Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

It’s possible for a dead character to have great influence on the plot without being undead or some other form of not-really-dead.

In real life, such things are echoes, or mechanisms setup beforehand.

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Many years ago, I observed a discussion between an acquaintance and his father.  The father said that the shows the son watched did not deal with death.  The son said that Dragon Ball Z did deal with death - that the characters had died at such and such time, and were trapped in the spirit realm.  But the father said that, as those characters came back, and so on, that they hadn’t really died, not in the way we understood it, and that the work didn’t really deal with death.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

While this may not be the Perfect Policy That Would End All Badness Forever, a large part of my… not ideal world, but at least “world where things are mostly okay from a system one perspective” is just “competition and violence exist, but everyone is honorable and plays by the rules.” Like, where CEOs do their thing and make as much profit as possible, but are honest negotiators, don’t collaborate to raise prices, etc, and where war exists, but everyone follows the Geneva Conventions.

It’s weird to me that this isn’t a more popular position. In particular, it seems like “bring back honorable warfare, real men don’t torture children or use chemical weapons” should be prime neoreactionary territory, and yet somehow it isn’t.

[mitigatedchaos]

I think the Neoreactionaries would welcome it - if they thought it were remotely possible.

I certainly find something… hmn, I’m not sure what the right word is for it, but I appreciate that CEOs in Japan still experience shame as an emotion.

And I probably shouldn’t.  I probably shouldn’t be satisfied that someone embezzling ten million dollars would throw themselves into the sea, never to return, out of such a deep sense of shame.

Maybe it’s because one of our weapons against embezzlement is the stripping of social status - and if someone has no shame, it’s a sign that their social status hasn’t been stripped and can’t be used against them.  And then what is there to stop them embezzling?  White collar jail?  House arrest?  Not very effective.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

it seems dangerous to play something like baseball in australia. if you go after a ball you hit out of the diamond, you'll probably end up grabbing some sort of deadly insect or something instead of the ball.

argumate answered:

let me tell you about cricket

[mitigatedchaos]

First, a dingo runs off with your ball, then you get lost in the vast wilderness between the cities and die.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

mitigatedchaos

I cannot trust it will actually turn out like that at all due to how this has gone previously.

Why I specified “agreement to execute anyone who commits an honor killing” is that it’s an ideological sin to do that, and thus serves as a costly signal that they actually care and aren’t just trying to pull one over like they have previously, when they promised this stuff would not happen.

(Also it would de-normalize honor killings, but you get the idea.)

anaisnein

It brings in the whole existing orthogonal discourse over the death penalty and complicates the already complicated debate terrain. Also, summary execution is more of a What’s Wrong With Those Others thing and less a What’s Right About Us Here thing and I would think you wouldn’t be enthusiastic about that, it instantiates the cultural decay you’re postulating.

Well, let’s assume that the plan is to create an international-thinking city-state that values this free migration.

Right off the bat, the existing high-immigration city-state that does not have an issue with honor killings is Singapore, where the sentence for murder is death by hanging.  Until 2012, this was mandatory.  So flat out, if you engage in an “honor killing” in Singapore, they will kill you.

But of course, we don’t have to just copy-paste Singapore.

Cultural practices have inertia.  Apply that inertia to Italian cuisine and you get Chicago-style deep dish pizza.  Apply that inertia to throwing acid on women to control them, and you get acid attacks by British gangs.

They have to be stopped before that inertia can take hold.

And since we’re being so heavily about freedom of movement, we want to put the brakes on this within one generation, since we can’t necessarily rely on other methods, like limiting the maximum size of one incoming ethnic group and where they live in order to fragment them such that their number of cultural graph edges is insufficient to sustain their culture.  

That leaves responding to barbarism and medieval behaviors, to some degree, with medieval means.

To some degree you can rely on liberal atomization, but only if the conditions are right for that atomization to have an effect, which means no cousin marriages or other barriers that honor-killers and the like can use to stop their families from atomizing.  (And note that banning all new cousin marriages is, itself, not without controversy.)  It also takes a while.

The sharper the change, the greater the degree of braking force necessary.  It must be communicated not just to the men involved, but to the entire community they are a part of that this activity is not just socially disapproved of by the ethnic majority (who they may not care about), but that it is bullshit for chumps that only an idiot would engage in.

