Meta note: Is it… necessary or useful (at least at this point in the conversation) to label a bunch of these ideas right-wing or left-wing? Like, I both feel like this is overstating the degree to which there exists either a coherent right-wing or left-wing philosophy, and also makes discussion of these ideas a political statement in a way that seems counterproductive.
I think a post that’s like “Three under-appreciated framed for AGI (Geo)Politics” that starts with “I’ve recently been reading a bunch more about ideas that are classically associated with right-leaning politics, and I’ve found a bunch of them quite valuable, here they are” seems just as clear, and much less likely to make the discussion hard in unnecessary ways.[1]
And like, I think this is symmetrically true in that I think a discussion that didn’t label hypotheses “grey tribe hypotheses” or “left-wing hypotheses” or “rationalist hypotheses” also seems less likely to cause people to believe dumb things.
There’s a layer of political discourse at which one’s account of the very substance or organization of society varies from one ideology to the next. I think Richard is trying to be very clear about where these ideas are coming from, and to push people to look for more ideas in those places. I’m much more distant from Richard’s politics than most people here, but I find his advocacy for the right-wing ‘metaphysics’ refreshing, in part because it’s been unclear to me for a long time that the atheistic right even has a metaphysics (I don’t mean most lw-style libertarians when I say ‘the right’ here).
This kind of structuralist theorizing is much more the domain of explicitly leftist spaces, and so you get these unexamined and, over time, largely forgotten or misremembered ideological precepts that have never had to pay rent. I think offering a coherent opposition to liberal or leftist orthodoxy, and emphasizing the cross-domain utility of the models there, is great for discourse.
I think these gestures would mean more if Richard were in the room with the leftists who are thinking about what he’s thinking about (it would help keep them honest, for one), but there’s still at least some of this effect on lw.
I strong agreed with your comment because I think people are taking the bait to argue against what they may suspect is kind of a motte and bailey or dog whistle, and so there’s one layer of discourse that would certainly be improved by Richard down-playing his ideology. But still, there’s another layer (not much of which is happening here, admittedly) that stands to profoundly benefit from the current framing.
[I’m not sure how straw I think his stories about the left are; I’m not sure what he means by the left; I’m not sure how many things he believes that I might find distasteful; I’m not sure how valuable this line of inquiry on his part even is. But it’s nice to see a style of thinking ~monopolized by the left proudly deployed by the opposition!]
This is a reasonable point, though I also think that there’s something important about the ways that these three frames tie together. In general it seems to me that people underrate the extent to which there are deep and reasonably-coherent intuitions underlying right-wing thinking (in part because right-wing thinkers have been bad at articulating those intuitions). Framing the post this way helps direct people to look for them.
But I could also just say that in the text instead. So if I do another post like this in the future I’ll try your approach and see if that goes better.
Meta note: Is it… necessary or useful (at least at this point in the conversation) to label a bunch of these ideas right-wing or left-wing? Like, I both feel like this is overstating the degree to which there exists either a coherent right-wing or left-wing philosophy, and also makes discussion of these ideas a political statement in a way that seems counterproductive.
I think a post that’s like “Three under-appreciated framed for AGI (Geo)Politics” that starts with “I’ve recently been reading a bunch more about ideas that are classically associated with right-leaning politics, and I’ve found a bunch of them quite valuable, here they are” seems just as clear, and much less likely to make the discussion hard in unnecessary ways.[1]
And like, I think this is symmetrically true in that I think a discussion that didn’t label hypotheses “grey tribe hypotheses” or “left-wing hypotheses” or “rationalist hypotheses” also seems less likely to cause people to believe dumb things.
There’s a layer of political discourse at which one’s account of the very substance or organization of society varies from one ideology to the next. I think Richard is trying to be very clear about where these ideas are coming from, and to push people to look for more ideas in those places. I’m much more distant from Richard’s politics than most people here, but I find his advocacy for the right-wing ‘metaphysics’ refreshing, in part because it’s been unclear to me for a long time that the atheistic right even has a metaphysics (I don’t mean most lw-style libertarians when I say ‘the right’ here).
This kind of structuralist theorizing is much more the domain of explicitly leftist spaces, and so you get these unexamined and, over time, largely forgotten or misremembered ideological precepts that have never had to pay rent. I think offering a coherent opposition to liberal or leftist orthodoxy, and emphasizing the cross-domain utility of the models there, is great for discourse.
I think these gestures would mean more if Richard were in the room with the leftists who are thinking about what he’s thinking about (it would help keep them honest, for one), but there’s still at least some of this effect on lw.
I strong agreed with your comment because I think people are taking the bait to argue against what they may suspect is kind of a motte and bailey or dog whistle, and so there’s one layer of discourse that would certainly be improved by Richard down-playing his ideology. But still, there’s another layer (not much of which is happening here, admittedly) that stands to profoundly benefit from the current framing.
[I’m not sure how straw I think his stories about the left are; I’m not sure what he means by the left; I’m not sure how many things he believes that I might find distasteful; I’m not sure how valuable this line of inquiry on his part even is. But it’s nice to see a style of thinking ~monopolized by the left proudly deployed by the opposition!]
This is a reasonable point, though I also think that there’s something important about the ways that these three frames tie together. In general it seems to me that people underrate the extent to which there are deep and reasonably-coherent intuitions underlying right-wing thinking (in part because right-wing thinkers have been bad at articulating those intuitions). Framing the post this way helps direct people to look for them.
But I could also just say that in the text instead. So if I do another post like this in the future I’ll try your approach and see if that goes better.