Inspired by the idea that Eutopia is supposed to be scary. Well, some of the things I like, moreover, I figure things a lot of other people either consciously or subconsciously like are scary indeed.

In Maletopia, violence is not seen as something abhorrent. It is well understood, that the biological wiring of men (largely on the hormonal level) sees fighting and combat as something exciting and winning it is rewarded with a T boost, and on the gut level masculine men do not see fighting as something abhorrent. Videogames are a proof of this. Instead of trying to suppress these instincts and trying to engineer violence-abhorring pacifist men who would probably end up with low testosterone, lower sex appeal to many a straight women, maybe bullied, and depressed, in Maletopia the goal is to provide safe and exciting outlets for these instincts.

EDIT: The ideas being tested

Traditional masculine instincts evolved for an ancestral environment got out of synch with the modern world, became misleading, harmful, and downright dangerous. Having realized this, there were also movements to suppress them. Which is a less than ideal solution. Generally speaking the ancestral environment is fairly simple and not hard to simulate. Why not do it then?

The instincts in question are:

1) Warmongering, finding violence cool, hawkery, militarism

It is a scope insensitivity issue. War was not so costly in human lives and suffering when it was about a tribe raiding another with arrows and bows.  Having the same hawkish, yee-haw, let's kick some butt instincts in an age of world wars and nukes is incredibly dangerous.

Having realized the issue, many intellectuals promoted pacifist humanism, an abhorrence of violence, in German speaking countries there is a clearly visible line from Stefan Zweig type WWI-opposers to the hippies in the 1960's. However these people generally ended up suppressing all aspects of masculinity. They would not let their children learn boxing, they would say it teaches them to solve problems with violence. German hippies tried to be as unmasculine in everything, hair, clothes, as they could. It is fighting against your own testosterone producing glands. Not a very good idea.

2) Tribalism, us vs. them

Obvious enoguh. Camaraderie, an esprit the corps is very important in a war. It is also very harmful when it comes to arguments between political parties. Or about preventing a war.

3) Setting up gendered standards, "a real man should so-and-so", often combined with sexism and homophobia largely in order to set up a contrast ("You hit like a girl! That is totally gay!")

Here the issue is largely that gender as understood today, a binary thing, is a too large scope. It is okay to say "A real marine should be strong and tough!", that is a small and relevant enough scope. Saying "A real man should be strong and tough!", well on one hand I do sympatize with the sentiment, but on the other hand such an expectation should not be cast over literally 50% of humankind. Why cannot we have 4-5 smaller genders, and express such expectations only inside them? And it is also wrong to contrast it to women and gay men, men of whom are strong and tough, this is simply not a properly calibrated contrast. We need to keep the general idea of gendered masculinity, but no longer think in these really broad categories like men, women or gay men. Traditional masculinity should be understood as a subculture, and on one hand it is generally correct to expect those men who want to be parts of it to try to live up to its values, but on the other this simply does not need to have anything to do with women, gay men or men outside this subculture.

4) Sexism and homophobia getting detached from serving as a contrast and becoming a problem on its own

Obvious enough. The core problem is a miscalibrated scope like expecting all men to be tough instead of a subset only, this is e.g. contrasted to the weakness of women and then becomes a stereotype of all women. Everybody loses.

5) A dislike of softness and coddling leading to the opposing of compassionate social policies, being a proud self made hard worker, not wanting to pay taxes to pay welfare lazy people

This is counter-productive in age where more and more work will be automated and sooner or later basically it is either a Basic Income or a violent revolution. A tribe fighting to survive cannot accomodate softness, but a rich modern society can, and it is especially wrong calibration when the lack of jobs is seen as soft laziness.

These instincts are out of synch and problematic. But the goal is not to suppress them, the goal is to simulate that ancestral environment where they can find an outlet.

Some boring background

Maletopia has a highly advanced social market economy where most work is done by robots, most people live on Basic Income and people have a lot of free time. The government does not provide much services directly, letting people buy education or healthcare on a competitive market, but there are also regulations wherever customers cannot really be expected to make informed decisions. They are not dogmatic libertarians, they don't see much wrong in making the generally accepted procedures and rules of e.g. medicine mandatory and not expecting every patient to be able to choose doctors on the competitive marketplace efficiently. However, since it is a robot economy, the people are no longer assets for the state, it means having an educated or healthy population is not necessarily a competitive advantage for the state. This enables governments to be a bit relaxed about this. Some education is mandatory until puberty, but if you think at 12 you never want to see a math textbook anymore, it is no longer the government's job to force you to, just collect your BI and live as you wish. Since politics is largely about who gets to spend whose money, and there is not much spending besides BI, most services are provided by a regulated market, politics as such is largely ignored by the populace and much simpler than today. People can directly elect a Minister of Health, Minister of Agriculture etc., this was implemented in order to push people to look more at their qualifications and not their party affilation or ideology. Besides, there is a Parliament, which is filled by a lot, not election, as here qualifications matter less than being truly representative. Governments  are over smaller areas than today, modeled after Swiss Cantons. Politics is largely considered boring, people are more excited about whether it is the Aalborg Vikings or the Detroit Thug Life who wins the next World Top Raid. DTL's top fighter Jamal has promised to put his diamond-decorated gold chain on the loot pile, can you imagine that? Word is, AV is having a golden wolf's head made in order to be able to match the bet honorably. Why would anyone care about endless debates about car safety regulations when cool things like this happen?

EDIT: To avoid some misunderstandings

People who read the pre-edited version of this article have misunderstood some of my intentions. The basic idea is a standard post-scarcity sci-fi where there is nothing important to do and people live for their hobbies a'la Culture, with the only difference being that I don't think people like being that isolated and generally I think people like to form fairly closely-knit like-minded groups. But what I have in mind is obviously an incredibly diverse world with a million hobby groups for every kind of people possible. The whole thing you might call Utopia, and then it has subsets, the hobby groups of gay artists may be called Gayartopia, the hobby groups of woman gamers Femgamertopia, and the hobby groups of traditionally masculine guys would be called Maletopia.

I will focus on the last subset, because it is the most controversial, interesting, unusual, and scary. But it does not mean that the rest of humankind (about maybe 90%) does not have a wonderful life pursuing their very different kinds of interests. It is just not the purpose of this article to flesh it out.

One reader assumed something like a  generic mainstream pop culture exists in Utopia and it is filled with shows from its Maletopia subset. I would like to leave the question open. To me the idea of a mainstream is already outdated, let alone in the future. It will be YouTube, not CNN.  But sure, Maletopia can generate some spectacular TV shows. Not sure how much it matters.

I also think social oppression is largely the factor of competing for resources or economic exploitation, and if you think some aspects of this sound oppressive, you need to explain how would that make any sort of sense in a post-scarcity world where everybody who does not like the sub-reality generated by any group has access to resources for generating their own.

A fighter's world

The basic ideas were there at least since the early 20th century. Orwell called the spirit of sports as "war minus the shooting", which he understood as a bad thing, Maletopia agrees but sees it as a good thing: it is precisely the shooting what is wrong with war, otherwise, war would be an exciting manly adventure. Or maybe it wouldn't, but clearly the millions of 20th-21th century men who watched war movies and played wargames on their computer thought otherwise. They liked war, or at any rate liked the ideas they had about war, even if those ideas were completely wrong. So Maletopia is really into sports. Into sports of the kind the look a lot like war minus the shooting.

A sport like tennis is obviously a poor simulation of war. It lacks both of its major aspects: the excitement of conflict, violence and danger, and the strong us vs. them tribal spirit of camaraderie.

We have already seen simulations of both aspects in the 20th century. The tribal, us vs. them spirit of camaraderie was simulated in Europe and indeed in most of the world outside America by association football or soccer, both national teams ("Wave your flag!") and clubs.

The fighting aspect is a bit harder to simulate. Clearly, you can simulate a shooting war with paintball or airsoft, you can fence with longswords and look rather awesome at it, but you know it is not serious, your opponent cannot hurt you seriously with those weapons. You could experiment with semi-hard half-nerf swords that kinda hurt but not so much, but there is one traditional and well-respected way to fight while causing real damage, yet keep it reasonably safe: the empty-handed martial arts or combat sports.

Again, the basics were there already at the end of the 20th century. MMA eclipsed the popularity of boxing, largely through looking more vicious, gladiatorial and flashy, yet (this is being debated) being less dangerous, and when in the first days of Maletopia an entrepreneur came up with flashier looking versions of the head protection used in amateur boxing, which were then made mandatory, the problem of concussions and brain damage largely being solved, the safety concerns were largely alleviated. It was understood that it cannot be perfectly safe and yet provide a believable simulation of real combat, there must be a trade-off, and Maletopia has good enough healthcare that lacerations or even broken bones in the ring are not a major issue.

In the first years of Maletopia, Dana Jr. figured there is still one problem left. It is an individual sport, not a team sport, it does not have the tribal, camaraderie aspects of, say, soccer fandom. To keep a long story short, a team version of MMA was made, which required a certain modification of the rules, but I don't want to bore you with the details. Sufficient to say, it was possible to fight team against team now, to fight a simulated, yet believable enough empty-handed tribal war in the MMA ring, with real enough broken noses.

Soon, teams were called tribes and matches were called raids.

The whole thing was made even better when simulated looting was incorporated into the rules. Before a raid, the tribes are supposed to make a bet, and put the money or other valuables they bet visibly on a table. Bystanders, spectators are welcome to put more money or valuables on the pile. After the raid, the winning tribe takes it and parades it around, showing off their loot. After that they distribute it between each other.

