promethea.incorporated

ilzolende:

@thetransintransgenic and @socialjusticemunchkin, have you met?

If not, Gadit, this is Promethea @socialjusticemunchkin. Promethea, this is Gadit @thetransintransgenic Bielman.

(I tried to implement the procedures outlined here, but then I realized I don’t even know whether I introduced Gadit or Promethea first.)

original post

Yes, and we concluded that Gadit should be introduced first based on math, city of origin and mortal enemies. Also, for future introductions, I slightly prefer my name to be spelled lowercase, and my surname can be Oue (or Oü) at least for now so it doesn’t look that asymmetric.

3 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 9 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink

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

exsecant:

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.)

3 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #ambitious trans girls · 8 notes · source: exsecant · .permalink

inquisitivefeminist asked: The fandom is divided between people who think you are an Evil Manipulative Slut and your Intense Stans, who write a bunch of meta about what a complex character you are and complain about how People Undervalue You Becaue Transphobia. There are long forum threads about Is Ozy A Good Person and most of the arguments lack nuance ("Ozy is evil because sex!" "No Ozy is a perfect oppressed angel!") Also there's a lot of Discourse about whether it's okay for straight girls to say they're gay for you.

ozymandias271:

I would like to establish firmly that it is okay for straight girls to say they’re gay for me

it is also okay for straight guys to say they’re gay for me

whatever gender you are wanting to fuck me is gay

I tried reverse engineering my gender by using the test “which genders would be gay for me and which wouldn’t” but it didn’t work because my processes threw a bunch of errors at guys because neither straight nor gay for me is an acceptable option for most.

All non-guy genders are gay for me.

Straight or bi guys who are incredibly pretty and somehow still “guys” for some inexplicable reason are gay for me too if they are okay with their gender being kind-of-invalidated (hey, it has to be either them or me and I’m the one who had to fight the state for mine so gimme some slack okay) and reclassified as “a pretty” instead of “a guy”.

Guys who aren’t able or willing to have themselves regendered as instances of the gender “pretty” for such purposes should just be asexual for me.

3 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #my gender is apparently pretty · 44 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .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

sdhs-rationalist:

rusalkii:

lizardywizard:

I think I’ve managed to pin down my particular anxiety with eye contact to “I don’t know what looks natural, so if I try to make eye contact it’ll only look worse/creepier than avoiding it completely”.

Last night it came upon me that I shouldn’t just operate on this theory without checking if it’s true. So, people who actually do the eye contact thing/notice faces: which reads as worse to you, awkward eye contact (which might include staring for too long), or no eye contact at all?

I have the exact same problem. Anyone want to help us out?

From someone who notices faces:  awkward.  definitely awkward.  If you’re really good at face watching, try to time your glances away so they match the other person’s saccades, b/c then eye contact seems seamless and normal.

Depends on the context, I would say. My default assumption with people I interact with might operate so that awkward signals “I’m trying to pass as neurotypical because it’s instrumental for my goals, and I haven’t perfected it YGM” while avoidance signals “I’m uncomfortable with the strange customs of this foreign species, please be aware of it and accommodate”.

Avoidance makes one less threatening if one has that kind of a problem (at least for me; my limbic system prefers people who are big and have testosterone-dominant endocrine systems to err on the side of avoidance and that’s blatantly unfair but until I get bodymods to equalize physical disparities my lizard brain is going to keep being a lizard brain) but otherwise I’d probably recommend that people favor awkward with people who don’t understand; especially if one has any confidence in their ability to learn the rules of natural-seeming eye contact consciously and thus become better at it over time.

Obviously, individual situation matters; if awkward is too stressful it would be perfectly rational to ration it only for the most important situations.

Then again, anything I say about social interaction should be taken with a 200-gram sodium chloride monocrystal because edge cases etc.

3 months ago · tagged #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 8 notes · source: lizardywizard · .permalink

My little emotional kinkster: suffering is magic

Keep reading

4 months ago · tagged #death cw #parenthesis junkies unite #user's guide to interacting with a promethea · 1 note · .permalink

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.

(via ilzolende)

4 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #user's guide to interacting with a promethea #also i have no idea what i did here #did i steelman ancap or reinvent collectivism #boxes don't work · 30 notes · source: worldoptimization · .permalink