And as for “gruesomely facile reading of Moore,” well, I did tip my hand to socialjusticemunchkin when I asked if their use of “promethea” was a Moore reference, the fact that it wasn’t and they haven’t read any Moore other than Watchmen was maybe best taken as a sign that getting into a Moore battle with me was a high-risk strategy. And sure enough, they failed to construct an accurate picture of Moore by extrapolating from one character in Watchmen, then ascribed their inaccurate picture to me, a doubly risky strategy given that Moore is my biggest single influence, so getting this one wrong is going to leave all sorts of knock-on errors.
This is kind of breaking my style, but I just want to address it explicitly: did you seriously think I was interested in actually getting into a Moore battle with you, on your territory (which I was well aware of), with your rules? That the only way you could interpret that part was your way, and thus promethea is a defective Phil Sandifer?
Because wow, this is so beautifully an example of the Mandatory Comprehensibility. I put stones on a board with a known checkers champion, after having told him that I know jack about checkers, who promptly proceeds to assume I’ve made a shitty checkers move when actually I’m building eyes for my go pattern.
Getting an accurate picture of Moore was never the point, arguing that Moore is not someone who can credibly impersonate AlphaGo to me was. I’m closer to AlphaGo than Moore himself is, and I notice that Moore played a really bad move even though he can fool amateurs. (As I said, I never promised to be humble.)
Now if you’re willing to argue that both Moore and you are closer to Doctor Manhattan than I am (Moore so that he could model him better, and you so that you could recognize a better modeling), then you are certainly welcome to present your evidence, but be aware that this kind of inhuman psychology is evidently not your territory just like Moore-litcrit is not mine.
Okay guys, I’ll handhold more next week (until then I’m going to just keep posting koans and shit or maybe some other vay of Vagueblogging and Doing the Genre; but I promise that if you do your homework diligently and figure out the contents of part 9, part 10 will be up within 24 hours of the instant I’m informed of this success) but let me just tell you that if you think I’m incomprehensible, @nostalgebraist has written a way less incomprehensible explanation of the Dogma of Mandatory Comprehensibility than I ever could, because I’m not the one who owns the right hat for being Comprehensible in the way that is Mandatory: http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/144203687459/nab-notes-anti-subversiveness-miscellany-this-is
Also, keep on the good work of making my arguments for me, it saves me a lot of effort.
I like promethea @socialjusticemunchkin Oue’s reviews of NRx A Basilisk. I am therefore annoyed a bit by criticism of them that I see as baseless.
Anyway, some clarifications: Promethea is an enby who at I think is feminine-of-center, and if you have to use binary pronouns, “he” is not the one to use.
> In the first part, they’re pulling a standard That Guy move. (That Guy is somebody familiar to anybody who gives and most people who attend panels at anime, comic, or science fiction conventions. That Guy sits in the audience and constantly, loudly interrupts the panelists to interject their own opinions or points they feel the audience should hear. I use a gendered term for this because That Guy is almost but not quite always male.) One of That Guy’s favorite tricks is to respond to something which isn’t quite true, and which the panelist knows isn’t quite true, but usefully conveys an important concept to an audience who isn’t familiar with it (for example, Phil’s bluescreen/hourglass illustration of the halting problem), with something technically more accurate but which fails to get the point across at all. As with most things That Guy does, the primary thing it accomplishes (besides derailing) is to announce “I am a pedantic asshole” very loudly.
Um. Sandifer asked for reviews. He even sent promethea a review copy, which clearly means he wants a review from promethea. Therefore, they are not doing anything wrong by “interrupting” the plot with commentary. (Maybe the other thing is a problem, but explaining how the problem is a “That Guy” move when promethea is not being “That Guy” is unnecessary except to attach negative affect to them.)
Instead of sticking to his strong points, Sandifer feels an obsessive need to head straight back to the territory he doesn’t understand. The factual errors of the book have been taken apart thoroughly elsewhere; I won’t bore you by repeating them here. Suffice to say that there are plenty, including that Sandifer seems to be a Windows user, as evident from the assertion “As any computer user can attest, left running a computer will eventually either blue screen or get stuck with the cursor as an hourglass.” What I am interested in is the phenomenon I have often repeated but never quite fully explained: the liberal arts eschatology of Sandifer.
Sandifer’s computer illiteracy provides a revealing window to this pathology. “Let us assume that we are fucked, for we do not know how to install Linux.” He appears to assume that what he knows about computers, based on his experience with Windows, is everything there is. For all of his talk about pwnage, the actual pwning of objective systems is largely beyond his grasp and he instead sticks to “pwning” things where he can simply declare that he has pwned them and decide the facts on the matter by popular vote, not subject to the unfair constraints of a reality which doesn’t care about the cleverness of his arguments and the sickness of his burns if he still fundamentally, materially, utterly fails to actually pwn anything. It doesn’t take a massive quantity of technological mastery to install Linux and set up a system which doesn’t bluescreen or turn the cursor into a hourglass (partly because a computer doesn’t really need a cursor; this pedestalization of style over substance manifests yet again) but whose uptime can instead be mostly limited by the electric grid.
Now, this once again ties intriguingly to something else, for nothing is ever a coincidence. It’s universally known that trans women are massive computer geeks, and something in Sandifer is starkly reminding me of an egg: a closeted trans girl who doesn’t yet know that she is one (while other trans girls totally do see that she is one of them), but is nonetheless strangely fascinated by anything related to the topic, and whenever she is getting close to the underlying truth she gets frightened and recoils with a nervous laugh.
Throughout all of this, Sandifer has displayed the obvious behavior pattern of someone with a Basilisk of his own. Time and time again, whenever he might be getting too much into the matter, he turns away from the most promising prospects just like that trans girl who quickly closes the tab when she realizes the porn she had been watching made her feel like she wants to be the girl, rather than do her. (No, I’m not implying when Sandifer is like “screw these guys” he’d be using the other meaning of the word, but something more interesting. Why are postmodernists always having their minds in the gutter?)
And furthermore, for all of his talk about empathy being a defining feature of humanness, Sandifer has demonstrated a baffling level of its absence.
Just like the egg who tries to distance herself from an uncomfortable idea by petty transphobia which demonstrates mostly her motivation and her lack of any actual arguments to support it.
It is utterly jarring to see a self-identified “intersectional” marxist argue mostly by using a large number of ableist slurs. Or to be more accurate, the number of slurs he uses isn’t that impressive; the number of times he uses each of them is. One certainly would think that an intersectional marxist would have better arguments for his position than that his opponents and people with cognitive disabilities are the same kind of bad people for the same reasons, but nonetheless there did he go.
When Yudkowsky describes his rejection of irrationally anti-emotional “rationality”, Sandifer comments: “It’s tempting to describe this as an attempt to characterize emotion by someone who has never actually had one”. The thought that someone might just have a different natural vocabulary about talking such things doesn’t seem to occur to him. No, to Sandifer all other humans must be defective Sandifers wherever they differ from him.
Of course, there is a Reason for this.
Now I’m obviously not insinuating that Sandifer would be closetedly trans…gender. What I am insinuating is that, just like he is insinuating that Moldbug is a closet marxist who doesn’t know it yet, Sandifer himself is equally like a planet tantalizingly close to igniting fusion. That in his philosophy there is something that inevitably brings its own downfall, which would provide a natural explanation for why he is so fascinatedly seeking such features in someone else, unable to fully dive in and equally unable to look away, and most importantly make it make sense why he would do all the otherwise inexplicable choices he has made in the book.
Such as the ending. Sandifer promised that the real basilisk wouldn’t turn out to be ourselves all along; a promise he kept because instead of the most cliched ending possible he chose the second most cliched one: pusseh. The much-vaunted proposition for dealing with the unimaginable horror awaiting us is to screw our brains out in a pagan sex cult, because anything else would be arrogant. Or something like that, my eyes kind of glazed over from the bullshit and boredom. The secret at the end of the book is pussy. I can’t believe I wasted my time on this. Perhaps the most continentalest continental philosophers think psychoanalysis has some validity to it because they themselves see teh pusseh as a solution to everything. (And as a non-binary trans person I was vaguely insulted by the insinuation that masculinity and femininity would be some kind of fundamental features of the universe and so on; because oh my Yog-Sothoth can’t you guys ever imagine anything creative? (Obviously not, because then they wouldn’t be so cliched to begin with)) And this guy had the gall to call others inhuman and robotic?
Of course, the lovecraftian protagonist catching a glimpse of the Beyond and furiously retreating to what little reality they can still feel attached to; a pagan sex cult; is an obvious conclusion for this man’s tale of terror.
But what was this Beyond?
The key to everything, the explanation for the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility, the liberal arts eschatology, the degraded marxism, the postmodernity’s divorce from objective reality (while I consider it a credit to both that the rationalist community has managed to derive several key insights of postmodernism and queer theory solely out of first principles, and which probably is the most significant differentiating factor between it and the embarrassment that is the common “respect my identity as an objective unbiased reasoner” “rationality”, there is an inflection point where ideas lose all their attachment to material facts and these kind of literary reviews are without error way past it)…
…the genuine red pill that truly only needs to be taken once to shift one’s perspective on the world and from which all these false pills have been consistently finding ways to shy away from…
An astute reader will have seen the obvious conclusion a long time ago, for the pieces are all there; I have been circling it all this time, not like the egg who circles her transness, but like the predator who circles its prey before swooping in for the kill. To the less astute, let this statement itself be the koan, the gate and the key.
Of course, there is a reason that John Oliver is the face of faceless corporate Big Sneer while Sandifer is a guy with a $2000 kickstarter.
That same exact reason is why he targets Yudkowsky and Moldbug in the first place; Land, being on a level above the previous two in this Game, is the only one who actually presents a genuine challenge to Sandifer.
As this kind of postmodern cleverer-than-thou post-ironic dick-measuring contest of a literary review, Sandifer’s book is frankly stellar. That is to say, the points of brilliance are separated by vast bleak stretches defined mostly by the nigh-absence of any significant substance. Compared to the rogue black hole of Land, throwing searing jets of destruction from the accretion disk of galactic trash it has collected around itself, Sandifer is best described as a red dwarf: not particularly bright but with a remarkable stamina, able to keep producing what little it produces for what feels like forever and ever.
