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A clear and very delightful essay from Wayward Axolotl in 2017 on free speech being a means toward the unalloyed good “social rationality”:
This got me thinking about Google, which is in a round of layoffs of thousands of employees. I find myself thinking conspiratorially: this would be a great time for them to purge all remaining wrongthinkers from their midst, possibly using their AI to pick those who hold such “hateful” ideas as James Damore.
I have no evidence at all, nor have I heard of such a thing happening. The thought was partly inspired by the military having a similar purge under Obama and now Biden, such that the top generals and admirals are reported (on rightward and far right media alike) to be fully “globohomo” at this point.
Those of you in Silicon Valley or STE(A)M professions, do you know anyone recently laid off from Alphabet, and what their views are?
My experience has been that most techies are either mostly uninterested in politics or are roughly moderate politically by modern American standards. I think that you can see this reflected, for example, in the fact that Hacker News is politically much more moderate than Reddit. Obviously tech does have a problem with woke activism, but I would guess that this reflects the power of a minority rather than the consensus of the majority.
There is the often cited data about how techies overwhelmingly donate to the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party, but I think that it is likely that the overwhelming majority of techies donate to neither, it is just that the small subset of techies who donate to political parties at all overwhelmingly donate to the Democratic Party.
A similar dynamic may be at play in wokeness in tech. It is possible that most techies either do not care much about politics or are roughly speaking moderates, maybe a bit left-leaning moderates but still moderates and in particular ones who because of their economic success tend to support capitalism, but that at the same time wokeness has an outsized power in tech because the small minority of woke activists has outsized power.
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Responding to the blog post, Wayward Axolotl misses an important argument against free speech.
Consider how generational forgetting and the brevity of human life impose an upper limit on how high civilization can rise. Maybe there are five great truths to learn before we can build utopia. Learning the first takes up our youth. Learning the second takes as through middle age. By the time we have learned the third, we are old. We die and utopia is not built. Our children and grandchildren following behind run the same race against time and also lose.
But what kinds of knowledge are the great truths that I have in mind? Some of them are negative in nature. We learn "Don't do that!". For example, society responds to a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) by printing money. This leads to inflation. We combat inflation with price controls. The economic distortions accumulate, but we are trapped, needing the price controls to combat inflation. Eventually we learn vital lessons, against printing money and against price controls. We learn two vital lessons and vow not to repeat the mistakes. We (the individuals) keep our vows. We grow old and die without repeating the old mistakes. But our wisdom is interred with our bones.
Eventually our descendants face a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) and respond by printing money. The cycle repeats. The individuals kept their vows, but society did not, because society is made of people, who not only grow old and die, but...
The previous paragraphs trails off. Is the problem that old people fail to pass their wisdom down the generations? Is the problem that young people fail to learn? Why not both? We need to accept that we are not fixing the problem of generational forgetting any time soon.
Freedom of speech requires us to accept the eternal recurrence of bad ideas. No matter how many times mankind learns that printing money is a bad idea, the idea comes round again. Recurring bad ideas are often defeated. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was defeated this time around. But that dodges my initial point about generational forgetting limiting how high civilization can rise. Imagine that the first two of my five great truths are negative truths. We spend a long time learning to do this and to do that and finding out that we are wrong and the actual lesson is don't do this and don't do that. We suffer the opprobrium of historians who lament that "we" always knew those two "don't"s. Then the meta-historians berate the historians: if they had read their own books they would have noticed that people don't learn from history. The lessons of history are undoubtedly correct, we have learned them, forgotten them, and relearned them, many times.
When do we say: enough! At some point we have to censor recurring bad ideas. Life is too short to debate, argue, lose, and be proved right by time. Life is shorter than that. Life is too short to debate, argue,and win. We need to ruthlessly suppress certain potent, recurring bad ideas, so that we may have a chance to break the ceiling on civilization imposed by generational forgetting. The prize to be grasped is that we can skip learning the first two great truths, because they warn us against bad ideas, now suppressed. Then life is long enough to learn 3, 4, and 5 and build a Utopia for our grandchildren to enjoy.
I've never heard of even opponents of free speech claiming that we have to get rid of it because people will believe in printing money.
