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The best 15 words
People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.
- It doesn't need to cover everything in the book, it's just the best 15 words.
- It doesn't need to be a quote, it's just the best 15 words.
- It doesn't have to be 15 words long, it's just the best "15" words.
- It doesn't have to be precisely true, it's just the best 15 words.
- It doesn't have to be the main 15 words, it just has to be the best 15 words.
- It doesn't have to be the author's 15 words, it just has to be the best 15 words.
- Edit: It shouldn't just be a neat quote--the point of the exercise is to struggle to move from a book down to 15 words.
I'll start in the comments below.
(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)
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Comments (383)
The First 20 Hours (Josh Kaufman):
Practice something for 20 hours, and you'll learn a lot. Don't worry about feeling stupid/clumsy.
would your recommend this book overall?
To be honest, no. There really isn't much more to it than is contained in the sixteen words above, or listening to one of Kaufman's TedX talks.
On Writing Well, by William Zinsser
Every word should do useful work. Avoid cliché. Edit extensively. Don’t worry about people liking it. There is more to write about than you think.
"Don’t worry about people liking it"? This sounds dangerous.
Here is some clarification from Zinsser himself (ibid.):
N.B: These paragraphs are not contiguous in the original text.
That's not helpful. Say I've got an audience who wouldn't like me if they knew me as my inner circle does, who definitely wouldn't be convinced if I wrote as though I were writing for my own. What would Zinsser do? Give up? Write something else? I know that communicating effectively when you don't personally feel what you're saying tends to fail, well yes, it's hard, but that's precisely what I've got to do!
So perhaps the danger you're thinking of is the opportunity cost of spending time writing something that goes nowhere? That's sensible if you're already prone to writing lots of things and need a filter for what not to write.
If you're like me, though, you don't write enough, and thoughts that you might productively pursue with the assistance of a keyboard/screen don't get pursued if you're always thinking about who'd want to read it before writing, or thinking excessively about making it "sound right" instead of just getting the ideas out in a form that is clear to yourself. So the relevant opportunity cost for someone like that is ideas that you don't give expression to or that you fail to discover, perhaps to your surprise, that some people will respond to favorably to your writing.
In this sense, I think the principle is pretty useful, at least for me. If after writing it you think people won't like it, you could publish under a pseudonym, or just move on to writing the next thing.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Without the [view of life from gene perspective] there is no particular reason why an organism should 'care' about its reproductive success and that of its relatives, rather than, for instance, its own longevity
Great subset to have picked! Are there ways to shorten this style-wise or throw out technical vocabulary to make it accessible? Is some part of it less important than others, so that you can throw out ideas as well?
Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick:
Communicate one thing.
Matthieu Ricard, Happiness:
It's better to be happy than to be unhappy. If you're unhappy, you can fix it. Here's how: cultivate love, compassion and mindfulness.
If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
this seems like it belongs in the boring advice repository, but i'll say it anyway:
Smarter than Person X by most metrics ≠ nothing to learn from interacting with Person X
I'd modify the wording of the advice to:
"Strive to have at least one person close to you who exceeds you in your primary domains, (as well as the domains you wish to improve upon)"
Those are not the best 15 words!
Although this is the lesser of two evils. This comment and this are, it seems to me, trying too hard to be the smartest person in the room: technically correct, but only if you ride roughshod over Gricean principles. This is a common failure mode.
(My comment was kind-of tongue-in-cheek. I know what you actually meant.)
If "violating Gricean principles" = willfully misunderstanding what was meant, I wasn't.
The trouble with what ismeant by "your in the wrong room" is that while it can be taken to mean "seek out intellectual superiors" is also means "avoid intellectual inferiors". I meant to contest the latter.
How so? “You're the smartest person in the room” means that you have no intellectual superiors in there. It doesn't mean you have no intellectual inferiors -- that'd be “you're not the dumbest person in the room”.
By that standards, in every room there is someone who shouldn't be there.
By that standard, no one should be in any room.
That's why every room should have a way out.
And right here is the breakdown on why it is ok to gun for your boss's job, because he is gunning for the next room.
But I'm the only one here...
...which prompts that observation that apparently we should all be showering communally and only using toilets that are already occupied.
What book is this?
The "or anything else" files.
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (or works of Quine):
"is false when preceded by its quotation" is false when preceded by its quotation.
I hate you.
Hmm, the whole statement is ' "is false when preceded by its quotation" is false when preceded by its quotation.', and it is not preceded by its quotation.
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
Judea Pearl, Causality:
If two things are correlated, there is causation. Either A causes B, B causes A, they have common cause, or they have a common effect you're conditioning on.
Edit: If two variables are correlated, there is causation. Either A causes B, B causes A, they have common cause, or they have a common effect you're conditioning on.
That's 28 words. Isn't it a bit long? (Still upvoted because the first sentence stands on its own with just 8 words.)
I am confused, that doesn't seem to be true.
Consider a sine wave. It can be observed in a great number of phenomena, from the sound produced by a tuning fork to the plot of temperature in mid-latitudes throughout the year. All measurements which produce something resembling a sine wave are correlated. Remember that correlation (well, at least Pearson's correlation -- I assume that's what is meant here) is invariant to linear transformations so different scale is not a problem.
Correlation isn't a property of a pair of mathematical functions or a pair of physical systems, it's a property of a pair of random variables.
"A and B are correlated" means "Observing A can change your probabilistic beliefs about B".
If you already know that A and B are both sine waves, then neither has any belief-updating power over the others, there's no randomness in the random variables.
(I know that's not 100% precise... someone else please improve.)
In the vast majority of cases involving sine waves, the correlation between A and B is due to the common cause of time. Space is also a common cause of such correlations.
However, if you imagine a sine wave in time and another sine wave in space, they have no correlation until you impose a correlation between space and time (e.g., by using a mapping from x to t). In that case, Armok's comment about a logical rather than physical cause might apply.
I don't understand what does that mean. In which sense can time be thought of as a cause?
I started writing a reply to this comment, but as I was thinking through it I realized that the situation is actually WAY more interesting than I thought and requires a whole post. I've posted it in discussion:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/is7/the_cause_of_time/
Sorry if it's a bit unclear right now, hopefully I'll have time to add some diagrams this weekend.
This is a case of a common cause, in the form of a logical fact rather than a physical one.
I don't understand this. Which logical fact is the common cause? The fact that the measurements are correlated? Doesn't the whole thing collapse into a circle, then?
The fact of the shape of a sine curve.
Only if the frequencies are identical. In that case, follow the improbability and ask how they come to be identical.
http://xkcd.com/882/
Sometimes the cause is you've been looking at too many random data sets.
That doesn't seem to be strictly true. Of all the things that are correlated it would seem that there would be some that have none of the listed causal relationships. It is merely highly probable that one of those is the case.
To the mathematicians, correlation is a statement about random variables, and not the same as empirical correlation (which is a statement about samples, and might be spurious).
Of course the world isn't made of random variables, but only in the same sense that the world isn't made of causal models. They are models, and "correlation" and "causation" are features of the model which don't exist in the real world. In a causal model, correlation implies causation (somewhere).
But then this "true correlation" is unobservable, is it not? Except for trivial cases we can never know what it is and can only rely on estimates, aka empirical correlations.
Well, that makes Pearl's statement an uninteresting tautology. Correlation implies causation because we construct models this way...
