promethea.incorporated

jbeshir:

socialjusticemunchkin:

jbeshir:

socialjusticemunchkin:

neoliberalism-nightly:

argumate:

voximperatoris:

argumate:

It seems easy enough for a perfect Libertarian state to evolve/devolve into something very similar to what we have now without any non-Libertarian actions being taken along the way, if that makes sense.

If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.

To me this makes Libertarianism relatively uninteresting except as a reminder not to micromanage things and that centralisation has costs and should be employed sparingly.

This is a bizarre criticism to me.

If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.

There is no reason this would happen. If it did happen, it would be a bad outcome, because we’d be back in the position of an interventionist state. But again, I don’t see any reason why such a thing would happen without “non-libertarian actions being taken along the way”. And how to design institutions to minimize those is the chief project of libertarian jurisprudential theory.

In any case, I don’t see how this reduces the main points put forward by libertarianism, such as that nearly all of the arguments used to justify the existence of an expansive state are invalid, that nearly all government interventions in the economy or in people’s private lives are net harmful, etc. And if you agree with those, it’s hard to see how you could support an expansive state.

But if those arguments are wrong, that would be an entirely separate line of criticism from “a libertarian society would devolve back into a non-libertarian society”. Because in that case, the goal would be to prevent this from happening and/or minimize the role of the state as much as possible. Which is hardly the “middle of the road” position.

I think there are reasons why consolidation and centralisation would happen, as we are seeing in the corporate world across many industries today.

(In the case of monopoly on violence this is even more critical, and it is typical to see turf wars between nations or gangs flare up from time to time then settle into a steady state once they have negotiated who has control of which territory).

But the fact that this can easily happen means continual interventions and tweaking to keep the system from collapsing, maintaining it in a kind of dynamic instability much like a modern fighter plane, or going back further to Romance of the Three Kingdoms where any two of them can always gang up to prevent a takeover by the third. That’s not necessarily an efficient or fun process, though.

To take this line of thought further requires clarifying whether we are talking about a hypothetical state that still holds an absolute monopoly on violence or not, because that makes a huge difference.

Even a strong centralised state can be more discriminating in the interventions in which it undertakes, eg. a more sensible drug policy, fewer foreign wars, etc.

Doesn’t this sound exactly like how the world have been for a long time until relatively recently? It’s not not states even now holds absolute monopoly on violence.

I mean you are seeing the consolidation in industries, but not really comprehensively across industries. And it could be argued that tax systems and regulations actually disfavor non-big-businesses.

Few big corporations would be competitive against smaller challengers without state intervention to establish barriers to entry. Even the businesses themselves know this; advice to invest in those that have strong “moats” around them is cartoonish villainy and totally true.

Corporations aren’t magic; they are subject to the same information problems centralized states are. People usually know their own situations better than outsiders do, and a lot of the problems in eg. universities emphasizing “””productivity””” in terms of publications, or employers of programmers counting lines of code, are instances of precisely this: people can’t do the actually useful things because someone is trying to measure something that doesn’t lend itself to effective measurement, and the bad measurers should get outcompeted away in a functioning market by those who aren’t impacted by mismeasurement. This probably explains a lot of why academicians perform best in traditional public/monopoly-corporate settings where the rules are basically “you’re smart, here’s a bunch of money, figure out something cool, we won’t bother you in the meantime” and programmers are more productive in startups instead of corps burdened by mismanagement.

And state intervention also creates artificial and inefficient property rights. Copyrights, patents, etc. would be basically unenforceable without the state or an organization equivalent to it, and they have a massive centralizing effect on the economy. I don’t believe organic-pragmatic property rights would ever be able to extend to information in such a way as nobody could afford to hunt down pirates on their own unless the starting position is absolutely centralized to begin with (and that’s like “what if we turned the Soviet Union into a megacorporation but didn’t change anything else”; not libertarian at all in practice).

Bans on stripping DRM and stuff get legitimacy from the state; we’re seeing the backlash to “corps are trying to steal the stuff we own” even now and absent a state-equivalent enforcer all it would take is one defector who sells free-as-in-speech 3d-printers etc. to render such positions unfeasible in practice. And the world has way more idealists than a single one.

State and gang violence is seldom economically efficient either; a lot of it relies on the existence of a population those benefiting from violence can pass the costs of that violence on. Drafting soldiers, harming civilians, destroying value, etc.

So all of this turns into an engineering problem: how to craft a system that has, when accounting for known human biases, stable incentives against harmful centralization. My anarchist side suspects that the monopoly on violence is the key, specifically in the sense that its existence enables all the other centralization by passing the costs of enforcing that centralization onto others. When someone has that degree of power, it can be abused to create other forms of power as well, but if violent enforcement of monopolies of any kind is ~disrupted~ the prohibitive expense of trying to recreate them could protect a system made of smaller, competitive actors, from re-establishing them.

Of course, this necessitates solving the three key issues that the popular legitimacy of states presently rests on. One is safety, one is equality, and one is moloch. If people believe that only a state can protect them from crime, they will want a state; and if people believe that only a state can prevent a slide into feudalistic rentseeking by capital-holders and destitute indebted poverty for the rest, they will want a state; and if people believe only a state can disarm the shitty multipolar traps that will destroy everything of value, they will want a state.

The first one has seen a decent amount of work done on it, and I guess empirical experimentation would be enough to sort it out.

The second is what a lot of people object to, but I think simply stopping the state/crony-capital symbiosis of using artificial property rights and assignments to monopolize zero-sum things and propertyize non-scarce things would render it relatively inconsequential (of course, easier said than done); a lot of deliberate violent, coercive, and value-destroying action has gone to creating and maintaining economic hierarchies between people favored by states and people preyed upon by states, and modern technology makes maintaining a basic standard of living trivially cheap if one isn’t bound by rentiers holding artificial property rights. Thus basic solidarity, mutual aid, distributed productive capital etc. could ensure that even non-productive people would be able to have their needs met better than in current illfare states.

The third one is hard, but even states themselves are subject to the same pressures, and if we got from “states everywhere” to “Firewall has the monopoly on x-risk prevention and will nuke you if you act irresponsibly and refuse to stop doing it but otherwise you may do whatever you wish” it would still be a drastic improvement. And the less significant multipolar traps aren’t that terrible; I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.

For example, the most simple solution would be that the Filter Pact threatens to kick Mike’s ass unless Mike uses the filter. Or Mike’s Dia Paying Group, having negotiated the same deal with everyone else’s protection agencies, would tell him that disconnecting the filter is agreed to be illegal and obligates him to pay $999 in damages to everyone else (+10% for DPG) or they won’t protect him from attempts to kick his ass. The state bans this because kicking Mike’s ass is a crime but polluting everyone else’s fish farms isn’t, but an anarchistic system of organic property rights wouldn’t draw such a distinction as Mike isn’t able to lobby himself a special protected position from which to harm others.