Indeed, Sandifer versus Land was where this book shines, just as expected from the interaction of a black hole and a red dwarf. They both are consciously playing the same Game, while Yudkowsky for all his unorthodoxity (it is an oft repeated cliche that Yudkowsky is “a crank”; while it is trivially correct that he certainly has the brain of a crank (as do I, for example; this psychology which is eager to explore that which most ignore and which knight’s jumps to interesting conclusions unless one is extremely careful (and the owner of a crank brain can seldom be too careful) is not exactly exceptional; at its best this kind of a brain can swiftly fill in the gaps others struggle a long time with, at its worst it fills them in wrong and proceeds to be convinced that everyone else’s protestations to the contrary are simply manifestations of their evident incompetence (further compounded by the fact that the brilliant crank-brain can easily demonstrate a clear abundance of actually provable incompetence in everyone else); but nowhere is the universe obliged to make all such gap-fillings false), the crucial question “what is he right about and where is he mistaken?” is sidestepped by applying the universal label of crank, with the implication that every one of his ideas which diverges sufficiently from the mainstream is wrong, for they are the ideas of A Crank) is still trying to ultimately do science and engineering (Unless one goes full meta-paranoid and assumes he is actually playing a role of a cult leader simply because humanity would be incompetent enough to fall for it; the evidence in favor of which being quite abundant in his works. Indeed, if we follow this train of thought through and see where it leads, it has an astonishingly remarkable consistency to it. Surely it would not be an accident that the man who won the AI box experiments despite there being no logical reason for him to succeed, and who has written a thorough taking-apart on a multitude of mechanisms via which personality cults form, later wrote in the words of the obvious author avatar: “"So you decided to try a small-scale experiment first,“ Harry said. A sickness rose up in him, because in that moment Harry understood, he saw himself reflected; the next step was just what Harry himself would have done, if he’d had no trace of ethics whatsoever, if he’d been that empty inside. "You created a disposable identity, to learn how the ropes worked, and get your mistakes out of the way.” (…) “And eventually,” Harry said through the heart-sickness, “you realized you were just having more fun as Voldemort."” Thus, despite giving people every single caution against doing it, despite every warning about the failures of objectivism, the tendency of groups, not unlike caramelizing sugar all the way, to crystallize into the most nuttiest form, the halo effect and the horns effect, despite laying out the exact things people were supposed to avoid doing, they nonetheless fell into those exact patterns. Yet, to my disappointment, this hypothesis has been completely absent from this book no matter how much more entertaining as an AU fan fic it would be; Yudkowsky is not the only one about whom it can be claimed that he doesn’t recognize his full potential.), and Moldbug is just confused enough about everything to confuse Sandifer as well.
From this perspective the book makes far more sense, as two minds battling in a game which ultimately has meaning only as a game in itself, and the attempt to keep up the triptych structure mostly means that the contest of Sandifer vs. Land is punctuated by distracting side snipes at the other two. Sure, not riding the controversy around Yudkowsky would have attracted far less attention to begin with, but the book itself would have been so much better if Sandifer had stuck to his strong points.
So what is the book, actually? Its own description is, in fact, quite telling: “a book review in the form of an internet comment”; or alternatively: an incredibly verbose and deliberately obtuse TVtropes article. It clearly positions itself in the postmodern tradition of rejecting the possibility of empirical reality inseparable from emotions, motivations, genres, cliches, tropes, arguments and counterarguments. It’s playing a complicated Game in which there is no outside authority to determine truth from falsehood, (as evident from its way of manifestly proclaiming its conclusion and deriving arguments from it; going as far as to explicitly reject the notion that the assumption might be false, for that had never been the point in the first place), and the only goal is to play a kind of an elaborate rock-paper-scissors in which the most verbally clever and socially adept wins.
The first rule of this Game is that the rules of the Game (not to be confused with The Game) are not to be spoken of. This Game is a thoroughly anti-inductive process of demonstrating one’s dominance by analyzing the opponent convincingly while resisting succesful analysis oneself; and any verbalization of the rules means that they are now accessible to someone who has not done the work of learning them the hard way and they cease to be an useful status signal, and thus must be changed. The fact that this Game sounds remarkably similar to the game PUAs are about is no accident, and the common objection to any attempts to explicitly present rules governing human interaction for anyone to see is yet another facet of this Game. Predicting is a display of mastery over another, in the most fundamental macchiavellian form of human interaction, for playing this Game is ultimately what human intelligence has evolved for.
The second rule of this Game is that everything must be predicted, and one must stay tightly on the edge of the audience’s expectations. Do not say too much out loud, or you shall be a preachy embarrassment. (This was, of course, invented by the CIA as an anti-communist conspiracy when the US government realized that capitalism just doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of sincere propaganda as communism, and thus they made a big PR push to make it really embarrassing and tacky to sincerely present beliefs, preferring the less politically volatile genre of “white guy introspects without too much connection to the material world” which this book is a perfect example of.) Do not say too little out loud, or you shall be incomprehensible. As the ultimate spectator sport, one’s ability to predict and manipulate their audience’s state is a fundamental part of this game.
Modern rapid communication has enabled the Game to loop tightly back on itself, becoming a recursive and self-referential process of ever faster iteration in pursuit of the top spot (but of course, a material optimization process looping back on itself and getting out of control is simply preposterous techno-utopianism), and any other variables must be controlled to prevent reality from intruding on the Game; external facts must not override internal processes any more than the pawns may revolt on a chessboard. It’s not fun to pick on the nerd if the nerd can be proven right later, as any sophisticated high school bully knows, and the worst thing that could happen to the Game would be that an outside context problem were to disrupt it (naturally, I eventually figured out how to solve my own high school bullying problem by turning it precisely into an outside context problem with unexpected escalation that was totally against The Rules but upped the stakes into territory the bully was not willing to play at (I never promised to be fair)). Thus, everything is reduced to surface.
Now that we’ve rejected the inherent value of democracy and consider it kind of suspiciously overrated, we are getting dangerously close to the idea of the Cathedral. In fact, the neoreactionary cathedral is essentially a conspiracy theory based on noticing that a duct tape cartel exists, and subsequently concluding that therefore rubber hose must be the naturally superior option which is just kept down by The Man. A degraded rejection of the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility.
And this charitableness to unpopular ideas is very distinctive of the rationalist memeplex. A community where the median person is a social democrat (in the broad meaning of the word) and the entire statist right could almost be just a floating-point error in surveys, and as queer as a women’s college, gets stereotyped as friends of nazis simply because they sometimes stop to consider whether unpopular people might have a point before usually concluding that no, actually they really don’t have a point. (At least the sort of unpopular people this accusation is often leveled about; when they come for the unpopulars, they first come for those who are unpopular for a reason.) In fact, there is a certain deep irony in the fact that people who are going to understand Sandifer’s book as well as Sandifer understood the source material are usually socialists who think that people could basically get along and be excellent to each other if there were no artificial distinctions between them, and then they will proceed to artificially create as much of a distinction between themselves and the rationalists. Of course, there is a Reason for this.
Because let’s face it, this book is going to be used as ammunition. Sandifer himself, to his undeniable credit, is actually being very explicit that he doesn’t consider it true or fair to label Yudkowsky as a neoreactionary, but it’s the equivalent of “Ted Cruz is totally not the Zodiac Killer” while Ted Cruz is the only politician whose zodiackillerness is even a topic that ever comes up. Spin doctors know that if you can’t make your enemy admit something, the next best thing is to make him deny it, as repeatedly as possible. Because Ted Cruz might not literally actually be the Zodiac Killer but there certainly is something shady and creepy about him now that I think of it, because surely the entire question wouldn’t have come up in the first place otherwise, [alt-]right?
One of Sandifer’s stronger points (with the connotation that it’s fortunate he is a relativist instead of an objectivist) comes when he tries to apply armchair psychoanalysis (not that there is any other kind of psychoanalysis) to Yudkowsky, concluding that the rejection and fear of ill-informed authority is a significant influence in the rationalist movement. I cannot speak for Eliezer, but I can speak for myself, and I can speak for the statistics that suggest that the rationalist movement is basically made up of autistic and mentally ill trans girls who have rejected Mensa as being intellectually thoroughly amateurish and unsatisfying and are disproportionately libertarian but not in the way that wants poor people to die of hunger, and I can only say “no shit sherlock”. Being a mentally ill autistic trans girl with enough IQ for two basically functional adults is perhaps the best possible way to learn the fundamental inadequacy of everyone (including one’s self) in making any sort of good decisions on anything and thoroughly become convinced that people should especially not be making decisions on other people, and thus it flows really naturally that if there is a really big and important decision that might end up taking over the world, it should be made very very very very carefully so we don’t end up getting into a nanotech shotgun wedding with a decision that proved to be horribly bad in hidsight even though it seemed so charming and honest and chivalrous in the first year.
Of course, this observation is in no way original to Sandifer and others have made it better but it’s refreshing to finally find something relatively correct on page 49.
Naturally such ideas are verging uncomfortably to something Sandifer doesn’t seem to want to face and the book turns promptly back towards the less scary area of religion and the claim that Yudkowsky is fundamentally a believer in an authoritarian god because two things that superficially resemble each other on the surface when looked at from the right angle are totally exactly the same, and there is no objective reality against which the claim “AI would be likely to behave in certain ways” could be evaluated; everything is surface and appearance.
@socialjusticemunchkin, I think your idea that importing poor people into rich countries would increase empathy for poor people in those countries is incorrect, at least judging by treatment of poor people already inside rich countries or other countries with high degrees of inequality. Unless I’m misunderstanding you.
All I’m saying is, are we more sympathetic to poor people outside our countries? I don’t think so. Empirically we are way more interested in helping people inside our arbitrary borders over people outside our arbitrary borders even if the latter group’s situation is far more shitty in objective terms. The entire anti-globalization protectionist ideology proves this by its mere existence: “shipping jobs overseas” is bad and terrible because it takes jobs away from US and gives to THEM, and a thousand laid-off americans outweigh two thousand taiwanese.
Furthermore, for a bit of historical perspective I’d say that people in the US display far more empathy to the descendants of west africans who got imported to the inside of its arbitrary borders, than to those west africans whose ancestors didn’t. “Whites only” signs are taboo, but the implicit “no west africans whose ancestors didn’t get imported” hanging around everywhere passes unquestioned. It might not help the first generation that much (that’s what “getting access to the rich people’s job market” is for), but eventually people seem to get around to the idea that even people who do look different are kind of ingroup now because they live inside the same arbitrary borders.
Also, the word “import” itself is actually kind of a misnomer now that I think of it, as the entire point of open borders is to stop treating people as a product that may be imported and exported at will and instead treat them as people who may go where they want without getting shot at just for the crime of having the wrong parents.
@socialjusticemunchkin, I think your idea that importing poor people into rich countries would increase empathy for poor people in those countries is incorrect, at least judging by treatment of poor people already inside rich countries or other countries with high degrees of inequality. Unless I’m misunderstanding you.
All I’m saying is, are we more sympathetic to poor people outside our countries? I don’t think so. Empirically we are way more interested in helping people inside our arbitrary borders over people outside our arbitrary borders even if the latter group’s situation is far more shitty in objective terms. The entire anti-globalization protectionist ideology proves this by its mere existence: “shipping jobs overseas” is bad and terrible because it takes jobs away from US and gives to THEM, and a thousand laid-off americans outweigh two thousand taiwanese.
