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Yawn. It’s really tiresome to see that even purportedly “anti-woke” people have allowed their minds to be colonized by the nakedly anti-white framing that pins the blame solely on “privileged white” progressives for spreading and enforcing the things about modern society that they don’t like.
Well, as someone who has spent the entirety of my adult life in thoroughly progressive social spheres - everything from explicit socialist activist spaces in college, to the world of musical theatre and “queer performance art” - I can tell you from direct personal experience that the people who have been the most vindictive, the most ready to pounce at the slightest hint of wrongthink, the ones who have done the most to sully my personal reputation and those of others far less off-the-progressive-reservation than I am, have been uniformly non-white.
The three most egregious examples - the people who will be first against the wall if I’m ever magically granted dictatorial power - were, respectively, half-Filipino-half-black, fully black, and half-Puerto-Rican-half-white. These three individuals (and they’re far from alone) have significantly damaged the lives of a number of people whom I personally know, and they’ve successfully terrified a great many more people into staying in-line with the approved opinions. That’s the reality: most white progressives whose careers or social standing are wrapped up with their ability to stay ideologically up-to-date are terrified of stepping out of line, in a way that this simply far less true of most non-white individuals in the same milieu. Whites are far more cancellable than non-whites. Able to draw on a far smaller pool of mercy and benefit of the doubt, because they lack any sort of shield of “marginalized identity” on which they can fall back when questioned. Why do you think so many of them are socially “transitioning” to “non-binary” and other sorts of low-investment boutique identities? I’ve seen this process play out a number of times among people who, again, I personally know. If you’re a white guy in these spaces, you are literally vulnerable at all times and have to watch what you say at all moments, because you’re inherently suspect. So, you grow your hair out, maybe wear sort of ambiguous clothing, and declare yourself non-binary to give yourself some modicum of breathing room. Yes, many non-white progressives are doing the same, and I do not want to overstate the level of relative immunity from cancellation they enjoy, but the bar is undeniably set higher for them than it is for similarly situated whites. “White progressives” are not the ones primarily driving the dynamics you’re pointing at, and I think it’s a distraction tactic, or maybe part of a personal vendetta you’re prosecuting, to act as if they are.
Indeed, as it implicitly accepts the progressive Who? Whom? framework and the notion that non-Asian minority Lives Matter More: Non-Asian minorities can only be failed, not fail, much less be blamed for anything. For example, common normie conservative takes are that the Root Cause of black crime is white progressives being soft on crime and that the True Victims of affirmative action are talented non-Asian minorities. The old adage that conservatives are but progressives driving the speed-limit comes to mind.
Mood: “Man who thought it was all so tiresome finds he is more tired than previously thought possible.”
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It is true that the progressive racial agenda is driven primarily by non-whites. However (excluding the brief aftermath of George Floyd) the LGBT agenda seems to be much more prominent currently, and this is dominated by whites.
Was this ever done in response to violating orthodoxy on non-racial issues?
This seems to be completely contrary to what I've seen. Every "non-binary" I know of is either a woman or a male homosexual, except for one heterosexual white Chad, but he would be the one who punishes others for being insufficiently progressive. So in any case, this phenomena seems to be motivated primarily by attention-seeking, and, in rare cases, the opportunity to be an activist - but not out of fear you'll be accused of being some brand of bigot.
But to address your general annoyance at anti-woke people complaining about white progressives, I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. The problem isn't that they are willing to notice race here, it's just that they refuse to (or are at least extremely averse to) notice race when it would lead to blaming a non-white group.
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You have a point about people kneejerk complaining about "white progressives," but while you can argue all you like that it's a handful of POC dominating and terrorizing nice white boys like yourself, they would have no power if not for all the white progressives abetting them. You stay in these ultra-woke environments but keep complaining about the wokeness. You can't like everything about the white progressive environment except for the fact that they allow non-whites to have influence. That's part of the environment.
Have you uh… forgotten whom you’re speaking to? The guy who got a degree in theatre and had planned to pursue it as his life’s work, but who gave it up and distanced himself from huge swathes of his social group - burning important and otherwise rewarding relationships which he’d spent over a decade cultivating - primarily because of fundamental incompatibility with the progressive values dominant in that industry? Who’s still rebuilding his professional aspirations from the ground up as a result? That’s the guy you’re accusing of “staying in these ultra-woke environments but complaining about the wokeness”?
Again, an incredibly bizarre accusation to make toward me in particular. You actually believe that my only complaint about wokeness is that some non-white people believe in it? You have my entire posting history to disabuse you of that notion. I’m responding to a specific claim that “privileged white people” are the ones primarily responsible for driving wokeness. I believe that this claim is false. This is not a defense of the ideology, it’s merely a disagreement over the people driving the enforcement of it.
No, I have not. That's my point. As I understand it, you still live and work in that same environment (I don't know how much progress you have made in leaving it, but you seem like you are still very much a theater kid).
No, I think you basically like the white progressive environment, you just don't like the non-white people in it (and all the things they bring), and you think non-white people invented wokeness. Well, in a sense they did ("woke" was originally African-American vernacular), but we have had many people here over the years write extensively about how wokeness is just the natural endpoint of the Enlightenment. Which is quintessential white progressivism. Maybe you disagree with that take, but I haven't seen you offer an alternate hypothesis.
Yes, and I think that claim is correct.
I retired permanently from performing several years ago. Most of my IRL friends are still people whom I met while in that sphere, because I can’t just magically recreate an entire social network in my thirties. I have complained many times about how it’s easy for right-wingers who grew up in conservative areas, or who were never closely affiliated with any left-wing people or communities, to say, “Just move to a red state, join a church, get new friends, etc.” as if ripping up your entire life and starting over is just a super simple thing for people to do. I’ve burnt a considerable number of bridges by even revealing a fraction of my true beliefs, and I would almost certainly lose what’s left of my friends and my side job if I were outed.
You have a poor mental model of me. It is very true that I like a lot of things about living among college-educated people with artsy-fartsy tastes; I’ve commented before about how when I attend classical music concerts, I’m acutely aware that the vast majority of the people in the audience with me are not remotely conservative, and that this is not an accident. Progressivism correlates highly with having good taste in music, in film, in literature, etc. That correlation is only partially causative; a lot of it is simply that intelligent and educated people are socialized into progressive values by the sense-making institutions they gravitate toward, as is the case with me, but part of it is also that psychological traits such as openness to experience are related to leftist instincts. I also unapologetically love the urban lifestyle, and for a number of reasons that also correlated with progressivism. It’s not the progressivism that is the appealing part. I’ve said many times that my overriding goal is to figure out how to do my small part toward facilitating a reconciliation of white left-wingers and white right-wingers. Both have an integral part to play in the future of our civilization.
I’ve been severely behind on my effort-posting due to some professional and social obligations as of late, but I had a big effort-post planned about how a recent orchestra performance I attended, which featured a very racially diverse group of young performers, represents the sort of “best-case scenario” of multiracial elitism, as opposed to multiracial populism. I hope to write more about this dynamic in the future. I have numerous non-white friends and colleagues, and my racial views cannot possibly be summarized as simply “not liking the things non-white people bring.”
Again, not remotely true, and I’ve explicitly said otherwise. You’re correct that I have not laid out a comprehensive genealogy of “wokeness” because I myself am still working out exactly what I think the most useful and accurate model/explanation is. Certainly the Enlightenment is a factor, but there are lots of other ideological strains that contributed - transcendentalism, unitarian utopianism, even ancient religious traditions like gnosticism play a part. It’s a very complicated story, and in no sense whatsoever do I give non-whites any prominent part to play in it, at least not until up until the 50’s, or a bit earlier if you frame Jews as non-white. Again, you’ve assumed a ton about my worldview that is not supported by my actual statements.
This is a good post, and it echoes a lot of what I think personally.
I think the future for conservatives is rescuing the blue tribe, not throwing in our lot with the red tribe. I like classical music, and museums, and old cities with beautiful car-free corridors. And conversely I am disgusted by big trucks, obesity, Walmart, and pit bulls.
If the blue tribe and the red tribe are going to different planets and I need to choose, I'm going with the blue tribe. That's who my people are. In my opinion, they are the best people, even if they are more likely to be captured by the woke mind virus. For me, the ideal outcome is for the blue tribe to return to sanity rather than to let the red tribe run things.
I used to want to be part of the blue tribe but after seeing how they treated the red tribe since around 2008 I just don't anymore. The condescension and classism is so hideous. How can you see people who you feel culturally superior to and have contempt toward them rather than compassion and empathy for their condition? Yes, walmart is a hideous place, but god so is Baltimore. The red tribe likes big trucks and guns because they're tiny scared people in a big scary country. If you're taking the bait and seeing them as some Jan 6 insurrectionist threat rather than people with decades of subpar education under a semi hostile cultural millieu that confuses them and your response is "ew, no thanks" then I think that view is morally repugnant and I don't want to take part.
Red tribers like big trucks and guns because they're fun, not because they're "tiny scared people in a big scary country" (or "bitter clingers" as Obama put it).
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You can have compassion and empathy for the lower classes without wanting them to actually run things.
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I totally agree on the culture part. It shouldn’t be simply abandoned because it’s been more or less co-opted by the progressive elites as if they own it. And tbh I think honestly unless it’s reclaimed, it’s going to be lost when civilization rebuilds itself in the West. Good art belongs to everyone, and I don’t see why it has to be marked as progressive to read good books or listen to good music.
The eschewing of those kinds of art by the counterculture is part of why conservatives have such a hard time making good art. They don’t learn to understand good art, and how and why it’s good, so they end up creating childish art that can’t really compare. Christian media generally sucks mostly because they have to resort to telling rather than showing and can’t create characters who disagree without having them be cartoon characters.
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I don't often fall back on my progressive bona fides, as the only child of a lesbian mother. I had 'two moms' before there were books about it.
You don't even have to move to a red state. In our very blue state, we've joined a local traditional church, and made new friends that are on the same page regarding the madness and degeneracy of current year.
Your attachment to an urban lifestyle may be working against you here.
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I don't think I do have a poor mental model of you.
Yes, I understand it's not the progressivism per se that is the appealing part. But for all the reasons you mentioned, the things you like are basically "white progressive culture." You don't like that it's progressive. I kind of sympathize with your dilemma (not a lot), but I think you are pointing in the wrong direction by insisting it's not white progressives responsible for the things you don't like.
My entire point is that none of those things used to be the exclusive province of progressives. Classical music was a very right-wing tradition for a long time. Ditto for literature. We find ourselves in a very odd and atypical moment in history, in which the vast majority of smart and high-human-capital people are left-wing. There’s no reason this needs to be the case now, it hasn’t been the case for very long, and my contention is that it will not continue to be the case for very much longer.
Abandoning the cities, deriding high culture as faggy elitist status-signaling (as a number of conservatives on this very site have done) and going all-in on rural populism is a toxic dead end for the right wing, and I would rather actually try and rescue those parts of our culture - the BEST parts of our culture - from the mind virus of minoritarian identity communism. Being a white identitarian is inextricably tied up with this; I believe that white people are largely doing this to ourselves, and that all we need to do is stop. However, if we don’t stop very soon, things genuinely will be out of our hands and those who hate us truly will have the whip hand. Right now, white progressives are allowing vindictive race communists, like the individuals I mentioned in my original comment, because they’ve forgotten what made white people great, and forgotten that they have the strength to fight back.
It’s like if a huge jacked guy was allowing himself to be bullied by a scrawny manlet, simply because he had some psychological condition that caused him to forget that he has muscles. Some perceptual blindness that causes him to ignore the evidence of his own strength right before his eyes. He could snap out of it in a second and flatten the bully, but something is stopping him from doing so. And there are people like me standing off to the side yelling, “Bro, you’re fucking massive, just pummel this guy!” And he’s like, “Nah man, I’m puny and weak, and plus, even if I was super strong, it would be morally wrong of me to fight back.” That’s essentially how I see racial dynamics in this country, at least as it concerns whites and blacks.
I'm bemused that you just wrote a long screed saying at greater length what I said above - which you claimed was wrong.
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I have seen people say this but it makes little sense to me. The Enlightenment celebrated reason, it was a move away from unconditionally accepting orthodoxies about things like science, religion, and the supposed rights of monarchs.
Wokeness, on the other hand, is largely a turning away from reason and towards orthodoxies.
Why would wokeness be the natural endpoint of the Enlightenment?
The problem is that 'reason' does not provide any sort of moral imperatives on its own. The ultimate state of 'reason' is something like extreme libertarianism - treating every human like homo economicus. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) as we all know, humans are not like that. So you have a situation where reason tears down Chesterton's fence after fence, and ultimately starts to eat its own tail.
The only reason reason was able to go so far and become so successful at understanding the world was the high trust religious backdrop it developed in, Christianity. When you have reason on its own without a higher end than itself, bad things happen.
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"Reason" doesn't mean embracing "The Truth", but rather embracing "whatever I can't personally think of a good counter-argument for, possibly while being actively deceived." The Enlightenment moved away from Christianity; it immediately and enthusiastically adopted novel orthodoxies about science, religion, and the supposed rights of social classes, frequently to disastrous results. The places where it delivered good results are also the places where its push away from Christianity was largely neutralized. The places where it did move away from Christianity, it produced slaughter and oppression.
The basic problem is that human reason is not, in fact, a very good way of figuring out the world around us. If you're familiar with economics, think about economic Central Planning, why it was attractive and why it didn't work. The Enlightenment failed for similar reasons: it assumed it had the answers to questions that it did not, in fact, have the answers to.
See here for a debate on the subject.
I don’t think reason is the problem here. I think the notion of democracy as the defining form of government is the problem precisely because it is anti-reason. No reasonable person would allow people who don’t understand a subject weigh in on how it’s to be done.
To give a simple example, the current situation between Russia and Ukraine. Most of us, even here know so little about the subject that it would be ridiculous to give our opinion the same weight as someone with real expertise in Russian and Eastern European politics. We don’t know enough to make good decisions, but of course we do know enough to think we understand how to fight the war, or whether we actually should. It gets worse in science based policies— the average voter is for all practical purposes scientifically illiterate. They don’t have any idea how to decide what science is real, what’s useful, or even what’s dangerous. So, they base it on movies or TV or YouTube videos. When people think about AI, it’s not based on any understanding of what real AI is or does, it’s based on TV or movies. It’s Data VS Terminator, neither of which exist except on celluloid film.
Democracy can work for very simple things. You can probably reasonably vote for local roads and stoplights. But once society gets complex enough, it quickly outstrips the average person’s ability to really understand and make good decisions about every aspect of society. There’s simply too much going on.
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I like this post, and liked your previous one. Do you remember where you found these arguments?
I'm especially interested in historical books that focus on this - and discuss the long term rise of reason versus Christianity.
Violence Unveiled touches on this topic if you're curious.
I came up with them myself, largely from reading and arguing with people in the various forums that preceded this place. It'd surprise me if someone else hadn't thought it first and better, but if so, I haven't found them yet. Failing that, I've been off-and-on trying to write up a concise encapsulation of my own, but the going is slow.
Thanks for the recommendation!
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You're underestimating how much of this is driven by reason.
Transhumanism in general has a declared goal of freeing the mind from the body, which is the ultimate end of a movement which is the rejection of man's natural condition to recreate him in his own image using technics.
That this in turn makes itself into an orthodoxy is just the eternal irony of philosophy: all movements taken to their logical conclusion invert their original goal.
Now reason isn't bad or evil don't get me wrong. But it is indeed its worship that led us here. There is a direct throughline from Kant and German Idealism to the totalitarian modernisms and to post modern subsersive politics.
Such a throughline that some saw this as the conclusion of this style of thinking way back when the French Revolution ignited it all.
But all human history is the rejection of man's "natural condition" to recreate him using technics. The Enlightenment marks an acceleration in this but it's not like humans weren't trying to improve on their natural lot before it, it's just that around the time of the Enlightenment they got much better at it, so much better at it that scientific progress started to seem like it would just keep going and going rather than being something that happened once in a blue moon. Man's "natural condition" is to live naked without knowledge of agriculture or even how to make fire. Man has been rejecting it for hundreds of thousands of years.
I also think that philosophy's impact on politics is overestimated. Totalitarianism would probably have come about one way or another because of the rise of modern technologies that allow near-instant communication and dissemination of propaganda.
As for transgenderism, haven't there been versions of it in various human cultures for thousands of years? Modern transhumanism is not what created it. I doubt that transhumanism even did much to give it its modern, Western shape. Probably most transgender people don't even think in abstract terms of freeing their mind from their body, their concerns are more specific.
This is absolutely untrue, and you only believe this because you're a man of the Enlightenment living in a society made according to its principles.
People of the past did not think like this. Technological escape from man's condition was a very secondary concern if you actually look at what they left as artifacts of their thinking.
What you value of what they produced and what they valued of themselves are not the same categories, and people always confuse the two.
You're thinking in tautologies here. All you're attempting to relate nature to here are relationships of production. There are other things in life than making transformed goods that can fit on a spreadsheet. And before the advent of this period dominated by merchants, people thought of those are more important.
Are war, honor, faith and family more or less constitutive of man's natural condition than agriculture and business?
As you know, this is a longstanding debate in historiography. But I think sole technological determinism the likes of which you seem to be supporting here is almost entirely falsified. If only because we're not currently living under Both great men and ideology have a seat at the table of causality. Were Marx and Kant not to exist, the manifestations of the industrial revolution would take a distinctly different character, if through similar means.
