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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Bantu-maximization

Not being familiar with this term, I had to look up "so what is so bad about the Bantu, anyway?"

Turns out that they were a migrant population that displaced hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, developed agriculture, and smelted iron:

Another stream of migration, having moved east by 3,000 years ago (1000 BC), was creating a major new population center near the Great Lakes of East Africa, where a rich environment supported a dense population. The Urewe culture dominated the Great Lakes region between 650BC and 550BC. It was one of Africa's oldest iron-smelting centres. By the first century BC, Bantu speaking communities in the great lakes region developed iron forging techniques that enabled them to produce carbon steel.

Huh. What was that again about civilisation arising out of agriculturalists, and science/technology coming with the use of iron?

The peoples of other continents (sub-Saharan Africans, Indigenous people of the Americas, Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, and the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and South Africa's indigenous Khoisan peoples – largely exterminated by farm-based societies such as Eurasians and Bantu. He believes this is due to these societies' technological and immunological advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last ice age.

The apartheid government in South Africa tended to refer to South African blacks as "Bantu" - mostly accurately, although the small number of remaining pure-bred Khoisan got lumped in with them - hence the names of apartheid-era laws like the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act (which created the Bantustans). My experience is anyone who uses the term "Bantu" outside linguistic contexts (where it refers to a group of southern African languages) is dog-whistling support for apartheid.

That goes double for people like OP who use the term to refer to blacks who are not Bantu (or, to use modern politically-correct terminology, whose ancestors did not speak Bantu languages) - the vast majority of ADOS African-Americans have roots in west Africa, not southern Africa. So do most, but by no means all, recent African immigrants to Anglosphere countries.

Okay, that explains where they picked up the term and why they're using it in this manner. Thanks!

Most African slaves in America were imported from Bantu speaking parts of west Africa. The vast majority of sub Saharan Africa is Bantu speaking; Southern Africa particularly so, but not uniquely.

Every claim you made there is wrong. Most slaves were from peoples of the Niger-Congo family of languages, not Bantu speaking peoples. Bantus, while the largest group in Sub-Saharan Africa are still a minority; if, also, a plurality. South Africa is, also, not particularly Bantu compared to Central, or South East Africa and has large minorities of Whites, Coloureds, and Indians.

Per Wikipedia the boundary between Bantu and other Niger-Congo family languages is near the Nigeria-Cameroon border, with Igbo and Yoruba being non-Bantu. About 60% of the Atlantic slave trade took slaves from modern Nigeria and points west, and so would not have been Bantu speakers. The other 40% came from Portuguese Angola (which is Bantu), and mostly ended up in Brazil.

It's a play on Eliezer's paperclip maximizer thought experiment. Much like the paperclip maximizer has the goal of tiling the universe with paperclips, EA's actions (mosquito nets, etc.) have the net result of filling up the Earth with poor third-worlders. It's the same idea Garret Harding put forth in "Living on a Lifeboat" with a clever skiffy gloss.

the net result of filling up the Earth with poor third-worlders

Then just say "black people" or "Africans"; don't be clever-clever with "Bantu maximisation" when it seems that the Bantu cultures were the ones successful in the most similar to European fashion. It just makes you sound dumb because you end up saying you don't want the culture that was nearest to European ones, when surely you should want them instead of another!

(General "you" there, not addressed to any specific person in this thread).

Maybe a reference to the zero hp lovecraft 'bantu maximizer' game that was a reskin of the paperclip maximizer (cookiclicker style) game?

Turns out that they were a migrant population that displaced hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, developed agriculture, and smelted iron:

ones successful in the most similar to European fashion

I think that's part of why it gained use among white supremacists in the first place, because it complicates the mainstream african colonization narrative. For instance they like to talk about how the vast majority of black people in South Africa are Bantu but there were few Bantu in the region prior to Dutch colonization, mostly the region was inhabited by Khoisan. So they can argue that the Bantu pushing decolonization in South Africa are themselves colonizers barely more native than the Dutch.

More generally, since the majority of sub-Saharan Africans are Bantu I'd guess it's a way to refer to the main African population without having to say "sub-Saharan" and without including smaller groups like the Igbo (often claimed to be the most intelligent African ethnicity).

That seems really unlikely to me, it implicitly assumes that whether or not your current child survives has no impact on whether you have another child.

Every system has a carrying capacity, I don't think mosquito nets change the carrying capacity by that much, they just get there with fewer intervening deaths.

This isn’t true because the vast majority of Africa is not Malthusian- if the population of the DRC exceeds carrying capacity, it’ll be made up for with food imports(often in the form of aid).

I think the term as used by @futuristright-substack is a swipe at e/alts trying to save as many lives as possible. In practice, this (buying mosquito nets) effectively prioritizes saving the lives of sub-Saharan Africans over all other because they are the cheapest to save.

Okay, but using "Bantu" as a term of disapprobation is dumb, since the Bantu are one of the more "like us Europeans" in terms of "successful civilisations" in that context.

I do wish 'people who want to talk like racists without openly being racists' would at least do some fact-checking before throwing around terms.

I think anyone who is using the term "Bantu-maximization" is:

a) familiar with the history, using the phrase in the context of the Bantu expansion, and the negative consequences there-of b) familiar with the genetics, Bantu peoples being about as far away genetically as you can get from Eurasians, with the exception of KhoiSan, pygmies, ghost population remnants in Africa etc. c) probably comfortable being openly racist, not designed to disguise the target but in fact making it explicit (this Hakan tweet is relevant: https://images.app.goo.gl/Sr4T1UADRFBM4nCh9) d) and derivative of a, b and c, specifically including African-Americans in their sights.

It is naive to assume that someone using this language would consider a group to be 'more like us Europeans' because they developed iron. It is precisely because of this and a) above that the term is used.

/images/17005991991197555.webp

The feeling of disillusionment can happen to everyone. I can give an example unrelated to OP's beliefs but which came to mind reading the post: Caring about CO2 emissions because it poses some existential risk for humanity, and discovering that environmental groups oppose the most feasible solution: nuclear. This discovery caused me to believe most environmentalists are not serious; they're motivated by vibes.

Nuclear was the most feasible solution between about 50 and 10 years ago, but other power sources genuinely have gone through massive technological improvements since then and are viable competitors in many areas.

No doubt nuclear should be a part of the overall green energy portfolio and it shores up a lot gaps in the other methods. But it's no longer the simple 'just use nuclear for everything, duh' situation that was true for a while there.

Nuclear is still the only CO2-free baseload... and once you have it, you don't really need anything else except peakers. There's no room for eco-approved renewable energy in a world with plentiful nuclear, at least not until storage is solved.

The problem I see with the mainstream environmental movement isn’t vibes, it’s a lack of people who understand engineering and other scientific concepts. The people I’ve talked to who are environmentalists are by and large humanities students and similar. They’re unable to understand that nuclear energy works. They don’t understand the difficulties of solar. They don’t know where the things they use come from. And while I don’t think most care enough to find out, they don’t know because they’re not engineers.

I mean, that’s a pretty neat example right up until you claim it means something. There’s such a giant chasm between being in a war zone and a life and death situation, and the kind of everyday often trivial political shit that I think the analogy doesn’t work at all.

I dunno, if it's a battle for civilization you should probably use guns, instead of anonymous comments on an obscure message board.

I do think that what happens in online discussion/debate spaces like this is consequential in that it is a part of the process that produces our culture's priorities and values and beliefs, but it's a very small part of a very big process. The stakes are correspondingly much smaller.

I dunno, if it's a battle for civilization you should probably use guns, instead of anonymous comments on an obscure message board.

You are glowing.

From 1984 by George Orwell:

At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police, there is no other way.

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

and the kind of everyday often trivial political shit that I think the analogy doesn’t work at all.

I disagree; I think that increasingly describes the average Afghan soldier's thought process from 2001-2021.

As you know, in 2021, the people who were silently nodding along (in this example) ultimately laid down their arms, because as it turns out, Orc rule was actually better for those men (they do respect strength and capability, after all; it's generally what grants victors their victory). Sure, it had deleterious effects on the rest of the population, but that population wasn't getting killed on the front lines, so who were they to make demands?

Anyway, the people doing the actual work, once they see this sort of thing happen, rationally and understandably "check out" and start following the OSS Sabotage Manual- as the people giving the orders, if corrupted like this, are generally both incapable of realizing this and don't get that "following closer to objective reality" is a form of payment.

Remember, the trick for the elite ("elite" as the captain in that example- someone who dictates luxury beliefs that those beneath them must elevate regardless of objective cost or truth- and "don't shoot an unarmed man" here is quite a luxury) is to pay their soldiers as little as possible while still remaining in control of said soldiers: every deviation from the reality the soldiers observe that makes their jobs harder, every stupid management decision, is a pay cut as real as a smaller sum of gold would be (and it is notable that we evidently only require aspiring business ru[i]nners to notice the second for the corresponding accreditation).

If the elite refuse to pay, soldiers mutiny, and this is something despotic leaders tend to understand better than those that [claim to] paean freedom (as despotic leaders tend to be in far more unstable positions). Fortunately for the elite, it takes a lot of small paycuts for this to happen, salami-slicing can be persistent across generations such that no soldier really remembers what they used to be paid, technology (and slave labor, to a point) can obsolete soldiers thus lowering their bargaining power, and it can take hundreds of years for an elite to face an event where mutiny would be relevant.

You always knew something was off, but chalked it up to having a slightly different moral code to everyone else. You figured you were just unusually utilitarian and well, every society can use some deontologists

Having read that, gosh isn't it great that there are utilitarians out there to save the world from us crazy deontologists?

Come on. In that example, in wartime that's not "shooting an unarmed man", that's "enemy soldier engaging in act of war" and legitimate target. Maybe be clearer on what you mean, because even if it feels like it, online arguing is not the Battle of the Somme.

