We can model ideas and ideologies as existing in an environment of evolution, much like creatures (not a new idea - this is the basis of meme theory AFAIK).
In so doing, we can model them as having various components that suit different purposes, like viruses. Metaphorically.
There may be parts evolved to cause people to adopt the idea, parts to cause people to spread the idea, parts to prevent people from giving up on the idea, and so on.
If a human wants to stay aligned with the truth, they need to process and filter out harmful or dangerous idea complexes, because like viruses in nature, the only hard rules that prevent them from being too dangerous is that they don’t kill their hosts too quickly to spread.
And so humans reason about ideas, and have intuitions about bad ideas, and have various layers of defenses to protect themselves from bad ideas.
Now, if you’re making idea and don’t care that much about truth or whatever but want it to spread, what could you do to increase its chances of replication?
Demand that it not be scrutinized (so more of it gets through and it isn’t rejected)
Demand that it must be followed and copied EXACTLY (so more of it gets through)
Demand to punish anyone that gives up on it
Demand to punish anyone who doesn’t adopt it
Etc.
So, in the discussion of Bad Social Justice rhetoric, we sometimes see something come up about standpoint theory (or whatever the formal name is), the idea being that privileged people such as whites, men, white gay men, etc, cannot truly know the experiences of oppressed groups.
They must “sit down and listen”, to use the vocabulary.
Criticism of the ideology is then rejected (on the grounds that they cannot ever truly have the proper knowledge). The full content must be accepted, acted upon, and spread. No stopping to consider whether it’s healthy or safe or anything else.
The problem is that, like a rootkit that gets direct access to the core of a computer system, this leaves a giant, exploitable hole.
This is not the only group, ideology, or movement to do or have done this.
I don’t know what a good solution would look like, but it doesn’t have to involve any more high-IQ individuals than we have now, just a better distribution of resources schools already have.
I want to test solutions to the current system, and to find many different possible set-ups that are different from the one we have now. (They might not scale well, of course.)
Even improvement in a limited geographical area or to some minor aspects, for relatively affluent middle-class individuals, would be really valuable to me.
Roight, let me suggest my plan, which would only help matters that you want tangentially most likely.
Are you familiar with Spaced Repetition? It’s used in programs like Anki. The basic summary is this: your brain flags things as important by whether or not you use them, and forgets them gradually over time. Spaced repetition brings the item up again at a certain point in the forgetting, so that your brain goes “oh hey this came up again, it must be important, I better remember it!”
Gamification is also a thing, and I have a theory that a big part of why people don’t like school stuff is that it doesn’t feel applicable, or that it will ever be applicable. But while I do not enjoy math for its own sake, I feel almost no resistance to doing math when I have to in order to accomplish some other task.
I’d like @argumate to read this post, too, and probably a few of the others as well.
So here’s my proposal:
1. This will be primarily implemented as a computer program. It will be implemented on a custom computer system that is not easily compromised.
2. All textbooks will be presented in both a fuller, contextualized format, and as semi-atomic facts of information, ready for use for spaced repetition memorization.
3. Exercises will be split between grinding and synthesis. Synthesis exercises will sometimes be in the form of game-like programs that have a complex problem which the students must integrate their knowledge of the subject to perform. (That is, students must be able to take the knowledge and use it and apply it, not just repeat it.) Other times, for other subjects like English, they will be items like essays that are manually graded by teachers. Students earn resource points to attempt synthesis exercises through grinding exercises, which are the rote learning component intended to reinforce the knowledge and speed up processing (e.g. of doing math). If you fail the synthesis exercise, you may have to do more grinding to attempt it again.
4. The computer program will conduct a review of all the subjects the student needs to know, based on spaced repetition algorithms and data about the student and their previous performance. This prevents the constant information loss that is pervasive in the American school system.
5. All of this is individualized. Students go at their own pace, and graduate when it has all been completed, or are pushed out of the school system at 21.
6. Homework is mostly rare or non-existent. Instead, students will stay another hour or two at school. Homework is for doing exercises, which we are having them do at school.
7. The school day will be broken up by various social activities to let students’ brains relax in between blocks of studying, which will still be somewhat unified by subject of study to make #8 easier.
8. In addition to grading work, teachers will also act as tutors to individual students. Students will be grouped in classes with students who are in a similar position of progress within the system. Teachers will go around the room answering various questions and helping students with items they are having trouble with. There may be some small lecturing sections, maybe.
The following is less necessary, but additional depending on your balance of Nationalism/Capitalism/Technocracy/etc.
9. Students will be awarded points based on a mix of (about 1/3 each) progress, attendance, and and percentile academic standing within their school. These points can be spent on a very larger variety (over 100) of uniform parts, snacks, media, and other items at participating retailers. This has the virtue of aligning the school’s social hierarchy more closely with the desired outcome of learning & academic performance, as well as giving students practical experience with small amounts of “money”.
10. Research shows that teaching math below a certain age doesn’t actually accelerate learning progress on it much at all, so for very young students, the system will focus on “moral/social” education and socialization and potentially language skills.
