Politics is the mind-killer, but maybe we should talk about it anyway

post by Chris_Leong · 2024-06-03T06:37:57.037Z · LW · GW · 33 comments

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I completely agree with Eliezer that Politics is the Mind-Killer [LW · GW], but at the same time, I worry that talking in abstracts all the time is limiting. I wouldn't want this site to tilt too much toward politics, but I feel that there's such a thing as too little discussion as well.

We recently lived through a period where "wokeness" - as ill-defined as that term is - was the dominant strain of thought within the educated strata of society. It's unclear exactly what percent of people supported this strain of thought, particularly when you account for people agreeing with reservations or with some parts, but not with others. It's not clear that this perspective was ever even a majority even within this particular strata. But there was a period where it was able to crowd out other perspectives through some combination of people being scared to speak out, people feeling that it as morally dubious to nitpick the specifics, people being censored and access to particular levers of power.

Of course, this doesn't tell us anything about the object-level. All of this could be true and the "woke" perspective, insofar as it makes sense to talk about a single perspective, could be correct on all or almost all points. I don't particularly want to litigate this right now, so I'll just talk about what makes sense if you agree with me that a substantial proportion of claims made were false or exaggerated.

First of all, now that certain pressures have passed, it makes sense to re-evaluate your views in case social pressure distorted your perception such that you to adopted views without good reason. On one hand, you don't want to be too quick to update, as it's very easy for humans to be pulled whichever way the social winds are blowing. At the same time, you may also be subject to a bias of not wanting to admit that you were wrong or go against what you said. The law of equal and opposite advice applies here.

Additionally, insofar as you feel that much of what was said by the social justice movement was either in bad faith or coercive, this could make you want to swing all the way to the opposite side. Overreactions are very common, don't let this be you. Again, the law of equal and opposite advice applies. Some people are likely only slowly realising how much their information environment was manipulated, these people would do well to realise that they're likely to discover more such manipulation over time. On the other hand, as previously mentioned, some people are swinging too far. And those people would do well to keep in mind that if they wait a few more years, there will be quite persuasive articles explaining why certain woke ideas were more reasonable than they sounded.

It may be worth keeping in mind that it's not like the social justice movement had no reasons for pursuing its goals so aggressively. It arose in a context in which sexual minorities were really treated as second-class citizens and had been subject to this, much as I hate to say this, oppression, for hundreds of years. It was also quite reasonable to suggest that removing overt discrimination was insufficient and that we needed to re-examine societal defaults and perhaps take action to address inequalities persisting from the past. Unfortunately, the most viral forms of these ideas involved a theory of change based on social pressure/entryism rather than engaging in rational debate/discussion and this led to the societal discussion being truly absurd for a certain number of years.

The lessons people draw from this will widely vary. Some people will suggest that these events were unfavorable to conflict theory by demonstrating how it damages a movement's ability to think strategically, leads to infighting and achieves short-term objectives at the cost of making long-term enemies. Others will suggest that these events were unfavorable to mistake theory, by demonstrating the naiveness of this perspective against determined bad faith actors.

Some people will note that the community came through mostly unscathed and suggest that sitting this fight out was the correct choice because it avoided internal divisions and making ourselves a target. Others might argue that this was blind luck, that if the social justice side had an overwhelming victory, then they would have come for us and that we might have been able to prevent things from getting as bad as they did had we acted early. I personally feel that we likely would have been too naive/politically inexperienced to have had a truly major influence, but I'm less certain that applies going forward. At the same time, we seem to be staring at short or mid-AI timelines, so the cost of getting distracted is much higher than it was before.

I don't want to pretend that I have all of the answers here. However, I do want to share a few thoughts. Less Wrong has always had something of an individualistic bent. While there has been some discussion about what a strong rationalist community would look like, the dominant focus has been on how to be rational as an individual.

And perhaps it's time to think broader than that. Maybe it's time to start taking an ecosystem perspective of society and realise that as much as we'd like to be able to just ignore the rest of society and do our own thing, that isn't always an option. Once a group of people gains a sufficient amount of influence, other groups will start to see it as a threat. This incentivizes them to do things such as engage in bad-faith criticism, attempt to capture institutions or produce a watered-down but more popularist-sounding version of the group's beliefs. At the same time, these are very difficult to distinguish from good-faith criticism, good-faith participation and reshaping the belief system to be less narrow.

It's not clear that any of these issue have nice, neat solutions. Nonetheless, we do what we can, it's probably better to have a shared awareness of these kinds of issues rather than to either have a blindspot or to have a bunch of individuals thinking about these issues just by themselves.

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