- Things I learned this week:
- Things that go viral with relatively low effort:
- Hilarious trolling of people everyone hates
- Surveys
- (if I’m going to continue tumblring in Lisp, I should do it this way
- (at least I think this is easier to follow))
metagorgon said: didn’t you already learn surveys go viral when you grouped everything into left/right, female/male, etc and it was used as a personality test?
Yes, and I replicated the study and tested the method myself. Thus, if I ever need to draw attention to things, I should try to formulate them into a survey somehow so people will spread it. This is vital for memetic engineering purposes.
You gotta work on making an equivalent of the nolan chart that tags everyone as mutualist.
Okay.
Q1: Immigration
- open borders, but no benefits for immigrants ()
- make immigration dramatically easier, provide them the very basic necessities (S)
- make immigration dramatically easier, all comers get generous benefits (SS)
- regulate immigration, but cut their social benefits (H)
- regulate immigration, give some benefits to those who get through the process (HS)
- regulate immigration, but give generous benefits (HSS)
- only import vulnerable foreign labor with few legal rights to keep the underclasses in control and wages low (HH)
- close the borders, deport foreigners (HHS)
- stop the movement of both people and capital (HHSS)
Q2: Taxes
- should be low, simple and easy to comply with ()
- should be progressive, without loopholes (S)
- the rich should pay proportionately less tax than others (H)
- we should have a system of progressive taxation with many different deductions and exceptions to ensure that the outcome is fair and just to everyone (HS)
Q3: Welfare
- keep it strictly voluntary, or just a barebones basic income, but eliminate criminalization of poverty as well ()
- provide people an unconditional income that covers their basic needs (S)
- provide all people enough money for a comfortable life (SS)
- reduce welfare, but retain the criminalization of begging, dumpster-diving, sex work, and other means of survival (H)
- have multiple different programs for addressing social issues, and keep them means-tested (HS)
- add more social programs and benefits (HSS)
- the state should provide everyone a job with a living wage (HHSS)
- work should be a condition for receiving any money; replace the system with workfare where companies get free labor, people get “unemployment benefits”, and taxpayers foot the bill (HHS)
- just put the poor to forced labor, no need to pay them (HH)
Q4: Trade
- trade should be free ()
- the only legitimate use of tariffs is to reduce the unfair market position of countries which use forced labor or have insufficient environmental protections; or to protect the developing industries of poorer countries (S)
- trade policy should furthen the economic interests of domestic businesses (H)
- trade policy should protect domestic jobs from foreign competition (HS)
Q5: Discrimination
- don’t legislate morality ()
- some anti-discrimination laws are okay as long as compliance is easy and cheap and they target genuinely marginalized groups (S)
- businesses should be incentivized to treat everyone equally, but the mechanism should be one which doesn’t distort competition in favor of the strong (SS)
- make laws explicitly protecting certain types of private discrimination (H)
- protect some groups, and establish stringent and specific standards and bureaus to enforce them and monitor compliance and punish those who get caught discriminating (HS)
- like above, but expand the coverage and try to reduce the perverse incentives (HSS)
Q6: Housing
- reduce zoning rules, let the market decide ()
- use regulations only as a temporary measure while waiting for zoning reforms to render housing more affordable (S)
- legalize squatters seizing unoccupied houses as long as involuntary homelessness exists (SS)
- use zoning laws to protect neighborhoods from undesirable kinds of people (H)
- combine zoning laws with rent control, subsidies etc. to manage the housing supply (HS)
- have the state produce housing for people (HSS)
Q7: Immaterial property
- should be abolished ()
- is useful and should be protected (H)
- should be protected better and enforced more strongly (HH)
Q8: Private property (capital, not toothbrushes)
- is private, no concern of the state ()
- is sometimes legitimate but other things should belong to everyone, and depriving others of such things (eg. land) should at the very least warrant compensation (S)
- should not be respected; only possession is legitimate ownership (SS)
- should be protected by the state, while owners are free to do whatever they want (H)
- should be protected, taxed and regulated reasonably to serve the common good (HS)
- the state should limit how much capital the rich can accumulate (HSS)
- the state should use eminent domain to seize private property for important business interests (HH)
- the state should seize property for important public interests (HHS)
- the state should own all capital and allocate its use optimally (HHSS)
Choose your answer, sum the letters after each to see your position on the two-axis chart of economic freedom. “S” means intervention to reduce inequality, while “H” means intervention to preserve/create hierarchy. The maximum score on each axis should be 12. This is not a purity test, so reaching out for the corners isn’t what one is “supposed” to do although I guess ardent ancaps would get a solid 0/0.
You see, part of the point of the test (as I see it) would be to push back against ancaps/libertarians. You’d want a test that points out the key issues there.
I would push the line that property is a creation of the state more. To say that private property “is private, no concern of the state“ is not true, you are asking for the state to enforce private property. You would want a test that points that out.
If you accept property rights as some inherent fact of nature the preservation of which is just the default state, you’ve already lost the major battle. You’ve gotta make the libertarians fight for it. Although you give hierarchy points for immaterial property, you describe the base state as “should be abolished.“ You want to make it clear that enforcement of property is, if not state action, at least violence.
