction" supports, whether its followers start out technocratic/utilitarian or not.