#threadreader

To understand why a magazine dedicated to science is advocating for censoring free speech we need to talk about the German cat 🧵/1

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In the early 1930s there was a Jewish journalist living in Germany. The journalist loved cats so he had a subscription to a cat magazine. At first the magazine had articles about grooming your cat, toys for your cat, exactly what you would expect in a magazine dedicated to cats/2

But as the 30s went on the journalist started noticing articles appearing in the magazine about the German cat. How the nature of German cats were superior. How essential the loyalty of German cats were. Slowly some variant of this message made it into every article. /3

In the total state every aspect of life must relate back to the power of the regime. No academic discipline, piece of art, or hobby can simply exist for its own sake. It only exists to point back to the power of the regime. /4

In more formally totalitarian regimes we understand how this works. In the 3rd reich or USSR there was an official official organ of the state in charge of coordinating propaganda. Forcing every piece of media to point back to the state. /5

That doesn’t exist in our society so we need to explain why we can still observe the same phenomenon.

Our regime is governed by a decentralized network of consensus manufacturing institutions sometimes called the cathedral /6

Our ruling class do not have their orders handed down by one official propaganda office but they do all attend one essential institution during their formative years that shapes their morality, worldview, and personal networks

The university /7

The people who operate our key institutions and shape our culture all share the same moral system. They read the same things, attend the same parties, watch the same programs, and need to signal the same types of virtues to succeed in personal and private life /8

This is how a science publication can dedicate itself to denouncing free speech. The elites who run it share the same interests values and culture as other cultural elites and will become preoccupied with the same causes placing them above the stated purpose of the institution/9

Our ruling class has fully embraced the danger of information hazards. In fact, they have decided they are so dangerous that they now advise you to stop thinking all together. The WHO to advise that you wear a mask on your brain.

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An information hazard is a piece of true information that causes some harm to the person who learns it. Bostrom identifies six types hazardous information transfer: data, ideas, templates, signals, attention, and evocations. 

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In addition to the infohazard typology by information transfer, we can also classify infohazards by the type of risk they present: adversarial risks, market risk, error risk, psychological risk, information system risk, and development risk

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When we evolved the power to understand and propagate arbitrary information, we became vulnerable to information hazards. This was a novel danger; only humans can be hurt by true information. 

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We can build AIs today that are capable of thinking, but no one would accuse them of reasoning. This is not because they lack intelligence, but because they lack motivation.

An AI was programmed to seek novelty, and this made it capable of solving a maze, but it encountered the distinctly human problem of procrastinating in front of a TV.

A cynical man might suggest that our motivation mechanisms are also this crude

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In most cases, biasing hazard is less about things that pull you from the truth, and more about things that pull you from the center of social consensus. This is rule zero of power, which you've heard many times before.

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Infohazards are so pervasive and dangerous that we have evolved a defense against them in the form of strategic epistemic failure.

It's hard to believe things that go against social consensus, when you know they are signaling hazards. If someone presents you with an ironclad case for a socially dangerous idea, you will tend to doubt it or dismiss it. You might agree one moment, and forget the next.

For example, with Gellman amnesia you forget a disturbing observation the moment it leaves your field of attention. How many other jarring revelations don't stick in your head this way? You'll never know

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My favorite example is this study, which shows we don't believe scientific studies that come to negative conclusions about women. If this finding doesn't match your predilections, you will also surely dismiss it

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And why not? The truth is all persuasion is grounded, not in reason, but in strength. When a logical argument convinces you of something, it's not the mechanics of reason that does it, it's the display of power that reason presents.

The story of modern government is the attempt to abolish judgement. To outsource decisions to some set of "neutral" procedures which will self-execute, free from the corrupting influence of human interests. The paradox of people supporting "democracy" but opposing "politics"

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The problem with "government by smart contract" is the same problem as "government by science" or "government by expert." Humans have interests and those interests will creep into whatever system you devise. Power is existential. You never get rid of it, only obfuscate it.

Modern man is deeply uncomfortable with power and therefore eager to make power as nebulous as possible. In obscuring power, he ensures that power will never be held to account and therefore never have an incentive to do good. This is the nature of what we call "democracy."

This is the fundamental Nrx critique. Instead of trying in vain to escape from power, we should create a system that incentivizes it to do good. In a monarchy, for instance, the king's power is tied to the long-term wellbeing of his country. Nobody wants to rule over nothing.

You can never guarantee that a king /will/ be good. You can only guarantee that being good is in his self-interest. Abusive parents may exist, but parents in aggregate are the people with the greatest incentive to make good decisions for their children. So too with government.

Giving power to procedure does not eliminate the component of human judgement, it just decouples that judgement from any feedback mechanism that can keep it in check. It's been a year of Covid, now. Does anyone still believe that "Government by science" is in any way "objective"?

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This is not limited to "government by science." In law, conservatives thought they had achieved a theory of textual supremacy that would restrain progressive innovations. But the mechanical interpretation of a text still rests on human decisions about how to define words.

A redefinition or two later and Trump's first supreme court appointee rules that sex discrimination encompasses transgender people, a concept which didn't even exist at the time the law in question was enacted. "Text" means nothing without definitions. It does not read itself.

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Many people love to complain about gerrymandering. Instead of making congressional districts a matter of partisan political struggle, they say, we should hand the decisions over to a body of "experts" who can decide a "rational" way to allocate voters.

But there is no way to draw lines that optimize every value people claim to want. Districts in which minority votes are spread out and diluted are "racist." Limiting minority votes to one concentrated district is also "racist." How to answer the question is indeterminate.

Any number of different allocations can be rationally justified, and with vastly different political implications. In what way can such a process be neutral? It can't. Its inherently political nature can only be hidden and outsourced to highly interested but unaccountable actors.

All of these examples illustrate the problem with @RokoMijicUK's suggestion and the reason why Moldbug opposes it. Government by process is the very thing Nrx opposes. The problem is not Skynet getting the nuclear codes. The problem is making power unaccountable and indifferent

There is a civil war erupting at @SandiaLabs. Following my investigation, a dissident electrical engineer named Casey Peterson emailed all 16,000 employees denouncing critical race theory in the lab and hoping to spark a rebellion against Sandia executives. Here's the story.

On Tuesday, Peterson made a YouTube video "pushing back back on the narrative of modern systemic racism and white privilege." The video quickly hit 10,000 views within the labs and dozens of Sandia employees contacted Peterson to express support. Within hours, Sandia executives dispatched a counterintelligence team to lock Peterson out of the network and scrub his communications from internal servers—which, via the Streisand Effect, made the video even more viral and sparked widespread unrest against Sandia executives.

By the afternoon, executives were panicking about the brewing rebellion, placed Peterson on paid administrative leave, and established a "security review board" to "evaluate whether [his] actions have comprised or posed a threat to Sandia computing and security systems."

Peterson—who took a stand at grave risk to his career—says he is speaking on behalf of all of Sandia employees who are "scared to speak out" because of the lab's repressive culture. "If I get fired because of this," Peterson says, "the fight does not end, it only intensifies."

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Keep this in mind: Sandia Labs is a federally-funded research agency and designs America's nuclear weapons. Senator @HawleyMO and @SecBrouillette have launched an inspector general investigation, but Sandia executives have only accelerated their purge against conservatives.

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The virus of critical race theory is spreading to all of the national laboratories. In new documents from Argonne National Lab—which handles national security and supercomputing for the federal government—a whistleblower describes a relentless campaign of racial harassment.

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The laboratory's leadership believe that the lab must move away from a system of "meritocracy" and towards a system of "nonuniform treatment" that leads to "equity of outcome." They have abandoned competence as the key measure—and replaced it with critical race theory.

Eleven predictions, presented without judgment.

First, Biden defeats Trump in November in a historic landslide—think FDR over Hoover, Nixon over McGovern, or Regan over Carter and Mondale.

Second, and in addition to the Biden Blowout, Democrats take both houses of Congress by decisive margins.

Third, the media—transformed from a nominally neutral institution into an overtly partisan one—heralds the Biden Blowout a historic mandate to pursue a fundamental realignment of American government along "progressive" lines.

Fourth, by the end of Biden's first term, Democrats will have secured one-party rule for the foreseeable future. The means will be (1) consolidating control of government, (2) aggressive de-Trumpification, and (3) new "progressive" rulemaking.

Fifth, consolidation of government will be achieved by (a) ending all immigration restrictions—there will be millions and millions of new "Americans” by 2024; (b) gerrymandering, taking advantage of the 2020 Census delay; and (c) court-packing, to dilute Republican efforts to appoint conservative judges. There will be new Supreme Court seats, new circuit court seats, and new district judges; naturally, “diversity” will be the most important criterion for appointees.

Sixth, de-Trumpification will be understood as justifying any measures necessary to erase Trump's policy legacy (such as it is) and to ensure “nothing like this” (i.e., a nationalist government) “ever happens again.” You can count on:

(a) a rollback of any and all immigration restrictions and an immediate end to any border walls (or other controls); (b) a rollback of reforms to the campus sexual tribunals under Title IX; (c) stepped-up pressure to force organizations to adopt anti-bias training in all forms; and (d) stepped-up pressure on social media companies and web hosts to de-platform dissidents—by 2024, @Steve_Sailer, @bronzeagemantis, @Cernovich, and many others will be off Twitter and perhaps purged from the internet entirely.

Seventh, progressive “reforms” will emanate from every organ of the administrative state and from Congress. Most notably, you can be assured of a "Truth and Reconciliation" style commission to address the historical legacy of slavery. The result—reparations—is predetermined.

Eighth—and almost too obvious to say—is that reparations will be explained as a necessary but never sufficient step to reconciliation; indeed, you will be told that "nothing” can atone for the sin of slavery, so calls for expropriation will intensify, not diminish.

Ninth, Biden will begin at least one new major military conflict by 2024.

Tenth, any prediction that Biden's election will somehow moderate the zeal of today's "woke” vanguard will be proven wrong. Biden, manifestly suffering from dementia, will cede governance to cadres already steeped in @wesyang‘s Successor Ideology; things will get more oppressive.

Eleventh, the Biden Blowout indeed heralds a new, likely permanent ruling coalition: the marriage of monopoly capital (cc @WokeCapital) and their shock troops, the evangelical progressives (the “woke”), united against their common foe—the white middle class.

The dynamic to watch is whether the new ruling coalition can manage the system's fundamental contradiction: that, for all the hate directed at whites, it is the quiet competence of white people (and especially white men) that keeps the lights on, literally and figuratively.

Will the evangelical progressives prove too emboldened and zealous to manage? Too thorough a purge of white people from institutions and organizations will hasten their collapse.

But conversely, if not suppressed vigorously enough, white Americans may begin to think and act like the reviled minority they are rapidly becoming, paving the way for a figure even more formidable than Trump.

Thread: I was sent this and felt the need to thread it here on Twitter. It will be long. It is purported to be an anonymous, open letter from a professor at UK Berkeley in the History Department. The only comment I will make is to say it is worth every moment of the read.

C Berkeley History Professor's Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy

Dear profs X, Y, Z

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders.

Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

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A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email.

Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates' undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department's apparent desire to shoulder the 'white man's burden' and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it's fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. "Those are racist dogwhistles". "The model minority myth is white supremacist". "Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime", ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM's problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

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The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution.

Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders.

Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald's and Wal-Mart.

For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

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Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the 'systemic racism' there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

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Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach.

He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.

And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I'm ashamed of my department. I would say that I'm ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It's hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

It shouldn't affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating.

No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

Separation of church and state is not possible. It just creates a selection pressure for religions to shed the spandrels named "church" and "god." And this is precisely what we see today -- a state religion with no church and no god 

We cannot escape religion and myth. All states are always theocracies, the only question is: whose gods? whose myths? 

In America we tried to create an explicitly agnostic state, but our founding fathers did not understand that religion is a living organism, and that all living things, like liquids, eventually taker the shape of their container

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The humanist state was supposed to be a platform for diverse Christianities, a trick it pulls off by rooting the tenets of the faith and inserting some enlightenment values into the kernel 

It’s possible to run Christianity on an enlightenment stack, but it wasn't designed for it. Christianity was built to run on monarchy, because the relationship of a king to his subjects reflects the relationship of God to man 

The USA civics patch allows multiple Christianities to run in one polity, but it introduces some critical security vulnerabilities and ultimately denatures that which it was meant to preserve 

It was only a matter of time before a someone developed a fork of protestant Christianity that could cross the church-state barrier. We call that fork “progress,” and with a few tweaks to the phenotype it was able to capture the entire state 

Progress is built on the protocols of USA civics. It can’t pay homage to God, because God is explicitly excluded from the political formula. Instead it deifies abstract concepts, venerating liberty, equality, and “rights”.

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One way we can tell progressive politics is essentially religious is to note this curious formula: the personal is political. Progress is not content with the non-overlapping magisteria of church and state. It demands that all facets of life be subjected to its moral calculus

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It's absolutely the case that phones make you more civically and socially engaged, not less, which is why everyone is so stupidly credulous in social media, because when you feel like sauron is watching, the safest thing to do is hail mordor.

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In Chinese POW camps, they converted prisoners into agents for the CCP by enticing them to make public speeches praising the party, not with sticks but with carrots, and what you say publicly "of your own volition" becomes your own conviction.

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Smartphones catalyzed the great awokening because in the seething vortex of social media, people want to say things that make them feel important, and nothing makes them feel more important than regurgitating anthems about lifting up the oppressed 

If you can manufacture an oppressed denomination of people, then a majority of other people will make public noises about helping them, because doing so makes them feel large and powerful and gregarious. 

The Great Awokening is a play on "The Great Awakening", the name that we give to a series of Christian revivals across the last few centuries. And just as we see in The Current Year, revival has alway been a disease that primarily afflicts women 

Charles Grandison Finney in the Second Great Awakening: “Women composed the great majority of members in all churches. They dominated revivals and praying circles, pressing husbands, fathers, and sons towards conversion and facilitating every move of the evangelist.”

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Christian men could not formulate any principled objections to the revivals of the great awakenings and no one running the American civics stack can formulate a principled or compelling argument against the great awokening 

We live in a world where both the right and the left are significantly to the left of the civil rights act, and that means they are both very far to the left. Your republican leaders have never rolled back one jot or title of the accursed machinations of progress 

As long as you believe in the moral validity of “human rights”, as long as you think individual liberty is an end in itself, the most you can do is plead “too fast, too fast”

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There’s nothing women like more than correcting the speech of petulant children. If “what about the freedom to say mean things?” is your principled argument, you’re a twat. Not even God believes in freedom of speech 

In Stalinist Russia, there was only one way to criticize the state that didn’t get you gulagged: the 50 Stalins criticism: “yes, Stalin is good, but he doesn’t go far enough! If only we had 50 Stalins!”

Arguments from leftist overreach are just haggling over the # of Stalins

Theocracies do not tolerate heretics. With the merging of church and state, freedom of religion is a shambling corpse, and Christianity has the option of abandoning patriarchy and heteronormativity or being destroyed