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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31000 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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I agree with you about status and wanting to be loved, but I think you can both be right. Mass immigration is the perfect example - no matter how bad it makes life for the peasants, the problem is most easily solved by forcibly re-educating the peasants to say they love immigration. The governments really care about not letting anyone complain about immigration, and having people tell the elites that they appreciate their big-hearted care for refugees.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, while the face says "unlike those intolerant right-wingers, I'm open-minded enough to appreciate boot culture and cuisine!"

the problem is most easily solved by forcibly re-educating the peasants to say they love immigration

It's throw-away lines like this that make me avoid commenting here.

Then it's followed up by

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, while the face says "unlike those intolerant right-wingers, I'm open-minded enough to appreciate boot culture and cuisine!"

Ahh, such steel-manning, such charity - definitely no booing outgroup here!

Haha, sorry, that was a little self-indulgent. Your criticism is fair. I was venting a little at my real-life neighbours and colleagues for so full-throatedly and unthinkingly embracing whatever cause-de-jour is being pushed by our national media.

But I do think immigration is a good example of how elites thread the needle of wanting to be loved and respected while also, in practice, largely ignoring the desires and well-being of their constituents.

You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times. This forum does have a certain political slant, it's unavoidable. But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.

You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times

I don't. I expect people to follow the rules such as

  • Be Kind

  • Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.

  • Be charitable.

  • Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is

  • Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

The comment I was responding to violates these. The great grand parent violates these:

Noone needs to face anything, just increasingly automate weapon systems and let the peasants die. If they're not needed and can't use violence to effectively overthrow the system then why would anyone need to pay any attention to them whatsoever?

The forum is replete with obvious violations of the rules. The mods obviously won't mod comments like this, because then they'd be modding like 30% of all the comments here.

But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.

Why not? I have better places to discuss topics like this where. I wish this place were better, because then I'd find much more value out of discussing things here, but c'est la vie. [edit: for instance, I found the /r/slatestarcodex threads much more pleasant and insightful]

The rules are, and always have been, subjectively interpreted, not according to some algorithmic rubric. We do try to be more or less consistent, but consistency and a robotic pretense of objectivity has never been the goal here - avoiding what @ZorbaTHut calls "negative dynamics" and optimizing for light over not heat, is.

The level of strictness with which we apply the rules is a bunch of sliders, not a pair of buttons.

@astrolabia's comment isn't high quality, but I don't really see reason to mod a vague complaint about "elites" and their supposed attitude towards "peasants." It's obviously making use of cheap rhetoric and Orwell memes, but who exactly is he being unkind to or weakmanning? Hypothetical elites who consider the rest of us peasants?

optimizing for light over not heat [is the goal]

...

It's obviously making use of cheap rhetoric and Orwell memes

Using cheap rhetoric while making no real argument is, in my mind, the almost the quintessential example of optimizing for heat over light (the anti-goal)

Hypothetical elites who consider the rest of us peasants

Re unkind: yes, and anyone who supports existing politicians. If you tell me my preferred candidate wouldn't care if millions of US citizens die, and that is a purely rhetorical move on your part, I'd call that unkind and needlessly inflammatory.

Re weakmanning: he is weakmanning the memes he's referencing, since Bruce Bueno de Mesquita almost certainly would disagree with his claims. Though, it's hard to say he's even weakmanning, when he has not actually made an argument (again lots of heat in that comment; virtually no light).

I acknowledge that "unkind" and "weakmanning" are not the best fits, but it definitely fails on

  • Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.

  • Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

  • Avoid low-effort participation

I know "Don't boo outgroup" isn't a rule, but imo it should be, and that comment fails that.

But, like you, I view the real problem as a heat-v-light one. Unlike you (I think?), I believe that comment offers approximately 100% heat and approximately 0% light.

Edit: It occurs to me, that perhaps I'm intuitively thinking of this as

heat / (heat + light) < threshold ==> bad

and you're thinking of it is

heat - light < threshold ==> bad

So, to my mind, a comment that makes no real contribution and has some heat, is bad. In your mind (I conjecture), a comment making no contribution is fine so long as its heat is sufficiently low.

Don’t boo out group is a reporting bucket.

It's not in the sidebar or the rules. @Amadan can we resolve this inconsistency?

It's right at the top of the page:

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.

Once again, the rules are not an algorithm where we are required to strictly enforce everything that's written, exactly as written, and nothing that isn't. That's not how it works.

You don't like that I didn't mod a comment you think is bad. Duly noted.

More comments

Re unkind: yes, and anyone who supports existing politicians. If you tell me my preferred candidate wouldn't care if millions of US citizens die, and that is a purely rhetorical move on your part, I'd call that unkind and needlessly inflammatory.

