Freddie deBoer writes a white paper supporting standardized testing in colleges.
His position is that private colleges need to be held accountable and
we need proof that online courses don’t work, but American Interest points out
that it might break the power of education-industrial complex if people
who go to less prestigious institutions have an objective way to prove
they’re just as good as people who went to more prestigious ones. And I
will add that it might incentivize colleges to admit based on something
vaguely resembling merit if they want higher test scores. Overall this
would be amazing it it happened.
Um, but… We already have this in the Caribbean? Because we’re halfway civilised? Do you mean to tell me Americans are barbarians who let random colleges do whatever? If you don’t test your colleges, what are they even for? How can you know how a student at one college compares to one at another? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS???
I think I’ve determined the main trade-off between the Caribbean and the US: Sure, we’re poor; but when we design an institution, it isn’t fucking stupid.
I know I’m biased as someone who is, I think, reasonably smart and capable and does v poorly on standardized tests, but the idea that more standardized tests will force institutions to admit based on merit is ridiculous ime. Like with subject GREs, it will give schools an easy but inaccurate metric so they can avoid actually judging merit or potential.
As someone who does well on standardized tests, I also think that they are pointless as actual assessments. IMO the things that may make me successful in academics are exactly the things I had to learn to suppress to pass standardized exams. Logic, analytical skills, creativity. I think @quasitree is just not as good at suppressing her brilliance / perhaps her brilliance surpasses mine (the latter has always been my theory).
…Are your standardised tests really really different to mine? Like, as far as I can tell, logic, analytical skills, creativity, and depth of knowledge of the subject area are what I’ve been tested on?
Like, typical chem question would be something like: “You run a laboratory and have been given samples X, Y, and Z to identify. Their characteristics are [description]. Your budget is limited, so you can only devise one testing regimen to apply to all the samples. You can use some or all of [list of apparatus]. Design and justify an identification process with explanations of the principles behind each stage of chemical testing, cost effectiveness, the trade off between accuracy and efficiency, and the level of confidence you can expect for your identification.”
[cue me furiously writing four pages while cursing several deities]
I mean, if building and justifying your own experiments from scratch isn’t evidence of understanding chemistry, is their literally any observation you could make that would give you information about someone’s chemistry proficiency? If not, I still have to wonder what colleges are for because, for all we know, they aren’t teaching shit and no one can tell.
This response is based on one year of high-school chem with an above-average teacher in a 30-person classroom, and one semester of college-level intro chem in a 350-seat lecture hall (twice-weekly lectures, with a corresponding twice-weekly 30-seat ‘recitation’ period to explain the lecture and a once-weekly 30-seat lab period). This is also drawing on years of PSAT and SAT tests, and on the AP Calculus AB test.
In my experience, in the US, standardized tests are designed to make the jobs easy for the graders.
Your “typical chem question” would be the end-of-test essay question, and would be preceded by 25 to 50 multiple-choice questions requiring you to regurgitate facts about various compounds and their properties. Then, there would be around 25 multiple-choice questions where you would solve chemistry-related math or balance chemical equations. These two sections would all answered by filling in the bubbles on scantrons. If there is a short-form free response series of questions, (if!) then there will probably be no more than 5 of the free-form response questions, and your answer must fit within the designated area on the form. Your final answer (if it is a math problem) must have a box drawn around it: This is a standardized test. Priority is placed on the graders’ ability to grade your test.
Finally, there is the longer essay, which is again limited by space. When I took the SAT, the writing space available for the essay question on the writing section was about equal to one and a half single-sided pages of college-ruled paper. It was not a lot of space to write a 1-3-1 essay, and if your response wasn’t in the 1-3-1 format, if you were taking space to explain your arguments and to back them up with knowledge not included in the test form (this practice is encouraged), then you are more likely to run out of paper. If you write large, you’re more likely to run out of paper.
In the AP Calc AB exam, there was still a lot of bubble-filling. But there were more free-form responses, and at the end were six word problems, of which you were allowed to choose three. Each response was allowed to take up half a page of the printed workbook. You could use scrap paper to work, but all logic required for your response needed to be in the workbook.
The chem course I took in college was the not-remedial intro-to-chem course. You were expected to have memorized the speed of light, and you were expected to use 300,000,000 m/s as an acceptable substitute, because it would simplify your calculations and allow you to finish the test faster.
About half the class did not finish the average exam. The average exam grade was 75% correct, a ‘C’. ‘C’ is a grade in the middle of the scale from the top scores, marked ‘A’, to any failing grade, marked ‘F’. ('E’ is skipped for legacy reasons, except where 'E’ is used in place of 'F’ because 'F’ hurts children’s feelings. I’m not kidding.) (Letter grades are still tabulated from point scores in order to convert point scores to GPA scores, which are a 0-4 scale that is used in college admissions, in inter-school comparisons, and in entry-level job placement.
