2018-07-02 RRG Notes
- A large number of right-of-center thinkers have come around to a particular unnamed consensus
- Consensus between Jonathan Haidt, Jordan Peterson and Geoffrey Miller
- Do these thinkers actually represent a "large number" of people? It seems to me like they represent a small
number of people, but have high visibility among rationalists, because their ideas are tailored towards being
attractive to rationalists
- The fact that "all of a sudden it seemed like everyone you knew who was a 'centrist' or 'conservative' was
quoting Peterson and Haidt is just a testament to the strength of your bubble, not to the inherent popularity of
these people's ideas
- I disagree that Haidt and Peterson are even that popular/influential in the "culture and politics" fandom.
Heck, I bet that Alex Jones is more popular than they are
- On the other hand, they might be influential -- after all how many have heard of Evola or Gramsci? Yet, they're
cited by alt-right figures as having inspired their tactics and their thinking
- Are Peterson and Haidt this generation's Gramsci and Evola?
- The consensus between these three thinkers is psycho-conservatism because they're all psychology professors
- Psycho-conservatism is about human nature
- Humans have a given, observable nature
- This nature isn't always pretty
- Human nature places limits on what we can do with culture and society
- Traditional wisdom is often a good fit for human nature
- Utopian changes fail because they run contrary to human nature
- Small-'c' conservatism
- Look to the past for inspiration
- Be skeptical of radical changes
- Methodologically skeptical
- In light of the replication crisis in the social sciences, these professors are skeptical of existing evidence
- Draw conclusions from the most replicated and difficult to misinterpret experimental findings
- IQ
- Behavioral genetics
- Heritable stable phenomena like Big-5 personality dimensions
- Share a distinct set of political and cultural concerns
- Modern culture doesn't meet people's psychological needs
- Sympathy for values like authority, tradition and loyalty
- Belief that science on IQ and evolution is being suppressed in favor of science on more egalitarian theories,
which are less correct
- Belief that illiberal left-wing social activism is a major problem
- Disagreement with contemporary feminism, anti-racist activism and LGBT activism
- Disapproval of the "culture of victimhood" -- better to be "sunny and persuasive" than aggrieved
- No association with the current Republican Party
- Moderate or silent on "traditional" controversies, like abortion, war, government spending, etc.
- Interested in building more national or cultural unity, as opposed to polarization
- What are the weaknesses in psycho-conservatism?
- Sometimes we actually do know what we're talking about
- Highly skeptical methodology ensures that you won't be totally wrong, but there might be exceptions that your
methods don't see
- The airplane analogy is awful. In fact, the Wright Brothers managed to build their airplane by doing
exactly what she argues against -- they built their own wind tunnel, and gathered their own aerodynamic
data using the "strongest empirical principles"
- In fact, the Wright Brothers faced a replication crisis of their own -- their initial prototypes were all
failures, which led them to question the accuracy of the "conventional wisdom" aerodynamic data they'd
picked up from books
- Similarly, for society, we should insist on actually knowing how people and society work (i.e. gathering
our own wind-tunnel data) before making attempts to engineer better outcomes. Otherwise we'll crash over
and over again and we won't know why
- Might be ways of engineering society in order to ensure that better outcomes, even though in general
attempts to engineer society fail
- I don't think Haidt and Peterson would disagree with this. In fact, they've argued for social
engineering, in order to offset the psychologically damaging aspects of modern society
- But what Haidt and Peterson do say is that social engineering must be done in an empirical manner --
you can't just disregard human nature, or pretend that e.g. the only reason men and women have
different interests is because of "the patriarchy"
- There might be biological interventions that allow us to do better than default human nature
- Sure there are! It's just that if you mentioned "free genehacking clinics for all" the default
left-liberal reaction would be horror rather than, "Yes, let's make this happen as soon as possible
- There will always be a minority of people that your "conventional wisdom" doesn't apply to -- you shouldn't
override those people's local knowledge with your general principles of society
- Default ancestral society was terrible for nonconformists -- modern society is much better for them
- By advocating a return to ancestral society, Peterson and Haidt are advocating a return to oppression for
people who cannot or will not conform to ancestral norms
- Sometimes psycho-conservatives get the facts wrong
- Not all "cultural universals" are actually universal
- Example: patriarchy is a result of a particular type of agricultural civilization, not a human universal
- When a principle is at stake
- The fact that it is in our nature to do something doesn't mean that we should do it -- naturalistic
fallacy
- Yes, certain societal structures and behaviors may be easier to sustain if they're in alignment with human
nature
- However, this doesn't make those behaviors morally right
- Sometimes the thing to do when someone tells you that you're going against human nature is to smile and say,
"So what?"
- The problem I have with her conclusion is that she's leaving out the human costs of failure. Every effort to
re-engineer human nature in the past has involved massive amounts of authoritarian coercion
- It's easy to smile and say, "So what," when it doesn't result in an 8-figure death toll
- Scott Alexander has noticed the piles of skulls. Have you?