Getting executed because your took up arms against the state might be martyrdom, but getting executed because you honor-killed your sister is just stupid (and therefore low-status).

Otherwise you risk a long-burning change that could ride under the surface until it obtains enough political support (which may not be legalization, but just deliberately ignoring the problem).  

If 5% of your population cousin marry, it takes a congressman to end it.
If 10% of your population cousin marry, it takes a President.
If 30% of your population cousin marry, it takes a King.
The right time to end it, then, is before it cracks 6%.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

can’t have viciously genocidal warfare between the tribes if you’ve already eradicated all the other tribes, tapping head meme etc.

[mitigatedchaos]

Dude, 

Do you realize what the optimal strategy strategy is under the Collective Intergenerational Justice certain political factions love so much?

Total extermination.  There is no giving all the land back if there is no one left to give it back to.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[discoursedrome]

Reflecting a bit more on the “Death: Woke or Joke?” topic, I guesspart of the gap is that the people who feel strongly about eliminating death see it as a major source of surd evil, whereas it just doesn’t seem to me like very much suffering comes from mere fact of death so much as the particulars.

It seems to me that the bulk of the suffering caused by death is the result of prolonged and unpleasant deaths, which can largely be addressed with euthanasia, or else it’s either a matter death being used as coercion and punishment (which I expect would get worse in a world with indefinite lifespan) or of large numbers of people dying at once from the same thing (which isn’t something I would expect most death-cheating technology to help with). From where I stand it looks like nearly all suffering is caused by what I would call “samsaric” issues – competition over limited resources, Red Queen’s races, and incentive structures that make suffering beneficial to us, or make it beneficial for us to make others suffer. It seems more likely that technology that permitted indefinite lifespan would make all of those problems worse than that it would ameliorate them, though the exact way this is likely to happen would vary greatly depending on how the tech worked.

[mitigatedchaos]

If you use that as a moral principle, though, you can justify almost arbitrarily-short lifespans.

[discoursedrome]

what’s even the point of living once your wavefunction collapses, really? you can never get those days back.

more seriously: my position isn’t exactly “living is terrible, and the less of it the better!” Rather, my concern is that there are fairly serious risks in circumventing humans’ senescence limit that don’t apply when simply helping more people to reach that ceiling, so if you have a mild preference for people living longer but are very wary of those risks, the safest lifespan seems to be “as far as you can get it without senescence-hacking”.

There are two separate angles on this. The first is that the more capital-dependent staying alive is, the more that dependency threatens quality of life by enabling extreme inequality and coercion. Most death-cheat proposals are extremely capital-intensive in ways that simply reducing incidental mortality is not. The second issue is that senescence is a feature, not a bug: lifespan varies widely in nature, and there are non-senescent animals, so we obviously evolved this lifespan for a good reason. Now, of course you can’t just stop at “God/evolution knows best” or it’s the naturalistic fallacy, but it seems to me that understanding why we have the lifespan we do instead of some other lifespan, what problems are likely to arise if we change that, and how we can get out in front of them, should be step one of eliminating death, and there appears to be significantly less interest in that topic than there ought to be.

[mitigatedchaos]

Well, I mean there are two things here,

The first is that human lifespan is probably not as evolutionarily meaningful as human sexual dimorphism and various other traits are, because, like the Sherman tank, you expect to lose humans to the environment over time even without aging (including to insufficient resources), and that you’re making an engineering tradeoff for longer designed lifespan for each additional decade and if the tiger population is high and random diseases are high and there is parasite load, etc, it’s just not worth the effort.

That things like bridges aren’t designed to last forever is not a feature, it’s just something contingent on available resources, so I don’t find this particularly compelling.

The other thing is that I don’t expect those philosophers and pundits and whatnot to actually come up with much good.  What I’ve seen so far has not impressed me, so it hardly seems worth increasing my risk of death just to be told some half-baked explanation about “human temporality” or some other hogwash.

Practical risks are the better argument, but, it lacks many of the worst possibilities of Transhumanism, since it’s just regular humans, but for longer.

The biggest risk I see is probably that people don’t accept limits on reproduction, but I think they’ll come around.