Sinity
1yr ago
Yeah but the 'dead drop' system seems pretty good. Providing your home address to the counterparty seems horribly risky.
In Poland we have something seemingly even better. Customer pays in Monero into the Escrow (operated by darknet forum admin), and provides a parcel locker's location code. And also what they ordered + some contact info (this is the weak part, most sellers use some properiary communicator called Wickr).
They just send it to a given parcel locker and when it arrives, you get the code to open it. Overall, it seems absurdly safe. And there are 20000+ locations in the country to choose from.
Sinity
1yr ago
Few random results. I only played with it for a few minutes after setting it up so far.
Sinity
1yr ago
Ofc judges can decide whatever. But there's no way they're going to side with the artists, destroying AI tech. It'd be just yielding to China.
Ignoring practicalities, it just doesn't make any sense. Why couldn't you train AI on copyrighted works while still able to train your own biological neural network on them?
Sinity
1yr ago
You're punishing people for voting illegally
It should be ~impossible to vote illegally by mistake. It's stupid to try to fix broken procedures which allow 'illegal voting' by just punishing citizens really hard if they make a mistake.
There's a book written by a polish author, Jacek Dukaj - "Ice". I didn't read it yet, but I thought it might interest some of the people here, especially @DaseindustriesLtd. English wikipedia claims there's Russian translation, but I'm not sure. No English translation yet.
The story of the book takes place in an alternate universe where the First World War never occurred and Poland is still under Russian rule. Following the Tunguska event, the Ice, a mysterious form of matter, has covered parts of Siberia in Russia and started expanding outwards, reaching Warsaw. The appearance of Ice results in extreme decrease of temperature, putting the whole continent under constant winter, and is accompanied by Lute, angels of Frost, a strange form of being which seems to be a native inhabitant of Ice. Under the influence of the Ice, iron turns into zimnazo (cold iron), a material with extraordinary physical properties, which results in the creation of a new branch of industry, zimnazo mining and processing, giving birth to large fortunes and new industrial empires. Moreover, the Ice freezes History and Philosophy, preserving the old political regime, affecting human psychology and changing the laws of logic from many-valued logic of "Summer" to two-valued logic of "Winter" with no intermediate steps between True and False.
Dukaj noted that in this book, science in science-fiction stands for the philosophy of history.
Plot section explains what this last sentence means, but it seems too spoiler'y.
Here's a partial (3%) translation[2] of his other book I did read, "Perfect Imperfection". I'm not sure how faithful it is; he uses fancy language structures. It has Russian translation; quote from English wiki: "One of many original twists in the book is the new language, such as new grammar and prefixes that try to describe the posthuman beings (somewhat resembling the concept of gender-neutral language). This language play also makes the book especially challenging for translators. The book's translation to Russian was nominated for a Russian awards for best translations" <yep, trying to translate it with Deepl was a struggle>
I put off reading his other books after I bounced several times from one called "Science Fiction"; IIRC I kept getting lost b/c of how meta it is (and the first time I read Perfect Imperfection I really got it only on second reread due to defamiliarization[1]).
Actually, I just remembered that besides "Perfect Imperfection" I also did read his "Black Oceans". It was good, but not very thought provoking in a way Perfect Imperfection was. But now that I looked at the Wiki, this seems interesting (given it was written in 2001):
Technological trends are far from only ones explored by Dukaj in his book. He portrays the futuristic bureaucracy, political power struggles behind private sector, government and the military, and changes in culture. Dukaj extrapolates from the current trend of increasing lawsuits and political correctness: in his world many people willingly live under constant mass surveillance of the New Etiquette (NEti), which registers all their actions so that they couldn't be falsely accused of some "personal offense crime".
He's apparently switching from writing to making video games. Translated polish article:
Jacek Dukaj has announced that he has established the Nolensum studio, which will produce video games based on his works. The first project will be "Hardware Dreams," a virtual adaptation of the novel " The Old Axolotl." That title has received international acclaim, with two TV series based on it - the Belgian "Into the Night" and the Turkish "Yakamoz S-245". The director of the game, also responsible for its visual side, is Maciej Jackiewicz: art director and co-creator of numerous animations and cinematics for games ("Cyberpunk 2077", "The Witcher")
[Dukaj's quote] You can write on paper and you can write into the world. For many years, I have watched closely as the center of gravity of culture has shifted from forms based on writing to audiovisual media. A technological revolution is advancing that makes it possible to experience the content of these media in direct sensory experiences. Much of my work has described the consequences of such transformations. Until the time came when at least some of these ideas of mine, instead of on paper, I can realize for real, out in the world. The work in which I most fully described the world of metaverses, NFTs, universal guaranteed income, the social credit system and similar phenomena was 2010's "Line of Resistance." From it comes the term "nolensum", meaning the situation when technological civilization meets our needs so well that we have to artificially create identities and goals for ourselves. The need to engineer people's sense of life arises. And the pioneers of engineering the meaning of life are the first practitioners of gamification of the human destiny: computer game developers.
The richness of Dukaj's worlds is of a scale that the budgets of Hollywood blockbusters would not be ashamed of," says Marcin Kobylecki, creative producer. - "Hardware Dreams is distinguished by its universality and scalability. Its plot is set in Tokyo, and the post-apocalyptic vision of life in a computer network is sure to gain the attention of audiences around the world.
The strategic plan is to gradually expand the team and production capacity so that Nolensum simultaneously develops several projects. Not necessarily just games. Nolensum is affiliated (through the Bellwether Rocks fund, in which Dukaj is also a shareholder and board member) with companies involved in NFTs, cryptocurrencies, metaverse and tokenization, among others.
Nolensum has secured full funding for the first year and a half of production. In the near future, Nolensum also intends to work with outside contractors.
Nolensum. Sounds promising.
[1] There are concepts / technologies which are just not explained for sth like first half of the book, in order to immerse reader in post-singularity world by showing it from a perspective of someone from ~near-future. (/u/gwern described his It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World as doing the same thing)
[2] Because I figured I'd try to translate it. Unfortunately I asked for the permission, wrongly expecting I'd just get no response, most likely. In hindsight, that was stupid.
Sinity
1yr ago
If you've got other ideas, or have a more specific idea on how this could work, let me know :)
Maybe somehow integrate comparative sorting into the site? Gwern's text about it. I'm not sure how this could be done though. Make a shortlist of QC's, have users vote on whether the thing they read previously was better/worse than current item? If people actually used it, that'd provide a lot more value than upvotes, I think.
edit2: The markdown parser doubles newlines in the three-backtick code span.
Also lists are possibly broken (plus there's too much spacing between items)
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test
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second
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second level
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sth sth
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A few ideas/suggestions on how to proceed.
Scope
/r/themotte was mainly rat-adjacent civil discourse concerning Culture War. Possibly we could broaden the scope of the new themotte - it could be rat-adjacent civil discourse, period. It was already the case to some degree on subreddit, maybe. General discussion area? Somehow network/collaborate with LessWrong, /r/slatestarcodex, Scott(?), /r/rational maybe. Possibly this space could be a glue between all of the fragmented communities, sort-of?
Organization
/r/themotte was mostly a recurring CW thread, with some extra recurring threads (friday fun thread etc.) and some ad-hoc Posts which didn't get much engagement. Maybe we should lean even more into recurring-threads model? IMO this encourages contributions. I'm thinking of this part, from Beware Trivial Inconveniences:
I was reminded of this recently by Eliezer's Less Wrong Progress Report. He mentioned how surprised he was that so many people were posting so much stuff on Less Wrong, when very few people had ever taken advantage of Overcoming Bias' policy of accepting contributions if you emailed them to a moderator and the moderator approved. Apparently all us folk brimming with ideas for posts didn't want to deal with the aggravation.
Okay, in my case at least it was a bit more than that. There's a sense of going out on a limb and drawing attention to yourself, of arrogantly claiming some sort of equivalence to Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky. But it's still interesting that this potential embarrassment and awkwardness was enough to keep the several dozen people who have blogged on here so far from sending that "I have something I'd like to post..." email.
IMO it'd help to add some features for comments. Collapsible blocks of text, for large comments, or quoting a large amount of text. Make them not count towards character limit (if there's any). Footnotes[1]. Images.
Which recurring threads? Certainly CW one. I think 'Meta' thread would be helpful, especially now. Media thread. Old 'friday fun' and 'small questions' threads could be merged(?) Maybe add 'bare link repository' as a recurring thread? Also Quality Contributions Reports.
Keeping the community from disintegrating
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IMO it'd be a good idea to keep cross-posting some stuff from here to there at least for now, perhaps with comments turned off. Quality Contributions, maybe link posts to threads here.
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Email list. Possibly contact frequent posters, people with QC directly to sign in? If we had a list of people in the old community, then we wouldn't be as time dependent as otherwise. Without contact, if it flatlines...
Also, if the subreddit is basically ending now, it could be a good moment to compile a up-to-date archive. Through now that I checked, pushshift archives are roughly up-to-date, so it shouldn't be an issue.
Misc
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somehow letting user know effectively about new posts in a whole subtree of a thread
- at least specifically if user's comment is at the root - e.g. if I make a comment, user foo replies to it, and then bar replies to foo, I should be notified about both of these comments
- maybe enable & encourage replying to multiple comments at once (same as mentioning users on Reddit, but not limited to 3). But comment still needs exactly 1 parent to not break threading...
