Apr 23, 2023·edited Apr 23, 2023Liked by Richard Hanania
> (animal suffering BTW is something I take seriously enough that it could blow up this entire analysis, but I’ll bracket the topic for now and save it for another day)
Some societal issues are mostly or fully empirical. "What energy policy will lead to the most economic growth and reduction in human suffering?" "What form of government best accomplishes objectives X, Y, and Z?" etc. Answering these questions requires the qualities that ECs excel at: an open mind, intelligence, and seeing the world as it is (as opposed to what you would wish it to be). Also, contemporary thinkers have an advantage here, because there is more empirical information available in the present.
But some questions are far more moral than empirical. "What is the moral weight of animal suffering?" "What duties do we have to fellow citizens, and to foreigners?" "What freedoms should we treasure most? How do we judge compromises between preserving freedom and avoiding chaos?" "What is the moral worth of an unborn child's life?" "What causes are worth dying for, and when is it better to compromise?" No scientific experiment can answer these, and the EC toolset is mostly worthless here. ECs may sidestep many of these questions with libertarianism, or support economic progress as a way of papering over divisions. But sometimes there is no compromise option, and the can be kicked no further.
This is where the ancients come into their own. Jesus, Confucius, Socrates, Homer, Virgil, the Buddha, and St. Aquinas may be clueless about pandemic mitigation or tariff policy. But on what it means to live a good life, what values to cherish most, and what rhetoric and symbolism to use to support these views—they are infinitely superior to the modern "ethicists" and "communications" midwits.
Tanner Greer is such a great intellectual because he excels in both disciplines. He has the detachment necessary to properly judge empirical questions. But he also has read history and the classics, and has a clear moral vision of what is worth living for.
I simply don’t buy it. Wisdom has to build on knowledge. Someone born 2,000 years ago knows nothing of biology, statistics, psychology, physics, and has a much shorter range of historical lessons to draw on. Most social science is worthless, but we have learned *some* things over the centuries, and they have relevance for understanding humanity and how we should live.
Absolutely they did, but they knew how to live in a preindustrial society. Machiavelli's thoughts on hiding your true appearance are a lot harder to put into practice with social media and the like.
Well, on one hand you can create an elaborately curated fake life for yourself. On the other, you leave a much larger digital trail than prior generations did, forensic stuff like DNA evidence makes perfect crimes harder than when you could have 2 condottieri ambush some guy behind the docks and nobody could know who it was after the fact. People run around digging up some stupid thing a politician said 10 years ago that's now un-PC. I'm not saying these older texts have no value--it's still better to be feared than loved than hated, but we do live in a different world.
Industry is purely a matter of how good humans are at mastering the physical world. Mastering oneself or other people, or preventing others from mastering you, simply do not change. As for social media hindering hiding your true appearance, sorry, but I see that as nonsense.
For a lot of these debates (abortion, animal suffering…) physics and statistics aren't all that relevant.
Psychology is kind of a mixed bag. Sure, we have a lot of studies these days, many data points, but they largely tell us about the brains of grad students in Western universities. The ancients may be comparatively lacking in rigor, but the past was far less homogeneous then the present and that breadth of experience advantages them in understanding human nature.
Then of course there is Chesterton's fence. If thousands of years of civilizational achievement are inspired by a particular moral code, that code is likely on to something. Is it really mere coincidence, that the world's most literate nation with a deep love of the classics, evolved into the world's greatest superpower?
Biology, specifically lack of knowledge of inheritance and natural selection, is IMO the greatest weakness of the ancients on moral questions.
Descartes thought animals don’t feel pain. And pro-lifers are always talking about science showing this or that. Even on these seemingly purely moral issues it appears that science has contributed to the debate.
Do they? They may have neural structures that look like the ones that appear to be associated with pain in yourself. But how do you know whether something is actually having a conscious experience, versus just following lots of complicated but blind physical processes? There is no empirical definition of consciousness, anything beyond solipsism must rest at least in part on blind faith.
Science, by giving us a very thorough understanding of the human reproductive process, has shown us that the unborn are in fact individual human beings.
Whether people are willing to admit it or not, the abortion debate is thus over whether or not those lives have any value, or whether their value is worth less than some other consideration (typically something about the woman's bodily autonomy). This is in fact a question of morals/values and unfortunately cannot be decided by science. If science could tell us objectively which human lives have value and when, then the debate would presumably be settled on that basis, in the same way that the debate over whether the Earth is round or flat has in essence been settled.
I don't think that Chesterton's fence is generally a great heuristic. Civilizations are resilient to small outpourings of bad ideas. The fact that an idea survived shows it is adaptive, not that it is good.
For example, suppose our treatment of animals is very immoral. There's no mechanism by which this fact would allow it to be rooted out. So we cannot infer from its prevalence that it is fine. Additionally, I think that appeals to Chesterton's fence is often just status quo bias. https://benthams.substack.com/p/anti-burkean-progressivism-at-the
Chesterton’s fence could be one of a number of heuristics that you employ. It need not be the deciding factor all, or even most, of the time. The problem is when you do away with it entirely.
As I argue in the linked article, it should be more of an anti-heuristic. When we ditch old institutions, things often improve, though it depends on the details. My point was that Chesterton's fence would tell you precisely nothing about the wrongness of eating meat--not just an imperfect heuristic, none at all.
That seems like a very broad statement. The biggest and boldest experiments in removing fences were communist revolutions and things definitely did not improve, with them.
If one is a utilitarian the fact that we eat meat is some evidence that eating meat has an upside. That makes it less likely that the overall effect of eating meat is net negative.
Suppose one went full vegan before we knew about B12 and stuff, see the use of Chesterton's fence then?
Per Chesterton's original quote, I don't see the point of Chesterton's Fence being to just end at ignorance. "I can't explain why this exists, so it must be important, let's not disturb it."
It's more about what we now call "steelmanning" -- before destroying an old thing, investigate its origins and purpose and come back to me with the strongest defense you can for why it should keep existing. If that argument for keeping it around is still unsatisfactory, if it truly has outlived its usefulness and it's in the way of something useful we want to do, then let's go ahead and be done with it (though we can still ask if any part of it is worth salvaging).
Also (and somewhat contra what Anonymous said above), Chesterton's Fence is more about conservatism than reaction. Which is to say, it's about arguing *against* destroying old alive things rather than arguing *for* reconsidering old dead things. There may be good reasons for reconsidering old dead things, but those are separate arguments, because not every old dead thing warrants this sort of steelmanning. In contrast, at an old enough age, every alive thing that exists warrants a steelmanning before being destroyed.
Not all knowledge is knowledge of the material world. What point of statistics could possibly improve this?
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
I feel like you’re violating your EC precepts somehow with this notion. It’s almost (or not almost) conspiratorial, in the sense that it’s premised on the notion that all of the people who say they find profundity in ancient or even, say, 19th century thought are just fooling ourselves and each other. I’d bet good money that the majority of people on your EV list would disagree with you. Would that make a difference in your perspective if so?
I forgot to mention Stoicism. The early CBT writers like Albert Ellis actually mentioned it! Of course there are other philosophies from that era we don't follow... there was a whole mystical side with things like Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism. The ancient Greeks had a variety, like anyone else.
I mean, gender roles vary from place to place, but biology puts a big constraint on them. If we find a way to let women have kids at 50 you might see smaller differences, for instance.
LOL...as for free love, it was obvious to me even back in high school you had to have two willing parties for sex and most people wouldn't want to sleep with you. The bit about hierarchy being the root of *all* evil is a great point, though. They really seem to think racism is the worst thing possible a priori, when it always seemed to me it was only bad because of its effects...and there are non-racist justifications for mass murder, just ask Stalin and Mao. (Even Leopold II of Belgium was mostly interested in money.)
I came to evo psych through the PUA blogs of the 2000s, though I had read about it in connection with the Matrix movie (it was on the list of books the Wachowskis had all the actors read, ironically enough). It's probably rather telling I was more into the denunciations of feminism than the advice on how to get laid. ;) I'm...not sure it's totally true, a lot of it seems to be post hoc justifications for observed behaviors. I do think there are human universals that are biologically rooted, or we wouldn't see the same patterns in culture after culture. But it's hard to tell without running experiments you couldn't possibly do, particularly in the modern era when cultures run together more. Is feminism in Japan (which is much weaker) a natural outgrowth of a post-industrial society, or did it spread there from the West?
I feel like evo psych is more scientific justifications for old values (which may in fact be better than the new ones!), because science involves falsification of a hypothesis. We can notice that marriage rates have dropped in the past few decades, but is it feminism emasculating men? Men turning to internet porn and video games? Women having better options due to increased incomes? All of the above? Only the first two? Only the first and third? How do you know?
(There are a few polyamorous evolutionary psychologists...Geoffrey Miller comes to mind.)
There are two parts that I disagree with. First, I think it is wrong that there are no methodologies to apply. There is one--just be a consequentialist and then shut up and multiply. The enlightened centrists are disproportionately enlightened centrists, and for very good reason--there are good arguments for it.
Second, you claim the ancients are good on these questions. I think it would be a miracle if people in the absence of collaboration were able to churn out good works of scholarship. See here for a more thorough explanation of this https://fakenous.substack.com/p/against-history
1. You still need a standard by which to judge the goodness of outcomes.
2. Predicting the consequences of actions is a hard problem in general, and it is easy to underestimate the difficulty. There is a reason why "for the greater good" is a common villain trope. Abrahamic religion provides a good lens to think about this: God, being omniscient, can be 100% utilitarian without danger; faillible humans should stick to the Ten Commandments and other time-tested heuristics.
Also, when I speak of "the ancients", I am specifically referring to those thinkers and writers whose works have remained in the limelight for many centuries. Sturgeon's law applies in all eras, but History tends to filter out the crap.
All plausible views will get similar accounts of which consequences matter. But utilitarianism is a good heuristic. I don't think that Abrahamic religion generally gives very good heuristics--though the ten commandments are mostly fine. We can just be sophisticated utilitarians to solve this problem.
I think re: animal suffering there is a normative question - "how much should we care about the well being of animals" - but it is hard to separate out from the positive question "what are the qualia of different animals like?".
