As someone new to this dialogue I find these second-hand sources highly suspect. There seems like a big difference between this one person and that movement. I don't really see him 'leading' anything. Why not stick to primary sources?
Could you provide citations for those posts? This is the first I have heard of either Curtis or Moldbug, and I'm having trouble seeing the connection you're drawing. However, it seems to be the consensus. [edit: I see that there are secondary sources — but I'm curious about a primary source. Shouldn't that be the most important?]
In all these relationships, the structure of obligation is the same. The subject, serf, or slave is obliged to obey the government, lord, or master, and work for the benefit of same. In return, the government, lord or master must care for and guide the subject, serf, or slave. We see these same relationship parameters emerging whether the relationship of domination originates as a hereditary obligation, or as a voluntary obligation, or in a state outside law such as the state of the newly captured prisoner (the traditional origin of slave status in most eras). This is a pretty good clue that this structure is one to which humans are biologically adapted.
Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. And others still are badly suited to either. These characteristics can be expected to group differently in human populations of different origins. Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries, whose sense of political correctness was negligible, found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not. This broad pattern of observation is most parsimoniously explained by genetic differences.
"He has literally written that several of his co-speakers are genetically more fit to be slaves while he, a white male, is genetically designed to be a master."
Certainly a powerful use of the word literally.
Frankly, I'm actually considering recanting. Who wouldn't rather be Galileo than Giordano Bruno? But recanting is a serious matter - it's the sort of thing you need to get right the first time.
To appear at future conferences without my fellow speakers worrying that I'll enslave them or kick off Holocaust 2.0, it'd be ideal if someone can tell me what I have to believe. I'm guessing it's either:
(a) all human beings are born with identical talents and inclinations.
(b) human beings may be born with different talents and inclinations, but these talents and inclinations are distributed identically across all living populations.
Let's face it, Strange Loop is an awesome conference - there's a reason I applied. And I think Alex's decision is totally understandable for practical reasons, as someone downthread explains. If there's a chance of being invited back next year, I could totally go for (b). But if it has to be (a), I might still be all "e pur si muove" and stuff.
> (a) all human beings are born with identical talents and inclinations.
> (b) human beings may be born with different talents and inclinations, but these talents and inclinations are distributed identically across all living populations.
Or: (c) The inter-group variation in the talents and inclinations of human beings is completely dominated by the intra-group variation.
In other words, "living populations" (= ethnic groups) don't matter. You'll have (e.g.) smart and dumb people in every group, and everything else is noise.
I'm not sure how a reasonable person could choose hypothesis (b) over (c), given the long history of hypothesis (b) proponents trying (and failing) to make the math work out for them.
As a disinterested (in both senses of the word) outside observer, I'd point out that while his (c) is pretty much the same as (b), sans the editorializing it's in no way incompatible with any of the previously mentioned Yarvin/Moldbug quotes.
Take, for example, the statement "America is richer than Mexico." By which is meant, "on average, Americans are richer than Mexicans." Someone else could say: "But there are plenty of homeless people in America, and Carlos Slim is the richest man in the world! There are vastly greater internal differences in wealth within America and Mexico than the difference between the two countries' averages."
Perfectly true. But, it doesn't then logically follow that America and Mexico must not differ in terms of average wealth, or that the difference in average wealth between the two countries is irrelevant or less relevant than their internal inequality.
This is exactly right. Unfortunately, the fallacy—often called Lewontin's Fallacy [1], after the Harvard biologist who most famously committed it—seems nigh ineradicable. Perhaps there should be some sort of Godwin's Law for it: "As an online discussion of human biological differences grows longer, the probability of someone committing Lewontin's Fallacy approaches 1."
But you've got to be careful not to make the mistake of incorrectly accusing someone of committing Lewontin's fallacy. Saying that race isn't real is clearly wrong, in the sense that people reliably fit into racial categories.
On the other hand, the other claim (race has no discernible effect on behaviour) isn't fallacious (at least if Lewontin's results are accurate). If there is much greater variance within populations than between them, then it is foolish to make decisions about people based on their race, as it gives very little information about them.
If there is much greater variance within populations than between them, then it is foolish to make decisions about people based on their race, as it gives very little information about them.
All you say is true, but it won't necessarily save you from the Thought Police. For example, the variation in strength within male and female populations is bigger than the variation between them. It may therefore be foolish to make decisions based on gender rather than on strength when hiring, say, dockworkers. But when people complain about how few female dockworkers there are, what will you tell them? Mutatis mutandis.
I don't have anything to add to this thread except to say that this is a gracious response and thank you for chiming in even while being at the center of controversy.
