Some Notes on My Introduction to Carl Schmitt

Kalim Kassam pointed me to a new-to-me introduction to Schmitt. Contains mostly politics but also a bit about consciousness, which is my favourite bit.

"Anti-political utopianism includes all forms of liberalism as well as international socialism, global capitalism, anarchism, and pacifism: in short, all social philosophies that aim at a universal order in which conflict is abolished."

Cheerfully acknowledged as true enough of me! As any charitable observer would note, the ideal of abolishing violence doesn't mean I fail if homeopathic amounts of violence remain. I mainly think that a few simplifying steps could abolish more than half of extant violence. And that anyone who is averse to phase I trials must ultimately be pro-violence.

"Furthermore, Schmitt believes that utopian attempts to completely abolish conflict actually increase its scope and intensity. There is no war more universal in scope and fanatical in prosecution than wars to end all war and establish perpetual peace."

An excellent test of my anarchist philosophy.

Certainly, I want to avoid universal, fanatical war. How does my philosophy imply peace? The central feature of anarchism is that I deserve to be left alone by anyone I leave alone. In other words, I could achieve my utopia unilaterally if my country would give me the option of not paying taxes. (Of course they know better, because it wouldn't be just me.)

Specifically, I have, with only one proviso, no fundamental objections to Progressivism. The proviso is that they let me leave. If they'd let me out of their little 'let's try it on everyone at once' trials, I'd be happy to let them corrode themselves down to nothing with no further interference. But I suspect that's the ultimate point of Progressivism - justification for coercion. I'd be just fine with being proven wrong about this.

Ironically they accept this as moral, which you can verify by trying this argument on one. They'll respond by arguing that I can't leave them alone. However, their argument is that they can impose obligations on me through the gift of roads, or some such. If that's so, I'd give them a fiver and then impose lifelong slavery on them, and my first order would be to stop making me pay taxes. ("Only reasonable expenses." "Your gifts aren't reasonable." Etc, until they go in a circle, having forgotten I'd refuted those arguments already.)

"It is important to note that Schmitt’s concept of the political does not apply to ordinary domestic politics. The rivalries of politicians and parties, provided they stay within legal parameters, do not constitute enmity in Schmitt’s sense."

Moldbug has shown that this is incorrect. The appearance of tranquility is illusory. Republibrats and Democan'ts would happily kill each other if only it would work better. They just think the risk is too great. In due course, I'm sure they'll get to it, though.

I'm disappointed in the reactosphere for not discussing the Civil War 2. It seems more important to me than most other things, though perhaps I don't know about some other catastrophe, of about the same size, that will likely arrive first.

(Q:"Why don't you discuss it yourself?" A:"Even if I were knowledgeable, discussing this with myself is a waste of typing. If I knew how to spark a wider discussion I'd have already done it.")

"For Schmitt, political sovereignty is the power to determine the enemy and declare war. The sovereign is the person who makes that decision."

A fascinating distinction. The word is wrong, I think. Let me rearrange.

The leader of a group is who decides on the group's enemies. If a section of the group disagrees, then they aren't really part of the group. They're not working toward common goals. They're not following the leader.

Is it truly sovereignty? With this wording, does it matter? What matters is whether the above paragraph is true or only suggestive. Verification: can you think of a situation where different sub-groups are fighting different enemies, without working at cross purposes?

"and (b) life-transcending and life-negating values, i.e., things that are worth killing and dying for, like the defense of personal or collective honor, one’s culture or way of life, religious and philosophical convictions, etc. Such values make possible mortal conflict between groups."

So either group selection is a thing (there are conditions usually overlooked) or consciousness straight-up trumps genetics. (This is mechanically equivalent to having a non-evolved soul.)

No species will ever directly evolve to pursue a life-negating goal. Evolution simply can't work that way, without group selection. It is a fact that humans - in fact most humans - have life-negating goals.

So, I have in front of me an organism that has every system telling it not to die except consciousness, which in practice can override all the subsystems at any time, dying and taking all the subsystems with it. It could have happened indirectly by, for example, having human goals proceed from values, which proceed from consciousness. Regardless, consciousness must be its own thing that evolution exploited, rather than simply a kind of measurement device for pathways already evolved.

However it works, this is a pretty big elephant, so I'm impressed at how well it gets ignored. That takes skill, that does.

"The abolition of the political, therefore, requires the abolition of the human capacity for passionate, existentially serious, life and death attachments. The apolitical man is, therefore, the apathetic man, the man who lacks commitment and intensity"

Error, as I mentioned above. I have great attachment to being left alone.

Schmitt may have good pro-politics arguments, but lets me down by being ignorant of anti-busybody arguments. At least, he has failed to address them.

"The apolitical utopia is a spiritual “boneless chicken ranch” of doped up, dumbed down, self-absorbed producer-consumers."

This I must agree with. Were the previous paragraph put into practice, this would be the result.

"Politics cannot be abolished by universal declarations of peace, love, and tolerance, for such attempts to transcend politics actually just reinstitute it on another plane. After all, utopian peace- and love-mongers have enemies too, namely “haters” like us."

