Politics Discussion Thread December 2012

Not really, considering that according to polls about half of our readers are from the US and their presidential elections there are the stuff of global debate, interest and even tribal feelings.

On the other hand, maybe "this is the stuff we learn at school" makes it boring, and less attractive to rebels. You could make as popularly hated as math.

Do you manage your time with particularly elaborate Excel macros?

I actually do use spreadsheets and Evernote hacks to manage my time and medium term plans for the future most of the time, especially when I have a very productive period. I have in the past occasionally had week long periods where I am generally not motivated to do anything and profoundly displeased with my life and the world. In those I don't do much of anything and let alone use the mentioned tools.

I know someone with similar tastes who is in a similar situation - one loved one pregnant by planning, the other at around the same time by accident. I think he spends his entire life just being dad.

While I know this is a hard lifestyle "just being a dad" actually sounds very appealing to me.

You are ignoring the much of classical New Left thought in this response. As an exercise put on your Gramschian glasses and consider how in a personal relationship based on informed consent, mutual satisfaction and without much support from the rest of society patriarchy exists in a meaningful sense. Bonus points if you see how even with the first two conditions in place this might be something feminism and regular Joe would strongly object to.

I'm currently in the process founding a company I hope will be very profitable or at least profitable enough to support a large family. Barring this I shall try to find a regular job in STEM, but in that case the wives will have to go to work as well and private tutors instead of home-schooling will likely be required.

Isn't it rather unikely that you suddenly become a monogamous person and lose your interest in dominance play?

People do break up no?

nasmuch as you relate your sexuality to your politics, do you think your framework would be good for - or is at least undervalued as a personal option by - the wider population

Yes.

(and/)or are you more concerned that feminism will seek to make your lifestyle choices untenable?

Not really. Far too few men are pursuing it for it to be a viable source of power once broken down. And my social circle has an anarchist bent already. It may become endangered by families in general being outlawed but that is decades away even in the worst case scenarios.

(Also, whenever I need to raise my subjective status relative to yours I'm going to think of you as a Gorean. Fair warning.)

Read up on them. So far Goreans are an interesting subculture but seem to be bad at political theory. Not that it much matters since politics is not how they prosper.

I'll ask them. I've mentioned the site before but neither showed interest in spending time here so far.

Are they even allowed to? (I ask because of the "patriarchal" part. It could mean many things.) :D

Are your girlfriends free to have sex with other men?

It isn't the case for my regular current girlfriends.

I have had friendship with benefits relationships where this is the case. I certainly considered the women involved my friends, not really girlfriends however. Also in those I didn't experiment with traditionalist patriarchal mindsets.

Do you value having sex with girls with whom you don't want to start families?

Not really. I elaborated on how I view it a few years ago.

Konkvistador political position is Moldbuggian if I understand it right. According to the LessWrong survey 61% of the 18 Moldbuggian's prefer monogamous relationships while only 53% of all LessWrong people prefer them. I didn't calculate whether the difference is statistically signifcant but if Moldbuggians would be more into PUA I would expect their preference for monogamous relationships to be less than the overall LessWrong population.

The Moldbuggian in the survey are all male.

Code:

mold<- subset(survey, survey$AlternativeAlternativePolitics=="Moldbuggian")

length(subset(mold, mold$Relationshipstyle=="Prefermonogamous")$Relationshipstyle) /length(mold$Relationshipstyle))

I'm confused. What does this have to do with politics?

Of all the subjects discussed on lesswrong, the subjects related to sex are the most political in style and motivation. If I recall, this applies even to your own contributions on that subject.

"Politics" doesn't mean "Obama et al".

I don't see the relevance to the topic at hand but I see no harm in answering your question. Yes I do.

It's the sub who has the final say, that's not exactly the "real power". By most ways of calling something patriarchy, most lifestyle dom/sub relationships are patriarchal, they are just a form of patriarchy that is consensual and not immoral by my sentiments at least.

Depends on the relationship. In some relationships, the sub gives out a set of limits, and other than that the dom has free reign. In more extreme ones, there's even a master-slave relationship, where the master definitely has power over the slave.

When a dom/sub relationship is non-abusive, it's the sub who has the real power, which seems to contradict your "patriarchal" assertion.

When a employer and employee relationships is non-abusive, it is the employee that has the real power.

Does this sentence make sense to you? I mean it may seem plausible but when asserted if it isn't standard economics theory we will probably want to hear an argument and some related evidence. Where is the difference between the epistemic status of this statement and yours?