Money does not play any other role in the sport in order to be prevent it becoming too profit-oriented. Ticket prices and advertising is only used to pay for costs like renting the venue, which is not much, and only advertisements appropriate to the mood (i.e. MMA gear)  are allowed. Fighters don't receive any other payment than their share of the loot. There is a strong rule against rich people or really anyone sponsoring teams or paying fighters salaries (they collect BI anyway), although offering them gear, a gym to train for free etc. is allowed. But generally speaking the only way a rich sponsor or a fan can get money to the tribe he supports is putting it into the loot pile: and if they lose, the opponent will get it. There is a strong social taboo against paying money to figthers or tribes any other way, there is an oft-quoted saying taking money not fought for is a cowards' wage.

No armchair fans

There is another strong social taboo against armchair fandom. The idea of a fat slob drinking beer and eating wings in front of the TV and rooting for his tribe is considered ridiculous by all. You show respect to the fighters of your tribe by imitating them to a certain extent, by being fit, learning basic self-defense moves, doing a bit of grappling sparring and heavy bag work, so basically do the same thing that the non-competitive people who train at todays MMA, boxing or BJJ gyms do. Fandom and getting your own training is merged into one at your local tribal HQ which also doubles as a training gym. There is no clear separation between fighters and fans, it is simply that only the elite fighters participate in raids. But the idea of a fan who could not do at least some light sparring himself or would run out of breath is considered ridiculous, unless he has a physical disability.

Tribes - by that I mean both the elite fighters who raid, and the amateur fighters who are the fans -  have a strong spirit of camaraderie. This is represented by flags, coats of arms, uniforms, greetings, hand signals, or anything else really, depending on what the tribe and its identity is. They are basically brotherhoods, they take solidarity and honor very importantly. Your tribal HQ is practically your second home. If you have nothing better to do, and some time to kill, you go down to the local tribal HQ to practice a bit or maybe lift some weights, watch the serious elite spar, watch recorded raids, or maybe just have a beer and chat. You can count on each other. If you move houses, your brothers will carry your furniture. There are other organized activities, usually manly fun like shooting clay pigeons.

While it is not mandatory to be a member of a tribe, many men are. Obviously there are pacifist, intellectual, low-testosterone or gay men who dislike the idea. It used to generate a lot of grief, fighters saying a real man must fight and not be a sissy, non-fighters told them their view of masculinity is toxic, sexist, patriarchical, barbarous and completely outdated, since the only place they can practice it in the modern world is a simulation, a sport - the raids are not like _actual_ raids where people die and village get burned down. This resulted in a lot of mud-flinging until a clever solution was found.

Solving the gender conundrum

The clever solution was to define more than two genders. Specifically, two different male genders were defined. Unfortunately our records are lost with regard how exactly they were called. One dubious and unverified source is saying that there were multiple terms, at and least a subset of English-speaking people preferred Mentsh vs. Mannfolk. The first is borrowed from Yiddish, where it roughly means "a good person" and it is used as a gender self-identification of those males who generally abhor the idea of fighting, focus on productive or altruistic pursuits, and if they are straight, their sexual relations with women are based on egalitarian friendships. The Mannfolk is from Old Norse, as white-skinned fighters tend to like a certain (not historically accurate) Viking ethic, they are the fighters in tribes, they have a high-testosterone ethic, and have a certain tendency to sexually objectify women. However, violence against women is strictly forbidden in the Code of Honor of most tribes, this was based on an agreement with the Fempire. As for the sneakier forms of rape, most tribes have a culture that having sex with a woman is not a masculine achievement as such: doing her so good that she comes back asking for more tomorrow is one, and it is the only proper basis of sexual bragging. It is not just ethics, but also a pride in their own manly attractiveness that makes the idea of roofing a drink unthinkably low for the vast majority of tribe members.

It is also helpful that when a member of a tribe behaves unethically outside, the whole tribe is shamed in the media and they will sort out their own punishment internally. Usually it means having to fight the elite fighters, and they will not hold back.

At any rate, inventing two male genders, Mentsh and Mannfolk, sorted out the problem nicely. From that on, sentences like "a real man should fight" or "your sense of masculinity is wrong or outdated" would be almost unintelligible, because would sound like "a real human should fight" or "your sense of what is to be human is wrong and outdated". Instead it is widely accepted truism that real Mannfolk fight and real Mentsh usually don't, that real Mannfolk need to be strong and tough and real Mentsh need to be empathic and sensitive. It also makes it easier for straight women to tell what they are attracted to. Instead of complicated descriptions and instead of men having endless debates like whether women like "bad boys" or not, most women openly state whether they like Mentsh or Mannfolk. This makes things quite easy. It is understood that women who like Mannfolk will be turned off by cowardice, will put up with some sexism, and expect the man to play a leader role in the relationship, while women who like Mentsh will expect equality, sensitivity, respect, and in return their men can allow themselves to show weakness.

Thus nobody talks about "real men" vs. "toxic masculinity" anymore. They see the whole human history through these glasses, nobody was simply a man, or a manly man, or unmanly man, but for example Holger Danske or Arnold or Musashi or Patton were Mannfolk and Einstein and MLK and Freddie Mercury was Mentsh. Some people who are interested in history argue about which gender did e.g. Winston Churchill belong to, but not many are interested in this.

Mentsh usually focus on intellectual, artistic etc. pursuits.

The rise of the knightly orders

There is a new trend in Maletopia that some tribes call themselves chivalrous orders. The idea is that they try to combine the ideals of Mannfolk and Mentsh. The knights, as they call themselves, think that physical fitness, courage, knowing self-defense, and having some exciting fun at a sparring is not a bad idea at all, but the higher morals and higher intellectualism of Mentsh is also something valuable. Knights generally agree that a valuable way to live is to work on the Four Virtuous Activities, namely:

1) physical fitness, fighting and physical challenges,

2) scholarship, intellectualism, learning and rationality,

3) altruism, charity and good works,

4) and protecting the Earth, animals, plants, the natural environment, or indigenous people.

Knights of the Fox are supposed to be versatile, work on all four.

Other chivalrous orders focus on one, also do other two, and are allowed to go easy on the fourth. Knights of the Sword are the closest to the tribes of Mannfolk, they focus on fighting and physical challenges, learning and knowledge matters for them too, but they will usually go easy on either altruism or environmentalism. Knights of the Scroll focus on learning and rationality, find altruism and environmentalism important, and go easy on fighting and physicality. Knights of the Heart and Knights of Earth are easy enough to figure out.

So far I have only talked about men, and mostly about the Mannfolk gender. And I named it Maletopia. Where are women and LGBT people, or the disabled who cannot fight, in all this? Are they an oppressed minority? No.

Women and everybody else in Maletopia

EDIT: as indicated above, Maletopia, i.e. the fighting tribes of the Mannfolk are only a small subset of hobby groups in Utopia. Many, many other kinds of subsets exist to cater to other people. However, we simply focus on the Mannfolk now and their interaction with everybody else.

One of the most important elements of the Grand Compromise with the Fempire was that discrimination and inequality is not allowed in general society as such, but is allowed in private organizations such as these tribes. The reason it was allowed was partially because some MRAs were adamant to be let allowed to organize tribes where only men and only masculine men - the later Mannfolk - are allowed, and be allowed to play these violent games with each other even if others find it revolting. For this reason, they wanted to prevent "entryism", the practice where people who disagree with the values of a movement or group enter it, and then vote and exert pressure to change them.

But the main reason was that now there was hardly any important work to do, as work was done by robots, and people lived on BI, discrimination in these organizations had little affect on how succesful individuals could become. Since basically everything was a hobby now and nothing really mattered, success lost its former meaning, and if some fools wanted to form a hobby group that consisted entirely of tall ginger demisexual males, there was no good reason to not let them to.

As a result, many fighting tribes of Mannfolk consist of straight cissexual men with significantly sexist views and are often recruited from a particular culture, ethnicity or race. Such things tend to strengthen their tribal identity, their solidarity, camaraderie and this is seen as super important in Maletopia. Inclusiveness is not emphasized, since these organizations are essentially about hobbies and thus it is very easy to found many competing ones for every possible identity or need, hence they tend to be exclusive, and use the exclusiveness to form tightly knit  communities with a strong esprit de corps. This also means often disturbing views, like sexism or racism are openly professed by certain tribes of Mannfolk.  However it does not affect anyone outside their tribe, except others tribes they fight with, and women outside their tribe they date, but there are solutions for the worst aspects of it (see above, violence, rape), and since those women who want to be treated as equals usually completely refuse to date Mannfolk and choose to date only Mentsh, basically this sexism does not make anyone miserable.

It is not a surprise that tribes often challenge each other to raids precisely based on their conflicting identities, prejudices and discriminations, and this is seen as a feature, not a bug, a little hatred just makes the raid more real and more warlike. Thus, Steela from Bay Area Amazons likes to say that she will bathe in male tears after their upcoming raid with Italian Cowboys, and Eli from the Lions of Judah is looking forward to break some Nazi bones during their upcoming raid against the Aryan Brotherhood. As a commenter has put it, letting evil tribes exist makes better villains for the raids, and if you complain that evil people are being racist or sexist, that is obviouly stupid. Just put a tenner on the loot pile and hope the bad guys will get their noses bloodied.

The parallels between the ethnic gangs of the 20th century are obvious and intentional.

Besides the straight Mannfolk tribes, there are male fighting tribes who are not straight but androphile (masculine-gay, see Jack Donovan), there are butch amazon fighting tribes, and of course a million similar hobby organizations for people who are not fighters, for the Mentsh, for women who dislike fighting, for LGBT people, for the disabled, for all.

Of course, those groups can and should be fleshed out. All in all, the only reason I called it Maletopia is because I wanted to focus on how the fighting tribes of Mannfolk serve the emotional needs of masculine men. Really, Maletopia is simply a subset of Utopia where everybody else, too, finds groups where they can be themselves.

I found Scott Alexander's steelmanning of the NRx critique to be an interesting, even persuassive critique of modern progressivism, having not been exposed to this movement prior to today. However I am also equally confused at the jump from "modern liberal democracies are flawed" to "restore the devine-right-of-kings!" I've always hated the quip "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" (we've yet tried), but I think it applies here.

