promethea.incorporated

shlevy:

Things that made me more likely to read NAB: @slatestarscratchpad and @yudkowsky talking about how terrible it would be to do so

Things that convinced me not to bother: @nostalgebraist‘s and, to a lesser extent, @socialjusticemunchkin‘s reviews.

…to defeat the sneer, you must first become the sneer…

He Who Is Bad at PR needs to hire a competent PR manager so I don’t need to pick up the slack. The Cool Kids don’t play by the same rules as He Who Has Fascinating Ideas But Doesn’t Understand The Cool Kids, that’s the entire point because they wouldn’t be the Cool Kids to begin with if they did. People are clockwork, don’t just complain, find the levers that make them do what you want to do. Shut up and do the impossible. I don’t want to victim-blame, but the last thing you want to do to sharks who surround you when diving is to bite your lip and try to do like an octopus.

1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit #clockwork people · 24 notes · source: shlevy · .permalink

oligopsony:

effective altruism is not applied communism, because charity is not applied communism, because charity can be voluntarily withheld, and if someone can voluntarily withhold resources you need, you are in a state of dependence on them.

this doesn’t mean EA is bad. it’s telling people who have the right to withhold such resources: “choose not to withhold! furthermore let’s do some analysis on how to not withhold most effectively.” this means people living when they might have died, living happily when they otherwise might have lived miserably, and that is Good.

and furthermore I don’t at all buy the line, which I think is put forward in good faith but is nevertheless dangerous, that this ultimately serves to actively prop up an unjust system. healthy, literate people are better at standing up for themselves than unhealthy, illiterate people, and social radicalism actually tends to be stronger in periods of economic growth.

but where charity exists - where charity must exist - we do not yet have communism.

The point of EA is to make itself unnecessary and impossible. That is very much the main difference in EA versus traditional charity; instead of doing things that look good and keep people dependent, make it so that people can’t do such things anymore, by removing the need. Every time the cost of saving lives increases, it means that lasting change has been achieved. When malaria is eradicated, nobody is dependent on bednet handouts anymore. When direct cash transfers let people obtain their own means of production with which they don’t need to rely on outsiders anymore, well, they don’t need to rely on outsiders anymore.

I don’t see why the means of achieving a goal would be more crucial than the goal itself; if Elon Musk builds free chargers for electric cars everywhere, or Bill Gates releases free textbooks for anyone to use, there is a commons where there previously wasn’t. In fact, this can be ad-absurdumed quite thoroughly: if one accepts the idea that change brought voluntarily is not the same as change brought coercively, the collective decision by every single capitalist in the world to redistribute their capital to the rest of the population would not count as communism. Thus the word loses its meaning as “the means of production are shared” and intead merely means “coercively seizing them”. Of course, if the intent is indeed to define the methods, not the results, the word may mean it; but in that case I’d suspect that quite a many people have been thoroughly misled about its meaning.

And even more: the boundary of voluntary and coercive is itself fuzzy and impossible to define. An EA suffering from scrupulosity may be voluntary on paper, while practically all coercion is actually done with acquiescence to a threat of violence, not the direct application of violence itself (and even then it could be argued that any form of resistance that does not reach the most desperate extremes is in itself “voluntary” submission as one “could” have “chosen” to escalate even further and it was simply that the actions we call choices happened in a certain kind of a context). So what ultimately differentiates pulling the levers of the clockwork world by speech, and pulling the levers of the clockwork world by guns? All is clockwork in either case. And when social pressure comes in everything gets even more muddled.

Furthermore, there is no ideal state of emptiness and non-dependency on others in a world with more than one person. As the failures of the welfare states have shown, using the state apparatus of violence to seize property from Adam to Steve doesn’t make Steve not dependent on someone else, Steve just simply becomes dependent on those who control the state apparatus of violence, instead of Adam’s charitableness; and when the controllers of the apparatus of violence decide to withhold their seized property from Steve it doesn’t help one bit. Or if the property is collectively, ~democratically~ controlled, one’s dependency on individuals, or the state apparatus of violence, has simply been replaced with a dependency on a mob, which can just as well withhold the resources if it so wishes with the scorned individual having no recourse against the popular opinion because such genuine recourse never exists as long as people can’t both satisfy all their material needs and wants on their own and unassailably defend themselves from the entire rest of the world while being unable to turn the means of that defense against others. In other words, never ever in reality.

Underneath there is always the twins of naked force and human goodwill, the two faces of clockwork, no matter what pretty narratives and constructs are set up on top of them. Sure, one can write a constitution saying that all resources shall be collectively owned and shared, but what is constitution but a piece of paper (or in modern days, simply a number) which gains all its strength from the willingness of people to enforce and keep up the fiction they share? So, what is the fundamental difference between the mob choosing to let me use the “shared” 3d-printer, and some individual choosing to let me use “their” 3d-printer? Certainly, withholding it may be more difficult in the first case, but it’s merely a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. When a certain number of people reject the idea that I may use it, I de facto lose my ability to use it and in the end there is no jure, only facto.

Certainly, build technologies that make denying access to resources more difficult (as in reality there is ultimately no “withholding” even; as property itself is a construct built to determine who is denied access to what and it all reduces to whose word on the matter reality ends up reflecting, all is clockwork with thick layers of fiction on top); write your constitutions in blockchains instead of mere paper; let people get used to shared 3d-printers and become violently unwilling to give them up should anyone ever seek to deny them them; let them feel entitled to what they need, not merely to exist but actually live, and demand it in a world of plenty; but in the end there still is no qualitative difference. The dependence never goes away entirely, only its exact form and extent can change.

