That is an excellent example of how the mentally ill (or attentionally lacking? Is there a word for those who chronically can't get enough attention?) find the modern systems useful for generating what they want, while at the same time making things worse for themselves and others. In the before times such people might be kind of annoying, the hypochondriac aunt or whiney coworker, but now the relative easy access to a rotating set of millions of potential attention givers drives them into ever more wild gyrations of created afflictions.
Exactly. In real life, person to person interactions that only goes so far before the individuals stop caring, but online there is an almost infinite supply of fresh people who haven't had enough of your shit to keep the sympathy pump going.
Smith, because he is the best that ever was, also points this out, and notes how we humans care much more deeply that our friends and associates share our hatreds compared to our loves. So it is more important that you hate the same things I do than that you love the same things. That is an amazing predictor of the current "outrage goes viral" pattern we see in social media (and media in general) where activating negative emotions is much more powerful than activating good ones, so much of the discourse just devolves into "OMG LOOK HOW EVIL THESE PEOPLE ARE!!!!!"
I'm really glad you focused on the concept of "propriety" because I think propriety is more indicative of so- called "revealed preferences" than a lot of the things we like to say define a culture ("our values," identified religion, etc. )
I also find propriety vis-a-vis revealed preferences fascinating in what society chooses to ignore.
Adultery was on-the-books illegal into this century in places, along with weed and prostitution. They are also tacitly considered "normal" parts of the, landscape.
Prohibition outlawed alcohol with federal penalties; in short order most people ignored illegal consumption.
In Japan, the things you do when you're drunk simply didn't happen, and it's almost reality-busting to reference them.
Violations of the sliding scale from reward to punishment that are simply (consciously) ignored are fascinating, because they speak to some value overriding another: that the guilty party "can't help it," perhaps, or we ourselves are frequently guilty of the same sin and don't want to be judged as fully as as ought to be.
Indeed! I think people focus too much on legislation as a measure of what a society's priorities are, when it is really just a measure of what the legislator's priorities are (and even then, not a very good one.) It definitely is a huge hurdle for those studying things like "ease of doing business" or "freedom indexes" because there can be a lot of laws on the books that no one enforces, or areas where some citizens just completely ignore the written rules while in others they bind so you can't measure it at a high level accurately.
I suspect the increasing gap between social law and government legislation explains in part the rise of administrative law and doing everything outside the normal court system, not to mention how much the notion of jury nullification is buried. The farther the gap between what the people (who would be on a jury) think is proper and what their rulers want them to do, the less the English common law based legal system can be trusted to come up with the rulers' preferred outcomes.
The rules as written and the rules as people actually care to enforce are so increasingly different, which just can't be good over all.
I think this is an extremely important concept to discuss in this moment where the future of our societal underpinnings are, potentially, in great flux.
Have you read any of "Law, Legislation and Liberty?" It is quite good on that, and Hayek draws out the distinction well. Don Boudreaux of GMU and Cafe Hayek writes on it a lot too.
It is especially noticeable from a Smithean perspective, because you start to notice how people treat complying with the rules, which would normally be mere propriety, getting praise for it, which suggests that people don't really expect them to follow the rules. I recall a friend of mine in college who had a girl he was interested in throwing herself at him while she was drunk, and he gently put her off for hours and went out of his way to make sure she was alright. Sure, in theory that is what you do, but in reality everyone was impressed at how he acted, and presumably would not have dinged him for hooking up with her. I didn't think about it that way at the time, but in retrospect (and considering other people's revealed preferences in their behaviors) it is pretty clear that what was normal and accepted was much less than what was spoken of as what was expected.
When it comes to society, and social law vs legislation, we are going to have to have a serious sit down as adults and throw out all the thousands of pages of legislation that doesn't match what we actually care about. I mean, we probably won't and will just stagger on until we collapse, but we really need to if we want things to get better.
Not long ago when I was still consulting, I read a (imo) very well written study on perception of quality; the study focused on hospitality but the thesis was, I feel, broadly applicable to the topic. In essence, service where a mistake or oversight occurred and was visibly corrected was higher rated than service where no error occurred in the first place.
That's interesting, sort of a service example of untested vs tested virtue. Things have the opportunity to go bad, and people are glad to see how well things go instead. Possibly a good example of what causes many of our current problems too: too much protection from temptation and the opportunity to make the right decision instead of the wrong decision. We get so scared that people (children especially) will make the wrong decision that we just take the whole thing out of their hands, and thus deprive them of both the opportunity to practice virtue, but to demonstrate it.