I don't normally get involved in these types of discussions on the Internet, but I met you when you presented Urbit in SF a couple years ago, and thought your work was very interesting.
Have you heard of "Yali's question"? [1] This is the framing of Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. I believe this is a question that you think people are dodging, perhaps with politically correct wish-wash.
Apparently you think the answer is that some races are genetically superior to others. Jared Diamond of course has a different answer than you.
I tend to believe Diamond, as he lived among various tribes of New Guinea, studied them professionally, and wrote multiple well considered books about the topic. He also speaks simply and plainly, whereas you have a penchant for sophisticated arguments, whether they are true or not.
Let me also say that this type of thinking isn't exactly unique to whites. In my family are various Chinese academics (professors, Ph.D.'s, etc.) In this company, it's not unusual to hear an assertion that the Chinese are genetically superior to other races.
I think you should recant, but only if you have arrived at the conclusion honestly. I think you should also consider the possibility that some past emotional experience is driving all these rationalizations.
Here's the crux of the problem: Jared Diamond's answer to Yali's question is not mutually exclusive with the converse of (b). In other words, Guns, Germs, and Steel argues persuasively that environmental factors played a major role in observed group outcomes, but it does not argue persuasively (or at all) that those environmental factors left no imprint on the genomes of the groups in question.
To put it in concrete terms: Do you believe that, say, Scandinavians and Australian Aborigines have—on average or at the extremes—identical talents and inclinations for playing chess? If so, what is your basis for this belief?
This is the kind of discussion that doesn't end anywhere productive, but I don't have any reason to believe that those two groups have substantively different inclinations for playing chess. As others have said, the individual variations drown out the group differences.
Look at how superior Americans are to Europeans economically. Americans invented the iPhone, Google, and could best all of Europe combined in a military battle. Does that mean that Americans are genetically superior to Europeans? No, it's that they had access to more resources on a bare continent, which led to a positive feedback loop of wealth and creation.
You can perhaps make fuzzy statements about averages or extremes, but what matters is how you act on those beliefs. Are black people better at basketball than whites or Asians? Hard to say on average, but maybe at the extremes? Does that say anything about which races should play in the NBA? No. It's not like Larry Bird or Jeremy Lin don't exist. There might be some differences there, but they're not substantive.
The minute you start using this to justify slavery, that's when it becomes racism. If you are white, would you accept an Asian person's claim to enslave you based on the fact that their IQs are higher on average?
Even if you accept that intelligence implies a right to rule, there are plenty of dumb Asians that don't deserve to rule over a smart white person, and likewise for whites and blacks. This is a simple consequence of the fact that individual variation is greater than group variation.
I appreciate your thoughtful comments. Inspired by these discussions, I believe I've sharpened my understanding of this subject considerably. When it comes to accounting for observed differences between different groups, the following statements are the only two possible explanations:
(a) Genetic factors contribute to differences in outcomes
(b) Non-genetic factors contribute to differences in outcomes
Note that the two are not mutually exclusive. For example, when you write
Does that mean that Americans are genetically superior to Europeans? No, it's that they had access to more resources on a bare continent, which led to a positive feedback loop of wealth and creation.
you are arguing for (b). But because (a) and (b) are not mutually exclusive, this is not a valid argument against (a). Indeed, virtually the entire mainstream discussion around group differences consists of increasingly strong statements in favor (b), without ever addressing (a) directly.
This isn't to say (a) is always true, just that you need direct evidence to dismiss it. For example, given the observation that any human being with the ability to learn a language can learn any language, (a) appears to be false with respect to acquiring specific natural language (as opposed to language acquisition generally, which of course is genetically based).
So, why is it that so many otherwise clear thinkers fail to see that arguments for (b) aren't arguments against (a)? My guess is that most people who believe in (b) and only (b) implicitly apply the following reasoning:
The non-genetic factors in group differences are so numerous, egregious, and well-documented that they plausibly account for all known differences in outcomes between people of different ancestry. Therefore, genetic factors are probably irrelevant or negligible.
Unfortunately, this reasoning is faulty. For example, there is no a priori way to know how big an effect discrimination will have, and hence no way to rule out (a) without direct evidence.
As to your other points, I agree completely that we should treat people on an individual basis, without discriminating on the basis of ancestry, gender, etc. Furthermore, I believe in finding and cultivating talent anywhere it exists, regardless of background. I hope you agree.
This is too meta -- they're not exclusive, but the structure of the argument is pretty clear.
