promethea.incorporated

h3lldalg0:

theunitofcaring:

i’m just so happy like - the GiveDirectly people have a really impressive track record in terms of turning money into results, being super transparent, publishing literally all of the data they collect on their website for people to look at….they even do stuff like randomly sample the population they serve for the stories they put up on their website, instead of trawling for the most inspirational ones

they preregister their studies

my sacred values are autonomy and empiricism and GiveDirectly is so deeply committed to both of them

if universal basic income works, this is how we’ll know. if it doesn’t, this is how we’ll figure out why. 

This makes me incredibly happy.  :D

In which promethea fanbies GiveDirectly even harder

grugq:

The statement “I’ve nothing to hide” is a clear and simple statement of privilege. It says that one is currently totally in line with existing culture power structures, that one is not a minority, or marginalized, or being sought by security forces. Privileged individuals who have no fear of persecution by cultural power structures are usually content to conduct their affairs in the open. These people have a moral obligation to use their privilege to help those who’re marginalized and in the minority, use secure services, encryption and so on to provide cover traffic for the rest.

theunitofcaring:

if your reaction to someone saying “what’s a math topic I should get experts to explain to me in this format, to test whether the format is useful for explaining math?” is “oh my god keep rationalists away from math fucking forever.” then I think you are doing something wrong.

It’s sort of the same objection I had to that post a few days ago about essay editing. If you think someone’s approach to learning is counterproductive, you can make suggestions or you can ignore them. I do not think it’s appropriate to laugh at them, declare that they deserve to fail, or tell them to stop trying because they don’t deserve success and them touching your Serious Field taints it somehow.

Which is exactly what happened when someone says “for the first test of our explanatory format, it’d be best to test with a concept that is relatively not homework-intensive”: people go “rationalists need to stop talking about math altogether” and “you’re not mature enough…” and “Okay, nevermind, keep rationalists away from math fucking forever”.

I don’t think this is because all math concepts require the same amount of homework to grasp, and I definitely don’t think it’s because anyone is harmed by asking “is there a topic you could teach me that is not homework-intensive?” I think it is because people regard homework as virtuous, and asking this question is saying “I don’t want to work hard”, and not working hard is contemptible, so the question must be responded to with contempt. That’s how you get the otherwise baffling phenomenon of “hey, what’s a good relatively self-contained math concept to test our explanatory format” getting a response of “you don’t deserve to be allowed near math!”

But, like, it’s okay to both be proud of the work you put in to understand something and to be decent to people who aren’t willing to do that work, or can’t, or are in the early stages of a project and want to test it on something simple and maybe build up to the hard stuff. Telling people who ask questions that the fact they’d ask proves they’re not hardworking enough to deserve to understand your subject is cruel. You don’t have to keep people away from math. They aren’t going to accidentally put the numbers back in the wrong order while you’re not looking. If someone asks a question that they’d know was stupid if they knew more, you can tell them more or you can ignore them. You really, seriously, don’t have to point and laugh.

ilzolende:

consulo-cuniculos:

ilzolende:

thekerbalkraken:

nathanielbuildsatesseract:

thekerbalkraken:

ilzolende:

araxoolie:

Neutrality is not enlightenment. It is a position only accessible to those for whom the stakes are very low, who want to feel superior to those who have no choice but to care.

If you’re opposed to neutrality, I am curious about the following:

Catalonian and Basque separatism: Good or bad?

Which is better: The Danish state church or the Finnish state church?

What is the appropriate way for Liechtenstein to respond to accidental Swiss invasions?

Are the anti-censorship attitudes that I have been told are common in the Caribbean good or bad, given that if they exist, they almost certainly include support of playing music calling for extreme homophobic violence?

If “no”, what’s the appropriate action to take, if any?

(I think neutrality is okay, because it’s hard to be right about everything, so people shouldn’t be pressured to display more confidence than they have in their opinions.)

A Jewish Holocaust survivor named Yehuda Bauer once said “ Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.“

Let me get this straight: it’s better to do evil than to realize that rushing in without a clue (particularly to issues that one has no a priori reason to believe are important) is not the best idea?

@ilzolende, what’s your take on this?

Well, while it is bad to be a perpetrator, it is better than just being a bystander and letting it happen. If you’re a bystander, you don’t really get involved with it one way or another. For example in the Holocaust, if you were a bystander, you were no better than being an oppressor. Of course, there were still people who helped, such as the Denmark people. The way I think of it is, if you’re COMPLETELY NEUTRAL, you don’t talk about what’s going on, you’re not helping anyone. You’re not bringing any sort of attention to the problem by being a bystander. If you’re a perpetrator, I can see how you could bring attention to the issue. It’s just how our minds perceive the message.

…

“For example in the Holocaust, if you were a bystander, you were no better than being an oppressor.”

I am parsing “bystanders are not better than oppressors” as equivalent to “oppressors are not worse than bystanders”. (If you endorse the first statement but not the second statement, I’d sincerely appreciate your reasoning for doing so, because I can’t model it.)

I disagree with [my parsing of] this statement. I take the apparently bold and controversial stance that Nazi war criminals are morally worse than randomly selected German kindergarteners in the early 1940s who may have repeated propaganda slogans or what have you.

Actually murdering real people to “bring attention to [an] issue” is bad. If an issue already involves people dying, another death will probably not generate enough additional attention to be justified. Does “108 people died!” make something sound significantly more important to random people than “107 people died!”? Probably not. And if people aren’t dying, how on earth could killing someone to raise awareness or something possibly be justified? (If you’re talking about perpetrating non-murder harms, then substitute in “had their wallets stolen” or what have you, I still stand by this argument.)

For a second I thought OP was trying to convince me invade Iraq.

#you’re either #with us #or #against us #bitches

“Are you with us or against us?” rarely has a good answer. It’s often a scary question to be asked, too.

“Are you with us or against us?”

“I’m against everyone who ever asks that question.”

thetransintransgenic:

themindislimitless:

clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:

pterocopter:

clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:

Uber and Lyft and this new women only drivers service are all equally bad. I get that people are excited but let me just toss a few concepts out there:

Cab drivers, as employees (when they are employees which is not all the time luckily in pdx we have radio cab) are held to certain standards. If a cab driver harasses you, you can report him.
Cabs have to be ADA compliant.
Cab drivers have to make minimum wage.

There is a REASON cabs are more expensive and that reason, in Oregon at least, is that your cabby is making minimum wage.

This is not true of your uber driver, your Lyft driver, or your fancy new all woman driver but male owned service.
They are abusing the independent contractor system, as strip club owners are! to be falsely competitive in a market place they could never otherwise survive in and they are doing it at the expense of poor, vulnerable people, at the expense of cabbies, and at the expense of every other marginalised and misclassified worker because we are ALL in the same boat.

So no, I’m not excited that some man saw an opportunity to capitalize on the frequency of sexual harassment into making a niche for himself in an already exploitative market.
I’m not excited that he is donating 2% of his profits to charity–this serves the exact same purpose as a pink yoplait top: if you want to do good, do good; don’t disguise your consumerism and liking for a product behind false altruism.
I’m not excited that in a city already drowning in literally tens of thousands of underpaid drivers, there will now be one more.

And if you think women can’t be oppressive, shitty, hate on strippers and sex workers, and otherwise totally unpleasant, you’re dreaming. Especially once these women realise what a ferociously competitive starving market they’ve entered.

You better fucking tip 30%, is all I’m saying. And at that point, you might as well have taken a cab.

Ok wait a second wait a second.  I’m seeing Uber hate on my dash.

First of all, the cab industry (at least in my city) is corrupt as hell.  There are a limited number of cab “permits”, and they are all owned by super rich people who then rent them out to cabbies for outrageous fees.

Cab drivers don’t always take the most direct route, milking you for more money, because they do not make very much money.  The REASON cabs are more expensive is the cab company is taking most of that money and putting it in the pocket of the super rich person, not in the pocket of the driver!

Uber, on the other hand, pays each driver significantly more, so even though you are paying less your uber driver is actually making more.  Uber displays your route right on your phone so you can follow along – and you are agreeing to a certain fee to get to a certain location.

