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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31037 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:

I keep hearing about fascist infiltration or alt-right infiltration into spaces, including themotte, but no one seems to actually be showing examples...

But now I find myself wondering if this has happened in more progressive spaces that were open to debate.

I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."

A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.

One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.

(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)

In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.

And they take the black pill.

A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.

I have observed the pendulum swinging back the other way...the rise of what I have called normcore-right ,since 2021. These are people who are strongly anti-woke but at the same time hold mainstream (or normie) views, like about vaccines or even Ukraine. They sometimes take extreme views on otherwise mainstream positions, like Richard Hannia on the death penalty. Or supporting open borders in the case of Caplan. It's a subset of the un-woke who have carved out a niche of signaling high-status beliefs appealing to a well-educated, high-SES audience who are anti-woke but also strongly inclined to reject conspiracy theories , extremism, or tribalism. It's close to the IDW but more traditionalistic and less secular. NRO columnist Kevin Williamson started this in 2016 by opposing Trump and also strongly opposing economic populism, and in one of his more famous articles taking an especially incendiary or hard-core tone in which he said that downtrodden, white-working class towns “Deserve To Die”', which at the time generated some controversy.

These are people who are strongly anti-woke but at the same time hold mainstream (or normie) views, like about vaccines or even Ukraine

That's just the online right returning to pre-2020 form. Someone like Steve Sailer never changed his views, people are simply realizing he was right all along now that billions of people haven't dropped dead from the "clot shot," Russia has not saved Christendom, and black crime and immigration are still pertinent issues.

It hard to peg what Sailer is. He's not really right but not left either. He's not a centrist. He's more like a social critic, a more left-wing version of Ann Coulter, who has one foot in both sides. He does not reject the NYTs crowd completely.

To go on a tangent a bit, I remember having this debate a while back, but I think the focus on black crime overlooks committed by other groups which may be worse in some respects, in part because crime committed by non-blacks, like identity theft, fraud, etc. tend to have many victims per perpetrator. (Every single person who lost money with FTX is a victim.) So this offsets to some degree the lower crime rate among non-blacks. Imagine how many American have been victims of call center theft or computer crimes, particularly targeting elders or computer-illiterate (It's so bad the FBI has dedicated an entire part of their website to it). I know people who were victims of this. I recall a Podcast in which the host interviewed a prolific conman, Brett Johnson (real black sounding name, huh) and over 10-year period until he was finally arrested he stole millions of dollars from probably hundreds or thousands of people and businesses, but all of it would technically be rolled up as 'one crime' or 'one count of fraud' even though it had hundreds or thousands of victims just from this one person. The crime stats do not make a distinction between someone whose crimes have thousands of victims or just one. Mr. Johnson and 'the random hoodlum who holds up a store' would both technically count as a single entry in the stats, yet Mr. Jonson's crime had way more victims over much longer period of time.

This multiplication of crime game can be played more ways than one. Mr. stickup probably hasn't only done one crime, my understanding is that criminals tend to have a long series of crimes before they get caught. And the financial criminals do hit lots of people but when you start considering the knock on effect of entire neighborhoods being unable to maintain profitable storefronts because of crime the decay is hard to quantify.

How is Sailer not right-wing?

I think HlynkaCG explained it well a while back on Reddit. I initially thought he was wrong but upon closer inspection it seemed he was right. Sailer is someone who otherwise adopts the culture and trapping of the left but rejects some of the parts he deems too far left. He's too cosmopolitan. But his posts are mostly on point anyway, like about HBD anyway. Same for Charles Murray. He's a conservative cultural critic but not right-wing. Same for Moldbug.

How is he adopting the culture and trapping of the left? Is the argument that he's blue tribe?

You know Hlynka: no one is right wing except him. He's eternally internally consistent.

yeah pretty much except for some of his political views . I think he's closer to grey tribe. Being 'red' means choosing to reject the blue tribe completely. Steve has not done that. Neither have I.

To be fair, every one of the scammers who targets my elderly dad is either indian or mexican, so it wouldn't swing the balance that far back. Whenever they call while I'm over I get to learn some fantastic retro racial slurs from the 60s.

But, like, how many people scammed out of a hundred bucks is worth one 7-11 clerk executed in cold blood even after giving up the cash, or being lit on fire with gasoline or having bleach poured down her throat?

A lot of the anger at the media for not covering this stuff isn't the scale so much as the sheer hideous and callous evil of it, which they ignore to chase made up stories about white frat bros lighting a chick's hijab on fire.

The financial crimes equivalent would be the whole media totally ignoring Bernie Madoff in favor of writing a thousand pieces about some white bartender who was rumored to have under-reported his tips to the IRS, which I think people would get equally upset about.

Actuary tables put the (economic) value of a life at somewhere under $10 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#United_States

Actuary tables

(economic) value

Note that the federal govt.'s figure of ten million dollars is based on revealed-preference studies that estimate how much money the average person theoretically is willing to spend in order to save his own life, not on economic studies that estimate the present value of an average person's expected future earnings (or net tax revenue).

But, like, how many people scammed out of a hundred bucks is worth one 7-11 clerk executed in cold blood even after giving away all the cash, or being lit on fire with gasoline or having bleach poured down her throat?

That leads to the question is many people scammed for small amounts is equal to one person killed in cold blood in terms of loss of quality of life and externalities. But this is not an apples to apples comparison. The serial scammer would not be listed under homicide stats but somewhere else. If you just limit it to homicides or assault, then Sailer is right.

otherwise mainstream positions, like Richard Hannia on the death penalty.

Death penalty has majority support almost everywhere. Even in the US.

Maybe some places in western Europe oppose it, but by and large, death penalties were abolished in their respective countries in spite of popular opposition.

Death penalty is only an 'extreme view' if you have fully internalised the regime narrative or are otherwise too busy to read widely and have been convinced by all the op-eds and human rights activists that it's universally regarded as barbaric.

Death penalty is only an 'extreme view' if you have fully internalised the regime narrative or are otherwise too busy to read widely and have been convinced by all the op-eds and human rights activists that it's universally regarded as barbaric.

No, what I mean is his take on it, not that he supports it. Subtle difference. I think his take is somewhat extreme, at least in my opinion. It seems like he wants to expand the scope of the death penalty and does not seem perturbed by the possibility of wrongful executions. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/survey-results-ii-likes-and-dislikes I don't think he's wrong per say but it still seems extreme. I think he's right that mass incarceration and the death penalty are effective deterrents and crime mitigators, but the literature is at best mixed on the matter.

Death penalty is only an 'extreme view' if you have fully internalised the regime narrative or are otherwise too busy to read widely and have been convinced by all the op-eds and human rights activists that it's universally regarded as barbaric.

There are other reasons someone can oppose something that does not involve assimilating propaganda , like weighing the pros and cons of an issue

It's not that extreme a view even if it's outside the overton window. A fairly robust majority of Americans supports the death penalty while also believing innocent people are sometimes executed, and a large majority disapproved of the supreme court banning the death penalty for pedophilia. Heck you'd probably not get much below 50-50 on the Trump platform of executing drug dealers because they kill 500 people on average(or whatever statistic he made up).

Yeah you're right. His views on the death penalty would not be that extreme compared to Saudi Arabia. Extreme is a relative term.

Even compared to the average American his views on the death penalty don’t seem extreme, it’s only next to the elite consensus that it seems weird.

Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games

I hope you'll forgive me for ignoring the main thrust of your post to go off on this tangent, but I've had this rolling around in my head for a while. I hope the rest of you will forgive me for poking fun at things that I'm often guilty of myself.

How to Win Friends and Influence People: the Rationalist Edition

  1. Extreme (emotional) Decoupling. Emotion is weakness, rationality is strength. Utilitarianism and consequentialism are our gods; the more gruesome the morally correct action you're willing to undertake, the greater human good you're able to invoke, the better. Examples: Eliezer 'melt all GPUs' Yudkowsky, Abortion/forced sterilization/[policy harming black people] is eugenic and therefore net good, censorship is worthwhile when you're bearing the lofty weight of future quadrillions of the human pan-galactic human-AI-hybrid diaspora on your shoulders. Humility is for normies and low-status chuds, not you, you beautiful prism of rarefied logic, you.

  2. Long, internally consistent logical chains based on premises with monstrous error bars/uncertainty (see previous points). The longer and harder to follow, the easier it is to obscure and deflect criticism, and the greater your boost in status.

  3. Literature references. Point score is directly correlated with obscurity; actually having read the the work in question is optional. Bonus points for linking SSC pieces, double bonus points if they're from 2016 or earlier.

  4. Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus. IQ is life. Everyone knows that vocabulary size is correlated to IQ, which is correlated to g, which determines your worth as a human being and position in the hierarchy. What better way to give your stock a little bump than to sprinkle in a few five syllable words that fell out of common use somewhere in the 19th century?

  5. Why post a succinct list with references when you can write a 30,000 character multipost that is a struggle to get through? This (1) gives you wriggle room to claim any characterization of your thesis is a strawman and (2) allows you to...

  6. ...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read! Remember, the goal is gaining status, not clear communication of ideas or mutually working towards a model of the world. Obscurantism serves the former, brevity will only hurt you. And potentially get you in hot water with the mods.

  7. Complain about the normies in academia, MSM, HR, government, your life, etc vocally and frequently. This communicates that you're smarter than them, and remember, criticism is always easier than defending a thesis or building something worthwhile and thus disproportionately easier for gaining status.

How to Win Friends and Influence People: the Rationalist Edition

My reaction at this point:

At this point, reading an article a comment like this one, you already know what the next “narrative beat” has to be.

The fact that this has to be the next narrative beat in an article like this should raise red flags. Another way of phrasing “this has to be the next narrative beat” is that it’s something we would believe / want to believe / insert at this place in our discourse whether it was true or not. That means we need to be on extra special good epistemic behavior when we try to consider whether it’s true in this individual case, understanding that we’ll have a strong bias towards assuming “yes” that needs to be counteracted.

So I checked your points against both the latest 7 top-levels in the thread 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and my memory of popular comments.

Extreme (emotional) Decoupling.

Not true of any of the top-levels. Some popular comments are like this but some are also earnest presentations of a situation that doesnt fit any mayor narrative, or being vocally angry at the outgroup.

Long, internally consistent logical chains based on premises with monstrous error bars/uncertainty

Not true of any top-levels nor of popular comments. Long arguments tend to make their points in more detail rather than make more points. Including multible examples for something. Adding visceral details to a situation youre asking people to consider. Countering first-order objections. Even just repeating yourself in different words. Very long comments mostly invest in parallel rather than serial argumentation.

Literature references.

Not true of any of the top-levels. Occasionally in popular comments.

Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus.

True of one of the top-levels, and I would guess a similar rate for popular comments. I think the author of that one top-level is ESL and that probably contributes. Then again so am I, so maybe comments that dont seem pretentious to me (or my own) do seem that way to natives.

Why post a succinct list with references when you can write a 30,000 character multipost that is a struggle to get through?

Not true of any of the top-levels. Popular comments are sometimes very long and a struggle to get through, but its not clear that they could be effectively shortened into a list of references. The last multipost I remember is this, if you want to try at compression. Its also built around a literature reference and has a pretty decoupled premise, but its doesnt seem bad to me.

...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read!

OK I think at this point there are two people doing this and only one of them where you actually find it annoying.

Complain about the normies in academia, MSM, HR, government, your life, etc vocally and frequently. This communicates that you're smarter than them, and remember, criticism is always easier than defending a thesis or building something worthwhile and thus disproportionately easier for gaining status.

Depending on how you count it, up to 4 of the top-levels. Id say one of them is mainly about that. It seems hard to avoid criticising academia, MSM, HR, or government in CW posts, and "normies" doesnt restrict the description very much. I think this is actually a bit less common/intense in popular comments.

Based.

I am disappointed that this post didn't include the word "quokka", though point 1 covers part of it--it's basically applying #1 to yourself. So much high decoupling that you not only don't recognize when your words seem monstrous to others, you no longer recognize other people acting monstrously to you.

  1. Literature references.

Or anime.

I am disappointed that this post didn't include the word "quokka"

Quincy is too cute, didn't have it in me.