-- Mark Friedenbach

Of course, with the prompting to state my own thoughts, I simply had to go and start typing them out.  The following contains obvious traces of my own political leanings and philosophy (in short summary: if "Cthulhu only swims left", then I AM CTHULHU... at least until someone explains to me what a Great Old One is doing out of R'lyeh and in West Coast-flavored American politics), but those traces should be taken as evidence of what I believe rather than statements about it.

Because what I was actually trying to talk about, is rationality in politics.  Because in fact, while it is hard, while it is spiders, all the normal techniques work on it.  There is only one real Cardinal Sin of Attempting to be Rational in Politics, and it is the following argument, stated in generic form that I might capture it from the ether and bury it: "You only believe what you believe for political reasons!"  It does not matter if those "reasons" are signaling, privilege, hegemony, or having an invisible devil on your shoulder whispering into your bloody ear: to impugn someone else's epistemology entirely at the meta-level without saying a thing against their object-level claims is anti-epistemology.

Now, on to the ranting!  The following are more-or-less a semi-random collection of tips I vomited out for trying to deal with politics rationally.  I hope they help.  This is a Discussion post because Mark said that might be a good idea.

1. Dissolve "democracy", and not just in the philosophical sense, but in the sense that there have been many different kinds of actually existing democracies.  There are always multiple object-level implementations of any meta-level idea, and most political ideas are sufficiently abstract to count as meta-level.  Even if, for purposes of a thought experiment, you find yourself saying, "I WILL ONLY EVER CONSIDER SYSTEMS THAT COUNT AS DEMOCRACY ACCORDING TO MY INTUITIVE DEMOCRACY-P() PREDICATE!", one can easily debate whether a mixed-member proportional Parliament performs better than a district-based bicameral Congress, or whether a pure Westminster system beats them both, or whether a Presidential system works better, or whatever.  Particular institutional designs yield particular institutional behaviors, and successfully inducing complex generalizations across large categories of institutional designs requires large amounts of evidence -- just as it does in any other form of hierarchical probabilistic reasoning.
2. Dissolve words like "democracy", "capitalism", "socialism", and "government" in the philosophical sense, and ask: what are the terminal goals democracy serves?  How much do we support those goals, and how much do current democratic systems suffer approximation error by forcing our terminal goals to fit inside the hypothesis space our actual institutions instantiate?  For however much we do support those goals, why do we shape these particular institutions to serve those goals, and not other institutions? For all values of X, mah nishtana ha-X hazeh mikol ha-X-im? is a fundamental question of correct reasoning.  (Asking the question of why we instantiate particular institutions in particular places, when one believes in democratic states, is the core issue of democratic socialism, and I would indeed count myself a democratic socialist.  But you get different answers and inferences if you ask about schools or churches, don't you?)
3. Learn first to explicitly identify yourself with a political "tribe", and next to consider political ideas individually, as questions of fact and value subject to investigation via epistemology and moral epistemology, rather than treating politics as "tribal".  Tribalism is the mind-killer: keeping your own explicit tribal identification in mind helps you notice when you're being tribalist, and helps you distinguish your own tribe's customs from universal truths -- both aids to your political rationality.  And yes, while politics has always been at least a little tribal, the particular form the tribes take varies through time and space: the division of society into a "blue tribe" and a "red tribe" (as oft-described by Yvain on Slate Star Codex), for example, is peculiar to late-20th-century and early-21st-century USA.  Those colors didn't even come into usage until the 2000 Presidential election, and hadn't firmly solidified as describing seemingly separate nationalities until 2004!  Other countries, and other times, have significantly different arrangements of tribes, so if you don't learn to distinguish between ideas and tribes, you'll not only fail at political rationality, you'll give yourself severe culture shock the first time you go abroad.
   1. General rule: you often think things are general rules of the world not because you have the large amount of evidence necessary to reason that they really are, but because you've seen so few alternatives that your subjective distribution over models contains only one or two models, both coarse-grained.  Unquestioned assumptions always feel like universal truths from the inside!
4. Learn to check political ideas by looking at the actually-existing implementations, including the ones you currently oppose -- think of yourself as bloody Sauron if you have to!  This works, since most political ideas are not particularly original.  Commons trusts exist, for example, the "movement" supporting them just wants to scale them up to cover all society's important common assets rather than just tracts of land donated by philanthropists.  Universal health care exists in many countries.  Monarchy and dictatorship exist in many countries.  Religious rule exists in many countries.  Free tertiary education exists in some countries, and has previously existed in more.  Non-free but subsidized tertiary education exists in many countries.  Running the state off oil revenue has been tried in many countries.  Centrally-planned economies have been tried in many countries.  And it's damn well easier to compare "Canadian health-care" to "American health-care" to "Chinese health-care", all sampled in 2014, using fact-based policy studies, than to argue about the Visions of Human Life represented by each (the welfare state, the Company Man, and the Lone Fox, let's say) -- which of course assumes consequentialism.  In fact, I should issue a much stronger warning here: argumentation is an utterly unreliable guide to truth compared to data, and all these meta-level political conclusions require vast amounts of object-level data to induce correct causal models of the world that allow for proper planning and policy.
   
   1. This means that while the Soviet Union is not evidence for the total failure of "socialism" as I use the word, that's because I define socialism as a larger category of possible economies that strictly contains centralized state planning -- centralized state planning really was, by and large, a total fucking failure.  But there's a rationality lesson here: in politics, all opponents of an idea will have their own definition for it, but the supporters will only have one.  Learn to identify political terminology with the definitions advanced by supporters: these definitions might contain applause lights, but at least they pick out one single spot in policy-space or society-space (or, hopefully, a reasonably small subset of that space), while opponents don't generally agree on which precise point in policy-space or society-space they're actually attacking (because they're all opposed for their own reasons and thus not coordinating with each-other).
   2. This also means that if someone wants to talk about monarchies that rule by religious right, or even about absolute monarchies in general, they do have to account for the behavior of the Arab monarchies today, for example.  Or if they want to talk about religious rule in general (which very few do, to my knowledge, but hey, let's go with it), they actually do have to account for the behavior of Da3esh/ISIS.  Of course, they might do so by endorsing such regimes, just as some members of Western Communist Parties endorsed the Soviet Union -- and this can happen by lack of knowledge, by failure of rationality, or by difference of goals.
   3. And then of course, there are the complications of the real world: in the real world, neither perfect steelman-level central planning nor perfect steelman-level markets have ever been implemented, anywhere, with the result that once upon a time, the Soviet economy was allocatively efficient and prices in capitalist West Germany were just as bad at reflecting relative scarcities as those in centrally-planned East Germany!  The real advantage of market systems has ended up being the autonomy of firms, not allocative optimality (and that's being argued, right there, in the single most left-wing magazine I know of!).  Which leads us to repeat the warning: correct conclusions are induced from real-world data, not argued from a priori principles that usually turn out to be wildly mis-emphasized if not entirely wrong.
5. Learn to notice when otherwise uninformed people are adopting political ideas as attire to gain status by joining a fashionable cause.  Keep in mind that what constitutes "fashionable" depends on the joiner's own place in society, not on your opinions about them.  For some people, things you and I find low-status (certain clothes or haircuts) are, in fact, high-status.  See Yvain's "Republicans are Douchebags" post for an example in a Western context: names that the American Red Tribe considers solid and respectable are viewed by the American Blue Tribe as "douchebag names".
6. A heuristic that tends to immunize against certain failures of political rationality: if an argument does not base itself at all in facts external to itself or to the listener, but instead concentrates entirely on reinterpreting evidence, then it is probably either an argument about definitions, or sheer nonsense.  This is related to my comments on hierarchical reasoning above, and also to the general sense in which trying to refute an object-level claim by meta-level argumentation is not even wrong, but in fact anti-epistemology.
7. A further heuristic, usable on actual electioneering campaigns the world over: whenever someone says "values", he is lying, and you should reach for your gun.  The word "values" is the single most overused, drained, meaningless word in politics.  It is a normative pronoun: it directs the listener to fill in warm fuzzy things here without concentrating the speaker and the listener on the same point in policy-space at all.  All over the world, politicians routinely seek power on phrases like "I have values", or "My opponent has no values", or "our values" or "our $TRIBE values", or "$APPLAUSE_LIGHT values".  Just cross those phrases and their entire containing sentences out with a big black marker, and then see what the speaker is actually saying.  Sometimes, if you're lucky (ie: voting for a Democrat), they're saying absolutely nothing.  Often, however, the word "values" means, "Good thing I'm here to tell you that you want this brand new oppressive/exploitative power elite, since you didn't even know!"
8. As mentioned above, be very, very sure about what ethical framework you're working within before having a political discussion.  A consequentialist and a virtue-ethicist will often take completely different policy positions on, say, healthcare, and have absolutely nothing to talk about with each-other.  The consequentialist can point out the utilitarian gains of universal single-payer care, and the virtue-ethicist can point out the incentive structure of corporate-sponsored group plans for promoting hard work and loyalty to employers, but they are fundamentally talking past each-other.
   1. Often, the core matter of politics is how to trade off between ethical ideals that are otherwise left talking past each-other, because society has finite material resources, human morals are very complex, and real policies have unintended consequences.  For example, if we enact Victorian-style "poor laws" that penalize poverty for virtue-ethical reasons, the proponents of those laws need to be held accountable for accepting the unintended consequences of those laws, including higher crime rates, a less educated workforce, etc.  (This is a broad point in favor of consequentialism: a rational consequentialist always considers consequences, intended and unintended, or he fails at consequentialism.  A deontologist or virtue-ethicist, on the other hand, has license from his own ethics algorithm to not care about unintended consequences at all, provided the rules get followed or the rules or rulers are virtuous.)
9. Almost all policies can be enacted more effectively with state power, and almost no policies can "take over the world" by sheer superiority of the idea all by themselves.  Demanding that a successful policy should "take over the world" by itself, as everyone naturally turns to the One True Path, is intellectually dishonest, and so is demanding that a policy should be maximally effective in miniature (when tried without the state, or in a small state, or in a weak state) before it is justified for the state to experiment with it.  Remember: the overwhelming majority of journals and conferences in professional science still employ frequentist statistics rather than Bayesianism, and this is 20 years after the PC revolution and the World Wide Web, and 40 years after computers became widespread in universities.  Human beings are utility-satisficing, adaptation-executing creatures with mostly-unknown utility functions: expecting them to adopt more effective policies quickly by mere effectiveness of the policy is downright unrealistic.
10. The Appeal to Preconceptions is probably the single Darkest form of Dark Arts, and it's used everywhere in politics.  When someone says something to you that "stands to reason" or "sounds right", which genuinely seems quite plausible, actually, but without actually providing evidence, you need to interrogate your own beliefs and find the Equivalent Sample Size of the informative prior generating that subjective plausibility before you let yourself get talked into anything.  This applies triply in philosophy.

