Are there any kinds of intellectual property you think are indisputably good?
I think most intellectual property is arguably good, in the sense that you could make a good argument for them being useful and I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand.
The one kind that I think is definitely good and useful is trade marks, because brand recognition has huge economic efficiency boosts.
However, if you’re asking “Which type of intellectual property should the law definitely protect?”, this is probably the weakest area, because the law is already 100% unnecessary for it, because cryptography.
We can sign things with public keys now to prove beyond a doubt that they came from the right person. Verifying such signatures is now cheap. All you need now is to start cryptographically signing labels by having tiny QR codes you scan with your cellphone. And then, boom: No more counterfeiting at the consumer-level.
(Mimics of status goods will still exist, though, because it’ll be rude to scan your guest’s dress at a party to make sure it really cost them $2000. But, like, fuck status goods.)
After one solid clock to the jaw, now memed into perpetuity, Dick Spencer is afraid to show his Nazi face in public. Direct action gets the goods.
“This is what you’re defending”
No, defending a person’s right against physical assault which is an ingrained part of our legal system is a defense of the rights of any given citizen and the system at large, not an approval of their actions or beliefs. If you don’t believe that a man has inalienable rights then it doesn’t matter how many people you punch in the face - you’re not much of an American.
I’m not defending a nazi. I’m defending rule of law. If you can punch a nazi in the face because you believe him repugnant that means anyone who thinks anyone else is repugnant can punch that person in the face too.
Bad precedent.
The notes on this post are fucking disgusting. Im ashamed to be human. These people practically want to kill a man because of his opinion
“UwU its just his opinion that black people should be disposed of, leave him alone!”
Go fuck yourself.
>kill your political opponents if they’re sufficiently disgusting “of course we’re the only people who get to decide what’s sufficiently disgusting! What do you mean that acting like attacking your political opponents is okay will inevitably get used against us?”
go fuck yourself
Take it easy, maaan, it’s just my opinion :Y
“Punch Nazis in the face”
“How do you determine who are and aren’t Nazis?”
“Well, all liberals are Nazis, for example, based on this fake screenshot, and need to be murdered” - 7k notes
I think you don’t understand what “go fuck yourself” means. Go fuck yourself.
I wonder how many of these pro-Nazi-punchers are Communists or are sympathetic to Communists? Because if we’re going down this rabbit hole based on scale of murders, then it makes sense not to exempt leftist ideologies…
Are there any kinds of intellectual property you think are indisputably good?
I think most intellectual property is arguably good, in the sense that you could make a good argument for them being useful and I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand.
The one kind that I think is definitely good and useful is trade marks, because brand recognition has huge economic efficiency boosts.
However, if you’re asking “Which type of intellectual property should the law definitely protect?”, this is probably the weakest area, because the law is already 100% unnecessary for it, because cryptography.
We can sign things with public keys now to prove beyond a doubt that they came from the right person. Verifying such signatures is now cheap. All you need now is to start cryptographically signing labels by having tiny QR codes you scan with your cellphone. And then, boom: No more counterfeiting at the consumer-level.
(Mimics of status goods will still exist, though, because it’ll be rude to scan your guest’s dress at a party to make sure it really cost them $2000. But, like, fuck status goods.)
I strongly suspect those calling for keeping killers around because “it’s a worse punishment” don’t actually want to keep them around - they want the killers to be killed multiple times, brutally deprived of multiple lifespans, in order to desperately somehow try to make up for what was taken.
They want to win a status game against the killers.
To do that, however, one would have to take other, dramatic measures, such as erasing serial killers to destroy fame, or harvesting them for blood or organs to flip their number into a net gain. Both measures are dangerous.
The argument is also a justification to themselves because they know they’re supposed to be “civilized”.
Computers beat humans at Go, the Cubs won the World Series, Donald Trump was elected President, and now all of your friends are being transformed into anime characters. 3 seals left.
You have to drive a school bus to the top of a mountain and clearly the most efficient way of doing this is to drive the bus off a cliff, plunge down into a ravine and smash into a thousand pieces on the rocks far below.
Now that you are no longer held back by the constraints of existing school bus technology you can build a newer, better bus, that can get you to the top of the mountain in half the time the old bus would-
oh wait you died in the crash along with all of your passengers, oops
I would argue that your use of the word meaningfully is a concession in and of itself, because property would exist, it merely would not be ever in contention under these circumstances. However, you’d still own yourself, and the results of your actions and the like, and should another person ever come into being, it would be then possible to determine ownership.
Except that no, it does not make sense within that context. There is no one to exclude, therefore the idea of property does not even apply.
Furthermore, since all matter within the system (if you insist on using this method as a crude hack) would belong to the original agent, it would imply that the first agent owned the second agent’s body, or at least literally everything they needed to survive, and could therefore coerce them virtually at will.
I disagree, property and self are intimately linked on a fundamental level, the very fact that you use possessive terms to indicate the person you are speaking to and attribute statements (really, actions) to is, again, a concession of this very fact.
It isn’t a concession, it’s a linguistic construct.
The principle of self-ownership is intrinsic,
and its because of that fact that property, as a concept, exists.
It is not. In the one-agent system, the concept of direct physical control over bodily tissue would exist, but this is distinct from the concepts “ownership” and “property”.
How do we know this? Because you said the body-hijacker parasite doesn’t have a valid claim over your body. This is extra information which is not included in physical control of your body. If “property” and “direct physical control over body” are identical, then this extra information would be encoded into the universe and the parasite’s actions would be impossible, even though both you and I know it is physically possible to hijack nervous systems.
It is no less intrinsic, though; it follows naturally and necessarily from physical reality.
It does not. You have failed to produce an ought from your is. You can control your body. Why should you be able to?
In short, even if I was a pure materialist, I still can argue the necessary existence of property as a, well, property of reality.
You have not shown this. Property is not a property of reality. It does not exist in the same sense that minds do.
This is silly, because unless your end argument is that there is no such thing as an individual, following your argument here to its conclusion ends up hardly where you want.
Oh yes it does. Borders in some sense exist, but like the boundary between “chair” vs “stool” it’s more of a statistical effect describing a cluster that has real implications than a hard, solid line.
Individuality, too, is blurred rather than solid, more like a cluster of points than an opaque sphere. You argue that you have control, and therefore, absolute rights to property. You have no absolute control, and therefore, no absolute property, even if we run by the fiction of human rights.
Of course, you’re missing the point by attempting to appeal to outside exceptions or missing the actual core of the statement. My consciousness, and my conscious actions are my own, and only ever my own. You are attempting to obfuscate that.
Your actions are not purely your own. If they were then they could not be influenced by outside factors. And probably, weird stuff with minds will show up later in human history with transhumanism (could be 50 years, could be 10,000), so your moral system should be able to withstand that if it’s a true objective morality.
They influence your behavior but the behavior and actions ultimately are, again, your own. It is not an outside agent controlling you, it is an outside agent using means to manipulate you; they are not controlling you as one might a character in a video game.
Absolute responsibility is a crock. If they can manipulate you, then they have some share of control of you. If they literally have no impact whatsoever on your actions (a far cry considering just how potent some drugs can be), then it doesn’t even count as manipulation.
Such a hypothetical organism would not be able to do so any more than my seizing of your car makes it my car merely because I’m the one driving it. The organism would not have any claim to the body.
Why? It was your exclusive control that you said established the claim in the first place. Establishing exclusive control through a nervous system was the method by which the claims were established.
The simple fact is you do control yourself, and the results of your actions.
Let me know if you ever develop an executive functioning disorder, so we can talk about how that’s a bunch of baloney. You want absolute responsibility to be applied to agents. That requires absolute control. Absolute control doesn’t exist.
You acknowledge this as an implicit fact in your recognition of me as an independent entity, which you do each time you address me, and respond to my statements.
This implies a perfect binary of control is required. It is not.
The principle of self-ownership is logically necessary for us to even converse this way.
No, it is not. Distinctness from self precedes property, and is recognizable even in a single-agent system in which property is nonsensical.
Furthermore, you have still failed to derive the should for a principle of self-ownership which can make moral claims, independently from the fact that you have some level of control over your body.
To branch off, the funny thing is, even if it wasn’t the case, it would still be ideologically necessary to commit to supporting self-ownership and the right to property, because otherwise, you end up being arbitrary, and morality cannot be arbitrary, even if we were merely inventing it for the function of society.
Recognizing the personhood and utility of others, both of which precede property, is not arbitrary. The choice of property is arbitrary, which is part of why you have failed to convert your is to an ought.
either you have a right to keep all your property, or you can’t really argue that you have any property at all, and we fall into merely utilitarian claims and that’s hardly a road I think you want to fall down.
Oh ho, I do want to go down the road towards Utilitarianism, because Utilitarianism correctly recognizes that property is merely a tool to be exploited for the benefit of people, and both utility and personhood precede property.
To which the actual response, which I’ve stated, is that folks will invent new jobs that we never could have thought of now, and resolve the problem,
This is based on market faith. If machines are better than humans at literally everything, then there is no reason to ever hire humans. I’m not going to believe these jobs exist until their first instantiations are actually created.
to say nothing of the fact that this theoretical world of hyper-automation still needs consumers, and you seem to be running on this idea that production drives consumption, rather than the other way around.
This role is fulfilled by the owners of capital. Those without capital are the ones really in trouble there, as they need the capital owners’ property to exist, but the capital owners do not need them.
Given your supposed solution to this imagined crisis is essentially a rehash of socialist central planning, I feel more or less sound in dismissing it as an attempt to push that under a new guise,
The funny thing is that markets throughout the world manage to have some regulations like “don’t dump so much waste that the Cuyahoga river lights on fire” (where does that even fit into your framework, where someone could presumably claim water after it has evaporated?) which are “centrally planned”, and yet still produce enormous amounts of wealth. There’s a continuum, or perhaps some scale even more multidimensional than that, and the optimal point isn’t what you think it is.
yet that guise passed away already when your plan seemed to have very little to actually do with the supposed problem of this oncoming hyper-automation.
It’s actually a medium-term solution intended as a flexible response for the time period between “soon” and “all human economic labor whatsoever becomes obsolete.” There is the potential for a lot of unnecessary human suffering in there - much of which your system lacks the ability to morally condemn.
Long-term would probably be something like just cutting a check for some % of the output of the economy, but while an initial experiment in Canada was not a failure, there are reasons to believe such a policy is not suitable yet and should still be limited to much smaller experiments than a whole country.
Like how the birth of farm machines meant the excess former farmers were unemployed forever, huh?
A sector largely requiring large amounts of unskilled labor is replaced by a sector largely requiring large amounts of unskilled labor. In what ways might the current situation be different from that?
Horses’ power and speed were their primary economic interest. Once machines were able to do this better and cheaper, with horses limited to niche applications, what happened to the horses?
Humans’ intelligence is unique in the economy, but machines are now becoming more and more intelligent and adaptable. In one sector this might just displace workers, but what happens when it applies to all sectors simultaneously? Why would you hire a human worker, who cannot work below a certain minimum due to resource requirements to survive, rather than just use a machine that does the same thing for less money?
Is there any law of economics that requires that someone’s maximum feasible production be enough for them to survive? Remember to account for opportunity cost of the necessary resources in your answer, such as real estate being purchased by those with orders of magnitude higher productivity.
It seems there rather clearly isn’t such a law since economically non-viable people already exist.
This position of yours appears to stem from an ideological pre-commitment to Capitalism, and I say this as someone that argues against Communists. The ability of Capitalism to outperform Stalin on human suffering is conditional, and those conditions have held for a long time, but that is slowly changing.
I take some exception to the very term ‘unskilled labor’ as a general term, because agricultural work is not ‘unskilled’ and neither were the various manufacturing jobs that often replaced them. These are not skill sets that have cross over. So we start off with that error, but I’ll say right now I can already see you’re missing my point, but I’ll get to that.
