This is the shit about “rational” thinking that pisses me off.
you start with a premise that sounds reasonable: “Wouldn’t it be good if future generations were better off than their parents?”
Then you throw out all the hard parts of the question like:
what does it mean to be better off?
would there be equal access to the technology?
what would the social consequences be if there isn’t?
could one group of people impose their designs for humanity on others?
have people tried this before? did anything go wrong?
Then you ignore all of history, pretend it’s just a surface level question of technical ability and the only objections people have must be because they’re stupid.
And voi-French noises you have yet another position to be smuggly superior in.
Like fuck, we do this to other animals and we get fucking sheep that die if you don’t sheer them and get infections around their bum, chickens with a fifth the lifespan of their ancestors, chickens that grow so fast their legs sometimes break, dogs so fucking inbred they are a mess of health problems.
Maybe you could take a lesson from this about how fucking awful we are at deciding what traits are desirable and how twisted the logic of capital is. Or nah? maybe people who think a few random rich shits deciding on the perfect human will go about as well as other high modernist ideas are just idiots. That must be it.
Then you throw out all the hard parts of the question like:
Then you ignore all of history
Seems to me that this is all swimming in the same water as End of History and anti-politics: defining humans and humanity out of the problem space, and insisting that in order to be taken seriously you must be focused only on productivity, good governance, and technological progress, the only problems.
Yeah there’s a book I quite like called seeing like a state. The author is an anthropologist who spent a lot of time studying SEA people living in the margins of states and non state areas as the state tried to bring them to heel.
In this book he coins the term “high modernism” to talk about this style of thinking wherein problems are simply matters of technical expertise and can, and should, be solved by abstract design from the centre and this design should be inflexible (because it is ideal).
While this kind of eugenics and sundry stuff isn’t exactly the same I think it shares lots of characterists: The idea that you can solve real problems by sitting in a chair, the ignorance of how ideologically motivated you are and how heavily aesthetics features in your motivation (e.g. here they are far more concerned with the aesthetic of rows of healthy, pretty children doing well on tests than any of the messy details. Such as whether this is actually particularly useful in a world where many people suffer illness or disability merely because they are not given access to proper care), and the dismissal of other’s reservations as a sort of “peasant ignorance” which in this case is highlighted by the notion it’s merely the scary thoughts at the word holding people back, as if eugenics were some phantom we cower at in ignorance.
Anyway moral of the story read the book it’s good. Weirdly rationalists also sometimes read this book and take all the wrong lessons from it. Stuff like “wow it was bad to supplant traditional agriculture because it yielded just as well or better than western” instead of “Oh their obsession with rational farming made them completely blind to reality including the enormous human cost of their authoritarianism”
Weirdly rationalists also sometimes read this book and take all the wrong lessons from it.
Scott Alexander is a crypto-reactionary and I think he reviewed it as a way to expose his readers to neoreactionary ideas under the guise of superficial skepticism, in the same manner as the anti-reactionary FAQ. The book’s author might be a anarchist but a lot of the arguments could easily work in a libertarian context.
Idk if I’m steeped in enough siskind lore. How did he frame it?
Also James Scott is not an anarchist, or at least wasn’t at the time he interviewed about writing “three cheers for anarchism” anyway. He is very sympathetic though as is typical in anthropology.
iirc he basically agrees with the tennents but thinks states are unlikely to be defeatable.
The review is mostly positive, but then it also has passages like this:
Well, for one thing, [James C.] Scott basically admits to stacking the dice against High Modernism and legibility. He admits that the organic livable cities of old had life expectancies in the forties because nobody got any light or fresh air and they were all packed together with no sewers and so everyone just died of cholera. He admits that at some point agricultural productivity multiplied by like a thousand times and the Green Revolution saved millions of lives and all that, and probably that has something to do with scientific farming methods and rectangular grids. He admits that it’s pretty convenient having a unit of measurement that local lords can’t change whenever they feel like it. Even modern timber farms seem pretty successful. After all those admissions, it’s kind of hard to see what’s left of his case.
and
Professors of social science think [check cashing] shops are evil because they charge the poor higher rates, so they should be regulated away so that poor people don’t foolishly shoot themselves in the foot by going to them. But on closer inspection, they offer a better deal for the poor than banks do, for complicated reasons that aren’t visible just by comparing the raw numbers. Poor people’s understanding of this seems a lot like the metis that helps them understand local agriculture. And progressives’ desire to shift control to the big banks seems a lot like the High Modernists’ desire to shift everything to a few big farms. Maybe this is a point in favor of something like libertarianism?
for some reason the phrase “as a socialist, there’s nothing I love more than banks” is cracking me up in ways that are going to be very difficult to explain to the people around me right now if I’m asked to explain why I’m giggling
“Well, step one will naturally have to be that every single person in the world accepts that I am the pinnacle of evolution and everybody else is comparatively worthless and nothing but a waste of space. Once we got that out of the way, we can tackle the question of how to make humanity as cool and awesome as I am while weeding out all the factors I do not approve of. Why is everybody looking at me like I am the crazy one? Didn’t we just establish that everybody else is inferior trash?”
Well obviously they’re garbage, they have boring hobbies like sewing while I have cool premium hobbies like writing bdsm erotica where AI dominates everyone at once.
This is the shit about “rational” thinking that pisses me off.
you start with a premise that sounds reasonable: “Wouldn’t it be good if future generations were better off than their parents?”
Then you throw out all the hard parts of the question like:
Then you ignore all of history, pretend it’s just a surface level question of technical ability and the only objections people have must be because they’re stupid.
And voi-French noises you have yet another position to be smuggly superior in.
Like fuck, we do this to other animals and we get fucking sheep that die if you don’t sheer them and get infections around their bum, chickens with a fifth the lifespan of their ancestors, chickens that grow so fast their legs sometimes break, dogs so fucking inbred they are a mess of health problems.
Maybe you could take a lesson from this about how fucking awful we are at deciding what traits are desirable and how twisted the logic of capital is. Or nah? maybe people who think a few random rich shits deciding on the perfect human will go about as well as other high modernist ideas are just idiots. That must be it.
Seems to me that this is all swimming in the same water as End of History and anti-politics: defining humans and humanity out of the problem space, and insisting that in order to be taken seriously you must be focused only on productivity, good governance, and technological progress, the only problems.
Yeah there’s a book I quite like called seeing like a state. The author is an anthropologist who spent a lot of time studying SEA people living in the margins of states and non state areas as the state tried to bring them to heel.
In this book he coins the term “high modernism” to talk about this style of thinking wherein problems are simply matters of technical expertise and can, and should, be solved by abstract design from the centre and this design should be inflexible (because it is ideal).
While this kind of eugenics and sundry stuff isn’t exactly the same I think it shares lots of characterists: The idea that you can solve real problems by sitting in a chair, the ignorance of how ideologically motivated you are and how heavily aesthetics features in your motivation (e.g. here they are far more concerned with the aesthetic of rows of healthy, pretty children doing well on tests than any of the messy details. Such as whether this is actually particularly useful in a world where many people suffer illness or disability merely because they are not given access to proper care), and the dismissal of other’s reservations as a sort of “peasant ignorance” which in this case is highlighted by the notion it’s merely the scary thoughts at the word holding people back, as if eugenics were some phantom we cower at in ignorance.
Anyway moral of the story read the book it’s good. Weirdly rationalists also sometimes read this book and take all the wrong lessons from it. Stuff like “wow it was bad to supplant traditional agriculture because it yielded just as well or better than western” instead of “Oh their obsession with rational farming made them completely blind to reality including the enormous human cost of their authoritarianism”
Scott Alexander is a crypto-reactionary and I think he reviewed it as a way to expose his readers to neoreactionary ideas under the guise of superficial skepticism, in the same manner as the anti-reactionary FAQ. The book’s author might be a anarchist but a lot of the arguments could easily work in a libertarian context.
Idk if I’m steeped in enough siskind lore. How did he frame it?
Also James Scott is not an anarchist, or at least wasn’t at the time he interviewed about writing “three cheers for anarchism” anyway. He is very sympathetic though as is typical in anthropology.
iirc he basically agrees with the tennents but thinks states are unlikely to be defeatable.
Here’s the old sneerclub thread about the leaked emails linking Scott Alexander to the far right
Scott Alexander’s review of Seeing Like A State is here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
The review is mostly positive, but then it also has passages like this:
and
[citation needed]Leftists are all into findom. Nothing hotter than exposing your bank statements every time you need a new service.
Hnnnngh audit me harder daddy.
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for some reason the phrase “as a socialist, there’s nothing I love more than banks” is cracking me up in ways that are going to be very difficult to explain to the people around me right now if I’m asked to explain why I’m giggling
Ah yes, you can have vibrant cities or sewers. Clearly there is no other way.
It’s also obvious that people can either have predatory loans or starvation, no other choice!
“Well, step one will naturally have to be that every single person in the world accepts that I am the pinnacle of evolution and everybody else is comparatively worthless and nothing but a waste of space. Once we got that out of the way, we can tackle the question of how to make humanity as cool and awesome as I am while weeding out all the factors I do not approve of. Why is everybody looking at me like I am the crazy one? Didn’t we just establish that everybody else is inferior trash?”
- people claiming to be the rational ones.
Well obviously they’re garbage, they have boring hobbies like sewing while I have cool premium hobbies like writing bdsm erotica where AI dominates everyone at once.
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Beauty standards are fixed and appearance is not influenced by environmental factors such as lifestyle and diet.
Come on keep up, we can’t keep rehashing the basics.