Does all of this apply also to immigration in Europe and ethnicity?
Conflict Theory works when resources are scarce. The fact that socialists believe in conflict theory is because their economic ideas are stupid, not because conflict theory is wrong.
Take Europe as example. Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region. Where is the mistake theory here? That Europeans should share more land with foreigners because not-sharing is economically illiterate?
"Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region."
First, and kind of unrelated, this is not clear at all, it's a pretty extreme statement coming from a very particular worldview. You can tell because very similar statements, like "only one eye-color can be master of a given land at a time, so the blue eyed people and green eyed people have to fight it out forever" are obviously false.
More related to the point of this essay, I think that *even* granting that the European right is correct about every single one of their points (immigrants are extremely criminal, rapist, terrorist, etc), conflict theory *still* doesn't describe European immigration politics accurately. What percent of Europeans who vote for AfD have actually, themselves, been victims of an immigrant crime in a way that's seriously affected their lives? And even if they have, the same free-rider problem I talked about in the post applies - there will still be 99.9999% as many anti-immigration activists if you yourself don't bother to get involved. If you were actually promoting your own personal material self-interest, you'd either not worry about politics at all, or just vote once every few years for lower taxes on yourself. Maybe you would vote for the anti-immigrant party rather than the pro-immigrant party if it were a free action, but you certainly wouldn't post on blogs about it or anything.
(this isn't criticizing the European right - it's virtuous to care about your country overall besides just your personal material self-interest. But let's not pretend that this is #1 on most Europeans' material self-interest list).
"Were you yourself mugged?" type arguments elide the possibility that people may be unhappy with general disorder, with ugliness, or for instance where I live - the public realm actually full of trash, and that means we are light years away from (and never returning to) the sort of niceties like landscaping and infrastructure kept in repair - that were once considered a legitimate government function, and not at all unknown in America.
And I live in a city that has no ideological bias against such things! City crews very slowly on some schedule known to themselves, make the rounds and do stuff, not uncapably. But it's laughable. It's like Wall*E going around and sifting through the trash.
It's nice to see them, though. In my last city - they had completely forfeited all such work.
I'm not sure I follow what you mean - in a city of 2 million - please elaborate?
I suppose you can if you have any imagination, guess exactly the sort of thing I do when confronted with a piece of trash lol. I tend to gross others out, with what I will pick up. I was given one of those pickers, and I keep it in the car for highway stop use, road trips, etc. but I tend to just go with bare hand locally.
Well, with some imagination, the question shouldn't be hard. If it turns out that picking up the trash in your city is indeed easy, then you should be able to get others to do so, and then, assuming the people of your city want less trash, you should be able to make a profit selling your services. This is the process described by noted racist crank Mencius Moldbug, so I have to presume I'm not being too woke in my suggestion.
The alternative outcome is that picking up the trash is indeed too hard, in which case we should cease our criticisms of the City's efforts, having learned that they are not quite so incompetent. Or else that your fellow citizens quite like living in garbage heaps, and that seems to me their right. After all, nobody has yet called for evicting Oscar the Grouch.
I do think you are right - people have absorbed the idea that things should only get worse - and it is right that they should! - in service of something mysterious and larger, always in the far distance. Kind of the opposite of 19th century Whiggism.*
The sign that one is approaching utopia is the presence of dystopia.
*However, as usual, there seems to be a heterogeneity to it. Some people actively seek an alternative, for their surroundings. "Bubbles". Perhaps your 3 acres is one such.
What gets lost in between these poles - is simply America as it used to be, without any extraordinary effort - for ordinary folks in the middle.
I'm relatively confident that landfills are government-owned, which means you can't dump any trash you gather legally without a government permit (or burn it, for that matter.) So this is a rather dumb suggestion.
It isn't necessarily the case that one could sell trash removal services at a profit, because there could be a collective action problem. Everyone wants the trash picked up, but they'd also prefer that someone else be the one to pay the trash removal bill, so everyone just waits for someone else to hire the garbageman and nothing actually happens.
Don't walk past litter and then complain about it. Of course you personally can't pick it all up. But maybe two other people will see you, and start picking it up. That's all that's needed for it to work.
I’ve got 2 dozen shopping carts clogging a creek bed with your name on them! And about a million plastic bags snagged in the trees. I don’t live adjacent but maybe you do.
Or they may get picked up if there’s an organized pickup day. Those will attract lots of people, many more than two will see! It’s fun or at least comradely, and you get a tee shirt.
And then voila, a week later, there it all is again.
(The sort of people who attend such things, are unfortunately exactly the sort of people who agree with my view of litter, of course.)
Did it work? Has my compulsively picking up trash all my life started that chain of litter pickup? Has David Sedaris?
I will close my eyes and you tell me when to open them, so I can see how that has worked.
No, what's needed is a culture of not littering in public places and an infrastructure to support the desired behaviour (i.e., having sufficient trash cans that are regularly emptied and maintained). Without it, individual clean up efforts can make a small temporary difference in a local area but will not dramatically alter the situation.
I believe that immigration levels and AfD support are anti-correlated. Immigrants have largely moved into the richer former West Germany and AfD support is mostly in the former East Germany
As I see it, this is a testimony to the powers of self-delusion on the part of north/western upper-class german liberals. The evidence for recent mass immigration into Germany having overall negative social and economic consequences is utterly overwhelming.
Doesn't that disprove conflict theory? Because if it's possible to self-delude about something that's so bad for you, then it would seem that material self-interest is not the primary motivator of how people form their political opinions.
People can totally believe things are against their or their country’s own self interest, yet still believe it’s morally good to do so? That’s called charity or foreign aid, for just one example.
When Syrians came in 2015, the primary question was “do we have a moral duty to help these people by letting them be here?”. Not about whether it would be totally awesome for our economy or not, nobody believed it would.
Okay, but that's distinct from the argument that east-germans or MAGA voters or whatever don't have rationally-self-interested reasons to oppose immigration. (Welfare distribution, for example, often occurs at the federal level.)
Immigrants overwhelmingly cannot be contributors to a welfare state, so it becomes a bit of a clash. Will we in future be able to help people for principled or simply compassionate reasons, given the trend?
If that is so, why 90% of the West-Germans - who do live in parts of Germany with lots of refugee-immigration see those refugees as a less urgent problem. While those in East-Germany with much less immigrants see a huge problem (they do have more "Russians" though, many with German passports, many voting AfD) and vote 30% AfD. Are those losers really so much smarter?!? Ay, there may be the rub: They live one gov. handouts! And do not want to "share". Conflict theory wins! - Maybe we should have never let those losers in and given them passports, agreed. 2 trillion euros for nothing. - Thomas Pueyo has some fine data and comment in his recent piece: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/whats-at-stake-in-germanys-elections
It's true that the AfD is stronger in the east but to some extend this is a factor of the east voting for anti-establishment (a.k.a. protest) parties. Before the AfD die Linke (far left party) was quite strong in the east (although not as strong as the AfD is now).
Also looking at the raw number masks the fact that AfD votes have been rising everywhere. Even in Hamburg (their weakest state), the vote-share has doubled from 5 to 10 percent. And that's the story nearly everywhere: If you compare the numbers from last election to now, the numbers have doubled in most states, except in the east where they were already very strong (for example "only" a 57% increase in saxony).
Yeah, AfD is rising everywhere, I just wanted to point out that there seems to be a negative correlation between living amongst foreigners and wanting to reduce immigration. The "protest party" dynamic is interesting, I hadn't considered that angle
That's what you expect if people have at least some leeway in choosing where to live and vary from each other in how much they like immigration? People who want there to be as few immigrants as possible will live in places with few immigrants and vote for politicians opposing immigration, etc.
I don't think internal migration in Germany is high enough for that to be the explanation. If you map basically any social factor on a map of Germany, you see a stark divide between the former East and West Germany. I believe that's much more likely to be because of cultural persistence then sorting
Murder's fine, boys, because I personally have never been shot.
If there's a stronger point you and Scott are making here, I really can't see it. I can't find a charitable version that doesn't prove far too much and have the effect of electing oneself the role of arbiter over what other people are allowed to care about. Which, being a transparently aggressive move, will make other people angry and get you insulted.
Well-stated. Everyone alive has by definition not been the victim of murder. And yeah, we’re enjoying our toast, for which we must apologize, because - well, we have to eat.
If either of us were arguing *for* conflict theory, I would understand this criticism. Murder is wrong because somebody is the victim, not because I am. If a time traveller showed me definitive proof that myself and everyone I know would never be murdered, it would not shift my position on murder- this is already what I expect.
I don't think either side is trying to decide what others are allowed to care about. The argument is not about what they should care about, it's about why they care about the things both sides agree they do. If your answer to that is that it's in their self interest, I'd expect you to be able to demonstrate self interest for any given belief.
I mean, Scott's position is "The view 'Murder's fine, boys, because I personally have never been shot' is obviously not how anyone feels. But it is how a conflict theorist predicts someone would feel, plus/minus some probability estimate of being murdered and a EV calculation of what my politics do about that. So, because no one shares that view, conflict theory is wrong."
I think east-germans already have plausible reasons to care about immigration even from a short-term self-interested PoV, although I agree that a lot of human behaviour is driven by non-self-interested or a-rational concerns.
During the Daniel Penny trial the white nationalist Twitter personality "captive dreamer" expressed anger that a Filipino immigrant could sit on the jury in judgement over a white man. Several of the people replying to him said that the Filipino immigrant is exactly the person you want on that jury, more likely to sympathize with Daniel Penny than the average person in Manhattan.
The whole story of Daniel Penny is a story of pre-1965 Americans. Jordan Neely was a pre-65 black. The prosecutor was a Jewish lesbian. The chorus of people calling for Penny's arrest was made up mostly of pre-65 blacks and woke whites, disproportionately female. Yet with this and much else, the far-right grasps for straws trying to blame immigrants for the behavior of blacks, Jews, and white women. Shows the intellectual bankruptcy of the whole worldview.
Of course the left likes to leave itself an out, always. The latest out, which was actually and breathtakingly baked into the cake of affirmative action almost from the get-go - is that the condition of blacks in America need never be a concern, because immigrants trump blacks.
In the Sunbelt where I live, immigrants and their children are utterly competitive as a source of disorder, and crime, with any group you care to name.
Though, to be sure, the legal system is only interested in perpetuating disorder, so the Daniel Penny trial doesn't seem to me to signify *anything* larger than itself, except that mayhem of that sort is permanent, and possibly whether people still have enough common sense to know that that Penny, presumably no genius, in that moment, was trying to do nothing other than just shut the other fellow down, without any evil intent or desire to kill him, certainly, which only gets you in trouble.
It's perfectly normal and understandable to worry about CRIME. But the instant somebody complains about dis(order), I stop paying attention. A fairly consistent marker of busybodyism and/or paranoia.
Nah. The Karens are funny. They are unusually reliable voters for all the things that lead to urban dystopia. One could say it's their baby. Now it's true that they are apt to go on reddit and complain when somebody sets the fire in the camp behind their house, or is defecating at the stoplight, or they see the guys who carries the machetes everywhere and waves it at people and only occasionally stabs someone, then spends a night in jail.
But their complaints are as nothing to their overall complicity with what you approve.
Of course, these conversations are among the silliest on the internet, as far as anonymity and geography go. You could have someone in Vermont lecturing somebody in south Austin, about what they should care about.
The Karen in Vermont is of course your friend and ally in that sort of exchange.
I was making a narrow point about vocabulary. People who talk about "order" and "disorder," those exact words, tend to be unworthy of consideration. This is a different (overlapping) category then Karens and it is disproportionately on the right.
Public pooping, littering, assault and arson are crimes, so complaining about "crime" covers these just fine. "Disorder" complaints signify that the complainer is, more often then not, on board with the rabid social engineering that I associate with the far right.
This would be much more compelling if the concepts of crime and disorder had remained distinct. As it is, the practical definition of crime - that is, the definition of it as something that is prosecuted and deterred - has been altered beyond recognition, blurred into "disorder". The result is what it is. You may be happy about it, even exult in it as obviously some do - or you may not be - but there is no virtue in it for you, or demerit for me.
>"Were you yourself mugged?" type arguments elide the possibility that people may be unhappy with general disorder, with ugliness, or for instance where I live - the public realm actually full of trash, and that means we are light years away from (and never returning to) the sort of niceties like landscaping and infrastructure kept in repair - that were once considered a legitimate government function, and not at all unknown in America.
This explains unhappiness, but you still have a free-rider problem if you want to use it to explain political action. This is Scott's point.
I think immigration is a perfect example of how white pilling could change policy. If immigrants are perceived to come because a country is "the greatest on Earth", culturally, politically, economically, it will flatter the right in that country and make them more immigration-friendly.
If, instead, one perceives the immigrant-attracting rich nations as beneficiaries of exploitation, so that it is only fair that they compensate by allowing immigrants to seize a share of the benefits, the right will be much more resistant to immigration.
I mean, the sort of people who don't like taxes actually *do* like them better when they're a head tax, which is how a membership fee is usually structured.
"We don't much care what exactly you build or do there - within reason, poison gas or excessively loud noises or the like might be a problem - but between army and navy and air force and judiciary keeping trouble away, interstate highways and other infrastructure delivering whatever you could want, etc., it's a very desirable area. Here's what all that costs per square foot per month. If that's more than you care to pay, there are plenty of other spots, cheaper but with less conveniently proximate services, on a sliding scale... or you could figure out tighter ways to stack whatever it is you plan to do, so it occupies a smaller footprint."
People will never like paying taxes, but if paying a lot in taxes genuinely earned people more respect, they would vote less against, because of the free rider problem. The SALT Cap is the first example in Scott's post.
It wouldn't be trying to fool them, though. It would be changing for real the expressive value - the humiliation/praise - associated with being in favor or against immigration. In fact, I believe the republican shift against immigration owes much to going from the first to the second scenario.
one thing which is probably overlooked by those observing Germany from the US is how susceptible people are to Russian propaganda, and how much more so in the Eastern part of Germany. I am pretty sure that, without Russian propaganda and financing, AfD would stay marginal at best, never standing a chance of any serious electoral result.
I wonder if their respective histories could have them at somewhat different places about their expectations of the future, and what they hope for, and even maybe their ideas about who's owed what, and why Muslims should be the beneficiary of/have to do with a lot of Jews and Slavs and Belorussians etc. having been murdered.
To me this whole post is a riddle. There seems to be a reluctance to confront what it is, that is bothering our host. Or to make himself plain.
But: if you are confused about the difference between East and West Germany, I think Wikipedia can help. They operated under rather different dispensations for a few crucial decades. Thus might not be expected to have identical notions of liberalism, what good governance looks like - even down to the desirability of globalism.
I understand totally if this is retroactively cancellable. I guess.
> To me this whole post is a riddle. There seems to be a reluctance to confront what it is, that is bothering our host. Or to make himself plain.
Yeah, I thought that too. I think it's because Scott actually knows, deep down, that conflict theory is true - not as a 100% determinant, but certainly as a very significant factor among others (including mistake-theory and this new identity-theory model of his.)
But Scott would very, very much prefer conflict theory to be not true at all, because it undermines the whole premise of this blog and (I suspect) would set him irreversibly at odds with his much more lefty friends and family.
So we get this weird output that doesn't quite land, which I think this is what motivated reasoning looks like from a smart person who's ideological background includes a bunch of material on noticing and not participating in motivated reasoning.
Something that feels worth stating is that the AfD is by far the most pro-Russian party and East Germany is by far the area with the most pro-Russian sentiment. That's not to say these other arguments aren't valid, but that's a significant contributing factor for why regional support for the AfD in the East might be unusually high that has nothing to do with AfD's immigration position.
"The very region with the least migrants (aka the least impacted by migration related harm):"
The parathesis does not follow from the main statement. Different regions may suffer differently from migration. Poverty, for instance, means even minor harm may be immensely more destructive for you than for other citizens.
Oh, I'm from East Germany, and as far as I could tell your theory of trauma explains the rightward shift exactly.
East Germans have a historically distrustful relationship to the state and the media rooted in their socialist past in the GDR with an oppressive regime and a press that was more propaganda than news. Reunification was promised as liberation and an economic miracle, but instead it was a shock treatment. Companies where shuttered (often to prevent competition rather than because they where not viable). The remaining companies were overtaken by west German management and "rationalized" - often rejects that couldn't hack it back home, sidelining competent East Germans. Unemployment - which practically didn't exist in the GDR - became sky high. This was obviously a deeply traumatic experience. To this day the media has a mostly western German view that doesn't care to understand east Germans and talks about them in unflattering and uncaring tones. East Germans do not feel that they have a voice in German society.
Then Corona happened. The Germans handled it about as good or bad as anywhere, but one thing that was remarkable was the bungled communication that was often inflammatory, intransigent and often enough simply nonsense, projecting a state that doesn't trust it's citizen to behave responsibly and "knows better". Many of the mandates were perceived in the population as unreasonable (I would chalk this up again to bad communication rather than bad substance). The biggest issue was that criticisms - even reasonable ones - were rejected wholesale, protests simply dismissed and the protestors treated with general suspicion (of being conspiracy theorists, fascists, egomaniacs, what have you). This did not go over well, especially with an east German population that still deeply remembered its past under a state that behaved exactly like this. The right used this opportunity, latched on to protests, organized new ones, subsumed the movement under its banner. They proclaimed themselves the "voice of the people". Of course they injected it with their own radicalizing narratives, which fell on open ears. The fact that the AfD is hated and feared by the establishment is the cherry on top.
My guess is the price of eggs is going up, and the first person who acknowledges this without some complicated theory why it's a net good overall, and points to someone they claim is responsible for it, gets the attention. Bonus points for blaming an outgroup.
See also: blaming the Jews for conditions in Weimar Germany, following punitive reparations for WWI, the Great Depression, and hyperinflation. We are definitely sure that there was no Great Jewish Conspiracy but it's also not hard to see how economic conditions at the time were terrible and the coalition government was a complete mess.
I presume the level of Nazi support is also completely unrelated to which places had the most Jews.
> Life is Permanent Warfare, as Eco puts it, “there is no struggle for life, but rather, life is lived for struggle.”"
The rest of the points don't read particularly mistake-theorist either.
I presume the Nazis actually believed this rather than just putting it on as a show to get votes, after all they were pretty invested in what they thought of as purifying the race long after they'd eliminated political opposition. If "Conflict theorists treat politics as war" to quote the old SSC post on that, the Shoah seems pretty conflict theorist. Alongside the actual war.
A counter-argument is that the Nazis treated race purity as a science, and looked for "rational" solutions given their framing of the problem. Invading Poland was an engineering solution to the problem of Lebensraum. But that is stretching the definition of science to mean scientific-sounding arguments in favour of the accepted ideology: no-one wanted a honest investigation whether someone with 1/4 Jewish ancestry really corrupted the blood in some measurable way.
But "mistake theorists view debate as essential" definitely does not describe the Triumph of the Will. Who wins is far more important than the truth prevailing, because the only possible truth is the one The Party is fighting for. There was certainly a genuinely held belief of a Darwinian material conflict between the races, and a belief that not allowing the Master Race to degenerate was good for its members.
It looks like Fascism is confict theory in its purest form, and there were sure a lot of conflict theorists in 1930s Germany.
"First, and kind of unrelated, this is not clear at all, it's a pretty extreme statement coming from a very particular worldview. You can tell because very similar statements, like "only one eye-color can be master of a given land at a time, so the blue eyed people and green eyed people have to fight it out forever" are obviously false."
But that's not a proper comparison. Ethnies are extended kin groups which display similarities across a multitude of different characteristics, including but not limited to eye colors. Your comparison is like jumping into an argument about what genre of music should dominate a radio station, and saying the the whole discussion was akin to quibbling over whether rhythms should only include eighth notes or also quarters.
>>First, and kind of unrelated, this is not clear at all, it's a pretty extreme statement coming from a very particular worldview. You can tell because very similar statements, like "only one eye-color can be master of a given land at a time, so the blue eyed people and green eyed people have to fight it out forever" are obviously false.
It also relies on arbitrary categorizations of places, in addition to groups of people.
Who is the ethnic master of the Iberian Peninsula? The Spanish or the Portugese (perhaps the Catalans)? Does New York City have an "ethnic master" or do we have to drill down to individual blocks or boroughs, or up to the State?
Or for a really spicy take, who is the ethnic master of the Balkans? The Caucuses?
there's no ethnic master of "the Balkans", but the Balkans is made up, today, of distinct states that are (with the exception of Bosnia, arguably), fairly ethnically homogeneous: one ethno-national group per state. As it should be, in my opinion.
It's not an extreme statement at all. ethnic fractionalisation increases the chance of political instability , corruption and decreases social trust which is important for place to be somewhere nice to live. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2000/wp0082.pdf
Even if many on the right have not yet personally been victims of high crime rate african and muslim immigrants, the growing presence of those immigrants strongly increases the chance over time that our kin and extended kin (i.e. our ethnic group, whom we share more genes with than people from other continents whom we evolved to care for more than people from other continents the same way we evolved to care for our close relatives more than strangers from our ethnic group) will be victims of high crime rate african and muslim immigrants.
Also, high crime rate immigration directly negatively impacts all right wing Europeans by reducing social trust which makes society overall have more friction , less charitable giving and less pleasant to live in.
Given the choice between Sweden remaining like sweden and sweden being significantly more like afhganistan in 20 years, obviously it is in the interests of Swedish people who care about and appreciate the nice qualities of sweden to prevent Sweden becoming more like afghanistan
"but if you did nothing then everyone else would accomplish your goal"
And if everyone thought like this then your goal wouldn't get accomplished and you and your group whom you share more genes with would be much worse off.
According to your argument nobody should ever do anything in groups because it's irrational , yet clearly acting in groups is a very successful evolutionary strategy hence its ubiquitousness.
A typical person sometimes acts in a group as a team player and sometimes is a free rider which indicates that this mixed strategy is much more successful in the evolutionary long term. than being a free rider 100% of the time and never acting in a group and working towards your shared interests
I can't believe that you actually believe these arguments. You writes a post saying it's possible to rationally persuade people of arguments at the same time as doing brazen mental gymnastics to claim how groups are never actually in conflict due to differing interests (" they just want to FEEL like they are benefiting, which is totally different than acting in their shared interests, honest, even though it results in them acting as though they're seeking their group's shared interests") . I suspect you take pleasure in writing tenuous sophistry for obviously false positions.
His father is a scholar, the green grass, and his mother is a mixed race, one from the East and the other from the West. Both of them are criminals with the same goal, and they have the illusion that the world leaders have seen the secret world from a single perspective.
My wife and I jointly possess our modest estate, comprising precisely three acres. My wife hails from the ancient lineages of Eastern Africa, while I myself am descended from the misty bogs of Ireland. Given that there can exist but one ethnic master of the land in a singular region—a fact that is surely as obvious as the sunrise, though considerably less beautiful—how then is our domestic arrangement possible?
The answer is that what the world calls impossible, love calls Tuesday afternoon.
If you're waiting for racial intermarriage to solve this problem, that will (A) take centuries, and (B) result in the simultaneous disappearance of racial diversity, which runs counter to what the liberal left claims to value.
No, friend, my question is how is my domestic arrangement possible, if there can be only one ethnic master of the land? I'm sorry if my question is too confusing or vaguely worded—you seem to have gotten the idea that I ought to be very concerned about ethnic diversity. This is a trifling matter to me, but then again, my children will be both the descendents of Africans and Irishmen, which seems enough diversity to make any given Britisher to quail in his boots.
I am pointing out that over long enough time periods, every racially/ethnically-mixed human society either becomes an ethnostate (through ethnogenesis) or becomes a caste system, and observationally all such human societies have a dominant racial/ethnic group.
Or... do you think that you or your children are individually going to outvote the other 99% of your countrymen, or outfight the police and armed forces, or something? A single family isn't a nation, why would you even think this is a relevant example?
We are not talking about nations. Perish the thought! The gentleman I am responding to has argued that there can be only one ethnic master of any parcel of land, and I am dutifully pointing out that my parcel of land has two ethnic masters, and this fact has not yet led to any considerable hardship.
My nation has a good deal of history allowing for miscegenation, so I consider my progeny relatively safe. You point out that over a long enough time period, my land will be owned by an ethnostate, that is, my children. That seems like a neutral or even positive outcome to me. Perhaps if I am too worried about it I could force my children to only marry delineated subgroups that are different enough from them for your satisfaction—perhaps Pygmies, or Prussians. But I doubt that I shall go to that extreme.
> The gentleman I am responding to has argued that there can be only one ethnic master of any parcel of land...
If 'the land' you're referring to is only two acres in size, then this is a stupid and pedantic example which isn't going to convince anyone.
> You point out that over a long enough time period, my land will be owned by an ethnostate, that is, my children. That seems like a neutral or even positive outcome to me...
That's a separate debate, but it doesn't refute the notion that "in the end, there can be only one."
I will admit that the Congo faired poorly under Belgian administratorship. Perhaps Belgians are not racially fit to be the administrators of other countries? My personal theory was that Leopold II was simply a villainous and evil man, but that might not fit with the more literally high-brow theories of scientific racialism. I suppose we shall simply have to find measurements of Leopold's skull to continue the discussion.
To be honest, friend, you're being a bit too vague. If you are vaguely writing of serious current matters, I urge you to be a bit more explicit. What you will lose in biting sarcasm you will gain in me being able to understand what you are talking about.
Sorry, I misconstrued you to be saying that whatever is happening in a place like that, must necessarily happen because of someone who died 120 years ago - and that's to be expected, and one shouldn't think about it overmuch or at the very least it should only furnish a little wry humor. In any case - you didn't see it - so perhaps it didn't even happen.
Or else - you would have tried stopping it yourself? Or figured out a way to stop it while making a profit? Someone should be willing to pay you to stop it.
Scott has written at some length about how Belgian adminstration post-Leopold was probably the best government the Congo ever experienced, and there's little or no reliable data on the death tolls Leopold was supposedly responsible for. In any case, that's hardly an explanation for the Congo's condition after the Belgians left.
Yes, that's the joke. If the ethnic masters of Belgian ancestry were able to provide Congo with the worst administration the world had ever seen, and then, immediately thereafter, the best administration the Congo had ever seen, that seems to cut against the line of racial homogeneity. Dare I say it, it might just lead us to conclude that one can't accurately make predictions about a person solely based on their ethnic ancestry?
I think you're boxing with shadows here. No-one on the HBD/race-realist end of the political spectrum has claimed that ethnic belgians are all clones of eachother, or even that being clones would make their behaviour fully predictable. (We have extensive data on the topic from twin studies, after all.)
Your domestic arrangement is possible because you have both submitted to and taken on the same mores and beliefs - the mores and beliefs of the ethnic masters of the land you're living in. This isn't a clever rebuttal to people alarmed at what's happening to their homelands, this is a smug deflection that addresses nothing.
I admit I am smug. Pardon me, please. But the rest of your comment is wrong. The land I am living in is not Catholic, and nor was my wife, before she married me. Perhaps I am the ethnic invader of homelands you are so alarmed about.
If your Catholicism meant that you had to worry about whether you were going to come to blows with teachers, judges, bystanders or the police, simply for trying to live as your personal sensibilities dictate, then you would by now have a good idea where the real cultural and ethnic power lay in your country, and you would not be being smug about it.
If Catholicism does not mean doing any of that, then Catholicism fits into the belief system you have both adopted, in which case there wasn't really any point in bringing it up.
My Catholicism is currently under attack by both parties. Republicans attack our charities, and Democrats are attacking our ministry's seal of confessional.
I have spent hours of my time pushing back on this, and perhaps it will work. But rest assured, I know very well that I am currently in the minority.
Then you must be able to understand how much easier it would be if Catholics made up a bigger proportion of those parties, and how much harder if they made up less.
You can see how you would (and should, if you care about what you're doing) have an opinion on the prospect of a hypothetical influx of a large number of people who are likely to be Catholics vs vehement anti-Catholics into your country.
There is no need to be smug and condescending to us evil racists, now you already have the groundwork to see where we're coming from. Catholicism doesn't make its determinations based on race. Pakistani grooming gangs do. It should not take much empathy to see why this side is concerned.
ethnic fractionalisation increases the chance of political instability , corruption and decreases social trust which is important for place to be somewhere nice to live. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2000/wp0082.pdf
two people getting married and living together is very different from ethnic groups living in the same country.
A much closer analogy would be two entirely seperate families living in the same house sharing the same living quarters. Obviously that arrangement is much more likely to result in high tensions and conflict when those two nuclear families are completely unrelated or of different ethnic groups than if those two nuclear families have parents who are brothers or cousins with both the same culture and closely shared genes (blood is thicker than water).
Ethnic groups tend to try to gain control of land of their own when possible
A mistake-theory anti-immigration analysis of the pro-immigration position is that the people in favour of it are mistaken about group differences and about the possibilities to assimilate foreigners. A mistake-theory pro-immigration analysis of the anti-immigration position is that people in favour of it are mistaken because they have succumbed to xenophobic bias. I'm not sure what the conflict-theory version would be, i.e. what material conflict there might be between greens and nationalists that would explain the very different perspectives on immigration from e.g. Afghanistan.
Pretty easy to come up with a conflict theory explanation of immigration. On the one side, you have globalist elites willing to sell out their countrymen for cheap labour and scoring social points with each other, on the other hand, you have nationalists willing to cause enormous amounts of suffering too much poorer people in other countries for small benefits to themselves or their countrymen.
But most people who are in favour of mass migration aren't globalist elites – they're just regular people who think that being anti-immigration is icky – so it seems like that could explain only a small part of what we're trying to explain. The other side, with nationalists being nationalists because they have a material interest in reducing certain types of immigration, sounds plausible, but it would seem to predict that nearly the entire native population would be nationalists.
You don't need to be a globalist elite to benefit materially from immigration. If you're a middle class person in a leafy suburb, cheap immigrant labour makes your door dash cheaper.
You get the benefits, and the costs (taking the anti-immigrant arguments as true for argument's sake) like suppressed wages and higher crime go to the working class.
Aside from this, there is also the fact that a lot of these people are in a coalition with the globalist elites, which means going along with some of their interests in exchange for support on their own pet issues. I do think the social points angle is also important because having the cultural elite praise you and think highly of you has its own benefits. Also, you know that the other tribe is in conflict with you on a number of goals, so it’s reasonable to be suspicious of what their leaders say, but they’re being only 24 hours in a day, you can’t actually look into every policy issue yourself, so it’s sensible to take whatever people who share common goals with you say on faith as long as they don’t say something obviously pretty hostile to your interests,, although that’s beginning to sound less like a conflict theorist and more like my actual views, which are a mix of conflict and mistake theory
Doordash doesn't even exist in Europe. I think you're projecting the US situation on European countries, where the immigration controversy tends to center on migrants groups who largely live off welfare and are a net drain on the public coffers.
Have to admit "immigrants from petrostates" is a very different issue than "immigrants from agricultural/manufacturing areas" ... and there's also a big difference in how much the state denies/permits welfare services to non-naturalized migrants.
"Doordash doesn't even exist in Europe" -- so what? Deliveroo, Glovo and a few others do exist, and people working "for" them are also mostly recent immigrants hence they would probably be a lot more expensive if there hadn't been as much recent immigration.
Do you really think that pro-immigration people think about cheaper Doordash and Uber when they come up with the position? It doesn't make any sense to me. Far more likely they just want to feel like "good people" who are "welcoming" and "non-discriminatory," not quite thinking through the consequence that not "discriminating" also means abandoning "choice" or "evaluation."
"Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region."
There is so much wrong with that sentence. Like, this is a super interesting insightful article and the first comment I read is racist garbage that doesn't address the substance of the article and complains about white people sharing too much land with foreigners, and people take that in stride. I don't think I'm jumping to conclusion: this is hatred, wrapped with a thin layer of sarcasm.
Also worth noting that one of the main people defending the above quote is making quite reasonable points and contributions in the animal welfare subthread. An example of what the mainstream is missing out on by hunting "witches" and judging commenters by their single most obnoxious view.
It’s not at all obvious whether it’s better to have someone who makes reasonable points in some threads and weird racialist ones in others, or to not have them! A lot of it depends on which of these gaps would basically be filled by others if they were gone.
As I read it the current mainstream view on this issue makes the assumptions:
- There is an excess of ability to make positive contributions to society
- The ability to make positive contributions in any given situation is almost entirely fungible
- Therefore making a positive contribution to society is entirely valueless and only avoiding negative contributions to society is worthwhile
- There actually are people who have no stubborn habits of contributing negatively to society
- Shunning an ever-increasing number of people and having them live on welfare with unlimited free time and only ever talk to other people who agree with them on their worst views will never come back to haunt us.
The third one really is an *assumption*, it doesn't actually follow from the first two unlike how people assume it does.
If we really do have some slack in the ability of people to contribute positively versus what society needs, I would prefer to spend it on relaxing meritocratic hiring in order to erase self-perpetuating differences in human capital accumulation among groups, rather than on a method of making things welcoming based on a, to some extent self-fulfilling, prophecy that people's bad tendencies will change either immediately or not at all.
I’m not convinced that many of the assumptions you mention really are shared by “the current mainstream view”, though I can see one way of trying to justify some practices that would make use of these assumptions.
But regardless of that, these assumptions seem much more plausible when it comes to participation in comments sections than when it comes to participation in society more generally.
The dumbest and most frothing-mouth partisans tend to come across as normal people in topics that aren't related to politics or their hobby horses. It is pretty amazing to see sometimes.
Probably because elsewhere you can expect to say, "there's so much wrong with that racist garbage," and anyone who might demand more thought than that has already been removed from play.
Its sad. Along with larger shifts in western politics, Scott's interaction with the NYT entered him, involuntarily, more directly into the culture wars around media, cancel culture, woke, etc. After that the commentariat became more and more rightwing. The old blog was mostly centrist/center left with a sprinkling of extremists from both sides to provide flavor. The old blog comments were much more about exploration than debate.
The hidden open threads are less contentious but much less popular.
I remember there always being some extreme right-wingers, probably as many as now, but their positions were even less mainstream within the right wing than now (part of that being a change in the right wing itself rather than the commentariat), and they didn't make up as high a percentage of the comments. There were also more extreme left-wingers. But the biggest difference I remember was there were more rationalists commenting who didn't have a strong right- or left-wing bent. The core constituency was the biggest casualty of the event. Also, if you look at things other than views, the SSC right-wingers were more able to carry on a coherent argument, although not necessarily more likely to be convinced. On the other hand, they (and commenters in general) were less polite.
I generally agree with this and it conforms to my memories. David Friedman and Steve Sailor used to be common posters, but I haven't seen either in a longe time. David is 80 and has other things to focus on, but i always appreciated a "true intellectual" weighing in on this. No complaints about Sailor being gone though. There may be other notable figures lost as well.
It also seems like the "community" turns over more often now. I remember even in the early ACX days, you'd see the same commenters over and over and you could get a sense of who was arguing in good faith and willing to provide evidence of their side. Now it seems like the open threads have a totally new set of commenters every couple months.
> But the biggest difference I remember was there were more rationalists commenting
Maybe you could have stopped there. The number of ACX readers has grown, the number of rationalists has not. As a result the debate is getting more similar to the rest of the internet.
I remember it being a mix of libertarians, leftists, and people living in group houses in SF in a polycule of some kind. When was the last time polyamory was discussed here? There were definitely far right-wingers but they were marginal.
Not sure what the surveys says but I am not sure the commenters are reflective of the readership as a whole. Based on the more moderate positions in the hidden open threads, my guess is the readership is pretty much the same but the most prolific commenters have changed.
I have also noticed a drop in the quality of the discussion. There used to be strong norms against ad homonyms, straw-manning, and other biases. People regularly asked for sources to support claims. Those norms have been eroded. Take the parent comment for this thread. In the old days we would have demanded support of the claims made, not just dived in to refute it (or support it).
Of course my memory could be wrong and likely puts things in the best light. But i get a lot less out of these threads than i used to. Except for the "joy" of arguing with those you disagree with.
Scott comments less now than he used to. I wonder if that contributes to it. No "parent" around to impress.
Previously, the new readers were mostly coming from the rationalist community. Now, the new readers are mostly coming from... the rest of the population. That seems like a sufficient explanation to me.
> There used to be strong norms against ad homonyms, straw-manning, and other biases. People regularly asked for sources to support claims.
These norms are extremely rare on the internet. Also, there is no way to enforce them here. Suppose that someone starts using ad hominems and strawmanning, what are you going to do -- ban them? Seems excessive. Downvote them? Oops, there is no downvote button. Disagree with them? They will just strawman you and throw an extra ad hominem at you. What else is there? The silent stare of disapproval?
Banning them is *exactly* the right answer for the sort of forum Scott used to (and I believe still does) want. But it's harder to do consistently at this scale and in this environment.
There are a great many online spaces where "racism" is banned. If you continually find yourself coming here and not there, you might want to ask yourself why.
I think it has something to do with the fact that Scott has been positioning himself too clearly as anti-woke lately, and other anti-woke people have begun to see his blog as a comfortable platform for themselves. By mysterious coincidence, “racist garbage” is a pretty representative comment for anti-woke people.
Scott anti-woke lately? As opposed to... the good old Scott who would never e.g. compare feminists to literally Voldemort?
I think this is more about moving further away from the rationalists norms of debate, as the audience grows. In the past, a racist could some to the comment section... but he would be expected to provide evidence for his statements, or shut up if he had none. These days, you can do a lot of drive-by shooting and no one cares. There is no attempt to seriously figure out the truth. But without such attempt, the choices are either to accept anyone, or to make an arbitrary list of mandatory beliefs and ban everyone who challenges them. Both options are bad for the kind of discussion we used to have.
"Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region. Where is the mistake theory here? That Europeans should share more land with foreigners because not-sharing is economically illiterate?"
This is clearly pointing at a general cluster of ideas that is pretty charged with hatred and resentment: the idea that civilization is fundamentally a clash of ethnicities, that immigration is part of a conflict that Europeans are losing by sharing their lands, that Europeans are being replaced as the one given ethnic master of the land, etc.
It's worded in a way that deliberately omits hateful keywords, but the tone itself isn't curious or open-ended, it's sarcastic and inflammatory. The poster isn't curious about the best policy, they're preemptively mad that we don't see the way western civilization is being destroyed by immigration or whatever.
This is isn't subtle or ambiguous. This is hatred with just enough of a layer of indirection that it would pass an AI filter.
Saying "I can't abide someone's existence (unless they're far away and never interact with me in which case fine)" is basically the definition of hating them. If you say it without the second part you've crossed from mere hatred to obsession.
I wouldn't want a bunch of white Americans (or white Englishmen, or for that matter brown Hindi speakers) moving to my ethnic homeland, but that doesn't mean I 'hate' them. What a bizarre notion.
Do you mean skin color or culture? If two million Poles suddenly moved to east Germany because of Russian aggression, would there be no civil strife because everyone is white?
"Conflict Theory works when resources are scarce."
This is an interesting assertion since a belief in scarcity tends to be less associated with socialism. Socialism tends to argue for abundance within a zero sum game, with the barrier to happiness being redistribution. Free market proponents tend to argue for scarcity, with the barrier to happiness being investment and markets being used to efficiently allocate resources and encourage increased productivity.
By "scarcity," did you mean zero sum games?
I mean, granted some Brits want to bring back rationing. But rationing, I suspect, primarily worked because it was short term and in the face of tremendous need. In the longer term, people would tend to get sick of it and find ways to work around it. Though it's never immediately clear what criteria people are appealing to when they say that a thing 'works.'
> Conflict Theory works when resources are scarce.
That is the only sentence you wrote I agree with. Consider some neolithic tech level groups. If their population density is much below the carrying capacity of the land, then a thrive mindset would be the dominant strategy. Sure, one group can attack their neighbors and enslave them, but this just means that both them and their victims will be out-competed by a third peaceful group. By contrast, if the population density is over the capacity of the land, then someone is going to die, of starvation if nothing else. In that situation, a violent "survive" strategy where you drive your neighbor from their lands to get what meager resources they have, or die trying seems dominant: the size of the pie is fixed, so you engage in a zero sum fight over its distribution.
While humanity has mostly been in the latter mode for as long as humans have been around, the contemporary US is not in that mode. Nobody needs to fight for their survival, or so that all of their kids will have enough resources that they don't starve. Our tribal conflicts are not driven by necessity, but the same evolutionary process which failed to prepare us adequately for a permanent abundance of high caloric food also failed us here.
> Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region.
You should try reading something other than Hitler, perhaps. Ethnostates might have sounded like a great idea in the 19th century. Since the 20th century, that one renegade colony populated by the interbreeding of half of the European ethnicities -- and even some non-European ones! -- has been kicking the butts of just about every ethnically pure state on the globe. Ethnostates are fine if you want to have an agrarian society, but if you want to compete on the global stage, there is no way around multi-culturalism.
> Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region.
You know that the current ethnicities of Europe are essentially made up?
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_France about how eg France until rather recently was far less homogeneous than it now seems. Similar, when modern Italy was formed, hardly anyone spoke 'Italian'.
So just like in the past they managed to make up a 'French' ethnicity out of (most) of the people living in France, why can't they reshape that concept again?
Britain is fairly good at this, at least a lot better than eg Germany. And America is rightly famous for welcoming and integrating basically everyone who can shout 'U.S.A!, U.S.A.!'
> So just like in the past they managed to make up a 'French' ethnicity out of (most) of the people living in France, why can't they reshape that concept again?
We did. It's called "white". Obviously we can't get away with pretending that non-whites are the same race.
What an horrible thought, as if the remading of post-feudal Europe was not marked by widespread oppression and violence to make everyone french and italian.
And implying that ethnicities present before the formation of nation-states were "not real".
"Yeah, everyone south of the Garigliano spoke Campanian dialect instead of Latium dialect, so it means that we can insert 1 million subsaharian africans."
"Similar, when modern Italy was formed, hardly anyone spoke Italian."
That is often stated, and it's fashionable to say things like that even here in Italy, but it's an exaggerated statement. In 1861, when Italy was formed, 25% of the population could read and write, and at least that 25% knew Italian, considering that since the Renaissance it had been the language in which people were taught to read and write in every part of Italy.
As for how the masses spoke, those who lived in Central Italy
spoke essentially Italian with regional variations.
The north and the south spoke local languages, but Italian was widely understood.
Google translated quote:
at the beginning of the eighteenth century (...) Father Andrea Serrao, from Naples, attests that in his region "there is no one, however crude and ignorant, who is not able to understand Italian"
And here are public announcements from Milan from the 1600s that were meant to be shouted by a town crier, therefore they had to be widely understandable, and they're all in Italian:
The bottom line is that when Italy was unified Italian had already been for centuries the lingua franca of Italy and the standard language used in writing everywhere in Italy, *without a single state enforcing it*. It was precisely that state of things that inspired Italian nationalism, and therefore the unification of Italy. So Italian identity arose organically and is not as "artificial" as that cliché depiction of history makes it seem.
It seems to me that, although it might indeed be true that there can be at most one "ethnic master of the land" (whatever that means) in a given region, it would also possible - and possibly quite common - for there to be zero.
Do you think that morality only applies when a social contract is in place? Like when Columbus came over to the New World and did enslaved a bunch of indigenous people, was that OK because there was no social contract with them? If the US government were to find a new undiscovered tribe today, would they be ok to factory farm since there's no social contract?
No. I think morality is a question of what we value. It's subjective and negotiated at the societal level.
We value things like avoiding gratuitous suffering. Most people have no qualms about slaughtering an animal for sustenance (irrespective of whether you think one needs it), it does not conflict with values.
I think part of the reason we don't have qualms with it is that most people have absolutely no exposure to the average chicken's conditions. We don't oppose slaughtering them, true, but I think a lot of people would oppose the level of suffering your caged chicken experiences daily, if they saw it themselves.
That's because people prefer to be ignorant. Various animal-right types have been banging on about horrors of factory farming for decades at this point, and if their message was popular it would've percolated to the top of popular consciousness by now.
People do oppose that, which is why we're seeing new requirements for cage-free eggs, cage-free poultry, and new technologies rolling out for sexing before eggs hatch.
And even before these novelties, it's possible to purchase from local trusted farms at a premium. Some cities allow you to raise chickens, but bylaws usually forbid it (there's a grassroots movement to change this too).
Morality is just a question of what we value. But if “we” includes the chickens, then of course we value not suffering. All the work is being done by deciding who goes into the “we” you are talking about.
This. We evolved to make moral distinctions between groups--that's just the in-group bias. What groups we make central to our self-concept, and which groups we decide are unimportant or dangerous depend on local circumstances as we grow up. It makes sense that since we benefit from eating chickens, many people will fail to feel empathy for them.
If empathy/morality is to any degree sensitive to personal cost, then people are going to vary subjectively regarding what costs are worth bearing.
I think that argument would need reviewing after the moment you not only pass on an invitation for thursday night dog torture but report it to the police.
If we take gratuitous to mean free of charge then yes, but we create chicken torture camps so eggs are a dollar cheaper. It's not about sustenance it's about being cheaper.
There is contradiction in how we deal with animals.
I can see an argument for defending dog torture tuesdays that's as solid as defending the stuff we do to farm animals in order to shave a few cents off the cost. Neither are truly solid though.
I think if you converted enough of a continental plate into microcircuitry that, when close enough to stressed fault lines for earthquakes to be a concern, any given ton or cubic meter of rock was more likely than not to be capable of understanding the concept of death and making tangible decisions based on it, the results would change seismic behavior quite a bit.
I think flu vaccines require billions of eggs and save maybe millions or tens of millions of (human) QALYs per year. (Anyone who researched/knows about the topic should feel free to supply the correct figures.) Is it your stance that we should stop doing it too? Assuming there's no easy alternative, what should be the cost of human life-year in eggs for you to think it's roughly in balance, if there is such a number?
How do you evaluate chicken suffering anyway? If there's a unit of suffering, how much of that one egg costs? I don't think chicken QALYs is a good measure because if we don't use them for our needs, presumably 99%+ of them won't ever get born. Maybe it's the right thing if their existence is so terrible it's negative QALYs, but can it be fixed by bringing their quality of life up then? Should we also include chicken pleasure as a positive term in our calculations, or it's only suffering that counts? If it's the latter, it seems like you shouldn't in fact advocate for "letting live", not getting any chicken made in the first place should be the right course. And continuing to cover all the planet in concrete and asphalt to stop the animals we never domesticated from reproducing, too.
Yes, I do think we should stop using eggs for vaccines and switch to ethical alternatives. I don't have a number like that; there probably is one but it seems like a waste of time to figure out.
How do you evaluate the suffering of any sentient being that isn't you? How do you even evaluate your own suffering? And yeah I think we should stop breeding them, I'm pretty sympathetic (tho not 100% on board) with antinatalist reasoning, including for nonhumans, but actually wiping out all life is neither feasible nor ethically possible. There are better ways of reducing wild animal suffering than killing them, just like there're better ways of eliminating human suffering that don't involve killing
> I don't have a number like that; there probably is one but it seems like a waste of time to figure out.
Well it boils down to (1) the practical question of the cost of an egg in terms of suffering or other metric and (2) the moral question of the ratio of human to animal suffering where it's an acceptable tradeoff for you. I expected you had a good answer to (1) as you advocated against use of animals, but if you don't, sure, let's just reduce it to (2) which is about your moral intuitions and doesn't require any research.
> How do you even evaluate your own suffering?
This one is simple: I consider lengths I would go to to prevent it. Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) is a decent metric for long-term suffering: if I consider living without a non-dominant arm to reduce the quality of life to 85%, I should consider it reasonable to trade less than 15% of my remaining lifespan to prevent losing the arm and vice versa. Extrapolating it to non-sapient animals isn't quite so easy but I think a reasonable approximation can be worked out. And needs to be, because otherwise you can only give a qualitative answer like whether some living being is suffering or not (and that's the best case scenario) and anti-natalism does seem to be the only answer.
I think ignoring pleasure and positive utility in general is wrong. You're talking to me because suffering isn't the only thing I consider when I evaluate my own life, there are things worth living for for me, why should I ignore this possibility for others? Of course positive utility is harder to figure out than suffering and we have a conflict of interest when in comes to animals we want to breed, but I don't think destroying life would be a positive outcome if we could achieve it.
> There are better ways of reducing wild animal suffering than killing them
No? If you don't care about positive aspects of life, they need to stop living as soon as possible. Preferably in a humane manner, sure, but at least for us mammals most ways of dying don't feel so good and the best you can do for someone is euthanize them before they accumulate more suffering and then die more horribly.
If you do care about positive aspects of life, why are they outweighed by the negative ones to make antinatalism sympathetic?
Perhaps we should simply stop putting an objective number on suffering if it's not actually useful. In practice, the suffering of others is only meaningful to any given individual to the extent that it causes 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 suffering. If it doesn't cause them suffering, what value could it possibly have?
You have a headache, and your neighbor's dog is barking incessantly. Is it okay to shoot it? Unknowable: we don't try to measure suffering objectively.
"You have a headache, and your neighbor's dog is barking incessantly. Is it okay to shoot it?"
Dogs are one of those things where if we didn't have them and suddenly someone proposed introducing them to urban/suburban America, people would be like "hell no!"
I do care about positive states too, but I think the purely consequentialist pov misses something important. Namely, the importance of respecting bodily autonomy. You should be free to swing your fist, except for where my face is. If you violate the autonomy of others, you forfeit your own, because you've shown that in practice you don't actually value it generally (this especially goes for beings that can recognize this). It's sort of a nonaggression type of principle, by exploiting others for our benefit we are the ones initiating violence. Don't initiate violence
ultimately I don't feel like getting into the specifics right now, these are scattered thoughts while I'm on break. Generally I think of things in terms of sentientism (evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings) and original position/veil of ignorance. Would I be ok with being born into society where I could end up as a human with a vaccine, or I could end up living my entire life in the torturous conditions of a factory farm? No, I wouldn't accept those odds, I would take the odds between natural chicken life or human without a vaccine though. If you would preferred tortured chicken/vaccinated human odds, that's probably a pretty fundamental disagreement we have that won't be resolvable in these comments (especially given the amount of effort I'm willing to put into this conversation, which is not much)
Actually if you measure the probabilities per life, you are most likely to be "born" a virus. Especially in a world without vaccines :-) Personally I reject that measure, there needs to be some weight factor like intelligence or biomass or something for it to get meaningful. I don't particularly like sentience because of all the consciousness questions, but if we use it, I don't think an elephant's and a mouse's minds should be considered equal.
In general it's a hard question for me, because on one hand I do have some intuitions stemming from similar lines of thinking, but on the other hand, "I" who was born a Han (let alone a hen) wouldn't be me in a way that makes sense to me.
I have a different framing: suppose Earth was colonized by aliens who are as intelligent compared to us as we are compared to chickens, would I rather want us to be made extinct, or kept and exploited with some accounting for our puny preferences, or exploited with no restrictions? Definitely not the last one, but I don't automatically reject the second in favor of the first and might find it preferable, probably depending on the particulars.
(There is no option "they should just leave us alone".)
I don't know about bodily autonomy. Obviously I don't condone murdering healthy people to harvest their organs and save a greater number of sick people, but it's not hard to think of consequentialist arguments against this. It seems like if you take this principle too far, you would indeed arrive at antinatalism, which might not be a good argument against it for you, but for me is an indication that it can be taken too far to make sense.
The tricky thing is, imo if the mouses experience is somehow more salient than the elephants, then I would argue they matter more. My extremely limited understanding of brains/neurology puts a low prior on that, but I could totally see it being that way. But afaik there's no way to objectively, "foolproofly" measure sentience let alone its intensity, so we have to go on heuristics and our best understanding of mind, even tho it's wildly lacking
I also don't automatically reject the middle choice, but the advanced aliens could do a lot better lol
imo something like consequentialism/utilitarianism is probably the "objective" morality, but it's too expensive to compute, with way too many unknowns (e.g. see intensity of sentience above), so a blend of the easy utility calculations, a few hard lines/"rights", and maybe some other stuff like virtue thrown in, all unified under compassion and reason for all who can experience, is the best bet we have of approximating the true utility calculation.
> If you violate the autonomy of others, you forfeit your own, because you've shown that in practice you don't actually value it generally (this especially goes for beings that can recognize this).
The Zizians are back in the news, and IMO taking the quoted extremely seriously is a big part of how they got where they are. (That is: in prison for murder, because the vast majority of humans become acceptable targets.) Where do you personally get off the train of logic?
That's another spot where the veil of ignorance and compassion comes in. I'm born into the world either as someone ignorant (or amoral or apathetic or impulsive or cruel or whatever) enough to violate the bodily autonomy of others, or as the one who's being violated. If I'm the former, I want as few negative consequences to come my way, but as the latter, I don't want to be harmed by the former. The balance (as I see it) is the minimum retribution needed to protect the victim, but no more
This kurzgesagt video just came out yesterday on the topic. It has figures for how much more it would cost to change an animal's quality of life from torture camp -> prison -> decent.
Well, for the exact question, tossing the Earth into the sun is one of the most energy-inefficient of the "obvious" ways possible to destroy all life on Earth, second only to annihilating the entire Earth with antimatter.
As far as I understand, yes, some suffering-focused ethicists would press a button to send the earth into the sun if they could. But I imagine this is a minority opinion among them; a focus on reducing suffering doesn’t imply it is the only moral end, only a primary one among others like promoting human and animal flourishing.
I would be very surprised that billions of eggs are really required for flu vaccines.
But if it is, we should find alternative, and if there isn't any, the chickens necessary for the eggs should be treated a lot better, and we should still not eat the eggs (they would be necessary only for the vaccines, and also much more costly)
If the chickens are happy, I think this is ok, the problem is that even when chickens are well treated, they often have poor health, so we should also do some selection to improve it.
I want egg prices to go up way higher. I hate birds and think birds don't deserve to live, and as egg prices approach infinity the bird population approaches zero.
Once upon a time I hated birds (victim of several bird attacks as a child), but reached the opposite conclusion - I always bought the cheap cage eggs to ensure more birds were being tortured. What is better, a bird that doesn't exist, or a bird that exists under a state of constant torture? I guess that's the difference between negative-sum and positive-sum anti-utilitarianism.
I'm not sure how to answer this... why do you want to know why I commented this?
It's a true story that relates directly to the post I replied to. It's unusual to see someone else who hates birds. Do you want more details? Aside from the typical magpie swoopings many Australians would relate to, I was attacked 3 times by birds during a family holiday at age six. Pelicans, parrots, and finally and most traumatically by an emu. It was bigger than I was. I had a proper complex for years... I'm over it now.
I wanted to know if you were serious, or if it was some sort of humor, or some sort of provocation.
How is it reasonable to want more birds to be tortured if you were victim of some ?
Imagine I were victim of a man, or I were bullied by a child at school, would it then be reasonable for me to want more men and more children to be in a state of constant torture ?
Agreed. From what I've found, chickens are raised unusually badly, are unusually sentient in comparison to how much food they produce, and in particular, they produce less eggs than meat in a given amount of time. So if you're going to cut one thing out of your diet, it should be eggs. Vegetarians have it backwards.
Economists like to talk about incentives, or used to, but it definitely can seem like ordinary people maintain more straightforward faith in incentives than do economists - however much one may wave this away by asserting that people "just want to feel that they deserved this or that".
Except when it comes to political actions, where people often take it as given that nobody will respond to the incentives being created, and violently shout down anyone who tries to suggest otherwise.
You use a loaded argument at the very beginning: "it’s because they *correctly* believe racism is good for white people.". Why is this belief correct? Are you a racist? :) So, a) how would you know if it is good or bad for a racist if you are not one of them (unless you are), and b) where is the proof that is good for whites to be racist? I think history would very quickly disagree. Evidently, the racists have been the weak side, over and over (so it bears to evidence that it is not 'good' for them). Even though racism has perniciously infiltrated many societies.
Right. Can there not be groups with counterproductive beliefs? For example, the anti vaxxers are generally wrong, and their wrongness is difficult to see because they are free riding on herd immunity and even outbreaks of formerly epidemic diseases like measles aren’t that big and are easy to ignore.
Presumably, that is just an example of an application of conflict theory. For Racism to exist it needs a reason to exist and persist. If conflict theory is the correct explanatory mechanism than this means that racism benefits those who are racists, thus creating a basis for conflict. If it does not seem like racism in fact benefits racists than this is just another hit against conflict theory.
I think it would be more illuminating if someone *once* tried to write an essay about conflicting views or the origin of this or that custom or why things are so, across the whole world - with the small constraint - or spur to thought, or enemy of laziness, as may possibly be the case - that he would do so without using the word racism.
If I'm understanding you correctly, I think you'll find the spirit of what you're looking for in the old SSC post "Against Murderism", which talks about how the word "racist" has many conflicting meanings and most of the people who use it are pulling a bait-and-switch to protect their self-image.
As for this post, I'm with Andrew Cavallo above--the statement that they "correctly believe racism is good for white people" must be true in order for conflict theory to apply to that situation; the fact that it doesn't is a mark against conflict theory.
In any case, having read the earlier SSC post, I knew where Scott stood on the topic and the phrasing didn't bother me.
I have not found it to have the totalizing explanatory power that he and others do, even if he uses it "uniquely". There's not much there, and I've noticed people who tend not to be interested in specifics about why things happen or are, or persist - use it most.
Again, that's almost word-for-word the thesis of the post I linked. "Racism" is a word whose meaning changes constantly because it's mostly used for motte-and-bailey arguments by people who can't or won't acknowledge reality.
Also: I need to understand what would be meant by “correctly believe racism is good for white people” - it’s just so much word salad to me! I’ve read it 3x now.
If conflict theory is applicable to this situation, by definition, racism needs to be an unequivocal good for the people that express it. If it does not benefit them, then by definition, conflict theory does not apply.
The "expression" (as needed for argument) could lie anywhere from "just existing" to inaction in some particular fashion to how someone voted to how they spend their time to - even having interests (the cringey thought of which would have embarrassed all of us who grew up in a much earlier period) to particularly keenly in American history - where they happen to live. Even if where they lived involved them in the lives of people of other races and vice versa, 99% more than people who live somewhere "above all this" with no "racism" target on their backs.
Basically, I think if you utter a sentence, as the foundation of some argument, that nobody in history has ever spoken, that sounds weird, and in fact causes more than one commenter to read it over, trying to parse it - it's incumbent on you to give a little background, or concrete example of this in action.
ETA: or to choose two groups whose interests are not automatically considered suspect, say blacks and Hispanics.
Meritocratic hiring from a global talent pool is massively economically beneficial in the short-to-medium term and will produce a racially non-homogenous workforce, but it also does not produce 'equal representation' relative to the racial fraction of the global population. This is definitionally 'racist' according to modern legal standards.
Once you aim for equal-representation (and many 'meritocratically' promoted individuals from under-represented racial groups will do so), you will ultimately get a Venezuela/Zimbabwe scenario. It's a highly politically unstable arrangement.
I would assume that racism is good for those who are not being discriminated against, at least in the short term. Whilst the loss of a large number of people to top positions is terrible (in a sense the reverse of Trump’s DEI statements about the crash) in the short term it reduces competition - if their are 100 people who would want a job, but 50 cannot get it because they are black that is good for the white people - it reduces the completion making it more likely they would get the job. In addition, in a racist society, being against racism is bad - so in such a society it is again better for white people to be racist
There is not a shortage of jobs at the moment. The proposed situation is still good for those not being discriminated against. The companies will have to offer more money to recruit people who already have jobs. People shuffle around to take advantage of the rising wages and the result is, "inflation."
It appears to me to be effectively unchanged. In both cases, the result is a reshuffling of who works where with the necessity to raise wages to recruit (since unemployment is low). The results is inflation. What assumptions are you making that prevent this?
In a racist society, all the low paying jobs that people do not want can be given/forced to to the discriminated group (see black people and sugar canes, or in a different way, Jews with moneylending). This means that there is less competition for the specific jobs, which people see as an advantage. I mentioned earlier ‘the short term’ because there are many reasons a racist society is bad - that doesn’t mean that people feel it that way. For many people presented with two arguments
1) The ‘discriminated people’ are stealing your jobs! They are bad! Stop them, and then you will get the good jobs and those bad people will get the bad jobs
2) The economic effects of racism…and therefore profit!
No matter that one is objectively correct, and one is not, will support the second since it aligns with their values, shows a clear economic advantage, and can be much more easily articulated. This is admittedly the reason why populism picks extreme, and simple platforms, and is so good at winning elections - since the truth is often nuanced and complex, a side who can say ‘this is the truth, it can be summed up like this and then you are right about everything’ looks much better than another side who says ‘it is a complex situation…’ - there is a reason that so many people listen to or watch Matt Walsh who describes himself as not so clever - he can turn up, say ‘what is a woman?’ and do nothing more - which makes him look much more put together and correct than the other side who cannot sum up their views in a pithy statement. (Not advocating either way on beliefs here - just a description of debating technique)
I think I rambled quite a bit here, so if it is overly complex let me know and I will try and reframe
When the jobs that people do not want *are* well-paying, or at least not badly-paying, but unwanted for another reason, this often leads to an additional level of discrimination against those who got stuck with them, see e.g. Jews or burakumin.
You said that my argument "collapsed if we changed 'jobs' to 'better jobs'." I wasn't aware that we were also adding the option of enslaving people. If enslaving workers is on the menu, I am pretty sure we don't need a Federal Reserve to tame inflation.
That's presented as the premise behind a conflict theory of racism, not as a sincere belief of the author, who explicitly says in the title that he's not a conflict theorist.
> b) where is the proof that is good for whites to be racist? I think history would very quickly disagree
I mean, isn't the entire point of the 1619 project and things like land acknowledgements that racism was super beneficial for whites historically? I'm not the one to fight this fight but that seems like a flagrantly overconfident statement that a lot of people, particularly anyone on the left, would vehemently disagree with.
Perhaps you mean racism wasn't good for whites in a moral/ethical/spiritual framework, or you're using history to mean basically just the 20th century? Hard to say there wasn't some significant material and political/cultural gains from it.
Conflict theorists thinking that racism logically must have been beneficial, organizing projects on that basis, is not necessarily the same as it actually being true. Pro-racism side didn't do so well in the 1860s when those material benefits were put to the test.
> "it’s because they *correctly* believe racism is good for white people.". Why is this belief correct?
It's not correct and Scott doesn't think it is either? But someone who truly believes in conflict theory MUST believe this, because "their beliefs are correct" is literally the premise of conflict theory. This is literally the viewpoint this whole essay is arguing against.
You are making the exact same argument that this piece is making.
"a faction could vastly increase its chances of achieving its material goals just by making compromises on who it flatters vs. humiliates."
It doesn't have to be a faction. It's shockingly easy for individuals to achieve material goals in their personal and professional lives by making these compromises. But society has some rude words for people who do this.
Most people will react more to the words you write (their tone and social signals and language connotation as much as the explicit meaning) in the intros to your grant proposals and reports than they will to the actual technical content.
It's pretty easy to get free things from older people if you flatter them. The book review on LBJ's career shows the extreme of this.
As a youngish person I find it depressing and fascinating how my contemporaries argue over foreign policy, wokeness, climate change etc when housing policy is materially making their life much worse in a way they think about every day but it doesn't attract much of their focus.
On the bright side, housing is much more salient as a topic than it was just a few years ago. Unfortunately, it is also getting polarized in all sorts of ways.
This theory also points to why housing policy is starting to change. The YIMBYs have been shifting the identity lens away from the developer/landlord vs renter frame to homeowner vs renter
Yes, in my old stomping ground, the urbanists complained that homeowners showed up too much to neighborhood or civic planning meetings (and silenced the voices of "those who aren't here (in the country) yet"). Just die already was a regular meme. I think they understood democratic process to be the enemy. It was kind of an inversion of the old activism, at least that which had been considered, somewhat affectionately, with occasional exasperation, the norm in that city. I think they are getting their way, though. There's no longer any but a few grey heads protesting freeway expansion or advocating for parks. Needless to say, "open space" is now a bad word.
neighborhood or civic planning meetings are notoriously unrepresentative of the constituencies of the jurisdictions they happen in. Older, wealthier people are more likely to have the time and/or resources to take time out of their day or night to attend a meeting.
Your last two sentences are strange to me. Is the suggestion that urbanists got power and now they are fine with freeway expansion, against parks, and don't like open space? That doesn't characterize any urbanist belief set I am aware of.
Of course conservation is racist - have you no awareness of the takeover of the Sierra Club?
It was the concern of past people, activists, who were bad, unlike us who are good. Thus it was bad.
In particular it had as its object something over than people, and more particularly still, the people we’ve anointed the good people.
We don’t think they care about that and we don’t care about anything but them - eg birds or something stupid like that.
Roads are disfavored of course, by urbanists, while transit is talked of endlessly and ineffectually, but they don’t push back too hard - that’s still on the grey heads to organize. It’s pretty easy to pacify people with weird things like bike lanes adjacent to big rigs and platforms over roads dug into the ground, for treeless parks - because what’s better than crossing 3 or four lanes of frontage road to play in the engine exhaust?
Is it? I find it's a rare bipartisan wedge, it just doesn't have a large enough demo behind it. Zoning reform is a deregulatory market-solution, which coming from the more libertarian angle will satisfy most conservatives, and the left, despite not putting it front-and-center in their wishlist for housing ("wE nEEd SoCIal HOuSing"), will begrudgingly admit that it can lower housing costs and mostly support it.
One would think so, but now that some in the center left are in favor of it, people like Trump have been making negative noises about it. And homeowners seem like a readymade part of that coalition.
Yeah that could pose a problem. One of the reasons it can be a moot point to rally conservatives is that it's easier to build in red states anyway. Blue states are the ones who need to turn things around.
>despite not putting it front-and-center in their wishlist for housing ("wE nEEd SoCIal HOuSing")
What's the benefit of mocking capitalization here? Social housing can indeed be a part of a comprehensive housing policy (as is zoning reform), though it can't solve the housing question all by itself (neither can zoning reform).
It's made redundant by zoning and regulatory reform, and tends to a small lucky chunk of an already small demographic. Not that it doesn't have a place, but it's useful for just one thing: giving very poor people free or nearly-free lodgings.
It's just supply and demand. You can soften demand by pulling back somewhat on immigration, which of course has other consequences. Democrats don't want to give an inch here so it's a non-starter.
This would be true if those groups were assembling their beliefs based on rational assessments of the issue. But they aren't. They look at their cultural identity and then arrive at a belief from there.
The left is slowly slowly moving to accept the vast research showing that building more housing lowers housing costs for all, but there are still large portions of the left that refuse to believe it or will accept it but claim where they live is different (literally NIMBY arguments). The left is having a very hard time shedding their anti-capital (and therefore anti-developer or anti-landlord) identity. They may concede that a lot more housing is needed but will push for it to be government provided or non-market priced.
The right has moved much less (in my opinion). Libertarians are swayed by the deregulatory arguments, but they always have been. More traditional conservatives and newer MAGA types view urbanism/house reforms/etc as an attack on the traditional view of American suburban life coming from "city folk" (meaning leftist, elite, coastal, white collar). The appeal of the traditional American identities is stronger than their ant-regulation goals. This same thing happens with cars. Cars require a huge amount of government action to use (roads, licenses, insurance, etc) but the right rejects almost every policy that is viewed as "anti-car".
I actually think this topic would have been a good one to explore in this article (though in the past Scott hasn't demonstrated a very good understand of the YIMBY beliefs.)
One thing I've heard as an argument against building market housing is that there's an ongoing bubble in urban luxury apartments driven by global investors who let them sit unoccupied and this is eating up all the new market-rate development so that there are fewer available units for occupancy at *local* market rates even when there are more total units (and also the luxury apartments are needlessly large so you don't get as much new density as you hope). I'm ... not sure how much I believe it, but it's not impossible enough that I reject it out of hand.
If you check the vacancy rate, this is no longer true. It may have been for a minute, but they are rock-bottom in places where this was cited as a problem e.g. Vancouver.
Even if some condos are investor-owned, they're rented out.
Supposedly Vancouver applied regulatory (tax IIRC) penalties to vacant housing specifically to counteract this, though, so it could maybe still be true absent that?
How do you square this assessment of the right with the fact that it's generally easier to build in red states, and housing is mostly cheaper in those cities, large and small?
A lot of NIMBYs who want to protect the suburban design are just wealthy democrats.
Your second point first: Yes thats absolutely true. NIMBY views rarely fit neatly in typical political buckets. Wealth is usually a better predictor. Blue states and cities are the ones that need to reckon with their housing policy much more so than red states and cities. Purple states too like VA, PA, etc.
To your first point: Very good question. They are usually cheaper because there is more land still available (as in the case of AZ, TX, OK, etc) or their cities have had population declines because of deindustrialization (for example Cincinnati had a population of 500k in 1950 but less than 300k in 2010). It's easier to build because of historical policy decisions. So the issue just doesn't come up for debate in those places so people are not asked to have a strong opinion. Inertia is pretty powerful. The development that does occur is most often very suburban and fits the traditional view of American life that i mentioned before (big house, big yard, big car) and not of the type most often talked about in reference with Urbanism. I will also admit that I don't know much of housing policy debates in many red cities/states outside of Dallas and Austin both of which are relatively blue.
There isn't much money at stake at a federal level for this policy to be a big factor in national elections. The Harris campaign was trying to get make it part of their platform but I think they watered it down to please the Bernie sanders wing.
Luckily, there has been some great progress made in many cities and states on this topic.
Note on the anti-vax section. I believe the origin of the vaccines->autism link was made in self interest as the researcher wanted to shill vaccines which he had a stake in over the “dangerous” mumps rubella measles vaccine.
The subsequent wave of followers certainly did not act in their own self interest though, so certainly conflict theory can’t take us that far.
Wakefield wasn't shilling for alternate vaccines, he was shilling for a test for vaccine-induced autism that he and his wife could sell to many, many lawyers looking to sue vaccine manufacturers because the parents of autistic kids are sympathetic plaintiffs and pharmaceutical companies have deep pockets.
The traditional Marxist story is that the bourgeoisie were in the "free rider" situation at one time, unable to advocate for themselves against the nobility. But in the 18th and 19th century they organized themselves so as to overcome the coordination problems and became dominant. At which point "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" -- i.e. maintain stability, punish free riders, etc.
The Marxist political project is just to repeat this but for the working class -- organize into groups with social tools to overcome the same coordination problems. (Unfortunately one such tool is "democratic centralism"...)
So even Marx himself was slightly more sophisticated than "conflict theory" as described here. And later on people started denouncing each other as "Vulgar Marxists" for being too literal-minded about the material economy determining all of politics.
Trade and industry. The middie classes (in some countries)became able to make more money than the aristocrats could from agriculture. And, in some countries, they had enough voting rights and property rights to build on that.
As I understand it, conflict theorists believe that political disagreements are corelated with self interest and this correlation is causal. Mistake theorists believe there is no correlation and if there is one it's not causal. For example, if we had run a poll in 1800 on whether slavery should be abolished, mistake theorists predict there wouldn't have been a significant difference of opinion on this topic between slaves and slave owners. And if there was, it would be entirely explained by demographic characteristics and not at all by self interest.
Conflict theorists also believe that "what makes people feel good" and self interest are so heavily corelated (what is called ideology by Marxists) that they can be treated as one and the same. Mistake theorists must believe that they are not corelated, otherwise the distinction is simply not helpful in practice expect in the edge cases that you present in this post.
Needless to say, I think the data tips in favor of conflict theorists. Throughout history, all groups have aligned their political beliefs with their material interests. The correlation is not perfect but very strong.
For any theory, there is a version of it so strong that it invalidates itself. Consider efficient markets, for example. Markets are weakly efficient in that they tend towards the right prices, and it can be difficult to beat the market. But clearly many market prices are still wrong much of the time, just in a relatively difficult to prove fashion.
I think your no correlation version of mistake theory is one of those. So perhaps we should reject the strong version but accept the weak version.
I would also be more persuaded by your take if you engaged with any real examples.
Talking about examples, I notice that Scott had only ever used examples from contemporary america when defending mistake theory, ie. examples he has a stake in. But if it's true then it must be applicable everywhere at any time in history! Now try to explain to me how mistake theory accounts for the french revolution better than conflict theory.
food prices were. It seems like Conflict Theory is being used in 2 ways
* Everything is only about direct monetary values of the arguers (probably false)
* Everything is about competing over well specified goals of the arguers (mostly true)
The execution of Louis XVI was definitely driven by conflicts over the material interest of the delegates and much of the French Revolution is driven by Parisians trying to maximize their wealth and safety. Material changes in facts (the state of the war, economic conditions, how crazy Robespierre was) lead to changes in policies.
If this was true, that would constitute a pretty damning refutation of your theory, since you seem to think it's strong support for your theory. Would you agree?
"But if it's true then it must be applicable everywhere at any time in history!"
Why? This implies that if any two groups are *ever* in genuine conflict at any point in history they must *always and forever* be in conflict, which seems straightforwardly false. Why can't some conflicts be due to irreducible misalignments in interest, while others are due to misunderstanding?
I don't think Scott's theory is really mistake theory any more. Maybe call it insult theory.
This
> the socialists ... started talking about how the rich were parasites who didn’t deserve their money. ... it insulted ... the rich, who then naturally reacted by lashing out and saying “No, you poors are the real parasites!” And this naturally insulted/traumatized the poor, who then redoubled their attacks on the rich to psychologically compensate. By the nth round of this cycle - ie all human history other than the original-state-of-nature - the mutual animus / self-defense / trauma-enactment was driving the cycle more than the original desire for money
feels like a better explanation for how the French Revolution actually played out than anything that involves people behaving rationally in line with their own interests.
I think the French revolution is much better explained by people behaving semi rationally about their own interests (plus ideals). At the start of the revolution, France was broke and needed to call a national convention. The 3rd estate had grown economically more powerful but did not have political power and wanted more say in how their money would be used. Over the initial phase, the 3rd estate was able to basically use their power to take privileges and money from the church and nobility. This lead members of the nobility to want to reverse these changes and restore their privileges and attempted to use foreign pressure combined with Lousi XVIs attempt to flee France results in his execution to prevent the restoration. The reign of terror's peak is when dealing with defeats of the French armies and revolts outside Paris (this is probably the closest to mistake theory being correct in that the people getting killed were not advancing the general publics goals). Most actions can best be understood as people trying to optimize their interests (economic status, safety, and status/privileges).
I think if you are on the verge of starving to death, you care a lot more about your material conditions, than when you live a relatively comfortable life in the modern western world. If you have your basic material needs met, you can start to care about signaling and feeling good about yourself, and so on.
> As I understand it, conflict theorists believe that political disagreements are corelated with self interest and this correlation is causal. Mistake theorists believe there is no correlation and if there is one it's not causal.
Your definitions here seem to be lopsided. A literal reading suggests that any correlation between political and material interests is proof of conflict theory, whereas mistake theory can only be proven by a total absence of (non-confounded) correlation.
