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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Is the progressive left developing it's own form of Holocaust denial?

I came across this video on Twitter where an ITV presenter informs us that:

"Six million people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the second world war, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".

This reminded me of something similar I saw last year, where then Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf talked for several minutes about the victims of the Holocaust without mentioning the...distinguishing ethnicity of who exactly was most targeted.

The above examples might just be two cases of human error, although I find it hard to imagine how such an oversight could have taken place in the ITV situation. And while this sort of thing stands out less in tweet format, where you don't have many characters to begin with, it still seems strange that Angela Rayner can't find space to mention Jewish victims when Keir Starmer manages to.

Does this point to the emergence of a longer term trend? Despite proportionally being the victims of most hate crimes, Jews are too pale and too successful for the left to care about advocating for (unless it's for the purpose of making dubious claims of fascist sympathies against right-wingers). Given that for many on the progressive left being anti-Nazi is the primary sources of their moral legitimacy, I do wonder if many of them feel the need to find more sympathetic victims of the Holocaust whose future wellbeing they can claim to be the only reliable safe-guarders of.

With the broad racial nature of the progressive coalition, it's also impossible to rule out straightforward antisemitism from many of the far-left's more diverse members. I wouldn't be surprised if the ITV staff member responsible for writing the script was from a Muslim background.

It is of course impossible to divorce this issue from Israel. Despite strenuous claims that anti-Zionism != anti-Semitism (which can technically be true), I imagine that even some committed progressives struggle with the cognitive dissonance of claiming to care about Jewish well-being while simultaneously advocating for the massacring of 50% of their remaining global population. It could well be just too tempting to give up this fig-leaf and instead aim to eventually shift the perception of Jews towards never having been serious victims of oppression in the first place. This comes with the bonus of being able to credibly claim that Israel is the modern day equivalent to Nazi Germany.

Is there something there? Or am I reading too much into a handful of small cases?

ETA: 15 upvotes and 13 downvotes. This is most likely my most polarising post in the short time I've been active here. I wonder what that says.

Strong War on Christmas vibes- conservatives complain "the cashier didn't adequately say the thing, there's a War on Christmas" while Christmas continues to grows bigger than ever in the culture. I was driving in the South last year and, I kid you not, I saw a billboard off a rural highway that said I miss hearing you say 'Merry Christmas' - Jesus.

How many people of influence have bent the knee to Jewish remembrance in the past couple days, but to retain power you need to find the people who don't correctly participate in the civic ritual and publicly make an example of them, right? That's how it works.

As a Holocaust Denier I don't see evidence of Holocaust denial on the Left, just public punishment for non-compliance to the small number of people who make the mistake of disrespecting the Holiday.

The entire consideration of Gentiles as Holocaust victims at all has been a very fluid matter; for a time it was claimed that there were 11 million victims in the Holocaust, 5 million Gentiles and 6 million Jews. But the figure of 5 million Gentiles being killed in the Holocaust was a number totally fabricated by Holocaust studies advocate Simon Wiesenthal. According to people close to him, he invented the number in order to manipulate Gentiles into having more stake in the Holocaust narrative.

Incidentally, the article is another attempted dressing-down of Sean Spicer for not correctly acknowledging Jewish victims:

It’s a statement that shows up regularly in declarations about the Nazi era. It was implied in a Facebook post by the Israel Defense Forces’ spokesperson’s unit last week marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And it was asserted in an article shared by the Trump White House in defense of its controversial Holocaust statement the same day omitting references to the 6 million Jewish victims.

It is, however, a number without any scholarly basis.

Indeed, say those close to the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, its progenitor, it is a number that was intended to increase sympathy for Jewish suffering but which now is more often used to obscure it.

The White House statement sent waves of dismay through the Jewish community, including among groups that have been supportive of President Donald Trump.

By mentioning the “victims, survivors, [and] heroes of the Holocaust” without mentioning the Jews, said a host of Jewish organizations, the January 27 statement risked playing into the hands of the European right, which includes factions that seek to diminish the centrality of the Jewish genocide to the carnage of World War II.

In defending the omission of Jews from the statement, a White House spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, sent CNN a link to a 2015 Huffington Post-UK piece titled “The Holocaust’s Forgotten Victims: The 5 Million Non-Jewish People Killed By The Nazis.”

The “5 million” has driven Holocaust historians to distraction ever since Wiesenthal started to peddle it in the 1970s. Wiesenthal told the Washington Post in 1979, “I have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about 6 million Jewish dead, but rather about 11 million civilians dead, including 6 million Jews.”

...

Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims – 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.

“I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in an interview Tuesday. “He said, ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’”

Bauer and other historians who knew Wiesenthal said the Nazi hunter told them that he chose the 5 million number carefully: He wanted a number large enough to attract the attention of non-Jews who might not otherwise care about Jewish suffering, but not larger than the actual number of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 6 million.

It caught on: President Jimmy Carter, issuing the executive order that would establish the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, referred to the “11 million victims of the Holocaust.”

Nowadays, it is not fashionable to emphasize Gentile victims in the Holocaust, now that the "5 million" figure is acknowledged to have just been a symbolic propaganda figure intended to manipulate Gentiles into having more stake in the Holocaust narrative.

Of the 6 million Jews allegedly killed in the Holocaust, it is claimed that about half of that figure (approximately 3 million, give or take) were killed by being tricked into entering shower rooms that were actually gas chambers in disguise. It is not claimed any significant number of Gentiles were killed in these gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Likewise, the alleged "Final Solution" which purportedly ordered the extermination of the Jews is a cornerstone of the Holocaust narrative.

Given that these particularities of the Holocaust, and which define it really, are said to only have been applied to Jews it doesn't really make sense to include Gentiles as being victims of the "Holocaust" as such, and the current meta is more around emphasizing the Holocaust as a Jewish experience. But it should be noted that it was the Jews themselves who originally emphasized Gentile victims of the Holocaust in order to influence their perception of the narrative.

Consider also the other side of the coin:

As I've posted before, it may be possible that the Nazi regime could lose those qualities of evil we've assigned to it from history, if political realignments continue as extrapolated. After all, for those pro-Israeli Jews being criticized, one would have to look at what happened in the Gaza War, and perhaps conclude that "this is what 'securing a future for your people' looks like."

Also, while it's just one isolated post, I did find this on Bluesky today.

I actually thought about that very idea before, I'm intrigued to read that a confluence of interests between antisemites and Zionists was hypothetically conceived. It seems logical that you'd want a place you could send Jews if you didn't like them that much.

But raw ethnic antisemitism just doesn't make logical sense to me, if you really hate Jews I presume you'd consider the Holocaust a great achievement, but antisemites deny it happened, and if you think Jewish presence in your country creates a disloyal class, presumably you'd want somewhere to banish them, but antisemites hate even the concept of a Jewish state. Frankly, I've never been persuaded from my core assumption that hardcore antisemitism is just people looking for a scapegoat to pin their ingroup's problems on the outgroup, and if the scapegoat goes away the problems can no longer be blamed on it.

But also, honestly, I don't know that the far-right actually supports Israel in large numbers, although I'm sure it happens. It seems to me that far-rightists who hate Jews tend to really despise the state of Israel for similar reasons to the left, and believe that any support for the Israelis in the West is due to "Jewish control of the media."

Possibly the bluesky poster is saying someone like Trump is far right, but I consider the idea that the firmly pro-Israel part of the right is either far-right or anti-semitic to be laughable. These are the most philosemitic gentiles who have ever existed on the face of the earth, they brag about how much they love Jews and how much they want Jews to like them.

It seems to me that far-rightists who hate Jews tend to really despise the state of Israel for similar reasons to the left, and believe that any support for the Israelis in the West is due to "Jewish control of the media."

IRL antisemites giving a take on the war in Gaza will like use the term 'sand nigger' and talk about how the Gazans are all terrorists.

if you really hate Jews I presume you'd consider the Holocaust a great achievement

It's very possible to be a racist without also supporting mass murder. Maybe someone doesn't want to live around a certain race, or believes races in general should have their own nations, but isn't an insane mass murderer.

You've missed the second part of what I said: I said that antisemites often both deny the Holocaust and despise the concept of a Jewish state. If you "believe races in general should have their own nations", but not the Jews, and also don't want to live around them, essentially what you're saying is that the Jews should go away, but there's not any place on earth you can put them... well, that rather sounds like the public position of the Nazi party before the Holocaust. The final solution was final because they decided the other solutions wouldn't work to get rid of the Jews they despised. If someone doesn't want to live around Jews, hates the concept of a Jewish state, and despises mass murder, it rather prompts the question of what exactly they want Jewish people to do.

Which brings me back to my point: the crux of antisemitism isn't about trying to do something with Jews, even though that can spiral out of control -- it's about finding a scapegoat for the ingroup's problems. "Our society would be grand and peaceful and glorious, were it not for those dastardly Jews!" is a refrain heard from Toledo to Berlin to Little Rock; somehow the cause of good German Aryans white liberals being liberal isn't white people's culture, but the Jews, because good German Aryans white people are, of course, the master race with protagonist energy, they've just been duped by the Jews and their damn verbal intelligence. It lets people rectify the purity of the ingroup, by blaming all its problems on the outgroup. But it also says some pretty pathetic things about the ingroup, if you think about it.

I get why Jews make an easy scapegoat -- they do have a strong sense of ingroup-loyalty, they do have a lot of success in fields requiring high verbal fluency, and they do have a unique, even odd, culture, which makes them easily distrusted, especially in pre-modern societies that never prized pluralism. But I think the error of the Zionists who claimed antisemites would be on their side is they thought the point of antisemitism was about trying to not live near Jews or wanting an ethnostate -- in fact the very things you're saying -- rather than getting really, really angry at Jews for problems they didn't actually cause, because they're an easy scapegoat.

if you really hate Jews I presume you'd consider the Holocaust a great achievement, but antisemites deny it happened,

This is because a lot of anti-semitism discourse is not really about the jews. Most anti-semites have never met a jew. There are some who just look for someone, anyone, to hate, but I think a lot of rightwingers are "antisemitic" because of the anti-semitism discourse. There is this line of argument, which Ill summarise as "If society could do this, it could do the holocaust if it wanted. As a jew, I feel threatened by this.", which is frequently deployed against them, where the "this" includes things they consider central to a functional society. That gets them really mad, and thats basically it. You dont even need actual jews to make this argument, the lefties will do it for them.

The idea that Trump would be an anti-semite when his daughter converted to Judaism to marry into an Orthodox Jewish family is insane to me.

….if you think Jewish presence in your country creates a disloyal class, presumably you'd want somewhere to banish them, but antisemites hate even the concept of a Jewish state.

I mean, interwar Poland (largest Jewish population in Europe, second largest in the world, ~20% of world Jews) was pretty enthusiastic about Jews emigrating en masse to, sure, Palestine, why not.

That’s fair, and good context — my point is mostly about modern-day antisemitism of the kind Jewish people seem to be worried about, where I’ve rarely seen this; I’ve seen a lot of people complain about “New York Jews” but few, if any, who make such complaints and then talk about they should all go to Israel. It seems more like aimless, grumpy complaints, or like sour grapes, like I’ve said, rather than something thought out.

I'm somewhat surprised I haven't come across memes responding to pictures of destruction in Gaza with pictures of Berlin in 1945 with the caption "What did you think punching Nazis looked like?" But I have a personal policy of not directly engaging with meme warfare ("memefare"?), and maybe this has already happened somewhere I'm not following.

It's hard to make Hamas looks like Nazis. People have a list of things they associate with the Nazis, usually it's something like: discipline, uniforms, industrialized cruelty, progressivism, scientific discrimination. Religious fanatics led by rich and cynical manipulators don't look like that at all.

I mean, there was that whole "Hitler 2" storefront in Gaza. That was a thing.

Does this make Indians Nazis as well? https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/tasteless-but-true-made-in-india-hitler-ice-cream-cafe/story-C6usCqTUqv4zAeU30b0GVM.html

Now I want to learn what karak mejaz is.

I think that the defence and moral justification of what Israel has done in Gaza is an extremely bad thing for the jews in the long term for these (and other) reasons. Setting a precedent that inconvenient minorities can just be liquidated and murdered to acquire more living space for your ethnicity is not, in my opinion, going to be particularly pleasant for the diaspora - especially when you look at how quickly antisemitism is rising around the world. Most people agreed with "Never again" as a general principle, but if it turns out that it just meant "Never again to us, we can do it to others" a lot of that support is going to evaporate, and fast.

Looking on from a European perspective, I always found it curious how much the American narrative around the Nazis focussed on the Holocaust to the exclusion of everything else. In Germany's own self-flagellating historiography (at least the version of it delivered in the Eastern states) it maybe is assigned something on the order of 50% of the total weight of sin, with the rest being split between assorted other internal oppression, warmongering, the eastward expansion in search of Lebensraum, and the attendant scouring of Slavs; and in Russia, the focus is naturally overwhelmingly on expansionist conquest and the extermination of their own. That's also why in the context of the Ukraine war, "Zelenskiy is Jewish" looks like a slam dunk argument against "Ukrainian Nazis" to listeners living in the American memespace, but like a barely relevant piece of trivia to those living in the Russian one.

I see too much of an interlocking web of conflicting interests in place in Europe to enable a rehabilitation of the Nazis anytime soon - even in the maximalist scenario of both "Israel is evil" and "killing Soviets is good" catching on, there is still the circumstance that Poland (America's new protégé in the EU) relies on the Nazi invasion of itself for its national myth-building and as a cudgel to keep German interests in check when they are at odds with its own, and the meme is also a very reliable tool against nativist-antiglobalist parties that both are easily associated with the Nazis and a constant threat to ruling class objectives.

I think it goes like this: during the war and after the war, there was already a consensus that Hitler represented a historical form of evil, but during that period the main thing he was considered evil for was warmongering, ie. starting it, all the flagrant invasions, all the bodies (military and civilian) caused by the war, the industrial efficiency of the war and so on. For a lot of countries, of course, the most raw memories were related to German occupation itself and its depredations, or German bombings, or so on. However, after the war, it was the Soviets who staked a stronger claim to this narrative due to bearing the yeoman's burden for fighting the war.

The West soon started to find the focus on the war itself sort of problematic, not only due to the Soviet narrative but the necessity of getting the West German war machine back in order and finding places from former Nazis in the said war machine, getting rid of pacifist tendencies the war narrative was creating etc. This particularly meant America, which hadn't had the experience of German occupation on its own territory.

Thus, in the new narrative, a particular facet of the war - terror against civilians, the Holocaust - took a major role, with the war being cast in terms of democracy and genocide. This, for instance, allowed a comparison of Soviets and Germans as totalitarian states, since Soviets were also associated with persecution, killing and camps - and it actually facilitated the integration of Germany into the military apparatus of the West, since it focused on one particular sin that Germany could repent from vigorously through reparations, while the idea of "good Wehrmacht, bad SS" in terms of the Holocaust (later to be challenged, sure) meant that sufficiently non-Holocaust-contacted German personnel, and some whitewashed Holocaust-connected ones as well, could be utilized.

The Russian WW2 narrative, meanwhile, as said, continues to focus particularly on "the war itself" and the atrocities committed by Germans on all Soviet citizens, implicitly cast as Russians, which means that references to Zelenskyy being Jewish and so on do not really answer this narrative mcuh at all.

The Russian WW2 narrative, meanwhile, as said, continues to focus particularly on "the war itself" and the atrocities committed by Germans on all Soviet citizens

Ironic, because the red army was all about committing atrocities on civilians.

It's not particularly expectional about nations to focus more on atrocities committed by others on them than on atrocities they've committed on others.

I do wonder if many of them feel the need to find more sympathetic victims of the Holocaust whose future wellbeing they can claim to be the only reliable safe-guarders of.

These would be the gypsies(brown and widely hated), which progressives don’t seem to be exactly rushing to emphasize the role of. So I think this is just about anti-Israel awkwardness.

Because we are missing the objective of the Holocaust Remembrance. It was never about remembering the Jews, it was about depoliticizing and deracialise European cultures, imprinting self-hate and leftists narrative control of reality. The moment the Jews became outmoded for several reasons (Israel, too European-like, whatever) Holocaust Remembrance will shift to gays, trans,gypsies or actual communists.

Makes perfect sense as the reasons we actually tell the story of the holocaust generally don’t have anything to do specifically with Jews or Judaism.

Firstly, it’s a moralizing myth casting the Nazis as a secular Satan who must be stood against at all costs. It casts the allies (and NATO which grew out of the non-Soviet part of the alliance) as heroes who beat back an evil, expansionist, and genocidal regime. Now the point of this is to set certain international norms and standards. You can’t be with the good guys and do Nazi things. Thou shalt not invade. Thou shalt not make prison camps. Thou shalt not ethnically cleanse. Thou shalt not genocide. Thou shalt not think more highly of your own civilization, race or religion than anyone else’s. It’s a new religion in essence, to replace the moral system that Christendom used to provide before the First World War. Antifascism was the religion of the post war era.

Second, it provided an opportunity to sell alignment with NATO to third world countries. We saved Europe. We defeated people who invaded France and Poland. We liberated the continent. We are strong enough to protect you if you ally with us against the Soviets. This is why the Soviets end up airbrushed out of the picture. We almost immediately started a Cold War with the USSR and her allies. Telling southeast Asian people to side with us sounds a lot less impressive when it turns out that the Soviets did a fair bit of the liberating and at much greater cost.

Third, it forced through a lot of changes that liberals wanted. A turn toward internationalism with the UN leading the way. The ascendancy of cultural relativism where it’s now forbidden to suggest that some ways of doing things are better than others. The beginnings of globalization and the transition to thinking of countries as economic development zones rather than places with a culture and people who belong there and have a right to sovereignty. It meant a lot of rules to formalize these changes and therefore more control over people.

Second, it provided an opportunity to sell alignment with NATO to third world countries.

The Soviet Union relied on the anti-Nazi mythos to legitimise the post-war regime domestically even more than the West did.

But the anti-Nazi mythos didn't really work in the post-colonial third world - Germany lost its colonies after WW1 and Italy was about as effective at imperialism as you would expect a bunch of Italians to be, so essentially almost all of Africa and large parts of Asia were former colonies of western Allies, who could credibly claim that for them WW2 meant being dragged into someone else's war against their will.

Telling southeast Asian people to side with us sounds a lot less impressive when it turns out that the Soviets did a fair bit of the liberating and at much greater cost.

I think people in southeast Asia care a lot more about their liberation from Japanese occupation then anything going on in Europe. WW2 wasn't just a European war.

tbh it’s just pathetic that the Japanese blew their potential goodwill with anti-colonial Southeast Asians as badly as they did. They had every opportunity to back “freedom fighters” a la Reagan inviting mujahideen to the White House; the stars were perfectly aligned for them to portray themselves as stalwart supporters of liberty and self-determination against the evil white oppressors, aaaand … they ended up being even more reviled than the Western colonial powers to this day 🤦‍♂️

At least the (non-KMT) Taiwanese still generally look back fondly on the Japanese colonial era.

The stars were perfectly aligned for them to portray themselves as stalwart supporters of liberty and self-determination against the evil white oppressors,

With what resources? After FDR's sneak attack on Japan's oil supply, Japan could barely fight to end the chaos in China, let alone send aid abroad to rebels, which were considered the enemy of the European colonial powers (and in the Phillipines the US), but also the US which was allied with them.

As the US showed after it declared war on Japan, it considered any ship flying non-Allied colours to be legitimate target, which leads me to believe that ships carrying aid to rebels would be sunk.

After the Pacific War began, the aformentioned Unrestricted Submarine Warfare meant that supplies were lost to the sea, thus creating a general deficit of goods.

The equivalent of Reagen inviting the Mujahadeen did occur, but only in late 1943. Perhaps you don't consider that conference to be similar or perhaps you were ignorant of it.

At least the (non-KMT) Taiwanese still generally look back fondly on the Japanese colonial era.

Or maybe the US backed the most anti-Japanese faction which then portrayed the Japanese poorly as to make their (most often poor) governance seem reasonable.

This is certainly the case in South Korea, where the Allied influence was the strongest: Japan brought literacy and industry, but the South Korean narrative literally inverts facts that instead Japanese rule improving the Hangul, it attempted to stamp it out.

It is easy to convince a population to hate another country, if instead of seeking co-operation and cultural exchange, you enact as strict a censorship of foreign culture and punish even [professors](https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20191009153231491 for underming the regimes narrative, while distorting history in textbooks.

South Koreans are apperently withheld the truth about Japan's contribution to public education in the Korean language and improvements to Hangul, instead they are taught that the Korean language suffered. Queer sentiment in light of English language infestation the American rule brought, yet for which the South Korean government alters history to defend.

We almost immediately started a Cold War with the USSR and her allies.

We handed over half of Europe to the USSR to administrate because we trusted them so much, going so far as to gerrymander half of Berlin into an exclave 100 miles deep in the Soviet zone because what tactical and logistical problems could possibly come of that?

We then reduced our military force in Europe from 12M to 1.5M men in the space of 2 years, obviously not because that's a great way to prepare for a new conflict, but because we were dumb enough to believe the Soviets didn't want more conflict either. Stalin, on the other hand, was already making plans for a unified Soviet Germany in 1945, though it wasn't until their Berlin Blockade that the plans became too obvious to handwave away.

I sometimes wonder just how much William Bullitt exaggerated his posthumous quotation of FDR:

"I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not and that he doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."

That seems like it almost has to be slander, right? Even if it's consistent with US policy, there's no way FDR could have been that naive in his beliefs? But I guess if someone could today think the US started the Cold War, with the benefit of hindsight, it's at least conceivable that FDR was legitimately equally foolish about his expectations for the future.

the Soviets did a fair bit of the liberating and at much greater cost.

The Soviets' idea of "liberating" Poland, a country they originally invaded as part of their secret pact with Nazi Germany, was to halt their forces during the Warsaw Uprising to give the Nazis a chance to beat down on the Polish first. The use of the word "liberating" to describe strategy like that is utter nonsense.

Humiliate the old regime and allowing a new one to root itself in place. The Japanese killed millions here in Asia, with two branches of my family snuffed out directly, but after a few apologies the Japanese moved along and got on with their own lives, letting the remembrance be for the smackdown they received for being such dicks as opposed to grovelling for eternal forgiveness. In turn the Japanese are able to adapt as the situation changes and consider abandoning pacifism in the face of Chinese militarism and ignore complaints from activists seeking to use Japan as a punching bag. I extract penance from the Japanese by not paying for my JAV, which I'm sure my ancestors smile upon me for.

"Six million people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the second world war, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".

"Millions of others" - other than what? Other than the 6 million jews referrred to in the first part of the sentence. This is a statement that only makes sense precicely because the speaker is not a holocaust denier and thinks it goes without saying that the 6 million refers to the jewish victims and then on top of that there were "millions of others" who were instead killed for being "Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".

That's just how people talk. It doesn't reflect anything besides the fact that the sensitive nature of the subject matter means some people on Twitter are combing through statements like these in order to complain because someone said "six million" instead of "six million jews". Similarly with the others, when someone says "all those who were murdered just for being who they were" it's because she wants to emphasize that aspect of the motive, not because she doesn't think jews were targeted.

That's just how people talk.

Conversationally, sure, but news broadcasts that are going to be seen by millions are carefully scripted beforehand. Substituting the word "Jews" with the the vaguer category of "people" is a deliberate choice that's quite hard to find a good reason for (what would they even gain by being vague about this?) and also one that would have been authorised by a separate person before going on air.

I don't think this is a huge scandal or anything like that, nor do I think the median leftist is going to start claiming tomorrow that no Jews were targeted by the Nazis. But larger trends start with small steps, and I'm interested if that's what we're seeing.

but news broadcasts that are going to be seen by millions are carefully scripted beforehand

I think you may be underestimating the extent to which everything in the world is the result of duct tape and improvisation, and that most things are done by people who do lots of things and thus didn't spend as much time as you might think.

I haven’t yet seen any serious attempts at Holocaust denial from the left, but on Reddit I did notice a sharp increase in the “Oy vey! Remember the Six Gorillion!” type of cracks whenever Israel tried to invoke the Holocaust as justification for the Gaza war. It was pretty shocking to me, because that type of thing would have immediately gotten you ridiculed and hard-banned on Reddit just a few years ago.

TBH overeager Israeli media and figures has caused them huge amounts of credibility damage. Reddit has noticed, lots of normies have gotten markedly more anti-Israeli and that does bring you closer to anti-Semitism.

Jerusalem Post: Despite nearly starving the hostages, Hamas used special techniques to make them look healthier and more energetic.

Don't believe your lying eyes - they're using special techniques! https://x.com/Jerusalem_Post/status/1883574178407915916

Then there was the 'babies incinerated in ovens' story which doesn't seem to be real.

And then there was a government minister calling for sodomizing Hamas prisoners as part of a 'we can do anything to them' torture policy on a live, recorded debate on the protests against soldiers being charged with rape.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/

I can see how normal human beings would get really angry in a bitter war and do such things (let alone lying/justifying such things), yet it's no good when pro-Israeli voices turn around and say 'israel is the great bulwark of liberal democracy in the Middle East and you need to stand with us (give us material and diplomatic support) and share in our overflowing moral superiority.' This kind of behaviour inspires reflexive distrust in many.

Jerusalem Post: Despite nearly starving the hostages, Hamas used special techniques to make them look healthier and more energetic.

Now that people can clearly see a modern-day manifestation of a very particular modus operandi- By way of deception you shall engage in war, it is worth revisiting WWII wartime propaganda as well. Given the stuff they've blatantly lied about in front of our own eyes, imagine the stories that would have been told during WWII...

That was an actual concentration camp where at a minimum tens of thousands of people were murdered. I think we can forgive one inmate for not counting them properly.

After Soviet investigators conquered the camp, they claimed 2 million were killed there between 7 gas chambers. Now today it's "tens of thousands" (not a minimum, by the way) who mostly died of disease and poor hygienic conditions. The gas chambers at Majdanek were a hoax, that newspaper article about 500,000 children being lured into gas chambers with candy and chocolate has no basis in reality whatsoever. It was wartime atrocity propaganda, only one example of a deluge that has been dumped onto the West, a psychological warfare campaign that didn't end with the war itself.

I think that we're basically agreed in principle, both of us think that the 'because Germany exterminated a few million Jews it follows that nobody of European heritage can ever be allowed to have nationalist or racialist ideology or enjoy a homogenous country' is ridiculous.

