I feel like this strategy is more meant to apply to things you can do. Like, if you don't volunteer at a homeless shelter, but if most people did you would, that's an indication you should reevaluate 'not volunteering at a homeless shelter'. Not even change your mind, you might have a perfectly valid reason not to, but a sign to at least check in if there might be bias there. I don't know if this is a great method of testing huge policy changes for bias, just individual thought processes and actions.
Yeah well I wouldn't really do it for arbitrary reasons. I'd just replace the existing tax system with an annual flat "membership fee" which for the US right now would need to be about $24K. If you can't pay the fee you don't get to live there.
If it's good enough for your country club, it's good enough for your country.
That’s EXACTLY the sort of “how can I get away with ignoring her” that she is talking about.
Perfect example: imagine a world where germophobe Trump panicked at the first news of Covid and demanded federal laws for masks, working at home, etc. In that world are you still supporting all those things? Or are you complaining about yet another insane Republican power grab that is the first step on a slippery slope, a scheme that, conveniently, works out great for the jobs of rich white men but reduces quality of life for everyone else?
THAT is what it is about. Consider arguments in a different world…
It's nice to hang out in spaces where at least a significant portion of people accept that "most people are fundamentally incapable of being rational most of the time, when they are rational it's mostly an accident, and that even most people who are more rational than average still mostly engage in irrational motivated reasoning".
You might consider the possibility that you are trying to think about things, and that the reason you think the things you think is not a cosmic accident. After all, it's possible you're wrong on that point and it would make a big difference if you are.
I'm not sure how that conclusion is supposed to follow. Even if we think that it's impossible for most of us to be mostly rational most of the time, if we think that some sorts of efforts can help us be more rational some of the time, without making us less rational other times, and we can show the benefits of that increment of rationality, then it seems like we should pursue those efforts.
Just like I can still think it's worthwhile to do things to cut carbon emissions somewhat, even if I think it's unlikely or even impossible to get the world to cut enough to avoid 4 degrees C of warming.
Isn't that just parallel to "most people are fundamentally incapable of being altruistic most of the time, when they are altruistic it's mostly an accident, and that even most people who are more altruistic than average still mostly engage in selfish behavior." That doesn't lead me to conclude that altruism is pointless; it leads me to conclude that altruism is difficult.
Don't you need to make a distinction beween "irrational" and "unpredictable?" I would agree most people are incapable of being rational, for a certain definition of that word. But they are often 100% predictable, so in *that* sense they *are* "rational" = "following a system of logically consistent rules." The rule may very well be "John is in love with Mary and so Mary can do no wrong, so even if Mary carelessly drives through a red light and wrecks the car John will argue fiercely that it's the other guy's fault." So John is certainly irrational by one definition of "rationality" but he is "rational" by another -- he follows a set of rules in a predictable way.
If people are predictable, as they kind of are, I would say, then there's no reason you need to abandon all hope of working with them and do your own thing, you just need to fold the rules by which they actually operate into *your* rational decision-making process. I see it as pretty similar to how one approaches natural phenomena. You wouldn't argue that a tornado is the atmosphere behaving "irrationally," you would just fold the possibility of a tornado into your own decision-making.
I agree with the last point, but I'm confused by what you mean in the first paragraph. Let's say I was a horse breeder. Nobody would suspect horses of having complex mental states or being nuanced in Bayes' Theorem, and they're clearly emotional animals. But it turns out their behavior is quite "rational" in the sense that it follows from a set of deducible rules, and they're pretty reliable about following those rules, so one can manage them and work with them pretty well.
Why not think the same way about people? They may very well have silly internal mental states and do things that are logically inconsistent with their stated aims and beliefs, but...why not just discount their stated aims and beliefs as epiphenomenal, and treat them like...well, horses? They do appear to follow a set of logically consistent rules, which granted aren't the same as the rule they *say* they are following, but which are still deducible and pretty reliable.
Also, I kind of beg to differ on human knowledge being cumulative. It's only cumulative in certain areas, such as fire and antibiotics and so forth. But in other areas, it doesn't seem to be. One generation is scarred by getting into an expensive war without clear aims, and by gum in a generation and a half people will be doing it again. "This time it's different!" Nobody every thinks that perpetual motion has never worked only because it hasn't been tried the right way, so why not give it another spin?
I mean, sometimes the societal consensus happens to be the correct thing. Do you think Luke changed his mind because of societal consensus or because of good arguments?
Social consensus. I say that because he was very careful to explain how it was a good argument. If it was obvious, either to himself or others, that it was a good and argument and not the build-up of social pressure, he wouldn't feel compelled to defend his pride by arguing it totally was his own decision, no not giving in to the crowd at all, nosireebob.
Agreed. Likewise on the Jerry Taylor example. Getting with the climate consensus line isn't heroic. If anything it makes me think he was just taking his anti-climate change line because it was popular with some group when he claims "Oh, I read the science and I guess it is better now"; the science hasn't changed much at all, hardly enough to justify a 180 turn in my opinion.
Then I asked myself "Why does that name seen vaguely familiar?" Oh, right, he is the head of the Niskanen Center. Jerry Taylor is something of a weather vane, one that has in recent years spun left. He's a political salesman, not a serious thinker.
I haven't read the book. Are there any examples where the rational change was away from the current social consensus? Anyone who went from "Climate is an existential threat and if we don't do something serious about it in the next ten years we are finished" to "climate change may present some problems over the next century?"
He's no longer head of Niskanen, as was revealed today. He's also someone people might want to associate less, although an aspiring rationalist like Julia might still say that the specific incident of him changing his mind is worth emulating.
1. The global warming skeptic who moves towards accepting global warming
2. The Republican party supporter who moves towards believing that a Republican Party politician involved in a scandal is actually guilty
3. Another global warming skeptic, this one named, who moves towards accepting global warming
4. An anti-dating pastor who moves towards accepting dating.
On the flip side we do have a feminist who retracted an anti-man article after realising it was wrong. But the other examples are all oriented in one direction.
> including the one that ends in landing a hot rationalist wife
Holy crap, your take is weird and dehumanizing.
Like... what is the author supposed to do here. Not talk about a personal experience that defined keys parts of her life while being directly related to the subject of the book? Be a gay man so that she can't be accused of selling herself as a trophy that lonely men could get if they buy her book?
> Like... what is the author supposed to do here. Not talk about a personal experience that defined keys parts of her life while being directly related to the subject of the book?
Probably? If my wife were writing a book about rationality I'd prefer she didn't illustrate it with examples of "Here's times that my husband was wrong and was successfully badgered into admitting it".
Why not, if they were true? I have repeatedly told the story of a time when I was wrong — about the implication for me of Covid early in the pandemic — and was persuaded by my son to cancel the last two talks of my European trip and fly home. And about why I was wrong — using crystalized instead of fluid intelligence, possibly due to age.
I have no objection if my son wants to tell the story.
I feel like disagreements between husband and wife are different to disagreements between father and son. A husband and wife should act (in public, or in front of their children) as a single unit, in a way that a father and son aren't expected to.
I didn't take it that he was badgered, the story is that despite everyone trying to badger him into "it was wrong", he stuck to his guns, but later changed his mind because someone convinced him (not bullied him) and then he equally stuck to his guns when other people were trying to badger him about *that*.
I can see why she would find it admirable: social bullying didn't work, persuasive evidence did!
It could equally be taken as "hey you too can land yourself a hot rationalist husband", for people interested in acquiring a husband 😀
What's interesting to me here is that I really, *really* dislike the Obama anecdote, and poking at my brain as to *why* it is making me itchy is turning up a lot of things that are not really rational as such, but possibly the way most of us react instinctively when we dislike stuff.
As with Trump, I never believed the hype around Obama - either that he was the Starchild Indigo Child Lightbearer (and people unabashedly saying this on social media made me go "Hmmmm????" very hard) or that he was a secret Muslim going to overthrow the dear old US of A. I considered he was a standard politician who had made a career by a bit of adroitness and being willing to push the "First African-American Ever" angle hard (no blame to him, you do what you can with what you have to achieve your goals).
