this is awesome but you know, anyone still wondering why healthcare eats up more and more of GDP
Not that I’ve looked at the math or anything, it’s 2:40 am and no. But unless there’s a digit missing in that pricing, the health economics of that thing have got to be a total slam-dunk. I don’t doubt the payor resisted paying because resisting payment is what payors do. If it’s a novel device that isn’t on approved formulary lists, which probably if new thing and not many candidates, that alone is plenty for at least one line of nope. It doesn’t require an actual rational objection based on the value proposition. SOP would be bog-standard automatic bureaucratic obstructionism framed as a best practice in cost consciousness. It’s only a story because someone got pissed off enough to deploy the courts and a journalist thought the device looked cool.
Try pricing five days in the critical care unit on a ventilator for a dying eighty-seven-year-old with advanced dementia, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease, found short of breath and tachycardic in bed at the nursing home, rushed to the hospital, and admitted with sepsis and pulmonary edema. Including imaging and cath lab. Then get back to me about unjustifiable Cadillac expenditures on luxurious medical devices that enable (a very small number of) paralyzed people with normal life expectancies to walk again, for less than it costs to put a remote monitoring device into a heart failure patient’s chest, which, statistically, costs less than *not* doing that because it reduces hospitalizations by just a tad.
maybe we do need a Muslim registry so we can make sure citizens are obeying Islamic law and only marrying other Muslims, just like in Malaysia
You joke about that, but right wingers think that’s exactly what will happen if Muslims get a majority… and I can’t see anything to really prove them wrong on it.
This is why every political debate feels like arguing with the mirror: why would people who fear and detest Islamic law push for something common in countries which follow Islamic law, and why would their opponents oppose it.
(Rhetorical question, but still).
You already know the answer to this one. American right-wingers want a Muslim registry with fingerprints and DNA samples for testing bombs, not one with marital status for limiting marriages to Muslims. As for the Left, they don’t want Muslims to actually practice Islam; they want Muslims to become the equivalent of non-practicing Catholics or something along those lines.
maybe we do need a Muslim registry so we can make sure citizens are obeying Islamic law and only marrying other Muslims, just like in Malaysia
You joke about that, but right wingers think that’s exactly what will happen if Muslims get a majority… and I can’t see anything to really prove them wrong on it.
Okay this is mostly hilarious as a profile of some NRXer’s online presence in a way that probably feels deeply familiar to anyone reading this from the dashboard of tumblr dot com.
Probably not actually relevant as a political matter, because he was an appointee of Flynn and so unlikely to stick around.
Honestly, I didn’t find anything in there particularly outrageous. Homogenous societies do seem to have the better stats he mentions, Islamist terrorists really do exist and would love to nuke New York. I think the risk he assigns it is overestimated, but potential nuclear attack is one reason I don’t want to live in New York.
the idea that Milo can’t be racist because he’s Jewish or can’t have regressive gender politics because he’s gay is just strange, I mean isn’t that the exact kind of identity politics weirdness that he and his acolytes decry?
or is it supposed to function as a tu quoque to his opponents?
I mean it just seems like the correct response to allegations of racism or sexism or whatever would be to own it and stick to his guns.
It may be operating on the theory that if this brute categorization is weaponized and shoved in the Left’s face enough, they’ll get the idea that Venn Diagram Intersectionality is dumb and cuts the corners off of people to get them to fit in the overlapping circles of identity prescribed for them.
If that is the intent, it won’t actually work, though. We’re talking about the same political movement that pushed identity politics so much that white nationalism is starting to come back from the dead.
A number of people recommended this post to me, and it is indeed good and worth reading. I say that only partly because it provides evidence that aligns with the preconceptions I already had :P
I was thinking about this stuff after I was arguing about deep learning the other day and claimed that the success of CNNs on visual tasks was a special case rather than a generalizable AI triumph, because CNNs were based on the architecture of an unusually feed-forward and well-understood part of the brain – so we’d just copied an unusually copy-able part of nature and gotten natural behavior out of the result, an approach that won’t scale
The gist of Sarah’s post is that in image recognition and speech recognition, deep learning has produced a “discontinuous” advance relative to existing improvement trends (i.e., roughly, the trends we get from using better hardware and more data but not better algorithms) – but in other domains this has not happened. This is what I would expect if deep learning’s real benefits come mostly from imitating the way the brain does sensory processing, something we understand relatively well compared to “how the brain does X” for other X.
In particular, it’s not clear that AlphaGo has benefitted from any “discontinuous improvement due to deep learning,” above and beyond what one would expect from the amount of hardware it uses (etc.) If it hasn’t, then a lot of people have been misled by AlphaGo’s successes, coming as they do at a time when deep learning successes in sensory tasks are also being celebrated.
Sarah says that deep learning AI for computer games seems to be learning how to perform well but not learning concepts in the way we do:
The learned agent [playing Pong] performs much better than the hard-coded agent, but moves more jerkily and “randomly” and doesn’t know the law of reflection. Similarly, the reports of AlphaGo producing “unusual” Go moves are consistent with an agent that can do pattern-recognition over a broader space than humans can, but which doesn’t find the “laws” or “regularities” that humans do.
