i’ve long positied that the lesswrong/rationalist ideology is specifically inimical to marxism and leftism in a way it’s not inimical to other political ideologies, and also that the lesswronger ideology has a profoundly anti-democratic undercurrent. so it’s nice to get both of those confirmed by the second banana himself.
Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects.
Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.
this here is a shoddy dichotomy which vastly oversimplifies reality- people don’t break down neatly into the “mistake theorist” and “conflict theorist” camps, because virtually everyone is in the middle range, because this is reflective of observable reality- in which some disagreements are caused by mistakes of fact, and some disagreements are caused by conflicts of interest. any reasonable person would go on a case by case basis, and thoroughly evaluate the evidence to determine if a particular political issue hinges on mistake or on conflict, and not pre-suppose one or the other.
scott’s framework here is strawmaning marxists as viewing all political disagreements as matters of class conflict, which is ridiculous. for one thing you have to at the very least have to acknowlege that marxists generally don’t view debates with other marxists on these terms.
however, scott’s this framework isn’t completely useless- while very few people actually fall close to his categories, and most are somewhere in the middle, there are occasions in which one side of a debate views the debate as a conflict of interest, and the other as a debate over mistake of fact. however, this has no bearing on how they’d be positioned in other debates.
furthermore, scott’s use of this framework is somewhat revelatory- the fact that scott proposes this sort of dichotomy for his framing, and doesn’t hesitate to align with the “mistake theorist” side, shows that scott really does have a knee-jerk tendency to view all disagreements as mere issues of error of fact. scott is so strong in this knee-jerk tendency that when he encounters someone saying a particular debate is centrally about conflict of interest, scott is unable to parse that person as having a nuanced view, and assumes they are as knee-jerk as himself in the opposite direction, and they must view ALL debates as conflicts of interest.
there are some holes in his strawman, though- even this imagined “conflict theorist” he’s created has to acknowlege that most people on the other side are simply mistaken:
Conflict theorists think this is more often a convenient excuse than a real problem. The Elites get giant yachts, and the People are starving to death on the streets. And as soon as somebody says that maybe we should take a little bit of the Elites’ money to feed the People, some Elite shill comes around with a glossy PowerPoint presentation explaining why actually this would cause the Yellowstone supervolcano to erupt and kill everybody. And just enough People believe this that nobody ever gets around to achieving economic justice, and the Elites buy even bigger yachts, and the People keep starving.
in this scenario, even the strawman conflict theorist acknowledges that the people who believe the powerpoint are mistaken, and could be won over through reason and debate, thus undercutting the narrative scott is presenting in which strawmen “conflict theorists” are generally uninterested in debate.
while he briefly touches on the idea of there being a spectrum between “easy” and “hard” conflict theorists toward the end (with easy conflict theorists viewing all conflicts as battles to the death between good and evil, and hard conflict theorists viewing them as clashes between differing but comprehensible worldviews) the essay at large mostly ignores the existence of the latter group in order to make his strawman a more exaggerated anti-rational stereotype. the whole tendency to caricature opponents as anti-rational also plays in to his assumption that conflict theorists would be anti-intellectual, which ignores that in the context of a conflict, having intelligent people working on your side to win the conflict is obviously desirable.
relating to the way in which the imagined “conflict theorist” archetype is exaggerated into an anti-rational strawman:
What would the conflict theorist argument against the Jacobite piece look like? Take a second to actually think about this. Is it similar to what I’m writing right now – an explanation of conflict vs. mistake theory, and a defense of how conflict theory actually describes the world better than mistake theory does?
No. It’s the Baffler’s article saying that public choice theory is racist, and if you believe it you’re a white supremacist. If this wasn’t your guess, you still don’t understand that conflict theorists aren’t mistake theorists who just have a different theory about what the mistake is. They’re not going to respond to your criticism by politely explaining why you’re incorrect.
while i’m not a “conflict theorist”- as i’ve pointed out, in reality no one is- i imagine i’m somewhat close to what scott has in mind with the term, as i am (roughly) a marxist. and i would hope my response to this post would show that this is not accurate, and i am in fact interested in responding to scotts criticism by explaining why he is incorrect.
even if i do think scott amounts to the hypothetical “Elite shill” with a powerpoint saying yellowstone will erupt, proving his claims wrong on a technical level is still my first and most important priority if i want him to not be a successful shill. simply accusing him of being a shill, and pointing out the $1,627,000 which MIRI (which scott is affiliated with) has received from Peter Thiel would be useless if i couldn’t also demonstrate to people that he was incorrect. the insinuation that viewing a particular disagreement as a conflict of interest presupposes any possibility of engaging on a factual level is ludicrous. even if i think the “conflict theorist”/”mistake theorist” is just a cheap rhetorical trick to sell people on anti-democratic ideology, i still need to demonstrate that it’s not reflective of material reality.
also, there’s the way in which scott frames the issue to exaggerate the anti-free-speech tendencies of the “conflict theory” strawman, while glossing over the anti-free-speech tendencies of his “mistake theory.” he says:
Mistake theorists think that free speech and open debate are vital, the most important things.
For a mistake theorist, passion is inadequate or even suspect. Wrong people can be just as loud as right people, sometimes louder. If two doctors are debating the right diagnosis in a difficult case, and the patient’s crazy aunt hires someone to shout “IT’S LUPUS!” really loud in front of their office all day, that’s not exactly helping matters. If a group of pro-lupus protesters block the entry to the hospital and refuse to let any of the staff in until the doctors agree to diagnose lupus, that’s a disaster.
note that even if his hypothetical pro-lupus protesters were not to block the entry of the hospital, and were to engage in a less disruptive form of protest, this would still be viewed within his framework as a complete waste of energy and a public nuisance, to be eliminated for efficiency sake- as, indeed, would all protest. this is not actually an especially pro-free speech framework! while viewing a particular political debate as a conflict is certainly compatible with an anti-free speech perspective, it doesn’t necessarily imply it- while conversely, the mistake theory framework does firmly imply an anti-protest stance, making his claim that mistake theorists are champions of free speech more than a little questionable.
i do like how he acknowledges the strong anti-democratic undercurrent of his analysis:
When mistake theorists criticize democracy, it’s because it gives too much power to the average person – who isn’t very smart, and who tends to do things like vote against carbon taxes because they don’t believe in global warming. They fantasize about a technocracy in which informed experts can pursue policy insulated from the vagaries of the electorate.
gotta stop that electorate!
i like the use of global warming as an example though- it shows what the undercurrent of the whole lesswronger/”rationalist” framework is, which is trying to sell profoundly anti-leftist ideas toward a progressive-leaning audience by dressing them up in progressive shibboleths- in this case, trying to sell anti-democratic technocracy to environmentalists by presenting it as a way to prevent climate change. it’s very clever, i gotta admit.
at the end of the day, this whole framework is just a cheap trick to convince people to ignore the material reality that conflicts of interest exist in politics, by trying to claim that anyone who acknowledges conflicts of interests must view everything in terms of conflict, and then saying that the only way to avoid becoming this “conflict theorist” boogeyman is to become a “mistake theorist”, which implies an anti-democratic, anti-leftist stance.
it’s ludicrous, completely lacking in nuance, and doesn’t hold up even remotely to scrutiny.