Alternatively, everyone could agree to start paying $.29945 a month to everyone else who uses a filter once everyone has agreed to this deal and joined the Filter Fund. Thus, everyone will join it to earn $700, and Mike won’t disconnect his filter because he would lose the $299.15 he gets from others plus $1 from pollution while only gaining $300 from not operating the filter, making a net loss of $.15. And Mike won’t stop paying the Filter Fund because if he does it, everyone else will disconnect their filters because now they would make a profit of ~$.15 from doing so, and everything will go to shit. This should be a game-theoretically stable equilibrium afaik.

But the basic thing is: if there’s a problem that causes net harms, someone could make a profit by solving it. In the fish farming example, the solution will exist if implementing it costs significantly less than the $700 000 a month it would create in value.

For food regulation I could join with a bunch of people to pay our own food certification agency, which in turn is held responsible for the costs of illnesses caused by tainted food, and is thus incentivized to minimize its occurrence. And it itself would pay restaurants, manufacturers etc. to inspect their facilities so that it could get accurate information on risks. If the seller pays the regulator they will have an interest to collude, but if the buyer pays the regulator (whose entire point, after all, is to be serving the buyer’s interests) it’s possible to construct a system where nobody has an incentive to sell unsafe food. And this can naturally be bundled with a whole lot of other services in insurance, healthcare, etc. to create a de facto regulatory regime that is nonetheless voluntary and actually incentivized to serve the people, instead of special interest groups and the careers of lobbyists and cya-obsessed bureaucrats.

So in ~theory~, (and this is very much the sort of theory which is just entertaining instead of serious) if the emergence of states is a harmful thing, people would find a clever way to prevent it as long as they are permitted to do so.

And then there’s the cultural thing. Nowadays when there is a problem, people automatically think the state should do something about it, and try to pass a law. Fixing that would go a long way; instead of what-is-basically-violence-at-the-bottom people could try a different way of solving it.

Unregulated trade unions were nice until the state stepped in and ruined the labor market (the socialdemocratic corporatist labor laws in Finland were literally implemented as an anti-communist conspiracy, but just as usual the left has forgotten this and nowadays everyone in the unions defends the thing that was intended to destroy their influence, because redwashed rentiers got comfy jobs from it and it got tribally associated as “left” so of course they must support it; and nowadays everything related to work and welfare is an unholy hell of bullshit which hurts workers and honest entrepreneurs alike).

Mutual aid societies were nice until the state stepped in to implement price floors for doctors and artificially restrict the supply because doctors didn’t want to be in an equal bargaining position with working-class customers; they wanted to be authorities and the state obligingly served those interests because screw the poor that’s why.

Rojava is nice, but Turkey is a state which is doing its damnednest to step in and prevent it from being successful.

But basically, getting people from the mindset “the state should solve this” to “okay how do we solve this” would help a lot. And that’s the mindset I’m trying to operate in, and I’d love for the state to get out of my way when I make the world better.

okay this got excessively long and rambly and I lost track of what I was originally saying and whatever, enjoy

I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.

But, as the FAQ comments, those clever ideas did not, in fact, happen and are continuing to not happen when it comes to fisheries in international waters nowadays.

Any fool can imagine a utopia; the problem is that the incentive structures of economics will produce exactly one thing out of the space of things you could imagine might happen, and the one thing they pick is not, usually, your favourite. From the perspective of a human, there’s billions of free variables we can tweak in our imagination to get the result we want to fall out; in reality, those free variables already have specific values, and they’re not conveniently setup for anything in particular. Insofar as stable equilibria do appear, there’s lots of them and there’s no principled reason to expect the one you like to emerge- as demonstrated by the lack of clever coordination schemes in the real world.

I’d like it if “how do we solve this” could be consistently and universally answered without involving coercion, but I’m very dubious. You need a very specific pattern of people being able to coordinate effectively whenever it’s good and unable to coordinate effectively when coordination is bad that’s unlikely to emerge by chance; you’ll get cases where people can’t/don’t coordinate effectively where it’d be desirable, and where they coordinate effectively where it isn’t, e.g. to set up cartels, or to torture and kill people for being “deviants” because the owners of the the three nearby violence-handling firms don’t care enough about deviants, are better paid by the people doing it, and trying to start your own is just helpfully highlighting yourself as the next target.

The only way I could see it sort of working is if you could coordinate everyone to *create* that pattern, because it’s vanishingly unlikely to occur by chance. If you could get everyone to agree to a norm of cooperating and coordinating if and only if coordinating is a good idea for everyone and had near-perfect (possibly perfect; a lot of stuff doesn’t handle even a single defector well) value alignment and agreement on game theory between people maybe it’d work.

But I think this boils down to a complicated description of requiring perfect humans to make your society go, rather than fitting a society to your humans- every instance of individual corruption is people failing to do that in reality, and it isn’t clear how you’d get people to all agree to not try to create regional monopoly violence handlers in any world you couldn’t get them to all agree to just not commit crimes- or not run a centralised government shittily.

And one reason you can’t do that is that human actions are noisy; in your lake scenario, some human is going to pay the 15c to defect because they get in their head the idea that they’re not going to let the other people tell them what to do, or because of some stupid argument over how the filter should be implemented, or something else (15c is a cheap way to make a point). Any system needs to be able to tolerate individuals being wildly and ridiculously bad at optimising for their own interests, which means it needs to have stability after defections even if defection is stupid. Even perfectly mentally healthy humans behave stupidly often, nearly always if the argument for “correct” behaviour is not intuitive. It needs to be able to tolerate channers deciding in numbers of about a thousand to try to fuck things up for the lulz of seeing the world burn.

And I’m really doubtful you can get that kind of quasi-stability without coercion, especially since you need it to persist over technological development and other things which will wildly change all the factors involved in decision-making.

EDIT: To put this last bit in engineering terms, your system would need Byzantine fault tolerance for up to some reasonable number of byzantine (arbitrarily, possibly maliciously designed with intent to break the system) failures. (There are impossibility proofs for byzantine fault tolerance with more than a third failing, but a third is much more than a reasonable number, so the problem remains not *proven* unsolvable)

Obviously. Incentive structures are everything; but there’s a certain laziness in “let’s have the state solve it” which regularly backfires. And state action has an entire class of shitty incentive structures that inevitably cause those backfires and massive large-scale harms. Just as there are inherent issues in voluntary coordination/consensual subjection to coercively binding agreements, there are inherent issues in having a centralized implementer of arbitrary violence. My claim is that people should be allowed to test the hypothesis “voluntary systems are less shitty than coercive systems” without getting shot at, because voluntary systems eradicate one class of failures (voting on promethea’s body) and there are incentives to migitate other classes of failures.