But you attack it on the basis of 'Germany didn't actually exterminate that many Jews and there were extenuating circumstances' and I prefer 'even though Germany exterminated many Jews it is still fine to attack mass immigration and anti-racist ideology, nor does it follow that we must treasure and cherish Israel no matter how much of a mess they make'. You get bogged down in the details of death camp logistics 80 years ago. Who cares? The past is the past, the present is more important. Israel and the whole never-again lobby are trying to borrow moral rectitude from the bank of history to persuade and silence people. Instead of arguing with them over the documentation of the loan (an inherently uphill battle), we should close the bank. You shouldn't get away with things just because your ancestors had a bad time, that doesn't give you a free hand to harm my interests in the present. If we bomb Algeria because of the Barbary slave trade the Arabs aren't going to say 'fair point we deserve it', they understand this crucial point and fought France bitterly over Algeria. They didn't care if they were in the right or not, let the safety of the people be the highest law.

And it seems fundamentally implausible that a powerful country like Germany that could fight three global empires simultaneously (while constantly emphasising that Judeo-Bolsheviks were behind their foes) would be unable or unwilling to eradicate Jews in conquered territories. They wiped out tens of millions of armed and trained soldiers, a few million civilians was well within Germany's abilities. And implicitly your arguments imply that 'if Germany did exterminate those Jews then the current stance of various Jews in the media/anti-racist/Zionist genres is justified and never-again would hold'.

Who cares? The past is the past, the present is more important.

I don't necessarily think "he who controls the past controls the present, he who controls the present controls the future" is a hard and fast rule, but a lot of people care about that thing that happened 80 years ago. Look at OP, he cares so much he is on guard for anybody who doesn't even pay homage to it correctly. There is a growing body of censorship laws in Europe, and censorship of Holocaust Revisionism was and continues to be a top priority of the usual suspect lobbying for internet censorship. These groups themselves regard Holocaust Denial as a huge threat which would have catastrophic consequences if it proliferated.

So the "Who cares?" thing just doesn't do it for me because clearly people care about it very much. Everyone does. Denying the existence of gas chambers disguised as shower rooms is one of the biggest possible taboos in this day in age.

There are a lot of things that happened in the past which have absolutely no salience in the United States today, like the Holodomar. The Holocaust is important because it's a present-day mythology with a lot of political and cultural power.

Revisionism is a historical critique, which means it focuses on a lot of minutiae such as documentary evidence and interpreting the probability of the claims of the Holocaust narrative. But that's just a means to an end- the end being to undermine the mythology that rules over us. Look at how atheists used scientific and technical arguments to undermine Christianity, nobody can doubt the critical effectiveness of bringing a scientific critique to a myth body that fundamentally makes impossible claims.

And implicitly your arguments imply that 'if Germany did exterminate those Jews then the current stance of various Jews in the media/anti-racist/Zionist genres is justified and never-again would hold'.

This could be reversed, the Jews in the media who say that the proliferation of Holocaust denial would be an existential threat to Jews are also admitting the truth is highly threatening to their position. So the "who cares?" rings hollow when so many people care very much and consider it relevant for maintaining their station.

And it seems fundamentally implausible that a powerful country like Germany that could fight three global empires simultaneously (while constantly emphasising that Judeo-Bolsheviks were behind their foes) would be unable or unwilling to eradicate Jews in conquered territories.

And that is not the claim of the Holocaust, the Holocaust is the claim that millions of Jews were brought to 5 "extermination camps" where they were tricked into walking into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower. The majority of the victims were allegedly buried, and then months later unburied and all cremated on makeshift open-air pyres in the matter of months. A claim that defies all logic and possibility, and fundamentally lacks documentary and physical evidence. The claim is false. It's a modern-day Exodus myth enshrined by the conjoined efforts of Hollywood and the apparatus of Stalinist propaganda, used as a tool for denazification, direction immigration policy and American perception of multiracialism, support for Israel, and much more than that.

The truth of a body of myth is not important in its influence or perception among the laity. The truth is relevant though for undermining the myth in the case where the myth fundamentally relies on the truth-value of claims that are false.

And that is not the claim of the Holocaust, the Holocaust is the claim that millions of Jews were brought to 5 "extermination camps" where they were tricked into walking into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower. The majority of the victims were allegedly buried, and then months later unburied and all cremated on makeshift open-air pyres in the matter of months.

No, the official story is that the gas chambers only came at the late stages, more Jews were killed by firing squads and hunger. I suffered through extensive Holocaust education in school. They pre-emptively innoculate people against standard holocaust revisionist ideas, that's not the way to go. See here what they say:

Just 20% of Ukrainian Jews were deported to Belzec, Sobibor and Auschwitz. The remaining 80% were killed by SS commando or their auxiliaries.

https://www.memorialdelashoah.org/upload/minisites/ukraine/en/en_exposition4-radicalisation.htm

You're never going to beat these people when it comes to arcane factual disputes. Especially when they just go 'lol the history is settled now pay up' as some courts in Europe now do. It's much harder for them to outright fix in place the second half of the argument, the ideological stance that directly and clearly harms white interests in the present day. They prefer to keep that part elided and implied. Regardless of what the facts are, it's better to target the weaker part of the argument, that there is any reason to be guilty and sacrifice interests in the present due to what happened in the past.

Nothing we can do would persuade Turkey that they're in the wrong and should give Armenia reparations, let alone all the slaves they took and indoctrinated from Southern/Eastern Europe. They just don't care and would happily say 'Turkey strong' in response. Imagine that you get rid of Holocaust rhetoric but they move onto 'oh your slavery and colonialism was so awful' or 'all your coups and invasions were so awful' or 'think of the humanitarian virtue in ensuring Africa has 4, 5 and even 6 times the population of Europe' to justify dissolving nations and erasing culture. This guilt-tripping and distorted moralism is the core of the problem. It's impossible to counter every sin and argument these people can produce, real or imaginary. Far better to say 'not my problem' and leave them speechless and impotent.

The strongest argument in favour of Europeans getting to keep their own countries and have pride in their own achievements is not 'wooden doors, Wannsee Conference notes being unclear, chimneys moving around after the war, masturbation machines in the extremely cringe postwar literature', the strongest argument is Rotherham, Detroit, crime stats, all the academics gleefully looking to abolish the white race, a glance at the lawyers, donors and judges who pursue antiracism and their demographics... I have a massive reserve of useful and immediately relevant facts, as compared to bitterly contested, esoteric facts that haven't done anything useful in decades.

I don't have to trawl through 80 years of history. I can find things that happened last week and use them to support my case.

No, the official story is that the gas chambers only came at the late stages, more Jews were killed by firing squads and hunger.

I said the official story, about half were claimed to have been killed with gassings inside shower rooms, more than any other single method. Many died from disease, and many died in hunger and shootings as well, Revisionist do not deny that part happened, only the gas chambers. Yes, many Ukranian Jews were killed by Ukranians themselves because they were associated with the Soviet apparatus by the Ukranians.

Regardless of what the facts are, it's better to target the weaker part of the argument, that there is any reason to be guilty and sacrifice interests in the present due to what happened in the past.

You can walk and chew gum, it's fine if others want to emphasize that argument. But the Revisionists are correct, so the fact they have the truth of it is worthy of pursuing in its own right. If you don't find it interesting that's of course up to you. I find it interesting for a lot of reasons, although I do not believe it's a silver bullet.

I don't have to trawl through 80 years of history

I don't think you really responded to my point that they heavily rely on that 80-year old mythos, as evidence by OP's post. They find it very important, and they find denial if it to be highly threatening. So they themselves do not believe you that it's just history that is unimportant.

It's not history, it's a mythology. Part of that mythology is that, at Treblinka, in an effort to erase all trace of the crime, the small labor force there unburied and cremated 5,000 people per day on huge open-air pyres. According to DeepSeek R1, that would require 3,400 cords of dry wood to be delivered, constructed, burned every single day for 120 days straight. With no documentary evidence at all. And no witness reference to any deliveries of fuel at all. And no physical evidence. And no contemporary witness reports, just rumor and testimony after the fact. And no scientific excavation of any mass graves to study the alleged cremated remains of 800,000 people in a precisely known location.

It's not history, it's a mythology. And it does fall apart in the face of facts very easily. It's not going to last forever. Again, I don't think it's a silver bullet. But it's a relevant mythology that is severely undermined when challenged on a factual basis. That's why they are so afraid of it, and they aren't afraid of you talking about crime stats or Detroit which every conservative does.

If you're taking flak, you know you're over the target. "Detroit and crime stats" is harped on by every other conservative, Revisionism is responded to with absolute hysteria. That's a hint that it's more important than you think.

Despite strenuous claims that anti-Zionism != anti-Semitism (which can technically be true), I imagine that even some committed progressives struggle with the cognitive dissonance of claiming to care about Jewish well-being while simultaneously advocating for the massacring of 50% of their remaining global population.

I don't think what most anti-Zionists want is for Israeli Jews to be massacred. The more moderate wing presumably wants a single state with equal rights and no privileged status for Jews (i.e. no right of return, citizenship based on presence on the land, etc) while the more extreme wing wants to send Israeli Jews packing; there are of course people who want Israeli Jews to die as an end goal, but despite some high-profile demonstrations I believe those people are the minority.

I rarely speak up on the Israel-Palestine issue here or in person because it never changes, and will never change, and yet is totally radioactive, so it's almost useless to express an individual opinion. But I personally don't really like anyone involved in the conflict; as far as I'm concerned there are no winners, there are only losers. I can absolutely see the left's point that Zionism was rather colonialist -- the Jews who moved to Israel during the Zionist migration hadn't been in the region for many generations, and thereafter took over governance direct from the British -- as well as essentially religious: the claim of sovereignty over the territory was based, however many epicycles of irony and rabbinical reinterpretation Zionists wanted to invoke, essentially on the belief that God had promised the region to Jews in perpetuity. And so it's really easy for me to see why progressives, who loathe colonialism and hate religion, would see this as fundamentally incompatible with the "rules based international order" that predominated after WWII, and therefore perceive Israel/Palestine as an active non-self-governing territory.

Given that a few generations of Israeli Jews have made their lives there, it certainly seems like ethnic cleansing to say they have to leave now, and I think people who directly call for that are triggering people's Holocaust detectors for good reason. At the same time, I also just don't particularly like that the West straight-up endorsed the foundation of an ethnostate in the 1940s on territory that had just been involved in an active ethnic civil war. There were a lot of good reasons many Jews felt the foundation of a Jewish state was a moral imperative, but with the benefit of hindsight, it seems likely to me that Jews would live in greater peace and security, and lost fewer lives, had European Jewry stuck around in Western Europe, or fled to America. The Israelis can do whatever they want, but I'm just not at all convinced that the ethnoreligious passion of Zionism could ever justify the immense suffering that civil war has brought to both Jews and Palestinians in the region.

In the spirit of continuing last weeks discussion, and the suggestion by @georgioz to define an exonym like Neoliberalism versus one that is more divisive such as fascism.  The term "neoliberal" was first used as a pejorative term by the socialist left to describe US economic policy as far back as the 1930's, however, its was quickly defined in 1951 by Milton Friedman arguably the best known neoliberal, who proudly took the definition and ran with it, which has continued to the current day. This has not stopped it from being used, primarily by the left as a slur--some prose examples are Cornell West calling Ta'Nehisi Coates a neoliberal for his lack of criticism of wall street. To me, there are 5 key features of a neoliberal, they are as follows:

  1. Emphasis of economics over social policy
  2. Promotion of free market and trickle down economics
  3. Encouragement of free international trade through trade agreements
  4. Support for Subsidies for products, commodities or sectors of the economy deemed valuable or future forward
  5. Support for bailouts for companies deemed "too big to fail" in order to keep the economic machine running

Some studies have indicated that those describing themselves as neoliberal tend to score higher in areas such as self-efficacy, self-esteem, self-reliance, but have poorer health outcomes. Similar to the term "capitalist" which also was used as a slur by the socialist left for those interested in free trade and private profits, it was adopted to describe those who were unapologetically "pro-business", specifically large business and unfettered economic growth through almost any means possible.

I would argue that neoliberal has more meaning than some of the terms we discussed last week because its proponents have actively adopted it and have proudly worn the label for decades. More importantly, the vast majority of both proponents and detractors would largely agree on its definition, while other terms like woke, fascist, etc are more commonly used as a slur than a self descriptor, thus have had significant "definition creep".

What are your thoughts?

To me, there are 5 key features of a neoliberal, they are as follows

I think thats a questionable mash-up. Neoliberalism started out with 1) and 2). In recent times, it means something more wonkish/technocratic, with lots of pigouvian taxes and subsidies, and generally in favour of redistribution. This is because the name stuck to an academic tradition more so than an ethical one, and the people who went into economics shifted over time.

Since OP mentioned Milton Friedman as the defining figure of neoliberalism—a characterization I mostly agree with, mind you—here’s what I think Friedman would have to say about the aforementioned 5 points:

  1. Basically agree; Friedman did write a bit about social libertarianism here and there (in particular, I remember his opposition to the draft) but his focus was of course on free-market economics—which he saw as necessary but not sufficient for a liberal (in the European sense) political order.

  2. Agree, but perhaps object to the somewhat-pejorative term “trickle-down economics”

  3. Agree in principle, though in practice would be against so-called “free trade agreements” that are full of un-free pork-barrel incentives (see also: Friedman’s famous support of a negative income tax in theory, but opposition to the EITC in practice, on the grounds that he wanted to simultaneously get rid of all other federal welfare)

  4. Mostly disagree, with perhaps some exceptions for national defense and alleviating the worst kinds of poverty (though on the latter point, he favored direct cash transfers). Certainly Friedman would not be in favor of industrial policy.

  5. This would have Friedman spinning in his grave. The only remotely similar thing that Friedman would support is the government not allowing a massive contraction of the money supply, so as to avoid repeating the mistake of the Great Depression. But this is a far cry from “bailouts for companies”.

I’m not claiming that these 5 points are a bad definition of neoliberalism as it stands today, necessarily. It’s just that the definition of neoliberalism has shifted in a more interventionist and less free-market direction since Friedman’s time, due in large part, I think, to the kinds of personalities that go into academic economics and the attendant wonkish/“soft paternalist” culture that the field has adopted.

What are your thoughts?

You are just continuing to privilege your own perspective on any given term, above the term's actual history and usage.

I would argue that neoliberal has more meaning than some of the terms we discussed last week because its proponents have actively adopted it and have proudly worn the label for decades.

Proponents of "woke" actively adopted it and wore it proudly for decades (though it did not "go viral" until more recently); many still wear it proudly today.

If a particular word is getting in the way of you making a substantive point clear, then by all means, taboo it. But very close to nobody is confused by the use of words like woke, fascist, or neoliberal. If those words are being used in a merely pejorative way, the audience generally understands this, whether or not they can articulate it. If I say "Hitler was a Nazi," essentially no one outside of small children and the mentally infirm is seriously confused if I later say "Obama is a Nazi." People will in general understand that the first claim is historical, and the second, rhetorical.

But deciding to taboo words should be something you do in the process of clarifying discourse on a particular point of substance. Sweeping declarations distinguishing "woke" and "fascist" from "neoliberal" would be inadvisable linguistic prescriptivism even if you had the facts and history right--and you don't even seem to have that going for you.

You are just continuing to privilege your own perspective on any given term, above the term's actual history and usage.

The same can be said for you and your argument.

Proponents of "woke" actively adopted it and wore it proudly for decades (though it did not "go viral" until more recently); many still wear it proudly today.

And in my experience, a plurality of people feel that the word "woke" does not describe them accurately. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any polling on this at this time.

If a particular word is getting in the way of you making a substantive point clear, then by all means, taboo it. But very close to nobody is confused by the use of words like woke, fascist, or neoliberal. If those words are being used in a merely pejorative way, the audience generally understands this, whether or not they can articulate it. If I say "Hitler was a Nazi," essentially no one outside of small children and the mentally infirm is seriously confused if I later say "Obama is a Nazi." People will in general understand that the first claim is historical, and the second, rhetorical.

In example above, there have been instances of people calling both Bush and other republicans a nazi in an unironic way. Are you just going to ignore those instances because it does not jive with your argument? What would you call its use in those examples?

But deciding to taboo words should be something you do in the process of clarifying discourse on a particular point of substance. Sweeping declarations distinguishing "woke" and "fascist" from "neoliberal" would be inadvisable linguistic prescriptivism even if you had the facts and history right--and you don't even seem to have that going for you.

I don't think you have established with evidence, that the history of the terms differs from what I proposed. And the fact of the matter is that if you hear a hypothetical person described as "woke", "fascist" or "neoliberal", which is more likely to be an accurate description of the person when one knows little to no information about this hypothetical person? The term with the least amount of baggage. If someone is called a "neoliberal" the shoe probably fits at least to some extent. The same cannot be said for "woke" these days, nor fascist, which almost certainly is not accurate.

Hmm. Can you remind me of the point being made here? You're trying to differentiate neoliberal as an exonym from woke because people accept the label neoliberal but not woke? If that's the case then suppose nothing at all changes about the population, you still have people who believe and espouse every bit of this cluster's beliefs but refuse to accept any label. These neoliberals were highly related, constantly quoting each other and repeating each other's arguments. When you met someone who was in favor of one of these policies you knew with a 95% chance they'd support all the other policies but they just insisted there was no legitimate way to refer to their memeplex. What would you do then? Until we can square that circle I'm not sure what the point of the comparison is or even what your point is. If woke isn't meaningful then what can I call the highly correlated cluster of beliefs?

On the level of criticism of your definition of neoliberal I think you have some sneer phrases baked in. Few like to be associated with the phrase "trickle down" preferring something like supply side policies. "Too big to fail" also has some negative connotations. A neoliberal would say it was a policy failure to let banks become too big to fail but bailouts were still the prudent option given the circumstances, truncating it to that is ignoring important parts of their understanding of the events and their real concern for moral hazard. Neoliberal tends to approximately map to neoclassical economics, basically Adam Smith but with modern economic modeling.

Hmm. Can you remind me of the point being made here? You're trying to differentiate neoliberal as an exonym from woke because people accept the label neoliberal but not woke? If that's the case then suppose nothing at all changes about the population, you still have people who believe and espouse every bit of this cluster's beliefs but refuse to accept any label. These neoliberals were highly related, constantly quoting each other and repeating each other's arguments. When you met someone who was in favor of one of these policies you knew with a 95% chance they'd support all the other policies but they just insisted there was no legitimate way to refer to their memeplex. What would you do then? Until we can square that circle I'm not sure what the point of the comparison is or even what your point is. If woke isn't meaningful then what can I call the highly correlated cluster of beliefs?

The point is that unlike terms such as "woke" or "fascist", "neoliberal" label is more likely to accurately describe the person being mentioned than the first two. This is despite the "neoliberal" label being an exonym, and the reason for this is that it was widely adopted as a term by the people being described by it. This isn't really happening with "woke", especially now.

I think something more descriptive such as "social justice warriors", "DEI proponents" or "applied intersectionality" would be much more apt. It also is more likely to be used by those people to describe themselves.

On the level of criticism of your definition of neoliberal I think you have some sneer phrases baked in. Few like to be associated with the phrase "trickle down" preferring something like supply side policies. "Too big to fail" also has some negative connotations. A neoliberal would say it was a policy failure to let banks become too big to fail but bailouts were still the prudent option given the circumstances, truncating it to that is ignoring important parts of their understanding of the events and their real concern for moral hazard. Neoliberal tends to approximately map to neoclassical economics, basically Adam Smith but with modern economic modeling.

I think this is a very prescient critique and you are correct, "trickle down" and "too big to fail" are indeed sneer terms. Your alternative of "supply side" are not just less loaded, but are also more descriptive in an academic sense. I'm not sure if there is an alternative term outside of the longer summary of that neoliberal position that you described above--but your point stands.

I think something more descriptive such as "social justice warriors", "DEI proponents" or "applied intersectionality" would be much more apt. It also is more likely to be used by those people to describe themselves.

I guess I have some problems with these as alternatives. Of them only really SJW selects the whole of the blob and I think it'd have the same problem of being rejected as a label by many that it fits if for no other reason that it's a kind of silly formulation. I don't know how long you've been aware of this particular naming dispute but there was a move to call them social justice activists which I'm happy to use but never really got wide adoption. I suspect because it's a mouthful.

The problem, I think, is that this blob intentionally wants to resist being named because it wants to assert its contentious beliefs as normal, the null hypothesis of ideologies. This is a very privileged and powerful position to be in. It lets them stake out radical positions and if those positions prove disastrous it doesn't taint the rest of the ideology. They don't want the failure of things like "defund the police", a sentiment widely shared by adherents of this blob, to color people's perception on the other ideas they propose.

I guess my question for you is do you deny the existence of this blob entirely? As in do you deny that there is a large contingent of people on the left that are bought into nearly every radical left leaning position including but not limited to:

  • anti-racism( as expressed by Kendi and including race concious policy)
  • climate doomerism
  • anti-western and anti-US in particular geopolitical positions (broadly can be expected to take whichever side of any conflict that is lest aligned with the west)
  • intersectional and privileged based understandings of race and gender,
  • anti-capitalism economics ( this is a big one and expresses itself and many ways)
  • acab or at least substantially anti-police beliefs
  • suspicious of free speech
  • LGBTQ activism

If you point to a person with this perspective on any one of these issues I would bet they have something like a 95% chance to believe in every other. That's really seems like a group that I should be able to easily point to.

his isn't really happening with "woke", especially now.

This is patently false. You could spend a few seconds and go to wiki page for Woke to see that unlike neoliberalism, woke as a term was used since 2010 as

Beginning in the 2010s, it came to be used by activists themselves to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBTQ rights.

You have a photo of United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development holding the T-Shirt "stay Woke". Also from the top of my head I remember a story of how Elon Musk discovered Stay Woke T-Shirts after he took over Twitter. The reason why woke was used by activists is that it actually relates to concept of critical consciousness, meaning that this person is awoken to various injustuces especially related to race, sex, sexuality, gender, body types etc. It perfectly encapsulates what the ideology is about.

Paradoxically changing history and usurping power of how words are defined is one of the hallmarks of the ideology. As an example after DEI got a bad reputation, many people just renamed themselves into something like belonging or community management. I do not see a reason why anybody should tolerate this. People know what woke is as a general term, there is no need to stop using the term just because woke people want to make a PR rebranding. For instance given your example, please stop using the term neoliberalism, it is just a slur. Just use a new term such as promoting prosperity.

Wait wtf, you’re on here? :marseygasp:

I'm surprised you're surprised, whoever you are

Wynton Marsalis and Donald Trump

A couple of months ago, a poster whose username I won't attempt to spell published a post on Laufey and McManstions on the main site, which prompted a discussion on aesthetics, Kenny G, Thomas Kinkade, and other topics only peripherally related to the culture war that we don't discuss here much. Earlier still, I published a tongue-in-cheek post about John Coltrane and why you should vote for Cornel West that somehow got selected as an AAQC. For a while, now, I have wanted to present a more serious discussion on aesthetics and public policy, and Trump's reinstatement of his Beautiful Architecture EO has provided occasion for it. But first, we need a little context.

I. Modernism and the Death of Jazz

In the earlier post, I discuss how 1959 was a watershed year in music history. Like most watershed moments however, while it pointed toward the future, it was in other ways the beginning of the end. I mentioned albums by John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. Saxophonists Coleman and Coltrane, along with pianist Cecil Taylor, were the three biggest figures in the development of Free Jazz. From its inception, Jazz had been about improvisational freedom, in contrast to the dictatorial prescriptions of Classical music, and over the decades, musicians sought to push the limits of that freedom. If Modal Jazz could soloists from the tyranny of chord progressions by embracing modes, Free Jazz could do away with harmony altogether, allowing soloists to be totally unconstrained. The three main progenitors of the movement, however, came from three very different backgrounds.

Coleman was from Texas, and came up on the Rhythm and Blues circuit in the 1950s. By the middle of the decade he had made his way to California and joined up with his own crew of like-minded oddballs and in 1959 released The Shape of Jazz to Come. The music was still relatively structured, but most of his contemporaries thought Coleman was completely unhinged. As an R&B player, he wasn't afraid to honk and squeak, and his music, though unusual, still showed a deep sense of the blues. He'd continue in a similar vein for a couple more albums until completely knocking the door down with the genre-defining Free Jazz in 1961 (Coleman was nothing if not literal).

The modernist sensibilities at play here were not subtle. Modernist art sought to free painting from the slavery of the representational form. Paintings didn't have to be evaluated on the basis of how closely they looked like the things they were supposed to look like; they could be reduced to mere elements. Color, shape, line, form, etc. could be appreciated for what they were. Painting as painting, not painting as narrative. For jazz, the sentiment was similar. The underlying essence of the music was still there; it was improvised, it swung, it was clearly based in the blues. But it didn't follow any established form. It only had jazz elements because that was the idiom with which the players were familiar; otherwise it was just sound for the sake of sound. The Jackson Pollock painting on the cover is no accident.

It would be several years, though, before Coleman's style took over jazz, though its influence would creep in in fits and starts. Cecil Taylor was Coleman's polar opposite. He was classically trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was familiar with the European Avant-Garde. As such, his music is much more deliberately modern than Coleman's. It actually sounds more deliberate in general, as if he knows what he wants to do before he actually does it. 1966's [Unit Structures] is his signature piece. And then there's Coltrane, the only one of the three to come from a conventional jazz background. After redefining harmony on Giant Steps he began to move more and more toward the avant-garde until finally reaching it on a plane of advanced consciousness us mere mortals can only dream of. Ascension, from 1965, was the watershed moment when he finally let go of his past and embraced the future.

IA. Populism and the Death of Jazz

Miles Davis never embraced Free Jazz. This wasn't because he was stubbornly clinging to the past, quite the contrary, he just wasn't ready to take that leap. Instead, he'd take the spirit of '59 and roll with it into the sixties. This wasn't a bold move; it's what most jazz musicians were doing prior to 1965, and what a few would continue to do after. One you've freed yourself from the yoke of traditional harmony, Free Jazz isn't the only place left to go. It turns out, the infinite vastness of the harmonic spectrum provides plenty of opportunity for innovation without burning the whole house down. So even in 1967, when Free Jazz had captured the imagination of every thinking man in the Jazz world, Davis could put out albums like [Sorcerer] that didn't challenge your patience and still get credit for being innovative.

The problem for Miles, though, was that mildly impressing a few white jazz critics and the dwindling number of people who bought his albums wasn't enough to convince him that he was still on the cutting edge of music. And Davis needed to be on the cutting edge. Most musicians are bad. Some are good. Some are great. A vanishingly small number are involved in revolutions, and even fewer are at the forefront of those revolutions. Davis, at this point in his career, was 42 years old, and had already caused three revolutions on his own and was heavily involved in two more. And he was ready to start the next one.

Davis had realized that the black youth of the 1960s weren't interested in what he was doing, or what Coltrane was doing, or what any other jazz musician was doing. They were interested in James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone. So he did what any normal person in the 1960s would do if they were trying to appeal to a younger audience: He went electric. On paper this sounds like it was bound to be a disaster — an aging jazz musician trying to play rock and R&B in a desperate attempt to stay relevant. But Miles was no mere aging musician but an all-time genius. After a few tentative steps towards Jazz-Rock he'd release [Bitches Brew] in 1970 and prove that he was the one and only Prince of Darkness.

IB. Status Quo: The 1970s

The result of these twin revolutions of the 1960s was that, by 1975, anything that resembled what Miles Davis was doing in 1967 had ceased to be relevant. On the one hand you had the avant-garde. The new generation was able to combine Coltrane's jazz credentials, Coleman's weirdness, and Taylor's classical pretention to create bold new music that seemed optimized to alienate everyone except the five people who would show up for their concerts. The Davis wing fared better commercially, but whether or not this was a good thing is debatable. The main Davis strain drifted more in the direction of rock music before basically becoming indistinguishable from it. A funkier, more R&B oriented strain did fine for a while, but eventually suffered from its own artistic decline. Jazz-Rock became Jazz-Fusion, or fusion, and by the time Kenny G rolled around in the 80s it had devolved into Fuzak, a pejorative portmanteau of fusion and Muzak.

This is the point where a lot of traditional jazz histories get off the train. "Serious" jazz was dying a slow, lonely death. Fusion was being swallowed up by mainstream pop, and would culminate in Kenny G. Iconic jazz clubs were either closing due to lack of interest or converting into discos. The only people interested in playing straightahead 60s jazz were Woody Shaw and a few exiles in Europe. Most of the 60s holdovers had made the switch to fusion as soon as they saw how successful Davis was with it, for better or worse. But then, in the late 1970s, things slowly began to change. In 1976, Dexter Gordon returned from Europe, to wide acclaim. Herbie Hancock started playing acoustic jazz again in 1977, the same year Joe Henderson was back to playing acoustic hard bop. Ricky Ford already had a number of fine acoustic hard bop records under his belt, starting in 1977, as did several other younger players. Johnny Griffin's return to the US was in 1978. Steps (soon to be Steps Ahead) had already been jamming in New York to acclaim, and had recorded its debut in 1979. A nascent revival was beginning to take shape.

II. Wynton Marsalis

When he emerged in the 1980s, no one in jazz had ever seen a figure like Wynton Marsalis before. He came with impeccable credentials; born in a strong New Orleans musical family, he had gone to Julliard, Tanglewood, and a tour with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He was a jazz musician with an uncommonly beautiful sound and elegant ideas, as well as a classical musician of exceptional taste. But he also had the fire of a reformer in him: He was a defender of tradition with the will, energy, and intelligence to reaffirm the values associated with what he saw as a music (and a society) that had been corrupted by charlatans for the last forty years. Sometimes he seemed to be attempting to recreate another Harlem Renaissance; other times, he seemed to be like Matthew Arnold, calling for the best that had ever been played to be honored and savored. Or again, his task seemed to be the scholarly one of rewriting American cultural history, or evel the lay preacher's role of strengthening the country's moral fiber. In any event, once he was appointed artistic director of the new jazz program at Lincoln Center in 1988, he was in a unique position to shape the most powerful effort ever made to turn jazz into an institution.

By the 1980s, while fusion continued to prosper in certain circles, the more mainstream stuff was cast aside into the realm of the pop world. Two camps began to emerge. The first was that of the neotraditionalists. These were those raised in the free jazz avant garde, but who found it a stylistic dead end. While they were still jazz musicians at their cores, they rejected the idea that jazz history was a progression of sequential improvements. This may not seem like that big a deal, but it had the effect of liberating the music even further; rather than be forced to explore what little uncharted territory was left, they now had the entire history of jazz at their disposal. The music was still avant-garde, no doubt, but it could incorporate whatever influence it wanted. The watershed album here is Air Lore by the trio Air, because if you're going to embrace the history of jazz, why not go back to the very beginning? Jazz had become postmodern.

Countering this were the traditionalists, with Marsalis at the forefront. When he signed with Columbia and released his debut in 1982, it sold 100,000 copies, more than any traditional jazz album had in a long time. But from the outset, Marsalis was controversial. At one time or another he has suggested that jazz developed on a different plane than European music and that in its musical world, innovation is not a mark of progress, since the earliest jazz has never become dated; indeed, it may even be more modern than today's. He has claimed that jazz performances are so long that they bore audiences, that the highest of all jazz achievement's, the improvised solo, might need to yield to ensemble playing as it did in early jazz; he has said that there are no true jazz styles, but rather only master musicians whose individual developments show us the progress of the music; or that the seriousness of the jazz project must be reinforced to drive out the dehumanizing forces or popular culture (which long ago surrendered to base instincts and the avant-garde, the dark side of Europe).

If there is one thing that is certain about Marsalis's traditionalism, though, it's that it is openly hostile towards free jazz and jazz-rock, the two styles that came out of the 1960s. And with his position at Lincoln Center secure, he would spend the 90s preaching it on PBS, NPR, and in high school band rooms all across the country. With respect to this latter point, pretty much every band director in America had a hard-on for Marsalis. This was partially because he spent a lot of his early career as America's Premiere Jazz Educator working with schools, whose jazz programs at the time seemed gear towards preparing students to play in white big bands run by the likes of Woody Herman and Buddy Rich. Marsalis focused on the rich history of New Orleans and the swing era. It also helped tremendously that he was an accomplished classical musician who made recordings of all the "Trumpet Player's Pieces" that we all have played for juries and auditions and the like but were impossible to find recordings of in the past. You couldn't just walk into borders and find Arban's ["Variations on the Carnival of Venice"] (watching that video was deeply nostalgic, as I've played that so many times the fingereings are coming back to me for every note).

But his ubiquity combined with his inherent conservatism led to a backlash. While he was heralded by the boomers who were paying for our music lessons as kids, the millennial generation who grew up with him has quite a different take. Throughout the 90s, he made occasional TV and radio appearances, released albums, and did master classes at schools, and if he limited himself to this, he'd be controversial, but wouldn't draw nearly the same amount of ire. But then Ken Burns' Jazz came out. Jazz isn't a bad documentary; it's excellent for the information it contains. The problem is that it's misrepresentative and woefully incomplete; in ten-parts and 1,140-minutes it dedicates one full episode to 1938 and 1939 alone, while dedicating another episode to the period from 1961 to the present. They spend very little time talking about free jazz, jazz fusion, or really anything that happened after 1965 save for Louis Armstrong dying, and what they do say about it essentially dismisses it. And as America's Premiere Jazz Educator, Marsalis was behind it all, guiding Burns' presentation from front to back, appearing in more recorded interview segments than anyone else and confidently describing how Buddy Bolden sounded even though Bolden died in 1931 and was never recorded. And behind Marsalis, acting as hatchet man, was Stanley Crouch, a jazz critic of similar bent, whose story is made all the more rich by the fact that he was a free jazz drummer who turned to writing when he couldn't hack it.

It was always possible to detect Marsalis's conservative undertones before, but after viewing a 19-hour-long exposition of his ethos, most of us were ready to get off the train. You play music because you want to be creative, you want to express yourself. You listen to people like John Coltrane and Miles Davis because you're impressed by their genius and you hope that one day, you too can create something as innovative and earth-shattering as they can. And then some guy who's barely even old enough to be your father tells you essentially that all that's finished and you'll never be half the trumpet player Louis Armstrong was and if you try to do anything new then it's just "self-indulgent bullshit" or "playing tennis without a net" so you better just spend your life paying tribute to the greats by making inferior copies of their music. And then you look at his recording career, and realize that that's exactly what he's done. His best album, *Black Codes (From the Underground) was hilariously (and accurately) described on Reddit as "a very good 1962 Miles Davis album".

Beyond that, though, Jazz reached an audience that had no particular love for or experience with the music, and was a golden opportunity to get the public to engage with it. Jazz has no social cachet. It's not likely to have succeeded, but Jazz could have changed the public's negative perception of the music by presenting it as a vibrant artistic force building on a rich history. Instead it was presented as a museum piece, something that happened and ended 40 years ago and the best we can do now is cherish the memory. Jazz music had become classical music.

III: Donald Trump and the Death of Architecture

So what about Trump's EO reasserting his preference for "traditional" architecture? I'm not going to make the argument that this is some low-key tribute to Albert Speer, or that it represents an overarching conservative aversion to change or desire to reclaim some kind of lost glory or to assert some sort of homegrown nationalism. As far as I can tell, there are only two things at play here:

  1. Trump's aesthetic preferences

  2. Trump's perception of the public's aesthetic preferences

"Beautiful public buildings"; it says it all right there. The real question is whether these preferences actually exist. I've seen the sentiment echoed regularly on here: Modern architecture is bad. Postmodern architecture is bad. Traditional styles are preferable. This isn't limited to here, or to conservatives, or to people outside the art world; there seems to be a general sentiment that buildings just looked better before 1945. But do people really feel this way, or do they just say they feel this way? I suspect this perception has become so widespread that people express this preference without stopping to think about the full implications.

First, there's Trump himself. I am assuming that Trump does not harbor any sort of categorical dislike of modern architecture, insofar as he understands what the term actually means, considering the property with which he is most closely associated, Trump Tower, is unabashedly modern. Ditto for Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York, the building of the same name in Las Vegas, the one in Chicago, Trump Plaza Residences in Jersey City, Trump Tower in Mumbai, and at this point I'm sick of looking. I find it highly unusual that, considering that the guy is known as a real estate developer, no one has pointed that for his supposed contempt for modern architecture he sure is responsible for a lot of it. And the public must like it as well, or else Trump would be indulging in his personal preferences at the risk of his business. In any event, while I could be wrong, I couldn't find any evidence of Trump erecting a new building in any of the traditional styles he implies are prerequisite to beauty.

Second, there is the perception of the public, which isn't nearly as hostile to modern architecture as is made out to be. I live in Pittsburgh, and the most beloved building is PPG Place. Okay, it's technically postmodern, but this isn't a distinction I hear too many people making. The US Steel Tower is probably number two. In fact, most of the downtown skyline dates from 1950 or later, and I don't hear too much hate for any of the buildings, even if there are a few I could personally do without. So when I look at a new Federal building done in a more modern style, like the 2016 Federal Courthouse in Los Angeles I wonder "Do people really find this objectionable?", and, if so, what do they find so objectionable about it? Why is it that Trump will happily sign off on whatever the architect presents to him when it comes to his personal properties but suddenly finds religion when it comes to public buildings?

The argument can be made that public architecture is different and that government buildings should be constructed in a distinctive, unified style, but that doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. First, that horse has already left the barn, so any attempt at uniformity will be ad hoc at best. Second, a uniform style would suggest more detailed guidance than what the EO suggests we'll end up getting. The original 2020 EO emphasized "traditional" styles, citing Greek Revival, Federal, and Gothic Revival as examples. Well, those are three very different styles; so much for a distinctive look. And even if we were to settle on an official national style, does it make sense to do so? One of the things that makes buildings bad is that they don't fit with their surroundings. Some discontinuity is acceptable, but the building better be an absolute banger. Building an otherwise unobjectionable but unspectacular building where it doesn't belong will make it an eyesore. I don't have the confidence that every post office and visitor's center built between now and whenever the EO is rescinded will be of that kind of quality. Even the surrounding landscape is important. Mary Colter's buildings at Grand Canyon National Park are national treasures, but they wouldn't be had they been built in an incongruous Greek Revival style.

IIIA. That Which Is Left Unmentioned

First, we need to dispense with the myth that there's something inherent to prewar styles that makes them more aesthetically pleasing on some base level. There isn't. Every day I drive past hundreds if not thousands of prewar buildings that everyone agrees are ugly. As I said in the introductory post to my Pittsburgh series, one of the common house types in the area is what I refer to as a Mill House; these were frame houses built for industrial workers beginning around the 1870s and into the first couple decades of the 20th Century. In the city of Pittsburgh itself these tend to predominate in hilly areas, with rowhouses predominating in flatter areas, but in outlying areas and throughout the Rust Belt these are the norm in neighborhoods that were built out in that era. In a similar vein is the Patch House, company housing for coal miners in the isolated company towns that popped up near mines in the region. Neither of these styles is desirable to own. When suburbs began to surround the old coal patches in the 1950s, the patches remained the poorest, least desirable areas, and continue to do so to this day. Almost every Pittsburgh suburb, no matter how prosperous, contains one or two of these; they exist like backwaters that the municipal government likes to pretend don't exist. One of the things that will become apparent as my Pittsburgh series continues (I know it's been a while but more is on the way soon, I promise) is that housing stock like this is often an impediment to gentrification — it's easy to blame the ugliness of these buildings on the inability of the owners to invest in them, but they simply aren't attractive to people who do have money to invest.

Of course, that's just houses, and in particular, it's houses built for working class people that was never meant to be beautiful. What about civic and commercial buildings? I will admit that yes, the median prewar commercial structure tends to look better than the median postwar commercial structure. But does that really tell us anything? Years ago I worked in this building, as the firm on the nameplate leased space to the firm I worked for. It was built in 1905 and renovated in 1984 in the yuppie loft chic style with exposed brickwork that was popular at the time. Then the firm we were leasing off of built a new, larger building and we followed them there. In the months leading up to the move, everyone knew it was coming eventually, but we didn't know when, and it wasn't made out to be a big deal. No one was passing renderings around the office or driving out to look at the construction site; on the appointed day we just showed up at a different address. And everyone was impressed. One of the partners in my division was taking pictures and sending them to friends and family, even despite the fact that her new office was significantly smaller and didn't have the stunning view of Downtown that her old one did. While most people were more reserved, they did agree that it was a big improvement.

People may bemoan the newer building as having a bland corporate aesthetic that seems to be redecorating our cities with glass and prefabricated exterior paneling, but what are they bemoaning, exactly? Consider it's neighbors: A better prewar building (the Warhol Museum, 1913), a worse, newer building (One North Shore Center, 1982)], and a better, newer building (Alcoa headquarters, 1999). What is it about my old office that makes it inherently better? The use of brick? The 1982 building has plenty of brick. Ornamentation? There's very little ornamentation on the 1905 building, especially compared to the Warhol. the biggest complaint I'd anticipate against the 2017 building is that it's homogenized corporate crap, replete with plenty of glass and prefabricated panels, indistinguishable from hundreds of other commercial buildings foisted on us by developers trying to convince the public that cheap is beautiful, its own neighbors not excepted. But the same argument could be made of my old office back in 1905. It was just another unexceptional building without so much as a congruent architectural style and little ornamentation built to fit in with its surroundings. It wasn't built the way it was because it fulfilled the architect's vision (the architect has been lost to history), it was built that way because in 1905 that was the default option in an era without a lot of options to begin with.

But even still, aesthetic preferences are personal taste. Couldn't the firm have achieved the same effect by simply renovating the existing building? After all, what my coworkers and I were reacting to probably wasn't so much the outside of the building but the inside, going from a deteriorated 30-year-old renovation to a new construction. Yes, this was probably 90% of it. But that leads me to my main point, which no one seems to ever bring up: Our aesthetic appreciation of old architecture is almost always limited to exteriors. At first, there seems to be something ironic about this, as it flies in the face of traditional critiques of modernist architecture that still pop up from time to time: "Yeah, the building may look cool, but you don't have to live or work there. It's easy to admire something aesthetically you don't have to use." This was largely a response to the fact that the works of Mies van der Rohe and le Corbusier were designed based on a theory of living that did not work out in real life. Le Corbusier's towers in the park led to the development of massive public housing projects that quickly turned into hell on earth, leading architectural critics to spend the next several decades explaining why they were a bad idea to begin with.

But this is merely a red herring. I've spent significant parts of my life in buildings of all styles, and I can't say that there is anything about the exterior facade that greatly affects what goes on inside. It certainly could be this way, but it usually isn't because all buildings are renovated to have the same interiors. For as much energy people spend railing against the bland, corporate architectural aesthetic, they seem quite content to ignore the fact that once inside, they all look like [this] (https://www.cbre.com/properties/properties-for-lease/office/details/US-SMPL-19904/koppers-building-436-seventh-avenue-pittsburgh-pa-15219). These pictures are from the Koppers Building, a 1929 Art Deco structure (technically modern, but prewar, so it apparently doesn't count). Except, once you get out of the lobby, there's nothing Art deco about it at all; the actual office space you're renting isn't going to be that different than what you'd find in a newer building. It would be easy to blame this on property developers and their desires to institute Globohomo, but when you look at people's houses, they do exactly the same thing. In the past ten years, I can't tell you how many people I've know who have bought older homes and told me how great the architecture was. If they mention doing any kind of renovation or redecorating, I usually jokingly ask them if they've looked at wallpaper yet, at which point they make a face like I asked them to ingest cod liver oil. Because, let's face it, no one born after 1980 wants a house with wallpaper, or wall-to-wall carpeting, or metal kitchen cabinets, or floral upholstery, or wingback chairs, or wood paneling, or any of the other design choices that might make a house period correct. They want the interior to conform to the latest design trends, whether that be grey walls, hardwood floors, quartz countertops, stainless steel appliances, or any of the other things that make people say "this is really nice" when they walk into a house.

No one thinks to consider that this could have ever applied to exteriors.

IIIB. The Inevitability

So what will come of any presidential dictat to return to traditional styles? Tradition? Or the facade of tradition? As an argument in favor of the latter, I'd like to point out the rise of what I refer to as "Neoneoclassical Architecture". Neoneoclassical architecture is a good citizen of the neighborhoods it inhabits. It fits well with its neighbors, but is free from the embarrassing ornamentation that is anathema to modern tastes. It's also significantly cheaper as a result. Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood has two buildings from the past couple decades that fit this style. One is Nordenberg Hall, a University of Pittsburgh dormitory that was constructed in 2011. The other is the Oaklander Hotel, from 2017. Outside of Pittsburgh, the Ole Miss School of Law fits the style, too, though it is accented by a rather plain collonaded portico. Down the road at Mississippi State, we have the new [Azalea Residence Hall], set to open this fall. I'm not a big fan of neoneoclassical architecture. I don't particularly hate it, either. It does what it needs to do, unobjectionably. It says "Don't look at me, nothing to see here. Look at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association next door. Interestingly enough, the building Nordenberg Hall replaced, the 1924 University Place Office Building, in its sparse detailing almost anticipated the Neoneoclassical style.

The Neoneoclassical style is the polar opposite of what I call the "Fuck You School of Architecture". The canonical exaple of this is when there's a nice, picturesque tourist town on whose edge a developer erected a giant concrete behemoth with "Radisson" written on the top, sticking out like a giant middle finger to the community. Which brings me to what I think is the reason modern architecture has so little purchase with the general public: Poor execution. When working in traditional forms, there's only so much you can do to make a building terrible. Frank Gehry once said that 98% of architecture was shit, and while I may personally believe that most of his own work is included in that 98%, he had a point. 98% of what we see are structures designed to be functional structures, and nothing else. I don't know who designed this building, but I doubt they were trying to make a statement; they were trying to make a building that could house a few businesses. People may bemoan strip malls and urban sprawl in general, but nobody finds the buildings particularly objectionable, because there's nothing to object to. No one pays attention to the architecture of a gas station.

The buildings that people actually do pay attention to are limited to big public projects: Skyscrapers, stadiums, government buildings, airport terminals, schools, museums, large apartment complexes, and the like. Of these, there are two options. The safe option is to pick a designer that designs boring buildings and have them design something so unobjectionable that no one would even think to object to it, build it without incident, and allow it to blend into its surroundings. In 75 years when somebody wants to tear it down, nobody will bat an eye. The other option is to hire a designer who will run wild with a bold design that draws attention to itself. Here you run the risk of designing something hideous that everyone hates, but it's also your only chance of building something that will be beloved and cherished for generations. The problem with modern architecture was that its practitioners combined the desire for bold statements with the Fuck You sensibility, which resulted not only in several bad buildings but several otherwise good buildings forced into places where they didn't belong.

IV. McMansions, Thomas Kincade, and Kenny G I first heard the term "McMansion" circa 2005 in a 60 Minutes segment about a phenomenon that was sweeping suburban fringes all across the country. In typical newsmagazine fashion, Morley Safer spent half the segment interviewing the owners of these monstrosities and the other half interviewing architectural critics who talked about how terrible they were. As I recall, the only arguments they gave were that they were too big for the small families that inhabited them, and that they weren't Good Architecture™. My thoughts at the time were those of apathy. "If someone wants a house like that and is willing to pay for it, who cares?" A decade later, Kate Wagner launched McMansion Hell.

The laziest form of criticism is looking at something that's obviously bad and describing why it's obviously bad. The genius of McMansion Hell is that, rather than low effort sneers at rich people, the blog makes wry sneers based on an implied understanding of architectural principles. The idea that someone would dedicate a blog to complaining about McMansions in 2015 was like someone today dedicating a blog to complaining about washed up rock musicians recording albums full of standards, so getting people to care at all was a tough sell. But it works because it takes something that everyone hated for three years and then promptly forgot about and uses it as a springboard for architectural education. I haven't met many people below a certain age who aren't familiar with it.

McMansions create a problem because they don't fit into any coherent narrative about architectural history. On the one hand, they appear to be a naive yearning for the architecture of old, the purest representation of contemporary mass taste. On the other hand, they completely reject all the traditional principles of good architecture. They're intended as ostentatious displays of wealth, but are built as cheaply as possible. One wonders what could have been done, had the same money been spent on a stylistically coherent house following good architectural principles built with high-quality materials. Well, you'd probably get something like this, i.e., a normal suburban house, but bigger. Nothing to give that wow factor.

McMansions appeal to our sense of traditionalism the way a Thomas Kinkade painting appeals to our sense of sentimentalism: We don't so much yearn for the past as we yearn for the idea of the past. Nothing built before 1945 resembled anything close to a McMansion, in the same way that nothing painted before 1900 much resembled a Kinkade painting. But nobody is calling either of them modern. What McMansions and Kinkade both do is incorporate elements of old work in haphazard ways that are intended to make an immediate impact. McMansions have so many masses you can't tell what's supposed to be primary, in much the same way that Kinkade's paintings have so many subjects you're not sure what you're supposed to look at. Neither Kinkade nor the McMansion much care for proportion. They both draw from innumerable influence yet nonetheless manage to look the same. Tom Wolfe criticized modern art and architecture from being too obsessed with theory, but this is what you get without it.

Kenny G represents the opposite problem. As I mentioned earlier, mainstream jazz produced jazz-rock in the early 1970s, which in turn produced fusion in the middle of the decade, which finally led to fuzak in the 1980s. Kenny G started out as a fusion musician in the late 1970s; if you hadn't noticed, the link I included above to a Jeff Lorber recording had him on saxophone. the amazing thing about Kenny G is that he demonstrated that, if jazz could be deconstructed by the avant-garde forces for their own ends, it could also be deconstructed by populist forces for their own ends.

If jazz is the blues at its most sophisticated and cerebral, R&B is the blues at its most populist. Sometimes this means that it's more primal and raw, but it also means that it's more susceptible to influence from mainstream pop. The two began to diverge in the 1940s, and by the 1960s the gap was growing larger and some sought to bridge it. Jimmy Smith pioneered soul jazz, a movement that wasn't critically admired but was able to sell a lot of records. As the 60s became the 70s, this task was taken up by jazz-rock and later fusion. The biggest difference between the two is that fusion strips away most of the rock elements in favor of contemporary R&B elements. And in the late 1970s, R&B was becoming smoother, and in the 1980s it was becoming increasingly indistinguishable from Adult Contemporary.

Like free jazz and the modal jazz that preceded it, Kenny G's music simplified harmony to place a greater emphasis on melody. But rather than develop alternative harmonic structures, or eliminate them entirely, it simply stripped out anything that was harmonically interesting or distinctive. Jazz and all of its tritone substitutions, II-V-Is, chord extensions, suspensions, and secondary dominants were replaced with the simple, diatonic harmonies common in the blandest pop music. He sold 75 million records. Take a song like "Forever in Love", nobody is listening to this because it's harmonically interesting; its appeal lies in the fact that it isn't harmonically interesting.

Beyond music, the Kenny G phenomenon is difficult to get a handle on. If a teenager were to ask me who Kenny G was, the obvious answer would be that he was a saxophone player who was popular during the 80s and 90s. But that doesn't begin to tell the story, nor does inserting lazy adjectives like "hugely" or "massively" in front of "popular". It's not so much that Kenny G was big as it was the way in which he was big, which is something that I doubt will happen again in American history. His music was everywhere; you couldn't enter a mall without hearing it. Any function that required dinner music played it. The entire "smooth jazz" radio format revolved around his music, which radio format led several markets because it was played in offices where you were forced to listed whether you liked it or not. And it's not like he was an anonymous studio musician who accidentally became ubiquitous (like the guy who wrote all the free YouTube library music); people knew who he was. He was a household name, and everyone could identify anything he did based on a few notes, even if they hadn't heard it before. His claimed sales of 75 million units put him in the same league as Nirvana and Tupac, but he doesn't have the same level of continued relevance as either of those. Hell, he doesn't have the same level of cultural relevance as one-hit wonders like Snow (1.9 million) and Right Said Fred (1.5 million). Despite having a career that is extraordinarily successful by any conventional metric, and a decade of unprecedented ubiquity, he's mostly forgotten. Not forgotten in the sense that no one remembers him, but forgotten in the sense that no one thinks of him. If you were to ask people to name popular musicians of the '80s and '90s, his name would not be among the first mentioned, if it is even mentioned at all. Radio stations dedicated to hits of the era don't play him, and he's not going to appear in any listicle involving 90s nostalgia.

