Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[silver-and-ivory]

Sometimes it strikes me as really really immoral that schools exist. They seem like an almost universally terrible experience, though I suppose that might be biased by who I discuss things with.

I don’t really see why more people haven’t tried something different, especially considering how painful the entire thing is. You’d think that the Elite would at least realize that school sucked.

Maybe it’s a way for them to control their children, though.

[argumate]

it’s free childcare

[silver-and-ivory]

I don’t think so, though- there are easier ways to get free childcare. It’s probably aimed at edifying the children and preparing them for adulthood.

It is often not-great at that. This is quite possibly an organizational problem, in that it’s very hard to control and also educate a large number of people who often have a bad grasp of their own preferences and long-term needs.

What it probably comes down to is that a standardized set of Stuff to Learn and ways to judge that is far easier and more coherent to measure and encourage. In general people want to make sure that schools are Actually Working to educate children, and standardization gives them a good measure.

(To be clear, it is perfectly reasonable to want schools to Actually Work and I myself would like, in theory, to ensure that schools Actually Work. It is just the implementation that is often botched.)

It is way harder, less reliable, and probably leads to more upset or worried parents to set up a non-railroady, truly open-ended experience. It might also have not-that-many appreciable benefits, except to a few students.

School is probably also in some sense a competition for positional goods and status. If your kid doesn’t go to school, then they’ll lose out! If they don’t get into this school they will be a loser forever. I suppose that part of this is also tradition/family based.

(I’ll address other responses later today.)

[mitigatedchaos]

Please keep in mind that the supply of high-IQ individuals to run both our nation’s institutions and industries is very limited.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

The recent UK polls are killing me, because despite the surge in labor, the fact that UKIPers are now voting Tory and their districts are first-past-the-post means that the Tories are likely going to win.  (Labor, the libdems and the SNP together get >50% of the vote in some polls.)

[collapsedsquid]

raginrayguns:  i was telilng some europeans that having > 3 parties was dumb but they werent buying it

It’s a good idea if you have an electoral system set up to support it properly.  If we had a proper system we could have a Trump party separate from the republicans and a Bernie party separate from the dems.  Then maybe people would be a little less insane because they’d have parties that represent them.

[mitigatedchaos]

I would actually like for both the Bernie and Trump parties to exist, since they might actually do something about the trade balance and conditions for American workers, tbh.  I wonder if they might have less regulatory capture, too, but I’d have to check that against foreign countries where multiple parties are the norm.

[cromulentenough]

FPTP is basically the worst system for anything with more than 2 choices. there’s pro’s and cons of the other types (AV, instant runnoff, proportional etc.) among each other, but they’re pretty much all better than FPTP.

[mitigatedchaos]

It’s always bothered me, TBH, and then I learned there are other voting methods that could break it and haven’t been the same since.  I would like seven parties of incompetent politicians to vote for, please, so I can pick the flavor of stupidity that most closely matches my own.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[wirehead-wannabe]

I really wish we could just somehow make neighborhoods be more like college campuses, but unfortunately that whole model is built on people all working (or schooling or whatever) in the same place and more or less committing to not moving for four years. (It could also be relying on people not having kids, but if anything I would expect the college campus model to be better at having local daycare services and safe, stimulating places for kids to play, so I don’t think that’s it.

[jadagul]

Which aspects are you thinking about that college campuses have and dense urban environments don’t?

[wirehead-wannabe]

A lot more “third spaces” that function well as such, better sense of community/higher trust, green space that actually functions well as green space. Room and board + campus maintenance + activity fees combined seem to be far more modest than the cost of living in an urban area (maybe because it avoids the problems that come with having to pay for a safe neighborhood in a positional-goods type of way by being strongly selected for IQ + consciousnessness? Idk).

[furioustimemachinebarbarian]

A lot of this is just describing, like, suburbs and small towns.  Nothing stops you from continuing to live in a college town after you finish college, and there are lots of small towns with a similar “feel.” 

