(Epistemic Status: Quick brainstorm slash free form just-write-it exercise. This wants to be a post but want to throw it out as a comment quickly first and see if it sounds right.)
If you are a big thing you are being evaluated primarily on the basis of what horrible things you’ve done, and reap little of the relative benefit from the brilliant things. If you’re going to then enable many weird offensive things, that’s a losing plan. Even if the group is a huge win on net, some of them will be bad and get you in a lot of trouble.
If you are a small thing, and want to do one weird thing as the only thing, you have a chance that it turns out all right at least with respect to those you are appealing to with your newspaper, blog or what have you. So you can gain the benefits of exploration, free expression, creation of knowledge and so on.
If you are a medium-size thing doing correlated weird things, which are weird and offensive in the same way, then again your risk is contained, because if they’re sufficiently correlated, it’s all one thing, so you won’t reliably be evaluated as bad and can again get the benefits of your one thing. But it also means that in order to do that, you need to be consistent. No violating your group’s party lines so they evaluate you as just. And of course you need to support free speech to avoid being shut down yourself by the “moderates.”
So what happens? “The center” or ’moderates” trying to hold is the biggest thing, has to worry about all sides judging it asymmetrically, so it is forced to come out in favor of blandness. Since a big thing like capitalism or a major corporation or the government interacts with tons of stuff enough to get blamed for it they need to censor it in order to not be found guilty. Increasing polarization and uniformity on all sides.
And in parallel, as a moderate proposing policies and law, you can accuse a whole class of tings of being bad because one of them is bad with respect to one thing, and thus make the case that one must censor.
Which means this “moderate center” isn’t actually anything of the sort. It’s a third power with very little popular support trying to cram things down our throats, because they understand our point scoring systems better than we do—and only partly because they had a large role in engineering those systems. And they are responding to their own incentives.
You actually get the whole dynamic from first principles.
Individual people are small, can and want to take risks, feel increasingly censored for increasingly stupid reasons, and become more pro-free-speech. Large powerful things that want to appeal to multiple sides race with each other to be bigger censors so they can avoid being found guilty, and scapegoat the other moderate powerful things they’re struggling with for power, along with everyone else who they can directly censor to gain the upper hand as a group. Ideally they’d like to censor any attempt to portray things accurately or create clarity or common knowledge at all, because the people hate the censorship and they distrust power and the more information they find out, the bigger the negative points they’ll assign to every big powerful thing. This creates a tacit (at least) conspiracy of the powerful against all communication, coordination and creation of common knowledge on anything that might matter. A general opposition to reason and competence seems to logically follow.
I thought this did a good job of tackling the issue in an explanatory/model centered way.
(Relatedly, Sarah’s posts in general tend to discuss politics in a way that is framed in an explanatory and/or model-centered and/or abstracted fashion, which is a good approach for discussion controversial things in a way that fits the frontpage guidelines)
It’s not so much that big things are for blandness and censorship. They’re for opacity. They are against being mappable. Blandness is boring, and being boring deflects attention. It makes it unrewarding to investigate things, to map the territory. Critics, unable to keep up, have to resort to criticizing the whole system.
“I know you’re up to a whole bunch of bad stuff, even if I can’t keep up with the particulars because you’re actively hiding them from me with your gigantic budgets and political power” is not untrue. Also, “I know that I have an exaggerated notion of how much good you’re doing, because you’re using your money and power to spread propaganda and I don’t have the capacity to distinguish your lies from the truth” is also not entirely unfair.
Hence, asymmetric injustice as a corrective to propaganda.
Of course, even if it’s producing neutrality on average, the landscape is lots of regions of intense propaganda for or against the system. Work for a major corporation, and you’re in a region of intense pro-corporate propaganda. Work for the Sanders campaign, and you’re in a region of intense anti-corporate propaganda.
Material wealth just sits there, waiting to be consumed. It doesn’t exist unless you make it. It’s a thing: a bushel of wheat, an mRNA vaccine, a mile of water pipe.
Knowledge is fugitive. Have an edge in the stock market? Better hide it if you want to use it. Need to criticize your opponent but don’t have any dirt on them? Make something up. Expert in your field? Better not exit the field, because your current skills and network will be obsolete in a year or two.
If you have a budget of time, and you’re trying to invest it wisely, you invest in material wealth, technical skill, or political power.
Only giant institutions or deeply invested players can really afford to invest in serious technical knowledge about the political landscape. It changes too fast, and it doesn’t produce anything of direct value.
Activists can’t afford fugitive knowledge about fugitive knowledge. So they criticize the shell game of the whole system, and we get the results we observe. Particular examples aren’t meant to be accurate, just illustrative.
Any activists who deviate from this and actually try to accurately model the current state of some political subsystem are building a form of knowledge that’s only lucrative in terms of power or money from within that system.
They’ll eventually either get tired or get hired.
Maybe there’s a sort of “efficient market hypothesis” at work here? Anybody who understands the system well enough eventually does it for a living? So anybody who isn’t part of the system doesn’t have an updated model about it, i.e. doesn’t understand it?
