promethea.incorporated

playinghardtolistento asked: i dont have much interest in rationalism-as-thought-techniques because from what i've observed it doesn't seem to have uniquely benefited people who subscribe to it in ways that a general purpose self-help book and associated social support structure wouldn't have, with the added detriment of being tangled up in rationalism-as-techno-libertarianism. if there actually are "one weird tricks" employed by rationalists that would be helpful to leftists i'd love to hear about them tho

oligopsony-deactivated20160508:

socialjusticemunchkin:

soundlogic2236:

socialjusticemunchkin:

oligopsony-deactivated20160508:

I’ll have to think about this because it’s important, but my facial impression is indeed that there aren’t really any superpowers or whatever - I just like discussing weird ideas and some versions of The Community are good places to do that

well, I DO think everyone reading “how to do things with words” (I think that’s the title?“) would nip a lot of the dumber arguments we keep having in the bud, like for instance the definition of socialism or whatever, but the basic insights aren’t unique? There’s probably a number of small things like that that ppl are likely to point out in the comments

A Human’s Guide to Words

Then there’s CFAR which seems to be “self-help, except we try to apply ~optimization~ to it, which is 100% more optimization than other self-help things”

Rationality checklists and deliberate de-biasing (I’ve been working on trying to recognize when my brain does something unsavory and bring it to my own conscious attention instead of letting it fester unnoticed, and like “why doesn’t anyone else anywhere even recognize that this is a thing”)

Then there’s that thing which makes people really likely to turn out trans and I suspect is at least partially modulated by the same transhumanist-y “optimize everything” morphological freedom attitude which makes people also use nootropics and sign up for cryonics even though all of them may be perceived as weird by the general population, and partially by the emphasis on changing one’s mind and not getting tangled up in silly things such as whether or not one’s non-doll-playingwithness in childhood makes using estrogen in 20-somethings verboten or not

Then there’s the parts of “technolibertarianism” that are positive instead of normative and thus would be very good for leftists to understand and use, such as public choice theory, behavioral economics, the corrupted hardware problem, group and individual irrationality, the impossibility of efficiently regulating things one doesn’t understand (and the diaspora is very much linked to things that are regulated by people who don’t understand them, such as nootropics, transhumanism, cryonics, transgenderism, urban planning, etc. and it might help illuminate the reasons why regulating things excessively and not respecting autonomy is extremely harmful), the need to deal with the coming post-labor future in which traditional ideas don’t work even to the very small degree they currently work and thus things like “who owns the robots” are even more important than presently, and so on

In addition the diaspora’s technolibertarianism is overwhelmingly social-technolibertarianism and the non-libertarian right is basically a rounding error, suggesting that either rationalism turns people non-rightist or repulses the mainstream right to begin with, and that in turn suggests that leftists should be interested in why these “technolibertarians” nonetheless aren’t what people usually think of when they hear the word “technolibertarian” even though they sure look like it, and that people like Thiel are more outliers than median examples of the wider rationalist-adjacent population

Then there’s Effective Altruism which is basically applied communism, in a way that is not vulnerable to the failure modes of working for a revolution (such as “Lenin” or “the fiftieth anniversary of the discuss the imminent revolution and never actually get shit done club”); eg. GiveDirectly is redistributing capital to people who don’t have capital and these “technolibertarians” routinely claim this redistribution of capital is one of the best and most important humanitarian interventions in the world, usually only outclassed by things like “not having people die and suffer from diseases that are really cheap to prevent, simply because they are too poor to afford even the really cheap prevention”

Then there’s the fact that the community has managed to derive a lot of significant leftist-associated insights from first principles and in the process repackage them as something the STEM class can understand and hopefully even apply in action occasionally

Huh. Never seen a list like that. Nice.
Thoughts:
CFAR bit is admittedly a weak-nothing about the optimization actually doing anything
Trans bit is good, though the description of improving introspection and such so people can notice ways of helping themselves feels awkwardly phrased to me? I had to read it twice to understand the meaning (and I only optimistically assume I parsed it correctly now-if I didn’t please inform me). Might just be me having trouble with the phrasing though-can anyone confirm?
Technolibertarianism part seems just about perfect
‘Applied communism’. That… Something feels wrong about the opening sentences there.
‘Derive from first principles’ seems understated. I feel that having a strong theoretical justification and comprehension of something is worth a lot more than ‘explain to STEM people’. It lets you catch failure modes in advance, do more diagnostics on it, all sorts of things.
In conclusion:
I like having this list. It is a good list. I want a better one, but that is usually true of almost everything. Thank you for creating it, especially because just listing the stuff… somehow hadn’t occurred to me?