Furthermore, for a bit of historical perspective I’d say that people in the US display far more empathy to the descendants of west africans who got imported to the inside of its arbitrary borders, than to those west africans whose ancestors didn’t. “Whites only” signs are taboo, but the implicit “no west africans whose ancestors didn’t get imported” hanging around everywhere passes unquestioned. It might not help the first generation that much (that’s what “getting access to the rich people’s job market” is for), but eventually people seem to get around to the idea that even people who do look different are kind of ingroup now because they live inside the same arbitrary borders.
Um, a lot of people are already rankled at not letting refugees escape war or famine. Some of them are just regular liberals who don’t care about skilled immigration at all.
I’m not sure what you mean by economically? Are we talking about maximizing world utility or utility of the current citizens of the developed country in question?
Most people are incoherent on the refugee issue. I mean sure, you can welcome the ones that manage to survive the incredibly dangerous journey. But true compassion for victims of war or persecution would involve buying them airline tickets on the first flight out, or chartering a ship.
Some economists have pushed for open borders on the grounds that it would boost GDP by allowing cheap labour to move to expensive locations.
How exactly is cheap labour going to afford to live in San Francisco?
So you allow shanty towns to spring up around the major cities so that poor people have somewhere to live and they can take the bus to their jobs working as servants for software developers and this two-tier society will over time become less unequal instead of more? It just sounds somewhat optimistic.
The other problem is that it leaves open the problem of how to deal with weak states, rogue states, and civil wars, which will remain troublesome even if some fraction of the population manages to escape them.
If there are places in the world that are horrible places to live, maybe we can consider doing something about that, since we’ll have to eventually anyway.
Obviously we need to upzone the regions around San Francisco very hard. If we don’t want people to live in shantytowns, we should do the thing which makes them not live in shantytowns instead of the thing that makes the shantytowns keep away from us.
If we remove the option of “make them live in shantytowns in Guatemala instead”, the only solution to “people living in shantytowns in the US” is “give them something better than shantytowns”.
That, in turn can be pursued by liberalizing urban planning (and I don’t mean fire codes and earthquake resistance, but the pointless regulations that mainly just subsidize rich people and make poor people keep away; for example I was utterly astonished that in some places it’s illegal to build houses that are smaller than 100m2 because they wanted all people to be able to afford properly sized houses or something and I’m like what the fuck; poor people who can’t afford non-shitty housing are inevitably going to live in some kind of shitty housing, and if you ban all the shittiness that isn’t location (such as smaller homes, families living together, creative ad hoc arrangements) then congratulations, achievement unlocked: shitty ghettos) and doing some deliberate social engineering to ensure that the poor and the rich mix as much as possible, because empirically living in an area with rich people is better for poor people (who could’ve guessed that having access to the quality of services that is considered adequate for rich people, instead of that which is considered adequate for poor people, would be beneficial? and considering that most of the US is the product of deliberate or incompetence-induced social engineering in the other direction I don’t think reversing the process a bit would be any worse than stealing from a thief).
Now, phrasing it as “servants to sofware developers” is rightfully ugly and I agree that we should seek a society with no servants, but the reality is that with the inequality we already have “servant to software developers” is a pretty damn good deal to the people we are talking about. Software developers are lazy af and thus are v willing to pay other people to do stuff they don’t want to do, which is an opportunity for other people to acquire currency. If I had to be poor af I’d very much prefer to be poor af in a place where I can be a servant to software developers instead of something even worse.
And empirically, the answer to “would they magically become less unequal over time?” seems to be: yes. San Francisco and San Jose have some of the highest social mobility for poor people in the country, so this would suggest that being a servant to software developers gives better prospects to one’s children than flipping burgers to other poor people in a place with only poor people in it.
Furthermore, visible inequality is a very big thing. I knew that gig contractors often were in a shitty situation, but actually hearing a Lyft driver tell he doesn’t really have any dreams was a very visceral gut-punch over the society we’ve allowed to form because we hadn’t been giving af and I couldn’t receive the emotional effect from just reading thinkpieces. Personally knowing someone who was hurt by a tropical disease I had never even heard of before made me emotionally acutely motivated to do EA in a way soulless statistics alone never could. Having to walk around a roma beggar on my way to buy groceries reminds me that the world is broken and needs to be fixed immediately because this was the best this person could do for themselves; if they had stayed in Romania they wouldn’t have been cold, poor and miserable on a sidewalk on the 60th latitude N, they would’ve been something even worse and I just wouldn’t have seen it.
(On a darker and more cynical side, I just love the aesthetic of local inequality and global equality over local equality and global inequality. Every location I find instinctively appealing to myself is characterized by a comparatively “v”-shaped distribution of rich and poor people, while homogenous locations are not my taste. If a place is like “/” you get smug self-congratulatory assholistan that’s detached from reality; if it’s a “" you get a shitty slum; if it’s a ”^“ you get boring ‘burbs. Thus, open borders would replace inequality across borders with inequality inside borders, which is the prettier kind of inequality and if there must be inequality at least let it be pretty.)
In addition, I’d expect open borders to help with failed states and other such problems too. Tyrants can’t stay in power as easily if their subjects can just pack up and leave, and local tragedies get more attention in the west if the tragedy shows up on the west’s own doorstep wearing rags. (Of course, it’s usually the educated middle class which brain-drains and leaves the strongest, but emprically the educated expatriates seem to be pretty good at helping their countries and hurting their governments.)
The west is already v v good at completely ignoring the problems of Shitholistans, or if it intervenes, intervening badly; but I’d trust people from Shitholistan to have a bit of a better idea on what their country of origin needs. For example, I don’t think Somalia would be any better off if the diaspora hadn’t been able to get money and degrees in the west which they could then use to reconstruct their country and institutions; and if some place is creating massive refugee flows, taking away the easy option of just keeping the refugees away would be a powerful incentive for the west to actually do something about the thing which creates the refugees in the first place.
We’ve been trying the "borders closed, [pretend to] help them where they are” option for decades and it hasn’t been achieving shit because with closed borders it’s way too easy to “”“forget”“” to do the “help them where they are” part; then we got globalization and stuff basically FOOMed. Furthermore, I just don’t think it’s okay to let people’s accident of birth determine their status in the world for the rest of their lives; we were supposed to have gotten over this serfdom/caste system/aristocracy deal in the 19th century already. It’s nonconsensual and monopolistic to force people to live under a shitty government they didn’t get a choice in (or if they did, only the “”“choice”“” of a democracy which was probably corrupt and controlled by some foreign cronyist imperialists or local robber barons, or usually both).
TL;DR: if you want global equality you must first redistribute the inequality equally.
Wiktionary says that’s “an autonomous psychic entity composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people”, and I-as-in-ilzolende-the-persona-and-even-[realname]-the-person (pretty similar, don’t worry) am, uh, definitely composed of my own thoughts, and to the extent that I’m not autonomous I’m influenced by [my models of] the thoughts of the people around me, but that seems to be true of everyone?
TIL that there is a word for what promethea-the-utility-function is.
Also, “try to do things promethea would do” is 100% my One Weird Trick too
And “things promethea would do” basically mean optimizing for the unlikely; if I try to live in a way nobody has probably lived before, and make choices to place myself on such a trajectory, it neatly offers a clear roadmap for avoiding cliches and known failure modes (because they are known) so at the very least if I fuck up I’ll fuck up in an interesting way that also is simultaneously science (because then we know more of what does and doesn’t work)
35 mostly because I”ve never been in legal trouble. I was a boring teenager.
90.
Well.
92 :P
64/100 seems about right
45; I’m not sure if I should be surprised at it being so low because I’m gray-asexual, or at it being so high because I’m one pretty freaky gray-ace, so it’s probably around right.
As far as unworkable policies go, though, I’d support Open Borders before I’d support Basic Income.
Free movement of labor would reduce world inequality and poverty much more than a guaranteed income would. And it would increase world output by somewhere between 60 and 147 per cent [1,2]. GI wouldn’t do that.
And implementing GI would make real improvement in migration policy that much more difficult.
In many places the disability pension already is a basic income, just one that requires pervasive corruption to acquire, includes perverse incentives against paid work, pushes people to take medications they may not need, and ingrains habits of learned helplessness.
Free movement of people would be great, but it’s not really practical without resources to acquire housing, unless we allow shanty towns. The US has free movement of people, but it hasn’t created a utopia.
If we had to pick one unworkable policy, I would actually go for basic income first, and work to resolve the other issues that make migration policy so fraught.
unless we allow shanty towns
The point…is to allow “shanty towns” / tenements / whatever other word is used for the kind of housing very poor people can afford to live in.
The problem is that countries like the US / Australia / Western Europe are, in global terms, country clubs for rich people. And our immigration restrictions are like policies for the country club saying we’re not going to hire any poor people to come in and cook the food or clean the toilets because they’ll stink up the place. So here we are as the rich people having to pay other rich people exorbitant sums to do these jobs ourselves—or increasingly, having to go without because we can’t afford it—rather than condescending to hire some of the poor people outside the club.
If you had open borders but said “Oh, but you can’t work for under $10 an hour and besides we’re not going to allow the kind of low-quality housing you could afford”, then it would basically be useless. If you’re not going to allow poor people to have jobs and housing suited to their earning potential, you might as well not let them come at all.
The US has free movement of people, but it hasn’t created a utopia.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. No one is saying that it will create utopia, but it’s a lot better to have the right to live and work in the US (or an equivalently nice place) than not to have it.
Moreover, the US is a utopia compared to, like, the Congo…
The point is to allow people from the Congo or equivalent places to come and work “shitty” jobs for “shitty” pay—by American standards—but which is nevertheless a large improvement for them and a win-win deal for both parties.
If your concern is purely for the welfare of Americans / Australians, then I still think open borders is the superior reform. (Well, I don’t think basic income is desirable at all from that perspective, either…) But especially if you claim to be utilitarian/cosmopolitan, I can’t imagine how you could think basic income does more to help the truly needy of the world.
Basic income for Americans or Australians is like the people at the country club passing around the collection plate because one of their friends has to sell his $2 million house and move down to a $1 million one. It’s not exactly a pressing need compared to the dire poverty abroad.
I think the idea of importing the poor to make them our servants at marginally higher quality of life than they had in their home countries is not well thought out.
Economically it might make sense in the short-term, but people are not perfect economic maximizers and that has to be taken into account.
Creating a large disadvantaged underclass with a sharp racial distinction doesn’t lead to a peaceful and stable polity, I think.
So unless you combine mass immigration with large scale redistribution as well, the outcomes probably won’t be ideal.
