Sometimes people will say that their politics are based on “common decency” or “treating others well.” Most intelligent observers I imagine roll their eyes at this kind of talk. If you describe your politics or philosophy in a way no one would disagree with, you’re not really saying anything substantive.
Came in here expecting to read an article about how Electronic Arts will be anti-woke and it was something video game related. This is still cool though.
I've seen this claim in a few of your pieces, that liberals are reasonable but just have a blind spot on identity issues. I think energy/climate is another blind spot, a huge one. Here liberals want to pursue the goal of "decarbonization", which is absolutely insane -- an entire overhaul of the energy system (the most fundamental of industries) in pursuit of an incredibly vaguely specified goal. So you have lots of smart economists and scientists conducting rational discourse and employing utilitarianism (the way you describe in this essay) on the best strategies to go about this without questioning the underlying premises which are absolutely bonkers. This makes me think that it's not just identity issues that are a blind spot: liberalism (so e.g. the NYT and liberal media) has fundamental problems wherever social justice ideology holds sway, and this applied to a lot of things -- race and feminism, but also the environment, crime, homelessness, and more.
I agree, but once we recognize how broad these "blind spots" are, it seems to be less a case of a "blind spot" and more a case of liberals just being straight up wrong about everything, period. Social justice ideology has a really strong viewpoint on basically every issue of import, after all. Some other things that liberalism has gotten catastrophically wrong in very recent memory: COVID, immigration, fighting wars overseas. The list goes on.
This leaves conservatives as the lesser of two evils not necessarily because they are right about everything, or even very much, but they are simply less absurdly wrong. The liberal position on "climate change" and energy alone is clearly more dangerous than the sum total of all conservative beliefs, in my opinion (given that conservative beliefs tend towards not doing very much and/or defending the status quo).
Being 'catastrophically wrong' about COVID would have meant tens, if not hundreds, of millions more dead from COVID than we got. That didn't happen because we 'liberals' got some things anti-catastrophically right.
There is a big difference between just not being unreasonably afraid of nuclear power and buying into the "net zero" climate insanity garbage. I would imagine that many, if not most people who reject climate insanity also don't really have much of a problem with expanding nuclear power. Definitely the case for me.
I don't think they buy into the "net zero" climate insanity garbage, whatever you mean by that? EAs seem really uninterested in climate stuff in general? The most common take I've heard is that geoengineering mostly solves the problem in a pinch.
I may not be familiar enough with this "EA movement" then. From what I've seen of it so far, I was assuming that they take the supposed problem of "climate change" seriously in much the same way as the mainstream left. If they're smarter than that then never mind.
It was an early sign of the present issues (I initially wrote rot) that a lot of EAs were trying to find ways to say that climate change might, maybe be an effective cause, despite the obvious point that it doesn't look dangerous as an x-risk, or nearly as important as other things from a present day well being pov. And the far more obvious point that it isn't neglected.
Mainly the arguments were pointing out that tail risks are bad, saying (without making a detailed argument) global warming leads to tensions might lead to nuclear war, and (reasonably) that even if climate change is not neglected developing certain useful technologies might be.
I'd also say, it sounds like you perhaps have your own blindspots about global warming. It is pretty unlikely to be harmless or net positive to allow carbon levels in the atmosphere to get arbitrarily high. Of course you might not be saying that we should simply burn all the coal in the ground if it is the cheapest energy source, but I'm not at all sure what you are concretely proposing. And the tail risks of change are always bigger than the tail risks of not changing things.
I think the supposed threat of climate change is basically a fantasy, and the extreme wild overbearing moral panic hysteria that currently surrounds the topic is comically out of proportion to whatever risk it might pose (I've seen some people make the case that global warming is actually likely to be a net positive).
So I do have a "blind spot" in the sense that I tend to dismiss out of hand any viewpoint that takes the topic seriously to begin with.
CO2 levels rise at a pretty steady and predictable rate, so it's not a case of arbitrarily high. If you make the bold assumption that a trend that has only been measured since about 1960 will continue indefinitely and in the same way, you can know what it will be a long way in advance. The trend is just that linear.
The goal is not vaguely specified. It is the prevention of catastrophic changes to climate which could cause the collapse of civilization or render Earth uninhabitable. These scenarios may be low-probability, but they are so bad that the expectation value of not addressing them is worth a lot of economic loss. Something like this (though obviously with volcanoes instead of humans releasing the GHG) probably caused the Permian mass extinction, also known as the only one worse than the dinosaur killer. Every kilogram of GHG not in the atmosphere reduces the risk of those scenarios. Hence the objective function is simply "minimize release of GHG into atmosphere, until such time as we have sufficient too-cheap-to-meter power to remove it as necessary to restore pre-Industrial level (250 ppm)".
Yeah, that still sounds pretty vague to me. If you're worried about the collapse of civilization, then the most important thing is to make civilization as resilient to catastrophe as possible. Decarbonization by transitioning to solar and wind is the absolute worst course of action, as it makes the whole grid vulnerable to bad weather: no sun and low wind and the power's out. (Alex Epstein made this point in his recent testimony: we're currently loading enormous amounts of unreliable electricity onto the grid, this is a much bigger threat to the grid's security than hackers). Add to this the push for electric cars and electrification, and a power outage has even worse consequences. In short, a recipe for utter disaster.
If you actually want to be resilient, you do things like build dikes, do effective forest management, invest in early warning systems, stress-test critical infrastructure, etc. These are well-defined steps that address concrete problems. In general you want to encourage economic growth and technological progress, and cheap energy is fundamental to this.
I don't understand what you think is vague about that. We know which substances are greenhouse gases. We know what emits them. And we know from their physical properties how much they directly change planetary temperatures, though not the exact effects of subsequent feedback loops.
Variation decreases as solar and wind are more geographically distributed per law of large numbers. They also have resiliency advantages: once built, they are not dependent on huge masses of noxious material that must be mined, processed, and then shipped great distances. And worst case, you can schedule rolling blackouts and give priority to areas which most need heat or AC; that is a nuisance for everyone but rarely a serious problem.
This was pretty good. As a religious conservative bordering on a theonomist, I like the rationalist and EA stuff because I generally think they're straight shooters, and I learn about interesting ideas and concepts. But I think their teleology is lacking (to the extent it exists at all) and I wouldn't want them making hard moral decisions. Which makes sense...since I'm a borderline theonomist.
Utilitarianism leads to some weird places. Like arguing that "we should destroy nature because nature involves the suffering of animals" and "is it okay to eat mentally challenged people?" I enjoy the idea balls being sent from the rationalists but you guys could still stand to church it up a bit to remain relevant.
Regarding Jesus-Darwin I'm surprised by how often I use concepts from evolutionary psychology in Sunday School. Of course, I don't phrase it like that. But I do think Christian thoughts on human nature are often in agreement with naturalism.
Christianity evolved over thousands of years to deal with human problems, it's not surprising they would have evolved ways to deal with common human problems like lust and violence ('The Fall') and getting men to invest in children (patriarchy, responsibility, guilt), as described by evolutionary psychology. Weird Sixties ideas have a little less of a track record. ;)
Not that there haven't been weird offshoots of Christianity like Catharism and all the other heresies--but they didn't survive, did they?
You see it in other cultures too--China has Confucianism, which talks about the five relationships of ruler to subject, parent to child, husband to wife, older brother to younger brother, and friend to friend. The idea of excess yin producing yang and vice versa reminds me of the Greek golden mean, and has the added knowledge that trying to make too much of one thing tends to produce its opposite (look at our swings from left to right and back). There's cultural selection just like the natural kind, and the Great Traditions are that way because they've been useful to societies over hundreds of years (thousands in the case of China).
One funny facet of "rationalism" to me is that rationalists never seem to consider the possibility that religion is useful simply to keep the unwashed masses placated. Richard has said something close to this in the past, and he seems perfectly aware that almost everyone is incapable of living life "rationally," yet he remains overtly hostile to religion. Even though the actual historical track record suggests that religion is an inevitable fact of human nature.
Yes, like I said, Richard has come close to acknowledging this at times also. What's funny is that these types always then remain overtly hostile to religion and attempt to stamp it out or hurt it as much as possible, as opposed to recognizing it as part of human nature and working within it. Marxism, of course, being an outstanding example of this. Whereas wokeism has had great success in simply infiltrating churches and turning them to its own purposes.
Evolutionary psychology is one of the wooliest subfields of evolutionary biology. Says this biologist. That guys like Hanania et al. rely on so much it is telling.
Richard, this is the best thing I've read in a long time. You really have a way to boldly state things we all recognize as true, but often don't like to talk about.
I would love to see utilitarians argue for executing violent criminals to improve society.
I agree with Richard and Tyler that the main reason part of EA is "woke" is because it draws from secular liberals at elite universities. But within EA, there are three rough groups. The AI/rationalist/far future group, the mosquito net people, and the animal people. The first group is the most anti-woke. It's also the group that's most likely to think the importance of AI trumps everything else, we might all be dead next year and so forth. As such the expected value of fighting wokeness is very low even if you think wokeness is very bad.
The people who care about the global poor and animals (who start off being more woke) are also the people who are optimizing for long-term influence (assuming no AI apocalypse). So I expect EA to become more left-wing.
Finally, I think both admirers and detractors of EA exaggerate how much people within it are driven by philosophical commitments. EAs are happy to praise weird philosophical when it's on noncontroversial issues (welfare of shrimps and insects). But EAs are barely more likely than typical people to change their life paths because of utilitarian arguments about natalism or theism or whatever. (Possibly the prevalence of veganism among EAs shows that many are willing to bite the bullet.)
EAs embracing veganism raises a huge question that seems to go entirely unaddressed--who decided, or on what basis, that animal life has equal worth to human life? This has always seemed bizarre to me. The idea that our own species is more valuable to us than other species should be the most self-evident concept possible, I would think. And it is not at all self-evident why we should care about the suffering of animal species, at least from a purely "rationalist" lens. Sure, we might not like the idea of animals suffering because it upsets us on an emotional level, but that's, y'know--emotional, not rational.
It seems to me that if we run with this pseudo-religion of stigmatizing human interaction with the rest of the planet, maybe we as humans should simply go extinct, as this is the only real way that we will stop "harming" nature.