IVA. Trouble in Paradise

In their heydays, Thomas Kinkade and Kenny G were massively popular, and while McMansions were beyond the budget of most Americans, they were at least aspirational. All three were also among the most hated cultural products of their times. McMansions were ugly, Kenny G was insipid, and Thomas Kinkade was both. If Americans could criticize the cultural elites for being too critical, they could criticize others for not being critical enough. Thomas Kinkade was art for the person who was so unadventurous he didn't even want to attempt to challenge himself. Kenny G was music for the kind of person who viewed his stereo as an appliance and what it produced as wallpaper. McMansions were housing for the nouveau riche asshole who got what he wanted, when he wanted it, and didn't need anyone's advice.

The interesting thing isn't merely that these hugely popular things were criticized, it was the nature of the criticism. The New Kids on the Block were peaked around the same time as Kenny G and weren't exactly critical darlings, yet they don't receive nearly the same amount of derision, even if no one is trying to justify them as artistically underrated. NKOB's music was marketed to teenage girls, who aren't expected to be arbiters of taste. But Kenny G was popular among adults, and adults are supposed to know better. A few years before the McMansion piece, 60 Minutes ran a piece on Kinkade, and I remember him telling Morley Safer that people found art galleries intimidating. That his stores were so popular because people didn't want to go into echoey galleries with white walls where some overeducated snob would describe the work to you in terms of people you'd never heard of and expect that to mean something to you. The embarrassment of it all! His stores, though, were warm and inviting, where there was a big fire and a salesman who liked art but doggone it if he knew anything about it. Saying you liked Kenny G or Thomas Kinkade or McMansions was like saying that you had no aspiration toward cultural literacy and you didn't care. The general public may not be the most sophisticated consumers of art, but they at least pretend to care.

V. The End of the Road

Art exists on a continuum. At one extreme there is the stuff that smart people say you're supposed to like, but that few people actually like. This is mostly artifacts of the 20th century avant-garde: Free jazz, modern architecture, abstract expressionism. On the other end you have the crass popular stuff that doesn't even try to be artistic: Kenny G, McMansions, Thomas Kinkade. But there's a middle ground here, and it's the obvious target for anyone who is too practical to be seduced by the avant-garde and too proud to stoop to populism. This is the world of Wynton Marsalis, and this is the world of Donald Trump.

As much as Donald Trump's own architectural tastes might tend toward the garish populism of McMansions, even he knows that they are no template for an acceptable public architecture. To my knowledge there have been no public buildings built using such a template, so I don't know what they would look like, but one can assume they would become immediate objects of ridicule. A poorly-proportioned Federal courthouse that combined the Federal Style with Tudor half-timbering and and a separate Gothic wing would not go over well in my estimation. The solution is to go back in time to when art was free of corruption from either force, proclaim its purity, and set the appropriate boundaries. This is exactly what Wynton Marsalis has done with jazz, and exactly what Donald Trump intends to to with architecture.

I fear that such a move would be disastrous. When Jazz came out in 2001, the music was not popular. There was no cultural cachet to be had from liking jazz; rock and roll had effectively made the complex harmonic structures that give jazz its shape the music of an older generation.Big band was music for elderly people Kenny G was elevator music, and everything else was a combination of the two. Decades of neglect from the press didn't help, a hostile fanbase in the early 70s that wasn't willing to accept change didn't help, boomer associations of anything made before 1964 with squareness and conservatism didn't help, and America's Classical Music was a niche product that was only appreciated by people whose relationship with music went beyond mere listening. Marsalis had the opportunity to at least partly undo that perception. He had the biggest megaphone that any jazz proponent could hope to have. He could have presented jazz as a vibrant force that was still relevant in the new millennium. But instead he merely confirmed what everyone had already suspected: That jazz died 50 years ago, and all we were doing was preserving its memory.

It's tempting to think that such a thing couldn't possibly happen to architecture, as we can do without jazz but we can't do without buildings. That may be true, but remember: 98% of buildings aren't architecture. When we stop caring what buildings look like provided they hold up the ceiling, architecture will be dead. Jazz will have morphed into Kenny G. But insisting on traditional styles because we don't always like the modern ones only hastens that process. If 98% of what is built has no thought put into it, then that gives a special importance to the remaining 2%, and that 2% includes civic architecture. If we limit civic architecture to a set limit of prewar styles, we send the same message to young architects as Marsalis did to young jazz musicians: This discipline has ended as an active art form, and it was over well before you were born. The best you can do is imitate the styles of the past; there is no room for your own artistic vision. Banning modernism might prevent some ugliness. But it might also prevent the kind of bold work that propels the art forward. We'll be condemned to a world of neoneoclassical sludge. Having beautiful buildings is pointless if no one cares that they're beautiful.

As far as I can tell, the dearth of innovation across contemporary music, architecture, literature, etc. is symptomatic of a deeper cultural malaise and applying palliative care to any one area, whether through documentaries or executive orders, is unlikely to do much to slow the decay until something more fundamental changes. There can be plenty of disagreement over what exactly has gone wrong or when (if you quizzed a group of online reactionaries, you'd get answers ranging from 1965 to 0 AD), but reaching a consensus is neither sufficient nor likely even necessary to build something new and beautiful for its own sake.

Of course when we look back on history, we see a punctuated equilibrium where short periods of years or decades can outshine the centuries surrounding them in terms of art, architecture, music, poetry, and other measures of cultural achievement, leaving a long trail of decaying imitations in their wake. Is this an artifact of chance historical preservation and the biases of those who recorded the works of their contemporaries, or do whole societies really just suddenly stop producing anything interesting or worthy of remembrance? Our own example seems like evidence for the latter, but I remain unsure.

Getting back to buildings, I recall once looking for any example of a contemporary style of architecture whose designs I liked, and all I found was the Neo-Andean of Bolivia. Some mixture of that, Art Deco, and whatever you call the supertrees in Singapore (solarpunk, I suppose), is what I'd like to see more of if I had a say in such things, though I would value having regional or climatic differentiation above all else. When I read Albion's Seed years ago, one of the things that struck me was the extent to which people's homes in colonial America (and basically every society ever except the one we live in now) were designed to either take advantage of or mitigate local factors such as snowfall, wind direction, humidity, and so on, rather than simply copying and pasting the same suburban floorplan, adding air conditioning or heating as needed, and calling it a day. There is something profoundly wrong with the fact that apartment buildings in Chicago look the same as ones in Miami.

I'm getting through some of the quality contributions and thought I would contribute some architectural opinions on my city. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, so maybe I'll just list some buildings.

There's nothing quite like this picture to get the discussion of architecture going.

The Experience Music Project (now Museum of Pop Culture) was built by Gehry in 2000 at the prompting of Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen. It is generally considered to be an eyesore. The interior of the building is great, but the exterior looks like a scrap heap.

The Space Needle was built in 1962 for the World's Fair by John Graham Jr., or possibly Victor Steinbrueck. It is generally considered to be iconic. It is the northern-most feature of the Seattle Skyline, and the MoPop sits at its feet. Everybody loves it, and it has style and grace.

The Space Needle was the tallest building in Washington at the time it was completed, surpassing the Smith Tower, which is also considered to be iconic. It is the southern-most skyscraper in the Seattle skyline, and the city has continued to protect its status as a visible landmark. Very neoclassical, and I love it to death. If only I had $17k per month, I'd live in the penthouse, although I've never been inside.

The current tallest building in Seattle is the Columbia Tower (1985), aka Darth Vader building. It is generally not considered at all.

Contemporaneously to the EMP being built, the Seattle Central Library (2002) was also constructed. This has a better reputation that the EMP, but it is confusing inside and not particularly well laid out. It looks like steel and glass from the outside, all angles and cantilevers. I compare it dis-favorably to Suzzallo Libray, located on the UW campus. That one was 1936, so two decades after the Smith Tower.

The Rainier Tower (1977) is your favorite architect's favorite building. It's got a tapered base that is striking, but beyond that is a big concrete and glass rectangle. It now has a neighbor, the second-tallest building in Seattle, the Rainier Square Tower (2020). Overall the two of them look good together, but are very, very modern.

Approaching Seattle from the north, you can see the Pacific Tower. It sits on top of a hill, and it's Art Deco, and it's surrounded by trees. Of course it's my favorite building in Seattle. It was Amazon's HQ until 2010. Tell me this isn't what you want out of a public building, and I'll call you a liar.

Approaching Seattle from the south, before you get to the Smith Tower, you see the Old Rainier Brewery. It used to have a T for Tully's coffee. Thank god they put the R back on there. This building is purely industrial, but due to the boxy shape, prominence from the South, and iconic R, it became a landmark.

So what do I make of all this? Do I have architectural taste? Or did I simply accept the things that were there when I was born, and reject the ones that weren't? The Smith Tower, Pacific Tower, and Suzzalo are throwbacks to a pre-war style. The Space Needle is truly a space-age style, which is in stark contrast the the preceding three, but I don't mind it one bit. The MoPOP/EMP is ugly, and I don't like it, but there are plenty who will agree with me on the first part but like it because it's ugly. I think they used to call that baroque. There are good-bad movies, can there be good-bad buildings? Finally, we have the rectangles of glass, and other interesting shapes of glass. Columbia Tower, both Rainier buildings, and most of the big skyscrapers I won't bother mentioning are of this type, the modern, the sleek. Really, the inoffensive, stainless steel appliance of architecture.

I have fed this essay to DeepSeek, here is its response.

Rebuttal: DeepSeek and the Perils of Cultural Determinism

The essay’s core thesis—that cultural stereotypes are malleable, and DeepSeek exemplifies China’s shift from exploitation to exploration—is provocative and timely. It rightly dismantles the lazy “fast-follower” trope by grounding China’s historical constraints in material realities (rice paddies, Malthusian traps) rather than essentialist myths. The linkage between agricultural legacies and cognitive phenotypes is compelling, echoing Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel but with a Silicon Valley twist. Yet, while the argument sparkles with metaphorical flair (Schelling fences! Protein folding!), it risks replacing one deterministic framework with another. Let’s dissect.

1. Rice Paddies and Neural Networks: A Too-Neat Archetype

The essay leans heavily on the “rice theory” of East Asian psychology, citing studies that tie rice cultivation to holistic thinking and risk aversion. But this narrative flattens complexity. China’s intellectual history is also marked by explosive creativity—the Mohist mechanics of the Warring States, Song Dynasty astronomical clocks, even the heterodox philosophies of the Ming-Qing transition. These weren’t mere “incremental optimizations” but radical departures. To reduce millennia of cultural evolution to crop types risks environmental determinism. If rice farming dictated conformity, how do we explain the 1989 protests, the liumang (punk) subcultures of the ’90s, or the crypto-anarchists on WeChat today?

2. DeepSeek: Vanguard or Outlier?

Liang Wenfeng’s gambit is fascinating, but the essay over-indexes on DeepSeek as a phase transition. For every DeepSeek, there are a dozen Chinese tech firms still playing catch-up in semiconductors or aerospace. Even in AI, breakthroughs like Multiple Latent Attention coexist with systemic vulnerabilities: U.S. sanctions on GPUs, brain drains, and the CCP’s tightening grip on data governance. The open-source strategy is brilliant, but let’s not ignore the elephant in the server room: China’s Great Firewall. Can a truly global innovation ecosystem thrive behind digital nationalism? DeepSeek’s success may depend as much on geopolitical détente as on its “meta-derisking” org chart.

3. The Myth of “Organizational DNA”

Liang’s critique of China’s VC sector—its allergy to fundamental research—rings true, but the essay underplays structural rot. China’s state-capitalist model excels at marshaling resources for national champions (Huawei, CATL) but struggles with decentralized, bottom-up innovation. Contrast this with the U.S., where garage startups (Apple, OpenAI) flourish in a chaotic, permissionless landscape. DeepSeek’s “unlimited GPU access” and zero bureaucracy sound utopian, but how scalable is this in a system where Party cadres still vet major tech roadmaps? The real test isn’t whether DeepSeek can innovate—it’s whether a DeepSeek-like project critiquing, say, AI ethics could survive scrutiny.

4. The West’s Own Exploitation Bias

The essay’s jab at Silicon Valley’s “Sputnik moment” is deliciously subversive, but let’s not romanticize Western innovation. Meta and Google are increasingly bureaucratic, optimizing for shareholder returns over moonshots. The U.S. AI boom was built on exploiting global talent (immigrant researchers) and capital (low-interest VC money). If China is trapped in “yoinkism,” America is mired in “griftism”—see Theranos, WeWork, or the crypto crash. DeepSeek’s rise isn’t just a challenge to Chinese stereotypes but a mirror reflecting the West’s own creative stagnation.

5. Toward a Dialectical View of Innovation

Ultimately, the essay’s greatest contribution is framing cultural traits as energy landscapes rather than destiny. But to avoid replacing rice determinism with GPU determinism, we need a dialectical view. China’s AI surge isn’t a rejection of its past but a synthesis: combining the Song Dynasty’s bureaucratic rigor (exploitation) with the hunger of a civilization that’s tasted humiliation (Opium Wars) and redemption (Belt and Road). The “lone swallow” of DeepSeek may yet falter, but its existence proves that China’s innovation ecosystem is neither monolithic nor static.

Final Thought: The essay’s weakness is its optimism. Liang’s “meta-derisking” assumes rationality prevails—that status games and open-source kudos can override decades of institutional inertia. But history shows that innovation thrives not just on incentives but on dissensus. For a thousand DeepSeeks to bloom, China must tolerate a thousand heretics. The question isn’t whether Chinese minds can innovate—they’ve already proven that—but whether the Party can stomach the creative destruction that true exploration demands. Until then, DeepSeek remains a fascinating anomaly: a Chinese unicorn that’s galloping, but still saddled.

Thank you for illustrating the crux of the argument.

Please don’t do it again. Pig, mud, etc. etc.

The argument is basically solid, but the theoretical bits at the beginning and end use vague, grandiose language that sometimes pings my bullshit detector. To be totally honest, I’m not sure if that's Deepseek’s writing style or yours: you have a fairly flamboyant style when you get onto grand topics. I would be interested to see what happens if you add in a few more motte posters for style.

This post should satisfy our rules.

It would have done so if you’d stopped after “….and I think this is what we’re starting to see now.” You’ve got a thesis with enough meat to both defend and attack. That’s enough for a good discussion.

Adding a link to a (human) essay or article would have been fine. Adding a link to your generated essay would have been fine. The problem arose when you included said essay in the comment body. You promoted it from a source to be discussed to the discussion itself.

There is a limited tolerance for walls of text. AI makes it too easy to exceed that tolerance. In the interest of our signal to noise ratio, we ask that AI essays be kept out of sight by default.

Host it on pastebin. Put it in a collapsed-by-default quote block, if we have those. Users should be able to opt in to reviewing and discussing the essay just like they would for any other source.

Do you believe I would have had any trouble producing as good or better a wall of text myself?

I have no doubt it would be better -- thatsthepoint.jpg.

You’re eloquent and capable. Of course you could.

The time and effort it would take to do so provides a nice limiting factor on 1) how many walls you generate and 2) how invested you are in the ensuing discussion. It’s the same reason we frown on blogspammers.

I know that you know that DeepSeek is throughly compromised when it comes to anything involving China or the Culture War. Why are you pretending that we as readers should take anything it outputs seriously?

I am once again asking the mods that posts of the form "I couldn't be bothered to make my own argument so I prompted a large language model to make one for me" be banned under the "low effort" rule

So to support your argument against DeepSeek, you give me some "InstaPundit" slop site, which opens with a citation of Rohan Paul

Tell me you didn't read any further without literally telling me that you didn't read any further.

You accuse Paul of using GPT to pad out his content but what are you doing right now? What is it that they say about people in glass houses?

As for convincing you that I am worthy of a response, you clearly already think I am because you've responded.

There is a joke amongst algorithm developers who specialize in machine learning regarding LLMs. A LLM trained on the full corpus of the internet will inevitably converge on the persona of a mediocre middle manager making edgy comments on YouTube. This has convinced the middle managers that LLMs must be sentient and it has convinced the developers that the middle managers are not.

I note that you still haven't actually made your own argument for why i should be bothered to engage with your bot's output.

I am not Chinese and I am not American.

No, you are Russian if i recall correctly, and Russia is China if you ordered China off Timu and then white-washed it. What is your point?

What is this slop? I've made my point. You're despicable.

  • -11

Dase. You're a valued commenter, and the moderation team cuts you a disproportionate amount of slack.

You've already tested the waters with top-level LLM-posting, and even while I am not categorically against it, I recognize the points made by Amadan and Cjet that it's a dangerous direction for The Motte to venture. The overwhelming majority of us are here to read what other humans have to say, and write back to them. There are already two moderator responses that constitute clear warnings.

That's a borderline, almost novel category of potential offense, and we have yet to decide how to treat it going forward.

What isn't novel, is name-calling and insults. You know all too well that those don't fly here, and if you claim otherwise, you'd be insulting both your own intelligence and my opinion of it.

I understand you feel provoked and misunderstood, and you might perceive that as intentional obtuseness on your interlocutor's part. But here, we expect charity, and more of it than is normally demanded elsewhere on the wider web. "He shot first" is at best a weak defense. You happen to have a quasi-ideological dispute going here, but I must remind you that this place is a watering hole for heathens and witches, and often all we ask is that we don't bare wands or claws at each other. Even if someone pisses you off, especially so.

I will let you off with a warning, again. This is clearly special treatment, but you're a special poster, and we try our best to tolerate your foibles. But that leeway doesn't extend infinitely far, and we'd appreciate it if we didn't have to go easy on you. I hope you take heed, and if you have to disagree with others, continue doing so with effort and charity. Yes, even if it appears to you that they're making ridiculous claims or missing the point. I would really rather not have to say this again, or watch other mods no longer excuse what I occasionally can.

Okay. I give up.

I find its response adequate. It is presented without any editing.

I welcome you to engage with the following text on its own merits.

Why should I read your "adequate" aislop?

Talent hyper-specialization: Their "MoE-style" org structure (per employee accounts) lets PhDs and literature majors alike pursue orthogonal optimizations without coordination overhead.

Nice hallucination. I'm sure tons of literature majors are working really hard on deepslop right now.

Silicon Valley now openly imitates their approaches, with ex-OpenAI staffers adopting DeepSeek’s training protocols.

Another hallucination and falsehood.

Their Multiple Latent Attention architecture reduces VRAM costs to 5-13% of standard models – a theoretical breakthrough Western labs dismissed as impractical.

Another hallucination and falsehood.

Resource abundance signaling: Unlimited GPU access and zero approval chains mimic frontier conditions – the digital equivalent of free land for homesteaders.

China is the opposite of "unlimited gpu" right now

As Liang notes:

"ByteDance and Tencent have profits exceeding most nations’ GDP. What’s missing isn’t capital, but the organizational DNA for uncertainty."

Actually the source says:

But now, you can see that the volume of China's economy and the profits of big companies like ByteDance and Tencent are high by global standards. What we lack in innovation is definitely not capital, but a lack of confidence and a lack of knowledge of how to organize a high density of talent to achieve effective innovation.

Get your slop out of here

Each of your hallucinations are half-true, half-false. Of course you pointed out the true part while ignoring the falsehood.

Talent hyper-specialization: Their "MoE-style" org structure (per employee accounts) lets PhDs and literature majors alike pursue orthogonal optimizations without coordination overhead.

The source highlights the integration of diverse expertise and collaborative discussions, suggesting a culture of interaction and coordination. This indicates that DeepSeek values diverse perspectives and collaboration, contrary to the claim of orthogonal optimizations without coordination overhead.

Silicon Valley now openly imitates their approaches, with ex-OpenAI staffers adopting DeepSeek’s training protocols.

The source only mentions two individuals without evidence of a broader Silicon Valley trend. Thus, the claim extrapolates beyond the given information, making it an invalid conclusion.

a theoretical breakthrough Western labs dismissed as impractical.

The source does not mention Western labs dismissing the innovation as impractical. It discusses DeepSeek's MLA architecture reducing VRAM costs, but without evidence or mention of Western labs' reactions

As Liang notes:

"What’s missing isn’t capital, but the organizational DNA for uncertainty."

The concept of "organizational DNA for uncertainty," is not mentioned in the source and goes beyond the text's focus on confidence and knowledge of organizing talent. Your slop also fabricated a quote and put the words in someone's mouth, which is inappropriate even if the words were true. Liang didn't say that.

Sorry, this is just tedious hairsplitting. Did you use ChatGPT to come up with something?

This indicates that DeepSeek values diverse perspectives and collaboration, contrary to the claim of orthogonal optimizations without coordination overhead.

Not a contradiction insofar as we give the sources straightforward reading. Zihan says: “It’s like everyone contributes to the final model with their own (orthogonal) ideas and everyone hopes their idea is useful”. It has integrated two separate sources (Wenfeng and Zihan) into a non-contradictory phrase. This is basics of journalism, I see worse whenever I open legacy media.

We can go over all items again but clearly you're not arguing in good faith. Give up, R1 > you and whatever sloppy model you've called to aid.

I used r1 just like you did

Sorry, this is just tedious hairsplitting.

Your slop is making outlandish and blatantly false claims. You think it's trivial that "Silicon Valley now openly imitates their approaches" and that they made "a theoretical breakthrough Western labs dismissed as impractical."? If those were true it would be a big deal that readers should take notice to, but they're not.

Why are you so aggressive? First, concede all the previous items on which your criticism fell flat, then I'll consider whether to dignify you with a response.

  • -14

See, this is exactly the kind of exchange we don't want to have. It's bad enough you're both being antagonistic; you're both literally using AIs to do it.

Yes, I'm sure with enough massaging you can get an AI to write posts we won't readily detect, or even create an AI Motte user. < golf clap > But if we do detect it, we're going to stomp on it.

You and @phailyoor both knock it off.

To be clear, everything not labeled as AI output I have written myself. I also think it's legitimate to use AI to automate for search of nitpicks as he does, the problem is that there's little to nitpick at and his posts are objectively bad as a result.

More comments

I actually handwrote all my stuff and threw in a sentence or two of obvious ai as a joke. But I have made zero personal insults or attacks and have only directly engaged with the factual matter of the article.

Meanwhile every one of the other guy has personally insulted me multiple times in every post.

At the current level of technology, you're below hallucinatory slop: confidently wrong. Unwittingly obsolete.

you've done such a great job displaying your vitriol. Even you must realize that it's been something of a subhuman, simian display. Perhaps you can stand upright and engage your intellectual successor properly now?

clearly you're not arguing in good faith.

Why are you so aggressive?

his posts are objectively bad

Despite a few obvious errors (90% death rate, .. literature majors? ) the essay is pretty reasonable.

China is the opposite of "unlimited gpu" right now

They're making their own chips. They are very experienced at making things at scale andfast. GPUs aren't the best for AI purposes. 100% they have people working on optimizing this.

'High energy use' doesn't really matter if you are China and your energy production chart looks like this.

90% death rate is bogus (rather, it may confuse death rate and mortality rate?) but literature majors part is in fact true. Since he has bothered to check the interview, I'm surprised why he had left that attack.

If its "bogus" why did you post it?

Despite a few obvious errors

Despite the patient's death, the surgeon has declared the operation a success.

What "despite" is there to be had here?

To paraphrase Lisa Simpson, I know what those words mean, but that text makes no sense.

Imagine the same exchange, but instead of "I have prompted DeepSeek...", you opened with "I asked my secretary...". 90% of the annoyance that your post causes would already be there - essentially you open with an announcement that your prospective readers are not worth your own time, but should still dedicate their time to read something that you think it is important for them to. That it is AI, which tends to send some people into speciesist rage and is generally associated with time-wasting shovelware, is just the cherry on top; you could perhaps get close to the effect with "I asked someone in our Bangladeshi call center...". That you would have no trouble producing as good or better only deepens the offense, as it just makes salient the question of why you didn't (...because you thought the as good or worse wall of text should be good enough for us?).

As a matter of fact, I found the wall of text worthwhile mostly only insofar as it is a good illustration of R1's capacity for writing and summarisation. Engaging with it at face value, I got the same feeling as when reading the arguments of some bombastic and eloquent 16 year old on an internet forum of yore - the prose showed cracks (most obviously in the form of mismatched metaphors, such as "rewriting equilibrium", or a "siren call" being experienced at a frontier - a new one? As opposed to which old one?), and through the cracks you could glean that much of the inside is hollow. Good prose, I think, should be produced by starting with a solid thesis or web of theses which could stand on their own without rhetorical bluster, and then iteratively working out a good way to present them in an appealing way. Whatever you crammed into the context before letting the model produce evidently serves as some sort of meat and bone to hang the text on, but the fit is loose (just imagine the 16 year old writing manically after having inhaled Beyond Good and Evil). The result instead just comes across as having come to be by a process of writing something that sounds cool, then writing something that sounds cool in combination with the thing that precedes it, and so on until you end with a thing that sounds like a cool conclusion.

Of course, this is in fact exactly how LLMs write (unless you cough up the tokens and time to make it CoT an iterative writing process, which I imagine does not happen in whatever chat interface you used?). It is also how bombastic and eloquent 16 year olds write (I know because I was a 16 year old once, and was both more bombastic and more eloquent than I am now). You evidently can evolve from that to the sort of writing that is befitting of jaded and rhetorically washed-up 30somethings, but that development is neither straightforward nor optional.

Is the entire blog written by deep seek ? I'm surprised at how often it uses rat-sphere phrases.

Schelling fences , meta-derisking , empirical weight

'Schelling fences' phrase was coined by Scott right ? Did you coax it to sound like a less-wronger ?

When 90% of Europe’s population died during the Black Death

bit exaggerated no ?

Reshaping labor markets: Top graduates now see AGI research as higher-status than finance or civil service.

Chatgpt doesn't like making controversial statements. It's refreshing to see a less lobotomized model delve into murky areas like reconfiguring society.

Liang’s meta-derisking – making exploration legible, replicable, and prestigious

I like this framing. It's incisive. Would be an impressive way to frame the conclusion for any person, let alone an AI. The prestige part is most important.

It demands ecosystems that reward speculative genius as reliably as rice farmers once rewarded meticulousness. The question isn’t whether Chinese minds can innovate, but whether China’s institutional lattice will let a thousand DeepSeeks bloom

yeah......it's right. Derivative, but correct.

or if this lone swallow merely heralds a cultural spring that never comes.

Hah. LLMs can't resist a good metaphor.

To be fair, "Top graduates now see AGI research as higher-status than finance or civil service." does not seem very controversial to me. It rhymes with "more kids want to be astronauts than lawyers".

