I think some currents of contemporary left-wing thought are best understood as secular people craving the shared sense of moral purity we traditionally got from religion. Most recent example: taboos against AI use.

@binarybits If you can believe that, you can dismiss the views and concerns of... and tens of thousands of others. Very handy to be able to dispose of so many thoughtful arguments and observations with a simple projection.

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@binarybits @TaylorLorenz or we don’t want to poison people and the planet with data centers…

@binarybits Is AI use really becoming taboo on the left? I haven’t seen many takes that using AI is morally wrong in and of itself. Certain use cases, yes - deepfake porn, misrepresenting AI-generated art as your own, etc. - but not a broad moral objection to all uses.

@binarybits @jbarro I’ve been banging this drum for a while. Politics is a replacement for religion for people who want what you described & are turned off by the supernatural aspects of religion and hate the passages that don’t square with modern morality (ie anti gay passages)

@binarybits Close. The human species is inherently tribal, dogmatic, religious. It's in our herd DNA. This is the human baseline. Much like a power vacuum, a person lacking religion will unconsciously seek to fill that vacuum, because their brain is signaling an unmet need.

@binarybits The taboo structure follows the same pattern as previous tech moral panics - calculators in math class, Wikipedia in academia. The objection is rarely about the tool itself but about maintaining the effort-as-virtue framework that existing institutions were built around.

@binarybits the same thing can be said more precisely of the right. what the left seeks is to build a sense, or rather many senses of community. AI destroys several of them: shared trust, shared meaning in and beyond education, human interaction. taboos, as you know, are not all encompassing

@binarybits In my experience, when someone online tells you that you're going to hell, they're more likely to be a leftist than an actual Christian. There definitely are crazy Christians on this site, but they don't seem to invoke hell nearly as much as leftists.

@binarybits Lots of people want to use AI, but nobody wants to read that shit.

@binarybits Yes, which is why the most dogmatic left wingers are often former Christians seeking to apply Abrahamic judgement on new forms of heterodoxy

@binarybits I think I'd expand that to craving a tribal sense of community or kinship prior to religion but I would mostly agree. This also happens on the right. Nevertheless there are certain justifications for taboos against AI use, namely that it damages your brain after using it too much

@binarybits "taboos against AI use" = Autoretardation. Who cares if they disempower themselves, it will reduce the amount of harm they can do.

@binarybits AI is marketing hype. Has always been so throughout its history. LLMs aren't even AI. Nothing to do with moral purity.

@binarybits Taboos against bad AI use can come from either rational grounds or religious/pseudo-religious grounds, just like taboos about stealing.

There's a long history of people using the pretense of religion to get others to do what they want. Or not even what they want, they just liked having the power to tell people what to do and made up increasingly restrictive rules because they could. It seems likely that those same kinds of people, and those same desires for control, exist now in non-secular communities too.

@binarybits let me sin with my GPUs in peace

@binarybits You mean as in Dune? Written by Frank Herbert, who was a conservative

@binarybits @jbarro Precisely because the rigidity, and consequent legibility, facilitated the felt participation in a meaning-providing cultural worldview.

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@binarybits Religion and (small-p) puritanism are different things, Tim. It is not only possible but quite common to live in line with one’s faith without imposing it on others. And moral panics, such as they are, have existed with and without religion, and do not indicate a craving for it.

@binarybits The taboo against having someone else do work and then passing it off as yours long predates the AI era.

@binarybits it may just be that I'm a hardcore atheist and pro-LLM coding assistants (at least for those ones I find it uncomplicated) while many friends are very anti-AI but this feels distant to me. would you predict left wing, religious people are less anti-AI then?

@binarybits @jessesingal Yes, we should embrace useless trash that dumbs us down and tell us to k1ll ourselves.

@binarybits @jessesingal Traditional Christianity was a bulwark from human nature’s desire to self destruct. Liberalism isolated people and left them unaware of that desire. Leftism walks people directly into that self destruction by justifying it and misery loves company.

@binarybits Noticed the same thing hottakes.space/p/leftism-as-r…

@binarybits Lol no. I do not get a sense of moral purity from finding much of the world to be a right-wing hellhole. I get horribly irritated. If my politics were about self-interest, I'd choose to be invested in the status quo.

@binarybits x.com/Playerinthgame…