>Isn’t all concern for the suffering of other beings emotional though? A purely rational person would arguably only care about maximizing his own happiness without any concern for other beings, whether human or animal. Being upset because another human is suffering is just as emotional as being upset because an animal is suffering.<
Yes, caring about anything is emotional in the sense that, strictly speaking, there is no first-principles reason to care about anything, ever. First principles are necessarily irrational, and rationality can then proceed only once that starting point is selected. But to admit this is to admit that morality cannot be based on pure reason alone, which would be anathema to the "enlightened rationalist atheist skeptic" types that I imagine populate the world of EA.
>If you accept the premise that the mental feeling of suffering is bad even if you aren’t the one experiencing it, then it seems logical to also want to reduce animal suffering.<
It doesn't seem clear at all to me why caring about human suffering means that I must necessarily care also about animal suffering. If we're being honest, I'm not really capable of even caring about all the human suffering out there--when you tell me about starving children in Africa, I can recognize what that means in an abstract sense and say truthfully that I would prefer those children not to be starving, if I had any real say in the matter, but this would not elicit much of an emotional response from me. It is simply too distant from my own sphere of experience and considerations.
Regardless of that, it seems like a pretty huge issue to skip straight over the question of how we value animal vs human life and to instead simply assume a particular position as self-evident on that question. I think most people would agree that literally not caring about animal suffering at all in any circumstances is probably wrong, since nearly everyone condemns animal abuse when it is done purely for purposes of amusement. But that still leaves a ton of room for debate between that extreme and the other end of treating animal life as literally equal to human life.
If you were really trying to fix the world, you'd probably want to be pretty damn sure you got the right answers on a question that big. But if you're just looking to virtue signal how righteous you are because you really care a lot about things, well, that would fit with automatically erring on the side of what appears more empathetic (i.e. veganism).
Common sense ought to tell us that women – who now insanely believe they can do whatever men can, sexually or otherwise – are going to get themselves into trouble by tantalizing exploitative or weak men in a power relationship. Trouble is, power is an aphrodisiac. Therefore, in order to protect themselves, normal men should make sure there are witnesses when dealing with women in a work environment. Almost all of these harassment cases involve two people by themselves and women do lie, or more likely, have morning after regrets, apparently even lasting decades.
The Mike Pence discourse really pissed me off. "Oh you're so horny and repressed that you can't be ALONE with a woman without hitting on her?!" The reality is that he doesn't want anyone to be able to LIE about an encounter. He was smart to protect himself in that way.
Yep. Of course, some people are single, and work acquaintances form a natural group for socialization which can bleed over into romance. I get it. But I don't really understand why anyone who is married and not looking to cheat would permit himself to be alone with an unrelated woman. This is how I live, and it's not really any kind of challenge to maintain.
The reasons for being alone with an unrelated women are basically the same as those for being alone with an unrelated man. What if one of your friends wants to do something no one else feels like doing, and she's a woman. For example, a while ago a friend of ours asked my wife and me if we wanted to see "The Black Phone." My wife wasn't interested in that movie, so I ended up seeing it alone with her.
If you spend any time hanging out with friends you're inevitably going to be alone with them occasionally. Unless you have no women as friends, which is obviously ridiculous, there's not much of a way to avoid it. (I know there are some people who only have friends of the same gender, but I have no idea how that happens. How could anyone limit themselves like that?)
It's like you live in an alternate dimension from me. I've never in my life heard of a married person IRL seeing a movie with a person of the opposite sex, except as part of an affair.
I had female friends when I was in high school and college, usually because we were all part of an interlocking social web. I never made any after that. Now I'm generally friendly with my wife's friends and with my friends' wives, but I would never spend time alone with them and thus wouldn't really call them "friends". It's incredibly easy for all your friends to be single sex, because most hobbies and interests are naturally sex-segregated.
What normal men do with their friends (besides drink and socialize): watch sports, work out, golf. Fish or hunt perhaps. Help with a home improvement project. If they're younger, maybe play videogames. On the nerdier side, perhaps even RPGs, wargames, or strategy board games.
All of these activities are extremely male-coded.
Even things like discussing controversial or new ideas, discussing world events and geopolitics are male-coded. The commentariat in a place like this skews heavily male for a reason.
When I get together with my family or my wife's family, we hang together as couples for a bit, but without ever saying anything, the men and women naturally split up at some point and spend the rest of the night talking about very different things. To me, this just seems entirely natural.
That's interesting. I participate in a lot of "male-coded" nerdy activities, but generally understand male-coded to mean "fewer women" not "zero women," or that "women are less interested" not "women are uninterested." For example I am in an RPG group which has 4 men and 3 women in it. One factor might be that the nerd community I participate the most in is anime, which has historically been less male-coded than other nerd interests.
As another example, my wife and I both enjoy discussing controversial ideas and geopolitical events, but she tends to get tired of that topic and want to discuss something else faster than I do.
I sometimes notice the phenomenon you describe at family gatherings, but not as commonly as you seem to. Occasionally my mother, wife, and sister-in-law will organize a "girls day", but other times they hang out with me and the other men.
You're right that there's nonzero female interest in these activities. But I think what happens is that you gravitate towards people with similar interest.
Back in college and my early 20s, we used to play RPGs with women. Often, but not always, these were girlfriends of people in the group that wanted to check the whole thing out. What usually ended up happening was they had some fun with elements of the concept, but they hated the whole "crunch" of the experience. They didn't want to spend their free time outside the game reading rules. They were flaky about showing up and only wanted to attend 1/2 or 1/3 of the sessions.
I still occasionally play RPGs over Roll20 with longtime friends of mine, all of us dads. Some of these guys are far more liberal than me, but it would be unthinkable for us to bring a woman into the group at this stage. We've all "been there, done that" (independent of the matter of our marriages).
Now, another friend of mine is an avid golfer, and it's funny that he describes much the same experience with a very different hobby. His various girlfriends and eventual wife all wanted to golf with him when they were dating. They all had SOME interest in golf, but it was much lower than his and eventually fizzled out, and their lower energy and interest always just bummed him out when it came to playing with them. He'd rather golf alone, but happily enough, he has plenty of golf buddies that share his energy.
Another friend of mine tried playing World of Warcraft in its heyday with his girlfriend. What ended up happening was he wanted to focus on grinding for the best gear, and she wanted to go around the world looking for interesting vistas and picking herbs, and the difference in styles led to some real-world fights.
So I think it's extremely common among women to just not put nearly the same energy into hobbies that men do, and this applies to a wide range of hobbies. In practice, it means that doing those hobbies side-by-side just isn't fun for anyone in the long run, and while young people may try to make it work, almost everyone has given up on it by middle-age.
Do you think there are things men can do that women can't (That arent related to sex or physical strength)? Like, do you think a woman could be a world class chess player or a world class mathematician or so? To me it seems clear that women can do all these things basically as good as men.
I think a woman could be a world class chess player or world class mathematician, but it's very much less likely for several reasons. Firstly, men probably have an advantage in those subjects, but even in areas when women do better on average, like languages, men show more variability, meaning more at the top, more at the bottom, fewer in the middle. Best and worst at anything tends to be male dominated. Plus, men tend to be more single-minded, driven and ambitious, and more willing to take risks to achieve great success, for good evolutionary reasons (more benefit for men in the form of more and better partners with success, while women get less benefit and higher cost in the form of time not spent having/raising kids). And if she does have kids, that will get in the way of becoming a world-class anything, whereas men can wait until later and still have a family, or just be less involved with them.
If women and other groups could compete fair and square against white men surely they wouldn't need quotas, #metoo struggle sessions, hate speech, forced integration, etc. They wouldn't need to infiltrate institutions created by white men. They'd have their own companies, media groups, and so forth by now, I'd have thought. They would have learned to do what white men do which is to provide goods and services people actually want – and are willing to pay their hard-earned money for. Instead, besides forced quotas and integration, we see women are very active in legal work, philanthropy, arts and entertainment (which is actually a real market that people want), and government work. But even arts are a status marker project, which is fine, but arts and entertainment may not necessarily be healthy or sane.
I can agree that women might generally have different preferences than men. Maybe women naturally tend towards more social work and fewer leadership positions, but I would guess the fact that e.g. women only make up 2% of economics nobel winners is explained by women being encouraged by society to be homemakers instead of researchers and maybe a preference for fields like psychology over economics and sexism by e.g. universities, some universities in the western world only allowed only allowed women to enroll in the 1979. I don't think women not being able to do economic research is true.
I could I imagine an affirmative action free world in which women make up about half of all business owners. The biggest hurdle seems to be childbirth being annoying and taking up lots of time not anything like there being some things men can do that women can't do.
If one imagines a world in which two kinds of people exist and one used to be oppressed (not being allowed to vote, go to school, open their own bank accounts) but both groups are exactly the same exept in appearance. And then people stop all discrimination against the one group. It would of course it takes some time for the previously oppressed group to catch up, I could imagine something like affirmative action being created to help them.
So affirmative action existing doesnt seem like strong evidence that women (or other groups) can't do some things that men can do.
That is, often there can be _more_ gender diversity in different areas for "less free" societies. More women in engineering/programming simply because there is lack of well-paying alternatives; when choice is free natural tendencies are amplified and women flock to social and medical work rather then economics or STEM.
And then there is also higher percentage of female execs in Russia then in US... though that is often because those with levers of power, like governors, cannot own firms directly, and instead have to force enterprises to provide positions to their spouses, mothers, and mothers-in-law as a form of kickbacks.
I suppose you were taught everything wrong with the world is the white man's fault (all white men without exception) and without them women, blacks, gays, literally everyone else would now be living in diversitopia. It's one of those beliefs that can never be disproven. The thought that they succeeded against all other groups because they were superior, spiritually, materially and intellectually, is too horrifying to contemplate. Therefore, the non white groups and man-hating women will scapegoat white men forever. White men, apparently, are now taking on aspects of malignant spirits. I think this explains the hysteria over Trump/Putin and what they represent. Not so much that they are exceptional but because they are so average. This drives feminized, establishment bohemians out of their minds.
I love white people and think they are great. I also love men and think they are great. I think it is possible to prove that white people are not the cause of all evils.
I just think there is a good chance that the main reason there has never been a black or female world chess champion is not to be found in biology, but in history. And especially the history of oppression of black people and women. But I could also imagine that the reason is found in biology.
