I downvoted this because I want less content on this subject on this site - I'm here for the AI, philosophy, and psychology, and have made my truce with the people who want to talk about lifehacks all the time. I think politics, even meta-level politics, is a better fit for /r/slatestarcodex or the SSC comments, where there's already herds of people who want to talk about politics all the time.
If you didn't think it was a helpful post, I'm fine with you downvoting it, but I don't think you should be downvoting posts on people's personal blog just because you don't like politics. My understanding was that politics was fine, but not on the front page. If you don't want politics on people's blogs I would suggest posting on meta arguing against people posting politics on their blogs or contacting the mods directly.
I think this is an understandable position, but it seems to me that most active users are looking at the daily posts, and the front page isn't particularly priveleged. I don't think there are any firm norms about politics at the moment either, only the aggregate of peoples' opinions.
Well, if you're downvoting all political posts, maybe I should upvote all non-frontpage political posts to counter this? All I'm saying is that a discussion on meta seems to be a better way of handling this than a upvote/downvote war.
I think it's a mistake to see people as either Mistake theorist or Conflict theorists.
There are political problems for which the best explanation is mistake theory and there are political problems for which the best explanation is conflict theory.
Political power of various groups does impact the resulting policy. The fact that 20 years ago it was possible to extend the copyright to 70 years and now it's not possible to create another copyright extension isn't because people thought up new arguments about copyright but because political power shifted.
Most people are up to having some debates and not having other debates. I don't think it's hard to find a person on the left who's willing to openly tell you that they aren't open to debate with you whether or not African Americians are dumber than Whites.
"I think it's a mistake to see people as either Mistake theorist or Conflict theorists" - true if you take the model too seriously, but this post wasn't about testing the limits of Scott's model, but explaining one single complication - that conflict theorists will often take on certain mistake theorist characteristics as camoflauge.
[I kinda feel like I have a post in me about this, but I'll start with a comment here first.]
Aren't we all conflict theorists? Of course we're also 'mistake theorists', i.e. we all agree that there are lots of 'first-order mistakes' being made.
But Robin Hanson has been beating the X is not about Y drum now for ... decades?
David Chapman (of the site Meaningness) was the person I most remember at making me feel the emotional truth that conflict is inevitable. Any specific conflict may not be, and probably isn't. But some conflict is inevitable; if for no other reason that even our one species has such a large diversity in apparent values.
I consider it to be an open question whether there is a single set of values that human beings would agree to, even among a superintelligent version of everyone alive today (let alone alive ever). Conflict just is an inextricable aspect of existence.
We (for any particular instance of 'we') should try to win conflicts by pointing out the mistakes being made. We should also win via other means (i.e. 'politics') when the cause is sufficiently important.
"Aren't we all conflict theorists?" - We all have some element of conflict theory inside of us. And indeed we should, as sometimes we really are in a conflict. But just as some people lean towards conflict denialism, others see conflict everywhere they look. Both are harmful.
I found this thought-provoking, particularly the metaphor about total war and proportionality as applied to dialog and puersasion. I wonder why it was downvoted? I don't agree with all of it and even see some premises I'd disagree with, but I found it thought-provoking and interesting.
If mistake-theoretic ideas are better at influencing people on the margin, there's hope for the world yet! We just need to let our curiosity shine through, not get hung up on how mistaken conflict theorists are.
Very related: Guardians of the Truth.
I'm not so much trying to talk about how mistaken they are, but trying to understand the phenomenon. Which I haven't quite managed yet though...
trying to understand the phenomenon
Are you sure the camouflage phenomenon exists though? The behaviors described in your post all seem explainable by the usual biases.
The incentives for a Conflict Theorist to present themselves as a Error Theorist are very strong. Of course, once they gain enough social power, they'll often be confident enough to be out in the open.
OK, but do you have a specific conflict theorist that you know used to pretend to be a mistake theorist? Are you sure that this person intentionally obfuscated their beliefs instead of just changing their views along the way? Or is your claim purely theoretical? To be fair, there is a mild interpretation of your claim - merely that some people aren't arguing in good faith. This is trivially true, but I imagine you meant something more.
There is another issue of whether there is a real benefit in pretending. Mistake theorists are not the most poplar people.
Specific examples would definitely make this post clearer, but I wanted to abstract away from hot button issues. Unfortunately it is hard to do both at the same time.
I've been trying to think about historical examples. Marxism while in some ways being strongly about conflict theory, they still wanted to keep the veneer of reasoned debate to get the backing of academics.
A quote from wikipedia from Popper.
Hegel thought that philosophy develops; yet his own system was to remain the last and highest stage of this development and could not be superseded. The Marxists adopted the same attitude towards the Marxian system. Hence, Marx's anti-dogmatic attitude exists only in the theory and not in the practice of orthodox Marxism, and dialectic is used by Marxists, following the example of Engels' Anti-Dühring, mainly for the purposes of apologetics – to defend the Marxist system against criticism. As a rule critics are denounced for their failure to understand the dialectic, or proletarian science, or for being traitors. Thanks to dialectic the anti-dogmatic attitude has disappeared, and Marxism has established itself as a dogmatism which is elastic enough, by using its dialectic method, to evade any further attack. It has thus become what I have called reinforced dogmatism.[51]
OK, but you have real evidence that these people exist, right?
To clarify, I worry that these people don't exist. The theory makes sense to some extent, but I don't consider the average human to be this devious. And the behaviors this theory explains already have better explanations. Unless you use the words "pretend" and "conflict theorist" in some extremely mild way.
Notice that I've been asking a lot of yes/no questions in the previous comments. I'd love to get some yes/no answers to them.
Sometimes answers can't be reduced to a simple yes or no.
I don't have the power to see into people's minds. So I can only infer why people behave the way that they do. And this post isn't about whether Conflict Theorists mimic Mistake Theorists consciously or unconsciously, but about the fact that they do, with the point being that it is hard to tell them apart.
but about the fact that they do
Again, I'm asking you to provide some sort of evidence that they actually do. You haven't done that yet, aside from suggesting a motive. I'm not asking for something magical here. What sort of experiences and observations have led you to make the conclusion that these people exist?
Scott's recent post on Conflict Theory vs Mistake Theory is probably his most important post in quite a while. As Less Wrongers tend to be Mistake Theorists, they tend to try to see others through the lens of Mistake Theory. And a lot of value can be derived from this. Even when someone seems to be merely pursuing their own interests, there usually are at least some arguments as to why they are actually acting for the common good. Yet some people are Conflict Theorists and denying this reality is simply not rational.
Before I continue any further, I need to make a distinction between Total War Conflict Theory and Proportional War Conflict Theory. Those who practise Total War have very weak inhibitions against using underhand or vicious tactics against their enemies. I don't mean they have no limits - many people set a limit at serious physical violence - but they certanly don't wait for their enemies to shoot first. On the other hand, those who practise Proportional War still have a strong respect for ethical standards of behaviour. They recognise that they are in a war and that winning a war has a cost, but they try to hold onto as much morality as they can, knowing how easy it is to slowly slide down the slippery slope. In those post, when I talk about Conflict Theorists, I'll actually be using it as shorthand for Total War Conflict Theorists. I just wanted to clarify this before I started.
Anyway, one key point that Scott didn't mention is that many Conflict Theorists will try as hard as possible to convince everyone that they are Mistake Theorists. You see, if they admit that they are merely ideological warriors for their side and that they aren't really open to discussion or debate, many people would choose not to talk to them or to listen to them. So Conflict Theorists will pretend to debate in good faith, but if they aren't winning they will simply switch to attacking your character instead. Of course, they don't want to admit that they are Conflict Theorists, so the standard pattern for doing that is to present you as an unreasonable, ideological warrior who is in denial about obvious truths. The benefits of this strategy are to deny the enemy views airtime, to indicate to allies that considering these views would be a betrayal and to bully moderates into being silent.
Another common strategy is the use of ideological superweapons, where you make Conflict Theory moves like denouncing your opponent, while maintaining plausible deniability that you are actually making a Mistake Theory move. If you can denounce your opponent as falling into X-ism you can damage their credibility without exposing yourself to being called out, as long as you can create some intellectual justification for your claim. The reason why this works so well, is because at least some percentage of people actually are merely making an intellectual criticism and not actually trying to poison the well.
Conflict theorists will often build up a body of theory in order to justify their positions. This ensures that they will always have something to say in an argument so that they will never have to admit that they are wrong or look silly by not having a response. If they can obtain enough support from within the academy, then they can paint people who disagree with them as uneducated or arrogant for thinking they know better than the experts.
This body of theory will appear hugely flawed to anyone with any common sense. While Conflict Theorists may have intellectual standards, their standards are probably more at the level of, "Wouldn't be embarassed arguing that" vs "Actually trying to find the truth and question my biases". Conflict Theorists are simply going to be far too tempted to (not so) occasionally bend logic to get the conclusion that they want. Even if you don't want to do it personally, someone else will, and it is their work that will by promoted and shared. Holes can be covered by generating more theory, and any holes in this further theory can be covered by still more theory. Public conversations tend to be rather shallow, so this should be sufficient to maintain the illusion, especially if you have social power to discourage people from challenging you.
Eventually, they can recruit from the crowd who want to be seen as smart, but who aren't actually smart, and so who benefit from accepting the group's ideology in return for being given a bunch of long words and pre-packaged arguments (not to mention the pats on the back from other people who have bought into the deal). Of course, recruiting this crowd means maintaining the cover of intellectual respectability by pretending that actual serious research is going on and that your field isn't actually waging ideological war.
As we've seen, there are many benefits for Conflict Theorists who can convince others that they are Mistake Theorists. This means that it is always a challenge to try to tell the two apart.