Consider how similar and yet different those totalitarianisms of the XXth century are from each other despite being determined by supposedly similar technology.
No. Androgyny is eternal and its popularity recurs. Transgenderism in particular (both in ideological terms and in technical terms) is wholly new.
Gender theorists are constantly producing propaganda to pretend the past agrees with their novelty, a stratagem borrowed from the one used for homosexuality, but people of the past did not thing of things in those terms and it doesn't make sense to paint social edge cases of completely different social orders using contemporary social theories. No person born before the 1990s ever was "queer" in the sense these people mean.
This is like saying the proletariat always existed because at any time in history you can point at people who have more than others. Useful propaganda. But sociologically moronic.
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The Enlightenment didn't just accelerate the rejection of the natural condition, it marked a turn where the rejection of that natural condition became the end goal.
For most of history, in Christian Europe at least, technology progressed and people worked to improve their lot, but the main motivation (culturally if not individually) was to help the poor, and to improve people's lives in order to help them better serve their community and God. This motivation wasn't necessarily written down anywhere, because everything in this worldview was about serving God.
The ultimate purpose, the thing that gave people the motivation to get up in the morning and work on improving their lot despite their often terrible material circumstances, was the love of God. The belief that the divine was on their side and cared about them personally, that they were fundamentally flawed in many ways, and that by doing good they could save their soul:
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Or it could be that black progressives have different origins and I have different interactions with them.
It is hilarious when you can set them against each other.
Your mixed race white progressives are very different from the Black Hebrew Israelites I am used to dealing with.
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I’m assuming you’re not very familiar with my posting history and my views, if you believe that I’m currently an “ally” to progressives, or that I’m moved by your accusations that progressives “divide people by race”. It’s an easy misunderstanding based on my (true) statement that I’ve spent my entire adult life in heavily progressive social spaces; however, a quick perusal of my posting history in this forum should help you understand where I’m coming from. My worldview at this time is very, very far from progressive, and I’m far more guilty of “stoking racial division” than any of the progressives, white or otherwise, with whom you’ve incorrectly lumped me in.
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This is really not a healthy way to live. You don't need to take it from me, just pay attention to the sheer number of cliches along these lines---it's overwhelmingly accepted wisdom that keeping grudges like this is not good for you. "Living well is the best revenge", "don't let them live rent-free in your head", "you're just letting them hurt you even more", etc.
Even beyond that, revealing this kind of mindset dramatically weakens the potency of your arguments. It makes you sound like a strawman---the person who only becomes a white supremacist because they can't get over what some specific minorities did to them in their past. However many words dress it up, none of their beliefs are based on logic or correctness, just emotions they can't deal with properly.
I can literally point out this comment to people I know IRL as a way to argue "yup, racists really are what you think they are, here's some more confirmation that nothing they believe in is based on anything logical". This should tell you that something has gone terribly wrong on your end.
If your enemies tell you that you should do something for your own good that straightforwardly helps them and harms you, that's probably motivated reasoning or concern trolling. Some of the biggest proponents of getting rid of grudges are the people who are targets of grudges, who should be ignored for this reason. Someone who you have a grudge against probably isn't very interested in your mental health overall; why should you listen to them on the one subject where they have something to gain?
And combine this with sour grapes--when you can't have something (in this case, defeating the group you have a grudge against), you tell yourself that the thing you can't have really isn't all that great. Sour grapes is a form of bias, and it may be a coping mechanism, but it isn't rationality.
Seeing everyone as your enemy is a big part of the problem. Besides, do you really think holding grudges and living your life in anger and fear is the best way to live?
Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it is. And the people who are in a position to make that judgment are not the people with a stake in ensuring that you don't hold the grudge.
I'm reminded of Scott's post claiming that Republicans should vote against Trump because electing Trump actually helps the left. The straightforward effect of electing Trump is to help the right, and Scott isn't trustworthy when he tells you the reverse.
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Not if you're surrounded by enemies.
It may be the best available.
Then go somewhere you aren't surrounded by enemies, as @Amadan and many other users have been saying.
I don't think that's almost ever the case. There have been some miraculous transformations in life towards living a more peaceful and gentle life. Take for instance General Butt Naked, who transitioned from literally being a cannibal warlord to a Christian who at least purportedly does good deeds and runs a church. If you want to tell me that you and @Hoffmeister25 have fallen farther or are more surrounded by darkness than he is, well, it will take a lot of convincing to say the least.
I think this 'woe is me' attitude is the problem with large parts of the conservative movement, as a matter of fact. I tend to sympathize with the viewpoints of young white men who struggle to make it in the modern world, but if you change your viewpoint and take some damn agency and responsibility for your situation, your life can change into something much better than you might imagine. I say this because I see the posts above getting a lot of upvotes, and I'm worried about the type of young men especially who endorse these sentiments.
That presumes the existence and practicality of moving to such a place. I'm not going to fit in with "red tribe" any better than I fit in with blue, and if I tried I'd have a couple of strikes against me for coming from a blue place and not being religious or generally not understanding the culture at a practical level.
There's a culture war on, and my enemies are winning; no place is safe.
I think this attitude on the part of normies and "responsible conservatives" is part of why the left is winning. The left sees or imagines an injustice towards one of its own, they rally around them. Normies or responsible conservatives see an injustice towards someone by the left, it was the victim's personal responsibility to avoid it. Got a sexual harassment complaint for saying hello to the wrong girl? Well maybe you should have read the signals better. Got fired for saying the wrong thing? Well maybe you should have kept your damn mouth shut. "But leftists can say what they want?" "We're not talking about them, are we?".
Wrong. Responsibility has a large part to play, but it's not the victim's responsibility to avoid it. It's the victim's responsibility to deal with it, grow stronger, and continue to stick to good morals and the path of God. The path you and @Hoffmeister25 are taking is fundamentally weak, that's why 'normie' conservatives don't like it.
This may be true in some scenarios, while at the same time it's true that the larger society, and a specific subset of progressives in particular, are at fault. You are trying to reduce out all of the context and nuance in these situations and make it black and white, between you and 'leftists,' your sworn enemies. Again, I think that type of response is weak and leads to horrible outcomes. I reject it entirely.
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This is 100% the argument that every group that feels it's been aggrieved (including by you) uses. You're essentially arguing that we should never let go of grudges and always pursue retribution (reparations, anyone?).
Unprincipled conflict theory is at least as bad as naive mistake theory.
There are times when we should let go of grudges. But usually not when someone is telling you to let go of grudges, unless they're your family or someone else who is actually concerned about you and has has no ulterior motives.
"Guy on the Internet tells me to let go of grudges" is not it.
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I don't see what kind of mindset this reveals at all. If you were to say, witness a superior abusing their position to sexually exploit others at your workplace, are you supposed to just let it go, and not let it affect any of your beliefs around sexism or corporate culture or power, because to do so would be petty and grudgeful and Not A Good Look, like seriously my dude, Yikes?
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You’ve made a series of baseless assumptions about me, based on limited evidence, and used your false model of me to prove your thesis about “racists”.
Firstly, I didn’t bring up the three individuals in question because I obsessively ruminate about my contempt for them. While they genuinely are contemptible - two of them are actually quite pleasant in person (though ruthless behind your back) and the other is just an absolute mess, keeping everyone around him on edge - my contempt for them has absolutely nothing to do with their race, and did not have any influence on my developing a racial consciousness; the latter came significantly before the former. My relationship with these individuals soured in large part because I, independently of anything they did or said, had turned toward a positive racial identity, and therefore could not react any way other than negatively to their naked anti-white statements and assumptions. I brought them up, though, as counterexamples to a specific claim that had been made by the OP. I felt that they were appropriate to bring up in that context, not because I think of them all the time - I don’t - but because OP’s post made me think of them.
If the standard you want to hold white advocates to is “never make any negative statements about specific non-white individuals who have pissed you off or wronged you, because of you do then I will immediately assume that all of your beliefs are based on petty feelings of personal vengeance and not on logical reasoning” then not a single one of us is going to pass your test. You might as well write us off completely.
The reality is that for the vast majority of people who adopt any ideology, other than maybe the one they grew up around because of their parents, it’s going to be because of some combination of personal experiences, exposure to arguments, observation of patterns in the world, independent reasoning, and natural inborn personality traits and instincts. By ruling out one of those factors (the personal experiences part) as inherently illegitimate and discounting the possibility that others also played a part, you’re holding your ideological opponents to an impossible and anti-human standard.
Yes, I have had some bad experiences with some particular individuals in my life; the lion’s share have been non-white, although some have not. This is actually the pattern one would expect if one takes racial differences and the inevitably of interracial conflict seriously. You don’t, so you’re forced to impart causality that doesn’t actually exist, or at least not as a monocausal explanation.
Here's what I specifically assumed about the story in that post: there are some people who wronged you in the past---a few months to a few years ago. You cut off contact with them and are likely never going to interact with them ever again. However, you still keep a list of their names in your head as those who would be first to die in fantasies where you're a dictator. Please let me know if these specific assumptions are substantively incorrect.
Even this by itself is not normal. It is also very different from simply just "making...negative statements about specific non-white individuals who have pissed you off or wronged you" or "obsessively ruminat[ing] about [your] contempt for them". Please don't play this kind of debate game of skewing the strength of a claim to make it sound wrong (though you're definitely not as bad as some of the other replies here).
On your second point, there is a hierarchy of types of evidence. Personal experience and anecdotes are at the bottom and really on acceptable when you're dealing with something so hard to measure that you don't have a better option. For the specific question you raise about the inevitability of racial conflict, there is much stronger evidence---you can find statistics, research trials, multitudes of case studies of different modern and historical societies, etc. Just as a heuristic, if something is an active field of academic research (well, barring certain fields), you shouldn't be reasoning about it based on personal anecdotes. In fact, your strongest, most thought-provoking posts are the ones where you stick to these stronger forms of evidence.
I do have to disagree far more vehemently here. You can see above exactly what standard I use to discount the personal experience factor as illegitimate---I personally care more that my evidentiary standards lead me to conclusions that are correct than that they feel "human" to me. Obviously people are imperfect and not perfectly rational in seeking truth. However, I can't see any other interpretation of what your saying here except that this means that we should give up because trying to improve is "inhuman" (please again correct me if I'm wrong).
From another perspective, I'm someone who strongly disagrees with you about some particular argument; if you make a mistake because of human failings, that's your problem and I'm perfectly justified in writing off what you say as not convincing. However, please note here I'm not taking this as evidence that your point is wrong (just pointing out that many people definitely will!). I'm simply asking you to fix your argument and holding judgement until I see what happens.
You are the third person to interpret my joke as a serious statement, which means it clearly wasn’t a good joke, and I regret making it. No, I do not actually have fantasies about killing some bitchy theatre people who harmed me socially. No, I do not actually have fantasies about becoming a dictator. I expected people to extend to me some basic charity and assume that I’m not a nutcase; in hindsight I should not have expected this, especially given that people here are inevitably going to pattern-match me to The Austrian Painter, and therefore I need to hold myself to a higher standard.
That being said, your suggestion that it’s abnormal to remember specific individuals who have pissed me off or harmed me, and to remember those people’s names and faces, just seems nakedly wrong. That’s a completely normal human thing to do. Would it be more “normal” of me to have… forgotten who they were? People I knew for years and interacted with as recently as three years ago? It’s normal to lose all recollection of their names and faces in the span of three years? No, that would actually be really weird! I would have to have a pretty bad memory for that to be normal.
As for the rest of your post, we just disagree strongly about the relative merits of personal experience/anecdata as a basis for reasoning about the world. I agree with you that it’s not sufficient in itself and that it needs to be backed up by data. Were I to have made a serious effortpost, with citations and links and statistics, it’s fair to say that this would have been a stronger argument than my relatively low-effort comments that I rattled off without much forethought. That doesn’t actually mean that a post without data and citations is necessarily weak. Anecdotes are actually a totally valid way of reasoning, as long as the preponderance of available macro-level data doesn’t actually countervail against the conclusion you’ve drawn from personal experience. I think that the conclusions suggested by my personal anecdotes are sufficiently similar to the conclusions that the available data suggest, such that the anecdotes actually strengthen my case rather than weakening it. One would expect society-wide trends to be replicated at the micro/interpersonal level more often than not, and indeed that’s what my personal experience has been.
That drops the situation from "abnormal and worrying" to "within the range of normal but not healthy", leaving aside points others have made about whether the joke was a Freudian slip and whether that's a valid way to infer things about someone. The point that you're never going to interact with them again is doing a lot of work here---why waste mindshare making them one of the first things you think of in a situation like this?
Sure, as long as you understand that this is not going to mean anything to anyone who doesn't already agree with your interpretations of the stronger, macro-evidence. I think a lot of the pushback you got was because people interpreted you as saying that it should---the Motte isn't that much an echo chamber yet.
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I think you're reading 'against the wall when I'm dictator' as an outburst of suppressed rage. It's plausible that isn't the case, though. One explanation: in some online communities, "up against the wall" is just a figure of speech used to ironically emphasize distaste - "redditors should be shot / furries should be shot". Another potential explanation is OP's moral system puts much less emphasis on the 'right to life' of antisocial individuals, so "X should be killed" doesn't require all-consuming anger, and rather is a casual observation. I think the first is a more plausible explanation here, but the second demonstrates that desire for violence or murder doesn't have to emerge from hatred per se.
I think the context missing here is that "X will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes" is typically targeted at abstract groups ("Furries" "Business majors" "Lakers fans who don't live in LA") or public figures ("Roger Gooddell" "Nancy Pelosi" "Martin Shkreli"). Presumably you don't actually know these people, your rage is directed towards what they do in the world. It's not personal, personal impotent murderous rage is a different animal.
It's very different to say "These three people I know personally, I'd really like to murder them. When I talk to them I think 'The world would be a better place if you were dead.' The things you've done to me personally are awful enough to deserve death." That's an expression of personal Animus, and when your political conclusions seem to follow from personal Animus, well FreudGPT doesn't need much more of a prompt does he?
It's also a profoundly anti-conservative attitude to want to murder your friends. I've noticed a contrast between Evangelical conservatives, who often hate abstract groups while being friendly to actual members of those groups; and Bloomberg Democrats, who often love groups in the abstract but hate or ignore the actual members of these groups they come across. As exemplars picture a putatively racist contractor who will complain about Puerto Ricans over beers while working with them every day, versus the Liberal BLM profile pic investment banker who has zero Black friends they speak to regularly.
I admire our friend Hoff for his willingness to examine his own psyche, but it's hard not to disagree with his conclusions after we see what premises he's working with.
See my reply to Hlynka. The “get the wall” comment was intended to be read as an obviously hyperbolic joke. I do not want to kill my ex-friends in the San Diego theatre community.
I do advocate political violence in a limited capacity, and you’re correct to note that in this sense I am profoundly different from the median conservative who just wants to restore some sort of détente, but I don’t believe it’s in any way necessary or morally right to extend that violence to individuals whose “power” was ultimately nothing more than hyper-localized and entirely social in nature.
We will ultimately need to see certain public officials killed, maimed, or permanently jailed. I truly do believe that healing in this country will need to include that. This doesn’t mean that I want the jerk who told people not to be friends with me because I’m a problematic white man to suffer this fate.
Okay, can you please explain in more detail why you are so extreme in your views and why you think violence is necessary? I actually agree with you that the identity politics and views of the modern left are insane and need to be curtailed, but I'm nowhere near justifying the awful means you endorse.
All I'm getting from these posts is that you, personally, have had a really hard time and so you think extreme, violent, measures are needed to change our society. On a societal level, why have we moved so far that we can't resolve this situation without violence?
No, I haven’t! My life could definitely be a lot better, but a huge amount of that is because of poor choices I’ve made! Apparently my posts have given people the impression that I’m some sad-sack burnout with no prospects or something like that. My income is nothing like what most of the people on this sub make, but I’m not struggling to make rent or pay bills or anything like that. I even have some discretionary income that I use for frivolous things! My love life is a mess right now, but there was a period where it wasn’t, and a lot of why it is now is, again, due to things I’m doing wrong and choices that I’m making. I don’t feel “oppressed” or anything like that.
As for why my views are “extreme”, I don’t think that’s actually true when you look at the full scope of human history. In fact the norm historically has always been that major regime changes have been incredibly bloody affairs. This was true long before Robespierre and Cromwell. When the ruling class of a country fails spectacularly, and especially when those failures seem not only avoidable but to actually be the result of specific bad ideas or corrupt motives which that ruling class actively chose, then usually blood has been spilled.
Liberal democracy was supposed to “fix” this. It was supposed to structure society in such a way that this bloodletting would no longer be necessary, nor even desirable. And for some length of time, in some countries, it even accomplished this for real! That was no mean feat, and I’m not going to pretend like it wasn’t an improvement over a lot of what came before it. The problem now is that I think the Gods of the Copybook Headings have begun to reassert themselves. I believe that some public officials in nearly all European and Euro-diaspora countries have failed their people so comprehensively - in fact, they haven’t merely failed the people, they’ve actively conspired against them - that the burning rage, the despair and hopeless and sense of injustice which have begun to proliferate among the common people of these countries is going to boil over at some point.