> The fundamental problems of society, particularly the Left, are the result of mental illness that seeks to shape the rest of the world to match itself
Fair point, OK, yes, but please don't lump the realistic left together with the idealistic left. I think you'll find it isn't abortionists, utilitarians, or advocates of legalized psylocybin, prostitution, or euthanasia who are trying to drive us all off of a cliff: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/ohio-police-fatally-shoot-pregnant
a ways through the essay, I noticed a point which clarified the difference between the idealistic left and realistic left:
"Thomas Sowell once wrote to the effect that “Leftist ideas rarely work in reality, and so they have gained ascendency in realms where your ideas working in reality is not required.” The same logic applies here; ideas not working is a cost, after all."
I consider my views aligning with what now seems to be the Old Guard, and my views go both "left" and "right" depending on whether government is helping/harming the working class or the moneyed class (which, thanks to Citizens United, now includes corporate entities.)
Yes, I love the Sowell quote because it tends to cut through that distinction pretty well. Every side has has ideas that just don't work well, although Leftists tend to have a lot more it seems, and I think we can get there without mental illness. All it takes is sufficient disconnect from reality, sufficient inability to see the results of our ideas, to allow us to spin off crazy ideas and convince ourselves they totally work.
It would be like if physics was impossible to test, just a bunch of guys theorizing why things work the way they do. Pretty quickly it would become madness, with the most popular theories being the ones people liked the best for every reason other than "it describes observed reality". In fact it would start to look a lot like early religious mythos.
Agreed. Likewise with the social sciences' descent into Woke nonsense. There is no concern for what can be tested or shown to be false, and in fact trying to falsify any accepted idea is considered heinous. Instead it is all about making up stories that those in the group and especially those in high positions find appealing. It happens to be Leftist loonies making those calls now, but one can just as easily imagine Rightist loonies in the role.
The... interesting thing is that many political claims are in fact reality claims, that can in fact be tested against reality. The problem is that when the test results are in, people across almost the entire political spectrum balk at what they find. It takes a certain sort of person to be really, genuinely interested in reality, and to hell with what everybody wants to be true.
But I suspect that the political left was once more sane than it is now. For example, if you look at the hawkish conservative attitudes in England, France, and even the US which lead to the treaty of Versailles, it's hard to argue that pacifists and diplomats like Woodrow Wilson were the ones missing their marbles. Or look at the days of the Salem witch trials; it wasn't a bunch of leftists looking around for witches to burn.
Agreed on the political claims = claims about reality point. Although it is often very difficult to test those claims due to the complex nature of social reality (and we don't have many versions of societies to do proper controlled experiments on.)
I do want to caution using modern political terms like Left/Right to describe older political divisions. I think the definitions and groupings of policy stances move around a lot, and have moved around a great deal over the past two hundred years or so. See for instance the swings black American's allegiance from Republicans to Democrats, and the working class swinging from Democrats to Republicans.
I think the best, or at least most stable, divisions between Left and Right is Marxism/Communism, and Statism. Both are currently considered to be Leftist, but I think Statism goes across both major US political parties. Marxism/Communism seems to require Statism however, so it is very consistently tied to the Left if the Left is defined as the Marxist/Communist side.
Even still, I am not sure how I would fit those running the Salem Witch trials into that frame work. They are pre-Marxist... were they collectivists at least? Right wing Statists? I have no real idea, other than to point out that being religious doesn't matter much in terms of Left/Right.
Likewise, I am not sure that conservatives (or the Right) has a monopoly on hawkish foreign policy. I think we need to get used to breaking apart these groupings into clusters of related policy/ideological positions, because there is almost zero logical connection between the policy positions of political factions. Not perfectly zero, but pretty damned small. So just saying someone is a pacifist for example conveys very little information about their views on free trade, religion, who owns the means of production, etc. Or even who they voted for in a given election. You would need a lot more context to predict those things accurately.
> I do want to caution using modern political terms like Left/Right to describe older political divisions.
If you have a way of conceptualizing politics that isn't basically psychological, then I can definitely understand that. In fact thinking back, that's the position I used to take as a teenager. But that's really not the way I think about it anymore.
Personal values are more related to genetics than upbringing, and they show consistent relationships with personality; similar political divides have shown up across numerous times and places - Eysenck found the same factors of personality in 20th century Japan that I'm finding today, and Nazi Psychologists were calling their Woke opponents "Der Gegentypus."
So when you write,
> saying someone is a pacifist for example conveys very little information about their views on free trade, religion, who owns the means of production, etc.
that may be true philosophically speaking. But statistically speaking, attitudes cluster together in consistent ways, and scientists have been finding the same clusters over and over for nearly a hundred years.
Attitudes cluster, yes, but not the same attitudes and not the same clusters over time, and those clusters are not always called the same things. Why exactly isn't exactly clear, but logical philosophic consistency is almost certainly not it. We also have to be careful with statements like "personal values are more related to genetics than upbringing", as genetics and upbringing are extremely difficult to disentangle for most people. Even in twin studies we find that "religiosity" is largely genetic, but the expression of that in terms of which religion is due to upbringing. So someone will care a lot about their religion, but a devout Hindu and a devout Christian are going to have very different values about eating meat, for instance.
