Political Ramblings: On Disagreement and the Role of Values and Dispositions in Forging Different Factual Understanding of the World

I have long been anthropologically curious about the people who identify as scientific rationalists or Bayesians and politically identify as “centrists” and “moderates” or belong to the faction of socially liberalish “libertarians” (many of whom are happy also to identify as “centrists” or “moderates” or, in recent times, “neoliberals”). For about two years, I have occasionally looked at the public Facebook of Eliezer Yudkowsky and read the discussions of the S.V. “rationalists” who comment on his posts. On Twitter, I look somewhat regularly at his feed, along with that of Robin Hanson (I psychologically couldn’t stand following either of these men (seeing their tweets in real time), but I read the stuff they re-tweet or tweet every now and then)), along with that of Scott Alexander (even if he doesn’t tweet often), and I follow Julia Galef, and I also recently came to follow this moderate libertarian called Cathy Young (she is reasonable enough of the time to be tolerable, and more often than not criticises people I would criticise in much the same terms). I have followed Steven Pinker ever since I revived my Twitter account in, I think, early 2015 (whenever it was). (Steven Pinker is different from the rest of these people from my perspective since I just think he is far more interesting and knowledgeable, often tweeting interesting articles on a range of different topics (even if he sometimes tweets stuff I think is super dodgy) and refusing to use the medium for tribal sniping. He’s also different in the respect that I have a certain degree of respect for him as an academic totally outside of the internet context, having read and enjoyed all of his books except The Sense of Style (I have plenty of criticisms of The Better Angels but you can find these elsewhere on my blog with a bit of searching, and I also think The Blank Slate has major flaws but now is not the time for my thoughts on his philosophy of biology, given that I have also written about that elsewhere), and being in possession of an appreciation for his research in linguistics and cognitive science. He’s also different in the respect that he definitely isn’t a full-blown loony economic-libertarian like Yudkowsky seems to be and Galef might be (Galef is perhaps economically very agnostic, there are few indications). Further, Pinker doesn’t talk constantly about “signalling” and “Pareto distributions” like the Yudkowsky-Galef-Hanson gang (I’ve gotta say that this econbabble just creeps me out). Scott Alexander is also somewhat of an outlier at least insofar as I have enjoyed some of his blogposts, whereas I haven’t derived much insight or enjoyment from stuff written by Julia Galef, Robin Hanson or Eliezer Yudkowsky). I also keep tabs on the entrepreneurial psych graduate with slightly too strong views on gender differences, Claire Lehmann, and the puerile, edgelord evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, as well as his partner, the “sexologist” and vegan, Dianna Fleischmann. I also keep occasional tabs on a man I believe to be a very creepy and irrational person with horrible views called Bryan Caplan, who seems to have a strong relationship with Yudkowsky and Hanson (Hanson works at the same Koch brothers-supported institution as Caplan, the economic-libertarian stronghold, George Mason University). (Incidentally, I may soon write a brief demolition of an insanely stupid and ridiculous philosophy-of-science blogpost Caplan wrote several months ago comparing basic economics to anatomy (it is wrong on every possible level, factually and conceptually moronic), a post which happened to be retweeted by Mr. Yudkowsky.) I also follow Nicholas Christakis, who may be ideologically not too different from me (my exposure to him outside of Twitter strongly inclines me to like him and view him as intelligent and decent), but whose Twitter activity looks, for the most part, like that of someone within the emerging Quillette orbit (Bret Weinstein is a very, very similar case (really smart and decent-seeming outside of Twitter but distasteful (to my mind) on it); I stopped following Bret when he proclaimed that genocide and rape were adaptive (I was also sick of the stanning for Ben Shapiro and J. Peterson (obviously, this makes sense from the point of view of generating followers but I couldn’t stand it))). I also follow Noah Smith, who seems like he has a long association with Yudkowsky, Galef and Hanson (and also the very prominent libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, who is connected to these other figures), although he seems to be much more of a conventional progressive (a conventional Democrat) than these others I’m mentioning. I also follow Rolf Degen, this (apparently) libertarian dude who spends a huge amount of time writing short pithy summaries of papers in psychology and social science, inserting a lot of strong opinions about PC and so on (I should clarify that I think he’s a good and entertaining follow, even if I suspect he has questionable attitudes about sex and gender and such).  I also keep tabs on Jonathan Haidt (much of what I would say about that guy was already said by Massimo Pigliucci on blogs several years back). I have also long kept tabs on that irritating, nasty buffoon Michael Shermer (Pigliucci wrote some stuff on him back in the idea that holds up). And I also keep tabs on the insane clown known as Jordan Peterson (a man who is clearly not a scientific rationalist but who claims the mantle nonetheless (given his attraction to pseudoscience and counter-Enlightenment mysticism, his fervent opposition to “Postmodernism” is hilarious to me)).