I'm pretty sure the quoted sentence is popular meme in the wider BDSM community because it is compatible with the status games wider Western society plays with regards to sexual ethics and practice not because it is true (it may be). People in other words approve when something like that is said regardless if it is true or not. Not that I have much experience with their community or subculture beyond reading a few blogs.

I think you imply that people with such traits are somehow more entitled to their vote. Is this what you meant?

I can't speak for OP, but I can give my reason to think such a thing.

First off, democracy isn't a terminal good. People having a say in how the government is run is supposed to produce better goverment, not be an end in itself. As such, words like "entitled" are the wrong ones to use here I think. Better to ask what is the value, from a consequentialist perspective, of certain people having or not having the vote. The vote is a trust that you place in people to select good government on your behalf, not a right that they deserve.

If you can agree with that (which I'll admit is rather radical), then the interesting question becomes whether civic-minded responsible homeowners would make a better decision than the population at large. It some sense, it seems likely. In another sense, the sanity waterline is so low that even the political opinions of most responsible 10% of the population are unlikely to be correllated with what would actually be good.

For various reasons I no longer believe in democracy.

It has nothing to do with being "entitled" to a vote. My post is not concerned with the moral status of voting, but rather the outputs.

My prediction (and experience) is that a population high in traits like that - basically, conscientiousness - will result in better decision-making for everyone than a population with the opposite traits.

Interesting. This is basically what I meant by (4).

Is this the case with all such low-level elected officials, or just school board members?

Opposition to PCCs may have been part of it, but my understanding is that very large numbers of people weren't even aware that there was an election being held, and that many more felt they had no information about the role. Certainly that was the impression in my bubble, but you could well be right - unfortunately I haven't been able to find hard data on this. But I think the point holds regardless - local elections generally only get around mid-30s in turnout, unless they coincide with a general election, and I don't think people are opposed to having local councillors.

Yeah, I think it was partly that. Personally, I put a blank ballot paper in the box because I don't see the sense in this being an elected position. They should hire someone with the requisite qualifications and experience! The candidates in my area, to the extent that I heard anything about them, seemed to be running on platforms involving "keeping politics out of policing"... from which I infer that putting politics in policing is perceived as unpopular.

Incompatibility is an even harder problem than you say-- there's a town of 20,000 people. Times get hard, and half of them want to leave, but that will seriously disrupt the social fabric. To what extent is it possible for people to get what they want?

Okay, add a social safety net so that no one is driven away by poverty. However, different places appeal more to people of different ages. That stable small town is a good place for raising small children, but too boring for a lot of teenagers, many of whose parents don't want them to move to the big city.

The interesting question might be "How close can we get to a society where people can live under the circumstances they prefer?", and the answer is probably "Not all that close, but closer than what we've got now."

As a general point, your counterarguments seem to be based on the idea that "value-based self-organization" of human societies is infeasible. But it can't be that infeasible, since an approximate form of it exists today. The current organization of human society runs up against all the same problems you listed - for example, many Americans feel that the current US government is illegitimate, mirroring the feelings of Redland's serfs against their Duke. Modern countries have to interact on issues of trade, pollution, boundary disputes, etc - and those negotiations often break down, with disastrous results.

In other words, I am not saying that we should radically restructure the political order. Instead, I am saying that we should take incremental steps in the direction of more smaller societies that are governed by a more diverse set of values, and which compete to attract citizens. In the resulting world, individuals could select a society to live in based on how closely a society matches his/her personal values.

It is generally not possible to make different values compatible in this way just by splitting off into smaller societies.

Human values will never be perfectly compatible - indeed, they might not even be approximately compatible. But by creating many small diverse societies, and allowing people wide liberty to move between them (this notion of "exit rights" is a key element of the idea), we can guarantee that each individual's values matches up relatively well with the society she inhabits as well as with her neighbors' values. In the case of Redland, the serfs indicate their acceptance of the Duke's hegemony by the fact of their inhabitance of Redland. If they don't like the society the Duke has established, they can always move somewhere else - again, the notion of exit rights is fundamental to the whole proposal.

I'm living in my little society, you're living in yours, each one reflecting our conflicting values. But our societies still have to interact.

