Since Scott is once again attacking charitably engaging with leftists by claiming “most leftist groups sucked because they were primarily made of stoner college kids and homeless people” and complaining that they don’t outline understandable political goals (in this post), I think this would be a good time to review Scott’s manifesto. So go take a few minutes and read ARCHIPELAGO AND ATOMIC COMMUNITARIANISM, the clearest formulation that I’m aware of of a political ideal according to Scott Alexander. Fair warning - this was written in 2014, but Scott still promotes it as a top 10 post from his blog and doesn’t mention it in his compilation of mistakes. He also hasn’t made any obvious ideological shifts away from the position presented here, at least that I can detect. So while he might not currently defend every word of this post, I think it’s quite fair to take it as a leading example of Scott-ist political thought.

You can skim section I, it’s largely irrelevant ramblings. Also sorry in advance for quoting large blocks of text, but it’s necessary to avoid the ‘out of context’ fallacy and because Scott is incapable of writing concisely. Lastly, I’m not interested in pointing out that we have no available archipelago and Scott has no idea how to get to UniGov - let’s take the thought experiment at face value and see where we get.

In Section II, Scott likes liberalism. But he doesn’t like conflict - at all. In fact he claims to be basically unwilling to ever defend simple moral claims like “it’s alright to be homosexual”, because using a liberal government to enforce any moral precepts is effectively a regression to tyranny.

…we’ve mostly shifted from absolute monarchies to other forms of government, which is all nice and well except that governments allow a different kind of war of all against all. Instead of trying to kill their enemies and steal their stuff, people are tempted to ban their enemies and confiscate their stuff. Instead of killing the Protestants, the Catholics simply ban Protestantism…

Liberalism is a new form of Hobbesian equilibrium where the government enforces not only a ban on killing and stealing from people you don’t like, but also a ban on tyrannizing them out of existence. This is the famous “freedom of religion” and “freedom of speech” and so on, as well as the “freedom of what happens in the bedroom between consenting adults”. The Catholics don’t try to ban Protestantism, the Protestants don’t try to ban Catholicism, and everyone is happy. Liberalism only works when it’s clear to everyone on all sides that there’s a certain neutral principle everyone has to stick to. The neutral principle can’t be the Bible, or Atlas Shrugged, or anything that makes it look like one philosophy is allowed to judge the others. Right now that principle is the Principle of Harm: you can do whatever you like unless it harms other people, in which case stop…

The Strict Principle of Harm says that pretty much the only two things the government can get angry at is literally breaking your leg or picking your pocket – violence or theft. The Loose Principle of Harm says that the government can get angry at complicated indirect harms, things that Weaken The Moral Fabric Of Society…allowing the Loose Principle Of Harm restores all of the old wars to control other people that liberalism was supposed to prevent. The one person says “Gay marriage will result in homosexuality becoming more accepted, leading to increased rates of STDs! That’s a harm! We must ban gay marriage!”…And so on, forever.

…right now our way of dealing with these problems is to argue them. “Well, gay people don’t really increase STDs too much.” Or “Home-schooled kids do better than public-schooled kids, so we need to allow them.” The problem is that arguments never terminate…

If we force all of our discussions about whether to ban gay marriage or allow home schooling to depend on resolving the dispute about whether they indirectly harm the Fabric of Society in some way, we’re forcing dependence on object-level arguments in a way that historically has been very very bad. Presumably here the more powerful groups would win out and be able to oppress the less powerful groups. We end up with exactly what liberalism tried to avoid – a society where everyone is the guardian of the virtue of everyone else, and anyone who wants to live their lives in a way different from the community’s consensus is out of luck.

The claim here that society enforcing the legality of gay marriage would be “oppressing” those who have a problem with gay marriage is highly non-obvious - what liberal ‘right’ is being violated? Scott doesn’t want to enforce ‘gay marriage legal’ on the basis of an ‘object-level’ claim about societal well-being because he sees this as a neutral weapon that could easily be used against gay people: how could we beat the competing object-level claim that homosexuality increases the spread of STDs? He thinks we can’t, at least not reliably, so we shouldn’t rely on silly things like ‘truth’ or ‘morals’ to get us to good public policy. On the efficacy of political arguments, he says:

Maybe if you’re incredibly lucky, after years of fighting you can get a couple of people on the other side to admit your side is right, but this is a pretty hard process to trust.

Long-time listeners may wonder how Scott would square this with his plainitive calls for niceness, rational dialogue with reactionaries, and in fact the entire rest of his oeuvre. Me too. A reminder that this is the guy who thinks that the singularity is coming, and buys into Yudkowsky’s framing of the control problem, i.e. that we need to quickly figure out how to program an AGI with an objective moral framework that ensures it promotes human flourishing. Would Scott be willing to risk oppressing evangelical Christians by programming /u/acausalrobotgod to think that homosexuality is okay? Would he be willing to risk oppressing white nationalists by programming the AGI to believe that melanin is okay? Does Scott actually believe in anything? These are serious questions.

Scott has a consistent tendency toward absolute intellectual cowardice and moral relativism, which is funny coming from someone who routinely produces the necessary centrist shibboleths about postmodernism. His singular motivation is the fear of having other people be mad at him. This means that while he is very happy to say that obviously there’s nothing wrong with being gay, he’s unwilling to commit to an ethical framework or a politics that enshrines this principle, because some people disagree. Guess what, Scott - people will always disagree. Get the fuck over it. Stand for something or fall for anything.

After Scott says that believing in things is oppressive in section II, he begins to outline the political structure he believes in in section III. Yes, there will be some contradictions here. Scott here is a wizard that’s discovered a new, boundless, unsettled archipelago. The wizard “doesn’t want to rule the archipelago himself” (but later “…decides to formalize and strengthen his system” by “ban[ning] communities from declaring war on each other”), and instead allows all sorts of communities to establish charters and rule over individual islands on the archipelago however they want. All the people self-segregate and go to the islands of their choice, ruled by whatever system of law they desire.

Except this isn’t actually true, because Scott immediately starts laying out how a centralized government will restrict the ability of the independent communities to live autonomously.

First he bans communities from declaring war on each other. That’s an obvious gain.

Stop. No it isn’t, you’re a coward. Some wars are justified, because some people are evil and the ethically positive thing to do is to kill them. Another question for Scott: was the Union fighting the Civil War a good thing?

He could just smite warmongers, but he thinks it’s more natural and organic to get all the communities into a united government (UniGov for short). Every community donates a certain amount to a military, and the military’s only job is to quash anyone from any community who tries to invade another.

World government is definitely more natural and organic than strongmen enforcing their will via violence. Every community ‘donates’ a certain amount (that’s not what a donation is) - how much, and in what form? What about voluntary communities of pacifists?

Next he addresses externalities. For example, if some communities emit a lot of carbon, and that causes global warming which threatens to destroy other communities, UniGov puts a stop to that. If the offending communities refuse to stop emitting carbon, then there’s that military again.

Refer to the above:

The Strict Principle of Harm says that pretty much the only two things the government can get angry at is literally breaking your leg or picking your pocket – violence or theft. The Loose Principle of Harm says that the government can get angry at complicated indirect harms, things that Weaken The Moral Fabric Of Society…allowing the Loose Principle Of Harm restores all of the old wars to control other people that liberalism was supposed to prevent.

Also interested in the notion that it might be right for a world government to unilaterally put a stop to carbon production that is threatening to destroy distant communities. Another question for Scott: have you gotten in touch with the leadership of Nauru?

The third thing he does is prevent memetic contamination. If one community wants to avoid all media that objectifies women, then no other community is allowed to broadcast women-objectifying media at it. If a community wants to live an anarcho-primitivist lifestyle, nobody else is allowed to import TVs. Every community decides exactly how much informational contact it wants to have with the rest of the continent, and no one is allowed to force them to have more than that.

DJ, run that back

…[the wizard] thinks it’s more natural and organic to get all the communities into a united government (UniGov for short). Every community donates a certain amount to a military…

Hm…

Every community decides exactly how much informational contact it wants to have with the rest of the continent, and no one is allowed to force them to have more than that.

Um…?

…if some communities emit a lot of carbon, and that causes global warming which threatens to destroy other communities, UniGov puts a stop to that. If the offending communities refuse to stop emitting carbon, then there’s that military again.

…

Every community decides exactly how much informational contact it wants to have with the rest of the continent, and no one is allowed to force them to have more than that.

This is going to be a repeated sticking point.

But the wizard and UniGov’s most important task is to think of the children. Imagine you’re conservative Christians, and you’re tired of this secular godless world, so you go off with your conservative Christian friends to found a conservative Christian community. You all pray together and stuff and are really happy. Then you have a daughter. Turns out she’s atheist and lesbian. What now? Well, it might be that your kid would be much happier at the lesbian separatist community the next island over. The absolute minimum the united government can do is enforce freedom of movement. That is, the second your daughter decides she doesn’t want to be in Christiantopia anymore, she goes to a UniGov embassy nearby and asks for a ticket out, which they give her, free of charge. She gets airlifted to Lesbiantopia the next day. If anyone in Christiantopia tries to prevent her from reaching that embassy, or threatens her family if she leaves, or expresses the slightest amount of coercion to keep her around, UniGov burns their city and salts their field.

Didn’t we?

The third thing he does is prevent memetic contamination.

Every community decides exactly how much informational contact it wants to have with the rest of the continent, and no one is allowed to force them to have more than that.

Did anybody proofread this? How would Sally even learn the concepts or words for ‘atheist’ and ‘lesbian’?

But this is not nearly enough to fully solve the child problem. A child who is abused may be too young to know that escape is an option, or may be brainwashed into thinking they are evil, or guilted into believing they are betraying their families to opt out. And although there is no perfect, elegant solution here, the practical solution is that UniGov enforces some pretty strict laws on child-rearing, and every child, no matter what other education they receive, also has to receive a class taught by a UniGov representative in which they learn about the other communities in the Archipelago, receive a basic non-brainwashed view of the world, and are given directions to their nearest UniGov representative who they can give their opt-out request to. The list of communities they are informed about always starts with the capital, ruled by UniGov itself and considered an inoffensive, neutral option for people who don’t want anywhere in particular. And it always ends with a reminder that if they can gather enough support, UniGov will provide them with a galleon to go out and found their own community in hitherto uninhabited lands.

ahhhhhhhhh
That’s the good stuff.

Let’s start asking some questions: who decides what goes on the official UniGov ‘non-brainwashed view of the world’ curriculum? Hey Scott, what might you put on there? And how many chapters go to haplogroups? How much surveillance is necessary to ensure that all births are tracked and all children are taken to their UniGov classes? How much additional tithing is necessary from each community to sustain the bureaucracy necessary to power this Herculean effort, and how is the tithe policy determined? How does the UniGov representative communicate with the anarcho-primitivists? (Does he know that some of them are against language?) What are the policies of the UniGov capital that is an ‘inoffensive, neutral option’ (remember Scott, you’re always offending somebody - usually me)? How does any of this square with any single sentence written before it?

If you really want a laugh, read the next two paragraphs, where Scott decides that the other major problem he really needs to address is the possibility that people might flee high-tax communities after taking advantage of robust public education systems. He says that he ‘imagine[s] this is a big deal in Archipelago politics’. Personally, I’d put it fairly low on my list of priorities, but hey.

Not only is this revealing of intellectual cowardice, but supreme intellectual blindness. Scott wants to stay neutral, not enforcing any potentially oppressive ideals. What is neutral? Why, a strict prohibition against war, military intervention against ill-defined ‘externalities’ (yes those two things are directly contradictory), and dystopian-level surveillance and bureaucratic control over education and movement. Scott, do you understand that all the things that you already believed aren’t actually neutral? Do you understand that people disagree with you and sometimes even hate you? Do you realize that conflict exists? Do you realize that sometimes people are wrong?

Do you live in the real world?

In my fantasy, UniGov isn’t an enemy, where the Christians view it as this evil atheist conglomerate trying to steal their kids away from them and the capitalists view it as this evil socialist conglomerate trying to enforce high taxes. The Christians, the capitalists, and everyone else are extraordinarily patriotic about being part of the Archipelago, for its full name is the Archipelago of Civilized Communities, it is the standard-bearer of civilization against the barbaric outside world, and it is precisely the institution that allows them to maintain their distinctiveness in the face of what would otherwise be irresistable pressure to conform. Atheistopia is the enemy of Christiantopia, but only in the same way the Democratic Party is the enemy of the Republican Party – two groups within the same community who may have different ideas but who consider themselves part of the same broader whole, fundamentally allies under a banner of which both are proud.

No, you don’t.

Section IV. This is very tiring, but let’s see what else Scott can give us.

Robert Nozick once proposed a similar idea as a libertarian utopia, and it’s easy to see why. UniGov does very very little.

OH GOD LET’S STOP NOW