You can report your Uber driver easily, and Uber will take action. Also, riders are asked to rate their driver at the end of the trip.

You receive an email receipt at the end of your Uber ride.

You don’t need to carry cash with Uber, you pay through the app.

Oh, and with Uber Taxi, cab drivers can join Uber and make more money doing it!

The cab industry as it is needs to change.  Uber has created an elegant 21st century solution.  I honestly feel 100% safer riding in an Uber.

I do not speak for the other services - I’ve never used Lyft and only just heard about this service for women.  But Uber is the bomb.

I feel like people keep reading this as a defense of cab companies when all it is is an indictment of uber.

Listen, I get that you like Uber.

But I PROMISE YOU:

Your drivers aren’t making enough to live. They aren’t. And they will continue not making enough to live because the people who are brave enough to sue for employee protections get bought off with settlements that don’t help the rest of the drivers.

So let’s put it this way:

None of your drivers, if you are outside Portland Oregon, are making enough to live, no matter what the service you use, unless it’s a surge night and you’re charged $300 and even THEN, the majority of that money is going to the man who developed the ap.

Stop defending it. It works really well for you, that’s great.

It is not working for the drivers. Trust me. I heard from them constantly. They are BEGGARED, and strategies like the introductions of thousands more into cities that are already flooded only cement the proof that the company doesn’t care about the drivers, it cares about profit.

So if it works for you that’s really great, but stop ignoring the fact that the workers across the board are getting screwed for your cheap ride.

Other points, as someone who doesn’t care much for cab companies but will defend cab workers being able to, well, survive:

• Cab drivers generally don’t own their cabs, but rent them (thus leading, in part, to the massive fees they need to pay). Uber/Lyft don’t provide cars, and the ones they do rent– well, what’s the difference between renting from them versus the cabbie companies?
  
• Cab drivers are largely immigrant and/or working class folk that work as cab drivers full-time and rely on the income. Uber/Lyft drivers don’t work on it full time: they generally have other jobs and are looking to make extra $$$, and in a large city, most of the folk who have cars also have $$$ (hint hint, gentrification).
  
• Uber drivers practice “client poaching” (driving up to someone and going “Uber?” and said person possibly getting into the car before they realize this is not their ride. Not only shitty, but also extremely dangerous esp for women).
• Not sure if they’ve changed it but up until Jan at least, Uber didn’t have a customer service number, and people accidentally calling (and suing) a design company regarding shitty drivers or poachers or whatever it may be and getting nowhere. So no, “Uber will take action” is false, bye.
• Unless the state/city requires it, Uber (idk abt Lyft) cars are not required to undergo safety inspections, and even when required, it is a frighteningly basic “inspection” that consists of another Uber driver coming out to “inspect” the make/model/take pictures of the car and the licence plate, and getting paid $20 for it, a process that takes 30 minutes. (Hullinger). As opposed to cab drivers that, as stated, have to undergo: car/safety inspections, driving screenings, and their cabs abide by ADA regulations. 
• Please trust me when I tell you that you want to make sure your driver can drive well, because taxi driving is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US  (and more so than for cops, but that’s a different convo)
• Uber does not regulate their drivers as much as police them– you know, considering they’re trackable, even when not at work, and generate massive data for the company that folks aren’t compensated for? And no, Uber does not pay drivers “significantly more” and there’s a lot of info about Uber drivers not even making minimum wage. Also they dropped their rates even more recently. (Cassano)
• Not sure why people favour Uber/Lyft over cabbies as ~well their money goes to rich people too~. Yeah. But only cab drivers and cab companies are regulated and have fees applied that Uber/Lyft drivers don’t have to abide by. Tax evasions aren’t very progressive tbqh.
• No really, Uber/Lyft is directly aiding gentrification and it’s hurting people. Here’s an account by a cab driver why you should reconsider ride-share apps and how they aid gentrification.
• Ultimately when it comes down to it, Uber= gentrification and it’s one thing to have to deal with shitty government policies regarding working as a cabbie (which they do, whoa, guess what! many of them are in unions and/or community organizers), but add gentrification, the loss of income, and additional racism and this becomes much worse.  

@socialjusticemunchkin this responds to many of your points and a bunch of other ones and also does yes have some philosophical differences.

I … I think for the most part you were agreeing with at least 70% of the above?

Like I think the main jut of the above comments was specifically against the “sharing economy” which denies that the workers it actively controls are. workers. that they exert control (and thus ought to have responsibilities toward) over. Which I think was the main point of your final paragraph?

Like, in order of what you said emphatically, then going back through the above posts for the points that you mentioned off-hand:

Accountability: This is a fundamental difference you have, whether being held legally accountable is more or less powerful than being held market-based accountable. (Given that, what is your opinion on the ADA and stuff? ‘Cause that seemed to work pretty well, no?…) (I also don’t quite understand why you think that because cabs are held legally accountable they won’t be held accountable by the market, too…)

Surge Pricing: I’ve seen arguments for and against it – I’m not convinced either way, and I also don’t think either of the above people are, on a moral level – but for the purpose of this context, that was only mentioned once in the above two posts, in a single fragment of a sentence, as a PS at the end. It was explicitly not a fundamental part of their argument. (Possibly a good way to handle it is with multiple companies, at least one of which has surge pricing, at least one of which doesn’t, all trying to win brand loyalty? Which… seems much more possible and fair with the multi-taxi-company apps like Way2Ride and Arro, than single-app-per-company stuff like Uber, Lyft, and Chariot.)

Employee vs. no: Uber actually specifically has a system (which they brag about) to create drivers without control over their means of production:
- Rode with a Lyft driver who also drives for Uber. His car is lease-to-own, paid via Uber. If he doesn’t make $350/week, his car won’t start. – sha
‏@shashashasha 6:47 AM - 17 Jan 2016
- http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/04/24/one-uber-drivers-story-how-he-was-trapped-by-auto-loan-program

I don’t know about Lyft, or the new one, but especially for something advertising itself as “Uber but ~Feminist~ in this one specific way”, I seriously don’t have much hope.

I’m pretty sure they would agree with you after only a small discussion about the medallions.

(Frankly, I think I’m a bit frustrated at Uber about this, because wow, you looked at this bleeped-up system and found out how to make a copy of it – without medallions propping it up – so much worse.)

Also, here’s an entire article about how no, Uber drivers are in very few ways their own independent contractors. Comes with a published academic paper and 9 months of collected data. Samples: “Uber’s system enforces blind acceptance of passengers, as drivers are not shown the passenger’s destination or how much they could earn on the fare.” “In order to remain active on the system, drivers must meet an average rating target that hovers around 4.6 out of 5 stars.”

So I think they would agree that there are advantages to not being an “employee” – just that the’re pretty sure Uber deliberately removes most of them.

Unions: Uber, at least, is VERY anti-union. I dunno about Lyft?

Um… okay this post got unfocused and I think I claimed I would keep a consistent argument throughout but I’m not sure I did. I’m ending this now.

Tagged: Uber is EVIL, (And I’m glad we all agree on that fact. And the disagreement is more ‘is their more than a single thing they might have done okay-ly’.).

(Joining the two threads for trackkeepability)

So first of all, Uber is evils georg and I don’t know how bad the situation is with the competitors, other than “less bad” but that’s once again best described as “burying the bar”. I’ve even heard that Uber has an easy time attracting talent because conservative douchebros find the rest of Silicon Valley a bunch of neotenic degenerates who aren’t douchebro-y enough while Uber has a sufficiently respectable and elitist “screw the poor” attitude for them. “Ridesharing” as an idea is excellent and if Uber etc. bust the cartels and then get replaced by better and less abusive alternatives it would probably be the ideal outcome. I don’t oppose fairly maligning things that need to be maligned as long as it’s not used to defend other things that need to be maligned just as well.

And speaking of maligning, that cab driver’s account in huffpost was…pretty much what one’d expect from a working-class cartelmember. Sympathetic, but terrible.