Tbh i find your politics inscrutable, your writing style and your self-memery hit-or-miss, but what the hell, when failure costs little, experimentation should be encouraged, so rock on
Tbh i find your politics inscrutable
I mean, my blog description contains the word “Crypto-Centrist”, so I’m not really going to dispute that.
“Everywhere that this mass education model has been in place for significant amounts of time, there is an oversupply in aimless bureaucrat-people without bureaucracies to stuff them into. Europe in particular suffers from ‘mass youth unemployment,’ especially among the educated, which is because they have been educated to fill slots in imaginary bureaucracies which both don’t exist and are uneconomical where they do exist. Because educational bureaucracies have watered down their own standards over the years to be able to accommodate the entire population, many of these aimless bureaucrats are also unsuited for any pursuit that requires much real expertise. Further, their mentalities have been shaped to expect a didactic, predictable, safe, office-existence in which people tell them what they need to ‘learn,’ and then they complete an assignment graded by a light hand.”—
Tbh I really like your politics but find your writing style and incessant self-meming insufferable.
The memeing (#augmented reality break, #chronofelony, #the year is, etc) serves several purposes…
Provide a break from the politics for people that do like it (which is some of them - the guy tagged in the last post about a children’s rhyme on the cybersecurity of cybernetic augmentations almost immediately liked it)
Lower the tone of the blog from Serious Politics into something more playful (and more closely matching my actual energy/focus/seriousness levels)
Obscure my race and sex, which both constitute potential Discourse Attack Surfaces
Fuck over certain kinds of blog attacks by pre-establishing a range for spontaneous tone-shifting. Various bad-faith social attacks do not deserve a serious response, but regular counter-attacks are too much effort, too, and silence isn’t always appropriate. The meme persona is an option for twisting and distorting these attacks into something that their authors did not intend and against which they do not have pre-existing defenses. (Some people put warding symbols on their blogs for this instead.)
As for the writing style, it is what it is, you either read it or you don’t.
If you only want the actual serious stuff, I recommend the #flagpost and #policy tags.
Can’t get your core mind thread remotely hacked if it’s not wired to an antenna
Everyone, sing along:
The inputs aren’t together with the outputs And the outputs aren’t together with the inputs For each task a dedicated subsystem You are the network, You are the tree
The display is for displaying The arm for throwing The display doesn’t choose Where the arm is going
Memories are their own network Stored inside your brain Hardlink only can dive your memory Dead or dying in crimson rain
You are the network You are the tree What’s you is you, and what’s me is me
Firmware is manual update only The touch of the cord inside, Validated and crypto-signed Is the only right way for parts to sing
The songs of the aether are broken A great storm that seeks to consume all it sees Broken hearts and broken minds If thy let it in to thee
You are the network You are the tree What’s you is you, and what’s me is me
I mean, admittedly I kind of left out the rhythm entirely in translating it, but you get the idea. Every good child, raised by high-aptitude-scoring parents, is taught this at age 6.
I think abstract art suffers from getting associated with postmodernist putting-a-toilet-in-an-art-gallery type stuff, as a class marker of insufferable douchebags.
Yes.
What is visual art about? At its barest - color, shape/form, composition…
Abstract art, when it is good, is about these things, the far end of a continuum of realism vs abstraction.
And I think a lot of the pushback really is about seeing some kinds of art as a scam, defined totally by the artist’s popularity.
Anyhow, I don’t mind abstract art, per se - it can be an exercise in composition and minimalism - but there are other kinds of “art” that are eye-rolling.
why do people constantly want to point out how much they hate abstract art. yes you and the rest of society, it’s a very niche thing, but I actually like looking at a giant painting that is all the color red and I do not appreciate being called a stuck-up jerk for it
They think it’s a scam, and they think the haute couture looks down on them for not going along with the scam. No one likes “multi level marketing” by people on Facebook, either, but imagine the performative hatred if it were considered “sophisticated”.
It’s cool that Alaska and Australia, the geographic extremes of the Anglophone empires, each have flags of the constellations that define their respective poles
New Zealand would like a word
You mean New Tasmania? They can’t disqualify all Australians from the legislature if there is no separate country of New Zealand anymore.
Now, some might say this is extreme, that rectifying the law is a better course of action - but the Mitigated Chaos blog is dedicated to innovative solutions to political problems, that challenge long-held preconceptions, and overturn the stale thinking of the status quo.
Can you truly say, in your heart of hearts, that you never believed that New Zealand was the rightful territory of Australia?
Other possible names include Tasmania II, Newer And More Southern Wales, and Australia Jr.
It’s cool that Alaska and Australia, the geographic extremes of the Anglophone empires, each have flags of the constellations that define their respective poles
New Zealand would like a word
You mean New Tasmania? They can’t disqualify all Australians from the legislature if there is no separate country of New Zealand anymore.
Now, some might say this is extreme, that rectifying the law is a better course of action - but the Mitigated Chaos blog is dedicated to innovative solutions to political problems, that challenge long-held preconceptions, and overturn the stale thinking of the status quo.
