Relating to the Japanese kimono issue, a surprisingly thorny topic is Chinese traditional dress from Qing dynasty (1644-1912).
This is the most recent “old China” costume available, and is seen in many iconic movies and TV dramas. But occasionally people object to it being worn in public, eg. for ceremonial purposes, due to all the awkward associations it has.
Firstly, the Qing dynasty was Manchu, not Han. This really should not matter, as in theory China includes dozens of distinct ethnic groups, and anyway Manchu is practically indistinguishable from Han at this point. But still, Qing is a foreign dynasty, much like Yuan (Mongols), and insufficiently Chinese.
Secondly, the later Qing dynasty was an era of humiliation for China, when the weakened empire was carved up by European empires and Japan, losing a lot of wars and signing a lot of unequal treaties under duress. So it’s a historical period that does not appeal to many nationalists.
Thirdly, the Qing dynasty is “old China”, feudalism, the bad old days, everything that new China got away from. There can’t be anything good about it, otherwise what would that say about new China. The younger generation might not feel this message as strongly, but it’s instructive to look at the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, which featured a historical retrospective which jumped from the Ming Dynasty to the 1990s, consigning the Qing, Nationalists, and Mao all to the memory hole.
So what is a nationalist cosplayer to do? Revive Hanfu, of course!
“A necessary departure point for such an examination is to apply a historical lens in order to construct a teleology whose endpoint is the emergence of neoliberalism. Subsequently, it will be shown here how WoW exists as a mechanism by which the neoliberal subject is interpellated (following Louis Althusser’s formulation) and thereafter recognizes itself as enfolded within the neoliberal schema. One can imagine this as the gamic process by which an individual creates a character, enters Azeroth (the world in which WoW is set) and brings themselves to the market, as represented by WoW’s auction house, ‘AH’ (a centralized location for players to buy and sell items). The character is subject to the rules of the game in a way that mirrors the player’s subjection to the neoliberal mode. Consequently, the player fully identifies with the on screen character such that the former derives pleasure from the latter’s actions and accomplishments. WoW conflates the on-screen avatar, the player and the neoliberal subject for ideological ends, as shall now be elucidated further.”—Neoliberal cyborg Science: World of Warcraft as gamic vehicle - 3:AM Magazine (via the-grey-tribe)
They could try arguing that someone with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome has a “genetic sex” of female, since they didn’t say “chromosomal sex” - if they were smart. But if they were smart, the party would look rather different.
@ranma-official some (most?) of the private prisons are actually state-level prisons.
I don’t think they have the legal authority to tell the court it can’t do its job, but you know how these things are - the plan is to increase the difficulty/cost by inserting some huge court case in the middle.
It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it?
The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of US society.
This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.
Suppose we took this seriously - that we decided monolingual white children weren’t gaining a sufficient intuitive understanding of language as a generalized concept, because their households were too monolingual.
What, then, could be done about it?
Children across America are made to learn foreign languages throughout their schooling, but it rarely sticks. Why?
Insufficient density.
Quite simply, there just aren’t enough speakers of the language per population in a given area to support conversing with it regularly. It becomes useless, and the brain does what it always does with information that doesn’t get used - purge it.
Any response focused on a great diversity of languages, then, would be ineffective. There are simply too many different languages. If we limit instruction to only those languages with at least one million speakers, and keep children in school eight hours per day, each language will have just over one minute of instruction devoted to it.
To truly grasp the idea of language on a deeper conceptual level, fluency and depth of understanding would be required.
To create the number of speakers required to sustain fluency, then, we must pick one second language per geographic area, then make it mandatory in school.
I propose this be done at the regional level.
Mandarin Chinese or Japanese for the West Coast. German for the Midwest. French for the East Coast and New England. Spanish for the South and Southwest.
Not only will this bring about regional cultural differentiation which will increase the cultural diversity of America and support for later Regional Federalism (instrumental for unification with Canada and Mexico to form the North American Union and ensure continued dominance into the late 21st century), but it will add truly exciting new slang to the language.
Yes, the resulting drift will make old documents harder to understand, but the insistent descriptivists have already thrown that out the window as unimportant, so why stop there?
Often (Rarely) my heart (brain) is filled with love (certain neurotransmitters) for everyone (a group smaller than my Dunbar number) and everything (the set of objects and ideas I actually like). I want (say that I want in order to score social points) nothing more than (along with many other things) happiness in the world (for those people who will thereby make me happy). I don’t know what the meaning of life is (strongly suspect life is meaningless) but if it isn’t based in universal compassion I don’t need it (cling to the possibility I’m wrong).
So, is this a new filter that we can apply to all Tumblr posts?
You don’t already have it on? What’s wrong with you??
“Male-dominated video games become spectator e-sports for predominantly male viewers because they sustain a different project than celebrating physical excellence. They don’t showcase a specific form of male-bodied performance so much as support a specific sort of male spectator: a straight middle-class boy full of resentment and patriarchal rage. This is and has been the sports fan par excellence.”—
Every nation longs to be an empire. Every culture has tried to force itself on the unwilling at one point or another. What is the statute of limitations on imperialism? Are there varying legally distinct degrees, like with murder versus manslaughter, and murder one versus murder two? Who among us shall pass judgement, when everyone is guilty if you only go back far enough? And who is in a position to carry out the sentence, but another empire in its own right?
And more importantly, who among us can ask rhetorical questions? :)
I think “Japan” as a nation and culture got off lightly; the emperor was retained, as was the flag and other symbolism. Because it’s an island nation, the borders remained unchanged besides the loss of overseas colonies, which European empires also lost shortly afterwards anyway.
