I wonder if we need someone to distill and ossify postmodernism into a form that rationalists can process if we are going to tackle the problems postmodernism is meant to solve. A blueprint would be the way that FDT plus prisoners dilemma ossifies sartre’s existentialism is a humanism, at some terrible cost to nuance and beauty, but the core is there.
My suspicion of what happened at a really high level is that fundamentally one of the driving challenges of postmodernism is to actually understand rape, in the sense that rationalism is supposed to respect: being able to predict outcomes, making the map fit the territory etc. EY is sufficiently naive of postmodernism that the depictions of rape and rape threats in Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR basically filtered out anyone with a basic grasp of postmodernism from the community. There’s an analagous phenomenon where when postmodernist writers depicts quantum physics, they do a bad enough job that it puts off people with a basic grasp of physics from participating in postmodernism. Its epistemically nasty too: this comment is frankly low quality, but if I understood postmodernism well enough to be confident in this comment I suspect I would have been sufficiently put off by the draco-threatens-to-rape-luna subplot in HPMOR to have never actually engaged with rationalism.
At first I did not understand your comment, so almost downvoted it. However, GPT helped me understand the point, and just want to post what I think is the core of idea to make it easier for others:
-If rationalists want to address the social and epistemic issues postmodernism highlights (power, context, narrative, knowledge construction), they may need a stripped-down, formal version of postmodernism—just as decision-theory formalizations reduce existentialism to operational decision rules, at a cost.
-One of postmodernism’s central concerns is making sense of power, coercion, and violence—especially sexual violence—at a level of psychological and social realism that allows actual prediction and explanation. Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR handled these themes in a way that anyone with an understanding of postmodern analysis of power was filtered out from the community.
I agree with the first point.
The second point might be technically off: A lot of people do not come via TWC and HPMOR, and more importantly, people can acquire the understanding of postmodernism later. It is true though that LW is very mistake-theory focused and selects out (most) conflict theorist. This does not mean there are no rat or rat adjacent conflict theorists. However there is some selection effect pushing out those who are “pro postmodernism” but not those who are against it, even though both are conflict theorists: as mainstream ideas are (were?) primarily influenced/supported by pro postmodernists, mistake theory rats argued against them due to these ideas not reflecting reality. These are in turn used as ammunition/safe place for conservative/anti postmodern conflict theorists. In my experience (via meetups/forums), most rats are indeed cooperative mistake theorists, irrespective of whether they are left (e.g. EA types) or right (e.g. libertarians), but the very few conflict theorists seemed to be of the conservative kind. This is also a possible explanation why Vance is the most politically successful rat adjacent figure.
And what about Cynical Theories and their understanding of postmodernism? They claim that a major part of postmodernism, especially one related to sociology, began to produce conflict-theoretic slop.
I suspect that postmodernism could be meant to study the potential to lock in oppressing memes (like Black people being dangerous or mentally less capable than White people) and ways to free mankind from them. What I don’t quite buy is claims like “Memes propagating among White peopleharm Black people’s ability to succeed”. What if they achieve a different effect of making some Black people more determined to disprove these memes?
There might also exist things like crab bucket mentality or other meme complexes which tend to infect people and to change the behavior of the infected towards keeping them powerless. Or memes infecting weak-willed people and making them less likely to become strong-willed, but more likely to make the meme seem plausible and infect others.
However, in practice postmodernists try to stop propagation of the memes viewed as harmful even if they reflect some ground truth. More examples of such behavior can be found, for example, in the book that I mentioned.
I’m not entirely sure, actually. My main serious encounter with postmodernism was trying to engage with toni morrison’s beloved well enough to not fail a college class, which jumps out as a possible explanation. I’m willing to buy that its not as central as I thought.
I wonder if we need someone to distill and ossify postmodernism into a form that rationalists can process if we are going to tackle the problems postmodernism is meant to solve. A blueprint would be the way that FDT plus prisoners dilemma ossifies sartre’s existentialism is a humanism, at some terrible cost to nuance and beauty, but the core is there.
My suspicion of what happened at a really high level is that fundamentally one of the driving challenges of postmodernism is to actually understand rape, in the sense that rationalism is supposed to respect: being able to predict outcomes, making the map fit the territory etc. EY is sufficiently naive of postmodernism that the depictions of rape and rape threats in Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR basically filtered out anyone with a basic grasp of postmodernism from the community. There’s an analagous phenomenon where when postmodernist writers depicts quantum physics, they do a bad enough job that it puts off people with a basic grasp of physics from participating in postmodernism. Its epistemically nasty too: this comment is frankly low quality, but if I understood postmodernism well enough to be confident in this comment I suspect I would have been sufficiently put off by the draco-threatens-to-rape-luna subplot in HPMOR to have never actually engaged with rationalism.
At first I did not understand your comment, so almost downvoted it. However, GPT helped me understand the point, and just want to post what I think is the core of idea to make it easier for others:
I agree with the first point.
The second point might be technically off: A lot of people do not come via TWC and HPMOR, and more importantly, people can acquire the understanding of postmodernism later. It is true though that LW is very mistake-theory focused and selects out (most) conflict theorist. This does not mean there are no rat or rat adjacent conflict theorists. However there is some selection effect pushing out those who are “pro postmodernism” but not those who are against it, even though both are conflict theorists: as mainstream ideas are (were?) primarily influenced/supported by pro postmodernists, mistake theory rats argued against them due to these ideas not reflecting reality. These are in turn used as ammunition/safe place for conservative/anti postmodern conflict theorists. In my experience (via meetups/forums), most rats are indeed cooperative mistake theorists, irrespective of whether they are left (e.g. EA types) or right (e.g. libertarians), but the very few conflict theorists seemed to be of the conservative kind. This is also a possible explanation why Vance is the most politically successful rat adjacent figure.
And what about Cynical Theories and their understanding of postmodernism? They claim that a major part of postmodernism, especially one related to sociology, began to produce conflict-theoretic slop.
I suspect that postmodernism could be meant to study the potential to lock in oppressing memes (like Black people being dangerous or mentally less capable than White people) and ways to free mankind from them. What I don’t quite buy is claims like “Memes propagating among White people harm Black people’s ability to succeed”. What if they achieve a different effect of making some Black people more determined to disprove these memes?
There might also exist things like crab bucket mentality or other meme complexes which tend to infect people and to change the behavior of the infected towards keeping them powerless. Or memes infecting weak-willed people and making them less likely to become strong-willed, but more likely to make the meme seem plausible and infect others.
However, in practice postmodernists try to stop propagation of the memes viewed as harmful even if they reflect some ground truth. More examples of such behavior can be found, for example, in the book that I mentioned.
Why do you suspect this?
I’m not entirely sure, actually. My main serious encounter with postmodernism was trying to engage with toni morrison’s beloved well enough to not fail a college class, which jumps out as a possible explanation. I’m willing to buy that its not as central as I thought.