Thanks for this. It's always flattering when people take the time to write about one's views. A couple of thoughts upon reading it.
1) I think the concept of "reflective equilibrium" is useful. I tend to think that at reflective equilibrium, few people would want blue hair, androgyny, etc. There are good evolutionary reasons to think this. People want to impress others and gain mates, so that would mean being driven to be conventionally attractive to heterosexual members of the opposite sex. Empirically, we can see a strong connection between left-wing cultural views and unhappiness. You seem to see this as a matter of simply being open or not open to experience. I'm pretty open to experience when it comes to drugs, being outgoing, meeting new people, new ideas, etc. I think the pronoun stuff and blue hair reflect openness to experience plus something else that I don't think is healthy. Was Don Draper in Mad Men "open to experience"? I think so, but people would recognize there's something very different between him and what we mean when we use that term today. That said, you are right that I find polyamory, etc., sort of disgusting and would not want it to be widespread no matter what, as per the pronoun/genocide piece.
2) You underestimate the extent to which my worldview is libertarian, or at least don't give it enough attention. We can talk about my instincts, but actual policy opinions are where the rubber meets the road, and there I'm probably more libertarian than 99% of the population. My main objection to wokeness is in the form of hating civil rights laws, because they tell private individuals and institutions what to do. So it would be a mistake I think to exaggerate the links between my thought and right-wing authoritarianism. I'm happy to live and let live mostly. But I think you are touching on something real when it comes to conservatives more generally, where all the tribal insanity is part of the joy of politics. Yet I'd consider many of those people on the "right" to be political opponents. I therefore think that this probably works better as an essay about conservatives more generally than just me, with my writing being a sort of window into how others see the world.
> There are good evolutionary reasons to think this. People want to impress others and gain mates, so that would mean being driven to be conventionally attractive to heterosexual members of the opposite sex.
If I'm understanding this correctly, I think it's implicitly equating "adaptations that increased evolutionary fitness in the ancestral environment" with "actions I'd like to do in the present environment". We may have evolved adaptations like "impress others", and in the past being gender-nonconforming was not an effective way to do that, but social norms can change, and what our instincts consider to be "validation" changes along with now. It's now quite possible to impress others and gain social status by having blue hair; why is that any less valid an approach to satisfy that evolutionary drive?
> Empirically, we can see a strong connection between left-wing cultural views and unhappiness.
Do you know which direction the causality goes here? It could plausibly be either way. (Legitimate question, I don't know the answer.)
Regarding libertarian philosophy, I'm reminded of this quote from your article on quitting Twitter:
> I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long. I would bend my libertarian principles to be in favor of using government to take away Twitter’s power to censor, but not based on some broadly applicable principle, because principle points in the other direction. In fact, I’d hate to see a social media website completely devoted to free speech. Already, my replies were polluted with ad hoc attacks, insults, and anti-vaxx nonsense. I couldn’t imagine how unpleasant Twitter would be right now if they didn’t already purge the most defective personalities. As I’ve pointed out before, the problem with modern liberalism isn’t its intolerance, which is mild by historical standards, but the fact that it is wrong.
"It's now quite possible to impress others and gain social status by having blue hair; why is that any less valid an approach to satisfy that evolutionary drive?"
I don't think these things are infinitely malleable. Imagine two women, one goes to the gym, dresses nicely, and makes herself as conventionally attractive as possible. She feels attractive when looking in the mirror, and most people will treat her that way. Say there's another woman who lets herself go, dresses like a slob, gets covered in tattoos, etc., and she's fitting in to some community where that is the way to gain status. I think the second woman is living in a community that has found itself in a kind of mass delusion, and it will have to practice a lot of cognitive dissonance. Fat acceptance in particular can be seen as a kind of cope to make excuses for a lack of self-control. When Woman 1 looks in the mirror, human nature is telling her she's doing something right and the world confirms that instinct, while Woman 2 knows she looks awful, and has to live a life of lies. She might find herself unable to attract a quality mate to stick around and will be left wondering why. In the long run she would be better off losing weight and taking care of herself.
"Do you know which direction the causality goes here? It could plausibly be either way. (Legitimate question, I don't know the answer.)"
Well it's interesting either way. Either accepting left-wing social views makes you miserable, or miserable people are drawn to those views. Either way, it suggests this stuff is maladaptive. I don't think we can blame discrimination, because the connection between LGBT identity and mental illness has actually gotten stronger over time as we've become more accepting of these things.
I think this is making a *lot* of assumptions about evolution that are not very well justified. Tattooing has been practiced for at least six thousand years. Fashion changes wildly enough that "dressing like a slob" doesn't have any sort of cross-cultural meaning. (Tightlacing, for example, has transformed from a routine practice among fashionable women to a niche fetish.) And it seems very unlikely to me that we evolved any sort of genetic distaste for oddly colored hair. It seems to me that tattoos, dress style, and hair color are all markers of one's ingroup/subculture. Your reaction to women with tattoos is no more universal than my husband's (anecdote: when I dragged him to a My Chemical Romance concert he said "oh! this is where the hot women hang out! I should pretend to be into MCR to get girls").
I also think that you're underestimating the value of catering to a niche in dating. A trans man (for example) is unlikely to be appealing to most people, but often does quite well among people who chase trans men. What matters is not how many people have a preference but the ratio of people like you to people who want to date people like you.
I disagree with you about fat acceptance but that seems like a rather tangential point. :)
Seconded. On the male end, the "pretty boy" look has plenty of female admirers; lots of "teen heartthrob" actors and musicians are far from conventionally masculine. Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, David Bowie, Prince, most "boy band" performers, Justin Beiber, and many other men that teenage girls go crazy for are more feminine than the conventionally attractive masculine man.
> What matters is not how many people have a preference but the ratio of people like you to people who want to date people like you.
Well, obviously this ratio can't be smaller than 1 for everyone. And an easy way for it to approximately 1 is for everyone to have a preference for conventionally attractive people (of the opposite sex) and to be conventionally attractive themselves. That seems like a pretty good solution, if you don't mind changing other people's preferences.
I think you might be making a small mistake, where you are modelling people trying to optimize their expected value or average sexual attractiveness across a broad group of people, but unless you are constantly switching partners or are a movie star, what is actually more important is being very attractive to your potential partner, and not care about what that does to the average.
E.g. if your partner likes your tattoos then it doesn't matter if that tattoo makes you less attractive to 90% of the population. A spiky distribution might actually help you find you partner faster by weeding out people , yes?
This may be true, but it sure seems hard to distinguish between what's biologically nailed-down and what's cultural. I find hairy legs and armpits on women not very attractive, for example, but that's pretty clearly cultural--the natural state of womens' legs and armpits is hairy.
Facial asymmetry, markers of age or ill health, and lack of secondary sexual traits seem like they'd be unattractive most anywhere, but blue hair and tattoos seems no more likely to be universally unattractive than shaved legs and armpits.
The phenotypic null hypothesis would say that apparent correlations are merely chance? An explanation of the fifth law I’ve heard is that a high mutagenic load, for instance acquired in the early embryonic stage due to whatever reason, could damage multiple genes otherwise not related in the final phenotype, such as, say, intelligence and health. Then, in this example, the just-so story develops that smart people are cognitively able to take better care of themselves.
> The phenotypic null hypothesis would say that apparent correlations are merely chance?
No, it would say that genetic correlations are often due to stuff like vertical pleiotropy. For instance, smarter people might live in better neighborhoods, which are therefore healthier. This would lead to a genetic correlation between health and intelligence which would not be genetically confounded but instead would be an instance of the phenotypic null hypothesis.
There is an assumption here that I would disagree with: that "self-control" and "taking care of yourself" can treat or prevent obesity. As far as I can tell, it can't. There is only one safe medical intervention that reliably treats obesity, and that's bariatric surgery. Diet and exercise can make a fat person healthier, but it will not make them into a thin person who stays thin for five years. Trying to become thin is about as useful and effective as trying to become tall. Fat acceptance exists for the same reason disability acceptance exists: because blaming and shaming people for being fat is about as useful and moral as blaming and shaming people for being short, being deaf, or being wheelchair bound. Being fat sucks, but so does suffering from lots of other medical conditions that we don't blame the sufferers for.
I think you're just wrong here--the problem is that it's really hard, not that it doesn't work. I went from persistently-chubby to persistently-fit in my early adulthood and it was a fuckload of work. Both in an acute "lose the weight and transform my body" sense and a persistent "my life must forever be different than it was before to maintain this" sense. I eat differently and lift regularly and if I want to stay this way I must do so forever. And while I cannot prove it to you from here, it is as clear as day to me that virtually any person who took the same set of actions would get the same kind of outcome, barring some wild medical anomaly stuff
The problems are that to some people, this is just genuinely not worth it (is this a problem? perhaps only because we have insane cultural views about fatness, and with greater acceptance people could comfortably say "yeah, it's just not worth it to me not to be fat", while instead today they live in a perpetual internal tension from thinking they should lose weight but not actually wanting to). And also that "how do you make yourself make these changes" is a genuinely hard question that I cannot answer. It aint easy.
Perhaps it's more useful to think in terms of response to incentives. Most people could lose a fair bit of weight and get into much better shape if they were, say, put into basic training in the Army with lots of mandatory exercise and their food limited to get their weight down, with the consequences for failure being high. Similarly, people in combat sports with weight classes, actors and actresses, models, and the like all do, in fact, manage to diet down to much lower weights than they'd default to, since doing this is a requirement for their jobs. (Missing weight is a costly screwup for a pro MMA fighter.) And probably most of us could lose a lot of weight with really large incentives to do so--say, you're going to lose your job if you don't get your weight down to 240 lbs by this time next year.
But with the normal set of incentives for most people in modern US society, it seems really hard to get people to lose weight. That includes social incentives about being attractive, health incentives, etc.
One way to think about this is that stronger incentives to lose weight would decrease obesity/overweight. And indeed, this must be true, though it's not so clear how large the incentives would have to become before you saw a significant effect. And a lot of ways the incentives might work could be pretty nasty--if you decree you're going to fire all your fat employees Jan 1 2024, you're both going to put a lot of people through a miserable stressful experience, and also lose a bunch of employees who don't have to put up with that kind of crap.
This is one reason you might want to push back on the fat acceptance movement--you might worry that it will decrease the existing incentives to lose weight/stay thin, and that this will lead to even more obesity.
There's a kind of deadweight loss thing going on here, though. If there are high social costs to being overweight, and this gets some people to lose weight and be healthier/happier, that may make the world a better place. But if they don't cause much of a change, they just end up making fat people less happy, making the world a worse place.
And as with so many social science issues, especially those with a culture-war valence and many people occupying basically moral positions on factual questions, I despair of getting good information on this stuff. Perhaps we get the people who will lie to us for our own good by telling us fat is healthy when it's not; perhaps we'll get people who will lie to us for our own good by telling us fat is more bad for you than it really is, but I'm not confidence in my ability, as an outsider to the relevant fields, to distinguish between the folks lying to me for a good cause and the ones honestly trying to get to the truth.
Excellent comment. Yes it's about incentives. But not just incentives to lose weight, also incentives not to gain it in the first place. This could involve regulations on the food industry (both in terms of production and advertising), higher taxes on food with high fat and sugar etc. Of course a large part of it is culture, education, upbringing.
I would add that the "fat acceptance" movement seems to exclusively focus on acceptance of fat women. At the same time, male celebrities are shamed in the media for their "dad bod" if they put on even a little weight. Remember the reactions on that Elon Musk picture with him on a boat somewhere looking fat?
This leads me to believe the fat acceptance movement is largely another bs hypocritical offshoot of modern feminism, not wanting actual equality but rather special treatment.
You just seem to be saying that living healthily is hard in modern (Western) society, which I don't dispute. Our environment and society is not conductive to healthy living. There's too much easy and bad food, and our lives are too sedentary. Now we don't even have to get out of our house to get food delivered to us.
Of course staying fit takes constant work (or I would say, "effort"). That's what self control and taking care of yourself is. So what?
I never said any of this is easy. I find it hard too. I'm not super fit but I did go from never working out at all to working out 3-4 times a week and it made a difference. Yes, my life was "forever different" after I started working out. For the better! The problem I have with this whole "acceptance" theory is that in the end, being fat is unhealthy, being fat makes you less attractive (if you are dating it's going to severely limit your options, that's not a cultural thing IMO, but an evolutionary biology/psychology thing. We instinctively look for markers of health when dating although obviously physical atractiveness is not the only thing we look for) and it shows you have problems with self control and discipline. I'm not saying that to be judgemental. I myself have problems with those things but I'm not trying to pretend that that isn't an issue when it gets out of hand.
I admittedly drink too much alcohol.
Nobody is talking about being more accepting of alcoholism and telling people we have "insane cultural views about not being a raging alcoholic".
No, we would see an alcoholic has a problem that they'd better take care of.
Now of course it's everyone personal decision whether addressing that problem is worth the effort. But I think it's wrong to expect the world to treat you like what you're doing doesn't matter. You can't force the world to accept you. I think we're better off as a society if we're honest about things that are bad, without being too judgemental about it. Being fat (or an alcoholic) doesn't make you a "bad person". But it does have repercussions for your life that you have to take responsibility for.
We were not talking about "chubby" btw but about "fat" and "obese". I think those are different things.
Anyway, you said "taking care of yourself and self control can't treat or prevent obesity" when obviously they can and they do (or everyone would be obese). Now you say "yes they can but it's hard" to which I would say, I agree, of course it's hard! But so what?