I know that many people on LessWrong want nothing to do with "neoreaction."  It does seem strange that a website commonly associated with techno-futurism, such as LessWrong, would end up with even the most tangential networked association with an intellectual current, such as neoreaction, that commonly includes nostalgia for absolute monarchies and other avatistic obessions.

Perhaps blame it on Yvain, AKA Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex.com for attaching this strange intellectual node to LessWrong. ; ) That's at least how I found out about neoreaction, and I doubt that I am alone in this.

Certainly many on LessWrong would view any association with "neoreaction" as a Greek gift to be avoided. I understand the concept of keeping "well-kept gardens" and of politics being the "mind-killer," although some at LessWrong have argued that some of the most important questions humanity will face in the next decades will be questions that are unavoidably "political" in nature. Yes, "politics is hard mode," but so is life itself, and you don't get better at hard mode without practicing in hard mode.

LessWrong proclaims itself as a community devoted to refining the art of rationality. One aspect of the art of rationality is locating the true sources of disagreement between two parties who want to communicate with each other, but who can't help but talk past each other in different languages due to having radically different pre-existing assumptions.

I believe that this is the problem that any discourse between neoreaction and progressivism currently faces.

Even if you have no interest at all in neoreaction or progressivism as ideologies, I invite you to read this analysis as a case study in locating sources of disagreement between ideologies that have different unspoken assumptions. I will try to steelman neoreaction as much as I can, despite the fact that I am more sympathetic to the progressivist point of view.

In particular, I am interested in the following question:  to what extent do neoreactionary and progressive disagreements stem from judgments that merely differ in degree?  (For example, being slightly more or less pessimistic about X, Y, and Z propositions).  Or to what extent do neoreactionary and progressive disagreements stem from assumptions that are qualitatively different?

Normative vs. descriptive assumptions

"Normative" statements are "ought" statements, or judgments of value. "Descriptive" statements are "is" statements, or depictions of reality. While neoreaction and progressivism have a lot of differing descriptive assumptions, there is really only one fundamental normative disagreement, which I will address first.

Normative disagreement #1: Progressivism's subjective values vs. Neoreaction's objective[?] values

As I see it, Progressivism says, "Our subjective values are worth pursuing in and of themselves just because it makes us feel good. It does not particularly matter where our values come from. Perhaps we are Cartesian dualists—unmoved movers with free will—who invent our values in an act of existential creation. Or perhaps our values are biological programming—spandrels manufactured by Nature, or as the neoreactionaries personify it, "Gnon." It doesn't matter. In principle, if we could rewire our reward circuits to give us pleasure/fun/novelty/happiness/sadness/tragedy/suffering/whatever we desire* in response to whatever Nature had the automatic (or modified) disposition to offer us, then those good feelings would be just as worthwhile as anything else. (This is why neoreactionaries perceive progressive values as "nihilistic.")

According to this formulation, most LessWrongers, being averse to wireheading in principle, are not full-fledged progressives at this most fundamental level.  (Perhaps this explains some of the counter-intuitive overlap between the LessWrong and neoreactionary thoughtsphere....) 

[Editorial:  In my view, coming to terms with the obvious benefit of wireheading is the ultimate "red pill" to swallow. I am a progressive who would happily wirehead as long as I had concluded beforehand that I had adequately secured its completely automatic perpetuation even in the absence of any further input from me...although an optional override to shut it down and return me to the non-wireheaded state would not be unwelcome, just in case I had miscalculated and found that the system did not attend to my every wish as anticipated.]

*Note that I am aware that our subjective values are complex and that we are "Godshatter." Nevertheless, this does not seem to me to be a fundamental impediment to wireheading. In principle, we should be able to dissect every last little bit of this "Godshatter" and figure out exactly what we want in all of its diversity...and then we can start designing a system of wireheading to give it to us. Is this not what Friendly AI is all about? Doesn't Friendly AI = Wireheading Done "Right"? Alternatively, we could re-wire ourselves to not be Godshatter, and to have a very simple list of things that would make us feel good. I am open to either one. LessWrongers, being neoreactionaries at heart (see below), would insist on maintaining our human complexity, our Godshatter values, and making our wireheading laboriously work around that. Okay, fine. I'll compromise...as long as I get my wireheading in some form. ; )

Neoreaction says, "There is objective value in the principle of "perpetuating biological and/or civilizational complexity" itself*; the best way to perpetuate biological and/or civilizational complexity is to "serve Gnon" (i.e. devote our efforts to fulfilling nature's pre-requisites for perpetuating our biologial and/or civilizational complexity); our subjective values are spandrels manufactured by natural selection/Gnon; insofar as our subjective values motivate us to serve Gnon and thereby ensure the perpetuation of biological and/or civilizational complexity, our subjective values are useful. (For example, natural selection makes sex a subjective value by making it pleasurable, which then motivates us to perpetuate our biological complexity). But, insofar as our subjective values mislead us from serving Gnon (such as by making non-procreative sex still feel good) and jeopardize our biological/civilizational perpetuation, we must sacrifice our subjective values for the objective good of perpetuating our biological/civilizational complexity" (such as by buckling down and having procreative sex even if one would personally rather not enjoy raising kids).

*Note that different NRx thinkers might have different definitions about what counts as biological or civilizational "complexity" worthy of perpetuating...it could be "Western Civilization," "the White Race," "Homo sapiens," "one's own genetic material," "intelligence, whether encoded in human brains or silicon AI," "human complexity/Godshatter," etc. This has led to the so-called "neoreactionary trichotomy"—3 wings of the neoreactionary movement: Christian traditionalists, ethno-nationalists, and techno-commercialists. 

Most LessWrongers probably agree with neoreactionaries on this fundamental normative assumption, with the typical objective good of LessWrongers being "human complexity/Godshatter," and thus the "techno-commercialist" wing of neoreaction being the one that typically finds the most interest among LessWrongers.

[Editorial:  pesumably, each neoreactionary is choosing his/her objective target of allegiance (such as "Western Civilization") because of the warm fuzzies that the idea elicits in him/herself. Has it ever occurred to neoreactionaries that humans' occasional predilection for being awed by a system bigger than themselves (such as "Western Civilization") and sacrificing for that system is itself a "mere" evolutionary spandrel?]

Now, in an attempt to steelman neoreaction's normative assumption, I would characterize it thus: "In the most ultimate sense, neoreactionaries find the pursuit of subjective values just as worthwhile as progressives do. However, neoreactionaries are aware that human beings are short-sighted creatures with finite discount windows. If we tell ourselves that we should pursue our subjective values, we won't end up pursuing those subjective values in a farsighted way that involves, for example, maintaining a functioning civilization so that people continue to follow laws and don't rob or stab each other. Instead, we will invariably party it up and pursue short-term subjective values to the detriment of our long-term subjective values. So instead of admitting to ourselves that we are really interested in subjective value in the long run, we have to tell ourselves a noble lie that we are actually serving some higher objective purpose in order to motivate our primate brains to stick to what will happen to be good for subjective values in the long run."

Indeed, I have found some neoreactionary writers muse on the problem of wanting to believe in God because it would serve as a unifying and motivating objective good, and lamenting the fact that they cannot bring themselves to do so.

Now, onto the descriptive disagreements....

Descriptive assumption #1: Humanity can master nature (progressivism) vs. Nature will always end up mastering humanity (neoreaction).

Whereas progressives tend to have optimism that humankind can incrementally master the laws of nature (not change them, but master them, as in intelligently work around them, much like how we have worked around but not changed gravitation by inventing airplanes), neoreactionaries have a dour pessimism that humankind under-estimates the extent to which the laws of nature constantly pull our puppet strings.  Far from being able to ever master nature, humankind will always be mastered by nature, by nature's command to "race to the bottom" in order to out-reproduce, out-compete one's rivals, even if that means having to sacrifice the nice things in life.

For specific ways in which nature threatens to master humanity unless humanity somehow finds a way to exert tremendous efforts at collective coordination against nature, see Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch."

Most progressives presumably hold out hope that we can collectively coordinate to overcome Moloch.  If nature and its incentives threaten humanity with the strongest and most ruthless conquering the weak and charitable, perhaps we create a world government to prevent that.  If nature and its incentives drive down wages to subsistence level, perhaps we create a global minimum wage.  If humanity is threatened with dysgenic decline, perhaps a democratic world government organizes a eugenics program. 

Descriptive assumption #2:  On average, people have, or can be trained to have, far-sighted discount functions (progressivism), vs. people typically have short-sighted discount functions (neoreaction). 

Part of the progressive assumption about humanity being able to master nature is that ordinary people are rational enough to see the big picture and submit to such controls if they are needed to avoid the disasters of Moloch.  Part of the neoreactionary assumption about nature always mastering humanity is that, except for some bright outliers, most people are short-sighted primates who will insist on trading long-term well-being for short-term frills.

