Oceans Yet to Burn

anaisnein:

mitigatedchaos:

anaisnein:

mitigatedchaos:

immanentizingeschatons:

Seriously though it pisses me off immensely that most leftist’s response to the possibility of immortality only for the rich is to oppose immortality rather than to try and make it available for everyone.

Like, what the actual fuck, you’re the left, that is supposed to be your thing, saying you’d rather just ban transhumanism is basically just ceding ground to capitalism.

Immortality for all.

basically just ceding ground to capitalism.

That’s a good point, actually.  If you offer people to be Capitalist and have a chance of not dying, or be Communist and have a 100% chance of dying, they’re probably going to pick the former.

Anyhow, the good news is that life extension is probably worth a lot of money for any government that has to pay for healthcare, simply because aging is so ludicrously expensive.  If costs $100,000 to delay aging-related care for 10 years, then to a government like that of France’s, it’s worth it to just subsidize it en masse.

The other thing is that it’s not that probable that whatever procedure is needed will be necessarily expensive because of physics, the way rocket launches are.  It will probably be able to see large cost-reductions long-term through automation.

You most likely would not be eliminating old age and end-of-life costs but only delaying their onset by X years. And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.

(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)

And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.

That’s assuming the life extension effect doesn’t kick in until the person is already quite old.  That probably is not the case, or the life extension mechanism is not likely to be effective at its goal of extending life.  It won’t stretch out puberty, either (probably), so that leaves an effect on early and particularly middle adulthood, which are prime earning years.

If you can extend the amount of time that someone is effectively 40 by about a decade, or even just five years, then sure it isn’t as fun as being in one’s 20s, but it still adds plenty of earning potential.

(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)

At first, sure.  And the willingness of wealthy tech executives to pay almost any cost for it will fund a lot of the research necessary to make it cheap enough to be more widely available.  But while we are on the side of the medical cost curve where medical costs come down from infinity, and therefore costs go up since we start actually paying them rather than dying, there should be a far side of the curve where the costs start going back down again.

We’re growing new organs on laboratory animals, printing new (and functional) organs with 3D printers, and we just got CRISPR.  Apparently this year the NHS will be testing some kind of gene therapy on a subset of blind patients.  Surgical robots, while not autonomous, are becoming more common.  (That’s leaving aside the prosthetic robot arms since those aren’t relevant to aging right now.)  Even those immunotherapy drugs are a step up.  

On the far side of that curve, the sorts of chronic conditions that cost us so much money are prevented through gene therapy and selective IVF, while tissue engineering replaces organs damaged by disease with natural ones that require no immunosuppressant drugs.  Robots decrease the cost of surgery, either by automating part of it or allowing more labor to enter the field from elsewhere in the economy.  Critically damaged limbs can be replaced by nervous-system-linked prosthetics (which already exist) produced by highly-automated factories and custom-fit to the patient (factories are getting massive reductions in staff even in places like China), without drastically impacting patient mobility.

Much of the cost is in the research.  One can gene mod bacteria to synthesize the desired chemicals, build big heavily-automated factories, that sort of thing.

Many very expensive drugs cater to an illness that is not common in the population.  However, the market for life extension is probably at least one quarter of the population in all developed nations, if not much more, and they would be willing to pay an enormous amount of money to have it.  That’s a very large number of people to amortize the research cost over.

Now, reading all this, you might say I’m being naive and that it will require personalized interventions for each person, not a nice mass-manufactured one-size-fits-all solution.

But that’s what we have computers and big data for.  The market is enormous, and computer power is still increasing, so even if the genes have to be tailored to each specific person, the genetic tailoring can still probably be done by machines.

Now, it’s possible that I’m wrong about this, and it will remain unreachably expensive forever.  However, I think that sort of pessimism on this matter is driven in large part by how unattainable life extension has been for humanity, and all the Deathist myths in our culture that tell us that old age and mortality are really better for us, and that the immortality we crave but cannot have would be terrible.  In our myths, it is often associated with vampires and other undead, the temptation that drives sorcerers and other villains to do evil and corrupts their hearts.

In fact, weren’t people joking about Peter Thiel wanting to look into the qualities of young blood?  But we can just grow cell cultures, and if it’s something that’s common to all young blood, then that sort of thing would only last for about ten years before they crack the secret of how to do semi-artificially it on an industrial scale.

It seems likely to me that either the rich will have life extension treatment and it will become cheaper over a couple of decades, or that no one will have effective life extension treatment worth more than a few years, and not a stable in-between state where we go for a century with only the wealthy having life extension.

Clearly the interventions won’t be priced in the mid-six-figures on the rare-disease model, but that doesn’t mean that an intervention with everyone as its target market will necessarily be cheap, nor that there’ll be the fundamental willingness to pay for it on a large scale. Right now there are mortality-extending drugs for patient populations in the millions, pricing in the $4K-$6K a year range – that’s rack rate, obviously, much higher than the various sorts of actual rates – and the payor landscape has been extremely resistant, despite not only rigorous clinical evidence and strong medical guidelines recommendations but also great pharmacoeconomics models and strong value propositions across health-systems, hospital, and patient levels. It’s not going to be as simple as demonstrating impressive clinical benefits and rigorously proving cost-effectiveness.

