Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Treder, Traitor?

Mike Treder has been making waves among the Robot Cultists by pointing out that extropian transhumanist Max More's climate-change "skepticism" flogging discredited libertopian Cato Institute talking points (find it yourself, I won't link to him) looks rather like the derangement of factual discourse by whomping up endless non-controversies and resentments among the rubes one also finds in corporate-funded "safe cigarette" studies, "Death Panel" paranoia disseminated by the creatures of the catastrophically failing for-profit insurance industry in the face of reform efforts, "Intelligent Design" Christianist creationists demanding we "teach the controversy" in the name of "science," "Birther" and "Truther" conspiracists generating a froth of phony disconnected data-points with which to displace legitimate accounts of facts with paranoid counter-narratives testifying not to the worldly reality they claim to document but to the personal reality of their own deep alienation and distress, and so on.

Of course, this sort of thing usually plays out in the service of reactionary moralizing politics of the white racist patriarchal corporate-militarist variety or as a matter of straight up crony-capitalist mobster-style swindling and profit-taking, and is the furthest imaginable thing from the practice of or respect for the "Science" the sooper-scientisterrific superlative futurologists like to fancy themselves as exemplifying and defending above all others.

And so, Mike Treder is of course right about all this, as far as it goes, just as he is right to connect this self-marginalization from scientific consensus to the curious subcultural dynamics of wish-fulfillment and True Belief that accrete around self-appointed Singularitarian guru Eliezer Yudkowsky's "theories" about AI and human history. But, the Robot Cultists who are responding with such exasperation and pain against Treder's analysis are also completely right to feel perplexed and betrayed by what he has done. Robot Cultism is a sub(cult)ure, a moral community, a tribal formation, an identity movement -- and in offering up these critiques Treder risks amputation from Its Body.

After all, why notice More's denialism now rather than years ago when he penned the so-called "Proactionary Principle" which had no substance except to frame cautious policy and regulation in the face of likely threats to individual and ecosystemic health arising from extractive-industrial production practices as an advocacy of genocidal stasis while at once framing short-term corporate profit-taking as a marvelous fountainhead of beneficent "innovation" and "competitiveness" for the good of all?

Why notice the transcendentalizing superlativity in Singularitarian Robot Cultism now rather than comparable transcendentalizing formulations at the heart of techno-immortalist, cybernetic totalist, digital utopian, "optimizing" post-humanist, and nano-cornucopiast strains of Robot Cultism as well?

It is especially rich to discover that when Treder exposes what he takes to be a falsehood and indicates why he finds it to be particularly harmful, the way the Robot Cultists respond to this is to decry his "anger," his "aggression," his "incivility," his "food-fighting," his "irrationality." If Treder is correct in his forthrightly expressed assessments then the falsehoods he is exposing are facilitating actual harms in the world. It is curious that it is in just this moment that suddenly the Robot Cultists seem more interested in the "harm" of nonconformism in their tribe to the tribalists themselves than in the actual harms Treder is trying to draw their attention to, harms to people throughout the world (that would include the Robot Cultists, who do in fact live in the world and not in "The Future").

Why is it that it is "rudeness" and "incivility" that suddenly becomes the topic whenever one exposes the reactionary politics of climate-change denialists or insurance-industry flacks lying about healthcare reform? The short answer is, of course, that they want their way even when they lose, even when nobody else wants what they want, even when they fail to pass muster according to the standards they themselves mobilize when things go their way. But it is also true that in charging critics with incivility, the reactionaries displace onto a discussion of the terms of the discussion itself the uncivil substance that should be under discussion: the brutality and incivility of their actual proposals to swamp the world in poison and greenhouse storms so that a few people can make more money, to deny and derange healthcare provision so that a few people can make more money.

Why would rudeness of all things to a person cynically deploying dangerous deceptions in the service of the profit-taking of incumbent interests be more important than the harms facilitated by those deceptions? If the delusions and deceptions really are dangerous isn't it a profound trivialization of their irrationality and danger to insist that what matters here is to "respect" the deceptive to their satisfaction? Notice how often "respect" under these circumstances tends to take the form of the demand that the already well convinced and well motivated majority silently, demurely, passively, endlessly indulge every trumped up objection, assertion, anecdote, confession, and argument from the deceptive exception however wide the consensus at odds with him, however urgent the task at hand. Why, one begins to get the impression that "rudeness" is just a word for any disagreement with the desperate wish-fulfillment fantasies of the True Believer. So, too, to disparage the truth of any thread in the garment of Robot Cultism as Treder has done is to expose the deeper disavowed truth of its utter marginality and ridiculousness to the wider world, whole cloth.