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tags, hierarchical tags, community-curated tag tree, subscriptions to discussion about given topic by tags
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Making use of Gwern’s resorter somehow. Possibly in ctx of QCs?
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QCs integrated into UI sensibly
- Maybe it shouldn't be too effortless through.
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realtime chat (or official Discord, but it'd be nice to have chat integrated with the forum)
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voting
- user-normalization: some users might upvote/downvote a lot, others less
- a bit self-referential, but maybe weight up/downvotes based on user karma and activity
- multiple kinds/dimensions of votes. (apparently sth like that is implemented on LW)
(I had a list of suggestions I meant to post few months ago, when it was decided we'll move off Reddit; points below are vague enough I'm not sure exactly what I meant by them, but I figure I'll post them anyway)
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somehow solving perma topic threads defocusing recency bias (that's the vague one...)
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a wiki? Knowledge base?
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maybe something between a wiki and a discussion, somehow.
[1] Linking to them; linking back to the source from them; putting their content in alt-text on mouseover.
Sinity
1yr ago
Emphasis mine. Far from a "cutting off" of sense data, the exercise as described by Mahasi Sayadaw reads as one that scrutinizes sense data and investigates its nature.
Yes, I understand it that way as well. Very relevant text, I think, for thinking about it without 'spiritual' vagueness: I believed the hype and did mindfulness meditation for dumb reasons-- now I'm trying to reverse the damage - it speculates on what mindfulness does, physically. Also it shows why more mindfulness is not necessarily better.
I was very observant, introspective, disciplined, and my senses were very sensitive, so I quickly “made progress” in mindfulness and meditation (...) because I was excessively sensitive and trained myself to be vigilant, I kind of broke my mind with mindfulness.
I somehow didn’t think of “getting better at meditation” as reflecting changes in my brain, even though I gripe about it when anybody else forgets that all behavior has a basis in the nervous system. I viewed “do nothing” as a default state, almost how the brain should be, which is not justified at all.
I regarded the changes I saw from meditation as being not really changes at all, but a purer expression of how I was supposed to be, less clouded by distraction and unconscious autopilot. Some of them were pleasant, like noticing colors and details more vividly. I was more able to listen to and observe others without jumping in with my own opinions. The most exciting thing was being able to see more of my inner world. Readers of the blog will know that I’m quite fascinated with my navel, and getting access to more and more of it on demand led to a dangerous addiction. If I did anything wrong in my meditation practice— that is, completely against the advice of all authorities— it was seeking those sensations and insights.
I did not realize what a dynamic, feedback-driven process messing with your attention is. I wasn’t just clarifying my attention like you would clean rust off a bike chain; I was deeply reshaping my attention at multiple levels. In short, I was teaching myself not to get habituated to stimuli and not to pattern-match via sensory deprivation, in particular by depriving myself of my default mode network inner monologue stream (“letting go of thinking”).
Not habituating or pattern-matching are oft-exhorted goals because of typical mind fallacy: it’s common not to be nuanced enough. Many people believe that you can’t make too few assumptions, but it’s not true. We need heuristics for speed and to make room for the things that actually require nuanced attention. I felt the effects of reducing habituation and not pattern-matching across many domains, from verbal thinking to visual and auditory processing. Similarly, it's common to be excessively involved in "ego," or a self-image or self-narrative, and to benefit from loosening yours up and not seeing it as so solid. But when you attack your sense of self and try to train your brain not to build it up, you can lose things like proprioception and self-recognition.
One of the general things that mindfulness meditation aims to do is teach the practioner to perceive sense data more directly and less filtered through preconceived ideas of what it is we're sensing. It seeks to show us that concepts are an illusion, everything from thinking you see a "table" instead of a composition of light and shadow all the way up to our own self-concepts. The biggest harm of reducing the tendency to pre-filter input through concepts is the processing time that it takes to bind all the shapes or sounds or ideas I’m hearing into something my brain can use.
I take in excessive extraneous detail and don't prioritize incoming information as quickly as a result of mindfulness practice. I can cope with it, but it creates a lot of friction without much benefit. I just changed my graphics settings to be stupid high and now the game runs slow. I don’t pattern match quickly enough and it makes my thinking slow and contributes to a foggy brain feeling. I have trouble chunking information in my working memory, at least compared to how I used to be.
Harm: inability to accept "stories," fear of missing details of experience - This fear of making a perceptual or interpretive error leads to a constant sense of unease and bloat from maintaining a lot of unnecessary ambiguity in my models.
