— topic of #slatestarcodex
I.
Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat.
(this story makes more sense if you know Detroit is in a crisis where the bankrupt city government is trying to increase revenues by cracking down on poor people who can’t pay for the water they use.)
Predictably, the move has caused a backlash. The International Business Times, in what I can only assume is an attempted pun, describes them as “drowning in backlash”. Groundswell thinks it’s a “big blunder”. Daily Banter says it’s “exactly why everyone hates PETA”. Jezebel calls them “assholes”, and we can all agree Jezebel knows a thing or two about assholery.
Of course, this is par for the course for PETA, who have previously engaged in campaigns like throwing red paint on fashion models who wear fur, juxtaposing pictures of animals with Holocaust victims, juxtaposing pictures of animals with African-American slaves, and ads featuring naked people that cross the line into pornography.
People call these things “blunders”, but consider the alternative. Vegan Outreach is an extremely responsible charity doing excellent and unimpeachable work in the same area PETA is. Nobody has heard of them. Everybody has heard of PETA, precisely because of the interminable stupid debates about “did this publicity stunt cross the line?”
While not everyone is a vegan, pretty much everybody who knows anything about factory farming is upset by it. There is pretty much zero room for PETA to convert people from pro-factory-farming to anti-factory-farming, because there aren’t any radical grassroot pro-factory-farming activists to be found. Their problem isn’t lack of agreement. It’s lack of publicity.
PETA creates publicity, but at a cost. Everybody’s talking about PETA, which is sort of like everybody talking about ethical treatment of animals, which is sort of a victory. But most of the talk is “I hate them and they make me really angry.” Some of the talk is even “I am going to eat a lot more animals just to make PETA mad.”
So there’s a tradeoff here, with Vegan Outreach on one side and PETA on the other.
Vegan Outreach can get everyone to agree in principle that factory-farming is bad, but no one will pay any attention to it.
And PETA can get everyone to pay attention to factory farming, but a lot of people who would otherwise oppose it will switch to supporting it just because they’re so mad at the way it’s being publicized.
But at least they’re paying attention!
PETA doesn’t shoot themselves in the foot because they’re stupid. They shoot themselves in the foot because they’re traveling up an incentive gradient that rewards them for doing so, even if it destroys their credibility.
II.
The University of Virginia rape case profiled in Rolling Stone has fallen apart. In doing so, it joins a long and distinguished line of highly-publicized rape cases that have fallen apart. Studies often show that only 2 to 8 percent of rape allegations are false. Yet the rate for allegations that go ultra-viral in the media must be an order of magnitude higher than this. As the old saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
The enigma is complicated by the observation that it’s usually feminist activists who are most instrumental in taking these stories viral. It’s not some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists choosing the most dubious accusations in order to discredit public trust. It’s people specifically selecting these incidents as flagship cases for their campaign that rape victims need to be believed and trusted. So why are the most publicized cases so much more likely to be false than the almost-always-true average case?
Several people have remarked that false accusers have more leeway to make their stories as outrageous and spectacular as possible. But I want to focus on two less frequently mentioned concerns.
The Consequentialism FAQ explains signaling in moral decisions like so:
When signaling, the more expensive and useless the item is, the more effective it is as a signal. Although eyeglasses are expensive, they’re a poor way to signal wealth because they’re very useful; a person might get them not because ey is very rich but because ey really needs glasses. On the other hand, a large diamond is an excellent signal; no one needs a large diamond, so anybody who gets one anyway must have money to burn.Certain answers to moral dilemmas can also send signals. For example, a Catholic man who opposes the use of condoms demonstrates to others (and to himself!) how faithful and pious a Catholic he is, thus gaining social credibility. Like the diamond example, this signaling is more effective if it centers upon something otherwise useless. If the Catholic had merely chosen not to murder, then even though this is in accord with Catholic doctrine, it would make a poor signal because he might be doing it for other good reasons besides being Catholic – just as he might buy eyeglasses for reasons beside being rich. It is precisely because opposing condoms is such a horrendous decision that it makes such a good signal.
But in the more general case, people can use moral decisions to signal how moral they are. In this case, they choose a disastrous decision based on some moral principle. The more suffering and destruction they support, and the more obscure a principle it is, the more obviously it shows their commitment to following their moral principles absolutely. For example, Immanuel Kant claims that if an axe murderer asks you where your best friend is, obviously intending to murder her when he finds her, you should tell the axe murderer the full truth, because lying is wrong. This is effective at showing how moral a person you are – no one would ever doubt your commitment to honesty after that – but it’s sure not a very good result for your friend.
In the same way, publicizing how strongly you believe an accusation that is obviously true signals nothing. Even hard-core anti-feminists would believe a rape accusation that was caught on video. A moral action that can be taken just as well by an outgroup member as an ingroup member is crappy signaling and crappy identity politics. If you want to signal how strongly you believe in taking victims seriously, you talk about it in the context of the least credible case you can find.
But aside from that, there’s the PETA Principle (not to be confused with the Peter Principle). The more controversial something is, the more it gets talked about.
A rape that obviously happened? Shove it in people’s face and they’ll admit it’s an outrage, just as they’ll admit factory farming is an outrage. But they’re not going to talk about it much. There are a zillion outrages every day, you’re going to need something like that to draw people out of their shells.
On the other hand, the controversy over dubious rape allegations is exactly that – a controversy. People start screaming at each other about how they’re misogynist or misandrist or whatever, and Facebook feeds get filled up with hundreds of comments in all capital letters about how my ingroup is being persecuted by your ingroup. At each step, more and more people get triggered and upset. Some of those triggered people do emergency ego defense by reblogging articles about how the group that triggered them are terrible, triggering further people in a snowball effect that spreads the issue further with every iteration.
[source]
Only controversial things get spread. A rape allegation will only be spread if it’s dubious enough to split people in half along lines corresponding to identity politics. An obviously true rape allegation will only be spread if the response is controversial enough to split people in half along lines corresponding to identity politics – which is why so much coverage focuses on the proposal that all accused rapists should be treated as guilty until proven innocent.
Everybody hates rape just like everybody hates factory farming. “Rape culture” doesn’t mean most people like rape, it means most people ignore it. That means feminists face the same double-bind that PETA does.
First, they can respond to rape in a restrained and responsible way, in which case everyone will be against it and nobody will talk about it.
Second, they can respond to rape in an outrageous and highly controversial way, in which case everybody will talk about it but it will autocatalyze an opposition of people who hate feminists and obsessively try to prove that as many rape allegations as possible are false.
The other day I saw this on Twitter:
So as I understand it, Atticus Finch is now the bad guy in "To Kill A Mockingbird," because he doubted a story about rape.
— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) December 2, 2014
My first thought was that it was witty and hilarious. My second thought was “But when people are competing to see who can come up with the wittiest and most hilarious quip about why we should disbelieve rape victims, something has gone horribly wrong.” My third thought was the same as my second thought, but in ALL CAPS, because at that point I had read the replies at the bottom.
I have yet to see anyone holding a cardboard sign talking about how they are going to rape people just to make feminists mad, but it’s only a matter of time. Like PETA, their incentive gradient dooms them to shoot themselves in the foot again and again.
III.
Slate recently published an article about white people’s contrasting reactions to the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson versus the Eric Garner choking in NYC. And man, it is some contrast.
A Pew poll found that of white people who expressed an opinion about the Ferguson case, 73% sided with the officer. Of white people who expressed an opinion about the Eric Garner case, 63% sided with the black victim.
Media opinion follows much the same pattern. Arch-conservative Bill O’Reilly said he was “absolutely furious” about the way “the liberal media” and “race hustlers” had “twisted the story” about Ferguson in the service of “lynch mob justice” and “insulting the American police community, men and women risking their lives to protect us”. But when it came to Garner, O’Reilly said he was “extremely troubled” and that “there was a police overreaction that should have been adjudicated in a court of law.” His guest on FOX News, conservative commentator and fellow Ferguson-detractor Charles Krauthammer added that “From looking at the video, the grand jury’s decision [not to indict] is totally incomprehensible.” Saturday Night Live did a skit about Al Sharpton talking about the Garner case and getting increasingly upset because “For the first time in my life, everyone agrees with me.”
This follows about three months of most of America being at one another’s throats pretty much full-time about Ferguson. We got treated to a daily diet of articles like Ferguson Protester On White People: “Y’all The Devil” or Black People Had The Power To Fix The Problems In Ferguson Before The Brown Shooting – They Failed or Most White People In America Are Completely Oblivious and a whole bunch of people sending angry racist editorials and counter-editorials to each other for months. The damage done to race relations is difficult to overestimate – CBS reports that they dropped ten percentage points to the lowest point in twenty years, with over half of blacks now describing race relations as “bad”.
And people say it was all worth it, because it raised awareness of police brutality against black people, and if that rustles some people’s jimmies, well, all the worse for them.
But the Eric Garner case also would have raised awareness of police brutality against black people, and everybody would have agreed about it. It has become increasingly clear that, given sufficiently indisputable evidence of police being brutal to a black person, pretty much everyone in the world condemns it equally strongly.
And it’s not just that the Eric Garner case came around too late so we had to make do with the Mike Brown case. Garner was choked a month before Brown was shot, but the story was ignored, then dug back up later as a tie-in to the ballooning Ferguson narrative.
More important, unarmed black people are killed by police or other security officers about twice a week according to official statistics, and probably much more often than that. You’re saying none of these shootings, hundreds each year, made as good a flagship case as Michael Brown? In all this gigantic pile of bodies, you couldn’t find one of them who hadn’t just robbed a convenience store? Not a single one who didn’t have ten eyewitnesses and the forensic evidence all saying he started it?
I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.
The Ferguson protesters say they have a concrete policy proposal – they want cameras on police officers. There’s only spotty polling on public views of police body cameras before the Ferguson story took off, but what there is seems pretty unaninimous. A UK poll showed that 90% of the population of that country wanted police to have body cameras in February. US polls are more of the form “crappy poll widget on a news site” (1, 2, 3) but they all hovered around 80% approval for the past few years. I also found a poll by Police Magazine in which a plurality of the police officers they surveyed wanted to wear body cameras, probably because of evidence that they cut down on false accusations. Even before Ferguson happened, you would have a really hard time finding anybody in or out of uniform who thought police cameras were a bad idea.
And now, after all is said and done, ninety percent of people are still in favor – given methodology issues, the extra ten percent may or may not represent a real increase. The difference between whites and blacks is a rounding error. The difference between Democrats and Republicans is barely worth talking about- 79% of Republicans are still in support. The people who think Officer Darren Wilson is completely innocent and the grand jury was right to release him, the people muttering under their breath about race hustlers and looters – eighty percent of those people still want cameras on their cops.
If the Ferguson protests didn’t do much to the public’s views on police body cameras, they sure changed its views on some other things. I wrote before about how preliminary polls say that hearing about Ferguson increased white people’s confidence in the way the police treat race. Now the less preliminary polls are out, and they show the effect was larger than even I expected.
[source]
White people’s confidence in the police being racially unbiased increased from 35% before the story took off to 52% today. Could even a deliberate PR campaign by the nation’s police forces have done better? I doubt it.
It’s possible that this is an artifact of the question’s wording – after all, it asks people about their local department, and maybe after seeing what happened in Ferguson, people’s local police forces look pretty good by comparison. But then why do black people show the opposite trend?
I think this is exactly what it looks like. Just as PETA’s outrageous controversial campaign to spread veganism make people want to eat more animals in order to spite them, so the controversial nature of this particular campaign against police brutality and racism made white people like their local police department even more to spite the people talking about how all whites were racist.
Once again, the tradeoff.
If campaigners against police brutality and racism were extremely responsible, and stuck to perfectly settled cases like Eric Garner, everybody would agree with them but nobody would talk about it.
If instead they bring up a very controversial case like Michael Brown, everybody will talk about it, but they will catalyze their own opposition and make people start supporting the police more just to spite them. More foot-shooting.
IV.
Here is a graph of some of the tags I commonly use for my posts, with the average number of hits per post in each tag. It’s old, but I don’t want to go through the trouble of making a new one, and the trends have stayed the same since then.
I blog about charity only rarely, but it must be the most important thing I can write about here. Convincing even a few more people to donate to charity, or to redirect their existing donations to a more effective program, can literally save dozens or even hundreds of lives even with the limited reach that a private blog has. It probably does more good for the world than all of the other categories on here combined. But it’s completely uncontroversial – everyone agrees it’s a good thing – and it is the least viewed type of post.
Compare this to the three most viewed category of post. Politics is self-explanatory. Race and gender are a type of politics even more controversial and outrage-inducing than regular politics. And that “regret” all the way on the right is my “things i will regret writing” tag, for posts that I know are going to start huge fights and probably get me in lots of trouble. They’re usually race and gender as well, but digging deep into the really really controversial race and gender related issues.
The less useful, and more controversial, a post here is, the more likely it is to get me lots of page views.
For people who agree with me, my angry rants on identity politics are a form of ego defense, saying “You’re okay, your in-group was in the right the whole time.” Linking to it both raises their status as an in-group members, and acts as a potential assault on out-group members who are now faced with strong arguments telling them they’re wrong.
As for the people who disagree with me, they’ll sometimes write angry rebuttals on their own blogs, and those rebuttals will link to my own post as often as not. Or they’ll talk about it with their disagreeing friends, and their friends will get mad and want to tell me I’m wrong, and come over here to read the post to get more ammunition for their counterarguments. I have a feature that allows me to see who links to all of my posts, so I can see this all happening in real-time.
