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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38179 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Footnote to post here https://www.themotte.org/post/53/the-motte-and-the-future/5620?context=8#context

I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false, but because of a couple of edge cases I prefer the weaker "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". This felt off-topic there and is long-ish (it could be shortened, but only by abandoning my motte) so I'm putting it here.

Edge case 1: There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement. This is separate from SJers who honestly believe that being hostile and censorious is the most effective way to advance the movement's goals; those people (a majority of SJers TTBOMK) do believe they are making the world a better place. Obviously, this is not especially unique to SJ (any moralistic ideology will attract these sorts) and this definitely is a relatively-small minority, but I'm a pedant.

[Citation: I have a tab open of a forum discussion in which I told someone that a non-hostile approach would be better at converting people and he replied "Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em". He honestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil, but he is acting in a way that he admits is suboptimal for making a better world due to spite.]

Edge case 2: There are non-SJers who say or do SJ things because they are incentivised to do so in some way by SJers. These people by definition do not believe that saying/doing SJ things makes the world a better place, or that SJ is good and conservatives are evil, but they are not core members of SJ. Again, not unique to SJ (this is almost definitionally true of any powerful paradigm) but I'm a pedant.

[Citation: I turned down being a dorm RA at my university (a paid role insofar as RAs are not charged rent, and a role I was already somewhat fulfilling unpaid because our dorm had no RA) because I would have been required to recite SJ ideology to my dorm. I can imagine that another non-SJer less committed to honesty than I might have taken the job.]

Has this parallel been tried?

I believe that "the Nazi citizens of Germany in the 1930's were acting with the earnestly held belief that they were making the world a better place" is more true than false.

I am NOT trying to equate progressives with Nazis but rather making a simple reducio ad absurdum argument.

I'd contest that view. Of course, "Nazi citizens of Germany" leaves some leeway as to what is meant here, but at least a proper ideological Nazi would probably rather opine that a goal like "making the world a better place" sounds like mushy proto-Bolshevik nonsense and that their ideological goal was specifically the greatness and the improved livelihood of the German-Aryan race.

Presumably at least some of them would think that making the world a better place for Germans is making the world a better place.

Edge case 1: There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement. This is separate from SJers who honestly believe that being hostile and censorious is the most effective way to advance the movement's goals; those people (a majority of SJers TTBOMK) do believe they are making the world a better place. Obviously, this is not especially unique to SJ (any moralistic ideology will attract these sorts) and this definitely is a relatively-small minority, but I'm a pedant.

I don't think they care about convicting people or creating a movement. It's more of a 'comply or face the consequences' sort of thing. It's the opposite of how democratic American politics works, which is about compromise. It's the opposite of the OWS movement too. The OWS protestors seemed more receptive to criticism and debate compared to BLM, which got them nowhere while BLM is still a thing .It shows how might can make right. (Obv. it's much easier to get CEOs and banks to adopt vague DEI slogans than to fundamentally restructure their businesses).

TTBOMK

?

[Citation: I turned down being a dorm RA at my university (a paid role insofar as RAs are not charged rent, and a role I was already somewhat fulfilling unpaid because our dorm had no RA) because I would have been required to recite SJ ideology to my dorm. I can imagine that another non-SJer less committed to honesty than I might have taken the job.]

Unless the job paid well, I too would turn down any job that requires assimilating SJW ideology

Pretty sure TTBOMK = to the best of my knowledge

Willful blindness is perfectly compatible with sincerity. Merely not understanding reasoning is not only compatible with sincerity, but means that the worse someone is at reasoning, the more sincere he can be. So I find "these people are sincere" to rarely be a useful analysis.

I think it's more useful to truthfully think someone's sincere than to falsely think she's a liar either for the purposes of predicting her or for the purposes of convincing her. I'm ex-SJ myself; it is possible to talk some of these people out of it (SSC was a big chunk of it in my case). But, like I mentioned above, you need to understand where someone's coming from to do that.

I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false

Everyone believes they are making the world a better place, or at least not make it a worse place, a tiny tiny minority of literally psychotic individuals notwithstanding. No one believes themselves to be the villain of their own story. Progressive actors in this sense are unremarkable. Even those who just like 'dunking' and being hostile to conservatives would have rationalised their own actions. I think many of these people you are talking about truly believe that they are fighting against genuine 'evil'. That doesn't mean they are justified, only terribly mistaken. Unless you're a firm believer in absolute moral relativism I suppose.

What is quite unique about the (Critical) SJ movement is an almost unprecedented degree of black-and-white thinking, which is baked into the ideology. There is no room for compromise or forgiveness, it is totalising. The ideology fosters an extreme lack of self-reflection and introspection (e.g. labelling any one questioning the ideology of 'epistemic pushback'). This has really only been on this scale (not counting cults) by its predecessor ideology, Marxism, and its rival, Fascism. For something like this to emerge from a modern liberal democratic society should be deeply troubling. Even the Crusaders admired Saladin.

The non-SJ people who follow the SJ movement just do so not only because it's the path of least resistance in most cases, but also because the average person thinks very little about why they do the things they do, say the things they say, or believe the things they believe. Most people just take things at face value, something that has been taken advantage of by the SJ movement and fostered by its culture of lack of introspection.

Everyone believes they are making the world a better place, or at least not make it a worse place, a tiny tiny minority of literally psychotic individuals notwithstanding. No one believes themselves to be the villain of their own story.

I don't think it's that rare for people to hate themselves. I believe myself to be the villain of my story.

Edge case 1 implicates retributive versus rehabilitative philosophies of justice. A person can believe the proper course for obtaining the most social good is “fuck em” rather than persuasion, if they hold a retributivist philosophy regarding social infractions. Punishing defectors involves dispensing justice, involving just desert claims, etc. For instance, if someone killed an innocent woman, many would want that person executed even if you show them a detailed spreadsheet proving that he can be rehabilitated and increase sum total good marginally via tax revenue. I agree, and while the philosophical underpinnings are weak (compared to the unique but similar deterence theories of execution), I think it boils down to that I instinctually feel good as a biological organism knowing that the person has been executed, and this biological emotion is valuable in itself, as I’m sure it’s valuable to the crows that kill defecting crows and leave their carcass out for all to see.

Sort of a tangent. But my point is that they could still want to improve society, they just believe that the defecting out-group is so defective that punishing them is a good in itself for retribution’s sake.

There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement

The evolution of fairness through spite:

Given the sacrificial nature of making fair offers and rejecting unfair offers, the evolution of fair behaviour is naturally linked to altruism [11,12]. By contrast, our study shows that the connection is not so straightforward—fairness may have darker evolutionary roots.

Positive assortment facilitates the evolution of altruism; if altruists tend to interact more frequently with other altruists, then such behaviour can avoid subversion by free riders and evolve by natural selection [3,13–15]. Similarly, negative assortment facilitates the evolution of spite, social behaviour that inflicts harm with no direct benefit to the actor and often at some cost; if harm is more frequently inflicted on different types, then spite can evolve [16–18].

we focus on a simplified version of the ultimatum game where the proposer may make only one of two offers, fair (d = 0.5) or unfair (1 > d > 0.5), and the responder has two thresholds for acceptance, any offer or only fair offers (figure 1). Unfair offers (when accepted) mean that the proposer receives d of the resource and the responder receives 1 − d. Rejected offers result in both parties getting nothing. A strategy in the game specifies what choice to make when in the role of the proposer (fair, unfair) and what choice to make when in the role of the responder (accept, reject). There are four possible strategies in this game: S1 = (unfair, accept any), S2 = (unfair, reject unfair), S3 = (fair, accept any), S4 = (fair, reject unfair).

There are a number of mechanisms that can generate positive or negative assortment of strategies: spatial structure [29,30], population structure [31] and conditional strategies based on kinship [13], greenbeards [32] or co-evolving neutral markers [33]. Finite population size also generates some degree of negative assortment [34,35].

Positive assortment promotes the evolution of altruism. The best-known instance of this is Hamilton's rule.

Negative assortment, on the other hand, promotes spite. Suppose that some strategy pays a cost c to inflict a harm h on another individual. The condition for the spread of the spiteful strategy is r− > c/h. The ultimatum game, while a standard for modelling fairness, has a connection to spite: when the responder rejects any positive offer, she pays a cost to inflict a cost. For the responder in the mini-ultimatum game, the cost of spite is the amount rejected (1 − d), and the harm done to the proposer is the demand lost (d). Without negative assortment, S2 is eliminated by selection, and for this reason, it is often ignored in evolutionary analyses of the ultimatum game. However, S2 becomes increasingly important as negative assortment is introduced. This opens the door for spite to evolve, and has some unexpected effects on the evolution of fair behaviour in the game.

Seeing as each side considers itself fair and the other unfair, a political opponent can be likened to a player who has accumulated «unfair advantage» by repeatedly screwing the other side out of their fair share; this is literally what the progressives/sjws accuse the other party of doing. The rational or evolutionarily optimal purpose of «spite» is an attempt to suppress unfair behavior in the future, by rejecting not only new unfair offers but even fair (=equal; merit doesn't enter into it) ones that do not go towards rectification of the assumed standing imbalance. By much the same logic, political capital may be burned to punish people who defected in the past.

It needn't be 4D-chess-tier-strategically-reasonable, because the perceived worthiness of spite follows from heuristics and gut feeling. When people say «Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em», they don't really mean they're being self-defeating, they just shoot down what they concede is plausible sophistry and concern trolling in defense of a bad actor who's about to get his due.

It's a bit similar how Europeans can accept some of Russian logic around energy policy and consequences of tanking their economy but don't find it sufficient grounds to stop punishing an aggressor. In bloodless terms of game theory, it can be defined as spite, but it's spite motivated by the sense of justice.

Then again, of course,

For most evolutionary outcomes, only partial fairness exists at equilibrium, because many individuals both make and reject unfair demands.

P.S. This may have interesting implications in scenarios of mixing low-trust/egoistic populations/cultures and high-trust/altruistic ones. Evolution of strategies is not only biological, too.

Is "my outgroup overwhelmingly believes my ingroup is literally evil" actually a weaker statement? It seems that a more defensible phrasing would be "most progressive actors believe they make the world a better place."

Conservatives aren't actually my ingroup. I've swung a long way, but not quite that far; I'm still a lot closer to libertarian than tradcon.

I also did say "conservatism" rather than "conservatives".

Fair point, though; I should probably have said "bad" rather than "evil".

I too would agree with "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". But I would not agree with "the core SJ movement >99.9% earnestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil. Because their beliefs are driven in part by corrupt biases.

I think trying to make a distinction between someone genuinely believing that they're making the world a better place, and having corrupt motivations that advance their own interest, is a false dichotomy. Both can be true simultaneously and interlinked. I know Scott wrote a post on this on SSC, but I don't remember which one, if anyone does please let me know. But the point is through something involving or similar to cognitive dissonance, people are biased in favor of beliefs that justify things they already wanted to do. Rich people are more likely to believe in trickle down economics, or that poor people are lazy and deserve to be poor. People who are good at art are more likely to believe that art is beneficial to society. People who are charismatic and politically ambitious are more likely to believe that the old politicians are corrupt and evil but they themselves are incorruptible. Only to gain power and then be corrupt. Scott's conjecture is that this is evolutionary advantageous because lying is hard and possible to see through, but if you convince yourself then you don't have to explicitly lie, and can honestly convince people of your position, gain power, and then your brain switches gears and you reap the benefits of being corrupt and in power.

So the fact that many of their beliefs and practices of Social Justice involving cancellation and being an ally happen to have the property that they remove non-members from positions of power and replace them with members, is highly relevant. Even if the individual members are not consciously corrupt grifters trying to deceive people, those properties affect them subconsciously and shape their practices. You could imagine a more Christian-like SJ movement that believed in forgiveness and redemption, where people in power accused of racism could repent and be forgiven. But then SJ members couldn't create holes above them to advance their own careers, so they are incentivized not to believe in forgiveness for powerful people.

Beliefs are complicated, and not absolute. So I think each individual SJW has a mixture of genuine belief and corrupt motivations. For the majority of SJW people, they probably don't seek direct power, I believe the corrupt motivation is just that they find poor people distasteful, especially rural poor people, and need an excuse to keep hating them instead of feeling guilty about their privilege. Everyone needs an outgroup to channel their negative feelings and blame for the fact that their life isn't as good as they wish it was, so everyone is biased towards exaggerating the flaws of whoever their chosen outgroup is. So they end up believing their movement is true, but corrupt motivation is a key and relevant part of explaining and understanding that belief: they weren't reasoned into the position via facts and logic.

The post you're referring to might be "Does Class-Warfare Have a Free-Rider Problem?".

I'm skeptical though. It seems like the place that the modern SJW memeplex got going was internet communities like Livejournal/Tumblr/Something Awful and various fan communities, there's not a lot of career advancement happening there. (And being on the internet there's not even a lot of awareness of how wealthy anyone is, except insofar as it is displayed by behavior.) There might be advantages to be found in some early takeovers like academia and sci-fi writers, but in plenty of the proto-SJW communities like within activist circles the beneficial move was to not bother with the community in the first place. It was only later that it got enough power over influential institutions for there to be real benefits. You can say something like "it's incentivized by status-seeking/tearing down leaders/tribalist instincts that people are prone to because it helped obtain resources over evolutionary history" but at that point the connection between the behavior and the benefit is getting pretty tenuous.

there's not a lot of career advancement happening there.

No, but there is an awful lot of vicious backstabbing, glorifying in bullying, and petty status games. There was an archive of an article posted over at the Other Place a few months back, detailing how SJ spread like a daemonic taint through the Glee fandom because it was a useful tool for fangirls of one character or ship to attack fangirls of other characters and ships, and rapidly spiraled into a deranged race-to-the-bottom of everyone preemptively trying to brand each other as toxic and problematic for liking certain characters and ship as a First Strike defense against being branded toxic and problematic for liking other ships. SJ is like a Daemon Weapon of Toxic Femininity.

There was an archive of an article posted over at the Other Place a few months back, detailing how SJ spread like a daemonic taint through the Glee fandom because it was a useful tool for fangirls of one character or ship to attack fangirls of other characters and ships

Got a source I can read up on this (on the internet archive or otherwise)?

I tried to google a bit for it, but without remembering something specific like the name of the author, there are too many search confounders.

(I don't think that's the exact article I'm thinking of, but it contains some of the same concept.)

--

For the thought leaders and developers of this idealogy, it is largely about career advancement or just status/prestige/respect from the masses. For the majority of people, the status/prestige/respect is more about being associated with the movement and in the good graces of the leaders and each other. That is, Joe Schmoe doesn't need to personally become the Diversity and Inclusion Officer in order to benefit. If their friend becomes the Diversity and Inclusion Officer and then starts suppressing other people then Joe Schmoe benefits by having a high status friend.

In the context of internet discussions (in the days before cancel culture), the benefits are marginal, but so are the costs. It's not like it's a huge investment of resources and effort to yell at people on the internet that they're stupid and wrong. And I don't think it's inaccurate to describe as, at least in part, status seeking. People want to feel smart and morally superior and convince their peers that they're right and their opponent is wrong. And hijacking the definition of racism or sexism in order to tarnish your opponent with that label is an easy way to do that. This doesn't officially put you in power, but it does give social power/respect/esteem to the conqueror and potentially ostracize the victim, so it is, on a micro scale, a similar effect.

More importantly, the ideology has changed over time. Maybe the old original incarnation of SJW was less about power than it is now and just happened to be coincidentally good at acquiring it because of how powerful the label "racist" is, but the original adherents were true and honest believers (I'm not convinced of this, I think this philosophy has been brewing in the universities for decades, but I guess the modern incarnation took off online). And then as soon as it started to gain power it started to acquire power-seekers. Again, not necessarily people with the explicit psychopathic desire to lie in order to gain power, but the kind of people who instinctively like and imitate winners and high status people, and despise low status people, so end up adopting the behaviors and beliefs of the new high status group that they see. So even if the early movement contained mostly pure believers, more and more impure believers are drawn to it as it gains power.

"Imitate and flatter high status people/groups" is absolutely an instinct most people have, which is driven in large part evolutionarily by the ability to share status and privilege, or just avoid punishment, by the high status people. Again, it doesn't mean that their beliefs aren't as literal as any other belief, but there is an extent to which it lacks genuinity. That is, if the exact same person had been born 30 years earlier they would be a devout Christian condemning Pokemon for being demonic and trying to cancel people who like rock music, because that's what the consensus was at the time. And maybe they would have literally believed in Jesus and that they were making the world a better place. But they still believe it more because it's what they've been told and what the people around them respect and less because it's something they reasoned themselves into. There's a lack of genuinity to it.

I do not understand the distinction made in Edge Case 1. What is an earnestly held belief? I believe (haha) beliefs are anticipations, and so true beliefs are by definition the thing that makes people do what they do (caveats for deception). I would say that particular minority of SJer really does think they are making the world a better place. Consider the following thought process:

  1. Conservatives are bad people

  2. It doesn't matter what they think

  3. The world will be a better place once they die out, regardless of what I do

In this thought process, conversion just isn't a terminal value. "Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em" sounds like a not-so-well-thought-out response, because it doesn't actually say anything about reality, it is just a "boo outgroup" light. So, you should avoid reading too much into it. I certainly don't think it means, "I agree with your empirical claim that being less hostile will convert more people. And I agree with your value claim that converting more people will make the world a better place. But on the other hand, fuck them."

I won't go into a full recitation of why I think this of these specific people, but I guess what I'm trying to point at is that there's a breed of SJer that's more motivated by fairness/cheating (bad people should be punished) than by care/harm (make a paradise). Fairness/cheating is a conservative value in Haidt's six-foundation scheme, but The Righteous Mind's research predates SJ and I've seen it hypothesized that SJ is a six-foundation ideology (unlike liberalism proper).

I agree it's kind of a technicality that I don't count "punish the evil people" as "trying to make a better world".

I believe (haha) beliefs are anticipations,

So, another question would be "Do SJ proponents behave like they expect their purported beliefs to be true?" How do they react to proposals for empirical experiments? Do they welcome tests in the earnest belief that their purported expectations will be met? Or do they play invisible dragon games?

the specific SJ proponents we are discussing -- ones who think conservatives are not worth converting -- do behave in accordance with that anticipation, which is why I was arguing that they are in fact, the hero of their own story and making the world a better place according to their true beliefs.

Whether these individuals are open-minded in the scientific sense and open to experimentation is a completely different question.

I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false, but because of a couple of edge cases I prefer the weaker "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil".

What is the point of this sort of comparison? I'm sure the religious fanatics who were burning Pokémon cards and Harry Potter Books thought they were making the world a better place. People didn't send their kids to gay conversion camps to make the world worse. The Taliban think they're doing the right thing by forbidden women to learn, the Soviets and Nazis thought they were making the world better with their atrocities.

No one is a villain in their own story. Everyone thinks that their beliefs are good and result in good things. But specifically calling for generosity in regards to SJ on this seems particularly perverse, because as an ideology, SJ emphatically denies that generous goodwill to anyone else.

And it seems double-perverse given how much of SJ appears to be upper-class double-think games, e.g. the numerous times Darwin has expressed annoyed confusion that people keep trying to take SJ ideology literally and seriously, instead of just knowing that it's tribal-signaling mouth-sounds.

I generally agree with your first and second paragraphs. The context is in the link; the first quote is from Atomised.

I used to be an SJer and hang out in an SJ space; I remember believing parts of the orthodoxy (some of which I have since renounced) and other people there seemed to believe all of it. While I agree that SJ denies the Principle of Charity, I think of this mostly as an ultimately-self-destructive mistake that we shouldn't follow SJ into making rather than a defection by SJ that we should return in kind.

I am not sure which Darwin you refer to.

I am not sure which Darwin you refer to.

This guy:

https://old.reddit.com/user/darwin2500

Any ideology, however polished, serves as a device for rationalization and coordination within tribes. Is your point that sj is so consolidated as to be called an ideology -- but a flawed, contradictory one? Or that sj is just a spontaneous result of signaling games, and not ideology at all. I wouldn't dismiss any views, overlapping with its umbrella.

Edit: for prospective downvoters. Ever care to engage? or my view is too idiotic for you to descend to?

My point is more that SJ as an ideology is so optimized for conflict theory that it's adherents begging for the protections of mistake theory is somewhere between cute and contemptible. Say what you will about fundamentalist Christianity, but it does still contain memes about loving and forgiving your enemies for they know not what they do. SJ as a meme/ideology, OTOH, is more purely specialized as a weapon, which makes it more valuable to people who want a weapon, either because they just enjoy attacking or they want the weapon to win status games.

Christianity's potential as a weapon had expired long ago, but it performed well for several centuries. Ideologies, like institutions, are optimized for the contemporary circumstances. The more time passes, the more they confine your movement -- as you need to look coherent -- but less effective they are as intended tools. SJ might be in its most defiant phase now, but might evolve into something more net positive and cooperative (or provide a bunch of positive externalities and disappear altogether). Christianity also took time to assume its peaceful role.

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