So what is the difference between a family now “having” a cow because some people sent them “money” to “buy” it; and a family now “having” a cow because a mob “took” it from the herd “of” someone else? What is the difference between a family now having a cow because a number of people decided that such should be the state of the world, and a family now having a cow because a number of people decided that such should be the state of the world?

Or to taboo the C-word itself: what is the difference between a reallocation of capital achieved by people speaking things, and a reallocation of capital achieved by different people speaking different things? And if one seeks to reallocate capital, shouldn’t one be equally happy in either case? As far as a reallocation of capital is what some people seek, I see no reason to not tell them that something has actually resulted in a more substantial reallocation of capital than what they were previously doing, if they truly do value the reallocation of capital instead of the speaking of the different things.

(via oligopsony-deactivated20160508)

1 month ago · tagged #is the libertarian seriously arguing to the marxist that magical ontological distinctions between voluntary and coercive don't exist #this isn't normal #but on bayesianism it is #clockwork people · 37 notes · .permalink

2centjubilee:

I think I have thoroughly disproved the null hypothesis as to why my exercise was more difficult.  I actually let myself slack off for not multiple days but multiple weeks (the horror!) due to trying to extend my caffeine withdrawal further to reset my tolerance closer to “zero.”  Today, I started exercising again.  And I had commenced taking stimulants

On the balance exercise, I was as good as I had been at the top of my form, roughly, which wasn’t stellar, but… it wasn’t bad.  So the cause wasn’t food, or lack of practice…

It was the drugs.

My experience as well.

Most interestingly, ADHD meds turned my reaction to fatigue completely around. Previously even slight exertions of effort were like “I know I “””could””” do it if I just “””tried properly”””; it’s not a question of muscles but a question of willpower; but I can’t try properly and I know that a lot of people think I’m a shitty person because of it and scorn me and I’m going to cry”, whereas now I still might start that way (but not as badly as before) but after a few hours it’s turned upside down and I’m completely non-ironically endorsing corny fitness motivational slogans like “PAIN IS JUST WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY” (very much something I had not expected to ever find myself doing) so that at the end of a long bike trek my thoughts are basically a looping of one of those sites collecting the most over-the-top ones to make fun of them, except that I’m mocking the mockers by wearing it with pride.

I was not lazy or weak-willed like people tend to assume by default, just stimulant-deficient. Vices and virtues don’t exist. There is only chemistry (and electromagnetism), and those who don’t have the knowledge or opportunity to use it.

2 months ago · tagged #drugs cw #gfy cops i've got a prescription #clockwork people · 12 notes · source: 2centjubilee · .permalink

‘laziness’

endecision:

theunitofcaring:

I’m a lazy person.

What I mean by this is that I do not do my homework; I miss deadlines at work because I’d rather play games than do the work; I have projects I’m excited about but instead of starting them I scroll aimlessly through tumblr. I have occasionally failed to turn in important assignments because I didn’t do them because I didn’t feel like it.

My whole life I’ve thought of this like a personality trait. I can’t do things unless they’re interesting because I’m lazy. I tend to get in trouble with jobs and at school because I’m lazy. I hated the personality trait, I wanted to change it, I aspired rather desperately to be a hard-working person and caused myself a great deal of pain trying to imitate one, but I was still thinking of it as some sort of fundamental tendency, some sort of fact about me.

Keep reading

This post reminds me of how, from the inside, sleep paralysis feels exactly like “I’m too lazy to move and I could if I tried harder”. And then I wake up and it’s like, no, I was literally paralyzed.

Yes. So much to both of these. I call the general insight behind it “clockwork people”; instead of magical free-will machines people are essentially deterministic patterns that are only able to respond in certain ways. Thus, it’s useless to assign blame and praise for the fictions of vice and virtue and things are simply about understanding and using the patterns to achieve the desired outcomes. I may still get emotionally-angry at something and have a low-level desire to assign blame but that’s just another manifestation of the same pattern and nothing more. It results in a weird mix of tranquility and frustration at the understanding that one’s options in any situation are limited and even the options one can select from those are limited by the same things, and thus it’s kind-of-like-okay to achieve suboptimal outcomes as a result but simultaneously it’s like “imagine if you could somehow unlock ‘free will’ for yourself; it would be like an IRL godmode or at least noclip and the only thing that’s keeping such superhuman powers out of reach are just the bounds of flesh and bone and the laws governing neurons and it’s so close but so far away”.

Then there’s the unending hunger for agency, the things that bring one closer to this impossible dream and there’s something quite exquisite in the pain of loss when one knows that something that does it is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique because it has exponentially increasing downsides or limited use in any specific amount of time and thus the powers are right there, and one can taste the apotheosis every now and then but most of the time it’s just that much out of reach.

TL;DR: “We’re all puppets, but I can see the strings.”

(Then Doctor Manhattan was promptly ruined by something trivially ridiculous because Moore isn’t intelligent enough to consistently and credibly model someone on that level. Intelligence, upwards and outwards of oneself seems like a pretty hard limit, and trying to pass as that from below/beside may seem believable to ones on one’s own, but is transparently cargo-cultish to ones on the other level. In fact, exactly like awareness of sleep paralysis functions. There are no coincidences.)

3 months ago · tagged #drugs cw #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #clockwork people · 491 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink