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Lumifer comments on Open Thread Feb 29 - March 6, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Sorry for yesterday, I'll try to post a more coherent reply now.
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Once in a while someone accuses Less Wrong of having a specific political bias and being intolerant towards the dissidents. The alleged political bias depends on who made the accusation. For example, neoreactionaries believe that Less Wrong is politically correct and left-wing; they would probably use the word "demotist", which pretty much means anyone who is not a neoreactionary. Meanwhile, RationalWiki (an "Atheism+" website) believes that Less Wrong contains "cringe-inducing discussions of the merits of racism", and the supposedly "non-political" debates in reality promote libertarianism and neoreaction.
Looking at the 2014 survey results, Less Wrong members identify mostly as Social Democratic, Liberal, Libertarian, approximately in equal numbers.
Can this result be interpreted as a unified political bias? I don't know. Maybe yes. Maybe there is an idea of society that most Less Wrong members would approve of -- I imagine something like: universal basic income, universal healthcare, minimal government required to provide security and the basic income, freedom for entrepreneurs, freedom of sexual expression and identity -- while they may disagree on some technical details (such as affirmative action: yes or no) and mostly on which label is most appropriate for this idea. Or maybe I am completely wrong here.
If we map this to the traditional American politics (Democrats vs Republicans), Democrats would obviously win, cca 4:1. But this shouldn't be surprising, considering that Less Wrong is an openly atheist website (Republicans associate with religion) and that half of members are non-American (Republicans associate with American jingoism, which non-Americans have no reason to share). Correcting for these two factors, I think the ratio is pretty much what we should expect.
My conclusion (which anyone is free to disagree with) is that the accusations of political bias more or less express frustration "why don't these people all agree with me? they said they were rational, and rational people are supposed to agree with me! are they suggesting that I am stupid?" (exaggerated for easier comprehension).
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How to debate politics on Less Wrong without getting caught in the affective spirals? Let me quote:
Specifically for neoreaction this means that "neoreaction" is a wrong topic for a debate. (However, "tell me why do you identify as a neoreactionary" can be interesting; probably the most productive LW thread on this topic.) The best approach would be to taboo "neoreaction" (and all other political labels), choose one object-level belief and debate that. Of course this presupposes that someone could compile a list of specific object-level beliefs in simple language without links to the other beliefs (and no, "Cthulhu always swims left" is neither specific nor transparent). Then we could debate the individual beliefs, and perhaps agree on some and disagree on others; and maybe we could find out that some of those beliefs are actually not unique for neoreaction.
(And then there is the issue that people who would disagree with some neoreactionary beliefs would soon find that the karma of their comments written years ago have overnight dropped to -1. Which will require some technical changes in voting mechanism to fix, there is no other way.)
Right. And let me quote from a post (again):
So at issue is democracy. Given this, with respect to that belief, it's easy to see how LW is politically unified. In fact, doubting democracy is pretty much outside of Overton window (that's part of what makes neoreaction interesting).
Not sure how many neoreactionaries actually agree with that definition. But anyway...
So the belief is that societies that (1) accept democracy (2) will inevitably (3) meet their progressivism-caused doom.
(1) We would need a working definition of "democracy". Specifically, what about countries like USSR or Burma or North Korea that nominally have elections, but the winner is reliably known in advance. Do they also count as "democracies" for the purpose of our belief; that is, does even half-assed pretext of democracy inevitably bring the doom? Or do we need people to participate in real elections? What if the elections are real, but most media are in hands of a few rich owners, and most voters believe the media?
I am asking this to avoid rationalizations from hindsight, like: "Singapore seems to be doing pretty well despite being a democracy -- nah, they are a democracy only in name, it's actually People's Action Party ruling since 1959"; "North Korea seems like hell -- well, they do have elections, so this is an example of a democracy that already met its doom".
(2) The word "inevitably" actually doesn't predict any specific outcome, because if the prophesied thing didn't happen, you can always add "...yet". Could it be made a bit more specific? For example, do countries with a lot of democracy meet their doom faster, on average, than countries with only little democracy? (For example, should we expect Switzerland to meet their doom sooner than North Korea?)
I am not a neoreactionary, so you'll have to find somebody else to argue their side -- shouldn't be a problem, since you mentioned that they can't shut up :-P
However I'll explain why I find their ideology interesting. The thing is, in contemporary political discourse in the West democracy became a sacred cow. One could talk about better or worse implementations, point out issues with specific governments or policies, etc. but the notion that democracy is the best and you should always try to have as much of it as possible seems to be sanctified, enshrined, and maybe even embalmed :-)
And that is a bit of a problem. It's a problem mostly because democracy (even in an idealized state) is not perfect and has systemic faults and shortcomings. Discussing those is... difficult because of the sacred-cow status of democracy. Trying to mitigate and ameliorate them is also difficult because that usually involves something other than "moar democracy!" and publicly suggesting it can be less than wise.
Note that debates about the merits of democracy were common in the XVIII and XIX century, but are almost extinct now (again: in the West. Asia is quite different in that respect).
And me, I don't like blinders but I do like sacred-cow steaks :-)
I also find neoreaction interesting, or rather I did while the idea was new for me; later it became rather repetitive. But I do care about this "map reflecting the territory" thing more than I care about things being interesting.
Maybe I fail to appreciate this, living in eastern Europe, having communists and nazis in parliament, hearing "democracy doesn't work", "Jews are controlling everything", "vaccination causes autism" et cetera on a regular basis.
And I guess that in Russia, 90% of what neoreactionaries believe is a mainstream opinion, and you just have to turn on your TV to hear it directly from Putin. So I have a problem empathising with the argument by bravery.
I agree that everything should be open to debate, there should be no dogmas. But there is a difference between saying that, and embracing reversed stupidity. I'd rather know what makes some democracies work and other democracies fail. For example, Switzerland does a few things that neoreactionaries would agree with, despite having more democracy than any other country I know.
The first item in your list is relevant to NRx, but I'm not sure about the rest. Are you implying that from "these people believe in A" you can conclude that "they also must believe in B, C, and D"?
I don't think that is true.
It looks like you have a tendency to put all the people and all the views you dislike into one big bucket and say "They are all the same". That's not a very good idea.
You are not interested in what makes some political systems work and others fail..? :-)
That's why I said 90%. There are also obvious differences: Putin still keeps a democratic facade in Russia, he supports Orthodox Christianity, and ethnic Russians are considered the superior race. As far as I know, NRs would abhor even pretend-democracy, would support religion but not Christianity because that inevitably leads to progressivism; and would support an idea of superior ethnic group but probably only if it includes themselves.
But they could have a nice debate about how Western civilization is weak, decadent, and doomed to failure; how giving rights to homosexuals is obviously stupid; how religion is necessary for a strong society; etc.
You still haven't convinced me that Switzerland is a failure. I also don't know an example of a real country without elections where I would be tempted to move. Shall we discuss fictional evidence?
Depending on which neoreactionary. The neoreactionaries I'm familiar with, admittedly a tiny subset, are pro-traditional, i.e., non-progressive Christianity.
How many real countries do you know without elections, period? I here the UAE is rather nice.
That's part of what I mean by saying that you put everyone you dislike into one big bucket. Let me link again the post I already mentioned. I don't notice it talking about homosexuals or religion, do you? Do you expect the author to broadly agree with Putin?
I do not believe I have tried.