Emphasizing random variables sounds pretty frequentist to me, while the source being summarized is bayesian. But, yes, models are made of random variables.
thanks, this is exactly the case. a better objection is, it's not strictly true because things can be some complex net of the above cases, and it doesn't always break down into one of the four, but that doesn't fit in "15" words, and it's less important
edit: also it's possible in rare cases for things to be uncorrelated but causally connected
It's possible to find "spurious" correlations in a limited data sample, if two things just "happen" to happen together often by chance. But I don't think that really counts. Did you have any other scenarios in mind?
When absolute claims are made with exhaustive lists of possibilities then things can "not count" only when excluded explicitly. When dealing with things at the level of precision and rigour that Pearl works at the difference between 'almost true' and 'true' matters. Even with the ('probably' or 'overwhelmingly likely') caveat in place the statement remains valuable. It is still worth including such a parenthetical so as to avoid confusion.
No, the set of all correlations that are not causally related in one of the listed ways seems to fit the criteria "limited" and to whatever extent they can be described as 'spurious' that description would apply to all of them. Admittedly, some of them are 'limited' only by such things as the size of the universe but the larger the sample the higher the improbability.
I would replace 'spurious' with 'misleading'. A correlation just is. There isn't anything 'fake' or 'invalid' about it. The only thing that could be wrong about it is using it to draw an incorrect conclusion.
I have a feeling including a parenthetical like that would invite more confusion than it avoids. "Oh cool, I guess my magical ESP powers are just one of the unlikely cases where I can be correlated with the hidden coin flips without any causal influence."
Because "correlation" is normally taken to mean a systematic effect that can be expected to be predictive of future samples, or something. In this specific case, Pearl probably means something more precise by it (like correlations between nodes in a particular causal model).
I suppose you could accurately clarify the original quote by saying "systematic correlation", which would pin down the idea referred to for people who haven't read the book.
The unqualified version is more compatible with muddled thinking about ESP than the qualified version. Specifically, it outright excludes the possibility "No, you were just lucky" from consideration.
This exception applies in that case.
Doesn't count?!
With enough data from the two correlands, this goes away. I don't know the exact math, but I think there's a way to say the number of variables you're looking at, and the strength of a given correlation, and get a probability that it's really there.
This goes away only in the limit as the sample size goes to infinity.
For a finite sample size (and given a certain set of assumptions) you can establish a range of values within which you believe "true" correlation resides, but this range will never contract to a single point.
To address your correct criticism, how about we modify apophenia's "15" words to:
• If two things are reliably correlated, there is causation. Either A causes B, B causes A, they have common cause, or they have a common effect you're conditioning on.
A 15-word version is possible but awkward:
• Reliable correlation implies causation: one causes the other, or there’s common cause, or common effect.
Potentially a great deal of complexity is smuggled into the word "reliable".
--
Edit: A friend pointed out to me that the above sentences provide unbalanced guidance for intuitions. A more evenly balanced version is:
• Reliable correlation implies causation and unreliable correlation does not.
It goes against the spirit of "15 words" to insist on strict truth. The merit of the quote lies in the fourth clause.
That's the big surprise. The point of boiling it down to "15 words" is to pick which subtlety makes it into the shortest formulation.
I would suggest that it goes against the spirit of Judea Pearl's Causality to say things that are false or misleading.
Do note that I actually support the example, despite the problems. I expect that the surrounding context in Pearl's work more than adequately explains the relevant details. What I would object to is any attempt to suppress discussion of the limitations of such claims---so if it was the case that the "spirit of '15 words'" discourages discussion and clarification then I would reject it as inappropriate on this site.
"15 words" is a secretly a verb rather than a noun. I definitely think discussion and clarification is good, although in this particular thread I'm sad to some people engaging solely in that and missing an opportunity to try out the exercise instead.
As the thread creator you are entitled to specify the way you want the phrase to be used and what sort of replies you want. That said, it seems that the norms that you are attempting to create and enforce for this '15 words' activity don't belong on this site. It seems to amount to provoking and enforcing all the worst of the failures of critical thought that constantly crop up in the "Rationality" Quotes threads. Given as a premise that I hold that belief you could infer that my voting policy must be to downvote:
That isn't what you saw. You saw people engaging in that in addition to engaging with the the exercise. They lost no opportunity, you merely couldn't tolerate the critical engagement that is an integral part of discussion on a rationalist forum.
Note, as I discuss here for this to be true you need to allow mathematical truths (and the laws of physics) to serve as causes.
I think the problem may be what counts as correlated. If I toss two coins and both get heads, that's probably coincidence. If I toss two coins N times and get HH TT HH HH HH TT HH HH HH HH TT HH HH HH HH HH TT HH TT TT HH then there's probably a common cause of some sort.
But real life is littered with things that look sort of correlated, like price of X and price of Y both (a) go up over time and (b) shoot up temporarily when the roads are closed, but are not otherwise correlated, and it's not clear when this should apply (even though I agree it's a good principle).
An alternative version which avoids most of the complaints in replies below:
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it's damn strong evidence!
(Please reply if you remember either the exact wording or the source of that quote).
The Rebel Sell:
The Better Angels of Our Nature:
Causal Decision Theory / consequentialism:
"If your actions have results, you can use actions to choose your favorite result."
I just realized that if you took the movie the secret and took out all the pseudo science BS, then condensed it to one sentence this is what you get.
Saunders Mac Lane, Categories for the Working Mathematician
Is there a way to explain that to a non-mathematician?
He's saying that he made up categories and functors because what he really wanted to study was the idea of natural transformations, and the former notions are needed to define the latter. Or: categories and functors are nice, but natural transformations are the bomb.
Or even a non-category theorist?
Epistemic rationality (as far as I can tell):
"Take every mathematical structure that isn't ruled out by the evidence. Rank them by parsimony."
If after ten minutes you don't know who the sucker is, it's you.
(Common advice which applies mainly to zero-sum competitive situations. I heard it in the context of negotiating with competitors, but I imagine it applies to poker, political strategy, and other things too.)
The Black Swan:
For an example from real life, check out page 9 of this document for a fund my investment advisor wanted me to invest in:
"We got a positive number of pennies almost every day for several years!"
(NB: I'm not making a global judgment about this fund, just about the inherent anti-epistemology of obsessing over day to day "volatility".)
Belongs in Discussion IMO
Can you explain in 15 words what belongs to Main and what to Discussion? :D
Main: topics that are interesting to most LW readers, AND are notably worth reading
Discussion: topics that are interesting to most LW readers, OR are notably worth reading for some readers
Open Thread: everything else
It's not clear to me what category this post should fall under on that basis, but I'd suggest the heuristic that anything posted to Main which retains a positive score after a few days might as well stay there.
Many posts with positive scores are ejected from main.
Could you break down that intuition? Why?
If you think that because it's short, I STRONGLY disagree--value added is not proportional to length.
If you think that because it's an exercise, I disagree, although that's a stronger case. We happen to be doing original research in exercise form, and evidence shows exercises work better than academic articles.
If you think that for some other reason, or something like the above but not quite, I'd love to hear it!
Insufficient value add by the OP. Given that, insufficient expected value add in the comments. (I think that the Textbooks List and Procedural Knowledge Gaps lists belong in Main because the collection of knowledge by commenters is valuable enough, even though the OP is not a huge value add on its own. )
Why? Rationality Quotes threads are in Main too (though I suspect they are here more because of tradition than anything else).
You can read my reply here for a rough sketch of my viewpoint. To be honest, I'm not very interested in this bit of meta and am likely tapping out.