- Genuine forgiveness requires you to think that what the person did was actually wrong
- It's easy to "forgive" things like divorce when you don't think that divorce is wrong
- You can only forgive things that you find abhorrent
- The same principle applies to tolerance
- You don't gain any virtue by tolerating people who you have nothing against
- So what is "tolerance"
- Tolerance can be described as respect and compassion towards an "outgroup"
- So today, we have a lot of people who proclaim their toleration, even their love, of all sorts of groups that were
previously persecuted
- Is this tolerance?
- Before we can determine that, first we have to figure out what an outgroup is
- The conventional meaning of "outgroup" is simply "a group that you are not part of"
- But when we look at groups by similarity, we find that groups that are more dissimilar aren't necessarily more
persecuted
- Nazis and Japanese got along just fine with one-another (even though they both had virulently racist
ideologies)
- However the Nazis sent German Jews to death camps
- This is actually based upon a misunderstanding about Nazi ideology
- The Nazis did think that the Japanese were inferior to them
- However, according to Nazi ideology, the Japanese were still a race, and thus were "legitimate
competition" to the German/Aryan people
- Jews, on the other hand, were a cross-racial group, who, according to the Nazis, were parasites upon all
the races, in order to enrich themselves at the expense of their hosts
- According to the Nazis, the race that purged itself of Jews would have an advantage in the coming racial
struggle
- So yes, while the Japanese were certainly useful allies, the Nazis did not think of the Japanese as
equals in any way -- they were merely useful allies while the Aryan race purged itself of its parasites
- Any theory that looks only looks at raw dissimilarity when attempting to predict the level of hatred between
two groups is doomed to fail
- Outgroup = promimity + small differences
- Conservatives as "dark matter"
- 46% of Americans are creationists, yet Scott doesn't know a single American who is a creationist
- Maybe he does, and they just haven't told him? I know that I don't go around publicly proclaiming my belief
in evolution to people
- 40% of Americans want to ban gay marriage, but for Scott's social circle, that figure would be closer to 5 or 10%
- Scott lives in a Republican state with a Republican governor -- surely he should know at least some people who
hold standard Republican views
- This isn't just true of Scott's social circle either
- Numerous online spaces have zero representation from "god-and-guns" Republicans
- In fact, one of the things that Kill All Normies talks about is how so much of the liberal angst comes from
the fact that for the first time, conservatives have actually carved out online spaces of their own, in what
was previously a 100% liberal zone
- LessWrong has "conservatives", but when you look at the numbers more closely, they turn out to be libertarians who
accept the Republican Party as the lesser of two evils, or neoreactionaries who want to live under a king
- Scott has built an implausibly strong bubble around himself, excluding conservatives, even though he doesn't
select his friends on the basis of their political beliefs
- How is this possible?
- If people rarely select their friends on the basis of their political views, how do we end up with such strict
political segregation?
- Political parties are stand-ins for social tribes
- Political beliefs are only the tip of an iceberg that encompasses a broad range of lifestyle choices
- Red tribe
- Conservative political beliefs
- Evangelical religious beliefs
- Patriotism
- Enthusiasm for sports such as football and baseball
- Enthusiasm for (or at least tolerance of) gun ownership
- Traditional gender roles
- Blue tribe
- Liberal political beliefs
- Agnostic or new-age religious beliefs
- Concern about the environment
- Valuing (formal) education
- Grey tribe
- Libertarian political beliefs
- Atheism
- Otherwise like the blue tribe in lots of ways and can be considered part of the blue tribe
- I think a large part of why the so-called "Intellectual Dark Web" or "psycho-conservatism" has earned so
much ire from the blue tribe is because the Blue Tribe has noticed that the Grey Tribe is distinct
- These tribal categories are probably even more exclusive than political categories
- It's possible for someone with mostly blue-tribe beliefs to vote Republican, and it's possible for someone
with Red-Tribe beliefs to vote Democrat
- These tribal distinctions are the reason why Scott's filter bubble is so strong
- He isn't explicitly filtering his friends by politics, but he is implicitly filtering them via the hobbies he
has, the lifestyle choices he makes, the music he listens to, etc
- We don't know where these tribes come from but we can accept them as a brute fact about reality
- There are two, maybe three tribes
- They are basically all dark matter to each other
- These tribes are outgroups to each other
- When Osama bin Laden was killed, Blue Tribe people were able to talk about why, though his death may have been
necessary, we're wrong to revel in the death of anyone, even an enemy
- When Margaret Thatcher died, these same people threw parties in the street, singing, "Ding, Dong, the witch is
dead"
- Implict association tests find that political bias is 1.5x as strong as race biases
- Other studies using resumes show that discrimination on the basis of political affiliation is significantly
stronger than discrimination on the basis of gender or race
- People are way more scandalized by the thought of their child marrying across political party lines than they are
by the thought of their child marrying across racial lines
- The word "America", even though it explicitly refers to the country, has become a red-tribe cultural marker
- Blue tribe people write articles about how "Americans" are lazy, fat, stupid, etc
- However, these articles are written by Americans and read by Americans, most of whom nod in agreement, rather than
