The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority [pdf]
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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
For example, http://slatestarcodex.com/ and http://lesswrong.com/ have plenty of essays arguing for moral subjectivity.
But, it doesn't matter if you personally agree with moral realism or not. What matters is that it is controversial and that there is no philosophical consensus. As such, to claim that "there is no objective morality" as axiomatic, is to end an argument before it has begun.
edit: Also, I think LessWrong-types cling on hard to a kind of logical positivism that is philosophically pretty primitive. The most exciting way to study this is via Wittgenstein, probably. He was their foremost figure, and then he turned on them. If you don't want to delve into philosophy, try to read his biography by Ray Monk- "Duty of Genius". I think any techie could follow it and enjoy it.
> As such, to claim that "there is no objective morality" as axiomatic, is to end an argument before it has begun
I don't take that as axiomatic actually, unlike scientific research where we have an objective, consistent universe to compare against, moral objectivity seems to either come from group consensus (which doesn't guarantee correctness) or at an extreme moral naturalism which has fairly horrible implications[1]. Without an objective, consistent source, how would we get objective, consistent morals?
[1] slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
As far as HN is concerned, though, I think you should focus on this statement by my parent:
> Progress is just change that the writer agrees with.There is no objective morality and the ""long arch to justice" is just a random walk.
I don't think this is a good comment, or good attitude to bring into political discussion. You may not be able to pin down the notion of "Love" or "Art" or even "Game" to a definition, but they are still "real" enough as far as Philosophical Realism is concerned (here is where Wittgenstein may be useful), to discuss. To make quippy comments about how "there is no progress" seems to me like a cheap argumentative ploy in favor of a "fuck you got mine" life philosophy.
The idea that women's liberation and the abolishment of slavery are "arbitrarily" positive things, and that we may like them exactly as likely as we may not via some senseless quirk of history, seems pretty asinine and lazy.
I am a scientist, and I feel like sciency analogies to philosophical concepts are almost always dodgy, but I will try anyway: To me, it seems similar on some level to say that, because the particles of gas in a room could be here, or could be there agglomerated on a corner, there is no meaningful way in which we can talk about the temperature of a room. Truth is, some combinations and permutations have been observed to be way more likely than others, way before we could meaningfully articulate the underlying mechanisms with anything rigorous.
This doesn't mean that the radically opposite conclusion is true either. You could go all the way against "there's no arc of justice", and become a Fukuyamaist or a Spanish Inquisitor: "there is an arc of justice, and it bends towards this". This is not a necessary outcome of Moral Realism though. Moral realism, to me, basically seems to say, that ethics and morality is not a "nonsense" discussion topic (again: Wittgenstein).
Its not exactly arbitrary, its more dependent on the current state of the world. Take the trolley problem, if killing one person would save billions does murder become moral?
Similarly, (and more contentiously) we might look at pre industrial agrarian societies as barbaric for favouring male children but when your society/family is absolutely dependent on human labour and men are capable of providing far more for roughly the same amount of resources consumed you can see how that moral position could emerge.
Were they fundamentally evil for holding it?
* http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pd... is short story which also talks about this.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead#Disputed
(In quotology, "disputed" means "almost certainly didn't say".)
It's mind-blowing how few famous quotes were actually said by the people they're attributed to. Churchill, for example, veering wildly off topic, never said the thing about ending sentences with a preposition, never said the thing about having no heart/brain if you don't/do believe in socialism, and (prepare to gasp with dismay) never said the thing about drinking the coffee if Lady Astor put poison in it. And Lincoln never said the thing about fooling all of the people some of the time. Yeah, the rabbit hole goes that deep.
One example that comes to mind with me is the campaign by many university student groups across the country to encourage endowments to divest from fossil fuel companies. For example: http://www.fossilfreeuc.org/ http://www.fossilfreemit.org/ . The the vocal minority on this subject is very strongly in favor of their opinion (divestment), whereas the larger mass of students mostly doesn't care about the issue or perhaps leans to not divesting but only slightly.
It is interesting to consider the more detailed results of this where people don't have 0 cost acquiescence, for example if people really wanted some non-kosher soda it would still exist in the marketplace.
It is also interesting how this phenomena occurs in voting schemes where you have a fixed number of voting points to distribute over all issues up for consideration. In such systems people can have their minority issues more strongly represented.
It's at least seemingly male cultural phenomena. Or alternatively women are really really careful about it.
The surrounding cluster of pages there may also be useful for people curious about this topic.
Otherwise we end up being different people without desiring that.
Of course we should let good examples transform our society, but not opinionated minorities.
What examples do you have in mind?
There are accepted norms which are accepted by the majority for historical reasons, but also because people believe the norm seems both honest and accepted by many of who they see as honest people who are similar to them. So the norm is not just something you agree with, it's something consider to be decent and can be consented to.
