This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Scott Alexander, the guy who hosted the Culture War Thread on his blog slatestarcodex before that landed him in so much heat (from the woke left) that it was moved to reddit under the name /r/theMotte (and from there, subsequently, to themotte.org to preempt a reddit crackdown) comes usually across as a kind and considerate person to me. Charitable interpretations are very much his thing. While he has always engaged in CW topics on occasion, his forays deep into the trenches are rare (and in my impression have become rarer compared to the SSC days).
Apparently, there is a person called Steven Pinker. I have been vaguely aware that there was a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature which was probably authored by someone, but he was not someone I really had on my radar.
From the WP article, he seems solidly Grey Tribe. Believes in a computational theory of mind, Ashkenazi Intelligence Hypothesis, critical of both the woke left (cancellations) and the MAGA right (foreign student restrictions).
The main topic where he disagrees with Scott Alexander is AI x-risk.
Scott has now responded, and his reponse is a bit less than maximum charitable.
While Scott is diligent enough with his technical points, it is clear that he is personally hurt by Pinker's decision to ridicule AI x-risk. So his post is also a broadside fired against him. He cites Garfinkel et al 2017 who "proved" that machines will never be larger than humans using common philosophical arguments for AI being harmless.
Scott points out that while Pinker is busy berating the LW crowd for distracting from the more mundane risks of AI, x-risk advocates are willing to work hand in hand with groups with a more practical focus to combat pro-AI PACs like Leading the Future.
On model welfare (which is certainly not the core topic of the x-risk advocates):
He accuses Pinker of endorsing the "lowest quality voices", quoting Claire Lehmann:
Or
It ends with Scott seeming seriously willing to duel Pinker:
Scott has admitted in the comments that this is already the toned-down version of the post he originally wrote. I think that while he held back verbally (nobody get's called a "Vogon spy in a skin suit" this time), he uses his craft well to show his frustration.
For what it's worth, I think that Pinker is correct that Eliezer is in fact over-confident in p(doom|default-ASI). Just like Pinker is when he declares that any fear of doom is ridiculous.
The main difference is that for practical purposes, it does not matter much if your p(doom) is 0.99 or 0.05. Both would be pressing problems whose solution is the most important thing in the world.
Eliezer was bullish on AI capabilities when that was far out of the Overton window, back when the machines could beat humans at chess at most. Steven Pinker was tweeting that "deep learning has probably peaked" in 2019.
This might be giving too much credit to Pinker, but here is Clarke's first law:
I'd say that I lost some respect for both of them through this argument, but to be honest I don't think I ever had much respect for Pinker. The ignorant and strawmannish Enlightenment Now really ended any sympathy I had for him as a thinker. Nonetheless, Pinker's letter to Scott was courteous and concise; I think you can tell that Pinker is a better or at least more professional writer.
Scott's response... to be honest, it reminded me of point six here. The world Scott is in is small and homogenous - there's an awful lot of citing Omohundro and Hinton, and after a while one starts to think that that's because he's only got a handful of people, and is shocked and appalled that anybody disagrees with them. Scott does land some real hits on Pinker - the RAND study mistake is an embarrassing mis-step by Pinker - but also avoids some of Pinker's stronger arguments, and sets up his own straw men.
I'm not particularly interested in nitpicking many of the specific disagreements, especially because plenty of them leave ample room for both to be, in a sense, right. Pinker is correct that 'intelligence' can't be modelled as a single variable; Scott is correct that nonetheless it is reasonable to talk about 'intelligence' in a general sense.
What stood out to me, personally, was the way that the mask came down a bit, and setting aside all disputes about facts, Scott is dedicated to normative commitments that I think are repulsive, or frankly insane. Consider:
I'm sorry, but this is lunatic. We need to invest in language models or human civilisation will be permanently stunted? What? He's got some sort of science fiction eschatology in mind that seems both absurd on the factual merits and, perhaps more importantly, morally blinkered. While I did always know that Scott had some of those bizarre transhumanist beliefs (and I'm certainly not a convert to Phil-Torres-like conspiracism), it is, at least, a useful reminder that he approaches the whole issue of technology from a bizarre starting point that I cannot sympathise with.
This is a fair point. Based on people's answers to questions like "does AI pose an existential threat to the human race?", you should not be able to predict their opinions about completely unrelated topics like polyamory, gender ideology and factory farming. But in practice, you can, and with remarkable accuracy.
If I pointed this out to anyone in this Bay Area bubble, they would scoff and say that believing 2+2=4 is heavily correlated with belief in gravity and natural selection: the reason we all have the same opinions about AI, polyamory and gender ideology is because smart people who believe one obviously true thing tend to believe in other obviously true things as well. We're the "reality-based community"!* (Feel free to make your own "rationalist"-themed lawn sign.)
The less charitable explanation is that the Bay Area has become an ideological echo chamber, and that this is bad. A lack of viewpoint diversity will probably hurt the AI doomer movement in the long run, in ways that ironically mirror what's going to happen to future LLMs. With so much content (text, images, videos, music) on the internet now being AI-generated, the next generation of LLMs will be heavily trained on content which is itself AI-generated, resulting in incestuous artefacts and mode collapse. Similarly, the opportunity for novel, creative solutions is massively curtailed if everyone is reading the same articles, donating to the same candidates, attending the same house parties and fucking (literally) the same people.**
Scott complains about the way Pinker characterises the AI doomers as a "cult" who recite the "catechism" of their creed. Comparing group X to a religion or a cult is indeed a cheap way to make that group seem ridiculous, and the fact that so many AI doomers have similar ideas and concerns could well be evidence of independent convergence as opposed to top-down indoctrination. But leaving AI aside – surely Scott would agree that for people in this space who live in the Bay Area, there is a catechism, right? There are opinions unrelated to AI that you're expected to hold, opinions you're expected not to hold, and expressing those in the latter group will land you in hot water. I'm not persuaded that a genuinely brilliant AI researcher with novel ideas about how to improve alignment (but unorthodox opinions about gender ideology, which he makes no effort to hide) would be welcome in the Bay Area, and I think that should be cause for concern for anyone who's worried about AI as an existential risk. If nothing else, it makes you seem unserious, in the same way that buying up seafront property makes people reasonably question how serious you are about rising sea levels. "AI IS GOING TO KILL US ALL, ANYONE WITH A MODICUM OF CODING SKILL SHOULD DROP EVERYTHING AND HELP OUT (those exclusively in favour of monogamous relationships need not apply)" is not a good look.
"What – just because AI will kill us all, we have to stop caring about shrimp welfare and throw our trans comrades under the bus?" Part of me wants to say yeschad.jpg. Another part of me says: look, you guys are the ones saying that any intelligent agent with a goal would organically converge on the sub-goal of self-preservation, natural selection be damned. You can't advocate for trans rights if you're dead. So either you don't really think AI will kill us all, or you'd better start holding your nose and tolerating the presence of talented, creative individuals with whom you disagree.
*I'm sure Scott found it suspicious that, in 2020, support for lockdowns was so heavily correlated with support for ignoring those lockdowns to attend BLM protests – but he finds the same phenomenon unremarkable when it afflicts his in-group. The speck in your brother's eye, the plank in yours etc.
**There was an article in the Washington Post where someone is quoted as saying "All of the Zoomers that work for me are bisexual, and all of them have long covid. I’ll believe long covid is real when someone who is not bisexual has it." I saw a post on Substack the other day which edited it to read "I'll believe AI poses a threat to the human race when someone who hasn't had sex with Aella says so."
But this is literally a big part of the answer, higher intelligence is associated with a better understanding of nuance and open mindedness. As a well known example the unthinking masses normie wants to have a better horse, while the genius thinks outside the box and invents the car. The genius didn't see what was there in front of his eyes and say "that's it, everything is locked within these walls of potential", he opens his mind and sees what could be done.
Smarter people tend to be better at lateral thinking, understanding unintuitive ideas, and comprehending hypotheticals.
