promethea.incorporated

imu-li asked: How would you incentivize a voluntary basic income system/agreement?

unknought:

socialjusticemunchkin:

Basic income just a statist stop-gap solution. Soft material post-scarcity in high-tech communities based on mutual aid, solidarity and usage of even low-productivity labor where its comparative disadvantage is the lowest. If one were to run the numbers, accounting for the fact that a lot of stuff is artificially expensive, maintaining a lifestyle that can support human dignity in a free-as-in-speech society would be quite cheap. The present support for massive sprawling states with huge taxation shows that people are willing to sacrifice from the fruits of their own labor for the sake of others. Deliberate social engineering efforts to establish planned intentional communities supportive of such arrangements and avoiding the segregation of high- and low-productivity people. Utilizing the social mechanisms currently driving gentrification to create incentives for economic desegregation instead. Eradicating inhumane structures destroying many people’s productive ability. Organic property rights settling allocation questions to optimize human preferences while eliminating forms of useless rentseeking. Strong reputational systems giving status incentives for sharing. Normalizing EA memes. Minimizing coordination costs of such systems with technological solutions. Decentralizing control of productive capital via minifacturing etc.

A fully-trained promethea would have a productivity around $100 000 a year at the minimum assuming no taxes etc., and a low-productivity person can be maintained for $5000 a year assuming elimination of artificial costs. A fully-trained promethea can thus easily maintain up to ten low-productivity persons, and will be incentivized to do so if said low-productivity persons are cool to have hanging around, because it’s subjectively better to invest in the company of interesting persons than many material things. GiveDirectly for low-productivity persons not cool to hang around, because them suffering deprivation is still in violation of my preferences.

The “GiveDirectly for low-productivity persons not cool to hang around” part is critical, because otherwise you have a very large part of the population whose well-being is dependent on their ability to impress a wealthy patron, which is not exactly conducive to freedom and human dignity.

A large part of why GiveDirectly and similar programs are so effective right now is that desperately poor people are very easy to find. In your utopia, you need to provide that aid to everyone who needs it, which is a considerably harder problem. There are essentially two strategies for ensuring that everyone who needs aid gets it: You can provide aid to everyone regardless of need, or you can set up a system for determining need on an individual basis. In other words, you can provide a guaranteed basic income, or you can provide welfare. The same problems that apply to welfare-as-it-exists would apply to welfare-as-charity, so I have to assume that you’d favor the charity establishing a basic income. So, going with your numbers and assuming negligible overhead costs (ha!) that charity will need to receive $5000 per person per year in donations.

Right now, the average annual contribution to all charities by a person in the U.S. is around $1000, and most of those charities are considerably better at generating fuzzies than a universal basic income charity would be. How confident are you that the cultural changes needed to fund such a charity are even possible? What happens if they’re not?

We used to be called voluntary socialists…

Effectively, what I’m advocating is creating systems that have the sharing built-in. Basic income is a superior solution when things need to be rationed by bureaucratic systems, but if I had a coffeeshop and a person I knew to be poor came in, I’d just hand them an inexpensive sandwich for free instead of trying to establish a scheme of everyone chipping in a fraction of their income, especially if I was easily able to cash in the social rewards of doing so.

Gentrification shows that rich people like to live in areas that have a certain “vibrancy” and “authenticity” that homogenous high-income locations lack. The fact that gentrification routinely destroys those precise things is a market failure. It would be a mutually beneficial trade for high-income people to support an infrastructure that enables low-income people to coexist and flourish in the same environments, and it would look very different from “impress a wealthy patron”.

If I build a community which creates immaterial value to make it attractive to engineers and programmers and other high-productivity people, I’m able to charge them rents that are higher than in a boring gated community, and those rents could be used to supply a certain level of free stuff for the low-productivity people for “maintaining the atmosphere”. That’s something corps seem inherently very bad at doing; when they try it’s usually just phony and embarrassing, and there’s an obvious (albeit specifically very indirect) profit (or more like “”“profit”“”) to be made.

The result would be basically a private (private as in “privacy”, not private as in “privatized profits and socialized risks”) welfare state on a smaller scale, except without the bullshit, and the constant knowledge that it can be outcompeted if it gets bureaucratic and inefficient and doesn’t do its job properly. Even high-productivity people do actually voluntarily choose to live in the Nordic countries over the US, as astonishing as it might sound, as their combination of “this benefits me too” and “I want to support a system that takes care of people” makes them prefer that. All I’m asking is that they shouldn’t coercively monopolize things so that I’m subject to violence if I want to do things differently, such as by purchasing estrogen without asking the mob for permission first, or by not having corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies and omigad all the horrors.

