i dont have much interest in rationalism-as-thought-techniques because from what i've observed it doesn't seem to have uniquely benefited people who subscribe to it in ways that a general purpose self-help book and associated social support structure wouldn't have, with the added detriment of being tangled up in rationalism-as-techno-libertarianism. if there actually are "one weird tricks" employed by rationalists that would be helpful to leftists i'd love to hear about them tho
I’ll have to think about this because it’s important, but my facial impression is indeed that there aren’t really any superpowers or whatever - I just like discussing weird ideas and some versions of The Community are good places to do that
well, I DO think everyone reading “how to do things with words” (I think that’s the title?“) would nip a lot of the dumber arguments we keep having in the bud, like for instance the definition of socialism or whatever, but the basic insights aren’t unique? There’s probably a number of small things like that that ppl are likely to point out in the comments
I've seen you talking about sortition a few times, and I'm curious, how seriously do you take it? How worried are you about issues of legitimacy?
Serious! I think forms of government can be arbitrarily weird and yet considered legitimate as long as there’s appropriate ritual around them and they people’s lives are about as good as they expect them to be, and I don’t think sortition is that weird - it’s fair, it’s representative, it’s been done before.
effective altruism is not applied communism, because charity is not applied communism, because charity can be voluntarily withheld, and if someone can voluntarily withhold resources you need, you are in a state of dependence on them.
this doesn’t mean EA is bad. it’s telling people who have the right to withhold such resources: “choose not to withhold! furthermore let’s do some analysis on how to not withhold most effectively.” this means people living when they might have died, living happily when they otherwise might have lived miserably, and that is Good.
and furthermore I don’t at all buy the line, which I think is put forward in good faith but is nevertheless dangerous, that this ultimately serves to actively prop up an unjust system. healthy, literate people are better at standing up for themselves than unhealthy, illiterate people, and social radicalism actually tends to be stronger in periods of economic growth.
but where charity exists - where charity must exist - we do not yet have communism.
The point of EA is to make itself unnecessary and impossible. That is very much the main difference in EA versus traditional charity; instead of doing things that look good and keep people dependent, make it so that people can’t do such things anymore, by removing the need. Every time the cost of saving lives increases, it means that lasting change has been achieved. When malaria is eradicated, nobody is dependent on bednet handouts anymore. When direct cash transfers let people obtain their own means of production with which they don’t need to rely on outsiders anymore, well, they don’t need to rely on outsiders anymore.
I don’t see why the means of achieving a goal would be more crucial than the goal itself; if Elon Musk builds free chargers for electric cars everywhere, or Bill Gates releases free textbooks for anyone to use, there is a commons where there previously wasn’t. In fact, this can be ad-absurdumed quite thoroughly: if one accepts the idea that change brought voluntarily is not the same as change brought coercively, the collective decision by every single capitalist in the world to redistribute their capital to the rest of the population would not count as communism. Thus the word loses its meaning as “the means of production are shared” and intead merely means “coercively seizing them”. Of course, if the intent is indeed to define the methods, not the results, the word may mean it; but in that case I’d suspect that quite a many people have been thoroughly misled about its meaning.
And even more: the boundary of voluntary and coercive is itself fuzzy and impossible to define. An EA suffering from scrupulosity may be voluntary on paper, while practically all coercion is actually done with acquiescence to a threat of violence, not the direct application of violence itself (and even then it could be argued that any form of resistance that does not reach the most desperate extremes is in itself “voluntary” submission as one “could” have “chosen” to escalate even further and it was simply that the actions we call choices happened in a certain kind of a context). So what ultimately differentiates pulling the levers of the clockwork world by speech, and pulling the levers of the clockwork world by guns? All is clockwork in either case. And when social pressure comes in everything gets even more muddled.
Furthermore, there is no ideal state of emptiness and non-dependency on others in a world with more than one person. As the failures of the welfare states have shown, using the state apparatus of violence to seize property from Adam to Steve doesn’t make Steve not dependent on someone else, Steve just simply becomes dependent on those who control the state apparatus of violence, instead of Adam’s charitableness; and when the controllers of the apparatus of violence decide to withhold their seized property from Steve it doesn’t help one bit. Or if the property is collectively, ~democratically~ controlled, one’s dependency on individuals, or the state apparatus of violence, has simply been replaced with a dependency on a mob, which can just as well withhold the resources if it so wishes with the scorned individual having no recourse against the popular opinion because such genuine recourse never exists as long as people can’t both satisfy all their material needs and wants on their own and unassailably defend themselves from the entire rest of the world while being unable to turn the means of that defense against others. In other words, never ever in reality.
Underneath there is always the twins of naked force and human goodwill, the two faces of clockwork, no matter what pretty narratives and constructs are set up on top of them. Sure, one can write a constitution saying that all resources shall be collectively owned and shared, but what is constitution but a piece of paper (or in modern days, simply a number) which gains all its strength from the willingness of people to enforce and keep up the fiction they share? So, what is the fundamental difference between the mob choosing to let me use the “shared” 3d-printer, and some individual choosing to let me use “their” 3d-printer? Certainly, withholding it may be more difficult in the first case, but it’s merely a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. When a certain number of people reject the idea that I may use it, I de facto lose my ability to use it and in the end there is no jure, only facto.