The genius is also way better at self regulation and has less need for strict community based rules to apply to them, hence they can engage in stuff like polyamorism/drugs/etc other hedonistic activities with less risk. They're also better at recognizing how these "rules" are made up and enforced through societal pressure rather than any ironclad law of nature, hence they tend to be more accepting of people who do odd things. Dumb people will appeal to "nature" about their madeup rules, because to them "what I see", "what is", and "what must be" are the same thing.
Elite human capital is pretty much always liberal across the world.
One of the big reasons being that social conservativism even if it has the right answer will do so for the wrong reasons.
Even if you think homosexuality or people taking cross sex hormones is an immoral act and you have a strong argument for it, it doesn't change that most opposition in the group is from the low IQ reason of "ew that's gross" or "my fantasy religion book said that's bad".They aren't using your supposed better argument, they're using a stupid one.
I find this an odd argument, particularly if you care about truth or morality?
Suppose we have two groups of people, A and B. Group A generally finds right answers, but for wrong reasons. Group B generally finds wrong answers, but for right reasons. Which group would you rather be in?
I feel like there's a reasonable case that Group A is preferable. The right answers are, well, the whole point. I would rather be in the group that's not eating sharks or getting cyanide poisoning. Even then, I think the Secret of Our Success model is a bit too patronising - the shark and manioc examples are cute but sound too much like "they did something sensible but for bad reasons, whereas we know the good reasons now".
But what makes a reason 'right' or 'wrong'? If a certain type of reasoning generally leads you to right or good answers, doesn't that in itself make that type of reasoning right? The slogan used to be that rationality is winning. The process that gets you to the right answers is the right process, surely?
I do think that good reasoning and bad reasoning exist. A guess that randomly lands on the right answer is not epistemically virtuous; likewise a reasonable hypothesis that nonetheless turns out to be false is not un-virtuous. High school science teaches that Democritus came up with atomic theory, but firstly he didn't really, and secondly Democritus' atoms aren't really any more sensible or reasonable a guess than Thales' water-based theory. Good reasoning ought to reliably, in a manner better than random chance, lead to good results. Likewise we might think that good reasoning ought to, in some way, logically relate premises to conclusions, though even that might just be a result of the observation that logic positively correlates with reasons that lead to good conclusions.
However, in a case like this, if Group A are using some sort of black-box reasoning that regularly leads to good conclusions, and Group B are using a different black-box that regularly leads to bad or wrong conclusions, I would suggest that maybe we should look in Group A's black box. Maybe there's something inside it that works. Good reasoning is reasoning that regularly produces good conclusions.
In the hypothetical A obviously. But reality isn't that hypothetical and in the real world better reasoning skills will tend to result in more accurate answers. This is the literal point of reasoning after all. Smarter people will tend to be more right than dumber people are.
Modern western society is generally more intelligent and richer (one of the more objective ways to judge this because wealth is a universal goal and being better at getting money typically means you have higher skill somewhere) than both other modern societies and past societies western or not. The decisions of modern western society can be expected to generally be smarter and better than those alternatives then. Thus most likely "we don't really care about the gays" is a better choice than "behead the gays".
It's not perfect (there's probably hundreds of thousands/millions of different factors in a society after all), but it is a general trend that classically liberal democratic freedom embracing western society has more factors correct than illiberal oppressive freedom hating ones.
In that case, then what is the point of considering the hypothetical of "right for the wrong reasons" versus "wrong for the right reasons"? The former can only be right by accident, and the latter can only be wrong by some sort of mistake. Wrong reasons will inevitably conduce to wrong answers, and right reasons likewise to right answers.
Don't you just, at this point, reduce to "good and smart things are good and smart"? Well, sure, but that's not much of an insight.
In the post I was responding to, you suggested:
Okay, so, let's rephrase the hypothetical a bit.
Group A, which is small, holds position X for well-thought-out reasons.
Group B, which is also small, though larger than Group A, holds position anti-X for well-thought-out reasons.