Also, mutual aid societies can help people support each other, and social control can be used to ration resources so that people don’t over-consume. And simply having some stuff everyone can use works on a smaller scale; the true tragedy of the commons was that they allowed poor people to be free and the state colluded with landlords to eliminate that freedom.

Currency is ultimately a system of tracking favors people have done to each other and to enable reciprocity with anonymity, but when people know each other they don’t need special systems of tracking those things. And freedom of association can be used by people to preferentially associate with those who contribute to such a society: I can just pay more for my coffee at Queerbucks, knowing that they will provide Alice the poor person a free sandwich every day and pass the costs to people like me, instead of going to Starbucks which doesn’t do that thing.

And then there’s natural common-pool resources such as the atmosphere, aquifers etc.; there’s a very reasonable claim to be made that privatizing-mutualizing them so that their usage is limited to sustainable levels by setting a price on consuming them, and the profits after managing the resources distributed to people in a collective monopoly, would be a very good solution as it doesn’t interfere as much on productive economic activities as taxes. So in addition to watching that people don’t mess around irresponsibly with synthetic pathogens, Firewall would also collect rents from polluters, fishers, etc. and then redistribute the vast majority of the proceedings so it doesn’t get enough resources to establish greater authority over things.

(I know Firewall is starting to sound like a global state and mission creep would be a very dangerous prospect and it would have to be engineered very carefully to avoid it; but this is basically what I’d establish if I had unlimited power: an archipelago of voluntary systems and communities, with a carefully limited coordination mechanism for the stuff that absolutely needs to be coordinated, and which is practically capable of coordinating only those things through a combination of incentive engineering, ideological legitimacy, commitment systems to limit it etc.)

4 weeks ago · 9 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink

wirehead-wannabe asked: Can you expand on your identity crisis? I'm always a slut for sortinghatchats.

socialjusticemunchkin:

Finding the correct matches is HARD

But I think I got it sorted out. It took me two days, I was confused by a lot of things, but I think I know what they are.

And I feel like toying about a bit. If you’re a slut for sortinghatchats, maybe you are able to figure them out as well:

my primary
my secondary
my primary model
my secondary model
what I often perform

To make it less frustrating, here’s a few hints:

my username
my category tags and common phrases like “win-win is my superpower”, “this is a social democracy hateblog”, and “don’t vote on promethea’s body”
my political leanings
my steel feminist community hijacking shenanigans
my EAness
my “being the first person in the country to get a legal gender change while nonbinary” thing
the way I appeared on tumblr and built my social connections here
that thing I did regarding the recent controversy

In hindsight, with some help of the illusion of transparency and confirmation bias, everything is so ridiculously laughably obvious, but it did take two whole days to figure it out and thoroughly understand the system. This is also a hint.

And the precise nature of my identity crisis: it’s guessable as well. My primary.

jbeshir said: I’m pretty sure I know what the primary/secondary is (maybe confirmation bias, but the hints mostly confirm what I’d already guessed; I’d picked up on the presence of indirect intentions) but will wait and see rather than ruining it. I moved on before working out how models or performing worked so all I got there is a guess at performing.

So, this game can be played in both directions. I’m publicly committing to not revealing my sorting results until at least someone has given a correct guess on each of them; existence of public guesses makes this verifiable but private guesses in the askbox are acceptable as well.

4 weeks ago · 4 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink

imu-li asked: How would you incentivize a voluntary basic income system/agreement?

Basic income just a statist stop-gap solution. Soft material post-scarcity in high-tech communities based on mutual aid, solidarity and usage of even low-productivity labor where its comparative disadvantage is the lowest. If one were to run the numbers, accounting for the fact that a lot of stuff is artificially expensive, maintaining a lifestyle that can support human dignity in a free-as-in-speech society would be quite cheap. The present support for massive sprawling states with huge taxation shows that people are willing to sacrifice from the fruits of their own labor for the sake of others. Deliberate social engineering efforts to establish planned intentional communities supportive of such arrangements and avoiding the segregation of high- and low-productivity people. Utilizing the social mechanisms currently driving gentrification to create incentives for economic desegregation instead. Eradicating inhumane structures destroying many people’s productive ability. Organic property rights settling allocation questions to optimize human preferences while eliminating forms of useless rentseeking. Strong reputational systems giving status incentives for sharing. Normalizing EA memes. Minimizing coordination costs of such systems with technological solutions. Decentralizing control of productive capital via minifacturing etc.