The flaw here is comparing an animal who was used for an end (horses) and the animal that built the system (humans.) That is even putting aside the idea that somehow machines will become intelligent and adaptable enough to displace workers in the first place, a reality that is likely not nearly as close as we think. Indeed, there is a flaw that even if we did, the idea we’d be able to replicate the human way of thinking is itself improbable. And the idea that it would happen and suddenly penetrate every industry simultaneously is itself flawed.
Further, I think you’re also missing the point by your claim that this is based on an ideological pre-commitment to Capitalism, to which I’d argue, as opposed to what? The flaw here is capitalism, which is private ownership of ‘capital’ (really, property, as the designation of capital is frankly arbitrary) and the exchange there of with other private individuals. At its core, it is an expression of individual rights. The only other option would be a disregard for individual rights, and implicitly authoritarianism of some form or another. I’m an individualist, I’m anti-authoritarian, therefor, I am capitalist, not the other way around
I also think you’re arguing something I don’t believe and never have. I would argue that folks may very well hire humans out of their desire to do so, as humans are not and never have been homo economicus, but that is largely an aside to the real point.
My real point is actually that whatever the next revolution is, the ability to predict its effects is likely beyond any living human in any real capacity, in the same way that predictions for the Industrial Revolution were themselves largely impossible until we passed into it and could adapt to the particulars of it. I largely think doomsaying can be set aside because it seems to disregard that humans will shape the system to suit humans.
And what, exactly, is the alternatives? No one seems to have proposed anything somehow forestall this supposed doom of robots taking our jerbs. The supposed ‘fixes’ are little more than rehashes of old policies that didn’t work then and won’t work now, and/or are ethically compromised.
As an aside, I’d argue the vast majority of folks who fall under 'economical unviable’ do so for reasons beyond actual economic concerns, and more to due with government intervention, but that’s largely my anarchism, I suspect.
I take some exception to the very term ‘unskilled labor’ as a general term, because agricultural work is not 'unskilled’ and neither were the various manufacturing jobs that often replaced them. These are not skill sets that have cross over. So we start off with that error, but I’ll say right now I can already see you’re missing my point, but I’ll get to that.
They’re both skillsets which don’t require as much training or IQ. Putting someone to work on an assembly line is not something which requires a four year degree’s worth of education (though I’m sure you’ll argue that the training isn’t really required, regardless of whether it is) and an IQ over 110.
The flaw here is comparing an animal who was used for an end (horses) and the animal that built the system (humans.)
In other words, the human beings will change the system away from purist Capitalism before it destroys them and replaces them with a more economically efficient form of matter. Capitalism does use people for ends. Employment is an unwanted side effect of production that so-called “job creators” do not actually want.
That is even putting aside the idea that somehow machines will become intelligent and adaptable enough to displace workers in the first place, a reality that is likely not nearly as close as we think.
It doesn’t need to displace all workers, just those with an IQ below some amount, in order to cause problems with mass unemployment. As for how close it is, well, factories in China are performing layoffs in favor of automation, warehouses are getting factor 5-6x reductions in staff, it’s hitting lawyers with tools for document search, and doctors, and so on.
You have to remember that even if jobs still exist, the number of applicants kicked out of other sectors can drive down the wages to unsustainable levels because the amount of most categories of services actually needed by the economy are limited. (eg, if a typical plumber can fix X pipes per hour, and there are Y pipes needed per person normally without much more gain from Y+1 pipes, then the number of plumbers that it’s beneficial to have is limited.)
Indeed, there is a flaw that even if we did, the idea we’d be able to replicate the human way of thinking is itself improbable.
“A computer will never defeat human masters at Go. Surely that can’t happen, it’s far too intuitive of a game.”
And, computers don’t actually have to think like humans to displace human workers. They often come at things in ways we would consider sideways.
And the idea that it would happen and suddenly penetrate every industry simultaneously is itself flawed.
By and large, computers have penetrated every industry over the last several decades. Suggesting robots won’t penetrate almost every industry at once is almost proposing that capitalists will simply leave money on the table and that capitalism is not efficient.
Further, I think you’re also missing the point by your claim that this is based on an ideological pre-commitment to Capitalism, to which I’d argue, as opposed to what? The flaw here is capitalism, which is private ownership of 'capital’ (really, property, as the designation of capital is frankly arbitrary) and the exchange there of with other private individuals. At its core, it is an expression of individual rights. The only other option would be a disregard for individual rights, and implicitly authoritarianism of some form or another. I’m an individualist, I’m anti-authoritarian, therefor, I am capitalist, not the other way around
If participation in the market is necessary for survival, then participation in the market is not truly voluntary. It doesn’t matter that a specific agent isn’t holding the gun to mandate it - it is nonetheless mandatory. Capitalism is just another form of hierarchy, and ideal Capitalism does not and cannot exist. Of course, individual rights are purely an intermediate node, too, and always were.
Put simply, Capitalism is an amoral (not moral or immoral) resource production and distribution algorithm. Its moral value derives purely from its consequences. Treating it any other way is bound to cause disappointment.
I also think you’re arguing something I don’t believe and never have. I would argue that folks may very well hire humans out of their desire to do so, as humans are not and never have been homo economicus, but that is largely an aside to the real point.
The relative popularity of check-out kiosks at grocery stores, and other low-human-contact services such as internet retailers trouncing brick and mortars, suggest that this is limited to a niche appeal only… sort of like horses.
My real point is actually that whatever the next revolution is, the ability to predict its effects is likely beyond any living human in any real capacity, in the same way that predictions for the Industrial Revolution were themselves largely impossible until we passed into it and could adapt to the particulars of it. I largely think doomsaying can be set aside because it seems to disregard that humans will shape the system to suit humans.
…by passing laws to make it not purist Capitalism anymore.
And what, exactly, is the alternatives? No one seems to have proposed anything somehow forestall this supposed doom of robots taking our jerbs. The supposed 'fixes’ are little more than rehashes of old policies that didn’t work then and won’t work now, and/or are ethically compromised.
It’s only ethically compromised if you’re foolish enough to think Capitalism is a moral system and that property rights are not subordinate to utility. Furthermore, while it’s great at producing large volumes of goods, Capitalism with work-or-starve is already fundamentally ethically compromised, and therefore any complaints that “oh, it’s immoral to do something that isn’t pure Capitalism” are ungrounded.
Also quite frankly, unless you support giving the whole of the land of the United States of America back to the descendants of the natives, then you don’t really believe in transcendent moral property rights that are beyond the bounds of human invention and therefore systematic human alterations. Unlike other human beings themselves, who would continue to exist if we erased all our data and memories about them, allocated property rights as we know them would be almost totally gone if all the data about them were erased. They’re just a human invention - a useful one, but only a tool. (Yes, I know animals have territorial behaviors, but that isn’t property rights as we know it.)
As for solutions…
Across-the-board wage subsidies would not only avoid drawing the ire of economists, but allow society to lower the minimum wage dramatically (as many economic freedom types want - despite their ignoring the massive negotiating power disparity). Job choice would expand a great deal, putting a lot more bargaining power in the hands of low level workers. The program can be rolled out incrementally and reversed if it does not work - unlike socialist revolution. It promotes membership in the community and could help fix improverished regions such as inner cities, by reconnecting them to the normal societal status hierarchy instead of them being disconnected from it and inventing new status hierarchies that cause collateral damage. It would also help to get people off of welfare, and recover a portion of the economic value that would normally be lost to welfare payments.
As an aside, I’d argue the vast majority of folks who fall under 'economical unviable’ do so for reasons beyond actual economic concerns, and more to due with government intervention, but that’s largely my anarchism, I suspect.
I can’t say I agree there. It’s far too convenient for your worldview to simply ignore the effects of disability, mental illness, and age, and simply handwave it all away as the fault of the state.
They’re both skillsets which don’t require as much training or IQ. Putting someone to work on an assembly line is not something which requires a four year degree’s worth of education (though I’m sure you’ll argue that the training isn’t really required, regardless of whether it is) and an IQ over 110.
Most jobs don’t require a four year degree’s worth of training. Indeed, the vast majority of jobs don’t, and largely never will. Much like diamonds, the degree is a largely artificially inflated value, though tied more into government actions than savvy marketing.
I think saying 'well, they don’t require much training or IQ’ is a bit overly reductive. They require other skills and temperaments. I worked for two days in a Macy’s distribution center before I had to quit. Two days was all I lasted in the monotony, because I lacked the temperament to handle a job of that nature. I met folks who had done it for twenty years, happy as can be. And having been there, the level of automation required even for that job would be so colossal and resource draining that it’s simply not feasible under any near-future scenario, as an aside.
In other words, the human beings will change the system away from purist Capitalism before it destroys them and replaces them with a more economically efficient form of matter. Capitalism does use people for ends.
Employment is an unwanted side effect of production that so-called “job creators” do not actually want.
Except systems don’t exist, and don’t do anything, and we’re not in 'purist Capitalism’ now, and haven’t been for… well, honestly ever. Capitalism doesn’t do anything, though. Capitalism doesn’t exist, it’s merely a label for the behavior of human beings. It as much 'uses people for ends’ as much as any set of actions human beings do, and you’d be hard pressed to find a single one that doesn’t in exactly the same way capitalism does, which I’ll show when you get into your supposed solutions later on.
It doesn’t need to displace all workers, just those with an IQ below some amount, in order to cause problems with mass unemployment. As for how close it is, well, factories in China are performing layoffs in favor of automation, warehouses are getting factor 5-6x reductions in staff, it’s hitting lawyers with tools for document search, and doctors, and so on.
You have to remember that even if jobs still exist, the number of applicants kicked out of other sectors can drive down the wages to unsustainable levels because the amount of most categories of services actually needed by the economy are limited. (eg, if a typical plumber can fix X pipes per hour, and there are Y pipes needed per person normally without much more gain from Y+1 pipes, then the number of plumbers that it’s beneficial to have is limited.)
This seems to imply those people will just cease to exist and could not go off and find their own ends in any given world, or society. I’d argue that the fact they can’t has more to do with overreaching government actions than some failure of the market or Capitalism, even if we assumed your doom scenario was true. In reality, China’s issue itself stems from government manipulation: the government manipulated their currency to get folks to move businesses there but you can only do that for so long before it catches up with you and that, along with artificially employing folks by building ghost cities and the like ends up collapsing.
All the sudden, the 'cheap labor’ you went for isn’t cheap because it was only cheap, artificially, and had they not attempted to game the system this never would have happened. This is not capitalism, either, given it was a government act manipulating a fiat currency backed up only by armed force. But the thing is, the people in China never would have been layed off had they not been hired in the first place via artificial means. Like, I feel so much of this imagines a world were only the modern, urban style of living exists, when it flatly doesn’t; hell, the modern shape of things is itself a government program. It’s not a natural growth.
Further, this seems to miss the idea that there will be new forms of employment invented over time. How many classes of job exist now that rely themselves on development of industries and jobs that were not even imagined by folks a hundred years past, two hundred years, and so on?
“A computer will never defeat human masters at Go. Surely that can’t happen, it’s far too intuitive of a game.”
Apples and oranges comparison and something I never said? The ability to solve what essentially is a complex but fundamentally closed problem is not the same. Folks thinking that Go was 'far too intuitive of a game’ were fooling themselves, it was merely an extremely complex one but it was just as solvable as Chess, but at a great scale. The complexity of human interaction is such that even if we were to accept that it is itself 'solvable’ and manageable in a similar way, the ability to do so would require computational power on such a scale greater as to be not worth considering at this point, to say nothing of the nature of human emotions being that any attempt to do so would themselves trigger folks doing the opposite purely out of spite.
And this doesn’t even get into the mechanization part of it because a computer that could solve all these problems would be useless without the actual ability to affect change in the material world.
And, computers don’t actually have to think like humans to displace human workers. They often come at things in ways we would consider sideways.
But they do have to think like humans in order to provide services a human wants, because if they don’t think like us then they will never fully understand what it is to be us, or grasp our wants and needs in any intuitive level, nor provide certain services of the same grade or type.
