Convincing social democratic artists whose ingroup and paycheck literally depend on tax-funded subsidies that a libertarian market-based approach is the only truly egalitarian way of funding art and avoid contributing to marginalization. How troll can one get?
Beyond the dreams of Daedalus, beneath a darkling sky
The god of Carthage weeps to think that man was made to die
For clay can pump the irons of a torment yet unnamed
But fate cannot enslave the heart that dust and ash have claimed
So, save the soul of Sysiphus, as Sartre dared not to wish
And let the mettle of mankind be manifest in this
Unleash the deathless power of the children of the stars—
But do not think the only god that wills this thing is ours
It seems kinda odd to me that I haven’t heard anything about world federalism or unification from rationalists. Given the concern about solving coordination problems and preventing existential risk it seems like a perfect fit. The thing that makes me most pessimistic about solving X-risk problems is our history of dealing with near X-risk; we basically blundered through the cold war and survived out of luck, and climate change efforts are irrevocably hampered by international coordination efforts. Going forward, the lack of an international body with regulatory powers makes AI X-risk much more scary to me. It’s going to be a difficult enough problem to solve without China or the US creating an AI without taking the proper safety precautions because they’re in a race with each other, or with some seasteading genius cracking the code.
I guess it’s just not popular because the solution seems insoluble? I certainly used to think about it a lot in my more idealistic younger days. AI X-risk you can create MIRI, and if you’re good enough plausibly you make a difference. You can even lobby national governments for space settlement, or whatever. But world federalism is all or nothing, and much more likely to be nothing because you’re weird anyway. Or maybe it’s just that I’m way out on the far end of rationalists into politics. Still, I think it’s odd that I’ve never even heard the concept here in rationalist-land.
“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”
Problem is intractable, likely to corrupt those who work on it, does not assure a good outcome, requires incredible resource investment if a tractable approach is found.
And the optics are horrible.
I think some of the overly ambitious and mostly joking rationalist teenagers are working on that.
[epistemic status: mostly a feverish and visceral reaction to scary! bad! no! go away!, but there’s some substance as well]
World federalism is such an ugly idea. Its proponents strike me as exactly the kind of naive utopians deathspiraling around democracy I want to stay as far away from as possible, and its actual realization would be way more likely to be just a scaled-up version of the EU and the US federal government, possibly doing some useful coordination stuff while simultaneously enabling absolutely horrible conformity pressures with its political power, subject to democratic distortion of incentives.
I don’t think a world federation would be in any way able to limit itself to x-risks (and in fact x-risks would probably be on the agenda only way after all the bullshit), and instead would act as some kind of a mostly unfriendly singleton. Just looking at the things we have now makes me scream in horror internally at the thought of having more of the same, except there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. We have drug laws, we have corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies, we have regulatory capture, we have morally backwards and intellectually bankrupt groups looting and bossing around people who could do way better than that if they were allowed to, and worst of all there’s no simple answer to all of that.
It’s obvious that the Bay Area is horribly dragged down by being subject to a government Alabama has any influence in and the excesses of each (one tending positive, another negative) are dramatically tempered by the influence of the other. The scary part is that it’s not obvious that having them go their separate ways would be a net positive because a lot of innocent people live in Alabama and having the federal government limit the abyssal depths their polity could otherwise plunge into might actually be worth the way it restricts the heights other places could reach. Everywhere I look it’s the same story; the enlightened areas altruistically trying to drag the backwards ones kicking and screaming into at least yesterday if not the proper present, even if their own situation suffers. The Obviously Correct way to do things would be to let the Bay Area influence Alabama, but not vice versa, and letting Iceland boss around Poland without the latter having a say in the former’s affairs but there’s just no way to ever make that happen.
In the absence of magical one-way unfairness of exactly the right kind all the remaining options are horrible; naive pro-secessionism sounds alluring until one remembers that the US literally fought a war within itself to stop one part of it from doing nasty and nonconsensual things to some of its population and is still wrangling with versions of those exact same issues to this day (and other very similar ones), but the only viable solution allows that one part to try to do nasty and nonconsensual things to the other parts’ population as well, and the world is just not ready (if it ever will be) for the level of individual liberation that would allow such horrors to be eradicated with a consistent meta-level rule without opening the door to different horrors.
And horrors there would be. I don’t believe for a second that actually existing world federalism could end up as the one type I just might find bearable (a global minarchy that’s basically x-risk management along with the UN’s most fundamental human rights treaties enforced with actual muscle behind them, and stopping people who try to start wars, and erring on the side of caution on these because even the most fundamental human rights treaties are prone to having glaring flaws, and then using that as an excuse to erode nation-state sovereignty enabling individual liberation) but instead there’s talk of all sorts of scary things. There’s world democracy, democracy for this, democracy for that, democracy for everything, economic democracy etc. which is basically the political equivalent of seeing a big and really impressive spaceship having some really important part of it held together with duct tape because nobody found anything better for the job, and thinking “you know what would make this spaceship even better? making it totally out of duct tape!”.
