Something’s brewing in my brain lately, and I don’t know what. I know that it centers around:
-People were probably born during the Crimean War/US Civil War/The Boxer Rebellion who then died of a heart attack in a skyscraper/passenger plane crash/being caught up in, say WWII.
-Accurate descriptions of people from a decade or two ago tend to seem tasteless. (Casual homophobia) Accurate descriptions of people several decades ago seem awful and bizarre. (Hitting your wife, blatant racism) Accurate descriptions of people from centuries ago seem alien in their flat-out implausible awfulness. (Royalty shitting on the floor at Versailles, the Albigensian Crusade, etc...)
-We seem no less shocked now by social changes and technological developments and no less convinced that everything major under the sun has been done and only tweaks and refinements remain than people of past eras did.
I guess what I’m saying is that the Singularity seems a lot more factually supported-ly likely than it otherwise might have been, but we won’t realize we’re going through it until it’s well underway because our perception of such things will also wind up going faster for most of it.
We seem no less shocked now by social changes and technological developments and no less convinced that everything major under the sun has been done and only tweaks and refinements remain than people of past eras did.
I do expect the future to be different.
I could imagine a future where people see illegalizing LSD as strange as illegalizing homosexuality.
I can imagine that Google’s rent an AI car service will completely remove personal ownership of cars in a few decades. This removes cars as status symbols with means that they will be built on other design criteria like energy efficiency.
I can imagine a constructed language possibly overtaking English.
There are a lot of other things that are more vague.
Cthulhu always swims left isn’t an observation that on every single issue society will settle on the left’s preferences, but that the general trend is leftward movement. If you interpreted it as that, the fall of the Soviet Union and the move away from planned economies should be a far more important counterexample.
Before continue I should define how I’m using left and right. I think them real in the sense they are the coalitions that tend to form in under current socioeconomic conditions, when due to the adversarial nature of politics, you compress very complicated preferences into as few dimensions (one) as possible. Principle component analysis makes for a nice metaphor on this.
Back to Cthulhu. As someone who’s preferences can be described as right wing I would be quite happy with returning to 1950s levels of state intervention, welfare and relative economic equality in exchange for that period’s social capital and cultural norms. Controlling for technological progress obviously. Some on the far right of mainstream conservatives might accept the same trade. This isn’t to say I would find it a perfect fit, not by long shot, but it would be a net improvement. I believe most Western far right people would accept this trade, most Western far left people would not accept this trade. And in America at least, centrists would be uncomfortable both with that level of state intervention and the social norms of the 1950s.
Now that we have this claim about revealed preferences, let’s invoke a very simple heuristic. Imagine you have two players playing a zero sum game of politics, they are offered to move the game to the position it had 50 moves ago. One player accepts, the other refuses. Ceteris paribus which one do you think is winning?
The “who would prefer to return 50 years back?” argument is interesting, but I think the meaning of “winning” has to be defined more precisely. Imagine that 50 years ago I was (by whatever metric) ten times as powerful as you, but today I am only three times as powerful than you. Would you describe this situation as your victory?
In some sense, yes, it is an improvement of your relative power. In other sense, no, I am still more powerful. You may be hopeful about the future, because the first derivative seems to work for you. On the other hand, maybe the second derivative works for me; and generally, predicting the future is a tricky business.
But it is interesting to think about how the time dimension is related to politics. I was thinking that maybe it’s the other way round; that “the right” is the side which self-identifies with the past, so in some sense it is losing by definition—if your goal is to be “more like yesterday than like today”, then tautologically today is worse according to this metric than the yesterday was. And there is a strong element of returning to the past in some right-wing movements.
But then I realized that some left-wing movements have this component too. I remember communists emphasising that millenia ago humans lived in perfectly egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies (before the surplus value was taken by the evil slavers / feudal lords / capitalists), so when the true communism comes, this ancient harmony will be restored. Similarly, some feminists (maybe just a small minority of them, I don’t know) have stories about how exactly the ancient matriarchal societies were organized, so overthrowing patriarchy would kinda restore this ancient order.
At this moment my working hypothesis is that “returning to the perfect past” is simply an universal human bias, and the main political difference is where exactly is your Golden Age located. Then it would seem that the right wing puts the Golden Age in the more recent past, while the left wing prefers prehistorical societies.
That makes it pretty likely that in its heart, the left is about returning towards our hunter-gatherer instincts and abandoning as much as possible of our disappointing civilization, while the right is about insisting on some specific adaptations to scarcity. Something like what Yvain said, with the connotational objection that the category of danger does not include only zombies, but also criminals or dysfunctional bureaucracies, which are everyday reality for some people. Generally, as we improve economically, we can afford to remove some of the adaptations to scarcity; the trade-offs that are no longer necessary. But sometimes while doing so we fuck up things horribly and the scarcity returns; often in a way that university professors don’t notice, simply because it does not happen to them.
Imagine that 50 years ago I was (by whatever metric) ten times as powerful as you, but today I am only three times as powerful than you. Would you describe this situation as your victory?
I would describe it as me playing very well for the past 50 years and the game going my way.
Cthulhu always swims left isn’t an observation that on every single issue society will settle on the left’s preferences, but that the general trend is leftward
Dropping the “always” might lead to less confusion on this point.
Why does politics compress issues into a single linear dimension?
I suppose it makes sense in a two party system, but why do parliamentary systems with several small parties mainly have parties on the extremes, rather than mainly having parties with orthogonal preferences that could ally with either major party? In principle, a Green party ought not to care much about the left-right access, but in practice it cares very much.
Why does politics compress issues into a single linear dimension?
I don’t know, it might be an artifact of representative systems in the West where the all important thing is getting the majority vote. “Left” vs. “Right” being a strong signal of who your allies tend to be seems to work pretty well descriptively for most people’s political identities and preferences.
A slight nitpick: I wouldn’t describe politics as anything remotely near zero-sum. The actions of the players of a country’s game of politics have very far-reaching effects on the citizens and residents of that country, and in some cases of the residents of the entire world.
The actions of the players definitely do affect the world at large in ways outside the scope of the game, which makes it about as far from zero-sum as it could possibly be. I’m pretty sure that this changes the outcome of your thought experiment dramatically.