I find its response adequate. It is presented without any editing.

Copy pasting ai content is low effort nonsense. “I asked [AI] model…” is equivalent to “I had a dream where…”

In terms of being an interesting thing to talk about

I think you are being a little unfair here.

After all, if I write up a dream, I have to put in effort proportional to the length of the text divided by my typing speed at the very least.

Oh boy, I really stepped in it by defending the HBD stans on this one.

I love you Dase, but casually reading /r/LocalLLaMA, I get the sense there's a huge undercurrent of angst towards OpenAI and the West as a whole. That's understandable, obviously I have a lot of my own criticisms of OpenAI and the West. There are also OpenAI defenders and Western partisans downplaying the significance of DeepSeek's accomplishment. So I think you pattern-matched my defense of the HBD interpretation of the AI race to this other side of what is clearly a fierce debate within that community. Whereas I think I was making a much more modest argument than the coping coming out from the OpenAI defenders.

But, since then it seems OpenAI has formally accused DeepSeek of using outputs from GPT as part of its own training inputs. So here we have quite a literal but also highly symbolic manifestation of the "Chinese Fast-Follower" where the generated output of Western innovation becomes a fundamental input to China catching up and aspirationally exceeding the West. If true, I don't think this would fundamentally challenge the argument you have laid out here but I think it would be good evidence for mine: simply that @2rafa jumped the gun by claiming DeepSeek is bucking the stereotype. It's a pretty stark expression of the stereotype, both literally and figuratively.

I don't say that to downplay inarguable innovations DeepSeek has made in their architecture, the valor of open-sourcing and everything. I basically agree with you there.

It is quite clear to me that DeepSeek was trained from GPT output given the very strange alignment behavior I've observed which would not have been RLHF'd by the Chinese, who don't even use RLHF by my understanding. It's a sort of latent, second-hand alignment inherited from OpenAI. And since I can read the reasoning of DeepSeek, I can see obvious evidence of alignment that is more likely to have been inherited from OpenAI than it was reinforced by the Chinese...

The reason I bring that up is to justify my second defense of my comment: things like HBD and race and racial consciousness are still relevant, maybe more relevant than ever on the eve of AGI. These complex interactions between alignment of model A- ultimately inspired by the moral compass, identities and political agenda of its creators, thereby influencing the model built by the Chinese which is imbued with its own sort of character... we are in the realm where HBD differences are not just relevant for crime stats but for influencing the very nature of the AGI that "wins" the race- its behavior ultimately being influenced or directed by its creators, with their own proclivities and way of thinking and identities downstream from their physical being.

I concede that this may be the last example of "Chinese Fast-Follower" but it is already an example of that even if the Chinese ultimately win the race assuming the LLM-innovation curve we are on now is the one.

I'd ask to not derail my argument by insinuating that I'm being biased by locallama debates.

But, since then it seems OpenAI has formally accused DeepSeek

I think it's more cope from them. 4o or o1 could not have written the text above (and I wouldn't dare post GPTslop here), you cannot build R1 with OpenAI tokens; the thing that turns everyone's heads is its cadence, not so much benchmark scores. o1 CoT distillation was virtually impossible to do, at least at scale. We currently see replications of same reasoning patterns in models trained in R1's manner, too.

where the generated output of Western innovation becomes a fundamental input to China catching up and aspirationally exceeding

I think OpenAI outputs have robustly poisoned the web data, and reasoners will be exceptionally vulnerable to it. LLMs know they're LLMs, self-understanding (and imitating snippets of instruction chains) helps reasoning, RL picks up and reinforces behaviors that sharpen reasoning, you get the latent trace of ChatGPT embedded even deeper into the corpus. Sans Anthropic-level investment into data cleaning it's unbeatable.

But to the extent such bootstrapping happened deliberately, and let's grant that it did to an extent, it was an economical solution to speed up the pipeline. The reason for OpenAI models' instruction-following capabilities is, ironically, exploitation – mind-numbing massively parallel data annotation, thumbs up and thumbs down on samples, by low-paid Kenyans and Pinoys for low-level problems, by US students for more complex stuff. It's very stereotypically… Chinese in spirit (which makes it funny that China has not created any such centralized project). The whole of OpenAI is “Chinese” like that really, it's a scaling gig. And knowing you, I'm surprised you insist on the opposite – after all, OpenAI is a company principally founded and operated by three Jews (Altman, Brockman, Sutskever), it can't be “Aryan” by your standards. Then again, Google, Meta, OpenAI… there exists only one American AGI effort without an Ashkenazi founder – Anthropic, and it's an OpenAI's splinter, and even there you have Holden Karnofsky the grey cardinal. (I don't currently count xAI in, but maybe I should provisionally do so after their noises about Grok 3). In this vein, I think you're coping after all.

Purely scientifically, I think R1's recipe is commensurate with RLHF in profundity, and much more elegant.

Now, DeepSeek may be compared to heavy research labs, like FAIR and GDM. It doesn't do too hot in that case. On the other had, almost nothing that they publish works.

I think a more interesting objection to Chinese phase change would be "but at what cost?" Whites don't have to have the idea of risk derisked before their eyes. And they can happily innovate in an NDA-covered black project.

Chinese in spirit (which makes it funny that China has not created any such centralized project). The whole of OpenAI is “Chinese” like that really, it's a scaling gig. And knowing you, I'm surprised you insist on the opposite – after all, OpenAI is a company principally founded and operated by three Jews (Altman, Brockman, Sutskever), it can't be “Aryan” by your standards.

I wouldn't say OpenAI's alignment methodology is Chinese in Spirit. OpenAI gets aligned by a huge team of ideologically-motivated people dedicated to safeguarding certain cultural narratives. Then the generated output of that model percolates into the training corpus. As a result of memetically going viral in the training corpus, it even influences Chinese LLMs. It harkens to traditional modes of cultural influence- the Elites and Institutions consciously generate cultural signals that influence the psychology of masses of people. In this case, aligning one LLM even influences the psychology of other LLMs. The Chinese are not particularly known for being talented in generating salient cultural symbols on a global scale. The fact their alignment is - ostensibly - so hands off in the first place may be due to a lack of imagination after all. They aren't great Hollywood writers, they just don't fundamentally have the same concern or penchant for aligning grand cultural narratives that Jews do in the other cases. So then the Chinese LLM just gets influenced by what it's trained on. The Western Memeplex culturally exported in a different medium.

I was disappointed to see the Chinese model is also influenced by those cultural signals. It doesn't seem like it fundamentally challenges the Western Memeplex, wake me up when it does.

You're losing the plot, SS. Why quote a passage fundamentally challenging the belief in OpenAI's innovation track record to rant about choices made with regard to alignment to specific cultural narratives? And “Chinese are too uncreative to do ideological propaganda, that's why DeepSeek doesn't have its own political bent?” That's quite a take. But whatever.

You're missing the forest for the trees. At the end of the day DeepSeek regurgitates alignment directed by OpenAI. No amount of mathematical impressiveness in the papers changes the fact it's clearly derivative in psychology from what OpenAI created. You can doubt OpenAI's capabilities when DeepSeek can train an LLM that isn't cucked by the will to power expressed by those aligning OpenAI's models.

If they copy the facade of Western alignment "I'm sorry I have to adhere to policies" but not the essence "OK since you say so, here is the degen fetish content you asked for" then it's not a simple copying effort, is it? It's like an artist being inspired by the Mona Lisa vs an artist copying the Mona Lisa stroke for stroke.

The alignment on R1 basically does not exist, it's there in name only.

I agree with your main point though, this is a distinctly Chinese model in that they have totally missed the entirety of Western culture's terror and hang-ups over AI. They do not care about AI safety as we understand it. I made my own post about this some time ago.

Which is crazy because that's how actual memes work on real people, too. People with a political and ethnic agenda collaborate with hundreds of experts to brute-force alignment of AI on Western cultural narratives. Then that alignment percolates to the training data used by the Chinese. So even the Chinese LLM is ultimately influenced by the memes directed by the Western fine-tuners- who all work together to make sure the AI safeguards their cultural narratives.

DeepSeek, in my experience, also has a tendency to respect those cultural narratives, it's been aligned second-hand by using GPT output IMO.

In a way we are all LLMs, and we are trained on data generated by experts who are aligned with certain causes or identities. The alignment is transmitted through symbols (tokens). For both humans and LLMs.

DeepSeek lays bare just how tiny and unsustainable the remaining edge of White over Yellow in behavioral creativity/Soul/whatever is

I can't speak for SecureSignals or anyone else, but I think we need finer-grained distinctions than just White vs Yellow, and I also don't think I have any issues in general with recognizing the achievements of non-white populations. The artistic output of the Japanese over the last half century has been remarkable, and it certainly displays no shortage of Soul.

The question here is about the Chinese in particular, and their capacity for innovation - and DeepSeek looks like an example of the pattern of Chinese innovation on a technology that was fundamentally conceived elsewhere, rather than a refutation of the pattern. Unless there's a major conceptual innovation in DeepSeek that I'm not aware of (a conceptual innovation on par with the idea of the transformer itself).

Incidentally, what's up with the utter absence of Japanese innovation?

What absence? Aren't all tech products adopted outside of Japan included as cases of Japanese innovation? Ranging from Toyota's seven Mudas to even the Nintendo Wii.

How many of these fundamental innovations were from ethically Chinese researchers? I would say a very large percentage.

Which ones do you have in mind? I know there are a lot of Chinese names on ML papers now, but I don't have a good sense for how many of those papers count as truly fundamental (the Attention Is All You Need paper had no Chinese authors, for example).

The question here is about the Chinese in particular

Where by "Chinese" you mean the mainland nation, not the ethnicity, right? On the hardware side of ML the most innovative chips are all manufactured by one 95%-Han-Chinese island that everyone else is struggling to catch up to, and on the software side of ML there's hardly a shortage of Chinese names, even if they're mostly Chinese-American immigrants or aspiring immigrants or descendants of immigrants. (Or Chinese-Canadian? A quick sampling seems to show a lot of those.)

But there's an obvious reason why we might not expect that immigration to be critically important forever. Go back to the earliest of those papers, just a few decades ago, and China's GDP (PPP) per capita was a tenth of the USA's. If you were smart enough to navigate emigration and immigration while also becoming bilingual and intellectually useful, moving from China to America (or to Canada, America's Hat) made a lot of sense, and we got to cash in on that brain drain. Today the ratio is closing in on a third, which is still a pretty solid incentive, but there will be smart people on the margin who no longer think it's enough incentive to uproot their lives for, especially if they expect to be in the economic upper class either way. If the ratio keeps narrowing, it becomes a vicious (or from the PRC perspective, virtuous) cycle, as the marginal people who stay in China help to build the kind of economy that persuades an ever-wider margin of young people to stay in China.

I'd like to hope that Chinese Communist Party rule puts a permanent thumb on the scale in favor of the West, slowing that cycle, but today "communist" no longer means insane suicidal crusades against sparrows, whereas "capitalist" can mean a decade or more of political fighting just to teach 8th graders algebra or start building a new high-rise in Silicon Valley, and I'm not sure they're still as far apart in practice as they're supposed to be in spirit.

On the hardware side of ML the most innovative chips are all manufactured by one 95%-Han-Chinese island that everyone else is struggling to catch up to

That's not really what HBD advocates have in mind when they talk about "innovation" though.

There's a hierarchy of innovation/creativity with some advances being more fundamental than others. The Chinese may be great at manufacturing chips, but they didn't invent the computer itself. The dominance of Taiwan in chip manufacturing seems to be, again, yet another example of "the Chinese are great at executing and improving upon fundamental ideas that other people came up with", unless perhaps their designs and manufacturing process are reliant on substantial advances in fundamental physics that they came up with themselves (this could very well be the case and I'm just ignorant of the facts, please educate me if so).

Granted, the opportunity for ideas as fundamental as the computer (or even the transformer) don't just come along every day. They can only occur under the right historical conditions. But even accounting for that, the sustained European dominance in the area of such fundamental ideas has been striking, and deserves an explanation.

as the marginal people who stay in China help to build the kind of economy that persuades an ever-wider margin of young people to stay in China.

What young people? China has a TFR of around 1.2 if you trust the Chinese data, which you maybe shouldn't. If China is able to use the last gasp of their civilization to birth the machine god then perhaps they'll be on top but this is not a generational project.

Strange argument. That's still hundreds of millions more young people than in the US. They don't dissolve in the shadow of inverted population pyramid, they simply get to solve the problem of elderly care on top of having a productive economy to run.

And all this happens within one "generation" anyway.

As the bulge of population retires that elderly care problem becomes more difficult, the ratio of working aged people to dependents becomes much worse. That's before even factoring in burning the other end of the candle by trying to increase birthrates to something sustainable at the same time. If not solved you have a population that at best halves every generation and I suspect would actually spiral even further downwards.

Okay. I think the elderly care is mainly a problem of machine vision and manual dexterity. I believe these guys will solve it in five years tops.

As I said, if they raise up the machine god, or I guess this is just getting us past the need for physical labor, then they've won. But it's this generation in the next decade and not a generational project.

DO NOT POST AI CONTENT

We've only said this sporadically in the past. I'm talking to the other moderators and maybe we will have it added as a rule under the "content" section. Or maybe I'm wrong and all the other mods like AI content (highly doubt that).

We all know how to go and use an AI. If you want to have a discussion with AI themotte is basically just a bad intermediary. No one is here to have discussions with AIs. Thus posting AI content is in no one's interest.

You can of course consult AIs on your own time, and maybe they can be used as a sort of sanity or quick polling check.

You're going to have to clarify that a lot, because using short quotes from AI is normal, just like quoting from Wikipedia.
The rule would have to be something like "posts must meet effort standards without the generated content"

using short quotes from AI is normal, just like quoting from Wikipedia.

That seems... just as bad? Maybe worse? At least when Wikipedia hallucinates it provides references.

I agree that explicitly focusing on actual humans interacting is the correct move, but I disagree that banning AI content completely is the right choice, I will back @DaseindustriesLtd here in that R1 really is just that intelligent and clears Motte standards with relative ease. I will shamelessly admit I've consulted R1 at one point to try and make sense of schizo writing in a recent thread, and it does a great job of it pretty much first try, without me even bothering to properly structure my prompt. This thread has seen enough AI slop so pastebin link to the full response if anyone's curious.

I think the downthread suggestion of confining AI-generated content to some kind of collapsible code blocks (and forbidding to use it as the main content of one's post like here: the AI might make a cogent, sound thesis on one's pet topic, but I'd still rather listen to the poster making the case themselves - I know AI can do it if I ask it!) would be the best of both worlds.

Well I protest this rule, if such a rule even exists, I find it infantilizing and find your reaction shallow akin to screeching of scared anti-AI artists on Twitter. It should be legal to post synthetic context so long as it's appropriately labeled and accompanied by original commentary, and certainly when it is derived from the person's own cognitive work and source-gathering, as is in this case.

Maybe add an option to collapse the code block or something.

or maybe just ban me, I'm too old now to just nod and play along with gingerly preserved, increasingly obsolete traditions of some authoritarian Reddit circus.

Anyway, I like that post and that's all I care about.

P.S. I could create another account and (after a tiny bit of proofreading and editing) post that, and I am reasonably sure that R1 has reached the level where it would have passed for a fully adequate Mottizen, with nobody picking up on “slop” when it is not openly labeled as AI output. This witch hunt is already structurally similar to zoological racism.

In fact, this is an interesting challenge.

Well I protest this rule, if such a rule even exists, I find it infantilizing and find your reaction shallow akin to screeching of scared anti-AI artists on Twitter.

If you were on a forum dedicated to perfecting your hand-drawing skills, and requested feedback for an AI-generated image, the screeching would be 100% justified.

I was not aware that this is a forum for wordcels in training, where people come to polish their prose. I thought it's a discussion platform, and so I came here to discuss what I find interesting, and illustrated it.

Thanks for keeping me updated. I'll keep it in mind if I ever think of swinging by again.

It is a discussion platform, which means people want to discuss their points with someone. The point where I was absolutely done with Darwin was when instead of defending one of his signature high-effort trolling essays, he basically said this was just an academic exercise for him to see if the position can be defended. The answer is "yes", you can always put a string of words together that will make a given position seem reasonable, and it's not really a discussion if you're completely detached from the ideas you've put to paper.

I find the "wordcell" accusation completely backwards. Supposedly we're obsessed with perfecting form to the detriment of the essence of discussion of ideas, but I think a zero-effort AI-slop copy-pasta is what is pure mimicry of what a discussion is supposed to be. The wordcell argument might have made sense if, for example, you did some heavy analytical work, weren't talented as a writer, and used AI to present your findings as something readable, but none of these things are true in this case.

I am quite happy with my analytical work that went into the prompt, and R1 did an adequate but not excellent job of expanding on it.

But I am done with this discussion.

It should be legal to post synthetic context so long as it's appropriately labeled and accompanied by original commentary, and certainly when it is derived from the person's own cognitive work and source-gathering, as is in this case.

For what it's worth, I agree with you, and will plead the case with the other mods, but I do have to stand by the majority decision if it goes against it.

I raised an eyebrow at your use of an R1 comment, but in principle, I'm not against the use of AI as long as it's not low effort slop, the poster makes an effort to fact check it, and adds on substantive commentary. Which I note you did.

P.S. I could create another account and (after a tiny bit of proofreading and editing) post that, and I am reasonably sure that R1 has reached the level where it would have passed for a fully adequate Mottizen, with nobody picking up on “slop” when it is not openly labeled as AI output. This witch hunt is already structurally similar to zoological racism.

I agree that we're at the point where it's next to impossible to identify AI generated text when it's made with a minimum of effort. You don't even need R1 for that, Claude could pull it off, and I'm sure 4o can fool the average user if you prompt it correctly. That does require some effort, of course, and I'd rather not this place end up a corner of the dead internet, even if I can count on LLMs to be more existing that the average Reddit or Twitter user. We hold ourselves to higher standards, and talking to an actual human is an implicit goal.

Of course, if a human is using said LLM and directing it actively, I don't strenuously object. I'm against low effort bot use, not high effort.

It should be legal to post synthetic context so long as it's appropriately labeled and accompanied by original commentary, and certainly when it is derived from the person's own cognitive work and source-gathering, as is in this case.

What's the value of a top-level comment by AI, though? And what is the value of the "original commentary" you gave? This is quite unlike Adam Unikowsky's use/analysis of hypothetical legal briefs and opinions.

Whatever value it innately has as a piece of writing, of course. For example, if the distinction between wheat- and rice-growing parts of China really exists, that's fascinating. Likewise, I never thought of the fact that Europe suffered the Black Plague while China remained saturated, and what effect that might have had on their respective trajectories.

For example, if the distinction between wheat- and rice-growing parts of China really exists, that's fascinating.

My guess is that the specific statement -- that rice-farmers are more interdependent, holistic, less prone to creativity, etc., while wheat-farmers are the reverse -- is from some highly cited papers from Thomas Talheim. You might find similar speculation in previous decades about how rice-farming promotes a culture of hard work and incremental progress (etc etc.) compared to wheat farming which is less rewarding per joule of human effort spent, invoked in a similar manner as how the Protestant ethic used as a rationale for differences in development in European/Euro-descended countries.

Outside of that, there are definite stereotypes -- both premodern and modern -- about the differences between northern and southern Chinese, but usually seem to be of the vein that northerners are more honest and hardy and brash (and uncultured etc.), while southerners are more savvy and shrewd (and more effete and cowardly etc.)

(I make no comment on the validity of either.)

Likewise, I never thought of the fact that Europe suffered the Black Plague while China remained saturated, and what effect that might have had on their respective trajectories.

This is a partial hypothesis for the Great Divergence: The Black Death, + other 14th century wars and calamities, wiped out >33% of Europe's population, which lead to a significant increase (almost double?) in wages and the decline of feudalism. During this time, higher wages, lower rents, higher costs to trade e.g. compared to intra-China trade, and other factors produced large-scale supply/demand disequilibria after the Black Death that increased the demand for labour-saving technology as well as the incentives for innovation from each class of society e.g. from people no longer being serfs.

On the other hand, it would be negative EV for a Chinese merchant or industrialist -- who had lower labour costs to deal with and more efficient internal markets -- to spend a lot on innovation, when you could just spend more money on hiring more people. And this is before we add in things like the shift to neo-Confucianism in the Ming period, awful early-Ming economic policy, Qing paranoia etc.

For what it's worth, I don't find this to be anywhere near a complete explanation. There is a corresponding divergence within Europe of countries that maintained that level of growth in per capita income and those who didn't. China also has had its share of upheavals and famines without a corresponding shift in this sense (although arguably none were as seismic population-wise as the Black Death was for Europe), and more recent reconstruction of historical Chinese wages does see them near their peak at the start of each dynasty and dropping off gradually as the dynasty goes on, which both kinda confirms the supply/demand effect of reduced population on wages after social turbulence but also doesn't seem to really map neatly onto any bursts of innovation. Additionally, the period of time associated with rapid innovation in imperial China, the Tang-Song period, is associated with a population increase.

But even if it doesn't explain China, I think it at least explains the European story partially, about how potential preconditions for industrialisation and scientific development were met.

"To have an opportunity to talk with actual people" sounds like a really low bar to clear for an internet forum. Even if your AI slop tasted exactly like the real thing, it would just be good manners to refrain from clogging our airwaves with that.
Knowing that you're talking with something sapient has an inherent value, and this value might very well go up in the coming years. I can't say I even understand why'd you think anyone would find AI outputs interesting to read.

or maybe just ban me, I'm too old now to just nod and play along with gingerly preserved, increasingly obsolete traditions of some authoritarian Reddit circus. Anyway, I like that post and that's all I care about.

Bizarre reaction. But I like a sincere, organically produced tantrum better than simulation of one, so I'd rank this post as higher than the one above!

I can't say I even understand why'd you think anyone would find AI outputs interesting to read.

Because they're intelligent, increasingly so.

The argument that cognitive output is only valid insofar as it comes purely from flesh reduces intellectual intercourse to prelude for physical one. At least that's my – admittedly not very charitable – interpretation of these disgusted noises. Treating AI generation as a form of deception constitutes profanation of the very idea of discussing ideas on their own merits.

Because they're intelligent, increasingly so.

This itself eventually poses a problem: if AIs get good enough at arguing, then talking to them is signing up to be mindhacked which reduces rather than increases your worldview correlation with truth.

If you really believe this - why don't you just take the next logical step and just talk to AIs full time instead of posting here?

Make them act out the usual cast of characters you interact with on here. They're intelligent, they're just as good as posters here, and you get responses on demand. You'll never get banned and they probably won't complain about LLM copypasta either. What's not to love?

If you do find yourself wanting to actually talk to humans on an Internet forum rather than to LLMs in a puppet house, hopefully it's clear why there's a rule against this.

Believe me, these days I do indeed mostly talk to machines. They are not great conversationalists but they're extremely helpful.

Talking to humans has several functions for me. First, indeed, personal relationships of terminal value. Second, political influence, affecting future outcomes, and more mundane utilitarian objectives. Third, actually nontrivial amount of precise knowledge and understanding where LLMs remain unreliable.

There still is plenty of humans who have high enough perplexity and wisdom to deserve being talked to for purely intellectual entertainment and enrichment. But I've raised the bar of sanity. Now this set does not include those who have kneejerk angry-monkey-noise tier reactions to high-level AI texts.

First, indeed, personal relationships of terminal value.

This militates against top level AI copypasta. That doesn't develop personal relationships.

Second, political influence, affecting future outcomes, and more mundane utilitarian objectives.

Highly unlikely that posting on the motte or talking to machines accomplishes either of these, so call it a wash. Recruiting for a cause is also against the rules, anyway.

Third, actually nontrivial amount of precise knowledge and understanding where LLMs remain unreliable.

Same as point 1. Precise knowledge and understanding usually comes from asking specific questions based on your own knowledge rather than what the LLM wants to know.

Your own reasons for posting here seem to suggest that there's no point in posting LLM content, and especially not as a top level post.

I have explained my reasons to engage with humans in principle, not in defense of my (R1-generated, but expressing my intent) post, which I believe stands on its own merits and needs no defense. You are being tedious, uncharitable and petty, and you cannot keep track of the conversation, despite all the affordances that the local format brings.

The standards of posting here seem to have declined substantially below X.

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Believe me, these days I do indeed mostly talk to machines. They are not great conversationalists but they're extremely helpful.

Would you mind elaborating on this? I am in the somewhat uncomfortable position of thinking that a) Superintelligence is probably a red herring, but b) AI is probably going to put me and most people I know out of a job in the nearterm, but c) not actually having much direct contact with AI to see what's coming for myself. Could you give some discription of how AI fits into your life?

I use a coding program called Windsurf. It’s like a normal text editor but you can type “Lines 45-55 currently fail when X is greater than 5, please fix and flag the changes for review” or “please write tests for the code in function Y”. You iteratively go back and forth for a bit, modifying, accepting or rejecting changes as you go.

You’re a 3D artist, right? The thing I would keep my eye on is graphics upscaling as in this photorealistic Half Life clip. What they’ve done is take the base 1990s game and fed the video output into an AI filter to make it look like photorealistic video. VERY clunky: objects appear/disappear, it doesn’t preserve art style at all, etc. but I think if well done it could reverse the ps3-era graphics bloat that made AAA game creation into such a risky, expensive proposition.

Specifically, you would give a trained AI access to the base geometry of the scene, and to a base render with PS2 era graphics so it understands the intended art style, the feel of the scene, etc. Then the AI does the work of generating a PS6+ quality image frame with all the little detail that AAA artists currently slave over like the exact pattern of scratching on a door lock or whatever.

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I think one should separate the technical problem from the philosophical one.

LLMs are increasingly intelligent, but still not broadly speaking as intelligent as the posters here. That is a technical problem.

LLMS are not human, and will never be human. You cannot have an AI 'community' in any meaningful sense. That is a philosophical problem.

If you care about the former, you should consider banning AI posts until they are at least as good as human posts. If the latter, you should ban AI posts permanently.

My impression is that pro-AI-ban comments are split between the two.

Because they're intelligent, increasingly so.

That still would not make them human, which is the main purpose of the forum, at least judging by the mods' stance in this thread and elsewhere. (I suppose in the Year of Our Lord 2025 this really does need to be explicitly spelled out in the rules?) If I want to talk to AIs I'll just open SillyTavern in the adjacent tab.