That chem course was explicitly designed as a weed-out course, to deflect people from the Chemistry department’s majors.
In comparison, my high school: with ~65 people taking the course in three sections, the (delightfully sadistic) teacher didn’t use scantrons. (It would not be cost-effective at this scale.) There might be 10 multiple-choice or true-false questions at the start of the text or exam, but the remainder of the test was all short-answer or essay questions, where you were expected to explain your reasoning. If there was an extra credit question, you were expected to be creative in your response.*
This teacher’s methods would not work in standardized testing, because this teacher’s methods required effort on the part of the grader. The grader would need to understand the question, the solution, the student’s answer and the student’s reasoning behind their answer.
Your “typical chem question” can’t be scaled up to deal with ~10 million students per year.
And thus, why standardized tests suck.
* One Intro to Engineering final exam was one question, whose prompt was as follows**: You awaken to find yourself in a locked room the size of this classroom (25 feet by 75 feet). There is a door in one corner. At the opposite end of the room is a weighty metal desk. On the desk is a cardboard file box containing one (1) fully-disassembled AK-47 and one round of ammunition. Next to the box is the AK-47 user manual, printed in Swahili. In 15 minutes, a hungry Bengal tiger will be introduced to the room through the door. Explain how you will survive the tiger and escape the room.
** If you recognize this teacher, go say hi! He likes hearing stories of our adventures.
For college-level standardised tests in the Caribbean, there would be two separate papers per subject area, plus a portfolio.
For the first paper, which receives lower weight in your grade, you would have to answer 60 multiple choice questions. If this is chem, they’ll be split between chem math and “what would you expect to happen if [chem thing] were done?” type of stuff. This is generally ~25% of your grade. It’s not thought too highly of and mostly exists as a check on the other bits. If you do really well on one type of assessment while flunking the others, someone calls your school and asks what’s going on.
Paper II would have 2-3 questions of the type I described, plus 20-30 (depending on subject) short-answer questions that would definitely require creativity to figure out. This would be ~35% of your grade.
Finally, there’s the School Based Assessment. This is a portfolio of projects that the Caribbean Examinations Council required you to do as part of your class during the year. In the hard sciences, this is mostly a write up of labs (some of which you design). In the social sciences, a research paper. In Computer Science, code. This was the final ~40%.
Then, at the end of the year, your school ships all this stuff to CXC head quarters. Additionally, since this is the summer vacation, some of your professors will also get shipped to CXC head quarters. There begins the super labour-intensive multi-week process of grading every exam paper and portfolio.
The papers are divided up and distributed among the graders. Physics professors get the physics papers; lit profs get lit; etc. Everything is broken up into pieces and assigned a serial code so you don’t know whose paper you’re grading.
If you are confused by an answer or find it ambiguous or think it doesn’t fit the rubric, you flag it as such and a panel of other professors in your field will look it over and come to a consensus grade. A couple of the grades you give will also be randomly submitted for review to make sure you aren’t grading too far out of line with the rubric.
After all this is done, the grades are distributed to the colleges. Then the colleges hand grade slips to the students. Then the professors are allowed to go home. I have been told that, if the review panels think you’ve been marking unfairly, they drown you in the caves in Barbados and you never see your family again. However, I’m sure that’s just a myth…
And this, of course, can only be done because the body that tests every college has been officially elevated as the Education Tsar by each Caricom government. This is one of those areas where I am kind of doubtful about a private corporation being able to do it. No one but the government is allowed to exile all the professors each year and drown them in the caves if they fail. The only rule of survival is don’t go into the caves academia.
Accred Inc. starts with a significant capital investment. It devises this kind of a testing regime, offers it for a four-digit price per student, and conducts a lot of studies on how the test scores predict things like “will this person actually know how to do their job”. The testing regime is optimized for predictive power. Accred pays good money for people from the academical precariat to get sufficient expertise for the review process.
Blind review is utilized, and a lot of ~statistics~ is run on the answers to see if people can eg. recognize the characteristic style of some institutions, or the race or gender of the person answering, or any other irrelevant characteristic, because it can introduce biases. The aim is to have the answers be completely statistically indistinguishable when controlled for quality, so that the reviewers can’t cause conscious or unconscious favoritism. Reviewers are scored on their adherence to the consensus and those who deviate are dropped like uber drivers; reviewer scores might also be automatically adjusted so that if #526 tends to give everyone half a point less than the consensus the system gives it back if doing so improves the predictive power of the standardized testing.