As with alcoholism, there isn't one way to fix it. Some people get sober on their own, some go to AA, some take meds. All these are valid treatments or ways to tackle the issue. What I would disagree with is saying that the best solution would be to be "more accepting" of something that is obviously very damaging and bad for you. These days we are constantly arguing that society should just change to accept and affirm every "flaw" a person can have. I think that just leads to the death of personal responsibility. "Society" eventually pays for the healthcare costs too. Society has a stake in promoting healthy living of it's members. We can be more accepting of the person, sure, be less judgemental, but that's something different.
That seems like another outcome that can be achieved, but I don't think those people would be incapable of also not appearing fat, if their diet and exercise program went harder.
Not saying that's necessarily something they *should* do, I would expect for many people it isn't. Just that it's possible (and I think framing weight loss as a control process makes this clear--easy to see that for any weight a person can live at, there's some level of food intake + exercise that will achieve it)
Surely there may be certain medical conditions that make certain people fat beyond their ability to influence it by making different lifestyle choices. But most fat people are fat because they eat too many calories and don't get enough exercise. That is hardly rocket science. There are countless examples of people who made transitions in their life from being fat and generally unhealthy, to being fit, by changing their diet and exercising regularly.
Diet and exercise absolutely can improve the health of someone who is fat and unhealthy. What it can't do is make most people who *look* fat into people who *look* thin, and have them maintain that appearance for five years, because the amount of weight loss a person needs to improve their health is usually much less than the amount they need to go from "fat" to "thin".
Also, I think fat is the marker, but state of your arteries and blood chemistry is the thing you care about for health. (For attractiveness, OTOH, fat is the problem and arteries/blood chemistry isn't an issue.). Being fat is correlated with clogged arteries and high cholesterol and insulin resistance and such, but it's not the same thing.
Are there cultures/societies where being fat is sufficiently unpopular that very few people are fat? My guess is that there are. (I think in the military you can get kicked out for being too fat, and I expect the incentives there are strong enough to convince a lot of people to keep their weight down.)
One weirdness of all this is that in approximately every human civilization everywhere and everywhen before modern times, being at least somewhat fat was a marker for high wealth, status, and class. In modern US society, it's now the opposite, and being very fit is somewhat correlated with high wealth, status, and class.
The problem for nearly all our ancestors was that we might have a bad harvest and starve to death, or get deficiency diseases from having nothing to eat but one staple like white rice. The problem for us is that we might eat too much of the amazingly abundant tasty food all around us and get fat enough to endanger our health.
Well, not quite. Blue haired types have managed to convince a sizable chunk of the population that they're an oppressed class deserving sympathy, which isn't something that anybody thought about the KGB.
A universal way to gain in status is to show that you understand the social norms in your society and align with the high-status people. I don't know that blue hair and tattoos manages that, but I expect it works in some places. (And the look that knocks the girls dead on a cute 20 year old boy in college isn't going to work out the same way for a 50 year old man, or even for a cute 20 year old boy who works hanging drywall.)
I’m pretty sure that you’re wrong about the androgyny. Basically, the extremal functional cultures, Jewish and Japanese culture, both tend towards androgyny (though more masculine in the first case and more feminine in the second), while the least functional cultures seem to all exaggerate sexual dimorphism.
I think that tells me that if your culture is functional you want androgyny, although the causation might go both ways. Either way, it implies sexual dimorphism isn’t the reflective equilibrium.
Furthermore, having two gender phenotypes would be a weird coincidence. One instance of a set or many both occur regularly but sets of two are extremely uncommon.
"I am very interested in coherent articulations of Value Systems Very Different From My Own, to further help my thinking about this."
I think I have a fairly detailed model of conservative values. I don't know for sure if my model is actually true or if it's just a steelman. I also necessarily expect it to be accurate for the median conservative, as it's based on my experience with certain online conservatives. But I suspect it to be accurate for Richard Hanania, since he is among the people who my model is inspired by.
I think the critical value difference is that you've got the value of "diversity is good", which is closely allied with "universalist" values such as "everyone should be treated as a first-class citizen". A lot of things seem to follow from a model of conservatives as being total utilitarians who proxy men's and women's preferences by rounding them off to the median man and the median woman. I'm unsure to what extent this proxying is just for practical convenience (accurately modelling diversity is hard, interaction effects are often small relative to main effects) vs a genuine values difference; but whether it's a convenience or a values difference probably doesn't make much of a difference for most cases where you'd apply this model.
Once you've got a values difference, this is likely going to ripple down into a bunch of epistemic differences, due to which memes get the benefit of doubt. Consider for instance the meme "Gay people are born that way and sexual orientation is immutable"; this is not a meme that most people can straightforwardly evaluate from everyday experience. They could decide to just copy it, as they naively should due to Aumann's agreement theorem. But if you don't value diversity, it would be more convenient if everyone could be straight, as then they would fit in better under your preferred policies. And if you don't value diversity, the fact that there are people right over there who do value diversity, and who might push this meme despite its being wrong, makes accepting the meme a form of security vulnerability, and therefore it must be rejected. At scale, this leads to differences on all sorts of empirical questions.
Next, lifestyle. Conservatives want everyone to form heterosexual couples, get married, and have kids. Why? Partly, because this ranks reasonably well under the median utilities. But also partly, because as total utilitarians (or people who are aware of economic problems due to the population pyramid, or ...) they *very much* want to increase the total population. (*Especially* the total population of smart, mentally healthy, highly productive, prosocial people, as such people generate a lot of value for others.) Notably, if you take the importance of increasing the total population seriously, then that raises questions such as "Shouldn't we tell people who are on the fence that they ought to have more kids?" - essentially making offspring encouraged and childlessness stigmatized. Furthermore, since most people aren't relentlessly optimizing for long-term goals, conservatives would tend to want there to be nudges and pressures which push people toward the situations that tend to generate families - such as dating for long term relationships rather than causal sex.
And this then gets into conflicts, because there are some people who very much would not like this. A woman who is running a company might not have time to birth a huge family. While many gay people want children, I have the impression that it is far more common for gay people to just go childfree, presumably for the obvious reason of having less direct opportunity to reproduce. Teenage transition will similarly prevent fertility.
The diversity-valuing way to address these conflicts would be to try to make a space that accommodates everyone's preferences, which at the margin especially means investing energy in accommodating the minority's preferences (both because decisions are usually made by majority members and therefore take their preferences into account, and because for historical reasons a lot of institutions did not properly value the minority's preferences). But this makes sacrifices on the extent to which one can push child-having, and I suspect that those sacrifices are pretty big in terms of number of children (IIRC the far right have something like twice as many children as the far left, which is of course not entirely exogenous, but also this neglects the effects that applying it on greater societal scale might have, so I think that might cancel out the endogeneity).
Another thing: If you don't consider diversity, it's easier to apply certain kinds of deontological reasoning. You don't have to wonder about whether something is good for some people and bad for others. You don't have to wonder what proportion of people might engage in a behavior if it was permitted; you can just assume everyone will.
Ok, so we've got all that, but still, why be so opposed to blue hair of all things? I think there's a conflict element to it. Having blue hair and pronouns in bio is correlated with supporting progressive, diversity-appreciating norms. And if you have enough of such people around, you get the sorts of societal moral changes that we've seen over the past decades (or centuries, idk how far back Hanania would go).
This is far from the whole story of my model of conservative values, but my comment is getting long so I'll stop here and answer questions. Also remember to take my model with a grain of salt because I am not a conservative so real conservatives might differ from my model of them. It's more like a steelman.
As a conservative, I think this model of my values is largely right, but it's missing one essential component: Chesterton's Fence. I assume that any traditional value, hierarchy, or taboo is justified until I have strong evidence to the contrary. Even if I don't have a detailed model of why a particular tradition is good or necessary, I will vigorously defend it until I have proof beyond reasonable doubt to the contrary.
Why be so dogmatic about this? Western civilization is a uniquely successful experiment that has resulted in a uniquely non-sucky society, with high trust, low crime, functioning institutions, high standard of living, and a high level of personal and intellectual freedom. All of that is incredibly valuable, and if it were to fail I doubt it would be easy to replicate elsewhere. Also, I don't fully understand the reasons behind this success; nobody does. So whenever an idealistic reformer tries to rewire central components of the machine (for example, redefining the family), I get very scared, and I try to stop them. Even if I understand the reformer's motivations, and even if I *share* them, whatever benefit the reform hopes to achieve is massively outweighed by the risk of damaging the (by historical standards) exceptionally good society I live in.
As for dislike of blue hair: when someone decides to change their perfectly good and adequate natural hair color, just because they feel like it, and in doing so exposes themselves to some novel chemicals they probably don't fully understand—that signals to me that they may want to fix other things that ain't broken, and as explained above I can't accept that.
(Dyeing hair also means doing away with the hair color you inherited from your parents, which signals low filial piety, which goes against conservative values.)
Surely, if "Western civilization is a uniquely successful experiment", one key ingredient in that experiment was, well, experimentation—an unusually high level of social change for a protracted period of time. Do you believe:
1. That's false, and what is valuable about western civilization was present for a long period with little change?
2. That's true, but the time for changes has ended, and we should now adopt a posture of retrenchment and stasis?
3. Past changes were good but currently proposed changes are bad?
4. The success of past changes relied on adversarial collaboration between advocates and skeptics, and you serve as the contemporary representative of skepticism?
Very late to this thread, but: I see societal experiments as coin flips. And we’re the one society out of 1024 that got heads ten times in a row. Should we flip again? Not unless things get quite a bit worse first.
I'm back and I'm much later! I'd dispute your claim at several levels:
1. We sure didn't get ten heads in a row! Plenty of advances were very bad. Possibly the signal social innovation of early modernity was transoceanic slaver imperialism, which, yikes. Fortunately we're not stuck with coin tosses, and it's possible to make changes, see how they're going, and then redirect or reverse those changes—we do it all the time.
2. In a society co-evolving with changing technology, and adversarially co-evolving with other societies, refusing to flip a coin is a guaranteed losing strategy. Voluntary ossification is a suicide pact.
Sometimes you just call it like you see it. Trump might not be a literal fascist by a strict definition, but the Jan. 6 riot proved that he shares at least one defining characteristic of fascists: acceptance of political violence.
My take is similar. Prior experience shows that leftists want change simply for the sake of change. Because (1) They believe utopia is possible in finite time. (2) They have no respect for nonlinearity, chaos theory, or the inevitable but never discussed unintended consequences of their actions (3) The serotonin high of asserting (without actually being) more virtuous/empathetic than the "deplorables" is too addictive for them.
While you have a good point, I think the main flaw in this is that technological advance has caused such fundamental changes that keeping old policies may be just as dangerous to our society as changing to new ones.
In so far as I have conservative leanings, this seems pretty off the mark to me. The underlying ideological divide would seem much more to do with conservatives viewing many existing inequalities/hierarchies as justified (and a source of instrumental value), in contrast to progressives generally viewing such inequalities as the unjustified result of oppression/racism. So I don't think many conservatives object to diversity per se, but rather the particular kinds of diversity that progressives tend to push for, often driven by exaggerated claims of oppression. For example, while conservatives are much more skeptical of affirmative action as a mechanism for diversity promotion, they are actually more vocal than progressives in advocating for ideological diversity in academia or on social media.
As far as superficial forms of diversity like blue hair, I doubt many conservatives would care, if not for the accurate stereotype that these styles are generally associated with left-wing views; though Hanania raises an interesting point that some of these stylistic issues, e.g. pro-obesity aesthetics, are probably driven by some of the same underlying forms of wishful thinking and biological denialism that are more fundamental to the contemporary left-wing viewpoint (e.g. rejecting genetic behavioral differences between sexes or between rich and poor, etc).
This ties into the "Once you've got a values difference, this is likely going to ripple down into a bunch of epistemic differences, due to which memes get the benefit of doubt." part of my model, I think:
Suppose that there are a bunch of organizations that support the conservative project of maximizing total median person welfare; churches, companies, etc.. These organizations end up creating various forms of hierarchy in order to support their tasks (and realistically also in order to enrich some of the people within the organizations, etc., but whatever). Meanwhile, there are various people who end up performing poorly on this hierarchy, essentially because they have less to contribute to the conservative project and/or are weird outliers who just don't fit into the project. These people end up forming the progressive coalition, with the ultimate goal of the progressive coalition being that there ought to be better place for these outliers, i.e. that organizations ought to support diversity, equity and inclusion with respect to these outlier demographics, essentially placing the members of the outlier demographics higher in the hierarchies.
Everything is a tradeoff, so of course conservatives can't simply promote these demographics within the hierarchies without also compromising on the hierarchies' abilities to maximize total median welfare. This then leads to a fight about how the hierarchies should be. Conservatives appeal to the value the hierarchies provide, and the lack of value that the outlier demographics provide, while progressives critique flaws in the hierarchies, i.e. conservatives generate pro-hierarchy memes while progressives generate anti-hierarchy memes. Furthermore, due to the fact that you rationally ought to hold ideas to higher epistemic standards when they threaten the implementation of your values and when they might be generated by people biased towards different values, there's also differences in how the memes get shared in social networks, with conservatives repeating pro-hierarchy memes and progressives repeating anti-hierarchy memes.
So essentially it is the mirror image of the "Gay people are born that way and sexual orientation is immutable" situation. The meme "Traditional hierarchies provide lots of value, and the people they are excluding are often inferior" is a meme which supports conservative policies over progressive ones, and so conservatives are going to be more likely to promote it, while progressives would be more likely to suppress it.