I don’t make enough money off the ads on this blog to matter very much. But if I did, and this was my only means of subsistence, which do you think I’d write more of? Posts about charity which only get me 2,000 paying customers? Or posts that turn all of you against one another like a pack of rabid dogs, and get me 16,000?
I don’t have a fancy bar graph for them, but I bet this same hierarchy of interestingness applies to the great information currents and media outlets that shape society as a whole.
It’s in activists’ interests to destroy their own causes by focusing on the most controversial cases and principles, the ones that muddy the waters and make people oppose them out of spite. And it’s in the media’s interest to help them and egg them on.
V.
And now, for something completely different.
Before “meme” meant doge and all your base, it was a semi-serious attempt to ground cultural evolution in parasitology. The idea was to replace a model of humans choosing whichever ideas they liked with a model of ideas as parasites that evolved in ways that favored their own transmission. This never really caught on, because most people’s response was “That’s neat. So what?”
But let’s talk about toxoplasma.
Toxoplasma is a neat little parasite that is implicated in a couple of human diseases including schizophrenia. Its life cycle goes like this: it starts in a cat. The cat poops it out. The poop and the toxoplasma get in the water supply, where they are consumed by some other animal, often a rat. The toxoplasma morphs into a rat-compatible form and starts reproducing. Once it has strength in numbers, it hijacks the rat’s brain, convincing the rat to hang out conspicuously in areas where cats can eat it. After a cat eats the rat, the toxoplasma morphs back into its cat compatible form and reproduces some more. Finally, it gets pooped back out by the cat, completing the cycle.
It’s the ciiiiiircle of life!
What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?
Consider the war on terror. It’s a truism that each time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Taken as a meme, it is a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and several bajillion of their tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.
From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.
Replicators are also going to evolve. Some Afghan who thinks up a particularly effective terrorist strategy helps the meme spread to more Americans as the resulting outrage fuels the War on Terror. When the American bombing heats up, all of the Afghan villagers radicalized in by the attack will remember the really effective new tactic that Khalid thought up and do that one instead of the boring old tactic that barely killed any Americans at all. Some American TV commentator who comes up with a particularly stirring call to retaliation will find her words adopted into party platforms and repeated by pro-war newspapers. While pacifists on both sides work to defuse the tension, the meme is engaging in a counter-effort to become as virulent as possible, until people start suggesting putting pork fat in American bombs just to make Muslims even madder.
So let’s talk about Tumblr.
Tumblr’s interface doesn’t allow you to comment on other people’s posts, per se. Instead, it lets you reblog them with your own commentary added. So if you want to tell someone they’re an idiot, your only option is to reblog their entire post to all your friends with the message “you are an idiot” below it.
Whoever invented this system either didn’t understand memetics, or understood memetics much too well.
What happens is – someone makes a statement which is controversial by Tumblr standards, like “Protect Doctor Who fans from kitten pic sharers at all costs.” A kitten pic sharer sees the statement, sees red, and reblogs it to her followers with a series of invectives against Doctor Who fans. Since kitten pic sharers cluster together in the social network, soon every kitten pic sharer has seen the insult against kitten pic sharer – as they all feel the need to add their defensive commentary to it, soon all of them are seeing it from ten different directions. The angry invectives get back to the Doctor Who fans, and now they feel deeply offended, so they reblog it among themselves with even more condemnations of the kitten pic sharers, who now not only did whatever inspired the enmity in the first place, but have inspired extra hostility because their hateful invectives are right there on the post for everyone to see. So about half the stuff on your dashboard is something you actually want to see, and the other half is towers of alternate insults that look like this:
Actually, pretty much this happened to the PETA story I started off with
And then you sigh and scroll down to the next one. Unless of course you are a Doctor Who fan, in which case you sigh and then immediately reblog with the comment “It’s obvious you guys started ganging up against us first, don’t try to accuse **US** now” because you can’t just let that accusation stand.
I make fun of Tumblr social justice sometimes, but the problem isn’t with Tumblr social justice, it’s structural. Every community on Tumblr somehow gets enmeshed with the people most devoted to making that community miserable. The tiny Tumblr rationalist community somehow attracts, concentrates, and constantly reblogs stuff from the even tinier Tumblr community of people who hate rationalists and want them to be miserable (no, well-intentioned and intelligent critics, I am not talking about you). It’s like one of those rainforest ecosystems where every variety of rare endangered nocturnal spider hosts a parasite who has evolved for millions of years solely to parasitize that one spider species, and the parasites host parasites who have evolved for millions of years solely to parasitize them. If Tumblr social justice is worse than anything else, it’s mostly because everyone has a race and a gender so it’s easier to fire broad cannonades and just hit everybody.
Tumblr’s reblog policy makes it a hothouse for toxoplasma-style memes that spread via outrage. Following the ancient imperative of evolution, if memes spread by outrage they adapt to become as outrage-inducing as possible.
Or rather, that is just one of their many adaptations. I realize this toxoplasma metaphor sort of strains credibility, so I want to anchor this idea of outrage-memes in pretty much the only piece of memetics everyone can agree upon.
The textbook example of a meme – indeed, almost the only example ever discussed – is the chain letter. “Send this letter to ten people and you will prosper. Fail to pass it on, and you will die tomorrow.” And so the letter replicates.
It might be useful evidence that we were on the right track here, with our toxoplasma memes and everything, if we could find evidence that they reproduced in the same way.
If you’re not on Tumblr, you might have missed the “everyone who does not reblog the issue du jour is trash” wars. For a few weeks around the height of the Ferguson discussion, people constantly called out one another for not reblogging enough Ferguson-related material, or (Heavens forbid) saying they were sick of the amount of Ferguson material they were seeing. It got so bad that various art blogs that just posted pretty paintings, or kitten picture blogs that just reblogged pictures of kittens were feeling the heat (you thought I was joking about the hate for kitten picture bloggers. I never joke.) Now the issue du jour seems to be Pakistan. Just to give a few examples:
“friends if you are reblogging things that are not about ferguson right now please queue them instead. please pay attention to things that are more important. it’s not the time to talk about fandoms or jokes it’s time to talk about injustices.” [source]“can yall maybe take some time away from reblogging fandom or humor crap and read up and reblog pakistan because the privilege you have of a safe bubble is not one shared by others” [source]
“If you’re uneducated, do not use that as an excuse. Do not say, “I’m not picking sides because I don’t know the full story,” because not picking a side is supporting Wilson. And by supporting him, you are on a racist side…Ignoring this situation will put you in deep shit, and it makes you racist. If you’re not racist, do not just say “but I’m not racist!!” just get educated and reblog anything you can.” [source]
“why are you so disappointing? I used to really like you. you’ve kept totally silent about peshawar, not acknowledging anything but fucking zutara or bellarke or whatever. there are other posts you’ve reblogged too that I wouldn’t expect you to- but those are another topic. I get that you’re 19 but maybe consider becoming a better fucking person?” [source]
“if you’re white, before you reblog one of those posts that’s like “just because i’m not blogging about ferguson doesn’t mean i don’t care!!!” take a few seconds to: consider the privilege you have that allows you not to pay attention if you don’t want to. consider those who do not have the privilege to focus on other things. ask yourself why you think it’s more important that people know you “care” than it is to spread information and show support. then consider that you are a fucking shitbaby.” [source]
“For everyone reblogging Ferguson, Ayotzinapa, North Korea etc and not reblogging Peshawar, you should seriously be ashamed of yourselves.” [source]
“This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I see stuff about ppl not wanting to reblog ferguson things and awareness around the world because they do not want negativity in their life plus it will cause them to have anxiety. They come to tumblr to escape n feel happy which think is a load of bull. There r literally ppl dying who live with the fear of going outside their homes to be shot and u cant post a fucking picture because it makes u a little upset?? I could give two fucks about internet shitlings.” [source]
You may also want to check the Tumblr tag “the trash is taking itself out”, in which hundreds of people make the same joke (“I think some people have stopped reading my blog because I’m talking too much about [the issue du jour]. I guess the trash is taking itself out now.”)
This is pretty impressive. It’s the first time outside of a chain letter that I have seen our memetic overlords throw off all pretense and just go around shouting “SPREAD ME OR YOU ARE GARBAGE AND EVERYONE WILL HATE YOU.”
But it only works because it’s tapped into the most delicious food source an ecology of epistemic parasites could possibly want – controversy,
I would like to be able to write about charity more often. Feminists would probably like to start supercharging the true rape accusations for a change. Protesters against police brutality would probably like to be able to focus on clear-cut cases that won’t make white people support the police even harder. Even PETA would probably prefer being the good guys for once. But the odds aren’t good. Not because the people involved are bad people who want to fail. Not even because the media-viewing public are stupid. Just because information ecologies are not your friend.
This blog tries to remember the Litany of Jai: “Almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken”. We pretty much never wrestle with flesh and blood; it’s powers and principalities all the way down.
VI.
…but one of them tends to come up suspiciously often.
A while ago I wrote a post called Meditations on Moloch where I pointed out that in any complex multi-person system, the system acts according to its own chaotic incentives that don’t necessarily correspond to what any individual within the system wants. The classic example is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which usually ends at defect-defect even though both of the two prisoners involved prefer cooperate-cooperate. I compare this malignant discoordination to Ginsberg’s portrayal of Moloch, the demon-spirit of capitalism gone wrong.
I would support instating a National Conversation Topic Czar if that allowed us to get rid of celebrities.
— Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) August 26, 2010
Steven in his wisdom reminds us that there is no National Conversation Topic Czar. The rise of some topics to national prominence and the relegation of others to tiny print on the eighth page of the newspapers occurs by an emergent uncoordinated process. When we say “the media decided to cover Ferguson instead of Eric Garner”, we reify and anthropomorphize an entity incapable of making goal-directed decisions.
A while back there was a minor scandal over JournoList, a private group where left-leaning journalists met and exchanged ideas. I think the conservative spin was “the secret conspiracy running the liberal media – revealed!” I wish they had been right. If there were a secret conspiracy running the liberal media, they could all decide they wanted to raise awareness of racist police brutality, pick the most clear-cut and sympathetic case, and make it non-stop news headlines for the next two months. Then everyone would agree it was indeed very brutal and racist, and something would get done.
But as it is, even if many journalists are interested in raising awareness of police brutality, given their total lack of coordination there’s not much they can do. An editor can publish a story on Eric Garner, but in the absence of a divisive hook, the only reason people will care about it is that caring about it is the right thing and helps people. But that’s “charity”, and we already know from my blog tags that charity doesn’t sell. A few people mumble something something deeply distressed, but neither black people nor white people get interested, in the “keep tuning to their local news channel to get the latest developments on the case” sense.
The idea of liberal strategists sitting down and choosing “a flagship case for the campaign against police brutality” is poppycock. Moloch – the abstracted spirit of discoordination and flailing response to incentives – will publicize whatever he feels like publicizing. And if they want viewers and ad money, the media will go along with him.
Which means that it’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship case for fighting police brutality and racism is the flagship case that we in fact got. It’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship cases for believing rape victims are the ones that end up going viral. It’s not a coincidence that the only time we ever hear about factory farming is when somebody’s doing something that makes us almost sympathetic to it. It’s not coincidence, it’s not even happenstance, it’s enemy action. Under Moloch, activists are irresistably incentivized to dig their own graves. And the media is irresistably incentivized to help them.
Lost is the ability to agree on simple things like fighting factory farming or rape. Lost is the ability to even talk about the things we all want. Ending corporate welfare. Ungerrymandering political districts. Defrocking pedophile priests. Stopping prison rape. Punishing government corruption and waste. Feeding starving children. Simplifying the tax code.
But also lost is our ability to treat each other with solidarity and respect.
Under Moloch, everyone is irresistably incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive. Race relations are at historic lows not because white people and black people disagree on very much, but because the media absolutely worked its tuchus off to find the single issue that white people and black people disagreed over the most and ensure that it was the only issue anybody would talk about. Men’s rights activists and feminists hate each other not because there’s a huge divide in how people of different genders think, but because only the most extreme examples of either side will ever gain traction, and those only when they are framed as attacks on the other side.
People talk about the shift from old print-based journalism to the new world of social media and the sites adapted to serve it. These are fast, responsive, and only just beginning to discover the power of controversy. They are memetic evolution shot into hyperdrive, and the omega point is a well-tuned machine optimized to search the world for the most controversial and counterproductive issues, then make sure no one can talk about anything else. An engine that creates money by burning the few remaining shreds of cooperation, bipartisanship and social trust.
Imagine Moloch, in his Carthaginian-demon personification, looking out over the expanse of the world, eagle-eyed for anything that can turn brother against brother and husband against wife. Finally he decides “YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING. LET ME FIND SOME STORY THAT WILL MAKE PEOPLE HATE EACH OTHER OVER BIRD-WATCHING”. And the next day half the world’s newspaper headlines are “Has The Political Correctness Police Taken Over Bird-Watching?” and the other half are “Is Bird-Watching Racist?”. And then bird-watchers and non-bird-watchers and different sub-groups of bird-watchers hold vitriolic attacks on each other that feed back on each other in a vicious cycle for the next six months, and the whole thing ends in mutual death threats and another previously innocent activity turning into World War I style trench warfare.
