promethea.incorporated

“Punching Down” in a curved social spacetime metric

leviathan-supersystem:

socialjusticemunchkin:

veronicastraszh:

leviathan-supersystem:

leviathan-supersystem:

the-grey-tribe:

leviathan-supersystem:

the-grey-tribe:

leviathan-supersystem:

the-grey-tribe:

leviathan-supersystem:

leviathan-supersystem:

szhmidty:

barrydeutsch:

frustrateddemiurge:

So, a friend posted this on Facebook:

I just read a text exchange in which a guy tried to flirt with a stranger on Facebook by sending her a picture of his penis. The woman responded by ridiculing him, sending him lots of pictures of other men’s penises to demonstrate how horrible it is to receive dick pics, and suggesting that his dick was small and diseased. He got angry, and asked to end the conversation, which she didn’t do. Then he asked her not to share the conversation, and she posted the whole thing publicly, along with his name. Now it’s on my news feed because lots of people are reading it and finding it hilarious.

I hope I’m not the only one who thinks this is tragic.

The perception of dick pics as disgusting, low status, and worthy of ridicule is part of the larger perception of sexuality as shameful. I would much, much rather live in a culture where I sometimes received unwanted images of strangers’ genitals as part of clumsy flirting than to live in a culture where being open about sexuality is about as safe as making violent threats.

I would love to live in the nearby world where “you’re cute, wanna see my dick/vulva?” is a polite way of finding out whether an attractive stranger feels like sharing a casual online sexual interaction. The man’s actions in this exchange make me feel a lot more like I live in that world than do the woman’s.

I recognize that, given we *don’t* live in that world, *and* that the world we do live in includes a lot of people who feel women should be grateful for male attention and never allowed to protect themselves let alone retaliate, dick pics are often (usually?) more of a harmful spam tactic than a kind of benign if inept way of flirting.

I think it’s a good idea to discourage spamming people, and also to discourage treating women as if they have no right to refuse sexual advances.

But please, please, do not confuse strategic choice of social norms with the rush of a cheap status-boost. Do not play along with the game where we all punish each other for having bodies in the context of Christian purity and original sin.

So I gave my take on it:

The boy in question may not, himself, have realized he was performing an aggressive move. He may have just been emulating a move that he saw as successful, because when aggressive men make that move they often *are* successful.

It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.

The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.

Then I read this cracked article:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-internet-gun-aimed-at-everyones-face/


Now, spread this ridiculously important meme:

If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.

If you’re making some fedora-wearing neckbeard cry delicious man-tears, if you’re viciously shaming some size 0 fetish model for promoting unhealthy body standards, if you’re screaming at some transgirl for “invading your safe space” and “not being a real woman”, if you’re savaging some internet pundit for using “transgirl” because they haven’t kept up with the lingo-of-the-week… you’re almost certainly attacking someone who’s probably been hurt worse by the Patriarchy than you have.

Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.

Feels nice, doesn’t it?

The conclusion only makes sense if we assume that structural and institutional power are virtually the only forms of power that exist.

It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.

… The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.

…

If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.

…

Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.

Feels nice, doesn’t it?

This grosses me out more than I can properly articulate. The idea that if you ever “win” a social conflict that you’re really the bad guy is gross as all hell. The idea let’s virtually anyone off the hook. Were you successfully criticized for your behaviour? Congratulations, your detractor is a bully abusing their superior social power against poor meek little you. You fire a woman for getting pregnant, and she succesfully sued you and damaged your business’ reputation? What an abuse of power, you poor little thing. You harrass someone online and they actually stand up to you? You shouldn’t have to stand for such mistreatment. Were you cruel to a friend, and now less people want to hang out with you? You’re the real victim here.

This is the weaponization of the pretense of meekness. It’s the whine of particularly nasty members of the religious right, who complain, in naked envy of Saudi Arabia’s ability to persecute “deviants,” that their detractors would never be so critical of militant islam.

So yes, it feels fucking fantastic.

None of this is to say that anything in the name of ‘winning’ a social conflict is acceptable, or that one cannot be disprortionate, excessive, or sadistic and cruel towards others in response to mistreatment, or that what you’ve identified as mistreatment is accurately described as such. Nuance, proportionality, and compassion are excellent virtues. But it is vastly unjustified to cast ‘winners of social conflict’ as nearly equivalent to abusers of social power attacking the weak in place of the strong.