Mindfulness interventions have been proven to reduce habitation to stimuli, what is usually described within the originating traditions as “freshness of perception”. I became more reactive in part just from noticing more stimuli, but also because of common Buddhist doctrines that encourage you not to distinguish between internal and external occurrences. All of your perception is you, and boundaries between you and other people or the environment, or ultimately between anything and anything else, are ephemeral and imagined (according to two of the three marks of existence, non-self and impermanence). I still endorse a version of the view that "you" are actually your whole world, not just the avatar in the world, but I don’t believe that your sense of self should try to reflect that— for practical purposes, I am inside my body, which is inside a larger world, and most things that happen in that world are causally disconnected from me.
Sinity
1yr ago
These aren't the same people. You can think Yud is wrong, but Yud is not remotely related to "make AI woke or else it is biased" people.
Sinity
1yr ago
So is caffeine if lethal in relatively small doses = poison.
It's pretty irrelevant, given that people generally aren't taking large enough doses to die.
Sinity
1yr ago
Huge walls of text that can be succinctly spelled out in a few sentences is not clarity.
It reduces the chance of being misunderstood, lowers inferential distance to everyone. I'm not claiming it's universally good ofc.
Sinity
1yr ago
Shape rotation and the like is still cognitively taxing to people irrespective of any "trick"
I was convinced that I had aphantasia in the past, so I didn't even bother to try actually "shape rotating" on these sorts of tasks; I tried to somehow determine "logically" if shape could be rotated some way around.
Now I sorta can do it by visualizing*, but I'm not sure if performance is any better. Definitely cognitively taxing. I hate these tests.
* there's still no actual qualia, I think. But I could will myself to imagine e.g. "an apple", and then examine details. Ofc they're probably generated the moment I look for them, and certainly unstable. Also works for moving visuals - e.g. I could 'see' gameplay of a game I played for hundreds of hours (years ago).
On one LSD trip, I couldn't really think verbally at some point. Possibly that's when I learned this; I'm not sure through.
But I almost never think like this spontaneously. I wonder if it's useful and/or trainable.
Sinity
1yr ago
Incredibly annoying nitpick: IQ tests absolutely can be trained, and I'm confident if I or someone else smart took an IQ test now, and then took another after a dozen hours of practice, there'd be a measurable increase.
I didn't factcheck this; I'll quote it in case someone could spot any issues [bolds mine]:
tl;dr: practice effect is a thing, yes, but people here wildly exaggerate it.
"I think some of it has to do with time limit. If there is a strict time limit, I suspect the effect will be larger than otherwise, for obvious reasons (tell me if they aren't obvious).
I do think there is some practice effect in most perceptual reasoning tests in any case as well.
Someone posted a large meta-study on practice effect not too long ago. I'll link it below. I just took a quick look at it.
There was a significant effect, in fact, the MEAN effect was 0,5SD or 7,5 IQ points. This was after 3 prior tests, and there was no significant practice effect after that. HOWEVER, 2/3 of the population was given THE SAME TEST those 3 tries, and only 1/3 was given alternate forms (though not significantly different).
When looking at retest for alternate forms, the effect was 0,15-0,2SD or ~3 IQ points. HOWEVER, the time interval between retests mattered. If a long time had passed, the effect was smaller (in fact, it was -0,0008SD per week, which seems extremely slow, and it indicates to me that the practice effect is mostly a) feeling comfortable/not-anxious with the test, and b) very general logics, i.e. "I have to look for something rotating" etc.).
What's interesting is that the studies that used alternate forms actually had shorter time intervals than those with identical forms. This means that the impact of alternating forms is even larger than the drop of 0,2-0,35SD relative to identical form retest effect, ceteris paribus.
It should be noted, however, that the retesting of different studies was made with very different amounts of time, as far as I could gather. Some within the same week, others after several years. That's honestly quite a big problem for the study...
It should also be noted that the mean time interval was around half a year. Whether a few studies had a disproportional influence I don't know (one had an interval of around 6 years for example). Our retesting is way more often.
Here's the study: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Retest-effects-in-cognitive-ability-tests%3A-A-Scharfen-Peters/048102820f00a77ec242e5459a7c25ce1bccfa62
A last point of notice is that practice effect and training was helping low-IQ people more than high-IQ people (another test linked by the same redditor also showed this. 10.1016/j.intell.2006.07.006).
Edit: thanks for the silver!"
Edit: the comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/cognitiveTesting/comments/r4qrdv/practice_effect/hmkd0f1/?context=3
Sinity
1yr ago
and even if you don't do well on them initially you can basically get a perfect score by reviewing the patterns/ concepts that people are unfamiliar with.
