The Overton Window and Political Control
thefutureprimaeval.net
thefutureprimaeval.net
I don't believe that is true. In fact the problem with the current rhetoric is that academia, (that is, the part of academia that can publish (thus the part that passes the review of its peers)) pushed its fringe identity politics rhetoric to the mainstream media, instead of the actual economic issues that cause the global Trumpism[1]. It's not a new phenomenon - academia always had control of the media rhetoric.
On the other side, conspiracies have always existed. From my european perspective, it actually amazes me how everyone is surprised and looking to russian conspiracies for explanations, when we have had this propaganda phenomena for a very long time under the cold war from both sides (and i doubt they caused a huge swing in democracies). Social media doesn't really make such a huge difference, because social networks have always existed, just not online, and just less transparent to everyone. I think Occam's razor would suggest it's much easier to explain your election results on economic terms (again, [1]) than doing a witch hunt.
1. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/18/mark_blyth...
Blyth has the best analysis of the changes the West is undergoing. I recommend the video you linked to everybody.
Democracy is a vote market, and strong identities are the strongest persuasive tool available for acquiring votes. Strong identities we know of are skin color, religion, and universalist ideologies (think communism).
Once a particular identity, or combination of compatible identities becomes large enough to have a chance at becoming a winning coalition, the logic of the democracy market almost guarantees it will be deployed for that purpose. Even in the absence of underlying economic factors.
TLDR; democracy has a lot of very scary failure modes, and the US has been lucky to avoid them because until very recently, there haven't been strong competing identities, so people have been free to argue over tax rates.
But doesn't this Presidential election at least suggest that enough people got unhappy about the very "fixed" (more like steadily declining) economic "resource" known as the working class job to swing the election to Trump?
All the raw statistics, from labor force participation to suicide rate changes, suggest your point isn't correct, except in a theoretical sense, or "any practical sense" except in the very long term.
What comprises the modern left spends its time (fruitlessly) trying to escape the conditions of Late Capitalist oppression by trying to reform language and symbols, as if the amoral profusion of signs inherent to our era can somehow be cowed into a uniform, virtuous narrative. These supra-simulations of identity immediately collapse beneath their demands of consistency of performance, both from their actors and their audience. The instability of economic and social conditions, as well as the myriad seductions of manufactured identity found in consumerism and technology, erode them as soon as they are constructed.
Meanwhile, the modern right (more properly understood as the postmodern right)understands and embraces the semiotic chaos of our contemporary condition, gleefully pirouetting from whatever simulation of politics, truth, and identity serves their immediate purposes. White supremacy, Leninism, religious conservatism, Objectivism, FDR New Dealism, Libertarianism. These are all just just roles which the postmodern right can occupy or discard at will, mirroring the social and psychological conditions of their constituency. The promise is stability, but not in the form of consistent identity. It's a stability of occult freedom, where whatever is can be transmuted into whatever is necessary.
I don't think so. They react to their economic condition.
Just to be clear-- I'm talking about a paper that a) makes a hypothesis about public policy, b) presents relevant data, and c) makes a conclusion based on the results of that data.
Edit: removed redundant line
But it's sheer confusion to use that same concept as a metric for freedom of thought. Suppose that respectable opinions on encrypting messaging apps, treating dimentia, and political correctness all shifted and narrowed in the last 10 years. So what? You must still look into the details and context of each shift to have any idea whether or not speech got stifled in the process. So I don't understand how reference to a narrowing "Overton window" (or "Overton bubble") has any explanatory power wrt freedom of thought.
My preliminary list would be
- human neurological uniformity
- anti-Semitism
- Islamophobia
- ethnonationalism
- conspiracy theories
- libertarianism and Objectivism
Also there is a kind of inverse-Overton, subjects that can be safely debated because they are unlikely to lead off the reservation. For instance abortion and gun control. Everything's already been said.
Here's a hint: liberal academicians and "people using social media to communicate directly to citizenry" do not, in fact, constitute a dichotomy.
It's funny though, because the other day there was a free speech debate at the University of Toronto where a gender ideologue explicitly denigrated her opponent's outreach on Youtube as amateurish videos unworthy of consideration. Despite him being a tenured professor. [1]
Then again, both his opponents also expressed how dismayed they were that this debate was taking place at all, after they reinterpreted its topic as being offensive to common decency. They ignored the indecent actions from their camp that led to it though. It seems liberal academicians do not like debate of any kind, official or otherwise, they'll just bang on about empathy and care while denying it to those they disagree with.