A fully-trained promethea would have a productivity around $100 000 a year at the minimum assuming no taxes etc., and a low-productivity person can be maintained for $5000 a year assuming elimination of artificial costs. A fully-trained promethea can thus easily maintain up to ten low-productivity persons, and will be incentivized to do so if said low-productivity persons are cool to have hanging around, because it’s subjectively better to invest in the company of interesting persons than many material things. GiveDirectly for low-productivity persons not cool to hang around, because them suffering deprivation is still in violation of my preferences.

4 weeks ago · 9 notes · .permalink

jbeshir:

socialjusticemunchkin:

neoliberalism-nightly:

argumate:

voximperatoris:

argumate:

It seems easy enough for a perfect Libertarian state to evolve/devolve into something very similar to what we have now without any non-Libertarian actions being taken along the way, if that makes sense.

If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.

To me this makes Libertarianism relatively uninteresting except as a reminder not to micromanage things and that centralisation has costs and should be employed sparingly.

This is a bizarre criticism to me.

If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.

There is no reason this would happen. If it did happen, it would be a bad outcome, because we’d be back in the position of an interventionist state. But again, I don’t see any reason why such a thing would happen without “non-libertarian actions being taken along the way”. And how to design institutions to minimize those is the chief project of libertarian jurisprudential theory.

In any case, I don’t see how this reduces the main points put forward by libertarianism, such as that nearly all of the arguments used to justify the existence of an expansive state are invalid, that nearly all government interventions in the economy or in people’s private lives are net harmful, etc. And if you agree with those, it’s hard to see how you could support an expansive state.

But if those arguments are wrong, that would be an entirely separate line of criticism from “a libertarian society would devolve back into a non-libertarian society”. Because in that case, the goal would be to prevent this from happening and/or minimize the role of the state as much as possible. Which is hardly the “middle of the road” position.

I think there are reasons why consolidation and centralisation would happen, as we are seeing in the corporate world across many industries today.

(In the case of monopoly on violence this is even more critical, and it is typical to see turf wars between nations or gangs flare up from time to time then settle into a steady state once they have negotiated who has control of which territory).

But the fact that this can easily happen means continual interventions and tweaking to keep the system from collapsing, maintaining it in a kind of dynamic instability much like a modern fighter plane, or going back further to Romance of the Three Kingdoms where any two of them can always gang up to prevent a takeover by the third. That’s not necessarily an efficient or fun process, though.

To take this line of thought further requires clarifying whether we are talking about a hypothetical state that still holds an absolute monopoly on violence or not, because that makes a huge difference.

Even a strong centralised state can be more discriminating in the interventions in which it undertakes, eg. a more sensible drug policy, fewer foreign wars, etc.

Doesn’t this sound exactly like how the world have been for a long time until relatively recently? It’s not not states even now holds absolute monopoly on violence.

I mean you are seeing the consolidation in industries, but not really comprehensively across industries. And it could be argued that tax systems and regulations actually disfavor non-big-businesses.

Few big corporations would be competitive against smaller challengers without state intervention to establish barriers to entry. Even the businesses themselves know this; advice to invest in those that have strong “moats” around them is cartoonish villainy and totally true.

Corporations aren’t magic; they are subject to the same information problems centralized states are. People usually know their own situations better than outsiders do, and a lot of the problems in eg. universities emphasizing “””productivity””” in terms of publications, or employers of programmers counting lines of code, are instances of precisely this: people can’t do the actually useful things because someone is trying to measure something that doesn’t lend itself to effective measurement, and the bad measurers should get outcompeted away in a functioning market by those who aren’t impacted by mismeasurement. This probably explains a lot of why academicians perform best in traditional public/monopoly-corporate settings where the rules are basically “you’re smart, here’s a bunch of money, figure out something cool, we won’t bother you in the meantime” and programmers are more productive in startups instead of corps burdened by mismanagement.

And state intervention also creates artificial and inefficient property rights. Copyrights, patents, etc. would be basically unenforceable without the state or an organization equivalent to it, and they have a massive centralizing effect on the economy. I don’t believe organic-pragmatic property rights would ever be able to extend to information in such a way as nobody could afford to hunt down pirates on their own unless the starting position is absolutely centralized to begin with (and that’s like “what if we turned the Soviet Union into a megacorporation but didn’t change anything else”; not libertarian at all in practice).