That depends on the definition of “left.” What is your definition?
(I am skeptical that “left” is a useful concept.)
Moldbug sometimes seems to define it as Puritan or Protestant more generally. But at other times he seems to say that the two are the same, but not by definition.
In the early 19th century, the Temperance movement was the same people seeking the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Surely this counts as left? A century later it won by having a broader base, but it was still Protestant. Indeed, much of the appeal was as a way to attack Catholic immigrants.
Marijuana and cocaine were banned at about the same time as alcohol. One interpretation was that this was a side effect of the temperance movement. (This is more clear in the case of cocaine, which was a dry run of prohibition; less clear with marijuana, which was banned later.) Another interpretation is that they were race war (just like alcohol). That sounds right-wing, but what is your definition? The prohibition of LSD was much later and seems much more clearly right-wing.
I am talking only of America. I believe that prohibitions elsewhere were imported. If you think America is right-wing, that makes them seem right-wing.
Added: I forgot opium. It was nationally banned with cocaine, but it was banned in SF much earlier, when the Temperance movement was a lot weaker. I think most local Prohibitions were left-wing, but opium in SF might not fit that.
Marijuana and cocaine were banned at about the same time as alcohol. One interpretation was that this was a side effect of the temperance movement. (This is more clear in the case of cocaine, which was a dry run of prohibition; less clear with marijuana, which was banned later.)
I think the ban of Marijuana in 1937 was a win for DuPond business interests. From a right/left perspective of the 19th century that’s difficult to parse as either left or right.
Yes, the commercial aspects probably pushed it over the line despite it not being banned earlier, but the fact that lots of things were banned suggest that there is probably a common cause and that the commercial aspects were only secondary. Whether the common cause is that one group opposed everything or that one group opposed alcohol and moved the Overton window is harder to decide.
If I had to guess, I’d say that as Konkvistador is against democracy and voting in general, he wants voting rights to be denied to everyone, and as such, starting with 51% of the population is a good step in that direction.
starting with 51% of the population is a good step in that direction
Sure, but the process would likely have hysteresis depending on which group you remove first, and “women” doesn’t seem like the best possible choice to me—even “people without a university degree” would likely be better IMO.
Maybe it is because of our instincts that scream at us that every woman is precious (for long-term survival of the tribe), but the males are expendable. Taking the votes away from the expendable males could perhaps get popular support even today, if done properly. The difficult part in dismantling democracy are the votes of women.
(Disclaimer: I am not advocating dismantling democracy by this comment; just describing the technical problems.)
If you stop thinking of democracy as sacred and start seeing letting various groups vote as a utility calculation, one starts looking at questions like how various groups vote, how politicians attempt to appeal to them, and what effect this has on the way the country winds up being governed.
It’s not just a question of whether they vary, it’s whether they vary in a way that systematically correlates with better (or worse) decisions. Also there are Campbell’s law considerations.
I chose those examples in particular because in the United States the movement behind prohibition, making prostitution illegal and expanding the franchise to women was basically one and the same.
I disapprove of voting obviously. I chose it as the example because in the US the same movements argued for making these three things, among others, as they are in the first place.
But these are not, seemingly, as different as, say, the discovery of LSD. Or psychotropics. Or the establishment of homosexuality as relatively innate. Or the invention of the car, or the very first creation of a constructed language.
The invention of the car wasn’t that big a deal. At the beginning it wasn’t clear that cars are all that great. It took time for people to figure out that cars are much more awesome than horse carts.
I think you underrate the effects of legalizing LSD. If you say you legalize all drugs, you have to ask yourself questions such as why pharma company pay a lot of money for clinical trials when all substances can be legally sold. As a society you have to answer those questions.
As far as the establishment that homoesexuality is relatively innate, I think you have to keep in mind how vague the term homosexuality happens to be. At the moment homosexuality seems to be an identity label. To me it’s not clear that this will be the case in 200 years.
A lot of men who fuck other men in prisons don’t see themselves as homosexual. Plenty of people who report that they had pleasureable sex with a person of the same sex don’t label themselves as homosexual.
There are also a lot of norms about avoiding physical contact with other people. A therapist is supposed to work on the mind and that doesn’t mean just hugging a person for a minute. I can imagine a society in which casual touches between people are a lot more intimate than they are nowadays and behavior between males that a conversative American would label as homosexual would be default social behavior between friends.
If you run twin studies you find that being overweight has a strong genetic factor. The same goes for height. Yet the average of both changed a lot during the last two hundred years. The notion of something being innate might even be some rest of what Nietzsche called the God in the grammar. It might not be around in 100 years anymore as it exists nowadays.
There are also a lot of norms about avoiding physical contact with other people. A therapist is supposed to work on the mind and that doesn’t mean just hugging a person for a minute. I can imagine a society in which casual touches between people are a lot more intimate than they are nowadays and behavior between males that a conversative American would label as homosexual would be default social behavior between friends.
This futuristic society of casual male intimacy was known as the 19th century.
In it, the Russia of the 1950s and the modern Middle East you could observe men dancing together, holding hands, cuddling, sleeping together and kissing.
More generally, ISTM that displays of affection between heterosexual men correlate negatively with homophobia within each society but positively across societies. (That’s because the higher your prior probability for X is, the more evidence I need to provide to convince you that not-X.)
If I look at that description it seems to me that the current way of seeing homosexuality won’t be permanent.
It seems being homesexual became a separate identity to the extend that people focused in not engaging in certain kinds of intimacy to signal that they aren’t gay.
If the stigma against homosexuality disappears, homosexuality as identity might disappear the same way.
The word homosexuality is even in decline in google ngrams.
There’s a distinction occasionally drawn between homosexual and gay; homosexual is the sexual preference, gay is the cultural lump/stereotype populated mainly by homosexuals. So the ‘metrosexual’ thing in the early 00s was a kind of fad for heterosexual men adopting gay culture.
This distinction is mainly drawn to point out that the political right’s objection is largely to ‘gay’ rather than to ‘homosexual’.
