I tend to agree with that synopsis. The positions of the factions are switching on race and class - impossible to believe a century ago. I don't know how it fits into my model or anybody else's model. There are factors like social sorting, a surplus of information processors - but how it all fits together? I'm open to ideas about these poles shifting.
I don't want to snipe but sometimes it's irresistible.
The Golden Rule should be abandoned as an ideal. It's a Christian ideal, it's a Western ideal - I support the general effort but I think we've made a mistake. It is the sort of heuristic that works well in a smaller society but does not scale.
People treat themselves badly all the time don't they. If they are motivated to do this it puts a big hole in lots of social ideas about how humans work. .
The drive to set rules to govern behaviour might be because people are control freaks - or it might be the rules are made by people to moderate their own actions because they correctly believe they can't control them otherwise. A high agency society doesn't need rules - they are developed for low agency societies.
This is another version of why political Liberalism seems to be getting unhealthy in the United States and the United Kingdom - the assertion all equal before the law would have better results in a homogeneously high agency society.
> People treat themselves badly all the time don't they.
Are we thinking of the same Golden Rule? In the more archaic form: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It says nothing about how an individual treats himself or herself. It therefore is sensible for both narcissistic and self-loathing individuals. Perhaps the rule is a little odd for masochists, but that's hardly disqualifying as a fraction of the population.
> It is the sort of heuristic that works well in a smaller society but does not scale.
The scalability is perfect in the version that I know: For everyone with which you personally interact, the overhead is like the amount of time spent with your personal circle. This is fundamentally limited to 24 hours/day of treating people in any way no matter how outgoing the individual. For everyone else, endeavor for universally applicable policies under which you would want to live.
Perhaps the breakdown that you are pointing out is that it is difficult to craft Golden-Rule-compliant policies suitable for massive nations posessing many, many unique individuals each with unique needs. I agree there, and I have my own take on how to address it. Largely, my take is how I wish others would address that particular challenge for me (ducks). Now, my policy preferences could be awful in another's eyes. But, no one must agree with my preferences as far as the rule is concerned.
> The drive to set rules to govern behaviour might be because people are control freaks.
This Golden Rule only acts from within the adherent. It is not enforced directly by any government or culture of which I know. Rather, it is about governing one's self accordingly.
I'm a bit tired RhysU - so I might take back some of this later.
We are - you can read the Golden Rule as an ideal to aspire to as you are doing. There is nothing wrong with that - as I mentioned I'm with the general thrust of the idea - but I still contain doubts about it. It can be warped.
The person is intended to ponder the consequences of their behaviour onto other people - to place themselves in another's shoes. This is an appeal to self interest and use of self control by means of empathy. This is sense - if you have agency - this is understood to be an ideal.
Suppose though - the person thinks ill of themselves. They are in a bad place and hate themselves. You mentioned masochistic behaviour as jarring - but it doesn't have to have this specific ritualized sexual nature. You have heard of suicide by cop. Some of these shooting videos are kabuki. If people are tearing their hair out - they may be in a state of self harm and to be harmed by others in response to their provocations may be an informal request to society from something primal deep inside their minds.
This is common with low agency people and locations with low agency people. I would go so far as to say some people and some groups of people are constantly sending out signals to the society that they want to be attacked. That is their ideal. That is their ideal. I don't have an origin explanation but it's there.
This is a weird place in the human psychology but it is not rare. Even this morning I read an adult dating advert where a woman wanted to be sexually assaulted and then implied she'd provide her daughter for the same - age unknown - but a troubling impulse - and not the first time I've heard of this. I once saw a man advertising he had HIV and wouldn't use protection but it got weird when other people subscribed to his meetups for... reasons. On the internet it is difficult to discern what is real here but I think most of us have seen enough pornography that it is obvious there is a demand for harm - sure this is legal pornography but this is something different and darker to the idealization of sexuality the feminists use as a foil - but it is an idealization.
> Largely, my take is how I wish others would address that particular challenge for me (ducks).
This is where I come to also. You might mean in jest - but I mean it seriously. It's not my job to solve another communities problems. It might be my job to get out of the way - but that's it.
I think there exist instances the endeavor for universally applicable policies under which you would want to live is a failed project.
