Sometimes I wish tumblr had a downvote option to allow me to go hog-wild in fucking over fascist / anti-sjw / 4chan blogs.
Right, because that works so well on reddit…
Haha, in about ten minutes, downvotes would become a badge of pride, showing how successful the blog was at annoying people like OP. Plus the dumb call-out posts would immediately begin downvoting random fifteen year old girls into oblivion for not liking the right SU ship.
My concern about Anarchism is that it will just replace formal power with social power, and I don’t think that’s really a step up.
Yuuuup. I started getting suspicious about how many Anarchists are people who (think they) have social power but lack formal power.
Since you mentioned this in the other thread, I thought I should round up some of my comments and thoughts on anarchism.
Whenever you have a highly controversial word, go to the root. Anarchy means “without hierarchy.” It should not be about the lack of government, but about the lack of levels of power altogether.
Some anarchists do just see it as a lack of government (or rather, the State.) I think they are blisteringly wrong. This would be particularly dumb for anyone who shares normal social justice concerns, because can’t they see right now that women and racial minorities have formal equality before the government, but massively lack social and soft power, such that they get exploited? For all the many problems with the current Left, it is at least aware of the existence of social power in most of its critiques. I can’t see why they’d simply want to do away with the cops and laws and hope… everything works out.
I guess it makes sense for the AnCaps, but they’re just really wrong and would make a Hellworld.
Lack of hierarchy would be better than that, and address the concerns in my Unfreedom essay.
However, I subscribe to anarchism as a lack of coercion, where no one is coerced to do something they don’t want to by any means (well, socially at least.) Coercion is still possible under flat, egalitarian systems after all, and so are many problems of the state, like a cruel justice system.
It’s a long way to get there, which involves everyone’s norms getting on the page of genuinely caring about the well-being of others (and not throwing a wrench in the works of every consensus because of self-interestedness or fear), but I think it’s possible and better than any of the alternatives. Coercion is just terrible, and begets terribleness.
Right now of course in social terms, anarchist is just an edgelord word for social justice liberals who found their own intentional communities and political action groups, suffused with a great deal of judgmentalism and disregard for the cultural norms of society around them. This disregard includes norms like “Christian charity” and “innocent until proven guilty” so I don’t really give two fucks about them as allies.
Simply: I don’t think this alternative is possible, and the path attempting to get there will just result in social power dominating.
I don’t think it’s actually feasible to get everyone to care about each other like that without massive violations which involve large amounts of coercion to begin with. Brainwashing techniques and probably literally mind-altering invasive procedures would be required. Social power is natural and organic, and will arise in almost any system among humans. People are born unequal before society even gets its hold on them.
Like, are you just going to cancel introverts or something? Or are you going to get rid of extroversion? Because if you don’t unify the preferences, then extroverts will have more social power even if they have equal material resources, without even attempting to do so.
learn-tilde-ath asked:
This seems reasonable to me on first reading.
My late night tired concern is that the census might not update the house seats fast enough to account for changes in policy or something.
It could act as a pressure against the politicians to be Tough On Crime, or at least for them to use whatever means they can to try to strip their opposition from voting. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want certain convicted criminals voting until they are, at least, out of prison again.
I may return to this later.
I’m probably going to write up my own thoughts about this soon, but I’m curious to see what people think (and also if anyone’s familiar with any literature on the question, because I wasn’t able to find any):
From a utilitarian standpoint, are we ever justified in calling a a voluntary economic interaction “exploitative” if no party is acting to make alternatives to the interaction worse, and there’s no asymmetric access to information that would change one party’s mind about whether the interaction is to their benefit? If so, what are the justifications?
(Someone’s going to say “well, that depends how you choose to define ‘exploitative’” so to be clear: In common usage, calling such an interaction exploitative seems to be basically synonymous with considering it as a wrong done by one party of the interaction against another, and this is the sense I mean. More technical definitions of exploitation exist, but as far as I can tell these are usually used by people who believe that their economic definition coincides with the moral one.)
Let’s say you’re wandering the desert, lost and dying of dehydration. While wandering, you find my oasis. I say “You can drink from my oasis if you give me everything you have, not just what’s on you but your life’s savings.“ Is that exploitative?
I certainly think so, yes. But it’s not completely obvious how to ground that intuition in utilitarian ethics. I think it’s possible to do so –I think there are several different ways in which it is beneficial to have a concept of exploitation which includes scenarios like that one– but I’m still working out how to express what those benefits are, and I was curious to hear what other people thought they were.
I’m driving someone into poverty in this example, I am a little better off, you are a lot worse off. Seems pretty straightforwardly utilitarian.
