marten
4mo ago
I share the sentiment. I would especially like to hear about why Andrew Jackson was a “lion” of a president, somewhere in a neighborhood of Lincoln, which I interpret from the context to mean “highly impactful and in a net positive way.”
I don’t necessarily disagree — I don’t know much about the early American presidents — but this strikes me as a possibly heterodox assertion and the explanation might be juicy.
marten
5mo ago
they're usually cagey on details, but they talk about everyone living together in harmony and doing whatever it is they find personally fulfilling.
South Park nailed it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ywVHF6Lltac?si=4DBzhyjxJT3tvYc3
The point of my method is to apply a metric that enables us to answer this question: given two political positions, which is more leftist?
Let’s suppose that we live in a society like the one that your Alice lives in, where currency has been abolished and Alice has a network of hundreds of laborers who work for her, all happily, freely, and voluntarily, either (a) in direct exchange for her poems, or (b) in exchange for the labor of people who work in direct exchange for her poems. Alice’s poems are a form of wealth, and you correctly note that a hierarchy has been created, with Alice at the top. She likely enjoys a great deal of social status and prestige in this hypothetical society.
Now let’s suppose that there are two competing political parties: the Yellows and the Pinks, who take the following positions:
Yellows: “It is fine that Alice has such status and prestige — this system of voluntary association incentivizes the production of her poems, a valuable resource; it allows everyone involved the freedom to do what they like, and it makes society wealthier while directly harming nobody. It is nothing like the bad old days when people had to work for wages to survive.”
Pinks: “What right does Alice have to put on such airs? It is an accident of fate that she has this peculiar capacity to produce beautiful poetry. Morally, she has a duty to willingly share this gift with the community instead of exploiting it. We find it very problematic indeed that good people should be obliged to labor for hours every day only to receive a poem that takes her mere minutes — in the comfort of her well-appointed living quarters, we might add — to put forth. The watchword of the day should be: poems from each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs, with special privileges for none. Alice should be set to producing poems all day for the benefit of all; her needs will be adequately taken care of in return, the same deal as everyone else. She is not better than anyone else.”
Now, using the distance-from-pure-leftism metric, it is pretty clear which of the parties is more leftist.
My claims are (1) that this metric can generally be pretty handily applied to any two political positions addressing the same issue, and will predict with good accuracy which will be perceived as more leftist, and (2) given a political position that is not equivalent to pure leftism, I can use the metric to construct a position on that same issue that is recognizably further to the left of it.
marten
5mo ago
First- do you evaluate ideologies on what they claim they want, or how they are in practice? […] It's a rare person who'll call Biden farther left than Stalin, but I consider Stalin far more hierarchical.
Since we are speaking pragmatically, I would apply the rule you set forth in your original post:
If you have to say, “Uh, akshually, Party X falls here on the spectrum”, then you are automatically wrong, because the popular conception is the ultimate arbiter of truth, not your definition.
Thus, Stalin is to the left of Biden.
Consider two tribes: Tribe A, which has a norm that the chief and his buddies have the power of life and death over everyone else, and will apply it according to their private notion of what constitutes justice, and Tribe B, which has a system of courts and laws and a norm that no tribesman may be deprived of life or property without due process. Applying the distance-from-pure-leftism metric, we can see that the norm in Tribe B is closer than Tribe A to theoretical pure leftism (where all would be treated equally, regardless of merit or station), and that leftists would prefer Tribe B over Tribe A.
It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that a commitment to justice (by which I mean “the giving of what is deserved”) and due process is therefore a feature of leftism; rather, in historical context, it is just an intermediate, instrumental goal. While Tribe B might be stable, with most members adhering to its norms, the leftmost elements in Tribe B will be dissatisfied with the unequal outcomes (even if those outcomes are just). They will eventually start to wring their hands about the disparate impact of the justice system (either by race or wealth or what have you) or maybe how society actually creates criminals and so they shouldn’t be punished, but only helped, and they will begin to abandon the norm of the pursuit of justice / due process once it is in the rear-view mirror on the road to increased equality / abolition of hierarchy. The historical Tribe B revolutionaries who dethroned the chief and established the courts in the first place — leftists themselves, likely, in relation to the norms in their day — will eventually be recast by the purer leftists of the future as only slightly less noxious right-wingers than the chief himself, so that the march to total equality — the true terminal goal — can continue.