Certainly, build technologies that make denying access to resources more difficult (as in reality there is ultimately no “withholding” even; as property itself is a construct built to determine who is denied access to what and it all reduces to whose word on the matter reality ends up reflecting, all is clockwork with thick layers of fiction on top); write your constitutions in blockchains instead of mere paper; let people get used to shared 3d-printers and become violently unwilling to give them up should anyone ever seek to deny them them; let them feel entitled to what they need, not merely to exist but actually live, and demand it in a world of plenty; but in the end there still is no qualitative difference. The dependence never goes away entirely, only its exact form and extent can change.
So what is the difference between a family now “having” a cow because some people sent them “money” to “buy” it; and a family now “having” a cow because a mob “took” it from the herd “of” someone else? What is the difference between a family now having a cow because a number of people decided that such should be the state of the world, and a family now having a cow because a number of people decided that such should be the state of the world?
Or to taboo the C-word itself: what is the difference between a reallocation of capital achieved by people speaking things, and a reallocation of capital achieved by different people speaking different things? And if one seeks to reallocate capital, shouldn’t one be equally happy in either case? As far as a reallocation of capital is what some people seek, I see no reason to not tell them that something has actually resulted in a more substantial reallocation of capital than what they were previously doing, if they truly do value the reallocation of capital instead of the speaking of the different things.
Wait, so you write fanfics that turn readers trans? Link pls
No, it’s Yudkowsky who writes fanfic, and empirically speaking exposure to his writings tends to make people trans. And he has taken money from people with the AI box experiment that he seriously has absolutely no reason to be able to take. My text-only-channel wetware exploits are less impressive (YGM)
i dont have much interest in rationalism-as-thought-techniques because from what i've observed it doesn't seem to have uniquely benefited people who subscribe to it in ways that a general purpose self-help book and associated social support structure wouldn't have, with the added detriment of being tangled up in rationalism-as-techno-libertarianism. if there actually are "one weird tricks" employed by rationalists that would be helpful to leftists i'd love to hear about them tho
I’ll have to think about this because it’s important, but my facial impression is indeed that there aren’t really any superpowers or whatever - I just like discussing weird ideas and some versions of The Community are good places to do that
well, I DO think everyone reading “how to do things with words” (I think that’s the title?“) would nip a lot of the dumber arguments we keep having in the bud, like for instance the definition of socialism or whatever, but the basic insights aren’t unique? There’s probably a number of small things like that that ppl are likely to point out in the comments
Any neoreactionary types who would like a review copy of the book in exchange for a promise of a fair and public thrashing of it, please let me know and give a link to the blog you’ll review it on. I’m happy to give you a PDF if you’ll promise to trash-talk it honestly and with quotations.
The offer also applies to Yudkowskian rationalists, but you have to promise to say more than just “it’s sneer culture.” It’s totally sneer culture, and you can point that out, but that can’t be the main thrust.
Yes I am doing this for the money. Will sorcelate for food.
So I heard someone was giving neoreactionaries and people who once freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt them the John Oliver treatment, except that this person is not John Oliver but instead some guy with a vaguely similar-ish sounding name who started his Kickstarter campaign at $2000. As someone who once freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt them, and who always enjoys the John Oliver treatment of anything, I’m very interested in finding out the facts of the matter.
Now, whether or not this one is sneer culture is obviously not the relevant fact of the matter, but instead whether or not this one is good sneer culture.
In addition this is the rare treat of sneer culture actually directed at me without the highly visible hand of meatspace violence backed up by the sneering and thus, unlike the works of bioethicists or terfs, I expect that even in the worst case I would receive a highly unusual opportunity of getting to read something in the vein of “this is what these people actually think of people like me” that doesn’t make me feel like writing a vengeful computer god just to feel safe in a universe which contains such people.
And more, some people have alleged that this sneer culture is endangering the very fate of our universe by making a fanfiction writer who turns people trans and takes their money for no reason whatsoever through a text-only communication channel and once was very overconfident on quantum mechanics appear less seriously-takeable by Serious People, which is quite a fascinating prospect and I am very intrigued to find out more.
However, I’m unlikely to spend an actual $5 on the book, so I need to find a way to read it for free. Conveniently I’m allegedly quite good at producing value to people by writing things and it just so happens that the guy whose name sounds just a bit like “John Oliver” is offering free copies to people who could create value by writing about it. In light of this information I believe that it would be a mutually beneficial transaction to engage in such an exchange.
In addition, I am a person who chooses to like exercise so that I would have have received a better set of genes than otherwise, and I do Actually Believe in computer gods, programs from the future that threaten people, and living forever by dying from severe rapid hypothermia and turning into a number.
(At least for some values of “Actually Believe” that to most people, such as the ones who use phrases like “Actually Believe”, are utterly indistinguishable from other values of “Actually Believe”.)
As such, I believe that I am uniquely qualified to review this book: as an overconfident neophyte dropout with a lot of raw talent and weird ideas and a disrespect for the established and respected authorities and their sensible commonly accepted ideas, and an utter absence of actual accomplishments other than convincing many people of those weird ideas, I might be the closest thing to basilisk-era Yudkowsky the guy with a really small kickstarter could ever hope to get to read his book. The most important difference is that I openly display a substantial degree of self-awareness and do a lot of countersignaling on the topic of credibility; whether that makes me more or less fun to interact with on this matter shall be left to the readers.
I even promise not to leak the book to the pirate bay just because information wants to be free, because the weird computer god decision theory says that my promises should be reliable even when I totally could flake on them. In addition, I believe that incentivizing other people to purchase this piece of sneer culture (if it is worth purchasing; something I’d expect to have an answer to a few days after I receive a copy) for their entertainment might be a good thing: support your friendly local sneer culture instead of faceless corporate Big Sneer!