And I’m not even a populist! I think that some of the complaints that common people have about the government, and some of the things which they accuse the government of doing, are actually illegitimate and ill-considered! That doesn’t change the fact that the rage is real. I certainly feel it. When I see career criminals continually released back into the streets by DAs who are actively pro-criminal and anti-white, and when I see what used to be actual borders reduced to open doors, I feel burning rage at the people responsible, and a profound sense of injustice when I reflect on the fact that none of them will suffer any consequences or accountability whatsoever. Even if they get voted out, they’ll immediately land on the board of a non-profit, or get a show on a cable news network, or an academic sinecure, which in some cases will make them even more powerful - and certainly more wealthy - than they were when they were in formal elected office!
This cannot continue indefinitely. We are so far past the point of no return, as far as I can tell. And my reading of history is that these situations always end in bloodletting. And that this is not always a bad thing. In this case, since I’m not expecting to die myself, or for anyone I know or care about to die, as a result of the coming bloodletting, it’s especially easy for me to be comfortable with expecting it.
Do you disagree with my assessment of what’s coming? Or do you merely disagree that it will be something other than a calamity? Do you think that the targeted persecution of specific individuals responsible for catastrophic failed policies is the historical norm? Or do you think it’s “extreme”? Can it be both? What does “extreme” mean in this context?
Absolutely, and this still happens today in much of the world. I think it's bad, and I think one of the most important efforts of each person is to move away from this sort of world.
Do you think people didn't have burning rage during the Civil Rights movement? After the Great Depression? During the fight of the sufragettes? Hell, I'd say the rage back then compared to the limp, satiated populace we have today is barely comparable. I'm frankly shocked you just look at history, supposedly, then say the rage in the modern West is at a boiling point. People have endured far, far worse situations than we have without rebelling. We don't even have it that badly, and even if we did we have ample distraction. Bread and circuses orders of magnitude better than the romans.
You really see the modern world as irreparable without violence? I don't buy it.
I don't trust your reading of history. I think that as you admitted above, the miracle of modern liberal democracy is that we can make changes like this without bloodshed. I'd argue that we try and let those mechanisms work, and actively push for that sort of non violent revolution.
Yes I disagree with your assessment if it means violence is inevitable. Sure I think targeted persecution is a historical norm, but I also think that we've miraculously managed to move past that historical norm, as we've moved past other historical norms. Did we all the sudden go back to oral history after writing was invented? No. Permanent step changes in human history can happen when we find a vastly superior cultural technology. Liberal democracy is a step change.
Whether or not violent political purges are extreme, they are foolish, sub-optimal, and most importantly wrong. Whatever justification you try and make for them regarding our current state of the world is foolish. Perhaps in circumstances orders of magnitude worse than the West's current situation I could see the justification for violence, but even then I'd prefer we find our way without it.
What happens is not out of our control. Which path we go down depends on the actions individual people make, day to day. Creating a just-so story of inevitable political violence is you trying to justify your worldview by making up a narrative that makes it impossible to avoid. Again, I don't buy it.
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I disagree with this narrative a lot.
tl;dr: it's not the normies that fought the old internet and won. It's the lolcows.
Old internet places were normie-proof. The first and most simple reason for this was that normies have lives to live, no-life internet losers do not. So in any given area the internet culture was always dictated by the no-lifers since they are always there.
A secondary reason is emergent culture. When similar people engage with one another, you get a form of culture. These people were, back in the day, no life white dudes. The cultural expression was indirectly just young white men. Not being that sticks out like a sore thumb.
The third reason is that caring is weak. If you care about something you can be made fun of. If you value something it can be desecrated. So in order to be bulletproof you can't care about anything.
The thing that killed these places and led to the 'New Internet' we have today were a few things. Primarily it was different kinds of no-lifers mixed with grifters mixed with weak men with power. /v/ after GamerGate is a great example. Grifters create drama, no-lifers join in to point and laugh, weak men with power, i.e. mods and moot, side with grifters and /v/ is turned into a 'no fun allowed' zone since weak mods are enticed by grifters.
That wouldn't be enough to kill everything off though. The second nail in the coffin can be seen with reddit. Starting with places like SRS. It turns out super motivated no-lifers who obsessively care are much better than unmotivated no-lifers who have made it their entire thing to not care at all. Especially when the weak men with power are completely ready to abandon fun in favor of attention from women, since that happens to be a thing men care about a lot regardless of what they say on the internet.
The third nail in the coffin was the 'New Internet' realizing that having no-lifers on the internet laugh at you doesn't matter all that much. Sure it hurts, and the old no lifers can get under your skin and create better internet memes and whatever. But in real life they have no power. So what does it matter? Just ban, laugh, and lie. The old truth can never reach anyone that way.
The final nail is simply that you can out-no-life the old no-lifers. No one is 16-25 forever. Sooner or later real life rears its head and you stop being permanently online. And for a lot of white men that happens. But what if you are a professional no-lifer? What if you are way past thirty and your entire life revolves around modding the biggest social media sites? The ultimate NEET lifestyle so coveted by the old no-lifer. Living rent free in real life. But instead of the old idealism of just playing video games, going to the gym and buying the occasional hooker, you intend to enforce your will unto the internet with ideological fanaticism and fervor that defies reality and reaches depths of depravity so great that no shock documentaries of hoarders or maniacal weirdos even come close.
The new internet is the lolcow. And they make sure anyone who laughs gets the stick.
If you want a glimpse of the future, look at Call of Duty. A bunch of transparent grifters running around a multi billion dollar game franchise desperate to please the lolcow community managers so they can get more power, status and money to continue grifting off of the sub-100 IQ brown normie playerbase. The entire thing is so degenerate and disgusting I have no words to describe it. But it's the norm.
I think what invited the normies was the advent of apps for common media sites. Back in the day, if you wanted to be a part of a forum, you had to first find it, register and go specifically to that site. It wasn’t a sub-Reddit in a huge forum-of-forums model, it wasn’t Facebook or Twitter-X where everything was easy enough to find. And because it wasn’t app-based, you’d have to either stumble on it from elsewhere, search for something related, or be told about it. This helped protect the community from being overly saturated by outsiders with little connection and a chip on their shoulders. The community formed was tighter because it was shared interests and a small enough community where most people knew each other, and it wasn’t shot through with people drive-by posting and being drive-by offended. The internet was a series of “small towns” in a sense. You’d have people who knew each other talking to other people who knew you.
With aggregator sites (Digg, Reddit, and so on) and general social media (Facebook and X), there’s no need to become part of the community. If you type in the name of a given sub-forum, or click a link from the front page, you’ll not only be there, but able to participate even if you know nothing. With an app, you just open the app, look for the sub-forum, and if what you see is shocking or offensive or weird, you and every other tourist gets to weigh in.
Tourists coming into the space was always a thing. They would either get curious and lurk after getting told off or they would leave. That doesn't explain why old communities were culturally replaced.
It's not the normie who has the power to 'weigh' in on anything. Mod cliques do what they want to do. They enforced their rules from the top down. And it's not even that they catered to normies. They just enforced lib/progressive/leftist ideological orthodoxy because that's what the lolcows like in real life. The ultimate ideology that says you can't laugh at them anymore.
Take any regular reddit post that gets locked because too many users are noticing something about black people. You get the typical condescending reddit mod "I guess we just can't play nice today" or whatever. Normies just put up with it because they are normies, they have a real life to live and care about, after all. The mods see themselves as curators of comments that the normies can be allowed to see.
/v/ was a great example of how extremely top down things are. Moot bans discussion on GamerGate because of his real life social circle. This was so contrary to the wants of the userbase that it spawned an entire splinter site.
Same thing, to a lesser extent, with reddit and voat.
I think it would be much fairer to say normies don't actually have opinions. They just read them. In a war of internet minorities, no-lifers lost to the lolcows.
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I'm aware of CoD but never played it. What is the phenomenon you reference here? It sounds interesting.
It's hard to give concrete examples. It's a feel you get from being in the feed or the bubble so to speak. Compared to games I used to spend a lot of time with CoD just feels dumber. The way people talk, how they type, how they reason.
But the easiest example would be the classic of developers inviting streamers to go play the game early, the streamers then rave about how amazing it is, then the game is released and it's crap. An apology is made by the streamers. Then you repeat the process for the next annual release after having complained along with your following that the previous game was actually bad even though you recommended everyone part with their money before it was even out. Despite the exact same thing happening last year.
This isn't an issue isolated to CoD, but the way it plays out in CoD is so extremely brazen and ridiculous it's just beyond any reason. The timescale is just so short. If you are not stupid you recognize the process and stop buying the game. The cycle of buying, complaining and then just a year later doing it all again is pathetic. But as far as I know it's the biggest gaming franchise in the world and it's been doing this for years.
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Even themotte isn't safe from such behaviour. Our well-read Russian friend (currently in exile in Turkey) accidently used the Russian notation for quotation («I am a Berliner.»). After an accusation of anti-semitism (ironically, not by a leftist) due the second poster mistaking guillemet for the triple parenthesis, a third poster explained the difference. Someone reported the third poster to the admins and his post was [removed]. This was the straw which broke the camels back and led JabbaTGreek to lead his flock to independent pastures.
Orwell's thoughts on this topic are well-known, inability to express dissent leads to an inability to even think dissentient thoughts. But on the second hand, lingusts today think that while the Strong Sapir-Whorf (language determines thought) is false, the Weak (language influences and shapes thought). Mathematicians also agree that in their field at least, their version of WSW (notation influences mathematics) is also true. Correct notation makes it easier make generalizations which are true, and correctly obscures feneralizations which are false.
Where?
This website that you're currently posting on.
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Having charity and kindness being rules here was a mistake. Our great enemy has no concept of truth as we'd understand it. I'd accuse them of being habitual liars, but the dichotomy of truth and lies simply is not in their world view. In this environment where you are required to take their truth-void statements "charitably", it's impossible to grapple with them. Think of Darwin.
Furthermore, they have hacked our empathy to such an extend that our truth is offensive to them and cannot be spoken under rules dictated by "kindness". We are constantly forced into using their terminology. It's not mutilating and sterilizing children, it's "Trans health care".
If this place in an experiment, it's failed.
Ironically, you are the mirror image of your "enemies." When I hear leftists say "Punch Nazis," my initial reaction is "Sure, fuck Nazis." Except we know that their definition has ever-expanded until now "Nazis" is basically "anyone who's not a leftist."
You whine here all the time about how you're "not allowed to speak your truth." That's because your truth is "Everyone not politically aligned with me is an Orwellian monster" and you think our charity rules are bad because we allow people not politically aligned with you to talk too, and we don't allow you to shit on them just because you really want to.
You just want to war, war, war. Your praise of KiwiFarms is very revealing. Yeah, KiwiFarms is fun for what it is, but it's not some shining beacon of Truth and Realness from "the old Internet," it's a collection of people who really like watching trainwrecks, pointing and laughing, mocking, bullying, and driving people into a rage. It appeals to the basest impulses. I don't say this judgmentally - I like reading the lolcow threads too. But if your complaint is that the Motte failed because we're not more like KiwiFarms, well, you misunderstand and apparently have always misunderstood what this place is and isn't.
My reaction to "punch Nazis" is "please don't empower the Nazis."
Without the brownshirts squabbling with the communists people would have been less welcoming for someone, anyone, to step in and provide order. Unchecked political violence is good for the people that want to destabilize the status quo and put authoritarians in power.
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People forget that being a goon would get you kicked out of much of the old internet because of places like helldump.
I never knew helldump was a thing back in the day but the circles I hanged out in mostly mocked them for being Lowtax's paypigs.
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Maybe. Or maybe I understand perfectly well, and it's still failed. When I think about what this place was supposed to be, the phrase that most comes to mind is "Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came". It was this utopian vision of curating a rationalist garden of eden where nice people were nice to each other and came up with solutions to problems rationally, and promoted pro-social norms of continuing to be nice and solve problems rationally.
This has clearly failed, and the rules have become the boot on the neck of people trying to find actual workable solutions, because people have weaponized our empathy against finding solutions. The most fragile perspective dictates what is "charitable" or "kind", and the most dysfunctional deeply felt priorities prevents any solutions.
Turns out it's even worse when they start a war and nobody shows up.
No. I don't think that's what Zorba or anyone else ever envisioned this place being. That's purely a projection by you. Funny, you and Hlynka are sounding awfully alike lately.
There is no boot on your neck. There are rules like in almost every forum about not just slagging people off and shitting the place up with low-effort hot takes.
Seriously, what "workable solutions" have you ever proposed? Raging about how much you hate your enemies is not a solution. If you were proposing solutions, you would not be modded (unless your "workable solution" is something like "treat my enemies like the zombies they are, with headshots").
You are trying to characterize us as letting wokes and snowflakes dictate the norms of discourse here? Bullshit. Give me specific examples.
As someone who does run against the rules fairly often for being too spicy, it isn't something I have any complaints about. I just sometimes forget which ruleset I am under.
My only complaints are what would happen when new mods come up, but that hasn't happened yet.
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This is definitely not true, and if you had those inflated expectations then clearly you haven't been paying attention to the history of the Motte. This place has always been a haven for witches, and the mods and long term folks have been very clear eyed and open about that.
You're being extremely dramatic here. Sure the Motte could be bigger, have better discourse, etc etc. But you're still here aren't you? Where else on the internet can you have the same quality of conversations, be able to tell the truth without worrying about being banned immediately?
I'm sure there are other pockets of free speech and truth-seeking on the internet, but the Motte is still one, and an important one. What we're doing here is worth it, and again if you truly felt like this whole endeavor has failed then I don't think you would be here.
Are the list of bans still publicly available? You should see my name their amply. Sometimes justified. Too often not IMHO.
That's the answer to your question. Not here.
You have a ton of warnings, and two bans here. I defy you or anyone else to defend those as being anything other than low-quality shit-takes. You have never been banned because you were speaking truths that we can't handle. You've been banned because you want to do exactly the same thing that raging wokes do everywhere else - scream and spit venom.
I stand by my thoughts that the first ban was absolutely unjustified, and my response was perfectly valid and called for. After that I stopped giving a shit and the second was on purpose.
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Maybe that was Scott Alexander's vision, but as far as I know that was never TheMotte's vision. For the most part, the mods here do not censor people for being not-nice, they just censor people for writing in a not-nice way (and even there, the mods give a lot of leeway). Which makes sense, because without some kind of standards for effort-posting, posting in good faith, and being civil this place would just turn into 4chan or, at best, rdrama. Both of which are places that I enjoy, but they already exist and we are free to go post there as well as here. It's not like you have to pick just one. If you want to go post with almost no rules, you have other options.
"But," you might object, "I want both! The effortposting and at least pretense of intellectual standards that TheMotte has, and the freedom of 4chan."
Ah, that is an understandable desire. Who of us here wouldn't? The problem is that in practice it is probably not possible. If you allow the freedom of 4chan, it then follows according to what one might almost call an iron social law that, in the current world political context, your site will become just like 4chan, a place that is shaped by Darwinian competition over who can get the most (You)s by crafting the most juicy bait and forcing stale memes, where every other thread devolves into people just unimaginatively trying to insult each other, and where the politics discussion is a stale echo chamber (just right-wing, not left-wing).
Not that I hate 4chan. Like I said, I enjoy it. But I would not want to spend all my time there, it can get tiring to wade through the 90% of repetitive shit over there to find the 10% of content that is interesting plus it also gets tiring to be somewhere where so many people have a fundamentally loser, defeatist, and constantly angry attitude about reality (which TheMotte also kinda has, but not nearly to the same extent).
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There's a famous invocation of the line (though a misquote) which follows up with Why then, the war would come to you.
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Who is "our great enemy", here? Personally, I'd say that my great enemy are people unwilling or unable to extend charity and kindness to those holding viewpoints or values they disagree with.
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Not sure what you mean by this. Charity and kindness in debate have been norms that have been useful for far longer than wokeism, even if wokeism is taking those rules to the extreme. Baby and the bathwater, and all that.
Charity is one of those things where some people need more, some people need less, and you can't aim the advice at the people who need it. And the reason we've come up with the quokka idea is that rationalists have a habit of not understanding that attacks are attacks and treating them with excess charity, like Scott not thinking that Cade Metz was malicious from the very start and if he had only been nicer to Metz, Metz would have written a completely fair article, or like this post.
It's not always bad to be a quokka.
Scott's star has never shined brighter. How many billionaires read his writing? I think I remember he's making 600k/year from Substack. Probably more now.
Scott may be a quokka but it's working for him.
Meanwhile nobody cares about this Cade Metz creature except that he wrote about Scott. That will probably be his epitaph: "Wrote a hit piece on a beloved and respected public intellectual". Writing that just now makes me feel sorry for the guy. Scott crushed him like a bug without even meaning to.
Scott Alexander went from being one of the best writers in the world writing the most interesting articles with a comment section of gold attracting the best thinkers in the world getting to the naked causes of many problems we now face to Scott Siskind, a forgettable content producer who makes good money on substack.
If Cade Metz is a forgettable nobody, it makes this story all the more tragic. I think in a couple decades, people will still talk about Scott Alexander and some of the articles he wrote. I do not think the same is true of Scott Siskind.
Maybe I'm being harsh, but watching Scott cower and slink away to come back different was such a disappointment to me.
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His star shone brighter when he was, briefly, one of the best writers in the world, looking directly at the nature and causes of the core problem eating our society.
I'm sure he's making more money now, but then he had a solid shot at making a difference. Not many draw that hand, and he folded.
