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Rotherham is in large part the reason I don't comment on this forum anymore.
I no longer believe in cross-ideological discussion. I no longer believe in good faith, or shared values in disagreement, or the merits of discourse.
There have been a million things like this lockdowns, vaccine passports, the summer of floyd, the millions of ancestral liberties stolen from us, a thousand tyrannies some more abstract, some more immediate, etc. , and for the longest time I tried to persuade people... but its concisely summarized by the fact that even after hearing about HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of white girls raped with the assistance of their own government... between 1 in 6 and 1 in 3 girls age 11-17 in the affected cities...raped for days or even years on end... 11 year olds raped by 4 men who used bicycle pumped to widen their anal cavity even as they wept and cried out for help....
After explaining THAT, and that the government itself knew and covered it up, and let the perpetrators go free...
People will still hem and haw, and not accept violence RIGHT THIS SECOND is called for, and that we should feel anguish and moral scorn every second we're delayed by practical realities, eternally filled with fury, humiliation, and longing, with sharpened knives and hearts of hatred for the day of justice and vengeance.
People will here that... Up to a million girls by some estimates, from the core ethnicity, of not just a NATO power, but an Anglo power, the subject of the "special relationship", the motherland of the founding fathers... And then NOT say that violent revolution is called for. Not say that Oceans of blood are demanded. Not say That any not full of rage and passionate intensity are nothing worth.
That if the best lack all conviction, then they are not only not the best, they are not even the worst, but are instead worms in human flesh unworthy of life
This is what the west is now, old men and women telling raped children to shut up and not be racist.
And everyone has known this on both sides of the pond for at least 10 years, it came out under Obama, and it's still going on, and no US politician has called for the british government to be sanctioned, or arms supplied to british white nationalists.
And when I say this to people in conversation, they use discussion, discourse norms, "charity" and the usually hems and haws to dodge all responsibility to even experience rage at the injustice.
This isn't a result of a lack of dispassionate rationality, or lack of charity, if no one ascribed good intentions ever again til the end of time it would be too soon.
The problem isn't that we were intolerant, or uncurious, or too quick to ascribe to malice what was better ascribed to stupidity... It was all malice!
When a Detective asks a white five year old whether or not she consented to have sex with 10 pakistani men, its malice. When her social worker signs off on her "marriage" to one of them and even attends the wedding, it is malice. When councilmen and government bureaus cover for them and pressure any who tries to speak out, and sends special envoys to intimidate victims, It is malice. When police arrest the parents trying to rescue their own 9 year old daughters and don't even question the Pakistani men holding her, it is malice. When US politicians and media say nothing, and gladly bury the issue as this CONTINUES in one of it's closest allied countries, it is malice. When they suggest expanding immigration into their own countries after seeing the example of the UK, IT IS MALICE.
Rationality, politeness, tolerance, charity (personal and intellectual), the benefit of the doubt, everything that came out of Overcoming Bias, less wrong, Scott Alexander, and the old Motte...
All of it is as discredited as Yudkowsky's research into AI alignment that went nowhere and has no relation to the associational intuitive AI we got.
Our foes, the enemies of the west, they aren't biased, they aren't irrational, they aren't operating under different assumptions...Whether invader or traitor, they are simply evil.
And any who press the matter and assess their psychology won't find a rational soul with some cognitive biases, but will find the most depraved blends of cowardice, sycophancy, depravity, resentment, perversion, inferiority complexes and irrational hatred...
This Indian professor did an excellent lecture into the complete depravity that dominates Indian culture and psychology
And while Pakistani, islamic, and --according to at least several well thought of books and authors-- Classical Jewish psychology are all different, yet we find similar depravities and monstrosities of mental patterns that rule in cultures dominated by clannishness, low IQ, Sexual Resentment, minority inferiority complexes, Low trust or some combination of these and other depravities.
In a word nearly all cultures that aren't an immediate product of European Civilization, or East Asian Civilizations that more or less consciously copied it.
The entire project of this space is wrong... It is not the case that the madnesses of the modern world are caused by common universal cognitive biases, or poorly thought of philosophies that can be overcome, the way a conscientious high IQ Protestant with a good education might stop and think more closely and avoid a mistake.
