6 ms·

The Priest in the Arena

70 points by jger15 4y ago

iskander 4y ago
I think the equivalence between these is very weakly argued: The DEI cult is fueled by the genuine issue of social justice The ESG cult is fueled by the genuine issue of climate change The trad cult is fueled by the genuine issue of the meaning crisis The AI safety cult is fueled by the genuine issue of AI regulation For example, ESG seems to largely exist as a cover for not taking substantive actions to decrease carbon emissions since those would be both unprofitable within specific companies and broadly unpopular in most societies. There isn't the same kind of socially cohesive group of proponents as eg AGI x-risk rationalists.
- whatgoodisaroad 4y ago
  I don't read the post as drawing an equivalence across these four, but I think the two you picked out are actually the most comparable pair. Certainly corporate profit interests have harmed ESG discourse, but the leading AI developers right now are corporations and it's only a short matter of time before whatever legitimate AI risk concerns will get contaminated by profit-protecting PR campaigns.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  The entire piece sort of feels like restating the concept of "virtue-signaling" (as a pejorative) in different, and more, words.
- defrost 4y ago
  Good point and one I came here to make after reading the article. In my experience the DEI and AI safety crowd are mostly sincere in their belief and desires .. leaving aside whether their approaches are sound. By contrast a great many corporate level ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) programs are knowingly cynical in promoting green washing schemes that pay lip service to reducing carbon emissions but don't bear looking into details.
xianshou 4y ago
Excellent summary of how particular social groups lay claim to a dominant, universal, and unimpeachable voice in their chosen domain. One point that I'm surprised the post didn't raise: the notion that such groups are often able to claim authority because "this time is different". In true messianic style, the underlying genuine issue must be framed as both uniquely important and imminently approaching a tipping point. As such it is too urgent for observers to study the issue and form their own views - instead they must defer to the insiders before it is too late. This strategy is all the more dangerous because, at least in the cases of AI and climate change, inaction does imply catastrophe and the consequences to civilization are vast and potentially permanent. When the diagnosis of the problem is perceptive, eloquent, and mostly accurate, people tend to assume the proposed solution must be right as well. The clearest indicator of a priest-in-the-arena, and the associated social movement aimed at institutional capture, is the motte and bailey: implying and advocating for an extreme position, then retreating to a reasonable and harmless one when pressed. (The crisis is coming - put me in control - we must change everything!) "Oh, you misunderstand! I was simply advocating for a sensitive and cautious approach." Usually people back off from the extreme position when writing for public consumption. At least in that regard, the "AI-not-kill-everyoneism" camp is startlingly frank about reading the subtext out loud.
- reb 4y ago
  I don't know if it's really even reflective of any particular social group, as opposed to a reliable rhetorical maneuver that's just too effective to die out. History is made by people and organizations who use this One Simple Trick™, for better and for worse.
aetherspawn 4y ago
The piece makes sense, but likening the { stupid Arena Man with inaction and no expertise } to a priest was lazy writing. Anyone with any religious background isn’t going to understand your analogy at all (which is based on a certain movie depiction of priests from a religion-hate angle), because contrary, real priests are quite wise and get a lot done for the community.
- javajosh 4y ago
  I suspect the term "priest" was used metaphorically. It describes anyone who assumes the authority of God's Voice. If granted, this authority is absolute, brooks no disagreement. It leaves no room for "pluralism". There is one right, what I say. One wrong, what I say. The priest silences dissent, calls it heresy. Most terrifyingly, if the group agrees that the priest has this authority, then he does. I'm glad there are good priests - I'm sure most of them are fine. But the role itself has a critical flaw. The bloody history of every church demonstrates what happen when men speak for God and are believed. I wish there was a place where kind and caring people could be supported in their efforts to support the community, in general. Because that's the essence of their goodness, not being a priest. IMHO.
  - lo_zamoyski 4y ago
    > But the role itself has a critical flaw. The bloody history of every church demonstrates what happen when men speak for God and are believed. To quote Chesterton, “There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it.” Pluralism is a dogma like any other. The stereotype of bloody religious wars is a tired and melodramatic one. The bloodiest wars were not religious, or I should say, not traditionally religious. Look at the bloody revolutions and wars fought for the sake of liberalism, liberty, republicanism, communism, socialism, and so on. These, too, can be said to be religious wars because man is religious in the broad sense. What he takes to be the highest good becomes the object of his worship and that which orders and organizes the rest of his life. That is why there is no such thing as "neutrality". "Neutrality" is a liberal concept that attempts to establish liberal norms and sensibilities as the One True Way by trying to pass them off as something prior to debate or beyond debate. It's a need trick to attain hegemony. And consider that if a "theocratic" power tried to extinguish your preferred variety of pluralism through peaceful means, and the "pluralistic" camp was unable to resist through peaceful means, is it really that improbable that the latter might resort to violence?
motohagiography 4y ago
I get the authors criticisms of other cults, but he had to dispense with the competence and the real of his arena man strawman first. The whole point of nihilism is you can't argue with it because once you've accepted the burden of proof of arguing against literally, nothing, there's no resolution. It's tedious, and I think in this case the author is yet another intellectual predator trying to mislead the lost and calling it enlightenment. History will remember him as a good critic.
- javajosh 4y ago
  I find a charge of nihilism with no coherent support rather tedious. At worst this is a bad take. Good heavens, why would a nihilist even bother writing such a piece? The author struck me as someone genuinely concerned about a pattern he's seeing in public discourse, a kind of "grand unified theory" of why things feel like they are falling apart. The goal being, I would assume, to remove the people tearing the zeitgeist apart from the public sphere. If anything, the nihilist is you, for disparaging a noble goal.
  - motohagiography 4y ago
    The support is that the author needed to neutralize competence, risk, skin in the game, and the real as a straw man before the rest of his points could be made. That rhetorical neutralization for its own sake, and holding it as equivalent to a positive case is the belief in nothing that I referred to. We can do fancy versions of 'no, you' but the Achillies heel of a lot of critical ideas is that they are in fact, only critics and spectators who don't have any respectable standing for the things they are problematizing, and reconciling that with the actual experience of the man in the arena is the limit on the value of their contribution. My point is, having opinions about the things others actually, physically do, particularly from the perspective of the artifacts of ideology, is arguing from a moral position of weakness. The reason that Breaking Bad meme is so popular is because there is an essential quality to the statement, "we are not the same." The competency of the man in the arena is not something one gets to affect.
    - 4y ago
Apocryphon 4y ago
In my perhaps under-informed and uncharitable impression, Venkatesh Rao always seemed a bit of a rather coldly calculating amateur social theorist. The way he dismisses entire categories of people in his Gervais Principle analysis, which made him viral in the first place, felt mildly sociopathic. So I'm rather surprised that he's labelling Elon Musk here as a "priest in the arena," since most similar blogger types probably embrace Musk's ruthless cost-cutting and preening at Twitter as necessary things that hard men do. I wonder what cult Rao is the priest of.
- istjohn 4y ago
  Maybe you need to reevaluate your opinion of Rao based on your new evidence.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    It’s an additional datapoint, sure. What I would like is actual corroborating or refuting accounts, either way, though.
- rukuu001 4y ago
  He did write a book called "Be Slightly Evil"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
balsam 4y ago
According to eternally recurring themes in myth-legend-history the next one in the sequence is: the engineer/developer/artist in the arena. From the Aesir/Vanir, the Titans/Olympians to the French & Russian revolutions. “The ultimate structure of the myth, then, is that the three estates of Proto-Indo-European society were fused only after a war between the first two against the third...” (The third being not those who engage in (corporate) warfare or (rhetorical) magic, but those who working with concrete stuff (modern day fertility cults)) From the wikipedia article on the aesir-vanir war. For the decentralized subculture, perhaps “the persons above the arena”
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Those above the High Table, so to speak.
istjohn 4y ago
I have to suspend disbelief when I read Rao's sociological theories. They oversimplify and bend things to make reality fit into these elegent intellectual structures, but they are fun to read, and I sometimes gleen novel ways to look at the world. Also, the entire edifice doesn't necessarily need to hold together for his central thesis to be true. I do wonder, though, if he wouldn't come closer to finding the truth if he kept his analysis more grounded, and spent less time playing at building grand theories. It's a neat rhetorical trick to disparage four social trends as cults by suggesting they are all the same phenomenon instead of evaluating each on its own merits, but I wonder if the effect is less to increase the reader's understanding than to simply nudge the reader to take on the same views as the author because the reader is seduced by the order Rao's theories create out of our chaotic reality. It's fun to read in any case.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  It also feels like a cheap way to profit off of contemporary polarization by invoking four incendiary controversies of the day and posturing as one somehow above them all.
- exmadscientist 4y ago
  I often feel like I disagree, sometimes viciously, with the details of his arguments (see: these four particular cults) and especially with the context into which he puts them and thus the resulting conclusions, but I usually also feel like he's hitting on something important and true nonetheless. Guess that's a good reason to still read his articles!
chris_wot 4y ago
What is the "trad cult"?
auggierose 4y ago
Wondered what the acronyms mean, so asked ChatGPT: Given the acronyms DEI, ESG, AI, and trad, what does each stand for? ------------------------ DEI: DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is a term used to describe efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, in education, and in society more broadly. ESG: ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. It is a framework used by investors to evaluate the sustainability and ethical impact of a company before investing in it. AI: AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. It refers to the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation. Trad: "Trad" is a shortened form of "traditional," and is often used to refer to traditional values, beliefs, or practices, particularly within certain subcultures or communities. It is not an acronym, but rather a colloquialism.
barrysteve 4y ago
It's not a very balanced take on the affair. Ascribing the whole concept of a stochastic parrot to one guy and subtly dismissing it, is blatantly unfair. We come up with those interpretations like 'robot parrot' individually and just because one guy wrote an article he is speaking for me? No.
jkingsbery 4y ago
This article is extremely poorly written. The author makes many claims without justifying any of them. To the extent it had a point, the So What of the point gets lost.

70 points by jger15 4y ago

I think the equivalence between these is very weakly argued: The DEI cult is fueled by the genuine issue of social justice The ESG cult is fueled by the genuine issue of climate change The trad cult is fueled by the genuine issue of the meaning crisis The AI safety cult is fueled by the genuine issue of AI regulation For example, ESG seems to largely exist as a cover for not taking substantive actions to decrease carbon emissions since those would be both unprofitable within specific companies and broadly unpopular in most societies. There isn't the same kind of socially cohesive group of proponents as eg AGI x-risk rationalists.

whatgoodisaroad 4y ago
I don't read the post as drawing an equivalence across these four, but I think the two you picked out are actually the most comparable pair. Certainly corporate profit interests have harmed ESG discourse, but the leading AI developers right now are corporations and it's only a short matter of time before whatever legitimate AI risk concerns will get contaminated by profit-protecting PR campaigns.
Apocryphon 4y ago
The entire piece sort of feels like restating the concept of "virtue-signaling" (as a pejorative) in different, and more, words.
defrost 4y ago
Good point and one I came here to make after reading the article. In my experience the DEI and AI safety crowd are mostly sincere in their belief and desires .. leaving aside whether their approaches are sound. By contrast a great many corporate level ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) programs are knowingly cynical in promoting green washing schemes that pay lip service to reducing carbon emissions but don't bear looking into details.

xianshou 4y ago

Excellent summary of how particular social groups lay claim to a dominant, universal, and unimpeachable voice in their chosen domain. One point that I'm surprised the post didn't raise: the notion that such groups are often able to claim authority because "this time is different". In true messianic style, the underlying genuine issue must be framed as both uniquely important and imminently approaching a tipping point. As such it is too urgent for observers to study the issue and form their own views - instead they must defer to the insiders before it is too late. This strategy is all the more dangerous because, at least in the cases of AI and climate change, inaction does imply catastrophe and the consequences to civilization are vast and potentially permanent. When the diagnosis of the problem is perceptive, eloquent, and mostly accurate, people tend to assume the proposed solution must be right as well. The clearest indicator of a priest-in-the-arena, and the associated social movement aimed at institutional capture, is the motte and bailey: implying and advocating for an extreme position, then retreating to a reasonable and harmless one when pressed. (The crisis is coming - put me in control - we must change everything!) "Oh, you misunderstand! I was simply advocating for a sensitive and cautious approach." Usually people back off from the extreme position when writing for public consumption. At least in that regard, the "AI-not-kill-everyoneism" camp is startlingly frank about reading the subtext out loud.

reb 4y ago
I don't know if it's really even reflective of any particular social group, as opposed to a reliable rhetorical maneuver that's just too effective to die out. History is made by people and organizations who use this One Simple Trick™, for better and for worse.

aetherspawn 4y ago

The piece makes sense, but likening the { stupid Arena Man with inaction and no expertise } to a priest was lazy writing. Anyone with any religious background isn’t going to understand your analogy at all (which is based on a certain movie depiction of priests from a religion-hate angle), because contrary, real priests are quite wise and get a lot done for the community.

javajosh 4y ago
I suspect the term "priest" was used metaphorically. It describes anyone who assumes the authority of God's Voice. If granted, this authority is absolute, brooks no disagreement. It leaves no room for "pluralism". There is one right, what I say. One wrong, what I say. The priest silences dissent, calls it heresy. Most terrifyingly, if the group agrees that the priest has this authority, then he does. I'm glad there are good priests - I'm sure most of them are fine. But the role itself has a critical flaw. The bloody history of every church demonstrates what happen when men speak for God and are believed. I wish there was a place where kind and caring people could be supported in their efforts to support the community, in general. Because that's the essence of their goodness, not being a priest. IMHO.
- lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  > But the role itself has a critical flaw. The bloody history of every church demonstrates what happen when men speak for God and are believed. To quote Chesterton, “There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it.” Pluralism is a dogma like any other. The stereotype of bloody religious wars is a tired and melodramatic one. The bloodiest wars were not religious, or I should say, not traditionally religious. Look at the bloody revolutions and wars fought for the sake of liberalism, liberty, republicanism, communism, socialism, and so on. These, too, can be said to be religious wars because man is religious in the broad sense. What he takes to be the highest good becomes the object of his worship and that which orders and organizes the rest of his life. That is why there is no such thing as "neutrality". "Neutrality" is a liberal concept that attempts to establish liberal norms and sensibilities as the One True Way by trying to pass them off as something prior to debate or beyond debate. It's a need trick to attain hegemony. And consider that if a "theocratic" power tried to extinguish your preferred variety of pluralism through peaceful means, and the "pluralistic" camp was unable to resist through peaceful means, is it really that improbable that the latter might resort to violence?

motohagiography 4y ago

I get the authors criticisms of other cults, but he had to dispense with the competence and the real of his arena man strawman first. The whole point of nihilism is you can't argue with it because once you've accepted the burden of proof of arguing against literally, nothing, there's no resolution. It's tedious, and I think in this case the author is yet another intellectual predator trying to mislead the lost and calling it enlightenment. History will remember him as a good critic.

javajosh 4y ago
I find a charge of nihilism with no coherent support rather tedious. At worst this is a bad take. Good heavens, why would a nihilist even bother writing such a piece? The author struck me as someone genuinely concerned about a pattern he's seeing in public discourse, a kind of "grand unified theory" of why things feel like they are falling apart. The goal being, I would assume, to remove the people tearing the zeitgeist apart from the public sphere. If anything, the nihilist is you, for disparaging a noble goal.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  The support is that the author needed to neutralize competence, risk, skin in the game, and the real as a straw man before the rest of his points could be made. That rhetorical neutralization for its own sake, and holding it as equivalent to a positive case is the belief in nothing that I referred to. We can do fancy versions of 'no, you' but the Achillies heel of a lot of critical ideas is that they are in fact, only critics and spectators who don't have any respectable standing for the things they are problematizing, and reconciling that with the actual experience of the man in the arena is the limit on the value of their contribution. My point is, having opinions about the things others actually, physically do, particularly from the perspective of the artifacts of ideology, is arguing from a moral position of weakness. The reason that Breaking Bad meme is so popular is because there is an essential quality to the statement, "we are not the same." The competency of the man in the arena is not something one gets to affect.
  - 4y ago

Apocryphon 4y ago

In my perhaps under-informed and uncharitable impression, Venkatesh Rao always seemed a bit of a rather coldly calculating amateur social theorist. The way he dismisses entire categories of people in his Gervais Principle analysis, which made him viral in the first place, felt mildly sociopathic. So I'm rather surprised that he's labelling Elon Musk here as a "priest in the arena," since most similar blogger types probably embrace Musk's ruthless cost-cutting and preening at Twitter as necessary things that hard men do. I wonder what cult Rao is the priest of.

istjohn 4y ago
Maybe you need to reevaluate your opinion of Rao based on your new evidence.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  It’s an additional datapoint, sure. What I would like is actual corroborating or refuting accounts, either way, though.
rukuu001 4y ago
He did write a book called "Be Slightly Evil"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

balsam 4y ago

According to eternally recurring themes in myth-legend-history the next one in the sequence is: the engineer/developer/artist in the arena. From the Aesir/Vanir, the Titans/Olympians to the French & Russian revolutions. “The ultimate structure of the myth, then, is that the three estates of Proto-Indo-European society were fused only after a war between the first two against the third...” (The third being not those who engage in (corporate) warfare or (rhetorical) magic, but those who working with concrete stuff (modern day fertility cults)) From the wikipedia article on the aesir-vanir war. For the decentralized subculture, perhaps “the persons above the arena”

Apocryphon 4y ago
Those above the High Table, so to speak.

istjohn 4y ago

I have to suspend disbelief when I read Rao's sociological theories. They oversimplify and bend things to make reality fit into these elegent intellectual structures, but they are fun to read, and I sometimes gleen novel ways to look at the world. Also, the entire edifice doesn't necessarily need to hold together for his central thesis to be true. I do wonder, though, if he wouldn't come closer to finding the truth if he kept his analysis more grounded, and spent less time playing at building grand theories. It's a neat rhetorical trick to disparage four social trends as cults by suggesting they are all the same phenomenon instead of evaluating each on its own merits, but I wonder if the effect is less to increase the reader's understanding than to simply nudge the reader to take on the same views as the author because the reader is seduced by the order Rao's theories create out of our chaotic reality. It's fun to read in any case.

Apocryphon 4y ago
It also feels like a cheap way to profit off of contemporary polarization by invoking four incendiary controversies of the day and posturing as one somehow above them all.
exmadscientist 4y ago
I often feel like I disagree, sometimes viciously, with the details of his arguments (see: these four particular cults) and especially with the context into which he puts them and thus the resulting conclusions, but I usually also feel like he's hitting on something important and true nonetheless. Guess that's a good reason to still read his articles!

chris_wot 4y ago

What is the "trad cult"?

auggierose 4y ago

Wondered what the acronyms mean, so asked ChatGPT: Given the acronyms DEI, ESG, AI, and trad, what does each stand for? ------------------------ DEI: DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is a term used to describe efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, in education, and in society more broadly. ESG: ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. It is a framework used by investors to evaluate the sustainability and ethical impact of a company before investing in it. AI: AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. It refers to the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation. Trad: "Trad" is a shortened form of "traditional," and is often used to refer to traditional values, beliefs, or practices, particularly within certain subcultures or communities. It is not an acronym, but rather a colloquialism.

barrysteve 4y ago

It's not a very balanced take on the affair. Ascribing the whole concept of a stochastic parrot to one guy and subtly dismissing it, is blatantly unfair. We come up with those interpretations like 'robot parrot' individually and just because one guy wrote an article he is speaking for me? No.

jkingsbery 4y ago

This article is extremely poorly written. The author makes many claims without justifying any of them. To the extent it had a point, the So What of the point gets lost.