(You think I’m exaggerating? Listen: “YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? VIDEO GAMES.”)
The backlash to PETA brings to mind the recent complaints of Uber surge-pricing; that is, people complaining about something THAT WOULD OTHERWISE NOT EXIST.
If PETA weren’t doing this promotion, THEY WOULDN’T PAY ANY WATER BILLS AND NO ONE WOULD CRITICIZE THEM FOR THIS.
Same with Uber. Years ago this service didn’t exist. Now it does and people complain that it’s expensive.
Entitlement is what people call this, but that’s the wrong word. This is not entitlement. I don’t know what I’d call it.
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I think it’s the same phenomenon wherein people become outraged at the prospect of trading-off sacred values for mundane ones.
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I think the perceived immorality of this comes because it breaks the moral principle of not taking advantage of people’s misery. It’s the same moral uneasiness that you feel towards the pay day lenders who take advantage of people’s momentary distress to lend them money at exorbitant rates of interest. From a utilitarian perspective this feeling is obviously stupid as all sides are deriving gains from trade, but that is where I think the condemnation comes from.
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What I think is outrageous is not that PETA is doing this promotion, but that people are offended by it.
PETA’s charity here is the best kind of charity: it has strings attached that encourage people to reform bad behaviors and live better lives. It is the same principle as the old charities that used to require people to adopt a “clean” lifestyle rather than just sending them a check.
If you have a limited amount of money to give out in charity, why not give it to the most virtuous and deserving people, instead of those most likely to use it for bad ends?
My problem with PETA is that I disagree with their fundamental premises. I don’t think animal rights are a good cause. I think it’s actively harmful.
But what I just can’t understand is the people who seem to actively support PETA’s goals, but are opposed to this method, which is perhaps the most reasonable method of advancing its beliefs that PETA has ever adopted.
Let’s imagine the cause was a more worthy one. Some organization decides to give money to poor people, and in return asks them to sign a pledge stating that they will support open borders, and whenever they hear someone say “Why don’t the illegals just wait in line?” they will explain why that’s bullshit. If they don’t want to sign the pledge, the money goes to some other poor person who doesn’t want to condemn foreigners needlessly to much worse poverty.
Is that organization the devil now in that scenario? I don’t think so.
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I do think you can argue that any new thing changes the ecosystem in ways that can hurt others. In most of the US, the widespread use of cars changed city planning and made it close to impossible to do without a car. Public transit works well in New York because lots of middle class people use it, and they can exert political pressure; I can imagine a future in which Uber siphons off a lot of them, leaving an underfunded transit system used mainly by poorer people. Or, if the church down the road provides meals and beds for the homeless if they listen to a sermon – it may be better than not providing food and beds for people, but if it reduces support for secular homelessness services because people think the need is taken care of, that’s a problem.
Which is not to say that PETA or Uber are bad things, but I don’t think people are just being entitled when they raise concerns about this kind of thing.
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That is something I see quite frequently, though, I’d say there is harm in being targeted and taken advantage of by a comparatively wealthy interest group.
I’ll admit that this case bothers less than others that come to mind, like religious charities forcing desperate folk to jump through sectarian hoops to receive aid: PETA, at least, has an honest goal, even if they are targeting the vulnerable.
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The only impression “harm” comes from equivocation over what is meant by “to take advantage of” (you can “take advantage” of somebody and leave them better off, or worse off). The strict definition of “take advantage of” doesn’t mean you’re making somebody worse off, but that’s a frequent implication.
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I don’t think this is a fair comparison, since Uber is competing with taxi drivers, putting some of them out of business, and so when they implement surge pricing or whatnot, it’s actually limiting peoples options.
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I think it’s observation. You can’t see people not getting rides, so it’s not an issue. But you can see people being charged a lot of money for rides, and that makes it an issue.
Call it the Copenhagen Interpretation of ethics.
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Or as Bastiat named it: what is seen and unseen.
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It smells bad when people profit or advance a cause by means which are only possible because someone else is miserable. This remains the case even when this profiting and/or advancement reliably alleviates that misery.
It makes a sort of sense, actually. If you’re profiting from the fact that someone is crying, that gives you a de facto stake in making them cry more often (or just resisting changes which could cause them to cry less), which potentially leads to bad behaviour. I think the missing link is that the possibility of relevant bad behaviour is far lower than it was in the ancestral environment, so our natural reactions on issues like these are obsolete.
(If Gurg is getting things he wants by trading Yarg those berries that make her feel less nauseous, it’s not implausible that he’s secretly causing her nausea somehow, and it’s highly likely that he won’t make any effort to work out what’s really wrong; as a result, it’s reasonable to make sure his profit comes at a cost. But PETA almost certainly had nothing to do with Detroit going bankrupt in the first place, so the outrage is pointless.)
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In fairness, most objections I’ve heard to Uber complain about it replacing a regulated, expensive market, with a slightly less expensive but totally unregulated market.
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If there’s a way to pay people to cut down on meat that will make people despise you, PETA will figure it out. They won’t get controversy by offering nicely.
If people wouldn’t have gotten outraged at PETA paying people to not eat meat, then PETA wouldn’t have made the offer.
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Anonymous, have you heard about the ultimatum game? You get $10 to split with a partner, and the partner can either accept whatever split you propose, or reject it, in which case you both get nothing.
If you know human nature at all, you probably guess that when you try that game in practice, people do complain about getting something that would otherwise not exist, even to the extent that they reject it just to punish the unfair partner.
That’s exactly why people are mad at Uber for taking advantage of crises.
And yes, they do take advantage of crises. They do not suspend their profit margin in times of “surge pricing”, and even when there’s no crises, they benefit from their selfish policy. I’ll explain how
In my country, and I suspect in most jurisdictions, holding a taxi driving permit means you have an obligation to drive. You can’t just sit on it, or choose just to drive at the most profitable times (nor can you, rent out or sell the permit: it’s tied to your person. I understand some jurisdictions are a lot more stupid on that point).
The deal with the municipal government is that taxis should be available on weekdays too, even if it’s a lot less profitable to drive then. Likewise, you can’t work only in the rich parts of town, or only for white customers. Taxi customers are happy that they can get cars at a predictable price when and where, they need them. Taxi drivers, while they might individually prefer to “skim the cream”, are happy that they compete on equal terms.
Now Uber could do something similar: they could charge more during non-crisis situations in order to subsidize in crisis situations, for instance, or they could do a bit of collective bargaining and demand that drivers take their share of rides at inconvenient times (like regular taxis do).
But they don’t. They are all about skimming the cream of the personal driving market, they disavow any personal, longer term responsibility towards their customer base. It’s not really in crisis situations that Uber is screwing its customers, it’s in everyday non-crisis situations, when they undercut the people who do play by some rules of solidarity to each other and to the customers. In effect, they are leeching of the trust we have in taxis to have a minimum of social responsibility.
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This is a huge problem in my mind.
That hipster in the selfie is not only self-contradicting (because he uses the same method of blackmail against PETA that he accuses them of), he also has to explain why he doesn’t pay those water bills unconditionally.
It gets worse when government is involved in this fallacious behavior, because they can seriously hurt people. A common theme is when they ban things that look like exploitation without compensating the party who needs it most for their loss of option value. It looks like morality and helpfulness but really makes people worse off.
Full disclaimer: I’m not paying anyone’s water bills and have no intention to do so. I should get at least as much outrage as PETA for this.
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I’m not sure I understand your argument here. Are you saying that anything new should be automatically immune from criticism? How far back should this extend? Should people not criticise their iphones/ipods because they didn’t exist ten years ago, or moan about the price of petrol because a hundred and fifty years ago cars did not exist? Or perhaps nobody should complain about the rent because back in the ancestral environment there were no houses.
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The PETA case is a really interesting one to think about. If you’re angry at PETA for giving the water-or-meat ultimatum, are you angry at the government for giving similar ones all the time? Are you angry at the fact that families who can’t pay their water bill face a far worse ultimatum from the city? (After all, anyone can stop eating meat. Not anyone can get a job.)
I’m unsympathetic to anarchism on empirical grounds, but it’s hard to argue with some of their points in the abstract. The Leviathan makes PETA look like fluffy little kittens.
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Well, I’ve already had a half-kind of sort of mini-fighteen on Tumblr about this, so I’m quite willing to have another go, because I think PETA are a shower of [expletives deleted] and not alone that, they’re probably setting their cause – whatever it is, apart from patting themselves on the back over how they must all be super-enlightened purely correct only right-thinking beings because of all the criticism they get – back a hundred years.
Before I begin, I don’t know what Scott’s policy (if any) on swearing or how much or what kind is, so I’ll cut that out, but imagine your favourite epithets liberally sprinkled throughout the following to get the flavour of my reaction to this stunt.
I’m going to assume that PETA consider not eating meat to be more ethical than eating meat. By using the situation in Detroit, they are trying to (a) publicise their campaign (b) encourage people to adopt a more ethical lifestyle and/or a new system of ethics.
Now it’s quite plain that PETA don’t care a straw about the people involved, else they’d be doing the water bill paying with no strings attached or they’d be involved in activism to change the situation. That’s fine, that’s not what they’re about; they’re an animal-rights movement not a social justice (in the Catholic sense) movement.
Okay, so imagine a similar situation with, say, an evangelical non-denominational Christian church outreach or parachurch ministry involved in street ministry to the homeless. They run a volunteer shelter where you can get a bed for the night and a meal and have the chance to bathe, get rudimentary medical attention, and be in a relatively safe environment (they have a strict dry policy so no alcohol/drugs on the premises and they have enough volunteers so that bullying, petty theft and assault by your fellows is clamped down on).
All you have to do is agree to recite the following simple formula about inviting Jesus into your heart and turning your life over to God. Some version of the Sinner’s Prayer. To make it more like the PETA example, let’s say you have to follow it up with a committment to a thirty-day programme of saying one Bible verse a day.
That’s all. That’s a choice, right? That’s not creating the problem, it’s not even exploiting it, because homelessness exists and isn’t some problematic help better than none? Are you saying that you would prefer people to remain sleeping rough on the street and running the risk of dying by hypothermia these cold winter nights rather than take the offer? Surely it’s only people who are in a position of privilege and have never been poor and desperate who are making these objections! Besides, it’s giving people the chance to be exposed to Christianity, and they don’t have to keep saying the verses once the thirty days are up, and maybe they’ll find they like saying the prayers once they’ve had a chance to try it, and anyway it’s only giving exposure to their campaign to make people aware of Christianity (I’m using the kind of arguments I’ve seen used in defence of what PETA are doing).
And how do you think these arguments would fly, if it was about religious strings attached to an offer? And why then should an ethical conversion, rather than a religious conversion, be let off the hook more easily?
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I think this is a clash of utilitarian ethics vs. virtue ethics.
From a utilitarian perspective (which Ozy helpfully articulates in the link), PETA is helping. They are providing an option that was not there previously. If anyone takes advantage of it, the world will be better off. If nobody takes advantage of it, the world will not be worse off. According to utilitarian ethics, this is a “good” action.
From a virtue ethics standpoint, PETA is taking advantage of people in an unfortunate situation, and that’s wrong. Most interpretations of virtue ethics tell us that when people are suffering from an unexpected disaster, it’s wrong to seek to profit from their misfortune. People who rely on virtue ethics will condemn PETA.
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I love it when you tie things back to Moloch. From a reading perspective, not a “our species is really really screwed” perspective
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The anthropomorphization makes it more memorable but I worry that it’s not conducive to coming up with solutions.
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The thing I want most for the rationalist community right now is for us to figure out how to build a better garden for talking about social-justice-related issues. Because there are really important questions there that we as a society need to find the answers to, and I feel like if some corner of the rationalist community were able to keep the forces of Moloch at bay long enough to get some work done, they might produce some results, as they’ve managed to do on questions that weren’t as politicized.
EDIT: Also, have comments been turned off on this post?
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What are these questions to you?
To me it seems like the only questions that really matter are to what extent differences between races and genders are biological, and the fact that science doesn’t know yet is why the issues are controversial. So I personally feel like just talking about them rationally won’t do us much good.
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>(You think I’m exaggerating? Listen: “YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? VIDEO GAMES.”)
Oh boy, here we go.
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I remember the Console Wars and the Jack Thompson Crusade, and I’ve seen YouTube videos of Xbox Live chatter. And I can tell you, there has never been a time when no one hated each other over video games.
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yeah, you merely have to ask any group of teenage boys: “Which is better, COD or battlefield (or halo)?” and you have probably created enduring hate between them.
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I’ve seen a few people who were previously pro-feminist on tumblr gradually get argued into changing their opinions as they saw a few of the flaws in feminism memes. And promptly started reblogging every single thing they saw criticizing feminism- Valid or not.
The culture of controversy is horrifying not just because it polarizes people who are naturally drawn to one side or another, but also because if you can ever manage to persuade someone that perhaps a more moderate position is called for, they are much more likely to flip all the way over to the other side with a vengeance and pick up the very worst of the MRA memes to offend the feminists they can no longer tolerate and purge their follower list.
Because being in one of the extremist camps sure seems to feel a lot better for most people than taking a position where you’ll get shot at from all sides.
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You could argue that this is Bayesian reasoning in action. If I was previously confident in [Issueist] issue X, and later decide that I was way off on X, it stands to reason that the other things [Issueists] had me convinced of are also way off.