...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read

please do this more, @everyone! If someone finds your writing interesting, they're often want to read more, and conveniently-located links are much nicer on this platform than scrolling through a comment history.

Abortion/forced sterilization/[policy harming black people] is eugenic and therefore net good

this doesn't win friends among rationalists. this wins friends among a subset of the alt right / neoreactionaries. those don't have much overlap. Most HBD-believing-rationalists are either left-leaning, centrist, or libertarian, and even most who lean far-right don't want to forcibly sterilize black people. Even if that was the right move because nietzche or nature or w/e, it's still not something any rationalists believe.

Assume that any professional field that doesn't involve code, protein folding, or pure math is trivially understood.

This is generally my strategy and it works pretty well. It's landed me ~1000% returns in the stock market in 6 months, a new house, and a great career, essentially because I picked a professional field and put 1-2 days of effort into researching it rather than assuming that the experts would outcompete me. It's truly shocking how incompetent the average professional is.

Is this not your experience? Do you not live in a world where professionals constantly get obvious things wrong? It seems to me like most people in all fields basically just glide through life with a bare minimum of understanding necessary to do their day-to-day work, with very little understanding of even the field to which they've devoted their lives.

To be clear I'm sure there are plenty of fields that take ages to learn, and professionals much smarter than I could be given 100 years of study. But for me, that assumption--that I can gain a competitive edge over an experienced professional given only a couple of days' study of their field--has yielded spectacular results wherever I've applied it.

10x returns in 6 months has to be mostly luck, right?

For programming, my guess is you're just very smart and competent (as a ssc offshoot we select for that a bit), so you're better than most via that, and then selected a niche that's relatively underexplored but is still profitable. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to, in a few days, come up with a string searching or GPU matrix multiplication algorithm that significantly improves on currently used ones.

Yeah, I admit that I'm being a bit contrary by even presenting this as disagreeing with you when really I'm just making my own point here. The stock returns were probably mostly luck (though it wasn't a particularly high-risk strategy) and the programming was probably mostly a result of me being good at math. I absolutely agree I couldn't do string searching/GPU matrix multiplication, or probably even things 1/10 that hard.

I guess a better (less argumentative) way of phrasing my point would be that domain-specific knowledge is extremely important, but there are also more base-level skills (such as math, critical reasoning, charisma, etc.) that feed into many different professions. I think there are many "experts" in fields like programming, sales, psychology, etc. that lack those more base-level skills and thus can be outperformed by people who have them.

You're arguing against the EMH, not professional expertise

I'm arguing against the expertise of stock market traders and programmers (the two fields I studied for a few days). I'm also arguing against expertise more generally, but programming especially is the field where just a few days' study was enough to be in, say, the 99th percentile of programmers in the (admittedly fairly obscure) language I was studying. Stock market trading too, but that can easily be ascribed to luck.

It's well known that doctors make terrible returns doing technical analysis while on break and investing in IMB rather than drug companies where they have a comparative edge

Sure, but I bet there are some doctors who consistently outperform the market too, even when doing technical analysis for companies in unrelated fields. I never claimed that the average person could outcompete experts, just that some people can and do, and that assuming that you can't is a great way to ignore $100 bills lying on the ground.

this doesn't mean you could perform open heart surgery, land a 747, or design a bridge after reading up about it on Wikipedia.

747's can generally land themselves, and I absolutely could design a bridge without reading about it at all--just perhaps not a very large or efficient one. I get your point though--there are certainly things experts are 10^10x better at than I will ever be. I just think that generally, if you are a fairly intelligent person, treating expert claims with skepticism will often yield great results.

But code is just math, math is just code, and protein folding is just the intersection of the two!

I feel personally called out, but in my defense I'll say that all of that is more justifiable than

  • Flat-out lying and especially gaslighting to advance your political agenda

  • Pretending to have amnesia about previous rounds of the discussion

  • Fearmongering, sneering, concern-trolling and going for other emotionally manipulative tactics because you lost the argument and don't wanna admit it

  • Manipulating procedural outcomes by doxxing, vote-brigading, reporting technicalities, attacking the infrastructure and so on, plus the whole Alinsky rulebook.

So long as rats/mottizens, generally speaking, do not commit these sins (perhaps on account of lacking the psychopathic aptitude), whereas their opponents stick to them religiously, I'll say a sperging-out chud is more deserving of attention than a person endowed with such common decency.

I had to reread this post a few times as I forgot the overall topic of the discussion as these bullet points are a near perfect guide to preventing a misleading/deceptive Wikipedia page that you personally agree with from ever being fixed by good-faith editors trying to make factual corrections. Getting the article in question into the preferred slanted state is a different and often more difficult undertaking usually requiring a fair amount of clique building and clout amassing within the community, but once its where you want it this is basically playbook for defending bad-faith edits on Wikipedia from any principled sieges. As a long time contributor over there this so perfectly describes a great deal of other editors I've known over the years its appalling. Well done.

I feel personally called out

No no, of course not. Everyone is guilty of some of the things, but it's not a caricature of one person who is guilty of all of the things. And as Naraburns points out, mostly weakmen.

So long as rats/mottizens, generally speaking, do not commit these sins (perhaps on account of lacking the psychopathic aptitude), whereas their opponents stick to them religiously, I'll say a sperging-out chud is more deserving of attention than a person endowed with such common decency.

For Reasons, I was part of a minority that was a bit rootless in North America and didn't really fit in anywhere. Insofar as I'd identify with any community, it would probably be some flavor of rationalism, and if I found something closer to my heart I'd vote with my feet and leave. But people here articulate a worldview that I was struggling towards explaining to friends and family for years in a much more inchoate manner.

I still can't help but find some habits and norms oscillating between amusing and irritating.

Examples: Eliezer 'melt all GPUs' Yudkowsky

Don't forget Eliezer "Horrifically torture someone for 50 years to prevent many trivial inconvenient dust specs from getting in people's eyes" Yudkowsky

Which is either obviously the correct choice, or misunderstood to be a silly Modest Proposal showing how very naive utilitarianism can break down.

It's pretty annoying that 16 years ago Yudkowsky wrote a blog post that was deliberately unintuitive due to scope insensitivity (seemingly as some sort of test to spark discussion) and as a result there are people who to this day talk about it without considering the implications of the contrary view. In real life we embrace ratios that are unimaginably worse than 1 person's torture vs. "3↑↑↑3 in Knuth's up-arrow notation" dust specks. People should read OSHA's accident report list sometime. All human activity that isn't purely optimized to maximize safety - every building designed with aesthetics in mind, every spice to make our food a bit nicer, every time we put up Christmas decorations (sometimes getting up on ladders!) - is built at the cost of human suffering and death. If the ratio was 1 torturous work accident to 3↑↑↑3 slight beneficiaries, there would never have been a work accident in human history. Indeed, there are only 10^86 atoms in the known universe, even if each of those atoms was somehow transformed into another Earth with billions of residents, and this civilization lasted until the heat-death of the universe, the number of that civilization's members would be an unimaginably tiny fraction of 3↑↑↑3, and thus embracing a ratio of 1 to 3↑↑↑3 would almost certainly not result in a single accident throughout that civilization's history.

A more intuitive hypothetical wouldn't just throw out the incomprehensible number and see who gets it, it would make the real-life comparisons or try to make the ratio between the beneficiaries and the cost more understandable. The easiest way to do this with such extreme ratios is with very small risks (though using risks is not actually necessary). For instance, lets say you're helping broadcast the World Cup, and you realize there will shortly be a slight flicker in the broadcast. You can prevent this flicker by pressing a button, but there's a problem: a stream of direct sunlight is on the button, so pressing it will expose the tip of your finger to sunlight for a second. This slightly increases your risk of skin cancer, which risks getting worse in a way that requires major surgery, which slightly risks one of those freak reactions to anesthesia where you're paralyzed but conscious and in torturous pain the whole surgery. (You believe you have gotten sufficient sunlight exposure for benefits like Vitamin D already, so more exposure at this point would be net-negative in terms of health.) Is it worth the risk to press the button?

If someone thinks there's something fundamentally different about small risks, the same scenario works without them, it just requires a weirder hypothetical. Let us say that human civilization has created and colonized earth-like planets on every star in the universe, and further has invented a universe-creation machine, created a number of universes like ours equal to the number of atoms in the original universe, and colonized at least one planet for every star in every universe. On every one of those planets they broadcast a sports match, and you work for the franchised broadcasting company that sets policy for every broadcast. Your job consists of deciding policy for a single question: if the above scenario occurs, should franchise operators press the button despite the tiny risk? You have done the research and know that, thanks to the sheer number of affected planets, it is a statistical near-certainty that a few operators will get skin cancer from the second of finger sunlight exposure and then have something go wrong with surgery such that they experience torture. Does the answer somehow change from the answer for a single operator on a single planet, since it is no longer just a "risk"? Is the morality different if instead of a single franchise it's split up into 10 companies, and it works out so that each company has a less than 50% chance of the torture occurring? What if instead of 10 companies it's a different company on each planet making the decision, so for each one it's no different from the single-planet question? Even though the number of people in this multiverse hypothetical is still a tiny fraction of 3↑↑↑3, I think a lot more people would say that it's worth it to spare them that flicker, because the scale of the ratio has been made more clear.

In real life we embrace ratios that are unimaginably worse than 1 person's torture vs. "3↑↑↑3 in Knuth's up-arrow notation" dust specks. People should read OSHA's accident report list sometime. All human activity that isn't purely optimized to maximize safety - every building designed with aesthetics in mind, every spice to make our food a bit nicer, every time we put up Christmas decorations (sometimes getting up on ladders!) - is built at the cost of human suffering and death. If the ratio was 1 torturous work accident to 3↑↑↑3 slight beneficiaries, there would never have been a work accident in human history.

This isn't a fair assertion because you neglect the difference your hypothetical makes in "slight beneficiaries". Dust specks truly do have no noticeable effect on people. Things like aesthetic buildings, time saved putting up Christmas decorations, spice in food, etc. can easily have enough of an effect on people to change their lives. I would never choose torture above dust specks, but (depending on knock-on effects) I could easily be convinced to allow someone to be injured for enough time saved elsewhere, or for an aesthetic building.

Also, real life is nowhere near as clean as these hypotheticals, and focusing more on safety has many negative knock-on effects elsewhere. It's not so simple as just "we prefer aesthetic buildings to safe people" because there are SO MANY principles in play in real life, from economics (the harm of mandating safety everywhere--can we give the government that much power?) to technology (if we care that much about safety then we'll never reach immortality etc.) to philosophy (maybe God put us here for a reason and that includes suffering sometimes) to X-risk (why worry about workplace accidents when we could worry about nukes?) to pragmatism (resources better spent elsewhere) to game theory (if you focus on safety, some other country will outcompete you, or some business rival will) and honestly I could go on and on with other considerations which immediately take precedence above safety when you try to make real life into a thought experiment.

In short, life isn't a thought experiment, and in this case it doesn't work to say it proves something about the dust specks.

More importantly, moral intuition doesn't generally need to be built to account for such enormous numbers. I expect that anyone calculating their risk of skin cancer is losing far more utility to the calculation itself than they are to the risk of skin cancer. Genuinely, even going so far as to write out a company policy for that ridiculous scenario (where 3^^^3 people risk skin cancer) would mean asking all of your employees to familiarize themselves with it, which would mean wasting many lifetimes just to save one lifetime from skin cancer.

The other thing is, your last example is still much more mathematically favorable towards the "dust specks" side than the original question was. Many people enjoying a game is (imo) much more significant than many people getting dust specks, while a few people getting skin cancer is much less significant than one person getting tortured for 50 years.

I realize I'm fighting the hypothetical here, but at some point when the numbers are so absurd you kind of have to fight it. The whole point (which I disagree with with numbers this big) is that "shut up and multiply" just works, so here's a counter-experiment for you:

  1. Define "Maximally Miniscule Suffering" as something like: "One iota of a person's field of vision grows a fraction of a shade dimmer for a tiny fraction of a second. They do not notice this, but their qualia for that moment is reduced by an essentially imperceptible amount. This suffering has no effect on them beyond the moment. Do this for 3^^^3 people."