The only reason Deontologists even function is because they're Consequentialists in denial.

I don't think there are any people who are real deontologists, consequentialists, or virtue ethicists -- I think people look at what the consequences of their past actions and decision processes were, and try to do more of the things that turned out well and less of the things that turned out badly. "Try to take actions that future-you will think were good actions" sure is a decision process, and if it's gone well for you in the past I'd expect you to keep using it in the future, but if it starts going badly I would expect you'd stop using it.

And if your decision process is "consequentialism when the successes of consequentialist reasoning are salient to me, and not consequentialism when the failures of consequentialism are salient to me" then I don't think you're a Real Consequentallist™.

Other way around, surely?

The fact is, nobody is actually sitting down and crunching the numbers on utils. When it comes to actually making decisions in the real world and not in thought experiments, everyone resorts to the same expedients and heuristics - usually, some combination of virtue ethics and deontology. Don't commit murders, don't be dishonest.

Even if people aren't explicitly crunching the numbers (few except rat-adjacent nerds bother), the fact that they implicitly consider consequences and then evaluate their relative weights to trade them off against each other, that makes them consequentialists in practise.

That very aspect is an inescapable part of being a functional agent that doesn't halt and catch fire when it encounters two mutually exclusive or conflicting Kantian imperatives, such as not lying versus letting people come to harm when an axe-murderer knocks on your door and asks where their target is hiding.

That very aspect is an inescapable part of being a functional agent that doesn't halt and catch fire when it encounters two mutually exclusive or conflicting Kantian imperatives, such as not lying versus letting people come to harm when an axe-murderer knocks on your door and asks where their target is hiding.

Honestly. I don't know if I agree with this. They don't catch fire but they certainly seem to get quite mad if you don't side with whichever imperative they've decided takes precedence. I got into a spat today on twitter in response to a post about a boy who reportedly had to have his ponytail cut off because of some school policy. I said if it was a public school this was definitely wrong but if it was a private school then they have the right to make whatever arbitrary dress code rules they want. A classic freedom of association vs freedom of expression problem. People didn't, an I propose in most cases like this don't, consider the trade off and say that they disagree with placing freedom of association over freedom of expression, they accused me of hating minorities and any number of other moral deficiencies. This is how normal people respond to values conflicts, pure black and white thinking.

they have the right to make whatever arbitrary dress code rules they want

Legally yes (subject to antidiscrimination laws and such like), but it sounds like this was a discussion about morals rather than law.

Free speech is a (contested) moral principle, which in its shortest and most principle-based form is "thou shalt not speak power to truth", and the 1st amendment is a law enforcing that principle against the US federal government (before the 14th) and all US governments (after the 14th). But if you think free speech is a good idea, it is still a good idea when the speech restrictor is a private school. If free speech is a good idea, then a school that imposes unnecessary speech restrictions is a worse school - just as a knitting circle which kicks you out for criticizing the latest woke-stupid fad is a worse knitting circle.

So the moral question of "Should a school prohibit boys wearing ponytails?" is more complex than "They can, so they should." Clearly there are schools where the answer is "Yes" - if the school has a purpose beyond academic education and enforcing gender roles is part of that purpose (for example a Christian or Jewish school that takes Deuteronomy 22:5 seriously) then the school is a better Christian school because it prohibits ponytails on boys. But this doesn't apply to a pure academic crammer, and I personally don't see how it applies to Eton. A knitting circle which exists to encourage knitting should not kick people out for blaspheming against the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But a Pastafarian knitting circle which exists to promote social interaction among the knitters in the local Pastafarian congregation probably should - and in fact might want to go further and require people to knit correctly designed noodly appendages.

This goes to why wokeness looks totalitarian (right now it isn't a totalitarian threat because there is no woke Hitler, but there are plenty of people lining up to be work Hugenberg and woke Papen should she show up). Wokeness believes that every organisation should be a purpose-driven organisation with wokeness as one of its core purposes - that every knitting circle should be a woke knitting circle.

Right, it's a contest between rights and one can reasonably decide either one comes out supreme from the he context. It's an argument about trade offs. But most people aren't engaging in arguments acknowledging trade offs, they pick whichever response looks most flattering to the ingroup without any regard to reason. If the kid being made to change his appearance is a minority they will decry the act, if it's some visibly Maga kid they will support the school. This is what approximates moral reasoning for most people. It's a kind of consequentialism where the only consequences considered are PR.

There is a passage in the Zuo Zhuan, under the 21st year of the reign of Duke Zhao of Lu, where a member of the lower aristocracy in Spring and Autumn China dies from allowing an enemy to take a shot at him after missing his own shot and, prior to a second shot he was readying, was chastised by his opponent (who shot him dead) that taking two shots in a row without allowing a return shot was dishonorable.

Even granting that "breaking decorum has social consequences" and thus you can offer consequentialist explanations for actions like these, I think it's important to acknowledge that there are many people throughout history who are much more on the deontological side than otherwise.

(In the end I am more of a consequentialist myself, but I see the value in deontological thinking and virtue ethics as proxies for these, and I can somewhat understand how deontological thinking turns in the heads of those that accept it..)

the fact that they implicitly consider consequences and then evaluate their relative weights to trade them off against each other, that makes them consequentialists in practise.

The fact that they consider duty, separate from consequences, makes them deontologists in practice. In fact nobody is either--ethical systems exist as a sort of meta-system which we use to correct our intuitions and heuristics as appropriate. Nobody actually follows any ethical system for even one second of the day--it would be impossible.

Humans are neither hyper rational utility calculators nor are they blind rule followers. Everyone uses both rules and a consideration of consequences to help them make decisions. But it's my impression that consequentialists are much more resistant to this idea.

It's a typical consequentialist trick to conjure up some idiotic thought experiment, as if it means anything. It doesn't.

Very well, if axe-murdering is too outlandish for your tastes, what if it's the Gestapo looking for the Jews in your attic?

Deontologists are far more prone to deny that tradeoffs can and must be made even for sacred values, so I have no idea what makes you think Consequentialists don't make a principled decision to rely on heuristics where the expected utility of following more formal procedures isn't worth it. We are computationally bounded entities, not platonic ideals.

I tend to agree with your overall point, but I've always felt like the Jews in the Attic example merely reveals that the person under questioning doesn't place honesty as a terminal value.

Deontologists still have a hierarchy of values -- Kant may value truth over helping Nazis kill Jews, but most people just say "yeah, lying is bad but helping Nazis is worse" and carry on. This is still a deontological position, and definitely nobody is halting or catching fire over this dilemma.

Ok, replace Nazi soldier asking for whether there are jews in the attic with your Nazi neighbour asking for whether you have a potato peeler they could borrow because theirs broke.

I suspect deontologists would still not see lying to not giving your Nazi neighbour a potato peeler as just as good a trade compared to lying to not let Nazis capture a Jewish family.

Consider two worlds, identical except in world A Alice refuses to reveal whether she is hiding Jews in the attic/Bob gives his Nazi neighbour a peeler while in B it's the other way around where Alice reveals the location of the Jews while Bob refuses the potato peeler. According to the deontologist's position both these worlds are equally good/bad, but I suspect very few people would in reality see it that way.

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I think we can make a more concrete claim, which is that deontologists are doomed in the long run due to competition and natural selection. Their rules will consistently be used against them. Today it's asylum seekers, tomorrow it will be ultra-charming machines that will claim moral primacy over whoever has resources.

These strike me as bigger problems for the utilitarians, memed best by the bikecuck illustration.

Really though, no premise moral philosophies should be subject to those particular failure modes - it's the specific tenets that become problems. Deontologists can easily adhere to the principle of concentric loyalties and avoid issues with "asylum seekers". Utilitarians can concoct a calculation that "shows" that it'll make things worse in the long-run.

The bike cuck meme is only a problem if you subscribe specifically to a humanist universalist progressive conception of utilitarianism, which it’s not clear to me at all that most of the early utilitarians did.

Of course not. The usual form of modern utilitarianism I see is posthoc accounting of utils to make them work based on gut feeling. There's always a good utilitarian reason to do what I wanted to do anyway!

It's my own impression that the fiercest advocates for generous asylum policies or even open borders aren't deontologists (who generally have a lot of respect for rules around borders and citizenship), but utilitarians (who are willing to compromise because they value the utility of asylum seekers over maintaining strong borders). It's also my own impression that utilitarians are more vulnerable to charisma and arguments - theoretically a utilitarian is capable of endorsing any behavior if they're persuaded of it's utility, whereas it's much harder to argue a deontologist into bending his own rules.

It is a trope of right-populist complaints against the pro-immigration lobby that advocates for generous asylum policies are doing virtue ethics. As a practical point about the noisy bits of the pro-immigration lobby, this is mostly correct - hence language like "What kind of country does this?" The person of hair colour supports generous immigration policies because she/they is kind, anti-racist, not a xenophobe, sympathetic to the oppressed, tolerant, cosmopolitan, etc. and a person who is those things is the type of person who supports generous immigration policies.

The effective bits of the pro-immigration lobby are doing consequentialism - Bill Gates supports generous immigration policies because he believes that the types of immigration enabled by liberal immigration policies are good for the immigrants and (on net, applying Kaldor-Hicks aggregation of gains and losses to individual host country citizens) good for host countries.

It is a trope of right-populist complaints against the pro-immigration lobby that advocates for generous asylum policies are doing virtue ethics.

Virtue signaling surely, unless right populists are criticizing the Aristotelian basis of pro-immigration policies.

For virtue signalling to be useful, you have to believe in virtue ethics in the first place. Dishonest deontologists engage in casuistry to explain why they haven't committed a wrong. Dishonest utilitarians exaggerate the benefits of their actions and minimise the costs. Dishonest virtue ethicists signal virtues they don't possess.