I might not be able to save the fisheries, but I could save many people from the violence inherent in the system. In a world with NSA, gender identity clinics, FDA, the war on drugs, privatized prisons, regulations banning non-rich people from making profitable investments, criminalization of poverty, cronyist businesses and lobbyist rentseekers, the entire mil-ind complex, FBI destroying the Black Panthers because fuck you that’s why, etc. the decimation of the world’s fisheries doesn’t sound like such a big deal in comparison.

I’m all for letting people try stuff (so long as they’re not coercing people internally or abusing children or anything), and I definitely agree that there’s incentive structure problems with how the people-that-comprise-the-state (meaning civil servants/agents + ‘representatives’, not citizens) are selected and behave and use their power, too.

I’m just very dubious that what will fall out of the new incentive structures would be any better- cronyism between companies as well as with the state becomes legal and not restrained by any need for appearance of legitimacy, and those companies also now run everything the state used to, and this seems unlikely to be any better than the old cronyism and probably a lot worse, and to promptly lead to a lot of the rest of the complaints as well as fascinating new ones that are not readily predictable from here.

I do agree you’d lose the NSA, probably, and military entirely. If you could avert the “monopoly on violence re-emerges” problem and not wind up with a single Police Inc you’d avoid the war on drugs and Black Panthers getting destroyed because fuck you thing, but as I’ve said I find this extremely unlikely and can’t think of anywhere with multiple violence regulators which didn’t have them immediately hash out territories to individually be monopolies within and tolerate other armed groups only insofar as they were clearly not threats to their supremacy.

And if you did end up with a single Police Inc, well, you now live in a dictatorship where social norms are that if you want defence by the police at all you better be able to pay for it, the police can arbitrarily charge whoever they want however much they want (including deliberately pricing you out, if someone else wants you priced out), cronyism is set up to go because we explicitly threw out the regulators, and the head of the doctors’ union has a meeting scheduled with the CEO about all this dangerous drug taking going on scheduled for 2PM and the rest of the CEO’s day is packed too. I think this would be a lot worse, wouldn’t want to live under it, and think the best hope would either be to be popular, or that the market goes so wildly dysfunctional it collapses and lets you try some other kind of government.

I guess what I’m really picking up on here, though, is that the current democratic system is ultimately checked by the empathy of the electorate. This is a shitty check, and a lot of people get overlooked, including you, and it’s bad at complicated problems. But it constrains how *far* a bad consequence of the incentive structures can go. The current system doesn’t have all its problems stop just before the point the majority would get outraged by chance- it has an incentive setup which ensures that.

This new system would have no empathy checks, not even the shitty one. Its bad consequences of its incentive structures go *all the way*. To the extent it shares any problems, those problems are now unrestrained, to the extent it has new ones, they start out that way. And for all the current non-human incentive structure does awful things, I think a non-human incentive structure unconstrained by even the minimal constraints on the current one would be worse. I can understand how that is not such a concern for you given how shittily the current system treated you, but it’s a fairly major one for me.

And while I mostly expect this means it would be immediately overthrown by an angry and appalled population as soon as it spits out 18 hour workdays for children or a Child Abusers’ Mutual Defence Force, or something else obviously cartoonishly evil, there’s a good chance the fix for that will come in the form of a dictatorial Police Inc or something else awful, and it’d probably take centuries to get back to a State even as bad as the current ones again.

But yeah, I’m for people being able to try it, so long as they’re trying it mostly with other people who want to try it. But I wouldn’t want it anywhere near me or the people I care about, and would fear for the people trying it even as I thought they should have a right to.

Cronyism between companies is enabled by centralized control of the economy; a sufficiently competitive market without big dominant players would help in reducing those possibilities. And even then there’s a limit to how much damage cronyists can cause when their ability to coordinate it (and to violently extract corporate welfare etc.) is reduced.

And if the psychological-cultural issue of “there’s a problem, let’s have a state solve it” is reduced (which I consider necessary; freedom is facto, not jure, and the culture most people form is very unfree and inherently coercive and disrespectful of people), people can just band together to destroy the Child Abusers’ Mutual Defence Force.

Anarchism is under no obligation to be nice to coercive people; if some people decide that slave trade is legal and okay and try to take slaves, I’d fully support violence against them until they stop trying to take slaves. And I’d expect other people to feel the same; but I don’t think they would be willing to do violence to stop people from smoking weed if they couldn’t hide it behind the facade of artificial civility of “laws”. Maybe they would scorn weed-smokers in their communities, but weed-smokers could move to other communities. And since there is no crystallized essence of coercion somewhere in the laws of nature that things could be compared with, the exact boundaries would always be a question of negotiation, fluidity and constant adjustment, and ultimately determined by the combination of what people accept and what they are willing to fight for.

If power to do violence is sufficiently decentralized, the point where the majority gets outraged is just as dangerous for those who are causing it, as it is now, if not more. And with proper coordination systems in place, it might be possible to create a sufficiently stable equilibrium where principles of symmetry, “I don’t mess with you if you don’t mess with me”, etc. complement the woefully deficient empathy of the majority enough to eliminate most of the democratic failures of coercion, while still serving as a check on flagrantly intolerable practices.

Cultural liberals and cultural conservatives could agree that they won’t shoot each other for saying disagreeable things, and won’t try to vote each others’ cultures into oblivion. Trans people could sign up with the Tranarchist Mutual Defense Force which would, with help of allied security providers, keep them safe, or evacuate them from the worst communities where keeping them safe is too difficult. Judge Rotenberg Centre could be at risk of getting raided by Dawn Defense which lets children sign up at age ten, and has made a niche in challenging abusive parents both pro- and retroactively. Dia Paying Group could have its Large Employees harass ArguProtect Platinum members to convince them to stop harassing DPG customers and respect restraining orders. Everyone could band together against the CAMDF and the slavers because fuck them.

The late 19th century-early 20th century saw violence in labor battles because people considered some practices sufficiently intolerable. The difference is that back then the state intervened to artificially favor the cronyist robber barons (eg. in the Battle of Blair Mountain the government even bombed its own citizens from the air); without state support for some groups over others, the knowledge that workers and people sympathizing with them would be willing to draw a line and the mutual desire to avoid violent confrontation could incentivize everyone to prevent 18-hour workdays for children.

Or another example; banks evicting people after a financial crisis has fucked up everything and there are lots of homeless people and empty houses. Without the state to back up the banks with police violence, I’d expect greatly increased amounts of squatting and renegotiating terms.