You can't. At least not to a great extent. Hard IQ test questions stress your working memory. You need to process information to solve them; you could memorize exact same patterns, but make it slightly different and it won't help you.
Sinity
1yr ago
An alternative way to frame this is that spreading infohazards is good for people near the bottom of society but bad for those near the top, since higher societal instability is like heating up a bubbling cauldron of soup - the increased volatility makes it more likely that ingredients at the bottom will bubble up to the top.
Watch "Mr. Robot" TV show. a) it's great; b) shows things going the other way around than you expect, so you might notice sth you haven't considered.
Remember when countries with no black people were having BLM protests?
We also get right-wing news of "random black person in the US commits X crime" variety. In Poland, where there are ~no black people.
It's just US cultural dominance.
Random current example. Title is "United States law collapsing and crime rising". (well, not news exactly, just video)
In Poland... some excerpts from a random article
According to Eurostat data, 47.5 percent of Poles aged 25-34 live in family homes. "That's almost 2.6 million people, 172,000 more than in 2019." - HRE Investments expert Bartosz Turek pointed out.
The issue does not primarily affect students. (...) in the last year the percentage of adult Poles who lived with their parents rose most sharply in the 30 to 35 age bracket. "The data confirms the impact of home loans becoming much more difficult to obtain in 2020"
The situation worsened in 2021. "We saw a dynamic recovery of the economy and the loosening of valves on housing loans. As a result, banks received at least tens of thousands of loan applications, which would normally have been realized in the first year of the epidemic." However, the massive increase in demand contributed to increases in housing prices, making real estate unaffordable for many young people.
(...) in the last year the percentage of adult Poles who lived with their parents rose most sharply in the 30 to 35 age bracket. "The data confirms the impact of home loans becoming much more difficult to obtain in 2020"
The situation worsened in 2021. "We saw a dynamic recovery of the economy and the loosening of valves on housing loans. As a result, banks received at least tens of thousands of loan applications, which would normally have been realized in the first year of the epidemic." However, the massive increase in demand contributed to increases in housing prices, making real estate unaffordable for many young people.
However, he pointed out, the massive increase in demand contributed to increases in housing prices, making real estate unaffordable for many young people.
According to Turk, the situation could be improved by the government's credit guarantee program for homebuyers - the so-called no-down-payment loan program, which is due to take effect in six months. "The reason is simple - no-down-payment loans can shorten the path to one's own apartment by as much as several years. After all, that's how much time the young need to collect the necessary contribution to the loan."
Big lol at some real estate investment firm's representative praising government for ~subsidizing housing*. That will surely not increase demand (and prices) further.
* it's not just no-downpayment. They also make the loans have 2% interest for the first 10 years (by paying the difference).
Sinity
1yr ago
Apparently it was pretty bad in Poland too. The following is about XVIII, so it's not even medieval period...
The British traveler and historian traveled half of Europe. In the course of his many voyages, he also ended up in Vistula. The description that came out from his pen is considered extremely valuable, as you can hardly accuse him of bias. Coxe depicted what he saw and had no interest in embellishing Polish reality. In addition, he was able to relate the appearance of Polish peasants to how the landowners in other parts of the continent presented themselves. He wrote:
I could never project in my mind an area so sad and empty. (...) For 45 miles we met only 2 carriages and 12 wagons (...) The sight of the miserable villages matched completely with the miserable surroundings that surrounded them.
The villagers in this country are poorer and gloomier than in others we visited. Wherever we stopped, beggars came to us in groups and asked for handouts with the basest intrusiveness. Compared to Swiss peasants, who are polite but also demand politeness, Polish peasants are slavishly submissive: they bow to the ground having taken off their hats, holding them in their hands until the man is out of their sight.
The Polish peasant has a wild appearance, a burnt, dark, almost black face, lean cheeks, sunken eyes, short stature; he moves slowly, his general apathy making him incapable of feeling either great joy or suffering. n winter in a simple sheepskin coat, in summer in a shirt and pants made of ragged canvas, barefoot, he drags himself lazily behind his skinny, shaggy horse, pulling a socha with which he tears up a weedy field to harvest winter supplies from it, insufficient to feed his family and possessions.
(...) The villagers, whose number they count to six million, called peasants, constituted two-thirds of the nation. Hardly different from cattle, they have no property, live from day to day, rotting in filth and misery. In the absence of light and means of subsistence, half of their offspring are lost, which would have increased the population (...). It must be said that whatever fate awaits Poland, their condition cannot get worse.