(And I mean I’d really, really like the answer here to be as simple as “well, fucking well charge a bit less and just roll around in a zillion tons of moneys instead of a jillion,” cf: literally everyone. I get that. I spent fifteen years in oncology. I’ve seen some shit. Suffice it to say structural incentives across biopharma and the entire US access landscape are pervasively and fundamentally fucked in that way where you can’t do much more than tinker with any one bit without catastrophic repercussions due to the whole contextual gestalt of it and solving for pricing strategy is a killer of a hard problem.)

As per the rest of your response, of course, there’s always the possibility (necessity) of a lateral and sharply innovative solution.

I actually like your optimism and find it less implausible that outsider/cross-industry thinking could in fact end up generating the way to break the back of what look like intractable problems from here than that the healthcare industry will manage to painfully stepping-stone its own way out of the mess. I’ve been in the industry for a long time (mostly in biopharma rather than devices, which your post is kind of suggesting to me might be part of the problem) and I’m tired and maybe jaded. And personally I might be a little bitter about transhumanism. I’m over forty and feel like even if all of this really truly comes to pass it’s going to be too late for me to benefit, certainly while in my prime, on which I haven’t yet lost my goddamn death-grip [so to speak] thank you very much but the writing would seem to be on the wall even if I’m not yet forced to look that way. It’s hateful tbh.

And personally I might be a little bitter about transhumanism. I’m over forty and feel like even if all of this really truly comes to pass it’s going to be too late for me to benefit, certainly while in my prime, on which I haven’t yet lost my goddamn death-grip [so to speak] thank you very much but the writing would seem to be on the wall even if I’m not yet forced to look that way. It’s hateful tbh.

I’m younger than you are, enough that I may benefit from at least replacement organ technology (probably only 10-20 years out now), if not reach at least the early tiers of life extension or cryo that actually works.

But my parents aren’t.  I’m fortunate enough that they’ve made it this far, but I need to start thinking about how they may not be here in 20 years.  And that hurts, because I have not yet showed them me being successful.  I want them to at least see that, before it’s too late.  I’m trying to record some more things, too.

They had me late.  On the one hand, that put me perhaps ten years farther into the future, which gives me more of a fighting chance, and allowed me to meet the people and have the experiences that are important to me.  On the other hand, I won’t be able to know them as long, and they are good people.

I know you may feel bitter about Transhumanism, because younger generations will benefit more than you will, and younger generations still would benefit more than me.

…but isn’t it better to be one of the last generations than any generation before?  Isn’t it better than to be born earlier than this, in the 1700s or the 1800s, or the early 1900s, where the people were recognizable to us, but the only hope was some vague abstract notion that progress would overcome it? Clashing against a seemingly-indestructible monolith of despair.

It’s like knowing a war will end soon, and that even though you won’t make it through to the end, your children will, and after this, they may never have to experience a total war again, not the way you have.

Please, keep fighting, though.  At this point, even a few years could make a difference, for both you and for others.  Those tech billionaire money spigots are starting to turn.  If we can just manage to keep the economy going for another 20 to 30 years, I think we may just make it through to the other side as a species.

anaisnein:

mitigatedchaos:

immanentizingeschatons:

Seriously though it pisses me off immensely that most leftist’s response to the possibility of immortality only for the rich is to oppose immortality rather than to try and make it available for everyone.

Like, what the actual fuck, you’re the left, that is supposed to be your thing, saying you’d rather just ban transhumanism is basically just ceding ground to capitalism.

Immortality for all.

basically just ceding ground to capitalism.

That’s a good point, actually.  If you offer people to be Capitalist and have a chance of not dying, or be Communist and have a 100% chance of dying, they’re probably going to pick the former.

Anyhow, the good news is that life extension is probably worth a lot of money for any government that has to pay for healthcare, simply because aging is so ludicrously expensive.  If costs $100,000 to delay aging-related care for 10 years, then to a government like that of France’s, it’s worth it to just subsidize it en masse.

The other thing is that it’s not that probable that whatever procedure is needed will be necessarily expensive because of physics, the way rocket launches are.  It will probably be able to see large cost-reductions long-term through automation.

You most likely would not be eliminating old age and end-of-life costs but only delaying their onset by X years. And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.

(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)

And during much of that X-year period the person is very probably going to be retired and drawing a Social Security or equivalent payment. In this case, it’s a net absolutely massive *rise* in costs.

That’s assuming the life extension effect doesn’t kick in until the person is already quite old.  That probably is not the case, or the life extension mechanism is not likely to be effective at its goal of extending life.  It won’t stretch out puberty, either (probably), so that leaves an effect on early and particularly middle adulthood, which are prime earning years.