I don’t think dick-pic-sender’s name should have been released to the internet at large. Large, diffuse groups on the internet are personally removed from the situation, are frequently full of unprincipled people, and the individuals involved frequently feel like a snowflake in an avalanche. Consequently the people involved are often ignorant or apathetic of the scale of harm they as a group are causing, which can quickly become vastly improportionate to scale of the harm to which the group is responding.

I do think it’d be entirely fair game to show the messages to people within dick-pic-sender’s social group. It’s fair for the people in your life to know how you treat others, and I don’t think you necessarily deserve privacy when you treat someone poorly through unsolicited messages (IANAL, but I think the law generally agrees as well).

And for the love of fucking god I wish people would stop defending people like dick-pic-sender by trying to cast them as weak, bumbling little angels. Aside from the fact that there’s not much justification for it: you can mistreat the strong. You can be cruel to anyone. If you’re gonna argue that excessive responses, cruelty, and internet mobs are bad, do it because those things are bad in principle, not because they’re being used against a particular victim class you wanna defend.

op’s post is like the ultimate example of everything i find foul about the lesswronger worldview

even though the lesswrongers claim to be against “toxic sj,” in reality they just subscribe to a twisted backwards grotesque parody of the most misapplied sj identity politics, except in their version the primary “marginalized community” which they must fight for and protect at all costs is “dudes who are experiencing consequences for being shitty to other people.”

and notice the whining about “the actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them”- any sensible person would decide that the solution would be to fight to make it more difficult for aggressive men to mistreat people, but op seems to be implying that instead, we should try to make it should be easier for less aggressive men to mistreat people. it’s completely backwards and awful tbh.

also, i’m really grossed out by op comparing the backlash that the dickpic sender received to the harassment and mistreatment that trans women and eating disordered women receive.  especially appalling is the implication that the dickpic sender has been hurt by the patriarchy on a level comparable to the harm the patriarchy does to trans women and eating disordered women. this is ludicrous, standing up to a sexual harasser isn’t comparable to bullying marginalized women, fuck off.

Do two wrongs make a right? Is it possible that the response to something bad is also bad? Do you think seeing pictures of genitals is worse than being publicly shamed? Do you think that male genitals are inherently evil and shameful?

The lesswronger mindset is that you must /update/ your beliefs about an individual based on evidence. That means after you hear additional information about a straight dude, you won’t continue to use your straight-line prior. You should

(swap! (*belief* 'straight-dude-g359) bayes-update new-evidence)

Do two wrongs make a right?

already you’re assuming that it was “wrong” to publicly shame the dickpic sender. tsk tsk.

Is it possible that the response to something bad is also bad?

certainly. but the op wasn’t just trying to claim the response was excessive, but also attempted to cast the pickpic sender as a persecuted innocent. which is absurd.

Do you think seeing pictures of genitals is worse than being publicly shamed?

sending a naked picture to someone is pretty clearly a sexual act, and performing a sexual act with someone without their permission is indeed many times worse than public shaming.

Do you think that male genitals are inherently evil and shameful?

no, i think performing a sexual act with someone without their permission is inherently evil and shameful.

The lesswronger mindset is that you must /update/ your beliefs about an individual based on evidence. That means after you hear additional information about a straight dude, you won’t continue to use your straight-line prior. You should(swap! (*belief* 'straight-dude-g359) bayes-update new-evidence)

what possible additional information would make me decide the dickpic sender was actually an okay dude.

i….. i hate this. i hate this so much.

Thank you for your explanation. The last bit was in response to your framing of the situation as a between-group conflict and the lesswrongers taking a side. The problem is that there are ways to draw the line (hyperplane?) based on meta-level or object-level criteria, but even if you draw it right through the original culprit, you will sound like you are endorsing either sexual harassment or online hate mobs.

I understand you better now. I kind of assumed that you were a utilitarian. For a virtue or deontological ethics-ist your stance makes more sense. Or even an old-fashioned randian objectivist who thinks you forfeit your rights when you break the social contract, which I assume is an unfortunate accident.

thinking that people have a right to tell other people when they’ve been mistreated by someone isn’t incompatible with a utilitarian viewpoint. especially if one believes- as i do- that the beneficial deterrent effect of the punishment outweighs the harm caused to the dickpic sender. people are less likely to mistreat others if they know that the person they mistreat might inform other people. furthermore the dickpic sender will be less likely to act that way in the future.

i don’t think the dickpic sender “forfeited their rights”- it doesn’t remove any of his rights that people think negatively of him because of how he treats people. i’m not saying he should be killed or thrown in jail or whatever- but people he’s mistreated have a right to speak about it.