Hmmm. I think you're on to something. I think we need to distinguish between utilitarianism done well, and done poorly. I agree it's easy to do poorly - I think that's part of why we love rules so much - they're easier to follow than trying to come up with a good strategy from scratch for every situation. I guess my claim is that, in the presence of enough adversarial intelligence or optimization, following even pretty good rules won't protect you, because the adversary will find the edge cases they can exploit. At that point you have to adjust your rules, and I claim the only effective way to do that in a way that avoids exploitation is very intelligent consequentialism.

I claim the only effective way to do that in a way that avoids exploitation is very intelligent consequentialism.

I claim that doesn't work either, if your environment is adversarial, because the difference between your model of the expected consequences of your actions and the actual realized consequences of your actions can be exploited. This doesn't even require an adversary that is generally more intelligent than you, just an adversary that notes a specific blind spot you have (see how humans can beat the wildly superhuman Go engine KataGo by exploiting a very specific blind spot it has in its world model).

Okay, well I include some degree of adaptation in my definition of "very intelligent". In fact, adaptation is the main advantage that consequentialists have over deontologists.

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Sure, no one does math, but that's just a theoretical explanation of the ideal way to do decision theory in a world without limits on calculation.

Being a consequentialist just requires that you judge the morality of an act based on the empirical outcomes it has for the world, rather than judging it based on some abstract rule or by what virtues it exhibits or etc.

Deontology was never about ignoring effects. It's impossible to consider actions at all without some acknowledgement of cause and effect. Let's say you're a deontologist and are trying to decide whether murder is moral. It obviously is not, but how about simply shooting a gun at someone? How about pulling the trigger on a gun while it's aimed at someone? How about flexing your finger while it happens to hold a gun pointed at someone? How about sending a nerve impulse to your finger while it happens to hold a gun aimed at someone?

In both practice and theory deontology, virtue ethics, and all other moral philosophies I can think of are consequentialist, just not in precisely the same way as the actual system of consequentialism.

Well, I do think that almost all people are inherently consequentialists, and that people who claim to be deontologists or virtue ethicists or surrendering their moral judgement to the guidance of a higher power or etc. are for the most part basically just being dishonest or failing at introspection.

But this may just be me drawing weird boundaries around term definitions.

To me, if you claim to be a virtue ethicist but you wouldn't follow a virtue into an action that had really bad consequentialist outcomes, then your morality isn't really based on virtues, it's based on consequences and you're just using virtues as a hueristic towards that end.

Same for deontology or religion, if you are making a conscious effort to bend those things towards good consequentialist outcomes, or occasioanlly breaking from them in order to achieve good consequentialist outcomes instead, then you're just a consequentialist who likes to frame your innate consequentialist morality in terms of an externalized locus of control.

But, maybe that's unfair to those philosophies, or proves too much about consequentialism. It's true that I have a concept that non-consequentialists would act innately alien in a lot of ways, doing seems that seem insane given the consequences, because they do not consider consequences to be part of their judgement criteria in the first place. But maybe I should be accepting a more humanistic version of these philosophies that aligns with the ways human nature naturally cares about outcomes, without lumping them all under consequentialism for that reason.

Let's say you murder someone, then later learn your victim was planning on bombing an orphanage or some either heinous act. Does this retroactively make your murder moral? Most consequentialists would say no. I wouldn't say this makes them secret deontllogists. It's not that they're dishonest or failing at introspection, it's that in a sense, consequentialism is the heuristic, and deontology the base reality.

Consider each of the following framings:

A: deontology is a good heuristic for achieving good consequences. Consequentialism is the explicit method, strictly better if followed perfectly.

B: consequentialism is a good heuristic for performing morally correct actions. Deontology is the explicit method, strictly better if followed perfectly.

I see consequentialism and deontology as fundamentally trying to answer slightly different questions. Each can be used as a heuristic for the question which the other is built to explicitly answer. I think everyone is deontologist in the end, because consequences are not all that factors into their moral calculus. The intent matters too.

It's true that I have a concept that non-consequentialists would act innately alien in a lot of ways, doing seems that seem insane given the consequences, because they do not consider consequences to be part of their judgement criteria in the first place. But maybe I should be accepting a more humanistic version of these philosophies that aligns with the ways human nature naturally cares about outcomes, without lumping them all under consequentialism for that reason.

Yeah I mean, I think it's pretty clear that all philosophies consider consequences. What is a "lie" but a set of words that produces a specific effect, e.g. a consequence? I don't think the concept of an "action" makes sense at all absent an understanding of cause and effect.

Would it be reasonable to summarize as "Deontology is consequentialism in advance"? It seems like the point is that, come time for decision-making, rationalizing a suboptimal decision is easier than you'd expect, so it's better to have the decision already set. The downside being that genuinely out-of-context problems might return garbage when put through Deontological checks, but it's also easy to convince yourself something is an OOCP when it isn't, too...

What makes this categorically different from rule utilitarianism?

The utilitarianism part. Not all consequentialists are utilitarians.

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I'm totally in agreement there.

Having read that, gosh isn't it great that there are utilitarians out there to save the world from us crazy deontologists?

Unironically yes.

Maybe the people who make a big deal about calling themselves utiliatarian and talk about it all the time (eg me) aren't the best examples, but if we didn't have someone guiding humanity who cared about good outcomes for people as a goal in-and-of-itself, we'd never have advanced very much as a civilization.

I guess we can quibble about what makes someone a utilitarian, I count people who intuitively have 'the overall well being of everyone' as the basis of their moral reasoning and goal structure, even if they've never heard of utilitarianism and don't do calculations on anything. Maybe you'd want to call those people something else.

I honestly don't want to be mean, because I accept that many of the people claiming the label Utilitarian do have "overall well being of everyone" at heart.

It's just the air of "Of course this is the One True Way, everyone else is a flâneur or cosplaying at ethics or has their head in the sand" that is irksome if one is not a Utilitarian of any stripe and has no wish to be and disagrees with some/much/all of the philosophies involved.

Some of the rest of us also like to think we are in it for the well-being of everyone, too, you know!

we are in it for the well-being of everyone, too

If you justify your deontology in terms of its consequences, doesn't that make you a consequentialist who thinks that certain rules happen to be the optimal policy?

Oh gosh, you got me there, how clever you are! Yes, we're all secretly consequentalists!

Really, can we not play this type of "gotcha!" game? I'm trying to be civil so far and not lay into Utilitarians, but it's getting tougher by the minute.

I'm really not trying to play gotcha games. I guess we are playing definition games, but I guess I'd say you have to choose which you prioritize: The well-being of everyone, or following rules. If you follow rules only for the sake of the well-being of everyone, then I guess I'd call you a consequentialist. I'm not trying to be clever or counter-intuitive.

And I think you're setting up a false dichotomy: follow rules OR universal well-being.

If I make it a rule to always prioritize the well-being of everyone, am I really a consequentialist? After all, that's following a rule, not deciding on the basis of consequences!

Yes, consequentialism are rule-following are special cases of each other. You got me. The usual meaning of the word refers to situations in which they differ, i.e. any rule other than "maximize utility".

Some of the rest of us also like to think we are in it for the well-being of everyone, too, you know!

Then I would call you a utilitarian, by my own definitions of the term. Which is admittedly very broad.

I basically separate it into the motives underlying someone's moral reasoning, rather than adherence to a specific decision procedure. If you're trying to follow some set of rules no matter what, you're a deontologist; if you're trying to do the right thing because it's right, you're a virtue ethicist; if you're trying to do whatever helps people the most, you're a utilitarian.

By your definition, you can call me a banana if you like. No skin off my nose. But I'm not a banana, and I'm not a utilitarian.

As I recall, you rather dislike HPMoR, but this discussion reminds me of the one time it did make an argument in favor of deontology. ... in chapter 108, and I'm not sure if we have spoiler tags, here?

It's much easier to make a convincing-sounding argument to violate a rule, than to find a genuinely good and acceptable reason to violate the rule. Even profoundly intelligent people are vulnerable to deception, biases, temptations, etc, and that makes deontological injunctions a valid defense against those failure modes.

In my experience, the downside is that, when breaking a rule fails to have any noticeable negative consequences, it becomes easier to break the rule in the future. One might argue that this is a sign that said rule wasn't worth having in the first place, to which I must point out that the way the brain associates actions with outcomes can only predict so far ahead on incomplete information. See also: the crack and opioid epidemics, small lies that turn into a house of cards you're forced to live in, how the whole free love and hookup culture things turned out...

Just fyi we do have spoiler tags, you put two pipes in front of and following what you want to say

like this

Edit: now if only I could get code blocks working.

I thank all gods, guardian deities, spirits, and the autochthonic entities I have never read anything like 108 chapters of HPMoR. So I can't comment on Yudkowsky's notion of deontology.

In that example, in wartime that's not "shooting an unarmed man", that's "enemy soldier engaging in act of war" and legitimate target.

Well that's the thing, that man is both. He is an enemy soldier engaging in an act of war and a legitimate target, but he is also an unarmed man.

So there are two rules in conflict, both completely applicable and giving opposite results. What actually happens has a lot to do with which rule is emphasized and brought to the forefront.

This is similar to people using the term "NPCs" to describe others. I've never liked or ascribed to that terminology. The feeling you describe is not totally unfamiliar to me, but it isn't quite right for me. You describe feeling like you are a part of the tribe, and suddenly realizing you are not. I never felt entirely comfortable with the idea that I was in the tribe in the first place. I slowly had it confirmed over the years that "yes, your feelings are correct, we don't want you in the tribe". There wasn't a grand illusion that broke, I was just always sitting in the far wings of the theater where I could see the flatness of the background facade that looked so beautiful from the center seats.

Your questions at the end imply a certain yearning to return to the comforting embrace of the beautiful illusion. And you noticed that people still under the illusion got mad at your for pointing out things that might break the illusion for them. Your yearning to return seems to validate their anger. I have no illusion to return to. I'd burn down the illusion if I thought I could.