Perhaps, contrary to the stereotype that contrasts “mechanical” with “outside-the-box” thinking, reinforcement learners can “think outside the box” but can’t find the box?
My broad, intuitive sense of these things is that human learning looks a lot like this gradient descent machine learning for relatively “low-level” or “sensorimotor” tasks, but not for abstract concepts. That is, when I’m playing a game like one of those Atari games, I will indeed improve very slowly over many many tries as I simply pick up the “motor skills” associated with the game, even if I understand the mechanics perfectly; in Breakout, say, I’d instantly see that I’m supposed to get my paddle under the ball when it comes down, but I would only gradually learn to make that happen.
The learning of higher-level “game mechanics,” however, is much more sudden: if there’s a mechanic that doesn’t require dexterity to exploit, I’ll instantly start exploiting it a whole lot the moment I notice it, even within a single round of a game. (I’m thinking about things like “realizing you can open treasure chests by pressing a certain button in front of them”; after opening my first chest, I don’t need to follow some gradual gradient-descent trajectory to immediately start seeking out and opening all other chests. Likewise, the abstract mechanics of Breakout are almost instantly clear to me, and my quick learning of the mechanical structure is merely obscured by the fact that I have to learn new motor skills to exploit it.)
It is a bit frustrating to me that current AI research is not very transparent about how much “realizing you can open treasure chests”-type learning is going on. If we have vast hardware and data resources, and we only care about performance at the end of training, we can afford to train a slow learner that can’t make generalizations like that, but (say) eventually picks up every special case of the general rule. I’ve tried to look into the topic of AI research on concept formation, and there is a lot out there about it, but a lot of it is old (like, 1990s or older) and it doesn’t seem to the focus of intensive current research.
It’s possible to put a very pessimistic spin on the success of deep learning, given the historically abysmal performance of AI relative to expectations and hopes. The pessimistic story would go as follows. With CNNs, we really did find “the right way” to perform a task that human (and some animal) brains can perform. We did this by designing algorithms to imitate key features of the actual brain architecture, and we were able to do that because the relevant architecture is unusually easy to study and understand – in large part because it is relatively well described by a set of successive “stages” with relatively little feedback.
In the general case, however, feedback is a major difference between human engineering designs and biological system “design.” Biological systems tend to be full of feedback (not just in the architecture of the nervous system – also in e.g. biochemical pathways). Human engineers do make use of feedback, but generally it is much easier for humans to think about a process if it looks like a sequence of composed functions: “A inputs to B, which inputs to C and D, which both input to E, etc.” We find it very helpful to be able to think about what one “part” does in (near-)isolation, where in a very interconnected system this may not even be a well-defined notion.
Historically, human-engineered AI has rarely been able to match human/biological performance. With CNNs, we have a special case in which the design of the biological system is unusually close to something humans might engineer; hence we could reverse engineer it and get atypically good AI performance out of the result.
But (I think; citation needed!) the parts of the brain responsible for “higher” intelligence functions like concept formation are much more full of feedback and much harder to reverse engineer. And current AI is not any good at them. If there are ways to do these things without emulating biology, many decades of AI research has not found them; but (citation needed again) we are no closer to knowing how to emulate biology here than we were decades ago.
That might be for the best. In order to hold the economy together (for human workers) and ensure human safety, we need AI to develop slowly enough that its arc of development can be directed towards human goals.
If one compares market solar to collectivist coal, of course market
solar ends up looking worse than it actually is, because market solar
isn’t taking everyone else’s money at gunpoint (or at smokestackpoint
via hospital bills, disabilities etc.).
In
what sense are negative externalities “collectivist” or “taking
everybody’s money at gunpoint”? Because they wouldn’t exist in ancap
utopia, because in ancap utopia all problems would be fixed?
Calling things with unaddressed negative externalities “collectivist” sounds like some kind of psyop to trick libertarian capitalists into accidentally becoming socialists. I mean, I’m happy to see capitalists acknowledging the seriousness of externalities, but trying to roll them into a capitalist economic model takes you to weird places.
Externalities tend by their nature to be subtle and off-book: they’re very hard to quantify or even identify, and companies and NGOs expend considerable resources on further obfuscating them. So you might go 20 years under a policy before you have
even a crude measure of its externalities, and even then, getting that information is so costly that the crude measure will be heavily influenced by the interests of whatever group first chooses to bear that cost. And then, what? How do you actually price externalities from air pollution and climate change into carbon? As far as I can tell, you can’t except via a carbon tax (which will almost surely not price it “correctly” since it’s imposed by political fiat). Which might not sound like a dealbreaker for a capitalist, but the problem with handling broad externalities this way is that there are so many of them.
Like, okay, one thing I like to go on about is that small neighbourhood stores have major positive externalities on their neighbourhoods and broader communities, and the move toward big-box stores is one of countless ways in which companies improved margins by declining to provide those externalities. Thus big-box stores have an “unfair” advantage and which eventually leads to a world where no one can afford to provide those classic benefits and all the social structures dependent on them collapse. Morever, economic monoculture (in this case, The Only Store Is the Wal-Mart) is itself a negative externality, since it reduces the ability to weather shocks. If you really want to get serious about accounting for subtle and diffuse externalities in a capitalist model, you end up with massive interventionism and forced wealth redistribution through taxation and subsidy pretty fast, at which point you’re not really letting “the market” do things in the first place.
