2018-02-05 RRG Notes
- In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death
- Being on the wrong side of a political argument could get you killed, and being on the right side could let you kill your hated rivals
- If you want to make a point about science, don't choose examples from contemporary politics; if you have to choose, choose a historical example that isn't likely to cause controversy
- Politics is an extension of war by other means
- Arguments are soldiers
- Once you know which side you're on, you're obligated to attack all arguments of the other side
- You're obligated to support arguments of your side, regardless of how weak or flawed they are
- Try to avoid attacking the other side deliberately with political examples
- My thoughts
- This is fairly straightforward, and probably one of Eliezer's better essays
- That said, just because you're uininterested in politics, it doesn't mean that politics is uninterested in you
- Knowing how to argue in the political arena is an important skill, and one that all too many rationalists have deliberately avoided cultivating, using this essay as their justification
- Jacobite claims that Marxists assume that ideology will solve all the incentives problems and principal-agent issues that stand in the way of good government
- This would explain why Marxist governments so often fail
- Much of the debate in contemporary politics can be treated as a dichotomy between Mistake Theory and Conflict Theory
- Mistake theorists treat politics as a science or a form of engineering, or medicine
- State is diseased or broken
- We need to figure out the best way to cure the disease or fix the state
- Some ideas are effective, whereas other ideas either wouldn't help or would cause too many side-effects
- View debate as essential - need to hear all views in order to understand the whole situation
- Need to create an environment where truth can prevail, regardless of who is right or wrong on any given issue
- View different sides as symmetrical - both sides include trustworthy experts and trolls, and feel about as strongly about the issue at hand
- Only difference is which side turns out to be right about the matter at hand
- Worry about the complicated and paradoxical effects of social engineering
- Use paradoxes to prove that we can't trust our instincts about social engineering, and need to have lots of research and debate
- Believe that you can solve social problems by increasing general intelligence
- Make the people smart enough to choose the most intelligent politicians
- Make the politicians smart enough to choose the wisest technocrats
- Make the technocrats smart enough to choose the best policies
- Views passion as suspect
- Wrong people can be just as loud as correct people
- All passion does is use pressure to introduce bias
- Views free speech and open debate as the most vital things
- View the content of ideas as more important than their origin
- Think democracy gives too much power to the average person
- Think that conflict theorists are making a mistake
- If they were taught philosophy 101, they would see that forming mobs and smashing things are not the appropriate answer to social problems
- Conflict theorists treat politics as war
- Different blocs are at war with each other to claim resources for themselves and deny those resources to others
- See debate as having a minor clarifying role at best - outcomes are decided by who has the most power in a situation, not who has the best arguments
- Take asymmetry of sides as a first principle
- Elites are few in number but have lots of power
- People are many but powerless
- The Elites try to sow dissent and confusion
- The People must remain united in the face of these attempts so that their solidarity may overwhelm the Elites' material advantages
- Conflict theorists see emphasis on paradoxical effects as a distraction - people presenting on paradoxical effects of social engineering are shills for the elites
- Believe that the best way to save the world is to increase passion
- Rich and powerful win because they work together effectively
- Once the poor and powerless unite and stand up in the same way, they can have just as much power as the rich and powerful
- Need activists to tell people which causes are important
- Views intelligence as suspect
- Sees intelligence as being mainly used to create sophistic arguments that justify existing inequalities
- Views free speech and open debate as a way to allow the enemy to come in and spread their ideas
- View the origin of ideas as more important than their content
- Thinks the problem with democracy is that it's too easily coopted by elites
- Think that mistake theorists are the enemy - if it weren't for mistake theorists shilling for the rich and powerful, social problems would already be solved
- So now that we have this conflict vs. mistake distinction, what do we do with it?