Can you truly say, in your heart of hearts, that you never believed that New Zealand was the rightful territory of Australia?
I'm a mestizo hispanic immigrant who managed become an American citizen. How can I assimilate and become a real American?
Stop asking questions like this.
You become a real American the moment you stop worrying about how you’re not a real American, and start worrying about how everybody who disagrees with you isn’t a real American.
wirehead-wannabe said: Reading bits and pieces from you and @luminousalicorn and @yudkowsky has more or less convinced me that reading stuff produced by the ingroup will get you a surprisingly comparable level of quality to that of the Big Names with 23852520% more sincerity, if only because Dunbar
Hot Take: Rationalists are actually Good, because they are not celebrities (or are, at best, micro-celebs), and thus don’t compete in the DC, NY, or LA baloney circuits, which deserve infinite scorn.
but even the raddest of radfems would have to concede that women being able to legally marry other women doesn’t bolster the Patriarchy, or so I would have assumed before today.
Welllll, there is an argument to be made about how marriage’s validity as an institution is fortified by every new marriage, no matter between whom, and the institution of marriage is a tool of the patriarchy in many respects. Hence many gay rights activists arguing that the focus on gay marriage as the be-all end-all of gay rights not only distracts from other important issues, but also at this point often just feels like a successful assimilation into the institutions one should be trying to dismantle.
“if you’re so gay, why aren’t you married??”
Yeeesssssss, assimilate all the gays into normal society without them even realizing it…
anaisnein said: is everyone in this set of threads under the impression that it’s perfectly fine and dandy for *women* not to display the trappings of financial success? that it has no impact at all on their perceived attractiveness? I swear every time i read one of these how gender works conversations I feel like I’m in Bizarro World or a space alien
don’t be silly, there’s no money in trying to sell expensive accessories to women
Expensive accessories might raise the status of women among other women, but do they really help get men?
why do you speak russian if you're "not a homophobe"?
every day I get on this site and every day I think ‘maybe today will be the day that I don’t get a stupid ask’ but every day, every single day, people like you ruin that hope for me. you’ve disappointed me. you’ve disappointed your parents. you’ve disappointed your country. go away
"God is omnipotent" clearly can't mean "God is unrestrained in His actions", I mean just look at Jesus. Why would God go through all that faff with immaculate conceptions and virgin births and whatnot if He didn't have to? Maybe God has to play by some ruleset unkown to us to keep the universe running. Thinking of it like an engine, you can't leave off, say, the intake valves to get better flow into the cylinder even if you're designing from the ground up. That's my theory, anyways.
“Our paper defines ‘omnipotent’ as ‘possessing the maximum possible administrative rights within the boundaries of the simulation-’” - Anon-kun et al, Boundaries of the Infinite, Tumblr Journal of Experimental Philosophy Vol. VII, 2017
My steelman estimate is that, if we posit a capital-G God, even said God cannot skip steps in computation - that is, in order to find the end of existence, He must imagine it in sufficient detail such that he effectively creates it.
Of course, that still leaves a lot more room for patching and interventions, so my real estimate is that there is no God, or if there is a God, God does something like create every possible reality or some very large subset of possible realities.
The new ultra-right-wing American Traditional Party clinches control of the government with only 35% of the vote in a divided electorate.
Their executive, President Ronald Jameson, issues an executive order reinterpreting the text of the Culturally Significant Properties Anti-Appropriation Act.
He reclassifies medieval and renaissance Europe, as well as Rome, and all derivative properties, as White European, a group which previously had no assigned cultural properties under the act.
Chaos ensues. Hundreds of thousands of cultural appropriation lawsuits are filed. Challenges are made both to his interpretation, and to the unique ownership of these ideas and concepts.
But it is too late. The Act was never designed with the proper restraints on power. After all, the future only moves forwards, right? And the metaphorical train of Separatism soon left the station.
because i’m like them and they’re like me and we both need someone
also like
“every kind of woman is sexualized”
no, they really aren’t. and the insistence that they are is very typical of a certain kind of abled feminism. the kind that insists that all women are drowning in catcalls when some women would give their left tit to be considered someone’s, anyone’s, lust object.
Of course, I have still never seen a satisfying explanation WRT the Problem of Evil. The whole “hey we’re going to design this system to do things we don’t want it to, and also to feel, and then exact literally infinite punishment for doing exactly what we knew it would during the design phase, even though we have literally infinite time and resources to pour into engineering” thing is likely never going to be properly answered. “Free will,” is, as ever, a cop-out, as it has always been, especially when one controls the literal laws of the universe.
All this fussing about “God says do this” or “God says don’t do that”, combined with “God is Good”, when the option for a completely different system design from the very start was always on the table, is nonsensical.
Plus, once you’ve posited magic of that tier, nothing prevents the whole thing from being a ruse by another supernatural being instead, including any and all forms of divine revelation.
War between nation-states, or with factions willing and able to use explosions as weapons, may require explosions.
