I would split my thoughts on this subject into two groups:
some things are bad, and we need to fix them
some things are good, and we need to explain them better to the masses
Importantly, these are two separate points. Communication to the masses is necessary; but when something is bad, it should actually be fixed, instead of trying to communicate to the masses that it is good.
Let’s start with the explanation part, because it is easier. Smart and educated people may naturally underestimate it, but we live in a world that is complex and confusing… and even more so for those who are average or below-average in intelligence or education. Educating them is a public good, because if we won’t, then it is practically guaranteed that they will make choices based on either first impression or some propaganda. With public goods, we have the free-rider problem (if we are all in the same boat, why should the holes in the boat be fixed from my budget?), and a chicken-and-egg problem with government solutions (why should politicians vote for spending government budget on liberal values, if many of them were elected precisely because the voters oppose those values?). I think this might somehow be addressed e.g. by a non-profit that would hopefully get money from some donors, and produce e.g. YouTube videos explaining the basics of liberal thought.
Then there is the problem with finding actual liberals to state and defend those values. Because there don’t seem to be many. One side of the American political spectrum opposes them openly, but the other side spend the last years undermining them gradually. (From my perspective, the woke are enemies of liberal thought as much as the redcaps. Remember “freeze peach”?) So there is a risk that a project in defense of liberal thought would be co-opted by the illiberal factions of one side, which would obviously make it unpalatable for the other side. If you want to argue for liberal values, it must be done by someone who really cares about the liberal values per se, rather than someone who merely sees them as a convenient tool to oppose Trump.
If you want to argue for liberal values, it must be done by someone who really cares about the liberal values per se, rather than someone who merely sees them as a convenient tool to oppose Trump.
I fear this makes the situation far trickier. Fundamentally, adhering to liberal values such as freedom of speech/rule of law/etc. is akin to playing “Cooperate” instead of “Defect” in a Prisoner’s Dilemma-like game.
If everyone agrees to these values, we end up with a better outcome than if both sides suppress the other whenever and wherever they have a local concentration of force, because it allows for genuine deliberation, compromise, and the use of mistake theory instead of conflict theory to find optimal, technocratic solutions.
But if your side is the only one that defects and censors, while the opposition holds onto the notion that they must give you a full and fair chance to criticize them whenever they have the reins of power, you are at an immediate political and memetic advantage. It’s a fundamentally unstable outcome, one that rightfully feels “unfair” to the side that’s being punished for its cooperation and will likely push them to become more illiberal and censorious themselves.
Typically, the way PD-like games get resolved in society is through two main mechanisms: reputation and changing the payoff matrix.[1] By “changing the payoff matrix,” I’m referring to stuff like cooperators getting socially rewarded as nice, upstanding citizens to the point that they internalize the reward and become intrinsically motivated to love liberalism, thus making them genuinely prefer Cooperating to Defecting as actions in and of themselves.
(By the way, I recall an old LW comment which made the critical point that yelling “This is a PD-like situation! Everyone knows the Nash Equilibrium is to defect!” when people are cooperating in real life is an actively bad thing to do, because you are fundamentally changing the payoff matrix: before, game participants who cooperated thought of themselves as good; after, they think of themselves as idiots.[2] You are actively pushing the real outcome out of its fragile social-reward-supported equilibrium into the simplified and reductive and Pareto-dominated Defect-Defect one.)
But largely as a result of technological changes governing how we relate to each other (and what kinds of ingroups, subgroups, etc. we identify with), both mechanisms are starting to tear apart at the edges. This leads to stuff like “based” culture, where people circlejerk over how anti-liberal and anti-feeling-empathy-for-the-opposition they are. The social rewards in these subgroups have shifted to such a point where Defecting is seen as commendable and morally virtuous.[3]
There is also a pop culture saying that when the percentage of cheaters on some sort of test crosses a critical threshold (I think usually 5-10%), those who otherwise wouldn’t cheat start thinking of themselves as suckers and start giving in
I definitely wish I had a detailed, mechanistic explanation of precisely how this came about, but for now I only have disparate lines of thinking about it that I haven’t quite been able to piece together yet
The social rewards in these subgroups have shifted to such a point where Defecting is seen as commendable and morally virtuous.
Not only subgroups. Discriminating against conservative people when hiring on universities was considered virtuous by… almost everyone except for the conservatives themselves, and a handful of principled liberals?
(As someone who would vote for Democrats—while holding my nose—if I lived in USA, as I see it, the Democrats defected first. And Republicans are now doing the same thing, only 10 times faster.)
I think the matter is a fair bit more complex than this, but I’ll refrain from discussing explicitly partisan politics on this site, despite the relaxation of the old norms.
I would also prefer not to be partisan, but unfortunately, framing things as “neutral vs conservative” is a trick that one side has been using for a while, and I believe it is impossible to fix the problem without addressing this tactic explicitly.
Basically, we need to make sure that “non-partisan” does not mean “supporting (pre-Trump) status quo”.
Funnily enough, I was also thinking about that exact SSC post when I was writing my comment. I do think I have a different perspective on this matter from yours, however.
I would split my thoughts on this subject into two groups:
some things are bad, and we need to fix them
some things are good, and we need to explain them better to the masses
Importantly, these are two separate points. Communication to the masses is necessary; but when something is bad, it should actually be fixed, instead of trying to communicate to the masses that it is good.
Let’s start with the explanation part, because it is easier. Smart and educated people may naturally underestimate it, but we live in a world that is complex and confusing… and even more so for those who are average or below-average in intelligence or education. Educating them is a public good, because if we won’t, then it is practically guaranteed that they will make choices based on either first impression or some propaganda. With public goods, we have the free-rider problem (if we are all in the same boat, why should the holes in the boat be fixed from my budget?), and a chicken-and-egg problem with government solutions (why should politicians vote for spending government budget on liberal values, if many of them were elected precisely because the voters oppose those values?). I think this might somehow be addressed e.g. by a non-profit that would hopefully get money from some donors, and produce e.g. YouTube videos explaining the basics of liberal thought.
Then there is the problem with finding actual liberals to state and defend those values. Because there don’t seem to be many. One side of the American political spectrum opposes them openly, but the other side spend the last years undermining them gradually. (From my perspective, the woke are enemies of liberal thought as much as the redcaps. Remember “freeze peach”?) So there is a risk that a project in defense of liberal thought would be co-opted by the illiberal factions of one side, which would obviously make it unpalatable for the other side. If you want to argue for liberal values, it must be done by someone who really cares about the liberal values per se, rather than someone who merely sees them as a convenient tool to oppose Trump.
I fear this makes the situation far trickier. Fundamentally, adhering to liberal values such as freedom of speech/rule of law/etc. is akin to playing “Cooperate” instead of “Defect” in a Prisoner’s Dilemma-like game.
If everyone agrees to these values, we end up with a better outcome than if both sides suppress the other whenever and wherever they have a local concentration of force, because it allows for genuine deliberation, compromise, and the use of mistake theory instead of conflict theory to find optimal, technocratic solutions.
But if your side is the only one that defects and censors, while the opposition holds onto the notion that they must give you a full and fair chance to criticize them whenever they have the reins of power, you are at an immediate political and memetic advantage. It’s a fundamentally unstable outcome, one that rightfully feels “unfair” to the side that’s being punished for its cooperation and will likely push them to become more illiberal and censorious themselves.
Typically, the way PD-like games get resolved in society is through two main mechanisms: reputation and changing the payoff matrix.[1] By “changing the payoff matrix,” I’m referring to stuff like cooperators getting socially rewarded as nice, upstanding citizens to the point that they internalize the reward and become intrinsically motivated to love liberalism, thus making them genuinely prefer Cooperating to Defecting as actions in and of themselves.
(By the way, I recall an old LW comment which made the critical point that yelling “This is a PD-like situation! Everyone knows the Nash Equilibrium is to defect!” when people are cooperating in real life is an actively bad thing to do, because you are fundamentally changing the payoff matrix: before, game participants who cooperated thought of themselves as good; after, they think of themselves as idiots.[2] You are actively pushing the real outcome out of its fragile social-reward-supported equilibrium into the simplified and reductive and Pareto-dominated Defect-Defect one.)
But largely as a result of technological changes governing how we relate to each other (and what kinds of ingroups, subgroups, etc. we identify with), both mechanisms are starting to tear apart at the edges. This leads to stuff like “based” culture, where people circlejerk over how anti-liberal and anti-feeling-empathy-for-the-opposition they are. The social rewards in these subgroups have shifted to such a point where Defecting is seen as commendable and morally virtuous.[3]
I’d love to hear a shorter, snappier version of “changing the payoff matrix” to use in the future as a descriptor of what I’m referencing here
There is also a pop culture saying that when the percentage of cheaters on some sort of test crosses a critical threshold (I think usually 5-10%), those who otherwise wouldn’t cheat start thinking of themselves as suckers and start giving in
I definitely wish I had a detailed, mechanistic explanation of precisely how this came about, but for now I only have disparate lines of thinking about it that I haven’t quite been able to piece together yet
Not only subgroups. Discriminating against conservative people when hiring on universities was considered virtuous by… almost everyone except for the conservatives themselves, and a handful of principled liberals?
(As someone who would vote for Democrats—while holding my nose—if I lived in USA, as I see it, the Democrats defected first. And Republicans are now doing the same thing, only 10 times faster.)
I think the matter is a fair bit more complex than this, but I’ll refrain from discussing explicitly partisan politics on this site, despite the relaxation of the old norms.
I would also prefer not to be partisan, but unfortunately, framing things as “neutral vs conservative” is a trick that one side has been using for a while, and I believe it is impossible to fix the problem without addressing this tactic explicitly.
Basically, we need to make sure that “non-partisan” does not mean “supporting (pre-Trump) status quo”.
Funnily enough, I was also thinking about that exact SSC post when I was writing my comment. I do think I have a different perspective on this matter from yours, however.