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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32497 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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Inferential Distance: part 4 of ? Do You Think That's Air You're Breathing?

This post is an installment of an ongoing series.

@DaseindustriesLtd writes...

After you get out of jail, I would like to see an Inferential Distance episode where you finally explain your strange predilection to insist that people believe things they vociferously repudiate and belong to groups they consistently and vocally loathe.

...and to be fair, he and I have been going back and forth enough for long enough that I genuinely feel like I owe them an honest explanation. The short answer is that I am a genuine believer in this sub's core premise IE that "engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time". The long answer is to follow...

Long time readers will know that I've been going on for years about that Star Trek TNG episode Darmok and Jalad. For those unfamiliar, the premise and core conflict of the episode is summarized in this scene here. The idea being that without a shared narrative or frame of reference communication becomes difficult if not impossible. As observed by Dr Crusher, the image of "Julliet on her Balcony" would mean little to someone who has never been exposed to the works of Shakespear. An alternative for those more academically inclined might be to consider Wittgenstein's "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him". Long story short I actually agree with Wittgenstein here, but I also think that this is an obstacle that can be overcome and if anything, overcoming that obstacle is what this whole series is about.

As such, If you really want to understand what I'm doing here I urge you to watch Fight Club and The Matrix. These two movies were released about 6 months apart and came along at a very strange time in my life. My user-name "HlynkaCG" is, among other things, an obscure Fight Club reference. Hlynka/Hilinka being the Czech word for quicklime and a surname associated with makers of soap. These days the name is more closely associated with hockey but that too feels appropriate as an online "fighting nam". (See the old joke about going to a fight only for a hockey game to break out) In any case, being fresh out of high-school and just starting to realize that the vision that I had been harboring of my future was not going to come to pass, these films left me feeling "seen" in a way that I hadn't since I was a small child. This scene in particular had a profound effect on my outlook in life and it is one that I still find myself reflecting upon and seeing in new light over two decades later.

The extreme degree to which the modern secular mindset tries to insulate itself from the simple universalities of life and death is one of those things that I had never noticed it until it was pointed out to me, but once it had, I found it impossible not to notice. Every subtle (and not so subtle) "nudge" to accrue debt, consume [product], and engage with [latest thing], all seemed to come back to this impulse. The impulse to turn away from life. The Sheeple/NPC meme is rightly derided, especially when it's some angst riddled 19-20 year-old pushing it, but it feflected my sincere feelings at the time. I just couldn't understand how so many people could miss what now seemed so obvious to me. Could they not see where this path leads? Do those Raging Against the Machine not recognize that they themselves are part of it, that their whole existence depends on it?

Enter The Matrix.

I'm a huge fan of The Matrix, I'm even a fan of it's sequels. It is easily one of my favorite series. I'm not going to describe it as underrated or underappreciated because it's not. It was massively influential across multiple domains and basically set the tone of the early 2000s and 2010s. That said I do feel like it's often underestimated. There seem to be an endless stream blogposts and YouTube videos arguing something to the effect of "the Matrix is a lot smarter than you remember" or "the Matrix is a lot smarter than you remember" and they're both correct to some degree. The important and "underestimated" part in my eyes (and in the context of this post) is that the Matrix by presenting us with a narrative it provides the vocabulary needed to discuss a deep inferential gulf. the "red pill", the "blue pill", "cipher's speech", "freeing one's mind", No one can be told what the matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.

So to finally get to the meat of @DaseindustriesLtd's question, let's adress with the elephant in the room.

Identity politics is bullshit.

To be clear, I'm not saying that I don't like it, or that I disagree with it's policy proscriptions. I'm saying that it's bullshit, all of it. Identity politics is a load of incoherant post-modernist nonsense that actively diminishes an individual's ability to understand basic human psychology/behaviors and make accurate predictions about the world. In short, identity politics makes people stupider. It makes people stupid because as with a lot of other post-modernist academic fads it gets cause and effect, source and sink, exactly backwards.

Marcus Aurelius admonishes us to look upon each particular thing and ask what is it's nature? IE what does it do? where does it come from? How does it behave? The answers you get are what that thing is. Scott wrote about this idea at length in The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories but veared away from the what ought to have been the logical conclusion at the last moment rather face it squarely. Identity, to the degree that it represents something meaningful and real, exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified. Dylan Mulvaney can identify as woman all he likes but it but it wont make him a biological female any more than my identfying as a LGM-118 Peacekeeper Missile means that the US government must report on my movements in accordance with the START treaty.

Dase asks from whence "my predeliction" comes, and my reply is whether someone identifies as a progressive or expresses loathing towards "the woke" is not the point. The point is how do they behave? what beliefs do they espouse? and where do they come from? My position is that somebody who behaves like a progressive, comes from a progressive background, and who argues progressive talking points, is for all practical intents and purposes a progressive regardless of how they might identify. Identity exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified.

Which brings us back to the Matrix. The reason that various flavors of failed progressive seem to gravitate towards an ideology resembling early-mid 20th century fascism (as opposed to some flavor of conservatism) is that fascism is a fundamentally progressive ideology. They might take the red pill but they never manage to free thier minds. They want to continue believing that the world runs on inductive logic when any game involving multiple agents is going to be anti-inductive. They want to quibble some group's position within the intersectional stack rather than question the validity of the stack as a concept. They cling to psuedo-marxist nonsense about group/class consciousness and group/class differences to salve their own wounded pride. They still seem to think that they can appeal to some non-existant higher authority with words like "academic consensus" and "studies show". In other words they still think that's air they are breathing.

At the risk of eating another ban I think that it is quite possible for both of the following statements to be true...

The median east African has a room temperature IQ.

The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.

The thing that struck me about Africa when I was living there back in 2012-13 was that everyone had a hustle or three, the people who didn't have some sort of hustle going were bums, as in literally destitute. There's nothing like neccesity to narrow one's focus. Truth is I don't think guys like Bryan Caplan or Elizer Yudkowski can even hold a candle to the average Kenyan Cabby, in terms of observational astuteness, number of languages spoken, or real-time problem solving ability and there is no study you can cite that will convince me otherwise because the entire institution of social science is a fucking joke.

Truth is that primary goal of academia is not to educate, it is to sort winners from losers on the basis of academic aptitude and ability to flatter one's professor. The reason your professors graded on a curve was that your professors were lazy and stupid. After all "Why go through the trouble of designing your test so that only X% of students can answer 90% of the questions when you can just hand out the test as is and set the threshold for an A at the Xth percentile of correct responses?". At the end of the day it is much easier to get students to compete amongst themselves than it is to accurately grade their understanding/uptake of the material. This in turn comes back to what I've said before about how it is combativeness, not consensus, nor the desire to please that produces truth.

I couldn't help but think about this comment when reading Tyler Cowen's latest post. A modern academic, normally completely sequestered from the realities of life and death, existential struggle, catches a glimpse of multi-agent games.

It sometimes feels like the biggest inferential distance for me is between the typical motte poster you describe and myself, despite the hugely similar surface level appearances.

I'm on OG motter, I came over as a moderator from the culture war thread on slatestarcodex. You know this, because (for those who don't know) you were there with me.

I'm a systematizer, I liked reading some of Elizer's fictional works, Bryan Caplan has long been an intellectual north star for me, I often dislike getting my hands dirty, I doubt I would have made it through a week of boot camp, and I'd certainly be lost and hopeless in a foreign country etc etc.

Still, I read your posts and I never think "that is me he is talking about". It is like describing to a fish that a fish is creature that swims in water. The fish looks around and sees other fish and thinks "oh those things".

Anyways weird personal feelings aside, or maybe because of them, I feel like I've already grokked these insights you have to bring.

Humans are adaptive. And when we live in a world of systemetizers we shall get good at systemetizing. When we live in a world of multilingualism, multi-businesses, and multi-cons we shall get good at that too.

To a large extent I think the world of academics and systemitizing has not arisen out of anyone or anything's desire for control, but as a natural competitive process among humans. Our big useless brains are peacock feathers. Adaptiveness is hot and sexy, and to be so adaptive that you can waste a bunch of resources on something that is not adaptive is even hotter! The original academics were all bored out of their minds landed aristocrats. Pick almost any philosopher / thinker / scientist from the 17/18/19th century and they were nearly all independently wealthy. Those aristocrats had won the game of life so badly that they had to invent a new game just to keep playing.

The enlightenment was a great accident. A result of man's competitive nature hitting a wall. A wall that meant that the best of them had all sort of won. Or at least couldn't figure out how to clearly win any harder than they already had. The new game they created was enlightenment about the physical world. Eventually they seemed to tire of that game as well, and they went back to killing each other to prove who was best. We ended up with the absolute tragedy of the world wars, and a century of the elites trying to strut their dicks around like fucking cavemen. A tragedy, but a predictable, and expected one.

I think of all the competition in the modern world as a game. Its not really for survival, unless someone chooses to make it about survival (which they often do). And I fully get that I am playing a game, and that it is very different than the struggle that is survival.

It is fathers day. My father has always epitomized a yearning to have that struggle for survival. He joined the army just as the vietnam war was ending. He was disappointed that he wouldn't get to go over and kill the [ethnic slurs]. He loved camping, hiking, cross country running, collecting knives, hunting small game, carpentry, and construction. I use past tense because he is old and does fewer of these things nowadays, and has mellowed out with the copious amounts of marijuana he consumes.

He was always terrible at playing "the game". He always managed to be on the wrong side of office politics anytime there was cleansing. There was always a bitterness he carried through life as he never seemed to understand why he kept losing at the soft things in life.

In contrast, my mother plays politics like a champ. Well enough that I can't always tell if she knows what she is doing, or has just been doing it so long it is second nature. She was nearly in the c-suite at a company that had billions in revenue a year before she retired.

So I get it when guys watch fight club and the matrix get that feeling that the world is fucked up. We are animals damnit! Our instincts and our bodies are not meant for these soft games of politics! We are meant to fight for survival, to truly struggle, and to be beaten by the world not by our fellow people! I get it. I feel the same way.

But I grew up watching my dad yearn for that world that doesn't exist, and I think it broke him hard enough to make me and my brother come out pre-broken. I'm not gonna live wishing for a world that doesn't exist. I've got the world as it is, and I don't plan to be a sucker that loses to the soft men and women of the world. And by being unwilling to lose to them, I have become a soft man myself.

Long rambling to say, we won too hard at the struggle of survival. Now everything is just games of competition, and losing isn't fun.

Here I am reading Nietzsche like a chump where I just consume popular culture like Fight Club to learn how we are socialized into obidient little slaves to the "Machine". All that to have the fleeting experience of escaping the cave of our social conditioning we have known for over two millenia. Catching a glimpse of the outside and then heading right back into our schackles staring at the shadows because we think that there is nothing more to be learned. But alas there is...

The machine/system/society strives towards totalitarianism through techonology, even if the technology doesn't work in reality. To quote "Industrial Society and Its Future" from the recently deceased Theodore Kaczynski

But it is not in the interest of the system to preserve freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is in the interest of the system to bring human behavior under control to the greatest possible extent.

Every piece of media you have quoted is only there to give you glimpse of the truth and then having you heading back into the cave to service the machine. I have also learned a glimpse of the truth but I have no intention of stopping trying to learn more.

Thank you for taking the time and effort to write these posts. As I understand it, your argument is more or less as follows:

  • There is a large inferential distance between yourself, as a former soldier and a representative of the Red tribe, and most of us on this forum, who went to university young and are mostly some form of international knowledge worker.

  • This is not something we can see ourselves. The equipment being used to do the looking gets in the way of the looking. As with the matrix, only a situation that forcibly relocates our worldview will allow us to see what you're getting at.

  • This inference gap, to the extent that we're capable of seeing it, is basically that we ultimately see things in a systemising, academic way. We are armchair professors who sit down and discuss abstract ideas like race, class, representation. We believe in the existence and importance of Society with a big S. We spend most of our lives in urban environments where social convention and rules are more relevant than fundamental natural laws.

  • Because we discuss in those terms, we're incapable of stepping back and seeing that this is all just people. By discussing the culture war, we inevitably find ourselves seeing the world on the culture war's terms. You aren't sitting in traffic, you are traffic.

  • Therefore it is acceptable to describe the average Mottizen as a progressive, even if we vehemently reject that classification, because ultimately it's true. From the perspective of one who can stand outside, we are part of a modern movement which uses a lens that is fundamentally incompatible with what we say we would like to conserve.

@HlynkaCG This is a bit short and muddled, but how close is it? I have thoughts but will put them in a different comment.

@HlynkaCG This is a bit short and muddled, but how close is it?

Pretty damn close, in particular the observation that "you aren't stuck in traffic, you are the traffic." is a framing that I wouldn't have thought of myself but kind of wish I had because it I feel like it accurately conveys the broader idea that I am trying to get at. Now take that principle and apply it wholesale to the sort of people who say things like "but it's society that is to blame". Bro, you are the society.

There is a large inferential distance between yourself and most of us… This is not something we can see ourselves. The equipment being used to do the looking gets in the way of the looking.

The irony here is that this (and I do think what you’ve written here is an accurate summary of Hlynka’s position) is a very postmodern view of knowledge and discourse. It’s something that Foucault or Derrida easily could have written themselves.

Well, yes. One of the things that I would really like Hylnka to write about is what this inferential distance means for his understanding of the average Mottizen’s position.

EDIT: I think there’s something to it, though. I write a bit about it below but in the last few years my understanding of the world had several big shifts. There’s an impossible-to-describe difference between intellectually analysing position that position and feeling in your bones that it’s true. I have a friend who is a pretty serious conspiracy theorist and on occasion I can just about get close enough to feel his viewpoint from the inside. It’s vertiginous, a cascading loss of trust that produces a completely different understanding of the world. Discussing it from the outside is much easier and more comfortable.

Well, yes. One of the things that I would really like Hylnka to write about is what this inferential distance means for his understanding of the average Mottizen’s position.

I would like to open by freely conceding that I may very well be wrong. These are only my own personal impressions that I am describing.

But my understanding average Mottizen’s position is that they expect things to make inductive sense. they expect the world to be coherent, simple, and readily systemitizable. The absolute last thing they want to hear is that their "one weird trick" wont work, and that reality is naturally messy unpredictable and analog. Multi-agent problems will naturally resist systematization, but that wont stop them from trying.

My position is that the alleged "sense making crisis" so many rationalists are fretting about is not a crisis at all, It is simply how things have always been.

I might not fit into average...

they expect things to make inductive sense. they expect the world to be coherent, simple, and readily systemitizable.

I do believe this. But I also think we (as humans) will never be up to the task. Our models will get better (than other models) but will never be perfect (always wrong).

My one weird trick might might be useful but it will always fail eventually. I know this... And if I can understand why it wont work, I might be able to improve my weird trick.

:marseyshrug:

(Continued from the above)

I have some innate sympathy with this position, because I have personally known very intelligent people who had blindspots you could drive a bus through and they couldn't see it however gently you led them.

I used to think somewhat similarly to you (perhaps, inferential distance and all that). I was a Cameron Conservative in the UK (kind of like a Reaganite conservative in the US). I really believed in colourblindness, and treating everyone as an individual, and in equality of opportunity. I scoffed at left-wing abstractions like the Establishment, manufactured consent, class conflict. Most of my extended family were army officers.

And then the wind changed.

Without any particular intention to do so, I got caught up in a proto-Culture War conflicts in 2015/2016. I won't bore you with the details, but I learned very quickly that what was said did not matter. There was no meaningful possibility of persuasion. The way you won conflicts was by controlling the people who were in the room to vote. The usual mechanisms for that were to get the committee secretary to slip in lots of boring business before the meaty stuff, so that anyone who didn't care enough to listen through hours of bullshit and miss supper left, and by making life miserable enough for the people who stayed that they didn't come back. I also learned that it's impossible for a man to win a public argument with a crying woman.

The Brexit vote happened maybe a year later. The pattern was stark. Mostly the university staff (cooks, cleaners, etc. were in favour). Every single academic and student was against. Every. Single. One. Even outside academia, again and again I would find myself the only one in the room. At best people would be interested, at worst they would say vile things without even considering the possibility that someone like me could exist. (Those who expressed doubts about mass vaccination during Covid will recognise the feeling). The Establishment did exist, and I'd just fallen out of it.

By your taxonomy, maybe this makes me a failed progressive, I'm not sure. But what I feel like is a failed Conservative. I tried to be an individualist and I found that in this place and at this time, individualism is wrong. There really do exist mass movements of people that you describe with an abstraction like "whites" or "blacks" or "the Establishment". In a world ruled by identarian leftists, which one of those groups you get pattern-matched to, and the relative status of that group, really does matter - it changes what you can do, what you can say, and the consequences for doing so.*

The live-and-let-live rugged individualism that I think you would like us to follow is not adaptive. A predator has appeared that exploits its weaknesses with great efficiency. The Kendi card beats the MLK card at trumps. You can sit there in splendid isolation as you lose your money, happy that you stayed true to yourself, or you can find a different card.

I don't know what that card looks like. Accusations of anti-semitism were very powerful against Corbyn, groomer discourse seems to get somewhere. To be honest, I think it's too late for the UK - we've imported too many immigrants and we have too few children. We are going to be cursed with a permanent disaffected ethnic minority and the resultant identity politics from now on and I can't see anything we can do about it in the time left. So it goes, I guess.

But if you are sure that the most important thing for conservatives is that they hold fast and don't get seduced by the poison of identity politics, please consider it possible that you might be wrong.

*I have a strong feeling that you are going to say, "Nope, you can say and do whatever you like. That's your decision, and the consequences will be whatever they are." Bugger that. There was a time I didn't have to self-immolate to have a sensible conversation and I want that time back, please. And call me a coward, but if I'm going to kamikaze I want a reasonable estimated return on investment.

The live-and-let-live rugged individualism that I think you would like us to follow is not adaptive.

Say rather, it will not maximize material outcomes when you are the only one doing it.

On the other hand, nothing good will ever happen unless a critical mass of people do it.

Further, no critical mass is possible if everyone else is waiting for others to do it first.

Finally, there are things more important than maximized material outcomes.

The game-theoretic logic you are describing is doomed. People adopting this logic is why everything is going to shit. It cannot make things better, only worse. Self-immolation is not necessary, yet, but what will keep it at bay is for people to live by worthwhile axioms, rather than sinking to the level of their environment. That doesn't mean walking into the office and laying down truth-bombs until you're dragged bodily from the premises. It does mean figuring out what your principles are, and living by them, regardless of the outcome.

There is a problem with your claim. Game-theory was once the best argument in favor of individualism. Game theory predicted that communism would fail because of the incentives. If people had been ready to ignore their own interests for the greater good, then individualism would have had a harder time. And how do you justify the sacrifices for individualism, if you are individualistic? It seems to me it makes no sense.

I think it touches the core of the problem, the heart of the internal contradiction of the american patriotism (or any kind of disinterested attachment to individualism). On one side, there is the individualism that you have learnt to love, and on the other side the attachment that you feel for it; you feel it so strongly that you are ready to sacrifice yourself for it. The problem is that both are contradictory.

Game theory is individualistic (it assumes everyone follows his own interests), yet it predicts that individualism will sometime be sub-optimal. It's like saying that saving America requires more state intervention, but more state intervention will destroy what America stands for. If what I just said is true, then America (or the world individualist party if you prefer) is doomed.

Fair enough. Serious question: What is your plan for obtaining a critical mass?

From where I am standing, you and I are the possessor of exactly one human body each. Those bodies exist in the vicinity of many, many other bodies and so, whether either of us like it or not, they must contend with game theory.

The power of tyranny comes from fear. Fear is generated and maintained by observing punishment. Every time someone stands up for their principles without a plan to survive doing so (or at least to extract net benefit), I believe they are making of themselves a sacrifice to feed what they hate. So the outcome matters. Whether your beliefs work in situ matters. I’m not arguing for nihilistic pursuit of gain, but I am arguing for pragmatism, and sacrificing your lower-level principles when they’re sabotaging your ultimate ones.

I think we are going to have to suffer. As long as you require a reasonable return on your investment you will remain hostage to the powers that be.

The obvious question in such a case is who has the gun to who's head? If you try to take me hostage, I'll take you hostage first. You didn't really think the gun to the head was a metaphor did you?

So what would be an example of a situation in which you'd start non-metaphorically holding up people with Gun and expect it to help?

Well I don't have a gun, which is my biggest problem (second biggest: explaining why this is a problem to Australians). But my point is that we hold it to our own heads when we try to play by stable society rules in an unstable society.

From where I am standing, you and I are the possessor of exactly one human body each.

I have a family, so that's a couple-dozen people right there. I have a church, which is upwards of a thousand more. I have a state and, at least nominally, a political party, and finally a tribe. All of these can be encouraged, strengthened, grown, built-up, in ways small and large. The best way to avoid the problems of atomic individualism is to not be an atomic individualist.

The power of tyranny comes from fear.

Fear is a choice. It works by threatening things, and leveraging your desire to preserve them. The truth, however, is nothing can in fact be preserved. Death comes to all men soon or late. Everything you have will one day soon be gone, and this realization can be internalized, to a lesser or greater extent. Doing so immunizes you against fear to the degree the internalization is successful.

I am all for being intelligent, understanding the reality of the situation, and having a plan. What I have found, personally, is that your plan needs to account for the very real possibility that you will suffer significant losses, and you need to make peace with that reality in advance. Here is an example of what that peace looks like, from a time when people were trying to deal with a novel emergent threat of apparently titanic proportions. If one cannot grasp this peace, fear will never cease to cast the deciding vote.

This is not, I think, something that Rationalism is good at, speaking at least from my own meager attempts to apply it. Rationalism is about winning, about optimization, about superior planning leading to everything working out after all. This is one of the major reasons why I don't think Rationalism is actually a workable approach to cognition; it doesn't seem to encourage the sort of gambles that life requires, and its obsession with calculation self-defeats due to unaccounted errors.

In any case, some values are subordinate to others, true enough. But terminal values are not created equal, and "survival" is a very poor and quite doomed one. "Success" is not much better. "Defiance" is better than either, and "Virtue" better still.

This is one of the major reasons why I don't think Rationalism is actually a workable approach to cognition; it doesn't seem to encourage the sort of gambles that life requires

After the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, people were criticizing rationalism/EA for the exact opposite reason, i.e., that it encouraged him to take a gamble and risk major losses just because the expected value was positive, and that without rationalism/EA he would have been more risk-averse.

Stupid, illegal bets with other peoples' money != doing the right thing even if the evidence indicates it's going to cost you dearly. The arguments I saw about SBF's gambles rather underscored the point: I recall people claiming that the fraud made sense by EA principles, because even though he and his business got burned, he donated a lot of money first (apologies if this is misrepresenting the arguments, but it's my basic recollection). This is very, very far from anything I would recognize as "doing the right thing because it's right, even at significant cost, even with no reasonable expectation of a payoff." For starters, it's the difference between accepting hardship and inflicting hardship on others. I can see how hardcore utilitarians might disagree, but that's one of the reasons I'm not a utilitarian.

I have a family, so that's a couple-dozen people right there. I have a church, which is upwards of a thousand more. I have a state and, at least nominally, a political party, and finally a tribe. All of these can be encouraged, strengthened, grown, built-up, in ways small and large. The best way to avoid the problems of atomic individualism is to not be an atomic individualist.

Will any of these groups stand with you if you go against larger society? I've found not only will they not, but the opposite is true. Family is not support but control and hostages; if your family cannot directly coerce you, you will be coerced into going along by implicit or explicit threats of harm to them if they continue (e.g. if you lose your job how will you support them?). Other organizations will warn you not to make trouble because it reflects on them, and expel you if you continue regardless. They may claim to support your position but in fact they will tell you it's not worth it to fight any particular battle. And of course they're right, because the juggernaut state can crush them as easily as it can crush you.

You can 'solve' the problem of atomic individualism by not being an atomic individualist. But that just replaces it with the problem of being a collectivist, which is that nobody gets a say except the head of an independently-powerful faction.

Will any of these groups stand with you if you go against larger society?

Yes, they will.

e.g. if you lose your job how will you support them?

I'll get a different job. In the meantime, my parents and siblings, and my wife's, and members of our church will be happy to house us.

Other organizations will warn you not to make trouble because it reflects on them, and expel you if you continue regardless.

Some organizations will do that, definately. Not my church, I don't think, at least not for reasons I wouldn't consider valid before the fact, and hence would not engage in.

They may claim to support your position but in fact they will tell you it's not worth it to fight any particular battle. And of course they're right, because the juggernaut state can crush them as easily as it can crush you.

The crushing seems to be slowing of late, and much remains un-crushed. In any case: "If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up." And also: "The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one".

What victory are you, personally, willing to accept other than one that comes at no cost to your comfort? If there's a fight and my side wins but we're stuck living with the damage long-term, I can live with that. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that you are not, because long-term diminished standards of living re just another form of loss to you. Am I mistaken?

Then you get a lot more support than I have ever seen. Perhaps you are simply higher status; in any organization I have been in, the organization's needs (meaning those of the people running it) come first, second, and last.

What victory are you, personally, willing to accept other than one that comes at no cost to your comfort?

I no longer believe in victory.

If there's a fight and my side wins but we're stuck living with the damage long-term, I can live with that. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that you are not, because long-term diminished standards of living re just another form of loss to you. Am I mistaken?

I could live with that as well, but your side seems mostly unwilling to fight and if they did would likely be unable to win. Those on your side in power hold to principles the other side cynically turns against them, even to the point where they enforce those principles against their own side but not the other (e.g. see the recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act). The rest retreat believing that perhaps THIS TIME, they will not be chased... and if they are, well, there's always victory after death, as both you and Hlynka have claimed. I'm not religious and not a born Red Tribe person; I have nowhere to retreat to and I do not believe in anything after death.

The median east African has a room temperature IQ.

The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.

This isn't just wrong, it's antagonistically wrong. You do not understand what intelligence is. You do not understand what identity or progressivism is either. By your own epistemology, I don't even have to back this up with any kind of serious reasoning or source, I can just state and restate it, likening it to some pop-culture concepts (in an admittedly artful way).

But since I have a better and clearer method of thought, I'll explain. Intelligence is not whether you can hustle or are observationally aware, or can speak many languages. A meercat can be observationally aware. Intelligence is the capacity for abstraction, logic, planning, critical thinking and so on. It's precisely and ironically what you're doing and what the median East African is not doing. Even if you go by Taleb's 'intelligence is about making money rather than passing tests' concept, we can be confident that East Africa is not a particularly intelligent place. If East Africans are so smart, why aren't they living like kings on a programming salary (as many motte posters do)? Why aren't people sifting through Africa for cheap programming talent, as is done in India or Eastern Europe?

Societies composed of intelligent people have enormous amounts of machinery to do their work for them. Societies composed of unintelligent people murder their children in witchcraft rituals to this very day: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-02/witchcraft-child-sacrifice-uganda-victims/11248026

As for 'fascism is progressive', not in any useful way. Would a fascist agree with a liberal that 'there is a role for politics in improving society'? Yes, of course. But the ideas they support are totally different, based on different values and goals, with a wildly different understanding of what improving society looks like.

Furthermore, when most people say progressive, they mean the blue-haired they/them, not the SS officer. Calling fascists progressive introduces unnecessary confusion and anger. Even more confusion is added by reactionaries, who are in some ways progressive (in wanting a radical change to society) and other ways reactionary, wanting to go back. We should classify political beliefs by their goal, not in their desire to change things.

Finally, everyone is progressive from some point of view. Say you're against child sacrifice to appease the spirits and want some kind of political action to prevent it. You're seeking a progressive stance in certain parts of Uganda! Every institution we have today was progressive once. Even you are a progressive, you just want a different direction and mode of travel to other people. Do you see how the meaning you have assigned the word becomes worthless and shallow?

Identity politics is similar. It exists. It is political. America or China might well be an 'imagined community' full of people who feel solidarity with eachother, yet they are still enormously powerful entities. People will rally around the flag, a piece of fabric with some ink on it. People will fight and die for their identity. It can't get much more real than that! You can't just smear it as being bullshit when identity rules the world, forms the world, is the substance that social structures are made of.

As for 'fascism is progressive', not in any useful way.

I liked most of your post, but this I totally disagree with. Progressives basically agree with fascists on tactics, and delude themselves in some ways to convince themselves they don't also agree on policy. The only real difference is a who/whom not on what prescriptions are to be once you figure out who is the baddie. Its always centralized power with plausible deniability when everything goes pear shaped.

The median east African has a room temperature IQ.

The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.

I don't think this statement is in any way banworthy, but it is rather ironic. Because you're basically arguing the "multiple types of intelligence" theory, which is just a step away from blank slateism (everyone is equally talented and has equal potential, just in different ways).

It reminds me of something. Ah yes-

Gathering knowledge of abstract items, from words to equations, that have no relation to our everyday lives has long been the amusement of the leisured elite. Relegating the non-elite to the basement of intellect because they do not know as many abstractions has been the conceit of the elite.

What if we measured literacy by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environment: how much individuals knew all those complex equations and verbal and nonverbal vocabularies of their everyday life?

What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know? What if we measured intellect by how open an individual’s mind is to self-critique and new ideas?

Given that you seem to be echoing Ibram X. Kendi, maybe there is something to your theory that a lot of right-wingers are actually just parroting woke ideas.

I don't know if I have the right to call myself a Mottizen, but I'm not getting bent out of shape about this and I certainly didn't take Hlynka to be saying we're all stupid.

There's book smarts and street smarts, and the East African guy probably has a ton more street smarts to survive in his environment whereas we'd be robbed, rolled, knifed, and left in the gutter if we were plonked down there.

Plus, me am stupid too so I can't object to the characterisation, and I've had people call me dumb in online exchanges much more directly because I wouldn't kiss their... shoes about their special snowflakeness.

😁

If you want to get Hlynka banned, man up about it (even if you identify as female) and ask for it directly instead of doing the "Mommy, he said mean word about me!" dance.

I don't know if I have the right to call myself a Mottizen

Is there any right needed besides being on here? You have over a thousand comments, not many can say that.

Amadan seemed unable to see this, so I was attempting to enlighten him. It failed, as it usually does.

Oh hey, now I know who you are. Just like old times, I guess.

Anyway, the point is not whether a statement is, in theory, banworthy. Of course you could construe the quoted words as being banworthy. Fortunately for everyone, "use the most pedantic interpretation that could be considered a violation of one or more rules" is not how we do things.

Way to miss the point buddy.

I'm not arguing that the median Mottizen is retarded, I'm arguing that IQ has only a tenuous bearing on actual intelligence or ability to function.

Isn’t the general understanding among the HBD crowd that IQ and g are distinct. IQ may be a decent approximating of g for lack of a better measurement.

I presume that if someone has above average g, they will be able to easily navigate whatever environment they find themself.

Some environments reward g a lot more than others. For example, in a food-scarce environment, it might be beneficial to be really small, and people with bigger brains might actually be hurt by the extra caloric needs. This happens in isolated communities, supposedly, and is why Homo floresiensis became small and dumb. In other environments, perhaps size and martial vigor are more useful, harkening back to the old debate between Odyseus and Ajax.

It is only in environments where there are options that intelligence becomes important. If all you can do is scratch a living out of the ground, perhaps g does not matter so much. In contrast, perhaps it matters a lot more for hunters.

The statement implies that most posters here on TheMotte.org are mentally retarded (in the sense that their IQ is less than 70, which I presume is room temperature). That is a personal attack on people reading this and would normally be the subject of a ban.

I don't think you are being ingenuous. If you read his entire post, he's very clearly not saying he thinks most posters on the Motte have sub-70s IQs. His entire point is that IQ is not a reliable measure of "intelligence." Agree with him or don't, but engage with what he's actually saying.

I did read his whole point and I know that was what he was arguing. That does not make the quoted piece not offensive if taken out of context.

Then don't take it out of context.

Credit where credit is due.

Amusingly if we follow this line of thing to its natural and logical conclusion, we arrive back at MLK's dream of a world where people are judged by the content of their character rather than skin color or group affiliation. IE the precise thing that Kendi finds so problematic.

We’re still waiting for one of your high-effort “Inferential Distance” posts to produce a single new insight or argument that hasn’t already been repeated by you in tons of smaller comments over the years. This was literally just a long-winded (and full of misspelled words and poor grammar) restatement of the exact same argument you’ve made 10,000 times.

You mock people who want to “consoom product” on the one hand, but on the other hand the only new content you produced in this post is extolling the supposedly profound insights of two massively-popular Hollywood films.

You brought up the Wittgenstein quote about how if a lion could speak, we would not understand him. Well, the lion also would not understand us! We could maybe glean an interesting window into the thought processes of an alien mind, if we really cared to listen and to parse things out over iterated conversations; meanwhile, there are entire constellations of subject matter which intelligent humans could try and make the lion comprehend - particle physics, the principles of compound interest, comparative linguistics - and he just wouldn’t have any hope of grasping any of it. Firstly because his brain simply does not have anywhere near the level of raw computing power that even a below-average human’s brain does, but also because he would find all of it utterly uninteresting and would not bother to try and grasp it.

I’m not saying you’re as dumb as a mere beast, Hlynka. But I am saying that your posts on this topic grow more and more tedious each time, because you continue to fail to demonstrate that you’re even making a cursory attempt to understand, or learn anything from, or synthesize, any of the counterarguments we offer. You can shout “identity politics is bullshit” three trillion times into the void, but if every time some smart person offers a sophisticated rebuttal and you don’t integrate that rebuttal into your worldview at all, people will justifiably begin to lose interest in you.

You brought up the Wittgenstein quote about how if a lion could speak, we would not understand him. Well, the lion also would not understand us! We could maybe glean an interesting window into the thought processes of an alien mind, if we really cared to listen and to parse things out over iterated conversations

Yes, that's the joke. And here you are getting angry about how said alien mind stubbornly refuses to conform expectations. What a prick. Why cant they just be "reasonable" IE not alien.

This isn’t about being “reasonable”, it’s about the fact that you keep repeating the same argument over and over, providing little to no additional scaffolding to support it, and basically never respond to specific criticisms of specific claims, nor show any sign that you’re even listening to the actual words any of us are saying. Your problem isn’t “Inferential Distance”, it’s an “Inferential Moat”. You intentionally insulate yourself from our attempts to bridge the inferential distance, content to lob infinite reiterations of the same tired general-purpose argument over the carefully-constructed mental fortifications you’ve erected to avoid ever having to grow or have your mind changed about anything by anybody from your hated outgroup.

We’re still waiting for one of your high-effort “Inferential Distance” posts to produce a single new insight or argument that hasn’t already been repeated by you in tons of smaller comments over the years. This was literally just a long-winded (and full of misspelled words and poor grammar) restatement of the exact same argument you’ve made 10,000 times.

Yeah dude, do you get tired of @SecureSignals constantly reiterating the same talking points over and over 10,000 times? Or do you eagerly wait for his next epistle on why you should hate the Jews?

This is not a mod warning, because you're allowed to criticize people and tell them you don't like their posts, but it's borderline, because if all you have to say is "I don't like you and I don't like your posts," maybe you should just skip them instead of writing a tirade. You get a pass because at least you picked at a few specific things to refute. But I also noted the "I’m not saying you’re as dumb as a mere beast, Hlynka" apophasis.

But I also noted the "I’m not saying you’re as dumb as a mere beast, Hlynka" apophasis.

This was not an apophasis at all, but merely a way to proactively head off that interpretation at the pass. I understood the way that the lion analogy might be perceived, and I was genuinely attempting to make clear that the intent was not to call Hlynka stupid. I have made no secret that I find Hlynka’s oeuvre tedious and of very little intellectual value, but I don’t think it’s because he’s not smart enough to do better. If I thought he was too dumb to learn, I wouldn’t keep replying to him in an attempt to get him to learn.

Say what you will about SecureSignals, but every time somebody refutes or challenges on of his points, he has a well-sourced and effortful response that addresses the specifics of the challenge. I myself have argued with him multiple times, and I’ve explicitly told him that he has failed to adequately meet challenges to some of his claims. He also has many users here who take shots at his claims, and who are far more knowledgeable about the subject matter than I am; are you suggesting that I’m not allowed to argue with Hlynka unless I also spend equal time arguing with every other user?

a well-sourced and effortful response

Mostly, he has responses full of lies and terribly-sourced claims. I'll take someone writing about their own beliefs over someone distracting away from their lies with even more lies any day.

In any case, being fresh out of high-school and just starting to realize that the vision that I had been harboring of my future was not going to come to pass, these films left me feeling "seen" in a way that I hadn't since I was a small child.

That's fascinating, because I saw the movie and then sought out the book, and both seemed very male to me, the movie in particularly - a young man's vision of the world, when he's drifted into adulthood and so cannot rely on his parents shielding him from the world any longer, but without roots or attachments (like marriage and family) to anchor him.

So it really is - to me - a young guy going "wow, real truths!" but give him another ten to fifteen years of life and he'll grow out of it.

EDIT: That scene is also pointless damage. Yes, learn to face pain and endure, but that scene ends up with a suppurating wound which will need to be treated or else he will suffer more damage and may even lose the use of the hand. Ridiculous vaunting for the sake of it, not for achieving anything.

The damage in this seen is far from pointless, it is intensely meaningful. Tangentially I think Moby Dick is an excellent book that is mostly wasted on highschoolers because you have to have been in a failed relationship and had a brush with death (or three) for its themes to really start resonating.

You say "give him another ten to fifteen years of life and he'll grow out of it" but what do you think is the mechanism here, because it's clearly not simple age. An argument I get into on a semi regular basis here is where someone will say something to the effect of "a man with a gun to his head never has a choice." and I will respond "a man with a gun to his head always has a choice". As Tyler says "First you have to give in. First you have to know, not fear, know you are going to die." This acceptance is crucial (especially for men as the disposable sex) to becoming a functional adult and agent in one's own right. Without getting into spoilers for a two-decade old movie, it's worth noting that Jack ultimately rectifies his issues with Tyler by letting go of his fear of death.

His alter ego pours lye on him in order to teach him to endure pain, but by sitting there and letting the base burn him, instead of seeking a way to remove it, the character is not learning to endure and be strong and steadfast, he is self-harming.

That is not healthy psychological coping mechanism.

It may be I am indeed more female than I generally feel like, in that there is a vast difference between the bravado of this ultimately useless scene (he gets a scar for nothing, it is not a scar won in battle or from performing any useful task or action) which does seem like the sort of thing to appeal to young men who have no means of otherwise expressing how Manly and Tough they are (they're white collar middle class white boys), and how women would think about this.

(I speak as someone who managed to get concentrated sulphuric acid spilled on the back of my hand in one early job and rushed to wash it off, but by some fluke the acid was so concentrated it was too oily to penetrate and I've come away without a scar. I certainly would not have sat there gritting my teeth and 'toughing it out' for any silly show of machismo, there's enough real pain in life to learn how to put up with it).

I don't want to just say "what @FCfromSSC said" but at the same time i kind of want to want to reply with "what @FCfromSSC said"

You keep describing the pain and damage that jack endures as "useless" and "meaningless" and my reply is that it is anything but. In both the book and film the moment jack chooses to face the pain and trauma head on rather than turn away is a critical moment. It is the moment that Jack begins to take charge. Prior to the burn he has been acting purely as a spectator, It is only after the burn that he begins to act as an active participant.

And I would contend that it is the willingness to "turn in to" that pain that makes him an agent in the proper sense.

I speak as someone who managed to get concentrated sulphuric acid spilled on the back of my hand

How much? I went to a private high school that was hard-core about chemistry, and at the start of the year the teacher said something on the lines of "if you don't use more than the recommended quantities, the only thing we do here that can actually permanently injure you is alkali in the eye". A few drops of conc. H2SO4 on the hand was considered a nothingburger - it stang a bit. The same amount of conc. HNO3 was embarassing because your hand would be yellow for a few weeks. The worst accident we had was when someone filled the lab with hydrogen sulphide and we had to evacuate.

His alter ego pours lye on him in order to teach him to endure pain, but by sitting there and letting the base burn him, instead of seeking a way to remove it, the character is not learning to endure and be strong and steadfast, he is self-harming.

The narrator's entire existence has been self-harm. He's lived his entire life to that point reactively, instinctively, to the point that he's incapable of choice, only scripted response. He's dead inside, a walking corpse, a moral nullity, neither satisfying his desires nor living for something beyond them. A chemical burn is the least of his worries, and the pain can be instructive. Specifically, it's pain he chooses, pain he accepts and endures rather than being driven by.

I certainly would not have sat there gritting my teeth and 'toughing it out' for any silly show of machismo, there's enough real pain in life to learn how to put up with it).

The whole point of the film is that for the characters, there isn't enough real pain, at least not in the forms they need. The reason it continues to resonate to this day is because that's true in the real world too: we are anesthetized to the point of catatonia by a culture of relentless, lazy hedonism while our lives slowly drain away a minute at a time.

The point isn't that it's super-cool to get a chemical burn. The point is that excessive comfort is deadly to the soul.

Probably the single most manipulative person I know has a documented mental disability (low IQ) in addition to her autism (which I share, which is how we met). She tried to manipulate my emotions to get me to be on her assisted decision team, which I know she will hector until they bow to her wishes and let her go to Disney World for a week instead of fixing her roof with the savings.

She has had her rights thoroughly and fully explained to her throughout her public schooling in Special Education. She insists upon them at every turn when someone says something she doesn’t like. She uses threats of suicide to summon the police Crisis Intervention Team to try to get her caretakers at group homes and even her mother to give her what she wants.

But her deficit is real. Attempts to explain, by people she genuinely trusts, go over her head and you can practically hear them whizzing by. Try to stuff into her head a concept not directly concrete or tied to her health and wellness, and you will find nothing but misery and confusion.

She has been convinced, in those terms, that literally every Republican wants to take away her Social Security and let her starve, and she was genuinely suicidal during Trump’s Presidency, and grateful that someone let her vote. No concept of the deep philosophical reasoning behind the right to vote, just a bunch of motivated reasoning.

I find myself remembering that IQ 100 is an average, and realizing how many more Americans like her I’ve never met because I never go where they are; my ingroup is clever talkers, and she is adjacently a clever-talker by the quirks of autism.

They cling to psuedo-marxist nonsense about group/class consciousness and group/class differences to salve their own wounded pride. They still seem to think that they can appeal to some non-existant higher authority with words like "academic consensus" and "studies show". In other words they still think that's air they are breathing.

No, I think the studies are only necessary to argue with people that reject what's in front of their own eyes. You see it as clear that Africans are actually more intelligent than Motteposters. OK, if we redefine the word to mean something other than typical usage, that's probably true, so you'll get no argument from me, other that my usual quibble that I find it irritating when people use words in non-standard ways and insist that they're actually more correct than the standard. Whatever. At the end of the day, my position that living around large numbers of people of African ancestry sucks isn't based on what studies show or academic consensus, it's on looking at places I've been to and observing that I'd rather live near the Scandinavians. I think most people can see that just as easily, but to argue with someone that insists up and down that they don't really see the difference, I can pull data on productivity and murder rates, but that's still just a proxy for my sincerely held position that it's obvious to all that it's better to be surrounded by a bunch of Dutch, Swedes, and Germans than a bunch of Somalis. If someone points out that those designations are just, like, a construct man, I'm left to roll my eyes and move on.

Re Africa — judge them by their fruits. Either intelligence isn’t really helpful to building prosperity or the Africans aren’t that intelligent.*

*On a large enough time scale.

Intelligence is helpful, it just isn't sufficient. African kingdoms have been prosperous before (at least in a similar way to other old civilizations, which is to say, they had rich rulers and impressive art, even if the average person's life sucked). But building truly prosperous societies, in the sense of benefiting a large portion of the people, is incredibly difficult. What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace--is probably closer to many ancient societies that we now glorify as being important steps on the road to civilization, than the latter are to what we have today.

they had rich rulers

There is no question, that Mansa Musa, King of Mali, was immensely rich.

impressive art

This is more questionable. Here are some highlights from Met. Which do you consider impressive?

What many African countries have now--a strong man extracting wealth from an oppressed populace

The model African model of a strong man extracting wealth is only possible because of Western (or recently Chinese) trade. The ruler can now exchange what he takes from his people for useful things. Prior to being able to trade with the developed world, there was little reason to oppress the populace as they had nothing (save some daughters) that was particularly worth much to the ruler. It takes a lot of organization and manpower to extract rents from the poor.

This is more questionable

I can only assume that you don't consider Egypt to be "Africa" if you are questioning the impressiveness of African art and architecture.

It takes a lot of organization and manpower to extract rents from the poor.

Rulers have been extracting wealth probably since rulers and concentrated societies existed. This review agrees with you that it is difficult, but it seems an exaggeration to say that Africans couldn't figure it out until the past few centuries. Unless I'm wrong, but if Africa also lacks anything worth anything worth stealing, maybe that contributes to its lack of developed nations?

I can only assume that you don't consider Egypt to be "Africa" if you are questioning the impressiveness of African art and architecture.

When HBD proponents talk about “Africa” we are pretty much exclusively referring to sub-Saharan/“black” Africa. Egypt, Carthage, and other historical North African superstates were Semitic or Semitic-adjacent, and part of the Mediterranean world, not the “African” world as most people intend it when doing comparative history like this.

Ok, but the Northern part of Africa is still incredibly dysfunctional and poor today, so it still seems to present a question about what makes people capable of building civilization which can't be answered by reference to inherent intelligence. I don't know enough about the ancient history of sub-Saharan Africa specifically, but I do know that Botswana has seemingly dodged most of the problems plaguing its neighbors and is substantially richer than Egypt today.

The northern part of Africa today has basically no genetic continuity with ancient Egypt or Carthage; Northern African countries are overwhelmingly Arab, due to the Arab conquests of the seventh century under the Umayyad and Rashidun Caliphates. I agree with you that hereditary IQ is not the entire story of why many MENA countries are as poor and dysfunctional as they are, but trying to link them to the ancient Mediterranean empires of the Bronze and Iron Ages doesn’t make any sense either, since there’s little to no genetic carry-over between then and now.

But the ancient Arab world didn't lack large and rich cities, centralized empires, writing, art, mathematics, etc. either. Even today some Arab countries have most of those things; yes, it's unsustainable decadence due to oil rather than true economic development, but they still managed to maintain a reasonably stable government, something resembling property rights, etc.

Actually, Arabs are Semitic, so yes the current inhabitants of North Africa are not directly descended from pharaohs or Carthaginians, but they aren't that distantly related either.

I would say that intelligence is helpful but, contra most other users here, far from necessary or sufficient. Something you see a lot of in Africa is a reluctance to build wealth/institutions because people (quite reasonably) expect some warlord, crimeboss, or whacky tribal/religious group to come along and murder them for it should they succeed in rising above their station. A common sentiment i heard expressed was dont try to fight or fix Africa, Africa Always Wins.

Mexico (and much of Central amd South America) are highly dysfunctional for similar reasons, yet you still see significantly better results in infrastructure, innovation, and general prosperity in Latino countries than in sub Saharan Africa. Why bother building a successful ranch or small business or whatever in Mexico if the cartels are just going to take it away? And yet a decent amount of Mexicans strive and succeed despite such risks.

How does your mental model account for this?

How does your mental model account for this?

Easily, culture matters. Even when it is irrational and silly, perhaps especially when it is irrational and silly. It only takes a few farmers choosing to be unreasonable out of a "misplaced" sense of machismo to skew the Cartel's cost-benefit equations the other way.

It's a long post, but it doesn't say much; largely it's an extended sneer. Yes, we who oppose progressive politics know the framework is bullshit. We know that if you attempt to dig through the morass of contradictions that it claims as principles and internal logic that you will find either nothing or just power politics -- "who/whom". And yes, it is true that much of the online right comes from a progressive (though usually not "woke") background, though some do not. That does not mean they are still progressives.

I don't know how bright your average Kenyan cabby is; unlike some HBD believers, I find IQ measurements in the Third World to be extremely suspect. But while you may find it admirable that they "hustle" constantly, that doesn't make them highly intelligent. Again, perhaps they are. There are similar types in the US -- some of them fitting the stereotype of the late '80s Jamaican immigrant who has three jobs and is always looking for more work, and others always looking for a new con/scam. The former may be admirable for their work ethic but it says nothing about their intelligence. The latter aren't admirable and most often tend to prey on those of a similar class; they're not lazy but that doesn't mean they're intelligent, just a little brighter (or just less trusting) than whoever they scam. And certainly your average Kenyan cabby has better real-time problem solving ability in his domain than your average Motte poster does. But the reverse is almost certainly true as well.

The reason your professors graded on a curve was that your professors were lazy and stupid.

Some of them were, some of them were not. There are good reasons for not grading on a fixed scale other than laziness, the main one being that if you change your test questions, it's possible you erred about its difficulty. Professors don't have the luxury of trying their questions in advance on calibrated students and seeing how hard they are.

Curves also help fight grade inflation. Yes, your exam was good but it was only the 10th best exam so I can’t give you an A no matter how much you protest.

I found in law school the nature of the curve encouraged me to study harder as it was zero sum and the stakes were high. I acknowledge it can also cause students to study less (probably depending on staked and personality type).

Professors don't have the luxury of trying their questions in advance on calibrated students and seeing how hard they are.

I had one particularly likeable professor that did grade on a curve, but also threw out questions that seemed to get outlier quantities of incorrect responses on the basis that even though the question seemed clear to him, the number of bright people getting it wrong demonstrated that he had either failed to teach it correctly or had asked it poorly. His approach certainly wasn't some red in tooth and claw vision of pitting students against each other, it was genuinely trying to get kids to work hard to understand the material.

This happened to me literally once, in an advanced engineering statistics course. The class average was like 16/100 and the professor decided he would rescind the exam. Except for 3 of us. We had curiously scored in the low 90s. He just told us we'd be getting 105/100 for the exam and could go home for the week.

Identity politics is bullshit. [...] look upon each particular thing and ask what is it's nature? IE what does it do? where does it come from? How does it behave? The answers you get are what that thing is.

As I understand it identity politics caught on as an alternative to class politics. It was a means for the left to scoop up the various previously un/under-represented minorities in an effort to gather enough extra votes to tip the scales in their favour. In the 1970s politics was class politics with labour unions playing a significant role. Then Reagan and Thatcher came along, crushed the unions and identity politics followed. It had little to nothing to do with what you "identified as" and lots to everything to do with who you voted for. It was about politics, not identity, and although the academic material and its derivatives that explore identity are 99% socially corrosive bullshit the political appeal is arguably pragmatic, albeit on a short-term and short-sighted basis.

It seems to me your point is that people from outside the left have adopted the identity lens with the difference being that they largely denigrate the minorities to flatter the majority. This has taken over from the socially synthesising MLK colour blindism and classical albeit imperfect liberalism that preceded the idpol era. Well, yeah. You can't form an ingroup without creating an outgroup. This is what has always baffled me about the identity politics of the true believers rather than the pollsters. It makes sense for the majority to adopt idpol, they're the majority. The minority are at a democratic disadvantage by definition, and the only way it worked/works is that it depended on the majority adhering to fuzzy social liberalism while the minorities rally around their flag/s. Once the idpol mindset takes root in the wider discourse, even if it's just via objection to it, you get the opposing side being drawn onto the pitch and you start to see MRAs, HBDists, trans denialists, principled free speech trolls and so on take up position. And if the idpol nonsense gets too fevered you arrive at the yeschad.jpg ethno-nationalism of white people, after having been identified as such externally, coming to a position where they may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. It ain't pretty.

In summary the idpol left promoted it, the minorities adopted it, the classical liberals and class-first left adapted to it and the majority are progressively shifting from passively accepting it to being boxed into actively adopting it in kind. It's less The Matrix's "you think that's air you're breathing" and more the fish noticing the water it's been swimming in. It's less red pill vs blue pill and more black pill vs white pill.

Identity, to the degree that it represents something meaningful and real, exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified.

Quite, and like the saying goes just because you do not take an interest in [identity] politics doesn't mean [identity] politics won't take an interest in you.

In 2020, Biden said somewhat infamously words to the effective of ‘if you ain’t voting Biden you ain’t black.’ That is, he said the quiet part out loud that politicians viewed identity as downstream of political affiliation.

That seems consistent with your post.

Indeed, It's also why you'll see articles in Salon, the Washington Post, and LA Times lamenting the "white nationalist tendencies" of men like Thomas Sowell, Vodie Beauchamp, and Larry Elder.

This scene in particular

Don't take it as a personal criticism when I say that I hate shit like this.

This naive optimism of "rah rah face the pain, ride the tiger, you'll come out stronger for it". For the most part, this line is only repeated by people who have never faced true terror before. People who haven't faced up to the gravity of the problem.

Now, I am not saying that we should simply crumple in the face of tragedy, or that it would be better if we could simply eliminate it. There is a tension that I must navigate here because, as I have intimated elsewhere, my fundamental project is to argue, contra utilitarianism, for the necessity of (the possibility of) pain, even terrible pain, even the worst pain, as a precondition of anything that could be called "meaningful". But I recognize full well that this is a fundamentally insane proposition, at least prima facie. Any person with any sense at all should be running for the safety of the experience machine once they comprehend what horrors are "out there", in "reality". Overcoming this eminently reasonable proposition will require the marshaling of the most advanced and subtle resources at our disposal. This puerile pollyannaism of "ah, bring it on, I can handle it, because I'm tough!" is simply not up to the task. There is a limit point where things simply break. Only beyond this limit does the problem of pain actually begin to present itself.

Consider the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, an Austrian woman who was imprisoned by her own father in the basement of their house for 24 years. She was never once allowed to leave her prison chamber in that time period. She was raped repeatedly and delivered several children while in captivity.

Would you go to her in that basement and tell her "stay with the pain, don't shut this out"? Would you tell her "what you're feeling is premature enlightenment"?

She did end up surviving and is doing remarkably well now, but of course she would have had no way of knowing that while the ordeal was actually going on. As the years ticked on, she would have faced nothing but crushing uncertainty every day, the knowledge that every day could be her last. And of course she just as easily could have died; there could have been no happy ending. What then? In that case, there are no scars to serve as monuments of your victories; there is only a terrible waste of life.

fascism is a fundamentally progressive ideology. [...] They want to quibble some group's position within the intersectional stack rather than question the validity of the stack as a concept. They cling to psuedo-marxist nonsense about group/class consciousness and group/class differences to salve their own wounded pride. They still seem to think that they can appeal to some non-existant higher authority with words like "academic consensus" and "studies show".

As has been pointed out to you multiple times, the policy prescriptions proposed by the far right and progressives are wildly different. Fascists want to railroad women into being housewives, they want to make pornography and other types of sexual "deviancy" illegal, and they want to build a wall to keep immigrants out. Progressives don't want these things. The two camps want to build two different types of societies that are obviously different and would feel different to live in. Given these numerous disagreements, any assertion of similarity between the two ideologies in terms of alleged shared metaphysical or epistemological presuppositions seems rather moot.

Can you give a quick rundown of what your alternative looks like? What is your proposed belief system that does not depend on these concepts like "group difference" that you find problematic?

I think there is some benefit to “riding the tiger” in a controlled way. It builds the muscles that let you face the worst. It’s really pretty obvious. We’ve never had it so good, yet we have so much anxiety and depression that we didn’t have back before this kind of living was possible.

In my view, the confidence and ability to handle what life throws at you is a muscle. The people who can bounce back from terrible things, failures, and disappointment are people who have done exactly that on a small scale and in safe circumstances. This is why athletes do so well in life. They’ve learned how to win, how to brush off a loss, and (depending on the sport) that a little pain isn’t fatal. These things pay dividends because, first of all, being able to learn to bounce back from failure and setbacks also teaches that setbacks are not permanent. A kid who doesn’t make the team this year tries again next year. And often in the process learns the values of hard work and preparation— because quite often the reason he didn’t make the team was that he hadn’t worked on his weaknesses enough. Either way, learning to fail and try again makes the idea of bouncing back after a setback possible in his mind.

Can we not abuse the metaphor of "riding the tiger"? The significant thing about riding the tiger isn't that it's difficult, it's that once you start it's really damn dangerous to stop (because the tiger will eat you).

Isn’t this merely arguing the difference in aims is sufficient to say progressivism and fascism is different even if the methodology / thought process is the same?

If we are talking about movies, I think the progressive / fascist mind is the Alliance whereas the libertarian or perhaps conservative mindset is Mal’s in serenity. Specifically this scene https://youtube.com/watch?v=1VR3Av9qfZc

The aims are what matter in a political system. People will be more subservient to the aims than to the method. Frequently, one’s choice of method is just a post hoc rationalization of one’s pre-reflective, extra-rational aims.

Immediately in the wake of Hegel’s death you had left Hegelians, who ultimately spawned Marxism, and right Hegelians, who were politically conservative. Both claimed to be following Hegel’s dialectical method, but they had radically different aims. Any analysis that claimed that the left and right Hegelians were somehow “the same” because they both claimed to be inspired by Hegel would obviously be missing the point. They’re obviously not the same, because one side wanted a communist revolution and the other didn’t.

Aims matter to a degree. While not quite the same, there is an almost red queen problem for progressivism/ fascism. They believe they are playing chess but don’t realize even the pawns make moves on their own.

So both systems run into the problem that the outcomes are due to human actions but not human design. Thus the aims may become much less important than the actions and the kind of actions.

the outcomes are due to human actions but not human design.

I’ll ask you the same question I asked Hlynka: what is your alternative, an alternative that avoids these problems that are allegedly shared by progressivism and fascism?

I don’t really understand what your comment is getting at here, but maybe you can help me understand by giving me an example.

After all "Why go through the trouble of designing your test so that only X% of students can answer 90% of the questions when you can just hand out the test as is and set the threshold for an A at the Xth percentile of correct responses?". At the end of the day it is much easier to get students to compete amongst themselves than it is to accurately grade their understanding/uptake of the material.

I had a professor that was ecstatic when I told him I barely finished his test on time, as it was his specific goal to write tests that were just hard enough to be barely beatable by the best student in each class. This both prevented cheating and allowed him to confidently grade everyone on a curve. Alas, he was the only one that want to the trouble of doing that.

The median east African has a room temperature IQ.

The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.

I heartily disagree that the latter is true, with my argument being simply, just look at that cursed continent.

That being said, I once read something by a prolific HBD poster on Twitter or Substack who I can't recall, who made an argument about why black people, despite significantly lower IQs than average, still seem to function much better than that low value would suggest:

When most people benchmark mental retardation, they implicitly consider the case of retarded white people, the majority of who have some kind of developmental or neurological disorder that's dragging them down. They're not just stupid, they're non-functional in important regards.

Whereas an 70 IQ African is not sick, they're just dumb, but are much more capable of social interaction and productive endeavors than the former, though they can't hope to match 100 IQ people of any race.

I believe that person showed anecdotes from special needs tard wranglers who noticed how the black kids were better behaved and apparently smart than the white ones, because they simply were much better functioning overall despite their identically low IQ scores.

I contend that a healthy chimp can beat a bad case of Downs in almost everything, even if they're both terrible at IQ tests. One is an animal well honed to its niche, whereas the other is simply outright defective.

So, African society and culture evolved to be well adapted to lower IQs, and they're not as clearly dysfunctional as you'd expect.

Leaving that aside, in desperately poor countries, like most of Africa, people need to be able to hustle or starve, they don't have well trodden paths ahead of them that they can follow as long as they're competent and come out ahead. While hustling is certainly a laudable thing, I suspect that if the world went to shit and we had to start from scratch, the median Mottizen would spank their asses.

Indians speak 2 or 3 languages because that brings clear and massive utility to them, presumably the same case for Africans who need some more. On the other hand, most Americans can speak English from the cradle to the grave and do just fine, so it's by no means their failure that they don't bother to do so most of the time. In their place, I wouldn't either.

You don't judge Bill Gates by the standards of Stone Age persistence hunters and get all perplexed that he has wealth and high status despite his abysmal inability to run a marathon.

I heartily disagree that the latter is true, with my argument being simply, just look at that cursed continent.

I don't think this necessarily follows, unless you want to look at Europe after Rome left, and declare the Europeans must have naturally crazy low intelligence as well (or, I suppose you could argue that the difference can be made up in 1000 years).

Based on the my observation of the middle-ages, it seems pretty reasonable that the former territories to struggle amongst themselves in a series of constantly escalating conflicts until a distaste for war is (quite literally) beat into the local culture enough to outweigh the natural human drive to see your out-group killed (at least enough to stop fighting with people within a few hundred km). This seems to take several hundred years (it could possibly be faster with increased communication speed, but the power vacuum in Africa is only 60-80 years old, so I'm not willing to write off the theory yet).

It's only at that point that you can build infrastructure and complicated supply lines that complex societies are built on. Before that, I would only expect high-intelligence to result in more efficient killing.

Alternatively a single victor/foreign power can come in and dominate (your classic pax X-ana period). The point is more that stability seems to come from either subjugation or deep cultural changes that seem to be orthogonal to intelligence.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're entirely wrong, but I think looking at the state of an area for a single 50-100 year period is a horrible argument about the IQ of the humans that live there.

I catch a lot of flak from HBDers on this sub when I argue that IQ doesn't measure intelligence per-se so much as it measures something like "Academic Aptitude" and that to the degree that any correlation between IQ and life outcomes exists it is mostly due to modern secular society using academics as a means of sorting "winners" from "losers" and enforcing social stratification.

Yet here you are seemingly making what is effectively the same argument.

any correlation between IQ and life outcomes exists it is mostly due to modern secular society using academics as a means of sorting "winners" from "losers"

Do you think tests like reaction time, or reverse digit span fall into this category? Reaction time is correlated with IQ:

Correlations of simple RT means with AH4 scores were − 0.27, − 0.30 and − 0.32, for age 30, 50 and 69, respectively; and − 0.44, − 0.47 and − 0.53 for 4-choice RT.

0.53 is quite high as these things go.

Reverse Digit Span is 0.45 correlated with WISC-R IQs, according to Jensen.

I agree that tests like WORDSUM (whose correlation with IQ is 0.71) are very culturally loaded and surely are mediated by academics, but I can't see how reaction time, or the backward digit span are similarly affected.

g has a lot of correlation with IQ tests and a whole bunch of other measures, and to say that it's irrelevant is just not true. Intelligence is useful. There are other relevant factors in life success, of course.

There are other relevant factors in life success, of course.

What would you say are the genetic factors that are relevant? I can think of a bunch of social factors, like being wise enough to choose parents who are rich and live in a free society. The ones that come to my mind are being good-looking, being musical, and being tall. For women, being blonde is a huge win, as are the other obvious things, so long as you don't approximate the Willendorf Venus (and even then?).

There have been great efforts to find other factors that are independent of g, but it seems quite hard to isolate any. Even being good-looking is correlated with having less genetic mutations, and this also weakly correlates with g. In the US:

It shows that physical attractiveness is significantly correlated with general intelligence (r = .126),

Musicality correlates as well.

A remarkable direct correlation between IQ and musical scores in both the control (r≥0.38) and experimental (r≥0.37) groups was observed.

Alas, among non-Hispanic whites, even being blonde correlates with IQ. Brown haired men (104.4) and blonde women (103.2) are on the top of the heap, though blonde women have the smallest standard deviation (12.2) and black haired men (mean IQ 100.1) the largest (15.2).

The conclusions come from a survey of 10,878 white Americans asked about their natural hair colour (Hispanics and African Americans were excluded to eliminate bias). The results showed the average IQ of blonde-haired women was 103.2, 102.7 for brown hair, 101.2 for red hair and 100.5 for black hair.

The results showed the average IQ of blonde-haired women was 103.2, 102.7 for brown hair, 101.2 for red hair

Scottish and Irish people BTFO? In all likelihood dark hair probably has the highest standard deviation because it includes some white America’s highest and lowest populations, while blondes are more uniformly from Northern Europe.

Red heads are also more uniformly from Northern Europe.

Redheads are highly disproportionately from specific sub-regions of Northern Europe, though.

Some personality traits is one, I think. The big 5, for example, have some correlations with intelligence, but they don't correlate perfectly, and do impact life.

For most of your answers, yes they might correlate, but that's not the same as causation. (or, at least, there will be more than one factor involved in the causation, which complicates the picture beyond IQ being the only factor that matters)

Hlynka, to put it bluntly, your claims on that matter were conclusively debunked by multiple posters, yet your approach, instead of engaging, was to stick your fingers in your ears and not respond.

IQ is a good measure of g and also immensely predictive for almost all life outcomes we really care about.

I've seen several posters catch bans for expressing their frustration with your obtuseness, so I'll leave it here before it annoys the mods.

Hlynka, to put it bluntly, your claims on that matter were conclusively debunked by multiple posters

No they weren't. What happened is that same half dozen or so posters linked the same tired unreliable sources and then got mad and accused me of being "obtuse" when I questioned their sources and methodology rather than play the role of a straw-man who "gets destroyed by facts and logic"

tard wranglers

Leave off the rdrama/4chanisms, please.

Aww, can't a man enjoy himself sometimes? I'd like to think that almost all my posts are still net positive :(

But as you wish.

I'd like to think that almost all my posts are still net positive

They are, that's why this is more of a "tut tut" than a real warning.

The median east African has a room temperature IQ.

The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.

Hlynka confusing extroversion with intelligence once again.

Africans do pretty poor on real-life tasks "realizing witchcraft isn't real" and "whether having sex with virgin cures you of AIDS".

You're a military man. So tell me why McNamara's moron corps were bad at real-life tasks they were assigned, and damaging to other units' morale even though all what they were different is just worse result on paper-and-pencil test?

number of languages spoken

Do you believe if we compelled children to learn multiple languages at gunpoint they'd be any smarter? Compelling vaccinating children makes them healthier, at least for most vaccines.

Hlynka confusing extroversion with intelligence once again.

@aardvark2 making the "uncharitable" straw-man flesh again.

Do you really think rationalists are any better at "real-life tasks"?

Likewise, if you know many military men you know that the name McNamara is a dirty word. There's a reason that his is one of the only red headstones in Arlington.

I'd be curious to hear why Captain DeJearnette deserves similar disdain for having a red headstone. Unless both of them simply paid extra for a custom piece.

I don't know the story behind Captain DeJearnette, but the legend is that McNamara's headstone is red for all the Americans his incompetence killed.

Likewise, if you know many military men you know that the name McNamara is a dirty word. There's a reason that his is one of the only red headstones in Arlington.

Wouldn't that suggest that people who think IQ measures something real and useful in real life might have a point? Guy comes up with idea of lowering the threshold on a mental aptitude test to fill a manpower shortage, and now his name is considered cursed for generations. This sure seems consistent with mental aptitude tests mattering in real life.

No.

If anything Robert McNamara illustrates my point that it is possible for someone with a high iq to be a complete moron.

I've been lurking this community since the /r/slatestarcodex days and I've finally registered for the first time just to say that this is absolutely the worst kind of post.

You've been presented with a massive ironclad statistically significant block of data on the relationship between those silly irrelevant IQ tests and real-world competence, and it utterly refutes your position on the subject.

And what's your response to this? A pithy joke, about how McNamara was a high IQ moron, and for what? Disregarding the value of standardized IQ testing? Kind of giving up the game, aren't you?

You would have been right behind McNamara talking about how his morons had hustle and moxy and what do those eggheads know with their tests anyway?

There's absolutely no reason anyone should take you seriously as a poster after posts like this. In any case I'm relurking, enjoy your ongoing career as Libertarian Darwin for as long as the moderators continue letting you rack up infinite temp bans.

Do you really think rationalists are any better at "real-life tasks"?

I think I am better at picking up real life tasks than other people. For example, I am a better cook than most other cooks. I am a better gardener and landscaper than most of the people who do it professionally. I was a top tier football referee for a while. I learned how to be a glazier to exceed lifelong employees in a summer. I am top 10% at my actual paper job.

This IQ thing seems to translate pretty well for me.

Can you list some examples of real-life tasks?

Do you really think rationalists are any better at "real-life tasks"?

I think intelligent people are generally better at real-life tasks than unintelligent ones.

I think intelligent people are generally better at real-life tasks than unintelligent ones.

I would agree but I'm also the one who is explicitly questioning the premise that IQ = intelligence. The thing about being in the military is that you get exposed to both ends of the spectrum.

It would help, you know, if you defined intelligence in not sense "personality which I like", which is not very useful.

About cab drivers, there's a quote alleged to Mitterand "it is very unfortunate thing that people who know most about how to govern, are already employed as hairdressers and taxi drivers".

And the people who can't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel are pretty fucking useless, right? And they'd score badly on an IQ test, too. Yes, there are pitfalls high-IQ people can fall into that low-IQ people never will. That's largely because they'll never get far enough to fall into that pitfall; for a physical analogy if you can't climb the rock wall in your local gym you're never going to fall from halfway up a mountain. But there's a lot of people in the motte who take pride in their high IQ and by claiming that doesn't mean anything you get to piss on them, so all is good, right?

Hlynka confusing extroversion with intelligence once again.

The extroverts are the people that you'll interact with when you go to east Africa, so there's some selection bias.

The Africans are higher in extroversion than Europeans, esp Northern ones. (~Americans)

I'm sympathetic to the institution of Gen X gnostic angst, but you have to do what every reasonable skeptic does and apply this to your own ideas.

Okay yes nothing is real we're just living through simulacra and buying furniture designed by committees of people whose idea of a human being is a bunch of noisy statistics made by some Marxist that slept through their statistical methods courses. This has literally only become worse since The Matrix.

The West is living a lie that's only maintained by a tower of abstractions that survives on creating more abstraction and nothing else. Collapse is locked in and it's not that people are asleep at the wheel, there's not even a wheel anymore.

But then, people have been saying this for decades now and things have not collapsed. The lie just gets worse and more detached from reality, seemingly without consequence. Clown world marches on over Baudrillard's corpse.

How do you reckon with this?

Strangely you seem to be able to find this problem when Russia is involved. And like many of your countrymen are eager to point out that despite the West living a complete lie, so is Russia and so is China. Just different kinds of lie. The one the other country believes being always the most ludicrous for everybody.

Consider that the Africans you see as practical are living their own kind of lie, and that what you consider resourcefulness may just be adaptation to that different kind of lie.

Also how does any of this relate to your premise of explaining why you constantly seem to accuse people of believing the opposite of what they claim to believe?

Is it really just that you think one's own mindreading of people is the true measure of character because selfid is bull? Because the one thing this does not apply to is politics. Because politics, literally all of it, is coalition building. Even at its best ideology is nice window dressing for a convergence of interests, and at its worst it's nerd bait to keep a meme in cold storage until it's useful again. It doesn't have to make sense. Hell it's better in many ways if it doesn't. In any case the language of truth is as suited to it as empiricism is to theology.

There is such a thing as truth, but politics is the one realm where it's almost completely useless. There is a good moral argument to be made that you should still abide by it ultimately, but if you only think and act in those terms you're going to lose.

The progs may be talking nonsense, but they are still better than you at the actual game being played, because unlike you they know the rules. And yeah sure playing to win means everything burns to the ground because moral righteousness doesn't grow crops. But that's always what happens. And Lysenko died of old age while Vavilov died in prison.

I mean first of all, winning a bullshit game is kind of meaningless. If I’m the best Calvinball player who ever lived, it’s nonsense because Calvinball has nothing to do with reality. Games that are real matter. At worst, Calvinball playing is a horrid distraction from the baseball game that’s actually meaningful. That baseball game is the practical real world problems being ignored to play identity games. Roads and infrastructure need fixing, education needs overhaul, people are not doing so well economically, Russia and China. These are real problems, but we don’t care about them because Dylan visited the White House in a dress and held up a beer can on instagram.

I’ll agree that our current name-and-claim version of identity is largely bullshit. Identity is a social label often given in response to a person’s place in society. Asians are not honorary whites they simply don’t fit what minority means in modern, WEIRD culture, which is that a person’s minority status is seen (wrongly imo) as a lower status to be fixed. Asians are not seen as lower status. That doesn’t mean honorary white, it means higher status. My identities are formed in contradistinction to others or in response to roles I take. I’m not a mother and cannot become one without having children. I am an aunt because my siblings have children. I’m a worker because I have a boss. The best metaphor to me has always been a status effect, not a class. It’s based on something outside of your skull.

winning a bullshit game is kind of meaningless

Not if the victors get to rob and kill the vanquished it isn't.

What you're complaining about isn't that the game is meaningless really, but that people care more about winning than making sure you can continue to play in the future.

My point is, it doesn't matter because if you don't win right now you don't get to play in the future anyways. Because you're dead and poor.

Of course this isn't stable, you can't have people defect like this forever, but this is how and why societies collapse. Focus on internal rather than external conflict, widespread erosion of norms, etc.

What people seem to often miss though is that this is the result of a series of rational decisions.

If you don't fight the meaningless social issue game, if you don't give citizenship to sympathetic foreigners, if you don't loot the treasury to give spoils; you will not get to keep power versus someone who can and does those things. Using power to gain more power at any cost is a practically superior strategy to any other which is why anyone that has power is inexorably attracted to it or replaced by people who are.

The one flaw, or saving grace, is that power is cursed and by accumulating it you will eventually reach a point where you have too much of it and the distance to reality becomes great enough that you destroy yourself.

The best metaphor to me has always been a status effect, not a class. It’s based on something outside of your skull.

You're just laying out the principles of any good model of the world, what naturalists call science.

There is no disagreeing with this.

Except, unfortunately, in the one game where you get to rob and kill the losers. Where this attachement to the truth falls easily pray to the more immediately expedient strategy of seeking power and using it to eliminate the competition.

Connecting this game and truth seeking is basically what the Enlightenment did by inventing scientific government, and though we've gained tremendous boons from it, I think it was ultimately an evil act precisely because now that this connection exists, it has become impossible to have either proper government or proper truth seeking.

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