nomenym
10mo ago
I contend that the biggest problem right now is simply that concern about GOF research has become right-coded.
nomenym
10mo ago
That's a lot of "ifs". In the meantime, I'd also sacrifice a few goats to the gods just to be sure all your bases are covered.
nomenym
10mo ago
This is eminently reasonable, but the problem is who goes first. There is no trust. Better to keep the anti-gun activists fighting over Hawaii rather than allow them to open up another front.
nomenym
10mo ago
Sure, it's not fair in the cosmic sense of all that might have been but for the random vicissitudes of life. A "fair fight" does not need to satisfy that standard to achieve its intended purpose.
nomenym
10mo ago
Always was, but less so. It's all on the margin, as the economists say. It's not like men were always honorable, but they could at least sometimes be held to that code of honor. It sometimes worked, and that was usually enough. Now it's mostly gone.
The competency of men vs. women is a complicated issue; female social norms don't scale as well but work better in some contexts than others. Science loses much when the "fair fight" model is rejected in order to be more "welcoming" to people who shouldn't be there. Women also tend to bring down the status of professions, because a large part of what makes a profession high status is that it makes men desirable to women, but the reverse is rarely true. It's one of the reasons why high status seems so frustratingly elusive for many women; they do the same things as the men but don't enjoy the same results.
Status is a thing, but once a challenge has been accepted the rules are fair. You're equals at least temporarily. The idea is to suppress the role of status in the conflict.
So the Motte struggles to productively engage with ideas that are usually held and advocated by the types of people who are a poor fit for the culture here, is that right? Sure, I can believe that.
In general, the Motte is a very male social group that is structured around creating conditions for a masculine "fair fight". The rules are all about structuring an environment where people openly challenge each other, state their position and opposition plainly, and have a battle of wits, skill, and knowledge. The roles of popularity, status, and broader coalitional politics of the people involved are supposed to be temporarily suspended. Some kind of analogous form of this kind of competition occurs throughout the animal kingdom, but almost entirely between competing males, and it's more common as intra-group competition. The outgroup may be regarded more like dangerous animals that need to be eliminated by any means necessary.
Feminized social spaces don't tend to have much time even for the concept of a "fair fight". In fact, for women (or feminine males), the very notion of a fair fight is foolishness. Female social competition is much more about misdirection, subtefuge, and ambush. You should never challenge an enemy openly and square off against them; there should be no declaring a time and place or choosing your weapons. The goal is to wait until your opponents' back is turned and strike, or even better get someone else to strike for you. The roles of popularity, status, and coalitional politics are front and center, and even the very means by which the battle is waged.
This is essentially why too many women in academia is ruining science and related fields. Once there are enough relatively ordinary women, they shift the culture away from the "fair fight" model of science, and so science is now more about popularity, status, and coalitional politics and the battle of ideas is engaged by way of back channels. I recall recently listening to an interview with a philosopher lamenting the terrible influence that critical theory has had on the philosophy profession, and how it has all but taken over without seeming to have won any arguments. Infamously, such people do not engage in debates, i.e. "fair fights", but rather they use indirect, institutional, and social power to defeat their enemies often without even giving them a chance to defend themselves.
In my experience, advocates of veganism (as opposed to all vegans) tend to disproportionately belong to the latter group, and so they aren't going to feel comfortable and competent at interacting with the Motte. Sometimes people like these will actually stumble upon good ideas, and those ideas will perhaps not get a fair hearing on a forum like The Motte because their advocates usually don't fight fair. This could undoubtedly cause a blind spot. There is no solution. White nationalist types tend to be rather masculine in their disposition, and so they usually intuitively and more comfortably engage with the fair-fight culture.
nomenym
10mo ago
Yes, and it also incentivizes them to indulge in short-term mate selection. That was also my original point.
Yes, frequently. I live embedded in a very poor region of the deep south. In fact, by the standards of most people here, I am a poor lower class blue collar guy.
nomenym
10mo ago
There are low status and low income men who aren't especially criminally inclined and are relatively more stable and dependable. There may be relatively fewer of them than historically, but they still exist. Welfare makes them less desirable, and on the margin incentivizes more short-term mating preferences and competition from everyone.
The welfare state can never give people status, but it can reduce the status of low skill men who are more inclined to be providers and caregivers. Without the welfare state, lower class women have to make a trade-off between sexy bad boys and dependable good guys. With the welfare state, they don't.
Of course, it doesn't disprove anything. It just adds another wrinkle to the defense, but wrinkles accumulate until an idea starts to look old and haggard. Each wrinkle reduces the explanatory power of the hypothesis, since there are more and more exceptions, caveats, outliers, and improbabilities piling up around the thing meant to be explained. In the extreme, you reach a point where the argument is essentially that of Descartes' demon--P is true despite appearing for all intents and purposes to be false. That is, P has no functional role in explaining anything happens, but it is nonetheless asserted to be the true hidden cause of everything. That is, it ceases to be an explanatory hypothesis.