Past the missing busybody considerations, Schmitt constructs a good logical comparison, but this is an engineering question, not philosophy. Tolerance etc, is not the fundamental opposite of politics, and therefore 'haters' are not fundamental enemies of utopians. Declarations of tolerance etc. are merely one possible tool for reducing conflict. They didn't work.

Nineteenth century policing methods worked on criminals, so perhaps try those next. If that doesn't work, try something else until something sticks.

"Thus the abolition of politics is really only the abolition of honesty about politics."

I can't approve of the path but Schmitt seems to get to good places in the end. Yes, I agree, and the first engineering challenge for a sound utopianism is how to be against politics and dishonesty simultaneously. However, Schmitt's arguments must prove that it is impossible.

"But dishonesty is the least of the utopians’ vices. For in the name of peace and love, they persecute us with a fanaticism and wanton destructiveness that make good, old-fashioned war seem wholesome by comparison."

Dishonest utopians, yes. Honesty is hardly the least virtue, its lack proceeds directly to those wanton wars. Dishonesty plus power equals destruction, shockingly. Do phase I trials because dishonesty can slip in the back door.

To me this looks like quitting. It requires a much higher quality of argument to prove that honesty and utopianism can't be combined, or that it would lead to violence regardless. Historical patterns are useful but not sufficient. By contrast, we could just run some phase I trials and skip all the arguing.

"Two peoples occupying adjacent valleys might, for strategic reasons, covet the high ground between them. This may lead to conflict. But such conflicts have finite, definable aims. Thus they tend to be limited in scope and duration."

Moldbug's distinction between conflict and violence is extremely useful here. Conflict is ubiquitous and always will be. Schmitt wants to quit trying to reduce violence.

"But when war is wedded to a universalist utopianism—global communism or democracy, the end of “terror” or, more risibly, “evil”"

Shame, Schmitt. Violence is evil. Not risible.

Schmitt would have profited by disentangling means and ends. Proggies always promote means, as do most every group. Schmitt promots a means of not trying to abolish politics.

I promote an end. The end of violence. If you can show that my means are not promoting my end, I will change them. Further, by being explicit, I make it convenient to oppose the end directly. I can prove that Proggies means are not promoting their supposed ends - and indeed many others have besides, to their faces - but they don't stop. They're dishonest. Is Schmitt honest? I can't tell, because he avoided speaking explicitly about ends. I would have to check by poking him and seeing how he wiggles, like I've done by proxy to the Proggies. (They can prove me wrong by achieving their stated ends or even stopping the bleeding, so to speak - cease the cutting until they know better where to cut.)

Sociology is easy. Proggies choose the right means for their real ends, which is why they defend the means, not the ends. Schmitt, I feel, can do this too, which makes me suspicious about his real ends.

"As for the drugs of relativism, individualism, tolerance, and the multi-cult:"

A classic conservative error. Liberals are bad, therefore everything that liberals politically like must be bad.

Moldbug's version: "It also suffers from the electoral coincidence that it has to despise everything that progressivism adores, a bizarre birth defect which does not appear to be treatable." In an election debate, saying, "Oh yeah, you're right about that," is suicide. Ergo...many things, none of them good.

Relativism is good but has always been wrongly applied; morality is relative to the victim's values. Individualism actually contains collectivism as a proper subset. Tolerance of difference is good, tolerance of violence is bad. Multi-culturalism could work if both cultures respected each other and used an etiquette API to talk to each other, and obeyed property law. This last one may be pretty far-fetched, but that means it is bad due to being impractical, not impossible.

So Schmitt is right that all those things are, historically, bad. But that's due to the dishonesty and corruption, factors which Schmitt's anti-liberalism blinds him to. He seeks to condemn before he seeks to repair.

Not every liberal is a drooling moron incapable of appreciating anything good. They are lazy, self-serving, arrogant, foolish, rash, ignorant, stubborn, parochial, preening, and so on...in other words, they're human beings. Just like conservatives.

Notes on Sociologist Epistemology and Catholic Power Fossils

A good question, (via) being asked by hbdchick. Humanity was tribal everywhere before city-states. City-states did not replace tribes, but were some evolution of certain tribes. Regional contempt still exists, but it is based almost entirely on region, not on bloodlines that just happen to be associated with regions. Where did the tribes end up?

It appears that sociology is real easy up until the very end bit. As an aside, this is unfortunate for balance-of-power theories.

Second, great examples of how power grabs fossilizing into popular attitudes and received wisdom.

"The medieval church instituted marriage laws and practices that undermined large kinship groups."

The key point is that they did so on purpose, and more or less on the first try. Imagine the complexity of society, then for an analogy, a software program or car of similar complexity. Imagine getting the program or auto prototype to work on the first try. Or on the fourth or fifth, using only armchair logic to iterate.

Lenin wanted to make Russia run by soviets, so he did. He just...did.

It's just the end bit that's hard - the consequences. The powerful can decide to change society to more or less whatever they want it to be. But this fools them into thinking they can choose the consequences of it being that way.

Lenin couldn't make soviets a good organizational principle. Nobody can - it is logically impossible. The Catholics couldn't make weakening tribes a good thing, so it is lucky that it probably is.

