Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

But the blogger's position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.

I object most to is what is left unsaid. For a faint second the author talks in gender balanced ways, then she drops it to spend the rest of the discussion showing how men do this thing wrong. The author could have used an additional anecdote about how women the equivalent, or a gender neutral anecdote, or an offhanded comment noting where women do it too.

But she didn't.

Instead we're left with the impression that unconscious oppression is something men perpetrate on women. It's a similar trick to what she's talking about in her post. Her post is still insightful regarding feminism, but it could have been more. Underneath the overt message I hear her saying that oppression and abuse is a male thing, and her responses in the comments reinforce that. Again, a very good post for feminism, but I had been hoping for humanism, and I left disappointed.

But the blogger's position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.

I think some of it is a defensive reaction to perceived possible vaguely-defined moral demands/condemnation. Here's a long comment I wrote about that in a different context.

Also simple contrarianism, though that's not much of an explanation absent a theory of why this is the thing people are contrarian against.

the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.

What are those?

I'd generalize the point more broadly to say that jokes are a good way to get things you otherwise can't say past the radar.

As a rule of thumb, I assume that anyone claiming to be only joking is lying. They are saying exactly what they think while pretending not to.

A while ago I was in an online discussion with someone from an East European country who was demostrating to end the current government.

I asked the person for an article that explains the evils of the government. He told me that I didn't know of an English article that explained the issue in detail.

I told him that instead of being the 10,001st person at protest it would be much more effective to write a English article that explain the evil of the government and submit it to the Guardian's Comment is Free section.

He didn't think he was qualified to write the article and instead continued to demonstrate. Writing such an article is something that doesn't need special connections or money.

On the other hand it does take courage. You might come under attack. It takes real political understanding of the situation. It takes writing abilites.

Most other effective political action involves talking to people who have influence or donating money.

This probably hardly counts as "political action", but one of the most efficient ways of voting is probably with your feet - move to a place whose policies you like.

My general policy is "Most political action is counterproductive; the silent vote is the least likely to engender resistance."

That said, I'm probably wrong on this matter. Loud political movements are frequently also effective political movements, even though they do engender high degrees of resistance. The issue is it's hard to identify quiet political movements and evaluate their influence.

"Structural power" is something that in itself excites only non-neurotypicals. Top earners may get excited about earning even more money much like gamers get excited about a high score. It only matters to them either because of their private fixation or their social circle.

Nitpick: Those people would usually be considered neurotypical, unless you think they have some congenital neurological condition that causes them to enjoy high scores. Which isn't inconceivable, I suppose.

People are not equally competent, nor virtuous, nor do they deserve equal social power [emphasis added]

That people are not equally competent or "virtuous" is trivially true; that lacking these things means that it is less important that they have Fun is, in my experience, a common product of confused thinking. That you seem to have this as an instrumental goal of producing more total Fun is interesting; I would advise avoiding the word "deserve" to avoid confusion, though.

General Anti-Leftism: People are not equally competent, nor virtuous, nor do they deserve equal social power as compensation for their lack of ability at accruing institutional power (starting positions on such capital tho may best be equalized).

Could I ask you to taboo 'deserve' in this context?

I'm a little confused by what you are saying? Do you believe the General Anti-Leftism, or oppose it?

Also, social power seems to me like a non-zero-sum thing. (possibly the amount that is non-zero-summable could be called respect.)

[Unfinished Draft for Essay which will not be published as a Discussion or Main article]

Originally part of the above comment but I've decided it fits more as an independent essay. Still in a very rough draft form.

Democratic society: A vista of horror as seen by reactionaries

We want the sum of structural power over nature, the amount of wealth a society has available to be ceteris paribus as high as possible. Isn't it interesting how Pareto Optimality while being one of the most reliably benign goals is systematically neglected in pursuit of the misfiring heuristics of our mind. The heuristics I speak of are the ones that do not understand institutional power and demand to use the same "social power" mechanism field tested and efficient only on Dunbarian scales for the distribution of resources in the large societies of civilized man. Note how this relates to a currently popular hypothesis on the origin of our intelligence as driven by the parts of the brain that deal with optimizing for social power by bending and breaking explicit rules.