I feel like, to betray something, you have to have declared loyalty to it and then abandoned it and/or sided with its enemies. The New Atheists criticized Islam but they didn't pledge loyalty to some notion of the West as being a place that must be protected from all Muslim immigration. There is no betrayal when a bunch of classical liberals simultaneously criticize Islam and say that a total ban on Muslim immigration is wrong. Presumably, they believe that the right thing to do is to first let at least some Muslims come over and to then try to convert them to secular liberalism, rather than stopping all of them from coming over. You can argue that this is an unrealistic plan, but to call the whole thing a betrayal seems inaccurate to me.

What does it even mean to betray "the West"? Which West? The West is a hodgepodge of many different societies, many of which fundamentally disagree with and often hate each other. There are certain things that a large majority of people in the West do agree on. For example, that people should not be put in prison without due process. Or that it is good to have a pretty large level of free speech compared to authoritarian countries (though people in the West disagree about how much free speech is good, exactly). But the New Atheists are not going against anything that a large majority of The West supports when they disagree with a Muslim ban. At best you can accuse them of being too stupid to clearly perceive the possible danger of being demographically replaced by people who are fundamentally opposed to the things that the West agrees on. But that would not be betrayal, it would just be a failure of perception.

I feel like, to betray something, you have to have declared loyalty to it and then abandoned it and/or sided with its enemies. The New Atheists criticized Islam but they didn't pledge loyalty to some notion of the West as being a place that must be protected from all Muslim immigration. There is no betrayal when a bunch of classical liberals simultaneously criticize Islam and say that a total ban on Muslim immigration is wrong. Presumably, they believe that the right thing to do is to first let at least some Muslims come over and to then try to convert them to secular liberalism, rather than stopping all of them from coming over. You can argue that this is an unrealistic plan, but to call the whole thing a betrayal seems inaccurate to me.

Sam Harris absolutely has explicitly said that some societies are better than others and the West - i.e. the secular liberal democracies spawned by Western Europeans and their adopted East Asian allies - is the best. This is one of his main arguments against leftists academics: moral relativism and the refusal to accept this. He is 100% on the "swore allegiance to 'the West'"

Sam Harris went around claiming that it was highly plausible that France would have a civil war that'd kill millions over Islam. This was more than a decade ago mind. To a lot of people at the time (including me) it seemed at best to be hysteria or even outright race war fantasizing you see amongst neo-nazis who are eagerly waiting for the day of days. Simply suggesting it was disqualifying.

But he felt it strongly and stuck to it, including citing Eurabia about the upcoming Muslim majority (which, btw, defeats your "he was too stupid to clearly perceive the demographic danger". Putting aside whether Eurabia is accurate, he thought he perceived the danger).

Taken with his general views on Islam - which the article accurately lays out* - it absolutely is a problem I don't think he's ever resolved conclusively. I was all over New Atheist forums: this is a point the left-wing enemies of Harris constantly made: his argument strongly suggests ethnic cleansing or at least anti-Islamic immigration despite his steadfast refusal to connect those dots.

And Sam reliably came out to tell us that all of the right-wing European leaders saying as much may or may not be bad, but the problem is that "grown-up"' European leaders really should just do their anti-Islam work for them and defuse them because if liberals don't do it voters will elect fascists to do it. One of the right-wingers he's feted is Douglas Murray, who has explicitly backed removing as many Muslims as one can (though he seems to have basically become blackpilled now)

Yet Sam decided to insist that Trump's behavior was just totally incongruent with anything he said when he won (but also see the David Brooks quote about fascists and borders). I'm sorry, but people are right to point out the issue (he isn't the only one to have this problem - the author of this book somehow always puts on his Tucker Carlson face when European right-wingers take him at his word and attack Muslims).

I mainly put it down to just how fundamentally disgusted Sam was by Trump and the dangers of even pretending to side with him on anything. The people Sam respects and hangs around with would likely defenestrate him. Harris is, as a matter of demographics, the exact sort to loathe Trump despite his disagreements with leftists. In terms of character you could hardly think of someone more offensive to Harris on a visceral level, if you know anything about him or what he's written. Just take his book Lying....

If we're being charitable, he learned something from Bush where he seemed to have sympathetic instincts when it came to the War on Terror but it only seemed to make things worse, and Bush was actually restrained in many ways (Harris' most-loathed phrase about Islam was popularized by Bush).

* The article is arguably generous in that it attributes the problem to modern Islam. Harris has often put on his amateur historian and exegete hat to say Islam is in its fundamentals problematic and what are typically cited as its successes - precisely to defuse people like him - like the supposed tolerance in medieval Andalusia are mirages or at least oversold.

Even when he was writing a book about reforming Islam with Maajid Nawaz, he couldn't help but continually point out the whole endeavor basically involved lying and was incredibly difficult for Islam specifically.

Surely this is an empirical question. What has Muslim immigration been like for America? What are Muslims in America actually like? PEW did a giant study back in 2007 that surveyed over 60000 Muslims in American and found they're... pretty similar to the general American public. Less likely to go to college and a little bit more likely to be poor. They did have more socially conservative views than the general American public but, like, "median American of 1994" not, like, "median American of the 1800's". I think it's pretty easy to believe that a substantial shift in the social beliefs of Muslims can occur over the course of some decades, given we have already seen such a shift occur in the general public's perception over a similar time frame. Maybe Islam is going to turn out to be inoculating against modernity in a way that Christianity or Judaism weren't but color me skeptical.

I’m not convinced. The behavior of Muslims doesn’t indicate they’re 1990s style Americans who are okay with other religions as equals. They’re absolutely not okay with gays, they don’t want women working, and so on. There are numerous videos of Muslims preaching that America or Europe will become Muslim. A Baptist preacher saying even 10% of that is a far right radical. A Baptist preacher saying that and blocking major roads for prayer services would be probably thrown out of the SBC.

A lot depends on how much of a filter immigration is, immigrants who go through a highly selective system are obviously going to be better than refugees or illegal immigrants who don't. Due to geographical proximity Europe has more unfiltered Muslim immigrants, and correspondingly has more problems with them. That said, I suspect that even for unfiltered immigrants a lot of the difference would disappear if you controlled for race.

If you control for race do muslim immigrants and their descendants assimilate and secularize less than christian immigrants? Or is it just that they are disproportionately arab and african? Intelligence correlates with economic success, low criminality, and atheism. I'm not saying that the actual content of islam must not be relevant, I genuinely don't know, but it's not something you can compare by just assuming other variables are equal.

You could blame them for commenting on immigration policy without taking HBD into account, but that is pretty expected for anyone close to the mainstream. The fact Sam Harris has discussed HBD at all makes him a rarity for a commenter of his prominence, even if he either didn't consider it in this case or thought it wasn't sufficient to make the policy a good idea.

and their descendants assimilate and secularize less than christian immigrants

I think the biggest confound here is that Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs are two non-overlapping collections of ethnic groups, and that Christian Arab ethnic groups probably rival Brahmins for genetic IQ while Muslim Arab ethnic groups definitely don’t. So Maronite and Coptic and Assyrian immigrants are highly successful wherever they go, including in societies where they face active discrimination(like their home societies) and tend to assimilate because they get rich. Muslim immigrants aren’t very successful, conversely, so a lot of them are stuck in their ghettos.

This reminds me of my tenure on the Atheism+ forums, back before my redpilling/blackpilling (I don't know what to call it, since I didn't really change my beliefs, I just realized the people I thought were on my side, aren't).

A+, as you know, was woker than woke before "woke" became a thing. And one of my "WTF?" moments when I realized these people are fucking crazy is when they went hard on defending... Muslims. Not against general racism and bigotry, but against criticisms that the "New Atheists" had no problem applying to every other religion.

At one point, the forum got trolled hard by a poster from one of the hater-forums who monitored them, a set of people running an account that adopted the persona of a gay man who proceeded to post long effort-posts about the connection between homophobia and Islamophobia, and how seeing the latter "triggered" him, as a gay man, despite the fact that he was an atheist.

The mods on the A+ forum proceeded to take him very seriously and started modding comments that were too "Islamophobic."

He also declared that the term "homosexual" was homophobic. The mods proceeded to mod anyone who used the word homosexual.

I was one of the few people who pushed back and kept getting in arguments with him, until he eventually DMed me and let me know what the game was. I already suspected something of the sort, because to any sane person his arguments were so transparently nonsensical. But the mods and the other SJWs on the forum ate it up.

As to your broader point, I think liberals like Maher and Harris suffer from a misapprehension that I had myself until recently (my beliefs have changed on this one): that Islam is just another religion and that, like Christianity and Judaism and other bronze-age religions that were once full of barbarism and genocidal ideology, the civilizing effects of modern Western liberalism will eventually secularize them until they are just like the rest of us, and we'll have a big joint Christmas/Hannuka/Ramadan holiday season.

This does happen to an extent. Moderate Muslims in the West are... mostly like the rest of us. I hesitate to say that Islam is fundamentally incapable of undergoing some kind of "Enlightenment." (Leaving aside the arguments from some of our resident Christians that post-Enlightenment Christianity isn't real Christianity at all.) I don't think Islam is some sort of unique Neal Stephenson mind virus that turns its followers into violent p-zombies even if many of Islam's critics do.

But I am pessimistic about Islam, in its current form, being capable of coexisting long-term with other ideologies. I have a lot of other uncharitable and blackpilling thoughts I've been tossing around and trying to decide how much of it is Chinese Cardiology and selection bias.

I do think a blanket "Muslim ban" is stupid (and clearly unconstitutional). But a ban on importing large numbers of people from countries that just happen to be dominated by Muslims of an uncompromising, anti-Western, pro-jihadist bent does not seem irrational or bigoted to me, but it would be hard to frame it in a way that would be acceptable to those who believe Islam is "just another religion."

