iprayiam3
1yr ago
I think my example was too detailed, and the analogy gets lost. The TLDR is that Russell's teapot and Sagan's dragon are ontologically different concepts. And you can have anecdotal data of the former which can be used to diagnose lack of formal observation, but you cannot have it in the latter.
I am not trying to equivocate qualitative and quantitative research. But qualitative research can observe phenomena that that existing quantitative research may be unable to effectively construct, generalize, or have enough power to measure.
Your default to no, he loses, circumvents my entire point.
If your belief is Russell’s teapot, you’ve already lost. “At least it’s not Sagan’s dragon”. How would we know, with current tech they look exactly the same. You are multiplying entities beyond necessity.
You're missing my distinction. The classic form of Russell's teapot is that it is completely unobserved, but not materially unobservable, while Sagan's dragon is both. They only both look the same when they are both speculative. Russel's teapot can be qualitatively or anecdotally observed while Sagan's dragon cannot. If Megan's argument is that she's never actually seen the damage of prostitution, but is convicted it exists based on her ethical assumptions, then yes, it matters not whether it's a teapot or a dragon.
But if her conviction is based on cases, then it's more like, yes I have seen dishware in outer space, even can't give you the coordinates, so I'm not going to take your inability to find it with current satellite tech as proof it isn't there. except the analogy fully breaks down here so this last paragraph is more confusing than enlightening, so why am I even still typing, I'm not even using periods anymore, just commas,
iprayiam3
1yr ago
That's the charitable version (that she believes that porn is in fact empirically a bad thing, but she doesn't have enough data to prove it).
Maybe I'm confused, because i thought that's what OP was saying she was saying explicitly.
On a tangent, were I to sit down with someone like Aella and try to discuss whether porn was empirically bad, we'd never even get to the empirical part because we'd have such different worldviews that we wouldn't be able to operationalized 'bad'. I'm all for finding common ground, but most of the ground to cover on porn is too tied to conflicting foundational moral visions, that it's...well... about as effective as masturbating.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I posted, but deleted this in response to a previous AI thread, but I think it actually aged better with Elon's signature to the letter yesterday and Yud's oped:
I am not a Musk fanboy, but I'll say this, Elon Musk very transparently cares about the survival of humanity as humanity, and it is deeply present down to a biological drive to reproduce his own genes. Musk openly worries about things like dropping birth rates, while also personally spotlighting his own rabbit-like reproductive efforts. Musk clearly is a guy who wants and expects his own genes to spread, last and thrive in future generations. This is a rising tides approach for humans Musk has also signaled clearly against unnatural life extensions.
“I certainly would like to maintain health for a longer period of time,” Musk told Insider. “But I am not afraid of dying. I think it would come as a relief.”
and
"Increasing quality of life for the aged is important, but increased lifespan, especially if cognitive impairment is not addressed, is not good for civilization."
Now, there is plenty, that I as a conservative, Christian, and Luddish would readily fault in Musk (e.g. his affairs and divorces). But from this perspective Musk certainly has large overlap with a traditionally "ordered" view of civilization and human flourishing.
Altman, on the other hand has no children, and as a gay man, never will have children inside of a traditional framework (yes I am aware many (all?) of Musks own children were IVF. I am no Musk fanboy).
I certainly hope this is just my bias showing, but I have greater fear for Altman types running the show than Musks because they are a few extra steps removed from stake in future civilization. We know that Musk wants to preserve humanity for his children and his grandchildren. Can we be sure that's anymore than an abstract good for Altman?
I'd rather put my faith in Musks own "selfish" genes at the cost of knowing most of my descendants will eventually be his too than in a bachelor, not driven by fecund sexual biology, doing cool tech.
Every child Musk pops out is more the tightly intermingled his genetic future is with the rest of humanity's.
In Yud's oped, which I frankly think contains a lot of hysteria, mixed among a few decent points, he says this:
On March 16, my partner sent me this email. (She later gave me permission to excerpt it here.)
“Nina lost a tooth! In the usual way that children do, not out of carelessness! Seeing GPT4 blow away those standardized tests on the same day that Nina hit a childhood milestone brought an emotional surge that swept me off my feet for a minute. It’s all going too fast. I worry that sharing this will heighten your own grief, but I’d rather be known to you than for each of us to suffer alone.”