Does promethea get a free book out of this?
Do they write the review as promised, earning them the effective monetary value per work-hour of Bangladeshi minimum wage?
Is your friendly local sneer culture truly friendly and worth supporting over Big Sneer? Or is this all a ploy by the Unfriendly Sneer Culture in an attempt to blackmail us into bringing it into existence?
And most importantly of all: will the ultimate fate of the universe be decided for good (or evil, as it may be) by a guy who wrote a silly book and started his kickstarter campaign at $2000?
I've seen you talking about sortition a few times, and I'm curious, how seriously do you take it? How worried are you about issues of legitimacy?
Serious! I think forms of government can be arbitrarily weird and yet considered legitimate as long as there’s appropriate ritual around them and they people’s lives are about as good as they expect them to be, and I don’t think sortition is that weird - it’s fair, it’s representative, it’s been done before.
This isn’t so much a review as it is an address to a particular comment I’ve seen often come up among those who oh so desperately want to undo the project, to argue that the links made within NAB are irrelevant, and more generally the statements that are made whenever the politics of the lesswrong community are attacked. Whenever Yudkowsky’s politics are ‘conservative’ or not is argued over and over and over again in the horrid way characteristic of a group with a strong belief in the powers of language, and this argument has come up yet again in the conversation about NAB, that Sandifer’s choice to talk about Yudkowsky alongside Moldburg and Nick Land (two massive neoreactionaries) is a miscategorization to the degree that Sandier shouldn’t finish the book, that the book is communist propaganda, whatever.
I’m just going to provide my reading of the situation, as ya know, an actual communist. Because I’m of the opinion that while Yudkowsky may not be a ‘conservative’, his work definitely fits within the reactionary project, and that this key element explains a large degree of the way the lesswrong/rationalist community leans.
To sum up the key element; the major part of Yudkowsky’s project is a desire to work towards the creation of a beneficent AI who we can then give the resources to to run the world. To this end he has created a pair of think tanks, has written innumerable papers and thinkpieces, etc. Now, this is hard to take seriously but if we do take it seriously then this is merely a new coat of paint over a desire that is over two hundred years old.
You see, it’s easy to forget that feudalism (stay with me now) wasn’t just ‘having a king’, that the feudal system was a whole system wherein the whole hierarchy was justified in generally divine terms. And while the literary origin of the divine right of kings was in Bodin, Bodin’s work actually is a degradation of the concept; the fact that it needed to be expressed in the 16th century showed just how much it was being questioned. Because, before this period, while the King was not absolute the hierarchy he remained atop of was, it’s an amazing statement that no matter how many aristocratic intrigues and revolts occurred before the 17th century, not a single one of these revolts sought to end the whole edifice of monarchy. I can go on about this separately but a full discussion of it would take quite a bit of time and I’m not specifically talking about this.
But the thing about the divine right of monarchs is that in the end it is divine. Many who sought to bring back monarchs seek to merely turn the clock back to 1788, but some of the more intelligent reactionaries who wrote in the generation following the French Revolution noted that you would have to turn it back even further, that the beginnings of secular thought was the beginning of the demise of a fully justified monarchy. Because if God is not there in the foreground, justifying the difference between King and noble and noble and peasant, then the King is just some guy, your local lord is just some guy, and what the fuck justifies their existence over you?
This became worse and worse over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, with ever more and ever more complicated justifying measures appearing–for instance, a focus on the innate power of the blood which became a motif among reactionaries for centuries to come. But in the end these measures just didn’t cut it, and after the French Revolution it became harder and harder to justify Monarchy, or any sort of Autocracy, on divine or secular grounds.
I would argue that the reactionary project ever since the French Revolution is the search for a newly justified King, a King who could reestablish the hierarchy of old. But they come up on an issue, without the totalizing religious beliefs of old your hierarchy is always going to comprise of regular people, and unless you engage in nonsensical magical thinking (a trait actually increasingly common now even in mainstream works but constantly under challenge), you’re going to have to find another way.
And so, at the end of this line of thinking, we find Yudkowsky. How is it that neoreactionaries found such a home in the bosom of rationalism? Because they were, in the end, seeking the same thing. Moldbug declaring that he is, in the end, searching for a king is not a more radical view compared to Yudkowsky’s, only a more honest one. It takes away the varnish of technoutopianism of a beneficent and omnipotent AI and says that in the end a person will do. Because in the end a King is a King, regardless of how many philosophy classes he’s taken and, indeed, whether he is human or not. The two exist on the same plane within the same project: the AI Philosopher King is, to the Lesswrongers, ideal, but Moldbug says that he’d settle for Steve Jobs. It’s the same shit, the same longing for a newly justified King.
You can make this analogy, but you could of course also make a similar analogy to, say, godbuilding or the dream of society being ruled by reason. (And conversely, conservatism is much more aligned analogically and genealogically with those aristocratic rebellions against absolutism more so than absolutism itself.) Which isn’t to say there are no connections to be drawn - I think Phil is pretty clear and honest about what does, and doesn’t, connect them - just that I don’t see this in particular as persuasive.
Actually I would very much draw those analogies in that Godbuilding and the dream of a society ruled by reason is a desire to reinstitute hierarchy and ‘order’ onto a system seen as chaotic by a ruling class which is constantly having to reinvent itself in order to retain its justified status.
And I would agree with you about the geneology off conservativism, but the thing is I’m not saying Yudkowsky is a conservative, I’m saying that he’s a part of the reactionary project which is a more specific thing.