Now, everyone who cares about work performance has an incentive to use Accred. Employers can hire equally skilled workers from less prestigious institutions; a cheap college + Accred fees saves students money compared to an expensive college; and expensive colleges need to prove they are worth the money.
Accred can use the fuckload of money it starts with to prove the superiority of objective standards in the media, it hires some really smart people who figure out how to spin it into a social justice issue (protip: it should hire me) of evil rich people pushing down competent poor people while simultaneously presenting it as “hey businesses, here’s a way to get free money by hiring smarter than the competitors” in a clever left-right pincer movement.
It clashes with the established education-industrial complex but thanks to ~free market magic~ it inevitably comes out as the winner because ~incentives are aligned~ (read: the VCs funding it pull some strings behind the scenes with their buddies) and it can use data to discredit any cheaper competitors who try to use less stringent standards for easier grading, and becomes a precarious monopoly which is profitable but must keep up with the demonstrable objectivity so that someone else doesn’t figure out how to do better than it.
One issue I can immediately perceive is that if Accred is cartelled out by prestigious professors and institutions and gets a reputation as a second-rate service for second-rate students, but even then a brutal focus on predictive power could show that even less prestigious graders can do a good job, and prestigious students could be offered money to defect and get tested and show that their credentials are less important than their score.
The biggest problem might be if the ~cathedral~ declares Accred evil and racist (~completely unlike~ the big name schools with their legacy admissions for incompetent whites and affirmative action aka. asian quotas) because black people score worse on average, and it gets regulated away like IQ testing. To pre-empt this, Accred needs to play the SJ card in its opening salvo, “we didn’t cause black people to test worse, the System is failing them but we developed a method to measure it so that now we can find out what actually helps with the achievement gap”, and put the establishment on defense. (protip: hire me to help with it) Furthermore, sufficiently reliable blind testing could reduce biases in employment when test scores can be given more weight than subjective evaluations. Self-taught people could test against those with degrees, and credentials could lose their importance in favor of measurable competence.
I totally see how it could possibly be done as a private enterprise, as long as it starts with enough money to afford the initial investment in proving its effectiveness with data. Anyone got Peter Thiel’s phone number?
socialjusticemunchkin asked: Hi! I noticed your post on pop radicalism and it really resonated; as it happens I'm exactly the kind of a person who actually tries to build and test some alternate institutions and systems. I also really like things that *seem* like hyperbole but I put my money where my mouth is and thus I have no choice but to actually live it and be the change I want to see instead of just talking about it. As a result I thought introducing myself a bit more personally might be a high-EV decision for both :3
I like where you’re headed with this. Would you mind telling me about some of your alternate institutions?
By EV, you mean expected value, right? I was thinking electron-volts at first, and it took me a few minutes to come up with something that makes a little more sense. :-)
Yes, expected value.
I’m basically working on stuff to substitute the state where it fails to serve the people it claims to serve.
I’ve seen firsthand the failures of the traditional welfare state, and creating some kind of mutual economic security mechanisms to replace its humiliating means-tested benefit schemes would be a really big deal. I don’t trust the state to handle the upcoming issues with automation-induced unemployment in any reasonable way, so I obviously must do it myself, and the faster I get it going the better prepared it will be.
Traditional welfare has a really big problem with incentives, structural unemployment, lack of dignity and feeling of self-determination etc.; traditional religions and extended families demand comformity far in excess of what’s reasonable, and restrict entry and exit in ways that expose people to risks of abuse; traditional workplaces have no place for people whose productivity isn’t high enough. Hacking that into something that can credibly guarantee people their basic needs, a sense of dignity and belonging, and opportunities for growing stronger and more productive, without imposing burdens to dogma, authorities etc. while still solving the problem of incentives would be very useful.
While I obviously don’t know what form it would ultimately take, I think it could be visualized as a decentralized network of small communes and individuals sharing common ideals; that unconditionally help other members but expect a reasonable contribution in return (and have some ways to enforce that if mutual solidarity is broken), while running their own businesses and offering other opportunities for contributing internally that aren’t restricted by the broken rules of state bureaucracies; and the system is backed by capital in minifacturing equipment and investments to supply people those basic needs as cheaply as possible and provide a stable source of income for things that need to be bought from the markets. And that system is enclosed within a shell of a corporation, a co-operative, or whatever is needed to interface the internals with the external society while minimizing the burdens of taxation etc. and giving it some high-level coordination mechanisms wherever those are needed. Solidarity, Inc. or something like that. At least this describes the general weirdness-space where I’m searching for solutions.