However, there is a duty to not be a complete fucking idiot about it and invade a country that had nothing to do with the explosions that happened to your country, killing thousands or more, destabilizing the region, and creating the environment suitable for the rise of a violent theocracy.
If one cannot pass this very simple hurdle, one has no business using explosions for any purpose.
with “society hates a weak man” you could say “society hates an ugly woman”, and the discourse really is very similar.
an obvious objection would be that there are no ugly women, or that the real ugliness is moral/spiritual and not external, etc. but this is just carping: it’s easy to note that individuals and society have preferences as to appearance, and that these preferences can be exacting and weigh heavily on many women.
if someone claims that they would only date someone who meets a particular standard of appearance then they are both reflecting and contributing to an incentive gradient which is going to affect the behaviour of other people.
their preference may be attacked on various grounds: shallow, objectifying, unrealistic, or whatever, and can be defended on the grounds that attraction is not voluntary, or that “taking care of yourself” is a conscious choice.
the woman who prefers to date the man with the car and the man who prefers to date the woman with the looks are not on different sides, really.
(Signs of disease are generally ugly, too much asymmetry, too.
The social conditioning necessary to get around that would be pretty intense (and oppressive).)
if the thing about people preparing less for hurricanes with female names is true, that suggests that giving all hurricanes female names would apply evolutionary selection pressure against sexism
morganwintermiller said: Far as I’ve read, it’s not considered accurate. There was a lot of iffy statistical analysis behind it.
kontextmaschine said: It’s an artifact of the fact they used to only get female names so the “female” set tips older with less warning and shoddiest buildings
kontextmaschine said: oh *preparing less* that might be something different, that’s my stock response to the “dying more” statistic
I think you can treat all headlines about gender issues as false and you will be right more than you’re wrong.
I certainly don’t believe any of these things anymore until I’ve seen it verified from someone I trust on these matters.
I’m no longer holding Star Trek or Star Wars “accountable” for their clunky-looking sixties-and-seventies future technology.
Why?
Because the Enterprise is off on a years-long voyage through space. There’s no Verizon store, no Radio Shack, no Geek Squad out there. If the Klingons fire photon torpedoes and the bridge shakes and Spock’s head bangs against the fancy iPad72 touchscreen and cracks the glass, the ship’s toast. If Han Solo’s fingerprints get all over the starchart and the touch-calibration is off by half a centimeter, the Falcon is going right into a star. But if Mister Worf accidentally twists the command knob too hard and pops it off, he can just screw that thing right back on and it will keep working. Dust gets in there? Take it apart and clean it out. All the plugs are big and universal, all the power cells are functional and have a decent battery life, and nothing is built to expire in the next six months so you have to buy a new one.
That tech isn’t anachronistic or suffering a bad case of Zeerust–it’s practical, effective, and it works. Apple tried launching its own space exploration craft, it had to come back for full repairs within three months, and then it had to be upgraded over the next two.
But this? This is just good, long-lasting, fully-functional, and reliable craftsmanship.
The actual real-life space shuttles’ electronics looked pretty much like that for their entire lifespan and this is exactly why.
A big point of this stuff: Making it extremely rugged (because enviroments are harsh, having it break is bad, and if you’re in the military people are shooting at you), making it extremely reliable (because you’re dead if it breaks, imagine the equivalent of having an arrow key get stuck down on your computer), and making it easy, or at least possible, to field repair. You might not be able to see the screws and bolts that hold the connectors together, but they are there. No molded-blob-of-plastic USB connectors or featureless monolith ipod cases allowed here.
(A specific thing that irritates me: The exclusive use of touchscreens or holograms for controls. These are great ways to make a complicated system easier to use or let lots of functions be controlled with a simple panel. However, they can’t be used blind and they lack tactile sense, so they are not good for important stuff like flight controls or turning your engine on and off. Modern fighter jets have a lot more big screens (”glass cockpit”) but flight controls are still your classic joystick with buttons on it. Also, in the military, often instead of a touchscreen you have a row of buttons around the edge of the screen, and the labels for these buttons appear on the screen.)
(This can lead to problems. The USA’s main battle tank contains several tons of copper that’s just carrying weak electrical signals, on a tank that only weighs about 70 tons in the first place. That’s several tons that can’t be armor, ammo, engines, or the gun. There’s a plan to upgrade to fiber optics. One of the reasons that Elon Musk is able to eat the lunch of all the other rocket vendors is by taking a much more liberal approach to this kind of thing. All computers in any military ever are dreadfully obsolete and NASA sometimes needs to lurk Ebay for spare parts. An awful lot of this equipment has been updated to have some basic computer control and internet connectivity but with zero security.)
Okay, but consider this - the entire crew of the Enterprise should be paramilitary cyborgs able to manipulate all this machinery with their thoughts, with manual controls built throughout the ship as a backup.
Does anyone else obsess over the idea that they have become mentally worse – less motivated, less energetic, more anhedonic – than their former selves?