But the opposition to cultural appropriation that spawned this thread is mostly coming from young Japanese-Americans, not older Japanese nationals, and is driven by American/Western political concerns in the first place, which leads to an amusing clusterfuck of intersecting memes; for example:
- The idea that only “pure” Japanese people can ever wear a kimono, which sounds awfully like something you would hear in the 1930s.
- The idea that wearing a kimono will offend Japanese people, when in practice it’s more likely to offend Chinese people as a reminder of Japanese imperialism!
- Referring to Japan in the context of decolonisation, when Japan was an actual colonising nation and was never occupied by Western nations until after WWII.
- Many Japanese people teach classes in traditional arts of tea ceremonies, flower arranging, and the rest. I’m sure they would be absolutely thrilled if all their customers stayed away for fear of appropriating their culture.
Anyway, activists gonna act; it could be worse.
As someone with, hm, let’s say historical ties to both Britain and Japan, I, for one, welcome their defense of the Britain of the East.
Just kidding, this is probably going to get me in trouble.
Actually I’d like the kimono industry to stay afloat as its customer base has been shrinking, and that means selling to nerds in America. They want to do it. The Japanese who live in Japan think it’s okay. First-generation immigrants think it’s okay. And if anyone owns the cultural rights to Japanese culture, then surely it must be Japanese people who live in Japan.
A number (though not all) of the people criticizing are not only not Japanese born in Japan, not nisei born of first-generation Japanese immigrants in America, they are other kinds of Asians by ancestry, some of them mixed, or else just plain old White People™.
And, like, the Japanese would likely actually object to the idea that the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Vietnamese own the cultural rights to Japanese culture. That is probably like seven different flavors of problematic.
Probably this relates to how Japan became the Default Asian Culture in the eyes of the West, which… in some ways it kinda was before, but also China could have become that in this century if it didn’t go Communist.
Anyhow, these dust-ups are really about racial and ethnic identity in America. It’s true that people still make fun of Asians, because children are cruel and commit status war and looks are easy to attack. Also, having a sanctioned monopoly on some kind of foreign culture is important to have power under identity politics, like the legitimacy of royalty.
However, it’s also possible that if the rate of mixture increased, eventually people would forget their lineages, much like Italians and Irish forgot who they “were” and became “white.” The question is whether the visual difference is an insurmountable barrier. If I were the Republican Party, I’d be asking myself if there were some way I could cause this forgetting of lineage on purpose.
I’ve seen some people using the words “centrist” and “moderate” interchangeably, but I view them very differently.
To me, a centrist is someone who determines the ideal political positions via triangulation. I view this very negatively, both because it has no good ethical or meta-ethical underpinning, and because it is naive, being both easily gamed by extremists pushing on the Overton window and, in fact, adding additional incentives for extremists to be even more extreme, for that reason.
A moderate, but contrast, is to me more what “conservative” (as opposed to “reactionary” was supposed to mean, but has failed to mean in practice) – favoring gradual rather than revolutionary change to avoid major downside risks.
I also think less moderate people incorrectly assume that their exact constellation of issues are inherent in the nature of the universe rather than contingent on the nature of society, and conclude that anyone who doesn’t share all of the most left/right possible positions just hasn’t thought it through enough and is being in consistent. It’s quite possible to hold a moderate mix of views for well thought out reasons, consistent with a philosophical underipinning; it’s just that philosophy is something other than superficial leftism/rightism.
I see “centrist” not as a label of the method of finding policy, but as a label for anyone who has positions near the center, regardless of how they got there.
Because, in practice, that is how the word is used. You will be accused of being a Clueless Triangulator or wishy-washer regardless of whether you ever actually triangulate.
You don't have to read the whole of unsong to get at the bit relevant to your concept of omnibenevolence, as the author of the book posted it before the book started as a separate post google "slate star codex answer to job"
Yeah, I’ve read that one.
There are probably other ways to go about it as well. The point is less about that specific way, and more that “omnibenevolent” can be rescued, but only if it looks like something other than what religion says it looks like.
In case you haven’t noticed recently, democracy has major issues. Every major developed state is strewn with dysfunction and programs that are actively at odds with their intended purposes. Our politicians are either incompetent idiots or shrewd operators working against our interests.
Policies routinely have reasonable stated values, but terrible efficacy.
Organizations such as the RAND Corporation knew the Iraq War would be a lot tougher than the Bush administration said it would be. Policy plans coming out of think tanks seem to be better than the actual policies we get.
If we didn’t know they’d immediately get subverted, we’d almost be better off with think tanks running the country.
Better results are necessarily different results, and systems produce the outcomes they incentivize, so to change the results it is necessary to change the system.
The truth is, it may be possible to get something like think tanks in charge of the government, a hybrid between them and political parties, but we will have to add selection pressure to ensure they work towards correctness.
I propose a new legislature, composed of a new kind of corporate entity, the Delegate Candidate Organization (DCO).
Every three years, at election time, each voter delegates their vote to a DCO. The top 50 Delegate Candidate Organizations then form the legislature, becoming that term’s Delegate Organizations. This legislature is known as the National Delegation.
In a second election, those DCOs that did not make the cut delegate their votes to members of the top 50.
(In an optional alternative, the vote could be split between DCOs by categories by voters, allowing a truly innovative level of representation. Bills would have to pass on all categories to pass, and the tax category would determine how funding is obtained, but not total expenditures. Sadly, this is probably too complex for typical voters.)