Men tend to be more competitive in these events, I think because of their higher propensity for risk taking. Same with gaming, but it is controversial to say so.
I don't think risk-taking is the main reason why men heavily outperform at all mental-based forms of competition. I'd say it's some combination of:
1. Male tendency towards monomania. High-level chess requires an irrational obsession with the game of chess, to the exclusion of all other human endeavors, that borders on mental illness. Studying and practicing openings, theory, etc. Jeopardy these days requires studying various facts to an insane degree. Men are far, far more prone to this sort of monomania than women, and it can explain other sorts of overachievement, both useful and useless.
2. Greater male variability - the most extreme examples of any human characteristic will tend to be male.
3. Male competitiveness - duh. But probably the least important of these factors, my sense is that plenty of women are more competitive than plenty of men.
When it comes to winning at Jeopardy specifically, men also seriously outperform women at "general knowledge," by 2-3 SDs IIRC, which naturally applies to any games of general trivia and also translates to an interest in Jeopardy in the first place.
Chess meanwhile is just a masculine endeavor. It is an abstract simulation of war. Victory requires crushing someone by systematically eliminating all his possibilities of survival until he has no choice but to die. Of COURSE it was invented by men, for men.
Contra men having more monomania, becoming very good at playing classical music on an instrument seems very similar to being good at chess. But I feel like there are about as many great female pianists as male pianists, same goes for other instruments. At least there doesnt seem to be a big a gender gap.
And if I look at youth orchestras I have played in they are about 50 50 girls and boys. Whereas my school chess club was just boys IIRC. So maybe its mostly different interests.
Also, do you think the past being extremely sexist plays no role?
On the one hand, there's probably a little psychological overlap between obsessive music practice and obsessive chess practice. But music practice doesn't have the same autistic, half-insane quality -- there's a distinction between monomania and conscientiousness (and I'd argue that when it comes to practicing music in high school or younger, it's almost 100% conscientiousness).
I actually dated a woman in college who became a professional classical musician. I haven't known anyone who played high level chess, but I did have a college friend who was making a serious attempt to go pro at Starcraft. And it was pretty clear that his level of obsession with Starcraft was much greater than hers with classical music.
She loved classical music, practiced her instrument for a few hours per day, but she also was attending classes, getting good grades, and also had other interests and didn't really talk about music all that much.
He was obsessed with Starcraft, played it all day, skipped classes for weeks at a time, and when he wasn't playing it, he wanted to relate everything in life to it, and discuss strategies for it at great detail on the Internet. He dreamed about it, doodled pictures of it. My guess is that it was pretty similar to a high-level chess player's personality, applied to a different strategy game.
As for sexism -- or, let's say, traditional gender roles, that might have played a part. But Amelia Earhart died 80+ years ago, and society has desperately been searching for women who can break through in male-dominated fields for at least as long and trying to elevate them. I don't think any sort of discrimination is a relevant factor in female achievement today, with women representing a solid majority of college students.
One statistic that's interesting is that women are MORE inclined to go into traditionally feminine fields in more egalitarian societies. Women are more likely to pursue disciplines like engineering if they come from societies where hard skills are more valued, which are more traditional societies. But when women are totally free to choose what to study, they pursue more feminine, "soft-skill" fields.
Well, yeah, but t'was ever thus. Conquest's Second Law - well, it was attributed to him, regardless of whether or not he actually said it - says that any organization that is not constitutionally right-wing will become left-wing. Just because we've changed what left and right denote doesn't make this any less true.
The path you've suggested - trying to wave a shiny penny at the rubes and have them follow - is what the "Intellectual Dark Web" is doing, and it's having some success, even though the IDW is dorky, and that's because a lot of the Right is credulous. Example: a lot of people on the Right became isolationist converts in the Trump era, but the IDW has waved "women's tears in Iran" at them, and now we're hearing about how important Taiwanese sovereignty is (to whom?) and now a lot of people who wanted us out of Afghanistan are back to wanting a three-front war with China, Iran, Russia, and anyone else foolish enough to oppose ARE FREEDOMS. There really is a direct causal line of success between "nod and smile when conservatives say they don't trust puberty blockers for children" and "then fill their head with whatever else you want them to believe." So, EA will succeed on that score if it tries it.
The problem is that support from anti-wokes is either highly conditional (in the case of people of principal) or wide but shallow (in the case of the Right, who'll scream bloody murder at a squirrel until a slightly bigger squirrel appears in their peripheral vision, at which point the original squirrel may as well never have existed.) Or to be slightly more charitable, it's shallow less because of attention span and more because being animated by wanting to be left alone is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever a winning strategy against someone who doesn't want to leave you alone. To wit: anti-wokeism is a losing proposition because it has no positive view of its own to offer.
Precisely the biggest challenge: developing a positive vision. Or rather, a Cathedral-worthy vision, one that involves applying power. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the term “Cathedral” comes from the name for seats of metaphysical authority in Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox and some Lutheran countries.
I'm less a fan of the term cathedral than I am the blob, because I think cathedral implies a coherence of vision and purpose that I don't think is really there. Not to dispense with the whole thing because as you imply there is something mission-oriented about it. (This is also why libs love saying things like"we have so much work still to do", something you never hear a right-winger say, because they don't believe in governing.)
This requires a religious viewpoint or at least a viewpoint with religious characteristics ala wokeism (which I prefer to just call a religion), so I agree with you, but also I think "EA" or "rationalism" or whatever you want to call it will fail and cannot do this because it holds rejection of religion as a fundamental tenet.
They're two different things, but both will eventually hit the wall that virtually none of us is actually rational, so trying to have a mass movement that pushes rational aims is a massive uphill struggle.
Well, I think you can certainly have a mass movement that pushes a rational aim. The distinction that is possibly being overlooked is that between a rational end goal and the fact that mass movements inevitably do not operate in a purely rational fashion. So you may have a mass movement that pushes for something that is very rational, or something that is very irrational, it simply depends.
For instance, I believe that the "pro-life" movement represents a far more rational viewpoint on abortion than any of the various pro-abortion positions. That position being that human lives are human lives from the moment of conception and that killing a human in an early stage of development is still killing a human. This viewpoint makes much more sense than the absurd but politically convenient view that humans somehow do not become humans until some arbitrary number of weeks have passed since their individual physical form actually came into existence from previous non-existence.
However, most people who are in the "pro-life" movement do not necessarily view the issue this way, and do not necessarily hold their "pro-life" viewpoint as a result of this sort of "rational" thinking. Instead, they more likely hold the viewpoint due to simple social conditioning, and thus when pressed on the issue, they will often struggle to articulate it in rational terms, instead resorting to vague platitudes such as a "culture of life" and whatever other gobbledy gook. And this of course turns off some "rationalists" from the topic, even though such people are ignoring that the other side of the debate is also completely irrational, but I digress.
The point is, since most people are normies, and normies suck at rationality, mass movements will always appear to be irrational in some degree, even if their actual aim is perfectly rational. It seems that this contradiction is one you must make peace with if you want your viewpoints to ever gain any popularity or influence, because they will then inevitably be adopted by a bunch of normies who don't actually understand them all that well but are simply holding them due to social norms.
We should note that while many anti-wokes seem to balk at the idea of recognizing these social power dynamics and accepting them, wokes have no issue doing so, what with their eagerness to "cancel" enemies over any perceived slight and such. Here I think Richard has finally made it onto the right track when he suggests co-opting the right and attempting to steer that train, so to speak.
"We can use the terms “rationalism” and “utilitarianism” almost interchangeably. Most rationalists I think would say that they are Utilitarians on most things, and when they’re not utilitarians, as in when they bring something like “human dignity” into the equation, they are honest and upfront about it. But to them, non-utilitarian views are more of an aberration than they are for most other people."
I'm going to push back here.
Consequentialism means judging an act by its consequences. Utilitarianism is a subset of consequentialism, usually making a value judgement that the optimal consequence involves some sort of utility maximization.
I don't think it's irrational to NOT want a society that tries to maximize utility, especially if utility is defined in unusual ways or makes no distinction about whose utility is being increased/decreased and why.
I'm skeptical that any society that is built for humans can be called 'good' if it goes out of its way to maximize **anything**. More often then not it's about optimizing the balance of things that make life enjoyable with the things that make life possible. (pleasure vs. self control, suicidal belligerence vs. suicidal altruism, etc.)
Small quibble: at elite universities, there are way more strong female college applicants than male. To maintain near gender parity at those universities, there’s basically an affirmative action program for male applicants. There are lots of reasons that the males are less qualified in general that isn’t about IQ. And this says nothing about advanced degrees in cognitively demanding fields, where there is clearly affirmative action for women. Still, it’s worth being accurate.
I think the contention is that IQ is really most of what matters. Even GPA reflects what classes you took. A kid who got an A+ in BC Calculus but C's in everything else belongs at an elite institution (in the sense that society can get more from cultivating said student's skills) than one who got straight A's in their mostly humanities classes and a B in precalc.
So yeah, the elite institutions should mostly be made up of the kids who got high scores on the math section of the SAT. That would skew more male.
This is pretty wrong. HS GPAs better predict college success than standardized test. If a college wants students that have the cognitive abilities and study skills to do well, they shouldn’t ignore grades. There is no a priori reason that universities “should” admit intelligent, lazy students. With that said, I do think that the move away from standardized tests is mostly done for affirmative action type reasons. This will decrease the average IQ of the student body at elite schools.
We can of course dispute whether “college success” is really worth much these days, but I think it probably is in STEM and social science. Even if lots of social science is bogus, it turns out that being good at analyzing it is important for reasons independent of its content. I cannot say the same for gender/race studies, which are gobbledygook to the point where any thinking person should never waste time thinking about it.
It is true that there are a lot more males who get top SAT math scores. There are lots of reasons that intelligent boys might do worse in school than less intelligent girls. Teacher bias is a thing, but it seems to be more a matter of effort. At least, that’s what I’ve seen in my 8 years of academic and standardized test tutoring.
This is interesting and I hadn't heard this before. The definition of strong applicant here is, I assume, mainly around high school grades? Of course extracurriculars etc. will play a role but I assume academics are the core focus. How does this break down, percentage-wise, and what percentage of women who would otherwise get in (assuming a 50/50 division of both gender applicants and gender application strength) end up losing out here?