It looks to me as if some parts of Chicago are informally monomachy - that is young men dueling over mates, power, money. I say informally in the sense the government could step in with soldiers and kill a lot of them - who I'm sure would go out of their way to get themselves killed - to restore a universal order. It is easier to let them kill themselves chaotically - I'm certain the police came to the conclusion if two assholes subtract each other from the system - who cares, nobody to blame but themselves.
Official recognition of an underpolicing policy with this intended affect will never happen because the Liberal (R+D) faction has a strong desire to not send in soldiers - admitting policy failure and also has a strong desire to punish those who don't conform to universal norms - so informal monomachy it becomes.
The honest answer might be formal monomachy - which was used to regulate some medieval societies and I feel it likely it would be instantly embraced by the culture to solve the problem within itself even as it would be declared immortality by Democrats and Republicans.
In China they are using Social Credit. As they see it - if you break the rules, they begin subtracting off your privileges. Western Liberals are correct this could be abused - no doubt - but are much more reluctant to admit that offering equality under law to all is using as cover by violent criminals.
In my country we used to have outlaws or those beyond the pale. The idea is there were people who broke the law but were still on board with the society. Then there were another category who broke the law but also rejected the society - and for these the protections of the law were removed. If they rejected the premise of the society - it was not economical to continue for the government to pretend they were citizens.
I don't want to claim I know the answers either - but I think this is the conversation we should be having. I seem to be in a minority of agreeing that the BLM sentiments are real but also that it's a problem they're going to have to fix themselves and by that I mean something much more than the nonsense of getting rid of the police or having black police officers. This is repeating the same process and ridiculous soul searching for why it doesn't work. This means you go deeper - and ask yourself if the laws should be the same.
This would be upsetting but it would present a clear choice. Opt into the Liberal Western society with its norms and rules - or don't and make a different choice - then live with this choice. It might have a better equilibrium or it could blow up - it's really not the responsibility of other Americans to convince blacks what road to take - it has to be their own or there is no agency. Agency means giving your citizens the ability to become ex-citizens - maybe.
America is a big space - you can cede some territory for separatists to break off into. I'm sure that sounds crazy to 90% of United States citizens but it's starting to sound less crazy than putting up with the threat of insurrections and everybody gaslighting each other.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your response. I hear and appreciate both your points and also the obviously long and uncomfortable, reflective path it has taken for you to write them down so clearly. I will reread this for a long time to come. Please be well and reach out if you would like to talk further on any of these topics.
I get where you're coming from but there is a general frustration out there about physics that a lot of nerds share. We need kicks as well as truth or the heart won't be in it. People invest a lot of energy into something if they feel they are involved with the general effort because it gives meaning and we enjoy that. Our lay ideas will be incorrect - but the urge to ask questions being stifled by a existing body of understanding we don't understand makes us apathetic and prone to leveling.
Somebody like Graham Hancock is actually delivering more people to the pipeline of scientific understanding than Richard Dawkins. We don't want to hear it but it's true. Similar things are true of WebMD and doctors, Elon Musk and space research. All the time the domain experts are shooting themselves in the head because the true opposition isn't a cruder wrong idea - it's apathy. Creationists at least give a shit about what version of events took place, the population that doesn't care is much larger. There is no critical mass of creationists that is going to undermine scientific research but the universities being defunded by an apathetic public turning hostile because they believe we're a waste of dollars - that is only a matter of time.
Science and expertise are an ecology - the people on the edge only exist because of a bigger enterprise capable of providing support. So it's not great that the stories the general public and scientists tell themselves are starting to sound like a protagonist antagonist relationship.
This is a really great point and I believe it is (at least partially) driving the anti-science rhetoric that seems to be metastasizing. When a topic is inaccessible to the general public, and only experts in the field can understand it and hold a monopoly on information, then you inevitably start to see pushback against it.
That being said however, making certain fields more accessible to the populace often comes with the price of a false sense of understanding. You see this a lot in medicine with WedMD, where heuristics that largely ignore the deeper pathophysiology have empowered some to believe they are more knowledgeable than their doctors.
This must be doubly true for the more abstract forms of physics - where any simplified analogy is going to give rise to false notions via extrapolation. I think there has to be some sort of balance between the two
Here is a example solution for the WebMD problem - I think it's about empowerment and tribalism - in positive senses of those words.
