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I have been thinking about politics again, this time from a meta level and considering motivations for positions.
Among my peer group and much of the media, the dominant model seems to be 'anyone who has center-right views is consumed by hate and/or a useful idiot for the evil ones, and anyone who has further right views is a jackbooted fascist'.
Now, given that the views they cannot tolerate are nothing compared to the NRxers, in a way this strikes me as absurd hysteria. But in another way this makes sense (except for the overreaction). I don't think most people really grasp that, for instance, P(women are better at maths than men on average) should be independent of whether one wants it to be true, or whether one hates women. And while LWers probably grasp this in theory, I would doubt that these beliefs and values are actually uncorrelated among LWers, since we are not perfect Baysian reasoners (or, to put it another way, there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path).
So far, this is probably fairly obvious. Its also fairly clear that, unless everyone believes you to be a perfect Bayesian reasoner, it is certainly possible that by holding certain beliefs you are signalling moral stances even though this should be independent.
When I worried that the correlation between testosterone and politics means that political opinions are hopelessly biased by emotions, it was pointed out to me that it could be valid for emotions to affect values if not probability estimates. At the time I accepted this, but now I have largely changed my mind, at least WRT politics on LW.
The reason is that whatever we value, we should hold that the survival of civilisation is a subgoal. (Voluntary human extinction movement excepted).
As an example, there are NRxers who believe that there is a substantial probability that tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civilisation. I don't believe this, but to leave a line of retreat... well, IIRC future civilisation could be between 30 orders of magnitude and infinitely bigger than current civilisation, dependent upon the laws of physics. I put it to you that if
P(tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civiliseation)-P(tolerance of homosexuality will save civiliseation)>10^-30
Then a utilitarian has to be against tolerance of homosexuality, and it doesn't matter whether you hate gays or not, it doesn't matter if you have gay friends or indeed if you are gay. Its a simple (edit: actually, its quite complicated) cost-benefit calculation. (Although, of course this does not mean that campaigning on this points would be a productive use of your time).
If you have a different utility function than 'value all human-equivlanet life-years equally', then I think this argument should still hold with only slight changes. 10^30 is a very big number, after all.
I should emphasise that I'm not saying that this does justify homophobia. For one thing, I think that a general principal of not defecting against people who do not defect against you could arguably help save civilisation. What I am saying is that the issue of whether we should tolerate homosexuality (for instance) should be a matter of probability estimates and values almost all of us hold in common. Whether one actually loves or hates gays is irrelevant.
That different rationalists hold wildly differing opinions on this matter (as with various other political matters), and moreover polarised positions, is bad news for Aumann's agreement theorem and motivated cognition and so forth.
Or perhaps it is a sign that deontological or virtue ethics have advantages? I am aware that what I have written probably sounds shockingly cold and calculating to many people.
EDIT: I am not trying to say that tolerance of homosexuality fails the cost-benefit calculation. I am not trying to pick on left-wing people for saying that their opponents are evil, I used to think that anyone who was against of homosexuality was evil, but then I changed my mind. I realise the right wing also uses 'my political opponents are evil' retoric, but the left tries to frame everything as heroic rebels vs the evil empire, with an almost complete refusal to discuss or consider actual policies, whereas I think the right discusses actual politics more.
And whoever just downvoted every single comment in the thread, you are not helping.
Given the attitude of nearly every previous civilization towards homosexuality (including our own until ~30 years ago) I don't see how you can justify assigning this a value anywhere close to P(tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civiliseation).
So does this count as defecting? What about this?
A large part of my argument is based on my understanding that the Roman empire and Greece and so forth did tolerate homosexuality. AFAIK intolerance of homosexuality in the west started with Christianity.
If you are right that every past civilization was intolerant of homosexuality, then P(tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civiliseation) would obviously have to increase a lot.
Yes and yes.
Did the Romans and Greeks "tolerate homosexuality" in the sense we understand that phrase today? They certainly didn't have gay weddings. And allowing people to have homosexual affairs as long as you marry a woman would not nowadays be thought of as toleration, but as an anti-gay double standard.
I think the Romans and the Greeks did not "tolerate", but rather "accepted and celebrated as a morally and socially fine practice". Not to mention that from a contemporary perspective they were all pedophiles and corrupters of youth, anyways X-D
Not when the "passive" partner was a mature adult man, IIRC.
Sort of, the passive partner had to have lower social status then the active partner. For example, at least in Rome, using slaves as the passive partner was common.
wikipedia seems to think there was sort of gay marriage, in that gay marriage ceremonies were occasionally held but not legally recognised. Dunno exactly how reliable wikipedia is on this.
Actually, if everyone is comfortable with the affairs and practices safe sex, this strikes me as a reasonable compromise.
In fact, anecdotally it seems that most bisexuals have hetrosexual relationships, and very frequently their partners allow them to have homosexual affairs.
Yes, there is some evidence things like this happened during the late Roman Empire (this certainly happened). Of cource, this is hardly encouraging from a gay marrige being pro-civilization point of view.