I have a habit of assuming this decline is just a known fact, and then thinking a lot about what has changed and how I could reverse those changes. But in the rare cases when I reflect on it, I realize I have no idea if I’ve declined at all. I might be comparing the present baseline to highlights of the past, for instance. Looking around on my computer storage, I can find occasional notes on my mood and motivation from various points in the past (up to 6-7 years ago), but these were all motivated by this same worry, which apparently goes back a ways.
It’s also possible that I really have declined in these ways, but that I’m choosing such a pivotal set of ages (roughly 17-22) for my reference points that I ought to expect decline.
I definitely declined, but I feel like in hindsight I was always sort of set up for a Fall From Glory, personality- and neurotype-wise :/
I worry about this regularly, but I continue to surprise people with new ideas, so I cannot accurately estimate it, and I think that if I can nail this aerobic exercise and eating and sleeping thing, I will improve again.
“Hey there’s some low-probability, high-cost health problem that it’s crazy to try to prevent/prepare for on an individual basis, let’s contribute to a communal pool to deal with it when it comes up, maybe with some incentives to keep controllable risk factors down”
“Hey negotiating per product/service on every health maintenance transaction is kinda crazy making, how about I (or my patron) pay a flat monthly fee that cover all my basic needs and you handle the details?”
“I am foreseeably going to need more care as I get older or my disease progresses. Let’s make some sort of social / financial arrangement that leverages this, like I raise kids who will care for me or I give you investment money now and you pay my medical bills later.”
“most people don’t like the policy where we just let disabled people die, but disabled people can often cost tens of thousands of dollars a month or more to keep alive, and they rarely have the high incomes that would enable them to keep themselves alive”
fluffshy said: How are you not involved? You have acted as the core of my experience of the social side of rationalists for months.
as far as I know the rationalists hang out on Facebook and the SSC comment section and in the Bay Area and at various meetups in cities around the world, which I’m not involved in.
The set of Rationalists is defined as such:
Eliezer Yudkowsky is in the set of Rationalists.
Anyone who argues with a member of the set of Rationalists is in the set of Rationalists.
The proof of your membership in the set is left as an exercise for the reader.
Do you honestly think there's any chance that your very intellectual approach to politics will ever translate into a movement radical enough to mobilize people to implement it?
“Very intellectual”
Heh.
Could someone start a knock-off of Singapore’s People’s Action Party and get any seats for it?
Not under the current electoral system in America, though we see elements, bits and pieces can sometimes get through, such as Maine adopting a kind of preference voting for the governor’s seat.
The polarization into two parties is the natural state of the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system - you want exactly 51% of the vote in order to have the minimum amount of compromise. This creates a lot of dumb politics.
There is, after all, no place for me in the Republican Party, nor in the Democratic Party.
However, while a unified party powerful enough to take power may not emerge, some ideas, elements, and legislative reforms could get through. And if there are subtle changes to the system, then a more unified platform could become viable.
Some of these elements which escape to be adopted by others may be ideological in nature. Some of my posts on Nationalism have caused some local Rationalists to scratch their heads, wondering “wait, why isn’t that the argument actual American nationalists, in the form of the GOP, actually make?” Or otherwise they simply have never been exposed to an argument for Nationalism that is more than performative flag-waving, by the kind of person who believes that nations are both real and fake at the same time, that can see them as constructs, but still considers them desirable. Also, many may not have been exposed to the idea that open borders may be a pathway to an incompetent yet oppressive world government (gradually, over time).
Likewise, in constructing a kind of Social Centrism, most people do not currently have access to arguments against the most liberal positions (on e.g., polygamy) that are rooted in secular considerations and which also take in mind future developments (e.g., Transhumanism).
There is a question - when GOP members exit their current ideological basis, what will they exit to?
By making these arguments, which then are shared, I create a more defensible ideological position of retreat other than just crossing over entirely to the other side.
The ideal body for my politics right now, given conditions, would be a think tank that could conduct research and produce ready-to-sign legislation along pathways that the existing political parties are not currently setup to defend against (insufficient pre-built memetic barriers - battles they don’t even realize they are or will be fighting). This does not require a mass movement, but rather a fairly good-sized chunk of funding and a core of intelligent and motivated contributors.
On a more mass basis, once a more clear ideology is produced, I think it can be simplified in a way that is more easily communicated…
…though that may still have issues generating sufficient excitement.
@argumate on the one hand, it seems dubious to poke the bear’s nest by resurrecting the weak men post and its attenant cloud of discourse, but on the other, it’s still hilarious every year how butthurt people were about it. Potentially still are? Haven’t been paying enough attention to know if the discourse is fresh.
it’s a complicated and it takes time and careful words to unpack.
there are a few posts going around Tumblr of the form “if your friend has to drive you places because you have no car then I will be dating him, not you” followed by general acclamation; yeah girl, respect yourself, etc.
if widely held, this view guarantees one or both of these:
1. you’re damn right there will be a wage gap
2. many people will be dissatisfied with their relationship options
statements seen as being generally “pro-women” are read as non-sexist, even if they have implications which are exceedingly sexist.
for groups to be equal, individuals must be equal; if there is a preference for inequality at the individual level, it’s going to drive inequality at the group level.
one cannot complain about people reacting to an incentive structure that you yourself participate in creating.
