Sorry I haven’t got anything out this month. I wrote something for Scott’s book review competition (which I’ll post here once the competition is over), I went on a camp, and I’ve been working on a mammoth essay on medium-term AI futures. To compensate, I thought I’d do a little round-up of spicy takes I have that didn’t belong in their own essay.
This essay is gonna be very rough and ready. Probably there are hanging sentences, and bits of syntax that don’t make sense. However, this looseness does allow me to play with some entertaining ideas. Just treat it as me chucking some thoughts out there for discussion, not a final draft.
1. Demanding that people stop being friends with someone even if they’ve done legitimately awful things is almost never a good idea.
There’s a person who tried to bully me a lot, and at one point was too forward with me at a party. I fucking can’t stand them. Nonetheless, one of my regrets in life is having criticized a mutual friend for still hanging out with them. Everyone needs friends, even people who have done truly awful things. Friends are more often than not a positive force, the demand that bad people should be made into loners is counterproductive.
2. We don’t punish constructive rule-breaking nearly hard enough
By constructive rule-breaking, I mean putting other people in a situation where they have no choice but to break rules on your behalf. Imagine you’re a nurse in a hospital. There are fifteen patients for every nurse. Management has created elaborate rules about charting patients, documentation, procedures, etc. You haven’t got a hope in hell of completing them, and management knows that, but management has covered its ass by setting that as the benchmark. Management has shifted the burden of breaking the rules from itself onto the staff. WE SHOULD NOT TOLERATE THIS. We should treat it as much worse than normal rule-breaking.
A closely related phenomenon is setting rules that you don’t actually expect to be followed (or at least not followed all the time), and then using them to fire people when you need an excuse to get rid of them. Starbucks has been using these tactics lately to fire union organisers. If there’s a revival of the labour movement, one of its key demands should be a crusade against non-bona fide rules. In my view such rules are at least 10% of what is wrong with American work-places, higher in places that are particularly vulnerable to this stuff (e.g. administration)
3. Aristotle was close to right when he said that government is by dictatorship, oligarchy, or democracy, but the real truth is that almost all government and organization is by dictatorship, oligarchy, AND democracy
Organizations, or at least larger and more formal organizations, are usually a mixture of all three- dictatorship, oligarchy and democracy. Sometimes one or more modes is latent-hidden, but they are usually there, below the surface.
Take an organization like MacDonald’s or IBM. You can argue it has some dictatorial features due to the powers of the CEO. You can argue it has some oligarchical features, due to the power of relatively small numbers of shareholders and board directors. So where’s the democracy? Well, it’s subtle, but if the upper management really pissed off a majority of its staff- to the point that they were willing to lose their jobs immediately just to punish upper management, upper management wouldn’t last a day.
To pick an absurd example. Suppose the board of Starbucks said tomorrow “Starbucks is a proud Nazi company and everyone who works for us is a Nazi”. Staff would quit, wildcat strike, criticize the company publicly, and generally cause anarchy. Doubtless, the shareholders would see the board replaced to save the company, even if they were personally indifferent to the comments or supportive.
Every organization depends on a kind of tacit majority consent and is in that sense democratic. Almost every organization has a smallish minority that makes the majority of real decisions and bears a majority of the influence. In that sense, almost every organization is oligarchic. Almost every organization has someone who makes the snap decisions and can speak on behalf of the organization- even if this is contextual or time-limited. In this sense, almost every organization is a dictatorship.
Organizations differ in the formal extent to which they are democracies, oligarchies or dictatorships, and informally in how power dynamics are really structured, but it’s quantitative, not typological. Personally, I want the world to be more democratic, but it’s important to remember this is more than simply a constitutional question, it is a question of larger structures than the merely legal, of weighting.
4. One of the most central contradictions in human life that almost never gets talked about- is the contradiction between universal beneficence and the love of one’s nearest and dearest. We don’t grapple with it nearly enough, and we all too often treat love of nearest and dearest as if it were just an expression of universal beneficence.
The highest moral aspiration in many traditions is impartial love for all sapient beings. Yet we human beings both need and want specific attachments, to friends, and especially to family. The clash between specific attachments and universal love can be as dramatic as the clash between selfishness and universal love. The great moralists were aware of this tension. Jesus, for example, said:
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”
and
“Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law
My take on this would be that Jesus thought serving his universalist moral message requires a degree of detachment not just from your own life, but even from your family. Modern Christians though don’t like to talk about this tension though because they tend to be social conservatives who think family is synonymous with their creed. It’s not!
I worked in an ER once. In ER, the difference between philanthropic universalism and love of family is glaringly obvious. I’ll remember to the end of my days that the most bothersome, insistent people were not the people inquiring how long they would have to wait on their own behalf, but the people, yelling, raising their voice, on behalf of their relatives. MY MOTHERS KNEE IS SO BAD SHE CAN’T WALK AND SHE HAS BEEN WAITING TWO HOURS THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS, I WILL BE WRITING TO THE MINISTER, THE PRIME MINISTER, AND THE POPE. Meanwhile, as you have already patiently explained to them, there are not one, but two people on the verge of heart failure who the medical staff are trying to prevent from dying.
I actually think people often get worse when advocating on behalf of other people they are very close to, like their children. When it comes to advocating for themselves, they feel constrained by their sense of ethics. When they’re advocating for their kids, parents or siblings, they think “I’m being altruistic, I’m fulfilling my moral duty, I can go nuts and scream at this receptionist and still sleep well because I was trying to help my loved one.”
I saw someone on Twitter the other day who said in their bio they were involved in politics because they were “just trying to make a better world for their family”. As if this were a simple, innocent, thing! As if the great feudal lords of the medieval ages weren’t also involved in politics because they were “trying to make a better world for their family”. I remember someone, I think it might have been Jordan Peterson, said that politics would be better if we expected politicians to have families. On the contrary! My half-serious proposal would be to ban people who have kids from politics, for only the childless have a hope of achieving impartiality.
Some people have imagined dealing with this contradiction by doing away with partiality. Either through philosophical self-reflection or social or biological engineering, they propose people should be shorn of their special attachments. I think it would make life much less rich if you had no special connection to anyone, and everyone you met had no special connection to you. I can feel existential vertigo just thinking about it. My life is better for knowing that my parents would be on my side, even if I did the wrong thing. I wouldn’t want to remove that joy and comfort from the world.
So I suspect it’s a contradiction-irresolvable. We’re doomed to be split not just two ways- between selfishness and selflessness, but three ways, between self, nearest and dearest, and universal love. Even if humans start getting made in factories and raised communally, we’ll still have our special bonds of friendship. Some awful contradictions are just built-in, and that’s not okay, but we have to make it so. Hey, at least it’s great fodder for novelists and filmmakers.
5. The Libs of Tik Tok argument is stupid because it treats doxxing as the red line when the real red line is inflicting real-world consequences on people for shit they do on the internet.
There’s been a fight over the morality of doxxing Libs of Tik Tok. The argument goes like this:
“Doxxing Libs of Tik Tok is wrong, because doxxing is wrong”
“No, doxxing Libs of Tik Tok is legitimate, because it’s retaliation for several doxxing-like things that Libs of Tik Tok itself did”
“Ah, but these things were not doxxing. These people had already put their names on the internet. Thus they weren’t doxxed. So this wasn’t proportionate retaliation against libs of Tik Tok, it was an escalation”
Now the first reason this is wrong is because Libs of Tik Tok did doxx people, in a pretty comprehensive sense of that term.
But more philosophically, I think this misunderstands the reason we have a rule against doxxing.
The first rule of internet club is that, barring monstrous behavior, and I mean truly monstrous, you don’t inflict major real-world consequences on people for stuff they do or say online. What happens in internet club, stays in internet club. The golden rule of internet club exists because we like to keep things a little wild and free out here and because, frankly, if we all faced the consequences we technically should for the stupid things we’ve done in everything-gets-recorded-land, we’d all be fucked.
Doxxing is bad because it’s one kind of breach of this golden rule of internet club. Trying to get someone fired for stuff they do online is bad because it’s a breach of this golden rule of internet club. Thus the question in considering whether the doxxing of Lifbs of Tik Tok is legitimate is not “did they dox people”, it’s “did they try to ruin people’s lives for things they did online that wasn’t truly heinous”. The answer is yes.
Now, if you think there’s a significant moral line between “doxxing” and “trying to get people fired” I challenge you to explain what it is. The most common answer is “well, if you’ve put your name out there on the internet, you’ve given people the right to use your name, including to get you fired, but if you don’t put your name out there, you haven’t”. I’d suggest that this is a scholastic argument, that doesn’t capture the experiential reality of people trying to get you fired. If you’re some private citizen who posted a Tik Tok under your own name because you wanted to have friendly conversations about your teaching techniques, the argument “you gave us tacit permission to try and get you fired because YOU put your own real name out there in public” is going to be meaningless. If ethics are about human welfare, this is a bad argument because it doesn’t relate to the real fault lines and distinctions that affect people.
Thus I’m inclined to agree with those who say that Libs of Tik Tok suffered the rebounding consequences of their own actions. They persecuted others. They were persecuted in turn.
6. Raise your kids about average, with a slight lean towards permissiveness
People often debate what the right way to raise kids is. Tiger mom or free-range?
The scientific literature on raising kids generally says that the details of how you raise them don’t matter all that much. Kids tend to find their level and their habitat whatever you do. The most important thing is not to make any big mistakes that will really screw them up or traumatize them. “Wonder parenting” won’t make much of a difference, but awful parenting can stuff them up.
Given this, I’d suggest that the safest thing to do is probably to raise them about average on the strictness/leniency spectrum because it’s hard to majorly break them this way. There’s wisdom and safety in the crowd. If you’re wondering “should I let them play this computer game” or whatever, just ask yourself “what would the parents of my children’s peers be doing”. Another big advantage of this approach is that your kid won’t end up too culturally isolated from their peer group.
However, you should have a slight bend towards permissiveness. Maybe aim for about the 30th percentile on the strictness curve. Why? Because if your kids are going to turn out the same basically whatever you do, you might as well relax and help them enjoy their childhood, and not stress them out unnecessarily. Treat their childhood as an end in itself, and not just a training ground for successful adulthood.
7. Twitter taken over by Musk? Libs whinging. A pox on both your houses.
Here is the tweet I twote about Musk taking over Twitter:
“It's bad that the guy who said "we will coup whoever we want, deal with it!" owns Twitter, one of the most important loci of opinion formation among journalists in the world. It's easy to scoff at Twitter as irrelevant, but if ideas have any power (and they do), Twitter matters.”
A pox on Musk’s house! A pox I say.
Yet I want to add something else to the mix. The liberals who are now complaining about this are fools. A pox on their house too. They’re like people complaining about a monarchy as if the only problem with it was that the wrong king is in power. The possibility of something like this happening is built into any system which gives individuals private ownership over the internet’s most important hubs. Maybe instead of bemoaning that the wrong individual won the monopoly game this time, you should be thinking about how the rules could be different. About how we could all win, and get a stake in how the places we hang out- like Twitter- are run.
Again, complaining that the wrong billionaire won this time is a bit like complaining about a monarchy by saying that you just like the particular guy who happened to come to the throne this time.
If you won’t use this as an opportunity to consider socialism, at least propose some sensible reforms, like a requirement that no one can own more than 5% of a major media provider.
I would call "constructive rule-breaking" something else. Perhaps "structurally required rule-breaking". Constructive rule-breaking sounds like breaking rules to achieve positive ends i.e. prosocial rule-breaking. Saying that we should *punish* this kind of rule-breaking also sounds like we want to punish the rule-breaker, but we actually want to punish the *rule-maker*.
There's even a nice catchy rhyme there – don't punish the rule-breaker, punish the rule-maker!
Also, even if someone does post pseudonymously, that's frequently only a paper-thin barrier in terms of actually finding them, as demonstrated by how easy it was to find the woman behind LibsOfTikTok.
Most people on social media post "public" things for an audience of ~Dunbar's number without thinking about it. Take almost any post that touches on some subject with emotional resonance and put it in front of thousands and thousands of people with an uncharitable framing and if you haven't completely screwed their life up you've definitely made their next few days or weeks on social media miserable, even if you didn't intend to (LoTT clearly does intend to do exactly this, of course, she knows exactly the game she's playing). I saw a pretty tame vent tweet from a mom about dealing with newly adult kids result in CPS being called to their house a couple weeks ago because someone criticized that initial tweet, that criticism struck a chord, and all of a sudden tons of accounts well outside the sphere were dunking on them, a ton of people were post-hoc justifying the pile-on, and somewhere in there some people called CPS. What was most frustrating to me was not the blow-up, because I don't think that was really intended on the part of the few initial critics, but the rationalization the people involved did to justify their behaviour after the fact, after it became abundantly clear that the person in question was fine and decent and mostly just a bit cringe.