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Like others have said, free speech protects us from people with terrible ideas that have never worked like printing money and ruthless censorship to achieve utopia. But I would like to focus on your last paragraph - while I don't want you to go anywhere and thought this was a well written post, it seems like an odd take for the motte. If life is too short for even arguing and winning, what are you doing here? Just by posting here you are damaging the credibility of your argument, because the motte was built in response to the type of censorship you apparently approve of. By posting here you are demonstrating that you at least tacitly also approve of attempts to circumvent censorship.
I see paragraph structure as creating what a computer scientist would think of as a "scope". My sentence
is local to the paragraph, and part of the discussion of potent, recurring bad ideas.
I'm happy enough to debate Socialism_2.0. If I argue against Socialism_2.0 and win, I will consider the time well spent. But I notice that most advocacy for Socialism is for Socialism_1.0. It is advocacy for a straight repeat of policies that have failed and are doomed to fail. To argue against Socialism_1.0 and win is a terrible waste.
Perhaps you are uncomfortable placing yourself in my shoes. Fair enough. Try instead walking a mile in the shoes of those who advocate for Socialism_2.0. They notice that the arguments over Socialism_1.0 suck the oxygen out of the room. They cannot recruit opponents. They would like moderate push-back. If opponents take Socialism_2.0 seriously and point out flaws, that opens the way to correct the flaws, create Socialism_2.1 and see it adopted. They cannot recruit allies. Young people who are Socialist inclined have no patience for understanding why Socialism_1.0 will never work, nor for mastering the intricacies of Socialism_2.0 nor indeed for creating the intricacies of Socialism_2.0. In the world of endlessly recurring bad ideas, advocates of Socialism_2.0 are marginalised. There is no formal apparatus of censorship, and yet the ends towards which such an apparatus would be directed, are mysteriously achieved.
That said, what am I doing here? We both joined in September 2022. You have made 640 comments, I have made 17. I am not much "doing here". I am defeated by age and ill health. And also by the sense of the futility of political engagement. It is all so "Oh no! Not again!". I'm haunted by a comment that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, eleven years ago.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mPJu6d2jMwvGuB2BT/meta-karma-for-last-30-days?commentId=T4Tcz7GhhKFSCXuCc
Yudkowsky is concerned with the failure of websites. But what of the failure of whole societies? Do we need to focus our efforts positively? Does society as a whole need a banhammer to limit the costs of repeating impressive refutations of bad ideas?
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The problem is that banning discussions not only forbids bad ideas, but almost all new ideas. We don’t therefore progress as fast as we might as good ideas are kept out of discussions and therefore aren’t tried.
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And if your idea of idea suppressing is one of these great bad ideas? Precisely how much do you trust that it'll be the wise government that chooses which of these ideas is bad and which is not? We have better ways to remember now than ever and technology is nothing else is moving us forward. Lets not bet it all that we'll pick the right ideas to freeze in amber for all of time.
I half agree that the idea of censorship is a bad idea that ought to be suppressed. The factor of two in the denominator comes from splitting the concept of censorship into two. One of the rival positions is monocensorship. The other position is bicensorship.
Monocensorship is the traditional notion of a unitary system of censorship, with a Chief Censor who is a kind of Monarch. This is a much worse idea than it initially appears. The Chief Censor has three kinds of power: ideal power, armour power, network power.
Ideal power is the power to suppress bad ideas. It is what the Office of Censorship is for. Obviously this works badly. Some good ideas are suppressed because humans cannot reliably tell good from bad. Worse the Chief Censor is unsupervised. Yes, there are rules. This is to be blocked. That is to be permitted. But nobody gets to see what is blocked, so the Chief Censor gets to please himself and block whatever he disapproves of. It is built into the structure of Monocensorship that people don't know that permitted material is being blocked, because they don't get to see it.
Armour power. Criticism of the Chief Censor is the second victim of overreach. If you find out that your permitted political opinions are blocked, you will complain, and your complaints will also be censored
Network power. After a hundred years, the seventh Chief Censor gets a circle jerk going. The lazy and incompetent government bureaucracy make the lives of citizens miserable. If you complain, you get censored. Why? Try complaining about the Chief Censor. Your interactions with the bureaucracy will get even worse. The quid pro quo of the Chief Censor protecting the bureaucracy from criticism is that the bureaucracy retaliates against critics of the Chief Censor.