Grades and scores. Women get better HS grades, worse SAT scores. The grade gap is large enough that unless we heavily weight SAT, there will be more qualified women. That’s my sense from talking to admissions people and a few online research sessions. A simple Google scholar search for “high school grades gender” would do the trick.
There's no such thing as "college." There are subjects, some of which are real and many of which are fake. Are you going to tell me there's affirmative action for males in engineering? Because there isn't.
“Racism is wrong because collective guilt is wrong.”
Right. Not all blacks are criminals or low I.Q. Many are fine people. But enough of them are in the former category such that a NIMBY attitude might be warranted. It’s not rational to turn your country into Brazil.
It used to be possible to have lots of African-Americans* living in an area without having a very high crime rate. Look at a graph of the homicide rate over time, it's not fixed. NIMBYism becomes the preferred solution once people give up on trying to stop criminals from committing crimes, figuring they just have to designate certain areas as ones where crime will run rampant.
*I almost used the term "black people" there, keeping closer to your terminology, but then I remembered that black immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa are much less criminal than the culture America produced.
It is an interesting argument that one could analyze, but it is fundamentally non-serious and anti-white because nobody will ever use the same arguments against non-whites (The Turks, for example) since they aren't as masochistic as whites and will just laugh in your face. If people were actually serious about transferring money from one people to another as reparations, then they would apply that principle universally across time and space. Here, it's just another self-interested welfare scheme to take money from white people and give it to non-whites who are failing. Whites get the votes, virtue, and status, while non-whites get the money.
If a person were honest about the benefits of slavery and genocide, then their conclusions would be so unpalatable to modern sensibilities, that there's no way one could create a consistent policy. What are the benefits and costs of bringing black slaves to the US? Should all white people who have been victims of an interracial crime involving blacks be given reparations by other whites who brought the blacks here? That would bankrupt the country. How much money do whites deserve for extirpating slavery globally, mostly the British? That would bankrupt every 3rd world country. How much money should whites get for modern medicine which prevented further disease-mediated "genocides" of immunodeficient natives? How much money should the descendants or racial brethren of white slaves get? The answers don't matter because non non-white person or country is going to give money to whites. Only whites with their low ethnocentrism fall for this hoodwink.
In other words, the whole debate is rigged from the start against whites and shouldn't be taken seriously.
The Aella and Meghan Murphy interview is extremely amusing for those who have yet to see it, Its like Aella is talking to a brick wall, yet of course Murphy was clearly the victor in the eyes of twitter ppl. It's almost like Julia Galef is wrong about everything, and in order to influence ppl you don't engage in reasonable discussion Aumann's agreement theorem style rather you seek to humiliate your opponent with the eventual goal of making your opponents belief reprehensible to hold.
"B-B-But wat about that HIV treatment action grou.." Yes of course the normalization of homosexuality and homosexuality related accessories was the product of reasonable discussion and not indoctrinating small children and suing ppl who don't want to bake u a cake.... wait what, I think I have that backwards. Maybe there is a reason homo sapiens evolved to be bad at reasoning towards the truth and to be exceptional at intellectual tribalism.
"Why EA Will Be Anti-Woke or Die" no but what if it all just dies, like what if every conservative movement and any attempt at resistance and last ditch reactionary effort will just die, I dunno maybe by then we would have all evolved into 70.00 IQ Bomalians (notice the dot). Needless to say I'm not hopeful, I also find the lack of dysgenic and race and IQ talk by ppl such as Scott pretty interesting, like he clearly has gone on a autism fueled deep dive at 4 am, and like any reasonable person concluded that yes.....
I also find your attempt had resisting the woke mind virus valiant Mr. Richard and wish you the best of luck in your quest, till them im going to live in a cabin in the middle of the woods.
Scott has made his position on those issues clear enough. (check Greg Cochran on his blogroll) And he made it clear that neither SSC nor ACX is not going to be a hotbed for everything repugnant - crowding out and poisoning all else - just because one can give it a coherent argument. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
Not everybody agrees on "common decency" or "treating other people well," to wit the Abbott-DeSantis stunt with asylum seekers and people who push back against (not just forget) to use people's preferred gender pronouns.
But I agree that "rational" makes sense when applied to altruism.
Saying that your politics are based on "common decency" or "treating other people well" is meaningless because that's what EVERYONE believes about themselves. The idea that using someone's preferred pronouns is just "common decency" is a very modern idea which would have meant nothing to almost every Western person 20 years ago.
Pretty sure Hutcheson here is just a little more evolved, a little more on-the-right-side-of-history than the rest of us Neanderthals who have doubts about overthrowing the gender binary.
If someone's preference was for them to address you as "your highness", would you accede? If someone's preference was for you to treat them as if they were a mountain lion, would you accede?
No one in the entire world sincerely thinks that it's common decency to accede to every preference expressed by any person in civil society at any time. Woke and anti-woke simply draw the boundaries of what they think are reasonable accommodations differently.
And if your four-year-old insisted you use usted with them instead of the informal second-person singular, you'd tell them to knock it off, and among friends and family we speak informally to each other without airs and graces. Your four-year-old would soon learn that, or they'd cut a lonely figure on the playground.
This is the opposite side of the coin from making reasonable accommodations for people: the accommodations they ask for must themselves be reasonable.
The measures by which respecting pronouns can be considered reasonable are very easy to enumerate, and indeed I follow these most of the time: it takes very little effort, it's polite, and I don't want to upset people. For these reasons, most normal people in a liberal society will do the bare minimum here and go along with it, for the final reason if not the other two.
But we never ask the question - is the demand being made of us reasonable? And is the demand - pronoun respect - being made in isolation of other demands? In my experience, the answer to the latter question is "no", and accommodations of names - in the name of politeness, if nothing else - is an inevitable harbinger of further demands to follow.
Thank you for writing this. I agree it is reasonable to use preferred pronouns in most situations, but 'always go along with someone's preferences' is a totally unreasonable standard. It's important to ask whether the demands being made are reasonable, before we take it to the logical conclusion of agreeing to the demand of the rapist to be housed in a women's prison. Same with requests for 'trigger warnings' and other kinds of political correctness. The initial requests are generally reasonable, but it rapidly advances to 'insulate me from all potentially upsetting ideas', if a line is not drawn.
When your 4-year old has a secret friend, you go along it. (I guess, my four -year old's never had secret friends.) I agree that going along with personal pronouns may not seem reasonable but making the effort does. Other demands are other demands.
I'm in an odd kind of agreement here, like that perhaps experienced as a family friend listening to a father sternly warn a daughter about boys and pregnancy when I know that she is, in fact, already pregnant and has been having morning sickness for weeks.
That is, while I very much enjoy the writings of the OG rationalists mentioned, and apply the principles of rationality in myself wherever I can, I've never understood how anyone could think altruism is rational, or even compatible with rationality. I didn't need Robin Hanson to tell me about charity and social signals, and I can't see any way in which caring about malaria in africa is more rational than caring about women's tears.
I donate to malaria charities, because that's a problem we can actually do something about, which will keep people from dying and potentially make such places better as malaria gets selected to be less debilitating and selection for things like sickle cell gets reduced in humans. On the other hand, American culture right now is making depression among females worse, as accommodating "women's tears" is basically the opposite of cognitive behavioral therapy
The southern parts of the US once had lots of problems from parasites like hookworm. Then the Rockefeller Foundation decided to do something about it, and now the south is much more livable (I even lived in a suburb in a southern state for a few years as a child). I prefer for Africa to be more livable just as I prefer for lots of places to be more livable. Increasing the supply of livable places is good for people who have to live somewhere (a set that includes me).
Thank you for this piece; I just want to nitpick on a couple of small issues. Neuroticism is not opposite of rationality, these seem more like orthogonal. The rationalist movement contains many neurotic males; I myself am a highly neurotic female, yet still feel best when reading rationalists, and am disgusted by excessive wokeism. Having read your post I'm now trying to figure out at which point I should consider the EA to have lost its purpose and stop donating to them.
About polyamory: the reason why it's less popular among women compared to men is not that women are less rational (whether they are or not). For a rational ordinary heterosexual woman polyamory is probably not the best system, considering that aging lowers females quality much faster than that of males. It may be pleasant while we are young, but worse than monogamy when we get old.
There's this other little bug (or is it a feature?) in polyamory: having several partners absolutely lowers the emotional commitment to each one of them, almost like it was a limited resource. This is even somewhat true for having more children: getting a new child more often than not reduces the overwhelming feeling of love that the mother feels for her older child. It's not politically correct to say it (and I would never say it in front of my kids) but it's true. In some ways this is a good thing - should you lose one of your kids or your spouse, the pain will not be as strong as when he was your only kid or spouse. So yeah, there's a trade-off.
Frankly I think the threat of wokeness is overrated. The main problem with wokeness is not the object level issues but the cognitive anti-patterns often associated with it, like "how dare you question my lived experiences", "this is dehumanizing and therefore false", etc. As far as I can tell, the anti-woke anti-patterns are both worse and more common. Lots of liberal or left-wing commentators manage to mostly avoid these anti-patterns even as they spend lots of their time actively defending feminism, BLM, and trans stuff - it seems quite easy to be "woke" without being woke. I don't really see them taking in root for people who spend most of their time talking about AGI risk or malaria nets.
"Also, Lloyd's essay[*] is simply really thoughtful and well worth reading for the details of the distinction between radical ideas with more or less intellectual discourse norms versus slightly more radical ideas with essentially cult discourse norms"
Came in here expecting to read an article about how Electronic Arts will be anti-woke and it was something video game related. This is still cool though.
There are real, biological differences between humans and quarians, and disparities are not evidence of discrimination!
I've seen this claim in a few of your pieces, that liberals are reasonable but just have a blind spot on identity issues. I think energy/climate is another blind spot, a huge one. Here liberals want to pursue the goal of "decarbonization", which is absolutely insane -- an entire overhaul of the energy system (the most fundamental of industries) in pursuit of an incredibly vaguely specified goal. So you have lots of smart economists and scientists conducting rational discourse and employing utilitarianism (the way you describe in this essay) on the best strategies to go about this without questioning the underlying premises which are absolutely bonkers. This makes me think that it's not just identity issues that are a blind spot: liberalism (so e.g. the NYT and liberal media) has fundamental problems wherever social justice ideology holds sway, and this applied to a lot of things -- race and feminism, but also the environment, crime, homelessness, and more.
