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An Attempt at Following Up on the User Viewpoint Focus Series
Thanks to @hydroacetylene for 1) the nomination and 2) reminding me to get on it. I followed his excellent template here.
Self-description in Motte Terms
I'm a classical liberal with a keen awareness that the American dream was made for me. In my personal life, I'm a well-paid Texan engineer with an appreciation for firearms. I love America and the American ideal even though I feel it's currently struggling with (what I see as) a particular failure mode of populism.
We enjoy unparalleled material prosperity thanks to strong societal values combined with good initial conditions. That carried us through two centuries of struggle to the top of the world, and now it gives us opportunities to shape the future of mankind. It also reminds us of an obligation not merely to perpetuate the system which got us here, but to spread the benefits to others who are less fortunate.
Yes, this almost certainly makes me one of the most progressive posters still on the site.
I absolutely despise the fascism of pure aesthetics which is so adaptive on social media. Contrarian countersignaling that you'll make the world a worse place because bad things are good, actually. "Tear it all down," "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out"... That's the lowest form of demagoguery.
My girlfriend, whom I love and trust more than anyone, once asked "why do you hang out with these people?" Why am I spending my time on this Earth arguing with people who hate my guts and sneer at the things I value? It's because I believe in the project. I believe that when classical liberalism gets to compete with the fascists and the communards, it comes out looking great. I believe that our model of debate club is a valiant attempt at implementing the liberal ethos of free exchange of ideas. I believe I can win friends and influence people via the political equivalent of betting them that nothing ever happens.
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
Recommended Reading
I'm not going to give a list of published books. Y'all probably know what goes in the classic Western philosophical canon. Plus, and I might not be supposed to mention this, but the vast majority of my model overlaps with what they teach to reasonably smart high schoolers. Perks of subscribing to what's basically our civic religion.
Allow me instead to share a few standout motte posts.
I still think about this post by, I believe, @AshLael. The idea that certain flavors of argument are advantaged against others helps to explain large swathes of the political landscape. It's also part of the reason I'm so invested in maintaining a Debate-heavy space like this one.
Here's a classic bit of Hlynka for those who missed it. While I deeply, deeply disagree with him on lots of things, he was grasping at something that most other users don't quite get.
But I've always had a special place for the strange and wonderful digressions of the Motte. /u/mcjunker's stories, @Dean's policy analysis, all sorts of stuff. One of the best examples has to be this monstrous essay on the aesthetics of jazz. Amazing stuff.
If you have any affinity whatsoever for text-heavy, mechanics-light video games, you should play Disco Elysium. Its Moralintern is a bizarre but excellent commentary on our rules-based international order. Also, it's generally hilarious and poignant.
While I am tempted to namedrop countless other works of fiction, it'd probably be more of a distraction. Ask me on a Friday thread.
Brief Manifesto
Assume your model is not going to work.
Doesn't matter if you're theorizing about politics or international relations or the state of the youth. The very fact that you've taken the time to present it in a forum post is a comorbidity for any number of critical flaws. Maybe it's wildly overcomplicated; maybe it overlooks some basic fact of human psychology. As soon as you introduce your theory, the fine commentariat of the Motte will show up and explain how it's actually stupid.
This is a good thing, because picking holes in ideas is how you get better ideas. (Okay, yes, it's also quality entertainment.) But it might not be fun, and there will be some psychological pressure to insist that nothing is wrong. No. The critics are right, and your grand psychoanalysis is probably bunk. So why not try to get ahead of the curve and figure out what went wrong? What's the first objection someone is going to make when you hit "post"?
This is the difference between arguing to understand vs. arguing to win.
If you want to have a constructive discussion, the single most useful thing you can do is to think about how you might be wrong. It's not easy, I sure don't live up to it as much as I ought to, but I promise. It's worth it.
Ping Me On...
Voting systems. Electoral reform along the lines of single transferable vote is literally my single issue, because I think it's actually a credible path to a more functional government. Seriously, if you know about a way I can act against FPTP, let me know.
Science fiction. Fantasy. Weird hybrids that defy or define genres. I'd like to say I'm pretty well-read in this sense. I certainly enjoy the subject.
Historical trivia of all sorts. Perhaps it's stereotypical for a board like this, but yes, that includes military history and hardware. And while my own collection is still amateurish, I'm always happy to talk about firearms as a hobby, too.
Posts I'm Proud Of
I don't generate a lot of AAQCs, and when I do, I tend to look back with a little embarassment. Something of a tendency towards melodrama. Still, I'm convinced that I was on to something here.
I also feel strongly about my comments on the state of fiction. Media is the first thing to get the 'ol "back in my day" treatment, and especially with modern storage methods, it's so easy to put on rose-tinted glasses. But all sorts of bizarre fiction is out there. Perks of a bigger, faster, more interconnected world. I encourage everyone who thinks modern media sucks and/or is captured by their ideological enemies to go out and find stuff that's just too weird to capture.
This was easier to write and harder to do than I expected.
I'll nominate @Rov_Scam for the next entry.
One real benefit of putting your arguments in writing (in the context of a sincere argument) is that it motivates this. This is a major reason to argue with people that you will disagree with—even if it is hard to convince others, the argument will add nuances to your view, and point out where your position is weaker in a way that is often fruitful in leading to a greater understanding.
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What's the 'the fascism of pure aesthetics' supposed to be?