And this is what I mean by organic property rights; if I made up a paper claiming that I “own” a specific number or the entirety of Kibera, everyone would laugh and tell me to heck off. If I claimed that I made my child with my own labor and thus I “own” my child and can abuse my child however I wish, people would unkindly ask me to go to hell with my claims. But the state enforces patents, clears slums without compensating residents, and kidnaps runaway children and returns them to abusive parents. Democracy can’t ad hoc monkey-patch its rulesets pragmatically, so the rulesets will result in ridiculous edge cases and ever increasing sprawl of conditionals of conditionals to try to deal with them; but if the legitimacy of such an attempt at an exhaustive monopoly ruleset is thrown out, there’s less incentive to abuse those edge cases when there’s the risk of people just going “fuck it, that shit won’t fly”. And knowledge of this incentivizes people to craft agreeable rulesets that can avoid instances of “that shit won’t fly” while still enabling all the good things that rulesets make possible.

I won’t claim that it wouldn’t result in absurdly horrible things happening because everything results in absurdly horrible things, but I’m saying that monopoly violence enables certain hard edges in the culture that I’d expect to be less pronounced without it; and thus an anarchistic system shouldn’t be assumed to be “hard edges taken all the way, plus the novel failure modes” but more like “mostly novel failure modes” instead.

And as far as stability is concerned, theoretically all it takes is that users of violence coordinate effectively against anyone trying to establish monopolies. There are some claims that administrative burdens of inefficiency in policing set a natural limit on the size of security providers somewhere significantly below “big metropolitan police force” which is notably far below “state” or that monstrous “Police Inc”. And (attempts at) monopolies in violence happen in an environment where the idea of a monopoly of violence is relatively taken for granted, and organized crime etc. operate in the same constraints of police existing.

Furthermore, there’s an argument to be made that without a coercive government, trying to establish a coercive government would run against incentive gradients when people would rather be consensually governed. And in ~hypothetical perfect coasean utopia land~, coordinating efforts to stop the Absurdly Horrible Thing would be easier than coordinating efforts to create a state, as almost everyone can agree that AHT shouldn’t exist but rightists won’t want taxes and leftists won’t want morality legislation and thus neither would be willing to cooperate beyond stopping AHT; and stopping AHT could be done even by paying people to not do it and not tolerate it, if paying money would be easier than using violence.

And pragmatic-empirically, Rojava is planning to abolish police by training everyone in policing and having well-armed citizens united by a common ideological cause, and I’m extremely interested in how it goes, and extremely angry at Turkey for trying to fuck with the experiment. So far it seems to be only getting fucked up by authoritarians who don’t want freedom on their backyard, instead of rojavans shooting up sea slugs and shooting at each other.

(via jbeshir)

4 weeks ago · tagged #violence cw #this is a rojava fanblog #promethea's empiricism fetish #drugs cw #i am worst capitalist · 40 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

blog impact assessment survey

oligopsony:

this blog is first and foremost a shitpost curation station, BUT if I had to pretend it had some sort of greater mission I think increasing intellectual exchange between rationalists and leftists would be up there

if you are a rationalist, has this blog corrupted you at all with leftism? if there’s something at the level of “getting” ideas that prevents you from being corrupted, can you articulate what it is?

if you are a leftist, has this blog corrupted you at all with rationalism?  if there’s something at the level of “getting” ideas that prevents you from being corrupted, can you articulate what it is?

(where leftism/t arbitrarily and somewhat sloppily means “discourse community descended from marx’s writings” and rationalism/t means “discourse community descended from yudkowsky’s writings” and corruption means “getting more positively disposed to the idea that the associated people (at least here, On Tumblr) and ideas are worth engaging with,” but if you have a more interesting answer for different values of these go ahead - these definitions are sloppy and I really just mean “no, not bernie sanders” and “no, not descartes and spinoza” and “no, not selling all your possessions and joining the other cult”)

((credit for inspiring this come from @sinesalvatorem, who reminds me that i haven’t done that “reducing inferential distance from rationalism to communism” thing I said I would do, and also inadvertently that it would be a good idea to get a lay of what the inferential distances (in either direction) actually are))

Okay, so as someone who not only knows but cares about the Marx/Bakunin distinction (and thus felt really compelled to pick the nits of “descended from Marx’s writings” because as far as taking sides on the topic of two pre-all-the-empiricism-of-the-last-150-years dudes makes sense I’m on side Bakunin; for example when marxists.org tries to argue that Marx was right their arguments simply make Bakunin appear as the more sympathetic one even though they have been able to pick and choose them with the obvious itent of being favorable to Marx) I’m pretty much leftiness georg already by those standards, but then there’s the other distinction that is more political than cultural and which I am confused by.

The “communism as a vague description of the goal of post-scarcity and the end of poverty and material lack and rentseeker bullshit forcing people to toil for the benefit of powerful non-value-creator parasites; 3d-printers for everyone; beeline for future society: eudaimonic” thing makes sense; C4SS and David Friedman alike make sense (and I think the idea of “substantial basic income + actually laissez-faire” is effectively more socialist in the meaning of “alleviates the plight of the working class” than the entire state of Sweden), and “get maximum cash, invest in 3d-printers, share them, prevent the state from taking them away” is an actionable strategy, but what is the actionable strategy of “communism as politics, switch to economy: planned”, and what are its contents actually?

All I’ve managed to pick up from elsewhere is roughly “we have a lot of valid complaints about how a lot of things are really sucky for non-rich people but no proposed solution other than some kind of nebulous ~global revolution~ that is unlikely to ever actually happen and any attempts to do anything else than carry on the decades-old tradition of discussing the imminent revolution is liberal reformist bullshit, and we will control the economy democratically and it will ~automagically~ make it work better than markets despite not containing any actual replacement for the very important mechanisms markets have, and we will not expropriate your toothbrush even though we totally could expropriate your toothbrush and you’re supposed to trust us because this time subjecting everything to democracy would not work as disastrously as your previous experiences with democracy and de facto mob rule have led you to expect because this time democracy will ~automagically~ not vote on your body even though it totally could vote on your body and you would be a class enemy if you object” (this may sound a bit uncharitable but my interactions with statist marxists haven’t exactly been that fruitful because the inferential distance is too large)

So basically I’d like to know what steel marxism is _actually_ about, and especially wtf is up with the labor theory of value and democratic economy/economic democracy.

(via oligopsony-deactivated20160508)

1 month ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #still bitter for '36 #promethea's empiricism fetish · 46 notes · .permalink

h3lldalg0:

theunitofcaring:

i’m just so happy like - the GiveDirectly people have a really impressive track record in terms of turning money into results, being super transparent, publishing literally all of the data they collect on their website for people to look at….they even do stuff like randomly sample the population they serve for the stories they put up on their website, instead of trawling for the most inspirational ones

they preregister their studies

my sacred values are autonomy and empiricism and GiveDirectly is so deeply committed to both of them

if universal basic income works, this is how we’ll know. if it doesn’t, this is how we’ll figure out why. 