I know this is a serious conversation, but on a lighter note, this made me laugh:
Anyway, back to gay marriage and the collapse of civiliseation:
I would actually argue that prohibiting gay marrage could have contributed to the collapse of the Roman empire. The reason is that if a Christian government impose their values (including but certainly not limited to banning gay marrage) upon a traditionally pagan population, it could have led to internal conflict. Would you be so eager to lay down your life for Rome if Rome is banning centuries-old traditions like the Olympics which you still value?
Well, homosexuality (although not gay marrige) was much more traditional in the Greek east then in the Roman west (where it had only become acceptable under Greek influince). And yet it was the west that collapsed.
Also, there was a great deal of internal conflict (of the general declares himself Emperor and marches on Rome variety) even before the conversion to Christianity.
Homosexuals are a small proportion of the population. Annoying them would not make them emperor popular, but banning pagan ceremonies would cause far more discontent, because they are a greater proportion of the population.
Coups tend to resolve one way or the other quite quickly, but religious conflicts drag on and are more personal to individual citizens.
The pagan customs were banned in 393. Rome fell in 410.
I'm not saying its the fault of Christianity. But maybe its a 'United we stand, divided we fall' situation?
Suppose this interpretation was correct, what does it say about the current left-wing approach to Christianity?
Also, paganism was never a unified thing, and by the late Roman empire most of the leadership wasn't ethnically Italian (much less Roman).
Thinking about this conversation again, a few things struck me:
1) When I am thinking about the value of "P(tolerance of homosexuality will destroy civiliseation)" I can recognise a state of mind where I have logical reasons to believe something, but I also have strong motivated cognition. And this is a state of mind which often, but not always, leads to making mistakes
2) My defection argument is dubious, given the other various examples of behaviour, such as the links you provided, which also count as defection.
3) By tolerance I generally mean not physically threatening or harassing people. I don't mean, for instance, ranting about 'hetronormitivity'.
Well one problem is that these day SJW's are trying to get away with calling all kinds of things "physically threatening" and "harassing".
So what should I conclude about your attitude towards men from your use of "testosterone" in that sentence?
Well, ideally you would conclude that I was thinking about the digit ratios measured in the LW survey, which collates with testosterone but not estrogen.
Estrogen does affect politics too, and when an experiment proved this and was reported in popular science magazines (scientific american, I think) the feminists lost their minds and demanded that the reporter be fired, despite the fact that both the reporter and the scientists were female.
EDIT: and the article was, in fact, censored.
Are you referring to this article "The Fluctuating Female Vote: Politics, Religion, and the Ovulatory Cycle"? As discussed here?
Yes, I am.
What do you think of Gelman's criticism of the paper as, on scientific grounds, complete tosh? Or as he puts it, after a paragraph of criticisms that amount to that verdict, "the evidence from their paper isn’t as strong as they make it out to be"?
Well, the statistical criticisms they mention seem less damning than the statistical problems of the average psych paper.
This does seem rather large, unless they specifically targeted undecided swing voters. But its far from the only psych paper with unreasonably large effect size.
Basically, this paper probably actually only constitutes weak evidence, like most of psycology. But it sounds good enough to be published.
Incidentally, I have a thesis in mathematical psychology due in in a few days, in which I (among other things) fail to replicate a paper published in Nature, no matter how hard I massage the data.
Talk about faint praise!
It's far from the only psych paper Gelman has slammed either.
Such volumes of faint praise!
The work of Ioannidis and others is well-known, and it's clear that the problems he identifies in medical research apply as much or more to psychology. Statisticians such as Gelman pound on junk papers. And yet people still consider stuff like the present paper (which I haven't read, I'm just going by what Gelman says about it) to be good enough to be published. Why?
Gelman says, and I quote, "...let me emphasize that I’m not saying that their claims (regarding the effects of ovulation) are false. I’m just saying that the evidence from their paper isn’t as strong as they make it out to be." I think he would say this about 90%+ of papers in psych.
Yes. I think he would too. So much the worse for psychology.
Medical research has massive problems of its own, because of the profit motive to fake data.
Well, my cynical side would like to say that it's not in anyone's interests to push for higher standards - rocking the boat will not advance anyone's career.
But maybe we're holding people to unreasonably high standards. Expecting one person to be able to do psychology and neuroscience and stats and computer programming seems like an unreasonable demand, and yet this is what is expected. Is it any wonder that some people who are very good at psychology might screw up the stats?
I had wondered about whether the development of some sort of automated stats program would help. By this, I mean that instead of inputting the data and running a t-test manually, the program determines whether the data is approximately normally distributed, whether taking logs will transform it to a normal distribution, and so forth, before running the appropriate analysis and spitting out a write-up which can be dropped straight into the paper.
It would save a lot of effort and avoid a lot of mistakes. If there is a consensus that certain forms of reporting are better than others, e.g.
Then the program could present the results in an absolutely standard format.
Most papers have multiple authors. If you need to do heavy lifting in stats, bring a statistician on board.