Bicensorhip is the idea of sacrificing the old to protect the young. There are two classes of people, Elders, say the over forties, and Juniors. Twenty-something Juniors hear rumours of Communism. They go looking and find tales of Gulags and Terror Famines and not much else. They notice the censorship and get told "you'll get the full story when you are an Elder."
Twenty years later our twenty-something Junior goes to his Elder Initiation and gets his access-all-areas pass. What was the full story of Communism? By the time he is forty, he has lived out the story of good intentions and bad consequences in his own life. He gets to read the positive advocacy for Communism and it seems a little off. How do they not see that it is going to end badly?
But what do I have in mind with "sacrificing the old to protect the young"? Think about Breatharianism, the idea that one can live on light, no food required. Some young people believe it. Mix together naivety, wishful thinking, and a touch of mental illness; some young people starve themselves to death. Censoring Breatharianism protects young people. Age and experience partially protect the Elders. But once in a while, an Elder gets his access-all-areas pass, discovers Breatharianism, becomes a believer and starves himself to death.
Don't old people deserve protection from bad ideas? Shouldn't we change from Bicensorship to Monocensorship to protect every-one, young and old? Think about the social dynamics of Bicensorship. There will always be a temptation to make the qualifying requirements for being an Elder a little bit stricter, and a little bit stricter, and a little bit stricter, until after a hundred years it has turned into Monocensorship. The social dynamic pits news stories of Elders being corrupted by uncensored pornography or reading Ted Kaczynsky and turning into primitivist terrorists, against abstract principles of having a large body of people with access-all-areas passes to keep an eye on the censors.
We see that Bicensorship and Monocensorship are mortal enemies. Those who believe in Monocensorship want to protect everybody, young and old. (The cynical take is that they fancy themselves as Chief Censor and hate Bicensorship because it cripples the power of the Chief Censor.) Those who believe in Bicensorship answer the call of duty and willing undertake the work of an Elder, exposing themselves to bad ideas to keep the Chief Censor in check and preserve young peoples access to good ideas that the Chief Censor doesn't like. (Cynically, you cannot abolish Eldership, because Elders love their weird porn, even as they accept that it is too weird for young people.) I could see the social dynamics of Bicensorship being stabilized by ruthless censorship of the idea of Monocensorship. Stories of Elders being corrupted by uncensored pornography are kept out of the news. The whole idea of protecting Elders from bad ideas is missing from common discourse. Those who advocate Monocensorship run into a brick wall:"censorship is about sacrificing the old to protect the young" is the thought terminating cliche that the NPC's chant back at them, and the idea of protecting the old from bad ideas gets no traction, even when it can evade censorship.
The fun part of this comment is normifying "A system of Bicensorship preserves itself by censoring the concept of Monocensorship.". Since normies hate neologisms, they have to merge Bicensorship and Monocensorship into just censorship. This leads to the normie version: "A system of censorship preserves itself by censoring the concept of censorship." Which sounds weird. If you force it to make sense you probably come up with a notion of censorship censoring the concept of censorship so that people don't have the words to understand what is going on. That changes the meaning. When Bicensorship protects itself by censoring Monocensorship all of the Elders are in on it and know what they are doing and why. Sometimes you really do have to coin new words and split an old word in two.
Or in other words, it's the paradox of tolerance; the idea that a tolerant bicensoring society is a contradiction in terms, since a bicensoring society will be destroyed by tolerating monocensorship yet cannot truly claim to be tolerant of everything if they censor it. This concept is intentionally misused by monocensorship proponents when it comes to certain things bicensorship permits elders to view.
It helps if the old aren't provided with excuses (in this case, economic) to hate the young in this regard; our requirement for "elder" was "physical adulthood" in the 1900s, was 18 by 1980, and we're closer to 25-30 now (the meme about "fully developed brains" is specifically designed to evoke and reinforce this viewpoint).
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If we could somehow ensure that the people doing the censoring had correctly learned the lessons of history that other people had failed to learn then this would be great. But ensuring that is about as hard an just ensuring that we all collectively remember those lessons in the first place.
I see an ambiguity in the notion of learning the lesson of history.