(Note that my suggestion isn't that conservatives necessarily object to diversity, but rather that progressives are actively fans of it.)
As for ideological diversity, I think it's complicated. Part of the problem is that ideological DEI can directly trade off against demographic DEI, since supporting demographic DEI is itself an ideology and so supporting ideological DEI would mean being inclusive towards those who oppose demographic DEI. Another part of it is that progressivism has been winning a lot lately, which means that there is a progressive project that has a lot more focus on maximizing diversity than the conservative project does. And this progressive project has achieved very strong dominance in a lot of areas, leaving space for the whole "gather up all the outliers who don't fit into the project and create an ideology promoting diversity to support them" can be performed in the opposite direction, with conservatives supporting ideological diversity in response to the progressive project promoting the ideology of demographic diversity.
I still am not seeing what additional explanatory power is gained by this idea that conservatives are focused on benefits to the median person, or that they prefer hierarchies that are biased towards typical people. To the contrary, it seems that conservatives value hierarchies which give the highest rewards to outlier levels of greatness, competence and hard work, and only moderately reward the median person.
Progressives sometimes justify their opposition to these hierarchies in part by arguing that conservatives are merely biased against people who are different or far from the median (and maybe it will even turn out that progressives are correct), but if we're trying to understand the conservative ideological perspective, the issue isn't that people at the bottom are outliers, but rather that they are perceived to score poorly along dimensions of objective value, and in many cases that they aren't outliers enough along these positive dimensions. For example, even if you convinced conservatives that affirmative action hires are closer to the median competence than the highest ability applicants, this would hardly persuade them to support affirmative action.
I disagree that conservatives value hierarchies which give the highest rewards to the most competent and hard-working people. For instance, if a bunch of competent and hard-working people led an organization to overthrow the church and the traditional family structure, I think conservatives would consider their leadership to be very bad. _Why_ would conservatives consider their leadership to be bad? I think because conservatives feel that the church and the traditional family structure are highly beneficial to the median person. I.e. conservatives support hierarchies that focus on the benefits for the median person.
Conversely, I'm not asserting that conservatives want people of median competence and industriousness to be high in their hierarchies. They love for particularly productive people to be high in their hierarchies - as long as those particularly productive people support their values. A lesbian polyamorous businesswoman might be highly competent and productive, but she would be less inclined to support the traditional family model than a married, monogamous man would be, so she would less likely be a good fit to a conservative hierarchy. (That's not to say that all gay/etc. people push for progressivism, rather it's just a tendency that is greater among them, due to not fitting in strongly with conservative values.)
Of course *both* sides prefer people in power who support their values, particularly in political/religious contexts, but presumably the question is what are the ideological *differences* between left and right. And one clear difference is that conservatives often tend to see people at the top of existing hierarchies as deserving of those roles based on objective measures of value/competence, whereas progressives are more likely to interpret these advantages as undeserved privilege. On the other hand, I just don't see much evidence that conservatives have some particular bias towards benefiting the median person; for example, if conservatives suddenly found themselves in a small minority (e.g. after a plague that killed mostly conservatives), they wouldn't suddenly switch gears and start supporting the highly progressive preferences of the median person (and this will still hold even if you fully convince them that the majority are now progressive).
Now maybe you could tweak your view to say that conservatives care about the median values from *the past*, but then I'm not sure what explanatory power is this is adding beyond the usual notion that conservatives are simply more inclined to preserve traditional values/hierarchies/etc. And in fact, as I've argued, these traditional hierarchies weren't particularly biased in favor of the median, but rather the elites.
When emphasizing diversity/universalism, I am not so much aiming for something that describes the total differences in political ideology, but rather something that describes the root motivations which ripple out to other differences.
"On the other hand, I just don't see much evidence that conservatives have some particular bias towards benefiting the median person; for example, if conservatives suddenly found themselves in a small minority (e.g. after a plague that killed mostly conservatives), they wouldn't suddenly switch gears and start supporting the highly progressive preferences of the median person (and this will still hold even if you fully convince them that the majority are now progressive)."
I don't think you can equate between the political coalition and the types of people the coalition supports. I.e. if most conservatives die out, there are still going to be lots of christian, successful, monogamous, child-having white men and women that they could focus on. And if e.g. most white and asian people died out, then the economic competition would shift such that many hispanic and black people would be on top of the economic hierarchies, leaving that as a coherent demographic to support. And finally if most heterosexuals died out, the "total utilitarianism" point would still apply to imply pronatalism.
"How much money have you donated to leftist causes" can probably be turned into an objective metric, yet I think conservatives would be opposed to using this for placement into hierarchies. Rather, there are specific kinds of metrics, for specific reasons, that they would support.
"I'm unsure to what extent this proxying is just for practical convenience (accurately modelling diversity is hard, interaction effects are often small relative to main effects) vs a genuine values difference; but whether it's a convenience or a values difference probably doesn't make much of a difference for most cases where you'd apply this model."
I guess I should clarify: I'm quite sure that there is a ~genuine (obligatory The Whole City is the Center reference) values difference where conservatives value diversity less than progressives. However, it is possible to me that some conservatives see the diversity as being morally neutral, rather than morally negative, and they just fail to make space for the diversity out of convenience (and out of the other dynamics I described in the comment).
This statement is another example that leftists don't actually have a clue what conservatives believe and are still making shallow theoretical excuses for what they are doing.
Skip the theory and let's talk about reality.
In brief, leftists use blue-hair and pronouns, etc, to announce their team. And because they are currently the orthodoxy, they can mostly get away with lording their TEAM LOGOs in other people's faces. Which they do.
Conservatives don't like the other TEAM LOGOs because they can't do the same thing back.
When conservatives announce their team with a MAGA hat they get attacked. (Covington kid was brutally innocent of anything ...).
This is a wildly over-simplified, but a correct first-order accurate depiction of the reality, given the space constraints.
All the lame theory is just excuses - invented after the fact.
You don't value "diversity" or "novel experience" more than I do. I guarantee it.
You value ostentatious TEAM signaling - because you are winning - and you can do it.
Be honest with yourself.
There is no natural/biological/aesthetic reason for wildly unnatural hair colors - except to attract attention and to team signal. If they is a value for pronouns (and that is debatable) this argument is massively subsumed by the practical and actual reason leftists really use them - to team signal.
Subconsciously (or consciously) this is about societal division. An attempt to scream US and YOU_OTHERS at every opportunity. Political divisiveness is a result of leftist need to signal. Possibly a result of their higher desire for "a collective" in which to belong.
I don't deny that there is a political conflict with lots of shit-flinging at the opponents, and in fact I acknowledged that this was to a significant extent the case for the blue hair thing, and I agree that progressives have been winning on many fronts.
However, if this conflict is not *about* any underlying subject matter, then one could just join the winning side and ignore the conflict. So it is relevant to consider whether the conflict is about anything and if so what it is about, and I believe it is about diversity/equality/something along those lines.
The fundamental conflict doesn't seem to have changed for 2 centuries.
The value given to the collective good vs the individual merit/freedom.
"Diversity" is a leftist excuse invented 4 minutes ago that tracks with zero evidence.
Leftists don't like diversity of thought or ideas. They don't like diversity of income for sure. And they don't like diversity of outcomes. Today they are obsessed with equality of outcome, to the extent of desiring government and corporate/academia intervention to socially engineer endless unearned treats to their favored voting blocks.
Leftists: Equality of outcome (now called equity).
Rightists: Equality of opportunity, and merit from there.
Equity must be implemented by overlords to determine the oppression values and treat rewards
Equality of opportunity can be implemented with objective impersonal metrics (in theory).
Aside: Since it is difficult for me to see the sins of my own side, when have GOP leaders been insulting large swaths of the population in the last two decades?
The bitter-clinger, deplorable, semi-fascist level stuff.
Most of the conservatives I've seen would argue that conservativism is better for society, so I don't think the collective good is a strong distinction for leftism.
I agree that "diversity" is rather abstract and that progressives use it in a specific meaning that could perhaps be better called "diversity of demographics" or "equality" or "universalism" or whatever. I think I sketched out in more detail about how the progressive and conservative analysis differs in the original post.
I don't agree that objective impersonal metrics (I assume you mean stuff like IQ tests/exam grades and criminal background checks) leads to equality of opportunity. People and demographics can differ a lot in their propensities and abilities, and objective impersonal metrics would lead to those with objectively more productive and valuable abilities getting more opportunities than the rest.
Leftism is about top-down control - by them. (to obtain what they view as equal outcomes).
Conservatives are about using fair processes (equal opportunity).
Conservatives like a market economy. Fair rules for everybody.
Leftists like a command economy. The elite decide who gets the treats (them). Think USSR for the basic model.
Conservatives like SAT/GRE scores for academic admissions (for its fairness).
Leftists like affirmative action racism (for its outcomes).
Conservatives think if you want socialized medicine you are free to form a collective any second you please, with them not in it. (choice)
Leftists think there is no fun in a health collective that doesn't force everybody else who disagrees with them - to do what they want. (force)
Finally "objective impersonal metrics would lead to those with objectively more productive and valuable abilities getting more opportunities than the rest." Is incorrect, it would lead to those people having unequal *outcomes*. The opportunity is equal when the rules are simple and fair (like do well on the test). Leftists hate unequal outcomes. It clashes with their desire to control all outcomes themselves. Leftism, at its core, is out envy after all.
I don't think it's true that leftism is about top-down control. For instance, there's a bunch of leftist rationalists, but I am not aware of them creating any organization to dominate themselves. Rather they seem to do things informally and consensually, without any commanders to determine things. The top-down control aspect mainly seems universal when leftists have to deal deal with rightists in a left-dominated culture, which seems like an awfully specific case to focus on. (Yes, there is the history with the USSR, but most leftists and progressives aren't tankies.)
I'm not sure what definition of opportunity you have in mind when you endorse equality of opportunity. I have in mind something like "set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something", and it seems like the very design of IQ tests is made for the purpose of removing the possibility from low-g people to score high (while keeping the possibility for high-g people to score high), so it seems like under my definition, IQ tests create unequal opportunity on the basis of g. But if you're using a different definition of opportunity then maybe that's where the issue lies.
That's not to say that it wouldn't also lead to unequal outcomes or that those unequal outcomes aren't something progressives find objectionable. But it just seems inaccurate to characterize it as being equal opportunity; obviously opportunity is going to be highly correlated with outcomes, with the main decorrelating factor being personal preferences (i.e. if someone has a weaker preference for money, then given equal opportunity to earn money, they might prioritize the job less relative to other things like leisure, and thereby earn less).
I think a reflective equilibrium would probably take you to an entirely different belief system, sharing almost nothing with your current belief system.
Imagine using the concept of "reflective equilibrium" in the year 1600 in Germany. You would probably be wondering which theology was correct - Catholicism, or one of the various Protestant offshoots? Obviously some moral issues are well known to all sides and not really up for debate, like the dangers of witchcraft and blasphemy. But, given time, over the next hundreds of years it would become the conventional wisdom that, for example, religious tolerance was good for society, and it was not a good moral idea to force all residents of a country to have the same religion as the leader.
Probably over the next few hundred years we will also discover that we were completely wrong about some of the moral issues of today. For example, if all societies that permit blue hair collapse into civil war, we'll probably conclude there was a problem with that. Or vice versa, if all the societies that don't permit blue hair collapse into civil war, we'll conclude there was a problem with that.
In short I think you are assuming far too much when you assume that you are capable of predicting, without hundreds of years of reflection, what you yourself would arrive at in a reflective equilibrium.
"Imagine using the concept of "reflective equilibrium" in the year 1600 in Germany."
I've heard this argument before. I'm not impressed. The toy model deployed above does not take seriously what a project of universalist reflective equilibrium would look like in other historical contexts. It neglects both the opportunities available to—and restrictions upon!—thinkers in other places and other times.
Let's ask this question seriously. What religious tendencies would a serious thinker in 1600s Germany be aware of?
Well, Catholicism and Lutheranism, as you mention. Judaism, of course. Greco-Roman Paganism. (The New Testament is unintelligible without some sense of what the Classical pagans were on about; plus the writings of Aristotle were available throughout the Middle Ages.) Epicureanism, at least at a distance—the works were already being rediscovered in the 1400s. Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy. (How else could you understand the history of the Crusades?) Norse Paganism. The existence of Indian, Mongol, and Chinese religious frameworks. (These would probably be pretty muddled, and you might not be able to tell them apart—but you could know that they existed.) You'd have a more fine-grained theory of Catholic religiosity than I can really credit, informed both by prominent heresies like Catharism, etc., as well as the wide umbrella of sanctioned Catholicisms—a thoughtful critic could tell that folk Catholicism, what the Pope was up to, and what St. Francis was up to were three pretty different things. And so on.
You'd be aware of Lutheranism not as some sort of eternal option, but as a recent historical event—the 95 theses were about 80 years old—and so you could easily deduce that maybe some Luther-like but quite different moves were available. (Calvin and the Anabaptists were out there demonstrating this quite pointedly, but you'd have no reason to assume they explored the whole space.) You'd be aware of the Peace of Augsburg, which introduced the principle of "cuius regio, eius religio"—and you'd be aware that that principle itself was new, meaning that new permutations of religious toleration could be invented! And so on.
And this is just the religious theories that were successful enough to organize social movements and burn their names into history! The recorded speculations of the philosophers would give you a larger, more multi-dimensional space still; and the unrecorded notions in popular discourse would expand your available set of worldviews still further. (An interesting case of this was recently uncovered in the diary of Matthew Tomlinson, a private citizen who in 1810 wrote in his private diary an argument for the morality of homosexuality functionally identical to the modern "born that way" synthesis—even though this argument was nowhere published in elite discourse!)
