"I get a very strong “has never actually interacted with a working class person of average intelligence for a long period of time” vibe from some rationalist diaspora people, which is really unsettling, though. I guess it’s plausible that that could happen to you if your path through adolescence just goes from one Fancy Institution after another and the closest you get to a community college, public university that’s not Berkeley, or trade school is by driving past one. (Or the non-US equivalents, I don’t know too much about other countries’ educational systems.) There’s a good chance I’m completely wrong about many people on this website–I am not known for my skill at making predictions about others’ lives–but my System 1 says holy guacamole, there are some sheltered birds on here."
Then there are those who have interacted with such people for way longer than would count as not!cruel-and-unusual-punishment for whatever sins they have committed before birth and are desperate to get the hell away from them. I’d be very interested to know how these types manifest differently because my brain can imagine them being seemingly indistinguishable on the outside when being safely sheltered, while the subjective experience might vary from “hey, these are some strange creatures with curious habits” to “help no take them away don’t attract their attention they will tear you apart and feel good about it put them as far away from me as possible please”.
A cunning vampire door-to-door salesperson who stands in people’s doorways and talks until they can find a convenient moment to drop their pen and the person picks it up and the vampire says oh “Thank you” and the person says “you’re welcome” and the vampire smiles a big fangy grin and steps inside
And that’s this vampire’s modus operandi for decades And then the language starts to change and suddenly millenials have homes and the vampire thanks them and they say “oh, no problem” and the vampire is like ???????????????? this was not the plan
honestly the most unbelievable part of this is where millennials have homes
The main thing I’ve learned from watching Masters of Sex has been a better understanding of the fact that allosexuals care waaay more about sex than any reasonable human being should.
I mean, every time Bill Masters talks about how he wants to cure sexual dysfunction to “save marriages”, I’m like “???”. It honestly seems really strange to me that someone would end a relationship because their partner isn’t able to have sex with them. It parses to me like “I’m sorry, honey, but I married you for your singing voice, and this sore throat bullshit has gone on long enough.” Like, sure, you do you - but I’m kinda sorta judgin y’all.
Also, like, people keep cheating on their spouses??? Why??? I can’t imagine promising to only sleep with one person and then breaking that promise, because I can’t imagine wanting sex more than I want to follow through with an “Um, sure, whatever” - much less faithfulness-including marriage vows. (I’m poly because I can’t stop falling in love with people; not because I can’t stop fucking them.)
All in all, Masters of Sex is a fascinating look into a world where people care about how frequently they stick organs in orifices. I recommend to anyone who’s as confused about that as I am.
Optimization thinks strongly-reactive-gray-asexuality-ish-ish-ness is the Objectively Optimal™ type of sexuality (to which The One Which Watches The Watchers responds: “subjectively, you one-example-generalizing fool!”) because it results in really low amounts of time spent on sex-related things (I kind of get where people’s interest in such stuff comes from because pre-HRT I was more allo-ish, but it felt like an unpleasant compulsion which is hijacking my brain to waste time on pointless things instead of the meaning of life or something like that) but allows great quantities of diversity of experience and positive novelty when someone who fits the criteria is like “hey, want to do X?” and I’m able to respond “okay sure” for a wide variety of activities ranging from hugging to things-that-accidentally-break-ribs.
So yes, very definitely confused. Unfortunately Masters of Sex is like 36+ hours and Optimization is screaming “you could use those hours writing your way to world domination instead of trying to comprehend the arcane customs of a weird species” so I’m going to do that thing instead.
Okay. I guess other people have stronger feelings against Internet communists than I do.
My own feelings are kind of - puzzlement mixed with lack of understanding. Part of it is that I *still* don’t really know what communists believe beyond “overthrow capitalists, seize means of production”. In particular I don’t have a good feel for what people think true communism looks like, and when I ask I get answers anywhere from “Cuba” to “a bunch of loosely connected utopian farming communes”. I’m not sure what the difference is politically between a communist state versus an ordinary democracy or an ordinary dictatorship, except in the form of vague generalities like “the Party works for the good of the people” (just put that in the constitution and I’m sure it will come true).
