When it comes to "Politics is the Mindkiller" the important thing to keep in mind is that if you raise politics in a debate about a nonpolitical point your debate will likely become about politics and not your nonpolitical point. If your main goal is to make a political point that's okay, if your main goal is to make a nonpolitical point, you are doing something wrong.
You can't effectively do both at the same time. There's value in making both political and nonpolitical points.
Don't know about others, but to me feels like "wokeness" has faded from view a bit because economic inequality has become the main issue again. And I agree with that: making people less dependent on landlords and employers is indeed the main issue. (The AI issue is more urgent, but even the AI transition would feel safer to me if we had a system where people's livelihoods weren't tied to jobs or affording rent.)
I don't see that as the main cause. The only reason why economic inequality was able to take the perch is because people were already getting pretty tired of wokeness.
What specifically were people getting tired of, descriptively? It does seem quite plausible there's a communication pattern that wasn't working, for example. But I think that glossing it with a name is likely part of that communication pattern itself.
A key aspect of that stance was that there was pressure to call people out and get into arguments and I expect many proponents just got tired of it after a while, since this takes a lot of energy.
The neutral parties likely got tired of the culture wars and were more likely to tune it out. Lack of an undecided audience means less incentive to have some of these arguments on social media.
Aha, I like this description. I am personally unclear on the exact conversations meant by "culture wars", and won't reuse that term, but otherwise I agree that that sort of discussion is draining and unhelpful, no matter the cause.
I think a potential comparative advantage for the rationalist community is documenting what's going on on the object level, with respect to the areas the political discourse is about. Acting as mediators who elicit the driving observations behind the political views, and then expand on them in more robust and transparent ways. Making resources people can understand, and finding underrated levers, opportunities and problems that can be brought up as part of the exposition.
We recently lived through a period where "wokeness" - as ill-defined as that term is - was the dominant strain of thought within the educated strata of society.
Why do you think it is no longer dominant? I agree that it is no longer dominant on X/Twitter (after the Musk acquisition, partly due to evaporative cooling, and partly due to Musk allowing opinions that were previously banned), but X is hardly representative of the "educated strata" in general. In particular, it seems to me academics and journalists and politicians didn't get significantly less "woke".
Exactly. I live in the town that hosts the University of Florida. Despite Governor DeSantis best efforts of closing the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices, and all his other wasted efforts in his “war on wokism” the people that I know that work there haven’t changed their opinions, scientific and otherwise on topics that trigger the Governor.
I don't think that it is clear that his efforts have been wasted. I don't think that DeSantis was ever expecting this to have an immediate effect on people's opinions. Instead, I think the idea is to prevent people in these positions from dragging the institution further toward a particular direction over time.
(To be clear, this isn't a comment on whether these are or aren't good policies, just on whether it constitutes progress toward DeSantis' goals)
This is one of the points that I have less solid evidence about.
However, my sense is that much of the power of wokeness came from exerting strong social pressure on the discussion that occurred on social media, backed up by fears of an account ban. This limited the ability of opposition to co-ordinate, previous attempts to create social media without censorship just created a cesspit of the most extreme right figures such that all moderates evaporated off. I still don't think I'm quite articulating it right, but I'm pretty sure that losing control over a single social major media platform has been sufficient to dramatically limit the influence of wokeness, since the necessary communication can just occur on that platform.
Or, another way of putting it, Twitter acts as a magnet for the kinds of people who'd be open to learning about the perspectives shared there. But it doesn't just reach these people, instead these ideas further proliferate out.
But still it seems that empirically, the tide turning on Twitter hasn't yet resulted in the tide turning anywhere else, e.g. for the three intellectual groups I mentioned above. Non-intellectual niches like advertising and Hollywood also haven't become less woke/"woke" as far as I can tell.
It is plausible that something like this will happen in the future, because the current state (Overton window on Twitter being very different than on other social networks) doesn't seem to constitute an equilibrium. Another possibility would be for Twitter to "fall from grace" and become a website that is shunned by the mainstream and treated like e.g. 4chan.
Slight disagreement. I think the Overton window on twitter being very different from the window elsewhere can actually be a stable long-lasting equilibrium. The window is already different with different groups of people in real life, the sorts of things people say online have been quite different from what they would say in person for a long time. Its also very different in different online communities already. On a computer game discord server I am in new joiners often say things that break the sever rules (which they clearly did not read) and seem to be genuinely shocked by rules that seem (to me) very basic.
I think one difference is that on Twitter it is now possible to talk about highly taboo statistical data. When people hear about this, they don't forget it for contexts where it is outside the Overton window to mention them.
It is maybe like in the 16th century, one country (like the Netherlands) allows discussing whether God exists (or, somewhat weaker, whether or not God is a person). As a consequence, people outside the Netherlands still can't speak about this, but they may have read some of the debates published in the Netherlands, debates which previously didn't exist at all, and that may well influence what they believe. Which in turn can over time erode the Overton window on discussing God's ontological status.