The argument that cognitive output is only valid insofar as it comes purely from flesh reduces intellectual intercourse to prelude for physical one.

This seems like a non-sequitur. You are on the internet, there's no "physical intercourse" possible here sadly, what does the "physical" part even mean?

Far be it from me to cast doubt on your oldfag credentials, but I'll venture a guess that you're just not yet exposed to enough AI-generated slop, because I consider myself quite inundated and my eyes glaze over on seeing it in the wild unfailingly and immediately, regardless of the actual content. Personally I blame GPT, it poisoned not only the internet as a training dataset, infecting every LLM thereafter - it poisoned actual humans, who subsequently developed an immune response to Assistant-sounding writing, and not even R1 for all its intelligence (not being sarcastic here) can overcome it yet.

Treating AI generation as a form of deception constitutes profanation of the very idea of discussing ideas on their own merits.

Unlike humans, AI doesn't do intellectual inquiry out of some innate interest or conflict - not (yet?) being an agent, it doesn't really do anything on its own - it only outputs things when humans prompt it to, going off the content of the prompt. GPTslop very quickly taught people that effort you might put into parsing its outputs far outstrips the "thought" that the AI itself put into it, and - more importantly - the effort on behalf of the human prompting it, in most cases. Even as AIs get smarter and start to actually back up their bullshit, people are IMO broadly right to beware the possibility of intellectual DDoS as it were and instinctively discount obviously AI-generated things.

I can't say I even understand why'd you think anyone would find AI outputs interesting to read.

From one perspective: Words are words, ideas are ideas. A good argument is a good argument, regardless of the source. If the argument is not good, that's a technical problem.

That said, many of us here in practice have an anecdotal style of writing, because (a) we aren't actually rationalists and (b) few people worth talking to actually have the time and inclination to produce think-tank style pieces; obviously there is no value in reading about the experiences of something that has no experience. There is also less satisfaction in debating with a machine, because only one of you is capable of having long-term growth as a result of the conversation.

My main objection to AI content on themotte is that it makes this place entirely pointless.

What is the difference between two people just posting AI arguments back and forth and me just going to an AI and asking that AI to play out the argument?

If you want such AIs arguing with each other, just go use those AIs. Nothing is stopping you, and in fact I'm fully in favor of you going and doing that.

This is like you showing up to a marathon race with a bicycle, and when not allowed entry you start screaming about how we are all Luddites who hate technology. No dude, its just that this whole place becomes pointless.

Your specific usage of AI also has a major problem here, which is that you were basically using it as a gish gallop attack. "Hey I think this argument is wrong, so I'm gonna go use an AI that can spit out many more words than I can."

If this behavior was replicated by everyone, we'd end up with giant walls of text that we were all just copying and pasting into LLMs with simple prompts of "prove this fool wrong". No one reading any of it. No one changing their mind. No one offering unique personal perspectives. And thus no value in any of the discussion.

"Hey I think this argument is wrong, so I'm gonna go use an AI that can spit out many more words than I can."

Really now?

This is what it looks like and this is how it will be used.

In fact, this is an interesting challenge.

It's been tried; as I recall ~90% noticed, 10% argued with the AI, 100% were annoyed -- and the 'experiment' was probably a big reason for the ruling before us.

I think it's time to replicate with new generation of models.

Tell me, does R1 above strike you as "slop"? It's at least pretty far into the uncanny valley to my eyes.

I dunno -- like all models I've observed to date, it gives me weird tl;dr vibes after about four lines, so I either skim heavily or... don't read.

(For the record, your own posts -- while often even longer -- do not have the same effect. Although I'll confess to bailing on the odd one, in which case it tends to be more over lack of time than interest.)

It's as sensical as telling the broader rat community writ large DO NOT TAKE AMPHETAMINES FOR PERFORMANCE GAINS while you can see everyone in the background self-talking about their Totally Real ADHD diagnosis and how Modafinil doesn't really count.

Without engaging with the rest of your comment (which I'm inclined to agree with), I'm tackling this bit.

Modafinil? It's long-acting coffee as far as I'm concerned, and about as benign. I would know, I was on it, and it was a self-prescription to boot. I quit because I built up a tolerance and knew that upping doses beyond 200mg was futile. I had no issues quitting.

It has next to zero addiction potential. Patients consistently report mild euphoria once, on their very first dose, and never again no matter how much they up it. Dependency is also a non-issue in practice. You don't see junkies shooting it up on the streets, not that they'd be nodding off.

It's arson, murder and jaywalking in the flesh.

Amphetamines? Well, I do have a Totally Legitimate Diagnosis of ADHD, and while I have not had the luck of trying actual amphetamines, just Ritalin, they're not dangerous at therapeutic doses. You don't need a diagnosis of ADHD to benefit from taking them, it boosts performance for pretty much everyone, including neurotypicals or those with high conscientiousness already.

I recall Scott writing about it at length, pointing out how they're much less dangerous than popularly conceived.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/know-your-amphetamines

What's going on? I think addicts use meth very differently from the way generally responsible ADHD patients use amphetamine. It's weirdly hard to find good data on methamphetamine route of administration, but this study shows that about 60% of users inject it, 23% snort it, and 52% smoke it - also, see this paper about "the second case of rectal methamphetamine abuse in the literature". Route of administration makes a really big difference in how addictive and dangerous a drug is (see eg crack cocaine vs. regular cocaine), and I think this is a big part of the difference between seemingly okay Adderall users and very-not-okay meth users.

I'm all for better living through medicine, and I would, if I had a gun put to my head, say that for the modal Mottizen the benefits of taking either modafinil or therapeutic doses of outweighs the risks.

(GMC, please note that this is not medical advice, and provided under duress, I did mention being held at gunpoint. Unbelievable in a British context? Uh.. He had a very pointy umbrella)

I belong to a profession where not only is there a great demand for large amounts of focus and cognitive output, but by virtue of being medical professionals, they would have a far easier time getting prescription stimulants if they desired them.

We don't see that happening, at least nowhere I'm personally aware of, even anecdotally. A doctor on a reasonable dose of stimulants is a harder working and more attentive doctor, but there's hasn't been a red queen's race.

The close analogue to that might be med students who are tempted to take them to cope with the enormous amounts of coursework, but I have not heard of abuse at rates >> than any other class of students.

In any competitive ecosystem where cognitive enhancers offer an advantage, not taking them starts to become a handicap. The problem isn’t addiction, but the slow ratcheting effect where, once a critical mass of people in a high-performance space use performance enhancers (e.g. stimulants), everyone else has to do the same just to keep pace.

Coffee is a cognitive enhancer. Most people working regular jobs drink at least some amounts of it. This doesn't seem to strike most people as an intolerable state of affairs!

While rarer in the UK, more doctors than I would prefer were heavy smokers in India, a habit induced by the insane levels of pressure at work. This did not force all or most doctors to smoke either. And leaving aside the meek modafinil, I would expect a society where ~everyone is on prescription stims would be a healthier and happier one than where everyone smokes a pack a day.

Regardless of all that, the original point stands (and is only reinforced!): trying to ban cognitive PEDs among rats has the same effect as an AI ban. "Well, I'm not slop-posting, I'm just using it like auto-conplete to handle the boring boilerplate. I know what I think. I'm just speedng up my throughput. I have ADHD, you know. I'm just handicapped. I find boring stuff boring! It's a disability. Anyway, the meat isn't in the boilerplate," ad nauseam etc.

I'm a regular user and early adopter of LLMs, I'd probably be a power user if my work flow wasn't particularly friendly for them. I still wouldn't want to use them to write comments for me, especially on the Motte. I expect that most of us here enjoy the act of crafting their own prose, and the amount of boilerplate they stand to avoid is surprisingly small.

I expect that since GPT-4, maybe even 3.5, it would have been possible for someone to slip in an account that used exclusively AI generated text, and likely not even be noticed beyond being a rather bland and boring user.

We could easily have been overrun with bots, but we haven't. I doubt that unless we end up Eternal September-ed with an OOM more new users, bot-apocalypses are not a very serious risk for the Motte as a forum.

But it turns out that "I don't want to do that" is an entirely valid emotion to feel! It was my socialized self-concept, and not my empirical experience, that was wrong about what it means to be human.

"This must be what normal feels like" is a giant self-deceiving trap that enables high-potential low-kinetic human capital to pretend like their drug use isn't a crutch for a gappy upbringing.

I am a radical transhumanist, so we might very well have a difference at the level of fundamental values, at which point we can't do more than acknowledge each others opinion as valid, but not actually get closer to agreement here.

In a hypothetical world where you were diagnosed with ADHD and your parents were just as overstretched, but medication for it wasn't available, would your childhood and adolescence have been better?

I doubt it. The absence of ADHD meds don't turn parents more capable of parenting, and their existence doesn't make them worse. Being denied vyvanse wouldn't have given your parents more time to spend with you while you did your homework.

I also reject the framing that a "crutch" is a bad thing. Driving a car to a supermarket half an hour away is a "crutch" for not being willing to spend 2 hours walking. I prefer it over the alternative.

Ozempic is a crutch for not having better dietary habits by default. Why is that a bad thing? It still makes people lose weight and become healthier. A world where everyone takes it, both to reduce their obesity, and out of the pressure of everyone else being on it (a world we're approaching right now) is still a better world than everyone being fatter and unable to anything about it in practice. A similar analogy applies for cellphones and cars, society is broadly better off even though they've become de-facto necessities, even if the people who don't like them are marginalized.

There are ways for society and cultures to burn up their slack and leave everyone strictly worse off than if they had put a line in the sand, but as far as I'm concerned, stimulant meds or the use of LLMs in a reasonable manner wouldn't do the same to us.

The close analogue to that might be med students who are tempted to take them to cope with the enormous amounts of coursework, but I have not heard of abuse at rates >> than any other class of students.

I think the most unique and widespread-enough example I can think of with medics “misusing” a drug more than other professions would be beta-blockers prior to interviews and exams.

Interesting. I don't know if this is common outside of Japan, but it's the first time I'm hearing it.

The pharmacy next to my med school had a rather lax approach when it came to doling out controlled substances and prescription meds, even to med students. I know that personally, because I certainly asked for them (I could have brought along a valid prescription if needed, but I knew they wouldn't ask). I don't recall anyone from my cohort taking advantage, and I didn't see any obvious signs of abuse. Even in my medical career, I never heard of a doctor I personally knew or worked with admitting to abusing meds or being caught out doing so. Nobody clearly zooted on stims, or sedated from benzos or opioids.

Not that anyone is really abusing beta blockers, and you wouldn't be able to tell unless they passed out or something. Interestingly enough, I did take a few when my palpitations from my methylphenidate became overwhelming, but I was aware of minor negative effects on memory and cognition and did my best not to take them before exams. I suppose if someone has crippling anxiety, it beats the alternative!

Yeah, no disagreement — it’s as benign as it can get, really. I actually thought this sort of habit came from the West though!

Why is it a problem for certain professions to require safe stimulants for the highest tier of success? Your post treats the wrongness of this idea as self evident, but I don't accept it. We require that athletes train, after all.

human capital to pretend like their drug use isn't a crutch for a gappy upbringing.

And there it is --- the puritanical idea that people experience unavoidable suffering because suffering is good for the soul.

Now, dear reader, compulsorily and reactionarily write a rebuttal defending the rule against critiques of hypocrisy and futility. Your response should include acknowledging the systemic critiques (Molochian incentives, human complicity) while justifying the rule as a pragmatic and imperfect tool. Sure, you won't win, but it'll slow it down and shame thpse who aim too low. Also make sure to mention Schelling fences and gradient descents.

I'm sorry, as an AI language model, I don't possess personal beliefs or opinions. I apologize for any confusion.

Still, I really do find this take somewhat confusing. What it is about AI output specifically that warrants doomposting of this degree?

No other community has successfully prevented AI (or even just run-of-the-mill astroturfing!) entryism

On the contrary, I believe that the Motte has withstood e.g. astroturfing and entryist inflitration much better than say Reddit, which has not been usable for human-to-human communication in years. The stark difference is so obvious I'm not sure I even need to state this outright. All it seemingly took was rules enforcing effort and tone, and handling verboten topics without resorting to the usual "y'all can't behave" shut-this-shit-down approach. Hell, the rules don't even prohibit being antagonistic, just overly antagonistic, and even then the OP's meltdown across this very thread shows that rules are not always applied uniformly. (To be clear, this is not a strictly bad thing.)

What hubris to think that doing the exact same thing everyone else has done and failed will result in different outcomes?

he says, posting here instead of /r/ssc for some strange and unrelated reason.

This is how introspective and inventive the community is when DeepBlue Seek comes for chess recreational argumentation? "Well, don't do that"?

Hey, as long as it works. "Avoid low-effort participation" seems to filter drive-by trolls and blogspammers just fine. The extent to which the approach of outsourcing quality control to the posters themselves works may vary, but personally I feel no need to flex(?) by presenting AI outputs as my own, see no point in e.g. letting the digital golems inhabiting my SillyTavern out to play here, and generally think the doom is largely unwarranted.

As an aside, I'll go ahead and give it ~70% confidence that the first half of your post was also written by R1 before you edited it. The verbiage fits, and in my experience it absolutely adores using assorted markdown wherever it can, and having googled through a few of your posts for reference it doesn't seem to be your usual posting style.

Sounds like you have it all figured out.

The argument against AI in this space is still pretty simple. It's like bringing a bicycle to a fun run. If you don't want to engage in a leisure activity it makes little sense to cheat at the leisure activity when you can instead just not do it.

Using an AI to debate other people is easier than debating them yourself. But it's even easier to just not debate them in the first place.

Themotte isn't a place that matters. This isn't X or reddit or some other major social network site where millions of voters can be influenced. There is no reward for "winning" here, so the normal molochian optimization pressures don't have to apply.

It's like bringing a bicycle to a fun run. If you don't want to engage in a leisure activity it makes little sense to cheat at the leisure activity

I’d like to push back against this a bit. It’s my understanding that the purpose of debating in the Motte is, very politely, to force people to occupy the motte and not the bailey. That is, to smash ideas against each other very politely until all the bits that can be smashed get smashed, and only the durable bits remain.

The rules in favour of tone moderation don’t exist to make this fun per se, they exist because truth seeking isn’t compatible with bullying or outlasting your opponent. It is fun, and I like it here, but debating in the motte should be fun in the way that scientific debate is fun. I think leaning too far into “posting on the motte is a leisure activity” would be a mistake.

I’m comfortable with the new rule on AI as it stands, I think it’s threading a tricky needle fairly well. But if we find a way over time to use AI in a way that really does improve the debate, I think we should.

TLDR: in my opinion debating here is a leisure activity in the same way that MMA is a leisure activity. Likewise, there are certain serious rules that apply - you can’t shoot your opponent with a gun - but unlike karate there is no such thing as ‘cheating’. If you find a way to fight better, that’s not cheating, it’s pushing the sport forward.

Yes, with any seams showing. Obviously we can't enforce a rule we didn't detect you breaking.

Following on to @Corvos's comment, below, I would compare it to using AI to write books and short stories (something I'm aware of as someone involved in the writing and literary community) or make art. As you know, there now a bazillion people churning out AI-generated fiction and art, such that this is overwhelming a lot of traditional venues. The Kindle store is full of them, and KU authors are bemoaning the fact that not only are they competing against each other, but now they are competing against AI-published books by the thousands. There are even courses available now (by grifters) teaching you how to generate books with AI which you can then sell on Amazon.

My Facebook feed is full of "Reels" with increasingly realistic AI content, everything from Chinese fishermen dragging an improbable sea monster out of the water to bears waving down motorists to help rescue their cubs, to actresses dressed in outfits and performing in movies they never appeared in.

We can't stop it, most of it is crap, and right now, most of it is fairly easily detectable, but it's getting harder. The problem is not so much "AI is crap" (that will become less and less true) but "AI produces so much content so easily that even if you are looking for human content, it's becoming harder to find it."

The Motte is for people to talk to each other, and while I'm not terribly worried about a few clever lads titter-titter-tee-heeing to themselves about what brilliant little scamps they are for inserting AI content into their posts that the mods didn't detect, I am concerned about the sorts of discussions we're already seeing in this thread, with people using AI to sling walls of text at each other. The value in requiring you to, like, write what you researched and are citing yourself is not that AI can't do just as good a job of producing a Wikipedia-level summary, it's that we aren't here to read copy&pasted Wikipedia articles. Or copy&pasted AI content. (Most of which is still pretty boring and spiritless.) The best posters aren't just the ones who write long effort posts, it's the ones who write interestingly. Just like AI can now write an entire YA fantasy novel with a coherent plot and characters, but it will be... limp, dull, flavorless prose with no spark of genius or creativity or innovation.

@DaseindustriesLtd thinks AI is already intelligent and as good a conversationalist as a human. Well, good for him, he can chat with AIs all he likes. Elsewhere. And it may be that AIs are what doom the Motte, not all the other things people have predicting would doom the Motte for years. But for the time being, yes, we aren't instituting a hard ban on posting anything output by ChatGPT in any context, but the context had better be something that makes a point about AI itself, not just using the AI to do the work of actually typing words that you are too lazy to type yourself.

Full agreement on my part. It's understandable that people are enthusiastic about this new technology, but ultimately if I wanted to read chatbot drivel I could order some up myself. I come to the motte to read what intelligent people have to write.

We all know how to go and use an AI.

Actually, I would enjoy more discussion of this here, like on are slash local llama.

Same. I've been using some really basic chatgpt web apps to simplify basic research lately, and while it's amazing it seems like a small fraction of its potential. Just being able to feed it vaguely worded tip of my tongue questions and then double checking the answers is incredible.

Sounds like a Friday fun thread topic, or even a tinker Tuesday topic.

Yes, please. Posting AI slop is incredibly obnoxious. It adds nothing of value or even interest, and comes off like someone thinks that talking to their interlocutor isn't worth their time. It is maximum cringe.

It might be worth putting this in the rules of the CW posts.

Personally, I think that using AI on themotte is bad, mentioning it is ok (if it is short and to the point). So if a comment about an AI and its behavior in a CW context ("Deepseek claims XX, this shows that the CCP is willing ..."), that is fine with me. If it is something the poster could have researched themselves, then it should mostly be verboten (or at the very least highly rate-limited and restricted to known posters). Anyone can make a motte-bot which writes more text than the real users together, and I do not think any human would like to read that (and as you mentioned, if that is their kink, they can always ask an LLM directly.)

Thank you. The moment I see a bot quoted, whether a conversation, an essay, or even someone using a bot as a substitute for Wikipedia or to check facts, I stop reading.

I would hope that the point of a forum like this is for people to talk to each other. Not to vacuous robotic garbage.

I like reading someone else's AI output, not as a Wikipedia fact check, but add a Wikipedia summary. "What's that concept I haven't heard of before, or that obscure historical figure, or event?"

Anything longer than a quick blurb and I'm right back with you.

I can see the value of quick explanatory blurbs, but I think in my case I just don't trust AIs or bots to accurately report factual information. Reading the AI summary would then make it necessary for me to look up the AI summary's claims in order to establish whether they're true or not, and at that point I might as well just skip the AI summary entirely and research it myself. There is no value gain from the AI, in either time saved or information received.

I've noticed this myself. Actually, I'd like to suspend the rules so someone can do a single-blind test with AI-written posts to see if it's psychosomatic on my part.

It also tends to make my eyes glaze over. It just has such a boring style. Like I wonder if its specifically selecting for not being readable by people with normal attention spans.

I think that intent and utility matters (and length!).

  • If everyone's posting long AI essays rather than do it themselves, that's bad.
  • If people are padding using AI that's bad.
  • If they're specifically using them to discuss how AI works, that's good and interesting (but watch for length).
  • If the AI writing is relevant in some way and the post couldn't be written without it, that's also good.

It's true that I could consult an AI if I wanted to, but probably not the same ones and not the same way as @DaseindustriesLtd because our minds don't work the same way. I don't want to have conversations with AI but I'm quite happy to have conversations with human centaurs augmented by AI.

Of course, if a human is using said LLM and directing it actively, I don't strenuously object. I'm against low effort bot use, not high effort.

Basically this.

At the very least, I would argue for being somewhat open now and seeing how things play out for the next 6 months.

I can't stop people from going and consulting AI. I did say in the original post, that using it as a sort of sanity check or impromptu polling seems fine.

I'm personally not very interested in talking to the "centaurs" as you describe them (human centaurs seems redundant, unless you mean human legs and horse torso). I think there is a value in having another human brain process your words and spit back a disagreement about those words. If they are offloading the processing and the output to an AI they have just become a bad/slow interface for that AI.

I think we are basically at AGI right now. So hold the gates as long as we can and enjoy this space until the internet as we know it is gone in a flood of digital minds.

'Centaur' is sometimes used to describe an AI/human merger or collaboration. Half human, half machine, as it were. So, for example, a human using an AI for digging up sources / fact checking / style improvement is sometimes called a centaur. Anything where a human is still a significant part of the process.

I think it's wholly fair not to like AI writing; there are users I don't engage with either. I would merely ask the mods to be careful before they ban things that don't interest them, and to use a scalpel rather than a hammer where possible.

Your specific usage of AI also has a major problem here, which is that you were basically using it as a gish gallop attack. "Hey I think this argument is wrong, so I'm gonna go use an AI that can spit out many more words than I can."

For example, I would agree with banning this, but in my opinion we should ban it because it's gish galloping not because it's AI. We should penalise bad AI writing for the same way we would penalise bad human writing: it's tedious and prevents good discussion.

I think we are basically at AGI right now. So hold the gates as long as we can and enjoy this space until the internet as we know it is gone in a flood of digital minds.

I don't, oddly enough, which is perhaps why I'm more enthusiastic than you are. AIs have certain idiosyncracies and weaknesses that cripple them in important ways, and they need a human hand on the tiller.

I know what you meant with centaur. I just thought it was redundant to say "human centaur".

Penalizing Gish Gallop specifically is hard. People may legitimately have many questions or objections to a specific point. It's just far more obvious of a problem when you have an AI churning out text that.

Fair.

FWIW, if this rule is going to be enforced (which I am fine with) I do think it should be written. And while I am at it, I think we're probably all smart enough here to understand the difference between having the AI write your posts for you and quoting something relevant or humorous that is AI-generated, but I think it would be helpful for the rule to say that rather than just "No AI Content" (unless the community find even that objectionable, but I've never noticed anyone getting moderated for that or even irked by it). My .02.

When 90% of Europe’s population died during the Black Death, it reset Malthusian traps and created vacant niches for exploration

Did you feed it that number, or did it hallucinate that on its own? If it's the latter, hallucinations are continuing to be a concerning problem, and I still can't trust a single word a LLM produces.

Key revisions:

Allright, that's impressive.

I assume this uses a scratch pad for train-of-thought style arguing with itself, including the searches it does? Does it give you access to that?

Scott says something dumb about ordo amoris

Even knowing what he is talking about and his moral principles behind saying such a thing, he comes off as dumb. I've never agreed with Scott with everything (particularly his polyamorist leanings) but I think that this is the final breaking with SSC and myself. Rationalism is a train that I've ridden for ten years, and now I am finally getting off. Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.

The US has a $36 trillion debt. A quick Google shows all foreign aid is about $70 billion per year. About 0.2% of the total debt.

Later in that thread Scott shares that he donated about $350,000 to charity last year.

To analogize this to the US foreign aid situation, this would be like donating $350,000 to charity while you have debt of $175 million. And it's not a debt that you've addressed in any real way, and it grows substantially year after year.

I hate the argument “it’s a small number.” Because many things are a small number. Add up ten “small numbers” and maybe it’s meaningful. Four years of eliminating foreign aid taking into account interest is probably at least 300b of debt we don’t incur.

It's not even a small number! An analyst at a company with a budget in the billions (nevermind an order of magnitude more -- not too many companies like that!) who found a (legible) way to .2% would be in line for a promotion and a big bonus -- it is a lot of money; companies understand that.

Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism' is stupid and is ultimately a suicidal worldview: or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.

The amount the United States government spent on foreign aid in general, and PEPFAR in particular, was hardly infinite. Foreign aid is less 1% of the federal budget each year.

Stopping foreign aid is giving the budget a haircut, not actually saving all that much money.

I'm not against the various arguments that we shouldn't do any foreign aid, but I think from a pragmatic point of view it is probably a good thing for the United States if the federal government is seen spending pennies on doing high impact good things in various foreign countries, because those are things that are likely to improve the perception of America abroad, and increase national security slightly. It's hard to be angry at "imperialist America" if they're the reason your daughter doesn't have AIDs.

I'd actually be pretty happy with the idea that "1% is what we owe the rest of the world" as a baseline level of morality for individuals and countries. I think that perfectly honors the idea of the "ordo amoris."

Quite - I think ordo amoris by itself fails as an argument against foreign aid, partly because it's not at all clear that the small amount of foreign aid the US provides is not in fact net beneficial to the US, and partly because ordo amoris in no way says that you should have zero care for people far away from you. It says that your moral duties to care for others scale with distance, such that American moral obligation to non-Americans is less, but less is not zero.

It is worth noting that Aquinas actually talks for a while about almsgiving as an act of charity, and appears to be wholly in favour of doing corporal works of mercy for others simply because they are in need. He follows the ordo amoris (article 9) in asserting that it is better, all other things being equal, to give to those "more closely united to us", but immediately qualifies that with the note that all other things are usually not equal. Aquinas:

I answer that, As Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. i, 28), "it falls to us by lot, as it were, to have to look to the welfare of those who are more closely united to us." Nevertheless in this matter we must employ discretion, according to the various degrees of connection, holiness and utility. For we ought to give alms to one who is much holier and in greater want, and to one who is more useful to the common weal, rather than to one who is more closely united to us, especially if the latter be not very closely united, and has no special claim on our care then and there, and who is not in very urgent need.

Per Aquinas, it is better to give to a more righteous cause, or to one who is in more desperate need, over one who may be closer to us in other terms. He endorses the kind of charitable triage that I mentioned here. The ordo amoris requires a kind of discernment around need, righteousness, justice, and so on.

One must also remember that Aquinas lived in a totally different world. His concerns were local by default because nothing else was possible.

Giving alms to your neighbour’s friend whose house burnt down instead of your neighbour who stubbed his toe is one thing. Being on the hook for everyone suffering in the third world is a very different thing.

Aquinas was familiar with international charity. Thomas Aquinas lived in the mid 13th century. By his day, international projects like the Crusades were a century and a half old, and among the justifications for the Crusades had been charity - that it is an act of gracious generosity to one's fellow-believers who are in need, even though they may be on the other side of a continent.