CFAR:

I can’t comment on how much they have actually achieved with it because I haven’t researched it properly, but my prior is on “will attend a workshop as soon as I can afford it”.

The part with trans people:

Something keeps making them in the diaspora, and the obvious candidates are:

1. transhumanism and the general attitude of “if you don’t like it, you don’t need to put up with it just because of some ~natural order~”
2. the rejection of ontological bullshit about The True Metaphysics Of Gender or tying the social to the biological
3. ideology that demands allegiance to evidence even when it suggests weird things about oneself

“Applied communism”:

The entire point of communism is to socialize the means of production (afaiaa). Historically this has been attempted mostly by taking them away from people who haven’t been interested in giving them away and thus getting in fights with them. This has resulted in communism being applied in ways that are optimized for winning fights, or not applied that much at all.

EA is the radical new idea that maybe charity should stop being charity (as in optimizing for fuzzies and good feelings for rich people) and start being world optimization (as in actually helping the receivers, not just the egos of the givers). I claim that traditional leftists should take the fact that EA has resulted in rich people redistributing capital to poor people as evidence that:

1. the distribution of capital in the world is indeed a serious problem because redistributing capital has basically become the gold standard of “how to improve the world for humans” against which all other interventions are measured and which only a select few can surpass in effectiveness
2. the traditional means for pursuing said redistribution should be at the very least reassessed, because it’s highly likely that the marginal impact of revolutionary discussion clubs and tribal political polemics is way worse than the marginal impact of actually getting shit done and redistributing; and the ingenious plan of sneakily “”“expropriating”“” capitalists by performing services they think they want in exchange for currency, and then giving said currency to people who don’t have capital so they can purchase some, should be seriously considered as it’s not only an immediately actionable strategy, but also one whose marginal effect is predictable, consistently positive, and individually achievable without needing to solve massive coordination problems first
3. whatever made rich people arrive to the conclusion that yes, this should be done, is worth checking out because it seems to be outputting leftist conclusions without explicitly leftist input, and thus if one believes that such leftist conclusions are correct, this is evidence in favor of the patterns of thought that resulted in EA being correct as well
4. and whenever said patterns of thought generate outputs that disagree with traditional leftism, the correctness of said patterns of thought on some questions should be taken as evidence that such traditional leftist may be flawed (or to stop vagueblogging: if people who derive “let’s redistribute capital” from first principles think that anti-market biases are a problem, traditional leftists should seriously reconsider their anti-market attitudes)

Thus, greater engagement by leftists with the diaspora ideas would be likely to be positive as there are some rather obvious convergences that should make people assign even the ones they initially disagree about as being worthy of consideration as any processes outputting correct ideas must inevitably converge, and the more correctness something outputs the more likely the rest of it is to be correct as well. And then there’s the reasons why the memeplexes diverge, and understanding the mechanisms that cause it is quite crucial in not ending up with bad ideas just because one made a mistake in choosing the process to generate the ideas with.

(Similarly, the diaspora converges with libertarianism in many ways, but when it comes to conservative ideas I can’t really think of any others than “go to church lol is actually not always terrible advice and reddit atheism is in some ways quite naive” that would have been “derived from first principles” in the sense of the diaspora tending to adjust people’s opinions on them against stereotypes (for example, I used to be much more of a reddit atheist before encountering the diaspora’s way of dealing with religion, and early LW antitheism seems to be very reddit-atheisty compared with the modern diaspora’s “religion as a social technology, its upsides and downsides” approach) and thus I consider it to be evidence in favor of some leftist ideas (such as the inequality in capital distribution being a severe humanitarian loss) and some libertarian ideas (such as markets being a very neat piece of social technology for information-processing in allocation problems) but not that much in favor of conservatism.)

Applying my advice about the words essay means not responding to “EA is applied communism” (especially since I think, at the end of the day, EA is a good thing, I’ve taken the pledge etc) but does rationalist tumblr have a higher quotient of trans women than “nerdy spaces where feminism is the default gender ideology?” Anecdotally, it seems like rationalist tumblr has a huge number of trans women, but so does communist tumblr, the places where I discuss elfgames, my FB friends that I don’t know IRL, and so on. I promise I’m not consciously selecting for this, except in the sense that I’m selecting for nerdy spaces where feminism is (or at least TRP or whatever isn’t) the default gender ideology in the first place.

I don’t think there is necessarily a huge difference, but the more relevant question is IMO “why did the diaspora become disproportionately feminist” and thus one of such nerdy spaces, if the control population is significantly less feminist.