For cabbies to earn a decent living there has to be proper regulation of the industry. Too few cabs and the public isn’t served and too many and drivers can’t make decent money.

If there are “too many” cabs and drivers don’t make decent money, where do the drivers come from? Where do they go if they can’t be cab drivers? Whatever it is, it’s likely to be even worse than being a cab driver who can’t make decent money. (Unless there’s fraud or coercion, which Uber’s financing schemes seem to, unsurprisingly, be very good at. In fact, the financing is exactly as predatory as the medallion cabs’ in Toronto. That thing needs to be stopped with overwhelming force if necessary.)

The article basically says, “we’re poor, and should be allowed to have [disguised welfare]” and I don’t like [disguised welfare]. This would be solved by UBI (I’m starting to keep track of how many times I repeat my standard talking points of “UBI” and “liberalized zoning and better urban planning” (abbr. LZ) because I suspect they are going to come up a lot) so that everyone would make ends meet anyway.

Good jobs are scarce in this city for the working-class and driving a cab is one of those good jobs.

Good jobs are scarce, let’s maintain that scarcity, never mind those who can’t become cab drivers because they can’t get the medallions. Most of the customers are poor so they are effectively subsidized by the few who aren’t. UBI + LZ would help with the one-two of better income and lower housing costs. And unlike a cartel, it would also help those who aren’t cab drivers.

Then we get a broadside of binary politics and applause lights about how there are pros and cons and cons are bad and pros are good and pros must support regulation. As a lel I feel erased and marginalized and oppressed by this discourse, and this pro really needs to check his binary-political privilege. My eyes glazed over because there was no substance.

And then exciting words like gentrification! If 10 000 hipsters really want to move in to where 10 000 poor people live, they really can’t be stopped in any reasonable way. Hipsters are effectively a force of nature, an inevitable calamity, so it’s better that the neighborhood is rebuilt to accommodate 20 000 people so the original residents don’t need to move away just because hipsters move in. LZ, turn rent control into bostadsrett, etc. instead, and try to achieve a mix of classes and races which is the Objectively Correct Way to do cities because it leads to higher social mobility, better services for the poor and black people because they live where the rich and white people live and thus get rich white people services, and because the rich white people have more money they inject it into the local economy (the complaints about staffing bars with non-locals only are perfectly valid though, and I support voluntary initiatives to increase the diversity of workers in hipster bars and would participate if I ran a hipster bar and would pressure bars to participate if such a thing existed and I was a patron of an eligible hipster bar) which is better than poor black people being segregated in separate areas and economies with poor black people only. (If any city suffering from such issues wants to hire me as urban planning czar to experiment with cracking the question of how to replace regular gentrification with this kind of “hybrid gentrification” which could benefit the poor as well, I’m available.)

And then something about unions, and asfdgasfgd the current system is so broken. Right-to-work is bullshit, state-enforced collective bargaining is bullshit, everything in the current labor laws of apparently everywhere is bullshit. Let’s just introduce the UBI and erase most of the labor laws, let workers unionize and negotiate freely, let employers not employ if they disagree, and let someone else outcompete the troglodytes by offering something of actual value to then-inherently-consensual labor because people can just tell the employers to do something anatomically impossible if they don’t make a fair offer. And then something about local politics and “hail regulatory capture!” (total: 3 UBI and 2 LZ)

Okay, back to the rest of it. So Uber is terrible, treats workers like shit, news at eleven. So does the government. Everyone treats poor people like shit, except sometimes other poor people who know what they are dealing with, and I wouldn’t trust regulations a priori as not effectively treating poor people like shit exactly the same. The questions about safety etc. are not exactly lgbtq rights where the state just follows popular opinion and probably is a net negative, and I’m a fan of some things like ADA (or at least parts of it, not familiar with everything) because accessibility is awesome and at least California seemed to have made substantially more progress on that front than Finland, but those things can also be overdone. I don’t know the specifics of ADA requirements so I deliberately avoided commenting on that part.

Sexual assault is where the government obviously should be protecting people, but has proven to be relatively reluctant in practice, which is kind of what I’m referring to with the claim that the markets (broadly interpreted) are what actually deliver the outcomes. Unlike curb cuts and wheelchair ramps, sexual assault is one of those things that are disgustingly open to interpretation, so just banning it doesn’t help much if the actual de facto will to enforce it isn’t there. Cops are often not very cooperative, etc. so the standard tendency is to just sweep stuff under the rug everywhere. If there are actual credible methods for dealing with abuses, and not just a nominal complaint system, then great. But Uber still has the advantage of being inherently more capable of addressing them (because it tracks more data, while hailing a cab from the street is a hail mary in comparison); the same deal with driver safety, as they don’t carry money and riders are less anonymous.

Other regulations obviously sound superficially appealing to many, but my prior is to be skeptical, because often such things seem to devolve into mere barriers to entry with little actual content. At least around here a lot of certifications are basically paying some crony’s company to deliver a specified amount of lessons (which far exceeds the time an effective course would need, and still doesn’t really teach the material half as well) because it managed to lobby such a criterion. And then there’s the fact that there’s no way to avoid all tragedies; I do know that my utopia would have a steady stream of unfortunate fates because the harm from stopping people from having them is too great, and that’s terrible but I don’t pretend I can fix everything YGM. It’s easy to sweep the unfortunate fates under the rug with regulation, and thus we get things like the FDA which prevent spectacular bad things from happening, at the cost of creating far more bad things in a less spectacular form (I wouldn’t necessarily abolish it completely but I’d tone down the strictness a lot and accept that every now and then we’ll get a thalidomide or vioxx as the price of getting important things to the market faster; of course that’s probably impossible in a democracy because the voters would just vote back the regulations as big unspectacular tragedies are more politically viable than smaller spectacular ones, just ask anyone who’s gotten sick from the coal we burn to avoid scary ~nukular powaa~).

And I don’t consider taxpaying necessarily virtuous either; anyone who’s done the GWWC pledge has IMO a carte blanche ethically to do all the tax evasion they want because EA is so much better than the state. Bednets don’t shoot black people. There seems to be a “standard progressive fallacy” that if the tax is nominally paid by the employer it reduces the employer’s profit instead of the workers’ wages, which just isn’t expected in an elastic market; if you slap a tax of $20 on a thing costing $100 which initially is divided 50/50 with the worker and employer, I’d guess the prior for the actual outcome would be more like 40/40 once the market has adjusted, regardless of where it’s hidden. And once again there’s this “a real progressive is a socdem” thing which is really turning me off from progressivism even if I probably agree with many of the values regarding whether poor people should stay poor or not.

The situation with employee vs. contractor vs. fake contractor I agree with, and would definitely prefer to see an actual market instead of this bullshit, but I really think that there should be a better distinction; Uber isn’t evil because it has contractors instead of employees, it’s evil because it lies and calls its employees “contractors”, and this should be addressed properly so that a honest platform for independent workers wouldn’t be saddled with the fallout of re-designating Uber as an employer, because I’m kind of afraid that something along those lines might be a risk.

And surge pricing is very important, and it was called “fucking surge pricing”, so I kind of assumed that the writer of that part disagrees with me. I like flexible prices, I even buy my electricity by the hour (because I can’t buy it by the minute YGM) from Nord Pool Spot. Of course, the actual impact of optimizing my electricity consumption this way isn’t technically “worth it” but my kink is the great chain instead of the party whip (sorry, I simply had to say it) so it’s kind of a hobby and a cheap signaling effort to shift my consumption around the prices because I’m contributing! to! the! market!

Whether Uber is actually worse or just slightly less terrible than traditional cabs when accounting for the totality, not just the drivers (because being in a cartel can definitely be comparatively nice and distorts the data if the people who can’t get a job because of it aren’t accounted for) is not a question I can answer here right now because it would require scrutinizing a lot of data I don’t have. What I can say is that I could totally do better.