An alternative way to frame this would be to claim conflict theory requires material interests to explain nearly all variation in political belief, with mistake theory 'winning' if there is no strong correlation or if correlation is largely 'explained' by demographic factors.
I think both such framings are reductive and not conducive to discussion. The truth could be anywhere between conflict and mistake theories (or off the axis entirely!), and the relative merits of each could even depend on the issue.
Honestly, in practice in terms of the kind of behaviours, you expect ironically, often the two theories could often both be simultaneously correct like when two countries go to war, not only out of incompatible goals, but out of mistaken believes about the others power and would instead have reached some kind of mutually beneficial bargain if they were better informed. Mistaken perceptions can cause intractable wars that persuasion can’t solve and even incompatible goals can often be reconciled throw persuasion to reach a mutually beneficial outcome. So the theories don’t actually look as different as they might appear on first glance. I do expect that reality is probably described by some combination of these theories, but you are absolutely correct that it’s still an unhelpful way to think about things, especially when fights between people that are caused by differences of belief can be pretty much identical to fights caused by incompatible objectives when it comes to any practical policy one might adopt to deal with them. After all in political conflicts, it’s often very very difficult to get people to change their opinions on factual questions and mutually beneficial deals do exist.
But Scott is defending that only one of those theories is true, not that the truth lies in between. I actually agree with you, conflict theory doesn't account for everything. In fact, there is a puzzling trend in the last ~40 years in all liberals democracies where the upper class vote is drifting to the left and lower class vote to the right. I think Scott is essentially fooled by this trend because he uses such a narrow focus (his society at his current time). When you take things at higher level, it's obvious to me that material interests were always major driver of people's political behavior.
I do think conflict theory is slightly undermined by a narrow focus on self interest. For example, rich people don’t just oppose taxes because of self interest. They are against taxes because most people have principles and so will tend to conclude from the fact that according to their instincts, it’s bad when they have to pay high taxes to also conclude that it’s bad when other people have to pay high taxes. Empathy plays a role in this since it predisposes people to feel sympathy towards people in similar situations. Hence why a slave owner doesn’t just care about keeping his own slaves, but also cares about preventing such misfortune from befalling other people in a similar situation because he can easily put himself in their shoes mentally. But I do think it’s a minor modification to take this into account while doing conflict theory.
Just because you have principles does not suddenly mean you are necessarily a consequentialist. It feels bad when the Government comes and takes away money that you have worked very hard to earn and being principled means you are likely to generalise this to a relevantly similar situation, but that’s very different from suddenly becoming a utilitarian.
A non-political example might be helpful. If BOB comes and lies to you about something emotionally important to you, you might develop a principal against lying, but you’re not going to suddenly conclude that people in Africa are dying of disease and that’s far worse than being lied to.
Your example to me actually proves the opposite, because any time rich people got significant influence in contemporary (say, post 1990) European politics, they were a lot less concerned with small government as an ideal than to cut (or possibly just evade, in some countries), *their own* taxes. Laxer controls on accounts! More blank mass amnesties for tax fraud! More permissive rules for being considered a foreign resident for tax purposes! Add some other 30-odd pages to the tax codes and now my new villa is a business expense! But unfortunately the money has to come from somewhere, so until we enact out Tatcherite Utopia, dear skilled worker, please keep paying 50% marginal tax rate. We'll get to it in a second, pinky promise!
Things are a bit different in the US, probably bc Uncle Sam taxes citizens irrespective of residence so the well off have more reason to fight the income tax across the board. But still, I've never seen so much white-hot rage as when Biden added some IRS agents, a move that would make exactly 0 difference for employees but could have made a bit more difficult for business owners to be creative in their accounting. For all their talk about being principled libertarian warriors, they seem to care about their own tax bill a lot more than about mine...
I think a poll of slaveholders and slaves would have been likely to show that the slaveholders wanted to keep slavery and the slaves to abolish it. The more interesting thing ISTM is that society *as a whole* (thinking of the US and UK contexts here) moved from ‘keep’ to ‘abolish’. I imagine the actual slaveholders and actual slaves didn’t change their view much, but the people who didn’t have much material interest one way or another (most people) certainly did.
Maybe they had a nonzero material interest though. If you're in New York in 1780 then maybe you're a bit uncomfortable with slavery but you're well aware that the economy of your entire country is heavily based on it. If you're in New York in 1850 then the industrial revolution is booming, the economy is more diversified, and slavery starts seeming like something that only benefits rich southern slaveowners rather than benefiting you personally.
Unfortunately then you start slinging insults at the Southern states in general rather than slinging them specifically at slaveowners, causing non-slaveowning Southerners to side with the rich slaveowners, and hence you wind up with a dumb massive civil war instead of the more peaceful abolition of slavery which prevailed in the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
I think part of what is going on there was that it was not only about slavery. The north and South had frequent disagreement and conflicts of interest and indeed making it about fighting the South was probably part of what got the North motivated to abolish slavery. Opposition to slavery in the north greatly increased during the civil war in part due to hostility to the revolting South. Also, honestly, the southern economic system was kind of built around slavery, so it would be pretty difficult not to have the sudden states fight you, especially given that their elites were the most invested in the institution.
That said slavery might be an outlier here if you look at for example, women’s right to vote, both men and women started out bitterly against it, which sounds more like what mistake theory would predict. I personally think it’s because of sociological differences in women’s subordination when compared to slavery, but its certainly something that sounds more likely under mistake theory
I don’t think there were a lot of insults directed at Southern states in general, as opposed to slaveholders specifically. I think a major reason that many (not all) non-slaveowning Southerners sided with the slaveholders is that the slaveholders were at the top of the status hierarchy in the South, and thus had a lot of influence. In the run up to the American Civil War, southern leaders wrote pieces making the case that the non-slaveholder had an interest in preserving slavery. For example, Stephen Foster Hale (Dec. 27, 1860):
<blockquote>“If the policy of the Republicans is carried out according to the programme indicated by the leaders of the party, and the South submits, degradation and ruin must overwhelm alike all classes of citizens in the Southern States. The slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life...”</blockquote>
I think the politics of centuries past were *much* better modeled by conflict theory than the politics of the past 50-80 years. I agree that the disagreement over slavery in the U.S. was mostly a conflict-theoretic one[1] and a lot of ancient and medieval interstate wars are fairly blatant examples of one or more states trying to maximize their own self-interest without much pretense otherwise. I don't think that applies nearly as well to modern international relations. States often do still try to maximize their own self-interest, but a lot of that is fairly explicitly done by cooperating, and convincing others to cooperate, or at least by limiting conflict to fairly narrow and well-defined channels (such as trade negotiations). There's much more room for mistake theory in such a system.
[1] Though it can hardly be claimed that the abolitionist side were working solely in their own self-interest. Surely white abolitionists would have had much more to gain by trying to spread slavery to the North than by trying to abolish it in the south.
In fairness, I think a lot of the wars in history could be explained by mistake theory because with a lot of conflicts, they would not have happened if the involved countries had correctly judged each other’s capabilities and willingness to fight, and if both parties had properly understood game theory, maybe they would have been able to negotiate something better than both of them expending enormous resources on war
Mistake theorists are free to believe that "what makes people feel good" and self interest are correlated, as they obviously are. But they ALSO believe that "what people believe" and "what people say they believe" are correlated, and that "what people believe" and "what people have good reasons to believe" are correlated.
I think "it's not a conflict for most people" is a bit weak - every theory of politics should begin with Osho's law: "the people are retarded". if I was looking for a conflict I would look for some master class of shills. and maybe those statusy things are actually material for them. tho I guess it has to be true that in the end it's all based on traumatizing the shilled-to class
Why would the various “consequences of immigration” not be happening in Tennessee or Kentucky? The arguments against conflict theory are interesting in general but that’s a hole.
This is ignoring that immigration means companies don’t have to expand to most of America. Without immigration, you’d likely have every major tech company having an office in all major cities. “Willingness to relocate” is something that selects heavily for immigrants over natives. It’s a mistake to assume that immigrants moving to NYC aren’t competing for jobs with people who want to stay with their family in eastern Kentucky; they are. Google building an office in Lexington isn’t happening, mainly because they don’t need to, since they can just import people willing to move to the Bay Area or NYC.
The parallel to this in the tediously endless discussion of *why everyone can't live in the exact same place, because they all want to* is that America writ large is full of empty houses ...
This just moves the question to "then why are people who want to work in tech and stay with their family in eastern Kentucky against working from home?"
I'm talking about "why don't they support banning immigration and having tariffs but allowing working from home"? There's a substantial extra cost for the company when you have people WFH from another country as opposed to the same one, even if it's in the same time zone, and it could get much worse (thus more favorable to Kentuckians) depending on tariff policy.
They have locations in places that are major economic centers or have major research universities. They don't build in Lexington or where have you because it doesn't fit in either of those categories.
> Google building an office in Lexington isn’t happening, mainly because they don’t need to, since they can just import people willing to move to the Bay Area or NYC.
I think that the alternative to Google importing people into the Bay Area is not them building a campus in Lexington, but them building a campus in Bombay or something. Or some European or Asian country, for that matter -- I am sure that plenty of countries would be very willing to accept tech worker immigrants to become the next SV if the US decides it does not want them any more.
I like the direction these responses went but my original quibble was much more prosaic.
1. Any place that has agriculture has migrant workers. Kentucky and Tennessee have agriculture. The headline of this article got Kentucky and Tennessee mixed up but that’s germane “Foreign-born workers in his congressional district, for example, held $645 million in spending power in 2014 and paid $198 million in taxes.” - director of Tennessee farm bureau, doesn’t give a town. https://www.newamericaneconomy.org/feature/kentucky-crop-and-tobacco-farmer-says-without-migrant-labor-i-couldnt-do-what-i-do/
I’ve definitely heard (not recently though) liberal-allied people attempt to insult hypothetical conservatives along the lines of, how dare they question/object to/criticize immigration, they don’t live near immigrants/know immigrants/they didn’t lose a job to an immigrant themselves. There are a lot of reasons that doesn’t hold up but “Kentucky and Tennessee have unimportant/vanishingly small numbers of immigrants” is also not true ($645 million isn’t huge but it’s definitely not zero). They think they have immigrants and the tobacco farmer can’t make his $700k a year without them.
And the other commenters addressed other issues well.
I was in and around Dayton, Tennessee one time (notable for being the venue of the whole fake Scopes monkey business, thus practically *the* place of liberal fever dreams) and I assume the Nokia tire plant was there because they invited it/the Finns to come there. I spoke at length with an Indian guy on a tour-of-duty assignment there. It was probably meant to supply jobs to locals and probably that didn't happen at higher levels but nonetheless, weird to imagine that immigrants are not everywhere in America.
Yep, his perspective is so dripping with coastal elite bias it's incredible.
Yglesias has written adroitly showing how a chunk of the working class shift right (including among minorities) is an anti-climate voting bloc that works in fossil fuel extraction or an industry downstream of it (including the many blue collar and manufacturing industries dependent on low energy prices). This bloc loses its power - and you don't see this shift - in more twee places dependent, for instance, on tourism or a university.
Similarly, anti-immigrant sentiment (and anti-welfare/mooching poor sentiment) has long been concentrated among the lower working classes. They are more likely to be in competition with newly arrived immigrant groups for jobs (or at least whose employers can use the threat of immigrant labor to depress wages and keep them in line). They're also more likely to feel they have something material to lose, as their perch in the middle class is precarious and not to be risked/taken lightly for some social experiment.
That describes a lot of voters in those areas Scott dismisses and fewer who run in his social circle.
I'm not saying this materialism explains all politics (though Scott also neglects a primary reason a large share of the electorate is not embroiled in that fight - that older people live on government support, not the wage economy). But it explains a decent chunk and at least should not be dismissed in such a belittling fashion.
I call it the Fundamental Hypothesis of Economics. It goes like this: People choose those actions they believe will yield themselves their largest net value.
Let me unpack a bit. Value is what most economist call "utility." I call it value so that most people will understand what we're talking about Value is psychic satisfaction that occurs in human minds (and maybe dolphin minds, too). People "believe," but they can be and frequently are wrong. The work of Kahneman and Tversky flys to mind. But the FHE is unequivocal; it is a hypothesis about human nature. I am persuaded it is a true, positive statement.
Now don't get me wrong; I love ACX and all the information and fabulous thinking it embodies. But I think some of your examples that focus on monetary self interest are misleading in your essay about Conflict Theory. People by their very nature are self interested, but they are not necessarily just monetarily self interested; hardly anyone is.
I have taught economics and finance for about 45 years. I assure you that the world is filled with economic illiteracy and manifest ignorance of principles of economics.
Well sure, but isn't the whole point of the post that conflict theory posits people are thinking about material interests rather than psychological satisfaction. The latter is still value, but it's open to (re)definition based on polarized factions rather than material considerations. Owning the libs provides value, but not material value.
As Anthony Downs pointed out decades ago (An Economic Theory of Democracy), voting cannot be explained by rational/economic self-interest; at least not in the narrow sense. Why not? Because a fully rational/stereotypical "economic man" will not vote.
He/she will not vote, since the costs of voting (the opportunity cost of the time involved, the petrol needed to drive there, the shoe leather worn by shuffling in and out of the voting office, and do not forget the risk of having a fatal accident on the way to the voting office), will exceed the probability (p) that one vote will ever decide the outcome of a national election. Since this probability is essentially nil.
...Meaning that even if a voter has an extremely large economic-interest party differential (V), it cannot outweigh the smaller, but much surer costs of participating (plus the miniscule but still slighly higher probability of having a fatal accident on the way to the voting office). This is the famous Paradox of Not Voting (aka the Paradox of Voting).
...The upshot is that "something else" than material/economic interest (in a narrow sense) drives political behaviour - at least voting behavior, which is the most important form of political behavior in a democracy.
There are appox. 10 suggested solutions to the paradox. My favorite, for what it is worth, is a form of (mainly internalized) reputational costs associated with not voting. A solution that aligns rather nicely with the type of signalling-concerns that Scott writes about. I.e. that voting (as well as expressing political opinions more generally) can be analysed as signalling behavior.
...That is: ways to signal to others (and to oneself) that you are a person who holds "correct" views. "Correct" relative to the (sub)culture you and your friends belong to (including "correct" hostility toward groups & cultures your friends regard themselves as up against).
...Still conflicts, then, but not necessarily or primarily conflicts over "material" self-interests.
my favorite solution is that voting is rational given some degree of altruism.
the probability that your vote will be decisive is a decreasing function of population size, but if you have some utility from helping society (and are voting in a way you think will help society), that utility is an increasing function of population size, so the asymptotes can cancel out. https://www.nber.org/papers/w13562
Thanks for the link Kevin. (I collect solutions to the paradox, like others collect butterflies.)
It's late in my time zone, so just an off-the-cuff comment: The problem with presuming "altruism" is that it has an ad hoc-flair, unless you can put forward a theory of why some are more altruistic than others - since some abstain from voting.
Going into a solution through "concerns for reputation" has the advantage that it makes it possible to formulate testable hypotheses about why some vote, while others do not. This is an advantage over simply assuming "altruism".
For example: If you live in a subculture where your friends regard all politicians as crooks, you may jeopardize, rather than enhance, your reputation by voting. Hence we should expect to find non-voters more often in such (sub)cultures than in (sub)cultures that regard voting as something good & upright people do.
..this is just an example of how reputational concerns, i.e. concens about signalling a "type" that others regard as a good person (which is a beneficial reputation to have in private affairs), may lead to (falsifiable) theories about voting - theories which also happen to align with a lot of the (empirical) sociological studies of voting behavior.
...that said, I have nothing principally against including "altruism" as a concern. That is, if you can come up with a theory of why some feel an urge to signal to others that they are altruists, while others apparently do not. If so, we might reach common ground:-).
That's not a hypothesis; it's a model. Quite different. I'm tired of people accusing economists of believing in "Homo economicus". Every economist who models behavior as driven by self-interest, knows that it's a model. Not a great model, but the best we have so far.
It isn't a hypothesis in game theory, either. It's assumed, by definition of game theory, not from beliefs about the real world.
Obviously its hard to get the data at high quality but I would wonder how this pans out in a material very poor society. Like do you see similar dynamics in Malawi? A good use case for a time machine would be polling medivel peasents about stuff like this.
Thanks, insightful. I am not immune to status obsession, but, to the extent that I can assess my true motivations, I also genuinely care about justice, personal freedom for everyone, a job well done, etc... I care about these in a way that feels fundamental, like a terminal goal. Perhaps fixed by evolution to boost the chances of my tribe.
Which is why it should be separated in fact/predictions, material interests, values disagreements. I know that Scott argues that values are malleable and not all of them crystallized in something rigid, but you still need to consider them. And yes, trauma does cause value change
CORRECT! Conflict theory teaches that everything is about power, all alleged disagreements mask struggles for power, and these struggles can only be resolved through power, ultimately backed up by force.
> Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization.
I think this is related to why the median voter theorem fails in practice.
To make this mathematical, my hunch is that people's fundamental political values change only slowly, but how people weight these values changes much more quickly to minimize cognitive dissonance.
The mechanism might work like this: people are initially sorted into two political coalitions. Random controversies arise, coded as belonging to one coalition or the other. Members of the owning coalition realign their value-importances to "claim" the controversial point, with each member nudging their weightings to reduce their self-perceived distance between their own values and the controversy. Members of the opposite coalition move in the other direction.
My hypothesis is that over time peoples' opinions of fundamental issues (*not* policy questions, which involve a complicated mix of issues) become idiosyncratic and extremified. Many voters might become 'single issue voters' on weird, bespoke issues.
As for why this is happening now rather than in the past, I think partisan-aligned media (social media included, but I can imagine the genesis in talk radio) is the necessary condition. It acts as an echo chamber, allowing people to form an identity based on not just a political basis, but a shifting political basis. Forced interactions on a geographic or material basis would soften the sharp corners, since it's hard to feel fundamentally different from one's liked neighbours.
I'm surprised at no mention of tribalism. Free rider problems have a straightforward solution - identify and punish defectors - and a changing media and communications landscape has made that tactic far more "efficient". I agree that material conditions have declined in importance over the past couple decades, but I'm not sure this is a puzzle if we just have a situation where the second-order effects have been disproportionately amplified.
I have multiple problems with the "But What About All The Actual Issues" section, anything that clearly vibes-based can't be said to be said to be a sociological theory with a straight face and the ahistorocity is painful. But it gestures at coalitional effects at least, so eh.
Yep, I'm kinda baffled that Scott seems to have quietly transitioned from outgroup-bashing as The Explanation Of Politics (which is obviously correct), to that dubious trauma theory.
No? The explanations here are along the lines of "fighting for lower taxes gives them a rush of self-esteem by letting them defend their self-perception as job creators / heroic entrepreneurs who have played fair", which I think are secondary and largely arbitrary considerations. Plenty of rich people are on the both sides of the culture war, and I imagine neither group lacks self-esteem-enhancing justifications for why taxes should be raised/lowered.
Eh, there's some relevant arguments against the rationality of a materially-motivated conflict theorist.... but my concern is that even that runs into the classic fault (common in libertarians IME) of identifying a force and confusing it with an equilibrium. Other actors get to make choices in response to your choices!
In addition to wanting your side to be right, enough polarization leads to a scenario where extremes on both sides of a position depend on each other in a kind of symbiosis.
In my mind, Palestine is a sad example of this. The conservative Israeli government and Hamas both depend on each others' extremism to justify their own power.
The same is true in US politics. Both Republicans and Democrats depend on each other's missteps for fundraising and votes. Doing the actual best thing for the country sometimes seems like it only incidentally plays a role.
I suppose one conclusion for making oneself useful in public policy is to choose very quiet areas that almost no one cares about and are essentially boring (but have a meaningful impact on quality of life and governance), work on them with a low profile, and be annoyingly ingratiating to everyone involved. Not a strategy that is likely to be followed very often.
This was how Biden managed to pass a lot of legislation. He even said it out loud at one point after the debt ceiling negotiation. Reporters asked him about it and he said something like "if I make a big deal about it now, it's less likely to pass the House."
It's good for passing bills but bad for winning elections.
I was really amazed by the amount of major bipartisan legislation Biden managed to get through. After the experience of the Obama years, I thought bipartisanship was dead forever.
Big difference between Biden's 36 (or 44 counting the role as VP) years in the Senate and Obama's not-quite four when it comes to understanding how to get legislation through.
LBJ was similarly renowned as POTUS for his dexterity with lawmakers after 17 (19 with VP) years in the Senate.
"The conservative Israeli government and Hamas both depend on each others' extremism to justify their own power. "
I could make a similar argument during the Nazi Germany era that Nazis, and any Jews with the ability to act against Germany both depend on each other's extremism. This would be technically correct, but it would ignore the situation on the ground.
Moral equivalence is an excuse for tyranny. I wasn't alive during Nazi Germany, but I saw it constantly used that way during the Soviet era.
No, you could not, unless there was a state occupying German territories, whose currently ruling party was literally funded on the idea that the occupation of Germany had to go on indefinitely, with the Germans living there living in either indefinite subjugation or summarily expelled.
"In 2017, the Trump administration weakened the deduction. Although Republicans are usually anti-tax, this particular tax fell on high-earning people in high-tax blue states, ie the professional managerial class, ie coastal elites. The GOP thought it was funny to mess with the one tax deduction their enemies actually liked, so they capped it at a low level. This single policy cost the average coastal elite about 5% of their salary."
This ignores the fact that the same bill reduced overall federal tax rates on both income and capital gains.
"In 2020, the Democrats - party of coastal elites! - came back in power. They considered undoing Trump’s SALT cap. But they thought it would look bad to cut taxes on themselves at the same time they were expanding government, so they decided against."
It was only a few Democrats, most notably Joe Manchin, who made the decision to blackball that, which they were able to since the Dems only had a Senate majority of 1.
Failures of homogenizing outgroups aside, there's an interesting question there about the degree to which it's reasonable to ascribe the ideology of pivotal members of a group *to* that group. I think it probably is fair to say that "The Democrats" ultimately weren't in favor of SALT cap repeal (as in yesteryear Lieberman made them not in favor of single-payer), but then it's pretty darn disingenuous to call them coastal elites in the same breath!
Pro-vaxxx is a comforting religion driven by the fear of death by disease. Big Pharma takes full advantage of this fact and purposely intensifies the absurd religion.
I'm just imagining someone posting this right after Smallpox, one of humanity's greatest killers, was eliminated. How confusing it would seem to my grandmother.
People who have grown up in the present world and know nothing else find it hard to internalise how things came to be this way and what keeps them this way. Today's status quo feels like the default, natural state of affairs that requires no effort or upkeep. The pox was generations ago, but the needle is /right there/. The intuition is that tomorrow will be much like yesterday was; there is no experience or intuition to connect the pointless rituals with the needles to stories of things that happened in ancient history; so why not get rid of them?
(see also: removing OSHA, destroying everything that makes a democracy work)
Luckily this is self-correcting. We can expect a few hundred cute US kids to die of measles in the next few years, then everyone will have relearned that vaccines are important and vaccination rates will be high again.
What about the majority of those coming down with measles? Everyone use to get it before vaccination and hardly anyone had a severe case to say nothing of hospitals or death. We'll see what more considered reports say. There is scare after scare of the unvaccinated causing outbreaks. Often it is the vaccine itself causing the outbreak which spills over to unvaccinated.
Banned for this comment, do not expect having this person here to lead to productive discussion. For the record, I don't know what fraction of measles cases were vaccinated (it wouldn't surprise me if many were, since 95%+ of Americans are and the protection ratio might not be able to overcome that), but this should have way more citations and attempts to make real arguments compared to personal attacks.
The evidence in favor of fluoridation is a lot sketchier. Taking away the floride, like some US towns have done, doesn't instantly give people measles.
Did "Big Pharma" buy off the USSR rulers to make childhood vaccinations mandatory? Or did it run advertising on the Soviet state TV to convince the proletariat it needed vaccines? What is the mechanism Big Pharma used to fool the Soviet leadership to believe its lies to the point of ordering its scientists to develop these fake things?
Ok you have no clue. This is not an insult, you clearly have no idea about how Soviet healthcare was run, just throwing a "probably" out there. Anything else you say has about the same degree of validity then. Enjoy your measles outbreaks, RFK sends brain worms and a dead bear to ease the pain.
You appear to have fallen for the Russian agitprop designed to weaken the west by convincing people not to vaccinate themselves so that large chunks of the population get ill and die, and also polarise opinion so that people are more interested in fighting each other than containing Russia.
It's not for lack of trying. Cancer isn't exactly an infectious disease. There would have to be an organism causing cancer to be vaccinated against. READ: Turtles All the Way Down.
You're missing the point: if believing in vaccines is a religion, why is "creating" a cancer vaccine harder than a flu vaccine? Just fake some evidence like with the other vaccines.
And if you don't in fact dispute the effectiveness of vaccines, how is that a religion?
Safe and effective is the religion. No one says no vaccine is effective. The flu vaccines aren't effective nor very safe either. Respiratory diseases have never been successfully vaxxxed against.
So, some vaccines work less well than advertised, there are motivated groups of people who massage the evidence to make it look more convincing or lie outright, caveat emptor... Isn't it true for all of medicine? Maybe you believe that with vaccines in particular the lies dominate the scientific consensus and it's worse than with other areas, seems unlikely to me, but assuming you're right, again, how is that a religion? If I trust the wrong specialists it doesn't make me religious, it just makes me duped.
Big Pharma admitted vaccines were inherently unsafe and threatened to stop producing and distributing them unless Congress and Reagan gave the immunity from lawsuits. They got immunity. At least you can sue re: drug caused damage and death. Step one: Repeal immunity from liability. Then reverse regulatory agency capture by Big Pharma. Stop all conflicts of interest in regulatory agencies.
Well we actually do have a vaccine for cervical cancer, which, turns out, is caused by HPV. I wouldn't be surprised if more cancers caused by viruses are found.
Yeah, cancers are fiendishly complex. Just like most lung cancers are caused by smoking, but non-smokers also sometimes get them. We nonetheless consider not-smoking a good prevention, same with HPV vaccine. Would be nice to be able to avoid the infection in the first place, but.
Read the Big Pharma propaganda. That settles it. Don't look into the actual clinical trial data. All the vaxxxes are tested against other vaccines instead of actual placebos. Dig into that.
Vaccines against cancer are actually an active area of research because most potential cancers are taken care of by your immune system before you notice them, and cancer immunotherapy does work(ish), so a kind of "preventative cancer immunotherapy" where you figure out what antigens may be common across future potential tumor cells, and show them to your immune system in advance, is very tempting
The challenge is of course, that those cancers that you do notice are those that got very good at immune evasion
I am very willing to follow any religion which is able to produce miracles on the scale of the eradication of smallpox. If believing in the scientific method is a religion, then the members of that religion are clearly favored by some god in a way no other religion is.
If so, is your claim that there never was a disease called smallpox and it is a hoax created by evil big pharma to sell evil mind-altering "vaccines", or that smallpox is still at large and evil big pharma is just covering it up?
If not, are you claiming that it was eradicated, but that vaccines played no role in the process?
What if powerful interests are deliberately recasting material conflicts as cultural/identity battles to expand their support? By framing economic disputes as moral issues, elites can recruit supporters who don't benefit materially but feel emotionally invested. This obscures the actual stakes, prevents class solidarity, and creates stronger emotional engagement than boring policy discussions.
I think you're spot on when you say people take the positions that let them feel like good and reasonable people. Broadly, people buy into the dualistic political paradigm of politics being a battle between good and smart people like themselves and evil and stupid people like their ideological enemies. As such, people reflexively develop opposition towards that which their enemy thinks is good and support towards that which their compatriots think is good, even if they haven't thought about the issue at hand all that much.
Looking back, I can say that this was what was going on in my head when I used to be rather partisan. I stopped being partisan when I learned about rationalism and consequently starting thinking about issues by their own merits, disregarding where any particular hypothesis on them would fall on the left-right axis. But upon reflection, it seems that this too is because I want to feel like a good and reasonable person. Once I started reading about rationalism and following the rationalist community, I could no longer feel like a good or reasonable person while participating in this kind of partisanship. And over time, I've developed a strong reflexive aversion to partisanship in all forms because I consider it bad and stupid. But this is not that different to being reflexively aversive to the things of the other political side because they are bad and stupid. It really is a deeply ingrained psychological phenomenon such that even if you abandon partisan politics, the mentality will still manifest itself in other ways.
I think the examples you cite (SALT cap, etc) in refutation of material conflict as an operative factor in our politics don't disprove conflict theory so much as qualify its explanatory force. Material conflict may not explain everything, but it can still be a useful heuristic. However, I tend to agree that political conflicts have become largely emotional affairs. Just last week I wrote a piece about how the payoff of political triumph has long ceased being about material uplift, and is mostly about avoiding personal humiliation and enjoying that of people you don't like.
Social media probably plays a big part when it comes to political polarization specifically. You can start off leaning towards one side, probably based on your primary political position, then get funneled into all other related positions where the social validation that comes with signaling them overcomes the inertia of being indifferent. Eventually they just become a part of your identity.
Generally though I think it's all just vibes. You could probably get a significant amount of people to believe in almost anything with the right mix of social incentives and initial conditions.
Your discussion of identity alignment reminds me of a conversation I had with my father about partial ordering in mathematics. In a partial ordering, we can't always say that one point dominates another - (1,2) and (2,1) are incomparable because each exceeds the other in one dimension.
I think political identity might work similarly. Most people aren't calculating a simple sum of positions; they're prioritizing one or two dimensions they deeply care about (their y-axis might be abortion rights, their x-axis economic policy). From there, I suspect the remaining positions come through what could be called "political gravity" - a combination of echo chamber effects, social conformity with like-minded friends, and simply not having the bandwidth to develop independent positions on every issue ("it's not worth fighting this" syndrome).
This might explain why polarization happens so quickly despite people having genuinely different priority orderings. If I prioritize environmental issues above all else, I'll naturally sort into one coalition, even if my second-most important issue might align better with the opposite group. Once I'm in that coalition, the gravity effect pulls my other positions into alignment.
I'd be curious if anyone's studied whether the most polarized issues are also the ones people rank as most personally important, or if there's more ideological diversity on those particular dimensions.
(As a side point for if you see this - thanks Scott for this blog. It has been very useful for my thinking in general. This post in particular, although there is much I may disagree with, I think makes some exceedingly valuable, and interesting points)
This nicely reflects the ideological leanings of most trans people. It is going to be quite ironic if their alignment with the group that promised to protect them is ultimately what results in their destruction.
I guess some of their preferred issue are so important that they're willing to suffer gender dysphoria for a lifetime than having that issue be abolished
I broadly agree with this argument, but I think it misses something important about the mechanisms many conflict theorists believe in. Rather than being determined by popular opinion, my sense is that many conflict theorists believe that the system is so thoroughly corrupt that popular opinion rarely affects outcomes. Instead, politicians are beholden to organized interest groups who run the government by proxy.
So, for example, for vaccines, a pharma lobby being pro-vaxx matters far more than public opinion or the material interests of individual voters. If we're sending weapons to Ukraine or Israel, that can be explained by the defense industrial complex. And if the interests of regular people are obviously on the other side in the conflict theorist's view, that just means that the conflict is between the people and the interest groups and we need to organize and drain the swamp.
I think this view has a number of problems and is a poor match for the data, but I think it's pretty widely held and harder to disprove than the individual material interests version of conflict theory.
Speaking of Klein's book, what are the favored theories as to how we can *increase* decoupling and ideologically inconsistent beliefs (inconsistent with the factions I mean)? My intuition is that it would be summed as "the medium is the message". Maybe if we can't close Pandora's box (social media) it can be reshaped, if the recent diffusion into separate walled gardens (X vs Bluesky) continues to be a trend.
"But it seems like there should be ways to minimize this - you could even say explicitly “We like the rich and are happy to give them World’s Best Job Creator medallions in exchange for an extra 1% of their money, we just need some extra cash to fund government programs”."
This is pretty much what ancient Athens did: they did not really have direct taxation, what they did have is the office of "trierach", where if you get elected to it you get the honor of funding the construction of a trireme war ship from your money and your name gets added to a list in the middle of town of great men who were very good to the city, but also you can't say no to this honor.
It's also how most welfare states (including the U.S.) run when they run successfully.
It's funny the post can only conceive of anti- and pro-tax arguments over the welfare state in the most base terms when it also cites an example - the SALT deduction - that shows most people don't do so.
> they did not really have direct taxation, what they did have is the office of "trierach", where if you get elected to it you get the honor of funding the construction of a trireme war ship from your money
They had direct taxation. The Athenian state produced more than just triremes. It produced everything the same way, by making a list of what it needed, dividing that list into what were supposed to be reasonably-sized chunks, and assigning those chunks as taxes.
You can say no, but not without risk. You say This is a great honor but citizen Lysias is richer than me and the honor should be his. Lysias can either concede or refuse; if he refuses he has to swap his entire wealth with yours and you end up with the trierarchy and either richer or poorer, depending how right you were about his relative wealth. This is called antidosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_(ancient_Greece)
An interesting corollary of the narrow gender gap on abortion, combined with the fact that there are significantly more women than men casting votes in any given election, is that, until the first Trump administration, a majority of anti-abortion voters were women!
When reading it, I'm going back and forth between thinking Scott is saying that he doesn't think conflict theory drives people, and that he doesn't think stoking conflict theory amongst people is the best way to enact change. I think the later is the more defensible position, and if that's what he's saying, I think he should make it clearer up front.
But early on, Scott says "conflict theory doesn't explain politics", and then later points out that with socialists vs capitalists, conflict really does drive them, and conflict theory explains why they're so persistent in their attitudes; it's because they really want to own the other side due to their own psychological baggage. It gets them to desperately cling to their positions even where material gains would not.
> conflict theory explains why they're so persistent in their attitudes; it's because they really want to own the other side due to their own psychological baggage
But he's saying that's not conflict theory, it's mistake theory.
I'm not sure I understand why that is, then. Could you correct my mistake, and explain? If you ask me, the drive to want to own the other side because of past psychological trauma about those evil others who wanted to hurt you, but you'll show them, sounds pretty conflicty to me. It doesn't sound like "oh, I think the other side is wrong and I'm going to show them why", it sounds like "I think the other side is bad and I want to punish them for it".
He's saying that people acting that way are not acting in their best interests, thus they're not actually operating on conflict theory. Which I also think is stupid, so we probably should just wait for Scott to explain himself.
Oh, I see. I guess maybe the first problem, then, would be to accurately define conflict theory such that we're all on the same page as to what it is. I don't necessarily think "conflict theory" is defined by acting in your best interests, it's defined by thinking that we have differing values. Conflict theory seems to me to be more likely to result in people not acting in their best interests.
I would say that the central claim on the most general kind of thing that deserves to be called "conflict theory" is that people acting more rationally in their best interests than they do would not bring about any substantial deescalation of political conflicts. I don't think something could be meaningfully called "more a variant of conflict theory than of mistake theory" if it doesn't meet this criterion, much less being a central example of conflict theory.
I'm not certain I agree. Having never thought in-depth about the exact definition of conflict vs mistake theory before, I thought conflict theory was simply the belief that a disagreement is not caused by a simple misunderstanding of the facts, but rather opposing interests. What you said might be a corollary of this, I'm not sure, but I think it's a substantially more complicated way of putting it.
I was scrolling comments to see if this point was made. I am not saying I'm right, but I was rather baffled at Scott's definition of conflict theory. The colloquial definition I understood was that conflict theorists think most conflict is largely tribal (though one's tribe may often be organized around an idea or principal rather than ethnic) and politics is best understood as tribal warfare by other means. Scott's later "synthesis" to me sounded like straightforward conflict theory as I understood it - conflict derives from identifying We and They and taking positions to help We. Social media makes tribal identification easier and more homogenous (intersectionalism etc.).
I might be misunderstanding your post here. Are you saying that the only thing that explains political disagreement is the psychodrama theory? Why should any one of these theories, be it conflict theory, error theory, psychodrama theory, etc. be enough to completely explain why people disagree?
Is there any room in reality for people to disagree about issues because they have genuinely different values? Or can people disagree about a particular policy because they have genuinely different predictions for how that policy will play out?
It seems to me like all of these are separate things which can contribute to why a particular person might disagree with another. Depending on somebody’s temperament and the particular issue certain of these factors might play a stronger role than others.
> Is there any room in reality for people to disagree about issues because they have genuinely different values? Or can people disagree about a particular policy because they have genuinely different predictions for how that policy will play out?
What's surreal about this essay is that the first of those options would normally be called "conflict theory" and the second would be called "mistake theory".
Reasonable definitions of conflict theory might not allow people to have different values; but in practice all ideologies of conflict theory teach that all people have or should have the same values. That all people have, or should have, the same values, is a basic and necessary requirement for Platonism, Christianity, Rousseauism (eg the French Revolution), Marxism, Nazism, and the Social Justice Movement. All conflict theorists are in that same line of descent.
The last two paragraphs were basically how successful coalition building worked before social media when things were more top-down. Now, such strategies are impossible to coordinate.
Ooh, I’ve always had an odd fondness for the dimensionless Reynold’s number. Calculating the tube velocity for optimal heat transfer is an interesting little problem. Lemme know about any developments here.
This is just going to turn into a transitional flow regime problem, no? Are we talking fun toy problems, or does this actually come up in e.g. heat exchanger design?
I spent a couple years writing code to predict performance of custom industrial heating and cooling systems before they were built. The Reynolds number thing comes up when circuiting for laminar flow in water cooled or heated equipment.
Condenser Evaporator systems had a different set of problems.
The now defunct company filled a niche in the custom market. If it could be designed they would build it. For example If a wealthy UAE customer wanted a swimming pool cooler they would knock it out.
Mostly the stuff went on rooftops though. They did the original Mall of America system.
The substack app ate a longer digression on entrained flow research, so I'll just say that the Mall of America HVAC system is very cool and more spaces should leverage solar + human body heat where they get the chance. 👍
I just tried asking Claude about the MOA HVAC system because Zvi had a piece on the latest release.
No answer from Claude but Copilot came up with:
"The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, has a unique and innovative approach to heating during the winter. Despite the cold Minnesota winters, the mall does not have a central heating system. Instead, it relies on a combination of passive solar energy, heat generated by lighting fixtures, and the body heat of visitors to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature.
The mall's 1.2 miles of skylights allow natural sunlight to permeate the interior, which is then converted into heat. Additionally, the heat generated by the mall's numerous lighting fixtures is harnessed as a supplemental heating source1. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect is the reliance on human body heat. The presence of thousands of visitors contributes significantly to the mall's warmth.
This system not only highlights a commitment to sustainable practices but also showcases the ingenuity behind the mall's design. It's a marvel of sustainable engineering that reduces energy consumption and environmental impact"
A few notes that are not about the main point of the post:
-tax deductions involve subtracting from federal taxable income, then calculating the income tax on what remains--*not* deducting directly from tax (which would be a tax credit). For example taking a $10k tax deduction on $100k of income means reducing the taxable amount of income to $90k and taxing that (for example, at 10%, a tax of $9k), not taxing the $100k at 10%=$10k and then subtracting $10k to get zero. So, the SALT cap is very unlikely to mean 5% of someone's income at the level you describe. For someone in the top taxing state, California, the max bracket is 12.3% for people making over $720k, and with corresponding federal bracket of 37%. 12.3%x37%=4.5%, which is pretty close to 5%, but for the $150k earner you talked about, the amount would be 9.3%*24%=2.2%, and for someone in my state, Pennsylvania, it would be 3.07%*24%=0.74% of total income. And the cap still allows $10k of deduction, so it's actually quite a bit less than that. I am not an expert on this topic so feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Maybe I need to be considering property and local taxes?
-"Trans men in women’s sports." This should say trans women--ie people who transitioned to female. Trans men would be AFAB people who transitioned to male.
-"inflation benefits the poor at the expense of the rich" must be using a definition of poor that does not include people who worry about necessities, since in general inflation (even before this most recent bout) has had larger impact on food, etc, compared to luxuries
Your tax math is right, and it's even worse than that: only the portion of the tax deduction that is above the standard deduction provides any added benefit. This is one of my pet peeves with the idea that an average person can somehow be responsible for his retirement savings, when most Americans don't understand what percentages are, as well as basic mechanics of the tax system.
A $150k earner in CA in 2017 was about $11k income tax. Let's also assume they pay $10k property taxes (~1.5M house).
- that's $21k deductible with no cap vs $10k with cap
- so an $11k difference in taxable income
- which at 24% federal tax bracket is $2.6k (<2% of income)
and that's with paying property taxes - if you rent then pretty much all the difference goes away (I believe landlords get taxed differently so the SALT cap wouldn't affect the implied property taxes portion of rent).
as some secondary evidence, CRFB says that raising the SALT cap to an unreachable amount would save the average $250k earning household $630. now that's for all states, maybe you say 1/3 of those households are in "high-tax" states and all the tax savings go to that group, that's still $1800 per household (<1% of income).
Your first two points (taxes and trans men in sport) are correct but the last one is not. Inflation benefits people who are net debtors because inflation is a general rise in prices and includes wages. Since loans are not usually indexed to inflation, when people with debt see their nominal income rise (even if possibly more slowly than other prices) they see the *real* amount of money they owe (and payments) decline, which increase their *real* income.
Yea except most poor people hold debt in absurdly high APR accounts (credit cards, payday loans, loan sharks) that often rise with inflation to an extent. I wouldn't expect most truly poor net debtors to benefit from inflation, quite the opposite.
Nit: only *unexpected increases* in inflation are beneficial to net debtors; even fixed interest rates account for expected inflation over the term of the loan.
High inflation works really well for gov. debts and some financial wizards, true. In Weimar Germany: Hugo Stinnes. - Workers get by, cash/bond savers lose massively. I have most money in boring shares, did I really become richer when those rose from 300k to 400k while prices went up 30-60% on most goods I buy/intend to buy?
I think the idea of motivated reasoning is real, but wildly understated.
Reasoning, being metabolically expensive, has to be motivated. Otherwise you wouldn’t do it! I think you’re right that a lot of political stuff - precisely because it doesn’t effect people directly that much - is motivated by more tribal allegiance than a conscious evaluation of the evidence on an issue by issue basis. You seem to be seeing this kind of epistemic outsourcing as being irrational. I think that view - which says we can overcome motivated reasoning and should make an effort to try - is itself wrong; and constitutes a kind of group identity that’s divorced from analysis of the evidence.
Does that way of thinking actually work, at scale, over long periods of time to produce human flourishing? If not, what it may be doing is convincing people to deploy their limited attentional energy on the problems that are most amendable to rational analysis, while ignoring problems that are more difficult and for which group identity actually works better as a hueristic for long term survival. Whenever hard to measure questions come up, the rationalist has the instinct to shy away from them, because acknowledging we can’t measure the things we care most about threatens his identity as a member in good standing of the tribe that values truth, and - this is crucial here - imagines that wisdom is the supreme virtue and they other virtues are irrelevant.
If the world were a massive chessboard and we all shared a single well defined utility function, then rationality uber allows makes more sense as a root goal. But we’re not disembodied minds moving fixed pieces along a static grid - we’re psychotic primates who play imaginary games to determine status in massive hierarchies, and live mostly in structures made out of those status selecting beliefs. So once you define material interest to prioritize group identity over small amounts of money, I think you’re back in the conflict theory universe.
There is this theory stated in The Elephant in the Brain that the ego is mostly the PR department of the human body. Your job is to spin the decisions some other entity in your brain made, claiming credit for them and also explaining to your fellow tribes members of why they are in fact pro-social, and being aware of your selfish motivations would make that job harder.
This view neatly explains why even though, on their good days, the anti-ism ("woke") coalition can make a very good case that systemic isms exist and have a material negative effect on the lives of minorities and women, their actual tactics are much better at radicalizing majorities and men into at best category-identity politics and at worst conscious embrace of isms, than they are at reducing either the prevalence or impact of the isms themselves.
As you point out at the end, psychological motivations are quite flexible - too flexible imo to be predictive, other then perhaps in the very short run.
The real explanation is that in the long run, reason and empirical results are what matters, both for instigating new conflicts and resolving present ones. To give two simple recent examples, it is the case that gay marriage did not lead to any die consequence, and also that transitioning children did not work in resolving their problems, on average. I think it could well be that if transitioning could be done easily, reversibly and credibly (e.g. as in the Culture novels), it would actually be quite helpful to many people, but the technology does not currently exist.
In my experience the vast majority of people have an extremely vague idea of how the government works (remember how searches for "Is Biden still running?" spiked on election day? I doubt the average American could explain most issues even at the very high level Scott does here.
>The GOP thought it was funny to mess with the one tax deduction their enemies actually liked, so they capped it at a low level. This single policy cost the average coastal elite about 5% of their salary.
I'm really confused how you can say that the GOP made a policy change specifically to hurt their enemies, and then argue that conflict theory is wrong.
Like, what's the mistake-theory framing of this action? Is the GOP mistaken about their own desires, and they don't *really* want to hurt liberals? Did they have some other desire to pass tax reform but their hatred of libs blinded them to the correct policy? Both of those feel kind of tautological - it's basically saying "the GOP were mistaken, so long as you consider their desire for conflict to be a mistake."
That essay is not at all talking about how conflict theorists evaluate the material benefits of policies to see which side they support. It's saying conflict theorists don't even *bother* to evaluate policies, because politics is war and the only thing that matters is whose side you're on. It gives the example of communists who don't bother asking if communism works because the only question is if your argument supports global revolution or if you're secretly in bed with the Koch brothers, but you could write exactly the same essay about right wingers who only care about purging liberals from government and putting loyalists in power, or antivaxxers who don't bother looking at the science because what matters is if you're in the pocket of Big Pharma or not.
Scott, they say that you gain power over a demon when you know its name. Part of persuasion are posts like these. We can become more suspicious of our cognitive biases after being woke to their existence and influence on our thoughts and actions.
1) I am reminded of the controversy a long time ago (http://demaagd.com/anime/dvdbugs/mb.html) when Media Blasters accidentally produced some DVDs in mono. That article isn't the best to describe what happened at the time--Media Blasters literally claimed that their experts checked and the DVDs weren't mono. They were. In other words, yes, the users *did* find information that the experts missed. (And if you're going to claim that the experts lied or engaged in motivated reasoning, sure. That's the main reason why normal people are able to find out things that experts cannot!) If you want a further example, look at IQ. You've said things about IQ that no expert would go on the record as saying.
2) Everyday people engaging in conflict theory isn't the same as the media or experts doing so. You still don't believe that Metz was out to get you from the start, but surely you recognize that his final post was not honest, and was so dishonest that conflict theory is the only explanation. You actually brought up dishonest COVID messaging yourself. Why wouldn't this count as conflict theory? As far as I can tell, you seem to think it doesn't count as conflict theory because the people sincerely aligned themselves with the experts. But the experts *themselves* were engaging in conflict theory. They knew better, they were not honestly aligned with their own public statements.
3) "It's a mistake, but accompanied by a lot of motivated reasoning and trapped priors" is on a spectrum with "conflict". Sufficient motivated reasoning that is 95% of the way to conflict is basically the same as conflict.
They invoked talking to experts (which is not clear in the article, but it's hard to find posts from that period and Anime on DVD is long since dead.) If they lied and didn't actually talk to any experts, I'm pretty sure that that too matches to more politically relevant cases. I don't think six foot social distancing rules came from experts either.
Your "free rider" argument is most sketchy. You suppose that the millionaire knows that there are already many other millionaires with the same goal as himself, but calculate the $49K as if he did *not* know it. If that millionaire has a lot of millionaire buddies with the same interest and similar spending limit, he would join an interest group with them and each of them would have to contribute much less than those $49K to achieve the same effect, thereby increasing their ROI, or they each contribute $49K and can take measures none of them could individually. You also ignore the social capital each millionaire gains/loses with his buddies if he does/doesn't join the club, another selfish reason to participate.
And if that millionaire knew he really was the only millionaire interested in that tax break, why should he not have a realistic chance of achieving that goal even on his own? Especially if the politician in charge of that tax break bill doesn't particularly care one way or another, bribes can be surprisingly cheap:
In FY2023, 36% of bribes were equivalent to less than $15K, 90% were less than $1.5M, and the median was $35K.
So no, it doesn't take Musk levels of wealth to buy political outcomes, unless you want Musk levels of political outcomes. I think the fundamental issue is that you apply the rules of the democratic process (either "if 50.1% of millionaires try, they win", or "if only one millionaire tries, he loses") to the very different problem of buying political outcomes, i.e. corruption.
Good article. A quibble on how young people supporting lockdowns is inconsistent with conflict theory.
If lockdowns are effective at stopping the spread of Covid (big IF; see the Johns Hopkins meta-analysis [https://nationalpost.com/news/world/johns-hopkins-university-study-covid-19-lockdowns]), one would naively expect the people who have most to lose by catching Covid (i.e. elderly and infirm people) to be the most enthusiastic supporters of lockdowns.
But that isn't the only reason people supported lockdowns. A lot of people vastly prefer working from home than going into the office: ending lockdowns inevitably means that your boss would ask you to return to the office at least some of the time. Gen Z aren't shy about saying that all they want to do is rot in their beds and watch their favourite shows - they say so themselves (https://tellthebeees.substack.com/p/the-mainstreaming-of-loserdom). I've spoken to plenty of people who look back on the early days of Covid with barely disguised nostalgia, as a period in their life in which they felt fulfilled and thriving: they could lie in bed until 8:55, work in their pyjamas all day long, take as many naps as they wanted etc. I know a girl whose friends were becoming concerned that her homebody tendencies were worsening to the point of clinically significant agoraphobia: before Covid, her friends would routinely invite her out to the pub or a nightclub, and she'd make an excuse why she couldn't make it. She was keen for lockdowns to be extended indefinitely to spare her the awkwardness - no need to make an excuse for why you can't come to the pub if all the pubs are shut down.
So if you like lockdowns because it means you never have to leave the house, of course you'll want them extended indefinitely. But you'll be dimly aware that this is kind of selfish, so of course you'll confect some prosocial just-so story using whichever Covid metric currently suits your case (case counts/case fatality rate/rate of hospitalisations/long Covid). By the end of 2021 I could practically feel these agoraphobic introverts grasping at straws - PLEASE don't make me go back into the office, I LIKE wearing pyjamas all day and I HATE my colleagues!
If Millennials and Gen Z are disproportionately likely to be introverted compared to older generations (which certainly seems to be the case), their support for lockdowns is fully explicable by conflict theory.
Have you wondered how that ended up being the case? Because I have a theory: early exposure to social media have made people realize from a young age that humans are stupid, degenerate, malicious, disgusting animals. The world's desire to make information more free has only resulted in creating an entire generation of misanthropes. So of course they would become more introverted: they hate their colleagues because they hate people.
Both. I was a "victim" myself, you know. The internet gives you a pretty clear view of what people are like when they're not constrained by social pressures. And you're ultimately going to end up seeing and interacting with a lot more people online than in real life... All of which serves to fuel people's fear and disgust of others, during their most impressionable period of their life, no less. No wonder they're afraid of authentically interacting with others.
I generally agree with the conclusions of this piece because the empirical evidence is strong, but I think the theoretical argument about the free-rider problem is quite weak because it proves too much. It’s a general argument against any kind of collective political action (voting, donating to candidates, calling your representatives) which still applies if the thing you want out of the policy you’re supporting is a sense of satisfaction from owning the libs rather than a material benefit. So in order for it to not count against mistake theory too, you’d need to show that people don’t care about policy outcomes at all, and only value the psychological benefits of participating in political conflict. But this piece doesn’t seem to argue that. I think even under mistake theory people value their preferred policies actually being enacted, and the functional decision theory arguments for voting and similar actions apply regardless of their motivation for that.
> which still applies if the thing you want out of the policy you’re supporting is a sense of satisfaction from owning the libs rather than a material benefit.
> That is, this theory predicts that a faction could vastly increase its chances of achieving its material goals just by making compromises on who it flatters vs. humiliates.
I'd be super interested in ideas to operationalize this.
Isn't this just boring centrist triangulation? If you want to see what this looks like, look at Bill Clinton, look at Tony Blair, look at Keir Starmer. Predictably, the opposition that they try to appeal to still largely hate them, and they get the added bonus of alientating their base. However, it really does help make short term political gains, because it avoids riling up as large an oppositional force.
For example, Keir Starmer's Labour Party has a smaller popular base than the party under Corbyn, but Corbyn motivated much more opposition against him and that increased turnout for the Conservatives was decisive.
Mr Trump is so wise and kind and smart and hardworking, he can let me be acting president and I will do everything exactly as he had wanted it be done, for he would be instructing me on what to do, such the kind and magnanimous mentor and visionary he is, and every day I will tell the world how much better the world is on that day and how it is all thanks to him
This is a very simple take on materialism. For coastal elites, maintaining reputation may be more important to earning material goods than salary. For example, remaining a professor, or a high end journalist or media person, may earn you all sorts of unique and exciting travel opportunities on the company dime, so that you don't have to pay for those experiences directly yourself. The material gain comes from the position, and to a lesser degree, the salary.
Isn't the flattery-humiliation theory of political alignment just conflict theory with bonus bottle-bothering?
You may have heard that jewel beetle males look for a particular shade of green in their mates, and can find themselves trying to impregnate bottles with a similar color. Same deal with sulfur butterflies (might be a different species, going off of memory there): their idea of the sexiest possible woman is what I call the seizure square, a monitor four times the size of the male that switches between white and orange as fast as he can register. There are succubus orchids that will produce female pheromones at such a concentration that male wasps leave visible sperm stains on the flowers. The evolution fairy wants the male bug to mate, but has no need to perfectly define suitable mates since most things that meet the fuzzy criteria are going to work out. Except sometimes they don't.
(When you apply this principle to people, you get things like Last Origin and Azur Lane. In fact, I bet a gacha company will eventually design a digital succubus that is such a superstimulus that seeing it will fry men's brains like Langford's parrot).
Same deal here. Conflict theory was, in all likelihood, true for most of human history. We did not ask ourselves "do people in my socioeconomic class have a valid reason to compete with others?", resources were limited and it was a given that different tribes would fight over them. The evolution fairy wanted us to present a unified front and maximize the resources available to us. But "just hate the outgroup a lot and you'll probably be fine" accomplishes this, and that is the heuristic we ended up getting. Except now we are out of the caves and no longer have a small tribe to be ride-or-die with, but we still have the urge to call ourselves the Thundercock Clan, carve lightning bolt scars on our penises, and fight tooth and nail against the Deathsticle Clan (yes, they do have skull brands, and no points for guessing what their leader is called) over ownership of the local hunting grounds.
So yeah, it is true that the pro-skub and anti-skub crowds both want to maximize righteous feel-goodiness instead of objective group benefit. But that behavior can then be reduced to a little goblin in both of their heads, whispering "yes, precious, continue hating the other tribeses, they wants your resources and you have to attacks them all the time, or you will starve..."
"Isn't the flattery-humiliation theory of political alignment just conflict theory with bonus bottle-bothering? "
This was my take away too - I think Scott just talked himself back into a modified, more sophisticated version of conflict theory. The mistaken beliefs are still downstream of zero sum conflicts between groups of people. It's just that the conflict isn't pure material self interest, or even status (as Scott noted); it's something more like 'the ability to feel good about myself/my team.'
In this model, mistakes can still be the proximate cause of disagreement, and fixing mistaken beliefs can eliminate disagreements, so I suppose it's not pure conflict theory.
In general yes, but I think in the post it's pretty clearly framed as often being zero sum - part of what makes people feel like good and reasonable people is the perception that their foes have been shamed.
It's listed as one on a list of about 10 or so things. You could get to a quite satisfactory psychological state even without it. And if it must be addressed, it could at least theoretically be done by reorienting coalitions so the people who were getting shamed were "people who shame things other than shaming", and then having everyone leave that coalition, without anyone actually changing their opinion on any substantive political issue.
In theory, yes. In practice, morality diverges due to genes and circumstance, and pleasing everyone becomes a complete impossibility. This is, however, not a problem if either everyone has the same morality, or fulfillment is completely divorced from morality (via wireheading).
>There are some issues where one side can be justified by material self-interest. I think people are tough on crime partly because they don’t personally want to be crime victims. But then why do other people oppose them? There are far too many opponents for them to all be criminals, or even the family members of criminals. If a real conflict requires two sides, these don’t qualify either.
Rob K Henderson would say that being soft on crime is a luxury belief. Nobody wants to be a victim of crime, but certain demographics (namely, poor people and ethnic minorities) are at vastly higher risk of being victims of crime than others, so we would naively expect those people to support aggressive policing, as they're most likely to be the direct beneficiaries of it. Meanwhile, if you're rich enough to live in a gated community, why would it be in your self-interest for your tax dollars to go towards local policing? Presumably you're already paying for private security, which will offer vastly better protection for you and your family than the local police force ever could. So you chant "defund the police" while making up some prosocial just-so story about looking into the "root causes" of crime.
> There are far too many opponents for them to all be criminals, or even the family members of criminals.
I dispute that. If ~ 30% of black males go to prison at some point in their lives, crime must be a very common lifestyle in America's most dangerous areas. Girlfriends and mothers do directly profit from drug money and stolen goods, but even more people must knowingly associate with criminals without being bothered too much by the fact or have some trouble with the law themselves. They do not want the police to imprison their friends and relatives. To them, being a criminal is not abnormal. Perhaps there are mafia-infested areas where people think similarly. (I will also note that a liberal soft on crime is very much affected by crime and disorder if this makes the public transport unsafe and forces her to avoid the inner city and commute from the suburbs. Blacks also show consistently less support for policing than whites, despite the higher crime rates among them. The luxury belief idea makes little sense.)
"Economists would answer that inflation benefits the poor at the expense of the rich - poor people tend to have net debts, and rich people net assets, and inflation reduces the relative size of both."
Doesn't this ignore the fact that inflation weakens the purchasing power of what you earn, and wages generally don't grow at a compensatory rate in high-inflation periods (just look at the stagnant minimum wage...)?
only 10% of households have 'net debts', and though they're lower income on average they're not uniformly so (median income is $40k, so not even in the lowest bracket in Scott's chart)
It's pretty unclear whether a reduction in the minimum wage is good or bad for the poor. Theoretically it should increase employment for some of them while reducing income for others.
> and wages generally don't grow at a compensatory rate in high-inflation periods (just look at the stagnant minimum wage...)?
The minimum wage is not an indicator of how much money people are earning. In high-inflation periods, wages do grow at a compensatory rate, and the minimum wage becomes less and less of a constraint on hiring.
There isn't zero elasticity in hiring. When the minimum wage rises, some people don't get hired and some get hired at a higher wage. Similarly when the (real) minimum wage falls, some people get hired but some people get a real-wage cut.
So? Do you think "just look at the stagnant minimum wage" constitutes an argument in support of the idea that "wages generally don't grow at a compensatory rate in high-inflation periods"?
Well, not really. But wages do tend to grow unevenly across the wage spectrum during inflation, and the minimum wage *is* relevant to that. And it is an indicator of how much money (some) people are earning. And wage growth during periods of inflation trails general price growth, so for some periods of inflation the wage growth doesn't even really get started until the general inflation indicators have settled down.
Hey Scott, have you ever considered reviewing the Culture of Narcissism? Narcissism as a personality disorder can be framed as putting as taking an identity as a fixed idea to the detriment of forming a realistic self-image, kind of matches up to your "identity alignment" argument. In fact, a lot of what you argue here kind of matches up to what Lou Keep was writing about years ago with the connection between this phenomenon and the influence of technical elites in politics etc. (https://samzdat.com/2017/07/17/a-taylorism-for-all-seasons/).
I don't think this is the strongest possible version of conflict theory. Saying public debate is mostly symbolic isn't the same as saying actual policy is. Yes electoral research shows voters don't often vote according to self-interest, but it also shows public opinion doesn't correlate with policy very strongly. If policy is more influenced by interest groups (presumably ones small or organised enough to get around free-riding) which very much have material interests, that still vindicates the mistake theorists imo.
This was great, but I was on the verge of giving up. It seemed excessively focused on a narrow definition of interests: "[The SALT] cap costs them 5% of their salary per year. If they cared at all about their own self-interest, or material conditions, it ought to be 1000x more important to them than wokeness or Ukraine or anything else".
Then I got to "So What Does Drive Political Disagreement?" and everything turned around, for the better. Those psychological factors, those are interests too.
I feel like this still doesn't make a great case for mistake theory. Mistake theory, as it's often used in these spaces, seems to be something like "if we could just get correct information to people and educate them about overcoming their biases, we could reach some equilibrium beliefs and solve problems."
The trauma theory here seems like it suggests a strategy similar to that suggested by conflict theory - form coalitions of people based on their self-interest (with self interest defined differently than normal), then destroy the opposition, who you have no chance of winning over to your side.
In fact, if people were acting on material self-interest instead of psychological self-interest, a mistake theory approach would be more justified. You could craft arguments appealing to that material self-interest that suggest they should abandon their previous positions, and, assuming you did a good job, they would. This trauma theory suggests that if you craft arguments showing that something else is in their psychological best interests, that will inflict a psychic wound that causes them to hate you and everything you stand for.
True, right-wingers aren't exactly going to be receptive to claims that they're not acting in their best interests, seeing as that's what leftists have been telling them for the last two decades.
I agree with this in the main. For the last decade or so I've come to the conclusion that a lot of politics can be explained by personality types. In particular there is a type that just reflexively disagrees with whatever is popular or cool. Call them anti-establishment. I have a friend like that. If you like a movie, he will immediately think of reasons it sucks. I've learned never to express a political opinion around him. I will occasionally ask *his* opinion on some issues just to get an idea of his biases, but I never express mine. I just say "that's interesting."
This is intersectionality/cross cutting cleavages rediscovered. My sociology professor at super liberal Oberlin explained it as "I am a university professor and middle class and an atheist and a social democrat and pro choice and an American and a Serbian, so I vote against Clinton cos he bombed Belgrade but the republican is a religious nut and a billionaire stooge too."
People fall into a large venn diagram of identity groups. When identity groups are super .... coordinated(less flower or chain and more disjoint overlapping circles)you get weird tribal civil wars. The internet seems to be a great rationalizer of identity groups making it very difficult for people to maintain membership of conflicting identity groups.
"Dungeons and dragons" is woke, or racist or whatever but certainly can't be orthogonal to politics writ large and you can't game with a "other side" person.
Partly he blamed the loss of... irational yet stabilising social networks on Bowling Alone type effects. IRL in eastern europe, for instance, it's still inconceivable to break relationships with family or frienda over politics. In the US it seems almost the norm.
Online relationships are much more essentialized than irl ones where your edgy uncle is still your uncle and you can yell at each other and still want to yell at each other next month for dinner too.
What then of mistake vs conflict? In politics I think people fundamentally subsume into tribal thinking. No one is like I want to not be invaded by Russia so I'm training with a gun. Instead people think I want to not be invaded by Russia so I am doing something that gets millions of people that agree with me to coordinate on dealing with this problem.
People instinctively understand the freeloader problem! It's what triggers tribal mode to engage when looking for solutions to these problems.
When tribal mode is on people coordinate on lots of tribal interests even if they are not personal interests. Obviously people also sacrifice for the tribe. Peolle can also ditch the tribe if it sufficiently betrays their desires or expectations.
Inflation doesn't necessarily simply benefit the poor more than the wealthy. The wealthy tend to keep their wealth in assets that increase in value with inflation while poorer people only have cash savings. For example, if someone is wealthy enough to buy a 500k house and sinks all their savings into it, then 10% inflation means that they now have a 550k house that has the same real value. However, someone that only has $1,000 would keep it as cash. After 10% inflation, they'd still have $1000 but it'd have 9% less buying power.
The poor are also more likely to use entitlement programs which often lag behind inflation. So maybe they'll get the same amount in food stamps or social security checks but be able to buy less with them (until they're adjusted). Or they use an entitlement program that determines eligibility based off of income. In that case, they could lose eligibility if their real income changes. Or maybe they make minimum wage, in which case their income would not adjust to inflation.
The only actor that necessarily benefits is the government itself as it taxes inflation related "gains" and has to pay out less in benefits. It can get complicated to figure out who the winners and losers are so even voters operating entirely out of self-interest wouldn't have clear incentives.
This also ignores the fact that poor people tend to hold their debts in absurdly high interest accounts (credit cards, payday loans, loan sharks) that will almost always be at a higher APR than inflation.
On the other hand most wealthy people who hold debt will typically hold it in low APR things like mortgages and business or personal loans, etc. In fact the ultra wealthy tend to leverage debt to their advantage. [1]
"there should be ways to minimize this - you could even say explicitly[...]" Yeah, this is admittedly my longest-held confusion about politics. I've often wondered why we don't have many heads of state who, having attained modern society's highest power echelon, say fuck it and drop the pretense and games that made their careers in the first place. Especially with presidents who can't run again.
Why not just be ruthlessly upfront about all the trade-offs that every major policy entails? Maybe it's because the opposition, still playing the game, would use that honesty against the incumbent and block many of their policies through obfuscation and manipulation? Still, wouldn't you automatically make your opposition's point moot if you literally said "Look, we need to do X, and as our main opposition knows this entails A, B and C, and they're somewhat right about these but we're going to go ahead and do X anyway because we believe the benefits D, E and F are too strong to pass up."
This would shift the usual political talking points from party A clamoring that "A, B and C are HUGE negatives about policy X, plus D, E and F are fake" and party B clamoring the reverse. If party B (in power) adopts a clear trade-offs-but-we're-leaning-X-anyway communication strategy, party A (opposition) should lose credibility if they continue with the usual bullshit.
It really is a political disease. If you listen to the heads of the most important central banks (US, Europe, Japan), they have refined their communication strategies over decades with the express goal to be as data-driven and trade-off-conscious as possible, minimizing strong directionality in any given speech, even if all voting members agree on the course of action.
The major difference between heads of central banks and heads of state is that the former's target public is typically educated in economics and/or business, while the latter's target includes a mass of less educated people who vote based on vibes and along clan lines.
Maybe people should have to answer a couple of fact-based questions before voicing their opinion. Just kidding.
I think all of these theories are overrated compared to the much more compelling “My enemies are innately evil and want to increase suffering.”
Obviously that’s not true, at least not the “innately” part. But I think there is a real asymmetry here that a “both sides” framework completely ignores.
The left/left of center/libs/progressives/ whatever you want to call them are much more interested in ideas than the right. They follow their premises to their conclusions, even if this hurts them electorally. They are best modeled as trying to make the world a better place. While this all bottoms out in psychopolitics (desire to feel like a certain kind of person) eventually, I’m not sure there’s a single group (yes including EAs) where this isn’t the case on some level. People just bottom out at different points.
I don’t think the right can be modeled in this way. I think one particular psychopolitical value (owning the libs) has taken control of the entire party. To do this, they have sacrificed everything they supposedly care about (Limited government, moral values, democracy, freedom, America’s position on the world stage, our economic prospects) in favor of electing the one man who Owns The Libs more effectively than anyone ever has before. I don’t know how this happened, whether Own The Libs was always the chief value that nobody had figured out how to appeal to until Trump, or if it was simply one of many competing values that gained a competitive advantage during a period when The Libs were being very annoying. But right now it is very clearly at the top.
And when “the libs” are broadly in favor of decreasing suffering and increasing equality, the best way to “Own” them is to do the reverse. So now we have today’s politics, where the right’s position on nearly every issue is indistinguishable from someone whose goal is to increase suffering.
Now of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the left is always right. Sometimes they’re wrong about what reduces suffering, and sometimes that means that doing the opposite of what they do actually reduces suffering. But those cases are much more rare than the cases of “I support killing millions of people with HIV because it owns the libs” and the like.
TLDR one side is vastly more driven by psychopolitics than the other, and this has lead them to be worse on most things, and it’s a bit weird to not explicitly point this out.
In the US, the last two presidents from the right-wing party have been a draft dodger and a guy who doesn't know which side of a bible is up (and more significantly, said in an interview he never felt like he did anything that he needed forgiveness from God for). I can (and do) buy that the elements of the right-wing coalition have ideas that are important to them individually, but in a practical, results-oriented sense, "owning the libs" seems to be the one and only idea that the whole coalition is agreeing on.
I’m not sure it’s particularly patriotic to elect someone who attempted a coup, at least not if what you’re patriotic *about* is our history of freedom, civil rights, democracy, and limited government.
Simple explanations have their advantages. These asymmetries around negative polarization plus the general tendency for people to endorse political positions similar to those in their social circle (i.e., tribalism) can probably explain a lot about current political dynamics.
There are plenty of examples where the left just wants the right to suffer. The only difference is that the left tries to make excuses for it, so if you believe the excuses it sounds nicer. Some of it is motivated reasoning--if you really hate Trumpists, it's a lot easier to justify your hatred if you can come up witgh sonme excuse to do so.
Yeah, I really don't see where the "delicious X group tears" portion of the left is any more respectable than the "own the libs" portion of the right. They seem to have much less influence on the *governmental* levers of power when the left is in power though.
I do not seriously believe you can't think of prominent examples of the left hating Trump supporters and need me to mention some before you'll believe they exist.
You’ve moved the goalposts. This isn’t about just hating the other side. This is about having “Owning the Libs” (or Owning the Cons) being a guiding direction for policy opinions.
"Owning the libs" is the means, not the ends. The end goal is to reverse the social decay that has slowly consumed this country over the last century. They're reactionaries, not sadists.
Firstly, I think the average right wing voter cares much more about spite towards elites/The Libs than any actual long term vision for how the country should be, that stuff is very online.
Secondly, what exactly do you mean by social decay? If your problem is that women can vote or we don’t do segregation or we accept gay people, don’t hide behind vague terms, just come out and say it openly. If it’s something else, please explain it and explain how it’s going to be accomplished by Owning The Libs.
You don't need to be "very online" to see that day by day, a bigger part of the pie is going to pagans, savages, and degenerates. Society is becoming more and more hostile to the values of faithful Christians. Even if people can't put it into words themselves, the resentment is real. And it's this resentment that fuels this movement.
...Well damn, I genuinely wasn't expecting you to outright say that. I guess we've gotten to the bottom of this whole conflict. Have fun killing each other!
Was there a chapter/verse where Jesus said "have fun killing each other!"? If not, I kinda suspect "the values of faithful Christians" are not what you are actually concerned with.
Actually the values of faithful Christians are very good historically speaking. But we're now very much facing the ceiling of how good the values of orthodox Christians are ever going to get, and lots of people are still getting unfairly injured by the sharp edges that will remain now and forever. Post-Christians in the West have taken on most of the Christian values that are legitimately good (as many as the Christians have, anyway) without the unjustified epistemic commitments that create the ceiling. So the Christian values that are not actually good are very salient in a lot of the West RN, and it's not a good look when someone feels alienated and indignant specifically about people not privileging specifically those values of theirs that are actively bad and hurting people.
> Actually the values of faithful Christians are very good historically speaking.
Sure, you can easily make a case for this by observing the spread of Christianity over the course of history, though you'd have to note that "the values of faithful Christians" is a set with different membership at different times and places.
> and lots of people are still getting unfairly injured by the sharp edges that will remain now and forever
There are no sharp edges that "will remain now and forever". The content of a religion always changes to match what the believers want. Anything they don't want will fail to remain.
> I don’t think the right can be modeled in this way. I think one particular psychopolitical value (owning the libs) has taken control of the entire party. To do this, they have sacrificed everything they supposedly care about (Limited government, moral values, democracy, freedom, America’s position on the world stage, our economic prospects) in favor of electing the one man who Owns The Libs more effectively than anyone ever has before
I think if your mental model is "my side is motivated by principles and reason, the other side is purely acting on dumb nonsense" then you should probably stop to reconsider. Maybe it's true, but maybe it's just a massive failure on your part to understand what motivates your opponents.
I understand that sort of Outside View perspective, but I worry that the principle you endorse would prevent you from recognizing that situation when it does happen.
Ask yourself: What line would a political group have to cross before I believe this?
Actually, ask yourself what you would have said had you been asked that question ten years ago, and then reflect on how your answer applies to today.
"I don’t think the right can be modeled in this way. I think one particular psychopolitical value (owning the libs) has taken control of the entire party. To do this, they have sacrificed everything they supposedly care about (Limited government, moral values, democracy, freedom, America’s position on the world stage, our economic prospects) in favor of electing the one man who Owns The Libs more effectively than anyone ever has before."
Owning the libs has proven to be an effective way of also limiting the government and providing more freedom and democracy. It has sacrificed genteel manners and America's Position On The World Stage, but who needs that garbage? The people that seem most upset about America's image don't even live in America for the most part.
“but who needs that garbage?” Anyone who carries US dollars, for starters. Starting infantile trade wars and alienating everyone around us will make the US dollar less valuable. Inflation will rise massively because of Trump’s policies. I can’t say I’m a fan.
I also wouldn’t describe anything this administration has done as pro-freedom or democratic but I suppose we have very different definitions of those things.
Only Two More Weeks and the Trump hyperinflation is sure to occur. As opposed to the Biden inflation which happened for purely incidental reasons.
Gouging the ability of the government to enforce regulations is pro freedom. Giving the money straight from federal workers to regular people is pro democracy. Imagine the possibilities!
> I don’t know how this happened, whether Own The Libs was always the chief value that nobody had figured out how to appeal to until Trump, or if it was simply one of many competing values that gained a competitive advantage
I suspect the competitive advantage involved none of the rival Republican candidates being able to credibly deliver much progress toward any of those other values either.
Why, sirrah, I have no money, you know it; and therefore resolve to rail at all that have. And in that I but follow the examples of the wisest and wittiest men in all ages, these poets and philosophers whom you naturally hate, for just such another reason; because they abound in sense, and you are a fool.
"If they cared at all about their own self-interest, or material conditions, it ought to be 1000x more important to them than wokeness or Ukraine or anything else. It should completely dominate the airwaves and Intertubes. Instead, crickets."
Because such people care more about power than money. This is why a Blinken does not live in sybaritic luxury.
>Lincoln thought blacks were inferior, yet he acted against his own attitude n followed his belief .
Lincoln started a war against secession, not against slavery. Of course, by the middle of it keeping slavery around no longer seemed palatable (and appeasing the South no longer a big consideration), so he came around.
Of course after Lincoln was no longer around, appeasing the (white) South almost immediately became a huge consideration again for some reason. US history mostly resolves around the white South being politically dominant 95% of the time and throwing huge, nation-threatening shit fits the moment they ever aren't.
...When are you going to understand? You can't change human nature. The fact that the conflict is over psychological and not material needs is irrelevant, as psychology is also real. Small shifts in genetics and environment result in creating unbridgable gaps in morality, and ultimately ends up making moral conflicts a zero-sum game. Both sides cannot be psychologically fulfilled.