I will say in his defense that one of the things that I see in
Yudkowsky’s work is the idea that since such a machine is possible, it is near-certain that it will be made. The only option therefore is make sure it’s the best that it can possibly be.
The definition of “best” is of course not clear, which is the point of the philosophizing and something to dispute. But he’s saying it’s would be difficult to make such a machine that avoids absolutely terrible things that no one wants, like killing everybody.
Yes indeed; “if we’re going to have a boss we can’t get rid of, at least let it be a boss that doesn’t fuck everything up horribly like all the previous bosses and instead serve the people it has authority over” isn’t exactly a reactionary idea, it’s more like the people who began tearing down the unlimited authority of kings. Reactionariness would be closer to “fucking everything up horribly is actually an acceptable side effect of Restoring the Rightful Hierarchy”
i dont have much interest in rationalism-as-thought-techniques because from what i've observed it doesn't seem to have uniquely benefited people who subscribe to it in ways that a general purpose self-help book and associated social support structure wouldn't have, with the added detriment of being tangled up in rationalism-as-techno-libertarianism. if there actually are "one weird tricks" employed by rationalists that would be helpful to leftists i'd love to hear about them tho
I’ll have to think about this because it’s important, but my facial impression is indeed that there aren’t really any superpowers or whatever - I just like discussing weird ideas and some versions of The Community are good places to do that
well, I DO think everyone reading “how to do things with words” (I think that’s the title?“) would nip a lot of the dumber arguments we keep having in the bud, like for instance the definition of socialism or whatever, but the basic insights aren’t unique? There’s probably a number of small things like that that ppl are likely to point out in the comments
Critics of LessWrong or the so-called Rationalist movement probably have various people in mind like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, or Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley venture capitalist community. But surveys suggest that the median member of the community is more likely to be a 20-something autistic trans girl suffering from depression and pursuing STEM studies. Any critiques that don’t take this into account may end up being misinterpreted.
the broader rationalist community is only like ~3% trans girls. Which admittedly is an order of magnitude more than the general population.
Tumblr rationalists, on the other hand…
(are still not majority trans girls. yet.)
This makes sense if interpreted as a “representative member” which allows one to overcount overrepresented demographics for illustrative purposes; the rationalist community is characterized by being disproportionately likely to be a 20-something autistic trans girl suffering from depression and pursuing STEM studies in comparison to the control population.
If the community has 3% trans girls and 7% “other”, of whom I believe one could justifiably round off approximately half into “trans girl adjacent”, we get a quite staggering 6% of “literally trans girls, basically trans girls, and trans girl adjacents” (which in my opinion is a somewhat more natural cluster in personspace than drawing a strict boundary between binary trans girls and trans-girl-adjacent enbies like me (I’m not sure which one I’d personally answer, but when people talk about the diaspora being full of trans girls they do mean to include people like me as well)).
So if the control population of similar but not-diaspora-rationalist people was, say, 80% cis guy, 17% cis girl, 2% trans girl, 1% trans guy (I’m rounding off enbies from this for simplicity purposes, no erasure intended); then the diaspora with its 79% cis guy, 13% cis girl, 6% trans girl, 2% trans guy (enbies once again rounded off to the nearest categories with stetson-harrison or discarded from the data; the numbers are eyeballed from survey results so they shouldn’t be horribly off but are not literally correct) is most significantly characterized by having a huge number of trans girls and thus the archetypical member is a trans girl even though the modal, median and average member is a cis guy.
Similarly, the archetypical member has all of ADHD, anxiety, depression and ASD to either clinical or sub-clinical-but-significant degree even though none of those are quite the majority (apart from depression which is very close). Thus the archetypical member is indeed a trans girl with a specific collection of badbrainsness which, I suspect, is actually basically a single underlying neurological feature modulated by our culture and mistakenly categorized as separate things by psychiatry which doesn’t understand biology and mechanisms of origin, and also probably implicated in why her brain is so good at filling out IQ tests that nobody believes the diaspora when we report it no matter how honestly and diligently we try to remove possible confounders.
this is the masked bee! she has no friends and hates everyone. Sometimes when she has kids she raises them alone and doesn’t let the father come for day trips. she loves pollen but does not like waiting for it so she chews flowers open which is essentially stealing. we love her anyway.
these bees are homalictus bees! they are the rainbow gay bees. Females tend to live together in one nest and guard the entrance. one time we found 160 gay girls bunking together. They’re so irridescent and small that they might look like flies but they are really just tiny lesbians.
and this is the blue banded bee! she may look like she’s wacked out, but really she is pretty chill. she just wants to live independently (or with some friends) in a nest or burrow and look after tomatoes.
this is a cuckoo bee! she is really cool! she goes into other bee’s houses and lays eggs there, and then when the baby hatches it eats the host bees’ pollen and lays waste to the hive, murdering and eating all the other bee babies! BUT ONLY if it’s mother bee didn’t kill them all first.
thank u dark bee tumblr
cuckoo bee you are far too pretty to be an h r geiger nightmare like you in fact turn out to be
nature is magical
TIL popular authoritarian thoughts make sense if you mistakenly believe humans are bees. Somebody should inform white nationalists that they, in fact, are not bees; perhaps they would be a little less paranoid about immigrants if they were informed it’s dark bees that cuck the nest and eradicate the natives, not humans.
And I love people who are so eager to reject the harshness of reality that they don’t take five seconds to check whether other people think it can’t be changed.
