promethea.incorporated

slatestarscratchpad:

the-mememium-is-the-message:

slatestarscratchpad:

leviathan-supersystem:

minisoc:

oligopsony:

I think if I were to fully alieve it I’d have to change a lot of my behaviors, but I found this essay pretty persuasive.

I disagree. this person wants less open discussion which makes me suspicious of their views immediately. the argument rests on several emotional concerns, namely that the author feels they aren’t making progress in arguments enough (I.e. winning), that they feel a compulsion to correct others, and a compulsion to make others uncomfortable in those arguments as a punishment for questioning their world view. the comments section is enlightening as to what community we’re dealing with, and the author’s primary example is the “32 types of anti feminists” comic being made by “a jerk” who “insults [the author’s] friends”.

one thing that immediately jumped out at me:

one of the main reasons I get defensive is because I think some groups actively strategize to push their opponents out of the Overton Window and turn them into despised laughingstocks. When it works, it means I either have to be a despised laughingstock or spend way too much mental energy hiding my true opinions. The alternative to letting these people have the final say is defending one’s self.

speaking as someone who’s views exist almost entirely outside the overton window, and who regularly gets hate-mail for my political views, may i just says that scott can cry me a fucking river.

moreover, essentially all political debate is on some level an effort to shift the overton window, and inherently, doing so will result in people being pushed outside it. the idea that this is an illegitimate rhetorical move is absurd.

he goes on to say:

When I don’t want to argue but feel forced into it, I’m doing a very different thing than when I’m having a voluntary productive discussion. I’m a lot less likely to change my views or admit subtlety, because that contradicts my whole point in having the argument. And I’m a lot more likely to be hostile, because hostility is about making other people feel bad and disincentivizing their behavior, and in this case I really do believe their behavior needs disincentivizing.

this admission is incredible. scott is here basically admitting that he isn’t open to changing his view, and is openly hostile, with the express purpose of making his opponent feel bad, any time he feels they are trying to shift the overton window- which, i remind you, is something which is inherent to almost any form of political argument, period.

it’s interesting to finally understand how “rationalists” justify to themselves that they are everything they claim to be against (i.e., irrational closed minded bullies) but i do have to say i’m disappointed that the justification turned out to be so apologetically shallow and inane.

This is kind of an example of what I’m talking about.

Somebody who, every single time I’ve seen any of their posts, has been making really dishonest cheap shots at rationalists uses my admission that sometimes I get angry when I feel threatened, and twists it into “this is proof that all rationalists are irrational closed minded bullies”.

In the old days, I would have felt like I had to defend “NO WE’RE NOT,” and s/he would have kept up “YES YOU ARE”, and there would have been a lot of yelling, and there’s no way I would have convinced this person because they’ve already decided they hate me and everyone like me and this isn’t the sort of argument they’re in looking for truth or understanding.

Now I just block them. Blocked.

(if you’re genuinely interested in understanding my point of view or convincing me of yours, you can email me at scott@shireroth.org, and we’ll talk)

Turns out rationalists really hate the free market of ideas huh

I’m not sure if you’re being serious or not, but I think the free market of ideas is important in that nobody should be allowed to dictate what other people talk about. I also think that a controlled flow of ideas is personally important, especially in the sense not in curating the content of ideas you’re exposed to (which is dangerous and might create an echo chamber) but the maturity of the people expressing those ideas. In other words, getting rid of trolls and keeping signal-to-noise ratio high.

I’m happy for people who want 4-chan to have 4-chan - if that’s what you mean by “the free market of ideas” then they’re welcome to it. I’m just saying that I personally find that a certain style of combative and unproductive argument makes it more difficult for me to have productive debates, that I don’t feel bad controlling and pruning my intellectual environment in order to cultivate the sort of space where I can let my rational-thoughtful side come to the fore rather than my emotional-defensive side, and that I suggest other people try to notice if they have the same issue and do the same if they do.

In fact, I would argue that this goes along with the goal of a genuinely free market of ideas. I find that when there are really horrible people pushing a view in an insulting and hateful way, that makes me not just less likely to agree with them, but less likely to be able to fairly evaluate their position even when it’s expressed by other people who are more convincing than they are. Take away the feeling of personal attack and it’s a lot easier to give the other side a fair evaluation.

It’s ironic to see people talking about the “free market of ideas” and not noticing that overton windows are basically cartels, monopolies, and captured regulations. The whole point of the overton window is to shut some products outside the market, not because they’re not worth buying (if they were, they could prove their badness on the markets) but because people don’t want others buying them.

(Abolishing any and all overton windows would be an elegant solution if the market of ideas didn’t have material consequences from some ideas inflicting things upon nonconsenting bystanders. Ideas like “let’s use violence to stop people from doing things to their bodies we don’t like” would be far easier to dismiss if their carriers couldn’t use violence to enforce them, and the choice between pushing holders of anti-autonomy ideas into despised laughingstocks and having them brutally enforced upon oneself is pretty simple for people who perceive themselves in such situations. Intolerance of others’ tolerance of neoreactionaries seems very firmly correlated with vulnerable positions where one has similar ideas already inflicted upon oneself, or believes one could end up in such a position.)