Also, should we be doing a better job publicizing the fact that LW’s political surveys turn up plurality liberal, and about as many socialists as libertarians? Not that there’s anything wrong with being libertarian, but I’m uneasy having the site classified that way.
This will not work, to briefly explain why I think so:
For the intended audience of the article, Libertarianism is unusual, Liberalism is normative. If the community was completely liberal, its liberalism would not have more than one mention or so in the article, certainly it would not make the title.
The prevalence of Liberals and Socialists, no matter how emphasized, can not lead to a rebranding as long as there is a presence of Libertarians in a fraction greater than expected. Indeed even if Libertarians were precisely at the expected fraction, whatever that would be, they might still get picked up by people searching for weird, potentially bad things about this weird, potentially bad “rationality movement”.
As evidence of this note no journalist so far considers the eeire near total absence of normal conservatives who make up half of the population of the United States, the country most strongly represented, to be an unusual feature of the community. And furthermore if they somehow made up half of the community or some other “representative” fraction, this would be seen as a very strange, unusual perhaps even worrying feature of the community.
Hypothetically the opposite effect should be seen as well, if somehow this place was 100% liberal, yet still in the weird, potentially bad mental bin of journalists, its weirdness and badness would lead to its liberalism not being mentioned. For an example of this consider if you associate the Jim Jones’ Family, the mass suicide of which gave rise to the phrase “drinking the cool aid”, with liberalism or socialism.
The only way to inoculate would be to loudly denounce and perhaps even purge libertarians. Perhaps a few self-eviscerating heartfelt admissions of “how rationality cured my libertarianism” for good measure. This wouldn’t actually result in no Libertarians being present of course, though it would dent their numbers, but it would provide a giant sign of “it doesn’t make sense to use this fact about the community”. This doesn’t always work, since denouncing the prominence of witches or making official statements about how they are unwelcome has been read as evidence for the presence of witchcraft by journalists in the past as well.
Beyond the question of if it would work, I would like to more generally disapprove of this approach, since it would rapidly hasten the ongoing politicization of the rationality community, badly harming the art in the process. To make a step beyond that I will also say that I think many libertarian rationalists carry interesting insight, precisely because of their ideology.
Honestly, it would still be better publicity, and equally unusual, if we were known as “Those people with the arrogant Harry Potter fanfiction” rather than “those techno-libertarians, one of whom wrote Harry Potter fanfiction.” Harry Potter fanfic is something the popular audience can at least conceive of someone else enjoying. Techno-libertarianism has a smell, and that is the dead, dusty smell of server rooms in basements: all functionality with no humanity. It makes us sound like Cybermen from Doctor Who.
I think this is all pretty much true… but I still suspect that a lot of readers of that kind of article, if they learned that LW readers were mostly liberal/socialist, would be surprised and update a bit. Reading non-libertarian rationalists firsthand might do something similar.
ETA: That’s not to say any particular publication strategy, or any publication strategy at all, would be effective, or that there wouldn’t be other costs.
I wonder if, despite the fact that LessWrong members are equally liberal and libertarian, the leaders of the movement are disproportionally libertarian in a way that merits mention. Eliezer and Vassar, the two people featured in the article, both seem to be. Scott Alexander seems to be libertarian too, or at least he seems to like libertarianism more than any other political ideology. Who else?
Scott Alexander seems to be libertarian too, or at least he seems to like libertarianism more than any other political ideology.
Scott Alexander as in Anti-Libertarian FAQ Scott Alexander?
He’s a liberal. You probably think he’s a libertarian because there aren’t many liberals anymore—most of the parts of their demographic that ever show up on the internet have gone over to Tumblr totalitarianism instead.
(There’s probably a lesson in here about the Dark Arts: don’t call up what you can’t put down. You summon Jon Stewart, you’ll get Julius Streicher within a decade.)
He wants to update the anti-libertarian FAQ, but he isn’t sure he’s an anti-libertarian anymore
He feels like he is too biased towards the right and is looking for leftist media in order to correct this
These together imply to me that he favors libertarianism but idk, I could be wrong, I don’t think he has ever really come out and said anything about his concrete beliefs on policy proposals. He also seems to not dislike Ayn Rand and talks sometimes about the power of capitalism, iirc.