"They feel little and think little"
That the above comments were not at all far from reality is also evidenced by the words of Stanislaw Staszic. In Cautions, the famous Enlightenment activist and Catholic priest wrote with bitterness:
Five parts of the Polish nation stand before my eyes. I see millions of creatures, some of whom walk half naked, others covered with skin or rough coats; all of them dried out, shriveled, swollen, grubby; having their eyes sunken deep into their heads, breathless, and ceaselessly working.
Gloomy and stupid, they feel little and think little - this is their greatest happiness. One can barely see a rational soul in them. Their superficial form at first sight bears more resemblance to an animal than to a human being.
Sinity
1yr ago
Suppose we naively equalize this power, or just adapt current political institutions to it, such that in a few generations a plebeian can secure resources to start his own copyclan and bite off some share of the light cone. What would they make of it? Would they not devolve into puddles of high-maintenance hedonium? Or, worse, would they not spill into ugly rat races over artificially scarce artifacts to secure positional goods, invent increasingly absurd sports, flaunt their cognitive limitations, vote for some even more buffoonish Trumps, and generally mode-collapse into God-monkeys replaying behavioral loops from Savannah? Worst of all, would they not succumb to Moloch in His basest form, the Blight from Sandberg's own worldbuilding exercise, like Scott warned in his meditation?
Yeah, but that doesn't preclude giving them, say, equivalent of Earth's worth of resources. It doesn't necessitate murdering them by restricting anti-aging or mind uploading tech.
If a half-ape like me can think about eventual cool and useful things to do on an astronomical scale, to scale my agency up, they ought to be able to feel it already.
I don't expect there to be that much interesting stuff to do in Reality. Space ~undifferentiated at scale. Agency = compute.
I'm less of an elitist than you, and you're far from the worst offender, but frankly it's very hard for me to imagine that, if I were to make the decision that people upstream of of Altman or Hassabis will soon be positioned to make, I'd have the heart to play Prometheus. I would, however, try to spread the prerequisites of high agency. I'd be enticing baseline humans to partake of Ambrosia, the Fruit of Knowledge and the water of Mnemosyne before giving them Fire.
What would that involve?
Conveniently, utilitarians tell us that human lives, happiness points and QALYs are fungible, so it makes little difference on the cosmic scale if you uplift the current 8 billion half-apes, or let them expire (but ethically, e.g. doubling down on addictive entertainment production, SusTainaBility propaganda, birth control and child substitutes and industrializing this novel Canadian practice of recommending euthanasia to unhappy poor people), and generate a more aligned population from the small chosen seed.
I think most would agree that killing someone, to swap them for someone new, is not good.
Maybe it's copium, but I really don't believe that it's likely. It's a coherent view, and it does make sense from purely selfish perspective, sorta - but moral intuitions would scream. I mean, really? (not literal) post-scarcity achieved, now let's go kill everyone except close family and such? Kill actual living 10B humans, replace with new instances, personally designed?
All of that motivated by just wanting to grab, say, 10% more resources (otherwise allocated equally between existing humans)?
Anyway. From Perfect Imperfection:
- Yes. - She took a breath. - Take advantage of it. These are the privileges of your position. The ease of escaping into bliss, into places of absolute peace. Reverse the way you think: it's not you who moves in the world, it's the world that moves in front of you, like a perforated tape, and you choose on which part to latch the reader of your soul.
- Stahs [standard homo sapiens]. - He patted the horse on the neck. - I am a stahs. An aristocrat. Is that how I should think?
- Exactly. What, you don't like the word? Aristocracy is necessary.
- You are attempting to freeze culture in an artificial state.
- To freeze man. Humanity.
- It all amounts to the same thing.
- Does this outrage you? Why does it?
- I don't know. It seems to me some kind of... calculating, ruthless. Social engineering. It has a bad connotation.
- Didn't they tell you, every Progress inevitably gravitates towards UI.
- They said. Actually... you told me.
- Ah. - She raised her eyes to the starless sky. - Me. Well, yes. So you know - if it wasn't for Civilization, you would have found here after the resurrection only phoebes [posthumans] and inclusions; there would be no more stahs. Well, maybe a few zoological specimens.
- But did you have to go straight into all these pseudo-feudal rituals?
- There wasn't much choice. In an inf economy, in an economy of arbitrary distribution of infinitesimals, feudalism remains a stable system. Democracy - not. Is it democracy that you feel sorry for?
(...)
It appeared that she had gone all the way: the sun setting over the ocean, the golden beach, the white stones of the boardwalk, the warm wind above shaking the plumes of palm trees.
The beach was not yet empty, dozens of tanned nude people were walking along the wave boundary or playing volleyball. A girl with a dog stopped at the steps leading to the boardwalk and gawked at Adam and Angelica - she probably noticed their condensation. Zamoyski winked at her. She whistled at the dog and they ran on, child and animal. (...)