If I learned tomorrow that chickens had subjective experiences - social bonds, self reflection, capacity for physical suffering, etc - equivalent to elephants, I would radically re-evaluate my life.
Apr 22, 2023·edited Apr 23, 2023Liked by Richard Hanania
You touched on this a bit, but I would add that I like to read people is that people who write in plain language and use words in their standard meanings. I try to aim for this: my blog is called Simplify. Of the people from your list that I recognize, they all seem to write in a straightforward manner. They also avoid the non-standard word usage, where people say stuff like "eating sushi is colonialism" or whatever.
I spot people who write in a logical, rationalism-oriented style that bends over backwards to present opposing views fairly. I would say in addition to non-zero-sum thinking, they describe trade-offs and willing to engage in a cost-benefit discussion regarding their opinions.
I liked this post and the concept of EC certainly has some contemporary “bite” in 2023. That’s an interesting list of thinkers, too. Quite Substack-y, no? Which is a compliment to Substack.
Other people have dinged you for not taking ancient/classical thinkers more seriously, so I’ll skip that.
> Claims about previous generations having it better are demonstrably false
Globally, sure. Compared to 1500 or 1800, sure. But empirically:
- People in the US (including black people, btw) are less happy than they were in the 1950s.
- Crime went up hugely from the 60s to the 90s. It came down from then, but only because many more people were jailed, and it’s still higher than the 50s and rising again.
- Divorce is high and marriage itself is increasingly rare. This is bad for happiness.
- Relatedly, the birth rate is simply unsustainable! You can’t say “everything is fine” when your society is shrinking by like 1/3 or more every generation. That’s like a definition of “not fine”! This is the most important point; it’s amazing it doesn’t get more attention.
- Jon Haidt’s evidence on mental health is at least worth taking seriously. The decline in social trust is also empirically well established and goes back about half a century.
These topics share a common reference point in the 1950s - ie, before the 1960s. It’s worth confronting the thesis that advanced societies have gone badly wrong since then in a social fabric sense.
Yeah, technological progress seems to be doing a lot of the heavily lifting in terms of people being better off, I think. Very few people want to go back to 1950's medicine.
The problem is that technology changes society, so you can't just rewind the social affairs but keep the toys. The Pill probably made feminism possible, for instance, and being married to the same person your whole life is a lot different when you expect to live to 65 versus 90, even without Honor Jones-style divorcing to feel the wind on your face. The web and (for example) Tumblr probably did a lot in creating the SJWs we all know and (here) hate.
I've seen the argument, by poly advocate Elizabeth Sheff, that the rise in polyamory popularity among the young is due to 1. longer lifespans making living with someone your whole life less appealing 2. the lack of a steady job and 3. the inability to buy a house due to soaring prices making relationship flexibility more important. Of course, a lot of people would consider 2. and 3. real social problems that need to be addressed.
(What they won't tell you is that poly relationships are much more changeable even than modern monogamous relationships, which is hell on kids. Nonomonogamy's been attempted from time to time--the Bloomsbury Group is the most famous example, but there were anarchists 100 years ago and of course hippies in the sixties--but only by bohemian types who have a high desire for novelty.)
My name reflects my bias, but the bit about not reading old philosophy strikes me as a symptom of our current obsession with data at the expense of generating actually useful explanations. I love statistics and all that too, but that isn’t the only thing that matters.
While there can certainly be biases in favor of old writers simply because they are old, often there is deep wisdom that is hard to find in books written recently.
I worry you have given the classics an unfairly cursory treatment?
I read a lot of EC thinkers, but this is where I generally depart - there’s an undervaluing of ancient/older wisdom and an overvaluing of science, technology, and economic progress. What I would call an EC would strike a healthier balance in these areas.
1. People are still people. If modern science confirms something Machiavelli and Socrates said, it's more likely to be an eternal human truth since it holds over 2000 years, and is likely to persist in being true.
2. Distance from our modern shibboleths. There are all sorts of things our modern world lies about (women being attracted to toxic masculinity for example), and the ancients told it like it was on that. They had their own lies, of course, but we are rarely concerned with the reputations of the Medici or the existence of the gods of Athens.
3. Related to 1., the world changes and will continue to change. We can't tell what social media will wind up doing, but we can see how prior generations dealt with disruptive technologies. We don't know when the American Empire will fall, but we can look at the fall of Rome and Britain and the various Chinese dynasties and see what did them in.
4. They are beautiful. Many far more so than much of the ugliness that passes for modern art.
5. Perspective on history. Along with distance from modern shibboleths, it can immunize against excessive pessimism when you learn how brutally terrible life was for pretty much everyone.
6. You can actually understand your own culture! It seems that day by day fewer people actually understand the history that led up to our current time. We have lost the context for our own civilization.
7. Exposure to wildly different ideas than you might normally come across.
8. The chance to read people who were almost certainly smarter than you.
I could get poetic about liberal arts training people to be free citizens in a republic, which I think is true, but I'll leave it at that.
Agree on 4. at least as far as the arts go, though I'm not sure about writers, where there's more of a prescription for life. Michelangelo's David certainly is gorgeous (and has a lesser-known political theme of 'f*** the Medici!') but it's not clear what if anything it would say about tax policy (and Michelangelo would probably look at you strangely if you asked).
I would have believed in 6. as recently as 10 years ago. A lot of tropes and expressions make a lot more sense if you read the Bible, for instance, and it's nice to know what all those 60s liberals were reacting *against*. But there's been such an attempt to destroy any kind of cultural continuity or tradition as representing white male supremacy that I'm not sure how useful any of that's going to be going forward.
Good substance to this idea. Terrible label. "Enlightened Centrism" has nothing to do with centrism, and will consistently cause confusion (note that you immediately had to apologize for this confusion when you introduced the term). At best it's "non-partisan", but so are most things (pretzels, dandruff, breastfeeding). And the "enlightened" thing is just pompous and superfluous -- every philosophy thinks it's enlightened, by definition.
No, I don't have a better suggestion. But it's just a label. Make up a nonsense word. If the point is to avoid associating it with an existing political tribe, that's a fool's errand anyway: if it comes from you, the idpol left will say it's alt-right white supremacist transphobic fascist etc etc. Might as well sacrifice a nonsense word to the gods of the euphemism treadmill, instead of a term that has pre-existing semantic value.
The overall commonality seems to be (1) good at stats, (2) utilitarian ethical framework, and (3) non-tribal / recognizing few sacred cows. There are a few who don't fall into (1) or (2), but most on the list that I know hit all 3.
It's somewhat similar to Thomas Sowell's "constrained vision": reality is big, you are small, institutions that gather and propagate information are better than institutions of enlightened/superior thinkers, people should follow the agreed on rules even if the outcomes aren't ideal, etc.
“... but most on the list that I know hit all 3.” If you know Michelle Goldberg, you know she can’t possibly be considered “non-tribal / recognizing few sacred cows.” The idea that she could be considered any kind of “centrist,” enlightened or otherwise, is laughable.
I like centrism in that on lots of issue I think a "middle" positions the right one: some redistribution of wealth but not too much to damage incentives, create incentives to reduce CO2 emissions but not at too high a price per ton avoided, free trade, but some consideration of national security, strategic products, more immigration to raise per capita incomes of existing residents, but not at levels that it would change the political nature of the country, absolute right to possess many kinds of weapons, but registration of sales to let police track guns used in crimes, deficit reduction with both tax increases and expenditure reductions, etc.
I sort of agree on "Enlightened" Maybe "Considered Centrism" to signal that the "center" between arbitrary points of polarization would be equally arbitrary.
That’s fine as far as it goes. But as noted elsewhere in the thread, lots of the “EC” positions would be coded as far right or far left. School vouchers is coded right. Vaccine mandates (not just for Covid) would now be coded far left, through a recent bizarre twist of partisan polarization. Cutting funding for military and intelligence agencies would be off the Dem-Rep spectrum altogether. None of these are “centrist” positions even if they’re the rational ones.
It's also very similar to the "big-brained centrist" meme which exists to mock people who use mental gymnastics to avoid taking any 'extreme' positions (this does not describe Richard, but true extremists would think it does).
Yes. The “EC” position on many issues would be outside of the bipartisan consensus on many issues. “Centrism” implies splitting the difference between the two tribes, rather than discarding that dyad entirely and striking out in a different direction. Many positions would be coded as extreme right or extreme left within the two-tribe frame. “Centrism” is a poor fit for all of these reasons.
Thanks for writing this — it's one of my favorites so far, and really successfully ties together a collection of traits that I admire and strive to emulate, as well as a group of thinkers who I'd previously labeled (in my mind) as simply "not idiots."
You write that "if me and Matt Yglesias were in Congress we’d vote on opposite sides of most issues." This surprises me. If you were more of a libertarian, I could see this occurring simply as a result of skepticism about federal legislation in general, but it's not obvious to me that most bills are about the kind of thing that you and Matt would disagree on. It's like the Supreme Court — yeah, conservative and liberal justice disagree on the high-profile cases, but most of the time their decisions aren't party-line.
Now, I see what you're saying if by "most issues" you mean "most big issues", although I'm not actually certain it's true even then. But a big part of the EC idea (in #2, for instance) seems to be that most important issues are basically empirical and that ECs are people who are simply able to address them on the merits. If this is true, and if you and Matt are ECs, I'd expect you to agree on a lot, even on the Senate floor.
This is a good point, I think you may be right. I meant large, salient issues, but I don't know about all things Congress considers, and I bet some stuff is like renaming post offices which everyone votes in favor of.
l am a liberal who left the democrats forever in 2020. What you leave out is that one side is in power and using the state to brutally censor the other. This is the most important issue by far.
At worst, that's still a choice between two hammers, and just having to pick the one that is less wrong. Still a solid argument to vote GOP.
But I disagree with the notion that the right is capable of wielding power as effectively as the left. I wish they were, maybe then we wouldn't be in this mess. IF DeSantis is actually the nominee and IF he is actually elected and IF he then actually wields his power effectively, then and only then could you start to theorize that maybe the right is capable of playing on even ground. So far, it quite plainly isn't true. Conservatives have barely anything to show for their 4 years "in power" with Trump.
Honestly the right should have been more ruthless when they controlled the banhammer. But they were too committed to the already irrelevant concept of classical liberalism. Now we have every institution unapoligetically enforcing left wing progressive values.
It's not that easy. There's a strong libertarian streak in the USA, just as there's a puritanical one--First Amendment, suspicion of government, so on. I suspect the bluenoses of the left will be undone eventually by 4chan and internet porn just as the bluenoses of the right were by rock music and video porn. But it will take a long time.
That's what RH would call level 3 thinking. I support Republicans because I believe in small government (I'm not as conspiratorial as you), but I don't think like most Republicans.
Taleb is smart and insightful, and deserves credit for bringing to prominence, important ideas, but he is an emotional arguer who is prone to ad hominen attacks, and fails a lot of these criteria.
Thanks for the shoutout. I think Lemoine and Noah Carl deserve a place here, probably in the right wing category.
One observation I'd add is that funnily enough I consider myself a centrist. Holding HBD/IQ realist views is just acknowledging reality for me, and my basic views on it are ultimately Pinkerian: https://akarlin.com/race-denial-vs-racism-a-false-dichotomy/ In fairness, I was anti-Third World immigration for a long time period, but of late I have accepted that nations are not a viable or desirable construct in the long run, and have now sided with Caplan/Hanson and shifted to Open Borders.
This might be strange ostensibly be hard to reconcile with my professed Russian nationalism, but that position is primarily motivated by the observation that Russia's embrace of stridently a-national ideologies (Communism in 20C; market fundamentalism in the 1990s) has been consistently ruinous for the Russian people, and perhaps Russia should look out for the interests of its own people and the ethnicity that makes up 85% of its population in particular for a change during 21C (much as Israel privileges the interests of a certain ethnoreligious group that makes up 75% of its population). Even in Russia, I got on better with liberal nationalists (OB, Sputnik & Pogrom, etc.) and the National Bolsheviks than with conservative monarchist types. There two Tweets represent my views on that well:
> I'm probably better defined as a centrist-nationalist/ethnocentrist rather than a right-winger. My main "right" position is racial realism/rejection of the clean slate theory. But among these there are people of almost all ideologies, including liberals and even (though rarely) leftists.
> The main goal of nationalism is to self-destruct. To such an extent "normalize" national thinking that "nationalism" will remain, by and large, become the reserve of only freaks, outcasts, and Svidomy.
I was always against Russian nationalism that was loaded in any particular "extra" ideological direction and considering late Putinism's devolution into senile jeremiads about Satanism and the 666 genders that was actually a perspicacious call.
Anyhow I did write an extensive piece on how animal rights should be gradated based on their cognitive capacities and why I avoid pork as a result of that which is kind of well beyond the normie political scales and just schizo/unclassifiable. https://akarlin.com/animals/
Noah is good, and Philippe is so close to me that I forgot about him but of course he belongs. You’re still pro-capitalist and anti-woke right? I think that classifies as right rings.
I think most everyone on your is broadly pro-capitalist, right? Yes, I am.
I'm Woke-skeptical in the sense that will probably never be able to get truly excited about pronouns or hear about microaggressions without smirking on the inside, but it no longer annoys or triggers me as it once did. It is the new Christianity, it has won (become culturally hegemonic), a lot of anti-Woke discourse is at least equally retarded and often much meaner and more debased, and its success might have been preordained anyway (worlds in which AGI ends up aligned and as such account for the great bulk of all possible posthuman observer moments might be much more Woke than otherwise expected, because AIs taught to "check your privilege" and "read the room" may be far better for us than those brought up under other ethical systems).
“I really like Steve Sailer, but he’s way too prone to zero-sum thinking, leading to policies on trade and immigration that I don’t think are very sensible.”
It seems odd to me to complain about the political externalities of low IQ Republicans or the criminal behavior of blacks and then support mass, low IQ (even lower than GOP voters!) immigration that will increase the number of criminals and/or political externalities. Libertarians will often argue that immigrants have lower crime rates than natives but then you realize than the natives include tons of non-white criminals--many of whom arrived not so long ago.
"Libertarians will often argue that immigrants have lower crime rates than natives but then you realize than the natives include tons of non-white criminals--many of whom arrived not so long ago."
This has absolutely nothing to do with the point. Black people's ancestors were forcibly immigrated here and black people have high crime, therefore immigrants in general now have high crime? How is this a good inference?
Not just Asians. But even so, the “cosmopolitan elite” ignore the wishes of the masses who prefer their own kind. A homogeneous homeland is a type of consumer good, but in this case, the elite attack this consumer good as a form of “commodification”. When it comes to the streets, roads, parks, etc. (the access points for immigrants), suddenly the libertarian-minded are communists who think these state-held properties belong to the entire world.
>Covid came out of the blue. This meant we could observe its political effects as a kind of natural experiment, since pandemic policy wasn’t yet polarized, and watch how each side dealt with and processed evidence in real time.<
It seemed to me that there was essentially no opposition to lockdowns at first, in the very short term, like the first month or two. But then it got very polarized very quickly. I don't remember there ever being a moment where someone was able to question lockdowns and not have that perceived as a polarized right-wing (and therefore wrong-think) viewpoint.
>I’ll note that while Enlightened Centrists might not have a common position on major hot-button issues like gender transitions for minors or the retirement age for social security<
I find it hard to believe anyone could support gender transitions for children and still be considered any sort of worthwhile thinker. Maybe you think the issue doesn't matter, but that doesn't excuse getting something so obvious so wrong. It's about as bad as being a flat earther, arguably worse. People who believe the Earth is flat aren't really that politically important either, but it's still a pretty big marker that they shouldn't be taken seriously about much of anything else.
>the right doesn’t because it’s a movement dominated by rural interests, religious fundamentalists, and those who rely on audiovisual communication rather than the written word to receive and process information, due to some combination of stupidity and intellectual laziness.<
Doesn't this violate "no all-encompassing theories about political opponents?" The attitude that anything to do with conservatives boils down to them being stupid seems pretty all-encompassing.
There probably are some people who really do have the opposite sex's brain--we've seen things ranging from homosexuality to cross-dressing throughout history, and a lot of cultures have some marginal 'third-gender' role, so evidently there is some process where the 'wrong' gender 'program' gets turned on. I do think the huge upsurge in FTM kids is probably due to some social contagion, and at least some of the MTFs are autistic boys trying to avoid the brunt of Woke misandry. How much is just the culture being more accepting, I have no clue.
Ironically I'd rather see *more* acceptance of gender variance and less hormones and surgery. Doesn't bother me if a dude wants to paint his nails and wear a dress, but if he's cutting it off, it ain't growing back.
>Ironically I'd rather see *more* acceptance of gender variance and less hormones and surgery. Doesn't bother me if a dude wants to paint his nails and wear a dress, but if he's cutting it off, it ain't growing back.<
Sure, kids go through all kinds of silly phases. The issue is the whole deal where you permanently damage their bodies in some way. It's one thing to trivialize this issue and say it doesn't matter, which I obviously disagree with too, but it's quite another to actually defend the sterilization and/or mutilation of minors based on transgender ideology.
Transgenderism is one of those areas where society would have a more accurate worldview from just applying the Bible than saying "let's test everything with the scientific method!"
It's pretty insane that we've had to subject thousands of kids to mutilation and sterilize before the "enlightened centrists" have the data to conclude nope, actually it's better to put gender-confused kids in therapy with the goal of being comfortable with their sex than to chop off their body parts, put them on behavior-altering hormones, craft fake genitals, and pressure every other person in society to pretend that boys are girls and vice versa.
Transgenderism is what you get when you take an aversion to all forms of tradition/religion and just run with it straight off a cliff. "It makes Christians mad, so it must be good, because religious people are always wrong." This desire to hurt the religious by inverting morality seems to me like a common thread behind basically every left-wing perversion of basic norms, from encouraging promiscuity, to "normalizing sex work," and on down the list.
Correct. I will also add that trans is just what happens when you take "F you Dad" as your ideological foundation and amplify that with a decade of algorithmically driven Flamboyant Dishonor (credit; Jack Donovan). 20 years ago, these kids would have known nothing more rebellious than dressing as goths or getting tattoos. Most kids who were goths 20 years ago eventually grew out of it and today are trying to convince their children that face tattoos and gender reassignment surgery are bad ideas.
That said, the desire to offend religious people still lurks as the primary id of most left wing people I know. They can only conceptualize a certain type of cause for all problems, legitimately think corporate boardrooms are still run by JesusLand type evangelicals, and every joke about Canada has to have the punch line of "and then ackshually we would have healthcare too".
I think that this article is important and demonstrates the things that I trust in political thinkers. A few other notable similarities.
1) They seem to really like betting markets, though perhaps that's subsumed under the category of 'liking knowledge seeking institutions.'
2) They are dramatically disproportionately consequentialists.
3) They tend to be much more likely to be effective altruists or pro-animal welfare (I think Jesse Singal is a good example of another enlightened centrist, and he's also into effective altruism), and this also applies to Richard, Smith to some degree, Singer (obviously), Alexander, and like half of the people on the list.
4) Disproportionately anti-woke, but only a bit, such that it does not gobble up their identity.
I think that the animal welfare one is a decent test because it's overwhelmingly obvious that what we're doing to animals is wrong, but it's generally associated with annoying people. The people who are able to, through purely abstract reasoning, come to the conclusion that something which is very enjoyable is nonetheless deeply immoral are the people that are most trustworthy.
I think another great example of a brilliant enlightened centrist is...no, modesty prevents me from continuing.
Animal welfare seems an odd one. I fit the descriptions you outline here, but don't care all that much about animal welfare mostly because I can't find a consistent approach to it that isn't just "if it's cute and fluffy it deserves to be treated nice, otherwise it's open season" which is hardly defensible intellectually. It's one of those areas where I have to give credit to religion. Christianity has a coherent approach here. Animals were put on Earth for humans, and we're tasked to take care of them by God but ultimately we rule them. It results in mostly useful outcomes.
