My values, howled into the wind

He acts like his views are so nuanced that he can't be classified into a political bucket, yet like 90%+ are basically democratic party lines (pro abortion, pro sexual revolution, pro drugs, covid response should have been even stricter and of even greater scope than it was, etc).

If you&#x27;re curious about the protest against the California Mathematics Framework which inspired this post, I highly recommend this article, which exposes the extremely shoddy and essentially fraudulent research used to justify the CMF: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edsource.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;one-districts-faulty-data-shouldnt-drive-californias-math-policy&#x2F;663374" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edsource.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;one-districts-faulty-data-shouldnt...</a><p>Perhaps the most shocking point from the article: the oft-trumpeted claim that SF schools reduced retake rates of Algebra 1 from 40% to 7% by delaying it to 9th grade is entirely fraudulent.

I can&#x27;t believe any of that is controversial. All political systems have been extremely captured and are very polarized and focused on short term thinking to make us miss the forest and focus on tiny divisive details.<p>I would never vote for anything but democrats in the current form, but I think they are deeply corrupt and not really working for the people. Sadly easily the best we have right now. Especially in California we could do with competition from good republicans. And from better democrats.

I think this is largely damning of the american political system.<p>These are all fairly mainstream center-left views. E.g. except for the get rid of beurocracy in the fda one, i agree with all of them, and im not particularly out there.<p>If someone who has these relatively mainstream views feels unrepresented in the mainstream political discourse, something is wrong with the discourse.

My politics are similar to the policy prescriptions that Scott Aaronson lists in this post. I prefer the pragmatism of nuclear energy over coal, and GMO food over famine. I appreciate the implicit irony of listing out the possible coalition possibilities for the sad coalition that holds too many 49% positions. (I’m using 49% here and elsewhere to mean less than 50%).<p>I recently read the book Democracy For Realists that makes the point that in a society where people care about multiple issues there will be no 51% coalition that also holds the 51% position on every issue. It’s basically impossible. For anyone interested in the details of that theory, I posted a long excerpt here, along with an example:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demodexio.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;democracy-for-realists-part-4-of" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demodexio.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;democracy-for-realists-part...</a>

Man, I could almost take that as a manifesto, which probably means that I need to carefully re-examine my beliefs yet again. Just about one thing:<p>&gt;&gt;&gt; encouraging kids to learn advanced math whenever they’re ready for it.<p>I think the actual number of kids who are likely to be super advanced in math and continue with that interest past high school is so small that encouraging that interest will have absolutely no measurable effect on how the rest of us fare in school or life. Yet it could have a great effect on the quality of life for those kids, and for the future welfare of society. In fact, being great at math, given the tiny number of people who are, is a drop in the bucket compared to being great at computer programming. Likewise for kids who develop an aptitude for playing classical music.

One thing I am increasingly noticing as I get older is that the most interesting people hold wildly different political stances on different topics, meaning you can’t predict their stance on any given topic based on political affiliation alone.<p>In fact, I think this alone would be one of the be best predictors of a person’s intellect and interest in thinking deeply about things: ask 10 politically polarising questions in different areas and score responses based on how diverse they are.

&quot;… who’s happiest when telling the truth for the cause of social justice … but who, if told to lie for the cause of social justice, will probably choose silence or even, if pushed hard enough, truth?&quot;<p>Does everyone lie for the social justice cause because the truth never matches a pure ideological idea?<p>Is silence accepting the lie here empowering social justice or by not fully supporting the lie are you cast out of the movement and seen as working for the man or for power?

<i>It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a historic surge in nuclear energy, possibly with geoengineering to tide us over?</i><p><i>… who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops?</i><p>On first blush, I would say this is someone who is somehow overly attracted to idealized approaches -- dare we say silver bullets? -- without considering secondary effects or big picture, problem-first analysis. Most of his positions &#x2F; proposals sound a lot better, but something seems off &quot;off&quot; about these first two.<p>The first one just doesn&#x27;t pass the smell test. Nuke plants are expensive and slow to build, and wishing it were otherwise won&#x27;t make it so; and from a basic risk analysis perspective, it would be foolish to put most of our eggs in the geoengineering basket, without putting the problem of near-term emissions front and center.<p>And as for the second -- let&#x27;s just say the problem of global hunger is perhaps more multi-level and multi-factored than the issues that GMO, even in a best case scenario, can ever hope to address.

These are pretty clearly just liberal values (Locke, not DNC) plus a few hot takes.

These are completely mainstream liberal views and caricaturally imbued with moralizing self-importance. I know HN is as liberal a crowd as it comes but it&#x27;s hard to believe you guys are eating it up, and don&#x27;t see it for the obvious satire that it is.

Maybe that person is called &quot;rational, open minded, generally good-hearted&quot; ?

It doesn&#x27;t really strike me as incredibly outlandish to call someone like Aaronson simply correct, as he says at the end, albeit jokingly. He&#x27;s always struck me as eminently rational. For that reason, he&#x27;s established a great deal of trust with me and I&#x27;m sure with much of his reader base. Truly one of the most lucid thinkers of our time.

I think that most of us are missing the point.<p>What he laid out here is just mainstream gospel.<p>And then he punctuates it with &quot;correct&quot;.<p>Which is to say, he&#x27;s calling out the latest popular totalitarianism.<p>Yes, I might be spoiling the punchline here but it seems like it needs to be underlined.

The structure of this essay sets up the paired positions as opposing ideologically, but it&#x27;s not clear that they are.<p>Take this for example:<p>&gt; It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a historic surge in nuclear energy, possibly with geoengineering to tide us over?<p>The Democratic Party has recently endorsed nuclear power:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;robertbryce&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;23&#x2F;after-48-years-democrats-endorse-nuclear-energy-in-platform&#x2F;?sh=f2297cd58293" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;robertbryce&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;23&#x2F;after-48...</a><p>Republicans seem on board as well:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehill.com&#x2F;policy&#x2F;energy-environment&#x2F;543267-house-republicans-pitch-nuclear-natural-gas-as-cleaner-energy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thehill.com&#x2F;policy&#x2F;energy-environment&#x2F;543267-house-r...</a><p>Others appear to be tautologies:<p>&gt; … who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops?<p>I have yet to see anyone promote GMO as a way to make better tasting crops. It&#x27;s always painted as a way to better feed the planet and reduce starvation. To support GMO seems to be an affirmation for ending world hunger. At least it would be entertaining to see someone try to argue that that&#x27;s not the best use of GMO.<p>Still other opinions are often heard, but when push comes to shove, actively opposed. For example:<p>&gt; … who supports free speech, to the point of proudly tolerating views that really, actually disgust them at their workplace, university, or online forum?<p>Yet:<p>&gt; … who believes in patriotism, the police, the rule of law, to the extent that they don’t understand why all the enablers of the January 6 insurrection, up to and including Trump, aren’t currently facing trial for treason against the United States?<p>Those who participated didn&#x27;t think of themselves as traitors. They thought of themselves as doing their patriotic duty, exercising their Constitutional rights of speech and assembly, and their moral right of action against tyranny. They may be delusional, but that&#x27;s how they describe themselves. Not coincidentally unlike the lawbreakers who interfered with nuclear weapons research, animal cruelty practices, racial discrimination, the British occupation, the Vietnam War, and abortion clinics.

To me he&#x27;s someone who has taken the trouble to think things through, and even if he said something that was profoundly offensive to me, I&#x27;d just be more interested in why he thought it.<p>It has clicked recently that I now understand how urgent it is to develop tech to find and inhabit other planets, as the moment we got a picture of our own planet from the moon, whether anyone acknowledged it or not, life and culture here has became a finite zero sum game, and I now doubt that&#x27;s something we can roll back. This isn&#x27;t even a negative view, it&#x27;s just that the tech that enables it will also enable a new source of hope that I think people can orient toward again.

&gt; ... who feels little attraction to the truth-claims of the world’s ancient religions, except insofar as they sometimes serve as prophylactics against newer and now even more virulent religions?<p>The intuition behind this is appealing (that a lack of religion invites a void that is filled by crazier things), but the current evidence seems to indicate that this is incorrect. Mainstream religions aren&#x27;t a &quot;prophylactic&quot; against newer craziness like QAnon.<p>In fact, the reality is the opposite. QAnon is most effective in converting people who already believe in Christianity.<p>You could also look at partisanship. Countries with less religion aren&#x27;t really any more partisan.

This comes across as an academics utopia, especially the last bit.<p>This also made me realize I haven&#x27;t thought about utopia in a long time.

What I found remarkable about the list was the ones that were superficially appealing but fundamentally disastrous, in a way that takes more than a paragraph to explain why.<p>E.g., right at the top: Geoengineering, really? Maybe he does not know the expression &quot;termination shock&quot;. Or &quot;ocean acidification&quot;. And, does the author know nothing of the history of nukes in the US? Nuke projects nowadays produce $10B+ ratepayer debt and, ten years on, zero watts.

I don&#x27;t know how best to speak to these rationalist types. Here&#x27;s a new attempt;<p>There is a ---Dawkins----Gould--- political spectrum, and Scott and his people are in the Dawkins camp, in terms of the content certainly, but also in terms of the personal relationships, if one were to make a big over time social graph.<p>The Gould camp however I think is the better &#x2F; more correct &#x2F; more insightful one.

When your values lead you to [almost castrate yourself](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scottaaronson.blog&#x2F;?p=2119" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scottaaronson.blog&#x2F;?p=2119</a>) and then publicly flagellate yourself further when your supposed political allies dogpile you, maybe you should rethink them.

&gt;who feels a personal distaste for free markets, for the triviality of what they so often elevate and the depth of what they let languish, but tolerates them because they’ve done more than anything else to lift up the world’s poor?<p>I feel like this is a bad argument. There&#x27;s never been an instance of non-free markets that was given any sort of room to grow healthily without substantial outside powers trying to force it to fail. Free markets being the standard economic model doesn&#x27;t deserve any praise. It&#x27;s impossible to know without more examples of non-free markets whether we&#x27;re making progress because of it or despite it.