[pdonis]

> Scott specifically though, has an established history of thinking through arguments that I find much better than most

He has an established history of writing down detailed articles about arguments, yes.

Unfortunately, a significant number of his articles contain schoolboy errors that anyone who wants to claim they are better at thinking through arguments than the average person should never have made.

I'll mention just one such article:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/01/empireforest-fire/

Scott says:

"...democratic nations, like the US and UK, which have gone three hundred or so years with only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored violence (and those traces, like the camps for the Japanese during WWII, have not come from the Left)."

The two obvious, egregious schoolboy errors here are:

(1) Don't wars count as "state-sponsored violence"? The US and UK certainly haven't gone three hundred years without wars. And some of those wars were civil wars, so even the lame excuse of "well, wars are violence, but not against the state's own people" doesn't count.

And even if we let that pass, what about the US's treatment of Native Americans? What about the UK's treatment of Ireland? And so on. To say that the US and UK have gone three hundred years with "only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored violence" shows a level of historical ignorance that is just staggering.

(2) But even if we let all of the above pass: doesn't Scott know that the President who interned Japanese citizens in WWII was from the Left?

[naasking]

> To say that the US and UK have gone three hundred years with "only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored violence" shows a level of historical ignorance that is just staggering

Scott is not ignorant, therefore it seems more plausible that you should reconsider whether Scott is making the point that you think he's making.

[digital-cygnet]

While Scott does make errors, I've found he works hard to avoid making them and forthright when he does (e.g., not everyone has a Mistakes page in the main navigation bar of their site[1])

What you're missing in your example is that, in context, the state-sponsored violence he's talking about is "against one's own people" (e.g., he also refers to it as a "reign of terror" a few times, like those of Robespierre, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc). I think there's a difference of kind between say the 19th century US's (awful) treatment of Native Americans (who were explicitly treated as "other" very consistently) and Stalin's (also awful) dekulakization (in which one-time typical members of Russian society were declared enemies of the state and purged).

So his point isn't that the UK and US have done no wrong, it's that despite having democratic systems for centuries that haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mistakes

[pdonis]

Btw, I noticed another egregious error: "France, where a reign of terror five years after the Bourbon monarchy is clearly contrasted with a hundred fifty terror-free years since it became democratic in 1870." Um, what? France is now on its Fifth republic, and the transitions haven't always been peaceful. Not to mention Indochina, Algeria (France's own leaders explicitly described what the French did to subdue Algeria as "terrorism"), etc. And many of the people who were terrorized in Algeria were French citizens.

[pdonis]

> he works hard to avoid making them

He does so when he sees that there is a potential mistake to be made, yes. But he doesn't seem to me to work hard at all at questioning things that he appears to think are too obvious to need questioning. And yet those things are where he makes the egregious mistakes.

> forthright when he does

Yes, I agree with this: once he recognizes he's made a mistake, he's much better than most at acknowledging it.

> What you're missing in your example is that, in context, the state-sponsored violence he's talking about is "against one's own people"

I don't buy the hairsplitting distinction he's making there, but even leaving that aside, I already addressed this point in my post. The UK fought a war against its own people in the American Revolution. The US fought a war against its own people in the US Civil War. The US fought against Native Americans. The UK fought against Ireland. And so on.

> I think there's a difference of kind

I think this is even more of a hairsplitting distinction that I don't buy. But again, leaving that aside, if Scott wanted to make an argument for such a difference in kind, he should have made one. Just taking it as so obvious as not to need any argument is not justified. And the need for making such an argument doesn't even seem to be on Scott's radar. I find that either astoundingly obtuse, or astoundingly disingenuous.

[mistermann]

I agree with you, and I think this is a recurring flaw you'll see in Rationalist communities: they love smart, Rationalist, Just So stories ("X can be explained by Y", never mind whether that explanation is actually correct...and best not mention it if you want to be an upstanding member of the community).

[pdonis]

> haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have

There's another point about this as well. Scott claims in the article that his "alternate model" makes better predictions than his "Reactionary model" (which is something of a straw man, but let that pass). But if we look at the cases he cites, here is how they actually stack up against the models:

French Revolution: Ended up with Napoleon taking power as Emperor, i.e., a monarch. Sure looks more like the Reactionary model to me.

Russian Revolution: While the USSR did end up falling apart of its own weight after decades of terror gradually morphing into somewhat less terrifying bureaucracy, what has happened to Russia since looks more like "repressive monarchy" than "government mellows out and does pretty okay".

Chinese Revolution: I suppose that the fact that the Chinese Communist Party has adopted some features of capitalism in order to allow the country to actually have some economic growth might count as a sort of "mellowing out", but it would still be very hard to make a case that China's government is closer to "doing pretty okay" than it is to "strong repressive monarchy".

In other words, even if we agree that the US and UK have reached Step 6 of Scott's "alternate model", historically, those countries (and other countries in the British Commonwealth, like Canada and Australia) are the only cases where that has happened. Historically, reigns of terror brought on by repressive regimes have in all other cases led to new repressive regimes.

(Btw, this is not to say that the Reactionary model's claim that the new monarchy in its last step is an improvement, is correct. The actual historical facts are that the new repressive regimes are often worse than the old ones.)

[pdonis]

> haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have

I'll comment on this separately because it goes deeper into the central claim of the arrticle. If you're going to make this claim, you need to ask whether the UK and US have actually avoided such things, or merely made sure they happened in other countries instead.

The US under Woodrow Wilson enabled the Soviet Union to exist by failing to support the Kerensky government, even though the US had troops in the area, and by discouraging the other allied powers from helping on the grounds that everybody was already too exhausted after four years of war. (Not to mention that Communism wasn't of Russian origin; it was exported to Russia by American and British intellectuals, such as Jack Reed. And one of their reasons for doing so was that Communism was supposed to be more "democratic".)

The US, UK, and France created the conditions for the Nazis to take power in Germany by imposing such harsh terms in the Treaty of Versailles (terms which were nothing like what the Armistice had implicitly promised).

The UK under Chamberlain, along with France, enabled Hitler's Germany to conquer Eastern Europe by pursuing a policy of appeasement.

The US under FDR allowed Stalin to take over all of Eastern Europe at the end of WW II (which, btw, made WW II a failure in Europe since the stated objective was to free Eastern Europe from tyranny, and Stalin by any measure was a worse tyrant than Hitler) because FDR wanted to suck up to Stalin and be his friend. (For example, read the historical book Stalin's War.) And even before that, FDR and his administration (and the press, such as the New York Times) systematically lied to the American people about the true nature of Stalin's regime, which was well known to the US government (and to reporters who were there) in the 1930s. If the American people had known what was actually happening in Stalin's Russia, they would never have agreed to having the USSR as an ally in WW II or allowing the USSR to take over Eastern Europe.

The US allowed Mao and his Communists to take over China by withdrawing support for Chiang Kai-Shek. If the US had supported Chiang, the entire country of China would have a government that's basically the government Taiwan has now (since Taiwan is where Chiang and his supporters went when Mao drove them out of China). Imagine how much better the geopolitical situation would be if that were the case.

Sure, if you want to make hairsplitting distinctions, none of these counted as "state-sponsored violence" against the people of the US or UK. But Scott's central claim in the article is that it is repressive monarchy, not "democracy", that causes reigns of terror. Before making such a claim and exonerating "democracies", one should at least examine the possibility that the "democracies" actually enabled the reigns of terror. And when you examine that claim historically, you find that, yep, "democracies" were doing exactly that.

[wharvle]

I think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to bring in to the direct topic of this piece. Re-read the pieces Scott is responding to if you want to see what I mean—the topic of this piece is fairly narrow, and most of what you're proposing to bring in is non-sequitur without some pretty wild connective tissue added, which connective tissue I doubt you'd want to try to defend. Stuff like "leftward-trending liberal democracies tend to become more and more permissive of egregious domestic political violence in other countries over time" would be the minimum to make any kind of even oblique sort-of connection to the actual topic of the piece, and... surely not, right?

[pdonis]

> I think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to bring in to the direct topic of this piece.

I disagree. See the other comment I just posted upthread about what happens when you compare the actual historical events in the cases Scott cites to the two models he describes, the "Reactionary model" and his "alternate model". The fact that the particular "liberal democracies" Scott references, the US and UK, do their "state-sponsored violence" by proxy instead of directly is not a coincidence: it is what allows those countries to claim that they are "liberal democracies" and don't have "state-sponsored violence" for the benefit of their voters, while blaming those "repressive regimes" for all of the mayhem in the world--when in fact the "liberal democracies" themselves are just as much to blame.

> Stuff like "leftward-trending liberal democracies tend to become more and more permissive of egregious domestic political violence in other countries over time"

While I think this is actually true (the US has caused far more mischief recently in the name of "spreading democracy" than it did in the 19th century, for example), it is not the argument I was making. The argument I was making is simpler than that, and is summarized above.

[wharvle]

But the argument you'd prefer to focus on isn't connected to the topic in Scott's piece, because Scott's writing to address specific claims with predictive power (as in: we can "replay the tapes" of history and see if what we'd expect to see, if they're true, is evident—and they're strong and confident claims, so we'd expect it to be pretty clear if it is) in a couple other pieces, to which pieces the argument you want to make also isn't connected.

[pdonis]

> Scott's writing to address specific claims with predictive power

Which his model does not have. That was the point of the post of mine upthread that I referred you to. The actual cases he cites (French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution) are a much better match for the Reactionary model (though with a caveat that I gave in my upthread post--the final "monarchy" step in these cases, e.g., Putin's Russia, is not an improvement) than they are for his alternate model. (His justification for his alternate model matching the Russian Revolution better is that Khruschev and Gorbachev were "more mellow" than Stalin, but step 6 of his alternate model says that the government "does pretty okay", which was not true of Gorbachev's USSR any more than it was of Khruschev's--not to mention Putin's Russia, as I said above.)

So why is Scott so confident of his alternate model, if it actually is worse, on net, than the Reactionary model he criticizes? Because he fails to realize that the US and UK (and other countries in the British Commonwealth like Canada and Australia) are not the historical norm, but are historical outliers. They have managed to settle into "liberal democracy" which might be "mellow" and doing "pretty okay" at home only by exporting all of the "state-sponsored violence" elsewhere, where their voters can ignore it and their politicians can pretend it's the fault of those other "repressive regimes".

In other words, the egregious historical errors Scott makes in this article, which was what I originally called out in my first post in this discussion, are closely connected to the main point of his article: he is only able to even entertain that point, much less write an entire article about it, because of the false historical narrative he has.

Here's another example, where Scott restates the article's central claim (from which its title is taken):

"A monarch who voluntarily relaxes their power before being forced to do so by the situation – like the constitutional monarchs of Europe or the King of Thailand – is performing a controlled burn, destroying the overgrowth that would otherwise cause a fire and skipping directly from 1 to 6."

Tell that to Tsar Nicholas II, who voluntarily abdicated when his high officials convinced him that it was for the good of the country. Russia not only did not "skip directly" from Scott's 1 to 6, it never reached his 6 at all (see above). Since this was one of the examples Scott explicitly chose, you'd expect him to at least check to see whether the actual historical facts matched his narrative.

[helicalmix]

Have you considered that it's possible that both you and Scott are particular good at reasoning, and it's everyone else that is much worse at this stuff?

You're pointing out a bunch of errors, but it's not clear to me that they're schoolboy errors (i.e. errors a schoolboy wouldn't have made). I would also venture to guess that the average educated person would make much more egregious mistakes.

[pdonis]

> it's not clear to me that they're schoolboy errors (i.e. errors a schoolboy wouldn't have made)

If this is the case, IMO it's more a reflection of the awfulness of the schooling in our time than anything else. No schoolboy in the US of a century ago would have made such egregious historical errors, because they would have been taught some actual history instead of what students in the US today get taught.

[helicalmix]

My tongue in cheek response is that you are correct, because a century ago, WWII didn't happen yet.

Can you provably demonstrate that education quality was better a century ago? I'm not outright trying to refute you, so much as I have a belief that people tend to overstate the "good old days", so I usually prefer more concrete data points.

[hindsightbias]

> the Left?

You mean the GOPs modern definition of a leftist, or the vast majority of the times definition of a leftist?

https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Norman_Thomas/

[pdonis]

The Democratic party in the US, at least since Woodrow Wilson, has been on the Left. I don't think that is a matter of any serious dispute.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

It's a matter of very serious dispute if you were to read people who are actually on the left, or who live outside the USA.

The stated policies of the US Democratic Party barely correspond to those of leftist parties worldwide. Their actual policies when in power are even further from those of leftist parties worldwide.

So .. are they left of the US Republican Party? No question. Are they "on the left" in any broader sense? That depends very much on your conception of the nature and scope of the political space. For most people in most parts of the world, the US Democratic Party is a completely centrist party that would never be termed "leftist".

[pdonis]

> It's a matter of very serious dispute if you were to read people who are actually on the left, or who live outside the USA.

Ah, that old standby "No True Scotsman". Sorry, not buying it.

> The stated policies of the US Democratic Party barely correspond to those of leftist parties worldwide.

No political party's stated policies can be taken seriously, since political parties, on immense amounts of historical evidence, will lie about their actual goals as much as they need to to get elected and stay elected.

For example, the Democratic platform that FDR ran on in 1932 did not look very leftist, but the actual things he did once in office were most definitely leftist, and bore no resemblance whatever to the platform he ran on. Did any Democrats object? Hollow laugh.

If you want to argue that the US Democratic party is not as far left as, for example, leftist parties in the UK or Europe, yes, that's probably true. But saying that that means the US Democratic party is not leftist is like saying that the Atlantic Ocean is not an ocean because it doesn't have quite as much water in it as the Pacific.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

No, it's like saying that Walden Pond is not an ocean because it doesn't have quite as much water in it as the Atlantic or Pacific.

[pdonis]

If you seriously think that the US Democratic party, as compared to leftist parties in Europe, is closer to Walden Pond than the Atlantic Ocean in terms of leftism, then you and I clearly live on different planets and we don't have enough common ground to have a useful discussion.

In fact, historically speaking, even the US Republican party today is closer to the Atlantic Ocean than Walden Pond in terms of leftism. What today's US Republicans consider "conservative" would have been considered so far left as to be radical to the US Republicans of the late 19th century.

[dragonwriter]

A party that overtly supports capitalism is not a leftist party.

Its at most (in the direction of leftism) center to center-right.

[pdonis]

> A party that overtly supports capitalism is not a leftist party.

I'm not sure how the US Democratic party "overtly supports capitalism", since it is the party of government micromanagement of every aspect of business.

I'm also not sure how leftism is inconsistent with support of capitalism, unless the latter is taken to imply a complete rejection of socialism. Which is certainly not a good description of the US Democratic party. To the extent it does "support" capitalism, it is only as one aspect of a society which the party wants to organize along mostly socialist lines.

[hindsightbias]

Americans have little knowledge of their history, can't imagine an era when there were actual socialists, marxists, communists, fascists and literal nazis in uniforms holding conventions in NYC.

All choices must be binary.