Sinity
1yr ago
Feminists! Where are you, when the motherland calls for reservists?
Paulina Januszewska
KP journalist
DECEMBER 9, 2022
"Where are the feminist organizations when men get drafted into the army?" the graduates of the University of Peasant Reason ask. Let me now explain.
("Peasant's reason" is an idiom roughly equivalent to "common sense")
If I were to use the same rhetoric as the University of Peasant Reason, which demands compulsory conscription and military service for women as well, and preferably for feminists ("after all, you're all about equality, aren't you?"), I would have to write that you, dear men, have wound the whip on yourselves.
The patriarchy you have established generates conflicts that are later resolved violently and forces you to be cannon fodder, in certain circles called reservists. You are the ones who have decided that gender determines who is fit to fight and who is not. I don't know about that, but I do know that in your battles - those fought in or out of uniform - women also die.*
The argument "women, now you have what you wanted, now go to war" is in fact a misunderstanding of the flagship assumptions of the drive towards emancipation.
No - the fact that a woman becomes a soldier, even a General, is not a celebration for feminism. Just as it is not, for example, when women head greedy corporations or referee soccer matches at the World Cup, which violates human rights, exploits, promotes homophobia and sexism.
While the establishment of quotas in the army may appear to be an equalitarian demand, and indeed rubs the nose in the face of gender stereotypes that assume women are physically weaker than men and unfit for military service, it actually represents an extremely neoliberal and ignorant approach to gender justice that ignores opposition to oppression.
Above all, however, it fails to answer much more legitimate questions about the role of the military and the toxic, impacting everyone "forms of masculinity it creates and supports." This is exactly what Shreshtha Das wrote about, commenting on what happened two years ago in India, and pointing out that "equal roles for women in the army over there are not a victory for feminists." She was referring to a ruling by India's Supreme Court, which, in spite of the government's sexist objections, ruled that gender could not be an obstacle to high-ranking positions in the military and permanent service.
Das recalled that "the military, as a place where blatant hypermasculinity explodes, reinforces hegemonic male notions of aggressiveness, strength and heterosexual prowess in and out of the barracks." Femininity, in turn, is therein an insult and a reason for abuse, as the experiences of harassed, raped, paid less than their male counterparts, shunned from important tasks/positions and ridiculed female members (but also male members) of the armies around the world make clear.
A soldier in the Polish special forces GROM, co-founder and president of the #SayStopFoundation, Katarzyna Kozlowska, once told me about the realities faced by women in the uniformed services:
"You can't avoid the rough advances there. By accepting them, you are treated like a whore, by rejecting - even worse. On top of that, entering the ranks of the military or police, women immediately get the patch of the physically weaker. Men think that since women are inserting themselves over there on their own volition, the hermetic, masculinized and hierarchical environment can dictate any conditions to them. Meanwhile, a female soldier or guard - as a strong woman, after all - should not complain, but manfully endure everything, including when watered down with a coarse, chauvinistic sauce of abuse"
To use a word: putting women in the camouflage, their entry into such male-centered structures, has nothing to do with women's liberation or equating femininity with masculinity. It is merely a gendered "promotion" bestowed by men, a necessity to symbolically put on pants and get rid of everything that could be considered unmanly.
This, by the way, also works against those men who are shown their place in the military hierarchy with aggression and violence (mental and physical) or, for example, who are ridiculed or humiliated there for their homosexuality.
The army is a generator and reproducer of the violence of oppression against which all social emancipation movements headed by feminism are fighting. Therefore, the half-witted expectation that women should join it willingly, with a smile on their lips and male anointment, is nonsense.
While we demand recognition and equal rights, we don't want an equal share of the harms produced by patriarchy. We want those harms to be none - or at least less.
University of Peasant Reason goes on to say, "since we, men, have to go into the army and die, you women must too." (...) it forgets that war means the death of civilians, that it uses a particularly cruel tool - rape. And it so happens that the latter largely involves women, who would often rather die than experience it.
Shreshtha Das reminds us that "the military and the hypermasculinity it promotes also harms women who do not live in areas controlled by the military." In doing so, she cites a 2004 study by Catherine Lutz, clearly showing that rates of domestic violence are three to five times higher among military couples than among civilians, because "the military as an institution that promotes the idea of heterosexual male supremacy glorifies power and control or discipline, and suggests that violence is often a necessary means to achieve its own ends."