I can understand that intuition, but I'd like to see people err more on the side of putting slightly subpar things on Main, as opposed to erring on the side of putting slightly superpar things on Discussion. Main is underused, and I think metadiscussion about where to categorize things has become a bit too common.
I feel this quote belongs in this thread.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H.L.Mencken
But often it is worth understanding why the clear, simple answer is wrong.
Because it is incompatible with the beliefs of my tribe.
Because it is clear and simple, and therefore unfit to signal my sophistication.
Or because there are some specific technical reasons why it is wrong.
I guess these are the three most frequent reasons, perhaps even in the decreasing order of frequency, why clear and simple answers are wrong.
Because the problem is complex and your clear, simple solutions has at least 3 knock-on effects, one of which will make the original problem worse. And the other 2 will cause new complex problems in 10 years time.
The clear, simple solution to "X is to expensive" is "Declare a cheaper price for X by government fiat."
By the time you have compensated for the knock-on effects, regulated to prevent cheaters, and taxed to pay for costs, the solution is no longer simple.
The third one sounds a lot like “or anything else”.
Because it's actually an answer to a simple problem -- getting my mother out of the burning building is a simpler problem than getting her out of it alive and well, so the clearest. simplest solution to the former is a wrong solution to the latter. (In such an example it is obvious, but in many real-world situations it's easier to lose purposes.)
No, quotes don't belong in this thread, your intuition is wrong. This thread is about something closer to learning how to speak in original quotes.
Oh, I just went meta :-D
Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas
The Bell Curve:
Neat. It would be nice to describe this site in a dozen or so words and put this description on the front page.
How about...
:P
I would be interested to see if other readers could come up with a more eye-catching description/slogan
A community blog with the purpose of refining the practice of rational behavior?
Eliminates human bias, doesn't imply that rationality is an 'art', and proclaims itself teleologically rather than ontologically.
Oops, I missed the fine print :)
That would be great, but it would be more in the keeping of this thread to try and condense some section of this site to a dozen or so words. (Not leaving in everything, of course)
Scott Kim, What is a Puzzle?
http://www.scottkim.com/thinkinggames/whatisapuzzle/
I disagree about #2, incidentally.
It's a puzzle if I'm having fun trying to solve it.
That's interesting! I've had very different experiences:
When I'm trying to solve a puzzle and learn that it had no good answer (i.e. was just nonsense, not even rising to the level of trick question), it's very frustrating. It retroactively makes me unhappy about having spent all that time on it, even though I was enjoying myself at the time.
I certainly agree that being made to treat nonsense as though it were sense is frustrating.
And, sure, if things either have a right answer or are nonsense, then I agree with you, and with Scott Kim.
Nonsense is not a puzzle.
But I'm not sure that's true.
I'm also not sure that replacing "a right answer" with "a good answer" as you just did preserves meaning.
For example, I'm not sure there's a right answer to all puzzling questions about, say, human behavior, or ethics. There are good answers, though, and the questions themselves aren't all nonsense.
I am dubious about any definition of "puzzle" for which the claim "This puzzle is not fun" is tautologically false, regardless of either the speaker or the puzzle in question.
If a puzzle is not fun, it is a chore, a problem or in the worst case, high school math homework.
Good point, probably the title should be "What is a good puzzle?" then.
Jayne's Probability Theory:
There is nothing "subjective" about Bayesian probability.
EDIT: I like badger's suggestion below better than this one.
I'd go with: Probability exists in your mind, not the world, but there still is an "objective" way to calculate it.
I like it. In the spirit of iterative improvement, how about this:
Probabilities are subjective, but the information they represent is not. Use all available information on pain of paradox.
I propose an iteration with "on pain of paradox" truncated.
I'm split on this one. I like it better without "pain of paradox," but it seemed like a third of the book was devoted to pains and paradoxes arising from ignoring information.
Because a direct contradiction of this quote is also true (and also something that the Jaynes would probably agree with) it is perhaps not the best 15 words in his work. The problem is that all the meaning conveyed relies on the reader plugging in suitable meanings for 'subjective' so that it makes sense. The knowledge needed to construct an interpretation of the quote that is correct and insightful gets deducted from the information that is conveyed by the quote.
I do agree that this message and this source are worth quoting. If the excerpt badger quotes does come from Jaynes then it certainly deserves a place. Same message, less ambiguity.
50 shades:
Keep telling the girl that she is smart, beautiful and courageous and that you love her more than anything, and she will indulge your weirdest fantasy.
There's a quote I like from Terry Pratchett's juvenile book "Only You Can Save Mankind" that addresses a mistake that some people with a high IQ make:
"Just because you have a mind like a hammer doesn't mean you should treat everyone else like a nail."
That's 19 words (if you count "doesn't" as 1 word, rather than 2), but perhaps a 15 word version could be:
"Don't manipulate those you can out think, just because you are able to."
or, more abstractly,
"Don't treat people as inconvenient objects, even when you can get away with it."
If you just want to reduce the wordcount of the original without changing its flavor, you could go with "Other people aren't nails just because your mind is a hammer." That said, worrying too much about exact wordcount seems silly.
("The hammer is my mind.")
Why?
Firstly, having a centralised command economy run by the 'bright' people in charge at the centre didn't work out particularly well for the USSR. Even if you are well intentioned and manipulating them in a direction that you think is in their best interests (which, in any case, isn't the situation the dictum was talking about), you're unlikely to manage their affairs better than they would themselves.
Secondly, fooling people can become a habit. And the easiest person to fool is yourself. What do you changes who you are, to some extent.
Thirdly, people often realise they have been manipulated, on some level, even if they can't put words to it, or they realise too late. And it isn't a nice feeling. In utilitarian terms, despite any gain in pleasure you get, it is likely to be a net loss of utility.
Because your prior for "I am manipulating this person because it satisfies my values, rather than my pride" should be very low.
If it isn't, then here's 4 words for you:
"Don't value your pride."
Sorry to keep adding to the "why?" pile but do you mind explaining this one too?
For certain definitions of pride. Confidence is a focus on doing what you are good at, enjoying doing things that you are good at, and not avoiding doing things you are good at around others.
Pride is showing how good you are at things "just because you are able to," as if to prove to yourself what you supposedly already know, namely that you are good at them. If you were confident, you would spend your time being good at things, not demonstrating that you are so.
There might be good reasons to manipulate others. Just proving to yourself that you can is not one of them, if there are stronger outside views on your ability to be found elsewhere (like asking unbiased observers).
The Luminosity Sequence has a lot to say about this, and references known biases people have when assessing their abilities.
Maybe that's just my personal quirk (is it?) but my pride is a good motivator for me to become stronger. If I think I am more able in some area than I actually am, then when evidence for the contrary comes knocking, I try as much as I can to defend the 'truth' I believe in by actually training myself in that area until I match that belief. And since I can't keep my mouth shut and thus I tell and demonstrate everyone how awesome I am when I am not actually that good, there is really no way out but to make myself match what other people think of me. Maybe that's not a very good rationality habit, but I am fully mindful of the process, and if I ever need to know my actual level at expense of that motivational factor, it is no trouble to sit down with a pencil and figure out the truth. It can hurt (because my real level almost always is way less than my expectations of it most of the time), but is probably worth it.
Manipulating people just out of pride and sense of domination was actually the factor that developed my social skills more than anything else. I became more polite, started to watch my appearance, posture and facial expressions (because it's easier to trick those who like me), became better at detecting lies and other people's attempts to manipulate me. Also, I believe, it helped me to avoid conformity (when you see people making dumb mistakes on a regular basis just because you told them something, the belief in their sanity vanishes quickly). And I am safe from losing friends' trust, because I strive to never trick or decieve close people (in a very broad sense) and maintain something close to (but not quite) Radical Honesty policy wtih those whom I value.