To the question in the tags: I do think Uber is doing relatively well (for a certain value of “well”) in many things; the things they claim to be doing sound good on paper and I think the actual problem is the inherent exploitability of a desperate workforce on a shitty market. As long as it exists unscrupulous companies will keep trying to find loopholes for exploiting, and patching the loopholes without addressing the core issues just creates a regulatory hell that leaks constantly and makes legislators and unions play a silly whack-a-mole that ends up whacking a lot of innocent people too. And this is what’s letting Uber get away with being evilness georg and not delivering what it promises, not the lack of enough regulations everywhere.

leighalanna:

clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:

Uber and Lyft and this new women only drivers service are all equally bad. I get that people are excited but let me just toss a few concepts out there:

Cab drivers, as employees (when they are employees which is not all the time luckily in pdx we have radio cab) are held to certain standards. If a cab driver harasses you, you can report him.
Cabs have to be ADA compliant.
Cab drivers have to make minimum wage.

There is a REASON cabs are more expensive and that reason, in Oregon at least, is that your cabby is making minimum wage.

This is not true of your uber driver, your Lyft driver, or your fancy new all woman driver but male owned service.
They are abusing the independent contractor system, as strip club owners are! to be falsely competitive in a market place they could never otherwise survive in and they are doing it at the expense of poor, vulnerable people, at the expense of cabbies, and at the expense of every other marginalised and misclassified worker because we are ALL in the same boat.

So no, I’m not excited that some man saw an opportunity to capitalize on the frequency of sexual harassment into making a niche for himself in an already exploitative market.
I’m not excited that he is donating 2% of his profits to charity–this serves the exact same purpose as a pink yoplait top: if you want to do good, do good; don’t disguise your consumerism and liking for a product behind false altruism.
I’m not excited that in a city already drowning in literally tens of thousands of underpaid drivers, there will now be one more.

And if you think women can’t be oppressive, shitty, hate on strippers and sex workers, and otherwise totally unpleasant, you’re dreaming. Especially once these women realise what a ferociously competitive starving market they’ve entered.

You better fucking tip 30%, is all I’m saying. And at that point, you might as well have taken a cab.

And there ARE alternatives, in more and more places – if you need to hail via your phone or pay with your card you can still support drivers that have to have accessible cars and have unions and are further down the road of creating reasonable working conditions and compensation for their drivers, you can use Way2Ride and Arro and quite a few others at this point, depending on where you are. And they don’t have fucking surge pricing.

Rideshare drivers could be held to the same standards if the rideshare companies wanted (aka. were forced by pressure from the public) to implement proper accountability. Cab companies can ignore reports that don’t have enough proof/social clout to get them in trouble with cops/social media, and at least Uber can reliably check who drove whom from its databases so abuses are inherently more investigable (and that’s why not taking sufficient action when they happen is even more damning).

Surge pricing is the best. I’m totally a fan of surge pricing, speaking as a person who has once hit a 3.1 multiplier. Supply and demand. I find it slightly ironic that a post simultaneously supports higher compensation for drivers and rejects it when it happens in its most natural form. Surge pricing gives the drivers extra compensation, to reward them for their work when their contribution is the most important. In fact, I get a slight joy from paying surge prices because it means that not only is the system working and probably making the waiting times a lot shorter, but also that I am paying the worker the fair price (some terms and conditions apply; “less unfair” is closer to reality) of the moment, not an unfair fixed rate that deprives them of the full value of their work. I ship free markets and economic fairness so hard.

Also, why has nobody mentioned the downsides of being an employee? Control over one’s means of production for example. Driving a cab is materially not that capital-intensive, so of course the System (I’m antropomorphizing it because this is one of the things that makes me angry enough to warrant it even if there probably isn’t such intentional malice involved) creates alternative barriers to entry to establish an owning class that can get free money from others’ work without needing to create any value (or comparable value) themselves. An assembly line worker can’t just save up a bit of cash and start their own factory, so they will remain bound to wage slavery and dependent on the local capitalist, but anyone with a car can start carrying people around unless something is done to stop it.

Enter regulation, to legislatively deprive people of the means of production even when they materially could control them pretty easily.

When one needs a medallion to drive a taxi, and the medallions are artificially scarce and thus expensive as fuck and thus probably owned by companies or rich people instead of the workers, the capitalists don’t need to fear competition. They just send the cops (their cops, it’s always the interests of the powerful that are protected and served first and foremost) to chase down anyone who doesn’t submit to vehicular serfdom in which the non-value-creating rentier class exploits the workers and slaps a little bit of socdem PR like minimum wages on top like a pink yoplait, and if challenged, fills the media with propaganda about how evil it is to only take 20% instead of $100 a day (yes, the taxi capitalists, propped up by the state apparatus of violence and nothing more, make the workers toil the equivalent of one and a half days of minimum wage before they get to keep a single cent to themselves; compared to that pure rent and exploitation, ridesharers’ 20% for something that actually creates value (as a customer, I’m willing to pay slightly more for the convenience etc.) seems downright saintly). When a permit to work costs a million dollars, the industry is inherently controlled by millionaires.

(Incidentally, this is also why I get immensely angry at anyone on the left who ever says the words “licensed brothels” because the rule #1 of communism is you never enclose the commons and licensed legalization is a fucking forcible enclosure act; decriminalization and deregulation is how one does not piss in the cereal of sex workers. Free sex workers are inherently in control of their own means of production, and only violence can take it away so why the fuck do so many leftists want to turn them from independent workers to brothel proletariat ausetdiuesideutoiuuhunao (that’s dvorak for “asdf…”))

As far as unions are concerned, my emotional reaction to them is quite… all over the place. Free unions make my brain go all solidarity! liberty! workers of the world unite! while the instant the state gets involved and enforces collective bargaining my brain does a 180 and starts screaming about leeches! and moochers! and redwashed rentiers! (”right to work” laws are just as terrible; I’m definitely not taking a knee-jerk “pro-business” stance); so I’m not exactly the most impartial observer to comment on them. But I’m not surprised that tomato pickers in Florida (left outside normal labor laws because redwashed rentiers always need a precariat beneath them to exploit) extracted concessions from even Walmart by voluntary organizing, using tactics that would be illegal for corporatist state-sanctioned unions; while stevedores in Finland get super-comfy wages and benefits because they can nuke the economy any time they want and labor regulations prevent them from being replaced with less extortionate and rentseeky laborers (and they still threw a hissy fit and nuked the economy a few years ago because they wanted their employers to pay them an entire years’ wages for zero work if they got laid off, despite being already entitled to 500 days [sic!] of state-mandated income-dependent unemployment insurance only the middle class gets because fuck the poor and precarious).

And obvious disclaimer: Uber is evil anyway. But it’s not evil because it competes with taxi capitalists, it’s evil despite competing with them. The obvious ideal solution is to cut out the middleman and create an independent, worker-owned-and-controlled system for tracking reputation, ensuring safety, processing payments and matching riders to passengers (and having surge pricing! surge pricing is important!), but even ridesharing corporations are actually doing a lot of things right and should be only fairly maligned, instead of unfairly.

wirehead-wannabe:

ozymandias271:

I have come up with a WAY OF MEASURING CUCKS

The gram of our cuck-measuring system is the cuck proper: a small-penised unmanly white man’s white wife has casual sex with a manly large-penised man of a race white nationalists are insecure about, she gets pregnant and he raises the child, and he gets off on it because it is humiliating. This will be rated “1″. 

Things that participate to a degree in the Form of Cuck may now be ranked. For instance, using a sperm donor is about 0.2 cucks; supporting open borders is about 0.6 cucks (points have been subtracted for it being metaphorical). One may easily deduce which man is cucking which man, by carefully assessing which one’s cuck score is higher. Thus, we have settled such thorny issues as “if I’m poly but my husband’s dick is bigger than my boyfriend’s, who am I cucking?” (The husband, unless the boyfriend has spent at least $100 per extra inch on you.)

In rare cases, one may have over one cuck: for instance, if one has sex with the local cult leader one’s husband dislikes and then hangs around in a shirt saying “Harem Member of the Rightful Caliph” in order to annoy him, that would be at least two cucks. However, these extreme circumstances should be left to the experienced cuckologist, because of the danger they may pose to the unwary.