  2. Define "Maximal suffering" as something like:

a. Stretch out a person's nerves to cover an entire planet. Improve their brain so that they can feel all of these nerves. Torture every single millimeter of exposed nerve. Do similar things for emotional, psychological torture, etc.

b. Do (a) until the heat death of the universe

c. Do (b) for 100 trillion people

d. Repeat (c) once for each time any member of (c) experienced any hope

e. Repeat (d) until nobody experiences any hope

f. Find a new population and repeat (a-e)

g. Repeat (f) 10^100 times. Select one person from each repetition of (f) who has suffered the most out of their cohort, and line them up randomly.

h. If all 10^100 people from (g) aren't lined up in order of height, repeat (g).

Would you choose Maximal Suffering above Maximally Miniscule Suffering? Because mathematically, and in terms of EY's point, I don't see how this differs from the original dust speck thought experiment.

Also, real life is nowhere near as clean as these hypotheticals, and focusing more on safety has many negative knock-on effects elsewhere.

Sure, that's the cost of using real-life comparisons, but do you really think that's the only thing making some of those tradeoffs worthwhile? That in a situation where it didn't also affect economic growth and immortality research and so on, it would be immoral to accept trades between even miniscule risks of horrific consequences and very small dispersed benefits? We make such tradeoffs constantly and I don't think they need such secondary consequences to justify them. Say someone is writing a novel and thinks of a very slightly better word choice, but editing in the word would require typing 5 more letters, slightly increasing his risk of developing carpal-tunnel, which increases his risk of needing surgery, which increases his risk of the surgeon inflicting accidental nerve damage that inflicts incredibly bad chronic pain the rest of his life equivalent to being continuously tortured. Yes, in real life this would be dominated by other effects like "the author being annoyed at not using the optimal word" or "the author wasting his time thinking about it" - but I don't think that's what is necessary to make it a reasonable choice. I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that on its own very slightly benefiting your thousands of readers outweighs sufficiently small risks, even if the worst-case scenario for the edit is much worse than the worst-case scenario for not editing. And by extension, if you replicated this scenario enough times with enough sets of authors and readers, then long before you got to 3↑↑↑3 readers enough authors would have made this tradeoff that some of them would really have that scenario happen.

While the number 3↑↑↑3 is obviously completely irrelevant to real-life events in our universe, the underlying point about scale insensitivity and tradeoffs between mild and severe events is not. Yudkowsky just picked a particularly extreme example, perhaps because he thought it would better focus on the underlying idea rather than an example where the specifics are more debatable. But of course "unlikely incident causes people to flip out and implement safety measures that do more damage than they solve" is a classic of public policy. We will never live in a society of 3↑↑↑3 people, but we do live in a society of billions while having mentalities that react to individual publicized incidents much like if we lived in societies of hundreds. And the thing about thinking "I'd never make tradeoffs like that!" is that they are sufficiently unavoidable in public policy that this just means you'll arbitrarily decide some of them don't count. E.g. if the FDA sincerely decided that "even a single death from regulatory negligence is too much!", probably that would really mean that they would stop approving novel foods and drugs entirely and decide that anyone who died from their lack wasn't their responsibility. (And that mild effects, like people not getting to eat slightly nicer foods, were doubly not their responsibility.)

Many people enjoying a game is (imo) much more significant than many people getting dust specks, while a few people getting skin cancer is much less significant than one person getting tortured for 50 years.

But it isn't nullifying their enjoyment of the game, it's a slight barely-noticeable flicker in the broadcast. (If you want something even smaller, I suppose a single dropped frame would be even smaller than a flicker but still barely noticeable to some people.) If you're making media for millions of people I think it's perfectly reasonable to care about even small barely-noticeable imperfections. And while the primary cost of this is the small amount of effort to notice and fix the problem, this also includes taking minuscule risks of horrific costs. And it isn't a few people getting skin cancer, it's the fraction of the people who get skin cancer that then have something go wrong with surgery such that they suffer torture. I just said torture during the surgery, but of course if you multiply the number of planets enough you would eventually get high odds of at least one planet's broadcast operator suffering something like the aforementioned ultra-severe chronic pain for a more direct comparison.

Genuinely, even going so far as to write out a company policy for that ridiculous scenario (where 3^^^3 people risk skin cancer) would mean asking all of your employees to familiarize themselves with it, which would mean wasting many lifetimes just to save one lifetime from skin cancer.

Feel free to modify it to "making a design tradeoff that either causes a single dropped frame in the broadcast or a millisecond of more-than-optimal sunlight on the broadcast operator", so that it doesn't consume the operator's time. I just chose something that was easily comparable between a single operator making the choice and making the choice for so many operators that the incredibly unlikely risk actually happens.

Would you choose Maximal Suffering above Maximally Miniscule Suffering?

Sure. Same way that if I had a personal choice between "10^100 out of 3↑↑↑3 odds of suffering the fate you describe" and "100% chance of having a single additional dropped frame in the next video I watch" (and neither the time spent thinking about the question nor uncertainty about the scenario and whether I'm correctly interpreting the math factored into the decision), I would choose to avoid the dropped frame. I'm not even one of the people who finds dropped frames noticeable unless it's very bad, but I figure it has some slight but not-absurdly-unlikely chance of having a noticeable impact on my enjoyment, very much unlike the alternative. Obviously neither number is intuitively understandable to humans but "10^100 out of 3↑↑↑3" is a lot closer to "0" than to "1 out of the highest number I can intuitively understand".

To be clear here, I have two main points:

  1. Some categories of pain are simply incomparable to others (either because they're simply different or because no amount of 1 suffering will ever equal or surpass the other)

  2. Moral reasoning is not really meant for such extreme numbers

Say someone is writing a novel and thinks of a very slightly better word choice, but editing in the word would require typing 5 more letters, slightly increasing his risk of developing carpal-tunnel, which increases his risk of needing surgery, which increases his risk of the surgeon inflicting accidental nerve damage that inflicts incredibly bad chronic pain the rest of his life equivalent to being continuously tortured.

Has anyone ever experienced such nerve damage as a result of a decision they took? Do we know that it's even theoretically possible? I can't imagine that really any amount of carpal tunnel is actually equivalent to many years of deliberate torture, even if 3↑↑↑3 worlds exist and we choose the person who suffers the worst carpal tunnel out of all of them. So I'd probably say that this risk is literally 0, not just arbitrarily small. I have plenty of other ways to fight the hypothetical too--things like time considering the choice (which you mentioned), the chance that a better word choice will help other people or help the book sell better, etc.

The point in fighting the hypothetical is to support my point #2. At some point hypotheticals simply don't do a very good job of exposing and clarifying our moral principles. I generally use "gut feelings" to evaluate these thought experiments, but these gut feelings are deeply tied to other circumstances surrounding the hypothetical, like the (much, much greater) chance that a better word choice will lead to better sales or a substantially better reader experience for someone.

Common sense says you shouldn't worry about carpal tunnel when typing. It's easy to say "ok ignore the obvious objections, just focus on the real meat of the thought experiment" but hard to convince common sense and ethical intuition to go along with such a contrived experiment. I'll try and reverse it for you, so that common sense/ethical intuition are on my side but the meat of the argument is the same.

Let's go back to my original scenario of Maximally Miniscule Suffering vs. Maximal Suffering. You are immortal. You can either choose to experience all of the suffering in Maximal Suffering right away, or all of the suffering in Maximally Miniscule Suffering right away.

I think this gets to the heart of my point because

  1. If you sum up all of the suffering and give it to a single person, IMO the minimal suffering will add up to a lot less than the maximal suffering. The former is simply a different type of suffering that I don't think ever adds up to the latter. I would much rather see in black and white for a practically infinite amount of time than experience a practically infinite amount of torture.

  2. By the time you're finally through with maximal suffering in 10^10^100 years or so you will basically be totally insane and incapable of joy. But let's ignore that and assume that you'll be fine. I bring this up because I think even though I say "let's ignore that", when it comes to ethical intuition, you can't really just ignore it, it will still play a role in how you feel about the whole scenario. The only way to really ignore it is to mentally come up with some add-on to the thought experiment like "and then I'm healed so that I am not insane", which fundamentally changes what the thought experiment is.

It is precisely the ability to convert between mild experiences and extreme experiences at some ratio that allows everything to add up to something resembling common-sense morality. If you don't, if the ranking of bad experiences from most mild to most severe has one considered infinitely worse than the one that came before, then your decision-making will be dominated by whichever potential consequences pass that threshold while completely disregarding everything below that threshold, regardless of how unlikely those extreme consequences are. You seem to be taking the fact that the risks in these hypotheticals are not worth actual consideration as a point against these hypotheticals, but of course that is the point the hypotheticals are making.

Moral reasoning is not really meant for such extreme numbers

Nothing in the universe will ever be 3↑↑↑3, but 7 billion people is already far beyond intuitive moral reasoning. We still have to make decisions affecting them whether our moral reasoning is meant for it or not. Which includes reacting differently to something bad happening to one person out of millions of beneficiaries than to one person out of hundreds of beneficiaries.

Has anyone ever experienced such nerve damage as a result of a decision they took? Do we know that it's even theoretically possible? I can't imagine that really any amount of carpal tunnel is actually equivalent to many years of deliberate torture, even if 3↑↑↑3 worlds exist and we choose the person who suffers the worst carpal tunnel out of all of them. So I'd probably say that this risk is literally 0, not just arbitrarily small.

In some percentage of cases the cancer spreads to your brain, you get surgery to remove the tumor, and the brain surgeon messes up in precisely the right way. Both "locked-in syndrome" and chronic pain are things that happen, it's hardly a stretch to think a combination of both that paralyzes you for 50 years while you experience continuous agony is physically possible. And of course even if you were uncertain whether it was physically possible, that's just another thing to multiply the improbability by. It's not that rounding the probability down to 0 doesn't make sense in terms of practical decision-making, it's that "1 in 3↑↑↑3" odds are unimaginably less likely, so you should round them down to 0 too.

If you sum up all of the suffering and give it to a single person, IMO the minimal suffering will add up to a lot less than the maximal suffering.

I do not think this is a meaningful statement. We can decide which scenario is preferable and call that something like "net utility" but we can't literally "add up" multiple people's experiences within a single person. It doesn't have a coherent meaning so we are free to arbitrarily imagine whatever we want. That said, to the extent that its meaning can be nailed down at all, I think it would favor avoiding the 3↑↑↑3 option. My understanding is that a single pain receptor firing once is not noticeable. If a form of suffering is instead barely noticeable, it is presumably "bigger" than a single pain receptor firing. There are only 37 trillion cells the the human body, so the number of pain receptors is something smaller than that. So the first step in multiplying barely-noticeable suffering by 3↑↑↑3 is that it goes from "worse than a pain receptor firing" to "worse than every pain receptor firing continuously for an extended period". And that doesn't make a dent in 3↑↑↑3, so we multiply further, such as by making it last unimaginably longer than merely 10^100 times the lifespan of the universe.

That is a pretty arbitrary and meaningless matter of interpretation though. A more meaningful measure would be the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, You're a random member of a population of 3↑↑↑3, is it better for you that 10^100 of them be tortured or all of them experience a dropped frame in a video? This is equivalent to what I answered in my previous post, that it would be foolish to sacrifice anything to avoid such odds.

It is precisely the ability to convert between mild experiences and extreme experiences at some ratio that allows everything to add up to something resembling common-sense morality. If you don't, if the ranking of bad experiences from most mild to most severe has one considered infinitely worse than the one that came before, then your decision-making will be dominated by whichever potential consequences pass that threshold while completely disregarding everything below that threshold, regardless of how unlikely those extreme consequences are.

Yes, this is essentially how I think morality and decision-making should work. Going back to your word choice example, the actual word choice should matter not at all in a vacuum, but it has a chance of having other effects (such as better book sales, saving someone's life from suicide, etc.) which I think are much more likely than the chance that typing in the extra word causes chronic torturous pain.

In real life, small harms like stubbing a toe can lead to greater harms like missing an important opportunity due to the pain, breaking a bone, or perhaps snapping at someone important due to your bad mood. If we could ignore those side effects and focus on just the pain, I would absolutely agree that

your decision-making will be dominated by whichever potential consequences pass that threshold while completely disregarding everything below that threshold, regardless of how unlikely those extreme consequences are

With the appropriate caveats regarding computation time and other side effects of avoiding those extreme consequences.

