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toadworrier


				

				

				

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joined 2022 September 12 04:23:06 UTC
				

				

				

				

				

				

					
				

				

				
				
				

				
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toadworrier


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 12 04:23:06 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 1151


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Mary's Motte and the case against progress
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Where have you encountered it outside of Ms. Harrington's work?




I've seen it here, and I feel the ethos in a lot of the more intellectual parts of the New Right.  As far as I can tell, they are making are logical / epistemological case similar to Harrington.  I.e. we are judging the past by present standards, this logic extends over as many domains as you care to name.  But really Harrington is the only one I can clearly point to because she is the most honest and explicit. Which is why I like her.




I do find it interesting that this stance is left-coded.




The Harrington and the other tradfems are hard to place on the left-right axis. But insofar as they are "trad", their arguments are more like the post-liberal right than the left.


That said, the illiberal left has a similar thing going on. They want to deny the moral standing of the present.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Mary's Motte and the case against progress
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So, contra Harrington, you would say progress is a coherent concept. But you would deny that we've had any net progress in last two decades or so?


I wouldn't strongly disagree with that assesment.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What makes you think she's white?


Wikipedia says "She is of English, Irish,[8] DjabWurrung, Gunnai and Gunditjmara descent."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not wrong, but this could have been said, with equal truth at any time in the last 100 years.


Most of those civil servants are pretty ordinary centre-lefties. It is exceptional, and disturbing that an extremist is not only at high level but is so bold about it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are people starting to drink at cricket matches like Aussies?


Traditionally at that Gabba, people will be downing schooners of XXXX all day long. They get pretty smashed, but it's still only 4%ish so it's manageable.


(Nowadays they have better beer at the Gabba, but I don't approve. If it's not XXXX, it doesn't taste like Cricket).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Then again. I know Sri Lankans who will drink whisky all day long at the cricket, so maybe the %-alcohol isn't the point.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
All Anglo countries went pretty hard for the Temperance movement. Only the US actually had prohibition, but other countries (and the US in other times) had restrictive regulations that fell short of bans.  I wouldn't be surprised if these included incentives for moderating ethanol percentage.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


and it's important to note that almost no one disbelieves the allegations, but also that Ken Paxton won reelection by double digits while under indictment for bribery and fraud.




What's the dynamic here?


In a Banana Republic, voters tolerate this sort of thing because they know that corruption investigations only happen because of political will. So even if your man is corrupt, caring about it would be unilateral disarmement.  In the US, this is more or less the situation already with Trump, but I'd imagine Texas politics is too one sided for that to be the issue.


One-party states can easily be corrupt -- after all there's no effective opposition. But what leads to voters shrugging it off like that?  Why are they so desperate to elect this particular man?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They are in somewhat of a win-win situation, because even if their constitution gets rejects, they'd be left with the status quo-which they'd be happy with. The main task for them is to get through it without somehow re-energising the opposition.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In Australia this is normal. Pale-skinned aboriginals are commonplace and to be found on both sides of politics.  This is not really like Elizabeth Warren style fakery.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
First of all, I am Aussie, and I only said that we drink XXXX at the Gabba. I also said that they nowadays have better beer there, but I'm the traditionalist who sticks to the XXXX.


In other states, they traditional beer on tap was, Tooheys, or some other local equivalent of XXXX. These are affordable, not-very-strong beers that some people do indeed drink all day. I have seen the practice many times, and participated in it on occasion. These same people might sip wine and fine whisky at other occasions, but for them cricket calls for continuous rounds of beer.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Mary's Motte and the case against progress
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm dubious, for instance, that you actually understand the moral questions posed by slavery. Can you name the two developments which most changed the moral calculus of forced labour between 1400 and the present day?




Are you then taking a relativist stance, that slavery might have been OK for them even if it isn't for us? I'm sorry that sounds like a rhetorical-gotcha question -- it's not intended as such. I'm trying to understand you.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Mary's Motte and the case against progress
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks, these are interesting questions. Sorry I took me two weeks to get to them (I hope you get a chance to read the article itself!).




First, does it matter if Progress-advocates have emphatically endorsed a definition of "progress" that extends much further than "the growth of knowledge", "productivity", "social complexity", or "human health"




You are right to think in terms of definitions of "progress". There can be absolute progress of moral importance towards The Good; and there can be mundane progress towards other things.  I believe both kinds are real, but agree with you that they should not be conflated.  Also I'm showing that the mundane progress shouldn't be lightly ignored. My examples are there to show that any attempt to do so, distorts the word far away from it's ordinary meaning.




If they had explicitly committed to a far more extensive definition of "progress" than the one you are defending, why is it unreasonable for us critics to hold them to that definition, rather than accepting yours? For a concrete example, consider the concept of a "war on poverty".




I wouldn't condemn that critique. I even might join it, depending on what exactly is being critiqued.  But I object to that critique being extended to a blanket claim that progress doesn't exist -- that would be to conflate absolute and mundane progress.


I think that's also what you are doing in your second question




...t, it seems to me that there should be some fundamental difference between primitive!fight and progress!fight, but it doesn't seem to me that such a difference exists.




No there doesn't have to be such a fundamental difference. Because progress!fight only differs from primitive!fight by mundane progress. Even though I believe absolute (i.e. moral) progress is real, this is not an instance of it.




More generally, what does it mean to be human? What is the human condition? What is human nature? Have any of these answers changed meaningfully over time?




Are you asking this from an Aristotelian point of view? I.e. "what is the Telos of Man"?


To take your question literally. I'd say human nature has not changed very much. I wouldn't say our Telos has changed at all.




If so, high-quality analysis of these questions should fall out of date as the ground-reality being assessed changed, yes? So texts from antiquity focusing on these questions, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, various religious texts from the BCs and so on, should be obviously out-of-date with the humans we observe all around us.   Is this what you observe?




No I don't believe they should be out of date. Nor is it what we observe.


Is your point that, were absolute progress real, then we would have moved beyond the problems which those works grapple with?  Because that is a valid point, which I'd like to tackle if that's really where you are going with this.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Mary's Motte and the case against progress
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


or that civilization is a single unbroken line from Egypt to USA. We aren’t the same people.




I don't think you need to establish the existence of a single unbroken line (whatever that means) to say that civilisation has progressed between those two points -- it least in terms of material progress.  I'd say morally too, but that's more mixed.


But I would say, that the modern USA is one inheritor of knowledge that goes back to ancient Egypt and beyond. So in that (tautological) sense, there is some kind of unbroken line.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Mary's Motte and the case against progress
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, I'm inclined to think the causality runs the other way.  When new things are getting discovered, there are riches to be found by exploiting those things.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Mary's Motte and the case against progress
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think your examples of information loss prove my point. Greeks lost writing, the world did not, and eventually the re-learned it from the east. Basic technology never had to be re-discovered in the Tasmania, the people were simply replaced by others who had not lost them. That was a big disaster for the Tasmanians, but civilisation keeps going.


You are right that moral progress is very patchy and reversible. I think (despite your choice of example) there's a rough net improvement brought on by the axial age, and another one by the Enlightenment. We can pick human sacrifice and slavery as the iconic institutions obsoleted by those revolutions. But when we zoom in to finer detail we see lots of reversals.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Germans are generally unaware of how low their wages are.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Mary's Motte and the case against progress
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, I haven't even finished reading it, so this is only a response to the first bit. My available time is going to the thinly sliced for a while, so I'm going to be doing things in bite-sized morsels.






Are you asking this from an Aristotelian point of view? I.e. "what is the Telos of Man"? To take your question literally. I'd say human nature has not changed very much. I wouldn't say our Telos has changed at all.








I'll cop to not actually having read Aristotle, but from inference, that's the general thrust.




Same here. But I've seen enough secondary and tertiary material to box a whole class of thinking in a category named "Aristotalean", whether or not it reflects the actual writings of the great man.




I'd put it more in terms of values and experience and significant choices available. Fighting is a fairly significant part of the general human experience, and the core nature of a fight, what it is and what it means, its moral nature if you will, seems immune to technological progress.




I tentatively agree. But I'll also note that fighting and reduced over the course of civilisation (go read a Pinker tome for the empirical argument). This has some negative consequences, but mostly it's a good thing.




I think it is the same for love, friendship, ambition, curiosity, marriage, sex, procreation, pleasure, fear, sickness, pain, death, justice, betrayal, jealousy... every morally significant aspect of the human experience, in short.




Nice (though still incomplete) list! You are right that the story is much the same, and I think I have the same sort of response. Let's pick out "love, procreation, pain and death".  I understand what you mean when you say they are in some sense unchanged.  I'm writing this from the floor of a hospital room, where my two-day old son is sleeping peacefully (for now).  All the really significant parts of the experience are ancient.


But there's also this: we have better obstetrics than the ancients. Neither this boy, nor his big sister would have been likely to have survived their births in medieval times. Or at least they'd have been left without a mother. But we live in modern times, and so here is our family is.






Also I'm showing that the mundane progress shouldn't be lightly ignored. My examples are there to show that any attempt to do so, distorts the word far away from it's ordinary meaning.








Does mundane progress have any moral weight? It seems to me that by asking this question, we're already saying that our primary concern is morality




The point in my article was that by focusing on moral weight, we are distorting the common understanding of "progress". There's something sly about separating these things out.  And I think that's what our examples above are drawing out, there's things of moral weight and mundane utility interpenetrate in ways that make them inseparable (which is perhaps why sensationalists confuse the two).




We recognize a number of moral principles, all of which trade off against each other. If mundane progress has moral weight, then it too should trade off against our other moral principles,




What? Why should we assume that we are forever at optimal frontier where everything is a trade-off? You have to be doing everything right to be be at that frontier, and even then the frontier can move when circumstances change.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for that. It sounds like Banana Replublic logic does in fact apply.


The scandals you list sound awfully Clintonesque, so I can see why a voter would not want to unilaterally disarm because of them.  That said, as far as I can tell, the Clintons are unusually corrupt by the standards of prominent American politicians. I mean how is it that the many enemies of DONALD TRUMP can't come up with a good real-estate scandal to use against him, and have to settle for pissant stuff about paying off pornstars?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Rules before Governance (AI edition)
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
[This is quick, a partial response, I'll have to read your comment more carefully to give it a full and fair thought. Thanks!]




    

  1. You think that letting governments build high-powered AI while shutting down others' access to it is a bad idea.
    2. 







    

  1. You don't like Eliezer Yudkowsky and those who follow him.
    2. 





The thing is, these are entirely-separate points. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not want to let governments build high-powered AI.


My views on Eliezer are much more complicated than (2) that, but for the sake of this argument, I'll accept that as a simplifying approximation. Roughly I like Yud but disdain Yuddism.




The thing is, these are entirely-separate points. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not want to let governments build high-powered AI. Indeed, his proposal of threatening and if necessary declaring war against governments that try is the direct and inevitable result of taking that idea extremely seriously




Yes, to his credit (and I do give him credit for that in the article), Eliezer bites that bullet. But in this he becomes his own reductio




If you fear such experimentation in the west, then you should fear the use of AI by autocracies even more. Eliezer Yudkowksy is honest enough to acknowledge that—but it commits him to the absurdity of advocating a shooting war against a nuclear power as a hedge against Doomsday.




Eliezer's global ban is not going to happen. Even a ban in the west is not going to happen. The Biden administration is gearing up to set up an AI bureaucracy to regulate it on the advice of Sam Altman. And I see the LessWrongers cheering and declaring victory at each new headline.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Rules before Governance (AI edition)
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ok, I've reread your post, and I think I stand by what I said above.




So it's kind of weird that you set up Yudkowsky as your bugbear, but then mostly argue against something completely different from the "Yuddist" position.




I don't think that's a fair reading of either my substack post or my Areo piece. Yes, I do criticise his position, but my main target is centralisation.  The reason I bring in Yuddist foomer-doomerism into this is (a) this position is actually quite prominent, Eliezer got published in Time for chrissake, and (2) the  "smart" argument I hear for why centralisation is Good Actually is based on foomer-doomer assumptions. Eliezer himself is more consistent: he knows that his assumptions lead him to a ban even on government activity. His acolytes seem to think "well the worst of both worlds at least gets us part of the world we want, so let's go for it".




The PRC has actually started requiring interpretability as a precondition of large AI deployment, ...




This is just naive.


But anyway, even if you believe the people who brought us the Wuhan Institute for Virology have got it all covered, then you still have to worry about all the other countries in the world.




For all that the CPC is tyrannical, they still don't actually want to kill all humans; they cannot rule humanity if they, and humanity, are dead.




Communists don't all always kill millions of people on purpose! For example Great Chinese Famine, was more incompetence than malice.  Here's what I say in Areo




The tyrannical governments of the past were dependent on human beings to administer the machinery of repression, but an AI-powered tyranny has other means at its disposal. Totalitarian states have never been reluctant to depose their own leaders and an AI-powered ruling party could afford to dispense with every last cadre. The machines might be the true leaders. There’s no telling what such machines may choose to do with us humans. They might simply kill us all, since we are superfluous and a little unpredictable.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the BRICS New Development Bank (Egypt, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabi will probably join as well).




So after all those betl-and-road-initiative projects failed, the Chinese want to lose more money and influence?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
DeSantis has done lots to hobble woke indoctrination in education and also to energise citizens against it. That's been his most powerful point of leverage as as a state governor.  The Presidency has different points of leverage.


Ironically Hanania has done more than anyone (except maybe Chris Rufo) to document how much of the modern woke-imperium is upheld by American law, especially civil rights law.  Hanania is also the one who pointed out how much of that is actually done through executive orders.  Any republican could deal a big blow to that, and their respective track records show DeSantis is likely to actually do it while Trump is not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Australian Covid hysteria quietly died in Christmas of 2021. The governments ruined the Christmas of anyone travelling across the border, only for Omnicron to come and sweep the country. Within a few months nearly everyone had had the disease and found it to be no biggie.


Politicians quietly rolled back all the mandates etc. But in Canada they were still doing it and were only talking about changing things when the Truckers hit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Their goal isn't to persuade or influence the cosmopolitan tribe its to cripple it and slowly destroy it.




This is a correct analysis, but Canada is far from that yet. The protests have not crippled Trudeauism, they have upped the ante. Trudeau abused his power at the time, and has now abused it again by standing up phonies to whitewash it.  This game might end in failure if the next election replaces the regime with an angry and effective alternative.  Or else it might just confirm that the regime's right to power is above Canadian democracy.


It could go either way, but I suspect the median Canadian voter prefers to sleepwalk into dictatorship. The denial tastes so good. That's on them, the truckers have done as well as anyone could.