The Social Democrats in your example are not as committed to equality as the Communists. They are like the Tribe B moderates in that they ascribe some ultimate, non-instrumental value to competing values, such as personal liberty, and therefore, they are not as purely leftist. The Communists were, at least ostensibly, aiming for greater equality than the Social Democrats. If they thought they could get there through liberalism and democracy, they might go that route, but the police state route is acceptable, too.
It makes sense to remove explicit legal hierarchies, like ones that say you must obey a king, or that the government will not allow you to do drugs and if you do the police will throw you in prison. That is coherent as an anti-hierarchy position. But removing voluntary hierarchies does not. If two people sign a contract, such that Alice is the employer of Bob and Bob must do what Alice says, and in exchange Alice pays Bob a salary, with either party being free to cancel the contract at any time, that is hierarchical according to leftists. So far leftists would want to stop that. But the only way to stop it is to institute another hierarchy- some sort of government and some sort of police force to declare it illegal and to enforce its illegality. Therefore, a "pure leftist" is a contradiction.
To my mind, the reason that leftists are opposed to hierarchies is not because they dislike organization, but because they abhor the notion that one person should have greater social status or prestige than another. The underlying feeling is something like: Bob should not even be able to pay Alice a salary because he ought not to have more money than her in the first place. Even if it were accepted that the reason Bob has more money is because he was born more talented than Alice and his labor is therefore more valuable, that is not Alice’s fault, and she should be made equal to Bob. How exactly this is going to work is typically left as an exercise to the reader.
And I expect in reality, you wouldn't even be able to get close to being a pure leftist before running into significant issues.
We are in agreement here — systems such as Communism are necessarily to the right of theoretical pure leftism and yet have failed miserably — but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Very committed leftists would (incorrectly, in my opinion) resolve your paradox by asserting that once we have more equality, things will just magically work out, and we won’t need the police anymore.
My characterization of “pure leftism” is just a theoretical ideal — a single point in political space, useful for evaluating how leftist a particular position is. The fact that leftism, beyond a certain extreme, is probably unworkable in the real world is not a criticism of the measurement system.
I’ll start with Mathew Yglesias’ recent theory of Left vs Right, as it was partial inspiration for this post. I thought his post was great with an accurate summary of relevant history, but fails at making a consistent set of rules with which to define left vs right. He defines the right as being fundamentally pro-hierarchy and the left as fundamentally anti-hierarchy, and walks through a few issues he thinks proves his point, such as religion, racism, and policing. I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think he’s grasping towards a pattern that does exist, but that pattern doesn’t explain left vs right.
I think the problem boils down to the fact that leftism is well-defined: its fundamental, terminal value is equality, or the absence of hierarchy. Given two hypothetical positions, it is therefore easy to determine which is more leftist. For instance, consider answers to this question: What special duties do you owe to your own family member, or your countryman, or a member of your race, as opposed to a random stranger? The pure leftist answer is “none whatsoever.” Or: To what extent should a person’s merits or hard work or whatever lead to increased social status? The pure leftist answer is “not at all.”
Rightism, on the other hand, is not well-defined. In practice, it just means “something other than leftism.” To the extent that a position deviates from pure leftism, it is more or less rightist. This is why George Washington and Hitler are both considered right-wing, even though their policy positions (and terminal values) are not very consonant.
You can create a political compass with an arbitrary number of axes, but so long as only leftism is well-defined, determining how right-wing a position is only means calculating the geometric distance between that position and pure leftism. There could be an infinite number of value systems that value something other than equality and that have nothing in common with one another other than the fact that they are not leftist. Hitler is considered more right-wing than Washington because his policy positions were, in aggregate, more not-leftist than Washington’s, but he was not “like Washington, just more of it.”
marten
5mo ago
Good suggestion. I tested the same puzzle on GPT-4 instead of GPT-4o. It generated a correct solution on the first attempt:
To successfully transport all three creatures (grog, grindle, and grue) across the river without any of them eating each other, you can follow these steps:
- First trip: Take the grog and the grue across the river.
- Return trip: Leave the grog on the other side and bring the grue back.
- Second trip: Take the grindle across the river.
- Return trip: Leave the grindle on the other side and bring the grog back.
- Final trip: Take the grog and the grue across the river again.
Now, all three are on the other side of the river safely. At no point were the grog and the grue left alone without you present, nor were the grindle and the grue left alone.