I don't think so. First, I can't imagine it being flexible enough (and if it's too flexible its reason for existence is lost) and second it will just be gamed. People like Gelman think that the reliance on t-tests is a terrible idea, anyway, and I tend to agree with him.
My preference is for a radical suggestion: make papers openly provide their data and their calculations (e.g. as a download). After all, this is supposed to be science, right?
Sounds like the mythical Photoshop "Make Art" button.
Now consider what kind of publication biases incidents like that introduce.
Well, one would hope that journals would continue to publish, but the public understanding of science is inevitably going to suffer.
How about what's actually likely to happen, as opposed to what one would hope would happen.
What is likely to happen is that publication bias increases against non-PC results.
Correct.
You may have heard accusations that conservatives are "anti-science". Most of said "anti-science" behavior is conservatives applying a filter to scientific results attempting to correct for the above bias.
Of course this doesn't give one a licence to simply ignore science that disagrees with one's politics. Perhaps a ratio of two PC papers are as reliable as one non-PC paper? Very difficult to properly calibrate I would think, and of course the reliability varies from field to field.
The problem is that the experiment likely didn't prove it. A single experiment doesn't prove anything. Then the reporter overstate the results with is quite typical for science reporters and people complained.
Yes, it is true that there are massive problems in failure to replicate in psychology, not to mention bad statistics etc. However, a single experiment is still evidence in favour.
Actually, the reporter understated the results, for instance by including this quote from an academic who disgrees:
Thing is, Prof. Carroll is not a neuroscientist. So what gives her the right to tell neuroscientists that they are wrong about neuroscience?
Whether the reporter should be fired is not only about the quality of the experiment.
The journalist in this case.
What criteria would you advocate then?
Yes, obviously she has the legal right to argue about things she has no understanding of, and equally obviously I was not talking about legal rights.
Whether the article clearly communicates the scientific knowledge that exists. Most mainstream media article about science don't.
If the journalist quotes her, that likely means he called her on the phone and ask her for her opinion. If you think he should have asked somebody different then the journalist is at fault.
Is that what she's saying? My charitable reading suggests that Prof. Carroll is saying that either hormones don't affect politics, or else they have an effect for both sexes. Her problem appears to be with the experiment singling out women and their hormones.
As a political scientist, I'm sure she's familiar with the shameful historical record of science being used to justify some rather odious public policies (racism, eugenics, forced sterilization, etc.). I don't think she's as concerned with the actual science as with what people might do with the result, especially if it gets sensationalized.
I think what she's saying is "You wouldn't say that men's hormones affect politics, so why would you say that women's hormones do?"
But what she doesn't realise, because she failed to actually talk to actual neuroscientists, is that most neuroscientists would say that hormones affect both men and women.
The reason why the experiment singled out women probably isn't sexism, its probably because its better career wise to do one paper on women and one on men rather than combining it into one paper, as this gets you twice the number of publications.
Again, I'm trying to see this from a different perspective:
To us, it's an issue of science. We respect science because we understand it. We can read that study and get the gist of what it's saying and what it's not saying. To practitioners of the Dark Arts, however, truth is not an end in itself but merely one more aspect of a debate, to be exploited or circumvented as the situation requires.
In the realm of public debate, science can either be infallible truth or else a complete fabrication (depending on whether it supports your position). Think about it: one study, long since repudiated, fueled the anti-vaccination movement which has been chipping away at decades of progress and may lead to the new outbreaks of diseases we long ago stopped caring about. The proponents may point to that study and say "Aha! Science says vaccines cause autism" while dismissing the mountain of opposing evidence as a conspiracy by Big Pharma.
So what does this have to do with Dr. Carroll's concerns?
This. She fears the study about the effects of men's hormones gets ignored, while the study on women's hormones gets spun, exaggerated, and sensationalized into another iteration of "women are irrational and hysterical." It's a lot harder to do this with one study about people in general than two different studies.
EDIT: The point here is that once a scientific paper gets published, neither the author nor the scientific community get to decide how the research is used or presented.
This describes Dr. Carroll very well.
I broadly agree with what you say, however the dark arts are called dark for a reason.
Ironically, while the counter-argument generally used against this is "Its sexist psudoscience!" there is a perfectly valid explanation which is neither demeaning to women nor dissagreeing with experimental results - simply that hormones affect both men and women's opinions.
Why be so quick to resort to the dark side when there is a perfectly good light-side explanation?
I agree with this completely. I was merely trying to see what kind of mindset would produce Dr. Carroll's reaction and some politics/Dark Arts was the best I could come up with.
Reporters do this all the time. And yet they only get punished for it if the result is politically incorect.
Yes, reporters get away with a lot. That doesn't make it better.
I think you should distinguish between
Not to mention that you sound Pascal-mugged.
Well, any delay to civilisation increases the probability that civilisation dies permanently, due to asteroid impacts or being unable to restart civiliseation because too many fossil fuels and other raw materials have been depleted.