In society there is always one big dominant river which current is going in one direction. That's the social contract. If you don't have one rule for everyone, there is no society.
We see a lot of that in OSS, and I've seen it happen in companies: Bad behavior designed to make dissenting opinion go away (when sometimes the dissenting opinion is to just not be insulting), runs amok, and forces the lowest common denominator of behavior.
So IMO, it's not really about tolerance or intolerance, but about which side allows itself to be influenced, either by law, or pressure. When enough pressure to make someone resign is stronger, you end up with an environment where the intolerant wins. But in an environment where this doesn't happen, it's the people who have more to lose by leaving that wins. You can imagine how that is not helpful in a company: It's normally your best employees that have better alternatives when they leave.
Another important part is whether we really know everyone's opinion. When an opinion is considered impolite, we will think it's less popular than it really is, because people that share it will just be quite about it. It's one of the reasons we've seen quick changes of opinion in topics like Gay marriage: It's not that opinions change that quickly, but that what was considered the "polite opinion" has had a big reversal. So it isn't just about tolerance.
Ultimately what matters is, who really wins? An OSS project that kicks people out, for one mechanism or the other, wins when it keeps the most value. Maybe removing dissent is helpful. Maybe the dissent was making things better. So whether this effect is good, or bad, happens in a case by case basis.
Yes, you can smoke at a trainstation, or suicide bomb yourself to death in front of a football stadium. But that is only a success of your agenda in the very short term. If most of your coworkers are non smokers and you annoy them too often with your smoke, you lose their support in the long run and thereby your ability to push your agenda.
On the other hand we know that the straight white male is the default for our society beside being the biggest group, reason being that his agenda is integrated well in our world definition through media, history, etc. He doesn't win, because he's more stubborn. He wins because 90% of movies show him as the role model. You can be a very stubborn black woman but that won't make you rich and won't make people try to be like you, it won't enable you to push your agenda.
For example, eating Kosher or Halal is a rule and he is saying that by a minority following this rule, all of us end up by default following the rule.
Suicide bombing or smoking is an action which we don't inherently take. We are eating already, so eating kosher or halal isn't a huge difference.
Isn't that the bottom line? That in a reasonably democratic society, the majority makes way for the minority? Otherwise it's not a democratic society, it's apartheid.
Would not an unregulated democratic society not care to cater to the wishes of a minority? In a raw democracy if the majority did not observe Kosher or Halal, that nation would not see an issue with making it illegal. That a minority did follow it would not matter, the majority had ruled.
Individual and minority rights are protected in the US is because there are laws in place to restrict the simply majority rule to prevent the above from occurring. Those controls were put in place having recognized the limitations of majority rule in antiquity, it is not a property of a democratic society.
Apartheid was racial segregation in South Africa and doesn't appear to apply here.
The thing is, you can't "oberve" kosher or halal unless you actually believe in them.
I'm neither jewish nor muslim, but I was brought up christian, so here's an example I'm familiar with: if a priest sprinkled my food with holy water, my only concern would be hygiene; if the water was clean and he hadn't, say, used it to wash his flock's feet beforeheand, then I could care less. Or I might mind if the food was such that sprinkling water over it could make it worse somehow- I can't think of an example.
The point is, I don't believe in the supernatural. Some people do and they insist on imbuing real-world stuff with supernatural meaning. As long as the way they choose to do so has no real-world, tangible effect on me then I don't care, they can knock themselves out.
In short: people can believe anything they like about our common lives. As long as it's supernatural, it doesn't affect me. It's not real. I don't care about what's not real.
Accordingly, I don't see why halal and kosher should be made illegal. People should be free to believe in the supernatural if they so choose. Why would a democracy impose a specific set of beliefs on its people? In what sense would you say that such a democracy could be considered "unregulated" (let alone a democracy in the first place)?
I brought that up because I think that, for instance, having one kind of meat for the minority and another for the majority, is not _in the long run_ very different than the minority being forced to sit on different benches, drink from different fountains, use different entrances etc.
If a minority wants to eat kosher/halal and we make it harder for them to do that, they 're forced to have their own shops, their own butchers, their own restaurants and so on. Wheras, if there's more halal/kosher meat to go around, the majority, like myself, is unaffected, or possibly enjoys the positive contribution of the minority to the life of the community.
It's like when going to eat with a group of people, most might not care enough to voice an opinion, so the one or two people that do care will make the choice for the group.
But your point stands, it's not a phrase that I feel belongs in well written prose.
> "Radical democracy" means "the root of democracy." Laclau and Mouffe claim that liberal democracy and deliberative democracy, in their attempts to build consensus, oppress differing opinions, races, classes, genders, and worldviews. In the world, in a country, and in a social movement there are many (a plurality of) differences which resist consensus. Radical democracy is not only accepting of difference, dissent and antagonisms, but is dependent on it.
(Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_democracy
This article can be interpreted as evidence that radical democracy actually works and the root of democracy ought to be a diversity of minorities all advocating for things we could call their essential beliefs, and a healthy, free society is one in which on any given issue the majority is flexible enough to accommodate minorities that have stronger preferences.
That is, a prosperous, cohesive society isn't one that tends to homogeneity but is instead driven by its heterogeneity. Furthermore, a prosperous, cohesive society isn't based on rigid principles, but flexibility and the ability to evolve its structures to accommodate more and more diverse groups.
Seems legit to me. Most homogeneous groups in history seem to either arise from a founder effect or maintain their homogeneity through dehumanizing tribalism and Incredible Violence.
Or isolationism. Like how Japan essentially kept its borders closed for centuries.
To me the most homogeneous societies seem to be frontiersmen living in extremely harsh places. The Sami, Pygmy tribes and Inuits we're left alone for most of history. Nobody can fight off immigration indefinitely if there is some reason for them to come.
The most violent civilizations in history didn't seem to care who they oppressed. Roman Empire, Mongol empire and British empire had no problems taking different ethnicities as subjects. Some of them even had somewhat varied ethnic makeup in the power-base of the empire. For example Romans had Latins, Etruscan people and Greek city states assimilated into Rome proper.
This idea that ethnic makeup dictates success and violence of society is essentially racist. It doesn't really matter if you advocate a mix of ethnicity, you are still trying to sell policy with race. The only non-racist stance is to assume that ethnicity and success have no correlation what so ever.
> Do you think only burqa wearing Muslim society is prosperous and cohesive? That seems to be only way how that Taleb article could support Radical Democracy.
What? I'm going to ignore your nonsensical question and merely clarify what I meant:
In the traditional logic of democracy, consensus is the ultimate goal. It makes sense to me and you that a process that seeks consensus can function and effectively govern, probably because we have been raised to learn this logic since a young age. Radical democracy turns this on its head: The essence of democracy is plurality that defies consensus.
I don't think it is intuitive that this could function on large scales. I think Taleb's article gives evidence that yes, this can work, because the real dynamics of society are not driven by consensus building, but by minorities advocating for themselves. I am not saying the article is explicitly supporting radical democracy, but it gives us an empirical point of view from which to analyze its merits.
But to me that Talibs article is specifically one of the big problems that idea has. If the most stubborn and intolerant part of the populace always get their way, regardless of their size, then it should always result in stubborn and intolerant policy.
The more you put distinctly different groups of people in a society that runs this way, the more likely it is to have some extremely stubborn and intolerant idea to surface.
I give you that if the stubborn idea is "freedom of speech", that could work nicely. But recently "not mocking prophet Muhammad" has been seemingly bit more stubborn.
Yeah, sort of like the inhomogeneous groups in history acquire their inhomogeneity through dehumanizing tribalism and (nothing incredible about it -it's just human nature) violence. Take the British Empire for example. They deliberately moved people around their empire to keep their subjects angry at each other rather than at themselves; Indian rubber tappers and Chinese merchants in Malaysia, Scottish Protestants in Northern Ireland, Indians shipped to Kenya, etc. Worked for a few hundred years. Arguably, the modern neoliberal system is an extension of this to the modern day.
Taleb's argument doesn't seem to be in favor of any flavor du jour of democracy. More an exposition of how things work in complex pluralistic social systems, democracy or no. Ornery minorities in a pluralistic society end up getting their way most of the time. As all of western civilization seems determined to become some kind of ornery minority, the next 20 years should be pretty interesting.
I'm not sure what you mean about "western civilization" becoming an ornery minority but it gives me a sense of "barbarians at the gates" sort of thinking. Could you clarify?
Anyway, civilizations get sick and die: there is nothing I can do about it beyond scowling at the imbecile descendants of the people who once sent men to the moon. At least China seems to have walked away from its suicide attempt.
I really never thought I'd say that. I guess I'm getting old. "A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head." —Benjamin Disraeli
You don't understand the word this way, but that's ok. No one who talks about radical democracy lacks the context to see radical with the connotation of "root" and those people would consider your understanding of the word not to be apolitical, but very much political and thus contentious.
I suggest the next time you are introduced into a context where words mean different things from what you think, you don't try to colonize it with your understanding of the word as if you have a generic, impartial, apolitical comprehension of human communication.
Of course, the connotation of extremeness isn't opposed to the original meaning of radical. Anything that deals with the essential root of an idea will be extreme in its expression. It would be fine to associate 'radical democracy' with connotations of democracy taken to its extremes.