Of ideologies and mating strategies

Liberalism is the ideology of the alpha male. He supports sexual freedom for women because given a choice, women mate with him.

Conservatism is the ideology of the beta male. In a conservative society with strict monogamy the largest number of males are guaranteed at least one mate.

Libertarianism is the ideology of the omega male. Nerdy high IQ males with low mating opportunities resent a system that does not confer higher status for higher intelligence.

logical consistency, moral justification, and any other rationalization for ideology will never be able to compete with sex.

A comment worth saving

I know this now, because in the last month or so, I’ve been struggling to identify my “top-level” master control circuits.

And you know what I found they were controlling for? Things like:

* Being “good”
* Doing the “right” thing
* “Fairness”

But don’t be fooled by how harmless or even “good” these phrases sound.

Because, when I broke them down to what subcontrollers they were actually driving, it turned out that “being good” meant “do things for others while ignoring your own needs and being resentful”!

“Fairness”, meanwhile, meant, “accumulate resentment and injustices in order to be able to justify being selfish later.”

And “doing the right thing” translated to, “don’t do anything unless you can come up with a logical justification for why it’s right, so you don’t get in trouble, and no-one can criticize you.”

Ouch!

Now, if you look at that list, nowhere on there is something like, “go after what I really want and make it happen”. Actually doing anything – in fact, even deciding to do anything! – was entirely conditional on being able to justify my decisions as “fair” or “right” or “good”, within some extremely twisted definitions of those words!
-PJ Eby

retreading

ideology is a narrative that allows you to do what you wanted to do anyway and defend it as morally justified.

morals arise from competing preferences and the need for cooperation. morality means things that will benefit you that you are reasonably certain you can convince other people that it will benefit them as well.

ideology is adaptive. therefore modern ideologies should be viewed with particular suspicion since they are more likely to prioritize convincing the average person than about accurately modeling reality.

the egalitarian ideology has seized our schools and media institutions. this deprives other ideologies of an avenue towards large scale adoption.

ideology will tend to reinforce bias rather than compensate for it. but this is a tricky path to walk. as orwell notes, in order for the apparatus of society to keep functioning 2+2 has to equal 4. truth is a slippery slope.

Priorities

Eliezer Yudkowsky is finally posting about something important over on Less Wrong: in-group out-group dynamics. Now I think that a lot of other areas of economics, sociology, cognitive psych etc are interesting. But if you want to talk about the things that have the largest impact on all these fields...it isn't esoteric thought experiments, it's group dynamics and status signaling. Everything else is practically superfluous. These two explanantions for behavior account for the vast majority of all human actions. Ever.

blog vacation

back from my blog ennui. I've been reading Being and Time by Heidegger and about 1/3rd of the way through I've only gleaned one insight:
There are several different things that people mean when they say that they care about something. Confusion between the ways is one of the aspects of a failure to communicate between people of differing ideologies. This arises due to conflicting preferences. Cooperation is a spectrum. It runs from sharing one goal to sharing all goals.

Statistical Correlations

watch this asshole cavort for 20 minutes if you can stomach it.
Dan Gilbert on Happiness

so your results are reproducible. the self-reported happiness of a bunch of morons does not concern me. Much of humanity shares similar biases (such as justifying a choice by ranking the choice we didn't make lower than we otherwise would if we had no investment in the choice as in the video)

This does NOT justify you dictating what will make me happy. I am not the average person.
The problem with happiness research is socialists will grab onto it as justification for central planning. "You don't really know what makes you happy, these decisions are best left to experts".

FUCK THAT SHIT

Welfare as a Return to Elitism

Elitists don't like the free market. In the words of Professor Ebeling:

The privileged classes of pre-capitalist society hated the market. The individual was freed from subservience and obedience to the nobility, the aristocracy, and the landed interests. And for these privileged groups, the market meant loss of cheap labor, the disappearance of "proper respect" from their inferiors, and the economic uncertainty of changing market-generated circumstances.

In a welfare economy the noble has simply been replaced with the legislator and the regulator. This is not a hereditary nobility in the strict sense but it does tend towards one. Who achieves the highest positions within the civil service and elected legislature? The people who went to the most progressive, most prestigious institutes of higher learning (who just happen to receive huge grants and tax exemptions from the government). If your parents went to an ivy league school you are more likely to go to one. The legislator and the regulator hate nothing more than things that fall entirely outside their scope. Better to bring as much as possible into the fold...you know...just to make sure everything is on the up and up. Areas of life formerly left to the private citizen are now subject to the examination, and approval process of a government employee. The economy now tends towards pleasing the regulator moreso than serving the market. See the FDA for the most egregious example.