I do not think this is a meaningful statement. We can decide which scenario is preferable and call that something like "net utility" but we can't literally "add up" multiple people's experiences within a single person.

See this is kind of my point. I don't think we can just say that there's "net utility" and directly compare small harms to great ones. I agree that it doesn't necessarily make much sense to just "add up" the suffering though, so here's another example.

You're immortal. You can choose to be tortured for 100 years straight, or experience a stubbed toe once every billion years, forever. Neither option has any side effects.

I would always choose the stubbed toe option even though it adds up to literally infinite suffering, so by extension I would force infinite people to stub their toes rather than force one person to be tortured for 100 years.

edit: One more thing, it's not that I think there's some bright line, above which things matter, and below which they don't. My point is mainly that these things are simply not quantifiable at all.

This is an interesting thought experiment and I'm glad you've brought it to my attention. I appreciate it and think this place could use more of these.

Be kind, don't weakman... I'm a little conflicted because it's presumably healthy for the Motte and adjacent spaces to be introspective and self-critical, but we're still a group, the rules still apply. "Poking fun" is always risky business under the rules anyway, but the criticism you've assembled here barely rises above the level of pure, vapid sneer. Allowing that it also applies ("often") to you doesn't really change the fact that you're essentially framing certain behaviors as low status without effortfully addressing the relative merits of those behaviors. I appreciate that you refrained from literally calling out neckbeards and fedoras, but even so what you've mostly succeeded at here is just textbook nerd-bashing. So, please don't do that.

Strong disagree -- I'd say this is lighthearted enough to even rise to the level of 'kind' (or at least 'not unkind'), but it is surely true and necessary.

I'd definitely rather read this than a bunch of posts about how leftists are a bunch of pussies (even if though I am personally sympathetic to the underlying complaint) -- this is a bad warning.

it is surely true and necessary

Yeah, I disagree that it is true, and strongly disagree that it is necessary.

I'd definitely rather read this than a bunch of posts about how leftists are a bunch of pussies

How about neither? Because you know, "leftists are a bunch of pussies" is also something we would moderate.

The post is not quintessentially awful. It didn't get a ban. I expressed my own reservations in the warning. But it drew multiple reports and I felt like it was worth my time to point out that this is not really a good example of people who disagree having a fruitful discussion about that disagreement. This is more like a good example of how to playfully signal to someone that you regard them as low-status. I might even be persuaded that it is "not [at least entirely] unkind," but the rule isn't "be not unkind."

How about neither? Because you know, "leftists are a bunch of pussies" is also something we would moderate.

Just downthread of another marginal mod warning currently on the front page, for your reading pleasure:

https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/55391?context=8#context

I thought the policy was "tone over content"? CPAR's tone here is lighthearted and funny (also self-deprecating; "I hope the rest of you will forgive me for poking fun at things that I'm often guilty of myself."), and the content is something we could all take to heart. (ie. "necessary")

Yeah, I disagree that it is true

There's literally several responses to the effect of 'I feel seen' -- obviously the post is engaging in hyperbole, but most of the points are reformulations of classic complaints about the rational-o-sphere.

I'm disturbed that something that feels like it could be lifted from a c. 2012 Scott-post is attracting reports, and moreso that the correct response is not seen as "screw 'em if they can't take a joke".

I am concerned too, it is blowing my mind that that post was reported enough to get a warning. And yeah, it might not be facts, but it has a lot of truth to it. I wonder if it's hitting some people harder than others? Or maybe it's strategic, a retaliation against raptr or left wingers in general for some slight.

I'd say the "WEF conspiracies are an IQ test" post crosses the line a lot more than this.

The WEF post spends 7 paragraphs @ 1k words on non-accusatory exposition about the details of the WEF itself and the history of right-wing beliefs about the WEF, limiting the 'attacking people' part to the title and a short 100-word conclusion that makes a valuable strategic point.

OP by contrast is peppered with unfair generalizations and jabs all the way through, with no evidence to back it up.

Now, I don't really care about personal attacks or unfairness or jabs, my only issue with chris's post is that it's in large part wrong, but it is much more 'rule-breaking' than rafa's when we weight usefulness with bite. "necessary, true, kind: pick two".

The WEF post literally says "you're dumb for believing this", calls people "an embarrassment", and contains politically coded slurs like "rightoid". Anyone posting anything similar about the Blues would get banned, and I doubt anyone would bother defending it.

This is lighthearted poking fun at people. I don't particularly like it either but nowhere close to the other.

it's (vaguely) "criticism of your team" - "rightoids believing the WEF conspiracies is an embarrasment for us, and makes us less effective / likely to accomplish anything"

It's not. "Rightoids believing WEF conspiracies" are not part of his team, and this place is about discussion, not being effective or accomplishing anything.

The WEF post spends 7 paragraphs @ 1k words on non-accusatory exposition about the details of the WEF itself and the history of right-wing beliefs about the WEF, limiting the 'attacking people' part to the title and a short 100-word conclusion that makes a valuable strategic point.

I won't try to defend my post; if people take it as bullying and mean-spirited it's not my place to argue, only knock it off. That being said - I could have written seven paragraphs on each point, but would that have changed the fundamental argument I was trying to make or just obscured it? Was that length beneficial to the WEF post, or could detail have been cut in the interest of clarity and efficiency?

I've read the rationale behind making post length the low-bar to be cleared for many posts, and I even agree with it to an extent. That being said, it's still a kludge and should be treated as such rather than exalted as a terminal value or a virtue. It advantages the verbose and eloquent without improving their arguments, it encourages bad writing habits and degrades the quality of discourse as discussions fragment and people get hung up on minor, non-central points to your argument. The purpose of writing is to entertain or convey information, and while there should be latitude for the former, many trying to do the latter write far too much. In my opinion, for what that's worth.

I won't try to defend my post; if people take it as bullying and mean-spirited it's not my place to argue, only knock it off.

Say what? You wrote the post man, you know better than anyone else how bullying and mean spirited you meant it to be. You copped a warning for the op because it got a lot of reports apparently - what would you do if it was reported by people who have decided you are a leftist and therefore should be shut up? Would you still knock it off to accommodate them?

Say what? You wrote the post man, you know better than anyone else how bullying and mean spirited you meant it to be.

I generally believe the onus is on the writer to craft something for their audience to appreciate. If the audience doesn't like it or find it useful, either find a new audience or change your style. Telling them that they're wrong seems to be a bit futile.

I've also just adopted a general heuristic of 'if enough people are telling you you're being an asshole, you're probably being an asshole.' I recognize that can be particularly dangerous and opens you up to manipulation by bad actors, but it also transformed my life in college from unhappy friendless loner to being a relatively popular and successful guy.

But I am impressed that people cared enough to argue with mods on my behalf...

what would you do if it was reported by people who have decided you are a leftist and therefore should be shut up? Would you still knock it off to accommodate them?

Well, yeah, probably. If the community wanted to be an echo chamber, who am I to say otherwise?

If you are trying to avoid being an asshole, why did you write a snarky list of people's faults?

Well, yeah, probably. If the community wanted to be an echo chamber, who am I to say otherwise?

A member of the community.

But I am impressed that people cared enough to argue with mods on my behalf...

Yes, other members of the community defended you. It seems we made a mistake.

This matters a lot to me, because some people around here interpret everything I write in the most mean-spirited way possible, when I haven't tried to be mean spirited on the motte in years. Which doesn't mean I can't be mean spirited by accident of course, but take the phrase "You son of a bitch!" for example - depending on your mood, you might read that as anger. But it isn't necessarily angry, it could be excited - "You (magnificent) son of a bitch!", or it could be dismayed - "You son of a bitch! (I can't believe you've done this)", or so on. But if you are in a mood to read it as anger, it will change the tone of the whole post. That doesn't make everyone who interpreted it in the spirit you meant it wrong though. Nor does it make those who interpreted it as anger right. What makes them right is you then saying that the way you meant it doesn't matter compared to what they think. You gave them that power, and as a result made yourself irrelevant.

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I agree entirely with all of that*, don't mind arbitrarily harsh, short, or slur-filled posts if they are interesting, and as said above only dislike your OP to the extent I materially disagree (rationalists aren't bad because they're willing to do dangerous promethean moral acts, and malaria nets aren't very dangerous or promethean). (* - except specifically cutting detail improving the WEF post, the detail was nice).

I would say about the same amount, but yeah. Both posts are pretty much just sneering at people.

deleted

Oh. Alright, my apologies.

On the one hand, I too dislike arguing with Mods. On the other hand, I object to people apologizing for greatness. It's a real conundrum.

I thought your post was funny and didn't seem mean-spirited. I could see how someone would take umbrage, of course. (+2 cents)

All of his criticisms are on point, though. Those are all bad habits, and they're all endemic, and by framing it as a personal statement, he leaves people free to apply the statements to themselves as they personally consider it appropriate. A lot of posts I've written are obviously guilty of the things he's pointing out, and are the worse for them.

"Poking fun" is always risky business under the rules anyway, but the criticism you've assembled here barely rises above the level of pure, vapid sneer.

I strongly disagree, as one of the people the post was most obviously aimed at. Cogent criticism is valuable, and this is, in fact, cogent criticism.

All of his criticisms are on point, though.

Surely you don't actually mean that?

I was a bit hesitant on the mod button, for all the reasons I already mentioned. I recognize that there is some hyperbole there, and some humor, and some self-deprecation, and I always feel a bit schoolmarmish wagging a finger at that sort of thing. But like--

Literature references. Point score is directly correlated with obscurity; actually having read the the work in question is optional. Bonus points for linking SSC pieces, double bonus points if they're from 2016 or earlier.

What's the "on point" criticism, here--that we quote Scott too much? What's the "bad habit"--that we don't actually read the books we quote from and talk about? (This seems clearly false!)

The fact that we have our own status games is interesting, and worth talking about. And there are surely times and places to enjoy an amusing roast. But a lot of the stuff in this list is not actually bad, and most of the rest is unobjectionable if stripped of the pejoration and mockery. To treat e.g. complex vocabulary as a signal of low status is textbook anti-intellectualism. Yes, some people use big words strictly to appear smart, but treating people that way without further evidence requires an uncharitable take on their motives. Writing lengthy posts is frequently mocked in many places on the internet, but some problems are complex and demand extended reflection--assuming you want to do more than make a joke at someone else's expense. While many of the attitudes called out in this post are indeed counterproductive or otherwise objectionable, most of the behaviors are not in themselves problematic, particularly given a charitable interpretation of the writer's intent. If we're going to criticize such behaviors, we should do it in a thoughtful way--not by resorting to mockery that seems crafted to shame others away from effortful participation and thoughtful discussion.

It's not very fair if it's taken as a generalization about what we're doing here. It's absolutely on point as a description of how we do it wrong – not the only failure mode of this community, especially after the move, when we've gained some cocksure low-effort right-wingers, but the most prevalent one among the old guard. I agree 100% with @FCfromSSC that this list is a self-improvement opportunity for me.

Yes, some people use big words strictly to appear smart, but treating people that way without further evidence requires an uncharitable take on their motives.

Which is itself a problem with rationalists. In order to properly deal with people, you need to be able to conclude bad faith, and you need to be able to do this based on less than 100% clear evidence, because false negatives are as damaging as false positives. This is where quokkas come from--rationalists refusing to realistically consider the possibility that someone is acting in bad faith. We say "be charitable" because a lot of people aren't charitable enough, but there are also people who are too charitable and should ignore that advice (and it's hard to aim advice at only the people who need it.)

And here, it's not even just about bad faith. When someone uses big words that aren't needed for his point, he may be acting in bad faith, or he may just be bad at communicating. But even if he's an honest person who's just bad at communicating, he's still bad at it; it's not behavior we want to emulate, and it still deserves criticizing. If doing things poorly is low status, then yes, this is low status--communicating poorly is something we want to avoid.

Quokka is "rationalist who doesn't question progressive ideas like universal love and tolerance, gender and race equality, .....", not "rationalist who argues with trolls because they might be good faith". Having extended arguments with bad faith trolls doesn't really hurt you beyond wasting small amounts of time, whereas earnestly believing in universal love and sacrifice-for-all-humans-equally means your fortune or life is spent helping Open Philanthropy buy malaria nets instead of some other worthier cause.

edit: I might be wrong about the use of the term quokka, but still pretty sure 'arguing with bad faith trolls' isn't particularly bad.

A quokka is a creature that doesn't realize that people might want to hurt it. The metaphor from there is fairly direct.

You love this... hard-to-pin-down pattern of reasoning, and I don't love to have to keep asking you not do it. Nevertheless here we go again.

Quokka is "rationalist who doesn't question progressive ideas like universal love and tolerance, gender and race equality, .....", not "rationalist who argues with trolls because they might be good faith".

The explicit definition of quokka as a mental archetype is the guy who does not account for bad faith of other parties. It's not about wasting time on trolls on anonymous forums, per se. But it absolutely is about a robust mode of engagement with bad actors.

Here's the original thread by 0x49fa98. Here are the most relevant parts:

The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it, and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. As long they stay on their islands, they survive, but both species have problems if a human shows up

In theory, rationalists like game theory, in practice, they need to adjust their priors. Real-life exchanges can be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. In the classic version, the prisoners can't communicate, so they have to guess whether the other player will defect or cooperate. ...

The problem is, this is where rationalists hit a mental stop sign. Because in the real world, there is one more strategy that the game doesn't model: lying. See, the real best strategy is "be good at lying so that you always convince your opponent to cooperate, then defect"

Rationalists = quokkas, this explains a lot about them. Their fear instincts have atrophied. When a quokka sees a predator, he walks right up; when a rationalist talks about human biodiversity on a blog under almost his real name, he doesn't flinch away ...

The main way that you stop being a quokka is that that you realize there are people in the world who really want to hurt you. There are people who will always defect, people whose good will is fake, whose behavior will not change if they hear the good news of reciprocity

I think Bostromgate is a good illustration.

Quokka is "rationalist who doesn't question progressive ideas like universal love and tolerance", not "rationalist who argues with trolls because they might be good faith".

It's both, actually. I've seen the latter argued numerous times by right-wingers, specifically about right-wing trolls.

Right-wingers arguing that rationalists ... shouldn't listen to right-wing trolls?

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Surely you don't actually mean that?

I can and do. I assure you that my next effort-post will be better if, before I post it, I compare it to that list and edit accordingly.

What's the "on point" criticism, here--that we quote Scott too much? What's the "bad habit"--that we don't actually read the books we quote from and talk about? (This seems clearly false!)

That here, too, one's reference game being on-point can cover for a startling lack of engagement with the concepts behind those references. Further, that style trumping substance is always a danger, and one way it happens is by cribbing from better authors to provide gravitas to an argument that it cannot generate under its own power. There are a number of writers here who possess above-average rhetorical style, but style is not truth, and forgetting that is a constant danger for all of us.

While many of the attitudes called out in this post are indeed counterproductive or otherwise objectionable, most of the behaviors are not in themselves problematic, particularly given a charitable interpretation of the writer's intent.

...I see it exactly flipped. The behaviors are not in and of themselves problematic, but when combined with a poor attitude or mindset, they're counterproductive and objectionable. And while it might be uncharitable to accuse individual posters, noting the problem in aggregate seems like a reasonable way to express what is, at the end of the day, a complaint about general atmosphere. General atmosphere matters here; our rules are drafted explicitly to protect it, and changes for the worse are worth noting and pointing out.

General atmosphere matters here; our rules are drafted explicitly to protect it, and changes for the worse are worth noting and pointing out.

Yes--but with kindness, and charity.

Insofar as general atmosphere matters here, "you should be ashamed of your vocabulary, verbosity, and valuing of intellect over emotion" is not a vibe that should be cultivated.

If your vocabulary is being used poorly--and excessive wordiness is using it poorly--you should be ashamed of it, at least to the extent that you should be ashamed of doing things badly at all.

Insofar as general atmosphere matters here, "you should be ashamed of your vocabulary, verbosity, and valuing of intellect over emotion" is not a vibe that should be cultivated.

All I can say is that I did not read it as a general condemnation of those traits, and still don't. It probably helps that I have been very clearly guilty of several of these, and agree that they are problems, so it strikes me as less an attack and more just necessary truth delivered with some humor.

Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus. IQ is life. Everyone knows that vocabulary size is correlated to IQ, which is correlated to g, which determines your worth as a human being and position in the hierarchy. What better way to give your stock a little bump than to sprinkle in a few five syllable words that fell out of common use somewhere in the 19th century?

Maybe this would have been true pre-2017 or so, but there is inconsiderable disagreement about supposed intellectual-supremacy in rationalist communities. I think what unites these communities is a general skepticism of mainstream narratives by the media, credentialed experts, or mainstream science. And also, considerable self-critique and introspection. Posts which express skepticism of rationalist beliefs, like EA, are as up-voted as posts which endorse them, maybe even more so, which you typically don't see in other communities. This clearly goes against the stereotype of singlemindedness you describe.

Also, an affinity for making up new terms. Maybe we could call it neologophilia.

Yes, this is terrible, especially when they're puns.

Thanks man.

Oof, I feel this one.

I think you're missing

8: Go meta. If someone has an idea, you should try applying that idea to itself. It's fine if it's a stretch, the idea of applying an idea to itself means that you probably read Godel, Escher, Bach, which means that you are Smart and therefore Good. Or at least it proved that you read a summary of it. Or interacted a lot with people who did.

(I say this as someone who does (8) way too much, including arguably right now)

It's true! That also reminds me, I was expecting exponentially more meta threads with the move here. I've been sorely disappointed so far.

I...even though the quote gives an excuse for why you’ve posted this in response to me, I have a visceral feeling as if I were being called out in particular. Is this what the kids call feeling “seen”?

An amusing post but it critiques itself doesn't it? What are you doing if not criticizing instead of defending a better thesis? Where are these better norms?

It's true, and it's also awash in other hypocrisies. I could use the John Stewart 'I'm just a comedian, bro defense because I mostly was just trying to entertain, but if you want:

  1. An expectation of more citations and sources for claims being made, or if the data doesn't exist/can't be collected, acknowledgement of that fact.

  2. Embracing brevity, concision and clear communication as terminal values rather than long manifestoposts (obviously some leeway for people writing personal stories or stream of consciousness rants).

  3. Some self-awareness when mocking others for status-signaling.

  4. Embracing intellectual humility (something akin to the old 'epistemic status: xyz...')

To some extent, this is just me imposing my values on others which is why I tried not to be explicitly prescriptive. The community should be what the community wants to be. Hopefully someone out there laughed.

Blue Tribe is never going to forgive the Rats for shattering the illusion you have to be a dumb redneck ti disagree with them, are they?

I think it's more of the "I feel bad for you" / "I don't think about you at all" situation.

Who doesn’t think about the other one here?

In the context of the show Don spent all day thinking about the guy he told he didn't think about at all. He even went out of his way to sabotage him by leaving behind Ginsberg's ad pitch so he could only do his own because he knew that his was inferior.

Blues aren't even aware of us. We are merely conservatives/fascists/whatever-boo-term with tech jobs to them.

Ehhh, given the number of NYT/new Yorker articles about "the dark secret of tech reactionaries: they could be hiding in your boardroom!", they clearly have some kind of hangup.

Like, ignoring tone entirely, we could compare the number of articles about furries to nrx/ssc/etc., and I think furries get less media attention despite being a significantly bigger thing in tech.

There literally is a whole community that is explicitly dedicated to sneering at us. They have their own forum, where they do nothing but repost things from here and other rat-adjacent spaces and mock them.

I meant almost all blue tribers, not that miniscule number of sneer clubbers.

(Most) blues don't think about sneerclub either.

I think blues think about fascists/conservatives quite a bit, as evidenced by twitter.

But that could be thinking about just about anyone ;)

Are we thinking about specific progressives all that often?

That doesn't really answer the question. They get plenty angry about conseratives/fascists/whatever-boo-terms.

Blues don't think about or are even aware of the grey tribe. "Grey tibe" is just conservatives with tech jobs from their point of view.

If the Blues freak out about conservatives, and to them we're just conservatives with tech jobs, are they not thinking about us at all, or are they freaking out? They even have a subreddit devoted to trolling us.

I dunno, they seem historically to have been aware that ‘climate change deniers’ weren’t personally stupid rednecks even if they tended to round the difference off to being evil.

Shattering the illusion is a bit of a strong word to use when I'd estimate >95% of the population has never heard of rationalists, and I don't think it's the source of my amusement at these habits, but if it makes you feel better: I, ChrisPrattAlphaRaptor, high pope of the Church of the Blue Tribe absolve you of your sins. Go forth and live in virtue, my son.

(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)

As @RandomRanger asks with conspiracies, can we get this down to the object-level? What locally popular position with regard to COVID skepticism do you think is an edgelord position adopted for status games?

Mainly Ivermectin and Long COVID research. Even when I think the skeptics are correct and valuable.

Alex Marinos may or may not be a good example. He makes a strong case for his position, and is clearly trying hard to “do his own research,” so I won’t call him insincere or even wrong. To me, he still comes across as heavily status-motivated. He has a very hostile dynamic, as if he’s trying to replicate Twitter callouts on other platforms. I think it’s kind of a personal brand.

Not who the question is directed at, but I’d nominate the idea that Covid vaccines have been behind recent large declines in fertility.

Wow, this is the first time I've encountered this hypothesis.

It’s shown up on the forums more than once. And you can draw crude correlations based on the data.

Edgy is just an aesthetic now. It doesn't mean a damn thing. People who self-describe as "punk" will mandate all the exact same speech codes in their spaces as HR departments in multinational megacorps across the world do, if not even more stringent. Rebellion has been successfully co-opted by the monoculture and you can buy it at your local strip mall now.

In addition, that isn't really what people mean by infiltrating spaces. It's not about simply existing in those spaces, it's about wresting control of them and changing their culture. We're talking about the mirror inverse of far-left reddit power mods taking control of a formerly-apolitical space and mandating leftist politics and banning all dissent, something that happens all the time. Do you have any instances of anything like that? Trump supporters wresting control of a forum and banning trans-positivity and requiring people use the birth names of trans people? Banning anyone who advocates for anything other than zero immigration?

Edgy is just an aesthetic now. It doesn't mean a damn thing. People who self-describe as "punk" will mandate all the exact same speech codes in their spaces as HR departments in multinational megacorps across the world do, if not even more stringent. Rebellion has been successfully co-opted by the monoculture and you can buy it at your local strip mall now.

Or the barber pole turns eternal. Perhaps the true counter-culture in a society awash with twitter narcissists, outrage porn and nihilistic realpolitik is a throwback to something like Victorian era propriety. Subs like /r/Cleanlivingkings and /r/nofap (although the latter included a bizarre strain of muslims struck by self-loathing for being horny and masturbating) always fascinated me for this reason. Maybe if we can make it edgy and high-status to be a decent human being without coding it red or blue, to value honesty, earnestness and a moral code we can rein in the brinksmanship and hatred coursing through our country's veins. A man can dream.

And if Your (the royal you, not picking on you personally) visceral reaction to this is 'But the left/right are the lying fascists/cartoonish villains intent on destroying society, consider that you might be part of the problem.

Maybe if we can make it edgy and high-status to be a decent human being without coding it red or blue, to value honesty, earnestness and a moral code we can rein in the brinksmanship and hatred coursing through our country's veins.

And then the barber pole, which turns eternally, would continue to turn, making it, as they say, "cringe" to be concerned with honesty, earnestness, and a moral code.

Ties into the whole "counterculture became commodity culture" issue, but aren't these two generally at odds?

I suppose I was trying to invoke the high-(social) status low-class activist being invited as a set piece to a high-class gathering. The avant-garde artist, philosopher, psychologist, social scientist etc. rubbing shoulders with wealthy elites. The elites are wealthy and control what is fashionable to some degree, but they don't control what is cool, right?