This means that dick pic sender would still deserve to have his name circulated as a terrible person if dick pic receiver had replied “what a beautiful penis you have” and then posted the screenshots by accident.

Our society with its expectations of masculinity on the other hand /rewards/ boundary-pushing when it works and punishes only when it fails.

Edit: Dick pic receiver has the right to post receipts. I am more critical of third parties; public shaming when it comes to victims posting receipts is a-ok. The victim is not the person who is punching down, the hypothetical internet person who reblogs the clear name of the guy might be.

i don’t buy this at all. i don’t buy that more masculine dudes get rewarded for sending unsolicited dickpics. i buy perhaps that more masculine dudes are more likely to get away with crossing peoples boundaries, because of the implicit threat of violence they can credibly maintain, but this idea that they’re getting rewarded for it is absurd. (as is the implication that this is unfair primarily to the less masculine men who can’t get away with disrespecting peoples boundaries, rather than unfair to the people the more masculine dudes get away with mistreating)

in the incredibly unlikely event of an unsolicited dickpic which was positively received (which i seriously doubt even exists), and the screenshot being posted by accident, then yes, i people who found out about that would still have the right to evaluate that action and for it to affect how they think of the person who sent the picture.

oh hey, i just saw the exchange which this whole thing is about: [link]

so just to clarify, THIS is the dude who OP and the-grey-tribe are casting as a poor gentle victim who only experienced backlash because he wasn’t masculine enough to get away with it, and had he been more “alpha” or whatever he would have been “rewarded” for disrespecting peoples boundaries:

lmaooooooooooo okay

Holy shit!

By the way, that woman’s “edits” are a thing of sublime hilarity.

I think the original argument still holds very well. When one is winning, it means the adversary is losing, and that usually kind of inevitably means one’s own side is stronger than the adversary’s in that specific battle. Sometimes people gathering together power to beat up on those who violate important rules can be useful to enforce those rules (just like cops are supposed to arrest people who do physical violence, and we don’t tell them to stop the instant they gain the upper hand), but they should never forget the simple fact that if they’re winning, they are the stronger side.

If people consistently remembered this one weird trick, it would probably help reduce toxic forms of sj by several dozen percentage points. Shifting the mindset from “I’m lashing out at the Oppressor and thus anything is justifiable” to “I’m using my contextual power to beat up on someone with less contextual power and my actions need to take that into account or otherwise I’ll just be a bully” would force people to keep in mind that with great contextual power comes great contextual responsibility and sometimes people need to even restrain themselves.

no, i don’t buy this. there are better ways to establish a sense of proportion and restraint in sj than to adopt a self-defeating ideology that any success in a social conflict is a sign that your opponent is actually an innocent misunderstood victim.

no, someone isn’t inherently the stronger side if they win. sometimes the underdog successfully stands up for themselves, and that doesn’t automatically mean they have structural power. dickpic sender didn’t suddenly become an underdog the moment someone stood up to him.

and there’s this whole framework here- “It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive”- which is clearly just the discredited 4chan “alpha/beta male” framework with a fresh coat of paint.

and i mean, it’s appalling to use the logic of “but the ~alpha males~ get away with it!” to defend this kind of behavior anyways, but why, why, why, of all people, is James McRippedBro here being assumed to be a “less aggressive” “beta” male when literally every indicator suggests the exact opposite.

No, you’re misunderstanding my argument and this is calling for a reductio.

Let’s say Fallon Fox is catcalled by some rich white cis guy who has very much structural power over her. She proceeds to beat him up. I think there needs to be a way to describe the type of power Fallon has in the situation where she’s beating up the guy. If we are not able to say that she has a certain type of contextual power which is very much defined by the fact that she is indeed kicking his ass (in this case it’s the fact that she’s a skilled MMA fighter and the random guy is not), we are missing something epistemically important.