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Bayes’ Theorem says, “If people who are wrong about X also say Y, then assume Y is wrong too?”
I can think of very few modes of thinking that are more conducive to political tribalism.
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That only really holds if there’s some sort of general parameter of correctness that affects everything a group believes, and I very much doubt that. It might be weakly true, in that sometimes by pure coincidence an ideology will happen upon a Grand Theory of Why The Other Guys Suck that represents reality a bit better than the alternative. But anything that’s obviously true will quickly reach fixation, the selection pressure’s all in the direction of simplification and controversy and good headlines, and the reality of non-obvious issues tends to be complicated and boring and highly unsexy. So on average I’d expect any mature ideology’s performance to be little better than chance.
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That doesn’t sound like valid Bayesian reasoning to me. It sounds like the fallacy of assuming that reversed stupidity is intelligence.
To spell it out: let’s say that feminist theory is your evidence for believing X, Y and Z. You become convinced that X is false. In this case, it’s rational to place less weight on the evidentiary value on feminist theory, since it led you to a wrong conclusion. It’s also rational to reduce your credence in Y and Z, since your evidence for them is now much weaker.. But it’s decidedly *not* rational to suddenly believe not-Y and not-Z with very high credence, on this basis alone.
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More cynically, in some communities it might be a signal of one’s ability to change one’s mind.
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Surely if X is evidence for A, B and C, then A, B and C are evidence for X, and therefore a belief in !X should weaken my belief in A, B and C, but A, B and C should weaken the extremity of my belief in !X?
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So I have a friend, or someone who used to be a friend, who is in a convent. (This story is relevant to the above, but gradually.) I’m currently rather horrified that she is there. The rules of the convent read like a manual for bringing about persuasion through the dark arts rather than rational means: Isolation from society? Check. Conformity in dress and action? Check. Having other people read your mail, and being obliged to tell them all about yourself? Check. Framing so that leaving the convent is seen as rejecting a gift? Check. And so on and so forth.
So this bothers me. It seems to me the kind of thing that is designed to produce non-agenty automatons. If a Catholic is reading this, bear with me.
But to the people in the convent, of course, all this is precisely designed to free one from the slavery to the flesh. Conformity in dress and action? Destoys pride and vain signalling so you can be with Christ. Isolation from society? Again, separation from the world so you can be with Chris. All this is optimization, from their point of view, for truthseeking–not something designed to brainwash you. The basic Catholic point is that all this is supposed to be the only way you can really be perfect, or really be an agent, or something.
This is a severe disagreement, then, between Catholics and me. I feel the rage when I see a FB article about someone joining a convent (“She said yes to Christ!”). And no doubt, if I were stupid enough to share some atheist article about Mother Theresa, people reading that would feel the rage. We could shout at each other a lot.
The problem, though, is that this isn’t an edge case to either of our worldviews. It isn’t something that we can reasonably remain silent about, because we think it is really, really important. For me, it’s something important because it is about something at least resembling brainwashing. For them, it’s the highest calling a Christian can come to. I want to say things about it because it is distressing for me to think that someone thinking about joining a convent would not hear an opposing view. And they could say something similar, of course.
So with regard to the above post. The above is really, really excellent. It’s convicting, to use the Protestant term of art. It’s like a secular sermon. (If Scott kickstarted a book by that title, I would fund the hell out of it. [Profits can go to charity to ease his conscience. {Please do this.}]).
But the problem…. well… meh. This isn’t a disagreement with the above–it’s more of a problem for the whole SSC project which I don’t see a way out of. Some things people actually disagree with each other about, and actually disagree with each other to such an extent that the people with whom they are disagreeing don’t appear to them to be anything like rational agents. When I argue with a non-cloistered individual Consecrated to Christ, very nearly everything that they say presents itself to me as something a horrible, evil, infectious, dangerous memetic attachment would cause them to say. And no doubt they perceive very nearly everything I say as something someone would say who is in thrall to the Devil and Sin and bound by the chains of the flesh. It seems–although I’m not certain–that once you get separated from someone, after a certain point, they no longer present themselves to you as rational agents–that we lose the ability to see others as reasonable, if they are too far away. (We may be right or wrong in not seeing them as such, of course.) Catholic nuns and atheist rationalists seem clearly sufficiently far away that what is identified as truth-seeking behavior by one is usually identified as foreign-principality-infection by the other.
And you don’t disagree with someone carrying a horrible infectious viral agent–you tell people to STAY AWAY NO MATTER WHAT. And this is surely true of memetic as well as viral agents. And this warning to stay away will be perceived as an attack–which, to a certain degree, it is–and this will lead to name calling. It leads to a fight, but it’s not a fight because of people forgetting the things that they actually agree on. It’s just a fight.
So basically I’m wondering whether the body present thinks it’s true that we can’t really have reasonable disagreement between people separated by a certain distance–and I suppose, by extension, that we’re always going to get into nasty fights like these in any reasonably pluralistic society. (Not really sure I am right about this, of course, and not really sure I formulated this clearly.) It seems to jar a little with the SSC project, if so.
(I’d also be curious what other examples people could think of, where what is identified to the self as extreme truth-seeking optimization is identified by the other as extreme brainwashing.)
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>And you don’t disagree with someone carrying a horrible infectious viral agent–you tell people to STAY AWAY NO MATTER WHAT. And this is surely true of memetic as well as viral agents
This is not clear. While there is no upside to allowing viral agents to go around and infect people, allowing the same for memetic agents is both less bad and has benefits in allowing broader consideration of ideas.
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Memes-as-virus is the dominant metaphor, but sometimes it’s also useful to switch gears to memes-as-alleles. In that case, discourse stands in for sex, which we use to recombine survival strategies for tomorrow’s minds. In this metaphor, limitations on discourse look less like a quarantine and more like a mandatory eugenics program.
Which, I suppose, says less about the merits of free speech than it does about the dangers of choosing metaphors arbitrarily.
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Yours is a better point than the one I was going to make, but luckily the two are compatible:
There is an upside to allowing viruses to go around infecting people, which is why we do it. The opportunity cost involved in avoiding all viral infections is much worse than the cost of infection for most viruses. That’s why we don’t live in quarantine bubbles.
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Counterargument 1. Link is not safe for sanity.
Counterargument 2 (rot13’d for your protection):
lbh whfg ybfg gur tnzr
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…unless you yourself are carrying rival memetic viral agents which are threatened by that other person’s memes, and which can spread themselves more effectively if that other person is nowhere near you to counteract them. Which is what I think SeekingOmniscience was getting at – what is good from a god’s-eye-view may be bad for the specific memeplexes we currently value.
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When I read that comment, I immediately tried to think of some benefit to letting viral agents go around and infect people, and Guns, Germs, and Steel came to mind: it may suck for people in your civilization, but when you meet a different civilization without your old immunities they get crushed, if you call that an advantage. Which would actually support you: it seems likely that that when civilization with tons of competing memes / idea runs into civilization without so many, the one with more memes / ideas prevails. So one could develop a theory of American cultural imperialism based on this. Or something. Whether this is a benefit probably depends on what you think most contributes to adaptive fitness of memes / ideas…
But thanks for the criticism. You’re right that it is not clear that the quotation is true, and that there are obvious and clear benefits of letting memetic agents encounter people. How about I respond by qualifying the generality of the statement: you at least tell people whom you regard as in a nascent, youthful, particularly vulnerable epistemic state to stay away–that seems more generally true. (And Xianity and rationalism, oddly, share that they regard large portions of mankind as being in a vulnerable ungrounded epistemic state.)
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As a Catholic who has a number of atheist friends, it seems, from my experience, that disagreement is only detrimental to the extent that the controversy begins to affect the daily lives of the interlocutors in relation to one another. Obviously your convent example is on the extreme end, but in most cases a Catholic and an atheist (or agnostic, or Pastafarian, or whatever) can live in harmony since they usually have vaguely similar life goals such as advancing careers or trying to raise families.
The problem arises when this commonality begins to collapse, when the implications of utterly contrasting belief systems begin to manifest as contradictory ways of life. Your convent example is one, but another would be if, for example, one party decides that having over 5 children is part of their divine calling, or if one person wants to send their son to a private school that the other wants to shut down, because he believes private schools should not exist.
Ultimately, I think that the existence of such incidents demonstrates that pluralism is not a stable end-state for society if it generates such completely antithetical views. At some point trends will shift to favour one world-view over all the others, simply because there is no other way to have a naturally stable polity. It seems that, essentially, you need to start making conversions to your worldview, if at the very least as a self-protection measure.
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I think it’s true, and recommend this post on that subject:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/
The TL;DR is that when the person you’re arguing with has too much separation from you it is REALLY HARD to not seem like a crazy person, yet subjectively doesn’t feel like it OUGHT to be so hard as it actually is.
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This is one of the weaknesses of Scott’s piece, though it is in many ways an excellent post: there really are some issues where people radically disagree.
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what if the 2000 years institutional tradition of philosophy and civilization-building practice that Catholicism has built up has interesting points to make? What if it’s simply true that detaching oneself from the world allows one to argue about it without constantly wondering about how they can advantage themself by their arguments?
I mean, but here I am, anonymously on the Internet, so no one knows who I am or how, if at all, I advantage myself by this argument. Plus, faster information turnaround than the old monks reading and writing books system.
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I too sometimes feel like Scott’s stance is, basically, “Sure, these object-level issues are horrible and all… but what really matters is people being rude in blog comments!”
However, I think the point you’re making is orthogonal to this particular post.
Yes, there are differences in values, worldviews, and epistemology, both between individuals and between groups. And it’s scary to see other people turning into belief-aliens right in front of you.
But, on the other hand, there are also beliefs we have in common. Perhaps not with every person in every situation, but certainly on most of the controversial issues with most people, there is an area on consensus: e.g., having “sex” with an unconscious person without prior consent is wrong, reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies is a worthy goal, we should minimize the amount of pain we inflict on the animals we breed.
And these points of agreement could be a basis for both action — implementing policies most of us would support, even if our reasons are different, and dialogue — trying to persuade each other and expand the common ground, one step at a time.
But the outrage machine described in Scott’s post makes the common ground seem smaller, erodes it in the long term, and distracts everyone from actually working on the problems.
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I’ve heard this idea phrased (by Rorty) as “non-commensurable values” or “non-commensurable worldviews”. If your premises and foundational beliefs are far enough away from someone else’s, it becomes basically impossible to have a coherent or sensible conversation with them.
(I’m acutely aware of this because I’m a bit off from a bunch of people. I’m probably going to throw a bomb relevant to Scott’s post in a separate comment thread, but I also find a desire for equality to be totally incomprehensible, and reject any argument that involves the concept of fairness or deserving something).
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If it’s not breaking a confidence, what order is your (ex)friend joining? Enclosed or religious institute (all nuns are sisters, but not all sisters are nuns)?
Generally, discernment of a vocation nowadays is more nuanced than it used to be, and psychological fitness is one of the things assessed. Also, you go through a series of stages before final profession of vows; up to then, it’s revocable. Using the example I’m most familiar with (my sister is an ex-nun; didn’t take final vows but was first profession stage, now she’s married with two kids if that’s any encouragement to you about your friend?)
There’s a short introductory period where you and the order scope each other out to see if you’re a good fit for each other, this can be anything up to six months.
Then there’s the period of candidacy (what used to be called a postulant) that can last from one to two years.
Then you’re a novice, which is another two year period.
Then you make your first profession which is taking temporary vows binding for three to six years, depending what order.
Then finally after all that, final profession and commitment for life.
So you do get chances to change your mind, and it does happen that people are refused by orders at any time and get told “We don’t think this is the place for you”.
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I think the Consecrated to Christ people you talk to also think everything you say “presents itself to [them] as something a horrible, evil, infectious, dangerous memetic attachment would cause [you] to say.” They don’t use those words, but they mean the same thing. In fact their model for how to become more religiously pure seems to incorporate memes as a significant component even if it doesn’t call them that.
People have been trying to control ideas for as long as there’s been history. Ancient attempts by societal leaders to control religion are really a type of memetic warfare, though perhaps a very simple form. Generally speaking ancient religions that were open to other religions and had a way of incorporating them did better than ancient religions that required strict doctrinal purity.
As for staying away from memetic risks, I disagree. Your worldview, by which I mean the mental model you use for all of reality, should be constantly adjusted to incorporate everything you’re exposed to. If you’re exposed to a meme, like joining a convent, and it changes your worldview to the point where you start acting differently then that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I find no good standards for determining what information people should not ever be exposed to. I don’t even think there are people you should never have discussions with, assuming you can do so in physical safety.
Yes, we’ll always get into nasty fights over our disagreements. Moloch requires it because if you’re good at surviving strife you’ll eventually start causing it to weed out competitors who can’t survive it. Take heart in the fact that Cthulhu swims ever leftward, at least on long enough time scales. Scott’s gardens of rational discussion seem to grow wherever they spout up, and they are often involved in astonishingly good achievements for humanity. Eventually we may become the unstoppable eusocial aliens that could pose an existential threat to us.
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…I’d bet you 10 dollars that I could find three counterexamples. But even if I’m right, I don’t actually want to go looking for them.
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Steubenville provided way more than three counterexamples.
Of course, Steubenville also falls under this part…
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Is this a “you can find some shmuck to believe any proposition” response or a “I define feminism as good and good as feminism so the people who oppose it must have all negative qualities” response?