Making decisions based on how much they offend the outgroup rather than actual effectiveness. Adopting reversed stupidity as a signifier of intelligence. Noticing that certain reactionary and authoritarian trappings are reviled, but taking this as evidence that they’re actually awesome.
Doing things to trigger the libs, basically.
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Voting systems. I'm very against STV and would love to hear some counterarguments if you've got them so I can feel sane again. STV makes ballots unresolvable on a local level; local counting is no longer easily aggregated. Every ballot needs to be held onto to possibly be recounted, possibly multiple times depending on exactly how the global election is progressing. Local recounts can force global recounts, multiple times as who is eliminated changes. On top of that automated vote counting has to rely on OCR or heavier use of voting machines instead of scantron like devices.
STV doesn't even give you compromise candidates, it only prevents spoiler candidates. By example, if 50% want A > B > C and 50% want C > B > A, B is immediately eliminated and you have FPTP.
The fact that all the talk is about STV instead of approval voting (a better, simpler system) is either proof of a psy-op or proof that we don't deserve better government.
I think you may be confusing IRV and STV. STV is the multi-winner version of IRV, intended to produce proportional representation.
As for defending IRV:
Clone independence is a huge deal. It is a much-bigger deal than what sort of candidates get elected, because it gives an escape valve against leaders going corrupt (since a clone can steal their seat). Approval voting is also clone-independent, but there are a ton of voting systems that aren't.
Approval voting has a massive tactical voting problem. Specifically, an approval cutoff (that is, when you rank the candidates in order of preference, the point at which you stop approving) that does not divide the viable candidates wastes your vote. This is in play most of the time for most voters. Rampant tactical voting cases are bad because they disenfranchise the honest and principled in favour of the unscrupulous, and the world has more than enough of that. Its tactical voting problem is not as bad as plurality, but it is close. Now, of course, there is no system that never has tactical voting except for random-ballot (i.e., pick a ballot paper at random, and whoever's on that ballot wins), but IRV does much better than most in this regard; in most cases voting your true preferences is correct.
IRV does not directly advantage compromise candidates. However, it's one of a few systems that if paired with compulsory voting invoke the Median Voter Theorem, and that does tend to produce compromise candidates. I'm not sure that approval does; I think maybe it might if everyone were to vote his/her true preferences, but that's not going to happen because of #2.
STV run with one seat and a 50% quota (under most methods of doing STV) is equivalent to IRV. I prefer the mental abstraction of STV, but your right that it isn't common parlance to use it in that way.
IRV is clone independent but still falls to the center squeeze (where several nearby candidates can choke out the center of the group). Also, every single Condorcet method is clone independent if there exists a Condorcet winner (which polling suggests is over 90% of elections). Many of these algorithms will choose something from the Smith set where it isn't even clear mathematically what you could do that is better, it just chooses a different one from the Smith set if there are clones. These are all ranked choice systems that can be computed in a single pass over the ballots. Why are we looking at IRV among the ranked choice methods?
Approval at least has the guarantee that you should never rate something you like less higher than something you like more. Approval and IRV have relevant tactical voting in the same situations: when your preference is close to losing to something more moderate. Both ask you to downrate the moderate if you think you can win, or uprate the moderate if you think you can't. IRV requires you to tell an outride falsehood to do this. In terms of the benefit you get from tactical voting, it is pretty similar across the two methods (both about 10-20% of what you get in FPTP).
IRV does not choose a Condorcet winner, and thus does not invoke the Black median voter theorem. There are many ranked choice algorithms that do, but not IRV.
Yes. There's a solid argument for some of the better Condorcet-completion methods as better than IRV, despite them failing later-no-harm. Approval is not a Condorcet method.
I... suspect you're not counting things as tactical that are, in fact, tactical. Honest voting in approval is approving everyone better than some fixed standard of goodness. This usually doesn't split the viable candidates (i.e. you approve all of them or disapprove all of them), which means your vote is fully wasted (just as with voting third-party in plurality). To make your vote count, it usually has to be tactical - to take note of which candidates are viable and choose a cutoff that splits them.
IRV has tactical voting a little bit of the time for some voters. Approval has tactical voting literally all of the time for most voters.
I only bring up Condorcet as if we are going to be doing ranked choice ballots we have all these other better options. Options where counts can be aggregated from different polling centers and that provide better mathematical guarantees. I don't think later-no-harm is a good outcome. If a candidate B becomes more popular with a subgroup, but doesn't reach the threshold of being their first choice, candidate B should be more likely to win the election. I'd much rather have monotonicity, so that rating a candidate higher makes them more likely to win.
I'll grant that your threshold choice is inherently tactical, but I think it is a much better brand of tactical than other things that fall under the label. In IRV, tactical votes are misrepresenting your preferences to the voting system. You have to lie about who you actually like and dislike. In approval voting, you are compressing down the vote to provide as much information as possible to the voting system. It is a "true preference" that you like everyone you voted for more than everyone you didn't. It doesn't reward liars, it rewards those in touch enough to know roughly the bounds of possibility for this election.
But yeah, I guess there are some real selling points of IRV:
-a lot of the other ranked choice methods aren't clone independent which is definitely a problem that needs a solution
-you can just walk in and list your candidates in order and be voting "optimally for your desired outcomes" a good chunk of the time.
I still think ranked methods aren't worth the cost (really try it, with a group of even 5 people trying to decide what to do, ranked methods are demolished by approval voting in terms of implement-ability, then extend to the entire country). IRV among them is particularly bad for counting but is among the better set of election properties and especially explain-ability.