But the amount of - let's say "boot licking" instead of my first phrasing of this - annoyed the heck out of me. The tingle down the leg wasn't the half of it:
Now we were supposed to admire Obama's diet, for one (and the point here about Hannity attacking Obama for putting mustard on his burger reads very ironically when you consider Trump's steak and ketchup):
And in general, the idolising just got to the point that I started wanting to kick the cat whenever I saw yet another "Most fantastic person ever in the history of the world does another fantastic thing" story. So anecdotes about "Obama behaved like a control-freak boss" push several of my buttons (I don't like mind games of this kind, if a boss wants to know my genuine opinion let them ask me, not play cat-and-mouse games of this kind to see if they can trip me up; also, anybody who gets that far up the ladder already knows that your underlings are going to "yes sir no sir" anything you say, because the guy who points out that the Emperor is wearing no pants generally doesn't get showered with praise and rewards, see the history of whistleblowing).
I would guess you dislike the Obama anecdote simply because it shows him at his patronizing better-than-you worst. "You people are just children, helpless in the face of my Jedi mind tricks to keep you on your toes. Who's your daddy, bitches?"
What may be causing you trouble is why it doesn't bug *other* people the same way. And that is an interesting question. Put that anecdote in the mouth of Trump and a whole lot of those same people would be foaming at the mouth about his arrogance, narcissistic manipulativeness, inability to trust or be trusted. Why the difference? It isn't *just* politics, but what it is is not easy to pin down.
Well, in fairness a book advising you on how to think more skeptically is obviously in a tricky place. The message has to be carefully tailored "Be more skeptical! Er...except not about what *I'm* saying...you can totally take that to the bank. But the next guy over, in the book on the best-seller shelf -- you definitely want to take him with a grain of salt. Not me, though. Him."
"(sometimes this is be fine: I don’t like having a boring WASPy name like “Scott”, but I don’t bother changing it. If I had a cool ethnically-appropriate name like “Menachem”, would I change it to “Scott”? No. But “the transaction costs for changing are too high so I’m not going to do it” is a totally reasonable justification for status quo bias)"
Hmm yes, transaction costs of changing a name are high. After all, it's not like you had been writing under a pseudonym for many years that could have been anything you wanted, Menachem Alexander
I mean, the transaction costs for switching psuedonyms are still pretty high. Setup costs on any name you fancy are cheap, but a reputation builds on the name etc
A fair point, except that Scott was originally writing under "Yvain" at LessWrong, and I believe started to use "Scott Alexander" once SlateStarCodex was started. So he accepted the costs then, but failed to call himself Menachem Awesomeman.
Although I'm sure there are probably a bunch of good reasons for the original SA pseudonym which we aren't privy to
I wasn't around back then, but the LessWrong wiki has a page for "Yvain" that redirects to "Scott Alexander", so I feel pretty confident that "Yvain" is correct.
You may be confusing 'Yvain' with the real last name of Mencius Moldbug, 'Curtis Yarvin'. (I keep misremembering it as "Yavin" -- I hope the man himself would appreciate the irony that I get him confused with a "Star Wars" battle which culminated in the death of an Emperor and the restoration of a democracy.)
Is it charitable to make jokes saying that someone you disagree with is simply an invention of someone else? As if they're a character or parody? This joke seems very "soldier mindset".
The joke, of course, is not on Nikole Hannah Jones, but rather depends on the obvious social and political and identity differences between Scott and Jones, and is itself simply playing on Presto's joke of saying that Curtis Yarvin is a creation of Scott's. Now I am well and truly out of patience with you, so please find someone else to haunt.
This comment has finally made it clear to me that you, marxbro1917, are completely uncharitable and only here to be a nuisance. It is quite clearly a harmless and lighthearted (and also funny, imo) joke. I gave you the benefit of the doubt for too long. Thanks for making it so obvious with this one, buddy.
Tip: You made a good point here, but you overly belaboured it with your followups. You don't have to respond to everyone that replies to you; if they don't raise any points you haven't already addressed, there's no point repeating yourself.
>bunch of good reasons for the original SA pseudonym which we aren't privy to
I believe he said he didn't want to use "Scott Alexander (Actual-Last-Name)" to protect his private practice. As you may know he had a serious tiff with the NYT over the use of his last name.
Since he could have published SSC under the name Menachem Awesomeman I read this as a strong inclination within Scott to tell the truth. He says his name is "Scott Alexander" which is true. It's not the whole truth, but the whole truth could be hurtful to innocent parties. So he looks for a middle way with some success and some difficulty.
I agree. I'm suspect about the idea that the transaction costs of a name change are really that high, although I agree they are not zero. Women in the United States routinely change their last name when they marry, and then revert to their "maiden" name upon divorce. Marry more than once or twice ... the transaction cost here is actually that institutions make you jump through hoops to update documents, but in terms of socially and professionally everyone gets it and just adapts like they would if you changed your pronouns. Ah but what about famous people? It seems likely easier for them after all, a famous person has the benefit of people being interested in what they are doing and a desire to keep up with the news about that person. Re-branding in the consumer product/business world happens, sometimes due to company mergers and sometimes due to escape the bad associations with the prior name. Anyway, just stream of consciousness thinking, but in support of how imho, while not zero, the transaction costs of changing one's name are not prohibitive, and likely just high enough that one wouldn't do it without a compelling reason (e.g. marriage, disassociate with a hated family name, etc.) but not so high that if your whimsy is to do it, it's easily enough done.
One complicating factor is that so much of American life is set up around the assumption that a married couple have the same last name (and that both parents have the same last name as their kids) that bearing the costs of violating this assumption sometimes outweighs the transaction costs (particularly since the law actively lowers the transaction costs for name changes associated with changes in a woman's marital status).
That's true, but it can get sticky in regards to the career aspect where the social convention rule doesn't apply (e.g. when the name on your driver's license and diploma don't match, or you publish a paper in an academic journal and then change your name, and so on). And then what if you do it twice (because let's face it, second marriages are common). And yet both of those things happen all the time too with seemingly little negative effects.
Right, but those effects are so small because you're still following a common pattern; everyone instantly understands when you say that was your maiden name, and everything is set up to deal with it.
Changing your name in opposition to cultural norms would be a lot harder than changing it in compliance with them.
Hmm, I think the effects are rather large when it comes to one's career in the sense that you do have to manage it to ensure that people know. But at the same time, I don't see how the cost is higher if the reason you're doing it is not due to marriage/divorce. The pathway is the same regardless.
Most married academic women I know kept their maiden names. It really does muck up your CV, and it’s so common in the community that it doesn’t surprise anyone when a married couple doesn’t share surnames.
I for one am offended by the idea that "Scott" is an Anglo-Saxon name. Scott is a Scottish name that pre-dates the arrival of Angles and Saxons in Britain.
Hardly. It's an English word originally applied to Irish speakers derived from a Latin ethnonym, which became a surname (note the Scott's in Scotland were mostly found in the English-speaking southeast) and then a forename, I presume through the normal process for this (e.g. Stanley, Baker) of naming a son with the surname of another branch of his ancestry.
All of which to say it is an English name and an Anglo-Saxon word at least. And that I'm somewhat pedantic about names.
I feel compelled to plug my friends' and my fan project, mindsetscouts.com. Everyone likes earning cool merit badges! One of the merit badges even has a link to a calibration spreadsheet template, if that is a thing you've always wanted but never wanted to bother making.
This excellent review convinced me to buy the book. One area of life where it is fine to have a pure soldier mindset is being a sports fan. You start rooting fro a team when you are young because of where you live, your family, whatever. You never consider changing your allegiance (although if, like me, you're a Mets fan, you sometime wish you could). If we all have a certain amount of "soldier"tendency in us, then sports fandom is a good and healthy way to exercise and partially exhaust that tendency.