“[Some people] support both free markets and a social safety net. You could call them ‘welfare capitalists’. I ran a Google search and some of them seem to call themselves ‘bleeding heart libertarians’. I would call them ‘correct’.” [...]
“The position there’s no good name for – ‘bleeding heart libertarians’ is too long and too full of social justice memes, ‘left-libertarian’ usually means anarchists who haven’t thought about anarchy very carefully, and ‘liberaltarian’ is groanworthy – that position seems to be the sweet spot between these two extremes and the political philosophy I’m most comfortable with right now. It consists of dealing with social and economic problems, when possible, through subsidies and taxes which come directly from the government. I think it’s likely to be the conclusion of my long engagement with libertarianism (have I mentioned I only engage with philosophies I like?)”
This is still probably an oversimplification, and Scott’s views may have developed in the year since he wrote that article—in particular, his Moloch piece and exploration of Communism suggest he’s seriously considering autocratic views on the far left and far right, though he has yet to be won over by one. He likes meta-level views and views that can be seen, from different angles, as liberal, conservative, or libertarian—the Archipelago being a classic example.
I don’t think he has ever really come out and said anything about his concrete beliefs on policy proposals.
His main classification of LW wasn’t libertarian but post-political. On a website that uses the slogan “politics is the mindkiller” I think post-political is a fair label.
The article is not only about LW but also about people like Peter Thiel who are clearly libertarian and the crypto-currency folks who are also libertarian.
Most of those people who answer liberal or socialist on the LW survey don’t do anything political that matters. Thiel on the other hand is global player who matters.
The core summary of LW’s politics in the article might be Vassar quote:
“You have these weird phenomena like Occupy where people are protesting with no goals, no theory of how the world is, around which they can structure a protest. Basically this incredibly,
weirdly, thoroughly disempowered group of people will have to inherit
the power of the world anyway, because
sooner or later everyone older is
going to be too old and too technologically
obsolete and too bankrupt.
The old institutions may largely break
down or they may be handed over, but
either way they can’t just freeze. These
people are going to be in charge, and
it would be helpful if they, as they
come into their own, crystallize an
identity that contains certain cultural
strengths like argument and reason.”
I didn’t argue with him, except to
press, gently, on his particular form of
elitism. His rationalism seemed so
limited to me, so incomplete. “It is
unfortunate,” he said, “that we are in
a situation where our cultural heritage
is possessed only by people who are
extremely unappealing to most of the
population.”
I think most those people who do label as liberal or socialist on LW would agree with that sentiment. Getting politcs right is not about being left, right or liberatarian but about actually thinking rationally about the underlying issues. That’s post-political from the perspective of the author.
That’s in the CFAR mission statement:
What if we could shrug off our feelings of defensiveness, and honestly evaluate the evidence on both sides of an issue before deciding which legislation to pass, what research to fund, and where to donate to do the most good?
I think the author was right to present that idea as the main political philosophy of LW instead of just pattern matching to the standard labels.
If you want to be perceived as a liberal or socialist community than you would need people who not only self-label themselves that way on surveys but who also do something under those labels that’s interesting to the outside world.
I think most those people who do label as liberal or socialist on LW would agree with that sentiment. Getting politcs right is not about being left, right or liberatarian but about actually thinking rationally about the underlying issues. That’s post-political from the perspective of the author.
It’s also, strictly speaking, incorrect. A set of propositions must have some very specific properties in order to be made into a probability distribution:
1) The propositions must be mutually exclusive.
2) Each proposition must be true in some nonzero fraction of possible worlds/samples.
3) In any given possible world/sample, only one proposition can be true.
(This is assuming we’re talking about atomic events rather than compound events.) So for example, when rolling a normal, 6-sided die, we can only get one number, and we also must get one number. No more, no less.
Political positions often fail to be mutually exclusive (in implementation if not in ideal), and the political reasoning we engage in on most issues always fails to exhaust the entire available space of possible positions.
This means that when it comes to these issues, we can’t just assign a prior and update on evidence until we have evidence sufficient to swamp the prior and we declare ourselves to arrive to a “rational” conclusion. The relevant propositions simply don’t obey the axioms of probability like that. Outside Context Problems can and do occur, and sometimes Outside Context Solutions are the right ones, but we didn’t think of them because we were busy shuffling belief-mass around a tiny, over-constrained corner of the solution space.