Democracy is to politics what duct tape is to engineering; something that’s occasionally really useful for patching things over with but never ever a terminal value and anyone who tells you otherwise should never be responsible for designing or maintaining anything important. Unfortunately, these world federalists seem to be exactly that kind of people. I suspect it’s some kind of a psychological thing. A certain kind of person who’s fundamentally agreeable to the majority might easily fall prey to the idea that the things that are wrong in the world are all the result of a minority imposing its will on the majority, but I’m minoritarian enough to recognize that the majority is actually really fucking scary and hostile and would destroy me the instant it had the opportunity to do so and is in fact constantly trying to make it happen even right now, and giving it any more power to do so is the exact last thing I want.
In fact, I’m pretty sure something like that is behind my desire to get really rich not-just-for-EA-purposes; in the unfair world we have now I could at least buy myself some degree of freedom, impunity and existential security when I’m definitely not guaranteed such things anywhere near to the same degree majority-agreeable people are, and anything that tries to take that opportunity away or even diminish it a little bit must be opposed at all costs unless it seriously gives me those things some other way. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a lot of strongly libertarian people were fundamentally weird and at least partially driven by a fear of the mob, and thus anyone who seriously wants to address economic inequality should address that thing as well, instead of just spouting the standard socialdemocratic jantelaw rhetoric that comes off as “we’re coming for not just your money but your lives and fundamental aspects of your identities as well”.
In the absence of such credible guarantees, a world federation would probably start accumulating unnecessary powers in exact the same ways national governments have done, and do all kinds of evil stuff like banning GMOs altogether, regulating sex work, crabbucketing economies, creating more market distortions for crony capitalists to capture and enforcing all kinds of oppressive shared sensibilities of dominant groups. It’s bad enough when the Swedish model of suppressing sex and drugs can be lobbied for internationally, and it would be even worse if they could just vote for it and enforce it everywhere. The vast majority of the global population is not WEIRD bonobo rationalists and even the present degree of subjecting the latter to the rule of the former is unbearable. At least now it’s possible (if rich and resourceful enough) to move somewhere else if the rule of one polity becomes too overbearing, but unifying a strong global government would make it all too likely to turn it into an unescapable situation.
This not the peace you had in mind? The one you waited for? There is no land beyond this law, there is no place to go
(But it’s not like the standard opponents of world federalism are any better, national sovereignty is just as ugly and disgusting and oppressive with the way it always seems to repeat the same pattern of forcing extremely different cultures under the control of each other; prosperous cosmopolitan urban enlightened libertines really shouldn’t have to share polity with reactionary rural xenophobic conservatives who mostly mooch off the previous ones’ money while hypocritically espousing economic rightism themselves, but nation-states love to put boundaries in silly locations. It would be way better for places like Stockholm and Amsterdam to be together and separated from their spatially neighboring but culturally worlds-apart regions; nations are far less of a natural joint in reality than whatever-it-is that’s underlying the difference that seems to be popping up everywhere in extremely replicable ways. And the Bay Area should be independent even from the ‘better-than-most-but-still-not-the-bay-area’ places just to make sure its special nature stays as untarnished and incorruptible as possible.)
Proponents of evidence-based medicine claim that some things are better than other things. You know who else claimed that some things are better than other things?
Which Incredibly Tortured Definition of Fascism Describes You? Take This Quiz to Find Out!
Very disappointed that your post doesn’t link to a quiz. B+, good shitpost but not excellent.
I don’t know how to write non-static websites yet, sorry. Also, I don’t actually know enough well-defined terrible definitions of fascism.
This sounds like something to work on. I can totally see how I’d code the innards of the quiz (in fact I kind of want to do it Just Because, for programming exercise) but not how to turn it into a website (…yet! growth mindset!).
Damn, I could totally hack some codecademy Ruby lesson into this quiz instead. Just need to figure out the terrible definitions and the questions.
My oversupply of absolutely unbelievable stories is probably pushing their prices down so hard they’re pretty soon going to pass the bar of fetishizations of trans women. I have absolutely no clue what illness I just had; basically it behaved like the influenza equivalent of a really short and violent food poisoning. Within less than 24 hours I’ve gone from “yeah, it would be a good idea to move so this doesn’t get chronic again” through “I can’t breathe or think” through “trying to sleep at a hotel but also kind of afraid to sleep, and not really sure how many meta-levels of sleep paralysis, hallucinating tumblr-people visiting me, and being aware that I’m asleep and just dreaming that I’m awake, I’m still going to have” to “basically fine, feeling like the late recovery state of a regular flu, and laughing at the absurdity and weirdness of it all”.