This makes the last sentence of the liberal argument above sound suddenly terrifying.

It is I hope I have shown to me far more terrifying than your virtual Conservative feels it is.

!Unfinished!

tldr: Make it so that institutional power matches the virtues we claim to value rather than the ones our revealed preferences show we value in social power games. The former are mostly more conductive to civilization and the common good.

General Anti-Leftism: People are not equally competent, nor virtuous, nor do they deserve equal social power as compensation for their lack of ability at accruing institutional power (starting positions on such capital tho may best be equalized).

Social power today does not nor has it ever accurately matched contributions to wealth creation. Of course neither does "institutional" power perfectly match this. But there are good reasons to expect it to be a better fit, foremost of those is how it can leverage the neat information properties of markets.

I should emphasise I am not at all saying the nature of institutional power in our society can't perhaps be reformed to more closely match this.

I do think Progressive like memes would have developed in a non-Christian descended implementation of what is often called The Cathedral

I think this is quite likely to be the case, since Progressivism (which one might think of as "altruism gone rampant") might actually emerge in time from the mating patterns and the resulting genetic structure of a population.

The question is: will Chinese elites adopt Western attitudes towards race and racism? If they do, they too may forbid their scientists from researching HBD, because doing as much will make them appear parochial and uncouth to the greater world community.

Assuming HBD is correct, as the west becomes less white, it will also become less intelligent and hence less powerful, this will mean that the Chinese have less reason to care what the west thinks of them.

Because it works well as a Schelling fence.

It's seen as a formal license to spread any specific group-on-group antagonism to all members of the associated formal class/caste. All aristocrats/capitalists/cool people are entitled condescending parasites, all serfs/poor workers/uncool people are dull, crude and amoral; all Jews/Anglo-Saxons/Irish/Slavs/Blacks/Westerners/Catholics/Hugenots/heretics...

My model is, divides along official or semi-official lines in society have practically always tended to accumulate resentment in "quiet" times and blow up in a crisis. Just imagine how much more peaceful and nicer South Africa would've been today, if the goddamn Afrikaners could've got along with colored people like the British did in India! And you'd add a new faultline just for some tactical gain?

Because you don't want to have different classes of citizens to fight against each other.

the best example of a successful non-democracy in the modern world is China.

I thought the go-to example for a successful non-democracy was Singapore - it's a much nicer place to live in than China!

Given the seeming economic success of this model would it be sensible for other countries to adopt it?

No. The gains from not being stupid about economics and not engaging in centralized planning and actually industrializing are so enormous that they compensate for even wretched leadership. Soviet Russia industrialized and grew for a long time despite having awful and wasteful leadership, and the same thing is happening to China.

The question is, can they, with their wretchedly corrupt non-democracy, reach similar per capitas as Japan and America? Or will they remain in a middle-income trap? If the former, then their government could indeed be considered something other countries might adopt; but if the latter, they will merely have demonstrated what all acknowledge: the Industrial Revolution is pretty damn awesome.

I think there's a valid alternative narrative where China's explosive growth is the result of enormous quantities of previously untapped natural resources and a previous lack of infrastructure. One could argue that prosperity was inevitable for China as soon as it eased up on its isolationism, almost regardless of what government was in place.

China is playing catch-up, not innovating. When you're as far behind as China was 30 years ago, all you have to do is make yourself less awful to grow explosively. They became an economic success by emulating us somewhat, but the reverse will not hold true, because most places where they deviate from us they bias in the direction of more corruption which is hardly a good model.

Do you consider The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution a success? That's only about 50 years ago.

When you're trying to judge the performance of a system of government, some historical perspective is required.