Oh, not really. But one of the interesting places where that soldier mindset comes out in fandom is when there's a controversial play; people for one side are more likely to see that the _other_ team, for example, committed pass interference or touched the ball last before it went out of bounds.
So I use situations like that to remind myself to stay in scout mindset (not literally--I've been doing this for years, and now have a framework for it).
I tend also to be a scout when it comes to calls. But I am 100% soldier when it comes to my partisanship. Long ago, I should have, rationally, switched from being a Mets fan to being a Yankees fan. But I grew up pro-Mets, hating the Yankees, so that's that.
But as a Cubs fan, let me assure you that when the breakthrough happens, the payoff in joy is likely 200x better than the ersatz happiness of cheering for a team you only picked to win titles. ;)
(That said, my grandfather was born a Cubs fan, lived 87 years a Cubs fan, and died a Cubs fan without ever seeing them win a Series. There are risks to the approach.)
I was able to watch something like that with my local "Little League" 15U team. Our league isn't very competitive and usually gets crushed when it comes time to play outside the league (which happens at the end of each season). But one year we won *one* game before being eliminated. The next year we won district. The kids were happy, but some of the adults who had been working with our little league organization were ecstatic! They had been supporting our teams on the losing end for well over a decade.
My team just lost a really big game, and then video of the 3 best players sniffing a white powder (after the game) surfaced, and at first I was totally convinced that either the other team provided the white powder, or made the video! But then I thought, nah!
I try to take a scout mindset with regard to sports fandom when I set my expectations around how good I think the team will be in a season or how they will perform in a game.
Every pre season the talk is always all sunshine and rainbows about how great our team will be this year. Then the season happens and everyone is upset that the pre season expectations are not met.
Luckily it is very easy to find an outside view for your sports teams because the folks in Las Vegas put a number out there that you can bet on for total wins in the season and odds of winning each game. There are also computer models estimate those odds. So you can say "lots of people think we will be 6-5 this year why might they think that?"
I am a Nationals fan but I was incensed this summer when they traded away Kyle Schwarber at the trade deadline. Trading veteran Max Scherzer I understood, and saying goodbye to Trea Turner was a necessary part of that deal. Other trades I didn't mind. But Schwarber hit 16 home runs in 18 days in June and pulled the entire team into contention until he injured his hamstring.
I was furious with the team. It seemed unfair to Kyle and more unfair to the fans. Kyle is doing great things for the Red Sox. Having him and Juan Soto both would have won a lot more games for the Nats in the second half.
It seems my loyalty to some abstract concept of fairness is greater than my loyalty to my team.
I'd never bet on my own team. Occaionally I will bet against my team as a form of emotional hedging though. "I really want them to win, but if they don't then at least I get ten bucks"
Not being a sports fan, I find the soldier mindset in relation to sports a bit confusing.
If you root for a team, you generally admire and like your team's best players, and work up a fine froth about the best players on the opposing teams. But what if the players are traded? How does the process of changing your personal allegiances work? What is the sequence of thoughts and ideas one goes through in that situation?
that's why it's a soldier mentality. You follow the uniform. It lacks all rationality, can be incredibly engrossing/entertaining/sometimes enraging, but harmless.
Can I suggest a friendly edit? Instead of being in a froth about the "best" players, people get in a froth about "cheap" or "unsportsmanlike" players on the other team. (When people dislike the other team's best players, it's usually a sort of comradely dislike where it's understood that the only reason one dislikes them is the color of their jersey.)
But when an unsportsmanlike player joins one's team, the cognitive dissonance gets acute but goes away quickly. Usually, I find, after an uncomfortable transition of about a quarter season, fans revel in the new player's "gamesmanship."
What's hilarious is that, when confronted with their past views on this topic, the fan will easily, even gleefully, acknowledge that their views are purely because of their team allegiances. In other words, there's a real self-understanding in sports fandom that just doesn't exist in political fandom. People know they're being ridiculous, and don't care.
Funny example of that. My aunt was a huge University of South Carolina football fan and for years and years they were beaten (often badly) by the University of Florida and their coach Steve Spurrier who in addition to being a great coach was also very arrogant and quite abrasive. My Aunt hated him.
Fast forward several years later and he became the coach for the University of South Carolina and my aunt loved him. "He's an asshole but he is our asshole."
"Not being a sports fan, I find the soldier mindset in relation to sports a bit confusing.
If you root for a team, you generally admire and like your team's best players, and work up a fine froth about the best players on the opposing teams. But what if the players are traded? How does the process of changing your personal allegiances work? What is the sequence of thoughts and ideas one goes through in that situation?"
A number of sports fans are well aware that their support for "their" team is highly irrational, but go with it because it is fun.
So ... I am an SF Giants fan and passionately hate the Dodgers. I hope their players do poorly (but do NOT hope their players are injured ... lets keep a sense of perspective). If one of their players gets traded to the SF Giants then he gets promoted to "one of our guys" (with a few exceptions).
I like to think that my disdain for the Dodgers lets me be part of a long historical tradition dating back to the late 1800s. If I had grown up in the LA area I would, of course, have been a Dodgers fan. But I didn't, so SF Giants it is.
And note that there is no need to *admire* your team's best players. Some of them can be jerks. It is not disloyal to acknowledge this. It is also not disloyal to acknowledge greatness in players on "the other team." We just hope they play poorly in the future (unless they get traded to our team, of course). Very few SF Giants fans would claim that Clayton Kershaw was either a bad player or a bad person. We just want him to lose because he is a Dodger. Nothing complicated here.
If one of "our" players gets traded it is fine to continue to wish them well. Just not when they are playing "us." There is the concept of a "Forever Giant" (which likely exists for other teams, too) that signals that even though the player isn't on "our" team we still consider him "one of us."
The important point to realize is that many fans DO KNOW that this is borderline nuts. It is still fun to embrace, however, so many of us do.
It helps a lot if there's a decent amount of continuity. I'm not sure I could maintain emotional investment in a sport where 'my team' was just a set of jumpers to be filled arbitrarily from year to year or week to week. But when each year's team is last year's team with, say, 20% turnover, it's usually not too hard. Once you see the new guy not only wearing the colours but bonding with the players you already know and like, contributing to a win or sharing in the pain of a hard-fought loss, etc., it's not too hard to see him as part of the in-group and let your natural biases do their thing.
"It helps a lot if there's a decent amount of continuity. I'm not sure I could maintain emotional investment in a sport where 'my team' was just a set of jumpers to be filled arbitrarily from year to year or week to week."
Agreed.
Watching how the minor league teams (where year-to-year you might have 10% of the team returning) is interesting. And minor league baseball is fun! The teams manage this and fans cheer for "their" team and "hate" on their rivals (who are also seeing 90% turnover year-on-year) ...
I guess that's where you'd really need to lean into the sense of community with fellow fans. The team might be a mercenary army, but they're fighting for us!
I think it's important to consider WHY you're a sports fan. Is your goal to always support the winner? Or are you supporting the team that helps you connect with neighbors/clients/coworkers?
I've been left unsatisfied just supporting the team most likely to win. Just a boring experience since you really don't have anything invested in it. If you're supporting your underdog home team, you've got a cheering section at the bar, you get a high five from strangers for wearing their logo, and if they win... it's really a unique satisfaction. Even if they lose, you've still got all the other good stuff that comes with supporting that team. (I realize that doesn't apply as well in two-team cities.)
A more useful application for soldier/scout mindset in sports, IMHO, is analyzing what happens with your team. Your team get caught cheating? Key player caught doping? Star QB caught molesting 20 women? When the Astros got caught, I was immediately on the "all the other teams are doing it" bandwagon. After reflecting on it, I realized that was in direct conflict with my principles. So, I chose to shift my energy to supporting the local minor league team. Turns out that was way more fun in the end.
I moved from the SF Bay Area to North Carolina. I have always been a fan of the S.J. Sharks (NHL). Since moving here I decided that I was better served by being a Carolina Hurricane fan since very few Sharks games are televised here. And being a fan of a team I never see provides little or no joy.
This worked out really well since the Hurricanes are actually really good (both in terms of winning and in quality of gameplay). I went to a Sharks vs. Canes game. I rooted for the Canes(with a side of I won't be too unhappy if S.J. wins).
I know many fans in NYC who will root for both teams. I cannot, because of endless debates with my friends when I was a kid as to which team was "better."
I've often wondered what would happen in that situation, but fortunately, no team I've ever rooted for has done anything the least bit tawdry, so I don't have to decide.
You can hate the sin/sinner but still support the team. You just have to say, "Yes, that was terrible and he has brought shame to my team. We will move on without him."
"I've been left unsatisfied just supporting the team most likely to win." You better. I have some compassion for the poor people needing a top team to identify with while having no root connection. The small doses of happiness with all the achievements of regular winners one roots for never amount to what happens when Werder Bremen wins the Cup and the Championship in one season. Happening to some people, at least.
Still, professional Sports is a business and sometimes teams more or less vanish, when the economic background in their hometown changes, others develop weirdly and gain a whole new fanbase. I've also noticed developments between sports. Towns that don't have the potential for a top team in the most popular game (like, in these parts, association football aka soccer) sometimes get to have very good hockey, handball or basketball teams and enthusiastic fans to fill their venues. That's a bit tricky when most supporters have played the most popular game themselves as kids but not the game they are supposed to identify with.
Lol, but on the short line between “erudite, provocative right wing intellectual” and “just a Larpy nazi”, that cuts it a bit close to the right, while Moldy’s firmly on the left of it
Bronze Age Pervert is one of those rare intellectuals who doesn't need to be extraordinarily verbose, or even use sensible grammar, in order to let you know how intellectual he is. Wat mean?
I've read (well, skimmed) his book and while he's certainly a white supremacist I didn't see any support for any form of Socialism, National or otherwise.
yeah his book was toned down a lot, he regularly speaks about the inferiority / subversive nature / global power of / need to remove from power and influence of da jooz, although is somewhat careful to hide it from the least inquisitive of eyes
my bigger criticism is he’s just kinda making stuff up, say what you will about moldy but he writes seriously about history and power. brap just says stuff that sounds good if you dont look into it
oh you meant if he’s a “nazi”. nazi colloquially means Jew hate / white nationalist, just like “communist” means whatever it does in the net. But he also has (critical support style) endorsed the NSDAP many times
On the political scandals thing, one noticeable trend is that for people who support party X, they have to weigh the cost of having a politician who has done something scandalous against the risk of getting a politician from party Y, which is (for supporters of party X) intrinsically scandalous.
So it's not unreasonable to have a higher standard for your opponents (whose replacement is costless) than for your own party.
The other factor is about who will replace them, which is why I favour political systems that make it easy to replace a politician with another of the same party (and make that a separate process from the electoral process where voters choose between parties). Note that Al Franken was replaced as Senator easily - but his replacement, Tina Smith, is of the same party. Ralph Northam was also in a scandal of comparable magnitude, but remained as Governor of Virginia because his two same-party successors were involved in the same scandal and the third in line was of the other party. You can see the same process with the recent California recall; Gavin Newsom was able to ensure that the only possible replacement was a Republican and was able to run against that Republican. From the perspective of the Democratic majority in California, however bad Newsom was, a Republican would be worse.
The only case I can think of in recent years when a politician has been replaced by one of the opposite party as a result of a scandal is the Alabama Senate election when Roy Moore was defeated by Doug Jones.
Agreed with this analysis. Interesting case study in what could be seen as an application of this principle: Germany's electoral system, where everyone casts *two* votes: one for their direct representative for their region, and a "second vote" for a party. The direct representatives all make it into the Bundestag. But then, on the second vote, seats are added to the Bundestag to align its composition with the results of the party vote. Those second-vote seats are filled from a list each party prepares in advance of the election.
So if you like a party, but not their candidate in your district; or if you think a candidate from an opposing party is unusually good and moderate, but still dislike their party's principles; you can cast your direct vote for the individual you prefer, then your party vote for a party other than theirs, where only the party vote is really important for the eventual balance of power.
In practice, this still likely won't help you get rid of odious incumbents, at least if they're well-connected. Direct candidates are often high-up on their party's "list"; so even if they lose their local election, they'll make it in on the second vote. So it's not a perfect mechanism for removing Moores, Northams and Cuomos from office. (The latter two are/were executives, but you know what I mean). Nonetheless, I still like the scheme, since it allows for some decoupling of character judgment from political persuasion.
The Irish system which creates competition between candidates of a party as well as between parties (the exact details are rather long for a comment, and can be easily found on wikipedia) has a similar effect, perhaps better.
The Maltese system, which is normally described as being the same (they are both versions of "Single Transferable Vote") has a rule that makes it superior for this purpose, which is a rule prohibiting undernomination (again, I'll omit the details, they're easy to find).
In the US, the nature of the primary system means that STV with a rule against undernomination would be easy to implement, and this would very much sharpen intraparty competition - if you have to have five candidates of your party to be allowed to have any, and you're (even in a very strong area) not going to get more than four elected, then there is always an intraparty contest as well as an interparty contest.
The German system would work better if it was combined with some form of "open list" where voters can vote to influence who gets elected from the list; there are several versions of this, some of which entirely remove the influence of the party in terms of ordering the list, and others require a voter revolt on a huge scale to move a single candidate up a single place.
For people who already understand electoral systems, what I'm suggesting is STV in multi-member constituencies, with party primaries also conducted by STV, where the number of winners of each primary is the same as that in the general election, and where a shortage of nominees in the party primary would eliminate that party from contention in the general election.
The crazy thing about Roy Moore is he was kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court *twice* before he ran for Senate. Both times he was elected to that position. So he definitely represented the will of the people, and surely would have won again if not for the Washington Post reporting.
I was generally in favor of Franken resigning because I felt we Democrats needed to set a good example. I regret that outlook now, both because it was an unnecessary rush to judgement and because good examples mean nothing to Republicans.
I supported Northam because I felt that wearing blackface in a school skit decades earlier was trivial.
I wanted Chris Cuomo to resign because there was extensive evidence and the offenses were not trivial.
Frankly, if Al Franken hadn't resigned I still wouldn't take Democrats seriously on sexual harassment. That sacrifice was absolutely worth it, because it set a markedly different standard than the tribal defense of Bill Clinton a couple decades prior.
Generally, the only effective signals across tribal lines are costly ones.
I feel like this strategy is more meant to apply to things you can do. Like, if you don't volunteer at a homeless shelter, but if most people did you would, that's an indication you should reevaluate 'not volunteering at a homeless shelter'. Not even change your mind, you might have a perfectly valid reason not to, but a sign to at least check in if there might be bias there. I don't know if this is a great method of testing huge policy changes for bias, just individual thought processes and actions.
I am unironically in favour of deporting poor people to poor countries.
Yeah well I wouldn't really do it for arbitrary reasons. I'd just replace the existing tax system with an annual flat "membership fee" which for the US right now would need to be about $24K. If you can't pay the fee you don't get to live there.
If it's good enough for your country club, it's good enough for your country.
That’s EXACTLY the sort of “how can I get away with ignoring her” that she is talking about.
Perfect example: imagine a world where germophobe Trump panicked at the first news of Covid and demanded federal laws for masks, working at home, etc. In that world are you still supporting all those things? Or are you complaining about yet another insane Republican power grab that is the first step on a slippery slope, a scheme that, conveniently, works out great for the jobs of rich white men but reduces quality of life for everyone else?
THAT is what it is about. Consider arguments in a different world…
Yes, and...
It's nice to hang out in spaces where at least a significant portion of people accept that "most people are fundamentally incapable of being rational most of the time, when they are rational it's mostly an accident, and that even most people who are more rational than average still mostly engage in irrational motivated reasoning".
