promethea.incorporated

shieldfoss:

But on the other hand these “technolibertarians” don’t actually seem to be that libertarian. In fact, I get very strong “these are the exact same people who built the nordic eugenics programs” vibes from them. The same naive “I can run people’s lives for them” progressivist elitist attitude, which in business simply either results in a product that solves someone’s problems, or bankrupty, but which in government has historically had the failure mode of forcibly sterilizing about 1% of the population. They don’t seem to reject the idea of running other people’s lives for them, but rather simply to think that they could do a better job at it.

There is a very serious difference though: They do not impose this on you from the barrel of a gun which is very unlike most eugenics programs.

It is becoming harder and harder to have a social life without giving Zuckerberg acces to your private data, but at least he isn’t hiring people to show up at your house with uniforms and truncheons because you decided to stay away from him.

Is there a potential problem? Absolutely! Power, a lot of power, is concentrating into a very small area. If they ever decide that they should use the power of the state to impose on you, it will be easy for them. So far, they haven’t.

Yes, this is currently true. But the mindset seems to be the same, and refraining from such violence doesn’t seem to be the product of principles but rather of opportunity and situation, and that is why the idea of those people taking over the government is frightening. Not as frightening as the idea of Actual Democracy where the bottom 50% in informedness actually have 50% of all power, but frightening nonetheless. It might be better than what we have now, but it would be staggeringly sub-optimal with some very bad failure modes that only the less-inherently-coercive nature of business is keeping in check.

If those people ever start doing a significant amount of democratic politics, I’d expect such failure modes to emerge relatively quickly. The desire to use the state to optimize others, and the ideology of interconnectedness that legitimizes intrusions into people’s personal autonomy are there, and have the potential to turn really ugly and oppressive if combined with bias and lack of hard-to-transmit information about other people’s situations (which the STEM class is displaying in staggering abundance).

And politics happens outside the state as well. Facebook may be well within their rights to require “real names”, but this has massive knock-on effects in outing people and exposing them to stalkers and abusers etc. and may result in someone else showing up at one’s house with the means, motive and opportunity to do violence. And Facebook may be allowed to set their own policies, but banning nudity while allowing violence and hate speech is not apolitical. It’s not even a Grand Principled Stand for freedom of expression; it’s simply a rather cynical acquiescence to certain norms over others, with certain outcomes instead of some different ones.

The desire to optimize without thoroughly understanding shows very well in the real name policy. So many not!white-upper-middle-class-men have expressed that such policies have certain predictable results, due to which it has recently been made less stringent which imo shows that the entire situation could have been avoided if Facebook had been a bit less activist about things it didn’t know enough of, right away instead of having to be told it with a backlash and a lot of innocent people getting hurt. Just because I don’t want to make things worse by having PoliceMob be able to get involved in this doesn’t mean that I consider such private policies to be above scrutiny and criticism.

(via shieldfoss)

2 months ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 38 notes · source: marcusseldon · .permalink

shieldfoss:

rainaramsay:

gothhabiba:

useless-swedenfacts:

my biggest pet peeve wiht the english language is that you don’t have sin/sina

in swedish if u have two people who use the same pronoun u can always tell whos doing what bc its like ‘han tog sin väska’ (he took his[own] bag) and ‘han tog hans väska’ would be that he took the other persons bag

but in english its like if u have 2 ppl w/ the same pronoun:

“she took her bag” whose bag????WHose BAG was it her OWN bag or the other her’s bag??????????????

“he ate his donuts” were the donuts his own???? did he fucking eat someone elses donuts??? YIU DONT KNOW bc english is a bullshit language 

also known as, the gay fanfiction dilemma

I’ve been cursing myself for starting a fanfic with two male main characters; this would make my writing SO much easier.

Have you considered: Just use our words?

Adam and Steve meet in a coffee shop, both put down their bags and, ugh, Steve is wearing exactly the tie Adam told him to get rid of.

Adam took sin bag, and his as well, leaving Steve sitting alone and bagless with a terrible tie.

NOTICE HOW English doesn’t have a different word you can confuse it for, because the pre-existing English word “sin” doesn’t fit into the sentence at that spot.

