Multiheaded

Karma: 3,081

Multiheaded 26 Jun 2014 22:10 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Rationality Quotes February 2014
Credibly dissociate yourself from people you don’t want to be pattern-matched to, and show that you understand the reasoning by which your audience opposes them (in this case, for example, Salemicus should at least acknowledge that at-fault divorce can—to put it mildly! - increase underlying gender inequality without any explicitly gendered provisions), and that you’re not going to defend them in that particular battle. Leftists do it all the time, to the extent that they have the opposite problem of not being able to unite while agreeing with each other on 95% of everything.

Multiheaded 26 Jun 2014 14:59 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Rationality Quotes February 2014

I say “damages in the case of breach” and I am confronted with people suggesting I mean specific performance, dragging people off in chains, or slavery. It’s so strange.

Pattern-matching is often rational in politics just because it’s so cheap, as long as the pattern makes sense in the first place. I’m sorry, but the pattern of reactionary rhetoric about marriage has these very deliberate connotations. People who discuss this tend to discuss punishing sinners (vicariously so), not holding rational economic actors accountable for damages on underrecognized-but-valid contracts.

Multiheaded 26 Jun 2014 14:53 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Rationality Quotes February 2014

a two-tier society, with the virtuous Vickies behaving themselves and keeping each other in check, and the other types reverting to the Somalia that Kennaway etc so fervently desire

David Brooks Says

I personally call this phenomenon “the Regressive Cost of Virtue” (virtue in the descriptive, not the normative sense). Too lazy to write a good comment on it, I’ll just quote myself from IRC.

06:00 < Multiheaded> anyway, the thesis: not only is poverty insanely cognitively expensive, etc, but wealth and cultural capital are very very good for you. not only can you afford to buy virtue, but crucially it’s easy and not painful to desire to buy virtue. like crazy work/study hours, responsible substance use, etc.
06:01 < Multiheaded> http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/
06:01 < Multiheaded> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/science/the-rational-choices-of-crack-addicts.html
06:01 < Multiheaded> http://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decisions-or-poverty-thoughts-1450123558/1469687530
06:07 < Multiheaded> note: naturally, there is much less written about the… cultural luxury of the rich and how awesome it is than about the culture of poverty. except by conservatives, who are awed at how inherently virtuous the elites seem to be, not noticing the regressive cost of virtue.
06:07 < Multiheaded> rightists say that the elites profess liberal values but are good hard-working conservatives at heart. i say that they profess liberalism but really just go with the flow in daily life and the “flow” is mostly determined by material circumstances, not memetics, even though it does shape behaviour
06:09 < Multiheaded> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/other-peoples-pathologies/359841/
06:09 < Multiheaded> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/black-pathology-crowdsourced/360190/

Multiheaded 26 Jun 2014 14:46 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Salemicus’s comment on: Rationality Quotes February 2014

Once people realised that marriage wasn’t enforceable, the marriage rate collapsed.

Would social conservatives and social liberals please both attempt to explain and steelman/criticize this assertion? Because it has always been among my biggest gripes with the conservative account of why divorce is so bad. It just doesn’t seem plausible, especially given how over-optimistic most people are about the prospects of their marriage! And frankly, I’d be creeped out by people who start a marriage for affection or companionship and already think about enforcing loyalty. It might be rational in the abstract, but signals many troubling things about the individual, such as low trust and an instinctively transactional view of relationships. (Marriages for economic reasons probably need a whole different set of norms, such as a historically seen unspoken tolerance for adultery.)

I always understood falling marriage as being primarily linked to the rise in women’s education and economic independence. Now, reasonable people who think those are great things can disagree whether the decline of traditional marriage is a cost or a neutral consequence, but I’ve never had time for people who seek to pin the blame on deliberate and direct political subversion.

Sure, I don’t like how some liberals attempt to be contrarian and claim that all the changes in this sphere have actually been unreservedly wonderful and a worthwhile goal from the start.… but that’s a general problem of people wanting policies to have no downsides, and the other side’s logical leap from calling out the downside to denying the problem is always baffling. Liberals cheering for something as a triumph for the Wonderful Nice Liberal Agenda might be less evidence that it’s a triumph for the Degenerate Corrupt Liberal Agenda and more evidence that liberals like cheering. This should not inform one’s analysis of the material/economic factors.

Multiheaded 24 Jun 2014 20:04 UTC
−6 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Open thread, 23-29 June 2014
...stand back and look at what you’ve written. I don’t know whether to laugh or cringe. What connection could this… “Rationalist”-fanfic-thinking possibly have to the real fucking world?! This is not how urban legends work, how teenagers work, how speading disinformation works… not to mention the ethics of it (which would not come into play in practice, as you’d just get called out on your bullshit).