You might consider the possibility that you are trying to think about things, and that the reason you think the things you think is not a cosmic accident. After all, it's possible you're wrong on that point and it would make a big difference if you are.
How is it irrational?
I'm not sure how that conclusion is supposed to follow. Even if we think that it's impossible for most of us to be mostly rational most of the time, if we think that some sorts of efforts can help us be more rational some of the time, without making us less rational other times, and we can show the benefits of that increment of rationality, then it seems like we should pursue those efforts.
Just like I can still think it's worthwhile to do things to cut carbon emissions somewhat, even if I think it's unlikely or even impossible to get the world to cut enough to avoid 4 degrees C of warming.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TSSxyvjO4SSrC7_NLQAUYHSNTiq5dXtgityIeqRbAmI/
Isn't that just parallel to "most people are fundamentally incapable of being altruistic most of the time, when they are altruistic it's mostly an accident, and that even most people who are more altruistic than average still mostly engage in selfish behavior." That doesn't lead me to conclude that altruism is pointless; it leads me to conclude that altruism is difficult.
Don't you need to make a distinction beween "irrational" and "unpredictable?" I would agree most people are incapable of being rational, for a certain definition of that word. But they are often 100% predictable, so in *that* sense they *are* "rational" = "following a system of logically consistent rules." The rule may very well be "John is in love with Mary and so Mary can do no wrong, so even if Mary carelessly drives through a red light and wrecks the car John will argue fiercely that it's the other guy's fault." So John is certainly irrational by one definition of "rationality" but he is "rational" by another -- he follows a set of rules in a predictable way.
If people are predictable, as they kind of are, I would say, then there's no reason you need to abandon all hope of working with them and do your own thing, you just need to fold the rules by which they actually operate into *your* rational decision-making process. I see it as pretty similar to how one approaches natural phenomena. You wouldn't argue that a tornado is the atmosphere behaving "irrationally," you would just fold the possibility of a tornado into your own decision-making.
I agree with the last point, but I'm confused by what you mean in the first paragraph. Let's say I was a horse breeder. Nobody would suspect horses of having complex mental states or being nuanced in Bayes' Theorem, and they're clearly emotional animals. But it turns out their behavior is quite "rational" in the sense that it follows from a set of deducible rules, and they're pretty reliable about following those rules, so one can manage them and work with them pretty well.
Why not think the same way about people? They may very well have silly internal mental states and do things that are logically inconsistent with their stated aims and beliefs, but...why not just discount their stated aims and beliefs as epiphenomenal, and treat them like...well, horses? They do appear to follow a set of logically consistent rules, which granted aren't the same as the rule they *say* they are following, but which are still deducible and pretty reliable.
Also, I kind of beg to differ on human knowledge being cumulative. It's only cumulative in certain areas, such as fire and antibiotics and so forth. But in other areas, it doesn't seem to be. One generation is scarred by getting into an expensive war without clear aims, and by gum in a generation and a half people will be doing it again. "This time it's different!" Nobody every thinks that perpetual motion has never worked only because it hasn't been tried the right way, so why not give it another spin?
Based on Scott's review, I don't think this book is an endorsement of uncritical acceptance of the social consensus of the last several years.
While not seemingly the point of the book, it seems like adopting a "Scout Mindset" would cause one to have more skepticism, not less.
I'm even more confused. The socially approved consensus of ... meeting new people? Making friends? Falling in love?
I mean, sometimes the societal consensus happens to be the correct thing. Do you think Luke changed his mind because of societal consensus or because of good arguments?
Social consensus. I say that because he was very careful to explain how it was a good argument. If it was obvious, either to himself or others, that it was a good and argument and not the build-up of social pressure, he wouldn't feel compelled to defend his pride by arguing it totally was his own decision, no not giving in to the crowd at all, nosireebob.
Agreed. Likewise on the Jerry Taylor example. Getting with the climate consensus line isn't heroic. If anything it makes me think he was just taking his anti-climate change line because it was popular with some group when he claims "Oh, I read the science and I guess it is better now"; the science hasn't changed much at all, hardly enough to justify a 180 turn in my opinion.
Then I asked myself "Why does that name seen vaguely familiar?" Oh, right, he is the head of the Niskanen Center. Jerry Taylor is something of a weather vane, one that has in recent years spun left. He's a political salesman, not a serious thinker.
I haven't read the book. Are there any examples where the rational change was away from the current social consensus? Anyone who went from "Climate is an existential threat and if we don't do something serious about it in the next ten years we are finished" to "climate change may present some problems over the next century?"
He's no longer head of Niskanen, as was revealed today. He's also someone people might want to associate less, although an aspiring rationalist like Julia might still say that the specific incident of him changing his mind is worth emulating.
1. The global warming skeptic who moves towards accepting global warming
2. The Republican party supporter who moves towards believing that a Republican Party politician involved in a scandal is actually guilty
3. Another global warming skeptic, this one named, who moves towards accepting global warming
4. An anti-dating pastor who moves towards accepting dating.
On the flip side we do have a feminist who retracted an anti-man article after realising it was wrong. But the other examples are all oriented in one direction.
> including the one that ends in landing a hot rationalist wife
Holy crap, your take is weird and dehumanizing.
Like... what is the author supposed to do here. Not talk about a personal experience that defined keys parts of her life while being directly related to the subject of the book? Be a gay man so that she can't be accused of selling herself as a trophy that lonely men could get if they buy her book?
> Like... what is the author supposed to do here. Not talk about a personal experience that defined keys parts of her life while being directly related to the subject of the book?
Probably? If my wife were writing a book about rationality I'd prefer she didn't illustrate it with examples of "Here's times that my husband was wrong and was successfully badgered into admitting it".
Why not, if they were true? I have repeatedly told the story of a time when I was wrong — about the implication for me of Covid early in the pandemic — and was persuaded by my son to cancel the last two talks of my European trip and fly home. And about why I was wrong — using crystalized instead of fluid intelligence, possibly due to age.
I have no objection if my son wants to tell the story.
I feel like disagreements between husband and wife are different to disagreements between father and son. A husband and wife should act (in public, or in front of their children) as a single unit, in a way that a father and son aren't expected to.
I didn't take it that he was badgered, the story is that despite everyone trying to badger him into "it was wrong", he stuck to his guns, but later changed his mind because someone convinced him (not bullied him) and then he equally stuck to his guns when other people were trying to badger him about *that*.
I can see why she would find it admirable: social bullying didn't work, persuasive evidence did!
It could equally be taken as "hey you too can land yourself a hot rationalist husband", for people interested in acquiring a husband 😀
What's interesting to me here is that I really, *really* dislike the Obama anecdote, and poking at my brain as to *why* it is making me itchy is turning up a lot of things that are not really rational as such, but possibly the way most of us react instinctively when we dislike stuff.
As with Trump, I never believed the hype around Obama - either that he was the Starchild Indigo Child Lightbearer (and people unabashedly saying this on social media made me go "Hmmmm????" very hard) or that he was a secret Muslim going to overthrow the dear old US of A. I considered he was a standard politician who had made a career by a bit of adroitness and being willing to push the "First African-American Ever" angle hard (no blame to him, you do what you can with what you have to achieve your goals).
But the amount of - let's say "boot licking" instead of my first phrasing of this - annoyed the heck out of me. The tingle down the leg wasn't the half of it:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chris-matthews-i-felt-thi_n_86449
Now we were supposed to admire Obama's diet, for one (and the point here about Hannity attacking Obama for putting mustard on his burger reads very ironically when you consider Trump's steak and ketchup):
https://www.mashed.com/114046/barack-obama-really-eats/
And in general, the idolising just got to the point that I started wanting to kick the cat whenever I saw yet another "Most fantastic person ever in the history of the world does another fantastic thing" story. So anecdotes about "Obama behaved like a control-freak boss" push several of my buttons (I don't like mind games of this kind, if a boss wants to know my genuine opinion let them ask me, not play cat-and-mouse games of this kind to see if they can trip me up; also, anybody who gets that far up the ladder already knows that your underlings are going to "yes sir no sir" anything you say, because the guy who points out that the Emperor is wearing no pants generally doesn't get showered with praise and rewards, see the history of whistleblowing).