In more general terms, I expect it to require a combination of social engineering, business, and technology to create a system where incentives (when considering the known quirks of human psychology) are aligned towards stability, growth and co-operation.
David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom pointed out that most workers could afford to simply buy out owners in a few years of sustained effort (in reality it wouldn’t be that mathematically neat as the increased demand for capital would drive prices up, further enrichen the initial owners, and possibly loop back into raising the prices even more); and after I got over the despair of “why the fuck has everyone on the left been ignoring this incredibly obvious solution forever just because it doesn’t look like the revolution they are looking for” I decided that I’m going to build something to solve the problem of people sitting on their asses, voting, and whining, instead of actually preparing for the post-labor future.
There’s the obvious problem of people barely able to provide for themselves even now, and who definitely can’t afford to invest, and hacking that is important as well. Regular forms of work severely restrict the ways people can create value to capture, and a lot of people are suffering from chronic hypo-opportunititis. An internal system without taxes, minimum wages, psychologically damaging environments etc. but instead an universal atmosphere of growing stronger and contributing in some way, even if the outside economy doesn’t appreciate it, would probably alleviate those issues substantially. Fostering social bonds makes it easier to support those who need it without having those who support them feel resentment towards “moochers”. Easy access to credit would help with the current situation where poor people can get desperate from even small debts because they can’t ever actually pay them, and if the system is built on a strong base of capital it can afford to absorb some inefficiencies to be more humane.
But what do the monetary contributors get from this? I’ve identified some interesting loopholes in the tax and pension laws of Finland which basically allow anyone to boost their wages 25% at the price of becoming ineligible for pensions (nobody born after 1980 is ever going to get any pensions anyway so it’s practically free), with some perfectly legal accounting tricks. Building a system to consistently deliver those returns would be worth solid cash, and I’m expecting a lot of countries and economic systems to have similar unexpected sources of exploitability hidden somewhere. Then there’s the opportunity of providing bureaucracy-resistant safety nets which many people with irregular incomes would probably gladly take. Then there’s pure altruism, community, being involved in a movement that’s going to Solve big structural problems instead of just talking about how they will be solved once idea X is pushed through the democratic political machinery or enforced with a revolution (I’m totally going to try to discredit the “our revolutionary discussion club celebrates its 50th anniversary of never getting shit done” style of activism), and the investment base I’m expecting to build (with the implication that people who start contributing early will get a bigger slice of the pie later once their jobs get automated away and they turn into recipients).
Basically, libertarians say that “the free market will figure out some way to make the poor not starve” and leftists protest that “it hasn’t happened yet, how on earth would it happen then” and here I am, being the free-market messiah rejecting the traditional political tug-of-war and pushing forward an extraordinary effort on the question of “how do we make it so that poor people don’t starve even if states fail and utopian revolutions fizzle out”. (It was really weird to realize that I was headed straight towards the magical three question marks between “1. Free markets” and “3. Poverty and destitution are solved” without consciously thinking of it that way; all I wanted to do was to do better than the government.) I’ve literally had an anarchist tell me that if my plans succeed history will probably remember me as an anarcho-capitalist (I don’t do labels. Boxes don’t work and words don’t feed people. All I care about is results.) and that they’re going to help me with making that happen anyway. Weird things happen around me.
Then I’m also the person who made the system in Finland de facto recognize that gender is self-determined when it comes to conscription and thus a person who’s legally male can still be exempt if they consistently insist that it’s simply not true, without needing any official papers “proving” it; and the person who forced the system to allow non-binary people to change their legal gender without pretending to be the other binary option.
And then there’s my practical transhumanism. Actually taking control of my body and brain to do whatever I want (at least within my financial and technological constraints). When someone says “nice body” I could honestly answer “thanks, I made it myself”. And I’m totally in favor of eliminating gender as we know it, and actually working towards it. If I ever had children I’d put them on puberty blockers until they could give informed consent to a puberty of their own choosing, medically controlled to produce exactly the desired results regardless of what they are. Because I’m not going to have children, I’m just going to show the world that there are options and that being restricted to two boxes shows an absurd lack of imagination.
(Also, you mentioned your disappointment with people who share your political philosophy; and I’d be interested in hearing out what it actually is because it’s not obvious. Of course, I’m having some predictions because I always try to predict and model most things, but I’d like to get some feedback on my calibration.)
Okay, wow. I am going to need some time to think about this, but here are my quick first impressions:
Are you sure you didn’t just reinvent the kibbutz, except without the socialist jargon and shared property? Actually, wait a minute, a kibbutz without shared property is a totally new and exciting thing. Sometimes it just takes a slight design tweak and a new marketing strategy to make an existing thing go from okay to legendary!
I haven’t done much in comparison to you, I guess. I’m currently in the stage of figuring out what it is I want to make, how to do it, and who else will be on the team that does it with me.
My disappointment is pretty much exactly what you’d expect–people talk about how they should create gradual change by creating new institutions that out-compete current ones, and then they do 1 of 3 things. Either they continue writing about their revolutionary new systems and taking no steps toward actually trying them out in a situation where there’s a chance they might fail, they create systems that only benefit themselves and their close friends and never bother extending them to anyone else, or they create “resource vortexes” that take in donation money and do barely anything with it. I guess those 3 kinds of failure are common for any type of charity, including ones that are in favor of high-speed systemic change, but it’s particularly annoying when it comes from “my team.” I may not be Social Entrepeneurs Georg, but hey, at least I don’t go around inventing systems and publicizing them as solutions to every problem ever, then refusing to actually do anything that determines whether or not those systems will advance society.
Okay, I can definitely see the parallels to kibbutzim (especially the more modern ones) so finding out what they succeeded at and what failure modes they’ve been subject to is definitely relevant. I suppose “pluralist outwards-oriented free-market kibbutzim, with modern decentralizing technology, as a startup, as a post-welfare survival system” describes it reasonably well.
Aligning the incentives and figuring out the necessary psychological mechanisms to stabilize it is the crucial part, but the technological and societal situation I’m expecting to be operating in is also different.
Then there’s also The Plan For Taking Over Substantial Parts Of The Global Economy which is more dramatic but also [classified information] and synergizes very neatly with this. Then there’s single-handedly fixing healthcare for poor people, which also synergizes well. (It’s kind of embarrassingly simple: instead of costly and inefficient end-of-life care, focus on prevention, treating chronic conditions early, and adopting new technology faster than the FDA allows; saving huge amounts of $$$$$ and improving both the quality and span of people’s lives. It can’t be implemented in a currently existing healthcare system because it doesn’t look good at all, but with the right application of contracts and data and unconventional insurance/risk-pooling it would be a reasonably efficient option for making “patient pays” not be horribly expensive and inhumane.)
The 3d-printed kibbutzim coordination mechanism could be used to implement these kinds of measures, and it could also provide people legal assistance against oppressive policing, buy people’s debts for the market price instead of nominal, and be all kinds of “If the world is controlled by hypercorporations, at least this one is genuinely friendly”. All in all, it’s interesting how “assume welfare states will fail in 30 years and the government won’t be there to help anyone anyhow, and labor will be mostly displaced from the productive market; how will people survive then” feels like it unleashes a kind of an exhilaratingly desperate creativity. “It’s impossible, now shut up and do it.” I can’t just say “oh, let’s pass law X and it’ll solve itself” like most people do. I can’t just say “we’ll just have a revolution” like some people do. I can’t just say “well, looks like a dystopia is inevitable” like most of those who’ve gotten this far do, because despairing is not a solution. I can only actually solve it. And even if the assumption I’m starting from is flawed and the solution is not that desperately needed, I’d still give people something better than the illfare state.
In fact, that’s what it’s about. Most people don’t try to solve things, they try to look like they’re doing their part. Some who want to change things a bit put pieces of paper in boxes. Others contact their representatives. Those who want to change things a lot become revolutionary discussion clubs. At most they do a desperate regular effort and become lobbyists or terrorists. Very few people seem capable of thinking outside the box labeled “outside the box”, and willing to do even extraordinary and unexpected things to actually solve problems. All of those failure modes are related to losing genuine ambition and being content with just putting up an appearance and effort instead of creativity.
Also, I now notice that my question was ambiguous; I was actually asking about your political philosophy.
socialjusticemunchkin asked: Hi! I noticed your post on pop radicalism and it really resonated; as it happens I'm exactly the kind of a person who actually tries to build and test some alternate institutions and systems. I also really like things that *seem* like hyperbole but I put my money where my mouth is and thus I have no choice but to actually live it and be the change I want to see instead of just talking about it. As a result I thought introducing myself a bit more personally might be a high-EV decision for both :3
I like where you’re headed with this. Would you mind telling me about some of your alternate institutions?
By EV, you mean expected value, right? I was thinking electron-volts at first, and it took me a few minutes to come up with something that makes a little more sense. :-)
Yes, expected value.
I’m basically working on stuff to substitute the state where it fails to serve the people it claims to serve.