You are quite right about the Pascal's wager nature of what I seem to be saying. To clarify, there are rationalists who's estimates are far higher than 10^-30 - some of them were actually planning how to dig in and keep the spark of civiliseation alive in a remote, well-fortified location for hundreds of years when the barbarians overrun the rest of the world (due to liberalism in general, not just homosexuality). I don't think you would start plans like that unless your prob estimates were a lot higher than 10^-30, because it implies that making those plans is a better use of your time than trying to save us from meteorites/AI/nanowar.
Why shouldn't one want the statement: 'women are better at maths than men on average' to be true? Note, don't confuse the above statement with the statement: 'men are worse then [this fixed level] at maths on average'.
Well, its certainly widely considered that wanting there to be differences between the sexes is wrong, or at least it is if men are better at something. Personally I don't care whether men or women are better at maths, but if most people do, then I suppose they are entitled to their own values.
I'm not sure about that. Near as I can tell their values here are either poorly thought out or insane. Consider the following thought experiment:
Suppose men are on average better at math then women. Suppose you could reduce the male average to the female average by pressing a button, should you?
Well, that both decreases inequality and lowers the average. A better thought experiment would be to ask whether, if you had a button which would affect the next generation of children (so you do not infringe on the rights of people who already exist) to increase math ability in women but decrease it in men, should you use it to bring the averages in line?
Far stranger actually is that some people seem to be strongly attached to the idea that men and women are equally strong on average, even though this is obviously not true.
You can take this further. Would the world be better if everyone was equally good at everything? Seems kinda dull to me.
Well, that would make the universe less organized and in particular make it harder to find the people with the best people in math, so likely retard scientific progress somewhat.
If you want to find the best people in maths, you are far better off testing them, rather than reasoning based on the base rate, unless the inter-group difference is very large.
Huh? 8-/
Well, a system where all the elements are the same has maximal entropy.
Not sure we should be applying thermodynamics to society in this manner - we are not ants - but I can see what he means.
I am quite sure -- this is nonsense on stilts.
By this "reasoning" the fact that all life on Earth replicates via DNA is horrible, twins are an abomination, and industrial mass production is an unmitigated disaster.
To be fair, I would like to see conciousness on non-biological substrates.
The sentence you quote doesn't make a statement about whether one should want it to be true. It makes a statement about "wanting it to be true" being independent from 'being true".
I just want to point out this is more or less what was called conservatism for a long time, before it got more radical. If you look up e.g. Edmund Burke's works, you find precisely the attitude that civilization is worth preserving, yet it is something so fragile, so brittle, radical changes could easily break it. So the basic idea was to argue with the progressivist idea that history has a built-in course, going from less civilized to more civilized, and we will never become less civilized than today, so the only choice is how fast we progress for more, Burke and other early conservatives proposed more of an open-ended view of history where civilization can be easily broken. Or, a cyclical view, like empires raise and fall. Part of the reason why they considered civilization so brittle was that they believed in original sin making it difficult for human minds to resists temptations towards destructive actions, like destructive competition. An atheist version of the same belief would be that human minds did not evolve for the modern environment, the same destructive competitive instincts that worked right back then could ruin stuff today. To quote Burke: "Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
This moderate view characterized conservatism for a long time, for example, National Review's 1957 takedown of Ayn Rand was in this Burkean spirit.
However throughout the 20th century, conservatism has all but disappeared from Europe and and it turned into something quite radical in America. Far more than a civilization-preserving school of ideas, it became something more radical - just look at National Review now and compare it with this 1957 article. I don't really know the details what happened (I guess the religious right awakened, amongst others), but it seems conservatism in its original form have pretty much disappeared from both continents.
Today, this view would be more characterized as moderate e.g. David Brooks seems to be one of the folks who still stick to this civilization-preserval philosophy.
My point is, you probably need to find people who self-identify as moderates and test it on them. e.g. moderatepolitics.reddit.com
What on earth are you talking about? Take a typical left-wing position from ~50 years ago (or heck ~10 years ago). Transport it to today, and it would be considered unacceptably radically right-wing. Hence the reason left-wing polititians constantly have their positions "evolve".
For example, the parent said:
That is, nearly the whole political spectrum from as recently as ~15 years ago is now considered "evil" by 'mainstream' leftists.
Look, policies are the least important part of political identities. Personality, tone, mood, attitude, and so on, people's general disposition are the defining features and in this sense yes the Michele Malkin types today are far, far more radical than the Whitaker Chambers types back then.
It is a huge mistake to focus on policies when understanding political identities. Something entirely personal, such as parenting styles are far, far more predictive. A policy is something that can be debated to pieces. It is far too pragmatic. People can come up with all kinds of clever justifications. But if a person tells me their gut reaction when they see a parent discipline a child with a light slap and I know pretty much everything I need to know about their political disposition and attitude, philosophy, approach to society and life in general, views of human nature and so on, so everything that really drives these things. Or, another example, the gut reaction they have to a hunter boasting with a trophy. This pretty much tells everything.
And in both your examples, what today comes across as the "conservative" reaction was the standard reaction of everybody except parts of the far left ~50 years ago.
Okay, that's true... but you cannot deny the tone changed, became more, how to put it, aggressive or paranoid? Compare Chambers in the article vs. Ann Coulter or Malkin.
