guajalote
2mo ago
"Premised on" is an important qualifier in my post. People should feel free to cite personal knowledge and experience, but if their argument rises or falls based on that personal knowledge or experience being true, I think they are failing to make a real argument. If their argument boils down to "trust me bro, I know what I'm talking about" it's not contributing to the discussion.
I sometimes mention that I am a lawyer, and I am, but I don't expect anyone here to give me special trust or deference on legal topics because of it. I don't expect anyone to even believe me when I say I'm a lawyer. My arguments need to be independently supportable via evidence and reason, not purported credentials or lived experience.
guajalote
2mo ago
IMO, any argument premised on the speaker's personal identity should be bannable regardless.
guajalote
3mo ago
Declined, happy: saw the writing on the wall, jumped ship at the right time
I think "sour grapes" is more like "declined, regretted, doubled down." You're doubling down on the decision you regret by claiming you wouldn't have been happy if you'd done things differently, the grapes would have been sour anyway.
Similarly, for "invested, regretted, doubled down" you could use the term "throwing good money after bad" or "sunk cost fallacy."
guajalote
3mo ago
I don’t see why you should agree. If you’re not a utilitarian you can say “people getting more of what they value” can be a bad thing if their values are confused, perverse or evil.
Right, this is why I said "generally tends towards."
For instance, let's say you're a deontologist and your morality consists of the maxim "obey the ten commandments." If someone is dirt poor, they have to do what it takes to survive, they have little freedom. Maybe they are forced to steal or kill to survive, thereby breaking the ten commandments. As people get wealthier and have more options, so they have more freedom to choose to follow the ten commandments. This doesn't mean they necessarily will do so, but it means that they are more able to do so. They have more capacity to be morally good actors under any moral system because they have more freedom of choice.
guajalote
3mo ago
Rule 1 of fighting nationalists - don’t let them become proxies for their supporters. Lots of Americans are fat, lots of them have bad tans.
Exactly. You can't call him "fatty" because that's endearing and relatable to many Americans. You have to call him "gold toilet" or "Epstein island" or something. Something that makes him seem out of touch and elitist.
guajalote
3mo ago
Maybe if there is another financial crisis or 911 there may be an amendment to ensure that there are minimal delays for stimulus or other action for exigent circumstances.
This is one of the most horrifying amendments I can imagine. If there's ever a constitutional clause that grants broad emergency powers to the executive, the president will find an excuse to declare a "state of emergency" from which we will never again emerge. We would still be in a "state of emergency" from Covid if such a clause existed.
guajalote
3mo ago
I think it's true that technological progress generally leads to moral progress. Here I'm defining "technological progress" as "that which lets people get more of what they value at lower cost." If you are a utilitarian it's almost a tautology that "people getting more of what they value" leads to moral progress, because increasing utility is the definition of moral progress. Even if you are not a utilitarian, I think you should agree that "people getting more of what they value" generally tends toward moral progress, because it gives people the option to choose between more alternatives and therefore more freedom to choose the morally best alternative.
This is why I often disagree with people here who see preserving one's culture as a good in and of itself. Culture is a form of technology - different cultures differ in terms of how well they enable their adherents to get what they value for a given cost in a given context. Therefore cultural progress is possible as a form of technological process. Cultural change should only be resisted to the extent it's not technological progress.
guajalote
3mo ago
I predict if her numbers continue to climb, he's gonna mention her daughter's married to a black guy. Way too tempting for a guy like Trump.
I think it's very unlikely he will do this, simply because neither Trump nor most of his supporters care about this. I think you are making the same mistake as the media by assuming "Nimra" is a racist dogwhistle. It's not, it's serving a different set of purposes:
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It calls attention to the fact that she doesn't use her real name, which makes her seem fake and insecure.
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Like all Trump nicknames, it's a power play. If you can give someone a nickname and make it stick, it reveals a kind of power you have over them. And I think it's clear that Haley could not do the same to Trump in reverse -- all prior attempts at nicknames (Drumpf, Cheeto, etc.) have failed to stick.
guajalote
4mo ago
Yes, many examples. And I think there's at least some degree of truth to these arguments:
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There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US, so any large scale attempts at gun control cannot work.
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The government cannot significantly tax or otherwise confiscate the wealth of the ultra-rich because they will just leave the jurisdiction.
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Attempting to regulate carbon emissions at this point won't stop climate change, and many of the biggest carbon emitting countries won't get on board anyway.