I agree, but once we recognize how broad these "blind spots" are, it seems to be less a case of a "blind spot" and more a case of liberals just being straight up wrong about everything, period. Social justice ideology has a really strong viewpoint on basically every issue of import, after all. Some other things that liberalism has gotten catastrophically wrong in very recent memory: COVID, immigration, fighting wars overseas. The list goes on.
This leaves conservatives as the lesser of two evils not necessarily because they are right about everything, or even very much, but they are simply less absurdly wrong. The liberal position on "climate change" and energy alone is clearly more dangerous than the sum total of all conservative beliefs, in my opinion (given that conservative beliefs tend towards not doing very much and/or defending the status quo).
Being 'catastrophically wrong' about COVID would have meant tens, if not hundreds, of millions more dead from COVID than we got. That didn't happen because we 'liberals' got some things anti-catastrophically right.
Unfalsifiable claim.
Viruses don't care about your sophistry.
How do you know the covid response "got it right?"
Virtually every EA I know supports deregulation of nuclear.
There is a big difference between just not being unreasonably afraid of nuclear power and buying into the "net zero" climate insanity garbage. I would imagine that many, if not most people who reject climate insanity also don't really have much of a problem with expanding nuclear power. Definitely the case for me.
I don't think they buy into the "net zero" climate insanity garbage, whatever you mean by that? EAs seem really uninterested in climate stuff in general? The most common take I've heard is that geoengineering mostly solves the problem in a pinch.
I may not be familiar enough with this "EA movement" then. From what I've seen of it so far, I was assuming that they take the supposed problem of "climate change" seriously in much the same way as the mainstream left. If they're smarter than that then never mind.
It was an early sign of the present issues (I initially wrote rot) that a lot of EAs were trying to find ways to say that climate change might, maybe be an effective cause, despite the obvious point that it doesn't look dangerous as an x-risk, or nearly as important as other things from a present day well being pov. And the far more obvious point that it isn't neglected.
Mainly the arguments were pointing out that tail risks are bad, saying (without making a detailed argument) global warming leads to tensions might lead to nuclear war, and (reasonably) that even if climate change is not neglected developing certain useful technologies might be.
I'd also say, it sounds like you perhaps have your own blindspots about global warming. It is pretty unlikely to be harmless or net positive to allow carbon levels in the atmosphere to get arbitrarily high. Of course you might not be saying that we should simply burn all the coal in the ground if it is the cheapest energy source, but I'm not at all sure what you are concretely proposing. And the tail risks of change are always bigger than the tail risks of not changing things.
I think the supposed threat of climate change is basically a fantasy, and the extreme wild overbearing moral panic hysteria that currently surrounds the topic is comically out of proportion to whatever risk it might pose (I've seen some people make the case that global warming is actually likely to be a net positive).
So I do have a "blind spot" in the sense that I tend to dismiss out of hand any viewpoint that takes the topic seriously to begin with.
CO2 levels rise at a pretty steady and predictable rate, so it's not a case of arbitrarily high. If you make the bold assumption that a trend that has only been measured since about 1960 will continue indefinitely and in the same way, you can know what it will be a long way in advance. The trend is just that linear.
The goal is not vaguely specified. It is the prevention of catastrophic changes to climate which could cause the collapse of civilization or render Earth uninhabitable. These scenarios may be low-probability, but they are so bad that the expectation value of not addressing them is worth a lot of economic loss. Something like this (though obviously with volcanoes instead of humans releasing the GHG) probably caused the Permian mass extinction, also known as the only one worse than the dinosaur killer. Every kilogram of GHG not in the atmosphere reduces the risk of those scenarios. Hence the objective function is simply "minimize release of GHG into atmosphere, until such time as we have sufficient too-cheap-to-meter power to remove it as necessary to restore pre-Industrial level (250 ppm)".
Yeah, that still sounds pretty vague to me. If you're worried about the collapse of civilization, then the most important thing is to make civilization as resilient to catastrophe as possible. Decarbonization by transitioning to solar and wind is the absolute worst course of action, as it makes the whole grid vulnerable to bad weather: no sun and low wind and the power's out. (Alex Epstein made this point in his recent testimony: we're currently loading enormous amounts of unreliable electricity onto the grid, this is a much bigger threat to the grid's security than hackers). Add to this the push for electric cars and electrification, and a power outage has even worse consequences. In short, a recipe for utter disaster.
If you actually want to be resilient, you do things like build dikes, do effective forest management, invest in early warning systems, stress-test critical infrastructure, etc. These are well-defined steps that address concrete problems. In general you want to encourage economic growth and technological progress, and cheap energy is fundamental to this.
https://apnews.com/article/science-climate-and-environment-832854311bb5d3907971a1298583e15c
I don't understand what you think is vague about that. We know which substances are greenhouse gases. We know what emits them. And we know from their physical properties how much they directly change planetary temperatures, though not the exact effects of subsequent feedback loops.
Variation decreases as solar and wind are more geographically distributed per law of large numbers. They also have resiliency advantages: once built, they are not dependent on huge masses of noxious material that must be mined, processed, and then shipped great distances. And worst case, you can schedule rolling blackouts and give priority to areas which most need heat or AC; that is a nuisance for everyone but rarely a serious problem.
This was pretty good. As a religious conservative bordering on a theonomist, I like the rationalist and EA stuff because I generally think they're straight shooters, and I learn about interesting ideas and concepts. But I think their teleology is lacking (to the extent it exists at all) and I wouldn't want them making hard moral decisions. Which makes sense...since I'm a borderline theonomist.
Utilitarianism leads to some weird places. Like arguing that "we should destroy nature because nature involves the suffering of animals" and "is it okay to eat mentally challenged people?" I enjoy the idea balls being sent from the rationalists but you guys could still stand to church it up a bit to remain relevant.
Regarding Jesus-Darwin I'm surprised by how often I use concepts from evolutionary psychology in Sunday School. Of course, I don't phrase it like that. But I do think Christian thoughts on human nature are often in agreement with naturalism.
Christianity evolved over thousands of years to deal with human problems, it's not surprising they would have evolved ways to deal with common human problems like lust and violence ('The Fall') and getting men to invest in children (patriarchy, responsibility, guilt), as described by evolutionary psychology. Weird Sixties ideas have a little less of a track record. ;)
Not that there haven't been weird offshoots of Christianity like Catharism and all the other heresies--but they didn't survive, did they?
You see it in other cultures too--China has Confucianism, which talks about the five relationships of ruler to subject, parent to child, husband to wife, older brother to younger brother, and friend to friend. The idea of excess yin producing yang and vice versa reminds me of the Greek golden mean, and has the added knowledge that trying to make too much of one thing tends to produce its opposite (look at our swings from left to right and back). There's cultural selection just like the natural kind, and the Great Traditions are that way because they've been useful to societies over hundreds of years (thousands in the case of China).
One funny facet of "rationalism" to me is that rationalists never seem to consider the possibility that religion is useful simply to keep the unwashed masses placated. Richard has said something close to this in the past, and he seems perfectly aware that almost everyone is incapable of living life "rationally," yet he remains overtly hostile to religion. Even though the actual historical track record suggests that religion is an inevitable fact of human nature.
Yes, like I said, Richard has come close to acknowledging this at times also. What's funny is that these types always then remain overtly hostile to religion and attempt to stamp it out or hurt it as much as possible, as opposed to recognizing it as part of human nature and working within it. Marxism, of course, being an outstanding example of this. Whereas wokeism has had great success in simply infiltrating churches and turning them to its own purposes.
Evolutionary psychology is one of the wooliest subfields of evolutionary biology. Says this biologist. That guys like Hanania et al. rely on so much it is telling.
Richard, this is the best thing I've read in a long time. You really have a way to boldly state things we all recognize as true, but often don't like to talk about.
I would love to see utilitarians argue for executing violent criminals to improve society.
I agree with Richard and Tyler that the main reason part of EA is "woke" is because it draws from secular liberals at elite universities. But within EA, there are three rough groups. The AI/rationalist/far future group, the mosquito net people, and the animal people. The first group is the most anti-woke. It's also the group that's most likely to think the importance of AI trumps everything else, we might all be dead next year and so forth. As such the expected value of fighting wokeness is very low even if you think wokeness is very bad.
The people who care about the global poor and animals (who start off being more woke) are also the people who are optimizing for long-term influence (assuming no AI apocalypse). So I expect EA to become more left-wing.
Finally, I think both admirers and detractors of EA exaggerate how much people within it are driven by philosophical commitments. EAs are happy to praise weird philosophical when it's on noncontroversial issues (welfare of shrimps and insects). But EAs are barely more likely than typical people to change their life paths because of utilitarian arguments about natalism or theism or whatever. (Possibly the prevalence of veganism among EAs shows that many are willing to bite the bullet.)
EAs embracing veganism raises a huge question that seems to go entirely unaddressed--who decided, or on what basis, that animal life has equal worth to human life? This has always seemed bizarre to me. The idea that our own species is more valuable to us than other species should be the most self-evident concept possible, I would think. And it is not at all self-evident why we should care about the suffering of animal species, at least from a purely "rationalist" lens. Sure, we might not like the idea of animals suffering because it upsets us on an emotional level, but that's, y'know--emotional, not rational.
It seems to me that if we run with this pseudo-religion of stigmatizing human interaction with the rest of the planet, maybe we as humans should simply go extinct, as this is the only real way that we will stop "harming" nature.
I think the popularity of veganism shows that some EAs do follow through on their intellectual/philosophical commitments.
>Isn’t all concern for the suffering of other beings emotional though? A purely rational person would arguably only care about maximizing his own happiness without any concern for other beings, whether human or animal. Being upset because another human is suffering is just as emotional as being upset because an animal is suffering.<
Yes, caring about anything is emotional in the sense that, strictly speaking, there is no first-principles reason to care about anything, ever. First principles are necessarily irrational, and rationality can then proceed only once that starting point is selected. But to admit this is to admit that morality cannot be based on pure reason alone, which would be anathema to the "enlightened rationalist atheist skeptic" types that I imagine populate the world of EA.
>If you accept the premise that the mental feeling of suffering is bad even if you aren’t the one experiencing it, then it seems logical to also want to reduce animal suffering.<
It doesn't seem clear at all to me why caring about human suffering means that I must necessarily care also about animal suffering. If we're being honest, I'm not really capable of even caring about all the human suffering out there--when you tell me about starving children in Africa, I can recognize what that means in an abstract sense and say truthfully that I would prefer those children not to be starving, if I had any real say in the matter, but this would not elicit much of an emotional response from me. It is simply too distant from my own sphere of experience and considerations.
Regardless of that, it seems like a pretty huge issue to skip straight over the question of how we value animal vs human life and to instead simply assume a particular position as self-evident on that question. I think most people would agree that literally not caring about animal suffering at all in any circumstances is probably wrong, since nearly everyone condemns animal abuse when it is done purely for purposes of amusement. But that still leaves a ton of room for debate between that extreme and the other end of treating animal life as literally equal to human life.
If you were really trying to fix the world, you'd probably want to be pretty damn sure you got the right answers on a question that big. But if you're just looking to virtue signal how righteous you are because you really care a lot about things, well, that would fit with automatically erring on the side of what appears more empathetic (i.e. veganism).
Common sense ought to tell us that women – who now insanely believe they can do whatever men can, sexually or otherwise – are going to get themselves into trouble by tantalizing exploitative or weak men in a power relationship. Trouble is, power is an aphrodisiac. Therefore, in order to protect themselves, normal men should make sure there are witnesses when dealing with women in a work environment. Almost all of these harassment cases involve two people by themselves and women do lie, or more likely, have morning after regrets, apparently even lasting decades.
The Mike Pence discourse really pissed me off. "Oh you're so horny and repressed that you can't be ALONE with a woman without hitting on her?!" The reality is that he doesn't want anyone to be able to LIE about an encounter. He was smart to protect himself in that way.
Yep. Of course, some people are single, and work acquaintances form a natural group for socialization which can bleed over into romance. I get it. But I don't really understand why anyone who is married and not looking to cheat would permit himself to be alone with an unrelated woman. This is how I live, and it's not really any kind of challenge to maintain.
It can get awkward if it's not the norm in your organization. But I bet I come back and you're still married in 20 years. ;)
The reasons for being alone with an unrelated women are basically the same as those for being alone with an unrelated man. What if one of your friends wants to do something no one else feels like doing, and she's a woman. For example, a while ago a friend of ours asked my wife and me if we wanted to see "The Black Phone." My wife wasn't interested in that movie, so I ended up seeing it alone with her.
If you spend any time hanging out with friends you're inevitably going to be alone with them occasionally. Unless you have no women as friends, which is obviously ridiculous, there's not much of a way to avoid it. (I know there are some people who only have friends of the same gender, but I have no idea how that happens. How could anyone limit themselves like that?)
It's like you live in an alternate dimension from me. I've never in my life heard of a married person IRL seeing a movie with a person of the opposite sex, except as part of an affair.
I had female friends when I was in high school and college, usually because we were all part of an interlocking social web. I never made any after that. Now I'm generally friendly with my wife's friends and with my friends' wives, but I would never spend time alone with them and thus wouldn't really call them "friends". It's incredibly easy for all your friends to be single sex, because most hobbies and interests are naturally sex-segregated.
What normal men do with their friends (besides drink and socialize): watch sports, work out, golf. Fish or hunt perhaps. Help with a home improvement project. If they're younger, maybe play videogames. On the nerdier side, perhaps even RPGs, wargames, or strategy board games.
All of these activities are extremely male-coded.
Even things like discussing controversial or new ideas, discussing world events and geopolitics are male-coded. The commentariat in a place like this skews heavily male for a reason.
When I get together with my family or my wife's family, we hang together as couples for a bit, but without ever saying anything, the men and women naturally split up at some point and spend the rest of the night talking about very different things. To me, this just seems entirely natural.
That's interesting. I participate in a lot of "male-coded" nerdy activities, but generally understand male-coded to mean "fewer women" not "zero women," or that "women are less interested" not "women are uninterested." For example I am in an RPG group which has 4 men and 3 women in it. One factor might be that the nerd community I participate the most in is anime, which has historically been less male-coded than other nerd interests.
As another example, my wife and I both enjoy discussing controversial ideas and geopolitical events, but she tends to get tired of that topic and want to discuss something else faster than I do.
I sometimes notice the phenomenon you describe at family gatherings, but not as commonly as you seem to. Occasionally my mother, wife, and sister-in-law will organize a "girls day", but other times they hang out with me and the other men.
You're right that there's nonzero female interest in these activities. But I think what happens is that you gravitate towards people with similar interest.
Back in college and my early 20s, we used to play RPGs with women. Often, but not always, these were girlfriends of people in the group that wanted to check the whole thing out. What usually ended up happening was they had some fun with elements of the concept, but they hated the whole "crunch" of the experience. They didn't want to spend their free time outside the game reading rules. They were flaky about showing up and only wanted to attend 1/2 or 1/3 of the sessions.
I still occasionally play RPGs over Roll20 with longtime friends of mine, all of us dads. Some of these guys are far more liberal than me, but it would be unthinkable for us to bring a woman into the group at this stage. We've all "been there, done that" (independent of the matter of our marriages).
Now, another friend of mine is an avid golfer, and it's funny that he describes much the same experience with a very different hobby. His various girlfriends and eventual wife all wanted to golf with him when they were dating. They all had SOME interest in golf, but it was much lower than his and eventually fizzled out, and their lower energy and interest always just bummed him out when it came to playing with them. He'd rather golf alone, but happily enough, he has plenty of golf buddies that share his energy.
Another friend of mine tried playing World of Warcraft in its heyday with his girlfriend. What ended up happening was he wanted to focus on grinding for the best gear, and she wanted to go around the world looking for interesting vistas and picking herbs, and the difference in styles led to some real-world fights.
So I think it's extremely common among women to just not put nearly the same energy into hobbies that men do, and this applies to a wide range of hobbies. In practice, it means that doing those hobbies side-by-side just isn't fun for anyone in the long run, and while young people may try to make it work, almost everyone has given up on it by middle-age.
Do you think there are things men can do that women can't (That arent related to sex or physical strength)? Like, do you think a woman could be a world class chess player or a world class mathematician or so? To me it seems clear that women can do all these things basically as good as men.
I think a woman could be a world class chess player or world class mathematician, but it's very much less likely for several reasons. Firstly, men probably have an advantage in those subjects, but even in areas when women do better on average, like languages, men show more variability, meaning more at the top, more at the bottom, fewer in the middle. Best and worst at anything tends to be male dominated. Plus, men tend to be more single-minded, driven and ambitious, and more willing to take risks to achieve great success, for good evolutionary reasons (more benefit for men in the form of more and better partners with success, while women get less benefit and higher cost in the form of time not spent having/raising kids). And if she does have kids, that will get in the way of becoming a world-class anything, whereas men can wait until later and still have a family, or just be less involved with them.
If women and other groups could compete fair and square against white men surely they wouldn't need quotas, #metoo struggle sessions, hate speech, forced integration, etc. They wouldn't need to infiltrate institutions created by white men. They'd have their own companies, media groups, and so forth by now, I'd have thought. They would have learned to do what white men do which is to provide goods and services people actually want – and are willing to pay their hard-earned money for. Instead, besides forced quotas and integration, we see women are very active in legal work, philanthropy, arts and entertainment (which is actually a real market that people want), and government work. But even arts are a status marker project, which is fine, but arts and entertainment may not necessarily be healthy or sane.
Thank you for your comment.
I can agree that women might generally have different preferences than men. Maybe women naturally tend towards more social work and fewer leadership positions, but I would guess the fact that e.g. women only make up 2% of economics nobel winners is explained by women being encouraged by society to be homemakers instead of researchers and maybe a preference for fields like psychology over economics and sexism by e.g. universities, some universities in the western world only allowed only allowed women to enroll in the 1979. I don't think women not being able to do economic research is true.
I could I imagine an affirmative action free world in which women make up about half of all business owners. The biggest hurdle seems to be childbirth being annoying and taking up lots of time not anything like there being some things men can do that women can't do.
If one imagines a world in which two kinds of people exist and one used to be oppressed (not being allowed to vote, go to school, open their own bank accounts) but both groups are exactly the same exept in appearance. And then people stop all discrimination against the one group. It would of course it takes some time for the previously oppressed group to catch up, I could imagine something like affirmative action being created to help them.
So affirmative action existing doesnt seem like strong evidence that women (or other groups) can't do some things that men can do.
Isn't relationship actually inverse?
That is, often there can be _more_ gender diversity in different areas for "less free" societies. More women in engineering/programming simply because there is lack of well-paying alternatives; when choice is free natural tendencies are amplified and women flock to social and medical work rather then economics or STEM.
And then there is also higher percentage of female execs in Russia then in US... though that is often because those with levers of power, like governors, cannot own firms directly, and instead have to force enterprises to provide positions to their spouses, mothers, and mothers-in-law as a form of kickbacks.
I suppose you were taught everything wrong with the world is the white man's fault (all white men without exception) and without them women, blacks, gays, literally everyone else would now be living in diversitopia. It's one of those beliefs that can never be disproven. The thought that they succeeded against all other groups because they were superior, spiritually, materially and intellectually, is too horrifying to contemplate. Therefore, the non white groups and man-hating women will scapegoat white men forever. White men, apparently, are now taking on aspects of malignant spirits. I think this explains the hysteria over Trump/Putin and what they represent. Not so much that they are exceptional but because they are so average. This drives feminized, establishment bohemians out of their minds.
I love white people and think they are great. I also love men and think they are great. I think it is possible to prove that white people are not the cause of all evils.
I just think there is a good chance that the main reason there has never been a black or female world chess champion is not to be found in biology, but in history. And especially the history of oppression of black people and women. But I could also imagine that the reason is found in biology.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/649995/highest-earning-jeopardy-winners-all-time
https://www.chess.com/ratings
Men tend to be more competitive in these events, I think because of their higher propensity for risk taking. Same with gaming, but it is controversial to say so.
I don't think risk-taking is the main reason why men heavily outperform at all mental-based forms of competition. I'd say it's some combination of:
1. Male tendency towards monomania. High-level chess requires an irrational obsession with the game of chess, to the exclusion of all other human endeavors, that borders on mental illness. Studying and practicing openings, theory, etc. Jeopardy these days requires studying various facts to an insane degree. Men are far, far more prone to this sort of monomania than women, and it can explain other sorts of overachievement, both useful and useless.