Bans on stripping DRM and stuff get legitimacy from the state; we’re seeing the backlash to “corps are trying to steal the stuff we own” even now and absent a state-equivalent enforcer all it would take is one defector who sells free-as-in-speech 3d-printers etc. to render such positions unfeasible in practice. And the world has way more idealists than a single one.

State and gang violence is seldom economically efficient either; a lot of it relies on the existence of a population those benefiting from violence can pass the costs of that violence on. Drafting soldiers, harming civilians, destroying value, etc.

So all of this turns into an engineering problem: how to craft a system that has, when accounting for known human biases, stable incentives against harmful centralization. My anarchist side suspects that the monopoly on violence is the key, specifically in the sense that its existence enables all the other centralization by passing the costs of enforcing that centralization onto others. When someone has that degree of power, it can be abused to create other forms of power as well, but if violent enforcement of monopolies of any kind is ~disrupted~ the prohibitive expense of trying to recreate them could protect a system made of smaller, competitive actors, from re-establishing them.

Of course, this necessitates solving the three key issues that the popular legitimacy of states presently rests on. One is safety, one is equality, and one is moloch. If people believe that only a state can protect them from crime, they will want a state; and if people believe that only a state can prevent a slide into feudalistic rentseeking by capital-holders and destitute indebted poverty for the rest, they will want a state; and if people believe only a state can disarm the shitty multipolar traps that will destroy everything of value, they will want a state.

The first one has seen a decent amount of work done on it, and I guess empirical experimentation would be enough to sort it out.

The second is what a lot of people object to, but I think simply stopping the state/crony-capital symbiosis of using artificial property rights and assignments to monopolize zero-sum things and propertyize non-scarce things would render it relatively inconsequential (of course, easier said than done); a lot of deliberate violent, coercive, and value-destroying action has gone to creating and maintaining economic hierarchies between people favored by states and people preyed upon by states, and modern technology makes maintaining a basic standard of living trivially cheap if one isn’t bound by rentiers holding artificial property rights. Thus basic solidarity, mutual aid, distributed productive capital etc. could ensure that even non-productive people would be able to have their needs met better than in current illfare states.

The third one is hard, but even states themselves are subject to the same pressures, and if we got from “states everywhere” to “Firewall has the monopoly on x-risk prevention and will nuke you if you act irresponsibly and refuse to stop doing it but otherwise you may do whatever you wish” it would still be a drastic improvement. And the less significant multipolar traps aren’t that terrible; I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.

For example, the most simple solution would be that the Filter Pact threatens to kick Mike’s ass unless Mike uses the filter. Or Mike’s Dia Paying Group, having negotiated the same deal with everyone else’s protection agencies, would tell him that disconnecting the filter is agreed to be illegal and obligates him to pay $999 in damages to everyone else (+10% for DPG) or they won’t protect him from attempts to kick his ass. The state bans this because kicking Mike’s ass is a crime but polluting everyone else’s fish farms isn’t, but an anarchistic system of organic property rights wouldn’t draw such a distinction as Mike isn’t able to lobby himself a special protected position from which to harm others.

Alternatively, everyone could agree to start paying $.29945 a month to everyone else who uses a filter once everyone has agreed to this deal and joined the Filter Fund. Thus, everyone will join it to earn $700, and Mike won’t disconnect his filter because he would lose the $299.15 he gets from others plus $1 from pollution while only gaining $300 from not operating the filter, making a net loss of $.15. And Mike won’t stop paying the Filter Fund because if he does it, everyone else will disconnect their filters because now they would make a profit of ~$.15 from doing so, and everything will go to shit. This should be a game-theoretically stable equilibrium afaik.

But the basic thing is: if there’s a problem that causes net harms, someone could make a profit by solving it. In the fish farming example, the solution will exist if implementing it costs significantly less than the $700 000 a month it would create in value.

