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I'm not sure how else to start this so I'm just going to dive straight in.
A long time bug-bear of mine is something I've come to refer to as the "Leviathan-shaped Hole in the discourse". It's something that has come up multiple times in the last couple weeks and while I've written about it at length back when this community was on reddit and in the comment section of SSC proper back in the day it's been pointed out to me that I haven't really written about it in a while and that I should probably revisit the subject for those who are just joining us. Aknoldewdgment to @Fruck, @hydroacetylene, Et Al.
The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview.
The long version might require a bit of background to explain.
I get the impression that I'm something of an odd man out here in that I did not go to college after high-shool and in that I never really thought of myself as being particularly intelligent. If anything it was the inverse. I'll be the first to tell you that I am not that fucking bright. I had dreams of being a professional fighter and/or skate-border, but as I moved up the food-chain it became increasinly clear that natural talent was no match for natural talent coupled with the time and money to train full-time. If I were smart I may have figured that out a head of time. In anycase 9/11 Happened and I enlisted. I spent 10 years as a Combat Medic and another 18 months as a feild operative for a Prominant Humanitarian NGO in East Africa before deciding to return to the states and go to college on the GI bill.
As one might imagine, going from being a "Muzunga" in Nairobi to being undergrad at the University of California was a bit of a culture shock. And it is that sense of culture shock that has stuck with me and signifigantly shaped my worldview since. It's one thing to stick out visually, to be visibly older than all the other freshmen, or to be one of half-a-dozen white guys in an otherwise black neighborhood. But it is another to realize that you genuinely walk different, talk different, and think different from your obstensible peers. I was first introduced to rationalism through one of my professors and a fellow-student, and the desire to make sense of whatever the fuck was going on was major part of the initial apeal. I was actually at one of the first SSC reader meet-ups hosted by Cariadoc where I got to meet Scott, and bunch of the other movers and shakers, face to face but as much as I was a fan of the general ideas (systemitized wining Yay!) it was painfully obvious to me that we had fundementally different conceptions of how how the world actually worked. Which in turn brings us to the real topic of this post.
One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society. Accordingly it becomes difficult to ignore just how much of liberal society (or what Scott would call "the Universal Culture") is predicated on assumptions that do not necccesarily hold. Yes, If A & B then C, but that's a mightily Laconic "If". This is where the hole comes in. My position is that the secular liberal dominiation of academia has effectively castrated our society's ablility to discuss certain topics in a reasonable manner by baking liberal assumptions about how the world ought to work (rather than how it actually does work) into the vocabulary of the discussion. As such, in order to argue against a liberal in a manner the the liberal will regard as valid one is forced to go through a whole rigirmarole of defining terms that nobody's got time for. Thus the liberal inevitably wins every argument by default. However, winning the argument does not neccesarily equate to being "correct" as one can make a dumb argument for a smart position and vice versa.
The "Leviathan shaped hole" is named for the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. I find Hobbes signifigant in that he was one of the first guys in the enlightenment/modern era to approach political science as an actual science with theories that could be either proven or falsfied. However these days he's mostly regarded as a joke, a cartoon characterchure of an absolute authoritarian drawn by people who've never really bothered to read or engage with any of his arguments and I believe that this does our society a disservice. It seems to me that we are at a point where the sort of culture/worldview that produces a guy like Greg Abbott or the median Trump voter is as alien to the typyical liberal as that of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and I can't help but expect this to end badly.
Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so. I'm reminded of an argument I got into with another user regarding the killing of Jordan Neely. The Argument has been made that Daniel Penny acted unlawfully by interposing himself between Neely and his intended victim and subsiquently killing Neely. To call Penny a "murderer" and a "vigilante" implies the pressance of a sovriegn authority that penny was obliged to defer to. Hovever if that's the case why did it not act? The simple answer is that it was not pressant and thus the accusations against Penny ring hollow.
One of those fundamental Hobbesian bits of insight that liberals see to lack is the understanding that violent schizophrenics attacking people on the subways is not some aberation, it's the default, and if you aren't going to do anything about it someone else just might.
I've ridden a lot of subways and never seen a schizophrenic attack anyone, so I'm going to be reluctant to agree that I have some Ivory-tower blindspot in my own knowledge of the subject. Be loud and annoying and smelly, sure, but that's not the same thing, especially when we're talking about justifications for killing them.
I would agree that I have a blindspot to some type of worldview where that is a default assumption about how the world works, where there's a belief that deadly attacks on subways happen all the time and it's a huge failing that the government hasn't stopped them and every citizen needs to be armed and ready to deploy deadly force against them at all times. Or whatever your actually position here is, for being the only concrete example you give you really don't spend much time outlining it.