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1: Steubenville.
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Looking for them would imply searching for “rape caught on video”, which is likely to return 100% really unpleasant porn sites. <>
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I suspect the “I can find a counterexample” attitude is a powerful tool of Moloch. You can always find a counterexample – but this is not always significant. All too often I see articles in my FB feed of the form “BREAKING: People Say Offensive Things on Twitter!” Invariably the actual content of such articles is one or two particularly nasty anonymous Twitter posts, then a bunch of scene chewing about how this Says Something Important about society as a whole. The actual legwork of proving that “anonymous ass says something nasty about X” actually indicates that “a significant population actually believes nasty things about X” is left as an exercise for the reader, and thus the controversy monster is fed.
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Steubenville wasn’t about anti-feminists, it was about small town celebrity.
Anti-feminist tends to be a particular, semi-educated stance, if you take it to mean ‘against feminist ideology/epistemology’ rather than ‘conservative’.
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Re animal rights charities: Many people have actually heard of Vegan Outreach. They hand out more than a million leaflets a year on university campuses. This is an impressive number of interactions, arguably more valuable ones than PETA’s, and it might just be coincidence that you’re not one of the people who ran across them.
There are other organisations in animal welfare which try to optimise more for media coverage than Vegan Outreach while being less objectionable than PETA, most notably Direct Action Everywhere, who managed to get a bunch of mainstream coverage recently.
People in animal rights certainly think about these problems.
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I’d also point out Mercy for Animals and Compassion Over Killing as animal advocacy groups that are able to get media attention without being outrageous. They do it by regularly releasing absolutely horrifying undercover video of abuse on factory farms and slaughterhouses.
They seem to be incredibly good at getting media coverage, and the coverage they get is pretty consistently about the issue, not about their own silly stunts.
PETA is simply trapped in a very old-school “all media is good media” mentality. Maybe that had some value when they started in the 80s, but as Scott points out, enough people are aware of the basic issues (factory farming, etc.) that optimizing for media coverage and nothing else seems like a pretty poor strategy.
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I’ve been involved in a number of vegan communities along the west coast and I’ve never heard of Vegan Outreach. I have not met anyone who is not familiar with PETA (conversely, I have also not met anyone that *supports* PETA)
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I had Direct Action Everywhere in mind when I read the post. Its publicity seems to be an effect of controversy — as I understand it, its lucky break came when Glenn Beck mocked one of their protests. Possibly it can surpass PETA at its own game, find a new Pareto frontier in the controversy/publicity space, and still be less controversial than PETA.
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I don’t think that “[VO] hand out more than a million leaflets a year on university campuses” implies that “many people have actually heard of VO”. Just because someone receives a pamphlet doesn’t mean that they remember the organisation that gave them the pamphlet (or even that they actually read the pamphlet).
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I have a vegan animal-rights activist brother and I get all this PETA-style crap from him and let me tell you, it has not changed my mind re: vegetarianism/veganism.
In fact, after one or two of their stupid pronouncements, I’m in a mood to go “Let’s bring back the live plucking of geese!”
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Many schools of ancient philosophy (e.g., the Stoics or Epicureans) have an undercurrent of resignation or detachment. Roughly, they teach that “the world is a big chaotic place and lots of things happen that you can’t control. The point of a philosophical education is to help you make peace with that.” Modern science and even modern political theory is much more about transforming or fixing the world.
Scott has done a fantastic job of pointing out ways in which our control over the world is exceedingly imperfect. In trying to improve the world by collective action, we create serious coordination problems. There is no particular guarantee that these problems are actually soluble. Arrow’s theorem and similar results demonstrate that some natural-seeming coordination problems do not have any possible solution.
Is the right approach a return to a less activist world-view? Should we be trying to fix the problem, or primarily trying to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are trapped inside a badly flawed system?
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I’m not so sure I see a necessary dichotomy.
It seems to me that people ought to strive to accept the world-as-is with as much equanimity as possible. If the world is full of serious co-ordination problems, I desire to see the world as full of serious co-ordination problems! If those problems are unsolvable, I should desire to see them as unsolvable.
But my prior against a problem being ‘unsolvable’ is pretty high. Like, if I define ‘solving this problem’ as ‘removing all the negative consequences by changing the world in a way which exclusively produces good outcomes’, that’s pretty unsolvable-sounding, but that’s also not normally the standard for solving problems.
(Given how long green-team/red-team biases, halo effects and feedback loops have been going on, they certainly look very *hard* to solve even by a lower standard.)
But unless there’s a really good reason for getting worked up about the world being in an imperfect-but-improvable state, a little equanimity is probably healthy for most people. I don’t think I’ll see Moloch slain in my lifetime, so I should learn to love the world even though Moloch is in it.
…but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t measure every sword I come across to see if it’ll strike its heart.
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I think it’s entirely possible, and very important, to be aware of and use accordingly each approach. You can be reconciled to the badly flawed system while still trying to fix it.
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You might as well be describing the gulf between rationalism and post modernism. Not that I disagree with you, but the movement you are proposing is that large. I dare say that many rationalists have disregarded the notion that man can be perfected through repressive application of culture and morality, which already puts us squarely opposed to post-modernist thought and the “activist” world view.
This is of course, not to say, that society cannot be made more equitable or just or safe, but as you are alluding to, the world/society/mankind are flawed. For instance, despite all our efforts to eliminate expressions of evil intent and action, there are not many rational people who would state that evil can be eliminated from man.
Therefore the question is more of a philosophical one – Imagine you live in a desert village where the sun rising every morning causes pain, discomfort, potentially even death, to the people in your village. Do you attempt to keep the sun from rising or do you protect yourself from it’s rays? Many people in “our village” have not accepted the inevitability of the sun, so they act in ways that they think can stop it that are often disruptive to the rest of the people who are attempting to find shelter or protect themselves or others.
I think the same scenario applies to your question, that is, a significant portion of the population have not accepted the nature of man as flawed, so rather than working within those constraints to find equitable solutions, they seek instead to fix that which cannot be fixed.
So, to put it succinctly – the “only thing” (and I suppose it’s quite a big thing) standing in the way of your proposition is the post-modernist “tabula rasa” interpretation of the nature of man and the infatuation that media and cultural activists have with it.
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The problem is that there’s no obvious way of telling which issues are soluble or not, so passivity means not solving ones that could be solved.
For example the stoics would say that disease will always ravage mankind and we should come to accept the impermanence of life, then we eradicated smallpox, invented antibiotics, massively reduced infant mortality, etc. War and general violence is far less common than it was in the past, and while politics is still fractious we don’t have emperors proudly displaying the severed heads of their rivals anymore.
I don’t think stoic detachment would have allowed you to solve those problems, or our current ones, to change things you need to care.
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We need some kind of social technology that can put hard limits on this insanity. Infobitt might fit this bill, or it might make the insanity spiral even more out of control, we shall see. I wonder how many potential controversies have been strangled in their crib by the existence of wikipedia over the years. Moldbug’s old essays about uberfact and duelnode proposed a way to harness the insanity and channel its power, which seemed prettty cool but who knows.
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On politically contentious topics wikipedia tends to be horribly biased towards one side or another. Since winning on wikipedia makes it seem like your side is right, people fight to accomplish that. It’e especially useful if you can get Wikipedia to reflect your side’s slant during the very earliest stages of the news cycle, so that lazy reporters read your slant and write articles that reinforce it, which can then be used as source material to justify making the page even more slanted in the future!
(If one cares about what’s actually *true* it is often helpful to read the “talk” page to see what points of view are being actively suppressed by biased editors.)
(Entries related to global warming tend to be *particularly* bad in this regard. Or economics. Or medicine.)
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Great, now you’ve got me plotting to create an army of sockpuppet accounts praising the virtues of the CIA’s torture program.
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I thought about the torture report example while reading this.
The torture report details conduct that is clearly terrible, like pointless torture of innocent people. But it’s still politicized, discussed a lot, has plenty of outrage about it – and people who disagree with the outrage. Clearly we don’t always just nod along sadly and look away when something clearly awful is revealed.
There are older SSC posts and concepts that address this: uber-politicization of all the things, and the “if I’m bad at fidelity then fidelity isn’t important” argument (“if we torture people, torture must not be so bad”). Perhaps those factors outweigh the “yeah these things are obviously bad so I won’t pay attention, whatever” factor.
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Would there be a way to write about it such that conservatives were triggered?
If we need to torture a few American citizens to help make our moderate Muslim friends in Pakistan feel safe then you’d be a racist to try and stop Obama fulfilling his duty to the international community. And if the government needs to probe your anus you should calm down and stop being such a homophobic prude – we have college educated experts working on this and they know what they’re doing. The fact that a few old white men like McCain think torture is bad is meaningless because they’re just hung up on outdated Christian morals.
The fact that you’re only bringing this up now that there’s a black man in the White House is really problematic, why don’t you Google: ingrained racial bias, shitlord.
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Scott, this is brilliant. Please consider becoming a full time writer.
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I think he effectively explained in the post itself that this would be a bad idea. His truth-seeking incentives are much better aligned while he is not relying on writing as his primary source of income.
(I am pessimistic about even Scott’s ability to make a living while mostly excluding the “things I will regret writing” category.)
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I would actually strongly counsel against this – I am betting that a good deal of what makes Scott’s writing so prolific and brilliant is the pressure caused by having a full-time job that doesn’t allow him to write whenever he wants to.
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From an outside view, are the best writers people who do it full time?
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Oddly enough, I found this post to be a great example of one reason that he should keep his day job, which is that it allows him to choose to write about articles like charity and methodological statistics that won’t garner many views but will be important and improve the world. If his livelihood depended on it, as well as the well being of his loved ones, this would be a much harder choice to make.
Sidenote, Scott already knows this but in case others are curious, psychiatrists actually have some of the shortest average hours of any medical specialty, so once he finishes residency he should have relatively more time to blog than he would in a different specialty, ceteris paribus.
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On this post of all posts, you need to consider the incentives. There is an oversupply of writers and success is only weakly correlated with ability. Can you think of a way to make it so that writing more and/or better will make Scott more likely to get the things he cares about? Because I can’t.
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Success for Scott could involve being a columnist for, say, Slate or the Bloomberg View and being read by far more people than he is now. If Scott could get 100x as many readers, then his occasional efficient charity articles would reach 100x as many people.
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Or, at the very least, release a printed (book) version of these posts on political ideology. I think a lot of people are looking for this kind of clarity and even-handedness.
Most attempts at being nonpartisan are transparent bullshit. This is the real thing.
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But as a brilliant writer he could turn us into packs of rabid dogs without us even noticing. The incentive would always be there, lurking.
Moloch be damned.
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I’m actually a little bit freaked out by how much I admire you Scott. Keep it up.
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I’m not sure the timing works out right for your theory. Ferguson became a big story before we had any real information on it, particularly (and importantly) the information that supported the police officer. Similarly, the UVA rape story was a big one before it became clear that it was fabricated (although that certainly blew it up further).
I don’t have a good alternative theory to offer. I do find it weird that that both the Trayvon and Ferguson stories were such poor supports for the narratives they were intended to push, especially when there were much worse injustices available that would have served. It seems like it would take a special kind of incompetence to miss that badly, but I haven’t seen any theories attributing it to malice which make much sense either.
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I half-jokingly told my family that the government should ignore issues that are controversial and quietly try to pass a bunch of laws that people have no opinion on. My suggestion: getting rid of the penny. They are so pointless, I don’t know why we have still have them.
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Do you read Throne & Altar? I’m guessing not, but coincidentally enough Bonald put up a post there last week with almost the exact same thesis:
https://bonald.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/why-the-media-keeps-highlighting-dubious-racist-police-murder-stories/
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This explains some of why you are a centrist, Scott.
In your day-to-day life you see disputes all the time where one side is conspicuously wrong, and you judge these disputes appropriately. You *are* aware of the balance fallacy. Yet, when a topic becomes huge enough to become Part Of The National Conversation, then it’s going to be “dubious enough to split people in half along lines corresponding to identity politics.”
Just as Chesterton Fences are a meta-argument for conservatism, the PETA Principle is a meta-argument for centrism.
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Edit: Also, what James Miller said: you could write this stuff full time, I’d buy the book.
The first thing the gamergate meme did was build discussion forums. With these it spread rapidly, even reforming at 8chan after 4chan expelled it. In this time many gamergate carriers began discussing the creation of friendly videogame news sites. Multiples such sites were launched with funding and attention from carriers, and rapidly bootstrapped themselves by focussing on controversial topics. Page view based internet advertising further incentives controversy. Speaking of pageviews: gamergate meme carriers widely use archive.org to capture snapshots of sites, preserving the outrage-generating properties of links without giving the enemy advertising revenue.
Both gamergate and anti-gamergate are leaderless online movements with the mutual goal of (memetic) extermination. They have prominent members, but no one group or person can do more than influence their course. They self-modify, rapidly adopting the use of tools like archive.org to improve internal outrage generation. Users even build tools like the gamergate blocklist, a tool which auto-blocks any Twitter account following more than N accounts deemed to be carriers of the gamergate meme.
Analogizing the combined social graph and information distribution channels of a distributed movement to a brain, these memes are doing radical neurosurgery. They’re not just evolving better outrage generating media, they’re generating tools to improve their ability to generate outrage, changing their structure, and adding new information-propagation nodes. Viewed through this lens, it almost looks like a very primitive AI bootstrapping.