You must realize this yourself as well. Were the consequences of your doxxing any less real because the causes of those consequences were purely psychological? Of course not. The presence of opposing morality presented a direct obstacle to your own happiness. Those obstacles can be removed, however. The country can be brought under to the power of one god, a god who will let you make all the posts about IQ you want. All it requires of you is faith... a small price for the fulfillment of all your desires.
You need a competent eugenics program for that, which isn't happening under either establishment... And frankly, with the technological progress we're seeing, it's going to be significantly faster to just replace them entirely.
I think executing rapists and allowing abortions in cases of rape can have predictable results. I dont think it would be hard to get *a* result, its hard to control the results of biology.
"Zero-sum games" is a pretty narrow class of situations where you win exactly as much as I lose. Expecting it to naturally arise in psychology of a social species is counter-intuitive at best.
Even positional goods can be nonzero-sum when you consider transitions between states when they are stable and states where they are actively contested.
Interesting that despite extensive discussions regarding pros and cons of conflict theory and psychodrama theory that mistake theory is effectively dismissed as almost unnecessary to refute. I want to see that refutation. I know that I (and colleagues) have plenty of hidden motivations and these are interesting to ferret out, but I missed the self-obviousness that my opinions-du-jour weren't foundationally motivated (quite simply and transparently) by my specific understanding of how things work and my assumptions about morality/ethics/law.
In fact, my reaction to reading this and noting that gap is so instant/visceral (and the lack of comments resonant with my reaction) that I'm wondering if I'm missing a meta-context for the article.
Perhaps the ACX crowd is primarily left-of-center (or more to the point, anti-Trumpian) whereas I am not, and the recent U.S. election may have left them far more in the mood to question not just the logic of their opposition but the "Id" controlling the opposition than I. If so, fair enough, but if that crowd wants to understand their opposition they might do well not to dismiss without a lot of deliberation the fact that their opposition believes the majority of things they do quite simply because they've got a fact and moral base from which they would logically do so? Maybe "Id" like stories are critical (and econ value, and feeling better, and replicating a gene pool, and...) are all interesting, but how about just a face value: "that's what the other side derives from their pre-existing observations/logic/morality"?
I mean, this theory kind of *is* a subset of mistake theory, just with a strong presumption as to what sort of mistakes people make and why. And practically it works out more like mistake theory as it doesn't posit that political conflicts are irreducible and irreconcilable.
> Perhaps the ACX crowd is primarily left-of-center
Far left, the thought leaders are still fundamentally in coastal cities and think the furthest right silicone valley investor is some how a good baseline estimate of the entire rest of america, world, history of thought. Texas and where im from are purple yet I think its treated as if fly over country isnt allot more people.
There's a good chunk of this that feels wrong on its face, but I need to sit and really ponder it to figure out why.
What I can say off the cuff is that we tried that whole "give a little to take a little" thing in the realm of politics. It's called "pork", and people got so mad about it that Congress barred Congress from doing it. What you've written in the final paragraphs reminds me of that specifically. It was dumb to forbid pork and should be brought back in some manner.
Re the gender gap on the abortion question: I'm consistently baffled by the extent to which this is framed by both sides (but especially the pro-choice side) as men vs. women in a way that starkly implies that men have no vested interest in abortion being safe and legal. I'll concede there are no consequences directly *to the physical body* of male-bodied (or post-menopausal) people, but having the option of abortion can be *extremely* consequential to the lives of men who are or expect to be in sexual relationships with women. (Yes, some men feel free and able to escape the consequences of fathering a child without anything coming back to them. I think this is the exception, not the norm.)
But it's allergic to appealing to men as men, even when it wouldn't require any modification to the policies advocated for. Perhaps they think it's a slippery slope, if they encourage people to vote for legal abortion because it's good for them as men, they might start asking "is this good for me as a man" about other issues like affirmative action.
Yeah, and I mean also, some of the motives for men to support abortion rights are potentially selfish in nature, at the expense of women. Seems to me that channeling this would still be worth it if it leads to more victories for abortion rights, but some feminists may be worried about indirect later consequences to the dynamics between men and women in sexual relationships.
Yes, the difficulty you run into here is that pretty quickly you butt up against another long-time piety of both conservatives *and* many liberal feminists, which is that "a real man takes responsibility" for unexpected pregnancies. The man who talks a bit too enthusiastically about how abortion benefits him personally starts coming off less as a right-thinking progressive and more as a deadbeat dad, in practice or wannabe.
I recall a while back some activist group or other put out a video with Hollywood actors talking about why men should be pro-choice. The main response - which I saw from both social conservatives and liberal feminists - was basically: "Oh, so a bunch of handsome, wealthy, powerful men find it highly beneficial to be able to quickly and quietly get rid of inconvenient pregnancies, eh? Wonder why *that* could possibly be."
I basically agree with you and Turok. Legal abortion is good for men, and I support it for this reason among many others; an enlightened MRA should support abortion on demand. As Turok says, though, the Left won't appeal to men as a class, and as you say below, feminists may be worried about later consequences to the dynamics between men and women in relationships (though I bet they just hate the idea of doing anything that benefits men).
One adjustment that could salvage conflict theory is to posit that people's politics stem from self-interest at the identity level, not the personal level. A PMC liberal supports Ukraine because they identify as a member of the U.S. global hegemony; an anti-gov conservative supports cutting his own farm subsidies because he identifies as a self-sustaining yeoman. You could even argue that this identity-centric location is more rational than locating one's politics at the personal level, given that a single citizen's voting behavior only matters in aggregate with their identity cohorts.
It sounds like "conflict theory" might not mean exactly what I thought. For example, I thought "People want to defeat and humiliate anyone who has previously tried to defeat and humiliate them, especially anyone who succeeded." is a central example of conflict theory, whereas you seem to think that only direct material self-interest counts as conflict theory.
"Conflict theory" as historically formulated is that conflict is based in groups or classes rationally attempting to secure conflicting self-interests. According to this theory they are not acting rationally (e.g. the self-destructiveness of supporting conspiracy theories) and conflicts between their actual (even their psychological) self-interests, if they even exist at all, are certainly not the primary driver of political conflict.
Parts of this post feel like the sort of fundamental objections that a conflict theorist might exasperatedly respond to with their version of "Yes, We Have Noticed The Skulls".
A number of these ideas are covered in Bryan Caplan's book "The Myth of the Rational Voter". He examines the "self-interested voter hypothesis" (closely related to "conflict theory") and finds it lacking. His preferred explanation is "rational irrationality" - it doesn't cost very much in expectation to be wrong about political questions (for the basically free-rider reasons you mentioned), so people are willing to indulge in believing what feels good to them.
The theory appears reasonable enough, although I think personal Covid decision making has been a striking counterexample. A lot of (mostly conservative) people lost their lives from refusing to get vaccinated, and a lot of (mostly liberal) people maintained stringent Covid precautions well beyond the point it conceivably made sense. This can't be explained by beliefs being "cheap", because in this case they had substantial costs.
I think youre overly first-order about peoples self interest. This is especially clear with the Ukraine issue: Dont you think it matters in the long term whether your country is the world hegemon? And by a similar token: Is it so crazy to think that being on the winning team in domestic politics has benefits beyond psychodrama? Whether you personally benefit from any particular issue is secondary; thats just being a good soldier.
> This is especially clear with the Ukraine issue: Dont you think it matters in the long term whether your country is the world hegemon?
Sure, but is that cause better or worse served by throwing resources at some foreign conflict on behalf of the side that's inevitably eventually going to lose?
The Vietnam War is probably the closest historical analogue (the lack of actual US troops being an important difference). Much like the Vietnam War, opinions may reasonably differ on whether this whole horrid exercise is actually in the interests of the US or not.
It seems like the psychopolitical framing could make productive political discussion difficult. It allows everyone to tell everyone else, "You don't hold your beliefs for your stated reasons. You only hold your beliefs because they flatter and soothe your ego." How can we falsify this charge to others, or even to ourselves? What is an appropriate response to all of this mind reading?
> Economists would answer that inflation benefits the poor at the expense of the rich - poor people tend to have net debts, and rich people net assets
I know it's only tangential to your point, but I'm not sure to what extent this is true. Some rich people do have a lot of debt, and the poorest people tend not to have much debt at all because no one will loan lots of money to someone with low income. (I think what matters more to the poor is wage stickiness, which might cause prices to rise faster than their incomes). And having assets only matters if those assets are cash or their appreciation doesn't increase when inflation does. E.g. housing is one of the prices that determines inflation, so if inflation is higher, your house's nominal price might be increasing more quickly as well.
Really thought-provoking essay which made me LOL or groan several times; your closing lines provoked both reactions simultaneously. Which was a bit painful actually but some antacid seems to be helping and anyway, kudos.
Also I'm here to salute, with admiration and a little jealousy, the stealth-Churchill-quote deployment.
Maybe I'm missing something here, why can't conflict theory include things that are valued for idiosyncratic, aesthetic or otherwise not *directly* material reasons? You defined it as material, maybe because it has roots in something Marxist-adjacent that's really wedded to materialism, but even so people ascribe monetary value to a whole lot of things that are not gold bars or a large house or medical care. People value all sorts of things that I personally wouldn't value, things have different levels of utility to different people, and so on.
If disagreements are fundamentally a conflict of what people value, isn't that still just conflict theory? And a lot of what people value is on that bulleted list of things you gave. The young people during covid who supported lockdowns valued "feeling their own identity group is heroic net contributors, and that their outgroup are villainous moochers." If you *want* to feel a certain way, you value it, and in fact will pay cash to feel that way, that's what charities are counting on. And if they'd pay for it, we're still just in conflict theory.
I place a lot of value on "avoiding situations where I feel like a sucker". The basic level response of the overcoming-bias crowd might be to say "you're being too risk averse, you should calculate the actual EV of taking that path, opportunity cost of doing that versus something else, etc". But my loss would actually BE higher, because if losing made me feel like a gullible dope I would get extra negative value from that outcome. Then somebody's "xenophobia" is the same thing, they could have a 100% accurate understanding of the economic consequences of immigration and the probabilities of which crimes might increase by what %, and if they made the "wrong" decision you might call it bias or mistake, but what the risk/loss tables didn't account for was that person valued the current aesthetics of his community, or maybe placed a large negative value on the outcome where "I generously welcomed these people into my community and now they're everywhere and act like they own the place and run stop signs and sit around on street corners smoking joints and now I feel stupid." This still seems like conflict theory being right and mistake theory being wrong, with a definition of material that includes anything a person values.
The refusal to engage with aesthetics - or dismiss arguments as merely "aesthetic" - makes so many debates moot from the get-go: we're going to remove a big old chunk of reality, possibly a very important part of our evolution - before we start arguing!
I actually wrote about this recently on my (single post) Substack. American politics is definitely rooted in status games, but I think the emphasis is different for both groups. It's really about the games for the Republicans and you get status automatically if you win. Meanwhile, the emphasis is about status for Democrats.
The problem with a theory that it's all psychological, is that you can interpret it in such a way that any conceivable belief-forming mechanism is indeed psychological.
Imagine a person who forms political beliefs only by building from the barest moral intuitions, and adjusting her credences in each political proposition by carefully reasoning through each of their relations and entailments. Also, she somehow consumes the entire human corpus of social science prior to forming any political beliefs so she won't be subject to motivated reasoning. Whatever belief she arrives at, we could say she only believes that because she likes to think of herself as a good and reasonable person, not subject to any of the common political biases.
I genuinely applaud Scott for admitting his theory is unfalsifiable and has no predictive content, but that's not the place to stop working on your theory!
> Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization.
That sounds like the "loss of geography" point Klein was making in that book, but I'd frame it as "people are now able to form consistent ideologies".
The worldviews that we have derived through coalition-forming are actually not that logically consistent. Maybe you mean consistent as in reproducible, not logically consistent?
Coalition forming isn't what I mean. I mean that people can start to make the rest of their object-level beliefs line up with their meta-level values. They can do this because they can easily talk to people, quite a few of whom have spent a long time thinking about precisely this topic.
For example, if you were a rural progressive who was just neutral on Israel, you can far more easily be persuaded that you should be anti-Israel after 7/10 because there's plenty of technology to connect you with people and communities who will believe roughly in what you do and will just tell you about how that's the consistent view with progressive ideology. Or perhaps, that community's view of what it means to be progressive.
> But it also predicts that nobody will try this in real life.
Hmmm. Is that true? Isn't this kind of how the tax system in ancient Athens worked, where the government would collect taxes by telling some rich person to fund a project, but they could get status for doing so? E.g. they would fund a warship, but also be in charge of operating it? I could be getting all the relevant details horribly wrong. But I also sort of get the impression that this is how some high-tax European countries operate, by having a strong social norm of everyone having a responsibility to pay taxes, and doing so being considered patriotic. (Again I could be very wrong here).
This is a great take. Could you help me unravel something: Lets say that a middle class worker supports a billionaire because that billionaire gives to charities that they agree with. Is this a counter-example? Or can this be explained in the framework? (I.E. "I'm part of the good group that believes in community support and so does the Billionaire so we're all good people?")
So, people are motivated to become respected members of identity groups, and to be respected within the group they must work to convince everyone else that this identity group has good qualities and should be respected and that the enemies of the group are bad? Does it then make sense to say that conflict theory is sort of true at the level of these groups? Each group is an entity in conflict with the other groups?
But how can we get over this bipartisanism? How can a person that's anti-illegal-immigration, pro-climate-change-action, pro-lower-taxes, pro-choice, pro-gun-control, anti-Putin, pro-vaxx, anti-woke and so on be able to feel ok about his position? Because that's the only way to really tackle the individual issue (unless there are real dependencies to other issues)?
It seems whenever you take one position these days, you are supposed to buy the whole package of positions about very different things. This undermines a democratic process of finding consensus heavily.
Political bipartisanism in the US is structural and has held true since the beginning of the country for structural reasons, the only new thing is that people are internalizing it more. We won't get rid of that without substantial changes to the form of government, for example instituting a parliamentary system.
I think Scott's story of how these bipartisan positions came to be internalized by their respective coalitions leaves out an important causal element in the purposeful excavation and destruction of subcultures as alternate centers of identity and self-esteem by the political coalitions, which was a both-sides thing but the left gets mostly blamed for because their tactics looked worse to the people who didn't buy into either side's.
This may be true for the US, but even there it seems less and less possible not to take on the full opinion package of either side. I remember some 20, 30 years ago both parties in the US had diverse opinions in their ranks, often driven by the interests of the politician's respective constituency.
These days, it seems like even in countries with proportional representation, it seems to be only "us" and "them". Even the media consumed by either side is outlawed by the other
Yeah, I wonder if the fact that there are increasingly only two poles in places like Europe is something intrinsic in the dynamic or a result of the outsized influence of the US in the West. I don't know how you'd go about untangling that.
Bipartisanism is even easier to sustain with only one party. There's no pesky actual other party to maybe not be the complete opposite of your party in every way.
...Why? If there is no meaningful opposition, there is no need to fight. The point is to eliminate conflict, no? People are free to have their own opinions, they just won't express them anymore because there's no point. Just look at Japan and how peaceful things are there.
Um, have you *seen* the Japanese internet? Not to mention bullying in schools, etc. There's a surface-level peacefulness, which is not nothing, but for some people, the world can never be inoffensive enough to not offend them, and Japan certainly hasn't learned the secret to not raising that kind of person.
But that discord is contained in places outside of regular society. As for the bullying, that's just a symptom of Japan's extremely hierarchial culture, and is present in workplaces as well. Or at least, it was; they are taking some steps to make things less soul crushing. Did you know they banned students from giving people nicknames? Not just mean nicknames, but all of them?
Still, all that hierarchy served a purpose. Costly power struggles are rare when there is an unquestionable hierarchy at every level of society. Order is maintained, and all is well.
I guess that just being aware of the problem is some defence against it.
Like, if you agree with Republicans on 70% of the issues, you need to be aware of the psychological pressure which is going to constantly be pushing you in the direction of agreeing with them on the other 30%. People you hate, and who hate you, are going to be arguing in favour of things you agree with, and it's sometimes going to be really hard to remember that you agree with them.
If you're aware of this then maybe you can defend your true beliefs against the tide, but if you're not then you'll probably just get swept away with it.
I work on tax policy as my day job and I *strongly* disagree about the SALT analysis here. SALT is expensive, and it's eating up budget room for more popular, broad based tax policy (e.g. the Child Tax Credit).
GOP members from blue states (e.g. NY) have a lot of leverage in a razor thin majority, so they have made SALT their go-no go parameter for the tax rewrite, which will probably lead to money being spent there that GOP leadership and many Dems would prefer to go elsewhere.
The people with the most at stake are willing to blow up the tax bill for the sake of their constituents' very specific material interest.
I do remember thinking about the SALT cap and the reaction to it when it came to (relative) prominence. I often get the impression that when the PMC/upper middle class/haute bourgeoisie are caught bang to rights, they generally don't make too much fuss about it because they are smart enough to know how it looks to 'ordinary' people. Fundamentally, the SALT deduction isn't easy to defend and, knowing this, most of the beneficiaries don't make a big song and dance of it in public. Where the public aren't all that aware of somewhat arcane bits of the tax code (for example) making a fuss can cause them to cotton on and the results can be the opposite of what was intended. However, House Democrats did push hard for the cap to be raised and passed the Build Back Better Act which raised the cap to $80k. Only one Dem voted against. The public don't generally follow the minutiae of legislative debate so that's actually a good place to make your displeasure known.
In addition, the PMC are often personally or ex oficio part of informal networks where they can subtly lobby politicians and decision-makers without having to go onto the airwaves or write an op-ed to make their case. They use their position subtly to get what they want. So, just because there isn't a big hoo-ha about something doesn't mean that very strong representations aren't being made. They are, just in places where most people don't see them. If you know your local politician is on your side, there isn't any need to launch a campaign. All parts of the political spectrum do this which means that there isn't much fuss about it.
There is one psychological aspect of the anti-vax stuff that occurred to me during the pandemic which was inspired partially by Adam Curtis (someone who I am ambivalent about at best) and very short film he made (https://youtu.be/VrSQinf8Qto?feature=shared) about how, since Watergate. people are seeing conspiracies everywhere even when they don't exist. This isn't an original observation but I think people get enormous satisfaction from telling other people how the thing they like is actually bad. In this mode of thinking, to come over as a smart, clued-up kind of person you have to be a critical thinker always prone to trying to find a contrarian angle. Except maybe there isn't really enough unknown dodgy stuff out there so you end up trying to prove that black is white. To me, this is a legacy of Watergate, DDT, thalidomide etc. etc. I'm not saying that there aren't scandals waiting to happen, there always are. The interesting thing is that this conspiracist thinking used to afflict the left in the main, now the right are at it too maybe more so. It may also partially explain some of the more ludicrous examples of 'woke' overreach. "We were right about civil rights, so we're definitely right about latinx [or whatever]"
My overall feeling is, though, that for the first time since WW2, a lot of people in the West whose families have been fairly secure for generations are really starting to worry about their material position (not that it's disappearing or disappeared but that it could disappear in the near future). To me that's driven a lot of the polarisation we've seen recently. The rebalancing of global wealth away from the West has something to do with it. The push against 'woke' could be seen as desire to maintain the structure of society that existed when certain groups were did very well (who are now feeling precarious). Probably, though, even without 'woke' those times aren't coming back.
But yes, political persuasion is difficult these days due to the psychological ramifications of admitting you were wrong. "What else might I be wrong about?" "My credibility is shot". Maybe people feel it's better to defend an idea they suspect could be wrong rather than admit they were wrong? If you concede, the other side wins, you are no longer trusted and so all your other ideas are cast with suspicion. Whereas if you stick to your guns, maybe the other side might secretly think that you could be right. Perhaps also worsening material conditions make things worse because the potential consequences of being wrong are greater?
> Fundamentally, the SALT deduction isn't easy to defend and, knowing this, most of the beneficiaries don't make a big song and dance of it in public.
On the contrary, the fundamental case for SALT deduction is extremely strong. It just consists of the idea that you can't be taxed on something you've never possessed.
SALT deduction formalizes the idea that the state and federal governments are different entities, and the states outrank the federal government. That's it.
Imagine that you face state income taxes of 75% and federal income taxes of 90%. What do you think that should mean?
NOW you finally understand ~Diderot~ [I meant Girard] and scapegoating. His overall theory may be useless, but his critical insight was this dynamic is essential for social cohesion and/or progress.
Forgive me for paraphrasing, possibly uncharitably (as paraphrasing always carries such risk), but...
>People form beliefs based on biases and motivated reasoning...
...yes?
>...but the beliefs they form are genuine.
Yes. This is emphatically NOT an argument against conflict theory.
I mean, the whole argument seems in perfect concordance with, e.g., Marx's famous statement about "social existence determining consciousness". If you're not really disagreeing with [prototypical, stereotypical conflict theorist], then who are you actually disagreeing with?
(As a side note, businesses are already busy funding politicians to lobby them for various handouts, privileges and favorable laws, often in a zero-sum game against other businesses / industries. Using their existing influence to additionally ask for lower taxes comes at zero additional cost.)
The bit on free rider problems seems to me to prove too much. Consider the case of a unionized workplace during a contract negotiation. This analysis would suggest that, because of free rider problems, it would be irrational for each worker to strike or take other job actions over their potential material gains from a contract, so any such conflict can't be about material interests.
I think what's actually going on there is that a bunch of political organizing (like union organizing) is about overcoming collective action problems by building cultural affinity, conferring status, etc. Unions mobilize workers to strike by building a shared culture, conferring status on workers who strike and penalizing those who don't, etc. You could apply some of the same logic to e.g. donor networks - the fact that status-based tools are used to help mobilize people doesn't erase the fact that they might be getting used in the service of some underlying material interest.
I'm not sure where exactly Scott is coming down on what share of political disagreement is about conflict - whether this piece is supposed to purely be rejecting a Marxist "it's all class conflict through different lenses" frame (sure), or whether it's arguing that essentially none of our present-day political arguments are about underlying material interests.
My view would be that over time we've moved from a situation where most political arguments were pretty narrowly about material conflict (will Henry VI or Edward IV wear the crown of England and dispense the power and revenues it commands) to a situation where our politics is a mix of conflict-driven, values-driven, and mistake-driven arguments, with each of the three forming a substantial portion of our national stock of stuff to argue about.
The narrative you write about experts is annoying to me. I am not convinced that most "experts" were actually looking down on and humiliating average people as much as you claim. It might have felt like that because of social media, which would explain why this is a more recent phenomenon.
The theory does not need the experts to generally be people looking down on and humiliating others. All it needs is for experts to be part of a coalition which uses its association with experts as a means of humiliating those outside of it. Even if no single expert ever humiliated others in such a way, even if they universally opposed this, so long as experts tended to stay in the coalition and their presence and ideas continued to be used as humiliation fodder the account holds.
And there’s also at least a couple of deranged academics, scientists, public intellectuals etc. in each field. All it takes is one of those people to become prominent for this impression to grow.
I think the "experts" section is the weakest in the article by far.
What's interesting about Covid vaccinations and the Ukraine War is that the polarisation probably could have gone either way in the US.
If the Covid vaccine and the Ukraine War had come along in the second term of Jeb! Bush then I imagine he would have done pretty much the same things that Biden did, and being anti-vaxx and anti-war would still be left-wing positions today.
> and being anti-vaxx and anti-war would still be left-wing positions today
Anti-war, sure, but anti-vaxx? Really?? The left and the right aren't complete mirror images of each other. They do, in fact, have different values.
Also, Trump was the guy who started Operation Warp Speed, so according to your model the left would have refused to take the vaccine. They did take it anyways, because they're not complete morons.
> anti-vaxx? Really?? The left and the right aren't complete mirror images of each other. They do, in fact, have different values
Being anti-vaxx was traditionally a left-wing position even in the US, wasn't it? Long-haired hippies living in communes and embracing crystal healing over industrialised medicine?
It's still that way in Australia, where the least-vaxxed towns are the crunchy hemp-belt ones of northern NSW.
Exactly how being anti-vaxx became right-wing in the US in 2021 is still a bit of a mystery to me. The mainstream of both parties was fully in favour of mass vaccination, but somehow the right-wing loonies got out ahead of the left-wing loonies and were louder, which somehow made it a right-wing phenomenon. The defining moment was not the moment the first right-wing loony said "the vaccines suck" but the moment the first left-winger said "Man, those stupid right-wingers think the vaccines suck".
My read is that it was because the health experts were not afraid to say "close the churches" and yet were afraid to say "close the BLM protests". This made "health experts" read as part of a faction, and the other faction decided to reject everything they said as fruit of the poisoned tree.
The free rider problem mentioned here is exactly why socialist movements were so insistent on organizing entire workplaces and fields of labor into union sections - precisely to minimize the effect of those free riders. Of course, at least the assumption was that capitalists were doing much the same, though through more informal and social means.
In general, it was a part of the socialist movement's worldview right from the start that yes, there was a conflict, but there are also a plenty of people who hold a mistaken view - a mistaken view of their own class position, that is, i.e. workers who don't understand their interest lying in working-class organization and who thus had to be specifically recruited to the unions. The whole unions angle of traditional left-wing organizing and the counterposing of labor and capital is presumably less obvious in the US, where both the labor unions *and* the sector-related business organizations are less powerful within the society than in many European countries, where there are long traditions of formal negotiations between them precisely to defuse this conflict.
Also, the antivaxxers have often portrayed the vaccine/lockdown debate as a class confict, with the class they're opposing being the PMC technocrats ostensibly supporting vaccines or other Covid measures due to them being technocratic scientific management solutions aimed at increasing the power of technocratic management throughout the society and thus benefitting the PMC technocrats (a class extending, of course, over a variety of age classes).
Again, whether one agrees with this thesis or not, it's an example of negative class-formation, us vs. them, in a pure conflict-theory way. Furthermore, people into this framing usually interpret a lot of other issues through it, directly or indirectly - opposing "climatism" as even more technocratic management, opposing Ukraine aid since they see support for Ukraine as a part of globalist internationalism that wishes to tie more and more countries to technocratically led international organizations etc etc.
I would say that the biggest issue with your sketch of Conflict Theory is that it treats growth as a zero sum game: either the poor gain something, or the rich gain something, but never both. In reality, some policies are better across the board for everybody. For example, the flavor of market capitalism that we see in Europe, the US, etc, is clearly a Pareto improvement over the command economies of the Soviet Union and Mao era China. Public Choice theory seems like a better explanation to me for why policies that improve standards of living in the aggregate don't get passed.
This whole article seems to be based on a false equivocation. It switches between the motte of
"conflict theory is the belief that people disagree because they're trying to get what they want" and the bailey of "conflict theory is the belief that people are fully selfish rational agents like homo economics".
It provides the first definition in the intro to explain that mistake theory is the belief that people are just wrong about things, but as evidence against conflict theory it gives stuff like "liberals don't benefit from immigration so that can't be why they support it", completely ignoring the fact that the stated primary reason for this is altruism.
I feel like he's explained why he's not a conflict theorist by defining conflict theory so narrowly that hardly anyone actually is.
I've never particularly liked "conflict" vs "mistake". So much of politics doesn't really fit into either category. The two sides of the abortion debate don't believe the other side is making a mistake, they believe that the other side is fundamentally mistaken about an irresolvable values question. The "anti-vaxx" debate is partially about the question of whether particular vaccines work, but partially about the values debate of whether someone should be forced to undergo a particular medical treatment.
I think what Scott is arguing here is that these all count as "mistake theory" anyway but it doesn't seem like a useful classification. There's a big difference between "you are mistaken, minimum wages actually don't increase unemployment" and "you are mistaken, foetuses actually aren't people".
It *feels* much different, but is it actually? I don't think people actually have differences in their *fundamental-level, reflectively consistent* values, outside of some weird cases like psychopaths. In practice it's often easier to get, for example, Christians to change their mind on values than on epistemic things like the inerrancy of the Bible.
This is my view as well. Conflict theory, to me, is thinking the world will be a better place if the other side loses. And it's often correct, given the convergence of values that social media has accelerated, and accepting one's values as premises! In any event, I always though "the fighting is the point" is the conflict theory, not that "my wallet" is conflict theory.
"It may even destroy your reputation and social life. But it does let you briefly feel good about yourself during your downward spiral. “Sure, I may have lost all of my friends and ruined any chance of anyone taking me seriously ever again, but at least I’m not one of the sheeple!” In the same way, people don’t strategically support political positions that raise their status later, they’re support whatever lets them feel good about themselves right now, however destructive it may be to their social standing"
You're implying this is a clash between impulsive short-sightedness and wise long-sightedness.
But from your own words it rather sounds like a clash between prioritizing internal self-esteem and prioritizing what others think of you. I don't think prioritizing internal self-esteem is short-sighted.
In light of the evidence that has come out since the Rootclaim debate, what is your current subjective estimate of the probability that COVID had a zoonotic origin (meaning in particular that that Furin cleavage site evolved naturally in animal hosts)?
Please don’t duck this question. If you can’t place it on one side or the other of 50.00%, I won’t believe you.
> Anyone with an X account is living part of their life in a weird psychodrama where millions of bullies are brute-force-attempting to find the most enraging possible attack on the most intimate parts of their identity at all times.
> I think people are tough on crime partly because they don’t personally want to be crime victims. But then why do other people oppose them?
Because it lowers their rent! They could probably get mugged monthly and still come out ahead.
In my neighborhood every attempt to lower crime, clean up, beautify, add art, etc., is fought by renters because it would "gentrify" the area, which is another way to say that their rents would go up. I never thought people would fight to make their neighborhood worse until I saw it first-hand.
Renters vs. owners might be a pretty legit example of conflict theory.
No rational description of vaccines would put them as "good" or "bad." Witness that no one is advocating the return of the smallpox vaccination.
Vaccination pits the real, non-zero potential from harm from the vaccination, after factoring in that some percentage of vaccines fail to protect vs. the real, non-zero potential harm from the disease, after factoring that there is a real chance the patient will never be exposed to danger.
You've got it backwards. It is precisely rational descriptions of vaccines which must put them as "good" or "bad".
That's because rationalism does NOT mean "proper reasoning". It's an ancient, clearly-defined philosophical view in which all sentences are either True or False, because that's necessary to do deductive reasoning. There are no probabilities in rationalism, only in empiricism. (Bayesianism is a much more-recent hybrid of rationalism and empiricism.)
The term names a 2,500 year-old philosophical tradition. If you asked someone in the 18th century whether "rational" meant "good reasoning" or "faith in the axiom of choice", they'd say "both"; they weren't aware that there could be any other good way of reasoning. So every time you use the word "rational" today to mean "good reasoning", other people are given license to interpret that as "Boolean logic".
Using the semantic slippage between the long-accepted meaning of rational, and its modern folk-meaning, was a tactic of French post-modernists to attack modernity by calling High Modernism "rational", which it technically is, and then blaming that "rationality" on science, which is empirical.
I aware of allot of the debates, by dropping the word "tralse" I was implying my actually position
When you come across a unsolvable problem with a formal system you should find a simple edge, label it, figure out how to integrate it with your existing knowledge base
When grog asked what number of apples he had and grammically couldnt answer "he had none" in 1 word, he must invent the concept of 0; debts when they exceed your assets, negitive numbers. "i". Surreal numbers and defining flavors of infinity; etc.
Huh? Is there some meaning of “the axiom of choice” in philosophy that is different from what mathematicians mean by it?
Because, as mathematics, it is only important in infinitary contexts far removed from any situations concrete enough to apply “rationality” to, rationality is about decisions.
When you say "rational", you're invoking rationalism, even if you don't want to. The vast majority of people in the US are still rationalists. Christianity is rationalist. The default behavior for most Americans is to categorize things as "good" or "bad", full stop.
I'm not saying you must belong to one. I'm saying that you shouldn't be surprised when many people classify things as simply "good" or "bad" which shouldn't be treated that way.
"Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people."
That's more like a consequence of conflict theory than a definition. Conflict theory, I argue, is more-importantly and more-fundamentally the belief that political disagreements can be solved not by compromise, but only by a battle between Good and Evil, which one side wins and the other loses. Also, Good always wins in the end, because mumble-mumble Ahura Mazda / the Good / God / World Spirit / historicism / social Darwinism.
Today, conflict theorists think that the kinder, gentler approach to this battle is to first try to win it by suppression of the other side; but if that doesn't work, you must resort to physical violence. (This is, of course, much easier if you've already convinced your side that there is no difference between debate and physical violence.)
If the belief that disagreements come from material conflict were the root of the problem, conflict theorists would still be open to compromise. Do a utility calculation and maximize utility. For instance, look at each sport individually and figure out how much advantage males have in it, and consider each trans athlete individually WRT their history of hormone treatment; and come up with criteria for judging individual cases that will balance the interests of cis-female athletes versus those of trans-female athletes. I think this is what most Olympic sports committees are already doing.
But no activists on either side are calling for this AFAIK. All demand complete capitulation to their interests.
Conflict theorists consider utilitarianism and compromise to both be mortal sins. They are out for total victory; anything less is unacceptable. In America, their archetype for political conflict is the Civil War. In the week of Trump's election, this manifested in a rash of blog posts in the online community I'm most-embedded in, which argued that (A) the election proved that most Americans are irredeemably evil racists, (B) peaceful democratic reform is therefore hopeless, but (C) anything other complete capitulation to every item on our moral agenda is unthinkable; therefore (D) [post trails off into silence].
The obvious unstated conclusion (D) was that it's time for civil war. I pointed that out to some of them, and was mobbed by dozens of leftists calling me a Nazi, misogynist, racist, supporter of slavery, et cetera. Most of their arguments (though there were very few of those) brought up the Civil War or WW2 as reference points by which to guide our present actions.
Conflict theory is the only theory of politics that's possible within the ontology that the vast majority of the world's population has always held. I could call that ontology "logocentrism", though strictly speaking logocentrism is just one manifestation of it.
Logocentrists believe that words cut the world at its joints, accurately and reliably enough that a sentence stated in natural language must be either True or False, without any numeric or qualitative quantifiers such as "one-third of" or "most". Not "99.9% of birds can fly", but "birds can fly."
A moral truth, to a logocentrist, is True or False. You thus cannot construct a utility equation out of moral truths, because they output only True or False, and it needs numbers. The only way to act morally, they think, is to create a fulfilment criteria for each of your moral truths, like "No one is homeless", and try to make all of these criteria True, with the assumption that none of them can ever possibly come into conflict. (That assumption is not a result of logocentrism; it's part of the cluster of ideas that always go together with logocentrism.)
The result is that a logocentric "moral system" is never more than an arbitrary collection of taboos.
So while I agree with Scott's arguments that political conflict isn't mostly selfish at the surface level, I think it's very soft on conflict theory, seeing it as a misapprehension, rather than as a philosophy by which liberal democracy is morally repugnant, progress is only made by civil war and the creation of a new authoritarian government, the costs of civil war need not be considered because war is temporary but progress is permanent, and war need not be avoided because one's own side is destined to win.
In other words, Scott isn't taking a conflict-theory view of conflict theory. So his argument will have no effect on conflict theorists. Not that any argument could; conflict theory teaches that arguments are inherently useless, and should only be engaged in dishonestly.
Conflict theory is a natural result of two observations. One, which was probably mostly correct for 9,000 years, is that only authoritarian governments were stable. The other is that your own society's present morality always appears more-moral to oneself than do its previous moralities, and one's private morality appears more-moral than all competing present moralities.
Its philosophical spelling-out began, so far as I know, in Zoroastrianism and Judaism; its ontology was formalized by Plato and by Christianity. It was rejected in Athens, Iceland, Venice, the Netherlands, and several places in the pre-colonial Americas; but didn't threaten to displace conflict theory until free markets in Europe proved even more-conclusively that compromise, in the form of mutual exchange and wage-labor, combined with individual liberty rather than social unity, were more-productive than theft or forced labor. Only then were the reactionary beliefs of conflict theory spelled out at length in Hegelianism, which was born of Lutheranism and Prussianism, and is fundamental to Marxism, American "progressivism", Nazism, and the "Social Justice" movement.
Hardcore conflict theory, which is not merely instinctual or empirical, but philosophical, is AFAIK uniquely Western. The far left is not wrong when it says that the West is uniquely oppressive. But the West is uniquely oppressive because it's unique in having religions and philosophies which elevate conflict theory to a moral necessity. The far left and the far right both try to use more-rigorous conflict theory to solve the problems created by conflict theory, which is why their cures are worse than the disease.
Conflict theorists tend to think utilitarianism is daft on its merits, like I do, regardless of whether or not it is a "mortal sin" due to opportunity cost.
For starters, utilitarians use the base assumption that all human lives are more or less equal in value, which goes against the moral intuition of most human beings. In reality, different human lives have different amounts of value, and these amounts vary greatly. (Don't get me wrong, you might have to tease this out of people, and ask them the right questions with the right phrasing. And even then some people are stubborn enough that they won't admit they feel this way. But actions speak louder than words.)
So the metaethical framework that makes sense to you is ethical egoism? Since you're founding things on a moral intuition that logically can't be objectively true for "most human beings".
Actions speak louder than words. I think actions show people's morality more than empty words do, and looking at the morality of humanity expressed through their actions, I think I am on solid ground saying that people generally fall into the same category I do when it comes to this issue.
This basically means, though, that you believe that two people or groups can be in conflict and *both* sides are completely morally right! This also goes against the moral intuition of most human beings, at least these days.
Virtue signals are already vices; canceling is just gossiping to new exciting heights and ANY level of gossiping is unethical
> Being a conspiracy theorist doesn’t raise your status, in the sense of making people like you more or giving you access to cool parties. It may even destroy your reputation and social life. But it does let you briefly feel good about yourself during your downward spiral. “Sure, I may have lost all of my friends and ruined any chance of anyone taking me seriously ever again, but at least I’m not one of the sheeple!”
I have a lot of thoughts but I'll restrict myself to one.
I think that the US is a bit unique in terms of how bad people are at sticking up for their class interests. Nowhere else that I know of do you get quite so many rich people voting for the left-wing party and so many poor people voting for the right-wing party.
The American upper middle class (and in particular the White upper middle class) is astonishingly poor at advocating for its own class interests, hence why I've never heard of this SALT stuff until now.
People who invoke conflict theory explicitly are usually trying to persuade people to vote in line with their class interests -- usually trying to get poor people to vote left, but sometimes trying to get rich people to vote right.
I think this pattern is shifting somewhat, perhaps due to American influence on culture. In the 2024 French elections, the RN had its best numbers among people with the lowest income. Of course, the left wing coalition also did well among those voters; it was the wealthiest people who tended to vote for Macron's centrist coalition or the traditional center-right Republicans.
I haven't seen any results by income from last weekend's German election, but this breakdown (https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demographics-explained-in-charts/a-71724186) by education level has 28% support for AfD among people with "basic education" and only 13% among people with "higher education" (I'm not sure exactly what degrees that includes). If you add AfD plus CDU/CSU, you get 60% support in the basic education category and only 40% in the higher education category.
There was obviously a red state/blue state cultural divide before Trump, but things have obviously changed quite significantly in the past 10 years. I just went looking through CNN's exit polls from last year's presidential election. Trump won non-college white voters by a margin of more than 2-to-1; Harris won every other category. Republicans used to dominate among wealthy voters; that's not the case anymore.
It's hard for me to say that people don't care about the economy; I think the typical swing voter (probably not well-represented among the ACX commentariat) just wants to punish the party in power if he or she feels that things aren't going well. I think a negative perception of the economy drove the 2024 result more than any sort of reaction against wokeness (as many on the right would like to believe). But for a lot of voters, they just don't care that much about the economic stuff, and don't see the government as likely to have a huge impact on any of that. So they vote on the culture war stuff.
I think it's worthwhile to write a post like this, in part because I shudder to think how commonplace it may be to reject "conflict theory" (I will call it materialism from now on), so someone saying outright they don't think politics has a material basis, and arguing from there, is helpful for me. Personally, if we could objectively conclude political discourse is immaterial, I think that might actually drive me insane. I may not know much or care to know much about politics, but to me, it *must* be material. (It might not be a surprise that I was once a leftist, and voted for Bernie in 2020)
So, here I will dispute some things I noticed that, thought rooted in truth, display a bit of anti-materialist motivated reasoning:
First of all, on the "free-rider" problem, and I think this generally applies to the whole essay, we need to distinguish between the ideologue and the rational subject of materialism. I don't think materialism denies the existence of ideologues, people with "irrational" attachments to an ideology. For one thing, Marx probably spent an irrational amount of time trying to create a materialist theory of history. Your counter to this is that propaganda cannot be a part of conflict theory. Why?
More generally, I think America's material abundance and lack of a rival power since the 90s means this is not a great time for materialism, I will admit that. But I think that it's the exception that proves the rule. If when the material becomes less important, politics become less material, that is actually evidence for materialism, especially if the political environment feels more "insane" and irrational as a consequence. That being said, some of the arguments you made feel a bit sloppy, and you should've stopped to consider how absurd they are. That national elections are decided on vaccines, and that there are "100s of millions" of antivaxxers in America seems like a vast overstatement to me, I could be wrong, but I haven't seen data on that.
When it comes to inflation, yes, that is classic materialism, full-stop. There's no need to insist there must be a conflict there, the wealthy and the middle class, basically anybody with a mortgage or a car loan, don't want high interest rates, while the poor and the middle class don't like CPI inflation, or high rents. It's really that simple. The "psychopolitics of trauma" argument would heavily penalize swing voting, since it would require you to admit you were wrong before. This seems especially true in the past decade, where every election has been a referendum on Donald Trump, so to change your vote would mean doing a 180 on the central figure of our time. And yet, people did change their vote, and most who did so explicitly cited inflation!
More generally, the idea that a plurality of Americans will still vote for Trump when political discourse has been very anti-Trump for a decade has an easy explanation under materialism. The fact that, as you discuss, political discourse is immaterial is probably very alienating for the median voter! They just don't care about what gets discussed on social media, be it wokeness, Gaza, the Trump trial, etc. But they concluded that a change of government might fix inflation, and therefore voted to change the government. To refute this effectively, the "psychopolitics of Trauma" camp would have to propose an immaterial explanation for the election result. At the same time, they would have to explain why the very immaterial online political discourse, which has had an anti-Trump bias over the last 10 years, was not effective, ie if politics is immaterial, and there are 10-100s of millions of people who really dislike trump, why couldn't any of them find an argument that could break through!
The problem with materialism is that it is too simple, people with too much time on their hands who like to argue about politics do not really appreciate that.
My philosophy is that when people tell me what their politics are about, I take their word for it. If I see a Twitter account that's always calling things "demonic," I assume that that's their political priority. People on the far-left will tell you "they're really just mad about the (real) decline in unionization and the (imagined) defunding of public schools."
There's a common assumption that "culture war" issues are irrelevant to people's lives. That's true for many, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unless you're a Palestinian immigrant or a Jew planning to emigrate to Israel. But a lot of the "culture war" on places like Twitter is young men and young women talking about dating. You can say those people are wrongheaded or don't have solutions, but you can't say the thing they're talking about is irrelevant to their lives.
I mean I can't be epistemically certain about any of this. For that reason I am just going to be very blunt, instead of pretending I have strong evidence for this.
When I think about the people you're talking about who see the culture war as directly impacting their lives, I imagine if they lost their internet access, or if they otherwise had those beliefs in a pre-internet world. I think they would either be committed quite quickly, or their "culture war" problems would go away.
US swing voters may be driven by material considerations more than core voters but it's not in a very classic "conflict theory" way. Instead of finding a coalition that supports their interests and supporting it until this is no longer the case, they defect from party to party whenever they feel uncomfortable, without involving themselves much in the internal running of whatever party they currently support. The psychology behind *this* behavior seems to be "neither party cares either way about the well-being of the majority of Americans nor ever will, so we play tit for tat with the hostile aliens by never letting them finish what they want to do unless they keep us comfortable at the same time", as far as I can tell. Swing voters seem to act on approximately this theory in concert even though they neither are a natural class nor have any organizational apparatus other than the dissemination of a number of variations of this theory as memes.
I mean the psychology you describe is explicitly materialist, but on the other hand, I will admit that "materialism" in general would expect this group of people to organize around this shared interest to expand their power. I think the problem here is quite simple: it's genuinely hard to become more powerful in American politics than to be a swing-state swing voter. You would have to get a full-time job in national politics or otherwise spend a lot of time volunteering (indeed, I did textbanking for Biden in 2020, campaigns clearly think the best use of volunteer time is to send texts begging swing state voters to turn out for them).
I would say that this is because American democracy is small-c conservative, there are explicit checks on how radical the party in power can be ("be" in the sense of actions, not rhetoric).
Is this is a good or bad thing? At one time I would say bad, but consider how Biden received an offer from moderate gop senators like Romney before passing his first stimulus bill. They would support a much smaller stimulus bill (like 1+ Trillion less). Biden instead passed a stimulus that people correctly predicted would exacerbate inflation. This time, even though all swing states voted Trump, I think they all have at least one democratic senator (not 100% on that though), and voters in AZ, MI and WI split their ballots to elect dem senators. From a consequentialist perspective, this all seems to support the argument that political outcomes are driven by materialism.
The bit about status certainly holds for the UK a generation ago and probably earlier, when the middle and upper classes were happy to be paid below their market value in exchange for status. You work your way up in the civil service from a shared office to your own office to an office with carpets to having your oak desk replaced by a teak one, until you reach the really high levels where you have your own company-supplied hat stand in your office. Of course pay rises at each level, you generally have enough to raise a family on, and of course the service has a decent pension scheme, but your main reward for climbing the ranks is status.
At some point the status bit no longer worked and managers in private industry started getting and demanding higher pay, and nowadays government jobs struggle to attract and keep the best people to the point where we pull the trick of employing them as consultants or setting up QUANGOs (quasi-non-governmental organisations, the first word is doing a lot of work here) so they're not bound by civil service payroll restrictions.
I think it's incorrect to assume there's limited value in status compared to pure wealth. Using the taxes thing as an example: a long time ago, progressives implicitly or explicitly realized that paying extra taxes was a vehicle for gaining more political power overall, by intertwining the well being of tycoons and industries directly into the state. BigCorp is paying 10% tax to make sure that the government now relies on BigCorp existing for a source of consistent revenue. BigCorp may then try and lower that tax rate to save some pennies, but it is incentivized to keep it around rather than entirely remove it.
I also would theorizethat the status that comes with winning arguments or feeling humiliated or traumatized online probably relates to mate selection in some areas.
You should look at campaign ads and not just media coverage. If you look at campaign ads or press releases by politicians it's clear that political candidates (in particular, GOP politicians in swing districts in high tax states) think their constituents care more about SALT than vaccines or Ukraine. Similarly, if you look at ads, candidates obviously believe voters care a lot about Medicare but this is not really reflected in media coverage. You are relying heavily on media coverage for deriving insight for how much people care about issues, but media is partly entertainment and journalists seem to get bored by tax or healthcare policy. It's more fun to write about issues of global significance or gossip but that doesn't mean this is what drives politics.
None of this is to say that material interests are all there is to politics, but I think you are underestimating the degree to which the major coalitions in US politics are determined by conflict over taxes and entitlements that do basically follow material interests.
This seems all right but it begs the question of whether democracy is compatible with cheap mass publication. The sad truth is that you need really strong norms - like those we have around religion - to stop people from insulting those with other political beliefs. Indeed, as you've observed everyone needs a story as to how they can obviously be right yet other people still disagree. It's really hard to answer that without insulting some one.
Sure, evidence can occasionally cut through but enough?
Bigger stick for enforcement only helps if people are thinking far enough ahead to see it. Winning strategy here might turn out to involve AI and microtransactions, eroding bad habits through the immediate feedback of a series of petty inconveniences.
"Sorry, you've already used up your allotment of death threats to strangers. More will be available in two weeks, or you can unlock premium features immediately by making a sincere personal apology to some member of the outgroup you've previously wronged."
I understand why you didn't want to do this, but for me, a discussion like this is incomplete without discussing the fact that one tribe is actually wrong about most things. I feel like the mistake theory/psychopolitical theory would result in a fairly random scattershot with each side being right about some things and wrong about others. Your example about (environmentalists + gun-haters + atheists) sounds like you're suggesting it could have gone the other way by random chance, but then why is it that the side that is wrong about climate science is also the side that is wrong about god, vaccines, tariffs, immigration, drugs, and Brexit?
I'm aware that the simplest answer is "you, Fion, are biased. Your perspective that conservatives are 'wrong' about all these things says more about you than about them. You are so fully indoctrinated into one side that you believe your side is right about everything and the other side is wrong about everything." And sure, I can't disprove that answer in one short comment (although I will note that I think the Left is wrong about plenty of stuff. Just nowhere near as much as the Right. I also make the unproven claim that I've done a heck of a lot of analytical soul-searching, questioning all my beliefs until I sweat blood and ended up developing several views that I wouldn't want my left-wing coworkers to know about. My point is I'm not just a liberal drone.) But even while acknowledging that I can't disprove the simplest answer, a discussion about mistake/conflict theory and/or polarisation that doesn't address the elephant in the room (that one side is wrong about everything) just seems incomplete to me.
The second-simplest answer is probably that educated people joined the left/liberal/centrist coalition and less educated people joined the conservative/right coalition, and educated people are better at being correct than less educated people. Is that all it is? It still doesn't seem satisfying. Why aren't educated people split more evenly between the two coalitions? Is it something to do with conservative economic positions benefiting the powerful, so they adopt whatever propaganda will get sufficient masses on-side, and to convince the masses to abandon their material interests is easier if you target the less educated masses? That sounds kind of like reinventing conflict theory, though, and it has the problem that bad policies on, for example, trade and immigration, probably hurt the rich just as much as the poor.
I dunno. I don't have an answer. But I'd like to see an essay-length treatment by somebody smarter than me that takes into account what I see as one of the most crucial observations in this debate.
"Why aren't educated people split more evenly between the two coalitions?'
College graduates voted 56-42 for Kamala over Trump, while white college grads voted 53-45 for Kamala over Trump. It's biased to one side but not overwhelmingly so. The gap in education is about as big as the gap between men and women and less than gaps based on race or religion.
This is true. In fact I am more mystified by how the educated people can be split so evenly between the coalitions and yet one can be so anti-intellectual and so often wrong on the merits. I wonder if someone has done a poll that breaks this down on axes like what area the degree is in or which institution awarded it.
DEI, transgenderism, insane housing prices in blue cities, mentally ill homeless encampments, MeToo, student loan forgiveness, eviction moratoriums, etc.
ETA: I do agree, though, that the Republican Party is doing next to nothing to appeal to educated people. Surely some of those people's loyalty is vestigial, from the time the GOP was the suit-and-tie upper-class party.
I'd say the Republican and Democratic party positions are wrong about equally often on the supposed expertise of politicians: how to get a desired change with a policy intervention. However, when it comes to pure epistemic facts-about-the-world questions, the Democrats and their core supporters, while not perfect, are head-and-shoulders better than the Republicans and their core supporters.
ETA: Addressing particular things above: While a lot of the rhetoric and the larger policy goals related to #MeToo may have been questionable, and it eventually degenerated into whipping up cancel mobs, the fact is that the core activity of #MeToo uncovered a lot of actual, legitimate crimes. DEI and transgenderism-as-currently-constituted are also driven by people's real problems, and their issues are mainly those of rhetoric and tactics/strategy. Insane housing prices in blue cities are purely because of coalitional misalignments, the blue *party* doesn't particularly want them that way. Mentally ill homeless encampments are also not something hardly anyone wants, just nobody knows how to get rid of them in a humane way--to the extent Democrats are doing anything wrong here it's just inaction bias. Student loan forgiveness and eviction moratoriums also fall under the umbrella of non-solutions (that sound like solutions) to real problems. So all of these fall under bad *instrumental* rationality (often, i think, for the reasons given in the OP) rather than bad *epistemic* rationality (which is less directly affected by those reasons).
>Mentally ill homeless encampments are also not something hardly anyone wants, just nobody knows how to get rid of them in a humane way--to the extent Democrats are doing anything wrong here it's just inaction bias.
It's not inaction bias. It's a combination of 1) naive ideas about what the homeless are like and 2) not caring about people who suffer because of the homeless. Both of these are subject to motivated reasoning and are an example of how motivated reasoning can be 95% of the way to conflict theory. If your reaction to everyone complaining about the homeless is to minimize their concerns, that is in the limit indistinguishable from not caring if they suffer.
I think the people involved in responding mostly minimize people's concerns to make themselves feel more comfortable about the fact that they're not going to do anything either way.
I think they painted themselves into a corner with that "mass incarceration" thing. They said they wanted less incarceration. They said, "no, that doesn't mean releasing Jeffery Dalmer, we're talking about low-level, non-violent offenders." The lesson of the last decade is that low-level non-violent offenses can seriously harm quality of life, particularly in the urban environment of busses, subways, etc.
I'm not able to distinguish between the epistemic and the instrumental there, but I'll tell you what the gap is, at least from the ground level 'uneducated lower-middle/working class white person' viewpoint.
That only works (I was happy then because the other guy probably needed it more) when you are *not* negatively impacted by having your bike (or other property) stolen. When it's not going to be a financial drain. When you can get to work or school or wherever by walking or taking a bus or you can call a friend to give you a lift. When you're able to buy a new bike (or a good second-hand one) fairly soon to replace the stolen one.
When, in short, you're well-off enough to be able to tra-la-la away thinking that the theft was probably a single act of desperation by someone in real need, and so you can pat yourself on the back for your virtue.
I'm sure the cartoonist would have protested that they're not well-off or rich. But I repeat: if the theft of your property does not inconvenience you more than mildly, you are well-off.
I realise this is ironic, due to my dislike of using personal stories, but years back I had my purse stolen. And this was a real harm to me, because it had all my money in it (and I was unemployed at the time so this was all my ready cash), my bus ticket, and this was in the days before mobile phones so I had no means of contacting anyone to get home; I didn't have friends or contacts in the city that I could just turn up on their doorstep to get shelter for the night or a drive home. (The only good thing was that this was in the days of phone boxes on the streets and reverse-charge calls, so I was able to ring home and get my brother to come collect me).
Believe you me, I was *not* walking off tra-la-laing about how the thief probably needed it more than me and was probably happier and so the total happiness in the world had increased.
It's much more likely the bike was stolen by someone who is a professional thief, or a junkie who sold it for drug money. Or even someone just looking for some fast, easy cash.
And the "la-la-la total happiness" attitude is why we can't have nice things, because the thieves don't give a flying fuck about the total happiness in the world levels, and will continue if not discouraged.
And this is the difference between Red and Blue, or the nice Democrats versus the dumb old Republicans, or liberals versus conservatives, or however you want to slice it up: people who can shrug off loss because it's not really harming them, versus people who have been harmed.
Leaving aside the "so often wrong on the merits" thing (because both sides are so often wrong on the merits)... the thing you're ignoring is self-interest. Of course educated people are going to vote Republican, since educated people make more money and Republicans promise lower taxes.
The current (and relatively new) equilibrium of US politics is that the Republicans try to staple together a winning coalition by appealing to the self-interest of the rich and the prejudices of the poor, while the Democrats try to staple together a winning coalition by appealing to the self-interest of the poor and the prejudices of the rich.
Unfortunately, education doesn't mean understanding.
I mean, education is an attempt to make people understand, but that attempt often fails. Sometimes because the school sucks. Sometimes because the students suck. Whatever is the reason, we get a lot of educated people who know the right keywords, and know how to write long sentences, but their opinion on most things is essentially the same as it was before being educated; maybe except for some very narrow set.
This is how you get the people who "believe the science" (because they are neither smart enough to actually *do* the science, nor humble enough to admit that they actually believe what other *people* tell them). Ironically, those are also people happy to dismiss any inconvenient science, because from their perspective (which seems supported by their personal experience) science is a merely a consensus of the high-status scientists, so if something feels low-status is definitely cannot be that "science" thing they are supposed to believe.
So at the end, some of them join the current mainstream consensus, and believe that this makes them the true scientists, while others do their "research" at conspiracy theory websites and believe that this makes them the true scientists. Both of them feel smarter than the other, neither is interested in technicalities such as looking for opposing evidence.
Being educated isn't that much of an advantage in being right , since it makes you more susceptible to castle-in-the-air philosophies like Marxism and Libertarianism.
In the United States, the political right has been trying to build an alternative reality for a long time. Fox News was founding in 1996. The messaging--that you cannot trust the “mainstream media”--is sufficiently widespread that is most conversations you can just use the acronym MSM and everybody will know what you mean.
I’m not sure a general theory of politics can be expected to explain this, but let me take a stab at it. If your constituents are unhappy about something, there are two ways to conceptualize the problem. You can view it as a policy problem, and try to implement policies that will fix it. Or you can view it as a public relations problem, and try to come up with suitable messaging to keep people from blaming you for the problem.
The Republican Party, starting with George W. Bush, classifies most problems as public relations problems rather than policy problems. Or to put it another way, they view their constituents as marks to be fleeced rather than as constituents to be served. I believe that the underlying cause is the Republican dedication to tax cuts for the rich. If you only care about the interests of the top 1%, but need to get at least 50% of the vote, then things that concern the remaining 99% of the population are not things you want to fix, but you don’t want these concerns to convince voters to vote for your opponent instead of you. It’s easy to reach for a public relations fix.
Given that your post leads off with a woefully uniformed description of the America media environment in 1996 and by implication, today, its not surprising that so many of the follow-up conclusions are wrong.
What was the media like when Fox was launched? What was the pitch? It was simple, the mainstream media was significantly to the left of the average American. On top of that, CNN was pretty boring and MSNBC was launching as the left wing news place. In addition the appetite for conservative voices was already demonstrated on talk radio with people like Rush Limbaugh flourishing. So yeah, they were picking up the $100 bill on the ground of being the sole mainstream TV news source not on the left.
This piece (along with Psychopolitics of Trauma) is one of those wonderful Scott articles that takes something innately but fuzzily obvious and puts it into the perfect words that your mind has always been searching for
I think people like conflict theory because it gives you a clear strategy: unify everyone with the same self-interest and fight a war (using soft power first, hard power if necessary) and either destroy the other side or force a compromise that feels palatable.
Under mistake theory, you are left performing some combination of therapy/dialectics/social work with every single person who disagrees with you until you've hopefully converted enough people to some level of agreement. In an environment where we are already extremely sorted along ideological, geographical, and information-gathering lines. Whoever's to blame, we may be too separated and polarized to ever reach meaningful consensus again.
I'm not sure that's true. I think democracy, at least modern liberal democracy was forged by people who believed in conflict theory. Ie, they thought everyone had a sense of their own rational self-interest and all political theory was mostly about balancing those interests when they compete through a series of checks and balances. Our system wasn't designed to accommodate people who will happily commit some measure of political suicide out of spite, or delusion, or mass psychosis. And I think the issues we are dealing with now demonstrate that.
Some philosophers, particularly the ancient ones, had some deeper ideas about the problems inherent in building democratic consensus, but they weren't the people being consulted in drafting our constitutions.
Full strength conflict theory is war. Democracy is based on replacing war-war with jaw-jaw...debates, rather than battles. But that doesn't meant that the conflict aspect dispears entirely. The British house of commons has traditions of polite verbal engagement with the other "side" ...and has literal, ,physical sides. A zero conflict system would just be the bureaucracy running everything.
I'm not sure we are disagreeing. I'm okay with some amount of conflict. I'm just stating that our system appears to be set up to adjudicate conflicts among rational competing interests, not conflicts between people who are treating their political preferences as a proxy for their entire psychological and social persona. Its not set up to deal with people who will make irrational decisions out of spite, or mass psychosis, or to signal virtue, and consequently it is failing.
Democracy works by allowing us to mask our conflict theory as mistake theory.
If democracy openly becomes 49 wolves and 51 sheep voting on what's for dinner, then the mask is off and there's no point participating in the process any more, the sheep will try to run away and the wolves will try to eat them. But as long as everyone can pretend that they're just honestly and disinterestedly trying to decide what a nutritionally optimal meal for a medium-sized mammal might be, we can all pretend we're getting along.
I mean, I like to think we are all the same species. But even if your analogy holds, we appear to have an honest-to-god "sheep voting for wolves" situation on our hands.
Maybe they thought they were wolves, but a lot of people who would have sworn a month ago that the government never provided anything to them their entire lives apparently didn't realize that the things included in that category extended to "government jobs, government subsidies on services, government contracts." How they could have failed to recognize this, why democrats are so cosmically terrible at helping them understand this, this is all fair questions, but it is certainly the case that people are feeling consequences that, while quite predictable, do not seem to be what they expected.
"Wokeness is the single issue that makes people most passionate. It has some direct material consequences - affirmative action gives some jobs to blacks rather than whites. But nobody cares about it because of the consequences - affirmative action lasted fifty years, and Richard Hanania ably chronicles how none of the five Republican administrations during that period bothered to shut it down, because it would have cost them political capital which they preferred to save for higher priorities. People only started caring about wokeness once it started interfering with non-material, seemingly trivial issues. Pronouns in bios. Statues torn down. Trans women in sports. Disabled LGBT Women Of Color Awareness Months. On-site sensitivity training."
I don't remember Hanania saying that, and if he did he was wrong with regards to the Reagan administration. (but right with regards to the Bushes) See "Right Turn: William Bradford Reynolds, the Reagan Administration, and Black Civil Rights" by Raymond Wolters.
Reagan _wanted_ to shut down federal affirmative action, and actually drafted the executive order to that effect -- but then it leaked, and there was unexpected pushback, and the president backed off.
I find this pretty plausible, but there is one problem: If this didn't used to be true, say, fifty years ago, back when we were less polarized, then something changed. Something has made this a worse problem than it used to be. Figure out what that something was/is, and that might reveal a path toward reversing or reducing it.
Most of the people with whom I've discussed this seem to think that the internet is responsible, but the problem is that political polarization began in a period (the 1980's) before the internet was a thing. Economic factors might be more plausible, but which one's correlate to political polarization?
It isn't absolute or relative poverty; absolute or relative unemployment; differences in education; region of origin or the urban/rural divide. The problem with urban/rural as an explanation is that that difference began all the way back in the 19th century, so something would have to have made this more relevant recently.
I'm asking what caused the behavior of a population of people, and you are providing an answer that seems to amount to more behavior by that same population of people. In other words, your explaining the behavior of a system by referring to behavior of that system. I'm looking for causal factors from outside that system--that is, not the result of previous behavior by those same people. In asking for this, I am assuming that populations of people have external reasons for behaving the way they do--that ultimately, population behavior is rational in the sense that it is a response to some set of environmental conditions. I am asking for clues as to what those environmental conditions might have been.
Something changed in the political environment changed sometime between 1979 and approx. the 2000's. Anyone have any ideas?
>I'm asking what caused the behavior of a population of people, and you are providing an answer that seems to amount to more behavior by that same population of people.
I might be misunderstanding you. Assuming you're referring to my 'Enlightenment' answer,
1. I meant to only answer the specific question of what caused religion to decline, not your broader question of what caused political polarization. In hindsight I wasn't clear about that
2. The Enlightenment started long before anyone born in the 1900s so it can't be referring to behavior by the same people
I don't know if political polarization is that recent of a phenomenon anyways. The conflict between conservatives and liberals goes back a long time, the vast majority of which far fewer people were enfranchised. Those who did have any political influence were probably politically polarized to a similar degree as us, and the rest of us peasants started behaving the same way soon after gaining some degree of political power. If I have it right and you have it right that 1979-2000s was notably non-polarized, the better question would be what was exceptional about 1979-2000s
Fifty to sixty years ago you had Vietnam, you had riots in the streets, multiple political assassinations, various forms of Civil Rights brouhaha and so forth. You had decidedly non-centrist politicians like Hubert Humphrey and Barry Goldwater close to the levers of power.
It doesn't strike me as a golden age of low polarisation. Perhaps what you can say is that the big dividing line was less aligned with the Republican-Democrat line than it is today.
Ok, that's a good point. The '60's were highly polarized, arguably still more so that we are today (they aren't shooting people on campus yet). But I remember several decades when riots, assassinations, and other forms of overt brouhaha were relatively rare. It wasn't really until the rise of the Tea Party in the 2000's that American politics started to become overtly polarized. So that still requires an explanation.
If it's that recent, "widespread internet / social-media use" is an option. Shorter ping times and less editorial moderation might reasonably have done much the same for https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ as what World War One did for the spanish flu: severe symptoms no longer result in isolation, so evolving pathogens have less incentive to keep current hosts alive.
Weren't the 1960s also characterized by a "counterculture" with its own internal communication channels, deliberately avoiding mainstream censorship standards?
People simply didn't know what the party positions were. Newspapers and radio were local. Once sharing of information become faster then national polarisation increased.
The rate at which news diffuses throughout a population. News just being one type of information but the most important when it comes to politics.
You can read 1,000 tweets in the time it takes to watch the evening news. The information is shared even without active intent, it just happens. Information is transferred between people.
The faster news travels the harder it is too keep something secret. In the past politicians would do deals in Washington safe in the knowledge that few of their voters would ever find out about it.
Additionally, voters would not be aware of many of the political positions that their friends and neighbours (i.e. people voting for the same party) had so they'd only be able to have a few major positions in common. As it became easier to know in more detail what your side believed then it became easier to adopt those positions. Thus polarisation into two camps of positions with ever decreasing overlap.
This feels correct. Not necessarily "didn't know"; maybe more like it didn't seem to matter that much, locally.
A few decades ago, I remember hearing statements like "the branch of this political party *in this city* seems like decent people". People actually looked at their neighbors, saw which of them joined which party, and made their opinion on the party based on them. And even if someone on TV said something else, they could be like "yeah, in general this party sucks, but in our city they are the good guys" or vice versa.
Now with internet, all this local nuance is lost. No one knows anymore what their neighbors do, but everyone knows what is everyone's position on Ukraine (or Covid being an American hoax, or something about Israel and Palestine).
This is generally a problem that communication across long distances is awesome, but it also takes your attention away from the local things (because people you talk with do not share that context), which sometimes means taking your attention away from actual things done by actually people ("did someone just steal a large part of our city's budget?") towards... virulent memes ("what was their position on transgender bathrooms?").
I like the essay, overall. Once I got halfway through the Identity Alignment section though, I found myself thinking "this sounds a lot like two sides battling over a limited resource." It's just that this limited resource is pride/status/feeling good about yourself.
Once you add group identity to your theory (psychological theory? Does it have a name?), I don't really understand how it differs from conflict theory other than the limited resource not being material. Is it just that one says "people support ideas that would materially benefit their group", and the other days "people support ideas that would _emotionally_ support their group"?
You address this as a flat world, as if everyone just falls into one camp or the other and everyone in one camp disagrees at the same level with everyone in the other camp. That's obviously not true. People have different levels of of identification with one camp or another. So what explains those different levels of identification? If you're coming you're with a causal theory for polarization, it should also explain some kind of theory about a "dose effect," as with the Bradford Hill criteria for causality.
My theory is that we all kind of know that in most of these issues there's a spectrum of views where neither one side or the other is entirely correct. But it's hard to reconcile how oppositional beliefs can both be true at the same time. And so the opposing beliefs becomes an identity threat to our own beliefs. So we identify with one camp or the other, for mostly random reasons, and the more strongly we identify at one end of the spectrum the more our reasoning is "motivated" to filter away reasonable perspectives that would seem to invalidate our own views. Our need to reject the opposing view comes from an understanding at a deep level that two things both exist, but in top of thst we have a psychological construct that days opposing things can't both exist at the same time. It's too existentially disturbing.
If you haven't already, you might want to look at:
The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America, by Hyram and Verland Lewis.
There's a lot of crossover in that book and what you wrote, centering around the idea that the polarization that manifests on issues doesn't reflect an actual opposition of coherent sets of beliefs or values.
I mostly agree, though I think you're somewhat overstating the theoretical case against conflict theory by assuming zero coordination. People in real life do sometimes succeed in mitigating free rider problems. I remember at least one time when you referenced functional decision theory to encourage people to ignore a similar problem with something that you wanted people to do.
I think people who believe in the sociologists' version of "conflict theory" usually have some notion of "false consciousness" as well, where powerful groups are able to mislead less powerful group about their true interests. I think there are all sorts of conceptual problems with that, but it's clearly an attempt within conflict theory to explain some of the issues you're pointing to.
I don't agree with the assertion that "nobody cares" about affirmative action. It might have been taboo to question ("are you some kind of RACIST or something?!1!"), but it's not something people are indifferent to.
I also think that the complexity of beliefs going from individual to individual has increased, if anything, especially in the Age of the Internet. But it is true that there are two major political parties in many plurality voting systems. (Sometimes regional parties may still become a thing in such systems.) While there's only one realistic horse to back for many people, the polarization can just mean that people feel the stakes are higher, and people may also project their desires beyond what is stated onto their steed. It doesn't mean that more people are becoming Median Democrats or Median Republicans.
There's an 4th position that I don't think quite matches any of your 3 options (Conflict Theory, Mistake Theory, and Psychology Theory).
You state that Conflict Theory posits correct assessment of material interests, and subsequent conflict over them.
But why need the interests be only material? People often have strong investments in cultural and institutional practices that are not "material" in any narrow or direct sense.
I would posit an expanded version of Conflict Theory in which groups are in conflict over interests that are neither narrowly material nor merely psychological in the sense of "it makes me feel good," but rather are ways of life to be supported or suppressed.
Indeed. A lot of the immigration issue has to do with wanting to be around people who look like you and speak the same language (though as the example of Rotherham shows us self-interest definitely plays a role too).
I think Scotts explanation of polarisation is unconvincing because while it explains why there is polarisation now it can’t explain why this was not always the case instead of polarisation becoming worse with time. Given his theory, I think we should expect society to be polarised all the time instead of it increasing or decreasing with time.
I agree with this. What has changed? I guess one could tell a narrative about social media etc., but from my eye it's a trend that goes back to at least the 90s, and probably longer.
One other piece that I think is missing from this puzzle is something about the way that our political coalitions work. Because we have a two-party system, everything polarizes into one of the two parties (and occasionally once every few generations, these coalitions undergo a big shift, as is happening now). But how does this process look in countries with multi-party systems? Does the thing Scott describes still happen in the same way?
That's where I figure the actual material circumstances become more relevant. When enough PvE content is available, people can sweat out their inner demons by dancing and hammering on rocks in novel ways, instead of hunting for enemies to scream at in PvP.
The last paragraph is gold. Not new knowledge, but both rings true and aligns with many examples in political history and complex private deal-making realities.
For the “we award you X emotionally rewarding accolade… and/in exchange we really really need your money/agreement/acquiescence” method to be *durably effective* without eventually coming undone, the follow through has to be more than performatively hollow.
Therein in lies the rub - vilification of the group being asked to take one for the team, at least on the topic in question, can’t resurface even as an undercurrent of discussion.
"But the experts were joining in the coalition’s project of humiliating working-class white people (to flatter their educated and minority constituents), and it all proved too much."
No, I'm serious. Even if I take your comment completely straight (I have no reason not to) "alignment" doesn't seem to imply "humiliation". At the very least, further explanation would be helpful.
For specific examples, a few that come to mind are:
1. The experts yelling about anti-lockdown protests as murderous, then doing a 180 overnight and declaring that everyone should join the BLM protests because racism is a health issue.
2. Dr Fauci publicly declaring that Americans (meaning red-tribe Americans) should stop caring about their freedoms so much.
3. Mocking those taking Ivermectin as taking horse-dewormer, to the point that the media ran basically made up stories about hospitals being overrun because of such rubes.
"The experts yelling about anti-lockdown protests as murderous, then doing a 180 overnight and declaring that everyone should join the BLM protests because racism is a health issue."
Who said that, and when? Link, please.
Dr. Fauci, regardless of what he said or the reasons he said it, is only one "expert" who is not a spokesperson for other experts on any subject except the spread of disease. Even if one objected to his statement, why would anyone extend that objection to experts in general, and what does that have to do with "humiliating working class white people"? "Red" doesn't equal "working class", and even if it did, where's the humiliation? At face value, he appears to disagree with some people, but that's just his opinion.
Dr Fauci was considered the spokesperson for the health experts during the pandemic. I admit my example is not a clear cut example of humiliation, but he always seemed to have contempt for his Trump-supporting outgroup, who hated him bitterly as well. And yes, Red tribe does more or less map onto the white working class.
It's very simple: experts thought they were entitled to respect and authority because they were smarter and more knowledgeable than the populace. The people who disagreed with them interpreted it as the experts claiming they were better than everyone else, despite being wrong. It's not any more complicated than that.
Can you link me to an incident when this occurred? I mean a representative population of experts who expressed entitled to respect and authority specifically because they are smarter and more knowledgeable than the general populace? Is this a thing that happened, or is it a perception on the part of a certain group of people not based on any specific incidents?
Yeah, it wasn't the experts per se, rather than people who *identified with* the experts.
You know, the "I fucking *love* science" people... as opposed to the "I actually *do* science as my day job, and it is often too complex to fit in a single tweet" people.
Well, I love science, and I frequently respect expertise, but I am not aware that I have ever joined a coalition to humiliate white working class voters.
Your argument replaces selfish material motives for political action with selfish psychological motives. I don't believe that switch answers your free rider objection to the idea that material self-interest motivates politics. If I'd prefer relax on the beach and let someone else go out and campaign for my $50K tax break, why wouldn't I stay on the beach and let someone else do the grunt work of convincing all those losers out there that us rich guys really are morally superior?
I admit that the various psychological pleasures you describe are addictive, but so is money. Personally, if I had a choice between an additional $10K per year from restoring SALT or another opportunity to "knock down anyone who makes a status claim to be better than [me]," I'd take the money. Other people will make different choices and weigh things differently, but my point is that that psychic pleasures you describe are not uniquely powerful and can be exchanged for other types of good things. So, why would psychic selfishness be so much more powerful in politics that material selfishness?
I guess one could respond to my objection by arguing that the psychic returns to political virtue signaling are immediate and guaranteed. To get my $10K or $50K tax cut, my side actually has to win, but I can get the psychic pleasure of owning the libs regardless of whether my candidate wins or my chosen policy is adopted. But there are a couple of responses to this argument. 1) It doesn't feel good to lose. My observation of my Democratic friends in November 2024 suggests that the psychic pain of losing the election far outweighed any psychic pleasure they enjoyed through dunking on Republicans over the course of the campaign Thus, psychic winning in politics depends on collective success (i.e actually winning) just as much as material winning does. 2) B/c it is so easy to get a psychic dopamine hit by dishing out mockery to others, it is also very easy to receive psychic pain cheaply dished out by others. In the long-run, it's a dumb, no win game to play in which the best we can do is tread water and many will drown.
So, I guess that I have two arguments: 1) for a lot of people, I think that it is a genuine desire to do what is better for society rather than psychic or materialistic selfishness that motivates political engagement 2) maybe the virtue signaling politics of social media will die down (a little) when enough people figure out that it is a losing game -- I understand that waves of drug addiction tend to fade when a new generation sees how bad that it was for their elders.
