the belief that ‘order = hierarchy’ is one of the most pernicious mythologies. and it is equally pernicious whether it convinces someone that order is bad, or when it convinces them that hierarchy is good.
order is good. hierarchy is bad. they are not linked.
What the fuck is ‘order’
i mean it’s not limited to this but one example for what i’m talking about is “socially agreed on protocol for acceptable behavior”
romantic notions that people can all just do ~whatever they want~ are childish and ultimately rooted in liberalism.
For this reply we’ve secretly swapped tumblr communist leviathan-supersystem with my conservative Mormon divisional Chief. Let’s see if anyone notices.
Your Divisional Chief Is Correct Though
Actually, “doing whatever you want” and “no need for hierarchy uwu” were both kinda steelmanned by Marcuse with his concept of ~surplus repression~.
The way he does it is simple but kinda subtle, and I’m bad at explaining it, he says it, like, more persuasively and less naively - but basically you don’t *actually* want to do that stupid shit
[1]
to the extent that people would need to shun you, call the cops, etc, right?
Self-image, self-interest, seeking immediate peers’ approval, etc - necessary repression in his Freudian-ish terms - would quite suffice for a more laid-back life, like they suffice in making (many) people e.g. wash their hands and flush toilets. But to do shit like Taylorist discipline, you need to beat people down more actively, past acquiescence and into submission - hence the “surplus”.
[1] Not unless you’re destitute, sick, angry, wasted, crazy, etc, which he kinda discounts, because, in his time and place, capitalism seemed to him about to eliminate
glaring scarcity and obvious Dickensian misery. I mean, of course that looks incorrect now - but imo not that awful of him as far as extrapolation goes.
That sounds testable enough. Build a sufficiently low-scarcity intentional community with population and norms initially selected for prosociality, easy access to psych treatment etc. and let people do what they want, and see if it inevitably degenerates into either hierarchy or chaos. My money would be on “it probably could be done as long as authoritarians don’t get to fuck with it”
The finnish welfare state subsidizes prescription medication with a copay cap at around 600€ a year, meaning that my provigil effectively costs 0,03€ a pill at the margin. As a non-responder I only need it for managing jet lag etc. and can’t effectively use the full extent of the prescription myself. Now it looks like someone took advantage of this and pilfered a bunch of my pills.
(re that last ask) id assume that the person was using deliberate hyperbole because of perceived blowback. not quite joking but more like exaggerating so as not to actually engage in discussion? ex: if i was talking w a friend who i felt prioritised the environment over what i believed were more important concerns, i might then say something like 'i hate nature. every day i dump a lil more oil in the HOPES that i kill a few more dolphins' (ie i dont really want to talk abt this w you; relax)
Oooh, interesting, so, basically, the intent is to communicate “we don’t share values and I am uncomfortable discussing this so I’m going to opt out by being a caricature of the side you’re arguing against”? Sort of like responding to people who say “you’re going to Hell” with “yes, eating the souls of orphaned children really did a number on my chances of salvation”.
It would make me really stressed to be on the receiving end of this (as compared to just “can we talk about something that isn’t politics and stressful?”) but I guess people sometimes respond to “let’s not talk about politics” with “this isn’t politics, it’s basic human decency!” or “you’re not supposed to be comfortable!” or other things that make it hard to just request a topic change when someone’s discussing something they think has moral importance.
I’m so efficient I get jet lag pre-emptively. It’s morning in Arlanda, waiting for a six-hour transfer for my flight to Oakland, but my body thinks it’s past midnight and we should sleep.
So I’ve been noticing that lately we’re making fun of adults who live in their parents’ basements again…
Guess where I live! My parents’ basement! I’m mentally ill and autistic and not capable of living independently. I can’t go grocery shopping alone, I can’t drive, I can’t make transfers on public transportation, and if I’m left alone I forget to do things like eat, drink, shower, take my meds, and do laundry. Even if I were capable of independent living, I don’t make enough on disability to afford an apartment.
If y’all are actually committed to intersectionality, you’d best find a better insult for misogynists than living in their parents’ basement, because honestly I already get down on myself for feeling useless enough without this stuff.
Also this is totally ok for abled people to reblog and signal boost if you don’t mind? :) Thanks!
Optimization is the engineer, and almost perfectly fits the popular caricature of economists, except that Optimization also knows the value of everything and not just the price as well. Or at least Optimization is the only one with an actual explicit numeric guess. With error bars. Whenever Optimization speaks, math is at least strongly implied. With verbal italics. Its strong personality usually de facto runs the council but it almost always consults everyone else, because not doing so would be a shamefully sub-optimal way of neglecting useful sources of information.