Ownership of the means of production doesn’t seem that important to me. It seems to correspond to the stock market (owners of stock control companies capital and receive companies’ profit), but last time I tried to calculate it out if all stock were distributed evenly among the population, it would mean $6000 “profits”/year/person in the United States. Add in all CEO salaries and it gets up to $6400. That’s a lot of money, but it’s only about half the poverty line, and it would barely increase the average worker’s salary by 10%. Is the difference between inhumane oppression versus the glorious golden future really just earning $50,000 vs. $56,400? And that’s assuming that the transition to communism doesn’t decrease wages or profits in any other way, like by hurting the economy or making companies less ruthlessly profit-seeking and so decreasing stock dividends. But without the whole means-of-production/worker-owned-company thing, communism just seems like a more dictatorship-prone version of Sweden.
Finally, my meta-political stance is caution and empiricism - I have some political stances, but more important than enacting them is getting a framework where they can be tested, made sure they’re not dangerous, and enacted if and only if they work. Communists don’t seem very good at testing their ideas in contexts less irreversible than a giant revolution that destroys everything that has come before. The exceptions I can think of are a few communes - most of which have failed - and a few worker-owned companies with a mixed track record. In other words, I’m not sure what incremental communism would look like, or what it would mean to move in the direction of communism other than “stockpile armaments and wait for a chance to shoot people”. And the few examples of giant-revolution-communism I have to go on are either horrible bloodbaths like Maoist China or places like Cuba with some detractors and some proponents that nevertheless if you’re trying to help the poor and ensure equality of opportunity seem inferior to the best social democracies.
And my other complaint about communists is that I rarely see them talking about any of these things, either explaining/debating their solutions or being properly worried at not having any. Whenever I see them they’re either going on for the zillionth time about the whole thing where the proletariat need to seize the means of production, encouraging general agitation and discontent, getting angry at people for trying to solve things incrementally, or talking in incredibly dense post-modern jargon about issues that seem a thousand levels removed from the real world.
This is what I mean when I say communists aren’t my out-group: I have so much trouble placing them ideologically and seeing them as a coherent movement that it’s hard to have strong opinions about them.
At the very least I consider communism an useful error message. It arises from discontent in society and while its proposed solutions to the problems it identifies are debatable, I find many of the problems themselves at least worthy of noticing. As a psychiatrist you are probably familiar with the patient who says they are in excruciating pain caused by an alien implant in their neck, and just because there is no implant to remove doesn’t mean the pain is just as imaginary; and even the most uncharitable interpretation of communism would be basically the political equivalent of that thing.
One of the reasons you don’t have a clear idea of what people want is that “communism” is an extremely diverse label containing a huge number of different and sometimes diametrically opposed ideologies. Stalinists, libertarian communists, and anarcho-primitivists won’t get along at all, and their utopias will be dramatically different. Also, one of the main ideas of communism (or so I’ve understood; my familiarity with the theoretical material is admittedly very limited) is the abolition of states as well so “what a communist state looks like” is kind of similar to asking a gay couple “which one of you is the man?”. In practical terms, the Zapatistas and Rojava are probably the closest to what communists actually want (or at least the communists worth considering; stalinists, maoists etc. seem to throw tantrums about the latter but ideologies whose supporters haven’t updated after tens of millions of deaths can be safely ignored as far as I’m concerned).
Ownership of the means of production is not just about money. (But for a lot of poor people $500 a month is a really big deal.) The basic idea that people work for themselves instead of someone else is very attractive for many (if not most), and there is also evidence suggesting that it might make people more productive as well. Companies with employee stock ownership plans, more worker participation in management etc. might be more productive (haven’t scrutinized the data but studies usually argue something like 5-10%), and even people like Paul Graham agree with the basic ideas behind socialism in the workplace (bosses, hierarchies and investors tend to suck and it’s more awesome to own one’s own work) in essays like this or this. In addition, if workers are also the owners and they hire their own bosses it would (in theory) solve some issues in misaligned incentives as they could balance the monetary value created by management with the immaterial value destroyed by the actions management takes to extract more productivity from workers at the expense of their well-being. In other words, it’s not a question of $50,000 vs. $56,400 but a question of $50,000 and bosses and hierarchies and no freedom vs. $56,400 and having genuine participation in one’s work; a difference which seems like the difference between a really good employer and a median employer, and the impact of a really good employer on a person’s happiness seems to be pretty big. Basically, the communist ideals are less “government bureaucracy for everyone!” and more “startups for everyone!”; whether or not it would be realistic in practice is another question I won’t start addressing in depth here. But having seen it firsthand, Silicon Valley is awesome, and it makes a lot of sense that people would want to give everyone the things that make Silicon Valley awesome.
