Man Becomes Communal Property, Is Confused By Optimization Heck Which Results | TheMotte, or: "Intellects as Unknowing Slaves to the State"

One of the things I want to write about is how the systemic thinking that typifies the STEM mindset fails really hard upon encountering multidimensional optimization problems, sometimes referred to in the online STEMlord literature as 'multipolar traps.'

For those of you who haven't been paying attention to a fringe group of would-be philanthropists who became preoccupied with the question: how can we most philanthropy? How philanthropy is the best mostest, even goodest philanthrope?

At first glance the question of being Effective with your Altruism would be noncontroversial. The Effective Altruists demonstrated the failure of neoliberalism's dominant decision-making paradigm: data-driven. Known as the CYA principle at work, data-driven decision methodologies constrained choices to those which could be validated prior to their active implementation.

It constrains the imagination to that which is possible to run, as if laundry, through a committee, and committees are the death of intellect unless they are bound to the will of a competent executive.

This poor fellow, profiled by one of the few papers who maintained reality sketchers on payroll (most reality sketches are worthless, so reality sketching is a rare skill, highly prized by none except the true aristocracy who know its occasional vast power, and certainly not useful for telling the news.), is a perfect symbolic figurehead for the failure of the STEM way of thinking to produce or provide leadership for a country on the rocks as a ship with a mutiny ongoing. These people are focused on dreams and fantasies of good. The concept of 'the individual' confuses this individual: that is how far he has been disconnected from himself as he has entangled himself in a quest to measure numbers of good.

Freddie DeBoer tried to help these people, you know. They didn't take it well.

I'm going to get real with you. The reason I'm here is I'm still bitter.

Here's who I am: an actual fricking historian. It doesn't matter what credentials I have or don't have.

What you know if you read history, and particular, the history of movements generally referred to with fascism, is that the hardest part will be convincing the moderates who don't want it to be true that it's here.

So I, being or at least feeling young, still, took the symptoms of 2016 and I went to an enclave of people whose politics I thought were moderate, and whose logic I thought was sound. And I pointed to the signs and symptoms, and I tried to give them clues.

I was thwarted.

I was thwarted by Scott Alexander, who invited online reactionaries into his spirit dirigible.

See I was hitting the notes I wanted to hit. There was the eternal male ressentiment, which I expected, as communities around a figure are shadows of the conscious mind of that figure. Scott Alexander's writings resolved or revolved around male ressentiment, so as men gathered to discuss politics, the politics of womanhood were a natural expectation. Some of the people I talked to on these topics would go on to be outed as naked misogynists. This is where the abusers went to justify their abuse of women, after the fact. Creeps and losers are not a good market segment for your political forum. The expression of male angst is only useful as far as it is being converted into masculine adulthood. Older males must help.

I was helping, actually. I just tried to remind these men that the more they enabled their anger against the divine feminine because it is feminine, they more they are rebelling against the divinity they, by their nature, must worship. The image of femininity you have is the image you will create. What she does to you because she is woman is what you deserve, it's ok to feel sad for a while and move on.

Simple rhetorical strategy: talk to people in the language they understand, be of use to them.

And then when I found racists I said it was racism. When I found admiration for authoritarian figures I said that sounded suspiciously authoritarian.

I pointed to the fascist smoke pouring in. The eyes ears nose jaw of a wolf.

Woke Derangement Syndrome is being unable to see that the present Republican party has become a party organized by someone calling for violence under a false reality because your popularity online was based largely on standing up for men in politics online. Whether or not there is legitimate grievance with individual feminists, the grievance cannot be said to be well-founded if it is causing gross errors of this magnitude.

So people noticed when I left. No one wants to see how they look from the outside, even if that outside is colored heavily by my own perception. Writing "White Men Can't Dance" is one of the top ten things I've ever written. I think it holds up well.

But I also think this holds up well.

I left the Culture War Threads before they became TheMotte. The fact that I'm also banned from TheMotte is only because they know I'm still the writer who wrote and meant "White Men Can't Dance." I'm unrepentant of my insulting condescension to the people who thought that what they did is writing. You have taken the greatest gift--free criticism on demand--and managed to neuter it. You live in an island of poor thinking built by the rules of a false civility.

I go in and out of phases hate-reading TheMotte. Mostly because I knew I'd write this post one day. A confession of my sins: Father, O Lord, I have hurt these people. I thought I could get through to them and I was arrogant. I thought my persuasive charms would do the trick.

I'm still bitter.

But what I'm not bitter about? I'm not bitter about flaming out, that was a good choice. There's no trying harder. I'm not bitter about getting banned. To find out who rules over you, find out who you're not allowed to criticize: the implicit message of my ban was always "Not allowed to criticize white men."

TheMotte is a Confederacy of Dunces.

Let's have a highlight reel of moderation choices made at TheMotte. I'll spare a Motte from having to write copy: "Impassionata provides a cherry-picked set of samples of our moderation, when we have to deal with extremists on both sides in about equal number and they're equally insane and appear equally insane to the other!"

Sorry, but these moderation samples tell the pattern. See what we have here is late-stage evaporative cooling.

All of the sane normal people came into the culture war thread and found the open racists. On pointing to the racists, they were told: don't point, that's rude.

And the normal people left.

This happened to so many people that one of them created a term for the progressions of burning out of discourse with the dunces.

But what becomes radically, even viscerally apparent as you contemplate this effect of banning negative feedback on certain topics, is the moderation. Take a look at this

Or this one, which I will excerpt, because it's hilarious:

Yes, the guy who incited the riot said that they should march to the capitol and "show strength".

The guy before him at the rally suggested "trial by combat".

This is a two movies scenario, in which you believe these are clear calls to violence for the purpose of changing election outcomes and I do not.

I was watching the movie that happened instead of "charitably interpreting" everything Trump says to mean something reasonable. I don't know what movie you're watching.

This comment earned a 1-week ban by the head moderator.

So leftwing perspectives were banned for being too straightforward and correct and hurting the feelings of those who were there to pontificate among friends. Intellectual inquiry!

Where it all went wrong of course could only be understood in retrospect. One of the funny little things about Scott Alexander's communities is they developed sidecars. Communities, on the side, which had a shared audience. The racists would go to their sidecar community, say the mask-off thing, and then put a mask on for the rightoid masquerade. The goal of the fascist masquerade is to perform the postmodern fascist dance moves. Keep Race and IQ as talking points, and throw up a huge fit about free speech when the community thought a break from that might be a good idea. That sort of thing.

And then it came out that Scott Alexander was conscious that he was seeking an audience in online neoreactionaries. He went to the racists and fascists and said: here, step inside my spirit dirigible.

And the hole in the dirigible from people leaving caused it to whiz out of control.

Scott Alexander's Home for Lost and Confused Boys, it says on the dirigible.

Scott wrote a dream he had, the other day. About a prophet and a bishop.

A man sent forth to live in paper forever struggles with effective altruism. As if in from a religious fervor indistinguishable from Christian neurosis. "I don't know, I guess I might be the guy to speak for the movement." "Things are complicated."

... Don't laugh. Ok, laugh a little.

The problem the Effective Altruists have is they think they're counter-cultural but they're merely cultural, an outgrowth of the obsessive need to improve applied through the usual forms of technique (in the sense Ellul describes--briefly, 'technique' is the perfection of execution accomplished by training to which we are forced to kneel, the skill of ritual by which excellence is summoned forth from the void. Practice, but with the philosophical understanding that technique rules our society in that we are bent by it into something inhuman; we become the machine, but of course all theories end that way). Generally thinking of themselves as strong thinkers because they could read and memorize information, and do the normal calculations, they nevertheless did not seem to comprehend the reality that they were in.

The Effective Altruists sent out a call for proposals: I propose that they disband. Those who have organizations for a cause, operate those organizations for that cause. There is no need for an umbrella. You've come to the microphone, your 'leader' has said hello and that he doesn't know how to figure any of this movement stuff out, get off the stage or put something out.

The bishops of our time spent so much time doing numbers proving they had only made data-driven decisions. This made it impossible for them to question the assumptions of that which they were generally ordered to do.

The bishops of our time liked to contemplate theoretical threats and disregard real ones, and in fact they conjured up elaborate reasons why there was no fascism and those who called it such were themselves extremists.

Just this week, the mouthpiece for the fascist movement declared itself the true leader again and there are renewed threats of violence.

So, my friends. I am quite sure that were I to create an Impassionata account on TheMotte it would be swiftly banned.

But surely we can flood TheMotte with questions about fire alarms and pulling them? It doesn't have to be overt.