2. Greater male variability - the most extreme examples of any human characteristic will tend to be male.
3. Male competitiveness - duh. But probably the least important of these factors, my sense is that plenty of women are more competitive than plenty of men.
When it comes to winning at Jeopardy specifically, men also seriously outperform women at "general knowledge," by 2-3 SDs IIRC, which naturally applies to any games of general trivia and also translates to an interest in Jeopardy in the first place.
Chess meanwhile is just a masculine endeavor. It is an abstract simulation of war. Victory requires crushing someone by systematically eliminating all his possibilities of survival until he has no choice but to die. Of COURSE it was invented by men, for men.
Contra men having more monomania, becoming very good at playing classical music on an instrument seems very similar to being good at chess. But I feel like there are about as many great female pianists as male pianists, same goes for other instruments. At least there doesnt seem to be a big a gender gap.
And if I look at youth orchestras I have played in they are about 50 50 girls and boys. Whereas my school chess club was just boys IIRC. So maybe its mostly different interests.
Also, do you think the past being extremely sexist plays no role?
On the one hand, there's probably a little psychological overlap between obsessive music practice and obsessive chess practice. But music practice doesn't have the same autistic, half-insane quality -- there's a distinction between monomania and conscientiousness (and I'd argue that when it comes to practicing music in high school or younger, it's almost 100% conscientiousness).
I actually dated a woman in college who became a professional classical musician. I haven't known anyone who played high level chess, but I did have a college friend who was making a serious attempt to go pro at Starcraft. And it was pretty clear that his level of obsession with Starcraft was much greater than hers with classical music.
She loved classical music, practiced her instrument for a few hours per day, but she also was attending classes, getting good grades, and also had other interests and didn't really talk about music all that much.
He was obsessed with Starcraft, played it all day, skipped classes for weeks at a time, and when he wasn't playing it, he wanted to relate everything in life to it, and discuss strategies for it at great detail on the Internet. He dreamed about it, doodled pictures of it. My guess is that it was pretty similar to a high-level chess player's personality, applied to a different strategy game.
As for sexism -- or, let's say, traditional gender roles, that might have played a part. But Amelia Earhart died 80+ years ago, and society has desperately been searching for women who can break through in male-dominated fields for at least as long and trying to elevate them. I don't think any sort of discrimination is a relevant factor in female achievement today, with women representing a solid majority of college students.
One statistic that's interesting is that women are MORE inclined to go into traditionally feminine fields in more egalitarian societies. Women are more likely to pursue disciplines like engineering if they come from societies where hard skills are more valued, which are more traditional societies. But when women are totally free to choose what to study, they pursue more feminine, "soft-skill" fields.
Well, yeah, but t'was ever thus. Conquest's Second Law - well, it was attributed to him, regardless of whether or not he actually said it - says that any organization that is not constitutionally right-wing will become left-wing. Just because we've changed what left and right denote doesn't make this any less true.
The path you've suggested - trying to wave a shiny penny at the rubes and have them follow - is what the "Intellectual Dark Web" is doing, and it's having some success, even though the IDW is dorky, and that's because a lot of the Right is credulous. Example: a lot of people on the Right became isolationist converts in the Trump era, but the IDW has waved "women's tears in Iran" at them, and now we're hearing about how important Taiwanese sovereignty is (to whom?) and now a lot of people who wanted us out of Afghanistan are back to wanting a three-front war with China, Iran, Russia, and anyone else foolish enough to oppose ARE FREEDOMS. There really is a direct causal line of success between "nod and smile when conservatives say they don't trust puberty blockers for children" and "then fill their head with whatever else you want them to believe." So, EA will succeed on that score if it tries it.
The problem is that support from anti-wokes is either highly conditional (in the case of people of principal) or wide but shallow (in the case of the Right, who'll scream bloody murder at a squirrel until a slightly bigger squirrel appears in their peripheral vision, at which point the original squirrel may as well never have existed.) Or to be slightly more charitable, it's shallow less because of attention span and more because being animated by wanting to be left alone is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever a winning strategy against someone who doesn't want to leave you alone. To wit: anti-wokeism is a losing proposition because it has no positive view of its own to offer.
Precisely the biggest challenge: developing a positive vision. Or rather, a Cathedral-worthy vision, one that involves applying power. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the term “Cathedral” comes from the name for seats of metaphysical authority in Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox and some Lutheran countries.
I'm less a fan of the term cathedral than I am the blob, because I think cathedral implies a coherence of vision and purpose that I don't think is really there. Not to dispense with the whole thing because as you imply there is something mission-oriented about it. (This is also why libs love saying things like"we have so much work still to do", something you never hear a right-winger say, because they don't believe in governing.)
This requires a religious viewpoint or at least a viewpoint with religious characteristics ala wokeism (which I prefer to just call a religion), so I agree with you, but also I think "EA" or "rationalism" or whatever you want to call it will fail and cannot do this because it holds rejection of religion as a fundamental tenet.
They're two different things, but both will eventually hit the wall that virtually none of us is actually rational, so trying to have a mass movement that pushes rational aims is a massive uphill struggle.
Well, I think you can certainly have a mass movement that pushes a rational aim. The distinction that is possibly being overlooked is that between a rational end goal and the fact that mass movements inevitably do not operate in a purely rational fashion. So you may have a mass movement that pushes for something that is very rational, or something that is very irrational, it simply depends.
For instance, I believe that the "pro-life" movement represents a far more rational viewpoint on abortion than any of the various pro-abortion positions. That position being that human lives are human lives from the moment of conception and that killing a human in an early stage of development is still killing a human. This viewpoint makes much more sense than the absurd but politically convenient view that humans somehow do not become humans until some arbitrary number of weeks have passed since their individual physical form actually came into existence from previous non-existence.
However, most people who are in the "pro-life" movement do not necessarily view the issue this way, and do not necessarily hold their "pro-life" viewpoint as a result of this sort of "rational" thinking. Instead, they more likely hold the viewpoint due to simple social conditioning, and thus when pressed on the issue, they will often struggle to articulate it in rational terms, instead resorting to vague platitudes such as a "culture of life" and whatever other gobbledy gook. And this of course turns off some "rationalists" from the topic, even though such people are ignoring that the other side of the debate is also completely irrational, but I digress.
The point is, since most people are normies, and normies suck at rationality, mass movements will always appear to be irrational in some degree, even if their actual aim is perfectly rational. It seems that this contradiction is one you must make peace with if you want your viewpoints to ever gain any popularity or influence, because they will then inevitably be adopted by a bunch of normies who don't actually understand them all that well but are simply holding them due to social norms.
We should note that while many anti-wokes seem to balk at the idea of recognizing these social power dynamics and accepting them, wokes have no issue doing so, what with their eagerness to "cancel" enemies over any perceived slight and such. Here I think Richard has finally made it onto the right track when he suggests co-opting the right and attempting to steer that train, so to speak.
"We can use the terms “rationalism” and “utilitarianism” almost interchangeably. Most rationalists I think would say that they are Utilitarians on most things, and when they’re not utilitarians, as in when they bring something like “human dignity” into the equation, they are honest and upfront about it. But to them, non-utilitarian views are more of an aberration than they are for most other people."
I'm going to push back here.
Consequentialism means judging an act by its consequences. Utilitarianism is a subset of consequentialism, usually making a value judgement that the optimal consequence involves some sort of utility maximization.
I don't think it's irrational to NOT want a society that tries to maximize utility, especially if utility is defined in unusual ways or makes no distinction about whose utility is being increased/decreased and why.
I'm skeptical that any society that is built for humans can be called 'good' if it goes out of its way to maximize **anything**. More often then not it's about optimizing the balance of things that make life enjoyable with the things that make life possible. (pleasure vs. self control, suicidal belligerence vs. suicidal altruism, etc.)
This was a double plus good post. A 100% improvement over your ode to the MSM.
Small quibble: at elite universities, there are way more strong female college applicants than male. To maintain near gender parity at those universities, there’s basically an affirmative action program for male applicants. There are lots of reasons that the males are less qualified in general that isn’t about IQ. And this says nothing about advanced degrees in cognitively demanding fields, where there is clearly affirmative action for women. Still, it’s worth being accurate.
I think the contention is that IQ is really most of what matters. Even GPA reflects what classes you took. A kid who got an A+ in BC Calculus but C's in everything else belongs at an elite institution (in the sense that society can get more from cultivating said student's skills) than one who got straight A's in their mostly humanities classes and a B in precalc.
So yeah, the elite institutions should mostly be made up of the kids who got high scores on the math section of the SAT. That would skew more male.
This is pretty wrong. HS GPAs better predict college success than standardized test. If a college wants students that have the cognitive abilities and study skills to do well, they shouldn’t ignore grades. There is no a priori reason that universities “should” admit intelligent, lazy students. With that said, I do think that the move away from standardized tests is mostly done for affirmative action type reasons. This will decrease the average IQ of the student body at elite schools.
We can of course dispute whether “college success” is really worth much these days, but I think it probably is in STEM and social science. Even if lots of social science is bogus, it turns out that being good at analyzing it is important for reasons independent of its content. I cannot say the same for gender/race studies, which are gobbledygook to the point where any thinking person should never waste time thinking about it.
It is true that there are a lot more males who get top SAT math scores. There are lots of reasons that intelligent boys might do worse in school than less intelligent girls. Teacher bias is a thing, but it seems to be more a matter of effort. At least, that’s what I’ve seen in my 8 years of academic and standardized test tutoring.
This is interesting and I hadn't heard this before. The definition of strong applicant here is, I assume, mainly around high school grades? Of course extracurriculars etc. will play a role but I assume academics are the core focus. How does this break down, percentage-wise, and what percentage of women who would otherwise get in (assuming a 50/50 division of both gender applicants and gender application strength) end up losing out here?
Grades and scores. Women get better HS grades, worse SAT scores. The grade gap is large enough that unless we heavily weight SAT, there will be more qualified women. That’s my sense from talking to admissions people and a few online research sessions. A simple Google scholar search for “high school grades gender” would do the trick.
There's no such thing as "college." There are subjects, some of which are real and many of which are fake. Are you going to tell me there's affirmative action for males in engineering? Because there isn't.