(Epistemic Status: Quick brainstorm slash free form just-write-it exercise. This wants to be a post but want to throw it out as a comment quickly first and see if it sounds right.)
Could we tie this directly in with Asymmetric Justice?
If you are a big thing you are being evaluated primarily on the basis of what horrible things you’ve done, and reap little of the relative benefit from the brilliant things. If you’re going to then enable many weird offensive things, that’s a losing plan. Even if the group is a huge win on net, some of them will be bad and get you in a lot of trouble.
If you are a small thing, and want to do one weird thing as the only thing, you have a chance that it turns out all right at least with respect to those you are appealing to with your newspaper, blog or what have you. So you can gain the benefits of exploration, free expression, creation of knowledge and so on.
If you are a medium-size thing doing correlated weird things, which are weird and offensive in the same way, then again your risk is contained, because if they’re sufficiently correlated, it’s all one thing, so you won’t reliably be evaluated as bad and can again get the benefits of your one thing. But it also means that in order to do that, you need to be consistent. No violating your group’s party lines so they evaluate you as just. And of course you need to support free speech to avoid being shut down yourself by the “moderates.”
So what happens? “The center” or ’moderates” trying to hold is the biggest thing, has to worry about all sides judging it asymmetrically, so it is forced to come out in favor of blandness. Since a big thing like capitalism or a major corporation or the government interacts with tons of stuff enough to get blamed for it they need to censor it in order to not be found guilty. Increasing polarization and uniformity on all sides.
And in parallel, as a moderate proposing policies and law, you can accuse a whole class of tings of being bad because one of them is bad with respect to one thing, and thus make the case that one must censor.
Which means this “moderate center” isn’t actually anything of the sort. It’s a third power with very little popular support trying to cram things down our throats, because they understand our point scoring systems better than we do—and only partly because they had a large role in engineering those systems. And they are responding to their own incentives.
You actually get the whole dynamic from first principles.
Individual people are small, can and want to take risks, feel increasingly censored for increasingly stupid reasons, and become more pro-free-speech. Large powerful things that want to appeal to multiple sides race with each other to be bigger censors so they can avoid being found guilty, and scapegoat the other moderate powerful things they’re struggling with for power, along with everyone else who they can directly censor to gain the upper hand as a group. Ideally they’d like to censor any attempt to portray things accurately or create clarity or common knowledge at all, because the people hate the censorship and they distrust power and the more information they find out, the bigger the negative points they’ll assign to every big powerful thing. This creates a tacit (at least) conspiracy of the powerful against all communication, coordination and creation of common knowledge on anything that might matter. A general opposition to reason and competence seems to logically follow.
Does that sound right?
I thought this did a good job of tackling the issue in an explanatory/model centered way.
(Relatedly, Sarah’s posts in general tend to discuss politics in a way that is framed in an explanatory and/or model-centered and/or abstracted fashion, which is a good approach for discussion controversial things in a way that fits the frontpage guidelines)
It’s not so much that big things are for blandness and censorship. They’re for opacity. They are against being mappable. Blandness is boring, and being boring deflects attention. It makes it unrewarding to investigate things, to map the territory. Critics, unable to keep up, have to resort to criticizing the whole system.
“I know you’re up to a whole bunch of bad stuff, even if I can’t keep up with the particulars because you’re actively hiding them from me with your gigantic budgets and political power” is not untrue. Also, “I know that I have an exaggerated notion of how much good you’re doing, because you’re using your money and power to spread propaganda and I don’t have the capacity to distinguish your lies from the truth” is also not entirely unfair.
Hence, asymmetric injustice as a corrective to propaganda.
Of course, even if it’s producing neutrality on average, the landscape is lots of regions of intense propaganda for or against the system. Work for a major corporation, and you’re in a region of intense pro-corporate propaganda. Work for the Sanders campaign, and you’re in a region of intense anti-corporate propaganda.
Material wealth just sits there, waiting to be consumed. It doesn’t exist unless you make it. It’s a thing: a bushel of wheat, an mRNA vaccine, a mile of water pipe.
Knowledge is fugitive. Have an edge in the stock market? Better hide it if you want to use it. Need to criticize your opponent but don’t have any dirt on them? Make something up. Expert in your field? Better not exit the field, because your current skills and network will be obsolete in a year or two.
If you have a budget of time, and you’re trying to invest it wisely, you invest in material wealth, technical skill, or political power.
Only giant institutions or deeply invested players can really afford to invest in serious technical knowledge about the political landscape. It changes too fast, and it doesn’t produce anything of direct value.
Activists can’t afford fugitive knowledge about fugitive knowledge. So they criticize the shell game of the whole system, and we get the results we observe. Particular examples aren’t meant to be accurate, just illustrative.
Any activists who deviate from this and actually try to accurately model the current state of some political subsystem are building a form of knowledge that’s only lucrative in terms of power or money from within that system.
They’ll eventually either get tired or get hired.
Maybe there’s a sort of “efficient market hypothesis” at work here? Anybody who understands the system well enough eventually does it for a living? So anybody who isn’t part of the system doesn’t have an updated model about it, i.e. doesn’t understand it?