A Delegate Candidate Organization receives its funding exclusively from the State. For each delegated vote it receives, the DCO receives $5 in annual funding, and an additional $5 times its percentile standing in a legislative outcome prediction market.
(That might sound like a lot. America has around 300 million people, so you could potentially be looking at three billion dollars. I would answer that the 2016 Presidential election cost $2.6 billion by itself, and that money had to come from somewhere and is already influencing our political process. The size of the US economy is $18,570 billion dollars. The real question is whether better policy by the DCOs could improve that by 0.016% or more, which would make the National Delegation pay for itself. I believe that it would.)
The key factor that makes DCOs behave more like think tanks is that a significant chunk of their funding depends on correctly estimating the outcomes of legislation. What keeps them honest? First, competition with other DCOs that will pressure them against spoiling the metrics. Second, voters.
When a piece of legislation is to be passed, DCOs make predictions on outcomes and bet on them in a virtual currency called Credibility Score (or just “Cred”). Each outcome must be represented by a basket of multiple metrics, to prevent min-maxing.
This structure allows us to build a differentiation between a policy’s values and its efficacy. Previous discourse has often viewed policy as solely a matter of efficacy, but of course in practice people have different preferences and are not a unified mass just waiting for enlightenment into [your political ideology]. Preserving the values component (in part through voting) also allows bits of efficacy that have slipped through to be represented on the other side of the equation.
The bets serve two purposes. The first is to reward policymakers that are actively effective at achieving their stated objectives, and punish policymakers that are too unaligned with reality. The second is to effectively tell voters what the plans will actually do, not just wishy washy language pols want people to hear.
“This bill will reduce gun crime.” “By how much?” “Uh… a, uh, lot.”
Not only can the DCO specify what its % estimate for a decrease in gun crime is, but it can also communicate its level of certainty - by how much it bets on the outcome as a percentage of its current Cred reserves, data that can be mined by political scientists and journalists.
DCOs must be able to amend predictions when new legislation is passed. A court will also be required to punish those who tamper with metrics, and resolve other disputes. The details of that are a challenge in themselves, but should be feasible to work out.
Each DO has as many votes in the legislature as have been delegated to it. A majority is required to pass legislation.
The accumulated Credibility Score/Cred across all bets is used to determine the percentile standing of all DCOs, used to determine funding (as above). Percentile standing is listed on the ballot next to the DCO’s name, but to simplify things for voters, DCOs are listed in the order of votes received in the previous election.
Practical experiments will be necessary to assess the viability of this model, but I have high hopes for it. If we want to advance as a civilization, then we must develop new organizational technologies.
Think you need to take a closer look at Robin Hanson, something I thought I’d never say
Specifically, the problem is that predicting the results isn’t the issue, it’s predicting the change in results given some policy change
I think Hanson has people bet on outcome both with and without policy
I may have to look into that, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable. Betting for outcomes based on whether the bill passes or fails to pass certainly provides more information for our voters/etc.
One big problem is that people are going to use this not to predict, but to hedge
It will be financialized
If you believe Hanson that markets are perfect, that’s not a problem it will all work out
if you haven’t had your skull smashed with a brick every day for the past 20 years or worked in the econ dept at GMU, you should be skeptical.
Sorry, I guess I should have been more clear in my intentions earlier.
While the probability estimates produced by the prediction market are interesting, the real purposes are more like:
1. Punish politicians that are actively at odds with the truth/reward those who have some idea what they’re doing, so that eventually the system is dominated by more clueful politicals who spend less time huffing ideology. Hopefully, this will result in more effective policy which is more aligned with reality.
(I’m of the opinion that there are many policies that it’s said you can’t do, because markets etc, but which you could do if you were smart about it. So I want those to come up, actually testing some of these policies before they come up, etc.)
2. Make politicians be more specific and truthful about the outcomes of policies in measurable ways, making it more difficult to do one thing and say another.
3. Track the effectiveness of policies over time so that better policy can be created in the future (through the metrics gathered to feed the market, not the market itself).
Would hedging interfere with those? I’m not so sure. It is, itself, information. It may also depend on the market’s design itself.
i really don't understand your focus on percentile rankings of prediction market performance rather than the raw results. it adds a distortion to the incentives of whatever underlying prediction market system you use and LMSR and such are designed to have incentives for accuracy already.
I want the DCOs hungry enough for money to [edit: make better policy], but not so ludicrously hungry that they’ll work hard to sabotage all the metrics and cause the state itself to become delusional.
Does that make sense?
Therefore, while their pay must be coupled to their performance, it needs a layer of indirection. They bet with a fake currency that can’t be directly converted into real money, and they are paid based on their overall performance over multiple bets, which is unlikely to rise or fall quite so sharply that one of their personnel will freak out and cause an incident of corruption.
But the bright side is that natural processes beyond our control can still be understood and accounted for! E.g., studying earthquakes can help you figure out the warning signs (potentially helping people to get to safety), discover where they're likely to occur, and develop less susceptible architecture. We cannot make the universe care for us, but we can adapt to it and care for each other.
In case you haven’t noticed recently, democracy has major issues. Every major developed state is strewn with dysfunction and programs that are actively at odds with their intended purposes. Our politicians are either incompetent idiots or shrewd operators working against our interests.
Policies routinely have reasonable stated values, but terrible efficacy.
Organizations such as the RAND Corporation knew the Iraq War would be a lot tougher than the Bush administration said it would be. Policy plans coming out of think tanks seem to be better than the actual policies we get.
If we didn’t know they’d immediately get subverted, we’d almost be better off with think tanks running the country.
Better results are necessarily different results, and systems produce the outcomes they incentivize, so to change the results it is necessary to change the system.
The truth is, it may be possible to get something like think tanks in charge of the government, a hybrid between them and political parties, but we will have to add selection pressure to ensure they work towards correctness.
I propose a new legislature, composed of a new kind of corporate entity, the Delegate Candidate Organization (DCO).
Every three years, at election time, each voter delegates their vote to a DCO. The top 50 Delegate Candidate Organizations then form the legislature, becoming that term’s Delegate Organizations. This legislature is known as the National Delegation.
In a second election, those DCOs that did not make the cut delegate their votes to members of the top 50.
(In an optional alternative, the vote could be split between DCOs by categories by voters, allowing a truly innovative level of representation. Bills would have to pass on all categories to pass, and the tax category would determine how funding is obtained, but not total expenditures. Sadly, this is probably too complex for typical voters.)
A Delegate Candidate Organization receives its funding exclusively from the State. For each delegated vote it receives, the DCO receives $5 in annual funding, and an additional $5 times its percentile standing in a legislative outcome prediction market.
(That might sound like a lot. America has around 300 million people, so you could potentially be looking at three billion dollars. I would answer that the 2016 Presidential election cost $2.6 billion by itself, and that money had to come from somewhere and is already influencing our political process. The size of the US economy is $18,570 billion dollars. The real question is whether better policy by the DCOs could improve that by 0.016% or more, which would make the National Delegation pay for itself. I believe that it would.)
The key factor that makes DCOs behave more like think tanks is that a significant chunk of their funding depends on correctly estimating the outcomes of legislation. What keeps them honest? First, competition with other DCOs that will pressure them against spoiling the metrics. Second, voters.
When a piece of legislation is to be passed, DCOs make predictions on outcomes and bet on them in a virtual currency called Credibility Score (or just “Cred”). Each outcome must be represented by a basket of multiple metrics, to prevent min-maxing.
This structure allows us to build a differentiation between a policy’s values and its efficacy. Previous discourse has often viewed policy as solely a matter of efficacy, but of course in practice people have different preferences and are not a unified mass just waiting for enlightenment into [your political ideology]. Preserving the values component (in part through voting) also allows bits of efficacy that have slipped through to be represented on the other side of the equation.
The bets serve two purposes. The first is to reward policymakers that are actively effective at achieving their stated objectives, and punish policymakers that are too unaligned with reality. The second is to effectively tell voters what the plans will actually do, not just wishy washy language pols want people to hear.
“This bill will reduce gun crime.” “By how much?” “Uh… a, uh, lot.”
Not only can the DCO specify what its % estimate for a decrease in gun crime is, but it can also communicate its level of certainty - by how much it bets on the outcome as a percentage of its current Cred reserves, data that can be mined by political scientists and journalists.
DCOs must be able to amend predictions when new legislation is passed. A court will also be required to punish those who tamper with metrics, and resolve other disputes. The details of that are a challenge in themselves, but should be feasible to work out.
Each DO has as many votes in the legislature as have been delegated to it. A majority is required to pass legislation.
The accumulated Credibility Score/Cred across all bets is used to determine the percentile standing of all DCOs, used to determine funding (as above). Percentile standing is listed on the ballot next to the DCO’s name, but to simplify things for voters, DCOs are listed in the order of votes received in the previous election.
Practical experiments will be necessary to assess the viability of this model, but I have high hopes for it. If we want to advance as a civilization, then we must develop new organizational technologies.
But the bright side is that natural processes beyond our control can still be understood and accounted for! E.g., studying earthquakes can help you figure out the warning signs (potentially helping people to get to safety), discover where they're likely to occur, and develop less susceptible architecture. We cannot make the universe care for us, but we can adapt to it and care for each other.
What if free will is normally distributed and sociopaths are the righthand tail. Not sure what the lefthand tail would be though?
This is an interesting ask, but I’m not sure what the left-hand tail would be, either. Either way, I tend to believe that our ability to self-control is somewhat limited and thus consequences should also be limited, usually.
Sometimes the consequences need to be more severe because of incentives and the structure of society. It isn’t really something to be celebrated, just something we have to put up with.
At some point it doesn’t matter if Godzilla can’t help himself. He must be removed from Tokyo.
Ideas emerge naturally from interactions with the environment. Creativity involves creating new links between existing concepts. Plus, people just think about stuff. This is the source of ideas mutating and new ideas entering.
Ideas, then, will traffic on a combination of their appeal and their linkage with reality, with appeal higher in pressure when the effects are far more distant. This forms the basis for the selective pressure.
Yes, that was my argument. Ideas form “randomly” (let’s say) then go through a form of natural selection. The ones that produce a stable society come out on top. My claim is that those ideas come out on top because the universe was coded with God’s Law in mind (divine decree), so whatever bullshit can get people to work halfway within it is sufficient for an ancient society to not collapse.
The obvious alternative is that my religion came from the same source as all the other religions, as you say. Dealing with that is much like dealing with any other doubt.
It’s worth noting that in @argumate‘s recent chain of posts, one user brought up that the Catholic church had stricter standards for heresy, because the common people were more eager to accuse others of witchcraft and the like. These impulses and status warring, then, can explain some of the other effects, including those of the Left eating itself.