On the topic of racism, I think this is a sloppy argument by an “anti-woke” rationalist:
https://betonit.substack.com/p/the-ironclad-argument-against-racism
“Racism is wrong because collective guilt is wrong.”
Right. Not all blacks are criminals or low I.Q. Many are fine people. But enough of them are in the former category such that a NIMBY attitude might be warranted. It’s not rational to turn your country into Brazil.
It used to be possible to have lots of African-Americans* living in an area without having a very high crime rate. Look at a graph of the homicide rate over time, it's not fixed. NIMBYism becomes the preferred solution once people give up on trying to stop criminals from committing crimes, figuring they just have to designate certain areas as ones where crime will run rampant.
*I almost used the term "black people" there, keeping closer to your terminology, but then I remembered that black immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa are much less criminal than the culture America produced.
It is an interesting argument that one could analyze, but it is fundamentally non-serious and anti-white because nobody will ever use the same arguments against non-whites (The Turks, for example) since they aren't as masochistic as whites and will just laugh in your face. If people were actually serious about transferring money from one people to another as reparations, then they would apply that principle universally across time and space. Here, it's just another self-interested welfare scheme to take money from white people and give it to non-whites who are failing. Whites get the votes, virtue, and status, while non-whites get the money.
If a person were honest about the benefits of slavery and genocide, then their conclusions would be so unpalatable to modern sensibilities, that there's no way one could create a consistent policy. What are the benefits and costs of bringing black slaves to the US? Should all white people who have been victims of an interracial crime involving blacks be given reparations by other whites who brought the blacks here? That would bankrupt the country. How much money do whites deserve for extirpating slavery globally, mostly the British? That would bankrupt every 3rd world country. How much money should whites get for modern medicine which prevented further disease-mediated "genocides" of immunodeficient natives? How much money should the descendants or racial brethren of white slaves get? The answers don't matter because non non-white person or country is going to give money to whites. Only whites with their low ethnocentrism fall for this hoodwink.
In other words, the whole debate is rigged from the start against whites and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Exercising your freedom of association to avoid criminal blacks is not equivalent to the collective punishment of white people for slavery.
The Aella and Meghan Murphy interview is extremely amusing for those who have yet to see it, Its like Aella is talking to a brick wall, yet of course Murphy was clearly the victor in the eyes of twitter ppl. It's almost like Julia Galef is wrong about everything, and in order to influence ppl you don't engage in reasonable discussion Aumann's agreement theorem style rather you seek to humiliate your opponent with the eventual goal of making your opponents belief reprehensible to hold.
"B-B-But wat about that HIV treatment action grou.." Yes of course the normalization of homosexuality and homosexuality related accessories was the product of reasonable discussion and not indoctrinating small children and suing ppl who don't want to bake u a cake.... wait what, I think I have that backwards. Maybe there is a reason homo sapiens evolved to be bad at reasoning towards the truth and to be exceptional at intellectual tribalism.
"Why EA Will Be Anti-Woke or Die" no but what if it all just dies, like what if every conservative movement and any attempt at resistance and last ditch reactionary effort will just die, I dunno maybe by then we would have all evolved into 70.00 IQ Bomalians (notice the dot). Needless to say I'm not hopeful, I also find the lack of dysgenic and race and IQ talk by ppl such as Scott pretty interesting, like he clearly has gone on a autism fueled deep dive at 4 am, and like any reasonable person concluded that yes.....
I also find your attempt had resisting the woke mind virus valiant Mr. Richard and wish you the best of luck in your quest, till them im going to live in a cabin in the middle of the woods.
What interview are you referring to?
Scott has made his position on those issues clear enough. (check Greg Cochran on his blogroll) And he made it clear that neither SSC nor ACX is not going to be a hotbed for everything repugnant - crowding out and poisoning all else - just because one can give it a coherent argument. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
Not everybody agrees on "common decency" or "treating other people well," to wit the Abbott-DeSantis stunt with asylum seekers and people who push back against (not just forget) to use people's preferred gender pronouns.
But I agree that "rational" makes sense when applied to altruism.
Saying that your politics are based on "common decency" or "treating other people well" is meaningless because that's what EVERYONE believes about themselves. The idea that using someone's preferred pronouns is just "common decency" is a very modern idea which would have meant nothing to almost every Western person 20 years ago.
Pretty sure Hutcheson here is just a little more evolved, a little more on-the-right-side-of-history than the rest of us Neanderthals who have doubts about overthrowing the gender binary.
Of course "personal" pronouns are new, but it's still just common decency to go along with people's preferences.
What an absurd standard.
If someone's preference was for them to address you as "your highness", would you accede? If someone's preference was for you to treat them as if they were a mountain lion, would you accede?
No one in the entire world sincerely thinks that it's common decency to accede to every preference expressed by any person in civil society at any time. Woke and anti-woke simply draw the boundaries of what they think are reasonable accommodations differently.
I calls 'em the as I sees' em. :)
Languages are funny things: The formal "you" in Spanish derives from "Vuestra" Merced, "Your Grace."
And if your four-year-old insisted you use usted with them instead of the informal second-person singular, you'd tell them to knock it off, and among friends and family we speak informally to each other without airs and graces. Your four-year-old would soon learn that, or they'd cut a lonely figure on the playground.
This is the opposite side of the coin from making reasonable accommodations for people: the accommodations they ask for must themselves be reasonable.
The measures by which respecting pronouns can be considered reasonable are very easy to enumerate, and indeed I follow these most of the time: it takes very little effort, it's polite, and I don't want to upset people. For these reasons, most normal people in a liberal society will do the bare minimum here and go along with it, for the final reason if not the other two.
But we never ask the question - is the demand being made of us reasonable? And is the demand - pronoun respect - being made in isolation of other demands? In my experience, the answer to the latter question is "no", and accommodations of names - in the name of politeness, if nothing else - is an inevitable harbinger of further demands to follow.
Thank you for writing this. I agree it is reasonable to use preferred pronouns in most situations, but 'always go along with someone's preferences' is a totally unreasonable standard. It's important to ask whether the demands being made are reasonable, before we take it to the logical conclusion of agreeing to the demand of the rapist to be housed in a women's prison. Same with requests for 'trigger warnings' and other kinds of political correctness. The initial requests are generally reasonable, but it rapidly advances to 'insulate me from all potentially upsetting ideas', if a line is not drawn.
When your 4-year old has a secret friend, you go along it. (I guess, my four -year old's never had secret friends.) I agree that going along with personal pronouns may not seem reasonable but making the effort does. Other demands are other demands.
Thank God we don't speak Japanese, or Hanania-sama would be in a lot more trouble. ;)
Not if those preferences come with a sledge hammer behind their back ...
What if my preference is to not see drag queens?
Then don't. :)
Time will tell if they are silly. Singular they will stick. I think the rest will not if people just make some, largely futile, effort to follow.
I'm all for opposition to bullying.
I'm in an odd kind of agreement here, like that perhaps experienced as a family friend listening to a father sternly warn a daughter about boys and pregnancy when I know that she is, in fact, already pregnant and has been having morning sickness for weeks.
That is, while I very much enjoy the writings of the OG rationalists mentioned, and apply the principles of rationality in myself wherever I can, I've never understood how anyone could think altruism is rational, or even compatible with rationality. I didn't need Robin Hanson to tell me about charity and social signals, and I can't see any way in which caring about malaria in africa is more rational than caring about women's tears.
I donate to malaria charities, because that's a problem we can actually do something about, which will keep people from dying and potentially make such places better as malaria gets selected to be less debilitating and selection for things like sickle cell gets reduced in humans. On the other hand, American culture right now is making depression among females worse, as accommodating "women's tears" is basically the opposite of cognitive behavioral therapy
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness-epidemic
I should have cited Yglesias on how anti-CBT has implicitly flourished:
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1626227292405137414
The part where you conclude that people dying of malaria is a problem? Yeah that's pure deontology.
The southern parts of the US once had lots of problems from parasites like hookworm. Then the Rockefeller Foundation decided to do something about it, and now the south is much more livable (I even lived in a suburb in a southern state for a few years as a child). I prefer for Africa to be more livable just as I prefer for lots of places to be more livable. Increasing the supply of livable places is good for people who have to live somewhere (a set that includes me).
If that's as non-altruistic as it sounds, it seems pretty rational to me. Similar views are possible about environmentalism.
Thank you for this piece; I just want to nitpick on a couple of small issues. Neuroticism is not opposite of rationality, these seem more like orthogonal. The rationalist movement contains many neurotic males; I myself am a highly neurotic female, yet still feel best when reading rationalists, and am disgusted by excessive wokeism. Having read your post I'm now trying to figure out at which point I should consider the EA to have lost its purpose and stop donating to them.
About polyamory: the reason why it's less popular among women compared to men is not that women are less rational (whether they are or not). For a rational ordinary heterosexual woman polyamory is probably not the best system, considering that aging lowers females quality much faster than that of males. It may be pleasant while we are young, but worse than monogamy when we get old.
There's this other little bug (or is it a feature?) in polyamory: having several partners absolutely lowers the emotional commitment to each one of them, almost like it was a limited resource. This is even somewhat true for having more children: getting a new child more often than not reduces the overwhelming feeling of love that the mother feels for her older child. It's not politically correct to say it (and I would never say it in front of my kids) but it's true. In some ways this is a good thing - should you lose one of your kids or your spouse, the pain will not be as strong as when he was your only kid or spouse. So yeah, there's a trade-off.
Frankly I think the threat of wokeness is overrated. The main problem with wokeness is not the object level issues but the cognitive anti-patterns often associated with it, like "how dare you question my lived experiences", "this is dehumanizing and therefore false", etc. As far as I can tell, the anti-woke anti-patterns are both worse and more common. Lots of liberal or left-wing commentators manage to mostly avoid these anti-patterns even as they spend lots of their time actively defending feminism, BLM, and trans stuff - it seems quite easy to be "woke" without being woke. I don't really see them taking in root for people who spend most of their time talking about AGI risk or malaria nets.
You seem to be getting at something like this:
https://twitter.com/RogueWPA/status/1626065466933514240
"Also, Lloyd's essay[*] is simply really thoughtful and well worth reading for the details of the distinction between radical ideas with more or less intellectual discourse norms versus slightly more radical ideas with essentially cult discourse norms"
* https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell