Published on July 14, 2025 8:14 PM GMT
Short Post: I want to get the idea out.
I have written in the past about a type of intellectual distraction I call "Attention Trolls". The name follows the idea behind online trolls and concern trolling. Attention Trolls are distractions that lead one astray by wasting their time and attention on irrelevant matters.
The Supreme Values
A major Attention Troll that I care about is ideologies. Ideologies waste so much time and attention.
It always follows the same pattern:
- Focus on a narrow slice of human values.Declare these values Supreme, and that the others don't matter / don't exist.Show that everything can be explained in terms of the Supreme Values.
The last step is easy because everything is connected to everything. All major world problems involve all values.
Looking at Climate Change, one can see in it a proof of: capitalism's inherent contradictions, the lack of strong nations that once could take decisive actions, a failure to develop technologies fast enough to develop CO2 capture, too many non-sensical regulations preventing the use of nuclear energy that all markets would naturally prefer, etc.
Sadly, this leads to endless arguments. The world is complex, and different people can see different slices of it. But ideological discourse discourage proper synthesis by denying that other points of view also capture a meaningful aspect of reality.
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The Three Ideologues
I have talked a while ago about the Ideological Spiral, a dynamic that leads to people becoming more and more extreme in their ideological beliefs.
Similarly, I have found it practical to distinguish supporters of an ideology based on how they deal with the limitations of their ideologies. As ideologies focus on a narrow slice of the world, they are missing a lot, and how someone deals with this is very informative.
1. The Naive Supporter
I have found that by mass, most supporters of an ideology are just very naive. They don't even see the limits of their ideology.
Most libertarians have not seriously considered negative externalities, the rarity of informed consent or how economic power concentration reliably leads to governmental corruption.
Most communists have not seriously considered the utility of markets as a tool, and the strength of the necessity for a field-tested replacement (not a philosophical essay or a report about a small tribe) should one forego them.
I find it largely useless to proactively engage with naive supporters. That they are naive about their own ideology is a sign that they don't care that much about the subject matter.
I don't expect I have much to learn from them, and except if they explicitly want to learn from my opinions, I will politely not bother engaging.
2. The Pill Swallower
They have swallowed the proverbial bitter pill. They have embraced the limits of their ideologies and wallow in them.
They are the negative utilitarians that are for the extinction of humanity. They are the degrowthers against having children. They are the accelerationists that are for replacing the existence of humans with that of machines as fast as possible. They are the communists for the violent revolution and the killing of the bourgeoisie.
What they have in common is that when they have to decide between their ideologies and humanity, they pick their ideologies.
They can be more or less extreme. They might merely endorse actions that will directly lead to deaths for ideological purity. They might screw over people as long as it satisfies a technical definition of consent.
Lately, I mainly engage with pill swallowers by reminding them that they can just opt to care for all human values. They have spiraled down, they have nexused, they have lost the plot for so long that they can only conceive of human values through the lens of their ideology.
I have met quite a few utilitarians who can only conceive of human values through utility functions, and libertarians who justified the morality of every action and policy in terms of consent and freedom.
I believe the best thing to do with them is to explain that they can just escape the box.
3. The Engineer
The Engineer has acknowledged the limits of their ideology, and is trying to design a way to make it work with the rest of human values.
The Engineer is rare, so it might be easier to just point at an example. The most recent example of The Engineer is Vitalik's d/acc. Vitalik is a techno-libertarian. Yet, he understands the risks that come from dangerous technologies (like AI) and from strong power differentials.
His synthesis is to try to engineer a techno-libertarian paradise in a way that doesn't annihilate the rest of human values. This is the point of d/acc, a way to race for technologies that differentially favour individuals' resilience from harms as opposed to blind accelerationism.
I feel conflicted about The Engineer.
On one hand, historically, humanity progressed a lot thanks to Engineers trying to implement their ideological ideals in a non-totalitarian way, and having society integrate their work.
On the other hand, we can clearly do better. Why waste our time trying to repair ideologies when we can just directly work on the hard problem of achieving human values in their entirety? We have limited time and attention, it seems terribly inefficient to get tunnel visioned on overly specific approaches.
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To a large extent, this waste of time caused by an intellectual distraction echoes my concerns about Academic Science.
Researchers too often waste time on their specific restricted interests, as opposed to the most important problems of their fields. Still, their approach does somewhat work. And I do learn a lot from talking to researchers and Ideological Engineers.
But we can clearly do better. We don't need to go through these intellectual hoops.
Conclusion
This is a common conclusion of mine, that ideologies are too slow and that we can do better than them when dealing with things that matter.
I have more to say about this topic, and I will!
On this, cheers, and have a nice day :)
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