What's wrong with the consistent approach that "animals matter morally, their suffering is bad, their welfare is good, and we should treat them well?" Every plausible moral view will hold that the fact that we inflict more suffering on animals every few years than has ever existed in human history is seriously wrong.
If you disagree, what is it about animals that makes their suffering not bad?
What's wrong with it? It's all so vague as to be useless.
1. What does "treat them well" mean? A lot of people would say organic farming counts. Would you, or does eating animals of any kind count as not treating them well?
2. Should I be consumed with guilt if I clear out an infestation of moths? Step on a slug? If so, how is that practical?
3. There are MANY animals that would kill me and eat me given a chance. They wouldn't give a shit about my suffering, they wouldn't even have any notion of my suffering. Why should I care about the suffering of something or someone who would happily cause me to suffer if it could? How does that generalize to other humans, and war?
4. How do you weigh up animal suffering that leads to less human suffering e.g. experiments, if not via speciesism?
5. What is an animal, exactly? Where do you draw the line? Are insects animals? Bacteria? A bacterial colony? A nematode worm? If the answer is "no" then at what level of cellular organization does a lifeform become an animal?
1. Well, I am obviously not going to propose a comprehensive way to treat animals well, just as saying that one should have a presumption against war does not require having a comprehensive way of figuring out the precise set of necessary and sufficient conditions for war. I think that it's fine to eat animals who lived overall positive welfare lives--which is fewer than 1% of animals given the ghastly conditions on factory farms. We may not agree on exactly what it means to treat animals well, but any remotely sensible definition will say that the ghastly factory farms do not treat them well (e.g. they castrate them with no anesthetic).
2. I think that's a difficult case but probably fine. Moths have very little capacity for welfare, are probably not conscious, and you can harm animals to avert a greater harm.
3. Suppose we came across amoral severely mentally disabled people. Would you be fine with setting up factory farms that torture and kill 80 billion of them each year. The fact that something doesn't understand morality and would harm you doesn't mean it's okay to bring it into existence just to harm it. Additionally, even if you think it does, nearly all the animals we eat are herbivores and generally wouldn't harm you.
4. You look at which causes more suffering. Maybe if you believe in rights you think there are other important factors, but I don't, because I'm a utilitarian.
5. Insects are animals, bacteria aren't. It's only conscious beings that matter, however, not all animals. Biologists have well understood definitions of animals.
My claim is that, regardless of what position we stake (or perhaps steak out) out on the finer details of animals ethics, any remotely plausible view will say that what nearly all western people do nearly every day is deeply evil--namely, eat meat from factory farms. 99% of meat comes from factory farms.
I don't think your arguments are robust enough to class people who disagree as "deeply evil", sorry, that's a serious accusation against others that these points cannot justify. Take your last point, "it's only conscious beings that matter" followed by a claim that not all animals are conscious. What's your definition or test of consciousness, exactly? How can I decide? Given that the difference is one of being a good man and "deeply evil" it seems to matter but I never came across a crisp objective definition.
"Suppose we came across amoral severely mentally disabled people ... would you be fine with setting up factory farms that torture and kill 80 billion of them each year"
Amoral severely mentally disabled people very often turn out to be dangerous and they do get imprisoned, no? I guess that must be a lot like torture to the people it's inflicted on but I don't really want deranged psychos wandering around trying to kill me, so I tolerate it.
I also don't quite follow your point about bringing animals into existence. Surely there's no difference morally between doing something to an animal that was born on a farm, and an animal born in the wild. Why does it matter if we humans bring an animal into existence or not?
You seem very fixated on factory farming. I buy organic because I too prefer the idea of happy cows that wander around eating grass in nice big fields all day and have cash to spend on it, but I also realize I have no real idea of what conditions are like on organic farms, and that I can't really justify my position via a rigorous set of moral rules. It's just that, well, sheep and cows seem kinda nice and friendly and I'd like them to enjoy their life before they get shot in the head so I can eat them (preferably so quickly it's painless). If I were up against a vegan who was convinced any kind of animal eating was evil, I'd struggle to justify my position though because it's not consistent. Like, I don't really care if the salmon I eat is factory farmed. They're slippery and cold and I don't really ever encounter them in my own life except on the table. So, I eat them guilt free.
I didn't say that the people were deeply evil--I said they were, like nearly all humans throughout history, doing something deeply evil. I argue for this at length in the article that Richard linked. Consciousness is having subjective experience--it's when there's something it's like to be a thing. There are different ways to decide whether something is conscious--it's a difficult scientific question. I think that insects have about a 50% chance of being conscious, oysters and such probably aren't, and fish almost definitely are, as our the animals that we factory farm.
You note rightly that we keep severely disabled people in institutions. Okay, but with animals, we're not keeping existing ones in institutions so they don't hurt us. Instead, we breed billions of them into existence, torment them in ghoulish conditions (castration with no anaesthetic, tails being cut off often with full pliers, forcing them to live in feces and ammonia, etc). The reason that it matters that we bring the animals into existence is that, while it might be okay to contain existing severely mentally disabled people, it would be wrong to breed billions of them into existence and give them very terrible lives.
I'm fixated on factory farms because 99% of meat in the US comes from factory farms--and the same is true in much of the rest of the world. Anything else is just a distraction--if we were discussing whether US arms sales are generally good, we'd focus on what they are like in most cases, not weird edge cases. I elaborate more on this here https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-discussion-of-meat-should-be
A common thread with all the EC names you listed is that they're a very niche set. Although I know and have read many of those names, I doubt any of them are known by even a third of the American population. This makes sense- if they refuse to identify as part of a tribe, then it's hard for them to become super popular, because humans are wired to form tribes to ensure ingroup survival. To be an EC means to reject that primal impulse and think from a very abstract level, which usually requires a high IQ and some degree of neurodivergence. I'm not surprised that ECs tend to be less popular among right wingers, considering how conservatives dislike abstraction. Matt Yglesias has written about how conservatives are much less likely to think that abstract art is "real art": https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/16/20856316/poll-yougov-art-ideology-trump
Considering how rare it is for someone to be an EC, is this ideology doomed to be a niche one? Can you imagine a world of ECs? It would probably require a lot of eugenics to get people like the names you listed, especially when you consider that high-IQ people have less children.
The art thing is nonsense. I dislike abstract art, am libertarian conservative and yet have been a computer programmer for decades. My entire job is nothing but dealing with abstractions, all day every day. This also describes many of my colleagues and friends. There is no correlation between disliking that sort of art, being conservative and disliking abstraction, in my experience.
Looking at the image they picked as an example of "abstract art", it's pretty clear what's going on there. Liberals are far more likely to support this kind of thing for a couple of reasons. One, because they don't believe in "hard" skill or merit at mundane tasks, considering such things to be excuses for oppression hierarchies and not really existing to begin with. See how they freak out over the word meritocracy; there's a long history of it.
Instead they are far more interested in people with (apparently) complex ideas, frequently confusing complexity for quality.
Secondly, they have extremely strong in-group loyalty.
The sort of people who produce random scribbling like that piece of art will, with near 100% certainty:
1. Be extremely left wing (+quite possibly be supported by the state).
2. Justify their image as having deep meaning using very convoluted and intellectual-sounding language.
This stuff is attractive for leftists because they see an opportunity to divert money and influence to ideological fellow travellers by praising it and insisting on support for it. Non-leftists look at it and say, does this image look like the work of a skilled artist, someone who had to refine their craft? No. Is it beautiful? No. Then I don't see the value in it.
Here's a simple experiment - rerun the poll but this time state that the piece of art in question was drawn by Trump when he was a child, then ask if it's art. I'd be willing to bet a fair amount that the answers of the conservatives won't change much, whereas the leftists will suddenly decide it's not art anymore.
Huh? That's a bit like asking a civil engineer how building a bridge deals with physics, because if one girder is weak the bridge can collapse. The question doesn't seem to make much sense.
Yes, programming languages require very tight adherence to the syntax rules and many other rules. The code that people write though, very often is an abstraction over something. Modern programs are nothing but towers of abstractions often 30-50 abstractions deep. To have this discussion right now we're using Substack, which is built on top of hundreds of abstractions. Some of them abstract the details of drawing shapes, others of typesetting text, some of dealing with the network, others of dealing with the low level details of the hardware. The result is that Substack can write code of the form "Place comment 1234 by the Lone Ranger after comment 1233 by Sheluyang Peng, offset to the right by the width of 32 dips", without thinking about the exact sequence of electrical signals to send to the networking or video processors in order to achieve that.
Despite all that abstraction, the Substack code must still close parens correctly. The two things aren't really related.
They're mostly soulless off putting douchebags who have interesting ideas but have to be kept at arms length (except FdB, who comes across like a grown emo kid, like me except he never found something to live for).
"Freddie deBoer is the only person on the EC list who would call himself a Marxist of any sort, although when I interviewed him he didn’t sound like any other Marxist I was familiar with."
I suspect Freddie would defend or explain this by saying that he's remained "true" to what he's long understood the principles/whatever of Marxism to be, while there are many "Marxists" who have flooded the ranks ever since Occupy that have little understanding of historical Marxist theory or policy. This is something of an axe he grinds from time-to-time on his Substack.
I am neither a Marxist nor a "Marxist" - so not my place to says who the "true Scotsman" is. Just a note to anyone curious.
> (animal suffering BTW is something I take seriously enough that it could blow up this entire analysis, but I’ll bracket the topic for now and save it for another day)
Some societal issues are mostly or fully empirical. "What energy policy will lead to the most economic growth and reduction in human suffering?" "What form of government best accomplishes objectives X, Y, and Z?" etc. Answering these questions requires the qualities that ECs excel at: an open mind, intelligence, and seeing the world as it is (as opposed to what you would wish it to be). Also, contemporary thinkers have an advantage here, because there is more empirical information available in the present.
But some questions are far more moral than empirical. "What is the moral weight of animal suffering?" "What duties do we have to fellow citizens, and to foreigners?" "What freedoms should we treasure most? How do we judge compromises between preserving freedom and avoiding chaos?" "What is the moral worth of an unborn child's life?" "What causes are worth dying for, and when is it better to compromise?" No scientific experiment can answer these, and the EC toolset is mostly worthless here. ECs may sidestep many of these questions with libertarianism, or support economic progress as a way of papering over divisions. But sometimes there is no compromise option, and the can be kicked no further.