Wait a goddamn second political alignment charts are literally the same exact thing as D&D alignment grids. What the shit
Lawful Good: True State Socialism
Lawful Neutral: Left-leaning liberals
Lawful Evil: “moderate” liberals, neocons
Neutral Good: [Impossible due to the nature of politics?]
True Neutral: South Park libertarians, Legal Weed Capitalists
Neutral Evil: people obsessed with “states’ rights”
Chaotic Good: Anarcho-communists, the Yippies
Chaotic Neutral: Vermin Supreme
Chaotic Evil: militia groups and anarcho-capitalists
tag yourself I’m true neutral
I’m seeing that Neutral Good is unoccupied territory and seizing it to be the refuge of all “I don’t really know the specifics but we should have post-scarcity and freedom and niceness and 3d-printers for all and nobody voting on anyone’s body” people
I thought given it’s between between state socialism and
Anarcho-communists, “Social Democracy“ was the obvious idea to slot there.
No, socdems are LN in this one; NG is a continuation from “states’ rights” to “weed capitalists” to X so it’s some kind of egalitarian minarchism which is close enough for these purposes.
But that doesn’t include the idea that we are obligated to help each other, which joins state socialism and anarcho-communism.
Curses, maybe OP was right.
“We are obligated to help each other, so the state should get out of the way and stop hindering it by trying to micromanage human interaction, but it should ensure a sufficient basic income because that’s very important and can’t be left to chance”
The axes are perfectly coherent: Lawful = big government, Neutral = small government, Chaotic = no government; Good = equality, Neutral = (as Vermin Supreme puts it) “letting shit fall where it may”, Evil = hierarchy.
Thus the Neutral Evil/Neutral/Good becomes:
small government for purposes of hierarchy
(“states’ rights” is often basically a very transparent euphemism for “the federal government shouldn’t be able to stop us from reinstating slavery”)
small government for purposes of letting shit fall where it may
(soft libertarianism)
small government for purposes of equality
(which some kind of welfare minarchism would be pretty much exactly;
(arguably a post-scarcity society might be closer to “letting shit fall where it may” and I personally might be actually closer to Chaotic Neutral in this chart
(except quite pragmatic about it and thus approaching True Neutral most of the time or something)
but I wanted to impose my desire of not allowing impossibilities on this one and the politics of niceness and helping each other were a good fit with neutral good
(as I said I don’t really know the specifics and we just should have a good society with no poverty or voting on people’s bodies and I’m not lawful enough to let the letter of the chart override the spirit of neutral good)))
In comparison: Lawfuls are:
big government for hierarchy
(imperialism, authoritarianism)
big government for letting shit fall where it may
(social democracy is not exactly known for its anti-statist ideals; the people making “governmentisgood.com” websites about how the mortgage deduction is supposedly not an indirect way of robbing the poor to subsidize the homeowning middle class which is more well-off to begin with than those who don’t own homes, but instead “a good thing your tax moneys pay for”
(oh sure, it’s my tax moneys all right, paying for someone else’s McMansion because I’m the kind of a person who doesn’t want to get tied down to property and thus the state shall scorn me financially to punish my degenerate lifestyle
(I’m not a fan of landlords but they do create some value by enabling me to not own my own housing so I can move somewhere else really easily in pursuit of opportunities and/or cute people))
and defending things like “the state should regulate the opening hours of grocery stores” and doing all the big government apologia tend to disproportionately be socdems who don’t see all the harms they are causing with reckless applications of the State and PoliceMob; and it notably rejects the more aggressive leveling of Actual Socialism in favor of simply regulating the excesses of statist crony capitalism
(or less charitably, sweeping them under the rug by its tendency to be unwilling to address the root causes like dysfunctional markets which, combined with the absence of meaningful alternative ways of acquiring sustenance, together permit the existence of such abominations as “shitty jobs for poor people” in the first place)
thus it belongs here; of course it could be that “social democracy” means different things in different places, but I definitely live in one, am desperately trying to get away from there, and can tell that around here “social democracy” means Jantelaw, mind-bogglingly unnecessary regulation
(San Francisco is certainly trying though, but it’s a neophyte in comparison)
voting on people’s bodies, and “omfg you
(mostly)
americans aren’t going to believe how much of the value we create is seized by the state”
(in Finland 24% VAT on most things, up to ~35% progressive national income tax, ~16-23% municipal income tax depending on location
(with a flat deduction for the first few thousand euros a year)
~25% payroll tax for pensions, 20% corporate tax, ~30% capital gains tax, and extra taxes on specific things; and Sweden once taxed a childrens’ book author 102%[sic])))
big government for equality
(statist socialism)
And Chaotics:
no government for purposes of hierarchy
(basically “we have guns, you don’t, so we tell you what to do; should’ve gotten guns of your own if you didn’t want this to happen”)
no government for purposes of letting shit fall where it may
What is your opinion on International Tell Your Crush Day?
I am, if you will recall, a fan of the no-obligation crush. Which is to say that in the unlikely scenario that I have a crush upon your totes adorbs self, you are in no way obliged to return it.
My crush is my own. It’s nice if we share a mutual attraction, but even if you show no interest in my pudding-like physical form, I will still hang out with you. This isn’t a contract where I will only do nice things for you unless you promise to smooch the hell out of me; no, we are friends, and while my friendship may be laced with a bit of intoxication over the idea of smooching you, I value your actual presence over my daydreams.
Tl;dr: I’d rather have you in my life as a buddy than reject you for the crime of not crushing back.
