This year I’ve been thinking a lot about how the western world got so dysfunctional. Here’s my rough, best-guess story:
1. WW2 gave rise to a strong taboo against ethnonationalism. While perhaps at first this taboo was valuable, over time it also contaminated discussions of race differences, nationalism, and even IQ itself, to the point where even truths that seemed totally obvious to WW2-era people also became taboo. There’s no mechanism for subsequent generations to create common knowledge that certain facts are true but usefully taboo—they simply act as if these facts are false, which leads to arbitrarily bad policies (e.g. killing meritocratic hiring processes like IQ tests).
2. However, these taboos would gradually have lost power if the west (and the US in particular) had maintained impartial rule of law and constitutional freedoms. Instead, politicization of the bureaucracy and judiciary allowed them to spread. This was enabled by the “managerial revolution” under which govt bureaucracy massively expanded in scope and powers. Partly this was a justifiable response to the increasing complexity of the world (and various kinds of incompetence and nepotism within govts) but in practice it created a class of managerial elites who viewed their intellectual merit as license to impose their ideology on the people they governed. This class gains status by signaling commitment to luxury beliefs. Since more absurd beliefs are more costly-to-fake signals, the resulting ideology is actively perverse (i.e. supports whatever is least aligned with their stated core values, like Hamas).
3. On an ideological level the managerial revolution was facilitated by a kind of utilitarian spirit under which technocratic expertise was considered more important for administrators than virtue or fidelity to the populace. This may have been a response to the loss of faith in traditional elites after WW1. The enlightened liberal perspective wanted to maintain a fiction of equality, under which administrators were just doing a job the same as any other, rather than taking on the heavy privileges and responsibilities associated with (healthy) hierarchical relationships.
4. On an economic level, the world wars led to centralization of state power over currency and the abandonment of the gold standard. While at first govts tried to preserve the fiction that fiat currencies were relevantly similar to gold-backed currencies, again there was no mechanism for later generations to create common knowledge of what had actually been done and why. The black hole of western state debt that will never be repaid creates distortions across the economy, which few economists actually grapple with because they are emotionally committed to thinking of western govts as “too big to fail”.
5. All of this has gradually eroded the strong, partly-innate sense of virtue (and respect for virtuous people) that used to be common. Virtue can be seen as a self-replicating memeplex that incentivizes ethical behavior in others—e.g. high-integrity people will reward others for displaying integrity. This is different from altruism, which rewards others regardless of their virtue. Indeed, it’s often directly opposed to altruism, since altruists disproportionately favor the least virtuous people (because they’re worse-off). Since consequentialists think that morality is essentially about altruism, much moral philosophy actively undermines ethics. So does modern economics, via smuggling in the assumption that utility functions represent selfish preferences.
6. All of this is happening against a backdrop of rapid technological progress, which facilitates highly unequal control mechanisms (e.g. a handful of people controlling global newsfeeds or AI values). The bad news is that this enables ideologies to propagate even when they are perverse and internally dysfunctional. The good news is that it makes genuine truth-seeking and virtuous cooperation increasingly high-leverage.
Addenda:
I led with the ethnonationalism stuff because it’s the most obvious, but in some sense it’s just a symptom: a functional society would have rejected the taboos when they got too obviously wrong (e.g. by defending Murray).
The deeper issue seems to be a kind of toxic egalitarianism that is against accountability, hierarchy or individual agency in general. You can trace this thread (with increasing uncertainty) thru e.g. Wilson, Marx, the utilitarians, and maybe even all the way back to Jesus.
Michael Vassar thinks of it as Germanic “kultur” (as opposed to “zivilization”); I’m not well-read enough to evaluate that claim though. I’m more confident about it being driven by fear-based motivations, especially envy—as per Girard, Lacan, etc.
Some prescriptions I’m currently considering: - reviving virtue ethics - AI-based tools for facilitating small, high-trust, high-accountability groups. Even if we can’t have freedom of association or reliable arbitration via legal or corporate mechanisms, perhaps we can still have it via social mechanisms (especially as more and more people become functionally post-economic) - better therapeutic interventions, especially oriented to resolving fear of death
But I spend most of my time trying to figure out the formal theory that encodes these intuitions—in which agents are understood in terms of goals (in the predictive processing sense) and boundaries rather than utility functions and credences. That feels upstream of a lot of other stuff. More here, though it’s a bit out of date.
Edited to add: I am surprised both by the extent of disagree-voting (-38 as of writing this), and by the extent to which this is decoupled from karma (23 as of writing this). This is an impressive level of decoupling. Given that the gap between my views and most LWers is much bigger than I thought, I’ll have a think about how to better convey my perspective in a way that makes cruxes clearer. Since many LWers believe in something like Eliezer’s civilizational inadequacy thesis, though, I’m curious about the best explanations other people have for why our current civilization is “inadequate”.
This class gains status by signaling commitment to luxury beliefs. Since more absurd beliefs are more costly-to-fake signals, the resulting ideology is actively perverse (i.e. supports whatever is least aligned with their stated core values, like Hamas).
Without commenting on your broader point, I think you believe elites support Hamas because the conservative Twitter feed is presenting you/your circle tailored ragebait, not because elites invert their own utility functions.
That’s a mechanism by which I might overestimate the support for Hamas. But the thing I’m trying to explain is the overall alignment between leftists and Hamas, which is not just a twitter bubble thing (e.g. see university encampments).
More generally, leftists profess many values which are upheld the most by western civilization (e.g. support for sexual freedom, women’s rights, anti-racism, etc). But then in conflicts they often side specifically against western civilization. This seems like a straightforward example of pessimization.
More generally, leftists profess many values which are upheld the most by western civilization (e.g. support for sexual freedom, women’s rights, anti-racism, etc). But then in conflicts they often side specifically against western civilization. This seems like a straightforward example of pessimization.
Not at all. The trend is that in any given context, American leftists tend to support the ‘weaker’ group against the stronger group, regardless of the merits of the individual cases. They have a world model that says that that most social problems come from “big” people hurting “little” people, and believe the focus of their politics should be remedying this. In the case of Israel-Palestine, Israel and the United States are much more militarily and economically powerful than Gaza, so ceteris paribus[1] they side with Gaza, just as they side with women, ethnic minorities, the poor, etc. You may disagree with this behavior but it’s fairly consistent.
By contrast, the argument that Israel is a bastion of western values and therefore leftists should support its war against a smaller neighbor is kind of abstract. The immediate outcome of Israel winning the war is just that Israel gets stronger, not that women in Gaza become more free. There’s also a thing there about Gazans being brown and Israelis not, etc...
None of this has anything to do with liberals pessimizing their own values, and it feels like you must have a blind spot somewhere if you’re reaching for that explanation when there’s a much simpler and more obvious one readily available.
Liberals’ protests in support of Palestine are additionally amplified as a result of a media diet that drip feeds them an artificially strong amount of Israeli war crimes, instead of western liberal hysteria.
As per my post on underdog bias, the question of which group is actually weaker and which group is stronger is often a pretty subjective call. I even discuss in the post the example of Israel, where you could see it as the “stronger” group (vs Palestine in particular) or the “weaker” group (vs all the Muslim countries surrounding it).
There are plenty of cases where leftists support the stronger group against the weaker group—most notably Soviet and Chinese repression of dissidents and minorities. E.g. it took Solzhenitsyn publishing Gulag Archipelago to finally get leftists (even fairly “mainstream” leftists) to stop lionizing the USSR.
Even insofar as leftists tend to support the weaker group, there are almost no cases where they do so as strongly as in Israel vs Palestine. So there’s still something important to be explained here even accepting your claims.
This characterizes leftists sufficiently dishonestly that I think you’ve gotten mindkilled by politics. As people keep removing my (entirely accurate and if anything understated) soldier-mindset reacts, I will strong-downvote instead :)
Wanted to revisit this because it seemed like one of the points where people most strongly disagreed with me. I’m trying to figure out a crux here. One might be something like: how widespread were celebrations of the 10⁄7 attacks amongst prominent leftists (and especially the student groups that later organized encampments)? I could imagine updating that there were only a handful of cases that disproportionately blew up, which would make me take back or at least caveat the “supports Hamas” thing.
If you on the other hand found that there were many cases where prominent leftists and encampment organizers actively celebrated the 10⁄7 attacks, would you (@dirk or @lc) then agree that “supports Hamas” is a reasonable summary?
I am not one of the tagged people but I certainly would not so agree. One reason I would not so agree is because I have talked to leftist people (prominence debatable) who celebrated the 10⁄7 attacks, and when I asked them whether they support Hamas, they were coherently able to answer “no, but I support armed resistance against Israel and don’t generally condemn actions that fall in that category, even when I don’t approve of or condone the group organizing those actions generally.” One way to know what people believe and support is to ask them. (Of course, I don’t think this is a morally acceptable position either, and conversation ensued! But it’s clearly not “supporting Hamas” in any sense that can support your original claims.)
My social circles also include many leftists, including student organizers and somewhat well-known online figures, so I separately suspect that you’re vastly overestimating the proportion of self-identified leftists who celebrated the attacks in any meaningful sense, but that’s probably not the crux here.
I think you’re confusing levels of behavior, here. It may be that their net effect is to support Hamas, but that they don’t intend this, and that their actual intent does not make the mistake you’re (at least if I read correctly) attributing to intent here. I do think they end up on net having intentions that make them vulnerable to being manipulated by those in power in adversary groups, since their intent is to support the weak among any group. In particular, they typically are thinking in different group selectors than you seem to assign here; of the people I’d guess you mean, in my interactions with them, they don’t seem to profess support for Hamas, and in fact explicitly say they’d like to support palestinians without supporting hamas.
But, I strongly agree that leftists tend to pessimize their values on net, and that that is one of the biggest issues with leftist approaches to the world. So whether we disagree depends on what level we’re looking at.
Your reasoning seems like it would be improved by finding people who seem to exhibit the belief you suspect exists and want to model, and interviewing them without letting your opinions leak, to try to get a map of their actual opinions; before making this comment I spent some time brainstorming to find a way to do that fast, and didn’t come up with one, so perhaps it makes sense to not take this suggestion, but I maintain that it would be useful if practical. As a stopgap, going to the main locations that a group discuss things online can be useful, keeping in mind that then one will have uncertainty like the kind I have about you: you seem overall to be a good person as far as I’ve been able to tell so far, but you interact enough with people whose personal policies in practice support things that seem to me like they’re at imminent risk of causing human-induced catastrophic outcomes for many of the humans in the world that it’s unclear to me what your intentions are.
Without commenting on the specifics, I agree with a lot of the gestalt here as a description of how things evolved historically, but I think that’s not really the right lens to understand the problem.
My current best one-sentence understanding: the richer humans get, the more social reality can diverge from physical reality, and therefore the more resources can be captured by parasitic egregores/memes/institutions/ideologies/interest-groups/etc. Physical reality provides constraints and feedback which limit the propagation of such parasites, but wealth makes the constraints less binding and therefore makes the feedback weaker.
The main reason I disagree with both this comment and the OP is that you both have the underlying assumption that we are in a nadir (local nadir?) of connectedness-with-reality, whereas from my read of history I see no evidence of this, and indeed plenty of evidence against.
People used to be confused about all sorts of things, including, but not limited to, the supernatural, the causes of disease, causality itself, the capabilities of women, whether children can have conscious experiences, and so forth.
I think we’ve gotten more reasonable about almost everything, with a few minor exceptions that people seem to like highlighting (I assume in part because they’re so rare).
The past is a foreign place, and mostly not a pleasant one.
I totally buy that peoples’ verbal models aren’t at a local nadir of connectedness-to-reality. The thing which seems increasingly disconnected from reality is more like metis, peoples’ day-to-day behavior and intuitive knowledge, institutional knowledge and skills, personal identity and goals, that sort of thing.
I’m notably not thinking here primarily about examples like e.g. heritability of IQ becoming politicized; that’s a verbal model, and I do think that verbal models have mostly become more reasonable modulo a few exceptions which people highlight.
I used to agree with your understanding but I am now more skeptical. For example, here’s a story that says the opposite:
The poorer humans are, the more vulnerable each human is to the group consensus. People who disagreed with groups could in the past easily be assaulted by mobs, or harassed in a way that led them to literally starvation-level wealth. Nowadays, though, even victims of extreme ‘cancel culture’ don’t face such risks, because society is wealthy enough that you can do things like move to a new city to avoid mobs, or get charities to feed and clothe you even if you lose your job.