That's not a valid comparison. Coulter and Malkin are people whose success is basically measured by how much outrage can they generate, so they generate a lot.
This is pretty much my view on many things relating to progress and danger, but I don't think it's necessarily "conservative". I see the general principle behind chesterton's fence, but I think civilization itself as terrifyingly novel.
So, I'm not gonna place my "every practice this point is probably okay since nothing terrible has happened yet" Chesterton's-Fence anywhere near civilization. If you've gotta put your C-Fence somewhere, I think you should put it in the ancestral environment.
It's all terrifyingly novel, we're rapidly hurtling towards space, we're in the 21st century mesosphere and people who make this argument for "traditional values" keep trying to stick the C-Fence into the 15-20th century stratosphere, whereas they aught to stick in into the paleolithic/neolithic ground because that's the only place we've ever actually been stable as a species. Hunter gatherers did not care about homosexuality to use OPs example, many didn't even have marriage, and one day suddenly we suddenly picked up pen and paper and built a rocket ship and now people want to arbitrarily stick the C-fence at some random point after takeoff which generally corresponds to whatever values were in vogue in the brief interval before they were born.
Citation?
Regarding marriage, obviously there's a lot of variance, but it's a generalization that at least some people who aren't me make, and I know it's at least true for the Mbuti and the Piraha.
Of course, we'd have to first define the practice first. I'd say that marriage in the broadest sense of the word means that there's some sort of extensive activity (whether legal or ritual) which signifies that people who have romantic or sexual relations of some sort are in some way bonded, which remains in effect until death unless actively nullified.
I bet your average hunter-gatherer wouldn't really know what homosexuality is, let alone be against it, since bands are small and it's a minority phenomenon, but as far as I can tell there's plenty of cultures where it isn't taboo.
Given the diversity of cultures and the difficulty of cleanly delineating modern hunter-gatherers from agriculturists, it's not exactly an open-and-shut case where broad generalizations can be made and the anthropologists doing the reporting are a pretty politically leftist bunch, but I think given the information we have to work with my general impression is reasonable.
One of my pet theories is that a huge part of it reduces to gender roles. And if you look at it this way, the difference between a hunter-gatherer and a 19th century farmer (especially if we consider the farmer being on the chaotic American Frontier and not e.g. in the far more orderly German villages) is not very big. He is considered a fighter (defending the family with guns), he does heavy-lifting kind of work, and there is a sense of communal tribalism, "we don't like outsiders much around here". While his wife focuses on reproduction and finger-skill type jobs, like milking cows - roughly equivalent to the ancestral environment.
Let's stick to the homosexuality example. In Ancient Rome, the concept does not exist. Rather they see sexuality as such in dominance / submission lines, and they simply consider the adult citizen man should be the dominant (penetrating party) and everybody else - women, boys, slaves - the penetrated / submissive. This attitude carries actually far into the 20th century, maybe even today. While the "official" definition of homosexuality includes both parties, it seems the generic homophobic instincts are far more focused on submissive behavior not being suitable for men. 90% of homophobic instincts are all about basically men who don't behave dominantly enough being called sissy. It has surprisingly little to do with actual sexual partner choice preferences. In a typical high school ANY sign of weakness, submission, whining etc. gets a boy called a sissy and then some smartass remarks you surely like to suck dick (again understood as being submissive in a sexual context) and shit hits the fan from that on, usually you have to fight to prove you are not sissy and so on.
So, apparently, it is generally a don't-be-a-sissy type of male-dominance machismo that is driving homohobia, and it is only by accident, largely by the classic human biases of thinking by association where it becomes something like not allowing gay marriage - the typical line of association being roughly like: sissy men are yuck -> gay are yuck -> don't "give in to" yuck people. Again - NOT a line of reasoning, but an association, connotation bias at work, things that sound like the same thing treated as the same thing.
Now, ask yourself, the generally sissy-men-are-yuck feeling can't be very ancestral? If you are fighting mammoths, you may be okay with having technically, literally homosexual comrades, but you probably don't want "sissy", "typical gay stereotype" ones. By logical thinking, you can say "gays of the bear subculture would be excellent at fighting mammoths" but again these things don't work by logical thinking but by association biases.
In short, I would say, modern conservative instincts are pretty ancestral (and gender based), my point is more like you are far too optimistic about the sanity waterline, or about on what high level in the cognitive apparatus these things are decided. It is not a System-2 "what is marriage?" kind of thing but closer to a System-1 "sissy men are yuck" kind of thing. It is very primitive. (I am not saying conservatives are unusually primitive: everybody is. You see the same associations amongst liberals: homophobes -> "rednecks" -> low socioeconomic status so their anti-homophobia often being "poor rural working class guys are yuck" "homophoboes or racists are the kind of people who can hardly use a fork to eat and they are yucky" sort of similar instincts).
What is this "gays of the bear subculture" you speak of?
