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Notes -
When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them
Some people refuse to admit they're wrong, but there's other clues
Paul Ehrlich became well-known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he made many confidently-stated but spectacularly-wrong predictions about imminent overpopulation causing apocalyptical resource scarcity. As illustration for how far off the mark Ehrlich was, he predicted widespread famines in India at a time when its population was around 500 million people, and he wrote "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." He happened to have made this claim right before India's Green Revolution in agriculture. Not only is India able to feed a population that tripled to 1.4 billion people, it has long been one of the world's largest agricultural exporter.
Ehrlich is also known for notoriously losing a bet in 1990 to one of my favorite humans ever, the perennial optimist (and business professor) Julian Simon. Bryan Caplan brings up some details to the follow-up that never was:
The first bet was fairly straight-forward: Ehrlich picked 5 commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, & tungsten) and predicted that their price would be higher in 1990 compared to 1980 as the materials become scarcer. Instead of rising, the combined price went down. Ehrlich's decade-spanning obstinance and unparalleled ability to step on rakes make him an irresistible punching bag but despite his perennial wrongness, his responses have ranged from evasion to outright denials:
Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error. It's a reflex I personally find utterly baffling, because nothing engenders someone's credibility to me more than their ability to admit error. So if we can't always rely on people to admit a mistake, what else do we have?
What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were [image link]:
I kept thinking "...so?" as I read these. Why would someone care about the availability of firewood versus the heating and cooking costs in general? Why would someone care about per capita cropland statistics versus the availability of food in general? Many of these are also blatant statistical fuckery, such as monitoring increases in absolute worldwide AIDS deaths during a period of persistent population growth.
Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to his pet theory. He does not believe in truth, but rather believes in belief as the kids say, and he's not willing to jeopardize it.
The acrobatics are the tell here. When Meghan Murphy debates the sex industry, she has to keep the wheels on her goalposts perpetually greased up. Meghan wants to say that everyone who works in the industry has a negative view of it, but the preemptive goalpost shifting she employs is proof she knows that's a lie. The guy claiming there's a dragon in his garage can only preemptively dismiss [thermal imaging/flour/whatever] as a legitimate investigatory tool only because he knows there is no dragon.
It's not perfect but it's often the best we have. Ideally we get people who act honorably and admit mistakes and are willing to falsify their own theories but barring that, just look for the acrobatics. They're the product of intelligent design, not random chance.
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You respect people more for admitting mistakes. Others decide people who make mistakes are unreliable and respect people who don't appear to make mistakes.
Or people who publicly flipflop on serious ideological issues seem more like psychotics than they do like fair minded thinkers. It often strikes me as arrogance rather than humility.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs just seem to have something off in their brains to me.
And I'm old enough to have friends who were complete shitbirds when we were 19 and who found Jesus at 30 and now won't shut up about it. And while I respect them for their change, I kind of reject their lectures. I stayed at a 5 (semi open relationship with the same girl) all along, you were at a 0 (lie to girls about your career and family to try to trick them into sex) and now you're at a 10 (premarital sex will lead to hell). Maybe take a chill pill, a touch of humility, if you were wrong then you might be wrong now.
It's super consistent behavior, though; they like attention and they found a larger audience, or they tend to follow the crowd and the crowd changed directions, or, less charitably but perhaps more accurately, they like to bully others and they found a less costly way to be horrible.
I grew up in a religious community. I was always unorthodox, and was treated poorly by a lot of people who were regarded as "upstanding" for their piety. I expressed doubts about God as a kid, so no one is surprised to hear me say such things as an adult. But the same individual people who were most likely to mete out social punishment for my little heresies are still the people most likely to mete out social punishment for my heresies, only now they're various shades of woke and my heresies are political instead of theological.
Whether they've stayed in the faith or separated from it, basically all of them are ultra-orthodox woke advocates now (mostly for LGBT issues, but depending on their circumstances also for a rainbow of disabilities, with autism--or "autism"--and obesity being common pet projects in addition to the usual vapid strains of so-called anti-racism). The ones who haven't blocked me on their social media feeds are still the same bullies they've always been (I assume the same is true for the ones who took the step of blocking me, but I can't guarantee it). No amount of hair dye or piercings can hide the fact that they are still doing everything they can to punish independent thought or questioning of the party line. That it's a different party line is irrelevant except, perhaps, as a "born again" bona fide. As the Wizard sings--"the most celebrated are the rehabilitated..."