Am I walking the wrong path?
Eh, probably not. Heuristically, I shy away from modes of thought that involve intentional self-deception, but that's because I haven't been mindful of myself long enough to know ways I can do this systematically without breaking down. I would also caution against letting small-scale pride translate into larger domains where there is less available evidence for how good you really are. "I am successful" has a much higher chance of becoming a cached self than "I am good at math." The latter is testable with fewer bits of evidence, and the former might cause you to think you don't need to keep trying.
As for other-manipulation, it seems the confidence terminology can apply to social dominance as well. I don't think desiring superior charisma necessitates an actual belief in your awesomeness compared to others, just the belief that you are awesome. The latter to me is more what it feels like to be good at being social, and has the benefit of not entrenching a distance from others or the cached belief that others are useful manipulation targets rather than useful collaborators.
People vary on how they can use internal representations to produce results. It's really hard to use probabilistic distributions on outcomes as sole motivator for behavior, so we do need to cache beliefs in the language of conventional social advice sometimes. The good news is that good people who are non-rationalists are a treasure trove for this sort of insight.
From the Buddha's Kalama Sutra:
Ok here's a stab at it:
the basic goal of ethics is getting everyone to cooperate in a mass mutual prisoner's dilemma
"When you start treating people like people, they become people."
~Paul Vitale
"The person you can most easily fool is yourself. Before all else, avoid doing so."
~Richard Feynman (paraphrased)
"What is your excuse for not following the advice you claim is good for all?" ~paraphrase of link
Hehe...here's a controversial one.
The process and the consequences of fighting oppressive heirarchies are worse the heirarchies themselves - my take on Mencius Moldbug.
I don't really agree. But I've tried pretty hard to wrap my head around his ideology (he's incredibly long winded) and this is what I got from it. If I had to add a second sentence, it would be this:
"Progressive culture seduces intellectual elites and redirects their power to destructive, unreflective, self-righteous reformation."
..."This reformation inevitably strengthens the Progressive ideology and institutions, resulting in an invisible feedback cycle of power".
If there are any actual formalists reading this thread, I'd like to see one of them condense the main point into a supershort string like this, because it's really long...
If you want me to cut an actual quote down to 15 words it'll sound like absolute nonsense, but if a paraphrase is sufficient;
"Humans thrive under Order and suffer without it, but Chaos is both easy and attractive."
I think that hits all the major points;
(Fair warning: I'm not a Formalist per se, I think the Patchwork is way too silly an idea to put my name near it, but I hope that this is a good enough summary for someone with a low tolerance for Moldbuggery.)
See, the trouble I have with Moldbug is that it's written less like a thesis and more like a poem. I got through a bit of it, and it was pretty fun to read and it constantly felt like I was on the edge of some earth-shattering revelation which would destroy all my previous political notions...but in the end I came away not quite getting the point. In places where I did understand the point, I didn't understand how it was supported.
I can readily identify all the statements you've listed as belonging to Reactionary schools of thought, but the bit about Order, Chaos, and Cathedral are all so layered in metaphor that I'm not really sure what they actually mean, let alone why I should believe that they are true. The point about life getting worse seems empirical, and I haven't fully grasped why he believes this.
So far, what I've taken is that reforming pre-democratic heirarchies (order) is both an act of violence and leads to violence and turmoil (chaos). Like most violence, this is a transfer of power to the progressive powers (the universities, the liberal democracies, and the reformers - collectively, the cathedral).
Yeah, as much as Moldbug likes to talk about his site as a "red pill" it's really a horrible place to introduce yourself to Neoreaction. He is stingy with citations, assumes a lot of prior knowledge, and seems to assume his readers are either archive-binging or regulars.
The Cathedral is a less clunky and more memorable way of saying "the bureaucracy of the international Progressive (he prefers Unitarian or Communist, but the territory is the same) movement and aligned criminal organizations." It's not exactly your standard conspiracy theory as there are no leaders, no actual plot, not even a conspiracy per se; just people reacting to a really bad set of incentives which drives politics leftwards and increases governmental entropy. It's an ideological feedback loop; a memetic parasite which gets more powerful by creating conditions hostile to its host.
Order / Chaos is really just a D&D-laden way of articulating Hierarchy v Anarchy. An Ordered society has clear lines of authority stretching downwards from the top (Moldbugian Formalism literally means making sure Formal de-jure authority and informal de-facto authority line up), with an incentive structure which promotes civilized behavior through appeals to morality and self-interest. A Chaotic society has unclear and/or conflicting sources of authority, such as imperium in imperio, and the incentive structure promotes societal conflict.
In terms of evidence, he alludes to some but you really need to come in with your own knowledge for the most part. Learn more about the biology (genetics and epigenetics) of intelligence, as well as other physiological differences linked to race / sex, a little macroeconomics and some history and you'll be able to make most of his points better than he can. Just ignore the climate skepticism and Chicago School stuff, put it down to him not having a science background. His crime stats are interesting but highly contested; his stats show a roughly 35x increase in reported murder over the last two centuries (that's after the recent crime dip; it was 50x in the mid 20th century) but people have claimed that it can at least partially be explained by poor record keeping.
Personally, I suggest you read him as a sort of autocthonian Free Spirit; someone who independently came to realize the need for a transvaluation of values and to avoid becoming a civilization of Last Men, but without either the elegance or nascent transhumanism of Nietzsche himself.
TL;DR: Moldbug is not user-friendly. If you want to get the most out of him, use your own prior knowledge and steelman his philosophy then have it fight with yours. The results may surprise you.
Drives politics leftwards: This is confusing to me because I'm sitting leftward. This insidious set of incentives is shifting society's values towards mine. I want this to happen. Am I supposed to be rubbing my hands together and cackling gleefully as Cthulhu does my bidding?
Governmental entropy: So, the way you phrased that makes me assume that this doesn't mean "overturning of social order via revolution". But what does that mean, then? How is it measured? What's a real-world correlate?
Personally, my confidence about climate change is based largely around my confidence in the scientific consensus. Moldbug seems sufficiently well read as to not allow himself to be ignorant of the scientific consensus on the matter. I would thereby not make the inference that Moldbug is scientifically illiterate, but that Moldbug mistrusts the validity of scientific consensus itself. The real question is not about the facts of climate change. The real question becomes - is he overestimating the degree to which the supposed "Cathedral" can control the scientific consensus, or are you and I underestimating it?
Thus far the result has been: It's probably a bad idea to try and tear down imperfectly good systems to make room for better ones. World-improvement-plots should follow the heuristic of minimizing destruction to existing societal infrastructure.
I'd call that conclusion valuable, but hardly a paradigm shift.
Today? Absolutely.
But Cthulhu doesn't stop swimming. The Whigs (both parties on both sides of the Atlantic applied), the Republicans (in the "First French Republic" sense), the Democrats (in the Jacksonian populist sense) and even most recently the Social Liberals all learned that lesson the hard way when they ended up taking their turns on the right side of the Overton Window.
You are not an exception; eventually, there will be a point at which today's intellectuals become tomorrow's targets. Given the ferocity of the anti-science postmodernism of Europe and California today, I don't think it's that far off. Look up the word "biotruth" or do some research into the anti-GMO movement and you'll see your leftist buddies are on the front line right now fighting against the very science which might someday make transhumanism possible.