This critique seems particularly out of touch with historical reality. Societies with wildly different values can and do interact to solve problems. The Saudis have been selling oil to the West for decades in spite of the vast differences between the two moral systems. The Soviets bought grain from the US during one of their state-sponsored famines. Maybe your point is that with more societies there is a greater need for extensive negotiation and interaction, but that seems like a technical point and can be solved with technical innovation (for example, we could establish central bodies like the WTO, so that each individual society negotiates with the central body instead of with every other society, resulting in a O(N) rounds of negotiation instead of O(N^2)).

Even if the "Outsiders" critique has force, it only implies that there must be global rules governing inter-society relationships; it says nothing about intra-society relationships. It is entirely possible that a society will decide to govern itself based on principles of collectivization, but still enter into capitalist trade with the outside world (the Israeli kibbutzes did this). Most ethical problems involve coordination with your immediate neighbors, so there is still a huge potential here. For exapmple, Christians who are strongly opposed to adultery could very effectively prohibit it within their own society without having to coordinate with or depend on Outsiders in any way.

Suppose I want to live in society C. Then I change my mind, and I want to leave.

Again, exit rights is the key concept here. Finding a workable solution about how to define and guarantee exit rights is not easy, but it doesn't seem unachievable. In the case of Society D, you are no worse off than you are in the modern world - all modern countries assert, more or less absolutely, the right to restrict immigration and keep out undesirables. Regarding Society E, nothing I've said requires that the small societies be undemocratic (though I hope there would some undemocratic ones, as some people have reactionary/anti-democratic values). So Society E could simply vote to change whatever rule was holding them back.

But on the issue of change, I believe that my system will be much more adaptable and dynamic than the current order. Change will be spurred by immigration - societies that lose citizens will have to adapt to make themselves more attractive. At the same time, the benefits created by the smart rules of successful societies will be delivered to an ever-larger group, as more and more people move to well-run societies. Indeed, this system will benefit even people who never choose to relocate, because governments will be under pressure to continually improve themselves.

Ultimately, I worry that your proposition is a way to evade the problems of politics, rather than solve them

Certainly - every good engineer knows that it is better to avoid a problem than to have to solve it! Seriously, though, any political system which forces people with widely differing moral systems to live together under the same set of rules is bound to run into intractable problems - as I think all Americans today are keenly aware. The principle I've described allows us to avoid having to figure out the precise set of optimal moral rules (such a thing probably doesn't even exist), and instead focus on developing a framework within which diverse societies can peacefully coexist.

If you aren't already aware of the literature, you might be interested in reading about anarcho-capitalism, which is similar to what you're talking about.

I certainly disavow any claim to originality; I am just repeating what people like Patri Friedman have been saying for years, though I think it is a good way to frame the idea in terms of a human right to live in a society that reflects one's own values.

Interesting post! I agree with much of your analysis but disagree with your main conclusion that:

Far from being undesirable, we actually need more “fiscal cliff” like deadlines in the future – because in Washington today that’s the only way the parties are going to get serious, put their cards on the table, get a partial solution, and (gasp!) realize that in the end, the compromise was mutually beneficial.

I think creating more scenarios like the fiscal cliff to force "compromise or else…" is a recipe for disaster: some time is bound to arrive where no compromise will be reached despite the elaborate set-up to force one lest disaster follows... and disaster will follow.

Instead, I think that the parties should abandon the concern with long-term policies (like the size of the government, the deficit and entitlement programs, two decades from now) that require Grand Bargains, and address only short and medium-term problems where compromise might be easier, because they cannot foresee what unexpected problems and societal changes there will be over such long times, and their current decisions cannot bind the future government anyway. In addition, the US should try incremental moves (like eliminating or reducing the filibuster) that make it easier for an elected party to enact its agenda without so much veto power to the opposition, thus eliminating the need for Grand Bargains. Let the voters throw out the rulers if their policies are too extremely partisan.

If you mean predictions as to "what will actually happen", this depends heavily on the outcome of the current negotiations, and I don't think anybody has a reliable idea at this point.

If you mean predictions as to "what would happen if absolutely no change to current law was made", then I think the standard prediction is that there would be a negative hit to the US economy from the "austerity", pushing it back into recession. But this would happen over a period of several months, not right away on January 1st, leaving quite a lot of time for a compromise changing the laws to be negotiated. So there is no immediate reason for alarmism. In addition, this prediction assumes no extra non-legislative policy measures, such as new monetary stimulus by the Fed, that could potentially soften the impact of the cliff.