- Can draw further distinctions between mistake theorists and conflict theorists
- Easy Mistake theorists believe that most of our problems come from really dumb making simple mistakes
- Hard Mistake theorists believe that questions are complicated and require more data than we've been able to collect so far
- Easy conflict theorists believe that some positions are good and others are evil
- Hard conflict theorist believe that conflicts occur between basically comprehensible viewpoints
- While conflict theory is probably a less helpful way to view the world than mistake theory, both can be true in places
- If someone is a conflict theorist, you can't use mistake theory arguments to convince them
- My thoughts
- I like the distinction between conflict theory and mistake theory, but I'm not sure that the distinction can be turned into useful policy recommendations
- I think the last part of the essay, where Scott attempts to do something with the theory, is by far the weakest
- That said, not every distinction has to translate into immediate action recommendations - it's fine to notice things, even if you're not sure exactly what to do, or even if anything has to be done
- I think the biggest argument in favor of conflict theory is free trade
- Mistake theorists think that conflict theorists just don't understand comparative advantage and the economic benefits of trade - "if only they'd internalize the lessons from economics 101, there wouldn't be a controversy at all!"
- Conflict theorists, on the other hand, recognize that aggregate output is greater under free trade
- However those gains in aggregate output somehow magically accrue to other people, whether they're peasants in third world countries or plutocratic factory owners
- So what good does it do the average middle class person to know that the aggregate output of the economy is greater, when none of those gains accrue to them?
- Conflict theorists understand this and say, "Arguments for free trade are a scam - they are a plot to take your economic surplus and reallocate it to other people" which isn't entirely wrong
- Countercultures of the 1960s-1980s took attention to boundaries as their central theme
- Monist counterculture - 1960s youth movement - wanted to eliminate boundaries and level distinctions
- Dualist counterculture - religious right - wanted to make all boundaries absolute
- Meaningness suggests that oppositions between these mirror image stances can be resolved by more complete stances that correct metaphysical errors
- So, Meaningness is nothing but Hegelism in disguise? Treat the two (counter)cultures as thesis and antithesis, and attempt to turn them into a synthesis?
- Apply conceptual framework to two countercultural battlegrounds: gender and national borders
- Both are about boundaries
- Both boundaries are nebulous and patterned
- Ideologues sway many people by claiming that they're not nebulous and patterned
- Gender was the most important cultural issue in countercultural politics
- War was the most important social issue
- Boundaries are nebulous yet patterned
- "Nebulosity" is the unstable, uncertain, fluid, complex and ill-defined nature of all meanings
- These properties are unwelcome because the lack of solid ground makes it difficult to build a durable personal identity, social structure or political movement
- Confused stances are defensive responses to nebulosity
- Confused stances attempted to fixate meanings
- Monism and dualism are confused stances concerning boundaries
- Monism denies boundaries and distinctions
- Dualism fixates them as perfectly sharp
- Boundaries are generally nebulous, but they also represent real patterns, so monism and dualism are both wrong
- When you're close to a boundary, it can become impossible to tell which side some items are on
- Boundaries are also selectively permeable - some items pass through easily, whereas others are stopped
- Monism and dualism deny this inherent complexity
- They promise simplicity and clarity by hiding the variability and ambiguity of reality
- However both monism and dualism are partly correct
- Monism recognizes that boundaries are never absolute
- Dualism recognizes that boundaries are important and should not be wished away
- Complete stances recognize both nebulosity and pattern
- The complete stance with respect to boundaries is "participation"
- Recognition that boundaries are always both nebulous and patterned
- Combines the insights of monism and dualism
- The fundamental method for resolving confusion of meaning is to look for unacknowledged nebulosity
- Look for unacknowledged nebulosity
- Notice why it is unwanted
- Watch how patterns of meaning are fixated and denied in order to avoid recognizing nebulosity
- Work out what would be implied if nebulosity were acknowledged as inherent and unavoidable, but not a defect in the fundamental nature of reality
- Fluid mode extends this method from the individual to the social and cultural level
- When people are stressed by confusion, they retreat to simple, extreme views that they know are wrong, but which seem defensible in their absolutism
- Gender
- Second-wave feminism emerged during the countercultural era
- Initially focused on workplace equality, and broadened into a general equality movement
- Theme of equality resonated with monist counterculture
- Denied the existence or legitimacy of any difference between male and female, sometimes even at the biological level
- Symmetrically, dualist theorists insisted that men and women are properly, essentially, immutably and totally different
- Society must, therefore, reflect and enforce the boundary between them
- During the countercultural era, these extreme claims seemed somehow plausible