I agree that their lack of empiricism is most communists’ biggest weakness in both theory and practice. I’d argue that if people want to do practical communism, the best way would be to accumulate capital to workers in legal ways so the state doesn’t take it away with its guns. In other words, by having worker-owned businesses, especially worker-owned businesses that seek aggressive growth, especially in sectors which are the most critical for a self-sufficient society (food production, minifacturing, tech) and thus would allow the communists to discouple their basic needs from the wider capitalist system while also getting material feedback on how communism works in the real world, without depending on bad ideas like “let’s replace our entire production system with something that hasn’t been tested because we predict it will only work if it is never tested in a smaller scale, and without backups so we can’t roll back if the new system sucks”.
ETA: Stuff I forgot to mention:
Under this kind of communism, BART workers would gladly automate their jobs away to get more free time because they would be the ones reaping the benefits.
Also, there are other forms of capital than just dividends; for example real estate is one really important source of income for rentseekers instead of value creators.
I am not responsible for the outcomes of assuming actual communists agree with this; while I’ve tried to stay within the rules of fair steelmanning, I’m certain some of my beliefs are leaking through (wrt things like revolutions) and making the result fall somewhere between “right in the goals and wrong in the implementation” and “burn the heretic”. But this is the strongest simple description of what communism might actually be about I can produce, and it’s noticeably more specific and sensible than, and at least as substantiated as, the stereotypes most people operate on.
Do any of the transhumanists in the room have a non-handwavey solution to overpopulation? I still haven’t seen one.
One solution would be to universally agree that the resources of the universe shall be split among each currently living person and everyone’s descendants, forks etc. shall only be allowed to access those allocated to their ancestor-at-the-time-of-splitting or voluntarily reallocated to them by their owners. Defectors will get destroyed.
It would be totally unfair to the innocent children of several generations of transhuman Quiverfulls, driven to subsistence level while those who don’t have any children enjoy unimaginable wealth and that’s the entire point. It would directly incentivize keeping one’s descendants as few as possible because maintaining a larger population requires more food/space/whatever just for survival, which is then not available for other productive uses, and minds that have greater per capita resources available can grow larger; one human is smarter than the equivalent carrying capacity consumption in rodents, and a single planet-sized computronium brain is smarter than the same planet tiled with individual ems.
This would mean that as long as the resource boundaries are initially enforced long enough to solidify such differences, the breeders can’t catch up and will most likely be the ones who get wiped out if the agreement is broken. Therefore posthumans would be incentivized to be growers instead of breeders, but also to maintain the balance as a long-term survival plan if they nonetheless are breeders.
If we growers initially outgun breeders, we can unilaterally enforce this if we can cooperate until the incentive landscape turns around; and thanks to transhuman decision-theoretic reasons our commitment to maintain that deal, even when it would be in our own interests to break it, can be trusted.
okay maybe this is just me but like when you’re deep inside of a good book but forced to put it down for a bit does the outside world seem weird and soft and like you find yourself thinking in the author’s voice and even after you’re done with the book there’s like this “book hangover” where you’re still in the writer’s world and seeing the characters and hearing the narrator and stuff feels… different ….
thinking in the author’s voice
This is actually how I get myself to write most of the time! I’ll read something by an author whose voice is similar to my own, and that’ll almost immediately get things flowing.
Other people do this “thinking in the author’s voice thing” too!?!! [excited screeching]
After I read Thing Explainer my head began to use simple words for all things when talking to itself without making noise. Even for very complicated things. This was not a big problem and in some ways having my head talk to itself in that way makes explaining complicated things to other people easier. It was also pretty fun.
The one after eight out of ten. Would have my head talk to itself that way again.