The problems of the world are created by biologically twisted and totally culturally poisoned souls, and far from the Nature vs. Nature debate, these two feed off and reinforce each other as across generations inbreeding and other depraved cultural sexual practices have created a biological stock that cannot but be depraved, and that depraved biological stock cannot but pervert and reproduce depraved cultures.
And communist and progressive cultures select out the most twisted and unfortunate of a noble cultures biological stock, the most frayed ends of its cultural values, and then weaves these weak and stained strands of an otherwise healthy sheet, to create twisted and depraved subcultures and values that can replicate their depravity through the previously healthy stock.
Underperforming minorities in otherwise high performing cultures they 'empower' to tear down the high performance; unprincipled and narcissistic workers they elevate to regulate dynamic industries; ordinary perverts they organize into degenerate sexualities and conspire to wield them against healthy families, and grant them access to healthy children; and invaders from more depraved cultures they conspire to let in.
All of this is not a mistake, it's not an unintended consequence, it's not a cognitive bias or faulty premise... it is intentional. It is motivated by perverse resentful psychology, by resentment, status lust, and even more base lusts.
Our enemies are not mistaken, they are evil. They are evil from the core of their biology, culture, values, psychology, and sociology.
10s of thousands of UK muslims saw, knew and participated in the horror, and their wives and family knew, and they said and did nothing.
And 10s of thousands of leftist UK government officials conspired to cover it up.
This has happened to hundreds of thousands of white girls, possibly as many as a million... not because of a failure of charity or tolerance or curiousity or to ascribe good motive... but because of a failure to simply identify evil. To categorically and ruthlessly declare enemies and vow hatred.
A complete and total failure to resort to violence, ethnic conflict, vendetta, rage, hatred, fury, illegality, and ruthlessness.
"Charity" is now a concept fully discredited.
And while one might try to protest that there's a difference between intellectual charity and charity to migrants or christian charity which has ever preached nothing but forgiveness to these unforgivable monsters... I don't think there is.
I think the idea of intellectual charity uses the word "charity" accurately. And is thus fully discredited.
If you had given your suspicion that this would happen, and described the 3rd world psychology that would perpetrate this or the progressive psychology that would allow it to happen, and willingly enable it... There is not a "Rationalist" or "Post-Rationalist" space that would not have censored you, called you "uncharitable", or argued that that is obviously not the case and no one could be so morally mistaken.
But the racist grandfathers, 14 year old boys, 4channers, White Nationalists, prison Nazis, they could have and did tell you INSTANTLY. They would, and did, predict exactly this and described exactly the 3rd world psychology that would commit it, and described exactly the perverse sexual acts that would be committed, and describe exactly the progressive/communist values that would cover for it, and described exactly the broken conservative, aging white boomer reaction to it, and the minority ethnic interests that would enable it and openly advocate for it.
And they would have said Nigger, Towelhead, Turd-people, Pajeet, Cuck, Faggot, Race-Traitor, kike, cunt, and all the rest... And this would have accurately and succinctly conveyed the depth of depravity, treason, and moral approprium under discussion.
And they would have never been allowed to say as much here, and there would have been no way to convey the underlying idea.
The Truth, and the actual reason it is true, could not be conveyed, in RATIONALIST spaces that claim to only value the truth... Because we don't value reason or the truth... We value politeness and discussion, and the truth has been allowed to go to hell because of it.
If any critical mass of people here or in other rationalist spaces actually valued the truth above politeness we would rationally immediately ditch all the speech norms of rationalist spaces and adopt those of 4Chan.
Where everyday you could have seen exactly this discussed, predicted, and parallels drawn to comparable things happening across the west.
But the Motte won't, because the Motte doesn't value the truth that highly, but rather values endless self justifying discussion for its own sake.
But to summarize all that in more honest and truthful language... The language of the future. The language of ACTUAL truth, rationality and honesty
TL;Dr
Hundreds of thousands of white girls have been raped in the UK, and are almost certainly being raped across the many countries of the west because you are faggots, cucks and race traitors who value you failed cuck discussion norms far more that the truth. Failed discussion norms taught to you by failed jews like Yudkowsky and Alexander who openly admit their ritualized cuckoldry and sexual depravity. In this you are a microcosm and exact continuation of the failed morality and intellectual norms that have led the west to this exact moment.