Entropy is an apt metaphor here actually;
Your metaphorical solid block of hydrogen at 0K is something like the thousand year Fnarg. Authority is absolute, atomic and universally acknowledged. Of course, in reality absolute zero is impossible but the principle remains that a more ordered state is one of greater regularity and lower volatility. We've all heard the proverb about how a woman could carry a pot of gold from one end of the silk road to the other under the Mongol Empire's rule, and while certainly an exaggeration it's clear that terrorism and organized crime in the modern sense would have been virtually impossible there.
On the other hand our metaphorical ideal gas might be something like the state of affairs during the Congolese or Somalian Civil Wars; or in other words, most of Post-Colonial Africa. The governments of these nations are actually rather large, in the sense that they employ a lot of people and pay them pretty well, and when you factor in the various NGOs and foreign governments propping them up their bureaucracies are extraordinarily complex while providing no actual governance or exercising any actual sovereignty. Those abdicated functions are carried out, if at all, by short-lived local warlords or tribal chiefs who are so insecure in their positions that constant terrorism of the people is the only way to survive.
There's a lot of room in between those extremes, for example I'd say the US today is an uncomfortably warm liquid, but that doesn't change the nature of the spectrum. Order is a state where unambiguous leadership creates a simple structure of government to incentivize productive behavior, whereas Chaos is a state where a leadership vacuum creates political complexity / volatility that incentivizes counterproductive behavior.
I don't see a distinction; if you think science is that institutionally corrupt, on a scale greater than even Lysenko could have aspired to, you're not functionally different from a postmodernist and have just as little credibility when talking about institutional science.
Not necessarily. Moldbug might trust scientific consensus to be correct in areas where politics won't distort it.
i obviously do trust the scientific consensus, but steelmanning, there have been times when politics or culture has interfered with science in half-science half-humanities fields like anthropology. Historically, even biology has been tainted by politics at times, when it comes to sexuality. (I'm not talking about modern evolutionary biology, but historical things such as chalking up female orgasms to "hysteria" and the historical attribution of homosexual behavior in animals as "dominance displays")
That's a devil's advocate though. For the most part, I agree with you.
I predict that the liberal iteration of this movement will not gain in strength within our natural lifetimes, and will gradually peter out at some point (although maybe it won't peter out within our natural lifetimes). If for some reason it does not peter out, it will gradually become a conservative movement against the transhumanist liberals.
Historically, it hasn't been the first time lefties have done stupid things. Movements in which Lefties Do Stupid Things have tended to die away gradually (separatist feminism) or are considered crazy fringe groups today (Nation of Islam)
Also (I say this with the awareness that I run the risk of committing "no true liberal") each of these Liberals Being Stupid movements have an aspects which I instinctively associate with conservatism. Nation of Islam and Separatist Feminism favors in-groups over out-groups. Anti-GMO is largely driven by concerns about purity and keeping the status quo. If I didn't know the cultural context surrounding the green-blue affiliations, I would have labeled these to be conservative values.
The point is this: I've got some values. Some of those values pin me down as liberal. When I look at "liberals being stupid" examples, I do not see people who have taken the "liberal values" dial and turned them all the way up higher than I would like. Instead, I see people who have either turned off one or more of my liberal value dials, or added a conservative value into the mix. These people don't feel like current trends extrapolated - rather, they feel like a divergent stream.
When I think about what turning up the "liberal values" dial too high would look like, I think of things that don't hurt anyone but are nevertheless disgusting, and cannot be prevented without somehow imposing authority to restrict personal autonomy. For example, if large segments of society were to start falling into self-pleasure-stimulation feedback cycles, I can imagine a hyper-permissive liberal state which decides that they should be given the autonomy to do so.
Just imagine...the entire human race. Totally functional, with most rational faculties intact, still interacting with the outside world...but constantly in a great mood.
I'd really hate that idea. It's a world I wouldn't fit into at all. But oddly, I can already feel Cthulhu's persuasive tentacles convincing me that as long as the rational faculties do remain intact, it wouldn't be so bad if some people chose to live this way. As long as not everyone chooses it, what is the harm?
(history-politics is outside my domain and I haven't fact-checked so you shouldn't take any specific examples I give at face value)
I think the issue here is that to you progressivism is a set of very specific ideals whereas to me it is a set of general-purpose political tactics. We could argue it around in circles forever, so why not cut to the meat of the issue; what would we expect the progressive response to be like if each of us were right?
Situation A: Three nationalist groups representing their country's majority begin systemic campaigns of genocide against minority groups whom they resent for their higher social standing and perceived foreignness (in reality, both have lived there for centuries). The German NSDAP targets the Ashkenazim, the Vietnamese Viet Minh targets the Hoa, and the Hutu Akazu targets the Tutsi. What do we expect the modern sensible progressive to feel?
If this is a simple question of morality, we could expect that each case would merit strong condemnation and the failure to prevent them as an unforgivable tragedy. If on the other hand Progressivism is simple political expedience, we expect our answers to break along purely practical lines; the NSDAP was a rival and is thus condemned as strongly as possible, the Viet Minh are even now an ally and thus their actions are completely ignored, and the Akazu are of no consequence whatsoever and are thus thought of only within the context of expanding the power of allied NGOs.
Situation B: Two men lead attacks on US Federal Government buildings in an attempt to spark a race war which they believed was divinely ordained, failed, and were subsequently executed. John Brown attacked the Federal Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, while Timothy McVeigh attacked the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In both cases innocents were killed as a result of the attacks, and in both cases their actions hurt their cause in the public mind and encouraged the expansion of paramilitary police forces designed to prevent similar future strikes.
If this is a question of humanitarian ideals, you might expect that both would be repudiated for their actions; even if we hate slavery, surely a student of history should recognize that slave revolts tend to involve mass murder even when successful which means that regardless of the validity of their complaints, both were attempting to start a genocidal war. Of course, from the point of view of political expediency there is no conflict whatsoever; the neofascist terrorist is a threat and thus irredeemably evil while the radical abolitionist terrorist is a predecessor and thus an inspiring heroic figure.
Situation C: Two governments of modern first-world nations have made the deliberate descision to deny life-saving care from those seeking it for a practical purpose. The US government's Tuskegee Syphilus Experiment has denied 400 black men access to syphilus treatment so that the army can gather data on how best to treat STIs (a major readiness issue in any military), while the UK government's Liverpool Care Pathway has dehydrated and neglected 10,000(!) "dying" patients to make room for patients with better QALY returns.
If this was a case of values, we should expect universal condemnation; the TSE was nothing short of a racist massacre while the LCP crossed the line into actual mass murder. On the other hand, the US Army is a traditionally right-wing institution while the NHS is a monument to Social Democrat ideology; it would be surprising if the TSE didn't result in public shaming and calls for new boards of well-paid ethicists (read: academics) in every hospital while the LCP is met with calls for increased funding to the very organizaion which enacted it.
Obviously this isn't a perfect test of the principle; it's not particularly sporting of me to pick examples with perfect hindsight and I do apologize for that. As a rational intelligent person I know you're more than capable of stepping outside your philosophy and asking why it happens to have grown into the shape it's in, and who it's ultimately helping. As long as you've done that, as far as I'm concerned we don't disagree on anything substantive.
(Also I was hoping for your opinion on whether my explanation of the "governmental entropy" made any sense. I guess putting it in the middle of a text wall was a poor idea lol.)