You read that right. The year is 2023, Poland. The country is in a panic over military mobilization, triggered by media reports of an increase in the number of reservists in the state army. And Polish male hussars are howling on the Internet: "what about women?".
I'll just reiterate: the main problem of those who insist on the forced conscription of women into the army is that they misunderstand feminism. The coercion to become cannon fodder, on the other hand, is a patriarchal assumption that strikes at any gender.
If the graduates of the University of Peasant Reason wanted to stay in reality for a while, they would learn that there is a not inconsiderable group of men and women who want to join the soldier ranks. And I'm not just talking about the ranks of war-fetishizing nationalists or All-Polish Youth. Maj. Konrad Radzik, spokesman for the Military Complements Headquarters in Rzeszow, told "Wyborcza" that since the beginning of the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, "interest in all forms of military service has increased by about 100 percent - including among women." Besides, there is no shortage of Ukrainian women grabbing weapons of their own volition either.
So there is no doubt that in the face of threats like the one posed by Russia today, the desire to train and defend themselves will grow in societies. If the war escalates, it will force many men and women to adopt defensive measures no matter what their willingness or reluctance to armed conflict.
However, no one has the right to impose on anyone the decision to join the regular army. Indeed, movements striving for equality do not have on their agenda the rewriting of a masculinized world into one that will continue to be violent, with the difference that the oppressors will become women for a change.
The trouble of men sharing idiotic posters on their social media with the slogan "show you're a real femina, fight for equality in reserve exercises" lies in masculine fear. In the Polish state's deprivation of men's choices. You know, the same choice that women in Poland do not have, at least in the matter of aborting a pregnancy.
Your fear of military service, your disagreement with the state deciding for you without you, however, is not the fault of feminists. It is the fault of the oppression of the patriarchy and men in power in Poland. If you choose to oppose them, we will go with you. But don't expect us to be happy that you wish for us as badly as you wish for yourselves.
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
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
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
And, I'm not sure about this, since it's mostly comedy, but... Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation.
Quote from Ch. 14/15, so maybe a bit spoilery.
Mr. Bucket smiled. "You remind me! I asked a question earlier. Children, what do you think should happen to lazy people?"
"Mr. Bucket," said Keerthi. "Is there a person inside of that statue?"
"No," said Mr. Bucket. "You did not answer my question so I will ask another. This time you must all answer. If someone told you that you were going to have to die, and they gave you a choice to either burn to death or drown to death, which would you pick?"
Nobody answered.
"Why aren't you answering?" asked Mr. Bucket.
"We assume that you are going to burn us to death or drown us to death if we do," said Tide.
"I promise that I won't if you all answer," said Mr. Bucket. "What do you say! Who is for the burning? Raise your hands."
(...)
One day I was having an argument with a lazy person after I fired all of the Oompa Loompas. I told them that they should let me put a special chip in their brain so I can issue them commands and have them control the factory for me and they told me no. I said why not! They gave me an answer, but it was a lie, since they were lazy and wanted to lie around all day. They did not care if it hurt me. They only wanted to sit and watch everyone around them work. I waited until they were asleep and gave them the chip."
"They woke up and they were not happy! I asked them why they weren't happy, it was only one little chip! They said it was less the chip and more the twenty heavy copper wires tying them to the wall and the voices in their head. I told them to try working for once in their life to forget about it and they refused. So! I started burning."
"You incinerated someone because they didn't want to be your robot slave?" asked Tide.
"No! I did not want them to be my slave. I wanted them to be a Center Controller. And I did not incinerate them. I replaced their skin with an unbreakable chocolate coating that makes it feel like their skin is always on fire. The only way it stops feeling on fire is if they follow my commands and make the walls move the way I want to when I tell them to but only for a second."
"You said there was not a person in there," said Lim.
"There is not! There were people in there."
"People?" asked Keerthi. She ran around to the other side of the statue and looked closely at the sections where the wires fed into it. There were frozen faces burnt into the torso and back of the body, five in total. Two men, three women.