One version involves people poring over the history. Doing X didn't work last time. It didn't work the time before either. People make adjustments, informed by the past. They do X version 3. It doesn't work. Merde! Some commentators claim that the adjustments were silly and stood no chance of making a difference to the outcome. People knew the history and did X anyway because they don't learn from history.
An alternative version involves people ignoring the history. A few point out that X didn't work last time. One more knowledgeable person points out that it didn't work the time before that either. The naysayers get told "this time is different". The people saying "this time is different" know nothing of last time and know of no difference between this time and last time. But they want to do X and "this time is different" are the magic words that let you do X. They repeat X version 1 and it fails the same way it failed the previous two times.
I believe in both versions. Sometimes there is a real, but unsuccessful effort to learn from history. We say that people didn't learn from history, because we judge by results. But there was an honest effort. I see no reason to censor such efforts. Other times, only a few people study the history. They are unanimous: don't do it! But they get out voted, and X gets done with foreseeable bad results. If you were paying attention, you notice that the bad results were actually foreseen. We would be much better off if we censored those saying "We should do X. This time is different."
Well, that is my claim. I don't think it fails because it is hard to learn the correct lesson from history. I think that there are cases were a policy doesn't work in theory, doesn't work in practice, and those in the know, know. There are low hanging fruit, ripe for plucking. Society screws up because people ignore the history because they don't care.
But is my claim true? I think that the weakest point is that the power to censor is a power honey pot that will attract a lot of wasps. I'm talking of technocrats carefully selecting the low hanging fruit. But society is run by chancers and grifters who don't care whether the fruit hangs low or is ripe. They want power. They want money. If there is an Office of Censorship, they will fight to control it, planning to censor any-one who blocks their route to power and money. I don't know what to do with this insight. It proves too much. If I take it seriously I end up an anarchist and reject government and power structures entirely.
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I think “free” anything only really exists if a people share the same broad civic religion. The second that splits of the other because a legitimate threat no one believes in “free” anything.
I’m pro free speech when the marxists, the crt, Pride, etc are not a threat to me and are just some academic types discussing it in some liberal arts wing of universities. I’m very fine with limiting their speech etc when it hurts my quality of life. Or they’re actually convincing children they are trans and doing surgery on them.
I don’t want to live in the USSR. As long as the Marxist or even on the right are just some small 2% of people talking I don’t care. But I have no problem becoming authoritarian if I believe they might take over the institutions and turn us into a marxists country.
That’s the problem today. America no longer shares a core set of common values.
The other type of people you can have are Mormons who don’t challenge any core American people and largely self-isolate their differences. Though I guess it would be interesting if Mormons would change from the nice guys to enforcing power if their numbers approached say 30%.
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I'm reasonably on the inside, and this does not seem to be the case. HR (and DEI) was hit harder than most other areas, for example.
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I don't know what's actually happening, but reasoning about motivations, I'd expect the opposite.
Most people at Google are "woke" but they aren't true believers. In a Muslim society, they'd be religious. In WWII Germany, they'd be Nazis. They just go with the flow and want to advance their own career.
Meanwhile, the 5% (or whatever) of woke true believers make everyone's life miserable. Also, being a litigious bunch, they are hard to fire. Layoffs provide the perfect time to rid oneself of these troublemakers.
On the other hand, there are basically zero outspoken conservative activists at Google. That behavior was already a fireable offense. Any wrongthinkers are either keeping their head down, already gone, or more likely never hired in the first place.
Good points all around; thanks for assuaging my fears.
I’d say of that sort, in WWII Germany, they'd be “folk”: not hiding Jews, but not looking for them.
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I’m going to second this notion, in large part because it seems like the soft skills jobs that always had a bigger portion of true believers were harder hit.
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Something about the name “Wayward Axolotl” really makes me think “nRx.” I’m not sure why.
I must object, as usual, to the
slurcatchall term “globohomo,” which I find both imprecise and inflammatory. It equivocates between the hard power of a neoliberal consensus and the soft, cultural power of American idpol. While this is very handy for channers looking to gesture at the outgroup, it’s a terrible fit for this community.This is brought into relief when considering the military. I have no doubt that the higher echelon advocates quite strongly for globalism in the sense of foreign commitments, power projection, and military spending. I would not be surprised if they espoused a general sense of American exceptionalism while considering Russia and China both militarily and ideologically threatening. But what about gender politics? About race? Has the lumbering behemoth of the US military really internalized a narrative with less than 10 years of momentum?