Would there be people who, in the face of all of this available ideological diversity, would decide that the core problem moral problem of universalism was to choose between the two factions with the most social power in their own little corner of the world? Sure. There are people in America today who believe that the most urgent moral question is finding exactly the right Goldilocks compromise between the Republican and Democratic party platforms. However, they are not commenting on Ozy Frantz's Animal Welfare and Polyamory substack; they are too busy working for Evan McMullin and/or Michael Bloomberg.
Hi! It's me! Since I posted this effort comment I have started reading THE ADVENTURES OF SIMPLICIUS SIMPLICISSIMUS, a novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. This semiautobiographical novel is set in the context of the 30 years war between Protestant Sweden and the Catholic imperial forces. Some notes on the world it depicts:
1. Obviously Protestantism vs. Catholicism is a huge huge huge deal. At the same time, our hero switches armies repeatedly, lots of soldiers seem to, and the text is pretty uninterested in the confessional experience of soldiers in either party.
2. The knowledge of the Classical world is vastly more abundant than I anticipated. Both the narration and random characters spout elaborate reference to Greek mythology and Roman history that send me, a certified contemporary dork, frantically skidding over to Wikipedia.
3. There is a chapter where our hero by accident applies the flying lotion and travels to a witches' sabbath. It is presented explicitly as a rebuttal to those who doubt the existence of witches. The clear implication: witch belief was common; so was witch skepticism. I'm reminded of my experience with THE JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR, which made it very clear that the microbe hypothesis of disease was current and popular in the late 1600s-early 1700s; it's just that the hypothesis hadn't achieved dominance or fixity. From tAoSS, I think it's pretty clear that the "no witches" hypothesis occupied the same space in Germany half a century earlier—quite available if not dominant.
4. During an extended fantasy sequence where a future German superman successfully unites the majority of Europe with his fiery sword (yikes), there's clear evidence of awareness of (though not necessarily deep understanding of) Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam.
5. Apparently in later chapters (I haven't finished reading yet) our hero is going to go to Russia, China, and a secret kingdom of merpeople, so I'll let you all know how that shakes out.
Yeah -- to take an example that I think is current (sorry, I guess I'm directly jumping into politics-is-the-mind-killer here, but I think this example is important and this isn't LW :P ), the belief in limited good, or a zero-sum world, is quite prevalent; and I think many people, if they realized the falsehood of this, would basically have to rethink their politics from the ground up.
I guess the basic problem here is that people don't actually just have 1-level preferences, but rather have both preferences about results and preferences about policy, and these aren't necessarily compatible with one another (or even their preferences about results may be incompatible among themselves). How this shakes out at reflective equilibrium is anybody's guess...
Note that the reason we don't prosecute people for witchcraft these days is not that we think it's okay to use magic to do harm, we just think that trying to use magic to do harm is completely ineffective.
I haven't read The Iron Dream and I'm far from an expert on Nazism, but I just don't buy that Nazis didn't value things other than dominance. Hitler didn't like his dogs because they won dogfights, but for the normal reasons people like their dogs. The Nazis are known for deriding lots of art as "degenerate" BUT they liked other kinds of art, which weren't all just about dominance.
All that being said there IS a Nazi who resembles your quasi-caricature of only valuing the struggle against an enemy: the legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. His writing did seem to reduce everything to that. I suppose that he likely also valued other things in his private life, but the viewpoint he articulated resembled the caricature.
I believe in a distinction (which maybe I didn't make clear enough in the post?) between Naziism as an ideology and Nazis as individuals-- similar to how utilitarianism as an ideology says you should only care about the greatest good for the greatest number, but utilitarians have pet dogs and like art.
That would get closer, since Schmitt as a legal philosopher was unusually theoretical for a Nazi, but even there I don't think that the Nazi ideology was that all art (including "non-degenerate" art) was worthless. The ideology valorized Germans as a race, and the ideal end-goal was for Germans to enjoy lots of normal approved things rather than just domination.
How you feel about art museums, I might feel about what you said about competitive board games.
I can't resist the shot: have you tried playing them not to compete, but to pursue excellence?
To me, the fun is not in trying to *win*, it's in trying to play as well as I can. And the competition is a way to test if you did, and to sift through ideas so you can get closer to the ideal. Something like pandemic is not as good for this, because once you get good enough that you usually win, the quality of signal degrades--it's very hard to tell when the change you made moved your winrate from 98% to 99%, or whatever.
My feeling on this is "it is the one true way", how anyone should play these games to have the most fun. I'm sure that's wrong, but not so deeply that I won't come here and preach it.
I have two comments: one on psilocybin and value change, and one on people whose values are just different.
1) I am scared that using shrooms will turn me into a theist. I grew up christian, and I like the experience of church, and I am sad that I cannot understand the common experience of God. However, I feel very strongly that there is no god. The idea that this drug could change this fundamental perception of mine is low-key terrifying. I think I'm fairly high-openness, but the idea of this basic tenet being threatened is not an experience I want. It doesn't feel very rational.
2) My husband and I have very similar values. However, he is turned off by Effective Altruism because of the assumption that everybody would abandon their locality bias if they merely examined it. He says that it is simply a terminal value for him. I do not understand this.
I generally am closer to Hanania on politics but am closer to your position on gender variance and the like. I hate the way feminists are trying to attack masculinity, but I don't have any problem with people who choose other paths or are nonbinary, gay/lesbian, trans, etc. I don't think being AMAB or AFAB means you should 'act like a man' or 'act like a woman'. I like that there are more options available for people who want or need them. You do your thing, let me do mine. (Indeed, you personally may not be part of the problem!)
So can you imagine that people exist that don't like salads much?
Do you think that alien inspired reflection would make them like salads more, or you less?
So why would our preferences for more abstract values be any different?
You like salad, and value the collective good (dislike individual failure). I like cheese and individual freedom (to succeed - and fail). Is contemplation really going to change that, or are our neurons simply hardwired by genetics and experiences to weight things differently?
We can differ in height, funniness, sociability, coordination - but not value weights?
Leftism is riddled with bizarre axioms, and the "blank slate hypothesis" is one of them. Thinking there must be one "right" weighting of value systems (if we thought hard enough) is a corollary of that hypothesis. If we all knew enough - we would all agree? Really? Why? Not a single other thing works that way in life. That is just a flawed axiom causing grief. Drop it - or find evidence for it.
Having agreed (I hope) that people will always disagree - how do we structure society?
Do we bust up into teams and endlessly announce our sides? I don't think so.
And that is my (and I think Hanania's) objection to the blue hair and pronouns. I couldn't care less that you are different (I like different, so does he). But you aren't different (at all) - you are the same as all the other leftists announcing their team - using the identical announcement methods. THAT is the point. And that is why you do it (even if you make of excuses after the fact for why you do it).
Dig deeper. Are you really different? Or are you just team signaling. The rest of us are not idiots, we can see it is the latter.
I can substitute "blue-haired" for "radical leftist" in a tweet and 99.5% of the readers know they are exactly the same thing. You are fooling exactly nobody with the "I am more open to difference" lie.
Leftists actually hate "difference". A dislike for differences is why they are suckers for the "blank slate hypothesis". It is also why they weight communality higher than individual freedom.
If you actually valued "different" you would wear purple every day, or always walk on your hands.
You are not doing that.
You are just team signaling.
And it is gross. To me. Try not waving your gang colors around...
I can't believe I have to actually log in and comment for once to defend my Southern cred. I grew up out in the woods in the middle of the Bible Belt and to pick a specific example watched NASCAR after church damn near every week (only visited a speedway in person the once, sorry we were not made of money) but then Ozy and I move in together and that just doesn't count for anything anymore I guess
But I didn't say Ozy. The sentence says, "most leftists".
Doesn't appear to count for much in this context. Her understanding of conservative (actually libertarian) values seems to come from a random internet guy.
guess Lindsey beat me to making the same point but hi, friend of Ozy's here. my family owns like idk 20 guns, grew up on ten acres with chickens and horses and goats and pigs throughout the years. :v
It must feel great being so much morally superior to others. But what if (low odds I realize) your moral superiority was just another leftist lie (like my blue hair is definitely not just a clan announcement)?
If I had to steelman Hanania, I'd use this chain of logic (I personally think it's wrong, but it's not impossible)
1. The United States Government is the political entity most responsible for the dramatic rise in living standards both within the US but also around the globe over the last two centuries, achieved in large part through free-market capitalism.
2. The "woke" worldview, which includes things like blue hair and polyamory, very often also includes a desire to reform the government to dramatically reduce or even eliminate the free market.
3. Victory in the culture wars which means a permanent reduction in status for the woke crowd would make continued capitalism in the US more likely and therefore higher standards of living for most of humanity
4. This makes the US culture wars more important than other localized famines or genocides but also justifies illiberal actions to ensure victory
Yeah, never having believed in convergence of human ethics in reflective equilibrium is a reason I'm an anti natalist. We will never agree, and that's profoundly sad I think.
I am consistent, though. I don't like the school of anti natalism who insist that everyone is secretly miserable or would, at reflective equilibrium, discover that they too would have rather not been born. Fuck that shit. To me it's more than enough that some people feel that way. No need to get everyone to agree.
This also makes me hate politics in general, because almost everyone (at least in Denmark where I'm from) insists that The Others just haven't thought hard enough or de-biased themselves enough and if they did, they'd agree with them. That's dumb and ridiculously self serving, to me.
According to the Big Five test with 300 questions, I am high openness, very high agreeableness, extremely high neuroticism, average extroversion and low conscientiousness.
> Having the power to crush people, and then crushing them? How is that even desirable in any way? What is the point?
Not my strong suite, but it's my understanding that ideology is driven by kinship institutions. Fascists such as the Nazi Party tend to come from cultures of primogeniture. The glorification of dominance probably comes from non-first-born sons frequently using the military to make a name for themselves. For reasons such as this, I tend to conceptualize morality/ethics as being determined by fitness for a given environment, rather than universal. Though some tenets like "murder bad" certainly have broader appeal than others. Also, maybe ponder the fact that Genghis Khan sired something like half a percent of the world's current population.
> Is there no convergence at all, merely a thousand thousand different attractors into which an ethical system can settle?
No, but also yes. I think there's a huge landscape of different possible attractors. But in practice, they do often converge onto a select few, because of network effects. Gwern's essay is relevant, although it's not my only influence.
> I and most of the people I talk to about ethics are moral nonrealists. But we often talk about being “wrong” about ethics. The concept seems incoherent.
It's not a matter of correspondence to a One True Morality. It's a matter of deviation from protocol. Etymonline informs me that the word "wrong" evolved from words that meant "crooked, bent," etc. E.g. if I want to climb a mountain, there's several mountains to choose from. But once I commit to a particular mountain, there's a right way and a wrong way in the sense that "if the peak is north, but I'm headed south, I'm on the wrong path." Likewise, there's no One True Language either. But it's certainly coherent to say "moralitie" is spelled wrong, relative to English vernacular.
> blue hair or puppy kinks.
I'm not invested in either side of the debate. But from my observations, I think the LGBT debate just boils down to liberalism (individualism) vs illiberalism (collectivism). Gender norms are standardized protocols. When you fragment those into a thousand shards, you decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of the dating market. Society must weigh the pros of individual choice against the cons of weakening the commons. Blue hair is just a signal of openness/politics.
On point 5: something like "work-related" is still to easy to weaponize. Until someone manages to come up with a variation of this which doesn't result in someone seriously thinking that James Damore was going to get fired from Google (let alone actually did) you haven't addressed the problem.
Thanks for this. It's always flattering when people take the time to write about one's views. A couple of thoughts upon reading it.
1) I think the concept of "reflective equilibrium" is useful. I tend to think that at reflective equilibrium, few people would want blue hair, androgyny, etc. There are good evolutionary reasons to think this. People want to impress others and gain mates, so that would mean being driven to be conventionally attractive to heterosexual members of the opposite sex. Empirically, we can see a strong connection between left-wing cultural views and unhappiness. You seem to see this as a matter of simply being open or not open to experience. I'm pretty open to experience when it comes to drugs, being outgoing, meeting new people, new ideas, etc. I think the pronoun stuff and blue hair reflect openness to experience plus something else that I don't think is healthy. Was Don Draper in Mad Men "open to experience"? I think so, but people would recognize there's something very different between him and what we mean when we use that term today. That said, you are right that I find polyamory, etc., sort of disgusting and would not want it to be widespread no matter what, as per the pronoun/genocide piece.
2) You underestimate the extent to which my worldview is libertarian, or at least don't give it enough attention. We can talk about my instincts, but actual policy opinions are where the rubber meets the road, and there I'm probably more libertarian than 99% of the population. My main objection to wokeness is in the form of hating civil rights laws, because they tell private individuals and institutions what to do. So it would be a mistake I think to exaggerate the links between my thought and right-wing authoritarianism. I'm happy to live and let live mostly. But I think you are touching on something real when it comes to conservatives more generally, where all the tribal insanity is part of the joy of politics. Yet I'd consider many of those people on the "right" to be political opponents. I therefore think that this probably works better as an essay about conservatives more generally than just me, with my writing being a sort of window into how others see the world.
> There are good evolutionary reasons to think this. People want to impress others and gain mates, so that would mean being driven to be conventionally attractive to heterosexual members of the opposite sex.