Under this distinction: Men who prefer to have sex with men rather than women are homosexual. Men who prefer to have sex with women rather than men are heterosexual.
Prison sex may be homosexual (that’s a matter of fuzzy definitions), but (under this distinction) definitely isn’t gay.
This distinction is mainly drawn to point out that the political right’s objection is largely to ‘gay’ rather than to ‘homosexual’.
No the political right’s objection is to people engaging in homosexual sex and to popular culture telling people this is a normal and healthy thing to do. The subtler objection is to it telling people that if they find 19th century style male bonding appealing it means that they’re “gay” and should thus engage in homosexual sex.
I see no reason to believe that is the case; gay culture, by its nature of growing out of highly-liberal communties during the 60s and 70s, is highly hedonistic and permissive, both things the political right objects to already. That they strongly dislike (perceived) core attributes of this culture and the associated homosexuality looks like a strictly simpler hypothesis than that they dislike (perceived) core attributes of this culture, and also homosexuality.
In short: Occam appears to be on my side, so you’ll need some evidence for that.
Read what traditionalists actually write for one thing. They’re against hedonistic behaviors and that includes homosexual sex (this is not the only reason they’re against it). Notice that this was true long before the current cultural concept of what it means to “act gay”.
The subtler objection is to it telling people that if they find 19th century style male bonding appealing it means that they’re “gay” and should thus engage in homosexual sex.
What? ISTM it’s right-wingers who say things like that. EDIT: I guess I had misread that (I had read “should” as ‘are likely to’ rather than ‘had better’), in which case… what??? I can’t remember anyone ever suggesting anything remotely like that with a straight face, and I know plenty of left-wingers; are you sure you aren’t attacking a straw man?
I guess I had misread that (I had read “should” as ‘are likely to’ rather than ‘had better’), in which case… what??? I can’t remember anyone ever suggesting anything remotely like that with a straight face,
They tend to phrase it as encouraging people to “find out if they’re gay”, i.e., encourage people to declare themselves “gay” if what amounts to 19th century style male bonding appeals to them. Furthermore, once someone has been declared “gay” it’s considered a horrendous hate crime to discourage him from engaging in homosexual sex.
They tend to phrase it as encouraging people to “find out if they’re gay”, i.e., encourage people to declare themselves “gay” if what amounts to 19th century style male bonding appeals to them.
Never heard that either.
Furthermore, once someone has been declared “gay” it’s considered a horrendous hate crime to discourage him from engaging in homosexual sex.
And once someone has been declared “straight” it’s considered a horrendous hate crime to discourage him from engaging in heterosexual sex (except by fundamentalist Christians and the like, but that also applies to gay sex), so what’s your point?
And once someone has been declared “straight” it’s considered a horrendous hate crime to discourage him from engaging in heterosexual sex
Encouraging “gays” to become “straight” is considered a hate crime, encouraging “straights” to become “gay” is framed as encouraging them to “find out if they’re gay” and considered commendable.
Also, at least in the US, encouraging “straights” to hold of until marriage is considered old fashioned but not nearly as bad as attempting to deconvert “gays”. The latter has in fact been made illegal in California.
encouraging “straights” to become “gay” is framed as encouraging them to “find out if they’re gay” and considered commendable.
What the hell are you talking about? AFAICT nearly all straight people I know would find such an, ahem, encouragement quite annoying at the very best, and most of them would be utterly disgusted by it. “I’m flattered, but I’m straight” said with a poker face is about as positive a reaction as I’d ever anticipate seeing.
You and Eugine seem to be talking past one another;
He’s saying that society tends to see it as (at worst) a bit of a faux pas for a gay man to try to get a straight to switch teams whereas a gay converter is one step off from an SS officer in terms of the hatred they get.
You, on the other hand, seem to be talking about how annoyed straight guys get when being harassed by gays trying to convert them, and presumably vice versa. That people get pissed off, with good reason, when people try to dictate terms to them on whom they desire.
Oddly enough, both of you are right. It is much more acceptable for gay men to be “straight chasers” and try to get straight guys to “come out” than it is for Christians to be “deconverters” and try to get gay guys to “find Jesus,” at least everywhere I’ve lived (admittedly, my favorite cities tend to be pretty deep blue). People confronted with this kind of obnoxious behavior don’t appreciate it in either case, but the straight guy has to be a lot more careful not to say anything “offensive” to the guy grabbing him (God forbid throwing a punch) than the gay guy who can tell the pastor to go to hell and walk off with the full force of the law / media behind him.
There seems to be a pretty big asymmetry here that you’re ignoring. Christian “deconverters” aren’t simply saying “Hey, why don’t you try straight sex? You might end up enjoying it.” They’re saying “There is something deeply wrong with your sexual orientation and you will suffer eternally unless you sincerely attempt to change it.” I doubt that attempts to convert straight men result in higher rates of depression or suicide among them.
The appropriate analog of the gay “straight chasers” you’re talking about would be a straight woman who attempts to “convert” gay guys by, say, trying to convince them to sleep with her, maybe because she likes the challenge. Do you think such a person would also be seen as one step off from an SS officer?
The appropriate analog of the gay “straight chasers” you’re talking about would be a straight woman who attempts to “convert” gay guys by, say, trying to convince them to sleep with her, maybe because she likes the challenge. Do you think such a person would also be seen as one step off from an SS officer?
BTW, IME straight men who manage to convince lesbians to sleep with them usually inspire awe, not disgust. (I can’t think of any concrete examples of the gender-reversed situation, which you described.)
Or the establishment of homosexuality as relatively innate.
When did this actually happen? All the arguments I’ve boil down to either the “it shows up on brain scans and is thus innate” fallacy, or if you don’t agree it’s innate you must be an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!!!11!!
if you don’t agree it’s innate you must be an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!
What? I can’t see why knowing that genetics (assuming that’s what’s meant by “innate”) affects how likely people are to commit violent crimes would make me dislike violent criminal any less, nor why knowing that (say) the concentration of lead in the air also affects that would make me dislike them any more.