For food regulation I could join with a bunch of people to pay our own food certification agency, which in turn is held responsible for the costs of illnesses caused by tainted food, and is thus incentivized to minimize its occurrence. And it itself would pay restaurants, manufacturers etc. to inspect their facilities so that it could get accurate information on risks. If the seller pays the regulator they will have an interest to collude, but if the buyer pays the regulator (whose entire point, after all, is to be serving the buyer’s interests) it’s possible to construct a system where nobody has an incentive to sell unsafe food. And this can naturally be bundled with a whole lot of other services in insurance, healthcare, etc. to create a de facto regulatory regime that is nonetheless voluntary and actually incentivized to serve the people, instead of special interest groups and the careers of lobbyists and cya-obsessed bureaucrats.

So in ~theory~, (and this is very much the sort of theory which is just entertaining instead of serious) if the emergence of states is a harmful thing, people would find a clever way to prevent it as long as they are permitted to do so.

And then there’s the cultural thing. Nowadays when there is a problem, people automatically think the state should do something about it, and try to pass a law. Fixing that would go a long way; instead of what-is-basically-violence-at-the-bottom people could try a different way of solving it.

Unregulated trade unions were nice until the state stepped in and ruined the labor market (the socialdemocratic corporatist labor laws in Finland were literally implemented as an anti-communist conspiracy, but just as usual the left has forgotten this and nowadays everyone in the unions defends the thing that was intended to destroy their influence, because redwashed rentiers got comfy jobs from it and it got tribally associated as “left” so of course they must support it; and nowadays everything related to work and welfare is an unholy hell of bullshit which hurts workers and honest entrepreneurs alike).

Mutual aid societies were nice until the state stepped in to implement price floors for doctors and artificially restrict the supply because doctors didn’t want to be in an equal bargaining position with working-class customers; they wanted to be authorities and the state obligingly served those interests because screw the poor that’s why.

Rojava is nice, but Turkey is a state which is doing its damnednest to step in and prevent it from being successful.

But basically, getting people from the mindset “the state should solve this” to “okay how do we solve this” would help a lot. And that’s the mindset I’m trying to operate in, and I’d love for the state to get out of my way when I make the world better.

okay this got excessively long and rambly and I lost track of what I was originally saying and whatever, enjoy

I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.

But, as the FAQ comments, those clever ideas did not, in fact, happen and are continuing to not happen when it comes to fisheries in international waters nowadays.

Any fool can imagine a utopia; the problem is that the incentive structures of economics will produce exactly one thing out of the space of things you could imagine might happen, and the one thing they pick is not, usually, your favourite. From the perspective of a human, there’s billions of free variables we can tweak in our imagination to get the result we want to fall out; in reality, those free variables already have specific values, and they’re not conveniently setup for anything in particular. Insofar as stable equilibria do appear, there’s lots of them and there’s no principled reason to expect the one you like to emerge- as demonstrated by the lack of clever coordination schemes in the real world.

I’d like it if “how do we solve this” could be consistently and universally answered without involving coercion, but I’m very dubious. You need a very specific pattern of people being able to coordinate effectively whenever it’s good and unable to coordinate effectively when coordination is bad that’s unlikely to emerge by chance; you’ll get cases where people can’t/don’t coordinate effectively where it’d be desirable, and where they coordinate effectively where it isn’t, e.g. to set up cartels, or to torture and kill people for being “deviants” because the owners of the the three nearby violence-handling firms don’t care enough about deviants, are better paid by the people doing it, and trying to start your own is just helpfully highlighting yourself as the next target.

The only way I could see it sort of working is if you could coordinate everyone to *create* that pattern, because it’s vanishingly unlikely to occur by chance. If you could get everyone to agree to a norm of cooperating and coordinating if and only if coordinating is a good idea for everyone and had near-perfect (possibly perfect; a lot of stuff doesn’t handle even a single defector well) value alignment and agreement on game theory between people maybe it’d work.

But I think this boils down to a complicated description of requiring perfect humans to make your society go, rather than fitting a society to your humans- every instance of individual corruption is people failing to do that in reality, and it isn’t clear how you’d get people to all agree to not try to create regional monopoly violence handlers in any world you couldn’t get them to all agree to just not commit crimes- or not run a centralised government shittily.

And one reason you can’t do that is that human actions are noisy; in your lake scenario, some human is going to pay the 15c to defect because they get in their head the idea that they’re not going to let the other people tell them what to do, or because of some stupid argument over how the filter should be implemented, or something else (15c is a cheap way to make a point). Any system needs to be able to tolerate individuals being wildly and ridiculously bad at optimising for their own interests, which means it needs to have stability after defections even if defection is stupid. Even perfectly mentally healthy humans behave stupidly often, nearly always if the argument for “correct” behaviour is not intuitive. It needs to be able to tolerate channers deciding in numbers of about a thousand to try to fuck things up for the lulz of seeing the world burn.

And I’m really doubtful you can get that kind of quasi-stability without coercion, especially since you need it to persist over technological development and other things which will wildly change all the factors involved in decision-making.

EDIT: To put this last bit in engineering terms, your system would need Byzantine fault tolerance for up to some reasonable number of byzantine (arbitrarily, possibly maliciously designed with intent to break the system) failures. (There are impossibility proofs for byzantine fault tolerance with more than a third failing, but a third is much more than a reasonable number, so the problem remains not *proven* unsolvable)

Obviously. Incentive structures are everything; but there’s a certain laziness in “let’s have the state solve it” which regularly backfires. And state action has an entire class of shitty incentive structures that inevitably cause those backfires and massive large-scale harms. Just as there are inherent issues in voluntary coordination/consensual subjection to coercively binding agreements, there are inherent issues in having a centralized implementer of arbitrary violence. My claim is that people should be allowed to test the hypothesis “voluntary systems are less shitty than coercive systems” without getting shot at, because voluntary systems eradicate one class of failures (voting on promethea’s body) and there are incentives to migitate other classes of failures.

I might not be able to save the fisheries, but I could save many people from the violence inherent in the system. In a world with NSA, gender identity clinics, FDA, the war on drugs, privatized prisons, regulations banning non-rich people from making profitable investments, criminalization of poverty, cronyist businesses and lobbyist rentseekers, the entire mil-ind complex, FBI destroying the Black Panthers because fuck you that’s why, etc. the decimation of the world’s fisheries doesn’t sound like such a big deal in comparison.

(via jbeshir)

4 weeks ago · 40 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

neoliberalism-nightly:

argumate:

voximperatoris:

argumate:

It seems easy enough for a perfect Libertarian state to evolve/devolve into something very similar to what we have now without any non-Libertarian actions being taken along the way, if that makes sense.

If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.

To me this makes Libertarianism relatively uninteresting except as a reminder not to micromanage things and that centralisation has costs and should be employed sparingly.

This is a bizarre criticism to me.

If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.

There is no reason this would happen. If it did happen, it would be a bad outcome, because we’d be back in the position of an interventionist state. But again, I don’t see any reason why such a thing would happen without “non-libertarian actions being taken along the way”. And how to design institutions to minimize those is the chief project of libertarian jurisprudential theory.

In any case, I don’t see how this reduces the main points put forward by libertarianism, such as that nearly all of the arguments used to justify the existence of an expansive state are invalid, that nearly all government interventions in the economy or in people’s private lives are net harmful, etc. And if you agree with those, it’s hard to see how you could support an expansive state.

But if those arguments are wrong, that would be an entirely separate line of criticism from “a libertarian society would devolve back into a non-libertarian society”. Because in that case, the goal would be to prevent this from happening and/or minimize the role of the state as much as possible. Which is hardly the “middle of the road” position.

I think there are reasons why consolidation and centralisation would happen, as we are seeing in the corporate world across many industries today.

(In the case of monopoly on violence this is even more critical, and it is typical to see turf wars between nations or gangs flare up from time to time then settle into a steady state once they have negotiated who has control of which territory).

But the fact that this can easily happen means continual interventions and tweaking to keep the system from collapsing, maintaining it in a kind of dynamic instability much like a modern fighter plane, or going back further to Romance of the Three Kingdoms where any two of them can always gang up to prevent a takeover by the third. That’s not necessarily an efficient or fun process, though.

To take this line of thought further requires clarifying whether we are talking about a hypothetical state that still holds an absolute monopoly on violence or not, because that makes a huge difference.

Even a strong centralised state can be more discriminating in the interventions in which it undertakes, eg. a more sensible drug policy, fewer foreign wars, etc.

Doesn’t this sound exactly like how the world have been for a long time until relatively recently? It’s not not states even now holds absolute monopoly on violence.

I mean you are seeing the consolidation in industries, but not really comprehensively across industries. And it could be argued that tax systems and regulations actually disfavor non-big-businesses.

Few big corporations would be competitive against smaller challengers without state intervention to establish barriers to entry. Even the businesses themselves know this; advice to invest in those that have strong “moats” around them is cartoonish villainy and totally true.