And I often do reveal crushes, just to get that out of the way. “Hey, I crush on you, this is a factor to be considered in our relationship, like the weather or traffic jams.” I do it not because I intend to arm-wrestle love out of them, but because they should probably know that if they choose to, say, complain to me extensively that there aren’t any good men out there who like them, I may get a bit huffy for reasons that might seem mysterious in the absence of this crush-visibility zone.
I've seen you talking about sortition a few times, and I'm curious, how seriously do you take it? How worried are you about issues of legitimacy?
Serious! I think forms of government can be arbitrarily weird and yet considered legitimate as long as there’s appropriate ritual around them and they people’s lives are about as good as they expect them to be, and I don’t think sortition is that weird - it’s fair, it’s representative, it’s been done before.
We nordics are all a bunch of pirates and don’t believe that information may be owned so I’m not stealing || expropriating anything, I’m simply copying it and spreading it. In fact, I’m actually doing you favor because your reps are so going to get bumped by exposing these posts to as wide an audience as possible, so if anything I’m creating value to you totally for free (which is COMMUNISM, you COMMUNISTS who use my value, which I’ve created, for free like the COMMUNISTS you are!), but I’m not seeking any compensation, just a bump to my own rep corresponding to the value I’ve created to everyone.
Information wants to be free as in “speech”, and inspecting the supply/demand graphs suggests that information wants to be free as in “beer” too because it has an inverse price/quantity relationship. We can have one Tesla model S if we pay $100k, but to buy a million model S’s asap we’d need to pay way more than $100k for each because we’d need to reallocate a lot of stuff on the margin; but if I was willing to supply one piece of information to one person for $100k, I’d supply it for a million for $0.1 per purchaser because copying costs are less than the price of keeping track of them. This suggests that societal value will be maximized by eliminating monopolies in information (expect information that produces negative externalities like leaked nudes) and rewarding the producers of information in some other way than having users of information pay for it.
Why would you sometimes prefer to call that group "extropians"? I'm just asking because I'm unfamiliar with that...
cause it’s the earliest group that was a recognizable version of the clique, it was this transhumanist discussion group in the 90′s [link] which was where yudkowsky and robin hanson met, before they would go on to start the blog “overcoming bias,” and then yudkowsky started lesswrong as a spinoff of overcoming bias, and the rest is history. also the extropians were overtly libertarian/objectivist, so bringing up that the lesswrongers/”rationalists” have their roots in the extropian movement supports my argument that the politics of the lesswrong ideology is ultimately right-libertarian in nature.
I've seen you talking about sortition a few times, and I'm curious, how seriously do you take it? How worried are you about issues of legitimacy?
Serious! I think forms of government can be arbitrarily weird and yet considered legitimate as long as there’s appropriate ritual around them and they people’s lives are about as good as they expect them to be, and I don’t think sortition is that weird - it’s fair, it’s representative, it’s been done before.
Wait a goddamn second political alignment charts are literally the same exact thing as D&D alignment grids. What the shit
Lawful Good: True State Socialism
Lawful Neutral: Left-leaning liberals
Lawful Evil: “moderate” liberals, neocons
Neutral Good: [Impossible due to the nature of politics?]
True Neutral: South Park libertarians, Legal Weed Capitalists
Neutral Evil: people obsessed with “states’ rights”
Chaotic Good: Anarcho-communists, the Yippies
Chaotic Neutral: Vermin Supreme
Chaotic Evil: militia groups and anarcho-capitalists
tag yourself I’m true neutral
I’m seeing that Neutral Good is unoccupied territory and seizing it to be the refuge of all “I don’t really know the specifics but we should have post-scarcity and freedom and niceness and 3d-printers for all and nobody voting on anyone’s body” people
I thought given it’s between between state socialism and
Anarcho-communists, “Social Democracy“ was the obvious idea to slot there.
No, socdems are LN in this one; NG is a continuation from “states’ rights” to “weed capitalists” to X so it’s some kind of egalitarian minarchism which is close enough for these purposes.
Wait a goddamn second political alignment charts are literally the same exact thing as D&D alignment grids. What the shit
Lawful Good: True State Socialism
Lawful Neutral: Left-leaning liberals
Lawful Evil: “moderate” liberals, neocons
Neutral Good: [Impossible due to the nature of politics?]
True Neutral: South Park libertarians, Legal Weed Capitalists
Neutral Evil: people obsessed with “states’ rights”
Chaotic Good: Anarcho-communists, the Yippies
Chaotic Neutral: Vermin Supreme
Chaotic Evil: militia groups and anarcho-capitalists
tag yourself I’m true neutral
I’m seeing that Neutral Good is unoccupied territory and seizing it to be the refuge of all “I don’t really know the specifics but we should have post-scarcity and freedom and niceness and 3d-printers for all and nobody voting on anyone’s body” people
“The authors conducted two experiments which looked at the effect of two different types of motivational intervention – a controlled form (telling people what they should do) and a more personal form (explaining why being non-prejudiced is enjoyable and personally valuable).
In experiment one; participants were randomly assigned one of two brochures to read: an autonomy brochure or a controlling brochure. These brochures discussed a new campus initiative to reduce prejudice. A third group was offered no motivational instructions to reduce prejudice. The authors found that, ironically, those who read the controlling brochure later demonstrated more prejudice than those who had not been urged to reduce prejudice. Those who read the brochure designed to support personal motivation showed less prejudice than those in the other two groups.
