Polygon’s Ben Kuchera on why he has no friends.
In today’s episode of “I Don’t Understand Incentives”, guest star Ben Kuchera reveals why everyone not in his movement should work to destroy its political power…
So, to return to Jeb Bush:
BUSH: I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.
That’s a justification. It’s just one that turned out to be wrong.
Alrighty, we’ve established that Jeb Bush thinks Iraq was justified.
Clearly the whole thing was a massive case of motivated cognition:
Step 1: We want to invade Iraq.
Step 2: Cook up an excuse to do this.
Step 3: Convince enough people it’s not bullshit.
Step 4: Quagmire.
And of course the real question for elected officials is not just Iraq: yes or no, but why Iraq at all? Why not Saudi Arabia? and so on.
But I’m just feeling slightly ancient in that this Iraq question was the defining issue of the early blogosphere, circa 2003-2005.
It split the tech community into two camps, the pro-War bloggers (also known as the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, or chickenhawks) and the anti-War bloggers (also known as the Decadent Left Fifth Column, or pro-Saddam stalinists).
It was a deeply stupid time.
Understanding the depths of the stupidity may help those who were not there avoid such stupidity themselves, when they face the next great challenge.
I’m younger than you, and I was too young to understand how strange it should have seemed to me at the time.
But I have not forgotten.
Fortunately, I already understood what a mistake it was by the time I was able to vote.
Thesis: the narrow focus on public performance over substantive action in certain activist circles has less to do with cynical schemes to game the system for progressive brownie points, and more to do with the fact that many folks basically think social activism is a form of ritual magic. Popular histories give us images of Great Men making speeches and leading marches and circulating petitions, and completely erase all the ground-level infrastructure that made all that stuff work; the end result is that a lot of folks seem honestly to believe that bringing about social change is a matter of performing the appropriate symbolic actions and waiting for reality to reconfigure itself accordingly.
Also, for any issue that society gradually comes to a new position on, the popularity needed to stage mass activism is almost the level needed to simply institute the desired policy. So, for those issues determined more by material circumstances, it’s possible that the policy would have happened without any activism whatsoever, but you’ll still see the most activism just before it’s accepted, creating the illusion that it was accepted due to activism.
Interesting thought.
honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why
The main reason is that most people I’ve encountered were big boosters of transhumanism seemed to consider it a kind of cheat code for fundamental social and ecological problems – in other words, they conceptualize it as a way to get easy answers to hard problems, with the details left extremely vague. Very often they seemed to have a fantasy of technological wonders saving them from death and taxes. So, that all goes in the same bucket as other sorts of utopianism.
I’m not against the idea of using technology to solve our problems, even if it means changing ourselves in the process, but that isn’t some kind of new thing, it’s a continuation of the same process as the invention of agriculture, in the same way that GMOs are a continuation of ancient crossbreeding. Calling that “transhumanism” implies a quasi-religious millennarian outlook, which makes me extremely wary.
It seems like a way to get religious salvation out of technology for a lot of people, and that is not the kind of outlook I want someone to have when tinkering with radical, dangerous civilization-scale technology.
I don’t think it actually solves race or gender, per se… I mean, kind of. It sort of explodes them instead, and new issues are created, but often dealing with the new issues will be preferable to the old ones.
What does race discourse look like when you can change your race? Or less radically, when you can copy all the non-appearance genes from whatever race you like?
What does meritocracy look like when everyone already has the basic “good” genes and massive, expensive genetic problems only exist in the time-local version of anti-vaxxers?
What does gender discourse look like when people can change their sex easily?
Et cetera.
I think it’s net beneficial to go there, but I see it as important that we are prepared, first.
(Also, notice how totally unprepared most WNs are for these changes.)
honestly I’d really appreciate it if people who dislike transhumanism point me in the direction of why
Some of it is consequential - there are some potential dark futures in that direction. But I think mostly, they’re at peace with their sex, their body, and with aging, so H+ seems like an alien, “arrogant,” or “immature” value system to them.
kinda independent though? like I’m at peace with not being splattered across a mountainside but I don’t get enraged at people who fly wingsuits.