Part of the problem is that the powerful almost never (ctrl-f 'Cowperthwaite') have the interests of society in mind. I'm sure the soviets worked out just fine for Vladimir Lenin, and the Church got exactly the power it craved.

Which is unfortunate for balance of power theories. The Church was to an extent balanced by tribes, so it rid itself of tribes. Since sociology is easy, you can expect that most attempts by a power 'balanced' by another to succeed in its attempts to rid itself of the competitor.


As to the specific measures...

"From as early as the fourth century, it discouraged practices that enlarged the family, such as adoption, polygamy, concubinage, divorce, and remarriage. It severely prohibited marriages among individuals of the same blood (consanguineous marriages), which had constituted a means to create and maintain kinship groups throughout history."

I don't want to commit the broken window fallacy. What did the Church do that didn't work, and thus wasn't listed, or was abandoned? I don't know, but my hypothesis predicts that it wasn't much, and that bad initiatives were abandoned quickly, where 'quick' is scaled to the communication and information-processing abilities of the time.

There's an interesting detail at the end.

"The church also curtailed parents’ abilities to retain kinship ties through arranged marriages by prohibiting unions in which the bride didn’t explicitly agree to the union."

Sound familiar?
It became the legal right of brides to reject suitors. Then, they start feeling entitled to reject suitors, as if it were the natural order of things. (Hmm, entitled? Turns out humans were human in 1000 AD too.) This, in time, naturally progressed to women demanding their lovers in fact love them and inspire love in return.

The modern romance novel has its roots in a successful Catholic attempt to wrest power away from tribes.

"However, by the late medieval period the nuclear family was dominant."

Modern 'family values' have the same roots. Which would be fine if it didn't apparently entail the absurd practice of having women to either hire an nanny or be the sole nanny. If the 2:1 average is true, I'd expect that children and mothers would be adapted to the expectation of, for example, getting enough sleep every other night as the other wife took over. At the very least.

"In contrast, the percentage of such [consanguineous] marriages in Muslim, Middle Eastern countries, where we also have particularly good data, is much higher – between twenty to fifty percent."

Fifty percent? Wow. Gross.
The Church decided it wanted us to find marrying a cousin creepy, and so now we do. No muss, no fuss. Just flash some raw power, thus status, and you're good to go.

"But, inadvertently, they also seem to have laid the groundwork for the civilized western world"

This is where Hanson signalling is a good thing. Then as now, the Church wouldn't have been able to sell its anti-tribe campaign, even to its own clergy, as 'we want more stuff.' It probably, then as now, noticed that tribal fighting is vicious and brutal, and sold the campaign as one to stop that. Propaganda being extremely primitive relative to modern kinds, they had to find a good thing their campaign would actually do.


(Found April 7)
"One of the basic laws of modern evolutionary science, quantified by the great Oxford biologist William D. Hamilton in 1964 under the name "kin selection," is that the more close the genetic relationship between two people, the more likely they are to feel loyalty and altruism toward each other."The Church worked this out a little earlier. Without any formal scientific method. Glad to see independent corroboration, though.

Notes On US Family Field Guide

I suspect the real main problem is that status-focused people (via) never imagine that a status contest could go any direction except one side winning. It never occurs to them to win by not playing.

"Parents intend to develop their children’s independence, yet raise them to be relatively dependent, even when the kids have the skills to act on their own, she says."

I suspect the same. Unfortunately, the (report of the?) study is instead mainly a paean to the coercion of children.

Note that it doesn't really matter whether the tone was set in the original by Ochs' study or set by Wang's interpretation.

"In those cultures, young children were expected to contribute substantially to the community, says Dr. Ochs."

One word. "Expected."

In a sense, that's a good thing, because it means that children are thought to be capable of contributing, which is not true of our civilization.

Actually, a second word too. "Community."

"Children in Samoa serve food to their elders, waiting patiently in front of them before they eat,"

Ah, I see they mean 'serve' literally, as in 'servant.'

"Another video clip shows a girl around 5 years of age in Peru's Amazon region climbing a tall tree to harvest papaya, and helping haul logs thicker than her leg to stoke a fire."

By 'expected' to 'serve' the 'community' they mean 'forced' to be a 'servant' to their 'parents.' To put the desires of the powerful before the weak. (Verification of power: if children could fight back, what happens? Answer: see the report. Ctrl-f 'ignored')

Of course it's mainly about status, not any physical good. The motive for Ochs is to convince everyone to let her have miniature vassals.

Verification: what do children in hunter tribes get up to? This coercion may have started as a survival necessity in starving farmer tribes, and is now simply a fossil of that power grab.

Double verification:

"Asking children to do a task led to much negotiation, and when parents asked, it sounded often like they were asking a favor, not making a demand, researchers said. "

Yes, this is what freedom is about. Absent a promise or other contract equivalent, you don't get to demand anything. Your options are to embrace liberty or embrace demands.

"Rather, the studied children didn't seem to view it as their routine responsibility to contribute, the researchers say."

That's because it isn't.