You just have to google "bear subculture" to find out. The first hit is to a Wikipedia article on the subject. If you have done this you do not need to ask and if you have not you do not need to be answered. What is your real question?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlGclIZV5JQ :-DDD
But that entire realm of thinking doesn't even come into play until high scarcity conditions break egalitarianism and patriarchy/hierarchy/private property/agriculture begins. My impression is that pressure towards masculinity varies greatly from culture to culture, and ours (by "ours" I mean most people who participates in the global economy instead of subsistence hunting/gathering/farming) is one in which it is particularly strong.
Height is unimportant in Hazda female mate choice. Practices such as the !kung insulting the meat illustrate active suppression of dominance-seeking instincts. I'd be really surprised if these people value machismo and dominance in the sense you describe.
Now, I'm not one to carelessly opine that these things are cultural constructs. I think there's a fair case that humans are predisposed to one set of behaviors when they find themselves in a precarious, hierarchical, high-scarcity situations, and a second set of behaviors when faced with secure, egalitarian, resource abundant situations.
I think that any situation where individuals compete for dominance, the strongest individuals (which tends to be whoever has the most androgen exposure) tend to rise to the top, and that's when you get strong cultural or selection pressure towards masculinity. Taken to the extreme, this produces gorillas and lions and hyenas. When largely removed, this produces bonobos and all the other animals without marked dimorphism or aggression. I think humans are somewhere in between, and our culture and behavior shifts according to circumstance.
But many hunter gatherers (especially those living in resource abundant areas) didn't compete for dominance in that sense. Competing for dominance is not something humans must do, it's only something that humans are forced into when resources are scarce. And your own example illustrated that while disgust instincts are ancestral, the objects of disgust is a matter of cultural conditioning.
Some hunter-gatherers would strongly disagree To put it harshly, wombs are always scarce resources and it is likely the evolution of human intelligence can be reduced to guys competing for women. (EDSC model). Another excellent resource is http://www.warandgender.com/ (the book), arguing how war and gender mutually create each other, and the root cause is probably competing for women.
(To the people helpfully downvoting the whole thread, they are probably feminists: for example War and Gender is a feminist book. You get exactly the same sort of theories from the better feminist sources, as at the end of the day there is no such thing as different truths, thus the difference largely being the tone of abhorrence vs. grudging acceptance.)
Argumenting with hunter-gatherers is always a bit iffy, though, as current HG cannot be typical HG: there must be a special reason they stayed HG while everybody else moved on, this making them atypical. Perhaps The Yanimamö are a better example than most HG as their special feature seems to be mainly remoteness.
At any rate, womb-competition is pretty much an inescapable fact of huge human brain sizes. It means difficult and dangerous childbirth, and it means long and time-sinky mothering, and it means males having harems is a reproductive advantage when and if they can pull it off.
I admit I don't know the final answer, if there is one. I.e. how to explain the difference between e.g. the Yanomamö and Hazda people for example. Perhaps these instincts for competing for women are culturally suppressed. Perhaps I am wrong and it is not an instinct, although it makes perfect sense in evolutionary logic. Perhaps Hazda type people are more K-selected, i.e. fathers focusing more on fathering than on trying to build harems, fewer offspring, but higher quality. There is probably some mystery to unweil here which was not done yet. Perhaps it is a patriarchy vs. matriarchy thing, perhaps in matrilineal socities K-selected high fathering investment instead of harem-building gives more reproductive advantage.
Also note that this seems like there was such a thing as cultural differences already at the HG level, such as the Yanomamö and Hazda people. To get raw biology, if there is such a thing, we would have to go back even more.
Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don't fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.
My theory about bonobos is that since they live in such remote locations, fewer people have had a chance to study them. Thus the scholarship on them hasn't yet left the "project one's ideals onto the noble savages" phase. Similarly it took Jane Goodall a remarkably long time to realize/admit how her beloved gorillas were actually behaving.
The reason I try to stay close neutral in such issues is that iti is perfectly possible that both sides of the debate project what they like into the data. There are also red-pill / reactionary types who like the idea of a harsh world red in claw and tooth, who like a dark Nietzschean romance of a brutal world, who liked it when Raistlin turned black robe. Maybe you know some of them :-) So while there is "idealism porn" on the left, there is also "dark romance porn" on the right and it is really hard to avoid both biases. My own leanings tend to actually towards the dark romance bias - I always played evil characters in RPG and as a teen I was a huuuge Nietzsche fan, and escaped Atlas Shrugged fandom only because I was too old when I first met it. So I have to be cautious of that. Quite possibly the world is more forgiving and nicer than what I like to think. Plato the philosopher actually impressed me when he argued justice often means efficiency. It was fairly new to me, and far too optimistic compared to what I was used to.
There are a lot of idealists on the right (and "dark romanticists" on the left) as well, they just focus on different ideals.
That's partly the point - the fact that there's variation shows that many of the behaviors people try to justify with "chesterton's fence" aren't particularly stable in the first place. I'd also stress the fact that the yanomami are also slash-and-burn horticulturalists, indicating that they're experiencing enough scarcity to engage in fairly laborious tasks.