2/5 not recommended. Better than sleeping outside at -10 degrees but substantially less comfortable than the benches of Arlanda airport or an actual bed. Especially uncomfortable if the reason you’re doing it is that you ended up de facto homeless after returning to Finland because your apartment turned out to have massive air quality issues that make it impossible to live there, and the triage apparently diagnosed you with an ableist slur despite all your protestations of “would I be at the goddamn triage at 3 in the morning complaining that I can’t breathe and have nowhere to go, if just opening the fucking window helped?” and you decided to sleep in the waiting room so that if you die from asphyxiation at least the right people would be blamed for it. On the other hand I did think the public healthcare would actually help instead of just making things worse so I kind of see why they’d treat me as someone who is terminally incapable of making decisions for oneself.
Now the interesting part is figuring out how to talk the rental agencies to giving me a new place to live at despite having pretty much none of the papers they ask for, but just some money of dubious origin and an absolutely unbelievable story.
That would probably make producing food harder unless we did a really good job of it.
Uh, does the Green Revolution have a flag? Because, if so, [waves Green Revolution flag]. I have a feeling that some generic green flag would probably pattern-match to Islam, though, which is not really my intention.
Golden double helix and grain stalk crossed like X on a green background, which is a noticeably brighter shade than the one usually used for Islam?
Your thoughts?
(So not putting anything into the creative commons until I’ve thought about it while the sun’s up, but I generated the helix myself and took the wheat from a public domain-image, so I can if I want to.)
I was thinking of a bit darker green and the design elements should be smaller; the DNA cut in half and rotated to a more aesthetically appealing angle (10:30 to 11 o’clock to the opposite side) and the wheat scaled down to match its size and positioned in an equivalent angle. Possibly having them on top of a solid brightish blue circle representing the Earth so that the golden elements go from corner to corner within it while the green is solid. Possibly with a golden border around the circle to make the blue-green boundary look better. The flag of Eritrea is probably closest to the colors I’m thinking of while Brazil and Bangladesh would be examples of the general design.
That would probably make producing food harder unless we did a really good job of it.
Uh, does the Green Revolution have a flag? Because, if so, [waves Green Revolution flag]. I have a feeling that some generic green flag would probably pattern-match to Islam, though, which is not really my intention.
Golden double helix and grain stalk crossed like X on a green background, which is a noticeably brighter shade than the one usually used for Islam?
Anonymous asked: Heyyy I hear you're planning to not be the kind of asshole who mutilates an intersex baby for your convenience! I've forgotten the right url to link you to, but did you know currently adult intersex people generally think you should assign a gender socially (but be willing to be wrong) without doing anything surgical? Skyler's still a good name but you probably want to go with "he" or "she" until Skyler can express a preference.
I didn’t know that! Does it make a difference that there are several nonbinary people in my social circle and a Skyler (…although I’m tempted to bump Skyler to the middle name slot and use Raziel as a first name since it seems ambiguously gendered) would have people using alternating and gender-neutral pronouns available as role models?
As a non-binary trans person I feel a strong need to counter this with a plea to not socially gender children (at least intersex ones) unless/before they personally express a desire for it, if one is able to get away with it without suffering stigma, and homeschooling in the rationalist community seems to be pretty much the place one would be able to get away with it. Please please do consider the fact that those people are older and from what’s effectively a completely different culture and their suggested coping strategies might not be optimal for Raziel’s flourishing in better environments.
Latest studies suggest almost 1% of the population are trans and something like 5% have some kind of gender issues, that number seems to be just growing bigger every time, and intersex children are especially disproportionately likely to end up something else than people presumed. If being systematically scorned for doing something unusual is taken out of the picture, I’m having a really hard time imagining what would be the benefits of gendering children instead of just letting them be whatever they are and express themselves however they do. Children are not …close-minded adults, and the mythical gender confusion arising from not given a ready-made set of priors is really just mythology perpetuated by adults who feel invested in not having their conceptualizations challenged. It’s kind of pascaly in the “1% this saves your children from a lot of disutility and otherwise doesn’t do much unless the people arond you decide to punish you for it” aspect and I’m biased as a gendering survivor (my self-conceptualization was dramatically impaired for years if not decades by it but thanks to pure unfair luck it didn’t cause much lasting harm, as I was mostly able to keep my hardware in the neotenic androgyny my firmware is compatible with, even with the delay in access to modification having been raised in a binary-gendering environment caused) but I seriously think gendering children is likely to err on the side of defaulting to status quo biases and the alternatives haven’t been explored enough.