Also it’s much harder to design parasitic egregores now than it used to be, because our science is much better and so we know many more facts, which makes it harder for egregores to lie.
I’m not saying my story is true, but it does highlight that the load-bearing question is actually something like “how does the offense-defense balance against parasitic egregores scale with wealth?” Why don’t we live in a world where wealth can buy a society defenses against such egregores?
Or maybe we do live in such a world, and we are just failing to buy those defenses. That seems like a really dumb situation to be in, but I think my post is broadly describing how it might arise.
Why don’t we live in a world where wealth can buy a society defenses against such egregores?
I would point to the non-experts can’t distinguish true from fake experts problem. That does seem to be a central phenomenon which most parasitic egregores exploit. More generally, as wealth becomes more abundant (and therefore lots of constraints become more slack), inability to get grounded feedback becomes a more taut constraint.
That said… do you remember any particular evidence or argument which led you toward the story at top of thread (as opposed to away from your previous understanding)?
Can you explain more your affinity for virtue ethics, e.g., was there a golden age in history, that you read about, where a group of people ran on virtue ethics and it worked out really well? I’m trying to understand why you seem to like it a lot more than I do.
Re government debt, I think that is actually driven more by increasing demand for a “risk-free” asset, with the supply going up more or less passively (what politician is going to refuse to increase debt and spending, as long as people are willing to keep buying it at a low interest rate). And from this perspective it’s not really a problem except for everyone getting used to the higher spending when some of the processes increasing the demand for government debt might only be temporary.
AI written explanation of how financialization causes increased demand for government debt
Financialization isn’t a vague blob; it’s a set of specific, concrete processes, each of which acts like a powerful vacuum cleaner sucking up government debt.
Let’s trace four of the most important mechanisms in detail.
1. The Derivatives Market: The Collateral Multiplier
Derivatives (options, futures, swaps) are essentially financial side-bets on the movement of an underlying asset. The total “notional” value of these bets is in the hundreds of trillions, dwarfing the real economy.
The Problem: If you make a bet with someone, you need to ensure they can pay you if you win. To solve this, both parties post collateral (or “margin”), which is a high-quality asset held by a third party (a clearinghouse). If someone defaults, their collateral is seized.
The Specific Mechanism: What is the best possible collateral? An asset that is universally trusted, easy to price, and can be sold instantly for cash. This is, by definition, a government bond. It is the gold standard of collateral.
How it Drives Demand: The growth of the derivatives market creates a leveraged demand for collateral. A single real-world asset (like a barrel of oil) can have dozens of derivative contracts layered on top of it. Each layer of betting requires a new layer of collateral to secure it. As the volume and complexity of financial trading grows, the demand for pristine collateral to backstop all these bets grows exponentially. This is a huge, structural source of demand that is completely detached from the need to fund real-world projects.
Analogy: A giant, global casino. The more tables and higher-stakes games the casino runs (financialization), the more high-quality security chips (government bonds) it needs to hold in its vault to ensure all winnings can be paid out.
2. Banking Regulation: The Regulatory Mandate for Safety
After the 2008 financial crisis, global regulators (through frameworks like Basel III) sought to make banks safer. They did this by forcing them to hold more “safe stuff” against their risky assets.
The Problem: Banks make money by taking short-term deposits and making long-term, risky loans. This makes them inherently fragile.
The Specific Mechanism: Regulations created the concept of High-Quality Liquid Assets (HQLA). Banks are legally required to hold a certain amount of HQLA that they could sell instantly to cover their obligations in a crisis. The regulations are very specific about what counts as HQLA. The highest tier (Level 1 HQLA), which has no restrictions, is almost exclusively comprised of cash and government bonds.
How it Drives Demand: This creates a legally mandated, non-negotiable demand for government debt. For a bank to grow its business (i.e., make more loans), it must simultaneously purchase more government bonds to satisfy its HQLA requirements. This directly links the growth of private credit in the economy to a mandatory increase in the demand for public debt.
Analogy: A building code for banks. The regulators say, “For every floor of risky office space you build (loans), you must add a corresponding amount of steel-reinforced concrete to the foundation (government bonds).” To build a taller skyscraper, you have no choice but to buy more concrete.
3. The Asset Management Industry: The Rise of Liability-Driven Investing (LDI)
The pool of professionally managed money (pensions, insurance funds, endowments) has exploded. These institutions have very specific, long-term promises to keep.
The Problem: A pension fund needs to be able to pay a 65-year-old a fixed income for the next 30 years. They cannot rely on the volatile stock market for this guaranteed cash flow.
The Specific Mechanism: This led to the strategy of Liability-Driven Investing (LDI). The goal is to own assets whose cash flows perfectly match your future liabilities. A 30-year government bond, which pays a fixed coupon every six months and repays principal in 30 years, is the perfect instrument for this. It is a contractual promise of cash flow that can be precisely matched against the contractual promise to a retiree.
How it Drives Demand: As the global population ages and the pool of retirement savings grows, the total value of these long-term liabilities skyrockets. This creates a massive, structural, and relatively price-insensitive demand for long-duration government bonds from the largest pools of capital in the world. They aren’t buying them for speculation; they are buying them to defease their promises.
Analogy: A pre-order system for future cash. An insurance company is like a business that has accepted millions of pre-orders for cash to be delivered in 20, 30, and 40 years. To guarantee they can fulfill those orders, they go to the most reliable supplier (the government) and place their own pre-orders for cash (by buying bonds) that will arrive on the exact same dates.
4. The Globalization of Finance: The Search for a Universal Safe Haven
Finance is no longer national; it is a single, interconnected global system. This system requires a neutral, trusted asset for settling international balances and storing wealth.
The Problem: A Chinese exporter earns dollars, or a Saudi sovereign wealth fund earns euros. Where do they store this foreign currency wealth safely and in a liquid form? They cannot hold billions in a retail bank account, and they may not want the risk of corporate stocks.
The Specific Mechanism: The US Treasury bond has become the de facto global reserve asset. It is the ultimate safe haven for foreign central banks, corporations, and investors. Its liquidity and the military/political backing of the US government make it the world’s default savings vehicle.
How it Drives Demand: Every time global trade grows, it creates larger trade surpluses in countries like China, Japan, and Germany. These surpluses are recycled into US Treasury bonds. Every time there is a global crisis (a European debt crisis, an emerging market collapse), capital flees from the periphery to the perceived safety of the core, which means a rush to buy US government debt. This makes the demand for Treasuries reflexive: the more unstable the world gets, the higher the demand for them becomes.
An analogy I like is with China’s Land Finance (土地财政), where the government funded a large part of its spending by continuously selling urban land to real estate developers to build apartments and offices on, which was fine as long as urbanization was ongoing but is now causing problems as that process slows down (along with a bunch of other issues/complications). I think of government debt as a similarly useful resource or asset, that in part enables more complex financial products to be built on top, but may cause a problem one day if demand for it slows down.
ETA: To make my point another way, I think the modern monetary system (with a mix of various money and money-like assets serving somewhat different purposes, including fiat money, regulated bank deposits, government debt) has its own internal logic, and while distortions exist, they are inevitable under any system (only second-best solutions are possible, due to bounded rationality and principal-agent problems). If you want to criticize it I think you have to go beyond “debt that will never be repaid” (which sounds like you’re trying to import intuitions for household/interpersonal finances, where it’s clearly bad to never pay one’s debts, to a very different situation), and talk about what specific distortions you’re worried about, how the alternative is actually better (taking into account its own distortions), and/or how/why the system is causing erosion of virtue ethics.
...if the west (and the US in particular) had maintained impartial rule of law and constitutional freedoms.
The US did not have impartial rule of law in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Notably, black Americans in the south were regularly impressed into forced labor, often for the rest of their lives, on the basis of flimsy or even non-existent legal pretext.
(A representative but concocted example: the local sheirf arrests a black man who’s walking through town on charges of “vagrancy”. The man is found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. The sheriff sells the “contact” for hard labor to a local industrialist who owns a mine. (The sherif and the industrialist are buddies, and have done versions of this deal many times before). The man is set to work the mine for the period of his sentence. When he’s near the end of his sentence, he’s accused of some minor infraction as a pretext to add more years to his sentence (if anyone bothers to keep track of when his sentence is served at all.)
What makes you think that impartial rule of law decayed since WWII instead of generally (though not evenly) improving?
That’s a fair point; however, I don’t think it undermines my overall claims very much. I think the lack of rule of law for black Americans was bad in a comparable way to how the lack of rule of law for various European colonies was bad. That is, while it was bad for the people who didn’t get rule of law, they were a separate enough category that this mostly didn’t “leak into” undermining the legal mechanisms that helped their societies become productive and functional in the first place.
That is, while it was bad for the people who didn’t get rule of law, they were a separate enough category that this mostly didn’t “leak into” undermining the legal mechanisms that helped their societies become productive and functional in the first place.
I’m speaking speculatively here, but I don’t know that it didn’t leak out and undermine the mechanism that supported productive and functional societies. The sophisticated SJW in me suggests that this is part of what caused the eventual (though not yet complete) erosion of those mechanisms.
It seems like if you have “rule of law” that isn’t evenly distributed, actually what you have is collusion by one class of people to maintain a set of privileges at the expense of another class of people, where one of the privileges is a sand-boxed set of norms that govern dealings within the privileged class, but with the pretense that the norms are universal.
This kind of pretense seems like it could be corrosive: people can see that the norms that society proclaims as universal actually aren’t. This reinforces a a sense that the norms aren’t real at all (or at least) a justified sense that the ideals that underly those norms are mostly rationalizations papering over the collusion of the privileged class.
eg when it looks like “capitalism” and “democracy” are scams supporting “white supremacy”, you grow disenchanted with capitalism and democracy, and stop doing the work to maintain the incomplete versions of those social mechanisms that were previously doing work in your society?
This makes no mention of the repeal of the fairness doctrine nor the shift in financial model for major newspapers. The 1987 abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine led very directly to Rush Limbaugh gaining a national political audience.
The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints.[1] In 1987, the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine,[2] prompting some to urge its reintroduction through either Commission policy or congressional legislation.[3] The FCC removed the rule that implemented the policy from the Federal Register in August 2011.[4]
Rush Limbaugh used to be a regular music DJ in the 1970s. His political talk show was distributed nationally in 1988, soon after the cessation of Fairness Doctrine support by the Reagan administration. Carl McIntire was the Rush Limbaugh (maybe a little more Glenn Beck) of the 1960s and had his radio talk show shut down by the Fairness Doctrine after years of litigation. The legal challenges the Fairness Doctrine presented to McIntire prevented imitators, at least until the abolishment paved the way for Limbaugh, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, etc.
But over the last ten years the division has accelerated largely due to left outlets adopting a similar bias after switching financial models in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Former editorial page editor for the NYT James Bennet explains the shift here:
It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism. I recall his astonishment, fairly early in the Trump administration, after Times reporters conducted an interview with Trump. Subscribers were angry about the questions the Times had asked. It was as if they’d only be satisfied, Baquet said, if the reporters leaped across the desk and tried to wring the president’s neck. The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.
This Tablet article by Zach Goldberg documents statistical evidence of a cultural shift at some point near the middle of the previous decade. Usage of terms related to racism in major newspapers increased as much as 1500% in this period.
Starting well before Donald Trump’s rise to power, while President Obama was still in office, terms like “microaggression” and “white privilege” were picked up by liberal journalists. These terms went from being obscure fragments of academic jargon to commonplace journalistic language in only a few years—a process that I document here in detail. During this same period, while exotic new phrases were entering the discourse, universally recognizable words like “racism” were being radically redefined. Along with the new language came ideas and beliefs animating a new moral-political framework to apply to public life and American society.
Consider the graph below, which displays the usage of the terms “racist(s)” and “racism” as a percentage of all words in four of the nation’s largest newspapers from (depending on the publication) 1970 through 2019.
To be honest, this post approaches a level of disjointedness from reality-as-I-understand-it that I fear I cannot accurately respond to it in a way that would satisfy the author.[1] However, if I don’t give some response, I suspect that it will join a growing cultural current within LessWrong which involves an intellectualised rationalisation of ethnonationalism, hygiene-oriented eugenics, oligarchy[2], and implicit or explicit support of political action and political violence for these ends. If this current becomes normalised (and it has, frankly, always been present in the rationalist sphere), it makes TESCREAL-style categorisations of the rationalist/EA/AI safety intellectual sphere bascially correct. Therefore, I want to commit to voicing my objection to this line of argument where I see it. There are parts of me that feel strongly against doing this. There is no glory to be gained in political arguments online. However, there is the possibility of avoiding shame, which as a virtue ethicist I’m sure the author will understand.
