Oceans Yet to Burn

Ideological Spread with Nationalist Characteristics

I was half-joking when I suggested that I’d use the statue controversy to remark on how to carry out an imperialistic foreign policy.

But I was half-serious as well.

Nationalism is one of the main drivers of imperialist foreign policy, but it is also one of the primary forms of opposition to the same.

Consider, however, an Empire with a different plan - it wants to spread not its people, nor, per se, its culture, but its ideology. (It may not even consider itself an Empire.)

The thing to do with Nationalist sentiments in other countries, then, is to merge and entangle them with the ideology to be installed (or rather, instilled). For each country, an adapted version of your ideology, fit more closely to the local needs and patterns. Not all countries need to be exactly the same. This allows you to deflect some of the popular will away from direct opposition to your imposed form of government.

This is actually part of why Democracy has had what success it has in its acts of imperialism. (And yes, Democracy as an ideology has a bit of a habit of imperialism, though a lot of that has been driven by America.)

How to interweave them?

Take elements of the local culture that are aesthetic or which are not in opposition to your ideology, and make them official and protected. (For instance, you probably want people to be timely, so if being chronically late is one of the local things, you need to get rid of that. On the other hand, architectural style can generally vary without crushing the GDP.) Pick various writers, historical works, and so on. Tie your ideology into the history of the region, as part of its self-narrative. Elevate local historical thinkers that can be described as proto-your-ideology. Build statues of locals that exemplify the positive qualities you want your ideology to represent.

You must create a new national mythology as a legitimization for the new government.

Over time, if executed well, your transplanted ideology will become part of the socially legitimized history of the country and thus gain the protection that affords.

In the meantime, most countries you could conceivably do this in are going to be relatively underdeveloped. Take advantage of the physical security you can manage to impose in order to pursue a long-term program of development.

Borrow a page from Milton Keynes and have the price of the development paid for by speculating on the values of the land to be developed. If you don’t drop the ball on this, the country is going to undergo a 7-10% annual rate of economic growth for some years. Investors would normally be skittish due to concerns about corruption and physical security, but you have the power to calm those risks.

The development doesn’t have to take place across the whole country, but a critical mass is needed so that future development will be self-propelling, and local talent must be trained (in your universities) so that it can continue to operate in the future.

Now I know this sounds incredibly expensive, and of course it is, but the goal here is to turn those countries permanently to your ideology and increase your ideology’s share of total global resource output - and that is, in itself, very valuable.

(Also, your pension funds can ride that 7-10% annual growth as your corporations are able to buy up assets at low prices.)

It also requires a great deal of political will. Will that, in Afghanistan and Iraq, America did not have.

The simultaneous cowardice, foolhardiness, and ignorance of the American political establishment and voters made for a military campaign that was not only highly aggressive, but failed to accomplish all that much for all the blood it spilled.

Something more ideologically imperialistic that sought to convert Iraq and Afghanistan into true, developed democracies, with all the basic underpinnings that required, would have been better. Alternatively, not going at all would have many advantages. Instead we get the worst of both worlds - a willingness to invade without a willingness to see a conversion through to the end, fueled by the naive belief that liberal democracy is the natural state of humanity and will flourish in all soils if it is simply unleashed.

There are, of course, far crueler ways to expand dominion if one has different goals. I will not go over them here. The age of such empires is over, now, and for the better.

politics policy national technocracy shadowed waters

The proper role of the state, I believe, is most often (though not always) to establish frameworks for private action.

Macro-information vs micro-information. Macro-coordination vs micro-coordination. Flexible hierarchies. Coordination of rules for predictability and thus lowered computational and compliance cost.

my politics national technocracy politics flagpost

Although, if anything, that post about healthcare costs is perhaps a better summary of my current politics than any.

Efficiency - in government, in the private sector, anywhere - doesn’t just mean some nice bonus that lets rich people we don’t care about have more sports cars.