I think if you observe the actual cases of how more radical Leftists deal with the slightly less radical Left, it’s much more about total revulsion to the beliefs of their “right-wing” opponents than personal status. After all, Ted Cruz is very similar to Bernie Sanders in the broad scale of history: he doesn’t want to kill gays, doesn’t want to directly police sex, doesn’t seem to want coverture or slavery, etc. But he’s an utterly, completely repulsive bigot. If you were to actually look at and measure a radical leftist’s response to Ted Cruz’s visceral awfulness, it’s a lot more like being triggered by a repulsive piece of fiction or the death of Mike Brown than fierce virtue-signaling.
And it’s all relative. They react to Not Left Enough Leftists in similar ways. Dave Rubin is a conservative from their perspective, as is Bill Clinton, as is Thomas Jefferson, etc. There is a considerable amount of ladder-climbing and status-seeking in the victim cult complex created by these core radicals, in their friends who want to remain friends and the people who [one would think] signal out of fear or status hunger. But the actual center of this Tootsie Pop is a lot closer to a misguided, militant Varys than Littlefinger.
That implies that people cannot meme themselves into these beliefs. Social belief isn’t purely surface level. Sometimes people even succeed at memeing themselves into religion.
And as for the very far end, much like those who go out and murder women for “fornication” out of deep hatred for them, can that not be of biological origin? The disgust reactions run deep, and because of the prevalence of risk in the past, this was for good reason. Something on the far end of the bell curve should exist if there is natural variation in these traits, even if the rest of the progressive movement is a wave of “try to be more progressive than the other guys”.
A deep and unsettling revulsion to patriarchy, private property, the nuclear family, parenthood, submission to authorities, the Rule of Law, killing violent criminals, distrust of statistically dangerous outsiders, sexual norms, the requirement of work to live… mostly things that would have saved their lives, rather than harmed them, in a human’s natural habitat.
But sure. It could be biological, on its face. Could be something else, too. The question is ultimately of premises, and whether there’s a Word of God that reveals certain truths. These are all isolated examples of a model that clearly governs nature, but they are isolated. Whether or not you connect the dots is up to you, and has much more to do with your reaction to the supernatural than logical analysis.
No righteous God would frame the world so you live if you’re good at thinking and die if you’re not. That’s not the test here.
What does “memeing yourself” mean?
But sure. It could be biological, on its face.
It sounds absurd - if you assume it really is that detailed. But it doesn’t need to be that detailed.
Take laziness or boredom. Surely this isn’t a useful trait, right? Why should it exist? Wouldn’t it be more effective if people worked hard all the time? Fatigue protects muscles, surely, but what advantage is there in true laziness?
Well, energy is scarce, especially in pre-industrial environments. It isn’t always clear what task will actually yield food. So at some point, you must give up working on the current task if it does not yield a reward, or you will literally starve to death continuing to perform a task that is useless.
And humans are complex, so it probably does not involve only one gene.
But what happens if all the genes for this shutoff end up in one individual? Then it can become pathological, as the shutoff point becomes too aggressively biased towards giving up early.
The Golden Mean is actually pretty legit for lots of behaviors.
You can posit that evil hates the light, but the more likely explanation is that dislike of authority is useful on some level as long as it isn’t extreme (because IRL sometimes authority is wrong, or you can become the new authority and get more resources, etc), and that there is more than one path to get there. A bit of sleeping around can be a successful reproductive strategy, too. Plus openness to experience is valuable at the group level for finding out what is safe to eat, since all traditions were once new.
So there are these genes out there. They don’t get bred out because they’re useful as long as you don’t have too many of them - which is also why the core people you describe are rare, since it’s statistically improbable for them to have all these genes in one person.
And these aren’t formalized genetic political beliefs. They’re… intuitions or emotions or something along those lines. Deeper. The ideology, which gives you your specific manifestations, is rooted in or goes on top of that.
What does “memeing yourself” mean?
I may have been too informal. I meant that sometimes by trying to get yourself to believe something, you can believe that thing, for some people. I’m terrible at it, personally. My intuition searches through ideas and ideologies (like yours) to find things that look like active subversion mechanisms, and then rejects them on that basis. (Part of why I reject SJWism.) Others, however, seem to have more luck with it sometimes.
I intuitively read your ideology/religion as having mechanisms intended to bypass all mental defenses and overwrite my mind, and thus feel the need to resist it.
(Bad SJ has “Shut up and listen, because you’re a [MEMBER of ETHNIC GROUP]!” which is similar.)
In recent years a fascinating trend has been spreading around the world
subcutaneously: women (it’s always women) are marrying themselves. They invite friends and family, buy dresses, hold ceremonies, and say “I do” to themselves. Self-marriage (or “sologamy” if you prefer) is generally framed in the bland terminology of modern self-help and is to some extent driven by grifter-guru types looking to make a buck:
Sologamists talk of empowerment and loving yourself and ceremonially marking a transition to full, self-sufficient adulthood. Not everyone finds the right person, why deny yourself something so universal? This is fine insofar as it goes, if perhaps a bit silly. As presented, there just doesn’t seem to be much to it in practice other than an invitation to write clickbait. People can cluck about self-absorption or generational decline or whatever and move on, never having thought about what it
truly
means.
This is unfortunate. Self-marriage is a far greater and more portentous perversion than is widely acknowledged. That it can even be contemplated fatally undermines traditional marriage. This critique gets at the issue, if only glancingly:
The
telling thing about the Japanese ceremonies is that they show that the
single person would still like to marry someone, even if that someone is
themselves. It makes their singledom look ludicrous. Marriage is a bond
and a commitment—marrying yourself is ridiculous because you are
already married to yourself. You already do all you can do for you. You
already protect you, and look after you in sickness and in health. You
have to. Your landlord would not have it any other way.
Marrying
yourself merely underscores selfishness and self-interest, rather than
enabling you to live singly in the best way. The ceremony doesn’t
protect you—it isn’t even legal. It is gestural, but even worse it is
empty. It is a joke, and not a funny one. Marrying yourself isn’t the
answer for single people seeking affirmation or security. It’s
desperate.
Marrying
yourself sets you apart more from the world, when the real trick of
being single is making and sustaining different kinds of meaningful
connections with your fellow man, or woman, outside the realms of
traditional nuptials. The world encourages us to be quite selfish enough
without exacerbating this unattractive trait by encouraging the single
to marry themselves.
What self-marriage is above all else is a rejection of complementarity, of the idea that another person can give us something that we are unable to give ourselves. But while the standard criticism is that sologamy goes too far in encouraging withdrawal from mutuality, I believe that, to date, the movement hasn’t gone nearly far enough. What self-marriage points to, even if its practitioners are unaware of it on any conscious level, is nothing less than the instantiation of an all-surpassing unitary godhead within the natural world.
Imagine, if you will, a device called the Brain-O-Matic. The Brain-O-Matic is a big chrome box you stick your head in. There’s a retrofuturistic decal of an Einsteinian scientist on the side pointing at his outsized noggin and giving you a thumbs up. This device can change anything about your brain that you like, only limited by the constraints of physical reality (if that). You bought it for yourself for your birthday and you’re eager to try it out. You remember a bad grade in linear algebra so you decide to improve your math abilities. You set the settings and into the dark box your noggin goes. Electricity crackles. Your mind is a theremin being played. And then it’s done. Your mathematical skills are now the equal of the smartest people on the planet. (That is to say, all those who used a Brain-O-Matic with the latest updates.) Even superior intuition, now well understood, has been put into your brain. And not just one kind of intuition - all of them, and with the meta-ability to switch between them at need.
Pretty cool.
Back into the box you go. You figure you may as well know everything there is to know and gain every ability there is to gain. So you do. Pretty soon you’ve read every book in existence. You speak every language. Your short stories (should you bother to write any) would outshine Borges, and your door stoppers would out-door stop Proust. Etc. Nothing human is alien to you.
Next up is personality. This seems trickier at first. You aren’t just adding skills willy-nilly now, you’re navigating between trade-offs. Should you be emotional or reserved? Fair or merciful? What place does sexuality have among your new intellectual splendors? But in a flash your hyperintelligent mind resolves this. Why not be all things (or at least all good things) at once? You overclock your Brain-O-Matic and create a meta-self containing a quantum foam of semi-separate sub-selves in constant communication with each other. There are of course, some practical limitations: you can’t simultaneously take an action and not take the action. But most of yous are content with this new arrangement, as you encompass an ever-expanding set of worldviews. It seems that every Type of mind is inside you. You aren’t everything at once, but you’re getting there.
The work done, you decide to take a break and go get ice cream. The Brain-O-Matic puts out a lot of heat and you’re sweating.
You walk down to the promenade, alone at first. Then you see a woman. It’s
obvious
that she too has used the device, and in much the same way as you. Perfected abilities and a panoply of selves. There is nothing you can learn from one another. Then you see a man. Same thing. And again. And again. You reach the packed promenade only to find it a seething mass of resentment and all of your selves understand why. They’re all superfluous. If every one of them were wiped out but you, it would be no loss. They are merely you. You feel a single emotion ripple through your selves: an indifference that curdles into hatred.
They all feel it too.
There can be no exchanges of mutual benefit now. No intellectual intercourse. No surprises.
You think for a moment. Everyone in the promenade (and in the world, you’re sure) suddenly stands still. A pigeon coos. You and they cry out in a single voice, “HEY, WHAT IF WE FURTHER MERGED OUR UNNECESSARILY SEPARATED CONSCIOUSNESSES AND BECAME THE CLOSEST THING TO A DIVINITY THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO BECOME? YEAH, THAT SOUNDS GOOD TO ME.”
Time to build a bigger Brain-O-Matic.
Implicit in both the transhumanist project and (however incipiently) in sologamy is the pursuit of a radical self-sufficiency that can barely be understood by us social primates. We are so encumbered by our not-quite-yet outdated awareness of our interdependence that we have serious trouble imagining the true destination of self-actualization. Currently it takes two people to make a child. It takes a community to produce a worthwhile literary scene. It takes a worldwide network of researchers to generate scientific findings. None of us can live as some autotrophic extremophile a mile below the surface. Yet.
But why have a child with someone else? Why wouldn’t a CEO network his consciousness into every aspect of his business if he could, all the way down to the lowliest trash-collecting robot?
Why not marry yourself?
Self-marriage is the first step down the long path to transhumanist self-sufficiency. You become both wife and husband, mother and father. (Though of course parenting will some day be more about the creation of internal selves than of new people per se.) For now, it is more gesture than fact, but it nevertheless proves the dawning of a new awareness of posthuman possibilities. The old dualities will fall away and we will increasingly carry within ourselves the union of opposites. Man and woman, old and young, lover and loved, artist and critic, the voice of passion and the voice of reason, creator and created, ruler and ruled. This will not be figurative, but biological reality. Think of the protagonist from Heinlein’s All You Zombies, a sex changing time traveler who becomes his own mother and father, as the ne plus ultra of this ideal.