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We're in a bubble. Scott seems important only because of that. And Metz is a Times writer. This inherently means that a lot of people care about what he says.
Plenty of people told similar lies about Gamergate. It's pretty obvious by now that none of them will be chiefly remembered for those lies. We don't control the discourse, and in most places where it's relevant you can't even suggest that anything said about Gamergate was a lie. And yes, it still gets brought up every so often.
And this pattern extends back in time. "White Flight", the history of race relations generally, erasure of the anti-suffragettes, and so on. The control has existed for much of the last three hundred years; what changed is that some few people have become aware of it.
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At what cost?
When was the last time he wrote anything people here bother quoting anymore? Besides "Scott wrote a thing which is a good opportunity for my more interesting post on the topic" type deals.
I think there's something to this, but >80% of scott's old posts that I like the most aren't about the culture war. Control Group Is Out Of Control, Different Worlds, etc. Those seemed to have slowed down too (probably?) so I'm not sure if that's the cause.
I thought Radicalising the Romanceless was some of his best work to be perfectly honest, and I think that gets incredibly culture-warry. But to continue being honest I haven't been reading Astral Codex Ten nearly as much as Slatestarcodex and the writing seems less compelling when I do.
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What does 'quokka' even mean here? Scott intentionally hides his belief in [thing about race] while still hinting at it once in a while (e.g. in the Galton Erlich Buck post). I don't think he has any illusions about the media being good and nice on that topic.
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I think charity is fine, but it must be in service to telling the truth. That’s where the liberals have weaponized kindness and charity. In the hierarchy of speech values, truth must weigh much higher than charity. You can insist that people not be antagonistic about the way they tell truth as they understand it, but the truth is often unkind and makes people uncomfortable. It’s not kind perhaps, to suggest that jumping off the roof won’t result in flight, but it’s absolutely true that gravity will pull the roof jumper back to earth. There can even be a sort of backhanded cruelty in withholding truths in the name of kindness. Telling a middling student with a C- average who doesn’t read on grade level to go to university and major in whatever they want is absolutely not kind, because the truth is that such a student is unlikely to be gainfully employed in white collar work. You don’t have to call them stupid, but if telling them that maybe they won’t make it as a lit major is unkind, well, letting them face the consequences without a warning is cruel.
But you aren't describing the kind of "kindness" we enforce here. This is why periodic complaints like @WhiningCoil's annoy me. They complain that they aren't allowed to "tell the truth." The fuck? We have Holocaust deniers here. We have white nationalists here. We have hard HBDers here. People openly talk about dumb people not being fit for university educations, trans women being men, and all kinds of other unkind "truths" here. None of that gets people modded. Going annoyingly on and on and on about the same thing over and over (like our resident Joo-poster), yes. Snarling insults, yes. Strawmanning your enemies as zombies, yes. But you are mischaracterizing what "charity" means the same way Whining does.
My comment was more based on the general concept of the kind of kindness that pervades much of the rest of the internet. It’s always felt a bit patronizing to me to kindly pat people on the head and tell them exactly what they want to hear and that they’re wonderful even if they’re terribly flawed and refusing to work on those flaws. Such things are not only lies, but unkind in more ways than one. It’s patronizing to assume that a person is so weak that they’ll crumble at the first hint of challenge to things they believe in. It’s flawed because allowing untruths to continue often hurts the very people that it’s intended to help. And I think just society-wise, it prevents us from dealing with problems straight on.
I don’t believe for a minute that happens here. I’m sure you like every other human have biases. But I think an honest person would see that we’re at least trying to get it right. Other places aren’t like that. Even if you’re being nice, saying something other people don’t like is going to get modded.
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I absolutely agree. Postmodernism and the idea that there is no objective Truth is probably the most pernicious thing that has happened to our society. It's difficult to stop however, precisely because the postermodernists define the entire battlefield.
I think that something like Jordan Peterson's view is the right way to fight back, although I also believe we can build a lot further on his basic ideas. He claims that even if we can't tell there's objective good, most people aren't willing to bite the bullet and will call the Nazis, or Japan's rape of Nanking, or other horror stories objectively evil. From there, even if we can't necessarily agree on what's good, we at least have an idea of what not to do.
And if you take evil being a real force seriously, that means that every time you tell a lie, even to yourself, you contribute to the downfall of us all. You push us back towards the concentration camps, the torture, madness, and genocide. Truth is what keeps us from those things, and as you say charity cannot become an end in itself. Like rationality, it's an excellent tool but a malevolent master.
I kind of tend toward the Kantian view of ethics most of the time. I recognize the limits of course, but I agree that without firm limits on what may and may not be done — regardless of the reasons given — you really can’t prevent bad things from happening. It’s like a person who doesn’t set boundaries for themselves, it ultimately comes down to the other person choosing the right words to make that hesitation go away.
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The Nazis and invading Japanese would likely strenuously agree with you that objective good exists, and furthermore, that their actions are objectively good. Pushing ethical relativism to the point that you're reserving judgment on genocide is a recipe for disaster, but having such conviction in the objective righteousness of your cause that you're willing to commit atrocities in the name of the greater good is just the mirror image failure mode. See the people in this thread ranting about our Great Enemy - do you think that attitude is any more conducive to a thriving society than the people they loathe?
Planting a flag wholly in the objectivist or relativist camps is fraught for different reasons, in my opinion. Perhaps planting a flag wholly in any camp is fraught, and everything in moderation (except for moderation) remains the wisest course.
Well, they're wrong. Part of moral objectivism is that people can be deluded, yes, but their opinions are wrong. And the world came together and agreed that they were wrong.
You see my moral objectivism is more like: "committing atrocities in general is wrong, for any ends whatsoever, whoever uses those means is evil."
The people ranting in this thread about a Great Enemy are hopefully not evil, but I'm sure some of them are. I'm not sure we understand each other very well - can you clarify your arguments against moral objectivism?
I apologize that personal circumstances don't allow me to get back to this promptly, or as extensively as I'd like.
So what then, a Kantian categorical imperative against 'atrocities?'
Oh, I doubt very much that they are. The person in question (if memory serves) posts fairly regular wholesome updates about their woodworking, book reading and other hobbies. If they didn't realize I was a Great Enemy we could likely share a few beers without issue.
1 - I'd likely agree that an objective 'truth' exists, I'm just pessimistic that it is knowable by you/I/anyone short of God. Some cases are egregious enough that it doesn't take much beyond a fifth grader, let alone God, to label something as wrong, but the vast majority of the issues we wrangle don't fall into this bucket. We've built such horribly complex social, economic and political structures that understanding them in a meaningful way to influence policy is virtually impossible. What is the objective truth of the CHIPS act? Even beyond that, should we compete with China at all or give them their sphere of influence? I could list a hundred other policy questions from the last decade that I lack the answer to, and I'd argue anyone trying to sell you an 'objective' answer is lying.
You might argue that I'm agreeing with you and simply think that most moral questions are hard, but my rejoinder would be that if we're making all our decisions based on vibes, values and feelings isn't that a lot of subjective bullshit that exists in relation to our cultural norms?
To be clear - this doesn't mean I think we should throw up our hands and abandon trying to base our decisions on evidence. I'm just mighty suspicious of the folks who claim to be doing so objectively, and doubly so of people who have strong convictions when it comes to complex issues.
2 - The moral relativists have strong arguments of their own without having to lean too much on criticisms of objectivism. A decade or so ago, some areas of Canada were debating banning burqas. I read an op-ed written by an immigrant from the middle east who'd worn a burqa her whole life and argued she felt naked and vulnerable without one even when given the choice. The public wasn't particularly swayed, and Quebec ended up banning public servants from wearing certain clothes.
On the flip side, I had a friend tell me about her experience in the Peace Corps. She was stationed in a country where women weren't allowed to wear shirts or bras and felt profoundly uncomfortable for the entirety of her stay. Not to mention her pale skin did really poorly with the tropical climate.
As an objectivist, what's your judgment here? Are Middle Easterners brutal oppressors, or are we? Is the objective truth that everyone should be free to choose their own garb without judgment from their peers? But how would you enforce the latter without some brutally oppressive state banning wrongthink/speech?
3 - I'm running very short on time, so this won't be particularly well fleshed out. Many, including our resident theocratic fascist, argue that people are happier with these social norms and restrictions on their behavior. And while I don't share his utopian vision where the gays get thrown in prison, it is clear that there is something to the idea that people require these social structures to be happy, and furthermore, that they are often built in such a way that not everyone can be happy. I also wonder how much of this is biologically hardwired.
What would your prescription be in that scenario?
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If you want this place but without the charity and kindness rule, then what's that supposed to be?
Oopen discussion without charity and kindness rules? You'll get shouted down by the more numerous party.
Bilious contrarians heaping abuse upon absent bien-pensants? 4chan still exists, enjoy.
Supposedly very intelligent contrarians organizing to topple woke orthodoxy? Ask yourself why that is not happening already.
I disagree with kindness, charity is worthwhile though something of a hopeless cause. Someone else said it here but kindness is an insidious term that has been weaponised politically, eg COVID and trans issues.
The term I favour is civility. Civility is a form, so isn't as loaded, and doesn't require people to hide any of their views or fail to call people out, it just requires that it's done with style, panache even. As in a debate where someone says someone is stupid but with a witty retort.
I thought kindness meant kindness towards debate opponents, not the kindness towards the entire world that modern orthodoxy demands. But sure enough, civility should be sufficient in its stead.
I'm sure it does mean the narrower definition but even then I think for certain people it might encourage a certain holding back. Any term has the problem of where the agreed threshold is and they also overlap, the duty of civility derives from some consideration that is a kindness.
But kindness is deeper and sometimes it's not clear what is kind, ie giving a streetperson money that you are sure they will buy drugs with, or the tradition of fierce wisdom-telling people what they might need to hear even if they will find it unkind. Now, we're not in a spiritual or personal community here so I don't advocate for fierce wisdom, there should be protocols that understand the nature of the space. But this fits better with the less loaded term of civility in my view.
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I've thought about this a lot in the context of the observation "the left can't meme". The idea is that memes (or jokes more generally) advocating a woke or leftist worldview tend to be less funny than apolitical memes, or memes advocating an anti-woke, classical liberal or conservative worldview. An alternative phrasing applies it to creators of memes rather than the memes themselves, so that even an apolitical meme created by someone known to be woke or left will tend to be less funny than an apolitical meme created by someone who isn't. Anecdotally I think this is a very accurate description, and most leftist memes (and jokes and comedy more generally) seem intended to provoke clapter rather than actual laughter. In some cases, "stand-up comedy" in which the audience isn't supposed to laugh (which we might have traditionally called "spoken-word performance" or "lectures" or "sermonizing") is the explicitly intended point.
For argument's sake, let's assume the premise of the meme. Why is woke/leftist comedy less funny than other kinds of comedy? Your point is essentially my explanation for the phenomenon. Effective comedy and humour depends on creativity and the element of surprise. Wokeness depends on absolute ideological conformity and rigorous adherence to a set of linguistic prescriptions which are essentially arbitrary ("coloured people" is out; "people of colour" is in), vary depending on the perceived identity of the speaker (who has "N-word" privilege? Does the one-drop rule apply?), and subject to a euphemism treadmill which seems to accelerate every year. It should come as a surprise to no one that comedians cannot reasonably be expected to serve two masters.
And it's no good telling these comedians "just write the funny jokes, then go through them with a fine-toothed comb and replace all the naughty words with items from this official list of PMC and HR-approved ones". Replacing a single word in a punchline can be the difference between uproarious laughter and dead silence, as any skilled standup comedian knows. But at a deeper level than that, we're talking about habits of mind. Once you get into the habit of obsessively overthinking and analysing everything before you say it, walking on eggshells for fear of saying anything which could be taken as offensive, the funny jokes simply won't occur to you anymore. It's impossible to write a funny joke when you're living in mortal fear of your career being destroyed because you couldn't remember whether you're supposed to say "unhoused person" or "person suffering from unhousedness" this month.
By and large no-one can meme, at least if the goal is to meet the exacting humor standards of extremely online weirdoes who have fried their brain with a mental diet of years of image boards and other social media.
Your modal right-wing meme is not "dissident humor", it's a boomer uncle posting a picture of laughing Minions with a Comic Sans text "How is it that the Left wants to tell you what to think, when they can't tell a girl from a boy?"
Speaking as an extremely online weirdo who has fried his brain with a mental diet of years of image boards and social media, it really isn't that hard to make me laugh, chuckle or smile. If I scroll through my Instagram feed for ten minutes, I can reliably expect to laugh at at least one image I see, whether it's a meme or a screenshot of a tweet or a silly video. (I would say the overwhelming majority of content that makes me laugh isn't political at all.) And yet this is a bar that explicitly woke/leftist memes, jokes and standup consistently fail to meet. Oftentimes the purpose of the ostensible joke seems less about making the audience laugh (even in a supercilious "ha ha our opponents are so lame and stupid" way) than merely signalling allegiance to the cause i.e. clapter.
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Comedy is, by its nature, subversive. It doesn't have to be politically subversive necessarily, but it needs to subvert expectations. Taken to its extreme, like Andy Kaufmann, it can even subvert the idea that a comedian is supposed to tell jokes.
The problem with woke comedians is that they are limited. Their worldview is dominant. So woke comedians like Amy Schumer are boxed in. They can't tell jokes about politics. They can't tell jokes about society - not funny ones at least. So they try to mine the existing sources of taboo they can find, for example toilet humor. But it's all been done a million times. We basically expect female comedians to make jokes about their vagina nowadays. That's why those jokes never land and Amy Schumer is cringe as fuck. But it was probably mind-blowing in the 1970s or whatever.
Being against the current paradigm lets you be funny in a lot of different ways. Being for whatever's cool now is by definition not funny.
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Even assuming wokes and dissidents are equally endowed with humour, the political domination of the former creates a selection effect. Any leftist joke, funny or not, is allowed to spread. People repeat it, if only to signal conformity and obedience. But non-cathedral-approved funnies face suppression, and only the most laughable survive. One will share them only if their quality outweighs the social cost imposed on the sharer for outing themself as enjoying egregious entertainment.
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You know, for years now I've felt like the internet of old that I grew up with had been completely ruined by normies. The flame wars, the shit talking, the profoundly creative obscenity, the irreverence and iconoclasm. The Internet that gave us goatse, stile project, or "I Like to Watch", and honest to god classic I highly recommend not watching around children or at work.
Then I started spending some time at Kiwi Farms since they documented the schizophrenic decline and eventual suicide of an old associate of mine. Many community members who knew him blamed Kiwi Farms for "bullying" him, but I mostly blamed them for enabling his obvious mental decline. For giving him the illusion that he's not mentally ill, but instead a special snowflake who is misunderstood. It eventually followed the arc of many schizophrenics where he lost his job, his marriage broke up, he violently assaulted his parents who took him in, and then he died on the streets. The final straw was clearly going off his prescription meds, self medicating with god knows what, and attacking his parents. Not Kiwi Farms noticing.
Regardless, everything I used to love about the internet of yore still survives on Kiwi Farms as it turns out. I highly recommend it.
The hell, you knew Terry A. Davis IRL?
Nah, a different schizophrenic. They're basically all the same it seems.
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You forgot your (pbuh)
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Where would you go to find it now? Ever since it antagonised that politically influential anime enjoyer I haven't been able to find a trace of it.
Think the onion link generally still works with TOR to my knowledge. He had a .pl site up for a while but checking now it looks down at the moment.
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kiwifarms.st the .pl domain was seized by a german provider.
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I've made this kind of observation before, how social media can mold us into becoming the online identities we wear.
I kinda don't miss the flame wars of old, personally, but I really wouldn't say that modern-age online beefs are any improvement.
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This is good stuff.
This reminds me of how I compared the US Constitution to an open-source microkernal, and the US Code to all the other operating system items necessary to support the microkernal, and the individual states to various Linux distros.
Unlike actual microkernels, the constitution is actually running in production.
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Also very relevant: https://haleynahman.substack.com/p/138-are-we-the-robots
Seems to reverse causality. We're not becoming robots or acting like them, we developed polite speech first and then insisted the robots follow it. As they say, it never costs you anything to be kind, and a robot fundamentally doesn't care in the same way we do. You can hurl abuse all you want at it and there is no satisfaction in the possibility that it might go home and cry that day.
There's no conflict between being polite and expressing yourself with creativity and individuality. Nahman isn't complaining that corporate communications require politeness (indeed, an absence of politeness would be a big red flag for an unpleasant work environment), but rather that corporate communications in the Anglosphere tends to be extremely dry and deracinated and heavily reliant on prefab canned phrases ("going forward", "if you could just circle back to me", "per my last email"). In other words, corporate drones are NPCs. Politeness isn't an inherent hallmark of robotic speech (it would be fairly trivial to make a ChatGPT knockoff which swears like a sailor), but speaking in canned phrases absolutely is, because a computer program can only do what it's instructed to.
I'd argue that people just don't care enough to express their creativity in corporate communications. Once you have a phrase that people understand, no one is going to bust their heads in coming up with a better one. Doesn't seem like a case of people being robots as much as it is people being lazy. Or perhaps those two are really the same.
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So what sort of reeducation/disciplinary actions are the Canadians imposing on Peterson? It sounds like we’ll get to see the course content, however will he have to take a test at the end and falsify his beliefs to pass?