- However, gender can't be wished away, nor is it an entirely hard-and-fast distinction
- Sexes are different on average, but individuals span the range of variation
- Some people don't fit neatly into either category
- No essential characteristic that makes something definitely masculine or feminine
- Most people are reasonably comfortable with the somewhat different expectations contemporary society and culture have for men and women
- A minority finds these expectations burdensome
- No one conforms to these expectatiosn perfectly or consistently
- This common-sense understanding is at least implicitly accepted by a majority of people
- The mingled ambiguity and definiteness of gender isn't a big problem for most people most of the time
- Since the end of the countercultural era, subculturalism and atomization have further complicated the meanings of gender
- Second-wave feminism split into numerous third-wave sects
- These third wave sects took diverse stances on the metaphysics of gender, with contributions from the LGBTQ community
- This led to atomized intersectional fourth-wave feminism, which has lost coherence and uses whatever contradictory subcultural ideologies are convenient in the moment
- What is the fluid mode with regards to gender?
- Gender manifests as a pattern of interaction between two specific people in specific situations at specific times
- What counts as a masculine or feminine way of interacting is constantly renegotiated
- Does not mean that this distinction is arbitrary
- However, it is usually so routine as to go unnotices
- Only when this routine breaks down that the nebulosity of gender comes momentarily into consciousness
- While we are constantly aware of how our micro-scale behaviors will be interpreted according to macro-scale ideologies, we're never really governed by them
- Broad ideologies ignore day-to-day realities
- Are not specific enough to govern individual interactions
- Because gender is patterned, we can never really be free of it
- Because it is nebulous, we can never perfectly embody it
- Between the two extremes, there is an open space, in which we can take a playful attitude towards choice
- Monism and dualism obscure the practicalities of specific conflicts
- Dropping monism and dualism would still leave plenty of room for disagreements, but those disagreements would have to be argued on specific, practical grounds, instead of abstract metaphysical ones
- Some dualists point to biological differences, like the presence of a Y chromosome as being essential
- But the Bible doesn't mention anything about chromosomes
- There are some people with Y chromosomes who everyone believes to be female, because there's no indication, physical or mental, of masculinity
- Some monists say that since there are no differences between men and women beyond those imposed by society, you are whatever gender you say you are and society has an obligation to treat you that way
- But then what about someone like Rachel Dolezal, who claims to be black, even though she doesn't have any black ancestry and was born blue-eyed and blonde-haired
- Race is even less biologically determined than gender, so if it's okay to someone to claim that they're a different biological gender from what they were born as, shouldn't it be equally okay for someone to claim to be a different race than what they were biologically born as?
- It's reasonable to recognize that gender can't simply be wished away
- On the other hand, it's also important to recognize that there is no reasonable fact about what sex anyone is
- Someone who passes for a particular sex might as well be treated as being that sex for most purposes
- It would be helpful if we could restore the public/private boundary that the countercultures destroyed, and then agree that gender is a private matter
- Sovereignty, borders and war
- The Westphalian model of a state is the epitome of dualism
- Holds that there are perfectly defined permanent borders between states
- Every square inch of land is part of one and exactly one state
- The government of a state holds sway uniformly within its borders
- The government of a state has no right to to exert any influence beyond its borders
- This is a highly unnatural configuration
- In older eras, borders were vague and shifting
- The sovereign's rule was absolute in the capital, but faded with distance
- The main job of a king was to meddle in the affairs of neighboring kindgoms, which led to wars and border adjustments
- Westphalian system was invented to prevent war
- However, Westphalian sovereignty laid the foundations for World Wars 1 and 2
- Monist approach to borders
- Eliminate national boundaries
- Wars occur between countries
- No countries = no wars
- However, countries and borders can't be wished away
- But, that said, borders aren't hard-and-fast divisions
- Only North Korea today even maintains the pretense of total isolation
- At the end of the countercultural era, diplomats and international institutions quietly revised the system of international relations to reflect the nebulosity of borders
- European Union develops as a model for blurred sovereignty, with extant, but permeable borders
- World Trade Organization increases the permeability and complex selectivity of borders
- Rwandan and Bosnian genocides changed the minds of many anti-war leftists and established the principle that great powers have both the right and the responsibility to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states
- More recently, failures in the middle east have convinced many dualists that many wars cannot be won by military force alone
- The only workable questions today concern the specific pragmatics of how borders operate
- Which peoples, goods, services, monies and armies are allowed to cross and for what reasons?