When the insider conversation is about the grief of seeing your daughter lose her first tooth, and thinking she’s not going to get a chance to grow up, I believe we are past the point of playing political chess about a six-month moratorium.
I'm unclear whether this is Yud's bio-kid or a step kid, but the point ressonates with my perspective of Elon Musk. A few days ago SA indicated a similar thing about a hypothetical kid(?)
I once thought about naming my daughter Saffron in its honor. Saffron Siskind the San Franciscan, they would call her. “What a lovely girl in a normal organic body who is destined to live to an age greater than six”, the people would say.
In either case, I don't know about AI x-risk. I am much more worried about 2cimerafa's economic collapse risk. But in both scenarios I am increasingly of a perspective that I'll cheekily describe as "You shouldn't get to have a decision on AI development unless you have young children". You don't have enough stake.
I have growing distrust of those of you without bio-children eager or indifferent to building a successor race or exhaulting yourself through immortal transhumanist fancies.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I understand, and am generally inclined to accept this point. Mostly, it is only my tribe with children who I trust the most. However, tribes are concentric circles, and here, I don't think your objection applies if we are talking about existential crises.
I am sure that Elon Musk would do a lot of (indirect) harm to me to see his children survive, thrive. But if AI has the possibility to conquer / destroy the whole world or flip the whole Western economy into unpredictable pieces, then my entire point is that a parent saving their own child, will necessarily care about saving at least some of humanity. Certainly more so than a singleton who abstractly reasons that a successor race of AI reaching the stars actually extends our legacy best.
If you have a button that might blow up the whole world or give you riches, I believe the risk reward calculus changes if you also have children and moreover the way you approach the question is less alien to me.
ON the other hand in the case of just economic board flipping, I think it's not coincidence that the two most hyped transhumanists on the board are non-Westerner expats from their own countries, and at least one of whom has no children. I trust the future most to those with families invested in a Western, Catholic, American life and move outward from there.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
You're taking what was explicitly called out as a cheeky framing of what is more of a heuristic for why I trust Musk more than Altman, people with kids more than single people when talking about the future of civilization and asking me to generalize it into a principle. But sure let's play with it.
All three of your examples are Mad-libs fallacies, they are written the same way, but actually point at the opposite of my argument (if taken as a 'principle)
-
'you don't get to have a say on abortion unless you have a uterus'
-
'you don't get a say in gun control unless you own an AR-15'
-
'you don't get a say in our adventures overseas unless you serve(d) in the military.'
The more accurate analogy that fits with your examples is something like "You don't get a say on AI, unless you are working on AI" or own a LLM or something
But again, that is very far away from what I said. None of those examples are formulated to capture what I was talking about. They all angle at direct experience in the subject, with the partial exception of the abortion one, but that will quickly develop into an abortion debate.
Your examples are of agency in the policy based on exposure to the tools, while mine was agency based on effects of the outcomes. Again the abortion one only follows if you argue that the baby isn't a party with exposure.
but in theory, self-determination and broad involvement of the populace in moral questions seems to be a fundamental value of the western political tradition.
So this is the part that I disagree, and my first round on the Motte helped disabuse me of. AI risk is a good example of where this kind of libertarian ethic breaks down.
My "general principle" looks something like this, but it's really a heuristic not a principle
-
If you are farming the commons, appeals to axiomatic autonomy and unlimited self-determination are weak.
-
EVERYTHING you do is farming the commons, though unequally weighted.
-
The more something farms the commons, the more it should be determined by those who's commons are affected than by the farmer's desires.
-
Something about how, if you extend this to longtermism, you've gone to far.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I don't trust Altman, I don't trust Yud, and I don't trust you for the exact same reason.
If you don't have children and want to become a transhumanist immortal being, you shouldn't trust me (hypothetically. In reality, I have no power or agency and wouldn't make enemies over something I can't control).
You cannot be bothered to obscure the self-serving, gratuitously unprincipled nature of your words.
Self-serving? of course! So are all of your positions. Look I like liberal democracy. but I like it because it serves the world well, myself and my family included. The point at which it doesn't I don't have to religiously hold libertarian values.
Unprincipled? Absolutely not. This is a bullshit attack. My principles are based on values you disagree with, My positions which extend from my principles may be extrapolating on faulty data or predictive ability, but they exist. My principles are primarily toward the flourishing of my children and the of the existing human race. I think people with kids also have some extra buy in there. People without kids who want to appeal to democratic ideals, then use that to gamble the future of those with kids are less allied to my worldview.
Now I also have some WEIRD lifestyle preservation impulse. Because I do not come from Russia like you or India like selfmade, I am less inclined to rock the boat of my 'good life'. However, it is my Christian belief that lets me know that this particular self-interest is not morally acceptable past a very limited point. If you told me I could push a button that would preserve my lifestyle but keep the third world in poverty, part of me might like to, but I would not. Is that self-interest somewhat laundered through the 'altruistic' interest of my children. Yeah, and admittedly it becomes dicier there. But your interest in democratic ideals is likewise laundering of your own self-interest as well.
You and ChrisPratt both took the "cheeky" line too literally. I do not actually advocate a policy where only people with children get a stake.
Much more seriously, I am noting that Elon Musk's perceptions and goals about humanity are more readily parsable and agreeable to my POV than a childless technologist. Elon Musk has expressed a lot of views about human concern that I, (perhaps wrongly!) recognize as informed by the worldview of a parent, and that is a comfort against the rhetoric I find coming from a lot of other people. I said in my post that it could even be a product of my own bias, extrapolating too far gets what I called a "cheeky" heuristic, not an actual governance suggestion.
That folks without kids are so immediately hostile to the idea that folks with kids want to put the interest of their kids forward, is one of the biggest redpills against the techno-liberal worldview. I used to find the common argument is such circles that "think of he children is an emotive backdoor to authoritarianism", until I had chidren to think of. That doesn't mean I am an infinite safteyist. But it means I can recognize and reciprocate when other leaders are clearly thinking of the children.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I think this splits too quickly into a discussion about principled views that I would be happy to have under separate cover. I'd rather revert to my only real point that, as a parent the concerns of other parents about their children is a force of commonality and a potential for alignment. I recognize that in Elon Musk to an extent, and I was surprised to see both Elizier express sentiment that at least the child of a loved one is top of mind for him.
I am of course, aware of the ways appeals to children can be an emotional camel's nose into the tent of control. But my perspective is to ask, why it works and whether that reason is not always wrong.
People with kids, and people with traditional families (neither Elon, nor Elizier have the latter) are going to weigh future planning differently than those without. Am I, someone invested in the survival of the traditional human family wrong to prefer the leaders and those with power over transformative technology to share my experiences and values?
Generally speaking I want leaders and decision makers and people with power to share my values (as does everyone everywhere all the time. Just because the liberal's values are liberalism, doesn't mean that their desire for leaders to prioritize liberalism isn't the same exact impulse). AI is not an exception to that, and might be, rather the most extreme case in my lifetime.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
These are stakes in different futures for different people. Elon Musk has a perspective about human longevity that I am sympathetic to. When multiple groups of people have different future visions, each person is going to align to the leaders who most share their own.
Suppose three tech-billionaires all find a genie (it can be an AI genie if you want) who will grant them one only vision of the future of AI and humanity.
The first wants the fruits of humanity to reach the stars and survive trillions of years. The genie says the way for this to happen is for AI to succeed humanity, which may be destroyed in this process. The first finds this acceptable, echoing "I believe it should be regarded as a privilege to be a stepping stone to higher things". He believes these AI beings are our descendants and the future belongs to them.
The second wants a transhumanist future of long-lividness and maybe techno-immortality. The genie says that for this to happen, human reproduction will have to be bottlenecked to prevent Malthusian destruction. Un-exalted humanity will be culled and may die out as they will be of little use to the exalted, and represent a threat to their resources. The second finds this acceptable since has no need for descendants, as he will occupy their place.
The third isn't opposed to AI space explorers or transhumanist improvements but mostly wants his children and their children and theirs after to have the option to live their life in traditionally biological ways in peace and prosperity. He wants them to be able to form human families and create new generations. The genie says that this is doable but may altogether prevent or delay the opportunity for AI and transhumanists.
So all three futures are not necessarily incompatible, but only one gets to be prioritized. You can call all three of theirs "stake" in the future (though the first much less so), but you can see that each primary purpose comes at the expense of certainty of the other two.
DaeschIndustries and Chrispratt, seem stupified and angry at the idea that I might endorse the third guy, at the expense of the other two because this isn't dEmOcRaTic. I have my values and want to see them survive. Democracy is not a terminal value. Usually democracy is a great compromise, but on an existential scale, it can break down if your real values have an existential bottleneck.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I am not arguing about the likelihood of AI outcomes. Yud seems hysterical to me. But what do I know either way.
I am making the (apparently controversial) claim that I like the idea of someone who has the future of their children as a weight on their decision making algorithm when pursuing transformative technologies.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I think the problem here is interpreting whether the non-existential objections are nearest risks or the maximal risk from the objector. Suppose our roommate wants to bring a gorilla to live with us. I object that it will eat all our bananas. You say "Eat our bananas! Who cares it's going to rip our arms off while we sleep!"
The key here is that my objections can be interpreted in two ways:
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(maximal risk) If we get the banana grabbing figured out, I'm on board.
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(nearest risk) The banana grabbing already meets the threshold for me to veto it, I don't even to weigh all the additional risks beyond that, which I would if the banana grabbing was solved, and would still veto.
In this hypothetical, your response, assumes I mean 1, when I might mean 2. Why talk about whether the gorilla might kill us in our sleep when we can align around the banana thing and get the same outcome of no-gorilla. This is especially helpful if our fourth roommate thinks the night-murder thing is ridiculous, but can be convinced of banana grabbing concerns.
Screaming harder about night-murder and dismissing banana-grabbing as trivial, actually hurts the case with the fence sitter, who's name is Allan and loves the beach.
It gets worse when I say to Allan in concession, look there's like a 90% chance of banana grabbing and a 50% chance, of night-murders too. Then you jump in and scoff at my 50% as too low and of trivializing the real danger. Now we are in an inside baseball debate that simultaneously makes Allan take both banana-grabbing and night-murder less seriously.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
Even if most people prefer seeing white men on tv that doesn't mean the profit maximizing strategy is to make all your shows feature only white men.
Sure but suppose you have 10 shows, and you want to add token diversity by having 10% LGTB representation.
You could make 1 of them have a central LGBT focus, you could make all of them have 10% lgbt themes or anywhere in between.
When you go with 'everything has to be a tentpole, you end up with worst of both worlds where 3 of them are LGBT focused and the other 7 have 10-20% LGBT themes, and you've lost any diversity that includes "not about LGBT"
When you decide that "Not-LGBT" doesn't have any place in your definition of positive inclusivity, fine, that's a value you can have, but you are clearly leaving profit on the table for the sake of values. There is clearly a large an audience in America that is interested in content which doesn't feature progressive values. If you go with the tolerance includes intolerance of intolerance view, fine. But stop the pretense of the 'profit-maximizer' explanation
iprayiam3
1yr ago
personal perspective: I've listened to the first two Eliezer interviews and part of this one. Yes the guys, presentation is horrible etc, but I'm actually suprised at how receptive I've been to hear him out. I have always had very negative view of most ratsphere things, and Eliezer was prime example.
He does not present well outside of his fanbase in writing. Twitter to lessWrong, to HPMOR, he's always come off to me as insufferably arrogant, weird, and over concerned with how clever he is. (Anything SA has ever written on AI has been much much worse, his regular simple penetration of issues falls apart on the subject of AI, and has done more to make me (wrongly) dismissive of the whole thing than anything else.)
Back to Yud, having never actually seen or heard him before, I am shocked by how much more I like the guy in video format. He seems a lot nicer and sympathetic and likable than I ever imagined him. To the point that for the first time ever, I'm honestly open to hearing out his concerns and combined with Musk's views on the issue, I am in medium to high medium support of any 'pause' efforts, but tentative to being done in a way that doesn't require nuclear war or a totalitarian world government.
It is very bizarre to me that every normie in the world may have to, in their lifetimes, decide where they stand on a 'Butlerian Jihad'. This is a possibility I would have mocked relentlessly 18m ago, and am depressed that I even have given thought to.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I remember a later season Full House plotline where Jesse and Joey's side plot involved trying to build a self-driving car with help from Danny's mechanic (Hank?). At one point, Joey joked that it would be easier to teach a dog to talk than teaching a car to drive. Sure enough a few episodes later, Comet, the family dog, had a POV bit where he could talk (in the Garfield way). Of course, that just turned out the be a dream or imagination sequence of Michelle's.
Unfortunately, the actor who played Hank (I forget who) left the show and the plotline was kind of dropped and I think that's when Joey and Jesse went on to host a radio show. Point being, Full House, had a pretty good perspective on the challenges of AV and AI a few decades ahead of their time, albeit with a few forgivable misses and some comedic exaggeration. Possibly apocryphal, but "Whatever happened to predictability?" was supposedly meta-commentary on this whole idea.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I find surrogacy morally absurd, in pretty much the same reaction you do. I have gone back and forth on it with @TracingWoodgrains (respectfully) before, and it is (sadly) one of the best examples of why I can't adopt a 'live and let live' perspective, although I am dispositionally inclined toward that. I think it is a a sister moral issue to abortion, involving the commoditization of children and subordinating the natural family to liquid modernistic relativism.
Where I will push back, is that I don't think it's so much a transhuman issue as another slip of the sexual liberation + LGBT slope and repudiation that gay rights had much more social effect than, people doing their thing in the bedroom. Much like Grindr-> Tinder, this is another social-sexual transformation of norms that really matured in the gay community before being adopted by elite, then PMC straights.
Of course, straight surrogacy has been in the public consciousness for a long time (Phoebe from friends had a plotline around this in the 90s). But it really became trendy in the last decade through wealthy DINKy gay couples using this as an equal access avenue to 'biological children.
You will probably be mocked here and elsewhere for the Lovecraftian horror descriptor, but it fully resonates with me. But let me back it up, and roll back my anti-LGBT perspective here. This is ALL DOWNSTREAM from contraception, socially acceptable divorce and casual sex. I have become less and less patient with people who try to propose some limiting factor to sexual liberation that stops exactly where they want it.
The Catholic view is really the only one that provides a complete and coherent counter framework against this that isn't a bunch of special pleading.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
Well Catholicism has the additional advantage of a sub-philosophy that suggests all these morals expressed within Natural Law, which doesn't necessarily have to be founded on "God".
But you're going to run into the pushback you find in the relativism across your other responses. You're framework is dismissed as an aesthetic complain because the moral relativist, the materialist, and the moral liberalist are married in gnawing at an object morality as arbitrary.
A Natural Law view offers a complete and coherent opposite view (while other conservative or Protestant viewpoints don't imho), but it doesn't and can't address why this not that. I suggest biting the bullet and deriving a religious foundation for your moral intuition or accept being homeless in a neighborhood of transhumanists.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
(and he does in fact exude lots of feminine energy)
I think this point is being refuted by the @hanikrummihundursvin :
His mannerisms are also just... gay.
which, I agree with. There's nothing feminine about his energy, maybe a grokkable distinction here is "effeminate". The 'energy' put out by this guy is not remotely like anything I've ever seen in any women I've met, and comes off more like someone who's never actually met a woman. On the other hand, it pattern matches for plenty gay men I've met, if a little less 'bitchy'.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
Natural law has nothing to do with christianity...only became part of catholic doctrine in the 13th century when Aquinas brought it in
In other words, it doesn't have nothing to do with it.
and never got baked into the other branches of christianity like it somehow did with catholicism.
Which is why I explicitly said that was an advantage of Catholicism over Protestantism, in this sense.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I think this is something that has to get figured out fast. I agree that right now, they can't really regulate that. At most the AMPTP could themselves agree not to train their own AI instances on it, but yeah, what's stopping you from using AI's already trained on that.
I have stated elsewhere, that I'm personally disposed toward supporting some kind of expansion of copyright-adjacent rights that includes training rights. But that would have to be a somewhat globally coordinated legal effort.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
So overall both parents of a child get half an extra vote that they can use to vote as they wish. Then we can just count the votes after the election, giving 1/2 weighting to the green ballots.
This is the part I disagree with. Much of the benefit of giving a parent the extra vote weight is the investment and stability. Only married parents should get the extra vote.
If you want to get a divorce after having kids, you've proven your future planning unreliable enough. and if you're kids are already harmed by your (or your spouse's) bad decisions, you shouldn't have the benefit of sharing that with the rest of the country.
I think stable marriages is probably a stronger lever than number of children, and would largely mitigating @Walerodim 's hesitation.
My proposal would be something like:
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No voting under 26 unless you are married.
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If you are married your vote counts 1.5 extra
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If you ever divorce your vote reduces to .75, and remarriage doesn't affect this
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After age 40, if you are married and did not have children with your spouse, your 1.5 reduces back to 1
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After age 60 your vote reduces to 1 regardless.
Obviously that's too complicated to be realistic, but why not throw it out there for fun.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I don't think such a complex solution is workable anyway, but if you start splicing up voting rights beyond "everyone" it's a lossy thing to begin with, and I would worry less about catching edge cases. In this hypothetical, everyone above 25 gets a vote, but there is a general finger on the scale toward stable families, in such a scenario I would be less concerned about the distribution of that finger on the scale. Much like how a landowner requirements don't suggest that no-one without land would be capable of voting, but it's rather a broad brush toward a enfranchising a certain interest.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
does it give you any pause
It gives me no pause because I don't think it's seriously under consideration. If this was turned into a formal proposal tomorrow to be voted on at a Constitutional Convention, I can assure you I would regret the haste at which I spit out the content of my post.
Sounds plausible, but do you trust me?
I do trust that you would find that more aligned with particular object policies that you find better, and would be relieved that you were finally discussing the particulars of policy outcomes at such a level instead of the self-referential fetish over democracy as it's own end entirely.
I would likely disagree with your policy outcomes, and after going back and forth, you and I would settle on everyone getting a vote as a decent and fair compromise. But unlike the real you, we wouldn't think that the compromise was in itself the thing.
while disenfranchising those you dislike?
It has nothing to do with disenfranchising "those" I dislike and the fact that you read it so, is frustratingly uncharitable. This isn't a political test or a race requirement or anything like that. Almost anyone can become married and have kids. Those who chose to have more vested interest in the long term stability of the system.
it is about disenfranchising outcomes I dislike, which, by the way everybody wants. Everybody wants the things they value to be popular and the things they find bad to be suppressed. You do as well.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
Maybe, but the badness of his ideas are not super relevant to what @ace has laid out as absolutely piss-poor rhetoric and presentation, except in the narrow case of having such a clearly and obviously great idea that poor communication is negligible. On a meta-level the poor rhetoric does make the general uh, "credential" of 'super-smart, rational thinker' tremendously weaker.
If you present a good idea poorly, I am inclined to think less of it, if even subconsciously because I trust your evaluation less.
If you present a bad idea well, I am inclined to think more of it, if even subconsciously because I trust your evaluation more.
No matter how good or bad the idea is, there are better and poorer ways to present it, and Eliezer consistently chooses poorer. I spent years dismissing AI at all, mostly over Eliezer's poor presentation.
Ironically, as I've said before, he does come off as tremendously more human and likable to me in these interviews and my personal opinion of him has risen, but unlikely in a generalizable way across most audiences, and his persuasion game remains total shit.
iprayiam3
11mo ago
My wife actually added a job in the year after the third kid was born. I'm not sure how far apart yours are, but ours are pretty close and the third didn't blow up much that wasn't already deconstructed after the first kid.
Our third one was temperamentally, and schedule-wise the worst by a long-shot (e.g. sleep-training and fussiness) and that sucked, but was really just luck of the draw. It didn't affect bigger things much once we got through the beginning period.
That said, overall, I think where possible mothers should be at home with their children at least part time in the first several years in their lives, and if you're trying to balance a career to the point that you throw that kid in daycare, I disagree with that call. Although I'll probably have disagreed with your first two. My wife went down to part time work when our first was born, then left work for a few years when the second was born, then went back to working part-time once the third was ~6 months old.
I have had to be much more scheduled to make it all work, and I've taken on more housework, but overall I don't socialize much less than I do now. I've probably given up a few hobby-projects due to time/budget constraints, but not consciously and not all at once. I don't feel like #3 really adds all that much to the time commitment, but makes some times within that commitment a little more stressful.
You are describing what I used to criticize here as liberalism of the gaps: the theory that the solution to culture and institutions falling to progressivism via post-detraditionalization liberalism is MOAR liberalism!
No, the solution to protecting tradition and institutions is protecting tradition and institutions, both through fortification and legal protection. Libertarian solutions to protecting / building institutions cannot work in a legal landscape that makes a key component: free association, illegal.
OP is pointing this out with the fact that 'no politics' is subverted when you declare X value neutral. But the other side of the coin is also on display. When X is value neutral, anti-X is illegal discrimination / harassment. Start your own... cannot work without first winning back the neutral ground, which cannot be done when you spend all your time abandoning your institutions and fortifying elsewhere.
Show me an example where conservatives/traditionalists abandoned X to go build their own X-prime, where X-prime remains both not a ghetto and not actively infiltrated.
Your question about why traditionalists don't build their own X is easily answered in that they can't build their own X, and part of the reason is ironically because half their rank are actually liberals who keep telling them to build their own X.
Example:
Jonny Vanheusterwhilton is a made up character who used to get picked on as a child for his ridiculous last name, but that is completely irrelevant to this story so let's call him JV and we don't need to spell out his last name again.
Jonny V (JV), has lived in his neighborhood his whole life, even buying his parents' house when they retired. It's June 1st, and bigot that he is, JV (Jonny) bemoans that the neighborhood is plastered in Pride Flags and preachy yard signs. He's saddened that his neighborhood July 4th picnic has been discontinued and replaced with a late June Pride Party.
Jonny's actually not even a bigot, not even by modern standards, nor even a conservative. He is very pro-LGBT right, a believer in letting people live their own lives etc. He's just a combination of patriotic, nostalgic, and finds pride to be tacky and over commercialized. Yet this gets Jonny labeled a right wing bigot, which almost frustrates him as much as getting picked on for his name as a child.
Eventually his friend, @Primaprimaprima encourages him to just build his own neighborhood. (+) Out of options and tired of being picked on JV sells his family house and buys some farmland with several others in a less desirable exurban part of the town to turn into a new neighborhood. Saddened by the lack of mature hardwoods, history, culture, or accessibility to the broader city, JB puts that aside and focuses on the upside: no more Pride Month.
Although JV is not a conservative, it took partnership with a lot of them, and some outright bigots to even get this neighborhood started. No worries, though, because they aren't banning anyone. JV has a simple liberal solution: Their HOA will just say, no value-messaging yard decorations.
The HOA includes a lot of other shit JV doesn't like. His old neighborhood didn't have an HOA, but now, just to get back to neutral JV has to accommodate regulating EVERYTHING, even the length of his grass. He hates mowing. Almost as much as he hates his last name. Or being called a bigot.
Trouble begins when some of their conservative neighbors put up a cross on their front door, or Easter decorations. 'Hey,' yell the libertarian sect. NO MESSAGING. The French neighbor, Le Prima, convinces everyone that secularism is the best they can hope for in this new arrangement, the conservatives mostly* sadly acquiesce, telling themselves, at least it's better than Pride Month. (*A few with conviction move away to an even shittier, further exurb, to find out what happened to them scroll up to the + above and start reading. Continue recursively.)
This satisfies JV until July 4th comes around, JV's favorite holiday. There will be no J4 parade, and he is forced to take down the American flag he hung must come down at once.... Oh well... at least in the name of fairness this is a compromise.
JV wonders how previous generations like the one he grew up in were able to use maintain communities with shared traditions, while keeping out the elements they didn't like without over-regulating everything. JV can't ponder long before his neighbor accusingly reminds him about the types of discrimination that happened in yesterday. Remembering quickly that nostalgia for any aspect of the past is for bigots, JV quickly stops his musing, and never follows his train of thought to the answer: The type of community JV is describing is found alive in the neighborhood he left, albeit with different values.
Well all goes well for 2 more years until, as the city grows, his neighborhood does too. His exurb becomes a desirable suburb, and now folks who would have simply ignored the neighborhood move in. Doesn't matter thinks, JV, they'll have to live by our rules just like everyone else.
Imagine Jonny Vanheusterwhilton's shock on June 1st of the current year, when after returning from a trip oversees, he sees PRIDE FLAGS everywhere and a flier for a neighborhood pride parade.
"But.. but...but...," stutters Jonny. "I thought we didn't allow value messaging!"
"We don't," his helpful, new neighbor replies. "But... this was brought up at the HOA meeting you missed. You see us new neighbors quickly explained that this isn't about value messaging. It's common decency. To suppress it wouldn't be neutral, it would be bigoted and hateful. They saw it our way.
There were a few hold-out undesirables, but our lawyers were there to make sure they understood this is not negotiable, it's equality. I mean, anything less would be like not allowing you to hold your wife's hand while walking around the neighborhood."
"I'm actually gay," says Jonny.
"And a happy Pride Month to you!," the neighbor replies cheerily, while handing him a school board voting guide for the candidates who most protect trans youth.
That night, JV's visiting his old friend distraught. "It's simple," says Primaprimaprima as he opens a beer and hands to JV. "Just start your own neighborhood."
I am going to wade back into the motte for a sec and respond to part of this. Bear with me, as my tie in will take a few detours. TLDR, I grow weary of the cult of “data-driven decision making”
There’s a difference between non-falsifiable theories , an non-demonstrable theories (unlikely the right term, I’m sure some rat has a real term for this).
The Sagan’s dragon is non-falsifiable, but the Russell’s teapot, even though it’s considered exemplar of unfalsifiable, is only non-demonstrable. It could be falsified, but we don’t have the tools to do it. People play these two interchangeably (often they can be), but too much and it causes a lot of soldier arguments. I think most of Caplan, who is correct a lot about education, a lot of his arguments play on a motte-and-bailey between these two.
Suppose Jon argued hard that learning Shakespear in middle-school paid off in various interpersonal interactions later in life. That is certainly not non-falsifiable, but it is almost a teapot's difficulty to measure empirically. Any study bound by real world constraints that attempted it would be insufficient.
So you say, it’s non-falsifiable, and Jon says No, I don’t think so. Jon goes out and interview a lot of people and puts together a nice phenomenology or narrative or whatever, and finds lots of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence of a phenomenon that appears again and again that many people seem to be able to draw a connection between their Shakespear and communication benefits. Suppose it is gold-standard qualitative research. Now I still think that it’s perfectly valid for you to stop here and argue, it’s not compelling enough to convince you.
But say you respond by pointing to several studies that went looking for these benefits but weren’t able to reject the null hypothesis of no connection. The first looked at learning Shakespeare and life outcomes with no relationship. Jon responds that of course the effect of a single course in shakespeare on life outcomes is going to be tiny, all other influences considered, that no study would be powered enough to find that signal. You find another study that looks at learning shakespeare and recall of his plays in college students, and finds very small retention. Jon again disagrees that it’s looking at the same thing. And so on.
You accuse Jon of refusing to update on data, and of holding a non-falsifiable belief. Here Jon admits that the whole logic model and all the influencing factors are somewhat unknown, but that there is connection as seen in his field research. Jon argues back at you that studies that don’t show any connection may be evidence that they aren’t designed properly since the phenomenon does exist and seems to in a nontrivial amount. He argues that if your data is correctly measuring the construct, it would predict that he wouldn’t have found the qualitative results he has.
He concludes that even with the unknowns, the benefit-cost is worth including it in the curriculum.
I’m not suggesting that Jon’s logic is air-tight, but I think it does show cracks in worshiping empirical ‘data’ in complex, longitudinal experimental problems, and the weakness of dismissing theories about difficult problems as unfalsifiable.
I think when someone like Megan says they won’t update on data, they’re essentially saying this. She has observed an actual and significant (not statistically) phenomenon that influences her epistemic and ethical view of the situation, enough so that when data that fails to capture it, her priors don’t rule out under-powered or poorly operationalized designs that aren’t measuring the right thing.
Another example. You ask me what data would change my mind that there are thousands or more faithful Catholics in the world, I would say none. Because I know several dozen myself. The alternatives that I live in a completely anomalous space and happen to know a large percentage of all faithful catholics, or that I am so bad at modeling others, the people I think are faithful aren’t, are both so ridiculously improba
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