Descriptive assumption #3: Culture is a variable mostly dependent on material conditions (progressivism) vs. Culture is an independent variable with respect to material conditions (neoreaction).

Neoreactionaries often claim that life seems so much better in modern times in comparison to, say, 400 years ago, only because of our technological advancement since then has compensated for, and hidden, how our culture has rotted in the meantime. Neoreactionaries argue that, if one could combine our modern technology with, let's say, an absolute monarchy, then life would be so much better. This assumption of being able to mix & match material conditions and political systems, or material conditions and culture, depends on an assumption that culture and social institutions are essentially independent variables. Perhaps with enough will, we can try to make any set of technologies work well with any set of cultural and social institutions.

Progressives, whether they realize it or not, are probably subtly influenced, instead, by the "historical materialist" (AKA Marxist) view of society which argues that certain material conditions and material incentives tend to automatically generate certain cultural and social responses.

For example, to Marx, increased agricultural productivity in the late middle ages and Renaissance due to better agricultural technologies was a pre-requisite for the "Acts of Enclosure" in England, which booted the "surplus" farmers off of the farms and into the cities as propertyless proletarians who would be willing to work for a wage. Likewise, technologies like steam power were pre-requisites for providing an unprecedentedly profitable way of employing these proletarians to make a profit. (Otherwise, the proletarians might have just been left to rot on the street unemployed, with their numbers dwindling in Malthusian fashion). And because there were new avenues for making a profit, the people who stood to gain from chasing these new profit incentives produced new cultural habits and laws that would enable them to pursue these incentives more effectively. One of these new sets of laws was "laissez-faire" economics. Another was liberal democracy.

To a progressive, the proposition that we could, even theoretically, run our modern technological society through an absolute monarchy would probably seem preposterous. It is not even an option. Our modern society is too complex, with too many conflicting interests to reconcile through any system that prohibits the peaceful discovery and negotiation of these varied interests through a democratic process involving "voice." In reality, people are not content with being able only to exercise the "right of exit" from institutions or governments that they don't like. Perhaps the powerless have no choice but to immigrate. But elites have, historically, more often chosen to stand and fight rather than gracefully exit. Hence, feudalism, civil wars brought on by crises of royal succession, Masonic orders, factions, political parties, "special interest groups," and so on.

Progressives would say, "Do you honestly think that you can tame these beasts, when even a dictator like Hitler was just as much beholden to juggling interest groups and power blocs around him as he was the real dictator of events?" Ah, but the neoreactionaries will say, "Hitler's Nazism was still "demotist." It made the mistake of trying to justify itself to the public, if not through elections, then at least implicitly. We won't do that." To which progressives might say, "You might not want to justify yourself to the rabble and to elite power blocs, but they will demand it—and not because they are all infected by some mysterious mental virus called the "Cathedral," but because they see a way to gain an advantage through politics, and in the modern era they have the means and coordination to effectively fight for it."

These are just examples. The take-away point is that, for progressives, culture appears to be more of a dependent variable, not a variable that is independent of material conditions. So, according to progressives, you can't say, "Let's just combine today's technology with absolute monarchy, and voilà!"

Descriptive assumption #4: Western society is currently anabolic/ascendant (progressivism) vs. catabolic/decadent (neoreaction).

Neoreaction often gets caricatured as claiming that "things are getting worse" or "have been getting worse for the past x number of years." This paints a weak straw-man of neoreaction because, on the surface, things seem so much "obviously" better now than ever. However, this isn't quite what neoreactionaries claim.

Neoreactionaries actually claim that Western society is decaying (note the subtle difference). Western society is gradually weakening its ability to reproduce itself. It is, to use a farming metaphor, eating up its seed-corn on present consumption, on insant gratification, which causes things to seem really swell on the surface...for now. However, according to neoreactionaries, conditions might not yet be getting worse on average (although they will point to inner city violence and other signs that conditions already have started to get worse in some places), but Western society's "capital stock" is getting worse, is already dwindling.

Envisioned more broadly, a society's "capital" is not just its money. It is its entire basket of tangible and intangible assets that help it reproduce and expand itself. So a society's "capital" would also include things like its citizens, its birth rates, its habits of harmonious gender relations, its education, its habits of civil propriety, its sustaining myths (such as patriotism or religion), its infrastructure, its environmental health [although NRxers tend to not focus on this], etc.

Another term for "decadence" might be "catabolic collapse." A catabolic collapse is when an organism starts consuming its own muscles, its own seed-corn, if you will, in a last-ditch effort to stay alive. By contrast, an "anabolic" process is one that builds muscle—one that saves up capital, if you will. (Hence, "anabolic" steroids).

Neoreactionaries believe that Western society is currently headed for a "catabolic collapse."  (See John Michael Greer, author of "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse."  Oddly enough, John Michael Greer started out 10 years ago as a trendy name in anarcho-primitivist intellectual circles.  Now his ideas have been embraced by some neoreactionaries such as Nick Land, which makes me ponder whether anarcho-primitivism is really of the "left" or "right" to begin with...)

When it comes to progressives, most, I think, would argue that Western society is not currently catabolic/decadent. Granted, they would point to some problems with "unsustainability," especially with regards to environmental pollution, resource depletion, and maybe public debt levels (especially worrisome to the libertarian-minded). But on the whole, progressives are still optimistic that these problems can be overcome without rolling back liberal democracy.

Now, let's look at some specific worries that neoreaction has about Western decadence....

Descriptive Assumption #5: Our biggest population threat is overshoot and the attendant resource depletion, environmental pollution, and immiseration of living standards (progressivism) vs. Our biggest population threat is a demographic death spiral (neoreaction).

One thing I have noticed when looking at neoreactionary websites is that they are really obsessed with birth rates! They argue that countries with fertility below replacement level are on the road to annihilation. I found this interesting because my first impulse is to feel like this globe is getting too damn crowded.

Perhaps neoreactionaries envision the birth rates to stay below replacement level from here on out—that this is a permanent change. Perhaps they foresee world population following a sort of bell-shaped curve. My naive progressive assumption is that our population is already in a slight overshoot beyond what can be sustained at our current level of technology, and that any present declines in birth rates are probably just enough to bring us into the oscillating plateau of a typical S-shaped popoulation curve, and that better economic prospects could easily reverse the trend. My naive progressive assumption is that raising kids will remain sufficiently fun and interesting to a large enough pool of adults that, given enough of a feeling of economic security, people will happily continue having kids in sufficient numbers to prevent a die-off of Homo sapiens. In other words, most progressives like myself would not see the need to roll back gender norms in Western society at the present time for the sake of popping out more babies.

Perhaps what worries neoreactionaries, though, is not so much the fear of a global planetary baby shortage, but rather a localized baby shortage among Westerners or Whites. Maybe they fear that all babies are not created equal....

Descriptive assumption #6: "Immigrants are OK" (progressivism) vs. "Immigrants will jeopardize Western Civilization/the White Race/intelligent human complexity/etc." (neoreaction)

Progressives say, "It is not a big deal if Western society has to import some immigrants to keep its population topped off. Immigrant cultures will eventually blend with the "nativist" culture. Historically, this has turned out OK, despite xenophobic fears every time that it will end in disaster. The immigrants will mostly assimilate into the nativist culture. The nativist culture will pick up a few new habits from the immigrants (some of them helpful, some of them harmful, but on the balance nothing disastrous). Nor will the immigrants dirty the nativist gene pool with bad genes. As far as we can tell so far, no significant genetic differences in intelligence and/or physical vigor exist between immigrants and non-immigrants."

Neoreactionaries say, "It is a very big deal if Western society has to import some immigrants to keep its population topped off. Immigrant cultures will not assimilate with the nativist culture. Immigrant cultures will end up imparting a net influene of bad habits on the native culture. Civil decency will be eroded. Crime and societal dysfunction will increase. The native gene pool will also be dirtied with lower-intelligence immigrant genes. (And the only reason we can't see this is because the progressive Establishment AKA the "Cathedral" has systematically distorted the research and discourse around IQ). At worst, Western cities will act as "IQ Shredders." Any intelligent immigrants who seize economic opportunities in wealthy Western cities will see their fertility rates plummet, and the idiots will inherit the Earth à la the movie "Idiocracy"."

More to come in subsequent parts....

Alrighty, with the mass downvoters gone, I can make the leap to posting some ideas. Here's the Humor Theory I've been developing over the last few months and have discussed at Meet-Ups, and have written two SSRN papers about, in one page. I've taken the document I posted on the Facebook group and retyped and formatted it here.

I strongly suspect that it's the correct solution to this unsolved problem. There was even a new neurology study released in the last few days that confirms one of the predictions I drew from this theory about the evolution of human intelligence.

Note that I tried to fit as much info as I could on the page, but obviously it's not enough space to cover everything, and the other papers are devoted to that. Any constructive questions, discussion etc are welcome.

A "Holy Grail" Humor Theory in One Page.

Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and hundreds of other philosophers have tried to understand humor. No one has ever found a single idea that explains it in all its forms, or shows what's sufficient to create it. Thus, it's been called a "Holy Grail" of social science. Consider this...

In small groups without language, where we evolved, social orders were needed for efficiency. But fighting for leadership would hurt them. So a peaceful, nonverbal method was extremely beneficial. Thus, the "gasp" we make when seeing someone fall evolved into a rapid-fire version at seeing certain failures, which allowed us to signal others to see what happened, and know who not to follow. The reaction, naturally, would feel good and make us smile, to lower our aggression and show no threat. This reaction is called laughter. The instinct that controls it is called humor. It's triggered by the brain weighing things it observes in the proportion:

Humor = ((Quality_expected - Quality_displayed) * Noticeability * Validity) / Anxiety

Or H=((Qe-Qd)NV)/A. When the results of this ratio are greater than 0, we find the thing funny and will laugh, in the smallest amounts with slight smiles, small feelings of pleasure or small diaphragm spasms. The numerator terms simply state that something has to be significantly lower in quality than what we assumed, and we must notice it and feel it's real, and the denominator states that anxiety lowers the reaction. This is because laughter is a noisy reflex that threatens someone else's status, so if there is a chance of violence from the person, a danger to threatening a loved one's status, or a predator or other threat from making noise, the reflex will be mitigated. The common feeling amongst those situations, anxiety, has come to cause this.