This sort of utter fucking idiocy comes from a long-time and highly-upvoted LW user! No wonder LW is already seen as a fucking joke in some circles, and not for the transhumanist/singularity stuff either.

Multiheaded 16 Jun 2014 9:10 UTC
8 points
on: What resources have increasing marginal utility?

But cheating on spouses in general undermines the trust that spouses should have in each other, and the cumulative impact of even 1% of spouses cheating on the institution of marriage as a whole could be quite negative.

In the comments on Scott’s blog, I’ve recently seen the claim that this is the opposite of how traditional marriage actually worked; there used to be a lot more adultery in old times, and it acted as a pressure valve for people who would’ve divorced nowdays, but naturally it was all swept under the rug.

Multiheaded 18 Apr 2014 11:36 UTC
4 points
in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: What is Evil about creating House Elves?
This is among the best political comments on LW.

Multiheaded 17 Apr 2014 19:59 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open Thread April 16 - April 22, 2014
Many internet libertarians aren’t very consequentialist, though. And really, just the basic application of rule-utilitarianism would expose many, many problems with that post. But really, though: while the “Non-Aggression Principle” appears just laughably unworkable to me… given that many libertarians do subscribe to it, is lying to voters not an act of aggression?

Multiheaded 17 Apr 2014 19:22 UTC
−6 points
on: Open Thread April 16 - April 22, 2014
Evil Stupid Thing Alert!

“The Duty to Lie to Stupid Voters”—yes, really

I decided to post it here because it’s just so incredibly stupid and naively evil, but also because it’s using LW-ish language in a piece on how to—in essence—thoroughly corrupt the libertarian cause. Thought y’all would enjoy it.

Standard rejoinders. Furthermore: even if Brennan is ignorant of the classical liberal value of republicanism, why can’t he use his own libertarian philosophy to unfuck himself? How is lying like this ethical under it? Why does he discuss the benefits of such crude, object-level deception openly, on a moderately well read blog, with potential for blowback? By VALIS, this is a perfect example of how much some apparently intelligent people could, indeed, benefit from reading LW!

Multiheaded 10 Jan 2014 3:38 UTC
−4 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: [Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike
Don’t know; it’s quite intellectually consistent, sure, but my point is that the argument in favour of poverty was pure 110% motivated cognition, and its full absurdity can be seen much better in retrospect . At the very most, I’d suspect that someone paid lip service to the latter part after a long attack on the poor—like, say, a right-libertarian like Tyler Cowen spends much more time condemning labour regulation (and I agree with him that private companies shouldn’t be charities in disguise) than he does advocating for more ample welfare to compensate the proletariat.

Multiheaded 9 Jan 2014 12:10 UTC
−4 points
on: [Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike
Let me just bring up one historical parallel to put complaints like this (“if we ease up on controlling and punishing some particular group, this will greatly decrease society’s productivity”) in context. Such rhetoric was very common in the 18th and early 19th century, and its object was the proletariat and poverty. Here’s a paper and an article about old-time Malthusian/anti-worker beliefs held by elites.

“The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant. . . . In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days, are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion in- creases by indulgence. And at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.”

“Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.”

In my opinion, this justification for class warfare from the top is analogous to such justifications for anti-feminism as seen today.

Tl;dr, from the outside view, the author is not in a good reference class.

EDIT: Downvotes, really? :tips fedora:

Multiheaded 9 Jan 2014 10:36 UTC
12 points
in reply to: bramflakes’s comment on: [LINK] Why I’m not on the Rationalist Masterlist

Someone affected by the issue might bring up something that nobody else had thought of, something that the science and statistics and studies missed—but other than that, what marginal value are they adding to the discussion?

Thinkers—including such naive, starry-eyed liberal idealists as Friedrich Hayek or Niccolo Machiavelli—have long touched on the utter indispensability of subjective, individual knowledge and its advantages over the authoritarian dictates of an ostensibly all-seing “pure reason”. Then along comes a brave young LW user and suggests that enlightened technocrats like him should tell people what’s really important in their lives.

I’m grateful to David for pointing out this comment, it’s really a good summary of what’s wrong with the typical LW approach to policy.

(I’m a repentant ex/authoritarian myself, BTW.)

Multiheaded 4 Nov 2013 20:27 UTC
−8 points
in reply to: Vladimir_M’s comment on: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die

However, “dehumanized” was not a very good choice of term for the exact attitudes I had in mind, which I think indeed have little historical precedent and, and which don’t really correspond to the traditional patterns of exercising crude power by higher-status groups and individuals, being a rather peculiar aspect of the present situation.

Dear Vladimir, must as I hesitate to offer you any assistance in your presumably shady-looking intellectual enterprise (as frankly I’ve grown to dislike you quite a bit, period).… the term you might’ve been looking for is “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopower”. Foucault, Arendt and Agamben have all pondered its significance in the 20th century.