Group C, which is very large, holds position X for poorly-thought-out reasons.
Should Group A therefore recant position X, and switch to anti-X? Why?
From the position of Group A, maybe Group C have accidentally or arbitrarily landed on a correct position. Is that a reason to turn down Group C's support? I can't see any inconsistency in Group A allying with Group C, and perhaps also aiming to better-educate Group C.
Alternatively, Group A might theorise that there's some deeper, hard-to-express wisdom that is being expressed by Group C, even if Group C are incapable of rationalising it or expressing it. This is the argument you get in The Secret of Our Success, or what concepts like the wisdom of repugnance are getting at. In Catholic theology, this is also called the sensus fidei - the people as a whole may not be able to competently express a doctrine, but they have an 'instinct' for its truth. (A famous example of this is that most lay Catholics cannot define the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, but they have an instinctive, inchoate sense that Mary is special, or in some way set apart by God for a holy task.)
Maybe you buy the idea of some sort of pre-rational folk wisdom, like SooS or the sensus fidei, but even if you don't, I do not see how the existence of Group C constitutes a reason for Group A to reconsider their views. Even if Group C picked a position completely at random, from Group A's perspective, they got lucky and picked the right position. It's certainly not evidence that position X is wrong.
You used the example of social conservatism, but I don't think you have to read this in a partisan way like that. Your post, following Hanania, seems to be written assuming that the intelligent elite will always trend liberal (for some unspecified definition of 'liberal') whereas the masses will be conservative, but that doesn't seem to empirically always be the case. Even on the example he used, sexuality, the masses have switched sides and now the opposite seems to be true - in the West nowadays, position X is pro-LGBT, and it's Group B who are anti-gay. (The intellectual gap is visible as well! Group A, the intellectual pro-LGBT camp, are now the ones who've dived into queer theory and trans liberation and family abolition. Group C, the masses, are the ones who say 'sure, let them marry, don't care one way or the other'.)
But generally and more broadly, it is true that there are sometimes liberal or progressive positions embraced by the masses, while smaller intellectual groups are against them. I don't think you can universally generalise. The masses adopt all sorts of positions - maybe sometimes arbitrarily, sometimes through being honestly persuaded, maybe sometimes due to messy, organic cultural revolution - and I do not consider the fact that the masses hold a particular position to be an argument against that position.
On the individual level, of course you should always try to hold your positions for the right reasons. That goes for everyone. But the existence of large numbers of people who hold the same position for the wrong reasons should not invalidate your reasons, nor cause you any kind of intellectual crisis.
You're right, the hypothetical doesn't really work to begin with. Good reasoning and intelligence are specifically measures meant to reflect the ability to get the correct answers.
Groups with bad reasoning and right answers are broken clocks, they were just lucky. Groups with good reasoning and bad answers are not fools, they are just unlucky.
For instance imagine someone trying to calculate how far a bullet will go, and an idiot says "one inch" randomly cause he doesn't understand gunpowder and thinks the bullet will slide out of the chamber. The genius does a bunch of math, but is blind and doesn't know there's a wall right in front of the gun stopping the bullet.
The idiot is correct from luck, the genius is incorrect from luck. We should not want to be the idiot, because the idiot will be wrong in every other bullet calculation.
That's true to some degree, but a lot of populist beliefs held by the masses are not even particularly left or right leaning to begin with among the general population! Like price controls sound as though they should be left leaning, but look at the major conservative states and they have it too..
A divide among intellectual elites does not necessarily reflect a divide among the general populace.
If smart people trend towards X and dumb people trend towards Y, and everything else you know about it is equal you should go with X. Yes smart people can sometimes be wrong too, but if intelligence doesn't reflect a general ability to get things more correct more often, then we have a bad measurement of intelligence. It shouldn't overwrite all sense and reason you have obviously (especially since often the correct answer is nuanced and can differ based off the situation like how in a video game a top tier character might be top tier because of high execution that a lower rank player can't do, and therefore the character is actually weak in low ranks), but you really should trend towards what smart people do and say.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link