I can’t see why knowing that genetics (assuming that’s what’s meant by “innate”) affects how likely people are to commit violent crimes would make me dislike violent criminal any less,
Well, there are a lot of people arguing that we should go easy on violent criminals since “it’s not their fault”. I don’t agree with this argument, but a lot of people seem to be convinced by it.
Relative to what? If “lots of things” are “relatively” something, your standards are probably too low.
Yes, twin studies give a simple upper bound to the genetic component of male homosexuality, but it is very low. As an exercise, you might try to name 10 things with a lower genetic contribution. But I think defining “innate” as “genetic” is a serious error, endemic in all discussions of human variety.
Added, months later: Cochran and Ewald suggest as a benchmark leprosy, generally considered an infection, not at all innate. Yet it has (MZ/DZ) twin concordance of 70⁄20. For something less exotic, TB is 50⁄20. That’s higher than any reputable measure of the concordance of homosexuality. The best studies I know are surveys of twin registries: in Australia, there is a concordance of 40⁄10 for Kinsey 1+ and 20⁄0 for Kinsey 2+; in Sweden, 20⁄10 and 5⁄0.
Since everybody in this subthread is talking about the numbers without mentioning them, from Wikipedia:
Biometric modeling revealed that, in men, genetic effects explained .34–.39 of the variance [of sexual orientation], the shared environment .00, and the individual-specific environment .61–.66 of the variance. Corresponding estimates among women were .18–.19 for genetic factors, .16–.17 for shared environmental, and .64–.66 for unique environmental factors.
Numbers like ”.34–.39″ imply great precision. In fact, that is not a confidence interval, but two point estimates based on different definitions. The 95% confidence interval does not exclude 0 genetic contribution. I’m getting this from the paper, table 1, on page 3 (77), but I find implausible the transformation of that raw data into those conclusions.
Ok, taboo “relatively innate”. The common analogy used in the ‘civil rights’ arguments is to things like skin color. By that standard homosexuality is not innate.
I can’t speak for Bayeslisk, but I’d say it means that things other than what happens to you after your birth have a non-negligible effect (by which standard your accent is hardly innate). But I agree it’s not a terribly important distinction.
The common analogy used in the ‘civil rights’ arguments is to things like skin color. By that standard homosexuality is not innate.
I probably agree. (But of course it’s a continuum, not two separate classes. Skin colour also depends by how long you sunbathe and how much carotene you eat, yadda yadda yadda.)
The problem is that human social mores seem to change on the order of 20-40 years which is consistent with the amount of time it takes a new generation of people to take the helm and for the old generation to die out. I have personally seen extreme societal change within my own country of origin, change that happened in only the span of 30 years. In comparison, Western culture over this same time has seemed almost stagnant (despite the fact that it, too, has undergone massive changes such as acceptance of homosexuality).
However, by some estimates, we are already just 20-40 years away from the singularity (2035-2055). This seems like too short a time for human culture to adapt to the massive level that is required. For instance, consider a simple thing like food. Right now, the idea of eating meat that has been grown in a lab seems unsettling and strange to many people. Now consider what future technology will enable, step-by-step:
Food produced by nanotech with simple feedstock, with no slow and laborious cell growth required.
Food produced by nanotech with household waste, including urine and feces (possibly the feces of other people as well), thus creating a self-contained system.
Changing human biochemistry so that waste is simply recycled inside our bodies, requiring no food at all, and just an energy source plus some occasional supplements.
Uploading brains. Food becomes an archaic concept.
There is likely to not be a very large span of time between each of these steps.
Absent mass mind uploading, I doubt that food in some relatively recognizable form will ever die out, or that we will ever find it economically feasible to eat food known to be made from human waste. Sunlight and feedstock are cheap, people get squicked easily, and stuff that’s stuck around for a long time is likely to continue sticking around. You may as well say we’ll outgrow a need for fire, language, or tools; indeed, I’d believe any of those over the total abandonment of food.
Absent mass mind uploading, I doubt that food in some relatively recognizable form will ever die out, or that we will ever find it economically feasible to eat food known to be made from human waste.
Fecal implants do seem to have some health benefits.
There are people who do drink their own urine. Spirilina can be grown on urine.
Algae also have the advantage that they are signal cell organism with means that it’s easy to introduce new genes into them via DIY-bio efforts.
That means you can easily change the way the stuff tastes and let it produce vitamins and other substances. If you want a cheap source of THC you can transplant the relevant genes needed to produce the THC into an algae and grow it at home in a way that isn’t as easily discovered as growing hemp.
You can trade different algae species and get more interesting compounds than THC.
Few people do, and I doubt that it will catch on; spirulina can also be grown on runoff fertilizer, which will probably sound more appealing to most people.
Oh, makes sense. That’s not food, though; that’s a very easy organ(?) transplant.
You don’t transplant the organ but the feces. They get processed in the intestine. Stuff that enters the body to be processed in the intestine is food for some definition of “food”.
But once you accept the goal to get feces into the gut, the way is only a detail that’s open to change.
No, I know that the colon is not transplanted; the flora is. Hence the (?). Also, it hopefully doesn’t get processed but rather survives to colonize the gut. Further, an enema would probably be far more effective, given its lack of strong acid and pepsin designed to kill the flora.
Few people do, and I doubt that it will catch on; spirulina can also be grown on runoff fertilizer, which will probably sound more appealing to most people.
Sounding appealing is a question of marketing. Plenty of people prefer organic food that grown with feces of animals over food grown with “chemical” fertilizer. They even pay more money for the product.
I also think you underrate the cost of fertilizer for some poor biohacker in Neirobi who has plenty of access to empty bottles. Human urine should also be pretty cheap to buy in third world megacities.
Access to cheap natural gas and oil is also central for the current way of doing agriculture. Without having access to those resources for cheap prices resource reuse might be a bigger deal.
human social mores seem to change on the order of 20-40 years which is consistent with the amount of time it takes a new generation of people to take the helm and for the old generation to die out
If there’s a causal link here, then it’s possible the biggest problem with social change and technological advances would be due to increased longevity, in which case it might not matter how long the time span is… even if there were decades, it wouldn’t be enough.