I’ve seen firsthand the failures of the traditional welfare state, and creating some kind of mutual economic security mechanisms to replace its humiliating means-tested benefit schemes would be a really big deal. I don’t trust the state to handle the upcoming issues with automation-induced unemployment in any reasonable way, so I obviously must do it myself, and the faster I get it going the better prepared it will be.
Traditional welfare has a really big problem with incentives, structural unemployment, lack of dignity and feeling of self-determination etc.; traditional religions and extended families demand comformity far in excess of what’s reasonable, and restrict entry and exit in ways that expose people to risks of abuse; traditional workplaces have no place for people whose productivity isn’t high enough. Hacking that into something that can credibly guarantee people their basic needs, a sense of dignity and belonging, and opportunities for growing stronger and more productive, without imposing burdens to dogma, authorities etc. while still solving the problem of incentives would be very useful.
While I obviously don’t know what form it would ultimately take, I think it could be visualized as a decentralized network of small communes and individuals sharing common ideals; that unconditionally help other members but expect a reasonable contribution in return (and have some ways to enforce that if mutual solidarity is broken), while running their own businesses and offering other opportunities for contributing internally that aren’t restricted by the broken rules of state bureaucracies; and the system is backed by capital in minifacturing equipment and investments to supply people those basic needs as cheaply as possible and provide a stable source of income for things that need to be bought from the markets. And that system is enclosed within a shell of a corporation, a co-operative, or whatever is needed to interface the internals with the external society while minimizing the burdens of taxation etc. and giving it some high-level coordination mechanisms wherever those are needed. Solidarity, Inc. or something like that. At least this describes the general weirdness-space where I’m searching for solutions.
In more general terms, I expect it to require a combination of social engineering, business, and technology to create a system where incentives (when considering the known quirks of human psychology) are aligned towards stability, growth and co-operation.
David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom pointed out that most workers could afford to simply buy out owners in a few years of sustained effort (in reality it wouldn’t be that mathematically neat as the increased demand for capital would drive prices up, further enrichen the initial owners, and possibly loop back into raising the prices even more); and after I got over the despair of “why the fuck has everyone on the left been ignoring this incredibly obvious solution forever just because it doesn’t look like the revolution they are looking for” I decided that I’m going to build something to solve the problem of people sitting on their asses, voting, and whining, instead of actually preparing for the post-labor future.
There’s the obvious problem of people barely able to provide for themselves even now, and who definitely can’t afford to invest, and hacking that is important as well. Regular forms of work severely restrict the ways people can create value to capture, and a lot of people are suffering from chronic hypo-opportunititis. An internal system without taxes, minimum wages, psychologically damaging environments etc. but instead an universal atmosphere of growing stronger and contributing in some way, even if the outside economy doesn’t appreciate it, would probably alleviate those issues substantially. Fostering social bonds makes it easier to support those who need it without having those who support them feel resentment towards “moochers”. Easy access to credit would help with the current situation where poor people can get desperate from even small debts because they can’t ever actually pay them, and if the system is built on a strong base of capital it can afford to absorb some inefficiencies to be more humane.
But what do the monetary contributors get from this? I’ve identified some interesting loopholes in the tax and pension laws of Finland which basically allow anyone to boost their wages 25% at the price of becoming ineligible for pensions (nobody born after 1980 is ever going to get any pensions anyway so it’s practically free), with some perfectly legal accounting tricks. Building a system to consistently deliver those returns would be worth solid cash, and I’m expecting a lot of countries and economic systems to have similar unexpected sources of exploitability hidden somewhere. Then there’s the opportunity of providing bureaucracy-resistant safety nets which many people with irregular incomes would probably gladly take. Then there’s pure altruism, community, being involved in a movement that’s going to Solve big structural problems instead of just talking about how they will be solved once idea X is pushed through the democratic political machinery or enforced with a revolution (I’m totally going to try to discredit the “our revolutionary discussion club celebrates its 50th anniversary of never getting shit done” style of activism), and the investment base I’m expecting to build (with the implication that people who start contributing early will get a bigger slice of the pie later once their jobs get automated away and they turn into recipients).
Basically, libertarians say that “the free market will figure out some way to make the poor not starve” and leftists protest that “it hasn’t happened yet, how on earth would it happen then” and here I am, being the free-market messiah rejecting the traditional political tug-of-war and pushing forward an extraordinary effort on the question of “how do we make it so that poor people don’t starve even if states fail and utopian revolutions fizzle out”. (It was really weird to realize that I was headed straight towards the magical three question marks between “1. Free markets” and “3. Poverty and destitution are solved” without consciously thinking of it that way; all I wanted to do was to do better than the government.) I’ve literally had an anarchist tell me that if my plans succeed history will probably remember me as an anarcho-capitalist (I don’t do labels. Boxes don’t work and words don’t feed people. All I care about is results.) and that they’re going to help me with making that happen anyway. Weird things happen around me.