Once the Transhuman Genie is out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back. The alternative of banning it prevents them from having to become the cyberpunk version of the Amish, leaving them in the mainstream.
To pick another example, letting gays get married also means living in a society in which gays can marry, in which that becomes normal, even if you don’t get gay married. And that’s a bit less irrevocable!
So if you don’t want to see what Tumblr users will become when allowed access to 2090-era robotic surgeons, implanted computers, and automated tissue engineering facilities, you have to oppose it before it starts.
You’ll also die because a cure for whatever disease you have won’t exist, or else your body will fall apart, but you already didn’t care as much about that, soooo…
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,
On the other hand, each link adds a greater chance of costs external to the pilfering of the treasury like hiring a less efficient jet manufacturing company or passing needless regulation to enable rent seeking. Directly raiding the treasury would have less real world consequences besides enriching the crook..
Ah, but you see, one of the cheaper links to add…
Is just to pay your politicians more money.
People just hate politicians, so they’re unwilling to do this, but every doubling of a politician’s income is a doubling of how much money it takes to bribe them, possibly greater as money becomes relatively less important the more of it you have.
Kickbacks have to be hidden in larger projects/funds, so going from $100,000 in kickbacks to $200,000 in kickbacks could mean an increase in costs of $1,000,000, which just makes the thing even more noticeable.
I once calculated that it would cost something like $250 million USD to highly pay the US Federal legislators and President something like $500,000-$1 million each, annually.
That sounds like a lot of money, but suppose the federal government spends 25% of an $18 trillion dollar economy.
If we got a 1% improvement in federal government spending, it would provide potentially $45 billion in value, 180x that increase in cost. Does it seem feasible that we’d get 1% better spending out of congress if we paid them at that level? Not from existing congress critters, maybe, but some of those seats might start to look really tempting to more talented individuals…
Minimum wage, basic income, and wage subsidies are the perfect example of why testing won’t work. All of them will cause effects like migration if tested in a region that won’t apply if used universally. All of them have inflation fears that won’t be seen if tested in a small population. All of them have work disincentive effects that won’t be visible if tested in a small region. And all of them can have effects that are swamped out by economic fluctuations that are unrelated and therefore can have difficult to interpret effects.
And wait, don’t we have to test miti’s
iron fist control of the central government before we test any of the rest? I think we’ve gotten trapped in an infinite recursion here, we have to test the act of experimentation before we test experiments.
To a degree, but incremental testing will have less of those effects, as would varied testing across various areas. It should be possible to extract a decent amount of information just from testing lesser versions of all of them in multiple differing areas.
After all, you have to test them in a world where migration exists, unless one of your tests is banning migration. If your policy fails so badly that you have to build a wall to keep people from leaving the country, that is very important evidence in itself. Likewise, if immigrants swarm into one of your districts to free ride.
For some items that do require national-scale implementation (aside from the rather dramatic alternative of splitting the country in two, which would have been quite interesting to see with Commies/Anarchists), the policymakers should be registering their bets before it goes into effect. (Additional considerations modifying those bets can be worked in later, it will get a little complicated, but should be possible.)
Iron fist control of the national government was presented only as a framing device.
In a way it’s heartening that crooked politicians can’t raid the treasury directly and have to engage in dodgy contract kickback arrangements via foreign banks; each extra link in the chain increases the vulnerability of the scheme and guarantees its eventual exposure.