I would guess you dislike the Obama anecdote simply because it shows him at his patronizing better-than-you worst. "You people are just children, helpless in the face of my Jedi mind tricks to keep you on your toes. Who's your daddy, bitches?"
What may be causing you trouble is why it doesn't bug *other* people the same way. And that is an interesting question. Put that anecdote in the mouth of Trump and a whole lot of those same people would be foaming at the mouth about his arrogance, narcissistic manipulativeness, inability to trust or be trusted. Why the difference? It isn't *just* politics, but what it is is not easy to pin down.
Reader, I married him
Well, in fairness a book advising you on how to think more skeptically is obviously in a tricky place. The message has to be carefully tailored "Be more skeptical! Er...except not about what *I'm* saying...you can totally take that to the bank. But the next guy over, in the book on the best-seller shelf -- you definitely want to take him with a grain of salt. Not me, though. Him."
Norbert Wiener's name was Norbert Wiener.
Lengthy ads, but: https://www.cc.com/video/8j4n7k/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-the-dick-swett-incident
Not the famed jazz pianist Dick Hyman? Composer of the fingerbuster?
"(sometimes this is be fine: I don’t like having a boring WASPy name like “Scott”, but I don’t bother changing it. If I had a cool ethnically-appropriate name like “Menachem”, would I change it to “Scott”? No. But “the transaction costs for changing are too high so I’m not going to do it” is a totally reasonable justification for status quo bias)"
Hmm yes, transaction costs of changing a name are high. After all, it's not like you had been writing under a pseudonym for many years that could have been anything you wanted, Menachem Alexander
I mean, the transaction costs for switching psuedonyms are still pretty high. Setup costs on any name you fancy are cheap, but a reputation builds on the name etc
A fair point, except that Scott was originally writing under "Yvain" at LessWrong, and I believe started to use "Scott Alexander" once SlateStarCodex was started. So he accepted the costs then, but failed to call himself Menachem Awesomeman.
Although I'm sure there are probably a bunch of good reasons for the original SA pseudonym which we aren't privy to
I wasn't around back then, but the LessWrong wiki has a page for "Yvain" that redirects to "Scott Alexander", so I feel pretty confident that "Yvain" is correct.
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/index.php?title=Yvain&redirect=no
You may be confusing 'Yvain' with the real last name of Mencius Moldbug, 'Curtis Yarvin'. (I keep misremembering it as "Yavin" -- I hope the man himself would appreciate the irony that I get him confused with a "Star Wars" battle which culminated in the death of an Emperor and the restoration of a democracy.)
I felt like his pseudonym of "Moldbug" worked pretty well
And the "Nikole Hannah Jones" character is a brilliant touch.
Is it charitable to make jokes saying that someone you disagree with is simply an invention of someone else? As if they're a character or parody? This joke seems very "soldier mindset".
The joke, of course, is not on Nikole Hannah Jones, but rather depends on the obvious social and political and identity differences between Scott and Jones, and is itself simply playing on Presto's joke of saying that Curtis Yarvin is a creation of Scott's. Now I am well and truly out of patience with you, so please find someone else to haunt.
This comment has finally made it clear to me that you, marxbro1917, are completely uncharitable and only here to be a nuisance. It is quite clearly a harmless and lighthearted (and also funny, imo) joke. I gave you the benefit of the doubt for too long. Thanks for making it so obvious with this one, buddy.
Tip: You made a good point here, but you overly belaboured it with your followups. You don't have to respond to everyone that replies to you; if they don't raise any points you haven't already addressed, there's no point repeating yourself.
>bunch of good reasons for the original SA pseudonym which we aren't privy to
I believe he said he didn't want to use "Scott Alexander (Actual-Last-Name)" to protect his private practice. As you may know he had a serious tiff with the NYT over the use of his last name.
Since he could have published SSC under the name Menachem Awesomeman I read this as a strong inclination within Scott to tell the truth. He says his name is "Scott Alexander" which is true. It's not the whole truth, but the whole truth could be hurtful to innocent parties. So he looks for a middle way with some success and some difficulty.
I do respect Scott Alexander, but I might follow Menachem Awesomeman to the ends of the Earth. Food for thought.
:-)
He could change his name to “Scout”.
And that concludes the discussion. Good night everybody!
Or Scout Goode!
I agree. I'm suspect about the idea that the transaction costs of a name change are really that high, although I agree they are not zero. Women in the United States routinely change their last name when they marry, and then revert to their "maiden" name upon divorce. Marry more than once or twice ... the transaction cost here is actually that institutions make you jump through hoops to update documents, but in terms of socially and professionally everyone gets it and just adapts like they would if you changed your pronouns. Ah but what about famous people? It seems likely easier for them after all, a famous person has the benefit of people being interested in what they are doing and a desire to keep up with the news about that person. Re-branding in the consumer product/business world happens, sometimes due to company mergers and sometimes due to escape the bad associations with the prior name. Anyway, just stream of consciousness thinking, but in support of how imho, while not zero, the transaction costs of changing one's name are not prohibitive, and likely just high enough that one wouldn't do it without a compelling reason (e.g. marriage, disassociate with a hated family name, etc.) but not so high that if your whimsy is to do it, it's easily enough done.
One complicating factor is that so much of American life is set up around the assumption that a married couple have the same last name (and that both parents have the same last name as their kids) that bearing the costs of violating this assumption sometimes outweighs the transaction costs (particularly since the law actively lowers the transaction costs for name changes associated with changes in a woman's marital status).
That's true, but it can get sticky in regards to the career aspect where the social convention rule doesn't apply (e.g. when the name on your driver's license and diploma don't match, or you publish a paper in an academic journal and then change your name, and so on). And then what if you do it twice (because let's face it, second marriages are common). And yet both of those things happen all the time too with seemingly little negative effects.
Right, but those effects are so small because you're still following a common pattern; everyone instantly understands when you say that was your maiden name, and everything is set up to deal with it.
Changing your name in opposition to cultural norms would be a lot harder than changing it in compliance with them.
Hmm, I think the effects are rather large when it comes to one's career in the sense that you do have to manage it to ensure that people know. But at the same time, I don't see how the cost is higher if the reason you're doing it is not due to marriage/divorce. The pathway is the same regardless.
so just use maiden name for work publications and use family name for family stuff, tbh
Most married academic women I know kept their maiden names. It really does muck up your CV, and it’s so common in the community that it doesn’t surprise anyone when a married couple doesn’t share surnames.
I for one am offended by the idea that "Scott" is an Anglo-Saxon name. Scott is a Scottish name that pre-dates the arrival of Angles and Saxons in Britain.
Hardly. It's an English word originally applied to Irish speakers derived from a Latin ethnonym, which became a surname (note the Scott's in Scotland were mostly found in the English-speaking southeast) and then a forename, I presume through the normal process for this (e.g. Stanley, Baker) of naming a son with the surname of another branch of his ancestry.
All of which to say it is an English name and an Anglo-Saxon word at least. And that I'm somewhat pedantic about names.
Scout Mindset is, accidentally, a really great general self-help and CBT book, that doesn't talk down to you
Agree. It is a less psycho-jargony, more real world version of "Would you rather be right or would you rather be effective?".
Haven't read it yet, but much of what Scott talked about made me think "that just sounds like CBT".
Typo thread: "sometimes this is be fine"
> there is no such thing as telepathy, p < -10^10.
p < -10^10 is p < 10,000,000,000, I think that was supposed to be p < 10^-10
I thought the negative probability was funny
Agreed. I already think "what would Julia Galef do."