The burden of proof falls on the one making the claim. If you are claiming (a) or (b), you need to justify it. I haven't seen credible evidence for (a). I'm not refuting it because I don't have the burden of proof.
Answering Yali's question requires at least one of (a) or (b). If (b) were false, then that would imply (a). Providing evidence for (b) rules out the argument based on elimination.
No, the burden of proof is on those who claim not-(a), because it is evident at a glance that there are at least some genetic difference between groups. (Detailed genetic analysis, of course, confirms this. Noted anti-racist Henry Louis Gates Jr. has a whole show about it. [1]) There's no law of biology that says evolution only works on physical traits; quite the opposite. Therefore, the burden of proof is on the claim that any particular cognitive or behavioral characteristics have no genetic component.
Answering Yali's question requires at least one of (a) or (b). If (b) were false, then that would imply (a). Providing evidence for (b) rules out the argument based on elimination.
It is impossible to use the process of elimination when the alternatives are not mutually exclusive. I.e., this reasoning is specious: Why are men generally stronger than women? Well, men lift weights more often than women. Therefore, strength differences have no genetic basis. So it goes with Yali's question. You, and Jared Diamond, are obviously smart enough to understand this completely. But the conclusions are heretical, which is the only reason I can think of for why you fail to do so.
There are genetic differences between groups, but claim (a) is that there are such differences that contribute (substantively) to different outcomes -- as you wrote yourself. I don't know of any such evidence. It's controversial to say the least, but if you are engaging me in a discussion, you have the burden of proof on that point.
As mentioned, I don't really care for these types of discussions, because either way, it's not going to lead me to change my actions. My original motivation was to see what moldbug thinks of Jared Diamond's work (i.e. if he tries to refute it)
(a) and (b) aren't exclusive, but it could be that one contributes vastly more to the observed outcomes than the other. I happen to believe that this is the case with (b), as Jared Diamond explains. There is just much less evidence supporting (a) compared to that supporting (b).
I think you misread my last statement. Providing evidence for b means that you can't apply the argument that if b were false, then a. They are not exclusive, but at least one of them is necessary. I would assume (b) is false without evidence as well.
claim (a) is that there are such differences that contribute (substantively) to different outcomes
That is not claim (a). Claim (a) is that there are genetic factors in group differences, but makes no assertion about their magnitude. You believe that genetic factors make at most a small contribution. You may well be right. But you have offered no evidence for this assertion, and the burden of proof is on you to show it.
I would assume (b) is false without evidence as well.
Given that different groups live in manifestly different physical and social environments, this assumption is also wrong. The null hypothesis is that both (a) and (b) contribute; the burden of proof in both cases is on those who think one or the other is false. Confusing this issue, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is perhaps the most common source of crimestop on this subject. (Not that I blame you; as a crimethinker myself, I can assure you that volunteer Thought Police are everywhere, even—perhaps especially—on HN.)
Of course, in reality the discussion usually goes something like this:
"There might be genetic factors accounting for differences in group outcomes."
"I doubt it, but even if there are such factors, they're small."
"How do you know they're small?"
"Well, how do you know they're not?"
[Caught in trap] "I don't. So let's investigate the magnitude of the effect by examining the direct evidence…"
Don't fret it. Most of what you wrote as MM may be described as "what we were all thinking already, but lacked the time to express at length."
As for the "literally" bit, I suspect you experience resignation that few actually read what you've written as MM and instead rely upon executive summaries otherwise known as gossip and propaganda. As a guy whose real name sometimes appears in print, I wouldn't fret it.
For whatever it's worth, I'm on record proposing that urbit may be your most notable legacy, so keep working.
Galileo? How dare you compare the SJWs to the inquisition?
A confession detailing how you put ground glass into the (minority and female) workers' meatloaf, along with a list of your co-conspirators MIGHT be a start.
a) Describing a master-slave structure with the implication that it is a biologically programmed one.
b) That some are born for more dominant roles, some for more submissive ones, and then others who are in between or neither.
c) That the aforementioned characteristics are genetic.
Not particularly savory, but also a pretty standard evopsych position. In fact, I'd say that the only truly controversial part is the argument that these structures are innate and predetermined. That such master-slave structures permeate society is readily observable.
That's one way to read it, I guess. The more straightforward way to read it would be to just use the normal accepted meanings of words, under which the quote straightforwardly argues that Africans are genetically adapted for slavery, and that arguments to the contrary constitute "political correctness".
I feel like the only "reaching" I had to do to take that meaning from the quote was c/p'ing it out of my browser window to correct for the weird spacing HN put on it.