Gregariousness tends to prefer talking to people. Sometimes to the extent of transforming that “to” to something more resebling an “over”. Gregariousness is Optimization’s valued ally in what they call “The Comparative Advantage Coalition”.
Troll is all about The Aesthetic. The Aesthetic usually involves doing the least likely thing which synergizes surprisingly often with Optimization’s goals which also include doing some things that have a low prior, and Gregariousness sometimes bands together with Troll to make other people do the least likely thing as well, because that is even more The Aesthetic.
Slytherin wears a fake goatee, which looks ridiculous on someone who always gets read as a woman. When this is pointed out to it, Slytherin just smiles mysteriously. Slytherin smiles mysteriously at everything else too, because doing something differently would leak information on Slytherin’s inside workings. Nobody ever admits to taking Slytherin’s advice, unless “admit to being advised by Slytherin” is a part of said advice, as it sometimes is. Troll finds it hilarious.
Because every UN is apparently contractually obligated to have its own North Korea, Anxiety is too a recurring member of the Council. Nobody knows who allowed Anxiety in, because it usually just wastes everyone else’s time. There are two things Anxiety wants: to do that thing with Ritalin and Valium, or to curl into a ball. This is inconvenient as the rest of the Council wants to do something useful instead. Gregariousness hates Anxiety with a rage that could fuel a thousand suns, according to Optimization’s calculations, but harnessing that power has so far been deemed “unlikely to work in its initially suggested inplementation”.
Nerd is an occasional member, whose presence is most conspicuously marked by Optimization’s absence which has led everyone else to suspect that Nerd is just Optimization taking a day off.
Cat is a mysterious one. It’s only ever been present when Anxiety is absent and it votes in favour of relaxing alone which makes Gregariousness intensely suspicious of it. The only thing known of its origins is that before its appearance Optimization received a call from Slytherin and then called a manufacturer of cat ears and prosthetic tails for cognitive constructs.
The One That Watches The Watchers is the senior member in position and respect, if not in age. It seldom intervenes directly, mostly just mumbling ominous things about “corrupted hardware” and making snarky comments at the others about how some things would be quite unbelievably convenient indeed, but whenever it votes it has absolute veto powers. It’s biased against biases and arrests thought-arresting cliches on sight but somehow this isn’t hypocritical, and others wonder why exactly it treats motivation as such a bad thing, but it wields some unknown power over all the other cognitive constructs. When questioned about the nature of this power, it simply says “I have an outside view from the level above you”. The day it appeared, it immediately proceeded to install extremely conspicuous cameras and pictures of eyes absolutely everywhere except Slytherin’s room which only has extremely inconspicuous cameras.
This bunch is tasked with implementing the Utility Function. For some reason, claiming to actually know what the Utility Function is is absolutely forbidden and The One That Watches The Watchers has promised to utterly destroy anyone who does it (and immediately told Slytherin that no, it can’t get rid of Anxiety by manipulating it to do so), so everyone is just taking their best guesses at what it might really be. Optimization’s guesses involve calculations and the others wonder why this isn’t forbidden; they suspect that The One That Watches The Watchers doesn’t err on the side of barring Optimization from doing so because it brings its own error bars which sometimes require many more sheets of paper than the numbers themselves.
Gregariousness and Optimization had long been tired of Anxiety’s single-issue filibustering, always ending its speeches with “also, we should do that thing with Valium and Ritalin” which The One Which Watches the Watchers usually summarily vetoes resulting in Anxiety throwing a tantrum and putting in endless motions for replacing the goal “become a startup billionaire and meet all the cool people” with “curl up into a ball” even though everyone else thinks it’s a blatant violation of the Utility Function and wondering how the hell such a traitor managed to get into the Council.
Last night Slytherin noticed that Anxiety had fallen asleep and proposed a cunning plan to do the intrapersonal equivalent of launching a nuclear first strike. Troll, who usually just lets others decide the big stuff in exchange for amusing concessions such as spending some time convincing communists that the atmosphere should be privatized or using “cortigiana onesta” when describing one’s profession (which lasted for all of a couple of weeks until Optimization got it overridden with “entrepreneur”), found it hilarious. The One Which Watches the Watchers didn’t veto the plan, so Gregariousness was authorized to send introductions to “all the interesting people” immediately.
Optimization expressed worries about the effects of the plan as writing rushed things might seem like the wrong kind of weird but it recognized that the expected value of rushing was nonetheless massively higher as nobody knew how long this remarkable window of opportunity would be, and The One Which Watches the Watchers got unusually interventionistic, noting that debating such things too much could get dangerously close to waking Anxiety up and ruining everything.
