This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Tribal wars and the quest for meaning
(another sleep-deprived inebriated rant. The resurgence of data-driven object-level motteposting is rather welcome; those interruptions won’t be frequent).
Anatoly Karlin is a self-identified Russian Cosmist. Like me. This means, in brief, the belief in the common cosmic endowment of humanity, the moral imperative – Great Common Task – to overcome bodily death (and, ideally, reverse as many past deaths as possible by technical means, redeeming human history, regathering «particles of our fathers»), and the notion that institutions, cultures, techniques and weapons or warfare ought to be pointed away from our kin and aimed against the lethal force of nature. One may think it’s a rather obvious idea to arrive at, during the long North Eurasian winter as you see malnourished peasants «recruited» for another dumb imperial war. It was invented by Nikolai Fyodorov, and our lefty friend deponysum has a poignant note on it; also available in his book.
Karlin is not very Russian, though, from his Berkeley education to meme-heavy Imperial identity compensating for confused ethnic ties; and starting Oct 3, he’s not very Cosmist. He’s now a direct threat to projects like Musk’s, an Anti-Cosmist, if anything:
Within a day he, too, has noticed the implication, and conjured a cope:
My guess here is, he references the iconic phrase that Taras Bulba, a fictional Zaporizhian Cossack and the main character of Gogol’s eponymous book, has said to his son Andriy who has betrayed Orthodox Cossacks for love of a Polish girl – before shooting. «I gave you life, I will take it», the savage, essentially Olympian expression of patriarchic morality. It’s also one of the justifications for the whole war, of course – «Czar’s gifts», «Lenin’s Ukraine», «Khrushchev’s mistake».
Or like the late demagogue extraordinaire for hire, «telekiller» Dorenko, had uttered once in 2014 while singing a Paean to the Priest-Czar Putin:
Back in August, Alexander Dugin was accused of ritually sacrificing his daughter to the altar of Russian Empire. I think that’s vile bullshit, as far as criminology is concerned, but spiritually it may be true along those lines.
I’ve talked to a number of people whose parents have asked them why they’re not mobilized yet.
But none of this is as sad as a Cosmist proposing denial of the skies to man, for his team to not lose as hard while conquering a chunk of the European plain.
This wasn’t meant to be about Karlin and his inane proposal that has no chance of being implemented (logistics aside, Russian state cannot improvise, a Zombie system going mechanistically through Soviet materiel). This is about values. How was it in Meditations? «Multipolar traps – races to the bottom – threaten to destroy all human values».
In the draft of my Substack that’ll most likely never be released on the account of being moody and overwrought, the opening concerned values too.
No – well, except the tribe, I suppose. Except nationalism. Except that our guys be winning and making Ourtribia Great Again, or else let it all burn. Right?
…
This puts Never-Trumpers in a new light, for me (even if they specifically may have bad arguments); and suggests a general scheme for defection from entrenched positions (or in their case, from the reasonable expectation of trenches). It’s just that such situations are a good test for having principles.
If you have anything at all that is more meaningful than pure tribalist loyalty and intransigence, if your politics is a means to a certain vision and not just an end, you may arrive at a fork on your road. Sure, Our Guy At Least Will Go Down Swinging. Other than that, what does he swing for? Does he offer enough even if he triumphs over his foe, and most importantly can he deliver? You start on this path expecting tremendous things – a revolution, a revival, a revenge at least. Suppose the promise is not fulfilled even as the challenge grows. You may consider yourself betrayed, and reject the leader in turn, and say that those who remain loyal are in fact unwitting traitors of everything the movement stood for. Or you double-down in commitment to the cause, because what other way could even hint at the possibility of your vision blossoming? Surely none! This path of unreciprocated loyalty ends, logically speaking, in you giving up everything, soul and mind and vision and whatever the tribe could ever offer, in exchange for nothing but the chance of personal success for its elite; the exemplary Stalinist Party discipline, masterful exploitation of Palaeolithic reactions. Through it all, one feels righteousness, because one’s loyal comrades are close.
I suppose some leftists may suspect at times that they are no longer pursuing maximalist goals – equality, liberty, fraternity (no sarcasm); but they cannot accept that their political coalition is going in the other direction. It may be temporarily misguided, but others are deliberately hostile to justice and truth!
