When the bigots are better people than you

Russell conjugated vice signaling as overton preservation (NOT CLICKBAIT)

Every now and again I see some variation of this meme

There’s an element of truth to it. You can find this in abundance here on Substack:

As the saying goes, a lot of online bigots don’t even care about your background, just as long as you’re a bigot yourself.

Jason Pargin expands on this phenomenon here, providing an anecdote where he mentions that his most racist friend had an extremely diverse social circle. He adds that it’s a well understood phenomenon where people abstractly pretend to take up all these social causes when they are actually quite horrible in daily life, but we don’t really understand the reverse phenomenon where people go out of their way to be rancid in their vibes, but are nevertheless always helping out.

So what’s happening here? I think the answer is pretty simple. This is a textbook definition of…

Russell conjugated vice signaling as Overton preservation

What? You want me to explain what that means? Fine.

It’s probably best to illustrate as an example.

Let’s take one of the more spicy opinions that I hold: I believe in eugenics.

Which is to say, I believe that women should have the right to take the pill, and that people shouldn’t have incest babies between genetic relationships closer than second cousins.

“What? None of that is eugenics,” some of you might be tempted to reply.

Yes it is. Diana Fleischman has an excellent article which expands on the subject here.

“Yeah, but that’s not what most people mean when they speak of eugenics. Usually it’s about Nazis and stuff.”

So here’s my reply to that: Cool. I guess I’m a Nazi.

The point is this

In the above scenario I can either do one of two things:

1. First, I can get into a definitional rabbit hole as to what exactly constitutes eugenics, and what sorts of beliefs align me with Nazism, OR

2. I can preemptively accept the worst possible label for any of my ideas

With option two, I have to swallow the fact that people are going to associate my opinions with the worst possible connotation, but if I already factor that in, then it means I get to move on to the part where this hypothetical interlocutor has to deal with the actual substance of what I’m saying, rather than the connotations around it.

For example, I can now add on some of my additional thoughts regarding eugenics. For example:

1. I think that we should strongly dissuade two people with down syndrome and other highly inheritable mental defects from having children (although I continue to remain unsure to what degree this should be ratified into law)

2. I’m dubious whether hockey and tennis actually have the best athletes in the sport right now, considering the lack of black guys.

3. I think most of the dating app algorithms are just artificial selection with extra steps

I’m not sure how controversial these opinions actually are — I would assume the first one is probably the most controversial. Nevertheless, this opens up the accusation of being a Nazi.

But yes, we’ve already established that. I am a Nazi, and I started the holocaust. Now tell me why I’m wrong. You might indeed have a good argument as to why I’m wrong, but at this point you actually have to make that argument instead of going “big yikes! not a good look bro.”

In other words…

I have successfully performed: Russell conjugated vice signaling for the purposes of preserving the Overton window

So now let’s understand that word salad.

A Russell conjugation is just a fancy way of framing the connotation of a given topic:

• For example, depending on your personal politics, one group of people is likely to describe an event as “aborting of fetus” while the other would use the description of “terminating an unborn child”

• Or, to use a previous example, Americans living abroad are ex-pats while people who come to America are immigrants.

• And of course, companies never “fire” anybody. No, there are layoffs, streamlining, or otherwise finding labor efficiencies.

So when you’re in these conversations, instead of getting defensive, you can just go the other way and immediately adopt the worst possible Russell conjugation for whatever it is you’re talking about. (Yes I am a Nazi eugenicist).

Why would you do this?

Simple, vice signaling — the opposite of virtue signaling.

Take the anti-gay priest who gets found out that he’s secretly blowing other guys behind the Denny’s parking lot. Why is it so satisfying to find out that he’s gay? Because his job is to virtue signal, to imply that he is more virtuous than the rest of us — and yet he himself is a hypocrite.

When you signal your vice, however, everything is already out on the table. If you preemptively admit that you blow guys for cocaine, then it’s not exactly a scandal when someone catches you blowing a guy for cocaine.

Liberals hate hearing this, but this is something that T Dawg is a master of, and one of the reasons why their “this is not normal” rhetoric falls on deaf ears for a large percentage of the population.

Signal your vice, bypass the connotation, and nothing sticks. It’s amazing how he’s been pulling the same shtick for 12 years and the mainstream outlets simply cannot adapt.

OK, so we Russell conjugated to signal our vice. What’s this about Overton preservation?

The Overton window represents the range of acceptable discussion subjects. That is to say, some boundary condition beyond which people find a subject to be naturally offensive to their sensibilities.

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Allow me to go on two nerd tangents.

The first is that we shouldn’t consider the Overton window to be a uni-dimensional axis; rather, we should take people’s personal Overton windows as some sort of high dimensional vector, and then the overall Overton window for cultures would be some sort of cluster of all of the different vectors in this high dimensional space.

The second tangent is that the populist backlash that we’re seeing right now is largely due to the mismatch between the Overton window of the elitist cluster and the Overton window of the general population. Not necessarily because the Clusters are different, but rather because the elitist cluster tends to have a smaller average residual.

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Stepping back for a second, what’s the main purpose of pointing a finger at someone and calling them a Nazi or fascist? The vast majority of the time it’s used as a way for someone to disengage with concepts or ideas that fall outside of their personal Overton window. Of course, they don’t say it like that, they simply say that it’s offensive language, or rude, or “not a good look.”

But we’ve already signaled our vice. “Not a good look” is not a good excuse anymore. We’re already okay with the worst look. And so the Overton window is preserved.

This brings us back to this picture

The supposed “racists” in this meme might say some naughty words, and they might actually have pre-existing stereotypes about groups of people, to varying degrees of accuracy and harmfulness.

But the prevailing sentiment behind the adoption of the label is not necessarily the racism itself. On some subconscious level, many of these people are saying “I have a wide Overton window, even if that window allows for bigoted ideas.”

So coming back to the Pargin video, people will project the worst possible interpretations of themselves (whether it’s by intentional counter signaling, or otherwise some other subconscious process).

1. In some cases, they do this with the knowledge that if you actually got to know them, then it would only raise your opinions of them.

2. Or, in other cases, it’s an extreme prioritization of action over any sort of optics — or in other words, an extreme aversion for optics to dictate those actions.

But of course, I don’t think any of you needed this explanation.

Russell conjugated vice signaling as Overton preservation was pretty self-explanatory, to be honest.