Yes, exactly. And I’d say more: there’s a strong analogy to everything here. Baking bread? Imagine a baker a few hundred years ago getting interrogated by a philosopher about “but how do you really know what yeast is and why it’s needed?” Or music, imagine the early rock-n-roll groups being interrogated by a philosopher about what makes rock music good, and the philosopher doing the Socratic “five whys” thing. It’s just nonsense. Lots of things in life are art: you do it and then later, maybe, someday, someone else understands it. Law and morality too, that’s why we have juries, you can’t take the subjectivity out and you shouldn’t, sometimes there should be lenience because people just feel it.
Athens gathered a jury of 500 people for Socrates. What more can any of us ask? When a philosopher proposes to replace all this with “but do you know what piety is? come on, define exactly how all your morals work by which you’re judging me!” this is not a neutral thing, this is a bid for something, for a certain direction of society. His student evolved it into the philosopher-king proposal; yep, checks out. Benquo likes this direction and I don’t.
Based on this and your other comments in this thread, I suspect you’re mixing up questions of
What’s good?
How do we know what’s good?
How should we treat other people who disagree with us about what’s good?
It’s possible to think someone is baking bread wrong without thinking that you should use violence to force them to do it differently. It’s possible to think that bakers should be allowed to pick their own baking methods without thinking that all methods produce equally tasty bread.
Civilization typically uses many different levels of coercion for different sorts of rules. Different offenses might get you jail, or fines, or social censure. This difference isn’t because some of those offenses are Wrong and others are Not Wrong; it’s because creating effective policies of enforced cooperation is more complicated than just asking whether some action is Wrong. (I think this essay from Scott Alexander significantly improved my thinking on this topic.)
I think your hypothetical baker has a good and sufficient answer to your hypothetical philosopher, which is that they actually make good bread. I broadly agree that you don’t need a theoretical understanding of why your practices are good if you have some other valid reason for thinking they’re good.
But while the bakers with the best recipes won’t necessarily have good theoretical explanations, that doesn’t mean that there are no bad recipes, or that you can identify good recipes by sheer intuition. You do still need actual entangled evidence of some kind to reach accurate conclusions.
If we accept (as you wrote in another comment) that “success in convincing is the sole criterion”, then the best conclusion is one enforced by a mind control ray. I think that’s nonsense. In real life, people frequently believe things for reasons that are not much correlated with accuracy.
Furthermore, using this as the defense of any specific conclusion is circular. We, who are questioning the conclusion, are included in the group of “people”, and we have not been convinced. Insofar as your proposed system works at all, it only works because you are depending on “people” to be more likely to be convinced of correct conclusions than incorrect conclusions. If everyone who might object to the decision allowed themselves to be convinced merely because others are convinced, we’d be removing the only element of this system that makes it better than chance.
If you keep fabricating opinions I didn’t assert and don’t believe and explicitly disavowed in the comments on this page, and falsely attributing them to me, I’m going to ban you from this thread.
I think we might have a factual disagreement, which to you looks like “cousin_it is misrepresenting my opinion as being anti-democratic” and to me looks like “Benquo is misrepresenting my opinion as agreeing with Moldbug”. But it’s also ok to let things simmer down a bit, so I’ll check out.
Accountability might or might not be better served by some modes of power distribution than others, but we need accountability even to have contracts, discourse, and other types of commitment at the distances required for scale in the first place. Without relations of accountability, why should I believe that there really were 500 jurors and an unrigged ballot, or that the best explanation for some soldiers’ behavior is that there really is a living human king whose orders they follow?
It seems to me like you are assuming that any demand for an account is a bid to become the self-appointed enforcer for the relations between others. But I don’t accept that premise, so if you don’t like something that follows from what I said plus that premise, you’d need to argue for that premise to have a conversation with me.