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Wow, this is a really great article, and articulates something that was driving me crazy all throughout the Ferguson thing. I generally try to avoid posting about politics, and especially about race and gender on Facebook, because it’s just not worth the headache, but I did, unwisely post one little comment about how it seemed to me that there was a strong tendency to pick the wrong cases to focus on.
I wasn’t even denying the premise that “police brutality is a big problem which disproportionately affects black people.” I even explicitly said something like that in my post. Yet even questioning whether the Brown case was the right one to get outraged about when there were so many other more unambiguously outrage-worthy cases out there got me shouted down. It was “white people don’t understand.” “How dare you blame the victim,” “STFU (not in acronym form)” from otherwise very kind, educated FB friends, etc. And then someone posted an NYTimes article about the fallacy of looking for the “perfect” victim (disregarding the question, of course, of whether Brown WAS a victim, which I guess only a racist would ask, since to the non-racist, a black person killed by a white policeman is, by definition, a victim).
And when the Garner thing got big and I saw the video of him getting strangled I was genuinely and profoundly outraged, saddened, and disgusted, both at the way the police behaved, and at the failure of the justice system, in all the ways I was supposed to be outraged about Ferguson but wasn’t… yet I quickly realized that if I posted about my outrage over that, it would one, only be to “prove” how not-racist I am to all the cool people and two, be a very ineffective way to do so, since, it doesn’t take an “anti-racist” to be outraged over the Garner case, it just takes a reasonable person, and isn’t that totally boring?
But I don’t think I consciously realized this latter bit of internal calculation in regards to signalling until I read this article. I think you are definitely on to something.
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The good news here is that we’ve mostly managed to coordinate to work around this by setting and adhering to standards of civil arguing, even if there’s a few different sets of standards. People manage to be vectors for these memes mostly without physically attacking vectors at other stages in the cycle, with a few failures.
Thanks a bunch for this explanation! This is probably why all the articles I see about nonprofit A focus on its more nebulous and arguable flaws (“After they made this offensive statement, bad stuff similar to the statement happened, but we can’t prove causality!” “Their rhetoric sounds similar to Nazi rhetoric!” “They do activity x!” when only people who already oppose this organization think x is bad) rather than less controversial failings, like the fact that the nonprofit in question has allowed group B to advertise with them, and group B appears consistently in UN reports and other reports due to their use of torture on unambiguously innocent victims.
(I don’t think the identity of nonprofit A or group B is relevant, but if anyone wants to know, just ask.)
I seriously dislike being a vector of memes that I oppose, which is why the exceptions I make to my “never promote religion memes” are when I am in a situation when I can’t really influence people. (The retired missionaries aren’t going to be more Christian if I carol for them.)
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I don’t think the toxoplasma analogy quite works. It’ close, but the memetics really fails. The key point in is that the DNA stays the same as it moves from cat to rat, so we have multiple strains of the parasite, each one competing with each other to become more effective at infecting hosts on both sides of the divide.
In the “jihad” and “war on terror” case, there is no DNA that is preserved between the transmission. The conversion from one side to the other is overly broad. For example, violence on one side also encourages “stop the violence!” memes on the other. I suppose this is a good thing that individual strains are not competing for their ability to provoke the other side, but merely for their ability to spread among their own side, given the environment set up by the memes on the other side. I think a better analogy is a symbiotic relationship.
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Give credit to the XKCD comic please.
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Also, though I am a super pro-free market anarcho-capitalist, I have to say that news reporting is one area where market incentives really seem to produce a lot of perverse effects (just one area??? I’m sure others might chime in, but yes, to me, at least, the media seems uniquely bad in this respect). It’s just so much more profitable to stoke tribal animosities and sensationalize everything than to aim for any sort of dispassionate presentation of facts or careful, balanced analysis. In a sense, it’s like “news” is being replaced by “outrage porn” or something, which, while it might serve some psychic purpose, does not function as “news.”
I don’t have very good ideas how this might be fixed, either with the government coercion I don’t like, or in an anarcho-capitalist society. I suspect the only thing that could really change it in either case would be a shift in attitudes toward greater awareness of this sensationalism and the tribalism it stokes and a corresponding growth in demand for more nuanced treatments… but I imagine that will be very slow in coming.
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News reporting, political commentary, opinion journalism, press releases, science reporting, blogging, micro-blogging, facebook posting, advertising, the TV and film industry, talk radio, televised political debates, and so on, ad nauseam, to encompass the whole of the apparatus of mass communication, on which our entire political and social system rests.
But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln et c
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So one obvious counterexample comes to mind: Rosa Parks. Parks was deliberately selected by anti-segregation activists as a rallying point because of the lack of ambiguity in her case. There were other black people who refused to move to the back of the bus beforehand. But they were not chosen because their cases were more ambiguous and less sympathetic. Many of them had rude and confrontational personalities, or had made disreputable lifestyle choices. Parks was chosen because she was a completely unambiguous example of a good decent person who was forced to go to the back of the bus.
Why did the NAACP and others not obey Moloch’s incentive structure? Was it MediaMoloch weaker in the 60s because the media was less advanced? Did it simply take time for the toxoplasma to infect the Civil Rights movement, and the Black Power movement was the result of that infection?
Whatever the case, the Civil Rights people in the 60s are generally regarded as more successful at changing policy than the subsequent Black Power people. They are also better remembered in history. So maybe fighting against infection is the way to go, even if it reduces media exposure.
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I can think of a lot of counter-examples. In fact, I think it is a very common strategy for activists to pick cases that will generate broad agreement/outrage in their favor.
Consider the Phelps family. They don’t get attention because the nation is divided over support for them. They get it because everybody hates them, which makes them useful for tarring the rest of the anti-SSM side.
This doesn’t necessarily invalidate the point of the post, any more than pointing to the turtle invalidates the statement “cheetahs evolved to run super-fast.” There are a lot of useful strategies available, and not all of them are compatible with each other. Molech selects for many things.
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Scott, I hate you for making me know about this:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/bird-watching-now-also-racist/
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Funny, I was just thinking about how a concerted effort to eliminate toxoplasma in humans would be the ultimate test of societal effectiveness: in the least convenient world where no vaccine can be found and it really just comes down to eliminating cats, could a democratic society officially sanction throwing bags of adorable kittens into furnaces, even if it’s for the sake of destroying a behavior-altering human brain parasite?* Given that we can not stop selling water to farmers at grossly below market rates in California despite there being a bit of a dry spell because their lobby is too powerful, I suspect that we would also fail to eliminate toxoplasma.
So this prompts the question: does this implicitly propose the existence of solutions to this analogous problem that we don’t implement because it emotionally amounts to throwing bags of adorable kittens into furnaces? The good feeling of supporting your fellow in-groupers, I suppose.
*Yeah, there would be other problems caused by eliminating cats, but the bags of kittens part would probably get a disproportionate share of opposition propaganda.
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This pattern has a long history. Take for example the Democratic-Republican reaction to the Jay Treaty in 1795: “Damn John Jay. Damn everyone who won’t damn John Jay. Damn everyone who won’t light candles and sit up nights damning John Jay.”
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Any thoughts on how we solve this? It seems like a step backwards from a previous culture of nuanced decision-making, but in the same way democracy is a chaotic mess compared to dictatorship – it’s probably still an important step forward?
Also there is a little smile at the very bottom of your blog post, and that is making me happy
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The government of the city of Ghent gives its inhabitants a 200 euros discount on any electric bicycle, but only if they stop driving a car. (people who didn’t drive a car in the first place can’t get the discount).
Virtually everyone thinks this is a perfectly reasonable way of incentivising bycicle use and disincentivising car use.
It is also analogous to your PETA example.
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When newspapers started, they did exactly the same thing. It was called “yellow journalism”.
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Ferguson made the news because of rioting and police response, long before people polarized on the original shooting. Riots always make the news, and there was one within 36 hours of the shooting. Maybe social media helped organize the protests, but I doubt social media confrontation was involved.
Most of the 60s race riots, such as in Watts, were prompted by non-fatal police brutality.
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Why is PETA considered assholes here? They are offering a to do something nice for others doing something nice. I’m not vegetarian, not PETA fan, but is that vegan in the picture seriously nuts? Does he expect Peta to start paying everyones water bills all of the sudden or does he prefer that they pay noones at all?
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Comparing this dynamic to Moloch is brilliant.
I mean, I’ve been (trying to) tell people about this exact problem for years. (“It’s not a liberal/conservative bias. It’s a sensationalism bias. The media produces so much outrage because, collectively, that’s what we want to consume. The problem isn’t the really just the media, it’s a collection of very poor incentives“.)
The description just takes me to long for me to drop in a conversation.
Crystallizing this pattern as is great. The enemy has a Name. We can fight memes with counter-memes.
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If Tumblr’s requirement that responses contain a copy of what they’re responding to has led to great discussions in which people misrepresent each other less than usual, we wouldn’t know because those discussions wouldn’t stir controversy.
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https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop
This will fix the problem. A formal language for group discussion. People who routinely jump on false controversies will be tuned out, and we can give more signal to people whose statements are rational.
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Technical solutions only work if people adopt them. Whats the incentive for most people?
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I’m warming up to the idea of anthropomorphizing Moloch. When your friends say awful things on social media, it’s not them who are doing it, it’s Moloch.
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It’s funny that you’ve chosen Moloch, who is itself a reference to capitalism. When marxists are talking about how capitalism turns us against each other, they aren’t just talking conspiracy-minded corporate CEO’s. They’re talking about inhuman dynamics like this.
Your poetic summary doesn’t go far enough. It’s not that we have a broken system, it’s that the system is working exactly as designed, which is to produce misery.
The only hope is when we reject the system, which itself requires a very radical re-understanding of our own world. But words like radical, or anti-capitalist become dirty words, and change becomes impossible.
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You know I really hate it when I read one of your posts and leave with a general feeling of dissatisfaction about how the world works and a burning desire to try and fix things.
By which I mean that this was a really excellent posts and one of your bests. (Even if it had just contained the section about the terrorist/war on meme, this post would have been one of your best.)
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There’s exceptions to this. The organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott purposefully avoided publicizing Claudette Colvin’s case like they did Rosa Parks’ because Colvin was a teenage girl who had become pregnant out of wedlock, while Parks by comparison was much harder to criticize. The NAACP knew they had to pick someone to represent the movement that could actually win (to paraphrase E.D. Nixon). Deliberating avoiding unnecessary controversy sometimes works out.
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Half-baked idea: News aggregator with a main sort function of “consensus”. People vote articles up or down, are sorted into clusters based on voting patterns, and the articles with broad approval from multiple clusters get promoted. The controversial articles, with significant disparities in approval from different clusters, quietly disappear
Of course, this would only work with a National Social Media Czar. More or less passing the buck here.
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This would be very gameable. News aggregators are in general very gameable.
The first problem is multiple/sockpuppet accounts. Not much to say about that, other than that it’s a hard problem to deal with.
The second problem is that (going from something a reddit admin said once), about one in ten ever register on a site, and about one in ten of those ever write or vote. Of those again, most people only vote or reply when they have a strong reaction to something (which is why popular one-liners get far more extreme ratings than essays), while there are a few people who vote on almost everything.
The third problem is that there’s a feedback effect here: stuff that “quietly disappears” tends to do so quickly, after only a very few people have ever looked at it. And guess what, those people tend to be the power users.
My proposed solution is sortition; that people don’t get to vote on everything, but instead they get two random comments every day (or so), and told to judge which one better contributes to the discussion. Since you don’t self-selected for issues you care strongly about, your judgment will probably be fairer. And since it’s only one decision each day, you can afford to think a little more about it.
You can then do cluster analysis on the answers if you wish, and maybe mark especially divisive comments. But I’d leave to people to decide what sort of conclusions they should draw from polarization.
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I sharply disagree with your assessment that your posts on very controversial topics are your least useful. Your rational, data-driven and lengthy considerations have rare quality, meaning you have practically a monopoly in that area. About charity, you’re pushing the right message, but so are others.
Maybe check how post length correlates with hits? I’d assume that your longer posts get more traffic because they’re really hard to summarize and people will say about them “go read it in full”. Why would they do that about charity posts?
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I suspect that the problem may be slightly worse than you think.
Pre-Ferguson, the Garner case was a fairly open-and-shut case of police brutality that everyone who noticed pretty much agreed on. Post-Ferguson, while (as you noted) there is still broad agreement, there is nevertheless a small but persistent pro-Pantaleo movement. Part of this would just be the increased exposure bringing it to the attention of assorted fringe groups- the more you sample any population, the higher the probability of getting an outlier- but I suspect there’s more going on.
I think that not only do controversial cases polarise issues (even previously unpolarised ones), but they prime every following case to be controversial as well, at least for a while afterwards. You said even the most anti-feminist of anti-feminists would condemn videotaped rape- here is a case of videotaped brutality that even major figures of the opposing tribe agree is troubling, and yet there are still people supporting it.
If I’m right, there are a few different mechanisms of action. Firstly, by polarising people, the deliciously controversial gap between their windows of acceptable behaviour grows and some previously boring cases become Moloch-fodder. Secondly, it loads up the issue with affect on both sides (is controversial affect [two groups loading opposite affect onto the same case] a thing? If not, I’m making it one), so that innocuous cases adopt the baggage of less innocuous ones. Thirdly, memes need their food and when they find a source, they’ll do their best to milk it dry before moving on- which is probably why the media dragged up the Garner case in the first place.