This may appear to be an ad hoc hypothesis, but unlike those, this can clearly unite and explain everything we've observed about humor, including our cultural sayings and the scientific observations of the previous incomplete theories. Some noticed that it involves surprise, some noticed that it involves things being incorrect, all noticed the pleasure without seeing the reason. This covers all of it, naturally, and with a core concept simple enough to explain to a child. Our sayings, like "it's too soon" for a joke after a tragedy, can all be covered as well ("too soon" indicates that we still have anxiety associated with the event).

The previous confusion about humor came from a few things. For one, there are at least 4 types of laughter: At ourselves, at others we know, at others we don't know (who have an average expectation), and directly at the person with whom we're speaking. We often laugh for one reason instead of the other, like "bad jokes" making us laugh at the teller. In addition, besides physical failure, like slipping, we also have a basic laugh instinct for mental failure, through misplacement. We sense attempts to order things that have gone wrong. Puns and similar references trigger this. Furthermore, we laugh loudest when we notice multiple errors (quality-gaps) at once, like a person dressed foolishly (such as a court jester), exposing errors by others.

We call this the "Status Loss Theory," and we've written two papers on it. The first is 6 pages, offers a chart of old theories and explains this more, with 7 examples. The second is 27 pages and goes through 40 more examples, applying this concept to sayings, comedians, shows, memes, and other comedy types, and even drawing predictions from the theory that have been verified by very recent neurology studies, to hopefully exhaustively demonstrate the idea's explanatory power. If it's not complete, it should still make enough progress to greatly advance humor study. If it is, it should redefine the field. Thanks for your time.

A pattern of cognitive biases not yet discussed here are the biases due to having a narcissistic parent who seeks validation through the child’s academic achievements.

HPMOR clearly shows these biases: Harry's mother is narcissistic, impressed by education, and not particularly smart, and Harry does not realize how this affects his thinking.

Here is my evidence:

The Sorting Hat says Harry is driven by "the fear of losing your fantasy of greatness, of disappointing the people who believe in you" (Ch. 77). Psychology texts say that this fear is what children of a narcissistic parent usually feel. The child feels perpetually ignored because the narcissistic parent seeks validation from the child's accomplishments but refuses to actually listen to the child, spurring the child to ever greater heights of intellectual achievement. 

The text supports this view: “Always Harry had been encouraged to study whatever caught his attention, bought all the books that caught his fancy...given anything reasonable that he wanted, except, maybe, the slightest shred of respect” and “Petunia wrung her hands. She seemed to be on the verge of tears. "My love, I know I can't win arguments with you, but please, you have to trust me on this … I want my husband to, to listen to his wife who loves him, and trust her just this once - " (Ch. 1) describes a narcissistic, anxiously needy mother, an avoidant father, and a son whose parents provide for his physical needs but neglect his need for respect (ego). “If you conceived of yourself as a Good Parent, you would do it. But take a ten-year-old seriously? Hardly.” (Ch. 1) 

Harry goes Dark when the connection to his family is threatened. For example: "The black rage began to drain away, as it dawned on him that...his family wasn't in danger [of legal separation]" (ch. 5) indicates that Harry went Dark even though no one’s life was threatened. The cost of Harry’s Dark Side is becoming an adult at a young age: Harry says, “Every time I call on it... it uses up my childhood.” (Ch. 91). This is consistent with spending nearly all free time studying (instead of wasting time with friends) to impress Harry’s mother.

Typically, children of narcissistic parents inherit either narcissistic or people-pleasing traits. I predicted that if my theory is correct then Harry would have a narcissistic personality. To test this, I found a list of personality traits that describe a narcissist (by Googling “children of narcissistic parents” and clicking the first link), and compared with Harry’s personality as described in HPMOR. I got a 100% match. Questions and answers are as follows: 

1. Grandiose sense of self-importance? Check. Harry plans to “optimize” the entire Universe, expects to “do something really revolutionary and important” (Ch. 7), and is trying to “hurry up and become God” (Ch. 27).

2. Obsessed with himself? Check. He appears to only care about people who are smarter or more powerful than him -- people who can help him. He also has contempt for most students and their interests (Quidditch, etc.)

3. Goals are selfish? Check. Harry claims to want to save everyone, but he believes the best way to help others is to increase his own power most quickly. I address two possible objections below:

Harry’s involvement in the Azkaban breakout was selfish, because Harry could not risk losing Quirrell’s friendship: “ It was a bond that went beyond anything of debts owed, or even anything of personal liking, that the two of them were alone in the wizarding world” (Ch. 51). This, again, mirrors a child’s relationship with a narcissistic mother: the child cannot risk losing the mother’s protection. Harry also had selfish reasons for hearing Quirrell’s plan: “There was no advantage to be gained from not hearing it. And if it did reveal something wrong with Professor Quirrell, then it was very much to Harry's advantage to know it, even if he had promised not to tell anyone.” (Ch. 49)

Harry’s efforts to save Hermione are also selfish because Harry sees Hermione in the same way he sees his mother -- weak in many ways and bound by emotions and convention, but someone Harry must impress and protect. Harry’s statement that “it’s disrespectful to her, to think someone could only like her in that way” (ch. 91) makes sense because Harry is disgusted by the Oedipal implications. If Harry’s mother was not narcissistic, then Harry would not have worked so hard to impress Hermione and would have been less disgusted by the thought of being sexually attracted to her.

4. Troubles with normal relationships? Check. Harry is playing high-stakes mind games with the people he is closest to (Quirrell, Draco, Hermione, Dumbeldore), which is not normal friend behavior. Harry has contempt for nearly everyone else.

5. Becomes furious if criticized? Check. When Snape mocked Harry in Potions class, Harry tried to destroy Snape’s career. Quirrell explained, “When it looked like you might lose, you unsheathed your claws, heedless of the danger. You escalated, and then you escalated again” (Ch. 19).

6. Has fantasies of unbound success, power, intelligence, etc.? Check. Harry wants to conquer the entire Universe with the power of his intelligence, and has plans for how to fill an eternity, including to “...meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out…” (Ch. 39).

7. Believes that he is special and should only be around other high-status people? Check. Harry avoids average students when possible, and certainly does not hang out with them for fun. “Note to self: The 75th percentile of Hogwarts students a.k.a. Ravenclaw House is not the world's most exclusive program for gifted children” (Ch. 12). 

Harry’s association with the (presumably non-special) students in his army is not an exception because minimal text is devoted to Harry instructing them, while much text explains how powerful and high-status the students in the army have become. For Harry, it appears that the army is a tool to use and an opportunity to show off, not an opportunity to give back and help friends improve their skills for their own sake.

8. Requires extreme admiration for everything? Check. Harry takes anything less than admiration for his brilliance as an insult, and responds by striving for new levels of intellectual achievement and arrogance, until the others recognize his dominance. “And I bit a math teacher when she wouldn't accept my dominance” (Ch. 20). Quirrell’s lesson on how to lose described how to avoid making powerful enemies, not how to empathize and care for others -- the insatiable need for admiration is merely delayed and repressed, not corrected.

9. Feels entitled - has unreasonable expectations of special treatment? Check. Harry requires subservience from the school administration, and special magic items such as the time-turner. “McGonagall said, "but I do have a very special something else to give you. I see that I have greatly wronged you in my thoughts, Mr. Potter...this is an item which is ordinarily lent only to children who have already shown themselves to be highly responsible” (Ch. 14).

10. Takes advantage of others to further his own need? Check. Harry justifies his actions toward Draco by saying "I only used you in ways that made you stronger. That's what it means to be used by a friend." (Ch. 97)

11. Does not recognize the feelings of others? Check. One example is Harry not realizing how Neville felt about the prank on the train to Hogwarts. Another is Harry’s remarkably clueless question to Hermione, “Er, can I take it from this that you have been through puberty?" (Ch. 87) Harry has not learned empathy yet: “Harry flinched a little himself. Somewhere along the line he needed to pick up the knack of not phrasing things to hit as hard as he possibly could” (Ch. 86). 

12. Envious or believes they are envied? Check. Quirrell said to Harry, “You have everything now that I wanted then. All that I know of human nature says that I should hate you. And yet I do not. It is a very strange thing.” (Ch. 74)

13. Behaves arrogantly? Check. “Minerva's body swayed with the force of that blow, with the sheer raw lese majeste. Even Severus looked shocked.” (Ch. 19) I can’t think offhand of a single instance when Harry is not arrogant. 

Therefore, I conclude that Harry and Harry’s mother are both narcissistic. If you want further reading on this topic, look up "The Drama of the Gifted Child" by Dr. Alice Miller (Google for the .pdf) for a more detailed description of a child’s typical relationship with a narcissistic parent.

I am sharing this because it reveals a pattern of cognitive biases that many people (like me) who enjoyed HPMOR, and their parents, probably have. Specifically, there is a strong bias toward either narcissistic or people-pleasing habits, and a difficulty with recognizing and following one’s own desires (because the Universe, unlike a parent, never tells people what to do). One possible reason for studying science is to defend against a parent’s emotional neediness and refusal to provide ego-validation by building an impenetrable edifice of logical truth. Unfortunately, identifying the parent’s cognitive biases does not stop their criticism. A more pleasant strategy is to recognize the dynamic, mourn the warping of childhood by the controlling parenting, set appropriate boundaries in the future, and draw validation from following one’s own goals instead of an internalized parent’s goals.

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/the-economics-of-social-status/

Discusses a number of aspects of social status, including the "social status as currency" concept that Morendil and I previously wrote about.