Downvoters probably just people who don't want to talk about politics in general, and they probably have a point. I'm a feminist myself, there's no good reason for anyone to shy away from discussing biological underpinnings, it's just that politics in general is toxic.
Chimpanzee males as large groups primarily compete for territory. Adolescent, childless females are free to leave communities and join new ones as they please, but once they start reproducing they have to stay within their chosen group because a novel group's males won't tolerate the infant. Competition for mates occurs among males within a given territory.
With bonobos, territory doesn't matter because food is plentiful everywhere, and any male or female can join any band at any time and everything is completely flexible. If any particular bonobo became aggressive, other bonobos would either avoid them or drive them away, either one of which results in the loss of social bonds and mating opportunities. Which isn't to say there is no mating aggression, just that it's way less frequent and the incentives for aggression are fewer as compared to chimpanzees.
Scarcity is probably the culprit for behavioral differences. Bonobo habitats have much more food than Chimpanzee habitats. If your territory is too small as a chimp, you don't get enough food, so the most dominant, territory-defending individuals and those who successfully ally with them gain advantage. As a bonobo you can pretty much relax on that front.
So as far as evolution goes, I think what "prevents" it is the lack of scarcity. As for what "prevents" it in practice, I think both bonobos and humans have strong dominance heirarchy instincts leftover from ancestors, and we've each evolved strategies to subvert them (bonobos with sex as bonding and stress relief, humans with humor and stronger fairness instincts) but they are still under the surface, ready to arise again when high scarcity calls.
Hm, this sounds like a pretty solid evidence for the food-competition (scarcity) hypothesis. However the evidences for the mating-competition hypothesis are also fairly strong. Not sure if non-primates matter, but animals like deer or reindeer are walking knee deep in food ( grass) and the mating competition, antler fights, is pretty strong. What I find particularly convincing is humans having abnormally large maternal investments (huge baby head -> dangerous birth, slow infant development -> lots of mothering investment) which would suggest one hell of a mating competition. But it could also be used as an evidence of fathering investment and monogamy. I don't really know how to construct at least a thought experiment to split the two without having an influence from culture. After all, if big heads are part of my hypothesis, i.e. intelligence is, intelligence pretty much means something akin to a culture must be there. Culture is probably way older than the archeological evidence for it - just the old versions lacking in artifacts. While lack of evidence is an evidence for lack, probably in case of archeology it is not true - it is a highly inefficient thing. For example, from much more recent history, Gaels were considered to be culturally inferior to Romans because they did not build roads and bridges. Turned out they did, but they made them out of wood, not stone, and that is far harder to find and evidence through archeology.
It just so happens that deficits in emotional processing are usually linked to gambling disorders and in the lab are linked to difficulty in distinguishing good bets from bad bets. I suspect that most decisions are less "probability estimates" and more based on approach/avoid emotions. (And incidentally, political orientation is also linked to differences in approach/avoidance behaviors and differences corresponding brain regions. If you thought the testosterone link were bad wait till you read about the amygdala links).
In short, as far as humanity goes emotion basically is totally inextricable from accurate probability estimates, and differences in emotional processing are probably responsible for the variation in viewpoints that cannot be explained by variations in life experience.
I'm trying and failing to extract your main point out of your post. Is it that you believe that people don't, or shouldn't, have emotional motivations for political beliefs? Or that a good way to check whether a political belief is right or not is to perform utilitarian calculation on the truth or falsity of the belief, and disregard the emotional implications?
Closer to shouldn't have purely emotional motivations - the dominant paradigm for normal left-wing people (as in, not LW) seems to be that political opinions are entirely emotional, and so, for instance, if you see yourself as an empathic person you might be in favour of writing off all debt, and you don't need to bother thinking about the logical ramifications of this. People who disagree with you do not do so because they have considered different lines of reasoning, they are evil.
I'm saying that its possible for politics to be decided by utilitarian calculations, but in practice it probably isn't.
Do you have a reason to consider this, and not the inverse [i.e. P(intolerance of homosexuality will destroy civilization)-P(intolerance of homosexuality will save civilization)>10^-30]?
I don't think this is even a Pascal's mugging as such, just a framing issue.
Well, personally I think:
a very small number>P(intolerance of homosexuality will destroy civilization)>P(intolerance of homosexuality will save civilization)>10^-30
But some people would disagree with me.
I wasn't actually trying to imply that we shouldn't tolerate homosexuality - I hope this was clear, otherwise I need to work on communicating unambiguously. I was trying to make the meta point that right-wing opinions don't have to be powered by hate, but perhaps they often are because people can't separate emotions and logic.
LOL
Has it occurred to you to ask the question whether left-wing opinions have to be powered by hate?
I very rarely hear anyone say that left-wing opinions are powered by hate. Its not a question that comes up. The converse comes up very frequently.
It's not that rare.
Consider accusations of hate against: Israel/Jews; straight cis white men; Christians; America; Freedom; rich people...
Have you actually seen people claiming to hate freedom?
It makes sense if you're talking about some specific understanding of it, e.g. free-market policies or gun rights, but for someone to declare themselves anti-freedom as a concept... Nope, it doesn't map to anything I've ever witnessed.