This makes me incredibly happy.  :D

In which promethea fanbies GiveDirectly even harder

(via metagorgon)

2 months ago · tagged #promethea's empiricism fetish #nothing to add but tags · 161 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink

slatestarscratchpad:

Okay. I guess other people have stronger feelings against Internet communists than I do.

My own feelings are kind of - puzzlement mixed with lack of understanding. Part of it is that I *still* don’t really know what communists believe beyond “overthrow capitalists, seize means of production”. In particular I don’t have a good feel for what people think true communism looks like, and when I ask I get answers anywhere from “Cuba” to “a bunch of loosely connected utopian farming communes”. I’m not sure what the difference is politically between a communist state versus an ordinary democracy or an ordinary dictatorship, except in the form of vague generalities like “the Party works for the good of the people” (just put that in the constitution and I’m sure it will come true).

Ownership of the means of production doesn’t seem that important to me. It seems to correspond to the stock market (owners of stock control companies capital and receive companies’ profit), but last time I tried to calculate it out if all stock were distributed evenly among the population, it would mean $6000 “profits”/year/person in the United States. Add in all CEO salaries and it gets up to $6400. That’s a lot of money, but it’s only about half the poverty line, and it would barely increase the average worker’s salary by 10%. Is the difference between inhumane oppression versus the glorious golden future really just earning $50,000 vs. $56,400? And that’s assuming that the transition to communism doesn’t decrease wages or profits in any other way, like by hurting the economy or making companies less ruthlessly profit-seeking and so decreasing stock dividends. But without the whole means-of-production/worker-owned-company thing, communism just seems like a more dictatorship-prone version of Sweden.

Finally, my meta-political stance is caution and empiricism - I have some political stances, but more important than enacting them is getting a framework where they can be tested, made sure they’re not dangerous, and enacted if and only if they work. Communists don’t seem very good at testing their ideas in contexts less irreversible than a giant revolution that destroys everything that has come before. The exceptions I can think of are a few communes - most of which have failed - and a few worker-owned companies with a mixed track record. In other words, I’m not sure what incremental communism would look like, or what it would mean to move in the direction of communism other than “stockpile armaments and wait for a chance to shoot people”. And the few examples of giant-revolution-communism I have to go on are either horrible bloodbaths like Maoist China or places like Cuba with some detractors and some proponents that nevertheless if you’re trying to help the poor and ensure equality of opportunity seem inferior to the best social democracies.

And my other complaint about communists is that I rarely see them talking about any of these things, either explaining/debating their solutions or being properly worried at not having any. Whenever I see them they’re either going on for the zillionth time about the whole thing where the proletariat need to seize the means of production, encouraging general agitation and discontent, getting angry at people for trying to solve things incrementally, or talking in incredibly dense post-modern jargon about issues that seem a thousand levels removed from the real world.

This is what I mean when I say communists aren’t my out-group: I have so much trouble placing them ideologically and seeing them as a coherent movement that it’s hard to have strong opinions about them.

At the very least I consider communism an useful error message. It arises from discontent in society and while its proposed solutions to the problems it identifies are debatable, I find many of the problems themselves at least worthy of noticing. As a psychiatrist you are probably familiar with the patient who says they are in excruciating pain caused by an alien implant in their neck, and just because there is no implant to remove doesn’t mean the pain is just as imaginary; and even the most uncharitable interpretation of communism would be basically the political equivalent of that thing.

One of the reasons you don’t have a clear idea of what people want is that “communism” is an extremely diverse label containing a huge number of different and sometimes diametrically opposed ideologies. Stalinists, libertarian communists, and anarcho-primitivists won’t get along at all, and their utopias will be dramatically different. Also, one of the main ideas of communism (or so I’ve understood; my familiarity with the theoretical material is admittedly very limited) is the abolition of states as well so “what a communist state looks like” is kind of similar to asking a gay couple “which one of you is the man?”. In practical terms, the Zapatistas and Rojava are probably the closest to what communists actually want (or at least the communists worth considering; stalinists, maoists etc. seem to throw tantrums about the latter but ideologies whose supporters haven’t updated after tens of millions of deaths can be safely ignored as far as I’m concerned).

Ownership of the means of production is not just about money. (But for a lot of poor people $500 a month is a really big deal.) The basic idea that people work for themselves instead of someone else is very attractive for many (if not most), and there is also evidence suggesting that it might make people more productive as well. Companies with employee stock ownership plans, more worker participation in management etc. might be more productive (haven’t scrutinized the data but studies usually argue something like 5-10%), and even people like Paul Graham agree with the basic ideas behind socialism in the workplace (bosses, hierarchies and investors tend to suck and it’s more awesome to own one’s own work) in essays like this or this. In addition, if workers are also the owners and they hire their own bosses it would (in theory) solve some issues in misaligned incentives as they could balance the monetary value created by management with the immaterial value destroyed by the actions management takes to extract more productivity from workers at the expense of their well-being. In other words, it’s not a question of $50,000 vs. $56,400 but a question of $50,000 and bosses and hierarchies and no freedom vs. $56,400 and having genuine participation in one’s work; a difference which seems like the difference between a really good employer and a median employer, and the impact of a really good employer on a person’s happiness seems to be pretty big. Basically, the communist ideals are less “government bureaucracy for everyone!” and more “startups for everyone!”; whether or not it would be realistic in practice is another question I won’t start addressing in depth here. But having seen it firsthand, Silicon Valley is awesome, and it makes a lot of sense that people would want to give everyone the things that make Silicon Valley awesome.

I agree that their lack of empiricism is most communists’ biggest weakness in both theory and practice. I’d argue that if people want to do practical communism, the best way would be to accumulate capital to workers in legal ways so the state doesn’t take it away with its guns. In other words, by having worker-owned businesses, especially worker-owned businesses that seek aggressive growth, especially in sectors which are the most critical for a self-sufficient society (food production, minifacturing, tech) and thus would allow the communists to discouple their basic needs from the wider capitalist system while also getting material feedback on how communism works in the real world, without depending on bad ideas like “let’s replace our entire production system with something that hasn’t been tested because we predict it will only work if it is never tested in a smaller scale, and without backups so we can’t roll back if the new system sucks”.

ETA: Stuff I forgot to mention:

Under this kind of communism, BART workers would gladly automate their jobs away to get more free time because they would be the ones reaping the benefits.

Also, there are other forms of capital than just dividends; for example real estate is one really important source of income for rentseekers instead of value creators.

I am not responsible for the outcomes of assuming actual communists agree with this; while I’ve tried to stay within the rules of fair steelmanning, I’m certain some of my beliefs are leaking through (wrt things like revolutions) and making the result fall somewhere between “right in the goals and wrong in the implementation” and “burn the heretic”. But this is the strongest simple description of what communism might actually be about I can produce, and it’s noticeably more specific and sensible than, and at least as substantiated as, the stereotypes most people operate on.

(via wirehead-wannabe)

3 months ago · tagged #promethea's empiricism fetish #win-win is my superpower #i am worst capitalist · 163 notes · source: slatestarscratchpad · .permalink

rusalkii:

socialjusticemunchkin:

worldoptimization:

hey if anyone on my friends list feels like it and has sum good knowledge i will venmo u 5$ to explain to me the way that tumblr talks about DID/multiples systems n stuff? this seems important to a lot of younger queer n trans folks and i wanna understand it (and also pay u for yr labor lmao)

I keep seeing this “pay you for your labor” thing and like … what is the goal? replace all non-financial transactions with financial ones? like I get that people think women do more ~emotional labor~ in families/relationships and that’s unfair but this is just a person asking if any friends (not necessarily female or members of any oppressed group) want to volunteer to do them a favor? and not even an onerous favor, it’s “talk about something interesting with me for a little while”

idk how I feel about this. I do think money is really great and maybe people should use it more in friendships, but otoh something about nonfinancial transactions building trust and social cohesion? also a society in which you’re expected to pay for friends to do you a favor seems uh, unfortunate for those who lack class privilege

This is kind of interesting. One intuition says that this is not an aesthetically appealing way of dealing with these things, while another thinks normalizing micro-tipping even in friendships could be useful, at least if implemented with a modicum of class awareness; even if one enjoys thinking of and discussing the ideas, making them into a more widely shareable post is more work than simply doing some rough and vague chat-style explaining and being able to incentivize the former with a small monetary reward to compensate for the effort would create more value in total.

I suspect that some of this could be related to an equilibrium of norms where friendships and money are supposed to be kept separate from each other and anyone trying to unilaterally break it ends up worse even if allowing the right kind of commodification could be a better equilibrium overall. It would be undesirable if such things were totally commodified so that anyone asking for favors would need to pay the market rate, but I do think establishing a norm of tipping for effort, possibly at levels comparable to generic western minimum wages when asking a specific person to do a specific thing so that people making such money could do favors to friends instead of working without losing sorely needed money as a result but asking for a lot more would be considered at the very least exceptional so the system wouldn’t degenerate to a complete money-market, would be at least worth considering.

All in all, I think the (seemingly pretty common) norms of keeping money and friendships completely separate do contribute to class segregation by making it difficult to socialize across class lines.

If we take the classic example of a poor person and a rich person going for lunch together, expectations of both paying for themselves result in staggeringly sub-optimal outcomes as either the poor one has to pay way more than they can afford, or the rich one will have to settle for a place that might not meet their standards. If the poor one tries to change this, they will be perceived as a moocher, while the rich one might be seen as condescending and/or flaunting their money if they offer to pay. As a result, people will inevitably feel a pressure to only socialize within their class on pain of social disapproval or material constraints.

In my experience this is a big problem in Finland where it’s very popular to keep up a socialdemocratic facade of pretend equality in which even acknowledging that people don’t all make the same amount of money is at best gauche; if done from below it makes people uncomfortable and if done from above it creates resentment at how does this nouveau riche asshole dare to violate the sacred law of Jante. Naturally, this doesn’t work very well when there never has been a situation where such claims would’ve been at all substantiated outside a quite narrow space of comfortable post-ww2 suburban segregationism.*

Pretending not to see race leads to greater racial discrimination, pretending not to see gender leads to sexism remaining unchallenged, so I’d be very surprised if pretending not to see class wouldn’t make undermining classism more difficult.

As a result I’ve been trying to personally chip away at these norms by using a different standard whenever possible: in friendships it should be totally normal and acceptable for people to share material things in reasonable proportion to their material wealth, without the need to match the absolute financial values of contributions. In practice this means I’ll never say no if someone with more money than me offers to pay for something, and I’ll similarly offer to pay things for people poorer than me (right now that seems to mean only @sinesalvatorem but growth mindset!), if I trust that the person I’m dealing with is able to understand, and okay with, it.

The practical results of normalizing such things would be expected to be: a certain degree of redistribution as some de facto commodification of friendships shifts costs of social interaction from poorer people to richer people; a consequent undermining of illusions when people whose company isn’t worth the price of a lunch discover it**; and hopefully a certain degree of adaptation for possible higher-inequality futures, because if only a few people hold most of the material income in the world, everyone else’s jobs being automated away, I’d very much prefer such people to live with norms that expect them to share.

The last part ties to a bigger pattern of incomplete and asymmetrical commodification in a money economy, which creates and maintains some significant inequalities. When only certain types of work are paid labor and others are kept out of the money economy by moral censure, it isn’t surprising that doers of the paid kinds of labor get privileged over others. Sex, housework, child care, friendships, emotional labor, military service (in countries with conscription), etc. are treated as sacred moral duties which must not be defiled with money, which very conveniently ensures that middle-aged men have a disproportionate control over money and other groups, who tend to do more of the uncompensated types of work, have lower power in society.

One could propose removing money altogether as a solution, instead of subjecting everything to monetary markets, but I think these alternatives aren’t as diametrically opposed as most people would be liable to believe. The artificial distinction into profane (men’s, paid) work and sacred (women’s, unpaid) duties*** seems to maintain a situation in which money-work can be treated rigidly while a community which doesn’t make such distinctions could be less of a straw libertarian dystopia in which everything has an exact price, and more of a comparatively relaxed gift-economy-ish sharing culture (at least if the general level of material scarcity is sufficienly low) with a closer resemblance to open-source than to YA literature. People would create value to each other, recognize their unequal material situations, and consequently optimize the allocation of the surplus value their interactions create in a way which integrates material sharing (money being simply one form of it, not the psychologically hijack-y high score to counterproductively measure and optimize for it’s now treated as) into the social fabric, instead of segregating the social and the material into altogether separate magisteria and ensuring a certain material hierarchy tied to one’s position in markets which are artificially restricted to disproportionately favor some groups over others.