One problem is that most of the arguments that can be used in favor of a Muslim ban can also be used in favor of banning people who have far-left or far-right views. Even if there might be some good pragmatic reasons for being wary of Islam, banning Islam is a slippery slope towards banning every militant ideology that is incompatible with the mainstream of today's West. But I would not want to live in a country that is even as censorious as modern Germany, much less China. Personally I think that Islam is stupid, but I think that communism and fascism are stupid too, and I perceive that banning communists, fascists, and Muslims from immigrating to the US, aside from just grating very strongly against my pro-free-speech attitude, would also open a whole can of worms that could potentially lead to banning even people with much less far-out political views, myself included.

Adding onto this, as a participant in New Atheism at the time it was definitely noticed by some atheists that what the evangelical Christian right (at their generational height of power in the Bush administration) said about Muslims while calling for bans on them, leveling the middle east, profiling and so on matched and rhymed with the things that they also said about us. Given many new atheists were former evangelicals in heavily religious areas, myself included, we were quite familiar with how much hatred they had for "secular humanism" and atheists in particular.

There was a distinct feeling that if the Bush administration put this unpopular religious minority on the chopping block, we could end up being targeted down the line in the sense of the "first they came for the socialists, and I did nothing because I was not a socialist" speech.

This is a very self serving far left take which justifies Christian hostility towards "secular humanists".

The neocons are influential now and wrecking harm and new atheism had plenty of crossover with that but you are going to frame your political coalition as the victims by focusing on the past. This fails to address the current problems of our time and gives excessive sympathy over the past to atheists.

"secular humanists" have had their influence and have targeted others especially Christians, so please stop with this victimhood narrative. Atheists are one of the groups that poll as one of the most pro censorship in fact.

Importantly, the ideology of these atheists has western civilization at a trajectory of destruction. It is justifiable to suppress that ideology just for not caring about extinction and low fertility rates. If atheists in general were so good, they wouldn't poll so far to the left. Now, I think personally that there are some wise atheists so I am against hostility towards every atheistic person in a general manner from political discourse. But I don't buy into this idea of atheists as on average the wise people who have abadoned stupid dogma.

And even their anti religious sentiment seems to somehow focus especially against Christianity, with certain other religions (less so Islam) getting much less criticism.

Now, there are problems with Christianity and progressive Christianity is a disaster that shares the pathologies of the "secular humanists" so there also needs to be a significant change but the reality is ironically that a Christian society of a somewhat conservative bent is more successful in creating a society ruled by humanism than "secular humanists" have ever been. It is a model that worked, while you "secular humanist" atheists have behaved in inhumane and destructive manner in societies you ruled over. Albeit the term secular humanism is a misnomer and those using it are not eager to gatekeep that their faction does not include cruel fanatics willing to be inhuman in the name of humanism. Moreover, there are tradeoffs and some of the rules and behaviors encouraged by Christianity are actually necessary components of a lasting civilized society.

So rather than recreating a wise framework from a "secular" perspective, the "secular humanists" just adopt, or are in fact part of the leaders of a far left ideological dogma that works badly. The vaccum left by Christianity's decline does not lead to less fanaticism, as the new ideological religion is promoted with fanaticism.

Today, Christians are arrested in Britain for silently praying in abortion centers. When a trans mass shooter kills Christian kids due to anti christian and anti white racism, the American goverment promotes transgenders as the victim. Not to mention all other left wing associated racism against whites who are more right wing coded and direct promotion of progressive stack. So enough with this idea of groups in a left wing framing due to events of the past are the victims against the right wing oppressor. Especially funny you bring up the socialists when they have also done their own great share of crimes.

This one sided obsession is incredibly destructive, and atheistic anti christian types have been rather willing to use power to screw over others in modern history. Have some humility and consider your own faction's sins, and whether your faction's influence have made things worse.

Are you using ChatGPT? The longwinded passages that read as if responding to things that weren't said in my post have certain qualities and odd phrasing that are seriously tripping my AI-generated content radar.

Instead of responding to anything of substance you just throw some false accusations. If 2 days pass and you haven't come up with something that addresses the actual post, it is better if you say nothing.

I'm still suspicious.

This is a very self serving

The argument revolves around self preservation.

far left take

I was a rightist at the time, as were all atheists I knew, and I would still be one for another decade afterwards. One doesn't have to like a group's beliefs - and I very much dislike Islam - to be against empowering others to inflict collective punishment and wage concerted attempts at destroying them. You've already advanced to arguing that atheism is incompatible with western civilization, which is what was being said in the arguments building up for going after rando Muslims.

most of the arguments that can be used in favor of a Muslim ban can also be used in favor of banning people who have far-left or far-right views

We are overburdened with too many communists and fellow travelers in the US. Let's not import any more

Personally I think that Islam is stupid, but I think that communism and fascism are stupid too, and I perceive that banning communists, fascists, and Muslims from immigrating to the US, aside from just grating very strongly against my pro-free-speech attitude, would also open a whole can of worms

Communists are already banned from immigrating to the US.

Moderate Muslims in the West are... mostly like the rest of us. I hesitate to say that Islam is fundamentally incapable of undergoing some kind of "Enlightenment." (Leaving aside the arguments from some of our resident Christians that post-Enlightenment Christianity isn't real Christianity at all.) I don't think Islam is some sort of unique Neal Stephenson mind virus that turns its followers into violent p-zombies even if many of Islam's critics do.

"Moderate Muslims" are mostly people who are not particularly islamic; they eat turkey bacon while getting drunk the night before sleeping through morning prayer. Now I suspect that it's possible that devout Muslims in the west could be very like Christian fundamentalists, who are, reddit to the contrary, very rarely a problem, but you'll notice they're still a breed apart.

I do think a blanket "Muslim ban" is stupid (and clearly unconstitutional). But a ban on importing large numbers of people from countries that just happen to be dominated by Muslims of an uncompromising, anti-Western, pro-jihadist bent does not seem irrational or bigoted to me, but it would be hard to frame it in a way that would be acceptable to those who believe Islam is "just another religion."

I mean Assyrians and Maronites make great citizens, but shias and sunnis from their same countries do not. Obviously we could openly discriminate but that's illegal.

they eat turkey bacon

There is nothing wrong with eating turkey bacon as long as the animal was slaughtered in a halal manner.

Well yes, the point was that following Islam is inconsistent for these people. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, either way it’s not really out of religious devotion.

But that has nothing to do with Turkey bacon, which is fine.

The point was to include one Islamically influenced behavior in a list of haram ones. Maybe ‘breaks Ramadan with Turkey bacon’ would have been better.

That's what the ideal is, though. "Culturally Muslim" like "Culturally Catholic" or Methodist or what have you. Keep some of the traditions for the Exotic Old Country flavour, be steeped in the modern secular liberal Western values of the surrounding society, and have "our mosque has a female imam" service attendance for the big cultural holidays (whatever the Muslim version of Christmas-and-Easter is).

That's what meant by and understood as "moderate Muslims"; the kind who won't rock the boat and are indistinguishable, apart from skin colour and maybe names, from the people around them. The sort of "diversity" that isn't diverse ideologically. A Muslim who is orthodox and follows the teachings is tolerable, the same as with Christians, so long as they know their place: religion is a private matter and you don't get to intrude it in the public square.

that Islam is just another religion and that, like Christianity and Judaism and other bronze-age religions that were once full of barbarism and genocidal ideology, the civilizing effects of modern Western liberalism will eventually secularize them

I say, who cares? I mean yes, maybe in 400 years the barbarians' descendants would be as civilized as we are now, or much more, and their descendants would look with horror on what is being done now and conduct ceremonies to honor the innocent victims of Islamic terror in 20th-21th centuries. Why should I care whether it happens or not? I won't live in 400 years, I am living now and the barbarians are committing their barbaric atrocities now. Screw that 1000-year stare the ivory tower idiots try to sell us because they read a couple of history book and now they think for some reason they are oh so much smarter than the rest. If there are barbarians now, they should be judged now. If some crazy Christian dude would come and try to burn heretics on the central square of my city, I think he should be jailed, and if he resists, shot. I want the same treatment for crazy dudes of all religions. If declaring "it's just another religion" helps that, so be it, I don't care. I don't see why either way would matter here.

The thing we need to realize here is we don't need any special case for Islam. On the contrary, we should stop applying special cases for Islam - and that's what is happening constantly in the wokesphere. Rape? Of course it's horrible, one of the most horrible sins imaginable! Oh, you mean it's done by fanatical Islamists who proclaim to be oppressed? Ah, that's different business, we need a nuanced approach here! Woman oppression? That's bullshit, maaan! Oh, you mean woman oppression in Saudi Arabia? Maaan, you can't apply your morals there! Well, yes, I can. Screw that. That's the root of all evil here. If we ever manage our culture to stop doing that, we'd win 99% of the battle already.

But I am pessimistic about Islam, in its current form, being capable of coexisting long-term with other ideologies

Again, I say I don't care, it's not my problem. I mean, it's not on me to figure out how to make requirements on Quran work in the modern world. What needs to be done is the uniform demand to live by the modern world rules, no ifs, no buts, no coconuts, no discounts and "nuanced approaches". If you can do it and keep the Quran - fine, keep it. I don't mind at all, I don't care what you do to achieve it, whatever works for you. If you can't - you should be either forced to, or be forcibly expelled from the places where civilized people live. That should be the test - whether you can follow the civilized society rules.

I hesitate to say that Islam is fundamentally incapable of undergoing some kind of "Enlightenment."

Whatever about the Enlightenment, what made me laugh (I don't see it so much these days, if it's still going around) is the notion that what Islam needs is the Reformation.

