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Notes -
Inferential Distance: a Prologue
Over the few weeks I've come a across multiple posts here that have left me wondering "are we looking at the same event?" or less charitably "WTF has this commentor been smoking?", and this has gotten me thinking about something that I've been meaning to do since we made the transition to the new site, and that is to start consolidating the the things I've written under this pseudonym and that are currently spread out over a decade of time, and half a dozen different websites/forums, into something more manageable. This is not that post, but it is something of a prelude.
I see a lot of posts here from ostensible right wingers lamenting the progressives' omnipresence and inevitable victory, and I'm not sure what to make of them because that is not what I see, or what I hear, when I talk to the actual human beings in my life. If anything it's the opposite. The progressives are running scared. For every year since 1972, that's for half a century now, Gallup has run a poll on institutional trust that asks people to what degree they expect the media, the government, academia, etc... to report facts "fully, accurately, and fairly". The available answers are; a Great deal, a Fair amount, Not very much, and Not at all. Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%. This has been characterized by the talking heads, and many rationalists as "a crisis of sense making" but I don't really see it that way. Sounds more like healthy skepticism if you ask me.
Those that are familiar with me from my time on LessWrong and /r/SSC may recall that the concept of "inferential distance" has always been something of a hobby horse of mine, and I think this issue in particular illustrates why. You see. there is a lot talk here on theMotte about progressives "controlling the narrative", "twitter being the wellspring of culture", "normies doing whatever the tv tells them", that to me seems absurd, but in light of Gallup's results makes a certain amount of sense. I don't think it's any secret that this forum, as a splinter faction of the rationalist movement skews wealthy, secular, cosmopolitan, college-educated, and frankly Democrat. While I could be wrong, I would be willing to bet that there are way more fans of Cumtown here than there are fans of Rush Limbaugh or Tucker Carlson. And with that in mind I think the fact that trust in the media seems to break pretty cleanly along class and partisan lines (70% of Democrats having a fair amount of trust or greater in the media vs less than 14% of Republicans) explains a lot.
You expect people to believe what you see on the news because that's normal where you're from.
I expect everyone to roll their eyes at the news because that's normal where I'm from.
...and this points to the first of many fundamental disconnects.
You say 'this forum, as a splinter faction of the rationalist movement skews wealthy, secular, cosmopolitan, college-educated, and frankly Democrat' but also 'there is a lot of talk here on the motte about progressives controlling the narrative' and 'ostensible right wingers lamenting the progressives' omnipresence and inevitable victory'.
What if this forum just isn't terribly Democratic, even though it might be wealthy, secular, cosmopolitan and well-educated? That's why people complain so much about progressives. They're not just ostensible rightists, they're rightists. Just look at this week - we have:
Criticism of male circumcision
Criticism of Fetterman, a dem candidate as well as Biden somewhat
Criticism of reducing meritocracy in special forces
Fairly anodyne Canadian demographic predictions
Mild criticism of some drama in minecraft modding where leftists are turfing out a vaguely rightist/anti-left modder
Mild comparison between Griner and Jan 6 as political prisoners
Mild suggestion that some/many gays would be happier in a heterosexual lifestyle
Anodyne post about AI
FcFromSSC suplexing rationalism and Scott's mistake theory, to great applause
Discussion of weaponization of the FBI against the left in the past and the right today
Discussion of Kanye's cancellation, with the comments going into what probably would be called anti-semitism by the people who are calling Kanye anti-semitic.
Now I'm distilling long posts into short summaries, so a great deal of nuance is lost. But I think we can conclude that this forum is not Democratic. There's nothing clearly pro-Democratic that I can see at the top level.
This forum is an offshoot of rationalism but it's a pretty distant offshoot. Yud-Scott-motte and now motte.org... And let's not forget there were a fair few rightists back at the start on lesswrong, the whole hbd and neoreaction crowd had some presence there.
In the spirit of Tulsi Gabbard leaving the Democratic Party because her pro-meritocracy, anti-war, vaguely anti-PC views weren't really tolerated there, I think we should admit that this isn't an anti-PC Democratic forum, a forum for observing the culture war from an ivory tower, or a 'gray tribe' forum (how could it be given the level of anti-crypto sentiment, given gray tribe per Scott is supposed to be nerdy, tech-savvy libertarians). I think this is a rightist forum. Maybe that's too close to consensus building, I don't know. Is it wrong to observe a tendency?
It's probably worth noting that the people who make a habit of publicly sneering at rationalism have been accusing Yud-Scott-motte and now motte.org of being rightists, or at least crytpo-rightists, for years. The "rationalists" are furthermore in many ways the cultural inheritors of the cypherpunks--the community is overwhelmingly IT-adjacent by profession, or was last time we checked. The cypherpunk culture, in turn, was heavily libertarian, which is not the same as "rightist" even though libertarians in U.S. politics tend to get lumped in with Republicans more often than Democrats. The meme of libertarians who want gay marijuana farmers defending their private crops with automatic weapons is a much better description of the "tendencies" I see in this space than "rightist."
By curating a space where people can test their ideas in a broad Overton window, I do think we tend to encourage the discussion of political heresies, and since our U.S. cultural institutions are dominated by the left and/or the extreme left, the discussions here tend to be about things the left and/or extreme left would prefer to taboo--for the simple reason that other things can be discussed elsewhere, but many of these things can not. And I've gotten many great responses to my Fetterman thread that are clearly not pro-Republican, and I've gotten clear leftist pushback on the "groomer" discussion, too. That's a long way from what I see on genuinely "rightist" spaces.
Would a good metric be: how do people react to new accounts with no credibility posting shitty hard rightist takes, how do people respond to new accounts with no credibility posting shitty hard leftist takes?
The rightist takes tend to get "Nice try sneerclub." They get viewed as trolls trying to bait mottizens into saying something regrettable. "Yeah sure two day old account, you were just wondering about the holocaust/trans kids/armed rebellion against the state in favor of Christian Nationalism."
The leftist takes tends to just get downvoted to oblivion.
I'm not sure if you're saying that means anything, and I'm not sure it actually means anything either.
We're not going to see too many fake-left trolls because the right doesn't gain anything from saying "that forum is infested with leftists"--if they wanted to find a forum infested with leftists there are so many places they could go and they won't need to fake anything to do it. Also, regardless of whether they're sincere or not, the right has to support free speech right now, so they're probably not going to try to shut down a forum for being leftist.
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