If someone said "Joe Biden doesn't care if millions of US citizens die," yes, that would be an inflammatory claim and without some pretty substantial argumentation to back it up, would almost certainly be modded.

So, to my mind, a comment that makes no real contribution and has some heat, is bad. In your mind (I conjecture), a comment making no contribution is fine so long as its heat is sufficiently low.

As I said, it's a sliding scale. A comment that makes no contribution but is also low heat isn't great, but the more heat or the lower the contribution value, the more likely it is to get modded.

I report the worst of the worst. I suspect I report far more comments per-minute-read than most people here. But, as I mentioned, it's unfortunately not worth my time to engage very much on this forum, so my overall volume of reporting isn't terribly high.

The latter.

Noone needs to face anything, just increasingly automate weapon systems and let the peasants die. If they're not needed and can't use violence to effectively overthrow the system then why would anyone need to pay any attention to them whatsoever?

The forum is replete with obvious violations of the rules. The mods obviously won't mod comment like this, because then they'd be modding like 30% of all the comments here.

"Elites", "AI companies", and "governments" are not the outgroup. They're stand-ins for Moloch. "Progressives", "woke PCMs", or "democrats" are the outgroup. If @Azth's were writing about them in this way — or implying anyone reading this forum or talking to him thinks it's fine if peasants die — he'd be modded within a few hours.

For an alternate example from the left side of things, it's possible to write extremely mean things about "capitalism" or "corporations" without getting modded.

Unfortunately I think I have bashed the out-group. The out group is those who don't think the molochian forces of selection, competition, etc can possibly result in a extremly bad outocome for all us peasants because they don't want it to, have feelings, etc. Also moloch, who is evermost the outgroup to actual living beings as it, or he, is a normative manifestation of emergent evils.

Many people on this forum definitely consider "the elites" an outgroup.

The comment you chose in particular is as clear an example of outgroup bashing as its possible to be. You can tell because it makes vague negative claims without any evidence for the near exclusive purpose of venting.

Edit:

If @Azth's were writing about them in this way — or implying anyone reading this forum or talking to him thinks it's fine if peasants die — he'd be modded within a few hours.

This, I agree with. The mods have little tolerance for putting words in others' mouths.

Yes it is definetly out group bashing to an extent, but bashing both elites and those who I consider naive enough to think compassion and flourishing and deep meaning will provide enough reason for the continued existence of peasants. Outgroups bashing. I don't want to go and wipe out all the peasants (myself included).

Moving to a world where non-elite existence is an unnecessary adornment to civilisation, and non elite actions cannot do anything about this, even in violent we will take you with us last resort style violent protest, is absolutely horrifying to me.

The comment you chose in particular is as clear an example of outgroup bashing as its possible to be.

Hardly. He's applying the Dictator's Handbook hypothesis that the powerful don't need to (and can't) care about the population in countries where the workforce is economically irrelevant to the AI automation problem. Unlike @astrolabia's comment, @Azth's isn't more inflammatory than the underlying idea, so I disagree with you lumping them together.

And yet, the literal author of the comment agrees with me.

Yes it is definetly out group bashing to an extent, but bashing both elites and those who I consider naive enough to think compassion and flourishing and deep meaning will provide enough reason for the continued existence of peasants. Outgroups bashing.

Yes it's the same broad idea but phrased in a careless way. If a dictator in the prototypical primary resource extraction economy, say the classic example of a gold mine, doesn't need.to care about some subsistence farmers when he has his gold revenue then why would he?

In the hypothetical (or not, depending on perspective) economic disruption AI world this shifts to something new. If a dictator previously dependant on E.g., agriculture discovers gold to mine,

why would the new gold mining dictator care about the useless peasants who can't even perform subsistence farming (assume they don't own any land and merely worked on someone else's, who hasn't given them land now gold ha been discovered, or perhaps the gold mining has polluted the land, either case assume they can't subsistence farm), as well as the bureocrats who formerly administered the sectors of the economy that now don't exist?

As I see it, there are two possible explanations

Option One: He literally believes that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. This is absurd. No one not living in a cave could plausibly think that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. At the very least such a claim requires explanation/justification as per the rules:

Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

Option Two: He does not literally believe that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. In that case, the comment is much more inflammatory than necessary, again violating the rules.

He literally believes that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. This is absurd. No one not living in a cave could plausibly think that US leaders wouldn't lift a finger if millions of their citizens were dying. At the very least such a claim requires explanation/justification as per the rules

I disagree that it's absurd or inflammatory. I think it's probably wrong, but it seems an entirely reasonable belief, not just about US leaders, but basically anyone in general. Erring on the side of "people won't give a shit about megadeaths and megasufferings of people who are useless to them and powerless to stop them" doesn't seem like a major error, even if it is an error.

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