feeling insulted
- That's because to the Americans who read these articles, "American" is a demonym for "red tribe member", not
"person living in the USA"
- This is also true of "white": When Blue-tribe white people are writing articles about how "white people" are ruining
America, they're not talking about themselves
- The Blue Tribe does a neat bit of sleight-of-hand whereby they make it seem as if their criticisms of the Red Tribe
are self-criticisms, because after all, they're "Americans" too
- Thus the Blue Tribe is able to use the Red Tribe's own persecution of underprivileged groups as license to persecute
the Red Tribe
- The Blue Tribe discriminates against and persecutes the Red Tribe when it is able to do so
- Very liberal places push out conservatives
- College campuses
- The firing of Brendan Eich
- James Damore
- In writing the essay, Scott made exactly the mistake that he was writing the essay to warn about
- Scott isn't really a member of the Blue Tribe
- He's more grey tribe than he is blue tribe, and the blue tribe is the grey tribe's outgroup
- Criticizing your own group isn't fun, so if writing a critique feels fun, you're not criticizing your own group
- Grey tribe people should focus more on tolerating blue-tribe people
- Alternatively, we can pursue the intellectual dark-web strategy and ally with the red tribe to crush the blue
tribe
- According to moral foundations theory, liberals think of morality in terms of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity
whereas conservatives tend to be more concerned with loyalty, patriotism and respect
- Many of the centrists Ozy knows think that the onus is upon liberals to change
- Analogy with aesthetic preferences
- Ozy doesn't find things like landscape paintings to be aesthetically pleasing
- They like things like Joan Miro's Birth of the World
- Ozy's aesthetic preferences don't line up with normal human aesthetic preferences very well
- Is it incumbent upon her to change her preferences?
- Yes, probably
- The aesthetic preferences analogy is bad, because liking different kinds of painting doesn't impose the sorts of
costs and obligations as liking a different sort of politics
- However, Ozy does not want to change themselves to value different things
- With every passing day, I'm more and more convinced that Ozy is a paperclipper
- From their perspective, conservatives are perfectly willing to sacrifice things that actually matter in order to
preserve worthless purity-based values
- There is room for compromise
- However, the fact that we're compromising with someone shouldn't blind us to the fact that the person is completely
morally opposed to the values that we stand for
- From Ozy's perspective, half the country is evil and it is in Ozy's self-interest to shame the expression of their
values, indoctrinate their children and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on Earth
- Yeah, see, that's the kind of arrogance which annoys red tribe people
- Right or wrong, blue tribe people are arrogant
- Moreover, this perspective inherently limits the extent to which compromise can be acheived
- Compromise requires trust - you need to trust that your counterparty won't stab you in the back the moment
you turn away
- If the counterparty says that they think you're evil and are going to work to "indoctrinate [your] children,
shame the expression of [your] values, and [create] a future in which [your] values don't exist", then why
should you compromise at all with such a counterparty?
- Jordan Peterson is a prophet
- Prophets do three things:
- Tell you that you know what good and evil are
- Tell you that you're kind of crap - that even though you know what good and evil are, you still do evil sometimes
- Tell you that you can get better - that you're not beyond redemption
- So if being a prophet is that simple, why aren't more people prophets?
- Maybe the problem isn't the concept, but the execution -- you have to be really convincing in order to successfully
pull off being a prophet, and not everyone can manage it
- Peterson's book is about a central conflict between "order" and "chaos"
- Order is the comfortable habit-filled world of everyday existence
- Chaos is all the scary things pushing you out of your comfort zone
- People live best with a balance of order and chaos in their lives
- Too much order and you get boredom and stagnation
- Too much chaos and you get discombobulated and have a total breakdown
- Balance order and chaos correctly and you're constantly having new experiences which enrich you
- Failing to balance order and chaos retards our growth as human beings
- Peterson believes that suffering is a choice -- that you are avoiding a difficult reality by ensconcing yourself in a
narrative of victimhood
- This is where I disagree: not all suffering is a choice
- Also, even at this point, I'm starting to get suspicious of Peterson. I think he's falling into the trap that so
many psychologists fall in to, where they think that literally every problem can be reduced to a psychological
problem
- So why should we buy into Peterson's philosophy? What makes a person who does all this work balancing order and chaos
better?
- Alleviating suffering is good
- In order to alleviate suffering, you must make yourself stronger
- In order to build that strength, it's necessary to endure some suffering now, so that you're better able to deal
with suffering later
- But not all suffering is noble. Sometimes suffering is just stupid and pointless. How do you distinguish the
suffering that builds character from just pointlessly making your life more difficult for yourself?
- Concrete question: if I hire a cleaning person to just clean my bathroom for me, is that somehow damaging my
character?
- The problem with Peterson is that he never really grounds his ideology in anything
- He never answers the question of, "Why do bad things happen to good people," satisfactorily.
- Jordan Peterson's superpower is saying cliches and having them sound meaningful