That’s all well and good but not sacrificing your literal children to the hollowed-out ideology, nor contradicting your own key values that are as precious as children if not more, must be a decent lower bar for a tribalist’s sanity.
P.S. Vitalik, another Western-educated Russian, responds to Karlin with mocking hope that the way things are going we’ll perfect life extension by 2024. The joke, of course, is that Vitalik is precisely the type of man who finds no purchase these days in Russia, but who epitomizes everything Karlin was meant to support, and in part it was the hope to garner support for those things that have led him to Russian nationalism. It may turn out that everything of value your tribe stood for, or seemed to stand for, can no longer survive – within its structure and under its aegis. But ideas don’t die that easily, and can become seeds of new assabiyahs, assembled elsewhere, hopefully to a large extent even from the same stock of people. This is what I’d recommend tribalists to keep in mind.
Your vision seems techno-utopian and apolitical. It's fundamentally Christian- culminating in the resurrection of the dead, the lion laying down with the lamb, redemption from original sin, and a kingdom with no end.
We already have the promise of life after death. Our essence lives on in our children and our extended kin groups. Any ideology or project that neglects that, like promising personal salvation in the form of eternal life, from whatever divine source - celestial or technological - distracts from our real avenue for achieving life after death.
And a commitment to our progeny, in hopes that they are like us but better in every way: smarter, healthier, more beautiful, is intrinsically a political project and always has been; it's not a utopian vision that presupposes solving the political.
...And so the AGI worked, endlessly tiling the universe over with genotronium - the most compact and durable representation of the AI engineer's genome possible. For the engineer did not care about continuity, and he did not care about the medium, and he did not care about the memes (for memes were, by his reasoning, wholly downstream from genes). As long as the essence was there, he reasoned, it was good enough.
It is all nice and well to care about creating new lives. "Us but better", "us but better off" and all that. The visceral hormonal joy of parenting and the spiritual enjoyment of legacy. What's pitiful and disgusting is to not only settle for it but regard it as the only way. I must be frank, as immortalities go procreation is a mocking cope handed down by the blind idiot god of evolution as an afterthought. As for settling for "us but worse off", I cannot find epithets strong enough to describe that.
You know, I've argued on a number of occasions that utilitarianism, along with it's little brother consequentialism, are fundamentally perverse and incompatible with human flourishing. My experiences with the ground level effects of "realpolitik" already had me leaning in that direction for reasons similar to those expressed in this issue of Existential Comics but it was encountering posts like yours in my initial forays into LessWrong that truly solidified that opinion.
You say...
...and I say you're damn right it's nice.
You see, great crimes are always justified on the basis of great purpose, and vice versa. It's easy to convince people to build GULAGs and commit genocide when one frames it as "securing the future" or "maximizing utility". In contrast, the ordinary meat and potatoes of life, hearty meals, happy marriages, healthy children need no justification. They are good in and of themselves, no context necessary.
What you call "pitiful and disgusting" I call the very essence of humanity, and there is the possibility that we might both be right.
That said I think you're a fool, and not in the noble literary sense. The Faustian bargain is a cliche that predates print for a reason. When someone starts going on about about how what you might think of as good is bad and what seems obviously bad is just good sense or claims you you can attain worldly goods/power/knowledge/immortality "with this one weird" it's a fucking trap and if you're not the one setting the trap your just another dupe caught in it.
I think you're reading a lot of your baggage into my message here. I'm not talking about utility or securing the future. I'm not saying that having children which you might think of as good is actually bad. I don't have any weird trick for immortality to sell you.
All I'm saying is that death is not [obviously] good and that procreation is not immortality, full stop it ain't. There's no great purpose you might think I'm trying to sell you. It's just, what you call it, good in and of itself to live.
I don't think I'm reading much more than the plain meaning of your words. You open with the typical bay-area rationalist "tile the universe in [blank]-onium" boilerplate. You follow that with "It is all nice and well to care about creating new lives." but in common English usage the words "It is all nice and well" or "well and good" strongly imply that a "but..." is to follow and your comment seems to bear this out as you go on to describe procreation as "pitiful and disgusting", something to be "settled for".
That is what I'm reading into your message.
