Comment by moldbug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moldbug | Hacker News Reader

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Concentration camps and gulags excluded, I don't think there has ever been a human society - anywhen, anywhere - as degraded as the 20th-century tower block/project, a pure product of Enlightenment thought.

It's useful to go back and compare apples to apples when we compare the 19th-century "slum" to the 20th-century slum. You can read Robert Roberts on the Edwardian slum, for instance - a world which he grew up in:

http://www.julielorenzen.net/slum.html

Roberts: However, approximately sixty years after Engels wrote his book, Roberts described the working class as almost being obsessed with cleanliness. A dirty home or even a front step meant lower social status. Roberts wrote “Most people kept what they possessed clean in spite of squalor and ever-invading dirt. Some houses sparkled.”

Or read Riis' How The Other Half Lives:

http://archive.org/details/howotherhalfliv00riisgoog

You can even find an unbiased view of Southern slavery (admittedly milder than Louis XIV's Caribbean version):

http://books.google.com/books/about/A_south_side_view_of_sla...

You won't find anything like:

It never ceased to amaze me how the people could live like that~dirty diapers & sanitary napkins in the hallways, urine & feces everywhere, cockroaches scurrying from one apartment to the other and when you had the unfortunate luck of answering a call on the 11th floor of one of these hell-holes was horrifying! Just going in to see the "moving walls" and the chicken bones on the floor, the stove on for heat even though it was already 140 degrees in there and the stained couches & dirty mattresses on the floor where at least three or four little kids were napping with the roaches! Good times...

Lack of nice material things is one thing. Even in Cabrini-Green they had PlayStations. Louis XIV didn't have no PlayStation. Human degradation is another - and Enlightenment experiments hold the prize. (Especially if you count the "Soviet experiment" to its credit.)

Human degradation is another - and Enlightenment experiments hold the prize. (Especially if you count the "Soviet experiment" to its credit.)

I see where you're coming from. That's hardly a reason to throw out all of the >values< of the Enlightenment, however. I doubt Catherine the Great would've approved of Cabrini Green, and none of the Enlightenment experiments would've been conducted the same way had people in the past known what we know now about economics and game theory. On the other hand, we know these things. We have decades additional history about the pitfalls of unintended consequences.

In any case, I think this is a bit underhanded, if unintentionally so. First comes the implicit assumption of a not-widely understood interpretation of "Enlightenment" followed by the attachment of horrors of unintended consequences to the term.

It's fallacy to attach unintended consequences a set of values, absent an analysis of implementation.

Is this going to turn into another Libertarian flame-fest?

Really? I think results are always a good reason to question values. Note that libertarianism is an Enlightenment ideology too, just an older one (19th-century liberalism).

We know these things, so what are we doing about them? Replacing projects with Section 8? That would be fine if the problem was architecture, not Enlightenment ideology. If you read that cop thread you'll see what they think of Section 8. Here's what the Atlantic thinks:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american...

It's best to examine all these Enlightenment experiments from the standpoint of the debate between their critics and proponents before the experiment was tried.

If the results bear out the critics, not the proponents, what on earth are we doing when we persist with the experiment? Was it really an experiment at all? Scientific thinking may be better than nonscientific thinking, but nonscientific thinking is better than pseudoscientific thinking...

Really? I think results are always a good reason to question values.

So then 911 invalidates all the teachings of Islam. The children's crusade invalidates all of christianity? Ridiculous, and hardly examples of careful reasoning.

It's best to examine all these Enlightenment experiments from the standpoint of the debate between their critics and proponents before the experiment was tried.

Why? I suspect it's best for you and the particular axe you have to grind.

If the results bear out the critics...

The results always bear out the critics. The question is really how many ways of ruling a country have been tried, and what has there been to show for it. As far as that goes, everything has been a mishmash.

Scientific thinking may be better than nonscientific thinking, but nonscientific thinking is better than pseudoscientific thinking...

If you'd be sincere in this, then please be clearer about causality and causal relationships specifically with respect to >values<. I find your posts remarkably devoid of the specifics here. If you don't have concrete causal relationships, then your argument is just emotional manipulation by trying to link horrible things to ideology you oppose.

In general, meddlers with too much power who are too sure of themselves have caused untold misery, and it gets worse as technology amplifies our power. I'm not so sure particular ideologies are to blame so much as that general circumstance.

"Christianity" and "Islam" are historical clades of theological doctrine, not "value systems" in the same sense as "left" versus "right" or "revolutionary" and "conservative." For instance, Christianity contains both the Anabaptist republic of Thomas Muenzer and the Spanish Inquisition. These can be classified as left and right extremes just as easily as Stalin and Hitler.

Left-right polarity is also seen in historical Islam (9/11 is not a product of Islam, but of Western revolutionary nationalism with a thin Islamic veneer), as well as even more divergent histories (eg, classical Korea). I have no doubt that if there are intelligent, gregarious aliens anywhere in the galaxy, they divide themselves into revolutionaries and conservatives.

There are only three ways of ruling a country. Aristotle, who had access to the histories of hundreds if not thousands of classical city-states whose annals are now of course lost, described them: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy.

Monarchy is the null hypothesis. The vast majority of historical governments have been primarily monarchical, often with some admixture of aristocracy. Pure aristocracy is much rarer. Democracy is difficult to even define (most nominal democracies, certainly including ours, are in fact aristocratic), extremely rare if it does exist, and commonly associated (as in the Greek case) with national if not civilizational decay in the near future.

An example of thinking about causality would be the French decision to cede Saint-Domingue its independence. Critics (inherently conservative) of this decision would postulate one kind of future for the new Haiti; proponents (inherently revolutionary) would postulate quite another. Of course, at the time this or any similar such decision had large numbers of very eloquent critics and proponents; so their arguments are easily discovered, if not obvious already.

(Or if you'd prefer to think in terms of Cabrini-Green, it's really not difficult to imagine what Elizabethan intellectuals would make of Cabrini-Green.)

Obviously, this historiographic practice accords with the basic scientific principle of judging an experiment by criteria established in advance.

It's a shame most people don't decide what historical ideologies are "discredited" by a rigorous and objective standard such as this. Instead, the standard is the inevitable one: the winner is always right. This is the simple, yet remarkably practical, basis on which our supposedly rational faith in the Enlightenment rests.

"Christianity" and "Islam" are historical clades of theological doctrine

What's wrong with historical clades of doctrine? How is that different from "Enlightenment values?" (Other than one having a theological origin.)

An example of thinking about causality would be the French decision to cede Saint-Domingue its independence. Critics (inherently conservative) of this decision would postulate one kind of future for the new Haiti; proponents (inherently revolutionary) would postulate quite another. Of course, at the time this or any similar such decision had large numbers of very eloquent critics and proponents; so their arguments are easily discovered, if not obvious already.

So their arguments establishing a causal chain back to a certain system of values is too long to summarize here? I think you'd be able to explain, or I've caught you out with a fallacious tactic for winning forum arguments by tarring opponents with Cabrini Green.

So as far as I can tell, you claim to determined that either revolutionaries or conservatives are simply bad news and you're promulgating a historical science that shows this. I'm still not clear on where the causal chain is established in all this back to a certain set of values.

It's a shame most people don't decide what historical ideologies are "discredited" by a rigorous and objective standard such as this.

I still don't see what's rigorous and objective yet. There's almost always a significant difference between people's stated values and their practiced values. This has often been noted by anthropologists.

Instead, the standard is the inevitable one: the winner is always right. This is the simple, yet remarkably practical, basis on which our supposedly rational faith in the Enlightenment rests.

Why is the standard the inevitable one? I think it's partly because it's all a chaotic mishmash. Almost no one lives up to their stated values, especially those who govern, and most of the evil that happens is rooted in great part in basic human nature.

So their arguments establishing a causal chain back to a certain system of values is too long to summarize here?

Um, too obvious to summarize here? I really find it difficult to believe you're this obtuse. You seem quite adept with words but I'm not sure you're saying much.

Do you really find it difficult to get from the Enlightenment beliefs that all men are born equally free, equally good and equally talented, to Cabrini-Green?

If all men were equally noble, a social system that treats all men as nobles - that is, by making them financially independent and (pretty much) free of external government - would create a "vertical community" full of noblemen. Indeed this very thought is found in all sorts of 19th-century reformers (and 18th and 20th). Google "and above this ridge new peaks will rise."

Instead, every time the experiment is tried - in both the modern and antique worlds - we get Cabrini-Green or something like it. The epitome not of nobility, but of ignobility.

Proving no more than the basic counter-Enlightenment reality that the poor are not (on average) natural noblemen, and need for the sake of their own humanity to be forced to work if they want to eat. (Actually, this is true of most of the non-poor as well.) Whether this compulsion is implemented by an overseer with a whip, or by impersonal economic forces, is not terribly meaningful on an individual basis.

Um, too obvious to summarize here? I really find it difficult to believe you're this obtuse. You seem quite adept with words but I'm not sure you're saying much.

If you can't accurately quantify all the concurrent things you're hypothesizing about (like: values as practiced from values as professed) then your "experiments" just show correlation and not causation.

Proving no more than the basic counter-Enlightenment reality that the poor are not (on average) natural noblemen, and need for the sake of their own humanity to be forced to work if they want to eat.

So, just have less than perfect people on average, but keep the rest of the Enlightenment values. I don't see any problem with amending those with what we now know about human nature. (I think if one examines noblemen close enough, one finds a few impure motivations here and there.) This is pretty much the ideology of the folks over at lesswrong.com.

If you can't accurately quantify all the concurrent things you're hypothesizing about (like: values as practiced from values as professed) then your "experiments" just show correlation and not causation.

You can't "accurately quantify" anything significant in human affairs. This is why history is an art, not a science. So is government. (So is running a startup.)

This is pretty much the ideology of the folks over at lesswrong.com.

The folks over at lesswrong.com seem to exist in a bizarre philosophical and historical vacuum in which they're the only intelligent people who ever lived. All of them, Eliezer not at all excepted, could benefit greatly from exposure to the thought of other times and places. Especially Victorian thought, which has the great advantage that (a) it's written in English and (b) universally available for free.

Part of the problem is that the contemporary "humanities" are so empty, sterile, and meretricious that it's really tempting to behave as if no one else has ever had anything interesting to say, ever. But this is a disorder of the present, not the past.

First, most poor people still don't live in projects. Second, I don't know if degradation matters more than material possessions.

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