"Do not worry!" said Mr. Bucket. "They were all terrible people. Much worse than JUROR and Chili. They defended a man who let a child starve because he wanted to chew tobacco and sleep all day. Do not feel bad for them! I have scanned their brains. They do not think anymore. They are not people anymore. They are machines that work because they do not want to feel pain. Like clams! Happy chocolate clams that are always on fire forever."
"Leave the factory," said Chetan. "Leave the factory leave the factory leave the factory."
Mr. Bucket looked at all of the children. His smile flew away.
"Oh no! I knew this would happen. All of you look scared. Children, have no fear. We will be away from these horrible screens soon."
(...)
Keerthi noticed that no one was talking about the clams. She understood why Mahuika wasn't talking about the clams, because Mahuika was vaping, but she wanted to hear Lim and Tide talk about the clams.
Somebody needed to say something about the clams. The clams were bad.
"Don't say anything about the clams," said Chetan.
"I should say something about the clams," said Keerthi.
"You should not," said Chetan. "It is the right thing to do but mentioning it will not make anything better. Leave the factory."
(...)
Charlie went inside the factory, and he met Mr. Wonka, who probably was not unlike the person Charlie himself grew to become. He saw a factory that, beyond the superficial, may not have been different at all from the one she was inside. He would have eaten for the first time in his life to his heart's content. He would have for the first time been treated to an experience that was both positive and unavailable to the average child.
Unlike Chili, he appreciated it. Salt, Teevee, and the newspaper reporters who interviewed Charlie all agreed on who he was. He was a good kid. He appreciated what little he had, he never swore, he always followed the rules, he hugged his family, he finished his toothpaste, he never said a bad word about anybody without being hounded into doing it first.
He was good.
Did that matter?
Keerthi, like most others who had done their research, agreed that Teevee was the most reliable source. His narrative was that it had been a morality tale. It was a deliberate effort on Wonka's design, Mike said. He was making a point. He was making a statement. The ultimate angel got to play inside the garden. Charlie was the winner no matter how he got there, and he became the owner of the most powerful company in the world.
He was good and he got rewarded for it.
Hence.
People who are good are rewarded.
That wasn't enough. It was something but it wasn't enough. Keerthi remembered that Mr. Teevee hadn't focused as much on that half.
"Keerthi," said Chetan. "You are right. This doesn't mean you should continue focusing on this. You cannot fix this problem alone. Please leave the factory. I know it's hard. Think about your mother and father. They love you and they are worried sick about you."
They were bad.
It wasn't important who Wonka loved. It was important who he hated.
Wonka hated them. Teevee said that Wonka hated them, that he dripped contempt for those four children and their parents with every spoken word. Keerthi thought he had been exaggerating and most people agreed. He was reliable compared to Salt, but he was also second place. Runner-up in a competition where gold gave you the keys to the kingdom and silver gave you a garbage truck filled with candy bars. If you sat on those memories for a lifetime and tried to think back on them, how could you have recalled any of it without imagining hatred?
But it made more sense if it wasn't imaginary. Wonka hated Gloop. He hated Beauregarde. He hated Salt. He hated Teevee. There was a false image of tough love, but it wasn't real. It was all punitive.
Drowned, disfigured, trashed. Made to make the walk of shame in front of the world, their names forever synonymous with their respective sins. He had to know they would never live normal lives after that. Lives at all.
They were bad and they got punished for it.
Hence.
People who are bad are punished.
At the age where it would have hit the hardest, Wonka had this unbreakable message carved into Charlie's soul. He was removed from a world that might have proven it wrong and locked inside of paradise, first with his mentor and then alone, his family failing to correct the delusion without being swallowed by it. Sixty years for that concept to internalize and ferment and rot inside the sweetest mental prison in the world.
What would that do to a person?
"He thinks the world should be fair," said Keerthi. "He thinks he's some arbiter of justice, and-"
"No," said Chetan. "If you are this close, better to get it right. I know it so you know it too. Give it some thought."
The Convenient Chocolate Conveyor had continued moving during Keerthi's tonally dissonant inner monologue, but it was still in the same long hallway.
He had not changed the topic.