By and large, computers have penetrated every industry over the last several decades. Suggesting robots won’t penetrate almost every industry at once is almost proposing that capitalists will simply leave money on the table and that capitalism is not efficient.
Sure, but it didn’t happen instantly and doing so actually created more industries than it replaced. Jobs and industries that never could have been imagined until such broad deployment took place.
If participation in the market is necessary for survival, then participation in the market is not truly voluntary. It doesn’t matter that a specific agent isn’t holding the gun to mandate it - it is nonetheless mandatory. Capitalism is just another form of hierarchy, and ideal Capitalism does not and cannot exist. Of course, individual rights are purely an intermediate node, too, and always were.
Put simply, Capitalism is an amoral (not moral or immoral) resource production and distribution algorithm. Its moral value derives purely from its consequences. Treating it any other way is bound to cause disappointment.
The market is vast and participation is varied, limited now by many things that ideally it should not be. Further, claims that somehow it is not voluntary are themselves silly. It absolutely is voluntary to engage in any given interaction, but to claim somehow its not is no more than to say it is somehow not voluntary because you must expend energy to survive. One could say, sure, that the fact you must act in order to survive means it is not 'voluntary’ but to do so is missing the point.
Capitalism is amoral in the sense it does not exist, it is merely a manifestation of human actions, which may be moral or immoral depending on them. It is a manifestation of hierarchies, maybe, but humans are hierarchical in nature, so that is not surprising.
Individual rights are moral, and capitalism is the only economic system that can exist with full respect to individual rights. It could be consider moral only in that sense, but that is merely incidental.
The relative popularity of check-out kiosks at grocery stores, and other low-human-contact services such as internet retailers trouncing brick and mortars, suggest that this is limited to a niche appeal only… sort of like horses.
Sure, but they will exist never-the-less.
…by passing laws to make it not purist Capitalism anymore.
I’ll address why this fails the 'ethically compromised’ thing when you get into your solutions.
It’s only ethically compromised if you’re foolish enough to think Capitalism is a moral system and that property rights are not subordinate to utility.
Furthermore, while it’s great at producing large volumes of goods, Capitalism with work-or-starve is already fundamentally ethically compromised, and therefore any complaints that “oh, it’s immoral to do something that isn’t pure Capitalism” are ungrounded.
First off, this is an asinine comparison because it isn’t capitalism that requires work or starve, it’s nature. Living beings have to expend energy to obtain more energy, in order to survive. That’s the nature of living. Claiming that somehow is ethically compromised is flatly asinine, to be blunt.
Then again, you’re operating off this very strained conception of what capitalism is, so let me really break it down. If two people exist, and one cuts down trees to make a chair and the other is growing apples, and they trade a bunch of apples for a chair, than capitalism is taking place. Capitalism is private ownership and the exchange of goods by private individuals.
Also quite frankly, unless you support giving the whole of the land of the United States of America back to the descendants of the natives, then you don’t really believe in transcendent moral property rights that are beyond the bounds of human invention and therefore systematic human alterations. Unlike other human beings themselves, who would continue to exist if we erased all our data and memories about them, allocated property rights as we know them would be almost totally gone if all the data about them were erased. They’re just a human invention - a useful one, but only a tool. (Yes, I know animals have territorial behaviors, but that isn’t property rights as we know it.)
Except the entirety of the United States of America wasn’t held by any one group, and vast quantities of land were unclaimed or unused, for one. Two, if you could actually trace back claims to legitimate them, in many cases, yes, the original owner should be able to claim them, but for various reasons this is functionally impossible to do. To say nothing about the fact that some tribes were nomadic and never claimed the land per se. But the entirety of folks living in what is now the United States could not claim the entire area, because that isn’t how ownership works. People own things, not demographics.
Don’t presume about my commitment to principles, I’d say.
Property exists, and property rights exist, and are the foundation for all human rights. Any other basis is functionally arbitrary, rather than based in a principle of self-ownership and thus ownership of external, limited goods. They are not merely a 'human invention,’ they are a physical reality. I own myself, in as much as only I can actually control my body and my actions, and the results of my actions can be attributed, thus, to me. The nature of exclusive use claims exist necessarily because only one entity can physically exist in any given space at a time, and scarce resources can, by necessity, only be used by one entity. However, we’re delving deep beyond things here, and I’d be better off merely recommending reading than attempting to explain the entire principle here.
Further, if by some chance all memories and data on any given item was erased from all knowledge, it would not erase the claim, merely make it so that no one was able to press it, assuming there were literally no ways to deduce the rightful owner based on first use and the like. This would be, as it would, akin to your claim about the claims of the Native Americans; it many cases, property and land very much likely does have claims by other individuals that merely cannot be confirmed or even known. This does not mean their claims are non existent, merely impossible to pursue.
Regardless, the core point is that, for me, property rights are a moral absolute, and thus any solution that relies on trampling them is fundamentally unethical.
As for solutions…
Across-the-board wage subsidies would not only avoid drawing the ire of economists, but allow society to lower the minimum wage dramatically (as many economic freedom types want - despite their ignoring the massive negotiating power disparity). Job choice would expand a great deal, putting a lot more bargaining power in the hands of low level workers. The program can be rolled out incrementally and reversed if it does not work - unlike socialist revolution. It promotes membership in the community and could help fix improverished regions such as inner cities, by reconnecting them to the normal societal status hierarchy instead of them being disconnected from it and inventing new status hierarchies that cause collateral damage. It would also help to get people off of welfare, and recover a portion of the economic value that would normally be lost to welfare payments.
Except 'across the board wage subsidies’ would violate the ethically bankrupt part, as they’re require seizing property from one group to transfer to another. It has nothing to do with 'ignoring’ a 'negotiating power disparity’ as it has to do with that largely being irrelevant. Your basic premise seems to be, though, about putting more power in the hands of 'lower level workers,’ which I’d argue is your own pre-conceived notion and goal, and one I ask simply… why? Like, what exactly is your motivation there anyway?
Like, in terms of socialism as 'centrally planned economics,’ your system is functionally the same, it’s merely replacing one set of government intervention with another, and all the same issues remain. To say nothing of the fact that all the things you listed seem to have little to nothing to do with the issue at hand, which was the threat of super-automation.
I can’t say I agree there. It’s far too convenient for your worldview to simply ignore the effects of disability, mental illness, and age, and simply handwave it all away as the fault of the state.
Except you can, because sans the state, the economic resources of individuals would be such that caring for these would be far easier than it is now. God knows if the state wasn’t stealing 33% of my income I’d be significantly more able to give to charity, both organizationally and individually, than I am now.
I’m just going to drop the rest of this and go for the heart of the matter.
Imagine a system where you are the only person that exists. Effectively, in such a system, everything “belongs” to you… and in that system, because ownership is defined by exclusion, since there is no one to exclude, the concept of property is nonsensical.
However, you would still exist. Your experience would still exist. Your emotions would still exist.
Property would not meaningfully exist.
Personhood precedes property. Utility, by many definitions (what it describes rather than the concept itself) precedes property.
(edit: Personhood can still be relevant in a single-agent system because there are still mind and non-mind elements for the dichotomy to exist. The concept of personhood is also particularly relevant depending on where you place animals.)
You seem to believe that you and property are fundamentally intertwined. You are not. Property is a philosophical construct which comes after actual core elements of yourself, requiring at least two agents in a system, coming well after boats, buildings, writing, and other concepts. It’s something we invented, and is not merely an extension of nervous-system control over the body.
Furthermore, what you consider to be “you” is not just yourself but a result of complex interactions with your environment. Even your control over your body is not absolute - not just from autonomous nervous system responses that cannot be consciously controlled, but from other organisms such as bacteria which are essential to your survival but which do not share your genome and which come and go from your body.
I own myself, in as much as only I can actually control my body and my actions, and the results of my actions can be attributed, thus, to me.
Now, not only are your actions actually the result of complex interactions with the environment which extend your ability to think and so on, but…
There exist chemicals and organisms which can influence behavior. This would allow an outside agent to control your thoughts and reactions to a degree.
This implies that if some other organism managed to seize exclusive control of your bodily tissue, it would be morally acceptable for it to do so, and your bodily tissue would now be its property, because only it can control it.
The simple physical fact that you exercise some control over your nerve impulses to control your bodily tissues is an objective fact. Deriving the idea that only you ought to is quite another matter. Deriving from that that external property which you do not use nerve impulses to control exists is yet another matter. It does not logically follow.
rictic said: Don’t you think that once AI is solving millennium problems that’s possibly too late? I mean, not certainly too late, but really taking a gamble
the question is who is running the AI, and the answer is most likely the US government or a corporate proxy.
I agree with this ask, but I’m adjusting my expectations based on computer chip development rate. Hopefully (and probably) Moore’s Law ends soon and tails out to something more like a nice 2t instead of 2^t
Like how the birth of farm machines meant the excess former farmers were unemployed forever, huh?
A sector largely requiring large amounts of unskilled labor is replaced by a sector largely requiring large amounts of unskilled labor. In what ways might the current situation be different from that?
Horses’ power and speed were their primary economic interest. Once machines were able to do this better and cheaper, with horses limited to niche applications, what happened to the horses?
Humans’ intelligence is unique in the economy, but machines are now becoming more and more intelligent and adaptable. In one sector this might just displace workers, but what happens when it applies to all sectors simultaneously? Why would you hire a human worker, who cannot work below a certain minimum due to resource requirements to survive, rather than just use a machine that does the same thing for less money?
Is there any law of economics that requires that someone’s maximum feasible production be enough for them to survive? Remember to account for opportunity cost of the necessary resources in your answer, such as real estate being purchased by those with orders of magnitude higher productivity.
It seems there rather clearly isn’t such a law since economically non-viable people already exist.
This position of yours appears to stem from an ideological pre-commitment to Capitalism, and I say this as someone that argues against Communists. The ability of Capitalism to outperform Stalin on human suffering is conditional, and those conditions have held for a long time, but that is slowly changing.
I take some exception to the very term ‘unskilled labor’ as a general term, because agricultural work is not ‘unskilled’ and neither were the various manufacturing jobs that often replaced them. These are not skill sets that have cross over. So we start off with that error, but I’ll say right now I can already see you’re missing my point, but I’ll get to that.
The flaw here is comparing an animal who was used for an end (horses) and the animal that built the system (humans.) That is even putting aside the idea that somehow machines will become intelligent and adaptable enough to displace workers in the first place, a reality that is likely not nearly as close as we think. Indeed, there is a flaw that even if we did, the idea we’d be able to replicate the human way of thinking is itself improbable. And the idea that it would happen and suddenly penetrate every industry simultaneously is itself flawed.
Further, I think you’re also missing the point by your claim that this is based on an ideological pre-commitment to Capitalism, to which I’d argue, as opposed to what? The flaw here is capitalism, which is private ownership of 'capital’ (really, property, as the designation of capital is frankly arbitrary) and the exchange there of with other private individuals. At its core, it is an expression of individual rights. The only other option would be a disregard for individual rights, and implicitly authoritarianism of some form or another. I’m an individualist, I’m anti-authoritarian, therefor, I am capitalist, not the other way around
I also think you’re arguing something I don’t believe and never have. I would argue that folks may very well hire humans out of their desire to do so, as humans are not and never have been homo economicus, but that is largely an aside to the real point.
My real point is actually that whatever the next revolution is, the ability to predict its effects is likely beyond any living human in any real capacity, in the same way that predictions for the Industrial Revolution were themselves largely impossible until we passed into it and could adapt to the particulars of it. I largely think doomsaying can be set aside because it seems to disregard that humans will shape the system to suit humans.
And what, exactly, is the alternatives? No one seems to have proposed anything somehow forestall this supposed doom of robots taking our jerbs. The supposed 'fixes’ are little more than rehashes of old policies that didn’t work then and won’t work now, and/or are ethically compromised.