Judging by the examples you give, the tactic you're attributing to progressivism is basically harsh condemnation (and often forceful suppression) of purported "human rights abuse" when the perpetrators are ideological enemies, but quiet tolerance (and sometimes even approval) of the same actions when they are perpetrated by allies or by people/groups who do not fit the "bad guy" role in the standard progressive narrative. Is this pretty much what you intended to convey, or am I missing something important?
If I'm not, then I don't see why you tie this behavior to progressivism in particular. It seems like a pretty universal human failure mode when it comes to politics. Of course, the specifics of the rhetoric employed will differ, but I'm sure I can come up with examples similar to yours that apply to conservatives, or indeed to pretty much any faction influential enough to command widespread popular allegiance and non-negligible political clout. Do you think progressives are disproportionately guilty of this kind of hypocrisy, or that this hypocrisy is more central to the success of progressivism than that of other ideologies? Or are you just using the term "progressive" in a much more encompassing sense than its usual meaning in American political discourse?
I've also got to say that I don't find your three examples of progressive hypocrisy all that compelling (even though I don't deny the existence of this sort of hypocrisy among progressives -- I just think you're wrong about degree).
On situation A: The claim that progressives completely ignored Vietnamese ethnic cleansing is false. The push for a more inclusive refugee policy in America in the wake of mass Vietnamese displacement (culminating in the Refugee Act of 1980) was spearheaded by progressives in the Congress (like Ted Kennedy) and backed by labor unions. The UNHCR (which I'm assuming Moldbug regards as a tentacle of the progressive kraken) played a major role in drawing attention to the plight of the boat people. It's true that the Viet Minh's oppression of ethnic Chinese doesn't get condemned as vociferously or routinely as the Nazi oppression of Jews, but I don't buy that this is solely or even primarily attributable to the preservation of the progressive Grand Narrative. One relevant observation is that as bad as the Viet Minh's treatment of the Ethnic Chinese was, the Nazi treatment of Jews was considerably worse.
As for the Rwandan genocide, once again your characterization of the progressive response doesn't seem apt. While it is true that America did basically nothing to stem the genocide while it was in progress, some of the harshest criticism of this American inactivity has come from progressive academics (Samantha Power is a prominent example). Also, I don't think condemnation of the Akazu has been lacking at all. In fact, the impression I get is that Rwanda is the go-to example for modern (post WWII) genocide.
On situation B: I concede that a lot of contemporary discussion of John Brown is unjustifiably reverential, and I don't consider him particularly heroic. But I do think the difference in motivation between McVeigh and him is very relevant to our evaluation of their respective actions. Also, you seem to take for granted that the Haitian revolution was, on the whole, a bad thing. If not, your claim that Brown should have been dissuaded from starting a slave rebellion by the example of Haiti would make no sense. And I disagree that the Haitian revolution was on the whole a bad thing, despite the considerable loss of life involved. Perhaps this is another instance of progressive double standards, but you'll have to make that case for me. As it stands, the argument "Haiti's slave rebellion had horrible results, so John Brown should have expected his rebellion to have horrible results, so he should be treated as someone trying to bring about horrible results" is not very convincing to me, for a number of reasons.
On situation C: I just straight-up reject your characterization of the LCP as "mass murder". While there have been reports of some patients on the LCP being dehydrated and neglected by hospital staff, the numbers do not remotely approach 10,000. That's about the total number of people on the pathway, and there is no evidence I'm aware of that more than a small fraction faced systematic mistreatment (in contravention of the actual guidelines for the LCP, I should note). There is also evidence that a number of people on the pathway received exemplary end-of-life care.
And again, your characterization of the progressive response is pretty tendentious. I guess it's technically true that there are "calls for increased funding to the very organization which enacted" the LCP, but progressives also support increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, the very organization which enacted the Tuskegee experiment (gasp!). So no hypocrisy there, then. I find neither demand particularly scandalous, since both organizations do a lot of other good stuff that warrants increased funding. As for the specific abuses of the LCP -- while they are much less common than you claim, they are troubling, and as far as I can tell, there has been no significant progressive opposition to the Neuberger review's recommendation that the LCP be phased out and replaced with something that can be more effectively enforced. I'm not British though, so I may be wrong about this.
Now, it is quite possible that I have to some extent been duped by progressive myth-making in my conception of these situations. If so, I'd appreciate evidence indicating where my beliefs are false.
I consider him extremely heroic. Not ultrarational, but there were people suffering in the darkness and crying out for help, a lot of people saying "Later", and John Brown saying "Fuck this, let's just do it." If there's a historical consensus that the Civil War could have been avoided, I have not encountered it; and that being so, might as well have the Civil War sooner rather than later.
More or less; it's all about framing the debate in terms which push popular sentiment leftward. Whoever controls the null hypothesis gets to decide what the data means, and conservatives suck at statistics.
Now each of my examples is debatable; there are official Progressive answers to each dichotomy and they're all designed to make sense to well educated intelligent people (no-one with any sense would call the Cathedral dim). But if you look at the pattern, not just here but anywhere you look, you see double-standards which invariably favor the political Left and Demotism in general. I can't force you to see it, and I don't begrudge it if you don't, but it is there to see.
I took your explanation of "governmental entropy" to indicate a breakdown of heirarchy.
High order gov't = clear lines of heirarchy, which you could draw in a simple diagram
low order gov't = constant uncertainty about who's in charge (with the resulting insecurity resulting in violence).
So this is good, but I'm still confused.
Your examples describe a government which acts in its own interests (rather than by moral ideals) and I accept that this is in fact the case for our government, that it acts not according to ideals but in self-interest.
What I don't understand is why this is particular to progressive-ism, and not a general property of ideologically driven power structures. Or even power structures in general, for that matter - doesn't Fnarg also act in his own interests, by strengthening his allies and weakening his enemies?
Let's take India and Pakistan, and observe their positions on the Israel-Palestine scenario. Pakistan strongly sides with Palestine, probably because Palestine is the Muslim state and Israel are the Western Imperialists. Polls show India to be the most pro-Israel country in the world: despite India's strong anti-imperialist sentiment - here's a short analysis that makes sense to me.
India was chosen as an example because while many major variables are different from Western nations, I know it possesses the equivalent of what we've been calling "The Cathedral" and its conservatives are similar as well. As you might expect, India's leftists are more pro-muslim than the nation as a whole, and thus are less pro-Israel.
But I know that If a Muslim power started invading an indigenous Jewish population, left and right in India would be united in opposition. The alliance on the Right depends on the interests of the cultural in-group (which is why Pakistan supports Palestine and Indian conservatives supports not-Palestine), but the alliance of the Left doesn't seem tied to any particular culture's interest. Leftists from India to Europe to America tend to have greater support for Palestine.
So, once you subtract any moral variables, who does the leftist tend to help? One possibility is that they tend to help the underdog who wants to be autonomous from Fnargl. and thus cause the "underdog" to win. And if the underdog keeps winning, I suppose that this leads to chaos and constant revolutions.
if that's the case, it brings my back to the one useful thing said I had gleaned from reactionary thought - "World-improvement-plots should follow the heuristic of minimizing destruction to existing societal infrastructure."
That's just what I came up with, though, I'm not sure actually sure whom you meant when you said "who it's ultimately helping". Did you just mean that it acts to strengthen itself? If so, why is this unusual for a major ideology? All rapidly spreading things... Islam, English speaking, etc... can boast the same.
That's one way to look at it, but this is more about the actual responses of progressives themselves and I tried to phrase it that way (I.E. "What do we expect the modern sensible progressive to feel?").