In some sci-fi settings they have rules where people above a certain ‘age’ can’t directly enter politics anymore. Although I’m not sure exactly how effective that would be, since they would still hold power and influence, and human nature seems to be that we allow more power and influence to the elderly than to the young.
Vinge said something of the sort—that the Singularity would be unimaginable from its past, but after the Singularity (he’s assuming one which includes humans), the path to the Singularity will be known, and it will seem quite plausible.
That’s something a little different—I think that’s already talked about here. Maybe under the Hindsight Bias? At any rate, I’m not talking about looking back; I’m talking about looking from within. The march of history is almost always too slow to see, and even with a significant speedup it’d still probably seem “normal”. Only right at the end would it be clear that a Singularity is occurring.
Something’s brewing in my brain lately, and I don’t know what. I know that it centers around:
-People were probably born during the Crimean War/US Civil War/The Boxer Rebellion who then died of a heart attack in a skyscraper/passenger plane crash/being caught up in, say WWII.
-Accurate descriptions of people from a decade or two ago tend to seem tasteless. (Casual homophobia) Accurate descriptions of people several decades ago seem awful and bizarre. (Hitting your wife, blatant racism) Accurate descriptions of people from centuries ago seem alien in their flat-out implausible awfulness. (Royalty shitting on the floor at Versailles, the Albigensian Crusade, etc...)
-We seem no less shocked now by social changes and technological developments and no less convinced that everything major under the sun has been done and only tweaks and refinements remain than people of past eras did.
I guess what I’m saying is that the Singularity seems a lot more factually supported-ly likely than it otherwise might have been, but we won’t realize we’re going through it until it’s well underway because our perception of such things will also wind up going faster for most of it.
I do expect the future to be different.
I could imagine a future where people see illegalizing LSD as strange as illegalizing homosexuality.
I can imagine that Google’s rent an AI car service will completely remove personal ownership of cars in a few decades. This removes cars as status symbols with means that they will be built on other design criteria like energy efficiency.
I can imagine a constructed language possibly overtaking English.
There are a lot of other things that are more vague.
Drug prohibition laws introduced in the 20th century are a nice counterexample to reactionaries’ claim that Cthulhu only swims left, BTW.
(Edited to replace “always” with “only”—I misremembered that quote.)
Cthulhu always swims left isn’t an observation that on every single issue society will settle on the left’s preferences, but that the general trend is leftward movement. If you interpreted it as that, the fall of the Soviet Union and the move away from planned economies should be a far more important counterexample.
Before continue I should define how I’m using left and right. I think them real in the sense they are the coalitions that tend to form in under current socioeconomic conditions, when due to the adversarial nature of politics, you compress very complicated preferences into as few dimensions (one) as possible. Principle component analysis makes for a nice metaphor on this.
Back to Cthulhu. As someone who’s preferences can be described as right wing I would be quite happy with returning to 1950s levels of state intervention, welfare and relative economic equality in exchange for that period’s social capital and cultural norms. Controlling for technological progress obviously. Some on the far right of mainstream conservatives might accept the same trade. This isn’t to say I would find it a perfect fit, not by long shot, but it would be a net improvement. I believe most Western far right people would accept this trade, most Western far left people would not accept this trade. And in America at least, centrists would be uncomfortable both with that level of state intervention and the social norms of the 1950s.
Now that we have this claim about revealed preferences, let’s invoke a very simple heuristic. Imagine you have two players playing a zero sum game of politics, they are offered to move the game to the position it had 50 moves ago. One player accepts, the other refuses. Ceteris paribus which one do you think is winning?
The “who would prefer to return 50 years back?” argument is interesting, but I think the meaning of “winning” has to be defined more precisely. Imagine that 50 years ago I was (by whatever metric) ten times as powerful as you, but today I am only three times as powerful than you. Would you describe this situation as your victory?
In some sense, yes, it is an improvement of your relative power. In other sense, no, I am still more powerful. You may be hopeful about the future, because the first derivative seems to work for you. On the other hand, maybe the second derivative works for me; and generally, predicting the future is a tricky business.
But it is interesting to think about how the time dimension is related to politics. I was thinking that maybe it’s the other way round; that “the right” is the side which self-identifies with the past, so in some sense it is losing by definition—if your goal is to be “more like yesterday than like today”, then tautologically today is worse according to this metric than the yesterday was. And there is a strong element of returning to the past in some right-wing movements.
But then I realized that some left-wing movements have this component too. I remember communists emphasising that millenia ago humans lived in perfectly egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies (before the surplus value was taken by the evil slavers / feudal lords / capitalists), so when the true communism comes, this ancient harmony will be restored. Similarly, some feminists (maybe just a small minority of them, I don’t know) have stories about how exactly the ancient matriarchal societies were organized, so overthrowing patriarchy would kinda restore this ancient order.
At this moment my working hypothesis is that “returning to the perfect past” is simply an universal human bias, and the main political difference is where exactly is your Golden Age located. Then it would seem that the right wing puts the Golden Age in the more recent past, while the left wing prefers prehistorical societies.
That makes it pretty likely that in its heart, the left is about returning towards our hunter-gatherer instincts and abandoning as much as possible of our disappointing civilization, while the right is about insisting on some specific adaptations to scarcity. Something like what Yvain said, with the connotational objection that the category of danger does not include only zombies, but also criminals or dysfunctional bureaucracies, which are everyday reality for some people. Generally, as we improve economically, we can afford to remove some of the adaptations to scarcity; the trade-offs that are no longer necessary. But sometimes while doing so we fuck up things horribly and the scarcity returns; often in a way that university professors don’t notice, simply because it does not happen to them.
I would describe it as me playing very well for the past 50 years and the game going my way.
Dropping the “always” might lead to less confusion on this point.
I only used “Cthulhu always swims left” because that is how army1987 termed it. Moldbug says “Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.”
That formulation has the same problem. Like “always swims left”, “only swims left” suggests that every observed movement is leftwards.
Unless there is an implicit distinction between purposeful movement, analogous to swiming, and some drift due to chance.
I doubt most people who read the phrase “Cthulhu only swims left” would pick up on that unspoken distinction, though I could be wrong.
(I’ve corrected it now.)