(Also, you've been a great conversation partner, kudos and gratitude)
Inherently, no, but later-harm produces tactical voting. Worse, it produces tactical voting in a mass-producible way; political parties will figure out which full ballot by their supporters will be best for them, and push it hard. Full how-to-vote cards are a thing in Australia, but the parties don't push them all that hard due to later-no-harm.
Now, yes, later-no-harm is incompatible with a bunch of other criteria, which is annoying. But, well, impossibility theorem.
I mean, yes, the O(N!) worst-case is a pain. I will say that it's not nearly as bad in practice as the worst-case; a good number of seats in Australia have [#2 > all votes other than for #1 and #2], which simplifies it to 2 buckets (and a lot of the rest have [#3 > all votes other than #1/#2/#3], which simplifies it to 6 buckets). Usually the AEC can predict this ahead of time; they do a full recount if their prediction is wrong, of course, but most seats are known within hours.
(STV absolutely always is a nightmare, though; we use it for our Senate, and it takes over a week to count. AIUI it's worse in terms of tactical voting, too.)
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Great post, you’re one of my favorite commenters here. This makes me wonder if I ever did the User Viewpoint series. I think I did (maybe @self_made_human nominated me), but I can’t remember.
I don't think anyone nominated me for a UVP, so I haven't had the opportunity. I probably would nominate you if it came up.
(Maybe you're thinking about the doge contest)
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What kind of engineer?
Defense contractor.
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The most straightforward reading of your word choice would be colonialism, which would not make you the most progressive person here.
A statement that nobody believes about their own position, of course.
It is just as easy to smear restorative justice advocates as believing "bad things are good, actually" as it is the right-winger calling for, say, England to sink the small boats.
Are the people that care more about murderers than their victims just doing contrarian countersignaling? How should one decide they're sincere but the other side isn't?
Any thoughts on if it's possible/reasonable to fix the gerrymandering issue or is the catch-22 deliberate and useful for some reason?
Mm. Point taken. I don’t think I quite conveyed what I wanted, there.
I believe Americans have an obligation to do things which benefit all humanity. Disease eradication is probably the easiest to defend, but I’d go to bat for various foreign aid and social programs to a lesser degree. Proximity is not the issue. Getting our own house in order is not the issue. There’s enough low-hanging fruit out there in the world that we can and should make a difference, even for non-Americans.
I was actually thinking about edgy contrarians like KulakRevolt. People who delight in judging things based on aesthetic. Perhaps nobody serious, nobody with money or lives on the line, embraces this. But I’m not particularly optimistic. There’s always going to be someone willing to play the heel.
That’s not (usually?) what’s happening with prison abolitionists, border maximizers, etc. Whether or not they embrace heel tactics, you can dig down and find an intended policy. I don’t think that’s true for your average Substack grifter.
This ought to be a solvable problem. I don’t think there’s a good philosophical case for keeping exploits of the voting map. But either way, FPTP exacerbates the problem. Get rid of that and then we can worry about edge cases in strategic district placement.
And maintaining the screw-worm border.
I'd be more satisfied if the people that go to bat for foreign social programs would just acknowledge that it's colonialism, but good when they do it.
Okay, fair. You seem to consider them more common than I do, and I will not defend the relative proportions.
Well, yes. Whether or not that policy is insane is another matter.
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My pet theory was that the easy way to solve gerrymandering would be to embrace its game-like structure, rather than try to regulate it into submission. Everyone's trying to build a system that is "fair", meanwhile games are the best way that humans have found to interact "fairly". The moves of the game:
The obvious con here is that low-polygon districts don't map well to geographical and societal features (rivers, mountains, city limits), but I don't think that we're doing well with our current system anyway.
Also it doesn't work if you have a number of districts that isn't a power of 2.
Any change would require parties to submit to their minority, though, which will never happen - except through the courts maybe.
Anyway, emphatic agreement that FPTP is one of the roots in the tree of evil and Washington would have outlawed it in his Republic if he had foreseen its consequences.
See also the shortest-splitline algorithm.
Yeah this and other "mathematically unbiased" district-drawing algorithms often get plenty of upvotes on Hacker News, so I've seen them. My first issue with them is that they often have to choose some arbitrary optimization criteria to close the space of the problem (e.g. for this one why is that the "shortest" splitline should be chosen among all splitlines?).
My second issue, more practically, is that you'll never get state congress critters to give up even a little bit of power, let alone the power of the district-drawing pen. But red-blooded Americans love a good competition so I'd like to almost think that it would become some sort of televised spectacle where each party announces its next line like it's the NFL Draft. Maybe even some will gamble on it (or would have, if the BBB didn't hamstring gamblers). The congress critters would even get additional time in the limelight, which we all know is what they truly crave aside from receiving a greasing of the palms from industry buddies and pals.
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Do you truly believe classical liberalism is at all viable in a society that's not heavy on small businesses, small companies and independent farmers ?
Look how it ended up the first time - it stopped being viable due to increased scale of businesses. In the US it started getting replaced by the managerial state in late 1930s and this was mostly finished by 1980s.
In case anyone is unclear on what the 'managerial state' is, here's a handy explainer:
God, if only big-business-influenced technical-bureaucratic elites really ran things, instead of the ideologically captured bureaucratic and political and academic progressive elites we actually have (on average, of course). It's so weird to conflate Big Business and Big Government in a world where Lina Khan Thought is popular on Left and Right.
Independent central banks are wonderful inventions it must also be said.