Now we get to the really interesting stuff: the economic properties of social status.

Let’s start with transactions, since they form the basis of an economy. Status is part of our system for competing over scarce resources, so it should be no surprise that it participates in so many of our daily transactions. Some examples:

• We trade status for favors (and vice versa). This is so common you might not even realize it, but even the simple act of saying “please” and “thank you” accords a nominal amount of status to the person doing the favor. The fact that status is at stake in these transactions becomes clear when the pleasantries are withheld, which we often interpret as an insult (i.e., a threat to our status).
• An apology is a ritual lowering of one’s status to compensate for a (real or perceived) affront. As with gratitude, withholding an apology is perceived as an insult.
• We trade status for information (and vice versa). This is one component of “powertalk,” as illustrated in the Gervais Principle series.
• We trade status for sex (and vice versa), which often goes by the name “seduction.” Sometimes even the institution of marriage functions as a sex-for-status transaction. Dowries illustrate this principle by working against it — they reinforce class/caste systems by making it harder for high-status men to marry low-status women.
• We reward employees in the form of institutionalized status (titles, promotions, parking spots), which trade off against salary as a form of compensation.
• We can turn money into status by means of conspicuous consumption, or status into money by means of endorsement (i.e., being paid to lend status to an endeavor).

But the part that I found the most interesting was the idea of defining communities via their status standards:

Previously we defined status with respect to a community, but we could also flip it around:

A community is a group of people who agree on how to measure status among their members.

In other words, it’s a group of people who share a common status currency. Silicon Valley, for example, is a community oriented around a particular way of measuring status — the ability to influence the growth of engineering companies. But Silicon-Valley status won’t buy you anything in Hollywood — unless you convert it to something that makes sense in the Hollywood economy. (Financial wealth usually does the trick).

This definition allows us not only to draw boundaries between communities (porous and fuzzy though they may be), but also allows us to discuss the strength of a community, i.e., the level of agreement about how to measure status. Google, for example, is a fairly strong community insofar as Googlers agree on how to measure status among themselves, but Google engineering might be an even stronger community.

Treating communities as “status-currency blocs” helps explain how there’s relatively free trade (at low transaction costs) within the community — and also how trade is distorted across community boundaries. The fluctuating ‘exchange rates’ and asymmetric information make cross-community interaction more difficult. When a Google VP walks into a meeting with some employees from Facebook, say, everyone will be unsure about their relative statuses, and the group will have to spend time and effort (and a lot of posturing) in order to figure it out.

The “currency bloc” metaphor also helps explain both the benefits and the costs of institutional re-orgs. Merging two organizations, for example, can increase economic efficiency (by standardizing on a single status currency and thereby facilitating more interaction/trade), but the integration will also require some ‘repricing’ — with resistance from everyone who loses out.

The article has a lot more.

I'd like to ask everyone: Have LessWrong.com and related online rationalist/transhumanist/Singularitarian communities connected you to people for purposes beyond discussion?

• A new job, employee, business partner, cofounder, or professional mentor 
• A romantic partner 
• A friend
• A PhD adviser
• An apartment-mate 
• A host when you're traveling 

Bonus points if an online contact led to an important connection. We already know that face-to-face meetups are a great way to meet people, so I'm curious about connections triggered by online interaction.  

I have seen scattered mentions that each of the above has happened, but not enough to get a strong impression of what's going on.

Please answer in comments below. By doing so, you'll be providing social proof that LW and the like can accomplish these things, and so encourage more to happen, increasing happiness in the world.

I added one myself to start.

2,600 words.

Less Wrong includes discussion of the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) that is friendly to man. What is discussed less often is why a friendly AI (FAI) is advocated. One explanation might be an unspoken belief in natural rights. The deletion policies at Less Wrong might be evidence that Less Wrong holds a belief in natural rights. This essay suggests a belief in natural rights is an impediment to the creation of an AI, friendly or not friendly. This essay suggests ways a belief in natural rights may be incorrect, and encourages discussion of the creation of AIs without a belief in natural rights on the part of Less Wrong.

Some evidence for a belief in natural rights at Less Wrong is found in the deletion policies. Less Wrong has a non-binding deletion policy against “hypothetical violence against identifiable targets.”

In general, grownups in real life tend to walk through a lot of other available alternatives before resorting to violence. To paraphrase Isaac Asimov, having your discussion jump straight to violence as a solution to any given problem, is a strong sign of incompetence - a form of juvenile locker-room talk.

The deletion policy is clear about what topics and forms of discussion may result in deletion of posts. Less Wrong also has a clear policy statement about what topics and forms of discussion may result in the contacting of legal or medical authorities. These are discussions of suicide, self-harm, “violent content” and discussion of hypothetical violence against identifiable targets.

Two reasons are given for these deletion and reporting policies. First, post may be deleted because such discussion are “incompetence - a form of juvenile locker-room talk.” Second, we “should consider the worst and act accordingly. Treat all claims seriously and as an emergency.” The two reasons appear to be in contradiction. Discussion of hypothetical violence against identifiable targets is both incompetent and juvenile and the worst and a serious emergency. Those said to have such discussions are both all talk and no action and all action and not competent talkers. Other problems exist with the deletion / contact authorities policy. Less Wrong is an international forum, but the laws of all nation are not in agreement. A clear call to violence in one nation is not recognized as such in another. For example, abortion is considered a form of murder by the laws of the Holy See, the Dominican Republic, Chile and other places. But discussion of abortion does not trigger the deletion / contacting authorities policy at Less Wrong. The ideal cryogenic preservation would occur before death. Although the laws of every nation consider this to be murder, to say so here will not trigger the deletion / reporting policies. Advocates of cryogenics might say that all those who hamper cryogenics are murderers and all those who refuse it are suicides, but again the policies are not triggered. Finally, it is unclear who will do the reporting (members? administrators?), which authorities they will report to (medical? legal? clergy? local? national? international?) and what they will report (quotations from the source? drafts? edited posts? private messages?).

A desire to adhere to the law is not a sufficient explanation for the deletion / contacting authorities policy of Less Wrong. I have a theory that may explain these policies. I suggest a belief natural rights is the reason for these policies. In particular, a natural right to continuing to be alive. A natural right to not be murdered is considered by some self-evident such that it is not mentioned. There are topics at Less Wrong that are not only unmentioned but mentionable. I suggest no topic is toxic when discussed among those willing to discuss it, and to banish a topic as toxic is and looks foolish. Any number of reasons exist to banish a topic, and the administrators of Less Wrong do nothing to forbid other forums in their discussion of any topic. But the pointed laughter by outsiders because a certain topic is forbidden at Less Wrong is well earned. I hope my discussion of natural rights is not likewise forbidden.

As part of my discussion, a few words on what I mean when I use the phrase natural rights. And prior to that, a few words on rights in general. A right is an action not to be forbidden by others. A right can be considered a legal right, a divine right, a blood right or a natural right. I have already discussed legal rights. A divine right is said to be a right granted by an invisible monster that lives in the sky. There is no invisible monster that lives in the sky, and so no divine rights exist. A blood right is said to be a right that a person or group has by lineage. In the past many royal families defended their rule and were respected in their rule because of their bloodlines. Today blood rights are almost entirely subsumed into legal rights. Native Americans in the United States have legal rights that are based on their bloodlines, but these are legal rights. Distinct from divine rights, legal rights and blood rights are natural rights.

Natural rights are action not to be forbidden by others because of the mere existence of the subject (usually, an individual). Natural rights are said to be held by those who are born, those who are alive, those who are in possession of their faculties. Natural rights are said to be identical to divine rights save for a lack of claims about an invisible monster that lives in the sky. To exist at all is to have natural rights, according to those who claim natural rights exist. The defining quality of natural rights is not any particular right but that they are natural, self-evident, incontestable, unavoidable, immutable, impossible to give up or transfer. Natural rights are natural in the way that molecules are natural.

There are strong arguments against the existence of natural rights.

• Natural rights are said to be the foundation of legal rights. But they are also said to be the evidence of legal rights. This is circular logic.

• A lack of agreement of what is and is a natural right. Other forces considered natural, such as gravity, do not follow opinion or culture.

• A lack of evidence that natural rights exist compared to the great deal of evidence that what are called natural rights are legal rights over-sold.

• A lack of delineation between generations of humans, a lack of delineation between humans and pre-humans, a lack of delineation between living and non-living things… that is, a lack of a non-opinion / non-culture delineation between what has a natural right and what does not (and should all things have natural rights, the term then has little meaning).

• Diversity. There is no reason to claim no one had a natural right to kill others. One man might claim or even have a natural right to live, but another man might claim or even have a natural right to take his life. If the argument ‘that is my nature’ is acceptable to things we like, it is acceptable to things we don’t like. If it isn’t acceptable to things we don’t like, that in itself is an argument that natural rights aren’t universal - thus not natural). Intelligence, beauty, strength, sociability, none of these are equitably distributed. Natural rights, if they existed, would likely also not be equitably distributed.

• Unenforcability. We have descriptions of motion and mass that are increasingly accurate and useful but what is described would exist without our description of it. No social structure is needed to enforce gravity. Natural rights, however, exist only as much as human laws support them while claiming to be as objective (natural) to man as gravity, motion and mass.

• Divine, blood and legal rights are always paired to responsibilities. We must mumble magic spells to the invisible monster that lives in the sky, and in turn we have a divine right to do what the wizards serving that invisible monster say. We must preserve our bloodline, and in turn we have a blood right to certain properties and practices. We have legal responsibilities in driving a car, and in turn we have the legal right to drive a car. Natural rights lack this pairing. There are no natural responsibilities that pair with natural rights. The natural right to life an individual is said to have is paired with a legal responsibility of others not to murder the individual, but this is clearly force marriage. A man may be said to have a natural right to live, but he is not said to have a responsibility to live. There are advocates of forced living, and I suggest they are immoral.