Charity is dead, she was a traitorous whore who could never have suffered enough.
Hatred alone is the truth, the light, and the way.
To give offense in and of itself is to drive towards the truth.
And that which cannot be said with the fury of an outrageous insult, that which does not wound its listener, and tear asunder all but the strongest social bonds and friendships, anything that can be """tolerated""" even if not agreed to, is invariably a lie, and is nothing worth.
Any light produced without heat is an illusion, a trick cast on the wall, a fire in a film that illuminates only what the director chooses and warms nothing. Real productive though, real productive discussion builds heat to intolerable levels and then combusts, burning away the lies in it's warming light, and injuring or killing the liars who crawled amongst their tools of darkness.
I wish that if instead of reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality or Rationality from Ai to Zombies whilst I was in school, that I had read the Turner Diaries or other far right ethnographic works
I will agree with you up to a point. Almost everyone in the West has long since abandoned the dispassionate search for truth. The problem being that truth is unkind. Most of the truth is unkind. The narrative denies that there can be bad cultures and that some should be at least reformulated into something civilized. It denies that talent exists, that not everyone is smart enough or capable of doing anything they want. It denies that some behavior should be condemned because it leads to terrible outcomes not just for individuals but for civilization as a whole.
I no longer believe in democracy because frankly it seems to lead directly to this rot. The credo of democratic politics is “your ignorance is equal to my knowledge.” The votes of people who actually know things are swamped by the votes of people who form opinions from Twitter, Bluesky, instagram or Facebook. It’s the ultimate in feels over reals, in which the key to getting into office is to lie convincingly. At least with a monarch you can teach someone to look to facts and listen to experts who have earned the right to have influence.
But you realise that this is exactly what the left says about you, right? It doesn't mean you have to retreat into pure relativism, but sooner or later two 'dispassionate searchers for truth' are going to run into the issue that both of them are interpreting the same facts differently. Or that they are both naturally, legitimately interested in certain true facts that uphold their particular hobby horse and less interested in doing a deep dive on facts that contradict it. And that's before you get into the chaos that erupts when one man's 'legitimate inference' becomes another's 'obvious delusion', as has happened to me many times in both directions.
Ultimately we have never disproved Descarte's assertion that the only thing you know 100% for sure is that you yourself exist, and we have never discovered how to dispassionately turn an 'is' into an 'ought'. Post-modernism survives because its skepticism is backed up by history: different societies and different subcultures have held very different things to be obvious facts and very different people to be 'experts who have earned the right to have influence'. And these judgements are ultimately affected consciously or unconsciously by the interests of those making them.
Truth seeking is good, but you can't do it dispassionately and so you are going to have to exercise official, ideology-driven judgement at some point. You're going to decide who's an 'expert' and who's merely highly-educated and credentialed. You're going to have to decide what's a fact, what's a controversial assertion backed up by insufficient evidence, and what's a lie. Doing that is good (again, I'm not a relativist) but you should be clear-eyed about what you're doing and you should be prepared to hold onto power while you do it.
I too am pro monarchy, not because you can teach them to listen to an expert but because you can't. Mostly, our kings and queens in the UK have been slightly thick, old-fashioned, hunting-and-shooting types who aren't particularly interested in what the weirdo with the sheepskin is saying. That's not always good, but it gets you through most of the 'you have be really clever to think something that stupid' crises we have today.
You can if and only if you agree on some values. If you want X to happen, then you 'ought' to take action Y. You need assumptions to have any truth at all (for the same reason you need axioms to have mathematics), and you need subjective values in order to rank possible future states and deem one of them better than the other.
The only problem here is that people are naive and rely on theory which only gets the first-degree consequences correct "I don't want birds to suffer, so I'm going to feed them", yeah but now there's more birds to feed, and more suffering if you stop giving them food (simple example)
In a naive way, that's true. But when has a successful post-modernistic society existed? As far as I know, the answer is "never". A culture which has a coherent set of values and beliefs, and strict social norms to avoid various bad spirals from occuring, will be successful. A culture which knows that no culture is more correct than any other ... Well, such a culture will probably destroy itself. And by its own logic, this is fine, for it's no better than what it replaces, right?