In other words, FDR-loving progressives are responsible for the administrative state's regulatory growth and misadventures, not our kindly corporate overlords, who fundamentally wanna make a buck by increasing consumer welfare.
We have not had "an ostensibly apolitical technocracy" in many government agencies in a long time. The DoD and DoJ were some of the best ones here, but public administration theory gave up on neutrality/objectivity as "impossible" a long time ago as a field.
Sadly, the consistent attempt of political neutrality, or even the pretense, was a load-bearing effort, even if imperfect. Hard to get it back now.
Bureaucrats used to be a lot better in the 40s, accumulation of bloat and it all went to the shitter after Carter on purpose lost that lawsuit over competence exams.
In general, yes.
But consider that the State Department has continued to use a very selective hiring process, starting with an exam, this whole time and was corrupted by other forces.
If you have a selective exam but don't get enough applicants because e.g. the wages are not that attractive anymore, or the institution has a bad smell, you're not going to get as good a selection.
e.g.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/U-S-Department-of-State-Foreign-Service-Officer-Salaries-E32768_D_KO24,47.htm?experienceLevel=FOUR_TO_SIX&location=
96-140k. 140K after six years isn't going to get you top talent these days.
I assure you that you have no idea what you're talking about. They get plenty of applicants for the FSOT.
Also, a member of the Foreign Service gets their life heavily subsidized when overseas. It's one of the most competitive entry level jobs out there. https://old.reddit.com/r/foreignservice/comments/1dtl17q/pipeline_funnel_numbers/
Plenty of brilliant people make career decisions based on considerations other than monetary compensation as the primary concern, especially if an early career choice is also considered a good stepping stone for a pivot. (Do you know how much academics make?)
A number of prestigious government careers have a model where effectively it's deferred career compensation, and/or a unique job you can't do elsewhere.
a) The people who were fired at state weren't FSOT?
b) even if you say it doubles compensation, it's still nothing compared to what very capable people can get in law, trading, finance, tech..
You don't want 90th percentile, you want 99.9th percentile people for your important diplomatic roles.
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Organisms attempt to grow. Unless there is a countermeasure, they will grow. There was for a long time no countermeasure to bureaucracy and therefore it grew.
This is not really true.
Wilson's Bureaucracy does a good job of showing empirical cases where agencies resisted growth and scope creep, but it was hoisted upon them.
Public choice theory is great overall, but Wilson pointed out where it got a little overdone in some respects.
Oh, and it's true because the bureaucracy grew a ton starting in the 30s, but in terms of government civilians it's been flat (and therefore proportionately lower) for some decades now. Of course, spending and regulation has gone up, overall including spending on contractors and NGOs.
There should always be the countermeasure of "can we afford this?"
Deficit spending outside defined emergency conditions ought to be unpermitted.
That seems like an overly narrow definition of bureaucracy. All of the revolving door between the official bureaucracy and the related contractors (with people going back and forth) form the true bureaucracy.
Well, I'd argue "bureaucracy" is an overly narrow conception of what the problem is with "big government."
I don't know how much "revolving door" you think there is, but it's not all that much in my experience in the DoD/IC. Mostly, people leave federal/mil service to become a contractor for more money doing much the same job.
Mostly though, the idea that you can map any given government agency onto a model where it always or by default seeks to maximize its size/budget/power/whatever is empirically false. That is often true, but it's a loose assumption. Or often various subunits of a given agency have ambitious careerists trying to maximize their impact via mission growth, but that is a zero-sum competition by default as the overall agency has a set budget.
Mostly, as someone with a (past) career and professional education in government bureaucracy, I get a bit up in arms about simplistic notions of government bureaucracy because it leads to obvious idiocy like DOGE, instead of actually getting us limited, effective government.
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I think honestly any future government would do well to have an automatic sunset to the creation of new agencies. Once a generation we really need to look into whether or not the laws, mandates, regulations, and agencies we built for the crisis of the moment even make sense generations later. It would also prevent those agencies from deciding on their own to do things that harm the country. If you know that in five years your environmental agency will be called to defend its right to exist, you might well think twice before regulating carbon and other common chemicals, or at least keep the regulatory regime as light as possible.
Every year, technically, agencies have to justify their budgets. Any given agency could be eliminated by Congress at nearly any time, if they so chose. The USAID demolition for example is a problem procedurally because Trump is trying to use the executive branch to effectively nullify what the legislative has done in creating and funding it. If you think a weak legislative branch and a lack of separation of powers is a big problem, this is not a positive development overall.
Sunset clauses always sound better in theory than they work in practice as an accountability mechanism. (Just ask the haters of FISA 702 about that.)
Nothing but mandated fiscal responsibility solves the overall problem of government spending growth. Regulatory growth is a harder nut to crack, since no budget is necessarily required. Perhaps law sunsets could help there because they would at least force a review, but that also generates a lot of work that itself could be a pretty big drag.
I’d agree very strongly with balanced budget amendments as good. But I don’t see any way to slow the growth of regulatory agencies other than having the government — be it executive or legislative — have to manually re-approve the agency (with the default being no) at regular intervals will at least allow for review and revision and avoid mission creep. If we have a department of horse welfare in 2025, it doesn’t need to exist anymore because few people need horses for transportation.
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But what if they have seized the means of musical production? 😁
(Forgive me, I don't often get to make 80s jokes).
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I'm going to agree with @MonkeyWithAMachinegun, on pushback here but for a different reason; not for the sake of preserving known untruths, but for avoiding type 1 errors. Overzelous knocking down of 'perceived untruths' can produce a lot of collateral damage;
There's a Chesterton's fence argument here imo, more than a 'value of the myth' argument.
