Hahaha I really need to use "Argle Bargle" more often.
But yeah I really do think there's a lot of liberals out there who, deep down inside, really think something has gone horribly wrong in our discourse. They're just afraid to say so for fear of being labeled a bigot or a Republican. They're pissing their pants constantly about it. And yes, I count myself in that group, but I'm slowly getting better at letting the fear go.
So, but then what to do about using terms in bad faith? Like I read a right wing news outlets piece describing a lesson I taught last year in my reading curriculum as crt and it literally was the most inane thing ever. It was teaching the prefix in using the word injustice and reading the text ruby bridges goes to school containing such divisive statements as black kids and white kids can be friends.
And this bad faith problem is made worse by it actually being the law that teaching crt is banned. If we don’t have clear definitions at the very least it seems like that creates a lot of ground for baseless complaints and frivolous lawsuits.
For fuck's sake, Freddie. I'm tired of these discussions, and I thought you were above them. "CRT" means "Cathode Ray Tube". It's meant that since 1890, and you don't get to change 130 years of usage just to gore that ox you seem to hate so much. And why DO you hate that ox, Freddie? You've no concern for animals whatsoever. I remember you mentioning eating meatloaf once a few years ago. I REMEMBER IT. You don't get to wiggle out from under your psychotic murderous impulses. Goring oxen and eating meatloaf is the same thing as murdering babies, just like Hitler did. Your support for the Nazi party has been noted.
I really don't think this is a twitter phenomenon - there's an incredibly long history of arguments where everyone agrees that a category of things is bad or good and the whole debate is settled on whether something fits in that category. As a socialist in a red state, I am incredibly tired of democrats conceding to conservative values and limiting their arguments to fighting over whether policies fit those values (e.g. family values or equality of opportunity).
Although it was overly complicated in the way of most rationalist literature, I really do find "How An Algorithm Feels From Inside" and the "A Human's Guide to Words" sequence useful on this front. (I'm sure someone could tell me that Yudkowsky was cribbing from someone who had made the point better and more concisely).
Speaking of definitions: you once published a list of short definitions for a few different concepts - capitalism, socialism, communism, etc - that I found it very useful, primarily for its succinctness. I showed it to some friends once during a political debate and they really liked it too. Any chance you could repost it? It was on your old blog.
And while I'm asking for things: you once wrote an excellent response to a NY Times article on the proliferation of seminars on identity politics taught at elite schools. It was sort of a line-by-line refutation of the article. THAT one isn't even available on Waybackmachine.org. I'd love to read it again, if you're interested in reposting it.
CRT is a weird one, because it does seem to me like a lot of people are just sort of uncritically buying into the conservative framing that all recent thinking on race issues can be lumped together as one thing (CRT) and debated as this sort of all-or-nothing intellectual monolith.
Within my friend group, I've seen the following (IMO unfortunate) line of thinking play out:
1) CRT is clearly an extremely important area of academic study (otherwise why would everyone be fighting about it?)
2) My own HS and college education never explicitly mentioned CRT by name
3) Therefore, I guess my education was woefully inadequate and racist
I've been sort of trying to explain where I can that really CRT is just one of many ways of looking at race, and we really shouldn't be lumping together all modern racial thinking as one big CRT blob, and that actually it's probably fine that your teachers never name-dropped CRT.
Was the "definition of communism" debate the "socialism is when the government gives me free stuff; communism is when the government gives me a lot of free stuff" definition?
Gonna be teacher's pet for a minute and post one of my favorites from a previous blog of Freddie's:
"But if I say “cancel culture” in front of a bunch of politics-obsessed professional-class shitlibs they will pretend to not know what I’m talking about. They’ll put on a rich fucking show. They do an impression of Cletus from The Simpsons and go “cancel culture?!? Hyuck hyuck what’re that? I’m not knowing cancel culture, I’m just a simple country lad!” These are people who have read more about cancel culture in thinkpieces than I read about any topic in a year. But pretending you don’t know what cancel culture is happens to be a key part of the performance, a naked in-group signifier, so they pretend. The “I don’t know what cancel culture is” bullshit performance is kayfabe at its most infuriating. I know you know what cancel culture is because you’re currently using it to demonstrate your culture positioning by pretending you don’t know what it is. You fucking simpleton."
This is a lot like that. "Defund the police?! Where'd you hear a crazy idea like that? I just want a modest boost to the budget of the social workers! Never heard nothin' 'bout no defundin'! And I reckon if anyone were fool enough to say 'Defund the police' - not that I ever heard tell of it - they'd mean exactly what's convenient to me at this exact moment, consarn it!"
