magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
I recall a blogpost on how most people's views on X issue aren't hard-set but contingent on how much of society is pro-X vs. anti-X, and how for certain shapes of the "what percentile of pro-X is needed to flip a given percentile of people to pro-X" curve this can lead to large, rapid changes in societal attitudes.
The blogger I've read the most of is Scott, of course; I'm pretty sure this post predates ACX, and I've searched SSC quite thoroughly for words I think might have been in it. Might have been from squid314; searching that is really hard and tiresome, so I haven't yet done it. Could also have been from someone else, probably in the Ratsphere. So I'm asking to see if anyone knows offhand the post I'm talking about, so as to save myself the trouble of digging through Actual Everything I Might Have At Some Point Read. Even knowing where to look would help a lot.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Searching up that term suggests that it's about people hiding their pro-X views until they feel pro-X is safe enough to say. This doesn't seem to be the same phenomenon as the more troubling one I'm talking about, where people actually aren't pro-X until being pro-X seems popular enough.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
I'll say this for the SJers; not all of them are liars regarding this. Yes, there are some who are just flat-out lying, but there are others that are more correctly categorised as "pushovers"; they honestly don't support X now, but they will once the cool kids say that supporting X is cool.
It's kind of a weird edge case, because on the one hand they're not actually lying, but on the other hand they're not telling the truth; they literally don't know the truth of their own allegiance.
(And there are some who'll legitimately peel off and switch sides.)
I remember a blogpost about this, possibly from Scott, but I can't find it. It talked about different kinds of societal conformity curves where with some curves a perturbation can send everyone over to the other side and with some it can't.
magic9mushroom
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13hr ago
I found "Respectability Cascades" in my initial searching (as I said, I searched SSC quite thoroughly), but that's not it. And indeed, it's not "Seventy Percent".
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
An interesting barometer here is Brexit and the Scottish independence question. Obviously Brexit went through, and from what I can tell there's zero English interest in even something relatively mild (like sanctions) if Scotland actually votes to secede. I don't think that this rules out punitive actions or even military action against seceding states, but after a clear referenda I think it is politically trickier.
On the other hand, there's the Catalonian independence referendum that got declared illegal by Spain and people arrested for voting, while the rest of the EU gave zero fucks.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
If you could also work 40 hours a week to be able to pay for my house that would be great too!
I would remind you that none of your interlocutors AFAICS are advocating that women work full-time jobs as well as do all the domestic work. They are suggesting that women be stay-at-home mums.
The motte is honestly far to serious most of the time. Lighten up people!
It's serious because jokes and sarcasm have a tendency to escalate into yelling matches. This is actually to some extent written into the rules.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that.
The nuanced version of this is less concerned with individuals changing their minds and more concerned with generational succession and coalitional realignment.
In essence: SJers were never liberals (they're clearly six-foundation rather than three-foundation), but while they were weak their immediate goals coincided with liberals' and they needed liberals' help to achieve them, so the coalitional rhetoric catered to liberals. Now that SJers are more numerous and powerful, and have already picked the low-hanging fruit, they have run out of common goals with liberals, and don't need the liberals to maintain a shot at power, so they kicked the liberals out of the coalition so that they could pursue their more illiberal goals. Meanwhile, the Moral Majority is no longer a majority and now needs the liberals, and also their most immediate goal of reversing SJ excesses is shared with liberals, so they've started including liberal things in their rhetoric.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.
I kind of wonder about that. The institutions that launder that sort of information into public awareness are to a large extent captured by people who are anti-Israel, so it's actually kind of questionable how many people they'd lose vs. the counterfactual by actually doing massive war crimes. A lot of the populace already thinks Israel's guilty of ethnic cleansing, and a reasonable amount have heard "Wolf!" cried enough times that they've tuned out and won't believe reports of massacres; there's just not all that much of the US meaningfully in play here.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
I would agree that the kind of "right" that appeals to the young is definitely the hardline, bordering-on-fascist sort, not dry conservatism. The young want a Great Cause and an Enemy, not milquetoast or cautious policy and definitely not "listen to your parents".
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
The transsexual issue is the ultimate expression of pure power dragging the party by the hair behind it, down to the fleshing table in the basement.
Paging @Capital_Room; I know you have an alternate explanation for this sort of behaviour, and SteveKirkland wasn't around back then (plus the situation has evolved somewhat), so I figure I might learn something from a discussion between you two.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
I wouldn't call the 3-foundationers SJers; I'd call them "90s liberals" or something (and there were 6-foundationers earlier than the 90s, just not in large numbers). But yes, that's my working bulverism of SJ as well.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Because the marketplace of ideas doesn't select for truth, but for virulence.
I believe you mean infectivity, not virulence. Infectivity is how easily something's spread; virulence is its tendency to kill its host.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
But you can't get out of a love hotel unless you've paid, at least in the modern iteration. That means both parties are shut-ins until the bill has been settled at the little machine on the wall.
Doesn't that run into issues with the trilemma of a) not have an emergency exit, and get arrested for manslaughter when there's a fire vs. b) have an emergency exit that can be opened all the time, and now you can get out without paying vs. c) have an emergency exit that only opens if there's a fire, and incentivise arson?
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
As the others said, moral foundations - care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation.
Everyone cares about the first three, but WEIRD (white/educated/industrialised/rich/democratic, and especially autistic) people care much less about the last three (while caring more about care/harm), which generates liberalism (and is why liberals frequently fail ideological Turing tests for conservatism, because it's harder to hypothetically add things to a moral compass than to remove them).
As @fishtwanger said, Haidt's book laying these out is dated because it predates SJ. My best working theory of SJ is that it's what happens if you try to cram 90s liberalism down the throats of people who are six-foundation-inclined; they will take superficial features of it, connect them to the missing foundations, and produce a bizarro-world morality that has all six foundations but lacks coherence and is divisive rather than unifying.
As I said above, this is a bulverism; it's an explanation for "why would people believe this crazy thing despite its craziness" rather than "what is the thesis of this thing and is it true". I don't like bulverism, and I don't like thinking of people as, well, morons susceptible to memetic effects. But it's the most sense I've managed to make of SJ.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
My point is: suppose Israel commits an atrocity. People who consume pro-Palestinian media will hear about it and be outraged, but they mostly already hate Israel so nothing's changed. People who consume pro-Israel media will just hear Israel's side of the story, as implausible as it may be, and therefore won't be outraged because they don't know it happened, so nothing's changed.
Sure, there are people who care about the truth, have a variety of sources, but are not either already pro-Palestinian or rabidly pro-Israel and thus can be flipped - those people are in play. But there aren't actually all that many of them.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
I mean, I did forget about the ADL, and that's my bad, but as you say they aren't in play either and so I think the overall issue of "remarkably little of the USA is actually movable by any potential Israeli warcrimes, because most of the populace either is already dead-set against Israel, is shielded from the information, or is so pro-Israel it'd still support it" still exists.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
I don't know about Peterson's case specifically, but benzos are on the list of medications that reasonably-often get administered without consent or with dubious consent (e.g. I was offered them immediately following a suicide attempt, before they even got around to transferring me to the psych ward, and my understanding is that the more-hostile psych patients get given them by force).
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
TBQH, the username refers to my interest in fantasy novels and (at the time, nearly 20 years ago) fungi.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
Protesters at elite universities will be tomorrow's leaders. They will be on the "right" side of the history not because they are morally right, but because they will be able to shape history to their whims.
I'm not sure protestors at Harvard, MIT or Columbia will be tomorrow's leaders. Yale's got better chances.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
Technically, there are cases where rape could be justified; it's just that most of the ones that are actually physically possible* are also so bizarre that one can assume they're negligible. The most plausible one is probably "fuckhead kidnaps man and woman, fuckhead tells man that unless man rapes woman - and no explaining to get her consent - fuckhead will shoot both man and woman".
And of course, all of the above deals with dictionary rape, not statutory rape, which is a huge mess and can be totally free of moral turpitude (the case I know off the top of my head went "girl seduces boy, boy asks for ID, girl provides fake ID, boy has consensual sex with girl, boy arrested for raping girl over girl's protests"; I think some nations' laws even have the insane edge case where if a minor forcibly rapes an adult, the adult is guilty of rape because strict liability).
*I'm thinking cases like the myth in Africa that having sex with a virgin cures HIV. If this were true, which it is not, there would be some hard moral questions in the case of HIV-positive individuals whom no virgin wanted to have sex with.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
Buying the grease through an exchange program just seems way too expensive. Having the grease is pretty important though. They should probably just pay some popular youtubers or ticktockers to do lifestyle viewpoint videos on rural/urban people. Idk, I'm not smart enough to figure out an alternative.
Sometimes there isn't a cheap substitute. And, well, I sure think this is a better value-add than the various ideological projects already in schools (it's not negative, for one thing), and in the limit it costs less than a civil war would, so "expensive" is relative.
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
I mean, the key attribute here is the monotony of it. As he notes, n=1 isn't really enough to say much because the pairing is not exactly unknown. It takes a good memory, a reasonable amount of exposure to modern Western media, and some level of political awareness to, as you put it, "notice". Most people don't have that. TheMotte concentrates those who do, but it's still not everyone here.
As it happens, @George_E_Hale has just admitted that he's not exposed to all that much of this.
Some charity would be nice. Even a reasonable amount of SJers haven't noticed this sort of thing; I didn't until somewhat after I left.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
Okay, I've looked up pillarisation in the historical sense, but would you mind defining exactly what you mean by it in this context? I'm not 100% on exactly what is being connoted and not connoted.
No, it's not what I'm looking for. As I said to KingOfTheBailey, I'm not looking for "lots of people were already pro-X, but were hiding until it became cool". I'm looking for "people actually became pro-X when it became cool".
Of course, it is easy to mistake one for the other, in either direction, and this may become emotionally charged because most people don't want to admit (even to themselves) that they're part of the latter.
Thanks for trying, though.
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