Oceans Yet to Burn

argumate

Every nation longs to be an empire. Every culture has tried to force itself on the unwilling at one point or another. What is the statute of limitations on imperialism? Are there varying legally distinct degrees, like with murder versus manslaughter, and murder one versus murder two? Who among us shall pass judgement, when everyone is guilty if you only go back far enough? And who is in a position to carry out the sentence, but another empire in its own right?

And more importantly, who among us can ask rhetorical questions? :)

I think “Japan” as a nation and culture got off lightly; the emperor was retained, as was the flag and other symbolism. Because it’s an island nation, the borders remained unchanged besides the loss of overseas colonies, which European empires also lost shortly afterwards anyway.

But the opposition to cultural appropriation that spawned this thread is mostly coming from young Japanese-Americans, not older Japanese nationals, and is driven by American/Western political concerns in the first place, which leads to an amusing clusterfuck of intersecting memes; for example:

- The idea that only “pure” Japanese people can ever wear a kimono, which sounds awfully like something you would hear in the 1930s.

- The idea that wearing a kimono will offend Japanese people, when in practice it’s more likely to offend Chinese people as a reminder of Japanese imperialism!

- Referring to Japan in the context of decolonisation, when Japan was an actual colonising nation and was never occupied by Western nations until after WWII.

- Many Japanese people teach classes in traditional arts of tea ceremonies, flower arranging, and the rest. I’m sure they would be absolutely thrilled if all their customers stayed away for fear of appropriating their culture.

Anyway, activists gonna act; it could be worse.

mitigatedchaos

As someone with, hm, let’s say historical ties to both Britain and Japan, I, for one, welcome their defense of the Britain of the East.

Just kidding, this is probably going to get me in trouble.

Actually I’d like the kimono industry to stay afloat as its customer base has been shrinking, and that means selling to nerds in America. They want to do it. The Japanese who live in Japan think it’s okay. First-generation immigrants think it’s okay. And if anyone owns the cultural rights to Japanese culture, then surely it must be Japanese people who live in Japan.

I mean heck, look at all the stuff they deliberately export to us! The government WANTS to export Japanese culture in order to gain soft power! (And more shitpostfully, importing exported Japanese culture is a long-standing European cultural tradition going back hundreds of years.)

A number (though not all) of the people criticizing are not only not Japanese born in Japan, not nisei born of first-generation Japanese immigrants in America, they are other kinds of Asians by ancestry, some of them mixed, or else just plain old White People™.

And, like, the Japanese would likely actually object to the idea that the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Vietnamese own the cultural rights to Japanese culture. That is probably like seven different flavors of problematic.

Probably this relates to how Japan became the Default Asian Culture in the eyes of the West, which… in some ways it kinda was before, but also China could have become that in this century if it didn’t go Communist.

Anyhow, these dust-ups are really about racial and ethnic identity in America. It’s true that people still make fun of Asians, because children are cruel and commit status war and looks are easy to attack. Also, having a sanctioned monopoly on some kind of foreign culture is important to have power under identity politics, like the legitimacy of royalty.

However, it’s also possible that if the rate of mixture increased, eventually people would forget their lineages, much like Italians and Irish forgot who they “were” and became “white.” The question is whether the visual difference is an insurmountable barrier. If I were the Republican Party, I’d be asking myself if there were some way I could cause this forgetting of lineage on purpose.

Britain of the East racepol

invertedporcupine

Regarding some recent political discourse…

I’ve seen some people using the words “centrist” and “moderate” interchangeably, but I view them very differently.

To me, a centrist is someone who determines the ideal political positions via triangulation. I view this very negatively, both because it has no good ethical or meta-ethical underpinning, and because it is naive, being both easily gamed by extremists pushing on the Overton window and, in fact, adding additional incentives for extremists to be even more extreme, for that reason.

A moderate, but contrast, is to me more what “conservative” (as opposed to “reactionary” was supposed to mean, but has failed to mean in practice) – favoring gradual rather than revolutionary change to avoid major downside risks.

I also think less moderate people incorrectly assume that their exact constellation of issues are inherent in the nature of the universe rather than contingent on the nature of society, and conclude that anyone who doesn’t share all of the most left/right possible positions just hasn’t thought it through enough and is being in consistent. It’s quite possible to hold a moderate mix of views for well thought out reasons, consistent with a philosophical underipinning; it’s just that philosophy is something other than superficial leftism/rightism.

invertedporcupine

@mitigatedchaos @ranma-official

mitigatedchaos

I see “centrist” not as a label of the method of finding policy, but as a label for anyone who has positions near the center, regardless of how they got there.

Because, in practice, that is how the word is used. You will be accused of being a Clueless Triangulator or wishy-washer regardless of whether you ever actually triangulate.

politics

mitigatedchaos

The National Delegation

mitigatedchaos

In case you haven’t noticed recently, democracy has major issues. Every major developed state is strewn with dysfunction and programs that are actively at odds with their intended purposes. Our politicians are either incompetent idiots or shrewd operators working against our interests.

Policies routinely have reasonable stated values, but terrible efficacy.

Organizations such as the RAND Corporation knew the Iraq War would be a lot tougher than the Bush administration said it would be. Policy plans coming out of think tanks seem to be better than the actual policies we get.