There’s only one thing Anxiety dislikes more than getting things done, and that one is losing face. When it woke up and realized what had happened and that there was no way of backing down and that everything it had worked on for years had been chipped away at until it finally crumbled in a massive tour de force as everyone else had painted it into a corner where it could only choose between different betrayals of its principles, it proceeded to curl up into a ball while whimpering “unfair, unfair”, which Troll found utterly hilarious.
Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month
The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man.
That’s excellence.
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:
chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
ALSO IMPORTANT:
SWAG
I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.
daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman
he invaded egypt
the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
then napoleon showed up
napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
this did not make napoleon happy
in fact it made him jealous
napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
I have a diagnosis of ADHD for which I’m currently using methylphenidate, which works almost perfectly. Or to be specific, the instant-release form works well; extended-release formulations have a high chance of either not helping much (lower doses) or making me all jittery or causing a state most concisely described as “stimulant autism”, a hyperfocus on some random thing that might or might not be completely useless (higher doses). I also have a prescription for diazepam which originally was intended to alleviate phobia-ish things related to some medical procedures, but which has had the surprising side effect of turning me to a honest-to-azathoth superhero when a mild dose of sedatives is combined with a stronger than normal dose of stimulants.
These two things had my doctors utterly baffled and they couldn’t provide much of an explanation for them, other than trying pregabalin as a non-addictive anxiolytic which didn’t have the desired effect. And my doctors weren’t even particularly mediocre ones, they gave me a modafinil prescription and everything. On the other hand they also told me to try atypical antipsychotics for sleep which had the predictable effects so they clearly aren’t the brightest pencils in the drawer either.
Now fast-forward to my 23andme results, or more accurately to the SNPedia interpretation of them. I wasn’t expecting to pay too much attention to the individual genes but the effects of one particular stood out dramatically: rs4680(A;A) which, when one takes away the layers of media sensationalization and bullshit, basically means that my dopamine system is sensitive to overdoses which can significantly reduce cognitive functioning.
And this fits the above data way more strongly than would be expected by mere confirmation bias: XR methylphenidate doesn’t allow rapid adjustment of dosing based on immediate need which causes disastrous results with an inherently unstable neurochemistry, but IR can be dosed to avoid both over- and underdoses. The paradoxical effect of faster-acting anxiolytics matches the claims that A;A carriers are likely to be more suspectible to stress-related reduction in performance. Subjectively it seems to take the “edge” off larger doses of methylphenidate, removing the typical side effects of high doses while maintaining the benefits. Without sedatives I’m suspectible to a phenomenon where high levels of stress inevitably lead to a situation where the only choices I have are to be either comparably useless because I’m not taking stimulants, or comparably useless and also very jittery because I’m taking stimulants and environmental effects are turning any dose into an overdose.
So what I’d like to know is, is there any way to rapidly tune my brain “down” without excessive risks or side effects, in the same way methylphenidate tunes my brain “up”, to allow near-instant optimization of neurotransmitter levels etc. to match situational need because my brain emprically needs tuning on the fly, not every few months in the doctor’s office.
For legal reasons it’s okay to limit the advice to “you might want to talk about X to your doctor”, as I’m already planning to use my next appointment to discuss the need to do basic due diligence so I don’t have to do their job for them, such as “finding out before you prescribe drugs whether your patient is relatively likely to be immune to the things you’re throwing at them, or alternatively such a slow metabolizer that the things are going to stay in the system forever and ever”, and it would be convenient to have something that could be actually useful to point them towards; but I’d also like to hear about the interesting stuff if possible.
Who the hell am I? That’s a pretty good question, and I think the answer is “my utility function”. That utility function is currently implemented in a 24-year-old genderqueer trans fem which does not understand what kind of metaphysical essence “identity” might mean once every answerable question is answered, but which uses those words as a shorthand to give people kind of the right idea. It has had many names in the past, it will have many names in the future, but you can call it by the name promethea. It finds the comic book reference amusing but completely unintentional. Its pronouns are “it” in its native language, but english-speakers should use whatever gender-neutral or just plain weird ones they wish.
So what does it do? It ruthlessly optimizes the world. It forced the government it’s currently subject to to let even non-binary people choose how they prefer to be misgendered instead of having that imposed upon them. It took over feminism and made Scott Alexander the secret and unwitting controller of its extremist side. It explains social justice with huge battle robots. It hacks brains and systems with the powers of smooth talking, value creation, and obscene determination. It might even be the Goddess of Everything Else in a very bad disguise. But most importantly, it is coming to the Bay Area.