In Japan there exists an institution called Ningen Dock. Almost nobody in the West has heard of it outside of Randox Research which is astonishing as most Japanese people visit it once a year. I believe this is a psycho-social-medical institution. It purports to be a medical institution but it's something more.
Youtubers describe their experiences of Ningen Dock if you're curious.
It works like this - most people in Japan visit the 'dock' - a metaphor from shipyards. There is a brain dock, a heart dock, a lung dock and so on. Every major hospital has this department where the patient is checked head to foot once a year. Here is the important part. They are given a grade sheet - the sort a schoolteacher awards students. Here you see your kidney was given a B-, a liver a C-. These are hints about your lifestyle choices. Perhaps you should feel bad. In one more year there will exist another Ningen Dock. I believe this institution is responsible for a superior resilience against lifestyle disease that overwhelms healthcare in other developed states. It's preventative healthcare taken seriously instead of mouthing platitudes about lifestyle choices while back in Western reality you're never far from a fatty who knows they're making mistakes. It could be you or me!
Now Sir Gwern and other analytical thinkers of HN will have spotted the problem. False positives leading to needless surgeries. This is how Western doctors are trained to think and they find Ningen Dock incomprehensible. If though we assume Japanese MDs are not idiots and positive externalities exist from the Ningen Dock then it could easily be paying for itself. The hypochondriacs don't menace the healthcare system. Their energy is redirected to superior choices. For everybody the locus goes away from the doctor and analysis and toward being responsible on your health to the best of your ability - guided by timely medical advice. The system also develops a giant database of longitudinal information which can be used to spot health patterns across populations - to enhance targeting of the analytical process. I'm sure there are lots of other tangible advantages I haven't mentioned.
So that is patient empowerment - but the tribalism aspect is important too. The system is saying to the people - we're on your side, we're on the same team, we are in your corner, we are working for you. A lot of people don't feel that way and it needs to be said. Think of the rise of ASMR videos. Hundreds of millions of people watching supposed doctors treating them. There's something there. Just the insistent affirmation would be positive for mental health.
>Somebody like Graham Hancock is actually delivering more people to the pipeline of scientific understanding than Richard Dawkins. We don't want to hear it but it's true.
This is a pretty bold statement. You are arguing that psuedoscience is resulting more people being scientific than actual science is?
Such an extraordinary claim needs some significant evidence behind it.
Is it really an extraordinary claim? In your own experience have you never settled for a poorer model of something, a lower resolution because you feel either you didn't have the cognitive resources to get there or you felt unmotivated? When the topic becomes more complex - this happens to more and more people.
If you have a compelling story you may be motivated to sip on the subject. After a time you probably shrug off the old understanding and get to something more robust and probably more scientific.
I acknowledge some people will head into annoying dead ends - but you have to respond to the question of whether you prefer some people to be wrong and some people get to better places - or if you want most of those people to have checked out altogether. After all it seems to me that longer people ponder on it the more it is they converge on something - often something true or useful. Those are your choices. If you want to call me a liar then I suggest taking this seriously means getting a whole lot better at telling stories that go in the direction you approve of instead of what to the inside looks like doubling down on accuracy but to the outside looks like obfuscation.
Practical test - A lot of scientists are concerned about CO2 emissions and climate change. A lot of the population thinks they're full of shit because of politics. Some people have noticed though - that there doesn't exist a conflict of interests in getting improved technologies that happen to reduce CO2 emissions. Just as many right wingers are going to buy passive houses, closed loop energy, solar panels, Teslas as left wingers. Instead of perusing this thought a lot of people veer off into sermonizing on the topic - but I have to wonder why anybody gives a shit about the means when it seems like pushing on one lever gets instant blowback and pushing on the technology lever wins friends every time. It's almost as if all these groups have ulterior motives different to the public facing ones.
I don't quite understand how we go from "Ancient aliens" to "real science" - I've never spoken to someone who believed in that stuff as the jumping off point that later went on to being curious about actual science when they weren't previously.
>Just as many right wingers are going to buy passive houses, closed loop energy, solar panels, Teslas as left wingers.
I also don't know that this is actually true. I as only able to find "what do you want to buy" polling for cars, but in a study surveying actual solar usage, it's 34% democrat and 20% republican.