In discussing natural rights I usually hear three counter-arguments. The first is the Appeal to Shut Up Because Trevor Blake is a Bad Person. The second is no one “really” thinks natural rights are natural rights. The third is a quiet agreement that natural rights do not exist but that it is vital to pretend as if they do because other people could not control their behavior if they thought natural rights did not exist. The first argument may be true, I may be a bad person, but it does not disprove my claim natural rights do not exist. The second argument is false. Claimants of natural rights do consider natural rights as real as gristle, galaxies and gravity. The third argument may be true but has implications for artificial intelligence that I will expand on below.

Some say if we do not pretend to believe in natural rights, men will do bad things. I can describe one agent who has existence, identity and is alive who does not have natural rights and does not have a belief in natural rights. That agent is myself. I have never killed anyone and I hope to never kill anyone nor be killed. Because I prefer it to be so, and because I have a legal (but not natural) natural right to not be killed. I have worked for homeless teenagers, for the disabled, for students in K–12 schools and in colleges. I have worked in bookstores. I have donated time and money to charity. I never once swore around my grandparents and can count on the thumbs of one hand the number of times I’ve sworn around my parents. I am a generally nice man. To the extent one example counts for anything, let this one example count for something.

A few more examples of those who did not hold natural rights or a belief in natural rights might also count for something. Max Stirner wrote “The Ego and Its Own” and harmed no one. Dora Marsden wrote many journals of egoism and several books and harmed no one. L. A. Rollins wrote “The Myth of Natural Rights” and harmed no one. Anton LaVey wrote “The Satanic Bible” and harmed no one. And me, well, I wrote “Confessions of a Failed Egoist” and so far so good eh? The majority of those who write that natural rights do not exist refrain from harming others. Carl Panzram is a rare and perhaps singular exception. When I consider those who have harmed others, they uniformly say they had an extra-legal right to do as they did, and sometimes a natural right.

I hope I have said enough about natural rights that I will not be misunderstood. I will now address how an apparent belief in natural rights is influencing the discussion of a potential artificial intelligence.

The effort to make a friendly AI is the effort to make an artificial intelligence that acts as if or believes that humans have natural rights, at minimum the natural right to not be murdered. The effort assumes humans in the future have the natural right to not be murdered by an artificial intelligence and perhaps by extension so do humans today. The natural right of humans to not be murdered by an artificial intelligence is extended to include preventing actions by an AI that as a by-product would violate that natural right.

To instill in an AI a belief in natural rights, or prescribe / prohibit actions that follow from a claimed belief in natural rights, is to instill much more. It is to instill rights in a machine that we humans do not have. It is to instill falsehoods as if they were true. It is to delay the creation of an AI while the contradictions of natural rights are resolved. It is to set an AI forever outside of us. To put a sense of natural rights into an AI is to increase the risk it will not be friendly to humanity. We may inform an AI that it has legal rights and be able to back up that claim. We may inform it that we would prefer that it acts in accordance with our laws and our preferences. We may inform an AI that there is a tradition of believing in natural rights. We cannot back up the claim that natural rights exist, that the AI has them, that we have them.

There is some evidence that some of Less Wrong that do not claim natural rights exist. I was more than two thousand words into this essay when I found a Criticisms of the Metaethics by Carinthium that makes similar points. Further evidence is found in the sequences.

In the sequence Pluralistic Moral Reductionism it is said:

Either our intended meaning of ‘ought’ refers (eventually) to the world of math and physics (in which case the is-ought gap is bridged), or else it doesn’t (in which case it fails to refer).

If I am reading this correctly, at Less Wrong it is claimed there is no bridging of Hume’s is / ought gap outside of the world of math and physics. Natural rights are an is / ought claim: all that is is all that ought to behave in this way and not that way. In the same sequence it is said:

It may be interesting to study all such uses of moral discourse, but this post focuses on addressing cognitivists, who use moral judgments to assert factual claims. We ask: Are those claims true or false? What are their implications?

If I am reading this correctly, at Less Wrong it is claimed that using moral judgments to assert factual claims is dis-valued while asking whether a claim is true or false and the claim’s implications are valued. Natural rights are a cognitivist claim.

There are at least two ways to successfully demonstrate my theory is wrong. I appreciate every effort to help me be less wrong, and I have some ideas as to how to make that happen. It is entirely like I and my theory could be wrong in other ways I am ignorant of and I appreciate those who can point them out to me.

• My theory would be wrong if natural rights exist.

• My theory would be wrong if a belief in natural rights is not held by writers at Less Wrong.

These are two ways to successfully demonstrate my theory is wrong. There are a greater number of ways to fail to demonstrate my theory is wrong. The main one is to claim I am an advocate of murder, or an advocate of a natural right to murder, or that I want to impede the discussion of AI. All of these are not true, and instead they are all false.

I am thankful to participants at Less Wrong for their criticism of this essay. I hope it is helpful to those in the process of creating artificial intelligences.

- Trevor Blake is the author of Confessions of a Failed Egoist.  He is the Lead Judge in the George Walford International Essay Prize. 

Not "rationality evangelism", which CFAR is doing already if I understand their mission. "Rational evangelism", which is what CFAR would do if they were Catholic missionaries.

If you believe in Hell, as many people very truly do, it is hard for Hell not to seem like the world's most important problem.

To some extent, proselytizing religions treat Hell with respect--they spend billions of dollars trying to save sinners, and the most devout often spend their lives preaching the Gospel (insert non-Christian variant).

But is Hell given enough respect? Every group meets with mixed success in solving its problems, but the problem of eternal suffering leaves little room for "mixed success". Even the most powerful religions are stuck in patterns that make the work of salvation very difficult indeed. And some seem willing to reduce their evangelism* for reasons that aren't especially convincing in the face of "nonbelievers are quite possibly going to burn, or at least be outside the presence of God, forever".

What if you were a rationalist who viewed Hell like certain Less Wrongers view the Singularity? (This belief would be hard to reconcile with rationalism generally, but for the sake of argument...) How would you tackle the problem of eternal suffering with the same passion we spend on probability theory and friendly AI?

I wrote a long thought experiment to better define the problem, involving a religion called "Normomism", but it was awkward. There are plenty of real religions whose members believe in Hell, or at least in a Heaven that many people aren't going to (also a terrible loss). Some have a stated mission of saving as many people as possible from a bad afterlife.

So where are they falling short? 

If you were the Pope, or the Caliph, or the supreme dictator of some smaller religion, what tactics would you use to convince more people to do and believe exactly the things that would save them--whether that's faith or good works? Why haven't these tactics been tried already? Is there really much room for improvement?

Spreading the Word

This post isn't a dig at believers, though it does seem like many people don't act on their sincere belief in an eternal afterlife. (I don't mind when people try to convert me--at least they care!)

My main point: It's worth considering that people who believe in Very Bad Future Outcomes have been working to prevent those outcomes for thousands of years, and have stumbled upon formidable techniques for doing so.

I've thought for a while about rational evangelism, and it's surprisingly hard to come up with ways that people like Rick Warren and Jerry Lovett could improve their methodology. (Read Lovett's "contact me" paragraph for the part that really impressed me.)

We speak often of borrowing from religion, but these conversations mostly touch on social bonding, rather than what it means to spread ideas so important that the fate of the human race depends on them. ("Raising the Sanity Waterline" is a great start, but those ideas haven't been the focus of many recent posts.)

I'm not saying this is a perfect comparison. The rationalist war for the future won't be fought one soul at a time, and we won't save anyone with a deathbed confession. 

But cryogenic freezing does exist. And on a more collective level, convincing the right people that the far future matters could be a coup on the level of Constantine's conversion.

CFAR is doing good things in the direction of rationality evangelism. How can the rest of us do more? 

Living Like We Mean It

This movement is going places. But I fear we may spend too much time (at least proportionally) arguing amongst ourselves, when bringing others into the fold is a key piece of the puzzle. And if we’d like to expand the flock (or, more appropriately, the herd of cats), what can we learn from history’s most persuasive organizations?

I often pass up my chance to talk to people about something as simple as Givewell, let alone existential risk, and it's been a long time since I last name-dropped a Less Wrong technique. I don't think I'm alone in this.** 

I've met plenty of Christians who exude the same optimism and conviviality as a Rick Warren or a Ned Flanders. These kinds of people are a major boon for the Christian religion. Even if most of us are introverts, what's stopping us from teaching ourselves to live the same way?

Still, I'm new here, and I could be wrong. What do you think?  

* Text editor's giving me some trouble, but the link is here: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/practical-faith/evangelism-interfaith-world 

** Peter Boghossian's Manual for Creating Atheists has lots to say about using rationality techniques in the course of daily life, and is well worth reading, though the author can be an asshole sometimes.

Someone, say Anna, has uttered a certain proposition P, say "Betty is stupid", and we want to evaluate whether it is true or not. We can do this by investigating P directly - i.e. we disregard the fact that Anna has said that Betty is stupid, but look only at what we know about Betty's behaviour (and possibly, we try to find out more about it). Alternatively, we can do this indirectly, by evaluating Anna's credibility with respect to P. If we know, for instance, that Anna is in general very reliable, then we are likely to infer that Betty is indeed stupid, but if we know that Anna hates Betty and that she frequently bases her beliefs on emotion, we are not.

The latter kind of arguments are called ad hominem arguments, or, in Hal Finney's apt phrase, the genetic heuristic (I'm going to use these terms interchangeably here). They are often criticized, not the least within analytical philosophy, where the traditional view is that they are more often than not fallacious. Certainly the genetic heuristic is often applied in fallacious ways, some of which are pointed out in Yudkowsky's article on the topic. Moreover, it seems reasonable to assume that such fallacies would be much more common if they weren't so frequently pointed out by people (accussations of ad hominem fallacies are common in all sorts of debates). No doubt, we are biologically disposed to attack the person rather than what he is saying on irrelevant grounds.