(of course, it might be simply that our shameless N E O T E N Y is driving away a certain type of person whose absence is causing the disproportionateness)

1 month ago · 27 notes · .permalink

collapsedsquid asked: I've seen you talking about sortition a few times, and I'm curious, how seriously do you take it? How worried are you about issues of legitimacy?

oligopsony-deactivated20160508:

socialjusticemunchkin:

oligopsony:

socialjusticemunchkin:

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

oligopsony-deactivated20160508:

Serious! I think forms of government can be arbitrarily weird and yet considered legitimate as long as there’s appropriate ritual around them and they people’s lives are about as good as they expect them to be, and I don’t think sortition is that weird - it’s fair, it’s representative, it’s been done before.

Those who see voting as expressing the “consent of the governed”, maintain that voting is able to confer legitimacy in the selection. According to this view, elected officials can act with greater authority than when randomly selected.[55] With no popular mandate to draw on, politicians lose a moral basis on which to base their authority. As such, politicians would be open to charges of illegitimacy, as they were selected purely by chance.

I don’t see the downside.

The issue is when lack of agreed-upon and enforceable methods for resolving disputes leads to terrible outcomes when disagreements do occur, such as mob violence or all-out war.

I think “avoiding mob violence or all-out war” or “let’s pay everyone the same reasonable amount of universal basic income for their basic needs, funded with a universal flat tax without loopholes or deductions or favoritism to special interests, and a land value tax based on the market value of the land in question” or “let’s ensure that people can’t pass the harms of their actions onto non-consenting third parties” requires way less legitimacy than “let’s ban e-cigs, unprescribed estrogen, transgenic food, sex workers, and black people” or “let’s arbitrarily intrude into the private lives of people so we can know how much exactly to rob them for the purpose of subsidizing cronies while simultaneously treating the poor with degrading paternalism” or “let’s decide (primarily based on whose special interests are the best in lobbying and arranging favors) the ~exact specifics~ of the future of energy, transportation, jobs, and other big parts of the economy and rob the public to pad the pockets of our buddies” and thus reducing the government’s legitimacy on the margin would primarily impact the latter before adversely impacting the former.

Welfare minarchism is a far more stable and less-legitimacy-requiring equilibrium than statist micromanagement, and people are far more likely to start asking questions about the latter while the former can defend itself with substance so it doesn’t need to resort to style by pleading to the vox populi.

The trust I need to let someone engage in a legal and low-value commercial transaction with me is far lower than the trust I need to let someone run my life for me, and attempting to run my life for me and failing at it reduces my trust for commercial transaction purposes as well, so at least I would consider a government that was only allowed to eg. set the tax rate, use 25% of the collected taxes to run a justice system, science, public-goods-kind-of research, and all the Institutes of Specific Study and Standardization that make basically a rounding error of the government budget and are actually useful or at worst just a harmless hobby for some nerds, and divide 75% equally to everyone, far more legitimate than a government that is allowed to define poker, vote on my body, require permits for fortune-tellers, socially engineer the entire nation into car dependency as an anti-communist conspiracy, socially engineer the entire nation into chemical moralism as an anti-hippie-and-black-people conspiracy, take some money from me to subsidize some asshole’s weapons manufacturing business to ~create jobs~ (something I could do perfectly well on my own thank you very much, by paying people who create value to me in proportion to the value they have created and thus incentivizing people to do positive-sum things to each other; who does the government think pays the wages of workers, the boss? okay actually please don’t answer that question oh god), kidnap poor people for trivial and victimless things (or socially engineer a situation which makes some poor people do more victimful things than they’d have otherwise done) so it can ~create jobs~ by paying other poor people (and their rich cronyist bosses and investors) to watch over and abuse the first set of poor people, etc.

#the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #seriously tho if the government was simply banned from doing any #~job creation~ #it would already be a massive improvement#because it would have to give money to people if it wanted to be keynesian #and thus people could use the money on the things they actually need #not things assholes think other people need to have imposed upon them #and the same thing goes for food stamps etc. #if you want paternalism you can buy paternalism on the market #yes this is what a promethea actually believes #basic income would enable life management businesses #that take people’s money and pay their bills for them #so they can’t drink or gamble themselves into trouble even if they have low conscientiousness #and the users of the service would be the payers of the service so the business would be incentivized to serve them #instead of the moralism of the voters

I think you’re underestimating the amount of overhead that would be required to prevent these from evolving into feudal statelets. Cultural individualism is mostly a side effect of central state power destroying local paternalisms.

…I don’t think a service of “we’ll take your paycheck/basic income and pay your bills and give the rest minus fees to you for spending in a gradual manner so you don’t waste it all immediately and end up begging on the streets later in the week/month/year” would be particularly likely to devolve into feudal statelets?