Plenty of policy ideas on LW are outside of the standard context of left vs. right. I don’t think that this community is reasonably criticised for for thinking enough about outside context solutions.
Sorry, I didn’t mean that “LW is outside standard left vs right.” I meant that “post-political” politics is categorically impossible when you can’t exhaustively evaluate Solomonoff Induction. You cannot reduce an entire politics to “I rationally evaluated the evidence and updated my hypotheses”, because the relevant set of propositions doesn’t fit the necessary axioms. Instead, I think we have to address politics as a heuristic, limited-information, online-learning utility-maximization inference problem, one that also includes the constraint of trying to make sure malign, naively selfish, ignorant, and idiotic agents can’t mess up the strategy we’re trying to play while knowing that other agents view us as belonging to all those listed categories of Bad People.
So it’s not just an inference problem with very limited data, it’s an inference about inference problem with very limited data. You can’t reduce it to some computationally simpler problem of updating a posterior distribution, you can only gather data, induce improved heuristics, and hope to God you’re not in a local maximum.
I think rationality in the LW sense can to be said to be about heuristics, limited-information and an online-learning utility-maximization inference problem.
If you say that on LW. People are generally going to agree and maybe add a few qualifiers. If someone on Huffington post would say: “We should think about politics as being heuristics, limited-information and an online-learning utility-maximization inference problem.”, the audience wouldn’t know what you are talking about.
the strategy we’re trying to play while knowing that other agents view us as belonging to all those listed categories of Bad People
That assumes that the best way to act is in a way where other agents get a sense that you are playing or what you are playing.
There no reason to believe that a problem being visible makes it important. Under the Obama adminiratrion the EPA managed to raise standards on mercury pollution by being able to calculate that the IQ points of American children are worth more than the money it costs to reduce polution.
The issue didn’t become major headlines because nobody really cared about making it a controversial issue.
Nobody had the stomach to hold a speech about how the EPA should value the IQ of American kids less.
At the same time the EPA didn’t get anything done on the topic of global warming that was in the news.
Naomi Klein description about how white men in Africa kept economic equality when the gave blacks “equal rights” is a good example of how knowledge allows acting in a way that makes it irrelevant that the whites where seen as Bad People.
Also, should we be doing a better job publicizing the fact that LW’s political surveys turn up plurality liberal, and about as many socialists as libertarians? Not that there’s anything wrong with being libertarian, but I’m uneasy having the site classified that way.
This will not work, to briefly explain why I think so:
For the intended audience of the article, Libertarianism is unusual, Liberalism is normative. If the community was completely liberal, its liberalism would not have more than one mention or so in the article, certainly it would not make the title.
The prevalence of Liberals and Socialists, no matter how emphasized, can not lead to a rebranding as long as there is a presence of Libertarians in a fraction greater than expected. Indeed even if Libertarians were precisely at the expected fraction, whatever that would be, they might still get picked up by people searching for weird, potentially bad things about this weird, potentially bad “rationality movement”.
As evidence of this note no journalist so far considers the eeire near total absence of normal conservatives who make up half of the population of the United States, the country most strongly represented, to be an unusual feature of the community. And furthermore if they somehow made up half of the community or some other “representative” fraction, this would be seen as a very strange, unusual perhaps even worrying feature of the community.
Hypothetically the opposite effect should be seen as well, if somehow this place was 100% liberal, yet still in the weird, potentially bad mental bin of journalists, its weirdness and badness would lead to its liberalism not being mentioned. For an example of this consider if you associate the Jim Jones’ Family, the mass suicide of which gave rise to the phrase “drinking the cool aid”, with liberalism or socialism.
The only way to inoculate would be to loudly denounce and perhaps even purge libertarians. Perhaps a few self-eviscerating heartfelt admissions of “how rationality cured my libertarianism” for good measure. This wouldn’t actually result in no Libertarians being present of course, though it would dent their numbers, but it would provide a giant sign of “it doesn’t make sense to use this fact about the community”. This doesn’t always work, since denouncing the prominence of witches or making official statements about how they are unwelcome has been read as evidence for the presence of witchcraft by journalists in the past as well.