The median Mexican immigrant household in the US has an income of an income of $37,390 [1], compared to $54,565 for the native-born population, and $13 085 in Mexico (PPP adjusted) [2]. (This third figure is after-tax income, while the first and second doesn’t say whether it is before or after tax, so I’m going to assume that it’s before; I don’t know what Mexico’s tax situation is like, but I don’t think it’s likely that it will have a major effect). That is an increase in income by almost a factor of three. I hardly call that “marginally higher quality of life”. Moreover, Mexican immigrant households make 69% percent of what native households make; this is noticeably less, but hardly qualifies them as an underclass.
Of course, these stats apply only to the current margins. It is likely that as immigration is allowed to increase, the gains to the marginal immigrant will decline until they reach the point where the prospects of immigration cease to be so appealing. When this happens, net immigration will likely cease. I predict that this will happen long before we need to start housing them in shantytowns.
Finally, the US has a long history of taking in economically disadvantaged immigrants who are perceived as being racially other by the native population, which actively discriminates against them (the Anti-Irish Know Nothing Party received 21% of the popular vote in the 1856 election) . The precedent is that within a few generations, they are completely de-ethnicized and assimilated into the population at large. (I seem to recall a discussion on my dash a few weeks ago about a Chinese-American actress being declared “functionally white” by the tumblr commentariat.)
As you say, the economic gains from immigration decreases as the number of migrants increases. However, you assume this process will terminate purely on economic grounds, but people may have other reasons to migrate, like war and famine. The economic rationale for open borders suggests that unfortunate victims of persecution should be hired as servants by the rich, on low wages obviously because they are competing with every other immigrant. This may rankle people on justice grounds.
Arguably it is a lot easier for the Irish to assimilate into America than other ethnic groups that are not phenotypically indistinguishable from Anglo-Americans.
(Phillipa Soo is not just Chinese-American, her mother is white, and she can often pass as white just as Obama can pass as black).
Creating a large disadvantaged underclass with a sharp racial distinction doesn’t lead to a peaceful and stable polity, I think.
Well yes, that’s why the world is as fucked up as it is. The inequality is already there, we are just uninterested in addressing it properly because it isn’t living in a slum next door and begging us for money each morning; instead they are living in a slum on the other side of the world and begging other poor people for money.
The way the “country clubs for rich people” have consistently created something of a welfare state for themselves but utterly disregard filthy foreigners (filthy because they can’t even afford proper sanitation because the rich people’s tax dollars are more pressingly spent on weaponry to shoot the poor people with if they make the rich people nervous, or tax credits to the even more rich rich people so they can be a bit more comfortable) demonstrates clearly that merely being located inside certain arbitrary boundaries makes one much more eligible for sympathy; and if one supports redistribution for the global poor and/or revolution, importing the global poor over here so that we can see the need for redistribution/they can see the need for revolution (Isn’t it convenient that opening the borders would be beneficial no matter which perspective one starts from?) would thus likely be a very powerful first step in creating the political will to do it even if we ignore the massive redistribution not cartellizing rich countries’ economies to rich people would inherently cause in the first place (remittances already being three times as large as international aid, etc.).
'the mind-virus hypothesis has been thoroughly disconfirmed' which hypothesis, what has disconfirmed it, citation citation citation needed.
I can’t be arsed to provide citations, but it’s really easy to denounce things nobody actually believes… (for example, Dawkins seems to have a more nuanced view on the topic than he is often accused of having; like with many things the idea of memes can be separated into a “strong” claim (such as all cognition being simply idea-viruses) which is obviously either false, dramatically oversimplified, or utterly trivial; and a “weak” claim (such as the general kind of cultural transmission happening) which is obviously true and a somewhat useful concept; so that the strong one can be used to motte-and-bailey those who dislike the idea by agreeing with them and the weak one can be used to motte-and-bailey those who like the idea by agreeing with them
(compare this with the efficient market hypothesis: the strong version that 100% perfect information is already there is impossible because nobody could benefit from inputting information and thus the information wouldn’t be 100% perfect, while the weak version that any trick that consistently outsmarted the markets must have some reason why it isn’t constantly applied by everyone is obviously inevitable, and thus I can agree with people who start from “efficient markets are bullshit” and people who start from “markets are efficient” and corrupt them both to my obviously correct view
(obviously correct because if there was a way to consistently outsmart myself on the memetic marketplace I’d be using it already
(yo dawg I heard u like meta so I put meta in your meta…))))
…but some people believe others do (this is how I achieve brilliant success with my feminism; when someone “egalitarian” says how they hate $weakman I can just say “yeah, we hate that thing too, and hating that thing is called feminism” and then they are like “lol wtf” and then I’m like “it tru tho, and many of the people you thought had that opinion actually have $nuanced_opinion which just resembles $weakman if you look at it from an uninformed position and while some people actually believe $weakman the truth is more complex” and then they are like “okay lol I was mistaken about this looks like feminism is not a monolith of ridiculousness even if some feminists are”) and I vaguely remembered that my leftist friends had scorned a silly interpretation of memetics and scorning a silly interpretation would implant idea-viruses in the cool kids’ minds that make them more friendly to me.
<
p>Oops, please don’t tell the cool kids that I said this. Oh wait, the cool kids can see it anyway because this is public. Well fuck, now they know that I think that few people actually shared the conception of memetics they thought people shared widely and now they are inoculated against my idea-virus. Damnit!
fortelling the end of the world as we know it is a prerequisite for being cool these days
holy fuck i’m the coolest guy i know IRL
a prerequisite. doesn’t necessarily make you cool.
but you probably are, because “these days” means “these days among people who are like paying attention to the internet and stuff” and if nobody you know irl thinks the world is going to end they’re probably not with the times
but decline is becoming a more popular narrative than progress *even with literal progressives* in a lot of ways (note: don’t know if this is really increasing, cultural trends are hard and i am but a young boy etc). moderates don’t necessarily think the world is going to end because moderates don’t think extreme things, but if bernie wins we will become a communist country and if trump wins we will never accept another immigrant and women will stop being able to vote and our environmental indiscretions will kill us all and so forth
narratives that go “the world will end….unless you do what i want” are good motivators, and narratives that go “yeah, the world is ending, there isn’t much you can do about it” attract the nihilist and fake deep demographics
the march of progress is for left libertarian nerds for some reason. promethea can [day negative things about] phil by saying that he thinks all the cool kids think the world is ending, what’s up with that
nihil i agree with you so much
this thing drives me nuts
There is one obvious hypothesis:
either we left-libertarian nerds are deluded and hopelessly uncool and sabotaging our social status and position in the hierarchy or absolutely no reason
or we know something the others don’t; perhaps we haven’t bought the anti-communist conspiracy of scorning sincerity hook line and sinker (srsly guys, it was literally invented by the CIA, leftists should know this); perhaps we have figured out how to pwn the material reality itself instead of just proudly proclaiming that we have obviously pwned somebody’s ideas because a bunch of people we agree with agree that indeed we have; perhaps we have looked at the ~big data~ and the dramatic absence of any meaningful indicators of actual apocalypse has convinced us that apocalypse is just a hipster thing because reality is catching up with things actually starting to be relatively okay and thus the cool kids need to abandon positions because being on the side of reality isn’t useful for signaling
No book even vaguely connected with technology and politics would be complete without a mention of Peter Thiel’s infamous “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible”. The response is utterly predictable, and speaks perhaps more about Sandifer than Thiel, as it doesn’t exactly take great intellectual courage to keep repeating the party line that is so thoroughly indoctrinated early and often into every western child, than it does to actually examine the ramifications of the statement. And by examine, I mean “try to understand why a reasonable person might come up with such an idea”. Whether Peter Thiel himself is a reasonable person (my money is firmly on “no”; as an extremely unreasonable person myself I do recognize my own kind when I see it) is not the point; whether he might actually have one (a point, not a reasonable person) is.
The idea that democracy is the solution to everything imaginable and anti-democraticness thus being inherently evil is such a standard feature of the modern western memetic environment (by which I mean the ideas that surround us and their respective positions of status, acceptedness, respectability, and sanctity; the mind-virus hypothesis has been thoroughly disconfirmed but the words themselves can be reappropriated into more useful things) that it’s hard to imagine democracy being anything other than the best idea ever (unless one shares one of the Officially Accepted Critiques of Democracy), but when one pokes at the foundations they turn out to be disappointingly vacuous. An educated person might get as far as Churchill before they run out of appealing soundbites and demonstrate their inability to explain their convictions, but a person who wants to get to the bottom of things must go all the way back to the 18th century.
To be specific, a fictional 18th century where everyone has a space program. There is just one unfortunate problem; the rockets tend to crash and burn horribly every few launches because nobody has figured out how to prevent an important part from breaking apart. Clever engineers, from a variety of countries I can’t be arsed to google right now but the United States was probably one of them considering that they implemented it in practice, finally come up with a solution: wrapping the parts in duct tape. NASA attempts it with great success in the rocket launch of 1800 when analysis shows that the parts did indeed once again break, but the duct tape kept them together and thus the part that should point towards the ground did keep pointing towards the ground instead of space, nothing that should not be on fire was on fire, they did not have a big problem and they did indeed go to space that day.
Thus, the marvels of duct tape in solving this particular problem are exposed to the world. When people ask how NASA could launch rockets so well, the answer is rightfully “duct tape”. Other countries get tired of crashing and burning and switch to use duct tape as well, or keep crashing and burning. Over time people forget what the original issue was, but they do remember that duct tape is vitally important for some reason, so they retroactively justify it with duct tape being basically magic. Some people propose that rockets would be even better if they used more duct tape, and some of the places it is applied in are beneficial, while others are wholly unsuitable but people don’t really stop to consider it as much as they should, because duct tape is Good. Idealists even suggest that since adding a bit of duct tape was wonderful, just imagine how perfect everything would be if the rockets were made entirely out of duct tape!
And then Mr. Thiel suggests that he doesn’t think duct tape and good engineering are compatible anymore, and gets verbally crucified because how dare he question the miraculous gray sticky thing.
Democracy is ritualized, formalized, non-violent enactment of a civil war, to achieve dynastic changes in a substantially more civilized way than before. Democracy doesn’t promise freedom. Democracy doesn’t promise fairness. Democracy only promises stability, a promise the keeping of which alone makes democracy one of the most brilliant inventions of the last centuries. No matter how disgraceful a spectacle the 2000 election was, it was nothing compared to the Wars of the Roses; and no matter how terrible Andrew Jackson was, he was not Henry VIII. That is all democracy promises, and that is all democracy delivers. Not having civil wars is a pretty neat thing mature democracies excel beautifully in (the comparatively recent unpleasantness was over something as significant as “should people be property” instead of the previously typical “rich people’s family drama” which has been demoted to be the subject of cable tv instead), but not having civil wars is not the same thing as being compatible with freedom.
