promethea.incorporated

Anonymous asked: With regards to competing needs, what is the response for large scale/mutually exclusive needs, such as someone who needs stability and consistency and someone who needs revolution or mass change?

wirehead-wannabe:

theunitofcaring:

(epistemic status: I’m an incrementalist. That means I support doing small things in the direction of this and checking whether they work.)

Archipelagoism, the political philosophy of lots of self-governed states which can operate by any rule at all as long as they have unconditional exit rights. So if someone wants to live in a feudal monarchy, they totally can - but anyone who doesn’t like it will leave, so good luck oppressing your inferiors. Want to set up a fundamentalist religious state? Okay, but I can set up a state specifically for ex-members of your fundamentalist religion who want to stop following your strict laws, and anyone who is unhappy in your state can come to mine. 

You really really like revolution? You can have a state that overthrows its political system every few years, but if it sucks (and honestly, sounds like it’d suck) then no one will choose to live there and it’ll die out. 

You want a communist state? You have one! And if it works everyone will join you and we’ll have full communism. But anyone who isn’t happy has the right to choose a different system.

The way to make this work is probably to separate governance from control of physical territory. A government is a contract between all of the people who agree to abide by the government’s system for choosing laws and the laws themselves, in exchange for whatever benefits the government offers them. Governance will probably mostly be local because it works best locally, but you needn’t claim a bunch of territory before you can start calling yourself a government. This makes it easier for people to leave, too, since leaving needn’t involve uprooting yourself to somewhere where you may not speak the language. 

As much as I’m in favor of this in most cases, I still have yet to be convinced that it does an adequate job of protecting the rights of children and animals. In the case of children you can say that they’re allowed to leave whenever they want, but brainwashing is a powerful tool, and some kids are too young to even communicate their desire to leave. If someone decides that they want to have a nation where they beat their infants and just let them die of preventable, deadly, and-or permanent disability-inducing illness, should they be allowed to? And once you start regulating what kids can be exposed to you start going down a long road of banning things that might conceivably harm young children.

Yes this. Archipelago would be basically ideal if kids didn’t exist. The closest thing that’d be anywhere near realistic would be Archipelago with child protective services, setting certain standands of what kinds of things all children must be allowed to do and know and what they’d be protected from. Unfortunately those standards would probably need to be determined by some process which is beholden to the vox populi at least to some degree. (democracy, yuck; collectivistic education to the standards of the mob, yuck; but letting evil parents do evil things to their children is even worse)

2 months ago · 68 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink

The generalized fuckup model of learning feels quite useful for a certain kind of personality.

If you assume you are predestined to do a certain amount of fuckups until you start running out of them and therefore will fuck up less, fucking up doesn’t mean “I’m worthless and can’t do anything right”, instead it means “okay, I can cross that one off my list”.

Of course, you might have a similar one awaiting later on, but that particular one instance of that particular one type of fuckup is done and won’t come again, and the amount of fuckups remaining is now lesser than it used to be!

And the right way to learn is to get all the inevitable fuckups done as fast as possible, which just so happens to match the right course of action for actually learning the stuff even outside the simplification of the fuckup model.

And eventually you will start fucking up in novel ways because you run out of the elementary fuckups, and the time between fuckups will start to grow greater and ultimately you will be a master because you fuck up in ways most people can’t reach while having run out of the fuckups people regularly have.

It has had a very positive impact on my social anxiety at least. 4.5/5 would recommend for people who haven’t thought of it before and think they could benefit from trying.

2 months ago · 3 notes · .permalink

ozymandias271:

Chapter two of the zootopia fic.

the theme of this chapter is Random Rants About Sex Work Decriminalization, and also Judy Breaking Nick’s Heart With Off-Hand Comments

I am such a terrible, shameful pervert

I can’t believe I just literally read a furry fic for the libertarianism about sex work and drugs

in my defense it was a very good libertarianism

that cop seemed like a sympathetic cop and making a cop seem sympathetic to me is evidence of very good writing (or at least I think that one was a cop didn’t really pay that much attention to the characters, I was there only for the decriminalization propaganda)

also this shame feels so good

what is happening to me

2 months ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #promethea has the weirdest kinks · 25 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink

wirehead-wannabe:

People on Facebook are now declaring their willingness to transition and then sleep with Eliezer in exchange for more HPMOR.