If you can extend the amount of time that someone is effectively 40 by about a decade, or even just five years, then sure it isn’t as fun as being in one’s 20s, but it still adds plenty of earning potential.

(Also, trust me, the procedure will be expensive. Look at immunotherapy and biologic cancer drugs and get back to me.)

At first, sure.  And the willingness of wealthy tech executives to pay almost any cost for it will fund a lot of the research necessary to make it cheap enough to be more widely available.  But while we are on the side of the medical cost curve where medical costs come down from infinity, and therefore costs go up since we start actually paying them rather than dying, there should be a far side of the curve where the costs start going back down again.

We’re growing new organs on laboratory animals, printing new (and functional) organs with 3D printers, and we just got CRISPR.  Apparently this year the NHS will be testing some kind of gene therapy on a subset of blind patients.  Surgical robots, while not autonomous, are becoming more common.  (That’s leaving aside the prosthetic robot arms since those aren’t relevant to aging right now.)  Even those immunotherapy drugs are a step up.  

On the far side of that curve, the sorts of chronic conditions that cost us so much money are prevented through gene therapy and selective IVF, while tissue engineering replaces organs damaged by disease with natural ones that require no immunosuppressant drugs.  Robots decrease the cost of surgery, either by automating part of it or allowing more labor to enter the field from elsewhere in the economy.  Critically damaged limbs can be replaced by nervous-system-linked prosthetics (which already exist) produced by highly-automated factories and custom-fit to the patient (factories are getting massive reductions in staff even in places like China), without drastically impacting patient mobility.

Much of the cost is in the research.  One can gene mod bacteria to synthesize the desired chemicals, build big heavily-automated factories, that sort of thing.

Many very expensive drugs cater to an illness that is not common in the population.  However, the market for life extension is probably at least one quarter of the population in all developed nations, if not much more, and they would be willing to pay an enormous amount of money to have it.  That’s a very large number of people to amortize the research cost over.

Now, reading all this, you might say I’m being naive and that it will require personalized interventions for each person, not a nice mass-manufactured one-size-fits-all solution.

But that’s what we have computers and big data for.  The market is enormous, and computer power is still increasing, so even if the genes have to be tailored to each specific person, the genetic tailoring can still probably be done by machines.

Now, it’s possible that I’m wrong about this, and it will remain unreachably expensive forever.  However, I think that sort of pessimism on this matter is driven in large part by how unattainable life extension has been for humanity, and all the Deathist myths in our culture that tell us that old age and mortality are really better for us, and that the immortality we crave but cannot have would be terrible.  In our myths, it is often associated with vampires and other undead, the temptation that drives sorcerers and other villains to do evil and corrupts their hearts.

In fact, weren’t people joking about Peter Thiel wanting to look into the qualities of young blood?  But we can just grow cell cultures, and if it’s something that’s common to all young blood, then that sort of thing would only last for about ten years before they crack the secret of how to do semi-artificially it on an industrial scale.

It seems likely to me that either the rich will have life extension treatment and it will become cheaper over a couple of decades, or that no one will have effective life extension treatment worth more than a few years, and not a stable in-between state where we go for a century with only the wealthy having life extension.

leafyhotdog:

mitigatedchaos:

leafyhotdog:

ranma-official:

leafyhotdog:

ranma-official:

leafyhotdog:

mitoticcephalopod:

punlich:

mitoticcephalopod:

punlich:

mitoticcephalopod:

punlich:

I can’t wait for liberals to go “ok we marched and we wore these cool hats now we’re done, we finished it, things will be fixed now”

See but that’s the reassuring thing, it means that people won’t actually be out in the streets assaulting random civilians for looking like nazis.

I’m sorry I can’t hear you over the beautiful sound of Richard Spencer’s glass jaw cracking under the force of glory-knuckled justice

why are you all like this

Because people keep asking me stupid loaded questions on my posts lmao

look I don’t want to live in a world where lots of people are roaming around looking to start fights with people who disagree on which batshit crazy political ideology they should implement, and I think you would too.

I’m annoyed at the liberals spamming “punch nazi” memes, but it’s reassuring to know that basically all of it is just posturing and signalling, and that most of them can’t be bothered to get off their asses to do the very things they advocate.

in? what? world? could? u? be? possibly? living? in? where? nazis? getting? attacked? isnt? something? to? cheer? for? ??? you act like this wasnt a known neo nazi that questions if jewish people are people and if black peoples “are neccessary” like lmao how about instead trying to act above violence you complain about the people calling for mass murder and genocide like??? messy messy messy

In this world.

you complain about the people calling for mass murder and genocide like

Tankies call for mass murder and genocide literally non-stop and unironically, yet they are on the other side of the fist for some reason. But they should not be. ///

i support them doing that tbh a fascist is a fascist, one should not and i mean never tolerate intolerance that bitch wants the government to control every aspect of peoples loves yeah she and anyone like her should be killed simple as that, theres no arguing their stupidity only crushing it

You missed the part where you people can’t tell who the Nazis are. “She must have been a Nazi anyways, right?”