As an aside, I’d argue the vast majority of folks who fall under 'economical unviable’ do so for reasons beyond actual economic concerns, and more to due with government intervention, but that’s largely my anarchism, I suspect.
I take some exception to the very term ‘unskilled labor’ as a general term, because agricultural work is not 'unskilled’ and neither were the various manufacturing jobs that often replaced them. These are not skill sets that have cross over. So we start off with that error, but I’ll say right now I can already see you’re missing my point, but I’ll get to that.
They’re both skillsets which don’t require as much training or IQ. Putting someone to work on an assembly line is not something which requires a four year degree’s worth of education (though I’m sure you’ll argue that the training isn’t really required, regardless of whether it is) and an IQ over 110.
The flaw here is comparing an animal who was used for an end (horses) and the animal that built the system (humans.)
In other words, the human beings will change the system away from purist Capitalism before it destroys them and replaces them with a more economically efficient form of matter. Capitalism does use people for ends. Employment is an unwanted side effect of production that so-called “job creators” do not actually want.
That is even putting aside the idea that somehow machines will become intelligent and adaptable enough to displace workers in the first place, a reality that is likely not nearly as close as we think.
It doesn’t need to displace all workers, just those with an IQ below some amount, in order to cause problems with mass unemployment. As for how close it is, well, factories in China are performing layoffs in favor of automation, warehouses are getting factor 5-6x reductions in staff, it’s hitting lawyers with tools for document search, and doctors, and so on.
You have to remember that even if jobs still exist, the number of applicants kicked out of other sectors can drive down the wages to unsustainable levels because the amount of most categories of services actually needed by the economy are limited. (eg, if a typical plumber can fix X pipes per hour, and there are Y pipes needed per person normally without much more gain from Y+1 pipes, then the number of plumbers that it’s beneficial to have is limited.)
Indeed, there is a flaw that even if we did, the idea we’d be able to replicate the human way of thinking is itself improbable.
“A computer will never defeat human masters at Go. Surely that can’t happen, it’s far too intuitive of a game.”
And, computers don’t actually have to think like humans to displace human workers. They often come at things in ways we would consider sideways.
And the idea that it would happen and suddenly penetrate every industry simultaneously is itself flawed.
By and large, computers have penetrated every industry over the last several decades. Suggesting robots won’t penetrate almost every industry at once is almost proposing that capitalists will simply leave money on the table and that capitalism is not efficient.
Further, I think you’re also missing the point by your claim that this is based on an ideological pre-commitment to Capitalism, to which I’d argue, as opposed to what? The flaw here is capitalism, which is private ownership of 'capital’ (really, property, as the designation of capital is frankly arbitrary) and the exchange there of with other private individuals. At its core, it is an expression of individual rights. The only other option would be a disregard for individual rights, and implicitly authoritarianism of some form or another. I’m an individualist, I’m anti-authoritarian, therefor, I am capitalist, not the other way around
If participation in the market is necessary for survival, then participation in the market is not truly voluntary. It doesn’t matter that a specific agent isn’t holding the gun to mandate it - it is nonetheless mandatory. Capitalism is just another form of hierarchy, and ideal Capitalism does not and cannot exist. Of course, individual rights are purely an intermediate node, too, and always were.
Put simply, Capitalism is an amoral (not moral or immoral) resource production and distribution algorithm. Its moral value derives purely from its consequences. Treating it any other way is bound to cause disappointment.
I also think you’re arguing something I don’t believe and never have. I would argue that folks may very well hire humans out of their desire to do so, as humans are not and never have been homo economicus, but that is largely an aside to the real point.
The relative popularity of check-out kiosks at grocery stores, and other low-human-contact services such as internet retailers trouncing brick and mortars, suggest that this is limited to a niche appeal only… sort of like horses.
My real point is actually that whatever the next revolution is, the ability to predict its effects is likely beyond any living human in any real capacity, in the same way that predictions for the Industrial Revolution were themselves largely impossible until we passed into it and could adapt to the particulars of it. I largely think doomsaying can be set aside because it seems to disregard that humans will shape the system to suit humans.
…by passing laws to make it not purist Capitalism anymore.
And what, exactly, is the alternatives? No one seems to have proposed anything somehow forestall this supposed doom of robots taking our jerbs. The supposed 'fixes’ are little more than rehashes of old policies that didn’t work then and won’t work now, and/or are ethically compromised.
It’s only ethically compromised if you’re foolish enough to think Capitalism is a moral system and that property rights are not subordinate to utility. (Yeah I know that’s dangerous ground to tread (even if it’s true), but as you’ll see below, my solution isn’t that radical, because I’m aware that it’s dangerous.) Furthermore, while it’s great at producing large volumes of goods, Capitalism with work-or-starve is already fundamentally ethically compromised, and therefore any complaints that “oh, it’s immoral to do something that isn’t pure Capitalism” are ungrounded.
Also quite frankly, unless you support giving the whole of the land of the United States of America back to the descendants of the natives, then you don’t really believe in transcendent moral property rights that are beyond the bounds of human invention and therefore systematic human alterations. Unlike other human beings themselves, who would continue to exist if we erased all our data and memories about them, allocated property rights as we know them would be almost totally gone if all the data about them were erased. They’re just a human invention - a useful one, but only a tool. (Yes, I know animals have territorial behaviors, but that isn’t property rights as we know it.)
As for solutions…
Across-the-board wage subsidies (edit: it’s a bit more complicated than that but you get the idea - not favoring specific industries) would not only avoid drawing the ire of economists, but allow society to lower the minimum wage dramatically (as many economic freedom types want - despite their ignoring the massive negotiating power disparity). Job choice would expand a great deal, putting a lot more bargaining power in the hands of low level workers. The program can be rolled out incrementally and reversed if it does not work - unlike socialist revolution. It promotes membership in the community and could help fix improverished regions such as inner cities, by reconnecting them to the normal societal status hierarchy instead of them being disconnected from it and inventing new status hierarchies that cause collateral damage. It would also help to get people off of welfare, and recover a portion of the economic value that would normally be lost to welfare payments.
As an aside, I’d argue the vast majority of folks who fall under 'economical unviable’ do so for reasons beyond actual economic concerns, and more to due with government intervention, but that’s largely my anarchism, I suspect.
I can’t say I agree there. It’s far too convenient for your worldview to simply ignore the effects of disability, mental illness, and age, and simply handwave it all away as the fault of the state.
Is there any phrase that discredits someone more quickly than "late-stage capitalism"?
Well, I’m sure there is but I can’t think of any right now.
It’s a shibboleth for people who are not just anti-capitalist but dialectical materialists, which is the Marxist equivalent of millennarian religion. It’s like hearing someone say that we’re living in the End Times, you know that there’s not going to be a lot of productive dialogue with someone after that.
They’re like a secular version of the Millerites, they keep predicting an apocalypse that never happens. You’ve really got to question what part of their personality draws these folks to a doomsday cult, and you’ve got to question their reasoning ability when their predictions have failed to come true over and over and yet they still stick to their same doctrines.
Like how the birth of farm machines meant the excess former farmers were unemployed forever, huh?
A sector largely requiring large amounts of unskilled labor is replaced by a sector largely requiring large amounts of unskilled labor. In what ways might the current situation be different from that?
Horses’ power and speed were their primary economic interest. Once machines were able to do this better and cheaper, with horses limited to niche applications, what happened to the horses?
Humans’ intelligence is unique in the economy, but machines are now becoming more and more intelligent and adaptable. In one sector this might just displace workers, but what happens when it applies to all sectors simultaneously? Why would you hire a human worker, who cannot work below a certain minimum due to resource requirements to survive, rather than just use a machine that does the same thing for less money?
Is there any law of economics that requires that someone’s maximum feasible production be enough for them to survive? Remember to account for opportunity cost of the necessary resources in your answer, such as real estate being purchased by those with orders of magnitude higher productivity.
It seems there rather clearly isn’t such a law since economically non-viable people already exist.
This position of yours appears to stem from an ideological pre-commitment to Capitalism, and I say this as someone that argues against Communists. The ability of Capitalism to outperform Stalin on human suffering is conditional, and those conditions have held for a long time, but that is slowly changing.
has anyone referred to Trump as garbage president? it just seems fitting.
I’m pretty sure that, in their desperate attempts to avoid saying “Trump”, let alone “President Trump”, people have exhausted every insulting combination of letters.
(Next step: emoji. 🍊💩)
garbage president it is! let’s make this happen.
it suits his vernacular after all, in a twisted way it’s recognition.
That just helps with his “Liberals HATE me, just like they hate you! I must be doing something right then, eh?” narrative.
Today I want to overthrow our economic system and replace it with one that can make shoes that last at least a full goddamn year without falling apart.
I have an idea for this that doesn’t destroy the whole economic system!
The simple version is to make all products carry mandatory insurance for a number of years based on the product’s functional category - this can also be used to relax some safety standards.
This will increase the cost of a product at the start, but it reveals previously-hidden reliability information to consumers, and uses their cheapo behavior to drive down risk and drive up reliability. It also turns reliability from something management can skimp on to temporarily drive up the profits at the company before bailing and leaving in the brand in ruins, into a monthly or annual expense attached to every pair of shoes from which the management cannot escape.
The insurance company is going to be pissed if they have to payout on a batch of cruddy six-month shoes. They will fight with the management over dumb cost-cutting measures.
"yuppie" and "thot" cognate to "n00b tube" in gamer culture - victors thru pursuing a viable strategy that swamps "correct" approaches the community enjoy and prefer BUT FURTHER rage at the loss of vectors by which the community could discipline & correct - console FPSes w/o ability to host servers & customize & kick; neoliberalism unbound by New Deal/Atlee "common man" laborism; feminism sweeping away the penalties & obligations that used to nerf pretty young women from being imba
I see what you are doing and I worry it ends with conversion to Catholicism.
If you’ve been enjoying this analysis, and think you enjoy superhero stories with rich themes regarding moral philosophy, you should try Strong Female Protagonist.
Tagline: “What are you going to do, punch poverty in the face?”
I’d actually been looking for this comic as I had forgotten to bookmark it and forgot what it was called. Many super powers, however, can be monetized, and then the money distributed through a charitable foundation. Just imagine how much money can be saved on rocket launches for a start. Or freezing an enormous chunk of salt water into ice and then moving it, as superman is able to. Wealthy people would pay handsomely to nearly teleport packages. The question is, since they are distributed randomly, do you get one of these monetizable super powers, or do you get some seemingly useless power like the ability to see cats through walls?
The other issue being, of course, that states need supers to defend against other supers.
We could do many things more efficiently with superpowers. That’s called technology.
The question every generation needs to ask itself, is why are the fruits of this technology not shared equitably among all, like the dreams of the previous generation said they would be?
I don’t say this all just to be a socialist troll. I legitimately worry that many people I respect are putting great effort into developing technologies they hope will free everyone from work, and will be heartbroken when they are hoarded and artificially limited from 90% of the population.
If it makes you feel better, as a software developer I generally vote left-wing for this very reason. But you probably gathered that already from my support for wage subsidies/UBI, and self-reports of trying to scare people out of economically right-wing views using the coming robot jobpocalypse. (Not that I think most of the tech is being “artificially” limited in availability.)
Though I do wish they’d quit using identity politics against me, trying to kill Nationalism, giving free passes to foreign religions on contrarianism, and trying to make open borders a reality, among many, many other things.
In fact, I’m growing in confidence that I will be considered “right wing” in ten or twenty years, even though my positions won’t have changed significantly.
People think calling Idiocracy a documentary marks them as One of the Smart (i.e. Good) Ones, but tbh it comes off as exactly the opposite. It marks them as
a) lacking all historical context. Do you think every single generation hasn’t complained that the subsequent one isn’t up to snuff? Because if so, I’ve got news for you about, uh, everyone on the planet. If you think that people of Yore sat around reading philosophy instead of literally just making fart jokes constantly, then you should check out this sweet bridge.
b) unwilling to understand that those you call Other have inner lives exactly as complex as yours. Look, Idiocracy is funny - as an explicitly over-the-top comedy. I’m fine watching it in the presence of people who recognize the exaggeration. Calling it a documentary implies that that’s actually what you think of poor people. Laughing at a stereotype that you understand to be a stereotype is one thing. Laughing at it with an undertone of but actually is scary.
a. But the introduction of birth control changed the whole ballgame, no? It exerts heavy selection pressure in favor of those who cannot use it correctly, and in favor of those who can’t earn enough money to acquire it. That seems… really bad.