This is good, but I feel like habitual cucking should get more points than a single instance of casual sex.

Okay but a few important questions about cuckness levels that I can’t find the answer for anywhere:

If a trans woman has sex with a neoreactionary’s wife, is it less cuck (because women don’t count) or more cuck (because neoreactionaries see trans women as failed men and thus especially humiliating to be surpassed by)? How does the state and proportion of her genitals factor into this?

All in all, what is the relationship of penis size and cuckness? Does it invert in “non-legitimate” situations; is it extra cuck for a manly big-dicked guy to still fail to keep his wife monogamous, and supercuck if the guy cucking the husband has a micropenis?

If there is an inversion where the big-dicked husband is cucking the poly boyfriend, but the micropenised paramour is cucking the husband, can we construct a situation of exactly zero cucks for any given combination by manipulating the degree of legitimacy of the relationships?

How about gender and cuck? Is this strictly binhet only or is the model able to deal with bis and enbies? Is there an inflection point where enbies stop being counted as members of the gender everyone misgenders them as or is it roughly linear all the way? Or are there “uncanny valleys” of enbie cuck that are especially un/cuck; what kind of a fuction should we use to fit the graph? How is cuck counted for lesbians or gay men?

Is ability to theoretically/actually get pregnant/sire a spawn how significant? If a trans woman and a trans man have a genetic child together, how does the cuckulus work?

How do political views factor into cuck? In the standard measurement reference, what are the assumed opinions of the participants? Is supporting open borders still cuck if one is of a race white nationalists are insecure about? Can we get a thorough ordering of nationalities in order of cuckness; I know Sweden is first but which one comes next (for the sake of simplicity let’s just assume a median or mean representative of the populations)? How about ethnicities and religions? Is a white muslim convert more or less cucky than a syriac christian?

So many important questions.

thetransintransgenic:

socialjusticemunchkin:

I had broken bash in my arch installation and managed to make it dump core like Chernobyl (baby leet’s first segfault!) so one quick reinstall later I’m exploring the joys of alternate shells, my feelings sufficiently summed up by this image:

…it’s basically ruby

…which is happiness (authoritative source)

I would be unimaginably glad if someone knew a CLI editor that was the same thing to nano as fish is to out-of-the-box bash. This is such good, perfection, sense-makingness, convenience and most importantly teh pretty.

How…

How did you manage to break bash?.

Isn’t that thing older than and more widely used than Linux? Like, the last significant bug it had was counter-intuitive handling of environment variables, no? How do you manage to break it?

For CLI editors – absolutely no idea, I’ll be honest (I just use emacs), but I’ve heard `jed`… mentioned once or twice? And not in a way that is “it has many good extensions” I don’t think? So it might be worth a look?

I think sourcing .bash_profile in .bashrc according to some customization instructions for OSX bash was the cause, because on my second try undoing that part unbroke it. First time I broke my account promethea with it, just got locked out and had no clue why (because it happened substantially after editing the files) and mucked around on root trying to make i3 and sddm work and managed to lock myself out of root as well. So I got back to ChromeOS (doing this on a c100pa chromebook because baby leet’s first arch must be as non-standard as possible because I always play life on hard mode), reinstalled (it was easy this time because I knew what I was doing) and broke bash again, but this time I was su’d to promethea from root, so it dumped me back to root instead of login, showed an error message and made debugging easy.

So why the fuck was I using OSX instructions for Arch? The bootcamp preparation didn’t include linux instructions, presumably assuming that anyone using linux either doesn’t need handholding (because they know how to do stuff) or doesn’t deserve it (because they’re running linux without knowing how to do stuff or bothering to figure it out themselves), which is IMO perfectly justified. I assumed they’d be similar enough because bash is bash, it wasn’t, and I learned. Fucking up and unfucking it taught me a lot more about bash than just following instructions successfully.

argumate:

socialjusticemunchkin:

wirehead-wannabe:

People on Facebook are now declaring their willingness to transition and then sleep with Eliezer in exchange for more HPMOR.

Okay, @sinesalvatorem existing might only be the _second_ most efficient way of equalizing the gender ratio in the community. More data is needed.

best tactic for avoiding ridicule is to blast through it and go way beyond ridicule

you have no idea…

It’s my purpose in life. Nothing is more satisfying than taking ridicule, owning it, and going above and beyond it with full sincerity. The (implied) looks on people’s faces are priceless.

theunitofcaring:

official opinion on “Chariot for Women”, the new Uber competitor that only hires women drivers and only picks up women:

women in Ubers are not at an elevated risk of sexual assault. most people who are sexually assaulted know their attackers. our societal obsession with the scary stranger as the prototypical case of sexual assault to protect ourselves from is deeply unhelpful.

women also commit sexual assault. saying “we’ll only hire female drivers, to keep our women safe” is buying into a narrative about female harmlessness and male predatoriness that helps female abusers and rapists get away with it. 

In general, the fact that women are scared to be out at night and scared to call a cab is a problem. That fear is not remotely warranted by the evidence, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect and limit peoples’ lives. it is part of the same patriarchal “women can’t go out alone; they need protection” mindset that motivates some countries to require women have male chaperones. It is not feminist and feeding the unwarranted flames of this fear in the name of feminism is disgusting. 

There’s this thing that keeps happening where people say “let’s unquestioningly accept the patriarchal narrative that women are pure, virtuous, and need protection. Let’s also unquestioningly accept the narrative that women are safe around other women, and that danger comes from men. Then, let’s come up with a plan for ‘empowering women’ that buys into both of those assumptions completely and in fact reinforces them! Why aren’t women empowered yet?”

On the bright side good on them for having an unequivocal “duh we take trans women, they’re women” policy. I guess if we’re going to all be subject to stupid empowerment-flavored pedestalization it may as well serve a population with a legit non-negligible risk of random strangers assaulting them.

Also, regular Uber is already able to be a lot safer for women than traditional cabs because both the driver and the passenger are identifiable from the app databases, while traditional cabs can easily be like “good luck trying to remember the license plate when you were totally wasted”.

Sexual assaults happen in ubers, and their numbers seem large because Uber carries so many people, and there has been some possibly-valid criticism about Uber not responding to them as well as they could/should (although taking it to the cops isn’t always that useful either, and if an abusive driver “only” loses their job it might be quite a bit more serious of a consequence than most assaulters get), but this is a relatively insignificant problem as far as the actual per capita numbers are concerned; and IMO only shows that Uber is evil, not dangerous.

jebiwonkenobi:

It seems like the first rule of magic, or at least the first limitation mentioned, is usually ‘you can’t bring back the dead.’

And I know it makes sense from a writing standpoint, but I also wonder if it comes from somewhere else. If that’s just the first, most common human response to hearing that magic is possible.

Maybe the first question was, ‘Are the dead still going to stay dead?’ for so long that people stopped needing to say it, that it just got answered right away. Yes, the world will still hurt. Chin up, you can make fire from your fingertips. Maybe you can hurt it back.

Make life take the lemons back. Burn life’s house down with the lemons.

Wipe away all the bloodsuckers with my Gene Driver.

shuffling-blogs:

nostalgebraist:

multiheaded1793:

I am all for basic income, I think it’s a great thing, the “non-reformist reform” that leftists ought to embrace. But.

I’ve been hanging out mostly with techno-libertarian types for a good while now - all wonderful folks, yes, I mean you, y’all just great -

- and I increasingly cannot shake the impression that propping up empty talk of ~basic income~ to every instance of economic oppression and misery is a lot like the internet bolshevik staple of ~we won’t have this problem after the Revolution~. And meanwhile, in the here and now, it is very easy to use it to brush aside lesser, economically Bad suggestions, dismiss ongoing workers’ struggles as misguided, etc, etc.

Like, tell me I’m just being uncharitable and gloomy and ideologically obsessed here. But seeing one post after another ending with “maybe, some indeterminate time in the blissful future, We shall be able to dole out enough for everyone to survive on - after scrapping every current social program everywhere and attaining efficiency and getting rid of Crony Capitalism” - well, it’s enough to see a pattern. I don’t know what it means, but it’s vaguely alarming.

And also… there is never a roadmap or even the most vague sense of how to get from here to there. How to deal with elite resistance to redistribution and capital flight, how to square it with another professed (and likewise worthy) techno-libertarian goal of open borders, etc, etc. There’s rarely anything at all written on this. Again, this is why ~basic income~ alarmingly resembles a hand-wave more than a goal.

@theunitofcaring @tropylium @socialjusticemunchkin 

I just remembered this post out of the blue and spent a while looking for it on your blog just so I could reblog it, it is a really good insight IMO

There really does seems to be some symmetry between communists who are like “don’t vote, don’t work to oppose short-term political changes that may directly screw over poor people, because only a revolution can really change everything” and libertarians who are like “don’t worry about what effect these policies would have without a basic income, because they’ll work great once we have a basic income”

It’s just really strange to me when people act like “caring about what happens in the short term” directly trades off against “wanting an ambitious, sweeping change in the long term.”  This at least makes sense when it’s actual accelerationism (”make the short term worse, to encourage ambitious sweeping change”), although I disagree with that, but if it’s not accelerationism I don’t know what the logic is supposed to be.

I think the issue, similar to the internet bolsheviks multi mentioned, is that the current choices involve unpleasant tradeoffs. It’s not like there aren’t better or worse options in these cases, but it’s a bit grim to only consider “should we go for the poverty trap, the other poverty trap, the answer that fucks over a different subset of people, the bureaucracy that seems like it was designed to foster corruption, or ignore the problem entirely.”

Like, the vast majority of answers here aren’t good. Someone or another is getting fucked over with means-tested welfare, with minimum wages, with various health and safety regulations, with politically tenable but regressive taxes, etc. That doesn’t mean they’re not better than nothing at all, for now, but they’re crude and do fuck people over and often the benefit is ambiguous.

The thing is, basic income isn’t as politically untenable as it looked even just a few years ago. The major centre-left party in my country is discussing it, I would be surprised if in another couple of election cycles it wasn’t official policy for at least the Greens (and possibly the Worst Libertarian Party) here. It’s because everyone’s harping on about it every time it becomes even the slightest bit relevant, and because it’s something you can talk about in front of people across the political spectrum without setting off outgroup alarms, that we’re getting closer. Like, I’m usually not one for “awareness” being a huge thing, but basic income is a much clearer and simpler policy than many other welfare systems that have been enacted in the past, and it’s becoming a big part of the global conversation on welfare now.

My issue is that more people aren’t pushing a land value tax to fund it. That solves the capital flight issue wealth taxes have. And open borders for residency, with throttled naturalization processes for citizenship (which I think is what everyone expects) could help avoid sudden unaffordability of the basic income due to the incentives it produces.

This. A lot of the proposed ways to alleviate the problems only bite someone else (or even the intended beneficiaries) in the ass seriously, and with proper epistemic humility I wouldn’t call it unvirtuous to be like “I am not a turd-polishing master, if you give me only crappy options I can’t build a shiny utopia out of them, but this one less crappy option should really be paid a lot more attention to”.

The fuck do I know whether supporting the side of crony capitalists or the side of redwashed rentiers is the better option. When traditional left-right politics is a horrible destructive tug-of-war, pointing at the huge pile of utility on the ground that is not picked up because an icky chicago school economist also pointed at it decades ago, is not such a terrible idea.

Also, UBI is far less difficult to make happen than a revolution, because the money is already there, it’s just spent at shittier things. It doesn’t need massive new taxes when it’s allowed to replace existing benefits, with a side order of cutting corporate welfare because everything needs to come with a side order of cutting corporate welfare. In fact, for any rich western country I could institute a proper UBI *and* still downsize the state enough to make even conservatives uncomfortable.

And seconding on the land value tax too. And the rest.

sinesalvatorem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

There’s been a recent trend of How I Got A Rationalist Social Circle posts going around, and I’ve noticed that most of them begin with “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!”

I mean if we’re going to have an Official Rationalist Welcome Wagon Alison’s probably the right person for the job

I approve of being the official welcomer. Anyone who wants to be initiated should totally hit me up.

Actually, tbh, your talents are being underutilized.  Too bad The Rationalist Community isn’t the type of organization that has marketing pushes to Recruit More Girls.

We could put you in a sexy outfit and have you dart around the edges of the Blue Tribe, enticing young girls to follow you into the Forests of Rationalism like some kind of gay will-o-the-wisp.

What!? Why would I prey on innocent Blue Tribe girls and turn them into My People??? *nervous laughter as I close my OkCupid tabs*

…why wouldn’t we be the type of organization to have a marketing push to Recruit More Girls? The rationalist community is what we make of it, and I don’t see any reason not to make a girlsmoreofrecruitment drive of it. We don’t have a rationalist czar telling us _not_ to do it.

As someone who grudgingly matches the description “girl” (at least by people who don’t know that my brain wants to belong in the “totally made-up category” of “N E O T E N I C androgyny” instead) and who perfectly matches the description “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!” I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.

IDK. I’m kind of off-put by pushes to recruit members of $DEMOGRAPHIC. Social communities thrive based on shared interests and values, and efforts to attract more people of a given demographic usually trade off against that.

I am all for recruiting more people with rationalist interests and values. If they’re female, great! But targeting women specifically would almost certainly mean compromising some feature of the existing community dynamic.

I enjoying being around members of my demographic as much as the next person, but if aiming for women means less Tolkien in textbooks, or aiming for Caribbean people means raising the level of acceptable homophobia, then no thank you.

I mean, a lot of the reason pushes to include particular demographics exist is because there are lots of people who are part of the demographics in question who would totally love to be part of the rationalist community, but there are other factors preventing members of the demographic from joining.

For example, despite loving Luminosity I initially avoided the rationalist community because I had heard that a lot of members were unusually hostile towards women. This has, for the most part, not been my experience. If Rationalist Recruitment Teams were a thing it would have been very helpful if one of them had said to me, politely and not in a Gotcha You Evil Assumption-Making SJer way, “hey, actually, most of us don’t hate women over here, check out all these high-status women in our community”.

 the point of campaigns like this should be to find people who would totally belong in the community but are staying away because they’re worried about hostility

I am totally in favour of that! I would like people who are afraid that we’ll be hostile to feel welcome. I am personally willing to roll out the welcome wagon.

because like no ones suggesting you pull random women off the street and press-gang them into being nerds or rationalists or whatever

Um, we have obviously seen very very different recruitment campaigns. In my experience, as a black person who has been active in a bunch of disproportionately-white internet groups, the average campaign leans more toward grabbing random people off the street and trying to integrate them into your group than toward targeting actually interested people.

I mean, the things I saw ranged from patronising (“We’ll get more black people if we talk about hip hop a lot!”) to actively destructive (”Our comic forum is going to ban discussions of any comics that don’t have at least one black character”). Have you seen a bunch of white guys desperately screaming into the void about hip hop in the hopes that their black senpais will notice them before? It’s the saddest thing. Three-legged puppies with cancer are more cheerful.

As my OkCupid activity indicates, I’m perfectly happy proselytising to women. I do it a lot! I tell people about the gospel of bednets and transhumanism and glowfic automatically. I’d be happy to join black student groups at Stanford and encourage anyone who’s a good fit to join us. Just from the fact that I like being around other women and black people, I’ll probably do more than my share of converting women and blacks.

But the moment someone says “You know what would attract black people? If we stopped talking about [heresy of the month]”, I will be the first person to say “Fuck black people. We don’t need them anyway!”

Yeah by “no one is suggesting” I totally meant “I am not suggesting/no one in the rationalist community is suggesting”, I have definitely seen really terrible demographic-based outreach campaigns.  (My absolute favorite are the ones that are like “hey girls!  You don’t have to be an Icky Nerd to be a programmer!  You can totally be good at computers and ALSO perform femininity, you don’t have to be like those gross girls who DON’T perform femininity!  Empowerment!”).  