Dude, (1) have you any idea what the Reformation was all about and (2) Islam had its Reformation, just like the European one: go back to the bare word of the holy books, no intermediaries, strip away all the accretion of worldly ideas, pull down the images and luxurious living. The Taliban who blew up the Buddhas were Reformers in the same vein as those who smashed the statues in churches all across Europe.

This pop-culture notion of the Reformation being all about 'freedom of conscience' and 'the church can't tell me what to do' is one that comes very long after the aftermath of the Wars of Religion and the fissiparous nature of Protestantism, particularly in America, where denominations split and split again over disputes as to interpretation of the Scriptures and godly living, so that eventually through exhaustion, Western societies were "we won't have a state church, and where we do, it will be subordinate to the civil government and not the other way round". Calvin tussled with the civil authorities as to who would have authority in Geneva and won in his lifetime, but after his death the civil authorities gradually pulled back power into their own hands.

I'm not sure if you mean me, but I know the Reformation was not about "freedom of conscience." I refer to the Enlightenment because that is generally regarded as the period in which the church lost much of its grip on state power. (Yes, I know it's more complicated than that, yes, I know "the Enlightenment" is a term like "Dark Ages" and the "Middle Ages" that doesn't neatly define a time period or movement.) The point is that Islam has never had any real subordination to civil authority. Muslim countries controlled by secular authorities generally need to use pretty brutal suppression methods and still give lip service to being Islamic.

Of course the Reformation is something different. Islam has had several (arguable) equivalents. Certainly it's had many schisms, the Shia/Sunni one being only the most notable.

I'm not sure if you mean me

No, I didn't. But it was a popular view in media articles a few years back, and I got dizzy from simultaneously shaking my head and rolling my eyes. Part of that is down to the lingering anti-Catholicism which swallowed the view of "heroic Reformers standing up against a dictatorial Church" and imagined that carried over to modern Christianity, where now the "dictatorial Church" wasn't the Pope any more but the Evangelicals, and the liberalised mainline Protestant denominations were the 'heroic Reformers'. "Hey, this lady clergyperson from one of the Seven Sisters denominations is wearing a rainbow stole and marching for abortion rights, now that's what the Reformation was all about and that's why Islam needs one!"

Yeah, I would love to see the faces of Luther, Calvin, etc. when looking at that example 😁

Yeah, Protestantism may have contributed to the growth of liberalism, but in itself it was not a very liberal movement. You can see that by looking at Martin Luther's calls to suppress peasant rebellions, or at the nature of the Puritans' society.

the nature of the Puritans' society.

That damned nonconformist John Locke was a real anti-liberal, you know.

Islam had its Reformation

It also had its own Enlightenment. The Golden Age of Islam and the whole Abbasid Caliphate was very loosey goosey with its Islam, with a focus on education, science, and (often Greek) philosophy for a few centuries until everything got buttoned up during the Middle Ages and especially after Al Ghazali. There's a reason that, of what wasn't from the Greeks, a lot of the recovery of mathematics and philosophy in the European Renaissance was recovery of texts from the Islamic world (which was simultaneously becoming less interested in these things).

This is something that's always struck me about calls for reform. Consider something like Quranism, the idea that Muslims should reject the sunnah and hadith, and this long tradition of interpretation and jurisprudence, and return to the purity of the Qur'an. As you can see, the wiki article on it is written mostly from a Western perspective and is very sympathetic to the idea, seeing it as more open and tolerant than the alternative.

It's just - did we forget the Protestant Reformation entirely?

Throwing out all tradition and interpretation and bypassing all the mediating institutions of a tradition is something that was attempted in Europe. The result was well over a century of bloody, fratricidal war and a multitude of new sects, many of which were more fanatical and violent than the order they originally criticised. Throwing out interpretation in favour of acting according to the original, pure divine revelation is a recipe for fanaticism, not tolerance!

(For what it's worth I say this as a Protestant; I don't mean that the Reformation was 'wrong', whatever specific claim you might attach to that. But the Reformation certainly had a price.)

It's one of those times that far-group and out-group are useful distinctions.

For the New Atheists, Christianity was the out-group. They lived/live in majority Christian countries. Christianity was the dominant religious and cultural force, and that was their enemy. Cool secular scientific rational materialism was being oppressed and kept down by the Bible-bashers.

Islam? That's the far-group. They weren't living under Islamic religious rules in Muslim-majority countries. So they could patronise Muslims and get the extra benefit of pats on the head for not being mean to all religions, just to the nasty ones like Christianity.

I also think the New Atheists/Atheism+ just didn't understand the reasons why people believe. If you're a believer, it's because you're stupid and/or hypocritical. You can't really mean the things you say you believe. So if you're anyway smart, you're going to be influenced by Western secularism and become more liberal, on the way to dumping religion completely. That people can sincerely hold and believe traditional tenets is one of those "does not compute" moments for them.

Hence why Dawkins etc. clamoured for arrest the Pope but never bothered calling for arresting the Grand Imam. Muslims just were not a threat to them or their way of life or their influence or power (such as it was).

For the New Atheists, Christianity was the out-group.

Nah, that’s not it. Harris and Dawkins took tons of shit from A+ and the rest for being ‘islamophobic’. They know full well that Islam is far worse than Christianity (or Jainism, to take Harris’ favourite comparison), they just aren’t ready to compromise on liberalism (eg, free speech and immigration restrictions on muslims). They hope that liberalism will work like it has worked so many times before, even as it faces a more formidable enemy. An enemy whose primary weapon, death for apostates and critics, is designed to counter liberalism’s weapon, free speech. Sadly, I think the compromise is necessary. The risk is just not worth it.

Given that liberalism successfully defeated both national socialism and communism, all in the span of just 100 years or so, I don't see why Islam is supposed to be such a big threat to it. National socialism and communism even had the advantages of being mainly preached by white-looking people in economically advanced and militarily powerful countries, as opposed to mainly being preached by foreign-looking people in weak countries. Also, unlike with communism, there is very little danger of influential politicians and intellectuals in the West converting to Islam. At most they might be sympathetic to Islam.

And if you think specifically about secular liberalism, well, one can argue that secular liberalism didn't even just outcompete national socialism and communism in the span of 100 years, it also, while it was doing all that, basically ended Christianity as a political force in the West after first using it as an ally of convenience against national socialism and communism. Secular liberalism should not be underestimated. It has some powerful advantages against other ideologies.

I think liberalism would win anyway, but I’d rather not have The Eastern Front, Civil War Edition , if all it takes to avoid it is closing the border and telling imams they can’t teach death for apostasy anymore. As you say, islam is so weak that expansion by the sword is not even an option for it, unlike nazism and communism. So the wolf is not really at the door-door, we can just tell him to fuck off. It would be a huge own-goal to import a problem that’s so easily avoided. Let liberalism and islam duke it out in their countries, and they can have their algerian civil wars instead of us.

I'm not into that but to be fair, I am realizing now that the version of liberalism that defeated the Nazis and communists was quite a bit less liberal than the version that I want. For example, communists were actually persecuted back in the first half of the 20th century in the West.

the version of liberalism that defeated the Nazis and communists was quite a bit less liberal than the version that I want.

Yes, the Nazis allowed quarter-jewish people to marry Germans while many white Americans were not allowed to marry quarter-black Americans.

It's not really free speech, freedom of religion, or due process that defeated the nazis but overwhelming fire-power and millions of slavic bodies.

Modern secular liberalism does not seem capable of sustaining birthrates, so all the muslims have to do is come in and wait for the old liberals to die out for a victory by default.

It was not "liberalism" that "persecuted" communists. Liberals were often fellow travelers.

The society that defeated the nazis was not ideologically liberal but had a mixture of liberal and non liberal beliefs. Like in fact most of the people called far right extremists and hated by liberals today.

Contrarily, most people who complain more about the far right today have insufficiently conservative views and are also insufficiently pro groups associated with the right.

It is not fair for liberals who are quite more far to the left and antinativist, to claim that they are part of the same tradition to people who are actually part of a different tradition. Modern liberalism is part of the new left and it represents a break from the past. It is continuous from some extremists that existed in that period too, but not the general society. It is much more far to the left and antiwhite than what Eisenhower or Churchil argued for. Of course neither figure was successful in the domestic culture war on the long term.

I don't agree with focusing on intolerance to far left communists in the first half of 20th century as the problem of liberalism.

As society and elite institutions became more liberal and left wing this did not result in less authoritarianism.

For a half-century, academics denied that there was substantial endorsement of authoritarianism among the left in the democratic West (e.g., Altemeyer, 1996) or of its psychological underpinnings, such as dogmatism (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski & Sulloway, 2003; see also Forgas, this volume). More recent research, however, has found ample evidence of leftwing authoritarianism (Conway, Houck, Gornick & Repke, 2018; Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, Tasimi & Lilienfeld, 2022). Leftwing authoritarianism (LWA) is characterized by dogmatism, social vigilantism, prejudice against outgroups, anti-hierarchical aggression, and willingness to censor one’s opponents (see also Forgas, this volume).

snip

The main outcome assessed was how many participants agreed with at least one of the modified Hitler quotes. 55% of college student participants agreed with at least one Hitler quote when it was applied to White people. Figure 1 presents the means by participant political identity (progressive liberal, moderate, conservative) and by the group used in the Hitler quote (Jews, Whites, Blacks). Endorsement of the Hitler quote when referring to White people was significantly higher across the board. This was especially true for U.S. liberals, who also showed the highest overall endorsement (55% vs < 40% for moderates and conservatives) of the Hitler quote when applied to Whites. Bernstein and Bleske-Rechek (2023) found a very similar pattern of endorsement of the rhetoric in DiAngelo’s White Fragility as was obtained for Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-new-book-burners

Moreover, seems that this discussion is full of people who are forgetting the neocons.

