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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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New Twitter file dropped that I think touches on a few live wires of the culture war.

First, media quality. Scott, Richard H., and Bryan Caplan all somewhat recently have posts out relating to the media. Only Caplan has taken a really negative view. In the new Twitter files, it seems that media without much scrutiny amplified Hamilton68; a project that appears to without evidence slander mostly anti right political opponents as Russian agents. This was a big complaint against Scott and Richard — when the media gets something wrong, it is generally a big thing and seemingly in one direction. This was big because it was used to tar (or further tar) many political actors with links to Russia; notably the then President of the US.

Second, misinformation. The argument presented by and large by progressives is that misinformation must be caught back against aggressively by social media because it pollutes our political system. Yet this article shows how easily “misinformation” is really short hand for “political beliefs I disagree with.” Matt T. compared it to McCarthy. The biggest difference I see is that Joe was actually correct about his targets being communists (doesn’t follow that Joe’s actions were correct). Here, it seems the factual claim (Russian bots / agents) are just wrong.

Third, Robin Hanson just produced a piece discussing the difference between elite and expert. The expert focuses on details and logic; the elite looks for the trees and how to navigate social (ie political) situations. The internal Twitter debates see the expert class somewhat at war with the elite class.

Anyhow, let me know your thoughts! Link to the story. https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton

Third, Robin Hanson just produced a piece discussing the difference between elite and expert. The expert focuses on details and logic; the elite looks for the trees and how to navigate social (ie political) situations.

Obviously, elites have power; experts do not. They have different priorities.

There's a pattern you'll see a lot in certain issues -- gun control and environmental issues, for instance -- where a previously little-known group is suddenly accepted as the unquestioned expert on the topic by the media. I interpret this as the Cathedral (or whatever you want to call it; I usually use "Left, Inc.") spinning up a new part of itself for the purpose of providing backing for the narrative that it has decided on. I suspect this is what was going on here; the Hamilton68 project was spun up by the same people who directed the media to pay attention to it, for the purpose of spreading the Russian collusion stories.

Not really, the central point of the Moldbuggian Cathedral concept is that it's emergent rather than coordinated:

The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

...

So it’s not just that everyone—at least, everyone cool—is on the same page. It’s more like: everyone is reading the same book—at the same speed. No wonder all the peasants are seeing conspiracies in their motherfucking soup. If you saw a group of bright red dots move across the evening sky this way, what would you think they were? Pigeons? Remote-controlled pigeons, illuminated by lasers? Sometimes even Occam is baffled.

...

It is not hard to see why, in the lecture halls and newsrooms, dominant ideas tend to outcompete recessive ideas. A dominant idea is an idea that tends to benefit you and your friends. A dominant idea will be especially popular with your friends and former students in the civil service, because it gives them more work and more power.

And a recessive idea, of course, is the opposite of all these things. A climate scientist who holds the recessive idea of climate denialism is saying to his colleagues and the whole world: climate science is not important. Is it surprising—in the Bayesian sense— that a consensus of climate scientists would conclude that climate science matters?

Moldbug's model has no predictive power over public choice theory or some generic conspiracy, and its allure lies precisely in stripping «The Cathedral», culturally close to him and his target audience (cough cough «dark elves»), of moral culpability inherent to conscious exercise of power while being aware of its consequences. If there is no genuine malice, we can hope to resolve our differences with another round of musical chairs, «reformalizing» power so that no perverse incentives remain and hobbits can return to their bucolic farms.

Much the same can be said of the brain-addled Memetic theory of politics in general, which is buttressed by Mistake theory (because Scott, of course, is a... half-dark elf himself, despite his polite differences with neoreactionaries, and also refuses to see simple malice in blue tribe). Memes and fads very much exist, but they are fickle epiphenomena of mass culture; consequential ideologies and even rhetorical frameworks that are perpetuated by human organizations have unlimited lifespans, rely on scholarship vastly more complex and cerebral than their "memetic" payload, and follow from material interests of self-aware groups.

The practical nonexistence of memes is one of the most underrated thoughts of our friend Julius, which he regrettably had not argued for with sufficient finesse.

Isn't this just ideology dressed up as something else? I think it was Scott who said that Moldbug can't argue that people are consciously aware of themselves in this way, but also can't bring himself to say that it's just people choosing to believe something because that sounds too mundane, so he came up with something that combines the inadvertant nature of ideological belief with the sinister tones of a conspiracy.

See below — isn’t it emergent order?

I guess. Just seems like its easier to just call it ideology - the term explains what people mean pretty well as opposed to Moldbug's attempts at casting this as anything other than the ideology of the elites enacting what it logically would.

Sure, ideas have some memetic aspect to them , but there is still considerable centralization. . Look how quickly the BLM protests evaporated after Biden won. These things are planned by professional activists . Same for the higher-ed administrative structure. Or media companies. But what makes some ideas dominant , is harder to know. It could be a competition for status and power as stated above.

Ironically, this is merely rediscovering the logic behind markets or emergent order. As someone described it, of human action if not human design.

Markets are great because its incentives generally harness market participants’ selfish interest in a pro social way.

The concern about elites (in bureaucracies) is that the incentives arguably harness the participants’ selfish interest in an antisocial way.

I disagree with Moldbug on that. There's a lot of flock-like coordination, but there's also centralized structures (like Jornolist). And if you try to look into the web of funding of the various NGOs, you find a snarl. They're all connected to each other -- often through foundations that are also connected to the media.

Power laws and competition don't disappear just because they're affecting your enemy. It can still be a decentralised process whilst appearing to be focused around a few key groups—this is a measure of success, the wheat winnowed from the chaff. There are very few moments where it's actually more efficient to create a thing/movement/site entirely from scratch rather than finding an already moving thing, no matter how fast, and boosting it.

Power laws and competition don't disappear just because they're affecting your enemy.

You can do a lot if you have solved the coordination problem.

And how have they accomplished that? And if so, why in heavens name would you seek to displace the first group ever to manage it? Such an innovation would instantly enable a utopia, and even if of an aesthetically malign sort, that must be better than our present straits? Surely on any remotely conservative principle such a breakthrough should be regarded as extraordinarily unique and not to be tampered with at all?

I personally very much doubt they have.

Utopia is impossible. Every attempt at Utopia invariably results in dystopia.

And how have they accomplished that?

I'll be damned if I know.

And if so, why in heavens name would you seek to displace the first group ever to manage it? Such an innovation would instantly enable a utopia

No, solving the co-ordination problem does not lead to utopia. It leads to great power for those who solved it.

More comments

This seems like an important distinction between the concepts of "Left, Inc" and "The Cathedral", right? I'm inclined to think both have explanatory power.

This has always seemed plausible to me, and I do believe it to be so in practice even if not necessarily in intention, but I do wonder if anyone has gone and actually collected some data on organizations quoted as experts compared to those organizations' actual track records. Obviously this is a muddy field to plow, so I don't really expect much.

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