Similarly, you want to explicitly point out the similarities between rent and taxes. That’s to me one of the key points of mutualism, they’ve realized the similarity between taxes and rents, and you want to make that similarity clear, that both are the threat of force by the state to make you pay money.
The key insight on polling and surveys is, as always, here.
- Illusion of transparency strikes again, I guess. I considered that “private property” question one of the more radical on the test, as the () option basically implies that the state doesn’t intervene to protect it either. Whatever that would actually result in is a positive question and depends very much on the rest of the system.
- Also, I’m using the status quo as the “middle” and comparing changes to that; these kind of tests get weird around the edge zones
- (for example, anarcho-communists could theoretically get either 0/0 or 0/12 or something in between depending on which they emphasize; the assumption that absence of state action would produce the absence of hierarchies they want, or the deliberate focus on egalitarianism; and the question on private property is already edging into the territory where stuff stops being renderable in euclidean space)
- and that’s why I didn’t focus on the edge zones too much and a lot of the options are relatively moderate. This is a statist test for people living in statist societies and only gets as far as the rough overton window; if I wanted to address edge cases properly I’d want to have a more thorough understanding of them first.
- (for example, if by “mutualism” one means “many parts of The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand make a lot of sense” then I guess I’m “a mutualist”, but if by “mutualism” one means “subscribes to a specific theory on property by possession and labor theory of value”
- (some form of it? “equal work for equal work” doesn’t really seem to work as its incentive structure is sub-optimal and it would basically rely on “people would do good things just for the sake of doing good things even if they somewhat conflict with their immediate economic interests” at which point I don’t get why there has to be a specific theory on cost/price if the system ultimately runs on concentrated human decency anyway
- (but I do agree that with sufficient material prosperity and absence of antagonistic hierarchical relations, systems could probably run reasonably well on concentrated human decency))
- (some form of it? “equal work for equal work” doesn’t really seem to work as its incentive structure is sub-optimal and it would basically rely on “people would do good things just for the sake of doing good things even if they somewhat conflict with their immediate economic interests” at which point I don’t get why there has to be a specific theory on cost/price if the system ultimately runs on concentrated human decency anyway
- then I’m not so sure)
- (for example, if by “mutualism” one means “many parts of The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand make a lot of sense” then I guess I’m “a mutualist”, but if by “mutualism” one means “subscribes to a specific theory on property by possession and labor theory of value”
- And the ethical side of my brain refuses to do that much of leading-questioning. I’m already running an obvious political agenda of splitting economic freedom to show that there’s a lot of pro-freedom options available on the left
- (the naive idea that the magnitude of economic intervention could be calculated by summing H and S points is probably not quite practical but it would give some insight to why mutualists and social democrats are very different)
- and thus people who want to reduce the amount of H points in the economy should be able to cooperate on those questions even if they disagree on S points
- (because the reduction in H points would also effectively render the economy more egalitarian by this naive model if S points are kept constant; thus satisfying both the “freedom” and the “equality” camps at least partially).
- As a quick draft of the first political chart I’m aware of which actually makes that distinction, and which was written in a couple of hours because I got nerdsniped, I don’t think this one does too badly; it’s definitely better than The Political Compass™ and while that is kind of burying the bar, being better than the de facto standard counts for something in my opinion :S
- (but improvements are obviously welcome always)
1 month ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #tumbling in lisp · 33 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink
pirozhok-s-kapustoj reblogged this from spiralingintocontrol and added:Can you maybe explain monads in simple terms if it is not too much trouble for you?
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spiralingintocontrol reblogged this from veronicastraszh and added:also: I think I learned to write cleaner code because of Haskell - some of the structures it has available (ALGEBRAIC...
veronicastraszh reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:Oh, well I don’t really do the “language evangelist” thing. But I kinda think certain languages, which include Lisp and...
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tentativelyassembled reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:7/1 I’m boring.
socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from collapsedsquid and added:Illusion of transparency strikes again, I guess. I considered that “private property” question one of the more radical...
- collapsedsquid reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
You see, part of the point of the test (as I see it) would be to push back against ancaps/libertarians. You’d want a...
ilzolende liked this
metagorgon said: i am very uncertain about the results of such interventions, though, and i would bet making all my recommended changes at once in such a short period would be massively disastrous. my politics is not overly dogmatic on the way the world actually works, only normative on the results.- metagorgon liked this
- metagorgon said: 10s, 1h
conductivemithril reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:PURITY. Haskell is too good for the real world, but you should learn the True Form anyway. I’ve heard tell of Lisp’s...
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imu-li reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:You have a lot of dynamically typed languages there, Haskell has a nice static type system. This means that you can find...
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need to control for follower count, and network analysis would also be useful. i suspect over a fourth of rst tumblr is...
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youarenotthewalrus liked this- metagorgon said: didn’t you already learn surveys go viral when you grouped everything into left/right, female/male, etc and it was used as a personality test?
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