When our news anchors are dishonest demagogues who rant from our televisions every night, when corporations are legally obligated to fuck their workers and society in the name of shareholder value, when half of the political body is constantly outraged at the party in power, maybe the counter-culture move is a retreat to decorum and a stricter moral code.

Straightedge reached a decent level of popularity at my high school which is amusing considering nobody drank or did drugs. I bet the majority of our class of a few hundred were virgins when they graduated. It's somewhat perplexing in retrospect.

Ties into the whole "counterculture became commodity culture" issue, but aren't these two generally at odds?

It depends. That is why there is a new niche of the right that is 'edgy' yet holds high-status belief, such as being pro-vaccine (or downplaying vaccine side effects). Criticizing the woke but also being pro-vaccine or downplaying vaccine side effects is appealing to the likes of Marc Andreessen, Scott Adams, and other high status people. There is way to have the best of both worlds or to have your cake and eat it too.

4chan. White supremacist entryism on a few boards starting circa the turn of the 2010s followed by every board getting swarmed and quality subsequently going down the gutter over the last few years. Whole site has changed drastically from pretty apolitical to extreme far right and driven off most people I met via it; in 2010 one could talk on /an/ without the thread getting derailed and destroyed with how dinosaur reconstructions with feathers are a Jewish plot to undermine the white race, which dog breed is most Aryan or Jewish, which human races should be reclassified as animals. None of those are hypothetical examples.

Rebellion has been successfully co-opted by the monoculture and you can buy it at your local strip mall now.

Are you a fan of Uncle Ted, by chance? This sentence is essentially the thesis of The System's Neatest Trick.

No, just an observation made from my time in and around countercultures.

I think in the current political climate, the infiltration and take-over of online spaces looks very different for progressive and right-wing invaders.

Progs use an entryist approach to either get into positions of power or to get the sympathy of people in power and then use top-down enforcement of increasingly strict rules to force their opponents out. E.g.: "This space is unwelcoming for X demographic / we need representation of X on the mod team, we need to use inclusive language to make this place welcoming to everyone!"

Right-wingers are currently powerless to infiltrate prog spaces because they will be banned on sight. They can, however, turn neutral spaces by spamming them with aesthetically unappealing opinions. Other people then drop out voluntarily either because they don't want to be associated with witches or because the aesthetics of RW opinions become unbearable to them. Examples include what happened to Voat or pretty much every Youtube alternative out there. E.g.: "Hey guys! Let's talk about the Holocaust for the 54.000th time this week. What about them Jews, amirite?". There is a degree of "left-wingers can't stand disagreement" to this but I would venture that everybody has their limits. The only user I have blocked here is our friendly neighbourhood pedo. If he were to post much more and I wouldn't be able to make his posts invisible to me, I would leave this place.

We did have a few moments in the past where aesthetically unappealing opinions worked to drive out some more sensitive right-wingers; I particularly remember a few abortion-related meltdowns back when we were still on Reddit. Since then I don't think we've experienced a repeat of the sort of long, detailed and many-sided discussion of abortion that precipitated it, and in general I do get the sense that the shock contributed to us becoming more of a safe space for the right wing only.

Unfortunately, without naming names, the people who were actually the first to be affected seemed to come from the best rather than the worst side of the spectrum of right-wing posters. For all the appeal that the idea of balanced offense to everyone has to me (for what it's worth, I even briefly brainstormed about the most offensive-to-the-right belief I could defend in good faith, and arrived at something like "mandatory mRNA vaccine drive to eradicate STDs, so we can reap the utility gains of more unprotected sex among strangers; the additional unwanted pregnancies can be taken care of by subsidised access to abortions"), I therefore fear that selecting for the thickest-skinned of posters will not only not remove the ideological bias, but also push the average quality down.

There seems to be a pretty even balance of pro-choice and pro-life posters here. See the latest discussion in this thread.

Indeed, Scott talks about this effect. Like, explicitly- he mentions that if you have a forum rules allowing any opinion and only police on tone, then your friendly neighborhood pedo will manifestopost. 4chan using racism to drive out liberals is probably a live demonstration of a, ah, less highbrow version of the same phenomenon(it does, in fact, have rules).

Can we bring this down to the object level?

I suppose I'm a conspiracy theorist. I think it's ridiculous that President Kennedy, supposedly the most powerful man in the world at the time, was shot dead by a single lone actor, Oswald. Oswald was then murdered 2 days later, after protesting his innocence! Then consider that the next most powerful Kennedy was also murdered in 1968 by another man working alone, just after he won the important California primaries. He was the favorite for the Democratic nomination - he could plausibly become President and unearth whatever was going on with his brother. Putting aside all the weird recordings, ballistics and so on... there were two high-profile political murders in the same family in five years, three if you include Oswald. That's too many deaths for it to be coincidence. There was likely some kind of conspiracy within the US government, a conspiracy that killed JFK and then nipped Robert in the bud before he could become a major threat. The CIA did all kinds of chaotic-evil things during this period, it would be well in character for them to be behind it.

Or take 9/11. They managed to find the passports of the hijackers but not the plane's black boxes. The fire somehow managed to spread its way over to Building 7 and bring the whole skyscraper down. There have been many skyscrapers on fire, many more visibly than WTC 7. So why does WTC 7 collapse? I can't explain why anyone would do such a thing - I'd arrange for another plane, or if I wanted the buildings to come down I'd use bombs like in the last attempt. There were a number of other bizarre mishappenings, NYC was doing a major drill that conveniently took leading many leading officials away from WTC 7:

When the September 11, 2001, attacks began, Operation Tripod was immediately canceled as attentions turned to the real ongoing emergency. Because Pier 92 had been set up ready for the exercise, NYC OEM staff were able to move there and quickly convert it into a large emergency operations center when their original command center (in WTC Building 7) was evacuated and later destroyed. Thus, within 31 hours of the attacks, NYC OEM had a functional facility able to manage the search and rescue effort, just four miles north-northwest of the WTC site.[16] The exercise was later rescheduled and took place on May 22, 2002.[17]

The Epstein thing is shady beyond belief. I refuse to believe you can commit suicide in a room specifically designed to prevent suicide, that the cameras watching for such a thing fail just at the time they're needed for a very high profile inmate. The guy had connections to Mossad via Ghislaine's father. On the other hand, a lot of high profile people were flying around on his aircraft, to his island. I don't know who did it but I'm very confident suicide was a lie.

Anyway, my point is that we should be discussing ideas based upon their merits, not trying to psychoanalyze their holders. I'm well aware that there are counterarguments to my propositions. Epstein definitely has a motive to commit suicide - he could only expect prison, a humiliating court process and a complete absence of underage girls. Some people are just very lucky - Hitler for instance dodged umpteen assassination attempts. It follows that others might just be very unlucky.

But we should discuss the arguments and counterarguments directly with regard to conspiracies. If it's bizarre, easily disprovable stuff like the earth not being round, then psycho-analysis is more appropriate. If we're talking about anti-semitism, why not discuss it directly? Is it the case that Jews are harming Western civilization? Or is it not the case?

So specifically about 9/11:

  • The US had a bunch of wargames planned that day. Including NORAD simulated hijackings. They weren't a secret and Saudi fighter pilots are trained at US airbases. So it's likely that the hijackers knew about the wargames and scheduled to take advantage of them.

  • There were 19 hijackers and 4 planes involved. They recovered 4 passports and 1 blackbox. The blackbox and two of the passports were from United-93. The other two were from the pentagon crash. My takeaway is that the United-93 crash wasn't as bad and the pentagon had a good fire suppression system that saved two of the passports.

  • The twin towers were especially vulnerable to fire. They were pure steel towers (no concrete) designed to use asbestos for fire protection. Asbestos was banned right after construction started. To complete the project the builders got a special fire retardant insulation approved for use in it's construction. It was never used elsewhere and it didn't work.

  • WTC 7 wasn't just on fire. Huge chunks of steel from the twin tower collapse did massive damage to the building and shattered the diesel tanks WTC 7 used for its back up generator. The damage occurred on the side facing the towers, so it isn't obvious on the recordings which were taken away from the site with a zoom lens.

designed to use asbestos for fire protection. Asbestos was banned right after construction started

Asbestos was used! Near 2000, they were supposed to start removing it. Some of the conspiracy theories focus on the owner destroying it for insurance money to avoid paying for the modifications, with the port authority buying it and paying or... Something. I don't remember. But removing asbestos plays a roll!

The Saudi connection is another issue - there was talk about a rather concerning 'dry run' for 9/11 where hijackers tried to force their way into the cockpit, funded by the Saudi embassy: https://www.oregonlive.com/today/2017/09/saudi_government_may_have_fund.html

Anyway, this is the sort of specific discussion there should be about conspiracy theories.

Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be?

And if you could say it out loud and you just dont, thats somehow cooler? Because the point of themotte is that there is a way to make a claim overtly. All the cases I can think of when some "darkly hinting" got popular in ratspace is when "You wouldnt understand it even if I said it out loud, because its so hard to explain and/or understand" like TLP or the meditation guys.

I think this misunderstands edginess. Edginess is a mix of the young desire to show your courage, and the desire to plot out the unknown frontier of ideology. It’s commonly an adolescent and young adult phenomenon when the sex hormones are highest and social identity is being developed. It is typically male. Then there’s the (more urban) desire to prove that one is “in the know”, has new insight and intellectual uniqueness. It’s a typically cosmopolitan feature of following the latest trend. Progressives have commodified this urge to being in the know in the form of being woke (literally awakened). That term has died, but the desire to know the truth about the grimdark fantasy of America’s evil racism is still alive.

Many progressives certainly want to appear cool — they follow the latest trends in fashion and music — but does this desire foment any edginess? I don’t really think so. So I would say we’re talking about different phenomena.

I'm going to disagree on several points here.

It is typically male.

Female teenagers are edgy in other ways, they'll rebel against trad parents by espousing communism, sexual promiscuity or drug/alcohol abuse, dating outside/below their socioeconomic class, etc.

It’s a typically cosmopolitan feature of following the latest trend.

Trend opposition is just as twitchy and fickle as trend following. Edginess can also express itself as disagreeing with consensus, not just aligning with it.

Many progressives certainly want to appear cool — they follow the latest trends in fashion and music — but does this desire foment any edginess?

Edginess strikes me as fractal, on a small enough scale, you're at the edge of some boundary. In hyper-woke circles, any pushback or criticism of the status quo might be considered edgy.

Are those female teenagers really being edgy against hegemonic currents, or are they simply assenting to what they consume in popular media and music to the dismay of their less powerful parents?

Are they actually doing as much of that as they’re said to? I mean I spend most of my time in a subculture where teenaged rebelliousness looks very different, but my priors are distinctly that boys are more likely to ‘ironically’ use the N word than girls are to carry on forbidden relationships. Even adjusting for the obvious level of commitment entailed in the two decisions it totally seems like boys just feel more need to be edgy.

Republicans got more than 46% of the votes in 2020. Of the Republican vote, more than a third is white evanlegical protestant, and more than 70% belong to a white Christian religious group (PRRI). These populations tend to be geographically segregated: if you're from Cullman, Alabama, where more than 85% of the 40000 or so votes went red, I think it's safe to say a tatooed psychonaut pansexual anarchist hippie is not so much on the edge as levitating above the adjacent gulf, cartoon physics style.

It doesn't matter where you live, everyone is inundated with the same messages from media and the internet.

Okay, so there are people who like to be edgy. In which way is that "infiltration"?

There’s something of a motte and bailey for that term.

The safe claim is that outgroup members will show up in a community and use sketchy rhetoric to hide their power level. I think this is true for almost any community, and will continue to be true as long as hinting-at-unpopular-truth can signal status. In this sense, my answer to drmanhattan has to be yes.

The strong claim is that catgirl-avatar Nazis will coordinate to sneak into your community and co-opt the discourse. I think this is really rare, has obvious rhetorical utility, and is thus a bogeyman.

I don’t think I did a good job distinguishing that I meant the former in my OP.

COVID skepticism does not neatly map to "edge" for a few reasons.