This is an excellent suggestion. In fact, the entire English language shoud be hacked to work better with pronouns. Discard gender because it only results in silly infinite lookup tables of custom pronous, and instead fix (at least) the following:

Inclusive local we two; I, thou (we!both) Inclusive local we many; I, thou, others here (we!here) Inclusive global we; I, thou, others not here (we!all) Exclusive local we: I, others here (we!us) Exclusive global we: I, others not here (we!myside)

Singular you: thou (thou) Plural local you: thou, others here (you!here) Plural global you: thou, others not here (you!yourside)

Possession referring-to-self: their own (sin) Possession referring-to-other: someone else’s (ses, because universal Finnish genderless “it” (in English se would be se(h)/ses/sem) is the Objectively Superior third-person pronoun)

For example:

Let me tell (thou) a secret.

Now (we!both) know the secret.

Adam and Steve also know the secret, (we!all) know sem.

Steve also has a secret of (sin) own. Adam is here and tells (we!both) (ses) secret.

Adam tells (sin) secret as well.

Steve doesn’t know Adam’s secret; only (we!here) know sem.

(thou) weren’t aware of (we!myside)’s secrets before, but now (we!us) have told them.

(you!here) have heard my secret now; if (thou) wish (thou) may tell sem to the rest of (you!yourside) rationalist tumblrers.

(via shieldfoss)

2 months ago · 79,813 notes · source: useless-swedenfacts · .permalink

Anonymous asked: What is your most controversial opinion?

shieldfoss:

ilzolende:

wirehead-wannabe:

Probably hedonic utilitarianism tbh. I would say suicide rights but there seem to be quite a few closet supporters. Or are you sending this in the hopes of getting a more provocative answer?

If you want us to not be closeted, I support suicide rights. Not because I’m actually pro-suicide, but rather because the preventative measures appear to be way worse than the disease. Also, every time people campaign for more bodily autonomy, people accuse them of basically legalizing suicide, sooo…

^– This is me also. I have never been suicidal but I have been moderately depressed and knowing that my state was only “moderate,” I absolutely support the ability of people who are somehow capable of feeling even worse to stop feeling worse.

Suicide_rights.support.uncloset.activate

I don’t want people to die, and I will certainly seek to build a world worth living in, but autonomy is always the first principle. If you want people to not die, how about making life bearable instead of setting the lower bound for its horribleness artificially low with non-consensual barriers to exit? Nobody else shall be allowed to control anyone’s life or death.

This shouldn’t be so hard; letting people to be excessively miserable without a way out is a really powerful way to have miserable people around (mostly in institutions, where they are under the power and control of someone else), whereas if people were allowed to kill themselves and people who wished them to not kill themselves weren’t allowed to take away that choice, they would be forced to implement more creative and human-flourishing-conductive solutions to people dying.

Once again, personal autonomy creates a superior incentive structure while allowing coercion destroys everything beautiful.

2 months ago · tagged #suicide cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 20 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink

fatpinocchio:

marcusseldon:

Okay, lately I’ve been becoming more and more suspicious about the techno-libertarianism/utopianism that seems to be increasingly popular in silicon valley and among the STEM culture more broadly, including the corners of the internet I frequent.

There seems to be a very anti-democratic strain to this sort of thinking. Like, the motivation seems to be to develop technology in such an unrestricted and unregulated way as to get around those annoying things like democracy, politics, and culture, in order to create broad based, systemic, and, in their eyes, positive changes to society. 

Let our Virtuous Intelligent STEM Heroes break free of the shackles of democracy and government and politics and culture so they can go forth and lead us into a new and Better age with their genetic engineering, AI, big data (and cough constant surveillance cough), private foundations, and so on.

And this trend makes me nervous and suspicious. I don’t think STEM people are any more virtuous, wise, or knowledgeable about ethics as anybody else, but I feel like a lot of technolibertarians/utopians think they are, probably based on some very one-dimensional idea of what intelligence is whereby if you are smart enough to do math well you are obviously smarter at ethics and politics too. I worry that really it’s just one very-self-confident group that is already very powerful, in its technology and its wealth, advocating much more power for itself so that it can impose its (not obviously correct or better than all other) value system on the masses through the technology it creates without any oversight or checks.

It’s actually kinda authoritarian, albeit in a non-standard way, despite being couched in the language of libertarianism.

I agree the cluster you’re talking about isn’t perfect, but - have you talked to actual normal people? They already have too much power, and we’re lucky they don’t have more. Given their authoritarianism, puritanism, status quo bias, sacred values, pathological egalitarianism, etc, routing around these kinds of people is good.

To a first approximation, you’ll get closer to the truth in ethics by adopting a negative “skeptical” strategy towards other people’s moral claims than by making your own positive theories. And at least the technolibertarian cluster is decent at that.