What I’m getting at here is that we shouldn’t decide not to do a thing entirely just because some people are terrible at doing it, especially if a well-executed version of the thing could do a lot of good.  And also that there should be more well-executed versions of the thing.

Good demographic-based outreach campaigns would be a great idea. I’m just not sure how to stop them from degenerating into really bad outreach campaigns. Most of the bad campaigns I’ve seen started off super reasonable, and then they collapsed in on themselves.

I don’t know how to do the thing in a way that I can be sure won’t end with egg on my face, so I’m hesitant to start now. If I learn more about what makes campaigns go sour first, then I might be less averse to trying.

Suggested datapoint for a good demographic-based outreach campaign: you doing the thing you are doing, exactly as you are doing. Sexy outfit optional but probably situationally useful sometimes.

Someone should run the data on this but I suspect that the best and reliablest way to fund a demographic-based outreach campaign for the community would be to pay your bills and arrange other things done so that you could fully focus on your comparative advantages of being an awesome person to talk to and introducing people to other awesome people.

Of course, it could be that my personal biases have simply led me to rationalize why we should let an Alison loose on the internets and meatspaces without being constrained by boring things, but out of all the things to rationalize I don’t think that one is anywhere near the worst.

This was actually basically my plan for working for Effective Altruism Outreach. Then that may or may not have fallen through.

But, like, if anyone wants to found Less Wrong Outreach and hire me, I’d definitely consider it.

Okay, I’m publicly committing to funding Degenerate N E O T E N I C Bonobo Rationalist Cuckfest Outreach once I make enough money that it’d be less expensive than my GWWC pledge, on the condition that I get to call it the Degenerate N E O T E N I C Bonobo Rationalist Cuckfest Outreach at least informally on tumblr. Additional funders to push that limit down are welcome.

ilzolende:

sinesalvatorem:

Me: But it’s not too bad, you see. This RadFem only said she hated Militant Transgenderism.

Person: What’s ‘Militant Transgenderism’?

Me: It’s the radical notion that people are women.

Uh, “militant transgenderism” clearly has something to do with your interests in being a space empress, dear.

metagorgon:

@osberend:

No, the subset of my tax dollars used for legitimate purposes are the price of my citizenship in society. The rest is stolen property, taken at gunpoint.

Please define ‘legitimate purposes’ in a way that doesn’t mean ‘only things that I approve of’.

An easy way to start would be “things that would not leave the world better off if the money was just burned instead of being spent on super-bad thing X” (my guess would be that a lot of super-long prison sentences for victimless crimes fail here).

If one wants to be more ambitious, “things that wouldn’t leave the world better off if the money was not collected in the first place” (this is the point where more ordinary ridiculous things such as spending all the money collected from corporate taxes on corporate welfare (Finland says hi!) become unjustifiable).

For a quite stringent category of legitimacy, try “things that wouldn’t leave the world better off if the money was just distributed evenly to the citizens as a UBI”, which leaves the properly beneficial stuff that doesn’t destroy value, such as effective, targeted programs for people that can be actually significantly helped by them (a very small subset of existing programs), and gives a reasonably good theory of justifiable governance when combined with the previous criterion.

shlevy:

drethelin:

thegreatjackal:

raginrayguns:

sinesalvatorem:

Me: Is there anything you believe the US government does well?

@theunitofcaring: *looks at the roof and contemplates for about half a minute*

Me: …The longer the pause, the more libertarian the person.

M tells me the us government’s virtues is what it does poorly, which is put people’s ideas into action. People’s ideas are mostly bad, and if the government can’t carry them out, we’re protected from them

only problem is when the government carries out ideas in a way that’s even worse for us than what people want

Vaccination programs

Is that an answer to the original question? Because, like, universal polio vaccination in a country that hasn’t had any polio cases in nearly 40 years and a world in which there were 400 cases three years ago, all localized in three countries half a word away, seems a tad excessive, no?

TBH I’d rather have excessive than insufficient vaccination programs. If unnecessary polio vaccines even when it’s almost eradicated were the price of actually making progress against measles instead of having ideological hold-outs who stubbornly defend their right to expose others to lethal diseases, it’s a trade I’d gladly take.

theunmortalist:

inwardjake:

At the time of my birth the human population on planet Earth was just over 5 billion people.  By the time I had reached 12 years old, that number had risen to 6 billion.  By the time I had graduated high school, that number had risen to 7 billion.

There is no easy way to address an issue like overpopulation.  At the very root of the problem is the fundamental right of every human being to procreate and prosper, as guaranteed to them by their own birth.  Efforts such as eugenics, enforced contraception, and the withholding of medical technologies in the third world, while effective, violate this human right.

In the end, it boils down to the individual: You and I, and every other human being on this planet, must bear the burden of improving the collective quality of life.  The only means by which this can be attained is to find equilibrium with our environment.  Our species, like any apex predator left unchecked, is beginning to see the negative impact of our actions: In the food chain, in water quality, in global temperature patterns, and within the hearts and minds of our own children.

We seem to forget, that despite God given rights, we also carry the responsibility of controlling ourselves for the sake of others.  This control may manifest in myriad ways, not the least of which being satiety.  

We have reached a point in our history at which medical advances have made the arbitrary extension of life available to the general public.  It is understandable that every person is motivated to continue living as long as possible, but I ask a single favor, from one human to another:

Really think about the consequences of your actions, now, and in the future.

The collective quality of life (including that of every species within man’s dominion,) is objectively more important than the singular pursuit of immortality.  If we allow our fear of death to rule all of our actions, we will destroy that which has been handed to us.  Transcendence of these human shackles requires faith in a power greater than oneself.

For you see, gravity is not a purely physical force, it influences existence in realms beyond both the third and fourth dimension. We are now aware that light itself can be warped by the gravitational pull of a massive object; time, on the other hand, requires a significantly more powerful well.

We, as semi-conscious beings, often neglect the uncomfortable realization that minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years are constructs created and maintained by the human mind, for the purpose of regulation of ourselves and our fellows.

It would do one well to remember that time, as we know it, is merely a standardized division of the cycles of the moon and sun. On a galactic scale, this model holds true, but stretched across the current projection of the known universe, it becomes obvious that our understanding of the passage of moments is woefully inept.

My only trouble with this would be to point out that we can only put our trust and faith in ourselves, and even then not too much. Everything in the Universe is horrific and awe-inspiring. There are no guarantees, no promises here. The great variety of life is not maintained because the Universe respects it; past events reveal in the long run, every species is doomed to starvation, disease, and death until it goes extinct. What we perceive as balance in the ecosystem is actually a monumental, blind struggle against that sort of suffering and destruction. We’ve run the experiments. We know what happens when the environment allows overpopulation. No species controls itself. Except, it would seem, creatures smart enough to notice what’s changed… like ourselves.

Our population has increased because we’ve become better at keeping ourselves alive in nature. I expect our population will decrease because we will become better at living well in nature. Once no one needs five babies just to keep the family line going, there is really only one option: make one or two babies that absolutely will live the best lives possible. As a result, the population spikes we experience as a location gets industry and medicine gradually become more manageable even if the great crowds expecting good living conditions frighten the authoritarians. We’re now experiencing a new development here in the West (and a great many other places are doing it much better than we are). With the introduction of science, existentialism, and the practices of rational thought, we come to expect more than previous generations from life. This, too, will have an impact on our population growth.

As we make life better for everyone, the number of people that want many children will go down. As we increase lifespans and make college-level education available, more people will want fewer children because they mean to do well by them. Plans for children will become something that must be done someday, rather than something that must be done soon. For an increasing number of people, Someday will become Never as they realize that children are not what they actually want from life. Eventually, we will live so long and so well that planning about what we can do outside Earth won’t be dreaming. If overpopulation is still a problem then, we’ll have somewhere new to bring our home ecosystems, allowing us to thrive in spite of refusing to bow down before starvation, disease, and death.

We seem to forget, that despite God given rights, we also carry the responsibility of controlling ourselves for the sake of others.  This control may manifest in myriad ways, not the least of which being satiety.  