It seems like at some point you just have to give up and accept that the market will price things not just in accordance with their real value but also according to the ease of pricing them and of slotting those prices into a transactional model. There are countless cases where things that are very valuable are handled poorly by the market simply because they have issues with that second criterion. As long as costs and benefits vary in legibility, profit-seeking will optimize for illegible costs and legible benefits at the expense of other varieties, irrespective of their true importance.
I mean, you say that about a Capitalist model, but any model is going to have difficulties effectively finding, evaluating, and pricing externalities. …even models that insist on “not using prices”.
Hey internet, I just mixed Indian curry with kimchi and put it over Japanese rice. Quick, someone come yell at me about cultural appropriation.
What about Japanese curry! They picked it up from the British, who picked it up from India, so it’s been through multiple layers of cultural reinterpretation.
The Imperial Navy made it a standard dish, just like the Royal Navy, and apparently the maritime defence force still eat curry for Friday meals even today!
But we must go deeper… while the Japanese were occupying Korea, they introduced curry there. Now you can get Korean Japanese British Indian curry, a hybrid dish whose existence depends on the most brutal imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries!
Coming up next: why the US navy drinks coffee and the British navy drinks rum, a sordid tale of slavery and exploitation. Yay, history!
Wrapping up this weekend of posts talking about the future, I’d like to ask a question.
A few weeks ago someone pointed out that the anti-SJW crowd is so cavalier towards Trump because they can’t really imagine our country ending up anywhere to the right of where we currently are. There might be some policy change in the tax rate, but fundamentally, campus activists will be arguing for corporations and the US government to stop oppressing numerous identities, and corps and the gov will condescendingly humor them.
Which sounded accurate (especially as rightists would argue I was wrong about things, but not actually deny that particular mindset,) but it raised a broader question - can any of us imagine a significantly different future than now?
Think about the strangeness of today’s situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global [liberal democratic capitalism] is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in
[liberal democratic capitalism]
. - Zizek
So what does everyone reading this think things will look like ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? Yes we can joke a lot about potential disaster scenarios (apocalypse, Big Brother, fast takeoff, the Social Justice Internationale) but uh, seriously, what do you think that will look like? What would living in it be like?
Do you think a fascist takeover no-for-real is likely? Will there be an underground? What will happen to the internet? Will we go backwards on racial justice and if so in what ways?
On the other side, does anyone think the forces of progressivism can win? Not just keep their head above water, but actually establish enough equality to make racism and sexism less pressing issues? What the hell does that look like?
Or even if your a techno-utopian who thinks some of these life changing developments (immortality, super AI, brain upload) will happen within 30 years, what will that uptake practically look like? Will everyone in the world get it on day 1? If not, how will it be distributed? How long will it take before more than the 10% richest people in the world benefit from it? 50%? Everyone? In the interim what does a world with radically powerful technologies in only the hand of a few look like to you?
I want to be more imaginative, and have at least some idea of what a medium-term future is that isn’t just more “Democrats and Republicans without progress fight and young people whine about it on the internet.” But do we even have the capability to take it seriously?
If you like, I could brainstorm some more exotic alternate futures.
In practical terms, however, I think the tech won’t be addressed until it is closer and looms in the public imagination. Same with lots of other issues.
Sorry if I was unclear (to @wirehead-wannabe too.) I mean what do you really think is a likely possibility for the 10-30 year timeframe.
A lot of decisions to pursue the normal career path don’t really make sense if you think within 20 years the world will look like a crapsack. And if you think fascism is really coming, writing easily search criticism of it is also a bad idea (same for if you really believed the Left was going to be sending enemies to the gulag.) Investing in retirement vehicles or long term assets would be absurd.
But most people don’t, and they act as if they are preparing for a life of perpetual liberal capitalism. I guess I can only think of survivalists or MIRI not fitting that, but I’m sure there are plenty of other groups putting their money where there mouth is.
What are non-liberal futures you see that you think might really happen, enough to consider life choices around?
Actually, as a combination of technological developments, lack of resource shortages so far, and the election of Trump, my estimates of the risks of global nuclear war and total collapse have gone down, even though my estimates of necessity of geoengineering have gone up. I was wanting to increase my level of survivability, and I still do to a degree, but less so now.
Which is basically the opposite of the Left’s reaction to him. But I’m a Nationalist (though I did not vote for Trump), and Trump’s election felt unreal - the Establishment was freaking out about him, even on the Right. So that meant it actually is possible to break out of the Establishment and its goals, possibly even lower the amount of unnecessary war, maybe.
If he is successful, Trump may shift the Republicans into a sort of Populist party that cares less about wedge social issues and less about raw exploitation and exporting all of the nation’s intellectual property/capital for short-term gains now. We’re seeing movement on the H1B issue, which was something big business desperately wanted, so while my estimate of environmental risks has gone down, my estimate of indestructible corporate oligarchy has also gone down (even as it went up for most leftists).