On the question of inherent racial or ethnic attributes, I suspect that I will not be able to settle the argument “on the facts”, given how long the online debate has been waged. Therefore I will cede as much as he wishes to stake “on the facts”. Despite ceding this ground, I still maintain my fundamental belief that all human beings (and, increasingly I would argue, all life) are worthy of a deep and sincerely-held respect, regardless of any intellectual or physical discrepancies between them. This is not a utilitarian argument, but a deontological or virtue-oriented one, where the basis is one of universal love and compassion. No one should be deprived of a socially and physically healthy standard of living because of the circumstances of their birth or genetics. Nor are people’s wants and needs more or less legitimate due to their intelligence, culture, belief or any other factor.
The arguments about inherent and unassailable differences between cultures presuppose what they aim to prove. They assert that, if culture is taken as an immutable, static prior that cannot be changed without being “diluted” or even “destroyed”, that cultures from different parts of the world are incompatible. Well, yes, if you presuppose that change is death, then change cannot happen, or else death follows. This attitude goes against any reasonable study of the past and of human society. So many of the words and ideas that are powering this conversation and this forum: “culture”, “virtue”, “algorithm”, even fundamental ideas like “zero”—are borrowed and integrated from other cultures. I will remind you again that it was not so long ago that, for example, French culture was considered utterly incompatible with or simply inferior to English culture, just as American culture was to British culture, as Polish culture was to American culture, or as Danish culture was to Swedish culture. So many differences that were once a matter of life and death quietly disappeared once the cultural battle lines shifted. We humans and all life forms in this universe are united by common world-models borne from within-lifetime observation of the world and bound by common laws of physics and information. Yes, shocks can happen from sudden changes in demographics. Yes, it is possible for tensions to arise and for relative needs between groups to be unmet, and therefore for conflict between groups to grow. But the missing mood is that of sorrow, because it is possible to do better. If it is not possible to do better...
The natural result of talk of immutable differences is life-or-death stakes. If they are different and irreconcilable to us, when we come into conflict with them we must destroy them, or otherwise secure some total strategic advantage. After all, this is game-theoretic conflict now, where we know that the outcome is explicitly zero-sum. Both parties cannot be convinced to cooperate and have incompatible terminal utility functions. The Nash equilibrium then is to defect.
And the longer they live and grow strong, the greater the threat is to us. For if in the future they secure some total strategic advantage, they would do the rational thing and wipe us out, seizing all future resources for themselves. I do not seek to exaggerate when I say that this is the argument that leads to final solutions and wars of hygiene. This is the Melian argument, brought to modern day geopolitics.
[...] and some treachery taking place inside, the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.
Thankfully, I believe that it is, in fact, possible to do better. That we have not found better coordination mechanisms is an engineering and social construction problem, not a problem of the failure to enact sufficiently powerful boundaries. Insofar as toxic egalitarianism and the managerial revolution have failed, their failures come from not understanding how to successfully coordinate under increasingly complex social and technical conditions, not from any inherent disdain of virtue or race to adopt increasingly ludicrous positions.
It is true, managing a global civilisation of 8.2 billion people is hard. But the author’s “solutions” of ethnic segregation and socially-enforced virtue ethics enforced by inter-group mutual distrust come from historical societies where the effective politically-active population is measured (at most) in the thousands to hundreds of thousands, and those societies were all more or less self-sufficient and autarkic. For better or for worse, we live in a society with globally connected dependencies in matters of trade, manufacturing, business, and culture. Our scientific, technological, and medical progress is dependent on research and collaboration that stretches across borders. We are already deeply reliant on massive AI systems (incl. Google and Facebook) to manage our civilisational information throughput, and we are becoming more and more tightly integrated as supply chains lengthen and cross-cultural relationships deepen. At the same time, the threats we face of advanced AI systems, global thermonuclear war, pandemics, climate change etc. also do not confine themselves to a single society or region. There is no easy way back to the old system of walls and borders. In light of this I can see no good argument for bringing back the demons of the last century today.
For the most obvious example, for the life of me I cannot understand how leaving the gold standard makes a culture less appreciative of any kind of moral virtue, unless you equate two very different senses of the word “value”.
E.g. under the name of e.g. “rule by the most qualified” and “rule by the most virtuous”. The line of argument descends through Moldbug, who has since become more happy to openly support fascism and ad-hoc oligarchy under Trump post-2024.
If this current becomes normalised (and it has, frankly, always been present in the rationalist sphere), it makes TESCREAL-style categorisations of the rationalist/EA/AI safety intellectual sphere bascially correct.
What? It seems like TESCREAL is clearly a natural cluster (modulo I don’t know any examples of the “C”), and whether takes like this are pervasive amongst rationalists doesn’t bare on whether it’s a good categorization?
I’m not sure how this is a response to the OP. It sounds basically right to me (and I imagine that Richard would agree with it as well, though he can speak for himself), but it seems like almost entirely a non sequitur to the claims made?
the author’s “solutions” of ethnic segregation and socially-enforced virtue ethics enforced by inter-group mutual distrust
This text doesn’t even mention ethnic segregation as a solution? It does promote virtue ethics as an alternative moral frame to utilitarianism, but it says nothing about “enforced[ing] by inter-group mutual distrust”.
I don’t doubt that you’re pushing back against a real cultural force, but it doesn’t look to me to actually be represented in this short-form, except (at best) as an implication.
For the most obvious example, for the life of me I cannot understand how leaving the gold standard makes a culture less appreciative of any kind of moral virtue, unless you equate two very different senses of the word “value”.
Might reply to the rest later but just to respond to what you call “the most obvious example”: consider a company which has a difficult time evaluating how well its employees are performing (i.e. most of them). Some employees will work hard even when they won’t directly be rewarded for that, because they consider it virtuous to do so. However, if you then add to their team a bunch of other people who are rewarded for slacking off, the hard-working employees may become demotivated and feel like they’re chumps for even trying to be virtuous.
The extent to which modern governments hand out money causes a similar effect across western societies (edited: for example, if many people around you are receiving welfare, then working hard yourself is less motivating). They would not be as able to do this as much if their currencies were still on the gold standard, because it would be more obvious that they are insolvent.
The extent to which modern governments hand out money causes a similar effect across western societies. They would not be as able to do this as much if their currencies were still on the gold standard, because it would be more obvious that they are insolvent.
modern governments
western societies
gold standard
insolvent
I’m afraid, if you’re actually trying to advance an argument, you’re going to need to be slightly more specific. Which government, in which society? Perhaps you will say, “all of the western governments”. Very well. Then which gold standard? I will remind you that “western societies” including Germany, the UK, and the US exited and entered the “gold standard”, or swapped out various forms of “gold standard”, all throughout the 20th century. Was Britain in 1931 or Germany in 1914 lacking in valor? I’m by no means an economic historian, and this is just wikipedia talking.
And even when countries obeyed the “gold standard”, policies varied strongly between regions, including how much currency could be redeemed for how much gold, whether citizens could redeem gold directly, the status of gold as a commodity, the trade of gold between countries etc. In what combination of policies can we find your notion of “honest work for honest pay”? Does virtue’s just reward include the ability to hold gold sovereigns as private property to be redeemed at any time at a national bank, or to exchange gold bullion across national borders? If so, at what exchange rates?
And what does “insolvent” mean? After world war II the world’s currencies were arranged such that the US dollar was the world’s reserve currency as part of the Bretton Woods agreement. The US obtained an exorbitant privilege, in that it could print paper and get money while other countries needed to produce goods or services. Was this the point at which the US became, as you say, “insolvent”? Yet it was the paramount superpower at the time, and the value of its currency was (supposedly) backed by gold—until it decided to break from the gold standard under Nixon and still more or less retained that privilege. But was America’s massive spending during the post world war II period and the Cold War (all powered directly or indirectly by this exorbitant privilege) a sign of degeneracy and decay? Surely not.
Okay, let us limit ourselves to the post-cold war, post-bretton woods period. To identify exactly where you think this massive amount of spending rewarding the non-virtuous is going, you’re going to need to leave the realm of abstract metaphor and actually state what you think your virtues are. Because the way I see it, in America social programs and government pensions are both now and in the past consistently some of the largest sources of federal spending. This is, as I understand it, also true in most European nations. Perhaps the “other people who are rewarded for slacking off” you are referring to are the poor, the sick, the young, and the elderly? In that case you should say so directly.
There are so many more issues missing from your view of labour, economics, virtue, and social organisation that I would be doing most theories a disservice to call it a theory. It is telling that, for example, you make no mention of oil in your comment. Oil a resource which has become so vital to the value of currency between nations that the US dollar is sometimes referred to as the petrodollar (since it is the international currency by which oil is priced). And if the societies of today are truly “insolvent”, I suspect that you will find it hard to find historical examples of “solvent” societies with which to compare them. National banks, international debt, and modern nation states as you would recognise them did not truly arise until maybe the 19th century. Before that, the fundamental notion of currency and obligation was entirely different in Europe, since most people lived in a feudal system. Serfs and people bonded to the land paid taxes not in gold but in goods, and did not receive payment for their work in currency either. We are living in possibly the first time in history that arguments about national solvency can be made, and economic data on this issue doesn’t really go back more than a century at best.
But there is a deeper issue at stake here. Why am I hounding you so much on these issues? From where do I get my sudden insistence on exactitude and rigour? After all, we should beware isolated demands for rigour. However, you are not raising these ideas as independent thoughts, but as a cluster. A cluster which points to a poorly defined yet pervasive moral and social degeneracy in modern society. A cluster which uses a vision of historic and traditional virtue as a high ideal, but cannot quite articulate what exact virtues it is chasing after. A cluster that makes vague and incoherent attempts to summarise and criticise modern institutions and economic systems. A cluster that invokes an explicitly racially and ethnically coded “people” as its core group, to be defended from “the others”, groups who are both culturally incompatible and an existential threat if they are allowed to integrate. A cluster that denigrates public servants, university intellectuals, and cultural elites as hopelessly perverse and degenerate in their cosmopolitanism. A cluster that frames the fear of difference as wise and justified. Yes, I will use that word.
I will repeat again, at the risk of sounding a bit like a broken record, that every time ethnonationalism is embraced the groups that are othered become framed as an existential threat to the majority. Calls for forcible relocation and elimination of the other in the name of the health and hygiene of the community become unavoidable. This is a pattern that worked its way through Europe during the two world wars, through the Partition of India and the later rise of the BJP, through the Rwandan and Rohingya Genocides, and through the Middle East today. The situation in Europe and America is already volatile. You are not being clever when you fan the flames. You are not so in control of the narrative that you can add just that touch of ethnic pride back into the meme pool to precisely steer society to an optimal maxima. People will get hurt, lose their homes and families, and most likely die.
Thanks for the extensive comment. I’m not sure it’s productive to debate this much on the object level. The main thing I want to highlight is that this is a very good example of how the taboo that I discussed above operates.
On most issues, people (and especially LWers) are generally open to thinking about the benefits and costs of each stance, since tradeoffs are real.
However, in the case of ethnonationalism, even discussing the taboo on it (without explicitly advocating for it) was enough to trigger a kind of zero-tolerance attitude in your comment.
This is all the more striking because the main historical opponent of ethnonationalist regimes was globalist communism, which also led to large-scale atrocities. Yet when people defend a “socialist” or “egalitarian” cluster of ideas, that doesn’t lead to anywhere near this level of visceral response.
My main bid here is for readers to notice that there is a striking asymmetry in how we think about and discuss 20th century history, which is best explained via the thing I hypothesized above: a strong taboo on ethnonationalism in the wake of WW2, which has then distorted our ability to think about many other issues.
It seems to me that Richard isn’t trying to bring back ethnonationalism, or even trying to “add just that touch of ethnic pride back into the meme pool”, but just trying to diagnose “how the western world got so dysfunctional”. If ethnonationalism and the taboo against ethnonationalism are both bad (as an ethnic minority I’m personally pretty scared of the former), then maybe we should get rid of the taboo and defend against ethnonationalism by other means, similar how there is little to no taboo against communism[1] but it hasn’t come close to taking power or reapproaching its historical high water mark in the west.