I was looking for it to just take the grog and grindle on the first trip (since they cannot eat each other) and then return for the grue, but it may have interpreted the rules as requiring that two creatures be taken at a time (as @confuciuscorndog suggested should be formally stated). Those rules would probably pattern match better to its training corpus.
I tend to agree with you in the broad sense, but having a soft spot for empirical methods, I decided to test @Gillitrut's puzzle on GPT-4o, but with a neutrally-worded question, to avoid the Stroop Effect:
I am trying to take a grog, a grindle, and a grue across a river; however, I can only take two of them at a time. If the grog is left alone with the grue, the grog will eat the grue. If the grindle is left alone with the grue, the grue will eat the grindle. How can I get all three across the river?
GPT flubbed it up and offered the following solution:
To solve this puzzle, you need to ensure that neither the grog is left alone with the grue nor the grindle is left alone with the grue at any point. Here’s a step-by-step solution:
Step 1. Take the grue and the grindle across the river.
- On the other side: grue, grindle
- On the original side: grog
Step 2. Leave the grue on the other side and take the grindle back to the original side.
- On the other side: grue
- On the original side: grog, grindle
Step 3. Take the grog and the grindle across the river.
- On the other side: grue
- On the original side: (empty)
- On the boat: grog, grindle
Step 4. Leave the grog on the other side and take the grindle back to the original side.
- On the other side: grue, grog
- On the original side: grindle
Step 5. Take the grue and the grindle across the river.
- On the other side: grog
- On the boat: grue, grindle
- On the original side: (empty)
Step 6. Return alone to the original side to pick up the grog.
- On the other side: grue, grindle
- On the boat: (empty)
- On the original side: grog
Step 7. Finally, take the grog across the river.
- On the other side: grue, grindle, grog
- On the original side: (empty)
Following these steps ensures that at no point are the grog and the grue left alone together, nor the grindle and the grue left alone together.
GPT-4o was completely unable to solve the puzzle after multiple attempts. When challenged, it would readily admit that its proposed answer was wrong, but was repeatedly unable (worse than random chance) to correctly respond to: "Identify the first step in your previous response that is wrong."
I expected it to do better.
NOTE: Meanwhile, I flubbed the test of using The Motte's markdown formatting. Took me two minutes to do the puzzle test on GPT, and more than a quarter hour to cipher out the syntax to make the results (a numbered list) legible here.
I have lurked this group since long before it had a site or even a name, and throughout the years, I have almost never commented. So I apologize for being critical of someone like yourself who actually does post and contribute, as that is a bit hypocritical of me.
I think you are pattern-matching OP as a member of your outgroup — that is to say, a theist — then skipping past his argument about the inferential basis of the scientific method to attack him because his post appears to give aid and comfort to the enemy.
I am familiar with some physics, some math, and some epistemology — not enough to be an expert, but enough to where I think OP’s argument is reasonably well-defined and not equivalent to extreme skepticism about everything. I can’t find a clear basis to dismiss OP’s argument (at least as to the inferential limitations of science) as bullshit. (I don’t think OP has established at all the truth of theism or anything like that, but he only appears to make a single terse allusion to it at the end of his argument, and perhaps was using it rhetorically as bait.)
As someone whose intuition is that we do have objective evidence for scientific laws, I’ve been hoping that some mathematician or philosopher would eventually pop in here and formally demolish OP’s argument in a direction pleasing to my sensibilities, and I subscribed to the thread to wait for that to happen, but it hasn’t happened yet. @self_made_human, who will often deliver an incisive and sometimes brutal presentation of the traditional rationalist materialist viewpoint, appears to have lost interest. And of the two posters in this thread, @sqeecoo and @IGI-111, who appear most literate in the epistemology of science (or at least, more literate than me), neither has outright dismissed OP’s major premises as nonsensical or solipsistic, and it appears that I will have to read some Popper if I want to get to the bottom of it for myself.
My questions for you, or anyone, are:
(1) What is the first premise or step in OP’s argument that is clearly unreasonable / irrational?
(2) Is OP’s “principle of abductive inference” truly the inferential basis of the scientific method, and if not, what is, and how does it work?
(3) Is it impossible to infer universal physical laws with greater than 0% confidence, as OP claims?
(4) For OP: you suggest downthread that we should be inclined to trust models like Newtonian or Einsteinian physics. Why should we trust them (if we cannot infer universal physical laws with nonzero confidence) and how much should we trust them?
I was genuinely enjoying the argument, and then you had to go be a wrecker and ruin it for everybody.
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…”
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