If it comes to "conspiracy" or "forbidden knowledge" then it instantly runs into the problem of equal and opposite conspiracy theories. Take someone living in Sweden. That person is a trusting, humble person who believes everything their government says. They do not care for forbidden knowledge The exact opposite, therefore, of an archetypical covid skeptic. Except... Their government IS covid skeptic, and thus they are too. They think all the countries doing lockdowns and forcing masks on people's faces are somewhere between silly and tyrannical, because this is the consensus in Sweden. And, like the rest of the world, Sweden has it's "conspiracy theorists", except in Sweden that means supporters of the mainstream narrative on covid, or zero covid advocates, who accuse the Swedish government of, approximately, a conspiracy theory to kill Swedes.

Are Swedes edgelords? Quite the opposite, in my experience.

No matter what position you hold on Covid, you almost necessarily must believe at least some conspiracy theory. Either Sweden's government is engaged in a conspiracy to kill people with covid, or another pro-lockdown regime is engaged in a conspiracy to needlessly perform lockdowns. Either Fauci conspired to stop people wearing masks, or conspired to make people wear masks.

As for aesthetics, the policy of... doing nothing, lacks a distinct, sharp edge to it. Far less cool than throwing everyone into lockdown and making them wear apocalyptic symbols. If you wanted a world of edge, the aesthetics of lockdownism certainly have a sci-fi evil supervillain edge to them. The contrasting aesthetic is usually middle-aged casual wear and when covid skeptics want to go edgy they do so by adopting the aesthetics of their opponents.

If my goal was edgy, I'd know where I'd plant my flag.

People can come to the same conclusion for normal or for conspiratorial reasons.

I don’t even think that the lockdown conversation is particularly conspiratorial in America! It seems like a straightforward extension of other mainstream personal-liberty narratives. “Fauci told people not to wear masks” is an observation, not a conspiracy. Neither Sweden nor the US has to be conspiring—one of them just has to be wrong.

The Motte has a giant soft spot for vigilante science. Before COVID that meant talking about the replication crisis, maybe nootropics sometimes. But now there’s a whole world of Ivermectin, long COVID, lab leak proof, etc. The budding countersignaller gets to pick and choose his point of attack. Given the chaotic state of COVID research, he may well be right. Given the sorry state of COVID tribalism...it doesn’t really matter whether he is.

Before COVID that meant talking about the replication crisis, maybe nootropics sometimes. But now there’s a whole world of Ivermectin, long COVID, lab leak proof, etc. The budding countersignaller gets to pick and choose his point of attack.

How do you distinguish "edgy countersignaller" from "principled libertarian" in this case, though?

You check if he’s actually talking about state power. Defunding the FDA fits. Complaining about lockdown calculus or the surveillance state, sure. “Do your own research” messaging, not so much. I don’t even know what libertarians say about the lab leak.

If he spends more time smugly asserting that Real science is suppressed, that such-and-such study is flawed, that anyone who believes the mainstream is a sheep, a shill for big pharma, and a bad rationalist to boot? Maybe he’s interested in something other than pure libertarianism.

But libertarians also think that people should be free to do their own research, and should not be mandated into going along with the herd?

There may be a useful distinction to draw between 'wonk-libertarianism' (ie. defund the FDA) and 'folk-libertarianism' (ie. don't tread on me) but I'm not convinced that one is 'edgier' than the other. And 'folk-libertarianism' is extremely common in the USA among people who wouldn't self-identify as libertarians -- so framing those people as edgelords I think is incorrect. Also uncharitable and dismissive, which is really no way to be.

I’m not talking about folk-libertarians or the USA in general. I’m talking about the Motte. Out of the very small set of Mottizens, some subset are lured to the edge; out of that subset, I think more are currently attracted to COVID counter-narrative rather than antisemitism or 9/11 truthing or whatever. I’d expect this theory to hold on other discussion boards, too.

This includes no claims about the principled libertarians, whether here or out in America. I’d like to think I can tell them apart!

"That's the neat part"

No matter what position you hold on Covid, you almost necessarily must believe at least some conspiracy theory.

I think there's a third position- that the elite and decision-makers really just did not know how to handle it, and their various decisions and mistakes were more them running around like chickens with their heads cut off. That would stand in opposition to the more conspiratorial claim of them being strategic about using Covid response for ulterior motives, which I've never bought into. They want people going to work and buying stuff, they don't want to destroy the economy simply because they are evil. These measures, bad and ineffective as they may be, were not motivated by a greater plan for social reform.

I would consider that to be a non-conspiratorial approach to opposing Covid measures.

You said it better than I could.

COVID measures are adequately explained by politics-as-usual. Once the options picked up a political framing, evidence took a backseat.

Conversely, lockdown/mandate skepticism is also down to normal factors. No conspiracy necessary.

I think there's a third position- that the elite and decision-makers really just did not know how to handle it, and their various decisions and mistakes were more them running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Which still necessitates the conspiracy theory that they falsely claimed certainty to goad the public into going along with their decisions. And still means they conspired to do lockdowns. And that they had an ulterior motive. It just makes the ulterior motive very petty.

They want people going to work and buying stuff, they don't want to destroy the economy simply because they are evil.

The average government official does not personally suffer from damaging the economy, so I don't think they "want" this in any meaningful way.

It's this. My observations of Finnish decisionmakers, including in some cases direct conversations with them, basically have given me an image of a process where various politicians have, more than anything, just make the problem go away so they can get back to doing what they were planning to do or advance before the pandemic, which typically would be one or several reforms or laws that often were conclusively derailed by the pandemic, either timewise or budget-wise.

However, this then led to varying ideas of what "making the problem go away" meant at various stages; at one stage it was possible to believe that just utilizing restrictions would be sufficient to get back to normalcy, this initially looked promising when Covid numbers dropped low in summer 2020, then when you had new variants you had more restrictions, when those didn't seem to work and looked like harmful for economy (bad! if the economy is bad you can't do your projects and get thrown out!) it was easy to fall for the idea that masks are the trick to keeping people out and about while combatting the virus, when that didn't do the trick it was time to buy into the vaccine hype and believe that would make the problem go away, when the vaccine hype started getting exposed as hype and there was no more willingness for restrictions it was time for more vaccines, then vaccine passports, when that didn't work there were restrictions after all etc.

In the end, the whole process just unravelled, everyone got Omicron, the Ukraine War occupied the national headspace etc. and now there's no masks, restrictions, and almost no new vaccinations, either. Of course they could have done that from the beginning, but once the process got going, it was pretty hard to step off directly - the masks, the vaccines, the passports etc. were all presented as tools for stepping off the hamster wheel softly and indirectly, but of course they then all had their own issues. And as for just doing nothing, well... what if the Long Covid was real? Then the problem would essentially never go away - there would be a permanent constituency of people disabled by Covid and their relatives ready for the blood of the politicians who were to blame, ie. you.

Combine them with an endless amount of Parks & Rec style bureaucracy turf wars (litres of ink have been spilled in the local media about territorial struggles inside the Finnish equivalent of CDC and between the CDC-equivalent and the Ministry of Health, etc., and I've also heard stories about ministers pushing for whatever measures they have that don't affect the operations of their ministry, or alternatively might keep their people safe from Covid) and what you get is less a conspiracy and more a SNAFU.

This gets into there being a very fine line between malice and extreme recklessness. If they instituted useless and harmful lockdowns because their ideology led them to believe that they knew better than the people and that the harm caused by lockdowns is very unimportant and should be heavily discounted when considering whether to do lockdowns, they aren't "deliberately evil". But indifference to how badly the people are harmed as long as the cause is good, is itself a type of evil.

But indifference to how badly the people are harmed as long as the cause is good, is itself a type of evil.

Only if you are a consequentialist surely? If not, then doing the (edit - what you think to be the) right thing regardless of the outcome is often seen to be good in and of itself.

I'd also add that often it was the people who were asking or even demanding lockdowns. The UK for example was explicitly against lockdowns early on and only changed when MPs were inundated with thousands of emails, calls and letters demanding that they take the same actions that other nations were taking. At which point responding to demand from the public even if it is stupid is arguably at least part of what they should do.

Only if you are a consequentialist surely?

There's also a fairly well establish strain of though that holds (among other things) that bodily autonomy and freedom of movement are terminal goods, and infringing them is (deontologically) evil?

Seems like the covid response loses either way.

Then we're grappling with what to do if one (supposed) good conflicts with another (supposed) good, which is a difficult problem definitely!

But it's a different issue as to whether people who hold to non-consequentialist beliefs are doing evil if the outcome is bad. That depends on whether good is judged on intentions, actions or outcomes which is entirely subjective (and highly contested).

I'm not specifically a consequentialist for example, but I think it's a mix of all three, trying to do the right thing can result in bad outcomes, but you're still reasonably a good person if the issue was big enough that the bad outcomes are worth the risk, or were not reasonably foreseeable, or all your choices were bad and you are trying to pick the best among them.

Then we're grappling with what to do if one (supposed) good conflicts with another (supposed) good, which is a difficult problem definitely!

Being a moral deontologist means never having to say you're sorry grapple with greater goods. "Violating a person's bodily autonomy is wrong" can pretty well stand alone; cf. "The Golden Rule".

But it's a different issue as to whether people who hold to non-consequentialist beliefs are doing evil if the outcome is bad.

But you can guarantee that they are not evil within their moral framework despite the bad outcome.

Conflicting moral frameworks tend to cause bad outcomes as well, of course -- which is why one of the principles of liberal governance is to ensure that the moral framework of government be as anodyne (and unyielding) as possible, so as not to be incompatible with that of large swathes of the citizenry.

Seems fair to say that the covid response taken in it's entirety runs counter to the deontological framework of (for instance) the founding of the United States -- and thus is evil by that standard.

deontological framework of (for instance) the founding of the United States -- and thus is evil by that standard.

The theoretical deontological framework of the founding of the US or the as practiced deontological framework? Given slavery was widely accepted you could argue it is perfectly in line with how it was practiced but not with it's optimistic theory. If you can justify slavery you can certainly justify vaccination mandates after all.

Just to be clear I much prefer the optimistic theory of the founding framework and prefer that as to what founding myth should be lived up to. But I think there are enough differences that we do need to specify, as I think the founders certainly could have justified mandates and more pretty easily under the deontological framework they actually demonstrated in practice.

There are covid skeptics in Sweden, of course, concentrating on Covid vaccines, which Sweden has distributed just like any other Western countries (quite a bit moreso than in the most).

However, the point about equal and opposite conspiracy theories stands currently in most Western countries, since even the mainstream media now regularly refers to the zero-covid remnant as a force in at least some ways equal to vaxx skeptics as a source of conspiracy theories and general wackiness.

Of course, in mainstream discourses, neither is considered to have cool aesthetics - the vaxx skeptics are portrayed as raving tinfoil hat wearing far-right hippies and zero-covidists as perpetually-scaredy-cat double maskers afraid to leave their building in fear of catching Covid.

One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be?

The phenomenon you are describing, attraction to "forbidden knowledge", doesn't make the content untrue. HBD would fit this description, and a lot of people were probably drawn to this community because it is almost the only place where you are allowed to talk about it.

if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be?

HBD and anti-semitism are things you can't say out loud. You would be banned from essentially any other space except for this one. Your books would be censored (Kevin Macdonald's Culture of Critique was recently banned from Barnes and Noble after having long been banned by Amazon, but it can be purchased direct through the publisher).

Anti-semitism is criminalized in much of the Western world, and historians and scientists have spent years in jail for the crime of Holocaust denial. The former head of CODOH (Germar Rudolf) has had his Green Card renewal denied by the United States, despite the fact he has an American wife and American children. His application for political asylum was also denied despite the fact spent time in jail for what would be protected speech in the United States, and would spend more time in jail for the same if he went back to his homeland. Germany also refused to renew his passport, so he is in hiding to avoid being deported to Germany where he would spend many years in prison. There are of course severe social sanctions even for American citizens, and Canada criminalized Holocaust denial only last year.

It is definitely true that there is an allure to "forbidden knowledge". It is to some extent a status game, by being an early adopter to forbidden knowledge- especially among a community like this that has a pride in higher sensitivity for detecting truth in forbidden knowledge. But the by far greater motivation is the belief that the knowledge is true, which is clearly what motivates people more than status-seeking. If they didn't think it was true, it would be far less-risky to status signal in a million different ways that would be less threatening.