Keep in mind that generals are not made in a day. Promotion in the American military is, no pun intended, quite regimented. You are looking at men and occasionally women with long service histories and longer lists of credentials. Consider the most recent candidate for a four-star position, Gen. Randy George. Aside from having one of the most red-tribe names I’ve ever seen, he has both enlisted and infantry officer experience, two Master’s degrees, a laundry list of command positions, and a combat paradrop. He is married with two children. I’m sure he’s also reasonably tactful and capable of saying all the right catchphrases.
It’s possible that this career soldier, who enlisted under Reagan and has more combat experience than this entire forum combined, is “fully globohomo.” I picked him knowing nothing other than that he was top of the pending appointments section on Wikipedia, so it’s also possible that he’s the exception rather than the rule. But is he what you’d expect to see from Democrats attempting to hollow out the military?
A military career is supposed to survive more than one president. It is intentionally very insulated from the back-and-forth of our politics. I think of the top brass as an oil mediating between transient politicians and the enormous inertia of the armed forces. They will make sure the garrisons get filled and the shipping keeps flowing. If that means making mouth-sounds about diversity or pushing around the MEPS requirements, so be it. Those changes are superficial compared to the business of projecting US power.
On the other hand, consider Charles Brown Jr., a career soldier who not only holds a higher position than Randy George (Chief of Staff of the Air Force), but was just today nominated by Biden to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest position in the US armed forces, short of being Commander-in-Chief. Besides being black, Brown came to national attention by releasing a video during the George Floyd riots where he expressed his sympathies for Floyd and displeasure with the law enforcement of the United States, and this video was released while he was a serving, uniformed officer, in flagrant contempt of the military code of conduct that frowns on servicemen weighing in on political conflicts while in uniform. Brown is also deeply concerned by how white the ranks of US military officers are, and intends to champion diversity and inclusion in future hiring and promotions of officers.
I think this is probably closer to what you'd expect to see from Democrats attempting to hollow out the military, and in fact today the Democratic President is proudly putting out press releases for Brown. For the record, I don't think Democrats actually want to hollow out the military or believe that's what they're doing, but I do think that, like many other issues involving race and culture, they are simply so far detached from reality that their intentions do not matter.
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Gays in the military is a lot older narrative, and they're well established.
E.g. did anything happen to the bunch of homosexual officers and enlisted who had a sex ring and were photograping themselves posing in fetish gear & uniform, on bases posting it around on public instagram, probably having orgies on bases and breaking military regulations in many, many ways ?
No, nothing, zero news whatsoever, as was predicted back in december.. In fact, the only 'change' is that some of the accounts on Twitter and on Instagram are now private, which is probably good.
So, weird pervs are now exempt from military rules as long as they're gay and pervy enough.
Others have been fired and investigated for somewhat less serious incidents, such as taping a re-enactment of a re-enlistment ceremony conducted while using a dinosaur hand puppet.. Within a week people were made to retire, dismissed from their posts, and iirc the NCO with the puppet was fired.
Here's the AF reddit post about the dog colonel that was of course removed by mods.
The assertion was about Biden and Obama’s “purges” of CW enemies in the top brass. This isn’t exactly the Joint Chiefs.
Do you happen to have another source for the “probably having orgies” squad? Redstate is seething a little hard, but you know, it’s tricky to Google this.
Yeah. They're a bunch of pup-play pervs who pose together in fetish gear all the time including in places where they shouldn't and they are not screwing each other.
We're talking about the demographic group that couldn't be arsed to stop having group sex parties when monkeypox, a rather painful and nasty non-fatal STD was going around.
Or just have sex parties but restrict themselves to people they knew well.
It kept spreading. All they had to do was stop having sex for a month.
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AdjectiveAnimal had to have gotten a giant boost from (sigh) the Xbox Live era. The default names suggested were of that form; I think they kind of became a touchstone. I’m not saying that neoreactionaries were heavily millennials and zoomers drawn from Xbox, but they were way more likely to be exposed to it. And socially aware enough to pick AdjectiveAnimal names instead of xX_SKULLWIZARD420_Xx.