I don't think there are any predictions that can be identified as very reliable a priori, to be honest; economics is hard, and economics combined with politics is super hard.

The speculations referred to what smart observers following carefully the DC chatter believed would happen, not the official public statements. Or rather, it is the impression I got from reading some such observers. This more recent post implies that I was wrong and that a December deal raising taxes is looking plausible after all.

Roissy is not saying "Treat ugly women as you would treat beautiful women".

He's saying something along the lines of not putting beautiful woman on a pedestal and belief that you have to seek their approval.

If you want to understand Roissy in this case, you should think about how he thinks about ugly woman. He's not the kind of person who treats ugly woman friendly.

has that connotation for those unfortunate enough to be familiar with his views.

On the contrary I think many more people should be reading Roissy. People here especially. Try out his advice, experiment with it and other variants extensively. If it doesn't work no biggie try something else, but do try it in good faith. I give this advice because this is how I massively improved my own romantic life. Authors like Roissy, Mystery and Athol Kay gave me a good map to understand social and sexual dynamics that mystified me before.

Currently I say the subtitle of his blog is perfectly accurate. There are a whole lot of pretty lies out there, bad advice that is in fact anti-knowledge when it comes to sex and dating. Some of it is well meaning but obsolete, crafted to reality that no longer exists, but some is created with the full knowledge it will harm its carriers. Heartiste demolishes many of them with the sadistic glee they deserve.

I doubt the pretty lies are doing much good because we see they don't condem other things that contribute to the evils they supposedly fight. I mistrust the pretty lies as the incentives working on those who craft them are perverse. I condem the pretty lies because I see friends making stupid decisions based on them that end up wrecking their lives.

I hate the pretty lies because my belief in them was rewarded by stagnation, blindness and pain.

I wouldn't have argued this in such vivid fashion if I wasn't ticked off at how casually you dump boo lights when talking about a guy I'm pretty sure is on net doing something good.

but in context, it instead says volumes about what a miserable heartless shit the author is :)

I don't see him advocating you treat ugly women badly. My model of Roissy has him ignoring ugly women or interacting with them like he would other people he doesn't want to have sex with.

I mean, anyone who's read him has no doubt that he would treat actually physically unattractive women as... subhuman

I read him and I strongly disagree with this statement. You confuse his online style of writing for the actual man. He does not advocate treating fat ugly women badly, he merely advocates not giving them the illusion that they are just as desirable on the sexual marketplace as other women, thus robbing them of the incentive to improve and the ideologies such delusions empower.

It certainly appears that Russian influence on politics is negligible in Western Europe - is this incorrect?

It's not as visible in Western Europe, but I think it's incorrect to call it negligible yes -- e.g. I understand that very recently there was some noise in the UK over the Conservative Friends of Russia who used an anti-gay attack on a Labour Party politician who was criticizing Russia's human rights record.

Why is hating the EU necessarily a pro-Moscow position?

It isn't necessarily so. But hating the EU currently helps Moscow policy, so any anti-EU movement will tend to be supported from afar by Moscow, which will in turn tend to lead such movements to end up holding pro-Moscow positions.

e.g. The russian textbook Foundations of Geopolitics says "United Kingdom should be cut off from Europe."

Please explain how the political parties map onto your axis in, say, Britain.

Where I use 'universalism' to mean 'focus on equality, democracy, human rights'.

Liberal-Democrats -- very Universalist, very pro-EU, significantly anti-Russia
Labour Party - somewhat Universalist, somewhat pro-EU, somewhat anti-Russia (currently -- it used to be different)
Conservative Party - minimally Universalist, recently getting more anti-EU, and recently getting cozier with Russia
BNP - very anti-Universalist, extremely anti-EU, extremely pro-Russia.

So I think that the pattern I observe holds even in the UK. e.g. The Conservatives are the main anti-EU party in the UK, and they're also in the same parliamentary group in the Council of Europe as Putin's party...

Obligatory Hitler/Nazi reference.

You know, this ending was kinda good for your average Godwin's law bait. If we're okay with condemning all the German non-resisters and excusing outright "terrorism" against a widely popular regime (like the Maquis' actions in France), then we should also be more tolerant of insurgent/revolutionary violence against modern governments.

(By the way, I've come to think that Moldbug's post equating Breivik and Nelson Mandela was justified in this regard - only the ends of political violence really matter, as we all de facto already approve of the means.)

(I lol'd.)