This is a really good framing of this issue, and I can think of several other moral homophones that are causing the general center-left coalition in the USA to fall apart (and, perhaps, enable MAGA victories at the polls):
1. Being pro-gay-marriage because you don't think you have a right to give a shit (me) vs. being pro-gay-marriage because you actually think gay people are cooler than straight people (most LGBTQ+ activists today, it seems)
2. Being anti-gun-control because you want to keep your collection of old pre-WW2 guns you inherited from your grandfather (me) vs. being anti-gun-control because you think everybody should be toting an AR around in public all the time (some gun rights activists, who call people like me "Fudds")
3. Being a "Motte Feminist", i.e. "women are human beings too" vs. a "Bailey Feminist", i.e. "all of society needs to be torn down and reconstructed around female social interaction preferences, plus women need all kinds of special help to compete with men on a level playing field".
Going to have to pick the nit about Fudds. The term has some ambiguity because it's also used to refer to older gun guys with pre-internet ideas about guns and how they work (.22lr bounces around the skull, etc), but the way you're using it is generally reserved for quislings, guys that think they can appease the gun control people by throwing modern guns under the bus. The rancor isn't from a difference of motivation, it's from frustration that the Fudds don't seem to understand that this doesn't work, e.g. all of the commonwealth states (plus the gun control groups have tipped their hand already, your antiques are actually "medium caliber sniper rifles" and too dangerous for you to own).
I'm actually in the gun business BTW, so I'm extremely familiar with the contours of this particular conflict.
You're right, I was using it in the quisling sense, not the old guys spreading old misinformation sense.
I live in a deep blue area and nearly all my friends are blue tribe. I have to pretend to be "reasonable" about gun control when the subject comes up. As far as what I really believe goes, I think I should be able to own whatever kind of gun I can afford that somebody else is willing to sell. A single-shot .22 in the hands of somebody that wants to hurt people with it is more dangerous than an FN Minimi is in mine.
There is also the fact that, other than the issue of gun control, I'm pretty far apart politically from your average pro-gun maximalist.
Ahh, I'm in a similar position, but I've never hidden my beliefs, wouldn't really be an option with my profession and education. It used to be that I could be open and agree to disagree with my friends on things, but that really did vanish in the 2010s when everyone decided that everything had to be political and no deviance was to be tolerated. Guns are a funny issue in that they're not a top tier one for most people but they carry a lot of symbolism, and a handful of billionaires are weirdly invested in banning them and so there's a lot of money being thrown around despite the low political priority.
While reading the first half, I kept thinking "This would benefit greatly from a reading of Scott Alexander's 'Against Murderism'", but I see now that you already read his work.
Funny enough, your first few steps for avoiding this problem are encapsulated in a meme from a few years ago: a scene in a German comedy about a talking kangaroo living amongst humans. At one point, he gets a new roommate (or new apartment), and their first conversation is
"I'm an anarchist, and you?"
"I'm a Communist."
"We can be friends until the Revolution. After that, it gets... complicated."
Good article, it reminds me of a concept that Jonah Goldberg occasionally touches on that he calls "intellectual stolen bases", which would be all of the editing of definitions and other word games to associate high emotional valence terms with meanings they didn't historically carry.
I think the way we organise politics in most western countries (maybe others, but I'm less familiar with other countries) encourages moral homophonicity.
Our politics are based around parties, voting blocks, and coalitions; where members are incentivised to artificially correlate their voting on issues at risk of being kicked out of coalition.
Rather than risk a dispute, it's often much easier to gloss over fundamental moral differences, giving the public a false impression.
I recently saw this online with moral outrage towards "teal independents" (pro environment, pro capitalist, and usually wealthy) candidates pushing for tax breaks. This should've been entirely predictable given their platforms, and is representative of the preferences of their voters, but somehow took people by shock. Somehow people took "pro-windfarm" as being homophonic for "socialist".
I imagine a political system where heterodoxy is encouraged might help with this tendency.
Side note:
I suspect you might have glossed over a moral homophone between racial redistribution politicians.
As a relatively feverant socialist myself, I suspect there are two distinct groups there.
A) People who genuinely believe some race deserves benefits for past wrongs. For example, some people I met in London who thought black people had the right to "reverse colonise the UK" (Tottenham can be a strange place sometimes!).
B) Socialists who want to dampen capitalism's reward function, and see rampant racial inequity as an easy place to start.
We’re discussing your piece on r/theschism and I had a more critical response, so I thought I would put it here, to challenge you a bit. With some wording slightly altered, to address you directly:
This piece is interesting, but I found it overly simplistic about the specific instance you apply it to, and that makes me less inclined to apply the “moral homophone” concept more broadly. You’re an individualist libertarian, and therefore easily prefer the version of “racism” that treats individuals as individuals, irrelevant of group membership. Yet Martin Luther King’s Christian antiracism wasn’t nearly as passive and individualist as you describe “individualist antiracism” to be. King, in particular, wanted to address socioeconomic disparities by way of help that would be available regardless of race but which would nevertheless certainly have been important in redressing racially-related poverty. King is outside this binary. Does that make King a mere “moral homophone” who you ought to see as a threat?
I don’t agree with the recommendation to “be ruthless in scrutinising your disagreements.” Of course I don’t! But for such ruthless scrutiny of small disagreements, I’m essentially *woke*. We’ve got plenty of ruthless scrutiny of minor differences already, on my side of the fence. I’ll pass.
There’s a fundamental underlying assumption here that the only reason those other “moral homophones” got any power is because they sounded like *us*, the real true good people, whom everyone would really be more inclined to agree with, deep down, if only we just insist more finely on our own proper right thinking. So what we need to do is be more critical of everyone who disagrees with us, whereupon everyone will see that we are right and they are wrong. Again, I recognise this attitude and I don’t think it leads anywhere good.
In citing MLK's speech, my intent was not to convey that he was a strict individualist. I'm aware that many parts of his speech explicitly discussed reparationist/redistributive economic policies. One of his best lines of rhetoric is "Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds." I will correct this potentially misleading impression by adding a footnote.
I also do not consider every homophone to necessarily be a threat! I thought I made it clear that collaboration is a good thing, and homophones would only be a threat to the extent you're ignorant of fundamental disagreements. While I have my own obvious biases towards which approach I think is best, my thesis would've remained the same had I sanitized this essay to be much more artificially bloodless. Whether or not my own approach is correct and true is besides the point.
I think that it is important to acknowledge that grand ideologies have an important memetic advantage.
First, they are very easy to communicate. "You are either for the people who drop bombs on babies, or you are against them" is much better for recruiting followers than a honest appraisal of the various factions in the Israel-Palestine conflict, how all the big players are terrible in their own way etc.
Also, grand ideologies can paint any conflict as the fundamental, apocalyptic conflict between good and evil. You do not want to sit out that one, do you? So you get a narrative (for example) on what is effectively Hamas is righteous in their struggle against the their evil colonial oppressors, and all right-thinking social justice people should support them, and minor policy differences between Hamas and their feminist LGBTQI+ anti-racist supporters in the west are swept under the rug.
Most successful political movements seem to follow this grand ideology scheme. It is hard to campaign for gay marriage when you acknowledge that it is a minor policy issue which will not affect the vast majority of the population either way. With a grand ideology where this is yet another key battle between the forces of good and evil, you can mobilize a lot more people.
But once you are in such a block, pointing out moral homophones is treated as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The German left had the word "Spalter", meaning "group-splitter", which has a distinct negative connotation. "Why are you squabbling over minor ideological nitpicks when the real enemy is right over there!" Of course, you also get arguments-as-soldiers and the death of any debate.
(Now I am wishing that Scott Alexander would post a terrible take I can disagree on to prove to myself that I am not simply a foot soldier following the rightful caliph.)
Sometimes, late at night, I imagine my writing the equivalent of Noah and Scott. Thankfully, I have you (together with my wife and children) remind me of my proper place.
This is a great piece and I agree with it, but I believe I've heard you say you use AI to draft a lot of your writing, and in this piece I think it shows. Several passages have that distinctive ChatGPT rhythm which I find distracting. I'll be properly embarrassed if I'm imagining things, but figured I'd mention it.
I do regularly use AI as an ever-present editor, so you may or may not be imagining things. Can you be more specific about what passages came off that way to you? I have access to the full workflow and I'm able to identify what I did and did not write myself.
Very interesting, almost everything you picked up turned out to be a false positive! I always start with a very rough draft, and I have the Claude4 chat saved, so I'm able to see exactly where each passage came from.
Your list in order, from 0% (AI) to 100% (Mine):
1. 100% `Within critical applications, forethought has provided us with safeguards`
2. 95% - Originally I said "Despite a fundamental..." but AI suggested "Despite this fundamental...". Second sentence was entirely mine. Also, the vegetarian example came from AI, I came up with mythical creature, and AI came up with LifeSpan Fillets name.
3. 100% - I love the word "Exemplar" and try to use it whenever I can, it's almost like a hero figure, a cross between "templar" and "avatar"
4. 100% - Same with "beneficence", it's so good!
5. 60% the first 2/3 are entirely mine. My original closing sentence was "all because they either appear identical or are intentionally camouflaged". It took some back and forth to hone exactly what I wanted to convey here, because I did not want to imply that the social reward mechanism can only be hijacked by malicious actors.
6. 100% `Many moral crusades had to go through a tendentious journey to finally garner lasting influence`
7. 100% bolded titles
8. 100% `like an engine revving out of control from its chassis`
9. 100% `buoyed by its tidal fervor`
10. 0% `These qualifications reflect an intuitive...'
The portions of the essay that are most from AI are transition/rephrasing sentences like that last entry. It's an aspect of my writing I have intentionally tried to remedy.
For what it's worth, reading the examples in the comment, the whole time I was thinking "None of these sound like they were written by AI". Actually, my spidey sense never tingled once while reading the post itself. I've definitely noticed AI-generated content in the wild before, but your use of it was subtle enough to get past me.
I'm guessing people get the wrong impression when they hear "written with the help of AI", most likely assuming [whole chunks AI-generated and immediately published] instead of [spending hours writing while consulting with a virtual editor].
There are also masquerades that attract unironic followers- sometimes intentionally, whether as a shield or as a motte-and-bailey for after the fact. We saw this with "safe, legal, and rare" abortions, or gay marriage without gayness in childrens' entertainment. Neither of those could have been implemented without setting the stage for social trends to push them further, and it was impossible to argue for them (as limits, from principle) except as a compromise (which would never have worked).
This is what leads conservatives to complain about slippery slopes and agendas all the time. People with religious objections to homosexuality (or really anything other than cishet sexuality in the context of family forming) knew full well, that 1990's gay rights activism (just leave us alone, stop persecuting us, let us have the same rights as everybody else) was not the end of the arc. Perhaps because they'd seen the same exact thing happen with other
things like divorce and premarital sex. First it's decriminalized, then it's destigmatized, and then it gets normalized (or even valorized).
This is a really good framing of this issue, and I can think of several other moral homophones that are causing the general center-left coalition in the USA to fall apart (and, perhaps, enable MAGA victories at the polls):
1. Being pro-gay-marriage because you don't think you have a right to give a shit (me) vs. being pro-gay-marriage because you actually think gay people are cooler than straight people (most LGBTQ+ activists today, it seems)
2. Being anti-gun-control because you want to keep your collection of old pre-WW2 guns you inherited from your grandfather (me) vs. being anti-gun-control because you think everybody should be toting an AR around in public all the time (some gun rights activists, who call people like me "Fudds")
3. Being a "Motte Feminist", i.e. "women are human beings too" vs. a "Bailey Feminist", i.e. "all of society needs to be torn down and reconstructed around female social interaction preferences, plus women need all kinds of special help to compete with men on a level playing field".
Yep, there's a lot of examples! I had to restrain myself from citing too many as I was writing.
Going to have to pick the nit about Fudds. The term has some ambiguity because it's also used to refer to older gun guys with pre-internet ideas about guns and how they work (.22lr bounces around the skull, etc), but the way you're using it is generally reserved for quislings, guys that think they can appease the gun control people by throwing modern guns under the bus. The rancor isn't from a difference of motivation, it's from frustration that the Fudds don't seem to understand that this doesn't work, e.g. all of the commonwealth states (plus the gun control groups have tipped their hand already, your antiques are actually "medium caliber sniper rifles" and too dangerous for you to own).
I'm actually in the gun business BTW, so I'm extremely familiar with the contours of this particular conflict.
You're right, I was using it in the quisling sense, not the old guys spreading old misinformation sense.
I live in a deep blue area and nearly all my friends are blue tribe. I have to pretend to be "reasonable" about gun control when the subject comes up. As far as what I really believe goes, I think I should be able to own whatever kind of gun I can afford that somebody else is willing to sell. A single-shot .22 in the hands of somebody that wants to hurt people with it is more dangerous than an FN Minimi is in mine.
There is also the fact that, other than the issue of gun control, I'm pretty far apart politically from your average pro-gun maximalist.
Ahh, I'm in a similar position, but I've never hidden my beliefs, wouldn't really be an option with my profession and education. It used to be that I could be open and agree to disagree with my friends on things, but that really did vanish in the 2010s when everyone decided that everything had to be political and no deviance was to be tolerated. Guns are a funny issue in that they're not a top tier one for most people but they carry a lot of symbolism, and a handful of billionaires are weirdly invested in banning them and so there's a lot of money being thrown around despite the low political priority.
While reading the first half, I kept thinking "This would benefit greatly from a reading of Scott Alexander's 'Against Murderism'", but I see now that you already read his work.
Funny enough, your first few steps for avoiding this problem are encapsulated in a meme from a few years ago: a scene in a German comedy about a talking kangaroo living amongst humans. At one point, he gets a new roommate (or new apartment), and their first conversation is
"I'm an anarchist, and you?"
"I'm a Communist."
"We can be friends until the Revolution. After that, it gets... complicated."
Good article, it reminds me of a concept that Jonah Goldberg occasionally touches on that he calls "intellectual stolen bases", which would be all of the editing of definitions and other word games to associate high emotional valence terms with meanings they didn't historically carry.
I think the way we organise politics in most western countries (maybe others, but I'm less familiar with other countries) encourages moral homophonicity.
Our politics are based around parties, voting blocks, and coalitions; where members are incentivised to artificially correlate their voting on issues at risk of being kicked out of coalition.
Rather than risk a dispute, it's often much easier to gloss over fundamental moral differences, giving the public a false impression.
I recently saw this online with moral outrage towards "teal independents" (pro environment, pro capitalist, and usually wealthy) candidates pushing for tax breaks. This should've been entirely predictable given their platforms, and is representative of the preferences of their voters, but somehow took people by shock. Somehow people took "pro-windfarm" as being homophonic for "socialist".
I imagine a political system where heterodoxy is encouraged might help with this tendency.
Side note:
I suspect you might have glossed over a moral homophone between racial redistribution politicians.
As a relatively feverant socialist myself, I suspect there are two distinct groups there.
A) People who genuinely believe some race deserves benefits for past wrongs. For example, some people I met in London who thought black people had the right to "reverse colonise the UK" (Tottenham can be a strange place sometimes!).
B) Socialists who want to dampen capitalism's reward function, and see rampant racial inequity as an easy place to start.
This too, is a very uneasy alliance.
We’re discussing your piece on r/theschism and I had a more critical response, so I thought I would put it here, to challenge you a bit. With some wording slightly altered, to address you directly:
This piece is interesting, but I found it overly simplistic about the specific instance you apply it to, and that makes me less inclined to apply the “moral homophone” concept more broadly. You’re an individualist libertarian, and therefore easily prefer the version of “racism” that treats individuals as individuals, irrelevant of group membership. Yet Martin Luther King’s Christian antiracism wasn’t nearly as passive and individualist as you describe “individualist antiracism” to be. King, in particular, wanted to address socioeconomic disparities by way of help that would be available regardless of race but which would nevertheless certainly have been important in redressing racially-related poverty. King is outside this binary. Does that make King a mere “moral homophone” who you ought to see as a threat?
I don’t agree with the recommendation to “be ruthless in scrutinising your disagreements.” Of course I don’t! But for such ruthless scrutiny of small disagreements, I’m essentially *woke*. We’ve got plenty of ruthless scrutiny of minor differences already, on my side of the fence. I’ll pass.
There’s a fundamental underlying assumption here that the only reason those other “moral homophones” got any power is because they sounded like *us*, the real true good people, whom everyone would really be more inclined to agree with, deep down, if only we just insist more finely on our own proper right thinking. So what we need to do is be more critical of everyone who disagrees with us, whereupon everyone will see that we are right and they are wrong. Again, I recognise this attitude and I don’t think it leads anywhere good.
In citing MLK's speech, my intent was not to convey that he was a strict individualist. I'm aware that many parts of his speech explicitly discussed reparationist/redistributive economic policies. One of his best lines of rhetoric is "Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds." I will correct this potentially misleading impression by adding a footnote.
I also do not consider every homophone to necessarily be a threat! I thought I made it clear that collaboration is a good thing, and homophones would only be a threat to the extent you're ignorant of fundamental disagreements. While I have my own obvious biases towards which approach I think is best, my thesis would've remained the same had I sanitized this essay to be much more artificially bloodless. Whether or not my own approach is correct and true is besides the point.
I think that it is important to acknowledge that grand ideologies have an important memetic advantage.
First, they are very easy to communicate. "You are either for the people who drop bombs on babies, or you are against them" is much better for recruiting followers than a honest appraisal of the various factions in the Israel-Palestine conflict, how all the big players are terrible in their own way etc.
Also, grand ideologies can paint any conflict as the fundamental, apocalyptic conflict between good and evil. You do not want to sit out that one, do you? So you get a narrative (for example) on what is effectively Hamas is righteous in their struggle against the their evil colonial oppressors, and all right-thinking social justice people should support them, and minor policy differences between Hamas and their feminist LGBTQI+ anti-racist supporters in the west are swept under the rug.
Most successful political movements seem to follow this grand ideology scheme. It is hard to campaign for gay marriage when you acknowledge that it is a minor policy issue which will not affect the vast majority of the population either way. With a grand ideology where this is yet another key battle between the forces of good and evil, you can mobilize a lot more people.
But once you are in such a block, pointing out moral homophones is treated as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The German left had the word "Spalter", meaning "group-splitter", which has a distinct negative connotation. "Why are you squabbling over minor ideological nitpicks when the real enemy is right over there!" Of course, you also get arguments-as-soldiers and the death of any debate.
(Now I am wishing that Scott Alexander would post a terrible take I can disagree on to prove to myself that I am not simply a foot soldier following the rightful caliph.)
That was a fun read, especially the sane-washing. Well done.
Sometimes, late at night, I imagine my writing the equivalent of Noah and Scott. Thankfully, I have you (together with my wife and children) remind me of my proper place.
*blush*
This is a great piece and I agree with it, but I believe I've heard you say you use AI to draft a lot of your writing, and in this piece I think it shows. Several passages have that distinctive ChatGPT rhythm which I find distracting. I'll be properly embarrassed if I'm imagining things, but figured I'd mention it.
I do regularly use AI as an ever-present editor, so you may or may not be imagining things. Can you be more specific about what passages came off that way to you? I have access to the full workflow and I'm able to identify what I did and did not write myself.
`Within critical applications, forethought has provided us with safeguards`
The sentence starting with `Despite this fundamental` and the sentence after
`The exemplar of this thinking is enshrined`
`you necessarily encourage people to advertise their beneficence, jumpstarting a constructive positive cycle`
Much of the paragraph starting with `This otherwise beneficial cycle`
`Many moral crusades had to go through a tendentious journey to finally garner lasting influence`
The bolded titles of the three individualistic-antiracist bullet points
`like an engine revving out of control from its chassis`
`buoyed by its tidal fervor`
`These qualifications reflect an intuitive recognition that surface-level agreement often masks deeper philosophical differences.`
Very interesting, almost everything you picked up turned out to be a false positive! I always start with a very rough draft, and I have the Claude4 chat saved, so I'm able to see exactly where each passage came from.
Your list in order, from 0% (AI) to 100% (Mine):
1. 100% `Within critical applications, forethought has provided us with safeguards`
2. 95% - Originally I said "Despite a fundamental..." but AI suggested "Despite this fundamental...". Second sentence was entirely mine. Also, the vegetarian example came from AI, I came up with mythical creature, and AI came up with LifeSpan Fillets name.
3. 100% - I love the word "Exemplar" and try to use it whenever I can, it's almost like a hero figure, a cross between "templar" and "avatar"
4. 100% - Same with "beneficence", it's so good!
5. 60% the first 2/3 are entirely mine. My original closing sentence was "all because they either appear identical or are intentionally camouflaged". It took some back and forth to hone exactly what I wanted to convey here, because I did not want to imply that the social reward mechanism can only be hijacked by malicious actors.
6. 100% `Many moral crusades had to go through a tendentious journey to finally garner lasting influence`
7. 100% bolded titles
8. 100% `like an engine revving out of control from its chassis`
9. 100% `buoyed by its tidal fervor`
10. 0% `These qualifications reflect an intuitive...'
The portions of the essay that are most from AI are transition/rephrasing sentences like that last entry. It's an aspect of my writing I have intentionally tried to remedy.
I'll take the L happily, thanks for being interested in feedback!
I know it's probably a "je ne sais quoi" but I'm really curious as to why those passages tripped up your robot detector.
For what it's worth, reading the examples in the comment, the whole time I was thinking "None of these sound like they were written by AI". Actually, my spidey sense never tingled once while reading the post itself. I've definitely noticed AI-generated content in the wild before, but your use of it was subtle enough to get past me.
I'm guessing people get the wrong impression when they hear "written with the help of AI", most likely assuming [whole chunks AI-generated and immediately published] instead of [spending hours writing while consulting with a virtual editor].
There are also masquerades that attract unironic followers- sometimes intentionally, whether as a shield or as a motte-and-bailey for after the fact. We saw this with "safe, legal, and rare" abortions, or gay marriage without gayness in childrens' entertainment. Neither of those could have been implemented without setting the stage for social trends to push them further, and it was impossible to argue for them (as limits, from principle) except as a compromise (which would never have worked).
This is what leads conservatives to complain about slippery slopes and agendas all the time. People with religious objections to homosexuality (or really anything other than cishet sexuality in the context of family forming) knew full well, that 1990's gay rights activism (just leave us alone, stop persecuting us, let us have the same rights as everybody else) was not the end of the arc. Perhaps because they'd seen the same exact thing happen with other
things like divorce and premarital sex. First it's decriminalized, then it's destigmatized, and then it gets normalized (or even valorized).
Definitely valorized.