Multiheaded 11 Oct 2013 12:13 UTC
5 points
in reply to: kalium’s comment on: Rationality Quotes October 2013

There’s only a certain amount of emphasis to go around. The more things you italicize, the less important each italicized word seems, and then when something’s really important it doesn’t stand out.

I keep trying to tell my mom exactly this, every time we need to design some kind of print materials for the family business. She just doesn’t get that emphasis is about the relative share of a reader’s attention to different parts within a text, a positional good of sorts.

Multiheaded 11 Oct 2013 11:12 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school

Please note that this answer does not include the “culture” part, because that’s the part I don’t have a reasonable definition for.

Oh! It’s ok, it sounds like you’ve simply never heard it explained. In a nutshell, my analogy here is that women in grown-up society who suffer some kind of sexual violation or threat are overwhelmingly likely to meet the same blind/wilfully ignorant/worse-than-useless response that is typical of adults overlooking bullying. (It sounds like you and me both have suffered from the latter.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_culture

So yes, this is not all of what feminists usually mean by these words - but they often do bring up such attitudes in the same vein as your description of bullying here. Given that you’ve previously decried some stereotypical “social justice” issues, including anti-sexist activism, as pointless/dishonest/hypocritical (IIRC), I wanted to point out how, this time around, you’ve independently echoed a popular feminist talking point.[1]

Here’s another analogy, with a widely used contrast of robbery vs. sexual assault:

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/01/03/the-rape-of-mr-smith/#comment-80958

“So you’d been drinking. Are you sure you didn’t tell him he could take the money? You know, maybe you were feeling sorry for him, feeling bad about telling him you weren’t going to lend him money any more… Are you sure you didn’t give him one last bundle of cash, out of sympathy, but maybe you’re feeling bad about it today?”
“Hey-”
“Maybe you’d had a few too many and it’s all a bit hazy? Are you sure you didn’t tell him he could have the money, but you can’t remember it?”
“No! He stole it from me-”
“What were you wearing at the time, Mr. Smith?”
“Let’s see. A suit. Yes, a suit.”
“An expensive suit?”
“Well–yes.”
“In other words, Mr. Smith, you were alone and drunk late at night with someone you had previously given money to in a suit that practically advertised the fact that you had money, isn’t that so?”

Etc, etc. Disturbingly familiar in some regards, isn’t it?

[1] Sure, a bit passive-aggressive of me… but at least I’m trying to achieve something rationalist here by pointing out that your beliefs appear not to be at reflective equilibrium.

Multiheaded 11 Oct 2013 10:11 UTC
−4 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school

Also, one important step is that the parents must believe the child’s report of bullying. As opposed to e.g. thinking “this is an exaggerated version of something that is probably harmless”. (This was a mistake my parents were making all the time.)

Quick, what are your thoughts on the concept of rape culture?

Multiheaded 11 Oct 2013 10:08 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Decius’s comment on: Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school

If you add that middle school lasts for three or four years, and after that most people are no longer in middle school, I think ‘short’ applies.

Not to one’s subjective experience. Oh no.

Multiheaded 10 Oct 2013 13:26 UTC
2 points
on: A Voting Puzzle, Some Political Science, and a Nerd Failure Mode

...the ranks of US liberals have included 9/11 Truthers, Marxists, etc., etc.

In spite of being a conservative Catholic apologist, what Chesterton is saying here isn’t crazy...

Withholding my upvote until you rephrase that. People can be highly intelligent and rational not “in spite” of being a conservative Christian—indeed, they can take some good ideas characteristic of classical conservatism and Christianity while avoiding the bad stuff. E.g. from what I know, cousin_it here on LW is a conservative, and Will Newsome is Catholic (?), and both are awesome. Or read The American Conservative, a pretty great and high-quality magazine.

And my model of an educated American Marxist would certainly have her dislike 1) liberals and 2) “truthers” of all kinds. I’m puzzled.

Nuance matters.

Multiheaded 9 Oct 2013 15:10 UTC
−4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, September 30 - October 6, 2013
Actually, y’all wrong. It was simply a fun idea for celebrating 4chan’s 10th birthday.

Multiheaded 8 Oct 2013 22:45 UTC
−7 points
in reply to: Moss_Piglet’s comment on: The best 15 words
...Michael Moore?

...Rachel Maddow?

Have you read a single damn word of my above comment?

The world today is a mess, and every time I wrote the DNC a check or marched for some Social Justice cause or kicked someone under the table for talking during a day of silence I was doing my part to make that mess worse. So I stopped. It’s that easy.

I’m getting full-on Poe’s Law vibes from this. Do you really, truly feel like the world revolves around your skinny first-world bourgeois STEM dudebro ass? That conversion from a very boring and milquetoast American white liberal to a wannabe fascist has been some ethical and philosophical triumph of yours? Man, oh man.