The presentation of socialism here is so straw as to cause me to doubt the whole story. I don’t know what brand/school of leftism is vulnerable to the particular critiques you laid out, but I’ve never seen it. These look like things libs say to one another to reassure themselves that poverty is fine actually and war is good, not like things that I’d expect to deradicalize someone who’d spent >20 hours in touch with primary sources on the topic.
It seems like the real story here is that you have very high openness, were swayed by Very Bad socialist arguments, and have now been swayed by some of the worst anti-left arguments on EA twitter.
This is importantly different from having had a profound realization about the inadequacies of Marx.
I think many “apostasy” stories (someone who had the atheist personality-type but grew up in a religious culture, people converting from left to right or back) have this character, and tend to be very popular with the destination audience and unpopular with the source audience. On the one hand, this is unsurprising—both on the levels of tribal affiliation and intellectual dynamics. (If people who use the EA tools come to the EA conclusions, then of course attempts to build alternative conclusions with the EA tools will fail.)
But it seems like—there should still be some ability to learn something, here? Either which tools are better, or whether it is reliably the case that applying analytic philosophy to Marxism causes it to evaporate, or so on. (Or that applying Marxism tools to analytic philosophy causes it to evaporate, and why we should care about that.)
I don’t know what brand/school of leftism is vulnerable to the particular critiques you laid out, but I’ve never seen it.
Like, ‘vulnerable’ is an interesting word here. Jon Elster isn’t a fictional character; he wrote his book 40 years ago, and people read it, and presumably some people were convinced and other people weren’t. I remember reading Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, thinking “oh I wish I knew what George Orwell would have thought after reading this”, and then discovering that he had read it and hadn’t been convinced by it, writing this review.
And as you might expect from someone who feels a lot of resonance with Hayek—I didn’t find Orwell’s criticism convincing at all! But it’s strange to say that means Orwell wasn’t “vulnerable” to the Hayekian critique; instead I looked at his argument (that liberal tyranny is less responsible than state tyranny) and said “yikes, that’s the best you could come up with?”
The presentation of socialism here is so straw as to cause me to doubt the whole story. I don’t know what brand/school of leftism is vulnerable to the particular critiques you laid out, but I’ve never seen it. These look like things libs say to one another to reassure themselves that poverty is fine actually and war is good, not like things that I’d expect to deradicalize someone who’d spent >20 hours in touch with primary sources on the topic.
It seems like the real story here is that you have very high openness, were swayed by Very Bad socialist arguments, and have now been swayed by some of the worst anti-left arguments on EA twitter.
This is importantly different from having had a profound realization about the inadequacies of Marx.
I think many “apostasy” stories (someone who had the atheist personality-type but grew up in a religious culture, people converting from left to right or back) have this character, and tend to be very popular with the destination audience and unpopular with the source audience. On the one hand, this is unsurprising—both on the levels of tribal affiliation and intellectual dynamics. (If people who use the EA tools come to the EA conclusions, then of course attempts to build alternative conclusions with the EA tools will fail.)
But it seems like—there should still be some ability to learn something, here? Either which tools are better, or whether it is reliably the case that applying analytic philosophy to Marxism causes it to evaporate, or so on. (Or that applying Marxism tools to analytic philosophy causes it to evaporate, and why we should care about that.)
Like, ‘vulnerable’ is an interesting word here. Jon Elster isn’t a fictional character; he wrote his book 40 years ago, and people read it, and presumably some people were convinced and other people weren’t. I remember reading Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, thinking “oh I wish I knew what George Orwell would have thought after reading this”, and then discovering that he had read it and hadn’t been convinced by it, writing this review.
And as you might expect from someone who feels a lot of resonance with Hayek—I didn’t find Orwell’s criticism convincing at all! But it’s strange to say that means Orwell wasn’t “vulnerable” to the Hayekian critique; instead I looked at his argument (that liberal tyranny is less responsible than state tyranny) and said “yikes, that’s the best you could come up with?”