Instead, this is also an insult to the intelligence of parents. If the way to train independence were that simple, they would have thought of it. The mistake is more devious. Isn't it true that the helicopter parent is a higher-class phenomenon? Hence also a high-IQ phenomenon?

It's also an auto-insult by Ochs. Can she really not tell the difference between a independence and servitude? A fine specimen of the public school system, if so.

""The kids are oblivious to their parents' perspectives," says Dr. Ochs."

Cry me a river. Your kids aren't about you. Earn their attention...if you can.

"The researchers theorize that stems from a tendency in U.S. society to adapt to and focus on the children, rather than teaching children to focus on others."

We can all agree that researcher theorizing is so much bullshit, yes? Have these self-serving potshots ever turned out to be true?


Moving back to the story they were trying to tell, unfortunately it is one I could mainly have told just from my personal experience. But I'll start with an exception.

"And, Americans tend to encourage children to pay attention to objects more than faces, emphasizing colors and shapes, for instance, over people, says Dr. Ochs. In Samoa, children are expected to be attentive to others from a very young age, and parents stress focusing on facial expressions, says Dr. Ochs."

Such a relief, actual data. Unfortunately the data doesn't properly support their contention. Paying attention to objects is masculine, (ergo feminist) and object-focus is important for high pay and status jobs like programmer and physicist. The parents are doing the correct thing for their children's future, and I very much doubt it is impossible to combine a physicist's mind with common courtesy.

"doing most of the housework and intervening quickly when the kids had trouble completing a task."

I saw this a lot as a kid. Parents would intervene - usually over the kids protests. It seems to be counter-coercion. Having gotten over thinking of children as self-grown domestic workers, the coercion quota goes unfilled and so they have to force the kid to be 'free' of 'work.'

"For instance, one exchange caught on video shows an 8-year-old named Ben sprawled out on a couch near the front door, lifting his white, high-top sneaker to his father, the shoe laced. "Dad, untie my shoe," he pleads. His father says Ben needs to say "please.""

Here I can show how analysis in terms of power is important. Who gets to make demands? Nobody. The flip side of not having any obligation to haul wood is not being able to demand the parents serve the children. (Some exceptions due to the child being a consequence of the parent's actions. Food and such.) Win status games by not playing. The game itself is wrong, not how it plays out.

I'm intimately familiar with this because I did it to my own mother. On purpose, no less - I was consciously looking for how servile she'd get, though note that it was an instinct that gave me the idea. Luckily, I was somehow aware at the time that it wasn't supposed to work this way, and so I rightfully viewed my ill-gotten gains as ill-gotten. (Also luckily my mother didn't do the 'force to be free' thing very often. Just enough that I know what it is.)

For children who don't luck into thinking for themselves? When are they going even to learn how to untie shoes, let alone find out how much better it is on the other side, away from laziness? I only found out because I intentionally went and looked, almost purely out of curiosity.

"Researchers are also examining how U.S. parents view family life and work. Parents tended to describe a "very prescribed way of being together," says Dr. Kremer-Sadlik.

They commonly used terms like "family night," "family movie," or "family breakfast," and it was understood that the activity was meant to be child-focused time and not include others outside the family."

Looks to me like this is a fossil of an ancient Catholic power grab. (Ctrl-f 'arranged') But it is odd, because apparently other researchers didn't see this in Italy. In any case, I aspire to get full notes on hbdchick's post up for tomorrow.

Regulatory Strangulation, Perhaps Also Puritanism

So it turns out that when you feel exhausted, it's because you are exhausted. (Via.) Outrageous, I know. Even more outrageous, it means you should stop working.

Apparently this is some great insight. I must be a genius for thinking of it myself, without any science to back me up. Are you a genius too? If you haven't read the article, here's a test: deathmarches are useful under what circumstances, and if any, what are the costs? Ctrl-f 'exception' to find out if you win!

Rants aside,

"We will not turn this situation around until we do what our 19th-century ancestors did: confront our bosses, present them with the data, and make them understand that what they are doing amounts to employee abuse — and that abuse is based on assumptions that are directly costing them untold potential profits."

Haha. No? Way to miss the elephant in the room. Let me cite this exact article...

"The rapacious new corporate ethic was summarized by two phrases: "churn ‘em and burn ‘em" (a term that described Microsoft’s habit of hiring young programmers fresh out of school and working them 70 hours a week until they dropped, and then firing them and hiring more)"

"The most essential thing to know about the 40-hour work-week is that, while it was the unions that pushed it, business leaders ultimately went along with it because their own data convinced them this was a solid, hard-nosed business decision. [...] By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight."

For every social problem, I must first rule out government intervention as the cause. Mainly because I almost never can.

The workforce can only withstand so much turnover before partly-burned-out becomes normal, degrading the entire thing. Similarly, the economy can only withstand so many wealth-destroying death marches before capital investment erodes noticeably, taking optimal productivity with it. Both effects amplify the number of jobs taken out of the money.
At the same time, new job creation - almost entirely due to innovation - has to compete with old innovations going artificially obsolete.