Kind of. In some sense the purpose of Utilitarianism is to judge outcomes rather than attach moral judgment to specific classes of actions. Once you get away from that, it’s less of a Utilitarianism, and more… something else. But the search for the One True Moral Theory continues regardless, so it’s worth investigating.
Most exploitative relationships are a kind of Utility Vampirism, or else a small difference in the rate of exploitation makes a huge difference in produced utility. In fact, under Utilitarianism, property itself is only contingent.
I’m probably going to write up my own thoughts about this soon, but I’m curious to see what people think (and also if anyone’s familiar with any literature on the question, because I wasn’t able to find any):
From a utilitarian standpoint, are we ever justified in calling a a voluntary economic interaction “exploitative” if no party is acting to make alternatives to the interaction worse, and there’s no asymmetric access to information that would change one party’s mind about whether the interaction is to their benefit? If so, what are the justifications?
(Someone’s going to say “well, that depends how you choose to define ‘exploitative’” so to be clear: In common usage, calling such an interaction exploitative seems to be basically synonymous with considering it as a wrong done by one party of the interaction against another, and this is the sense I mean. More technical definitions of exploitation exist, but as far as I can tell these are usually used by people who believe that their economic definition coincides with the moral one.)
Let’s say you’re wandering the desert, lost and dying of dehydration. While wandering, you find my oasis. I say “You can drink from my oasis if you give me everything you have, not just what’s on you but your life’s savings.“ Is that exploitative?
I certainly think so, yes. But it’s not completely obvious how to ground that intuition in utilitarian ethics. I think it’s possible to do so –I think there are several different ways in which it is beneficial to have a concept of exploitation which includes scenarios like that one– but I’m still working out how to express what those benefits are, and I was curious to hear what other people thought they were.
I’m driving someone into poverty in this example, I am a little better off, you are a lot worse off. Seems pretty straightforwardly utilitarian.
Kind of. In some sense the purpose of Utilitarianism is to judge outcomes rather than attach moral judgment to specific classes of actions. Once you get away from that, it’s less of a Utilitarianism, and more… something else. But the search for the One True Moral Theory continues regardless, so it’s worth investigating.
Most exploitative relationships are a kind of Utility Vampirism, or else a small difference in the rate of exploitation makes a huge difference in produced utility. In fact, under Utilitarianism, property itself is only contingent.
So you’re saying Act utilitarianism is the the only utilitarianism and vs Rule utilitarian is fake?
You’re hitting on what I was trying to get at though, this was originally about the abstract institution of “property,“ and like you said from an act utilitarian perspective that doesn’t matter. Only the consequences of the act itself matter. So you have to ask what’s the utilitarian framework you’re applying in questions like this.
Honestly though, can’t you just instantiate Act Utilitarianism as Rule Utilitarianism? Rule Utilitarianism seems less fundamentally true, and more “we know you’re going to try to justify being immoral by claiming you are special, you human, so we’re going to have Rules instead”.
00!me: characters in books are made up people
01!me: characters in books work like mathematics with algorithms designed by the author and won’t be as complex or intelligent as actual people
02!me: characters in books are abstractions made by authors to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of readers to extract money and political ends from readers
03!me: characters in books are people-ish; the brain is lazy and actually good at running “people” programs
galactic buddha brain: people are characters in books
The next one is something about tulpas, right?
Sometimes I forget that you’re older and thus a more powerful vampire more experienced than me.
Forgive me if I ever seem too provincial.
I leave out all the boring and embarrassing details. FWIW I might have been the dumbest least well-adjusted guy in my class.
Scattered thoughts on education:
If a technocratic dictator instituted a centrally managed, stratified education system (tracking), then party officials/bureaucrats would use it to extort parents by holding children hostage.
If school vouchers/tutor vouchers are in any way transferrable or fungible, alcoholic parents will sell them to temporarily embarrassed, frugal intelligentsia and thus widen the educational gap.
Efforts to make education more integrated are sold as left-wing or fostering solidarity and social cohesion, but are actually cost-cutting measures that make education net worse for everybody (Will-Rogers-Effect).
There is a lot of confounding going on between socioeconomic class and school/teaching style. Waldorf education is notoriously bad at actually imparting knowledge on children, but it tends to attract hippie parents with strong convictions and disposable income (I knew a couple of Waldorf-educated math students. They hated it. I don’t know if they would have hated regular high schools less, but still).
Montessori Schools are actually based on constructivist developmental psychology and not eastern mysticism woo, but the selection effect is even bigger there.