Freddie deBoer's "Planet of Cops" tells the story well, though I don't think he ever quite twigs to the shared identity of the conservative cops he complains about, and the woke cops he sees as imitating them. When he criticizes religious conservatives as natural cops, he memorably cites William Burroughs:
And my response is: it's still the "decent church-going women" (and, often, men), they still wear mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. Often, literally the same actual people. They just left their old church and joined your new, political not-a-church.
Ex Nazis who become Twitter SJWs are some of the most internally consistent people in the world. If feeling morally superior to others and reveling in hating and even seeking the extermination of the right people is something you enjoy, the difference between Nazis and Twitter SJWs is little more than a palette swap.
My view on that is that it's easier to claim the "decent church-going folks" are the natural pinch-faces, because that lets you ignore the pinch-faces on your side. 'We're not religious! We're not conservative! So we can never ever be like that!'
Oh yes indeed you can be, and often are.
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Absolutely how it works on Twitter. While neither a Nazi nor an SJW (hopefully), at some point I went from having followers like Nick Land and BAP to getting a whole clique of rabidly Communist transgender Jews. Twitter is dominated by leftists, and they supply cheap attention. If I cared more about such schlock I'd have probably tailored my messaging further; and were I worse at isolating processes (or just younger), I could have had this environmental change propagate back into my own value system.
Many people are not particularly good at that.
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You know what, this makes me grateful that my outspoken atheism as early as the age of 5 never really hurt me in any way. Religion never took in me in the first place, and despite occasional efforts by my parents when I was younger to drag me to the odd temple or festival, they never really made a fuss about what I believed. Nor did anyone else I've interacted with in person.
I'd chalk it to Hinduism being unusually non-evangelist or proselytizing, including continued historical acceptance of sects that were atheist (in the sense they denied the existence of any gods, while often holding vague spiritual views). "Nastik", the Hindi/Bengali term for atheist, specifically refers to them. I'm sure that if I had relapsed from Islam, the consequences would have been much more severe, but both Hindus and Muslims just seem grateful that I don't side with either and are content to let me be.
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Please don’t summon him…
I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to, though it sounds like maybe asking you to explain would potentially violate your concern.
@HlynkaCG, I believe you have been summoned.
Ah. If that's what we're talking about, I will cheerfully insist that I've been saying "the only difference between the alt-right and the far-left is the approved targets of their identitarianism" for at least as long as Hlynka has been on that train.
But then how do you explain:
Opposition to medical transition in general, and especially hormone therapy for children, is an alt right position, while supporting them is a leftist position.
The alt right thinks women should be encouraged (through both informal cultural means and formal policy) to be housewives, while the left thinks that women should be encouraged to build independent careers.
Opposition to mandatory Covid vaccination is right-coded, support for mandatory Covid vaccination is left-coded.
Are these not legitimate differences? Differences that aren't reducible to the target of their identitarianism?
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Yeah, /r/StormfrontorSJW is almost 10 years old now.
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I’ve always found the Peterson “ideological possession” idea useful as an explanation. Some people need a political and social framework outside of themselves to function and thus run from ideology to ideology in hopes that simply believing the ideology and living by it will provide structure they personally need to function. Other people don’t need as much structure in their lives so they tend not to follow or build one.
There’s a qualitative difference to me between someone who goes from one ideology— hook, line, and sinker— to another with no gaps in between, especially if they’re extremely different, and someone whose thinking evolved over time and can admit to nuances in their positions both before and after. If I go from fundamentalist Christian to hard core atheist SJW with pink hair and a nose ring, you’d be right to be at least suspicious of my reasoning— and at least from my observation of them, there wasn’t any hard dispassionate reasoning in between. People who reason themselves into a position are much less likely to make that position into a large portion of their personality.
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