I’d like to add a few more links to that chain…
political cartoon of Leia strangling Jabba with lots of unnecessary labels like POLITICAL ELITE, FINANCIAL REGULATION, WIKILEAKS, PUBLIC OPINION, MILLENNIALS, TAX HAVENS, COST OF LIVING PRESSURE,
look man, all I’m saying is I want a semi-secret anti-corruption unit to rope in and either get cooperation from or impersonate various businesses and offshore banks so that my politicians never know whether any kickback/bribe attempt is actually an elaborate sting operation,
and make my politicians pseudonymous so that would-be kickbackers can’t be sure who they’re dealing with is the real legislator they wanted to bribe or a member of the anti-corruption task force impersonating one as part of an elaborate sting operation, or replace them with think tanks which cost more money to bribe
I’m really a very reasonable person
Socialist countries have a really bad track record of human rights abuses and a strange set of failings that are either specific to them or unusually prominent compared to the general zeitgeist, so you can draw decent conclusions like “don’t break systems a lot of people depend on, just cuz” and “freedom of press is actually really important” and “science shouldn’t be controlled by the state’s ideology ever”
instead people realize that Marx was wrong about something and the Soviet Union killed people and then go become tankies but for capitalism
I guess the real question is, “is it possible to avoid these known horrible bugs in Communism/socialism, or is it time to go look for something else and try to make that work?”
The vast majority of Communists I’ve encountered in person or online don’t seem to be trying to avoid the known problems. They either ignore/don’t know/pretend to not know about the historical issues, or they consider eg. genocide a feature rather than a bug.
Yeah the communists I know mostly just roll their eyes at this sort of objection, and, like, okay, I get that they’re tired of fielding criticisms of that sort, but it’s not like they have really solid retorts that anyone who cares to know can easily look up. If their goal is just to wait for widespread revolutionary class consciousness to develop naturally and then assume it will all work out, I dunno guys.
Even on a maximally optimistic timeline we’re something like 30 years out from the kind of mass socialist movement that existed at the
fin de siècle, so if they’re serious about this then proselytism is crucial, and they’re not going to get very far with that unless they can convince people that the widespread suspicions toward communism aren’t likely to apply to their movement. Unless they’re just trying to use the threat of communist revolution as a bludgeon to extract short-term incremental concessions from the ruling class, in which case more power to them I guess.
Far leftists often get made fun of for obsessing about arcane details of ideology, having schisms over potential policy long before they ever conceivably might get actual power.
Far leftists also have to contend with a history of bad institutional and policy decisions leading to the death of millions and autocratic government.
I like to think the first is a result of the second.
I think that problem with that idea is that the schisming came before the gaining of power. There’s a good case to make that the causality is (partially) reversed there.
Agree. Far Leftist/Communist arguments, from what I see of them, don’t appear to be about technocratic differences, but more about moral ones.
It would be interesting to see them argue like economists over specific detailed alternative societal models, and probably more beneficial since they might run more tests of them.
Political factions in general also appear to lack the idea of running competing tests in order to assess their effectiveness. Sadly that might be an artifact of gaining power.
I mean, you can view the anarchist/leninist debate (which is what I was thinking of) as moral, but you can also see it argued in very technocratic terms. Anarchists argued a Leninist state would become oppressive. Leninists argued a anarchist non-state would be either impossible, or end up a state in all but name.
And the whole concept of “testing“ isn’t really possible. What works for small groups doesn’t for large groups, what applies to a part doesn’t apply to the whole. Meaningfully testing these thing is hard, hell, look at the replicability crisis in the social sciences, and those are much easier problems.
For a total revamp, sure. If you have iron fist control of the central government, though, you can do some pretty extreme tests, far more daring and dangerous than I would do, with the organization of the provincial governments, however. There are ways out of this testability mess, but they don’t really appeal to the political mind IME since political justification is often from perceived moral binding.
Imagine, for a moment, that the Central Director of the North American Union wants to test the results of various new minimum wage, basic income, and wage subsidies programs, and the National Technocrats have seized power and excluded all others from the legislature. She could have the legislative factions lay out multiple plans that are estimated to have a reasonable chance of success, then have the leadership of various jurisdictions rank them according to which they would like most for their district, and use that to guide district selection with a reasonable variation to choose from. A set date could then be set for evaluation before the next round, probably 3-5 years.
Even the United States in its current form provides some evidence from differing experiments, but our politicals mostly just throw it out amd go with whatever policy they already wanted.