Beyond the question of if it would work, I would like to more generally disapprove of this approach, since it would rapidly hasten the ongoing politicization of the rationality community, badly harming the art in the process. To make a step beyond that I will also say that I think many libertarian rationalists carry interesting insight, precisely because of their ideology.
Honestly, it would still be better publicity, and equally unusual, if we were known as “Those people with the arrogant Harry Potter fanfiction” rather than “those techno-libertarians, one of whom wrote Harry Potter fanfiction.” Harry Potter fanfic is something the popular audience can at least conceive of someone else enjoying. Techno-libertarianism has a smell, and that is the dead, dusty smell of server rooms in basements: all functionality with no humanity. It makes us sound like Cybermen from Doctor Who.
I think this is all pretty much true… but I still suspect that a lot of readers of that kind of article, if they learned that LW readers were mostly liberal/socialist, would be surprised and update a bit. Reading non-libertarian rationalists firsthand might do something similar.
ETA: That’s not to say any particular publication strategy, or any publication strategy at all, would be effective, or that there wouldn’t be other costs.
I wonder if, despite the fact that LessWrong members are equally liberal and libertarian, the leaders of the movement are disproportionally libertarian in a way that merits mention. Eliezer and Vassar, the two people featured in the article, both seem to be. Scott Alexander seems to be libertarian too, or at least he seems to like libertarianism more than any other political ideology. Who else?
Scott Alexander as in Anti-Libertarian FAQ Scott Alexander?
He’s a liberal. You probably think he’s a libertarian because there aren’t many liberals anymore—most of the parts of their demographic that ever show up on the internet have gone over to Tumblr totalitarianism instead.
(There’s probably a lesson in here about the Dark Arts: don’t call up what you can’t put down. You summon Jon Stewart, you’ll get Julius Streicher within a decade.)
I’m pretty sure that he has recently said
He wants to update the anti-libertarian FAQ, but he isn’t sure he’s an anti-libertarian anymore
He feels like he is too biased towards the right and is looking for leftist media in order to correct this
These together imply to me that he favors libertarianism but idk, I could be wrong, I don’t think he has ever really come out and said anything about his concrete beliefs on policy proposals. He also seems to not dislike Ayn Rand and talks sometimes about the power of capitalism, iirc.
Scott identifies as left-libertarian, so you’re both right. Quoting “A Something Sort of Like Left-Libertarian-Ist Manifesto”:
“[Some people] support both free markets and a social safety net. You could call them ‘welfare capitalists’. I ran a Google search and some of them seem to call themselves ‘bleeding heart libertarians’. I would call them ‘correct’.” [...]
“The position there’s no good name for – ‘bleeding heart libertarians’ is too long and too full of social justice memes, ‘left-libertarian’ usually means anarchists who haven’t thought about anarchy very carefully, and ‘liberaltarian’ is groanworthy – that position seems to be the sweet spot between these two extremes and the political philosophy I’m most comfortable with right now. It consists of dealing with social and economic problems, when possible, through subsidies and taxes which come directly from the government. I think it’s likely to be the conclusion of my long engagement with libertarianism (have I mentioned I only engage with philosophies I like?)”
This is still probably an oversimplification, and Scott’s views may have developed in the year since he wrote that article—in particular, his Moloch piece and exploration of Communism suggest he’s seriously considering autocratic views on the far left and far right, though he has yet to be won over by one. He likes meta-level views and views that can be seen, from different angles, as liberal, conservative, or libertarian—the Archipelago being a classic example.
He cites Jeff Kauffman’s policy proposals extremely approvingly: “Please assume this, if not quite a Consensus Rationalist Opinion on politics, is a lot closer to such than what random people on Tumblr accuse us of believing.”. Since he thinks this is a very reasonable mainstream-for-rationalists set of proposals, he probably agrees with most of the proposals himself, or at least finds them very appealing.
His main classification of LW wasn’t libertarian but post-political. On a website that uses the slogan “politics is the mindkiller” I think post-political is a fair label.
The article is not only about LW but also about people like Peter Thiel who are clearly libertarian and the crypto-currency folks who are also libertarian.