Okay, @sinesalvatorem existing might only be the _second_ most efficient way of equalizing the gender ratio in the community. More data is needed.

2 months ago · tagged #just one word: plastics · 67 notes · source: wirehead-wannabe · .permalink

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

There’s been a recent trend of How I Got A Rationalist Social Circle posts going around, and I’ve noticed that most of them begin with “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!”

I mean if we’re going to have an Official Rationalist Welcome Wagon Alison’s probably the right person for the job

I approve of being the official welcomer. Anyone who wants to be initiated should totally hit me up.

Actually, tbh, your talents are being underutilized.  Too bad The Rationalist Community isn’t the type of organization that has marketing pushes to Recruit More Girls.

We could put you in a sexy outfit and have you dart around the edges of the Blue Tribe, enticing young girls to follow you into the Forests of Rationalism like some kind of gay will-o-the-wisp.

What!? Why would I prey on innocent Blue Tribe girls and turn them into My People??? *nervous laughter as I close my OkCupid tabs*

…why wouldn’t we be the type of organization to have a marketing push to Recruit More Girls? The rationalist community is what we make of it, and I don’t see any reason not to make a girlsmoreofrecruitment drive of it. We don’t have a rationalist czar telling us _not_ to do it.

As someone who grudgingly matches the description “girl” (at least by people who don’t know that my brain wants to belong in the “totally made-up category” of “N E O T E N I C androgyny” instead) and who perfectly matches the description “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!” I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.

IDK. I’m kind of off-put by pushes to recruit members of $DEMOGRAPHIC. Social communities thrive based on shared interests and values, and efforts to attract more people of a given demographic usually trade off against that.

I am all for recruiting more people with rationalist interests and values. If they’re female, great! But targeting women specifically would almost certainly mean compromising some feature of the existing community dynamic.

I enjoying being around members of my demographic as much as the next person, but if aiming for women means less Tolkien in textbooks, or aiming for Caribbean people means raising the level of acceptable homophobia, then no thank you.

I mean, a lot of the reason pushes to include particular demographics exist is because there are lots of people who are part of the demographics in question who would totally love to be part of the rationalist community, but there are other factors preventing members of the demographic from joining.

For example, despite loving Luminosity I initially avoided the rationalist community because I had heard that a lot of members were unusually hostile towards women. This has, for the most part, not been my experience. If Rationalist Recruitment Teams were a thing it would have been very helpful if one of them had said to me, politely and not in a Gotcha You Evil Assumption-Making SJer way, “hey, actually, most of us don’t hate women over here, check out all these high-status women in our community”.

 the point of campaigns like this should be to find people who would totally belong in the community but are staying away because they’re worried about hostility

I am totally in favour of that! I would like people who are afraid that we’ll be hostile to feel welcome. I am personally willing to roll out the welcome wagon.

because like no ones suggesting you pull random women off the street and press-gang them into being nerds or rationalists or whatever

Um, we have obviously seen very very different recruitment campaigns. In my experience, as a black person who has been active in a bunch of disproportionately-white internet groups, the average campaign leans more toward grabbing random people off the street and trying to integrate them into your group than toward targeting actually interested people.

I mean, the things I saw ranged from patronising (“We’ll get more black people if we talk about hip hop a lot!”) to actively destructive (”Our comic forum is going to ban discussions of any comics that don’t have at least one black character”). Have you seen a bunch of white guys desperately screaming into the void about hip hop in the hopes that their black senpais will notice them before? It’s the saddest thing. Three-legged puppies with cancer are more cheerful.

As my OkCupid activity indicates, I’m perfectly happy proselytising to women. I do it a lot! I tell people about the gospel of bednets and transhumanism and glowfic automatically. I’d be happy to join black student groups at Stanford and encourage anyone who’s a good fit to join us. Just from the fact that I like being around other women and black people, I’ll probably do more than my share of converting women and blacks.