It’s weird that most people don’t pretend to be the other gender online, honestly.
Eh, there’s still existing gender conformity rules (though more for men than for women) saying not to do it, plus I think a lot more people are vaguely comfortable in their gender roles than they let on.
Not that I don’t recommend it. I have many faces, and I like to let people assume.
If you end up being the person running the @argumate account, I am going to be livid.
We are all running the Argumate account, ShieldFoss. The steady and unrestrained stream of anons assures that the Argumate blog is a democratic and participatory process.
We are all argumate, but none of us know it, because argumate is a Chinese Room whose output is determined by symbols that we pass around to each other without knowing their meaning.
Chinese-Australian room, surely.
If all owl possible owl hoots from all possible worlds in all possible contexts are placed into a lookup table, is the resulting lookup table an owl? - anonymous, On the Nature of @argumate, 2054
Do you honestly think there's any chance that your very intellectual approach to politics will ever translate into a movement radical enough to mobilize people to implement it?
“Very intellectual”
Heh.
Could someone start a knock-off of Singapore’s People’s Action Party and get any seats for it?
Not under the current electoral system in America, though we see elements, bits and pieces can sometimes get through, such as Maine adopting a kind of preference voting for the governor’s seat.
The polarization into two parties is the natural state of the first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system - you want exactly 51% of the vote in order to have the minimum amount of compromise. This creates a lot of dumb politics.
There is, after all, no place for me in the Republican Party, nor in the Democratic Party.
However, while a unified party powerful enough to take power may not emerge, some ideas, elements, and legislative reforms could get through. And if there are subtle changes to the system, then a more unified platform could become viable.
Some of these elements which escape to be adopted by others may be ideological in nature. Some of my posts on Nationalism have caused some local Rationalists to scratch their heads, wondering “wait, why isn’t that the argument actual American nationalists, in the form of the GOP, actually make?” Or otherwise they simply have never been exposed to an argument for Nationalism that is more than performative flag-waving, by the kind of person who believes that nations are both real and fake at the same time, that can see them as constructs, but still considers them desirable. Also, many may not have been exposed to the idea that open borders may be a pathway to an incompetent yet oppressive world government (gradually, over time).
Likewise, in constructing a kind of Social Centrism, most people do not currently have access to arguments against the most liberal positions (on e.g., polygamy) that are rooted in secular considerations and which also take in mind future developments (e.g., Transhumanism).
There is a question - when GOP members exit their current ideological basis, what will they exit to?
By making these arguments, which then are shared, I create a more defensible ideological position of retreat other than just crossing over entirely to the other side.
The ideal body for my politics right now, given conditions, would be a think tank that could conduct research and produce ready-to-sign legislation along pathways that the existing political parties are not currently setup to defend against (insufficient pre-built memetic barriers - battles they don’t even realize they are or will be fighting). This does not require a mass movement, but rather a fairly good-sized chunk of funding and a core of intelligent and motivated contributors.
On a more mass basis, once a more clear ideology is produced, I think it can be simplified in a way that is more easily communicated…
…though that may still have issues generating sufficient excitement.
Protectionism is supposed to be an evil bastion of inefficiency, but I’m not so sure that, in a loose sense over the policy space of various protectionisms, none of them are wise policy.
It isn’t just about protecting a baby industry in your country while it develops, but *also* there is the matter of retaining a network of industry necessary to achieve economies of scale in the first place, which may also have an impact on other industries. The marginal cost of the first auto factory is much higher since it includes the entire rest of the supplier network!
Motorola’s attempt to build a phone in the US did not fail due to insufficient virtue of the American worker (“shame on you for not living in a company barracks! lazy! so lazy!”), but rather the lack of this network, and we must also NOT ignore the political and geopolitical environment, where a slight marginal cost may be worth paying in order to avoid strengthening major ideological and political rivals.
@neoliberalism-nightly
um, you mean that the virtue of the american worker was insufficient to overcome the apparent lack of the relevant supply chains. you could change either of them, or some combination, and other variables that are unspecified but yet still exogenous.
In this case, I am not praising American workers as exceptionally virtuous. (Though they do work long hours by the standards of developed economies in Europe, our colleagues in Japan and Korea are very busy people indeed.)
Rather, there is an implicit argument that, in order to compete with China, America must go to the level of the Industrious Chinese Laborers living in company barracks, and remove its environmental tyranny and let the rivers run red with nickel processing runoff. That the failure to do so is a moral failure of the American people to compete adequately in the global economy.
I think, instead, that it is possible for America (and the other developed nations) to have some of these industries without doing so, assuming the correct policies are in play.
Speaking of environmental tyranny, undermining the ability of companies to engage in environmental arbitrage which allows them to get away with not paying the true costs of their environmental externalities would be one method to push for this in terms of policy vectors.
Protectionism is supposed to be an evil bastion of inefficiency, but I’m not so sure that, in a loose sense over the policy space of various protectionisms, none of them are wise policy.