?
No, I mean people sometimes accuse leftists of holding positions motivated by hate. It's more common for this accusation to be made against right-wing positions (which is what the grandparent was talking about), but I don't think the reverse is all that rare.
Oh. Okay; misinterpreted. I can reasonably imagine someone actually hating all those things except for freedom, because, except for freedom, all of them can be someone's outgroup. But I was thinking, maybe Caue actually encountered the odd one out, and I was wondering how they were like. (Support for slavery, gulags, and totalitarianism? The world is large and people are diverse.)
Hating freedom is pretty easy. Imagine yourself a religious fundamentalist where you know what is right. God pointed out the straight path to you and you should walk it -- any "freedom" is just machinations of Satan/Shaitan/demons/etc. to try to get you off the straight path mandated by God.
Perhaps not that rare, dependent upon where you live and who you mix with. But in my experience, the left tries to frame everything as heroic rebels vs the evil empire, with an almost complete refusal to discuss or consider actual policies.
Oh, that's quite close to my experience as well. Any disagreement about policies is actually a smokescreen - people only oppose leftist policies because they benefit from the status quo, you see, but they will invent anything to avoid admitting that (including, I gather, the entire field of Economics).
Do they not hate the evil empire?
They certainly do hate something, and they believe that the something is an evil empire.
Whether they hate a real evil empire, that is the question which separates left from right.
There is an name for such people...
So, do you think this reflects some intrinsic property of {left|right}-wing opinions or do you think this reflects the attitudes of your social circle?
Probably both. My social circle is very left wing, but when I occasionally read newspapers, the arguments against the right wing seem to be ad hominem "your politicians are evil" while the arguments against the left seem to be "your policies are stupid".
Which of these two stereotypes sounds like its coming from someone who hates his opponent?
The first. The second sounds more condescending than hatred.
Unless you mean do I hate left wing people, in which case the answer is no, I'm just kinda exasperated with the style of debate.
That's my point, i.e., the left sure sounds like it's motivated by hate.
I frequently read that left-wing opinions are powered by hate. Most recently here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417155/wisconsins-shame-i-thought-it-was-home-invasion-david-french
This was clear, yes. No worries!
It is certainly possible that, in the territory, homosexuality is an existential threat. I believe the Westboro Baptists have a model that describes such a case, to name a famous example. A person who believes that the evidence favors such a territory is morally obliged to take anti-gay positions, assuming that they value human life at all. in other words, yes, there's a utilitarian calculation that justifies homophobia in certain conditions.
But if I'm not mistaken, the intersection of 'evidence-based skeptical belief system' and 'believes that homosexuality is an existential threat' is quite small (partially because the former is a smallish group, partially because the latter is rare within that group, partially because most of the models in which homosexuality is an existential threat tend to invoke a wrathful God). But that's an empirical claim, not a political stance.
Since we're asking a political question, rather than exploring the theoretical limits of human belief systems, it's fair to talk about coalitions and social forces. In that domain, to the extent that there are empirical claims being made at all, it's clear that the political influence aligned with and opposed to the gay rights movement is almost entirely a matter of motivated cognition.
To generalize out from the homosexuality example, I think it's trivially true that utilitarian calculations could put you in the position to support or oppose any number of things on the basis of existential threats. I mean, maybe it turns out that we're all doomed unless we systematically exterminate all cephalopods or something. But even if that were true, then the political forces that motivated many people to unite behind the cause of squid-stomping would not resemble a convincing utilitarian argument. So, if you're asking what causes anti-squid hysteria to be a politically relevant force, rather than a rare and somewhat surprising idea that you occasionally find on the fringes of the rationalosphere, then utilitarianism isn't really an explanation.
If you're looking for a reason to think that any given person with otherwise abhorrent politics might, actually, be a decent human- yes, you can get there. But if you're looking for a reason why those politics exist, then this kind of calculation will fall short.
I don't think they do. They believe in a all powerful God. From that perspective thinking of existential threats doesn't make much sense. They mainly oppose homosexuality because they think God wants them to oppose homosexuality.
Maybe the squid need to be stomped on to stop them from morphing into Cthulhu, or other tentacle monsters?
Now, there may be various reasons why people would want to stomp on squid. Some may actually believe that the squid will turn into tentacle monsters, but its also possible that many simply hate squid without knowing why. Some argue that in our evolutionary environment, those tribes who did not stop on squid were more likely to be wiped out by tentacle monsters, and so people evolved to want to stomp on squid. Their hatred of squid serves a purpose, even though they don't know what it is.
Others say that just because this stomping was adaptive back then, doesn't mean it will be adaptive now. With modern technology we can defend ourselves from the tentacle monsters, subdue, harness and domesticate them.
Some disagree, and say that the Deep Ones are not our enemies, and the people that hate squid only do so because the Elder Gods tell them to, and yet they ignore the possibility that the Elder Gods are the real threat.
Yet more people say that this talk of tentacle monsters is silly and people just want to exterminate squid because they think tentacles are disgusting.