My understanding from having seen a couple interviews with him is that he will refuse to attend the training regardless of whether he wins or loses the court appeals. In which case it's likely they will escalate and revoke his professional license as punishment for refusing to comply.
If only Linus, who was in a more powerful position, had the stones to just refuse.
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But the article says he said he will take the training publicly, maybe a live stream.
Liberals read, conservatives watch Youtube live.
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Certain social policies are misguided attempts to ensure skin in the game.
Aristotle I think claimed that most vices correspond to the absence or perversion of some particular virtue. I reread Scott Alexander's review of Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart" and it helped crystalize an observation that a certain kind of approaches to solving social ills is likely to be a perversion of the concept of having skin in the game.
Skin in the game is, basically, the idea that things tend to work out much better when people making decisions are also the people reaping the consequences than when they are not, because otherwise you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem and doctors doing lobotomies on the involuntarily committed and people forcing their politics on culturally different communities and the government spending taxes on catastrophically wasteful projects instead of letting people buy private services with their own money.
Now, Scott REALLY HATES public schools. Literally in CAPS LOCK. So it was kinda funny how he nodded sagely along with Freddie explaining how public schools don't really teach anything, commended his analysis that Montessori schools maybe aren't much better at teaching but at least they aren't DYSTOPIAN CHILD PRISONS, and so on and so forth, until the last part of the review where he COMPLETELY LOST HIS SHIT upon realizing that Freddie's solution is making everyone go to public schools and forbidding all alternatives.
(this was when Scott already mostly calmed down by the way)
But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.
You can also see this approach in what is currently happening with the US justice system. America has a huge prison population and high rates of recidivism, which maybe could be solved by adopting the Nordic model of rehabilitative justice. But it's hard, it's much easier to lock up recidivists for decades, so that's what the system had been doing until roughly 2018, when a coordinated campaign had elected a bunch of progressive DAs in all major cities, who simply refused to prosecute a lot of crimes. Now with the crime wave affecting everyone people have no choice but to take rehabilitative justice seriously.
Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them (in addition to tolerance through familiarity I guess). As long as black people live in their own ghettoes and send their children to their own schools, rich and affluent people by and large don't care what happens there. But if you have gangs selling drugs in your kid's school and a crack den next door, you'll have to care about and fix the problem, right? Right?
Of course all such approaches range from simply not working to greatly increasing the harm they were meant to prevent plus causing other catastrophic consequences. Here's some reasons why:
Just because you incentivized someone to solve a problem doesn't mean they will be able to figure how. Some problems are very hard and you have to try to solve them purposefully instead of setting up incentives and hoping for the best.
Unless you want to live in a North Korea (and can bring it on), it's really hard to incentivize wealthy people to solve problems like that. They'll look at it, admit that they have no idea what to do about it, shrug, and move to another place. So attempting to overmilk that cow will leave you without milk at all.
You are not incentivizing the actual rich and affluent people, you're incentivizing middle class, which is not affluent enough to solve much. Or more precisely, it's the actual rich and affluent people who are doing the incentivizing and they sure weren't busing their own children to mixed schools etc.
Affluent people who end up in charge of solving social ills are usually ideologically incapable of solving them. For example, a school that has problems with drugs and discipline should punish and eventually expel troublemakers, but that's precisely the kids the progressive school board cares about the most, so it would demand that the parents solve the problem with discipline without disciplining anyone, at which point the wealthy parents will shrug and move elsewhere.
Or regarding crime: let's be real, most criminals aren't Jean Valjeans stealing a loaf of bread to feed their younger siblings, they pick $1000 worth of Gucci bags and go do drugs and have fun because it sure beats working a week at Walmart, and that's the truth. If you tell them otherwise they will laugh you in the face. If you ask them to think about the poor Gucci shareholders they will laugh you in the face. The only way to fix them is to promise them a reasonably long stint in prison, at which point our prison abolitionist decides that Gucci shareholders deserve it and secretly gives up on rehabilitation.
Is it possible to force people to have skin in the game in a way that works? Yes, you have to make sure that you're forcing the right people and they can't wiggle out of it. So regarding prison reform again: first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year. Having thus established that the vast majority of the society doesn't have real incentives against rehabilitative justice, we greenlight anyone who wants to test their theories about how to rehabilitate criminals--more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives, to make sure that the obvious grifters are excluded.
The most important part is that we also pass relatively strict laws against recidivism, say, doubling the term every time. This really incentivizes the anti-prison activists to do their best job trying to rehabilitate their charges. That doesn't mean that they will succeed--that any of them will meaningfully succeed--but they will try their best, and what more can we ask for?
This way instead of making the society hostage to criminals and hoping that someone figures out how to rehabilitate them, we take the criminals hostage and incentivize them and their rehabilitators to succeed.
Scott wants a place where smart and well-behaved students like him will not be bored to death. Freddie wants to use the school as a tool of redistribution. Neither are willing to discuss the impact of culture, so they argue around each other. There's a distributed motte-and-bailey going on here, where Scott and Freddie switch between three different concepts of "good schools". They're actually three different things, "good teachers/facilities", "well-behaved students", and "rich students". The three are correlated, but distinct.
It's not socially acceptable to talk about anything other than "good teachers/facilities", so everyone pretends that's what they care about.
When middle-class parents are buying a house in a "good school district", they pretend to talk about "good teachers/facilities", but they're really looking for good peers because they don't want their kids to fall in with a bad crowd or be bullied. Unless you're an immigrant, you don't say that out loud. Nobody seems to be checking on teacher effectiveness, they just look at test scores, which are mostly a proxy for parent involvement.
Freddie wants to use the schools as a tool of redistribution. He cynically accuses middle-class parents of being rich people who want to hoard the "good teachers/facilities". This is of course false. If middle-class parents were told that their school district boundaries were to now include a neighborhood full of poor Chinese kids, there would be no complaint. The reason "bad schools" are bad is not because of their funding, facilities, or teachers, but because are full ill-behaved kids. Whatever schools these kids are put in become back schools, because these kids are the problem.
Since you cannot discipline or expel badly-behaved poor kids in America, rich kids escape to better districts while well-behaved poor kids become the hostage.
Scott, who is mildly on the spectrum and from top-1% Irvine Unified School District, doesn't understand the sub-games being played around him and earnestly talks about the teachers/facilities/curriculum. He doesn't get that the middle-class parents are using education-talk to justify escaping the underclass, and Freddie is using education-talk to enact redistribution to the underclass.
Yes you do. You leave out the part where the ‘bad crowd’ can often be identified by the prominent skin color, but lots of parents say the quiet part out loud that they’re looking for their kids to have peers from stable middle class families. It’s what’s keeping catholic schools full(and catholic school tuition might well be cheaper than buying a house zoned for a ‘good school’- it certainly has less risk of bussing). It’s the main red tribe explanation for why poor kids do worse in school, too.
Now I’m not discounting that there might be some pockets of the blue tribe who pretend that they’re more concerned with their child’s access to a science lab than with their peer group, but it definitely doesn’t seem predominant.
Yes there would. Middle class whites don’t want to have to become tiger moms to keep up with class rank.
NJ is lousy with those types, but the peer group is already table stakes for them. These are the parents who want their kid to go to Princeton-Plainsboro* school district, with the robotics program and space camp and telepathy lab and what have you, rather than a more normal decent school district. Also all their kids are simultaneously geniuses and need extra help with their ADHD and/or high-functioning autism.
Yep, that group exists too, the term they tend to use is "pressure cooker".
* OK, it's actually West Windsor, there is no Princeton-Plainsboro whether it's a school district or hospital.
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I generally call this the hostage-taking approach: "You fix the public schools, or your kids suffer". Or in the perhaps more common form "You hand over more money for the public schools or your kids suffer." It's not about skin in the game. Skin in the game might be having legislators and school boards have THEIR kids in public schools. J. Random Taxpayer (even J. Random Wealthy Taxpayer) who sends his kids to private schools is not trying to play the game without having skin in it; he's trying to get out of the game.
He's probably going to laugh at you and inform you there's no such thing as an innocent n-word.
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In the same spirit: pointing and shaming how wasteful north americans are for driving instead of using public transport, claiming that if almost all the money we put on road maintenance and car infrastructure instead went to public transport it would be fast, clean, cheap and wonderful and all the junkies and mentally ill people belligerently bothering people on it would disappear, despite it being the very same people who push for everyone using public transport that are also pushing for complete tolerance of every nuisance in public spaces in the name of compassion.
What a specific breed of Intellectual Yet Idiot fails to grasp is that good public transit is a function of density, not the other way around. Rich people in London use the tube because of the density makes it the best option speed wise. Not because they wouldn't prefer a point to point solution or can't afford one. But congestion and death are the great equalizers for majority of people. And you only have so much time here and wasting it in Ferrari in a congestion is a stupid utilization of one's time. And because rich people are there it is clean and safe.
There's plenty of rich people on the NYC subway and it's neither clean nor all that safe.
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I do live in a city dense enough for mass transit, and I do use it all the time (having no car myself). It is usually fast enough, but the infrastructure is decaying, there's trash in busses and trains, constant visible, water infiltration in the concrete walls of subway stations that have been left unfixed for years. And the experience of using it in the last 5 years has become notably worse. There's the tolerance of disruptive behavior I've mentionned: mentally ill people screaming, groups of rowdy loitering late teens/young adults. But also the service itself is also getting worse, a mix of desperately hiring whoever is available and strong public service unions puts us far from the kind of pride and conscientiousness of, say, the Japanese rail system. We have busses showing up late (from the yard, not from traffic) regularly, sometimes not showing up at all with no indication at stops. The subway is somewhat more reliable, except for the daily service interruptions. Obviously, the cost has also kept increasing. All of this is of course overseen by politicians who are not in the least incentivized to solve the issues.
And this is one of North America's top public transit systems, and one of if not the most popular (as in % of population using it regularly).
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I doubt it. You don't have to be rich to Uber/Bolt everywhere. In fact by the time you can actively shape what the public is allowed/encouraged to vote for you can have a private driver.
To be honest I don't know why American cities appear so dysfunctional while other places do just fine, when I don't see how the decision-making is remotely democratic. Or maybe it is democratic but ordinary urban Americans are way more brainwashed somehow. I don't know, I know that where I leave we have very nice and cheap public transportation that is used exclusively by people who can't afford cars, but it's nice because it has these social ads playing, telling that if there's some smelly hobo (literally the ad is showing green noxious fumes!) you should immediately call the police and they will remove them. Which they do and if any politician tried to run on the platform of not infringing hobo rights, they would be laughed at by everyone.
In extremely dense cities like London and Tokyo, it is faster to catch an underground train, than it is to travel in a Taxi/Uber. The only option faster than train is "charter a private helicopter", which admittedly some do, but not in great numbers.
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Citation needed. Certain lines are quite good, but other lines are absolutely not clean, and these days I encounter roughly 1 beggar on the trains every time I go to/back from work.
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This has always been my frustration with affirmative action. Growing up poor, I saw first hand the kind of advantages other kids got. But when it came to getting into school, civil jobs, etc., The people with all the privilege were never the ones affected by it; In that, there was always a way (usually multiple) for them to still get a large advantage. It's like they feel bad for cheating, so they're giving a pass to a group to make themselves feel better.
If you bring this up or talk about a test that's harder to game, you get called a racist.
I had a similar experience when I was in grad school, I’m a white guy with middle/lower middle class parents. invariably the people whom were getting (I assume, i didn’t see their records) affirmative action benefits were overwhelmingly attractive women from more privileged backgrounds. It was one of the lived experiences which completely turned me off on the left and on academia more generally
This is what got me in law school. I was one of the poorest students in the class, had never met a lawyer until college, and really struggled to keep my head above water, but received essentially zero institutional support. Meanwhile I had to watch the privileged children of biglaw attorneys and Wall Street bankers get handed cushy paid internships, specialized career counseling, additional academic support, and special access to important alumni because of their "underprivileged" minority status. It's really hard to have positive feelings about social justice when you're watching your friends who are already richer, better educated, and better connected than you get literally tens of thousands of dollars worth of free shit because of the color of their skin, and then still have the audacity to ask for (and receive) extensions on their final exams because they were traumatized by some cop being an asshole a thousand miles away.
I've seen too many children of Yale graduates benefit from affirmative action to support affirmative action.
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I’m curious. Why do you think they were getting AA, rather than benefiting from elite backgrounds?
I went to a not-terribly-selective school in the Midwest. There were two big contingents that suggested “privileged background”: Greek life and foreign exchange. You could see either wearing branded clothes, throwing around money, and generally not taking the school part as seriously. But I’d have a harder time picking out anyone I’d assume was getting AA.
Well, unless you count sports.
Because people who benefit from elite backgrounds generally have the benefits that make them deserve it.
When your parent is able to homeschool you and groom you into an elite, you generally end up with the skills to get where you need to without any direct support from them.
But I suppose my definition of elite is the genuine American Aristocracy rather than someone's dad owning a car dealership.
If you had to ballpark...how large a percentage of the American population is the aristocracy?
Depends on where you are, the truly idle rich in my area are probably the top 2 % , but they are clustered here so likely less than 1‰ globally.
So - as a rough ballpark estimate - around the top 0.1 percent in America? That makes sense. Doctor tier salary is doing very well, but you wouldn't call them straight-up aristocrats...maybe either jumped-up tradesmen or managers or very bushleague aristocrats, not the real deal. IMHO you're not rich until you've got $15 million in the bank (and so don't have to work unless you want to) and you're not rich rich 'till you're making five million a year.
I put it more at around 3 million invested so it throws out a good yearly salary in returns. Otherwise unburdened and you can do whatever you want without too much hardship, at least enough to get free housing from someone who matters.
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I honestly think that this phenomenon is behind a bunch of the increase in racism/racists in society. When you're told that acknowledging or trying to solve some of the problems in your society makes you a racist, and that even just having white skin also makes you a racist... you're probably going to start having a look at this racism thing to see if it really does do what they're claiming.
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Am I the only one who grew up in a place that just had good public schools? Maybe it required living in a mildly conservative and middle class to upper middle class suburb but I really don't have any grievances with my schooling growing up and would happily send my kids to the same schools. It's not something fundamental about public schools, it's the students.
I went to what was considered to be one of the best public schools in the area, possibly in the country, and I didn't hate it at the time, but in retrospect, I do think that there really should be better alternatives.
Regarding interactions with other kids, I wasn't beaten up, and I had friends, but there is a degree of psychological bullying that happens there regardless. Your popularity was determined by how little you cared about anything. Being passionate about hobbies made you vulnerable to ridicule by the greater school body populace of the cooler kids, and people thought you were lame for it. That seems perverse, as we should be encouraging people to pursue their passions, not ridiculing them for it. I think trying to fit in with that system did leave some lasting personality problems for me. And I was very shocked in college that the opposite was true, and the people who did nothing but ridicule others for being passionate were not considered the top of the popularity chain.
Then there's the education aspect. I was in every advanced class that I could take, and it was still entirely underwhelming with regards to what I learned. I feel like if I was challenged and allowed to grow, I could have learned at least 5 times as much as I did. Instead I wasn't challenged to really learn, and instead was swamped with tons of busy work every day.
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It's also the curriculum, teachers and administrators.
I would happily send my children to my elementary school too, in 1980, when I started half-day kindergarten.
The reality of school today is very different even in top decile areas than 1980. We've found our high performing public school to be insufficiently academicly rigorous. Our school committee feels more like PR or cheerleaders for the superintendent and faculty, who are products of post-modern education academia.
Per multiple flyers from my elementary and middle school kids' schools, it is "educational equity". The bullet points are retaking tests, essentially no late penalties, etc., etc. I will see if I can find one of the ones I threw out last week for the exact verbiage. But this has been going on at least since Covid, if not explicitly denoted as such.
Fortunately my kids think it's ridiculous and will continue to follow the actual deadlines for the sake of their own innate sense of fairness. It has been interesting to see their relatively unfiltered takes on these issues.
I remember before Covid that in practice deadlines usually weren’t enforced(this would have been mid 2010’s), although it seemed like it was mostly for the sake of making teachers’s lives easier by not failing anyone.
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Writing also doesn't require spelling, penmanship or much actual writing.
They do so little handwriting in school I'm not surprised. There's some direct instruction but opportunities for incidental use / practice have been removed from much of the school day.
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Going to be honest, I remember 15yo pensmanship looking much the same. That was kind of the nadir of teenage effort.
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Had some rough times but past that I just remember constantly being tired in school.
Feel like school could get a lot better if we got away from school as babysitting. Give the lecture once or twice on a subject instead of 5 times. Fewer hours at school. Trust the kids to do the work at home.
The being tired bit was it’s own torture.
I do remember being quite tired, but I've always credited that to not listening to this wisdom of my parents and constantly staying up super late. There probably is something to scheduling in a way that affords students more sleeping time.
It probably says something that the one education policy that actually literally everyone agrees on is to have high school start later.
When high school starts depends on when the busses from other schools are available. If high school starts later, elementary school may have to start earlier, and that may be worse.
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And this would, indeed, be a major improvement for middle class kids with IQ’s of 105+. But public schooling is all about serving all kids, and those are a minority.
The core issue is that students are no longer allowed to fail, or even to feel badly about themselves. When half or more of the population did not complete high school, and vanishingly few graduated from college, those degrees were an actual signifier of merit. Now that they are essentially birthday gifts, withholding them seems unfair. I wish that was fixable but I cannot see the path.