If I'm understanding this correctly, I think it's implicitly equating "adaptations that increased evolutionary fitness in the ancestral environment" with "actions I'd like to do in the present environment". We may have evolved adaptations like "impress others", and in the past being gender-nonconforming was not an effective way to do that, but social norms can change, and what our instincts consider to be "validation" changes along with now. It's now quite possible to impress others and gain social status by having blue hair; why is that any less valid an approach to satisfy that evolutionary drive?
> Empirically, we can see a strong connection between left-wing cultural views and unhappiness.
Do you know which direction the causality goes here? It could plausibly be either way. (Legitimate question, I don't know the answer.)
Regarding libertarian philosophy, I'm reminded of this quote from your article on quitting Twitter:
> I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long. I would bend my libertarian principles to be in favor of using government to take away Twitter’s power to censor, but not based on some broadly applicable principle, because principle points in the other direction. In fact, I’d hate to see a social media website completely devoted to free speech. Already, my replies were polluted with ad hoc attacks, insults, and anti-vaxx nonsense. I couldn’t imagine how unpleasant Twitter would be right now if they didn’t already purge the most defective personalities. As I’ve pointed out before, the problem with modern liberalism isn’t its intolerance, which is mild by historical standards, but the fact that it is wrong.
"It's now quite possible to impress others and gain social status by having blue hair; why is that any less valid an approach to satisfy that evolutionary drive?"
I don't think these things are infinitely malleable. Imagine two women, one goes to the gym, dresses nicely, and makes herself as conventionally attractive as possible. She feels attractive when looking in the mirror, and most people will treat her that way. Say there's another woman who lets herself go, dresses like a slob, gets covered in tattoos, etc., and she's fitting in to some community where that is the way to gain status. I think the second woman is living in a community that has found itself in a kind of mass delusion, and it will have to practice a lot of cognitive dissonance. Fat acceptance in particular can be seen as a kind of cope to make excuses for a lack of self-control. When Woman 1 looks in the mirror, human nature is telling her she's doing something right and the world confirms that instinct, while Woman 2 knows she looks awful, and has to live a life of lies. She might find herself unable to attract a quality mate to stick around and will be left wondering why. In the long run she would be better off losing weight and taking care of herself.
"Do you know which direction the causality goes here? It could plausibly be either way. (Legitimate question, I don't know the answer.)"
Well it's interesting either way. Either accepting left-wing social views makes you miserable, or miserable people are drawn to those views. Either way, it suggests this stuff is maladaptive. I don't think we can blame discrimination, because the connection between LGBT identity and mental illness has actually gotten stronger over time as we've become more accepting of these things.
https://www.cspicenter.com/p/born-this-way-the-rise-of-lgbt-as-a-social-and-political-identity
I think this is making a *lot* of assumptions about evolution that are not very well justified. Tattooing has been practiced for at least six thousand years. Fashion changes wildly enough that "dressing like a slob" doesn't have any sort of cross-cultural meaning. (Tightlacing, for example, has transformed from a routine practice among fashionable women to a niche fetish.) And it seems very unlikely to me that we evolved any sort of genetic distaste for oddly colored hair. It seems to me that tattoos, dress style, and hair color are all markers of one's ingroup/subculture. Your reaction to women with tattoos is no more universal than my husband's (anecdote: when I dragged him to a My Chemical Romance concert he said "oh! this is where the hot women hang out! I should pretend to be into MCR to get girls").
I also think that you're underestimating the value of catering to a niche in dating. A trans man (for example) is unlikely to be appealing to most people, but often does quite well among people who chase trans men. What matters is not how many people have a preference but the ratio of people like you to people who want to date people like you.
I disagree with you about fat acceptance but that seems like a rather tangential point. :)
Seconded. On the male end, the "pretty boy" look has plenty of female admirers; lots of "teen heartthrob" actors and musicians are far from conventionally masculine. Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, David Bowie, Prince, most "boy band" performers, Justin Beiber, and many other men that teenage girls go crazy for are more feminine than the conventionally attractive masculine man.
That tends to die away after the teenage years.
> What matters is not how many people have a preference but the ratio of people like you to people who want to date people like you.
Well, obviously this ratio can't be smaller than 1 for everyone. And an easy way for it to approximately 1 is for everyone to have a preference for conventionally attractive people (of the opposite sex) and to be conventionally attractive themselves. That seems like a pretty good solution, if you don't mind changing other people's preferences.
I think you might be making a small mistake, where you are modelling people trying to optimize their expected value or average sexual attractiveness across a broad group of people, but unless you are constantly switching partners or are a movie star, what is actually more important is being very attractive to your potential partner, and not care about what that does to the average.
E.g. if your partner likes your tattoos then it doesn't matter if that tattoo makes you less attractive to 90% of the population. A spiky distribution might actually help you find you partner faster by weeding out people , yes?
This may be true, but it sure seems hard to distinguish between what's biologically nailed-down and what's cultural. I find hairy legs and armpits on women not very attractive, for example, but that's pretty clearly cultural--the natural state of womens' legs and armpits is hairy.
Facial asymmetry, markers of age or ill health, and lack of secondary sexual traits seem like they'd be unattractive most anywhere, but blue hair and tattoos seems no more likely to be universally unattractive than shaved legs and armpits.
Causation needn’t be directional from one trait to another. Two correlated traits can be caused or mediated by a deeper trait.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/04/a-fifth-law-of-behavioral-genetics/
Fifth law looks like a misunderstanding of the phenotypic null hypothesis.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8Koujx2SJZDG5W5kb/if-everything-is-genetic-then-nothing-is-genetic
The phenotypic null hypothesis would say that apparent correlations are merely chance? An explanation of the fifth law I’ve heard is that a high mutagenic load, for instance acquired in the early embryonic stage due to whatever reason, could damage multiple genes otherwise not related in the final phenotype, such as, say, intelligence and health. Then, in this example, the just-so story develops that smart people are cognitively able to take better care of themselves.
> The phenotypic null hypothesis would say that apparent correlations are merely chance?
No, it would say that genetic correlations are often due to stuff like vertical pleiotropy. For instance, smarter people might live in better neighborhoods, which are therefore healthier. This would lead to a genetic correlation between health and intelligence which would not be genetically confounded but instead would be an instance of the phenotypic null hypothesis.
There is an assumption here that I would disagree with: that "self-control" and "taking care of yourself" can treat or prevent obesity. As far as I can tell, it can't. There is only one safe medical intervention that reliably treats obesity, and that's bariatric surgery. Diet and exercise can make a fat person healthier, but it will not make them into a thin person who stays thin for five years. Trying to become thin is about as useful and effective as trying to become tall. Fat acceptance exists for the same reason disability acceptance exists: because blaming and shaming people for being fat is about as useful and moral as blaming and shaming people for being short, being deaf, or being wheelchair bound. Being fat sucks, but so does suffering from lots of other medical conditions that we don't blame the sufferers for.
I think you're just wrong here--the problem is that it's really hard, not that it doesn't work. I went from persistently-chubby to persistently-fit in my early adulthood and it was a fuckload of work. Both in an acute "lose the weight and transform my body" sense and a persistent "my life must forever be different than it was before to maintain this" sense. I eat differently and lift regularly and if I want to stay this way I must do so forever. And while I cannot prove it to you from here, it is as clear as day to me that virtually any person who took the same set of actions would get the same kind of outcome, barring some wild medical anomaly stuff
The problems are that to some people, this is just genuinely not worth it (is this a problem? perhaps only because we have insane cultural views about fatness, and with greater acceptance people could comfortably say "yeah, it's just not worth it to me not to be fat", while instead today they live in a perpetual internal tension from thinking they should lose weight but not actually wanting to). And also that "how do you make yourself make these changes" is a genuinely hard question that I cannot answer. It aint easy.
Perhaps it's more useful to think in terms of response to incentives. Most people could lose a fair bit of weight and get into much better shape if they were, say, put into basic training in the Army with lots of mandatory exercise and their food limited to get their weight down, with the consequences for failure being high. Similarly, people in combat sports with weight classes, actors and actresses, models, and the like all do, in fact, manage to diet down to much lower weights than they'd default to, since doing this is a requirement for their jobs. (Missing weight is a costly screwup for a pro MMA fighter.) And probably most of us could lose a lot of weight with really large incentives to do so--say, you're going to lose your job if you don't get your weight down to 240 lbs by this time next year.
But with the normal set of incentives for most people in modern US society, it seems really hard to get people to lose weight. That includes social incentives about being attractive, health incentives, etc.
One way to think about this is that stronger incentives to lose weight would decrease obesity/overweight. And indeed, this must be true, though it's not so clear how large the incentives would have to become before you saw a significant effect. And a lot of ways the incentives might work could be pretty nasty--if you decree you're going to fire all your fat employees Jan 1 2024, you're both going to put a lot of people through a miserable stressful experience, and also lose a bunch of employees who don't have to put up with that kind of crap.
This is one reason you might want to push back on the fat acceptance movement--you might worry that it will decrease the existing incentives to lose weight/stay thin, and that this will lead to even more obesity.
There's a kind of deadweight loss thing going on here, though. If there are high social costs to being overweight, and this gets some people to lose weight and be healthier/happier, that may make the world a better place. But if they don't cause much of a change, they just end up making fat people less happy, making the world a worse place.
And as with so many social science issues, especially those with a culture-war valence and many people occupying basically moral positions on factual questions, I despair of getting good information on this stuff. Perhaps we get the people who will lie to us for our own good by telling us fat is healthy when it's not; perhaps we'll get people who will lie to us for our own good by telling us fat is more bad for you than it really is, but I'm not confidence in my ability, as an outsider to the relevant fields, to distinguish between the folks lying to me for a good cause and the ones honestly trying to get to the truth.
Excellent comment. Yes it's about incentives. But not just incentives to lose weight, also incentives not to gain it in the first place. This could involve regulations on the food industry (both in terms of production and advertising), higher taxes on food with high fat and sugar etc. Of course a large part of it is culture, education, upbringing.
I would add that the "fat acceptance" movement seems to exclusively focus on acceptance of fat women. At the same time, male celebrities are shamed in the media for their "dad bod" if they put on even a little weight. Remember the reactions on that Elon Musk picture with him on a boat somewhere looking fat?
This leads me to believe the fat acceptance movement is largely another bs hypocritical offshoot of modern feminism, not wanting actual equality but rather special treatment.
You just seem to be saying that living healthily is hard in modern (Western) society, which I don't dispute. Our environment and society is not conductive to healthy living. There's too much easy and bad food, and our lives are too sedentary. Now we don't even have to get out of our house to get food delivered to us.
Of course staying fit takes constant work (or I would say, "effort"). That's what self control and taking care of yourself is. So what?
I never said any of this is easy. I find it hard too. I'm not super fit but I did go from never working out at all to working out 3-4 times a week and it made a difference. Yes, my life was "forever different" after I started working out. For the better! The problem I have with this whole "acceptance" theory is that in the end, being fat is unhealthy, being fat makes you less attractive (if you are dating it's going to severely limit your options, that's not a cultural thing IMO, but an evolutionary biology/psychology thing. We instinctively look for markers of health when dating although obviously physical atractiveness is not the only thing we look for) and it shows you have problems with self control and discipline. I'm not saying that to be judgemental. I myself have problems with those things but I'm not trying to pretend that that isn't an issue when it gets out of hand.
I admittedly drink too much alcohol.
Nobody is talking about being more accepting of alcoholism and telling people we have "insane cultural views about not being a raging alcoholic".
No, we would see an alcoholic has a problem that they'd better take care of.
Now of course it's everyone personal decision whether addressing that problem is worth the effort. But I think it's wrong to expect the world to treat you like what you're doing doesn't matter. You can't force the world to accept you. I think we're better off as a society if we're honest about things that are bad, without being too judgemental about it. Being fat (or an alcoholic) doesn't make you a "bad person". But it does have repercussions for your life that you have to take responsibility for.
We were not talking about "chubby" btw but about "fat" and "obese". I think those are different things.
Anyway, you said "taking care of yourself and self control can't treat or prevent obesity" when obviously they can and they do (or everyone would be obese). Now you say "yes they can but it's hard" to which I would say, I agree, of course it's hard! But so what?
As with alcoholism, there isn't one way to fix it. Some people get sober on their own, some go to AA, some take meds. All these are valid treatments or ways to tackle the issue. What I would disagree with is saying that the best solution would be to be "more accepting" of something that is obviously very damaging and bad for you. These days we are constantly arguing that society should just change to accept and affirm every "flaw" a person can have. I think that just leads to the death of personal responsibility. "Society" eventually pays for the healthcare costs too. Society has a stake in promoting healthy living of it's members. We can be more accepting of the person, sure, be less judgemental, but that's something different.
I believe that, for some people, a diet and exercise program will make them significantly healthier and cause them to lose weight, but not *enough* weight to avoid *appearing* fat. (Hence the "fat but fit" movement/controversy - https://www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/fitness/strength-training/a33441206/rose-stokes-odd-one-out/ )
That seems like another outcome that can be achieved, but I don't think those people would be incapable of also not appearing fat, if their diet and exercise program went harder.
Not saying that's necessarily something they *should* do, I would expect for many people it isn't. Just that it's possible (and I think framing weight loss as a control process makes this clear--easy to see that for any weight a person can live at, there's some level of food intake + exercise that will achieve it)
Surely there may be certain medical conditions that make certain people fat beyond their ability to influence it by making different lifestyle choices. But most fat people are fat because they eat too many calories and don't get enough exercise. That is hardly rocket science. There are countless examples of people who made transitions in their life from being fat and generally unhealthy, to being fit, by changing their diet and exercising regularly.
It's not at all the same as being tall.
Diet and exercise absolutely can improve the health of someone who is fat and unhealthy. What it can't do is make most people who *look* fat into people who *look* thin, and have them maintain that appearance for five years, because the amount of weight loss a person needs to improve their health is usually much less than the amount they need to go from "fat" to "thin".
Also, I think fat is the marker, but state of your arteries and blood chemistry is the thing you care about for health. (For attractiveness, OTOH, fat is the problem and arteries/blood chemistry isn't an issue.). Being fat is correlated with clogged arteries and high cholesterol and insulin resistance and such, but it's not the same thing.
Are there cultures/societies where being fat is sufficiently unpopular that very few people are fat? My guess is that there are. (I think in the military you can get kicked out for being too fat, and I expect the incentives there are strong enough to convince a lot of people to keep their weight down.)
"Fat acceptance in particular can be seen as a kind of cope to make excuses for a lack of self-control."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf
One weirdness of all this is that in approximately every human civilization everywhere and everywhen before modern times, being at least somewhat fat was a marker for high wealth, status, and class. In modern US society, it's now the opposite, and being very fit is somewhat correlated with high wealth, status, and class.
The problem for nearly all our ancestors was that we might have a bad harvest and starve to death, or get deficiency diseases from having nothing to eat but one staple like white rice. The problem for us is that we might eat too much of the amazingly abundant tasty food all around us and get fat enough to endanger our health.
My understanding is that currently Darwinian selection among women is to be shorter than average and somewhat overweight.
Well, not quite. Blue haired types have managed to convince a sizable chunk of the population that they're an oppressed class deserving sympathy, which isn't something that anybody thought about the KGB.
A universal way to gain in status is to show that you understand the social norms in your society and align with the high-status people. I don't know that blue hair and tattoos manages that, but I expect it works in some places. (And the look that knocks the girls dead on a cute 20 year old boy in college isn't going to work out the same way for a 50 year old man, or even for a cute 20 year old boy who works hanging drywall.)
I’m pretty sure that you’re wrong about the androgyny. Basically, the extremal functional cultures, Jewish and Japanese culture, both tend towards androgyny (though more masculine in the first case and more feminine in the second), while the least functional cultures seem to all exaggerate sexual dimorphism.
I think that tells me that if your culture is functional you want androgyny, although the causation might go both ways. Either way, it implies sexual dimorphism isn’t the reflective equilibrium.
Furthermore, having two gender phenotypes would be a weird coincidence. One instance of a set or many both occur regularly but sets of two are extremely uncommon.
"My main objection to wokeness is in the form of hating civil rights laws, because they tell private individuals and institutions what to do. "
LOL. Do you really object to civil rights laws because they tell other people what to do, or because they tell YOU what to do?
"I am very interested in coherent articulations of Value Systems Very Different From My Own, to further help my thinking about this."
I think I have a fairly detailed model of conservative values. I don't know for sure if my model is actually true or if it's just a steelman. I also necessarily expect it to be accurate for the median conservative, as it's based on my experience with certain online conservatives. But I suspect it to be accurate for Richard Hanania, since he is among the people who my model is inspired by.
I think the critical value difference is that you've got the value of "diversity is good", which is closely allied with "universalist" values such as "everyone should be treated as a first-class citizen". A lot of things seem to follow from a model of conservatives as being total utilitarians who proxy men's and women's preferences by rounding them off to the median man and the median woman. I'm unsure to what extent this proxying is just for practical convenience (accurately modelling diversity is hard, interaction effects are often small relative to main effects) vs a genuine values difference; but whether it's a convenience or a values difference probably doesn't make much of a difference for most cases where you'd apply this model.
Once you've got a values difference, this is likely going to ripple down into a bunch of epistemic differences, due to which memes get the benefit of doubt. Consider for instance the meme "Gay people are born that way and sexual orientation is immutable"; this is not a meme that most people can straightforwardly evaluate from everyday experience. They could decide to just copy it, as they naively should due to Aumann's agreement theorem. But if you don't value diversity, it would be more convenient if everyone could be straight, as then they would fit in better under your preferred policies. And if you don't value diversity, the fact that there are people right over there who do value diversity, and who might push this meme despite its being wrong, makes accepting the meme a form of security vulnerability, and therefore it must be rejected. At scale, this leads to differences on all sorts of empirical questions.
Next, lifestyle. Conservatives want everyone to form heterosexual couples, get married, and have kids. Why? Partly, because this ranks reasonably well under the median utilities. But also partly, because as total utilitarians (or people who are aware of economic problems due to the population pyramid, or ...) they *very much* want to increase the total population. (*Especially* the total population of smart, mentally healthy, highly productive, prosocial people, as such people generate a lot of value for others.) Notably, if you take the importance of increasing the total population seriously, then that raises questions such as "Shouldn't we tell people who are on the fence that they ought to have more kids?" - essentially making offspring encouraged and childlessness stigmatized. Furthermore, since most people aren't relentlessly optimizing for long-term goals, conservatives would tend to want there to be nudges and pressures which push people toward the situations that tend to generate families - such as dating for long term relationships rather than causal sex.
And this then gets into conflicts, because there are some people who very much would not like this. A woman who is running a company might not have time to birth a huge family. While many gay people want children, I have the impression that it is far more common for gay people to just go childfree, presumably for the obvious reason of having less direct opportunity to reproduce. Teenage transition will similarly prevent fertility.
The diversity-valuing way to address these conflicts would be to try to make a space that accommodates everyone's preferences, which at the margin especially means investing energy in accommodating the minority's preferences (both because decisions are usually made by majority members and therefore take their preferences into account, and because for historical reasons a lot of institutions did not properly value the minority's preferences). But this makes sacrifices on the extent to which one can push child-having, and I suspect that those sacrifices are pretty big in terms of number of children (IIRC the far right have something like twice as many children as the far left, which is of course not entirely exogenous, but also this neglects the effects that applying it on greater societal scale might have, so I think that might cancel out the endogeneity).
Another thing: If you don't consider diversity, it's easier to apply certain kinds of deontological reasoning. You don't have to wonder about whether something is good for some people and bad for others. You don't have to wonder what proportion of people might engage in a behavior if it was permitted; you can just assume everyone will.
Ok, so we've got all that, but still, why be so opposed to blue hair of all things? I think there's a conflict element to it. Having blue hair and pronouns in bio is correlated with supporting progressive, diversity-appreciating norms. And if you have enough of such people around, you get the sorts of societal moral changes that we've seen over the past decades (or centuries, idk how far back Hanania would go).
This is far from the whole story of my model of conservative values, but my comment is getting long so I'll stop here and answer questions. Also remember to take my model with a grain of salt because I am not a conservative so real conservatives might differ from my model of them. It's more like a steelman.
As a conservative, I think this model of my values is largely right, but it's missing one essential component: Chesterton's Fence. I assume that any traditional value, hierarchy, or taboo is justified until I have strong evidence to the contrary. Even if I don't have a detailed model of why a particular tradition is good or necessary, I will vigorously defend it until I have proof beyond reasonable doubt to the contrary.
Why be so dogmatic about this? Western civilization is a uniquely successful experiment that has resulted in a uniquely non-sucky society, with high trust, low crime, functioning institutions, high standard of living, and a high level of personal and intellectual freedom. All of that is incredibly valuable, and if it were to fail I doubt it would be easy to replicate elsewhere. Also, I don't fully understand the reasons behind this success; nobody does. So whenever an idealistic reformer tries to rewire central components of the machine (for example, redefining the family), I get very scared, and I try to stop them. Even if I understand the reformer's motivations, and even if I *share* them, whatever benefit the reform hopes to achieve is massively outweighed by the risk of damaging the (by historical standards) exceptionally good society I live in.
Tanner Greer's essay "Tradition is Smarter Than You Are" is a good longer explanation of the above position, though I am not fully convinced by the conclusion: https://scholars-stage.org/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are/.
As for dislike of blue hair: when someone decides to change their perfectly good and adequate natural hair color, just because they feel like it, and in doing so exposes themselves to some novel chemicals they probably don't fully understand—that signals to me that they may want to fix other things that ain't broken, and as explained above I can't accept that.
(Dyeing hair also means doing away with the hair color you inherited from your parents, which signals low filial piety, which goes against conservative values.)
Surely, if "Western civilization is a uniquely successful experiment", one key ingredient in that experiment was, well, experimentation—an unusually high level of social change for a protracted period of time. Do you believe:
1. That's false, and what is valuable about western civilization was present for a long period with little change?
2. That's true, but the time for changes has ended, and we should now adopt a posture of retrenchment and stasis?
3. Past changes were good but currently proposed changes are bad?
4. The success of past changes relied on adversarial collaboration between advocates and skeptics, and you serve as the contemporary representative of skepticism?
5. Some other thought that I haven't listed here?
Very late to this thread, but: I see societal experiments as coin flips. And we’re the one society out of 1024 that got heads ten times in a row. Should we flip again? Not unless things get quite a bit worse first.
I'm back and I'm much later! I'd dispute your claim at several levels:
1. We sure didn't get ten heads in a row! Plenty of advances were very bad. Possibly the signal social innovation of early modernity was transoceanic slaver imperialism, which, yikes. Fortunately we're not stuck with coin tosses, and it's possible to make changes, see how they're going, and then redirect or reverse those changes—we do it all the time.
2. In a society co-evolving with changing technology, and adversarially co-evolving with other societies, refusing to flip a coin is a guaranteed losing strategy. Voluntary ossification is a suicide pact.
Sometimes you just call it like you see it. Trump might not be a literal fascist by a strict definition, but the Jan. 6 riot proved that he shares at least one defining characteristic of fascists: acceptance of political violence.
My take is similar. Prior experience shows that leftists want change simply for the sake of change. Because (1) They believe utopia is possible in finite time. (2) They have no respect for nonlinearity, chaos theory, or the inevitable but never discussed unintended consequences of their actions (3) The serotonin high of asserting (without actually being) more virtuous/empathetic than the "deplorables" is too addictive for them.
While you have a good point, I think the main flaw in this is that technological advance has caused such fundamental changes that keeping old policies may be just as dangerous to our society as changing to new ones.
In so far as I have conservative leanings, this seems pretty off the mark to me. The underlying ideological divide would seem much more to do with conservatives viewing many existing inequalities/hierarchies as justified (and a source of instrumental value), in contrast to progressives generally viewing such inequalities as the unjustified result of oppression/racism. So I don't think many conservatives object to diversity per se, but rather the particular kinds of diversity that progressives tend to push for, often driven by exaggerated claims of oppression. For example, while conservatives are much more skeptical of affirmative action as a mechanism for diversity promotion, they are actually more vocal than progressives in advocating for ideological diversity in academia or on social media.
As far as superficial forms of diversity like blue hair, I doubt many conservatives would care, if not for the accurate stereotype that these styles are generally associated with left-wing views; though Hanania raises an interesting point that some of these stylistic issues, e.g. pro-obesity aesthetics, are probably driven by some of the same underlying forms of wishful thinking and biological denialism that are more fundamental to the contemporary left-wing viewpoint (e.g. rejecting genetic behavioral differences between sexes or between rich and poor, etc).
This ties into the "Once you've got a values difference, this is likely going to ripple down into a bunch of epistemic differences, due to which memes get the benefit of doubt." part of my model, I think:
Suppose that there are a bunch of organizations that support the conservative project of maximizing total median person welfare; churches, companies, etc.. These organizations end up creating various forms of hierarchy in order to support their tasks (and realistically also in order to enrich some of the people within the organizations, etc., but whatever). Meanwhile, there are various people who end up performing poorly on this hierarchy, essentially because they have less to contribute to the conservative project and/or are weird outliers who just don't fit into the project. These people end up forming the progressive coalition, with the ultimate goal of the progressive coalition being that there ought to be better place for these outliers, i.e. that organizations ought to support diversity, equity and inclusion with respect to these outlier demographics, essentially placing the members of the outlier demographics higher in the hierarchies.
Everything is a tradeoff, so of course conservatives can't simply promote these demographics within the hierarchies without also compromising on the hierarchies' abilities to maximize total median welfare. This then leads to a fight about how the hierarchies should be. Conservatives appeal to the value the hierarchies provide, and the lack of value that the outlier demographics provide, while progressives critique flaws in the hierarchies, i.e. conservatives generate pro-hierarchy memes while progressives generate anti-hierarchy memes. Furthermore, due to the fact that you rationally ought to hold ideas to higher epistemic standards when they threaten the implementation of your values and when they might be generated by people biased towards different values, there's also differences in how the memes get shared in social networks, with conservatives repeating pro-hierarchy memes and progressives repeating anti-hierarchy memes.
So essentially it is the mirror image of the "Gay people are born that way and sexual orientation is immutable" situation. The meme "Traditional hierarchies provide lots of value, and the people they are excluding are often inferior" is a meme which supports conservative policies over progressive ones, and so conservatives are going to be more likely to promote it, while progressives would be more likely to suppress it.
(Note that my suggestion isn't that conservatives necessarily object to diversity, but rather that progressives are actively fans of it.)
As for ideological diversity, I think it's complicated. Part of the problem is that ideological DEI can directly trade off against demographic DEI, since supporting demographic DEI is itself an ideology and so supporting ideological DEI would mean being inclusive towards those who oppose demographic DEI. Another part of it is that progressivism has been winning a lot lately, which means that there is a progressive project that has a lot more focus on maximizing diversity than the conservative project does. And this progressive project has achieved very strong dominance in a lot of areas, leaving space for the whole "gather up all the outliers who don't fit into the project and create an ideology promoting diversity to support them" can be performed in the opposite direction, with conservatives supporting ideological diversity in response to the progressive project promoting the ideology of demographic diversity.