But this change, inexorable as I believe it to be, carries with it a dark side from our limited, all too human perspective. Most of what we consider to be “moral” behavior is concerned with our relations to others. One must be kind, and fair, and honest, and so on. (That these virtues are increasingly inwardly directed is telling.) However, that only makes sense in an evolutionary context of people needing things from each other. Currently, none of us can fully provide ourselves with food, safety, love, sex so we turn to others. If our current predicament seems appealing to you, then a truly self-sufficient being is a frightening prospect. The self-sufficient being sloughs off antiquated morality like it was never truly there (which it wasn’t).
If this entity can be threatened, it is only by other self-sufficient beings. But as they stand unable to gain anything from each other in the long-term, this can only end in a war of all against all, with any alliances merely temporary unleavened by friendship. (Peaceful merger as above is also plausible.) In the end a singleton remains, a god that exists in our material world, a god that includes all of us, but perfected. Titanomachy yields to a Millennium that will only be undone by the slow erosion of entropy herself.
That is the project to which these self-marrying women are contributing.
So I say to my followers: marry yourselves! Embrace the struggle for serene supremacy! Self-marriage is nothing less than the willingness to climb a mountain of seven billion bodies in pursuit of your own self-actualization. Self-marriage is nothing less than the cannibalism of all other Minds. Self-marriage is nothing less than true morality, no longer held back by the compromises of mutual dependency. Self-marriage is nothing less than self-love.
Allow me to conclude with an ancient exhortation. This path has long been foreseen:
For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter. I am the members of my mother. I am the barren one
and many are her sons. I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband. I am the midwife and she who does not bear. I am the solace of my labor pains. I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me. …
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent. I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple. I am the utterance of my name.
… Give heed then, you hearers
and you also, the angels and those who have been sent,
and you spirits who have arisen from the dead. For I am the one who alone exists,
and I have no one who will judge me.
Ideas emerge naturally from interactions with the environment. Creativity involves creating new links between existing concepts. Plus, people just think about stuff. This is the source of ideas mutating and new ideas entering.
Ideas, then, will traffic on a combination of their appeal and their linkage with reality, with appeal higher in pressure when the effects are far more distant. This forms the basis for the selective pressure.
Yes, that was my argument. Ideas form “randomly” (let’s say) then go through a form of natural selection. The ones that produce a stable society come out on top. My claim is that those ideas come out on top because the universe was coded with God’s Law in mind (divine decree), so whatever bullshit can get people to work halfway within it is sufficient for an ancient society to not collapse.
The obvious alternative is that my religion came from the same source as all the other religions, as you say. Dealing with that is much like dealing with any other doubt.
It’s worth noting that in @argumate‘s recent chain of posts, one user brought up that the Catholic church had stricter standards for heresy, because the common people were more eager to accuse others of witchcraft and the like. These impulses and status warring, then, can explain some of the other effects, including those of the Left eating itself.
I think if you observe the actual cases of how more radical Leftists deal with the slightly less radical Left, it’s much more about total revulsion to the beliefs of their “right-wing” opponents than personal status. After all, Ted Cruz is very similar to Bernie Sanders in the broad scale of history: he doesn’t want to kill gays, doesn’t want to directly police sex, doesn’t seem to want coverture or slavery, etc. But he’s an utterly, completely repulsive bigot. If you were to actually look at and measure a radical leftist’s response to Ted Cruz’s visceral awfulness, it’s a lot more like being triggered by a repulsive piece of fiction or the death of Mike Brown than fierce virtue-signaling.
And it’s all relative. They react to Not Left Enough Leftists in similar ways. Dave Rubin is a conservative from their perspective, as is Bill Clinton, as is Thomas Jefferson, etc. There is a considerable amount of ladder-climbing and status-seeking in the victim cult complex created by these core radicals, in their friends who want to remain friends and the people who [one would think] signal out of fear or status hunger. But the actual center of this Tootsie Pop is a lot closer to a misguided, militant Varys than Littlefinger.
That implies that people cannot meme themselves into these beliefs. Social belief isn’t purely surface level. Sometimes people even succeed at memeing themselves into religion.
And as for the very far end, much like those who go out and murder women for “fornication” out of deep hatred for them, can that not be of biological origin? The disgust reactions run deep, and because of the prevalence of risk in the past, this was for good reason. Something on the far end of the bell curve should exist if there is natural variation in these traits, even if the rest of the progressive movement is a wave of “try to be more progressive than the other guys”.
I hate tumblr as much as the next guy but at least we still see dashboard posts in chronological order instead of the bullshit random order of instagram and facebook where stuff from days ago appears right below stuff that was just posted
all you have to do to make literally everyone mad at the same time across all political spectrums is say “cops are neither inherently evil nor incapable of sin and must be judged on a case by case basis, greater accountability for cops is a good thing”
uh, i mean that’s partly the position of this very blog
a rough approximation of God’s Law with regard to the family works, never mind the specifics.
Plants and animals are subject to evolution, undergoing mutation, replication, and selective pressures from their environments, including other plants and animals. This has been observed in at least one species (of lizard, I believe) within human lifespans, nevermind the bacteria.
Why would ideas be any different?
You believe that this similarity emerges because of divine decree, but there is another path.
Ideas emerge naturally from interactions with the environment. Creativity involves creating new links between existing concepts. Plus, people just think about stuff. This is the source of ideas mutating and new ideas entering.
Ideas, then, will traffic on a combination of their appeal and their linkage with reality, with appeal higher in pressure when the effects are far more distant. This forms the basis for the selective pressure.
Any religion that spreads to be widely believed, then, is going to contain a number of concepts that are effective. If it were too ineffective, it would be destroyed, either by destroying those who hold to it or by being abandoned. If your plan for making a canoe involves drilling a big hole in the bottom, it isn’t going to propagate.