I would say this is approximately where feminists are with patriarchy, or where racism-mongers are with white supremacy, and so on. Unfortunately, the wrinkles don't seem to have much diminished their power and influence. The explanatory power of hypotheses seems to bear little relation to their political power, at least so long as societies are wealthy enough to offset their costs. In fact, it seems as though the political power of a hypothesis is actually diminished by too much explanatory power, since the latter makes it specific and inflexible and disallows easy picking and choosing of its application.
Sometimes I fear that successful rational criticism of popular political ideas can be counterproductive, since it often has the effect of merely reducing their explanatory power while actually increasing their political utility. It kind of refines and purifies them, alerting them to potential soft spots and weaknesses that need to be patched over. The end result is an idea that means less and has more to say, an idea that can account for everything and demand anything. In other words, and ideal ideology for political action. Science sure as shit doesn't keep this in check, but the economic costs and dead bodies do tend to pile up eventually.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but I think I may be accidentally arguing against the entire purpose of this forum.
nomenym
10mo ago
I'm reminded of the Muslim suicide bomber's parents who said that they didn't know their son had become so religious as though that were the inevitable consequence. There is a sense in which leftists are just liberals that take the liberal's ideology seriously, and so liberals have no real textual defence against leftists. When a leftist takes them to task on an issue, they might have pragmatic objections but they can't argue the principle.
The accusations of Aparthied are so revealing. It's been a long time since the end of Aparthied, and how has that been going? Jews should not want to end up in a position like white South Africans, and frankly that would be on the wildly optimistic side of my expectations for what would happen. Even assuming that their situation is like Aparthied, the response would be "yes, and?"
nomenym
11mo ago
Right, as soon as the black mascots they hire start saying the wrong things, they're immediately oatracized. Their blackness is worth nothing unless they are telling white liberals what white liberals want to hear. Their power is largely illusory and dependent on the supremacy of liberal whites.
nomenym
11mo ago
The way I've seen it explained is that this is no different from a 16 year old dating a 22 year old (or maybe even a 14 year old dating a 20 year old). Super ick.
The curious thing is the new emerging taboo against age differences in relationships. Large age differences have always been somewhat inappropriate and suspicious, but differences of only a few years between obvious adults are now being castigated. I would expect this to be simply female mate competition by older women reacting to the situation you describe, discouraging successful men in their 30s and 40s trading them in on the dating apps for a younger model. However, this taboo appears to be coming from younger age groups who seem convinced that age gaps imply grooming which implies non-consent. Why are some young women apparently trying taboo a 22 year old women dating a 28 year old man when they are also disproportionaly hooking up with older men on the dating apps?
nomenym
11mo ago
So we're back to homosexual men in particular being especially sexually deviant--not just in their choice of partners, but also in their general propensity to trangress sexual norms. Personally, I'm inclined to see this as mostly just the expression of male sexuality unconstrained by females, but it also probably has something to do with homosexuals being a privileged class who have built an identity upon transgression. Perhaps this is partly where the "but I'm gay" defense comes from--to deny a gay man his sexual transgressions is inherently homophobic.
Of course, you could no doubt find heterosexuals who would engage in similar behavior, but proportionally many more gays seem to be up for it.
I can't really see how the "rationalist community" can be such a thing when it's utterly compromised. Progressive wokism, or whatever you want to call it, is the preeminent irrationalist philosophy of modernity, and the "rationalist community" is one of its vassals--all too often a willing one at that. From the outside, they're so absurd. Maybe they'll evolve into something worthy of their name eventually, but I see little sign of that. They would have been eugenicists 100 years ago.
nomenym
11mo ago
It's curious how non-governmental organizations seem to be so often funded by governments and directly involved in important questions of governance. Was it always this way? It increasingly feels like we're being governed by non-governmental organizations.
nomenym
11mo ago
No, it's going to be some flavor of insanity because it's purity spirals all the way down. The so-called less insane alternatives are just stepping stones between there and here.
I'm inclined to agree with this. I actually see a lot of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity in progressive politics, but it tends to come out in strange and indirect ways. These moral foundations often manifest like Freudian neuroses; they are seemingly repressed but then force their way through in ways that are often unconscious, perverted and vicarious.
I think Haidt is onto something, but his error is that modern progressives are psychologically more like old conservatives, except they have been raised in a tradition of progressivism. Older progressives were a self-selecting group of outliers, but modern progressives are just normies who grew up with that stuff. In any case, the upshot is that old fashioned expressions of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity have been tabooed. Essentially, the tenets of the progressive faith are all couched in the principles of Care and Fairness, and so when the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations bubble up to the surface, they do so dressed up in a guise of Care and Fairness. This is why modern progressivism seems to be taking on more a religious flavor, and it's often reinventing old customs but using new language to legitimize them.
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