Sunday life-seeking sprint 6: recapping the "ignoble privilege" argument

diff --git a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
index d17bd74..626af22 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
+++ b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
@@ -235,7 +235,7 @@ twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https
 
 I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club.
 
->  I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
+> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
 
 Scott got a lot of pushback just for including the blog that I showed him in a links post (Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
 https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/
@@ -308,7 +308,7 @@ Scott has so many fans—
 https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate-star-codex
 https://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
 https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/
-"Index of Yvain's excellent articles"
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xaLHeoRPdb9oQgDEy/index-of-yvain-s-excellent-articles
 
 Nate on dolphins (June 2021)—a dogwhistle??
 https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273
@@ -383,13 +383,19 @@ Then I would have at least hoped Eliezer Yudkowsky to be _in favor of_ rather th
 
 In part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Mencius Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
 
-Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners: 
+Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners. It's socially deviant for commoners to be rude to nobles, but permitted for nobles to be rude to commoners; violence of nobles against commoners is excused on the presumption that the commoners must have done something to provoke it; nobles are officially preferred in employment and education, and are allowed to organize to advance their collective interests, whereas any organization of commoners _qua_ commoners is outlawed or placed under extreme suspicion.
 
+[Moldbug argues that this is how America treats non-Asian minorities; and that it actually has bad effects on the people themselves—]
 
+> applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call _ignoble privilege_ would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, _noblesse sans oblige_ is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.
 
+[I can see the argument abstractly, but I couldn't put my weight down on it being bad for the people themselves, until I see it happening to my people ...]
 
 It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, but I clearly didn't have license to _talk_ about any reasons to be skeptical ...
 
+[Scott Alexander wrote about how there are different dimensions of power—
+http://web.archive.org/web/20130424233301/http://squid314.livejournal.com/354385.html]
+
 —until, suddenly, in 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wish they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies.
 
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