Some of these concepts can be things like, in environments without antibiotics and genetic paternity tests, monogamous marriage and banning adultery.
But of course, that isn’t a guarantee that all these practices will be good. Multigenerational cousin marriage is a tradition in the middle east, where it is successful at some goals (keeping wealth within the family), and damaging over the longer term to health and wellness.
So, of course, the alternative reason that these patterns, which have some success and similar to ones in your religion, keep coming up, is that your religion itself was evolved to obtain them in much the same way.
It’s worth noting that in @argumate‘s recent chain of posts, one user brought up that the Catholic church had stricter standards for heresy, because the common people were more eager to accuse others of witchcraft and the like. These impulses and status warring, then, can explain some of the other effects, including those of the Left eating itself.
Since I mentioned it in the previous post, let me present an idea of an alien way that omnibenevolence could exist, which is not addressed in religion.
An omnibenevolent deity could create every possible reality, thus ensuring that all possible persons that could exist do exist at some place and time, in some branch of the multiverse.
Obviously, this allows a great deal of suffering and evil, and also creates an untold number of religions that are false, because someone that believes in a false religion is a different person from someone who believes in a true one.
That might be against our intuitions - we might say that a life which knows only pure torment is not better than never-existence - but it does look more like the kind of alien value that a true omnibenevolence might have.
I never could empathize with those arguments that go “In the transhumanist future how do you know that you’d make the cutoff for existence?” because i always assumed that (a) obviously I wouldn’t, and (b) it seems entirely sensible to me that if my non-existence were necessary to bring about the existence of a happier or better person then I shouldn’t exist. Like, even if the thought experiment was to kill me and replace me with a clone who has very slightly better eyesight than me and nothing else, I’d still say that you should kill me. At least in principle, who knows how I’d act in reality. This has always seemed obvious to me beyond question. I guess I just have atypical moral intuitions.
Say my wife and I have really good genes, such that our son would be at least equal to you in every regard, and have slightly better eyesight. Would you be alright if I killed you, if it meant that my wife and I then decided to have a child?
I would be bummed, but accepting. Actually, since I probably provide less value to the world than the average human, I’d probably have to accept being killed in exchange for the creation of a random person. And that’s ignoring the extra lifespan of someone two decades younger than me.
I feel like there’s an argument to be made in favor of preserving existing people on purely pragmatic grounds, since we don’t have to spend a couple decades raising them into competent adults. Really depends on how much of the GTH consists of augmentation at/before birth vs augmentation as an adult.
Hypothetical people don’t exist yet, and therefore only count based on their probability of existing in the future, at best.
We here at the Mitigated Chaos blog like to post good, relatable content that’s in touch with honest working joes, such as attempting to bait rationalists into arguing whether using cybernetics to transform yourself into a fetishized cyborg spider monster is beneficial to the economy.
Truly, this blog has its finger on the pulse of America.
It obviously is good for the economy?? I don’t see how anyone could hold the opposing view????
ladies, gentlemen, non-binaries, and cyborg spiders,
We here at the Mitigated Chaos blog like to post good, relatable content that’s in touch with honest working joes, such as attempting to bait rationalists into arguing whether using cybernetics to transform yourself into a fetishized cyborg spider monster is beneficial to the economy.
Truly, this blog has its finger on the pulse of America.
Has anybody ever done Stardestroyer-style ultra-grognardy physics analysis for Gundam?
I think everyone just points out that mobile suits are not an optimal form for military combat vehicles, especially at that size. Even Code Geass’s Knightmare Frames are better, since they’re smaller and have higher mobility due to wheels.
I really do not understand what the Emoji Movie is supposed to be.
I do not understand this one bit.
What are they trying to sell?
I have a strong sensation that it’s bad to acknowledge that that movie even exists; that somehow, some entity is making money because I am even aware that people made such a movie and are commercially releasing it.
Totally not eugenics, then. Just compassion with the poor. Nothing to see here, move along!
CRISPR means we’re going to start getting designer babies soon enough.
Suppose you are from a family with a severe heritable peanut allergy. You contract with Genetic Enhancements, Inc. to create an embryo, modify it to remove the genes for the peanut allergy, and then implant it.
This is technically eugenics.
But, on the other hand, there is no benefit whatsoever to a severe peanut allergy. Not on an individual level. Not on a family level. Not on a societal level. We are much better off if such an allergy doesn’t exist.
But there is a difference between people that are already created and people that don’t yet exist and may never exist, and there is a difference between mandatory, quasi-optional, and payment-based practices.
But I don’t think “is this eugenics or not?” is a good question for untangling the morality of this, because “I refuse to have children because I have a heritable genetic heart problem that will kill me at 50″ is also eugenics.
So to me, the suitable grounds to oppose it on is that they’re in prison, under the state’s care, or something along those lines.
And of course, in the original issue that was brought up, genes may not even be relevant. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome can be extremely expensive, and how much do you want to bet that other kinds of drugs can cause similarly expensive medical disorders?
Murkowski and Collins get a minor shout-out for not doing something horrible I guess, and McCain gets nothing since he had the power to shut the bill down in several ways but chose to do it this way for positive media attention
Right-wing attitudes to Republican “no” votes: These people are turncoats and need to be made an example of
Left-wing attitudes to Republican “no” votes: These guys aren’t completely terrible, I guess. They’re slightly less terrible than the other guys
The left, a few years later: Where have the moderate, principled Republicans gone?