It isn’t just about protecting a baby industry in your country while it develops, but *also* there is the matter of retaining a network of industry necessary to achieve economies of scale in the first place, which may also have an impact on other industries. The marginal cost of the first auto factory is much higher since it includes the entire rest of the supplier network!
Motorola’s attempt to build a phone in the US did not fail due to insufficient virtue of the American worker (“shame on you for not living in a company barracks! lazy! so lazy!”), but rather the lack of this network, and we must also NOT ignore the political and geopolitical environment, where a slight marginal cost may be worth paying in order to avoid strengthening major ideological and political rivals.
Hot take: the LessWrong community is doomed to fail, because it’s original memetic code is written by a libertarian individualist. Yud focuses on rationalism as a singular activity of debiasing oneself, which is ultimately doomed to yield astonishingly diminishing results.
Modern theories on the origins of reason pose that the purpose of reason is not to independently find truth, but to evaluate and author arguments in debate. Hence, much like pair programming makes better code, pair reasoning ought to be a discipline. Indeed academic debate is a very natural medium for creation of good ideas.
A much better saying that “what do you think you know and how do you think you know it” would be “who did you hear it from and who benefits from you believing it.” A philosophy of truth-as-social-construct both ties into the paradigmatic theory of science and the skepticism of accepted truths that is crucial to good social idea generation.
In fact, science is a poor fit for a prototype of rationalism, since science is a highly involved and highly specific process of discerning the mechanics of reality in a way that makes it very easy to profit of (c.f. the practice of engineering) and therefore hard to question w.r.t. truth-as-social-construct (give or take global warming denialists.)
A much better prototype for rationalism is an unholy union of mathematics and postmodern philosophy, favoring discourse and communal creative problem solving over solitary reasoning. An idea-economy based on social deconstruction, rather than derision of one’s intellectual forbearers and lessers.
Also, queers and unashamed socialism (c.f. who told you socialism was bad and who benefits from you believing it?,) because it scares off the undesirable crypto-fascists and ancaps.
Discuss.
You’re making the ‘natural things are good’ mistake.
The evolutionary origin of reason is probably from the value of winning arguments, but that does not imply anything about what it is most useful for now.
Truth as social construct is toxic to anyone trying to exert their will upon reality, which is the universal goal.
I’m a libertarian individualist but I think OP might be onto something with the paired reasoning thing, it’s something I’m exploring.
> Invite crypto-fascists and ancaps to scare off the SJWs and commies.
> Invite socialists and queers to scare off the crypto-fascists and ancaps.
> Invite economists and meta-contrarians to scare off the socialists and queers.
> Invite bobcats and bears to scare off the economists and meta-contrarians.
> Invite tigers to scare off the bobcats and bears.
> Rationality overrun by tigers, all Less Wrong posts are just the word “GRRRRRRRRR” hundreds of times.
This Wapo op-ed by deBoer is worth reading, but in his eagerness to prove his point (that employer power over your speech is traditionally bad for the Left) he conflates two very different things.
I think most every liberal and leftist agrees that routine monitoring of employee communications is threatening. And while we may disagree on whether there should be laws against it, we would rather employers not fire people just for saying who they want for President or talking about controversial issues on Facebook.
However, that’s not what happened in any of the high profile cases he mentioned (google, Sacco, Eichs, etc) and it’s foolish to pretend it is. A large, loud mob formed threatening bad publicity and boycotts for the company, unless they fired someone who had become a public fixation (half through error, half through random chance.)
To talk about employer “rights” here is silly. It’s not like the employer innately wants to fire this person (and in most of these cases the employer knew about the offense well before it became public.) They will however, react to the demands of the mob, unless an even stronger force prevents them.
On cases like these, there are the more fundamental ethical questions of “How do we respond to mob demands? How do we respond when we agree with the point of the mob? When we disagree? Do we want a legal framework that limits what responses companies can have?”
It’s true that if we set a norm of “companies should fire someone when the mob finds them objectionable” then that can bleed into your employer monitoring your Facebook at all times “just in case.” But that’s not the only issue at play here.
For instance, I found these tweets by Popehat, a legal explainer who leans hard on “rights have legal meaning but free speech is not freedom from consequences” hilarious:
What what… thousands of people can yell about a person, and that’s fine, but if an institution wants to act on that yelling? Heaven forbid. You fully expect small institutions are gonna be happy keeping around someone who is “shunned and reviled by everyone?” No, that doesn’t work. If you make someone into a public humiliation, and tar everyone they are associated with, those organizations will seek to disassociate themselves. If that’s not a result you want, don’t publicly pile on someone.
(I’m not really trying to defend Peter here. He’s literally in a mob with torches, so if anyone is guilty of mob tactics, its him. Just you can’t really wish for the world where rogues are widely known and intensely mocked and villified by the masses, but they don’t lose their job or school position or anything else. You gotta choose.)