“you people” who people??? pretty easy to tell whos a bigot when they down talk someone else for race or talk up their own as some sort of master race like??? no, its not hard to see whos arrogant and punishment of who is arrogant is more than good, also any liberals who wanna defend bigots on the basis of free speech can feel free to join the pile of bigoted garbage

That is right, comrade. Anyone who questions our use of political violence is our enemy, and we must inflict political violence on them until the work camps swell with their numbers for the good of Communism. Only those who have already always ever agreed with us and those who are silent out of fear have virtue.

There is no possible way that expanding this sentiment of violence might have terrible consequences and get our regime labelled as one of history’s great monsters - after all, we are good Communists, and by definition, all monsters are counter-revolutionaries in disguise, right?

????? just saying man its not even an ounce of hard to tell whos a scumbag bigot and whos not and honestly? like i’ve said before yes antifa or whatever far left groups should make and maintain a more calm and organized look to the masses at large but actual nazi’s like spencer and his goons will always make up shit to legitimize their bigoted actions and someone going around questioning the humanity of other people based on imaginary shit like race needs not only their lights knocked out but their heads blown off plain and simple its not advocating violence it is 100% self defense against people calling for genocide

Yes.  Certainly, we must ignore all claims by the Fascists that any of their violence is a form of self-defense.  As they are corrupted by the sick, twisted, and vile influence of Fascism, they must assuredly know that any such claims are complete fabrications.  They are evil, and cannot be reasoned with, otherwise they would be good Communists like us - everyone knows Communism is true, deep in their hearts.

The defense of Communism is always an act of self-defense by the oppressed masses.  And the best defense is a good offense.  Until the last thoughts of Fascism have been purged from society, we must be ready to kill at a moment’s notice.

Anyone who doesn’t support killing all Fascists is also tainted by Fascism and must be killed.  Recursively.

History will smile on us and our glorious revolutionary Communist wave.  They will sing songs of our struggles.  Our leaders will never be put side-by-side in textbooks with Adolf Hitler, used as a justification for why Communism must be destroyed and alienating the same working men and women we sought to protect.  Completely impossible.  We are the good guys, here.  Definitely.

reasonableapproximation:

There is totally a missing mood around Nazi punching. It’s not “I hate this, but punching them really seems to be the best option right now, so I’m gonna go punch a Nazi and then probably feel guilty even though I think it was right”. It’s “punching Nazis, fuck yeah. Nazis are bad, it’s great to punch them. While we’re at it, let’s punch people who support Nazi free speech rights. Surplus to human requirements! Nazis are bad! Punch punch punch!”

So yeah, it really doesn’t sound like you’ve done a cost-benefit analysis, and put “a person gets hurt” as a negative that gets outweighed by the positives. It certainly doesn’t sound like you’ve done that taking into account the possibility of motivated cognition and the dangers of normalizing violence. What it sounds like is you just want to punch Nazis.

That’s understandable, but you don’t get to punch people just because you want to.

leafyhotdog:

ranma-official:

leafyhotdog:

ranma-official:

leafyhotdog:

mitoticcephalopod:

punlich:

mitoticcephalopod:

punlich:

mitoticcephalopod:

punlich:

I can’t wait for liberals to go “ok we marched and we wore these cool hats now we’re done, we finished it, things will be fixed now”

See but that’s the reassuring thing, it means that people won’t actually be out in the streets assaulting random civilians for looking like nazis.

I’m sorry I can’t hear you over the beautiful sound of Richard Spencer’s glass jaw cracking under the force of glory-knuckled justice

why are you all like this

Because people keep asking me stupid loaded questions on my posts lmao

look I don’t want to live in a world where lots of people are roaming around looking to start fights with people who disagree on which batshit crazy political ideology they should implement, and I think you would too.

I’m annoyed at the liberals spamming “punch nazi” memes, but it’s reassuring to know that basically all of it is just posturing and signalling, and that most of them can’t be bothered to get off their asses to do the very things they advocate.

in? what? world? could? u? be? possibly? living? in? where? nazis? getting? attacked? isnt? something? to? cheer? for? ??? you act like this wasnt a known neo nazi that questions if jewish people are people and if black peoples “are neccessary” like lmao how about instead trying to act above violence you complain about the people calling for mass murder and genocide like??? messy messy messy

In this world.

you complain about the people calling for mass murder and genocide like

Tankies call for mass murder and genocide literally non-stop and unironically, yet they are on the other side of the fist for some reason. But they should not be. ///

i support them doing that tbh a fascist is a fascist, one should not and i mean never tolerate intolerance that bitch wants the government to control every aspect of peoples loves yeah she and anyone like her should be killed simple as that, theres no arguing their stupidity only crushing it

You missed the part where you people can’t tell who the Nazis are. “She must have been a Nazi anyways, right?”