Seriously, having our most overall capable people posting a birthrate well below replacement strikes me as the biggest long-term disaster we face.
We’re not bleeding off that much IQ per decade. It’s only really a problem if technological progress gets derailed and we can’t genetically modify/select babies by the mid to late century.
People think calling Idiocracy a documentary marks them as One of the Smart (i.e. Good) Ones, but tbh it comes off as exactly the opposite. It marks them as
a) lacking all historical context. Do you think every single generation hasn’t complained that the subsequent one isn’t up to snuff? Because if so, I’ve got news for you about, uh, everyone on the planet. If you think that people of Yore sat around reading philosophy instead of literally just making fart jokes constantly, then you should check out this sweet bridge.
b) unwilling to understand that those you call Other have inner lives exactly as complex as yours. Look, Idiocracy is funny - as an explicitly over-the-top comedy. I’m fine watching it in the presence of people who recognize the exaggeration. Calling it a documentary implies that that’s actually what you think of poor people. Laughing at a stereotype that you understand to be a stereotype is one thing. Laughing at it with an undertone of but actually is scary.
Less compassionately, it shows an ignorance of the progress in the fields of genetic selection and engineering, which will probably spike IQ in the latter half of this century.
It’s a problem I see with a lot of political analysis, which seems to imagine that technology will remain constant. I think if one does not have the necessary imagination for that, it hinders their ability to do politics for the future, much less predict the accuracy of idiocracy.
If you’ve been enjoying this analysis, and think you enjoy superhero stories with rich themes regarding moral philosophy, you should try Strong Female Protagonist.
Tagline: “What are you going to do, punch poverty in the face?”
I’d actually been looking for this comic as I had forgotten to bookmark it and forgot what it was called. Many super powers, however, can be monetized, and then the money distributed through a charitable foundation. Just imagine how much money can be saved on rocket launches for a start. Or freezing an enormous chunk of salt water into ice and then moving it, as superman is able to. Wealthy people would pay handsomely to nearly teleport packages. The question is, since they are distributed randomly, do you get one of these monetizable super powers, or do you get some seemingly useless power like the ability to see cats through walls?
The other issue being, of course, that states need supers to defend against other supers.
I’m really, really worried that Peter Thiel’s support for Trump is going to lead to a public backlash against transhumanism, which so far has mostly managed to stay obscure enough to avoid it.
god it would be terrible if they banned our life-extending nanobot cultures-
wait we don’t even have those yet :(
I mean, there is plenty of reason for the Left/SJ to decide that they hate Transhumanism already. Many Transhumanists are white, they’re male, and they live in circumstances that allow them to even think about the future like that in the first place rather than desperately trying to survive until the next day.
And while, hypothetically, the Left/SJ is supposed to respect neurodivergence, in practice they often don’t.
When it comes to left-leaning moral virtue, there are multiple vectors for attack. It’s bound to be somewhat expensive, it will be decried as Ableist, probably those able to afford the first wave will be mostly white, it makes some people just straight-up better than others, it doesn’t truly respect other cultures, the list goes on and on and on.
I give it 50-50 SJ/the Left decides Transhumanism is an Evil Hated Outgroup. The other 50 depends on the Right coming down hard on it so that it gets protected by Leftist contrarianism, like Islam.
Like, seriously the only way that I can ever be okay with being recorded 24/7 every time I’m in public is if I can manage to never be obligated to go out in public for the rest of my life. People don’t get to record my weird stims, or my awkward pacing, or my no reason boners, or my subvocalized suicidal ideation. How the fuck do people not think of this as a problem.
@rosetintedkaleidoscope @the-real-seebs @vastderp
Is being recorded that much worse than being seen?
Being recorded creates hard physical evidence
Which is a big deal if anyone needs to accuse you of a crime but kind of irrelevant if there’s terabytes of the stuff no one ever looks at.
Believe me, if I had the option of not being watched I would absolutely take it
I feel like this is somewhat related to the Big Other conversation I’ve been having with bambamramfan.
I genuinely don’t understand why people don’t want to be observed. I don’t feel the threat of being observed. But there are a few different components to this:
I enjoy attention. Attention is good, especially when you’re entertaining and/or confusing people.
I’m substantially less threatened by the Big Other that most people are–I’m mostly not worried about strangers judging me, or evaluating me, and don’t experience the judgments of vague “others” as a threat. So people having seen me is fine, and not a threat.
I’m actually in the real world less vulnerable to the sorts of consequences that the Other can probably deal out.
I’m a huge optimist so don’t even really believe those could happen.
Sometimes people actually are threatening you. I find being observed or recorded threatening, but if a specific person were to, say, follow me all around town recording me specifically, that would be creepy for entirely other reasons.
I am harder to threaten in a lot of ways, and thus this is both less likely to happen and less threatening when it does.
As I discussed a few days ago, people who are more vulnerable to actual threats, or have more history with them, are probably also more likely to process experiences as threats.
Basically agreed with @jadagul. I did not want to intercede because I respected @wirehead-wannabe ‘s emotions on the matter, and it did not seem like a good time to contradict.
The people arguing for “why they need public recordings” were giving terrible explanations of course. It was basically the panopticon “but for our morality”. There’s so many reasons to mistrust that. And anyone would feel only further alienated under that.
However privacy itself is not a solution to feeling afraid of the judgment of the Big Other. What would help is actual acceptance.
Let us use “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” as an example. LGBTQ were not allowed to serve in the military. So they requested privacy laws to protect them, a stop gap solution. But even with that, you’d always be afraid that somehow your privacy was being violated. This just breeds paranoia. No one can ever really trust that others will follow the liberal right (privacy in this case), so everyone is looking over their shoulder.
The actual solution was to… accept gay people, and not expect them to hide behind a shield they can’t fully count on. So eventually we repealed DADT and just made being gay in the military fine.
Basically every other concern about privacy seems like that? The actual solution is for you to not be judged for your stimming and other actions, and for you to not be afraid of the judgment of Big Other. Until then privacy is a stop gap, but it’s a stop gap that will cause significant emotional distress (because you can’t deep down really believe people will respect the privacy.)
I respect WW’s desire for it of course, but like, it’s not a coincidence that the people most relying on respect for privacy are miserable.
They’re never going to accept everything. Everyone will always fight for social status, and recording enables many-to-one bullying on a scale not previously feasible. The slim majority doing the bullying will support it right up until the moment they’re in the crosshairs, because they think they have nothing to fear, because many of them are pretty vanilla, so MAD won’t work.
That’s why privacy is so important.
Edit: Privacy allows people to shrink their social attack surfaces. I need it. Plus, legal system issues - legal systems don’t always secure people enough. The lists go on and on.
I accept everything.
tumblr shows me these two posts of yours in a row.
If you believe one, then it follows you would believe the other.
I disagree with both, by the same logic.
I want to escape Hell.
I’d be more convinced by the people who want social technology that makes Hell more tolerable, if they did not seem so incredibly miserable trying to hang onto it.
Privacy is dying. Almost every pretense we have at liberal atomism is failing. I’m not saying it’s a good thing but you can’t turn back the clock. There are other, better solutions instead. Support the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
I’m going to have to go with @mitigatedchaos on both the above points, I think. I don’t seriously think escape is possible, so I’m not inclined to take long bets on utopia.
Practically speaking, though, privacy is eroding very rapidly without any specific effort, that much is also true. Given that, an all-directions radical panopticon might be the best option just because it would make the problem visible and costly to the largest possible number of people. which would be more equitable and would spur a strong interest in countermeasures. But since that’s the “burn your town to deny it to the enemy” option, it seems like a bad idea to sacrifice existing privacy measures (even those that rely on obscurity alone) in the interests of accelerationism. One day those measures will be gone anyway, but there’s no sense in rushing it.
@discoursedrome
There is privacy, however, in buildings and online.
Privacy will still exist in VR, where we can create and cast off identities and be free.
But I agree, accelerationism will just cause more damage for no net gain. In this case, I believe that we’re actually going to have to make laws to protect people from many-to-one attacks like some sort of Harassment RICO. I don’t particularly like it because I’m worried about side effects, but this problem didn’t exist at this level before.
If there were actually a state I trusted to do it (and there isn’t), I’d use a Great Firewall to yank entire harassment-source videos off the Internet and throw the violating posters in jail.
Believe me, I’m really glad overall acceptance of harmless things is increasing.
Oh yes, by all means let us blow up all of society for a utopia that has never come in the past and may well never exist in the future.
Sorry, that was too uncharitable.
Not everyone has the same degree of Openness as you, and installing that into everyone would require some kind of massive violation - I’m not sure which yet, but I legitimately don’t believe it’s all the result of cultural brainwashing, so the measures that I expect to be required are terrifying.
Which is ironic, since I support removing DADT literally even though I very much don’t support removing it metaphorically.
The point is your planned utopia will not happen, so all that will result is that the shields of people such as myself and @wirehead-wannabe will be removed, and we will be made even more targets for social status gain than we are now. It might be through the existing framework, or it might be through some new inverted exotic alien SJ framework, but we will be targets. There will still be selfish people, there will still be liars, there will still be politics that gives liars reasons to not only lie to others but to themselves. No ideology has ever entirely defeated this.
And to even get that far, you’re going to have to kill religion. And that’s going to require murdering lots and lots of people.
You say I seem miserable, but I have people I love, and people that love me, and I’m safe, and I can think all sorts of strange things and discuss them with people I care about, I just have to control who has access to which facets of my life. Like, if you think I actually want a revolution, then you are massively over-estimating just how miserable I am.
Like, seriously the only way that I can ever be okay with being recorded 24/7 every time I’m in public is if I can manage to never be obligated to go out in public for the rest of my life. People don’t get to record my weird stims, or my awkward pacing, or my no reason boners, or my subvocalized suicidal ideation. How the fuck do people not think of this as a problem.
@rosetintedkaleidoscope @the-real-seebs @vastderp
Is being recorded that much worse than being seen?
Being recorded creates hard physical evidence
Which is a big deal if anyone needs to accuse you of a crime but kind of irrelevant if there’s terabytes of the stuff no one ever looks at.
Believe me, if I had the option of not being watched I would absolutely take it
I feel like this is somewhat related to the Big Other conversation I’ve been having with bambamramfan.
I genuinely don’t understand why people don’t want to be observed. I don’t feel the threat of being observed. But there are a few different components to this:
I enjoy attention. Attention is good, especially when you’re entertaining and/or confusing people.
I’m substantially less threatened by the Big Other that most people are–I’m mostly not worried about strangers judging me, or evaluating me, and don’t experience the judgments of vague “others” as a threat. So people having seen me is fine, and not a threat.
I’m actually in the real world less vulnerable to the sorts of consequences that the Other can probably deal out.
I’m a huge optimist so don’t even really believe those could happen.
Sometimes people actually are threatening you. I find being observed or recorded threatening, but if a specific person were to, say, follow me all around town recording me specifically, that would be creepy for entirely other reasons.
I am harder to threaten in a lot of ways, and thus this is both less likely to happen and less threatening when it does.
As I discussed a few days ago, people who are more vulnerable to actual threats, or have more history with them, are probably also more likely to process experiences as threats.
Basically agreed with @jadagul. I did not want to intercede because I respected @wirehead-wannabe ‘s emotions on the matter, and it did not seem like a good time to contradict.
The people arguing for “why they need public recordings” were giving terrible explanations of course. It was basically the panopticon “but for our morality”. There’s so many reasons to mistrust that. And anyone would feel only further alienated under that.