I'm also not an academician, or part of the academy in any sense (I joined the workforce at age 18), which makes your specific choice of sermons, well, dumb.
† which might or might not be valid (I think it is, but then I wrote it)
I do agree with your criticism though, and the author would have done well to present historical examples that have lost their emotional intensity in the present day.
That said, remarkably convenient that apparently people who don't already agree aren't even capable of hearing examples and evidence, thus rendering it not just unnecessary to substantiate the claims but imperative not to.
Programming is a well paying, desirable job.
White, Asian, Indian, and Jewish males are over-represented in the trade.
All people have identical abilities and preferences on average, therefore the demographics of a profession should exactly match the census.
We note that this isn't the case, therefore these demographics are the result of a subconscious and economically counterproductive racist and sexist conspiracy.
Our reigning ideologies believe in a Lysenkoism of the mind, despite all psychometric evidence. There really are blogs with better epistemology on this topic than the top universities in the Overton bubble. Ideological indoctrination is the practice of instilling in people priors of 0 and 1 on certain topics, immunizing them against empirical experience. It is the practice of making geniuses more deluded than fools.
That is rubbish. A straw man. I've spent more than a decade within the so-called Overton bubble at a university, and this is decidedly not the consensus as I experienced it.
All biology is known to yield population variation. That is obviously true by necessity. However, there are both ontogenetic and phylogenetic influences on outcomes. The progressive/egalitarian view is that the cultural dynamics that result from small population differences (that are in any case too high variance to be reliable for making individual discriminations) should not inhibit phylogeny. Put another way, an individual's self-expression should not be limited by the fact of their membership in a particular category.
Further, while there may well be, in lab settings, reliable significant population level differences, these differences at an individual level may entirely be swamped by cultural influences, rendering them insignificant.
Lastly, the sources of the population differences may, in some instances, be factors that are entirely culturally malleable. Males as a population may have a slight predisposition not to understanding mechanisms better, but instead to finding them interesting, which over the course of development leads to greater competence. This predisposition may be easily changed at a young age by an encouraging mentor or compelling Hollywood film. Similarly, someone may be predisposed to kidney failure not because of bad kidney cells, but because they don't have as strong a compulsion to drink water (a deficit trivially remedied).
Nonetheless, those parts of academia that define the narrative on these topics (sociology, history, feminist academia, and political science) do not believe there is significant non-cultural variation in any economically relevant trait among the sexes or ethnically distinct populations, and put anyone who openly states the obvious through a struggle session that usually results in their firing, as happened with Summers. Though the vast majority of psychologists admit that IQ is largely genetically heritable, accepting the consensus of the twin studies, any future inference about what this implies is outside the Overton bubble.
Just as not knowing disease was caused by small invisible germs made us unable to treat disease properly, our inability to admit that intelligence and stupidity are caused by small, invisible alleles has made us unable to treat social pathologies properly. The distribution of intelligence is grossly unfair. But we can fix it if we are willing to admit its cause. Let us seize the high-IQ alleles and distribute them to the proletariat!
I think there is a deep sense in which education as a treatment for stupidity is like wearing perfume to prevent the plague.
Also, acknowledging these differences prevents racism. Antisemites love pointing out that jews are overrepresented in many high-status occupations, postulating crazy conspiracy theories for why this is the case. But once you acknowledge the IQ gap (Ashkenazi Jews score roughly a standard deviation above gentiles in most psychometric tests) we have an entirely benign explanation and it's evident that these conspiracy theories hold no water.
These differences are a perfectly valid subject of inquiry of very little use to the individual, but becomes necessary to discuss when progressives beg the question, assuming falsely (just as antisemites do) that underrepresentation in cognitively demanding endeavours necessarily implies discrimination that isn't based on ability.
Ontogeny is context dependent at every scale of analysis. As such it is sensitive to precise manipulation in myriad ways, the vast majority of which are likely not yet known. We remain profoundly ignorant of what intelligence is, let alone what underlies it.
It's likely that large population differences are the result of a synergistic interaction of genetics and culture, with each depending on the other. Ashkenazi Jews benefit from one such interaction, but there may well be many others yet to be discovered.
I disagree that the social theorists as a whole are entirely ignorant of basic biology. I think they would argue that the cultural forces swamp genetic signals often enough to be worthy of criticism.
There are no doubt theorists with views that are more extreme, but the appropriate response isn't to counterweight by going further in the other direction.
Group membership cannot be destiny. If it is we're not free.
There are a number of perfectly reasonable comments in this thread that carry the stain of appearing in light gray.
EDIT: It appears that I've been downvoted, and I don't know why. Anyone care to explain?
Paul Graham said several years ago that it made sense to him to use it for disagreement (because people might use upvotes for agreement), but I continue to feel uncomfortable with that and try never to use it that way. I try to upvote things that I disagree with that I thought were well-put or constructive.
Maybe an alternative would be to look at Paul Graham's own "hierarchy of disagreement" and try to use downvoting only for things at DH2 and below.
Indeed.
> I would very much like to see downvoting eliminated, or at least modified so that a small number of upvotes can counteract it.
No way. It was mostly like that not that long ago and the site was terrible. Filled with pseudo-spam and no criticism was possible.
The problem is humans don't have good manners. We are full of biases and try to do anything to advance whatever ideas we favor at the moment. Downvoting criticism is one of them.
Rather than each comment having a global score, each user sees comments scored based on their voting history. This means non-conforming opinions no longer get buried for everyone.
An upvote should mean "I'd like to see more of this" not "I'd like everyone to see more of this".
Just because there's an up button and a down button close together, and clearly the intent that they are correlated, doesn't mean that the usage in practice is the same.
A vote up means that the post is on topic, and relevant of showing to others preferentially in the eyes of the voter.
A vote down is often used on topics that the voter simply /disagrees/ with, irrespective of relevance to the topic.
Therefore I would propose that 'mixed votes' indicate a contentious, but likely on topic, point of discussion for further discourse and refinement.
There should clearly be a threshold (a large number of votes, with a vast majority of them negative) for indicating actually harmful content.
Huh. When I look over light-grey and dead comments in the stories I read, I see that most downvotes are not for non-conforming opinions.
However, by default, the page should randomize the display of comments every time it's loaded in order to force people to view some viewpoints occasionally that they might not like.
The reason I come here is to have my opinions and views challenged; this refines the metrics by which I judge reality and the viewpoints I consider valid and generally enriches my life. Google has become all about pushing a viewpoint. Go into google right now and start typing in "a", "b", "c"; first thing that comes up is large big-box retail chains. Used to be you could find fringe topics via major search engines, now everything lives in it's walled garden; giving corps the ability to control viewpoints like that is somewhere in-between suicide and genocide. You want people constantly debating and discussing topics and not forcing themselves into an orthodoxy because it forces the habitation of developing a personal scientific method which doubles as a BS detector and inoculation against agents of psychological warfare.
The article also postulates that due to the threat caused by people outside the academy/media/"cathedral", the overton window has shifted sharply in a radical direction in order to flush out those who are insufficiently loyal.
And if I recall correctly, that this is a regular process. Which has led us to this rather extreme point, historically near the extreme for the US.
What are the specific counter-reactions you see that limit this as an ongoing/regularly exercised pattern?
(This isn't really my opinion, I don't have good enough evidence for or against; it's just my understanding of the claims of the article.)
This erroneous concept seems to have spread to this writer via Curtis Yarvin (of Urbit/Strange Loop fame/infamy.)
It seems superficially valid because the media loves to use witnesses of academic prestige that back its own agenda. However, it should be clear that the ultimate gatekeeper has always been the media, not any media-selected credentialed proponents of whatever position the media wants to be seen as the most prestigious and scientifically valid.
If universities are really brainwashing people, then those who own the media can just not hire those brainwashed people. Power over hiring is the ultimate level of control over any organization, media companies included.
You can make the argument that the media needs an audience, and if the masses are brainwashed then they have to speak in that language. But if you're talking about non-objective-truths such as values, and those values are so widespread that media has to cater to them - that's not brainwashing, that's just popular culture.
Now, there is some distance from "radical libertarian think tanks" and the rest, but, for example, can you find any serious distance between any 4 of these groups on immigration? Use of marijuana? And libertarians are a relatively small, and in the US, a disintegrating group.
I'm sure there's enough diversity of opinion between televangelists for some of them to be on board with feminism, but that's more a sign that the US has less of a religious Establishment than many countries rather than more.