As efficiency and production increase, you stop having to triage. If one unit of sovereign services costs $1.00 to deliver and you have $1.00, then you can purchase only one unit. If one unit of sovereign services costs $0.50, then you can purchase two.

If there were two of you and you collectively only had one dollar to spend, then in the first case you have to fight about who gets that one unit of sovereign services, and in the second case you don’t.

The adequate planning of cities and efficient distribution of resources are absolutely vital. Surplus regulations don’t just have a cost in corporate bureaucrat annoyance, but in bus stops.

Private property, government regulations, wealth redistribution… these are tools, not moral imperatives.

Now I know many people would say “sure, but my politics is about using them correctly as tools,” and for some people that’s true. But a lot of the time that’s not what we see in practice.

So the great question, I think, is how we can make systems of governance better, to promote better and more accurate approaches to policy that more effectively accomplish what will benefit people.

politics national technocracy ideology my politics

slartibartfastibast

Source: resistdrumpf the invisible fist the iron hand flagpost policy my politics national technocracy politics

mitigatedchaos

The Mitigated Chaos Plan for School

@silver-and-ivory

…that’s true.
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.

mitigatedchaos

Reblog for context for new readers.

Source: silver-and-ivory politics policy national technocracy

Anonymous asked:

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.

anons asks politics national technocracy victory for national technocracy flagpost

A Price Paid in National Will

We’ve all seen various Leftists denouncing “Nationalists and their dumb wars.” While it can be tempting to argue the point regarding past interventions, the future of Nationalism must lay in the future, not the past.

It’s important, in attempting to define a new form of Nationalism, to understand that dumb wars don’t just have a price paid in blood and treasure, but also in the national spirit. Dumb wars undermine and destroy Nationalism.

Nationalism is not only an ideology, but it’s also a form of ideological or political capital. The will of the people to support the government and fight on behalf of the country, while necessary to secure the national defense, is an exhaustible resource. It is very precious, for without it there cannot be a nation. Therefore, in addition to acting to promote it, we must also act to conserve it. A nation that can rise up as one in military response has far greater power and sovereignty than those with only fragmented support, as both its threats and defense are more credible.

Propaganda cannot be the answer, as truth has odds of coming out eventually, since it is less in conflict with reality. And it was some truth or another that lead many of us to become Nationalists in the first place.

Think about it. Suppose you get into some dumb, unwinnable war in the middle east or southeast Asia. In order to pay for the war, you have to raise taxes (if not now, then later), diverting resources from the civic goods those taxes might have paid for. To get the necessary manpower, you must either create a draft, which creates opposition to the draft and thus empowers internal opposition and counter-culture, or your have to raise taxes higher and send some of your most loyal men to get shot at.

Then the history comes along later and says that not only was the mission not a success, but you didn’t even get any resources out of it for the country.

Not only does this make people less likely to sign up for or provide material support for the nation’s wars, but they may come to believe that the nation is bad and turn against Nationalism itself.

How much less powerful would left-wing anti-Nationalists be without the Iraq War? How much less powerful would they be without the Vietnam War?

On top of this all, it may end up preventing the country from having the ability to fight wars in ways that it can win. Having sowed substantial doubt about the virtue of the nation’s military action itself, it will be harder to obtain the necessary political will for the required partial cultural conversion needed to ensure the invaded territory is permanently no longer an enemy.

(Of course, there are other factors that can lead to declines in Nationalism, even in countries with less substantial military adventurism. But those must be addressed separately.)

politics flagpost national technocracy

xhxhxhx

mitigatedchaos asked:

What is your opinion of me? And what do you think of my plot to replace congress with a new legislature of political party/think tank hybrids that bet on outcomes of legislation (as outlined in my "The National Delegation" posts, where I still owe squid another post but I won't have sit down access to a computer for a while)?

xhxhxhx answered:

on The National Delegation:

I think it’d be hard to legitimate such a goofy system ex nihilo and I don’t think its performance would be enough to legitimate it in action
I have a bunch of cavils about specification: I don’t think you could define policy outcomes or contract conditions with sufficient precision to make the market deep or efficient under most outcomes, and I don’t think you can define values with sufficient precision to make that constraint binding
I don’t think the policy outcomes would be much better, except to the extent that you might fix the system by excluding ‘incoherent’ or ‘imprecise’ values – which would mean the system wouldn’t really be doing what it promises
I’m deeply skeptical of any regulatory system that’s this hard and finicky – it’s like you’re putting the FDA or the FTC in charge of the whole system of government, and I don’t think market discipline is enough to get federal agencies to behave themselves
I think its worse than electoral democracy, although that’s not an especially strong belief, and I think it’d underperform purer technocracies or a purer liberal states

on you:

you put effort and thoughtfulness into your work – that’s good and that’s rare
I’m too much of a liberal to appreciate your commentary
you’re very kind and thoughtful, and I haven’t done enough to return the favor

mitigatedchaos

Oh, there appears to be a point of confusion - values are informal, not rigidly specified. And values are not explicitly what is bet on. It’s more along the lines of both parties claiming their legislation would reduce gun crime, as they often do, and betting against each other and with amounts, and “gun crime” is defined as a bundle of metrics to prevent min-maxing. It occurs to me that because so much policy is just flat out wrong at achieving its supposed aims, some fairly large improvements should be possible with even that much of a check on whether it works.

Ofc, there is also the question of what a purer technocracy would look like.

politics policy national technocracy the national delegation

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.

mitigatedchaos

@collapsedsquid

Alright, then you’re gonna have the problem of “who gets to decide what comes up for prediction and how?” with the various possibilities for manipulation.

Yes, a challenge in itself. My opinion is that it must be easier to get stuff into the prediction pool than it is to pass the legislation. Otherwise, it just degrades to normal legislature with some fluff on top.

So, off the top of my head, it may require 30-40% approval to get an item into the prediction pool, perhaps with a limit on the number of items each DCO can put into the pool.

Second and related is that you can basically rewarding people who are connected rather than accurate
To some extent, this doesn’t matter, connections are a part of effective policy too, much as I wish they were not
But it comes down to who can manipulate the outcomes and who has the inside track on what people will do.

- court will be needed so they can sue each other when they cheat

- baskets of metrics harder to game than single metric, so all metrics must be baskets

- hard to actually game some of the more challenging ones by outside interference if metric collection is at all accurate, simply too costly, borders on cost of actually fixing the problem

I’ll expand on this when I have access to an actual computer, which will be a while.

politics policy national technocracy the national delegation

squareallworthy

theage.com.au

Melbourne's recycling mountain grows higher each day as industry hits 'dead end'

Hundreds of tonnes of plastic and paper pile up at Melbourne's recyclers every day.

Liam Mannix

argumate

ironically the recycling plants catch fire so frequently that they are essentially just incinerating the waste instead of recycling it.

voxette-vk

Post-consumer recycling of most non-metallic resources is just pointless.

squareallworthy

There is a point, but it’s not obvious. There’s a good article on this on Cato Unbound here. The unseen benefit of recycling is to divert material away from landfills, which are expensive. So expensive, in fact, that if we charged people the true cost of landfill disposal, they would resort to illegal dumping. We don’t want that, so we subsidize garbage disposal at the consumer level, and post-consumer recycling programs are an attempt to mitigate the cost of that subsidy.

mitigatedchaos

It’s putting the charge at the wrong end of the system. Put a landfill deposit on new products based on their rough contents, use the principal to buy the land and the interest to operate the landfills. Pay out money from the fund when recycling firms permanently recover waste from the landfill, based on rough contents.

Efficient land and resource usage, recycling, purchasing of used goods thereby incentivized.

Source: argumate politics policy national technocracy

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

Ideological Spread with Nationalist Characteristics

The Mitigated Chaos Plan for School

A Price Paid in National Will

The National Delegation

Melbourne's recycling mountain grows higher each day as industry hits 'dead end'