Why does politics compress issues into a single linear dimension?
I suppose it makes sense in a two party system, but why do parliamentary systems with several small parties mainly have parties on the extremes, rather than mainly having parties with orthogonal preferences that could ally with either major party? In principle, a Green party ought not to care much about the left-right access, but in practice it cares very much.
I don’t know, it might be an artifact of representative systems in the West where the all important thing is getting the majority vote. “Left” vs. “Right” being a strong signal of who your allies tend to be seems to work pretty well descriptively for most people’s political identities and preferences.
A slight nitpick: I wouldn’t describe politics as anything remotely near zero-sum. The actions of the players of a country’s game of politics have very far-reaching effects on the citizens and residents of that country, and in some cases of the residents of the entire world.
The actions of the players definitely do affect the world at large in ways outside the scope of the game, which makes it about as far from zero-sum as it could possibly be. I’m pretty sure that this changes the outcome of your thought experiment dramatically.
That depends on the definition of “left.” What is your definition?
(I am skeptical that “left” is a useful concept.)
Moldbug sometimes seems to define it as Puritan or Protestant more generally. But at other times he seems to say that the two are the same, but not by definition.
In the early 19th century, the Temperance movement was the same people seeking the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. Surely this counts as left? A century later it won by having a broader base, but it was still Protestant. Indeed, much of the appeal was as a way to attack Catholic immigrants.
Marijuana and cocaine were banned at about the same time as alcohol. One interpretation was that this was a side effect of the temperance movement. (This is more clear in the case of cocaine, which was a dry run of prohibition; less clear with marijuana, which was banned later.) Another interpretation is that they were race war (just like alcohol). That sounds right-wing, but what is your definition? The prohibition of LSD was much later and seems much more clearly right-wing.
I am talking only of America. I believe that prohibitions elsewhere were imported. If you think America is right-wing, that makes them seem right-wing.
Added: I forgot opium. It was nationally banned with cocaine, but it was banned in SF much earlier, when the Temperance movement was a lot weaker. I think most local Prohibitions were left-wing, but opium in SF might not fit that.
I think the ban of Marijuana in 1937 was a win for DuPond business interests. From a right/left perspective of the 19th century that’s difficult to parse as either left or right.
Yes, the commercial aspects probably pushed it over the line despite it not being banned earlier, but the fact that lots of things were banned suggest that there is probably a common cause and that the commercial aspects were only secondary. Whether the common cause is that one group opposed everything or that one group opposed alcohol and moved the Overton window is harder to decide.
I would consider legalizing drugs, prostitution and taking away women’s votes to be well worth voting for. If I believed in voting that is.
What’s your issue with women’s voting rights?
If I had to guess, I’d say that as Konkvistador is against democracy and voting in general, he wants voting rights to be denied to everyone, and as such, starting with 51% of the population is a good step in that direction.
Am I correct, or is there something more?
Sure, but the process would likely have hysteresis depending on which group you remove first, and “women” doesn’t seem like the best possible choice to me—even “people without a university degree” would likely be better IMO.
Maybe it is because of our instincts that scream at us that every woman is precious (for long-term survival of the tribe), but the males are expendable. Taking the votes away from the expendable males could perhaps get popular support even today, if done properly. The difficult part in dismantling democracy are the votes of women.
(Disclaimer: I am not advocating dismantling democracy by this comment; just describing the technical problems.)
If you stop thinking of democracy as sacred and start seeing letting various groups vote as a utility calculation, one starts looking at questions like how various groups vote, how politicians attempt to appeal to them, and what effect this has on the way the country winds up being governed.
Don’t forget to consider what sorts of political expression are available to those who are not allowed the vote.
Sure, but I’d guess voting patterns vary much more with age, education, and income than with gender.
It’s not just a question of whether they vary, it’s whether they vary in a way that systematically correlates with better (or worse) decisions. Also there are Campbell’s law considerations.
I think my point still stands.
Well, education is subject to Campbell’s law, but I suspect Konkvistador wouldn’t object to raising the voting age, or imposing income requirements.
Another strike against utilitarianism! One person’s modus ponens is another person’s modus tollens.
I chose those examples in particular because in the United States the movement behind prohibition, making prostitution illegal and expanding the franchise to women was basically one and the same.
I disapprove of voting obviously. I chose it as the example because in the US the same movements argued for making these three things, among others, as they are in the first place.
But these are not, seemingly, as different as, say, the discovery of LSD. Or psychotropics. Or the establishment of homosexuality as relatively innate. Or the invention of the car, or the very first creation of a constructed language.
The invention of the car wasn’t that big a deal. At the beginning it wasn’t clear that cars are all that great. It took time for people to figure out that cars are much more awesome than horse carts.
I think you underrate the effects of legalizing LSD. If you say you legalize all drugs, you have to ask yourself questions such as why pharma company pay a lot of money for clinical trials when all substances can be legally sold. As a society you have to answer those questions.
As far as the establishment that homoesexuality is relatively innate, I think you have to keep in mind how vague the term homosexuality happens to be. At the moment homosexuality seems to be an identity label. To me it’s not clear that this will be the case in 200 years.
A lot of men who fuck other men in prisons don’t see themselves as homosexual. Plenty of people who report that they had pleasureable sex with a person of the same sex don’t label themselves as homosexual.
There are also a lot of norms about avoiding physical contact with other people. A therapist is supposed to work on the mind and that doesn’t mean just hugging a person for a minute. I can imagine a society in which casual touches between people are a lot more intimate than they are nowadays and behavior between males that a conversative American would label as homosexual would be default social behavior between friends.
If you run twin studies you find that being overweight has a strong genetic factor. The same goes for height. Yet the average of both changed a lot during the last two hundred years. The notion of something being innate might even be some rest of what Nietzsche called the God in the grammar. It might not be around in 100 years anymore as it exists nowadays.
This futuristic society of casual male intimacy was known as the 19th century.
In it, the Russia of the 1950s and the modern Middle East you could observe men dancing together, holding hands, cuddling, sleeping together and kissing.
More generally, ISTM that displays of affection between heterosexual men correlate negatively with homophobia within each society but positively across societies. (That’s because the higher your prior probability for X is, the more evidence I need to provide to convince you that not-X.)