Then I’m also the person who made the system in Finland de facto recognize that gender is self-determined when it comes to conscription and thus a person who’s legally male can still be exempt if they consistently insist that it’s simply not true, without needing any official papers “proving” it; and the person who forced the system to allow non-binary people to change their legal gender without pretending to be the other binary option.
And then there’s my practical transhumanism. Actually taking control of my body and brain to do whatever I want (at least within my financial and technological constraints). When someone says “nice body” I could honestly answer “thanks, I made it myself”. And I’m totally in favor of eliminating gender as we know it, and actually working towards it. If I ever had children I’d put them on puberty blockers until they could give informed consent to a puberty of their own choosing, medically controlled to produce exactly the desired results regardless of what they are. Because I’m not going to have children, I’m just going to show the world that there are options and that being restricted to two boxes shows an absurd lack of imagination.
(Also, you mentioned your disappointment with people who share your political philosophy; and I’d be interested in hearing out what it actually is because it’s not obvious. Of course, I’m having some predictions because I always try to predict and model most things, but I’d like to get some feedback on my calibration.)
Robert Cialdini’s Wikipedia page says “He is best known for his book Influence“. Since its publication, he seems to have spent his time directing an institute to spread awareness of techniques for success and persuasion. At the risk of being a little too cynical – a guy knows the secrets of success, so he uses them to…write a book about the secrets of success? If I knew the secrets of success, you could bet I’d be doing much more interesting things with them. All the best people recommend Cialdini, and his research credentials are impeccable, but I can’t help wondering: if he’s so smart, why isn’t he God-Emperor?
Maybe he doesn’t want to? His book about the secrets of success appears to have been wildly successful, maybe he really likes studying that and spreading those ideas and living whatever private life he has.
I often get the impression from rationalists (most obviously Eliezer but Scott is up there too) that not only would they, personally, want to rule the world if only they could, but that anyone would do the same in the right position. As someone who, if appointed god emperor, would abdicate and get back to living his own life, I can’t help but wonder if this is more of a result of them being in somewhat of a social bubble or more of a typical mind fallacy type thing. I also have some concerns about the morality of wanting to be in charge of everyone, and with the political stances and approaches many of the same rationalists take, but I’m mostly just confused as to how someone could be this confused about people’s motivations.
(this is all setting aside the other obvious issue, which is that persuasion is not literal mind control and it’s dubious that the most persuasive person in the world, by virtue of that fact alone, would be guaranteed success of the kind Scott seems to be thinking of here).
That last paragraph x100. I’ve read Influence, it’s a good book, but Cialdini is up-front about the fact that nothing he describes is magic.
I often get the impression from rationalists (most obviously Eliezer but Scott is up there too) that not only would they, personally, want to rule the world if only they could, but that anyone would do the same in the right position.
True. I always get so baffled when someone has power and influence and only buys a yacht and a mansion and at most has wild and expensive sex parties. I literally can’t understand how a person who can get into such a position would only use that position in so boringly savanna ways, other than the system actually being mostly luck-based and rewarding fundamentally incompetent and/or only shallowly ambitious people who endlessly pursue lost causes simply to increase some arbitary high score.
Just to be clear, I’m actually fucking serious about this one. Applying for it, and overthrowing them later if I can’t take over and systematically reform them.
Because of stuff like this. “the aggressor is almost always a man and the victim a woman”; “Finnish government should make it clear that female [emphasis added] circumcision is a violation of human rights and as such is unacceptable.”; “Other major problems include trafficking in women, prostitution and pornography [and their] side effects.” (translation is as shitty as the implications of their policies because finnish is fucking weird)
Like, there’s an extremely obvious way in which you could’ve not thrown people under the bus, yet you deliberately chose not to do it. You deliberately excluded people from the “deserving of having their issues addressed” group. And I’m not talking about any “All lives matter” derailment bullshit but more like “there’s sexism outside tech and colleges you know”.
Also, how about we talk about the way evidence suggests pornography, if anything, reduces sexual violence. Yeah, welcome to the real world where stuff is not always pretty and clear-cut and awfully convenient. Or maybe we should discuss your bullshit attitude towards sex workers.
And then there’s all the grassroots transmisogyny etc. of which there’s ample reports but which they naturally neglect to mention on their website (serious accountability and transparency procedures: my reform #3 if I get the job). Or the way it began as a non-segregated organization but proceeded to throw out everyone except binary cis women in the late 1900s, and then the old guard uses dirty procedural tricks to keep it that way.