Yes, it’s possible to object that this would be impossible, but my prior for such objections is that they’re in the same category as claims that Sweden can’t exist without inevitably turning into Stalin. At the very least, it hasn’t been demonstrated that our current division of paid and unpaid labor is an optimum no amount of skilled memetic engineering could overcome, while there are a lot of reasons to believe that it would be an accidental artefact of cultural and material conditions to a relatively large degree. I’d predict the strongest argument against it to be that I’m generalizing from myself and a set of other rather exceptional people when evaluating the viability of such norms and that more median individuals wouldn’t be psychologically capable of what it takes, but then one could reasonably expect that at least such exceptional people should be able to live by them.****

* I suspect such middle-class sensibilities would be common in most western countries, at least among the middle class; a working-class pride of never accepting help from others seems slightly related but noticeably different.

** This could be considered a good or a bad thing; I personally think it’s good and it also lets people who do get the paid lunches from better-off people feel a bit more comfortable in how their company is indeed actually valued.

*** Of course, it isn’t anywhere near this clear-cut, but on a statistical level the effect is strong; also this sounds very much like the exact same mechanism as is behind “benevolent” sexism, with prisons disguised as pedestals. Conscription is an interesting case because the arguments for it sound exactly the same as arguments against sex work, in favor of domestic slavery, etc. but directed at men instead of women. This is easy to understand as an instance of ageist oppression modulated by gender though, as it’s mostly young men (and people mistaken for them) whom it exploits without compensation.

**** Slightly unrelated but possibly illuminating: I’m always kind of weirded out by how many of the same people who insist that money shouldn’t be a measure of a person’s worth as a human being also insist very strongly on people having the exact same amount of it, with arguments that really sound like they think money indeed is a measure of a person’s worth as a human being. I do intellectually understand where they’re coming from but on a different level make up your goddamn minds please. If the median person treats money as literally serious business it suggests that the median person might not be able to adjust to the norms I want to live by, but damnit I want these norms and I already have polyamory, I’m not going to let the median person’s failings prevent me from having casual money too.

I have a feeling that the norms you proposed would be far more effective in casual interaction between acquaintances, colleges, etc. For example, if you don’t own a car and want to borrow the neighbor’s second car for a weekend, you might offer them some compensation for it. So you don’t need to buy a car you’ll use once or twice a year, while the neighbor gets to make some money in exchange for having to drop their partner off at their weekend poker night or whatever. Or if, like OP, you want someone to explain something fairly complicated to you, you might pay them a bit. This might work something like commissions do: since it’s socially acceptable for people to promote “please pay me for my art”, it seems like the leap to “please pay me for my knowledge” might be fairly easy to make. However, I think that within close friendships, this might not be the best system.

Anecdotal data: I have a few friends with whom I almost always meet over coffee or lunch. I’m the only one of us with a job, and the only one who regularly has cash with me, so I usually pay for food. On one hand, this seems to match pretty well the the model you described above: I have a greater ability to pay, so I do, since the pleasure of my friends’ company is worth buying them coffee once in a while. On the other hand, this is a completely informal arrangement which we never discussed, and I’m not sure if they even notice it. We just usually ask around if anyone has money on them, and it ends up being me most of the time. I’ve been feeling rather resentful about this recently, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m expected to pay for them, because it’s not recognized that I pay for them, or because I’m spending money that could be used for something else important to me. I’m not sure if this is a data point for or against your the norms you suggested, but have it anyway.

One glaring flaw with this system seems to be that while the poorer people might discover if their company is “worth the price of lunch”, the rich would attract even more moochers (on top of the considerable social capital they already posses), while the poor would have a strong incentive to make friends with as many rich people as possible and ignore those with as less money. You could argue that a free lunch in exchange for company is a fair trade, but this doesn’t seem like a good environment to foster genuine friendships between different classes.

A possible way to test the viability of this might be to look at how different societies treat money vs friendship, unpaid labor, socioeconomic differences, etc., see which come closest to the standards you set out and see how that affects their culture, morals, economy, etc.  I’m not sure how far this would go or how effective it would be, but it sounds like it might be worth a try. Anyone who actually knows history or economics want to chime in?

((please tell me if I missed/misinterpreted something you said))

Data points is best! So is criticism because good ideas don’t come out fully formed from a frictionless vacuum of mystical wisdom! In fact I suspect most cognitively formidable people are just really good at outsourcing brain functions and connecting some key dots others don’t. I definitely outsource my thinking a lot because it produces way better results.

“Pay me for my knowledge” is best ever. Artists (or so I’ve heard them constantly complain) suffer from people thinking they’ll do things out of the goodness of their hearts because True Art Must Not Be Defiled By Money and creating explicit norms of “yes, it is work and I will be compensated for it at my own rates” and telling non-artists to just deal with it helps, so philosophers, sages, and jesters should be able to have the same thing too.

If I tried to model that anecdote on my own brain I’d suspect being taken for granted would be the key problem, but I’m notoriously horrible at modeling others with my own brain instead of just treating them as black boxes that can be investigated empirically so this one could probably be just ignored.

The glaring flaw sounds more like a caveat or a qualifier but (…simulates…) the issue of the oversupply of sycophants pushing prices of company down is a real one. Focken moochers, people. The opportunity of  predictably creates incentives for people to do fraudulent signaling of friendship by increasing the rewards of doing it successfully, therefore turning rejection of material favors into a hard-to-fake signal and damnit I knew there had to be a reason for why that focken fence was in such a silly place to begin with. (However, the markets would probably settle as the higher rewards from pleasing rich people would be balanced by more competition creating higher risks thus making the risk-aversion-adjusted expected returns for different socioeconomic strata not too mismatched. Then again, far more people waste money gambling instead of founding a startup so this speculation of people being anywhere near economically rational-resembling-ish must be discounted really hard.)

Okay: plan B: how to filter out the moochers and sycophants so that at least the exceptional ones can have casual money. It can be done at least in a limited sense because I definitely have done it successfully quite a lot without turning into a cynical moocher but my brain kind of has an obsession with sincere one-sided reciprocity in the vein of “I observe you have created value for me; let me create value to you too, fellow value-creating person”.

In some ways I fail to see what’s the bad thing in exchanging company for material favors voluntarily but this is probably why nobody should trust my brain in such things. A world where some people are players and others are pieces is unfair and manipulative, but there’s something aesthetically appealing about having a situation where all people are in on the game and know and understand the rules and just play with a sincerity that arises only from the abolition of pretenses of sincerity. That’s definitely casual acquiantance-level stuff only though, because Real True Friendships need to be possible so it might be necessary to have some secret or otherwise unfakeable protocol for “graduating” from “we’re playing games without pretending we’re not” to “we’re actually not playing games”.

So one possible solution could be to make it socially acceptable to play games and exchange social favors for material favors. Then the outcome would be casual money for exceptional friends, and mutually acknowledged games for a select category of casual acquiantances. At least players who know what’s going on are more entertaining company than clueless people (tfw you notice you just reinvented the MacLeod classification with gameplayers as the sociopaths, true friends as the losers, and uninteresting ones as the clueless) and sycophanty is harder to fall for when one starts with a prior of a knowing wink in one’s eye.