Really there are two problems here: the classification of political positions on particular issues as being right/left, authoritarian/libertarian, upspin/downspin, or whatever, and the classification of people based on the often confused tangle of issue positions they happen to hold.
My general theory is that people only care about a small handful of issues in a consistent way, then tend to pick a political group that agrees with them on those issues, and slowly absorb the overall positions of the other group members when it comes to the issues they care less about. I don't know if that is true, but it does seem to describe what most voters do, as they are wildly ignorant of most issues but have surprisingly strong preferences over them, yet swing depending on what their political team says. The Woke left has been getting progressively (heh) crazier for some time, but it is only recently that the rest of the American left has seriously started breaking with them. That's a little hard to square with positions being fixed over time, as that suggests that there would be more clear camps, or at least multiple parties, but you see very little one the American left like that. Not even to the level of the Conservative/Libertarian wings of the Republican party.
When it comes to clustering the policy positions over time, things get more odd. A pacifist in WW1 is going to have very different reasons than one in Vietnam, and probably has very different reasons than an Amishman in either period. Are they pacifist on principle, or expediency? Is it a particular war they are opposed to, but others are fine, or is it war in general. That matters to your time based clustering a good deal, and how you ask the questions in the survey and people answer. That's also why I am really skeptical of older survey results being consistent with modern survey results: the field has changed a huge amount over the past few decades in terms of realizing how hard it is to get consistent answers, and even still it is pretty sketchy about how well a "perfect" survey gets responded to, so there is little reason to believe earlier surveys were good. Plus there is the problem of language and cultural context changing over time, so it isn't always clear that a respondent in 1920 will understand the question in the same way someone does in 2020. I mean, hell, you get people today who will, with a straight face, agree that "speech is violence". I suspect zero English speakers in 1920 would consider that a meaningful statement whether they were anti free speech or not.
The Republican Party was the radicals and the Democratic Party was the establishment (more or less) when the GOP started. Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republic Calvin Coolidge had many similarities, as did Republican Teddy Roosevelt and later New Deal Democrats.
Agreed. Things get weird back in history, especially when the big questions of the day either don't exist any more or didn't exist then but do now. I remember back when many conservative Republicans were members of the Sierra Club!
I'd agree with that. the so called progressive movement is more like a deconstructionist movement in practice, attempting to tear down existing norms, standards, art, and institutions in the name of "progress."
Yea, when the American left (or what was pretty close to what we would recognize as "left' back in 1860 or so) took the name liberal, they were really doing a disservice since most of their policies were not liberal, not in a literal sense and not in the way the word had been used before (and since in most other parts of the world.) "Liberal libertarian" is redundant, and only kind of makes sense if one starts with the use of liberal that became the norm in late 19th century America, which is a bit like starting with the use of democratic as seen in Democratic Republic of Congo.
I think the old group "Bleeding Heart Libertarians" might be a better fit; I have known a few former Democrats who weren't hard leftists but rather wanted to leave people alone as much as possible while helping out those who need it. They were often the first to split from the party over the last 20 years.
Progressives, of course, are just vile. They were absolutely awful people in the early 20th century, and those who decided to label themselves as such again are equally so.
Well, ok to be fair, some people labeling themselves progressives today are just ignorant of what progressive meant back in the day, and just think the word sounds nice. I don't have a lot of sympathy for that, but I suppose more than I do for people who say "Woodrow Wilson was really on to something! Let's do that again!"
Agreed over all, although that sounds like more of a libertarian style set than a leftist set. It is confusing because there is a bit of overlap, the main difference being that the Left tends to pair those policies with "And someone else will pay for it, and also pay for any bad consequences you might inflict upon yourself," while the libertarian says "You can do it, but also have to pay the price."
Utilitarianism is not a libertarian value. And realists and libertarians are in sharp disagreement on issues like whether people with low IQs are having too many children. Libertarians are horrified the problem might even exist - they generally want everything to work out all right on its own.
While I do like that map, I suspect those aspects move around a good bit over time. Maybe not 30-40 years, but over 100 almost certainly. Especially when people are self reporting on their opinions on matters they probably haven't thought much about (or might even have trouble defining) and are no doubt engaging in a lot of social desirability signaling in their responses. But at any rate, that's interesting and you have yourself a new subscriber!
I am not sure how I feel about the "realist" vs "idealist" distinction. I think one would have to be very careful defining that so that people's claims about their position on that scale could be tested. Lots of people call themselves realist because it sounds good, but under further examination their claims and believes are entirely untested, and typically just represent whatever the opposite of whatever is socially desirable at the moment. Reversed stupidity, as it were.
Also, as written you haven't found that "Realistic libertarian leftists seem to have more bizarre kinks than idealistic authoritarian conservatives," but rather that people with more taboo kinks tend to be libertarians. In other words, all people into really taboo kinks are libertarians, but not necessarily all libertarians are into really taboo kinks.
A lot of libertarians and conservatives don't think low-IQ people having kids is a problem. They think the government taking care of low-IQ people, and then justifying controlling low-IQ fertility because taking care of low-IQ people is expensive, is a problem.
You can live and let live without having to pay for others to live.
(Separate and apart from whether low-IQ people have lesser "value," which I am not addressing here, although my answer to that would be "no.")
That's the biggest point of contention I find libertarians (or classical liberals) have with Republicans or other right wing types today: the assumption of government responsibility for ameliorating bad outcomes from personal decisions. I have frequently gotten in arguments with people on the right who say e.g. "we can't let people take drugs, because they will need to be taken care of and I don't want to pay for it." Point out "Well... what if we just don't pay for it?" and they reply "That's just silly pie in the sky nonsense, and politically impossible!" I suppose that is consistent if you assume some really bad and broken political choices as a given, but then why do that?
Personally, I think a lot of people who argue like that are merely making excuses for the big government right wing, either intentionally or repeating what they have heard. Maybe I am too skeptical of the notion that people think some policy changes are possible while others are absolutely unthinkable, even those that were the case within living memory. It is also possible that some have a subconscious commitment to taking care of those who have bad outcomes, but can't articulate it as such.
More on point, a lot of libertarians might not like low IQ people having a lot of kids, but are going to have big problems with government (or anyone else) attempting to do anything about it. That would be a tough survey question to word correctly, however if one wanted to clarify why one thought the low IQ thing was a problem and should be dealt with, etc.
Agreed, but that leads to some really confusing sentence structure. "The actor then performs his action upon another actor. The actor then explodes." One could designate them as "Actor A" and "Actor B", which is useful when discussing the reciprocating actions, but in looking at a single action it gets a little awkward. You want a word for the agent functioning as the actor of this particular action and a word for the agent who is being acted upon.
Of course it might be that you really can't get away from the awkwardness issue, and might as well assign them names or other unique designations to keep things clear.
How about subject/object? Could also be confusing, since there's been some concept creep, so that people being "subjected" to things are called "subjects" in various contexts, like people who are subjects of monarchs or subjects of experiments.
Yea, saying "How does the object of the action react?" is a little awkward because of smuggling in that "object" meaning. People don't care if it is like gerbils or something, but get a little touchy calling human analogues objects.
Then again, you can find someone being crazy and touchy about just about any choice :D
“ Anyone who has worked in a large company has seen this in action, with sales having a very different sense of reality than operations, and HR being basically Cloud Cuckoo Land.”
And then you realize that HR is about 80% of academia without an asshole operations grunt to put the fear of the Lord into them. See also -> Germany
I did, yes! Pretty seriously for some time, then switched over to WarmaHordes for a few years. Moving to MN then back to PA and COVID pretty much killed it though. Now that my eyesight is going I might not be able to get back into painting as much, and that is where my real focus tended to be. That and game design itself... as much as I love the Warhammer 40k and Fantasy settings (before they bombed the latter) the rules have been total pants for a looong time, so eventually I started making my own games. I hear good things about the new edition of Kill Team, though.
I should check out some of the local stores I know, though. They weren't doing even board game nights as recently as late 2022, but maybe people have calmed the hell down enough to get together again. I could use a good gaming group.
Nah, never took to the Stunties. For fantasy I rolled a warriors of chaos army. For 40k it was Sisters of Battle/Witch Hunters, Imperial Guard, and counts-as Orks dressed up as renegade chaos cults. And the obligatory space marines I think I used twice :)
Necromunda is fun with the right group. I ran a sorta-RPG =][=nquisimunda with modified rules where a handful of friends were an inquisitor's lackeys investigating a chaos cult on a Imperial manufactorum world. It was really fun. I miss those guys.
It would be kind of interesting to do a study of the personality traits of players compared to what factions they play for a lot of games, but particularly the Warhammer games since there are a million of the damned things. I have to wonder if there are not trends, particularly once you can control for "this is the most powerful after their new codex came out", since so much seems to center around whose fluff or personality do you find appealing. Do people pick factions that are different from their personality, or more similar? Etc.
An oldie but related goodie:
https://open.substack.com/pub/guttermouth/p/mom-watch-me-dive?r=awu4c&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
That is an excellent example of how the mentally ill (or attentionally lacking? Is there a word for those who chronically can't get enough attention?) find the modern systems useful for generating what they want, while at the same time making things worse for themselves and others. In the before times such people might be kind of annoying, the hypochondriac aunt or whiney coworker, but now the relative easy access to a rotating set of millions of potential attention givers drives them into ever more wild gyrations of created afflictions.
Ah, the symbiotic sympathy/outrage ratchet.
Exactly. In real life, person to person interactions that only goes so far before the individuals stop caring, but online there is an almost infinite supply of fresh people who haven't had enough of your shit to keep the sympathy pump going.
A potent reminder that outrage is itself also a form of attention.
Smith, because he is the best that ever was, also points this out, and notes how we humans care much more deeply that our friends and associates share our hatreds compared to our loves. So it is more important that you hate the same things I do than that you love the same things. That is an amazing predictor of the current "outrage goes viral" pattern we see in social media (and media in general) where activating negative emotions is much more powerful than activating good ones, so much of the discourse just devolves into "OMG LOOK HOW EVIL THESE PEOPLE ARE!!!!!"
I'm really glad you focused on the concept of "propriety" because I think propriety is more indicative of so- called "revealed preferences" than a lot of the things we like to say define a culture ("our values," identified religion, etc. )
I also find propriety vis-a-vis revealed preferences fascinating in what society chooses to ignore.
Adultery was on-the-books illegal into this century in places, along with weed and prostitution. They are also tacitly considered "normal" parts of the, landscape.
Prohibition outlawed alcohol with federal penalties; in short order most people ignored illegal consumption.
In Japan, the things you do when you're drunk simply didn't happen, and it's almost reality-busting to reference them.
Violations of the sliding scale from reward to punishment that are simply (consciously) ignored are fascinating, because they speak to some value overriding another: that the guilty party "can't help it," perhaps, or we ourselves are frequently guilty of the same sin and don't want to be judged as fully as as ought to be.
Indeed! I think people focus too much on legislation as a measure of what a society's priorities are, when it is really just a measure of what the legislator's priorities are (and even then, not a very good one.) It definitely is a huge hurdle for those studying things like "ease of doing business" or "freedom indexes" because there can be a lot of laws on the books that no one enforces, or areas where some citizens just completely ignore the written rules while in others they bind so you can't measure it at a high level accurately.
I suspect the increasing gap between social law and government legislation explains in part the rise of administrative law and doing everything outside the normal court system, not to mention how much the notion of jury nullification is buried. The farther the gap between what the people (who would be on a jury) think is proper and what their rulers want them to do, the less the English common law based legal system can be trusted to come up with the rulers' preferred outcomes.
The rules as written and the rules as people actually care to enforce are so increasingly different, which just can't be good over all.
I really, really like this phrase- "social law."
I think this is an extremely important concept to discuss in this moment where the future of our societal underpinnings are, potentially, in great flux.
Have you read any of "Law, Legislation and Liberty?" It is quite good on that, and Hayek draws out the distinction well. Don Boudreaux of GMU and Cafe Hayek writes on it a lot too.
It is especially noticeable from a Smithean perspective, because you start to notice how people treat complying with the rules, which would normally be mere propriety, getting praise for it, which suggests that people don't really expect them to follow the rules. I recall a friend of mine in college who had a girl he was interested in throwing herself at him while she was drunk, and he gently put her off for hours and went out of his way to make sure she was alright. Sure, in theory that is what you do, but in reality everyone was impressed at how he acted, and presumably would not have dinged him for hooking up with her. I didn't think about it that way at the time, but in retrospect (and considering other people's revealed preferences in their behaviors) it is pretty clear that what was normal and accepted was much less than what was spoken of as what was expected.
When it comes to society, and social law vs legislation, we are going to have to have a serious sit down as adults and throw out all the thousands of pages of legislation that doesn't match what we actually care about. I mean, we probably won't and will just stagger on until we collapse, but we really need to if we want things to get better.
I have read it. It's very valuable.
Not long ago when I was still consulting, I read a (imo) very well written study on perception of quality; the study focused on hospitality but the thesis was, I feel, broadly applicable to the topic. In essence, service where a mistake or oversight occurred and was visibly corrected was higher rated than service where no error occurred in the first place.
That's interesting, sort of a service example of untested vs tested virtue. Things have the opportunity to go bad, and people are glad to see how well things go instead. Possibly a good example of what causes many of our current problems too: too much protection from temptation and the opportunity to make the right decision instead of the wrong decision. We get so scared that people (children especially) will make the wrong decision that we just take the whole thing out of their hands, and thus deprive them of both the opportunity to practice virtue, but to demonstrate it.
> The fundamental problems of society, particularly the Left, are the result of mental illness that seeks to shape the rest of the world to match itself
Fair point, OK, yes, but please don't lump the realistic left together with the idealistic left. I think you'll find it isn't abortionists, utilitarians, or advocates of legalized psylocybin, prostitution, or euthanasia who are trying to drive us all off of a cliff: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/ohio-police-fatally-shoot-pregnant
a ways through the essay, I noticed a point which clarified the difference between the idealistic left and realistic left:
"Thomas Sowell once wrote to the effect that “Leftist ideas rarely work in reality, and so they have gained ascendency in realms where your ideas working in reality is not required.” The same logic applies here; ideas not working is a cost, after all."
I consider my views aligning with what now seems to be the Old Guard, and my views go both "left" and "right" depending on whether government is helping/harming the working class or the moneyed class (which, thanks to Citizens United, now includes corporate entities.)
Yes, I love the Sowell quote because it tends to cut through that distinction pretty well. Every side has has ideas that just don't work well, although Leftists tend to have a lot more it seems, and I think we can get there without mental illness. All it takes is sufficient disconnect from reality, sufficient inability to see the results of our ideas, to allow us to spin off crazy ideas and convince ourselves they totally work.
It would be like if physics was impossible to test, just a bunch of guys theorizing why things work the way they do. Pretty quickly it would become madness, with the most popular theories being the ones people liked the best for every reason other than "it describes observed reality". In fact it would start to look a lot like early religious mythos.
The$cience™ brand Consensus and Peer Review requirements for acceptance definitely facilitate the religious faith-based aspect
Agreed. Likewise with the social sciences' descent into Woke nonsense. There is no concern for what can be tested or shown to be false, and in fact trying to falsify any accepted idea is considered heinous. Instead it is all about making up stories that those in the group and especially those in high positions find appealing. It happens to be Leftist loonies making those calls now, but one can just as easily imagine Rightist loonies in the role.
The... interesting thing is that many political claims are in fact reality claims, that can in fact be tested against reality. The problem is that when the test results are in, people across almost the entire political spectrum balk at what they find. It takes a certain sort of person to be really, genuinely interested in reality, and to hell with what everybody wants to be true.
But I suspect that the political left was once more sane than it is now. For example, if you look at the hawkish conservative attitudes in England, France, and even the US which lead to the treaty of Versailles, it's hard to argue that pacifists and diplomats like Woodrow Wilson were the ones missing their marbles. Or look at the days of the Salem witch trials; it wasn't a bunch of leftists looking around for witches to burn.
Agreed on the political claims = claims about reality point. Although it is often very difficult to test those claims due to the complex nature of social reality (and we don't have many versions of societies to do proper controlled experiments on.)
I do want to caution using modern political terms like Left/Right to describe older political divisions. I think the definitions and groupings of policy stances move around a lot, and have moved around a great deal over the past two hundred years or so. See for instance the swings black American's allegiance from Republicans to Democrats, and the working class swinging from Democrats to Republicans.
I think the best, or at least most stable, divisions between Left and Right is Marxism/Communism, and Statism. Both are currently considered to be Leftist, but I think Statism goes across both major US political parties. Marxism/Communism seems to require Statism however, so it is very consistently tied to the Left if the Left is defined as the Marxist/Communist side.
Even still, I am not sure how I would fit those running the Salem Witch trials into that frame work. They are pre-Marxist... were they collectivists at least? Right wing Statists? I have no real idea, other than to point out that being religious doesn't matter much in terms of Left/Right.
Likewise, I am not sure that conservatives (or the Right) has a monopoly on hawkish foreign policy. I think we need to get used to breaking apart these groupings into clusters of related policy/ideological positions, because there is almost zero logical connection between the policy positions of political factions. Not perfectly zero, but pretty damned small. So just saying someone is a pacifist for example conveys very little information about their views on free trade, religion, who owns the means of production, etc. Or even who they voted for in a given election. You would need a lot more context to predict those things accurately.
> I do want to caution using modern political terms like Left/Right to describe older political divisions.
If you have a way of conceptualizing politics that isn't basically psychological, then I can definitely understand that. In fact thinking back, that's the position I used to take as a teenager. But that's really not the way I think about it anymore.
Personal values are more related to genetics than upbringing, and they show consistent relationships with personality; similar political divides have shown up across numerous times and places - Eysenck found the same factors of personality in 20th century Japan that I'm finding today, and Nazi Psychologists were calling their Woke opponents "Der Gegentypus."
So when you write,
> saying someone is a pacifist for example conveys very little information about their views on free trade, religion, who owns the means of production, etc.
that may be true philosophically speaking. But statistically speaking, attitudes cluster together in consistent ways, and scientists have been finding the same clusters over and over for nearly a hundred years.
Attitudes cluster, yes, but not the same attitudes and not the same clusters over time, and those clusters are not always called the same things. Why exactly isn't exactly clear, but logical philosophic consistency is almost certainly not it. We also have to be careful with statements like "personal values are more related to genetics than upbringing", as genetics and upbringing are extremely difficult to disentangle for most people. Even in twin studies we find that "religiosity" is largely genetic, but the expression of that in terms of which religion is due to upbringing. So someone will care a lot about their religion, but a devout Hindu and a devout Christian are going to have very different values about eating meat, for instance.
Really there are two problems here: the classification of political positions on particular issues as being right/left, authoritarian/libertarian, upspin/downspin, or whatever, and the classification of people based on the often confused tangle of issue positions they happen to hold.
My general theory is that people only care about a small handful of issues in a consistent way, then tend to pick a political group that agrees with them on those issues, and slowly absorb the overall positions of the other group members when it comes to the issues they care less about. I don't know if that is true, but it does seem to describe what most voters do, as they are wildly ignorant of most issues but have surprisingly strong preferences over them, yet swing depending on what their political team says. The Woke left has been getting progressively (heh) crazier for some time, but it is only recently that the rest of the American left has seriously started breaking with them. That's a little hard to square with positions being fixed over time, as that suggests that there would be more clear camps, or at least multiple parties, but you see very little one the American left like that. Not even to the level of the Conservative/Libertarian wings of the Republican party.
When it comes to clustering the policy positions over time, things get more odd. A pacifist in WW1 is going to have very different reasons than one in Vietnam, and probably has very different reasons than an Amishman in either period. Are they pacifist on principle, or expediency? Is it a particular war they are opposed to, but others are fine, or is it war in general. That matters to your time based clustering a good deal, and how you ask the questions in the survey and people answer. That's also why I am really skeptical of older survey results being consistent with modern survey results: the field has changed a huge amount over the past few decades in terms of realizing how hard it is to get consistent answers, and even still it is pretty sketchy about how well a "perfect" survey gets responded to, so there is little reason to believe earlier surveys were good. Plus there is the problem of language and cultural context changing over time, so it isn't always clear that a respondent in 1920 will understand the question in the same way someone does in 2020. I mean, hell, you get people today who will, with a straight face, agree that "speech is violence". I suspect zero English speakers in 1920 would consider that a meaningful statement whether they were anti free speech or not.
The Republican Party was the radicals and the Democratic Party was the establishment (more or less) when the GOP started. Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republic Calvin Coolidge had many similarities, as did Republican Teddy Roosevelt and later New Deal Democrats.
Agreed. Things get weird back in history, especially when the big questions of the day either don't exist any more or didn't exist then but do now. I remember back when many conservative Republicans were members of the Sierra Club!
I identify as a liberal libertarian. Liberal isn’t the same as progressive.
I'd agree with that. the so called progressive movement is more like a deconstructionist movement in practice, attempting to tear down existing norms, standards, art, and institutions in the name of "progress."
Yea, when the American left (or what was pretty close to what we would recognize as "left' back in 1860 or so) took the name liberal, they were really doing a disservice since most of their policies were not liberal, not in a literal sense and not in the way the word had been used before (and since in most other parts of the world.) "Liberal libertarian" is redundant, and only kind of makes sense if one starts with the use of liberal that became the norm in late 19th century America, which is a bit like starting with the use of democratic as seen in Democratic Republic of Congo.
I think the old group "Bleeding Heart Libertarians" might be a better fit; I have known a few former Democrats who weren't hard leftists but rather wanted to leave people alone as much as possible while helping out those who need it. They were often the first to split from the party over the last 20 years.
Progressives, of course, are just vile. They were absolutely awful people in the early 20th century, and those who decided to label themselves as such again are equally so.
Well, ok to be fair, some people labeling themselves progressives today are just ignorant of what progressive meant back in the day, and just think the word sounds nice. I don't have a lot of sympathy for that, but I suppose more than I do for people who say "Woodrow Wilson was really on to something! Let's do that again!"
Agreed over all, although that sounds like more of a libertarian style set than a leftist set. It is confusing because there is a bit of overlap, the main difference being that the Left tends to pair those policies with "And someone else will pay for it, and also pay for any bad consequences you might inflict upon yourself," while the libertarian says "You can do it, but also have to pay the price."
Try looking at the political map here:
https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/what-they-didnt-tell-you-about-political
Utilitarianism is not a libertarian value. And realists and libertarians are in sharp disagreement on issues like whether people with low IQs are having too many children. Libertarians are horrified the problem might even exist - they generally want everything to work out all right on its own.
Thanks for the link, that's an interesting read!
While I do like that map, I suspect those aspects move around a good bit over time. Maybe not 30-40 years, but over 100 almost certainly. Especially when people are self reporting on their opinions on matters they probably haven't thought much about (or might even have trouble defining) and are no doubt engaging in a lot of social desirability signaling in their responses. But at any rate, that's interesting and you have yourself a new subscriber!
I am not sure how I feel about the "realist" vs "idealist" distinction. I think one would have to be very careful defining that so that people's claims about their position on that scale could be tested. Lots of people call themselves realist because it sounds good, but under further examination their claims and believes are entirely untested, and typically just represent whatever the opposite of whatever is socially desirable at the moment. Reversed stupidity, as it were.
Also, as written you haven't found that "Realistic libertarian leftists seem to have more bizarre kinks than idealistic authoritarian conservatives," but rather that people with more taboo kinks tend to be libertarians. In other words, all people into really taboo kinks are libertarians, but not necessarily all libertarians are into really taboo kinks.