Most of those people who answer liberal or socialist on the LW survey don’t do anything political that matters. Thiel on the other hand is global player who matters.
The core summary of LW’s politics in the article might be Vassar quote:
I think most those people who do label as liberal or socialist on LW would agree with that sentiment. Getting politcs right is not about being left, right or liberatarian but about actually thinking rationally about the underlying issues. That’s post-political from the perspective of the author.
That’s in the CFAR mission statement:
I think the author was right to present that idea as the main political philosophy of LW instead of just pattern matching to the standard labels.
If you want to be perceived as a liberal or socialist community than you would need people who not only self-label themselves that way on surveys but who also do something under those labels that’s interesting to the outside world.
It’s also, strictly speaking, incorrect. A set of propositions must have some very specific properties in order to be made into a probability distribution:
1) The propositions must be mutually exclusive.
2) Each proposition must be true in some nonzero fraction of possible worlds/samples.
3) In any given possible world/sample, only one proposition can be true.
(This is assuming we’re talking about atomic events rather than compound events.) So for example, when rolling a normal, 6-sided die, we can only get one number, and we also must get one number. No more, no less.
Political positions often fail to be mutually exclusive (in implementation if not in ideal), and the political reasoning we engage in on most issues always fails to exhaust the entire available space of possible positions.
This means that when it comes to these issues, we can’t just assign a prior and update on evidence until we have evidence sufficient to swamp the prior and we declare ourselves to arrive to a “rational” conclusion. The relevant propositions simply don’t obey the axioms of probability like that. Outside Context Problems can and do occur, and sometimes Outside Context Solutions are the right ones, but we didn’t think of them because we were busy shuffling belief-mass around a tiny, over-constrained corner of the solution space.
I’m not sure how what you relate to what I wrote.
Plenty of policy ideas on LW are outside of the standard context of left vs. right. I don’t think that this community is reasonably criticised for for thinking enough about outside context solutions.
Sorry, I didn’t mean that “LW is outside standard left vs right.” I meant that “post-political” politics is categorically impossible when you can’t exhaustively evaluate Solomonoff Induction. You cannot reduce an entire politics to “I rationally evaluated the evidence and updated my hypotheses”, because the relevant set of propositions doesn’t fit the necessary axioms. Instead, I think we have to address politics as a heuristic, limited-information, online-learning utility-maximization inference problem, one that also includes the constraint of trying to make sure malign, naively selfish, ignorant, and idiotic agents can’t mess up the strategy we’re trying to play while knowing that other agents view us as belonging to all those listed categories of Bad People.
So it’s not just an inference problem with very limited data, it’s an inference about inference problem with very limited data. You can’t reduce it to some computationally simpler problem of updating a posterior distribution, you can only gather data, induce improved heuristics, and hope to God you’re not in a local maximum.
I think rationality in the LW sense can to be said to be about heuristics, limited-information and an online-learning utility-maximization inference problem.
If you say that on LW. People are generally going to agree and maybe add a few qualifiers. If someone on Huffington post would say: “We should think about politics as being heuristics, limited-information and an online-learning utility-maximization inference problem.”, the audience wouldn’t know what you are talking about.
That assumes that the best way to act is in a way where other agents get a sense that you are playing or what you are playing.
There no reason to believe that a problem being visible makes it important. Under the Obama adminiratrion the EPA managed to raise standards on mercury pollution by being able to calculate that the IQ points of American children are worth more than the money it costs to reduce polution. The issue didn’t become major headlines because nobody really cared about making it a controversial issue. Nobody had the stomach to hold a speech about how the EPA should value the IQ of American kids less.
At the same time the EPA didn’t get anything done on the topic of global warming that was in the news.
Naomi Klein description about how white men in Africa kept economic equality when the gave blacks “equal rights” is a good example of how knowledge allows acting in a way that makes it irrelevant that the whites where seen as Bad People.
Playing 1 or 2 levels higher can do a lot.
It’s possible to consistently call us disproportionately libertarian, or to call us disproportionately straight and cis, but not both. :)
This comment from user devi may be relevant.
There is no publicising anything to these people.
I think the survey is pushed by SJW trolls. I believe the comments on the articles represent LW views, and the votes on them show how we feel.
What does this even mean?