But the moment someone says “You know what would attract black people? If we stopped talking about [heresy of the month]”, I will be the first person to say “Fuck black people. We don’t need them anyway!”

Yeah by “no one is suggesting” I totally meant “I am not suggesting/no one in the rationalist community is suggesting”, I have definitely seen really terrible demographic-based outreach campaigns.  (My absolute favorite are the ones that are like “hey girls!  You don’t have to be an Icky Nerd to be a programmer!  You can totally be good at computers and ALSO perform femininity, you don’t have to be like those gross girls who DON’T perform femininity!  Empowerment!”).  

What I’m getting at here is that we shouldn’t decide not to do a thing entirely just because some people are terrible at doing it, especially if a well-executed version of the thing could do a lot of good.  And also that there should be more well-executed versions of the thing.

Good demographic-based outreach campaigns would be a great idea. I’m just not sure how to stop them from degenerating into really bad outreach campaigns. Most of the bad campaigns I’ve seen started off super reasonable, and then they collapsed in on themselves.

I don’t know how to do the thing in a way that I can be sure won’t end with egg on my face, so I’m hesitant to start now. If I learn more about what makes campaigns go sour first, then I might be less averse to trying.

Suggested datapoint for a good demographic-based outreach campaign: you doing the thing you are doing, exactly as you are doing. Sexy outfit optional but probably situationally useful sometimes.

Someone should run the data on this but I suspect that the best and reliablest way to fund a demographic-based outreach campaign for the community would be to pay your bills and arrange other things done so that you could fully focus on your comparative advantages of being an awesome person to talk to and introducing people to other awesome people.

Of course, it could be that my personal biases have simply led me to rationalize why we should let an Alison loose on the internets and meatspaces without being constrained by boring things, but out of all the things to rationalize I don’t think that one is anywhere near the worst.

2 months ago · 110 notes · source: inquisitivefeminist · .permalink

technologizeable:

anthropicprincipal:

socialjusticemunchkin:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

sinesalvatorem:

inquisitivefeminist:

There’s been a recent trend of How I Got A Rationalist Social Circle posts going around, and I’ve noticed that most of them begin with “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!”

I mean if we’re going to have an Official Rationalist Welcome Wagon Alison’s probably the right person for the job

I approve of being the official welcomer. Anyone who wants to be initiated should totally hit me up.

Actually, tbh, your talents are being underutilized.  Too bad The Rationalist Community isn’t the type of organization that has marketing pushes to Recruit More Girls.

We could put you in a sexy outfit and have you dart around the edges of the Blue Tribe, enticing young girls to follow you into the Forests of Rationalism like some kind of gay will-o-the-wisp.

What!? Why would I prey on innocent Blue Tribe girls and turn them into My People??? *nervous laughter as I close my OkCupid tabs*

…why wouldn’t we be the type of organization to have a marketing push to Recruit More Girls? The rationalist community is what we make of it, and I don’t see any reason not to make a girlsmoreofrecruitment drive of it. We don’t have a rationalist czar telling us _not_ to do it.

As someone who grudgingly matches the description “girl” (at least by people who don’t know that my brain wants to belong in the “totally made-up category” of “N E O T E N I C androgyny” instead) and who perfectly matches the description “I was too nervous to talk to anyone but then I talked to @sinesalvatorem and she was super nice, and then I made a bunch of other friends!” I wholeheartedly endorse this approach.

For most X, the best way to get more women who are X is to get women who are not X to be X. But, Rationalism seems to have pretty good luck getting non-woman Rationalists to be women.

I am going to pretend that I am evidence for this, even though I am not.

Datapoint reporting in. Yudkowsky changed my gender over a one-way text-only communication channel. Or maybe it was the plastics in the water, and LW just triggered it. Nonetheless, I read the sequences (except for the part on quantum mechanics), and deduced that I should go on hormones. It was a very successful individual application of X-rationality.

(via metagorgon)

2 months ago · tagged #just one word: plastics · 110 notes · source: inquisitivefeminist · .permalink