100 Comments

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.

Expand full comment

"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.

Expand full comment
Nov 28, 2022Liked by Ozy Brennan

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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment
Nov 28, 2022Liked by Ozy Brennan

I don't like art museums...

Expand full comment
Nov 29, 2022Liked by Ozy Brennan

My understanding is that the view that everybody converges at a single reflective equilibrium is called "constructivism".

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment

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!)

Expand full comment
(Banned)Dec 2, 2022·edited Dec 2, 2022

"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...

Expand full comment

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

Expand full comment

I wonder what the intolerant leftist banned me for.

Expand full comment

(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.

Expand full comment

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.

Expand full comment