But I really do believe that worldview is just factually wrong, my personal experiences and those of other people I know who ride the subway seem to confirm it, I'm not aware of any stats that contradict it and if they were shockingly strong I would sort of expect to know it.
Which brings us back to the point that it seems like you're making two different claims here, 1. that liberals are blind to the ways that non-liberals view and think about the world, in ways that lead to communication breakdowns and strife, and 2. that liberals are blind to portions of empirical reality that they can't/won't acknowledge.
1 is trivially true, and I would say fully bi-directional; it's just a description of what the culture war is, more or less, or even just what tribalism is more generally.
2 requires actual examples to back it up, and I don't buy it from the only one you give.
Genuine question - have you ever been in a fight or other violent situation that escalated suddenly? Not like a shoving match that turned into a sort of wrestling match with a few frat boy haymakers thrown in. A real unexpected fight. Maybe someone tried to mug you.
Because even though I haven't personally seen a schizophrenic on the subway get to the point of committing attempted murder, I routinely saw the near potential for it. As in, being fully aware that that smelly weird dude could be hammering on some passer-by within 5 seconds. Why/how? My own personal experience with violence.
As a good research exercise, go watch some videos on the "Police Activity" channel on YouTube. Choose any that involve a shooting. These showcase just how quickly a "calm scene" can turn into dozens of shots fired. This will also show the utter lunacy of ideas around "warning shots" or "deescalation" by cops.
A friend has a good metaphor about human (esp male) latent violence - it's like a garage door spring. 99% of the time, it's this utterly forgettable thing that you are completely unaware of even as you are very close to it. In the rare situation in which it makes itself known, it is incredibly fast and violent (garage door springs can fucking end you).
But that explosive lethal potential is always there. But you don't see it, do you? Isn't that exactly what @HlynkaCG said?
It seems to me that his argument is that as a matter of objective fact, whether it is always there is irrelevant, compared to the rate that it actually becomes a problem. He sees the bums as rude and smelly, you and Hlynka see them as dangerous, but he's saying his perception is born out by the actual stats, and yours is not. Therefore, he sides with something like "bums aren't actually dangerous, so people who hurt bums claiming they're dangerous should have just left them alone instead."
Presumably, pointing to cases where the bums actually were dangerous won't change his mind, unless those cases were common enough to actually constitute a serious problem in his mind, and then my guess is that his prefered solution would be housing policy or treatment or something aimed at the systemic problem, not to allow vigilante violence.
That's my guess, anyway.
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Yes, I've been in situations that escalated to real violence, none where anyone was killed but a few were people were stabbed and got an ambulance.
I don't let it make me paranoid and frightened every time I ride the subway, I don't let it make me support policies that aren't supported by statistics or utilitarianism.
Of course the potential for violence is latent in any situation involving traditional-gender-norm men... feminists have been pointing that out for a very long time, I'm sympathetic to their position. The way that this makes weaker and more vulnerable people afraid and deferential even when violence is not explicitly happening in the moment is part of what they mean by 'patriarchy'; the way that this makes people suspicious of and pre-emptively violent towards men who are doing nothing wrong is part of what they mean by 'toxic masculinity' and 'the patriarchy hurts men too'.
The fact that the right thinks the left is blind to the fact that the latent potential for violence exists around all men, when this has been central to feminist theory for so long, kind of strikes me as one of those things that happens when you accept the toxoplasmic strawman version of the other side's position, instead of exploring that community and literature for yourself. I expect myself to be wrong about a lot of right-wing positions in this approximate way, and I feel like I strongly observe this happening whenever I use feminist academic terminology on non-left spaces. /shrug.
But, again, as I understand Hlynka, they're not just claiming a difference in perspective and worldview like what would happen if you're subconsciously aware of the potential for violence in non-violent situations. They're claiming an empirical failure to accurately understand and predict the world, in ways that would justify things like applauding pre-emptive vigilantism and calling for more of it.
And I'm saying, no, I don't buy that on the empirical facts and statistics, and no, I don't buy that on some experience-driven 'sense' of how 'dangerous' the world is that exists outside the data itself.
I think you might want to take a little peek at the theory of black swan events. "Stats say this crazy man only has a 1% chance of ending my life. No need to worry!"
You mean the philosophy that leads to eugenics and "global optimization via local genocide." Fuck outta here with that nonsense.
Spoke too soon. Fuck outta here with THAT nonsense.
@Mods: I'll self-penalize here with a one day self-ban for this "boo outgroup." I should've not engaged. But I failed.
2-day ban.
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Is this going to be propped up as another example of "guesswho baiting people with bad faith" and used against him, while right-wingers say more vile shit on the regular and stay untouched just because their opponents don't flip out on them?
"Saying vile shit" is not what we mod for. "Flipping out on people" is.
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There's a difference between 1% and .000000000001%
Good steelman.
Hey look, I was right.
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