Although I disagree with FiftyTwo's conclusions, I am nevertheless disappointed that it has received net downvotes.... it's a perfectly valid question after all, and we're not supposed to be doing downvote==disagree, right?

People who don't want a regularly-occurring exception.

The entertaining thing from my perspective is that the discussions here have been polite, informative, and honest, and overall I'd consider them to have been productive thus far. It is of course possible that the tone or nature of these debates will change over time, but it seems on current evidence to be that a lot of people are mindkilled about whether or not politics is in fact a mindkiller. Granted, the voting system here generally encourages controversy - fifty votes yay and forty nine votes nay is better than an uninteresting post with one vote nay, after all.

but this regularly-occuring thread is supposed to be an accepted exception, isn't it?

What do you mean by that? Supposed on what grounds, accepted by whom and in what sense? (There's also a distinction between following a rule and agreeing with it, and there is no rule in this case.)

I downvoted this post because I don't want to see more attention to politics here. I don't see it as an "accepted exception" but as a recent push for more political discussions.

It can be interesting to talk about social issues, but doing this under the explicit heading "politics" header is likely to prime people into paying more attention to the political implications of the topic.

Immigration would be much better if we approached the issue of "How much do immigrants cost us vs how much do we benefit from them" and made laws in light of this, instead of approaching it from the moral difference between "This is our home and we shouldn't let strangers in" or "Freedom means allowing anyone to join us".

Corporations aren't people friend. This is precisely why it might be a good idea to trust them with absolute power.

Give absolute power to several UFAIs and hope that they dutifully compete for everyone's labour, and graciously don't cooperate against troublemakers? Um... have you ever read much about the history of the labour movement in the West? Have you heard, say about the labour struggles in China right now? Have you wondered what a megacorporation with a 100% secure source of rent would act like?

I hardly understand how this'd be supposed to work at all in your vision. (Or in anyone's.)

It is clear that some countries are more productive and generally nicer places than others. Why is that? A large part of it is because of the people in those countries. (I'll not get into the question of whether genetic or memetic differences are more important since it's not directly relevant to my point.) Thus it makes sense to restrict immigration from the type of people likely to make the country a worse place to live.

I want to know if there are arguments for limiting the rights of immigrants (legal or not) that aren't rooted in excessive self-interest ("they took our jobs!") Or perhaps xenophobia.

I'm unsure whether you want arguments for limits on (1) immigration in itself, or (2) the rights of immigrants once settled in a new country, but I'll focus on arguments against (1), since they can be turned into arguments against (2) by observing that policies in favour of (2) are likely to encourage (1). I don't know how you draw the line in terms of excessive self-interest or xenophobia so I've set those worries aside in listing these arguments; take 'em or leave 'em.

1. Potential immigrants might be worse than current residents, however you choose to define "worse". (Similar to Eugine_Nier's point.)

2. The sheer rate at which people would immigrate to a given country in the absence of limits might overwhelm that country's resources.

3. The loss of migrants from their home countries might harm those countries.

4. Immigrants themselves might actually be worse off in a different country.

5. Immigrants, regardless of their personal characteristics, might generate a negative reaction from the existing residents, institutions, and/or economy of their destination country.

6. Other countries might suffer negative externalities from immigration even if immigrants, their countries of origin, and their destination country all enjoy a net benefit.

7. Allowing certain immigrants to enter a country could provoke interference or punishment from their home country.

8. Limiting (or outright banning) immigrants from a particular country could be a useful signal or sanction against that country.

I find laws that discriminate based on national origin to be unfair

What is this "fair" thing? Life isn't fair. The governments are responsible to the citizens a single country, not the whole world, so they are unfair to non-citizens when it makes sense economically or politically. The immigration laws will be relaxed once it's in the interests of the country to attract more immigrants and tighten when there are enough. Happens all the time all over the world. You can pretend that this is about human rights, but it's really economics, with a healthy dose of politics.