Corporations aren’t magic; they are subject to the same information problems centralized states are. People usually know their own situations better than outsiders do, and a lot of the problems in eg. universities emphasizing “””productivity””” in terms of publications, or employers of programmers counting lines of code, are instances of precisely this: people can’t do the actually useful things because someone is trying to measure something that doesn’t lend itself to effective measurement, and the bad measurers should get outcompeted away in a functioning market by those who aren’t impacted by mismeasurement. This probably explains a lot of why academicians perform best in traditional public/monopoly-corporate settings where the rules are basically “you’re smart, here’s a bunch of money, figure out something cool, we won’t bother you in the meantime” and programmers are more productive in startups instead of corps burdened by mismanagement.

And state intervention also creates artificial and inefficient property rights. Copyrights, patents, etc. would be basically unenforceable without the state or an organization equivalent to it, and they have a massive centralizing effect on the economy. I don’t believe organic-pragmatic property rights would ever be able to extend to information in such a way as nobody could afford to hunt down pirates on their own unless the starting position is absolutely centralized to begin with (and that’s like “what if we turned the Soviet Union into a megacorporation but didn’t change anything else”; not libertarian at all in practice).

Bans on stripping DRM and stuff get legitimacy from the state; we’re seeing the backlash to “corps are trying to steal the stuff we own” even now and absent a state-equivalent enforcer all it would take is one defector who sells free-as-in-speech 3d-printers etc. to render such positions unfeasible in practice. And the world has way more idealists than a single one.

State and gang violence is seldom economically efficient either; a lot of it relies on the existence of a population those benefiting from violence can pass the costs of that violence on. Drafting soldiers, harming civilians, destroying value, etc.

So all of this turns into an engineering problem: how to craft a system that has, when accounting for known human biases, stable incentives against harmful centralization. My anarchist side suspects that the monopoly on violence is the key, specifically in the sense that its existence enables all the other centralization by passing the costs of enforcing that centralization onto others. When someone has that degree of power, it can be abused to create other forms of power as well, but if violent enforcement of monopolies of any kind is ~disrupted~ the prohibitive expense of trying to recreate them could protect a system made of smaller, competitive actors, from re-establishing them.

Of course, this necessitates solving the three key issues that the popular legitimacy of states presently rests on. One is safety, one is equality, and one is moloch. If people believe that only a state can protect them from crime, they will want a state; and if people believe that only a state can prevent a slide into feudalistic rentseeking by capital-holders and destitute indebted poverty for the rest, they will want a state; and if people believe only a state can disarm the shitty multipolar traps that will destroy everything of value, they will want a state.

The first one has seen a decent amount of work done on it, and I guess empirical experimentation would be enough to sort it out.

The second is what a lot of people object to, but I think simply stopping the state/crony-capital symbiosis of using artificial property rights and assignments to monopolize zero-sum things and propertyize non-scarce things would render it relatively inconsequential (of course, easier said than done); a lot of deliberate violent, coercive, and value-destroying action has gone to creating and maintaining economic hierarchies between people favored by states and people preyed upon by states, and modern technology makes maintaining a basic standard of living trivially cheap if one isn’t bound by rentiers holding artificial property rights. Thus basic solidarity, mutual aid, distributed productive capital etc. could ensure that even non-productive people would be able to have their needs met better than in current illfare states.

The third one is hard, but even states themselves are subject to the same pressures, and if we got from “states everywhere” to “Firewall has the monopoly on x-risk prevention and will nuke you if you act irresponsibly and refuse to stop doing it but otherwise you may do whatever you wish” it would still be a drastic improvement. And the less significant multipolar traps aren’t that terrible; I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.

For example, the most simple solution would be that the Filter Pact threatens to kick Mike’s ass unless Mike uses the filter. Or Mike’s Dia Paying Group, having negotiated the same deal with everyone else’s protection agencies, would tell him that disconnecting the filter is agreed to be illegal and obligates him to pay $999 in damages to everyone else (+10% for DPG) or they won’t protect him from attempts to kick his ass. The state bans this because kicking Mike’s ass is a crime but polluting everyone else’s fish farms isn’t, but an anarchistic system of organic property rights wouldn’t draw such a distinction as Mike isn’t able to lobby himself a special protected position from which to harm others.