I still am not seeing what additional explanatory power is gained by this idea that conservatives are focused on benefits to the median person, or that they prefer hierarchies that are biased towards typical people. To the contrary, it seems that conservatives value hierarchies which give the highest rewards to outlier levels of greatness, competence and hard work, and only moderately reward the median person.
Progressives sometimes justify their opposition to these hierarchies in part by arguing that conservatives are merely biased against people who are different or far from the median (and maybe it will even turn out that progressives are correct), but if we're trying to understand the conservative ideological perspective, the issue isn't that people at the bottom are outliers, but rather that they are perceived to score poorly along dimensions of objective value, and in many cases that they aren't outliers enough along these positive dimensions. For example, even if you convinced conservatives that affirmative action hires are closer to the median competence than the highest ability applicants, this would hardly persuade them to support affirmative action.
I disagree that conservatives value hierarchies which give the highest rewards to the most competent and hard-working people. For instance, if a bunch of competent and hard-working people led an organization to overthrow the church and the traditional family structure, I think conservatives would consider their leadership to be very bad. _Why_ would conservatives consider their leadership to be bad? I think because conservatives feel that the church and the traditional family structure are highly beneficial to the median person. I.e. conservatives support hierarchies that focus on the benefits for the median person.
Conversely, I'm not asserting that conservatives want people of median competence and industriousness to be high in their hierarchies. They love for particularly productive people to be high in their hierarchies - as long as those particularly productive people support their values. A lesbian polyamorous businesswoman might be highly competent and productive, but she would be less inclined to support the traditional family model than a married, monogamous man would be, so she would less likely be a good fit to a conservative hierarchy. (That's not to say that all gay/etc. people push for progressivism, rather it's just a tendency that is greater among them, due to not fitting in strongly with conservative values.)
Of course *both* sides prefer people in power who support their values, particularly in political/religious contexts, but presumably the question is what are the ideological *differences* between left and right. And one clear difference is that conservatives often tend to see people at the top of existing hierarchies as deserving of those roles based on objective measures of value/competence, whereas progressives are more likely to interpret these advantages as undeserved privilege. On the other hand, I just don't see much evidence that conservatives have some particular bias towards benefiting the median person; for example, if conservatives suddenly found themselves in a small minority (e.g. after a plague that killed mostly conservatives), they wouldn't suddenly switch gears and start supporting the highly progressive preferences of the median person (and this will still hold even if you fully convince them that the majority are now progressive).
Now maybe you could tweak your view to say that conservatives care about the median values from *the past*, but then I'm not sure what explanatory power is this is adding beyond the usual notion that conservatives are simply more inclined to preserve traditional values/hierarchies/etc. And in fact, as I've argued, these traditional hierarchies weren't particularly biased in favor of the median, but rather the elites.
When emphasizing diversity/universalism, I am not so much aiming for something that describes the total differences in political ideology, but rather something that describes the root motivations which ripple out to other differences.
"On the other hand, I just don't see much evidence that conservatives have some particular bias towards benefiting the median person; for example, if conservatives suddenly found themselves in a small minority (e.g. after a plague that killed mostly conservatives), they wouldn't suddenly switch gears and start supporting the highly progressive preferences of the median person (and this will still hold even if you fully convince them that the majority are now progressive)."
I don't think you can equate between the political coalition and the types of people the coalition supports. I.e. if most conservatives die out, there are still going to be lots of christian, successful, monogamous, child-having white men and women that they could focus on. And if e.g. most white and asian people died out, then the economic competition would shift such that many hispanic and black people would be on top of the economic hierarchies, leaving that as a coherent demographic to support. And finally if most heterosexuals died out, the "total utilitarianism" point would still apply to imply pronatalism.
The difference is in "who decides".
Conservatives want objective metrics to define placement in hierarchies.
Leftists want themselves to define who gets the treats.
The leftists believe they are morally superior and therefore appropriate for this job.
Everybody else and history - calls B.S. on that.
"How much money have you donated to leftist causes" can probably be turned into an objective metric, yet I think conservatives would be opposed to using this for placement into hierarchies. Rather, there are specific kinds of metrics, for specific reasons, that they would support.
not a metric (measurable thing) but an objective metric.
Objective means impersonal and unbiased in this context.
Political contributions would be the antithesis of an objective metric.
IQ scores for college admissions would be objective.
Affirmative action (race) would the antithesis of an objective metric.
For clarity, what bias criterion is it that you emphasize being unbiased relative to?
"I'm unsure to what extent this proxying is just for practical convenience (accurately modelling diversity is hard, interaction effects are often small relative to main effects) vs a genuine values difference; but whether it's a convenience or a values difference probably doesn't make much of a difference for most cases where you'd apply this model."
I guess I should clarify: I'm quite sure that there is a ~genuine (obligatory The Whole City is the Center reference) values difference where conservatives value diversity less than progressives. However, it is possible to me that some conservatives see the diversity as being morally neutral, rather than morally negative, and they just fail to make space for the diversity out of convenience (and out of the other dynamics I described in the comment).
This statement is another example that leftists don't actually have a clue what conservatives believe and are still making shallow theoretical excuses for what they are doing.
Skip the theory and let's talk about reality.
In brief, leftists use blue-hair and pronouns, etc, to announce their team. And because they are currently the orthodoxy, they can mostly get away with lording their TEAM LOGOs in other people's faces. Which they do.
Conservatives don't like the other TEAM LOGOs because they can't do the same thing back.
When conservatives announce their team with a MAGA hat they get attacked. (Covington kid was brutally innocent of anything ...).
This is a wildly over-simplified, but a correct first-order accurate depiction of the reality, given the space constraints.
All the lame theory is just excuses - invented after the fact.
You don't value "diversity" or "novel experience" more than I do. I guarantee it.
You value ostentatious TEAM signaling - because you are winning - and you can do it.
Be honest with yourself.
There is no natural/biological/aesthetic reason for wildly unnatural hair colors - except to attract attention and to team signal. If they is a value for pronouns (and that is debatable) this argument is massively subsumed by the practical and actual reason leftists really use them - to team signal.
Subconsciously (or consciously) this is about societal division. An attempt to scream US and YOU_OTHERS at every opportunity. Political divisiveness is a result of leftist need to signal. Possibly a result of their higher desire for "a collective" in which to belong.
I don't deny that there is a political conflict with lots of shit-flinging at the opponents, and in fact I acknowledged that this was to a significant extent the case for the blue hair thing, and I agree that progressives have been winning on many fronts.
However, if this conflict is not *about* any underlying subject matter, then one could just join the winning side and ignore the conflict. So it is relevant to consider whether the conflict is about anything and if so what it is about, and I believe it is about diversity/equality/something along those lines.
The fundamental conflict doesn't seem to have changed for 2 centuries.
The value given to the collective good vs the individual merit/freedom.
"Diversity" is a leftist excuse invented 4 minutes ago that tracks with zero evidence.
Leftists don't like diversity of thought or ideas. They don't like diversity of income for sure. And they don't like diversity of outcomes. Today they are obsessed with equality of outcome, to the extent of desiring government and corporate/academia intervention to socially engineer endless unearned treats to their favored voting blocks.
Leftists: Equality of outcome (now called equity).
Rightists: Equality of opportunity, and merit from there.
Equity must be implemented by overlords to determine the oppression values and treat rewards
Equality of opportunity can be implemented with objective impersonal metrics (in theory).
Aside: Since it is difficult for me to see the sins of my own side, when have GOP leaders been insulting large swaths of the population in the last two decades?
The bitter-clinger, deplorable, semi-fascist level stuff.
Most of the conservatives I've seen would argue that conservativism is better for society, so I don't think the collective good is a strong distinction for leftism.
I agree that "diversity" is rather abstract and that progressives use it in a specific meaning that could perhaps be better called "diversity of demographics" or "equality" or "universalism" or whatever. I think I sketched out in more detail about how the progressive and conservative analysis differs in the original post.
I don't agree that objective impersonal metrics (I assume you mean stuff like IQ tests/exam grades and criminal background checks) leads to equality of opportunity. People and demographics can differ a lot in their propensities and abilities, and objective impersonal metrics would lead to those with objectively more productive and valuable abilities getting more opportunities than the rest.
Fair enough, I will rephrase.
Leftism is about top-down control - by them. (to obtain what they view as equal outcomes).
Conservatives are about using fair processes (equal opportunity).
Conservatives like a market economy. Fair rules for everybody.
Leftists like a command economy. The elite decide who gets the treats (them). Think USSR for the basic model.
Conservatives like SAT/GRE scores for academic admissions (for its fairness).
Leftists like affirmative action racism (for its outcomes).
Conservatives think if you want socialized medicine you are free to form a collective any second you please, with them not in it. (choice)
Leftists think there is no fun in a health collective that doesn't force everybody else who disagrees with them - to do what they want. (force)
Finally "objective impersonal metrics would lead to those with objectively more productive and valuable abilities getting more opportunities than the rest." Is incorrect, it would lead to those people having unequal *outcomes*. The opportunity is equal when the rules are simple and fair (like do well on the test). Leftists hate unequal outcomes. It clashes with their desire to control all outcomes themselves. Leftism, at its core, is out envy after all.
I don't think it's true that leftism is about top-down control. For instance, there's a bunch of leftist rationalists, but I am not aware of them creating any organization to dominate themselves. Rather they seem to do things informally and consensually, without any commanders to determine things. The top-down control aspect mainly seems universal when leftists have to deal deal with rightists in a left-dominated culture, which seems like an awfully specific case to focus on. (Yes, there is the history with the USSR, but most leftists and progressives aren't tankies.)
I'm not sure what definition of opportunity you have in mind when you endorse equality of opportunity. I have in mind something like "set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something", and it seems like the very design of IQ tests is made for the purpose of removing the possibility from low-g people to score high (while keeping the possibility for high-g people to score high), so it seems like under my definition, IQ tests create unequal opportunity on the basis of g. But if you're using a different definition of opportunity then maybe that's where the issue lies.
That's not to say that it wouldn't also lead to unequal outcomes or that those unequal outcomes aren't something progressives find objectionable. But it just seems inaccurate to characterize it as being equal opportunity; obviously opportunity is going to be highly correlated with outcomes, with the main decorrelating factor being personal preferences (i.e. if someone has a weaker preference for money, then given equal opportunity to earn money, they might prioritize the job less relative to other things like leisure, and thereby earn less).
I think a reflective equilibrium would probably take you to an entirely different belief system, sharing almost nothing with your current belief system.
Imagine using the concept of "reflective equilibrium" in the year 1600 in Germany. You would probably be wondering which theology was correct - Catholicism, or one of the various Protestant offshoots? Obviously some moral issues are well known to all sides and not really up for debate, like the dangers of witchcraft and blasphemy. But, given time, over the next hundreds of years it would become the conventional wisdom that, for example, religious tolerance was good for society, and it was not a good moral idea to force all residents of a country to have the same religion as the leader.
Probably over the next few hundred years we will also discover that we were completely wrong about some of the moral issues of today. For example, if all societies that permit blue hair collapse into civil war, we'll probably conclude there was a problem with that. Or vice versa, if all the societies that don't permit blue hair collapse into civil war, we'll conclude there was a problem with that.
In short I think you are assuming far too much when you assume that you are capable of predicting, without hundreds of years of reflection, what you yourself would arrive at in a reflective equilibrium.
"Imagine using the concept of "reflective equilibrium" in the year 1600 in Germany."
I've heard this argument before. I'm not impressed. The toy model deployed above does not take seriously what a project of universalist reflective equilibrium would look like in other historical contexts. It neglects both the opportunities available to—and restrictions upon!—thinkers in other places and other times.
Let's ask this question seriously. What religious tendencies would a serious thinker in 1600s Germany be aware of?
Well, Catholicism and Lutheranism, as you mention. Judaism, of course. Greco-Roman Paganism. (The New Testament is unintelligible without some sense of what the Classical pagans were on about; plus the writings of Aristotle were available throughout the Middle Ages.) Epicureanism, at least at a distance—the works were already being rediscovered in the 1400s. Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy. (How else could you understand the history of the Crusades?) Norse Paganism. The existence of Indian, Mongol, and Chinese religious frameworks. (These would probably be pretty muddled, and you might not be able to tell them apart—but you could know that they existed.) You'd have a more fine-grained theory of Catholic religiosity than I can really credit, informed both by prominent heresies like Catharism, etc., as well as the wide umbrella of sanctioned Catholicisms—a thoughtful critic could tell that folk Catholicism, what the Pope was up to, and what St. Francis was up to were three pretty different things. And so on.
You'd be aware of Lutheranism not as some sort of eternal option, but as a recent historical event—the 95 theses were about 80 years old—and so you could easily deduce that maybe some Luther-like but quite different moves were available. (Calvin and the Anabaptists were out there demonstrating this quite pointedly, but you'd have no reason to assume they explored the whole space.) You'd be aware of the Peace of Augsburg, which introduced the principle of "cuius regio, eius religio"—and you'd be aware that that principle itself was new, meaning that new permutations of religious toleration could be invented! And so on.
And this is just the religious theories that were successful enough to organize social movements and burn their names into history! The recorded speculations of the philosophers would give you a larger, more multi-dimensional space still; and the unrecorded notions in popular discourse would expand your available set of worldviews still further. (An interesting case of this was recently uncovered in the diary of Matthew Tomlinson, a private citizen who in 1810 wrote in his private diary an argument for the morality of homosexuality functionally identical to the modern "born that way" synthesis—even though this argument was nowhere published in elite discourse!)