You're a powerful writer. I still think you're at least partially wrong here.
I'll begin by admitting my own prejudices. I got a lot of very idealistic views at a very liberal school growing up, which my parents mocked, and my parents were right more often than not. I also got a lot of second- and third-wave feminist rhetoric about how to behave that turned out to be less effective than (watered-down in application) advice from very sociopathic-looking PUA types. So I am very, very, suspicious of idealism and hope and building a better future. The piecing-together of dissociated knowledge opens up terrifying vistas of reality, and now that I have quoted my favorite author's most famous story I shall begin.
To take your first example, there aren't a million people making $1 million a year. Such people are rare. As such the free-rider problem diminishes and our uber-rich person is strongly motivated to pursue his self-interest. After all, we've seen rich people do just that throughout history, paying off kings and donating to cardinals.
The fact that SALT and vaccines do not obey the laws of self-interest do not mean that it does not play a powerful role in many other cases. Affirmative action, for instance, clearly divides blacks and whites (at least), and outside of the upper middle class (which may figure it can get a job anyway), people take roughly the expected positions by skin color.
That isn't to say self-interest is the *only* factor. Tribal loyalty easily explains things like immigration (we don't want the other tribe in) and wokeness (which hits as many tribal buttons as possible, and only hit a potentially temporary defeat when its partisans failed to realize intersectionality swung both ways). It even winds up explaining things like COVID lockdowns and abortion in our polarized era.
I do agree that people take positions which make them feel good, often to fairly ridiculous levels, and with your final statement that, yes, sometimes you can persuade people. I also agree with your statement in between these two that the current menu of positions on the Blue and Red Teams comes about in large part of historical issues with what experts on the Blue Team supported in the early days of social media. But this menu of positions dates back further than 2010, with some odd exceptions like free speech and tariffs.
But I do disagree with your bit that socialism and similar economically left arguments are motivated mostly by hating the rich. Sure, that's part of it, especially among the wealthy DSA types who want to stick it to Banker Dad. But historically, most socialist movements were supported by workers who wanted more money, more time off, safer working conditions... there's an old line about unions being the people who brought you the weekend. It's not totally untrue. Similarly, many feminists are motivated by fears of not being able to get an abortion if they get raped, as well as wanting access to traditionally male jobs and so on. And the whole affirmative action thing does collapse into black versus white--Asians finally turned when they realized they were getting the short end of the stick. A huge portion of the reason people are turning on trade is that they blame it for shipping their jobs to China.
You've only arguably disproven the strong case of conflict theory that material interest is the major driver of political conflict--and I'm not even sure about that. Sure, other things are part of it. I'm not sure how many and how much. But a large number of conflicts, including the race and gender type that are subsumed under 'wokeness', really do derive from zero-sum calculations, in the case of wokeness about the distribution of jobs between demographic groups. Not that Joe Sixpack is sitting there with his phone's calculator on...but he hears his son's been passed over for promotion because they 'aren't promoting white men', and he knows what to think. Similarly, the whole 'believe women' thing involves tradeoffs between false negatives and false positives in rape or harassment claims. (I'm sure as a physician you learned about the sensitivity and specificity tradeoff in diagnostic tests.) Who gets hurt by false-negatives? Women. Who gets hurt by false-positives? Men.
And you don't really make a case for mistake theory. The promise of mistake theory is that a better solution exists and we can converge on one. But many conflicts are zero-sum (or fixed-sum). There's only so much land and so many resources, for instance, and that's driven many wars throughout history. Us and the Chinese can't both be King of the World, and that's likely to be a problem at some point. And, as you say, sometimes people want to see the other side lose.
Yeah, people's opinions are a complicated farrago of self-interest, self-righteousness, and tribal loyalty, sprinkled with the occasional bit of rationality. And social media makes people a lot less rational, I will agree. But that doesn't mean self-interest doesn't play a huge role. And even if it's not purely self-interest, these tribal things are very hard to push away, while their ministers on earth still bellow and prance (and occasionally slay) around computer screens and smartphones in lonely places.
>The fact that SALT and vaccines do not obey the laws of self-interest do not mean that it does not play a powerful role in many other cases. Affirmative action, for instance, clearly divides blacks and whites
Affirmative action may be less divisive than people would expect, even though a policy of inherently zero-sum discrimination ought to be the area in which self-interest would play the largest role.
Per a strict conflict theory model, one would expect it to be 0% and 100%.
Alternative models might be to assume all questions would be 50% / 50%, or to assume that differing incentives wouldn't play a role and that the combined average would be universal (something like 73% opposition).
Both of these models, particularly the latter, seem to do a better job of describing reality than conflict theory, even though the models are dumb (they don't incorporate the actual social drivers of a non-conflict theory model).
There's been studies on various methods to get people to change their minds about strongly held values/opinions. Claude's summary of one such method that was noted to be effective in a book I read recently:
---
Deep canvassing, as described in McRaney's book, involves volunteers having non-judgmental, empathetic conversations with voters, often at their doorsteps. It typically involves:
1. Listening to people's views without judgment
2. Asking open-ended questions about personal experiences related to the issue
3. Sharing personal stories that relate to the topic
4. Finding common ground through shared values
5. Avoiding debate, argument, or presenting facts/information dumps
This approach was notably studied by researchers including David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, who found it was effective at reducing prejudice and changing minds on issues like transgender rights and immigration, with effects lasting for months after the conversation.
The key insight is that people change their minds not through being presented with facts or arguments, but through emotional connection, storytelling, and non-judgmental conversations that help them reflect on their own values and experiences.
I'll provide a concise summary of this deep canvassing method as described in McRaney's book, as it appears to be what the user is asking about.
In "How Minds Change," David McRaney describes "deep canvassing" as a remarkably effective method for creating political change across broad areas. This approach involves:
1. Person-to-person conversations (typically 10-15 minutes long) where canvassers:
- Listen non-judgmentally to voters' views
- Ask open-ended questions about personal experiences related to the issue
- Share their own relevant stories when appropriate
- Connect through shared values rather than arguing policy positions
2. Key elements that make it work:
- Creating a judgment-free space for reflection
- Encouraging people to recall their own experiences that might conflict with their stated views
- Using storytelling rather than fact-bombardment
- Avoiding debate in favor of genuine curiosity
McRaney highlights research by Broockman and Kalla showing these conversations produced measurable opinion shifts that persisted for months—even on deeply divisive issues. The method works because it engages people emotionally rather than intellectually, helping them reconcile their stated beliefs with their lived experiences and core values.
---
In the framing of this post, it's essentially a quick form of therapy for resolving the person's psychopolitical "trauma" via exploratory conversation. Maybe this line of thinking can lead to better approaches like this.
But the question is, can you increase people's prejudice with this method? Because the opposition isn't dumb, they're going to be trying to indoctrinate people in the opposite direction. This doesn't actually solve anything.
I actually hate the "sharing stories" stuff, because it feels to me like an attempt to emotionally manipulate me: "Oh, poor little Susie was just an ordinary nine year old trans kid but her dad used to listen to horrible racist conservative talk radio in the car*, so Susie had to hide her real true identity. Isn't it sad when those supposed to love us most make us the most fearful?"
Yeah, well all that does is make me want to slap the face off 'Susie' and tell HIM to grow up. There's probably deep psychological reasons back in my past growing up that make me react like this, but I do hate the "now if you dumb knuckledraggers are only introduced to (carefully curated**, normie-seeming) gays and trans people who tell you heartstrings-tugging stories of their struggles, why you'll finally learn to act like a normal person who is all about the LGBTQQIP2SAA rights!" type of suggestions.
Maybe I have a stupid reason for my prejudice and bias, maybe I have a good reason. So talk to me and try and *argue* with me, not manipulate me with "now isn't Susie just so nice and normal? why do you want to be mean to her? you don't want to be mean, do you? you're not really a horrible mean person?" prodding.
A lot of people will fold on "no, I don't want to be a horrible mean person". I am quite prepared to be a horrible mean person, so that just makes me itch when it's tried on me.
*Content of cartoon seen online, I'm not making this one up.
** Pete Buttigieg 'wrong kind of gay, he's not gay enough' types rather than the 'Scott Wiener at Folsom Street Fair showing off his chicken chest' types. If this strikes you as "sexy", I've got a scarecrow on a broomstick I'd like to sell you as a love toy:
If the person constructs an argument, makes their case, provides data to back it up, and is very sparing with the anecdotes, I'm more likely to at least shift my views.
What doesn't work is the likes of "don't you feel sorry for this* poor oppressed woman?" because right there is where I say "No, because (1) that's not a woman and (2) they're a scumbag criminal who is right where they should be, locked up in jail. That's the justice they deserve".
Does that make me a horrible mean racist fascist nazi transphobe? Well then I guess I'm a horrible mean racist fascist nazi transphobe! And all the sharing stories in the world about "I couldn't help myself, I just *had* to stab that man to death" won't shift my opinion.
(Honestly, please stop picking the absolute worst example of who to put up as your poster child for progressive views on X rights. Yes, bad people deserve fairness and justice too. But sometimes what they got *is* justice).
> If the person constructs an argument, makes their case, provides data to back it up, and is very sparing with the anecdotes, I'm more likely to at least shift my views.
Given past experience, I highly, highly doubt that.
I said *more* likely, not that I would be swayed every time. Sometimes it's "I still disagree with you, but I understand your position better". Sometimes it's "Yeah, I knew this was a crappy argument, thanks for proving it".
I am cool with sharing stories, under condition that everyone is allowed to share theirs. Which is usually not the case.
If the poor little Susie e.g. gets raped by a group of immigrants tomorrow, that part of the story is definitely *not* the one you are supposed to listen to and feel emotions about.
I would love to see the 'conflict' vs 'mistake' terminology credited properly, to Philosophy Bear (now known as a philosophy substacker). (I note you did credit him in your original 2018 piece in a way, giving their old Slate Star commenter name no_bear_so_low.)
I've found it kind of mindblowing and inspiring to watch this terminology proliferate. I happen to have known its creator years ago as a student and we are occasionally still in contact, and to think that he coined this thing that I now hear.... I think I even heard bloody Peter Thiel use it somewhere!
I wrote this totally off my own bat and was in no way put up to it.
People's stances on issues are 98% based on self interest.
As you identify nobody has much influence over any outcome, and as people are pretty rational, the 98% percent is thus all about signalling. E.g., endorsing policies that look good to others, and so raise your status. This effect causes the coastal elite to act as they do.
A good society manages this by making prudence, charity and intelligence the socially rewarded stance (causing people's self interest to mimic the genuine pursuit of social good), but the left has systematically moved towards outrage and emotion being the socially rewarded stance (e.g., elements of the radical left literally say that the prioritization of logic, reason and maths is racist and sexist - ofc this is insanely racist and sexist as a stance, as all races and genders can think and do maths, etc...)
Side note: actually genuinely caring about the truth and ideas is pretty rare. The vast majority don't, and tbh, that's a pretty smart stance of theirs. But it does mean that if you want to improve society you need to be a deep thinking pragmatist.
I hadn't read "The Psychopolitics of Trauma" - I think it's interesting, and may explain some of the dynamics of today's political tribes. But I think Arnold Kling's Three Languages of Politics (Civilization vs. Barbarism, Oppressors vs. Oppressed, Liberty vs. Coercion) does more to explain why most people take particular positions on salient issues. Also, especially in today's USA, people seem to be driven to align with one or another of the Tribes, and therefore take some positions simply because their Tribe does.
This framing does a lot to explain why Progressives, who claim to be extremely concerned about the catastrophic consequences of global warming, are willing to put enough Social Justice requirements in their carbon reduction program to prevent anything from actually being done. It explains why Conservatives ... eh, I can't think of anything that Conservatives seem to agree on. It could explain why Conservatives object to Affirmative Action, because it tears down the rules, except that most Conservatives didn't really care about it for over 40 years. Maybe Conservatives lived with Affirmative Action because they thought it was essential to preserving the basic order in society, even if it was unfair in practice and suffused with hypocrisy.
I have a simpler theory. It rests on two principles.
1. Technology. Technology changes how people think and they take time to adjust.
2. Trust. People want a group of people around them they can trust, they adopt the positions of those they find themselves with to gain the benefits of trust (e.g. lower transaction costs, credit, etc). The more absurd the positions the stronger trust bonds that are formed.
Following the introduction of the printing press arguments arose over religion (a type of trust group by the way), this led to the 30 Years War where about a third of Germans died. Afterwards people agreed not to go to war over religion any more, the people had adjusted to the introduction of a novel technology.
I see similar playing out with the internet/social media. Polarisation has increased as people became aware of what their side and their opponent's side political positions were.
People start with only one or a few political positions, e.g. the rich care a lot about tax policy because it makes much bigger of a difference to them, hunting animals with firearms is a rewarding experience, city living reduces trust group importance so makes support for individuality more appealing and less threatening, etc. Once they have a position or two there is a diffusion into two sides.
This bi-modalism (e.g. liberal/conservative) is due to the way the political and electoral system works. You need 50% support to form a government.
My proposed solution would be to encourage tri-modalism by awarding control of the executive branch and spending to the largest party or party alliance, regardless of if they achieve 50%. Control of law making and tax levels would still fall to parliament and require 50% agreement to change. I foresee three groups forming: socialist, conservative, and liberal; and on any good idea usually two of the three would agree and one oppose, while two would oppose bad ideas.
Of course none of this applies to states that don't already have a proportional parliamentary system of government. Since that is the best form of government known so far those that don't have it should adopt it before experimenting with the unknown.
PS: My brief guide to the three political ideologies.
Socialism: advance the condition of society as a whole.
Liberalism: advance the condition of the individual.
Conservatism: oppose changes that could make things worse.
Potential minimal-procedural-change way to force the formation of a meaningful third party in the existing US first-past-the-post system would be to forbid members of the defendant's own party from voting as part of an impeachment trial, due to conflict of interest. Or possibly only from voting to acquit, leaving a choice of "convict" or "abstain."
I think your argument about vaccines disregards the way in which the culture war eats everything. Being pro/anti-vaccines is not necessarily about vaccines - if the pro-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the Red Tribe being demoralised and feeling that it is not worth fighting for anything because they will expend effort and lose anyway, and if the anti-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the mirrored situation.
The common commentary all the way back in 2016 that said Trump's election will "embolden racists" had figured out this dynamic on an intuitive level. If you believe that we are tumbling towards an equilibrium where there is no fine-grained object-level policy debate but only an "emboldened" side that gets everything and a "demoralised" side that submits and saves whatever remaining energy it has to plot an overthrow, then anything that "emboldens" the side whose dictate is a bit more in your interest is itself in your interest, to a first approximation.
I remember reading an article, I think it was on "Cracked," that disputed the idea that people hate the rich and that's why they want them to pay taxes. It made the analogy to when Yoda asks Luke to defeat the Emperor. Yoda didn't ask him because he hated Luke, he asked him because he was the only one who could do it.
The article is wrong, of course, because Yoda was respecting Luke's talent and effort. He wasn't claiming that Luke had stolen his Force powers from hardworking people and he needed to fight the Emperor to make recompense. But it did make me wonder something along the lines of what Scott suggested near the end. What if we asked the rich to pay more taxes, and said it was their duty to do so because they were amazing heroes like Luke Skywalker. Only they are amazing enough to make the giant amounts of money needed to run the government.
Isn't it a lot simpler? You tax the rich because the rich have money. You can't get blood out of a stone, so taxing the guy panhandling on the street corner isn't going to raise much for your 'funding a concert hosted by the American ambassador in Dublin' efforts.
Problem is, if you de facto criminalize wealth, then only criminals will be rich. If the *entire* moral basis of taxation is "I, who hold the monopoly on legitimate violence, noticed that you have money, therefore give it to me" then anyone who would prefer to continue having and/or eating their own cake is faced with mostly bad options.
A land value tax avoids that problem. The guy panhandling on that street corner still gets off easy, might actually come out ahead if those ten square feet he's taking up can be converted into a proper mailing address, while somebody who wants to host concerts or live in a sprawling mansion needs far more space in which to do so... but exactly how much is negotiable. Behavior incentivized for someone who just wants to keep a big number is "stay out of the way," rather than "lie constantly" or "civil war."
I think big part of the problem is, its hard to become ultra-rich in modern times without being a huge control freak about money. I learned this from an estate-planning buddy of mine who said that for many of his highest net worth clients, the reasons they set up complicated trusts and estate plans weren't primarily for tax avoidance purposes, it was because they couldn't stand the idea that once they were dead someone else would have total control over how the money they'd been left was spent.
So I think for many of the wealthy, its not really the amount of money they are losing that's the biggest obstacle, its the fact that they know the government is in charge of how that money is going to be spent. I don't even mean particular ideological issues about government efficiency or what it funds, just the fact that someone else has control of money they earned and not them.
> Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization. That is, if a chance fluctuation makes environmentalists slightly more likely to support gun control, and this new bloc goes around insulting polluters and gun owners, then the gun owners affected will reactively start hating the environmentalists and insult them, the environmentalists will notice they’re being attacked by gun owners and polarize even more against them, and so on until (environmentalists + gun haters) and (polluters + gun lovers) have become two relatively consistent groups. Then if one guy from the (environmentalist + gun hater) group happens to insult a Catholic, the same process starts again until it’s (environmentalists + gun haters + atheists) and (polluters + gun lovers + Catholics), and so on until there are just two big groups.
This feels like an important model, I wonder if we can design an experiment or come up with some some data analysis technique to confirm or disprove this.
I think my conclusion based on Scott's argument is that we *ought* to be conflict theorists, because then we could negotiate rationally about the conflict and how to come to some kind of compromise that everyone could live with. We could calculate the exact amount of wealth that rich people must give up based on the ratio of rich people to poor people, and the best way to divide that wealth without shooting ourselves in the foot economically. But instead, we all live in mistake-land, where we can't even agree on what we are arguing about and we apply weird moral valences to everything that make compromise impossible.
I think the free riding argument is overplayed. Not that it does not exists, on the contrary: Free Riding taken to it's logical limit basically prevent any individual action with a cost within a group with majority-based decision. It just make most organized societies impossible.... still all humans live in (more or less)organized societies. Many non humans do too, so where is the catch?
The catch is free riding is such a fundamental problem for social animals that various counter-acting mechanism have evolved (biologically, and, for humans, culturally too).
Punish the free rider is the obvious answer and a universal constant (may be it's one of the driver behind memory and animal recognition. My guess is it is, by far. People have extremely good human recognition (face, silhouette, gait,...) and memory is probably better for social interactions than for anything else. Because it's super useful....
Free riding is not a pleasant act to most (because it is better not to trigger free rider punishment if you want to live successfully, so a psychological instinct to avoid doing it (and even more avoid getting caught doing it) is very high among the most useful instinct to evolve in social animals).
So yes, free riding is extremely important to consider for any social analysis. But it's also very important to play it right, i.e. never assume it's that common or automatic. If it's anything but fringe, in my experience it's because no punishment in any form has been implemented and evident for all (i.e. the law differ in practice and in theory), or (many cases) because free riding is done as a punishment/defiant measure for previous (perceived) wrongs by the society authorities,
or (most cases?) because the behavior is not considered free riding but the norm within a sub-group very detached from mainstream group who judge that as free riding. The latter may be quite common a cause behind very nasty pogroms, and should be investigated very seriously if identified because I think it can degenerate fast and ugly.
But in no case free riding can be invoked as a mechanism ruling out a behavior. Because the are soooo many examples of behaviors which would not be possible is free riding was an unchecked possibility, still are routinely observed in all social animals.
In fact, "punish the free riders" and "get revenge on those who did me bad, even if it costs" are clear drivers or political behavior (and we can get further by looking at who are considered free riders and who did wrongs in the political spectrum. It could fit in the psychological explanation, but contrary to some others psychological traits, those traits are basic, quite prevalent in social animals, and quite easy to explain from a game theory optimal strategy point of view.
If find these more convincing, with much more explanatory power and even predictive power than something like "people do not want to feel guilty"....
"This is not a claim that “people really want status, not money” - at least not for any objective sense of the word “status”. Being a conspiracy theorist doesn’t raise your status, in the sense of making people like you more or giving you access to cool parties."
People do trade mainstream status for subculture status. I certainly heard ex-anti-vax woman how valuable the support of community was to her and how it helped radicalisation
hey I tried to mathematically model identity alignment. model might be flawed, read through the algorithm and give me feedback! plaintext algorithm is as follows:
1. Create agents
2. Create a list of arbitrary issues, numbered issue 1,issue 2,...issue n
3. Let agents have "belief" for or against issues, on a scale of -1 for "against" to 1 for
"for", with 0 being neutral
4. Make agents have "affinity" towards each other, which starts off at 0
5. Make agents with similar beliefs on the same issues increase affinity for each other
with each chronological step, and agents with dissimilar beliefs decrease affinity with
each other with chronological step
6. With each step increase/decrease affinity based on belief, and belief based on affinity
7. Observe if a number of steps into this simulation, we have polarized groups - or, in
mathematical terms, if there's a strong correlation between beliefs in one issue and
another. Are most agents that are for issue 1 against issue 2? Or something along
those lines. If that holds true, then we can say that small fluctuations plus reactions
do force polarization. This doesn't say anything about human behaviour, because
we haven't yet linked this model's fundamental axioms with those of human
behaviour, but it's an interesting observation nonetheless.
nope sorry that was an outdated version of the algorithm that i posted in a sleep deprived slurry! belief is not set randomly at every step - it is randomized once at the start and with each step agent 1's belief in an issue is increased proportional to how much agents agent 1 has high affinity for believe in it, and decreased proportional to how much agents agent 1 has negative affinity for believe in it. affinity to other agents is also changed in a similar way with each step, but based on how similar/dissimilar beliefs are.
[politics is conflict between warring tribes trying to get the upper hand] and [humans are homo-economicus] and then treating arguments against the latter as arguments against the former.
Imagine someone watching rawanda and was asked "are these 2 groups motivated by conflict between groups?"
and they went "oh that's silly, the genocide was economically devastating, the people going out with machetes and beheading children mostly didn't end up a lot richer as a result so clearly this isn't a conflict-theory thing"
"And the positive consequences of immigration - taco trucks, cheap labor, etc - cannot possibly benefit the average liberal enough to justify their fervent support."
This is not true. Population growth is one of the major drivers of economic growth. The US is barely replacing itself in terms of fertility, so, like many another developed nation, we invite immigrants in to supply needed additional laborers and consumers. This elevates the standard of living for everyone in the US. In fact, given falling birthrates around the world, the US should pursue policies that make us more competitive in recruiting new immigrants.
None of this implies that we should have open borders or cede control over who enters our country. It does argue for expanding legal immigration.
"It’s hard to overcome, but it’s not impossible. People overcome it all the time."
Problem--not enough people and not enough times. Scott is presumably arguing that polarized public opinion on issues like abortion, inflation, vaccinations, even tax policy, are driven by motivated reasoning. Let's take that as a given. In order to end on a hope spot, he proposes that sometimes sufficiently strong evidence *can* break through, sufficiently strong disproof *can* motive people who desire to feel good and reasonable to abandon a position, and that *sometimes* you can move the goalposts in such a way as to convince people to defend a position (yet the example he gives is climate denial).
What this amounts to, I think, is an argument that you can sometimes use motivated reasoning to persuade people to adopt a position that you think is more rational. But this isn't a victory for reason, it's a victory for motivated reasoning.
Because, of course, the other side can do it to.
What I want is an approach to public discourse that a rational person can use, but an irrational one can't. This same approach should result int he person with the more factually correct argument winning. And finally, it has to persuade a minimum of a plurality of American voters, or it's all for nought.
I’m very skeptical about Ezra Kleins assumption that people used to be more eclectic, and that it’s only now, through social media, that they are beginning to align with the ingroup or party. People have always been tribal. To fix it, we must make sure that people don’t have to accept the package deal of party politics. Split the votes by issues, not parties. (Am I a tall puppy for daring to have opinions about this? Ok, fine.)
One of the reasons there is such a backlash against wokeness and all other forms of political correctness is because it infringes on peoples rights and freedoms. It is expanding the restrictions of the law to spheres where we used to rely on peoples judgement instead of the law. Example: hate speech laws. It may not be a good thing that people feel hate towards anyone or anything, but it shouldn’t be illegal. It is a very human emotion and shouldn’t be outlawed, however bad it may be.
My own revulsion against it stems from being curtailed by moralism and prudeness. There is and should be a difference between how we should act and how we must act. ’Eat your vegetables’ shouldn’t be the law. Many people don’t recognise this distinction. Many don’t even care. This can have the perverse effect that people can have their lives ruined even though they have done nothing legally wrong.
Would you like to be fired from you job, or having your drivers license suspended etc, for not attending the church on sundays or for having said you voted for Trump? It is SO infuriating. And the really serious problems comes when what we are supposed to think, how we should act, isn’t even morally right. We are supposed to think it’s ok to sterilize children etc. Hell no.
Your two cartoons doesn’t capture the problems of the last five years. We all agree to let pilots fly the planes, but we shouldn’t be expected to have some DEI bureacrat etc pilot our own lives. And finding information the world’s top scientist have missed? How about information that everyone claimed to know up until about five minutes ago, like, say, there are only two sexes. If every expert turns on a dime, the responsibility is on the rest of us to point out the discrepancies and lies.
About the claim that people support political positions which make them feel good, that is true, but there is also an element of social darwinism here. Some people may claim that they oppose things like welfare because they believe there is a lot of fraud, but I suspect there is also a significant amount of people who oppose giving people what they need, because it works. They don’t like people on the bottom of society, and their values tell them that those people should not survive. They oppose things that they know are beneficial to the people for the simple fact that they work. They view humans as a darwinist might view a wounded gazelle. It is better for the species to have the weak element perish. Let the lions eat them.
And what bothers people about the coastal elites is the fact that they blame people for the effects of the actions by the elites themselves. It’s not about normal people feeling morally superior, it’s about people being punched in the face and then being patronized for having a bruise.
I always find the problems people who vote for Republican candidates have very sympathetic, and then their choice of candidates and proposed solutions absolutely baffling from any standpoint of logical consistency.
People are tired of having their freedom infringed on, so they back Trump and his team of tech oligarchs, who are openly vindictive all critics of their policies to the point of celebrating the application any political pressure they can mount to destroy or silence them. Meanwhile, they aren't eliminating DEI mandates, they are mandating anti-DEI policies, which sounds like the same thing, but amounts to them threatening to cut off school funding to any state that acknowledges the existence of LGBT people or even looks like its history classes might take too hard a look at the evils of slavery or segregation.
I also agree with you about many people being closet social Darwinists, but what's baffling is a lot of these same people who would agree that the government should stop defending and aiding the weak are already feeling very upset at the loss of their government subsidies.
Like, poor people put rich people in power who are going to cut medicaid and now those same poor people who voted for them are going to die. And while liberals should not be gleeful about that, I'm not sure its fair being called smug for pointing out that actually, this is the logical consequence of your own actions. You wanted social darwinism, now, as the meme goes, the lion is eating your face.
>People are tired of having their freedom infringed on, so they back Trump and his team of tech oligarchs, who are openly vindictive all critics of their policies to the point of celebrating the application any political pressure they can mount to destroy or silence them. Meanwhile, they aren't eliminating DEI mandates, they are mandating anti-DEI policies, which sounds like the same thing, but amounts to them threatening to cut off school funding to any state that acknowledges the existence of LGBT people or even looks like its history classes might take too hard a look at the evils of slavery or segregation.
People who oppose DEI oppose skin color giving applicants additional points
That's perfectly fair (I mean, I don't personally agree, but I think that's a fair position), except if you look at the government's current anti-DEI policies, I think they go a lot farther than "eliminating programs that give people additional points for skin color." They look like creating an assumption that anyone who is not white in a position of authority should be targeted for special scrutiny. In other words, its reverse-reverse racism, also known as racism.
>except if you look at the government's current anti-DEI policies, I think they go a lot farther than "eliminating programs that give people additional points for skin color."
Much like DEI supporters didn't much mind the government non-response to the fiery but peaceful BLM protests, anti-DEI supporters don't much mind overshooting in the other direction
Well I don't think that's very principled, but at least you admit it. And I hope if it gets as far as purging the majority of people who aren't white or male from every aspect of public life, your conscience will move you to speak out then. I'm not saying it will go that far, but if it does, I hope then you find it in yourself to care.
On vaccines, it’s a bit more complex. First there is the free rider issue. When you get a vaccine you’re helping other people as well as yourself. If everyone else gets a vaccine then you don’t need to.
Second, there is a frequency dependent benefit to you. Lower the herd immunity higher the benefit of vaccines.
Compounding this, vaccines are a bit risky. Not highly risky but riskier than drugs. They can cause lot of weird side effects, like brain inflammation or narcolepsy (though probably not autism)
If they were risk free then there is not a strong reason to compel vaccinations. But because they’re a bit risky, you can’t allow free riders to benefit from others who take the risk. A bit analogous to draft dodging.
"The Miller-Rootclaim debate changed lots of people’s minds on lab leak. "
It may have done that, but I think you're the only one I've yet seen to say anything like "The Miller-Rootclaim debate caused me to go back and research the issue in a new light, and now I think it was highly unlikely to have been a lab leak". Pretty much every other time I've seen it raised, including here, it's been along the lines of "The Rationalists(TM) have now decided that it wasn't lab leak, here's a reference I can point to that says so, therefore anyone who still talks about it being a lab leak must be one of the stupidheads". Since the outcome of any single debate has more to do with the relative debating skill of the participants than it does with the truth of the underlying claim, it's hard for me to count this as a victory for truth-seeking behavior.
Really, I think it was a "victory" for believe-what-makes-you-feel-good, and in particular the part you describe as "people want to hear that they were right to support whatever positions they supported before". An awful lot of smart supported zoonotic origin in early 2000. I was one of them, and I think I had good reasons to be at 85-90% zoonotic origin then, but for many it was largely tribal - the Experts supported zoonotic origin, and the Trumpists supported lab leak. Then more evidence started to appear, and more people even in blue-tribe circles started to talk openly about how lab leak was looking more credible, and a whole lot of smart people were stuck with the sinking feeling that maybe they had been wrong - if not about Zoonitic origin, then at least about their high confidence re zoonotic origin. Some of them, I'm pretty sure, overcorrected for that.
Until Miller-Rootclaim gave them all permission to say "hey, we were right all along, it was only those stupidheads in the outgroup muddying the waters with talk of lab leaks". And the whole bit about how their identity group is the heroic special people, etc.
The earlier process where lab leak went from being dismissed as a conspiracy theory, to being something that was openly discussed and at least semi-accepted in Blue Tribe circles, seems to have had something to do with new evidence and openness, and that may have been a victory for truth-seeking behavior. But I don't really understand how it happened, and I'd like to see it studied more.
I disagree with your assessment of the origin of "trusting the experts" becoming such a polarized issue. To my mind, what is at the root of this historically is an erosion of authority much more broadly. Up until the 1980s (? depending on where you live) people with authority were deferred to because they had authority. Whenever I talked to my grandparents this was so striking to me. They followed people's advice because they had gone to university, were rich, or were civil servants. People were adressed by their titles and functions even in public life and it was simply considered rude to even contradict people with "authority" in a somewhat public manner.
This all changed some time between the 1990s and today, when people lost their deferrence to authority. I think this first started with mundane things, like no longer following the advice of their doctor or child's teacher. But then it slowly spilled over to other "experts". As experts could no longer rely on their authority to be listened to, they had to find another reason.
And I think it is in this context that they reverted to because they had superior knowledge. You should no longer listen to your doctor because she is a doctor, but because she knows the newest scientific studies and did a training on this very subject two years ago, she even has a certificate on the wall next to twenty other meaningless degrees.
Everything else, the polarization around it, is downstream from this and I am not sure could have been avoided once the process had started.
To do a boring N=1, I came out of the Rootclaim debate thinking lab leak was even more probable than before, but that the Rootclaim guy was a knucklehead. Not dumb, but pretty far up his own rear regarding his model.
I'm bothered by the implicit moral relativism of this post. But I did get one big insight out of it: that class war by the rich is not just based in greed, pure and simple; that it's also impoortant for them to morally justify their wealth, and that giving themselves giant tax breaks while slashing the social safety net is an integral part of that. Without this psychological motivation it would be a lot harder to explain their seemingly self-destructive behavior, like trying to tear down all the meliorist little efforts at saving capitalism from itself like the New Deal. I had always thought of this as a case of their being blinded by their own greed, but this provides a better explanation.
I think you saw this in 2012 (Wall Street mad) and 2024 (Tech mad). There was a material component to it, but in both cases they were annoyed about being played as the villain by Democrats and the (rich) socially liberal groups shifted towards Republicans.
Isn’t the free-rider problem just CDT "you should not vote because in expectation your vote has no influence on policy" in a sheep’s clothing ? And if you accept LDT normatively for "should I vote ?", it also follow that the free-rider strategy is not the rational policy ? Also if you accept LDT descriptively ("I observe people are actually voting, as predicted by LDT"), does not this also destroys the free-riding problem ?
> Partly because nobody would give their child measles _just_ to own the libs.
I’m not so sure. When you know you’re TOUGH and your opponents are pussies, you have to think BIG: how many of those runts will your kid OWN by bringing to them the disease they thought their phony baloney vaccines would protect them from via herd shmerd immunity shmunity? THAT is the question. Truth fears no trial. Let your kid know what’s going on so they can feel proud.
The "free rider" argument seems to ignore the division of labour which typifies how this plays out. It's politics. Boris Johnson makes huge (and profitable) investment in becoming Prime Minister, everyone else who wants lower taxes makes the barely distinguishable from zero investment of time and zero investment of money of voting for him. You are saying that people are going to be worrying about who picks up the tab, when democracy says there is no tab.
Of course there's hedge funds donating squillions to Johnson campaign funds, but they are balls out paying for lower taxes on carried interest and therefore express evidence of conflict theory, and that the reality of millions of others riding on their coat tails is not a sufficient deterrent to stop them making the donation
Interesting read. I certainly don't have a solely Conflict Theorist take on politics, but you could give more thought to some of your arguments against it.
1) Your first example of freeloaders has a baked in assumption of perfect information, when I'd argue it's something closer to a prisoner's dilemma. Even as a rich guy going to rich guy activities like megayacht auctions, where there's information on your demographic class to be acquired, it's hard to know who is bloviating and who is putting their money where their mouth is and spending money to influence politics. The inability to adequately root out freeloaders is an ancient and intractable social issue.
2) A theory of response-dependent polarisation needs to explain a start point of messy polarisation organising into neat polarisation. What's the mechanism that stopped this response-dependent polarisation happening in 1960, 1980, 2000? Gun control advocates and environmentalists existed throughout that entire period; the sort of polarisation we're seeing is a recent phenomena. You do need an additional factor here to explain why the alignment process begins when it does.
This was all good. But I still think you are missing something. I don't know what the something is. Maybe tribalism, maybe the media, maybe politics, maybe moloch. But there is something that doesn't 'allow' us to have middle of the road opinions. You get pushed all the way to one side or the other. Some restrictions on abortions, more regulation of gun ownership, vax hesitant, (because all vaccines have some side effects and I want to know about those side effects before making a decision about my kid or myself.) Middle of the road is not allowed and that is not good.
I mean, middle of the road is allowed if you don't want to engage in public, performative politics. It's still a quite common position, although it's seldom pursued rationally, in part because you can't engage in organizing. As for public politics, I think the phenomenon is similar to ethnic/racial gang formation in prisons, or radicalization of subpopulations during civil wars: once you have enough obvious signifiers on your visible persona that all but one group broad-brushes you as an enemy you are usually going to go out of your way not to alienate the last possible ally group you have left.
OK thanks, so you think it's tribalism that drives division. (I see it as this very sharp knife edge in the space of all ideas. ) But you also suggest that activism drives it too, and I'd call that either part of media or politics. I guess it all gets knotted together it's hard to call it just this or that.
It's more like, participating in even a slight level of activism exposes you to the radicalizing pressure of a very hostile and tribal social environment. That's why nobody hears or listens to the moderates even though a good number of them still exist.
There seems to be a huge amount of rationality bias in this entire post. Almost everything is predicated on people rationally looking at some problem, rationally evaluating the issue, taking in expert level analysis, etc. There are also some short term biases.
E.g. 1: maybe people don't sit down and calculate the exact 50k limit in the tax problem. Or maybe they have trouble having confidence in the 50k limit. Or maybe they just think that the type of person/political party that will lower their taxes now will do it again in the future so the real break even point is actually much higher than 50k.
E.g. 2: maybe some poorer people don't fully grasp that inflation will lower their debts. Maybe they just don't worry about their debts at all. Maybe they encounter inflation more everyday when they go shopping and don't spend nearly as much time looking at their financial statements.
I think the assumption left unchallenged at the beginning was: “does political capital exist?” I think that a conclusion about how political efforts work is important to resolve first. It’s easier psychomathematically for political capital to be fixed and depletable, but I’m not totally convinced this is the case. I think the difficulty curve is usually and inverted U, where both small and large quantities of policy changes are easier but there’s some middle resistance that people mistake for the pool of capital bottoming out.
This seems like a justification for why conspiracies form. People aren't 100% invested in every issue. Mostly, they listen to people (pundits, politicians, friends, parents, etc.) they trust and use that as a baseline. This has the side benefit of helping them fit in better with others in their community, which is a pro-social behavior that they're very invested in.
If a large percent of people are low-stakes, but all still have votes, there's a strong incentive for any high-stakes individuals to persuade/influence thought leaders of their position. The truth might help, but if it's a conflict-theory balance of interests at play, the challenge is to bring in people who are outside the conflict. You could do this in one of two ways:
1. Only tell your side of the story, and frame it in a way that makes you the sympathetic character.
2. Lie.
The result will be low-stakes influencers getting persuaded to join a CONFLICT on one side by MISTAKE. The conflict theory people can then point to the highest stakeholders and correctly identify that the issue is one of trade-offs, where one side wins and the other loses and neither side is making a 'mistake' about their relative interests. Meanwhile, the mistake theory people can point to the mass of people whose stake in the issue is relatively small, such that they might be persuaded to support either side by adopting one mistaken idea or another.
"one person fighting a lonely battle won’t get too far"
Wrong. Free riders problems break down at to low granularity. If Econ follows maths this is obvious to mathematicians. If you own enormous amounts of money, so concentrated like Musk does then you can get far by yourself. Free rider breaks for one side when there are only like 5 riders in one.
You need to take a limit for the theorem to hold, obiously!
It is too late Scott. Relish in the influence you have spread. You have birthed Medusa and like Medusa watch as the world turns to stone. You had influence, but the chickens have left the coop. Running interference like this won't do anything.
I think Scott’s definitions of "conflict theory" and "mistake theory" in Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist have drifted pretty far from how he originally described them back in his 2018 post Conflict vs. Mistake. In the original, conflict theory wasn’t just about material self-interest (e.g., rich vs. poor); it was a much broader framework for understanding politics as a clash between groups with incompatible goals. That could include cultural or ideological battles, status competitions, or even symbolic conflicts over values. But in the new post, Scott narrows conflict theory down to this purely materialist view—basically Marxism-lite—and then argues it doesn’t explain things like vaccine skepticism or Ukraine policy. Well, of course it doesn’t, if you define it that narrowly! But that’s not the conflict theory he originally described.
For example, in 2018, Scott acknowledged that conflict theory could explain stuff like culture wars or identity politics—things that aren’t directly about money but still involve groups fighting over power or status. The 2025 version completely ignores this and instead critiques conflict theory as if it’s just about rich people wanting tax cuts and poor people wanting socialism. It feels like he’s attacking a strawman version of his own idea.
Another issue is the way Scott ties conflict theory to rational self-interest and then dismisses it because of the free-rider problem (e.g., why would any individual rich person bother lobbying for tax cuts?). But conflict theory doesn’t actually require people to act rationally or selfishly—it’s more about group dynamics and how coalitions form around shared interests or identities. For instance, elites might act collectively to protect their privileges even if it doesn’t make sense for any one person to do so alone. Or people might fight over cultural narratives (e.g., immigration as a threat to national identity) because those narratives reinforce group solidarity. None of that depends on everyone acting like a perfectly rational agent.
What’s weird is that Scott’s psychodynamic explanation—where political fights are driven by trauma, status-seeking, revenge, etc.—actually overlaps with what conflict theory was supposed to explain in the first place! Status competitions and symbolic power struggles are conflict theory—they’re just not the Marxist class-struggle version he critiques in this post. It feels like he’s reinventing the wheel but calling it something else.
Finally, I think Scott’s earlier framing of mistake vs. conflict theory as complementary lenses worked better than this new "conflict theory is wrong" framing. In reality, most political disputes involve both mistakes (bad reasoning, incomplete information) and conflicts (groups with clashing interests). For instance, debates over abortion or COVID lockdowns aren’t purely material but still involve deep value conflicts between groups. The 2018 version of conflict theory could handle that complexity; the 2025 version can’t.
Overall, I feel like this post narrows conflict theory so much that it becomes easy to dismiss—but only because it’s no longer the same concept Scott originally described. If anything, his psychodynamic model could’ve been integrated into the broader framework instead of replacing it outright. As it stands, this feels more like conceptual drift than a real critique of conflict theory.
Here is my take as a sort-of Marxist on “conflict theory”:
No matter what humans are doing in the immaterial realm of ideas, human beings remain material creatures with material needs, such as food and shelter. Unlike animals, we mostly meet these needs by manipulating our material surroundings, like cultivating the land and producing produce. This conscious manipulation of our surroundings to meet essential needs, or to further improve our quality of life, is what I would call work. Humans in general dislike (this kind of) work, since it is a lot of hard physical effort, but do like the fruits of this labor. So humans try minimizing their personal ratio between input work and output gains. This not only leads to collective increases in trade and productivity (“the development of the means of production”) that are shared by all, it also leads – all throughout history – to social polarization between primarily two classes: One class that does the work, and one class that successfully omits working but, nonetheless, shares disproportionately in the gains of the working class. This second class does so, either by force (being warriors/conquerors or their decedents) and/or by psychological manipulation (being/employing “priests”). So the working class, it is being told by the priests, should remain docile and productive for the benefits of the idle class, because this social order reflects the natural/traditional/god-given/harmonic order of the universe. If the workers come to think, and act on, there being some kind of conflict between the interests of these classes, then by so doing, they disturb order, peace and harmony and must thus be put back into place by force of the warriors.
Now fast forward to modern capitalism. With regard to work/labor, society is still divided into two essential classes: 1) Capitalists, who own (enough of) the means of production, so that they can meet their material needs by profits/dividends/rents/capital gains, without ever >needing< to work at all – which does not mean that they may not >choose< to work for non-material reasons like status alone! 2) Workers, who are defined by not owning (enough of) the means of production, and therefore are obliged to do the work, i.e. sell their labor, in order to meet their material needs – they cannot choose not to work and thus have to accept whatever work they can find. From this fact alone emerge irreconcilable material conflicts of interest: Capitalists want wages to be as low as possible, because for them wages are a cost of production that decreases their gains from production: profits(*). Workers want wages to be as high as possible because they are their gains from production, by which they cover their material needs. And it’s not just about wages, it is even more fundamentally about the question/conflict of ownership itself: Who should own and control the means of production, the companies, the process of work and production? The workers, doing the work, or the people who happen to own them at present (mostly due to inheritance)? This is a vital material conflict >no matter whether or not< the individual workers and capitalists happen to be conscious of it at any given time
(*This is somewhat complicated by macroeconomic, demand-focused considerations by people such as Keynes and Henry Ford, who argued that by increasing wages in the present, they increase their workers’/customers’ demand and thus their spending in the future. Therefore, there supposedly exists no conflict between workers and (far-sighted) capitalists at all, but rather a prosperous, demand-driven cycle between the two classes.)
But sure, most political discourse and conflicts nowadays, enacted in mass media, does not cover these fundamental roots of conflict. You say, this is because these root conflict either do not exist, or because people don’t care about them, since they are naturally driven by non-material psychological urges. I disagree. You ignore the material question at the heart of the matter: Who owns the media and what (conflicting?) interests do they have? The “means of communication” are private property of the capitalist class, just the same way as most other means of production. The very social media platforms that are part of your argument above, are extremely concentrated in the hands of just a couple of ultra-rich capitalist owner-managers. The same is true for most TV channels, newspaper etc.. I would argue that these capitalists have mostly two material class interests: 1) Increase their platforms’ profits by capturing as much as possible of their users’ attention (since the free-to-use business model of these platforms requires selling users’ attention/awareness/engagement to advertisers). This sort of attention maximization (and thus ad exposure maximization) turned out to be most effective by appealing to the most primitive emotional urges (like “dirty strangers/foreigners are raping our daughters! / spoiling our culture! / eating our cats and dogs!!”). 2) Their other, more indirect, interest is preventing the workers from understanding what their own material interests are in the first place. Turns out, as you illustrate above, our modern, mostly non-material “culture war” spectacle is doing a great job achieving this objective as well.
All of this, I think, is further confounded by the fact, that in modern industrialized societies, most peoples’ basic material needs (food and shelter) are mostly met. This defuses not only the material conflicts themselves, but also the consciousness regarding the importance and very existence of material conflicts in general. I guess, it is understandable that the more disconnected one personally is from material needs of survival, the more boring, mundane and irrelevant do material conflicts appear. But that does not mean that material conflicts (who owns what / who >has to< work / how is the produce being shared) do not still exert causal force at the very basis of our modern industrialized societies.
This was all very abstract. Now some illustrative examples that are not covered by the text above (beyond direct questions of wages and ownership):
Climate Change. Is global warming really just an intellectual issue of us – humanity as a whole – still lacking proper solutions? Have the necessary technological and economics changes to safeguard human survival on the planet really been avoided for ~50 years because we are mistaken in our knowledge? Or are there powerful material interests at play, which oppose trillions of dollars being reallocated from hugely profitable ventures (like the oil and gas industries) to vague public goods (like collective long-term survival)? How can the political (non-)reaction to climate change be explained by mistake theory?
Land Rents. Ricardian-Georgist land rent policies and taxation are almost universally accepted as beneficial among a pretty much unprecedented spectrum of economic schools of thought (Marxists are usually only against it insofar as its implementation may further distract from the root causes of capitalist exploitation and its socialist remedies). So why aren’t these land rent policies being implemented? Is it because the policy proposals aren’t good enough yet, littered with intellectual mistakes, or because there is a material conflict between powerful economic interests?
Universal health care (and the like). As far as I know, in the US there has existed wide popular support for some form of universal health care for a long while (/forever?). Yet, implementation is nowhere in sight. Universal health care seems to be performing well (even better?) in most industrialized countries, so what kind of >mistake< is preventing its implementation in the US? There are probably many more social/economic policies with robust popular support, just like this, which mysteriously are not implemented in (overly) capitalist societies. In fact, European countries, with a history of stronger working-class collaboration, have many popular social services and labor laws in place, which are lacking in the US. What is the “mistake” here, happening solely in the US?
All in all, imho, you are confusing the petty political conflicts portrayed in the (billionaire-owned) media landscape with the material root causes of social conflict itself. Since your topics above are selected for by their predominance in this media landscape, they are a preselected sample, biased by the ownership relations and material interests of the private media institutions, which foster and spread these very topics in the first place! Or in other words: In a world, where all mediums of mass communication are owned and controlled by billionaire capitalists for their class’ profit interests, small wonder that material dimensions of conflict (and their socialist remedies) are strangely un(der)represented. Just because this particularly capitalistic media landscape does a great job at suppressing and diverting material conflict from public discourse, does not mean that material conflict does not affect politics. Beneath the surface of public spectacle in (social) media, material conflict very much does shape power and politics.
The mistake theory view of this is that the "fundamental" material conflicts you posit above are not actually fundamental, and there is a way of organizing society that is a Pareto improvement on any way of optimizing the system for just one of the classes by playing games with wage levels or allocation of control of the means/process of production between workers and capitalists. More generally, that fundamentally everybody's social class is something more like "human" or "sentient being" than "worker" or "capitalist", and we can get Pareto better results according to our actual values, or CEV or whatever, by optimizing for the benefit (including nonmaterial benefits like fairness) of all of society than by dividing society into subsets and optimizing for the material (only) benefit of just whatever subset oneself happens to fall into.
So the "mistake" happening in all those cases is that people incorrectly think they will benefit from conflict, then engage in it.
I’m not a fan of applying pareto optimization to the social sphere.
First of all, what is the starting point that you are trying to “improve” on? You are always going to start with some arbitrary point in time with all of its historical injustices (and inefficiencies) already baked in. Let’s say you are applying pareto improvements to a society with pharaohs and slaves, or feudal landlords and unfree peasants, or nowadays, with 12-figure billionaires and working poor. Sure, one may find ways to improve the lot of every class, but the more classes (or objectives in general) one optimizes for, the more limited will be optimization potential, or degrees of freedom, for the individual classes. Or in other words: why exactly should improving the lives of the slaves/peasants/poor be limited by the condition that the position of the pharaohs/landlords/billionaires must not worsen? Is every allocation that happens to historically come to existence worthy of preservation? Pareto cannot answer this, but if applied naively, it would mean foregoing all kinds of improvements for the masses for preserving inherited privileges of the rich and powerful. I don’t think we should put up with this.
And of course, this also goes the other way: Not just the working masses should not put up with this, the rich and powerful certainly >will not< put up with this. Why should they, from their point of view, limit their own enrichment by putting it under the condition that the workers must be better of as well? That’s not how elites historically operate and under perfect capitalism it shouldn’t even be possible for them to make such a choice (see below). So if you want to apply pareto improvements on society as a whole, and as such also on the powerful, how will you convince (or rather force) the powerful to accept pareto improvements over higher non-pareto improvements for themselves? Even if you had a perfect AGI, which could come up with perfect pareto optimization for all of society, for some/many people it would mean accepting opportunity costs with regard to more partisan optimization schemes. Applying it is thus less a question of theoretical calculations but rather of political enforcement. And how it could be enforced is another question Pareto cannot answer.
Furthermore, society isn’t being divided into subsets – it is, in fact, divided into subsets. Subsets regarding peoples’ economic positions and interests. But this is to expected and almost unavoidable given the complexity of modern production processes and the degree of division of labor. Not only workers and capitalists find themselves with opposing material interest, so do also for example creditors and debtors, exporting and importing enterprises, or in the past landlords and industrialists (think 19th century Britain). Sure, there are also universal humanitarian interests that could be optimized for, but the conflicting material interests in capitalism are systemic and not the result of individual wills. For example, under perfect capitalism, it shouldn’t even be possible for any given firm to increase wages, even if it wanted to, since doing so would increase its costs of production, thus the price of its goods and thus would bankrupt the firm in face of competing firms that do not increase wages. Material conflict theory does not posit that conflict exists because some individuals are evil-minded, but rather that individuals find themselves in complex socioeconomic property and incentive structures with all kinds of conflicting (yet not necessarily illegitimate) interests. These conflicts of interest do materially exist, whether or not people believe they can benefit from them or not.
It's true that Pareto improvements aren't very interesting if you think people's interests are all, or even mostly, in the amount of material resources they control. That's a mistake though. Billionaires are not millions or even thousands of times better off, in any real sense, than people who live paycheck to paycheck. In Pareto improving society we could take away most of the money and power billionaires have and make it up to them in other ways.
Further, I think it's a mistake to say things like "there is a conflict of interest between workers and capitalists because we live in a capitalist society". The only way to change the balance of material conditions between workers and capitalists, after all, is to change society so it is no longer, or at least less, capitalist, after all, so we can't take capitalism and its structural material conflicts as a fixed background except when we only contemplate small, fiddly changes. But mistake theory would posit that getting gridlocked over small, fiddly changes that preserve conflicts of interest instead of cooperating on larger changes that resolve them is, well, a mistake.
>Economists would answer that inflation benefits the poor at the expense of the rich - poor people tend to have net debts, and rich people net assets, and inflation reduces the relative size of both.
Economists might say that, but that's because economists by and large are people who go to very expensive universities for years in order to understand less about both money and human behavior than the average loudmouth on a barstool.
Inflation reduces the purchasing power of cash, but rich people don't sit on piles of cash--they own the kinds of assets that go up in value relative to cash during inflationary times!
And while inflation does reduce debt in real terms, that only meaningfully benefits people whose debt is long-term and large--classically, people with 30 year mortgages, a thing more associated with the middle class than the poor (and inflation still kicks the asses of the middle class on things like insurance, food, energy, and services, things they typically pay for with non-borrowed money).
>The anti-global-warming position gradually shifted from “global warming is fake” to “global warming isn’t caused by humans” to “global warming is actually good or at least not bad enough to be worth stopping”. All of these enrage and humiliate liberal experts about the same amount, so it’s not that hard to make people switch from one to another.
Enrage, sure. But humiliate? I don't think so: how can it possibly humiliate you, the expert who claims X is true, to see me, the fearless iconoclast, do the most obvious Person Who is Wrong and Knows It But Won't Admit It thing possible regarding the truth value of X?
Right, but since the amount rounds to zero, why mention it at all? Might as well say "any of these three positions, the latter two of which blatantly obviously represent backpedaling in the face of mounting evidence, make liberal experts equally horny." Or hungry, or itchy, or some other thing that people taking those positions in that sequence manifestly do not make liberal experts feel.
I can see that, but the reference there (and throughout the piece) is to people *trying* to humiliate and outrage the outgroup. I can't for the life of me understand why Scott keeps hammering on those concepts without addressing the obvious (to me, anyway) fact that both sides are constantly very very successful at the outrage part and only very occasionally at humiliation.
I think the humiliation is supposed to come when people are outraged but can't do anything equally effective against the outrage; humiliation doesn't come when people opine on Twitter, but it does when your boss opines to your face, or when "drill baby drill" becomes national policy over your objection as a top Federal scientist.
>Does anything rise to the level of a true material conflict?
Imo the battle between good and evil is the one real contender. I.e. ask about the criminals themselves - the ones who view themselves as evil but don't care/like it.
I really dislike the cope that these people are just 'confused about where their true interest lie'. They're enemies of the good and we're in conflict with them.
The free-rider problem is solvable in principle through social pressure. Wealthy people could exclude other wealthy people from their social networks or even interfere with their business operations in minor ways (badmouthing them to potential clients/partners) based on their political contributions (which could be accurately assessed because of transparency laws). Whether this actually happens significantly, I do not know.
The SALT alignments may be a contingent feature of modern political coalitions. The 1932 and 1936 elections pretty clearly ran on conflict theory, with wealthy against less wealthy (with a few minor oddities like the Solid South and Maine).
> Here there’s no plausible explanation except that one side or the other - the hundred million people who really want themselves and their kids to be vaccinated, or the hundred million people who really don’t - is making a terrible, tragic mistake.
There's a lot of mistake in this disagreement but at least some of it is conflict. Surrounding the role of government in healthcare (bodily autonomy, ironically) and also the question of how much the strong should compromise to protect the weak. I don't personally know any true anti-vaxxers in the scientific sense, but plenty of conservatives and centrists sneered at the idea of government enforced (in their view) experimental vaccines to protect the obese or iMmUnoCompRomisEd
>Recovering a duality first proposed by Max Weber, I suggest ethnic or national conflict is best conceptualized as a combination of "value rationality" and "instrumental rationality." Both of these rationalities are expressions of goal-directed behavior, but their conceptions of costs widely diverge. Instrumental rationality entails a strict cost-benefit calculus with respect to goals, necessi- tating the abandonment or adjustment of goals if the costs of real- izing them are too high. Value-rational behavior is produced by a conscious "ethical, aesthetic, religious or other" belief, "indepen- dently of its prospects of success."' Behavior, when driven by such values, can consciously embrace great personal sacrifices. Some spheres or goals of life are considered so valuable that they would not normally be up for sale or compromise, however costly the pursuit of their realization might be. The means to achieving these objectives might change, but the objectives themselves would
Relevant: belief in conspiracy theories is mediated by a spitefulness response to a perceived competitive disadvantage in society: https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/josi.12662
Imagine an alternate history where the Southern Baptist Church successfully persuaded everyone in the 19th century that slavery is a divinely ordained institution. Not just the slaveowners—everyone, including the slaves themselves—accepts it as an unremarkable fact of life, no more controversial than left-handedness. In this world, slaves are allowed to vote on certain local church matters.
Now, picture a particular church where two issues are up for a vote. The first: whether to allow women (both free and enslaved) to serve as alms collectors. The second: whether midwives should be required to disinfect their hands before delivering babies. The results? The first issue splits neatly along gender lines. The second shows no correlation with gender or slavery status.
According to Scott’s taxonomy, “female alms collectors” is a classic conflict-theory issue, while “hand disinfection” falls squarely into mistake theory. But what about slavery itself? In this society, no one talks about it much—just as we don’t spend much time discussing left-handedness. By Scott’s framework, we’re forced to say either that slavery is not a political issue at all or that it must be a mistake-theory issue, since slaves and slaveowners ignore it to the same extent. Both statements, in a trivial sense, are true: slavery is not a political issue in the sense that it isn't discussed, and both slave and slaveowners have the exact commitment to the claim that God ordained slavery, so abolishing slavery would require persuading both groups to the same extent (i.e. being a slave plays no role in requiring persuasion).
And yet, Scott’s framework misses something essential. If we were to launch a pro-abolition campaign, slaveowners and slaves would have objectively different things at stake. This isn’t a claim about their reactions—perhaps every slaveowner would cheerfully say, “Wow, enslaving people for profit was really dumb of me; let’s end this embarrassment right now.” But even if persuasion happened equally smoothly across both groups, the things at stake would be different for both groups.
(Crucially, this observation requires no stance on whether slavery is truly God-ordained. Even a devout Southern Baptist can recognize that slaves and slaveowners have different interests in the question of disobeying God's laws.)
This suggests that we need a finer distinction within Scott’s “conflict theory” category:
A. Conflict-theory issues: Disputes where the groups pre-exist the political disagreement, so the conflict could only be fully “resolved” if the groups themselves ceased to exist (which does not imply the disappearance of the individuals within them).
A1. The issue is actively contested.
A2. The issue is not actively contested.
B. Mistake-theory issues: Disputes where groups don’t pre-exist the disagreement —people might first hear about the issue, then take sides, and later switch positions.
As Scott describes, today's hot-button issues are definitely mistake-theory issues motivated by psychopolitics. Or, to borrow TLP’s more precise framing: modern politics operates like high school social dynamics—a shifting patchwork of rivalries between semi-equals, none of whom can even imagine changing the rules of the game.
If you believe we are all equally victims of this game (as TLP does), then naturally, you’ll see politics as mistake theory. But a case can be made against this (though not with Marxist discrete classes), leading to the conclusion that, at bottom, we’re dealing with an A2-style conflict.
<Follow-up on past thread about "Elon Musk's IQ is probably not that high" according to someone named Seth Abramson. Also, I've attached this same comment to the original thread>
So after reading Deiseach's comment, I acknowledge that Abramson is not an inherently credible source. He's not the sort of man anyone should say "well SETH ABRAMSON said it" because apparently he's sloppy.
However, that doesn't mean everything in the article is wrong. It just means the article is not credible for verifying anything (hence I'm not re-linking it).
However However,
I still *personally* find the article useful for researching Musk's bad press (I'm not telling anyone to do this), since it can be difficult actually digging for it.
For example, wikipedia doesn't mention that he was replaced as CEO at Zip2, but Britannica does:
"In addition, Musk was replaced as CEO by a more experienced businessman, Richard Sorkin, but remained executive vice president and chief technology officer."
Wikipedia does mention his ousting from Paypal/X.com twice:
"The company's investors regarded Musk as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year."
"Within the merged company, Musk returned as CEO. Musk's preference for Microsoft software over Unix created a rift in the company and caused Thiel to resign.[70] Due to resulting technological issues and lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in 2000."
So to conclude,
I personally think Musk has many negative qualities and is not as intelligent as people think. And part of me wants to keep going through the Seth Abramson article and independently verifying things. But I simply don't have the energy. It took a surprising amount of time to verify that Musk was removed as CEO from Zip2. Chatgpt "believed" this, but the wikipedia articles on Zip2 and on Musk were worded so as NOT to say it. And then I found Britannica. Shrug.
I think people subconsciously come up with what they think will be the selfishly beneficial political positions for them to hold, and then convince themselves consciously that they support those positions based on their neutral reading of the greater good. With the additional wrench thrown in the works that people are pretty bad at thinking through this sort of thing, especially unconsciously, and often get the answer wrong about what policies they'd benefit from.
"people don't actually want things that benefit them or their group, they just want to feel like they are benefiting, which is totally different, honest, even though it results in them acting as though they're seeking their group's shared interests"
Where did I say that? Show proof. It seems to me that you are lying and ascribing a false quote to me.
If you're going to quote my previous statements as an example of the totally nonsense idea that people don't want things that benefit them or their group, they just want to feel like they are benefitting which is totally different even though it results in them acting as though they're seeking their groups shared interests, then quote me accurately and demonstrate how the issue I'm talking about shows that I don't want things that benefit me and my group.
> "nobody would give their child measles just to own the libs"
I think you're very, very, very wrong about this aspect of political motivation. Think about how much people do for meaning, for identity: they will blow themselves up just to own the [fill in the blanks]; they will see their military volunteer child die in a country they know nothing about, and feel proud and full of meaning; they will burn to death at the stake, certain that it was all worth it. If they harbored some uncertainty about forgoing vaccines, and their child dies, they will take that and make their opposition to vaccines more certain, not less; it's far more attractive to retreat into certainty than to admit you might have made a mistake that killed your kid (and possibly other kids).
Does all of this apply also to immigration in Europe and ethnicity?
Conflict Theory works when resources are scarce. The fact that socialists believe in conflict theory is because their economic ideas are stupid, not because conflict theory is wrong.
Take Europe as example. Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region. Where is the mistake theory here? That Europeans should share more land with foreigners because not-sharing is economically illiterate?
"Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region."
First, and kind of unrelated, this is not clear at all, it's a pretty extreme statement coming from a very particular worldview. You can tell because very similar statements, like "only one eye-color can be master of a given land at a time, so the blue eyed people and green eyed people have to fight it out forever" are obviously false.
More related to the point of this essay, I think that *even* granting that the European right is correct about every single one of their points (immigrants are extremely criminal, rapist, terrorist, etc), conflict theory *still* doesn't describe European immigration politics accurately. What percent of Europeans who vote for AfD have actually, themselves, been victims of an immigrant crime in a way that's seriously affected their lives? And even if they have, the same free-rider problem I talked about in the post applies - there will still be 99.9999% as many anti-immigration activists if you yourself don't bother to get involved. If you were actually promoting your own personal material self-interest, you'd either not worry about politics at all, or just vote once every few years for lower taxes on yourself. Maybe you would vote for the anti-immigrant party rather than the pro-immigrant party if it were a free action, but you certainly wouldn't post on blogs about it or anything.
(this isn't criticizing the European right - it's virtuous to care about your country overall besides just your personal material self-interest. But let's not pretend that this is #1 on most Europeans' material self-interest list).
"Were you yourself mugged?" type arguments elide the possibility that people may be unhappy with general disorder, with ugliness, or for instance where I live - the public realm actually full of trash, and that means we are light years away from (and never returning to) the sort of niceties like landscaping and infrastructure kept in repair - that were once considered a legitimate government function, and not at all unknown in America.
And I live in a city that has no ideological bias against such things! City crews very slowly on some schedule known to themselves, make the rounds and do stuff, not uncapably. But it's laughable. It's like Wall*E going around and sifting through the trash.
It's nice to see them, though. In my last city - they had completely forfeited all such work.
Have you tried throwing away the trash yourself?
I'm not sure I follow what you mean - in a city of 2 million - please elaborate?
I suppose you can if you have any imagination, guess exactly the sort of thing I do when confronted with a piece of trash lol. I tend to gross others out, with what I will pick up. I was given one of those pickers, and I keep it in the car for highway stop use, road trips, etc. but I tend to just go with bare hand locally.
Well, with some imagination, the question shouldn't be hard. If it turns out that picking up the trash in your city is indeed easy, then you should be able to get others to do so, and then, assuming the people of your city want less trash, you should be able to make a profit selling your services. This is the process described by noted racist crank Mencius Moldbug, so I have to presume I'm not being too woke in my suggestion.
The alternative outcome is that picking up the trash is indeed too hard, in which case we should cease our criticisms of the City's efforts, having learned that they are not quite so incompetent. Or else that your fellow citizens quite like living in garbage heaps, and that seems to me their right. After all, nobody has yet called for evicting Oscar the Grouch.
I do think you are right - people have absorbed the idea that things should only get worse - and it is right that they should! - in service of something mysterious and larger, always in the far distance. Kind of the opposite of 19th century Whiggism.*
The sign that one is approaching utopia is the presence of dystopia.
*However, as usual, there seems to be a heterogeneity to it. Some people actively seek an alternative, for their surroundings. "Bubbles". Perhaps your 3 acres is one such.
What gets lost in between these poles - is simply America as it used to be, without any extraordinary effort - for ordinary folks in the middle.
I'm relatively confident that landfills are government-owned, which means you can't dump any trash you gather legally without a government permit (or burn it, for that matter.) So this is a rather dumb suggestion.
It isn't necessarily the case that one could sell trash removal services at a profit, because there could be a collective action problem. Everyone wants the trash picked up, but they'd also prefer that someone else be the one to pay the trash removal bill, so everyone just waits for someone else to hire the garbageman and nothing actually happens.
Don't walk past litter and then complain about it. Of course you personally can't pick it all up. But maybe two other people will see you, and start picking it up. That's all that's needed for it to work.
I’ve got 2 dozen shopping carts clogging a creek bed with your name on them! And about a million plastic bags snagged in the trees. I don’t live adjacent but maybe you do.
Or they may get picked up if there’s an organized pickup day. Those will attract lots of people, many more than two will see! It’s fun or at least comradely, and you get a tee shirt.
And then voila, a week later, there it all is again.
(The sort of people who attend such things, are unfortunately exactly the sort of people who agree with my view of litter, of course.)
Did it work? Has my compulsively picking up trash all my life started that chain of litter pickup? Has David Sedaris?
I will close my eyes and you tell me when to open them, so I can see how that has worked.
No, what's needed is a culture of not littering in public places and an infrastructure to support the desired behaviour (i.e., having sufficient trash cans that are regularly emptied and maintained). Without it, individual clean up efforts can make a small temporary difference in a local area but will not dramatically alter the situation.
I believe that immigration levels and AfD support are anti-correlated. Immigrants have largely moved into the richer former West Germany and AfD support is mostly in the former East Germany
As I see it, this is a testimony to the powers of self-delusion on the part of north/western upper-class german liberals. The evidence for recent mass immigration into Germany having overall negative social and economic consequences is utterly overwhelming.
Doesn't that disprove conflict theory? Because if it's possible to self-delude about something that's so bad for you, then it would seem that material self-interest is not the primary motivator of how people form their political opinions.
Sure, I just don't think the rural chuds are the ones acting against their interests here.
People can totally believe things are against their or their country’s own self interest, yet still believe it’s morally good to do so? That’s called charity or foreign aid, for just one example.
When Syrians came in 2015, the primary question was “do we have a moral duty to help these people by letting them be here?”. Not about whether it would be totally awesome for our economy or not, nobody believed it would.
Okay, but that's distinct from the argument that east-germans or MAGA voters or whatever don't have rationally-self-interested reasons to oppose immigration. (Welfare distribution, for example, often occurs at the federal level.)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist/comment/96352312
Immigrants overwhelmingly cannot be contributors to a welfare state, so it becomes a bit of a clash. Will we in future be able to help people for principled or simply compassionate reasons, given the trend?
what are these consequences and where's the data?
it's always interesting to hear how bad things are in Germany ... while living in Hungary
It’s not that hard to dig up twitter threads on the topic, the sources should be mentioned in the screencap.
https://x.com/Marc_Vanguard_i/status/1891532731751764455
If that is so, why 90% of the West-Germans - who do live in parts of Germany with lots of refugee-immigration see those refugees as a less urgent problem. While those in East-Germany with much less immigrants see a huge problem (they do have more "Russians" though, many with German passports, many voting AfD) and vote 30% AfD. Are those losers really so much smarter?!? Ay, there may be the rub: They live one gov. handouts! And do not want to "share". Conflict theory wins! - Maybe we should have never let those losers in and given them passports, agreed. 2 trillion euros for nothing. - Thomas Pueyo has some fine data and comment in his recent piece: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/whats-at-stake-in-germanys-elections
It's true that the AfD is stronger in the east but to some extend this is a factor of the east voting for anti-establishment (a.k.a. protest) parties. Before the AfD die Linke (far left party) was quite strong in the east (although not as strong as the AfD is now).
Also looking at the raw number masks the fact that AfD votes have been rising everywhere. Even in Hamburg (their weakest state), the vote-share has doubled from 5 to 10 percent. And that's the story nearly everywhere: If you compare the numbers from last election to now, the numbers have doubled in most states, except in the east where they were already very strong (for example "only" a 57% increase in saxony).
Yeah, AfD is rising everywhere, I just wanted to point out that there seems to be a negative correlation between living amongst foreigners and wanting to reduce immigration. The "protest party" dynamic is interesting, I hadn't considered that angle
That's what you expect if people have at least some leeway in choosing where to live and vary from each other in how much they like immigration? People who want there to be as few immigrants as possible will live in places with few immigrants and vote for politicians opposing immigration, etc.
I don't think internal migration in Germany is high enough for that to be the explanation. If you map basically any social factor on a map of Germany, you see a stark divide between the former East and West Germany. I believe that's much more likely to be because of cultural persistence then sorting
Scott did the meme:
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2565163-smugjak-but-how-does-this-affect-you-personally
It seems to be an appropriate response to the claim that everyone believes the things they do because they affect them personally
Murder's fine, boys, because I personally have never been shot.
If there's a stronger point you and Scott are making here, I really can't see it. I can't find a charitable version that doesn't prove far too much and have the effect of electing oneself the role of arbiter over what other people are allowed to care about. Which, being a transparently aggressive move, will make other people angry and get you insulted.
Well-stated. Everyone alive has by definition not been the victim of murder. And yeah, we’re enjoying our toast, for which we must apologize, because - well, we have to eat.
If either of us were arguing *for* conflict theory, I would understand this criticism. Murder is wrong because somebody is the victim, not because I am. If a time traveller showed me definitive proof that myself and everyone I know would never be murdered, it would not shift my position on murder- this is already what I expect.
I don't think either side is trying to decide what others are allowed to care about. The argument is not about what they should care about, it's about why they care about the things both sides agree they do. If your answer to that is that it's in their self interest, I'd expect you to be able to demonstrate self interest for any given belief.
I mean, Scott's position is "The view 'Murder's fine, boys, because I personally have never been shot' is obviously not how anyone feels. But it is how a conflict theorist predicts someone would feel, plus/minus some probability estimate of being murdered and a EV calculation of what my politics do about that. So, because no one shares that view, conflict theory is wrong."
He's not saying "murder is fine", he's saying "people will believe murder is wrong even if it they're not directly affected".
Which is true!
I think east-germans already have plausible reasons to care about immigration even from a short-term self-interested PoV, although I agree that a lot of human behaviour is driven by non-self-interested or a-rational concerns.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist/comment/96352312
During the Daniel Penny trial the white nationalist Twitter personality "captive dreamer" expressed anger that a Filipino immigrant could sit on the jury in judgement over a white man. Several of the people replying to him said that the Filipino immigrant is exactly the person you want on that jury, more likely to sympathize with Daniel Penny than the average person in Manhattan.
The whole story of Daniel Penny is a story of pre-1965 Americans. Jordan Neely was a pre-65 black. The prosecutor was a Jewish lesbian. The chorus of people calling for Penny's arrest was made up mostly of pre-65 blacks and woke whites, disproportionately female. Yet with this and much else, the far-right grasps for straws trying to blame immigrants for the behavior of blacks, Jews, and white women. Shows the intellectual bankruptcy of the whole worldview.
Of course the left likes to leave itself an out, always. The latest out, which was actually and breathtakingly baked into the cake of affirmative action almost from the get-go - is that the condition of blacks in America need never be a concern, because immigrants trump blacks.
In the Sunbelt where I live, immigrants and their children are utterly competitive as a source of disorder, and crime, with any group you care to name.
Though, to be sure, the legal system is only interested in perpetuating disorder, so the Daniel Penny trial doesn't seem to me to signify *anything* larger than itself, except that mayhem of that sort is permanent, and possibly whether people still have enough common sense to know that that Penny, presumably no genius, in that moment, was trying to do nothing other than just shut the other fellow down, without any evil intent or desire to kill him, certainly, which only gets you in trouble.
It's perfectly normal and understandable to worry about CRIME. But the instant somebody complains about dis(order), I stop paying attention. A fairly consistent marker of busybodyism and/or paranoia.
Nah. The Karens are funny. They are unusually reliable voters for all the things that lead to urban dystopia. One could say it's their baby. Now it's true that they are apt to go on reddit and complain when somebody sets the fire in the camp behind their house, or is defecating at the stoplight, or they see the guys who carries the machetes everywhere and waves it at people and only occasionally stabs someone, then spends a night in jail.
But their complaints are as nothing to their overall complicity with what you approve.
Of course, these conversations are among the silliest on the internet, as far as anonymity and geography go. You could have someone in Vermont lecturing somebody in south Austin, about what they should care about.
The Karen in Vermont is of course your friend and ally in that sort of exchange.
I was making a narrow point about vocabulary. People who talk about "order" and "disorder," those exact words, tend to be unworthy of consideration. This is a different (overlapping) category then Karens and it is disproportionately on the right.
Public pooping, littering, assault and arson are crimes, so complaining about "crime" covers these just fine. "Disorder" complaints signify that the complainer is, more often then not, on board with the rabid social engineering that I associate with the far right.
This would be much more compelling if the concepts of crime and disorder had remained distinct. As it is, the practical definition of crime - that is, the definition of it as something that is prosecuted and deterred - has been altered beyond recognition, blurred into "disorder". The result is what it is. You may be happy about it, even exult in it as obviously some do - or you may not be - but there is no virtue in it for you, or demerit for me.
>"Were you yourself mugged?" type arguments elide the possibility that people may be unhappy with general disorder, with ugliness, or for instance where I live - the public realm actually full of trash, and that means we are light years away from (and never returning to) the sort of niceties like landscaping and infrastructure kept in repair - that were once considered a legitimate government function, and not at all unknown in America.
This explains unhappiness, but you still have a free-rider problem if you want to use it to explain political action. This is Scott's point.
I think immigration is a perfect example of how white pilling could change policy. If immigrants are perceived to come because a country is "the greatest on Earth", culturally, politically, economically, it will flatter the right in that country and make them more immigration-friendly.
If, instead, one perceives the immigrant-attracting rich nations as beneficiaries of exploitation, so that it is only fair that they compensate by allowing immigrants to seize a share of the benefits, the right will be much more resistant to immigration.
This reminds me of George Lakoff's much derided claim that people would like taxes more if you reframed them as membership fees.
Most people just aren't that easily tricked, especially not when the reframing attempt comes from an outgroup member.
I mean, the sort of people who don't like taxes actually *do* like them better when they're a head tax, which is how a membership fee is usually structured.
What if it was based on land use?
"We don't much care what exactly you build or do there - within reason, poison gas or excessively loud noises or the like might be a problem - but between army and navy and air force and judiciary keeping trouble away, interstate highways and other infrastructure delivering whatever you could want, etc., it's a very desirable area. Here's what all that costs per square foot per month. If that's more than you care to pay, there are plenty of other spots, cheaper but with less conveniently proximate services, on a sliding scale... or you could figure out tighter ways to stack whatever it is you plan to do, so it occupies a smaller footprint."
People will never like paying taxes, but if paying a lot in taxes genuinely earned people more respect, they would vote less against, because of the free rider problem. The SALT Cap is the first example in Scott's post.
It wouldn't be trying to fool them, though. It would be changing for real the expressive value - the humiliation/praise - associated with being in favor or against immigration. In fact, I believe the republican shift against immigration owes much to going from the first to the second scenario.
Notably AfD was strongest in the East:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/ws/640/cpsprodpb/a3f5/live/2c6e46a0-f2bd-11ef-896e-d7e7fb1719a4.png.webp
The very region with the least migrants (aka the least impacted by migration related harm):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Germans_without_a_migrant_background_%282016%29.svg/800px-Germans_without_a_migrant_background_%282016%29.svg.png
I addressed this extensively, and I'm curious as to why you don't take this to imply that west/northern germans are the ones behaving irrationally.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist/comment/96352312
It shows that people are not responding to rational interests. Whomever is right is probably epsitemically lucky.
Maybe, but sometimes you have to pick a side.
one thing which is probably overlooked by those observing Germany from the US is how susceptible people are to Russian propaganda, and how much more so in the Eastern part of Germany. I am pretty sure that, without Russian propaganda and financing, AfD would stay marginal at best, never standing a chance of any serious electoral result.
I wonder if their respective histories could have them at somewhat different places about their expectations of the future, and what they hope for, and even maybe their ideas about who's owed what, and why Muslims should be the beneficiary of/have to do with a lot of Jews and Slavs and Belorussians etc. having been murdered.
You speak in riddles. It's 2025, you're not getting cancelled anymore.
To me this whole post is a riddle. There seems to be a reluctance to confront what it is, that is bothering our host. Or to make himself plain.
But: if you are confused about the difference between East and West Germany, I think Wikipedia can help. They operated under rather different dispensations for a few crucial decades. Thus might not be expected to have identical notions of liberalism, what good governance looks like - even down to the desirability of globalism.
I understand totally if this is retroactively cancellable. I guess.
> To me this whole post is a riddle. There seems to be a reluctance to confront what it is, that is bothering our host. Or to make himself plain.
Yeah, I thought that too. I think it's because Scott actually knows, deep down, that conflict theory is true - not as a 100% determinant, but certainly as a very significant factor among others (including mistake-theory and this new identity-theory model of his.)
But Scott would very, very much prefer conflict theory to be not true at all, because it undermines the whole premise of this blog and (I suspect) would set him irreversibly at odds with his much more lefty friends and family.
So we get this weird output that doesn't quite land, which I think this is what motivated reasoning looks like from a smart person who's ideological background includes a bunch of material on noticing and not participating in motivated reasoning.
Something that feels worth stating is that the AfD is by far the most pro-Russian party and East Germany is by far the area with the most pro-Russian sentiment. That's not to say these other arguments aren't valid, but that's a significant contributing factor for why regional support for the AfD in the East might be unusually high that has nothing to do with AfD's immigration position.
"The very region with the least migrants (aka the least impacted by migration related harm):"
The parathesis does not follow from the main statement. Different regions may suffer differently from migration. Poverty, for instance, means even minor harm may be immensely more destructive for you than for other citizens.
Oh, I'm from East Germany, and as far as I could tell your theory of trauma explains the rightward shift exactly.
East Germans have a historically distrustful relationship to the state and the media rooted in their socialist past in the GDR with an oppressive regime and a press that was more propaganda than news. Reunification was promised as liberation and an economic miracle, but instead it was a shock treatment. Companies where shuttered (often to prevent competition rather than because they where not viable). The remaining companies were overtaken by west German management and "rationalized" - often rejects that couldn't hack it back home, sidelining competent East Germans. Unemployment - which practically didn't exist in the GDR - became sky high. This was obviously a deeply traumatic experience. To this day the media has a mostly western German view that doesn't care to understand east Germans and talks about them in unflattering and uncaring tones. East Germans do not feel that they have a voice in German society.
Then Corona happened. The Germans handled it about as good or bad as anywhere, but one thing that was remarkable was the bungled communication that was often inflammatory, intransigent and often enough simply nonsense, projecting a state that doesn't trust it's citizen to behave responsibly and "knows better". Many of the mandates were perceived in the population as unreasonable (I would chalk this up again to bad communication rather than bad substance). The biggest issue was that criticisms - even reasonable ones - were rejected wholesale, protests simply dismissed and the protestors treated with general suspicion (of being conspiracy theorists, fascists, egomaniacs, what have you). This did not go over well, especially with an east German population that still deeply remembered its past under a state that behaved exactly like this. The right used this opportunity, latched on to protests, organized new ones, subsumed the movement under its banner. They proclaimed themselves the "voice of the people". Of course they injected it with their own radicalizing narratives, which fell on open ears. The fact that the AfD is hated and feared by the establishment is the cherry on top.
My guess is the price of eggs is going up, and the first person who acknowledges this without some complicated theory why it's a net good overall, and points to someone they claim is responsible for it, gets the attention. Bonus points for blaming an outgroup.
See also: blaming the Jews for conditions in Weimar Germany, following punitive reparations for WWI, the Great Depression, and hyperinflation. We are definitely sure that there was no Great Jewish Conspiracy but it's also not hard to see how economic conditions at the time were terrible and the coalition government was a complete mess.
I presume the level of Nazi support is also completely unrelated to which places had the most Jews.
Nazi ideology seems pretty conflict theorist to me - eternal struggle for the blood purity of the Aryan race? Umberto Eco's point 9 defining Ur-Fascism (https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-definition-of-fascism/)
is
> Life is Permanent Warfare, as Eco puts it, “there is no struggle for life, but rather, life is lived for struggle.”"
The rest of the points don't read particularly mistake-theorist either.
I presume the Nazis actually believed this rather than just putting it on as a show to get votes, after all they were pretty invested in what they thought of as purifying the race long after they'd eliminated political opposition. If "Conflict theorists treat politics as war" to quote the old SSC post on that, the Shoah seems pretty conflict theorist. Alongside the actual war.
A counter-argument is that the Nazis treated race purity as a science, and looked for "rational" solutions given their framing of the problem. Invading Poland was an engineering solution to the problem of Lebensraum. But that is stretching the definition of science to mean scientific-sounding arguments in favour of the accepted ideology: no-one wanted a honest investigation whether someone with 1/4 Jewish ancestry really corrupted the blood in some measurable way.
But "mistake theorists view debate as essential" definitely does not describe the Triumph of the Will. Who wins is far more important than the truth prevailing, because the only possible truth is the one The Party is fighting for. There was certainly a genuinely held belief of a Darwinian material conflict between the races, and a belief that not allowing the Master Race to degenerate was good for its members.
It looks like Fascism is confict theory in its purest form, and there were sure a lot of conflict theorists in 1930s Germany.
"First, and kind of unrelated, this is not clear at all, it's a pretty extreme statement coming from a very particular worldview. You can tell because very similar statements, like "only one eye-color can be master of a given land at a time, so the blue eyed people and green eyed people have to fight it out forever" are obviously false."
But that's not a proper comparison. Ethnies are extended kin groups which display similarities across a multitude of different characteristics, including but not limited to eye colors. Your comparison is like jumping into an argument about what genre of music should dominate a radio station, and saying the the whole discussion was akin to quibbling over whether rhythms should only include eighth notes or also quarters.
I don't get the Like button like some people do but if I did I'd have liked this post. A very nice way to put it.
>>First, and kind of unrelated, this is not clear at all, it's a pretty extreme statement coming from a very particular worldview. You can tell because very similar statements, like "only one eye-color can be master of a given land at a time, so the blue eyed people and green eyed people have to fight it out forever" are obviously false.
It also relies on arbitrary categorizations of places, in addition to groups of people.
Who is the ethnic master of the Iberian Peninsula? The Spanish or the Portugese (perhaps the Catalans)? Does New York City have an "ethnic master" or do we have to drill down to individual blocks or boroughs, or up to the State?
Or for a really spicy take, who is the ethnic master of the Balkans? The Caucuses?
there's no ethnic master of "the Balkans", but the Balkans is made up, today, of distinct states that are (with the exception of Bosnia, arguably), fairly ethnically homogeneous: one ethno-national group per state. As it should be, in my opinion.
It's not an extreme statement at all. ethnic fractionalisation increases the chance of political instability , corruption and decreases social trust which is important for place to be somewhere nice to live. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2000/wp0082.pdf
https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/polisci/23/1/annurev-polisci-052918-020708.pdf?expires=1741663394&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=189F3665D567ECDC32E9D8BBCF199794
Even if many on the right have not yet personally been victims of high crime rate african and muslim immigrants, the growing presence of those immigrants strongly increases the chance over time that our kin and extended kin (i.e. our ethnic group, whom we share more genes with than people from other continents whom we evolved to care for more than people from other continents the same way we evolved to care for our close relatives more than strangers from our ethnic group) will be victims of high crime rate african and muslim immigrants.
Also, high crime rate immigration directly negatively impacts all right wing Europeans by reducing social trust which makes society overall have more friction , less charitable giving and less pleasant to live in.
Given the choice between Sweden remaining like sweden and sweden being significantly more like afhganistan in 20 years, obviously it is in the interests of Swedish people who care about and appreciate the nice qualities of sweden to prevent Sweden becoming more like afghanistan
"but if you did nothing then everyone else would accomplish your goal"
And if everyone thought like this then your goal wouldn't get accomplished and you and your group whom you share more genes with would be much worse off.
According to your argument nobody should ever do anything in groups because it's irrational , yet clearly acting in groups is a very successful evolutionary strategy hence its ubiquitousness.
A typical person sometimes acts in a group as a team player and sometimes is a free rider which indicates that this mixed strategy is much more successful in the evolutionary long term. than being a free rider 100% of the time and never acting in a group and working towards your shared interests
I can't believe that you actually believe these arguments. You writes a post saying it's possible to rationally persuade people of arguments at the same time as doing brazen mental gymnastics to claim how groups are never actually in conflict due to differing interests (" they just want to FEEL like they are benefiting, which is totally different than acting in their shared interests, honest, even though it results in them acting as though they're seeking their group's shared interests") . I suspect you take pleasure in writing tenuous sophistry for obviously false positions.
His father is a scholar, the green grass, and his mother is a mixed race, one from the East and the other from the West. Both of them are criminals with the same goal, and they have the illusion that the world leaders have seen the secret world from a single perspective.
My wife and I jointly possess our modest estate, comprising precisely three acres. My wife hails from the ancient lineages of Eastern Africa, while I myself am descended from the misty bogs of Ireland. Given that there can exist but one ethnic master of the land in a singular region—a fact that is surely as obvious as the sunrise, though considerably less beautiful—how then is our domestic arrangement possible?
The answer is that what the world calls impossible, love calls Tuesday afternoon.
If you're waiting for racial intermarriage to solve this problem, that will (A) take centuries, and (B) result in the simultaneous disappearance of racial diversity, which runs counter to what the liberal left claims to value.
No, friend, my question is how is my domestic arrangement possible, if there can be only one ethnic master of the land? I'm sorry if my question is too confusing or vaguely worded—you seem to have gotten the idea that I ought to be very concerned about ethnic diversity. This is a trifling matter to me, but then again, my children will be both the descendents of Africans and Irishmen, which seems enough diversity to make any given Britisher to quail in his boots.
I am pointing out that over long enough time periods, every racially/ethnically-mixed human society either becomes an ethnostate (through ethnogenesis) or becomes a caste system, and observationally all such human societies have a dominant racial/ethnic group.
Or... do you think that you or your children are individually going to outvote the other 99% of your countrymen, or outfight the police and armed forces, or something? A single family isn't a nation, why would you even think this is a relevant example?
We are not talking about nations. Perish the thought! The gentleman I am responding to has argued that there can be only one ethnic master of any parcel of land, and I am dutifully pointing out that my parcel of land has two ethnic masters, and this fact has not yet led to any considerable hardship.
My nation has a good deal of history allowing for miscegenation, so I consider my progeny relatively safe. You point out that over a long enough time period, my land will be owned by an ethnostate, that is, my children. That seems like a neutral or even positive outcome to me. Perhaps if I am too worried about it I could force my children to only marry delineated subgroups that are different enough from them for your satisfaction—perhaps Pygmies, or Prussians. But I doubt that I shall go to that extreme.
> The gentleman I am responding to has argued that there can be only one ethnic master of any parcel of land...
If 'the land' you're referring to is only two acres in size, then this is a stupid and pedantic example which isn't going to convince anyone.
> You point out that over a long enough time period, my land will be owned by an ethnostate, that is, my children. That seems like a neutral or even positive outcome to me...
That's a separate debate, but it doesn't refute the notion that "in the end, there can be only one."
And yet what the dumb world calls possible, was last Tuesday afternoon in Congo.
I will admit that the Congo faired poorly under Belgian administratorship. Perhaps Belgians are not racially fit to be the administrators of other countries? My personal theory was that Leopold II was simply a villainous and evil man, but that might not fit with the more literally high-brow theories of scientific racialism. I suppose we shall simply have to find measurements of Leopold's skull to continue the discussion.
Yeah, I guess what happened is just kind of a joke. Facetiousness always welcome!
To be honest, friend, you're being a bit too vague. If you are vaguely writing of serious current matters, I urge you to be a bit more explicit. What you will lose in biting sarcasm you will gain in me being able to understand what you are talking about.
Sorry, I misconstrued you to be saying that whatever is happening in a place like that, must necessarily happen because of someone who died 120 years ago - and that's to be expected, and one shouldn't think about it overmuch or at the very least it should only furnish a little wry humor. In any case - you didn't see it - so perhaps it didn't even happen.
Or else - you would have tried stopping it yourself? Or figured out a way to stop it while making a profit? Someone should be willing to pay you to stop it.
Scott has written at some length about how Belgian adminstration post-Leopold was probably the best government the Congo ever experienced, and there's little or no reliable data on the death tolls Leopold was supposedly responsible for. In any case, that's hardly an explanation for the Congo's condition after the Belgians left.
Yes, that's the joke. If the ethnic masters of Belgian ancestry were able to provide Congo with the worst administration the world had ever seen, and then, immediately thereafter, the best administration the Congo had ever seen, that seems to cut against the line of racial homogeneity. Dare I say it, it might just lead us to conclude that one can't accurately make predictions about a person solely based on their ethnic ancestry?
I think you're boxing with shadows here. No-one on the HBD/race-realist end of the political spectrum has claimed that ethnic belgians are all clones of eachother, or even that being clones would make their behaviour fully predictable. (We have extensive data on the topic from twin studies, after all.)
"Dare I say it, it might just lead us to conclude that one can't accurately make predictions about a person solely based on their ethnic ancestry?"
It's a great refutation of an argument nobody makes.
Your domestic arrangement is possible because you have both submitted to and taken on the same mores and beliefs - the mores and beliefs of the ethnic masters of the land you're living in. This isn't a clever rebuttal to people alarmed at what's happening to their homelands, this is a smug deflection that addresses nothing.
I admit I am smug. Pardon me, please. But the rest of your comment is wrong. The land I am living in is not Catholic, and nor was my wife, before she married me. Perhaps I am the ethnic invader of homelands you are so alarmed about.
If your Catholicism meant that you had to worry about whether you were going to come to blows with teachers, judges, bystanders or the police, simply for trying to live as your personal sensibilities dictate, then you would by now have a good idea where the real cultural and ethnic power lay in your country, and you would not be being smug about it.
If Catholicism does not mean doing any of that, then Catholicism fits into the belief system you have both adopted, in which case there wasn't really any point in bringing it up.
My Catholicism is currently under attack by both parties. Republicans attack our charities, and Democrats are attacking our ministry's seal of confessional.
I have spent hours of my time pushing back on this, and perhaps it will work. But rest assured, I know very well that I am currently in the minority.
Hasn't come to blows, yet, though. Thank God.
Then you must be able to understand how much easier it would be if Catholics made up a bigger proportion of those parties, and how much harder if they made up less.
You can see how you would (and should, if you care about what you're doing) have an opinion on the prospect of a hypothetical influx of a large number of people who are likely to be Catholics vs vehement anti-Catholics into your country.
There is no need to be smug and condescending to us evil racists, now you already have the groundwork to see where we're coming from. Catholicism doesn't make its determinations based on race. Pakistani grooming gangs do. It should not take much empathy to see why this side is concerned.
Wait, are you saying ethnicity is innately genetic, or that it can be purely cultural?
Dunbar, more or less.
ethnic fractionalisation increases the chance of political instability , corruption and decreases social trust which is important for place to be somewhere nice to live. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2000/wp0082.pdf
https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/polisci/23/1/annurev-polisci-052918-020708.pdf?expires=1741663394&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=189F3665D567ECDC32E9D8BBCF199794
two people getting married and living together is very different from ethnic groups living in the same country.
A much closer analogy would be two entirely seperate families living in the same house sharing the same living quarters. Obviously that arrangement is much more likely to result in high tensions and conflict when those two nuclear families are completely unrelated or of different ethnic groups than if those two nuclear families have parents who are brothers or cousins with both the same culture and closely shared genes (blood is thicker than water).
Ethnic groups tend to try to gain control of land of their own when possible
Unless you're just joking, I think you basically proved the point.
A mistake-theory anti-immigration analysis of the pro-immigration position is that the people in favour of it are mistaken about group differences and about the possibilities to assimilate foreigners. A mistake-theory pro-immigration analysis of the anti-immigration position is that people in favour of it are mistaken because they have succumbed to xenophobic bias. I'm not sure what the conflict-theory version would be, i.e. what material conflict there might be between greens and nationalists that would explain the very different perspectives on immigration from e.g. Afghanistan.
Pretty easy to come up with a conflict theory explanation of immigration. On the one side, you have globalist elites willing to sell out their countrymen for cheap labour and scoring social points with each other, on the other hand, you have nationalists willing to cause enormous amounts of suffering too much poorer people in other countries for small benefits to themselves or their countrymen.
But most people who are in favour of mass migration aren't globalist elites – they're just regular people who think that being anti-immigration is icky – so it seems like that could explain only a small part of what we're trying to explain. The other side, with nationalists being nationalists because they have a material interest in reducing certain types of immigration, sounds plausible, but it would seem to predict that nearly the entire native population would be nationalists.
You don't need to be a globalist elite to benefit materially from immigration. If you're a middle class person in a leafy suburb, cheap immigrant labour makes your door dash cheaper.
You get the benefits, and the costs (taking the anti-immigrant arguments as true for argument's sake) like suppressed wages and higher crime go to the working class.
Aside from this, there is also the fact that a lot of these people are in a coalition with the globalist elites, which means going along with some of their interests in exchange for support on their own pet issues. I do think the social points angle is also important because having the cultural elite praise you and think highly of you has its own benefits. Also, you know that the other tribe is in conflict with you on a number of goals, so it’s reasonable to be suspicious of what their leaders say, but they’re being only 24 hours in a day, you can’t actually look into every policy issue yourself, so it’s sensible to take whatever people who share common goals with you say on faith as long as they don’t say something obviously pretty hostile to your interests,, although that’s beginning to sound less like a conflict theorist and more like my actual views, which are a mix of conflict and mistake theory
Doordash doesn't even exist in Europe. I think you're projecting the US situation on European countries, where the immigration controversy tends to center on migrants groups who largely live off welfare and are a net drain on the public coffers.
Have to admit "immigrants from petrostates" is a very different issue than "immigrants from agricultural/manufacturing areas" ... and there's also a big difference in how much the state denies/permits welfare services to non-naturalized migrants.
"Doordash doesn't even exist in Europe" -- so what? Deliveroo, Glovo and a few others do exist, and people working "for" them are also mostly recent immigrants hence they would probably be a lot more expensive if there hadn't been as much recent immigration.
Do you really think that pro-immigration people think about cheaper Doordash and Uber when they come up with the position? It doesn't make any sense to me. Far more likely they just want to feel like "good people" who are "welcoming" and "non-discriminatory," not quite thinking through the consequence that not "discriminating" also means abandoning "choice" or "evaluation."
"Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region."
There is so much wrong with that sentence. Like, this is a super interesting insightful article and the first comment I read is racist garbage that doesn't address the substance of the article and complains about white people sharing too much land with foreigners, and people take that in stride. I don't think I'm jumping to conclusion: this is hatred, wrapped with a thin layer of sarcasm.
Why is the ACX comment section like this?
Because all the other comparably-respectable blogs and forums are defecting by not taking on their fair share of this noise, so it all gathers here.
Also worth noting that one of the main people defending the above quote is making quite reasonable points and contributions in the animal welfare subthread. An example of what the mainstream is missing out on by hunting "witches" and judging commenters by their single most obnoxious view.
It’s not at all obvious whether it’s better to have someone who makes reasonable points in some threads and weird racialist ones in others, or to not have them! A lot of it depends on which of these gaps would basically be filled by others if they were gone.
As I read it the current mainstream view on this issue makes the assumptions:
- There is an excess of ability to make positive contributions to society
- The ability to make positive contributions in any given situation is almost entirely fungible
- Therefore making a positive contribution to society is entirely valueless and only avoiding negative contributions to society is worthwhile
- There actually are people who have no stubborn habits of contributing negatively to society
- Shunning an ever-increasing number of people and having them live on welfare with unlimited free time and only ever talk to other people who agree with them on their worst views will never come back to haunt us.
The third one really is an *assumption*, it doesn't actually follow from the first two unlike how people assume it does.
If we really do have some slack in the ability of people to contribute positively versus what society needs, I would prefer to spend it on relaxing meritocratic hiring in order to erase self-perpetuating differences in human capital accumulation among groups, rather than on a method of making things welcoming based on a, to some extent self-fulfilling, prophecy that people's bad tendencies will change either immediately or not at all.
I’m not convinced that many of the assumptions you mention really are shared by “the current mainstream view”, though I can see one way of trying to justify some practices that would make use of these assumptions.
But regardless of that, these assumptions seem much more plausible when it comes to participation in comments sections than when it comes to participation in society more generally.
The dumbest and most frothing-mouth partisans tend to come across as normal people in topics that aren't related to politics or their hobby horses. It is pretty amazing to see sometimes.
I'll gladly cast out the bigots if it means losing some support for animal welfare causes (a cause I am passionate about).
I guess DSL doesn't count as respectable because it is too much of a conservative circk jerk?
One Zillion Witches.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
Probably because elsewhere you can expect to say, "there's so much wrong with that racist garbage," and anyone who might demand more thought than that has already been removed from play.
Its sad. Along with larger shifts in western politics, Scott's interaction with the NYT entered him, involuntarily, more directly into the culture wars around media, cancel culture, woke, etc. After that the commentariat became more and more rightwing. The old blog was mostly centrist/center left with a sprinkling of extremists from both sides to provide flavor. The old blog comments were much more about exploration than debate.
The hidden open threads are less contentious but much less popular.
I remember it always being like this. Do the SCC/ACX surveys show that the readership got more rightwing?
I remember there always being some extreme right-wingers, probably as many as now, but their positions were even less mainstream within the right wing than now (part of that being a change in the right wing itself rather than the commentariat), and they didn't make up as high a percentage of the comments. There were also more extreme left-wingers. But the biggest difference I remember was there were more rationalists commenting who didn't have a strong right- or left-wing bent. The core constituency was the biggest casualty of the event. Also, if you look at things other than views, the SSC right-wingers were more able to carry on a coherent argument, although not necessarily more likely to be convinced. On the other hand, they (and commenters in general) were less polite.
I generally agree with this and it conforms to my memories. David Friedman and Steve Sailor used to be common posters, but I haven't seen either in a longe time. David is 80 and has other things to focus on, but i always appreciated a "true intellectual" weighing in on this. No complaints about Sailor being gone though. There may be other notable figures lost as well.
It also seems like the "community" turns over more often now. I remember even in the early ACX days, you'd see the same commenters over and over and you could get a sense of who was arguing in good faith and willing to provide evidence of their side. Now it seems like the open threads have a totally new set of commenters every couple months.
David's very active on DSL.
> But the biggest difference I remember was there were more rationalists commenting
Maybe you could have stopped there. The number of ACX readers has grown, the number of rationalists has not. As a result the debate is getting more similar to the rest of the internet.
I remember it being a mix of libertarians, leftists, and people living in group houses in SF in a polycule of some kind. When was the last time polyamory was discussed here? There were definitely far right-wingers but they were marginal.
Not sure what the surveys says but I am not sure the commenters are reflective of the readership as a whole. Based on the more moderate positions in the hidden open threads, my guess is the readership is pretty much the same but the most prolific commenters have changed.
I have also noticed a drop in the quality of the discussion. There used to be strong norms against ad homonyms, straw-manning, and other biases. People regularly asked for sources to support claims. Those norms have been eroded. Take the parent comment for this thread. In the old days we would have demanded support of the claims made, not just dived in to refute it (or support it).
Of course my memory could be wrong and likely puts things in the best light. But i get a lot less out of these threads than i used to. Except for the "joy" of arguing with those you disagree with.
Scott comments less now than he used to. I wonder if that contributes to it. No "parent" around to impress.
Previously, the new readers were mostly coming from the rationalist community. Now, the new readers are mostly coming from... the rest of the population. That seems like a sufficient explanation to me.
> There used to be strong norms against ad homonyms, straw-manning, and other biases. People regularly asked for sources to support claims.
These norms are extremely rare on the internet. Also, there is no way to enforce them here. Suppose that someone starts using ad hominems and strawmanning, what are you going to do -- ban them? Seems excessive. Downvote them? Oops, there is no downvote button. Disagree with them? They will just strawman you and throw an extra ad hominem at you. What else is there? The silent stare of disapproval?
Banning them is *exactly* the right answer for the sort of forum Scott used to (and I believe still does) want. But it's harder to do consistently at this scale and in this environment.
Hard right is a small minority, just loud. Self-definitions vary, but the most recent numbers look like:
~20% libertarian
~10% conservative
~35% liberal
~30% social democratic
Marx, Neoreaction, & Alt right between 1% & 2% apiece
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3UKmQTKiXjM92p3dtyybtlwt4q3r3lDw/closedform ("See Previous Responses")
Or they disproportionately don't take surveys.
There are a great many online spaces where "racism" is banned. If you continually find yourself coming here and not there, you might want to ask yourself why.
<< Why is the ACX comment section like this?
I think it has something to do with the fact that Scott has been positioning himself too clearly as anti-woke lately, and other anti-woke people have begun to see his blog as a comfortable platform for themselves. By mysterious coincidence, “racist garbage” is a pretty representative comment for anti-woke people.
Scott anti-woke lately? As opposed to... the good old Scott who would never e.g. compare feminists to literally Voldemort?
I think this is more about moving further away from the rationalists norms of debate, as the audience grows. In the past, a racist could some to the comment section... but he would be expected to provide evidence for his statements, or shut up if he had none. These days, you can do a lot of drive-by shooting and no one cares. There is no attempt to seriously figure out the truth. But without such attempt, the choices are either to accept anyone, or to make an arbitrary list of mandatory beliefs and ban everyone who challenges them. Both options are bad for the kind of discussion we used to have.
What exactly is hateful about it? Nothing in the statement he makes expresses any kind of hatred towards any group.
Assuming you're asking in good faith:
"Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region. Where is the mistake theory here? That Europeans should share more land with foreigners because not-sharing is economically illiterate?"
This is clearly pointing at a general cluster of ideas that is pretty charged with hatred and resentment: the idea that civilization is fundamentally a clash of ethnicities, that immigration is part of a conflict that Europeans are losing by sharing their lands, that Europeans are being replaced as the one given ethnic master of the land, etc.
It's worded in a way that deliberately omits hateful keywords, but the tone itself isn't curious or open-ended, it's sarcastic and inflammatory. The poster isn't curious about the best policy, they're preemptively mad that we don't see the way western civilization is being destroyed by immigration or whatever.
This is isn't subtle or ambiguous. This is hatred with just enough of a layer of indirection that it would pass an AI filter.
I don't see how wanting Europe to remain European is hateful. I wish other people's the best in their homelands.
Right, okay, "Assuming you're asking in good faith" did feel like a pretty bold leap.
Saying "I can't abide someone's existence (unless they're far away and never interact with me in which case fine)" is basically the definition of hating them. If you say it without the second part you've crossed from mere hatred to obsession.
No it isn't. I don't want Bill Gates in my living room, but I don't hate Bill Gates.
I didn't say that at all. I have no problem with non-Europeans visiting Europe as tourists for example.
no, no it isn't. what strange definition of 'hate' are you using here?
+1000.
+1000 to this.
I wouldn't want a bunch of white Americans (or white Englishmen, or for that matter brown Hindi speakers) moving to my ethnic homeland, but that doesn't mean I 'hate' them. What a bizarre notion.
Do you mean skin color or culture? If two million Poles suddenly moved to east Germany because of Russian aggression, would there be no civil strife because everyone is white?
The mistake theory is in the idea that land generally has *any* ethnic masters.
"Conflict Theory works when resources are scarce."
This is an interesting assertion since a belief in scarcity tends to be less associated with socialism. Socialism tends to argue for abundance within a zero sum game, with the barrier to happiness being redistribution. Free market proponents tend to argue for scarcity, with the barrier to happiness being investment and markets being used to efficiently allocate resources and encourage increased productivity.
By "scarcity," did you mean zero sum games?
I mean, granted some Brits want to bring back rationing. But rationing, I suspect, primarily worked because it was short term and in the face of tremendous need. In the longer term, people would tend to get sick of it and find ways to work around it. Though it's never immediately clear what criteria people are appealing to when they say that a thing 'works.'
> Conflict Theory works when resources are scarce.
That is the only sentence you wrote I agree with. Consider some neolithic tech level groups. If their population density is much below the carrying capacity of the land, then a thrive mindset would be the dominant strategy. Sure, one group can attack their neighbors and enslave them, but this just means that both them and their victims will be out-competed by a third peaceful group. By contrast, if the population density is over the capacity of the land, then someone is going to die, of starvation if nothing else. In that situation, a violent "survive" strategy where you drive your neighbor from their lands to get what meager resources they have, or die trying seems dominant: the size of the pie is fixed, so you engage in a zero sum fight over its distribution.
While humanity has mostly been in the latter mode for as long as humans have been around, the contemporary US is not in that mode. Nobody needs to fight for their survival, or so that all of their kids will have enough resources that they don't starve. Our tribal conflicts are not driven by necessity, but the same evolutionary process which failed to prepare us adequately for a permanent abundance of high caloric food also failed us here.
> Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region.
You should try reading something other than Hitler, perhaps. Ethnostates might have sounded like a great idea in the 19th century. Since the 20th century, that one renegade colony populated by the interbreeding of half of the European ethnicities -- and even some non-European ones! -- has been kicking the butts of just about every ethnically pure state on the globe. Ethnostates are fine if you want to have an agrarian society, but if you want to compete on the global stage, there is no way around multi-culturalism.
> Clearly, there can be only one given ethnic master of the land in a singular region.
You know that the current ethnicities of Europe are essentially made up?
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_France about how eg France until rather recently was far less homogeneous than it now seems. Similar, when modern Italy was formed, hardly anyone spoke 'Italian'.
So just like in the past they managed to make up a 'French' ethnicity out of (most) of the people living in France, why can't they reshape that concept again?
Britain is fairly good at this, at least a lot better than eg Germany. And America is rightly famous for welcoming and integrating basically everyone who can shout 'U.S.A!, U.S.A.!'
> So just like in the past they managed to make up a 'French' ethnicity out of (most) of the people living in France, why can't they reshape that concept again?
We did. It's called "white". Obviously we can't get away with pretending that non-whites are the same race.
You can, all you have to do is treat skin color like you treat eye color and hair color.
...Come on. You can't act like the those are equivalent. Those properties aren't even fully consistent across a single family of shared ancestry.
What an horrible thought, as if the remading of post-feudal Europe was not marked by widespread oppression and violence to make everyone french and italian.
And implying that ethnicities present before the formation of nation-states were "not real".
"Yeah, everyone south of the Garigliano spoke Campanian dialect instead of Latium dialect, so it means that we can insert 1 million subsaharian africans."
Horrible, horrible anglosaxon vision of reality.
"Similar, when modern Italy was formed, hardly anyone spoke Italian."
That is often stated, and it's fashionable to say things like that even here in Italy, but it's an exaggerated statement. In 1861, when Italy was formed, 25% of the population could read and write, and at least that 25% knew Italian, considering that since the Renaissance it had been the language in which people were taught to read and write in every part of Italy.
As for how the masses spoke, those who lived in Central Italy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Italy
spoke essentially Italian with regional variations.
The north and the south spoke local languages, but Italian was widely understood.
Google translated quote:
at the beginning of the eighteenth century (...) Father Andrea Serrao, from Naples, attests that in his region "there is no one, however crude and ignorant, who is not able to understand Italian"
https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/storia-della-lingua_%28Enciclopedia-dell%27Italiano%29/
And here are public announcements from Milan from the 1600s that were meant to be shouted by a town crier, therefore they had to be widely understandable, and they're all in Italian:
https://books.google.it/books?vid=IBNN:BN001408129&redir_esc=y
The bottom line is that when Italy was unified Italian had already been for centuries the lingua franca of Italy and the standard language used in writing everywhere in Italy, *without a single state enforcing it*. It was precisely that state of things that inspired Italian nationalism, and therefore the unification of Italy. So Italian identity arose organically and is not as "artificial" as that cliché depiction of history makes it seem.
"And America is rightly famous for welcoming and integrating basically everyone who can shout 'U.S.A!, U.S.A.!'"
Americanism is suspect on the political side non-whites largely support. Crime rates and other social outcomes don't converge.
As Steve Sailer puts it:
When I first got interested in social science in 1972, the rank order of average test score results was:
1. Orientals
2. Caucasians
3. Chicanos
4. blacks
But today the rankings are totally different:
1. Asians
2. whites
3. Latinx
4. Blacks
It seems to me that, although it might indeed be true that there can be at most one "ethnic master of the land" (whatever that means) in a given region, it would also possible - and possibly quite common - for there to be zero.
I want egg prices to go up way higher. They're unethical exploitation of chickens. Live and let live, including nonhumans
Based
yea….
I see nothing unethical about it in itself. We have a social contract with each other, not chickens.
Do you think that morality only applies when a social contract is in place? Like when Columbus came over to the New World and did enslaved a bunch of indigenous people, was that OK because there was no social contract with them? If the US government were to find a new undiscovered tribe today, would they be ok to factory farm since there's no social contract?
No. I think morality is a question of what we value. It's subjective and negotiated at the societal level.
We value things like avoiding gratuitous suffering. Most people have no qualms about slaughtering an animal for sustenance (irrespective of whether you think one needs it), it does not conflict with values.
I think part of the reason we don't have qualms with it is that most people have absolutely no exposure to the average chicken's conditions. We don't oppose slaughtering them, true, but I think a lot of people would oppose the level of suffering your caged chicken experiences daily, if they saw it themselves.
That's because people prefer to be ignorant. Various animal-right types have been banging on about horrors of factory farming for decades at this point, and if their message was popular it would've percolated to the top of popular consciousness by now.
People do oppose that, which is why we're seeing new requirements for cage-free eggs, cage-free poultry, and new technologies rolling out for sexing before eggs hatch.
And even before these novelties, it's possible to purchase from local trusted farms at a premium. Some cities allow you to raise chickens, but bylaws usually forbid it (there's a grassroots movement to change this too).
Morality is just a question of what we value. But if “we” includes the chickens, then of course we value not suffering. All the work is being done by deciding who goes into the “we” you are talking about.
This. We evolved to make moral distinctions between groups--that's just the in-group bias. What groups we make central to our self-concept, and which groups we decide are unimportant or dangerous depend on local circumstances as we grow up. It makes sense that since we benefit from eating chickens, many people will fail to feel empathy for them.
If empathy/morality is to any degree sensitive to personal cost, then people are going to vary subjectively regarding what costs are worth bearing.
I think that argument would need reviewing after the moment you not only pass on an invitation for thursday night dog torture but report it to the police.
I wrote above: "We value things like avoiding gratuitous suffering"
Society doesn't approve of animal torture.
If we take gratuitous to mean free of charge then yes, but we create chicken torture camps so eggs are a dollar cheaper. It's not about sustenance it's about being cheaper.
There is contradiction in how we deal with animals.
I can see an argument for defending dog torture tuesdays that's as solid as defending the stuff we do to farm animals in order to shave a few cents off the cost. Neither are truly solid though.
Morality is about moral agents, proving death is bad to a earth quake may be ineffective in changing its behavior
I think if you converted enough of a continental plate into microcircuitry that, when close enough to stressed fault lines for earthquakes to be a concern, any given ton or cubic meter of rock was more likely than not to be capable of understanding the concept of death and making tangible decisions based on it, the results would change seismic behavior quite a bit.
Speak for yourself; I have entered into multiple social contracts with chickens.
It's fun to pretend
I think flu vaccines require billions of eggs and save maybe millions or tens of millions of (human) QALYs per year. (Anyone who researched/knows about the topic should feel free to supply the correct figures.) Is it your stance that we should stop doing it too? Assuming there's no easy alternative, what should be the cost of human life-year in eggs for you to think it's roughly in balance, if there is such a number?
How do you evaluate chicken suffering anyway? If there's a unit of suffering, how much of that one egg costs? I don't think chicken QALYs is a good measure because if we don't use them for our needs, presumably 99%+ of them won't ever get born. Maybe it's the right thing if their existence is so terrible it's negative QALYs, but can it be fixed by bringing their quality of life up then? Should we also include chicken pleasure as a positive term in our calculations, or it's only suffering that counts? If it's the latter, it seems like you shouldn't in fact advocate for "letting live", not getting any chicken made in the first place should be the right course. And continuing to cover all the planet in concrete and asphalt to stop the animals we never domesticated from reproducing, too.
Yes, I do think we should stop using eggs for vaccines and switch to ethical alternatives. I don't have a number like that; there probably is one but it seems like a waste of time to figure out.
How do you evaluate the suffering of any sentient being that isn't you? How do you even evaluate your own suffering? And yeah I think we should stop breeding them, I'm pretty sympathetic (tho not 100% on board) with antinatalist reasoning, including for nonhumans, but actually wiping out all life is neither feasible nor ethically possible. There are better ways of reducing wild animal suffering than killing them, just like there're better ways of eliminating human suffering that don't involve killing
> I don't have a number like that; there probably is one but it seems like a waste of time to figure out.
Well it boils down to (1) the practical question of the cost of an egg in terms of suffering or other metric and (2) the moral question of the ratio of human to animal suffering where it's an acceptable tradeoff for you. I expected you had a good answer to (1) as you advocated against use of animals, but if you don't, sure, let's just reduce it to (2) which is about your moral intuitions and doesn't require any research.
> How do you even evaluate your own suffering?
This one is simple: I consider lengths I would go to to prevent it. Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) is a decent metric for long-term suffering: if I consider living without a non-dominant arm to reduce the quality of life to 85%, I should consider it reasonable to trade less than 15% of my remaining lifespan to prevent losing the arm and vice versa. Extrapolating it to non-sapient animals isn't quite so easy but I think a reasonable approximation can be worked out. And needs to be, because otherwise you can only give a qualitative answer like whether some living being is suffering or not (and that's the best case scenario) and anti-natalism does seem to be the only answer.
I think ignoring pleasure and positive utility in general is wrong. You're talking to me because suffering isn't the only thing I consider when I evaluate my own life, there are things worth living for for me, why should I ignore this possibility for others? Of course positive utility is harder to figure out than suffering and we have a conflict of interest when in comes to animals we want to breed, but I don't think destroying life would be a positive outcome if we could achieve it.
> There are better ways of reducing wild animal suffering than killing them
No? If you don't care about positive aspects of life, they need to stop living as soon as possible. Preferably in a humane manner, sure, but at least for us mammals most ways of dying don't feel so good and the best you can do for someone is euthanize them before they accumulate more suffering and then die more horribly.
If you do care about positive aspects of life, why are they outweighed by the negative ones to make antinatalism sympathetic?
Perhaps we should simply stop putting an objective number on suffering if it's not actually useful. In practice, the suffering of others is only meaningful to any given individual to the extent that it causes 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 suffering. If it doesn't cause them suffering, what value could it possibly have?
You have a headache, and your neighbor's dog is barking incessantly. Is it okay to shoot it? Unknowable: we don't try to measure suffering objectively.
"You have a headache, and your neighbor's dog is barking incessantly. Is it okay to shoot it?"
Dogs are one of those things where if we didn't have them and suddenly someone proposed introducing them to urban/suburban America, people would be like "hell no!"
I do care about positive states too, but I think the purely consequentialist pov misses something important. Namely, the importance of respecting bodily autonomy. You should be free to swing your fist, except for where my face is. If you violate the autonomy of others, you forfeit your own, because you've shown that in practice you don't actually value it generally (this especially goes for beings that can recognize this). It's sort of a nonaggression type of principle, by exploiting others for our benefit we are the ones initiating violence. Don't initiate violence
ultimately I don't feel like getting into the specifics right now, these are scattered thoughts while I'm on break. Generally I think of things in terms of sentientism (evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings) and original position/veil of ignorance. Would I be ok with being born into society where I could end up as a human with a vaccine, or I could end up living my entire life in the torturous conditions of a factory farm? No, I wouldn't accept those odds, I would take the odds between natural chicken life or human without a vaccine though. If you would preferred tortured chicken/vaccinated human odds, that's probably a pretty fundamental disagreement we have that won't be resolvable in these comments (especially given the amount of effort I'm willing to put into this conversation, which is not much)
> I would take the odds between natural chicken life or human without a vaccine
Do you mean a natural chicken life lived as a chicken, or lived as a person in natural chicken conditions?
life as a chicken (who are persons in the sense that they're individuals with an internal experience/sentience)
Actually if you measure the probabilities per life, you are most likely to be "born" a virus. Especially in a world without vaccines :-) Personally I reject that measure, there needs to be some weight factor like intelligence or biomass or something for it to get meaningful. I don't particularly like sentience because of all the consciousness questions, but if we use it, I don't think an elephant's and a mouse's minds should be considered equal.
In general it's a hard question for me, because on one hand I do have some intuitions stemming from similar lines of thinking, but on the other hand, "I" who was born a Han (let alone a hen) wouldn't be me in a way that makes sense to me.
I have a different framing: suppose Earth was colonized by aliens who are as intelligent compared to us as we are compared to chickens, would I rather want us to be made extinct, or kept and exploited with some accounting for our puny preferences, or exploited with no restrictions? Definitely not the last one, but I don't automatically reject the second in favor of the first and might find it preferable, probably depending on the particulars.
(There is no option "they should just leave us alone".)
I don't know about bodily autonomy. Obviously I don't condone murdering healthy people to harvest their organs and save a greater number of sick people, but it's not hard to think of consequentialist arguments against this. It seems like if you take this principle too far, you would indeed arrive at antinatalism, which might not be a good argument against it for you, but for me is an indication that it can be taken too far to make sense.
The tricky thing is, imo if the mouses experience is somehow more salient than the elephants, then I would argue they matter more. My extremely limited understanding of brains/neurology puts a low prior on that, but I could totally see it being that way. But afaik there's no way to objectively, "foolproofly" measure sentience let alone its intensity, so we have to go on heuristics and our best understanding of mind, even tho it's wildly lacking
I also don't automatically reject the middle choice, but the advanced aliens could do a lot better lol
imo something like consequentialism/utilitarianism is probably the "objective" morality, but it's too expensive to compute, with way too many unknowns (e.g. see intensity of sentience above), so a blend of the easy utility calculations, a few hard lines/"rights", and maybe some other stuff like virtue thrown in, all unified under compassion and reason for all who can experience, is the best bet we have of approximating the true utility calculation.
> If you violate the autonomy of others, you forfeit your own, because you've shown that in practice you don't actually value it generally (this especially goes for beings that can recognize this).
The Zizians are back in the news, and IMO taking the quoted extremely seriously is a big part of how they got where they are. (That is: in prison for murder, because the vast majority of humans become acceptable targets.) Where do you personally get off the train of logic?
That's another spot where the veil of ignorance and compassion comes in. I'm born into the world either as someone ignorant (or amoral or apathetic or impulsive or cruel or whatever) enough to violate the bodily autonomy of others, or as the one who's being violated. If I'm the former, I want as few negative consequences to come my way, but as the latter, I don't want to be harmed by the former. The balance (as I see it) is the minimum retribution needed to protect the victim, but no more
This kurzgesagt video just came out yesterday on the topic. It has figures for how much more it would cost to change an animal's quality of life from torture camp -> prison -> decent.
https://youtu.be/5sVfTPaxRwk
Rethink Priorities goes into a lot of detail on comparisons between suffering in different animals in their Moral Weights Project sequence:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hxtwzcsz8hQfGyZQM/an-introduction-to-the-moral-weight-project
Also see this interactive tool to compare the welfare cost of different animal products by calorie:
https://foodimpacts.org/
And this writing on why paving the natural world in concrete isn't strategically practical for suffering-focused ethicists:
https://reducing-suffering.org/applied-welfare-biology-wild-animal-advocates-focus-spreading-nature/?utm_source=chatgpt.com#Habitat_destruction_is_unpopular
> And this writing on why paving the natural world in concrete isn't strategically practical for suffering-focused ethicists
Why not just toss the earth into the sun, if this is your goal? Does animal satisfaction not feature in any of these utility calculations?
Well, for the exact question, tossing the Earth into the sun is one of the most energy-inefficient of the "obvious" ways possible to destroy all life on Earth, second only to annihilating the entire Earth with antimatter.
I didn't write the comment as a policy proposal.
As far as I understand, yes, some suffering-focused ethicists would press a button to send the earth into the sun if they could. But I imagine this is a minority opinion among them; a focus on reducing suffering doesn’t imply it is the only moral end, only a primary one among others like promoting human and animal flourishing.
I’m not disagreeing, I just find the hardcore anti-natalist position hard to grasp in general, let alone when it’s extended to all possible lifeforms.
I would be very surprised that billions of eggs are really required for flu vaccines.
But if it is, we should find alternative, and if there isn't any, the chickens necessary for the eggs should be treated a lot better, and we should still not eat the eggs (they would be necessary only for the vaccines, and also much more costly)
If the chickens are happy, I think this is ok, the problem is that even when chickens are well treated, they often have poor health, so we should also do some selection to improve it.
I want egg prices to go up way higher. I hate birds and think birds don't deserve to live, and as egg prices approach infinity the bird population approaches zero.
The unholy alliance between animal welfare enthusiasts and fowl-bigots to lower levels of factory farmed animals.
Not an example of bootleggers and baptists i'd considered before.
Once upon a time I hated birds (victim of several bird attacks as a child), but reached the opposite conclusion - I always bought the cheap cage eggs to ensure more birds were being tortured. What is better, a bird that doesn't exist, or a bird that exists under a state of constant torture? I guess that's the difference between negative-sum and positive-sum anti-utilitarianism.
Why did you comment this ?
I'm not sure how to answer this... why do you want to know why I commented this?
It's a true story that relates directly to the post I replied to. It's unusual to see someone else who hates birds. Do you want more details? Aside from the typical magpie swoopings many Australians would relate to, I was attacked 3 times by birds during a family holiday at age six. Pelicans, parrots, and finally and most traumatically by an emu. It was bigger than I was. I had a proper complex for years... I'm over it now.
I wanted to know if you were serious, or if it was some sort of humor, or some sort of provocation.
How is it reasonable to want more birds to be tortured if you were victim of some ?
Imagine I were victim of a man, or I were bullied by a child at school, would it then be reasonable for me to want more men and more children to be in a state of constant torture ?
Not reasonable, but quite common.
Responses to childhood trauma are rarely reasonable.
I don’t think this makes me insane or a serial killer tho. I regret engaging with you.
Agreed. From what I've found, chickens are raised unusually badly, are unusually sentient in comparison to how much food they produce, and in particular, they produce less eggs than meat in a given amount of time. So if you're going to cut one thing out of your diet, it should be eggs. Vegetarians have it backwards.
If only we could engineer something along the lines of an egg-laying koala.
If you think salmonella is bad, wait 'till you see the diseases koalas carry.
Economists like to talk about incentives, or used to, but it definitely can seem like ordinary people maintain more straightforward faith in incentives than do economists - however much one may wave this away by asserting that people "just want to feel that they deserved this or that".
Except when it comes to political actions, where people often take it as given that nobody will respond to the incentives being created, and violently shout down anyone who tries to suggest otherwise.
Typo: "Wokeness is the single issue people that makes people most passionate."
Should be "Typos are the single issue that makes people most passionate."
What a smart and thoughtful analysis. Thank you for this, Scott.
You use a loaded argument at the very beginning: "it’s because they *correctly* believe racism is good for white people.". Why is this belief correct? Are you a racist? :) So, a) how would you know if it is good or bad for a racist if you are not one of them (unless you are), and b) where is the proof that is good for whites to be racist? I think history would very quickly disagree. Evidently, the racists have been the weak side, over and over (so it bears to evidence that it is not 'good' for them). Even though racism has perniciously infiltrated many societies.
Right. Can there not be groups with counterproductive beliefs? For example, the anti vaxxers are generally wrong, and their wrongness is difficult to see because they are free riding on herd immunity and even outbreaks of formerly epidemic diseases like measles aren’t that big and are easy to ignore.
Presumably, that is just an example of an application of conflict theory. For Racism to exist it needs a reason to exist and persist. If conflict theory is the correct explanatory mechanism than this means that racism benefits those who are racists, thus creating a basis for conflict. If it does not seem like racism in fact benefits racists than this is just another hit against conflict theory.
I think it would be more illuminating if someone *once* tried to write an essay about conflicting views or the origin of this or that custom or why things are so, across the whole world - with the small constraint - or spur to thought, or enemy of laziness, as may possibly be the case - that he would do so without using the word racism.
If I'm understanding you correctly, I think you'll find the spirit of what you're looking for in the old SSC post "Against Murderism", which talks about how the word "racist" has many conflicting meanings and most of the people who use it are pulling a bait-and-switch to protect their self-image.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
As for this post, I'm with Andrew Cavallo above--the statement that they "correctly believe racism is good for white people" must be true in order for conflict theory to apply to that situation; the fact that it doesn't is a mark against conflict theory.
In any case, having read the earlier SSC post, I knew where Scott stood on the topic and the phrasing didn't bother me.
I have not found it to have the totalizing explanatory power that he and others do, even if he uses it "uniquely". There's not much there, and I've noticed people who tend not to be interested in specifics about why things happen or are, or persist - use it most.
But I will check that out.
Again, that's almost word-for-word the thesis of the post I linked. "Racism" is a word whose meaning changes constantly because it's mostly used for motte-and-bailey arguments by people who can't or won't acknowledge reality.
Also: I need to understand what would be meant by “correctly believe racism is good for white people” - it’s just so much word salad to me! I’ve read it 3x now.
If conflict theory is applicable to this situation, by definition, racism needs to be an unequivocal good for the people that express it. If it does not benefit them, then by definition, conflict theory does not apply.
The "expression" (as needed for argument) could lie anywhere from "just existing" to inaction in some particular fashion to how someone voted to how they spend their time to - even having interests (the cringey thought of which would have embarrassed all of us who grew up in a much earlier period) to particularly keenly in American history - where they happen to live. Even if where they lived involved them in the lives of people of other races and vice versa, 99% more than people who live somewhere "above all this" with no "racism" target on their backs.
Basically, I think if you utter a sentence, as the foundation of some argument, that nobody in history has ever spoken, that sounds weird, and in fact causes more than one commenter to read it over, trying to parse it - it's incumbent on you to give a little background, or concrete example of this in action.
ETA: or to choose two groups whose interests are not automatically considered suspect, say blacks and Hispanics.
Meritocratic hiring from a global talent pool is massively economically beneficial in the short-to-medium term and will produce a racially non-homogenous workforce, but it also does not produce 'equal representation' relative to the racial fraction of the global population. This is definitionally 'racist' according to modern legal standards.
Once you aim for equal-representation (and many 'meritocratically' promoted individuals from under-represented racial groups will do so), you will ultimately get a Venezuela/Zimbabwe scenario. It's a highly politically unstable arrangement.
Hereditarians would strongly disagree with regards to certain types of racism.
I would assume that racism is good for those who are not being discriminated against, at least in the short term. Whilst the loss of a large number of people to top positions is terrible (in a sense the reverse of Trump’s DEI statements about the crash) in the short term it reduces competition - if their are 100 people who would want a job, but 50 cannot get it because they are black that is good for the white people - it reduces the completion making it more likely they would get the job. In addition, in a racist society, being against racism is bad - so in such a society it is again better for white people to be racist
There is not a shortage of jobs at the moment. The proposed situation is still good for those not being discriminated against. The companies will have to offer more money to recruit people who already have jobs. People shuffle around to take advantage of the rising wages and the result is, "inflation."
I think your argument falls away if I replace ‘jobs’ with ‘good jobs’
It appears to me to be effectively unchanged. In both cases, the result is a reshuffling of who works where with the necessity to raise wages to recruit (since unemployment is low). The results is inflation. What assumptions are you making that prevent this?
In a racist society, all the low paying jobs that people do not want can be given/forced to to the discriminated group (see black people and sugar canes, or in a different way, Jews with moneylending). This means that there is less competition for the specific jobs, which people see as an advantage. I mentioned earlier ‘the short term’ because there are many reasons a racist society is bad - that doesn’t mean that people feel it that way. For many people presented with two arguments
1) The ‘discriminated people’ are stealing your jobs! They are bad! Stop them, and then you will get the good jobs and those bad people will get the bad jobs
2) The economic effects of racism…and therefore profit!
No matter that one is objectively correct, and one is not, will support the second since it aligns with their values, shows a clear economic advantage, and can be much more easily articulated. This is admittedly the reason why populism picks extreme, and simple platforms, and is so good at winning elections - since the truth is often nuanced and complex, a side who can say ‘this is the truth, it can be summed up like this and then you are right about everything’ looks much better than another side who says ‘it is a complex situation…’ - there is a reason that so many people listen to or watch Matt Walsh who describes himself as not so clever - he can turn up, say ‘what is a woman?’ and do nothing more - which makes him look much more put together and correct than the other side who cannot sum up their views in a pithy statement. (Not advocating either way on beliefs here - just a description of debating technique)
I think I rambled quite a bit here, so if it is overly complex let me know and I will try and reframe
When the jobs that people do not want *are* well-paying, or at least not badly-paying, but unwanted for another reason, this often leads to an additional level of discrimination against those who got stuck with them, see e.g. Jews or burakumin.
You said that my argument "collapsed if we changed 'jobs' to 'better jobs'." I wasn't aware that we were also adding the option of enslaving people. If enslaving workers is on the menu, I am pretty sure we don't need a Federal Reserve to tame inflation.
That's presented as the premise behind a conflict theory of racism, not as a sincere belief of the author, who explicitly says in the title that he's not a conflict theorist.
This is either reckless or intentionally misleading - Scott says this as a view representative of the position he is rebutting in this essay.
Try reading the article more carefully, and you'll notice it is not in fact arguing in favor of that belief.
I only pointed out the loaded argument at the beginning. I am not saying you argue or are pro-bs. Not at all.
If conflict theory is true, racists must be correct in their belief.
Because, if racists are incorrect in their beliefs they're making a *mistake*
they "might" be correct in their worldview. in fact, they undeniably are, or they would behave differently.
> b) where is the proof that is good for whites to be racist? I think history would very quickly disagree
I mean, isn't the entire point of the 1619 project and things like land acknowledgements that racism was super beneficial for whites historically? I'm not the one to fight this fight but that seems like a flagrantly overconfident statement that a lot of people, particularly anyone on the left, would vehemently disagree with.
Perhaps you mean racism wasn't good for whites in a moral/ethical/spiritual framework, or you're using history to mean basically just the 20th century? Hard to say there wasn't some significant material and political/cultural gains from it.
Conflict theorists thinking that racism logically must have been beneficial, organizing projects on that basis, is not necessarily the same as it actually being true. Pro-racism side didn't do so well in the 1860s when those material benefits were put to the test.
> "it’s because they *correctly* believe racism is good for white people.". Why is this belief correct?
It's not correct and Scott doesn't think it is either? But someone who truly believes in conflict theory MUST believe this, because "their beliefs are correct" is literally the premise of conflict theory. This is literally the viewpoint this whole essay is arguing against.
You are making the exact same argument that this piece is making.
"a faction could vastly increase its chances of achieving its material goals just by making compromises on who it flatters vs. humiliates."
It doesn't have to be a faction. It's shockingly easy for individuals to achieve material goals in their personal and professional lives by making these compromises. But society has some rude words for people who do this.
Neurotypicals
normies
Can you give an example? I’m not sure what you mean.
Most people will react more to the words you write (their tone and social signals and language connotation as much as the explicit meaning) in the intros to your grant proposals and reports than they will to the actual technical content.
It's pretty easy to get free things from older people if you flatter them. The book review on LBJ's career shows the extreme of this.
As a youngish person I find it depressing and fascinating how my contemporaries argue over foreign policy, wokeness, climate change etc when housing policy is materially making their life much worse in a way they think about every day but it doesn't attract much of their focus.
On the bright side, housing is much more salient as a topic than it was just a few years ago. Unfortunately, it is also getting polarized in all sorts of ways.
This theory also points to why housing policy is starting to change. The YIMBYs have been shifting the identity lens away from the developer/landlord vs renter frame to homeowner vs renter
Yes, in my old stomping ground, the urbanists complained that homeowners showed up too much to neighborhood or civic planning meetings (and silenced the voices of "those who aren't here (in the country) yet"). Just die already was a regular meme. I think they understood democratic process to be the enemy. It was kind of an inversion of the old activism, at least that which had been considered, somewhat affectionately, with occasional exasperation, the norm in that city. I think they are getting their way, though. There's no longer any but a few grey heads protesting freeway expansion or advocating for parks. Needless to say, "open space" is now a bad word.
neighborhood or civic planning meetings are notoriously unrepresentative of the constituencies of the jurisdictions they happen in. Older, wealthier people are more likely to have the time and/or resources to take time out of their day or night to attend a meeting.
Your last two sentences are strange to me. Is the suggestion that urbanists got power and now they are fine with freeway expansion, against parks, and don't like open space? That doesn't characterize any urbanist belief set I am aware of.
You sound just like them actually!
The old, these are the wrong people, let’s engineer the right ones, whether or not the right ones know or care.
Of course conservation is racist - have you no awareness of the takeover of the Sierra Club?
It was the concern of past people, activists, who were bad, unlike us who are good. Thus it was bad.
In particular it had as its object something over than people, and more particularly still, the people we’ve anointed the good people.
We don’t think they care about that and we don’t care about anything but them - eg birds or something stupid like that.
Roads are disfavored of course, by urbanists, while transit is talked of endlessly and ineffectually, but they don’t push back too hard - that’s still on the grey heads to organize. It’s pretty easy to pacify people with weird things like bike lanes adjacent to big rigs and platforms over roads dug into the ground, for treeless parks - because what’s better than crossing 3 or four lanes of frontage road to play in the engine exhaust?
are you drunk?
Is it? I find it's a rare bipartisan wedge, it just doesn't have a large enough demo behind it. Zoning reform is a deregulatory market-solution, which coming from the more libertarian angle will satisfy most conservatives, and the left, despite not putting it front-and-center in their wishlist for housing ("wE nEEd SoCIal HOuSing"), will begrudgingly admit that it can lower housing costs and mostly support it.
One would think so, but now that some in the center left are in favor of it, people like Trump have been making negative noises about it. And homeowners seem like a readymade part of that coalition.
Yeah that could pose a problem. One of the reasons it can be a moot point to rally conservatives is that it's easier to build in red states anyway. Blue states are the ones who need to turn things around.
>despite not putting it front-and-center in their wishlist for housing ("wE nEEd SoCIal HOuSing")
What's the benefit of mocking capitalization here? Social housing can indeed be a part of a comprehensive housing policy (as is zoning reform), though it can't solve the housing question all by itself (neither can zoning reform).
It's made redundant by zoning and regulatory reform, and tends to a small lucky chunk of an already small demographic. Not that it doesn't have a place, but it's useful for just one thing: giving very poor people free or nearly-free lodgings.
It's just supply and demand. You can soften demand by pulling back somewhat on immigration, which of course has other consequences. Democrats don't want to give an inch here so it's a non-starter.
This would be true if those groups were assembling their beliefs based on rational assessments of the issue. But they aren't. They look at their cultural identity and then arrive at a belief from there.
The left is slowly slowly moving to accept the vast research showing that building more housing lowers housing costs for all, but there are still large portions of the left that refuse to believe it or will accept it but claim where they live is different (literally NIMBY arguments). The left is having a very hard time shedding their anti-capital (and therefore anti-developer or anti-landlord) identity. They may concede that a lot more housing is needed but will push for it to be government provided or non-market priced.
The right has moved much less (in my opinion). Libertarians are swayed by the deregulatory arguments, but they always have been. More traditional conservatives and newer MAGA types view urbanism/house reforms/etc as an attack on the traditional view of American suburban life coming from "city folk" (meaning leftist, elite, coastal, white collar). The appeal of the traditional American identities is stronger than their ant-regulation goals. This same thing happens with cars. Cars require a huge amount of government action to use (roads, licenses, insurance, etc) but the right rejects almost every policy that is viewed as "anti-car".
I actually think this topic would have been a good one to explore in this article (though in the past Scott hasn't demonstrated a very good understand of the YIMBY beliefs.)
One thing I've heard as an argument against building market housing is that there's an ongoing bubble in urban luxury apartments driven by global investors who let them sit unoccupied and this is eating up all the new market-rate development so that there are fewer available units for occupancy at *local* market rates even when there are more total units (and also the luxury apartments are needlessly large so you don't get as much new density as you hope). I'm ... not sure how much I believe it, but it's not impossible enough that I reject it out of hand.
If you check the vacancy rate, this is no longer true. It may have been for a minute, but they are rock-bottom in places where this was cited as a problem e.g. Vancouver.
Even if some condos are investor-owned, they're rented out.
Supposedly Vancouver applied regulatory (tax IIRC) penalties to vacant housing specifically to counteract this, though, so it could maybe still be true absent that?
How do you square this assessment of the right with the fact that it's generally easier to build in red states, and housing is mostly cheaper in those cities, large and small?
A lot of NIMBYs who want to protect the suburban design are just wealthy democrats.
Your second point first: Yes thats absolutely true. NIMBY views rarely fit neatly in typical political buckets. Wealth is usually a better predictor. Blue states and cities are the ones that need to reckon with their housing policy much more so than red states and cities. Purple states too like VA, PA, etc.
To your first point: Very good question. They are usually cheaper because there is more land still available (as in the case of AZ, TX, OK, etc) or their cities have had population declines because of deindustrialization (for example Cincinnati had a population of 500k in 1950 but less than 300k in 2010). It's easier to build because of historical policy decisions. So the issue just doesn't come up for debate in those places so people are not asked to have a strong opinion. Inertia is pretty powerful. The development that does occur is most often very suburban and fits the traditional view of American life that i mentioned before (big house, big yard, big car) and not of the type most often talked about in reference with Urbanism. I will also admit that I don't know much of housing policy debates in many red cities/states outside of Dallas and Austin both of which are relatively blue.
Interesting points.
Especially since people are motivated to be smarter when talking about issues that actually affect them
(On the other hand, culture warriors have bad policy ideas in general, so maybe we're better off with them ignoring important issues).
The obvious explanation for this is that housing policy is mostly local while media is now mostly national.
There isn't much money at stake at a federal level for this policy to be a big factor in national elections. The Harris campaign was trying to get make it part of their platform but I think they watered it down to please the Bernie sanders wing.
Luckily, there has been some great progress made in many cities and states on this topic.
Note on the anti-vax section. I believe the origin of the vaccines->autism link was made in self interest as the researcher wanted to shill vaccines which he had a stake in over the “dangerous” mumps rubella measles vaccine.
The subsequent wave of followers certainly did not act in their own self interest though, so certainly conflict theory can’t take us that far.
This is correct. It always astounds me how effectively Wakefield was able to memoryhole his financial incentives in the debate.
Wakefield wasn't shilling for alternate vaccines, he was shilling for a test for vaccine-induced autism that he and his wife could sell to many, many lawyers looking to sue vaccine manufacturers because the parents of autistic kids are sympathetic plaintiffs and pharmaceutical companies have deep pockets.
But, yes, blatant commercial self-interest.
The traditional Marxist story is that the bourgeoisie were in the "free rider" situation at one time, unable to advocate for themselves against the nobility. But in the 18th and 19th century they organized themselves so as to overcome the coordination problems and became dominant. At which point "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" -- i.e. maintain stability, punish free riders, etc.
The Marxist political project is just to repeat this but for the working class -- organize into groups with social tools to overcome the same coordination problems. (Unfortunately one such tool is "democratic centralism"...)
So even Marx himself was slightly more sophisticated than "conflict theory" as described here. And later on people started denouncing each other as "Vulgar Marxists" for being too literal-minded about the material economy determining all of politics.
Trade and industry. The middie classes (in some countries)became able to make more money than the aristocrats could from agriculture. And, in some countries, they had enough voting rights and property rights to build on that.
As I understand it, conflict theorists believe that political disagreements are corelated with self interest and this correlation is causal. Mistake theorists believe there is no correlation and if there is one it's not causal. For example, if we had run a poll in 1800 on whether slavery should be abolished, mistake theorists predict there wouldn't have been a significant difference of opinion on this topic between slaves and slave owners. And if there was, it would be entirely explained by demographic characteristics and not at all by self interest.
Conflict theorists also believe that "what makes people feel good" and self interest are so heavily corelated (what is called ideology by Marxists) that they can be treated as one and the same. Mistake theorists must believe that they are not corelated, otherwise the distinction is simply not helpful in practice expect in the edge cases that you present in this post.
Needless to say, I think the data tips in favor of conflict theorists. Throughout history, all groups have aligned their political beliefs with their material interests. The correlation is not perfect but very strong.
For any theory, there is a version of it so strong that it invalidates itself. Consider efficient markets, for example. Markets are weakly efficient in that they tend towards the right prices, and it can be difficult to beat the market. But clearly many market prices are still wrong much of the time, just in a relatively difficult to prove fashion.
I think your no correlation version of mistake theory is one of those. So perhaps we should reject the strong version but accept the weak version.
I would also be more persuaded by your take if you engaged with any real examples.
Talking about examples, I notice that Scott had only ever used examples from contemporary america when defending mistake theory, ie. examples he has a stake in. But if it's true then it must be applicable everywhere at any time in history! Now try to explain to me how mistake theory accounts for the french revolution better than conflict theory.
I really don't think money was the first thing on people's mind when they were guillotining aristocrats...
food prices were. It seems like Conflict Theory is being used in 2 ways
* Everything is only about direct monetary values of the arguers (probably false)
* Everything is about competing over well specified goals of the arguers (mostly true)
The execution of Louis XVI was definitely driven by conflicts over the material interest of the delegates and much of the French Revolution is driven by Parisians trying to maximize their wealth and safety. Material changes in facts (the state of the war, economic conditions, how crazy Robespierre was) lead to changes in policies.
https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/french-revolution/
If this was true, that would constitute a pretty damning refutation of your theory, since you seem to think it's strong support for your theory. Would you agree?
"But if it's true then it must be applicable everywhere at any time in history!"
Why? This implies that if any two groups are *ever* in genuine conflict at any point in history they must *always and forever* be in conflict, which seems straightforwardly false. Why can't some conflicts be due to irreducible misalignments in interest, while others are due to misunderstanding?
I don't think Scott's theory is really mistake theory any more. Maybe call it insult theory.
This
> the socialists ... started talking about how the rich were parasites who didn’t deserve their money. ... it insulted ... the rich, who then naturally reacted by lashing out and saying “No, you poors are the real parasites!” And this naturally insulted/traumatized the poor, who then redoubled their attacks on the rich to psychologically compensate. By the nth round of this cycle - ie all human history other than the original-state-of-nature - the mutual animus / self-defense / trauma-enactment was driving the cycle more than the original desire for money
feels like a better explanation for how the French Revolution actually played out than anything that involves people behaving rationally in line with their own interests.
I think the French revolution is much better explained by people behaving semi rationally about their own interests (plus ideals). At the start of the revolution, France was broke and needed to call a national convention. The 3rd estate had grown economically more powerful but did not have political power and wanted more say in how their money would be used. Over the initial phase, the 3rd estate was able to basically use their power to take privileges and money from the church and nobility. This lead members of the nobility to want to reverse these changes and restore their privileges and attempted to use foreign pressure combined with Lousi XVIs attempt to flee France results in his execution to prevent the restoration. The reign of terror's peak is when dealing with defeats of the French armies and revolts outside Paris (this is probably the closest to mistake theory being correct in that the people getting killed were not advancing the general publics goals). Most actions can best be understood as people trying to optimize their interests (economic status, safety, and status/privileges).
I think if you are on the verge of starving to death, you care a lot more about your material conditions, than when you live a relatively comfortable life in the modern western world. If you have your basic material needs met, you can start to care about signaling and feeling good about yourself, and so on.
> As I understand it, conflict theorists believe that political disagreements are corelated with self interest and this correlation is causal. Mistake theorists believe there is no correlation and if there is one it's not causal.
Your definitions here seem to be lopsided. A literal reading suggests that any correlation between political and material interests is proof of conflict theory, whereas mistake theory can only be proven by a total absence of (non-confounded) correlation.
An alternative way to frame this would be to claim conflict theory requires material interests to explain nearly all variation in political belief, with mistake theory 'winning' if there is no strong correlation or if correlation is largely 'explained' by demographic factors.
I think both such framings are reductive and not conducive to discussion. The truth could be anywhere between conflict and mistake theories (or off the axis entirely!), and the relative merits of each could even depend on the issue.
Well (and politely) said!
Honestly, in practice in terms of the kind of behaviours, you expect ironically, often the two theories could often both be simultaneously correct like when two countries go to war, not only out of incompatible goals, but out of mistaken believes about the others power and would instead have reached some kind of mutually beneficial bargain if they were better informed. Mistaken perceptions can cause intractable wars that persuasion can’t solve and even incompatible goals can often be reconciled throw persuasion to reach a mutually beneficial outcome. So the theories don’t actually look as different as they might appear on first glance. I do expect that reality is probably described by some combination of these theories, but you are absolutely correct that it’s still an unhelpful way to think about things, especially when fights between people that are caused by differences of belief can be pretty much identical to fights caused by incompatible objectives when it comes to any practical policy one might adopt to deal with them. After all in political conflicts, it’s often very very difficult to get people to change their opinions on factual questions and mutually beneficial deals do exist.
But Scott is defending that only one of those theories is true, not that the truth lies in between. I actually agree with you, conflict theory doesn't account for everything. In fact, there is a puzzling trend in the last ~40 years in all liberals democracies where the upper class vote is drifting to the left and lower class vote to the right. I think Scott is essentially fooled by this trend because he uses such a narrow focus (his society at his current time). When you take things at higher level, it's obvious to me that material interests were always major driver of people's political behavior.
I do think conflict theory is slightly undermined by a narrow focus on self interest. For example, rich people don’t just oppose taxes because of self interest. They are against taxes because most people have principles and so will tend to conclude from the fact that according to their instincts, it’s bad when they have to pay high taxes to also conclude that it’s bad when other people have to pay high taxes. Empathy plays a role in this since it predisposes people to feel sympathy towards people in similar situations. Hence why a slave owner doesn’t just care about keeping his own slaves, but also cares about preventing such misfortune from befalling other people in a similar situation because he can easily put himself in their shoes mentally. But I do think it’s a minor modification to take this into account while doing conflict theory.
If they are thinking that way, they are bad at maths. A billionaire paying 90% has far more disposable income than an average person paying 10%
Just because you have principles does not suddenly mean you are necessarily a consequentialist. It feels bad when the Government comes and takes away money that you have worked very hard to earn and being principled means you are likely to generalise this to a relevantly similar situation, but that’s very different from suddenly becoming a utilitarian.
A non-political example might be helpful. If BOB comes and lies to you about something emotionally important to you, you might develop a principal against lying, but you’re not going to suddenly conclude that people in Africa are dying of disease and that’s far worse than being lied to.
Your example to me actually proves the opposite, because any time rich people got significant influence in contemporary (say, post 1990) European politics, they were a lot less concerned with small government as an ideal than to cut (or possibly just evade, in some countries), *their own* taxes. Laxer controls on accounts! More blank mass amnesties for tax fraud! More permissive rules for being considered a foreign resident for tax purposes! Add some other 30-odd pages to the tax codes and now my new villa is a business expense! But unfortunately the money has to come from somewhere, so until we enact out Tatcherite Utopia, dear skilled worker, please keep paying 50% marginal tax rate. We'll get to it in a second, pinky promise!
Things are a bit different in the US, probably bc Uncle Sam taxes citizens irrespective of residence so the well off have more reason to fight the income tax across the board. But still, I've never seen so much white-hot rage as when Biden added some IRS agents, a move that would make exactly 0 difference for employees but could have made a bit more difficult for business owners to be creative in their accounting. For all their talk about being principled libertarian warriors, they seem to care about their own tax bill a lot more than about mine...
I think a poll of slaveholders and slaves would have been likely to show that the slaveholders wanted to keep slavery and the slaves to abolish it. The more interesting thing ISTM is that society *as a whole* (thinking of the US and UK contexts here) moved from ‘keep’ to ‘abolish’. I imagine the actual slaveholders and actual slaves didn’t change their view much, but the people who didn’t have much material interest one way or another (most people) certainly did.
Maybe they had a nonzero material interest though. If you're in New York in 1780 then maybe you're a bit uncomfortable with slavery but you're well aware that the economy of your entire country is heavily based on it. If you're in New York in 1850 then the industrial revolution is booming, the economy is more diversified, and slavery starts seeming like something that only benefits rich southern slaveowners rather than benefiting you personally.
Unfortunately then you start slinging insults at the Southern states in general rather than slinging them specifically at slaveowners, causing non-slaveowning Southerners to side with the rich slaveowners, and hence you wind up with a dumb massive civil war instead of the more peaceful abolition of slavery which prevailed in the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
I think part of what is going on there was that it was not only about slavery. The north and South had frequent disagreement and conflicts of interest and indeed making it about fighting the South was probably part of what got the North motivated to abolish slavery. Opposition to slavery in the north greatly increased during the civil war in part due to hostility to the revolting South. Also, honestly, the southern economic system was kind of built around slavery, so it would be pretty difficult not to have the sudden states fight you, especially given that their elites were the most invested in the institution.
That said slavery might be an outlier here if you look at for example, women’s right to vote, both men and women started out bitterly against it, which sounds more like what mistake theory would predict. I personally think it’s because of sociological differences in women’s subordination when compared to slavery, but its certainly something that sounds more likely under mistake theory
I don’t think there were a lot of insults directed at Southern states in general, as opposed to slaveholders specifically. I think a major reason that many (not all) non-slaveowning Southerners sided with the slaveholders is that the slaveholders were at the top of the status hierarchy in the South, and thus had a lot of influence. In the run up to the American Civil War, southern leaders wrote pieces making the case that the non-slaveholder had an interest in preserving slavery. For example, Stephen Foster Hale (Dec. 27, 1860):
<blockquote>“If the policy of the Republicans is carried out according to the programme indicated by the leaders of the party, and the South submits, degradation and ruin must overwhelm alike all classes of citizens in the Southern States. The slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life...”</blockquote>
Source: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924079579524&seq=20
I think the politics of centuries past were *much* better modeled by conflict theory than the politics of the past 50-80 years. I agree that the disagreement over slavery in the U.S. was mostly a conflict-theoretic one[1] and a lot of ancient and medieval interstate wars are fairly blatant examples of one or more states trying to maximize their own self-interest without much pretense otherwise. I don't think that applies nearly as well to modern international relations. States often do still try to maximize their own self-interest, but a lot of that is fairly explicitly done by cooperating, and convincing others to cooperate, or at least by limiting conflict to fairly narrow and well-defined channels (such as trade negotiations). There's much more room for mistake theory in such a system.
[1] Though it can hardly be claimed that the abolitionist side were working solely in their own self-interest. Surely white abolitionists would have had much more to gain by trying to spread slavery to the North than by trying to abolish it in the south.
In fairness, I think a lot of the wars in history could be explained by mistake theory because with a lot of conflicts, they would not have happened if the involved countries had correctly judged each other’s capabilities and willingness to fight, and if both parties had properly understood game theory, maybe they would have been able to negotiate something better than both of them expending enormous resources on war
Mistake theorists are free to believe that "what makes people feel good" and self interest are correlated, as they obviously are. But they ALSO believe that "what people believe" and "what people say they believe" are correlated, and that "what people believe" and "what people have good reasons to believe" are correlated.
The phrase "trans men in women's sports," while something that happens, is probably not the phenomenon you had meant to reference.
Describing trans males as trans men could be either a mistake or a conflict.
I expect it was the former and that Scott will correct it.
By the way, are there any famous trans men in sports?
All the controversial cases I heard about were trans women.
I think "it's not a conflict for most people" is a bit weak - every theory of politics should begin with Osho's law: "the people are retarded". if I was looking for a conflict I would look for some master class of shills. and maybe those statusy things are actually material for them. tho I guess it has to be true that in the end it's all based on traumatizing the shilled-to class
Why would the various “consequences of immigration” not be happening in Tennessee or Kentucky? The arguments against conflict theory are interesting in general but that’s a hole.
They're 90-95% white + black + Native.
It is reasonable and normal to react to either the situation or the rate of change even if the current state isn't significantly different.
People politically react to inflation or crime increases more than they react to price level or background crime rate.
This is ignoring that immigration means companies don’t have to expand to most of America. Without immigration, you’d likely have every major tech company having an office in all major cities. “Willingness to relocate” is something that selects heavily for immigrants over natives. It’s a mistake to assume that immigrants moving to NYC aren’t competing for jobs with people who want to stay with their family in eastern Kentucky; they are. Google building an office in Lexington isn’t happening, mainly because they don’t need to, since they can just import people willing to move to the Bay Area or NYC.
Thank you.
The parallel to this in the tediously endless discussion of *why everyone can't live in the exact same place, because they all want to* is that America writ large is full of empty houses ...
This just moves the question to "then why are people who want to work in tech and stay with their family in eastern Kentucky against working from home?"
If they work from home, then they still have to compete with immigrants.
I'm talking about "why don't they support banning immigration and having tariffs but allowing working from home"? There's a substantial extra cost for the company when you have people WFH from another country as opposed to the same one, even if it's in the same time zone, and it could get much worse (thus more favorable to Kentuckians) depending on tariff policy.
But, again, the immigrants are still taking their jobs. Why settle for half-measures?
Without immigration, tech companies would have much bigger offices in Vancouver, and expand less in SF and NYC.
Google has offices in many US cities: https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/locations/
They have locations in places that are major economic centers or have major research universities. They don't build in Lexington or where have you because it doesn't fit in either of those categories.
> Google building an office in Lexington isn’t happening, mainly because they don’t need to, since they can just import people willing to move to the Bay Area or NYC.
I think that the alternative to Google importing people into the Bay Area is not them building a campus in Lexington, but them building a campus in Bombay or something. Or some European or Asian country, for that matter -- I am sure that plenty of countries would be very willing to accept tech worker immigrants to become the next SV if the US decides it does not want them any more.
I like the direction these responses went but my original quibble was much more prosaic.
1. Any place that has agriculture has migrant workers. Kentucky and Tennessee have agriculture. The headline of this article got Kentucky and Tennessee mixed up but that’s germane “Foreign-born workers in his congressional district, for example, held $645 million in spending power in 2014 and paid $198 million in taxes.” - director of Tennessee farm bureau, doesn’t give a town. https://www.newamericaneconomy.org/feature/kentucky-crop-and-tobacco-farmer-says-without-migrant-labor-i-couldnt-do-what-i-do/
2. Shelby county Kentucky 11% Hispanic.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/state-by-state/kentucky-population-change-between-census-decade.html
I’ve definitely heard (not recently though) liberal-allied people attempt to insult hypothetical conservatives along the lines of, how dare they question/object to/criticize immigration, they don’t live near immigrants/know immigrants/they didn’t lose a job to an immigrant themselves. There are a lot of reasons that doesn’t hold up but “Kentucky and Tennessee have unimportant/vanishingly small numbers of immigrants” is also not true ($645 million isn’t huge but it’s definitely not zero). They think they have immigrants and the tobacco farmer can’t make his $700k a year without them.
And the other commenters addressed other issues well.
I was in and around Dayton, Tennessee one time (notable for being the venue of the whole fake Scopes monkey business, thus practically *the* place of liberal fever dreams) and I assume the Nokia tire plant was there because they invited it/the Finns to come there. I spoke at length with an Indian guy on a tour-of-duty assignment there. It was probably meant to supply jobs to locals and probably that didn't happen at higher levels but nonetheless, weird to imagine that immigrants are not everywhere in America.
According to this source: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-in-kentucky
In 2018, immigrants composed 4% of KY population, which is on the low end of US states, but definitely not nothing!
Yep, his perspective is so dripping with coastal elite bias it's incredible.
Yglesias has written adroitly showing how a chunk of the working class shift right (including among minorities) is an anti-climate voting bloc that works in fossil fuel extraction or an industry downstream of it (including the many blue collar and manufacturing industries dependent on low energy prices). This bloc loses its power - and you don't see this shift - in more twee places dependent, for instance, on tourism or a university.
Similarly, anti-immigrant sentiment (and anti-welfare/mooching poor sentiment) has long been concentrated among the lower working classes. They are more likely to be in competition with newly arrived immigrant groups for jobs (or at least whose employers can use the threat of immigrant labor to depress wages and keep them in line). They're also more likely to feel they have something material to lose, as their perch in the middle class is precarious and not to be risked/taken lightly for some social experiment.
That describes a lot of voters in those areas Scott dismisses and fewer who run in his social circle.
I'm not saying this materialism explains all politics (though Scott also neglects a primary reason a large share of the electorate is not embroiled in that fight - that older people live on government support, not the wage economy). But it explains a decent chunk and at least should not be dismissed in such a belittling fashion.
> This coming year, the 2017 tax bill will expire
I was confused... google says 2025, which makes more sense. I guess just a typo?
Edit: nope, I just failed at reading comprehension.
In this coming year (2025), the tax bill from 2017 will expire.
The bill which was passed in 2017 will expire in the coming year (2025).
This theory needs a catchy name. I don't think Identity Alignment or Identity Politics captures it well
Politics of Narcissism. People support political positions that affirm their beloved image of themselves or punish those who question that image
I call it the Fundamental Hypothesis of Economics. It goes like this: People choose those actions they believe will yield themselves their largest net value.
Let me unpack a bit. Value is what most economist call "utility." I call it value so that most people will understand what we're talking about Value is psychic satisfaction that occurs in human minds (and maybe dolphin minds, too). People "believe," but they can be and frequently are wrong. The work of Kahneman and Tversky flys to mind. But the FHE is unequivocal; it is a hypothesis about human nature. I am persuaded it is a true, positive statement.
Now don't get me wrong; I love ACX and all the information and fabulous thinking it embodies. But I think some of your examples that focus on monetary self interest are misleading in your essay about Conflict Theory. People by their very nature are self interested, but they are not necessarily just monetarily self interested; hardly anyone is.
I have taught economics and finance for about 45 years. I assure you that the world is filled with economic illiteracy and manifest ignorance of principles of economics.
Well sure, but isn't the whole point of the post that conflict theory posits people are thinking about material interests rather than psychological satisfaction. The latter is still value, but it's open to (re)definition based on polarized factions rather than material considerations. Owning the libs provides value, but not material value.
It doesn't even provide psychological value that well, unless you have a *very* high discount rate.
> Owning the libs provides value, but not material value.
...And how does that make it not conflict theory?
The latter isn't obviously mistake theory. There maybe three things going on here.
If only people were less mistaken, then we could have true conflict.
I think we have plenty of conflict, even though I don't think "conflict theory" is a correct hypothesis.
As Anthony Downs pointed out decades ago (An Economic Theory of Democracy), voting cannot be explained by rational/economic self-interest; at least not in the narrow sense. Why not? Because a fully rational/stereotypical "economic man" will not vote.
He/she will not vote, since the costs of voting (the opportunity cost of the time involved, the petrol needed to drive there, the shoe leather worn by shuffling in and out of the voting office, and do not forget the risk of having a fatal accident on the way to the voting office), will exceed the probability (p) that one vote will ever decide the outcome of a national election. Since this probability is essentially nil.
...Meaning that even if a voter has an extremely large economic-interest party differential (V), it cannot outweigh the smaller, but much surer costs of participating (plus the miniscule but still slighly higher probability of having a fatal accident on the way to the voting office). This is the famous Paradox of Not Voting (aka the Paradox of Voting).
...The upshot is that "something else" than material/economic interest (in a narrow sense) drives political behaviour - at least voting behavior, which is the most important form of political behavior in a democracy.
There are appox. 10 suggested solutions to the paradox. My favorite, for what it is worth, is a form of (mainly internalized) reputational costs associated with not voting. A solution that aligns rather nicely with the type of signalling-concerns that Scott writes about. I.e. that voting (as well as expressing political opinions more generally) can be analysed as signalling behavior.
...That is: ways to signal to others (and to oneself) that you are a person who holds "correct" views. "Correct" relative to the (sub)culture you and your friends belong to (including "correct" hostility toward groups & cultures your friends regard themselves as up against).
...Still conflicts, then, but not necessarily or primarily conflicts over "material" self-interests.
my favorite solution is that voting is rational given some degree of altruism.
the probability that your vote will be decisive is a decreasing function of population size, but if you have some utility from helping society (and are voting in a way you think will help society), that utility is an increasing function of population size, so the asymptotes can cancel out. https://www.nber.org/papers/w13562
Thanks for the link Kevin. (I collect solutions to the paradox, like others collect butterflies.)
It's late in my time zone, so just an off-the-cuff comment: The problem with presuming "altruism" is that it has an ad hoc-flair, unless you can put forward a theory of why some are more altruistic than others - since some abstain from voting.
Going into a solution through "concerns for reputation" has the advantage that it makes it possible to formulate testable hypotheses about why some vote, while others do not. This is an advantage over simply assuming "altruism".
For example: If you live in a subculture where your friends regard all politicians as crooks, you may jeopardize, rather than enhance, your reputation by voting. Hence we should expect to find non-voters more often in such (sub)cultures than in (sub)cultures that regard voting as something good & upright people do.
..this is just an example of how reputational concerns, i.e. concens about signalling a "type" that others regard as a good person (which is a beneficial reputation to have in private affairs), may lead to (falsifiable) theories about voting - theories which also happen to align with a lot of the (empirical) sociological studies of voting behavior.
...that said, I have nothing principally against including "altruism" as a concern. That is, if you can come up with a theory of why some feel an urge to signal to others that they are altruists, while others apparently do not. If so, we might reach common ground:-).
The notion of altruism suffers from the same defect as the notion of selfishness. Neither concept has a concrete definition.
Real people , not homo economicus? Real people refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings, although they could have made a few bucks doing so.
Homo economicus is a straw man. I know exactly zero economists who argue that humans are anything like the straw man.
That's not a hypothesis; it's a model. Quite different. I'm tired of people accusing economists of believing in "Homo economicus". Every economist who models behavior as driven by self-interest, knows that it's a model. Not a great model, but the best we have so far.
It isn't a hypothesis in game theory, either. It's assumed, by definition of game theory, not from beliefs about the real world.
Obviously its hard to get the data at high quality but I would wonder how this pans out in a material very poor society. Like do you see similar dynamics in Malawi? A good use case for a time machine would be polling medivel peasents about stuff like this.
Thanks, insightful. I am not immune to status obsession, but, to the extent that I can assess my true motivations, I also genuinely care about justice, personal freedom for everyone, a job well done, etc... I care about these in a way that feels fundamental, like a terminal goal. Perhaps fixed by evolution to boost the chances of my tribe.
I didn't think conflict theory was only about material interests. I thought it was about intractable conflict, regardless of cause.
Apparently it’s typically associated with Marxism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theories
Yep, I think that plenty of people believe in irreconcilable value differences, which also can be reasonably called 'conflict theory'.
Which is why it should be separated in fact/predictions, material interests, values disagreements. I know that Scott argues that values are malleable and not all of them crystallized in something rigid, but you still need to consider them. And yes, trauma does cause value change
CORRECT! Conflict theory teaches that everything is about power, all alleged disagreements mask struggles for power, and these struggles can only be resolved through power, ultimately backed up by force.
> Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization.
I think this is related to why the median voter theorem fails in practice.
To make this mathematical, my hunch is that people's fundamental political values change only slowly, but how people weight these values changes much more quickly to minimize cognitive dissonance.
The mechanism might work like this: people are initially sorted into two political coalitions. Random controversies arise, coded as belonging to one coalition or the other. Members of the owning coalition realign their value-importances to "claim" the controversial point, with each member nudging their weightings to reduce their self-perceived distance between their own values and the controversy. Members of the opposite coalition move in the other direction.
My hypothesis is that over time peoples' opinions of fundamental issues (*not* policy questions, which involve a complicated mix of issues) become idiosyncratic and extremified. Many voters might become 'single issue voters' on weird, bespoke issues.
As for why this is happening now rather than in the past, I think partisan-aligned media (social media included, but I can imagine the genesis in talk radio) is the necessary condition. It acts as an echo chamber, allowing people to form an identity based on not just a political basis, but a shifting political basis. Forced interactions on a geographic or material basis would soften the sharp corners, since it's hard to feel fundamentally different from one's liked neighbours.
I'm surprised at no mention of tribalism. Free rider problems have a straightforward solution - identify and punish defectors - and a changing media and communications landscape has made that tactic far more "efficient". I agree that material conditions have declined in importance over the past couple decades, but I'm not sure this is a puzzle if we just have a situation where the second-order effects have been disproportionately amplified.
I have multiple problems with the "But What About All The Actual Issues" section, anything that clearly vibes-based can't be said to be said to be a sociological theory with a straight face and the ahistorocity is painful. But it gestures at coalitional effects at least, so eh.
Yep, I'm kinda baffled that Scott seems to have quietly transitioned from outgroup-bashing as The Explanation Of Politics (which is obviously correct), to that dubious trauma theory.
This post is a straight-up retread of "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"
Do you still expect him to have original ideas after over a decade of blogging?
No? The explanations here are along the lines of "fighting for lower taxes gives them a rush of self-esteem by letting them defend their self-perception as job creators / heroic entrepreneurs who have played fair", which I think are secondary and largely arbitrary considerations. Plenty of rich people are on the both sides of the culture war, and I imagine neither group lacks self-esteem-enhancing justifications for why taxes should be raised/lowered.
Eh, there's some relevant arguments against the rationality of a materially-motivated conflict theorist.... but my concern is that even that runs into the classic fault (common in libertarians IME) of identifying a force and confusing it with an equilibrium. Other actors get to make choices in response to your choices!
In addition to wanting your side to be right, enough polarization leads to a scenario where extremes on both sides of a position depend on each other in a kind of symbiosis.
In my mind, Palestine is a sad example of this. The conservative Israeli government and Hamas both depend on each others' extremism to justify their own power.
The same is true in US politics. Both Republicans and Democrats depend on each other's missteps for fundraising and votes. Doing the actual best thing for the country sometimes seems like it only incidentally plays a role.
I suppose one conclusion for making oneself useful in public policy is to choose very quiet areas that almost no one cares about and are essentially boring (but have a meaningful impact on quality of life and governance), work on them with a low profile, and be annoyingly ingratiating to everyone involved. Not a strategy that is likely to be followed very often.
Yglesias calls this “secret congress”
This also passes the EA test of important, tractable, neglected.
Or a 'bootleggers-and-Baptists' coalition, but that's been forgotten.
For a much more direct "secret congress", what if we extended the anonymous ballot to Congress?
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/your-book-review-secret-government
This was how Biden managed to pass a lot of legislation. He even said it out loud at one point after the debt ceiling negotiation. Reporters asked him about it and he said something like "if I make a big deal about it now, it's less likely to pass the House."
It's good for passing bills but bad for winning elections.
I was really amazed by the amount of major bipartisan legislation Biden managed to get through. After the experience of the Obama years, I thought bipartisanship was dead forever.
Big difference between Biden's 36 (or 44 counting the role as VP) years in the Senate and Obama's not-quite four when it comes to understanding how to get legislation through.
LBJ was similarly renowned as POTUS for his dexterity with lawmakers after 17 (19 with VP) years in the Senate.
If it wasn’t for Substack, I would never have heard about the CHIPS Act, even though it was the most important manufacturing bill in my lifetime.
"The conservative Israeli government and Hamas both depend on each others' extremism to justify their own power. "
I could make a similar argument during the Nazi Germany era that Nazis, and any Jews with the ability to act against Germany both depend on each other's extremism. This would be technically correct, but it would ignore the situation on the ground.
Moral equivalence is an excuse for tyranny. I wasn't alive during Nazi Germany, but I saw it constantly used that way during the Soviet era.
No, you could not, unless there was a state occupying German territories, whose currently ruling party was literally funded on the idea that the occupation of Germany had to go on indefinitely, with the Germans living there living in either indefinite subjugation or summarily expelled.
Several intifadas preceded the Bibi era, including under lib PMs, so applying that reasoning to Israel and Gaza seems quite suspect.
"In 2017, the Trump administration weakened the deduction. Although Republicans are usually anti-tax, this particular tax fell on high-earning people in high-tax blue states, ie the professional managerial class, ie coastal elites. The GOP thought it was funny to mess with the one tax deduction their enemies actually liked, so they capped it at a low level. This single policy cost the average coastal elite about 5% of their salary."
This ignores the fact that the same bill reduced overall federal tax rates on both income and capital gains.
"In 2020, the Democrats - party of coastal elites! - came back in power. They considered undoing Trump’s SALT cap. But they thought it would look bad to cut taxes on themselves at the same time they were expanding government, so they decided against."
It was only a few Democrats, most notably Joe Manchin, who made the decision to blackball that, which they were able to since the Dems only had a Senate majority of 1.
Failures of homogenizing outgroups aside, there's an interesting question there about the degree to which it's reasonable to ascribe the ideology of pivotal members of a group *to* that group. I think it probably is fair to say that "The Democrats" ultimately weren't in favor of SALT cap repeal (as in yesteryear Lieberman made them not in favor of single-payer), but then it's pretty darn disingenuous to call them coastal elites in the same breath!
The link to to the Miller-Rootclaim debate embedded in the essay appears to be broken for me in the mobile app
Pro-vaxxx is a comforting religion driven by the fear of death by disease. Big Pharma takes full advantage of this fact and purposely intensifies the absurd religion.
Anti-vaxx is a discomforting religion driven by being low-class.
Like multi-millionaire Robert F Kennedy Jr.? Like multi-millionaire Steve Kirsch?
Reliance on anecdotal evidence is indicative of low-IQ.
NO! The anti-vaxxxers rely on statistical evidence Big Pharma ignores and hides.
But, how do they do the statistics with low-IQ?
No low IQ with RFK Jr., Steve Kirsch or Robert Malone, nor the dissenting researchers in general.
Boring projection. Ignore the noise and go by the data, i.e. meta reviews.
I'm just imagining someone posting this right after Smallpox, one of humanity's greatest killers, was eliminated. How confusing it would seem to my grandmother.
People who have grown up in the present world and know nothing else find it hard to internalise how things came to be this way and what keeps them this way. Today's status quo feels like the default, natural state of affairs that requires no effort or upkeep. The pox was generations ago, but the needle is /right there/. The intuition is that tomorrow will be much like yesterday was; there is no experience or intuition to connect the pointless rituals with the needles to stories of things that happened in ancient history; so why not get rid of them?
(see also: removing OSHA, destroying everything that makes a democracy work)
Luckily this is self-correcting. We can expect a few hundred cute US kids to die of measles in the next few years, then everyone will have relearned that vaccines are important and vaccination rates will be high again.
The vaccines may be self-correcting, but the other stuff is not so easily undone.
And even if it is eventually undone, massive damage can be done in the meantime (c.f. Hitler)
I genuinely cannot tell whether you are being sarcastic or not right now, and that terrifies me more than anything else in this thread.
About 20 patients have been hospitalized. According to Texas, none of those hospitalized were vaccinated.
What about the majority of those coming down with measles? Everyone use to get it before vaccination and hardly anyone had a severe case to say nothing of hospitals or death. We'll see what more considered reports say. There is scare after scare of the unvaccinated causing outbreaks. Often it is the vaccine itself causing the outbreak which spills over to unvaccinated.
Banned for this comment, do not expect having this person here to lead to productive discussion. For the record, I don't know what fraction of measles cases were vaccinated (it wouldn't surprise me if many were, since 95%+ of Americans are and the protection ratio might not be able to overcome that), but this should have way more citations and attempts to make real arguments compared to personal attacks.
I can't believe that anti-flouridation went from being treated as a crazy joke in Dr. Strangelove to a major political position in the US.
The evidence in favor of fluoridation is a lot sketchier. Taking away the floride, like some US towns have done, doesn't instantly give people measles.
Did "Big Pharma" buy off the USSR rulers to make childhood vaccinations mandatory? Or did it run advertising on the Soviet state TV to convince the proletariat it needed vaccines? What is the mechanism Big Pharma used to fool the Soviet leadership to believe its lies to the point of ordering its scientists to develop these fake things?
Soviets probably copied the WEST as they did in most things.
Ok you have no clue. This is not an insult, you clearly have no idea about how Soviet healthcare was run, just throwing a "probably" out there. Anything else you say has about the same degree of validity then. Enjoy your measles outbreaks, RFK sends brain worms and a dead bear to ease the pain.
Now you repeat MSM media nonsense about the brain worm which RFK Jr. got traveling in a tropical country.
You appear to have fallen for the Russian agitprop designed to weaken the west by convincing people not to vaccinate themselves so that large chunks of the population get ill and die, and also polarise opinion so that people are more interested in fighting each other than containing Russia.
Why don't we also have cancer vaccines to believe in then? Cancer doesn't seem less scary than infectious diseases.
It's not for lack of trying. Cancer isn't exactly an infectious disease. There would have to be an organism causing cancer to be vaccinated against. READ: Turtles All the Way Down.
But but but, if we just injected everyone with cancer, maybe they'd all have immunity to cancer if they didn't die of cancer first!
You're missing the point: if believing in vaccines is a religion, why is "creating" a cancer vaccine harder than a flu vaccine? Just fake some evidence like with the other vaccines.
And if you don't in fact dispute the effectiveness of vaccines, how is that a religion?
Safe and effective is the religion. No one says no vaccine is effective. The flu vaccines aren't effective nor very safe either. Respiratory diseases have never been successfully vaxxxed against.
So, some vaccines work less well than advertised, there are motivated groups of people who massage the evidence to make it look more convincing or lie outright, caveat emptor... Isn't it true for all of medicine? Maybe you believe that with vaccines in particular the lies dominate the scientific consensus and it's worse than with other areas, seems unlikely to me, but assuming you're right, again, how is that a religion? If I trust the wrong specialists it doesn't make me religious, it just makes me duped.
Big Pharma admitted vaccines were inherently unsafe and threatened to stop producing and distributing them unless Congress and Reagan gave the immunity from lawsuits. They got immunity. At least you can sue re: drug caused damage and death. Step one: Repeal immunity from liability. Then reverse regulatory agency capture by Big Pharma. Stop all conflicts of interest in regulatory agencies.
Well we actually do have a vaccine for cervical cancer, which, turns out, is caused by HPV. I wouldn't be surprised if more cancers caused by viruses are found.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hpv-infection/in-depth/hpv-vaccine/art-20047292
I thought about it, and consider it a vaccine for HPV. Also last I heard HPV accounts only for a majority of cervical cancer cases, not 100% of them.
Yeah, cancers are fiendishly complex. Just like most lung cancers are caused by smoking, but non-smokers also sometimes get them. We nonetheless consider not-smoking a good prevention, same with HPV vaccine. Would be nice to be able to avoid the infection in the first place, but.
Read the Big Pharma propaganda. That settles it. Don't look into the actual clinical trial data. All the vaxxxes are tested against other vaccines instead of actual placebos. Dig into that.
Vaccines against cancer are actually an active area of research because most potential cancers are taken care of by your immune system before you notice them, and cancer immunotherapy does work(ish), so a kind of "preventative cancer immunotherapy" where you figure out what antigens may be common across future potential tumor cells, and show them to your immune system in advance, is very tempting
The challenge is of course, that those cancers that you do notice are those that got very good at immune evasion
A novel argument against Haidt moral foundations theory, but maybe not the strongest.
I am very willing to follow any religion which is able to produce miracles on the scale of the eradication of smallpox. If believing in the scientific method is a religion, then the members of that religion are clearly favored by some god in a way no other religion is.
Read Turtles All the Way Down
I don't get your point.
Are you disputing that smallpox was eradicated?
If so, is your claim that there never was a disease called smallpox and it is a hoax created by evil big pharma to sell evil mind-altering "vaccines", or that smallpox is still at large and evil big pharma is just covering it up?
If not, are you claiming that it was eradicated, but that vaccines played no role in the process?
What if powerful interests are deliberately recasting material conflicts as cultural/identity battles to expand their support? By framing economic disputes as moral issues, elites can recruit supporters who don't benefit materially but feel emotionally invested. This obscures the actual stakes, prevents class solidarity, and creates stronger emotional engagement than boring policy discussions.
I think you're spot on when you say people take the positions that let them feel like good and reasonable people. Broadly, people buy into the dualistic political paradigm of politics being a battle between good and smart people like themselves and evil and stupid people like their ideological enemies. As such, people reflexively develop opposition towards that which their enemy thinks is good and support towards that which their compatriots think is good, even if they haven't thought about the issue at hand all that much.
Looking back, I can say that this was what was going on in my head when I used to be rather partisan. I stopped being partisan when I learned about rationalism and consequently starting thinking about issues by their own merits, disregarding where any particular hypothesis on them would fall on the left-right axis. But upon reflection, it seems that this too is because I want to feel like a good and reasonable person. Once I started reading about rationalism and following the rationalist community, I could no longer feel like a good or reasonable person while participating in this kind of partisanship. And over time, I've developed a strong reflexive aversion to partisanship in all forms because I consider it bad and stupid. But this is not that different to being reflexively aversive to the things of the other political side because they are bad and stupid. It really is a deeply ingrained psychological phenomenon such that even if you abandon partisan politics, the mentality will still manifest itself in other ways.
https://xkcd.com/774/
“Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.”
Gray Tribe best tribe.
Precisely this
I think the examples you cite (SALT cap, etc) in refutation of material conflict as an operative factor in our politics don't disprove conflict theory so much as qualify its explanatory force. Material conflict may not explain everything, but it can still be a useful heuristic. However, I tend to agree that political conflicts have become largely emotional affairs. Just last week I wrote a piece about how the payoff of political triumph has long ceased being about material uplift, and is mostly about avoiding personal humiliation and enjoying that of people you don't like.
Social media probably plays a big part when it comes to political polarization specifically. You can start off leaning towards one side, probably based on your primary political position, then get funneled into all other related positions where the social validation that comes with signaling them overcomes the inertia of being indifferent. Eventually they just become a part of your identity.
Generally though I think it's all just vibes. You could probably get a significant amount of people to believe in almost anything with the right mix of social incentives and initial conditions.
Your discussion of identity alignment reminds me of a conversation I had with my father about partial ordering in mathematics. In a partial ordering, we can't always say that one point dominates another - (1,2) and (2,1) are incomparable because each exceeds the other in one dimension.
I think political identity might work similarly. Most people aren't calculating a simple sum of positions; they're prioritizing one or two dimensions they deeply care about (their y-axis might be abortion rights, their x-axis economic policy). From there, I suspect the remaining positions come through what could be called "political gravity" - a combination of echo chamber effects, social conformity with like-minded friends, and simply not having the bandwidth to develop independent positions on every issue ("it's not worth fighting this" syndrome).
This might explain why polarization happens so quickly despite people having genuinely different priority orderings. If I prioritize environmental issues above all else, I'll naturally sort into one coalition, even if my second-most important issue might align better with the opposite group. Once I'm in that coalition, the gravity effect pulls my other positions into alignment.
I'd be curious if anyone's studied whether the most polarized issues are also the ones people rank as most personally important, or if there's more ideological diversity on those particular dimensions.
(As a side point for if you see this - thanks Scott for this blog. It has been very useful for my thinking in general. This post in particular, although there is much I may disagree with, I think makes some exceedingly valuable, and interesting points)
This nicely reflects the ideological leanings of most trans people. It is going to be quite ironic if their alignment with the group that promised to protect them is ultimately what results in their destruction.
I guess some of their preferred issue are so important that they're willing to suffer gender dysphoria for a lifetime than having that issue be abolished
I'd say "continuing to live" is a pretty important issue for most people.
Yeah whether the one that influences it the most is economical problem or psychological problem. One will choose based on their own case.
I broadly agree with this argument, but I think it misses something important about the mechanisms many conflict theorists believe in. Rather than being determined by popular opinion, my sense is that many conflict theorists believe that the system is so thoroughly corrupt that popular opinion rarely affects outcomes. Instead, politicians are beholden to organized interest groups who run the government by proxy.
So, for example, for vaccines, a pharma lobby being pro-vaxx matters far more than public opinion or the material interests of individual voters. If we're sending weapons to Ukraine or Israel, that can be explained by the defense industrial complex. And if the interests of regular people are obviously on the other side in the conflict theorist's view, that just means that the conflict is between the people and the interest groups and we need to organize and drain the swamp.
I think this view has a number of problems and is a poor match for the data, but I think it's pretty widely held and harder to disprove than the individual material interests version of conflict theory.
Speaking of Klein's book, what are the favored theories as to how we can *increase* decoupling and ideologically inconsistent beliefs (inconsistent with the factions I mean)? My intuition is that it would be summed as "the medium is the message". Maybe if we can't close Pandora's box (social media) it can be reshaped, if the recent diffusion into separate walled gardens (X vs Bluesky) continues to be a trend.
"But it seems like there should be ways to minimize this - you could even say explicitly “We like the rich and are happy to give them World’s Best Job Creator medallions in exchange for an extra 1% of their money, we just need some extra cash to fund government programs”."
This is pretty much what ancient Athens did: they did not really have direct taxation, what they did have is the office of "trierach", where if you get elected to it you get the honor of funding the construction of a trireme war ship from your money and your name gets added to a list in the middle of town of great men who were very good to the city, but also you can't say no to this honor.
It's also how most welfare states (including the U.S.) run when they run successfully.
It's funny the post can only conceive of anti- and pro-tax arguments over the welfare state in the most base terms when it also cites an example - the SALT deduction - that shows most people don't do so.
> they did not really have direct taxation, what they did have is the office of "trierach", where if you get elected to it you get the honor of funding the construction of a trireme war ship from your money
They had direct taxation. The Athenian state produced more than just triremes. It produced everything the same way, by making a list of what it needed, dividing that list into what were supposed to be reasonably-sized chunks, and assigning those chunks as taxes.
You can say no, but not without risk. You say This is a great honor but citizen Lysias is richer than me and the honor should be his. Lysias can either concede or refuse; if he refuses he has to swap his entire wealth with yours and you end up with the trierarchy and either richer or poorer, depending how right you were about his relative wealth. This is called antidosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_(ancient_Greece)
An interesting corollary of the narrow gender gap on abortion, combined with the fact that there are significantly more women than men casting votes in any given election, is that, until the first Trump administration, a majority of anti-abortion voters were women!
I think this post is a little bit confused
When reading it, I'm going back and forth between thinking Scott is saying that he doesn't think conflict theory drives people, and that he doesn't think stoking conflict theory amongst people is the best way to enact change. I think the later is the more defensible position, and if that's what he's saying, I think he should make it clearer up front.
But early on, Scott says "conflict theory doesn't explain politics", and then later points out that with socialists vs capitalists, conflict really does drive them, and conflict theory explains why they're so persistent in their attitudes; it's because they really want to own the other side due to their own psychological baggage. It gets them to desperately cling to their positions even where material gains would not.
> conflict theory explains why they're so persistent in their attitudes; it's because they really want to own the other side due to their own psychological baggage
But he's saying that's not conflict theory, it's mistake theory.
I'm not sure I understand why that is, then. Could you correct my mistake, and explain? If you ask me, the drive to want to own the other side because of past psychological trauma about those evil others who wanted to hurt you, but you'll show them, sounds pretty conflicty to me. It doesn't sound like "oh, I think the other side is wrong and I'm going to show them why", it sounds like "I think the other side is bad and I want to punish them for it".
He's saying that people acting that way are not acting in their best interests, thus they're not actually operating on conflict theory. Which I also think is stupid, so we probably should just wait for Scott to explain himself.
Oh, I see. I guess maybe the first problem, then, would be to accurately define conflict theory such that we're all on the same page as to what it is. I don't necessarily think "conflict theory" is defined by acting in your best interests, it's defined by thinking that we have differing values. Conflict theory seems to me to be more likely to result in people not acting in their best interests.
I would say that the central claim on the most general kind of thing that deserves to be called "conflict theory" is that people acting more rationally in their best interests than they do would not bring about any substantial deescalation of political conflicts. I don't think something could be meaningfully called "more a variant of conflict theory than of mistake theory" if it doesn't meet this criterion, much less being a central example of conflict theory.
I'm not certain I agree. Having never thought in-depth about the exact definition of conflict vs mistake theory before, I thought conflict theory was simply the belief that a disagreement is not caused by a simple misunderstanding of the facts, but rather opposing interests. What you said might be a corollary of this, I'm not sure, but I think it's a substantially more complicated way of putting it.
I was scrolling comments to see if this point was made. I am not saying I'm right, but I was rather baffled at Scott's definition of conflict theory. The colloquial definition I understood was that conflict theorists think most conflict is largely tribal (though one's tribe may often be organized around an idea or principal rather than ethnic) and politics is best understood as tribal warfare by other means. Scott's later "synthesis" to me sounded like straightforward conflict theory as I understood it - conflict derives from identifying We and They and taking positions to help We. Social media makes tribal identification easier and more homogenous (intersectionalism etc.).
I might be misunderstanding your post here. Are you saying that the only thing that explains political disagreement is the psychodrama theory? Why should any one of these theories, be it conflict theory, error theory, psychodrama theory, etc. be enough to completely explain why people disagree?
Is there any room in reality for people to disagree about issues because they have genuinely different values? Or can people disagree about a particular policy because they have genuinely different predictions for how that policy will play out?
It seems to me like all of these are separate things which can contribute to why a particular person might disagree with another. Depending on somebody’s temperament and the particular issue certain of these factors might play a stronger role than others.
> Is there any room in reality for people to disagree about issues because they have genuinely different values? Or can people disagree about a particular policy because they have genuinely different predictions for how that policy will play out?
What's surreal about this essay is that the first of those options would normally be called "conflict theory" and the second would be called "mistake theory".
Reasonable definitions of conflict theory might not allow people to have different values; but in practice all ideologies of conflict theory teach that all people have or should have the same values. That all people have, or should have, the same values, is a basic and necessary requirement for Platonism, Christianity, Rousseauism (eg the French Revolution), Marxism, Nazism, and the Social Justice Movement. All conflict theorists are in that same line of descent.
That is a bold thesis..
This is where I repeat my periodic posting of this article . Not all rationality is instrumental!
https://websites.umich.edu/~satran/Ford%2006/Wk%206-2%20Sacred%20Values%20Varshney.pdf
The link is either broken or paywalled.
Thx! The new link should work.
Is there a short summary?
I tried to find some conclusion at the end, but there was only a reference to Weber.
The last two paragraphs were basically how successful coalition building worked before social media when things were more top-down. Now, such strategies are impossible to coordinate.
There’s no problem you can’t solve if you don’t care who gets the credit — and are willing to take all the blame.
Navier-Stokes equations, have 'em on my desk by Friday. I'll even let you take the credit.
Ooh, I’ve always had an odd fondness for the dimensionless Reynold’s number. Calculating the tube velocity for optimal heat transfer is an interesting little problem. Lemme know about any developments here.
Sorry, no *social* problem. :-)
This is just going to turn into a transitional flow regime problem, no? Are we talking fun toy problems, or does this actually come up in e.g. heat exchanger design?
I spent a couple years writing code to predict performance of custom industrial heating and cooling systems before they were built. The Reynolds number thing comes up when circuiting for laminar flow in water cooled or heated equipment.
Condenser Evaporator systems had a different set of problems.
The now defunct company filled a niche in the custom market. If it could be designed they would build it. For example If a wealthy UAE customer wanted a swimming pool cooler they would knock it out.
Mostly the stuff went on rooftops though. They did the original Mall of America system.
The substack app ate a longer digression on entrained flow research, so I'll just say that the Mall of America HVAC system is very cool and more spaces should leverage solar + human body heat where they get the chance. 👍
I just tried asking Claude about the MOA HVAC system because Zvi had a piece on the latest release.
No answer from Claude but Copilot came up with:
"The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, has a unique and innovative approach to heating during the winter. Despite the cold Minnesota winters, the mall does not have a central heating system. Instead, it relies on a combination of passive solar energy, heat generated by lighting fixtures, and the body heat of visitors to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature.
The mall's 1.2 miles of skylights allow natural sunlight to permeate the interior, which is then converted into heat. Additionally, the heat generated by the mall's numerous lighting fixtures is harnessed as a supplemental heating source1. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect is the reliance on human body heat. The presence of thousands of visitors contributes significantly to the mall's warmth.
This system not only highlights a commitment to sustainable practices but also showcases the ingenuity behind the mall's design. It's a marvel of sustainable engineering that reduces energy consumption and environmental impact"
A few notes that are not about the main point of the post:
-tax deductions involve subtracting from federal taxable income, then calculating the income tax on what remains--*not* deducting directly from tax (which would be a tax credit). For example taking a $10k tax deduction on $100k of income means reducing the taxable amount of income to $90k and taxing that (for example, at 10%, a tax of $9k), not taxing the $100k at 10%=$10k and then subtracting $10k to get zero. So, the SALT cap is very unlikely to mean 5% of someone's income at the level you describe. For someone in the top taxing state, California, the max bracket is 12.3% for people making over $720k, and with corresponding federal bracket of 37%. 12.3%x37%=4.5%, which is pretty close to 5%, but for the $150k earner you talked about, the amount would be 9.3%*24%=2.2%, and for someone in my state, Pennsylvania, it would be 3.07%*24%=0.74% of total income. And the cap still allows $10k of deduction, so it's actually quite a bit less than that. I am not an expert on this topic so feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Maybe I need to be considering property and local taxes?
-"Trans men in women’s sports." This should say trans women--ie people who transitioned to female. Trans men would be AFAB people who transitioned to male.
-"inflation benefits the poor at the expense of the rich" must be using a definition of poor that does not include people who worry about necessities, since in general inflation (even before this most recent bout) has had larger impact on food, etc, compared to luxuries
Your tax math is right, and it's even worse than that: only the portion of the tax deduction that is above the standard deduction provides any added benefit. This is one of my pet peeves with the idea that an average person can somehow be responsible for his retirement savings, when most Americans don't understand what percentages are, as well as basic mechanics of the tax system.
fully agree with #1
A $150k earner in CA in 2017 was about $11k income tax. Let's also assume they pay $10k property taxes (~1.5M house).
- that's $21k deductible with no cap vs $10k with cap
- so an $11k difference in taxable income
- which at 24% federal tax bracket is $2.6k (<2% of income)
and that's with paying property taxes - if you rent then pretty much all the difference goes away (I believe landlords get taxed differently so the SALT cap wouldn't affect the implied property taxes portion of rent).
as some secondary evidence, CRFB says that raising the SALT cap to an unreachable amount would save the average $250k earning household $630. now that's for all states, maybe you say 1/3 of those households are in "high-tax" states and all the tax savings go to that group, that's still $1800 per household (<1% of income).
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/weakening-salt-cap-costly-benefits-high-earners-increases-tax-complexity
Your first two points (taxes and trans men in sport) are correct but the last one is not. Inflation benefits people who are net debtors because inflation is a general rise in prices and includes wages. Since loans are not usually indexed to inflation, when people with debt see their nominal income rise (even if possibly more slowly than other prices) they see the *real* amount of money they owe (and payments) decline, which increase their *real* income.
Yea except most poor people hold debt in absurdly high APR accounts (credit cards, payday loans, loan sharks) that often rise with inflation to an extent. I wouldn't expect most truly poor net debtors to benefit from inflation, quite the opposite.
Nit: only *unexpected increases* in inflation are beneficial to net debtors; even fixed interest rates account for expected inflation over the term of the loan.
High inflation works really well for gov. debts and some financial wizards, true. In Weimar Germany: Hugo Stinnes. - Workers get by, cash/bond savers lose massively. I have most money in boring shares, did I really become richer when those rose from 300k to 400k while prices went up 30-60% on most goods I buy/intend to buy?
I think the idea of motivated reasoning is real, but wildly understated.
Reasoning, being metabolically expensive, has to be motivated. Otherwise you wouldn’t do it! I think you’re right that a lot of political stuff - precisely because it doesn’t effect people directly that much - is motivated by more tribal allegiance than a conscious evaluation of the evidence on an issue by issue basis. You seem to be seeing this kind of epistemic outsourcing as being irrational. I think that view - which says we can overcome motivated reasoning and should make an effort to try - is itself wrong; and constitutes a kind of group identity that’s divorced from analysis of the evidence.
Does that way of thinking actually work, at scale, over long periods of time to produce human flourishing? If not, what it may be doing is convincing people to deploy their limited attentional energy on the problems that are most amendable to rational analysis, while ignoring problems that are more difficult and for which group identity actually works better as a hueristic for long term survival. Whenever hard to measure questions come up, the rationalist has the instinct to shy away from them, because acknowledging we can’t measure the things we care most about threatens his identity as a member in good standing of the tribe that values truth, and - this is crucial here - imagines that wisdom is the supreme virtue and they other virtues are irrelevant.
If the world were a massive chessboard and we all shared a single well defined utility function, then rationality uber allows makes more sense as a root goal. But we’re not disembodied minds moving fixed pieces along a static grid - we’re psychotic primates who play imaginary games to determine status in massive hierarchies, and live mostly in structures made out of those status selecting beliefs. So once you define material interest to prioritize group identity over small amounts of money, I think you’re back in the conflict theory universe.
There is this theory stated in The Elephant in the Brain that the ego is mostly the PR department of the human body. Your job is to spin the decisions some other entity in your brain made, claiming credit for them and also explaining to your fellow tribes members of why they are in fact pro-social, and being aware of your selfish motivations would make that job harder.
This view neatly explains why even though, on their good days, the anti-ism ("woke") coalition can make a very good case that systemic isms exist and have a material negative effect on the lives of minorities and women, their actual tactics are much better at radicalizing majorities and men into at best category-identity politics and at worst conscious embrace of isms, than they are at reducing either the prevalence or impact of the isms themselves.
As you point out at the end, psychological motivations are quite flexible - too flexible imo to be predictive, other then perhaps in the very short run.
The real explanation is that in the long run, reason and empirical results are what matters, both for instigating new conflicts and resolving present ones. To give two simple recent examples, it is the case that gay marriage did not lead to any die consequence, and also that transitioning children did not work in resolving their problems, on average. I think it could well be that if transitioning could be done easily, reversibly and credibly (e.g. as in the Culture novels), it would actually be quite helpful to many people, but the technology does not currently exist.
In my experience the vast majority of people have an extremely vague idea of how the government works (remember how searches for "Is Biden still running?" spiked on election day? I doubt the average American could explain most issues even at the very high level Scott does here.
NIMBYs seem motivated by clear material interests that conflict with a change to the built environment.
Some do, but here in LA tenants' groups are often NIMBY in ways that seem counter to their material interests, to me.
Yes, leftists are materially interested but so stupid about economics that they hurt themselves.
Self-defeating ideology.
Score one for mistake theory!
>The GOP thought it was funny to mess with the one tax deduction their enemies actually liked, so they capped it at a low level. This single policy cost the average coastal elite about 5% of their salary.
I'm really confused how you can say that the GOP made a policy change specifically to hurt their enemies, and then argue that conflict theory is wrong.
Like, what's the mistake-theory framing of this action? Is the GOP mistaken about their own desires, and they don't *really* want to hurt liberals? Did they have some other desire to pass tax reform but their hatred of libs blinded them to the correct policy? Both of those feel kind of tautological - it's basically saying "the GOP were mistaken, so long as you consider their desire for conflict to be a mistake."
He seems to be construing conflict theory narrowly, as conflict about objective, material self interest.
If so, that's a pretty big change from how Scott originally described it.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
That essay is not at all talking about how conflict theorists evaluate the material benefits of policies to see which side they support. It's saying conflict theorists don't even *bother* to evaluate policies, because politics is war and the only thing that matters is whose side you're on. It gives the example of communists who don't bother asking if communism works because the only question is if your argument supports global revolution or if you're secretly in bed with the Koch brothers, but you could write exactly the same essay about right wingers who only care about purging liberals from government and putting loyalists in power, or antivaxxers who don't bother looking at the science because what matters is if you're in the pocket of Big Pharma or not.
Scott, they say that you gain power over a demon when you know its name. Part of persuasion are posts like these. We can become more suspicious of our cognitive biases after being woke to their existence and influence on our thoughts and actions.
1) I am reminded of the controversy a long time ago (http://demaagd.com/anime/dvdbugs/mb.html) when Media Blasters accidentally produced some DVDs in mono. That article isn't the best to describe what happened at the time--Media Blasters literally claimed that their experts checked and the DVDs weren't mono. They were. In other words, yes, the users *did* find information that the experts missed. (And if you're going to claim that the experts lied or engaged in motivated reasoning, sure. That's the main reason why normal people are able to find out things that experts cannot!) If you want a further example, look at IQ. You've said things about IQ that no expert would go on the record as saying.
2) Everyday people engaging in conflict theory isn't the same as the media or experts doing so. You still don't believe that Metz was out to get you from the start, but surely you recognize that his final post was not honest, and was so dishonest that conflict theory is the only explanation. You actually brought up dishonest COVID messaging yourself. Why wouldn't this count as conflict theory? As far as I can tell, you seem to think it doesn't count as conflict theory because the people sincerely aligned themselves with the experts. But the experts *themselves* were engaging in conflict theory. They knew better, they were not honestly aligned with their own public statements.
3) "It's a mistake, but accompanied by a lot of motivated reasoning and trapped priors" is on a spectrum with "conflict". Sufficient motivated reasoning that is 95% of the way to conflict is basically the same as conflict.
From my experiemce of business, I doubt that the PR person who said the DVDs were stereo even talked to the experts.
They invoked talking to experts (which is not clear in the article, but it's hard to find posts from that period and Anime on DVD is long since dead.) If they lied and didn't actually talk to any experts, I'm pretty sure that that too matches to more politically relevant cases. I don't think six foot social distancing rules came from experts either.
Your "free rider" argument is most sketchy. You suppose that the millionaire knows that there are already many other millionaires with the same goal as himself, but calculate the $49K as if he did *not* know it. If that millionaire has a lot of millionaire buddies with the same interest and similar spending limit, he would join an interest group with them and each of them would have to contribute much less than those $49K to achieve the same effect, thereby increasing their ROI, or they each contribute $49K and can take measures none of them could individually. You also ignore the social capital each millionaire gains/loses with his buddies if he does/doesn't join the club, another selfish reason to participate.
And if that millionaire knew he really was the only millionaire interested in that tax break, why should he not have a realistic chance of achieving that goal even on his own? Especially if the politician in charge of that tax break bill doesn't particularly care one way or another, bribes can be surprisingly cheap:
https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/bribery
In FY2023, 36% of bribes were equivalent to less than $15K, 90% were less than $1.5M, and the median was $35K.
So no, it doesn't take Musk levels of wealth to buy political outcomes, unless you want Musk levels of political outcomes. I think the fundamental issue is that you apply the rules of the democratic process (either "if 50.1% of millionaires try, they win", or "if only one millionaire tries, he loses") to the very different problem of buying political outcomes, i.e. corruption.
Good article. A quibble on how young people supporting lockdowns is inconsistent with conflict theory.
If lockdowns are effective at stopping the spread of Covid (big IF; see the Johns Hopkins meta-analysis [https://nationalpost.com/news/world/johns-hopkins-university-study-covid-19-lockdowns]), one would naively expect the people who have most to lose by catching Covid (i.e. elderly and infirm people) to be the most enthusiastic supporters of lockdowns.
But that isn't the only reason people supported lockdowns. A lot of people vastly prefer working from home than going into the office: ending lockdowns inevitably means that your boss would ask you to return to the office at least some of the time. Gen Z aren't shy about saying that all they want to do is rot in their beds and watch their favourite shows - they say so themselves (https://tellthebeees.substack.com/p/the-mainstreaming-of-loserdom). I've spoken to plenty of people who look back on the early days of Covid with barely disguised nostalgia, as a period in their life in which they felt fulfilled and thriving: they could lie in bed until 8:55, work in their pyjamas all day long, take as many naps as they wanted etc. I know a girl whose friends were becoming concerned that her homebody tendencies were worsening to the point of clinically significant agoraphobia: before Covid, her friends would routinely invite her out to the pub or a nightclub, and she'd make an excuse why she couldn't make it. She was keen for lockdowns to be extended indefinitely to spare her the awkwardness - no need to make an excuse for why you can't come to the pub if all the pubs are shut down.
So if you like lockdowns because it means you never have to leave the house, of course you'll want them extended indefinitely. But you'll be dimly aware that this is kind of selfish, so of course you'll confect some prosocial just-so story using whichever Covid metric currently suits your case (case counts/case fatality rate/rate of hospitalisations/long Covid). By the end of 2021 I could practically feel these agoraphobic introverts grasping at straws - PLEASE don't make me go back into the office, I LIKE wearing pyjamas all day and I HATE my colleagues!
If Millennials and Gen Z are disproportionately likely to be introverted compared to older generations (which certainly seems to be the case), their support for lockdowns is fully explicable by conflict theory.
Have you wondered how that ended up being the case? Because I have a theory: early exposure to social media have made people realize from a young age that humans are stupid, degenerate, malicious, disgusting animals. The world's desire to make information more free has only resulted in creating an entire generation of misanthropes. So of course they would become more introverted: they hate their colleagues because they hate people.
>early exposure to social media have made people realize from a young age that humans are stupid, degenerate, malicious, disgusting animals
I'm a little confused: are you describing what these people believe, or what you believe yourself?
Both. I was a "victim" myself, you know. The internet gives you a pretty clear view of what people are like when they're not constrained by social pressures. And you're ultimately going to end up seeing and interacting with a lot more people online than in real life... All of which serves to fuel people's fear and disgust of others, during their most impressionable period of their life, no less. No wonder they're afraid of authentically interacting with others.
I hope you now have the self-awareness to recognise that the misanthropy of your youth was severely misguided.
Given recent trends, I fear that my beliefs will only be further vindicated...
So you feel like you're basically a vicarious Woobie Destroyer of Worlds, I guess?
I generally agree with the conclusions of this piece because the empirical evidence is strong, but I think the theoretical argument about the free-rider problem is quite weak because it proves too much. It’s a general argument against any kind of collective political action (voting, donating to candidates, calling your representatives) which still applies if the thing you want out of the policy you’re supporting is a sense of satisfaction from owning the libs rather than a material benefit. So in order for it to not count against mistake theory too, you’d need to show that people don’t care about policy outcomes at all, and only value the psychological benefits of participating in political conflict. But this piece doesn’t seem to argue that. I think even under mistake theory people value their preferred policies actually being enacted, and the functional decision theory arguments for voting and similar actions apply regardless of their motivation for that.
> which still applies if the thing you want out of the policy you’re supporting is a sense of satisfaction from owning the libs rather than a material benefit.
That's a really good point.
I don't understand this argument.
It sounds like you think of "owning the libs" as a policy outcome, ie the libs are sad because they didn't get their preferred policy.
I'm positing it as an emotional outcome, ie you feel good because you struck a blow against evil.
> That is, this theory predicts that a faction could vastly increase its chances of achieving its material goals just by making compromises on who it flatters vs. humiliates.
I'd be super interested in ideas to operationalize this.
Isn't this just boring centrist triangulation? If you want to see what this looks like, look at Bill Clinton, look at Tony Blair, look at Keir Starmer. Predictably, the opposition that they try to appeal to still largely hate them, and they get the added bonus of alientating their base. However, it really does help make short term political gains, because it avoids riling up as large an oppositional force.
For example, Keir Starmer's Labour Party has a smaller popular base than the party under Corbyn, but Corbyn motivated much more opposition against him and that increased turnout for the Conservatives was decisive.
Mr Trump is so wise and kind and smart and hardworking, he can let me be acting president and I will do everything exactly as he had wanted it be done, for he would be instructing me on what to do, such the kind and magnanimous mentor and visionary he is, and every day I will tell the world how much better the world is on that day and how it is all thanks to him
But if Trump is so great, why would he need you?
What is a king without his men?
A gold-plated bastard whose catchphrase is "you're fired."
This is a very simple take on materialism. For coastal elites, maintaining reputation may be more important to earning material goods than salary. For example, remaining a professor, or a high end journalist or media person, may earn you all sorts of unique and exciting travel opportunities on the company dime, so that you don't have to pay for those experiences directly yourself. The material gain comes from the position, and to a lesser degree, the salary.
Isn't the flattery-humiliation theory of political alignment just conflict theory with bonus bottle-bothering?
You may have heard that jewel beetle males look for a particular shade of green in their mates, and can find themselves trying to impregnate bottles with a similar color. Same deal with sulfur butterflies (might be a different species, going off of memory there): their idea of the sexiest possible woman is what I call the seizure square, a monitor four times the size of the male that switches between white and orange as fast as he can register. There are succubus orchids that will produce female pheromones at such a concentration that male wasps leave visible sperm stains on the flowers. The evolution fairy wants the male bug to mate, but has no need to perfectly define suitable mates since most things that meet the fuzzy criteria are going to work out. Except sometimes they don't.
(When you apply this principle to people, you get things like Last Origin and Azur Lane. In fact, I bet a gacha company will eventually design a digital succubus that is such a superstimulus that seeing it will fry men's brains like Langford's parrot).
Same deal here. Conflict theory was, in all likelihood, true for most of human history. We did not ask ourselves "do people in my socioeconomic class have a valid reason to compete with others?", resources were limited and it was a given that different tribes would fight over them. The evolution fairy wanted us to present a unified front and maximize the resources available to us. But "just hate the outgroup a lot and you'll probably be fine" accomplishes this, and that is the heuristic we ended up getting. Except now we are out of the caves and no longer have a small tribe to be ride-or-die with, but we still have the urge to call ourselves the Thundercock Clan, carve lightning bolt scars on our penises, and fight tooth and nail against the Deathsticle Clan (yes, they do have skull brands, and no points for guessing what their leader is called) over ownership of the local hunting grounds.
So yeah, it is true that the pro-skub and anti-skub crowds both want to maximize righteous feel-goodiness instead of objective group benefit. But that behavior can then be reduced to a little goblin in both of their heads, whispering "yes, precious, continue hating the other tribeses, they wants your resources and you have to attacks them all the time, or you will starve..."
"Isn't the flattery-humiliation theory of political alignment just conflict theory with bonus bottle-bothering? "
This was my take away too - I think Scott just talked himself back into a modified, more sophisticated version of conflict theory. The mistaken beliefs are still downstream of zero sum conflicts between groups of people. It's just that the conflict isn't pure material self interest, or even status (as Scott noted); it's something more like 'the ability to feel good about myself/my team.'
In this model, mistakes can still be the proximate cause of disagreement, and fixing mistaken beliefs can eliminate disagreements, so I suppose it's not pure conflict theory.
Feeling like a basically good and reasonable person, unlike positional status conflicts, is not at all zero-sum.
In general yes, but I think in the post it's pretty clearly framed as often being zero sum - part of what makes people feel like good and reasonable people is the perception that their foes have been shamed.
It's listed as one on a list of about 10 or so things. You could get to a quite satisfactory psychological state even without it. And if it must be addressed, it could at least theoretically be done by reorienting coalitions so the people who were getting shamed were "people who shame things other than shaming", and then having everyone leave that coalition, without anyone actually changing their opinion on any substantive political issue.
In theory, yes. In practice, morality diverges due to genes and circumstance, and pleasing everyone becomes a complete impossibility. This is, however, not a problem if either everyone has the same morality, or fulfillment is completely divorced from morality (via wireheading).
>There are some issues where one side can be justified by material self-interest. I think people are tough on crime partly because they don’t personally want to be crime victims. But then why do other people oppose them? There are far too many opponents for them to all be criminals, or even the family members of criminals. If a real conflict requires two sides, these don’t qualify either.
Rob K Henderson would say that being soft on crime is a luxury belief. Nobody wants to be a victim of crime, but certain demographics (namely, poor people and ethnic minorities) are at vastly higher risk of being victims of crime than others, so we would naively expect those people to support aggressive policing, as they're most likely to be the direct beneficiaries of it. Meanwhile, if you're rich enough to live in a gated community, why would it be in your self-interest for your tax dollars to go towards local policing? Presumably you're already paying for private security, which will offer vastly better protection for you and your family than the local police force ever could. So you chant "defund the police" while making up some prosocial just-so story about looking into the "root causes" of crime.
Data point: in 2020, Gallup found that 81% of black Americans want the police to spend the same amount of time or more doing policing in their local neighbourhood (https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx), although this fell to 63% the following year (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/10/26/growing-share-of-americans-say-they-want-more-spending-on-police-in-their-area/).
> There are far too many opponents for them to all be criminals, or even the family members of criminals.
I dispute that. If ~ 30% of black males go to prison at some point in their lives, crime must be a very common lifestyle in America's most dangerous areas. Girlfriends and mothers do directly profit from drug money and stolen goods, but even more people must knowingly associate with criminals without being bothered too much by the fact or have some trouble with the law themselves. They do not want the police to imprison their friends and relatives. To them, being a criminal is not abnormal. Perhaps there are mafia-infested areas where people think similarly. (I will also note that a liberal soft on crime is very much affected by crime and disorder if this makes the public transport unsafe and forces her to avoid the inner city and commute from the suburbs. Blacks also show consistently less support for policing than whites, despite the higher crime rates among them. The luxury belief idea makes little sense.)
"A study regarding the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act concluded due to mandatory sentencing Blacks have a 1 in 3 chance of spending some time in prison or jail. Latinos 1 in 6 chance and Whites, a 1 in 17" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_in_the_United_States_criminal_justice_system#cite_ref-153
Note that your explanation contradicts mine, in that black Americans seem to be more likely to be tough on crime than white Americans.
"Economists would answer that inflation benefits the poor at the expense of the rich - poor people tend to have net debts, and rich people net assets, and inflation reduces the relative size of both."
Doesn't this ignore the fact that inflation weakens the purchasing power of what you earn, and wages generally don't grow at a compensatory rate in high-inflation periods (just look at the stagnant minimum wage...)?
also the original claim isn't true - households in the bottom 20% of income have on average >$100k net assets
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-wealth-does-the-american-middle-class-have/country/united-states/
only 10% of households have 'net debts', and though they're lower income on average they're not uniformly so (median income is $40k, so not even in the lowest bracket in Scott's chart)
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/thirteen-million-us-households-have-negative-net-worth-will-they-ever-move-from-debt-to-wealth/
AFAIU the rich are more insulated from inflation than the standard line suggests, too, since they mostly own equity and not debt.
It's pretty unclear whether a reduction in the minimum wage is good or bad for the poor. Theoretically it should increase employment for some of them while reducing income for others.
> and wages generally don't grow at a compensatory rate in high-inflation periods (just look at the stagnant minimum wage...)?
The minimum wage is not an indicator of how much money people are earning. In high-inflation periods, wages do grow at a compensatory rate, and the minimum wage becomes less and less of a constraint on hiring.
There isn't zero elasticity in hiring. When the minimum wage rises, some people don't get hired and some get hired at a higher wage. Similarly when the (real) minimum wage falls, some people get hired but some people get a real-wage cut.
So? Do you think "just look at the stagnant minimum wage" constitutes an argument in support of the idea that "wages generally don't grow at a compensatory rate in high-inflation periods"?
Well, not really. But wages do tend to grow unevenly across the wage spectrum during inflation, and the minimum wage *is* relevant to that. And it is an indicator of how much money (some) people are earning. And wage growth during periods of inflation trails general price growth, so for some periods of inflation the wage growth doesn't even really get started until the general inflation indicators have settled down.
Hey Scott, have you ever considered reviewing the Culture of Narcissism? Narcissism as a personality disorder can be framed as putting as taking an identity as a fixed idea to the detriment of forming a realistic self-image, kind of matches up to your "identity alignment" argument. In fact, a lot of what you argue here kind of matches up to what Lou Keep was writing about years ago with the connection between this phenomenon and the influence of technical elites in politics etc. (https://samzdat.com/2017/07/17/a-taylorism-for-all-seasons/).
Yes, that's what I was thinking–what Scott is describing here is basically narcissism. I think he's right, and I think you are, too.
I don't think this is the strongest possible version of conflict theory. Saying public debate is mostly symbolic isn't the same as saying actual policy is. Yes electoral research shows voters don't often vote according to self-interest, but it also shows public opinion doesn't correlate with policy very strongly. If policy is more influenced by interest groups (presumably ones small or organised enough to get around free-riding) which very much have material interests, that still vindicates the mistake theorists imo.
This was great, but I was on the verge of giving up. It seemed excessively focused on a narrow definition of interests: "[The SALT] cap costs them 5% of their salary per year. If they cared at all about their own self-interest, or material conditions, it ought to be 1000x more important to them than wokeness or Ukraine or anything else".
Then I got to "So What Does Drive Political Disagreement?" and everything turned around, for the better. Those psychological factors, those are interests too.
I feel like this still doesn't make a great case for mistake theory. Mistake theory, as it's often used in these spaces, seems to be something like "if we could just get correct information to people and educate them about overcoming their biases, we could reach some equilibrium beliefs and solve problems."
The trauma theory here seems like it suggests a strategy similar to that suggested by conflict theory - form coalitions of people based on their self-interest (with self interest defined differently than normal), then destroy the opposition, who you have no chance of winning over to your side.
In fact, if people were acting on material self-interest instead of psychological self-interest, a mistake theory approach would be more justified. You could craft arguments appealing to that material self-interest that suggest they should abandon their previous positions, and, assuming you did a good job, they would. This trauma theory suggests that if you craft arguments showing that something else is in their psychological best interests, that will inflict a psychic wound that causes them to hate you and everything you stand for.
True, right-wingers aren't exactly going to be receptive to claims that they're not acting in their best interests, seeing as that's what leftists have been telling them for the last two decades.
I agree with this in the main. For the last decade or so I've come to the conclusion that a lot of politics can be explained by personality types. In particular there is a type that just reflexively disagrees with whatever is popular or cool. Call them anti-establishment. I have a friend like that. If you like a movie, he will immediately think of reasons it sucks. I've learned never to express a political opinion around him. I will occasionally ask *his* opinion on some issues just to get an idea of his biases, but I never express mine. I just say "that's interesting."
I think there is something going on with inferential distances and coalition forming, but not sure what
This is intersectionality/cross cutting cleavages rediscovered. My sociology professor at super liberal Oberlin explained it as "I am a university professor and middle class and an atheist and a social democrat and pro choice and an American and a Serbian, so I vote against Clinton cos he bombed Belgrade but the republican is a religious nut and a billionaire stooge too."
People fall into a large venn diagram of identity groups. When identity groups are super .... coordinated(less flower or chain and more disjoint overlapping circles)you get weird tribal civil wars. The internet seems to be a great rationalizer of identity groups making it very difficult for people to maintain membership of conflicting identity groups.
"Dungeons and dragons" is woke, or racist or whatever but certainly can't be orthogonal to politics writ large and you can't game with a "other side" person.
Partly he blamed the loss of... irational yet stabilising social networks on Bowling Alone type effects. IRL in eastern europe, for instance, it's still inconceivable to break relationships with family or frienda over politics. In the US it seems almost the norm.
Online relationships are much more essentialized than irl ones where your edgy uncle is still your uncle and you can yell at each other and still want to yell at each other next month for dinner too.
What then of mistake vs conflict? In politics I think people fundamentally subsume into tribal thinking. No one is like I want to not be invaded by Russia so I'm training with a gun. Instead people think I want to not be invaded by Russia so I am doing something that gets millions of people that agree with me to coordinate on dealing with this problem.
People instinctively understand the freeloader problem! It's what triggers tribal mode to engage when looking for solutions to these problems.
When tribal mode is on people coordinate on lots of tribal interests even if they are not personal interests. Obviously people also sacrifice for the tribe. Peolle can also ditch the tribe if it sufficiently betrays their desires or expectations.
Inflation doesn't necessarily simply benefit the poor more than the wealthy. The wealthy tend to keep their wealth in assets that increase in value with inflation while poorer people only have cash savings. For example, if someone is wealthy enough to buy a 500k house and sinks all their savings into it, then 10% inflation means that they now have a 550k house that has the same real value. However, someone that only has $1,000 would keep it as cash. After 10% inflation, they'd still have $1000 but it'd have 9% less buying power.
The poor are also more likely to use entitlement programs which often lag behind inflation. So maybe they'll get the same amount in food stamps or social security checks but be able to buy less with them (until they're adjusted). Or they use an entitlement program that determines eligibility based off of income. In that case, they could lose eligibility if their real income changes. Or maybe they make minimum wage, in which case their income would not adjust to inflation.
The only actor that necessarily benefits is the government itself as it taxes inflation related "gains" and has to pay out less in benefits. It can get complicated to figure out who the winners and losers are so even voters operating entirely out of self-interest wouldn't have clear incentives.
This also ignores the fact that poor people tend to hold their debts in absurdly high interest accounts (credit cards, payday loans, loan sharks) that will almost always be at a higher APR than inflation.
On the other hand most wealthy people who hold debt will typically hold it in low APR things like mortgages and business or personal loans, etc. In fact the ultra wealthy tend to leverage debt to their advantage. [1]
[1] https://themoneyknowhow.com/how-do-the-rich-live-off-of-loans/
"there should be ways to minimize this - you could even say explicitly[...]" Yeah, this is admittedly my longest-held confusion about politics. I've often wondered why we don't have many heads of state who, having attained modern society's highest power echelon, say fuck it and drop the pretense and games that made their careers in the first place. Especially with presidents who can't run again.
Why not just be ruthlessly upfront about all the trade-offs that every major policy entails? Maybe it's because the opposition, still playing the game, would use that honesty against the incumbent and block many of their policies through obfuscation and manipulation? Still, wouldn't you automatically make your opposition's point moot if you literally said "Look, we need to do X, and as our main opposition knows this entails A, B and C, and they're somewhat right about these but we're going to go ahead and do X anyway because we believe the benefits D, E and F are too strong to pass up."
This would shift the usual political talking points from party A clamoring that "A, B and C are HUGE negatives about policy X, plus D, E and F are fake" and party B clamoring the reverse. If party B (in power) adopts a clear trade-offs-but-we're-leaning-X-anyway communication strategy, party A (opposition) should lose credibility if they continue with the usual bullshit.
It really is a political disease. If you listen to the heads of the most important central banks (US, Europe, Japan), they have refined their communication strategies over decades with the express goal to be as data-driven and trade-off-conscious as possible, minimizing strong directionality in any given speech, even if all voting members agree on the course of action.
The major difference between heads of central banks and heads of state is that the former's target public is typically educated in economics and/or business, while the latter's target includes a mass of less educated people who vote based on vibes and along clan lines.
Maybe people should have to answer a couple of fact-based questions before voicing their opinion. Just kidding.
I think all of these theories are overrated compared to the much more compelling “My enemies are innately evil and want to increase suffering.”
Obviously that’s not true, at least not the “innately” part. But I think there is a real asymmetry here that a “both sides” framework completely ignores.
The left/left of center/libs/progressives/ whatever you want to call them are much more interested in ideas than the right. They follow their premises to their conclusions, even if this hurts them electorally. They are best modeled as trying to make the world a better place. While this all bottoms out in psychopolitics (desire to feel like a certain kind of person) eventually, I’m not sure there’s a single group (yes including EAs) where this isn’t the case on some level. People just bottom out at different points.
I don’t think the right can be modeled in this way. I think one particular psychopolitical value (owning the libs) has taken control of the entire party. To do this, they have sacrificed everything they supposedly care about (Limited government, moral values, democracy, freedom, America’s position on the world stage, our economic prospects) in favor of electing the one man who Owns The Libs more effectively than anyone ever has before. I don’t know how this happened, whether Own The Libs was always the chief value that nobody had figured out how to appeal to until Trump, or if it was simply one of many competing values that gained a competitive advantage during a period when The Libs were being very annoying. But right now it is very clearly at the top.
And when “the libs” are broadly in favor of decreasing suffering and increasing equality, the best way to “Own” them is to do the reverse. So now we have today’s politics, where the right’s position on nearly every issue is indistinguishable from someone whose goal is to increase suffering.
Now of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the left is always right. Sometimes they’re wrong about what reduces suffering, and sometimes that means that doing the opposite of what they do actually reduces suffering. But those cases are much more rare than the cases of “I support killing millions of people with HIV because it owns the libs” and the like.
TLDR one side is vastly more driven by psychopolitics than the other, and this has lead them to be worse on most things, and it’s a bit weird to not explicitly point this out.
The Right have ideas, e.g. patriotism , religion.
In the US, the last two presidents from the right-wing party have been a draft dodger and a guy who doesn't know which side of a bible is up (and more significantly, said in an interview he never felt like he did anything that he needed forgiveness from God for). I can (and do) buy that the elements of the right-wing coalition have ideas that are important to them individually, but in a practical, results-oriented sense, "owning the libs" seems to be the one and only idea that the whole coalition is agreeing on.
Ok...but US politics isn't typical, and current US politics even less. There's a bigger picture.
I’m not sure it’s particularly patriotic to elect someone who attempted a coup, at least not if what you’re patriotic *about* is our history of freedom, civil rights, democracy, and limited government.
The right still.have ideas. One very unusual.politician doesn't change that.
Simple explanations have their advantages. These asymmetries around negative polarization plus the general tendency for people to endorse political positions similar to those in their social circle (i.e., tribalism) can probably explain a lot about current political dynamics.
There are plenty of examples where the left just wants the right to suffer. The only difference is that the left tries to make excuses for it, so if you believe the excuses it sounds nicer. Some of it is motivated reasoning--if you really hate Trumpists, it's a lot easier to justify your hatred if you can come up witgh sonme excuse to do so.
Yeah, I really don't see where the "delicious X group tears" portion of the left is any more respectable than the "own the libs" portion of the right. They seem to have much less influence on the *governmental* levers of power when the left is in power though.
“There are plenty of examples” (proceeds to name 0 examples)
I do not seriously believe you can't think of prominent examples of the left hating Trump supporters and need me to mention some before you'll believe they exist.
You’ve moved the goalposts. This isn’t about just hating the other side. This is about having “Owning the Libs” (or Owning the Cons) being a guiding direction for policy opinions.
You haven't actually presented any evidence either of "Owning the Libs" being a terminal goal, and not just a means to an end.
"Owning the libs" is the means, not the ends. The end goal is to reverse the social decay that has slowly consumed this country over the last century. They're reactionaries, not sadists.
Firstly, I think the average right wing voter cares much more about spite towards elites/The Libs than any actual long term vision for how the country should be, that stuff is very online.
Secondly, what exactly do you mean by social decay? If your problem is that women can vote or we don’t do segregation or we accept gay people, don’t hide behind vague terms, just come out and say it openly. If it’s something else, please explain it and explain how it’s going to be accomplished by Owning The Libs.
You don't need to be "very online" to see that day by day, a bigger part of the pie is going to pagans, savages, and degenerates. Society is becoming more and more hostile to the values of faithful Christians. Even if people can't put it into words themselves, the resentment is real. And it's this resentment that fuels this movement.
the values of faithful christians suck and we should be more hostile to them
I can see why you don’t understand right wing voters
...Well damn, I genuinely wasn't expecting you to outright say that. I guess we've gotten to the bottom of this whole conflict. Have fun killing each other!
Was there a chapter/verse where Jesus said "have fun killing each other!"? If not, I kinda suspect "the values of faithful Christians" are not what you are actually concerned with.