Whatever the causes, the effect is unpleasant to say the least. In the wake of a controversial edge case, every following case is scrutinised for the slightest drop of outrage- and if any is found, the whole situation repeats. It seems as though Moloch isn’t content with reducing a patch of human experience to a flaming wartorn parasite-infested heap: he must salt the earth so nothing good grows there for years, then lay incindiary mines so anyone trying to clean up the mess dies while making the situation worse.
On a side note, I would love for the next issue to be sexism in the study of reproductively viable worker ants, just to watch confusion reign supreme.
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I don’t want to burden you, but I swear to God you may be saving my brain with these articles. Being a long-time progressive who started to hate internet social justice was (figuratively) driving me insane in 2013, and I feel like you’re properly contextualizing a lot of thoughts I had about it in smartwords.
For example, connecting to the point about reblogging wars: when the Ferguson grand jury decision came in, I noticed the same effect where comedic accounts felt the need to weigh in. My absolute favorite example was from the “Doug Episodes” twitter, a (decently funny) account which tweets out absurdist descriptions of possible Doug episodes. This was their tweet on Ferguson: https://twitter.com/DougEpisodes/status/537118369515073536
I showed this to someone just to revel in the absurdity of the FAKE DOUG EPISODES COMEDY TWITTER feeling the need to weigh in, and was met with mild hostility for questioning his well-intentioned actions.
And now I feel like I get it. I understand the Doug episodes man and his support.
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Also, I can’t help but feel that there’s some sort of irony in writing an extremely in-depth post on why ‘Things I Will Regret Writing’-style posts are terrible and are leading to polarisation, poorer public discourse, and the general collapse of civilisation…and tagging it as ‘Things I Will Regret Writing’.
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Couldn’t the (alleged) effect of press exposure of rape allegations being negatively correlated with truthfulness be due to the fact that reporters select for headlines like “woman gets raped and university does not give a fuck” over “woman gets raped and perpetrator is arrested” when a reasonable explanation for why a rape allegation would not be actioned upon is that it was dubious?
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Well, I can probably unite most of the rest of the comments section? Opposition to factory farming is morally horrifying and it makes me angry that it exists. Animals have no moral worth and the idea of trading off any amount of human welfare for any amount of welfare is something I find so totally disgusting that I have trouble processing it.
(I don’t expect this to particularly convince anyone; it’s kind of silly to argue for premises. But I don’t like seeing the idea that “factory farming is bad” go unchallenged, and it’s all over the place).
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Jesus Christ, I’m glad you’re here.
I agree with you 100%. “Animal rights” are a nonsensical concept, and animal welfare by no means ought to have any primary significance to humans. Any significance it rightfully has is only derivative: it is not valued for itself but because it advances human interests in some way.
I think that animal welfarism is just as baseless and perverse as the kind of self-abnegating utilitarianism that so many “rationalists” seem to support.
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I came here to post (a slightly milder version of) this. (I’m not disgusted / can’t-process / anything, but I agree entirely with the sentiment.)
Let me also add that to the extent that factory farming makes meat more affordable, it seems to be an unalloyed good. Especially with respect to chickens; chicken is by far the most affordable meat, and you can (with a bit of skill/experience) stretch a single chicken to provide a good amount of protein and animal fat for a family of four for a week. Affordable chicken is a really, really beneficial thing for low-income families (speaking from experience here). Inasmuch as factory farming makes this possible — factory farming is a truly wonderful thing.
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The bird-watching controversy basically already happened with the EagleCam showing a wounded chick while maintaining the importance of the Prime Directive.
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This inter-group polarisation dynamic is then magnified by intra-group polarisation driven by chimp politics (a good way to prove yourself to the group is by persecuting and excluding arbitrary others from it).
This can lead to some highly entertaining outcomes; we have now almost got to a point where smart feminist women with reasonably prominent public roles should avoid identifying as feminist at all costs. That way no one can try to kick you out of the club, particularly if you don’t plan on toeing the party line at all times. You get some hate from the in-group, but less than you would if you identified as part of it (see also Mayer, Marissa).
Similarly, sending a strong signal that you don’t sign up to commonly held shibboleths can avoid an awful lot of hate from those who do. How can they persecute someone who doesn’t sign up to their framework? Their punishments have no power. Who gets more hate from social justice warriors – Laurie Penny or Steve Sailer? Laurie, of course, because she’s signalled that she wants to be part of the club, so she can consequently be hurt by exclusion from it. How could they hurt Steve? He’d just laugh.
Polarisation all the way.
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There is another confounding explanation for the “things I will regret writing” articles being the most popular. By definition, those are articles you had a good reason not to write; but you wrote them anyway. That would be because you had something particularly important to say, or a particularly clever way of saying it, or something like that. In other words, you should expect the TIWRR-tagged articles to be among the most important and/or best-written, because otherwise you wouldn’t have posted them.
(This very article is an example.)
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Was there a lot of media coverage of the Ferguson thing before the rioting started? If there wasn’t, I think that implies a different model.
I’ve never started a riot, but I don’t think the process normally includes a dispassioned examination of all the available evidence. I would suggest that the rioting started because of built up grievances, and that the specific incident was just the metaphorical match in the powderkeg.
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Yes, but who builds up and propagates the grievances in the first place? And remember there were lots of protests in places other than Ferguson too.
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I remember Eliezer once proposed that, as part of the War on Terror, any media outlet that reported on a terrorist attack should be fined for donating advertising space to a terrorist movement.
Perhaps the same is true of other cycles. In order to promote social justice/fight political correctness, we should boycott anyone on our side who helps publicise the Enemy’s clickbait.
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I remember Eliezer once proposed that, as part of the War on Terror, any media outlet that reported on a terrorist attack should be fined for donating advertising space to a terrorist movement.
Perhaps the same is true of other cycles. In order to promote social justice/fight political correctness, we should boycott anyone on our side who helps publicise the Enemy’s clickbait.
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This is good on the object level, but truly terrible on the meta level if we consider the inevitable results. If the government is handing out the punishments then we just have straightforward state censorship, while if each individual side is doing it then the incentives inevitably lead to more polarisation as each side penalises those on their own side who show the slightest sign of sympathy or understanding toward the hated enemy.
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I think this post from the resident contrarian at Crooked Timber complements our host’s…
…not only can you always “get a game” in the Israel/Palestine conflict, it’s a team sport. There any many injustices and abuses in this horrible old world, but not many of them will provide you with a social life. The political argument over the Middle East, however, will give you an entire set of friends, activities, topics of conversation – nearly all the services which an American college fraternity provides for its members.
(That dude looks like the worst vegan in the world, by the way. “Humans irritated me so I am going to harm a cow!” It’s like expressing your disapproval of Bono by stealing from a hungry orphan.)
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Now I know how I’m going to justify it next time I steal from a hungry orphan.
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You act as though the feminists and PETAists and such are making a tradeoff, that they have to make, in order to accomplish their goals. But are they accomplishing anything? They get people talking, but the only people convinced to side with them are the people who already sided with them. Later on, you describe this as people acting on a perverse incentive that creates destructive and pointless action, but earlier you act as if this is the best/only way they can accomplish their goals, so I am not sure what side you want me to land on here.
I also think you don’t really get the conflict between feminism and anti-feminism, because you seem to keep framing it as “these are the universally positive things feminism claims to be the only way to support, so anti-feminists must be the people who don’t like those things” but that’s sort of minor to the point at hand so you probably don’t want to talk about it.
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Off topic, but it’s good internet hygiene to link to or give credit to images you use (e.g. the xkcd one).
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This is an excellent summary of the first half of the reason I try to avoid ‘current events’.
(The second half, because paying attention to ‘the news’ results in having no understanding of risks and rates, as explained here:
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2007/05/virginia_tech_lesson.html)
In a way, there’s a sort of solution to this, which is to radically tune out as much as possible. Start ignoring places that you routinely get triggered. Try to filter your input stream down to things that are a) personally useful, or b) relatively uncontroversial. The correct response to a controversy is to ignore people who are talking about it.
Of course, this is like dieting, i.e. easy to describe in the abstract, and very difficult to put in practice in the moment when temptation is right there in front of you. Fortunately, techniques that help dieting work here too – manage the temptations you’ll be exposed to. Don’t punish yourself for failures, simply try to get back on the wagon without delay.
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This is my approach. My RSS reader has maybe a dozen feeds in it. Only about half of them are political/controversial. The ones that I select for politics are ones like SSC: ones which are thoughtful and interesting rather than outrage-generating, whether I agree with them or not. I have been on twitter a few times, but am yet to find a non-terrible use case for it.
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Like many other posts by Scott, this one deserves a stupidly epic soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcpGIVbPYrI
The lyrics are surprisingly relevant
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“As the old saying goes, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” This part looks like it got screwed up.
Anyway, if you understand memetics as well as you think, let’s see you repackage the ideas in this post so they go viral
Can’t be much harder than pretending to be a superintelligent AI and convincing a human gatekeeper to let you out of its box can it?
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Tumblr is extremely manipulative in it’s design, I use it because a lot of the artists I follow have migrated to it, but I can’t help feeling constantly annoyed by many of it’s design choices.
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I’ve actually long used the term “PETA Problem” for basically self-promoting activism over things that will actually result in sustainable long-term change. It always seemed to get the point across.
In today’s world where social cachet is becoming a more and more desired currency, I think this signaling effect is more and more pronounced. How to change this, I don’t know, other than reducing the importance of social cachet, which I’m not convinced we’re even able to put that particular genie in the bottle. And on top of that, people with social cachet want to keep that particular advantage. So they use their soapbox to demonize people who think that…wait a second…social cachet might not be a good indicator of what is good and what is bad and all that. And that reinforces and increases the value of signaling, making the problem a little bit worse.
That’s the way I see it in any case.
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Sailer has written extensively about our preference for 50-50 dramatic situation in which the outcome is uncertain and could go either way right up until the last minute: Sports, Electoral Politics, etc. Inflammatory Controversies are like endless overtime in which each side thinks it scores a point, then the other side does, and over and over.
And he’s also written about places like Slate who seem to writing articles specifically tailored to provoke and troll for outraged conservatives who can’t help but put their two cents in the comments. Most of their readership on their zaniest crap is conservatives, judging from the comments. This is probably Slate defrauding its advertisers, because I’m guessing those page views aren’t generating any sale-consummating clicks. So they have commercial incentive reasons – at least for the moment and until their advertisers get wise to the scam – to gin up controversy.
However.
Sometimes bad cases get promoted because they stand for the proposition that “X exists” when X doesn’t actually exist. Evidence of X is hard to come by, and in desperation, anything that remotely smacks of X is immediately pounced upon in a leap before you look, because the news is just “too good to check” in terms of the ability to say, “See! See! I told you X existed and is a real widespread problem as opposed to a really rare and aberrant thing!”
For example, hoaxes that get reported by easily duped journalists. These are real, they happen all the time. Because they fit the priors we want to believe – the ones that are high-status and politically leverageable – and so represent highly motivated confirmation bias.
For example – NY Mag recently went live with the insanely ridiculous story about that teenager who made “$72 Million!” in the stock market, and had to climb down, humiliated, when it turned out the kid just made it up and played them like fools, which they were.
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Commenters are not representative of readers at all. People who hate, for instance, an Amanda Marcotte piece are more likely to write a comment about how they hate it than any other group is to express their opinion about it.
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If you’re vetting all comments, you’ve probably gotten this message 10 times already, so just ignore it if that’s the case.
“As the old saying goes, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” Here the “once is happenstance” somehow ended up in the link for “twice”.
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Getting the outrage level wrong– in 1992, Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of the Pope on tv, partly to see what would happen and partly to draw attention to sexually abusive priests. As far as I can remember, all the publicity went to how obnoxious it was to tear up a picture of the Pope.
And on the other hand, Catholics are generally opposed to capital punishment, but what gets the attention is Catholic opposition to contraception, abortion, and homosexuality. Opposition to capital punishment somehow fails to generate enough outrage.
I’ve read a little about the early days of abolitionism, and it was a movement which spread really fast in England. I’m inclined to think that in addition to the outrageousness of slavery, that sort of moral movement was a relatively new thing– there weren’t so many competing moral demands, so people didn’t have as much resistance.
As I recall, Ferguson hit the news before the video about Michael Brown shoving the convenience store clerk came out. People didn’t start out knowing it was going to turn out to be a divisive case.
Again as I recall, people from Stubenville didn’t take the video seriously– enforcement doesn’t happen automatically from video, it only happens if people care about what’s shown on the video.
One thing I see from the outrage treadmill is that the cost of being moral keeps getting raised– this can make even trying to be moral seem to be not worth it.
I’m concerned about the relationships being destroyed in this politicized era. It’s a non-trivial loss.
I’m not interested in being racist, but I’ve decided to not read anything that starts with “Dear white people” and I feel much better for it. It’s definitely a “fuck you” to anyone who says I’m a bad person if I want to protect myself emotionally.
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I am pro-factory-farming. While there are certain problems in its current implementation (like the overuse of antibiotics), they are not intrinsic to the method, just like the business practices of Monsanto aren’t intrinsic to genetic engineering. As for the advantages:
(1) Factory farming provides a more controlled environment than free range farming. That means it can, if applied correctly, provide meat and eggs with much lower probability of having parasites, harmful bacteria or viruses. Which is nice.