"Elects commonly insist that critics of CRT would feel differently if they read actual foundational articles about it. But the issue is what is being done in CRT's name, not what some articles contained decades ago."
Maybe it's my legal background, but I'm a big fan of definitions. I've heard plenty of people use "defund the police" to mean "abolish the police," and also plenty to mean "mildly redistribute funds earmarked for policing into other municipal uses." So it's important to rigidly define the term before having a big conversation about it, even if just for purposes of the conversation itself otherwise we'll just be talking ourselves into circles. Or like you note, get everyone to agree that what "defund the police" precisely means is mostly irrelevant compared to simply describing what policies you think will minimize human suffering. But that's easier said than done.
I play Scrabble a lot - one thing you learn is to have a paper dictionary available that, before the game starts, everyone agrees will be the only source to determine whether something is a word or not. Otherwise everyone will be on their phones searching for and probably finding some obscure website to support their proposition that "kwyjibo" is a word. Language is weird like that so it's helpful to get everyone to agree to a definition, even temporarily.
I dig this. It reminds me of how in the sciences, we're taught to avoid using the word 'proof' when we argue something. Things like logical proofs and in fact rigid definite definitions only live in formal systems (logic, math, games like chess). But outside formal systems, we can at best 'provide evidence for' not 'prove' and similarly we can only have a rough mutual understanding of what words mean (maybe in a Wittgenstein-y way)
I think it's an empirical question of how large a group can be before rough mutual understanding breaks down. One thing that seems pretty true is that ~300 million people spread over a *literal continent* is probably way to big to ever hope of having shared word-meanings (still an empirical question, but probably not something we evolved to deal with).
Even within more manageable sized groups, I suspect that shared, non-formal definitions are only really possible when the group is actually a cohesive, uncoerced group, which is especially rare in the US with its communities and relationship obliterated by capitalism and other forms of authority
“….literally all of our communicative and political problems come from Twitter.”
Hope you’re being serious. I 100% agree. When I’m elected President my first executive order will be to abolish Twitter.
Seriously, almost every bad thing since about 2014 was helped by Twitter. ISIS, Trump, Q Anon, Pizza Gate, Defund The Police, Chaz, January 6. None of these insane ideas get as widespread without Twitter.
Yes, you can have good conversations on Twitter. But the bad outweighs the good. Bigly. (Sorry. Had too).
2. It cuts both ways because everyone who wants more equitable schooling is now "a Robin Diangelo acolyte" or some such. Poor performance all around!
3. I think CRT is going to quickly devolve into the "no true Scotsman" problem (or already has?) as people try to put the ideas into practice but somehow fail to end racial inequality. They even have a built-in mechanism to explain it called "interest convergence".
To zoom out and analyze the larger pattern, I think this annoying style of discourse is a (probably ill-advised) attempt to counter classic conservative wedge-issue politics.
The central problem is that any progressive coalition is necessarily a diverse coalition with lots of different views. Success is highly dependent on the coalition being able to hang together in solidarity with each other.
Conservatives recognize though that progressive coalitions can be unstable, and so deploy wedge issues to try and break them up. The tactic is fairly straightforward: find an unpopular opinion that is held by some chunk of the coalition and make a big deal over it. You try and get them to say unpopular things in defense of the position, with the hope that this will alienate other parts of the coalition and cause it to break apart.
For a long time, the basic defense against this was to exercise some discipline and play down the unpopular idea. This might alienate some section of the "base," but realistically they're the easiest people to keep in the coalition.
The problem with this, though, is that sometimes unpopular ideas are good. Also, sometimes unpopular ideas can become popular ideas if you're willing to just come out swinging and make your case. So now it has become very unfashionable to deny the unpopular idea - the new thing is to just lean into it and hope you can make a case for it.
The new style of "aha the thing we are all debating is not really the thing we are debating" seems to me like a way to try and have it both ways - play down the unpopular idea without having to do the thing where you explicitly reject the unpopular idea. You activate this sort of linguistic neutral zone where the activists can do whatever they want and the elites can agree with it, but mean totally different things (or often, the elites don't really mean anything at all and are just playing games to get along with activists). This doesn't seem very successful to me, though maybe(?) it can do its job of holding together some approximation of a progressive coalition without needing to completely stomp on activist enthusiasm.
Hahaha I really need to use "Argle Bargle" more often.
But yeah I really do think there's a lot of liberals out there who, deep down inside, really think something has gone horribly wrong in our discourse. They're just afraid to say so for fear of being labeled a bigot or a Republican. They're pissing their pants constantly about it. And yes, I count myself in that group, but I'm slowly getting better at letting the fear go.
So, but then what to do about using terms in bad faith? Like I read a right wing news outlets piece describing a lesson I taught last year in my reading curriculum as crt and it literally was the most inane thing ever. It was teaching the prefix in using the word injustice and reading the text ruby bridges goes to school containing such divisive statements as black kids and white kids can be friends.
And this bad faith problem is made worse by it actually being the law that teaching crt is banned. If we don’t have clear definitions at the very least it seems like that creates a lot of ground for baseless complaints and frivolous lawsuits.
For fuck's sake, Freddie. I'm tired of these discussions, and I thought you were above them. "CRT" means "Cathode Ray Tube". It's meant that since 1890, and you don't get to change 130 years of usage just to gore that ox you seem to hate so much. And why DO you hate that ox, Freddie? You've no concern for animals whatsoever. I remember you mentioning eating meatloaf once a few years ago. I REMEMBER IT. You don't get to wiggle out from under your psychotic murderous impulses. Goring oxen and eating meatloaf is the same thing as murdering babies, just like Hitler did. Your support for the Nazi party has been noted.
I really don't think this is a twitter phenomenon - there's an incredibly long history of arguments where everyone agrees that a category of things is bad or good and the whole debate is settled on whether something fits in that category. As a socialist in a red state, I am incredibly tired of democrats conceding to conservative values and limiting their arguments to fighting over whether policies fit those values (e.g. family values or equality of opportunity).
Although it was overly complicated in the way of most rationalist literature, I really do find "How An Algorithm Feels From Inside" and the "A Human's Guide to Words" sequence useful on this front. (I'm sure someone could tell me that Yudkowsky was cribbing from someone who had made the point better and more concisely).
Speaking of definitions: you once published a list of short definitions for a few different concepts - capitalism, socialism, communism, etc - that I found it very useful, primarily for its succinctness. I showed it to some friends once during a political debate and they really liked it too. Any chance you could repost it? It was on your old blog.
And while I'm asking for things: you once wrote an excellent response to a NY Times article on the proliferation of seminars on identity politics taught at elite schools. It was sort of a line-by-line refutation of the article. THAT one isn't even available on Waybackmachine.org. I'd love to read it again, if you're interested in reposting it.
CRT is a weird one, because it does seem to me like a lot of people are just sort of uncritically buying into the conservative framing that all recent thinking on race issues can be lumped together as one thing (CRT) and debated as this sort of all-or-nothing intellectual monolith.
Within my friend group, I've seen the following (IMO unfortunate) line of thinking play out:
1) CRT is clearly an extremely important area of academic study (otherwise why would everyone be fighting about it?)
2) My own HS and college education never explicitly mentioned CRT by name
3) Therefore, I guess my education was woefully inadequate and racist
I've been sort of trying to explain where I can that really CRT is just one of many ways of looking at race, and we really shouldn't be lumping together all modern racial thinking as one big CRT blob, and that actually it's probably fine that your teachers never name-dropped CRT.
Was the "definition of communism" debate the "socialism is when the government gives me free stuff; communism is when the government gives me a lot of free stuff" definition?
Update: CNN is calling the NYC mayoral primary for Adams: https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/06/politics/nyc-mayoral-results/index.html
Gonna be teacher's pet for a minute and post one of my favorites from a previous blog of Freddie's:
"But if I say “cancel culture” in front of a bunch of politics-obsessed professional-class shitlibs they will pretend to not know what I’m talking about. They’ll put on a rich fucking show. They do an impression of Cletus from The Simpsons and go “cancel culture?!? Hyuck hyuck what’re that? I’m not knowing cancel culture, I’m just a simple country lad!” These are people who have read more about cancel culture in thinkpieces than I read about any topic in a year. But pretending you don’t know what cancel culture is happens to be a key part of the performance, a naked in-group signifier, so they pretend. The “I don’t know what cancel culture is” bullshit performance is kayfabe at its most infuriating. I know you know what cancel culture is because you’re currently using it to demonstrate your culture positioning by pretending you don’t know what it is. You fucking simpleton."
This is a lot like that. "Defund the police?! Where'd you hear a crazy idea like that? I just want a modest boost to the budget of the social workers! Never heard nothin' 'bout no defundin'! And I reckon if anyone were fool enough to say 'Defund the police' - not that I ever heard tell of it - they'd mean exactly what's convenient to me at this exact moment, consarn it!"
"Elects commonly insist that critics of CRT would feel differently if they read actual foundational articles about it. But the issue is what is being done in CRT's name, not what some articles contained decades ago."
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize
Maybe it's my legal background, but I'm a big fan of definitions. I've heard plenty of people use "defund the police" to mean "abolish the police," and also plenty to mean "mildly redistribute funds earmarked for policing into other municipal uses." So it's important to rigidly define the term before having a big conversation about it, even if just for purposes of the conversation itself otherwise we'll just be talking ourselves into circles. Or like you note, get everyone to agree that what "defund the police" precisely means is mostly irrelevant compared to simply describing what policies you think will minimize human suffering. But that's easier said than done.
I play Scrabble a lot - one thing you learn is to have a paper dictionary available that, before the game starts, everyone agrees will be the only source to determine whether something is a word or not. Otherwise everyone will be on their phones searching for and probably finding some obscure website to support their proposition that "kwyjibo" is a word. Language is weird like that so it's helpful to get everyone to agree to a definition, even temporarily.
I dig this. It reminds me of how in the sciences, we're taught to avoid using the word 'proof' when we argue something. Things like logical proofs and in fact rigid definite definitions only live in formal systems (logic, math, games like chess). But outside formal systems, we can at best 'provide evidence for' not 'prove' and similarly we can only have a rough mutual understanding of what words mean (maybe in a Wittgenstein-y way)
I think it's an empirical question of how large a group can be before rough mutual understanding breaks down. One thing that seems pretty true is that ~300 million people spread over a *literal continent* is probably way to big to ever hope of having shared word-meanings (still an empirical question, but probably not something we evolved to deal with).
Even within more manageable sized groups, I suspect that shared, non-formal definitions are only really possible when the group is actually a cohesive, uncoerced group, which is especially rare in the US with its communities and relationship obliterated by capitalism and other forms of authority
“….literally all of our communicative and political problems come from Twitter.”
Hope you’re being serious. I 100% agree. When I’m elected President my first executive order will be to abolish Twitter.
Seriously, almost every bad thing since about 2014 was helped by Twitter. ISIS, Trump, Q Anon, Pizza Gate, Defund The Police, Chaz, January 6. None of these insane ideas get as widespread without Twitter.
Yes, you can have good conversations on Twitter. But the bad outweighs the good. Bigly. (Sorry. Had too).
1. I agree
2. It cuts both ways because everyone who wants more equitable schooling is now "a Robin Diangelo acolyte" or some such. Poor performance all around!
3. I think CRT is going to quickly devolve into the "no true Scotsman" problem (or already has?) as people try to put the ideas into practice but somehow fail to end racial inequality. They even have a built-in mechanism to explain it called "interest convergence".
To zoom out and analyze the larger pattern, I think this annoying style of discourse is a (probably ill-advised) attempt to counter classic conservative wedge-issue politics.
The central problem is that any progressive coalition is necessarily a diverse coalition with lots of different views. Success is highly dependent on the coalition being able to hang together in solidarity with each other.
Conservatives recognize though that progressive coalitions can be unstable, and so deploy wedge issues to try and break them up. The tactic is fairly straightforward: find an unpopular opinion that is held by some chunk of the coalition and make a big deal over it. You try and get them to say unpopular things in defense of the position, with the hope that this will alienate other parts of the coalition and cause it to break apart.
For a long time, the basic defense against this was to exercise some discipline and play down the unpopular idea. This might alienate some section of the "base," but realistically they're the easiest people to keep in the coalition.
The problem with this, though, is that sometimes unpopular ideas are good. Also, sometimes unpopular ideas can become popular ideas if you're willing to just come out swinging and make your case. So now it has become very unfashionable to deny the unpopular idea - the new thing is to just lean into it and hope you can make a case for it.
The new style of "aha the thing we are all debating is not really the thing we are debating" seems to me like a way to try and have it both ways - play down the unpopular idea without having to do the thing where you explicitly reject the unpopular idea. You activate this sort of linguistic neutral zone where the activists can do whatever they want and the elites can agree with it, but mean totally different things (or often, the elites don't really mean anything at all and are just playing games to get along with activists). This doesn't seem very successful to me, though maybe(?) it can do its job of holding together some approximation of a progressive coalition without needing to completely stomp on activist enthusiasm.