I feel compelled to plug my friends' and my fan project, mindsetscouts.com. Everyone likes earning cool merit badges! One of the merit badges even has a link to a calibration spreadsheet template, if that is a thing you've always wanted but never wanted to bother making.
This excellent review convinced me to buy the book. One area of life where it is fine to have a pure soldier mindset is being a sports fan. You start rooting fro a team when you are young because of where you live, your family, whatever. You never consider changing your allegiance (although if, like me, you're a Mets fan, you sometime wish you could). If we all have a certain amount of "soldier"tendency in us, then sports fandom is a good and healthy way to exercise and partially exhaust that tendency.
I take a "scout mindset" to my sports fandom.
Oh, not really. But one of the interesting places where that soldier mindset comes out in fandom is when there's a controversial play; people for one side are more likely to see that the _other_ team, for example, committed pass interference or touched the ball last before it went out of bounds.
So I use situations like that to remind myself to stay in scout mindset (not literally--I've been doing this for years, and now have a framework for it).
I tend also to be a scout when it comes to calls. But I am 100% soldier when it comes to my partisanship. Long ago, I should have, rationally, switched from being a Mets fan to being a Yankees fan. But I grew up pro-Mets, hating the Yankees, so that's that.
Ha! Indeed.
But as a Cubs fan, let me assure you that when the breakthrough happens, the payoff in joy is likely 200x better than the ersatz happiness of cheering for a team you only picked to win titles. ;)
(That said, my grandfather was born a Cubs fan, lived 87 years a Cubs fan, and died a Cubs fan without ever seeing them win a Series. There are risks to the approach.)
Your grandfather's tale reminded me of this cartoon. Even my black and stony heart was moved by it. Thirty years of waiting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWJ5D16hX3U
Thanks for that.
I was able to watch something like that with my local "Little League" 15U team. Our league isn't very competitive and usually gets crushed when it comes time to play outside the league (which happens at the end of each season). But one year we won *one* game before being eliminated. The next year we won district. The kids were happy, but some of the adults who had been working with our little league organization were ecstatic! They had been supporting our teams on the losing end for well over a decade.
My team just lost a really big game, and then video of the 3 best players sniffing a white powder (after the game) surfaced, and at first I was totally convinced that either the other team provided the white powder, or made the video! But then I thought, nah!
I try to take a scout mindset with regard to sports fandom when I set my expectations around how good I think the team will be in a season or how they will perform in a game.
Every pre season the talk is always all sunshine and rainbows about how great our team will be this year. Then the season happens and everyone is upset that the pre season expectations are not met.
Luckily it is very easy to find an outside view for your sports teams because the folks in Las Vegas put a number out there that you can bet on for total wins in the season and odds of winning each game. There are also computer models estimate those odds. So you can say "lots of people think we will be 6-5 this year why might they think that?"
I am a Nationals fan but I was incensed this summer when they traded away Kyle Schwarber at the trade deadline. Trading veteran Max Scherzer I understood, and saying goodbye to Trea Turner was a necessary part of that deal. Other trades I didn't mind. But Schwarber hit 16 home runs in 18 days in June and pulled the entire team into contention until he injured his hamstring.
I was furious with the team. It seemed unfair to Kyle and more unfair to the fans. Kyle is doing great things for the Red Sox. Having him and Juan Soto both would have won a lot more games for the Nats in the second half.
It seems my loyalty to some abstract concept of fairness is greater than my loyalty to my team.
Unless you bet money on games
I'd never bet on my own team. Occaionally I will bet against my team as a form of emotional hedging though. "I really want them to win, but if they don't then at least I get ten bucks"
I've been tempted by that hedge, but wonder if Id fell that the money was tainted if I won. Or can you compartmentalize?
Not being a sports fan, I find the soldier mindset in relation to sports a bit confusing.
If you root for a team, you generally admire and like your team's best players, and work up a fine froth about the best players on the opposing teams. But what if the players are traded? How does the process of changing your personal allegiances work? What is the sequence of thoughts and ideas one goes through in that situation?
that's why it's a soldier mentality. You follow the uniform. It lacks all rationality, can be incredibly engrossing/entertaining/sometimes enraging, but harmless.
Can I suggest a friendly edit? Instead of being in a froth about the "best" players, people get in a froth about "cheap" or "unsportsmanlike" players on the other team. (When people dislike the other team's best players, it's usually a sort of comradely dislike where it's understood that the only reason one dislikes them is the color of their jersey.)
But when an unsportsmanlike player joins one's team, the cognitive dissonance gets acute but goes away quickly. Usually, I find, after an uncomfortable transition of about a quarter season, fans revel in the new player's "gamesmanship."
What's hilarious is that, when confronted with their past views on this topic, the fan will easily, even gleefully, acknowledge that their views are purely because of their team allegiances. In other words, there's a real self-understanding in sports fandom that just doesn't exist in political fandom. People know they're being ridiculous, and don't care.
Funny example of that. My aunt was a huge University of South Carolina football fan and for years and years they were beaten (often badly) by the University of Florida and their coach Steve Spurrier who in addition to being a great coach was also very arrogant and quite abrasive. My Aunt hated him.
Fast forward several years later and he became the coach for the University of South Carolina and my aunt loved him. "He's an asshole but he is our asshole."
So funny and so true.
Great!
"Not being a sports fan, I find the soldier mindset in relation to sports a bit confusing.
If you root for a team, you generally admire and like your team's best players, and work up a fine froth about the best players on the opposing teams. But what if the players are traded? How does the process of changing your personal allegiances work? What is the sequence of thoughts and ideas one goes through in that situation?"
A number of sports fans are well aware that their support for "their" team is highly irrational, but go with it because it is fun.
So ... I am an SF Giants fan and passionately hate the Dodgers. I hope their players do poorly (but do NOT hope their players are injured ... lets keep a sense of perspective). If one of their players gets traded to the SF Giants then he gets promoted to "one of our guys" (with a few exceptions).
I like to think that my disdain for the Dodgers lets me be part of a long historical tradition dating back to the late 1800s. If I had grown up in the LA area I would, of course, have been a Dodgers fan. But I didn't, so SF Giants it is.
And note that there is no need to *admire* your team's best players. Some of them can be jerks. It is not disloyal to acknowledge this. It is also not disloyal to acknowledge greatness in players on "the other team." We just hope they play poorly in the future (unless they get traded to our team, of course). Very few SF Giants fans would claim that Clayton Kershaw was either a bad player or a bad person. We just want him to lose because he is a Dodger. Nothing complicated here.
If one of "our" players gets traded it is fine to continue to wish them well. Just not when they are playing "us." There is the concept of a "Forever Giant" (which likely exists for other teams, too) that signals that even though the player isn't on "our" team we still consider him "one of us."
The important point to realize is that many fans DO KNOW that this is borderline nuts. It is still fun to embrace, however, so many of us do.
It helps a lot if there's a decent amount of continuity. I'm not sure I could maintain emotional investment in a sport where 'my team' was just a set of jumpers to be filled arbitrarily from year to year or week to week. But when each year's team is last year's team with, say, 20% turnover, it's usually not too hard. Once you see the new guy not only wearing the colours but bonding with the players you already know and like, contributing to a win or sharing in the pain of a hard-fought loss, etc., it's not too hard to see him as part of the in-group and let your natural biases do their thing.
"It helps a lot if there's a decent amount of continuity. I'm not sure I could maintain emotional investment in a sport where 'my team' was just a set of jumpers to be filled arbitrarily from year to year or week to week."
Agreed.
Watching how the minor league teams (where year-to-year you might have 10% of the team returning) is interesting. And minor league baseball is fun! The teams manage this and fans cheer for "their" team and "hate" on their rivals (who are also seeing 90% turnover year-on-year) ...
I guess that's where you'd really need to lean into the sense of community with fellow fans. The team might be a mercenary army, but they're fighting for us!
I think it's important to consider WHY you're a sports fan. Is your goal to always support the winner? Or are you supporting the team that helps you connect with neighbors/clients/coworkers?