Actually the values of faithful Christians are very good historically speaking. But we're now very much facing the ceiling of how good the values of orthodox Christians are ever going to get, and lots of people are still getting unfairly injured by the sharp edges that will remain now and forever. Post-Christians in the West have taken on most of the Christian values that are legitimately good (as many as the Christians have, anyway) without the unjustified epistemic commitments that create the ceiling. So the Christian values that are not actually good are very salient in a lot of the West RN, and it's not a good look when someone feels alienated and indignant specifically about people not privileging specifically those values of theirs that are actively bad and hurting people.
> Actually the values of faithful Christians are very good historically speaking.
Sure, you can easily make a case for this by observing the spread of Christianity over the course of history, though you'd have to note that "the values of faithful Christians" is a set with different membership at different times and places.
> and lots of people are still getting unfairly injured by the sharp edges that will remain now and forever
There are no sharp edges that "will remain now and forever". The content of a religion always changes to match what the believers want. Anything they don't want will fail to remain.
> I don’t think the right can be modeled in this way. I think one particular psychopolitical value (owning the libs) has taken control of the entire party. To do this, they have sacrificed everything they supposedly care about (Limited government, moral values, democracy, freedom, America’s position on the world stage, our economic prospects) in favor of electing the one man who Owns The Libs more effectively than anyone ever has before
I think if your mental model is "my side is motivated by principles and reason, the other side is purely acting on dumb nonsense" then you should probably stop to reconsider. Maybe it's true, but maybe it's just a massive failure on your part to understand what motivates your opponents.
I understand that sort of Outside View perspective, but I worry that the principle you endorse would prevent you from recognizing that situation when it does happen.
Ask yourself: What line would a political group have to cross before I believe this?
Actually, ask yourself what you would have said had you been asked that question ten years ago, and then reflect on how your answer applies to today.
Entire sides of politics don't cross lines, individuals or small groups do.
I'm sure you've got examples in mind of how so-and-so did some stupid or terrible thing and _this_ therefore invalidates an entire side of politics.
> Entire sides of politics don't cross lines, individuals or small groups do.
Then why does everyone else on that side not stop them?
"I don’t think the right can be modeled in this way. I think one particular psychopolitical value (owning the libs) has taken control of the entire party. To do this, they have sacrificed everything they supposedly care about (Limited government, moral values, democracy, freedom, America’s position on the world stage, our economic prospects) in favor of electing the one man who Owns The Libs more effectively than anyone ever has before."
Owning the libs has proven to be an effective way of also limiting the government and providing more freedom and democracy. It has sacrificed genteel manners and America's Position On The World Stage, but who needs that garbage? The people that seem most upset about America's image don't even live in America for the most part.
“but who needs that garbage?” Anyone who carries US dollars, for starters. Starting infantile trade wars and alienating everyone around us will make the US dollar less valuable. Inflation will rise massively because of Trump’s policies. I can’t say I’m a fan.
I also wouldn’t describe anything this administration has done as pro-freedom or democratic but I suppose we have very different definitions of those things.
Only Two More Weeks and the Trump hyperinflation is sure to occur. As opposed to the Biden inflation which happened for purely incidental reasons.
Gouging the ability of the government to enforce regulations is pro freedom. Giving the money straight from federal workers to regular people is pro democracy. Imagine the possibilities!
> I don’t know how this happened, whether Own The Libs was always the chief value that nobody had figured out how to appeal to until Trump, or if it was simply one of many competing values that gained a competitive advantage
I suspect the competitive advantage involved none of the rival Republican candidates being able to credibly deliver much progress toward any of those other values either.
Why, sirrah, I have no money, you know it; and therefore resolve to rail at all that have. And in that I but follow the examples of the wisest and wittiest men in all ages, these poets and philosophers whom you naturally hate, for just such another reason; because they abound in sense, and you are a fool.
•Congreve, Love for Love (1695).
"If they cared at all about their own self-interest, or material conditions, it ought to be 1000x more important to them than wokeness or Ukraine or anything else. It should completely dominate the airwaves and Intertubes. Instead, crickets."
Because such people care more about power than money. This is why a Blinken does not live in sybaritic luxury.
Wrong. the whole thing !!
the above suggest all we have done is follow our self interest.
Lincoln thought blacks were inferior, yet he acted against his own attitude n followed his belief .
Truman voted forJewish state when most opposed it.
working class voted Reagan against their own $ interest
St Paul ran the spiritual race so he could be equal to the other apostles- in other words for his self interest
problem with phycology is its lack of ontology which causes it to chase its tale
>Lincoln thought blacks were inferior, yet he acted against his own attitude n followed his belief .
Lincoln started a war against secession, not against slavery. Of course, by the middle of it keeping slavery around no longer seemed palatable (and appeasing the South no longer a big consideration), so he came around.
Of course after Lincoln was no longer around, appeasing the (white) South almost immediately became a huge consideration again for some reason. US history mostly resolves around the white South being politically dominant 95% of the time and throwing huge, nation-threatening shit fits the moment they ever aren't.
>for some reason
They did make the unfortunate mistake of taking the South back in.
...When are you going to understand? You can't change human nature. The fact that the conflict is over psychological and not material needs is irrelevant, as psychology is also real. Small shifts in genetics and environment result in creating unbridgable gaps in morality, and ultimately ends up making moral conflicts a zero-sum game. Both sides cannot be psychologically fulfilled.
You must realize this yourself as well. Were the consequences of your doxxing any less real because the causes of those consequences were purely psychological? Of course not. The presence of opposing morality presented a direct obstacle to your own happiness. Those obstacles can be removed, however. The country can be brought under to the power of one god, a god who will let you make all the posts about IQ you want. All it requires of you is faith... a small price for the fulfillment of all your desires.
> You can't change human nature.
breed better humans if all else fails
You need a competent eugenics program for that, which isn't happening under either establishment... And frankly, with the technological progress we're seeing, it's going to be significantly faster to just replace them entirely.
You sure?
I think executing rapists and allowing abortions in cases of rape can have predictable results. I dont think it would be hard to get *a* result, its hard to control the results of biology.
"Zero-sum games" is a pretty narrow class of situations where you win exactly as much as I lose. Expecting it to naturally arise in psychology of a social species is counter-intuitive at best.
All positional goods are inherently zero-sum.
Even positional goods can be nonzero-sum when you consider transitions between states when they are stable and states where they are actively contested.
I've heard that "everything you want, in exchange for giving up your ability to want things" line before.
Are you implying it's a Faustian bargain? Nonsense. He will be forced to give up even more if he refuses the deal.
Interesting that despite extensive discussions regarding pros and cons of conflict theory and psychodrama theory that mistake theory is effectively dismissed as almost unnecessary to refute. I want to see that refutation. I know that I (and colleagues) have plenty of hidden motivations and these are interesting to ferret out, but I missed the self-obviousness that my opinions-du-jour weren't foundationally motivated (quite simply and transparently) by my specific understanding of how things work and my assumptions about morality/ethics/law.
In fact, my reaction to reading this and noting that gap is so instant/visceral (and the lack of comments resonant with my reaction) that I'm wondering if I'm missing a meta-context for the article.
Perhaps the ACX crowd is primarily left-of-center (or more to the point, anti-Trumpian) whereas I am not, and the recent U.S. election may have left them far more in the mood to question not just the logic of their opposition but the "Id" controlling the opposition than I. If so, fair enough, but if that crowd wants to understand their opposition they might do well not to dismiss without a lot of deliberation the fact that their opposition believes the majority of things they do quite simply because they've got a fact and moral base from which they would logically do so? Maybe "Id" like stories are critical (and econ value, and feeling better, and replicating a gene pool, and...) are all interesting, but how about just a face value: "that's what the other side derives from their pre-existing observations/logic/morality"?
I mean, this theory kind of *is* a subset of mistake theory, just with a strong presumption as to what sort of mistakes people make and why. And practically it works out more like mistake theory as it doesn't posit that political conflicts are irreducible and irreconcilable.
> Perhaps the ACX crowd is primarily left-of-center
Far left, the thought leaders are still fundamentally in coastal cities and think the furthest right silicone valley investor is some how a good baseline estimate of the entire rest of america, world, history of thought. Texas and where im from are purple yet I think its treated as if fly over country isnt allot more people.
There's a good chunk of this that feels wrong on its face, but I need to sit and really ponder it to figure out why.
What I can say off the cuff is that we tried that whole "give a little to take a little" thing in the realm of politics. It's called "pork", and people got so mad about it that Congress barred Congress from doing it. What you've written in the final paragraphs reminds me of that specifically. It was dumb to forbid pork and should be brought back in some manner.
Re the gender gap on the abortion question: I'm consistently baffled by the extent to which this is framed by both sides (but especially the pro-choice side) as men vs. women in a way that starkly implies that men have no vested interest in abortion being safe and legal. I'll concede there are no consequences directly *to the physical body* of male-bodied (or post-menopausal) people, but having the option of abortion can be *extremely* consequential to the lives of men who are or expect to be in sexual relationships with women. (Yes, some men feel free and able to escape the consequences of fathering a child without anything coming back to them. I think this is the exception, not the norm.)
"but having the option of abortion can be *extremely* consequential to the lives of men who are or expect to be in sexual relationships with women."
This is true, and I've suggested the Left do this:
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-democrats-use
But it's allergic to appealing to men as men, even when it wouldn't require any modification to the policies advocated for. Perhaps they think it's a slippery slope, if they encourage people to vote for legal abortion because it's good for them as men, they might start asking "is this good for me as a man" about other issues like affirmative action.
Yeah, and I mean also, some of the motives for men to support abortion rights are potentially selfish in nature, at the expense of women. Seems to me that channeling this would still be worth it if it leads to more victories for abortion rights, but some feminists may be worried about indirect later consequences to the dynamics between men and women in sexual relationships.
Yes, the difficulty you run into here is that pretty quickly you butt up against another long-time piety of both conservatives *and* many liberal feminists, which is that "a real man takes responsibility" for unexpected pregnancies. The man who talks a bit too enthusiastically about how abortion benefits him personally starts coming off less as a right-thinking progressive and more as a deadbeat dad, in practice or wannabe.
I recall a while back some activist group or other put out a video with Hollywood actors talking about why men should be pro-choice. The main response - which I saw from both social conservatives and liberal feminists - was basically: "Oh, so a bunch of handsome, wealthy, powerful men find it highly beneficial to be able to quickly and quietly get rid of inconvenient pregnancies, eh? Wonder why *that* could possibly be."
I basically agree with you and Turok. Legal abortion is good for men, and I support it for this reason among many others; an enlightened MRA should support abortion on demand. As Turok says, though, the Left won't appeal to men as a class, and as you say below, feminists may be worried about later consequences to the dynamics between men and women in relationships (though I bet they just hate the idea of doing anything that benefits men).
One adjustment that could salvage conflict theory is to posit that people's politics stem from self-interest at the identity level, not the personal level. A PMC liberal supports Ukraine because they identify as a member of the U.S. global hegemony; an anti-gov conservative supports cutting his own farm subsidies because he identifies as a self-sustaining yeoman. You could even argue that this identity-centric location is more rational than locating one's politics at the personal level, given that a single citizen's voting behavior only matters in aggregate with their identity cohorts.
Yes. The article is an argument for conflicts theory..just tribal/signal!ing conflict theory, not material self-interest conflict theoy.
It sounds like "conflict theory" might not mean exactly what I thought. For example, I thought "People want to defeat and humiliate anyone who has previously tried to defeat and humiliate them, especially anyone who succeeded." is a central example of conflict theory, whereas you seem to think that only direct material self-interest counts as conflict theory.
"Conflict theory" as historically formulated is that conflict is based in groups or classes rationally attempting to secure conflicting self-interests. According to this theory they are not acting rationally (e.g. the self-destructiveness of supporting conspiracy theories) and conflicts between their actual (even their psychological) self-interests, if they even exist at all, are certainly not the primary driver of political conflict.
My outgroup really does consist of villainous moochers!
Parts of this post feel like the sort of fundamental objections that a conflict theorist might exasperatedly respond to with their version of "Yes, We Have Noticed The Skulls".
You've incorrectly defined self-interest as economic.
Self-interest is evolutionary and competitive.
These behaviors are not mystifying when viewed as a game that prioritizes status and sex pairings based on status.
A number of these ideas are covered in Bryan Caplan's book "The Myth of the Rational Voter". He examines the "self-interested voter hypothesis" (closely related to "conflict theory") and finds it lacking. His preferred explanation is "rational irrationality" - it doesn't cost very much in expectation to be wrong about political questions (for the basically free-rider reasons you mentioned), so people are willing to indulge in believing what feels good to them.
The theory appears reasonable enough, although I think personal Covid decision making has been a striking counterexample. A lot of (mostly conservative) people lost their lives from refusing to get vaccinated, and a lot of (mostly liberal) people maintained stringent Covid precautions well beyond the point it conceivably made sense. This can't be explained by beliefs being "cheap", because in this case they had substantial costs.
In the US. Many other countries hit a compromise, rather than two extremes.
I think youre overly first-order about peoples self interest. This is especially clear with the Ukraine issue: Dont you think it matters in the long term whether your country is the world hegemon? And by a similar token: Is it so crazy to think that being on the winning team in domestic politics has benefits beyond psychodrama? Whether you personally benefit from any particular issue is secondary; thats just being a good soldier.
> This is especially clear with the Ukraine issue: Dont you think it matters in the long term whether your country is the world hegemon?
Sure, but is that cause better or worse served by throwing resources at some foreign conflict on behalf of the side that's inevitably eventually going to lose?
The Vietnam War is probably the closest historical analogue (the lack of actual US troops being an important difference). Much like the Vietnam War, opinions may reasonably differ on whether this whole horrid exercise is actually in the interests of the US or not.
I dont make a claim which side serves it better, thats not the point.
It seems like the psychopolitical framing could make productive political discussion difficult. It allows everyone to tell everyone else, "You don't hold your beliefs for your stated reasons. You only hold your beliefs because they flatter and soothe your ego." How can we falsify this charge to others, or even to ourselves? What is an appropriate response to all of this mind reading?
> Economists would answer that inflation benefits the poor at the expense of the rich - poor people tend to have net debts, and rich people net assets
I know it's only tangential to your point, but I'm not sure to what extent this is true. Some rich people do have a lot of debt, and the poorest people tend not to have much debt at all because no one will loan lots of money to someone with low income. (I think what matters more to the poor is wage stickiness, which might cause prices to rise faster than their incomes). And having assets only matters if those assets are cash or their appreciation doesn't increase when inflation does. E.g. housing is one of the prices that determines inflation, so if inflation is higher, your house's nominal price might be increasing more quickly as well.
Really thought-provoking essay which made me LOL or groan several times; your closing lines provoked both reactions simultaneously. Which was a bit painful actually but some antacid seems to be helping and anyway, kudos.
Also I'm here to salute, with admiration and a little jealousy, the stealth-Churchill-quote deployment.
Maybe I'm missing something here, why can't conflict theory include things that are valued for idiosyncratic, aesthetic or otherwise not *directly* material reasons? You defined it as material, maybe because it has roots in something Marxist-adjacent that's really wedded to materialism, but even so people ascribe monetary value to a whole lot of things that are not gold bars or a large house or medical care. People value all sorts of things that I personally wouldn't value, things have different levels of utility to different people, and so on.
If disagreements are fundamentally a conflict of what people value, isn't that still just conflict theory? And a lot of what people value is on that bulleted list of things you gave. The young people during covid who supported lockdowns valued "feeling their own identity group is heroic net contributors, and that their outgroup are villainous moochers." If you *want* to feel a certain way, you value it, and in fact will pay cash to feel that way, that's what charities are counting on. And if they'd pay for it, we're still just in conflict theory.
I place a lot of value on "avoiding situations where I feel like a sucker". The basic level response of the overcoming-bias crowd might be to say "you're being too risk averse, you should calculate the actual EV of taking that path, opportunity cost of doing that versus something else, etc". But my loss would actually BE higher, because if losing made me feel like a gullible dope I would get extra negative value from that outcome. Then somebody's "xenophobia" is the same thing, they could have a 100% accurate understanding of the economic consequences of immigration and the probabilities of which crimes might increase by what %, and if they made the "wrong" decision you might call it bias or mistake, but what the risk/loss tables didn't account for was that person valued the current aesthetics of his community, or maybe placed a large negative value on the outcome where "I generously welcomed these people into my community and now they're everywhere and act like they own the place and run stop signs and sit around on street corners smoking joints and now I feel stupid." This still seems like conflict theory being right and mistake theory being wrong, with a definition of material that includes anything a person values.
The refusal to engage with aesthetics - or dismiss arguments as merely "aesthetic" - makes so many debates moot from the get-go: we're going to remove a big old chunk of reality, possibly a very important part of our evolution - before we start arguing!
I actually wrote about this recently on my (single post) Substack. American politics is definitely rooted in status games, but I think the emphasis is different for both groups. It's really about the games for the Republicans and you get status automatically if you win. Meanwhile, the emphasis is about status for Democrats.
The problem with a theory that it's all psychological, is that you can interpret it in such a way that any conceivable belief-forming mechanism is indeed psychological.
Imagine a person who forms political beliefs only by building from the barest moral intuitions, and adjusting her credences in each political proposition by carefully reasoning through each of their relations and entailments. Also, she somehow consumes the entire human corpus of social science prior to forming any political beliefs so she won't be subject to motivated reasoning. Whatever belief she arrives at, we could say she only believes that because she likes to think of herself as a good and reasonable person, not subject to any of the common political biases.
I genuinely applaud Scott for admitting his theory is unfalsifiable and has no predictive content, but that's not the place to stop working on your theory!
> Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization.
That sounds like the "loss of geography" point Klein was making in that book, but I'd frame it as "people are now able to form consistent ideologies".
The worldviews that we have derived through coalition-forming are actually not that logically consistent. Maybe you mean consistent as in reproducible, not logically consistent?
Coalition forming isn't what I mean. I mean that people can start to make the rest of their object-level beliefs line up with their meta-level values. They can do this because they can easily talk to people, quite a few of whom have spent a long time thinking about precisely this topic.
For example, if you were a rural progressive who was just neutral on Israel, you can far more easily be persuaded that you should be anti-Israel after 7/10 because there's plenty of technology to connect you with people and communities who will believe roughly in what you do and will just tell you about how that's the consistent view with progressive ideology. Or perhaps, that community's view of what it means to be progressive.
> But it also predicts that nobody will try this in real life.
Hmmm. Is that true? Isn't this kind of how the tax system in ancient Athens worked, where the government would collect taxes by telling some rich person to fund a project, but they could get status for doing so? E.g. they would fund a warship, but also be in charge of operating it? I could be getting all the relevant details horribly wrong. But I also sort of get the impression that this is how some high-tax European countries operate, by having a strong social norm of everyone having a responsibility to pay taxes, and doing so being considered patriotic. (Again I could be very wrong here).
This is a great take. Could you help me unravel something: Lets say that a middle class worker supports a billionaire because that billionaire gives to charities that they agree with. Is this a counter-example? Or can this be explained in the framework? (I.E. "I'm part of the good group that believes in community support and so does the Billionaire so we're all good people?")
So, people are motivated to become respected members of identity groups, and to be respected within the group they must work to convince everyone else that this identity group has good qualities and should be respected and that the enemies of the group are bad? Does it then make sense to say that conflict theory is sort of true at the level of these groups? Each group is an entity in conflict with the other groups?
But how can we get over this bipartisanism? How can a person that's anti-illegal-immigration, pro-climate-change-action, pro-lower-taxes, pro-choice, pro-gun-control, anti-Putin, pro-vaxx, anti-woke and so on be able to feel ok about his position? Because that's the only way to really tackle the individual issue (unless there are real dependencies to other issues)?
It seems whenever you take one position these days, you are supposed to buy the whole package of positions about very different things. This undermines a democratic process of finding consensus heavily.
Political bipartisanism in the US is structural and has held true since the beginning of the country for structural reasons, the only new thing is that people are internalizing it more. We won't get rid of that without substantial changes to the form of government, for example instituting a parliamentary system.
I think Scott's story of how these bipartisan positions came to be internalized by their respective coalitions leaves out an important causal element in the purposeful excavation and destruction of subcultures as alternate centers of identity and self-esteem by the political coalitions, which was a both-sides thing but the left gets mostly blamed for because their tactics looked worse to the people who didn't buy into either side's.
This may be true for the US, but even there it seems less and less possible not to take on the full opinion package of either side. I remember some 20, 30 years ago both parties in the US had diverse opinions in their ranks, often driven by the interests of the politician's respective constituency.
These days, it seems like even in countries with proportional representation, it seems to be only "us" and "them". Even the media consumed by either side is outlawed by the other
Yeah, I wonder if the fact that there are increasingly only two poles in places like Europe is something intrinsic in the dynamic or a result of the outsized influence of the US in the West. I don't know how you'd go about untangling that.
You can't have bipartisanism if there's only one party.
Bipartisanism is even easier to sustain with only one party. There's no pesky actual other party to maybe not be the complete opposite of your party in every way.
...Why? If there is no meaningful opposition, there is no need to fight. The point is to eliminate conflict, no? People are free to have their own opinions, they just won't express them anymore because there's no point. Just look at Japan and how peaceful things are there.
Um, have you *seen* the Japanese internet? Not to mention bullying in schools, etc. There's a surface-level peacefulness, which is not nothing, but for some people, the world can never be inoffensive enough to not offend them, and Japan certainly hasn't learned the secret to not raising that kind of person.
But that discord is contained in places outside of regular society. As for the bullying, that's just a symptom of Japan's extremely hierarchial culture, and is present in workplaces as well. Or at least, it was; they are taking some steps to make things less soul crushing. Did you know they banned students from giving people nicknames? Not just mean nicknames, but all of them?
Still, all that hierarchy served a purpose. Costly power struggles are rare when there is an unquestionable hierarchy at every level of society. Order is maintained, and all is well.
I guess that just being aware of the problem is some defence against it.
Like, if you agree with Republicans on 70% of the issues, you need to be aware of the psychological pressure which is going to constantly be pushing you in the direction of agreeing with them on the other 30%. People you hate, and who hate you, are going to be arguing in favour of things you agree with, and it's sometimes going to be really hard to remember that you agree with them.
If you're aware of this then maybe you can defend your true beliefs against the tide, but if you're not then you'll probably just get swept away with it.
Or even just one issue you care a lot about. I'm pretty sure it was affirmative action that did it for me
I work on tax policy as my day job and I *strongly* disagree about the SALT analysis here. SALT is expensive, and it's eating up budget room for more popular, broad based tax policy (e.g. the Child Tax Credit).
GOP members from blue states (e.g. NY) have a lot of leverage in a razor thin majority, so they have made SALT their go-no go parameter for the tax rewrite, which will probably lead to money being spent there that GOP leadership and many Dems would prefer to go elsewhere.
The people with the most at stake are willing to blow up the tax bill for the sake of their constituents' very specific material interest.
I do remember thinking about the SALT cap and the reaction to it when it came to (relative) prominence. I often get the impression that when the PMC/upper middle class/haute bourgeoisie are caught bang to rights, they generally don't make too much fuss about it because they are smart enough to know how it looks to 'ordinary' people. Fundamentally, the SALT deduction isn't easy to defend and, knowing this, most of the beneficiaries don't make a big song and dance of it in public. Where the public aren't all that aware of somewhat arcane bits of the tax code (for example) making a fuss can cause them to cotton on and the results can be the opposite of what was intended. However, House Democrats did push hard for the cap to be raised and passed the Build Back Better Act which raised the cap to $80k. Only one Dem voted against. The public don't generally follow the minutiae of legislative debate so that's actually a good place to make your displeasure known.
In addition, the PMC are often personally or ex oficio part of informal networks where they can subtly lobby politicians and decision-makers without having to go onto the airwaves or write an op-ed to make their case. They use their position subtly to get what they want. So, just because there isn't a big hoo-ha about something doesn't mean that very strong representations aren't being made. They are, just in places where most people don't see them. If you know your local politician is on your side, there isn't any need to launch a campaign. All parts of the political spectrum do this which means that there isn't much fuss about it.
There is one psychological aspect of the anti-vax stuff that occurred to me during the pandemic which was inspired partially by Adam Curtis (someone who I am ambivalent about at best) and very short film he made (https://youtu.be/VrSQinf8Qto?feature=shared) about how, since Watergate. people are seeing conspiracies everywhere even when they don't exist. This isn't an original observation but I think people get enormous satisfaction from telling other people how the thing they like is actually bad. In this mode of thinking, to come over as a smart, clued-up kind of person you have to be a critical thinker always prone to trying to find a contrarian angle. Except maybe there isn't really enough unknown dodgy stuff out there so you end up trying to prove that black is white. To me, this is a legacy of Watergate, DDT, thalidomide etc. etc. I'm not saying that there aren't scandals waiting to happen, there always are. The interesting thing is that this conspiracist thinking used to afflict the left in the main, now the right are at it too maybe more so. It may also partially explain some of the more ludicrous examples of 'woke' overreach. "We were right about civil rights, so we're definitely right about latinx [or whatever]"
My overall feeling is, though, that for the first time since WW2, a lot of people in the West whose families have been fairly secure for generations are really starting to worry about their material position (not that it's disappearing or disappeared but that it could disappear in the near future). To me that's driven a lot of the polarisation we've seen recently. The rebalancing of global wealth away from the West has something to do with it. The push against 'woke' could be seen as desire to maintain the structure of society that existed when certain groups were did very well (who are now feeling precarious). Probably, though, even without 'woke' those times aren't coming back.
But yes, political persuasion is difficult these days due to the psychological ramifications of admitting you were wrong. "What else might I be wrong about?" "My credibility is shot". Maybe people feel it's better to defend an idea they suspect could be wrong rather than admit they were wrong? If you concede, the other side wins, you are no longer trusted and so all your other ideas are cast with suspicion. Whereas if you stick to your guns, maybe the other side might secretly think that you could be right. Perhaps also worsening material conditions make things worse because the potential consequences of being wrong are greater?
> Fundamentally, the SALT deduction isn't easy to defend and, knowing this, most of the beneficiaries don't make a big song and dance of it in public.
On the contrary, the fundamental case for SALT deduction is extremely strong. It just consists of the idea that you can't be taxed on something you've never possessed.
SALT deduction formalizes the idea that the state and federal governments are different entities, and the states outrank the federal government. That's it.
Imagine that you face state income taxes of 75% and federal income taxes of 90%. What do you think that should mean?
He meant it isn't easily politically rather than on the merits, what with the 'tax the rich' zeitgeist
Yes, that's it exactly. I wasn't referring to the economic or policy rationale.
I suppose some people can get to that model of SALT deductions.
I think the much more obvious and straightforward reading of SALT is as a giveaway to high tax jurisdictions.
NOW you finally understand ~Diderot~ [I meant Girard] and scapegoating. His overall theory may be useless, but his critical insight was this dynamic is essential for social cohesion and/or progress.
Do you mean Girard, or does Diderot talk about scapegoating too?
Doh! Yes, Rene Girard. I need to fact check, especially when jet-lagged…
Forgive me for paraphrasing, possibly uncharitably (as paraphrasing always carries such risk), but...
>People form beliefs based on biases and motivated reasoning...
...yes?
>...but the beliefs they form are genuine.
Yes. This is emphatically NOT an argument against conflict theory.
I mean, the whole argument seems in perfect concordance with, e.g., Marx's famous statement about "social existence determining consciousness". If you're not really disagreeing with [prototypical, stereotypical conflict theorist], then who are you actually disagreeing with?
(As a side note, businesses are already busy funding politicians to lobby them for various handouts, privileges and favorable laws, often in a zero-sum game against other businesses / industries. Using their existing influence to additionally ask for lower taxes comes at zero additional cost.)
The bit on free rider problems seems to me to prove too much. Consider the case of a unionized workplace during a contract negotiation. This analysis would suggest that, because of free rider problems, it would be irrational for each worker to strike or take other job actions over their potential material gains from a contract, so any such conflict can't be about material interests.
I think what's actually going on there is that a bunch of political organizing (like union organizing) is about overcoming collective action problems by building cultural affinity, conferring status, etc. Unions mobilize workers to strike by building a shared culture, conferring status on workers who strike and penalizing those who don't, etc. You could apply some of the same logic to e.g. donor networks - the fact that status-based tools are used to help mobilize people doesn't erase the fact that they might be getting used in the service of some underlying material interest.
I'm not sure where exactly Scott is coming down on what share of political disagreement is about conflict - whether this piece is supposed to purely be rejecting a Marxist "it's all class conflict through different lenses" frame (sure), or whether it's arguing that essentially none of our present-day political arguments are about underlying material interests.
My view would be that over time we've moved from a situation where most political arguments were pretty narrowly about material conflict (will Henry VI or Edward IV wear the crown of England and dispense the power and revenues it commands) to a situation where our politics is a mix of conflict-driven, values-driven, and mistake-driven arguments, with each of the three forming a substantial portion of our national stock of stuff to argue about.
The narrative you write about experts is annoying to me. I am not convinced that most "experts" were actually looking down on and humiliating average people as much as you claim. It might have felt like that because of social media, which would explain why this is a more recent phenomenon.
The theory does not need the experts to generally be people looking down on and humiliating others. All it needs is for experts to be part of a coalition which uses its association with experts as a means of humiliating those outside of it. Even if no single expert ever humiliated others in such a way, even if they universally opposed this, so long as experts tended to stay in the coalition and their presence and ideas continued to be used as humiliation fodder the account holds.
And there’s also at least a couple of deranged academics, scientists, public intellectuals etc. in each field. All it takes is one of those people to become prominent for this impression to grow.
I think the "experts" section is the weakest in the article by far.
What's interesting about Covid vaccinations and the Ukraine War is that the polarisation probably could have gone either way in the US.
If the Covid vaccine and the Ukraine War had come along in the second term of Jeb! Bush then I imagine he would have done pretty much the same things that Biden did, and being anti-vaxx and anti-war would still be left-wing positions today.
> and being anti-vaxx and anti-war would still be left-wing positions today
Anti-war, sure, but anti-vaxx? Really?? The left and the right aren't complete mirror images of each other. They do, in fact, have different values.
Also, Trump was the guy who started Operation Warp Speed, so according to your model the left would have refused to take the vaccine. They did take it anyways, because they're not complete morons.
> anti-vaxx? Really?? The left and the right aren't complete mirror images of each other. They do, in fact, have different values
Being anti-vaxx was traditionally a left-wing position even in the US, wasn't it? Long-haired hippies living in communes and embracing crystal healing over industrialised medicine?
It's still that way in Australia, where the least-vaxxed towns are the crunchy hemp-belt ones of northern NSW.
Exactly how being anti-vaxx became right-wing in the US in 2021 is still a bit of a mystery to me. The mainstream of both parties was fully in favour of mass vaccination, but somehow the right-wing loonies got out ahead of the left-wing loonies and were louder, which somehow made it a right-wing phenomenon. The defining moment was not the moment the first right-wing loony said "the vaccines suck" but the moment the first left-winger said "Man, those stupid right-wingers think the vaccines suck".
My read is that it was because the health experts were not afraid to say "close the churches" and yet were afraid to say "close the BLM protests". This made "health experts" read as part of a faction, and the other faction decided to reject everything they said as fruit of the poisoned tree.
Sounds plausibly accurate to me.
Great post, a new Scott Alexander classic.
The free rider problem mentioned here is exactly why socialist movements were so insistent on organizing entire workplaces and fields of labor into union sections - precisely to minimize the effect of those free riders. Of course, at least the assumption was that capitalists were doing much the same, though through more informal and social means.
In general, it was a part of the socialist movement's worldview right from the start that yes, there was a conflict, but there are also a plenty of people who hold a mistaken view - a mistaken view of their own class position, that is, i.e. workers who don't understand their interest lying in working-class organization and who thus had to be specifically recruited to the unions. The whole unions angle of traditional left-wing organizing and the counterposing of labor and capital is presumably less obvious in the US, where both the labor unions *and* the sector-related business organizations are less powerful within the society than in many European countries, where there are long traditions of formal negotiations between them precisely to defuse this conflict.
Also, the antivaxxers have often portrayed the vaccine/lockdown debate as a class confict, with the class they're opposing being the PMC technocrats ostensibly supporting vaccines or other Covid measures due to them being technocratic scientific management solutions aimed at increasing the power of technocratic management throughout the society and thus benefitting the PMC technocrats (a class extending, of course, over a variety of age classes).
Again, whether one agrees with this thesis or not, it's an example of negative class-formation, us vs. them, in a pure conflict-theory way. Furthermore, people into this framing usually interpret a lot of other issues through it, directly or indirectly - opposing "climatism" as even more technocratic management, opposing Ukraine aid since they see support for Ukraine as a part of globalist internationalism that wishes to tie more and more countries to technocratically led international organizations etc etc.
I would say that the biggest issue with your sketch of Conflict Theory is that it treats growth as a zero sum game: either the poor gain something, or the rich gain something, but never both. In reality, some policies are better across the board for everybody. For example, the flavor of market capitalism that we see in Europe, the US, etc, is clearly a Pareto improvement over the command economies of the Soviet Union and Mao era China. Public Choice theory seems like a better explanation to me for why policies that improve standards of living in the aggregate don't get passed.
This whole article seems to be based on a false equivocation. It switches between the motte of
"conflict theory is the belief that people disagree because they're trying to get what they want" and the bailey of "conflict theory is the belief that people are fully selfish rational agents like homo economics".
It provides the first definition in the intro to explain that mistake theory is the belief that people are just wrong about things, but as evidence against conflict theory it gives stuff like "liberals don't benefit from immigration so that can't be why they support it", completely ignoring the fact that the stated primary reason for this is altruism.
I feel like he's explained why he's not a conflict theorist by defining conflict theory so narrowly that hardly anyone actually is.
I've never particularly liked "conflict" vs "mistake". So much of politics doesn't really fit into either category. The two sides of the abortion debate don't believe the other side is making a mistake, they believe that the other side is fundamentally mistaken about an irresolvable values question. The "anti-vaxx" debate is partially about the question of whether particular vaccines work, but partially about the values debate of whether someone should be forced to undergo a particular medical treatment.
I think what Scott is arguing here is that these all count as "mistake theory" anyway but it doesn't seem like a useful classification. There's a big difference between "you are mistaken, minimum wages actually don't increase unemployment" and "you are mistaken, foetuses actually aren't people".
Agreed. It's a mixture of both mistake theory and conflict theory and other things like values, but I think it's closer to conflict than mistake.
It *feels* much different, but is it actually? I don't think people actually have differences in their *fundamental-level, reflectively consistent* values, outside of some weird cases like psychopaths. In practice it's often easier to get, for example, Christians to change their mind on values than on epistemic things like the inerrancy of the Bible.
This is my view as well. Conflict theory, to me, is thinking the world will be a better place if the other side loses. And it's often correct, given the convergence of values that social media has accelerated, and accepting one's values as premises! In any event, I always though "the fighting is the point" is the conflict theory, not that "my wallet" is conflict theory.
"It may even destroy your reputation and social life. But it does let you briefly feel good about yourself during your downward spiral. “Sure, I may have lost all of my friends and ruined any chance of anyone taking me seriously ever again, but at least I’m not one of the sheeple!” In the same way, people don’t strategically support political positions that raise their status later, they’re support whatever lets them feel good about themselves right now, however destructive it may be to their social standing"
You're implying this is a clash between impulsive short-sightedness and wise long-sightedness.
But from your own words it rather sounds like a clash between prioritizing internal self-esteem and prioritizing what others think of you. I don't think prioritizing internal self-esteem is short-sighted.
> people don’t strategically support political positions that raise their status later
The history of civil wars might highlight a different lesson.
Does it come across that I was quoting Scott?
Yes, it does.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/14/does-class-warfare-have-a-free-rider-problem/
I love it when Scott references his older work.
In light of the evidence that has come out since the Rootclaim debate, what is your current subjective estimate of the probability that COVID had a zoonotic origin (meaning in particular that that Furin cleavage site evolved naturally in animal hosts)?
Please don’t duck this question. If you can’t place it on one side or the other of 50.00%, I won’t believe you.
> Anyone with an X account is living part of their life in a weird psychodrama where millions of bullies are brute-force-attempting to find the most enraging possible attack on the most intimate parts of their identity at all times.
Thanks for explaining why I'm not on Twitter! 😃
> I think people are tough on crime partly because they don’t personally want to be crime victims. But then why do other people oppose them?
Because it lowers their rent! They could probably get mugged monthly and still come out ahead.
In my neighborhood every attempt to lower crime, clean up, beautify, add art, etc., is fought by renters because it would "gentrify" the area, which is another way to say that their rents would go up. I never thought people would fight to make their neighborhood worse until I saw it first-hand.
Renters vs. owners might be a pretty legit example of conflict theory.
Huh?
No rational description of vaccines would put them as "good" or "bad." Witness that no one is advocating the return of the smallpox vaccination.
Vaccination pits the real, non-zero potential from harm from the vaccination, after factoring in that some percentage of vaccines fail to protect vs. the real, non-zero potential harm from the disease, after factoring that there is a real chance the patient will never be exposed to danger.
You've got it backwards. It is precisely rational descriptions of vaccines which must put them as "good" or "bad".
That's because rationalism does NOT mean "proper reasoning". It's an ancient, clearly-defined philosophical view in which all sentences are either True or False, because that's necessary to do deductive reasoning. There are no probabilities in rationalism, only in empiricism. (Bayesianism is a much more-recent hybrid of rationalism and empiricism.)
> faith in the axiom of choice is the core of rationality
smh, the wokes have redefined terms again
#tralsegang
The term names a 2,500 year-old philosophical tradition. If you asked someone in the 18th century whether "rational" meant "good reasoning" or "faith in the axiom of choice", they'd say "both"; they weren't aware that there could be any other good way of reasoning. So every time you use the word "rational" today to mean "good reasoning", other people are given license to interpret that as "Boolean logic".
Using the semantic slippage between the long-accepted meaning of rational, and its modern folk-meaning, was a tactic of French post-modernists to attack modernity by calling High Modernism "rational", which it technically is, and then blaming that "rationality" on science, which is empirical.
I aware of allot of the debates, by dropping the word "tralse" I was implying my actually position
When you come across a unsolvable problem with a formal system you should find a simple edge, label it, figure out how to integrate it with your existing knowledge base
When grog asked what number of apples he had and grammically couldnt answer "he had none" in 1 word, he must invent the concept of 0; debts when they exceed your assets, negitive numbers. "i". Surreal numbers and defining flavors of infinity; etc.
"This statement is false" is "tralse"
I learned a new word today!
Huh? Is there some meaning of “the axiom of choice” in philosophy that is different from what mathematicians mean by it?
Because, as mathematics, it is only important in infinitary contexts far removed from any situations concrete enough to apply “rationality” to, rationality is about decisions.
Yeah, "excluded middle" would be more relevant here.
Notice the interpolation of "rationalism" which I did not mention.
When you say "rational", you're invoking rationalism, even if you don't want to. The vast majority of people in the US are still rationalists. Christianity is rationalist. The default behavior for most Americans is to categorize things as "good" or "bad", full stop.
Ah, I see your problem. You are dividing things into two camps and insisting I must belong to one.
I'm not saying you must belong to one. I'm saying that you shouldn't be surprised when many people classify things as simply "good" or "bad" which shouldn't be treated that way.
What has this to do with your claim about "rational"?
"Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected - it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people."
That's more like a consequence of conflict theory than a definition. Conflict theory, I argue, is more-importantly and more-fundamentally the belief that political disagreements can be solved not by compromise, but only by a battle between Good and Evil, which one side wins and the other loses. Also, Good always wins in the end, because mumble-mumble Ahura Mazda / the Good / God / World Spirit / historicism / social Darwinism.
Today, conflict theorists think that the kinder, gentler approach to this battle is to first try to win it by suppression of the other side; but if that doesn't work, you must resort to physical violence. (This is, of course, much easier if you've already convinced your side that there is no difference between debate and physical violence.)
If the belief that disagreements come from material conflict were the root of the problem, conflict theorists would still be open to compromise. Do a utility calculation and maximize utility. For instance, look at each sport individually and figure out how much advantage males have in it, and consider each trans athlete individually WRT their history of hormone treatment; and come up with criteria for judging individual cases that will balance the interests of cis-female athletes versus those of trans-female athletes. I think this is what most Olympic sports committees are already doing.
But no activists on either side are calling for this AFAIK. All demand complete capitulation to their interests.
Conflict theorists consider utilitarianism and compromise to both be mortal sins. They are out for total victory; anything less is unacceptable. In America, their archetype for political conflict is the Civil War. In the week of Trump's election, this manifested in a rash of blog posts in the online community I'm most-embedded in, which argued that (A) the election proved that most Americans are irredeemably evil racists, (B) peaceful democratic reform is therefore hopeless, but (C) anything other complete capitulation to every item on our moral agenda is unthinkable; therefore (D) [post trails off into silence].
The obvious unstated conclusion (D) was that it's time for civil war. I pointed that out to some of them, and was mobbed by dozens of leftists calling me a Nazi, misogynist, racist, supporter of slavery, et cetera. Most of their arguments (though there were very few of those) brought up the Civil War or WW2 as reference points by which to guide our present actions.
Conflict theory is the only theory of politics that's possible within the ontology that the vast majority of the world's population has always held. I could call that ontology "logocentrism", though strictly speaking logocentrism is just one manifestation of it.
Logocentrists believe that words cut the world at its joints, accurately and reliably enough that a sentence stated in natural language must be either True or False, without any numeric or qualitative quantifiers such as "one-third of" or "most". Not "99.9% of birds can fly", but "birds can fly."
A moral truth, to a logocentrist, is True or False. You thus cannot construct a utility equation out of moral truths, because they output only True or False, and it needs numbers. The only way to act morally, they think, is to create a fulfilment criteria for each of your moral truths, like "No one is homeless", and try to make all of these criteria True, with the assumption that none of them can ever possibly come into conflict. (That assumption is not a result of logocentrism; it's part of the cluster of ideas that always go together with logocentrism.)
The result is that a logocentric "moral system" is never more than an arbitrary collection of taboos.
So while I agree with Scott's arguments that political conflict isn't mostly selfish at the surface level, I think it's very soft on conflict theory, seeing it as a misapprehension, rather than as a philosophy by which liberal democracy is morally repugnant, progress is only made by civil war and the creation of a new authoritarian government, the costs of civil war need not be considered because war is temporary but progress is permanent, and war need not be avoided because one's own side is destined to win.
In other words, Scott isn't taking a conflict-theory view of conflict theory. So his argument will have no effect on conflict theorists. Not that any argument could; conflict theory teaches that arguments are inherently useless, and should only be engaged in dishonestly.
Conflict theory is a natural result of two observations. One, which was probably mostly correct for 9,000 years, is that only authoritarian governments were stable. The other is that your own society's present morality always appears more-moral to oneself than do its previous moralities, and one's private morality appears more-moral than all competing present moralities.
Its philosophical spelling-out began, so far as I know, in Zoroastrianism and Judaism; its ontology was formalized by Plato and by Christianity. It was rejected in Athens, Iceland, Venice, the Netherlands, and several places in the pre-colonial Americas; but didn't threaten to displace conflict theory until free markets in Europe proved even more-conclusively that compromise, in the form of mutual exchange and wage-labor, combined with individual liberty rather than social unity, were more-productive than theft or forced labor. Only then were the reactionary beliefs of conflict theory spelled out at length in Hegelianism, which was born of Lutheranism and Prussianism, and is fundamental to Marxism, American "progressivism", Nazism, and the "Social Justice" movement.
Hardcore conflict theory, which is not merely instinctual or empirical, but philosophical, is AFAIK uniquely Western. The far left is not wrong when it says that the West is uniquely oppressive. But the West is uniquely oppressive because it's unique in having religions and philosophies which elevate conflict theory to a moral necessity. The far left and the far right both try to use more-rigorous conflict theory to solve the problems created by conflict theory, which is why their cures are worse than the disease.
Conflict theorists tend to think utilitarianism is daft on its merits, like I do, regardless of whether or not it is a "mortal sin" due to opportunity cost.
In my experience, nobody who understands utilitarianism thinks it's daft. Tell me why you think it's daft, & I'll tell you how you misunderstand it.
For starters, utilitarians use the base assumption that all human lives are more or less equal in value, which goes against the moral intuition of most human beings. In reality, different human lives have different amounts of value, and these amounts vary greatly. (Don't get me wrong, you might have to tease this out of people, and ask them the right questions with the right phrasing. And even then some people are stubborn enough that they won't admit they feel this way. But actions speak louder than words.)
So the metaethical framework that makes sense to you is ethical egoism? Since you're founding things on a moral intuition that logically can't be objectively true for "most human beings".
Actions speak louder than words. I think actions show people's morality more than empty words do, and looking at the morality of humanity expressed through their actions, I think I am on solid ground saying that people generally fall into the same category I do when it comes to this issue.
This basically means, though, that you believe that two people or groups can be in conflict and *both* sides are completely morally right! This also goes against the moral intuition of most human beings, at least these days.
> vice-signal
Virtue signals are already vices; canceling is just gossiping to new exciting heights and ANY level of gossiping is unethical
> Being a conspiracy theorist doesn’t raise your status, in the sense of making people like you more or giving you access to cool parties. It may even destroy your reputation and social life. But it does let you briefly feel good about yourself during your downward spiral. “Sure, I may have lost all of my friends and ruined any chance of anyone taking me seriously ever again, but at least I’m not one of the sheeple!”
Conspiracy theorists are very very kind ... to me
Your taxes (most likely) did not materially go up because of the 2017 SALT changes. The AMT changes more than offset it until the $1-2M income range.
Your taxes just didn't go down like they would have if you lived in low-tax state.
> The GOP thought it was funny to mess with the one tax deduction their enemies actually liked
Are we just forgetting about the deduction for employer-provided medical "insurance"?
I have a lot of thoughts but I'll restrict myself to one.
I think that the US is a bit unique in terms of how bad people are at sticking up for their class interests. Nowhere else that I know of do you get quite so many rich people voting for the left-wing party and so many poor people voting for the right-wing party.
The American upper middle class (and in particular the White upper middle class) is astonishingly poor at advocating for its own class interests, hence why I've never heard of this SALT stuff until now.
People who invoke conflict theory explicitly are usually trying to persuade people to vote in line with their class interests -- usually trying to get poor people to vote left, but sometimes trying to get rich people to vote right.
I think this pattern is shifting somewhat, perhaps due to American influence on culture. In the 2024 French elections, the RN had its best numbers among people with the lowest income. Of course, the left wing coalition also did well among those voters; it was the wealthiest people who tended to vote for Macron's centrist coalition or the traditional center-right Republicans.
I haven't seen any results by income from last weekend's German election, but this breakdown (https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demographics-explained-in-charts/a-71724186) by education level has 28% support for AfD among people with "basic education" and only 13% among people with "higher education" (I'm not sure exactly what degrees that includes). If you add AfD plus CDU/CSU, you get 60% support in the basic education category and only 40% in the higher education category.
There was obviously a red state/blue state cultural divide before Trump, but things have obviously changed quite significantly in the past 10 years. I just went looking through CNN's exit polls from last year's presidential election. Trump won non-college white voters by a margin of more than 2-to-1; Harris won every other category. Republicans used to dominate among wealthy voters; that's not the case anymore.
It's hard for me to say that people don't care about the economy; I think the typical swing voter (probably not well-represented among the ACX commentariat) just wants to punish the party in power if he or she feels that things aren't going well. I think a negative perception of the economy drove the 2024 result more than any sort of reaction against wokeness (as many on the right would like to believe). But for a lot of voters, they just don't care that much about the economic stuff, and don't see the government as likely to have a huge impact on any of that. So they vote on the culture war stuff.
I think it's largely down to respect. People want to vote for the party that respects them, or at least disrespects them less than the other party.
"I think that the US is a bit unique in terms of how bad people are at sticking up for their class interests."
The U.S. is also uniquely wealthy relative to the rest of the world. Those two things might not be a coincidence.
In some sense this feels like it makes the following mapping:
Conflict Theory -> Orthogonality
Mistake Theory -> Non-Orthogonality.
I think it's worthwhile to write a post like this, in part because I shudder to think how commonplace it may be to reject "conflict theory" (I will call it materialism from now on), so someone saying outright they don't think politics has a material basis, and arguing from there, is helpful for me. Personally, if we could objectively conclude political discourse is immaterial, I think that might actually drive me insane. I may not know much or care to know much about politics, but to me, it *must* be material. (It might not be a surprise that I was once a leftist, and voted for Bernie in 2020)
So, here I will dispute some things I noticed that, thought rooted in truth, display a bit of anti-materialist motivated reasoning:
First of all, on the "free-rider" problem, and I think this generally applies to the whole essay, we need to distinguish between the ideologue and the rational subject of materialism. I don't think materialism denies the existence of ideologues, people with "irrational" attachments to an ideology. For one thing, Marx probably spent an irrational amount of time trying to create a materialist theory of history. Your counter to this is that propaganda cannot be a part of conflict theory. Why?
More generally, I think America's material abundance and lack of a rival power since the 90s means this is not a great time for materialism, I will admit that. But I think that it's the exception that proves the rule. If when the material becomes less important, politics become less material, that is actually evidence for materialism, especially if the political environment feels more "insane" and irrational as a consequence. That being said, some of the arguments you made feel a bit sloppy, and you should've stopped to consider how absurd they are. That national elections are decided on vaccines, and that there are "100s of millions" of antivaxxers in America seems like a vast overstatement to me, I could be wrong, but I haven't seen data on that.
When it comes to inflation, yes, that is classic materialism, full-stop. There's no need to insist there must be a conflict there, the wealthy and the middle class, basically anybody with a mortgage or a car loan, don't want high interest rates, while the poor and the middle class don't like CPI inflation, or high rents. It's really that simple. The "psychopolitics of trauma" argument would heavily penalize swing voting, since it would require you to admit you were wrong before. This seems especially true in the past decade, where every election has been a referendum on Donald Trump, so to change your vote would mean doing a 180 on the central figure of our time. And yet, people did change their vote, and most who did so explicitly cited inflation!
More generally, the idea that a plurality of Americans will still vote for Trump when political discourse has been very anti-Trump for a decade has an easy explanation under materialism. The fact that, as you discuss, political discourse is immaterial is probably very alienating for the median voter! They just don't care about what gets discussed on social media, be it wokeness, Gaza, the Trump trial, etc. But they concluded that a change of government might fix inflation, and therefore voted to change the government. To refute this effectively, the "psychopolitics of Trauma" camp would have to propose an immaterial explanation for the election result. At the same time, they would have to explain why the very immaterial online political discourse, which has had an anti-Trump bias over the last 10 years, was not effective, ie if politics is immaterial, and there are 10-100s of millions of people who really dislike trump, why couldn't any of them find an argument that could break through!
The problem with materialism is that it is too simple, people with too much time on their hands who like to argue about politics do not really appreciate that.
My philosophy is that when people tell me what their politics are about, I take their word for it. If I see a Twitter account that's always calling things "demonic," I assume that that's their political priority. People on the far-left will tell you "they're really just mad about the (real) decline in unionization and the (imagined) defunding of public schools."
There's a common assumption that "culture war" issues are irrelevant to people's lives. That's true for many, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unless you're a Palestinian immigrant or a Jew planning to emigrate to Israel. But a lot of the "culture war" on places like Twitter is young men and young women talking about dating. You can say those people are wrongheaded or don't have solutions, but you can't say the thing they're talking about is irrelevant to their lives.
I mean I can't be epistemically certain about any of this. For that reason I am just going to be very blunt, instead of pretending I have strong evidence for this.
When I think about the people you're talking about who see the culture war as directly impacting their lives, I imagine if they lost their internet access, or if they otherwise had those beliefs in a pre-internet world. I think they would either be committed quite quickly, or their "culture war" problems would go away.
So the question is: are social media posts representative of the general political consensus/debate? There is a great SSC reddit post that suggests not: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/
US swing voters may be driven by material considerations more than core voters but it's not in a very classic "conflict theory" way. Instead of finding a coalition that supports their interests and supporting it until this is no longer the case, they defect from party to party whenever they feel uncomfortable, without involving themselves much in the internal running of whatever party they currently support. The psychology behind *this* behavior seems to be "neither party cares either way about the well-being of the majority of Americans nor ever will, so we play tit for tat with the hostile aliens by never letting them finish what they want to do unless they keep us comfortable at the same time", as far as I can tell. Swing voters seem to act on approximately this theory in concert even though they neither are a natural class nor have any organizational apparatus other than the dissemination of a number of variations of this theory as memes.
I mean the psychology you describe is explicitly materialist, but on the other hand, I will admit that "materialism" in general would expect this group of people to organize around this shared interest to expand their power. I think the problem here is quite simple: it's genuinely hard to become more powerful in American politics than to be a swing-state swing voter. You would have to get a full-time job in national politics or otherwise spend a lot of time volunteering (indeed, I did textbanking for Biden in 2020, campaigns clearly think the best use of volunteer time is to send texts begging swing state voters to turn out for them).
I would say that this is because American democracy is small-c conservative, there are explicit checks on how radical the party in power can be ("be" in the sense of actions, not rhetoric).
Is this is a good or bad thing? At one time I would say bad, but consider how Biden received an offer from moderate gop senators like Romney before passing his first stimulus bill. They would support a much smaller stimulus bill (like 1+ Trillion less). Biden instead passed a stimulus that people correctly predicted would exacerbate inflation. This time, even though all swing states voted Trump, I think they all have at least one democratic senator (not 100% on that though), and voters in AZ, MI and WI split their ballots to elect dem senators. From a consequentialist perspective, this all seems to support the argument that political outcomes are driven by materialism.
The bit about status certainly holds for the UK a generation ago and probably earlier, when the middle and upper classes were happy to be paid below their market value in exchange for status. You work your way up in the civil service from a shared office to your own office to an office with carpets to having your oak desk replaced by a teak one, until you reach the really high levels where you have your own company-supplied hat stand in your office. Of course pay rises at each level, you generally have enough to raise a family on, and of course the service has a decent pension scheme, but your main reward for climbing the ranks is status.
At some point the status bit no longer worked and managers in private industry started getting and demanding higher pay, and nowadays government jobs struggle to attract and keep the best people to the point where we pull the trick of employing them as consultants or setting up QUANGOs (quasi-non-governmental organisations, the first word is doing a lot of work here) so they're not bound by civil service payroll restrictions.
I think it's incorrect to assume there's limited value in status compared to pure wealth. Using the taxes thing as an example: a long time ago, progressives implicitly or explicitly realized that paying extra taxes was a vehicle for gaining more political power overall, by intertwining the well being of tycoons and industries directly into the state. BigCorp is paying 10% tax to make sure that the government now relies on BigCorp existing for a source of consistent revenue. BigCorp may then try and lower that tax rate to save some pennies, but it is incentivized to keep it around rather than entirely remove it.
I also would theorizethat the status that comes with winning arguments or feeling humiliated or traumatized online probably relates to mate selection in some areas.
You should look at campaign ads and not just media coverage. If you look at campaign ads or press releases by politicians it's clear that political candidates (in particular, GOP politicians in swing districts in high tax states) think their constituents care more about SALT than vaccines or Ukraine. Similarly, if you look at ads, candidates obviously believe voters care a lot about Medicare but this is not really reflected in media coverage. You are relying heavily on media coverage for deriving insight for how much people care about issues, but media is partly entertainment and journalists seem to get bored by tax or healthcare policy. It's more fun to write about issues of global significance or gossip but that doesn't mean this is what drives politics.
None of this is to say that material interests are all there is to politics, but I think you are underestimating the degree to which the major coalitions in US politics are determined by conflict over taxes and entitlements that do basically follow material interests.
This seems all right but it begs the question of whether democracy is compatible with cheap mass publication. The sad truth is that you need really strong norms - like those we have around religion - to stop people from insulting those with other political beliefs. Indeed, as you've observed everyone needs a story as to how they can obviously be right yet other people still disagree. It's really hard to answer that without insulting some one.
Sure, evidence can occasionally cut through but enough?
Bigger stick for enforcement only helps if people are thinking far enough ahead to see it. Winning strategy here might turn out to involve AI and microtransactions, eroding bad habits through the immediate feedback of a series of petty inconveniences.
"Sorry, you've already used up your allotment of death threats to strangers. More will be available in two weeks, or you can unlock premium features immediately by making a sincere personal apology to some member of the outgroup you've previously wronged."
I understand why you didn't want to do this, but for me, a discussion like this is incomplete without discussing the fact that one tribe is actually wrong about most things. I feel like the mistake theory/psychopolitical theory would result in a fairly random scattershot with each side being right about some things and wrong about others. Your example about (environmentalists + gun-haters + atheists) sounds like you're suggesting it could have gone the other way by random chance, but then why is it that the side that is wrong about climate science is also the side that is wrong about god, vaccines, tariffs, immigration, drugs, and Brexit?
I'm aware that the simplest answer is "you, Fion, are biased. Your perspective that conservatives are 'wrong' about all these things says more about you than about them. You are so fully indoctrinated into one side that you believe your side is right about everything and the other side is wrong about everything." And sure, I can't disprove that answer in one short comment (although I will note that I think the Left is wrong about plenty of stuff. Just nowhere near as much as the Right. I also make the unproven claim that I've done a heck of a lot of analytical soul-searching, questioning all my beliefs until I sweat blood and ended up developing several views that I wouldn't want my left-wing coworkers to know about. My point is I'm not just a liberal drone.) But even while acknowledging that I can't disprove the simplest answer, a discussion about mistake/conflict theory and/or polarisation that doesn't address the elephant in the room (that one side is wrong about everything) just seems incomplete to me.
The second-simplest answer is probably that educated people joined the left/liberal/centrist coalition and less educated people joined the conservative/right coalition, and educated people are better at being correct than less educated people. Is that all it is? It still doesn't seem satisfying. Why aren't educated people split more evenly between the two coalitions? Is it something to do with conservative economic positions benefiting the powerful, so they adopt whatever propaganda will get sufficient masses on-side, and to convince the masses to abandon their material interests is easier if you target the less educated masses? That sounds kind of like reinventing conflict theory, though, and it has the problem that bad policies on, for example, trade and immigration, probably hurt the rich just as much as the poor.
I dunno. I don't have an answer. But I'd like to see an essay-length treatment by somebody smarter than me that takes into account what I see as one of the most crucial observations in this debate.
"Why aren't educated people split more evenly between the two coalitions?'
College graduates voted 56-42 for Kamala over Trump, while white college grads voted 53-45 for Kamala over Trump. It's biased to one side but not overwhelmingly so. The gap in education is about as big as the gap between men and women and less than gaps based on race or religion.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0
This is true. In fact I am more mystified by how the educated people can be split so evenly between the coalitions and yet one can be so anti-intellectual and so often wrong on the merits. I wonder if someone has done a poll that breaks this down on axes like what area the degree is in or which institution awarded it.
DEI, transgenderism, insane housing prices in blue cities, mentally ill homeless encampments, MeToo, student loan forgiveness, eviction moratoriums, etc.
ETA: I do agree, though, that the Republican Party is doing next to nothing to appeal to educated people. Surely some of those people's loyalty is vestigial, from the time the GOP was the suit-and-tie upper-class party.
Nowadays, educated people are people who read blogs, not newspapers or books. Pretty much all of Musk's ideas come from the blogosphere.
I'd say the Republican and Democratic party positions are wrong about equally often on the supposed expertise of politicians: how to get a desired change with a policy intervention. However, when it comes to pure epistemic facts-about-the-world questions, the Democrats and their core supporters, while not perfect, are head-and-shoulders better than the Republicans and their core supporters.
ETA: Addressing particular things above: While a lot of the rhetoric and the larger policy goals related to #MeToo may have been questionable, and it eventually degenerated into whipping up cancel mobs, the fact is that the core activity of #MeToo uncovered a lot of actual, legitimate crimes. DEI and transgenderism-as-currently-constituted are also driven by people's real problems, and their issues are mainly those of rhetoric and tactics/strategy. Insane housing prices in blue cities are purely because of coalitional misalignments, the blue *party* doesn't particularly want them that way. Mentally ill homeless encampments are also not something hardly anyone wants, just nobody knows how to get rid of them in a humane way--to the extent Democrats are doing anything wrong here it's just inaction bias. Student loan forgiveness and eviction moratoriums also fall under the umbrella of non-solutions (that sound like solutions) to real problems. So all of these fall under bad *instrumental* rationality (often, i think, for the reasons given in the OP) rather than bad *epistemic* rationality (which is less directly affected by those reasons).
>Mentally ill homeless encampments are also not something hardly anyone wants, just nobody knows how to get rid of them in a humane way--to the extent Democrats are doing anything wrong here it's just inaction bias.
It's not inaction bias. It's a combination of 1) naive ideas about what the homeless are like and 2) not caring about people who suffer because of the homeless. Both of these are subject to motivated reasoning and are an example of how motivated reasoning can be 95% of the way to conflict theory. If your reaction to everyone complaining about the homeless is to minimize their concerns, that is in the limit indistinguishable from not caring if they suffer.
I think the people involved in responding mostly minimize people's concerns to make themselves feel more comfortable about the fact that they're not going to do anything either way.
I think they painted themselves into a corner with that "mass incarceration" thing. They said they wanted less incarceration. They said, "no, that doesn't mean releasing Jeffery Dalmer, we're talking about low-level, non-violent offenders." The lesson of the last decade is that low-level non-violent offenses can seriously harm quality of life, particularly in the urban environment of busses, subways, etc.
I'm not able to distinguish between the epistemic and the instrumental there, but I'll tell you what the gap is, at least from the ground level 'uneducated lower-middle/working class white person' viewpoint.
Bike Guy.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/total-happiness-in-the-world-increased
That only works (I was happy then because the other guy probably needed it more) when you are *not* negatively impacted by having your bike (or other property) stolen. When it's not going to be a financial drain. When you can get to work or school or wherever by walking or taking a bus or you can call a friend to give you a lift. When you're able to buy a new bike (or a good second-hand one) fairly soon to replace the stolen one.
When, in short, you're well-off enough to be able to tra-la-la away thinking that the theft was probably a single act of desperation by someone in real need, and so you can pat yourself on the back for your virtue.
I'm sure the cartoonist would have protested that they're not well-off or rich. But I repeat: if the theft of your property does not inconvenience you more than mildly, you are well-off.
I realise this is ironic, due to my dislike of using personal stories, but years back I had my purse stolen. And this was a real harm to me, because it had all my money in it (and I was unemployed at the time so this was all my ready cash), my bus ticket, and this was in the days before mobile phones so I had no means of contacting anyone to get home; I didn't have friends or contacts in the city that I could just turn up on their doorstep to get shelter for the night or a drive home. (The only good thing was that this was in the days of phone boxes on the streets and reverse-charge calls, so I was able to ring home and get my brother to come collect me).
Believe you me, I was *not* walking off tra-la-laing about how the thief probably needed it more than me and was probably happier and so the total happiness in the world had increased.
It's much more likely the bike was stolen by someone who is a professional thief, or a junkie who sold it for drug money. Or even someone just looking for some fast, easy cash.
https://bikefinder.com/en/articles/how-to-avoid-bike-thieves-common-bike-theft-hotspots-and-prevention-tips/
And the "la-la-la total happiness" attitude is why we can't have nice things, because the thieves don't give a flying fuck about the total happiness in the world levels, and will continue if not discouraged.
And this is the difference between Red and Blue, or the nice Democrats versus the dumb old Republicans, or liberals versus conservatives, or however you want to slice it up: people who can shrug off loss because it's not really harming them, versus people who have been harmed.
Leaving aside the "so often wrong on the merits" thing (because both sides are so often wrong on the merits)... the thing you're ignoring is self-interest. Of course educated people are going to vote Republican, since educated people make more money and Republicans promise lower taxes.
The current (and relatively new) equilibrium of US politics is that the Republicans try to staple together a winning coalition by appealing to the self-interest of the rich and the prejudices of the poor, while the Democrats try to staple together a winning coalition by appealing to the self-interest of the poor and the prejudices of the rich.
Unfortunately, education doesn't mean understanding.
I mean, education is an attempt to make people understand, but that attempt often fails. Sometimes because the school sucks. Sometimes because the students suck. Whatever is the reason, we get a lot of educated people who know the right keywords, and know how to write long sentences, but their opinion on most things is essentially the same as it was before being educated; maybe except for some very narrow set.
This is how you get the people who "believe the science" (because they are neither smart enough to actually *do* the science, nor humble enough to admit that they actually believe what other *people* tell them). Ironically, those are also people happy to dismiss any inconvenient science, because from their perspective (which seems supported by their personal experience) science is a merely a consensus of the high-status scientists, so if something feels low-status is definitely cannot be that "science" thing they are supposed to believe.
So at the end, some of them join the current mainstream consensus, and believe that this makes them the true scientists, while others do their "research" at conspiracy theory websites and believe that this makes them the true scientists. Both of them feel smarter than the other, neither is interested in technicalities such as looking for opposing evidence.
Being educated isn't that much of an advantage in being right , since it makes you more susceptible to castle-in-the-air philosophies like Marxism and Libertarianism.
In the United States, the political right has been trying to build an alternative reality for a long time. Fox News was founding in 1996. The messaging--that you cannot trust the “mainstream media”--is sufficiently widespread that is most conversations you can just use the acronym MSM and everybody will know what you mean.
I’m not sure a general theory of politics can be expected to explain this, but let me take a stab at it. If your constituents are unhappy about something, there are two ways to conceptualize the problem. You can view it as a policy problem, and try to implement policies that will fix it. Or you can view it as a public relations problem, and try to come up with suitable messaging to keep people from blaming you for the problem.
The Republican Party, starting with George W. Bush, classifies most problems as public relations problems rather than policy problems. Or to put it another way, they view their constituents as marks to be fleeced rather than as constituents to be served. I believe that the underlying cause is the Republican dedication to tax cuts for the rich. If you only care about the interests of the top 1%, but need to get at least 50% of the vote, then things that concern the remaining 99% of the population are not things you want to fix, but you don’t want these concerns to convince voters to vote for your opponent instead of you. It’s easy to reach for a public relations fix.
Given that your post leads off with a woefully uniformed description of the America media environment in 1996 and by implication, today, its not surprising that so many of the follow-up conclusions are wrong.
What was the media like when Fox was launched? What was the pitch? It was simple, the mainstream media was significantly to the left of the average American. On top of that, CNN was pretty boring and MSNBC was launching as the left wing news place. In addition the appetite for conservative voices was already demonstrated on talk radio with people like Rush Limbaugh flourishing. So yeah, they were picking up the $100 bill on the ground of being the sole mainstream TV news source not on the left.
This piece (along with Psychopolitics of Trauma) is one of those wonderful Scott articles that takes something innately but fuzzily obvious and puts it into the perfect words that your mind has always been searching for
I think people like conflict theory because it gives you a clear strategy: unify everyone with the same self-interest and fight a war (using soft power first, hard power if necessary) and either destroy the other side or force a compromise that feels palatable.
Under mistake theory, you are left performing some combination of therapy/dialectics/social work with every single person who disagrees with you until you've hopefully converted enough people to some level of agreement. In an environment where we are already extremely sorted along ideological, geographical, and information-gathering lines. Whoever's to blame, we may be too separated and polarized to ever reach meaningful consensus again.
Mistake theory has been pretty successful, though. We woulnt have democracy, or a semblance of it, without mistake theory
I'm not sure that's true. I think democracy, at least modern liberal democracy was forged by people who believed in conflict theory. Ie, they thought everyone had a sense of their own rational self-interest and all political theory was mostly about balancing those interests when they compete through a series of checks and balances. Our system wasn't designed to accommodate people who will happily commit some measure of political suicide out of spite, or delusion, or mass psychosis. And I think the issues we are dealing with now demonstrate that.
Some philosophers, particularly the ancient ones, had some deeper ideas about the problems inherent in building democratic consensus, but they weren't the people being consulted in drafting our constitutions.
Full strength conflict theory is war. Democracy is based on replacing war-war with jaw-jaw...debates, rather than battles. But that doesn't meant that the conflict aspect dispears entirely. The British house of commons has traditions of polite verbal engagement with the other "side" ...and has literal, ,physical sides. A zero conflict system would just be the bureaucracy running everything.
I'm not sure we are disagreeing. I'm okay with some amount of conflict. I'm just stating that our system appears to be set up to adjudicate conflicts among rational competing interests, not conflicts between people who are treating their political preferences as a proxy for their entire psychological and social persona. Its not set up to deal with people who will make irrational decisions out of spite, or mass psychosis, or to signal virtue, and consequently it is failing.
Democracy works by allowing us to mask our conflict theory as mistake theory.
If democracy openly becomes 49 wolves and 51 sheep voting on what's for dinner, then the mask is off and there's no point participating in the process any more, the sheep will try to run away and the wolves will try to eat them. But as long as everyone can pretend that they're just honestly and disinterestedly trying to decide what a nutritionally optimal meal for a medium-sized mammal might be, we can all pretend we're getting along.
I mean, I like to think we are all the same species. But even if your analogy holds, we appear to have an honest-to-god "sheep voting for wolves" situation on our hands.
Isn't it just wolves voting for wolves?
Maybe they thought they were wolves, but a lot of people who would have sworn a month ago that the government never provided anything to them their entire lives apparently didn't realize that the things included in that category extended to "government jobs, government subsidies on services, government contracts." How they could have failed to recognize this, why democrats are so cosmically terrible at helping them understand this, this is all fair questions, but it is certainly the case that people are feeling consequences that, while quite predictable, do not seem to be what they expected.
"Wokeness is the single issue that makes people most passionate. It has some direct material consequences - affirmative action gives some jobs to blacks rather than whites. But nobody cares about it because of the consequences - affirmative action lasted fifty years, and Richard Hanania ably chronicles how none of the five Republican administrations during that period bothered to shut it down, because it would have cost them political capital which they preferred to save for higher priorities. People only started caring about wokeness once it started interfering with non-material, seemingly trivial issues. Pronouns in bios. Statues torn down. Trans women in sports. Disabled LGBT Women Of Color Awareness Months. On-site sensitivity training."
I don't remember Hanania saying that, and if he did he was wrong with regards to the Reagan administration. (but right with regards to the Bushes) See "Right Turn: William Bradford Reynolds, the Reagan Administration, and Black Civil Rights" by Raymond Wolters.
Reagan _wanted_ to shut down federal affirmative action, and actually drafted the executive order to that effect -- but then it leaked, and there was unexpected pushback, and the president backed off.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/01/21/ronald-reagan-affirmative-action-dei/
This seems like a nice article describing an erroneous way of thinking. Oddly enough, Scott seems to have engaged in such thinking, himself, as I've noted here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2024/comment/47588380 and here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2024/comment/75048003.
Amusing example of international relations analyzed through the lens of conflict theory: https://x.com/Hezbolsonaro/status/1838698521068999103.
I find this pretty plausible, but there is one problem: If this didn't used to be true, say, fifty years ago, back when we were less polarized, then something changed. Something has made this a worse problem than it used to be. Figure out what that something was/is, and that might reveal a path toward reversing or reducing it.
Most of the people with whom I've discussed this seem to think that the internet is responsible, but the problem is that political polarization began in a period (the 1980's) before the internet was a thing. Economic factors might be more plausible, but which one's correlate to political polarization?
It isn't absolute or relative poverty; absolute or relative unemployment; differences in education; region of origin or the urban/rural divide. The problem with urban/rural as an explanation is that that difference began all the way back in the 19th century, so something would have to have made this more relevant recently.
Any other plausible explanations?
Conceivably, the decline of religion led people to seek meaning and "community" in politics and political blocs.
That just kicks the can down the road. If that is correct (and I don't know that) then what caused religion to decline?
Liberalism and neoliberalism, probably.
We'll always be kicking the can down the road if you look at it that way
>then what caused religion to decline?
>X
>then what caused X?
>Y
>then what caused Y?
etc etc
Anyways, the X is the Enlightenment, in my opinion
I'm asking what caused the behavior of a population of people, and you are providing an answer that seems to amount to more behavior by that same population of people. In other words, your explaining the behavior of a system by referring to behavior of that system. I'm looking for causal factors from outside that system--that is, not the result of previous behavior by those same people. In asking for this, I am assuming that populations of people have external reasons for behaving the way they do--that ultimately, population behavior is rational in the sense that it is a response to some set of environmental conditions. I am asking for clues as to what those environmental conditions might have been.
Something changed in the political environment changed sometime between 1979 and approx. the 2000's. Anyone have any ideas?
>I'm asking what caused the behavior of a population of people, and you are providing an answer that seems to amount to more behavior by that same population of people.
I might be misunderstanding you. Assuming you're referring to my 'Enlightenment' answer,
1. I meant to only answer the specific question of what caused religion to decline, not your broader question of what caused political polarization. In hindsight I wasn't clear about that
2. The Enlightenment started long before anyone born in the 1900s so it can't be referring to behavior by the same people
I don't know if political polarization is that recent of a phenomenon anyways. The conflict between conservatives and liberals goes back a long time, the vast majority of which far fewer people were enfranchised. Those who did have any political influence were probably politically polarized to a similar degree as us, and the rest of us peasants started behaving the same way soon after gaining some degree of political power. If I have it right and you have it right that 1979-2000s was notably non-polarized, the better question would be what was exceptional about 1979-2000s
Fifty to sixty years ago you had Vietnam, you had riots in the streets, multiple political assassinations, various forms of Civil Rights brouhaha and so forth. You had decidedly non-centrist politicians like Hubert Humphrey and Barry Goldwater close to the levers of power.
It doesn't strike me as a golden age of low polarisation. Perhaps what you can say is that the big dividing line was less aligned with the Republican-Democrat line than it is today.
Ok, that's a good point. The '60's were highly polarized, arguably still more so that we are today (they aren't shooting people on campus yet). But I remember several decades when riots, assassinations, and other forms of overt brouhaha were relatively rare. It wasn't really until the rise of the Tea Party in the 2000's that American politics started to become overtly polarized. So that still requires an explanation.
If it's that recent, "widespread internet / social-media use" is an option. Shorter ping times and less editorial moderation might reasonably have done much the same for https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ as what World War One did for the spanish flu: severe symptoms no longer result in isolation, so evolving pathogens have less incentive to keep current hosts alive.
Weren't the 1960s also characterized by a "counterculture" with its own internal communication channels, deliberately avoiding mainstream censorship standards?
People simply didn't know what the party positions were. Newspapers and radio were local. Once sharing of information become faster then national polarisation increased.
By "sharing of information" what are you referring to?
The rate at which news diffuses throughout a population. News just being one type of information but the most important when it comes to politics.
You can read 1,000 tweets in the time it takes to watch the evening news. The information is shared even without active intent, it just happens. Information is transferred between people.
But that implies that the party positions change more rapidly than the time it takes to watch the evening news, which seems unlikely.
The faster news travels the harder it is too keep something secret. In the past politicians would do deals in Washington safe in the knowledge that few of their voters would ever find out about it.