“you people” who people??? pretty easy to tell whos a bigot when they down talk someone else for race or talk up their own as some sort of master race like??? no, its not hard to see whos arrogant and punishment of who is arrogant is more than good, also any liberals who wanna defend bigots on the basis of free speech can feel free to join the pile of bigoted garbage

That is right, comrade. Anyone who questions our use of political violence is our enemy, and we must inflict political violence on them until the work camps swell with their numbers for the good of Communism. Only those who have already always ever agreed with us and those who are silent out of fear have virtue.

There is no possible way that expanding this sentiment of violence might have terrible consequences and get our regime labelled as one of history’s great monsters - after all, we are good Communists, and by definition, all monsters are counter-revolutionaries in disguise, right?

bambamramfan:

marcusseldon:

I said I’d talk about politics less, but I feel like I do need to get this out of my system. 

There’s an idea going around both on my dash, and people I know in person, that the behavior of people on the left is what caused Trump to be elected. Different groups get the blame, whether it is rich white liberals in Silicon Valley, DC, and Hollywood, the campus left, black lives matter, internet SJWs and feminists, mainstream media journalists, late night comedians, or some combination of these, the theory goes that Trump was essentially a white working class middle finger to the condescension, radicalism, and disrespect toward traditional values of members of these various left-wing groups. People who put forward this theory say that to win back Trump voters, the left needs to be kinder, more compassionate, and less radical toward white working class (WWC) culture, values, and way of life. The claim is that if only the left were nicer to WWC people and respected their way of life more, Trump would have never even won a Republican primary, let alone an electoral college majority.

Now, leaving aside whether it would be personally moral and virtuous to be more compassionate and less radical toward the WWC (probably to at least some extent), I want to raise doubts about whether this perspective is actually useful for winning elections and defeating Trumpism.

No doubt many WWC people, and those sympathetic to them, feel condescended to, disrespected, and that their way of life is under attack by the left. There is also no doubt that there have been individuals and groups on the left that have been openly hostile to the WWC way of life, where “white male” is an insult, conservative Christians are publicly degraded and mocked, performative flag-waving nationalism is seen as not just gauche but stupid and hick-ish, and where white rural people are assumed to be personally racist and homophobic.

But, all political movements are going to have their assholes who degrade the other side and openly disrespect them. It’s easy to miss when you largely live in left-wing bubbles online and off, which I imagine is true of most people on my dash, and is certainly true of me, but the right has their own version of this, and it’s popular. There’s a post going around my dash about a condescending line in a Meryl Streep speech, and how this is an example of liberal condescension that created Trump, but I guarantee you that more people listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity on the radio every day than saw that Meryl Streep speech. And Limbaugh and Hannity on an almost daily basis disrespect, mock, and condescend to liberal constituencies, values, and ways of life. And guess what, Republicans still won.

People like Limbaugh and Hannity, not to mention Fox News and Breitbart, make their money by inflaming a sense of grievance and resentment of the left among the disproportionately rural, older, religious, and WWC Republican base. These outlets have far more political reach and power than random SJW blogs, the campus left, black lives matter, actors or tech billionaires giving speeches, or even late night comedians. 

In the educated liberal bubbles that I and many people in my online and offline circles reside in, the reverse can seem true. It can seem like left-wing culture is omnipresent and the right is completely stifled by blacks lives matter, SJWs, and late night comedians. But in other circles, which comprise nearly half the country, the reverse is true. 

In many ways, the left is already on net more compassionate to the WWC than the right is to left-wing constituencies. There were countless articles in left-wing outlets talking to Trump voters in order to understand and sympathize with Trump voters. I don’t think I’ve ever once seen an article in a right-wing outlet that went to Harlem, San Francisco, or Ann Arbor, trying to compassionately understand the motivations and lifestyle of people on the other side from their point of view.

So the idea that the left must hold itself to an even higher standard on compassion and  than the right to win elections seems implausible to me (again, leaving aside whether holding ourselves to a higher standard would be more virtuous and moral). 

Even if the left was nicer to the WWC, I don’t see that changing vote patterns, or making the WWC feel any less resentful and under attack. Suppose 90% of the left-wing people who are being blamed for the rise of Trumpism became nicer. The Limbaughs and Hannitys and Breitbarts of the world, and the millions who follow them, wouldn’t take a step back and say “you know, maybe the left doesn’t hate me or my way of life”. No. They would continue to cherry pick the worst examples, as they already do, from a smaller set of mean liberals in order to inflame cultural resentment and grievance among their followers, and they would also continue to see things that I think aren’t mean and are true that the left says, like that black people have a rougher relationship with the police than other groups, as offensive and attacking their dignity and way of life.

I’m not saying there’s no way to convince some of these people over to the left. But, pointing the finger at the meaner (and numerically smaller) strains of the left and thinking that if only for them being condescending and disrespectful we would be in a golden age of liberal dominance in politics doesn’t strike me as true or productive.

