Oceans Yet to Burn

Anonymous asked:

This is not intended to be as condescending a question as it reads, but I was wondering if you've studies public policy in university or if you have any qualifications relating to policy or political theory?

My major in university was originally Political Science, and then Political Science/Philosophy/Economics, before I switched to Computer Science, after I started selling some software/3D trinkets, so to speak. I’ve taken classes in international law, comparative politics, intellectual property, economics, and so on.

But my education in those fields is incomplete, and I’m not entirely well-suited to them.

This is a wildcat politics blog. I have no blogging license, nor sanction from the establishment.

I’m not approved by your mother, your progressive liberal friends, or the New York Times. I’ve been compared to Neoreaction, I cannot be cited in arguments, and even if you wanted to cite me, my identity is a deliberate mystery - though I suppose that last part isn’t new in politics.

Of course, what did the Establishment get us? The Iraq War? Meddling in Libya and in Syria? Migration crisis in Europe, and then refusing to acknowledge the issues it causes? Housing shortages paired with high immigration? And what advice do they offer the cities of the interior, but to wither and die?

Some benefit, they may have gotten us, but something better than them must exist somewhere, or some time in the future. Liberal Democracy, in its modern incarnation, is not the end of history, but Democracy means that we all practice politics.

anons asks 私 the iron hand

argumate

shlevy

If you want to claim that the distinction between economic incentives and physical force is often irrelevant, fine, make your case. But if you’re going to pretend it doesn’t exist, why should people who built their whole economic system on that difference pay attention?

shlevy

Also, these arguments usually suffer from the same flaw as “atheism is just another religion”: they are almost always part of a call for more physical force, but if you’re cool with that what exactly is your objection in the first place?

argumate

there are no economic incentives that aren’t ultimately backed by force, in any system

mitigatedchaos

Exactly.

And the objection isn’t so much “but they use force,” but rather “you’re claiming your system is Special and therefore should be treated differently. It is not Special, and therefore it lacks moral weight to prohibit us from altering it.”

Typically, it’s in response to bitching about “how dare there be taxation! commerce is freedom!”, when someone suggests some redistributive program. But if it’s work-or-starve, then this whole “commerce is freedom” thing is fundamentally undermined, and you don’t get to claim you avoid any responsibility just because you’re not the one holding the metaphorical gun.

Property, as it exists in nature, is not morally binding, and that’s the only sense in which it exists independently of malleable human construction.

Property might be useful as a concept, but that’s very different from it having inherent rather than instrumental moral binding.

(tired in writing this, maybe a bit confusing.)

Source: shlevy the invisible fist the iron hand

discoursedrome

shlevy

discoursedrome

Hmm, I dunno. Pretty much all states forbid some kinds of physical force but not others, and some kinds of economic incentives but not others. This is especially true when looking at de facto rather than de jure enforcement. In the eyes of the institution, I’d say that the kinds of economic incentives that are banned are more like the kinds of physical force that are banned than they are like the kinds of economic inventives that are permitted. “Is this permitted or not” is just about the most institutionally-salient quality.

Thus, I’m not sure any actually-existing systems really are built on a clear differentiation between those two categories. They tend to be grouped as distinct species in the sense that, say, bribery is distinct from assault, but this seems more like statutory syntactic sugar than the kind of substantive qualitative difference that the “physical versus and economic coercion” distinction is purported to represent under liberalism. It seems like more of a rhetorical distinction than one that people actually build societies around.

Source: shlevy the invisible fist the iron hand

the-grey-tribe

Source: thinksquad

Still, I suppose I can add “accused of being Mencius Moldbug” (though it was very probably a shitpost) to the List, along with “labeled ‘faux Asian nationalist political thinker’,” “suggested should work at a think tank,” and a few other things.

The thing about Neoreaction is that Gnon doesn’t care about you, either, and neither did it care about species throughout history that have gone extinct - and what we want is survival and prosperity for ourselves, not to be subject to outrageous Fortune. And Fnargl? There’s no reason for him not to overwrite your mind with his superior technology or just replace you with a robot.

Neoreaction is not positioned to account for Transhumanism, among other things. As such, it’s a dead end.

Any overlap I have with Neoreactionary thought is largely incidental. I don’t really interact with them, nor read them.

I’m not a dark angel cast out of Gnon’s heaven to dwell among the mortal Liberals and spread the heretical gospels of Dark Enlightenment™. I’m surfing a wave seeking a better future, looking to synthesize a new, upwards axis.

politics

mitigatedchaos

Anonymous asked:

wait a minute... national technocracy. rule by the truly enlightened. red herring memes of a female presenting selfsona that were probably made by a professional artist in MS paint -- and not crowdfunded -- possibly commissioned with peter thiel money. are you mencius moldbug?

mitigatedchaos answered:

mitigatedchaos

*ahem* er, uh, rather, I mean –

More than one person is able to practice forbidden dark magic, my darling Anon.