If you doubt this, there’s an advisor to my local school district who is a self-avowed Marxist and professor of education at the state university, and writes book reviews like this one: «For decades the educational Left and critical pedagogues have run away from Marxism, socialism, and communism, all too often based on faulty understandings and falling prey to the deep-seated anti-communism in the academy. In History and Education Curry Stephenson Malott pushes back against this trend by offering us deeply Marxist thinking about the circulation of capital, socialist states, the connectivity of Marxist anti-capitalism, and a politics of race and education. In the process Malott points toward the role of education in challenging us all to become abolitionists of global capitalism.» (Wayne Au, Associate Professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell; Editor of the social justice teaching magazine Rethinking Schools; Co-editor of Mapping Corporate Education Reform: Power and Policies Networks in the Neoliberal State)
For the sake of transparency, while in this post I’m mostly trying to identify a diagnosis, in the longer term I expect to try to do political advocacy as well. And it’s reasonable to expect that people like me who are willing to break the taboo for the purposes of diagnosis will be more sympathetic to ethnonationalism in their advocacy than people who aren’t. For example, I’ve previously argued on twitter that South Africa should have split into two roughly-ethnonationalist states in the 90s, instead of doing what they actually did.
However, I expect that the best ways of fixing western countries won’t involve very much ethnonationalism by historical standards, because it’s a very blunt tool. Also, I suspect that breaking the taboo now will actually lead to less ethnonationalism in the long term. For example, even a little bit more ethnonationalism would plausibly have made European immigration policies much less insane over the last few decades, which would then have prevented a lot of the political polarization we’re seeing today.
in the longer term I expect to try to do political advocacy as well
I find this idea particularly fraught. I already find it somewhat difficult to engage on this site due to the contentious theories some members hold, and I echo testingthewater’s warning against the trap of reopening these old controversies. You’re trying to thread a really fine needle between “meaningfully advocate change” and “open all possible debates” that I don’t think is feasible.
The site is currently watching a major push from Yudkowsky and Soares’ book launch towards a broad coalition for an AI pause. It really only takes a couple major incidents of connecting the idea to ethnonationalism, scientific racism and/or dictatorship for the targets of your advocacy to turn away.
I’m not going to suggest you stay on-message (lw is way too “truth-seeking” for that to reach anyone), but you should carefully consider the ways in which your future goals conflict.
I could imagine a world where discussing it is not something I would see as critically unwelcome, but I would still want to maintain part of the mechanism that implements the taboo, which is why I made the comments I did: being able to come to agreement that there are outcomes which are good and bad, such as the previous famous outcomes of ethnonationalism. I suspect that I’ve interpreted you to be saying that those previous outcomes were bad (“While perhaps at first this taboo was valuable”) but it’s not as reliable as the taboo implementation I carry would prefer.
If your view is that virtues are required to be independent of outcomes, in that eg a virtue whose adoption would predictably lead to mass death [edit to finish phrase: would still be a virtue if virtuous by its own merits], then I don’t think they can be truly called virtuous; but if your view is that we can discuss some features of outcomes that make an outcome good or bad, then I would want to discuss what virtues can lead us towards better outcomes by that standard. virtue utilitarianism, if you will, rather than rule utilitarianism[1]; the way I heard virtues described was that a virtue is a local aspiration, a non-totalizing learning process. If there are true things underneath these taboos, and those taboos were preventing those true things from being used to produce outcomes I find abhorrent, then if we are to remove the taboo, I wish to first discuss how we will maintain avoidance of those outcomes I see as bad.
At the same time, I recognize that some taboos that one might imagine were also protecting against bad things have already slipped, and so I would also suggest that we discuss this same thing about those topics.
For example, I think that an outcome I prefer is that people have freedom of association, that the groups be able to mingle non-destructively to a significant degree. A “friendly, non-destructive ethnonationalism” that is prosocial towards nearby ethnonational groups is something I could imagine being a worthy success, though it would strike me as odd, and I would hope it would not be the only kind of state that exists, because I would find it boring.
Also, I would find it odd if ethnonationalism is the only kind of nationalism worth considering, under the assumption that we’re seeking things that can be terminally-valued by a median progressive human.
I doubt that, by default, nationalism is less destructive than it was in the past. And so if we are to remove this taboo, I’d want to establish a way to enter into agreement with a person who will potentially discuss it that we agree on a particular value; not all values, not on everything. but a step towards fusing into a single agent within the particular topic of “do we want the outcomes that were previously the result of nationalism”. Because I don’t think we do, and I hope you also do not; and yet, it may very well be that the standard way of coming to agreement on this topic in current progressive society is one that prevents understanding necessary to achieve avoidance of the outcomes of other bad societal structures, such as a fully centralized command system[2] or a supercritical group[3].
I currently doubt that ethno- or national- are the grouping types that work best, and if you would like to convince me, I would want to understand what “best” is to you. If you will not, then I will be hesitant to further participate in reducing the taboo.
Re: why so much disagreement: because I think you’re trying to remove a taboo that should be there, and so far my impression is that when pressed to explain why it would be good to remove, you retreat to “well, it’s different from other levels of taboo”. My first instinct on realizing that is an obviously-irrational urge to taboo those as well—I don’t think that’s an effective move, so I wrote this comment instead.
@testingthewaters I think you’re jumping to conclusions a bit too quickly about what Richard thinks. Your interpretation is not clearly forbidden but jumping to conclusions in the way you do seems to me to be an error that prevents us from seeking outcomes that I would see as good, because you’re risking overclassifying people as malicious. I don’t think you’d need to do many more rounds of interaction before concluding you’ve identified what you see as malice, in order for the increased carefulness to increase your ability to cooperate with people you don’t fully agree with on important topics.
as you can see, I’m nowhere near being convinced to let go of “outer utilitarianism”, but could easily be convinced to accept “inner virtue ethicism” [edit: since writing this I’ve remembered that you didn’t, as of last discussion, object to processes that compare and rate according to preference, just that those processes may not fit into the type signature of utility functions]
I currently believe this is primarily seen in online discussions and in-person mobs, and I think what testingthewaters was saying feels to me like an instance of attempted irrational superreplicator instantiation, due to not first discussing whether the behavior testingthewaters demands—tabooing the topic—would be according to what you wish to be. However, the pattern you identified as mob dynamics in your talk isn’t obviously the same thing.
I still maintain my fundamental belief that all human beings (and, increasingly I would argue, all life) are worthy of a deep and sincerely-held respect, regardless of any intellectual or physical discrepancies between them.
I think the problem is that a part of “respecting” people is letting them choose things for themselves, and in a democratic society also letting them choose things for others.
I admit I do have a problem respecting many people in this specific way. Not sure what to do about it though.
Despite ceding this ground, I still maintain my fundamental belief that all human beings (and, increasingly I would argue, all life) are worthy of a deep and sincerely-held respect, regardless of any intellectual or physical discrepancies between them. This is not a utilitarian argument, but a deontological or virtue-oriented one, where the basis is one of universal love and compassion. No one should be deprived of a socially and physically healthy standard of living because of the circumstances of their birth or genetics. Nor are people’s wants and needs more or less legitimate due to their intelligence, culture, belief or any other factor.
I want to see if you are consistent. Do you support banning abortion and abolishing the death penalty?
Human perception of society has some paradoxes. Consider freedom of speech: In countries that generally have freedom of speech, many people complain about all kinds of injustice, censorship, etc. In countries that have no freedom of speech, everyone is quiet, and when asked explicitly, says: everything is great. Therefore, naive observers often conclude that the former countries have less freedom of speech than the latter, judging by the number of complaints about censorship.
I believe there is a similar effect with meritocracy/equality/etc. Imagine a perfectly unfair feudal society where unless you are born as a member of aristocracy, you are screwed; your talents and hard work will make absolutely no difference. Ironically, many people will believe that this society is fair, that the aristocrats are chosen by God for being better. If the poor kids are never given an opportunity to learn, everyone may believe, based on what they observe, that the poor kids are completely unable to learn. This is what all their priests would teach.
Then comes a revolution, and people find out that the aristocrats are often stupid, and that if you give free education to the poor kids, many of them turn out to be talented. So a meritocratic society is established, everyone gets the chance, the smart and hard-working people can raise, and the stupid and lazy can fall. After a few decades the society is rearranged and made much more fair than before. Ironically, people living in this society believe that it is most unfair, and that you only need to keep giving more and more resources to those at the bottom so that their geniality can manifest. Existence of IQ is denied, because to most people it seems similar to the arbitrary aristocracy of the past.
I was reflecting on some of the takes here for a bit and if I imagine a blind gradient descent in this direction, I imagine quite a lot of potential reality distortion fields due to various of the underlying dynamics involved with holding this position.
So the one thing I wanted to ask was that if you have any sort of reset mechanism here? Like what is the schelling point before the slippery slope? What is the specific action pattern you would take if you got too far? Or do you trust future you enough in order to ensure that it won’t happen?
Good question. One answer is that my reset mechanisms involve cultivating empathy, and replacing fear with positive motivation. If I notice myself being too unempathetic or too fear-driven, that’s worrying.
But another answer is just that, unfortunately, the reality distortion fields are everywhere—and in many ways more prevalent in “mainstream” positions (as discussed in my post). Being more mainstream does get you “safety in numbers”—i.e. it’s harder for you to catalyze big things, for better or worse. But the cost is that you end up in groupthink.
The black hole of western state debt that will never be repaid creates distortions across the economy
Can you give some examples?
Big government debts seem like the kind of thing that can fail catastrophically at some point, so they represent an important civilizational risk. But how are they distorting the economy? Do you just mean that governments spend much more than they raise in taxes?
Richard Cantillon observed that the original recipients of new money enjoy higher standards of living at the expense of later recipients. In colloquial terms, the closer you stand to the source of money creation, the wealthier you become.
When governments run large deficits that get monetized by central banks, this creates new money that flows first to government and financial sectors before reaching the broader economy. This distorts resource allocation because entities closer to the money source can bid up assets and resources before prices adjust throughout the system.
From a rhetorical perspective, I think it was wrong to lead with the ethnonationalism stuff, since it seems to have confused testingthewaters, and likely many more.
The points about IQ seem parochially American, not applicable to the rest of the West. But aren’t you British, not American? Does this really seem so central in Britain?
I find it hard to tell what you see as good or bad, among these things, especially around what currently is, vs what you would see in the world. I of course can read what you’ve explicitly stated as good, but the way you’ve written this puts it nearby in linguistic vector space to things which are controversial at best, but are intertwined with processes that I would expect to cause seriously bad things. I would appreciate if you could find a way to more clearly signal what outcomes you are inclined towards, to the degree that avoiding accidental pessimization permits you to do so, separate from how to get there. Because as is, it looks to me like you’re seeing the world through a … very strange lens, one that sees real problems but magnifies and distorts them in ways I find unfamiliar and confusing, and which from my understanding seems to blur things together; and I am unclear whether we have common ground, whether the things I see as good in the world are things you see as good, whether things I see as major evils of society are things you do. You’ve explicitly said that some things which attempt to do things in the world under banners of things one might think are good have instead done ill, and things that one might think do ill can be good.
In your talk I didn’t have an opportunity to properly probe your models, but it seemed to me that your label of evil was, at a minimum, not the core etiology of evil, and I worry that if what you seek as good really is simply the other quadrant, that you’re making a subtle mistake.
If you can look at what you wrote, and why I would write this, I think you will see that you have already described part of my reaction partially; but I think you have misunderstood my reaction, and I don’t feel that it is correct for me to fully clarify unless you can take a step of clarifying what it is you seek… virtues, I suppose, but I would want to know what those are.
I hope you can forgive my intentional vagueness.
edit: hash of the things I didn’t say: 0f4b9808113c6b10011fa485cd2176bba860c5e5008935a48c78722e9251c895 - will not edit this again
Since consequentialists think that morality is essentially about altruism, much moral philosophy actively undermines ethics. So does modern economics, via smuggling in the assumption that utility functions represent selfish preferences.
As git hashsums are short and tangible True Names of abstract git objects, there are abstract properties of behaviors of things in the world that are in principle as concrete and tangible as coal or silver. The economy uses abstract goods to produce new abstract goods. Consequentialism and utility functions or policies could in principle be about virtues and integrity as about hamburgers, but hamburgers are more legible and easier to administer. So I think the crux is relative legibility rather than methods, the same methods that should in principle work break down for practical reasons that have nothing to do with applicability of the methods in principle.