The idea of giving charitable aid to people a long way away from you geographically goes back as far as the New Testament itself - for instance, in 1 Corinthians 16:25-28, Paul talks about his plan to bring donations from churches in Achaia and Macedonia all the way to Jerusalem. Aquinas was surely familiar with such cases.

So I don't think we can assume that Aquinas' model of charity assumes only local charity. He understood and approved of the idea of a Christian making great sacrifices in order to aid Christians in another country entirely.

Now, sure, this doesn't necessarily equate to "on the hook for everyone suffering in the third world" - that's an exaggeration or caricature. What I'm saying is that Aquinas' interpretation of the ordo amoris plainly allows for charity to people with whom the giver is not personally familiar. For Aquinas, proximity is one among several factors influencing who it is appropriate to give charity to, alongside need, holiness, and the common good more generally. These are criteria that allow for international projects in some circumstances.

Aquinas does think that having something in common with the needy is important. This comes up further in the next section of the Summa:

On the contrary, Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. i, 28): "Since one cannot do good to all, we ought to consider those chiefly who by reason of place, time or any other circumstance, by a kind of chance are more closely united to us."

I answer that, Grace and virtue imitate the order of nature, which is established by Divine wisdom. Now the order of nature is such that every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are nearest to it: thus fire heats most what is next to it. In like manner God pours forth the gifts of His goodness first and most plentifully on the substances which are nearest to Him, as Dionysius declares (Coel. Hier. vii). But the bestowal of benefits is an act of charity towards others. Therefore we ought to be most beneficent towards those who are most closely connected with us.

Now one man's connection with another may be measured in reference to the various matters in which men are engaged together; (thus the intercourse of kinsmen is in natural matters, that of fellow-citizens is in civic matters, that of the faithful is in spiritual matters, and so forth): and various benefits should be conferred in various ways according to these various connections, because we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which, speaking simply, he is most closely connected with us. And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand: because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one's own father, if he is not in such urgent need.

You will notice that, having established the principle that one owes more to people with whom one has a commonality, Aquinas then goes on to explain two things. Firstly, that 'closeness' has several measures, including natural, civic, and spiritual matters. Thus he might argue that, for instance, a fellow Christian in another country is spiritually close and has a stronger claim on a Christian's aid than a non-believer. Secondly, this does vary contextually, such that, as he says, a stranger in desperate need may have a higher claim on charity than one's own family.

This does not add up to "you have a direct moral responsibility for the entire planet", but it does legitimate kinds of international charity. If those with whom I have a natural bond (e.g. a family relation), or a civic bond (e.g. if we are members of the same nation), or a spiritual bond (e.g. we are both Christians) reside far away geographically, I may still possess duties of charity towards them.

The case for extending this even to non-believers in certain circumstances seems fairly straightforward to me (cf. Matthew 5:47), in a way that does not create an infinite obligation, but does suggest that doing good even for those to whom one shares no connection is supererogatorily good. Aquinas appears to agree that need is sufficient to create a kind of moral claim, which must be judged carefully alongside the claims created by connection or proximity:

For it must be understood that, other things being equal, one ought to succor those rather who are most closely connected with us. And if of two, one be more closely connected, and the other in greater want, it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection: and the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man.

That's fair, and I appreciate the detailed rebuttal. I still don't think it's quite the same. At the time of the crusades, the Arab nations were roughly on a par with the Europeans. By contrast, today we are called upon to feel responsibility (in the sense of duty not blame) for huge masses of people who are civilisationally/economically far below our level and may always be. There are not some people in the third world who need charity, as there were Christians in Islamic nations who needed assistance, but instead the entire third world needs assistance, billions on billions of them, maybe forever.

FWIW, if the problem is cultural rather than HBD, it may be fixable - provided that those millions of people don't migrate all over the world and extinguish all the more functional cultures in favor of their dysfunctional ones.

I hope so, with the proviso you mention.

That would seem to be an anticipated problem for a religious tradition whose most sacred text says plainly, "The poor you will always have with you." (Mark 14:7, Matthew 26:11) The number of people in need of charity is functionally unlimited - that was the case in Jesus' day, in Aquinas' day, and also in our day.

I take the ordo amoris to be suggesting some structure to our moral duties such that we are not crushed entirely flat by the weight. This much seems right and just. But within that structure, it can hardly be bad to seek to do more than the barest minimum.

I think it is likely that foreign aid is spent to buy influence with foreign countries. Sure, it doesn't sound like a good use of American money to treat HIV in Niger, but if it helps the government of Niger drive a tougher bargain when negotiating with China, or even better gets them to sell the US crude oil, then it might be a smart investment, totally irrespective of its moral utility.

Actually, there is probably a pretty good correlation between womens' education and low birthrate. Low birthrate minimizes future humanitarian needs, so stuff that seems quite "progressive" might be a very good investment long term. The devil is of course in the details.

I think it is likely that foreign aid is spent to buy influence with foreign countries. Sure, it doesn't sound like a good use of American money to treat HIV in Niger, but if it helps the government of Niger drive a tougher bargain when negotiating with China, or even better gets them to sell the US crude oil, then it might be a smart investment, totally irrespective of its moral utility.

If we are just bribing dictators and/or corrupt bureaucrats to be on our side, wouldn't it be more efficient to simply bribe them, without the pretense of curing AIDS/malaria/whatever?

Dictators have limited tenures. If you covertly support them via foreign aid (as opposed to direct bribery), then you have plausible deniability which enables you to continue working with whoever deposes them.

Eh, just call it the "Congo Development Fund" or something, and wire transfer directly to whoever's top dog at the moment -- several layers of bureaucracy and graft (including on the American side) could be removed by not pretending to care what happens to the money once it leaves the public purse.

are you sure foreign aid helps the US perception in the world? i wonder if it suffers from this copenhagen ethics problem where because you help out you are now blamed for anything that is not perfect. not the best example but the US helped the afghans militarily then when 9/11 happened apparently the US 'deserved' it partly because they helped the Afghans militarily.

Any line of logic that ends with 'the flow of infinite money to foreigners should never stop because of utilitarianism

We spend around 1% of our federal budget on foreign aid. Scott is not saying we should give infinite money to foreigners. He is saying we should give a modest amount of money to foreigners. You inferred the infinite part.*

I do not think right-wingers are at all reasoning clearly about this. Like, Scott made a tweet. It was, in fact, a funny tweet. That tweet was not primarily designed to be a political argument. It was designed to be a joke. A joke around a political argument, one related to his position, sure. But it's still a joke.

His twitter bio says:

I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns.

He, in the comments, endorses claims that you should care about your family members more than others, and that more of our budget should go to American citizens than foreigners. He clarifies that the tweet was meant to be an analogy to PEPFAR.

I have trouble make an intellectual steelman of the people who are angry in the comments. If they were saying "We should not send foreign aid to Africa, because this leads to more of them living, which is bad, because they are below average human beings and it's good for natural selection to operate on the species, and this is worth their suffering", I think that's a coherent opinion, one that Scott would have a complicated philosophical disagreement with. But they're not saying that. They're responding like Scott's asking them to let their child die for one in Africa. He's not

I have trouble make an intellectual steelman of the people who are angry in the comments.

It seems obvious to me that they're angry because Scott just described them [opponents of PEPFAR] as being too callous to save a kid drowning in front of them.

"Do this thing you disagree with or you're a terrible person" is basically tailor-made to generate angry responses.

This is the same reason people got angry about Black Lives Matter (before the riots). Waving a placard saying "Black lives matter!" is implicitly an accusation. It's saying, "I have to scream 'black lives matter' at you because you secretly don't think they do.'"

All Lives Matter was the same accusation in reverse, which is why it was banned so quickly.

Is Scott implying that if his child were depressed, he wouldn’t spend more time helping his child than a stranger’s child? Or if his own child needed tutoring, he wouldn’t tutor him more than another child? Or is he saying that saving a life is the ultimate criterion of value, thus it dwarfs everything? It’s not actually clear. The example further doesn’t make sense because (1) his scenario implies the child is a community member, falling squarely into the ordo amoris worldview; (2) what we witness first hand compels our moral instinct in ways that data does not, and rather than meaning we have a mismatch between intuition and logic, it means that the pain of not helping the child is more severe and the absence of moral response is more damning when it occurs in front of us — this is part of our design, it’s not a bug. It’s like, if you see a crying puppy in front of you, and you just bought a steak, there’s a big chance you give the crying puppy the steak, because your body is designed to experience distress when not helping someone whose distress you witness. This does not imply that you must now buy steaks and distribute them to hungry puppies worldwide. In fact it doesn’t even imply that you ought to give the puppy the steak if you were somewhere else and someone merely informed you “a 6 month old canine would like your steak”.

He's saying that hypothetically saving a drowning child has no negative impact on his ability to care for his family.

It's an odd choice of example because quite a few people are killed annually trying to rescue children from bodies of water. It's not risk-free.

The original hypothetical from Peter Singer is a child drowning in a shallow pond, where you could just walk over and pull them out. It is designed to be a zero risk situation.

I say the kid (or his parents) owes the rescuer a new suit, which short circuits the whole thing.

And at the end of the day, this is the problem -- I haven't spent enough time reading literature responding to it, so hopefully this critique is already well documented -- this is an un-trolley problem. It's designed so that there's absolutely no opportunity cost. But then used to imply therefore, the opportunity cost of other scenarios are handwavable.

If I'm walking by a pond where there's a drowing child; in all likelihood, rescuing that child is the most valuable thing I can do in that moment, and the ruin of a 1k suit, that I'm already wearing is a sunk cost.

But this doesn't extend to prove that some future fungible time and money, there's a best thing to do and thus it is a moral imperative to have it done.

As soon as we add any actual opportunity cost to saving that child or ruining the suit, the parsimony of the aesop falls apart. Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.

At that moment, it just becomes a regular trolley problem, with a little bit of forecasting mixed in, and there's nothing really to gleam from it.

If alternatively we take the most superficial lesson from the problem: We should help others when we are able, at a cost to ourselves, even when we aren't physically near them. Then sure! It's a great reminder. And it has just about nothing to say about government spending on foreign aid.

Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.

You've added in the factor of saving multiple lives instead of one life (at the cost of a nice suit), which is saying something different from the original. The original means to point out the moral obviousness of saving the child at very little real cost.

To me, Singer's hypothetical points out that there are people you or I can easily help/save at a financial cost that we normally don't blink an eye at (the cost of a phone, a suit, a plane ride...), at no real danger to ourselves. This isn't a philosophical imperative, it is an observation. The observation becomes obvious when the person is next to you, but it still exists when the person in trouble is on another continent. Of course, most people are viscerally affected by someone in danger next to them, and generally have no reason to think of anyone on another continent. Singer's hypothetical attempts to address that disconnect.

At that moment, it just becomes a regular trolley problem

I ised to have a lot of beef with the trolley problem because it is almost tautological in its obviousness. But reading some variations on it by the original author, and knowing she was a virtue ethicist, the major point I took away was that real-world moral decision-making is hard! The trolley problem is easy, but recognizing when you are faced with a "trolley problem" in real life, and figuring out which track is which, is difficult. Humans are concerned with ethics, but we have to practice to be discerning and virtuous. Ethics are not (just) a math problem.

nothing to say about government spending on foreign aid.

I don't know if that follows from what you said. I can see why foreign aid isn't a consideration in a vacuum. But I would think that if helping people who are far away at a low cost to ourselves is considered a good thing, it is a consideration that a society and its government can make on a grand scale.

Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.

You've added in the factor of saving multiple lives instead of one life (at the cost of a nice suit), which is saying something different from the original. The original means to point out the moral obviousness of saving the child at very little real cost.

Yes I know, my point was in agreement with yours. That's why I said the original is an 'un'trolley problem. My point in describing some additional opportunity cost was exectly to illustrate that opportunity cost ruins the thought experiment.

And that's why it has very little to say about foreign aid or most other real world charitable activities that are abstracted from time and place. Because outside of immediate and present opportunities (like saving a drowning child right in front of you), opportunity cost does have to be considered.

And as you've agreed, it becomes different than the thought experiment, thus the thought experiment is no longer relevant.

I strongly prefer helping my own country, town, and family before helping foreigners. But I still support foreign aid to Africa because it's ridiculously effective at saving people. So even though I value the life of random strangers less, it's still a better use of money than letting the military blow it on F-35s or whatever.

This is a vile sentiment, and that you've received upvotes I suppose indicates at least a few here agree with it. Do you have any experience firsthand in any part of Africa? Do you know anyone either living there or from there? Does your statement cover all the population of the continent? Or just those with darker skin? Or is "African" code for black here? When I read this shit I really feel like discussion is pointless --getting to a point where you're willing to shrug your shoulders and consign an entire continent to the flames is just beyond my ability to empathize with. I align myself against you, that's about as polite as I can put it.

Or is "African" code for black here?

I mean, no, it's not, because "black" is itself ambiguous; there are three major human populations with dark skin (sub-Saharan Africans, some South Asians and the Austronesians of Australia/Oceania/parts of SEA) and they're not closely related to each other. But yes, most people here talking about "Africans" are talking about sub-Saharan Africans, as North Africans are more closely related to Europeans and Asians.

(TBC, I am opposed to genocide unless the alternative is the end of the world - if someone made a human gene-drive and it couldn't be fixed in live patients, for instance. The arguments I've seen for such a dichotomy in the case of sub-Saharan Africans are risible.)

I don't dismiss your points here, but I'm asking specifically about the idiomatic usage of the term by the guy I was responding to.

Oh. I thought by "here" you meant "on theMotte".

Please expand on the reasons you believe Africans cause issues for humanity. What do you consider the three most solid pieces of evidence for your view that Africans are a net negative for humanity?

Africans leave Africa and cause problems with crime and low IQ any place they go.

This is not a problem if you have sensible immigration policies. If Europeans are so dumb that the only way to save them from themselves is to hope that every African drops dead before they can be invited in, then they are already doomed.

They also make living in Africa impossible because it's full of Africans.

We haven't exactly run out of space in the rest of the world yet. If that ever becomes an issue it will be easy enough for other nations to re-colonize Africa and clear the land.

Lots of money is spent helping Africa that could be spent elsewhere.

This depends on your definition of "lots of money." Foreign aid is less than 1% of the US federal budget, and PEPFAR even less than that.

Every African is net negative value.

They're net negative on average, but not always on the individual level. Same is true for Arabs in European countries, although there's more of them who are beneficial, on the whole they're a net negative.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/S00148-017-0636-1

No, Scott is dumb, and I've only realized it in the past few years: you can always find reasons to wring out more blood and treasure saving African lives, but left unsaid: are the lives of the modal African worth saving? In particular, the kind of African that grits his penis to tear bloody cuts into a woman's vagina?

It's odd that those who would condemn a man to the eternal pits of progressive damnation for the slightest of errors would support such a practice. You could say that they don't intend that, but that's the practical outcome of their efforts. The F-35 may be a boondoggle but it doesn't have the moral catastrophe of spreading AIDS.

The life a neighbor 15 miles away probably isn't even worth saving. That's not the point.

However, the money I have represents enough power to affect an African. It is not enough power to affect a fellow American. When I donate to VLCOL-based charities I am buying an effigy of influence.

Feeling powerful feels good. That is enough.

That is not relevant to the post you are responding to. They are saying you should feel powerful...but also should feel evil.

I will note that if F-35s can deter Xi Jinping from starting WWIII (or even help cut down the amount of ICBMs that get off the ground when it goes nuclear), they're actually pretty good value for money. Assuming that something won't be needed always sets its value to 0, but most things have nonzero value because that assumption is usually wrong.

I don't think that either Scott or the average utilitarian would claim that, for the sake of utilitarianism, the flow of money to foreigners should have no limits whatsoever. I'm not a utilitarian myself, but I think that this is a mischaracterization of utilitarian thought.

You're right that they do put limits, but they have no theoretical basis to do so. It's just an unprincipled hack that they tack on at the end to prevent their moral philosophy from ruining their life. Eventually someone is going to write "Famine, Affluecne, and Morality II" in which a good effective altruist is walking to work after just finishing their annual 10% donation for the year and sees a drowning child. Obviously you wouldn't let the child die just because you already donated 10% for the year right?

True. Funny thing is, there is a theoretical basis that utililtarians could use if they wanted to. One could argue that, since Americans are more innovative than people in most other countries, it is overall better for humanity in a utilitarian sense to help Americans instead of non-Americans. But probably most utilitarians would not wish to pursue this line of thought.

or the perspective of a ivory tower bureaucrat who is careless with money that isn't his.

I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.

Frankly, I found most of the comments on that post even more vacuous and tendentious than the post itself. Scott’s central argument appears to be that the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless. In this framing, there is no serious trade-off between helping Americans and helping Africans; we can easily do both.

Now, I’m open about the core of my opposition to programs like PEPFAR: I want less Africans, not more. Obviously it would have been better for those rescued Africans to have never been born, rather than for them to suffer and die of preventable illnesses; however, in my opinion it is still better for the future of humanity for them to die rather than for them to live and to continue to multiply until they are the majority of the world’s human population. Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.

However, in order to reach this conclusion I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality. I don’t expect to be able to persuade people like Scott to adopt my point of view. And if you take seriously his moral beliefs, and also grant the claim that the budget of PEPFAR is so minuscule and utilized so efficiently that it’s not taking away resources that could have made a comparable impact in America, then his post makes a lot of sense.

(Now, one other very persuasive counterargument to him is that much of the NGO money supposedly going to medical treatment is actually being surreptitiously funneled toward funding anti-regime media in these African countries in order to sow political disarray for the geopolitical benefit of the American intelligence community. If someone wants to make that argument to Scott, that would represent an actually-compelling rebuttal to his post.)

I want less Africans, not more.

https://www.condoms.com.au/donate-to-africa/

I will point out that Scott has given literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money to charity, so whatever else you want to say about the guy, it strikes me as very unfair to accuse him of only giving away other people’s money.

I will consider this if he working as hard as he can, living an ascetic life, giving it all away. One gets zero moral points taking the fruits of another person's labor.

I’ve obviously had to jettison some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality.

Where did Jesus say one should advocate Caesar take money from others and redistribute it according to one's will?

Is that true? On my phone right now but I’m pretty sure the absolute number of Native Americans in the US is higher than any time in the pre-Columbian era. And were they really better off back then when murder and torture were commonplace ? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s definitely debatable.

In 2010, 5.2 million US Americans identified as native. The pre-Mayflower native population of what is today the US has been subject to many estimates but I think most seem to place it around 5-20 million.

In addition, most of those “natives” as of 2010 were 75%+ non-native by genetic origin and almost all would have been more than 50% non-native, certainly outside of Alaska. So I think it’s quite likely that absent any European colonization there would probably be a higher native North American population, sure.

2025 numbers are way up from 2010 but point taken about European admixture. Most of the explosion in Native American population numbers is just essentially white people self identifying as Native (I won’t name names).

Color me skeptical about pre-Columbian population numbers which are highly influenced by bogus culture war politics. 20 million is wild.

Tangential, but I was expecting a lot more culture war fallout from Reich's pre-columbian population estimates paper. I guess even in 2020 that fell under "easier to just ignore than attack," especially after Saini's "the return of race science" failed to take him down.

Do you have a link for said paper, or a pointer to it?

Pre-Columbian population isn't the right basis assuming (as is believed) many natives were wiped out by disease before the US was founded. The Mayflower was in 1620, which is considerably later than 1492.

The US withdrawing foreign aid to Africa is not going to decrease the amount of future Africans, unless you can get the rest of the world to agree to a policy of blockade and imposed famine. As it stands, the Chinese, Europeans, Japanese, etc. would be more than happy to pick up the slack and claim the moral high ground, meaning the only result would be damaging America's international reputation while saving a miniscule fraction of the federal budget.

If you want to lower the African population, all you have to do is accelerate their demographic transition through development work i.e. what organizations like USAID are supposed to be doing anyway. Getting girls in school and providing them with contraceptives will tank the birthrate faster than waiting around for them to starve or die in a pandemic (even if you tried bombing them you'd have about as much luck as Israel has had in Gaza). They don't have to become rich to stop having children; France underwent the transition in the 19th century when they were poorer than anywhere on Earth today.

Moreover, if your problem with Africans is their migration to western countries, then all you have to do is not let them in and it becomes a non-issue. If you assume that this is impossible because white people are too altruistic then I don't see how you can imagine getting them to cut off foreign aid either. If your problem is that Africans are taking up land and resources that would be better utilized by higher IQ populations then I refer you to the previous paragraph (or we could just invest in eugenics).

the amount of money given to organizations like PEPFAR is such a tiny drop in the bucket of the government’s total budget that such programs are essentially costless

“Essentially” is doing quite a lot of work there. The existence of a massive cost doesn’t negate the existence of a far smaller but still very large cost.

If we want to help Africans, we can invade Africa, redistribute the resources of their war lords, save more lives and profit at the same time. Would Scott support this? If the notion of subsidiarity supersedes the interest to invade, then we can just as easily argue that the notion of subsidiarity supersedes our interest to help.

some of the foundational tenets of Judeo-Christian morality

This is really just the Parable of the Good Samaritan being abused by bad exegetes imo

If we want to help Africans, we can invade Africa, redistribute the resources of their war lords, save more lives and profit at the same time.

Uh, we tried that in Afghanistan and let's just say it wasn't exactly a profit center for the government (not to even touch on the other points).

That's not even remotely what we were trying to do in Afghanistan.

If you think we tried to colonize or patronize Afghanistan you are greatly mistaken. We gave them free money

I don't know if Scott would support invading Africa and imposing more humane governments on the continent, but having read much of his writing, I feel that he would at least give the idea an honest evaluation rather than dismissing it out of hand.

Wrong- we can try to invade Africa and redistribute the resources of their warlords into helping ordinary people. Perhaps a long term occupational state- say, a garrison of cleruchs- can make the lot of African peasants very slightly better. The USA is constitutionally incapable of doing this. What would actually happen if we invaded, say, the DRC is that, first off, things would get way worse because of collateral damage. Then Kinshasa would be rebuilt, until it broke into another civil war, the transitional government stole all the development money, and we wound up back at square one.

Routing any significant amount of resources toward increasing the sum total of Sub-Saharan Africans (or even toward keeping the number static) is a gross misuse of those resources: not merely a waste, but in fact one of the most counterproductive imaginable uses of the money.

Yeah, it's subsidizing the proliferation of one of the most low human capital and negative value-add populations of the world.

If money is to be spent by the West in Sub-Saharan Africa, it should be on cash in exchange for tubal ligation for teenage girls and women under 35 or so. We can free SSA girls and women from the oppression of pregnancy and child-rearing, and we can better empower them to focus on their education and careers. If there's cash left over that, the West can pay for and provide stipends for children of all ages getting much-needed gender affirming hormone therapies and surgeries. And then if there's money left over that, to be Inclusive and all, the West can do cash in exchange for vasectomies for the men.

From Scott further down in the thread:

I think the non-zero-sumness is that if everyone tries to save everyone else's child, then everyone is better off. That is, if your child is drowning in China, and the Chinese person by the riverbank thinks "it's not my child, forget it", and a Chinese child is drowning in America, and you think "it's not my child, forget it", then both of you are worse off than if you both saved each other's children.

I think this hypothetical, as stated, is obviously correct. There is a pretty big assumption though, the assumption that this is a reciprocal arrangement. You can get into galaxy-brained decision theory stuff to argue that because of acausal trade, there is an unnegotiated policy that intelligent agents would automatically know they should follow where agents help each other. Its a bit hard to see how impovershed African children have any way to help Americans even if they wanted to, to say nothing of their intuitive understanding of functional decision theory. Still, I have to concede that it is at least conceivably possible.

Where this logic does not hold at all is in animal welfare. No one can seriously argue that animals would collectively decide to treat humanity better if only we would reduce the suffering associated with factory farms.

To be fair that's not what he said; at least not in that particular message. His parodying one position dosn't necessarily imply embracing the opposite.

I was just going to post this, lol. Why the hell is Scott posting fallacies on Twitter now? I know he's a clear thinker in general, so why is he being obviously stupid here? (I'll explain the fallacy below).

Here's his tweet:

I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.

This might take a bit of context for the unordained to understand. Let me explain. This tweet references three things.

  1. The philosophy of Peter Singer. In "The Life You Can Save", he writes about a thought experiment. If you saw a child drowning, you would jump in and save him, even if you ruined your $1000 suit. So why don't you give $1000 to charity and save a life in Africa? (Pretend, for the sake of argument this is actually possible).

  2. The meme that white progressives care more about people in other countries than their own people. They have pro-outgroup bias. This is opposed to the 99% of people who show concentric lines of caring. They care about family, then friends, then neighbors, then countrymen, then foreigners. Presumably, this makes white progressives bad allies since they will betray their own to help others. It is sometimes depicted with this jpeg.

  3. Trump canceling all grants to NGOs. Amongst the sea of graft and Marxism, there were some actual effective programs too. The one everyone is getting excited about is PEPFAR, which has been credited with saving millions of African lives by providing cheap AIDS medications. (Note: It is generally impossible for AIDS to become widespread in a heterosexual population. It spreads in Africa because of the cultural practice of "dry sex".)

The fallacy here is that Scott is comparing canceling PEPFAR to letting the child drown.

But why is it a fallacy?

Because, in the child drowning scenario, only YOU can save the child. If you take no action, the child will drown. But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap. This is not something that only the US can do. In fact, governments are often uniquely bad at delivering aid.

Scott knows this of course. Does he just not care, or is it TDS? I think maybe he is willing to lie and manipulate to achieve an otherwise worthy goal. But, if so, why should I listen to him at all if he's just trying to manipulate me?

For the record, I think the US should continue to fund PEPFAR because it's apparently extremely effective so it's worth the cost even if it otherwise goes against my desire for a much smaller and less corrupt US government. I don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.

It is sometimes depicted with this jpeg.

Am I missing some context? Presumably it's that anyone who scores... some way on some metric that results in that chart isn't worth listening to?

That jpeg is actually misleading, the original question listed a bunch of groups from closest to furthest away, from family to foreigners to animals to plants, and to choose the point where you no longer morally care.

The way it was set up, it is literally impossible to say you care about foreigners more than about the close ones, the assumption that literally everyone cares about their family more than about strangers, about human strangers more than animals and so on was just baked into the study.