I think the axiom as stated tautologically, creates zelousness without clear reasoning;
If you see something that you beleive can be destroyed by truth, but cannot discern any benefit to destroying it, or harm by leaving it, maybe consider leaving it be.
If someone says "those that are found guilty on good evidence should be punished" then that does imply some caution against not punishing the innocent on flimsy evidence. Here, the ideal is clearly not "do not hold any beliefs, for they may be false". If you kick out a true belief A and believe not-A or end up agnostic about A, then your map will match the territory less well than when you started, and this is very much contrary to the spirit of the saying. I mean, it does not even say "reject any beliefs for which on reflection you have insufficient evidence", it only asks you to abandon beliefs which have been proven false.
As a rationalist, I believe that beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experiences. A belief which can be destroyed by the truth, i.e. a false belief, will not be a reliable tenant.
Also, no beliefs exist in isolation, they form networks, and a false belief is more likely to prop up another false belief than a true one is.
Now you can carve out an exception for some personal things where the belief has other clear advantages despite being somewhat inaccurate. Believing your partner is a nine when a impartial analysis would determine that they are actually closer to a seven is probably permissible in most cases.
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I like the ideal of this, but in practice, sometimes the myth is more important than the truth. Humans are story-tellers by nature. It's in our blood. Telling stories is the great cultural commonality that links every society throughout human history. The Aztecs were telling stories about Cihuatecayotl God of the West Wind at the same time that Spaniards were telling stories about Clavijo at the same time the English were telling stories about King Arthur at the same time the Byzantines were telling stories about being Rhōmaîoi at the same time the Russians were telling stories about Koschei the Deathless at the same time the Chinese were telling stories about the Yellow Emperor. These stories, some of which were pure myth some of which were myth based on fact, provided a common basis of understanding for their culture. England is not England without the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Spain is not Spain without the myth of the Battle of Clavijo or Santiago Matamoros (Saint James Moorslayer). The Byzantine Empire only existed, only had legitimacy, because of their claim of being the Heirs of Rome, being Rhōmaîoi, Roman citizens.
When you shine the light of truth on King Arthur, you find a squalid little Welshman who may or may not have been a Roman Centurion, who probably fought a few battles and died in a meaningless cattle raid more likely than not. When you shine the light of truth on the Battle of Clavijo, you find nothing to support it. When you shine the light of truth on the Byzantine claims, you find something there, but come on, they're all Greeks, speaking Greek, worshiping the Christian god, with an Emperor-in-name as opposed to the Roman Emperor-in-all-but-name. Truth eviscerates these foundational, common myths. It destroys them utterly. But should it? Is England a better place where nobody cares about the Legend of King Arthur anymore? Where there is no common understanding that they are English, and that they have a common mythos that binds them together more firmly than something as pedestrian as the right to vote for some wanker in Parliament? Is Spain a better place when there is no longer that same pride in the Reconquest, that same understanding that their ancestors were chosen by God and Saint James to bring the light of Christendom to the Iberian Peninsula, and drive out the infidel who conquered the home of their fathers?
Myth and legend serve a purpose. Seeking truth is a noble goal, but it must be tempered with the understanding that sometimes there are things more important than the truth.
I do not understand why rationalist love this sentence as it obviously goes against their main moral philosophy of utilitarianism. Most people - even rationalists - are not against what they consider white lies either individually (e.g. lying to Kant's axe murderer asking where your wife is) or society wide myths (e.g. everybody is equal before law, every vote counts etc). The actual sentence should therefore be something like
Which is basically in line with other moral philosophies as well - most of them like the truth unless it goes against other key values in that system.
If you are the Czar and you're the only one who needs to be a utilitarian, sure. If you need there to be lots of utilitarians, then assuming some commonality of interests lies are terrible because they cause people to calculate utility incorrectly. All moral systems are somewhat sensitive to false information, of course, but utilitarianism is particularly and notoriously so.
Or lies can cause people to calculate utility correctly, especially if they have some sort of bias. Is it not the whole point of rationalist thinking - Overcomening Bias? If a white lie can do that, then it will increase utility and general good.
Truth and utility are different concepts that are independent of each other - rationalist could say that they if they are not exactly orthogonal, they are at least at some steep angle to each other. I am not sure why rationalists cannot understand this argument - are they not supposed to be impersonal calculators? If Yudkowsky calculated that spewing lie after lie for the rest of his life will enable humanity to align the AI, he would 100% do it to usher his utopia. Would he not?
I mean, this is basically just saying "sometimes lying results in people believing the truth". And, okay, this is not actually impossible, but it's not very likely, especially in the long run. COVID is the obvious recent example of people trying this shit and it blowing up in their faces.
More generally, you say "I am not sure why rationalists cannot understand this argument". Notice that if you're not sure why somebody doesn't accept something, one of the possible answers is in fact "they understand it just fine, but there's a counterargument that they understand and you don't".
Spoiler alert: there's literally a Yudkowsky article from 2008 about this. And another. Probably others I haven't read or can't recall offhand!
No. It says that lies can increase utils. Truth and utility are independent concepts, why do you have it confused?
Then demonstrate it. The very first sentence of your reply shows that I was right.
I don't.