In fact, anyone who has spent any amount of time as an unpopular person in high school should know that the most important thing the majority needs is restraint, for any amount of freedom to exist anywhere.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time as an unpopular person in adulthood knows that the majority is not good at restraint.
The entire idea of constitutions is to have a list of things the democracy is not allowed to do because otherwise the natural instincts of the mob are to trample over everyone who doesn’t fit in. (To prove this, just consider the way your political enemies are pursuing terrible witch-hunts for simple thoughtcrimes while your own side is reminding the world that some very bad people are doing very bad things. It works regardless of what your politics actually are!) Freedom makes far more sense as something that is primarily orthogonal to the type of government (even though different governance technologies certainly influence how easy or difficult different varieties of freedom are to achieve in practice, just like technologies of production dramatically affect facets of social organization) and from this perspective, Thiel’s outrageous claim boils down to the far more reasonable “I don’t think duct tape is good at something basically unrelated to the reason we are using duct tape” (for a comparison, imagine someone getting yelled at for claiming that Google is not a very good fast food company). Maybe he still has nefarious purposes; perhaps he owns a company manufacturing rubber hose which he wants to sell despite it not necessarily being any better than duct tape. But to get to this point where such things are even an allowable object of reasonable discussion necessitates rejecting the unchallenged sanctity of duct tape.
Nonetheless, this elementary idea is “strange terrain” because it doesn’t fit with the appearances of what one is supposed to cheer. The unlikely thought breaks the comfortable games.
The liberal arts eschatology rejects AI safety as obviously preposterous. After all, the basic premise of AI safety is that any sufficiently powerful optimization process would be nigh-inevitably driven by what might as well be laws of nature, leading to them optimizing human flourishing only incidentally as a side effect which might be sacrificed the instant it is no longer beneficial for the process, and that it would be a really good idea to design a solid, self-sustaining system that provides an actual alternative to such basic drives. The liberal arts eschatologist only engages with things on the surface while Marx would be right at home with the underlying logic.
Another part where Sandifer’s degraded marxism displays itself very prominently is the idea of “how can we respond to the eschaton without the arrogance of thinking that we can change its speed or trajectory” being somehow a question worth considering. The liberal artist deals with the social, and is ultimately concerned with the social, the appearance, the status ladder, the spectation and entertainment of observing people who think differently. The “technolibertarian”, the “accelerationist” and the “decelerationist” alike reject the “without the arrogance of thinking” part, and for such a crime of departing from the social, the reasonable, the comprehensible, Sandifer’s kind has little more than a response that can underneath its superficial verbosity be distilled into two words: “scorn dem”. After all, it had already been assumed that we are fucked, and it isn’t fair to try to change the rules when the game is being played.
One might hypothesize that this is because the liberal arts eschatologists have never been dealing with solvable problems. They are usually only good for writing descriptions of problems, many of which I find quite agreeable; the knee-jerk libertarian inequality apologia that is basically endless words on top of the just-world fallacy disgusts this libertarian just as much as the knee-jerk cishumanist death apologia. Some people purchase ice creams that are more expensive than the entire lives of millions of people, and to say that something is quite iffy with this shouldn’t be controversial. It is a goddamn civilizational disgrace that the keyboard I’m typing this text on, the headphones I’m listening to music with, and the cheap-ass laptop processing the words themselves, are together worth enough to push one person out of extreme poverty for an entire year, yet nonetheless we do have extreme poverty because we haven’t figured out how to not have it. Believing this does not obligate me to support any single proposal for a solution, any more than rejecting any single solution means that I reject the values the proposed solution was based on; but in the politics of mandatory comprehensibility the ought and the is are kept together and thus a great deal is inferred about a person’s values from the things they consider realistic. Of course, this works as long as everyone plays along to the rules and keeps their is and ought tightly bundled, but someone who rejects the rules appears effectively alien.
The liberal arts eschatologist’s solution is to write “Let us assume we are fucked”. The engineer’s solution is to try to find out what would actually work. In this sense Marx was certainly an engineer at heart, and his approach to the problems he observed was sensible at a time before the acceleration of technology gave ideologies that cannot be expressed as numbers a decisive disadvantage (something that once again is a far better match with the meta-level of marxism, historical materialism and everything, than the degraded object-level manifestations mainstream marxist liberal artists have transformed into). A thousand polemicians may advocate a policy, and one Satoshi Nakamoto may design a technology that renders it practically unenforceable, or makes it actually possible. This liberal arts eschatology rejects the obvious conclusion that the most pressing concern of the modern left would be to get into the game and impose one’s ideology on silicon (it isn’t even that hard to imagine how blockchain technologies, cryptography, and worldwide connectedness could be harnessed for socialist ends) and instead doubles down on its traditional talking points of democracy and/or revolution; the latter being obviously purely social from beginning to end, for a technological revolution solving social problems is so utterly horribly in contradiction with Marx and his historical materialism that even the thought itself might not be entertained for even a moment, and the possibility that a single person might effect meaningful change just doesn’t fit with the theories of a man whose followers number in millions if not billions and whose ideas dramatically influenced the entire 20th century.
Thus, any attempt to actually evite the supposedly inevitable fuckedness must be simple hubris.
The idea of a red pill features strongly in Sandifer’s book, the concept itself having taken a detour to the neoreactionary movement before finding its natural home in a subculture of fedora-wearing programmers who watch My Little Pony and love to complain that women never invented anything important (not that there’s anything wrong in being a fedora-wearing programmer who watches My Little Pony, it’s just that the last assertion is quite trivially incorrect).
Unfortunately Sandifer’s treatment of the topic falls short of the original inspiration. While The Matrix is an extended metaphor, sprawling temptingly and brilliantly into meta-five, meta-six and onwards into as deep a recursion as a human brain is capable of and hypnotizing me with its intertextual insight pornography into a state not unlike being on acid despite being fully and legally sober, Neoreaction a Basilisk is the sort of a book that is best enjoyed with half a tab of acid, being utterly hilarious and making a massive amount of sense mostly because absolutely anything is utterly hilarious and makes a massive amount of sense on half a tab of acid. Sadly I was not on half a tab of acid while reading it (because that would’ve been illegal, drugs are bad if you live in such a jurisdiction mmmkay) so I did not have access to the state of mind where I could have just leaned back and enjoyed the ride.
Leaning back and enjoying the ride is what the book ultimately is about. It is not a sophisticated argument or an honest attempt at genuine discourse (and neither is this review, frankly, just to clarify the issue to those who haven’t picked up that obvious fact yet). It is a confused amateur ethnography on cultures that haven’t earned enough mainstream respectability that writing confused amateur ethnographies on them would be considered distasteful. In that sense it could be best compared to the works of european colonialists traveling to Africa and reporting back on the barbaric disorganized nature of the locals’ communities, because african cities were organized according to a structure europeans didn’t understand, instead of the simple cartesian system white people considered the pinnacle of civilization.
This particular type of error is one of the biggest ones underlying Sandifer’s liberal arts eschatology, and it shows up again and again. The idea that all there is to know can be known by a marxist English major, and that the world is obligated to be fundamentally comprehensible to one, leaks through constantly yet remains forever unaddressed in explicit terms, thus leading to pattern-matching and deeply unsatisfying arguments.
For example, it is quite a cliche, faithfully repeated in the book, that transhumanism is “merely” a symptom of people’s fear of death. (Nothing is “mere”, my friend, nothing is “mere”.) This is nigh-universally accepted to the degree that no justification is considered necessary. Transhumanism is unwillingness to accept death, end of discussion. Nowhere is it actually explained why unwillingness to accept death would be a bad thing. The critical reader would obviously begin to suspect that perhaps they cannot explain it. The median reader would obviously get outraged at how a fundamental part of their worldview is not accepted as obvious.
One would expect a marxist to be more sympathetic to such ideas, as marxism itself is popularly dismissed as “envy, end of discussion”. The laborer in the dark satanic steel mills asks “why exactly should Mr. Carnegie have so much money while I have so little, and why exactly should the Pinkertons be allowed to shoot us if we protest while we aren’t allowed to shoot them?” and the popular opinion answers “haha, he is just envious that Carnegie has money and he doesn’t”. Marxism starts from the assumption that maybe things should not be that way, and like any movement it ultimately devolves into a cherished set of excuses for the parts of the status quo one doesn’t want to think about too deeply. Once again the red pill remains a blue pill with an instagram filter on top.
In fact, the book’s opening reveals the deeply corrupt nature of Sandifer’s modern marxism. “Let us assume we are fucked.” says Sandifer. “Let us not.” says Marx, “Let us assume that capitalism will indeed continue to disrupt every single industry until we each are gig contractors, languishing under the iron hand of the algorithmic management of the Uber of Whatever.” (of course, Marx originally did not know about the Uber of Whatever, but translating his original observations into modern language is mostly a simple search-replace operation) “Let us consider what might be done about this.”
Marx’s answer is obviously (spoiler alert to anyone who hasn’t been alive in the last 160 years) “historical inevitabilities will result in communism”. In fact, so is Sandifer’s, with one crucial difference: “communism” gets replaced by “extinction” which is even more revealing about this liberal arts eschatology. The world is ready, the answer is written on the first line, “Let us assume we are fucked”. Everything else is commentary. One may approach the conclusion in a “decelerationist” way, or in an “accelerationist” way, or shy away from it entirely, but rejecting the inevitability of this idea altogether is on the wrong side of the event horizon of comprehensibility, and thus the shadow it casts against the accretion disk must be pattern-matched into the nearest comprehensible thing.
(Or, to be more precise, the proper analogy to catch the true magnitude of the abomination this is would be Sandifer observing ideas from inside the event horizon and seeing something that claims it will escape the superluminal gravitational pull of the inevitable future of the black hole’s singularity; rejection of the limits of the comprehensible is to the liberal arts eschatology as magnificent a violation of the laws of reality as breaking the lightspeed barrier would be to a physicist. An astute reader might notice that only one of these rules seems to be hard-coded into the universe itself, and that the rules that are hard-coded into the universe itself are barely flickering within the boundaries of the comprehensible themselves. What this says about the merits of each might as well be left as an exercise to the reader, as I do not believe a person who believes in the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility would be willing to change their mind on this topic.)
Thus, rejecting death is seen as a personal flaw for one could not comprehend a reasonable mind that might not accept death. A universal feature of such a liberal arts eschatology seems to indeed be the unsolvability of problems, at least problems that are not fundamentally social in their nature. Dramatically restructuring the entire society and economy is seen as an obvious and laudable goal, for it’s “only” social, and the universe’s unwillingness to play along is unfair and unreasonable no matter how much the means of pursuing the goals conflict with the iron laws of incentives.