If we didn’t know they’d immediately get subverted, we’d almost be better off with think tanks running the country.

Better results are necessarily different results, and systems produce the outcomes they incentivize, so to change the results it is necessary to change the system.

The truth is, it may be possible to get something like think tanks in charge of the government, a hybrid between them and political parties, but we will have to add selection pressure to ensure they work towards correctness.

I propose a new legislature, composed of a new kind of corporate entity, the Delegate Candidate Organization (DCO).

Every three years, at election time, each voter delegates their vote to a DCO. The top 50 Delegate Candidate Organizations then form the legislature, becoming that term’s Delegate Organizations. This legislature is known as the National Delegation.

In a second election, those DCOs that did not make the cut delegate their votes to members of the top 50.

(In an optional alternative, the vote could be split between DCOs by categories by voters, allowing a truly innovative level of representation. Bills would have to pass on all categories to pass, and the tax category would determine how funding is obtained, but not total expenditures. Sadly, this is probably too complex for typical voters.)

A Delegate Candidate Organization receives its funding exclusively from the State. For each delegated vote it receives, the DCO receives $5 in annual funding, and an additional $5 times its percentile standing in a legislative outcome prediction market.

(That might sound like a lot. America has around 300 million people, so you could potentially be looking at three billion dollars. I would answer that the 2016 Presidential election cost $2.6 billion by itself, and that money had to come from somewhere and is already influencing our political process. The size of the US economy is $18,570 billion dollars. The real question is whether better policy by the DCOs could improve that by 0.016% or more, which would make the National Delegation pay for itself. I believe that it would.)

The key factor that makes DCOs behave more like think tanks is that a significant chunk of their funding depends on correctly estimating the outcomes of legislation. What keeps them honest? First, competition with other DCOs that will pressure them against spoiling the metrics. Second, voters.

When a piece of legislation is to be passed, DCOs make predictions on outcomes and bet on them in a virtual currency called Credibility Score (or just “Cred”). Each outcome must be represented by a basket of multiple metrics, to prevent min-maxing.

This structure allows us to build a differentiation between a policy’s values and its efficacy. Previous discourse has often viewed policy as solely a matter of efficacy, but of course in practice people have different preferences and are not a unified mass just waiting for enlightenment into [your political ideology]. Preserving the values component (in part through voting) also allows bits of efficacy that have slipped through to be represented on the other side of the equation.

The bets serve two purposes. The first is to reward policymakers that are actively effective at achieving their stated objectives, and punish policymakers that are too unaligned with reality. The second is to effectively tell voters what the plans will actually do, not just wishy washy language pols want people to hear.

“This bill will reduce gun crime.”
“By how much?”
“Uh… a, uh, lot.”

Not only can the DCO specify what its % estimate for a decrease in gun crime is, but it can also communicate its level of certainty - by how much it bets on the outcome as a percentage of its current Cred reserves, data that can be mined by political scientists and journalists.

DCOs must be able to amend predictions when new legislation is passed. A court will also be required to punish those who tamper with metrics, and resolve other disputes. The details of that are a challenge in themselves, but should be feasible to work out.

Each DO has as many votes in the legislature as have been delegated to it. A majority is required to pass legislation.

The accumulated Credibility Score/Cred across all bets is used to determine the percentile standing of all DCOs, used to determine funding (as above). Percentile standing is listed on the ballot next to the DCO’s name, but to simplify things for voters, DCOs are listed in the order of votes received in the previous election.

Practical experiments will be necessary to assess the viability of this model, but I have high hopes for it. If we want to advance as a civilization, then we must develop new organizational technologies.

mitigatedchaos

Think you need to take a closer look at Robin Hanson, something I thought I’d never say
Specifically, the problem is that predicting the results isn’t the issue, it’s predicting the change in results given some policy change
I think Hanson has people bet on outcome both with and without policy

I may have to look into that, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable. Betting for outcomes based on whether the bill passes or fails to pass certainly provides more information for our voters/etc.

One big problem is that people are going to use this not to predict, but to hedge
It will be financialized
If you believe Hanson that markets are perfect, that’s not a problem it will all work out
if you haven’t had your skull smashed with a brick every day for the past 20 years or worked in the econ dept at GMU, you should be skeptical.

Sorry, I guess I should have been more clear in my intentions earlier.

While the probability estimates produced by the prediction market are interesting, the real purposes are more like:

1. Punish politicians that are actively at odds with the truth/reward those who have some idea what they’re doing, so that eventually the system is dominated by more clueful politicals who spend less time huffing ideology. Hopefully, this will result in more effective policy which is more aligned with reality.

(I’m of the opinion that there are many policies that it’s said you can’t do, because markets etc, but which you could do if you were smart about it. So I want those to come up, actually testing some of these policies before they come up, etc.)

2. Make politicians be more specific and truthful about the outcomes of policies in measurable ways, making it more difficult to do one thing and say another.

3. Track the effectiveness of policies over time so that better policy can be created in the future (through the metrics gathered to feed the market, not the market itself).

Would hedging interfere with those? I’m not so sure. It is, itself, information. It may also depend on the market’s design itself.

politics policy