No, that's oversimplified, I find. The quote implies that the colonizers found Africans to be more suited to fulfilling slave roles, and that the master-slave cycle formulated earlier is a genetic one. It doesn't make a direct judgment whether the colonizers were correct. The jab at political correctness doesn't seem to be an absolute refutation of opposing arguments, so much as an outlining of the historian's fallacy of trying to apply contemporary moral value judgments to past circumstances. FWIW, there was "political correctness" (sidestepping taboos) in those days, but the taboos were wildly different.
The term "politically correct" comes directly from the quote, as does African genetic predisposition for slavery.
It's also not an isolated, out-of-context quote. For instance, it's easy to find Moldbug holding forth about the evils of South African apartheid abolition.
It's easy to find South Africans "holding forth" etc. For example: [0].
"The number of black people who believe life was better under South Africa's apartheid regime is growing, according to a survey published yesterday... In a rebuke to the African National Congress government, more than 60 per cent of all South Africans polled said the country was better run during white minority rule."
Yes, that's from 2002. Everyone who thinks the ANC has improved since 2002, please raise your hand.
While I didn't click on this thread to banter about details, details like this matter in a way - because South Africa is a real country and not a story or a song. In the real country, pressure from nice white people who live in America helped replace one one-party government, the Nationalists, with another, the ANC.
If the ANC governs South African blacks better than the Nats, the nice white people did a good thing for South African blacks; otherwise, they did a mean thing. Surely this is true whatever the names of the parties, the skin colors of the government bureaucrats, etc, etc, etc.
The possibility that, while listening to "Biko," singing "Free Nelson Mandela," and generally having a grand old time, our nice white people actually damaged the lives of actual real people (eg, there are 500,000 rapes a year in ANC-governed South Africa) does not seem to occur to our collective progressive consciousness. It seems much easier to express "guilt" about our 17th-century ancestors than to consider the possibility that we, ourselves, actually caused real harm.
>You aren't trying to say then that the colonial powers assumed control of Africa to stop rape?
We should be thankful that they didn't. Who knows how they would have screwed it up?
No, the mechanism is a happy accident of nature, that people take care of the things they own. A country with a bunch of rape going on is a disorderly, unsafe country, which is bad for business. It may grate against your idealism (as it does mine!) that the right things often come about for the "wrong" reasons, but I think the parties concerned would greatly prefer it to the wrong things happening for the "right" reasons---as things are now.
I get that social order was produced in colonial Africa, but you kind of have to ask...for whom? To say that there was strong social order for Africans is probably a stretch. The crimes against them were probably legal in a lot of colonial areas. So while they had fewer public works that were rusting it was probably legal for certain parties to commit rape even at the height of colonial Africa.
Rape maybe one extreme...it was certainly the case that crimes perpetrated by Africans were punished differently.
Same thing for the Southern US ...there were some slaves that chose to stay with their masters, but most of them were ok with the hunger and joblessness that came with emancipation.
Is the question in the end something like...Is a safe and orderly society under a tyranny the same kind of good as self determination in the face of lawlessness? Which one is the greater good? Is that even a meaningful question?
(Keeping in mind, I guess, that these kind of beard scatcher's are the hallmark of liberal western privilege.)
After reading the specific example given, I do have to qualify that as an out of context quote. The surrounding paragraphs make it clear he isn't targeting any one race in particular with the genetics business, just that the master-slave relationship occurs frequently enough and in enough forms that it seems to be fundamental to our nature as a people. I have a hard time finding that objectionable.
You're heavily implying that one can find writing wherein Curtis explains that black South Africans need white rule, but all the writings I can find "easily" (via google) are about how the current government fails to be at least as good as the apartheid-era government, which is an unpalatable truth but hardly racist. Do you have some specific examples? I'm not finding it as easy to come up with damning examples as you indicated.
I will admit I've found quite a lot that can be easily twisted if you're being uncharitable but I'm assuming you're better than that.
Overall, I'm getting the feeling that Mr. Yarvin is a victim of the modern moral panic led by "right-thinking" folks, and as seems to happen far to frequently, the panic seems to be precipitated by strange misinterpretations instead of what was actually said.
Sure, he advocates for forms of government few people want. I'm not too onboard with that meaning he needs his technical work suppressed.
This is not a "standard evopsych position". Evolutionary psychology seems to get conflated with a lot of unsavory bullshit just because the latter uses appeals to the former. Most people I know who do evolutionary psychology are extremely careful to point out all the ways they differ from (usually) sexists because they're so damn tired of people conflating one with the other.