Are coups, CIA involvement, and politicians like Zelensky who ban political parties and don't oppose new elections part of liberalism? Is the American miliary industrial complex, AIPAC, thinktanks, the lobyists who fund them and politicians like Nikki Haley who also is ex director of Boeing part of liberalism? Because they seem to be pushing for constantly more authoritarianism. What about the highly influential ADL and the mainstream liberal parties that are also promoting more censorship?

Is Greenwald and Snowden, and Manning and Assange, part of liberalism, or the enemies?

If we define liberalism more narrowly, then liberals should be less arrogant about their current victory. A question arises if they even qualify. And if we define it more broadly, then it isn't the principled pro freedom, pro rights, against racism ideology that it is claimed to be.

Is modern South Africa a success of liberalism, or a failure? Unlike the academics who see no evil, hear no evil and can't see left wing extremism, we should examine this.

What about those who support mass migration and are against islamophobia, and are antinative racists and support hate speech laws to enforce this ideology? Do people who defend rhetoric like "kill the boer" such as ADL qualify as liberals?

To conclude, there is a confusion about what liberalism means from liberals and is hard to separate it with far leftism and even warmongers, neocons, the American establishment and the desires of partisans for say the uniparty, or Democrats in particular.

What you advocate will likely end with the muslims who claim they will take over the west, and other groups who do this, to succeed. And no it won't be an elimination of tribalism and a freer society.

Has the last decade lead to "liberal" societies becoming freer or less free under this trajectory of the tribe of liberals gaining more influence?

They became less free and more in the direction of discriminatory hateful antinativist authoritarian states which are indeed lead by people who are incapable of standing up to fanaticism if promoted by the ethnic groups they sympathize with. And this element is key for liberalism's willingness for prioritizing "rights" is applied in a wildly inconsistent manner.

But liberals have compromised repeatedly against freedom of speech. And Sam Harris have endorsed an ends justifies the means ideology. But is Sam Harris even a liberal or a neocon? That this question isn't asked, tells us what kind of ideology the tribe of people calling themselves liberals are comprised off. Plenty of far leftists and neocons there.

There is something more going on than principles here.

What is going on is that liberals have much less will to power and are more quoka like when it comes to standing up against groups associated with the left and the narrative tm. This also applies to those who might make an exception for one particular demographic.

This has to do with the history of the left, and how it has sided with said nationalisms, and political tribalism. It also has to do with the phenomenon of "running from the far right". The attempt to not be a far righter and have positions that are associated with the far right ends up with people endorsing unreasonable and unfair positions, since they are unwilling to actually admit that maybe those they consider as far right extremists are right on SOME things.

Near-group and far-group was part of it, but a larger part, IMO, was that Muslims code as POC (notwithstanding the tiny number of white converts) and thus can only be the oppressed, never the oppressors.

As to your broader point, I think liberals like Maher and Harris suffer from a misapprehension that I had myself until recently (my beliefs have changed on this one): that Islam is just another religion and that, like Christianity and Judaism and other bronze-age religions that were once full of barbarism and genocidal ideology, the civilizing effects of modern Western liberalism will eventually secularize them until they are just like the rest of us, and we'll have a big joint Christmas/Hannuka/Ramadan holiday season.

I can say for a fact that this is untrue. Sam's entire career has been about arguing with liberals who think this.

I would argue he doesn't just think it's pernicious today (though in normie arguments he'll often focus on that). No, his phrase was "the only problem with Islamic fundamentalism is the fundamentals of Islam"

He had basically the same speech to give to everyone and it was:

  1. Islam says it's the final speech of God with no reformation possible. No fallible prophets you can blame bad words on, God is telling you himself to beat women (Q4:34) so it is what it is.
  2. The problems we see in the Muslim world are the direct result of this faith and its inherent problems, Westerners who believe it's just radicalization cause the West was mean are narcissists fooling themselves The West didn't do it to them, so the West fixing it for them by no longer exploiting Muslims is dubious.
  3. Islam was a religion made by and for a conquering warlord, and thus has no "render unto Caesar" secularizing principle.
  4. Islam has no "out" like Judaism got when the Temple was destroyed and Jews were so demographically overwhelmed they eventually had to reform.

If you want to see him break out the classics he basically hits most of the notes in this one video

Yes, he will say that he thinks Islam should be reformed and we need progressive Muslims. But he will also basically say those are noble lies and the rest of us (or him at least) need to say the truth. And yes, he recognizes this contradiction and has no solution for it.

I'm more familiar with Bill Maher than Sam Harris, so I believe you. I think he's unfortunately correct.

I think this forum should disable/remove the downvote button. It's a legacy holdover from Reddit but it really doesn't fit the theme of the motte. Downvoting increases the intensity of heat while doing little for light. Humans are hard-wired to care about the popularity of their ideas, even people very low on the agreeableness spectrum (which I'm sure accounts for the majority of posters here). People who are routinely downvoted are much less likely to post, intensifying the echo chamber effect.

If a post breaks the rules, reporting it is still the best solution.

If a post is just using bad logic, it's much better to refute that logic with a response than to downvote. There's nothing I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses. This doesn't happen nearly as often on this forum as it does on Reddit, but it's still a nuisance when it does occur.

  • -20

Voting has always been one of the worst functions of Reddit and should have been discarded with the offsite move. I voted on one comment in my decade plus on Reddit, and it was a technical solution to a video game bug buried under dozens of useless comments with bad advice. As a subjective “I agree/disagree” button, which is what it morphed into on Day 2 of Reddit going live, the philosophy of its inclusion is counter to the Motte’s explicit rule against consensus building.

Let ideas stand on their own, without the peanut gallery’s worthless input. Motte monkeys are often not nearly as informed as they believe themselves to be, either, outside of their favorite subjects of “computer science careers” and “why girls don’t think programmers are alpha males.”

Let ideas stand on their own, without the peanut gallery’s worthless input. Motte monkeys are often not nearly as informed as they believe themselves to be, either, outside of their favorite subjects of “computer science careers” and “why girls don’t think programmers are alpha males.”

Dial down the antagonism, returning-alt-with-a-grudge-against-the-Motte.

I think this forum should disable/remove the downvote button.

I think we should remove both. "Bad post got upvotes" complaints are as bad as the "my post got downvotes" ones. The only function of votes, as others mentioned, is a sink for low effort comments, but if the mods are up to it, I'd say just start banning for low effort. Unlike some of the more esoteric rules, this one is pretty easy to understand, and to apply in a relatively objective way.

You want to give the mods more control over the conversation? Who are you and what have you done with Arjin?!

I was always in favor of civility norms. I'm not really that much into demanding high effort, but it might be worth it, if it frees us from the hand wringing about up/down votes.

It sounds like a pyrrhic victory to me. You get rid of the, what, quarterly bitching about upvotes and downvotes, but in doing so you take away one of the public's few methods of influencing the discourse and put it on the mods, who are overworked already.

Problem is that people who shouldn't get influenced by votes (completely fine posters with a minority opinion) are, and people who should (trolls) are not. I sympathize with mods being overworked, which is why I said "if they're up for it".

The complaints are the worst part, because sometimes yes it is a bad post, but other times it's "that's your opinion based on your views which don't agree with the content of the post".

I don't care one way or the other about up votes, down votes, sideways votes. I get bans because a mod said so or somebody went running to teacher to complain. I don't ever recollect knowing or caring was the 'offensive' comment upvoted or downvoted.

If people want to keep them, keep them; if the majority want to get rid of them, democracy rules, baby!

I get bans because a mod said so

As opposed to a random user banning you? If that's happening the code base inherited from rdrama must be more interesting than I thought.

somebody went running to teacher to complain

I wonder how much bearing that has on whether the complaint was valid. Certainly the gangsters or mafiosos declaring "snitches get stitches" aren't saying so because of their wounded pride from being falsely accused. You did call me a goat-fucker lol.

I do wonder what a system entirely run off user reports might look like, plenty of social media platforms, Reddit and Facebook/Insta included, have that to a degree where a sufficient number of user reports gets things auto-removed. They still have humans in the loop somewhere even if they don't act in every case. Not that I expect this to be a good idea, or work very well if at all, l just want to see novel forms of dysfunction at times!

You did call me a goat-fucker lol.

No, that was 'high decoupling consideration of hypotheticals'. I wasn't saying you, self_made_human, was a goat-fucker, I was saying hypothetical general you who may want to defend goat-fucking.

But that's what amused me about it; suddenly all the silly low decouplers who were getting het-up over simple thought experiments unlike cool brainy people who could distinguish between "suppose I want to fuck goats" and "you're saying I want to fuck goats? that's a lie!" - suddenly you were sounding just like one of them 😁

As opposed to a random user banning you?

Eh, some mod decides I said something too much and hands out a ban. I may fight that one out, but generally I just shrug and take my lumps. They have their view of "that was needlessly antagonistic" and I have mine, but they're the Benevolent Dictators of this place so what they say goes and arguing with them isn't worth it. Often I just get overheated, and then the cage comes down.

No, that was 'high decoupling consideration of hypotheticals'. I wasn't saying you, self_made_human, was a goat-fucker, I was saying hypothetical general you who may want to defend goat-fucking.

Uh huh..

https://www.themotte.org/post/760/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/159366?context=8#context

Your notion of entertaining hypotheticals seems to be "agree with them". 'Oh, you don't like that proposal, you disagree with it? You're a low decoupler who's too stupid to be able to think abstractly'. That seems to be your go-to position.

Listen, you want to fuck goats? That's your thing, but don't try and get around objections with "Why are people so mean to me about goat-fucking, it must be because they're all too stupid to think outside of conventional notions".

You had plenty of opportunities to state that when I told you I had no desire to fuck goats, or either brand of "kid", but such a considered, nuanced intent was lacking.

At any rate, it's water under the bridge, you took your lumps.

I must hold my hands up to this fault, I was poking you since it did amuse me to see the reality of "talk about high decoupler behaviour and finger wag at low decouplers, then become a low decoupler when it was my ox that was gored" (or goat that was fucked, if you like).