What do you think about the Viet Minh's genocide against the Hoa? What do you even know about them? Is it anything at all like what you feel about the Holocaust?
What do you feel when you think about John Brown? Do you think about him? Is it at all like your mental image of Timmy McVeigh?
What's your response to the Liverpool Care Pathway? Is that even on your radar? How about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, I'm sure you've got a strong feeling about that one?
There is a pattern here; supposed moral concerns do not accurately predict how progressives, ordinary progressives not politicians remember, react to most issues. There are patterns of thought and behavior here and elsewhere which simply do not make sense except in the context of systematically eliminating non-aligned bases of power and expanding aligned ones. This is the absolute essence of the issue.
That's not exactly true; there is one particular culture which benefits very greatly from every Leftist alliance; the culture of Leftist intellectuals.
The Palestinians do not benefit from the "Peace Process" which keeps them in refugee camps, and neither does Israel or any of Israel's Arab neighbors or even the United States which keeps the scam going. But it does provide an enormous amount of jobs for smart progressive kids working in the UN and other NGOs, juicy materials for journalists and political pundits, a great laboratory for PoliSci academics connected to the State Department to test their pet theories, and the crisis itself is an excellent propaganda tool for anyone to the left of Mussolini to use on any pet issue they might have.
In other words, the Cathedral itself profits, even if (especially if) everyone else is losing money. That's not a healthy business model, in fact it's almost criminal.
One of those is a war to stop something which is actually bad. The other isn't. That's not a trivial distinction.
That's a very good point.
We have to start being careful about terminology here. The word "liberal" (at least in the contemporary US political discourse) has two quite distinct meanings. The first (at least historically) meaning is the "classic liberal" or "traditional liberal" or even "XIX century liberal" -- a political philosophy emphasizing individual rights and liberties. Nowadays a "classic liberal" is almost a synonym for a "small-l libertarian".
The second meaning is "leftist", "progressive", "opposed to conservatism". This is the usual meaning in which the word in used in the US today.
Now, what will happen if you dial the "liberal values" to 11? Liberal/classic, not much -- you'll get much weirdness, some of it disgusting, to be sure, but overall it might look like, I don't know, say, Burning Man.
But the liberal/progressive values are a different kettle of fish. These include things like serious dislike of inequality. Or, for example, strong preference for community over individual. So turning these things to eleven gets you moving towards the Soviet Russia territory. You should start thinking about confiscatory tax regimes, limitations on property rights, etc.
I'm not sure how turning the dial to 11 works, but there seems to be a pretty glaring asymmetry in your analysis here. If turning the dial to 11 on progressivism takes you to Soviet Russia, why doesn't turning the dial to 11 on classical liberalism take you towards complete stateless anarchism, which I imagine would be considerably less congenial than Burning Man.
"But," the classical liberal might say, "we believe the state does have a role to play in protecting its citizens from violence inflicted by others, and in enforcing contracts." Yeah, and progressives believe that the market has a role to play in solving the economic calculation problem. They also have commitments to civil liberties and individual autonomy that are incompatible with a Soviet-style dictatorship. If turning the dial past 10 is sufficient to erase those commitments, maybe it's also sufficient to erase the classical liberal's commitment to a night watchman state?
This line of conversation seems to focus on the "turning the dial to 11" idea, which I take to mean "increasing the distance from the mainstream".
I think I see a couple of problems with this.
First, a political ideology is composed of not one, but several "dial settings". Correlations between them are at least partly matters of historical accident, not logical necessity. We can conceive of dialing up or down any of these somewhat independently of one another.
Why is anti-colonialism linked to opposition to private property, instead of to protecting the private property rights of oppressed people? Why is it in the interests of "big-business conservatives" today to oppose scientific education, whereas in the mid-20th century the business establishment was strongly supportive of it? Why is antisemitism today found in both the far left and far right, whereas it once was a defining characteristic of right-wing nationalist populism? Because of the formation and breakdown of specific political alliances and economic conditions over historic time — not because these views are logically linked.
Second, a political ideology often opposes what outsiders see as more extreme versions. Conservatives may say that progressivism is nothing but watered-down Stalinism, and progressives may say that conservatism is merely watered-down fascism. But conservatives have reasoned arguments against fascism, and progressives have reasoned arguments against Stalinism — and these arguments do not merely amount to "too much of a good thing".
It takes me towards, that is, in that general direction. It doesn't get there, though, because classical liberals were quite familiar with stateless anarchism and have rejected it.
Again, turning the dial to 11 moves the progressives towards Soviet Russia without necessarily getting them there.
Note my examples -- they do not mention hanging capitalists on the lampposts.
Imagine a committed (maybe even a radical) progressive finding himself in a country which taxes incomes over, say $500,000 at the 99% tax rate. Would he start to demand lower taxes on the rich? Not bloody likely, and this is a confiscatory tax regime.
So, what is the harm?
There isn't any "harm" - that's the entire point. It just feels wrong at a gut level. The example was specifically chosen to be something that did not upset "harm avoidance" or "egalitarianism" or "autonomy" (in the john haidt sense). I was trying to think of a world in which I might be the conservative one.
In this case, I think that the notion of a human without negative effect is hitting some sort of psychological Uncanny Valley between human and alien for me. Maybe it violates some sort of purity norm? Or perhaps it causes individuals to in some senses leave the "in-group" by becoming less similar to me?
The truth is that the strangeness would probably wear off after repeated exposure. I only had to think about the idea for a small amount of time before realizing it wasn't really as bad as it seemed at first. But I can I imagine that if I hadn't ever considered the idea in my youth, an older version of me would no longer be cognitively flexible enough to consider it as acceptable behavior.
This is probably how conservatives feel with homosexuality. (And just the same way, if you take a young conservative who doesn't take any religious scriptures literally, and you give them repeated exposure, they tend to change their mind unless religion somehow interferes).
(If everyone did it, there might be ...not harm, but dis-utility. It wouldn't be my optimal universe, though perhaps it wouldn't be worse than the present. I think that I consider diversity of experiences intrinsically valuable, so I'd feel like something intrinsic to humanity was lost if at least some toned-down brands of negative affect weren't preserved in at least some people. A more obvious problem is that it might be boring...I'm not sure whether the fact that they wouldn't find it boring makes it better or worse. I guess I'd be happy for them, but I wouldn't identify myself, or humanity, with them as much.)
Yes... I think what bothers me most is that it is a subtraction. It's one fewer emotion on the spectrum of experience. I wouldn't mind people becoming strange and different, but I would want them to be more than human in the realm of breadth of experience, not less than human. Perhaps I wouldn't mind as much if they became more complex in other ways.
But really, that doesn't become a problem unless everyone chooses wire-heading.
(nods) Ah, I see. Gotcha.
I certainly agree that we can be squeamish about things that we don't actually judge to be wrong, whatever our ethical standards are (unless we explicitly consider squeamishness our ethical standard, of course).
That said, I don't seem to value diversity of experience enough that I'm willing to preserve suffering for the novelty/diversity value.
Tangentially, IME the stuff we class as "positive affect" is way less boring to experience than the stuff we class as "negative affect," as well as involving less suffering.
There is none, and the idea that it's at all a Left-Right issue is baffling. I personally don't like the idea on aesthetic principles but it's not the result of some Reactionist policy statement.
People being happy prosperous and free is the goal of Reaction; why would anyone bother with a philosophy which promised sadness poverty and slavery? The difference is entirely in the question of what sorts of conditions in the real world will lead to a good society, and that is a simple factual question.
