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?
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.
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.
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’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.
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?
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?
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.
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).
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’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.
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?