Damnit, do I really have to distract myself by infiltrating a genetics lab and releasing specicidally engineered mosquitoes to the wild? That is so goddamn perfect supervillainy: I shall wipe an entire species off the face of the Earth with my Gene Driver to save millions of lives! Fuck, just thinking about it is giving me a trollgasm of the “is it evil? is it good? is it just really confusing and beautiful and so much The Aesthetic?” variety. It is some of the most supervillainy things one could imagine while simultaneously being one of the most powerful irreversible altruistic acts in history. And less controversial than dumping several dozen metric buttloads of finasteride into California’s water supply to eliminate the gender binary so it’d be better for PR too!
as someone with borderline, anxiety, and depression, I can confirm that once I stopped getting treatment for any of them I developed levitation, started to glow, and acquired the ability to wield 3 Japanese Katanas at once like the dude from one piece
this is why im not medicated, it limits my ability to transcend to other dimensions
sometimes when I run out of meds I tenuously make contact with the godhead and proceed to immanentize the eschaton
I havent been on meds in close to fifteen years and im close to absorbing the entirety of the collective unconsious
one time I forgot my meds and spent a lovely afternoon having tea with the astral projections of all my past lives
I tell people that I’m unmedicated because of the prohibitive cost of mental healthcare but really it’s so I can continue psychically destroying planets on the other side of the galaxy
don’t believe these people, i am on medication and it has not at all disrupted any of my impressive supernatural abilities
after the third time I set someone’s still-beating heart on fire at the grocery store while accidentally channeling the primal forces of creation and destruction, I just started setting an alarm on my phone to remind me to take my pills every morning. It was that or be banned from the produce section :/
…I think I just realised why @socialjusticemunchkin offered to help me get meds* - they are trying to shut down my super powers before I can use them during the final climactic battle between good and evil.
(*transition hormones)
No, you’ve got this wrong, my empress. My cunning plan is to combine the powers of good and evil into an unstoppable doomsday weapon which will kill even death itself and make the skies turn dark with eldritch utility raining down from usurped heavens. I will destroy the world by replacing it with a far better one and that way nobody will have any moral justification for their foolish opposition to my dark designs, unveiling anyone who stands in our way as simply another hypocrite who would deny *humanity the weapons of its liberation from the tyranny of nature and the oppressive laws of reality.
Humans are so weak and easily destroyed that only the pathetic regular villains aim at them; it’s far more impressive and supervillainly to destroy anything that would or could destroy *humanity instead. The key to true power over the world is to be such that the world will have no choice but to follow one’s designs to achieve its own goals. That is devious and worthy. Instead of simply defeating one’s enemies on the field of battle one defeats them on a far mare fundamental level by making emnity impossible and thus achieves an ultimate victory the fools who rely on force alone couldn’t even dream of.
You’re a good, hormones are good, therefore you + hormones is doubleplusgood. Besides, as every amateur medicine nobelist on the internets knows, hormones are only encouraging the mental illness of transgenderism instead of curing it, therefore increasing your prophet powers severalfold in preparation for the godshattering clash against the cosmos.
A lot of y'all are following people who are buddy-pals with fascists, and it isn’t hard to notice. You can see this shit pretty clearly.
if Facebook is right and most people are 2.5 degrees away from everyone else, then this is irrefutable.
I probably am.
Is there a problem? I don’t feel unsafe. And I’m probably also internet friends with people who are friends with communists, and being disabled and Jewish and so on in the average Communist country historically also hasn’t been the greatest idea, but again, none of the Internet Horseshoe Theory Club people are going to launch a successful coup or revolution or what have you anytime soon.
Well that’s true. It’s going to take me a decade at least, trying to take Hofstadter’s Law into account. Then again, as far as I can tell my position in the Horseshoe Theory Club is “the one smashing stuff with it” so not sure if it’d count anyway.
TIL that “ambitious trans girl with a gothy aesthetic” is an actual human archetype and not just accidentally roughly half the people I know. It was quite amusing to find someone who had an entire list of them and was suspecting that it could be just pareidolia, then add my own observations to the list suggesting that it’s kind of probably not just pareidolia. At some point one needs to note that there might be something going on when we tend to have an ashkenazi-like disproportionate impact compared to our numbers in how we somehow always seem to end up being important in things; just off the top of my head I could list at least tech, and the OWS and GL..b… movements, as obvious examples. It’s also pretty troll (and trollishly pretty as well, usually), and apparently the fetish of a huge number of people. And it’s not a bad fetish as fetishizations of trans women go although that is admittedly setting the bar so low they need to hire geologists just to have a chance at finding it.