Similarly, in the social realm there is something which is the equivalent of “who is able to kick whose ass” and which isn’t a 1:1 match to structural power or anything like that.

If Fallon were to beat up the guy very badly, we wouldn’t listen to protestations that “he was still white and cis and rich and thus he still had all the power in the situation” because we would be missing something very important. Sometimes beating a guy up very badly might be warranted (such as in self-defense against assault or attempted murder), but it doesn’t make it any less true that the guy got beaten up, and that factor which led to his upbeatenness is relevant for the considerations, because in some situations That Factor ends up outweighing other considerations. If you beat someone up for having $5000 more in their bank account than you, their economic structural power over you is far less relevant than the fact that you beat them up. And that’s what I’m arguing; that if people don’t recognize when they’re beating up someone they might do exactly that thing except socially.

And empirically, even though this particular instance is most likely not an example of that thing, it nonetheless happens. I know because I have personally done it precisely because I wasn’t keeping myself aware of the presence of this factor and it’s quite embarrassing and shameful in hindsight and people should not do the same mistakes.

1 week ago · tagged #violence cw #steel feminism · 261 notes · source: frustrateddemiurge · .permalink

shlevy:

ozymandias271:

mankind will never be free until the last vice cop is strangled with the guts of the last NIMBY

#this is hyperbole please don’t murder nimbys

this just in ozy frantz totally cool with strangling vice cops

frankly…

2 weeks ago · tagged #death cw #violence cw #okay maybe don't murder vice cops either #mostly because you would get in trouble for it #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 28 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink

wirehead-wannabe:

inferentialdistance:

fierceawakening:

inferentialdistance:

fierceawakening:

lyycernment:

fierceawakening:

here’s the thing

I actually don’t know for sure if gun control will help

It seems to have helped in other places but perhaps the us is different

I honestly in humility must admit I do not know

But it seems to me that trying out incremental measures like background checks and like making it harder to get certain kinds of weapons and seeing whether they work is not by itself tyranny

Tyranny would be OK THATS IT NO GUNS FOR ANYONE EVER BOOM

incremental measures can be tried out and tweaked or reversed if they do not work

I mean I know people are terrified of a slippery slope but you know what? Even if we pass some laws we will still have an nra

they will still be loud

if shit goes south I guarantee you they will say something about it

Where the alternative is doing nothing out of fear of even trying something else at all

And doing nothing is getting us nowhere

The usual argument against incremental change is that anti-guns would push their advantage until guns are totally banned. So pro-guns prefer keeping the current situation as a Schelling fence.

Some examples are given in this SSC subthread : http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/15/open-thread-51-75/#comment-372796

I personally don’t know enough to form an opinion, but they might have a point.

That’s what I’m saying I disagree with.

Or at least think we should test the outer boundaries of to see if it looks likely to actually happen.

It is my understanding that the outer boundaries have, in fact, been tested. For example, the 10-year assault rifle ban. You can also look at other countries, such as the UK, or Australia, and what happened when they passed increased restrictions (including total bans) on guns. On the whole, increased gun control tends to reduce “gun violence” yet leave “total violence” unaffected; if violence was trending up (as it was in UK) it continues trending up in the same manner; if violence was trending down (as it was in Australia), it continues trending down. And I don’t see how turning eleven thousand shooting murders into eleven thousand stabbing murders is an improvement.

The reason that gun advocates are so testy about gun control laws is because they are law abiding citizens, so they have to put up with the consequences. Not the anti-gun people, who don’t buy them, and not the criminals, who disobey the laws.

I’ll give you that the assault weapons ban was poorly designed. I’ll also give you that humans are pretty violent and that those who would use a gun often would just go for a knife instead. (Though I also see little blurby statistics now and again that suggest that as a whole, violence is actually generally trending down. But that doesn’t really affect this.)

What I won’t give you is this:

“I don’t see how turning eleven thousand shooting murders into eleven thousand stabbing murders is an improvement.”

I’m pretty sure it is one, because if Omar Mateen had brought a couple knives to Pulse, I doubt anywhere near as many people would be dead.

I do understand that mass shootings are rare in the grand scheme of things. But compared to other countries they happen strikingly often here.