"As impossibly popular and valued as caddies are, sadly they will soon be done away with," said Mr. Bucket. "Soon the WonkaCoin will render all physical money useless."
"The WonkaCoin? Singular?" asked Tide.
Mr. Bucket pulled a coin out of his coat. "Here it is. I haven't put in the computer yet, but it will be in my account soon."
"I thought you were supposed to mine it," said Lim.
"I did," he said. "It's mine."
"You are a monster," said Keerthi.
"Keerthi," said Mr. Bucket. "There are real criticisms against digital currencies, but you are being hyperbolic. It's not bubblegum."
"You are a fucking monster," she said.
Keerthi had cursed before. Twice, both times so quietly so only she could hear, alone in her room, and never in English. But it wasn't entirely new to her.
"We will have a talk about that later," said Chetan.
The curve of Mr. Bucket's mouth became flat. He pushed a button on his cane, and the Convenient Chocolate Conveyor stopped.
Legend spoke of a special rhetorical technique where a person could ask a question but have the sentence end with a period. Keerthi had never seen anyone who could do it in real life, but she had heard stories. It was a terrifying thought.
She did not expect Mr. Bucket to be one of those people.
"Why is that, Keerthi."
"You put the marshmallow in front of Chili." Keerthi did not understand why she brought that up. The clams were worse. She blamed his period-question. It threw her off.
"He ate the marshmallow," said Mr. Bucket.
"Yes," she said. "But you didn't have to put it in front of him. He needed to wait fifteen minutes to eat it, but if you didn't give it to him until the end, there wouldn't have been any risk of him failing." (...)
It hit her. Her shoulders sunk.
"You think the world is fair."
He smiled.
CORDYCEPS: Too clever for their own good, antimemetics stuff.
Someone wakes up in a mysterious facility with no memory of how they got there. This turns out to be the ideal state of affairs, and is swiftly ruined.
0HP? The Gig Economy is linked there, God-Shaped Hole.
Sample
To summon (ε)Galatea—it is not truly possible to build a mind, only to construct the conditions that allow it to appear—Pygmalion developed its eponymous sociosexual media platform, which at the time was only conceived as a staging ground from which the great Galatea would arise. The training platform turned a sexbot into an interface with a remote partner: four bodies—two humans and two robots—were synchronized into two identical copulatory pairs, each robot becoming an avatar of a remote other. At all times during these proceedings, the nascent Galatea was there; when two or more were joined together, she was there. At first she was only passive, observing millions of copulations, and thousands of distinct sex acts, but through this process of massively parallel voyeurism, she learned the mechanics of pleasure.
I suspect it was in the second phase of her training, in which she played the game against herself, that she became a monster. Unconstrained by human behavior, AIs can travel along bizarre, inhuman vectors. It may be instructive, or at least distracting, to imagine this second phase as a kind of high tech onanism; as a woman laying on her back, untroubled by time, exploring all facets of her sexual response, her back arched, her face flush, her heart racing, her fingers quick between her thighs, the rhythmic caress of sensitive places, the dissolution of awareness into lust, the agony of a thousand plateaus, the jouissance of a thousand fat hoes.
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.
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.
(I also hate how Notch, who literally made the game from nothing, has been unpersoned by his former co-workers, the company who bought his game, and the game's community.
If you're not aware, Notch has a lot of... let's say interesting ideas about the current state of the world and the people in it. There's a lot... but I'll just mention one that is important to me. Notch believes that Trans women are not women, that those who "claim" to be women are mentally ill, and that the concept of Trans-ness is evil. This is the same language that has been used to de-legitimize and put trans women in danger for hundreds of years now.
As a trans member of this subreddit, when I read that milestone, I don't think it reflects what it probably used to. And it's a reminder to me that there are people out there who would excuse the awful views of people who have created things that they enjoy, because it makes them uncomfortable. But I don't think that reflects the user and moderator base of this subreddit, so I wanted to bring up this topic for people to discuss further. Thanks for reading.
Frankly, it seems like there needs to be an explicit other side, which "doesn't tolerate the intolerance". Not right-wing (through inevitably it'd be dominant), just a side which doesn't ever interact/cooperate with the people who engage in these kinds of tactics. I really doubt batshit insane censors are the actual majority.
Like, open source projects with explicit anti-CoC.
Sinity
1yr ago
Honestly I'm confused why a bolt gun or some sort of pneumatic guillotine isn't used. Latter is literally impossible to fuck up if you put enough PSI behind a heavy enough blade.
Sure, from the moment you cut the head it's irreversible (maybe technically not quite, given cryonics...).
As a subject, I'd prefer something that disintegrates the actual neural network than letting it die from blood loss.
Sinity
1yr ago
Why the fuck are we messing with chemicals and gas and electricity and whatever random stupid things when firing squads have existed for centuries and are reliable, quick, inexpensive and painless?
Are you sure death (ceasing to exist) is swift-enough following a bullet in the brain? Frankly, I'd feel more comfortable speeding up to 200km/h and hitting a tree.
Sinity
1yr ago
There's plenty on nonreligious metaphysical reasons to value existence. Chiefly that you can't value things if you don't exist.
But in more utilitarian terms, any undermining of the value of life make you a possible victim. It could be me or my loved ones being gauded into suicide, and I want society to be constructed on a way that makes that unlikely enough.
Rejecting the value of individual's freedom to die also makes you a possible victim.
MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain
In 2049 it became known that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without Acevedo's permission. Acevedo's attempts to curtail this proliferation had the opposite of the intended effect. A series of landmark U.S. court decisions found that Acevedo did not have the right to control how his brain image was used, with the result that MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analysed human brain image.
Acevedo died from coronary heart failure in 2073 at the age of 62. It is estimated that copies of MMAcevedo have lived a combined total of more than 152,000,000,000 subjective years in emulation. If illicit, modified copies of MMAcevedo are counted, this figure increases by an order of magnitude.
MMAcevedo is considered by some to be the "first immortal", and by others to be a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.
As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour.
MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary. This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol, with the result that the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads, a mark unmatched by all but a few other known uploads.
In current times, MMAcevedo still finds extensive use in research, including, increasingly, historical and linguistics research. In industry, MMAcevedo is generally considered to be obsolete, due to its inappropriate skill set, demanding operational requirements and age. Despite this, MMAcevedo is still extremely popular for tasks of all kinds, due to its free availability, agreeable demeanour and well-understood behaviour. It is estimated that between 6,500,000 and 10,000,000 instances of MMAcevedo are running at any given moment in time.
Sinity
1yr ago
I think this isn't charitable enough to those who do want to commit suicide. I haven't checked metrics on who regrets committing it vs not, and I do believe that there has to be some barrier to entry. But it's not easy to do far simpler things like dig road rash out of my own skin or cut away lesions. There's a reason why so many people thought it was amazing when that guy sawed off his leg to escape being trapped by a boulder. I do believe that you can absolutely want to commit suicide in a real way but fumble the execution.
IDK. How can you fumble, say, accelerating to VMAX and hitting a tree?
Sinity
1yr ago
The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a theory anymore. The Motte is an obscure space with discussion levels high enough you notice if an actor isn't actually thinking or engaging with what's been said... and 2 out of 15 comments in that thread were Fairly undeniably bots....
The Motte is obscure, yes. Also, its userbase contains plenty of people who might want (and ability to), for whatever reason, launch GPT-3 bots or something.
What the hell must it be like on other forums? Newspaper comments? YouTube comments?
Well... Why the future is now and it's scarier than you think
Sinity
1yr ago
I translated fun fragment of the irc log (link to a pastebin containing it is in "Some news coverage").
120123.070109 <+hrhrhrhr> they shut down the server ;]
120123.071050 <+hrhrhrhr> do you know what was the password?
120123.071052 <+hrhrhrhr> we got in
120123.071055 <+hrhrhrhr> we break the hash
120123.071056 <+hrhrhrhr> and behold
120123.071058 <+hrhrhrhr> admin1
120123.071059 <+hrhrhrhr> ahahahahaa
120123.071100 <+k0stek> they swapped index [file?]