Also...it just seems like the smartest people would always discard post-modernism. Values might shift away from mine, but post-modernism would imply that the epistemology would shift away from mine.
Values are mutable properties, but there's only one correct epistemology. It aught to be converged upon. It's not like the swimming Cthulhu just happened to swim by the correct epistemology by chance, as part of a leftward drift. The correct epistemology is one answer in a reasonably large memetic space - we wouldn't have found it by coincidence.
What's more, the ideals of reductionism and logic and the correct epistemology have been multiply, independently derived. China, India, and Greece all demonstrably converged upon them, and I'm sure many other unrecorded individuals have as well.
(I take it you agree with me that there is a correct epistemology and it approximately corresponds to science, rationality, reductionism, etc, since you decry anti-science post modernism)
Postmodernism doesn't have to be right to be popular, and right now political power is a matter of popularity. Even if "the smartest people" prefer being right to being powerful, a dubious proposition if you ask me, that just means their less intelligent but more ambitious cousins will be the ones wielding the power instead.
The modern feminist and anti-racist movements have started to learn that their pet pseudo-science sociology is just not credible enough to counter anthropology biology and psychology; they see postmodernism as a way to hit back at "the scientific establishment" which they identify as aligned with their oppressors. At the same time, anti-corporate alternative medicine and animal rights activists (who travel in the same circles) have wanted to discredit the medical industry for decades and are turning to PoMo rhetoric as well. These groups are all at the vanguard of the modern left and all of them have a lot to gain by weakening science.
In the bastardized words of Tolstoy: "Good ideas are all alike; every bad idea is bad in its own way."
An ordered society, like Greece India and China, will tend to look and think very similarly even when direct communication is limited. Their traditions are the results of centuries or millenia of received knowledge which has had to pass the test of each new generation before it was transmitted to the next. In a sense you could say their memes are K-strategists; in a stable environment with limited opportunity to transmit themselves, the high cost of a more correct idea pays for itself by out-competing rivals in the long run.
In the modern world (more-or-less everything after the printing press), where the our technology made data transmission and storage trivial, the new environment put out new pressures. Old ideas were built to last but slow to spread; new ideas could easily afford to be much stupider and more dangerous as long as they reproduced and mutated quickly enough. These r-strategist memes are fads; they flood the field and by the time they've burned out there's a new one ready to go.
I don't think it's surprising that science is coming under attack; it is very expensive to produce a proper scientific mindset, while pseudoscientific fads can use aggressive mimicry to cheaply soak up any good reputation we generate.
But ancient India, China, Greece were absolutely over-run by irrationality. The seeds of logic and reason were lying more or less ignored, buried in texts alongside millions of superstitions and bad epistemologies. And our currently fashionable epistemology is superior to theirs. They didn't have the notion of parsimony.
Why is logic and reason spreading faster today than in the past? Do you think that the rise of post-modernism (Actually, wait.... why are we using the word post-modernism to mean anti-science? That doesn't make sense...) will somehow eclipse the spread of rationalism?
Your model seems to have anti-science-post-modernism as a successor tor rationalism My model has anti-science as a reaction to the rapid spread of rationalism - a backlash. Whenever something spreads rapidly, there are those who are troubled. Anti-science can only define itself in opposition to science - imagine explaining it to someone who had never heard of science in the first place! Further, anti-science advocates a return to pre-scientific modes of thought. Both of these are the signals of a reactionary school of thought. Cthulhu doesn't swim that way.
I'm even more confused now. You aren't saying that Cthlulu's left-ward swim is powered by technological advance, are you?
Because my current working hypothesis for the Leftward trend of history has thus far boils down to technological progress. I thought Reactionaries et al were going to provide an alternative explanation involving power structures and perverse incentives.
Yvain's too.
Are they? Unless you mean that as a synonym for Progressivism, I've missed that bit.
Postmodernism isn't just a literary theory.
You can't have an Emperor surrounded by legions of Mandarins if everyone is out in the bush looking for acorns; you need agriculture and specialization long before anyone starts talking about the Mandate of Heaven or tracing out dynasties. The same way you couldn't expect someone to come up with Black Bloc tactics without there already being ubiquitous video recording.
But you could have crop rotation without building the Forbidden City; technology is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. The incentives are no less real and no less perverse if they require a technological substrate to be effective.
Huh. The definition I was using - I guess picked up from usage? - was something like "Liberals reframed as overdog, to counter the perception of underdog-ness and apply liberal strategies to themselves. See also: propaganda, censorship."
I suppose there are overlaps, but still ... I'll need to study further if I'm ever to pass the Reactionary Turing Test.
Have you read Yvain's summary?
Yes. The three things I've read are Moldbug's "Open letter to Open Minded Progressives", Yvain's summary, and the first 1/3 of "A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations".
You know that's a 9 (technically 12, since there's a 9a - c) post series, right?
Yeah, the bookmark is currently on this page.
Are those the best 15 words that the guy has? If so, that provides me significant information and potentially saves me time.
I don't assign high confidence to my ability to summarize it accurately because I didn't really get it - I was frequently confused about the meaning. What little I did get out of it doesn't match the praise it gets, and history/political science are not areas that I currently consider myself well informed about, so there is a high chance I'm missing something. Also, keep in mind I'm summarizing someone whose opinions are, superficially speaking, aligned with a group I generally tend to disagree with, so I might have un-adjusted for biases. Also, The Complete Works of Moldbug is frickin' long, and I've only read a minuscule fraction of the work.
I just felt like trying Moldbug because it fit this exercise really well. Moldbug is the writer I've read the most recently who I think could really use some brevity.
I did get one useful meme out of it which I actually agree with ... I generally felt this before reading reactionary literature, but I agreed with it more after:
Progressives should try their best to work within an existing imperfect system rather than against it - because structures are expensive and complicated, and if you're gonna tear one down you'd better be prepared to build another one. In other words - rather than attacking bad things, create good things and let bad things wither away naturally.
This subthread deteriorated into an unchecked and fruitless political discussion. How sad.
I have a problem with political stuff when it derails other, important conversations. But my original quote is, at base, about politics. Deterioration implies that the sub-thread was about something "higher and better" than politics to begin with. I do think the ensuing discussion has improved my understanding of the person I quoted, at least. That was the spirit of the main topic, right?
Edit: okay, I just read the sub-sub threads. You're right, it did deteriorate...I just didn't see the extent of it because there weren't many direct replies to me that displayed the deterioration.
Adding a note because I said "quotes don't belong in this thread" elsewhere. However, this quote belongs in this thread, because
Oh no, I'm sorry. That wasn't a direct quote, but a paraphrase of a set of long essays. I should not have formatted it like a quote.
I've edited the original comment to better reflect this.
source
Positivism: "Anything that can't be verified is meaningless". This can't be verified. So Positivism is meaningless / false.
"Try to choose actions causing high total net utility gains when summed over everyone affected."
is an attempt at a 15 word summary of:
Precedent Utilitarians believe that when a person compares possible actions in a specific situation, the comparative merit of each action is most accurately approximated by estimating the net probable gain in utility for all concerned from the consequences of the action, taking into account both the precedent set by the action, and the risk or uncertainty due to imperfect information.
Do you wish to know more about human beings? Then postulate less.
This seems wrong. Postulating seems to be a necessary part of exploring possibility space.
That sounds like it should apply to much everything (except pure maths), not just human beings.
“Whenever you ass-u-me, you make an ass out of U and me.”
The evaluator, which determines the meaning of expressions in a program, is just another program.
-- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs