Pasta Marketing, Magic Players, and Political Movements

tl;dr: I propose that we can classify movements into categories based on how their members relate to politics. Some approach politics as a way of achieving goals, and some approach politics as a way of relieving emotional impulses. The first kind of politics, however, is still downstream of some emotional impulse, just an extra step removed, because the impulse has been converted into a concrete goal by passing through a world-model.

Warning, this post contains some discussion of object-level politics, though I have tried to minimise it. I am also going to be trying to inhabit Richard Ngo's political frame a bit more than I normally would, so some parts of his frame with which I disagree, such as the choice of "Woke Left" vs "Tech Left" as the major split, I will leave be.

Richard Ngo says the following on Twitter

RichardMCNgo: Four analogies for a country:

1. The nationalist right views it as a family or community. So applying the same bar to citizens as to outsiders is nonsensical, because the country is of, by, and for its citizens.

2. The tech right views it as a company: you should bring in only the people who will benefit it. But this view is ultimately empty, because it doesn’t tell you what the interests of a country actually are. Hence the tech right (who are usually positive-sum thinkers) keep falling back on zero-sum concepts like “being competitive” or “winning against China” to justify their preferred policies. (Yarvin makes the “country as corporation” analogy particularly explicit.)

3. The tech left views it as a charity. To them, wanting others not to receive what you’re been given is hypocritical. This view is also empty, because it doesn’t tell you where the windfall actually comes from—and once you start to talk about the benefits of culture, ethics, institutions, etc, it becomes clear that citizens (and their ancestors) *built* that windfall rather than just being given it.

4. The woke left views it as a cancer: something that is aggressive and parasitic by its very nature. Countries are inherently violent (in asserting their borders) and exclusionary (of non-citizens) and therefore shouldn’t exist (or at least shouldn’t be allowed to police their borders, which is effectively the same thing). A charitable read is that this is a trauma reaction to the holocaust and colonialism—but regardless, it has become so deeply anti-civilization that it seems descriptively accurate to call it evil and insane. ...

I'm going to ignore most of this and just go off in my own direction. Leaving out the Nationalist Right for now, I think there's an interesting divide between the {Tech Left, Tech Right} cluster, and the {Woke Left} cluster here, and that Richard's model of the Woke Left is wrong because he's missing something.

...but before I can explain that I need to explain Magic The Gathering market research.

...but before that, I need to explain pasta sauce market research.

Tomato Sauce Marketing

This story is somewhat apocryphal, but here we go: back in the 1980s, Campbell's (the sauce guys) hired the psychophysicist (this is a real subdiscipline of psychology) Howard Moskowitz to improve their Prego tomato sauce brand. They just couldn't figure out the right formula, and their taste-testing results were all over the place. Sauces that seemed popular would lose on a taste-test to other sauces.

Moskowitz, allegedly, directed them make a bunch of different sauces, have a panel of testers rate all of them, and then looked at the data.

Turns out that to best serve the market, you want three different sauces: regular, spicy, and extra chunky. In particular, nobody was serving the market for extra chunky sauce. Campbell's filled the chunky sauce market niche, and did very well doing it.

Timmies, Johnnies, and Spikes

Magic The Gathering (the deck-building card game) did something similar. They also found three archetypical clusters of buyers, and, like Campbell's, resolved to serve all three clusters. For MtG, where you buy packs of cards without knowing their exact contents, this means that in each series of cards, there are a few cards geared towards each cluster of buyers.

The easiest one to explain is Spike. Spikes want to win. Spike wants cards which are useful for winning. This makes it quite easy to sell cards to Spike: if a card is good, then Spike wants it. One thing that Spike doesn't like is too much chaos. Spike wants predictability in their deck.

The next archetype is Johnny. Johnny wants to express creativity. A good card for Johnny is one which is kind of weird, but kind of good. Spike wants to win however possible. Johnny wants to win by combining three obscure and seemingly-useless cards in order to something something I don't play MtG.

Finally we get to Timmy. Timmy wants to have fun. Timmy wants to play the biggest, most bombastic card combinations. He enjoys winning, yes, but he'd rather have a few exciting wins than a bunch of boring ones.

I like the following anti-example of an unpopular card to illustrate the point:

Suppose you have a card with the following ability: when summoned, flip a coin. If heads, the card has eight attack, and one defense. If tails, the card has one attack and eight defense.Spike doesn't like this, because it's random and he can't plan around it, so it's not very good. He'd prefer something like "when summoned, pick between one attack/eight defense, and eight attack/one defense."Johnny doesn't like this, because the effect isn't interesting enough to express anything. He'd prefer something like "when summoned, swap the attack and defense of one card on your field".Timmy doesn't like this, because the randomness is too balanced! He'd prefer a fifty-fifty chance of getting eight attack/eight defense, and one attack/one defense.

(I saw part of the above example in a talk somewhere and can't now find it)

To put it succinctly:

• Timmy wants to feel something
• Johnny wants to express something
• Spike wants to win

Back to Politics

Here's a model which (I think) explains a lot of Richard's confusion.

The Tech Left and the Tech Right groups are both engaging with the political machinery of their country as a means towards achieving a goal. The Tech Left have a goal, something like "minimise suffering, maximise flourishing" and they see the American political machinery as one entity which can achieve that. Therefore, they disproportionately support things like foreign aid (which helps people where they are), immigration (which helps people by moving them to the US) as well as domestic policies that benefit existing citizens. Their political actions are then guided by what, under their model, helps them achieve these goals.

Likewise, the Tech Right has some kind of goal: a wealthy nation full of rich people, technological development, and cool stuff. In order for this to happen, they support getting skilled workers to immigrate (and, sometimes, less skilled workers, where this stimulates economic growth), and having less regulation.

I don't think a good model of the Woke Left is that they view nation states as a cancer and actively work to dismantle them. I think a better model is that you are making a kind of error when you consider them as trying to work towards a goal at all.

Some political movements are spikish. They appeal to people who are trying to achieve a goal and want to use politics to do that. Other political movements appeal to some kind of mix of Johnny and Timmy. I'll call them jimmish. jimmish movements appeal to people who want to use politics as an outlet for their emotions. What Richard sees as people on the Woke Left trying to, to paraphrase, destroy nation states as a concept, I see as people using politics as a direct outlet for the emotions they feel when they see people taking locally horrible actions.

Where Do We Get The Goals?

Of course, the goals of movements like the Tech Left and Tech Right don't come from nowhere. Most saliently, the Tech Left have built their altruistic goals from similar empathetic impulses as the ones from which the Woke Left have built theirs.

For any particular impulse, we can have a jimmish movement which directs that impulse towards politics-as-outlet. There might also be various spikish movements, which first use some kind of world-model to transmute that impulse into a goal, and then approach politics as a means towards that goal.

One rule of thumb is that spikish movements have a terrible track record of standing up to the jimmish movements which have grown from the same parent impulse. I suspect that this comes from a kind of internal sane-washing bias: we empathise with our jimmish counterparts, and project our reasonable (to ourselves) world-model-based action modes onto them.

The Second Transmutation

The above transmutation, of impulses into goals, makes sense. But there's a stranger transmutation that can happen. Sometimes, jimmish movements become highly strategic, towards an awful, awful version of a goal. Think "Environmentalists protest nuclear power" level bad. The environmentalists in question are really quite good at making sure we never get nuclear power, so they must have some kind of functioning world-model, but that world-model never lets them see that their own goal runs directly counter to their own impulses.

I don't quite know how this happens, but I can hazard a guess:

1. Your movement spews random impulsive outputs in all directions
2. Most of it does nothing
3. Occasionally, your impulses hit a weak spot in the world, and the world moves
4. This, on a lower level than the impulse itself, reinforces your movement towards spewing in that direction, because you satisfied the impulse.
5. Over time, the reinforcement towards satisfying the impulse turns your movement into a highly optimised machine for satisfying it's own impulse
6. Movements that do this well are better able to attract jimmish types

I guess this is like how, if you're lonely, you might transmute that into a plan to make friends, or you might transmute it into a set of behaviours which lead you to develop a parasocial relationship with a TikTok star and spend six hours a day online, which in fact hampers your ability to make friends.

Back To Ngo

I suspect that the most important split in organised political movements is whether they've performed the first transmutation, and turned their impulses into a plan to achieve an objective, thus appealing to spikish types, or performed the second transmutation, and become a machine for satisfying impulses directly, thus appealing to jimmish types.

There's a second set of questions as to i) whether you share the values implied by the impulses, and ii) whether you think the world-model of a spikish movement is good.

If I have to do some slightly unfair psychologising:

I think Ngo is a spikish type, and he has some reasonable impulses surrounding how a country should be organised. I think, like a lot of spikish types, he has a massive blind spot around the jimmish movement with those same impulses. I think this causes him to be biased towards Nationalist Right movements, despite those movements being, very often, highly jimmish and ineffective at their goals.

Coda: How Do You Tell If You're Jimmish?

I don't really know. There might be an internal feeling which corresponds to jimmish behaviour, and I can hazard something of a guess, but it's just a guess: I think that having a "hot" or "busy" mental state corresponds with jimmish impulses. That's it.

Coda 2: Are All Emotional Impulses Bad?

Probably not. I think, once you've verified that your feelings are rational, and you're really in a spikish way, you should try and really feel those impulses about the cause again. This is something that (IMO) EAs have done pretty well with on the global health front. I've met several people who really do seem to feel what $4000 per human life means.