Rationalism in an Age of Egregores

I think that's all pretty overstated. Yes, there is absolutely truth in it, but it's not the entire story. And I think this part in particular is really going too far:

People who have never really understood any other way to use words and arguments will sometimes say things like, "everything is political." I think this means something like: "there are no interesting, purely predictive uses of language that avoid signaling in some group-status relevant manner; anyone claiming so is actually making a status move by trying to arrogate the title of 'neutral.'"

I have sometimes said that, usually to people who were building technology, not just talking. What I usually meant by it was "You are intransigently trying to ignore the fact that what you are doing will have effects beyond those you're admitting to, and has different consequences for different groups (and usually just happens to give a relative advantage to you or to some group you're in)".

And even simple flat-out facts also have consequences for political disputes. Almost any fact is politically convenient or inconvenient for somebody, if for no other reason than that people have sometimes actually picked their political positions because of those facts. Somebody's choosing to assign salience to one set of facts, while ignoring another set of facts that are equally important, is almost always political. And people do do that while claiming neutrality.

You don't have to deny reality to notice that people slant things.

By the way, "People who have never really understood any other way to use words and arguments" is a pretty strong rhetorical attack...

I think it would be helpful to have maybe three examples of rationalists being apolitically truth-seeking and getting accused of hidden motivations. So that there is something concrete to talk about.

Agreed with horrifying, disagree with incorrect.  You cannot actually opt-out of status games and evaluations that others will make about you.  Joining the anti-tribe tribe is going to affect your status.  This is mostly because modern tribes are overlapping - saying you reject other tribes doesn't keep members of those tribes from judging you and acting on those judgements.  You're implicitly treated as a member (or target) of every tribe that you interact with.

However it's simply not true that all beliefs and communications are purely zero-sum status relationships.  In fact, almost all actions and statements are mixed games, with some elements of zero-sum status, some of variable-sum status (making your entire group higher status, even if your status doesn't change), some of zero-sum non-status (say, taking more of a trade surplus), and some variable-sum non-status (actually producing value).

You can influence that mix with your decisions.

This is slightly tangential to your main point but seems important to interject:

I think you're disoriented about what kind of thing an egregore is.

Like, near the end you say:

I bet that a core tenet of the Neo-Enlightenment project we're trying to carry out will be building a culture inimical to egregores.

That doesn't actually make sense. What's a non-egregoric culture?

The whole point of the "egregore" term is to notice how biological metaphors apply to patterns of human behavior [LW(p) · GW(p)]. So to the extent that we can talk about (say) cats "wanting" things or "trying to" make certain things happen, we can say the same thing about social movements and cultures and other groups.

You can't get away from this. If there's a big, powerful movement that starts to tear down all things identifiable as egregores… well, guess what kind of thing that movement is!

(Appropriately enough, it'd be a postmodern egregore, completely with postmodernism's paradoxes and probably with postmodern strategies for avoiding facing those paradoxes. "Oh, nothing is absolutely true, huh? Is that claim absolutely true?" This glitch prevents postmodern egregores from becoming fully self-aware. Wokism being the loudest current example I know of.)

I don't think this takes away from your main point. Some egregores really are about sweeping people up and blinding them, and I read you as pointing at something that opposes that kind of egregore.

I just want to note that even if you're exactly right about your main point, it'd be because you're describing something about the hyperobject ecosystem, not because you've identified something that prevents such an ecosystem from influencing you.

It's just plain wrong that we have to live in an adversarial communicative environment where we can't just take claims at face value without considering political-tribe-maneuvering implications.

Oh? Why is it wrong and what prevents you from ending up in this equilibrium in the presence of defectors?