This would explain why you are saying things that sound Moldbuggian to me but not to you. My important disagreement with Moldbug is that I do not think that monarchy is particularly helpful for substantive accountability. Because I think accountability is empirically distinct from monarchy, I don’t see why calling for accountability should seem monarchistic if we assume sincerity. But if someone thought that all calls for accountability were insincere, and really bids for “enforcer” (i.e. dominator) status, they might still dislike Moldbug’s call for accountability because they want more widely distributed patterns of domination rather than a single central pecking order. And such a person might say things that would register to me as Moldbuggian, like declaring that praise for accountability is a call for monarchy.
If that’s not an accurate characterization of your view, please explain.
I think yeah, this is very close. Though I wouldn’t call the category “accountability”; that’s your word and I think it makes the thing sound better than it actually is.
You’ve read Demons, right? You have the older generation, still basically decent guy popularizing nihilistic views (S.T.) and the younger guy putting it into practice with horrible results (Petr), at which the older guy is appalled, but the novel makes it clear that a lot of the fault is his. There’s a parallel between this and the Critias situation; I know you dismiss the link, but I wouldn’t dismiss it. Plato also felt Athenian democracy was too messy and subjective and preferred Sparta as more logical.
So instead of “accountability” maybe “nihilism”? Or “dissolving the subjective in favor of the logical”? To be clear, I do think this view can be held sincerely, without a power motive. It’s an appealing view. But I think it leads away from democracy. To have a democracy, we have to trust that people with their messy subjectivity can still be right. Otherwise we eventually end up with a system with more power at the top, and even less accountability at the top, where it matters.
EDIT: Maybe this comment should be taken as a package with Karl Krueger’s comment. In the response to him, you ask “what hazardous info”, and here I try to explain basically that.
I’ve gone to a lot of effort to say something very specific, and it seems like you’re just not interested, and have decided to try to use the comments section to try to project something stupider and simpler that’s already been said elsewhere onto what I’m saying. You could go argue with someone who has the opinion you’re trying to argue against, or you could try to explain to me specifically how what you’re saying is relevant.
You could start by describing what “the thing” you’re talking about is and how it relates to expecting people to mean something definite when they assert a justification for some action.
Yes, exactly. And I’d say more: there’s a strong analogy to everything here. Baking bread? Imagine a baker a few hundred years ago getting interrogated by a philosopher about “but how do you really know what yeast is and why it’s needed?” Or music, imagine the early rock-n-roll groups being interrogated by a philosopher about what makes rock music good, and the philosopher doing the Socratic “five whys” thing. It’s just nonsense. Lots of things in life are art: you do it and then later, maybe, someday, someone else understands it. Law and morality too, that’s why we have juries, you can’t take the subjectivity out and you shouldn’t, sometimes there should be lenience because people just feel it.
Athens gathered a jury of 500 people for Socrates. What more can any of us ask? When a philosopher proposes to replace all this with “but do you know what piety is? come on, define exactly how all your morals work by which you’re judging me!” this is not a neutral thing, this is a bid for something, for a certain direction of society. His student evolved it into the philosopher-king proposal; yep, checks out. Benquo likes this direction and I don’t.
Based on this and your other comments in this thread, I suspect you’re mixing up questions of
What’s good?
How do we know what’s good?
How should we treat other people who disagree with us about what’s good?
It’s possible to think someone is baking bread wrong without thinking that you should use violence to force them to do it differently. It’s possible to think that bakers should be allowed to pick their own baking methods without thinking that all methods produce equally tasty bread.
Civilization typically uses many different levels of coercion for different sorts of rules. Different offenses might get you jail, or fines, or social censure. This difference isn’t because some of those offenses are Wrong and others are Not Wrong; it’s because creating effective policies of enforced cooperation is more complicated than just asking whether some action is Wrong. (I think this essay from Scott Alexander significantly improved my thinking on this topic.)
I think your hypothetical baker has a good and sufficient answer to your hypothetical philosopher, which is that they actually make good bread. I broadly agree that you don’t need a theoretical understanding of why your practices are good if you have some other valid reason for thinking they’re good.