Alternatively, everyone could agree to start paying $.29945 a month to everyone else who uses a filter once everyone has agreed to this deal and joined the Filter Fund. Thus, everyone will join it to earn $700, and Mike won’t disconnect his filter because he would lose the $299.15 he gets from others plus $1 from pollution while only gaining $300 from not operating the filter, making a net loss of $.15. And Mike won’t stop paying the Filter Fund because if he does it, everyone else will disconnect their filters because now they would make a profit of ~$.15 from doing so, and everything will go to shit. This should be a game-theoretically stable equilibrium afaik.

But the basic thing is: if there’s a problem that causes net harms, someone could make a profit by solving it. In the fish farming example, the solution will exist if implementing it costs significantly less than the $700 000 a month it would create in value.

For food regulation I could join with a bunch of people to pay our own food certification agency, which in turn is held responsible for the costs of illnesses caused by tainted food, and is thus incentivized to minimize its occurrence. And it itself would pay restaurants, manufacturers etc. to inspect their facilities so that it could get accurate information on risks. If the seller pays the regulator they will have an interest to collude, but if the buyer pays the regulator (whose entire point, after all, is to be serving the buyer’s interests) it’s possible to construct a system where nobody has an incentive to sell unsafe food. And this can naturally be bundled with a whole lot of other services in insurance, healthcare, etc. to create a de facto regulatory regime that is nonetheless voluntary and actually incentivized to serve the people, instead of special interest groups and the careers of lobbyists and cya-obsessed bureaucrats.

So in ~theory~, (and this is very much the sort of theory which is just entertaining instead of serious) if the emergence of states is a harmful thing, people would find a clever way to prevent it as long as they are permitted to do so.

And then there’s the cultural thing. Nowadays when there is a problem, people automatically think the state should do something about it, and try to pass a law. Fixing that would go a long way; instead of what-is-basically-violence-at-the-bottom people could try a different way of solving it.

Unregulated trade unions were nice until the state stepped in and ruined the labor market (the socialdemocratic corporatist labor laws in Finland were literally implemented as an anti-communist conspiracy, but just as usual the left has forgotten this and nowadays everyone in the unions defends the thing that was intended to destroy their influence, because redwashed rentiers got comfy jobs from it and it got tribally associated as “left” so of course they must support it; and nowadays everything related to work and welfare is an unholy hell of bullshit which hurts workers and honest entrepreneurs alike).

Mutual aid societies were nice until the state stepped in to implement price floors for doctors and artificially restrict the supply because doctors didn’t want to be in an equal bargaining position with working-class customers; they wanted to be authorities and the state obligingly served those interests because screw the poor that’s why.

Rojava is nice, but Turkey is a state which is doing its damnednest to step in and prevent it from being successful.

But basically, getting people from the mindset “the state should solve this” to “okay how do we solve this” would help a lot. And that’s the mindset I’m trying to operate in, and I’d love for the state to get out of my way when I make the world better.

okay this got excessively long and rambly and I lost track of what I was originally saying and whatever, enjoy

4 weeks ago · tagged #promethea brand overthinking #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor · 40 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

wirehead-wannabe asked: Can you expand on your identity crisis? I'm always a slut for sortinghatchats.

Finding the correct matches is HARD

But I think I got it sorted out. It took me two days, I was confused by a lot of things, but I think I know what they are.

And I feel like toying about a bit. If you’re a slut for sortinghatchats, maybe you are able to figure them out as well:

my primary
my secondary
my primary model
my secondary model
what I often perform

To make it less frustrating, here’s a few hints:

my username
my category tags and common phrases like “win-win is my superpower”, “this is a social democracy hateblog”, and “don’t vote on promethea’s body”
my political leanings
my steel feminist community hijacking shenanigans
my EAness
my “being the first person in the country to get a legal gender change while nonbinary” thing
the way I appeared on tumblr and built my social connections here
that thing I did regarding the recent controversy

In hindsight, with some help of the illusion of transparency and confirmation bias, everything is so ridiculously laughably obvious, but it did take two whole days to figure it out and thoroughly understand the system. This is also a hint.

And the precise nature of my identity crisis: it’s guessable as well. My primary.

4 weeks ago · 4 notes · .permalink

collapsedsquid:

wirehead-wannabe:

fatpinocchio:

Progressives and conservatives? Retired 20th century factions. Now it’s SJ, Altright, and Everybody Else.

No libertarians?

I think the nature of political coalitions means that they generally get lumped in with the alt-right.

I will fight to the bitter end for libertarians to be SJ

Even the goddamn Fountainhead was about oppressive cultural norms hurting people and the things they care about

1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 25 notes · source: fatpinocchio · .permalink