I disagree, but you need something similar. I don't subscribe to any ideology, but I do have my own preferences. Whoever thinks you can succeed in life by being completely neutral is simply wrong. Biases exist in the first place because they aid survival.
Anyway, I trust reality, by which I mean that if a culture does X and it's nice to live in said culture, then said culture should continue to do X. Japan has strict borders, and Japan is perhaps the most civilized population in the world, so no other country has the right to tell them to open their borders.
This happened because we assume that "expert" means "nice credentials", that "intelligent" means "educated", and because appearance is starting to have more value than substance (Real nerds tend to have worse social skills, but now even Tech has become a normie space in which connections and good verbal skills are king. In fact, "wokism" seems to correlate with verbal skills and social skills, but most great scientists have been sort of autistic and controversial)
Will write a longer reply later if I can manage, but for now:
Yes, that’s what I meant by saying that you can’t dispassionately go from is to ought. You have to insert some values of your own and then you’ve lost everyone who doesn’t share those values.
Yes. Any culture that is successful must rely on a set of agreed beliefs that cannot be proved from first principles. It’s a cult, in a good way. A shared delusion. AFAIK this is what post-modernism says also. And once a hostile outsider applies skepticism to those values and isn’t beheaded for their presumption, the whole edifice crumbles.
By idiology I mean a set of beliefs and values.
IMO it happened because genuine intelligence and knowledge gives more wiggle room for justifying your preferred delusions. I have known a lot of genuine experts. In my experience they were often much more confident about much stupider things than normies.
No pressure! Reply if you want and whenever you want
What I meant to say was "It's not just that we don't know how, it's that it's impossible". I don't subscribe to the idea that no humans have figured this all out yet, for I pretty much have. But the conclusion is that humans (myself included) are stupid. I believe that things work out because of human instincts and the laws of nature, and not because we actually know what we're doing.
I think this perspective comes from the modern belief that everything must be justified or proved in order to be correct. I simply don't impose such rules on myself (and reality itself doesn't either). What I want to convery here is that preferences and beliefs aren't "illusions" in the sense that they're false or fake, and that there's no unique, more "real" underlying reality to discover. I'm "calibrated" for the world through my DNA (darwinism), through a process which made us to adapt to reality itself in a sense, so I will simply trust this process.
Anyway, it seems that beliefs influence reality. That your confidence influences your success (and that this applies even if you're entirely alone). Even if a belief is false, it may influence reality and become true. In other words, a belief seems to be an act of creation, making it "real".
I do have those, but everyone must have them, or else they simply don't live very long (since they don't prioritize future states in which they are alive). Even the belief that beliefs are bad is a belief, so there's no easy way out.
A lot of highly educated people don't seem all that intelligent to me, they just seem good at memorizing things. That said, I'd prefer it if people simply stopped believing that they were smarter than nature (including their own nature). There's so many things about life which are unintuitiv, one of them is eustress, and not knowing about it has caused a lot of damage (helicopter parenting etc). But there's a lot more. Thing seem to go better when one is not so antagonistic towards existence, nature and oneself
Oh, sorry. I agree with you on most of this. In fact, it's basically what I wanted to say originally.
OP wrote that the West has abandoned "the dispassionate search for truth" and I wanted to say that such a search is impossible. You have to put something of yourself in, and that will colour what you get out. This is true at both a personal and a societal level. I differ slightly from you in that I do believe there is some objective reality in the moral dimension, some true "oughts"; God knows them, we don't, and we won't understand until he shows us personally. But that's not going to happen in this life so it's not super relevant to actual interactions between people.
I would call this the standard post-modernist worldview. It works fine for a confident person or a confident civilisation, but the problem is that it devolves when you have a second actor who doesn't share the majority of your beliefs. Since there is no "dispassionate search for truth" that will inevitably lead those people to the same place, it's not necessarily possible for A to justify their beliefs to B in a manner that B finds convincing. So you end up in a power struggle where both sides use the incentives available to them to bend the other to their perspective. Even in liberalism or post-modernism this occurs on the meta level - both sides must agree on the base principle of liberalism in order to agree to disagree on the concrete issue.