- My thoughts
- Gender
- With regards to gender, Chapman is being stupidly wishful
- He's saying, essentially, "Why can't we just all get along and let people be whatever gender they claim, even if we disapprove in private?
- The problem is that modern society has a notion that certain genders and ethnicities are allowed to make priority claims for certain scarce resources (such as college scholarships)
- In such scenario, it makes sense to closely examine whether people are "truly" of their claimed race or gender, to ensure that only the people who are "deserving" of priority claims are making priority claims
- Borders and war
- Chapman is making some bold historical claims (the main job of a king was to meddle in the affairs of neighboring kindgoms) without a shred of evidence to actually back up his claims
- I don't even agree with his claim that the Westphalian system was created to prevent war
- The Westphalian system was created to prevent the sort of endless religious war that led to societal devastation
- The Westphalian system was an acknowledgement by Reformation-era kings and princes that, at the end of the day, it's better to have something to rule over, than fight until everything is destroyed
- I don't think anyone would have claimed that a Westphalian system would be end of all wars
- It was seen as a truce between two forces, Protestantism and Catholicism, that had fought each other to exhaustion
- I think responsibility to protect R2P has been a disaster for international relations
- R2P is impossible to enforce, and impossible to apply correctly
- Almost any intervention can be justified on R2P grounds
- Responsibility to Protect places an undue burden on Great Powers, and simultaneously takes sovereignty away from the people of less powerful countries and gives that sovereignty to Great Powers
- Responsibility to Protect is what got us the intervention in Libya - yes, a massacre was prevented… at the cost of wrecking the country. Is the average Libyan today better off than they were under Qaddafi's rule?
- Both sides in the counterculture war think they're losing
- They're both correct - they lost decades ago, and we're living in the wreckage of these countercultures
- The left and right of American politics are descendants from the monist and dualist countercultures of the 1960s-1980s
- We are doing politics wrong
- Politics is supposed to be the way we deal with vast problems and impending catastrophes
- Only now, politics is causing those problems, rather than solving them
- Democracy, by definition, isn't working when most people disapprove of the government
- The major parties, ostensibly representing monist and dualist value systems are both considered to actually represent little more than the interests of their corporate donors
- Media coverage of politics makes everything worse, deliberately, in order to drive engagement and ratings
- This is not just true of the US, but also of the world - extremist parties are gaining ground everywhere
- The public desires fundamental change, not necessarily extremism
- The current state of affairs has been good for the ruling class, both politicians and plutocrats
- Much easier to cut backroom deals when the political debate is overwhelmed by hot-button social issues
- Much of global macroeconomic policy has been run for the benefit of the financial industry at the cost of everyone else
- This persists because macroeconomic policy isn't about "values", so therefore it's "not political"
- Baby Boomer Bafflement
- The culture war persists because most Baby Boomers do not understand why their countercultures failed
- Many participants have a wistful certainty that the counterculture of their youth will rise up again, and will replace the current mainstream
- Both sides resent the other as the apparent explanation for their own counterculture's failure
- One of the reasons the culture war has heated up over the past few years is because the Baby Boomers are realizing that they're soon going to age out of politics and this is their last chance to influence the cultural consensus
- Maybe understanding that opposition from the other tribe was not the reason for the failure can help overcome polarization
- Countercultures failed because the majority did not agree with them
- The majority rejected countercultures because they were plainly wrong about many things