The US didn't had an engineer as president since Herbert Hoover. China is currently run by Hu Jintao who studied hydraulic engineering. The president before Hu, Jiang Zemin got a degree in electrical engineering. China's current vice president studied chemical engineering.

Having more people with science and engineering backgrounds into political leadership positions seem like a good idea.

Even if we're talking about axiomatic disagreements, rational debate is still useful. Eg, we can still use rationality to help identify which axioms we're disagreeing with.

Case in point is your abortion example. I think you've messed up your lines of cause and effect there. Being anti-abortion either causes or has a common cause with believing that life begins at conception. Being pro-abortion causes or has a common cause with believing that life doesn't begin at conception.

Let me posit an axiom that causes anti-abortion. Instead of the whole 'soul' thing, lets go with "Women deserve to be punished for having sex," and that 'life-begins-at-conception' is just a rationalization. If this were true, anti-abortion should coincide with religiosity (it does) and pro-abortion should coincide with women's rights (also does). Both axioms correctly fit the existing data. How could we tell the difference... which axiom is the true axiom?

My rationalist shoes say we'd want to identify a differentiation point where these two axioms would cause different results. Have there been any occasions where "reduce number of abortions" and "punish women for having sex" come into conflict? Here's one. Turns out free access to birth control slashes the abortion rate. Less punishing women, less abortions. Cool, we've identified a point of differentiation.

Okay, so what did most of the 'pro-life' side go with? Shit, turns out they went with punishing women instead of fewer abortions and again and again and again. Well, that's not cool. For fairness' and balance's sake, I'll say that the pro-choice is probably less about integrity of body and more about wanting to fuck without consequence.

As you note, we've still got an axiomatic disagreement. In order to change the opposing side's mind we still need to shift their axiom. However, rationality has let the pro-abortion side aim their rhetorical firepower at the correct target. Instead of talking about the neural activity of fetuses, they can start making people feel more comfortable and accepting of sex. Once they're correctly targeting the true axiom, they'll have a lot more luck in shifting the opposing side's position.

I don't think it's a matter of different axioms - humans aren't expert systems after all!

It's more about a tension between two systems for regulating reproductive behavior.

In system A, girls are expected to abstain from sex until marriage, girls that don't are shunned, men are discouraged from marrying "used goods", and anything promoting sexual promiscuity is dangerous. Parents are expected to have an important input into they're children's decisions, and women are expected to be mostly dependent on a man. This is what you'd get in traditional "farmer" communities, i.e. most of the civilized world in past centuries.

In system B, Marriage is about Love, which is considered kind of mysterious and spontaneous; sex is not frowned upon, though it's expected that girls will take the reasonable steps to avoid unwanted pregnancy. The law also steps in to make sure fathers take their responsibilities.

Basically, both feature ways of avoiding unwanted pregnancies, though system A is much more gung-ho about doing so; probably mostly because in a village a couple centuries ago, having a fatherless child would be one of the worse things that could happen to a girl.

But many of the norms in this are not considered as "ways to avoid unwanted pregnancies", but rather as things that are valuable of themselves (and the norms are supported by connotations in the language, common stories, etc.) - they are lost purposes. So from the point of view of someone raised mostly with System A values, abortion looks like something that reduces the bad consequences of immoral behavior, and thus encourages immoral behavior, so of course it's bad! They ignore the fact that the main reason such a behavior is considered immoral is because it leads to those consequences!

... or at least, that's one part of the story. There's also a good deal of identity conflicts involved (religion and culture more than politics), and of course it's entirely possible that overall, System A does work better than System B.

For a better example of a case where rational debate is useless, I'd take an exiled Tibetan and a Chinese Nationalist debating about the status of Tibet.

If someone believes something about the moral implications of conception, that is something they likely just took in as a social truth, and then later learned and crafted a rationalization for. I don't think we have moral instincts about cellular organisms.