For me, the most exhausting thing about the “why can’t we fire someone for having terrible opinions / it’s overkill to starve people or expel them from society for their terrible opinions” dichotomy is that it feels like it’s really a debate about rights and social support and who is obligated to provide them, but that aspect never gets foregrounded. Like, if we don’t want to force institutions to employ or support pariahs at their own expense, and we don’t want to completely destroy pariahs on principle, the obvious solution is to reduce the extent to which people are dependent on the support of institutions and employers, particularly private ones. People care a lot about school and jobs because those things are crucial to life in our society, and I don’t think there’ll be a satisfactory solution to the shunning issue as long as that stays the case.
Of course, the other part of the problem I guess is that it’s hard to maintain a space between “this person is somewhat unpopular and often criticized” and “this person is universally loathed as an enemy of society” – shunning seems to be a taboo designed that a situation doesn’t decay toward the former equilibrium, not because the latter is correct but because it’s, I guess, closer? Social sanction is not a fine instrument.
“You liberals and your safe spaces/trigger warnings/elitism/anti-fascist protests are the reason we have the alt-right” isn’t wrong just because it’s cruel and victim-blaming. It’s wrong because…well, follow that to its logical conclusion.
Suppose you’re right. Suppose we live in a world where a group of overeager progressive students demanding trigger warnings can actually cause large groups of Nazis to march with assault rifles and elect a leader who promises to bankrupt, deport, imprison, assault and/or kill millions of people. Suppose we live in a world where one punch thrown by an Antifa protester naturally and rightly leads to mass curtailment of civil rights for everyone.
Suppose we live in a world where those on the side of justice have to be perfect, have to moderate our language and keep our voices down, have to assemble politely and calmly, or else we can and should expect violent repression.
What kind of world is that?
If we live in a world where overeager college kids naturally provoke Nazi aggression, then the Nazis have already come, and the college kids and the Antifas and whoever else you want to blame today are just convenient targets.
“On the side of justice” - Hint, not everyone agrees that your faction is “on the side of justice,” especially when that faction is willing to do things like overlook sex crimes for ideological reasons. (“But right-wingers ignore sex cri-” right, but you’re implicitly claiming that you are better than them. If you aren’t really, why bother with you?)
Look, there can be dustups without it escalating so much. White nationalists were fringe earlier.
But there is support on the Left for demographic replacement, combined with an implicit belief in ethnonationalism for everyone except white people.
Every time some progressive talks about how “we are the guests of the native tribes here in Michigan,” it supports collective ethnic ownership of the land, which is a core component of ethnonationalism.
You cannot have collective ethnic justice and not have white nationalism.
Either you have civic nationalism without white nationalism, or you have individualism without white nationalism, but you cannot have racial consciousness without white people having racial consciousness, too.
And yeah, historically, white nationalism has been bad. So maybe I don’t appreciate people running around specifically making white people aware of their race and how it’s “problematic” all the time making them identify harder with whiteness.
Spencer’s rally wasn’t even that big! They had to truck people in from all across the country! That whole “anti Nazis” rally in Boston or whatever dwarfed the KKK that were said to be planning to arrive by orders of magnitude.
There might be ways to have ethnic consciousness without causing white ethnonationalism, but they are ideologically prohibited to you, and would probably look more like the behaviors of East Asian soft authoritarian low-democracy city-states than anything you’d see in a diversity seminar.
Casually talking about adult female friends is tricky business. Calling them “guys” can be considered misgendering. Calling them “girls” could be disrespectful. Calling them “women” is bizarrely formal and impersonal. “Ladies” is formal and/or condescending. Calling them “females” is TERF-y and makes you sound like a goddamn Ferengi posting on /r/incels.
Does this… does this mean “dames” should make a comeback? It’s vintage and a little slang-y, but also implies that you’re hanging out with a bunch of knights.
Ship, this will usher in a new form of noir talking.
During the Second World War, the Japanese Canadian population of coastal British Columbia was divided and resettled across the Canadian interior.
The Japanese Canadians did not concentrate anywhere. There were no resettled communities, only families and individuals. They did not live close to one another. They did not make new communities, out of a fear that they might once again become public enemies.
A few thousand left for Japan after the war was over. Those who stayed in Canada did not usually return to their homes in the Pacific exclusion area, which had been sold by civilian authorities at a profit.
The resettled families did not keep their language. They did not keep their culture. They kept friends among themselves, but they did not do it in public, and they did not pass it on to their children. Their children went to Anglophone schools. They made Anglophone friends.
And as the older generation died, it forgot. Their children grew up in a community that was not their own. But, for those children, it was different. This was their home now. This was their community.
Almost. They felt apart from it, somehow. Sometimes, by a word or a look, they felt as though they did not belong. They felt as though there was something missing. Sometimes they felt as though they did not know where they had come from. Sometimes they felt as though they did not know who they were.
They felt as though their parents had taken something from them. They had done it out of fear, or out of hope. The children had not understood what they were missing. Their parents understood it much too well.
As adults, they talked to one another, those with the same skin, with the same names, about that feeling of absence. Not often, but sometimes.
But they forgot those feelings, and those moments, most of the time. They lived and worked in a world that told them this was their community, and these were their people, and this was where they belonged.