- It would help to understand how younger generations relate to meaningness - some of your main issues are complete nonissues for them
- Let go of the sacred myths of your tribe
- Much of what you fight about is symbolic, not substantive - advocacy is not about issues but about establishing tribal identity
- If you understand what you disagree about, you can find pragmatic compromises, instead of trying to demand total victory
- Let Go Of The Sacred Myths of Your Tribe
- Both countercultures were claims about the ultimate truth of everything that explains all meanings
- Both countercultures were attempts to rescue eternalism from the threat of nihilism
- Counterculture eternalisms function much like religion, even when they're non-theistic
- Some of the hardest fought political battles are not even so much about "values" as they are over symbols
- Any issue that gets turned into a tribal/political shibboleth is invariably distorted by its role as such
- Abortion
- Gun control
- Keystone XL
- Both sides know that the other side's eternalism is wrong
- But secretly, they know that their own eternalism is wrong too
- The way to let go of these ideologies is to learn meaningness
- Moreover, people stuck in the countercultural mode of understand the the world don't even comprehend the problems that later generations face
- Why are THOSE PEOPLE so awful?
- During the countercultural era, politics was about substantial social issues and genuine differences in values
- Now, culture war is mostly about identity and status
- Most politics today is ritual posturing and intra-tribal communication, rather than engaging between tribes
- The question is about who is going to win, not how can we change society for the better
- The moralization of politics has been a disaster
- Ensures that compromise is impossible
- How can you compromise when the other side is evil?
- Moreover, even if you do compromise, how can you trust the other side to hold true to the compromise?
- The sense of doom among both tribes is correct, but not because the other tribe is about to win
- Both sides are doomed, because future generations largely don't care about their conflicts
- Disentangling the culture war
- Both sides recognize the culture war is harmful and should, at some level, stop
- On the other hand, the culture war feels like its about sacred values, and therefore not amenable to compromise
- Progress has to come from a better understanding about what both sides actually care about
- We need to disentangle morality from politics
- Better understand the functions of morality
- Differences in values are much smaller than people think
- Most supposed conflicts in fundamental values are actually disagreements about concrete issues
- Arnold Kling - Three Languages of Politics
- Progressives are primarily concerned with oppression
- Conservatives are primarily concerned with civilization vs. barbarism
- Libertarians are primarily concerned with freedom vs. coercion
- As a result, all three groups talk past one another, and no one hears arguments from the other two groups
- All three of the axes above are somewhat orthogonal - it's possible to to minimize oppression, maximize civilization, while limiting coercion
- Empirical studies suggest that opposing political groups can come to understand each other if they learn to talk in terms of the other side's preferred fundamental values
- Moreover, they can change the other side's mind by using that language
- Few people today are willing or able to switch moral languages
- More people passing the ideological Turing Test would go a long way to enabling more compromise
- Also, we should ask people questions about how they think a particular policy would work, rather than whether they think it's right or not
- Moreover we should recognize when people's actual personal practice differs from their political ideology and use that as a means to drive compromises
- Example: upper-middle-class liberal families often embody conservative values far better than lower class conservative families
- Less sexual promiscuity
- More economic stability
- Maybe the upper middle class could preach what it practices and understand that the rhetoric of sexual freedom is actually harmful for lower classes
- My thoughts
- Again with the historical ignorance! Galleons were actually quite good boats, for their time period. You try designing a craft to haul large amounts of cargo across the Atlantic from first principles!