The US has a massively larger population than most countries, and in the developed world has a much larger homicide rate, both of which would result in a substantial increase in mass shootings. For example, The US has around 10 times the population of Canada (320 million to 35 million), and about 2.7 times the homicide rate (3.9 to 1.4). We could then naively expect the US to have 27 times as many mass shootings as Canada. And since the US has 10 times as many people as Canada, there would be 10 times as many people being informed that their country has 27 times as many mass shootings, even if gun laws had no impact on mass shootings.

There may be disproportionately more mass shootings in the US than in other countries, even accounting for things like the large population and higher homicide rate. But I have not seen good evidence that this is so, and non-trivial evidence against.

Is this a consistent finding? Because if so its pretty damning to the left’s claim to actually be informed about expert opinion.

That’s pretty astonishing and it seems actually valid. Checking the numbers for Finland, the death toll for mass shootings in the last 10 years is approximately 0.47/1M annually. Dropping just to the time period they examined gives the results they had. Taking a longer time period to compensate for the difference in population and the excessive variance it causes makes the numbers a bit more moderate: 0.16 for 30 years, approximately 0.1 for 70 years, and of course this is getting ridiculous but it shows that assuming their US numbers are correct then even controlling for rare and anomalous incidents, the US is actually safer nonetheless.

The numbers seem to have an interesting relation to overall homicide rates: (normalized for murders/100 000 population)

Russia 0.001
Italy 0.01
US 0.023
Canada 0.023
Germany 0.025
England 0.027
Belgium 0.071
Netherlands 0.073
Finland 0.083
Austria 0.136
Slovakia 0.168
Czech Rep 0.175
Switzerland 0.284
France 0.298
Norway 3.15

So actually the Anglosphere+Germany seems to have pretty constant rates of mass shootings vs. overall homicides, with a lot of Europe lagging behind. Only Italy is able to solidly beat the US in that area and Russia and Norway are total anomalies and probably not relevant for this. But the main point is: the mass shooting rate in the US is not that exceptional, and actually pretty low when the overall rate of violence is controlled for.

And in light of this the US is just freaking out absurdly and needs to calm the fuck down and stop issuing bulletproof blankets to schoolchildren.

2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw #violence cw · 73 notes · source: fierceawakening · .permalink

shieldfoss:

shkreli-for-president:

responsible-reanimation:

baggvinshield:

my fellow US citizens please please, we’ve got to do something about the gun violence in our country. there’s no reason someone should be able to just go buy an assault rifle or an automatic firearm of any kind. these weapons are designed to kill people, why are they sold in stores as if they have any other purpose? we have big elections coming up in November and we have to put pressure on our politicians to do something about our gun laws, to fight back against the NRA and stand up for the victims of all these senseless killings. we have to stop this happening, way too many innocent people have died because our laws favor big gun manufacturers instead of the safety of our citizens.

I’m all for this, but banning assault rifles doesn’t do much for all the shooting victims who don’t make front-page news.

Trying to ban handguns is political suicide, but maybe we could try an anti-gun campaign that specifically works with America’s cultural mythology around guns?

“John Wayne is dead, he is not coming back, you are not John Wayne and never will be, put down the damn gun.”

Ah yes, the Guns, the guns that sprout limbs and walk into gay clubs and start shooting people entirely on their own,

And while we’re at it, “there’s no reason someone should be able to just go buy an assault rifle or an automatic firearm of any kind” congratulations, that is also illegal in all US states. Literally zero automatic weapons are available in American gun stores unless you’re buying for police/military use.

Every time I see a progressive misusing gun terminology it makes me want to head to a range just to bond with people who know their shit, and I’m supposedly way to the left of all those progressives. I mean, “assault weapon” is basically the “sex change operation” of gun politics and if one is pro-accurate-terminology anti-misleading-bullshit one should be consistent with that.

(also, mass shootings are anomalies and should never ever be used as the basis of laws; if you want to legislate (recommendation: maybe count to ten and reconsider whenever you get the urge; legislating is a bad habit people should try to drop), at least do it based on the actual number of annual gun homicides and suicides instead of a single goddamn individual fucking event kthxbye)

(also, mass shootings still below slippery bathtubs as a public health hazard; maybe consider doing something about them bathtubs first if you really feel the need to save lives instead of just signaling progressive virtue)

(via shieldfoss)

2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw #death cw #violence cw #is this what yelling at the 'blue tribe' feels like? · 760 notes · source: baggvinshield · .permalink

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