"Natives did not make good slaves, and so Africans were imported." That alone is so innocuous as to appear in elementary school textbooks. Is this really what the whole row is about?
No, it's because he said it was due to genetic differences between population groups. This makes him a "true" racist in that he believe there are different races, or sub-species, of homo sapiens (sapiens). There is a scientific consensus that this is not the case, because races only exist if population groups are completely isolated, which humans never have been.
Except that no one in ordinary discourse uses "race" in the way you are, which means "species" (the whole not-interbreeding thing is often taken as definitive of "species".)
"Race" as it is commonly used means "variety" or "breed", and the claim that there are observable and significant statistical differences between human populations in geographic regions is, one hopes, uncontroversial. Those differences come from different genes, and since we all know that a trivial edit to a single gene can result in a massive change in function, it is reasonable to ask about a wide range of characteristics that have some genetic influence.
To claim that "races" in this sense "do not exist" is to come across as incoherent and pedantic at the same time.
Whenever anyone has looked at any characteristic that is really significant in society and how it differs across "races" so defined, they have found that the differences are trivial at best, non-existent at worst. This is "controversial" because a bunch of idiots want to project their prejudices onto genes.
"Intelligence" is by far the most debatable target for this kind of nonsense because a) it is controversial as to whether or not anything like "g" is an objectively real feature of human beings; b) it is extremely controversial how heritable it is; and c) even if it is real and heritable, our ability to measure it is so poor that it is very difficult to make any claims about population statistics.
See... you can actually refute racist nonsense while at the same time acknowledging what everyone knows: varieties of humans exist, and redefining the word "race" so it does not apply to those varieties of humans does not make the fact that varieties of humans exist go away.
Different races cannot interbreed, but only because they are geographically isolated.
Different species cannot interbreed (generally speaking), even if they are not geographically isolated.
Humans are not geographically isolated. Geographical barriers have contributed to the creation of population groups, but these are distinct from races in that there is a mechanism for DNA to move between them (somebody takes a trip and makes a baby).
Anyway, Wikipedia says in the lead sentence of that article I linked to that simply classifying people into discrete races is scientific racism.
"Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify the belief in racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority, or alternatively the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races."
"Scientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify the belief in racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority, or alternatively the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races."
The first three actions refer to value judgments ("better" / "worse" - compared to what? for what purpose?). Most people would agree that science should steer away from such judgments.
On the other hand, "classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races" seems distinctly unproblematic. There are different clusters of genetic types that arose due to relative geographic isolation, and gave rise to various differences and adaptions. Obvious examples of these include skin color, hair color and texture, average height and build, and so forth. I did not realize that making this observation, in the absence of value judgments, was now interpreted as "scientific racism".
The problem is only that there are not discrete categories. For starters, how do you classify children of parents belonging to two discrete racial groups? And their children? And so on and so forth. Well, people have been spreading their genes around the globe for a long time, and the upshot is we all belong to the same racial group. Sure, there are clusters, but there are not purebreeds.
Further, culture / ethnicity is just a much more accurate way to classify people than genotype or phenotype. I don't have a source for this, but I believe the best way anthropologists have come up with to group people is by the kind of food they eat.
Science is not a democracy, and consensus means little when the peer review and tenure review process is designed to reward conformity rather than truth.
Use your own brain. Denying the existence of races is completely absurd. See for instance:
There's a scientific meaning behind the word race - geographically isolated population groups, or more precisely groups that do not interbreed. Humans don't have those, and never have had those. I never said we were homogenous, any nitwit can see that most people in Asia have black hair, and there's no reason to think that only superficial physical characteristics sort geographically. Just that, there aren't distinct races. You know, a middle ground, as proposed by the guy who wrote that first article you linked to, at the end.
Redefining the word "race" so it does not apply to the human varieties does not make the fact of human varieties go away, and so fails to make a counter-argument against racists. "Racism" exists, and saying "race doesn't exist" doesn't change that. All it does is mean that to be consistent you'll have to call it "variety-ism", which is awkward and irrelevant.
Racism is asserting superiority of one group of humans over another, and generalizing without evidence.
You could think certain people are genetically better adapted to cold or hot climates. That by itself is not racism, it becomes racism when you say that everyone who cannot stand cold weather is inferior, when in reality, it is totally dependent on circumstances.
I think people failing to see the difference stops some honest discussion and people go on a witch hunt. In this case, blocking the person may well be justified however.
I'm repeating myself here, but per WP, "Scientific racism is [...] alternatively the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races."
It seems worth taking this criticism up with the authors of, for example, Risch et al 2005 [0].
From the abstract: "Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."
It seems worth asking how a paper like this got published, as late as 2005. Scientific racism may be even more entrenched than many have feared...
I don't want to read too far into your comment, but if the intent was similar to: "Interracial children don't fall into classical racial categories and, as such, are proof that racial categories don't exist," that's fallacious. The fact that a lab and poodle can produce a labradoodle doesn't negate the fact that labrador and poodle are dog breeds. The spaniards had a system that classified people by percentages of ancestry, e.g. quadroon, octaroon. Today we have more modern technology and ancestry can be determined though the analysis of genetic markers. The usefulness of race can be (and is) debated. Its existence is hardly debatable.
Is there anybody that does not have mixed ancestry? Where are the human labs and poodles?
The only real argument is that discrete categories do not exist. What this means is that for the vast majority of cases, the expression of phenotype A is not strictly linked to the expression of phenotype B. That said, it's quite obvious that there is a geographical and cultural distribution of genes.
Humans are not dogs, our populations are not strictly controlled for the purposes of winning dog shows. Attempts to do so are racist, in that they are (scientifically misguided) attempts to create or purify a race. Such as when your parents don't want you to marry someone who doesn't look the same.
> The only real argument is that discrete categories do not exist.
And yet they're 'discrete' enough that certain drugs are more effective on specific 'races' (or groups of people who share certain genetic traits if you prefer) than others.
I'm all for equality. I'm all for being judged and identified by your individual traits irrespective of the groups you're a product of. But this race/gender doesn't matter (or even exist) stuff has gotten to the point that it's as bad as the old christian movements when it comes to blocking scientific progress.
> Humans are not dogs, our populations are not strictly controlled for the purposes of winning dog shows. Attempts to do so are racist, in that they are (scientifically misguided) attempts to create or purify a race. Such as when your parents don't want you to marry someone who doesn't look the same.
I consider politics quite the dog show, and people have been self-selecting their mates on the basis of looks, culture, and politics for as long as they've been on this Earth. Seeing if this has resulted in genetic differences is a question of science, but deciding whether this activity is ethical is a question of value.
That's really the heart of the matter. As long as people believe scientific conclusions reflect personal values, we'll never be able to address any of these issues effectively.
Mr. Yarvin, is there some way to get ahold of you, via email or IRC? I'm not some hater who's pissed off about your political views or anything like that. This is very important. Thank you in advance,
School textbooks also often make the case that Native Americans didn't make good slaves because they were native to the area and just walking away and vanishing was relatively easy for them. That's very different from asserting genetic racial differences were the factor at work.
Right, I think I saw this one pulled elsewhere. It's still not clear to me that the author holds that view, or that he's just putting forth a weak analysis. Considering the response, I thought there would be something explicitly aggressive.
It's pretty difficult. Racism, like other ideas that at some point were not considered unacceptable in public, is nowadays covered in what we could call Hermetic writing: In other words, instead of saying what they really want to say, a racist says things that imply they are OK with racism.
A way that you can find all over his writings is talk about how people and businesses should be free to refuse dealing with people for any reason whatsoever. It's not quite saying 'I do not like brown people', but instead 'In my ideal society, we are free to discriminate against brown people, or people that don't share my religion'. It's the same kind of rhetoric you'll find in traditional racist groups. That's enough for many people to call that rhetoric racist, but I see how you might not agree.
What I find most amusing is that in that libertarian utopia where people can discriminate at will, you can discriminate people because of their political views, or because you think it'd make some people feel less welcome, and that's exactly what happened here. Having people that defend the right to discriminate at will complain due to discrimination is interesting to say the least.
Either way, I don't think this is an economic decision though. Last year, StrangeLoop ran out of tickets in a few hours. This year, I know they had more companies wanting to sponsor the conference at than they had slots! So Alex could have reacted either way to this controversy, and he'd have done fine economically. This just seems like very predictable behavior given their pro-diversity direction, taken after a few years ago, they had so few women that they had turned all the female restrooms in the opera house into male restrooms, leaving just a single 'family room' in the entire venue for women.
If anything surprises me, is that they didn't vet their speakers before accepting submissions. Rejecting conference talks because of who the person is happens all the time. What turned this into a contraversy is that they rescinded the invitation after making the list public. I would be surprised if, for next year, they don't add an extra step to their process, to try to catch something like this in advance.
Edit: It seems to me like Yarvin is pretty overt about the racial stuff. His isn't a Rand Paul-ian "we don't need the Civil Rights Act, let the market take care of it" posture, but rather one that leans heavily on the just-world hypothesis to draw conclusions about the inferiority of Africans.
"What I find most amusing is that in that libertarian utopia where people can discriminate at will, you can discriminate people because of their political views"
This is also a dominant feature of progressive utopias. :)
Google is helpful here. There are plenty of articles that have been written about him (speaking as someone else who hadn't heard of him until today). This is the one I'm reading right now: http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis/
Probably because his blog posts are like millions of words of meandering stream of thought and links to public domain books and you would have to spend the next few months of your free time to read most of his posts? Occasionally funny and insightful, but concise and well-written they are not, burying the real content under mountains of fluff.
I do not know the man's writings. There are many links on that page to things he wrote. So this is the most informative link I am likely to be able to provide.
As for why not read his writings: why not read the writing of the timecube guy, or those of reactionary christian authors? Because I try not to waste my time on idiotic polemic.
If the goal of banning him from the conference was to suppress his ideas, his opponents remind me of George Bush standing beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner.
The goal of banning him is probably not to "suppress his ideas". I'd imagine the goal is something more like "not allowing the experience of conference attendees to be made a little less pleasant in the service of what is a quirky and maybe interesting but probably pretty marginal technical talk".
Um, as far as I understand, he wasn't banned from attending StrangeLoop, just that he had his talk pulled.
Given that, could we please either clarify this with Alex, or stop claiming this as it just further distorts the truth and politically weaponizes this situation even further?
I don't think you really believe, were the shoe on the other foot and you were the one organizing Strange Loop, that there's nobody you'd consider excluding.
But I would (and have) based on their political actions.
Regardless of how you feel about Yarvin's politics, he's not trying to force them on you. He's not trying to change the way you run your business or conference. On the contrary.
I can't say the same for his opponents however, who as well meaning as they are are too dogmatically driven to notice how nuanced this issue really is. If people like this join a group, they will either try to modify its politics and excise the members who don't fit the new order, or destroy it completely, driven by a belief that they have the moral high ground. And since they primarily work in the realms of words, their primary tactics tend to be in changing and obliterating the meanings of words to control what is being said. They'll alternatively go from claiming that words have no inherent meaning to attempting to redefine existing terms to mean different things to change what other people were trying to say.
The reason Yarvin concerns them is because on some level they believe he shares these same motivations and intents. I have no idea if he does, but I sure hope he doesn't.
In that Carlyle essay, he says these, among other things:
"Once we get this far, we are almost all the way to Carlyle on slavery. We have not agreed that a man can be born a slave, but we agree that he can sell himself into slavery. That is: he can sign a contract with a master in which the slave agrees unconditionally to obey and work for the master, and the master agrees unconditionally to protect and support the slave.
Moreover, this contract need not be a mere expression of sentiment. It can and should be enforced by the State, just as a loan is. If the slave changes his mind and runs away, the State will capture and return him, billing the master for the expense. Or at least, these are reasonable terms under which two parties might agree on the permanent relationship of master and slave."
"A person makes a good slave if he is loyal, patient, and not exceptionally bright or stubborn. But even great intelligence is not necessarily a bar to a good experience in slavery, as the experience of many Greek slave philosophers, such as Epictetus, shows. A slave must carry the unique burden of personal dependency and obedience, which we are all used to expressing only toward impersonal government agencies."
"Of course, like gay marriage (or ordinary marriage), slavery is not without its abuses. When we think of the word 'slavery,' we think of these abuses. Thus, by defining the word as intrinsically abusive, like marriages in which one party beats the other, we can conveniently define away all the instances of slavery (or, for that matter, marriage) in which the relationship is functional."
I mean, if those are not actually supporting slavery, it seems to be only because he takes care to voice a lot of pro-slavery rhetoric without actually crossing that line.
Moldbug did in other places explicitly denounce hereditary, chattel slavery and called it evil.
His actual view seems to be that it should be legal for a person to sign a permanent, life-long employment contract, mediated and regulated for abuse by the state, where the person gets a guaranteed wage in return for having to provide labor. The idea is that for the lower end of the bell curve, this is a lot more humane than subjecting someone to the capriciousness of the capitalist system, where a person can be fired at will. Note that some on the left have made the same argument. There was a leftist critique of the end of serfdom in Eastern Europe, by which they accused the end of serfdom of being a greedy power-play by the feudal lords, who wished to renege on their obligations to provide for the serfs. Does this view make Moldbug evil?
Yarvin makes repeated references to Carlyle in multiple pieces, not just the one that's being circulated. Carlyle's position on slavery is not compatible with your summary.
Carlyle's take† is distilled utilitarianism. The blacks in the West Indies are lazy and stupid. The English are not. The climate in the West Indies is such that a black person living there need not work at all; they can simply pluck their food off the vines. The English are starving. Left to their own devices, the black people will revert to a state of nature, killing each other in an atavistic reversion to a primal jungle. At least under slavery, they can be watched over by benevolent masters. The sugar trade will thrive. The English will prosper. Slavery is pareto efficient.
It's really not hard to find attachment points to Carlyle's "Discourse" in multiple places through Yarvin's writing --- the references to Carlyle, the nitpicking over 1850s politics extrapolated to condemnations of the abolition movement, the genetic predisposition stuff.
A reasonable person could reach the conclusion that the parent commenter did.
It is not, however, fair to say that Yarvin wrote overt defenses of slavery. His defenses of slavery --- presuming that's what they are --- are cryptic.
† and, I'll trepidatiously infer, Yarvin's (after correcting for modernity)
Carlyle's position on slavery is not compatible with your summary.
Agreed.
and, I'll trepidatiously infer, Yarvin's (after correcting for modernity)
Since Yarvin is on this thread, he can clarify his actual views if he so wishes.
I think it is possible to cite Carlyle, and to point out that Carlyle made better predictions than the abolitionists, without believing that all black people should be re-enslaved, without believing that chattel slavery is the optimal solution for people with an IQ under 85. I think one can draw from Carlyle while still being a good person.
I think his positive views are generally cryptic because his goal is not to produce some plan of action, his goal was to provoke and to get us to think critically about whether we are actually as moral and righteous as we think we are. We like to think of ourselves as being morally superior to Carlyle. But the counter argument is that when we try to abolish slavery in a righteousness holy war, we often end up in a worse state of general vagrancy and violence or even a worse state of exploitation (eg, share cropping) or a socialized form of slavery (eg, workfare). So rather than being holy and righteous, we should think about what kind of long-term paternalistic structures would actually work best for all involved. I don't that making this argument makes someone a bad person, or worthy of being purged.
Whatever else I think about the idea that Carlyle "made better predictions than the abolitionists", I think I can object that the problem doesn't stop at the approving references to Carlyle. For instance, Yarvin's "favorite primary source on slavery" is Nehemiah Adams, which he quotes in the most cryptic way possible, leaving out the fact that the book --- particularly in the context he cites it in --- is essentially an attempt to paint slavery as a benevolent condition. Look at their clothes! Look at their happy faces! They don't seem downtrodden at all!
Maybe "approver of slavery" is a less apt description than "whatever slavery's equivalent of a holocaust denier is".
Your response to this could be informed by the knowledge that the Adams reference is one of many others I could have chosen to highlight.
Again, I could just be misreading all of this. Yarvin surely made that easy to do.
Ultimately, my argument throughout much of this thread is straightforward, so I'd like to restate it as we delve further into the weeds: Yarvin's writing isn't a case where people have worked hard to mine unsavory associations from ambiguously worded old blog posts. Yarvin is best known for his writing, and much of that writing appears frankly and straightforwardly odious.
Keep in mind that Moldbug's blog is trying to provide a corrective to our default view, and so Adam's account is his favorite, shock therapy, corrective book in a world where we are already marinated in the view that southern slavery was an unmitigated horror. In world where slave-holder ideology ran supreme, perhaps his favorite book might be something else.
The key question is: do we have a more accurate view of slavery if we include Nehemiah Adams and Genovese and the Roving Editor in addition to the standard progressive accounts? Or do we have a more accurate view if we only read the standard progressive accounts? Is Nehemiah so credulous, so inaccurate, that we get negative information value from reading him? Do we trust his account at all? Or was he duped like Beatrice Webb visiting the Soviet Union?
My own sense is that reading Adams in addition to progressive sources gives us a more accurate view of slavery in its totality. I don't get the sense that he his Beatrice Webb, he wasn't being given a tour by official handlers. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. I honestly do want to have an accurate picture of history, whatever that may be.
I recoil from the idea that the view of southern slavery as unmitigated horror needs correction. Meanwhile, I don't have to defend every sentence in Nehemiah Adams, because the context in which Yarvin chose to cite him (approvingly, as one of his favorites) is as a rebuttal to the idea that slavery was harmful to blacks. If someone's being unfair to Adams in this situation, it's Yarvin.
I think, if anything, we tend to underestimate how southern slavery has continued to contribute to horrors that still continue well over a century after its abolition:
Could you be a little more explicit about what you're trying to say? Because I'm prepared to get into more detail here, if you're contesting my interpretation.