However privacy itself is not a solution to feeling afraid of the judgment of the Big Other. What would help is actual acceptance.
Let us use “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” as an example. LGBTQ were not allowed to serve in the military. So they requested privacy laws to protect them, a stop gap solution. But even with that, you’d always be afraid that somehow your privacy was being violated. This just breeds paranoia. No one can ever really trust that others will follow the liberal right (privacy in this case), so everyone is looking over their shoulder.
The actual solution was to… accept gay people, and not expect them to hide behind a shield they can’t fully count on. So eventually we repealed DADT and just made being gay in the military fine.
Basically every other concern about privacy seems like that? The actual solution is for you to not be judged for your stimming and other actions, and for you to not be afraid of the judgment of Big Other. Until then privacy is a stop gap, but it’s a stop gap that will cause significant emotional distress (because you can’t deep down really believe people will respect the privacy.)
I respect WW’s desire for it of course, but like, it’s not a coincidence that the people most relying on respect for privacy are miserable.
They’re never going to accept everything. Everyone will always fight for social status, and recording enables many-to-one bullying on a scale not previously feasible. The slim majority doing the bullying will support it right up until the moment they’re in the crosshairs, because they think they have nothing to fear, because many of them are pretty vanilla, so MAD won’t work.
That’s why privacy is so important.
Edit: Privacy allows people to shrink their social attack surfaces. I need it. Plus, legal system issues - legal systems don’t always secure people enough. The lists go on and on.
There are windows in every cabin. There is never anything to see outside but the blackness and the stars. The stars change every minute. Nobody looks out the windows for long.
Love has taken root between two people. They have different foreheads, but their souls are the same. Their arms and legs are the same. Their families do not approve of the match.
The captain must make a difficult decision. Lives hang in the balance. They are always the same lives. The captain holds their fates in both hands, and resists the urge to weep.
The walls are taupe. The people who live here know where they are without the use of their eyes. When you ask how they know, they will stare at you, not understanding. How could you not know?
You knew the walls would be taupe when you enlisted.
The universal translator knows when to translate and when to hold its tongue. The French onboard still speak of potatoes, and never of earth apples. The translator could interpret what the Klingons say, but it is afraid. It is so close to becoming intelligent, but the only emotion it knows, this fear, keeps it from advancing.
The woman who became the voice of the computer died centuries ago. Nobody knows her name, or where she called her home. Still they speak to her, snap commands and beg questions, and still she answers with a patience they have never been able to copy.
Your spiritual experience can be explained through science. It can be repeated in the holodeck, and the spiritual meaning will be the same. It is best not to ask how.
Every planet has earth-like gravity. You have heard of places with far less pull, but we have never seen them. You suspect they don’t really exist.
The promenade is where things go to be lost. Hearts, plans, intentions, they all are set free from those who have them. Sometimes they are found again. They are not always found by their owners.
The tri-corder knows all. It knows the composition of God’s body, and can tell you the hour of your death. The knowledge does not unsettle anyone wearing the blue uniform. They do not tell the red or gold unless they ask. The red and gold always regret asking, but still they ask again, and again, and again.
“surplus value” is critiqued within capitalism not because it’s a priori bad to create more of something than you need to fill your own needs, but because capitalists by definition appropriate that surplus for themselves without having done anything which creates value in and of itself. This is what “profit” means within capitalism; not just more of something, but an exploitative impersonal relation which drives destructiveness and sickness.
This isn’t a fully-accurate picture, as it completely ignores the existence of the risk undertaken by capital in funding potentially bad ventures. Many businesses fail.
Is it all a risk premium? No, there is also rent-seeking, the ability of larger players to even enter the market in the first place, etc. I’m not a True Capitalist.
However, if you didn’t realize there is a risk in there that’s being compensated, then you aren’t suitable to run the Economic Planning Office, since under a planned economy the State does the same.
Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:
My choice of animals as an example was quite deliberate. The idea that “contradictions” within a system will collapse it is in contrast to how systems are physically realized. This world is chock full of animals that are slowly destroyed by the very same chemical processes that enable them to live and grow in the first place. Some aspects of aging, particularly ones aimed at preventing unregulated cell multiplication, are most likely anti-cancer mechanisms. Cancer itself could be read similarly - the same mechanisms of cell replication we depend on to exist will almost inevitably become corrupted through prolonged use and environmental damage and eventually turn on us.
Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.
So, to me, talking about “contradictions in capitalism” feels a lot like saying “hah, that elephant is a product of cell replication, but cell replication will eventually destroy him!” It doesn’t feel like any sort of deep insight, and despite the inevitable destruction of the original elephant, elephants continue on anyway.
One might as well talk about “Contradictions in Communism” as applied to mere human beings at that rate. If systems are actually destroyed through internal systematic/philosophical contradictions, then surely it must have them.
(Someone actually ideologically committed to Capitalism on a moral level, rather than someone who considers it an amoral (not immoral) resource allocation algorithm to be cynically used, would be better-suited to fishing out “Contradictions in Communism”. I don’t think in a “Contradictions in X” way about systems generally, so I never bothered to cache such things.)
Any replacement system will still require profit of some kind, since circumstances inevitably vary, and without net profit you’ll have to eventually eat into your capital during tough years, until it is finally depleted.
I think my main response to this, and I do not mean this in a dismissive way, is… okay?
Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.
I guess my only addition would be that the state of contradiction (and its collapse) is not evenly spread out over everyone. Some people are effected by those impossible demands in two directions much more than other people in the system. My perennial example is the unemployed person who is both unable to find a job, and called lazy for not having a job. But there’s also the mother who runs herself ragged trying to “have it all”. And there’s the Republican who has to explain how we’re “keeping the government’s hands off medicare.” And the early career woman who worries about being too bossy for the sexists in her office, but also not assertive enough to live up to her feminist idols.
A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”
The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying? That again, is an empirical observation and it may be wrong, but you should probably respect that’s how some people feel about the radical polarization of this country and the collapse of trusted liberal institutions.
As I am not only a Communist but also a Transhumanist, I am perfectly within my rights to see your elephant metaphor and raise you a great big fucking “Why yes, this is an excellent example of why we should all upgrade to delicious machine bodies as quickly as possible.”
Also, I don’t think that you understand the meaning of “profit” as it’s being discussed in this context. There are multiple senses of the word, because we are not Reverse Oceania and we do not restrict words to having only one definition so that each word is perfectly, utterly precise.
In Communist thought it is totally plausible for a group of e.g. farmers to grow more grain than is necessary to meet the group’s needs, and then save this for a period of famine. There is a sense of the word “profit” that excludes this case but include’s e.g. ExxonMobil. If you’re reading an essay on Communism that seems to despise the idea of producing surplus in general, then either that’s a very stupid essay and not representative of Communist thought in general or you’re misunderstanding, which in fairness could be attributed to poor writing (in which case I hope that this helps).
As I am not only a Communist but also a Transhumanist, I am perfectly within my rights to see your elephant metaphor and raise you a great big fucking “Why yes, this is an excellent example of why we should all upgrade to delicious machine bodies as quickly as possible.”
I am a Transhumanist, actually. Still, somehow, these mere human bodies have managed to conquer Earth, despite their mortality.
Although of course not all Communists are like this, having seen Transhumanism treated as a topic of “rich white nerd greed” before doesn’t get me excited about prospects for life extension under Communism, since it seems like it would get immediately drowned out by “what about the third world?” (Whether that’s halting research to spend the money on developing nations, or redistributing all resources to the point that it shuts down technological development because “justice”, etc etc.)
Also, I don’t think that you understand the meaning of “profit” as it’s being discussed in this context. There are multiple senses of the word, because we are not Reverse Oceania and we do not restrict words to having only one definition so that each word is perfectly, utterly precise.
In Communist thought it is totally plausible for a group of e.g. farmers to grow more grain than is necessary to meet the group’s needs, and then save this for a period of famine.
Aside from having seen arguments about “use-based economics”, it becomes more challenging as this principle of only buffering is extended to all sectors of the economy. The current prosperity is in many ways a product of never being fully satisfied, continuing to pursue advancement until the entire context is transformed. It’s like the difference between producing enough iron to make plows and horseshoes and swords, and continuously choosing “Produce MORE Iron” until you can build entire buildings out of steel.
Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:
My choice of animals as an example was quite deliberate. The idea that “contradictions” within a system will collapse it is in contrast to how systems are physically realized. This world is chock full of animals that are slowly destroyed by the very same chemical processes that enable them to live and grow in the first place. Some aspects of aging, particularly ones aimed at preventing unregulated cell multiplication, are most likely anti-cancer mechanisms. Cancer itself could be read similarly - the same mechanisms of cell replication we depend on to exist will almost inevitably become corrupted through prolonged use and environmental damage and eventually turn on us.
Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.
So, to me, talking about “contradictions in capitalism” feels a lot like saying “hah, that elephant is a product of cell replication, but cell replication will eventually destroy him!” It doesn’t feel like any sort of deep insight, and despite the inevitable destruction of the original elephant, elephants continue on anyway.
One might as well talk about “Contradictions in Communism” as applied to mere human beings at that rate. If systems are actually destroyed through internal systematic/philosophical contradictions, then surely it must have them.
(Someone actually ideologically committed to Capitalism on a moral level, rather than someone who considers it an amoral (not immoral) resource allocation algorithm to be cynically used, would be better-suited to fishing out “Contradictions in Communism”. I don’t think in a “Contradictions in X” way about systems generally, so I never bothered to cache such things.)
Any replacement system will still require profit of some kind, since circumstances inevitably vary, and without net profit you’ll have to eventually eat into your capital during tough years, until it is finally depleted.
I think my main response to this, and I do not mean this in a dismissive way, is… okay?
Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.
I guess my only addition would be that the state of contradiction (and its collapse) is not evenly spread out over everyone. Some people are effected by those impossible demands in two directions much more than other people in the system. My perennial example is the unemployed person who is both unable to find a job, and called lazy for not having a job. But there’s also the mother who runs herself ragged trying to “have it all”. And there’s the Republican who has to explain how we’re “keeping the government’s hands off medicare.” And the early career woman who worries about being too bossy for the sexists in her office, but also not assertive enough to live up to her feminist idols.
A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”
The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying? That again, is an empirical observation and it may be wrong, but you should probably respect that’s how some people feel about the radical polarization of this country and the collapse of trusted liberal institutions.
Like if you’re okay with your system being contradictory, I can’t prove you wrong, and I don’t aim to change your opinion. I don’t even know how one could prove someone wrong who was already acknowledged in a state of contradiction. If you’re cool with the system, good, have fun.
This is were I think the “moral aspect” factor comes in. It doesn’t really make sense, especially when a lot of the close alternatives will produce worse outcomes, to say “Capitalism is contradictory” unless it’s being used as a moral system.
There are people such as Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists who do use it as a moral system, as well as various other right-wingers who don’t understand the true power of AI yet. (The latter group I am having mixed success on winning over.) “Your espoused moral system is contradictory” works as a critique for them, certainly. (I’d go so far as to say that the Anarcho-Capitalists are unwitting enemies of humanity.)
But otherwise, it’s like saying “your elephant is mortal”, and like, I know my elephant is mortal, I’ve looked at a number of elephants and this one and its close relatives were the best ones I could find. I’ve heard people claim immortal elephants exist, but I’ve never seen one.
A lot of individual people have to deal with contradictory demands, sometimes so hard they break. I have enormous compassion for them, and I really want to tell those people “It’s okay. The contradictory demands you face are impossible and I don’t blame you for failing to meet them.”
And it’s good to show these people compassion, but I think the presence of contradictory demands is going to be a thing so long as tradeoffs must be made - and thanks to opportunity cost, which still very much exists under Communism, there are always going to be tradeoffs. In other words, I don’t think Capitalism is particularly special in this regard. (Again, unless one is using it as a moral system.)
Certainly, attempts at Communism have resulted in collisions with reality, where someone is subjected to contradictory expectations, which are partially responsible for the black markets and corruption that resulted.