In experiment two, participants were randomly assigned a questionnaire, designed to stimulate personal or controlling motivation to reduce prejudice. The authors found that those who were exposed to controlling messages regarding prejudice reduction showed significantly more prejudice than those who did not receive any controlling cues.
The authors suggest that when interventions eliminate people’s freedom to value diversity on their own terms, they may actually be creating hostility toward the targets of prejudice.”
Pretty concise explanation of why I think a lot of SJ tactics work exactly opposite to how they’re intended.
TL;DR: evidence suggests libertarian forms of SJ good idea
That… is an interesting level of fucked-upness. Cronyist regulatory capture *and* bioethics explicitly simultaneously is not something one sees every day.
I can’t believe I never realized “come on and slam and welcome to the jam” is in iambic pentameter
also please remember that the flip side to this is that you can recite any other line of iambic pentameter as if it were the lyrics to the space jam theme
HOLD UP because basically what this means is you can read Chaucer’s Canterbury Talesto the space jam tune what a time to be a l i v e
…Except I’m a godless extrovert with too many friends, and even I can’t date a hundred people.
wait does this mean once I become poly I have to transition
damn you trans-philic SJ and your brilliant marketing tactics
it true tho
@sinesalvatorem once said that one should not be surprised that wanting to kiss girls correlates with other good decisions, and I say that transitioning would also be expected to correlate with other good decisions (at least it correlates with being a diaspora-type rationalist and with wanting to kiss girls, see the pattern?) and thus nobody should be surprised if trans lesbians, with our exceedingly high prior for making Objectively Good Decisions, would make the decision of dating all the friends or as close as possible or convenient
everything fits as beautifully together as a theory ever could, and empirical observation that trans lesbians and trans-lesbian-adjacents tend to be awesome people further supports it!
this blog is first and foremost a shitpost curation station, BUT if I had to pretend it had some sort of greater mission I think increasing intellectual exchange between rationalists and leftists would be up there
if you are a rationalist, has this blog corrupted you at all with leftism? if there’s something at the level of “getting” ideas that prevents you from being corrupted, can you articulate what it is?
if you are a leftist, has this blog corrupted you at all with rationalism?
if there’s something at the level of “getting” ideas that prevents you from being corrupted, can you articulate what it is?
(where leftism/t arbitrarily and somewhat sloppily means “discourse community descended from marx’s writings” and rationalism/t means “discourse community descended from yudkowsky’s writings” and corruption means “getting more positively disposed to the idea that the associated people (at least here, On Tumblr) and ideas are worth engaging with,” but if you have a more interesting answer for different values of these go ahead - these definitions are sloppy and I really just mean “no, not bernie sanders” and “no, not descartes and spinoza” and “no, not selling all your possessions and joining the other cult”)
((credit for inspiring this come from @sinesalvatorem, who reminds me that i haven’t done that “reducing inferential distance from rationalism to communism” thing I said I would do, and also inadvertently that it would be a good idea to get a lay of what the inferential distances (in either direction) actually are))
Okay, so as someone who not only knows but cares about the Marx/Bakunin distinction (and thus felt really compelled to pick the nits of “descended from Marx’s writings” because as far as taking sides on the topic of two pre-all-the-empiricism-of-the-last-150-years dudes makes sense I’m on side Bakunin; for example when marxists.org tries to argue that Marx was right their arguments simply make Bakunin appear as the more sympathetic one even though they have been able to pick and choose them with the obvious itent of being favorable to Marx) I’m pretty much leftiness georg already by those standards, but then there’s the other distinction that is more political than cultural and which I am confused by.
The “communism as a vague description of the goal of post-scarcity and the end of poverty and material lack and rentseeker bullshit forcing people to toil for the benefit of powerful non-value-creator parasites; 3d-printers for everyone; beeline for future society: eudaimonic” thing makes sense; C4SS and David Friedman alike make sense (and I think the idea of “substantial basic income + actually laissez-faire” is effectively more socialist in the meaning of “alleviates the plight of the working class” than the entire state of Sweden), and “get maximum cash, invest in 3d-printers, share them, prevent the state from taking them away” is an actionable strategy, but what is the actionable strategy of “communism as politics, switch to economy: planned”, and what are its contents actually?
All I’ve managed to pick up from elsewhere is roughly “we have a lot of valid complaints about how a lot of things are really sucky for non-rich people but no proposed solution other than some kind of nebulous ~global revolution~ that is unlikely to ever actually happen and any attempts to do anything else than carry on the decades-old tradition of discussing the imminent revolution is liberal reformist bullshit, and we will control the economy democratically and it will ~automagically~ make it work better than markets despite not containing any actual replacement for the very important mechanisms markets have, and we will not expropriate your toothbrush even though we totally could expropriate your toothbrush and you’re supposed to trust us because this time subjecting everything to democracy would not work as disastrously as your previous experiences with democracy and de facto mob rule have led you to expect because this time democracy will ~automagically~ not vote on your body even though it totally could vote on your body and you would be a class enemy if you object” (this may sound a bit uncharitable but my interactions with statist marxists haven’t exactly been that fruitful because the inferential distance is too large)
So basically I’d like to know what steel marxism is _actually_ about, and especially wtf is up with the labor theory of value and democratic economy/economic democracy.
this formatting is making me uncomfortable but I have to tell you something / ask you something that is vital to my career as a student.
I re-read and edited that sentence for an hour, but you’ll probably just glance over it for half a second.
thanks!
- [name]
k
-professor
I have a stock format and structure I use.
