Yes, 100% concur on all of this. We need to change the dialogue, not win the argument.
Another reason to avoid doing this—or perhaps the same reason, flavored differently?—is that it makes your position, and by extension you, look weak. The only times I find myself scrambling for a defense like these are times when I don't consider myself to be on firm moral or intellectual ground; I always try to notice when I'm scrambling like that, so I can use it as a cue to take a step back and reevaluate whether I'm even having the right conversation. I'm not always successful, but I keep trying 🙂
I’ve noticed that a many of your articles (and your recent Dark Arts talk) seem to circle the topic of Karpman’s Drama Triangle. A lot of folks seem allergic to the ‘victim’-based terminology, which I think is unfortunate, as the Triangle model is highly useful in its versatility (so I’ve been trying to come up with better terminology, like playing the Hot Potato Game, but I’m not quite there yet).
The superiority/inferiority lens is generally a tell that the Drama Triangle dynamic is afoot, which always takes one further from the territory rather than closer. Riding the Triangle is basically the opposite of taking full, sovereign self-responsibility. Instead, one will enter the game from one of three positions to fog the map with status, blame, or some other kind of deflection.
I can’t unsee the dynamic since learning it a few years ago. And each time I see someone else describing the limb they’ve touched, I’m like, I gotta write the damn Elephant into an essay somehow…
(Disclaimer - I will probably be replying to multiple of your posts over next few hours. Hope that is fine. Normally I don't comment on random blogs because low value use of my time, but I will make an exception today because I felt like, also your blog is important for the world IMO.)
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” - Dosteovsky
I actually strongly agree with the core point you are making in this post.
I will nitpick on a different point though. In a utopia, yes I would like everything to be fair and even people with less power (or less ability to acquire power) to be treated well and have nice things and so on.
We do not live in a utopia however, and given scarce resources, in my worldview, fairness absolutely is one of the first values to get thrown under the bus. Reality is red in tooth and claw (as Scott Alexander puts it), all the way down to the biological level, and trying to enforce fairness via laws and social norms alone, is hard.
Examples
- IQ is one of the single-biggest predictors of how much wealth you acquire, and wealth does weakly correlate with happiness upto a point, and I am fine with all this. I was born with a higher IQ than many people by chance, and therefore I lucked into having more options to find happiness than other people.
- Most people inherit the country and socioeconomic class they were born into, and this entirely random and doesn't have much to do with fairness, and I am also fine with this. I know the obvious ways of implementing an inheritance tax wouldn't work anyway, obviously parents want to give (unfair) advantages to their children, and if you restrict the legal way, they will do so by hook or crook.
- Beauty is a good predictor for what station in life women can end up in as well. You won't find true love with beauty alone, but you can find someone who will atleast protect you from actual violence (while hopefully not being violent to you themselves), and in a sufficiently low trust society, this alone can mean the difference between life and death. Even in a higher trust society, attractive women who want to can just marry into a higher wealth bracket, in a way that less attractive women can't I'm actually fine with this, I understand how deeply encoded it is that men and women find each other attractive for basically arbitrary unfair reasons, and you can't just pass some law to change how things work.
If you agree with me that fairness is one of the first values to get thrown under the bus by people and civilisation as a while, then the discussions of which minority group gets thrown under the bus first, actually start making a lot of sense. I'm not happy with how often this discussion happens, but atleast it makes sense to me why it happens.
Most of the above (though not all) seems true to me, but I'm a bit confused how it arose *in response* to the essay you're commenting on; this seems like a non-sequitur and fits with the pattern of "huh, Samuel sure is reading me as saying something very different from what I'm actually trying to say, more than half of the time."
Maybe it will help if you clarify what your goal is in writing this blog. Why do you write these posts? Why do you leave the comment section open? If you want responses, then why?
I think my reply might hint a bit at why we are coming at this from different lenses.
A lot of your posts have the vibe of "here is how utopia should work"
And I very much have the vibe of "fuck utopia, life is hell today, give me actionable advice that makes life less hell today, either for me or people I care about. Otherwise I have better things to do with my time than read your posts and comment on them and so on"
I also am quite pessimistic on anyone's ability to change mindsets of entire populations via blogs alone, if in case that is your goal. Yes, there are some people who are this good at persuasion, but my guess is you and I are both orders of magnitude below the skill level required to do this.
In this post, yes I agree I am not directly reacting to the post.
> I actually strongly agree with the core point you are making in this post. I will nitpick on a different point though.
Your post is about what to do in a utopia, what discourse norms should utopia have? I am a lot more pragmatic about it. I want an answer for what discourse norms should exist, given that obviously utopia doesn't exist and we are in a war of all-against-all to fight for resources and decision-making power, and people will inevitably weaponise language to further their narrow interest group's ends. Given that all this obviously exists, what is the correct response to that?
Yes, 100% concur on all of this. We need to change the dialogue, not win the argument.
Another reason to avoid doing this—or perhaps the same reason, flavored differently?—is that it makes your position, and by extension you, look weak. The only times I find myself scrambling for a defense like these are times when I don't consider myself to be on firm moral or intellectual ground; I always try to notice when I'm scrambling like that, so I can use it as a cue to take a step back and reevaluate whether I'm even having the right conversation. I'm not always successful, but I keep trying 🙂
I’ve noticed that a many of your articles (and your recent Dark Arts talk) seem to circle the topic of Karpman’s Drama Triangle. A lot of folks seem allergic to the ‘victim’-based terminology, which I think is unfortunate, as the Triangle model is highly useful in its versatility (so I’ve been trying to come up with better terminology, like playing the Hot Potato Game, but I’m not quite there yet).
The superiority/inferiority lens is generally a tell that the Drama Triangle dynamic is afoot, which always takes one further from the territory rather than closer. Riding the Triangle is basically the opposite of taking full, sovereign self-responsibility. Instead, one will enter the game from one of three positions to fog the map with status, blame, or some other kind of deflection.
I can’t unsee the dynamic since learning it a few years ago. And each time I see someone else describing the limb they’ve touched, I’m like, I gotta write the damn Elephant into an essay somehow…
(Disclaimer - I will probably be replying to multiple of your posts over next few hours. Hope that is fine. Normally I don't comment on random blogs because low value use of my time, but I will make an exception today because I felt like, also your blog is important for the world IMO.)
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” - Dosteovsky
I actually strongly agree with the core point you are making in this post.
I will nitpick on a different point though. In a utopia, yes I would like everything to be fair and even people with less power (or less ability to acquire power) to be treated well and have nice things and so on.
We do not live in a utopia however, and given scarce resources, in my worldview, fairness absolutely is one of the first values to get thrown under the bus. Reality is red in tooth and claw (as Scott Alexander puts it), all the way down to the biological level, and trying to enforce fairness via laws and social norms alone, is hard.
Examples
- IQ is one of the single-biggest predictors of how much wealth you acquire, and wealth does weakly correlate with happiness upto a point, and I am fine with all this. I was born with a higher IQ than many people by chance, and therefore I lucked into having more options to find happiness than other people.
- Most people inherit the country and socioeconomic class they were born into, and this entirely random and doesn't have much to do with fairness, and I am also fine with this. I know the obvious ways of implementing an inheritance tax wouldn't work anyway, obviously parents want to give (unfair) advantages to their children, and if you restrict the legal way, they will do so by hook or crook.
- Beauty is a good predictor for what station in life women can end up in as well. You won't find true love with beauty alone, but you can find someone who will atleast protect you from actual violence (while hopefully not being violent to you themselves), and in a sufficiently low trust society, this alone can mean the difference between life and death. Even in a higher trust society, attractive women who want to can just marry into a higher wealth bracket, in a way that less attractive women can't I'm actually fine with this, I understand how deeply encoded it is that men and women find each other attractive for basically arbitrary unfair reasons, and you can't just pass some law to change how things work.
If you agree with me that fairness is one of the first values to get thrown under the bus by people and civilisation as a while, then the discussions of which minority group gets thrown under the bus first, actually start making a lot of sense. I'm not happy with how often this discussion happens, but atleast it makes sense to me why it happens.
Most of the above (though not all) seems true to me, but I'm a bit confused how it arose *in response* to the essay you're commenting on; this seems like a non-sequitur and fits with the pattern of "huh, Samuel sure is reading me as saying something very different from what I'm actually trying to say, more than half of the time."
Maybe it will help if you clarify what your goal is in writing this blog. Why do you write these posts? Why do you leave the comment section open? If you want responses, then why?
I think my reply might hint a bit at why we are coming at this from different lenses.
A lot of your posts have the vibe of "here is how utopia should work"
And I very much have the vibe of "fuck utopia, life is hell today, give me actionable advice that makes life less hell today, either for me or people I care about. Otherwise I have better things to do with my time than read your posts and comment on them and so on"
I also am quite pessimistic on anyone's ability to change mindsets of entire populations via blogs alone, if in case that is your goal. Yes, there are some people who are this good at persuasion, but my guess is you and I are both orders of magnitude below the skill level required to do this.
@DuncanSabien
If you don't have time to read all my replies, please just read this one ^
In this post, yes I agree I am not directly reacting to the post.
> I actually strongly agree with the core point you are making in this post. I will nitpick on a different point though.
Your post is about what to do in a utopia, what discourse norms should utopia have? I am a lot more pragmatic about it. I want an answer for what discourse norms should exist, given that obviously utopia doesn't exist and we are in a war of all-against-all to fight for resources and decision-making power, and people will inevitably weaponise language to further their narrow interest group's ends. Given that all this obviously exists, what is the correct response to that?