Don’t discount the possibility that Trump will be somewhat successful. His immigration plan is going to tighten the labor market, and non-citizen immigrants don’t get to vote. He also isn’t fundamentally committed to hard right capitalist policies economically.
The most probable non-liberal outcome for the United States is a military coup after some combination of factors. Leftists lack the power to conduct a violent overthrow of the government, and the power of the US military is immense. I don’t think it would be a civil war. I also wouldn’t expect the coup forces to be hard right or to be sympathetic to hard racism - rather to just continue to let racial problems go unresolved. Likewise, they wouldn’t be Communist, but probably some kind of Capitalist economic Nationalists with some eventual level of corruption. The coup would lower economic output, but probably not wipe out all savings.
(Edit: I think the coup forces might target Muslims, but I think other groups such as Hindus and Buddhists would be left alone. (People worry about Islam spreading and undermining all of society, but only worry about Hindus as competition for jobs, which is way less pressure.) One of the groups at risk are Chinese immigrants, depending on the actions of the PRC and if it becomes way more dangerous than it currently is, instead of starting to succumb to the problems it has allowed to build up. Gays probably wouldn’t be pushed on too hard since they’re already in the military, and might even be used as a justification to exclude Muslims. They are even some transgender veterans, though they would be at higher risk.)
It’s also possible that California may leave the Union for real - the difference in values is increasing. If they do, I think they’ll be let go, and maybe the rest of the West coast will follow them. In this case, the US will start to be split into multiple countries and will shift right politically without the heavy blue weight of California.
Wrapping up this weekend of posts talking about the future, I’d like to ask a question.
A few weeks ago someone pointed out that the anti-SJW crowd is so cavalier towards Trump because they can’t really imagine our country ending up anywhere to the right of where we currently are. There might be some policy change in the tax rate, but fundamentally, campus activists will be arguing for corporations and the US government to stop oppressing numerous identities, and corps and the gov will condescendingly humor them.
Which sounded accurate (especially as rightists would argue I was wrong about things, but not actually deny that particular mindset,) but it raised a broader question - can any of us imagine a significantly different future than now?
Think about the strangeness of today’s situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global [liberal democratic capitalism] is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in
[liberal democratic capitalism]
. - Zizek
So what does everyone reading this think things will look like ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? Yes we can joke a lot about potential disaster scenarios (apocalypse, Big Brother, fast takeoff, the Social Justice Internationale) but uh, seriously, what do you think that will look like? What would living in it be like?
Do you think a fascist takeover no-for-real is likely? Will there be an underground? What will happen to the internet? Will we go backwards on racial justice and if so in what ways?
On the other side, does anyone think the forces of progressivism can win? Not just keep their head above water, but actually establish enough equality to make racism and sexism less pressing issues? What the hell does that look like?
Or even if your a techno-utopian who thinks some of these life changing developments (immortality, super AI, brain upload) will happen within 30 years, what will that uptake practically look like? Will everyone in the world get it on day 1? If not, how will it be distributed? How long will it take before more than the 10% richest people in the world benefit from it? 50%? Everyone? In the interim what does a world with radically powerful technologies in only the hand of a few look like to you?
I want to be more imaginative, and have at least some idea of what a medium-term future is that isn’t just more “Democrats and Republicans without progress fight and young people whine about it on the internet.” But do we even have the capability to take it seriously?
If you like, I could brainstorm some more exotic alternate futures.
In practical terms, however, I think the tech won’t be addressed until it is closer and looms in the public imagination. Same with lots of other issues.
We must preserve the US Second Amendment so that the people will be able to buy the near-military-grade augmentations that make them remain a non-trivial threat.
Like, the obvious question is: will the price you’re willing to pay be a price you can pay? The institutions of society (including authoritarian restrictions on reproduction, if any) are going to be designed for the service of the most powerful, and agelessness will considerably widen the gap between the most and least powerful (a stricter immortality such as through hand-waving “backup” technology is actually even worse).
There’s little reason to think that there is a fundamental physical cost that is highly expensive, like with flying cars.
The rules for agelessness cannot openly be designed so that only the wealthy benefit because people have accepted democratic principles. They’ll revolt if that happens. The powerful will have to make concessions whether they like it or not.
and the “being dead is terrible in principle” element is unconvincing to me simply because we’re all still going to die in an ageless world, or even an “immortal” one, and it’s not at all clear that we’d even die later than we would in this world.
Considering that the world is still getting safer overall, I’m not sure how reasonable that projection really is.
Additionally, postponing death by 10 or 50 or 100 years is still a very big deal, and here you’re treating it like “well you’re still going to die eventually, so it’s irrelevant.” Like another 50 years to know your loved ones or fulfill your potential (with things like art) is irrelevant.
and there’s a good chance that the quality of life we’d have in that world would be drastically worse overall, because society is made for the powerful and on average the powerful now live 100 times longer than everybody else and that will have really significant effects on how society, law, and work are structured.
Your argument hinges on this, but I feel it’s overstated and don’t find it compelling.
How hard would people be willing to fight if they knew it meant a lot more than just their ordinary limited lifespan?
And how do the powerful justify and maintain their power?
Political support for things like basic income are growing. If there is a big wave of mass displacement by automation, I think it will even go through, even though it would have been unthinkable ten years ago. The reason people aren’t thinking about these problems in the mainstream is that the technology doesn’t seem plausible yet. The political landscape will change as it does.
In other words, I expect the boring liberal democracies to essentially remain as such, with some set of politically-palatable compromise solutions. Some of the elites will even believe these solutions are good ideas.
Well yes, the economic argument isn’t the strongest one. The strongest argument is that the alternative is becoming weak, helpless, and mad, followed by literal involuntary permanent nonexistence. There are very few arguments that would convince me that we should not develop immortality technology when I have a metaphorical gun to my head that can only be moved farther back by immortality technology.
You don’t find the economic argument compelling, I don’t find “really, death isn’t that bad” plus all the other arguments compelling. The price I am willing to pay for this technology is very high. My enjoyment of the future beyond the end of my lifespan is literally zero or null if it is not developed.
That price includes authoritarian restrictions on reproduction.
I can on conscious level sort of understand that some people aren’t bothered by the fact that they’re gonna die, and can even sort of understand their reasoning (and I do believe in the right of people to make choices that I consider to be shitty), but on the intuitive level this is just incomprehensible for me. But then I remember that there are plenty of women who don’t just totally buy the idea that only young attractive thin women have value and deserve respect, and everyone else must be constantly shamed into “knowing their place,” but also enthusiastically and aggressively perpetuate it. That is despite the fact they’re basically guaranteed to sooner or later enter the category of people they worthless and deserving shame. And presumably the project of stopping appearance-based shaming or at least changing your own beliefs and finding yourself an accepting community is easier than eradicating death. So defending mortality makes at least as much sense - if not more - than defending old-unattractive-shaming, and evidently people can be extremely enthusiastic about the latter.
I’m definitely in the “death is preferable to no-death” camp, and while I can’t speak for others, I can
maybe
do a bit to try to explain my own position. The first thing I should emphasize is that “not being bothered by the prospect of your own death" and “in favour of mortality as a thing” are not as tightly coupled as you’re probably supposing. As with many issues, it’s often necessary to separate large-scale social policy from personal interests. It’s also important to distinguish between death by accident, trauma, or illness and death by aging, because they’re very different things. I don’t know anyone who’s against eliminating the former, but a lot of people (including me) are wary of tinkering with senescence. Futurist critics tend to frame this as a kind of superstitious nature worship, a slavish fixation on the moral supremacy of What Is, but I find that dismissal a bit too pat.
There’s more to it, but you even if you set aside the fact that not dying is actually very, very valuable, you also have to account for the disadvantages of the current system.
For instance, it is extraordinarily expensive to raise an entire generation of people, during which time they can’t really be part of the workforce without compromising their later effectiveness, have them work for a limited time as their bodies and minds slowly degrade, spend even more money as their bodies start to fall apart all at once, then discard them and bury their bodies.
Then we do it all over again. Only it’s worse, because they have to spend one quarter of their lifespan raising children to keep this going. This not only limits investment in children, but limits time in the workforce.
The stickiness of scientific theories might be related to health degradation and loss of neuroplasticity over time.
As for social change, I’m not sure that more is always better. We’re still wrestling with changes in incentives from the sexual revolution, and while LGBTs are only a small fraction of the population and were never a threat to society to begin with, polygamy has a lot more practical trouble associated with it (like decreases in the psychological health of women and children, and incentives that lead to very early or even child marriage) and is probably next on the Progressive schedule after Transgenderism, even though normalizing polygamy is probably not a good idea. (It’s different when it’s just a few nerds doing it.)
Where does "we're legitimately afraid for ourselves and our families" fit into the narrative? Do they just not believe us?
Actual supporters of Trump correct me if I’m wrong but I think they’d say “you’re afraid because the left has deliberately promoted hysteria and fear; the things you’re afraid of aren’t going to happen”. Like, I think they legitimately do not believe that someone could be scared of Milo because they are scared he’ll say their name on stage and then they’ll be beaten or strangled or deported or murdered over it, I think they model fear of Milo as ‘the left has deliberately self-modified to find anyone who is not cowed by leftist orthodoxy terrifying’.
So yeah, they don’t believe you (or they believe that your being scared has almost nothing to do with their behavior). Unless you or your loved ones are an undocumented immigrant or a refugee, in which case I think they’d say ‘well yes I am endangering your family but I don’t have an obligation to endanger my family to protect your family”.
This is not exactly encouraging but I think it’s roughly a description of the thing.
I feel like I’m the most “AFA/classical anarchist/radical socialist/murder the 1%’ers and topple their thrones” of all the tumblr rationalists/lesswrong diaspora…
Everywhere I look are libertarians aka greywashed neo-liberalists. And I appreciate that US is a lot different from Denmark, but I have yet to hear a solid refutation of Medications on Moloch.
Things which aren’t really refutations, but may be relevant: If you think that things, while in many ways bad, are mostly getting better, and most potential bad futures are bad in either apolitical ways (or in the case of nuclear war generic instability ways), you’ll probably think that the current status quo shouldn’t be altered very much. As far as I can tell, the standard rationalist EA position is “things are mostly improving, the obvious improvements look more like ‘make more malaria nets’ than ‘bloody revolution now’, and everyone in a first-world country is baaasically the 1% anyway”.
I’d be willing to discuss this more if you like, but I’m not really sure where to start.
Edit: Also, as far as I can tell, I am not the only person with the vague uncharitable impression that “the left” is mostly “a scary threatening group that is weirdly powerful in all the IRL communities that I tend to end up interacting with”.
That seems like a good way of characterizing the situation, actually.
What I feel that I guess most others don’t, is the fact that we’re playing 1930′s musical fascism chairs again. Denmark, as you might know, was under Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1945, and it is still very much a facet of our cultural identity.
While it is true that things are mostly going forwards, I feel that shrugging and focusing on malaria nets commits what I like to call the “Karkat Vantas’ predeterminism fallacy:”
CCG: EVERYBODY, DID YOU HEAR THAT?? SUPERFUTURE VRISKA HAS AN IMPORTANT LIFE LESSON FOR US ALL. CCG: WE DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT OUR PRESENT RESPONSIBILIES AND OBLIGATIONS! CCG: BECAUSE AS IT TURNS OUT, IN THE FUTURE ALL THAT STUFF ALREADY HAPPENED. WE’RE OFF THE FUCKING HOOK!
Basically, the reason why it is getting better is that people are fighting!
And one of the things to fight for, is civil rights and liberties, and welfare, and protection of the weak, and your right to party.
So, yeah. You can save a lot of lives right now by donating to fight malaria; but if you play the apolitical game and hope for the best, Plato already schooled you on what is going to happen:
The price good men pay for indifference in public affairs, is to be ruled by tyrants.
That is, roughly, my position.
PS. Notice how “things are mostly improving, the obvious improvements look more like … than …” is one of those dangerous snow-clone type sentences. I could use that argument against malaria as well, urging people to invest in… Greenpeace campaigns against animal abuse, to name a particularly nasty example.
I appreciate your attempt at synthesis, but as a factual matter I do not think things are getting better primarily because of the efforts of activists we are sympathetic to. Whatever improvement there is in the human condition, is coming from many disparate sources.
However, I do think you hit upon the very important question that a lot of reformist vs radical discussions can reduce to: do you think things are getting better?
I can admit there are some compelling reasons to feel things are getting better. Whig History says they’ve been getting better for hundreds of years, and this should continue. We have more technology to aid us than ever before. As an aggregate matter, lives over the entire world are in a better material position than ever before. If you think the current (liberal capitalist) system is stable, then there’s a lot of reason to go with the Alexandrian stance of improve, iterate, and don’t fuck things up. The radicals are just wrong then.
… The issue is that the radicals don’t think things are getting better. As you point out we may be on the verge of a fascist takeover (perhaps leading to World War), which is probably a result of decades of neoliberal inequality heightening. I’m not sure the immediate political situation of the rise of far-right parties is the only problem, but it’s suggestive of the many problems that out of control inequality will continue to throw out until everything collapses.
And of course, if you’re willing to look outside “post Renaissance Western Europe” there are many times in human history when civilizations took prolonged steps backwards, both in terms of technology and respect for human rights. “Ever forward” is not guaranteed in the human condition.
Zizek lays out the main theme of his book dealing with the response needed to “postmodern” capitalism: “The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.”
Maybe you think that’s nonsense, but it’s a belief structure people can attach to. And under that logic, changing the fundamental rules of our society (not being certain what will replace them) is entirely reasonable.
One need only look at previous Leftist revolutions without adequately-tested plans for society afterwards, as well as prior predictions of total system collapse by Leftists to see that this probably isn’t the greatest idea. One can even see that the Capitalists did better on the environment than the Communists, even despite their systemic design towards resource consumption. So while radicals may think this is a good viewpoint, I think it’s pretty easy to conclude that without an adequately planned and tested system already prepared for after The Revolution, a revolution will just kill a whole bunch of people and significantly damage the economy without improving governance at all or helping the environment very much. Also a revolution is not going to install mere social democracy, since it has to be sufficiently radical just to be effectively carried out.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I’ve been reading right-wing media - not all the time, because the point of the exercise is understanding and past a point it just breeds exhaustion. But my impression is that the way right-wing media interprets the protests and the outrage and the fear and anger at Trump’s presidency is something like this:
The left won a lot of battles in a row, and they got used to winning every fight they got into, so they picked fights that they couldn’t possibly really care about, just to grind our faces in the dirt. And then they lost! And we won! And they are handling this with immature hysteria and obstructionism and riots, and we basically have to wade through them to put the country back on the rails, and where we fail it’s their fault and where we succeed it proves that they’re ineffectual and intellectually bankrupt and have no tactics beyond crying and complaining and calling people racist. And they’re complaining about things they were fine with under Obama so they’re not actually sincere anyway. And they still have a stranglehold nearly everywhere, but maybe now people’ll start to see through them and we’ll have a chance to roll it back.)
(Some examples of fights we ‘couldn’t possibly really care about’: making employers cover health care plans that included contraception coverage, making bakers bake wedding cakes for gay people, letting trans people use restrooms of their choice.)
And the presence of the narrative imposes a sort of filter, where things you do that make sense within it, or reinforce it, don’t get seen by half the country. Sometimes that doesn’t matter. But sometimes it really does; sometimes I want to be able to talk to the people who voted for Trump and be heard and be understood to be saying what I’m actually saying and not just ‘blah blah liberals won and won and won and can’t handle losing and are going to call you racist no matter what racist racist racist’.
So, obviously, I think this narrative is unfair in many, many ways. But what I’m really interested in right now is, what could a person do or say in order to slip past the narrative? Because it’s, well, encompassing - narratives usually are. Peaceful protests fit into the ‘the left is all bluster and whining’ arm of it and violent protests fit into ‘the left is a danger’ arm of it and no protests fit into the ‘we are the silent majority’ arm of it. And there are battles which really are worth fighting but which are trivial and silly to people sufficiently removed from them, like fights over letting trans people use public restrooms.
But narratives are not all-encompassing - the vocal opposition of Senator McCain to Trump’s conduct doesn’t fit into it at all, the conservative judges overturning Trump’s executive orders doesn’t fit into it very well, the testimony of veterans about why their translators saved their lives and deserve the opportunity to live here which they were promised doesn’t fit into it.
Those are, of course, all examples of conservatives who can challenge the narrative by already having credibility within it. I can’t think of a great way for a liberal to establish that credibility - emphasizing that you understand why they believe the things they believe was tried very loudly during the campaign, and I think it mostly totally failed (both at establishing that, and at going from ‘we understand each other’ to ‘the filter you’re seeing me through isn’t capturing what I want and what I actually want is reasonable and comprehensible and human’.)
I feel like one important project of the next few months is figuring out how to communicate past the filter, how to say things that aren’t easily sorted into the narrative, and how to build from there enough trust that our concerns and fear and anger are heard as concern and fear and anger, instead of being easy to round off as ‘they lost and they’re sore losers’. I want past the filter. I want to be able to make myself understood. And I do still think that there’s some way that can be achieved.
I know that you mean what you say, even though I disagree on a number of key policies. They don’t. There is a risk that any way of bypassing the filter will get seen as cynical political manipulation - or will end up that way since politicals will start abusing it just like they abused the term “racist”. But then, I knew about you well before the election.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".
Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.
@remedialaction: Attempting to use property that is not yours is a violation, be it by seizure, trespass, violence, or the like.
is the radio spectrum property? how about the ionosphere? global fish stocks?
Can you contain and mix your labor with it?
this a perfect setup for the most epic your mum joke of all time
Property is like free will: no internally coherent model of it is possible, because it exists only in the form of a confusion of locally-meaningful but globally-incoherent arbitrary rules, but the various rules associated with the concept have been useful enough that we get rid of it entirely at our peril.
really we need a cool name for the political ideology of “taking the democratic institutions that we have and reforming them in the direction of producing better outcomes and increasing the popular legitimacy of the system, probably via some form of basic income guarantee and more flexible way of expressing voting preferences but other options may also be worth investigating”.
This isn’t exactly what I’m after, but it isn’t that far off.
I think we can improve the organizational technology and incentives of government itself, probably through a new sort of multidisciplinary behavioral game-theory-like field.
Also prediction markets, if we can fix the holes in them.
my gut feeling is that ancapistan quickly reverts to a regular capitalist state or in the worst case feudalism, while the ancoms end up in an authoritarian state of the usual variety, although this may be avoided if the scale is very small; eg. most families, tribes, and villages are run on ancom principles already.
I think most people have this gut feeling. At least, most people who are aware these two ideologies exist.
Since 2002, the survey has also asked questions designed to tease out
respondents’ nationalism, including the degree to which they agreed or
disagreed with the following standard measures of nationalist sentiment:
“Even if I could choose any other country in the world, I would prefer
to be a citizen of China than any other country”; “In general, China is a
better country than most others”; and “Everyone should support their
government even when it is wrong.”
The paper’s headline result suggests that nationalism among Beijing’s residents has not increased over time.
On the contrary, the proportion of survey respondents strongly agreeing
with the first and third statements decreased sharply from 2002 to
2015, while the number of those who agreed “somewhat” rose. Those
strongly agreeing with the second statement, about China being “a better
country,” did increase slightly — perhaps an understandable finding
given that personal incomes and infrastructure in Beijing both improved
significantly over the survey period.
The results not only show a drop in sentiment resembling nationalism;
they strongly suggest that Chinese youth, at least those in China’s
capital, are less nationalistic than their elders, belying notions of
growing numbers of internet-addled youngsters ready to take the
government to task for any perceived failure to defend the national
honor. In each instance of the survey since 2002, respondents born after
1978 were markedly less likely to “strongly agree” with any of the
nationalist survey prompts than were their older peers. Perhaps most
striking, by 2015, the proportion of older Chinese strongly agreeing to
support their country “even when it is wrong” was more than twice the
proportion of youth who felt that way.
