The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 8
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.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer shall be left as an exercise to the reader
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 14 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 7
The Players of Games
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.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 5 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 6
A Game to End All Games
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.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 6 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 5
The Darkening
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.
Part 1: A False Manhattan
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 3: Hubris
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 5: The Darkening
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 7: The Players of Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer
Part 10: Denouement
1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 7 notes · .permalink
socialjusticemunchkin:
argumate:
@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.
(via socialjusticemunchkin)
1 month ago · 13 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
argumate:
@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.
1 month ago · 13 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
argumate:
@neoliberalism-nightly:
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.
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 157 notes · source: scabphobic · .permalink
argumate:
davidsevera:
I wish to acquire a harem, mainly so that I can experience the emotion “Bored in my harem”.
okay I know I keep talking about pretentiously self-deprecating sexuality but this is getting out of hand
Finally a convincing argument for why I should acquire a harem! That one is such a rare and exquisite emotion that I simply must collect it!
1 month ago · 28 notes · source: davidsevera · .permalink
ilzolende:
ansiblelesbian:
ilzolende:
nniihilsupernum:
- ive done things because theyre what nihilsupernum would do before
- i am positively socially pressured to be a caricature of myself
- i like who a caricature of myself is, as a person
- i shouldnt do to much public insight porn bc content vs personality?
“try to say what a more ilzo-ish ilzo would say” is basically my one weird trick to getting low levels of charisma without too much effort
*coughs*
*points at tag*
#you are an egregore
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)
(via ilzolende)
1 month ago · 25 notes · source: nniihilsupernum · .permalink
wirehead-wannabe:
ilzolende:
hylleddin:
h3lldalg0:
eversolewder:
neurocybernetics:
rusalkii:
another-normal-anomaly:
empathy2000:
caucasiontrapgod:
cummienism:
petalise:
cummienism:
I got a 26 on that purity test is that bad or…..?
What purity test this I wanna see if I’m less pure
http://ricepuritytest.com/
the higher the number is the purer you are
also 26 lmao
I’m only at 53, darn hardwired monogamy :P
89. I’d like to say I’m surprised but I am absolutely not surprised.
also
89. also not surprised.
16!
@thejanitordoodles @regexkind @thewrittencurve @vermithrx
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.
1 month ago · 78,734 notes · source: cummienism · .permalink