So I get your frustration, and a lot of what you say is correct. It’s far too tempting to say “Hey leftists-who-disagree-with-me, YOU’RE the reason our enemy won!” without sufficient proof. That’s just opportunism.

And we should treat the WWC (and all of the WC) in this country with compassion, and we should help their material needs, regardless of whether it wins us elections. Trying to come up with political justifications for basic human decency is a bit creepy.

(Plus, not to mention a Far Right resurgence is occurring across the entire developed world. It seems very petty to blame that on a few annoying American liberals. There are deeper trends here.)

I feel you here.

---

However, there is some countervailing evidence here.

1. If we’re not being condescending to them, we should listen to what our enemies are saying. And in between accusations of corruption and defending the free market, Republican voters seem really, really upset about Political Correctness. Obsessed with it, and explicitly saying they support idiots like Trump just to defy Political Correctness.

You can dismiss what they say and come up with other reasons they voted the way they did (they just want to be racist, or economic anxiety) but then that is being patronizing because you aren’t really listening anymore. If you listen, Political Correctness is a huge deal to them, and teasing out the source of that sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.

2. A lot of this is just projection from some left-of-center allies about the illiberal tactics used by establishment social justice, such as extreme arrogance, dismissiveness, shallow analysis, using institutional power to punish dissenters, and a bunch of other mindkilling, groupthink tactics. Said allies (or, former allies) really hated those tactics, and so rejoice in blaming them for the defeat of the mainstream SJ candidate.

Projection is not a good source of analysis of course, and so they might be wrong that this really caused Trump’s victory. But said establishment really should pay attention to how many enemies it has, even “on its own side.” Their tactics are really ticking off their friends, causing dissension every step away. SJ can try to ignore this dissent and pain as long as they wield the hammer, but don’t be surprised when their enemies leap at any weakness as a chance to earn some rhetorical points.

Social justice has enraged and alienated conservatives, libertarians, moderates, socialists, communists, and artsy anarchists. At some point it will have no friends left except the business-friendly / socially liberal wing of a city-based party.

3. Something happened between 2012 and 2016. There’s some reason Republicans started really getting into unbridled rudeness and race-baiting. You can’t even wholly blame Trump for finally opening the floodgates, he tried in 2012. What the hell happened to make voters so much more racist, or at least racist-tolerant? It’s not like there are a lot more immigrants around or other normal causes of racial strife (let alone to explain the tolerance of crude sexual behavior.)

And to the unaided eye, one of the real changes of the past 4 years was the political visibility of intolerant liberalism. So it’s at least worth considering “the thing that changed in the last 4 years, is somewhat responsible for the rather different outcome this time around.”

Regarding #1: If a 100% black company is okay, but a 100% white company “isn’t diverse enough”, this implies whites are inherently worth less than PoC. If women have equal beneficial capabilities to men, but men are uniquely violent and oppressive, this implies women are better than men.

I think people can feel this even if they don’t consciously realize it.

Also, as one of those alienated types, those tactics you mention make SJ a liability to me in many ways.

ranma-official:

oktavia-von-gwwcendorff:

It should be pretty simple:

you can either punch literal nazis

or label everyone who disagrees with you a nazi

if you try to do both, don’t be surprised if everyone else is suddenly very interested in protecting even literal nazis from punchings, because you’ve shown an inability to distinguish the two

---

if you ask me, this is America

the country of Indiana Jones, Captain America, etc.

this is not the USSR

this is not the country where we label everyone we disagree with as fascists

if you want to do that, go back to Russia, comrade

---

There is actually a very consistent heuristic for punchings which would avoid the aforementioned issue. It should be perfectly possible to punch Spencer without justifying the punchings of people who aren’t like Spencer.

(This section used to contain information that seemed superficially true but has been corrected by insider knowledge; Spencer actually fired the guy who wrote the genocide posts in question but this information was not easily available on common sources. I apologize for the misinformation that happened. Spencer is a shithead who heils Trump but he did fire the guy who was even worse.)

---

So, if you do not entertain totalitarian notions of ethnic cleansing etc., you shouldn’t have to be worried that a heuristic that leads to Spencer being punched would be a threat to yourself. It is totally possible to have the rule that only people advocating ethnic cleansing (Spencer claims he wants “non-violent” ethnic cleansing which is a fucking joke; there is no non-violence in ethnic cleansing, the only question is how horrible the violence one will inflict in the process is), tyranny, democide etc. and actively politically working for it get punched.

So why the fuck are people afraid that punching Spencer means they too might get punched? I blame the tankies. No, really.

---

You see, if we had a consistent heuristic that (only) advocating tyranny and democide is what gets you the punchings, tankies would be on the wrong side of the fist as far as their preferences are concerned. Tankies don’t want this kind of consistency, so they will go to whatever lengths it takes to undermine the consistent attitude that democidal tyranny is the only thing that gets the punchings, and instead replace it with tribal bullshit.

And our broader culture and discourse are way more influenced by tankies than one would naively expect.

For example, Angela Davis, retired University of California professor and honorary co-chair of the Women’s March a couple of days ago, liked tankie-ism so much she got her doctorate in East Germany, and provided the guns people were killed with in the Marin County courthouse incident.

And here is Davis shaking hands with Erich Honecker, the leader of the tankie dictatorship of the GDR:

Apparently the principle of the progressive cultural elite no-platforming evil people only applies to right-wing evil people.

For comparison, let’s suppose some conservative professor were pals with B.J. Vorster, got his doctorate from the RSA because he liked apartheid so much, and was involved in supplying guns for a Klan shootout? What would it do to his career? The BDS people are adamant that anyone dealing with Israel is Bad, but how many people deal with Israel specifically because they like its treatment of Palestineans so much, and not just because it’s a first-world country with a lot of high-tech industry and good infrastructure etc.?

To say that I smell a bit of hypocrisy here would trivialize the traumas of those whose respiratory organs were devastated by chemical weapons.

And I don’t even mean to disparage prof. Davis’ work on the evils of the prison-industrial complex. Shocking as it might be, even people who have supported utterly evil things may be right sometimes. I’m not even trying to unfairly single her out because she’s only one example of the entrenched tankie corruption festering in the halls of left-wing power.

But it is clear that any sort of principled opposition to evil would require a massive purge in the progressive cultural elite, so naturally they will never support it. So instead the question of punching Richard Spencer gets turned into a tribal battle as the tankies try to justify punching anyone they don’t like and everyone else sees that and reacts in the only rational way.

On the other hand…

The super-structures that the marxist would typically speak entirely in terms of are ultimately simplistic macroscopic abstractions floating above a far more complicated and dynamic reality. The marxist loves to talk in terms of classes, the anarchist prioritizes talking in terms of interpersonal relationships and interactions.

Social justice has — on the whole — thus become in many regards a rather pragmatic attempt to hash out an etiquette or legal system (albeit a decentralized one largely enforced through reputation rather than state violence). This is an undertaking quite different from ethics. Indeed the biggest advantage and disadvantage of social justice is that it seeks to be as motivation-independent as it can be. It doesn’t attempt to establish why one should be for example opposed to misogyny. It either takes for granted that its audience already shares the same values (naturally causing some confusion from slight differences in these assumed values), or it seeks to arrange a sociocultural state of affairs independent of people’s underlying values. “Who cares what people actually believe, let’s find ways of browbeating them into at least acting decently.”

One can see why, as with marxism, most anarchists find the mainstream of social justice profoundly incomplete and insufficiently audacious. It often gives up before going deeper into challenging all power relations in and of themselves, settling instead for an incomplete intersectionality, and it shies away from the far more fractious problems of figuring out what we really value or should value, much less speaking explicitly of such values and their tensions. Of course the failure mode of some teens browbeating people over inane otherkin-style shit is a hell of a lot better than the marxist failure mode of The People’s Cops actually physically beating people.

Similarly there’s a temptation to see anarchist nuance and absolutism as frustratingly unpragmatic. There are big enemies doing a lot of damage that need to be knocked down and dithering trying to add complexities to our picture or speak in terms of distant and even more idealistic aspirations can understandably seem like a bunch of sabotague and backstabbing. When there’s a goal practically right in front of your nose you don’t want to hear some buzzkill well-actually anarchist telling you that’s not the ultimate goal and that the shortcut you want to take risks endangering their grander aspirations. Fuck their preposterously grand ambitions of a world without relations of control, you just want fucking bread. The picture you have, both of the world and your desires within it, are just common sense. Why dirty that up? Why undermine it?

Marxism and social justice largely look at the radicalism of anarchism with suspicion, seeing it as the kind of “reductionism” so accursed in the humanities. As something that either gets in the way of common sense or dissolves it entirely into useless and masturbatory intellectual rabbit holes. (“Oh so we’re supposed to care about individuals ultimately, I suppose that means ignoring systematic injustice and prioritizing every white dude with hurt feels cuz someone yelled at him.”) The proper notion of radicalism/reductionism — as something that compliments a realization of broad patterns and ultimately provides additional useful perspectives without undermining all capacity to prioritize — is alien to them.

Similarly the marxist (and the more vulgar social justice advocates) develop a kind of laser focus on some specific categories or forms of domination, often completely unequipped or unwilling to address more nuanced or complicated situations. Indeed just as marxist organizations have become particularly infamous among the activist left for tolerating and protecting abusers and rapists in their leadership, everyone is aware of circles of social justice where horrific interpersonal abuse is given a pass or becomes clouded and impossible to speak cleanly of because the perpetrators behavior isn’t easily definable along traditional dimensions of heteropatriarchal and white supremacist categories. The now quite old joke “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face while shouting ‘but this isn’t Formal Oppression!’ forever” reveals just how insufficient the “practical” lens can be. Aligning yourself against the currently most prominent expressions of power and domination does not equate preparing yourself to resist new or more local and particular instantiations of power, which can be all the more insidious or silencing for their relatively uniqueness or rarity.