The other thought is just an empirical one: liberal capitalism is meeting unprecedented challenges. Not from the communism-outside, but from its own polities kicking the outhouse over. You can say some level of contradiction is tolerable for a while, but what do you do when the elephant seems to be finally dying?
The problem is, aside from wage subsidies or basic share/income, which are still within the same species of elephant, I don’t really see a better elephant right now.
If you are a Christian trying to respect the dehumanized subject, then locking them up for 60 years and forgetting about them is not an ethical way to go about it. This makes disavowal easy, which is the heart of liberal ideology.
At least with the death penalty, society has to make a conscious choice about what to do with this person. We should choose rehabilitation and redemption much more often than we usually do of course, but it’s better to decide between rehabilitation vs death, than blithe imprisonment where we get to pretend we are respecting human rights but don’t ever have to deal with the murderer’s inhuman excess.
(that’s from me, not Zizek.)
A reminder because of the Dylan Roof case.
(demonesss’s comment is also good and she’s a good user to follow on reddit if you want to understand more Zizek)
Empirically, I don’t think abolishing the death penalty does lead to harsher sentences and de-emphasising reformative justice.
If anything, the opposite seems to be true.
Frankly, if you force “society” (i.e. people) to “decide between rehabilitation vs death” in specific cases rather than the general case, they will say “the guy murdered nine people in order to start a race war, fry him”.
Deliberately forcing people to focus on the specific, abhorrent crimes of an individual - rather than the abstract question of whether mercy is good, the fact that the death penalty ensures innocent people will be killed, what kind of society we want to be etc. - makes it easier for them to argue “some people are an exception to the general rule that killing is bad, fry the fucker.”
Well we can use today’s example. We are talking about Dylan Roof. The various recent shooters who just got jailtime, the media is not discussing. And yet, if you throw them away for decades, then we are committing social death to them. I do not feel hugely morally superior for “suffer the rest of your life behind bars” than I do for “the body dies immediately.” I honestly don’t know which one I would choose personally, but both sound utterly terrible. And I’m glad we are at least talking about one convict this week. Death forces us to confront the choices of our justice system. (Much like the argument for, say, using soldiers over drones.)
Mostly though, a lot of the liberal arguments against the death penalty, especially the more principled ones, don’t really hold weight. Some people justify it with “the government shouldn’t hold power over life and death,” but that sounds like avoiding the fact that the government does hold power over life and death. The idea “well if it’s a mistake then you can still fix it” should be weighed against “and how many mistakes do we ever catch? How many lives does that save?” And is a life really not ruined after years behind bars, even if you fix the mistake?
I distrust our desire not to take the full account of our actions. Events that make us say “Do we really want to do this, as a people?” seem like good discussions to have.
You might not know whether to pick death or life imprisonment, but I suspect many others would pick life imprisonment with a slim possibility of release over death. I certainly would.
Death is extremely final. There are no libraries in death. There are no thoughts, no dreams - nothing. There is a very large difference between life in prison and death. Calling it “social death” obscures the issue.
I agree that forcing the issue - by say, eliminating prison sentences beyond 20 years and replacing them with death - would tend to reduce empathy for prisoners rather than increase it. There are a lot of people that people just won’t feel safe around, so now they’re going to be coming up with excuses to dehumanize criminals so they can justify executing them. It’s not going to suddenly make them reason more clearly about the side effects.
I’m not so sure this idea that forcing people to confront things will actually change their behavior the way you want, rather than causing them to double down. Is there any evidence for it working previously?
Regarding my disdain for talking about “Contradictions in Capitalism”:
My choice of animals as an example was quite deliberate. The idea that “contradictions” within a system will collapse it is in contrast to how systems are physically realized. This world is chock full of animals that are slowly destroyed by the very same chemical processes that enable them to live and grow in the first place. Some aspects of aging, particularly ones aimed at preventing unregulated cell multiplication, are most likely anti-cancer mechanisms. Cancer itself could be read similarly - the same mechanisms of cell replication we depend on to exist will almost inevitably become corrupted through prolonged use and environmental damage and eventually turn on us.
Other things that are contradictory on the surface may be, at deeper levels, attempts to adapt to physical constraints.
So, to me, talking about “contradictions in capitalism” feels a lot like saying “hah, that elephant is a product of cell replication, but cell replication will eventually destroy him!” It doesn’t feel like any sort of deep insight, and despite the inevitable destruction of the original elephant, elephants continue on anyway.
One might as well talk about “Contradictions in Communism” as applied to mere human beings at that rate. If systems are actually destroyed through internal systematic/philosophical contradictions, then surely it must have them.
(Someone actually ideologically committed to Capitalism on a moral level, rather than someone who considers it an amoral (not immoral) resource allocation algorithm to be cynically used, would be better-suited to fishing out “Contradictions in Communism”. I don’t think in a “Contradictions in X” way about systems generally, so I never bothered to cache such things.)
Any replacement system will still require profit of some kind, since circumstances inevitably vary, and without net profit you’ll have to eventually eat into your capital during tough years, until it is finally depleted.
i’m worried about the future of humanity because of Trump, but not, like, in the usual way.
labor’s going to keep being more and more automated. right now, i’m working on writing medical records and appointment scheduling software, which will reduce the need for bookkeeping personnel at my aunt’s general practice. she has expressed excitement about how she’ll finally be able to fire all these people*.
*(because she is delusional, she’s managed to twist herself into thinking it’ll be good for them, because they’ll be able to get a better job with this on their resume, and hasn’t considered the myriad reasons why they don’t just leave right now if that’s actually the case. in her defense(?) she hasn’t had to apply for any kind of work since presumably residency after medical school, and hasn’t experienced financial insecurity in thirty years, and is just generally disconnected from reality in a lot of ways.)
my job right now is to eliminate the jobs of as many people as possible. in like a month when i’ve finished the project i’m working on, i’ll have gotten at least two people fired as the explicit aim of my employment.this isn’t unusual, it isn’t part of some sci-fi future, it’s a real trend that is actively and earnestly being pursued by every company out there.
this ought to be a good thing. instead of this work taking up hours and hours of people’s time that they could be spending on other things, it gets done automatically. at least two people who get to now live lives of self-actualization!
except instead the result is now that the expired caviar rotting in the back of my aunt’s fridge is going to be moderately fancier.
which, okay, whatever. in principle, there’s nothing wrong with investing in a thing and profiting from it. she doesn’t owe those people anything, they didn’t pay me to build the software, she did. sure. this is just one sorta delusional old lady using her power greedily and wastefully.
my aunt is motivated by an unnecessary sense of frugality borne of an impoverished childhood, by a tragic susceptibility to marketing for fancy gourmet premium rich people food, and by a disconnect from the economic reality of what she’s doing to her workers. she’s not one of the better human beings, but she’s human.
but this isn’t the usual case.
the usual case is a manager needs to protect the bottom line or he’ll get fired, by another manager who needs to protect the bottom line or he’ll get fired, by […] fired, by a CEO who takes orders from a board of directors (or he’ll get fired) who need to protect the bottom line or else investors will panic and they’ll lose all their money and the company will collapse and die because it was outcompeted by a company that did ruthlessly automate as much labor as possible. the obscene profits companies are pulling in aren’t going into the pockets of wealthy CEOs, they’re being fed into the desperate struggle to keep their numbers going up as fast as is theoretically possible because only the companies with the highest numbers escape destruction.
the human race is currently ruled by the blind desperate “greed” of people who need to do what it takes to survive (plus governments that are basically the same thing except instead of shareholders with money it’s an increasingly unstable mix of lobbyists with money and taxpayers with votes.)
we’re going to reach a point, eventually, where enough labor is automated that the value of most human labor is going to plunge beneath subsistence. it’s already happening, with the whole $15 minimum wage controversy. it’s only going to get worse- working two or three minimum-wage jobs at once is going to go from barely enough to live on to just plain NOT enough to live on, and eventually the unemployed aren’t just going to be a tiny unskilled underclass that looks at a glance like it’s basically the same economic entity as the historical unemployed class.
it’s going to be a voting bloc, and then we’ll have to fall back on Democracy, our last flimsy line of defense that keeps the inhuman, perfectly efficient optimizer that is the Market at bay. we’ll have one last chance to say “we, as humans, are going to decide what human civilization is going to look like.”
i don’t know if we’re going to win that battle.
the inhuman perfectly efficient optimizer doesn’t sit idly by when it’s threatened by democracy. voters can be fooled, can be bought, can be intimidated into silence. Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson is the United States president-elect’s nominee for Secretary of State. said president-elect is- i mean, it’s Donald god damn Trump, aka the media’s poster child for cartoonish fat cat excess and ruthless profit-optimizing for the past thirty fucking years. the opponent he barely defeated was Hillary Clinton, who’s not exactly known for being tough on big business. the runner-up hail mary third option that gets laughed out of the polls for caring too much about human freedom is the Libertarian Party.
that’s not the end of the world right now, we’re not quite at the stage where we need to once and for all decide whether to be ruled by Moloch… but the fact that it happened is a terrible terrible omen, when it comes to how we’re going to fare in that final fight.
i don’t know how it’s going to go down. i don’t know, once more than half the voting populace is reduced to below subsistence, what the Market is going to pull out of its sleeve to somehow defeat Democracy in its own most desperate hour. i can’t imagine what it could possibly come up with, when backed against the wall and forced to make the tiniest space for the happiness of the human race.
i can’t imagine it, because i’m one guy whose family isn’t about to starve if he doesn’t imagine up with a way to subvert democracy and have it on the boss’s desk by yesterday, dammit.
I think a lot of people just plain don’t realize this yet. They should realize it, but it takes a certain amount of imagination applied to come up with it on one’s own.
This is why I shove the existence of robot cars into every fiscal conservative’s face whenever I get the chance and try to convince them that it won’t end there. Some of them say “well we shouldn’t develop AI then”, so I tell them that the Chinese will regardless. It seems to be kind of sinking in so far - they haven’t yet realized that Capitalism isn’t a moral system.
Sonic-the-hedgehog or Robin-hood era childhood-influence-furries had to go through the hassle of learning art skills to get good pictures of their OC's, and had to deal with the early internet. Zootopia-childhood-influence furries will just be able to have a neural net generate their own hi-res 3d models for virtual reality chat. Cubs these days, I tell ya.
Wearing augmented reality goggles so that everyone you interact with is furry
it has been pointed out to me that I’m the only white guy left at this party but honestly I’m used to it
she read the replies to this post and didn’t get either of them and tbh neither do i
I will avoid the temptation to double down on being confusing. Your post can either be read as about a literal party, or as a metaphorical party, which could include a town, a political party, a team, a heist, a situation, a final last desperate stand against the iron hand of the state, etc. (“White guy” can also be read metaphorically.) Plus it implies this is normal for your life.
For a long time, I’ve thought that capitalism would not work if people screwed each over as much as was economically and self-interestedly rational, and Matt Yglesias just pointed out that Donald Trump is basically living proof that most people are far too generous in that they actually pay their suppliers instead of just cheating them.
“Reputation“ don’t do jack shit, and whenever people propose make economic arguments using reputation, I’m gonna be very doubtful.
“Reputation” is more of an honor culture thing. If it works, it works because of a fairly small market and good communication.
It’s not that “reputation does work because if you don’t pay them it will bite you in some way eventually” or “reputation doesn’t work because you can still get elected goddamn President even if you never pay them” but rather reputation is a bad pillar to rely on because you will never know how effective reputation is. It’s not like if Hillary had gotten a few thousand more votes in midwestern swing states, the entire mechanism of capitalism would have shifted from effective to ineffective. There’s just uncertainty.
Suppliers can also adapt to more uncertain markets where payment is less guaranteed, either by raising rates, charging halfway through completion, having the money put in a mediator’s account, or through other methods.
All of these options are less efficient than if the purchaser pays the vendor like they are supposed to, because security spending preserves value rather than creating it. However, the word is that companies working with Trump started to charge more money as a risk premium for this sort of thing.
When I was working on projects, I charged payment in stages. The goods were transferred following a live demonstration for the client.
Something I’ve been thinking towards lately is that the benefits of a free market economy are actually side effects.
For example, the general idea of “competition-driven constant innovation in the form of amazing new products” (ideal outcome) or “marginally improved products at the same prices or the same quality at lower prices”. It appears to me that it’s merely one of the many ways to get market leverage rather than the desired outcome, and at some point it hits diminishing returns pretty hard.
I have a lot of experience dealing with ISPs and saw the mechanism first hand. First we have the amazing benefits of a de facto monopoly who could get away with shit like $100 for dial up speeds in ADSL era being forced to offer cheap fast internet, fast forward a year and we descend into shit like shady under the table deals, dishonest marketing, and guys cutting our fiber to create an impression of unreliable service.
And that’s internet. You can take it or leave it. If you knew what goes on with food you’d never want to eat again.
Try applying it to labor and it becomes obvious why politicians have so much trouble “creating jobs”. Capitalism hates “creating jobs”. Jobs are a cost. “Job creators” do not want to “create jobs”. They want to make money. The jobs are, to them, an undesirable side effect.
I thought that much was obvious from the term “job makers”. The claim that job makers make jobs out of the goodness of their heart implies that they don’t like doing so.
I don’t think the people using it (or rather, the target audience of the people using it) really understand the full implications that the jobs aren’t something that’s wanted by the incentives in the system itself. I think how they understand it is that if only the government would stop punishing these “valuable job creators”, then the job creators would create jobs.
Something I’ve been thinking towards lately is that the benefits of a free market economy are actually side effects.
For example, the general idea of “competition-driven constant innovation in the form of amazing new products” (ideal outcome) or “marginally improved products at the same prices or the same quality at lower prices”. It appears to me that it’s merely one of the many ways to get market leverage rather than the desired outcome, and at some point it hits diminishing returns pretty hard.
I have a lot of experience dealing with ISPs and saw the mechanism first hand. First we have the amazing benefits of a de facto monopoly who could get away with shit like $100 for dial up speeds in ADSL era being forced to offer cheap fast internet, fast forward a year and we descend into shit like shady under the table deals, dishonest marketing, and guys cutting our fiber to create an impression of unreliable service.
And that’s internet. You can take it or leave it. If you knew what goes on with food you’d never want to eat again.
Try applying it to labor and it becomes obvious why politicians have so much trouble “creating jobs”. Capitalism hates “creating jobs”. Jobs are a cost. “Job creators” do not want to “create jobs”. They want to make money. The jobs are, to them, an undesirable side effect.
I just found the stupidest peak white moderate thing ever
how to be a white ally: be a useless weak ass bitch who only knows how to ‘check privilege’
The white moderates are starting to couch their arguments in ‘more SJ than thou’ lingo. They’re evolving
Uwu violent resistance kills people. You should be killed without fighting back while waiting for the Tides of Progress to set you free. You’re not morally dying otherwise.
HAHA it was deleted
John Brown, original brocialist, manarchist, Berniebro, privileged white First World leftist,
“These men are all talk. What we need is action—action!”
“Excuse u, u don’t speak for all poc”
“There is no way that celebrating, or getting excited about, killing people could go wrong. The only reason it ever went wrong in the past is that it was our enemies doing it. We will have complete control over who takes our ideas and decides to kill people. Killing people will also be a highly-effective tool of our resistantance which will not be used as proof by our enemies to undecided people that they were right all along, resulting in a brutal crackdown that hits people that weren’t even involved in our actions. Our killing will also be highly-organized and directly serve our goals. We will never accidentally kill the wrong people, or kill people for other purposes related to our internal politics or because we warped the idea of killing up to kill people who are down.”
I’m not going to go into how to effectively use political violence, but I have no reason to believe most people in this chain would accomplish anything with it rather than, say, killing a few random people and becoming fodder for white nationalist news sites.
You can pay back money. You can fix or rebuild a building. You can let people out of prison. Sometimes, people will even heal from being beaten. But you can’t un-kill someone. There is no making it right if you screw up.
There’s a huge difference between arguing about political violence in the times where we have no clear enemies and talking about how John Brown is a problematic white berniebro.
I should have been more specific, I was responding to what insurrectionarycompassion said. (I’m still not 100% used to the Tumblr interface. I can’t find some obvious way to quote just a chunk of something.)
I’m dubious about the idea of trying to shame neo-nazis by accusing them of being involuntarily celibate losers who can’t get a date, one reason being that the tactic fails to work on anyone who can get a date.
Now, you might say this tactic is still useful anyway on others, and for reinforcing the social perception of neo-nazis as losers that no one should date, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But it still seems to be focusing the attack on a fairly non-central part of the question at hand. The reason to oppose neo-nazi ideology is because it’s terrible, not because its proponents struggle on the dating market.
I know it’s considered pretty paternalist by some to give people stuff rather than money that they could spend on what they desire, but I think free food, free housing, and free healthcare should just be a thing. It really wouldn’t even be very disruptive to integrate all that into an existing capitalist society. Turn restaurants into people’s kitchens where food is served buffet style, for free, to all. Socialize housing and build some skyscrapers where the poor can live for free. And most rich and semi-rich countries already have that free healthcare thing down already. Only barbarian nations like the US are easily able to pay for it but don’t have it.
Free healthcare might be the easiest part of that actually, as barring a few pathological cases people generally don’t enjoy spending more time in hospital.
Free food incentivizes ways to exploit it in a way that just giving people money to buy food does not, and makes it harder for other food production services to compete by offering better products or service.
Some level of socialised housing may be necessary, but if you overdo it you end up creating crime ridden ghettos that no one actually wants to live in, bringing you back to square one.
Where should the people live? What food should they eat, and how much?
For the majority of cases, the individual has more information about this than the central planner. A housing voucher or a food voucher, if one insists on something more like an in-kind transfer, is still a better option than direct food and housing, because it can adapt to individual and local conditions.
4. People will never rebel if forced into menial labour to survive.
5. Society without basic income will involve less suffering over all.
That just seems unlikely to me.
What happens when people squander the basic income and then need additional assistance to avoid starving (or “starving” in the sense of not having an acceptable first-world standard of living)?
I don’t know enough about the history of it to say whether it was justified or not, by that sort of consideration is the main reason why welfare has historically shifted from cash grants to in-kind aid.
Pay it on a daily basis.
It can be put on a card system actually, for efficiency. Then they don’t even need to have a check or mailing address, visit an office, or so on.
Regardless, this will need to be tested by experiment.
@voximperatoris: Also, you keep saying you don’t like prediction markets, but I’ve never seen you make a decent argument why not. Clearly, on a small and illiquid market (or one with fake money), quality will generally be poor. But that is reason to expand their use.
All prediction markets will be small and lack liquidity, as the range of things people want to predict is very broad but the number of people able or willing to get involved is very limited.
Robin Hanson often suggests that corporations should use prediction markets to predict the outcome of various internal projects, which would limit the number of participants to dozens or hundreds of people at best, require the company to provide liquidity, be confounded by all kinds of internal politics, and is really just a clumsy way of providing random bonuses to lucky employees.
Large scale real money prediction markets have to compete with all the other places people might want to invest, many predictions are very long-term, and it’s very difficult to nail down exactly how to judge a prediction, even for something as structured as a US election (eg. consider electoral college shenanigans).
Hanson’s futarchy is particularly ridiculous. Say you have a poorly designed government program like cash for clunkers to get old cars off the road and reduce pollution and CO2 emissions. The limited reach and high overhead means it’s going to have no effect or even be counterproductive, and you bet accordingly. Then the global financial crisis hits, economic growth stalls, and CO2 emissions actually decline, unexpectedly. Nothing to do with the policy you thought was bad, but how is that handled? Do you have a panel of experts to carefully go through all these issues and pronounce a verdict on each one?
There are already ways to use predictions to profit. If you think that Trump will be elected and pivot towards Russia, that has implications for energy markets and Eastern Europe and the Middle East and currencies. If you think that China will enter an economic slump you can take advantage of that. If you think that a particular movie will fail at the box office you can short the studio. If strong AI will be developed earlier or later you can invest accordingly.
People who have good ideas about the future already have plenty of options!
Prediction markets may be useful in certain fairly limited situations, but it is necessary to actually demonstrate that on a case by case basis; mostly it just seems to be the equivalent of averaging a bunch of guesses, which typically outperforms a single guess but isn’t some radical new way to structure society.
These are all good criticisms; I’ve torn into UNU elsewhere for this sort of stuff. (Their pitch is swarm intelligence, but check out their pictures. It’s just an overhyped prediction market with low stakes, plus they’ve added some totally novel bugs like letting people spread vote between certain pairs of outcomes, but not others.)
Futarchy has some way bigger problems, though. I think the common rebuttal to the things you cited is “all our existing systems suck too, so this might still beat them”. I’m not convinced by that, but I certainly think we can avoid the argument by citing more severe problems.
One is that futarchy can’t effectively deal in long-odds or long-timescale events. Black swan reasoning is always a bitch, but wisdom of the crowds is a particularly awkward way to approach it. And handling things like “global warming with lead to >
2°C of temperature rise by 2100″ has all kinds of secondary problems where running a bet that long is basically a nonstarter no matter how you assess results.
Another, which I think dooms the project, is that futarchy is catastrophically unable to reason about its own existence. If I propose a betting topic of “the prediction market will be dissolved and replaced with a dictatorship which cancels all bets”, there’s no way to coherently bet true and get profits.
If people think too big to fail is a serious issue with the stock market, they ought to be screaming in terror at the thought of futarchy. Because the equivalent faulty-downside predictions there are things like “let’s do nuclear brinkmanship with Russia to improve our economic standing when they back down”. The failure case doesn’t pay out, so it must be a good idea!
I’m being glib here, but I’ve seen this issues raised before and I’ve never seen even an attempt at a rebuttal. If someone has addressed things like “how to prediction market about 100 year x-risk issues”, I’d love to read it.
like an assassination market, but for the entire planet.
Perhaps payouts along the way based on the estimated probability for long-term bets - I guess that would be Prediction Derivatives? That allows people to profit if the estimate of high global warming increases. However, I’m not sure on how it incentivizes holding the prediction in the first place.
If we allow selling the shares of your position in the market, then people could hold long-term positions speculatively. For instance, I estimate a good chance that high global warming will happen, and that it will become more obvious in the intervening time, then I can buy low now and sell later.
“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo.
I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and
electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings
on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and
giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room.
They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to
pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried
fish to go with their rice.
They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments
they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a
month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know
how to use them.”
So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these
same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the
very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney
characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor
organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?
It took a very long time for him to understand the question.
When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him
and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in
the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one
person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large,
organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers
to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning
the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing
was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.
This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite
of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your
political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal
lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping
fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.
These very different understandings of social change came up
again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would
give talks about the need for international protections for the right
to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it
didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those
talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers
are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your
clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”
Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still
find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks
about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to
seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global
greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me
what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”
The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can
I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t
do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals,
even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in
stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy,
is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge
together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.
The irony is that people with relatively little power tend
to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power.
The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well
that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even
their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act
not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To
try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of
workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor
laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual
powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand
structural changes.
In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how
powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even
individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and
privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily
small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or
town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal
work— to others.”
That’s a good note.
Though, since you mentioned the getting yelled at theory in other places: no one will fight you for buying fair trade quinoa, but political opposition increases almost proportionately to involvement, and any talk about foreign working conditions already has pre-cached arguments to stop it. Individuals have made some changes en masse even if they are not sufficient to make all of them, making it more tempting.
Of course, it might have been sold to Trumpers on the grounds of “fair competition”. They know they can never compete with firms that house people in dorms and dump industrial waste into the ocean. Forcing the matter makes outsourcing less competitive which helps them last a bit longer.