What I see as important is how many content creators are on Twitter. This is how these ideas proliferate out. The most progressive groups of society will be the last places where we’ll see a shift, partly due to preference falsification.
It's probably more productive, particularly for a forum tailored towards rationalism, to discuss policies over politics.
Often in research people across a political divide will agree on policy goals and platforms when those are discussed without tying them to party identification.
But if it becomes a discussion around party, the human tendency towards tribalism kicks in and the question of team allegiance takes precedence over the discussions of policy nuance.
For example, most people would agree with the idea that billionaires having undue influence on elections isn't healthy for democracy. But if you start naming the billionaire, such as Soros or Koch, suddenly half the people in your sample either feel more strongly or less strongly about the scenario depending on the name.
If you want to avoid simply seeking out and cultivating an echo chamber, leaving the politics part to the side and fostering discussion of the underlying policies and social/economic/etc goals instead will lead to discussions with more diverse and nuanced perspectives with greater participation across political identities.
You commented yourself that the word "woke" is ill defined, but I don't think this post takes that ill-definition seriously enough. I don't really know what you mean by it, and frankly I'd be surprised if two readers (both within the LessWrong overton window but with significant political differences), who were both confident that they understood what you meant, had the same understanding.
Why does having the exact same understanding here matter? As an example, we can discuss the importance of art or science without delineating the exact boundaries of either, although it certainly helps. I guess I see getting too caught up in this as something of a distraction when trying to form a high-level map of what happened.
Avoiding fnords isn't a universal rule. Objectivity is one property that writing can have that trade-offs against other elements.
It in fact destroys objectivity. If you want to model-build usefully, please be specific rather than invoking words that just mean "conflict".
Sometimes it makes sense to, you know, actually talk about things that are subjective.
That said, I limit how subjective I go in this post, attempting to be somewhat objective in light of a particular subjective stance.
Perhaps, but unfolding what you mean by the high-conflict term into more concrete terms would help people who have different subjective impressions understand meanings. My hunch is that the thing you're concerned about is a communication patterns issue, but if so, it seems to me that using the word should itself likely be classified as an instance of the thing you're criticizing by the description which identifies the pattern-to-avoid separate from the issues it's about.
Both-siding is often pragmatically useful, but sometimes we need to be able to step outside of this.
Agree there as well. The only general point I want to transmit is, I personally try to suck all commonly-used political wording out of my phrasings regardless of which subgroup of opinion I'm describing, and I find that this avoids activating shortcuts in people's reasoning that skip past the useful higher-level thinking I want to engage. I claim others will also find this effective at making political discussions go better; it doesn't require never speaking of a group, it just requires creative thinking to name the group using a currently-unused name every time. (It also tends to be annoying effort, so I wouldn't prescribe talking this way.)
(often, this forces me to describe a pattern rather than naming a specific group currently exhibiting the pattern; if we disagree on who exhibits the pattern how much, then we disagree, but it doesn't mean asserting it's not more common in some groups than others; it just means referring to the groups by-the-handle-of the behavior pattern itself. this allows people to include themselves in or exclude themselves from the behavior-pattern-selected group according to whether they agree with the behavior pattern, rather than whether they agree with the group known for exhibiting it.)
I don't disagree with most of this, but I also don't want to see very much current politics here. Even for important things, if there's not a tie to rationality methods or theory (NOT "rationalists should/do lean this way"), we don't have a comparative advantage in hosting the discussion.
The current equilibrium of it being discouraged overall, but high-status posters can get away with it if they feel strongly and present it well, seems about right to me.
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1To state it explicitly, only a good presentation seems necessary to me. I have a pretty high bar for this, but it doesn't depend on people agreeing with me or already being popular. I expect good presentation is very concise and is closer to simple english, to avoid words whose meaning is in heavy dispute. I also expect it'll focus primarily on policies, and perhaps on types of communication, not on groups of people. I also expect it'll mostly avoid value judgements, even if everyone involved has strong value judgements about the involved concepts. OP's post seems like some attempt at this, but insufficient to my view for the high standards of the topic.
As if by magic, I knew generally which side of the political aisle the OP of a post demanding more political discussion here would be on.
I didn't predict the term "wokeness" would come up just three sentences in, but I should have.
It's not clear to me what OP's object-level opinions are. I think you may be jumping to conclusions, and I think this conclusion-jumping is a good demonstration of the issue I've been describing in comments about word choice.
I can only tell what overall group of views you seem to have. the most predictive phrases:
as ill-defined as that term is
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insofar as it makes sense to take about a single perspective, could be correct on all or almost all points. I don't particularly want to litigate this right now, so I'll just talk about what makes sense if you agree with me that a substantial proportion of claims made were false or exaggerated
in order to know what your object level views are, I would have to dig into what claims are false and true. and then,
It may be worth keeping in mind that it's not like the social justice movement had no reasons for pursuing its goals so aggressively. It arose in a context in which sexual minorities were really treated as second-class citizens and had been subject to this, much as I hate to say this, oppression, for hundreds of years
which basically destroys any idea I had about what your views are. this is why I've been asking you to taboo the word: I really don't know what you mean by it, there are conflicting possible meanings, and it seems like your agreements and disagreements with the group you'd describe with it are a lot more complex than just "thing bad". It seems quite plausible to me that most policy positions someone who describes themselves as that word wouldn't, when you get into it, disagree with you on very much at all - just on communication patterns and belief-indicator-signal packages. but the process of establishing that would probably also reveal that their beliefs aren't the version that they seem on the surface, either.