All practitioners of Nationalism drink from the shadowed waters, but we do not all use the power it grants us to the same ends.

shtpost anons asks sidereal nationalism no i'm not actually moldbug haha can you imagine moldbug writing any posts as short as mine? man i must be coming off as low-key super-reactionary lately or something lol augmented reality break

Anonymous asked:

shtpost anons asks

Though really, I was just trying to figure out a way to have people bet, like a prediction market, on project completion times and success without inadvertently paying them to sabotage the project.

rictic

mitigatedchaos

Suppose we have hired a contractor to build a bridge. We issue partial payment for the project in the form of a financial instrument (presumably in a mutual fund or something else that bears interest) which only pays out in X years from now if the bridge does not collapse by then. We then monitor the price of this instrument, particularly the sales by those holding it, in order to obtain information about the quality of the bridge. This allows us to obtain this information without incentivizing anyone to deliberately sabotage the bridge project (assuming we prohibit short-selling).

Huh.

mitigatedchaos

@neoliberalism-nightly

construction surety bonds

So they (or rather, something like them) do exist. Though in this case, I’m thinking that these are offered to the employees, rather than, or in addition to, the company, with less access to the external market for a while, so that we can obtain this information in addition to not rewarding if the project fails to complete adequately.

And perhaps, more importantly, offer these across all sectors of government contracting and even public sector employment generally.

Though… if we have the mechanisms, why the fuck do we still have so many massive time and budget overruns?

And why aren’t we using these on government IT projects?

So many of them fail spectacularly, imagine if we made 1/3rd of the pay into deferred compensation in this format. We could not only see some of these failures coming and plan for them, but we could drive some of these people that cannot deliver a project and turn everything into dragged-out, cost-plus, out of the sector.

shieldfoss

>why does the government still pay out so much extra money to their connected contractors?

But of course there are budget- and time-overruns in private contracting as well.

When I’ve seen it, it has typically been one of the following:

Commissioned personnel pushing through a contract that’ll be good for them but not good for the company
rank optimism
VIPs slowing things down by being too busy to have time for you when you need the go-ahead signed
VIPs slowing things down by being too fucking self-important and unable to get it hard unless they first delay a project by grandstanding
Seriously don’t get me started on VIPs
On my tombstone, just write “Sure he’s dead now, but you should see what he did to the other guy once he learned they’d changed the project requirements during the project.”

mitigatedchaos

Sounds like some of these government contracts need what I’ll call “adversarial review”. Imagine, having a department who gets paid by reading through the contract and thinking of all the ways to fuck it up.

Not just some rubber stamp review, but getting paid for all the flaws (and by the magnitude of the flaw) they find.

There’s gotta be some way to bring the rate of costs and fuckups down. Certainly, other countries that are also developed are paying much less for infrastructure.

rictic

How do you keep that productive? Criticism is easy, accurate and actionable criticism is hard. Who criticises the critics? Scott’s IRB experience for example didn’t even have payouts per criticism, ordinary human and bureaucratic motivations were enough to make it counterproductive.

mitigatedchaos

Perhaps we put a contract synthesizer on top that pits the two sides against each other a few times and decides which criticisms actually matter to the organization, and then we also issue a few more employee deferred compensation instruments based on things like the number and magnitude of change orders.

Source: mitigatedchaos policy

shieldfoss

mitigatedchaos

Huh.

mitigatedchaos

@neoliberalism-nightly

construction surety bonds

And perhaps, more importantly, offer these across all sectors of government contracting and even public sector employment generally.

Though… if we have the mechanisms, why the fuck do we still have so many massive time and budget overruns?

And why aren’t we using these on government IT projects?

shieldfoss

>why does the government still pay out so much extra money to their connected contractors?

But of course there are budget- and time-overruns in private contracting as well.

When I’ve seen it, it has typically been one of the following:

Commissioned personnel pushing through a contract that’ll be good for them but not good for the company
rank optimism
VIPs slowing things down by being too busy to have time for you when you need the go-ahead signed
VIPs slowing things down by being too fucking self-important and unable to get it hard unless they first delay a project by grandstanding
Seriously don’t get me started on VIPs
On my tombstone, just write “Sure he’s dead now, but you should see what he did to the other guy once he learned they’d changed the project requirements during the project.”

mitigatedchaos

Not just some rubber stamp review, but getting paid for all the flaws (and by the magnitude of the flaw) they find.

There’s gotta be some way to bring the rate of costs and fuckups down. Certainly, other countries that are also developed are paying much less for infrastructure.

Source: mitigatedchaos policy

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.