[wirehead-wannabe]

This, I think, is where @jadagul’s point about colleges being selected for people like me becomes relevant. Plus small towns tend to lack the classes and guest speakers and general traits of academia that make it stimulating. But yes, “small Minnesota town filled with rationalists that has good access to infrastructure, jobs, etc” would be more or less ideal.

[mitigatedchaos]

I sympathize with you and have considered urban planning from this angle, constructing medium-density communities-within-communities.  Just put me in charge of the country as Technocratic Dictator Central Director of the North American Union and I’ll get it sorted.

I’m a good person, and there is little reason to worry about how this might be involved in plans to build an unstoppable super-nation.  Plus, I assure you the prediction markets for the National Delegation will have my back on this matter.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[medicine]

fbi on anon: hey just warning you op of that post about using proxies is problematic please disable your firewall

yall, inevitably: oh ok thanks

[mitigatedchaos]

“Proxy use is supported by white misogynist techbros in Silicon Valley, neckbeards, and MRAs, you see…”

[ranma-official]

you’re memeing, but I distinctly recall people spontaneously coming to a conclusion that forcing people to use their real names on the internet is Actually Good because it will save us all from trolling and misogyny

@blackblocberniebros do you have that comic about how masking up is Actually Bad that spontaneously also equated being a Nazi with not liking Ghostbusters 2016?

[mitigatedchaos]

That (the former) is the reason I’m memeing about it. Though Zuck ofc thinks real names are the coolest forever.

Tbh my ideal state would issue multiple crypto pseudonym keys to everyone that can be followed by law enforcement but not friends, employers, internet stalkers, etc, but let’s be honest USgov is not worth that level of trust.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[collapsedsquid]

I’ve been seeing in professors the result of the cutoff and scoring obsession and weird focuses of the NIH grant system.  If I were head of NIH, I would say “We’re obsessing about the scores of these grants to level that exceeds our ability to tell good research from bad.  How bout we just take an amount of grants that’s 4x the amount we can fund, and just randomly draw ¼ of those.“

Also, when I am Comrade General Secretary of the Socialist States of America, that’s how I’m allocating capital.

[mitigatedchaos]

> not assigning members of your government allocation funding blocks that they can bet on research outcomes

Bad post OP

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[thathopeyetlives]

I have a vague like (well below the level of actual political preference) for a monarchy.

And, well, I really, really, really don’t like British Monarchy Apologism. It’s simultaneously obscene and cowardly.

[thathopeyetlives]

If we see a restoration it will, and will have to be, different. Above all things the historical aristocratic contempt for all things useful and practical and especially for labor must pass away.

[rendakuenthusiast]

I’m not sure it’s possible to have a monarchy without some level of aristocratic contempt for useful and practical things. What would a non-aristocratic monarchy look like? 

[thathopeyetlives]

I didn’t necessarily say “a non-aristocratic monarchy”.

What I was specifically thinking of is, like, people who form entire cultures around considering Working For A Living to be basically illegitimate, and who then don’t have the saving grace to live in austere and ascetic poverty when their rent fails them.

[mitigatedchaos]

In my ideal nation, the royal family would have the role of safeguarding the nation’s culture (and a few other things) rather than being a tourist attraction or having full political power better reserved for the civilian government.

Their membership would be drawn from national heroes, waning over several generations and requiring new heroes to marry in for the line to remain royal.  So, great artists, great scientists, great warriors, those who have made amazing sacrifices - people who just knowing they’re from your country and embody its ideals, make your heart swell with pride.

This keeps the genetic lines fresh, rewards those who benefit society, helps keep the nation united, and so on.  In many countries the monarchy is reduced to a national mascot and cultural institution - so if we’re going to do that, let’s do it right.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Yeah, but you could take measures to ameliorate the long commute for employees--for example, running a high-speed train line there for their particular use. (If the commute is long even then, you could make that commute time paid--have people punch in/out as they get on/off the train, or just add a set amount per day.) Of course, that's expensive.

argumate answered:

Airports and sewage treatment plants have other constraints on their locations (flat land, downstream) and it’s not just the employees who have to travel to reach them but every construction vehicle, delivery truck, etc.