They ordered milkshakes. From the waitress's demeanor, her naked nervousness, her quick, stealthy glances, her artificial precision of speech, Adam inferred that she recognized the stahs in them.
When she left, he looked around the boardwalk and the beach. He looked for signs of tension and agitation in the behavior of the beachgoers - the recent war with the Deformants, the current one - with the Suzeren, these massacres of people from the ripped apart Ports... But nothing. A postcard resort.
How much of the information about these meta-physical clashes ever leaks into the cultural soil of HS Civilization, to the very bottom? Gnosis doesn't censor it, after all; it's all floating around in Plateau. But apparently the enstahs don't care much.
But you have to admit: they live luxuriously - in the luxuries of the 21st century.
- How many of them do you think have citizenship of Civilization?
- Probably none. - Angelika shrugged her shoulders.
- Do you remember what you told me then, in the clearing, under the moon? About the rules of Civilization and feudalism?
- Aha.
- "Because to me it looks", he waved his hand, "like the twenty-first century, right down to the marrow of its democratic bones."
- Well. Ninety-nine percent most of the time live as you lived in the twenty-first, after all, this is what our Civilization is based on, we must have a strong cultural foundation, a certainty of normality. But above these ninety-nine percent are the stahs, there is the whole hierarchy of Civilization, the Lodges and the Emperor and the Gnosis and the prohibition laws. Well, then, this political structure that makes the twenty-first century possible - now it was Angelika who embraced the landscape with a broad gesture - this structure is feudal in its essence.
- You can't live in democracy and feudalism at the same time. It is an absurdity of sorts. They quarrel with each other in every detail, in language even.
- Really? After all, in your time feudalism has already begun to overtake democracy. Don't make such a face. You knew. The greater the power of the intellect - and therefore of money - the lesser the power of the majority.
- You were well indoctrinated by the Jesuits. And the facts - what are they? He looked at the beachgoers.
- Stupid sheep herded by enlightened shepherds from the heights of the Curve. How nicely they play! How happy they are! How wonderfully tanned! How nicely fattened! We'll step in before bedtime, stroke their heads, they'll lick our legs, make us feel better - and let them continue to play carelessly.
- Isn't this what the paradise of democracy looked like in your day?
- Democracy. Repeat the word. And those here? They don't have the right to vote, they're not citizens, they don't -.
- But they don't want to be citizens! As stahs they would be restricted by Tradition. And yes - they are absolutely free. Civilization does not constrain them. They can be whatever they wish. Do whatever they desire. Do nothing if they desire it. Inf fulfills their dreams, inf gives them security.
- And what do they do? They lie on the beaches.
- And what did they do in your day? They drank through their allowances in neighborhood parks. - She laughed. - Fren is the same, only the laziness is more luxurious.
- But why is citizenship something that is bought? Even if they wanted to, they couldn't afford it.
- And how do you distinguish such a decision from hundreds of other temporary whims, fulfilled on a word? How do you make them feel that citizenship and politics are more than just another inf game?
- In such a culture they grew up, what do you expect from them?
- But nothing! This is just a man's natural state!
- After all, you can see it, she resumed more quietly. - Just look at them. Progress itself is undemocratic. Take a look at the Curve: up over here, down there. The universe is undemocratic. There is no such livable universe at all that doesn't enforce a Perfect Form, doesn't impose a hierarchy. Democracy goes against the laws of physics. And subconsciously they know it, they all know it.
Has problems with economics' most important question ("who live big house?") because it creates a permanent two-caste society in which one class of people who make up the vast majority of the population are eternally poor and live off the state, with no real chance of improving their situation (other than with a generally rising tide), while the other caste live off their capital and own all or most of the resources. Seems likely to fuel class conflict, perhaps successfully given traditional bulwark against socialist revolution (lower-middle class/burghers) no longer exists, nor do stratifications within working class (eg. between working class and underclass/lumpenproles). Might be social problems or dysfunction due to malaise or lack of labor in some communities.
It might be solvable with modest wealth taxes. The goal would be to gradually bring down wealth inequality. Possibly high taxes on inheritance.
It doesn't collapse to #4 IMO; market still functions as it did earlier, theoretically...
It's also hard to see what the structure of the 'elite' would be like. Would people try desperately to hold onto wealth, knowing that they'd die if they lost it? Wouldn't the huge collapse in aggregate demand caused by the withdrawal of billions of people from the market sink a lot of those rich people?
A fic mentions this problem. I already referenced it here days ago, so I'll keep the quote short this time...
The paradox of plenty had truly arrived. Factories were more productive than ever, but even at the lowest prices, the only clients with money were the increasingly opulent capital owners, the hyperclasses the newly emergent economic class that would come to define the following century. Economic production stagnated, even as potential production skyrocketed.