Now, Marx himself seemed to be quite aware of the iron laws of incentives; his predictions about where they might lead just happened to be subtly incorrect in a hard-to-immediately-anticipate way. Indeed, this attachment to the conclusions and rejection of the methods is a fundamental characteristic of Sandifer’s marxist liberal arts eschatology, and if reanimating the dead was possible I would be willing to bet money that old man Marx would readjust his beliefs in the present day while many of his followers would be left in the somewhat embarrassing position of wanting to die on the hill their idol has withdrawn from.
I once freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt me.
Now, this obviously sounds preposterous and utterly ridiculous. Nonetheless, the truth is that some people, including myself, do not find it as immediately rejectable as most, and in some parts of the internet these people have become quite the subject of debate, vigorous and vicious alike.
If you are anything like me, you are probably looking for a book that would tell you the basics of what exactly is going on with two of possibly the strangest subcultures of the last ten years. A book that would point and laugh, mock relentlessly and savagely eviscerate their beliefs with the brilliance only someone who truly understands what they are talking about can muster. A book that would force even the most ardent supporters of those ideas to recognize that there is a certain absurdity in them, and laugh along the ride. A book that would neatly tie together the triptych of the good, the bad, and the ugly that Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land personify and emerge victorious with some impressive insight to the human condition.
If so, keep on looking and tell me if you find it, because ‘Neoreaction a Basilisk’ is not that book.
But in its attempt to be that book it provides a fascinating and frightful perspective to an unwritten ideology that pervades every aspect of western popular thought in the postmodern day: that of the liberal arts eschatology and the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility; and reveals Sandifer as an unwitting lovecraftian protagonist in a classic example of the genre: the writer who studies the diaries of others who have encountered something outside everyday comprehension, and follows them into something he did not expect to encounter, either recoiling at the last minute to a reality whose trustworthy foundations have been fundamentally shattered, or succumbing to it completely.
Our protagonist, Phil Sandifer, is a marxist English major at the Miskatonic University of Arkham, Massachusetts, who has stumbled upon the collected texts of three controversial eccentrics and seeks to study their works to understand the dark truths beneath the superficially serene consensus reality we share. For this purpose he made a kickstarter starting at $2000. The book mostly talks about those three, but make no mistake; Sandifer is the true main character whose descent into classic lovecraftian horror we perceive through his writings.
The book begins bleakly, setting the tone and conclusion in advance: “Let us assume we are fucked. The particular nature of our doom is up for any amount of debate, but the basic fact of it seems largely inevitable. My personal guess is that millennials will probably live long enough to see the second Great Depression, which will blur inexorably with the full brunt of climate change to lead to a massive human dieback, if not quite an outright extinction. But maybe it’ll just be a rogue AI and a grey goo scenario. You never know.”
Of course, this is an assertion of an assumption, which is mainly founded on the mainstream dogma of ~capitalism~ destroying the ~ecosystem~ so that ~we are fucked~ and ~nothing can actually be done about it~. A clear case of liberal arts eschatology, an eco-material fatalism of a degraded marxism that lost its will to live somewhere in the last 50 years. But to truly understand this liberal arts eschatology, a head-on assault would be difficult (or at the very least, deeply unsatisfying), so let us instead head back in time a bit to seek pieces of its origins to piece together a terrifying vision of. Our first stop shall be in 1987.
In Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ Doctor Manhattan is a brilliant scientist whose physical body gets accidentally taken apart and who consequently becomes a disembodied consciousness living in a magical quantum dimension, able to manipulate matter on a fundamental level however he wishes. To Moore’s credit, he mostly does a splendid job of keeping the idea together; the universe of Watchmen operates on a different set of natural laws than ours, and the few glimpses the work reveals (prudently; just enough to maintain credibility while avoiding self-contradiction) fit together well enough to let the reader fill in the gaps. ESP, telepathy, mind over matter, and the superscience which produced Doctor Manhattan form neatly a coherent whole.
But where it falls apart is Manhattan’s psychology. Superintelligent characters are hard to write, because one needs to convincingly fake a level above one’s own. If you knew how AlphaGo would play, you would be just as superhumanly skilled, but because you aren’t, you are always at risk of making a move that vaguely seems like a move AlphaGo might make, but which does not fit the underlying logic by which AlphaGo plays. And if you are an amateur, making such a move may fool other amateurs, but Lee Sedol would recognize that something is off and AlphaGo itself would facepalm quite thoroughly if it had a palm. And a face. And a psychology.
This is basically exactly what Moore does to Manhattan. He is not actually a superpowered being to whom the world’s smartest man is little more than the world’s smartest termite, and thus when he needs to write Manhattan out of the story he does something that to him seems perfectly sensible, but to someone who is closer to what Manhattan would actually be than Moore himself is (I never promised to be humble), it is clearly a terrible move. A person’s father is someone unexpected, and Manhattan is like “woah, humans are way too random and unlikely, doc out”.
Unfortunately, Moore doesn’t understand what else is random and unlikely: the exact pattern of decay from a piece of plutonium, for example. And literally everything else as well. It is highly preposterous that Doctor Manhattan would so privilege the unlikely things of human psychology when he is completely unfazed by the unlikely things of nuclear decay; and especially grating because one can so obviously see a better answer.
“In this event, nothing was technically beyond my understanding. I could see the neurons, the axons, the transmitter chemicals, down to every single quark, with perfect clarity and the inevitability was obvious. Yet there is one thing I couldn’t know: the subjective experience of having this happen. This neuron sends this signal to that one, and it outputs actions, speech, thoughts, but I was not her, and from my own position I could never truly comprehend what was going through her head in that moment. Humans are the only thing in this universe that I can’t understand, they are way too fascinating for me, doc out.”
Of course, the weaknesses of this approach are still visible: Thomas Nagel could bring forth an impressive objection to why exactly Manhattan wonders what it is like to be a human, but not a bat, which surely must be an even more foreign experience. Nonetheless, this is defensible, and far stronger than Moore’s original; it is easy to imagine Manhattan’s mechanistic perspective, superhuman but still bound to his fundamentally humane mind, shaken at the realization when this one event makes him consider unexpected ideas, and not having wondered what it’s like to be a bat is obviously a simple oversight in Manhattan’s cognition which is all-seeing but not really all-knowing.
This idea that all human minds are fundamentally intercomprehensible underlies the works of Moore and Sandifer alike, and leads them to latch onto convenient stereotypes when they don’t know the more sophisticated reasons why people would believe different things (of course, as a marxist the author surely must have no experience in having his views misinterpreted by people who lack the background information with which they make a lot more sense; suffice to say, the very concept of ‘inferential distance’ gets its own dose of mockery early on because it was used in a less-than-optimal way in the early LessWrong community (yet again something marxists are obviously unfamiliar with)).
The Wachowski sisters’ masterpiece ‘The Matrix’ is another example of a work falling prey to inferential distances. The eponymous Matrix is a simulated reality which keeps people in a consistent state of non-awareness, to maintain them alive and sane so that the machine overlords of Earth can secretly run their processes on unused neurons (“You only use 10% of your brain, the rest runs the system that keeps you imprisoned”) because it’s a really convenient source of computing power in a world where humans destroyed other easy sources of computing power (and the reason why the society simulated is specifically the late 90’s american capitalism is obviously that, in its unironic embrace of “the end of history” and other ideas that would prove really embarrassing in just a couple of years, it was the least cognitively challenging period of humanity for your average corporate drone; convincingly faking the subjective experience of endless cubicle misery is far less computationally expensive than simulating the vibrant “life-or-death, doesn’t matter I’m living to the fullest” challenges of hunter-gatherer societies or the unpredictable synchronized global hivemind of the 2010s; and if someone questions why exactly they have been doing the same exact pointless intellectually unchallenging things in cubicles for what feels like fifty years, the perfect excuse is already there: this is the end of history, get used to it).
Of course, Hollywood wasn’t going to have any of that. They needed something that ~made sense~, so they switched the backstory away from stealing processing cycles from a brilliantly energy-efficient computer that can replicate itself even if semiconductor fabs are destroyed to the utter nonsense of using humans as batteries. Because with a form of fusion, the machines could satisfy all their energy needs with human bodies. Yes, you read that right, the machines have fusion but for some reason are still extracting energy from humans. The physicists in the audience are now facepalming really hard, the amateur physicists understand what I’m talking about, and the non-physicists demonstrate the validity of the crucial concept of inferential distance.
Naturally, Hollywood did not explicitly consciously mention that the movie should not be about ‘the things we don’t think about upholding an oppressive system that keeps us bound to serve it’, but that’s kind of exactly the point I am making here. Of course, the awakening to “reality” where people can be brave freedom-fighters against the evil system to liberate themselves from being squishy duracells is once again obviously simply yet another layer of The Matrix itself. The red pill is the ultimate blue pill, placating those who need to believe that they have some secret knowledge the rest of humanity lacks, to be willing to be placated. In actual reality the escape is no escape. Buy a Che t-shirt from Amazon. Identify as an objectively rational atheist whom absolutely nothing could convince of fairytales. Discard ideologies about gender and join the red pill movement. The Matrix is ultimately about ethics in gaming journalism.
What does Phil Sandifer have in common with a respected literary genius of modern pop culture?
What does it really mean that his book is “stellar”?
Is 20 pages, with digressions to, among other things, the revolution of 1800, short fix fics of two masterpieces, recursive meta-paranoia, and the implications of half a tab of acid, the right length for a book review?
Why is it vital for the fate of the universe to convince Sandifer to install Linux?
What is the horrible secret that would make Karl Marx and AlphaGo alike facepalm if one wasn’t dead and the other a cold unfeeling machine without a palm, a face, nor a psychology for that matter?
And what if the true sneer culture was ourselves all along?
…the tantalization shall continue until friendliness improves!
New favorite review.
This really should be the blurb.
Just you wait until I finish the real thing I’m putting the final polishing touches on…
do you think states can wither and die in post-scarcity societies?
No, probably not, although we will need to dissolve post-scarcity first, as some people would take that to mean a basic income guarantee and others would imagine an anarchist paradise where everyone has their own nanotech printer and others would say that the very concept is impossible due to human desire for positional goods, fame, status, and non-replicable authenticity.
How about this:
Soft material post-scarcity:
Providing the material necessities to people is so easy that it can be guaranteed with a negligible burden to the economy; currently theoretically possible materially but impossible socio-politically
Hard material post-scarcity:
Providing the means of acquiring material necessities to people is so easy that everyone can be made materially effectively independent from others’ input (imagine a nanotech fabricator that can take in waste matter and trivially available energy and output any good, including another fabricator, limited only by the availability of elements and isotopes); currently impossible but theoretically possible in the future
Hard absolute post-scarcity:
Impossible in a world of more than one person
And a natural way to shorten this is to ignore the absolute sense and just focus on the material, so we get “soft post-scarcity” (for example, what the traditional socialist claim basically is: that human cooperation would be able to provide everyone what they need) and “hard post-scarcity” (quite fantastic), and we can add a level of “medium post-scarcity” where quite a significant abundance can be provided but it’s nowhere near limitless (the “new economy” of Eclipse Phase fits this one pretty well) to granularize the distinction
do you think states can wither and die in post-scarcity societies?
