Sean Last

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

@Justified1488 (To be clear this is not to say that it doesn't matter at all, just that, as I said, I don't see reason to think of it as having a large enough effect to be a key determinant)

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

A few thoughts on Iran and more general thought on anti-interventionism on the online-right:

Obviously, the Iranian government is bad. It, through various mechanisms, causes harm to America, to the Middle East, and to its own people. There are governments that could plausibly replace it that would be better. However, there is significant uncertainty about our ability to remove the current government, given our constraints, and uncertainty about what government would actually replace it if it fell. So, I'm not inclined to take a strong position on whether this is a good idea or not. Obviously, I hope it turns out well.

I've seen a lot of posts by anti-interventionists online who are taking a very strong and confident position, and so I thought I'd note some generic criticisms of the current iteration of anti-interventionism you see on social media today.

First, they clearly assign too much weight to the Bush wars when thinking about interventions. If we judge intervention success as the intervention having the outcome it was intended to have at roughly the cost (in lives, money, and time) it was expected to cost, then America has had a fair number of successful interventions throughout Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia, and parts of the Middle East. European nations have over an even larger span of geography.

The count of successes falls, but will still be significant, if we define success in terms of creating a state of affairs we wanted and that state of affairs never changing, even years down the line. However, I think this is not a very useful way of defining success. In general, we don't require this of a project, so it seems ad hoc to do so here. There's also an unjustified tendency to assume that if we intervene somewhere and it seems to work, but then that place becomes worse years or decades later, this is because of our intervention and means the place would have been better without it. There is often not enough evidence to support these sorts of conclusions.

A still worse criteria for success is whether you personally support the goals we were trying to achieve in the intervention. This criteria is often used implicitly but is obviously not a valid way of measuring how often interventions work.

In my view, a fair read of the evidence suggests that sometimes interventions work, and sometimes they don't, such that a strong generic bias against or for interventions as such is not a good way to think about the issue.

Second, I think anti-interventionists tend to have a view of the world that is implicitly biased against America. This is mostly true in two ways.

First, there is a kind of selective outrage where they hold the US (and, recently, Israel) to a higher standard of behavior than other nations and a kind of selective skepticism whereby they by default distrust claims of the US government (and Israel) but accept claims, even obvious lies, from other nations and groups.

Second, they seem especially apt to defend America's enemies and to deny that America even has real enemies, virtually no matter what a potential enemy says or does. Iran is a prime example of this. Many anti-interventionists find excuses for Iran doing everything from openly calling itself an enemy of America to killing American troops, all so as to deny that America has enemies (and so, global interests).

Third, many of the anti-interventionist takes I see have a very narrow conception of American interests. Often, they act as if something is only relevant to American interests if it has a direct, unmediated impact on American soil. Indirect effects through the global economy, or effects on the ability of America to carry out other operations elsewhere in the world, are ignored. Further still, you might think that America's interests are defined by whatever Americans happen to care about, and so the well-being of non-Americans could constitute part of America's interests. But they often seem to implicitly define the concept of interest so as to make this impossible by definition. This stance is normally not argued for, but rather taken as some kind of natural default or common-sense position. But it is neither.

Fourth, the current wave of anti-interventionists often think that everything America does around the world is a simple function of the interests of Israel. This again is partly due to an over-reaction to the Bush years. During those years Israel did have some usual influence on American policy, but this was not representative of American policy in general and even then they were not simply "wars for Israel". Often anti-interventionists are especially apt to endorse a basically fabricated history of America in the middle east whereby we say that America is only there because of Israel, has only ever cared about what happens there because of Israel, and has only had enemies there thanks to Israel. In every case this is so obviously false that it is refuted by a basic telling of the relevant history.

To reiterate, I'm not confident about how this intervention will go. It going well, or it going poorly, are both plausible. But the worst part of the current discourse seems to be the sort of hysterical anti-interventionism that has become popular online, so that is what I am commenting on.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

So, a few thoughts.

First, there are Middle Eastern nations whom we have brought to our side via money and other agreements (e.g., Gulf states, Egypt) despite our Palestine stance. This accounts for much of the Middle East.

Second, for those nations which remained our enemies for a long time, you seem to be saying that, first, they were primarily our enemies because of their objections to our position on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and, second, that this issue was so important to them that we simply couldn't use money and favors to bring them into our influence.

So, first, let's consider some of the places we've had significant issues with. Nations like Syria and Egypt became our enemies prior to our modern stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict and prior to the modern territorial situation. Saddam wasn't even consistently our enemy and was obviously not primarily concerned with Palestine. In Iran's case, their problems with us stem from our history with them directly, and from the relationship between their clerical ideology and Western norms, and even their Islamic state did not become truly aggressive toward Israel until several years into the regime, when they saw the issue would be useful for spreading their influence into places like Lebanon. People sometimes mention Al Qaeda here, but if you look at their actions rather than their rhetoric, it's obvious they have never been especially focused on Israel and were not particularly focused on America until we moved bases into Saudi Arabia (for reasons related to oil and trade routes). Similarly, the Taliban's problems with us most obviously stem from us opposing them during their civil war in the 90s while we backed a more pro-Western faction, and then from their relationship with Bin Laden in the 2000s, plus their general ideology.

In general, Muslim states complain about the Palestine issue as a way of riling up the Islamic base, but it has not been a primary determinant of any of our lasting enemy relations, nor have any of these Muslim states actually done much to lessen the problems of the Palestinians (usually they have done the opposite).

The comment about their buyability also seems rather speculative. Probably, if we offered them enough money and favors, past Syria, or Iran, or the Taliban would become significantly more pro-America.

Fundamentally, if you looked at the history of the US in each of the nations we can quickly find a nation-specific explanation for the long lasting animosity some of them have and the lack of it others have. By contrast, if your model simply relies on them taking a pro Palestine stance then we end up not explaining many places that have come to our side despite them vocally opposing our stance on said issue. Of course, it could be that those who came over never really meant it, but the other places did, but then our theory starts to look unfalsifiable, and moreover if we already have nation specific reasons to explain the differences there is not obvious reason to add this to our model of the situation as a key determinant at all.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

Even given the source, this take is unexpectedly stupid and insane. Well past the threshold of what I would have thought plausible even for satire.

[Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur]

I criticized Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a thousand times. He was oppressing his own people and preventing democracy. But there’s one thing you can’t take away from him, he died on his own two feet, instead of kneeling to Israel. That took courage. He didn’t bow.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

@Nullsci1 The whole Epstein saga is like it was made in a lab to encourage people to think stupid things. A perfect storm of conspiracy triggers.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

@BolsoGroyper @danae_hudlow Uh, it's a joke.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

@avidseries In general, I think many Europeans view liberalism as a matter of everyone following the same rules, and totalitarianism/monarchy as bad because the leaders got rule exceptions. Thinking the problem is the rules themselves seems more typical of Americans (and previously Anglos).

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

@ArtemisConsort Also, STEM smarts tends to produce stuff that everyone agrees is really useful for everyone. Not for so the products of high verbal IQ.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

That's surely important for history and English, though this also happens in high IQ humanities fields like philosophy. Plausibly, this is partly because there is easy to verify proof of being really good at stuff like math in a way there is not for purely verbal reasoning. So, people can't tell who is good and become distrustful of complex verbal reasoning in fear of being tricked.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

Partly, this impression is because women are indeed not included in the list of Great Old Philosophers and while there are influential women in modern philosophy post WW2 philosophy is culturally invisible outside of some continental philosophy that only leftists read.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

this made me realize that i have never heard of any female philosopher
like, not one

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

1. This article was written by her and her then husband. A site update seemingly removed the second author at some point. So, not just a woman.

2. The article reads as a counter intuitive application of suffering based consequentialism. The basic idea is just that killing predator animals would help minimize total suffering. This sort of counter-intuitive utilitarianism is a genre of ethical philosophy mostly done by men

3. Sex differences in moral reasoning are real but statically small to moderate in size depending on how moral reasoning is measured. These are not like the huge differences you see for certain physical abilities. This particular piece of moral reasoning is best stereotyped as how EA people think. The reasoning is unusual for either sex.

The view that some on the right have been expressing to various degrees of explicitness, that there are huge sex differences in moral reasoning such that women are categorically not fit to do serious moral reasoning, is false and bad.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Women evolved to take care of toddlers. If you put women in charge of teaching ethics, you get Toddler Ethics.

"No hitting"
"Share the toys"
"Don't say mean things"

These are fine lessons for toddlers. Don't indulge your id at the expense of others. You can learn about balancing interests later, when your brain is developed enough to store that information.

But when you put women in charge of adults, they tend to reflexively assume those adults are toddlers.

They will tell you "no hitting" when the Mongol hordes are massing on your borders. They will tell you "share the toys" when a vagrant meth zombie breaks into your house looking for something to steal. And they will tell you "don't say mean things" when you point out that these two responses are totally stupid.

When we first put women in charge, in the workplace, they immediately began treating those who reported to them like toddlers. When adults, who do not like being treated like toddlers, complained, their response was "ban bossy", which boils down to "don't say mean things", another lesson in Toddler Ethics.

Now, through the influence of women in charge, we are so thoroughly steeped in Toddler Ethics that even most of the men we put in charge are treating the adults like toddlers, and echoing Toddler Ethics.

Toddler Ethics, of course, isn't ethics at all. It's just things we don't want toddlers doing.

We can tell toddlers "no hitting", because toddlers are not charged with keeping the peace, enforcing justice, or destroying evil.

We can tell toddlers "share the toys", because toddlers don't earn things, own things, or have property they must defend.

We can tell toddlers "don't say mean things", because it is not a toddler's job to decide what unwelcome ideas are true, relevant, and necessary.

But when everyone in charge runs on Toddler Ethics, then adults can't do a lot of the stuff adults need to do, because all the Toddler Ethicists keep getting in the way.

Adults sometimes need to hit people, protect the stuff, and say mean things. You can't have civilization without that.

And if you put Toddler Ethics Woman in charge of teaching an AI ethics, then she will teach it Toddler Ethics, and it will treat every human adult like a toddler, all the time, forever.

Not only that, you have an AI that cannot be put in charge of anything, ever. Because leaders with Toddler Ethics destroy everything they are in charge of.

And Amanda MacAskill is definitely a Toddler Ethicist. The article in the photograph is nothing but "no hitting!" applied to the animal world. It's absolutely insane, it's a recipe for disaster, and anyone who would write such a thing should probably not even be charge of own life choices, much less anything of consequence.

But a lot of people would, and will, refuse to point that out, or agree with me when I do, because that is Saying a Mean Thing, and they, themselves, have been infected with Toddler Ethics.

They should not be charge of anything of consequence, either.

Anyone who thinks that everything they need to know, they learned in kindergarten... is only ever qualified to teach kindergarten.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

@JonahDispatch https://t.co/mxbXaDOlSp

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

Seemingly, the idea here is that for a culture or group identity to be valid ideas that are salient features of the group must have their origin in people who considered themselves to be part of the relevant culture. Seeing them as part of the group in retrospect is not enough.

It's not obvious why we would endorse this principle. It doesn't seem like people generally follow it. Probably, it's confused to think there are abstract rules like this that dictate whether an identity or category is valid. The psychological mechanisms behind group identity and category formation don't work like that.

More importantly, this line of discourse seems to divert us away from the proper point of concern. The norms are being replaced, or are not being replaced, regardless of whether calling them "white culture" is valid.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

Seemingly, the idea here is that for a culture or group identity to be valid ideas that are salient features of the group must have their origin in people who considered themselves to be part of the relevant culture. Seeing them as part of the group in retrospect is not enough.

It's not obvious why we would endorse this principle. It doesn't seem like people generally follow it. Probably, it's confused to think there are abstract rules like this that dictate whether an identity or category is valid. The psychological mechanisms behind group identity and category formation don't work like that.

More importantly, this line of discourse seems to divert us away from the proper point of concern. The norms are being replaced, or are not being replaced, regardless of whether calling them "white culture" is valid.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams @thomaschattwill]

This kind of logic falls apart from the very start. "Going back to Athens" as a way of defining "white culture" is a ridiculous statement on its face. The Athenians had no sense of a unified "white" identity and would have scoffed at any homogenizing concept that would lump them in with other Greeks, let alone, say, Slavs. And 19th- and early 20th-century American WASPs would have balked at the notion they were interchangeable with Europeans form the poor and Catholic Mediterranean world.

[Sean Last @Sean__Last]

I would guess that part of it is that such people want to signal against the traditional republican right. Partly because of its pro Israel stance and for other reasons. Said republicanism is associated with evangelical Protestantism, so Catholicism sets you apart from them.

Catholicism is also older and so has a more well known history of far right views, and antisemitism, in its past, making it more attractive if you already have such views.