More generally, I have ended up thinking people play zero-sum status games because they enjoy playing zero-sum status games; evolution would make us enjoy that. This would imply that coordination beats epistemics, and historically that's been true.

explicitly joining the anti-tribe tribe

My brain wonders how best to go about this.  I'm not sure if this is what you had in mind, but at any rate, the first idea that comes to mind is to publicly maintain a list of positions you hold that would get you kicked out of every major tribe.  (Sort of analogous to having a bookshelf where you prominently display copies of The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and Atlas Shrugged; I've met people who do something like this.)

A failure mode that comes to mind is people selecting "disagreements" that wouldn't actually get them kicked out of a tribe (like "I disagree with party X's policy Y... because I don't think it goes far enough!").  It also seems possibly dangerous to succeed too well at this, and actually get kicked out of everywhere... ideally there would be enough non-tribal infrastructure that would support you.

Why are you using what I presume is your real name here?

I'm not actually interested in whether or not it is your real name, mind; mostly I'd like to direct your attention to the fact that the choice of username was in fact a choice.  That choice imparts information.  By choosing the username that you did, you are, deliberately or not, engaging in a kind of signaling.

In particular, from a particular frame of reference, you are engaging in a particular kind of costly signaling, which may serve to elevate your relative local status, by tying any reputational hits you may suffer as a result of mis-steps here to your real identity.  You are saying "This is me, I am not hiding behind false identities."  The overall effect of this is a costly signal which serves to elevate your status with the tribe here.

If it isn't your real name, why are you using a false identity that looks like a real identity?

Hang up, though.  Let us say instead that you, instead, see false identities as a form of dishonesty; this isn't signaling, this is sticking to principles that are important to you.

Well, if that is the case, another question: Would you use this identity to say something that does have strong reputational costs associated to your real identity?  Let us say that you would, you just don't have any such things to say.

Well, it is convenient for you, some might observe, that you are willing to stand up for principles that don't cost you anything.  (Hence some part of why signaling tends to be costly; it avoids this problem.)

I will observe there is an important political dispute about anonymity on the internet, which has major communal aspects.  The fewer users who insist on privacy, the more that commercial websites can exclude those who do.  Oh, you don't want us tracking you?  You don't get to use our website anymore.  Observe the trend in websites, such as Twitter, of becoming increasingly user-unfriendly to those who are not logged in, or of excluding them altogether.

"Everything is political" is an observation that this phenomenon is, basically, universal.

Once we observe that there -is- a political implication in your choice of username, we must ask whether you -ought- to do anything about it; a lot of people like to skip this question, but it is an important question.  Do you "owe" it to the people who prefer anonymity, to yourself remain anonymous?  The pro-anonymity side would be really well served if everybody was forced to be anonymous; they are certainly better served if the choice is explicitly served (hence the EU rules on website cookies) instead of anonymity being opt-in instead of opt-out.

However, there are also people who don't want to be anonymous, or who don't want to interact with anonymous people; certainly there's the potential for some power imbalances there.

We've happened upon some kind of uneasy mostly-truce, where anonymity is contextual, and violating another person's anonymity is seen as a violation of the cultural norms of the internet.  This truce is eroding; as fewer and fewer people choose to be anonymous, a higher and higher proportion of anonymous actions are those which would impose costs on the speaker if the speaker chose not to be anonymous, which makes anonymity an increasingly sinister-looking choice.

Imagine being a writer in a group of blogs with a common user system, moderating comments.  To begin with, all the blogs allow anonymous comments.  However, after one too many abusive comments, a blog bans anonymous commenters;  some percentage of previously-anonymous commenters value commenting there enough to create accounts, reducing the number of "legitimate" anonymous comments in the ecosystem as a whole.  This makes anonymous comments look worse, prompting the next blog to turn them off, then the next.

Look, the pro-anonymity people say, you're making a choice to oppose an anonymous internet; you're against us.

Well, there's definitely an "is" there.  What's missing is the "ought", the idea that the political implications of an act create individual responsibility.  There's a very deep topic here, relating to the way certain preferences are also natural attractor states, whose satisfaction rules out opposing preferences, but this comment is already long enough.