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It's not possible to introduce effective mass public transit in most US cities because they have already been designed around cars.
guajalote
4mo ago
Yes, basically cats lack a robust theory of mind, whereas dogs have a theory of mind that allows them to infer intentions. This makes "no" and other punishment-type responses especially ineffective for cats because it requires an inferential leap: I knocked over the lamp, the human made a loud scary noise. To connect those things causally you need to form a hypothesis about the human's mental state (they are upset I knocked over the lamp) which cats struggle to do.
guajalote
4mo ago
Completely true. Most animals, even monkeys, have a hard time understanding pointing because it requires a pretty sophisticated theory of mind. Dogs are one of the few species that can consistently understand pointing.
guajalote
4mo ago
Cats are definitely trainable, but dogs are so optimized for trainability they make cats seem untrainable by comparison. I think the biggest difference is that dogs are good at processing human social cues - voice, facial expression, and gestures. But cats are looking for cat social cues. This is why the cat always climbs into the lap of the party guest who hates cats. For a cat, avoiding eye contact and turning your back to them is a sign of friendliness; you're saying "I'm not threatened by you and I'm not a threat to you." To relate to a cat you have to think and act like a cat, but to relate to a dog you can think and act like human.
guajalote
4mo ago
So I am willing to bet that even today Catholics and protestants know that it was mostly political strife. As were the other major Christian schisms and fights. If you look it is very often some inter elite fight.
I think this is partly true, but to the extent it's true you can say the same about the current culture war.
If you asked a devout Catholic in the 1600s whether people should be burned at the stake for questioning the transubstantiation of the consecrated host, most of them are going to say "yes," and their reasoning isn't going to invoke political strife or other secular reasons. They are going to give a religious account of why it's important to burn heretics - e.g. if we suffer a heretic to live, they might lead my children into heresy, causing them to suffer in hell for eternity. It's certainly true that this underlying belief and reasoning was stoked and amplified by political actors who stood to benefit from the conflict, but the reasoning itself stands apart from the political strife going on in the background.
I think you can say the same about culture war issues today. Much of the culture war is being driven by inter-elite conflicts or by conflicts between elites and the common man. But the underlying reasoning stands apart from this conflict - e.g. if you ask someone their opinions on trans issues they are going to appeal to object-level arguments to support their views and they won't perceive their views as being the product of cynical elites stoking the conflict.
guajalote
4mo ago
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable.
The narrative will be: "why did anyone ever care about this shit?"
Think about the big protestant/Catholic culture war that waged in Europe in the 1600s, which was extremely bloody and widely agreed by its participants to be a big deal and today people (even devout Catholics and protestants) largely look back with bewilderment on that time period and have a hard time understanding what the big deal was. People were getting burned for saying the consecrated host is just a cracker. Today, Catholics still believe in transubstantiation but most have a hard time understanding why anyone would be punished (let alone killed) for holding a contrary view.
When talking about current culture war issues, it's hard for us to imagine how they could become irrelevant to the point that future generations would be baffled that anyone ever cared. But that's how people would have felt in the 1600s; it was a literal battle for immortal souls, how could this battle ever become irrelevant? Yet it did. I think our current battles will eventually suffer the same fate.
guajalote
4mo ago
Ah yes, the famously unprincipled and animalistic act of not killing one's own children.
guajalote
4mo ago
Amazing how the human race has managed to survive so long despite our inexorable intrinsic urge to kill everyone but ourselves.
guajalote
4mo ago
Identical twins (genetic clones) are perfectly capable of disagreeing or even hating or killing one another.
guajalote
4mo ago
Yes, a person's behavior is determined by his brain, so if his brain tell him to be violent then he will, and if his brain tell him not to be violent then he won't. Not a particularly insightful observation.
guajalote
4mo ago
And yet Freud and Marx are far less influential than they were 100 years ago. Even people who purport to be Freudians or Marxists today will readily admit these people got things wrong, because the countervailing evidence is so overwhelming.
"Free Speech" is not a stable ideal, and whenever implemented it rapidly decays into "Free Speech so long as most people are okay with what you say", at best.
No system of organizing society is stable. The tree of liberty needs to be refreshed from time to time.
guajalote
4mo ago
And this belief comes from your observation of "free individuals" in a "free society"? If so, could you name which individuals and what society you have in mind, as an example of what these terms look like in practice?
This is a matter of degree. The US is freer than North Korea or China. And within the US, some places are clearly freer than others.
Characteristics of a free society include:
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The ability to privately own guns and other weapons sufficient to enable the violent overthrow of a tyrannical government;
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Free speech and free association;
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All adult humans are equal before the law and are entitled to due process and the presumption of criminal innocence;
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The right to engage in consensual transactions and to dispose of one's property as one chooses without permission;
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The right to bind oneself with enforceable contracts.