You said "calculate utility correctly". To calculate utility correctly requires knowing the truth. Different worldstates result in different expected utilities for the same course of action, so a utilitarian with a bad understanding of reality will act suboptimally according to his own utility metric - often wildly so. The obvious example is that genocide looks utile if you think the relevant demographic are all evil.
Hence, "lies can cause people to calculate utility correctly" = "sometimes lying results in people believing the truth".
This is distinct from "lies can be utile", which is broader and covers things like people having different utility metrics and/or people not actually being utilitarians and/or direct, non-choice-based belief effects (e.g. stress). That condition of "if you need there to be lots of utilitarians" is actually relevant to my point, y'know.
So we are back to square one. It seems to me that you are truthitarian and not a utilitarian, which is fair game. Let's investigate it on my previous example of Kant's axe murderer asking for you wife. Since she can be destroyed by [you telling] the truth about her whereabouts, then she should be destroyed, right? Because telling a lie can hamper yours and murderer's ability to correctly calculate the utility in the future with immense impacts. Or you should tell a lie, because death of you wife would be more negative utility compared to whatever impact on correct calculation of utility is there from telling a lie. What is your answer to the axe murderer? Is the truth the ultimate value that should destroy all and everything in its path? Or is it subordinate to other values such as your best estimation of utility in a given moment?
That is why amended Sagan's mantra:
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This seems functionally identical to "I will exercise complete arbitrary freedom to pick and choose to destroy something that a truth would destroy while also feeling morally virtuous along the way." Human bias being what it is, if you dislike any outcome for any reason, any good-faith honest calculation of utils of that outcome will certainly come out negative, and sufficiently so to meet whatever bar it needs to to justify not getting that outcome.
The shorter quotation is going to be wrong sometimes, but that's expected of any simplistic pithy line that tries to describe huge, overarching principles in ethics. I think it's more useful than this longer one which makes no concessions or commitments at all to any principles beyond one's own whims and preferences.
Exactly, I could have not said it better. Despite their posturing, they weaponize their dogmas - such as this Sagan's quip - to destroy what they do not like, while selectively not applying it to things they like such as polyamory.
Yeah, it may be a useful white lie. Which again paradoxically is the exact thing that the sentence rails against.
Right, and the point of a pithy, simplistic mantra like "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is to explicitly condemn such behavior of selectively applying and not applying principles based on whims and preferred outcomes. Which makes it every different from a line that adds something like "except if destroying it would have huge cost in terms of negative utils," which doesn't condemn such behavior and, in fact, is openly supportive of selectively applying principles based on whims and preferred outcomes. That's what makes the shorter line actually different and better.
Statements of "should" and "ought" like this - which lack anything that can be measured to determine the effects of the behaviors that people "should" do - are subjective judgment calls that don't really fit into a "lie," useful, white, or otherwise. Possibly "misguided" or "wrong." But if it is indeed true that this statement is useful, then it certainly doesn't seem like truth would destroy the statement. Why would it?
But the point is that it is exactly what is expected - utilitarians ought to apply the mantra selectively.
Because the sentence is false and thus should be destroyed by its own prescription. Unless you selectively apply it based on your whims and preferences. Exactly what you condemned in paragraph before.
But it isn't false. Again, you can consider a judgment call like this "wrong" or "misguided," but that's, just, like your opinion, man. If the truth is that people listening to this phrase is useful, then why would the truth destroy it? Why would we want to destroy something that's truthfully useful?
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Here's Yudkovsky saying exactly that (but worse and with more words, as is his style). A common rationalist stance is that utilitarianism is what's correct, but deontology is what works for humans.
The irony inherent in that decision tickles me something fierce.
Utilitarianism holds that what is best for the largest group of people is correct (summarizing). What is best for the largest group of people is apparently, deontology. Thus utilitarianism can be explained as the belief that deontology is correct.
Well, Yudkovsky's interested in moral theories for nonhumans as well.
And, once you get detached enough, or more realistically, when deontology doesn't give a clear enough answer, you do get to do some utility calculation anyway. Effective altruists may have their 10% charity rule, but they use utility calculations to decide on the charity. Which can lead to both Givewll $/life saved and shrimp welfare, so not exactly perfectly reliable either, but nothing is.
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Sure, I agree. Which is exactly my point. Rationalists are deontological cult of reason with a lot of let's say idiosyncracies. I just noted that they love this Sagan's quip and cite it quite often as some kind of mantra. I do not deny its utility for their ideology, but it is still a little bit cringey in many contexts. It is equivalent to some religious believer just writing that Jesus the way, the truth, and the life randomly in the middle of some argument about healthcare or whatnot - exactly like the OP of this thread felt the need to write the sentence as part of his argument.
Actually I think it is even worse for rationalists. The religious believers are mostly self aware to the extent, that they do understand that it is a religious statement and that nonbelievers or Muslims etc. will disagree. Rationalists can sometimes forget that it is just a mantra with symbolic meaning, and they may take it too literally - as if it is actually a good argument to present in a debate.
If your point was that rationalists are deontoligical in practice, why did your first post in this thread express confusion as to why rationalists like the pithy phrase expressing this rule, not a useless utilitarian tautology? 07mk gave the rationalist answer to why prefer the shorter version. I do agree that you shouldn't mistake a moral rule for an argument, though. But it's going to be a popular rule in rationalist and ex-rationalist communities, as they do select for people who highly value epistemic rationality.
Because they pretend to be utilitarian, but are in practice quite dogmatic. This Sagan's quip is actually a good example of that, because it is self-defeating paradox. If taken literally, it should destroy itself. It is a very poor choice for some deontological rule for a wannabe utilitarian. There are much better rules - e.g. give 10% of your income to charity.
