The best 15 words

There isn't any "harm" - that's the entire point. It just feels wrong at a gut level. The example was specifically chosen to be something that did not upset "harm avoidance" or "egalitarianism" or "autonomy" (in the john haidt sense). I was trying to think of a world in which I might be the conservative one.

In this case, I think that the notion of a human without negative effect is hitting some sort of psychological Uncanny Valley between human and alien for me. Maybe it violates some sort of purity norm? Or perhaps it causes individuals to in some senses leave the "in-group" by becoming less similar to me?

The truth is that the strangeness would probably wear off after repeated exposure. I only had to think about the idea for a small amount of time before realizing it wasn't really as bad as it seemed at first. But I can I imagine that if I hadn't ever considered the idea in my youth, an older version of me would no longer be cognitively flexible enough to consider it as acceptable behavior.

This is probably how conservatives feel with homosexuality. (And just the same way, if you take a young conservative who doesn't take any religious scriptures literally, and you give them repeated exposure, they tend to change their mind unless religion somehow interferes).

(If everyone did it, there might be ...not harm, but dis-utility. It wouldn't be my optimal universe, though perhaps it wouldn't be worse than the present. I think that I consider diversity of experiences intrinsically valuable, so I'd feel like something intrinsic to humanity was lost if at least some toned-down brands of negative affect weren't preserved in at least some people. A more obvious problem is that it might be boring...I'm not sure whether the fact that they wouldn't find it boring makes it better or worse. I guess I'd be happy for them, but I wouldn't identify myself, or humanity, with them as much.)

Yes... I think what bothers me most is that it is a subtraction. It's one fewer emotion on the spectrum of experience. I wouldn't mind people becoming strange and different, but I would want them to be more than human in the realm of breadth of experience, not less than human. Perhaps I wouldn't mind as much if they became more complex in other ways.

But really, that doesn't become a problem unless everyone chooses wire-heading.

There is none, and the idea that it's at all a Left-Right issue is baffling. I personally don't like the idea on aesthetic principles but it's not the result of some Reactionist policy statement.

People being happy prosperous and free is the goal of Reaction; why would anyone bother with a philosophy which promised sadness poverty and slavery? The difference is entirely in the question of what sorts of conditions in the real world will lead to a good society, and that is a simple factual question.

I'm not sure how turning the dial to 11 works, but there seems to be a pretty glaring asymmetry in your analysis here. If turning the dial to 11 on progressivism takes you to Soviet Russia, why doesn't turning the dial to 11 on classical liberalism take you towards complete stateless anarchism, which I imagine would be considerably less congenial than Burning Man.

"But," the classical liberal might say, "we believe the state does have a role to play in protecting its citizens from violence inflicted by others, and in enforcing contracts." Yeah, and progressives believe that the market has a role to play in solving the economic calculation problem. They also have commitments to civil liberties and individual autonomy that are incompatible with a Soviet-style dictatorship. If turning the dial past 10 is sufficient to erase those commitments, maybe it's also sufficient to erase the classical liberal's commitment to a night watchman state?

I think the issue here is that to you progressivism is a set of very specific ideals whereas to me it is a set of general-purpose political tactics.

Judging by the examples you give, the tactic you're attributing to progressivism is basically harsh condemnation (and often forceful suppression) of purported "human rights abuse" when the perpetrators are ideological enemies, but quiet tolerance (and sometimes even approval) of the same actions when they are perpetrated by allies or by people/groups who do not fit the "bad guy" role in the standard progressive narrative. Is this pretty much what you intended to convey, or am I missing something important?

If I'm not, then I don't see why you tie this behavior to progressivism in particular. It seems like a pretty universal human failure mode when it comes to politics. Of course, the specifics of the rhetoric employed will differ, but I'm sure I can come up with examples similar to yours that apply to conservatives, or indeed to pretty much any faction influential enough to command widespread popular allegiance and non-negligible political clout. Do you think progressives are disproportionately guilty of this kind of hypocrisy, or that this hypocrisy is more central to the success of progressivism than that of other ideologies? Or are you just using the term "progressive" in a much more encompassing sense than its usual meaning in American political discourse?

I've also got to say that I don't find your three examples of progressive hypocrisy all that compelling (even though I don't deny the existence of this sort of hypocrisy among progressives -- I just think you're wrong about degree).

On situation A: The claim that progressives completely ignored Vietnamese ethnic cleansing is false. The push for a more inclusive refugee policy in America in the wake of mass Vietnamese displacement (culminating in the Refugee Act of 1980) was spearheaded by progressives in the Congress (like Ted Kennedy) and backed by labor unions. The UNHCR (which I'm assuming Moldbug regards as a tentacle of the progressive kraken) played a major role in drawing attention to the plight of the boat people. It's true that the Viet Minh's oppression of ethnic Chinese doesn't get condemned as vociferously or routinely as the Nazi oppression of Jews, but I don't buy that this is solely or even primarily attributable to the preservation of the progressive Grand Narrative. One relevant observation is that as bad as the Viet Minh's treatment of the Ethnic Chinese was, the Nazi treatment of Jews was considerably worse.

As for the Rwandan genocide, once again your characterization of the progressive response doesn't seem apt. While it is true that America did basically nothing to stem the genocide while it was in progress, some of the harshest criticism of this American inactivity has come from progressive academics (Samantha Power is a prominent example). Also, I don't think condemnation of the Akazu has been lacking at all. In fact, the impression I get is that Rwanda is the go-to example for modern (post WWII) genocide.

On situation B: I concede that a lot of contemporary discussion of John Brown is unjustifiably reverential, and I don't consider him particularly heroic. But I do think the difference in motivation between McVeigh and him is very relevant to our evaluation of their respective actions. Also, you seem to take for granted that the Haitian revolution was, on the whole, a bad thing. If not, your claim that Brown should have been dissuaded from starting a slave rebellion by the example of Haiti would make no sense. And I disagree that the Haitian revolution was on the whole a bad thing, despite the considerable loss of life involved. Perhaps this is another instance of progressive double standards, but you'll have to make that case for me. As it stands, the argument "Haiti's slave rebellion had horrible results, so John Brown should have expected his rebellion to have horrible results, so he should be treated as someone trying to bring about horrible results" is not very convincing to me, for a number of reasons.

On situation C: I just straight-up reject your characterization of the LCP as "mass murder". While there have been reports of some patients on the LCP being dehydrated and neglected by hospital staff, the numbers do not remotely approach 10,000. That's about the total number of people on the pathway, and there is no evidence I'm aware of that more than a small fraction faced systematic mistreatment (in contravention of the actual guidelines for the LCP, I should note). There is also evidence that a number of people on the pathway received exemplary end-of-life care.

And again, your characterization of the progressive response is pretty tendentious. I guess it's technically true that there are "calls for increased funding to the very organization which enacted" the LCP, but progressives also support increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, the very organization which enacted the Tuskegee experiment (gasp!). So no hypocrisy there, then. I find neither demand particularly scandalous, since both organizations do a lot of other good stuff that warrants increased funding. As for the specific abuses of the LCP -- while they are much less common than you claim, they are troubling, and as far as I can tell, there has been no significant progressive opposition to the Neuberger review's recommendation that the LCP be phased out and replaced with something that can be more effectively enforced. I'm not British though, so I may be wrong about this.

Now, it is quite possible that I have to some extent been duped by progressive myth-making in my conception of these situations. If so, I'd appreciate evidence indicating where my beliefs are false.

I took your explanation of "governmental entropy" to indicate a breakdown of heirarchy.

High order gov't = clear lines of heirarchy, which you could draw in a simple diagram

low order gov't = constant uncertainty about who's in charge (with the resulting insecurity resulting in violence).