Because that’s what I was thinking. If Johnny is the rare poor person who actually would be worse off not being paternalized by an authority (because surely such ones do exist somewhere in very slight numbers even though the vast majority I’d trust to make better decisions for themselves than bureaucrats do (and most importantly I’d trust Johnny to determine for himself whether he’s a Johnny or not better than I’d trust myself let alone anyone who is not me)), for example if he would waste all his available money on gambling unless he was provided food stamps that permit only the purchase of approved kinds of food, or if he would not remember to pay his rent from the basic income, he could buy the service of someone who prevents him from wasting his money and ensures his bills get paid, without everyone else being bothered and paternalized by the state just because Johnny exists.

Okay, I had assumed you meant, like, agencies that have the power to kidnap you if you break the contract. Bundling services seems less objectionable, and indeed everybody wants some paternalism in that sense.

In general I should say that arguments to the effect of “well maybe some people need paternalistic restrictions but that doesn’t mean everyone else should be forced to abide by it” seem Pareto-efficient on the surface but are extremely dangerous insofar as they make malicious paternalism more politically viable. Sometimes people benefit from restrictions being placed upon other people, and if the meta-rule is that restrictions must apply to everyone, then people will only prefer those restrictions being in place iff the benefit of others being restricted outweighs the inconvenience of being restricted themselves. For an obvious example I don’t think that the drug war would be politically viable if eg whites were policed to the same extent as blacks. (This is why “the drug war is racist” is a coherent critique even without nonracism as a terminal value.)

Now of course the situation might be different in a welfare minarchist world where paternalism is voluntary and UBI means nobody has to answer to an employer or paterfamilias if they don’t want to. We can’t know all the politics that would exist in such a world. I just don’t think that argument in the general case is reliable.

Well obviously my answer is that any non-consensual paternalism may be resisted with whatever force a person can be bothered to use.

And right now there is already a lot of paternalism the mob is willing to impose on everyone because it doesn’t feel personally bothered by it; I’m a convicted criminal for buying estrogen because the rest of the population are okay with losing their choice to buy unprescribed estrogen because they aren’t actually impacted by it at all. As long as there are differences between people, those who aren’t unpopular thing X feel no burden whatsoever from a prohibition on X and will impose it forcibly if they can and feel like doing it, and empirically the answer to the latter one is practically always “yes”. If it’s not okay to disproportionately target black people, why would it be okay to disproportionately target gamblers, smokers, trans people, nootropics users, sex workers, bitcoin users, etc.?

Thus bodily autonomy and consent is an incredibly beautifully good bright line, to be broken only in extremely serious situations, because then paternalism will mostly only happen if its every single recipient believes they personally benefit from it. Obviously this will result in an undersupply of paternalism as not all will know they would benefit from it but oh how I long for such a world where insufficient paternalism would be our primary problem.

1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 23 notes · .permalink

oligopsony:

effective altruism is not applied communism, because charity is not applied communism, because charity can be voluntarily withheld, and if someone can voluntarily withhold resources you need, you are in a state of dependence on them.

this doesn’t mean EA is bad. it’s telling people who have the right to withhold such resources: “choose not to withhold! furthermore let’s do some analysis on how to not withhold most effectively.” this means people living when they might have died, living happily when they otherwise might have lived miserably, and that is Good.

and furthermore I don’t at all buy the line, which I think is put forward in good faith but is nevertheless dangerous, that this ultimately serves to actively prop up an unjust system. healthy, literate people are better at standing up for themselves than unhealthy, illiterate people, and social radicalism actually tends to be stronger in periods of economic growth.

but where charity exists - where charity must exist - we do not yet have communism.

The point of EA is to make itself unnecessary and impossible. That is very much the main difference in EA versus traditional charity; instead of doing things that look good and keep people dependent, make it so that people can’t do such things anymore, by removing the need. Every time the cost of saving lives increases, it means that lasting change has been achieved. When malaria is eradicated, nobody is dependent on bednet handouts anymore. When direct cash transfers let people obtain their own means of production with which they don’t need to rely on outsiders anymore, well, they don’t need to rely on outsiders anymore.

I don’t see why the means of achieving a goal would be more crucial than the goal itself; if Elon Musk builds free chargers for electric cars everywhere, or Bill Gates releases free textbooks for anyone to use, there is a commons where there previously wasn’t. In fact, this can be ad-absurdumed quite thoroughly: if one accepts the idea that change brought voluntarily is not the same as change brought coercively, the collective decision by every single capitalist in the world to redistribute their capital to the rest of the population would not count as communism. Thus the word loses its meaning as “the means of production are shared” and intead merely means “coercively seizing them”. Of course, if the intent is indeed to define the methods, not the results, the word may mean it; but in that case I’d suspect that quite a many people have been thoroughly misled about its meaning.