We have reached a point in our history at which medical advances have made the arbitrary extension of life available to the general public.  It is understandable that every person is motivated to continue living as long as possible, but I ask a single favor, from one human to another:

Really think about the consequences of your actions, now, and in the future.

This world is afraid of me…I have seen its true face. The crowds are unaugmented fools and the fools are full of pain and when the telomeres finally run out, all the sheeple will die. The accumulated harm of all their shortsightedness and ignorance will build up about their neurons and all the cishumanists and bioconservatives will look up and shout “Kill yourselves to satisfy our moralistic whims!”… and I’ll look down and whisper “No.” They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good people like my friends or Elon Musk. Decent people who believed in a lasting future for a lasting species. Instead they followed the droppings of preachers and bioethicists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice.

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

There’s been a recent trend of How I Got A Rationalist Social Circle posts going around, and I’ve noticed that most of them begin with “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!”

I mean if we’re going to have an Official Rationalist Welcome Wagon Alison’s probably the right person for the job

I approve of being the official welcomer. Anyone who wants to be initiated should totally hit me up.

Actually, tbh, your talents are being underutilized.  Too bad The Rationalist Community isn’t the type of organization that has marketing pushes to Recruit More Girls.

We could put you in a sexy outfit and have you dart around the edges of the Blue Tribe, enticing young girls to follow you into the Forests of Rationalism like some kind of gay will-o-the-wisp.

What!? Why would I prey on innocent Blue Tribe girls and turn them into My People??? *nervous laughter as I close my OkCupid tabs*

…why wouldn’t we be the type of organization to have a marketing push to Recruit More Girls? The rationalist community is what we make of it, and I don’t see any reason not to make a girlsmoreofrecruitment drive of it. We don’t have a rationalist czar telling us _not_ to do it.

As someone who grudgingly matches the description “girl” (at least by people who don’t know that my brain wants to belong in the “totally made-up category” of “N E O T E N I C androgyny” instead) and who perfectly matches the description “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!” I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.

IDK. I’m kind of off-put by pushes to recruit members of $DEMOGRAPHIC. Social communities thrive based on shared interests and values, and efforts to attract more people of a given demographic usually trade off against that.

I am all for recruiting more people with rationalist interests and values. If they’re female, great! But targeting women specifically would almost certainly mean compromising some feature of the existing community dynamic.

I enjoying being around members of my demographic as much as the next person, but if aiming for women means less Tolkien in textbooks, or aiming for Caribbean people means raising the level of acceptable homophobia, then no thank you.

I mean, a lot of the reason pushes to include particular demographics exist is because there are lots of people who are part of the demographics in question who would totally love to be part of the rationalist community, but there are other factors preventing members of the demographic from joining.

For example, despite loving Luminosity I initially avoided the rationalist community because I had heard that a lot of members were unusually hostile towards women. This has, for the most part, not been my experience. If Rationalist Recruitment Teams were a thing it would have been very helpful if one of them had said to me, politely and not in a Gotcha You Evil Assumption-Making SJer way, “hey, actually, most of us don’t hate women over here, check out all these high-status women in our community”.

 the point of campaigns like this should be to find people who would totally belong in the community but are staying away because they’re worried about hostility

I am totally in favour of that! I would like people who are afraid that we’ll be hostile to feel welcome. I am personally willing to roll out the welcome wagon.

because like no ones suggesting you pull random women off the street and press-gang them into being nerds or rationalists or whatever

Um, we have obviously seen very very different recruitment campaigns. In my experience, as a black person who has been active in a bunch of disproportionately-white internet groups, the average campaign leans more toward grabbing random people off the street and trying to integrate them into your group than toward targeting actually interested people.

I mean, the things I saw ranged from patronising (“We’ll get more black people if we talk about hip hop a lot!”) to actively destructive (”Our comic forum is going to ban discussions of any comics that don’t have at least one black character”). Have you seen a bunch of white guys desperately screaming into the void about hip hop in the hopes that their black senpais will notice them before? It’s the saddest thing. Three-legged puppies with cancer are more cheerful.

As my OkCupid activity indicates, I’m perfectly happy proselytising to women. I do it a lot! I tell people about the gospel of bednets and transhumanism and glowfic automatically. I’d be happy to join black student groups at Stanford and encourage anyone who’s a good fit to join us. Just from the fact that I like being around other women and black people, I’ll probably do more than my share of converting women and blacks.

But the moment someone says “You know what would attract black people? If we stopped talking about [heresy of the month]”, I will be the first person to say “Fuck black people. We don’t need them anyway!”

Yeah by “no one is suggesting” I totally meant “I am not suggesting/no one in the rationalist community is suggesting”, I have definitely seen really terrible demographic-based outreach campaigns.  (My absolute favorite are the ones that are like “hey girls!  You don’t have to be an Icky Nerd to be a programmer!  You can totally be good at computers and ALSO perform femininity, you don’t have to be like those gross girls who DON’T perform femininity!  Empowerment!”).  

What I’m getting at here is that we shouldn’t decide not to do a thing entirely just because some people are terrible at doing it, especially if a well-executed version of the thing could do a lot of good.  And also that there should be more well-executed versions of the thing.

Good demographic-based outreach campaigns would be a great idea. I’m just not sure how to stop them from degenerating into really bad outreach campaigns. Most of the bad campaigns I’ve seen started off super reasonable, and then they collapsed in on themselves.

I don’t know how to do the thing in a way that I can be sure won’t end with egg on my face, so I’m hesitant to start now. If I learn more about what makes campaigns go sour first, then I might be less averse to trying.

Suggested datapoint for a good demographic-based outreach campaign: you doing the thing you are doing, exactly as you are doing. Sexy outfit optional but probably situationally useful sometimes.

Someone should run the data on this but I suspect that the best and reliablest way to fund a demographic-based outreach campaign for the community would be to pay your bills and arrange other things done so that you could fully focus on your comparative advantages of being an awesome person to talk to and introducing people to other awesome people.

Of course, it could be that my personal biases have simply led me to rationalize why we should let an Alison loose on the internets and meatspaces without being constrained by boring things, but out of all the things to rationalize I don’t think that one is anywhere near the worst.

technologizeable:

anthropicprincipal:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

There’s been a recent trend of How I Got A Rationalist Social Circle posts going around, and I’ve noticed that most of them begin with “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!”

I mean if we’re going to have an Official Rationalist Welcome Wagon Alison’s probably the right person for the job

I approve of being the official welcomer. Anyone who wants to be initiated should totally hit me up.

Actually, tbh, your talents are being underutilized.  Too bad The Rationalist Community isn’t the type of organization that has marketing pushes to Recruit More Girls.

We could put you in a sexy outfit and have you dart around the edges of the Blue Tribe, enticing young girls to follow you into the Forests of Rationalism like some kind of gay will-o-the-wisp.

What!? Why would I prey on innocent Blue Tribe girls and turn them into My People??? *nervous laughter as I close my OkCupid tabs*

…why wouldn’t we be the type of organization to have a marketing push to Recruit More Girls? The rationalist community is what we make of it, and I don’t see any reason not to make a girlsmoreofrecruitment drive of it. We don’t have a rationalist czar telling us _not_ to do it.

As someone who grudgingly matches the description “girl” (at least by people who don’t know that my brain wants to belong in the “totally made-up category” of “N E O T E N I C androgyny” instead) and who perfectly matches the description “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!” I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.

For most X, the best way to get more women who are X is to get women who are not X to be X. But, Rationalism seems to have pretty good luck getting non-woman Rationalists to be women.

I am going to pretend that I am evidence for this, even though I am not.

Datapoint reporting in. Yudkowsky changed my gender over a one-way text-only communication channel. Or maybe it was the plastics in the water, and LW just triggered it. Nonetheless, I read the sequences (except for the part on quantum mechanics), and deduced that I should go on hormones. It was a very successful individual application of X-rationality.

severnayazemlya:

psybersecurity:

Lmao wtf

This dude has stopped giving a fuck a LONG time ago

life goals tbh

He can be the Abbasid caliph of rationalist Cairo under the rightful sultan @sinesalvatorem.