"Politics Is The Mind-Killer" is Highly Hypocritical

And Why You Should Scoff At Any Group That Claims To Eschew Politics

If you’ve read any of my previous Hive Mind posts (all since taken down, but archived on archive.org) at older substacks of mine or on LessWrong, then you’ll note that there is a standard formula for what a “Hive Dance” looks like and how it works, and therefore, when you see these tell-tale signs, you’ll know you’re inside a Hive. [Edit 4/4/23: New Hive Posts Up].

Social media websites / apps are all Hives to some extent. Now what we’re trying to avoid is the sense that partaking in politics is, somehow, “wrong.” The more hive a hive is, the more people will hypocritically - and deceptively - turn their noses up at you for being “political” and claim that they are somehow more decent / virtuous than you are for being non-political (and ostensibly they show this by actively condemning people for acting politically / tribally).

LessWrong is a place that is ripe with a behavior I call “masking” - that is, when you embellish your writing style with inappropriate fluff, jargon, verbiage, or pepper it with things like “I’m really not sure, but…” in an overly “humble-signalling” type of way. Masking is typically enforced by others in the in-group, in that displays of it are visibly approved of by higher-status members and, most importantly, examples of non-masking are visibly disapproved of (which includes ignoring).

Hives - like LessWrong - will always loudly yell at you to leave if you don’t like it there. You can’t, actually, leave a hive, and furthermore, the hive requires you to criticize it constantly. It is good and healthy for the hive to be criticized. If your hive seems to punish hive-criticism, but not person-criticism, criticize it harder. LessWrong the website implements downvoting, and that by itself is really, really bad.

When I say that something is really bad, I don’t just mean that it had malicious intent behind it. I also mean that it was a stupid decision, that is guaranteed not to result in whatever it was intended to accomplish, good or bad. This is reserved for things that aren’t even “deceptively nice-looking camouflage.” It means it’s just gotta go, and there’s nothing that can be salvaged from it.

The Rationality-community has a ton of deceptively nice-looking camouflage, which means that - counter to the prevailing common wisdom of today - we can salvage quite a great deal from it, like Bayes’ Theorem.

I think that Eliezer Yudkowsky might - depending on where he decides to go from here - eventually proclaim that he highly regrets emphasizing Bayes’ Theorem so much. I predict this because I have a strong sense that Bayes’ Theorem (and especially the practice of trying to use it in common every-day tasks) actually reinforces Inner-Compassing-like thinking, and therefore, the opposite of Yudkowsky’s politics. It depends on what he considers more important. Right now, I am predicting that he will choose his politics, which means, he eventually will be seen angrily expressing regret over how much he chose to make it a centerpiece of his philosophy.

The longer we live without doom happening, the more the political aspects of Yudkowsky-thought will be brought to the fore. And therefore, the greater chance of Yudkowsky being seen as a hypocrite.

In a large hive, there will be loud, vocal proponents of anti-politics, who actively disapprove of anyone they see as promoting politics. Therefore, we can construct two political parties: The political, and the anti-political. The political just need to have realized that they are always going to be disapproved of, anyway, even though they are the ones who least engage in petty-politics. So, we the political then just stand up and proudly declare that we have willfully, knowingly chosen to pursue politics - yes politics, the social kind, the one with status and stuff - and we will even allow you to point at us and express moral outrage at the sheer effrontery of it all. For reasons that I do actually believe to be historically accurate (and will become more obvious over time), I declare the political to be called the Conservatives.

The anti-political may eventually decide to call themselves something. Which would also be ironic. But not the kind of irony that you don’t let someone get away with. I’ve always seen left-wing parties (in systems that have two major ones) essentially having an ideology that treats itself as “just pure facts” or as “Science itself” and being dogmatically not open to debate nor even considering opposing viewpoints as worthy of consideration.

A big difference from the norm in this political party is that we now - due to things like the Inner-Compass theorem - consider our politics to be as high up on the status-ladder of ideas as Science itself, too.

So the anti-political now have to face a “shoggoth” they’ve never had to face before: An opposing political faction that considers itself just as high-minded as the anti-political, as well as has their own social-scientific theory that supports them, and even explains why the anti-political exist.

If you have another group of people who also claim to be rationalists, also claim to be Bayesians, but claim that politics isn’t the mind killer, and that they have the body of work to argue for that too (as high up on the status ladder as mathematical proof, they say!), what are you to do then?

Well I would for one thing, congratulate yourself for getting your movement that socially-visible. But not too much, because we still consider you “wrong enough”, that is, you appear to be committed to fighting for your wrong ideas at the expense of your right ones.

You have an extremely difficult challenge ahead: You have to be politically condescending at anything that criticizes the LessWrong Hive, criticizes Yudkowsky, or criticizes aspects of his thought that disfavor politics, or disfavor Inner-Compassing. You have no choice but to be politically condescending and rude towards it, which will make you look bad. Arguing with it directly will be deemed too high-risk, and so it will get downvoted and-or censored from your public discussions. But I just don’t see how you believe that strategy isn’t stupid.

Therefore, because I predict that is what you will tend to do, I will make that part of my strategy. Either you let my discussion in, or you look bad. If you’re afraid of discussing it, that means you are pro-censorship, as well as implicitly makes it look like my ideas are controversial-because-of-how-maverick they are.

I will get my way, in the end, I think. I’m pretty confident in this, because I have the strategy, the ideological / philosophical foundations, and the proof that “a bunch of people are wrong, it will be a lot better with those people removed / status-lowered, and I have the moral-highground to do so.” You won’t be able to make me look selfish, because I explicitly do not advocate exclusionary or negationary behavior.

"Politics Is The Mind-Killer" is highly hypocritical. Hypocrisy leads towards cynicism. Cynicism leads towards you being oppositional for opposition’s sake. I will refrain from stating the ultimate irony, here, because it’s a bit too cliché.