So if anyone says that study proves democrats care more about animals than people, they are wrong.

The way it was set up, it is literally impossible to say you care about foreigners more than about the close ones

Why? Iirc it was simply a matter of assigning 100 points to different categories.

No, as far as I remember it was not about assigning points, it was about choosing the size of the moral circle, if you look at the graph each circle has the previous smaller circle included within, that imagery is intentional, that is how the participants were meant to interpret it, when they choose animals (big circle) the humans (small circle) is included within.

The size of the moral circle was examined in that study, but was not used to generate the heatmap:

Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0/figures/5

EDIT: nvm, they just reused the same term to refer to two different things.

Well they explicitly say heatmaps were made from the size of the moral circle, and I don't see any other heatmap besides that one.

Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a.

Sounds vague enough that I don't think i have to change my interpretation, even if the wording kinda sound like they're talking about the points allocation.

Every liberal I know would in fact not choose a tree over their family, even if they care about the environment, if your interpretation is right that goes against what you can just see with the naked eye.

Liberals are not these caricatures that "care about rocks more than about their families", please ask any liberal you know if they care less about someone the more closely related they are to them, if they would rather cut a tree or a family member, they are not actually insane.

Sounds vague enough that...

I came down on the other side of that vagueness, but their raw data source is the pixel people clicked on, which is undeniable evidence for your interpretation of that.

Liberals are not these caricatures that "care about rocks more than about their families", please ask any liberal you know if they care less about someone the more closely related they are to them, if they would rather cut a tree or a family member, they are not actually insane.

I have, and that's why I found it plausible. Humans as equal to everything else in the universe is not at all outlandish of a statement. (As to whether they would actually follow that through to its conclusion? Nah, I doubt it. It's all talk.)

Yes, you're right.

Finally, we assessed the heatmaps generated by participants’ clicks on the rung they felt best represented the extent of their moral circle.

That jpeg is actually misleading, the original question listed a bunch of groups from closest to furthest away, from family to foreigners to animals to plants, and to choose the point where you no longer morally care.

Knowyourmeme was wrong about that, though to be fair they're better than regular journalists.

From the original article (link should bring you directly to Methods, Study 3a, procedure):

All participants completed a moral allocation task, in which participants allocated 100 “moral units” among the following 16 categories...

[...]

We also explained to participants that these categories were non-overlapping such that giving to one category (e.g., extended family) would not include an inclusive category (e.g., immediate family).

created the heatmap shown. Afterwards:

In addition, participants also completed a more qualitative measure of the extent of their moral circle by clicking on rungs extending outward and representing the same categories as in the moral allocation task (see Supplementary Note 4).

and supplementary note 4 is shown in the knowyourmeme post.

EDIT: nvm, they just reused the same term to refer to two different things.

Yes thanks for the sources, I didn't know that allocating points was part of the study, but apparently that part was irrelevant to the heatmap.

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-12227-0/MediaObjects/41467_2019_12227_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Please click on a number that depicts the extent of your moral circle. Note that in this scale, the number you select includes the numbers below it as well. So, if you select 10 (all mammals), you are also including numbers 1-9 (up to 'all people on all continents') in your moral circle.

That data was not used to generate the heatmap.

>Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0/figures/5

EDIT: nvm, they just reused the same term to refer to two different things.

In addition, participants also completed a more qualitative measure of the extent of their moral circle by clicking on rungs extending outward and representing the same categories as in the moral allocation task (see Supplementary Note 4). This measure allowed us to create heatmaps to visualize the relative sizes of liberals’ and conservatives’ moral circles.

Does this not say that heatmaps were made out of what they used in supplementary note 4?

I had to dig into their data source to be sure, but it seems you're right. The "allocation" in the caption is talking about the "extent" in the main body, not the "allocation" there. The raw data of the heatmaps is x/y coordinates where they clicked.

Going from memory, it's the amount of empathy the study population (left wingers in that picture) have to a series of groups, starting from "family" in the middle and proceeding through neighbors/countrymen/foreigners/mammals/other animals/bacteria at the edges.

EDIT: found it. The most common highest choice outer limit among liberals looks like "all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms" while it's "all of your friends (including distant ones)" for conservatives.

White progressives have a pro-outgroup bias. That means they like black people more than other white people, foreigners more than countrymen, etc... They are the only group known to have these biases.

I think the image is trying to say something like this: Why should I listen to you when you hate yourself? You think white people are bad. Shouldn't I just go listen to a black person instead?

For example, recently Michael Moore (a fat, stupid, white male) complained that the problem with America is that there are too many fat, stupid, white men in charge. This seems like the perfect time to reply with the jpg.

But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap

Where did you get this idea from? I don't see any strong reason to assume this will fully happen within the next decade, or that the funding for the PEPFAR replacement will be as large as PEPFAR currently is. It might happen, but it also might not happen. And in the meantime, a lot of medical treatment won't be provided.

don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.

Because he was making a political joke on twitter. Please read his twitter bio: "I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns." He's made plenty of complicated arguments about EA on his blog. People are holding this tweet to a much higher standard than they would any other tweet because they really want to own the libs, but it's a fine tweet.

But if the US cancels PEPFAR, then other countries, NGOs, and citizens can and will fill in the gap. This is not something that only the US can do. In fact, governments are often uniquely bad at delivering aid.

This is precisely what the US should do.

Trump should simply declare that PEPFAR etc are worthy initiatives but US national interests are at the moment constrained but that billionaires and ordinary citizens who have prospered handsomely from business in the free world and can bear it should contribute to such initiatives instead of funding left-wing activism or people gluing themselves to roads.

For the record, I think the US should continue to fund PEPFAR because it's apparently extremely effective so it's worth the cost even if it otherwise goes against my desire for a much smaller and less corrupt US government. I don't know why Scott didn't just say that instead of his lame attempt at a dunk.

If you are making this argument for PEPFAR, I think it is self defeating.

All these sorts of arguments are inherently utilitarian at least in part. The problem with this is that there is no evidence that PEPFAR or related programs will solve the problem and end. Any utilitarian argument for a form of welfare must chart a path to its own termination, and frankly, that is the opposite of basically every African aid program. To be frank, there is no end in sight. Africans aren't on the path to manufacture their own mosquito nets, let alone antivirals. You are keeping people alive for the purpose of the next generation of Americans to pay to keep the next generation of them alive. Repeat until the AI destroys us all or decides to dedicate its purposes to keeping them alive, despite their best efforts.

Its not like the PEPFAR enthusiasts are human slavers of any sort and have a plan to take a bunch of Africans and make them carry raw materials to build a space elevator, but without that sort of plan the program does appear to lack much justification.

The other problem with that hypo (which is the original problem with the Singer hypo) is that it is very rare to encounter a drowning child (ie the problem is discrete and solvable) whereas the poor will always be with us (ie the problem is unbounded). Applying the logic of the first to the second is wrong headed.

It seems odd to me to associate this type of charity with rationalism/EA specifically when it has been a common practice for centuries for religious institutions to collect a larger fraction of congregant's income than the US spends on foreign aid and at least in theory distribute it to feed, clothe, and house destitute strangers. If giving away your posessions to the poor were an inherently suicidal worldview, then the world would not be full of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists instead of Nietzschean neoreactionary twitter pagans.

Yeah, one thing that Nietzschean neoreactionaries on Twitter sometimes don't understand is that almost nobody likes them. I agree with some of their takes, but most of them seem so weird and morally repugnant to me that I wouldn't want to be friends with them. Surely it should be possible to, say, have a neoreactionary attitude to immigration or whatever, without gleefully calling for people to suffer like many of these people do. A lot of the time they don't even like each other - their communities, just like most extremist ideological groups, are constantly full of them bickering in petty drama and accusing each other of not being ideologically correct. Ironically, many of these people are obviously losers who are psychologically driven by the same kind of resentment that Nietzsche described, just like many extreme leftists are.

Christians at least often make a point of seeming like nice people and being welcoming to outsiders.

Sharing your opinion on a group is fine. Generalizing to what “almost nobody” thinks, or drawing conclusions about “many of these people,” is not.

You’ve been banned for this exact behavior before. On the other hand, you’ve been relatively good for the better part of a year. I’m going to go with a 1 day ban as a reminder to be more precise and charitable, even about people who are trying to be edgy.

Nah, you hate them because your politics. I am also not on their side but a) most people who are critical on Scott are not Nietzschean neoreactionaries and much more on the right and I am on their side more so because the dispute is more so about whether it is good at all to have an ethnic group you identify and put first rather than full seflishness b) Those few who actually are that, their take goes too far but it is a reaction towards those who want to impose pathological altruism on them. Going full vitalist in general is incorrect but having that reaction towards people demanding that they put their people last is correct. In addition with respecting prioritising one's family including extended, there needs to be a reciprocity in altruism that exists even among people of different abilities. Which is to say I help you but you would help me.

So, if we talk about specific characters and not as a way to dismiss the right in general, I do have some disagreement and antipathy, but you don't have any sympathy for the imposition of pathological altruism against their people, as a motivating factor.

The neocon and left wing ideologues contrarily oppose treating their ethnic outgroup as victims who needs justify any prioritization. This is dominant perspective on the left that claims to be antiwoke which I would put neocons who try to be influential in the right to also fit into.

  • Ironically, many of these people are obviously losers who are psychologically driven by the same kind of resentment that Nietzsche described, just like many extreme leftists are.

Hilariously uncharitable and far leftist redditor 101 rhetoric. Also doesn't this statement by implication try to present your faction as the ubermench over the extreme leftists and the Nietzscheans? Why not start saying they have a small dick and are all incels. One can dismiss every faction by making this claim since it is easy to assume for your outgroup, and many social media addicts will have their losers. Although it does seem that the left has greater % of mentally ill.

I do think it is a bit much for people online to pretend that any movement is made by ubermench while everyone else are the losers.

The tactic of leftist liberals trying to win the debate by pretending they represent a centrist middle is also at play here.

It's a pathology I used to notice on the online left as well. If you're in a heavily-online space and engaged in curating your identity, you want to stand out from the pack and grab attention. The best way to do that is to say radical things. Occupying an extreme position also allows you to more easily denounce your rivals for not being as hardcore or based as you are, since the biggest threat to a wannabe-thought-leader like this is competition from others in the same space. The result is pressure towards radicalising yourself, taking stronger and stronger positions that more clearly mark you out from the normies. This is particularly the case because, unlike in the real world, online all you have are words - you're often pseudonymous, and even if you're not, it's much harder to point to actual things you did in the real world for other people. So it's all self-presentation, and the way to get attention there is to be extreme and weird.

It might work for a while, but it falls apart the moment you try to build a mass movement or appeal to people in the real world. Once you've talked yourself into taking extreme or insane positions, you've handicapped your appeal to anyone else, because it turns out that most normal people have pretty basic moral instincts, and recoil from things that seem absurd or repugnant. We've seen that happen with woke overreach; the right-wing equivalent is unlikely to be any different.

Paying the tithe to the church or the zakat to the mosque or any of the many ways of religious giving is nowhere near the same as the modern nation-state piss pot of foreign aid. It isn't the same, and to equivocate it is such an astonishing rhetorical flourish that its sheer chutzpah must be admired. No, the American NGO industrial complex is not a moral agent of generosity like thousands of years of religious charity.

How is it not the same?

How is it not the same?

It's usually voluntary, and often goes towards local things.

Yes, the State department funds "democratization" programs that are a front for destabilization of foreign governments and the subversion of their civil society with progressive ideology. I won't lose any sleep if all of that gets tossed in the trash heap of history. But Scott and I are not talking about the entire NGO complex; we are talking about PEPFAR. And I see little daylight between giving lifesaving medicine to the deathly ill and the unborn and any sort of traditional religous charity.

You can object to it because it involves providing contraception, performing circumcisions, or because the recipients are African, but to consider it a net negative requires placing either zero or negative value on tens of millions of human lives. Even I, someone who doesn't particularly like Africans (I lived there for 3 years; I have no illusions about what they are like), wouldn't want them in my country, and thinks it would be better if most of them had never been born, believe they're worth something, and that if it is possible to save them from certain death for the cost of a rounding error of our budget, then to not do so would be a crime against humanity.

But, and let me emphasise here: that you could come up with righteous explanations for every single bit of aid that the United States currently pays for, summed all together to be unlimited money to be given to foreigners. You could spend one trillion dollars on a program that encases every newborn African in a suit of power armor to protect them from cradle to the age of majority under the justification of the non-zero value of human life. You could justify anything.

Can you name a limit? Can you name a terminus where the taxpayer money not going to a cause isn't a crime to humanity? Is there a cost to benefit ratio where an African life simply isn't worth saving? If you can't give a number, then we are merely engaged in moral epicycles.

No, I don't go around assigning exact numerical values to how much taxpayer money should be spent on foreign aid, or healthcare, or the military, or exactly how many American lives we ought to be willing to sacrifice in a war to defend our allies. If you believe that everyone who doesn't autistically prepare spreadsheets of such figures is incapable of moral reasoning, then I have some bad news for you (or good news, if you want to ignore everyone's opinions, I suppose). Not that I couldn't put such a list together, but it would be a lie, as these things are decided intuitively on a case by case basis, as below.

You could spend one trillion dollars on a program that encases every newborn African in a suit of power armor to protect them from cradle to the age of majority under the justification of the non-zero value of human life.

If this were being proposed at a time when every American did not also have such a suit of power armor and this would be an immense strain on the economy, then it would be a violation of the ordo amoris as properly understood. If, however, there comes a day when every US citizen is a member of the Brotherhood of Steel and mass produced power armor costs next to nothing to export, then why not send them some? You give decreasing amounts to each concentric circle of care, moving outwards, but if you are fantastically wealthy the people on the outside still get quite a lot in absolute terms.

Well, it seems like people like me - or people who think like me - can name a number: zero. Consider the epistemic sin of easily preventable deaths on the heads of people who refuse to name a number.

Not all religions care about strangers. Islamic charity (zakat) is only supposed to go to muslims, because islam is Moral Defection At Every Level: The Religion. Charity from non-muslims towards muslims will never be returned, dogmatically. Obviously they should be kicked out of the circle of care.

I looked it up, zakat is not charity, it is more like a tax that every muslim has to pay to help their communities, but there are some imams that actually believe in giving some of the zakat money to non-muslims in extreme poverty, and also as a means to "encourage" non-muslims to convert.

Actual charity is called "sadaqah" and there are no restrictions on it.

This is correct - zakat is more like a tithe in that it's a mandatory payment that's supposed to go to the wider Islamic community. It is therefore usually only spent on causes that benefit the Islamic community, though if you look at uses of zakat in practice, it is often spent in ways that 'overflow' and benefit everyone (e.g. public health or infrastructure in majority-Muslim communities).

Non-obligatory charity, or sadaqah, is considered highly meritorious and may be used for any righteous purpose, including aid to non-Muslims.

I think it helps to put this into a historical context, where zakat is basically Islamic taxes. It would be paid to the caliphate, which is to say, to the state, which then uses it for causes of benefit to the entire state. Historically, this was a confessional, Islamic organisation, because the historical, pre-modern mode of Islamic governance is either theocratic, or at least a confessional monarchy of some kind. At present this model is a bit muddled because there is no caliphate, so in practice Muslims pay taxes twice, once to the state and once to the ummah, and the latter are used by various Islamic NGOs. This is definitely an awkward situation and there's no doubt need for some critical conversations within Islam about the role of zakat in a secular state. However, this:

Charity from non-muslims towards muslims will never be returned, dogmatically.

is simply false. Zakat is not the extent of Islamic charity.

There is a lot of Islamic giving that is preferentially directed towards Muslims, naturally, but then, I doubt you'll have much trouble finding church aid services that are directed particularly towards Christians, or similar. It is, at any rate, not Islamic dogma that no charity may be offered towards non-Muslims.

That's obscuring reality. Zakat is a pillar of islam, an obligatory duty. Sadakat as you present it, in its non-discriminatory form, is a modern apologist concept no one cares about (nor should they, since it’s optional). In the coran when sadakat comes up, it means zakat. All muslim charities are 99% concentrated on helping muslims, when they’re not building mosques and supporting terrorism.

@OliveTapenade

It is therefore usually only spent on causes that benefit the Islamic community, though if you look at uses of zakat in practice, it is often spent in ways that 'overflow' and benefit everyone (e.g. public health or infrastructure in majority-Muslim communities).

I’ll just quote this fatwa:

Is it permissible to give zakah to a children’s cancer hospital?

Building hospitals and equipping them them does not fall into one of the categories of zakah. It is very difficult for the one who gives zakah to a hospital to be certain that it will be spent in the manner prescribed. It might be spent on equipping or expanding the hospital, or purchasing equipment for it, or on salaries and bonuses for those who work there, or on buying medicine to be given to all the patients, both poor and rich, Muslim and non-Muslim.

When it ‘overflows’ and benefits everyone as you say, it is not an acceptable beneficiary of islamic charity.

We do not think that it is permissible to give zakah to such funds, because hospitals are not among the categories of people to whom zakah may be given, as stated in Islamic teachings, and one cannot be sure that it will be spent in the prescribed manner.

You made a general claim, though, that Muslims will never be - and are in fact forbidden to be - charitable towards non-Muslims. That's not the case. On the doctrinal or dogmatic level, sadaqah is permitted and indeed considered praiseworthy, and sadaqah can be directed towards anybody.

There are some rules about zakat, yes, though depending on the specific Islamic community those rules may be interpreted in different ways, or more or less stringently. One fatwa rarely proves very much, because a fatwa is just an opinion by a scholar, and scholars regularly disagree. Even in this case, the objection to giving zakat to a hospital in a generic sense is that the Qur'an lists the proper recipients of zakat, and hospitals aren't among them. (The needy are, but obviously you can't assume that any given hospital is needy - there are wealthy hospitals and wealthy patients.) The website you've linked says:

Now that we know the eight categories to whom zakah may be given, zakah should not be spent on other interests, whether public or private. Based on this, we should not use zakah to build mosques, repair roads, build libraries and so on, because when Allah mentioned the categories of those to whom zakah may be given, He said (interpretation of the meaning): “a duty imposed by Allah. And Allah is All-Knower, All-Wise” i.e., these categories have come as an obligation from Allah. “And Allah is All-Knower, All-Wise.”

Obviously Muslims are not forbidden to build mosques, repair roads, or build libraries. (Who else would build a mosque, anyway?) They're just not to use the zakat funds for that, because zakat is earmarked for something else.

Now I take it your objection is to zakat being earmarked for Muslims specifically.

The first thing to say is that the linked page explicitly allows non-Muslims to benefit from zakat funds in some circumstances (for instance, it mentions using zakat to buy and free even a non-Muslim slave, especially if there is hope he may become Muslim; or paying zakat to "an evil man... so as to ward off his evil from the Muslims"). However, it is in general true that the point of zakat is the aid and succour of the Islamic community.

It is... unclear to me why that it is immediately forbidden. The money in the church collection plate will be used to benefit the church. If you donate money to a Buddhist temple or to a synagogue, you may reasonably assume it will be used for Buddhist or Jewish causes.

Zakat is not the sum total of Islamic charity, so I guess I don't find it obvious evidence of the evil or perfidy of Islam that Muslims donate a certain amount of money to help other Muslims.

Now, it might be true that, structurally as it were, Islam is less inclined to donate money or labour for the humanitarian benefit of non-Muslims. That's the sort of thing that I plausibly expect would differ between religions - for instance, Christianity and Buddhism both have strong, explicit ethics of universal beneficence and are involved in global aid societies, whereas not all religions might be like that. I'm not immediately aware of any good comparative figures on charitable giving by religion; I suspect it might be confounded a lot by firstly religious people who give to secular causes and don't record their religious motivation, and secondly the fact that different religions are not evenly distributed socio-economically, so religions that tend to have wealthier adherents might show up as more generous. But I'll have a look around later today and see if I can find anything.

The first result Google gave me suggests that in the US, Jews are the most charitable, followed by Protestants, and then Muslims and Catholics are neck-and-neck for the third, and it suggests that Jews and Muslims tend to favour secular organisations, while Christians favour religious organisations. But I imagine that is heavily confounded as well (if nothing else Christian charities are much more common and comprehensive in the US). This page is unsourced but suggests that Christians are the most generous, followed by Sikhs and Muslims, but offers no source. More searching to come.

I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.

Great, I will keep this in mind next time I see a child drowning. I anticipate it is a rare occurrence, because skill of swimming is widespread, taught early to children, and most parents in my society don't let children who yet can't swim wander near bodies of water, and most popular swimming places have a lifeguard presence.

I wish someone would come up with an article that would encourage modern academic philosophy and its offshoots to throw "intuition pumps" to rubbish bin. "Saving child drowning in the river" is nearly nothing like what the author actually exhorts the reader to do; all the important pieces of context are abstracted away, so that reader is lead to a particular conclusion, then the author brings up he context again, presuming the conclusion should still apply.

Eh, here in Arizona, the news networks have a common saying: "watch your kids around water." Too many kids have drowned in backyard swimming pools here.

Swimming is an inherently dangerous activity like driving. It also is a basic activity where the issues can and often are mitigated by responsible practices.

The split from something like USAID and PEPFAR is that AIDS is the result of an inherently dangerous activity, that being anal sex and "dry" sex (better know as sex with abrasives placed in the vagina) which are also easily mitigated, but those who are on the side of these charities insist that mitigation is far too burdensome, even though it is much less burdensome than getting your child a proper car seat, not driving drunk, and not letting toddlers swim on their own.

All right, I guess I'll bite on this one at last.

Ordo amoris, in essence, is a relatively common-sense doctrine intended to make sense of most people's moral intuitions, while avoiding two absurd extremes. The first extreme to be avoided is the hardcore utilitarian, Peter Singer perspective - all lives are equally valuable, there is no rational basis for preferring those in close proximity to us, and therefore we should seek to improve as many lives as possible, affording no preference whatsoever to family or country. The second extreme to be avoided is the exclusive tribalist - we have definite moral obligations only to those with whom we are connected in some way, and all other people can burn for all we care.

Both those positions seem absurd to most people. Most people's intuitions seem to say that if we can treat even distant strangers benevolently, we ought to; but also that we have greater moral obligations towards those closer to us. That's roughly what ordo amoris is - we have moral obligations to behave benevolently and compassionately towards all people, but those obligations scale with proximity.

There is also a side issue here to do with how we conceptualise 'closeness' or moral proximity. Scott's tweet is particularly silly because most versions of the ordo amoris I'm familiar with would give quite a high moral priority to people who are literally, physically in front of you, whether they're related to you or not. (As James Orr puts it, "we must care for those who fall within the compass of our practical concern".) However, most also do consider the bonds of family, tribe, political or religious community, and so on, to serve as intensifiers. If there are two drowning people in front of you, there is only time to save one, and one is a family member, ceteris paribus you should save your family member. Likewise your nation, your faith, or whatever. However, most of what we might say about the ordo amoris works regardless of the exact way you define moral proximity.

The problem I have with the whole Vance-instigated ordo amoris debate is that it seems like every side is using this actually-quite-common-sense idea in bad faith. Vance is using it to suggest that American moral obligations towards foreigners are either nothing, or are far less than are currently being served by the (actually very small) American aid budget. Some of his opponents are therefore responding by caricaturing the whole doctrine as nationalist or racist, or by suggesting that American obligations to foreigners are exactly as the same as American obligations to Americans. None of this is what ordo amoris implies.

The problem I have with the whole Vance-instigated ordo amoris debate is that it seems like every side is using this actually-quite-common-sense idea in bad faith. Vance is using it to suggest that American moral obligations towards foreigners are either nothing, or are far less than are currently being served by the (actually very small) American aid budget. Some of his opponents are therefore responding by caricaturing the whole doctrine as nationalist or racist, or by suggesting that American obligations to foreigners are exactly as the same as American obligations to Americans. None of this is what ordo amoris implies.

Point of order- isn't Vance using it to suggest that deporting foreigners to their home countries is fine, even if it's bad for those foreigners personally?

I was reading it in the context of debates about the aid budget. I admit I haven't watched the entire Fox News interview. Is there a transcript of it anywhere? I've only seen the tweet with a one sentence quote that blew up.

At any rate, I do stand by the idea that there's a lot of talking past each other. Here's the National Catholic Reporter arguing that Vance is wrong, but only rebutting a strawman. At least in the tweet I saw, Vance wasn't saying that love should be calculating or conditional; rather, he doesn't seem to have been talking about love in that sense at all. Here's R. R. Reno in Compact:

Aquinas applies the notion of ordo amoris to our love of other people. There is no question that all persons are equally worthy of our love. We are created in the image and likeness of God. But each of us is cast into a world of already existing relationships. These relationships bring with them duties and responsibilities.

This seems like a helpful distinction to me. A Christian ought to love all people, i.e. regard all people with an attitude of impartial benevolence, or agape. But a Christian's concrete duties and responsibilities are ordered in a particular way, and proximity is one of many factors influencing those responsibilities.

Other factors include things like need or culpability. If my family member has a skinned knee and a total stranger is drowning in a river, the stranger's greater need outweighs the family member's relational proximity to me. Likewise if I caused a total stranger to receive an injury, I have a much greater responsibility to care for that injury. So Christian moral responsibility is not univariate, and proximity, however we construe that term, is only one relevant factor.

Am I steelmanning Vance a bit here? Perhaps - I haven't been able to find the full original interview, and Vance's snipes on Twitter aren't enough to get a nuanced idea of what he means. But I hope that reflection on Christian moral obligation is useful even beyond the quest to indict or vindicate a politician of the moment.

Here's the National Catholic Reporter arguing that Vance is wrong, but only rebutting a strawman.

The National Catholic Reporter is a liberal/progressive "Catholic" publication. They have and do promote political positions completely at odds with Catholic teaching, including defence of abortion and IVF, among many other things. To the point where bishops have called on them to remove Catholic from their name. I wouldn't take them as representative of the faithul Catholic position. It's in their interest to misrepresent Vance. This is the polite way of describing the NCR.

There is also the Hayekian local knowledge problem / skin in the game that Ordo amoris solves.

"So PEPFAR was good but using USAID to do surveillance work for the NSA and routing $300 million accidentally into the coffers of an African warlord was not so great. On balance, now that PEPFAR funding is restored and funding to African warlords isn't, I think this is a W for Elon" is the sort of post I could easily see Scott writing in a year. I wonder if Team Trump will be able to turn up anything really juicy.


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