Moscow-educated mathematicians or rather math teachers trained by Moscow-educated mathematicians were great at actually teaching math. I learned more English from Cartoon Network than from my teachers though. Eastern bloc English teachers were not very good. Same goes for Latin, but there was no Reticulum Tabulae.
I liked several books that were later required reading, before they were required reading.
Finnish comprehensive primary school until grade 10 with a good teacher/student ratio has the best outcomes in the EU. It’s not at all clear what causes that.
Back to vouchers:
I personally believe that there are lots of high school teachers out there either who do not understand the subject they are teaching or suck at the didactics of their subject. Good teachers can have a positive effect on students, but are limited by the material they work with.
Bad students can drag the rest of the class down. Smaller classrooms have numerous benefits: Not only does the teacher have more timer per student, but students who are slow to grok a particular concept keep the whole class back. It makes a difference if you have one stupid question per hour or three. The time adds up. It’s not always the same student lagging in every subject.
If you can use vouchers to pay for remedial classes or individual tutors in specific subjects, you could have slightly bigger classes moving on a much more consistent pace. It might be smarter to reduce the student/teacher ratio as needed for specific students and subjects.
I am much more skeptical of vouchers for whole schools (Which seems to be the proposed policy in the US?).
Actually, I already laid out a plan for a total revamp, something I’d instantiate a few prototypes of were I actually the technocratic dicta- er, I mean Central Director. Perhaps you could comment on it.
I’ve been slowly writing a more detailed version.
“Yes,” said the technician. “We got the test results back, and well…” The look on her face was very grim.
Bernstein was aghast. They had all agreed to pass the law. They had all agreed that it was wrong and immoral to have sexual thoughts about others who didn’t want to be thought of sexually.
And, since one couldn’t know who was or was not okay with being thought of sexually beforehand, it was a moral necessity that humanity should default to asexuality. Gender discrimination and sexual crimes had dropped off significantly. Only an underground of resentful dissidents had refused to comply.
“Surely it can’t be,” said Bernstein. “She couldn’t be that reckless. It’s impossible.” He let out a second “impossible” under his breath, just barely audible, as he stared at the technician.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bernstein,” said the technician, “she’s sex-positive.”
what incentive do you give me to do a better job when you keep taking my half-finished thoughts and making them funny
Don’t worry. I’m stealing your finished thoughts from the future.
we live in a world where you can claim that the field of computing is fundamentally broken because it rests on principles discovered by white men and you won’t get laughed off the stage
There are still places you will, it’s just that the list of those places is shrinking.
Of course, creating this environment has its costs, much like you’ll find in some Eastern European thoughts on Communism - once such a thing is enacted, the conversions against it are permanent.
trickytalks asked:
collapsedsquid answered:
They’re skeptical of globalization in general just like the other
anti-establishment groups, and tend towards anti-interventionism. They’re
generally in favor of public infrastructure and public projects, but
have mixed thoughts on welfare. Assimilation and the
act of building the national culture are a big deal, that affects their
views on immigration which can be flexible depending on their view of circumstances. Seem to shun ethnic nationalism, I get the
impression that some of them on the rightward edge do buy into some form of bell curve stuff
but they’ve decided it’s basically not terribly important, if somebody
isn’t highly intelligent there’s a lot of work to be done that doesn’t
require high intelligence to do. Neither especially pro or anti-market, I think they tend towards “not too afraid of public spending or taxation but somewhat anti-regulation.“
And you can sort of see that
as a third way, it’s the recognition that you depend on the people and
environment around you and therefore you can’t really get away from this
concept of the common good and improving society, but skeptical of
taking it too far. “selfish collectivism“ might be a somewhat trollish way of
putting it. Class-wise I think the people I’ve seen with it are educated professionals, I think this sort of inherits from “Rockefeller Republicans“
@mitigatedchaos, you are sort of close to this but you’re not a central example. This is pretty much random disconnected things I’ve found off tumblr, there isn’t really a big repository or central hub of this that I can think of. I mean, I’m not even honestly sure this is a real ideology or something I’m putting together in my head from people I think speak similarly but who don’t actually agree with each other.
It might be more of a thing if the US had more parties.
I know I’m trying to synthesize a lot of stuff while not ignoring the tyranny of the rocket equation of the economy, so to speak.
Some evil biostuff is probably true on some level, but we haven’t yet tried having social policy that doesn’t suck and tbh we haven’t even tried bulk distribution of multivitamins/etc.
Though some of this on my part is trying to put ideas into liberals about how to actually achieve their Happy Liberal Land without fking it up, seeing as there are a lot more of them than people out searching for harder civic nationalism or national technocracy.