Government responses were mixed. Almost universally, the world’s government’s, nominally democratic or not, had degenerated into instruments of their oligarchical hyperclasses. Nations where the hyperclasses sympathized with the masses handed out basic incomes to keep them solvent. Those that didn’t handed out pittances or, often, nothing, content to rely on increasingly brutal oppression.
(...) it was only in a certain proportion of nations that it was able to mutate into true Detachment, with the hyperclass extending their beliefs to include the proposition that it was morally correct for the lower classes to be kept down, that it was morally incorrect to hand out relief food or money, and so forth. These kinds of beliefs mutated into endless variety, to a degree wearingly and horrifyingly familiar to any historian of the age.
Eventually, the world’s nations, defined by their hyperclasses, began to sort into two groups. The nations where the hyperclasses detached in this manner began to back each other in international disputes. Similarly, the nations where the hyperclasses held onto their moral compasses, implementing relief and welfare programs–though never giving up their hold on power (...) War followed shortly thereafter
Eventually, agonizingly, and cataclysmically, the FA collapsed under weight of its economic inferiority, its own ideologies rendering it incapable of effectively mobilizing its populations, or even preventing its populations from being co-opted by the other side.
like retvrning to feudalism or whatever, unlikely or unpredictable enough that they're not worth discussing in this context.
Heh, in The Full Stack Of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier, UBI is categorized as a feudalist solution.
Working “Below the API” is the terrifying dystopian endgame vision driving the support in Silicon Valley for redistributive programs like Universal Basic Income, and Sam Altman wrote a prescient essay way back in 2013 about the political tensions of a low-growth Zero-Sum environment. The optimistic take is that “API-based” software businesses provide flexible employment, cash-on-demand-in-exchange-for-elbow-grease, and a way to provide for yourself and your family that didn't exist
10 years ago.
The pessimistic take is that working Below the API closes the path to Wealth for an entire Class of people as labor trends towards Perfect Competition, towards Zero Economic Surplus, towards a world where the serf~
peasantworkercan't afford to purchase the tools she uses to work and must instead rent them from her employer at an ever-increasing-margin, i.e. pay a feu/fee, to be able to feed herself.
(...) Speaking of the Wealth-generating ability of labor, people on the internet had many different responses to my Bermuda Triangle of Wealth essay on personal Wealth-building: i) government needs to regulate healthcare costs ii) government distortions are actually what caused the cost disease and iii) government needs to limit immigration. All in response to the same essay on building Wealth for yourself.
…but there was one other kind of response that I hesitated to include
This plays as edgy irony to most people Above the API [5 favorites]
And yes, stow the pitchforks, #killingisstillbad, and yes, violence is super bad, Non-Aggression-Principle is good, and no, I definitely don’t condone any of that. But in a Feudal world, history has been pretty clear that things are Zero-Sum and there’s still only one good way to build Wealth — Take it and Tax it. Veni vidi vici etc.. If people look out the window and see nothing but Feudalism and a personal lifetime of serfdom, you can at least understand their instinctive linguistic reaching for violence (while condemning it).
Is there a non-violent solution that people living Below the API can self-effectuate, instead of having to rely on the Noblesse Oblige of Skynet those Above the API?
Perhaps. Another preachy author provides a less bloodthirsty solution that still satisfies history’s fundamental rule of Feudalism:
“When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.”
Voting is violence (by proxy), and Democracy marks a difference between the Feudalism of old and Silicon Valley’s envisioned Feudal dystopia. Each vote you cast is an implicit claim on the full force of Uncle Sam. It’s buried beneath layers of civilization, thankfully, but US voters elect Representatives who determine Tax Rates which determine IRS policies which, if you try to fuck around on, will get you violently arrested and sent to jail.
Nowadays you can Take it and Tax it at the ballot box, with the use of force suitably restrained by process and bureaucracy. Which is precisely why so many in Silicon Valley who can see the writing on the wall (eventually all those jobs “Below the API” get replaced by a robot…) are instinctively turning to Political solutions instead of Technological ones to the Wealth-building abilities of their fellow Americans.
“It’s a shame, really, but you can’t fight (technological) progress.”
My point: As long as people who feel abandoned or impoverished or crushed Beneath the API or like they have no obvious path upwards, as long as those people feel that VOTING is a valid way to “Take it and Tax it”, they can peacefully express and effectuate what otherwise must become violence or generational poverty & stagnation.
There’s no other way to build Wealth in a Feudal world — you’re either a Lord or a Serf.
IDK. How can you fumble, say, accelerating to VMAX and hitting a tree?
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