Dear Person I am Writing To:
This is an optional sentence introducing who I am and work for, included if the addressee has never corresponded with me before. The second optional sentence reminds the person where we met, if relevant. This sentence states the purpose of the email.
This optional paragraph describes in more detail what’s needed. This sentence discusses relevant information like how soon an answer is needed, what kind of an answer is needed, and any information that the other person might find useful. If there’s a lot of information, it’s a good idea to separate this paragraph into two or three paragraphs to avoid having a Wall of Text.
If a description paragraph was used, close with a restatement of the initial request, in case the addressee ignored the opening paragraph.
This sentence is just a platitude (usually thanking them for their time) because people think I’m standoffish, unreasonably demanding, or cold if it’s not included.
Closing salutation,
Signature.
People always ask me how I can fire off work emails so quickly. Nobody has figured out yet that it’s the same email with the details changed as needed.
Do you know that feeling in an RPG when your character is all twinked-out and you’re just utterly destroying all the low-level content with your optimized build and great gear?
Because that’s what doing Project Euler with Julia feels like.
It’s amazing. The language knows what I want to do, it already has a tool to do it efficiently and easily and move on to the next problem, and pretty much everything in the syntax is easy to understand and bugs and mistakes are never counter-intuitive. Figuring out that the variable i needs to be typed to i::Int64 to deal with big numbers on my 32-bit ARM is exactly as obvious and quick to backtrack as it should be and makes perfect sense once noticed.
5/5 highly recommended.
omfg lol number 10 (sum of all primes under 2 million)
In a certain way I think (steel) postmodernism is the natural match for the archetypical Formidable X-rationalist neo-renaissance-person who appreciates the “hard” and “soft” arts alike.
There’s the thing where one hones their craft for their entire life and learns to build very intricate and detailed and high-quality worksmanship.
Then there’s the thing where one designs a 3d-printer that can do the same, and way more, as long as the blueprints are supplied. Or uses a high-level programming language, with the grunt work abstracted away, to write in a few lines the kinds of code that require weeks of work in a less sophisticated language.
Similarly there’s the thing where one spends countless hours learning the classics, history, Latin, cultivating the tastes and refinement, etc.
And then there’s the thing where one learns to question and evaluate the very base assumptions that underlie such things.
These things seem to very comfortably sort themselves into two pairs of somewhat fundamental similarity.
And one of the pairs fits together with dutifully thinking about the lofty ideas of important philosophers, and the other with recognizing that many of the things the philosophers so dutifully ponder are actually kind of embarrassing category errors, or results of biases that we’ve discovered with empirical research in the last few decades, or…
Do you know that feeling in an RPG when your character is all twinked-out and you’re just utterly destroying all the low-level content with your optimized build and great gear?
Because that’s what doing Project Euler with Julia feels like.
It’s amazing. The language knows what I want to do, it already has a tool to do it efficiently and easily and move on to the next problem, and pretty much everything in the syntax is easy to understand and bugs and mistakes are never counter-intuitive. Figuring out that the variable i needs to be typed to i::Int64 to deal with big numbers on my 32-bit ARM is exactly as obvious and quick to backtrack as it should be and makes perfect sense once noticed.
embarrassment squick is a phenomena i have been feeling literally my entire life bUT I NEVER KNEW THERE WAS AN ACTUAL TERM FOR IT???
except second-hand embarrassment i guess, but it’s not quite the same
there’s being embarrassed for someone else and then there’s being unable to sit through shows like the office and parks and recreation even though you KNOW they’re good, funny shows that everyone references all the time and you want to understand buT YOU CAN’T WATCH IT WITHOUT WANTING TO RUN OUT OF THE ROOM SCREAMING OH GOD I CAN NOT AAAAHHH
ALL SITCOMS EVER. ALL OF THEM. 100%.
there was already a perfectly good german word for this! fremdschämen!
Oh yes, THIS is the true translation of “myötähäpeä”; Finnish has it too, we are very familiar with the feeling.
It took me a weirdly long time to notice that you’re not playing as the emperor in 4x games, you’re playing as the empire.
This is a strange feeling for me, because instead of playing as a human person with human values, I am playing the character whose values are “become the most powerful”.
A bad thing isn’t “a million people died due to plague” a bad thing is “you lost 1 population unit”. You don’t get sad about the people who died. You do care if other people are sad about this, because people are less productive when they’re unhappy. It doesn’t matter you become the strongest empire, winning by exterminating everyone else is just as valid as winning by having the highest quality of life.
have something about playing strategy games as ethically as possible?
I don’t think so, it most likely someone else. I was just hacking that “GOP ‘16 nomination blessings” game into outputting world domination. But if my input on the topic is required, I’d say that from a purely utilitarian perspective maximizing tech and taking over the world ASAP to minimize the terribleness of the pre-modern era and implementing a free world as its sovereign ruler seems a pretty promising approach.
Or possibly it might be that I wrote a post about playing Victoria 2, rushing a social-liberal welfare state (because there is no option to shoot the pinkertons and eliminate other attempts to coercively prevent free negotiations between workers and employers, de-land the aristocrats, re-institute basic income (fun fact: some parts of britain had it in the early 1800s until a bad politically-motivated study led to its replacement by bullshit) and otherwise non-interfere; so one can only be a crony capitalist state, a welfare state, or a failed state) with all other freedoms except the freedom to vote conservatives into power (because screw the evil parties) and taking over as much of the world as possible to destroy all fascist regimes the instant they appear. Or I could have just thought it in my head because my brain is bad at keepin track of “things I’ve said” vs. “things I’ve thought a lot about saying”.
