argumate:
theaudientvoid:
argumate:
voximperatoris:
argumate:
xhxhxhx:
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.).
1 month ago · 157 notes · source: scabphobic · .permalink
metagorgon asked: '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!
1 month ago · tagged #the radical idea that people would yell less if someone translated things from one culture to another · 3 notes · .permalink
ilzolende:
nniihilsupernum:
genghis-khanye:
nniihilsupernum:
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
(via ilzolende)
1 month ago · tagged #the joke is that both are basically the same #because what could be more important than status and popularity #definitely not economic growth and malaria eradication #oh no those are poor people's things #rejoicing from malaria eradication suggests you're one of the sheeple who believe lives are more valuable than coolness #and thinking economic growth is nice implies you haven't got enough money to larp fashionable poverty already #or identify more with such scornable people with concerns like staying alive #than with the cool kids with concerns like being popular · 28 notes · source: nniihilsupernum · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 4/10
The Marvels of Duct Tape
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.
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 · 13 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 3/10
Hubris
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.
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 · 16 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 2/10
The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
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.
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 · 16 notes · .permalink
The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 1/10
A False Manhattan
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.
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 · 27 notes · .permalink
wackd:
philsandifer:
socialjusticemunchkin:
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…
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 16 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
socialjusticemunchkin:
argumate:
@obiternihili:
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
(via socialjusticemunchkin)
1 month ago · 11 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
Dark Marx show me the forbidden materialism!
1 month ago · tagged #shitposting #vagueblogging · 12 notes · .permalink