The Forces of Blandness and the Disagreeable Majority

(Epistemic Status: Quick brainstorm slash free form just-write-it exercise. This wants to be a post but want to throw it out as a comment quickly first and see if it sounds right.)

Could we tie this directly in with Asymmetric Justice [LW · GW]?

If you are a big thing you are being evaluated primarily on the basis of what horrible things you've done, and reap little of the relative benefit from the brilliant things. If you're going to then enable many weird offensive things, that's a losing plan. Even if the group is a huge win on net, some of them will be bad and get you in a lot of trouble.

If you are a small thing, and want to do one weird thing as the only thing, you have a chance that it turns out all right at least with respect to those you are appealing to with your newspaper, blog or what have you. So you can gain the benefits of exploration, free expression, creation of knowledge and so on.

If you are a medium-size thing doing correlated weird things, which are weird and offensive in the same way, then again your risk is contained, because if they're sufficiently correlated, it's all one thing, so you won't reliably be evaluated as bad and can again get the benefits of your one thing. But it also means that in order to do that, you need to be consistent. No violating your group's party lines so they evaluate you as just. And of course you need to support free speech to avoid being shut down yourself by the "moderates."

So what happens? "The center" or 'moderates" trying to hold is the biggest thing, has to worry about all sides judging it asymmetrically, so it is forced to come out in favor of blandness. Since a big thing like capitalism or a major corporation or the government interacts with tons of stuff enough to get blamed for it they need to censor it in order to not be found guilty. Increasing polarization and uniformity on all sides.

And in parallel, as a moderate proposing policies and law, you can accuse a whole class of tings of being bad because one of them is bad with respect to one thing, and thus make the case that one must censor.

Which means this "moderate center" isn't actually anything of the sort. It's a third power with very little popular support trying to cram things down our throats, because they understand our point scoring systems better than we do - and only partly because they had a large role in engineering those systems. And they are responding to their own incentives.

You actually get the whole dynamic from first principles.

Individual people are small, can and want to take risks, feel increasingly censored for increasingly stupid reasons, and become more pro-free-speech. Large powerful things that want to appeal to multiple sides race with each other to be bigger censors so they can avoid being found guilty, and scapegoat the other moderate powerful things they're struggling with for power, along with everyone else who they can directly censor to gain the upper hand as a group. Ideally they'd like to censor any attempt to portray things accurately or create clarity or common knowledge at all, because the people hate the censorship and they distrust power and the more information they find out, the bigger the negative points they'll assign to every big powerful thing. This creates a tacit (at least) conspiracy of the powerful against all communication, coordination and creation of common knowledge on anything that might matter. A general opposition to reason and competence seems to logically follow.

Does that sound right?

I worry that these studies in support of free speech are narrowly defining free speech as 'allowed to speak' rather than lack of social and economic punishment for speaking one's mind.

I also worry that the reason it looks like free speech looks supported in Murray's study is that he's asking about the things people wanted to censor in 1970, as opposed to the things they want to censor now. E.g. imagine the graph for someone against homosexuality, or in favor of religion, or for big crack-downs on communists. The consensus view on these now, among moderates, would have been subject to censorship in 1970.

I feel a lack of free speech on some issues, but actual zero of that is coming from the threat of government intervention or even corporate censorship, but rather worry about social, economic or reputational retaliation

About 80% of Americans think “political correctness is a problem”

And lots of people who agree with statements about hate speech being bad, white people starting out with advantages in life, sexual harassment being a problem, etc, also think political correctness is a problem.

How much of this is about the definition of political correctness? I haven't seen the term used positively since the 90s, while people only seem to care more about correct speech. I suspect many people who say they hate political correctness nonetheless support punishing a lot of kinds of speech.

Since the 1970’s, Americans have become more tolerant of allowing people with controversial views to speak in public

The question of whether Americans have become more tolerant of speech is about recent changes, not changes since the 1970s.

There's also the problem of how speech is classified. Those figures show that the tolerance for letting racists speak has gone down recently, which may be concerning--but it's much more concerning if more things get moved into the "racist" category, which seems to be happening. Also, I don't see "sexists" or any other category aside from "racists" that is hated by the left, and it's quite possible that adding more such categories would show more downturns.

The growth of lots and lots of outlets for more “unofficial” or “raw” self-expression — blogs, yes, but before that cable TV and satellite radio, and long before that, the culture of “journalism” in 18th century America where every guy with a printing press could publish a “newspaper” full of opinions and scurrilous insults  — tends to go along with more rudeness, more cursing, more sexual explicitness, more political extremism in all directions, more “trashy” or “lowest common denominator” media, more misinformation and “dumbing down”, but also some innovative/intellectual “niche” media.