No, probably not, although we will need to dissolve post-scarcity first, as some people would take that to mean a basic income guarantee and others would imagine an anarchist paradise where everyone has their own nanotech printer and others would say that the very concept is impossible due to human desire for positional goods, fame, status, and non-replicable authenticity.
How about this:
Soft material post-scarcity:
Providing the material necessities to people is so easy that it can be guaranteed with a negligible burden to the economy; currently theoretically possible materially but impossible socio-politically
Hard material post-scarcity:
Providing the means of acquiring material necessities to people is so easy that everyone can be made materially effectively independent from others’ input (imagine a nanotech fabricator that can take in waste matter and trivially available energy and output any good, including another fabricator, limited only by the availability of elements and isotopes); currently impossible but theoretically possible in the future
What does Phil Sandifer have in common with a respected literary genius of modern pop culture?
What does it really mean that his book is “stellar”?
Is 20 pages, with digressions to, among other things, the revolution of 1800, short fix fics of two masterpieces, recursive meta-paranoia, and the implications of half a tab of acid, the right length for a book review?
Why is it vital for the fate of the universe to convince Sandifer to install Linux?
What is the horrible secret that would make Karl Marx and AlphaGo alike facepalm if one wasn’t dead and the other a cold unfeeling machine without a palm, a face, nor a psychology for that matter?
And what if the true sneer culture was ourselves all along?
…the tantalization shall continue until friendliness improves!
The more insufferable parts of radfem tumblr seem to be into rehashing arguments about body odor this week. And to be accidentally copying this amazing #iconic #formative Crimethinc essay. Please read the whole thing and tell me your favorite parts. Mine is:
“ Those who find me disgusting for enjoying the scent and taste of my lover when she hasn’t showered or rubbed synthetics all over herself, when she smells like a real human being, are probably the same ones who shudder at the idea of digging a vegetable out of the ground and eating it rather than eating the plastic-wrapped, man-made fast food that we have all been brought up on.”
1. Body smells are erotic and sexual. Capitalists don’t like that because they are impotent and opposed to all manifestations of sensuality and sexuality. Sexually awakened people are potentially dangerous to capitalists and their rigid, asexual system.
I’m on a horse.
Even if they agree about the questionable nature of today’s sanitation products, most people today would still argue that sanitation is still healthier than filth. To some extent this is true—it probably is a good idea to wash your feet if you step in shit. But, aside from obvious cases like that, there are a thousand different standards of what is clean and what is dirty across the world; if you look at different societies and civilizations, you come across health practices that seem suicidal by our sanitation standards. And yet, these people survive as well as we do.
Um. Have you heard of infant mortality rates? And how they vary? And the prevalences of various diseases?
People in Africa a few hundred years ago lived comfortably in a natural environment that destroyed many of the very prim and polished Western explorers that came to their continent.
I am skeptical about “comfortably”.
Human beings can adapt to a wide variety of environments and situations, and it seems that the question of what kinds of sanitation are healthy is at least as much a question of convention as of hard-set biological rules. Try violating a few of the “common sense” rules of Western sanitation some time, and you’ll find that going a few weeks without a shower and eating out of garbage cans aren’t really as dangerous or difficult as we were taught.
Sure, go a few weeks and you’ll probably be fine. Go a few months or a few years and you almost certainly won’t be. And why is food from garbage cans sometimes safe? Because it’s prepackaged, and other people have erred on the side of caution when setting best-by dates. You can only safely break the common-sense rules because other people have followed them for you.
6. Deodorants hide the damage that capitalist products cause your body. Eating meat and other chemical-filled foods sold by capitalists makes you smell bad. Wearing pantyhose makes you smell bad. Capitalists don’t want you to stop wearing pantyhose or eating meat.
I totally know some capitalism-supporting people who want me to not eat meat.
7. Deodorant-users are insecure. Capitalists like insecure people. Insecure people don’t start trouble. Insecure people also buy room fresheners, hair conditioners, makeup, and magazines with articles about dieting.
Um, everyone looking to manipulate people likes insecure people. Frankly, I suspect that you like insecure people. Hence why you’re also trying to get us to feel bad about having basic, natural human traits, like being disgusted by indicators that something could be disease-carrying, rotten, or otherwise hazardous (especially in the ancestral environment).
EDIT: Also, voluntarily choosing to smell viscerally repulsive to most people and then demanding that they interact with you nonetheless is probably an attempted power grab of some kind.
They went full anarcho-primitivist
You never go full anarcho-primitivist
Look at this fucking genocidal social darwinist asshole
Liberal arts eschatology in action: when one has never been able to think in nuance, separating the evil from the good is impossible and the only possible separation is between reality and fiction; and reality, containing the evil, must be rejected altogether. All that is left is a battle of fictions and narratives, comfortably segregated from the material facts that underlie the very possibility of having such a solipsistic contemplation, and the only definition of victory is outsmarting the narrative of the Other Side in one’s own mind.
Right, but this is a strictly punitive measure, with no reward for countries who take extra refugees, giving no benefit for countries to try to optimise the efficiency of refugee processing.
tooth-and-nails said: Who would pay who? The refugees have nothing and its easier for the countries taking them to simply not instead of paying not to.
Within the EU this would be easy to arrange with an overall fund that applies to all member countries.
Outside the EU is more difficult, but an arrangement could be made between all the countries which have signed up to UN treaties regarding refugees.
tooth-and-nails said: Or they just not sign the treaties, keep their money AND not take refugees. To some thats a win/win/win scenario
Well, that’s how sovereignty works.
This sounds like something I would have invented.
Of course, the EU/UN lacking credible enforcement mechanisms is kind of a problem, but this could be easily bundled into free trade agreements instead; agree to join the refugee reception system (I’d make it so that every refugee is worth a certain sum of money, and they can then choose to go to any country which will accept them, and that country will then receive the money; this would incentivize better treatment of refugees as they become customers instead of product and it would naturally push the profit states can make from them downwards and optimize efficiency) and get rid of trade barriers and tariffs (and vice versa: refuse to pull your weight, and find your industries scorned).
While reading Neoreaction A Basilisk, I kept wondering how much it was meant as a takedown of the trio, and how much it was meant as a creative, conceptual riff which simply used the trio for some raw material.
Of course, the answer is “it’s both.” But that isn’t quite right, either. As a takedown, it’s scattered and not especially useful for someone who just wants to know what’s wrong with the trio. I’ve seen a few posts from people saying they wanted it to be some sort of primer for fighting neoreaction, and it clearly isn’t that – saying “Moldbug’s use of Satanic negation reveals his unacknowledged sympathy for Satan as represented in Paradise Lost” is not the kind of idea that will help you out in direct political scuffles with Moldbug fans.
As a conceptual riff, though, it’s continually limited by the invasion of takedown-related material. The book presents itself as an examination of strange internet (psuedo-)philosophers who – like classic horror story protagonists – are confronted with the unintended, disturbing, mind-searing implications of their own work. This sounds like a good story, and it seems as though Sandifer wants to tell it. But whenever the story starts to get interesting, whenever a bit of real narrative develops, whenever Sandifer starts tying the literary resonances here to his own literary interests like Milton or Blake … it all quickly runs aground, usually within a page, because Sandifer switches back to an evaluative mode.
Any attempt to build a mood, to dim the lights and get the audience spooked, is quickly interrupted as the lights flip back on and the storyteller starts haranguing you about how our mad philosopher protagonist made a totally shit point in this one blog post, oh my god, how are people so wrong on the internet.
It’s clear that Sandifer does not see Yudkowsky or Moldbug as intellectuals worth taking seriously (Land is a bit more complicated). So it would be easy for him to just say at the outset: “look, I don’t think these people’s actual ideas are worth the virtual paper they’re printed on. I do find them interesting as characters, and I’m going to tell a story about their journeys that I find potent in itself, like so many other good stories about awful or risible people.”
Indeed, this is sort of what he does, in the early parts of the book. As @psybersecurity writes:
One problem is that Sandifer can’t help but continue to use Moldbug and Yudkowsky as punching bags. It’s a bit of an issue - after presenting legitimately good, concise criticisms of the two in the book’s introductory segment, he seemingly feels justified in adopting a smug attitude towards them as easily ignorable figures that no respectable intellectual would take seriously. And yet he can’t help but bring up qualms with them again and again, as if he’s not quite as secure in his dismissal as he wishes he was.
This is not just some little infelicity, I think. It’s a major problem which holds the book back a great deal in its ambitions to do something creative and legitimately chilling. The “story” is so stop-and-go that it’s barely there: the book is so wedded to the takedown format that any flights of fancy Sandifer wants to attempt must be weighed down with great ponderous loads of potshots.
Why is the book like this?
My bet is that the conceptual/narrative riff, not the takedown, was Sandifer’s driving motivation. His descriptions of the book are heavily slanted in that direction, after all. Take this paragraph from the Kickstarter:
Neoreaction a Basilisk is a work of theoretical philosophy about the tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe. It is a horror novel written in the form of a lengthy Internet comment. A savage journey to the heart of the present eschaton. A Dear John letter to western civilization written from the garden of madman philosophers. A textual labyrinth winding towards a monster that I promise will not turn out to be ourselves all along or any crap like that.
IMO, this is a great pitch. It also sounds far more interesting and fun than the actual book. The description suggests literary game-playing, genuine induction of unease in the reader, a work of creative writing by someone who, incidentally, doesn’t think much of the people who served as its inspirations.
Why couldn’t Sandifer have just written that book? I suspect – and I could be wrong – that Sandifer has realized that his intended audience won’t look kindly at any book about neoreaction and Less Wrong unless it’s a takedown. Sandifer is not aiming this book at fans of these ideas, and his target audience is either already hostile to the ideas or likely to become hostile when made aware of them.
He’s clearly interested in writing something that takes concepts like “Red Pills” and “democracy will destroy itself” seriously, and doing creative work within that framework. But that framework comes from people whose other views he abhors. Writing a book of riffs on the aesthetic potential of “the Red Pill” runs you the risk of looking like you’re sympathetic to “the Red Pill” as conceived of by Moldbug and PUAs. “Roko’s Basilisk” makes Less Wrong a readily dismissable laughingstock to various parts of the internet; it’s also “a really spectacular story,” as Sandifer puts it, but if you push that angle to the point of admitting the idea really is chilling, you risk looking like you’re no savvier than the folks who freaked out about it in the first place.