As for it being authoritarian, that’s the same kind of conservative relativism that Eastern European national conservatives (e.g. Putinists) talk about when they complain about the West forcing homosexual equality down their throats. Rejecting other people’s (in this case, the masses’) imposition of power is libertarian and not at all authoritarian, and that’s what’s happening here.

I’m not exactly a central example but I felt like this post was talking about me, so it probably is.

Democracy has a very anti-me attitude so I don’t see why I should have anything but an anti-democratic attitude, when said anti-democraticness simply consists of “don’t impose your values on me no matter how much you think you know better than I do”. Because when people call for democracy on topics such as genetic engineering, I hear “let’s have the mob vote on promethea’s body”. I’m usually correct in hearing that.

But on the other hand these “technolibertarians” don’t actually seem to be that libertarian. In fact, I get very strong “these are the exact same people who built the nordic eugenics programs” vibes from them. The same naive “I can run people’s lives for them” progressivist elitist attitude, which in business simply either results in a product that solves someone’s problems, or bankrupty, but which in government has historically had the failure mode of forcibly sterilizing about 1% of the population. They don’t seem to reject the idea of running other people’s lives for them, but rather simply to think that they could do a better job at it.

Sure, they are better than the mob, but these technoprogressives seem to be other-optimizing way too hard and trying to replace democratic coercion with economic-cultural coercion which is not that much of an improvement.

The culture is good at solving white upper-middle-class men’s problems, and other people’s problems as far as they resemble white upper-middle-class men’s problems, but they are worse in solving even white upper-middle-class women’s problems, in a way that would have been perfectly predictable if they had had a healthy dose of austrian economics as a background assumption. The anti-democraticness of “I don’t consent to being paternalized by the mob” is not the anti-democraticness of “people should be paternalized by my culture and company, not the mob”.

2 months ago · tagged #heathy dose of austrian economics meaning #maybe people are non-trivially different #and thus more qualified to run their own lives #than we are to run their lives for them #not let's discard all empiricism #this is a social democracy hateblog #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 38 notes · source: marcusseldon · .permalink

ozymandias271:

okay my actual proposal:

• May 1st reserved for outdoor fucking, for historical reasons and because we have a song about it
  
• May 4th, the actual anniversary of the Haymarket Massacre, is worker’s day
• Victims of Communism Day can be the second or the third as they prefer

Okay so 30.4. || 4/30 is Walpurgisnacht, then it’s fucking day, then it’s victims of utopian experiment day and then it’s erased-from-history day (because nobody remembers the anarchists! Haymarket was about anarchists, not about tankie pieces of shit!). Sounds like things gone full Meguca. Not that I’m complaining.

Besides, victims’ day needs to be 7.11. || 11/7 because statist communists were the ones who caused them. There was never any anarchist regime killing people en masse because there was never any anarchist regime because authoritarians always fuck with other people’s experiments.

2 months ago · tagged #still bitter for '36 #i am worst capitalist #does space lesbianing count as outdoor fucking? #i say it does #saint madoka patron of transhumanist loophole exploitation #saint homura patron of something to protect · 24 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink

Okay, no solarized for the background. Using it on tumblr made me realize that simply switching the background to #222 is enough to improve it substantially. Mission accomplished, I guess?

2 months ago · tagged #baby leet #blog meta · 2 notes · .permalink

thathopeyetlives:

@socialjusticemunchkin is brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifiying… 

and yet I can see the desperate flaw. Better than H.G. Wells, sure– they see the methods by which things are to be done, by which incentives are to be arranged… 

but not well enough. Liberals plan incentives. God laughs. And many people can believe in their own destiny. 

As far as open borders are concerned, I would expect a tremendous revival of ethnic nationalism on a small scale, perhaps even non-geographic nations and a Fifty-Thousand-Mile-Rhine as in Diamond Age, and after a few generations, the system ossifying around whoever migrated the most early on and excluding others, similar to the cynical perspective on labor unions today. 

My first proper testimonial!

2 months ago · tagged #blog meta #support your local supervillain · 3 notes · source: thathopeyetlives · .permalink

New theme

I’m inflicting Solarized upon you (because it’s inflicted upon me as well (because all my attempts to change it just put me in a hell of .vimrc and .Xresources and .config/i3/config and so on when nothing is satisfactory)).

If you wish to change this state of affairs, I’m incentivizing anyone to give me a different color scheme for my terminal that still accomplishes the same goals of moderate brightness contrast and adequate hue contrast. Black/purple/orange/neongreenish are good colors for such a color scheme.

Also, if askbox issues still persist, please inform.

2 months ago · tagged #baby leet #meta · .permalink