Again, I agree with much of this. But, if you will forgive the standard dig, I presume you aren't living in a cave wearing furs from something you killed. Which parts of our society are an improvement over nature and which are not is hugely contested: you have the degrowthers, the anti-vaxxers, the Liver King, the socialists, the anti-feminists, etc. all criticising different aspects of our society for not being an improvement over nature while fervently defending other parts.
Ah, I see! And "You have to put something of yourself in" is a great way to put it! I do think that there's an objective reality, but that it cannot be described or modeled. If I make a mental model of you, that model would reveal more about myself than it would reveal about you. As for oughts, there seems to be actions which bring better results than others. Any process which is not sustainable will eventually cease, so that which wishes to stay in existence must play by certain rules, or make sure not to step too much out of line for too long. I don't really believe in something like morality, but my personal preferences looks a lot like what people call morality, and finally, it would be bad taste of me if I attacked your moral beliefs since it wouldn't benefit you.
Is that so? I don't like post-modernists though. Do you think they understand any of these things? Average people who are post-modernists likely don't know about axiomatic systems or the incompleteness theorems. Human perception is very malleable, they got that much right, but they want reality to be malleable as well, and they think we can achieve this if we simply agree that we can. We could agree that people were equal, and that would largely succeed, but IQ test results would remain entirely unchanged.
Like spiritualists say, everything we need to be happy is already inside of us. We have incredible power over our own reality. We only really need to deal with objective reality enough that we can meet physical needs like nutrition and shelter, which is quite easy. But treating reality like it's malleable is just immaturity, for social methods like "If I just complain enough, I will get my way" only work on other people, they do not work on reality. And treating reality like fantasy is dangerous, it very quickly leads to ruin.
I don't think the issue is necessarily diversity of though, for that actually works well to the extent that everyone is self-sufficient. When people are "enough in themselves", it doesn't matter much if there's other people who also have their own worldview. It's only when people are incomplete that they need other people to be coherent enough that the sum of whoever is present exceeds one person who can live independently. Of course, shared language and such is highly useful, but the more mature and developed you are, the bigger distances you tend to be able to cope with (which is why the old internet used to have many wildly different people co-existing somewhat well, while the modern internet is intolerant of differences as disagreement immediately results in drama and hurt feelings)
But what OP meant was probably "People are now valuing feelings over correct information, and their mental defense mechanisms kick in when they encounter evidence that their precious beliefs aren't workable, and they get hostile towards you if you cause them to reflect on themselves or if you ask them questions which makes them comfortable" and I can only agree with this. What he said wasn't exactly true, but what he meant still carries a good point.
While this is true, you can increase the tolerance for differences in beliefs by about 10 times by focusing on terminal values. For instance, two groups might be in a conflict, both claiming "We're civilized, while you're uncivilized!" very well, but they're in agreement in this: Both groups prefer civilized behaviour to uncivilized behaviour. They merely need to learn how to communicate better to resolve this issue. The reason communicating (talking about things) can resolve conflicts in the first place is probably because most peoples terminal values are highly similar, or because it allows people to understand eachothers perspective in a way which they can respect (in other words, it doesn't conflict with their core values, as that would likely be irreconcilable). Mentally immature people get triggered and misunderstand others quite easily, over minor perceived differences which tend to not be differences at all (at least not as you get closer to terminal/core values)
I don't think they're honest, even if they don't realize it. They will likely criticize the aspects in which they are at the bottom rather than at the top (meaning that they just want more power). And to be honest, I might enjoy society better if I was in the top 1% myself, or if I felt more compatible with the modern society than I do now. But besides a bit of technology (Computers, virtual reality, dishwashers, washing machines, driers, ovens, fridges and freezers, medicine and the ability to communicate over long distances with voice, video and files) I don't really need any aspects of the modern society. The modern society fulfills my physical needs better, but not my psychological needs. I like civilized people more than uncivilized people, but civility now seems to be decreasing as society gets more modern. In any case, what's important to me is peoples actual character. I've recently read some of the guodian bamboo strips from about 500 BC, and they resonate better with my own values than modern ideologies do. So civility does not necessarily require modernity nor scientific thinking.
I wrote quite a lot here, but I think we agree on most of it?
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