I think it should go without saying that those who want to imply that simply by disagreeing in public with certain ideas and describing what he takes to be their ill consequences, even by ridiculing what he genuinely takes to be ridiculous (and pointing out the factual marginality of what he takes to be ridiculous) Treder is indulging in a kind of "silencing" of debate, or a violent repudiation of those with whom he disagrees. Disagreeing in public is indispensable to debate, offering up judgments to an uncertain public hearing is a measure of respect one provides even to those one finds ridiculous. Treder is saying what he believes to be the case, and I might add willingly taking on an enormous amount of heat from people he actually respects (as certainly I do not respect them) in owning up to them. Nowhere does he imply that people who disagree with him lack the right to say things he regards as dangerous and wrong by his lights. One might expect him to be eager for wrongheaded ideas to be expressed precisely the better to be exposed to the scrutiny under which they might be defeated and do less of the harm that so clearly worries him. I must say that whenever these declarations about Treder's censoriousness and aggressiveness connect up to the denigration as well of Treder's "leftism" in making these charges it seems pretty clear that this is just the conventional right-wing fantasy of "true debate" always only taking the form of an endless monologue confirming their own parochial viewpoints to thunderous applause.

Indeed, many Robot Cultists are apparently so convinced of the naturalness, taken-for-grantedness, unquestionability of their (often quite extraordinarily marginal) political views that they imagine their politics to be pre-political, a-political, non-political altogether, something like pristine arithmetic calculations that them damn lie-bruls and them relativists in English Departments keep getting all muddied up and riled up about because them dang losers apparently have nothing better to do with themselves.

Yes, Robot Cultists are decrying Treder's expose as a "politicization" of the discussion as if he has introduced politics into the discussion of climate change or the attribution of intelligence or security in networked societies when, clearly, painfully clearly, on his own assumptions at least, he has simply exposed the hidden and underlying political assumptions, motives, and stakes already at issue here. Robot Cultists are decrying Treder's sinking to "vitriol" when he is, as he sees it at least, documenting the poisons spreading here, not concocting them. Robot Cultists are decrying Treder's "immoderateness" when it is only because the views he is ascribing to More and others are already so palpably marginal that it is only among Robot Cultists themselves that these views would get the respectful hearing they demand in the first place.

Of course, it's already obvious that almost nobody who isn't in a Robot Cult like transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, and so on takes Max More or Eliezer Yudkowsky the least bit seriously (frankly, I wish they would take them more seriously -- as symptoms of more prevailing problems in more mainstream technoscience and development discourses), but to remain in the Robot Cult (however often they change their name and re-brand their image and spruce up their terminology and change their web-page fonts to elude their crackpot reputations) is, at its essence, to take the likes of More and Yudkowsky seriously as nobody else does or will -- while to expose them to ridicule is inevitably to expose the Robot Cults in which they make their homes to the same ridicule.

Treder is at something of a crossroads, I suspect -- either he must find some rationalization enabling him to remain in the Robot Cult despite what he has grasped about it and then do some serious penance by handwaving futurologically until the membership is edified again, or he will likely find himself "gratefully thanked" by James Hughes for his many past services while he now moves on to spend more time with his family, write his book, pursue his other activities, or whatever spin they can cook up in the face of the latest inconvenient unpersoning.

I wish him well wherever he goes from here.

12 comments:

jimf said...

> Mike Treder has been making waves among the Robot Cultists. . .
>
> [T]he way the Robot Cultists respond to this is to decry his
> "anger," his "aggression," his "incivility," his "food-fighting,"
> his "irrationality."
>
> Why is that it is "rudeness" and "incivility" that suddenly
> becomes the topic whenever one exposes the reactionary politics
> of. . .[Robot Cultism]? . . . [I]n charging critics with
> incivility, the reactionaries displace onto a discussion of
> the terms of the discussion itself the. . . substance that
> should be under discussion. . .
>
> One begins to get the impression that "rudeness" is just a
> word for any disagreement with the desperate wish-fulfillment
> fantasies of the True Believer. . .
>
> Treder is at something of a crossroads, I suspect -- either he
> must find some rationalization enabling him to remain in the
> Robot Cult despite what he has grasped about it and then do
> some serious penance by handwaving futurologically until the
> membership is edified again, or he will likely find himself
> "gratefully thanked" by James Hughes for his many past services
> while he now moves on to spend more time with his family,
> write his book, pursue his other activities, or whatever spin they
> can cook up in the face of the latest inconvenient unpersoning.

Yes, well, speaking of "unpersoning": Nobody gets to criticize
Robot Cultists in their own venues. Those venues and organizations
are private parties, and all the participants are there at the
indulgence of the folks who are supplying the beer and pretzels.

You don't have to talk politics to the Cultists to get them riled
up.

Apropos of one of the folks you mentioned above, here is a declaration
of policy that was posted following a brouhaha which got somebody
(with some real technical credentials) banned over a purely technical
disagreement (regarding the inherent "irrationality" of the human
mind, a la the blog title "Overcoming Bias"). The list in question
was SL4, and the gentleman in question was one Richard Loosemore.


http://eugen.leitl.org/postbiota/sl4/0608/15930.html

META: To SL4's readership
From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Aug 31 2006 - 00:22:18 MDT

. . .

If you're a new subscriber, please rest assured that recent events on
SL4 are not typical. I think that this, these events of August 2006, is
the worst I can ever recall seeing it. I hope it does not happen again.

I suspect that SL4's policies need to be clarified. In particular, I
think that the front page needs to make clear that SL4 is a moderated
list, that the moderation is autocratic rather than democratic, that
some baby may get thrown out occasionally with the bathwater and this is
the cost we all pay, that moderation policies may be criticized all you
like but we will go on doing it anyway, that this is the foundation and
the price of SL4's existence, and if you don't like it there are plenty
of other mailing lists. . .

[T]he List Owner. . . reserves the right to ban anyone, at any time,
without even giving a reason. . . [T]he List Owner reserves the right of
Whim Death, and has exercised it in the past, and will exercise it as
whim takes him, possibly on you; and this is part of the foundation of
SL4, which no one is required to agree with or approve of, but which
they should nonetheless be warned of. . .

This list is, in the end, a party held in my living room. I surely
don't ask you to be grateful for that, or respect me for it, and Heaven
forbid that I should ask you to bow before me; but from time to time, I
might kick someone out of my living room. That's life. . .

Dale Carrico said...

You don't want to know what the Moot would look like right now if I were not exercising an enormously heavy moderating hand in ways that I know feel arbitrary and tyrannical (I know because they tell me so in comment after comment after comment) to what seem to me crazy stalkers and abusive attack-dogs. I feel that my moderation functions to enable rather than foreclose the possibility that somebody who might be interesting to me might be moved to say something interesting to me -- which is not a matter of agreeing with me or not -- but who is likely to turn away from a space saturated with the shit-stink of insubstantial pseudonymous "I know you are but what am I" expressions of id. I just want substance I can benefit from personally and relevance to the post -- but, again, these criteria no doubt seem arbitrary to those curtailed by them. It's hard to know what to do about it.

jimf said...

> It's hard to know what to do about it.

Yeah. You can make salad dressing by emulsifying oil and
vinegar.

But when it comes to people. . .

Athena Andreadis said...

"First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist."

You know the rest of this quote. Those in the TH tent that are truly socially progressive and/or science-literate will sooner or later find themselves in Niemoeller's position -- unless the movement decides to anchor itself firmly in scientific and social reality.

Michael Anissimov said...

>Nobody gets to criticize
>Robot Cultists in their own venues.

Except venues like my blog, where people disagree with me freely every day?

jimf said...

> Except venues like my blog, where people disagree with me freely every day?

The disagreement is not substantive.

You should read (or watch the documentary of) Noam Chomsky's
_the Manufacture of Consent_.

Chomsky alleges that all mainstream public discussion in this country
(he's talking about pre-web media like _The New York Times_)
is managed (according to the dictates of "responsible" editorial
policy, etc.) so that it stays within quite strict boundaries that
do not permit substantive disagreement with the prevailing corporate-
political consensus.

It's the same thing among the >Hists, entre eux.

Treder just went beyond that boundary (in directions that are
hardly new to anybody who reads **this** blog).
Presumably, he will soon "resign" from IEET, and he will
be persona non grata in the usual places.

jimf said...

> [Mike Treder will be] persona non grata in the usual places.

**Including**, I very much anticipate, your blog,
Mr. Anissimov.

Dale Carrico said...

In the final paragraph of this post I mentioned that if Mike doesn't want to leave or get booted from the futurological sub(cult)ure (to which he has devoted, after all, no small amount of his recent life), "he m[ight] find some rationalization enabling him to remain in the Robot Cult despite what he has grasped about it and then do some serious penance by handwaving futurologically until the membership is edified again."

Since he posted his critique of transhumanist, er, "luminaries" Max More and Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mike has posted to the IEET blog two posts that suggest he has seen the writing on the wall: in the first, he talks about cities criss-crossed with "moving sidewalks," a fairly innocuous gee-whiz futurological vision from the vaudeville era, followed by a brief bit of handwaving about uplifting dogs to sooperhuman intelligence, including pictures of dogs playing chess or pawing at books while wearing spectacles.

Comments inspired by these posts so far include "Cygnus X1" who writes, "Whoo hoo! Mike is back in the zone!" and "RJ Eskow" who "[l]ove[s] the out-of-the-box (or out-of-the-pet-carrier) thinking… Excellent post. Good boy!"

The latter post is critical of some assumptions of some singularitarians, but in ways that take singularitarians seriously on their own terms (including the pretense that their "terms" are coherent at all and that we should be talking about "friendly" or "unfriendly" "post-biological intelligence" rather than simply software usability and network security issues in the first place), which is more than they can manage themselves and, hence, a real gift.

It is this last point that the Robot Cultists cannot permit to be expose within their own hallowed precincts, and it is, of course, this last point that Treder made to provoke their ire. As I said, I wish Treder well whatever he does.

I think he should think carefully about what it means that so many of the boys within the superlative futurological circles within which he has circulated so conspicuously so long said so quickly and so loudly that he was obviously unintelligent, deranged with ideology, and a troll just because he pointed out that Eliezer Yudkowsky is not taken seriously by the field he and his followers regard him to lead and that Max More's libertopian climate change denialism involves claims that diverge conspicuously from consensus science.

There's a lesson there, and it's hard to believe that the critical intelligence that prompted Mike to write his intervention won't lead him to similar quandaries again soon enough.

Dale Carrico said...

"JimF" writes: [Mike Treder will be] persona non grata in the usual places.
**Including**, I very much anticipate, your blog, Mr. Anissimov.


Recent comments on Michael Anissimov's blog:

"Roko" -- "I suspect that since Treder is of fairly low intellectual calibre, he will never find that much evidence, because the dumber you are, the more slowly you spot patterns in the overall debate."

"Tim Tyler" -- "Mike Treder compares Eliezer Yudkowsky to Ken Ham (Young Earth creationist) -- and now his proposed solution is superintelligent dogs!?! A rather feeble joke. Are his views worth spending time on? He seems to behave like a troll." [emphasis added by me -- d]

"Michael Anissimov" himself -- "[P]erhaps it’s not worth paying attention to Mike."

jimf said...

> . . .a brief bit of handwaving about uplifting dogs to
> sooperhuman intelligence. . .

BTW, however plausible one considers the notion of
"uplifted" (TM, David Brin) dogs in the real world,
everybody should eventually get around to reading the
classic short novel based on that theme, Olaf Stapledon's
_Sirius_ (usually coupled with the equally classic novel
about a superhuman mutant, _Odd John_).
http://www.amazon.com/John-Sirius-William-Olaf-Stapledon/dp/0486211339

_Sirius_ is the more moving of the two. It's sad, and it's
disturbing on many levels (there's a suggested sexual relationship
between the superintelligent dog and his human "sister", Plaxy,
that almost kept the book from ever being published, but I don't
consider that disturbing at all).

Stapledon's novels, BTW, are today classified as "science fiction"
(and that's where you'll find them in the bookstore), but
Stapledon did not think of **himself** as a "science fiction" author
(any more than H. G. Wells did when he wrote _The Time Machine_) --
SF as a publishing genre hadn't been invented back then -- he was just
writing **novels** (or "romances" or "fantasies") of a philosophical
and speculative character. The portmanteau term "Scientifiction"
came along later.

Dale Carrico said...

And now we have futurologists who are indulging in the burgeoning cottage industry of speculative scenario multiplication -- essentially sf authors too inept to make even clumsy efforts at integrating characterization, plotting, contextualization via "setting," and so on that most fiction-writers at least try to have a go at if they want to claim to be worthy of reading, but who seem to see in this very ineptitude the sign that their own fiction-writing is not only "scientific" (the inaugural miscontrual that transformed the self-image of sf from fantasy-romance) but as actual scientific practice. I mean, I'm as big an sf fanboy as the next queergeek, but, honestly, writing worse than the worst sf doesn't turn sf into lab-science. Talk about fantasy-romance!

Roko said...

I have no problem with genuine, intelligent disagreement with the h+/S^ positions, but I think that Treder's recent articles have shown fairly poor quality criticism.

S^/h+ desperately needs high quality critics; but I realize that for the moment, being a high-quality critic can be a thankless task, so I don't find it surprising when people indulge themselves with a bit of good 'ol ranting against us. Then again, being ranted at is better than being ignored.