If I look at that description it seems to me that the current way of seeing homosexuality won’t be permanent.
It seems being homesexual became a separate identity to the extend that people focused in not engaging in certain kinds of intimacy to signal that they aren’t gay.
If the stigma against homosexuality disappears, homosexuality as identity might disappear the same way.
The word homosexuality is even in decline in google ngrams.
There’s a distinction occasionally drawn between homosexual and gay; homosexual is the sexual preference, gay is the cultural lump/stereotype populated mainly by homosexuals. So the ‘metrosexual’ thing in the early 00s was a kind of fad for heterosexual men adopting gay culture.
This distinction is mainly drawn to point out that the political right’s objection is largely to ‘gay’ rather than to ‘homosexual’.
What does “sexual preference” mean exactly?
Do you mean that the criminals in prisons who rape other criminals are gay but not homosexual?
Are you implying that neither or the terms is actually about whether a man has sexs with another man?
Under this distinction: Men who prefer to have sex with men rather than women are homosexual. Men who prefer to have sex with women rather than men are heterosexual.
Prison sex may be homosexual (that’s a matter of fuzzy definitions), but (under this distinction) definitely isn’t gay.
No the political right’s objection is to people engaging in homosexual sex and to popular culture telling people this is a normal and healthy thing to do. The subtler objection is to it telling people that if they find 19th century style male bonding appealing it means that they’re “gay” and should thus engage in homosexual sex.
I see no reason to believe that is the case; gay culture, by its nature of growing out of highly-liberal communties during the 60s and 70s, is highly hedonistic and permissive, both things the political right objects to already. That they strongly dislike (perceived) core attributes of this culture and the associated homosexuality looks like a strictly simpler hypothesis than that they dislike (perceived) core attributes of this culture, and also homosexuality.
In short: Occam appears to be on my side, so you’ll need some evidence for that.
Read what traditionalists actually write for one thing. They’re against hedonistic behaviors and that includes homosexual sex (this is not the only reason they’re against it). Notice that this was true long before the current cultural concept of what it means to “act gay”.
Taboo that word. Is being left-handed normal?
ISTM the point of that word is often to sneak connotations in.
What? ISTM it’s right-wingers who say things like that. EDIT: I guess I had misread that (I had read “should” as ‘are likely to’ rather than ‘had better’), in which case… what??? I can’t remember anyone ever suggesting anything remotely like that with a straight face, and I know plenty of left-wingers; are you sure you aren’t attacking a straw man?
They tend to phrase it as encouraging people to “find out if they’re gay”, i.e., encourage people to declare themselves “gay” if what amounts to 19th century style male bonding appeals to them. Furthermore, once someone has been declared “gay” it’s considered a horrendous hate crime to discourage him from engaging in homosexual sex.
Never heard that either.
And once someone has been declared “straight” it’s considered a horrendous hate crime to discourage him from engaging in heterosexual sex (except by fundamentalist Christians and the like, but that also applies to gay sex), so what’s your point?
Encouraging “gays” to become “straight” is considered a hate crime, encouraging “straights” to become “gay” is framed as encouraging them to “find out if they’re gay” and considered commendable.
Also, at least in the US, encouraging “straights” to hold of until marriage is considered old fashioned but not nearly as bad as attempting to deconvert “gays”. The latter has in fact been made illegal in California.
What the hell are you talking about? AFAICT nearly all straight people I know would find such an, ahem, encouragement quite annoying at the very best, and most of them would be utterly disgusted by it. “I’m flattered, but I’m straight” said with a poker face is about as positive a reaction as I’d ever anticipate seeing.
You and Eugine seem to be talking past one another;
He’s saying that society tends to see it as (at worst) a bit of a faux pas for a gay man to try to get a straight to switch teams whereas a gay converter is one step off from an SS officer in terms of the hatred they get.
You, on the other hand, seem to be talking about how annoyed straight guys get when being harassed by gays trying to convert them, and presumably vice versa. That people get pissed off, with good reason, when people try to dictate terms to them on whom they desire.
Oddly enough, both of you are right. It is much more acceptable for gay men to be “straight chasers” and try to get straight guys to “come out” than it is for Christians to be “deconverters” and try to get gay guys to “find Jesus,” at least everywhere I’ve lived (admittedly, my favorite cities tend to be pretty deep blue). People confronted with this kind of obnoxious behavior don’t appreciate it in either case, but the straight guy has to be a lot more careful not to say anything “offensive” to the guy grabbing him (God forbid throwing a punch) than the gay guy who can tell the pastor to go to hell and walk off with the full force of the law / media behind him.
There seems to be a pretty big asymmetry here that you’re ignoring. Christian “deconverters” aren’t simply saying “Hey, why don’t you try straight sex? You might end up enjoying it.” They’re saying “There is something deeply wrong with your sexual orientation and you will suffer eternally unless you sincerely attempt to change it.” I doubt that attempts to convert straight men result in higher rates of depression or suicide among them.
The appropriate analog of the gay “straight chasers” you’re talking about would be a straight woman who attempts to “convert” gay guys by, say, trying to convince them to sleep with her, maybe because she likes the challenge. Do you think such a person would also be seen as one step off from an SS officer?
BTW, IME straight men who manage to convince lesbians to sleep with them usually inspire awe, not disgust. (I can’t think of any concrete examples of the gender-reversed situation, which you described.)
Actually he said it is “considered commendable”, but I see your point.
When did this actually happen? All the arguments I’ve boil down to either the “it shows up on brain scans and is thus innate” fallacy, or if you don’t agree it’s innate you must be an EVIL HOMOPHOBE!!!11!!
What? I can’t see why knowing that genetics (assuming that’s what’s meant by “innate”) affects how likely people are to commit violent crimes would make me dislike violent criminal any less, nor why knowing that (say) the concentration of lead in the air also affects that would make me dislike them any more.
Well, there are a lot of people arguing that we should go easy on violent criminals since “it’s not their fault”. I don’t agree with this argument, but a lot of people seem to be convinced by it.