A lot of libertarians and conservatives don't think low-IQ people having kids is a problem. They think the government taking care of low-IQ people, and then justifying controlling low-IQ fertility because taking care of low-IQ people is expensive, is a problem.
You can live and let live without having to pay for others to live.
(Separate and apart from whether low-IQ people have lesser "value," which I am not addressing here, although my answer to that would be "no.")
That's the biggest point of contention I find libertarians (or classical liberals) have with Republicans or other right wing types today: the assumption of government responsibility for ameliorating bad outcomes from personal decisions. I have frequently gotten in arguments with people on the right who say e.g. "we can't let people take drugs, because they will need to be taken care of and I don't want to pay for it." Point out "Well... what if we just don't pay for it?" and they reply "That's just silly pie in the sky nonsense, and politically impossible!" I suppose that is consistent if you assume some really bad and broken political choices as a given, but then why do that?
Personally, I think a lot of people who argue like that are merely making excuses for the big government right wing, either intentionally or repeating what they have heard. Maybe I am too skeptical of the notion that people think some policy changes are possible while others are absolutely unthinkable, even those that were the case within living memory. It is also possible that some have a subconscious commitment to taking care of those who have bad outcomes, but can't articulate it as such.
More on point, a lot of libertarians might not like low IQ people having a lot of kids, but are going to have big problems with government (or anyone else) attempting to do anything about it. That would be a tough survey question to word correctly, however if one wanted to clarify why one thought the low IQ thing was a problem and should be dealt with, etc.
Note 5: In complex systems we use actor
What do you use for the person the actor's actions act upon?
Also actor. In complex systems each member acts on every other member. The chain of events is typically not linear.
Agreed, but that leads to some really confusing sentence structure. "The actor then performs his action upon another actor. The actor then explodes." One could designate them as "Actor A" and "Actor B", which is useful when discussing the reciprocating actions, but in looking at a single action it gets a little awkward. You want a word for the agent functioning as the actor of this particular action and a word for the agent who is being acted upon.
Of course it might be that you really can't get away from the awkwardness issue, and might as well assign them names or other unique designations to keep things clear.
You have it. Michael Crichton is the authority.
How about subject/object? Could also be confusing, since there's been some concept creep, so that people being "subjected" to things are called "subjects" in various contexts, like people who are subjects of monarchs or subjects of experiments.
It’s not my vocabulary. It’s the vocabulary of the domain
What domain?
Yea, saying "How does the object of the action react?" is a little awkward because of smuggling in that "object" meaning. People don't care if it is like gerbils or something, but get a little touchy calling human analogues objects.
Then again, you can find someone being crazy and touchy about just about any choice :D
“ Anyone who has worked in a large company has seen this in action, with sales having a very different sense of reality than operations, and HR being basically Cloud Cuckoo Land.”
And then you realize that HR is about 80% of academia without an asshole operations grunt to put the fear of the Lord into them. See also -> Germany
Great stuff. Had me thinking about the recent 'Nazi substack' kerfuffle when referencing the purity spirals.
I also like the suggestion that Doc Hammer played Warhammer (though other tabletop wargames are of course available)
I did, yes! Pretty seriously for some time, then switched over to WarmaHordes for a few years. Moving to MN then back to PA and COVID pretty much killed it though. Now that my eyesight is going I might not be able to get back into painting as much, and that is where my real focus tended to be. That and game design itself... as much as I love the Warhammer 40k and Fantasy settings (before they bombed the latter) the rules have been total pants for a looong time, so eventually I started making my own games. I hear good things about the new edition of Kill Team, though.
I should check out some of the local stores I know, though. They weren't doing even board game nights as recently as late 2022, but maybe people have calmed the hell down enough to get together again. I could use a good gaming group.
You must have had an army of dwarves right?
Nah, never took to the Stunties. For fantasy I rolled a warriors of chaos army. For 40k it was Sisters of Battle/Witch Hunters, Imperial Guard, and counts-as Orks dressed up as renegade chaos cults. And the obligatory space marines I think I used twice :)
How about you?
Skaven for me! And a preference for Necromunda over standard 40k
Bah, tricksy ratlings!
Necromunda is fun with the right group. I ran a sorta-RPG =][=nquisimunda with modified rules where a handful of friends were an inquisitor's lackeys investigating a chaos cult on a Imperial manufactorum world. It was really fun. I miss those guys.
It would be kind of interesting to do a study of the personality traits of players compared to what factions they play for a lot of games, but particularly the Warhammer games since there are a million of the damned things. I have to wonder if there are not trends, particularly once you can control for "this is the most powerful after their new codex came out", since so much seems to center around whose fluff or personality do you find appealing. Do people pick factions that are different from their personality, or more similar? Etc.