Would there be people who, in the face of all of this available ideological diversity, would decide that the core problem moral problem of universalism was to choose between the two factions with the most social power in their own little corner of the world? Sure. There are people in America today who believe that the most urgent moral question is finding exactly the right Goldilocks compromise between the Republican and Democratic party platforms. However, they are not commenting on Ozy Frantz's Animal Welfare and Polyamory substack; they are too busy working for Evan McMullin and/or Michael Bloomberg.
Hi! It's me! Since I posted this effort comment I have started reading THE ADVENTURES OF SIMPLICIUS SIMPLICISSIMUS, a novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. This semiautobiographical novel is set in the context of the 30 years war between Protestant Sweden and the Catholic imperial forces. Some notes on the world it depicts:
1. Obviously Protestantism vs. Catholicism is a huge huge huge deal. At the same time, our hero switches armies repeatedly, lots of soldiers seem to, and the text is pretty uninterested in the confessional experience of soldiers in either party.
2. The knowledge of the Classical world is vastly more abundant than I anticipated. Both the narration and random characters spout elaborate reference to Greek mythology and Roman history that send me, a certified contemporary dork, frantically skidding over to Wikipedia.
3. There is a chapter where our hero by accident applies the flying lotion and travels to a witches' sabbath. It is presented explicitly as a rebuttal to those who doubt the existence of witches. The clear implication: witch belief was common; so was witch skepticism. I'm reminded of my experience with THE JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR, which made it very clear that the microbe hypothesis of disease was current and popular in the late 1600s-early 1700s; it's just that the hypothesis hadn't achieved dominance or fixity. From tAoSS, I think it's pretty clear that the "no witches" hypothesis occupied the same space in Germany half a century earlier—quite available if not dominant.
4. During an extended fantasy sequence where a future German superman successfully unites the majority of Europe with his fiery sword (yikes), there's clear evidence of awareness of (though not necessarily deep understanding of) Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam.
5. Apparently in later chapters (I haven't finished reading yet) our hero is going to go to Russia, China, and a secret kingdom of merpeople, so I'll let you all know how that shakes out.
Yeah -- to take an example that I think is current (sorry, I guess I'm directly jumping into politics-is-the-mind-killer here, but I think this example is important and this isn't LW :P ), the belief in limited good, or a zero-sum world, is quite prevalent; and I think many people, if they realized the falsehood of this, would basically have to rethink their politics from the ground up.
I guess the basic problem here is that people don't actually just have 1-level preferences, but rather have both preferences about results and preferences about policy, and these aren't necessarily compatible with one another (or even their preferences about results may be incompatible among themselves). How this shakes out at reflective equilibrium is anybody's guess...
Note that the reason we don't prosecute people for witchcraft these days is not that we think it's okay to use magic to do harm, we just think that trying to use magic to do harm is completely ineffective.
I haven't read The Iron Dream and I'm far from an expert on Nazism, but I just don't buy that Nazis didn't value things other than dominance. Hitler didn't like his dogs because they won dogfights, but for the normal reasons people like their dogs. The Nazis are known for deriding lots of art as "degenerate" BUT they liked other kinds of art, which weren't all just about dominance.
All that being said there IS a Nazi who resembles your quasi-caricature of only valuing the struggle against an enemy: the legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. His writing did seem to reduce everything to that. I suppose that he likely also valued other things in his private life, but the viewpoint he articulated resembled the caricature.
I believe in a distinction (which maybe I didn't make clear enough in the post?) between Naziism as an ideology and Nazis as individuals-- similar to how utilitarianism as an ideology says you should only care about the greatest good for the greatest number, but utilitarians have pet dogs and like art.
That would get closer, since Schmitt as a legal philosopher was unusually theoretical for a Nazi, but even there I don't think that the Nazi ideology was that all art (including "non-degenerate" art) was worthless. The ideology valorized Germans as a race, and the ideal end-goal was for Germans to enjoy lots of normal approved things rather than just domination.
I don't like art museums...
I don't mind them. But I hate modern art museums.
Pure emperor-has-no-clothes stuff in those.
But how do you feel about fungi?
My understanding is that the view that everybody converges at a single reflective equilibrium is called "constructivism".
How you feel about art museums, I might feel about what you said about competitive board games.
I can't resist the shot: have you tried playing them not to compete, but to pursue excellence?
To me, the fun is not in trying to *win*, it's in trying to play as well as I can. And the competition is a way to test if you did, and to sift through ideas so you can get closer to the ideal. Something like pandemic is not as good for this, because once you get good enough that you usually win, the quality of signal degrades--it's very hard to tell when the change you made moved your winrate from 98% to 99%, or whatever.
My feeling on this is "it is the one true way", how anyone should play these games to have the most fun. I'm sure that's wrong, but not so deeply that I won't come here and preach it.
I have two comments: one on psilocybin and value change, and one on people whose values are just different.
1) I am scared that using shrooms will turn me into a theist. I grew up christian, and I like the experience of church, and I am sad that I cannot understand the common experience of God. However, I feel very strongly that there is no god. The idea that this drug could change this fundamental perception of mine is low-key terrifying. I think I'm fairly high-openness, but the idea of this basic tenet being threatened is not an experience I want. It doesn't feel very rational.
2) My husband and I have very similar values. However, he is turned off by Effective Altruism because of the assumption that everybody would abandon their locality bias if they merely examined it. He says that it is simply a terminal value for him. I do not understand this.
Drive-by from Hanania's blog...
I generally am closer to Hanania on politics but am closer to your position on gender variance and the like. I hate the way feminists are trying to attack masculinity, but I don't have any problem with people who choose other paths or are nonbinary, gay/lesbian, trans, etc. I don't think being AMAB or AFAB means you should 'act like a man' or 'act like a woman'. I like that there are more options available for people who want or need them. You do your thing, let me do mine. (Indeed, you personally may not be part of the problem!)
"I know whether I like salads!"
So can you imagine that people exist that don't like salads much?
Do you think that alien inspired reflection would make them like salads more, or you less?
So why would our preferences for more abstract values be any different?
You like salad, and value the collective good (dislike individual failure). I like cheese and individual freedom (to succeed - and fail). Is contemplation really going to change that, or are our neurons simply hardwired by genetics and experiences to weight things differently?
We can differ in height, funniness, sociability, coordination - but not value weights?
Leftism is riddled with bizarre axioms, and the "blank slate hypothesis" is one of them. Thinking there must be one "right" weighting of value systems (if we thought hard enough) is a corollary of that hypothesis. If we all knew enough - we would all agree? Really? Why? Not a single other thing works that way in life. That is just a flawed axiom causing grief. Drop it - or find evidence for it.
Having agreed (I hope) that people will always disagree - how do we structure society?
Do we bust up into teams and endlessly announce our sides? I don't think so.
And that is my (and I think Hanania's) objection to the blue hair and pronouns. I couldn't care less that you are different (I like different, so does he). But you aren't different (at all) - you are the same as all the other leftists announcing their team - using the identical announcement methods. THAT is the point. And that is why you do it (even if you make of excuses after the fact for why you do it).
Dig deeper. Are you really different? Or are you just team signaling. The rest of us are not idiots, we can see it is the latter.
I can substitute "blue-haired" for "radical leftist" in a tweet and 99.5% of the readers know they are exactly the same thing. You are fooling exactly nobody with the "I am more open to difference" lie.
Leftists actually hate "difference". A dislike for differences is why they are suckers for the "blank slate hypothesis". It is also why they weight communality higher than individual freedom.
If you actually valued "different" you would wear purple every day, or always walk on your hands.
You are not doing that.
You are just team signaling.
And it is gross. To me. Try not waving your gang colors around...
Oh, I'm not really an especially unusual person. :) I'm just lucky enough to have many friends who are very different from me and from each other.
I am not lucky enough to know someone who wears purple every day, but fortunately I do know someone who always wears blue. :)
Leftists superficially different from each other, like skin tone?
Or actually different - like value different things, and think differently?
Then why is you understanding of conservative views from a random internet guy you don't know?
Is somebody who grew up on a farm in your group? A person who owns a gun? Anybody who can fix a car?
When you go to NASCAR race, or help birth a litter of pigs - maybe you will have friends who are actually different from you.
But most leftists live in a totally insular bubble. Especially the young ones.
And their idea of diversity and difference is a largely one-sided racist one.
It is hardly *my* fault that Milton Friedman's grandson keeps procrastinating on writing that guest post I commissioned.
I can't believe I have to actually log in and comment for once to defend my Southern cred. I grew up out in the woods in the middle of the Bible Belt and to pick a specific example watched NASCAR after church damn near every week (only visited a speedway in person the once, sorry we were not made of money) but then Ozy and I move in together and that just doesn't count for anything anymore I guess
But I didn't say Ozy. The sentence says, "most leftists".
Doesn't appear to count for much in this context. Her understanding of conservative (actually libertarian) values seems to come from a random internet guy.
guess Lindsey beat me to making the same point but hi, friend of Ozy's here. my family owns like idk 20 guns, grew up on ten acres with chickens and horses and goats and pigs throughout the years. :v
But are you a conservative (or libertarian) that is the real question?
Did you vote Democrat in the last election? Be honest.
Surveys of college students show that leftists are intolerant of others.
Poll: Nearly Two-Thirds Of College Democrats Would Refuse To Room With A Trump Supporter; Republicans Far Less Likely To Reject A Biden Voter
https://www.dailywire.com/news/poll-nearly-two-thirds-of-college-democrats-would-refuse-to-room-with-a-trump-supporter-republicans-far-less-likely-to-reject-a-biden-voter?seyid=17462
Survey: Most Dem College Students Wouldn't Date A Republican
https://crooksandliars.com/2021/12/survey-most-dem-college-students-wouldnt
I didn't make it that way. You guys did that.
It must feel great being so much morally superior to others. But what if (low odds I realize) your moral superiority was just another leftist lie (like my blue hair is definitely not just a clan announcement)?
If I had to steelman Hanania, I'd use this chain of logic (I personally think it's wrong, but it's not impossible)
1. The United States Government is the political entity most responsible for the dramatic rise in living standards both within the US but also around the globe over the last two centuries, achieved in large part through free-market capitalism.
2. The "woke" worldview, which includes things like blue hair and polyamory, very often also includes a desire to reform the government to dramatically reduce or even eliminate the free market.
3. Victory in the culture wars which means a permanent reduction in status for the woke crowd would make continued capitalism in the US more likely and therefore higher standards of living for most of humanity
4. This makes the US culture wars more important than other localized famines or genocides but also justifies illiberal actions to ensure victory
Yeah, never having believed in convergence of human ethics in reflective equilibrium is a reason I'm an anti natalist. We will never agree, and that's profoundly sad I think.
I am consistent, though. I don't like the school of anti natalism who insist that everyone is secretly miserable or would, at reflective equilibrium, discover that they too would have rather not been born. Fuck that shit. To me it's more than enough that some people feel that way. No need to get everyone to agree.
This also makes me hate politics in general, because almost everyone (at least in Denmark where I'm from) insists that The Others just haven't thought hard enough or de-biased themselves enough and if they did, they'd agree with them. That's dumb and ridiculously self serving, to me.
According to the Big Five test with 300 questions, I am high openness, very high agreeableness, extremely high neuroticism, average extroversion and low conscientiousness.
I wonder what the intolerant leftist banned me for.
(drive by from ACX)
> Having the power to crush people, and then crushing them? How is that even desirable in any way? What is the point?
Not my strong suite, but it's my understanding that ideology is driven by kinship institutions. Fascists such as the Nazi Party tend to come from cultures of primogeniture. The glorification of dominance probably comes from non-first-born sons frequently using the military to make a name for themselves. For reasons such as this, I tend to conceptualize morality/ethics as being determined by fitness for a given environment, rather than universal. Though some tenets like "murder bad" certainly have broader appeal than others. Also, maybe ponder the fact that Genghis Khan sired something like half a percent of the world's current population.
> Is there no convergence at all, merely a thousand thousand different attractors into which an ethical system can settle?
No, but also yes. I think there's a huge landscape of different possible attractors. But in practice, they do often converge onto a select few, because of network effects. Gwern's essay is relevant, although it's not my only influence.
https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars
> I and most of the people I talk to about ethics are moral nonrealists. But we often talk about being “wrong” about ethics. The concept seems incoherent.
It's not a matter of correspondence to a One True Morality. It's a matter of deviation from protocol. Etymonline informs me that the word "wrong" evolved from words that meant "crooked, bent," etc. E.g. if I want to climb a mountain, there's several mountains to choose from. But once I commit to a particular mountain, there's a right way and a wrong way in the sense that "if the peak is north, but I'm headed south, I'm on the wrong path." Likewise, there's no One True Language either. But it's certainly coherent to say "moralitie" is spelled wrong, relative to English vernacular.
> blue hair or puppy kinks.
I'm not invested in either side of the debate. But from my observations, I think the LGBT debate just boils down to liberalism (individualism) vs illiberalism (collectivism). Gender norms are standardized protocols. When you fragment those into a thousand shards, you decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of the dating market. Society must weigh the pros of individual choice against the cons of weakening the commons. Blue hair is just a signal of openness/politics.
On point 5: something like "work-related" is still to easy to weaponize. Until someone manages to come up with a variation of this which doesn't result in someone seriously thinking that James Damore was going to get fired from Google (let alone actually did) you haven't addressed the problem.