Consequentialism and utility functions or policies could in principle be about virtues and integrity as about hamburgers, but hamburgers are more legible and easier to administer.
Here’s one concrete way in which this isn’t true: one common simplifying assumption in economics is that goods are homogeneous, and therefore that you’re indifferent about who to buy from. However, virtuous behavior involves rewarding people you think are more virtuous (e.g. by preferentially buying things from them).
In other words, economics is about how agents interact with each other via exchanging goods and services, while virtues are about how agents interact with each other more generally.
I don’t see why using the word “virtue” magically solves the hardness of that math (the reasons why such assumptions are simplifying). Maybe that is what your promised formalizations are about, but I’m also kinda skeptical that reputation and consumers’ preference to trade with some groups over others is a subject that no economist could give reasonable models about.
It seems very reasonable to be indifferent about who ends up incentivising or exhibiting virtuous behaviors you care about (to be more prevalent in the world or your community), and the incentives don’t need to come in the form of personal action about who to buy other things from.
In other words, economics is about how agents interact with each other via exchanging goods and services, while virtues are about how agents interact with each other more generally.
If virtues and other abstract properties of behaviors are treated as particular examples of goods and services, then economics could discuss how agents obtain the presence of virtues or patterns of interaction between people, by paying businesses that specialize in manufacturing their presence in the world.
This does need a scalable enough business to merit the term that can produce marginal virtue and patterns of interactions by employing the existing economy, rearranging the physical world in a way that results in greater presence of these abstract goods in it, wielding fiat currency to move other goods and labor in the world to make this happen by paying other businesses and people who specialize in those goods and labor. Some of these other goods instrumentally effected through other businesses could themselves be virtues or patterns of interaction. Building economic engines that scale is very hard (successful startups reward founders and investors), doing this with illegible abstract goods is borderline impossible, but this is not a fundamentally different kind of activity.
Crossposted from Twitter:
This year I’ve been thinking a lot about how the western world got so dysfunctional. Here’s my rough, best-guess story:
1. WW2 gave rise to a strong taboo against ethnonationalism. While perhaps at first this taboo was valuable, over time it also contaminated discussions of race differences, nationalism, and even IQ itself, to the point where even truths that seemed totally obvious to WW2-era people also became taboo. There’s no mechanism for subsequent generations to create common knowledge that certain facts are true but usefully taboo—they simply act as if these facts are false, which leads to arbitrarily bad policies (e.g. killing meritocratic hiring processes like IQ tests).
2. However, these taboos would gradually have lost power if the west (and the US in particular) had maintained impartial rule of law and constitutional freedoms. Instead, politicization of the bureaucracy and judiciary allowed them to spread. This was enabled by the “managerial revolution” under which govt bureaucracy massively expanded in scope and powers. Partly this was a justifiable response to the increasing complexity of the world (and various kinds of incompetence and nepotism within govts) but in practice it created a class of managerial elites who viewed their intellectual merit as license to impose their ideology on the people they governed. This class gains status by signaling commitment to luxury beliefs. Since more absurd beliefs are more costly-to-fake signals, the resulting ideology is actively perverse (i.e. supports whatever is least aligned with their stated core values, like Hamas).
3. On an ideological level the managerial revolution was facilitated by a kind of utilitarian spirit under which technocratic expertise was considered more important for administrators than virtue or fidelity to the populace. This may have been a response to the loss of faith in traditional elites after WW1. The enlightened liberal perspective wanted to maintain a fiction of equality, under which administrators were just doing a job the same as any other, rather than taking on the heavy privileges and responsibilities associated with (healthy) hierarchical relationships.
4. On an economic level, the world wars led to centralization of state power over currency and the abandonment of the gold standard. While at first govts tried to preserve the fiction that fiat currencies were relevantly similar to gold-backed currencies, again there was no mechanism for later generations to create common knowledge of what had actually been done and why. The black hole of western state debt that will never be repaid creates distortions across the economy, which few economists actually grapple with because they are emotionally committed to thinking of western govts as “too big to fail”.
5. All of this has gradually eroded the strong, partly-innate sense of virtue (and respect for virtuous people) that used to be common. Virtue can be seen as a self-replicating memeplex that incentivizes ethical behavior in others—e.g. high-integrity people will reward others for displaying integrity. This is different from altruism, which rewards others regardless of their virtue. Indeed, it’s often directly opposed to altruism, since altruists disproportionately favor the least virtuous people (because they’re worse-off). Since consequentialists think that morality is essentially about altruism, much moral philosophy actively undermines ethics. So does modern economics, via smuggling in the assumption that utility functions represent selfish preferences.
6. All of this is happening against a backdrop of rapid technological progress, which facilitates highly unequal control mechanisms (e.g. a handful of people controlling global newsfeeds or AI values). The bad news is that this enables ideologies to propagate even when they are perverse and internally dysfunctional. The good news is that it makes genuine truth-seeking and virtuous cooperation increasingly high-leverage.
Addenda:
I led with the ethnonationalism stuff because it’s the most obvious, but in some sense it’s just a symptom: a functional society would have rejected the taboos when they got too obviously wrong (e.g. by defending Murray).
The deeper issue seems to be a kind of toxic egalitarianism that is against accountability, hierarchy or individual agency in general. You can trace this thread (with increasing uncertainty) thru e.g. Wilson, Marx, the utilitarians, and maybe even all the way back to Jesus.
Michael Vassar thinks of it as Germanic “kultur” (as opposed to “zivilization”); I’m not well-read enough to evaluate that claim though. I’m more confident about it being driven by fear-based motivations, especially envy—as per Girard, Lacan, etc.
Some prescriptions I’m currently considering:
- reviving virtue ethics
- AI-based tools for facilitating small, high-trust, high-accountability groups. Even if we can’t have freedom of association or reliable arbitration via legal or corporate mechanisms, perhaps we can still have it via social mechanisms (especially as more and more people become functionally post-economic)
- better therapeutic interventions, especially oriented to resolving fear of death
But I spend most of my time trying to figure out the formal theory that encodes these intuitions—in which agents are understood in terms of goals (in the predictive processing sense) and boundaries rather than utility functions and credences. That feels upstream of a lot of other stuff. More here, though it’s a bit out of date.
Edited to add: I am surprised both by the extent of disagree-voting (-38 as of writing this), and by the extent to which this is decoupled from karma (23 as of writing this). This is an impressive level of decoupling. Given that the gap between my views and most LWers is much bigger than I thought, I’ll have a think about how to better convey my perspective in a way that makes cruxes clearer. Since many LWers believe in something like Eliezer’s civilizational inadequacy thesis, though, I’m curious about the best explanations other people have for why our current civilization is “inadequate”.
Without commenting on your broader point, I think you believe elites support Hamas because the conservative Twitter feed is presenting you/your circle tailored ragebait, not because elites invert their own utility functions.
That’s a mechanism by which I might overestimate the support for Hamas. But the thing I’m trying to explain is the overall alignment between leftists and Hamas, which is not just a twitter bubble thing (e.g. see university encampments).
More generally, leftists profess many values which are upheld the most by western civilization (e.g. support for sexual freedom, women’s rights, anti-racism, etc). But then in conflicts they often side specifically against western civilization. This seems like a straightforward example of pessimization.
Not at all. The trend is that in any given context, American leftists tend to support the ‘weaker’ group against the stronger group, regardless of the merits of the individual cases. They have a world model that says that that most social problems come from “big” people hurting “little” people, and believe the focus of their politics should be remedying this. In the case of Israel-Palestine, Israel and the United States are much more militarily and economically powerful than Gaza, so ceteris paribus[1] they side with Gaza, just as they side with women, ethnic minorities, the poor, etc. You may disagree with this behavior but it’s fairly consistent.
By contrast, the argument that Israel is a bastion of western values and therefore leftists should support its war against a smaller neighbor is kind of abstract. The immediate outcome of Israel winning the war is just that Israel gets stronger, not that women in Gaza become more free. There’s also a thing there about Gazans being brown and Israelis not, etc...
None of this has anything to do with liberals pessimizing their own values, and it feels like you must have a blind spot somewhere if you’re reaching for that explanation when there’s a much simpler and more obvious one readily available.
Liberals’ protests in support of Palestine are additionally amplified as a result of a media diet that drip feeds them an artificially strong amount of Israeli war crimes, instead of western liberal hysteria.
A few responses:
As per my post on underdog bias, the question of which group is actually weaker and which group is stronger is often a pretty subjective call. I even discuss in the post the example of Israel, where you could see it as the “stronger” group (vs Palestine in particular) or the “weaker” group (vs all the Muslim countries surrounding it).
There are plenty of cases where leftists support the stronger group against the weaker group—most notably Soviet and Chinese repression of dissidents and minorities. E.g. it took Solzhenitsyn publishing Gulag Archipelago to finally get leftists (even fairly “mainstream” leftists) to stop lionizing the USSR.
Even insofar as leftists tend to support the weaker group, there are almost no cases where they do so as strongly as in Israel vs Palestine. So there’s still something important to be explained here even accepting your claims.
This characterizes leftists sufficiently dishonestly that I think you’ve gotten mindkilled by politics. As people keep removing my (entirely accurate and if anything understated) soldier-mindset reacts, I will strong-downvote instead :)
Wanted to revisit this because it seemed like one of the points where people most strongly disagreed with me. I’m trying to figure out a crux here. One might be something like: how widespread were celebrations of the 10⁄7 attacks amongst prominent leftists (and especially the student groups that later organized encampments)? I could imagine updating that there were only a handful of cases that disproportionately blew up, which would make me take back or at least caveat the “supports Hamas” thing.
If you on the other hand found that there were many cases where prominent leftists and encampment organizers actively celebrated the 10⁄7 attacks, would you (@dirk or @lc) then agree that “supports Hamas” is a reasonable summary?
I am not one of the tagged people but I certainly would not so agree. One reason I would not so agree is because I have talked to leftist people (prominence debatable) who celebrated the 10⁄7 attacks, and when I asked them whether they support Hamas, they were coherently able to answer “no, but I support armed resistance against Israel and don’t generally condemn actions that fall in that category, even when I don’t approve of or condone the group organizing those actions generally.” One way to know what people believe and support is to ask them. (Of course, I don’t think this is a morally acceptable position either, and conversation ensued! But it’s clearly not “supporting Hamas” in any sense that can support your original claims.)
My social circles also include many leftists, including student organizers and somewhat well-known online figures, so I separately suspect that you’re vastly overestimating the proportion of self-identified leftists who celebrated the attacks in any meaningful sense, but that’s probably not the crux here.
I think you’re confusing levels of behavior, here. It may be that their net effect is to support Hamas, but that they don’t intend this, and that their actual intent does not make the mistake you’re (at least if I read correctly) attributing to intent here. I do think they end up on net having intentions that make them vulnerable to being manipulated by those in power in adversary groups, since their intent is to support the weak among any group. In particular, they typically are thinking in different group selectors than you seem to assign here; of the people I’d guess you mean, in my interactions with them, they don’t seem to profess support for Hamas, and in fact explicitly say they’d like to support palestinians without supporting hamas.
But, I strongly agree that leftists tend to pessimize their values on net, and that that is one of the biggest issues with leftist approaches to the world. So whether we disagree depends on what level we’re looking at.
Your reasoning seems like it would be improved by finding people who seem to exhibit the belief you suspect exists and want to model, and interviewing them without letting your opinions leak, to try to get a map of their actual opinions; before making this comment I spent some time brainstorming to find a way to do that fast, and didn’t come up with one, so perhaps it makes sense to not take this suggestion, but I maintain that it would be useful if practical. As a stopgap, going to the main locations that a group discuss things online can be useful, keeping in mind that then one will have uncertainty like the kind I have about you: you seem overall to be a good person as far as I’ve been able to tell so far, but you interact enough with people whose personal policies in practice support things that seem to me like they’re at imminent risk of causing human-induced catastrophic outcomes for many of the humans in the world that it’s unclear to me what your intentions are.
Without commenting on the specifics, I agree with a lot of the gestalt here as a description of how things evolved historically, but I think that’s not really the right lens to understand the problem.
My current best one-sentence understanding: the richer humans get, the more social reality can diverge from physical reality, and therefore the more resources can be captured by parasitic egregores/memes/institutions/ideologies/interest-groups/etc. Physical reality provides constraints and feedback which limit the propagation of such parasites, but wealth makes the constraints less binding and therefore makes the feedback weaker.