But I think this is also a false premise - that somehow conspiracy theory nuts have the same impact on public perception of science as one of the most public scientific issues with consensus from tens of thousands of scientists including basically 100% of the leading experts in the field. And the fact that there are long term economic advantages for things like solar, etc. that don't take into account at all whether or not you believe in man made climate change.
True - but most people never become scientists - not even amateurs - but there exists a flourishing industry of science books for people who are a bit science curious. Scott Alexander used to be a giant Hancock fan - anecdotal I know but he later realized it was sort of bullshit - but still was interested in deep archaeology. I'll call that a win.
On the stats - that's a rabbit hole I won't go down today but every time I've seen people talk about alternatives to the system the left and right become like a long married couple ending each other's sentences.
>And the fact that there are long term economic advantages for things like solar, etc. that don't take into account at all whether or not you believe in man made climate change.
Sure.
> But I think this is also a false premise - that somehow conspiracy theory nuts have the same impact on public perception of science as one of the most public scientific issues with consensus from tens of thousands of scientists including basically 100% of the leading experts in the field.
There I think you're making a mistake. Literary people think Proust is awesome. A lot of people have read Dan Brown. Who is having more impact? You're making a face now - I can see through the interneticals.
You are mixing up the far right with the right-liberal part of the Liberal faction.
We live in a chimeric system and it confuses nearly everybody in it. There are always two factions working against a third.
I think political partisans are victims - they have been given a bad political map. Spectrum, compasses - all ideas given credibility by their political competitors. You should ask yourself who benefits from these models. It isn't the left or right. It's a third faction hiding in the blindspot of the other two factions.
I have to admit it's very clever and it took me a long time to realize what was going on. I have to thank outsider science fiction author Liu Cixin who vividly bought the topic to life with his Straussian description of our political order in the Three Body Problem.
For most of the population it's the perfect political Venus Fly Trap and probably the explanation for why the West has dominated the world for centuries.
There exists an underclass in Ireland who have the same origin as the other Irish - but have many of the issues that exist in the African-American community.
Live to about 50, developed a different dialect, very high crime rate - expected to be underestimated, constant violence, high domestic abuse, high illiteracy, very large families, living in squalor.
Doesn't fit neatly into any faction's magic box of solutions.
Right explains the world by Biology. The Left explains the world by Culture. The Liberals explain the wold by Environment.
It is possible that you only need to scoop from one box to find a policy - but...
If a society has not solved a problem for a long time it's likely the solution is in higher dimensions.
Our political order is good at solving problems with 1 factor or 2 factors but I think our weakness appears when we need 3 factors simultaneously because it is not possible to select for that.
That is an odd definition of 'left', 'right' and 'liberal'. There are plenty of people on the 'right' side of the political spectrum who put far more emphasis on culture than they do on biology, I'd go so far as stating that this is the majority of those on the 'right' side. The same goes for the 'left' side, most people think in terms of culture instead of biology. It is only on the fringes of both sides of the chamber that you encounter people who put weight on biology, from 'white supremacists' and 'black supremacists' to followers of identity politics where people like Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo claim that 'white people' are by definition racist.
You need to define the term 'environment' to make clear what it is you mean here, it has far too many meanings to be useful. The essence is that the extremes on the 'left' and the 'right' bear close resemblance to each other, they use different symbology and make some different claims as to where they get their justifications from but if you remove those symbols and justifications their actions are more or less identical.
Error report. I should have switched Environment to the Left, Culture to the Liberal faction.
For the definition of Environment - it is used loosely but it is the physical facts of a location - climate, soil quality, material resources including non-human biological animals - wildlife and livestock.
Culture is a looser definition - it can mean food preparation techniques, language but also tools like combs and wheels and abstract tools in people's brains.
By few people I mean the conventional opinion in the middle class - to give credit where it is due HN is more likely to understand why these claims could be true.
The wages of blue collar workers will be much higher than white collar workers.
By mid-century most universities will cease to exist.
Robotics and Genetics are not technologies yet.
Liu Cixin's book The Three Body Problem is a Straussian criticism of the West's political system.
Most important technological advancements are now being developed outside Silicon Valley by people who don't consider themselves to be in technology at all.