And even more: the boundary of voluntary and coercive is itself fuzzy and impossible to define. An EA suffering from scrupulosity may be voluntary on paper, while practically all coercion is actually done with acquiescence to a threat of violence, not the direct application of violence itself (and even then it could be argued that any form of resistance that does not reach the most desperate extremes is in itself “voluntary” submission as one “could” have “chosen” to escalate even further and it was simply that the actions we call choices happened in a certain kind of a context). So what ultimately differentiates pulling the levers of the clockwork world by speech, and pulling the levers of the clockwork world by guns? All is clockwork in either case. And when social pressure comes in everything gets even more muddled.

Furthermore, there is no ideal state of emptiness and non-dependency on others in a world with more than one person. As the failures of the welfare states have shown, using the state apparatus of violence to seize property from Adam to Steve doesn’t make Steve not dependent on someone else, Steve just simply becomes dependent on those who control the state apparatus of violence, instead of Adam’s charitableness; and when the controllers of the apparatus of violence decide to withhold their seized property from Steve it doesn’t help one bit. Or if the property is collectively, ~democratically~ controlled, one’s dependency on individuals, or the state apparatus of violence, has simply been replaced with a dependency on a mob, which can just as well withhold the resources if it so wishes with the scorned individual having no recourse against the popular opinion because such genuine recourse never exists as long as people can’t both satisfy all their material needs and wants on their own and unassailably defend themselves from the entire rest of the world while being unable to turn the means of that defense against others. In other words, never ever in reality.

Underneath there is always the twins of naked force and human goodwill, the two faces of clockwork, no matter what pretty narratives and constructs are set up on top of them. Sure, one can write a constitution saying that all resources shall be collectively owned and shared, but what is constitution but a piece of paper (or in modern days, simply a number) which gains all its strength from the willingness of people to enforce and keep up the fiction they share? So, what is the fundamental difference between the mob choosing to let me use the “shared” 3d-printer, and some individual choosing to let me use “their” 3d-printer? Certainly, withholding it may be more difficult in the first case, but it’s merely a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. When a certain number of people reject the idea that I may use it, I de facto lose my ability to use it and in the end there is no jure, only facto.

Certainly, build technologies that make denying access to resources more difficult (as in reality there is ultimately no “withholding” even; as property itself is a construct built to determine who is denied access to what and it all reduces to whose word on the matter reality ends up reflecting, all is clockwork with thick layers of fiction on top); write your constitutions in blockchains instead of mere paper; let people get used to shared 3d-printers and become violently unwilling to give them up should anyone ever seek to deny them them; let them feel entitled to what they need, not merely to exist but actually live, and demand it in a world of plenty; but in the end there still is no qualitative difference. The dependence never goes away entirely, only its exact form and extent can change.

So what is the difference between a family now “having” a cow because some people sent them “money” to “buy” it; and a family now “having” a cow because a mob “took” it from the herd “of” someone else? What is the difference between a family now having a cow because a number of people decided that such should be the state of the world, and a family now having a cow because a number of people decided that such should be the state of the world?

Or to taboo the C-word itself: what is the difference between a reallocation of capital achieved by people speaking things, and a reallocation of capital achieved by different people speaking different things? And if one seeks to reallocate capital, shouldn’t one be equally happy in either case? As far as a reallocation of capital is what some people seek, I see no reason to not tell them that something has actually resulted in a more substantial reallocation of capital than what they were previously doing, if they truly do value the reallocation of capital instead of the speaking of the different things.

(via oligopsony-deactivated20160508)

1 month ago · tagged #is the libertarian seriously arguing to the marxist that magical ontological distinctions between voluntary and coercive don't exist #this isn't normal #but on bayesianism it is #clockwork people · 37 notes · .permalink

Anonymous asked: Wait, so you write fanfics that turn readers trans? Link pls

No, it’s Yudkowsky who writes fanfic, and empirically speaking exposure to his writings tends to make people trans. And he has taken money from people with the AI box experiment that he seriously has absolutely no reason to be able to take. My text-only-channel wetware exploits are less impressive (YGM)

1 month ago · 3 notes · .permalink

falloutfae:

Money absolutely does buy happiness. You are probably just spending it wrong give it to me I’ll show you how it’s done

(via metagorgon)

1 month ago · tagged #it me · 311,115 notes · source: next-venoms · .permalink