I ALMOST CLIMBED INTOA REFUGEES WINDOW WITHA MALT LIqUOR FOURTY BECAUSE THE PREVIOUS NIGHT IT WA A PARTY ROOMAND I GUESS ONCE THE PARTIERS LEFT, IT BECAME A REFUGEE FAMILY’S ROOM
“WELCOME TO CANADA I’M THE PARTY BRIGADE HERE TO GET YOU RIGGITY RIGGITY WRECKED!!” Prat, 2016
jdlkfgj
I witnessed some other fun shit that weekend as well
like someone in a MLP gilda suit being literally dragged off by 5 kids down the hall while the gilda costumer looked around confused and startled as the kids were screaming excitedly.
i was also walking around a bit in my kigurumi/onesie of prat and a group of syrian women and their kids stopped me to take a photo with the kids who were LOSING THEIR MINDS AND SCREAMING, unable to stand still for the photo, one was behind me the whole time stomping on the tail of my kigu
basically all weekend the kids ran around like it was goddamn disneyland until as late as midnight and the mothers hung about like “8DD?!?” not sure how to make of the situation but laughing to eachother over it.
I can only fathom what it’s like to flee the besieged suburbs of aleppo, spend a year in a turkish refugee camp, then be shipped over to cold, rainy ass Vancouver Canada only to encounter a sort of celebration with costumed idiots at the airport hotel you are checked into on arrival.
Certainly a WELCOME TO THE WEST culture shock, if anything.
Like the rest of the internet, I love lol furries jokes, but this is honestly super fucking adorable and heartwarming, and I’m glad people were nice for the kids, because they definitely need it
@inquisitivefeminist There are many reasons why you need this thread in your life.
Meanwhile, on this goddamn continent:
“Go back to your war-torn country and shoot some brown people, that’s what I fantasize about every day and you could get to live the dream you’re so lucky!”
“So the reason they’re coming here is that they are less likely to die in Europe than in Aleppo? So if we make Europe just as violent and dangerous as Aleppo, they won’t come here, right? Because that sounds like such a brilliant plan and it’s not like this continent has a track record of nationalism going horribly wrong every time it’s tried or anything like that.”
“Our national pride is how we once accommodated over ten percent of our population in refugees; people of a different religion and speaking in a strange language, women wearing scarves on their heads, into a country that was extremely poor by modern standards, and in which people’s livelihoods strongly depended on the zero-sum distribution of land. But now our modern, prosperous society will collapse into ruin if one tenth of that amount arrives because this time they’re brown instead of white.”
“Okay, we’ll grudgingly let you in, but we won’t let you work. If you acquire a permission to work, we won’t let anyone hire you because nobody may be hired below the union rates and our taxes make it too costly for employers to hire low-skilled people. If you manage to get hired against all the odds, we’ll blame you for stealing our jobs. If you don’t, we’ll blame you for stealing our welfare. Have fun trying to survive the odds we’ve stacked against you!”
I think if I were to fully alieve it I’d have to change a lot of my behaviors, but I found this essay pretty persuasive.
I disagree. this person wants less open discussion which makes me suspicious of their views immediately. the argument rests on several emotional concerns, namely that the author feels they aren’t making progress in arguments enough (I.e. winning), that they feel a compulsion to correct others, and a compulsion to make others uncomfortable in those arguments as a punishment for questioning their world view. the comments section is enlightening as to what community we’re dealing with, and the author’s primary example is the “32 types of anti feminists” comic being made by “a jerk” who “insults [the author’s] friends”.
one thing that immediately jumped out at me:
one of the main reasons I get defensive is because I think some groups
actively strategize to push their opponents out of the Overton Window
and turn them into despised laughingstocks. When it works, it means I
either have to be a despised laughingstock or spend way too much mental
energy hiding my true opinions. The alternative to letting these people
have the final say is defending one’s self.
speaking as someone who’s views exist almost entirely outside the overton window, and who regularly gets hate-mail for my political views, may i just says that scott can cry me a fucking river.
moreover, essentially all political debate is on some level an effort to shift the overton window, and inherently, doing so will result in people being pushed outside it. the idea that this is an illegitimate rhetorical move is absurd.
he goes on to say:
When I don’t want to argue but feel forced into it, I’m doing a very
different thing than when I’m having a voluntary productive discussion.