Chaos is a centrifugal force; it increases the chance of any unexpected outcome. Good things, bad things, existential threats, brilliant ideas, and a lot of weird, gross, and disturbing stuff.

The idea of an "anti-chaos elite" sounds fairly accurate to me, and it shows up a lot in the work of Thaddeus Russell, who wrote a book about American elites' history of stamping out rude/chaotic behavior and runs a podcast where he interviews a wide range of people on the fringes of polite society (including libertarians, sex workers, anarchists, and weird people with no particular political affiliation). It's not perfect from an epistemic standpoint, but it's still worth a listen from anyone interested in this topic.

I wonder how much of this is a consequence of the fact that in the offline world, rich people usually associate with rich people, and poor people associate with poor people (and when a poor person associates with a rich person e.g. in a role of a servant, the poor person must behave in a way that the rich person finds proper)... but in the online world, we all use the same Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.

So now rich people have a cultural shock of meeting the unwashed masses who don't give a fuck about their sensibilities, and will even laugh at their faces, protected by (perceived) online anonymity.

It should be possible to create separate gardens for the elites. Like, make a clone of a famous website, but require e.g. $1000 yearly membership fees, and you get rid of the plebs. There already are projects like that. But as far as I know, they fail. On the internet people provide value to each other, so a website for the 0.1 % would have much fewer interesting stories, fewer cat videos, etc. It would be less offensive, but mostly because it would be dead.

It is probably also hard to find the exact line; I suppose the elites would prefer to avoid dealing with people too low below them, but would welcome the presence of people slightly below them -- they are not that difficult culturally, and because how the top of the pyramid is shaped, there are lots of them, which means lots of useful content.

So instead, the rich people are trying to kick out the plebs from the online places they like. Using politeness and other things correlated with social class as an excuse.

In the study cited in this post I see progressive activists as being the most politically correct by far, even though the post itself is claiming the moderates should have been on that spot.

In this study it does look like the moderates are more likely to disallow racist speech, but the very far right seems to be just as likely, and even more so than the far left, which really makes me doubt the validity of this one.

I don't know why there seems to be such a discrepancy between these studies, or why it looks like the far right is so anti-racist in the 2nd one, can anyone explain?

About 80% of Americans think “political correctness is a problem”; and even when you restrict to self-identified liberals, Democrats, or people of color, large majorities agree with the statement.

This is interesting to me because it's surprising: I'd expect a sharper ideological divide on whether PC is a problem or not. I don't think "PC is a problem" reliably means "I have a high tolerance for verbal conflict"; "PC is a problem" can be read as "people trying to enforce political correctness are picking fights for no good reason and escalating verbal conflict".

Americans have become more tolerant of allowing people with controversial views to speak in public

This is an old-fashioned "Who should be allowed to speak in a town hall meeting in favour of outrageous opinion X?" sort of question. Frankly, this is a pattern-matched answer: "Yes, we believe in freedom of speech". I'm not sure the answer would be the same if the question were "Social media is full of (highly persuasive) advocacy for outrageous opinion X - is this acceptable?".

moderate liberals... against free speech

Hm. Why? Some explanations plucked out of thin air:

(a) To oppose free speech, you have to have enough people on "your side" that you might *succeed*, or that your training/experience has been in a situation where opposing free speech might succeed. (Large concentrations of moderate-left-liberals on a campus)

(b) Groups who have decided that "too much free speech is a problem" come from some particular community incompatible with being on the radical left. You're not going to find many hard-left-wingers in the RAND corporation thinking about counterinsurgency strategy; a SJW memeplex sweeping across college freshmen is going to do better if the freshmen don't have to already be Marxist believers to partake.

I think I'm suggesting that there might be *confounders* on the political-spectrum/free-speech-advocacy graph: "being a campus liberal causes free-speech-opposition and causes moderate-left beliefs" seems much more plausible to me than "there's a spontaneous peak in censorship advocacy at this point in the political spectrum".

The most passionate opponents of chaos are likely to be powerful, since change can only knock them off their pedestals

Opponents of chaos will be people with something to lose or something to protect. The ultra-rich 0.01% have the endurance to ride out most consequences this side of Armageddon, and the more excitable ones might see the chaos as an opportunity, or as a necessary evil.

I experimented with extracting some of the core claims from this post into polls: 

Personally, I find that answering polls like these make me more of a "quest participant" than a passive reader. They provide a nice "think for yourself" prompt, that then makes me look at the essay with a more active mindset. But others might have different experiences, feel free to provide feedback on how it worked for you.

(You can find a list of all 2019 Review poll questions here. [LW · GW])

I use the phrase "The Forces of Blandness" all the time. The post was counterintuitive to me at the time, but it has helped me understand what's been happening to me in many situations — there's a set of 'elites' who don't have sophisticated and important perspectives, but just generically push for people to be less interesting, and less honest because it's friction. Paul Graham calls them the aggressively conventional-minded, but the forces of blandness has stuck with me as a phrase much more strongly.

Following up on the Renee diResta piece, the DARPA program mentioned is Social Media in Strategic Communication. The manager of that program was Rand Waltzman, who currently works at the RAND Corporation. I think he makes for a much, much better source of information about the program and the role of propaganda management in government and the military.

A short summary of the program he wrote is here.

He uses the term cognitive security, and wrote a proposal for DoD funding of a center for it here.

He gave testimony to Congress on both the program and the policy proposal, found here.

The factual point that moderate liberals are more censorious is easy to lose track of, and I saw confusion about it today that sent me back to this article.

I appreciate that this post starts from a study, and outlines not just the headline from the study but the sample size. I might appreciate more details on the numbers, such as how big the error bars are, especially for subgroups stats.

Historical context links are good, and I confirm that they state what they claim to state.

Renee DiResta is no longer at New Knowledge, though her previous work there is still up on her site. I really like the exploration of her background. It might be nice to see something similar about Justin Murphy as well.

Swearing is negatively correlated with agreeableness

citation for this is in the link on the previous sentence; I might adjust the link so it's clear what it covers.

It’s often corporate caution that drives speech codes that restrict political controversy, obscenity, and muckraking/whistleblowing. It’s not just racist or far-right opinions that get silenced; media and social-media corporations worry about offending prudes, homophobes, Muslim extremists, the Chinese government, the US military, etc, etc.

This paragraph seems clearly true to me, but I'd prefer to see citations, especially since it's related to politics.

every guy with a printing press could publish a “newspaper” full of opinions and scurrilous insults

citation for this would be nice, or just a link to an example. Here's a discussion with sources.

I really like Zvi's comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] tying this back to a more detailed model of Asymmetric Justice.

I really like this post overall; especially in the context of Asymmetric Justice it feels like something that's simple and obvious to me after reading it, while being invisible to me beforehand.

I think we’re currently in an era of unusually large amounts of free speech that elites are starting to get spooked by and defend against.

I suspect this is explained sufficiently just by unusually large amounts of free speech. Speech is nearly free, nearly instant, and half the population of the planet now has global reach. I think of this as communication [LW(p) · GW(p)] pollution [LW(p) · GW(p)].

I think a large part of it stems from the dominance of marketing in our culture.  Our elites are fundamentally salespeople, and insulted customers walk away.  When the social justice movement made offense its cardinal sin, our leadership found a religion it could believe in.  The only irredeemable sinners are the working class, because they're too poor to be a valuable market segment.

The Myers-Briggs model always struck me as the perfect example of American culture.  There are 16 types , and all of them are wonderful.  You are encouraged to settle into the market segment that's right for you.  I suspect a Chinese discussion of the Myers-Briggs typology would start with which type makes the most money (INTJ, I hear), and the rest of it would be about how to become an INTJ.

I think we’re currently in an era of unusually large amounts of free speech that elites are starting to get spooked by and defend against.  Most people have high, perhaps even growing, tolerance for controversy and offense, but some find it unacceptable, and these people are disproportionately influential.

People always had a lot of free speech, it was just in unmediated human interaction. There was a lively civil society and people had closer relationships with neighbors and extended family and would naturally discuss things. This decentralized communication was a major way ideas and culture were shared. People suggest things like social media have widened the discourse, but ignore the fact that this kind of organic human interaction and community life has steadily declined (see Bowling Alone for more information). To some extent we have traded an unmoderated, uncensored private, in-person discourse for a heavily mediated, censored and monitored discourse. 

(I have been occasionally using the phrase "forces of blandness" with this reference link.)

Sorry, but: The thing at the top says this was crossposted from Otium, but I see no such post there. Was this meant to go up there as well? Because it seems to be missing.

Renee diResta, ... chilling — a call for social media to be actively regulated by the US military, ... New Knowledge, a firm offering corporations a new kind of service: using algorithms to bury social media scandals that would make them look bad.

This seems a very uncharitable interpretation. Is it deserved?