The main reason I disagree with both this comment and the OP is that you both have the underlying assumption that we are in a nadir (local nadir?) of connectedness-with-reality, whereas from my read of history I see no evidence of this, and indeed plenty of evidence against.
People used to be confused about all sorts of things, including, but not limited to, the supernatural, the causes of disease, causality itself, the capabilities of women, whether children can have conscious experiences, and so forth.
I think we’ve gotten more reasonable about almost everything, with a few minor exceptions that people seem to like highlighting (I assume in part because they’re so rare).
The past is a foreign place, and mostly not a pleasant one.
I totally buy that peoples’ verbal models aren’t at a local nadir of connectedness-to-reality. The thing which seems increasingly disconnected from reality is more like metis, peoples’ day-to-day behavior and intuitive knowledge, institutional knowledge and skills, personal identity and goals, that sort of thing.
I’m notably not thinking here primarily about examples like e.g. heritability of IQ becoming politicized; that’s a verbal model, and I do think that verbal models have mostly become more reasonable modulo a few exceptions which people highlight.
I used to agree with your understanding but I am now more skeptical. For example, here’s a story that says the opposite:
I’m not saying my story is true, but it does highlight that the load-bearing question is actually something like “how does the offense-defense balance against parasitic egregores scale with wealth?” Why don’t we live in a world where wealth can buy a society defenses against such egregores?
Or maybe we do live in such a world, and we are just failing to buy those defenses. That seems like a really dumb situation to be in, but I think my post is broadly describing how it might arise.
I would point to the non-experts can’t distinguish true from fake experts problem. That does seem to be a central phenomenon which most parasitic egregores exploit. More generally, as wealth becomes more abundant (and therefore lots of constraints become more slack), inability to get grounded feedback becomes a more taut constraint.
That said… do you remember any particular evidence or argument which led you toward the story at top of thread (as opposed to away from your previous understanding)?
Can you explain more your affinity for virtue ethics, e.g., was there a golden age in history, that you read about, where a group of people ran on virtue ethics and it worked out really well? I’m trying to understand why you seem to like it a lot more than I do.
Re government debt, I think that is actually driven more by increasing demand for a “risk-free” asset, with the supply going up more or less passively (what politician is going to refuse to increase debt and spending, as long as people are willing to keep buying it at a low interest rate). And from this perspective it’s not really a problem except for everyone getting used to the higher spending when some of the processes increasing the demand for government debt might only be temporary.
AI written explanation of how financialization causes increased demand for government debt
How it Drives Demand: Every time global trade grows, it creates larger trade surpluses in countries like China, Japan, and Germany. These surpluses are recycled into US Treasury bonds. Every time there is a global crisis (a European debt crisis, an emerging market collapse), capital flees from the periphery to the perceived safety of the core, which means a rush to buy US government debt. This makes the demand for Treasuries reflexive: the more unstable the world gets, the higher the demand for them becomes.Financialization isn’t a vague blob; it’s a set of specific, concrete processes, each of which acts like a powerful vacuum cleaner sucking up government debt.
Let’s trace four of the most important mechanisms in detail.
1. The Derivatives Market: The Collateral Multiplier
Derivatives (options, futures, swaps) are essentially financial side-bets on the movement of an underlying asset. The total “notional” value of these bets is in the hundreds of trillions, dwarfing the real economy.
The Problem: If you make a bet with someone, you need to ensure they can pay you if you win. To solve this, both parties post collateral (or “margin”), which is a high-quality asset held by a third party (a clearinghouse). If someone defaults, their collateral is seized.
The Specific Mechanism: What is the best possible collateral? An asset that is universally trusted, easy to price, and can be sold instantly for cash. This is, by definition, a government bond. It is the gold standard of collateral.
How it Drives Demand: The growth of the derivatives market creates a leveraged demand for collateral. A single real-world asset (like a barrel of oil) can have dozens of derivative contracts layered on top of it. Each layer of betting requires a new layer of collateral to secure it. As the volume and complexity of financial trading grows, the demand for pristine collateral to backstop all these bets grows exponentially. This is a huge, structural source of demand that is completely detached from the need to fund real-world projects.
Analogy: A giant, global casino. The more tables and higher-stakes games the casino runs (financialization), the more high-quality security chips (government bonds) it needs to hold in its vault to ensure all winnings can be paid out.
2. Banking Regulation: The Regulatory Mandate for Safety
After the 2008 financial crisis, global regulators (through frameworks like Basel III) sought to make banks safer. They did this by forcing them to hold more “safe stuff” against their risky assets.
The Problem: Banks make money by taking short-term deposits and making long-term, risky loans. This makes them inherently fragile.
The Specific Mechanism: Regulations created the concept of High-Quality Liquid Assets (HQLA). Banks are legally required to hold a certain amount of HQLA that they could sell instantly to cover their obligations in a crisis. The regulations are very specific about what counts as HQLA. The highest tier (Level 1 HQLA), which has no restrictions, is almost exclusively comprised of cash and government bonds.
How it Drives Demand: This creates a legally mandated, non-negotiable demand for government debt. For a bank to grow its business (i.e., make more loans), it must simultaneously purchase more government bonds to satisfy its HQLA requirements. This directly links the growth of private credit in the economy to a mandatory increase in the demand for public debt.
Analogy: A building code for banks. The regulators say, “For every floor of risky office space you build (loans), you must add a corresponding amount of steel-reinforced concrete to the foundation (government bonds).” To build a taller skyscraper, you have no choice but to buy more concrete.
3. The Asset Management Industry: The Rise of Liability-Driven Investing (LDI)
The pool of professionally managed money (pensions, insurance funds, endowments) has exploded. These institutions have very specific, long-term promises to keep.
The Problem: A pension fund needs to be able to pay a 65-year-old a fixed income for the next 30 years. They cannot rely on the volatile stock market for this guaranteed cash flow.
The Specific Mechanism: This led to the strategy of Liability-Driven Investing (LDI). The goal is to own assets whose cash flows perfectly match your future liabilities. A 30-year government bond, which pays a fixed coupon every six months and repays principal in 30 years, is the perfect instrument for this. It is a contractual promise of cash flow that can be precisely matched against the contractual promise to a retiree.
How it Drives Demand: As the global population ages and the pool of retirement savings grows, the total value of these long-term liabilities skyrockets. This creates a massive, structural, and relatively price-insensitive demand for long-duration government bonds from the largest pools of capital in the world. They aren’t buying them for speculation; they are buying them to defease their promises.
Analogy: A pre-order system for future cash. An insurance company is like a business that has accepted millions of pre-orders for cash to be delivered in 20, 30, and 40 years. To guarantee they can fulfill those orders, they go to the most reliable supplier (the government) and place their own pre-orders for cash (by buying bonds) that will arrive on the exact same dates.
4. The Globalization of Finance: The Search for a Universal Safe Haven
Finance is no longer national; it is a single, interconnected global system. This system requires a neutral, trusted asset for settling international balances and storing wealth.
The Problem: A Chinese exporter earns dollars, or a Saudi sovereign wealth fund earns euros. Where do they store this foreign currency wealth safely and in a liquid form? They cannot hold billions in a retail bank account, and they may not want the risk of corporate stocks.
The Specific Mechanism: The US Treasury bond has become the de facto global reserve asset. It is the ultimate safe haven for foreign central banks, corporations, and investors. Its liquidity and the military/political backing of the US government make it the world’s default savings vehicle.
An analogy I like is with China’s Land Finance (土地财政), where the government funded a large part of its spending by continuously selling urban land to real estate developers to build apartments and offices on, which was fine as long as urbanization was ongoing but is now causing problems as that process slows down (along with a bunch of other issues/complications). I think of government debt as a similarly useful resource or asset, that in part enables more complex financial products to be built on top, but may cause a problem one day if demand for it slows down.
ETA: To make my point another way, I think the modern monetary system (with a mix of various money and money-like assets serving somewhat different purposes, including fiat money, regulated bank deposits, government debt) has its own internal logic, and while distortions exist, they are inevitable under any system (only second-best solutions are possible, due to bounded rationality and principal-agent problems). If you want to criticize it I think you have to go beyond “debt that will never be repaid” (which sounds like you’re trying to import intuitions for household/interpersonal finances, where it’s clearly bad to never pay one’s debts, to a very different situation), and talk about what specific distortions you’re worried about, how the alternative is actually better (taking into account its own distortions), and/or how/why the system is causing erosion of virtue ethics.
The US did not have impartial rule of law in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Notably, black Americans in the south were regularly impressed into forced labor, often for the rest of their lives, on the basis of flimsy or even non-existent legal pretext.
(A representative but concocted example: the local sheirf arrests a black man who’s walking through town on charges of “vagrancy”. The man is found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. The sheriff sells the “contact” for hard labor to a local industrialist who owns a mine. (The sherif and the industrialist are buddies, and have done versions of this deal many times before). The man is set to work the mine for the period of his sentence. When he’s near the end of his sentence, he’s accused of some minor infraction as a pretext to add more years to his sentence (if anyone bothers to keep track of when his sentence is served at all.)
What makes you think that impartial rule of law decayed since WWII instead of generally (though not evenly) improving?
That’s a fair point; however, I don’t think it undermines my overall claims very much. I think the lack of rule of law for black Americans was bad in a comparable way to how the lack of rule of law for various European colonies was bad. That is, while it was bad for the people who didn’t get rule of law, they were a separate enough category that this mostly didn’t “leak into” undermining the legal mechanisms that helped their societies become productive and functional in the first place.
I’m speaking speculatively here, but I don’t know that it didn’t leak out and undermine the mechanism that supported productive and functional societies. The sophisticated SJW in me suggests that this is part of what caused the eventual (though not yet complete) erosion of those mechanisms.
It seems like if you have “rule of law” that isn’t evenly distributed, actually what you have is collusion by one class of people to maintain a set of privileges at the expense of another class of people, where one of the privileges is a sand-boxed set of norms that govern dealings within the privileged class, but with the pretense that the norms are universal.
This kind of pretense seems like it could be corrosive: people can see that the norms that society proclaims as universal actually aren’t. This reinforces a a sense that the norms aren’t real at all (or at least) a justified sense that the ideals that underly those norms are mostly rationalizations papering over the collusion of the privileged class.
eg when it looks like “capitalism” and “democracy” are scams supporting “white supremacy”, you grow disenchanted with capitalism and democracy, and stop doing the work to maintain the incomplete versions of those social mechanisms that were previously doing work in your society?
This makes no mention of the repeal of the fairness doctrine nor the shift in financial model for major newspapers. The 1987 abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine led very directly to Rush Limbaugh gaining a national political audience.
Rush Limbaugh used to be a regular music DJ in the 1970s. His political talk show was distributed nationally in 1988, soon after the cessation of Fairness Doctrine support by the Reagan administration. Carl McIntire was the Rush Limbaugh (maybe a little more Glenn Beck) of the 1960s and had his radio talk show shut down by the Fairness Doctrine after years of litigation. The legal challenges the Fairness Doctrine presented to McIntire prevented imitators, at least until the abolishment paved the way for Limbaugh, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, etc.
But over the last ten years the division has accelerated largely due to left outlets adopting a similar bias after switching financial models in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Former editorial page editor for the NYT James Bennet explains the shift here:
This Tablet article by Zach Goldberg documents statistical evidence of a cultural shift at some point near the middle of the previous decade. Usage of terms related to racism in major newspapers increased as much as 1500% in this period.
Yes, the article has awesome graphs.
To be honest, this post approaches a level of disjointedness from reality-as-I-understand-it that I fear I cannot accurately respond to it in a way that would satisfy the author.[1] However, if I don’t give some response, I suspect that it will join a growing cultural current within LessWrong which involves an intellectualised rationalisation of ethnonationalism, hygiene-oriented eugenics, oligarchy[2], and implicit or explicit support of political action and political violence for these ends. If this current becomes normalised (and it has, frankly, always been present in the rationalist sphere), it makes TESCREAL-style categorisations of the rationalist/EA/AI safety intellectual sphere bascially correct. Therefore, I want to commit to voicing my objection to this line of argument where I see it. There are parts of me that feel strongly against doing this. There is no glory to be gained in political arguments online. However, there is the possibility of avoiding shame, which as a virtue ethicist I’m sure the author will understand.