Confront the bosses? Robinson already admitted that it wasn't union action that caused the 40-hour week, it was all in-house. The unions demanded they do something they were going to do anyway, much like public execution was outlawed only after it stopped being done. Basically the difference was that Henry Ford knew his business and was, apparently, one of the last to do so. Consider this: where would Ford have got the idea to start research on working his dudes less and paying them more, in 1902?

Err...common sense? Isn't paying them more one of the first things you'd try, if you were a trying-things kind of person? And how much observation does it really take to notice that workers get tired at the end of the day? I'm honestly a bit baffled here. What do I have to do to not have considered these things?

Consider next: where does Microsoft get the idea of burning programmers like coal? How about the monotonically rising regulatory deadweight costs?

The burden has become so high that most businesses cannot afford to work their employees at any sustainable rate. The fixed per-employee costs are simply too high. (Lodge doctors are an example of an industry choked to death.)

Every time regulatory burdens increase, new jobs come out of the money, so to speak, and their bosses have only two options: fold immediately, or overwork the grunts and fold later.

Don't forget this wouldn't work if Microsoft had to pay for the programmer's training. They'd never make back the investment. This means that when Microsoft does this, it is almost certainly destroying wealth, net.[1]

Just in case you thought the 'housing crisis' was anything more than a minor symptom. (Effective red herring, though, gotta give them that.) It was hardly a crisis, and it isn't the problem. Indeed the only surprising thing is that employment didn't collapse sooner. A triumph of hope and optimism over experience, that.


Perhaps I should explain how I know that Mr. Ford was a real expert.
Managers may seem like idiots, but especially at the top, they really aren't. At any rate, they have accountants, who can tell them that their second-biggest expense on any worker is, by far, regulation. They could have lobbied to limit regulation. Instead, they decided to toss their own workforce under the bus, wholesale. Large corporations are very fond of regulation...it is a lot like sharks being fond of remora just because it happens to hurt smaller sharks more. Or: I'm sure GM's major (former?) shareholders are suffering a lot of cognitive dissonance by now. Say hi to Detroit for me if you're headed by.

I strongly suspect what Ford's real goal with his research was simply overcoming social norms. He needed those dozen years as a buttress against The National Association of Manufacturers, among others. Otherwise, he could have just tried it in one factory, and then done the rest if it worked out.

I don't even doubt that modern CEOs are experts. They're just not experts at any kind of management. (Quite good at lining their pockets, for example.) I can't even blame shortsightedness, because Ford's strategy was a short-term win as well.


Summary: No job? Probably the government's fault, and almost nobody will call them on it. Housing's a red herring, a minor symptom. The main problem is negative-wealth businesses (and maturity transformation) and regulation ensures we get a steady supply of new worthless businesses. Henry Ford clearly knew his stuff, something that modern managers do not.

[1] And yet profiting in money terms...so who can blame them? The government effectively outlawed being not-evil, by giving huge advantages to the bad guys. Exploit the system or be destroyed.

Notes on IQ vs. Arguments

I find communications of this type easier to verify and think about, but I don't know how or why. (HT.)

"The upshot of this is that if an argument doesn’t result in an agreement, at least one of the parties involved is being irrational or dishonest."

By far the most common reason for failure to agree is unwillingness or inability to communicate. The former leads to the latter, so almost all disagreement is proximately caused by lack of articulateness. In the comments on Aretae, Jehu adds that since tribes benefit differently from different conclusions, regardless of veracity, they'll lie to try to shift the likely outcome. Which is intentional inability to communicate.

The relevance of the simplification comes from being a single test I can apply to any argument. Are they articulating? If not, the argument is corrupt. At this point it doesn't matter why they're not, only whether it's worth trying to cause them to articulate. I find the listening unimportant. It'd be nice if I could get the debaters to listen to each other, but mainly I want to hear the articulations, so I can get all the evidence.

More generally, you can see the same kind of objection as Jehu's in Zietsman's comments. This means readers are intuitively concluding that this piece is misleading, as applied to their goals. I suspect they're onto something, but I'm unimpressed with their identification of the main issue. For a start, they didn't articulate what their take-away was, and I can't safely work it out from what they've said.

"One should also be aware that the equation gives an average IQ – the actual IQs vary quite a bit around the expected figure. For example, the authors show that threshold effects exist and that the minimum IQ needed to achieve a rating of 2000 is around 85-90. This is 30-35 IQ points lower than the expected IQ. Also from his peak rating Garry Kasparov’s expected IQ is 167 (and wild claims of 180+ have been made) but his actual IQ was measured at 135 (in a test sponsored by Stern magazine), some 32 IQ points lower."

Fascinating. My immediate thought: estimates of IQ for Einstein and Newton. I thought they were epistemically suspect, and now I have evidence. The same methodology gives a 180 IQ for Kasparov. Hey guys, I found some unknown unknowns... Note that this could underestimate IQ too.

"The difference between a grandmaster and a good beginner would be 5623 to 1."

Added to Dunning-Krueger, the beginner has no idea how utterly dominated they are by the grandmaster. Without unmistakeable evidence like a king getting knocked over, the beginner will think they won all five thousand times. Indeed, I can watch people saying they didn't 'really' lose, even when the king bites it. They make excuses. (So do I.)
I suspect this is largely because the brain incorrectly interprets losing at chess as morally relevant to the individual's character - that only bad people lose. This is the flip side of evaluating high-status people as 'better,' and accepting status hierarchies as morally relevant. (This one I don't do so badly on.)

"It would take the result of a string of 21-22 games (of backgammon) to provide the same test of relative skill as does a single game of chess."

In other words it's a lot easier to say you didn't 'really' lose at backgammon, and thus avoid triggering the faulty moral-status evaluation. Which both explains and excuses why games of chance are more comfortable to play and thus popular, especially among friends.


So here's a puzzle. He states his IQ is ~180 in the about section. You have enough evidence to evaluate my comprehension of the piece yourself.

"Some research shows that friends and spouses have an average IQ difference of 12 points, that for IQ differences less than 20 points a reciprocal intellectual relationship is the rule, for IQ differences between 20-30 points the intellectual relationship tends to be one way, and that IQ differences greater than 30 points tend to create real barriers to communication."

(There is a solution: the smart guy can talk down. By definition they can model the conversation, and the student cannot. I'm putting that aside for the moment.)

My IQ rates in the 130 region. If this was my only datum I'd have to conclude that my reading comprehension skill is worth something like 40 points of IQ.
Which observation is in error?

Err, Agnostic?

"Does God exist?" is the wrong question.

If you answer yes, the world is one way.
If you answer no, the world is the exact same way. 

Verification: care to propose an experiment to tell the difference?

E.g. I can be sure Zeus doesn't exist because he's supposed to live on Olympus, and no satellite can see him. But the monotheistic God has no analogue.

Which means the only difference is how the belief makes you, personally, feel. Even, "I follow the Bible because I believe in God" is a non-sequiteur. The key spiritual truths in these books are equally untestable.

There's a reason they're all about 'faith' and it is because their founders weren't idiots. They knew they were, experimentally speaking, shovelling bullshit that nobody can prove or disprove. So they exploited the guilt-by-association fallacy in reverse.

Both atheism and theism are wrong, in exactly the same way both are wrong in a debate between someone who thinks green dreams sleep furiously and someone who thinks green dreams party sedately.

I Want to Change Through Learning

I feel late to the party here, but I just found the words to describe what I mean by 'education.'

What things would change how I act, if I knew them?
What would change my worldview if I knew them?

I am well educated when I know most of those things, out of the set of all things other people know.
This should, theoretically, barely warrant saying. Of course, when making a decision, I want all the relevant information. So, of course, I want to have handy all the relevant information for all decisions I regularly make. More generally, I want to reach the equilibrium, where I'm not likely to immediately change my habits just after an offhand comment by some random dude. [1]

However, these words made some facts plain to me, facts I don't see a whole lot of evidence of being known. (Or, I'd have thought, some random curmudgeon would have offhandedly mentioned them by now.)


First branch, there's some difficulties in becoming well educated.

Second branch, there's a striking contrast between what I want and things generally called 'education.'

A Good Education
The problem is unknown unknowns. Meta-education. It is hard to know about a thing I need to discover, without simply discovering it. The search relies on serendipity and inspiration.

I've approached this problem by looking at the frequency I discover new ideas and viewpoints, by aggressively neophilia, and by measuring how often Reality puzzles me or presents obstacles.

But that's the thing, isn't it? How do I know? How can I check that these measure are enough? I don't think I can. What would change how I search for knowledge, if I knew it? Nevertheless, they're what I've got and what I'm going to use.

At least the inevitable boasting about my education is falsifiable.
It's hard to ignore it when one's worldview is uncomfortable or stressed. Especially when I've consciously decided it doesn't have to be.
Unsatisfied neophilia is intrinsically punishing.
The frequency of new ideas is a simple number, and I can check 'new' by requiring myself to state where else I saw old ideas.

Even if all this is sorted out, there's the fact that what changes my decisions may not change someone else's. Education is necessarily individualistic and personal...though I also expect an awful lot of overlap.

To help balance my ongoing comments on Progressivism, I'll also say I expect roundly educated scholars to converge, even starting from different cultures. There's a clear best way of accomplishing most goals, and if you knew what it was and how to do it, why wouldn't you use it? A global intellectual elite is exactly what I would expect. (I just don't expect proggies to be any good at it.)


Also clarified, what I mean by 'uninteresting details.' Once I get chemistry, any further specific reactions are of no use, unless I want to be a professional chemist. Evolution entire fit neatly into the category of 'details' until evo psych and paleo diets hit the intertubes.

Notably, mathematics is often not details, for example the idea of 'orthogonal.' I just wish there was an actual school doing actual education, so I wouldn't have to waste time repeating arithmetic to convince the lecturer to start talking about generalized perpendicularity.

Speaking of schools...


I've Never Been in School
I went to a place called 'school.' And there were people called 'teachers' there. But I was certainly never taught anything there, except maybe a few details.

This isn't too surprising, in retrospect. It's well known that most are comfortable with confirmation bias, and only read or watch to support and validate their already-made decisions and worldview.

This is exactly the opposite of education.[2]

But since most prefer it, and this is nominally a democracy, I would expect public 'schools' to confirm that confirmation bias is okay. To be anti-education. And lo, so it is written...

Eliding most of my rant about school, I did learn that it is possible to blind the world to evil, and for a person to commit atrocities on children, then go home and think of themselves as a good person. I went to some of the best schools in my country, by the way. 'Academically' stellar.


Rant aside, I suspect that anti-education, ignorance, is in fact the correct decision for most. (Part of what lead me to concocting my theory of natural human castes.) My brain wants to out-group anyone who doesn't love knowledge per se, but it isn't necessarily cost-effective for non-scholars. My difficulty in accepting this suspicion is part of what lead me to my blog's title.

Which means that non-scholars should not only stay out of university, they should probably never go to an academic school at all. But, I'd be appeased with just an acknowledgement that the populations of G8 countries are not highly educated, no matter how many hours they've supposedly spent being taught. If they are more skilled, the cause almost certainly doesn't lie in the classroom. And that is perfectly fine.


[1] When I was a kid I noticed that I should preemptively do things the adult way, as it was generally better, which meant looking beyond my peers to find out what the adult way was.
Second, I want Alrenous:2020 edition to find the worldview of Alrenous:2012 not-retarded. Luckily, genuinely taking this approach to information all but guarantees it, because even if I do dramatically change, I know I couldn't have reasonably found it any sooner or easier. I can look only as well as I can look, which I'm doing. This has been tested first by anarcho-capitalism and then by Mencius Moldbug.

[2] Dishonourable mentions: ad campaigns, raising awareness, debates, journalism including most blogs, Khan Academy, almost all scientific papers. Learning non-details from these is like pulling teeth.

How To Prevent Trolley Solutions

A hopefully exhaustive tour of reasons the standard analysis makes solving the problem impossible. (Some addenda.)
(Spoilers: morality is binary, the trolley problem as normally stated is meaningless, letting die must be qualitatively different, and I think the only honest answer to the trolley problem is ignorance. I don't know, and neither do you, which means anyone who thinks they have an answer is wrong about something. It should be about playing God, which is a really tough problem.)

Spandrell put the trolley problem in front of me, and therefore I have to try to solve it again.
This is additionally a warm-up for the next post I'll write.

I started with a couple new-to-me thoughts, that it's about playing God and it's about deciding who deserves to live. I googled the former, to see how standard it was, but instead I found a superb illustration of the standard analysis. Which will hopefully help clarify my explanation of how broken the approach is.

"Does an assessment of whether some act is morally worse than another act, settle the question of what it is morally permissible for an agent to do?"

The offered answers: yes, no.
My answer: if your morality ever puts you in a position where you must choose the least-worst, your morality is broken.
I found this by asking myself, "What if morality is binary? Actions are wrong or not-wrong and there's no meaningful magnitude?" What if acts are either evil or not-evil and that's it for morality?

Put this way, it became clear to me that even if your morality does have gradations, it should approximately boil down to 'not do' and 'do.' If you choose the former, you're evil. If the latter, not. Which means every morality functionally reduces to binary morality.

Which means this whole question is meaningless - there is no such thing as morally worse.

Verification: put another way, neither circumstance nor human agency can be capable of forcing you to perform an evil act, because you cannot be held responsible for circumstance or other people. Therefore, there must always be a pure moral way out of any situation. If your morality disagrees, your morality is broken and you probably want to fix that.

So yes, it settles the question, it settles it as 'both are impermissible.'

"Important: You don't need to worry that if you respond "Yes" you're going to get caught out because of some trickery to do with bad consequences. In other words, if you respond "Yes", you're not going to get into difficulties because of thoughts about situations such as where inflicting more rather than less pain, for example, avoids some horrible outcome, because one can quite consistently argue that in such a situation inflicting less pain would be the morally worse action (and, therefore, to be avoided), precisely because it would have horrible consequences. "

Having said the above, this seriously revolts me. They were intuitively aware that they were asking a broken question, that they were engaged in sophistry, then salved their conscience by avoiding the real problem. That their analysis on the off-topic point is correct only makes it worse - they could have got the real analysis right.

Though I require myself to admit that avoiding this kind of sophistry can be difficult. I'd share but I want to minimize the tangent. Anyway, I demand that appointed philosophers know or figure it out without me having to explain.

"If you are confronted by a situation where you will inevitably cause pain, but you can choose whether it's a small amount or a large amount, then, it does rather seem as if the fact that it is morally worse to inflict a large amount of pain as opposed to a small amount (assuming it is a fact) settles what it is morally permissible to do - namely, only inflict a small amount of pain."

Err...no? If this quiz were a person they'd have earned a facepalm.

Your first problem is that, without coercion, you should never get into a situation where you must inevitably cause pain. And if you're coerced - by circumstance or another human - then morally it's all on their shoulders.

Second, they haven't established that inflicting pain is morally bad. Sure we generally agree - general agreement is not a proof. 'Rather seem' is not a proof! We could all be wrong. That's indeed the point. We don't understand the trolley problem. We must be wrong about something. The issue may well lie in the morality of inflicting pain.

Although I didn't find anything when I checked pain per se, I did find a problem with the word 'inflict.' As the trolley problem is identical here, I'll hold off and do them both at once.

"Is killing five innocent people morally worse than killing one innocent person?"

I quote this to note that 'kill' has the same problem as 'inflict.'

"Without these organs, his five patients will definitely die; or, to put this another way, it will turn out [the surgeon accidentally] killed them by administering the chemical."

Depends on whether you think this is negligence or luck. I, at least, can't prove it either way.

"Assuming (a) that the backpacker doesn't consent to giving up his life to save five other people, (b) that the lives of the five people will be saved if, and only if, the organs are transplanted, and (c) that nobody will ever find out what the surgeon has done, is it morally permissible for the surgeon to take matters into his own hands, and operate?"

Is murder ever morally permissible? No.
But that's the question, isn't it? Is it murder to coerce someone out of their life to save other lives which are at risk through no fault of their own?

"An interesting thing about this class of killings is that in particular circumstances it represents a challenge to what most people will take to be a moral rule that killing more people is worse than killing fewer people. "

That's not the rule. This is formal equivocation.
The rule is murder is always wrong.
But letting die can't be wrong. This can be proven by taking the limit. Kel thinks that

"Yet isn't walking away from making a choice, making a choice? Choosing not to pull the lever when you had the power to do otherwise is making a decision that would kill 5. If you could have done otherwise, you're responsible either way."

So you must save a child from a burning building, at the cost of your dog.

But where does this end? I could (I'm told) save a child's life in Africa by paying for their food. Am I responsible for their death?

I could also train myself in firearms and patrol the streets of the Bronx, defending the innocent. Am I responsible for those murders, because I choose not to?
Perhaps I could save yet others, but I don't know how. Am I negligent for not aggressively searching out these methods and victims?

Take the limit, you find it's absurd. Where's the line? What is the qualitative moral difference between saving someone emotionally nearby and someone emotionally distant? By this logic, I'm responsible for just about everything. (Especially in the minds of those who think I could start a social movement and change the world.)

Take the limit, and I'm God. So are you. We're all fully responsible for everything. This logic sucks and I'm taking it back to the store.

"It seems, then, that the proposition that killing more people is morally worse than killing fewer people must be false."

And indeed it is. Because of the equivocation.
At first, 'kill' is used as 'murder.' Obviously doing more wrong can't be better than doing less wrong.
Perhaps this would be best explained by reversing the moral valence. So let's multiply by negative one...

"Is it more wrong to euthanize five innocent, consenting agents, or to euthanize one innocent, consenting agent?"

Answer: it depends on whether you think euthanasia is murder or not, doesn't it?
And so the trolley problem - or the murderous surgeon problem - entirely depends on whether you think intentionally killing someone is sufficient to define murder.

But that's exactly the problem the trolley is supposed to address.

Principle: self-referencing statements are invalid. Either they converge, which means they're circular and thus meaningless, or they don't converge, in which case they're paradox, and thus meaningless.

Or equivalently, inflicting pain and being responsible for the pain inflicted are different. The question under consideration is which it is.

Luckily the trolley can be righted, and put back on its tracks by making it about something else. It seems to me that most honest victims of the problem try to do that.
Kel, for example, tries to make it about whether refraining from action makes you responsible. This, at least, is an answerable problem.
I've seen it transferred to a problem about the worth of human lives. Again, very answerable.
I think a better one is the playing God angle. If you're at the trolley, or you're a surgeon, you decide who lives and who dies. Which means you should, by definition, let live who deserves to live.[1] But doesn't that make it clear that mere innocence cannot be the sole consideration? If they're innocent, all six deserve to live. This is what makes it playing God.

The playing God problem is hard. I can't even find an entry on it.

Luckily, in real life the playing God situation is very rare. The moral solution, as I mentioned previously, is simply to not get into that situation in the first place. Nevertheless, through mistake or luck, it does occur. As a practical matter, some humans must play God. It is therefore necessary for the philosopher to at least look for a solution.

I like the surgeon formulation, because the trolley people are faceless and thus seem identical in character. The surgeon has patients and a backpacker, giving some hint of personality. Which makes clear that the world will be very different, depending on who the surgeon kills. Humans aren't fungible. To take the limit, what if the five patients are all Down's victims and the backpacker is Norman Borlaug? (Assuming Norman's legend somewhat matches his actual actions.) Thing is, there's no reasonable way to know.

I suppose you could play statistics, and say they all have an equal chance at being Borlaug, as far as the surgeon knows. But as long as you're playing statistics, then I might find that cultures that let the surgeon kill the backpacker have more killings than cultures that call it murder.

More importantly, I may be able to show a logical contradiction in one of those rule sets...


[1] This is true even if 'deserve' is meaningless, which I think is a reasonable response. Let it not be said I also ask broken questions. If deserve is meaningless, no-one deserves to live. Or to die. The entire problem is rendered meaningless. That said I still want a thing which plays the role of 'deserve' and I'll invent it if I can't find it.