It is good to know that the universe has ordained that all incentives must be net-positive
Given a choice between a good thing and a bad (or less good) thing, a person with full information who is able to freely choose between them will prefer to choose the good thing. This is the definition of "good" I am operating under.
In fact, every system I've ever heard of has been pretty close to this description, but I am certainly not omniscient.
There are systems where a single central authority has a massive amount of power to make cultural decisions (e.g. North Korea, Spain in the 1500s, Iran), and there are systems where cultural authority is more distributed and less centrally powerful, e.g., the US. I would prefer even less centralized cultural power than currently exists in the US, but again it is a matter of degree.
If we wish to say that such systems "fail badly", one ought to demonstrate what "succeeds" looks like with concrete, large-scale examples.
Centrally planned economies like Soviet Russia and North Korea produce little wealth and generally cause massive amounts of starvation. They also tend to produce untrue ideas at a high rate, such as Lysenkoism. Decentralized economies like the US produce comparatively more wealth, less starvation, and more empirically correct ideas. It is a matter of degree, but the degree of difference is extremely large.
Or to put it another way, is your love for freedom and openness a means, or an end? If freedom and openness could be demonstrated to enable evil, would you still support them, or would you accept that some level of restriction was necessary?
It is a means. If you demonstrated that freedom and openness have a higher likelihood of causing bad outcomes as compared with another specific alternative system, I would change my view. However, I consider the empirical evidence in favor of freedom to be overwhelming, so I would require a considerable amount of evidence in the other direction.
This statement implies that central power structures are optional.
The degree to which power is centralized, and the kinds of power that such central structures have, clearly vary in different times and places. I don't think it's possible to eliminate central power, but I think it is possible to considerably reduce the influence of central power and to place checks on the exercise of such power (e.g. via the private ownership of the means of war).
guajalote
4mo ago
In the right time and place one of those would be the most useful with an extreme margin.
I assert that those beliefs can only be useful in a context where challenging them is not allowed. But the inability to challenge cultural beliefs is exactly what I am arguing against. Give me an example where those beliefs can be freely challenged and yet they are still "useful with an extreme margin."
It's not clear to me why you think any of those beliefs would be useful. It is almost never the case that an empirically untrue belief (e.g. sun won't rise without human sacrifice) is useful, particularly in an open society where untrue beliefs can be challenged and proven wrong. The only context where a belief like that would be useful would be a closed culture where competing values are not allowed to challenge dogma and orthodoxy. Cultural mixing in a free society brings about the destruction of such beliefs.
guajalote
4mo ago
I certainly hope they are smarter than me. I think it's unlikely they will reject all of my cultural values since many of them are pretty basic like "wear clothes in public" or "eat food off a plate" or whatever. But if they are smart they will probably accept the cultural values that are useful to them and reject the ones that are not, and I hope they do that, yes.
guajalote
4mo ago
Do you believe that all cultural elements are equal, or are some elements good and some bad?
I believe elements of culture can be good, neutral, or bad. Though this determination will depend heavily on context or "local environment" as you put it. For example, whether "all able bodied men must be proficient at archery" is a good or bad cultural trait depends heavily on context.
If the latter, then you yourself do not want "a process of mixture". You want the right mixture...
I think the only mechanism that will produce the right mixture is free association of individuals in a free society. I believe that free speech and open debate tends, over time, to promote true and useful ideas while destroying bad or counterproductive ones. Similarly, I think free association of individuals in a free society will tend to promote good cultural values and demote bad ones, since people are materially rewarded for adopting the good values and discarding the bad ones. People respond to incentives.
The alternative is some sort of top-down system where a person in power decides which cultural values are good and which are bad. Just as this structure tends to fail badly when applied to economics and ideas, it also fails badly when applied to culture.
Or am I wrong, and you would accept our culture "mixing" with openly-genocidal racial supremacism, hardline blood-sacrifice-based theocracy, slavery, etc, etc, such that their practices became our practices?
I think a free and open society will quickly destroy bad ideas like those, so I am not particularly worried about my culture mixing with them. Racial supremacy, human sacrifice, and slavery are all extremely economically inefficient and in a free society people who adopt these practices will be materially worse off for doing so. These practices can only persist if they are being propped up by a central power structure.
Any time someone makes an argument premised on (i.e. an argument that rises or falls based on) personal experiences or opinions being true, they should be warned or banned for doing so. People need to make arguments that other people can engage with. Claiming epistemic privilege based on identity, credentials, lived experiences, etc. is antithetical to this. It's the fallacy of appeal to authority.
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