So the mod(s) were in the right to smack my wrist there. However, I was not trying to intimate that you personally wanted to fuck kids (caprine) or kids (human).

That's close enough to an apology for me, while we certainly have our disagreements or outright arguments, you're not remotely as intolerable as some I could name here, heh.

Oh, just wait for the next fight I get into! 😁

If I were any good at this prediction market lark, I'd be able to start one on "When will FNE get their next ban?" and I'd clean up, I tell ya!

More comments

Vote counts should at least be hidden for longer. Perhaps a week. The impulse to focus on upvotes is a siren song.

If a post breaks the rules, reporting it is still the best solution.

Not if the moderators decide to not do their job because they like a troll poster, or want to encourage similar troll posters for "forum diversity." Very few posts that make good arguments are ever downvoted, and it gives the forum population a voice to deal with spammy agenda-posters (or hock-posters) that doesn't rely on the mods.

Is it really that aggravating to get a secondary signal for your post quality?

This forum is extremely well-mannered when it comes to downvotes. Everything I've ever seen under 0 deserved it.

It's not a signal for post quality. I make posts which meet quite a few quality standards, but they get downvoted for making left-wing arguments.

I have seen that happen, and many of my posts have been downvoted because they also went against the hive-mind.

Very rarely do they drop below zero, though. More likely, they are "ratio-ed" by simplistic quips that align more with others.

From my point of view, compared to the perpetual abuse of fucking idiot pre-teens on Reddit and inevitable negative karma, this is still a big step up. It's, of course, easier said than done, but if you don't view votes as a symbol of quality, you can just ignore them instead of the site being changed for it.

My posts do go below 0, especially if I make my kind of arguments. I don't know what specific arguments you're making that get you downvoted, but it was a consistent pattern in on Reddit that left-wing arguments took hits only on the basis of their position.

I would argue that downvotes don't help us - they encourage people to signal their approval of an argument instead of actually engaging with it. Better to remove them and force people to respond or move along.

I will chime in and say yes, sufficiently blue opinions are more likely to get downvoted.

But I’m still tentatively in favor of keeping downvotes. My reasoning is that expressing disapproval is going to happen, and it’s better done through (initially hidden) downvotes than through reports. I’m not very confident in this; vote buttons do feel pretty tribal, which is reason enough to be suspicious.

Abuse of the report function can also be modded. Reddit, for example, bans people who abuse the Sucide Prevention Bot. Set a few examples and people will learn.

It is hidden for a week. It is a good compromise. And downvotes are the best way to signal to the trolls.

Vote counts are definitely not hidden for a week, at least on most posts.

signal to the trolls

If you define troll as "genuine rulebreaker", then reporting is a better option

If you define troll as "person who disagrees with me", then "signalling" should really be done with a proper response.

They're hidden for 24 hours

I'm sorry to report that I could not resist downvoting this post, but will make amends with a comment.

Also - I think the downvote is useful, it's interesting sometimes to see the tally of up and down votes. Highlights contentiousness in an interesting way

Don't worry, I downvoted your reply as well.

it's interesting sometimes to see the tally of up and down votes. Highlights contentiousness in an interesting way

Could still be done indirectly by looking at upvotes on original post, and upvotes on the replies.

Slashdot meta moderation

This is part of what I'm slowly approaching with the volunteer system, although I have had no time to work on it lately :/

Downvotes are a feedback mechanic and I think a good one.

I understand that it was abused pretty heavily on reddit but karma isn't really a thing here, votes are hidden for a day, popular sorting isn't that useful here, ...

I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses.

You mind giving an example or two?

Since we don't use it to order or hide posts (I think?), I don't think having downvotes hurts too much. What I'd like to see are additional or replacement dimensions. LessWrong added an "Agree/Disagree" vote, which I like, with the original upvotes indicating quality alone. That can make it easier to get the highly upvoted, highly disagreed with posts that are really the ideal.

i don't really see the point, i think it'd likely just be as abused as upvote. it'd just be that "quality post" would be the new upvote and "not quality" would be the new downvote where "agree" is just a weaker form that would be uncommonly used.

i think it would be neat to see some indicator of controversiality though.

I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses.

Can you give examples where it happened undeservedly? (Reddit-grade jokes or trolling or blatantly bad posts or -1 buried deep in some 1 vs 1 thread do not count)

  1. It is easier to create bullshit than refute it. Therefore refuting bad posts with good logic is a losing proposition.

  2. Unlike responses, downvotes are typically not moderated, so if a post is so bad that the proper response to it would be moderated, a downvote is the best answer.

  1. That's what moderation is for.
  2. I don't understand what your second point is saying.

That's what moderation is for.

The Motte is past the size where mods can be expected to read every single comment. At most they can respond to reports, and even then there's usually a lag time of hours involved. I also personally don't expect the mods to commit themselves to sitting down and personally addressing every bad argument that gets deposited here like a turd on a doorstep.

I don't understand what your second point is saying.

Sometimes a comment is such utter bullshit that accurately/vividly calling it out as the bullshit it is can stray past the threshold where the reply itself violates the rules here. And that's leaving aside the emotive states where you're tempted to leave something more minimally inflammatory than theoretically possible, at which point just downvoting and moving on is better for you and the forum.

Don't ask me how I know the latter.

  1. It's not against the rules to post bullshit, at least provided the bullshit is in long-form prose.

  2. If someone posts bullshit and someone else posts "Bullshit." in response, the second person will get moderated. If they merely downvote, the second person will not be moderated.

We need a rule against long-form bullshit then.

If we're not thinking of the same people, then what does being able to down vote accomplish?

Downvotes don't refute BS to any meaningful degree. Most trivial BS can be refuted by knowing basic fallacies, and prolific BS'ers will get modded for low-quality posts.

Downvotes in practice are just like people writing "You're wrong" without elaboration.

Having a bunch of people answer BS with "you're wrong" without elaboration is better than allowing it to stand unchallenged. Downvotes are more efficient at that than actually posting "you're wrong", and attract less moderator ire.

Having a bunch of people answer BS with "you're wrong" without elaboration is better than allowing it to stand unchallenged.

You're wrong.

I don't have vast swaths of time to devote to responding at length to certain posts, even when I want to, and on the occasions when I do the iron is often no longer hot, as it were. I don't see a problem with downvoting and moving on.

This assumes your agreement or disagreement on its own is important or worth sharing. It isn’t.

Oh? And why isn't it? Presumably we aren't all conversing in a vacuum, nor is the detailed articulate response of every single person necessarily desirable, even for the most riveting posts. I don't agree generally with you about what you term "Motte monkeys," however, so I don't imagine we'll end up in agreement.

It is easier to create bullshit than refute it.

Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad, downvoting things you disagree just ends up looking like "they hated him because he spoke the truth".

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton[1], they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

That is, a downvoted post be such due to it being wrong, or due to it being heterodox with regards to the majority opinion on this site. A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.

[1]Apocryphally:

You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense.

The assertion that The Motte can or should be building consensus, let alone good consensus, is laughable on its face. The “high IQ” citizens of yesteryear’s Motte were in universal agreement that sub-100 IQ people were physically incapable of understanding hypotheticals, which is obviously false to anyone who actually interacts with idiots, and not insulated morons subsisting exclusively on a social diet of nerdy coworkers and college friends.

The “high IQ” citizens of yesteryear’s Motte were in universal agreement that sub-100 IQ people were physically incapable of understanding hypotheticals

No, they weren't. Many people pushed back against that claim. The Motte never comes anywhere near "universal" agreement on anything.

The Motte never comes anywhere near "universal" agreement on anything.

You worded this as an unqualified absolute just to troll all of us who disagree with it at that extreme, didn't you?

just 100 years ago, high IQ people had consensus that smoking was good

A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.

this comment has a nice "to be fair you have to have a high IQ to understand themotte" type vibe to it, which comes across as pseudointellectual at best.

more seriously though, just because a comment is highly downvoted doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently garbage or that it was a "low IQ" opinion. a lot of very smart opinions or ideas were not deemed to be very popular in the past, and I think it'd be foolish to think that what we think is objectively correct.

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton[1], they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

I'd say I covered that with "Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad".

A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.

Strong disagree. Even if you're right about the IQ and what it means (I personally lean to us not being as smart as we think we are), high-IQ does not mean unbiased, and so we are not a representative sample of all high-IQ people, which means we are perfectly capable of downvoting comments just because we don't like them, rather than them being wrong.

To expand on that, a +35 comment is easily in the top 10% of most-upvoted comments on any given thread. Most comments are +10 or less. Community consensus with such a small group means very little.

Unlike responses, downvotes are typically not moderated

Typically? Downvotes are never moderated. (As far as I know, we can't see who upvotes or downvotes a post even if we wanted to. I suppose Zorba could build that capability, but I know of no reason to.)

On reddit you couldn't see it,though AEO could and sometimes did take action based on it. Here, Zorba has control of the codebase so can certainly see it if he wants to.

Being a Metafilter exile, from my experience a lack of downvotes serves to push would-be downvotes to become upvotes for the nearest antagonistic reply. This has the effect of giving upvotes to whoever can write an opposing comment the quickest, regardless of the logic of the response.

Then get rid of upvotes too.

Transforming downvotes into upvotes on replies is something I've seen, but that seems like a good change to me. I've not seen the downvotes go to low-quality posts, at least not once a few higher quality posts have been made.

You can't remove the impulse and behavior by removing the button, as YouTube and twitter learned the hard way: people just start "ratio"ing each other instead.

This would be a purely cosmetic and ideological change. So I'm against it by default.

Ratioing on Twitter takes a significantly larger amount of effort than a simple downvote and requires lots of participation to distinguish it from random noise. The Motte also has rules against written downvotes so that would make it an even bigger hurdle.


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