I’m a lot less likely to change my views or admit subtlety, because that
contradicts my whole point in having the argument. And I’m a lot more
likely to be hostile, because hostility is about making other people
feel bad and disincentivizing their behavior, and in this case I really
do believe their behavior needs disincentivizing.
this admission is incredible. scott is here basically admitting that he isn’t open to changing his view, and is openly hostile, with the express purpose of making his opponent feel bad, any time he feels they are trying to shift the overton window- which, i remind you, is something which is inherent to almost any form of political argument, period.
it’s interesting to finally understand how “rationalists” justify to themselves that they are everything they claim to be against (i.e., irrational closed minded bullies) but i do have to say i’m disappointed that the justification turned out to be so apologetically shallow and inane.
This is kind of an example of what I’m talking about.
Somebody who, every single time I’ve seen any of their posts, has been making really dishonest cheap shots at rationalists uses my admission that sometimes I get angry when I feel threatened, and twists it into “this is proof that all rationalists are irrational closed minded bullies”.
In the old days, I would have felt like I had to defend “NO WE’RE NOT,” and s/he would have kept up “YES YOU ARE”, and there would have been a lot of yelling, and there’s no way I would have convinced this person because they’ve already decided they hate me and everyone like me and this isn’t the sort of argument they’re in looking for truth or understanding.
Now I just block them. Blocked.
(if you’re genuinely interested in understanding my point of view or convincing me of yours, you can email me at scott@shireroth.org, and we’ll talk)
Turns out rationalists really hate the free market of ideas huh
I’m not sure if you’re being serious or not, but I think the free market of ideas is important in that nobody should be allowed to dictate what other people talk about. I also think that a controlled flow of ideas is personally important, especially in the sense not in curating the content of ideas you’re exposed to (which is dangerous and might create an echo chamber) but the maturity of the people expressing those ideas. In other words, getting rid of trolls and keeping signal-to-noise ratio high.
I’m happy for people who want 4-chan to have 4-chan - if that’s what you mean by “the free market of ideas” then they’re welcome to it. I’m just saying that I personally find that a certain style of combative and unproductive argument makes it more difficult for me to have productive debates, that I don’t feel bad controlling and pruning my intellectual environment in order to cultivate the sort of space where I can let my rational-thoughtful side come to the fore rather than my emotional-defensive side, and that I suggest other people try to notice if they have the same issue and do the same if they do.
In fact, I would argue that this goes along with the goal of a genuinely free market of ideas. I find that when there are really horrible people pushing a view in an insulting and hateful way, that makes me not just less likely to agree with them, but less likely to be able to fairly evaluate their position even when it’s expressed by other people who are more convincing than they are. Take away the feeling of personal attack and it’s a lot easier to give the other side a fair evaluation.
It’s ironic to see people talking about the “free market of ideas” and not noticing that overton windows are basically cartels, monopolies, and captured regulations. The whole point of the overton window is to shut some products outside the market, not because they’re not worth buying (if they were, they could prove their badness on the markets) but because people don’t want others buying them.
(Abolishing any and all overton windows would be an elegant solution if the market of ideas didn’t have material consequences from some ideas inflicting things upon nonconsenting bystanders. Ideas like “let’s use violence to stop people from doing things to their bodies we don’t like” would be far easier to dismiss if their carriers couldn’t use violence to enforce them, and the choice between pushing holders of anti-autonomy ideas into despised laughingstocks and having them brutally enforced upon oneself is pretty simple for people who perceive themselves in such situations. Intolerance of others’ tolerance of neoreactionaries seems very firmly correlated with vulnerable positions where one has similar ideas already inflicted upon oneself, or believes one could end up in such a position.)
when buying an apartment in China the buyer pays the capital gains tax owed by the seller, a quantity that is intrinsically unknowable until after the transaction has taken place, thus leaving the buyer on the hook for an unspecified sum and making two apartments advertised at the same price potentially cost completely different amounts.
yes, this is a call out post for the real estate market, which should be ashamed.
As you value your life or your reason, keep away from libertarian Facebook.
Libertarian Facebook: the only thing right-libertarians and communists alike can agree on. (And everyone in between as well. I wouldn’t be too surprised if some immigrant billionaire created libertarian Facebook just to unite humankind against a common adversary which assaults their minds and souls with horrors previously barely imaginable.)