(2) It is more cost- and recourse-efficient. When we already have some problems with the environment and availability of fertile land, I find pushing the argiculture to less efficient methods a particularly bad idea. In addition, having farming permanently subsidized doesn’t seem like a very good idea either.
I personally don’t really care about the well-being of chickens, but if someone does, I see certain possibilities to increase it that are compatible with factory farming. For example, keep them on heroin (which is very cheap when produced with industrial methods instead of drug cartels) up until the moment they should be killed, minus the time for heroin to be metabolized. Or find a way to massively inflict as much brain damage as possible (in order to stop them feeling anything, if they actually do feel) without compromising their basic bodily functions (seems like they maintain that even when decapitated, so that’s a pretty low standard), the ability to eat, and produce eggs.
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Absolutely, I am also in favor of factory farming. If they’re doing something that somehow harms human health, then I’m against that specific practice.
But I am not at all concerned about stopping it for the sake of “animal rights” or “animal welfare”. I don’t regard those things as having any weight compared to the slightest benefit to a single human.
And moreover, most of the alleged things that factory farming is doing to harm humans are overblown because of the motivation of pro-animal activists to use the “shotgun approach” of finding any argument—true or not—that might decrease support for it.
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So I’m not sure I’m convinced by this mechanism, but consider…
If news was the result of holiness signalling by the right, we’d have stories trying to out-right-wing each other (12 reasons why “enhanced interrogation techniques” are effective and we should use them on domestic criminals). If we had a neutral Moloch process merely optimizing for controversy, we’d look for controversies where the country is actually split 50-50. If media is driven by intra left holiness signalling, we’d see them pushing left wing narratives to the edge of plausibility, which appears to be what we in fact see.
Which implies there’s something more going on than a pure, spherical cow Molochattractor, the actual humans involved do make some difference. At the very least, they can drag the Overton window in a particular direction in the process of being turned into controversy-generating machines.
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Heh. Can you imagine the rightist version of upworthy? “Heroic billionaire tycoon fights oppressive tax regime. You’ll never guess what happens next…” “Ten tweets which show why all immigrants need to be deported…” “That moment when a liberal tries to claim all races are equal…” “12 reasons why monarchy is better (and it’s not what you think)…”
More seriously though:
I imagine the null hypothesis here is that the holier-than-thou signalling process is a pure spherical cow in that it shows no inherent bias towards leftism, but rather its current leftness is simply due to initial conditions. I.e. prior to the rise of media technology which enabled such spirals, ideology and ideological supremacy was basically a random walk and it just so happened that the time when media technology began to rise was when leftism was on the ascendant and as such tilted the spirals in a leftist direction which then became baked into the system as it matured.
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I think if Moloch is optimizing for controversy, he’ll try to find soft margin issues that divide the public into two groups as far apart as possible while minimizing the number of people who don’t take a side. There’s no real preference for whether the split is 50/50 or 75/25 or 99/1. While much of the media, and especially huge chunks of Tumblr, does in fact push the “If you don’t believe [STATEMENT ON THE FAR EDGE OF LEFT THOUGHT] you’re a [MEMBER OF MORALLY-AWFUL CLASS]” narrative, this has the effect of redrawing the margin to put people close to it on one side or the other. It certainly seems to me like the Left does a better job of this than the Right, but this might be because Left sacred values are ones I got drilled into me from an early age, while Right sacred values are ones I hold more intellectually and came to later in life. (So YMMV). But there are obvious currents of neoreactionary thought that have the same effect of drawing a boundary and ensuring that you’re either firmly on THIS side, or way over THERE. While I generally avoid the right end of the mainstream media like a plague, Benghazi seems like an example of the same thing from them (although I could easily be wrong). So this seems like a pretty plausible mechanism to me.
(Side note: I’m actually pretty intrigued by the maximum margin classifier interpretation of politicization and wonder if it would be possible to come up with a model explaining it. However, I know nothing about math nor about social science, so I’m probably not the best person for this.)
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Half the US population is conservative, but it seems that way more than half of the *writing* is liberal. And this holds true even in a world of social media when anyone can write on the internet.
Possible explanations:
*memetic dominance is still driven by institutions (like universities and magazines) that are left-dominated, even in a world where technically anyone can blog
*there’s some intrinsic connection between the left and words; conservative culture is just somehow *less talkative* on the whole. [relevant data point: libertarian culture is extremely talkative, which probably explains why libertarians have disproportionate memetic dominance compared to their actual numbers.]
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I’m…not certain about the rape section. For one, it seems to me like the test case for controversy would be the most commonly reported rape: rape committed by an acquaintance, under the influence of alcohol. In addition, when the UVa story was initially spreading, I didn’t see a lot of discussion of it as a controversy; I saw a lot of people who spread the story not expecting it to be doubted. (This might be an artifact of my own online community presence, of course.)
I feel like there’s a missing factor here, one which correlates with controversy but isn’t quite it. Narrativity, maybe? People report news that tells stories when those stories exemplify how they think the world works, and are themselves dramatic and interesting?
Or maybe we’ve reached the point where it’s purely about the reporting that makes events viral, and that while each individual action in a category are clearly uncontroversially bad (e.g., the various bits of abusive idiocy hurled during the Ant Drone Thingy), what gets traction is people reporting on them with conclusions which are not justified (“This reaction to our perfectly legitimate and politely phrased grievances proves the other side is bad and wrong!”), and it’s purely the generated media driving the rage cycle, not the real-world events.
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Great post (did you really tag this one “regret”?), but there’s one part of this argument I can’t square. People adopt radical cases and radical stances not just for signaling purposes, but because we actually disagree — your Catholic man thinks God doesn’t want us using condoms, while I would dispute that reasoning, not just factually but morally. I see divine command theory as an indefensible commitment to ignorance and potential tyranny; he sees my moral skepticism as a devious snare of Satan. Controversial opinions and cases may heighten those contradictions, but they don’t create them. Moloch needed a much better reason to start the cycle of violence in the Middle East than “Hey, you know what people don’t hate each other over yet…?” He needed oil.
IIRC, when the genes-vs.-memes discussion was getting underway back in the ’90s, the most common objection to adopting the meme framework was that memes are ill-defined. The second most common was that they’re not very important, certainly not as important as genes. I think there’s something to the latter, even if the former has been decisively swept aside (in popular usage, at least). The causes of human behavior are best looked for in our most basic motives, our most basic disagreements. If it often seems like those disagreements are superficial artifacts of media culture, well, that itself could be the memeplexes doing their flashy, attention-grabbing routine, couldn’t it?
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Controversial opinions and cases may heighten those contradictions, but they don’t create them.
Yes, while I think it is true that one of the significant functions of the media is to inflame disagreements it is worth remembering that men have been at each other’s throats since long before the word “media” would have made people think not of Fox News or the New York Times but the grand-kid of Helios. What is interesting is how tribal and sacred impulses can be exploited in a society where so much else encourages pacification.
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Well, it seems that Rationality itself it is a complex memetic organism then. One who enters in a symbiotic relationship with us (giving us tools to better decision making so we can last longer and spread it further).
Can we use some “Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis” approach to some of the cases exposed here to see if we get a clue on how to fight this dual stage types of memes, perhaps by some type of uncaring operator, a mind with sociopathic or psychopatic tendencies perhaps?
(Admittedly this presupposes, that those memes exist and they are “just” dual stage memes… And I know it sounds really desperate and weird to use those individuals to analyse a problem, I am disturbed by the implications of this post. Scott feel free to censure/edit this post if I sound too moronic or insane)
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I’m not sure I agree with the UVa section. That situation reads like the author (Erdely) chose Jackie’s story because Jackie made a “good” victim. According to the original narrative she was lured into a gang-rape initiation ritual while completely sober — there’s no room there for the small army of people who will reliably try to second-guess the actions of any rape victim. The focus of the story was supposed to be on how terrible universities are at handling rape cases, and so Erdely needed to lead with an uncontroversial victim who wouldn’t draw attention away from that.
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Scott,
this post is as good at it is long. Well done! I have two minor quibbles to point out, and I’ve finally resolved to do so, trusting that at least in here I won’t be feeding the Moloch.
The first is on Memes: the way I understand the subject is only marginally related to parasitology. The whole idea is that ideas are subject to natural selection because they can replicate from one brain to another (and mutate while doing so), then extended to other informational media such as websites etc. So the analogy applies to genes and memes, where the former use the DNA substrate and the latter use minds and by extension written words (and more). I understand the appeal of parasitology for your specific case, as it links nicely to Toxoplasmosis, but sometimes I just can’t help getting a little over-zealous when the theory of evolution gets somewhat misrepresented. This is inconsequential for the main points you raise, so I’m mentioning it just because I can’t resist the temptation.
Second, perhaps more importantly, you repeat many times a variation of the following:
And this again disturbs me because it subtly misrepresents what’s going on, and in this case it may even undermine your discourse in an oblique way. Whatever the subject, flagship cases will be the ones that are controversial (difficult to adjudicate, able to split the factions in roughly even proportions), not the worst possible cases. The worst possible cases would be the ones that only the hard-core ingroups will ever be able to confidently support, and will look uncontroversially unconvincing to all neutral viewers.
It may seem a minor semantic issue but it isn’t, because realising that the highly infectious controversies tend to cluster in the grey “uncertain” area is (albeit pretty obvious) also a way to point to a constructive interpretation: in itself, the fact that what has the greatest potential of getting most people attention is usually a problem that is difficult to untangle could be a good thing. It’s the subsequent and potentially independent polarisation of opinion that is where the trouble begins. As a consequence, the possible (weak) countermeasures are about trying to create a culture where disagreements are expected and accepted (see my conclusions here, I may be wishful-thinking, but I thought it was worth pointing it out.
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So, re: “almost no-one is evil; almost everything is broken” —
I agree that almost no human beings are primarily evil. But I think that to some degree it makes sense to think of there as being malicious “powers and principalities.”
Moloch, as you describe him, is the spirit of perverse incentives that lead to results nobody wants. Tumblr “wars” are a result of Tumblr’s reblog structure, as you correctly point out, and that’s a Moloch sort of phenomenon. Mutual defection on the Prisoners’ Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons are both classic examples of Moloch problems. I think I agree with you that meaningless political controversy tends to be a Moloch kind of problem.
But Moloch isn’t the worst thing out there. Freud wrote of Thanatos, the driving impulse towards death and killing. Judaism speaks of the “yetzer hara”, the evil inclination. Poe wrote of the “imp of the perverse.” Rand wrote of “hatred of the good because it is good.” John said “all who do evil hate the light.” There is a human impulse to cruelty, a will-to-destroy. It’s a part of human nature; nobody’s immune, though different people are “possessed” by malevolence to different degrees.
Madeleine L’Engle’s “Echthroi” are a good metaphor for this. There aren’t really evil humans in her books, though there are misguided ones. But the Echthroi really *are* evil, and sometimes they get to humans and make them serve darkness.
(Ordinarily, as children’s-books-with-surprisingly-deep-theology go, I think Diane Duane is much more legit than Madeleine L’Engle, but I think L’Engle deals with evil better. The Lone Power is just an asshole, whom I find it hard to give credit for all the damage in the universe. The Echthroi, on the other hand… are very believable.)
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Behold Chthulu! One of the sephirot of Gnon!
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You’ve completely left out an essential part of memetics, which is that memes compete. While this starts an evolution that can make a few of them stronger, they all weaken each other. You leaving that out makes memes seem stronger than they are.
You make the global rage controversies sound like unprecedented danger. I disagree with that assessment, because national issues like Ferguson and global ones like the War on Terror are outcompeting for attention the countless local rage controversies which are worse.
There’s bickering in every village, there are feuds in every extended family, there’s resentment at every border. These all used to be a lot meaner, and frequently violent. This should be quite obvious from The Better Angels Of Our Nature. But if your excellent theory of Toxoplasma-like rage memes applies to gender issues on Tumblr, why wouldn’t it apply to the citizens of 18th century Tinyville always going on about each other, and to the hate between aunt Margie and uncle Billy that’s been going on for three decades?
You can look at rage bouncing back and forth between two groups on Tumblr, see a problem, and tell everyone about it. Well done. But please also see that this is much easier than to recognize a similar pattern within a tiny community where everything is personal and little collective brainpower is available. Tiny rage memes (hateful memories, unforgotten injustices etc.) bounce back and forth in local colonies that are perhaps too small to host a brainpower-hungry rational house cleaning process. Bringing in a social worker or therapist has helped clean a lot of houses, but lots of places especially outside the First World don’t have enough of these. If these hateful conflicts are Toxoplasma-like rage memes too, that gives an angle of attack. They’ll die when outcompeted by stronger memes. When the kids are too busy on Facebook to listen to aunt Margie talking about Billy again.
But if you can find another solution that works on the big and obvious problem, maybe it’ll work on the many small and nonobvious ones, too.
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So what are we to do to fight the controversy plague? What personality traits could help one stay clean, and maybe, if widespread enough, even block the rise of the Moloch? More to the point, how can we change our society to help those traits spread? For example, the xkcd comic you quote suggests that those less prone to meaningless online battles may have a slightly better chance of “going to bed”, hence of reproducing sexually. Of course this effect would be tiny at best, but that’s a start!
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