So Sandifer must continually reassure his readers: “it’s OK, I think these people are ludicrous, I’m not taking them seriously.” This explains why he keeps on taking potshots against Yudkowsky and Moldbug long after he’s fully dismissed them as serious thinkers. He knows that a book that treats these people even as serious literary characters is going to strike a lot of people as conceding too much to them. So he tries to treat them as serious literary characters, because that’s his fundamental project, but he still keeps worrying that he might be taking them too seriously for his audience’s tastes, and so he keeps interrupting the story with more disses, until the cancerous tissue of the disses occupies so much space that the story is a mere shadow of what it might have been.
This also explains why his disses are so half-hearted. That’s not to say he’s too nice: he’s perfectly willing to call these people idiots. If anything, though, he still pulls his punches. He’s willing to call the trio some nasty names – because that’s a cheap, easy way to convey antipathy – but he doesn’t delve into their work far enough to identify its true (and vast and deep) flaws, sometimes ignoring obvious and damning critiques in favor of much weaker ones. You can get a far more damning primer on Moldbug’s failings from the Anti-Reactionary FAQ (published Oct. 2013), and as sweet Yudkowsky dunks go, he has nothing on someone like @argumate.
I don’t think this is because Sandifer can’t write a takedown. I think it’s because his heart isn’t it in. He’d never countenance this kind of laziness when it comes to Milton and Blake, because he actually cares about Milton and Blake.
But nonetheless, the half-hearted dunks interrupt the action again and again, insistently, compulsively. Because if he went too long without them, he’d be writing an actual treatise on the serious literary potential, the horror and beauty, of “Red Pills” and “basilisks,” of silly and possibly evil internet ephemera.
I don’t want to go to far here, but I hope this way of going-too-far is in the spirit of all of this: it seems like his decision to send review copies to neoreactionaries and Less Wrong rationalists would fit naturally into this defense. Presumably these people will get bees in their bonnets and write some infuriated words, which will reinforce the impression that Sandifer’s book is a takedown, which will neutralize any remaining sense that he’s fraternizing with the enemy.
I should be clear. I’m not saying that Sandifer agrees with the trio’s substantial claims, any more than one has to endorse Humbert Humbert’s self-presentation to enjoy Lolita. But there are some people who, understandably, can’t enjoy Lolita anyway, because they simply and for good reason want nothing to do with people like H.H., and are emphatically opposed to exploring his emotional complexities, his pathos, what can be done with him from a playful ironic literary remove. They don’t want to explore his possibilities; they just want to say “fuck that guy” and be done with it. So, too, with some people and neoreaction. But Sandifer is not one of these. He’s interested in the pathos and the playful possibilities. He wants to write Lolita, not a manual on the prevention of child abuse.
And so, in the book itself, like one of the horror protagonists he discusses, Sandifer continually, compulsively – and less and less convincingly – says no, asserts that nothing is wrong, that he’s in control, that he’s not unhealthiyinterested in his subjects, that he knows they’re wrong and evil (did you know he thinks they’re wrong and evil? let’s say it again to make sure), that he may be gazing into the abyss but – rest easy – it’s not gazing into him, that nothing is off here, dear reader, oh no, that the trio is just as dismissible as you thought when you began reading, let me just reiterate that once again for clarity,no there is not anything going on over there in the shadows –
He’s of the Devil’s party, but he doesn’t know it.
Back in the Bad Old Days of printing, if you wanted to print a book, you had to pull out all the tiny little type letters and set them by hand for each page in the book. And if you didn’t have millions of pieces of type, you had to break up each page once you’d printed it (for however many times your initial print run was) so that you could reuse them in the subsequent pages.
But what if you wanted to, say…be able to print the book again at some point in the future? Well, you’d either have to put the whole thing back together again by hand (very expensive), or you’d have to create a plaster mold of the page that could be cast in metal and printed as a single immovable unit. This was also expensive but not as expensive as having your book typeset again.
The onomatopoetic sound of casting this plate was the French “cliché”: the hissing sound when the lead hit the mold.
So how did it come to have its modern meaning? Well, people joked that with certain set phrases like “better the devil you know”, you might as well cast them as a cliché so that instead of having to put the letters together one at a time, you just grab the “better the devil you know” plate out of your drawer. (Note that, in most cases, this would not actually work.)
The really funny part? The alternative, more formal name for a “cliché” plate was: a stereotype. It got its modern meaning through the idea of an “image perpetuated without change”. Thus we get the idea of a “greedy Jew” or “lazy Mexican” (thank you Engels), as if they were standard plates you could pull out of a drawer somewhere and put in place of the real people, instead of forming your judgments individually by putting letters together one at a time.
i don’t understand why people don’t instantly respond to “what would your dream superpower be” with the ability to manipulate probability. think about it. what’s the chance someone will drop 1mil in front of me? 0%? let’s make that 100%. what’s the probability i’ll wake up tomorrow and be X gender? 100%. what’s the probability my bathtub is filled with mac and cheese? 100%.
as a casino employee I can confirm this would be terrifying as fuck
I still like teleport, no error, whether I’ve ever been there or not.
The superpower of
probability
is terrifying for other reasons.
what’s the probability my bathtub is filled with mac and cheese? 100%.
Consider all the unlikely things that must occur in just the proper sequence for this to happen. It’s not just wishing 50 gallons of mac & cheese into existence – that’d be a different superpower.
No, we’re talking about some serious reality bending here.
Like maybe: an 18-wheeler hauling a load of instant Kraft macaroni & cheese collides with a tanker truck filled with water outside your home. Both vehicles erupt into flame, which cooks the combined noodles & cheese mixture within a small non-nuclear mushroom cloud of an explosion.
The cooked mixture of mac & cheese (and burning fuel!) rises into the air on thermals a hundred feet above your house, exactly above your bathroom.
At just the right moment, as the starchy cloud of cheesy noodles reaches the apex of its hideous arc, a freak storm causes a lightning bolt to crash down out of the blue, blasting a hole in your roof above the bathtub.
Shingles and plywood explode away from the roof and are diverted to the side by sudden 50 mph crosswinds… which, because of freak weather conditions, are perfectly timed to whisk away the roof debris but stop just as suddenly before the descending cloud of mac & cheese can be blown aside.
Four seconds later there is a moist mighty THLUPPPPnoise as ~50 gallons of half-cooked, badly mixed mac & cheese & diesel fuel land in a soggy mess within your bathtub.
Ding! Your bathtub full of mac & cheese? Probability 100%.
Also: two dead truck drivers, untold collateral damage from the explosion, a wrecked roof, dangerous storms trashing the neighborhood, and a disgusting inedible mess in your bathroom.
Oh wait, you wanted it perfectly cooked, ready to eat? Too bad… you didn’t specify that. And if you had, imagine the FURTHER ridiculous unlikely events required to make that happen.
Because you’re not just wishing shit into existence. You’re shifting realities.
Which, if you’re selecting for a very improbable circumstance means moving a LOT of existing reality out of the way – which takes energy. Because reality has inertia & momentum just like a river does, and does not want to be diverted.
This might be the most terrifying super power ever, just from its side effects.
people don’t instantly respond with this, or anything else that’s isomorphic to complete omnipotence, because it’s prototypically op & no fun
Perception: the rationalist community is around 75% social democrats and 25% centrists.
According to the last survey, 38% of rationalists identified as social democrats when choosing between that, liberal, libertarian, conservative and communist. When given more options, only 10-15% did (i don’t recall the exact number and checking while on my phone is inconvenient)
None of the questions asked about centrism, which is probably even more sensitive to number of options, so no comment on that.
reality tv show where teenage anti-communists are forced to work in food service for a month
Whenever people talk about some facet of non-communist life, my first instinct is to wonder what the equivalent would be in the soviet union. In this case, I wonder what food service jobs in the soviet union were like.
it seems that the Soviet Union was automating some of them before automation of that sort of thing was cool.
As a teenage anti-communist, forced labor is coercive and wrong and if I have my way your TV show is going to have a counterrevolution and subsequently a lawsuit on its hands.
You go Ilzo! Unite those anti-communist teenagers who are being forced to do work they feel alienated from solely for the benefit of the singular employer, into a revolution against that employer! Yeah!
This is a brilliant distillation of the inherent paradox of statist communism. Any coercive system necessitates its own downfall, no matter how much it may have been a reaction to the previous coercive system, and thus the only true solution is to abolish coercion instead of simply painting it red and pretending it goes faster now.
…now would you have a moment to hear about our not!lord and not!savior anarchism?
Tag yrself, I’m Every Breath a Black Trans Woman Takes.
Are you sure you aren’t
In his latest book, An Entrepreneur’s Manifesto,
the author posits that to sell a product or service to another is a
revolutionary act, “an act that has the power to transform lives,
rebuild families, and forever change communities.”
It certainly feels quite embarrassing to admit that in a certain sense I do kind of agree with that person because it’s politically correct to reject anything that can be pattern-matched into “just pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” but the thing is that I do think poor communities would benefit from their members having better access to ways of making a living for themselves and each other, independently of big faceless minimum-wage corporate monsters; and that while removing state barriers to it (Eric Garner was excactly that kind of a small entrepreneur and look where it got him) is crucial for properly achieving such change, the culture itself could also use some changing to rekindle all the dreams it’s taken a lifetime to destroy. Author seems kind of a “structural issues what structural issues, parents of Flint children can fight lead poisoning by eating a diet which minimizes absorption and should see a holistic doctor to remind them that electromagnetic waves are harmful too [sic]” (uncharitable description omitted) but there is a certain dignity in being less dependent on outsiders and a lot of troubled youth probably have ADHD which can often be constructively channeled into an entrepreneurial attitude in an environment where such a thing is possible and people’s future prospects aren’t systematically ground down.
TL;DR: in my utopia most people would be basically entrepreneurs (or at least a lot closer to it than the standard-issue interchangeable munitions-grade wage workers our current system produces), buying and selling whatever their comparative advantage is (and if the answer to that is “insignificant”, nonetheless enjoying the abundance of a low-scarcity society where people who are unable to make a dignified living for themselves can still trivially access what they need), so I can’t exactly complain if someone is saying things that constitute a part of it even if they seem to be Problematic.
Decriminalisation in New South Wales just survived the most concerted attack of any decriminalised jurisdiction so far, as the multi-year false flag campaign of the biggest brothels to try to criminalise their competition just spectacularly fell on its arse. You’ve got Liberal ministers telling the national press that licensing regimes have failed elsewhere.
And this is with a conservative government, whose own committee chairman was an extremely anti-sex work Christian extremist. Against all odds, state Cabinet has listened to reason, and NSW decriminalisation appears safe for the foreseeable future.
safe hooking, shitty burgers: the NSW 2016 story
The whole state has shitty burgers? Why?
I am honestly always surprised that even this kind of extremely basic civilizational adequacy is occasionally able to exist…
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.