While there’s no doubt often immense utility to the practical, the stakes in this world are too high to sit back and take things for granted. (…) [H]istory shows that oversimplifications into neat rhetorical frameworks have their own long-lasting momentum. People come to associate not with their original ethical motivations (if they even notice them) but merely in terms of the affiliations and strategies that once derived from such. The crude macroscopic patterns or tendencies that may well be correctly identified eventually get detached from their underlying roots. Those self-identified as underdogs remain stubbornly self-identified underdogs even when they come to rule regimes that slaughter millions, set up gulags, or occupy Palestine.

The radicalism of anarchism is what has left it fairly distinct among ideologies and mass movements, with no instances of mass murder in its name. It’s hard to stray too far, to ever let inertia and some “common sense” lead you down the road of slaughter and tyranny, when your philosophy grounds itself so directly in ethics, highlights it in every way and never lets you detach from your ultimate values. Many passingly claim to be champions of liberty, but anarchism demands of every action, every plan, does this liberate? Could this be more coherent with liberty? And if there are necessary tradeoffs how exactly do they work? Can they be improved? Are there better ways?

To reach a moment where we sit back, entirely satisfied, would be to abandon anarchism. To the radical there is no litmus for “due diligence”, no final finish line, no moment where we pat ourselves on the back. The vigilance of the radical is never satiated.

Anarchism has no allegiance to the tankies and is perfectly free to denounce all evil anywhere we see it. To reject this notion, the consistency of one’s opposition to evil, whatever forms it takes, is to reject the entire core principle of anarchism. Anarchism will always betray anything the instant it becomes oppressive, violent, and tyrannical. To not do so would be to betray anarchism itself.

Anyone who claims anarchists are or should be friends with tankies is lying and has a gulag to sell you.

The Status451 article on the book ‘Days of Rage’ is extremely interesting and important. Read it. If you wonder what the right-wingers got from UR, read this one instead because it contains the good parts of Moldbug without the bad parts of Moldbug. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, read the article so you’ll know.

TL;DR: tankies are way more influential than most people ever realize.

It’s also not an accident that within the article itself, marxism is named 2 times, communism 8 times, maoism 3 times, and even stalinism once, but anarchism exactly zero times.

Tankies and nazis want political violence where the nuances of reality get collapsed into a simplistic “us vs. them” frontline. Fuck that noise.

Bring back the Iron Front. Show people that one can be against nazis and tankies simultaneously. Show people that they have options beyond the bullshit quagmire. Queer the “with us or against us” binary.

This is America. We don’t punch someone who voted for Trump because they are afraid that a college professor promoting “white genocide” is actually serious (a fear which, when considering the stuff rich progressive cryptotankies have been all too happy to write endless apologetics for, is far less unreasonable than rich well-educated C-tribers might realize). We don’t punch nonviolent people who have shitty opinions if they aren’t involved in actively trying to impose their opinions into violent reality. We don’t even punch people who indent with tabs instead of spaces. And if we are to punch Richard Spencer, consistency demands that we shall recognize that with the same logic it’s perfectly okay to punch the tankie leaders too.

Fuck nazis

Fuck tankies

Fuck king George III too I guess

///

Mostly endorsed with nitpicking that would distract from the message

Not a fan of Anarchism, but yeah, basically. And yeah, thr Anarchists get more standing to talk about this than the tankies, since they don’t have the same historical record.

ranma-official:

rasec-wizzlbang:

mitoticcephalopod:

rasec-wizzlbang:

lucasnator2:

friendly-neighborhood-patriarch:

paradisemantis:

lexaproletariat:

bzangy:

THIS is what you’re defending: 

A punch is too fucking soft. 

And besides…

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…

drethelin:

remedialaction:

mitigatedchaos:

remedialaction:

mitigatedchaos:

@remedialaction

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.

remedialaction:

mitigatedchaos:

@remedialaction

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.

crazyeddieme:

funereal-disease:

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.

funereal-disease:

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.

argumate:

immanentizingeschatons:

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.

discoursedrome:

bambamramfan:

mitigatedchaos:

bambamramfan:

jadagul:

wirehead-wannabe:

drethelin:

meaninglessmonicker:

drethelin:

wirehead-wannabe:

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.

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.

@bambamramfan

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.

bambamramfan:

jadagul:

wirehead-wannabe:

drethelin:

meaninglessmonicker:

drethelin:

wirehead-wannabe:

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.

jadedanddark:

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?

Originally posted by spockvarietyhour

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.

whitemarbleblock:

bambamramfan:

mitigatedchaos:

@bambamramfan

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.

bambamramfan:

mitigatedchaos:

@bambamramfan

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.