I think 07mk did a pretty good job for why rationalist should ditch the whole sentence. He pretends, that the shortened version is somehow better, because it gives less space for individual whims and preferences. But he also basically admits, that it should not be applied all the time - of course subject to individual whims and preferences. How is that better? I focused more on the paradox side, but it does not mean that 07mk's explanation is satisfying in any way.
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We need phrases like that because the last years have shown that if you leave people any wiggle room, they will lie every chance they get. I hear ‘it’s just a white lie’ all the time now, and there are no limits and no brakes on its runaway use. The thing I found most shocking about the woke establishment is not that they would lie (about corona, discrimination, race), but that they would casually justify it if caught. And maga/trump casually lie even more, and then deny, so there’s not even the attempt at coherence left.
I at least hope that you appreciate the paradox here - that the sentence itself is a white lie or a myth if you will. But it has utility as a mantra preventing people from lying too much either to others or to themselves.
Exactly. Like some autistic rationalist "telling the truth" about some weapon of mass destruction - if humanity can be destroyed by the truth, then it should be. Right?
People jump on slogans, they want the ten commandments version, not the 2000 page discourse. Under those constraints, they should err on the side of telling the truth no matter what, instead of 'white lies' and 'necessary myths'. I don't think giving them the cliff's notes version counts as a lie. They're welcome to explore the topic in depth if they have the time.
Those aren't lies. First one is an aspiration : "Everyone should be treated as if they are equal before the law" - it just means there are no special categories of people, like aristocrats, as far as the law is concerned. Second one, well, every vote is literally counted.
Obviously that is justified, but I don't consider that a white lie
(wiki definition: A white lie is a harmless or trivial lie, especially one told in order to be polite or to avoid hurting someone's feelings or stopping them from being upset by the truth. A white lie also is considered a lie to be used for greater good (pro-social behavior))
It's not trivial nor polite, nor do I justify it on simplistic utilitarian grounds ("I just lied because my wife shouldn't die/the greater good." That's too weak a justification imo.) Essentially, a state of war or permanent defection exists between this evildoer and you, and acts which would be immoral normally, like murder and lying, are permitted or required in this case.
I think some exceptions can be made in the face of nuclear armaggeddon, at the margins of neurotypical society.
By contrast, our personal lives and our politics are saturated with unnecessary, harmful lies.
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The trouble with untruth is that it is hard in advantage to know when it will be harmless and when it will lead to disaster.
Myths work okayish even if most people do not believe that they are literally true. Most people who partake in the Star Wars subculture do not believe that there was a historical person named Luke Skywalker in a galaxy far away. They still can dress up as wookies and go to conventions or debate minor points of Jedi philosophy online, but they are much less likely to engage in harmful actions than a subculture which believes their myths are literally true.
The same can be said about the truth. In a sense the sentence itself is highly paradoxical, as it by itself is also not true and just a rationalist myth - vast majority of them would prefer lies if it increased utils, as they are utilitarians. This can be even trivially demonstrated by people who refuse to tell white lies and make their lives unnecessarily harder and miserable for other people as well. I am sure that even rationalists can be employed let's say in sales or service sector and pretend that they are thrilled to serve their customers instead of telling the "truth". The only thing that the truth destroys in that case is their job prospects with no upside.
I think that the sentence is generally more understood to express a preference for true beliefs for oneself and in cooperative settings. "Of course I told the Gestapo where the Jews were hiding, and destroyed them with the truth" is very much not a standard interpretation. Nor is there an imperative to destroy any respect your coworker might have for you by blurting "whenever I see you I fantasize about your tits". Same for consumer service.
Nor is it imperative to rub the truth into the face of an unappreciative audience. A religious person is very likely already aware of the fact that agnostic atheism is a thing. Telling them they are wrong once a day is not helpful.
A better example of a seemingly benign untruth might be homeopathy. Obviously it is bollocks. But the placebo effect is real, and larger if the patient is not aware of the fact that they are getting a placebo. So from a utilitarian perspective, it might seem beneficial to let your community believe some horseshite if it improves their health outcomes, and as long as you consider only direct effects, this might even be true (if you outlaw homeopathic "cures" for cancer and the like).
But the indirect epistemic consequences are devastating. "You know that orthodox medicine is wrong to deny homeopathy, why should you believe them if they claim that vaccines do not cause autism? Or why should you believe some adjacent ivory tower autofellating scientists that climate change is a thing?"
The consequences are devastating for what? Some cosmic sense of justice and rightness? As long as consequences are beneficial for utility, then lies are absolutely okay for utilitarians. Are they not? Of course you may argue that a specific lie is detrimental to utility, but then it is not my argument. Go and find some utility improving lie as an example, and defend destroying that one from utilitarian standpoint.
Act utilitarianism is not the only kind of utilitarianism there is. There is also rule utilitarianism and Two-level utilitarianism. Utilitarians can be against believing false things in the same way that they can be against child rape: while it is certainly possible to conjure hypothetical scenarios where the thing they are against has the better outcome, in practice these situations do not seem to appear.
Hey, I am not the one who claims that there is such a thing as a false belief which improves utility. You seem to claim that such things exist, so you should come up with examples.
One example comes from Pratchett:
There are several defenses of Granny Weatherwaxes behavior possible: 0. Operating on simulacrum level 2 is fine, truth does not matter. Obviously I reject this.