Last but not least, I’ve a long-standing vendetta with Sam Harris. More on him in just a minute.

I’ve tried my best to understand the centrist rationalist and empathise with her point of view, but I must admit that I just get endlessly frustrated with the fact that she never seems to talk about issues that I think are vitally important to talk about. These are issues like nuclear annihilation and sabre-rattling with North Korea, climate breakdown, soil erosion and salinization, air pollution, ocean pollution, overfishing, forest loss, habitat loss, extreme weather events, species extinction, the methane eruption taking place in the Arctic, the health and diet of American citizens, American poverty, how difficult it is to be an American on food stamps (“American” because I’m thinking almost exclusively about Americans (as you may have noted)), massive racial inequalities in education and health, mass incarceration and the horrors of the private prison system, atrocities committed by the US government, atrocities committed by Israel, the famine in the Horn of Africa, fraudulent and larcenous behaviour on Wall St, obscene Wall St bonuses, the financialisation of the US economy, the civilian toll of recent US bombings and Obama’s drone assassinations, dangerous jingoistic attitudes among the US public, the lies of “Free Trade” and the severe toll of IMF liberalisation and the “Washington Consensus” (Neoliberalism) in many developing countries around the world including Russia, sexism and misogyny in popular culture and pornography and as manifested in sexual harassment… and instead choose to spend most of their time criticising SJW dogmas and worrying about “free speech” issues (Jesse Singal is someone who I politically strongly identify with who has tweeted and written about this stuff I just mentioned really intelligently in a careful and considerate way (he’s writing a book on social justice activism), and he’s not who I’m talking about). Basically, it just inclines me to a deep moral suspicion. For example, I just can’t help finding something slightly distasteful about the fact that someone with a public profile would spend their time discussing such petty political issues as women mocking men who wear cargo shorts (this is a real Galef tweet subject, typical of her consistently anti-feminist output). Obviously, most of the figures I mentioned above would smirk or sneer at most of the issues I mentioned, since they disagree with me about what is actually going on in the world and how the world works (what is worth worrying about). But I strongly suspect that, at root, this has a lot to do with a gulf in values anyhow. Why? Well, I think that our values, psychological dispositions and personality can lead us to acquire very different perspectives on the world, since these factors strongly affect what we actually choose to spend our time learning about. I think the vast majority of these figures haven’t read – and probably won’t read – the books that have influenced my political worldview, like Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents or The Price of Inequality, or The Essential Chomsky or Who Rules the World? by Chomsky, or Collapse by Jared Diamond, or Flannery’s The Future Eaters, or the Peter Turchin canon, or Limits to Growth: the Thirty-Year Update, or Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics, or Gerry Mackie’s Democracy Defended, or Peter Wadhams’ A Farewell to Ice, and they don’t read George Monbiot columns and they’re not friends with the people I’m friends with and they don’t subscribe to the Youtube channels I subscribe to, and most of them aren’t camping-loving hippies like me with a strong affection for wild spaces and a consequent attitude of profound disgust and hatred towards those mega-corporations whose pollutants destroy ecosystems of great beauty and biological importance, and they don’t weep for the suffering of the impoverished and downtrodden and the sick, and they are not deeply moved by the first track of Sufjan Stevens’ album Michigan – I could go on. Meanwhile, I have not read the things they have, and had the experiences they have had. This has determined a lot.

I think one of the key ways in which many of these people are irrational is that they seem blind (many of them) to the way their psychological dispositions have shaped their political outlook, whereas I am not.

Anyhow, I also have high confidence in one prediction of mine that most of the figures mentioned would not make: global progress in life expectancy and health outcomes will stagnate or reverse within the next two to us three decades due to us reaching a tipping point in soil loss and pesticide overuse and the ravages of increased extreme weather events. (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/the-environment-versus-silliness-no.html).
We’ll see 😉

Onto Sam Harris, for fun. I have a very low view of Sam Harris, as I've made clear in a previous blogpost (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/11/a-slapdash-bricolage-of-reasons-to-hate.html). I have long been infuriated by how some Harris fans are smart enough to recognise a mediocre critique of Harris (and yes, obviously, no doubt, he has been very sloppily and unfairly smeared a great deal (to what extent this smearing is unusual for a public figure is not clear to me though, even if it is definitely a bad thing, as all smearing is)), but not smart enough to realise his major cognitive bugs nevertheless. He is a sloppy thinker who says silly and crude things; I document many of these things in that post. I am unfortunately resigned to the attitude that if you don't have this view of Harris after having properly read and digested a fair portion of the sub-sophomore-level material he has written on questions of morality, on religion, on crime, on race, on 'free speech' and on 'spirituality', you are intellectually my inferior and not the sort of person I want to interact with. Unless you are 17 or younger – then you might be redeemable. 

If a Harris fan who appeared pleasant enough in respects other than being a Harris fan pressed me on those last two sentences there, I would say that I was employing hyperbolic rhetoric, even though that is basically how I feel. Of course, on reflection, I do strongly suspect that some of the 17+ year-olds are redeemable even by my own misanthropic lights, and I do at least realise that Sam Harris is not even close to the most repugnant talking head with a big internet following (at least he’s not Stefan Molyneux or Sargon of Akkad). I do at least acknowledge that we have some common ground, insofar as we are both Atheists, and are both abstractly, verbally committed to being "reasonable" and "rational" and paying fealty to institutionally bona fide science in our pursuit to understand the world. We also have common ground insofar as we are both intellectually curious about a wide range of things. And I like some of the people he invited on his podcast; most of them are worth talking to, at any rate. 

But that doesn't really change the fact that I find the combination of self-importance, spurious thinking and racism that the man exhibits intensely irritating. Perhaps it's a personal defect of mine, but I think I am far more enraged and outraged by the man who is a pretender to the name of scientific rationalist, who uses this mantle to espouse crude and often racist or immoral notions, than the total irrationalist and mystic. It’s even worse if the pretend rationalist has a lot of sycophantic supporters who are absolutely convinced that the man is highly rational (and also "eloquent" and "highly logical" and so on), as Harris does. It probably is a defect. Then again, I do genuinely think that Harris holds very distasteful views: the racial-profiling stuff (never motivated by expert opinion, which was against); the ridiculous, unsupported nonsense about America being a clumsy "well-intentioned giant" (he is usually extremely scant on evidence in the domain of politics, which is very evident in the Chomsky emails (not that his epigones are even capable of noticing this)); the rhetoric about white nationalists being truth-tellers about Islam; the Motte and Bailey dancing that he constantly resorts to when defending his edgy-thought-experiment-based political oeuvre ("Classic regressive leftist, not understanding that I was just using that thought experiment like people do in philosophy seminars, to probe and push our intuitions, to try to see if there is an abstract principle to back them up" (even though I am using these thought experiments in the context of making political arguments and proposing concrete reforms, and their inclusion would be utterly random and bizarre if I didn't think they had some significance beyond this very abstract theoretical purpose)); the love affairs with really dodgy people who reinforce his Islamophobic views (http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/04/11/4651763.htm, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n21/pankaj-mishra/watch-this-man, https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali); the apparent recent acceptance of the whole box-and-dice of the Charles Murray perspective on race and intelligence (please see these on why this is intellectually wrong-headed: https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/05/solving-race.html, http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html); the nonsense about the Israeli army being humane (see original link for citation and discussion, and please see this website also: https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/); the lingering pussy-footing ambivalence about the Iraq War, despite its awesome destructiveness and horror (he may now be rhetorically condemnatory, but I remember that when the Rubin Report was just starting out, he expressed a very clearly ambivalent attitude, when asked by that clown-looking dullard if he was a “neocon” (check this out for yourself, if you can find it)); and, generally, the value system that motivates him to focus on the shit that he does focus on, when he could, e.g., focus on climate breakdown and pollution, or American poverty and disease, or promotion of peace activism.

Now that I’ve finished bitching and moaning, here’s a list of people whose way of analysing the political and economic world doesn’t annoy me:

Basically all the people in the Evonomics orbit, but Peter Turchin and David Sloan Wilson in particular (also used to be a huge Steve Keen admirer but have somewhat lost patience with his cocky rhetoric and the way he portrays the economics profession), Jared Diamond, Ann Pettifor, Joe Stiglitz, George Monbiot, Jesse Singal (my favourite person on Twitter, bar none), the Chapo people (I enjoy two out of every three of their episodes; I can’t fully get on board with everything they say, and I think they are more tribally left than me and less scientifically-minded), Chomsky, Barrett Brown (on board with the misanthropy), and Glenn Greenwald (this guy is anti-tribal to his core, and I fucking love it, being myself likewise with somewhat similar ideas about the world (though I doubt that my libertarian feelings are quite as strong as his, and I couldn’t motivate myself to focus on these issues like he has)).

In some ways, this is kind of a motley crew, but that reflects the fact that I don’t in fact belong to any tribe. The commonalities that do exist tell you a great deal about my values and how I think the world works. I personally think that these people are, if you average them out, just about as rational in evaluating evidence and following logical implications as the figures I mentioned at the start, even though they tend to be much more ‘left’. Which means that the dominance of the popular “rationalist” and “sceptic” movements on the internet by “centrists” and libertarians possess on the internet is by no means a state of affairs dictated by Reason itself. And I think we – whoever wants to join me – need to overturn this hegemony.