I completely agree with Eliezer that Politics is the Mind-Killer, but at the same time, I worry that talking in abstracts all the time is limiting. I wouldn't want this site to tilt too much toward politics, but I feel that there's such a thing as too little discussion as well.
We recently lived through a period where "wokeness" - as ill-defined as that term is - was the dominant strain of thought within the educated strata of society. It's unclear exactly what percent of people supported this strain of thought, particularly when you account for people agreeing with reservations or with some parts, but not with others. It's not clear that this perspective was ever even a majority even within this particular strata. But there was a period where it was able to crowd out other perspectives through some combination of people being scared to speak out, people feeling that it as morally dubious to nitpick the specifics, people being censored and access to particular levers of power.
Of course, this doesn't tell us anything about the object-level. All of this could be true and the "woke" perspective, insofar as it makes sense to talk about a single perspective, could be correct on all or almost all points. I don't particularly want to litigate this right now, so I'll just talk about what makes sense if you agree with me that a substantial proportion of claims made were false or exaggerated.
First of all, now that certain pressures have passed, it makes sense to re-evaluate your views in case social pressure distorted your perception such that you to adopted views without good reason. On one hand, you don't want to be too quick to update, as it's very easy for humans to be pulled whichever way the social winds are blowing. At the same time, you may also be subject to a bias of not wanting to admit that you were wrong or go against what you said. The law of equal and opposite advice applies here.
Additionally, insofar as you feel that much of what was said by the social justice movement was either in bad faith or coercive, this could make you want to swing all the way to the opposite side. Overreactions are very common, don't let this be you. Again, the law of equal and opposite advice applies. Some people are likely only slowly realising how much their information environment was manipulated, these people would do well to realise that they're likely to discover more such manipulation over time. On the other hand, as previously mentioned, some people are swinging too far. And those people would do well to keep in mind that if they wait a few more years, there will be quite persuasive articles explaining why certain woke ideas were more reasonable than they sounded.
It may be worth keeping in mind that it's not like the social justice movement had no reasons for pursuing its goals so aggressively. It arose in a context in which sexual minorities were really treated as second-class citizens and had been subject to this, much as I hate to say this, oppression, for hundreds of years. It was also quite reasonable to suggest that removing overt discrimination was insufficient and that we needed to re-examine societal defaults and perhaps take action to address inequalities persisting from the past. Unfortunately, the most viral forms of these ideas involved a theory of change based on social pressure/entryism rather than engaging in rational debate/discussion and this led to the societal discussion being truly absurd for a certain number of years.
The lessons people draw from this will widely vary. Some people will suggest that these events were unfavorable to conflict theory by demonstrating how it damages a movement's ability to think strategically, leads to infighting and achieves short-term objectives at the cost of making long-term enemies. Others will suggest that these events were unfavorable to mistake theory, by demonstrating the naiveness of this perspective against determined bad faith actors.
Some people will note that the community came through mostly unscathed and suggest that sitting this fight out was the correct choice because it avoided internal divisions and making ourselves a target. Others might argue that this was blind luck, that if the social justice side had an overwhelming victory, then they would have come for us and that we might have been able to prevent things from getting as bad as they did had we acted early. I personally feel that we likely would have been too naive/politically inexperienced to have had a truly major influence, but I'm less certain that applies going forward. At the same time, we seem to be staring at short or mid-AI timelines, so the cost of getting distracted is much higher than it was before.
I don't want to pretend that I have all of the answers here. However, I do want to share a few thoughts. Less Wrong has always had something of an individualistic bent. While there has been some discussion about what a strong rationalist community would look like, the dominant focus has been on how to be rational as an individual.
And perhaps it's time to think broader than that. Maybe it's time to start taking an ecosystem perspective of society and realise that as much as we'd like to be able to just ignore the rest of society and do our own thing, that isn't always an option. Once a group of people gains a sufficient amount of influence, other groups will start to see it as a threat. This incentivizes them to do things such as engage in bad-faith criticism, attempt to capture institutions or produce a watered-down but more popularist-sounding version of the group's beliefs. At the same time, these are very difficult to distinguish from good-faith criticism, good-faith participation and reshaping the belief system to be less narrow.
It's not clear that any of these issue have nice, neat solutions. Nonetheless, we do what we can, it's probably better to have a shared awareness of these kinds of issues rather than to either have a blindspot or to have a bunch of individuals thinking about these issues just by themselves.