But eh infrastructure is hard, Melbourne doesn’t even have a regular train line to the airport yet.

[mitigatedchaos]

“It’s expensive” is such a big deal that often doesn’t get weighed in public arguments correctly.

If the train is twice as expensive, then society itself can afford half as many trains, and when you’re making the decision to buy that train, you are necessarily giving up an entire train’s worth of resources that not only could be spent on a train, but could be spent on something else instead (like hospitals, schools, or golf courses).

So yeah, “NIMBY” is getting used to criticize people who are opposing things society needs.  However, because there are costs and they’re not currently dealt-with well, instead of doing something stupid like building a train line to no where, might I suggest insuring them for the difference in property values caused by the NIMBY item.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

@remedialaction​ Although I guess I will add on one more thing, regarding my policy proposals not being “innovative” enough - 

I’m an edgy centrist, not a far-right reactionary, extropian, or Anarcho-Lumberjack.  My idea of a “cool authoritarian regime” is Singapore, which is noted for being successful, safe, fairly open, and wealthy.

I tend to favor incremental policy rolled out experimentally, which won’t break the economy or be non-reversible.  I’m proposing things that I think are likely to actually work, which in some ways means they won’t be so different in kind from existing programs.   Revolution is, after all, overrated.

It’s true that in the space of all possible political policies, “ease up on zoning laws, end rent control and issue housing vouchers instead, throw on a tax based on expected new infrastructure required, then let the new housing stock roll in” is not particularly radical or revolutionary, but it’s likely to work and if it fails it isn’t likely to fail catastrophically.  

It’s still innovative relative to typical American and European politics, but my goal isn’t to be an innovation-maximizer within the absolute space of all political ideas.  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

RE: Centrists: The question then becomes, how does real change become possible? Revolution isn't a good option, since it tends to kill lots of people without much actually-good change.

diarrheaworldstarhiphop answered:

i legitimately dont know, because it seems any democratic option is instantly suppressed

maybe a mass uprising like in tunisia or egypt demanding politicians step down or make reform.

but reform to what?

[mitigatedchaos]

“Suck less” isn’t a good option, since the people will disagree dramatically on just what, exactly, that means and how to accomplish it.

However, the system will produce the candidates that the incentives within the system make possible, so it seems to me that a new system, something beyond liberal democracy, that hasn’t been invented yet, is necessary for something lasting and good.

Even in my damaged state, cruising with multiple engines non-functional, I’ve been pondering a system in which the legislature is replaced with think tanks that voters delegate their votes to across multiple categories, funded by public funding according to their votes and percentile standing in a prediction market based on the outcomes of the legislation.  (Edit: After all, we can conceive of political policy having two axes - values and effectiveness - and many policies that suck have okay values but are ineffective.)

But the question then becomes, who prevents the prediction market and the state’s instruments of measure for outcomes from being sabotaged by political operators, who notoriously don’t care for empiricism?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

I wonder what you'd get out of a survey that was structured like voting is--i.e. *guaranteed* anonymous, without having to say your answers to a person, just marking your answers and putting it in a box--and offered to all registered voters. Actually, it seems like a good idea to have something like that anyway--having an actual legally binding vote be people's main forum for ~expressing their opinions~ is far from ideal.

argumate answered:

Current representative democracy doesn’t give voters any direct influence over specific policy questions, literal direct democracy makes them vote on every issue, and most people suggest a sensible hybrid where everyone votes on every issue but you can delegate your vote to representatives at varying levels of pickiness.

[mitigatedchaos]

Scrap the existing legislature and replace it with a legislature of think-tanks to whom voters delegate votes across twelve categories.