Twin studies. (Though by that standard lots of things are relatively innate.)
Relative to what? If “lots of things” are “relatively” something, your standards are probably too low.
Yes, twin studies give a simple upper bound to the genetic component of male homosexuality, but it is very low. As an exercise, you might try to name 10 things with a lower genetic contribution. But I think defining “innate” as “genetic” is a serious error, endemic in all discussions of human variety.
Added, months later: Cochran and Ewald suggest as a benchmark leprosy, generally considered an infection, not at all innate. Yet it has (MZ/DZ) twin concordance of 70⁄20. For something less exotic, TB is 50⁄20. That’s higher than any reputable measure of the concordance of homosexuality. The best studies I know are surveys of twin registries: in Australia, there is a concordance of 40⁄10 for Kinsey 1+ and 20⁄0 for Kinsey 2+; in Sweden, 20⁄10 and 5⁄0.
Since everybody in this subthread is talking about the numbers without mentioning them, from Wikipedia:
Numbers like ”.34–.39″ imply great precision. In fact, that is not a confidence interval, but two point estimates based on different definitions. The 95% confidence interval does not exclude 0 genetic contribution. I’m getting this from the paper, table 1, on page 3 (77), but I find implausible the transformation of that raw data into those conclusions.
Ok, taboo “relatively innate”. The common analogy used in the ‘civil rights’ arguments is to things like skin color. By that standard homosexuality is not innate.
I can’t speak for Bayeslisk, but I’d say it means that things other than what happens to you after your birth have a non-negligible effect (by which standard your accent is hardly innate). But I agree it’s not a terribly important distinction.
I probably agree. (But of course it’s a continuum, not two separate classes. Skin colour also depends by how long you sunbathe and how much carotene you eat, yadda yadda yadda.)
The problem is that human social mores seem to change on the order of 20-40 years which is consistent with the amount of time it takes a new generation of people to take the helm and for the old generation to die out. I have personally seen extreme societal change within my own country of origin, change that happened in only the span of 30 years. In comparison, Western culture over this same time has seemed almost stagnant (despite the fact that it, too, has undergone massive changes such as acceptance of homosexuality).
However, by some estimates, we are already just 20-40 years away from the singularity (2035-2055). This seems like too short a time for human culture to adapt to the massive level that is required. For instance, consider a simple thing like food. Right now, the idea of eating meat that has been grown in a lab seems unsettling and strange to many people. Now consider what future technology will enable, step-by-step:
Food produced by nanotech with simple feedstock, with no slow and laborious cell growth required.
Food produced by nanotech with household waste, including urine and feces (possibly the feces of other people as well), thus creating a self-contained system.
Changing human biochemistry so that waste is simply recycled inside our bodies, requiring no food at all, and just an energy source plus some occasional supplements.
Uploading brains. Food becomes an archaic concept.
There is likely to not be a very large span of time between each of these steps.
Absent mass mind uploading, I doubt that food in some relatively recognizable form will ever die out, or that we will ever find it economically feasible to eat food known to be made from human waste. Sunlight and feedstock are cheap, people get squicked easily, and stuff that’s stuck around for a long time is likely to continue sticking around. You may as well say we’ll outgrow a need for fire, language, or tools; indeed, I’d believe any of those over the total abandonment of food.
Fecal implants do seem to have some health benefits.
There are people who do drink their own urine. Spirilina can be grown on urine.
Algae also have the advantage that they are signal cell organism with means that it’s easy to introduce new genes into them via DIY-bio efforts.
That means you can easily change the way the stuff tastes and let it produce vitamins and other substances. If you want a cheap source of THC you can transplant the relevant genes needed to produce the THC into an algae and grow it at home in a way that isn’t as easily discovered as growing hemp.
You can trade different algae species and get more interesting compounds than THC.
What are fecal implents?
Few people do, and I doubt that it will catch on; spirulina can also be grown on runoff fertilizer, which will probably sound more appealing to most people.
I think the parent post means fecal transplants which are a way to reseed the gut biota with something hopefully more suitable.
Oh, makes sense. That’s not food, though; that’s a very easy organ(?) transplant.
You don’t transplant the organ but the feces. They get processed in the intestine. Stuff that enters the body to be processed in the intestine is food for some definition of “food”.
But once you accept the goal to get feces into the gut, the way is only a detail that’s open to change.
By the time that stuff is in the colon—which is what gets transplanted—it’s not food any more. At least not for humans.
No, I know that the colon is not transplanted; the flora is. Hence the (?). Also, it hopefully doesn’t get processed but rather survives to colonize the gut. Further, an enema would probably be far more effective, given its lack of strong acid and pepsin designed to kill the flora.
Sorry, typo. Should be fecal implants or stool transplants.
Sounding appealing is a question of marketing. Plenty of people prefer organic food that grown with feces of animals over food grown with “chemical” fertilizer. They even pay more money for the product.
I also think you underrate the cost of fertilizer for some poor biohacker in Neirobi who has plenty of access to empty bottles. Human urine should also be pretty cheap to buy in third world megacities.
Access to cheap natural gas and oil is also central for the current way of doing agriculture. Without having access to those resources for cheap prices resource reuse might be a bigger deal.
Good point. I doubt that that extends to abandoning food altogether, though.
If there’s a causal link here, then it’s possible the biggest problem with social change and technological advances would be due to increased longevity, in which case it might not matter how long the time span is… even if there were decades, it wouldn’t be enough.
In some sci-fi settings they have rules where people above a certain ‘age’ can’t directly enter politics anymore. Although I’m not sure exactly how effective that would be, since they would still hold power and influence, and human nature seems to be that we allow more power and influence to the elderly than to the young.
Vinge said something of the sort—that the Singularity would be unimaginable from its past, but after the Singularity (he’s assuming one which includes humans), the path to the Singularity will be known, and it will seem quite plausible.
That’s something a little different—I think that’s already talked about here. Maybe under the Hindsight Bias? At any rate, I’m not talking about looking back; I’m talking about looking from within. The march of history is almost always too slow to see, and even with a significant speedup it’d still probably seem “normal”. Only right at the end would it be clear that a Singularity is occurring.