I've been left unsatisfied just supporting the team most likely to win. Just a boring experience since you really don't have anything invested in it. If you're supporting your underdog home team, you've got a cheering section at the bar, you get a high five from strangers for wearing their logo, and if they win... it's really a unique satisfaction. Even if they lose, you've still got all the other good stuff that comes with supporting that team. (I realize that doesn't apply as well in two-team cities.)
A more useful application for soldier/scout mindset in sports, IMHO, is analyzing what happens with your team. Your team get caught cheating? Key player caught doping? Star QB caught molesting 20 women? When the Astros got caught, I was immediately on the "all the other teams are doing it" bandwagon. After reflecting on it, I realized that was in direct conflict with my principles. So, I chose to shift my energy to supporting the local minor league team. Turns out that was way more fun in the end.
I moved from the SF Bay Area to North Carolina. I have always been a fan of the S.J. Sharks (NHL). Since moving here I decided that I was better served by being a Carolina Hurricane fan since very few Sharks games are televised here. And being a fan of a team I never see provides little or no joy.
This worked out really well since the Hurricanes are actually really good (both in terms of winning and in quality of gameplay). I went to a Sharks vs. Canes game. I rooted for the Canes(with a side of I won't be too unhappy if S.J. wins).
I know many fans in NYC who will root for both teams. I cannot, because of endless debates with my friends when I was a kid as to which team was "better."
I've often wondered what would happen in that situation, but fortunately, no team I've ever rooted for has done anything the least bit tawdry, so I don't have to decide.
You can hate the sin/sinner but still support the team. You just have to say, "Yes, that was terrible and he has brought shame to my team. We will move on without him."
"I've been left unsatisfied just supporting the team most likely to win." You better. I have some compassion for the poor people needing a top team to identify with while having no root connection. The small doses of happiness with all the achievements of regular winners one roots for never amount to what happens when Werder Bremen wins the Cup and the Championship in one season. Happening to some people, at least.
Still, professional Sports is a business and sometimes teams more or less vanish, when the economic background in their hometown changes, others develop weirdly and gain a whole new fanbase. I've also noticed developments between sports. Towns that don't have the potential for a top team in the most popular game (like, in these parts, association football aka soccer) sometimes get to have very good hockey, handball or basketball teams and enthusiastic fans to fill their venues. That's a bit tricky when most supporters have played the most popular game themselves as kids but not the game they are supposed to identify with.
Depends how awful your favorite sports team/star is.
I think a bronze age mindset reference would really round out that first paragraph.
Lol, but on the short line between “erudite, provocative right wing intellectual” and “just a Larpy nazi”, that cuts it a bit close to the right, while Moldy’s firmly on the left of it
Bronze Age Pervert is one of those rare intellectuals who doesn't need to be extraordinarily verbose, or even use sensible grammar, in order to let you know how intellectual he is. Wat mean?
I mean that he literally is a nazi, and in a sense where moldbug is not at all a nazi, he is still a nazi
probably not worth continuing this convo though given the location!
so I would not advise referencing him at all in something connected to your irl name, whatever your leanings are
I've read (well, skimmed) his book and while he's certainly a white supremacist I didn't see any support for any form of Socialism, National or otherwise.
yeah his book was toned down a lot, he regularly speaks about the inferiority / subversive nature / global power of / need to remove from power and influence of da jooz, although is somewhat careful to hide it from the least inquisitive of eyes
my bigger criticism is he’s just kinda making stuff up, say what you will about moldy but he writes seriously about history and power. brap just says stuff that sounds good if you dont look into it
oh you meant if he’s a “nazi”. nazi colloquially means Jew hate / white nationalist, just like “communist” means whatever it does in the net. But he also has (critical support style) endorsed the NSDAP many times
On the political scandals thing, one noticeable trend is that for people who support party X, they have to weigh the cost of having a politician who has done something scandalous against the risk of getting a politician from party Y, which is (for supporters of party X) intrinsically scandalous.
So it's not unreasonable to have a higher standard for your opponents (whose replacement is costless) than for your own party.
The other factor is about who will replace them, which is why I favour political systems that make it easy to replace a politician with another of the same party (and make that a separate process from the electoral process where voters choose between parties). Note that Al Franken was replaced as Senator easily - but his replacement, Tina Smith, is of the same party. Ralph Northam was also in a scandal of comparable magnitude, but remained as Governor of Virginia because his two same-party successors were involved in the same scandal and the third in line was of the other party. You can see the same process with the recent California recall; Gavin Newsom was able to ensure that the only possible replacement was a Republican and was able to run against that Republican. From the perspective of the Democratic majority in California, however bad Newsom was, a Republican would be worse.
The only case I can think of in recent years when a politician has been replaced by one of the opposite party as a result of a scandal is the Alabama Senate election when Roy Moore was defeated by Doug Jones.
Agreed with this analysis. Interesting case study in what could be seen as an application of this principle: Germany's electoral system, where everyone casts *two* votes: one for their direct representative for their region, and a "second vote" for a party. The direct representatives all make it into the Bundestag. But then, on the second vote, seats are added to the Bundestag to align its composition with the results of the party vote. Those second-vote seats are filled from a list each party prepares in advance of the election.
So if you like a party, but not their candidate in your district; or if you think a candidate from an opposing party is unusually good and moderate, but still dislike their party's principles; you can cast your direct vote for the individual you prefer, then your party vote for a party other than theirs, where only the party vote is really important for the eventual balance of power.
In practice, this still likely won't help you get rid of odious incumbents, at least if they're well-connected. Direct candidates are often high-up on their party's "list"; so even if they lose their local election, they'll make it in on the second vote. So it's not a perfect mechanism for removing Moores, Northams and Cuomos from office. (The latter two are/were executives, but you know what I mean). Nonetheless, I still like the scheme, since it allows for some decoupling of character judgment from political persuasion.
The Irish system which creates competition between candidates of a party as well as between parties (the exact details are rather long for a comment, and can be easily found on wikipedia) has a similar effect, perhaps better.
The Maltese system, which is normally described as being the same (they are both versions of "Single Transferable Vote") has a rule that makes it superior for this purpose, which is a rule prohibiting undernomination (again, I'll omit the details, they're easy to find).
In the US, the nature of the primary system means that STV with a rule against undernomination would be easy to implement, and this would very much sharpen intraparty competition - if you have to have five candidates of your party to be allowed to have any, and you're (even in a very strong area) not going to get more than four elected, then there is always an intraparty contest as well as an interparty contest.
The German system would work better if it was combined with some form of "open list" where voters can vote to influence who gets elected from the list; there are several versions of this, some of which entirely remove the influence of the party in terms of ordering the list, and others require a voter revolt on a huge scale to move a single candidate up a single place.
For people who already understand electoral systems, what I'm suggesting is STV in multi-member constituencies, with party primaries also conducted by STV, where the number of winners of each primary is the same as that in the general election, and where a shortage of nominees in the party primary would eliminate that party from contention in the general election.
Good analysis.
Thank you!
The crazy thing about Roy Moore is he was kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court *twice* before he ran for Senate. Both times he was elected to that position. So he definitely represented the will of the people, and surely would have won again if not for the Washington Post reporting.
I was generally in favor of Franken resigning because I felt we Democrats needed to set a good example. I regret that outlook now, both because it was an unnecessary rush to judgement and because good examples mean nothing to Republicans.
I supported Northam because I felt that wearing blackface in a school skit decades earlier was trivial.
I wanted Chris Cuomo to resign because there was extensive evidence and the offenses were not trivial.
I think you mean Andrew Cuomo, but it does seem like Chris should be resigning from his job too over his role in the whole thing.
Correct. I had them switched.
Frankly, if Al Franken hadn't resigned I still wouldn't take Democrats seriously on sexual harassment. That sacrifice was absolutely worth it, because it set a markedly different standard than the tribal defense of Bill Clinton a couple decades prior.
Generally, the only effective signals across tribal lines are costly ones.