This is where the ancients come into their own. Jesus, Confucius, Socrates, Homer, Virgil, the Buddha, and St. Aquinas may be clueless about pandemic mitigation or tariff policy. But on what it means to live a good life, what values to cherish most, and what rhetoric and symbolism to use to support these views—they are infinitely superior to the modern "ethicists" and "communications" midwits.
Tanner Greer is such a great intellectual because he excels in both disciplines. He has the detachment necessary to properly judge empirical questions. But he also has read history and the classics, and has a clear moral vision of what is worth living for.
I simply don’t buy it. Wisdom has to build on knowledge. Someone born 2,000 years ago knows nothing of biology, statistics, psychology, physics, and has a much shorter range of historical lessons to draw on. Most social science is worthless, but we have learned *some* things over the centuries, and they have relevance for understanding humanity and how we should live.
The idea that people who lived long ago didn’t understand psychology is just plain crazy.
Absolutely they did, but they knew how to live in a preindustrial society. Machiavelli's thoughts on hiding your true appearance are a lot harder to put into practice with social media and the like.
This is the best comment of the thread. I hope your humor was intentional Anonymous Dude.
Well, on one hand you can create an elaborately curated fake life for yourself. On the other, you leave a much larger digital trail than prior generations did, forensic stuff like DNA evidence makes perfect crimes harder than when you could have 2 condottieri ambush some guy behind the docks and nobody could know who it was after the fact. People run around digging up some stupid thing a politician said 10 years ago that's now un-PC. I'm not saying these older texts have no value--it's still better to be feared than loved than hated, but we do live in a different world.
Industry is purely a matter of how good humans are at mastering the physical world. Mastering oneself or other people, or preventing others from mastering you, simply do not change. As for social media hindering hiding your true appearance, sorry, but I see that as nonsense.
For a lot of these debates (abortion, animal suffering…) physics and statistics aren't all that relevant.
Psychology is kind of a mixed bag. Sure, we have a lot of studies these days, many data points, but they largely tell us about the brains of grad students in Western universities. The ancients may be comparatively lacking in rigor, but the past was far less homogeneous then the present and that breadth of experience advantages them in understanding human nature.
Then of course there is Chesterton's fence. If thousands of years of civilizational achievement are inspired by a particular moral code, that code is likely on to something. Is it really mere coincidence, that the world's most literate nation with a deep love of the classics, evolved into the world's greatest superpower?
Biology, specifically lack of knowledge of inheritance and natural selection, is IMO the greatest weakness of the ancients on moral questions.
Descartes thought animals don’t feel pain. And pro-lifers are always talking about science showing this or that. Even on these seemingly purely moral issues it appears that science has contributed to the debate.
> Descartes thought animals don’t feel pain.
Do they? They may have neural structures that look like the ones that appear to be associated with pain in yourself. But how do you know whether something is actually having a conscious experience, versus just following lots of complicated but blind physical processes? There is no empirical definition of consciousness, anything beyond solipsism must rest at least in part on blind faith.
Science, by giving us a very thorough understanding of the human reproductive process, has shown us that the unborn are in fact individual human beings.
Whether people are willing to admit it or not, the abortion debate is thus over whether or not those lives have any value, or whether their value is worth less than some other consideration (typically something about the woman's bodily autonomy). This is in fact a question of morals/values and unfortunately cannot be decided by science. If science could tell us objectively which human lives have value and when, then the debate would presumably be settled on that basis, in the same way that the debate over whether the Earth is round or flat has in essence been settled.
I don't think that Chesterton's fence is generally a great heuristic. Civilizations are resilient to small outpourings of bad ideas. The fact that an idea survived shows it is adaptive, not that it is good.
For example, suppose our treatment of animals is very immoral. There's no mechanism by which this fact would allow it to be rooted out. So we cannot infer from its prevalence that it is fine. Additionally, I think that appeals to Chesterton's fence is often just status quo bias. https://benthams.substack.com/p/anti-burkean-progressivism-at-the
Chesterton’s fence could be one of a number of heuristics that you employ. It need not be the deciding factor all, or even most, of the time. The problem is when you do away with it entirely.
As I argue in the linked article, it should be more of an anti-heuristic. When we ditch old institutions, things often improve, though it depends on the details. My point was that Chesterton's fence would tell you precisely nothing about the wrongness of eating meat--not just an imperfect heuristic, none at all.
That seems like a very broad statement. The biggest and boldest experiments in removing fences were communist revolutions and things definitely did not improve, with them.
But it's not supposed to.
It's just supposed to make you stop and think before you do away with an old institution, in a fit of reformatory zeal.
If one is a utilitarian the fact that we eat meat is some evidence that eating meat has an upside. That makes it less likely that the overall effect of eating meat is net negative.
Suppose one went full vegan before we knew about B12 and stuff, see the use of Chesterton's fence then?
Per Chesterton's original quote, I don't see the point of Chesterton's Fence being to just end at ignorance. "I can't explain why this exists, so it must be important, let's not disturb it."
It's more about what we now call "steelmanning" -- before destroying an old thing, investigate its origins and purpose and come back to me with the strongest defense you can for why it should keep existing. If that argument for keeping it around is still unsatisfactory, if it truly has outlived its usefulness and it's in the way of something useful we want to do, then let's go ahead and be done with it (though we can still ask if any part of it is worth salvaging).
Also (and somewhat contra what Anonymous said above), Chesterton's Fence is more about conservatism than reaction. Which is to say, it's about arguing *against* destroying old alive things rather than arguing *for* reconsidering old dead things. There may be good reasons for reconsidering old dead things, but those are separate arguments, because not every old dead thing warrants this sort of steelmanning. In contrast, at an old enough age, every alive thing that exists warrants a steelmanning before being destroyed.
The phrase you're looking for is WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), in case you don't already know.
Excellent points, well said.
Not all knowledge is knowledge of the material world. What point of statistics could possibly improve this?
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
I feel like you’re violating your EC precepts somehow with this notion. It’s almost (or not almost) conspiratorial, in the sense that it’s premised on the notion that all of the people who say they find profundity in ancient or even, say, 19th century thought are just fooling ourselves and each other. I’d bet good money that the majority of people on your EV list would disagree with you. Would that make a difference in your perspective if so?
I forgot to mention Stoicism. The early CBT writers like Albert Ellis actually mentioned it! Of course there are other philosophies from that era we don't follow... there was a whole mystical side with things like Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism. The ancient Greeks had a variety, like anyone else.
I mean, gender roles vary from place to place, but biology puts a big constraint on them. If we find a way to let women have kids at 50 you might see smaller differences, for instance.
LOL...as for free love, it was obvious to me even back in high school you had to have two willing parties for sex and most people wouldn't want to sleep with you. The bit about hierarchy being the root of *all* evil is a great point, though. They really seem to think racism is the worst thing possible a priori, when it always seemed to me it was only bad because of its effects...and there are non-racist justifications for mass murder, just ask Stalin and Mao. (Even Leopold II of Belgium was mostly interested in money.)
I came to evo psych through the PUA blogs of the 2000s, though I had read about it in connection with the Matrix movie (it was on the list of books the Wachowskis had all the actors read, ironically enough). It's probably rather telling I was more into the denunciations of feminism than the advice on how to get laid. ;) I'm...not sure it's totally true, a lot of it seems to be post hoc justifications for observed behaviors. I do think there are human universals that are biologically rooted, or we wouldn't see the same patterns in culture after culture. But it's hard to tell without running experiments you couldn't possibly do, particularly in the modern era when cultures run together more. Is feminism in Japan (which is much weaker) a natural outgrowth of a post-industrial society, or did it spread there from the West?
I feel like evo psych is more scientific justifications for old values (which may in fact be better than the new ones!), because science involves falsification of a hypothesis. We can notice that marriage rates have dropped in the past few decades, but is it feminism emasculating men? Men turning to internet porn and video games? Women having better options due to increased incomes? All of the above? Only the first two? Only the first and third? How do you know?
(There are a few polyamorous evolutionary psychologists...Geoffrey Miller comes to mind.)
There are two parts that I disagree with. First, I think it is wrong that there are no methodologies to apply. There is one--just be a consequentialist and then shut up and multiply. The enlightened centrists are disproportionately enlightened centrists, and for very good reason--there are good arguments for it.
Second, you claim the ancients are good on these questions. I think it would be a miracle if people in the absence of collaboration were able to churn out good works of scholarship. See here for a more thorough explanation of this https://fakenous.substack.com/p/against-history
Consequentialism is not enough.
1. You still need a standard by which to judge the goodness of outcomes.
2. Predicting the consequences of actions is a hard problem in general, and it is easy to underestimate the difficulty. There is a reason why "for the greater good" is a common villain trope. Abrahamic religion provides a good lens to think about this: God, being omniscient, can be 100% utilitarian without danger; faillible humans should stick to the Ten Commandments and other time-tested heuristics.
Also, when I speak of "the ancients", I am specifically referring to those thinkers and writers whose works have remained in the limelight for many centuries. Sturgeon's law applies in all eras, but History tends to filter out the crap.
All plausible views will get similar accounts of which consequences matter. But utilitarianism is a good heuristic. I don't think that Abrahamic religion generally gives very good heuristics--though the ten commandments are mostly fine. We can just be sophisticated utilitarians to solve this problem.
I think re: animal suffering there is a normative question - "how much should we care about the well being of animals" - but it is hard to separate out from the positive question "what are the qualia of different animals like?".
If I learned tomorrow that chickens had subjective experiences - social bonds, self reflection, capacity for physical suffering, etc - equivalent to elephants, I would radically re-evaluate my life.
You touched on this a bit, but I would add that I like to read people is that people who write in plain language and use words in their standard meanings. I try to aim for this: my blog is called Simplify. Of the people from your list that I recognize, they all seem to write in a straightforward manner. They also avoid the non-standard word usage, where people say stuff like "eating sushi is colonialism" or whatever.