However, none of these arguments apply to believing falsehoods yourself or your epistemic peer community. The peasant who tries to understand general relativity, fails and ends up believing that in a vague way, the aliens come from the stars, but not exactly is more virtuous than the peasant who just goes "sure, you come from the stars. whatever."
Of course, but in the end they still want to increase utils - be it by acts, rules etc. This does not weaken my arguments - whatever way you calculate utils, the sentence is stupid if destroying a lie decreases utils by that metric.
Sure, I can use a hypothetical. If utilitarian of any sort - act, rule or two-level - made a calculation and found out that let's say believing in Christianity increases utils, then he would be obliged not to destroy it even if he thought Christian belief was based on a lie. Is it not true statement?
My criticism of your "homeopathy" example was that you actually think that homeopathy decreases utility. Which is not an argument for anything, you just affirm that saying what you think is true increases utility. Which does not tackle my argument at all.
EDIT: you lost me with Pratchett, aliens and peasants. Was is supposed to be some longwinded explanation for why you hold truth as an ultimate good instead of utils?
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Better? I don't know about that. But worse? Almost certainly not.
If the very idea of "King Arthur" somehow fell out of the collective consciousness, then as far as I can tell, nobody would really notice or care. Maybe we might see an improvement in GDP figures when fewer awful movies come out every few years and then bomb at the box office.
Now, the current state of England, or the UK as a whole, leaves much to be desired, but I can recall no point in history, even at its absolute prime, when success or governmental continuity was load-bearing on watery tarts handing out swords. And even back then, people treated it as a nice story, rather than historical fact or the basis for their identity. England was conquered by the Danes and the Saxons after all, well after the knights of the not-square table were done gallivanting about.
On a more general level, I fail to see your case, or at least I don't think there's a reason to choose false stories or myths over ideas that are true, or at least not accurately described as either.
The French made liberty, equality and fraternity their rallying cry to great effect. I do not think any 3 of those concepts are falsifiable, but they still accurately capture values and goals.
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From "That Hideous Strength":
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These are not counterfactuals. Perhaps it is better to phrase it as ‘would Spain be better if the Spaniards believed, to this day, that God and St James chose them to militarily reconquer thé land for Christendom? Would England be a better place if the inhabitants believed they had a special place in the world?’. America still has a founding myth; and this is a major culture war flashpoint.
Yes, it would be much better.
England would be better if the English believed, to this day, that God chose them to build a global empire to spread Christian civilization and Protestant values to the world.
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I very much enjoyed reading your post and all your links. Thank you :)
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And that overlaps very much with classical liberalism?
When did you go to high school?
Do they still commonly teach at least the "Hamilton" version of the US, or are we in full-on "1619" territory these days for say APUSH?
I was in high school in a red state like 20 years ago, but I definitely got taught "center-leftish kinda neoliberal but state intervention in the economy is good by default to undo the [exaggerated, imagined] ills of markets" that I know is still all the rage in college and in the Intellectual Elite. So, leaving aside the woke-era Culture War, it was still very much not "classically liberal" on economics. Barely even neoliberal really.
Civil religion was nice when we had it.
Fortunately for my finances, my square footage limits my tendencies here.
Whaddya got going?
My best collection piece is technically a loaner from my father-in-law, an M1917 Enfield. It's sporterized, but otherwise in great condition. My grandfather was a WWI vet, so I really like having it. As a hobby, I got a little too involved in modifying my, uh, three Sig P365s. I'm done now. Definitely don't want a fourth to have suppressed. Luckily, I've been more pragmatic with my AR-15 and AR-10 and not actually got into long-range shooting. I did spend a good chunk of change on a sweet steel target setup my family can use in the desert.
Yes, actually.
I took APUSH only slightly more recently than you. Pre-Hamilton and too dry for that style of pop history. Very definitely pre-1619. Lots of time spent on westward expansion before and after the Civil War. Not particularly apologetic, either, if I recall correctly.
The one that really struck me as institutionally liberal was AP Gov. It was 75% Bill of Rights court cases with a clear admiration for the Marshall Court.
Macroeconomics was incredibly Keynesian in a matter-of-fact way. Here’s the money multiplier, here’s an equation for aggregate demand, don’t worry about it too much. What a strange class.
I would absolutely love to shoot a pattern 1917. I adore my No. 4 Lee-Enfield, which was my first historic gun. I’m working towards a collection of the major service rifles, but somehow let myself get sidetracked by a gorgeous Swiss K31. So it’ll be a while before I let myself fill out the set with a Mauser and an Arisaka.
I also have a real soft spot for the M1 carbine. But mine is a real pain and doesn’t like to feed properly. Haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.
Jealous of your steel range. Some day!
Man, my APUSH class included a lot of leftwing stuff, like reading a good chunk of A People's History of the United States. (And it was not because the teacher was a real lefty or anything--he was very focused on doing what we needed to pass.)
But in general I'd say everything you described was "classic center-left polite society civic religion of the professional class" and not "classical liberalism," even if one can still see the archeological roots. And then I have no idea exactly how bad it's gotten since, but all signs point to "not great" on matters of both economics and the Culture War.
I do think it's oversold how much the Founders got wrong and undersold how much they got right--particularly regarding a limited government as a strong guiding principle. Post-FDR, that's been out the window with only a bit of neoliberalism to at least focus on economic efficiency.
That's a pretty good collection you have going. I'd love to have the ~full U.S. inventory for WWI and WWII at some point (if a replica in some cases).
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