The solution then, should be to avoid the topic if you find it boring or believe the interlocutor to not be genuine. Or you could engage in a debate on the "forbidden knowledge" if you feel inclined to do so.

His application for political asylum was also denied despite the fact spent time in jail for what would be protected speech in the United States

Your implication that he was treated unfairly appears to be based on an incorrect premise. As Justice Alito said when he was on the Third Circuit "the concept of persecution does not encompass all treatment that our society regards as unfair, unjust, or even unlawful or unconstitutional. If persecution were defined that expansively, a significant percentage of the world's population would qualify for asylum in this country — and it seems most unlikely that Congress intended such a result." Fatin v. INS, 12 F.3d 1233, 1240 (3d Cir.1993). And see Foroglou v. INS, 170 F.3d 68, 72 (1st Cir.1999) ("The asylum statute does not inflict on foreign governments the obligation to construct their own draft laws to conform to this nation's own highly complex equal protection jurisprudence.").

The former head of CODOH (Germar Rudolf) has had his Green Card renewal denied by the United States, despite the fact he has an American wife and American children . . . so he is in hiding to avoid being deported to Germany.

Permanent residence status does not expire. Once a person becomes a permanent resident, he remains a permanent resident unless it is revoked or abandoned. The most common reason for the latter is being outside the US for more than 6 months in any calendar year. The card itself expires, but that is a different thing.

Having an American wife and children does not entitle someone to retain his status as a permanent resident if he is otherwise subject to revocation or abandonment.

Your implication that he was treated unfairly appears to be based on an incorrect premise.

Of course he is being treated unfairly. Your implication is that he is not being treated unfairly because his treatment is within the boundaries of the law, which relies on an incorrect premise that fairness and lawfulness are always aligned. This is from the CODOH update last month:

December 15, 2022

We had to deal with three major obstacles this past year: Ingram Content Group canceling our printing, distribution and order-fulfillment contract; Barclays Bank in the UK closing our British account and thus our last banking stronghold in Europe; and our CEO Germar Rudolf resigning from his leadership positions at CODOH and Castle Hill, and taking an extended leave of absence. Let me address them in sequence.

As we reported earlier this year in a blog post, the General Assembly of the United Nations ratified a resolution introduced by Germany and Israel on January 20, 2022, which calls for all governments in the world to do everything possible to combat and suppress Holocaust revisionism. Since both CODOH and Castle Hill have been singled out for decades by governmental and NGO watchdog organizations in the US, the UK, Germany and Israel, among other countries, for being the only entities left that produce new and relevant revisionist material, you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what was coming…

After eight years of flawless cooperation, Castle Hill’s partner for multi-national book printing, distribution and order fulfillment, the almighty Ingram Content Group, canceled the contract just four days after the above-mentioned UN resolution had passed, claiming that retailers had been complaining about Castle Hill’s type of books. Ingram has a monopoly in book distribution in the U.S., and Amazon controls some 70% of all new books sales here, hence also of Ingram’s turnover. Each time we published a new book, Ingram’s live data feed into Amazon’s websites had it show up there. Amazon got harassed by the usual enemies of free speech for again offering one of our books. They had to manually delete it, but the game would start all over once we issued a new edition (which we do with regularity). Finally sick of this futile whack-the-mole game, Amazon, no doubt with the UN resolution in hand, went to Ingram telling them to stop the charade at the source by kicking us out for good – which they promptly did. Since Ingram’s database also feeds into all kinds of databases abroad, all our books suddenly disappeared from the national and international book markets. We lost some 50% of our turnover in the U.S., and our entire turnover from overseas, as we don’t have any printing, warehousing and order-fulfillment outlets in the UK or Australia (but Ingram does).

As a consequence, we had to completely reorganize the way we operate. We had to find a new printing partner in the U.S., reformat all cover artwork to fit their specs, invest into a complete reprint of everything, get ourselves a small warehouse locally, equip it with shelving, basic equipment and shipping supplies so we can do order fulfillment ourselves, and then repeat the procedure also in Europe and/or the UK somehow to recover that market as well.

Just a week after the UN resolution, Barclays Bank in the UK, with whom we had our business banking since 2007 and never had any problems, opened some investigation by requesting more details about what our business was all about. Then three weeks later, they told us unceremoniously that they will close our accounts, citing a passage in the agreement that simply allows them to close whatever account they want whenever they please. Period.

Since business had become pretty much impossible for Caste Hill in the UK, with Brexit making exports to EU countries borderline impossible and banking being canceled, we decided it is time to pack up and leave. Castle Hill was officially sold by its UK owner (identity undisclosed) to CODOH on April 8, 2022, and CODOH reorganized it as a single-member, non-neglected limited liability company as “Castlehill Publishing LLC.”

Our attempts at establishing a printing, warehousing and order-fulfillment solution in the UK/Europe for our English-language material hit unexpected resistance when we realized that many British printers are now mortally afraid to get involved in the production of printed matters that could violate Britain’s 2017 anti-revisionist law. Although that law requires that “Holocaust denial” happens concurrently and in conjunction with disparaging the victims, which is something Caste Hill does not do, any printer accepting our printing jobs would be legally required to thoroughly read and correctly assess all our material before printing it to make sure it does not contain anything legally hazardous. No printer will invest that amount of time and effort. They simply turn down the job, and that’s the end of that…

When the first consequence of the UN resolution hit Castle Hill in early 2022, our then-CEO Germar Rudolf predicted that he expects “them” to go after him personally next. And that is what happened this past summer. This is not the place to divulge what exactly has been happening. Suffice it to say that Rudolf dropped all responsibilities at CODOH and Caste Hill this past summer, and disappeared from the face of the earth in early fall. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

Rudolf’s main vulnerabilities are that his application to become a U.S. citizen was terminally rejected in 2020, and that the German authorities have issued numerous arrest warrants against him for reasons that are yet unknown. However, with some 80 new revisionist books or new editions of older books in the German-language published over the past ten years with Rudolf as the production manager, it’s easy to understand why they want him locked away. Although those German arrest warrants cannot be enforced in the U.S. due to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Rudolf’s German passport expired in 2019, and Germany refuses to issue him a new one. His “Green Card” here in the U.S. expired in 2021, and the U.S. authorities followed Germany’s lead by also refusing to issue him a new one. You get the picture. They are trying to entrap him, then play the same dirty trick on him and his family as they did back in 2005: arrest, deport, put into a German dungeon, and throw away the keys.

In the meanwhile, Castle Hill is getting reorganized once more, so it can survive in this increasingly hostile environment even without Germar Rudolf’s involvement. We appreciate your patience and support for this drawn-out, difficult process.

This content is not if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? It's dangerous to talk about, and those involved continue despite the risk of persecution because they think it's true and important.

What does any of that have to do with his asylum application?? You said, "His application for political asylum was also denied despite the fact spent time in jail for what would be protected speech in the United States," implying that normally, being threatened with imprisonment for engaging in speech which would be protected were it engaged in in the US establishes an asylum claim. I pointed out that that does not seem to be the case, and nothing in that long quote is even relevant to that issue.

His “Green Card” here in the U.S. expired in 2021, and the U.S. authorities followed Germany’s lead by also refusing to issue him a new one. You get the picture. They are trying to entrap him, then play the same dirty trick on him and his family as they did back in 2005: arrest, deport, put into a German dungeon, and throw away the keys.

Again, a green card is just a piece of paper. It is an important piece of paper -- without a current green card, a permanent resident cannot travel abroad and then be admitted on his return, nor can a permanent resident legally work without a green card -- but lacking a green card does not expose a permanent resident to deportation; as discussed in the link I provided, the status of permanent residence does not expire.

his application to become a U.S. citizen was terminally rejected in 2020

Might that have something to do with his 2020 convictions for indecent exposure and open lewdness? "Certain crimes are defined by US immigration law as “crimes involving moral turpitude.” Conviction of one of these crimes will typically bar you from receiving citizenship for five years after your conviction date (only three years if your permanent residence is based on marriage to a US citizen). If you are convicted of one of these crimes, you will have to wait for the five-year (or three-year) anniversary of the conviction date to file your citizenship application.".

Is he or is he not at risk of deportation? Give a clear answer.

The implication is that he is being treated unfairly and he has no recourse. I didn't claim any lawbreaking. It is highly unusual

Might that have something to do with his 2020 convictions

Probation would be enough cause to deport someone with an American wife and American children? You clearly do not like his politics, so you are supportive of these decisions. But establishing that they are legal does not establish that they are fair. He is clearly being targeted for political reasons, and you wouldn't support the similar treatment of other people - denial of permanent residence where your wife is and children were born - based on such nonsense.

He just told you that denying a green card is not denial of permanent residence.

Probation would be enough cause to deport someone with an American wife and American children?

  1. You apparently do not understand your own argument. All you said was that his citizenship application was denied, not that he is being deported. 2. The relevant statute refers to conviction of a crime of moral turpitude. Not to serving a jail sentence.

You clearly do not like his politics, so you are supportive of these decisions

Please show me where I said I supported those decisions. As it happens, I support the right of Holocaust deniers or even outright Nazis to speak, and I believe that the US should grant asylum to anyone facing imprisonment for speech which is legal in the US. Unfortunately, the courts apparently disagree with me, and hence the claim that his asylum denial on those grounds is evidence that he has been discriminated against because of his views is simply wrong.

denial of permanent residence

As I have twice pointed out, he has not been denied permanent residence. You are tilting at windmills.

Rudolf’s main vulnerabilities are that his application to become a U.S. citizen was terminally rejected in 2020, and that the German authorities have issued numerous arrest warrants against him for reasons that are yet unknown. However, with some 80 new revisionist books or new editions of older books in the German-language published over the past ten years with Rudolf as the production manager, it’s easy to understand why they want him locked away. Although those German arrest warrants cannot be enforced in the U.S. due to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Rudolf’s German passport expired in 2019, and Germany refuses to issue him a new one. His “Green Card” here in the U.S. expired in 2021, and the U.S. authorities followed Germany’s lead by also refusing to issue him a new one. You get the picture. They are trying to entrap him, then play the same dirty trick on him and his family as they did back in 2005: arrest, deport, put into a German dungeon, and throw away the keys.

He is clearly being targeted for his views on Holocaust denial, I don't know why you feel so compelled to deny that fact. "The courts disagree with me" is not a justification for the decision or make it fair.

He’s disagreeing with the arrest/deport bit. An expired green card isn’t getting deported.

I think a non-revisionist with an indecent-exposure conviction would also not be issued citizenship. And the cited case makes it clear that speech laws don’t necessarily count for asylum. Whether or not these situations are morally correct, if they would be applied equally, they are not be unfair.

More comments

"The courts disagree with me" is not a justification for the decision or make it fair.

Yes, the decision was not fair IF it was based on hostility to his views. I merely am pointing out that the evidence you have presented for that claim doesn't work.

The idea of taking the black pill specifically so you can cast yourself as a "free thinker" is an interesting one, remind me of this Onion article. If it's about having status and independence, it should be left-right agnostic and more about whatever side is perceived as setting the rules more. There must have been edgelords in the 60s who were in favor of the counter-culture, right?

But if this is why you get infiltration, is it your opinion that it's ultimately harmless until taken seriously? That is, banning the "kids" from making their jokes can lead to them taking it more seriously than if they were just given a slap on the wrist and told to knock it off?

If it's about having status and independence, it should be left-right agnostic and more about whatever side is perceived as setting the rules more.

Unless one side manages to use its cultural dominance to cast itself in the role of the permanent underdog.

I hear people say that a lot, and I think people buy it far less than you think. Partisans will always think of themselves as underdogs, including young partisans. When we look at people who aren't so defined by their politics, you can see many people who are more willing to make jokes that would offend both sides.

I would need to find the data, but support among youth for things like ideological censorship has risen quite a bit.

edgelords in the 60s

Aye, and they were the counterculture. Or at least pushed it. I’m not clear on how much of the 60s and 70s was rebellion against the squares and how much was the memetic advantage of sex/drugs/R+R.

harmless until taken seriously

I’m still thinking about this one. It could be true, but I think it depends so heavily on the situation...Kind of a cop-out, I know, but like everything else in signaling, legibility is a downside.

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