To the extent that their in group remains constant, it would take a lot of serious moral argument to overcome that social truth. The problem with political arguments is that people don't seriously have them. They volley a couple of bumper stickers at each other, and then go off in a huff. They may do it a million times - but a million bogus arguments designed to achieve nothing individually will likely achieve nothing in the aggregate as well.

The social truth remains intact - no serious moral arguments oppose it - why would we ever expect a change?

Where you might expect a change - when one moves between social groups, or when one commits to and is capable of serious moral argument.

The social aspect is at least theoretically testable - how big are the moral shifts when people change in groups? I suspect pretty large.

And in the relatively rare ideologue class, the shifts are often pretty big too. I knew a gal who went from seminary->Leninism->WIcca/EnviroProgressivism. Lots of atheist ideologues are former fundamentalists. Conservatives who were former marxists.

Arguments work on people who engage in them. I'd guess that a changing social truth works even better on most.

Actually there are many more possible position in the abortion debate than pro-life and pro-choice. The fact that the position exist like this in US society is a result of the fact that the issue didn't get resolved democratically via congress but via the Supreme Court.

Different European countries have different abortion laws and it makes sense to discuss with laws around the issue are best. If you want to have a senisble discussion about the topic, don't treat it binary. You look at a bunch of different legal solutions to the abortion issue and start comparing which laws you prefer over which other laws.

Upvoted, beacause I agree in principle, but I don't actually see any examples of this in this thread.

I agree with you, but I'm not sure that "moral value conflict" is the mainstream position in this community (or in society in general).

That "offers little to no positive effects" comment suggests to me that you have limited personal experience with alcohol. The primary benefit I (and I think most drinkers my age) derive from alcohol is social: it helps me make new friends and connect more closely to existing friends. Lots of people drink, and it's easier to become friends with those people if you also drink. If that isn't enough LW lingo for you, drinking is a Schelling point.

Also, what do people have against placebo effects? Quoting myself seems dangerously egotistical, but "a placebo effect is still an effect." Maybe someone should write a top-level post about this.

Moderate drinking can offer some health benefits. Plenty of sources, here's one.

Just because many abuse alcohol does not mean it cannot confer health benefits in controlled doses.

Alcohol causes temporary loss of motor control and some brain functions, and this is exactly the point. Any mistakes can be blamed on 'being drunk', and thus people are able to cast of the shackles of social inhibition, and enjoy themselves more unimpeded. Our society is rather oppressive when it comes to making mistakes or looking 'low status' in normal situations, so alcohol is the perfect way for many people to compensate, and allow themselves temporary spans of time where they're less afraid to make mistakes or look incompetent (and I would argue this general fear of making mistakes or looking incompetent is one of the main plagues in society, preventing all sorts of people from improving their lives).

Call it placebo if you want, but placebo is great if it works. Anything is great if it works.

Does increasing the tax on alcohol count? I'm in favor of that (at least in the US), for basically the reasons given by Mark Kleiman here. Problem drinkers are a relatively small fraction of the population but they account for a relatively large fraction of the alcohol market - one statistic that Kleiman mentions elsewhere is that (in the US) half of all alcohol is consumed by people who average 4 or more drinks per day.

Neutral. I don't drink and I think it's a waste of money, but I think worrying about it is an even bigger waste of money.

Also, I don't work for the government.

Neutral.

I'm against legal alcohol prohibition, for lots of reasons. And of all the things I could devote effort to altering public opinion about, alcohol isn't a priority.

That said, I don't drink, and I don't tend to serve alcohol at parties (though if guests want to bring some they're free to, and I made an exception at my wedding because to do otherwise seemed inhospitable), and I tend to push back on the assumption more generally that social interactions have to be lubricated by alcohol. If alcohol became as unpopular tomorrow as, say, chewing tobacco is today, I wouldn't mind.

Well, hedonics is a positive effect. Kind of. Would probably go for altering public opinion.