Additionally, voters would not be aware of many of the political positions that their friends and neighbours (i.e. people voting for the same party) had so they'd only be able to have a few major positions in common. As it became easier to know in more detail what your side believed then it became easier to adopt those positions. Thus polarisation into two camps of positions with ever decreasing overlap.
This feels correct. Not necessarily "didn't know"; maybe more like it didn't seem to matter that much, locally.
A few decades ago, I remember hearing statements like "the branch of this political party *in this city* seems like decent people". People actually looked at their neighbors, saw which of them joined which party, and made their opinion on the party based on them. And even if someone on TV said something else, they could be like "yeah, in general this party sucks, but in our city they are the good guys" or vice versa.
Now with internet, all this local nuance is lost. No one knows anymore what their neighbors do, but everyone knows what is everyone's position on Ukraine (or Covid being an American hoax, or something about Israel and Palestine).
This is generally a problem that communication across long distances is awesome, but it also takes your attention away from the local things (because people you talk with do not share that context), which sometimes means taking your attention away from actual things done by actually people ("did someone just steal a large part of our city's budget?") towards... virulent memes ("what was their position on transgender bathrooms?").
I like the essay, overall. Once I got halfway through the Identity Alignment section though, I found myself thinking "this sounds a lot like two sides battling over a limited resource." It's just that this limited resource is pride/status/feeling good about yourself.
Once you add group identity to your theory (psychological theory? Does it have a name?), I don't really understand how it differs from conflict theory other than the limited resource not being material. Is it just that one says "people support ideas that would materially benefit their group", and the other days "people support ideas that would _emotionally_ support their group"?
I mostly agree but a couple of points.
You address this as a flat world, as if everyone just falls into one camp or the other and everyone in one camp disagrees at the same level with everyone in the other camp. That's obviously not true. People have different levels of of identification with one camp or another. So what explains those different levels of identification? If you're coming you're with a causal theory for polarization, it should also explain some kind of theory about a "dose effect," as with the Bradford Hill criteria for causality.
My theory is that we all kind of know that in most of these issues there's a spectrum of views where neither one side or the other is entirely correct. But it's hard to reconcile how oppositional beliefs can both be true at the same time. And so the opposing beliefs becomes an identity threat to our own beliefs. So we identify with one camp or the other, for mostly random reasons, and the more strongly we identify at one end of the spectrum the more our reasoning is "motivated" to filter away reasonable perspectives that would seem to invalidate our own views. Our need to reject the opposing view comes from an understanding at a deep level that two things both exist, but in top of thst we have a psychological construct that days opposing things can't both exist at the same time. It's too existentially disturbing.
If you haven't already, you might want to look at:
The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America, by Hyram and Verland Lewis.
There's a lot of crossover in that book and what you wrote, centering around the idea that the polarization that manifests on issues doesn't reflect an actual opposition of coherent sets of beliefs or values.
I mostly agree, though I think you're somewhat overstating the theoretical case against conflict theory by assuming zero coordination. People in real life do sometimes succeed in mitigating free rider problems. I remember at least one time when you referenced functional decision theory to encourage people to ignore a similar problem with something that you wanted people to do.
I think people who believe in the sociologists' version of "conflict theory" usually have some notion of "false consciousness" as well, where powerful groups are able to mislead less powerful group about their true interests. I think there are all sorts of conceptual problems with that, but it's clearly an attempt within conflict theory to explain some of the issues you're pointing to.
I don't agree with the assertion that "nobody cares" about affirmative action. It might have been taboo to question ("are you some kind of RACIST or something?!1!"), but it's not something people are indifferent to.
I also think that the complexity of beliefs going from individual to individual has increased, if anything, especially in the Age of the Internet. But it is true that there are two major political parties in many plurality voting systems. (Sometimes regional parties may still become a thing in such systems.) While there's only one realistic horse to back for many people, the polarization can just mean that people feel the stakes are higher, and people may also project their desires beyond what is stated onto their steed. It doesn't mean that more people are becoming Median Democrats or Median Republicans.
There's an 4th position that I don't think quite matches any of your 3 options (Conflict Theory, Mistake Theory, and Psychology Theory).
You state that Conflict Theory posits correct assessment of material interests, and subsequent conflict over them.
But why need the interests be only material? People often have strong investments in cultural and institutional practices that are not "material" in any narrow or direct sense.
I would posit an expanded version of Conflict Theory in which groups are in conflict over interests that are neither narrowly material nor merely psychological in the sense of "it makes me feel good," but rather are ways of life to be supported or suppressed.
Indeed. A lot of the immigration issue has to do with wanting to be around people who look like you and speak the same language (though as the example of Rotherham shows us self-interest definitely plays a role too).
I think Scotts explanation of polarisation is unconvincing because while it explains why there is polarisation now it can’t explain why this was not always the case instead of polarisation becoming worse with time. Given his theory, I think we should expect society to be polarised all the time instead of it increasing or decreasing with time.
I agree with this. What has changed? I guess one could tell a narrative about social media etc., but from my eye it's a trend that goes back to at least the 90s, and probably longer.
One other piece that I think is missing from this puzzle is something about the way that our political coalitions work. Because we have a two-party system, everything polarizes into one of the two parties (and occasionally once every few generations, these coalitions undergo a big shift, as is happening now). But how does this process look in countries with multi-party systems? Does the thing Scott describes still happen in the same way?
That's where I figure the actual material circumstances become more relevant. When enough PvE content is available, people can sweat out their inner demons by dancing and hammering on rocks in novel ways, instead of hunting for enemies to scream at in PvP.
The last paragraph is gold. Not new knowledge, but both rings true and aligns with many examples in political history and complex private deal-making realities.
For the “we award you X emotionally rewarding accolade… and/in exchange we really really need your money/agreement/acquiescence” method to be *durably effective* without eventually coming undone, the follow through has to be more than performatively hollow.
Therein in lies the rub - vilification of the group being asked to take one for the team, at least on the topic in question, can’t resurface even as an undercurrent of discussion.
"But the experts were joining in the coalition’s project of humiliating working-class white people (to flatter their educated and minority constituents), and it all proved too much."
I'm sorry, when did this happen?
Covid?
The cultural and political polarization we see started long before Covid.
If this is a genuine question, it’s referring to the expert alignment with the blue over the red tribe.
If you just wanted to signal indignation at the characterization, ignore me and carry on.
No, I'm serious. Even if I take your comment completely straight (I have no reason not to) "alignment" doesn't seem to imply "humiliation". At the very least, further explanation would be helpful.
Have you read https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/? Tribes don’t engage in friendly competition for their values, they despise their outgroup and enjoy taking them down a peg.
For specific examples, a few that come to mind are:
1. The experts yelling about anti-lockdown protests as murderous, then doing a 180 overnight and declaring that everyone should join the BLM protests because racism is a health issue.
2. Dr Fauci publicly declaring that Americans (meaning red-tribe Americans) should stop caring about their freedoms so much.
3. Mocking those taking Ivermectin as taking horse-dewormer, to the point that the media ran basically made up stories about hospitals being overrun because of such rubes.
"The experts yelling about anti-lockdown protests as murderous, then doing a 180 overnight and declaring that everyone should join the BLM protests because racism is a health issue."
Who said that, and when? Link, please.
Dr. Fauci, regardless of what he said or the reasons he said it, is only one "expert" who is not a spokesperson for other experts on any subject except the spread of disease. Even if one objected to his statement, why would anyone extend that objection to experts in general, and what does that have to do with "humiliating working class white people"? "Red" doesn't equal "working class", and even if it did, where's the humiliation? At face value, he appears to disagree with some people, but that's just his opinion.
I dimly remember people taking Ivermectin as a way to prevent Covid. For example: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/more-people-are-poisoning-themselves-with-horse-deworming-drug-to-thwart-covid/
Another article: https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/sep/08/nobel-prize-and-horse-dewormer-explaining-controve/
I don't know about hospitals, but are you saying that no one did this, or that it wasn't a mistake?
Article on the experts’ overnight 180: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/08/we-often-accuse-the-right-of-distorting-science-but-the-left-changed-the-coronavirus-narrative-overnight.
Scott’s dive into an Ivermectin story that is illustrative of what I am talking about: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-play-in-three.
Dr Fauci was considered the spokesperson for the health experts during the pandemic. I admit my example is not a clear cut example of humiliation, but he always seemed to have contempt for his Trump-supporting outgroup, who hated him bitterly as well. And yes, Red tribe does more or less map onto the white working class.
It's very simple: experts thought they were entitled to respect and authority because they were smarter and more knowledgeable than the populace. The people who disagreed with them interpreted it as the experts claiming they were better than everyone else, despite being wrong. It's not any more complicated than that.
Can you link me to an incident when this occurred? I mean a representative population of experts who expressed entitled to respect and authority specifically because they are smarter and more knowledgeable than the general populace? Is this a thing that happened, or is it a perception on the part of a certain group of people not based on any specific incidents?
Yeah, it wasn't the experts per se, rather than people who *identified with* the experts.
You know, the "I fucking *love* science" people... as opposed to the "I actually *do* science as my day job, and it is often too complex to fit in a single tweet" people.
Well, I love science, and I frequently respect expertise, but I am not aware that I have ever joined a coalition to humiliate white working class voters.
Your argument replaces selfish material motives for political action with selfish psychological motives. I don't believe that switch answers your free rider objection to the idea that material self-interest motivates politics. If I'd prefer relax on the beach and let someone else go out and campaign for my $50K tax break, why wouldn't I stay on the beach and let someone else do the grunt work of convincing all those losers out there that us rich guys really are morally superior?
I admit that the various psychological pleasures you describe are addictive, but so is money. Personally, if I had a choice between an additional $10K per year from restoring SALT or another opportunity to "knock down anyone who makes a status claim to be better than [me]," I'd take the money. Other people will make different choices and weigh things differently, but my point is that that psychic pleasures you describe are not uniquely powerful and can be exchanged for other types of good things. So, why would psychic selfishness be so much more powerful in politics that material selfishness?
I guess one could respond to my objection by arguing that the psychic returns to political virtue signaling are immediate and guaranteed. To get my $10K or $50K tax cut, my side actually has to win, but I can get the psychic pleasure of owning the libs regardless of whether my candidate wins or my chosen policy is adopted. But there are a couple of responses to this argument. 1) It doesn't feel good to lose. My observation of my Democratic friends in November 2024 suggests that the psychic pain of losing the election far outweighed any psychic pleasure they enjoyed through dunking on Republicans over the course of the campaign Thus, psychic winning in politics depends on collective success (i.e actually winning) just as much as material winning does. 2) B/c it is so easy to get a psychic dopamine hit by dishing out mockery to others, it is also very easy to receive psychic pain cheaply dished out by others. In the long-run, it's a dumb, no win game to play in which the best we can do is tread water and many will drown.
So, I guess that I have two arguments: 1) for a lot of people, I think that it is a genuine desire to do what is better for society rather than psychic or materialistic selfishness that motivates political engagement 2) maybe the virtue signaling politics of social media will die down (a little) when enough people figure out that it is a losing game -- I understand that waves of drug addiction tend to fade when a new generation sees how bad that it was for their elders.
You're a powerful writer. I still think you're at least partially wrong here.
I'll begin by admitting my own prejudices. I got a lot of very idealistic views at a very liberal school growing up, which my parents mocked, and my parents were right more often than not. I also got a lot of second- and third-wave feminist rhetoric about how to behave that turned out to be less effective than (watered-down in application) advice from very sociopathic-looking PUA types. So I am very, very, suspicious of idealism and hope and building a better future. The piecing-together of dissociated knowledge opens up terrifying vistas of reality, and now that I have quoted my favorite author's most famous story I shall begin.
To take your first example, there aren't a million people making $1 million a year. Such people are rare. As such the free-rider problem diminishes and our uber-rich person is strongly motivated to pursue his self-interest. After all, we've seen rich people do just that throughout history, paying off kings and donating to cardinals.
The fact that SALT and vaccines do not obey the laws of self-interest do not mean that it does not play a powerful role in many other cases. Affirmative action, for instance, clearly divides blacks and whites (at least), and outside of the upper middle class (which may figure it can get a job anyway), people take roughly the expected positions by skin color.
That isn't to say self-interest is the *only* factor. Tribal loyalty easily explains things like immigration (we don't want the other tribe in) and wokeness (which hits as many tribal buttons as possible, and only hit a potentially temporary defeat when its partisans failed to realize intersectionality swung both ways). It even winds up explaining things like COVID lockdowns and abortion in our polarized era.
I do agree that people take positions which make them feel good, often to fairly ridiculous levels, and with your final statement that, yes, sometimes you can persuade people. I also agree with your statement in between these two that the current menu of positions on the Blue and Red Teams comes about in large part of historical issues with what experts on the Blue Team supported in the early days of social media. But this menu of positions dates back further than 2010, with some odd exceptions like free speech and tariffs.
But I do disagree with your bit that socialism and similar economically left arguments are motivated mostly by hating the rich. Sure, that's part of it, especially among the wealthy DSA types who want to stick it to Banker Dad. But historically, most socialist movements were supported by workers who wanted more money, more time off, safer working conditions... there's an old line about unions being the people who brought you the weekend. It's not totally untrue. Similarly, many feminists are motivated by fears of not being able to get an abortion if they get raped, as well as wanting access to traditionally male jobs and so on. And the whole affirmative action thing does collapse into black versus white--Asians finally turned when they realized they were getting the short end of the stick. A huge portion of the reason people are turning on trade is that they blame it for shipping their jobs to China.
You've only arguably disproven the strong case of conflict theory that material interest is the major driver of political conflict--and I'm not even sure about that. Sure, other things are part of it. I'm not sure how many and how much. But a large number of conflicts, including the race and gender type that are subsumed under 'wokeness', really do derive from zero-sum calculations, in the case of wokeness about the distribution of jobs between demographic groups. Not that Joe Sixpack is sitting there with his phone's calculator on...but he hears his son's been passed over for promotion because they 'aren't promoting white men', and he knows what to think. Similarly, the whole 'believe women' thing involves tradeoffs between false negatives and false positives in rape or harassment claims. (I'm sure as a physician you learned about the sensitivity and specificity tradeoff in diagnostic tests.) Who gets hurt by false-negatives? Women. Who gets hurt by false-positives? Men.
And you don't really make a case for mistake theory. The promise of mistake theory is that a better solution exists and we can converge on one. But many conflicts are zero-sum (or fixed-sum). There's only so much land and so many resources, for instance, and that's driven many wars throughout history. Us and the Chinese can't both be King of the World, and that's likely to be a problem at some point. And, as you say, sometimes people want to see the other side lose.
Yeah, people's opinions are a complicated farrago of self-interest, self-righteousness, and tribal loyalty, sprinkled with the occasional bit of rationality. And social media makes people a lot less rational, I will agree. But that doesn't mean self-interest doesn't play a huge role. And even if it's not purely self-interest, these tribal things are very hard to push away, while their ministers on earth still bellow and prance (and occasionally slay) around computer screens and smartphones in lonely places.
>The fact that SALT and vaccines do not obey the laws of self-interest do not mean that it does not play a powerful role in many other cases. Affirmative action, for instance, clearly divides blacks and whites
Affirmative action may be less divisive than people would expect, even though a policy of inherently zero-sum discrimination ought to be the area in which self-interest would play the largest role.
This poll: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/02/25/most-americans-say-colleges-should-not-consider-race-or-ethnicity-in-admissions/, for example, found that affirmative action was opposed by 62% of Blacks, vs. 78% of Whites.
Per a strict conflict theory model, one would expect it to be 0% and 100%.
Alternative models might be to assume all questions would be 50% / 50%, or to assume that differing incentives wouldn't play a role and that the combined average would be universal (something like 73% opposition).
Both of these models, particularly the latter, seem to do a better job of describing reality than conflict theory, even though the models are dumb (they don't incorporate the actual social drivers of a non-conflict theory model).
> there aren't a million people making $1 million a year. Such people are rare.
As of 2021, there were about 700 000 people in the United States who made at least a million a year; that was about 0.2% (one in five hundred people).
There's been studies on various methods to get people to change their minds about strongly held values/opinions. Claude's summary of one such method that was noted to be effective in a book I read recently:
---
Deep canvassing, as described in McRaney's book, involves volunteers having non-judgmental, empathetic conversations with voters, often at their doorsteps. It typically involves:
1. Listening to people's views without judgment
2. Asking open-ended questions about personal experiences related to the issue
3. Sharing personal stories that relate to the topic
4. Finding common ground through shared values
5. Avoiding debate, argument, or presenting facts/information dumps
This approach was notably studied by researchers including David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, who found it was effective at reducing prejudice and changing minds on issues like transgender rights and immigration, with effects lasting for months after the conversation.
The key insight is that people change their minds not through being presented with facts or arguments, but through emotional connection, storytelling, and non-judgmental conversations that help them reflect on their own values and experiences.
I'll provide a concise summary of this deep canvassing method as described in McRaney's book, as it appears to be what the user is asking about.
In "How Minds Change," David McRaney describes "deep canvassing" as a remarkably effective method for creating political change across broad areas. This approach involves:
1. Person-to-person conversations (typically 10-15 minutes long) where canvassers:
- Listen non-judgmentally to voters' views
- Ask open-ended questions about personal experiences related to the issue
- Share their own relevant stories when appropriate
- Connect through shared values rather than arguing policy positions
2. Key elements that make it work:
- Creating a judgment-free space for reflection
- Encouraging people to recall their own experiences that might conflict with their stated views
- Using storytelling rather than fact-bombardment
- Avoiding debate in favor of genuine curiosity
McRaney highlights research by Broockman and Kalla showing these conversations produced measurable opinion shifts that persisted for months—even on deeply divisive issues. The method works because it engages people emotionally rather than intellectually, helping them reconcile their stated beliefs with their lived experiences and core values.
---
In the framing of this post, it's essentially a quick form of therapy for resolving the person's psychopolitical "trauma" via exploratory conversation. Maybe this line of thinking can lead to better approaches like this.
But the question is, can you increase people's prejudice with this method? Because the opposition isn't dumb, they're going to be trying to indoctrinate people in the opposite direction. This doesn't actually solve anything.
I actually hate the "sharing stories" stuff, because it feels to me like an attempt to emotionally manipulate me: "Oh, poor little Susie was just an ordinary nine year old trans kid but her dad used to listen to horrible racist conservative talk radio in the car*, so Susie had to hide her real true identity. Isn't it sad when those supposed to love us most make us the most fearful?"
Yeah, well all that does is make me want to slap the face off 'Susie' and tell HIM to grow up. There's probably deep psychological reasons back in my past growing up that make me react like this, but I do hate the "now if you dumb knuckledraggers are only introduced to (carefully curated**, normie-seeming) gays and trans people who tell you heartstrings-tugging stories of their struggles, why you'll finally learn to act like a normal person who is all about the LGBTQQIP2SAA rights!" type of suggestions.
Maybe I have a stupid reason for my prejudice and bias, maybe I have a good reason. So talk to me and try and *argue* with me, not manipulate me with "now isn't Susie just so nice and normal? why do you want to be mean to her? you don't want to be mean, do you? you're not really a horrible mean person?" prodding.
A lot of people will fold on "no, I don't want to be a horrible mean person". I am quite prepared to be a horrible mean person, so that just makes me itch when it's tried on me.
*Content of cartoon seen online, I'm not making this one up.
** Pete Buttigieg 'wrong kind of gay, he's not gay enough' types rather than the 'Scott Wiener at Folsom Street Fair showing off his chicken chest' types. If this strikes you as "sexy", I've got a scarecrow on a broomstick I'd like to sell you as a love toy:
https://www.advocate.com/politics/senator-scott-wiener-folsom-street#rebelltitem4
You may enjoy arguing more, but is it actually any more likely to make you change your mind?
If the person constructs an argument, makes their case, provides data to back it up, and is very sparing with the anecdotes, I'm more likely to at least shift my views.
What doesn't work is the likes of "don't you feel sorry for this* poor oppressed woman?" because right there is where I say "No, because (1) that's not a woman and (2) they're a scumbag criminal who is right where they should be, locked up in jail. That's the justice they deserve".
Does that make me a horrible mean racist fascist nazi transphobe? Well then I guess I'm a horrible mean racist fascist nazi transphobe! And all the sharing stories in the world about "I couldn't help myself, I just *had* to stab that man to death" won't shift my opinion.
(Honestly, please stop picking the absolute worst example of who to put up as your poster child for progressive views on X rights. Yes, bad people deserve fairness and justice too. But sometimes what they got *is* justice).
* https://justice4demi.org/about/
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/nj-trans-prisoner-impregnated-2-inmates-transferred-mens-facility-rcna38947
> If the person constructs an argument, makes their case, provides data to back it up, and is very sparing with the anecdotes, I'm more likely to at least shift my views.
Given past experience, I highly, highly doubt that.
I said *more* likely, not that I would be swayed every time. Sometimes it's "I still disagree with you, but I understand your position better". Sometimes it's "Yeah, I knew this was a crappy argument, thanks for proving it".
> you don't want to be mean, do you? you're not really a horrible mean person?
That doesn't exactly sound like "a judgement-free space for reflection."
> Content of cartoon seen online
...so, not actually a person-to-person conversation, either.
I am cool with sharing stories, under condition that everyone is allowed to share theirs. Which is usually not the case.
If the poor little Susie e.g. gets raped by a group of immigrants tomorrow, that part of the story is definitely *not* the one you are supposed to listen to and feel emotions about.
I would love to see the 'conflict' vs 'mistake' terminology credited properly, to Philosophy Bear (now known as a philosophy substacker). (I note you did credit him in your original 2018 piece in a way, giving their old Slate Star commenter name no_bear_so_low.)
I've found it kind of mindblowing and inspiring to watch this terminology proliferate. I happen to have known its creator years ago as a student and we are occasionally still in contact, and to think that he coined this thing that I now hear.... I think I even heard bloody Peter Thiel use it somewhere!
I wrote this totally off my own bat and was in no way put up to it.
People's stances on issues are 98% based on self interest.
As you identify nobody has much influence over any outcome, and as people are pretty rational, the 98% percent is thus all about signalling. E.g., endorsing policies that look good to others, and so raise your status. This effect causes the coastal elite to act as they do.
A good society manages this by making prudence, charity and intelligence the socially rewarded stance (causing people's self interest to mimic the genuine pursuit of social good), but the left has systematically moved towards outrage and emotion being the socially rewarded stance (e.g., elements of the radical left literally say that the prioritization of logic, reason and maths is racist and sexist - ofc this is insanely racist and sexist as a stance, as all races and genders can think and do maths, etc...)
Side note: actually genuinely caring about the truth and ideas is pretty rare. The vast majority don't, and tbh, that's a pretty smart stance of theirs. But it does mean that if you want to improve society you need to be a deep thinking pragmatist.
I hadn't read "The Psychopolitics of Trauma" - I think it's interesting, and may explain some of the dynamics of today's political tribes. But I think Arnold Kling's Three Languages of Politics (Civilization vs. Barbarism, Oppressors vs. Oppressed, Liberty vs. Coercion) does more to explain why most people take particular positions on salient issues. Also, especially in today's USA, people seem to be driven to align with one or another of the Tribes, and therefore take some positions simply because their Tribe does.
This framing does a lot to explain why Progressives, who claim to be extremely concerned about the catastrophic consequences of global warming, are willing to put enough Social Justice requirements in their carbon reduction program to prevent anything from actually being done. It explains why Conservatives ... eh, I can't think of anything that Conservatives seem to agree on. It could explain why Conservatives object to Affirmative Action, because it tears down the rules, except that most Conservatives didn't really care about it for over 40 years. Maybe Conservatives lived with Affirmative Action because they thought it was essential to preserving the basic order in society, even if it was unfair in practice and suffused with hypocrisy.
I have a simpler theory. It rests on two principles.
1. Technology. Technology changes how people think and they take time to adjust.
2. Trust. People want a group of people around them they can trust, they adopt the positions of those they find themselves with to gain the benefits of trust (e.g. lower transaction costs, credit, etc). The more absurd the positions the stronger trust bonds that are formed.
Following the introduction of the printing press arguments arose over religion (a type of trust group by the way), this led to the 30 Years War where about a third of Germans died. Afterwards people agreed not to go to war over religion any more, the people had adjusted to the introduction of a novel technology.
I see similar playing out with the internet/social media. Polarisation has increased as people became aware of what their side and their opponent's side political positions were.
People start with only one or a few political positions, e.g. the rich care a lot about tax policy because it makes much bigger of a difference to them, hunting animals with firearms is a rewarding experience, city living reduces trust group importance so makes support for individuality more appealing and less threatening, etc. Once they have a position or two there is a diffusion into two sides.
This bi-modalism (e.g. liberal/conservative) is due to the way the political and electoral system works. You need 50% support to form a government.
My proposed solution would be to encourage tri-modalism by awarding control of the executive branch and spending to the largest party or party alliance, regardless of if they achieve 50%. Control of law making and tax levels would still fall to parliament and require 50% agreement to change. I foresee three groups forming: socialist, conservative, and liberal; and on any good idea usually two of the three would agree and one oppose, while two would oppose bad ideas.
Of course none of this applies to states that don't already have a proportional parliamentary system of government. Since that is the best form of government known so far those that don't have it should adopt it before experimenting with the unknown.
PS: My brief guide to the three political ideologies.
Socialism: advance the condition of society as a whole.
Liberalism: advance the condition of the individual.
Conservatism: oppose changes that could make things worse.
Potential minimal-procedural-change way to force the formation of a meaningful third party in the existing US first-past-the-post system would be to forbid members of the defendant's own party from voting as part of an impeachment trial, due to conflict of interest. Or possibly only from voting to acquit, leaving a choice of "convict" or "abstain."
I think your argument about vaccines disregards the way in which the culture war eats everything. Being pro/anti-vaccines is not necessarily about vaccines - if the pro-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the Red Tribe being demoralised and feeling that it is not worth fighting for anything because they will expend effort and lose anyway, and if the anti-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the mirrored situation.
The common commentary all the way back in 2016 that said Trump's election will "embolden racists" had figured out this dynamic on an intuitive level. If you believe that we are tumbling towards an equilibrium where there is no fine-grained object-level policy debate but only an "emboldened" side that gets everything and a "demoralised" side that submits and saves whatever remaining energy it has to plot an overthrow, then anything that "emboldens" the side whose dictate is a bit more in your interest is itself in your interest, to a first approximation.
I remember reading an article, I think it was on "Cracked," that disputed the idea that people hate the rich and that's why they want them to pay taxes. It made the analogy to when Yoda asks Luke to defeat the Emperor. Yoda didn't ask him because he hated Luke, he asked him because he was the only one who could do it.
The article is wrong, of course, because Yoda was respecting Luke's talent and effort. He wasn't claiming that Luke had stolen his Force powers from hardworking people and he needed to fight the Emperor to make recompense. But it did make me wonder something along the lines of what Scott suggested near the end. What if we asked the rich to pay more taxes, and said it was their duty to do so because they were amazing heroes like Luke Skywalker. Only they are amazing enough to make the giant amounts of money needed to run the government.
Isn't it a lot simpler? You tax the rich because the rich have money. You can't get blood out of a stone, so taxing the guy panhandling on the street corner isn't going to raise much for your 'funding a concert hosted by the American ambassador in Dublin' efforts.
Problem is, if you de facto criminalize wealth, then only criminals will be rich. If the *entire* moral basis of taxation is "I, who hold the monopoly on legitimate violence, noticed that you have money, therefore give it to me" then anyone who would prefer to continue having and/or eating their own cake is faced with mostly bad options.
A land value tax avoids that problem. The guy panhandling on that street corner still gets off easy, might actually come out ahead if those ten square feet he's taking up can be converted into a proper mailing address, while somebody who wants to host concerts or live in a sprawling mansion needs far more space in which to do so... but exactly how much is negotiable. Behavior incentivized for someone who just wants to keep a big number is "stay out of the way," rather than "lie constantly" or "civil war."
I think big part of the problem is, its hard to become ultra-rich in modern times without being a huge control freak about money. I learned this from an estate-planning buddy of mine who said that for many of his highest net worth clients, the reasons they set up complicated trusts and estate plans weren't primarily for tax avoidance purposes, it was because they couldn't stand the idea that once they were dead someone else would have total control over how the money they'd been left was spent.
So I think for many of the wealthy, its not really the amount of money they are losing that's the biggest obstacle, its the fact that they know the government is in charge of how that money is going to be spent. I don't even mean particular ideological issues about government efficiency or what it funds, just the fact that someone else has control of money they earned and not them.
> Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization. That is, if a chance fluctuation makes environmentalists slightly more likely to support gun control, and this new bloc goes around insulting polluters and gun owners, then the gun owners affected will reactively start hating the environmentalists and insult them, the environmentalists will notice they’re being attacked by gun owners and polarize even more against them, and so on until (environmentalists + gun haters) and (polluters + gun lovers) have become two relatively consistent groups. Then if one guy from the (environmentalist + gun hater) group happens to insult a Catholic, the same process starts again until it’s (environmentalists + gun haters + atheists) and (polluters + gun lovers + Catholics), and so on until there are just two big groups.
This feels like an important model, I wonder if we can design an experiment or come up with some some data analysis technique to confirm or disprove this.
I read this as Scott is a conflict theorist, but on a social/emotional/ingroup-outgroup level rather than economic level.
Most of the examples are conflict rather than mistake in nature, but are on an emotional not a factual level.
Am I wrong?
I think my conclusion based on Scott's argument is that we *ought* to be conflict theorists, because then we could negotiate rationally about the conflict and how to come to some kind of compromise that everyone could live with. We could calculate the exact amount of wealth that rich people must give up based on the ratio of rich people to poor people, and the best way to divide that wealth without shooting ourselves in the foot economically. But instead, we all live in mistake-land, where we can't even agree on what we are arguing about and we apply weird moral valences to everything that make compromise impossible.
I think the free riding argument is overplayed. Not that it does not exists, on the contrary: Free Riding taken to it's logical limit basically prevent any individual action with a cost within a group with majority-based decision. It just make most organized societies impossible.... still all humans live in (more or less)organized societies. Many non humans do too, so where is the catch?
The catch is free riding is such a fundamental problem for social animals that various counter-acting mechanism have evolved (biologically, and, for humans, culturally too).
Punish the free rider is the obvious answer and a universal constant (may be it's one of the driver behind memory and animal recognition. My guess is it is, by far. People have extremely good human recognition (face, silhouette, gait,...) and memory is probably better for social interactions than for anything else. Because it's super useful....
Free riding is not a pleasant act to most (because it is better not to trigger free rider punishment if you want to live successfully, so a psychological instinct to avoid doing it (and even more avoid getting caught doing it) is very high among the most useful instinct to evolve in social animals).
So yes, free riding is extremely important to consider for any social analysis. But it's also very important to play it right, i.e. never assume it's that common or automatic. If it's anything but fringe, in my experience it's because no punishment in any form has been implemented and evident for all (i.e. the law differ in practice and in theory), or (many cases) because free riding is done as a punishment/defiant measure for previous (perceived) wrongs by the society authorities,
or (most cases?) because the behavior is not considered free riding but the norm within a sub-group very detached from mainstream group who judge that as free riding. The latter may be quite common a cause behind very nasty pogroms, and should be investigated very seriously if identified because I think it can degenerate fast and ugly.
But in no case free riding can be invoked as a mechanism ruling out a behavior. Because the are soooo many examples of behaviors which would not be possible is free riding was an unchecked possibility, still are routinely observed in all social animals.
In fact, "punish the free riders" and "get revenge on those who did me bad, even if it costs" are clear drivers or political behavior (and we can get further by looking at who are considered free riders and who did wrongs in the political spectrum. It could fit in the psychological explanation, but contrary to some others psychological traits, those traits are basic, quite prevalent in social animals, and quite easy to explain from a game theory optimal strategy point of view.
If find these more convincing, with much more explanatory power and even predictive power than something like "people do not want to feel guilty"....
"This is not a claim that “people really want status, not money” - at least not for any objective sense of the word “status”. Being a conspiracy theorist doesn’t raise your status, in the sense of making people like you more or giving you access to cool parties."
People do trade mainstream status for subculture status. I certainly heard ex-anti-vax woman how valuable the support of community was to her and how it helped radicalisation
https://biasnet.streamlit.app
hey I tried to mathematically model identity alignment. model might be flawed, read through the algorithm and give me feedback! plaintext algorithm is as follows:
1. Create agents
2. Create a list of arbitrary issues, numbered issue 1,issue 2,...issue n
3. Let agents have "belief" for or against issues, on a scale of -1 for "against" to 1 for
"for", with 0 being neutral
4. Make agents have "affinity" towards each other, which starts off at 0
5. Make agents with similar beliefs on the same issues increase affinity for each other
with each chronological step, and agents with dissimilar beliefs decrease affinity with
each other with chronological step
6. With each step increase/decrease affinity based on belief, and belief based on affinity
7. Observe if a number of steps into this simulation, we have polarized groups - or, in
mathematical terms, if there's a strong correlation between beliefs in one issue and
another. Are most agents that are for issue 1 against issue 2? Or something along
those lines. If that holds true, then we can say that small fluctuations plus reactions
do force polarization. This doesn't say anything about human behaviour, because
we haven't yet linked this model's fundamental axioms with those of human
behaviour, but it's an interesting observation nonetheless.
Is point 6 connected somehow with who they have affinity for?
nope sorry that was an outdated version of the algorithm that i posted in a sleep deprived slurry! belief is not set randomly at every step - it is randomized once at the start and with each step agent 1's belief in an issue is increased proportional to how much agents agent 1 has high affinity for believe in it, and decreased proportional to how much agents agent 1 has negative affinity for believe in it. affinity to other agents is also changed in a similar way with each step, but based on how similar/dissimilar beliefs are.
You seem to be mixing 2 arguments.
[politics is conflict between warring tribes trying to get the upper hand] and [humans are homo-economicus] and then treating arguments against the latter as arguments against the former.
I feel like I need to expand a bit on this...
Imagine someone watching rawanda and was asked "are these 2 groups motivated by conflict between groups?"
and they went "oh that's silly, the genocide was economically devastating, the people going out with machetes and beheading children mostly didn't end up a lot richer as a result so clearly this isn't a conflict-theory thing"
I hope you don't actually read all this stuff, Scott!
"And the positive consequences of immigration - taco trucks, cheap labor, etc - cannot possibly benefit the average liberal enough to justify their fervent support."
This is not true. Population growth is one of the major drivers of economic growth. The US is barely replacing itself in terms of fertility, so, like many another developed nation, we invite immigrants in to supply needed additional laborers and consumers. This elevates the standard of living for everyone in the US. In fact, given falling birthrates around the world, the US should pursue policies that make us more competitive in recruiting new immigrants.
None of this implies that we should have open borders or cede control over who enters our country. It does argue for expanding legal immigration.
"It’s hard to overcome, but it’s not impossible. People overcome it all the time."
Problem--not enough people and not enough times. Scott is presumably arguing that polarized public opinion on issues like abortion, inflation, vaccinations, even tax policy, are driven by motivated reasoning. Let's take that as a given. In order to end on a hope spot, he proposes that sometimes sufficiently strong evidence *can* break through, sufficiently strong disproof *can* motive people who desire to feel good and reasonable to abandon a position, and that *sometimes* you can move the goalposts in such a way as to convince people to defend a position (yet the example he gives is climate denial).
What this amounts to, I think, is an argument that you can sometimes use motivated reasoning to persuade people to adopt a position that you think is more rational. But this isn't a victory for reason, it's a victory for motivated reasoning.
Because, of course, the other side can do it to.
What I want is an approach to public discourse that a rational person can use, but an irrational one can't. This same approach should result int he person with the more factually correct argument winning. And finally, it has to persuade a minimum of a plurality of American voters, or it's all for nought.
Candidates?
...There is nothing. Humans are not rational creatures. All you can do is try to herd the rabble better than your enemies can.
I’m very skeptical about Ezra Kleins assumption that people used to be more eclectic, and that it’s only now, through social media, that they are beginning to align with the ingroup or party. People have always been tribal. To fix it, we must make sure that people don’t have to accept the package deal of party politics. Split the votes by issues, not parties. (Am I a tall puppy for daring to have opinions about this? Ok, fine.)
One of the reasons there is such a backlash against wokeness and all other forms of political correctness is because it infringes on peoples rights and freedoms. It is expanding the restrictions of the law to spheres where we used to rely on peoples judgement instead of the law. Example: hate speech laws. It may not be a good thing that people feel hate towards anyone or anything, but it shouldn’t be illegal. It is a very human emotion and shouldn’t be outlawed, however bad it may be.
My own revulsion against it stems from being curtailed by moralism and prudeness. There is and should be a difference between how we should act and how we must act. ’Eat your vegetables’ shouldn’t be the law. Many people don’t recognise this distinction. Many don’t even care. This can have the perverse effect that people can have their lives ruined even though they have done nothing legally wrong.
Would you like to be fired from you job, or having your drivers license suspended etc, for not attending the church on sundays or for having said you voted for Trump? It is SO infuriating. And the really serious problems comes when what we are supposed to think, how we should act, isn’t even morally right. We are supposed to think it’s ok to sterilize children etc. Hell no.
Your two cartoons doesn’t capture the problems of the last five years. We all agree to let pilots fly the planes, but we shouldn’t be expected to have some DEI bureacrat etc pilot our own lives. And finding information the world’s top scientist have missed? How about information that everyone claimed to know up until about five minutes ago, like, say, there are only two sexes. If every expert turns on a dime, the responsibility is on the rest of us to point out the discrepancies and lies.
About the claim that people support political positions which make them feel good, that is true, but there is also an element of social darwinism here. Some people may claim that they oppose things like welfare because they believe there is a lot of fraud, but I suspect there is also a significant amount of people who oppose giving people what they need, because it works. They don’t like people on the bottom of society, and their values tell them that those people should not survive. They oppose things that they know are beneficial to the people for the simple fact that they work. They view humans as a darwinist might view a wounded gazelle. It is better for the species to have the weak element perish. Let the lions eat them.
And what bothers people about the coastal elites is the fact that they blame people for the effects of the actions by the elites themselves. It’s not about normal people feeling morally superior, it’s about people being punched in the face and then being patronized for having a bruise.
I always find the problems people who vote for Republican candidates have very sympathetic, and then their choice of candidates and proposed solutions absolutely baffling from any standpoint of logical consistency.
People are tired of having their freedom infringed on, so they back Trump and his team of tech oligarchs, who are openly vindictive all critics of their policies to the point of celebrating the application any political pressure they can mount to destroy or silence them. Meanwhile, they aren't eliminating DEI mandates, they are mandating anti-DEI policies, which sounds like the same thing, but amounts to them threatening to cut off school funding to any state that acknowledges the existence of LGBT people or even looks like its history classes might take too hard a look at the evils of slavery or segregation.
I also agree with you about many people being closet social Darwinists, but what's baffling is a lot of these same people who would agree that the government should stop defending and aiding the weak are already feeling very upset at the loss of their government subsidies.
Like, poor people put rich people in power who are going to cut medicaid and now those same poor people who voted for them are going to die. And while liberals should not be gleeful about that, I'm not sure its fair being called smug for pointing out that actually, this is the logical consequence of your own actions. You wanted social darwinism, now, as the meme goes, the lion is eating your face.
>People are tired of having their freedom infringed on, so they back Trump and his team of tech oligarchs, who are openly vindictive all critics of their policies to the point of celebrating the application any political pressure they can mount to destroy or silence them. Meanwhile, they aren't eliminating DEI mandates, they are mandating anti-DEI policies, which sounds like the same thing, but amounts to them threatening to cut off school funding to any state that acknowledges the existence of LGBT people or even looks like its history classes might take too hard a look at the evils of slavery or segregation.
People who oppose DEI oppose skin color giving applicants additional points
That's perfectly fair (I mean, I don't personally agree, but I think that's a fair position), except if you look at the government's current anti-DEI policies, I think they go a lot farther than "eliminating programs that give people additional points for skin color." They look like creating an assumption that anyone who is not white in a position of authority should be targeted for special scrutiny. In other words, its reverse-reverse racism, also known as racism.
>except if you look at the government's current anti-DEI policies, I think they go a lot farther than "eliminating programs that give people additional points for skin color."
Much like DEI supporters didn't much mind the government non-response to the fiery but peaceful BLM protests, anti-DEI supporters don't much mind overshooting in the other direction
Well I don't think that's very principled, but at least you admit it. And I hope if it gets as far as purging the majority of people who aren't white or male from every aspect of public life, your conscience will move you to speak out then. I'm not saying it will go that far, but if it does, I hope then you find it in yourself to care.
The right would be playing to lose if it committed to staying principled while the left is committed to overshooting
On vaccines, it’s a bit more complex. First there is the free rider issue. When you get a vaccine you’re helping other people as well as yourself. If everyone else gets a vaccine then you don’t need to.
Second, there is a frequency dependent benefit to you. Lower the herd immunity higher the benefit of vaccines.
Compounding this, vaccines are a bit risky. Not highly risky but riskier than drugs. They can cause lot of weird side effects, like brain inflammation or narcolepsy (though probably not autism)
If they were risk free then there is not a strong reason to compel vaccinations. But because they’re a bit risky, you can’t allow free riders to benefit from others who take the risk. A bit analogous to draft dodging.
A huge amount of politic discussion seems to be venting about how people dislike X thing
"The Miller-Rootclaim debate changed lots of people’s minds on lab leak. "
It may have done that, but I think you're the only one I've yet seen to say anything like "The Miller-Rootclaim debate caused me to go back and research the issue in a new light, and now I think it was highly unlikely to have been a lab leak". Pretty much every other time I've seen it raised, including here, it's been along the lines of "The Rationalists(TM) have now decided that it wasn't lab leak, here's a reference I can point to that says so, therefore anyone who still talks about it being a lab leak must be one of the stupidheads". Since the outcome of any single debate has more to do with the relative debating skill of the participants than it does with the truth of the underlying claim, it's hard for me to count this as a victory for truth-seeking behavior.
Really, I think it was a "victory" for believe-what-makes-you-feel-good, and in particular the part you describe as "people want to hear that they were right to support whatever positions they supported before". An awful lot of smart supported zoonotic origin in early 2000. I was one of them, and I think I had good reasons to be at 85-90% zoonotic origin then, but for many it was largely tribal - the Experts supported zoonotic origin, and the Trumpists supported lab leak. Then more evidence started to appear, and more people even in blue-tribe circles started to talk openly about how lab leak was looking more credible, and a whole lot of smart people were stuck with the sinking feeling that maybe they had been wrong - if not about Zoonitic origin, then at least about their high confidence re zoonotic origin. Some of them, I'm pretty sure, overcorrected for that.
Until Miller-Rootclaim gave them all permission to say "hey, we were right all along, it was only those stupidheads in the outgroup muddying the waters with talk of lab leaks". And the whole bit about how their identity group is the heroic special people, etc.
The earlier process where lab leak went from being dismissed as a conspiracy theory, to being something that was openly discussed and at least semi-accepted in Blue Tribe circles, seems to have had something to do with new evidence and openness, and that may have been a victory for truth-seeking behavior. But I don't really understand how it happened, and I'd like to see it studied more.
I disagree with your assessment of the origin of "trusting the experts" becoming such a polarized issue. To my mind, what is at the root of this historically is an erosion of authority much more broadly. Up until the 1980s (? depending on where you live) people with authority were deferred to because they had authority. Whenever I talked to my grandparents this was so striking to me. They followed people's advice because they had gone to university, were rich, or were civil servants. People were adressed by their titles and functions even in public life and it was simply considered rude to even contradict people with "authority" in a somewhat public manner.
This all changed some time between the 1990s and today, when people lost their deferrence to authority. I think this first started with mundane things, like no longer following the advice of their doctor or child's teacher. But then it slowly spilled over to other "experts". As experts could no longer rely on their authority to be listened to, they had to find another reason.
And I think it is in this context that they reverted to because they had superior knowledge. You should no longer listen to your doctor because she is a doctor, but because she knows the newest scientific studies and did a training on this very subject two years ago, she even has a certificate on the wall next to twenty other meaningless degrees.
Everything else, the polarization around it, is downstream from this and I am not sure could have been avoided once the process had started.
To do a boring N=1, I came out of the Rootclaim debate thinking lab leak was even more probable than before, but that the Rootclaim guy was a knucklehead. Not dumb, but pretty far up his own rear regarding his model.
There’s nothing not even one, oh, one person ever disagreed about.
I'm bothered by the implicit moral relativism of this post. But I did get one big insight out of it: that class war by the rich is not just based in greed, pure and simple; that it's also impoortant for them to morally justify their wealth, and that giving themselves giant tax breaks while slashing the social safety net is an integral part of that. Without this psychological motivation it would be a lot harder to explain their seemingly self-destructive behavior, like trying to tear down all the meliorist little efforts at saving capitalism from itself like the New Deal. I had always thought of this as a case of their being blinded by their own greed, but this provides a better explanation.
I think you saw this in 2012 (Wall Street mad) and 2024 (Tech mad). There was a material component to it, but in both cases they were annoyed about being played as the villain by Democrats and the (rich) socially liberal groups shifted towards Republicans.
Love the Churchill allusion.
Isn’t the free-rider problem just CDT "you should not vote because in expectation your vote has no influence on policy" in a sheep’s clothing ? And if you accept LDT normatively for "should I vote ?", it also follow that the free-rider strategy is not the rational policy ? Also if you accept LDT descriptively ("I observe people are actually voting, as predicted by LDT"), does not this also destroys the free-riding problem ?
> Partly because nobody would give their child measles _just_ to own the libs.
I’m not so sure. When you know you’re TOUGH and your opponents are pussies, you have to think BIG: how many of those runts will your kid OWN by bringing to them the disease they thought their phony baloney vaccines would protect them from via herd shmerd immunity shmunity? THAT is the question. Truth fears no trial. Let your kid know what’s going on so they can feel proud.
The "free rider" argument seems to ignore the division of labour which typifies how this plays out. It's politics. Boris Johnson makes huge (and profitable) investment in becoming Prime Minister, everyone else who wants lower taxes makes the barely distinguishable from zero investment of time and zero investment of money of voting for him. You are saying that people are going to be worrying about who picks up the tab, when democracy says there is no tab.
Of course there's hedge funds donating squillions to Johnson campaign funds, but they are balls out paying for lower taxes on carried interest and therefore express evidence of conflict theory, and that the reality of millions of others riding on their coat tails is not a sufficient deterrent to stop them making the donation
Interesting read. I certainly don't have a solely Conflict Theorist take on politics, but you could give more thought to some of your arguments against it.
1) Your first example of freeloaders has a baked in assumption of perfect information, when I'd argue it's something closer to a prisoner's dilemma. Even as a rich guy going to rich guy activities like megayacht auctions, where there's information on your demographic class to be acquired, it's hard to know who is bloviating and who is putting their money where their mouth is and spending money to influence politics. The inability to adequately root out freeloaders is an ancient and intractable social issue.
2) A theory of response-dependent polarisation needs to explain a start point of messy polarisation organising into neat polarisation. What's the mechanism that stopped this response-dependent polarisation happening in 1960, 1980, 2000? Gun control advocates and environmentalists existed throughout that entire period; the sort of polarisation we're seeing is a recent phenomena. You do need an additional factor here to explain why the alignment process begins when it does.
This was all good. But I still think you are missing something. I don't know what the something is. Maybe tribalism, maybe the media, maybe politics, maybe moloch. But there is something that doesn't 'allow' us to have middle of the road opinions. You get pushed all the way to one side or the other. Some restrictions on abortions, more regulation of gun ownership, vax hesitant, (because all vaccines have some side effects and I want to know about those side effects before making a decision about my kid or myself.) Middle of the road is not allowed and that is not good.
I mean, middle of the road is allowed if you don't want to engage in public, performative politics. It's still a quite common position, although it's seldom pursued rationally, in part because you can't engage in organizing. As for public politics, I think the phenomenon is similar to ethnic/racial gang formation in prisons, or radicalization of subpopulations during civil wars: once you have enough obvious signifiers on your visible persona that all but one group broad-brushes you as an enemy you are usually going to go out of your way not to alienate the last possible ally group you have left.
OK thanks, so you think it's tribalism that drives division. (I see it as this very sharp knife edge in the space of all ideas. ) But you also suggest that activism drives it too, and I'd call that either part of media or politics. I guess it all gets knotted together it's hard to call it just this or that.
It's more like, participating in even a slight level of activism exposes you to the radicalizing pressure of a very hostile and tribal social environment. That's why nobody hears or listens to the moderates even though a good number of them still exist.
There seems to be a huge amount of rationality bias in this entire post. Almost everything is predicated on people rationally looking at some problem, rationally evaluating the issue, taking in expert level analysis, etc. There are also some short term biases.
E.g. 1: maybe people don't sit down and calculate the exact 50k limit in the tax problem. Or maybe they have trouble having confidence in the 50k limit. Or maybe they just think that the type of person/political party that will lower their taxes now will do it again in the future so the real break even point is actually much higher than 50k.
E.g. 2: maybe some poorer people don't fully grasp that inflation will lower their debts. Maybe they just don't worry about their debts at all. Maybe they encounter inflation more everyday when they go shopping and don't spend nearly as much time looking at their financial statements.
I think the assumption left unchallenged at the beginning was: “does political capital exist?” I think that a conclusion about how political efforts work is important to resolve first. It’s easier psychomathematically for political capital to be fixed and depletable, but I’m not totally convinced this is the case. I think the difficulty curve is usually and inverted U, where both small and large quantities of policy changes are easier but there’s some middle resistance that people mistake for the pool of capital bottoming out.
This seems like a justification for why conspiracies form. People aren't 100% invested in every issue. Mostly, they listen to people (pundits, politicians, friends, parents, etc.) they trust and use that as a baseline. This has the side benefit of helping them fit in better with others in their community, which is a pro-social behavior that they're very invested in.
If a large percent of people are low-stakes, but all still have votes, there's a strong incentive for any high-stakes individuals to persuade/influence thought leaders of their position. The truth might help, but if it's a conflict-theory balance of interests at play, the challenge is to bring in people who are outside the conflict. You could do this in one of two ways:
1. Only tell your side of the story, and frame it in a way that makes you the sympathetic character.
2. Lie.
The result will be low-stakes influencers getting persuaded to join a CONFLICT on one side by MISTAKE. The conflict theory people can then point to the highest stakeholders and correctly identify that the issue is one of trade-offs, where one side wins and the other loses and neither side is making a 'mistake' about their relative interests. Meanwhile, the mistake theory people can point to the mass of people whose stake in the issue is relatively small, such that they might be persuaded to support either side by adopting one mistaken idea or another.
"one person fighting a lonely battle won’t get too far"
Wrong. Free riders problems break down at to low granularity. If Econ follows maths this is obvious to mathematicians. If you own enormous amounts of money, so concentrated like Musk does then you can get far by yourself. Free rider breaks for one side when there are only like 5 riders in one.
You need to take a limit for the theorem to hold, obiously!
It is too late Scott. Relish in the influence you have spread. You have birthed Medusa and like Medusa watch as the world turns to stone. You had influence, but the chickens have left the coop. Running interference like this won't do anything.
I think Scott’s definitions of "conflict theory" and "mistake theory" in Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist have drifted pretty far from how he originally described them back in his 2018 post Conflict vs. Mistake. In the original, conflict theory wasn’t just about material self-interest (e.g., rich vs. poor); it was a much broader framework for understanding politics as a clash between groups with incompatible goals. That could include cultural or ideological battles, status competitions, or even symbolic conflicts over values. But in the new post, Scott narrows conflict theory down to this purely materialist view—basically Marxism-lite—and then argues it doesn’t explain things like vaccine skepticism or Ukraine policy. Well, of course it doesn’t, if you define it that narrowly! But that’s not the conflict theory he originally described.
For example, in 2018, Scott acknowledged that conflict theory could explain stuff like culture wars or identity politics—things that aren’t directly about money but still involve groups fighting over power or status. The 2025 version completely ignores this and instead critiques conflict theory as if it’s just about rich people wanting tax cuts and poor people wanting socialism. It feels like he’s attacking a strawman version of his own idea.
Another issue is the way Scott ties conflict theory to rational self-interest and then dismisses it because of the free-rider problem (e.g., why would any individual rich person bother lobbying for tax cuts?). But conflict theory doesn’t actually require people to act rationally or selfishly—it’s more about group dynamics and how coalitions form around shared interests or identities. For instance, elites might act collectively to protect their privileges even if it doesn’t make sense for any one person to do so alone. Or people might fight over cultural narratives (e.g., immigration as a threat to national identity) because those narratives reinforce group solidarity. None of that depends on everyone acting like a perfectly rational agent.
What’s weird is that Scott’s psychodynamic explanation—where political fights are driven by trauma, status-seeking, revenge, etc.—actually overlaps with what conflict theory was supposed to explain in the first place! Status competitions and symbolic power struggles are conflict theory—they’re just not the Marxist class-struggle version he critiques in this post. It feels like he’s reinventing the wheel but calling it something else.
Finally, I think Scott’s earlier framing of mistake vs. conflict theory as complementary lenses worked better than this new "conflict theory is wrong" framing. In reality, most political disputes involve both mistakes (bad reasoning, incomplete information) and conflicts (groups with clashing interests). For instance, debates over abortion or COVID lockdowns aren’t purely material but still involve deep value conflicts between groups. The 2018 version of conflict theory could handle that complexity; the 2025 version can’t.
Overall, I feel like this post narrows conflict theory so much that it becomes easy to dismiss—but only because it’s no longer the same concept Scott originally described. If anything, his psychodynamic model could’ve been integrated into the broader framework instead of replacing it outright. As it stands, this feels more like conceptual drift than a real critique of conflict theory.
(Disclaimer: This comment was written by Perplexity.AI's Deep Research, in response to this prompt: "Please write a critique of this post (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-i-am-not-a-conflict-theorist) that argues that the author's definition of "conflict theory" and "mistake theory" have drifted from how he originally described them in this post (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/)", followed by a request to o3-mini to re-write the report to make it sound more like a blog comment.)
Here is my take as a sort-of Marxist on “conflict theory”:
No matter what humans are doing in the immaterial realm of ideas, human beings remain material creatures with material needs, such as food and shelter. Unlike animals, we mostly meet these needs by manipulating our material surroundings, like cultivating the land and producing produce. This conscious manipulation of our surroundings to meet essential needs, or to further improve our quality of life, is what I would call work. Humans in general dislike (this kind of) work, since it is a lot of hard physical effort, but do like the fruits of this labor. So humans try minimizing their personal ratio between input work and output gains. This not only leads to collective increases in trade and productivity (“the development of the means of production”) that are shared by all, it also leads – all throughout history – to social polarization between primarily two classes: One class that does the work, and one class that successfully omits working but, nonetheless, shares disproportionately in the gains of the working class. This second class does so, either by force (being warriors/conquerors or their decedents) and/or by psychological manipulation (being/employing “priests”). So the working class, it is being told by the priests, should remain docile and productive for the benefits of the idle class, because this social order reflects the natural/traditional/god-given/harmonic order of the universe. If the workers come to think, and act on, there being some kind of conflict between the interests of these classes, then by so doing, they disturb order, peace and harmony and must thus be put back into place by force of the warriors.
Now fast forward to modern capitalism. With regard to work/labor, society is still divided into two essential classes: 1) Capitalists, who own (enough of) the means of production, so that they can meet their material needs by profits/dividends/rents/capital gains, without ever >needing< to work at all – which does not mean that they may not >choose< to work for non-material reasons like status alone! 2) Workers, who are defined by not owning (enough of) the means of production, and therefore are obliged to do the work, i.e. sell their labor, in order to meet their material needs – they cannot choose not to work and thus have to accept whatever work they can find. From this fact alone emerge irreconcilable material conflicts of interest: Capitalists want wages to be as low as possible, because for them wages are a cost of production that decreases their gains from production: profits(*). Workers want wages to be as high as possible because they are their gains from production, by which they cover their material needs. And it’s not just about wages, it is even more fundamentally about the question/conflict of ownership itself: Who should own and control the means of production, the companies, the process of work and production? The workers, doing the work, or the people who happen to own them at present (mostly due to inheritance)? This is a vital material conflict >no matter whether or not< the individual workers and capitalists happen to be conscious of it at any given time
(*This is somewhat complicated by macroeconomic, demand-focused considerations by people such as Keynes and Henry Ford, who argued that by increasing wages in the present, they increase their workers’/customers’ demand and thus their spending in the future. Therefore, there supposedly exists no conflict between workers and (far-sighted) capitalists at all, but rather a prosperous, demand-driven cycle between the two classes.)
But sure, most political discourse and conflicts nowadays, enacted in mass media, does not cover these fundamental roots of conflict. You say, this is because these root conflict either do not exist, or because people don’t care about them, since they are naturally driven by non-material psychological urges. I disagree. You ignore the material question at the heart of the matter: Who owns the media and what (conflicting?) interests do they have? The “means of communication” are private property of the capitalist class, just the same way as most other means of production. The very social media platforms that are part of your argument above, are extremely concentrated in the hands of just a couple of ultra-rich capitalist owner-managers. The same is true for most TV channels, newspaper etc.. I would argue that these capitalists have mostly two material class interests: 1) Increase their platforms’ profits by capturing as much as possible of their users’ attention (since the free-to-use business model of these platforms requires selling users’ attention/awareness/engagement to advertisers). This sort of attention maximization (and thus ad exposure maximization) turned out to be most effective by appealing to the most primitive emotional urges (like “dirty strangers/foreigners are raping our daughters! / spoiling our culture! / eating our cats and dogs!!”). 2) Their other, more indirect, interest is preventing the workers from understanding what their own material interests are in the first place. Turns out, as you illustrate above, our modern, mostly non-material “culture war” spectacle is doing a great job achieving this objective as well.
All of this, I think, is further confounded by the fact, that in modern industrialized societies, most peoples’ basic material needs (food and shelter) are mostly met. This defuses not only the material conflicts themselves, but also the consciousness regarding the importance and very existence of material conflicts in general. I guess, it is understandable that the more disconnected one personally is from material needs of survival, the more boring, mundane and irrelevant do material conflicts appear. But that does not mean that material conflicts (who owns what / who >has to< work / how is the produce being shared) do not still exert causal force at the very basis of our modern industrialized societies.
This was all very abstract. Now some illustrative examples that are not covered by the text above (beyond direct questions of wages and ownership):
Climate Change. Is global warming really just an intellectual issue of us – humanity as a whole – still lacking proper solutions? Have the necessary technological and economics changes to safeguard human survival on the planet really been avoided for ~50 years because we are mistaken in our knowledge? Or are there powerful material interests at play, which oppose trillions of dollars being reallocated from hugely profitable ventures (like the oil and gas industries) to vague public goods (like collective long-term survival)? How can the political (non-)reaction to climate change be explained by mistake theory?
Land Rents. Ricardian-Georgist land rent policies and taxation are almost universally accepted as beneficial among a pretty much unprecedented spectrum of economic schools of thought (Marxists are usually only against it insofar as its implementation may further distract from the root causes of capitalist exploitation and its socialist remedies). So why aren’t these land rent policies being implemented? Is it because the policy proposals aren’t good enough yet, littered with intellectual mistakes, or because there is a material conflict between powerful economic interests?
Universal health care (and the like). As far as I know, in the US there has existed wide popular support for some form of universal health care for a long while (/forever?). Yet, implementation is nowhere in sight. Universal health care seems to be performing well (even better?) in most industrialized countries, so what kind of >mistake< is preventing its implementation in the US? There are probably many more social/economic policies with robust popular support, just like this, which mysteriously are not implemented in (overly) capitalist societies. In fact, European countries, with a history of stronger working-class collaboration, have many popular social services and labor laws in place, which are lacking in the US. What is the “mistake” here, happening solely in the US?
All in all, imho, you are confusing the petty political conflicts portrayed in the (billionaire-owned) media landscape with the material root causes of social conflict itself. Since your topics above are selected for by their predominance in this media landscape, they are a preselected sample, biased by the ownership relations and material interests of the private media institutions, which foster and spread these very topics in the first place! Or in other words: In a world, where all mediums of mass communication are owned and controlled by billionaire capitalists for their class’ profit interests, small wonder that material dimensions of conflict (and their socialist remedies) are strangely un(der)represented. Just because this particularly capitalistic media landscape does a great job at suppressing and diverting material conflict from public discourse, does not mean that material conflict does not affect politics. Beneath the surface of public spectacle in (social) media, material conflict very much does shape power and politics.
The mistake theory view of this is that the "fundamental" material conflicts you posit above are not actually fundamental, and there is a way of organizing society that is a Pareto improvement on any way of optimizing the system for just one of the classes by playing games with wage levels or allocation of control of the means/process of production between workers and capitalists. More generally, that fundamentally everybody's social class is something more like "human" or "sentient being" than "worker" or "capitalist", and we can get Pareto better results according to our actual values, or CEV or whatever, by optimizing for the benefit (including nonmaterial benefits like fairness) of all of society than by dividing society into subsets and optimizing for the material (only) benefit of just whatever subset oneself happens to fall into.
So the "mistake" happening in all those cases is that people incorrectly think they will benefit from conflict, then engage in it.
I’m not a fan of applying pareto optimization to the social sphere.
First of all, what is the starting point that you are trying to “improve” on? You are always going to start with some arbitrary point in time with all of its historical injustices (and inefficiencies) already baked in. Let’s say you are applying pareto improvements to a society with pharaohs and slaves, or feudal landlords and unfree peasants, or nowadays, with 12-figure billionaires and working poor. Sure, one may find ways to improve the lot of every class, but the more classes (or objectives in general) one optimizes for, the more limited will be optimization potential, or degrees of freedom, for the individual classes. Or in other words: why exactly should improving the lives of the slaves/peasants/poor be limited by the condition that the position of the pharaohs/landlords/billionaires must not worsen? Is every allocation that happens to historically come to existence worthy of preservation? Pareto cannot answer this, but if applied naively, it would mean foregoing all kinds of improvements for the masses for preserving inherited privileges of the rich and powerful. I don’t think we should put up with this.
And of course, this also goes the other way: Not just the working masses should not put up with this, the rich and powerful certainly >will not< put up with this. Why should they, from their point of view, limit their own enrichment by putting it under the condition that the workers must be better of as well? That’s not how elites historically operate and under perfect capitalism it shouldn’t even be possible for them to make such a choice (see below). So if you want to apply pareto improvements on society as a whole, and as such also on the powerful, how will you convince (or rather force) the powerful to accept pareto improvements over higher non-pareto improvements for themselves? Even if you had a perfect AGI, which could come up with perfect pareto optimization for all of society, for some/many people it would mean accepting opportunity costs with regard to more partisan optimization schemes. Applying it is thus less a question of theoretical calculations but rather of political enforcement. And how it could be enforced is another question Pareto cannot answer.
Furthermore, society isn’t being divided into subsets – it is, in fact, divided into subsets. Subsets regarding peoples’ economic positions and interests. But this is to expected and almost unavoidable given the complexity of modern production processes and the degree of division of labor. Not only workers and capitalists find themselves with opposing material interest, so do also for example creditors and debtors, exporting and importing enterprises, or in the past landlords and industrialists (think 19th century Britain). Sure, there are also universal humanitarian interests that could be optimized for, but the conflicting material interests in capitalism are systemic and not the result of individual wills. For example, under perfect capitalism, it shouldn’t even be possible for any given firm to increase wages, even if it wanted to, since doing so would increase its costs of production, thus the price of its goods and thus would bankrupt the firm in face of competing firms that do not increase wages. Material conflict theory does not posit that conflict exists because some individuals are evil-minded, but rather that individuals find themselves in complex socioeconomic property and incentive structures with all kinds of conflicting (yet not necessarily illegitimate) interests. These conflicts of interest do materially exist, whether or not people believe they can benefit from them or not.
It's true that Pareto improvements aren't very interesting if you think people's interests are all, or even mostly, in the amount of material resources they control. That's a mistake though. Billionaires are not millions or even thousands of times better off, in any real sense, than people who live paycheck to paycheck. In Pareto improving society we could take away most of the money and power billionaires have and make it up to them in other ways.
Further, I think it's a mistake to say things like "there is a conflict of interest between workers and capitalists because we live in a capitalist society". The only way to change the balance of material conditions between workers and capitalists, after all, is to change society so it is no longer, or at least less, capitalist, after all, so we can't take capitalism and its structural material conflicts as a fixed background except when we only contemplate small, fiddly changes. But mistake theory would posit that getting gridlocked over small, fiddly changes that preserve conflicts of interest instead of cooperating on larger changes that resolve them is, well, a mistake.
>Economists would answer that inflation benefits the poor at the expense of the rich - poor people tend to have net debts, and rich people net assets, and inflation reduces the relative size of both.
Economists might say that, but that's because economists by and large are people who go to very expensive universities for years in order to understand less about both money and human behavior than the average loudmouth on a barstool.
Inflation reduces the purchasing power of cash, but rich people don't sit on piles of cash--they own the kinds of assets that go up in value relative to cash during inflationary times!
And while inflation does reduce debt in real terms, that only meaningfully benefits people whose debt is long-term and large--classically, people with 30 year mortgages, a thing more associated with the middle class than the poor (and inflation still kicks the asses of the middle class on things like insurance, food, energy, and services, things they typically pay for with non-borrowed money).
>The anti-global-warming position gradually shifted from “global warming is fake” to “global warming isn’t caused by humans” to “global warming is actually good or at least not bad enough to be worth stopping”. All of these enrage and humiliate liberal experts about the same amount, so it’s not that hard to make people switch from one to another.
Enrage, sure. But humiliate? I don't think so: how can it possibly humiliate you, the expert who claims X is true, to see me, the fearless iconoclast, do the most obvious Person Who is Wrong and Knows It But Won't Admit It thing possible regarding the truth value of X?
He didn't say the "humiliate" amount in particular was large, just that it was about the same between the three statements.
Right, but since the amount rounds to zero, why mention it at all? Might as well say "any of these three positions, the latter two of which blatantly obviously represent backpedaling in the face of mounting evidence, make liberal experts equally horny." Or hungry, or itchy, or some other thing that people taking those positions in that sequence manifestly do not make liberal experts feel.
It's just for parallelism with the use of "humiliate and enrage" earlier in the article.
I can see that, but the reference there (and throughout the piece) is to people *trying* to humiliate and outrage the outgroup. I can't for the life of me understand why Scott keeps hammering on those concepts without addressing the obvious (to me, anyway) fact that both sides are constantly very very successful at the outrage part and only very occasionally at humiliation.
I think the humiliation is supposed to come when people are outraged but can't do anything equally effective against the outrage; humiliation doesn't come when people opine on Twitter, but it does when your boss opines to your face, or when "drill baby drill" becomes national policy over your objection as a top Federal scientist.
That second one is definitely a humiliation. The first not so much, or at all. I see your point, though.
>Does anything rise to the level of a true material conflict?
Imo the battle between good and evil is the one real contender. I.e. ask about the criminals themselves - the ones who view themselves as evil but don't care/like it.
I really dislike the cope that these people are just 'confused about where their true interest lie'. They're enemies of the good and we're in conflict with them.
Two caveats here:
The free-rider problem is solvable in principle through social pressure. Wealthy people could exclude other wealthy people from their social networks or even interfere with their business operations in minor ways (badmouthing them to potential clients/partners) based on their political contributions (which could be accurately assessed because of transparency laws). Whether this actually happens significantly, I do not know.
The SALT alignments may be a contingent feature of modern political coalitions. The 1932 and 1936 elections pretty clearly ran on conflict theory, with wealthy against less wealthy (with a few minor oddities like the Solid South and Maine).
> Here there’s no plausible explanation except that one side or the other - the hundred million people who really want themselves and their kids to be vaccinated, or the hundred million people who really don’t - is making a terrible, tragic mistake.
There's a lot of mistake in this disagreement but at least some of it is conflict. Surrounding the role of government in healthcare (bodily autonomy, ironically) and also the question of how much the strong should compromise to protect the weak. I don't personally know any true anti-vaxxers in the scientific sense, but plenty of conservatives and centrists sneered at the idea of government enforced (in their view) experimental vaccines to protect the obese or iMmUnoCompRomisEd
From the intro:
>Recovering a duality first proposed by Max Weber, I suggest ethnic or national conflict is best conceptualized as a combination of "value rationality" and "instrumental rationality." Both of these rationalities are expressions of goal-directed behavior, but their conceptions of costs widely diverge. Instrumental rationality entails a strict cost-benefit calculus with respect to goals, necessi- tating the abandonment or adjustment of goals if the costs of real- izing them are too high. Value-rational behavior is produced by a conscious "ethical, aesthetic, religious or other" belief, "indepen- dently of its prospects of success."' Behavior, when driven by such values, can consciously embrace great personal sacrifices. Some spheres or goals of life are considered so valuable that they would not normally be up for sale or compromise, however costly the pursuit of their realization might be. The means to achieving these objectives might change, but the objectives themselves would
“Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically…”
Already shown:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/118/3/909/1943014
It’s a very good paper.
Relevant: belief in conspiracy theories is mediated by a spitefulness response to a perceived competitive disadvantage in society: https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/josi.12662
Imagine an alternate history where the Southern Baptist Church successfully persuaded everyone in the 19th century that slavery is a divinely ordained institution. Not just the slaveowners—everyone, including the slaves themselves—accepts it as an unremarkable fact of life, no more controversial than left-handedness. In this world, slaves are allowed to vote on certain local church matters.
Now, picture a particular church where two issues are up for a vote. The first: whether to allow women (both free and enslaved) to serve as alms collectors. The second: whether midwives should be required to disinfect their hands before delivering babies. The results? The first issue splits neatly along gender lines. The second shows no correlation with gender or slavery status.
According to Scott’s taxonomy, “female alms collectors” is a classic conflict-theory issue, while “hand disinfection” falls squarely into mistake theory. But what about slavery itself? In this society, no one talks about it much—just as we don’t spend much time discussing left-handedness. By Scott’s framework, we’re forced to say either that slavery is not a political issue at all or that it must be a mistake-theory issue, since slaves and slaveowners ignore it to the same extent. Both statements, in a trivial sense, are true: slavery is not a political issue in the sense that it isn't discussed, and both slave and slaveowners have the exact commitment to the claim that God ordained slavery, so abolishing slavery would require persuading both groups to the same extent (i.e. being a slave plays no role in requiring persuasion).
And yet, Scott’s framework misses something essential. If we were to launch a pro-abolition campaign, slaveowners and slaves would have objectively different things at stake. This isn’t a claim about their reactions—perhaps every slaveowner would cheerfully say, “Wow, enslaving people for profit was really dumb of me; let’s end this embarrassment right now.” But even if persuasion happened equally smoothly across both groups, the things at stake would be different for both groups.
(Crucially, this observation requires no stance on whether slavery is truly God-ordained. Even a devout Southern Baptist can recognize that slaves and slaveowners have different interests in the question of disobeying God's laws.)
This suggests that we need a finer distinction within Scott’s “conflict theory” category:
A. Conflict-theory issues: Disputes where the groups pre-exist the political disagreement, so the conflict could only be fully “resolved” if the groups themselves ceased to exist (which does not imply the disappearance of the individuals within them).
A1. The issue is actively contested.
A2. The issue is not actively contested.
B. Mistake-theory issues: Disputes where groups don’t pre-exist the disagreement —people might first hear about the issue, then take sides, and later switch positions.
As Scott describes, today's hot-button issues are definitely mistake-theory issues motivated by psychopolitics. Or, to borrow TLP’s more precise framing: modern politics operates like high school social dynamics—a shifting patchwork of rivalries between semi-equals, none of whom can even imagine changing the rules of the game.
If you believe we are all equally victims of this game (as TLP does), then naturally, you’ll see politics as mistake theory. But a case can be made against this (though not with Marxist discrete classes), leading to the conclusion that, at bottom, we’re dealing with an A2-style conflict.
"I'm going to have to identify as non-binary on this one."
"I'll take 'False Dichotomies' for $200, Alex!"
It is both. Always.
<Follow-up on past thread about "Elon Musk's IQ is probably not that high" according to someone named Seth Abramson. Also, I've attached this same comment to the original thread>
So after reading Deiseach's comment, I acknowledge that Abramson is not an inherently credible source. He's not the sort of man anyone should say "well SETH ABRAMSON said it" because apparently he's sloppy.
However, that doesn't mean everything in the article is wrong. It just means the article is not credible for verifying anything (hence I'm not re-linking it).
However However,
I still *personally* find the article useful for researching Musk's bad press (I'm not telling anyone to do this), since it can be difficult actually digging for it.
For example, wikipedia doesn't mention that he was replaced as CEO at Zip2, but Britannica does:
"In addition, Musk was replaced as CEO by a more experienced businessman, Richard Sorkin, but remained executive vice president and chief technology officer."
Wikipedia does mention his ousting from Paypal/X.com twice:
"The company's investors regarded Musk as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year."
"Within the merged company, Musk returned as CEO. Musk's preference for Microsoft software over Unix created a rift in the company and caused Thiel to resign.[70] Due to resulting technological issues and lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in 2000."
So to conclude,
I personally think Musk has many negative qualities and is not as intelligent as people think. And part of me wants to keep going through the Seth Abramson article and independently verifying things. But I simply don't have the energy. It took a surprising amount of time to verify that Musk was removed as CEO from Zip2. Chatgpt "believed" this, but the wikipedia articles on Zip2 and on Musk were worded so as NOT to say it. And then I found Britannica. Shrug.
I think people subconsciously come up with what they think will be the selfishly beneficial political positions for them to hold, and then convince themselves consciously that they support those positions based on their neutral reading of the greater good. With the additional wrench thrown in the works that people are pretty bad at thinking through this sort of thing, especially unconsciously, and often get the answer wrong about what policies they'd benefit from.
Excellent post. Best in a while.
"people don't actually want things that benefit them or their group, they just want to feel like they are benefiting, which is totally different, honest, even though it results in them acting as though they're seeking their group's shared interests"
Seriously? Why the mental gymnastics?
Where did I say that? Show proof. It seems to me that you are lying and ascribing a false quote to me.
If you're going to quote my previous statements as an example of the totally nonsense idea that people don't want things that benefit them or their group, they just want to feel like they are benefitting which is totally different even though it results in them acting as though they're seeking their groups shared interests, then quote me accurately and demonstrate how the issue I'm talking about shows that I don't want things that benefit me and my group.
> "nobody would give their child measles just to own the libs"
I think you're very, very, very wrong about this aspect of political motivation. Think about how much people do for meaning, for identity: they will blow themselves up just to own the [fill in the blanks]; they will see their military volunteer child die in a country they know nothing about, and feel proud and full of meaning; they will burn to death at the stake, certain that it was all worth it. If they harbored some uncertainty about forgoing vaccines, and their child dies, they will take that and make their opposition to vaccines more certain, not less; it's far more attractive to retreat into certainty than to admit you might have made a mistake that killed your kid (and possibly other kids).