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Ideally you could walk and chew gum at the same time. Product differentiation isn’t an issue everywhere else in America
Ok. Figure out a way to let middle class kids with IQ’s above 105 do it your way, without breaking any laws, and not making things worse for everyone else.
Because what you’re describing is ‘homeschooling’ and it works really well for the sorts of people who homeschool. But it isn’t a replacement for public schools and the reason it hasn’t seen much adoption among middle class families has at least as much to do with stigma as it does with lack of practicability.
Probably charter schools. Overall we just haven’t had experimenting in schooling because of the dominance of public schools and the unions.
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You’re good at learning the lecture material and homework so schools should just trust all students to be good/responsible at that. You’re bad at going to bed on time so schools should not trust students to go to bed at a sensible time.
Why should your strengths and weakness just be presumed to apply to all students?
True I’m more of a late person. Ideally you wouldn’t need to offer just one program.
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I had a decent, if lacking, public school experience here in Albuquerque. From the teachers, that is; the kids teased and hectored me to the point of tears quite regularly.
But the future is a foreign country, and those schools are not the same, even if housed in the same buildings.
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I think that most of the binary polarization around public schools depends on whether you were a 'cool kid' in school, or not. I made a bit of a transition from cool to uncool during my high school years, and it was like being on a totally different planet.
Like @DuplexFields says below, schools have likely changed since we were in them as well. I'd imagine kids nowadays don't have to deal with the same brutal physical beatings that nerds like myself went through in public school, but it seems that the social ostracization(sp?) is perhaps even worse due to social media and other factors that have been accelerating.
Not to mention the rise of internet pornography, the redpill sphere, etc. Growing up as a young man in public school must be a minefield nowadays, even outside of trying to figure out how to act in a socially acceptable manner.
I really wasn't anything like a particular cool kid, I had a couple social groups but frankly in retrospect a kind of an outsider complex that made me feel like a victim even though I probably wasn't. I was a bit of a geek, more into wasting time in video games than much socializing. albeit most of the time was playing those games with people I knew so socializing in a way.
I definitely had some social complaints but talking about the schooling itself? My teachers were professional and seemed happy and engaged in teaching the subjects, with one exception or my chemistry teacher that I think had to do with a last minute replacement for someone who quit. My fellow students mostly weren't disruptive and did what the teachers asked of them without much question. By highschool we were given quite a bit of freedom and had access to a wide range of elective options at either a community college or a career and technology center that many high schools shared(I took a couple CISCO certification classes, a video game design class and an mobile phone programming class).
People are talking about above and beyond improvements like better sleeping hours and even more accelerated options. These might be worth considering in their own right as an improvement on something that already works. But as far as doing all the basic stuff right I think I've personally seen it work given you have the right student population.
But yeah, the separate question of whether schooling itself is oppressive or the tyranny of teenaged social interactions ring somewhat true. Making young people going through puberty not be total assholes to each other constantly as they figure it all out just doesn't seem like it could reasonably be in scope in a discussion about improving schools in a country where, just to pull the first depressing stat I could find, 63% of high school seniors can't read at grade level.
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I doubt you're the only one, but the opposite experience seems to strike a chord with many, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (set in just such a suburb) wouldn't have been the hit it was.
Yeah public schools are a cesspool of misery and frankly, evil. @aqouta you're lucky you avoided the worst of it my friend. No wonder you're such a chad.
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I also don't have too many complaints about my education, but to be fair I spent the last few years of it at a magnet school with a lot more freedom and higher quality students than is the norm. Being familiar with some East Asian school systems also colors my perceptions, and while I have always been somewhat bemused by Libertarians in the US raging about how schools are prisons for children, their arguments are perfectly valid in places like China or Korea.
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I did, but I was in the third richest public school district in the country, locally recognized as a stealth private school.
By the time I graduated, I could see that bad times were ahead, even there.
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The problem with this is that it assumes that problems have solutions. Easy mistake! But the strongest possible incentives have failed to stop aging, or find a way to increase IQ. No set of incentives will find a way to generate negative net entropy, or move faster than the speed of light. People can successfully build a bridge or fight a war, sure, but contemporary politics have solved most of these tractable problems.
First of all, that's literally the first point in my list of possible explanations for why forced skin in the games fails in my examples.
But also I want to point out an important thing: I'd want a stable legitimately non-working solution. As in, imagine one of the more inconvenient possible worlds where we have implemented my proposal for solving recidivism, everything appears to work as intended, George Soros makes sure that the people he funds really believe in the cause, those people report that they get nothing but enthusiastic cooperation from the prison staff, and they keep trying protocols devised by the best sociologists and they can't get recidivism rate below 70%.
That world is pretty unfortunate, but it has one very good property: whenever someone says "hey I think that you people are doing rehabilitative justice wrong, we should abolish prisons and replace it with mutual support communes, and for starters let all recidivists out on no bail" we tell him that there's currently three pilot mutual support communes, he's free to join any of them as staff and try to do rehabilitative justice right, but no, no way no how we are restarting any of those catch and release programs. If his ideas work, they work, yay, he solved an impossible problem, the criminals don't reoffend and are not affected by our harsh recidivism laws. If not, too bad, but at least the society is safe.
It's important that if the solution doesn't work the society can be reasonably sure that it's because the problem is very hard and not for the lack of trying.
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PGT-P, polygenic testing for diseases for pre-implantation embryos in IVF, is available right now. The exact same technology works for IQ, and could be used today if people weren't worried about legal/regulatory/PR pushback. 50% chance it already is being used secretly.
Also, even before that, we know how to increase IQ: use sperm/eggs from smarter parents. This isn't something most average parents would want, but it'd work. In a few decades, there'll probably be direct gene editing for something like 'your kid looks like you but has the intelligence-related-genes of someone much smarter', and even though valuing your child looking like you but not valuing them acting like you is quite confused, that'll probably sell. Black on the outside, jew on the inside.
Large mammals, such as polo ponies and police dogs, can be cloned. Not only do these animals not have health problems, but they are able to perform their role very well. It's not difficult to extrapolate from that and conclude that human cloning is technically possible. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that some large, powerful nation-state has a human-cloning black project going...those super-soldier Navy SEALs might be in elementary school now, being raised by their SEAL fathers or CIA agents or something like that.
I'm pretty sure that isn't happening, although I wish it was.
Too expensive? I mean, the Chinese government is pretty goddamn ruthless and if they wanted to they could easily pull this off. Maybe it's more expensive to clone 1,000 Navy SEALs and hope that a hundred of them decide to follow in their fathers' footsteps. You've got 900 guys who are doing something with their lives other than being SEALs. Take David Goggins...there might be 1 David Goggins and 9 fat truck drivers (which Goggins was, more or less, at one point) from your cloning program.
The Chinese government isn't sufficiently based or red-pilled to do that, hence the imprisonment of the scientist who used CRISPR on humans.
To my dismay of course, I think we should absolutely be engaging in that kind of activity, but the Chinese are mostly happy to follow western norms in these matters.
If dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything, his "imprisonment" involved working on a similar program at some kind of black site. Show us you can cooperate, and someday you'll be able to go back to your normal life. Or, maybe not.
Well, they're happy to do so in Western-public-facing matters. I believe they still have organ theft vans rolling around, yeah?
Not limited to fiction.
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I don't know about that. There's definitely genetic editing that we probably should be doing: metabolic diseases like Huntington's come to mind. Then there's things where we've got trade-offs...where a little of it can be OK but a lot is straight up crippling, like autism and ADHD. The issue we have with cloning is that maybe a hundred or so different types of human become fashionable and that kind of monoculture is going to fuck us up royally. If it's a few hundred Navy SEALs or something it's all good though.
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What I've always suspected very strongly, but wasn't sure about until the happening on 24th February, is that people tend to be very mistaken about «ruthless» states. It's not ruthlessness a la evil AI picking the most instrumentally useful move in its strategic agenda to dominate the light cone, it's the ruthlessness of an unemployed wife-beater who sometimes shows her an inkling of kindness to keep mooching off. This geopolitical gobbledygook is cope, generated on auto by the pro-regime intelligentsia for the masses with superficial interest in politics; the elites of those regimes don't even notice it for the most part, and are exclusively invested in inner «stability» and individual survival, to the point of undermining the whole system's survival odds, to say nothing of its Grand Civilizational Future. If Putin couldn't be assed to make the army procure some drones or inflatable plyboard fake tanks… scratch that clever-ass stuff, even tyres or med kits – why would Xi invest in creepy, speculative projects like cloning? Does he even believe in genetics in the first place? Why would anyone below him risk checking if he does?
So it goes.
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Yeah, that's not about to happen. Especially in the face, a lot of those genes are doing multiple jobs and almost anything else in the body also affects the brain/neurons.
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I don't have great insight into this field but I think you overstate the science somewhat. A number of genes have been 'implicated in' intelligence but that is a long way off from the proof that inserting these genes into someone will make them intelligent. I believe there is evidence that genes can function differently in different circumstances/populations so it's not a trivial X makes Y scenario.
No, I'm not overstating it. Read this post by gwern or this post by genesmith for an overview of why embryo selection for intelligence works. Intelligence isn't caused by a few genes, but by thousands of genes that individually have a minuscule contribution but, when added up, cause >50% of existing variation in intelligence (note: i'm not claiming we understand each individual gene that's part of that, just that we've inferred that). (Note that this is in the modern environment - environmental effects have a much higher impact when malaria and starvation and infections from skin wounds are rampant, but they aren't in the modern US).
When parents have children, the DNA the child inherits from either parent is random. So we can say - okay, can we predict, just from the DNA of children, which child will be smarter? And polygenic scores indeed predict which child will be smarter.
I'm not 100% confident in these estimates, but they seem to be around the right order of magnitude. And ... that's a lot of IQ points. Even if we divide those estimates by ten, it's still well above anything that education reform can do.
I would bet good money that taking a genome, and then editing it until it had every gene which is correlated with higher intelligence, would not get you a baby that was even a single standard deviation above what you would naively predict based on the parents.
Consider a simple toy model, where
If you have this scenario, each gene IQN000...IQN999 will explain about 0.1% of the variance in IQ, and yet using CRISPR to force just 5% more of the IQN genes to the "good" variant will lead to poorer outcomes than just leaving the system alone.
All that being said, you should be able to squeeze some results out of that technique. Just not multiple SD of improvement, at least not by doing the naive linear extrapolation thing.
I don't think that toy model captures important features of the situation - there are people with 4SD higher intelligence, and while it's not clear how much of that is caused by non-additive genetics / idiosyncratic or random environmental contingencies, you could just clone them. I'd expect the children of two people of 3-4SD intelligence to be more than 1SD above average, and an algorithm that just randomly generated a child of two random 4SD intelligence people seems pretty close to a linear extrapolation, intuitively, yet performs above 1 SD.
The intuition for why linear extrapolation might work better than you'd expect in a complex system is that new beneficial alleles have a strong pressure to combine linearly with other alleles to spread throughout a population that'll have many different alleles in its members.
The toy model definitely does not capture the entire situation. It's mainly intended as a warning that the tails come apart. I specifically expect that the linear extrapolation would break down if you tried to use it very far outside the naturally occurring distribution, and proposed a toy mechanism of that.
Yes, I'd expect that would work fine. In fact I'd expect that "clone a very high IQ individual" would work much better than "CRISPR up a baby from two average parents so that it has all of the SNPs that GWAS said were best".
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What do you mean by this bet? Actually waiting for gene edited baby to grow is slow, and illegal, and we're still nowhere near to being able to edit 10,000 genes of future child without breaking unintended genes .
You are entirely correct that linear model has its limits. Arguing that than it would break well before 1 SD, is... just wishful thinking. There's still a lot of low hanging fruit.
Looks like in actual world, the tradeoff was "decreases libido, increases cuckoldry and other non-reproductive activity" rather than "decreases intelligence".
I am not arguing that you can't get a single standard deviation of gain using gene editing, and I am especially not arguing that you can't get there eventually using an iterative approach. I am arguing that you will get less than +1SD of gain (and, in fact, probably a reduction) in intelligence if you follow the specific procedure of
The specific thing I want to call out is that each of the alleles you've measured to be the "better" variant is the better variant in the context of the environment the measurements occurred in. If you change a bunch of them at once, though, you're going to end up in into a completely different region of genome space, where the genotype/phenotype correlations you found in the normal human distribution probably won't hold.
I don't know if you have any experience with training ML models. I imagine not, since most people don't. Still, if you do have such experience, you can read my point as "if you take some policy that has been somewhat optimized by gradient descent for a loss function which is different from, but correlated with, the one you care about, and calculate the local gradient according to the loss function you care about, and then you take a giant step in the direction of the gradient you calculated, you are going to end up with higher loss even according to the loss function you care about, because the loss landscape is not flat". Basically my point is "going far out of distribution probably won't help you, even if you choose the direction that is optimal in-distribution -- you need to iterate".
Yep. And yet, I claim, necessary if you don't want to be limited to fairly small gains.
Note that this is "below 1SD of gains beyond what you would expect from the parents, and in a single iteration". If you were to take e.g. Terry Tao's genome, and then identify 30 places where he has "low intelligence" variants of whatever gene, and then make a clone with only those genes edited, and a second clone with no gene edits, I would expect the CRISPR clone to be a bit smarter than the unaltered clone, and many SD smarter than the average person. And, of course, at the extreme, if you take a zygote from two average-IQ parents, and replace its genome with Tao's genome then the resulting child would probably be more than 1SD smarter than you'd expect based on the IQs of the parents, because in that case you're choosing a known place in genome space to jump to, instead of choosing a direction and jumping really far in that direction from a mediocre place.
Maybe technical arguments don't belong in the CW thread, but people assuming that the loss landscape is basically a single smooth basin is a pet peeve of mine.
I don't current state of art, but I think setting all genes to "high IQ allele" would have linear projection for IQ well past 300. So getting 300 IQ would need to avoid setting some alleles.
I have some experience with gradient descent methods, thought, not with ML. I challenge the premise "somewhat optimized", we are currently living in dysgenic age. If we were talking about making Borzoi dogs run faster, I'd have agreed.
Alternatively, we could just skip detection on which alleles have low IQ and just eliminate very rare alleles, which are much more likely to be deleterious (e.g. replace allele with frequency below given threshold with its most similar allele with frequency above threshold) without studying any IQ.
Well, people on this forum don't discuss genetics in detail at all.
It's a basin in some places until we travel to a mountain ridge. Since we are decades away from even trying "set all genes to specific allele" - even for model organisms - very few people discuss it.
In your hypothetical bet, how would result "IQ as intended, but baby brain too large for pregnancy to be delivered naturally" count?
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I am sorry for using "just wishful thinking", this was bad.
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I was more pointing to the gene editing reference. It seems more intuitive that we could select embryos as all the bits are functionally integrated via evolution.
There's a lot of reading so will tap into later. Do we really know if the causal correlation is from genes to IQ in the % of variation explained. Might they be markers of ethnicity, itself with a cultural link to IQ?
My journey in these waters is first to explore what level of evidence do we have. Aggregate associations between genetics and IQ scores would be low quality in terms of causal inference wouldn't it, in terms of evidence based medicine?
Ah, I meant direct gene editing on the alleles that the PGS identified / DNA sequences that people who are smarter than you have, so just a stronger version of embryo selection and natural reproduction, not the intentional design of entirely novel mechanisms, which I agree is far off.
That's what the sibling natural experiment is for - the ethnicity, culture, and environment for siblings are the same! Yet the sibling with a higher PGS does better in school. (outside of mutually reinforcing interactions between those and genes)
The similarity is also a problem in assigning variance to a single component but it's definitely a kind of experiment so worth taking seriously
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There a lot to respond to here but this sentiment just seems backwards to me. Isn't the goal not to get people who have decision making power to have artificial skin in the game, but to put people with genuine skin in the game into a position of decision making?
That's the difference between socialist and libertarian approaches I guess. A Libertarian seeks to reduce the scope of consequences of decisions to the maker of them. A Socialist seeks to increase the scope until everyone is affected including the people in power so they are forced to make decisions that are good for everyone else too. Or like everyone is forced to talk about it and make decisions that are best for everyone, because everyone's in the scope.
I guess that dichotomy works, but it seems over-necessary. It seems to me more like the rational vs. bizarro choice, poltical sensibilities aside. Consider these scenarios:
A local high school is unhappy with the prom planning decisions made by the responsible faculty.
Option A: Force the responsible faculty to attend the prom as guests with their spouses as their own 'date' night
Option B: Give the student council some decision making power in prom planning
The town council has a committee to plan road expansions that will affect a local neighborhood, and there have been some complaints.
Option A: Force the town council to move to that neighborhood.
Option B: Hold a public forum with input from the neighborhood members / have a representative join the committe.
You and your friends are planning on dinner and drinks and debating where to go. Some folks plan to eat at home.
Option A: Force everyone to eat at the restaurant chosen.
Option B: Don't count the folks eating at home in the vote for where to go.
I guess you could frame all of these as Socialist vs Libertarian, but it looks more to me like obvious path vs. comically absurd.
In the real world, the argument tends to be that the decision makers with no skin in the game are pulling all triggers available to them to ensure that they retain sole decision making authority, so it really looks like
Option A: Force the responsible faculty to attend...
Option B: Force the responsible faculty to surrender some of their decision making power in prom planning to the students. (They claim that this will be the doom of the prom and seem like they might even go so far as to deliberately do their job badly, just to be "proven right" about this)
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Or, looking at the valence of your choices, comically absurd vs. obvious (I hope.)