Related article:

John Derbyshire Wonders: Is HBD Over?

A prerequisite to the above question:

Do the political parties, when elected, implement the policies that they advocate when campaigning?

Are there other affiliations besides party which more accurately predict a politician's actions?

I think that this thread will go better, by the established norms of LW, if we stick to single, small topics that can actually be taken apart. The question you ask has far too many nested unknowns - definition of party platforms is hard, and economic outcomes of various policies is even harder - and too many places for discussion to go off the rails. Even with this group, that debate will devolve into talking points within three layers of replies. I'd rather have that sort of discussion in an ordinary group, and use LW for political debate of the sort LW actually has an advantage at.

This question strikes me as both too mindkill-y, and as unimportant in light of the fact that you don't get to vote for political parties, only for individual candidates in individual races. What do you think would be the important change in your behavior if you were convinced, in general, that Republicans were "better" than Democrats or vice versa, and how do you think that would impact the political process?

I believe that this is the most relevant question we can ask if we're talking politics

Why ???

One of ways politics messes up people's reasoning is that they tend to pay excessive implication to the political alignment of issues. When considering policy X, they first ask themselves, "is X a left-wing or a right-wing policy"? (I know I used to, though I try to do so less and less), which in turn is likely to subconsciously influence how skeptical they are of pieces of evidence, etc.

This isn't a very big problem for elections, where one's vote has very little weight anyway, but you also get the same effect when judging ideas about society or history, or parenting styles, or careers ...

So paying less attention to politics should reduce emotional priming and increase decision quality.

I don't see what benefit one could get from paying attention to politics, apart from maybe getting along better with people who care about politics.

How do you define 'prosperity?' Do you mean it in a narrow economic sense of a wider sense (e.g. ensuring general utility).

First, I think this is a very useful and interesting question. It actually impacts decisions.

Second, I think the question itself is biased, in a sense. It asks which is more optimal for ensuring prosperity implicitly leading some to think this is the only possible criterion for choosing. However, the party that leads to more prosperity by many definition might also be the party that produces a poor underclass and a society which is, overall, significantly less happy or healthy on average. Might do, I'm saying, the point being that prosperity alone is not necessarily even the most intuitive figure of merit.

Indeed another very important figure of merit is societal survival. What profiteth it a political system if it raise the happiness but succumb to an external enemy? Nature is "red in tooth and claw," this is not a value judgement, just a description of the survivors. There is no seriously large (i.e. successful) political system that isn't pretty amazingly cynical about basic rights when protecting itself. It can be codified and above board (such as passing laws about which "coercive interrogation" is allowed and what the rules for "extraordinary rendition" are) or it can be hidden and lied about, but even seeming peacey countries have militaries and intelligence services and are not anxious to repeat any subjugation they might have experienced in world war I or II or some other conflict they did not do well in.

Having said all that, my considered opinion (sort of like a conclusion I guess) is that the policies of either major party in the US can be made to work for prosperity. That the more fundamental difference is values, primarily a belief in different amounts of government redistribution (both parties support redistributive policies). If you can accept a repressed underclass, you can get an efficient economy carried out by the overclass. If you want to mitigate the bottom, you can get an efficient economy carried out. The provable results of economics are more about what mechanisms work and less about what the ultimate goals of the produced prosperity are.

Disclaimer: Republicans spend a lot of time torturing non-Americans and then laughing about it in their Republican forums, so as a non-American, I'm probably about as biased against them as a black guy would be biased against the KKK.

Regarding American politics, which party's general stance is more optimal for ensuring prosperity?

The Pirate Party.

I believe Eliezer said somewhere that, if you had to choose between one of the two major tribes, the Republican camp was slightly better.

Really? I wouldn't expect it of him. Frankly without context and certainty, I think this sentence is more distracting than useful, as I'm trying to figure out reasons he would say that, instead of actually judging an actual argument for or against a party.