I spot people who write in a logical, rationalism-oriented style that bends over backwards to present opposing views fairly. I would say in addition to non-zero-sum thinking, they describe trade-offs and willing to engage in a cost-benefit discussion regarding their opinions.
I liked this post and the concept of EC certainly has some contemporary “bite” in 2023. That’s an interesting list of thinkers, too. Quite Substack-y, no? Which is a compliment to Substack.
Other people have dinged you for not taking ancient/classical thinkers more seriously, so I’ll skip that.
> Claims about previous generations having it better are demonstrably false
Globally, sure. Compared to 1500 or 1800, sure. But empirically:
- People in the US (including black people, btw) are less happy than they were in the 1950s.
- Crime went up hugely from the 60s to the 90s. It came down from then, but only because many more people were jailed, and it’s still higher than the 50s and rising again.
- Divorce is high and marriage itself is increasingly rare. This is bad for happiness.
- Relatedly, the birth rate is simply unsustainable! You can’t say “everything is fine” when your society is shrinking by like 1/3 or more every generation. That’s like a definition of “not fine”! This is the most important point; it’s amazing it doesn’t get more attention.
- Jon Haidt’s evidence on mental health is at least worth taking seriously. The decline in social trust is also empirically well established and goes back about half a century.
These topics share a common reference point in the 1950s - ie, before the 1960s. It’s worth confronting the thesis that advanced societies have gone badly wrong since then in a social fabric sense.
Yeah, technological progress seems to be doing a lot of the heavily lifting in terms of people being better off, I think. Very few people want to go back to 1950's medicine.
The problem is that technology changes society, so you can't just rewind the social affairs but keep the toys. The Pill probably made feminism possible, for instance, and being married to the same person your whole life is a lot different when you expect to live to 65 versus 90, even without Honor Jones-style divorcing to feel the wind on your face. The web and (for example) Tumblr probably did a lot in creating the SJWs we all know and (here) hate.
I've seen the argument, by poly advocate Elizabeth Sheff, that the rise in polyamory popularity among the young is due to 1. longer lifespans making living with someone your whole life less appealing 2. the lack of a steady job and 3. the inability to buy a house due to soaring prices making relationship flexibility more important. Of course, a lot of people would consider 2. and 3. real social problems that need to be addressed.
(What they won't tell you is that poly relationships are much more changeable even than modern monogamous relationships, which is hell on kids. Nonomonogamy's been attempted from time to time--the Bloomsbury Group is the most famous example, but there were anarchists 100 years ago and of course hippies in the sixties--but only by bohemian types who have a high desire for novelty.)
My name reflects my bias, but the bit about not reading old philosophy strikes me as a symptom of our current obsession with data at the expense of generating actually useful explanations. I love statistics and all that too, but that isn’t the only thing that matters.
While there can certainly be biases in favor of old writers simply because they are old, often there is deep wisdom that is hard to find in books written recently.
I worry you have given the classics an unfairly cursory treatment?
I read a lot of EC thinkers, but this is where I generally depart - there’s an undervaluing of ancient/older wisdom and an overvaluing of science, technology, and economic progress. What I would call an EC would strike a healthier balance in these areas.
Here's what I think the value of the classics is.
1. People are still people. If modern science confirms something Machiavelli and Socrates said, it's more likely to be an eternal human truth since it holds over 2000 years, and is likely to persist in being true.
2. Distance from our modern shibboleths. There are all sorts of things our modern world lies about (women being attracted to toxic masculinity for example), and the ancients told it like it was on that. They had their own lies, of course, but we are rarely concerned with the reputations of the Medici or the existence of the gods of Athens.
3. Related to 1., the world changes and will continue to change. We can't tell what social media will wind up doing, but we can see how prior generations dealt with disruptive technologies. We don't know when the American Empire will fall, but we can look at the fall of Rome and Britain and the various Chinese dynasties and see what did them in.
4. They are beautiful. Many far more so than much of the ugliness that passes for modern art.
5. Perspective on history. Along with distance from modern shibboleths, it can immunize against excessive pessimism when you learn how brutally terrible life was for pretty much everyone.
6. You can actually understand your own culture! It seems that day by day fewer people actually understand the history that led up to our current time. We have lost the context for our own civilization.
7. Exposure to wildly different ideas than you might normally come across.
8. The chance to read people who were almost certainly smarter than you.
I could get poetic about liberal arts training people to be free citizens in a republic, which I think is true, but I'll leave it at that.
Agree on 4. at least as far as the arts go, though I'm not sure about writers, where there's more of a prescription for life. Michelangelo's David certainly is gorgeous (and has a lesser-known political theme of 'f*** the Medici!') but it's not clear what if anything it would say about tax policy (and Michelangelo would probably look at you strangely if you asked).
I would have believed in 6. as recently as 10 years ago. A lot of tropes and expressions make a lot more sense if you read the Bible, for instance, and it's nice to know what all those 60s liberals were reacting *against*. But there's been such an attempt to destroy any kind of cultural continuity or tradition as representing white male supremacy that I'm not sure how useful any of that's going to be going forward.
5., 7., and 8. I agree with without reservation.
Good substance to this idea. Terrible label. "Enlightened Centrism" has nothing to do with centrism, and will consistently cause confusion (note that you immediately had to apologize for this confusion when you introduced the term). At best it's "non-partisan", but so are most things (pretzels, dandruff, breastfeeding). And the "enlightened" thing is just pompous and superfluous -- every philosophy thinks it's enlightened, by definition.
No, I don't have a better suggestion. But it's just a label. Make up a nonsense word. If the point is to avoid associating it with an existing political tribe, that's a fool's errand anyway: if it comes from you, the idpol left will say it's alt-right white supremacist transphobic fascist etc etc. Might as well sacrifice a nonsense word to the gods of the euphemism treadmill, instead of a term that has pre-existing semantic value.
The overall commonality seems to be (1) good at stats, (2) utilitarian ethical framework, and (3) non-tribal / recognizing few sacred cows. There are a few who don't fall into (1) or (2), but most on the list that I know hit all 3.
It's somewhat similar to Thomas Sowell's "constrained vision": reality is big, you are small, institutions that gather and propagate information are better than institutions of enlightened/superior thinkers, people should follow the agreed on rules even if the outcomes aren't ideal, etc.
That's a good way to put it. I like it.
“... but most on the list that I know hit all 3.” If you know Michelle Goldberg, you know she can’t possibly be considered “non-tribal / recognizing few sacred cows.” The idea that she could be considered any kind of “centrist,” enlightened or otherwise, is laughable.
I overlooked her when reading the list. I agree with your statement. I'm surprised RH likes her.
I like centrism in that on lots of issue I think a "middle" positions the right one: some redistribution of wealth but not too much to damage incentives, create incentives to reduce CO2 emissions but not at too high a price per ton avoided, free trade, but some consideration of national security, strategic products, more immigration to raise per capita incomes of existing residents, but not at levels that it would change the political nature of the country, absolute right to possess many kinds of weapons, but registration of sales to let police track guns used in crimes, deficit reduction with both tax increases and expenditure reductions, etc.
I sort of agree on "Enlightened" Maybe "Considered Centrism" to signal that the "center" between arbitrary points of polarization would be equally arbitrary.
That’s fine as far as it goes. But as noted elsewhere in the thread, lots of the “EC” positions would be coded as far right or far left. School vouchers is coded right. Vaccine mandates (not just for Covid) would now be coded far left, through a recent bizarre twist of partisan polarization. Cutting funding for military and intelligence agencies would be off the Dem-Rep spectrum altogether. None of these are “centrist” positions even if they’re the rational ones.
It's also very similar to the "big-brained centrist" meme which exists to mock people who use mental gymnastics to avoid taking any 'extreme' positions (this does not describe Richard, but true extremists would think it does).
Amen
Yes. The “EC” position on many issues would be outside of the bipartisan consensus on many issues. “Centrism” implies splitting the difference between the two tribes, rather than discarding that dyad entirely and striking out in a different direction. Many positions would be coded as extreme right or extreme left within the two-tribe frame. “Centrism” is a poor fit for all of these reasons.
Thanks for writing this — it's one of my favorites so far, and really successfully ties together a collection of traits that I admire and strive to emulate, as well as a group of thinkers who I'd previously labeled (in my mind) as simply "not idiots."
You write that "if me and Matt Yglesias were in Congress we’d vote on opposite sides of most issues." This surprises me. If you were more of a libertarian, I could see this occurring simply as a result of skepticism about federal legislation in general, but it's not obvious to me that most bills are about the kind of thing that you and Matt would disagree on. It's like the Supreme Court — yeah, conservative and liberal justice disagree on the high-profile cases, but most of the time their decisions aren't party-line.
Now, I see what you're saying if by "most issues" you mean "most big issues", although I'm not actually certain it's true even then. But a big part of the EC idea (in #2, for instance) seems to be that most important issues are basically empirical and that ECs are people who are simply able to address them on the merits. If this is true, and if you and Matt are ECs, I'd expect you to agree on a lot, even on the Senate floor.
This is a good point, I think you may be right. I meant large, salient issues, but I don't know about all things Congress considers, and I bet some stuff is like renaming post offices which everyone votes in favor of.
l am a liberal who left the democrats forever in 2020. What you leave out is that one side is in power and using the state to brutally censor the other. This is the most important issue by far.
When the GOP gets into power they pull that stuff too, look at DeSantis.
You can still vote Republican if you like their issues better, just don't pretend they don't like the banhammer too.
At worst, that's still a choice between two hammers, and just having to pick the one that is less wrong. Still a solid argument to vote GOP.
But I disagree with the notion that the right is capable of wielding power as effectively as the left. I wish they were, maybe then we wouldn't be in this mess. IF DeSantis is actually the nominee and IF he is actually elected and IF he then actually wields his power effectively, then and only then could you start to theorize that maybe the right is capable of playing on even ground. So far, it quite plainly isn't true. Conservatives have barely anything to show for their 4 years "in power" with Trump.
Honestly the right should have been more ruthless when they controlled the banhammer. But they were too committed to the already irrelevant concept of classical liberalism. Now we have every institution unapoligetically enforcing left wing progressive values.