But while the bakers with the best recipes won’t necessarily have good theoretical explanations, that doesn’t mean that there are no bad recipes, or that you can identify good recipes by sheer intuition. You do still need actual entangled evidence of some kind to reach accurate conclusions.
If we accept (as you wrote in another comment) that “success in convincing is the sole criterion”, then the best conclusion is one enforced by a mind control ray. I think that’s nonsense. In real life, people frequently believe things for reasons that are not much correlated with accuracy.
Furthermore, using this as the defense of any specific conclusion is circular. We, who are questioning the conclusion, are included in the group of “people”, and we have not been convinced. Insofar as your proposed system works at all, it only works because you are depending on “people” to be more likely to be convinced of correct conclusions than incorrect conclusions. If everyone who might object to the decision allowed themselves to be convinced merely because others are convinced, we’d be removing the only element of this system that makes it better than chance.
If you keep fabricating opinions I didn’t assert and don’t believe and explicitly disavowed in the comments on this page, and falsely attributing them to me, I’m going to ban you from this thread.
I think we might have a factual disagreement, which to you looks like “cousin_it is misrepresenting my opinion as being anti-democratic” and to me looks like “Benquo is misrepresenting my opinion as agreeing with Moldbug”. But it’s also ok to let things simmer down a bit, so I’ll check out.
Accountability might or might not be better served by some modes of power distribution than others, but we need accountability even to have contracts, discourse, and other types of commitment at the distances required for scale in the first place. Without relations of accountability, why should I believe that there really were 500 jurors and an unrigged ballot, or that the best explanation for some soldiers’ behavior is that there really is a living human king whose orders they follow?
It seems to me like you are assuming that any demand for an account is a bid to become the self-appointed enforcer for the relations between others. But I don’t accept that premise, so if you don’t like something that follows from what I said plus that premise, you’d need to argue for that premise to have a conversation with me.
This would explain why you are saying things that sound Moldbuggian to me but not to you. My important disagreement with Moldbug is that I do not think that monarchy is particularly helpful for substantive accountability. Because I think accountability is empirically distinct from monarchy, I don’t see why calling for accountability should seem monarchistic if we assume sincerity. But if someone thought that all calls for accountability were insincere, and really bids for “enforcer” (i.e. dominator) status, they might still dislike Moldbug’s call for accountability because they want more widely distributed patterns of domination rather than a single central pecking order. And such a person might say things that would register to me as Moldbuggian, like declaring that praise for accountability is a call for monarchy.
If that’s not an accurate characterization of your view, please explain.
I think yeah, this is very close. Though I wouldn’t call the category “accountability”; that’s your word and I think it makes the thing sound better than it actually is.
You’ve read Demons, right? You have the older generation, still basically decent guy popularizing nihilistic views (S.T.) and the younger guy putting it into practice with horrible results (Petr), at which the older guy is appalled, but the novel makes it clear that a lot of the fault is his. There’s a parallel between this and the Critias situation; I know you dismiss the link, but I wouldn’t dismiss it. Plato also felt Athenian democracy was too messy and subjective and preferred Sparta as more logical.
So instead of “accountability” maybe “nihilism”? Or “dissolving the subjective in favor of the logical”? To be clear, I do think this view can be held sincerely, without a power motive. It’s an appealing view. But I think it leads away from democracy. To have a democracy, we have to trust that people with their messy subjectivity can still be right. Otherwise we eventually end up with a system with more power at the top, and even less accountability at the top, where it matters.
EDIT: Maybe this comment should be taken as a package with Karl Krueger’s comment. In the response to him, you ask “what hazardous info”, and here I try to explain basically that.
I’ve gone to a lot of effort to say something very specific, and it seems like you’re just not interested, and have decided to try to use the comments section to try to project something stupider and simpler that’s already been said elsewhere onto what I’m saying. You could go argue with someone who has the opinion you’re trying to argue against, or you could try to explain to me specifically how what you’re saying is relevant.
You could start by describing what “the thing” you’re talking about is and how it relates to expecting people to mean something definite when they assert a justification for some action.