Weird Alliances

I've been thinking lately about "allies" in the social justice sense of the word: marginalised groups who have unaligned object-level interests but aligned meta-interests. Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transfolk and [miscellaneous gender-people] may have very different object-level interests, but a very strong common meta-interest relating to the social and legal status of sexual identities. They may also be marginalised along different axes, allowing for some sort of trade I don't have a good piece of terminology for.

As I understand social justice, that's not what they mean by ally. An ally is a privileged person who is attempting to help non-privileged people. For example, a man trying to help women (in a social justice context) or a white person trying to help people of color (likewise in a social justice context).

Social justice is an effort to put together an alliance of all non-privileged people. This can definitely get weird,

There used to be a saying that politics makes strange bedfellows-- possibly less true in the US lately, since compromise has been less attractive. Still, there can be alliances on such issues as winding down the war on drugs.

The health store phenomenon you observe (weird alliances) is called "crank magnetism". People who believe one weird thing tend to believe other weird things. (This particularly applies to conspiracy theorists.) Alternative medicine advocates are highly supportive of other alternative therapies that directly contradict their own, because they're of a subculture that defines itself oppositionally. The money flows in to support this weird alliance.

LW's interests do indeed not necessarily hang together, except being things advanced by the transhumanist subculture. Friendly AI doesn't go naturally with cryonics or nanotechnology as interests, for example (even if those things might plausibly have synergies).

I submit that promoting LW as material for crank magnets may not work well and will just end up infuriating those capable of joined-up thinking.

The way you are using the word "alliance" is extremely broad. Different groupings require different levels of solidarity. For two people to work together in political activism, they need high levels of solidarity and aligned goals, otherwise they will be working at cross-purposes rather than co-operating - hence "weird" alliances are difficult. For two people to shop at the same store, they barely need any alliance at all - just don't get into fights in the aisles! Vegans and body-builders who both shop at Holland & Barrett are absolutely not entering into an implicit bargain with each other, and if they use the products for different purposes, it doesn't disrupt the others' use. So "weird" alliances are easy - and over time, they dissolve the lines that blur the groups. I very much doubt whether vegans and body-builders do metaphorically "hold their noses as they put their cash down" - when they go shopping, they are just customers.

This, of course, is why the free market and the commercial culture are the great solvents of clannishness and bigotry - they facilitate these "weird" alliances by providing a common set of rules that allow everyone to pursue their ends without disrupting the others. As Voltaire wrote as long ago as 1733:

Go into the London Stock Exchange - a more respectable place than many a court - and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, ... and everybody is happy.

Voltaire, Letters on the English, VI.

Let me attempt to incorporate what you mean with specifics to make sure I understand your point.

Say Less Wrong has an overly high proportion of fan fiction writers compared to some baseline. Fan fiction oriented people from other areas might come for the fan fiction and stay for other material, and swapping fan fiction will give people who are here... a community oriented leisure activity? (That doesn't sound like quite the right phrase but I'm having a hard time thinking of a better one)

As such, we should start and maintain Less Wrong fanfiction writing threads, rather than just sitting around waiting for another chapter of HPMOR.

That seems reasonable to me (As someone who writes a lot of not that great fanfiction and likes reading it from better authors.)

If I were to attempt to think of a potential downside, it would be something along the lines of a PUA person thinking "Well, if we can start Off-topic fanfiction discussions, then we can start off-topic PUA discussions." And then you seeing that and thinking "Ugh, a PUA discussion?"

Of course someone who liked PUA and disliked Fanfiction might have a switched reaction to those two things.

Might the apparent weird alliance not be a failure to accurately separate the substantive from the superficial? It could be the New Ager and the biohacker are driven by the same psychological imperative, each just dresses it a little differently. By even classifying their alliance as "weird", we are jumping the gun on what were are entitled to take for granted. I.e., we lack even the understanding to say what is weird as what isn't.

I've noticed a tradeoff in the anime community where people are more willing to tolerate pedophilia when it comes to "lolis" (sexualized portrayals of pre-teen girls)*. The problem is, where do you draw the line between reasonably "cute" and inappropriately sexy? I think there's a also a fear that if there was some sort of anti-pedophile crackdown, that might get banned because it has 13 year old girls in tight clothes.

*Specifically, people can lust over pre-teen girls to a certain extent on r/anime without getting downvoted by me or others.

George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist, argues that seemingly disparate groups which form political coalitions share underlying metaphors based on family structures. On the conservative side, he says that social conservatives and libertarian conservatives don't really have conflicting agendas because both share what he calls "strict father morality." They assume that we live in a harsh and dangerous world where men have to run things in a natural hierarchy, while the womenfolk and the children have to stay subordinate to men for their own protection. Strict fathers have the task of disciplining and toughening their children for the task of becoming self-reliant adults in the harsh and dangerous world. Therefore they oppose sexual freedom, on the social conservative side, and the welfare state, on the libertarian side, because both of these tend to weaken people's character and make them less capable of personal responsibility and independence.

This organic affinity also sheds light on why PUA bloggers have started to sound like Dark Enlightenment bloggers and Neoreactionaries: By getting all that exposure to the ugly way women behave when you remove the traditional constraints on their real preferences, you can see that our conservative ancestors had a legitimate point of view when they enforced patriarchal norms to keep women in line. Women's sexual freedom basically damages their ability to maintain a stable society.