- Doing politics wrong
- Has politics ever done well at solving problems and dealing with catastrophes? It seems to me that just barely dealing with catastrophes while occasionally causing bigger problems is the way politics has always worked
- Oh my god, for the last fucking time, AMERICA IS. NOT. A. DEMOCRACY. It's not even really a republic. It's this weird hybrid federal system that started out as being mostly a republic but had democratic elements grafted onto it by the Progressive movement
- The "only 20% of Americans approve of Congress" statistic is bullshit math. Yes, less than 20% of Americans approve of Congress as a whole, but the vast majority of Americans approve of their individual representative. Paul Ryan and Keith Ellison both get elected with >50% of the vote
- With regards to extremist parties gaining ground everywhere, that's both true and not true. Yes, AfD won more votes than they've ever received in the past, but on the other hand, Le Pen flopped hard in France
- The public may want fundamental change, but not extremism, but Chapman conveniently ignores that extremism is how you get fundamental change - moderates, by definition, want to continue the status quo
- With regards to backroom deals, again, Chapman is factually wrong and, as a result, gets the argument backwards. It is harder than ever before to cut backroom deals. Legislation is more heavily scrutinized than ever. In fact, much of our current gridlock results from changes intended to limit so-called "pork barrel" spending. As it turns out, bacon grease is a great lubricant, and without it, the gears of government seize up
- Baby Boomer Bafflement
- Literally any time you argue on the basis of generational cohorts, you're on really shaky ground, and your argument is automatically suspect
- There is as much diversity inside a so-called "generation" as there is between generations
- With regards to the culture wars heating up, I'm not sure they actually are. I don't think the culture wars of today are hotter than the culture wars of the 1960s, much less the 1860s
- The rest of this is literally just a long-winded version of, "Why can't we just sing kumbayah and hold hands?"
- Let Go of the Sacred Myths of Your Tribe
- What is Chapman even talking about here? He's drifted off into his own weird abstractions, where literally each word has multiple five-figure word counts backing it up
- Literally worse than reading postmodernist philosophers - even Derrida was restricted to footnotes
- Let Go of the Sacred Myths Of Your Tribe
- The leftist example of an issue that has become distorted by its role as a political shibboleth is Black Lives Matter
- Or alternatively, intersectionality of oppression
- The fact that Chapman can't think of any such issues just betrays his own political leanings
- I just don't buy this notion that Chapman has that people (even subconsciously) think that their own eternalisms are wrong
- From talking with and reading committed ideologues, both on the conservative and liberal side, I think they're quite convinced that their ideology is not only not-bankrupt, but actually flush with cash
- This notion of people secretly understanding that both ideologies are falling apart does not square with the reality of people who believe in said ideologies
- Why are THOSE PEOPLE so awful?
- I like how Chapman thinks Millenials all hold hands and sing kumbayah - it's cute, in a way
- Disentangling the culture war
- Repeatedly, Chapman has stated that if only both sides knew what they were actually fighting for, they would be able to compromise
- I am not at all sure about this
- Example: Abortion:
- If you think a fetus is morally a human being, then the killing of a fetus, for whatever reason, is an immoral act
- It might be necessary, in a trolley-problem sense - i.e. taking one life so that both mother and fetus don't die
- But to take the life of a fetus when it is not necessary to do so, is in this moral system nothing short of state sanctioned murder
- I think this puts you in opposition to those who state that abortion is a matter of "choice", and this opposition cannot be fixed by merely better understanding what you're fighting about
- He says that most disagreements about fundamental values are disagreements about concrete issues, but there's no way to disentangle the two - fundamental values inform your stance on concrete issues
- Insofar as government is about making meta-level decisions about the system that allocates scarce resources to people and groups, the abstract fundamental values decide who has moral priority to make claims on those scarce resources
- This is really important, and cannot be papered over by saying, "Oh if only both sides truly understood what they were fighting for, they'd be able to compromise
- Most people don't see themselves as evil
- The enemy's story, seen from the enemy's point of view, isn't going make the enemy look bad
- However, because politics is the mind-killer, it's difficult to construe the enemy's true motivations without making it seem like you're defending the enemy
- If seeing the world from the other side makes you feel sad rather than righteous, then you might be seeing the world as it truly is
- This doesn't mean that your enemies beliefs are true, or right
- It just means that they were doing the best for what they believe, just as you are doing the best for what you believe
- There is no rule that says that there has to be an option that isn't tragic in some way
- My Thoughts
- Yep, agree with pretty much everything in this essay