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Related question: Does the military treat its troops better if you have universal conscription or if you force the military to compete in labor markets?
Jury duty is an example of a service that people are universally compelled to provide. So looking at the working conditions and pay of jurors may also be instructive towards answering this question.
Comparing this comment with astrolabia's IDF comment, I wonder if that's a reflection of different culture in the US vs Israel (the US seems uniquely bad at public goods relative to peer countries) or jury duty being easier to escape than IDF time.
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Conscription in Turkey used to be universal and quite tough. This spawned about a million ways anyone with connections or money could get their sons an easy deployment or even an exemption. Meanwhile the average peasant would have to endure near slavery conditions in the hands of commanders. Also certain deployments in the Kurdish areas could be genuinely dangerous with serious casualty rates.
Nowadays anyone can legally pay some amount (not low, not crazy high) to do only a one month training course and be exempt from the rest of the service. The actual fighting army is a professional force and it pays a pretty decent salary for a stable job requiring no education.
The conditions in the training and service are much much better nowadays. Some of this is because Turkey is a wealthier and more middle class country now so overall conditions are better anywhere. But I suspect a big part is due to the need to recruit contract soldiers from the conscripts.
My lesson from this change is that without a very established civic culture and a homogenous society (not necessarily in terms of race but broadly in terms of group identity) it doesn’t work to try to take elites hostage in the system to force skin in the game. People with means almost always find ways to work around the system, and they cause enormous inefficiencies and dysfunction while doing so.
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Finnish conscript troops are treated fairly well. I hated the army myself, but that probably reflected my own weaknesses as a 20-year-old, really. The food was really good, at least, and I got into a better shape towards the end of it.
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I've heard that in the Israeli Defence force, young conscripts are generally treated with kid gloves (e.g. not ordered around much or expected to suffer) to the point where boot camp is referred to as "summer camp", apparently because even the children of the powerful have to do it.
It's not enough that the silver spoons have to do it - they also have to lack the ability to segregate themselves to cushier-than-average deployments.
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On the other hand South Korea’s similarly ‘no exceptions’ conscription seems to have a reputation for being rough.
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I imagine he'll tell you that there's a much simpler, cheaper and literally infallible way of preventing black recidivism and that he's happy to pay for it and implement it personally.
Presenting a binary choice narrows the range of options tremendously.
How would this get any good outcome? Does the George Soros fund care about helping prisoners, or do they want to advance their political goals? From a quick glance at their name, the 'Open Society Foundation' is more focused on the latter. What they'd do is the same inept 'rehabilitation' that works to undermine law enforcement already and a media/decisionmaker campaign against your harsh recidivism laws so it looks like you're causing the problem, not them.
They were very successful at electing people like Kim Foxx and Chesa Boudin and George Gascón who kept and keep doing exactly what was expected of them, so if that part were somehow removed and they were forced to select for people who are good at overseeing rehabilitation initiatives because that's the only way recidivists don't get back to prison, the people the Soros Foundation would choose for that would be pretty good at it.
It's, like, I'm saying what I would do if I were the Czar of the US prison system. I'd set some inviolable rules but then let Soros and friends do their best within the rules instead of trying to micromanage everything.
The Waffen SS was pretty good at fighting. But their combat abilities are localized, not general. They would not want to fight to defend Israel for instance - quite the opposite. Some of them went to help the Egyptians and Syrians attack Israel.
People have their own innate ideological goals and they want to advance them. You can't remove their core, motivating goals.
The Open Society Foundation wants their own goals and they'll advance them. If your goals are opposed to Open Society, then they're your enemy. They don't want to imprison anyone, they want to be nicer to criminals as part of their broad plans to transform society. Boudin wants to release criminals, to reduce imprisonment, to let repeat offenders out on 'community supervision'. You want to reduce crime, by rehabilitation if possible but otherwise by imprisonment. You're in conflict with his goals and he's in conflict with yours. Your foundational worldviews are dissimilar.
There's a time and a place for mistake theory and compromising but there's also a time for directly combating opponents. Trying to work with these people given differing goals and worldview wouldn't end well. Far better just to appoint prosecutors and officials that are aligned with your vision and suppress opponents.
They'd absolutely do the same to you, these are the kind of people who brought down the Tsar because he left them alone rather than suppressing them!
Minor nitpick but I believe the regular waffen-SS was actually outperformed by the Wehrmacht in combat, and the units with exceptional combat records were mostly highly selected units recruited from non-German groups after the war started to seriously turn.
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I don't disagree, that's why I said, specifically:
I'm not sure that the Open Society Foundation and the DAs it champions would prefer a world where unrehabilitated rapists are let free with a slap on the wrist and continue raping. Maybe they do but understandably never say it aloud, maybe they do but never even admit it to themselves. Maybe they don't believe that about rapists at all, but do believe that shoplifters are just collecting involuntary reparations. Anyway they end up promoting lawlessness, in effect valuing well being of criminals above that of law abiding citizens' while I strongly value them in the opposite direction, so I and other likeminded people should realize that this is an irreconcilable value difference that allows no compromise and we should fight to win.
What I was saying however is that a well-designed system doesn't need to be run on impeccably loyal people totalitarianly selected to have the same worldview (and in fact any system that has that as a requirement will fall to sociopaths). In case of Soros and friends we only need to ensure that they have no say on when to release repeat offenders, then their interests are aligned with ours: without an option of prematurely releasing unreformed criminals they sure prefer reforming criminals (so that they don't get imprisoned again for twice as long) to not reforming them, and can be relied to do as good job at it as they can.
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Wasn’t the point of charter schools to allow tax money to travel with the children to pay for private(ly owned) schools instead of public(ly owned) schools? Are charter schools now considered places for children of the rich? Did I miss something big?
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The most direct way this is confused is that public schools are just not that structurally different from private schools. They both have english, math, history. Students in both write essays on To Kill A Mockingbird. Students in both do homework. Students in both play sports in some capacity. Most of the differences (e.g. misbehavior, poorer academic performance) are caused by the different student populations/genes/cultures (and the rest are caused by the different teacher populations, which have the same cause as the different student populations). Affluent/rich/elite people cluster spatially, both for other reasons and intentionally for 'good schools', and - where they differ - public high schools in rich areas are much closer to private rich high schools than public poor schools. So it just doesn't do what it'd claim to. Maybe we could do class-based busing? I don't think that'd go over well.
Any form of rehabilitation that'd work would be too coercive for the DAs to endorse, though. Even something like 'actually preventing most crime' is too coercive for them. Moldbug's only-a-little-in-jest suggestion a decade ago was to give black church leaders legal control/ownership of the convicted black criminals.
I'm sure you've heard of 'three-strikes laws'? The anti-prison activists didn't 'try to rehabilitate their charges', they just fought three-strikes laws.
I assume one of those was meant to be "public".
The author is comparing private schools in US to private schools (actually public?!) in England surely! /s
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https://www.themotte.org/post/640/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/132062?context=8#context
The actual problem we have today is that progressives think that, even though recidivism is happening, criminals (many are black, after all) still shouldn't be imprisoned for extended periods of time. That's the thing that needs to be solved. Your proposal just assumes you can pass three-strikes laws that actually work, and then leave recidivism reduction up to team Soros, but ... we currently can't, because of the efforts of team Soros. As a result, I don't see the point here.
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I think you’re overlooking that a lot of these people pushing dumb social policies are conflict theorists- people(the rich in the case of deboer, racists in the case of some of the soft on crime advocates) are defecting against the commons to ruin outcome x for group y, and the way to get them to stop is to make it impossible to escape the consequences of their actions.
‘Defunding public schools’ and ‘systemic racism’ are just unfalsifiable mechanisms, because the point of conflict theory is that your outgroup is evil, not having a good model of people’s behavior.
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But that's not the goal of prison.
If you go to the nearest KKK leader and ask "are you willing to pay for prisons, and incidentally, there will be an innocent black man imprisoned at some point" he'll probably say yes.
The real question we are interested in: "we can have an intervention that would make this black man a productive member of society that you don't even have to pay for, or you can pay $30k/year for decades until he grows too old to do crime".
I don't follow. What exactly is that no-cost intervention? Or is the point just that the question is: "Would he still hate black people if they are productive members of society?"
Honestly asking. I don't get what you're saying.
Edit: never mind, I get it now upon re-reading. Leaving this to mark my shame.
Can you please explain for the rest of us? Because I don't entirely understand what that particular example was supposed to demonstrate.
By intervention I meant that hypothetical Soros-funded anti-recidivism experiment that funds all sorts of activists trying various ideas.
The alternative to that is the current situation when violent recidivists are in fact locked up for a long time on taxpayer's dime.
My point is that I'm sure that pretty much nobody, including KKK Grand Dragons, hates black people in a sense that they would actively pay to harm them. So we shouldn't worry that our hypothetical program would receive a pushback from the nonexistent group of people that prefers more black criminals around.
This feels more like a D&D scenario than it does political analysis. You're taking a bunch of groups of people, writing a few-sentence description of why they act a way they do, then pitting the groups against each other based solely on that description to achieve an outcome in a tortured way.
Like, """Soros DAs""" (or, more accurately, progressive city-level politicians) are currently a problem because they hold political power and set policy in ways that don't reduce crime as much as they should. If you had the power to set policy, you could set up a complicated incentive game where you trick your political enemies into solving your problem for you. Or you could just have the police aggressively investigate and arrest criminals, using modern technology, and there'd be much less of a recidivism problem because crime would be swiftly punished and no longer be rewarding. Police departments have lists of habitual offenders, gangs, gang members - just take action against them! There's no scenario where setting up the tortured game is actually worth anything - if you have the power to set the rules under which Soros and his 'activists' play, you can just ignore them. And if you don't have that
And there are a ton of people who actively hate black people in the sense they would pay to harm them. Internet nazis, virulent racists, white supremacist gang members, etc. People who advocate for mass deportation of nonwhites. They're currently, no matter how you count it, less than a few percent of the US population, but they absolutely exist. I'm not sure rebutting that point matters though, it feels like poking a hole in some complicated talmudic argument that's already ten thousand feet above reality.
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Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining.
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The fix the public schools dogma is missing the forest for the trees. Poverty, or at least poor people, isn’t why our schools suck. Lots and lots of poor people wildly succeed at educating their children. Whole, impoverished countries even! The state is an inadequate replacement for interested parenting and community. You will hardly ever succeed at forcing worse outcomes on people with means over the long term. This is an un-winnable game. Fixing education in practice more often than not turns into to destroying the social signal that education used to provide because that’s the direct incentive of all the low level players, at which point, society will create a new ones.
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I don't think forcing rich kids to go to public schools will make public schools better. It might make the public schools in their district better in some ways (it won't change the amount of money available since that's determined by property taxes), but I don't think it'll get any better in the way Scott envisions it. The people who own making decisions about public schools: teachers, politicians, parents, administrators, do not feel the pain of being in school. The children do. In that sense, no one has skin in the game. The pain of how shitty or worthless certain parts of public schooling were is a distant memory to those in control.
Now I don't think the correct solution is "let the kids decide", but forcing everyone to participate in something known to be awful in the hope that it'll get better somehow, when all the competing interests don't feel any of the pain, seems wishful.
Yeah, that's one of my points (excepting parents, parents feel the pain of their children to some extent), you can tell that this sort of forcing people to have skin in the game can't work because they are forcing the wrong people, the children and their parents, while everyone else would actively stop any attempts to improve things and they wield the power.
I don't think parents feel the pain of public schools anywhere close to how much children do. When smart kids are being bored out of their minds, isolated kids feel as if there's nothing left to live for, or kids with ambitious parents are being ground down chasing 5.0 GPAs and the most college friendly extracurricular programs, the parents hardly feel any of that pain.
You still haven't made it clear how forcing rich families into public schools will make them better. Rich people's property taxes are already going to their district's schools. What would rich kids in public schools do? More helicopter parents bothering teachers into giving their kids straight A's? Affluent coded extracurricular programs?
I still don't think there's any strong evidence that all we're missing is rich families being forced into public education to make schools great again. Their children will still be in rich upper class neighborhoods which means rich upper class school districts. Or are you suggesting we bus rich kids to inner city schools?
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First punishing recividism more seems silly. Because a lot of people do age out of crime. Though we should do more small and frequent busts.
The bigger issue is Democracy. I have solutions to these problems. It’s probably something like making POTUS the head of the Mormon church. Requiring daily mass attendance or you I guess go to jail. I’d probably put homosexuals in jail. And of course trans wouldn’t exists. I’d ban birth control and abortion. And yes I think enforcing this strict cultural package from our past would solve a lot of these issues. While still keeping modern capitalism.
It does seem to me that religious societies don’t have the social ills you speak of so it seems to work. But I’m fairly certain I am not going to be allowed to do it. But yes I no longer think liberalism works for people who aren’t in the higher IQ parts of society and most would benefit for earlier cultural packages.
If we are talking about rehabilitative justice then it’s probably too late. Just give people a cultural package from the start they can succeed with.
But like I said Democracy. I don’t think I have any chance at enacting this. My theocracy i believe would work. DeBoer seems to be advocating for a statism I think would be awful. But it seems the key thing both have is forcing their plan on others. And I’m willing to give up my plan if I don’t have to risks their plan.
What the fuck?
I can’t tell if you’re making a modest proposal as a roundabout argument for democracy. If so, sure, I’ll play along.
Your proposed theocracy is, to me, morally abhorrent. That’s not surprising, but I don’t think it’s particularly stable, either. Liberalism has a pretty good track record of defusing tensions. Especially the kind which would arise from, say, jailing all your dissidents and trying to build a culture from the top down. It didn’t work for the Soviets, and it wouldn’t work for your Mormon caliphate.
For what it’s worth, I also think you’re overlooking the important community ties underpinning LDS. The service and mission requirements can’t be instilled merely by mandating butts-on-pews. And I don’t think they can displace Western atomism, no matter how many troops you deploy. But that’s kind of beside the point.
Stick with liberal democracy, it’s safer for all of us.
Honestly was doing both.
And I’m not sure the god not god part is the key thing. Though having a dictator in the sky who would punish or reward you for living a certain way helps people to do it.
But as a cultural package spending 20 min a week talking about morality and good behavior (don’t do drugs/drink excessively, don’t get random chicks pregnant, pick a person and commit to them, don’t steal or hurt people), then 20 min doing a bunch of rituals with your neighbors (helps to get to know your neighbors, makes you feel a part of a group), a bunch of community events (sports leagues/fish fries - more community connections). For the average person and perhaps even more for the lower class it’s a package of stuff that works better than modern liberalism which doesn’t have rules anymore and doesn’t seem to produce communities.
But yes I wanted to contrast it with Deboers forced socialism of fixing the schools. Which wouldn’t have the forced morality. Both have a bit of hostage taking to them. His forced public schooling was my forced church going. I’d guess 20-30% of America would agree with my plan which might even be more than his plans. Both would have widespread pushback.
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I’m not in favor of theocracy, but I will say that democracy has many problems of its own that are baked in.
It cannot reign in the unelected deep state. We have dozens of autonomous agencies that the official government has little power over, and they pass regulations that define how we interact, what businesses can and cannot do, and what documentation needs to be kept (thus creating the need for administration jobs to make sure that the business can prove to regulators that it’s compliant.
On the other hand, it’s incapable of long term thinking itself. No elected official can afford to really think about the distant future. If his proposal causes near term pain, he’s out, even if it would be enormously beneficial long term. For that matter, a program that doesn’t work fast isn’t good for an elected official either — he might not win, then his opponent gets credit. In a related fashion, democracy promotes flashy new projects and initiatives over boring projects or maintenance projects. If you build a new highway, or a new school, or even a new wing of a school, you get to put your name on it. If you take the same money and fix roads and schools and subways, it’s invisible, and thus “waste”, even if it’s actually more efficient than building something new.
There are also issues of culture. Democracy by nature will embrace deviance however it’s defined. There are potential new voting blocs in legalization of forbidden behavior, in wealth transfers to people who engage in bad behavior, and in forcing acceptance of previously deviant behaviors. This isn’t long term good. Things like drug use are high risk behavior, often imposing hefty social and economic costs on the rest of society. Heroin addicts cannot hold productive jobs and need expensive interventions to allow them to continue. Less obvious are things like generous welfare payments that allow large segments of society to simply suckle the government teat without providing value, or student loan forgiveness that enable students to study useless things and provide little value to the rest of us for the trouble.
Are Democracies incapable of long term planning? The USA and England did plenty of long term planning in the 19th and early 20th century and emerged as the pre-eminent powers of the later half of the 20th century. The Russian Czars and German Kaisers used all their alleged long term planning abilities to allow their countries to be torn apart in the aftermath of WW1. The dictators Mussolini and Hitler also destroyed their own nations for no gain. They had long term plans that were destined for failure. I guess Stalin made Russia strong enough to defeat Germany; with ample help from the democratic USA, but Mao wrecked his nation and only Deng taking a 180 degree turn has allowed them to come back into prominence.
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I don't think this is a feature of democracy per se, I think it's a feature of what happens when you restrict democracy in a deliberate way. There's plenty of evidence from pre-1910s time frame that democracy can exercise control over the state apparatus. It's just that we got rid of the spoils system and deliberately shielded the bureaucracy from executive controle. Once upon a time, these jobs were handed out to political supporters as a reward for their support. In such a system, you virtually guarantee democratic control of the bureaucracy by virtue of everyone from the postmaster on up directly owing their livelihood to the current President.