The plain meaning of the words is that it's pitiful and disgusting to invoke procreation as the central example of immortality. That is all. If you want me to elaborate on why - settling for such copes goes against everything that drove us out of caves and into civilizations. Might as well have not invented writing in fear that we be distracted from oral culture as the actual way of passing information down. Might as well have not invented agriculture and medicine, lest we be distracted from the actual salvation of hunting-gathering and Just Not Getting Sick, Bro. (I am aware that some people regret agriculture and medicine.) My "but" regarding creating new lives is that it's not immortality. It's not "salvation". Even Christianity had the decency to promise more than "well your children will live on and in the end they're something something your essence".
I don't really see how you can hold throwing in some bay area rationalist shibboleths (invoked clearly as a reduction to absurd) against me, given this place's history.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Who wants to settle for "us but worse off?" I do not. But that's a political project, it's not a global humanitarian utopia or deus ex machina. It's civilization.
How else are you going to achieve your immortality? Are you going to pray to Yahweh? Receive the eucharist? Or study machine learning in joyful hope for the coming of robot-Jesus Christ? All of those aspirational dreams are fine in their own, but if they are distracting you from realizing the actual potential of your own immortality, however limited, (or worse, if they are actively inspiring behavior that ensures the decline of your progeny) then that is what I would call pitiful and disgusting.
It's a false assumption that procreation can even be called immortality. It's further from immortality than masturbation is from sex.
I agree with this. I like the idea of having kids for my own reasons but I find the idea that it's immortality as strange as people's claims that they wouldn't want immortality even with an escape clause if they eventually desired it. I can only model it as cope, trying to get into the head of someone who genuinely believes it is impossible for me.
More options
Context Copy link
I was riffing on your tongue-in-cheek reference reference to reproduction as a cheap immortality. I suppose it's more similar to reincarnation. In religious myth, the quality of your reincarnation is determined by your deeds in the current life. The same applies to reproduction. Breeding habits and mate selection have either beautiful or disastrous consequences based on how society is organized and how we behave on an individual basis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are you suggesting that anyone who cannot guarantee that his children are better off than himself should not have any?
There are no guarantees in life, and most people hope for the best. But if you have no hope for the better, and still go through - you're just making another sacrifice to Moloch.
Why is your standard of living the decision boundary? Your model can't handle civilizational cycles that are seen all throughout history. You would end your own line at the first hint of decline rather than engage in a multi-generational contest for civilizational rejuvenation? Your ancestors made it through decline. They weren't sacrificing their progeny to Moloch. They lived on, and those who thought like you are long dead, in the most real sense of the term.
"Your thoughts do not produce children" is a circular argument when I'm arguing against the fundamental value of procreating in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link
This does not match my experience. At the least, like you yourself said, the vision is fundamentally Christian - so it's hard to argue that universal resurrection and ascension into eternal paradise has no ideological staying power.
It's not the ideological staying power I question, it's that utopian visions of post-political, universal cooperation for personal salvation are a false god. It distracts from the real concerns of the here and now, the political, and our only actual hope for salvation: our children.
Ilforte is upset Anatoly Karlin, who shares his secular religion (I do not mean that as an insult, the creation of a secular religion is the greatest challenge of our time and I also think AI will have a place in that endeavor) is choosing Putin over cosmism. But what is Ilforte more upset about? Is he upset that Karlin is choosing Russian nationalism over Cosmism in general? Or is it only because the cause itself is lost and counter-productive to Russian nationalism?
Let's say that Putin were actually an extremely good leader for the Russian people and played his cards perfectly, and Russia stood to imminently gain from this conflict. If the strategic approach to realizing those gains for the Russian nation came into conflict with Ilforte's cosmist values, which would he pick? I know which Karlin would pick.
This can be taken to the extreme. You can ask a Christian: "Would you be OK with 100% of Europe being replaced by Africans, if all of the Africans were Christians?" The Karlin would say that this is not acceptable, but the good Christian who doesn't place nationalism before his religion would be more likely to consider this a worthy tradeoff. That's due to the staying power of the ideology. True. But it's not a good thing.
I for one am expecting a technological singularity in a few years.
I think it's a sentiment of "damn it, you had it! you had the right view!"
Are Christians Christianity-maximizers? I'm genuinely not sure the religion leads to that conclusion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link