We could argue it around in circles forever, so why not cut to the meat of the issue; what would we expect the progressive response to be like if each of us were right

So this is good, but I'm still confused.

Your examples describe a government which acts in its own interests (rather than by moral ideals) and I accept that this is in fact the case for our government, that it acts not according to ideals but in self-interest.

What I don't understand is why this is particular to progressive-ism, and not a general property of ideologically driven power structures. Or even power structures in general, for that matter - doesn't Fnarg also act in his own interests, by strengthening his allies and weakening his enemies?

who it's ultimately helping

Let's take India and Pakistan, and observe their positions on the Israel-Palestine scenario. Pakistan strongly sides with Palestine, probably because Palestine is the Muslim state and Israel are the Western Imperialists. Polls show India to be the most pro-Israel country in the world: despite India's strong anti-imperialist sentiment - here's a short analysis that makes sense to me.

India was chosen as an example because while many major variables are different from Western nations, I know it possesses the equivalent of what we've been calling "The Cathedral" and its conservatives are similar as well. As you might expect, India's leftists are more pro-muslim than the nation as a whole, and thus are less pro-Israel.

But I know that If a Muslim power started invading an indigenous Jewish population, left and right in India would be united in opposition. The alliance on the Right depends on the interests of the cultural in-group (which is why Pakistan supports Palestine and Indian conservatives supports not-Palestine), but the alliance of the Left doesn't seem tied to any particular culture's interest. Leftists from India to Europe to America tend to have greater support for Palestine.

So, once you subtract any moral variables, who does the leftist tend to help? One possibility is that they tend to help the underdog who wants to be autonomous from Fnargl. and thus cause the "underdog" to win. And if the underdog keeps winning, I suppose that this leads to chaos and constant revolutions.

if that's the case, it brings my back to the one useful thing said I had gleaned from reactionary thought - "World-improvement-plots should follow the heuristic of minimizing destruction to existing societal infrastructure."

That's just what I came up with, though, I'm not sure actually sure whom you meant when you said "who it's ultimately helping". Did you just mean that it acts to strengthen itself? If so, why is this unusual for a major ideology? All rapidly spreading things... Islam, English speaking, etc... can boast the same.

Situation B: Two men lead attacks on US Federal Government buildings in an attempt to spark a race war which they believed was divinely ordained, failed, and were subsequently executed. John Brown attacked the Federal Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, while Timothy McVeigh attacked the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In both cases innocents were killed as a result of the attacks, and in both cases their actions hurt their cause in the public mind and encouraged the expansion of paramilitary police forces designed to prevent similar future strikes.

If this is a question of humanitarian ideals, you might expect that both would be repudiated for their actions; even if we hate slavery, surely a student of history should recognize that slave revolts tend to involve mass murder even when successful which means that regardless of the validity of their complaints, both were attempting to start a genocidal war. Of course, from the point of view of political expediency there is no conflict whatsoever; the neofascist terrorist is a threat and thus irredeemably evil while the radical abolitionist terrorist is a predecessor and thus an inspiring heroic figure.

One of those is a war to stop something which is actually bad. The other isn't. That's not a trivial distinction.

I stated that too strongly... come to think of it there are some sexual behaviors that are, in fact, status contests between partners - like in hyenas. It's not as ridiculous of a hypothesis as I made it out to be, and I agree that this is because of my own biases.

That said, I think it's fairly clear that there are a large number of non-reproductive sexual behaviors found in nature which are not dominance contests between partners.

more sense than any modern theory I've heard.

Let me try to remedy that. Here are some hypotheses - not truth claims, just hypotheses.

-Our genomes contain both gender's body plans. Unusual hormone levels in an individual might set off developmental pathways which give a male a female-typical brain, or vice versa, leading to atypical sexual orientation and sometimes behavior. It plays no adaptive role and decreases the organisms fitness. In such organisms, homosexual behavior will be rare in most individuals in the population while being extremely frequent among a small minority. The trait might pop up due to environmental abnormalities, or be maintained genetically due to pleiotropy, or any number of reasons. This is thought to be the case in humans and possibly in sheep.

(Basically, people sometimes have unusual genitalia and unusual secondary sex characteristics, so why should a good reductionist ever be puzzled by the notion that people might have unusual brains?)

-Sex might strengthen group bonds. Female and male bonobos are thought to use homosexually to strengthen group bonds. It's involved in creating dominance hierarchies (Bonding with the dominant female causes her status to be conferred upon you)) but the sex in-and-of-itself is not a between-partners status contest.

But ancient India, China, Greece were absolutely over-run by irrationality. The seeds of logic and reason were lying more or less ignored, buried in texts alongside millions of superstitions and bad epistemologies. And our currently fashionable epistemology is superior to theirs. They didn't have the notion of parsimony.

Why is logic and reason spreading faster today than in the past? Do you think that the rise of post-modernism (Actually, wait.... why are we using the word post-modernism to mean anti-science? That doesn't make sense...) will somehow eclipse the spread of rationalism?

Your model seems to have anti-science-post-modernism as a successor tor rationalism My model has anti-science as a reaction to the rapid spread of rationalism - a backlash. Whenever something spreads rapidly, there are those who are troubled. Anti-science can only define itself in opposition to science - imagine explaining it to someone who had never heard of science in the first place! Further, anti-science advocates a return to pre-scientific modes of thought. Both of these are the signals of a reactionary school of thought. Cthulhu doesn't swim that way.

n the modern world (more-or-less everything after the printing press), where the our technology made data transmission and storage trivial, the new environment put out new pressures.

I'm even more confused now. You aren't saying that Cthlulu's left-ward swim is powered by technological advance, are you?

Because my current working hypothesis for the Leftward trend of history has thus far boils down to technological progress. I thought Reactionaries et al were going to provide an alternative explanation involving power structures and perverse incentives.

You can replicate experiments. It's hard if said experiment involves say an expensive telescope, but the observation should at least be consistent with what's observed with cheaper telescopes.

But the same applies if you replace “telescope” with “thermometer”, so replications in that sense are possible in climatology too! (The difference is just that the theoretical underpinnings of cosmology are much more solid than those of climatology.) You'd have a point if you said that you cannot create a new planet to test whether your climatological models are correct, but then again you can't create a new universe to test your cosmological models either, or get a bunch of maniraptorans, wait 150 million years, and see what their descendants look like for that matter. (EDIT: Now I remember that at least one person has said more or less that as an argument against evolution being a scientific theory. Alas.)

I've never heard people arguing for evolution use "the scientific consensus says evolution is true" as their main argument.

Okay.

As a non-palaeontologist who's never dug fossils or anything, the main reason I believe that birds are dinosaurs (in the monophyletic sense of the word) in spite of a small minority of palaeontologists disagreeing is that I think it's far less likely for the consensus to be wrong than for the dissenters to be wrong.

There. Now you've heard one person using the scientific consensus as the main argument. Are you shifting your probability that birds are dinosaurs downwards?

Their tendency to rely heavily on appeals to authority, e.g., "the science is settled".

I asked for a citation and I got a bare assertion. Can you produce a reference where a climatologist says “the science is settled” as if it was itself an argument, rather than a summary of evidence (preferably in a peer-reviewed journal -- surely if you dug long enough you could found some exasperated evolutionist on the internet telling a creationist the same thing)?

Their tendency to rely heavily on appeals to authority, e.g., "the science is settled".

...when countering the equally generic claim that the science is not settled.

Specific criticisms receive specific replies; generic criticisms receive generic replies -- not because more specific replies aren't available, but for the tactical reason that a generic criticism is trivial to generate whereas a specific reply to a generic criticism is exhausting to generate.