While it often looks like nationalism is ascendant now, sometimes it looks like it’s a last desperate gasp of a vanishing way of thinking. Can nationalism survive a population that grew up in a globally connected world?
As a Nationalist, a last, desperate gasp isn’t the way I’d put it. But then, I wouldn’t call it ascendant, either. Nationalism will fall in and out of favor as the consequences of Anti-Nationalism become apparent and then wane.
For China’s case, though, you have to consider that the PRC is incompetent, corrupt, and authoritarian. In the presence of international information, it’s going to be more difficult to cultivate Nationalism when the state, which is a key organ of Nationalism, is so highly at odds with the needs of the people.
blue-rondo said: This anon thinks that Marxist leftists aren’t also subverted by the CIA lol. Wait til these people discover who funded and backed Marx to begin with.
please don’t tell me the Soviet Union was a CIA plot to conquer Europe
For a short while, I and a few friends of mine joked that Communism was a Western plot to destroy Asia.
I’m really confused that the animosity between ancoms and ancaps. I feel like we all agree on the most important thing: that the state is bad. We just disagree on the economic system we should use after the state is removed. tbh I really don’t feel like that’s worth spending so much time arguing about when the real enemy is the statists.
One answer to this is that for ancoms any entity with the power to define and enforce property rights is a “state.“ Regardless of whether it’s a subscription or taxes , if It walks like state, quacks like a state, and enforces property rights like a state it will have to solve the same problems as a state and will crack heads like a state.
Many state policies can be replicated in Anarcho-Capitalism by adjusting who has the property at the start, only without the recourse to democracy to blunt the effects of the worst ones. I’m not even an Anarcho-Communist and it seems obvious to me why they shouldn’t be friends.
don’t ancoms need a way to “unenforce” property rights? why is that less powerful than a state?
The vibe I got was that this would be done by The Community somehow. …which basically means it is the state, only power will be more evenly distributed or something and it will dissolve afterwards when not needed?
Of course there’s a reason I’m a Nationalist not any kind of Anarchist. Naturally I don’t expect that to work. At least it’s better than Tankies though.
I’m really confused that the animosity between ancoms and ancaps. I feel like we all agree on the most important thing: that the state is bad. We just disagree on the economic system we should use after the state is removed. tbh I really don’t feel like that’s worth spending so much time arguing about when the real enemy is the statists.
One answer to this is that for ancoms any entity with the power to define and enforce property rights is a “state.“ Regardless of whether it’s a subscription or taxes , if It walks like state, quacks like a state, and enforces property rights like a state it will have to solve the same problems as a state and will crack heads like a state.
Many state policies can be replicated in Anarcho-Capitalism by adjusting who has the property at the start, only without the recourse to democracy to blunt the effects of the worst ones. I’m not even an Anarcho-Communist and it seems obvious to me why they shouldn’t be friends.
I really don’t understand white nationalists who think antebellum slavery was a good idea - even from a self-interest perspective.
Like, you guys do realise how the people you hate so much got to the Americas, right?
For people who say blacks can’t swim, you seem surprisingly convinced that we crossed the Atlantic without help.
The first White Nationalist I’ve met in a while does indeed think that the Atlantic Slave Trade was a bad idea, and roughly for that reason.
From a regular Nationalist perspective racializing slavery was also a dumb idea since it essentially created a separate ethnicity in a group that could have been fully integrated, causing expensive and politically-divisive rifts in society that last to this day, undermined the nation’s moral character, undermined national morale, etc. And that’s before even accounting for the ordinary moral damage it did in terms of unnecessary human suffering, which was enormous.
Of course if one is the kind to practice mass racialized slavery, one may not be the kind to give thought to the long term implications of mass racialized slavery on others in general.
nostalgebraist said: i don’t understand these two sentences – if they couldn’t reach him, how do they know what he said? – “Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. Yarvin said he has never spoken with Bannon.”
blatant bullshit Kremlinology, I just like the fact that Americans spend so long vetting their presidential candidates (over a year!) then once elected they immediately install a cabal of incredibly shady characters to run everything.
“oh I’d have a beer with Dubya!”
*cue Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz striding into Whitehouse in slow motion like world’s worst boyband*
Some dark part of me longs for Technocratic Dictatorship.
G-d. I am so fucking nervous about where this anti-fascist stuff's going. I feel like I'm an island in a sea of an increasingly violent left-wing culture. I lean left and libertarian. I sincerely feel that initiating the use of force is wrong. I have a kid. I don't want her growing up in the middle of a civil war or a totalitarian regime, and I feel like one or the other's inevitable. People keep telling me 'if there are Nazi sympathizers in power, why shouldn't we use violence', but no, _no_...
*hugs*
I know how you feel. I’m terrified. But I think in the coming months it’ll settle down a little as the left realises that Trump isn’t going to run away scared and the Administration realises that people are actually going to resist if they do anything egregious, and we’ll reach a lower-energy-if-still-unstable equilibrium.
I’m still not happy about anything that’s happening, though. You have all of my sympathy. Feel free to message me any time.