It's not that easy. There's a strong libertarian streak in the USA, just as there's a puritanical one--First Amendment, suspicion of government, so on. I suspect the bluenoses of the left will be undone eventually by 4chan and internet porn just as the bluenoses of the right were by rock music and video porn. But it will take a long time.
That's what RH would call level 3 thinking. I support Republicans because I believe in small government (I'm not as conspiratorial as you), but I don't think like most Republicans.
Taleb is smart and insightful, and deserves credit for bringing to prominence, important ideas, but he is an emotional arguer who is prone to ad hominen attacks, and fails a lot of these criteria.
He was right on the 2008 crash and COVID, no? That's a pretty good track record.
Yeah it's more the "anyone who disagrees with me is literally Hitler" schtick that wears thin in his case.
Thanks for the shoutout. I think Lemoine and Noah Carl deserve a place here, probably in the right wing category.
One observation I'd add is that funnily enough I consider myself a centrist. Holding HBD/IQ realist views is just acknowledging reality for me, and my basic views on it are ultimately Pinkerian: https://akarlin.com/race-denial-vs-racism-a-false-dichotomy/ In fairness, I was anti-Third World immigration for a long time period, but of late I have accepted that nations are not a viable or desirable construct in the long run, and have now sided with Caplan/Hanson and shifted to Open Borders.
This might be strange ostensibly be hard to reconcile with my professed Russian nationalism, but that position is primarily motivated by the observation that Russia's embrace of stridently a-national ideologies (Communism in 20C; market fundamentalism in the 1990s) has been consistently ruinous for the Russian people, and perhaps Russia should look out for the interests of its own people and the ethnicity that makes up 85% of its population in particular for a change during 21C (much as Israel privileges the interests of a certain ethnoreligious group that makes up 75% of its population). Even in Russia, I got on better with liberal nationalists (OB, Sputnik & Pogrom, etc.) and the National Bolsheviks than with conservative monarchist types. There two Tweets represent my views on that well:
https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1266680469753561091
> I'm probably better defined as a centrist-nationalist/ethnocentrist rather than a right-winger. My main "right" position is racial realism/rejection of the clean slate theory. But among these there are people of almost all ideologies, including liberals and even (though rarely) leftists.
https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1391537103230615554
> The main goal of nationalism is to self-destruct. To such an extent "normalize" national thinking that "nationalism" will remain, by and large, become the reserve of only freaks, outcasts, and Svidomy.
I was always against Russian nationalism that was loaded in any particular "extra" ideological direction and considering late Putinism's devolution into senile jeremiads about Satanism and the 666 genders that was actually a perspicacious call.
Anyhow I did write an extensive piece on how animal rights should be gradated based on their cognitive capacities and why I avoid pork as a result of that which is kind of well beyond the normie political scales and just schizo/unclassifiable. https://akarlin.com/animals/
Noah is good, and Philippe is so close to me that I forgot about him but of course he belongs. You’re still pro-capitalist and anti-woke right? I think that classifies as right rings.
I think most everyone on your is broadly pro-capitalist, right? Yes, I am.
I'm Woke-skeptical in the sense that will probably never be able to get truly excited about pronouns or hear about microaggressions without smirking on the inside, but it no longer annoys or triggers me as it once did. It is the new Christianity, it has won (become culturally hegemonic), a lot of anti-Woke discourse is at least equally retarded and often much meaner and more debased, and its success might have been preordained anyway (worlds in which AGI ends up aligned and as such account for the great bulk of all possible posthuman observer moments might be much more Woke than otherwise expected, because AIs taught to "check your privilege" and "read the room" may be far better for us than those brought up under other ethical systems).
Russians were just corrupt and coming out of communism, there was no ideological market fundamentalism that caused the 90s crisis.
Another issue where enlightened centrists basically agree: relaxing if not outright eliminating residential zoning restrictions.
“I really like Steve Sailer, but he’s way too prone to zero-sum thinking, leading to policies on trade and immigration that I don’t think are very sensible.”
It seems odd to me to complain about the political externalities of low IQ Republicans or the criminal behavior of blacks and then support mass, low IQ (even lower than GOP voters!) immigration that will increase the number of criminals and/or political externalities. Libertarians will often argue that immigrants have lower crime rates than natives but then you realize than the natives include tons of non-white criminals--many of whom arrived not so long ago.
"Libertarians will often argue that immigrants have lower crime rates than natives but then you realize than the natives include tons of non-white criminals--many of whom arrived not so long ago."
This has absolutely nothing to do with the point. Black people's ancestors were forcibly immigrated here and black people have high crime, therefore immigrants in general now have high crime? How is this a good inference?
When people like Richard talk about immigration, aren't they talking about bringing large numbers of high IQ Asians? Maybe I'm wrong.
Not just Asians. But even so, the “cosmopolitan elite” ignore the wishes of the masses who prefer their own kind. A homogeneous homeland is a type of consumer good, but in this case, the elite attack this consumer good as a form of “commodification”. When it comes to the streets, roads, parks, etc. (the access points for immigrants), suddenly the libertarian-minded are communists who think these state-held properties belong to the entire world.
>Covid came out of the blue. This meant we could observe its political effects as a kind of natural experiment, since pandemic policy wasn’t yet polarized, and watch how each side dealt with and processed evidence in real time.<
It seemed to me that there was essentially no opposition to lockdowns at first, in the very short term, like the first month or two. But then it got very polarized very quickly. I don't remember there ever being a moment where someone was able to question lockdowns and not have that perceived as a polarized right-wing (and therefore wrong-think) viewpoint.
>I’ll note that while Enlightened Centrists might not have a common position on major hot-button issues like gender transitions for minors or the retirement age for social security<
I find it hard to believe anyone could support gender transitions for children and still be considered any sort of worthwhile thinker. Maybe you think the issue doesn't matter, but that doesn't excuse getting something so obvious so wrong. It's about as bad as being a flat earther, arguably worse. People who believe the Earth is flat aren't really that politically important either, but it's still a pretty big marker that they shouldn't be taken seriously about much of anything else.
>the right doesn’t because it’s a movement dominated by rural interests, religious fundamentalists, and those who rely on audiovisual communication rather than the written word to receive and process information, due to some combination of stupidity and intellectual laziness.<
Doesn't this violate "no all-encompassing theories about political opponents?" The attitude that anything to do with conservatives boils down to them being stupid seems pretty all-encompassing.
There probably are some people who really do have the opposite sex's brain--we've seen things ranging from homosexuality to cross-dressing throughout history, and a lot of cultures have some marginal 'third-gender' role, so evidently there is some process where the 'wrong' gender 'program' gets turned on. I do think the huge upsurge in FTM kids is probably due to some social contagion, and at least some of the MTFs are autistic boys trying to avoid the brunt of Woke misandry. How much is just the culture being more accepting, I have no clue.
Ironically I'd rather see *more* acceptance of gender variance and less hormones and surgery. Doesn't bother me if a dude wants to paint his nails and wear a dress, but if he's cutting it off, it ain't growing back.
>Ironically I'd rather see *more* acceptance of gender variance and less hormones and surgery. Doesn't bother me if a dude wants to paint his nails and wear a dress, but if he's cutting it off, it ain't growing back.<
Sure, kids go through all kinds of silly phases. The issue is the whole deal where you permanently damage their bodies in some way. It's one thing to trivialize this issue and say it doesn't matter, which I obviously disagree with too, but it's quite another to actually defend the sterilization and/or mutilation of minors based on transgender ideology.
Transgenderism is one of those areas where society would have a more accurate worldview from just applying the Bible than saying "let's test everything with the scientific method!"
It's pretty insane that we've had to subject thousands of kids to mutilation and sterilize before the "enlightened centrists" have the data to conclude nope, actually it's better to put gender-confused kids in therapy with the goal of being comfortable with their sex than to chop off their body parts, put them on behavior-altering hormones, craft fake genitals, and pressure every other person in society to pretend that boys are girls and vice versa.
Transgenderism is what you get when you take an aversion to all forms of tradition/religion and just run with it straight off a cliff. "It makes Christians mad, so it must be good, because religious people are always wrong." This desire to hurt the religious by inverting morality seems to me like a common thread behind basically every left-wing perversion of basic norms, from encouraging promiscuity, to "normalizing sex work," and on down the list.
Correct. I will also add that trans is just what happens when you take "F you Dad" as your ideological foundation and amplify that with a decade of algorithmically driven Flamboyant Dishonor (credit; Jack Donovan). 20 years ago, these kids would have known nothing more rebellious than dressing as goths or getting tattoos. Most kids who were goths 20 years ago eventually grew out of it and today are trying to convince their children that face tattoos and gender reassignment surgery are bad ideas.
That said, the desire to offend religious people still lurks as the primary id of most left wing people I know. They can only conceptualize a certain type of cause for all problems, legitimately think corporate boardrooms are still run by JesusLand type evangelicals, and every joke about Canada has to have the punch line of "and then ackshually we would have healthcare too".
I think that this article is important and demonstrates the things that I trust in political thinkers. A few other notable similarities.
1) They seem to really like betting markets, though perhaps that's subsumed under the category of 'liking knowledge seeking institutions.'
2) They are dramatically disproportionately consequentialists.
3) They tend to be much more likely to be effective altruists or pro-animal welfare (I think Jesse Singal is a good example of another enlightened centrist, and he's also into effective altruism), and this also applies to Richard, Smith to some degree, Singer (obviously), Alexander, and like half of the people on the list.
4) Disproportionately anti-woke, but only a bit, such that it does not gobble up their identity.
I think that the animal welfare one is a decent test because it's overwhelmingly obvious that what we're doing to animals is wrong, but it's generally associated with annoying people. The people who are able to, through purely abstract reasoning, come to the conclusion that something which is very enjoyable is nonetheless deeply immoral are the people that are most trustworthy.
I think another great example of a brilliant enlightened centrist is...no, modesty prevents me from continuing.
Animal welfare seems an odd one. I fit the descriptions you outline here, but don't care all that much about animal welfare mostly because I can't find a consistent approach to it that isn't just "if it's cute and fluffy it deserves to be treated nice, otherwise it's open season" which is hardly defensible intellectually. It's one of those areas where I have to give credit to religion. Christianity has a coherent approach here. Animals were put on Earth for humans, and we're tasked to take care of them by God but ultimately we rule them. It results in mostly useful outcomes.
What's wrong with the consistent approach that "animals matter morally, their suffering is bad, their welfare is good, and we should treat them well?" Every plausible moral view will hold that the fact that we inflict more suffering on animals every few years than has ever existed in human history is seriously wrong.
If you disagree, what is it about animals that makes their suffering not bad?
What's wrong with it? It's all so vague as to be useless.
1. What does "treat them well" mean? A lot of people would say organic farming counts. Would you, or does eating animals of any kind count as not treating them well?
2. Should I be consumed with guilt if I clear out an infestation of moths? Step on a slug? If so, how is that practical?
3. There are MANY animals that would kill me and eat me given a chance. They wouldn't give a shit about my suffering, they wouldn't even have any notion of my suffering. Why should I care about the suffering of something or someone who would happily cause me to suffer if it could? How does that generalize to other humans, and war?
4. How do you weigh up animal suffering that leads to less human suffering e.g. experiments, if not via speciesism?
5. What is an animal, exactly? Where do you draw the line? Are insects animals? Bacteria? A bacterial colony? A nematode worm? If the answer is "no" then at what level of cellular organization does a lifeform become an animal?
1. Well, I am obviously not going to propose a comprehensive way to treat animals well, just as saying that one should have a presumption against war does not require having a comprehensive way of figuring out the precise set of necessary and sufficient conditions for war. I think that it's fine to eat animals who lived overall positive welfare lives--which is fewer than 1% of animals given the ghastly conditions on factory farms. We may not agree on exactly what it means to treat animals well, but any remotely sensible definition will say that the ghastly factory farms do not treat them well (e.g. they castrate them with no anesthetic).
2. I think that's a difficult case but probably fine. Moths have very little capacity for welfare, are probably not conscious, and you can harm animals to avert a greater harm.
3. Suppose we came across amoral severely mentally disabled people. Would you be fine with setting up factory farms that torture and kill 80 billion of them each year. The fact that something doesn't understand morality and would harm you doesn't mean it's okay to bring it into existence just to harm it. Additionally, even if you think it does, nearly all the animals we eat are herbivores and generally wouldn't harm you.
4. You look at which causes more suffering. Maybe if you believe in rights you think there are other important factors, but I don't, because I'm a utilitarian.
5. Insects are animals, bacteria aren't. It's only conscious beings that matter, however, not all animals. Biologists have well understood definitions of animals.
My claim is that, regardless of what position we stake (or perhaps steak out) out on the finer details of animals ethics, any remotely plausible view will say that what nearly all western people do nearly every day is deeply evil--namely, eat meat from factory farms. 99% of meat comes from factory farms.
I don't think your arguments are robust enough to class people who disagree as "deeply evil", sorry, that's a serious accusation against others that these points cannot justify. Take your last point, "it's only conscious beings that matter" followed by a claim that not all animals are conscious. What's your definition or test of consciousness, exactly? How can I decide? Given that the difference is one of being a good man and "deeply evil" it seems to matter but I never came across a crisp objective definition.
"Suppose we came across amoral severely mentally disabled people ... would you be fine with setting up factory farms that torture and kill 80 billion of them each year"
Amoral severely mentally disabled people very often turn out to be dangerous and they do get imprisoned, no? I guess that must be a lot like torture to the people it's inflicted on but I don't really want deranged psychos wandering around trying to kill me, so I tolerate it.
I also don't quite follow your point about bringing animals into existence. Surely there's no difference morally between doing something to an animal that was born on a farm, and an animal born in the wild. Why does it matter if we humans bring an animal into existence or not?
You seem very fixated on factory farming. I buy organic because I too prefer the idea of happy cows that wander around eating grass in nice big fields all day and have cash to spend on it, but I also realize I have no real idea of what conditions are like on organic farms, and that I can't really justify my position via a rigorous set of moral rules. It's just that, well, sheep and cows seem kinda nice and friendly and I'd like them to enjoy their life before they get shot in the head so I can eat them (preferably so quickly it's painless). If I were up against a vegan who was convinced any kind of animal eating was evil, I'd struggle to justify my position though because it's not consistent. Like, I don't really care if the salmon I eat is factory farmed. They're slippery and cold and I don't really ever encounter them in my own life except on the table. So, I eat them guilt free.
I didn't say that the people were deeply evil--I said they were, like nearly all humans throughout history, doing something deeply evil. I argue for this at length in the article that Richard linked. Consciousness is having subjective experience--it's when there's something it's like to be a thing. There are different ways to decide whether something is conscious--it's a difficult scientific question. I think that insects have about a 50% chance of being conscious, oysters and such probably aren't, and fish almost definitely are, as our the animals that we factory farm.
You note rightly that we keep severely disabled people in institutions. Okay, but with animals, we're not keeping existing ones in institutions so they don't hurt us. Instead, we breed billions of them into existence, torment them in ghoulish conditions (castration with no anaesthetic, tails being cut off often with full pliers, forcing them to live in feces and ammonia, etc). The reason that it matters that we bring the animals into existence is that, while it might be okay to contain existing severely mentally disabled people, it would be wrong to breed billions of them into existence and give them very terrible lives.
I'm fixated on factory farms because 99% of meat in the US comes from factory farms--and the same is true in much of the rest of the world. Anything else is just a distraction--if we were discussing whether US arms sales are generally good, we'd focus on what they are like in most cases, not weird edge cases. I elaborate more on this here https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-discussion-of-meat-should-be
Organic animals are roughly indistinguishable from factory farmed animals in terms of how they are treated. https://www.aspca.org/shopwithyourheart/advocate-resources/usda-organic-label-and-farm-animal-welfare
A common thread with all the EC names you listed is that they're a very niche set. Although I know and have read many of those names, I doubt any of them are known by even a third of the American population. This makes sense- if they refuse to identify as part of a tribe, then it's hard for them to become super popular, because humans are wired to form tribes to ensure ingroup survival. To be an EC means to reject that primal impulse and think from a very abstract level, which usually requires a high IQ and some degree of neurodivergence. I'm not surprised that ECs tend to be less popular among right wingers, considering how conservatives dislike abstraction. Matt Yglesias has written about how conservatives are much less likely to think that abstract art is "real art": https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/16/20856316/poll-yougov-art-ideology-trump
Considering how rare it is for someone to be an EC, is this ideology doomed to be a niche one? Can you imagine a world of ECs? It would probably require a lot of eugenics to get people like the names you listed, especially when you consider that high-IQ people have less children.
They don’t have to reach a majority of people, you just need to reach people in positions to do good things to have an influence.
Or their staff. :)
The art thing is nonsense. I dislike abstract art, am libertarian conservative and yet have been a computer programmer for decades. My entire job is nothing but dealing with abstractions, all day every day. This also describes many of my colleagues and friends. There is no correlation between disliking that sort of art, being conservative and disliking abstraction, in my experience.
Looking at the image they picked as an example of "abstract art", it's pretty clear what's going on there. Liberals are far more likely to support this kind of thing for a couple of reasons. One, because they don't believe in "hard" skill or merit at mundane tasks, considering such things to be excuses for oppression hierarchies and not really existing to begin with. See how they freak out over the word meritocracy; there's a long history of it.
Instead they are far more interested in people with (apparently) complex ideas, frequently confusing complexity for quality.
Secondly, they have extremely strong in-group loyalty.
The sort of people who produce random scribbling like that piece of art will, with near 100% certainty:
1. Be extremely left wing (+quite possibly be supported by the state).
2. Justify their image as having deep meaning using very convoluted and intellectual-sounding language.
This stuff is attractive for leftists because they see an opportunity to divert money and influence to ideological fellow travellers by praising it and insisting on support for it. Non-leftists look at it and say, does this image look like the work of a skilled artist, someone who had to refine their craft? No. Is it beautiful? No. Then I don't see the value in it.
Here's a simple experiment - rerun the poll but this time state that the piece of art in question was drawn by Trump when he was a child, then ask if it's art. I'd be willing to bet a fair amount that the answers of the conservatives won't change much, whereas the leftists will suddenly decide it's not art anymore.
How does computer programming deal with abstractions? If you miss one closing parenthesis in your code, it all falls apart.
Huh? That's a bit like asking a civil engineer how building a bridge deals with physics, because if one girder is weak the bridge can collapse. The question doesn't seem to make much sense.
Yes, programming languages require very tight adherence to the syntax rules and many other rules. The code that people write though, very often is an abstraction over something. Modern programs are nothing but towers of abstractions often 30-50 abstractions deep. To have this discussion right now we're using Substack, which is built on top of hundreds of abstractions. Some of them abstract the details of drawing shapes, others of typesetting text, some of dealing with the network, others of dealing with the low level details of the hardware. The result is that Substack can write code of the form "Place comment 1234 by the Lone Ranger after comment 1233 by Sheluyang Peng, offset to the right by the width of 32 dips", without thinking about the exact sequence of electrical signals to send to the networking or video processors in order to achieve that.
Despite all that abstraction, the Substack code must still close parens correctly. The two things aren't really related.
I see. Thanks for explaining.
They're mostly soulless off putting douchebags who have interesting ideas but have to be kept at arms length (except FdB, who comes across like a grown emo kid, like me except he never found something to live for).
I think FdB only sounds really emo when he gets on one of his "nobody hates America as much as I hate America" flexes.
Another thing: they're almost all YIMBYs.
"Freddie deBoer is the only person on the EC list who would call himself a Marxist of any sort, although when I interviewed him he didn’t sound like any other Marxist I was familiar with."
I suspect Freddie would defend or explain this by saying that he's remained "true" to what he's long understood the principles/whatever of Marxism to be, while there are many "Marxists" who have flooded the ranks ever since Occupy that have little understanding of historical Marxist theory or policy. This is something of an axe he grinds from time-to-time on his Substack.
I am neither a Marxist nor a "Marxist" - so not my place to says who the "true Scotsman" is. Just a note to anyone curious.