✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Richard Ngo's Shortform — LessWrong

lesswrong.com · 1,425 words · saved by 1 readers

This year I’ve been thinking a lot about how the western world got so dysfunctional. Here’s my rough, best-guess story: 1. WW2 gave rise to a strong taboo against ethnonationalism. While perhaps at first this taboo was valuable, over time it also contaminated discussions of race differences, nationalism, and even IQ itself, to the point where even truths that seemed totally obvious to WW2-era people also became taboo. There’s no mechanism for subsequent generations to create common knowledge that certain facts are true but usefully taboo—they simply act as if these facts are false, which leads to arbitrarily bad policies (e.g. killing meritocratic hiring processes like IQ tests). 2. However, these taboos would gradually have lost power if the west (and the US in particular) had maintained impartial rule of law and constitutional freedoms. Instead, politicization of the bureaucracy and judiciary allowed them to spread. This was enabled by the “managerial revolution” under which govt bur

x Richard Ngo's Shortform — LessWrong Richard Ngo's Shortform by Richard_Ngo 26th Apr 2020 AI Alignment Forum 1 min read 791 6 Ω 3 This is a special post for quick takes by Richard_Ngo . Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page . Rendering 0 / 791 comments, sorted by top scoring (show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 1:56 PM Moderation Log More from Richard_Ngo View more Curated and popular this week 791 Comments 791 Mentioned in 207 The behavioral selection model for predicting AI motivations 178 Some co

Explore this link on the map →

related reading