I’m suspicious that there was a cutesy period to nRx, or at least to the adjacent wignats. Things like the baby-talking nazis or clown stuff.
I still have no idea why Punished “Catgirl” Kulak picked up that call sign.
I was following him on twitter before he blew up and started a substack. He just really liked catgirls and it stuck, plus it goes with a cool picture of a Rhodesian he found.
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Hard agree.
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Can you tie together the first part of your post (linking to a blog post about free speech) to the second part (baseless speculation that your outgroup is behaving like dicks)?
The two people that were laid off on my team were lower-than-senior engineers who hadn’t been promoted in a long time. From what I can tell this is the general advice given by consultants to upper management for figuring out who is a weak performer.
Ever since hearing that the word “politics” is best understood as “power”, I’ve been watching ridiculous and insane policies asking, “who benefits?” Since 2015, I’ve included what is and isn’t covered on the news. Layoffs might just be economically-forced layoffs, or a consolidation of something of value: indirect coordination of the like-minded/agreeable (power), programming and/or management competence, tribe/class membership, and so forth. I can no longer afford to not be cynical.
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I’ve heard similar from managers I know. The longer someone doesn’t move up, the more likely that they get a “do not counteroffer” note if they try to make demands. But then I haven’t worked through a period of layoffs yet.
One step further is "up or out". Some organizations proactively fire people who get stuck in low or middling positions. The point being to replace them with someone who is capable of growth.
This sounds like a great way to ruin a business. You have to wonder if these people have ever even heard of the Peter Principle.
To justify up or out a bit:
I've only personally seen it used on junior engineers. If someone is hired fresh out of school and is not progressing to full engineer, then they are a weakling and should be fired. But they don't do this to full engineers. You can spend the rest of your career not making senior engineer and they won't automatically fire you. And it would be an act of insanity to fire a well-performing senior engineer. No one "up or out"s people already in senior positions.
The US military practices some version of this for officers. If an officer isn't being promoted with some regularity then he is stuck at his position and blocking a more promising candidate from holding it and perhaps advancing further. Fail to be promoted in two consecutive promotion cycles, get kicked out regardless of ability at your current level.
But to argue against this justification:
Googling the military version of up or out shows people complaining about how it arbitrarily fires competent effective officers who perform great at their level and simply shouldn't be at higher levels. Should the Wehrmacht have fired Rommel because he'd never make a good general and was instead a great field marshal? How is that not like the insanity of firing a senior engineer for no reason other than he'll never be a director or VP?
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"Up or out" is an answer to the Peter Principle. The idea is the reason people stop being promoted is they've reached their level of incompetence, so it's time to get rid of them.
If I have a perfectly good spanner and I try and use it to recalibrate CERN I'm gonna have a bad time. That doesn't mean I should throw my spanner out, it means I should go back to using it as a spanner. The solution to the Peter Principle is to hit the promotions board with a rolled up newspaper, not to institute rolling firings on everyone that could possibly be promoted.
If it were one organization succumbing to the Peter Principle, you'd have a point. When it's pretty much all of them, doesn't matter how much you remonstrate with the promotions board, you won't solve the problem that way. Probably you can't tell someone has reached their level of incompetence until they do reach it, and since demotions come with far too much stigma, you can't move people back to a previous position. So your best bet is to drop them and start over.
Of course, "up or out" also reinforces the Peter Principle; it rules out people deciding to be comfortably competent in their position and not moving up. But the people at the top probably find that idea utterly foreign and somewhat reprehensible anyway.
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In my experience it's actually the opposite. Companies are laying off outspoken woke people and keeping the small-c conservative people who are just getting things done.
Two anecdotes:
At the tech company where I work, almost all of the outspoken woke people were laid off in the last year. The people remaining are disproportionately non-political. There's a lot of hard-working immigrants and non-political "true nerds" who just love the work.
Among my friends who work in different tech companies, none could be considered woke and none have been laid off. Weak evidence but it's something.
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Slim pickings at this point; they've already done a few rounds of that.
Link?
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Yes, but the domain of wrongthink expands by the day, rendering bits of prior orthodoxy obsolete. And programming is full of people who have difficulty with contradictions in the newest patch.
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I have a very progressive friend who was laid off from Google.
Thanks for the data point/anecdote.
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