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I not infrequently see this framing but it strikes me as being off, and fails to address the root of the problem.
While the things many students study are useless, the loans enable the University to teach useless disciplines. The University has no skin in the game. Like mortgage brokers, they've originated the loan, but don't hold or fund the debt. While being incentivised to originate as many as possible, here the barrier of lack of human capital able to engage in useful disciplines, may go someway to explain the expansion of uselessness.
Students may want to study useless things, they're young and mostly don't know any better. It should be the responsibility of the University to ensure uselessness is minimized and human capital is deployed efficiently in useful disciplines.
The problem being that the current proposed solution would essentially incentivize make the problem much much worse. The colleges are still guaranteed to get their pay even if the students learn absolutely nothing of value. The students won’t care because the government will forgive the debt so why not study the philosophy of Harry Potter?
My thing is that loan forgiveness is basically about the schools through the students. If the government chose to fix the 2008 mortgage crisis by paying back the loans to the bank then there’s no incentive to be more careful about who you loan to, how much you loan them, and whether or not the house is worth anything near that cost. Borrowers would have little reason to economize on their homes or worry about resale value.
I agree that loan forgiveness is not a solution, for anyone other than the students that would have their debt burden lifted.
I'd like to see underwriting standards for student loans that look at the human capital of the borrower and the proposed program of study. Only these conforming loans would be eligible for government guarantees, etc.
The issue is that only by removing the government from the loan business would you have any need for underwriting of any sort. As it stands, no matter what happens after the prospective student signs the loan, the college and the financial institutions are guaranteed the money. If I take out a loan to attend the university of Virginia, everyone involved at present is guaranteed the money even if I never attend class or do anything related. Until that changes there’s no reason to vet anything. It doesn’t protect them because they get the money provided I sign a loan and sign up for class. Forgiveness doesn’t change that, it simply changes the payer from the students to the government.
If there were a risk, there’d be reason to vet students. If they admit unserious or unprepared students, they potentially lose money when those students don’t get jobs after college. If they teach poorly enough that employers don’t want that schools graduates, they lose as well. If they admit lots of students who study trivial things, they’re out the money.
That would be the whole point of underwriting. To not fund high risk borrowers / disciplines / institutions. The remaining confirming loans could be sold off to a GSE to service after a period.
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Those criticisms are decidedly non-unique, though. What system is really free of bureaucrats? Of regulation? Of short-term thinking?
The best I can think of is minarchist libertarianism, at least for the regulatory regime. But it doesn’t incentivize long-term thinking, either, and throws its independent hands up at coordination problems.
Easy enough to say about hard drugs. A little harder to bite the bullet for all forms of wasteful entertainment. Much harder for the myriad other ways that humans fail to optimize their potential. At the extreme, you can tell a story where industrialization is a high risk behavior, coal mining requires ever more expensive interventions, and in the meantime, our sky gets uglier every day. You and I can avoid going full Kacynzski by observing the actual, material value which the Industrial Revolution provided. But we disagree on how much value to assign to other forms of “deviance.” That’s okay, because we get to let democracy sort it out.
Monarchy? I guess the bureaucrats and regulation are on par with democracy but by virtue of the king doing whatever he damned pleases he very much could curtail the excessive bureaucratization of society.
I don't want to start shilling for Hans-Herman Hoppe here but he's right on the money. You need the ruler(kings in this case) to care about the well being of his domain, instead of having a revolving door of politicians who are only in the game to get theirs and get out.
In the best case, the Platonic ideal, maybe. But then we should be comparing to a best case for democracy, something like a republic of highly-engaged, highly-informed voters. They have all the same reasons as the monarch to care about their domain. What’s stopping them from voting to curtail the bureaucracy?
Well, the bureaucrats,, naturally. Whoever was benefiting from their entrenchment might also object. And it’s even possible that the bureaucrats actually were providing more value than they skimmed.
All of these pitfalls obviously apply to autocracies, too! Emperors aren’t immune to the pressure, political or social, to avoid upending the apple cart. Today’s monarchies have plenty of short-term strategy, lavish spending on public image, and bureaucratization.
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I mean to steelman the current system, this problem is exactly what these 'deep state' federal programs were meant to fix. You can argue, and I'd agree, that they aren't very effective at fixing this problem, but your argument clearly contradicts itself here.
This is also absolutely not true. Maybe secular liberal democracy founded in a nation full of deviants, but plenty of democratic societies have been able to avoid celebrating deviance. Look at Finland. Hell, look at ancient Athens. It's certainly possible, but perhaps not with freely open voting to every person in a society.
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That’s only more reason to punish recidivists harshly: if you identify someone as a recidivist type, you want to hold them in jail until they age out of crime. Third criminal conviction at 24, we keep you in jail until 40 (of course, for three felonies we keep the life sentence).
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Why Mormon theocracy? It seems as worthwhile as Jewish theocracy for all the US would accept it.
I don’t know. Jewish advantage seems to be higher group IQ from centuries of only breeding with each other. And hence being an ethnicity. Mormonism seems to work for whoever joins.
Though I’m not sure one is better than the other. We just have a better example of it happening in Utah.
And Utah is pretty much the only state which wouldn't rebel against an establishment of the Mormon church. It may as well be establishment of Zorastrianism.
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Yeah, what you have looks a little bit like Italian Fascism. I suppose it might work, for certain values of "work"; I've heard China called the world's first mature Fascist state.
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In Scandinavia we are fairly successful in forced skin in the game by using the draft. The smartest, strongest and healthiest are the ones who get drafted. People from the higher echelons of society are more likely to be conscripted and therefore have more skin in the game.
I fundamentally believe that immigration policy would have been completely different if people who voted for diversity had the diversity in their neighbourhood. Their ideological binds wouldn't apply when it is their property. Suburbs were a terrible mistake in the US as it allowed cities to deteriorate without in impacting the elite. The problemen wouldn't have arrisen from the first place as they would have kept things from getting out of hand. Migration is only fun when it is happening to someone else's area.
The corrent eltie completely lack a sense of duty and nobless oblige. This can't be forced, it comes as the result of hard times. The US needs a proper crisis to solve the corruption within its elite.
I don't think noblesse oblige comes from hard times, I think it comes from a combination of culture, tradition, education, and honesty about privilege. The nobles of yore were rich and wealthy because
Their parents were rich and wealthy. Therefore their parents could educate them and teach them about how to properly handle being rich and wealthy with the proper composure and respect for each person in their position.
They happened to be lucky enough to be born into said family. This makes it clear that their position is one inherited, not earned by their own efforts.
The peasants underneath them work hard and pay taxes to them. This makes it clear where the wealth is coming from: the efforts of the peasants under them. Of course the nobles did their own estate management and politics and whatnot, but the core production and farming is done by the peasants and with no underling peasants the noble has no income.
Further, the peasant noble relationship is less distributed. You don't have millions of peasants paying taxes which are combined and then divied up among a bunch of nobles, each noble family is in charge of specific peasants. If those peasants thrive, the noble thrives. If the peasants suffer, (at least economically) the noble suffers. You can't tax what isn't there. These together create an environment in which noblesse oblige can thrive. A Lord which makes good decisions will simultaneously benefit their peasants and themself. A Lord which makes bad decisions will have poor peasants and thus make themselves poor. A Lord which makes very bad decisions will have suffering peasants who have a very specific target for their anger and can rebel against the Lord specifically, rather than trying to overthrow the entire kingdom which consists of a mixture of good and bad elites.
Modern elites rise and fall in power and influence in a massively distributed system in which increasing your ability to capture larger slices of the existing pie dominates over trying to tend your own garden and increase the size of the pie. The ability to charisma and politick your way up the ranks causes new elites to rise higher than they deserve, while the competent value creators end up in middle management. And the high mobility across space means that terrible mistakes are met not with rebellion and death, but with an escape to a new job with a blank slate reputation, or a cushy golden parachute retirement.
I don't see how hard times would change this, there were both good times and hard times in the past, and noblesse oblige was present through both, though was universal in neither. It's the skin in the game by which peasants and elites shared good times and bad times that enabled and incentivized noblesse oblige at all.
The origin of the concept of noblesse oblige can easily be found in the phrase itself i.e. nobility, hereditary privilege that you are born into i.e. something that you didn't earn through your own efforts and were never expected to, and which thus obliges you to follow certain norms.
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Yeah, I get the impression that @functor’s understanding fits a later development. As militaries modernized, warrior aristocrats started to have a much harder time standing out, so justifying their social role got more important. By the end of WWI, their reputation for martial dominance was bleeding out in the mud. The hard times of modern warfare were not good fuel for noblesse oblige.
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They do. The most pro-diversity areas are urban areas with lots of younger college grads, not suburbs.
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And then for no reason at all, all the 'elite' moved to the suburbs.
This is why suburbs exist. The federal government and courts moved to address equity, the desires or votes of the majority mattered little. The resulting diversity motivated those that could, to move to the suburbs.
I understand your experience in Scandinavia is only recently enabling some to understand a reality that many in the US have known all their lives.
There is a big difference between Sweden and the US. We are far less diverse and the debate has already swung. Diversity is less popular now than 10 years ago and the country is noticeably less woke than it was around the peak in 2015. We have a coalition in government that ran on a platform of restricting migration.
The problems existed 20 years ago but didn't impact the middle class. When it was upper middle class kids getting robbed by immigrant gangs the public debate made a radical switch. In the US there is far more non white crime yet the american middle class seems comfortable with diversity from their suburbs.
Here in the US suburbs do insulate their inhabitants from the realities of urban diversity, in combination with beliefs in progressive orthodoxys, is comforting.
Of course there are many in suburbs who are uncomfortable or oppose the seemingly open border, or would prefer a return to tough on crime policing, or involuntary commitment for a larger cohort of the mentally ill. The silent majority has leadership issues and has been splintered by many divisive topics.
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Barring the emergency exits is a plausible framing for deBoer’s strategy. At the least, it fits neatly in with stereotypes about socialists, which I guess makes it good enough for this board. I doubt that it was the motivation for soft-on-crime DAs, and I am confident that it is not, and never has been, the modus operandi for desegregation.
Your hypothesis is stupid. It’s needlessly complicated, and paints your enemies as both naive and devious. Why should activists expect results from foisting “the problem” onto an unwilling majority? Is desegregation really worthless except as a means to an end? Who’s coordinating this gambit, anyway?
Here’s a simpler explanation: people opposed segregation because they thought it was bad. Evil, pernicious, self-perpetuating. And people oppose harsh sentences, or racial profiling, or whatever triggered the campaigns of 2018—they oppose these things because they think they are wrong. Not because they’re playing 5D chess with recidivism. Not because they want their opponents to suffer. Because they expect the benefits outweigh any costs.
It's not novel to De Boer.
It's not novel to education.
Ditto for discipline caps in schooling, which is the same logic again.
Ditto for affirmative action and other diversity quotas.
This is absolutely a thing people on the Left do. It's absolutely a thing people on the Right do, probably in the same way, though no examples leap readily to mind. It's a very human and highly recognizable tendency in contentious politics. If you squint and tilt your head, you can see something of the same pattern in Trump supporters' current and continued support for Trump, or in debt ceiling brinksmanship, or in dozens of other patterns of behavior. It does seem to me that leftists do it more with actual institutions, though, possibly because they run more institutions.
Because they believe that unwilling majority is ultimately to blame for the problem, and they are tired of waiting for a solution. Re-read that Kline article, it's all there in black and white. People see a problem, and they get angry at the people causing the problem. But then those people and their defenders say it's not them, it's actually a systemic thing. Spokespersons for the system blame individuals, and after a while the people worried about the problem get sick of the buck-passing, and insist on a solution now, even if the solution is lossy or dire. They reason that even if they can't identify exactly where the problem is, they can narrow it down to a general area and carpet-bomb, writing off the collateral damage as a cost of doing business. It's a reasonable strategy if you're correct about the general location and severity of the problem. If you aren't, it's just a disaster.
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I think the issue is that the people you’re trapping have so little power to actually fix the problems that essentially it’s locking the top deck of the titanic and then telling the passengers that the only way they live is if they manage to fix the leak — without any tools or training. Trapping kids in the public schools essentially means that everybody’s kids fail unless the parents can tutor alongside the school. Lock the school board’s kids in might work, locking in the teachers kids, maybe, lock in the kids of the people elected to government? Sure, I can see it.
Hmm. A civil service that requires employees to send their kids to public schools. Work for the government, no dodging the system you create.
It’s got a certain appeal.
I rather strongly suspect that most civil servants do send their kids to public schools. They tend to live in higher CoL areas and aren't paid particularly well. Likewise for teachers, school board members, etc...
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I disagree. The OP's list of institutions and reforms are highly associated with a set of people who really don't believe in or acknowledge tradeoffs (as a group). Largely those sorts of reforms are caused by an overactive sense of fairness and a Utopian vision. Maybe FDB thinks in the terms of "skin in the game" but mostly public school advocates think in terms of it being unfair if kids dont get the same education, and that if only we could get everyone into "good schools" most of societies ills would be solved. And, in addition, that if we didn't have public schools, all the poor kids would languish in illiteracy.
I don’t think we disagree.
Placing that much value on “fairness” is saying that it would be a huge benefit. Thinking public school ought to be good enough for the elite is assuming away the costs. For someone who thinks access to opportunity really is the only thing holding a kid back, providing that access is really supposed to fix the problem!
I think that’s a reasonable way to interpret progressive policy around education. My problem with the OP is modeling increasing access as a progressive psyop. It’s not—that Utopianism and fairness is enough.
OP is modelling the progressives as percieving and understanding the problem and its solutions the same way as he does, so is confused and left scrambling to find an explanation as to why they chose bad solutions, coming to the conclusion that bad solutions must be a deliberate part of a plan to force people to find good solutions. Progressives do the same thing when they claim that their ideological opponents must be evil or selfish for refusing to fix whatever social ill is their current project.
As you point out, most progressives likely see the issue differently, and their solutions don't seem bad to them.
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Because then the majority has skin in the game and has to deal with the problem. It's naive and usually doesn't work, but if you totally expect it from deBoer, why not from other activists?
I never said or implied that. But you're conflating two very different things: all the stuff that MLK mentioned, let's call it "negative desegregation", meaning that black people are no longer prevented from being in white spaces, and "positive desegregation" that actively tries to mix up communities, such as busing (read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing btw, it was an unmitigated disaster opposed by everyone involved expect the actual rich and affluent whites). Can you give me your best pro-busing steelman? Because I'd put making whites have skin in the game wrt education quality on the first place, tolerance through familiarity on the second, and aesthetic preference for de facto desegregation as a sort of a strawman (though no doubt real) justification.
Same for the Soros DAs. I'm not saying that there were devious conspirators planning to have a crime wave, I'm sure that they hoped that there wouldn't be a crime wave! But don't you think that it was very weird to do things in the opposite order to what I proposed? Like, first you figure how to prevent criminals from reoffending, then you go soft on reoffenders because they won't reoffend yet again? If you go soft on reoffenders first, what exactly do you expect? Is "uh I hope someone also figures how to prevent recidivism now that they are forced to" painting my enemies as more stupid and evil than "idk I don't give a fuck lol"?
Then you weren’t very clear when you claimed
You glossed over the part where people thought the segregation itself was bad and had obvious, object-level effects. Is that not a more obvious motivation for desegregation? Combine it with a sense of justice, and you have an adequate explanation for people trying things like busing. It’s not people trying to psyop the oppressors into caring about a problem. It’s people believing their remedy is just.
I said:
And again, steelman going above and beyond letting anyone to go to any school they want and forcing them to go to a racially diverse school.
You will have to spell it out for me, I don't have none.
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I feel like we read different things.
I agree and I agree that segregation is bad. The issue here is the side effects to the solutions proposed. There's a lot of people who greatly benefited from segregation that are now proposing solutions that will mainly effect other people. I'm not saying this is done maliciously but refusing to acknowledge this helps no one (and fuels the idea of 5d-chess).
I’m talking about
And
I don’t object to OP’s argument about skin in the game. I think assessing the cost-benefit of a policy (such as busing, soft-on-crime, or general segregation) is a legitimate discussion to have. The unreasonable bit is asserting that progressives are doing this as 5D chess. That they aren’t removing the thing because the thing is bad, but because it will make other people actually fix it. That’s convoluted and uncharitable.
As @anti_dan pointed out, place enough value on fairness, and you’ll come up with something like the soft-on-crime DAs. If you’re enough of a utopian, maybe you really do think the problems will go away when you remove a discriminatory pressure. These are more realistic explanations!
I'm confused. I think I misunderstood your tone.
Right, this is my point. A lot of people have utopian ideas but ignore the unintended consequences of those ideas. This gets galling when the people calling the shots (with those ideals) don't live in the area and don't have to deal with the consequences. Screaming racism because they don't want to deal with that criticism is disgusting.
If you OK a homeless encampment in the park, you don't get to ignore the girl who gets raped.
Aye. No objections to that.
Argument from side effects is legitimate. Claiming that opponents overlooked something, undervalued something, and so on—perfectly fine. Asserting that they were actually choosing policies because they wanted to force the majority to reckon with a problem? Now he’s starting to get uncharitable, not to mention convoluted.
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