Also, overthinking is the best thing ever! Nothing interesting ever came out of never overthinking anything.

4 months ago · tagged #promethea's empiricism fetish #in which they discover they're either starry-eyed or a sociopath #troll desperately wants to say #why not both #also brain needs to learn eclipse phase is fiction not evidence · 30 notes · source: worldoptimization · .permalink

leviathan-supersystem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

multiheaded1793:

oligopsony:

nuclearspaceheater:

leviathan-supersystem:

bitcoitus:

leviathan-supersystem:

the belief that ‘order = hierarchy’ is one of the most pernicious mythologies. and it is equally pernicious whether it convinces someone that order is bad, or when it convinces them that hierarchy is good.

order is good. hierarchy is bad. they are not linked.

What the fuck is ‘order’

i mean it’s not limited to this but one example for what i’m talking about is “socially agreed on protocol for acceptable behavior”

romantic notions that people can all just do ~whatever they want~ are childish and ultimately rooted in liberalism.

For this reply we’ve secretly swapped tumblr communist leviathan-supersystem with my conservative Mormon divisional Chief. Let’s see if anyone notices.

Your Divisional Chief Is Correct Though

Actually, “doing whatever you want” and “no need for hierarchy uwu” were both kinda steelmanned by Marcuse with his concept of ~surplus repression~.

The way he does it is simple but kinda subtle, and I’m bad at explaining it, he says it, like, more persuasively and less naively - but basically you don’t *actually* want to do that stupid shit [1]  to the extent that people would need to shun you, call the cops, etc, right?

Self-image, self-interest, seeking immediate peers’ approval, etc - necessary repression in his Freudian-ish terms - would quite suffice for a more laid-back life, like they suffice in making (many) people e.g. wash their hands and flush toilets. But to do shit like Taylorist discipline, you need to beat people down more actively, past acquiescence and into submission - hence the “surplus”.

[1] Not unless you’re destitute, sick, angry, wasted, crazy, etc, which he kinda discounts, because, in his time and place, capitalism seemed to him about to eliminate glaring scarcity and obvious Dickensian misery. I mean, of course that looks incorrect now - but imo not that awful of him as far as extrapolation goes.

That sounds testable enough. Build a sufficiently low-scarcity intentional community with population and norms initially selected for prosociality, easy access to psych treatment etc. and let people do what they want, and see if it inevitably degenerates into either hierarchy or chaos. My money would be on “it probably could be done as long as authoritarians don’t get to fuck with it”

I think an orderly non-hierarchical community definitely can be done, but it requires the cultivation of specific social forces in order for it to be accomplished. if it was easy, it would happen more often, and less briefly.

i think one of the keys is that there needs to be a vigorous culture of debate, based around trying to refine moral concepts based around increasing everyone’s well-being. in other words, The Discourse needs to be the central pillar of the society.

That’s detail-level stuff on the prosocial norms, then there’s the fact that “sufficiently low scarcity” seems to be right now achievable by what’s maybe the global 1% (in literal terms) (or maybe I’m just a spoiled materialist brat but having so much stuff that fighting over it doesn’t make sense sounds like a good plan for eliminating fighting over stuff), and the fact that authoritarians really love fucking with other people’s experiments.

And that’s why I want less “hashtag some asshole 20xx” or “global revolution once everything is ready and then we’ll be screwed by some novel failure mode we can’t undo” and more “could you just please let these people try this thing out, without turning it into another replication of authoritarians fucking with everything and ruining it”.

I managed to convince a bunch of anarcho-communists to not only tolerate but encourage seasteading (with the simple boundaries of banning polluting and slavery) so if those people get their revolution many libertarians and ancaps would get theirs too, how the hell is it so difficult for conservatives and libdems to not be like “We know this is a bad idea even though it hasn’t been tested so we’ll use violence to make sure any attempts to test it will result in a failure thus proving our point, ad baculum don’t fallacy.”

4 months ago · tagged #promethea's empiricism fetish #win-win is my superpower · 191 notes · source: leviathan-supersystem · .permalink

multiheaded1793:

oligopsony:

nuclearspaceheater:

leviathan-supersystem:

bitcoitus:

leviathan-supersystem:

the belief that ‘order = hierarchy’ is one of the most pernicious mythologies. and it is equally pernicious whether it convinces someone that order is bad, or when it convinces them that hierarchy is good.

order is good. hierarchy is bad. they are not linked.

What the fuck is ‘order’

i mean it’s not limited to this but one example for what i’m talking about is “socially agreed on protocol for acceptable behavior”

romantic notions that people can all just do ~whatever they want~ are childish and ultimately rooted in liberalism.

For this reply we’ve secretly swapped tumblr communist leviathan-supersystem with my conservative Mormon divisional Chief. Let’s see if anyone notices.

Your Divisional Chief Is Correct Though

Actually, “doing whatever you want” and “no need for hierarchy uwu” were both kinda steelmanned by Marcuse with his concept of ~surplus repression~.

The way he does it is simple but kinda subtle, and I’m bad at explaining it, he says it, like, more persuasively and less naively - but basically you don’t *actually* want to do that stupid shit [1]  to the extent that people would need to shun you, call the cops, etc, right?

Self-image, self-interest, seeking immediate peers’ approval, etc - necessary repression in his Freudian-ish terms - would quite suffice for a more laid-back life, like they suffice in making (many) people e.g. wash their hands and flush toilets. But to do shit like Taylorist discipline, you need to beat people down more actively, past acquiescence and into submission - hence the “surplus”.

[1] Not unless you’re destitute, sick, angry, wasted, crazy, etc, which he kinda discounts, because, in his time and place, capitalism seemed to him about to eliminate glaring scarcity and obvious Dickensian misery. I mean, of course that looks incorrect now - but imo not that awful of him as far as extrapolation goes.

That sounds testable enough. Build a sufficiently low-scarcity intentional community with population and norms initially selected for prosociality, easy access to psych treatment etc. and let people do what they want, and see if it inevitably degenerates into either hierarchy or chaos. My money would be on “it probably could be done as long as authoritarians don’t get to fuck with it”

4 months ago · tagged #playing your cards right #promethea's empiricism fetish #still bitter for '36 #stalin you asshole don't fuck with other people's experiments #fortunately syria doesn't have stalinists #also how on earth did the us become rojava's air force #lifegoals level #whatever the outcome is #the state of our knowledge wins #unless authoritarians fuck with it #we already know that ruins everything we don't need more replications · 191 notes · source: leviathan-supersystem · .permalink