On the question of inherent racial or ethnic attributes, I suspect that I will not be able to settle the argument “on the facts”, given how long the online debate has been waged. Therefore I will cede as much as he wishes to stake “on the facts”. Despite ceding this ground, I still maintain my fundamental belief that all human beings (and, increasingly I would argue, all life) are worthy of a deep and sincerely-held respect, regardless of any intellectual or physical discrepancies between them. This is not a utilitarian argument, but a deontological or virtue-oriented one, where the basis is one of universal love and compassion. No one should be deprived of a socially and physically healthy standard of living because of the circumstances of their birth or genetics. Nor are people’s wants and needs more or less legitimate due to their intelligence, culture, belief or any other factor.
The arguments about inherent and unassailable differences between cultures presuppose what they aim to prove. They assert that, if culture is taken as an immutable, static prior that cannot be changed without being “diluted” or even “destroyed”, that cultures from different parts of the world are incompatible. Well, yes, if you presuppose that change is death, then change cannot happen, or else death follows. This attitude goes against any reasonable study of the past and of human society. So many of the words and ideas that are powering this conversation and this forum: “culture”, “virtue”, “algorithm”, even fundamental ideas like “zero”—are borrowed and integrated from other cultures. I will remind you again that it was not so long ago that, for example, French culture was considered utterly incompatible with or simply inferior to English culture, just as American culture was to British culture, as Polish culture was to American culture, or as Danish culture was to Swedish culture. So many differences that were once a matter of life and death quietly disappeared once the cultural battle lines shifted. We humans and all life forms in this universe are united by common world-models borne from within-lifetime observation of the world and bound by common laws of physics and information. Yes, shocks can happen from sudden changes in demographics. Yes, it is possible for tensions to arise and for relative needs between groups to be unmet, and therefore for conflict between groups to grow. But the missing mood is that of sorrow, because it is possible to do better. If it is not possible to do better...
The natural result of talk of immutable differences is life-or-death stakes. If they are different and irreconcilable to us, when we come into conflict with them we must destroy them, or otherwise secure some total strategic advantage. After all, this is game-theoretic conflict now, where we know that the outcome is explicitly zero-sum. Both parties cannot be convinced to cooperate and have incompatible terminal utility functions. The Nash equilibrium then is to defect.
And the longer they live and grow strong, the greater the threat is to us. For if in the future they secure some total strategic advantage, they would do the rational thing and wipe us out, seizing all future resources for themselves. I do not seek to exaggerate when I say that this is the argument that leads to final solutions and wars of hygiene. This is the Melian argument, brought to modern day geopolitics.
Thankfully, I believe that it is, in fact, possible to do better. That we have not found better coordination mechanisms is an engineering and social construction problem, not a problem of the failure to enact sufficiently powerful boundaries. Insofar as toxic egalitarianism and the managerial revolution have failed, their failures come from not understanding how to successfully coordinate under increasingly complex social and technical conditions, not from any inherent disdain of virtue or race to adopt increasingly ludicrous positions.
It is true, managing a global civilisation of 8.2 billion people is hard. But the author’s “solutions” of ethnic segregation and socially-enforced virtue ethics enforced by inter-group mutual distrust come from historical societies where the effective politically-active population is measured (at most) in the thousands to hundreds of thousands, and those societies were all more or less self-sufficient and autarkic. For better or for worse, we live in a society with globally connected dependencies in matters of trade, manufacturing, business, and culture. Our scientific, technological, and medical progress is dependent on research and collaboration that stretches across borders. We are already deeply reliant on massive AI systems (incl. Google and Facebook) to manage our civilisational information throughput, and we are becoming more and more tightly integrated as supply chains lengthen and cross-cultural relationships deepen. At the same time, the threats we face of advanced AI systems, global thermonuclear war, pandemics, climate change etc. also do not confine themselves to a single society or region. There is no easy way back to the old system of walls and borders. In light of this I can see no good argument for bringing back the demons of the last century today.
For the most obvious example, for the life of me I cannot understand how leaving the gold standard makes a culture less appreciative of any kind of moral virtue, unless you equate two very different senses of the word “value”.
E.g. under the name of e.g. “rule by the most qualified” and “rule by the most virtuous”. The line of argument descends through Moldbug, who has since become more happy to openly support fascism and ad-hoc oligarchy under Trump post-2024.
[Footnote removed, I judged it to be overly combative and not constructive]
What? It seems like TESCREAL is clearly a natural cluster (modulo I don’t know any examples of the “C”), and whether takes like this are pervasive amongst rationalists doesn’t bare on whether it’s a good categorization?
I’m not sure how this is a response to the OP. It sounds basically right to me (and I imagine that Richard would agree with it as well, though he can speak for himself), but it seems like almost entirely a non sequitur to the claims made?
This text doesn’t even mention ethnic segregation as a solution? It does promote virtue ethics as an alternative moral frame to utilitarianism, but it says nothing about “enforced[ing] by inter-group mutual distrust”.
I don’t doubt that you’re pushing back against a real cultural force, but it doesn’t look to me to actually be represented in this short-form, except (at best) as an implication.
Might reply to the rest later but just to respond to what you call “the most obvious example”: consider a company which has a difficult time evaluating how well its employees are performing (i.e. most of them). Some employees will work hard even when they won’t directly be rewarded for that, because they consider it virtuous to do so. However, if you then add to their team a bunch of other people who are rewarded for slacking off, the hard-working employees may become demotivated and feel like they’re chumps for even trying to be virtuous.
The extent to which modern governments hand out money causes a similar effect across western societies (edited: for example, if many people around you are receiving welfare, then working hard yourself is less motivating). They would not be as able to do this as much if their currencies were still on the gold standard, because it would be more obvious that they are insolvent.
I’m afraid, if you’re actually trying to advance an argument, you’re going to need to be slightly more specific. Which government, in which society? Perhaps you will say, “all of the western governments”. Very well. Then which gold standard? I will remind you that “western societies” including Germany, the UK, and the US exited and entered the “gold standard”, or swapped out various forms of “gold standard”, all throughout the 20th century. Was Britain in 1931 or Germany in 1914 lacking in valor? I’m by no means an economic historian, and this is just wikipedia talking.
And even when countries obeyed the “gold standard”, policies varied strongly between regions, including how much currency could be redeemed for how much gold, whether citizens could redeem gold directly, the status of gold as a commodity, the trade of gold between countries etc. In what combination of policies can we find your notion of “honest work for honest pay”? Does virtue’s just reward include the ability to hold gold sovereigns as private property to be redeemed at any time at a national bank, or to exchange gold bullion across national borders? If so, at what exchange rates?
And what does “insolvent” mean? After world war II the world’s currencies were arranged such that the US dollar was the world’s reserve currency as part of the Bretton Woods agreement. The US obtained an exorbitant privilege, in that it could print paper and get money while other countries needed to produce goods or services. Was this the point at which the US became, as you say, “insolvent”? Yet it was the paramount superpower at the time, and the value of its currency was (supposedly) backed by gold—until it decided to break from the gold standard under Nixon and still more or less retained that privilege. But was America’s massive spending during the post world war II period and the Cold War (all powered directly or indirectly by this exorbitant privilege) a sign of degeneracy and decay? Surely not.
Okay, let us limit ourselves to the post-cold war, post-bretton woods period. To identify exactly where you think this massive amount of spending rewarding the non-virtuous is going, you’re going to need to leave the realm of abstract metaphor and actually state what you think your virtues are. Because the way I see it, in America social programs and government pensions are both now and in the past consistently some of the largest sources of federal spending. This is, as I understand it, also true in most European nations. Perhaps the “other people who are rewarded for slacking off” you are referring to are the poor, the sick, the young, and the elderly? In that case you should say so directly.
There are so many more issues missing from your view of labour, economics, virtue, and social organisation that I would be doing most theories a disservice to call it a theory. It is telling that, for example, you make no mention of oil in your comment. Oil a resource which has become so vital to the value of currency between nations that the US dollar is sometimes referred to as the petrodollar (since it is the international currency by which oil is priced). And if the societies of today are truly “insolvent”, I suspect that you will find it hard to find historical examples of “solvent” societies with which to compare them. National banks, international debt, and modern nation states as you would recognise them did not truly arise until maybe the 19th century. Before that, the fundamental notion of currency and obligation was entirely different in Europe, since most people lived in a feudal system. Serfs and people bonded to the land paid taxes not in gold but in goods, and did not receive payment for their work in currency either. We are living in possibly the first time in history that arguments about national solvency can be made, and economic data on this issue doesn’t really go back more than a century at best.
But there is a deeper issue at stake here. Why am I hounding you so much on these issues? From where do I get my sudden insistence on exactitude and rigour? After all, we should beware isolated demands for rigour. However, you are not raising these ideas as independent thoughts, but as a cluster. A cluster which points to a poorly defined yet pervasive moral and social degeneracy in modern society. A cluster which uses a vision of historic and traditional virtue as a high ideal, but cannot quite articulate what exact virtues it is chasing after. A cluster that makes vague and incoherent attempts to summarise and criticise modern institutions and economic systems. A cluster that invokes an explicitly racially and ethnically coded “people” as its core group, to be defended from “the others”, groups who are both culturally incompatible and an existential threat if they are allowed to integrate. A cluster that denigrates public servants, university intellectuals, and cultural elites as hopelessly perverse and degenerate in their cosmopolitanism. A cluster that frames the fear of difference as wise and justified. Yes, I will use that word.
I will repeat again, at the risk of sounding a bit like a broken record, that every time ethnonationalism is embraced the groups that are othered become framed as an existential threat to the majority. Calls for forcible relocation and elimination of the other in the name of the health and hygiene of the community become unavoidable. This is a pattern that worked its way through Europe during the two world wars, through the Partition of India and the later rise of the BJP, through the Rwandan and Rohingya Genocides, and through the Middle East today. The situation in Europe and America is already volatile. You are not being clever when you fan the flames. You are not so in control of the narrative that you can add just that touch of ethnic pride back into the meme pool to precisely steer society to an optimal maxima. People will get hurt, lose their homes and families, and most likely die.
Thanks for the extensive comment. I’m not sure it’s productive to debate this much on the object level. The main thing I want to highlight is that this is a very good example of how the taboo that I discussed above operates.
On most issues, people (and especially LWers) are generally open to thinking about the benefits and costs of each stance, since tradeoffs are real.
However, in the case of ethnonationalism, even discussing the taboo on it (without explicitly advocating for it) was enough to trigger a kind of zero-tolerance attitude in your comment.
This is all the more striking because the main historical opponent of ethnonationalist regimes was globalist communism, which also led to large-scale atrocities. Yet when people defend a “socialist” or “egalitarian” cluster of ideas, that doesn’t lead to anywhere near this level of visceral response.
My main bid here is for readers to notice that there is a striking asymmetry in how we think about and discuss 20th century history, which is best explained via the thing I hypothesized above: a strong taboo on ethnonationalism in the wake of WW2, which has then distorted our ability to think about many other issues.
If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I sincerely believe that people will get hurt if these ideas return to society at large, Richard. Please don’t do this.
It seems to me that Richard isn’t trying to bring back ethnonationalism, or even trying to “add just that touch of ethnic pride back into the meme pool”, but just trying to diagnose “how the western world got so dysfunctional”. If ethnonationalism and the taboo against ethnonationalism are both bad (as an ethnic minority I’m personally pretty scared of the former), then maybe we should get rid of the taboo and defend against ethnonationalism by other means, similar how there is little to no taboo against communism[1] but it hasn’t come close to taking power or reapproaching its historical high water mark in the west.
If you doubt this, there’s an advisor to my local school district who is a self-avowed Marxist and professor of education at the state university, and writes book reviews like this one:
«For decades the educational Left and critical pedagogues have run away from Marxism, socialism, and communism, all too often based on faulty understandings and falling prey to the deep-seated anti-communism in the academy. In History and Education Curry Stephenson Malott pushes back against this trend by offering us deeply Marxist thinking about the circulation of capital, socialist states, the connectivity of Marxist anti-capitalism, and a politics of race and education. In the process Malott points toward the role of education in challenging us all to become abolitionists of global capitalism.» (Wayne Au, Associate Professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell; Editor of the social justice teaching magazine Rethinking Schools; Co-editor of Mapping Corporate Education Reform: Power and Policies Networks in the Neoliberal State)
I like this comment.
For the sake of transparency, while in this post I’m mostly trying to identify a diagnosis, in the longer term I expect to try to do political advocacy as well. And it’s reasonable to expect that people like me who are willing to break the taboo for the purposes of diagnosis will be more sympathetic to ethnonationalism in their advocacy than people who aren’t. For example, I’ve previously argued on twitter that South Africa should have split into two roughly-ethnonationalist states in the 90s, instead of doing what they actually did.
However, I expect that the best ways of fixing western countries won’t involve very much ethnonationalism by historical standards, because it’s a very blunt tool. Also, I suspect that breaking the taboo now will actually lead to less ethnonationalism in the long term. For example, even a little bit more ethnonationalism would plausibly have made European immigration policies much less insane over the last few decades, which would then have prevented a lot of the political polarization we’re seeing today.
I find this idea particularly fraught. I already find it somewhat difficult to engage on this site due to the contentious theories some members hold, and I echo testingthewater’s warning against the trap of reopening these old controversies. You’re trying to thread a really fine needle between “meaningfully advocate change” and “open all possible debates” that I don’t think is feasible.
The site is currently watching a major push from Yudkowsky and Soares’ book launch towards a broad coalition for an AI pause. It really only takes a couple major incidents of connecting the idea to ethnonationalism, scientific racism and/or dictatorship for the targets of your advocacy to turn away.
I’m not going to suggest you stay on-message (lw is way too “truth-seeking” for that to reach anyone), but you should carefully consider the ways in which your future goals conflict.
I could imagine a world where discussing it is not something I would see as critically unwelcome, but I would still want to maintain part of the mechanism that implements the taboo, which is why I made the comments I did: being able to come to agreement that there are outcomes which are good and bad, such as the previous famous outcomes of ethnonationalism. I suspect that I’ve interpreted you to be saying that those previous outcomes were bad (“While perhaps at first this taboo was valuable”) but it’s not as reliable as the taboo implementation I carry would prefer.
If your view is that virtues are required to be independent of outcomes, in that eg a virtue whose adoption would predictably lead to mass death [edit to finish phrase: would still be a virtue if virtuous by its own merits], then I don’t think they can be truly called virtuous; but if your view is that we can discuss some features of outcomes that make an outcome good or bad, then I would want to discuss what virtues can lead us towards better outcomes by that standard. virtue utilitarianism, if you will, rather than rule utilitarianism[1]; the way I heard virtues described was that a virtue is a local aspiration, a non-totalizing learning process. If there are true things underneath these taboos, and those taboos were preventing those true things from being used to produce outcomes I find abhorrent, then if we are to remove the taboo, I wish to first discuss how we will maintain avoidance of those outcomes I see as bad.
At the same time, I recognize that some taboos that one might imagine were also protecting against bad things have already slipped, and so I would also suggest that we discuss this same thing about those topics.
For example, I think that an outcome I prefer is that people have freedom of association, that the groups be able to mingle non-destructively to a significant degree. A “friendly, non-destructive ethnonationalism” that is prosocial towards nearby ethnonational groups is something I could imagine being a worthy success, though it would strike me as odd, and I would hope it would not be the only kind of state that exists, because I would find it boring.
Also, I would find it odd if ethnonationalism is the only kind of nationalism worth considering, under the assumption that we’re seeking things that can be terminally-valued by a median progressive human.
I doubt that, by default, nationalism is less destructive than it was in the past. And so if we are to remove this taboo, I’d want to establish a way to enter into agreement with a person who will potentially discuss it that we agree on a particular value; not all values, not on everything. but a step towards fusing into a single agent within the particular topic of “do we want the outcomes that were previously the result of nationalism”. Because I don’t think we do, and I hope you also do not; and yet, it may very well be that the standard way of coming to agreement on this topic in current progressive society is one that prevents understanding necessary to achieve avoidance of the outcomes of other bad societal structures, such as a fully centralized command system[2] or a supercritical group[3].
I currently doubt that ethno- or national- are the grouping types that work best, and if you would like to convince me, I would want to understand what “best” is to you. If you will not, then I will be hesitant to further participate in reducing the taboo.
Re: why so much disagreement: because I think you’re trying to remove a taboo that should be there, and so far my impression is that when pressed to explain why it would be good to remove, you retreat to “well, it’s different from other levels of taboo”. My first instinct on realizing that is an obviously-irrational urge to taboo those as well—I don’t think that’s an effective move, so I wrote this comment instead.
@testingthewaters I think you’re jumping to conclusions a bit too quickly about what Richard thinks. Your interpretation is not clearly forbidden but jumping to conclusions in the way you do seems to me to be an error that prevents us from seeking outcomes that I would see as good, because you’re risking overclassifying people as malicious. I don’t think you’d need to do many more rounds of interaction before concluding you’ve identified what you see as malice, in order for the increased carefulness to increase your ability to cooperate with people you don’t fully agree with on important topics.
as you can see, I’m nowhere near being convinced to let go of “outer utilitarianism”, but could easily be convinced to accept “inner virtue ethicism” [edit: since writing this I’ve remembered that you didn’t, as of last discussion, object to processes that compare and rate according to preference, just that those processes may not fit into the type signature of utility functions]
authoritarianism, seen in both ethnonationalist and communist states in recent history
I currently believe this is primarily seen in online discussions and in-person mobs, and I think what testingthewaters was saying feels to me like an instance of attempted irrational superreplicator instantiation, due to not first discussing whether the behavior testingthewaters demands—tabooing the topic—would be according to what you wish to be. However, the pattern you identified as mob dynamics in your talk isn’t obviously the same thing.
This is a thoughtful comment, I appreciate it, and I’ll reply when I have more time (hopefully in a few days).
I seriously doubt Richard recommends any of the regimes/interventions you actually argue against here.
I think the problem is that a part of “respecting” people is letting them choose things for themselves, and in a democratic society also letting them choose things for others.
I admit I do have a problem respecting many people in this specific way. Not sure what to do about it though.
I want to see if you are consistent. Do you support banning abortion and abolishing the death penalty?
Human perception of society has some paradoxes. Consider freedom of speech: In countries that generally have freedom of speech, many people complain about all kinds of injustice, censorship, etc. In countries that have no freedom of speech, everyone is quiet, and when asked explicitly, says: everything is great. Therefore, naive observers often conclude that the former countries have less freedom of speech than the latter, judging by the number of complaints about censorship.
I believe there is a similar effect with meritocracy/equality/etc. Imagine a perfectly unfair feudal society where unless you are born as a member of aristocracy, you are screwed; your talents and hard work will make absolutely no difference. Ironically, many people will believe that this society is fair, that the aristocrats are chosen by God for being better. If the poor kids are never given an opportunity to learn, everyone may believe, based on what they observe, that the poor kids are completely unable to learn. This is what all their priests would teach.
Then comes a revolution, and people find out that the aristocrats are often stupid, and that if you give free education to the poor kids, many of them turn out to be talented. So a meritocratic society is established, everyone gets the chance, the smart and hard-working people can raise, and the stupid and lazy can fall. After a few decades the society is rearranged and made much more fair than before. Ironically, people living in this society believe that it is most unfair, and that you only need to keep giving more and more resources to those at the bottom so that their geniality can manifest. Existence of IQ is denied, because to most people it seems similar to the arbitrary aristocracy of the past.
I was reflecting on some of the takes here for a bit and if I imagine a blind gradient descent in this direction, I imagine quite a lot of potential reality distortion fields due to various of the underlying dynamics involved with holding this position.
So the one thing I wanted to ask was that if you have any sort of reset mechanism here? Like what is the schelling point before the slippery slope? What is the specific action pattern you would take if you got too far? Or do you trust future you enough in order to ensure that it won’t happen?
Good question. One answer is that my reset mechanisms involve cultivating empathy, and replacing fear with positive motivation. If I notice myself being too unempathetic or too fear-driven, that’s worrying.
But another answer is just that, unfortunately, the reality distortion fields are everywhere—and in many ways more prevalent in “mainstream” positions (as discussed in my post). Being more mainstream does get you “safety in numbers”—i.e. it’s harder for you to catalyze big things, for better or worse. But the cost is that you end up in groupthink.
Can you give some examples?
Big government debts seem like the kind of thing that can fail catastrophically at some point, so they represent an important civilizational risk. But how are they distorting the economy? Do you just mean that governments spend much more than they raise in taxes?
This is a theory often referred to as the Cantillian effect
Richard Cantillon observed that the original recipients of new money enjoy higher standards of living at the expense of later recipients. In colloquial terms, the closer you stand to the source of money creation, the wealthier you become. When governments run large deficits that get monetized by central banks, this creates new money that flows first to government and financial sectors before reaching the broader economy. This distorts resource allocation because entities closer to the money source can bid up assets and resources before prices adjust throughout the system.
From a rhetorical perspective, I think it was wrong to lead with the ethnonationalism stuff, since it seems to have confused testingthewaters, and likely many more.
The points about IQ seem parochially American, not applicable to the rest of the West. But aren’t you British, not American? Does this really seem so central in Britain?
I find it hard to tell what you see as good or bad, among these things, especially around what currently is, vs what you would see in the world. I of course can read what you’ve explicitly stated as good, but the way you’ve written this puts it nearby in linguistic vector space to things which are controversial at best, but are intertwined with processes that I would expect to cause seriously bad things. I would appreciate if you could find a way to more clearly signal what outcomes you are inclined towards, to the degree that avoiding accidental pessimization permits you to do so, separate from how to get there. Because as is, it looks to me like you’re seeing the world through a … very strange lens, one that sees real problems but magnifies and distorts them in ways I find unfamiliar and confusing, and which from my understanding seems to blur things together; and I am unclear whether we have common ground, whether the things I see as good in the world are things you see as good, whether things I see as major evils of society are things you do. You’ve explicitly said that some things which attempt to do things in the world under banners of things one might think are good have instead done ill, and things that one might think do ill can be good.
In your talk I didn’t have an opportunity to properly probe your models, but it seemed to me that your label of evil was, at a minimum, not the core etiology of evil, and I worry that if what you seek as good really is simply the other quadrant, that you’re making a subtle mistake.
If you can look at what you wrote, and why I would write this, I think you will see that you have already described part of my reaction partially; but I think you have misunderstood my reaction, and I don’t feel that it is correct for me to fully clarify unless you can take a step of clarifying what it is you seek… virtues, I suppose, but I would want to know what those are.
I hope you can forgive my intentional vagueness.
edit: hash of the things I didn’t say: 0f4b9808113c6b10011fa485cd2176bba860c5e5008935a48c78722e9251c895 - will not edit this again
As git hashsums are short and tangible True Names of abstract git objects, there are abstract properties of behaviors of things in the world that are in principle as concrete and tangible as coal or silver. The economy uses abstract goods to produce new abstract goods. Consequentialism and utility functions or policies could in principle be about virtues and integrity as about hamburgers, but hamburgers are more legible and easier to administer. So I think the crux is relative legibility rather than methods, the same methods that should in principle work break down for practical reasons that have nothing to do with applicability of the methods in principle.
Here’s one concrete way in which this isn’t true: one common simplifying assumption in economics is that goods are homogeneous, and therefore that you’re indifferent about who to buy from. However, virtuous behavior involves rewarding people you think are more virtuous (e.g. by preferentially buying things from them).
In other words, economics is about how agents interact with each other via exchanging goods and services, while virtues are about how agents interact with each other more generally.
I don’t see why using the word “virtue” magically solves the hardness of that math (the reasons why such assumptions are simplifying). Maybe that is what your promised formalizations are about, but I’m also kinda skeptical that reputation and consumers’ preference to trade with some groups over others is a subject that no economist could give reasonable models about.
It seems very reasonable to be indifferent about who ends up incentivising or exhibiting virtuous behaviors you care about (to be more prevalent in the world or your community), and the incentives don’t need to come in the form of personal action about who to buy other things from.
If virtues and other abstract properties of behaviors are treated as particular examples of goods and services, then economics could discuss how agents obtain the presence of virtues or patterns of interaction between people, by paying businesses that specialize in manufacturing their presence in the world.
This does need a scalable enough business to merit the term that can produce marginal virtue and patterns of interactions by employing the existing economy, rearranging the physical world in a way that results in greater presence of these abstract goods in it, wielding fiat currency to move other goods and labor in the world to make this happen by paying other businesses and people who specialize in those goods and labor. Some of these other goods instrumentally effected through other businesses could themselves be virtues or patterns of interaction. Building economic engines that scale is very hard (successful startups reward founders and investors), doing this with illegible abstract goods is borderline impossible, but this is not a fundamentally different kind of activity.
You seem to be talking about master/slave morality but do not mention Nietzsche?