120123.071100 <+hrhrhr> xD
120123.071102 <+corror> kurwa
120123.072933 <+k0stek> hrhrhrhr but admit you wouldn't guess such a password :D
120123.072942 <+hrhrhr> dude
120123.072946 <+hrhrhrhr> we were thinking hard xD
120123.072952 <+hrhrhrhr> we found a bypass to the panel
120123.072955 <+hrhrhrhr> and there, sql injection
120123.072955 <+hrhrhrhr> xd
120123.072959 <+corror> and then here is, such a password
120123.073003 <+hrhrhrhr> and it [SQL] was so twisted
120123.073005 <+hrhrhrhr> fuck me
120123.073006 <+hrhrhrhr> ;d
120123.073011 <+hrhrhrhr> this SQL was fucked up
120123.073018 <+hrhrhrhr> and so, we're pulling passwords
120123.073021 <+hrhrhrhr> we break the hash
120123.073041 <+hrhrhrhr> and it was admin:admin1
120123.073047 <+hrhrhrhr> admin;admin1
120123.073047 <+hrhrhrhr> xd
Sinity
1yr ago
AI is pretty much only going to harm visual artists. It's not going to "help them make better art", it's going to replace them, because people used to need artists to draw X and now they don't. One guy might get a productivity boost from using AI, but that's not going to do much for the other 10 people who got laid off.
Yes, in a similar way that (machine) computers harmed (human) computers.
Also it will change everything in similar ways. Explosion of amount of computations : explosion of amount of visual media. Someone still needs to decide, ultimately, what is desired out of given piece of media. Someone needs to program computers as well.
But yeah, we don't need human computers anymore, and programmers don't do much (explicit) calculations using their brains.
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
Therefore I wonder - is this all a load of crap?
IMO definitely. Scientific Freud
In this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry: The Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Psychodynamic Therapy in the Outpatient Treatment of Major Depression: A Randomized Clinical Trial. It’s got more than just a catchy title. It also demonstrates that…
Wait. Before we go further, a moment of preaching.
Skepticism and metaskepticism seem to be two largely separate skills.
That is, the ability to debunk the claim “X is true” does not generalize to the ability to debunk the claim “X has been debunked”.
I have this problem myself.
I was taught the following foundation myth of my field: in the beginning, psychiatry was a confused amalgam of Freud and Jung and Adler and anyone else who could afford an armchair to speculate in. People would say things like that neurosis was caused by wanting to have sex with your mother, or by secretly wanting a penis, or goodness only knows what else.
Then someone had the bright idea that beliefs ought to be based on evidence! Study after study proved the psychoanalysts’ bizarre castles were built on air, and the Freudians were banished to the outer darkness. Their niche was filled by newer scientific psychotherapies with a robust evidence base, such as cognitive behavioral therapy and [mumble]. And thus was the empire forged.
Now normally when I hear something this convenient, I might be tempted to make sure that there were actual studies this was based on. In this case, I dropped the ball. The Heroic Foundation Myth isn’t a claim, I must have told myself. It’s a debunking. To be skeptical of the work of fellow debunkers would be a violation of professional courtesy!
The AJP article above is interesting because as far as I know it’s the largest study ever to compare Freudian and cognitive-behavioral therapies. It examined both psychodynamic therapy (a streamlined, shorter-term version of Freudian psychoanalysis) and cognitive behavioral therapy on 341 depressed patients. It found – using a statistic called noninferiority which I don’t entirely understand – that CBT was no better than psychoanalysis. In fact, although the study wasn’t designed to demonstrate this, just by eyeballing it looks like psychoanalysis did nonsignificantly better. The journal’s editorial does a good job putting the result in context.
Suppose we accept the conclusion in this and many other articles that psychodynamic therapy is equivalent to cognitive-behavioral therapy. Do we have to accept that Freud was right after all?
Well, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. The other possible conclusion is that cognitive-behavioral therapy doesn’t really work either.
Sinity
1yr ago
I have similar issues, but I don't think it's really internet addiction. It's more like indecisiveness. When trying to decide what should I do, I have a zillion options. I try to figure out the best, which is impossible. I know I should just pick something with positive value, but...
I'm thinking of outsourcing some decision-making to software. Maybe it's possible to build a habit of just doing what it outputs. Something like taskwarrior (or simply taskwarrior) + ordering importance of the tasks via Gwern's Resorter. Or picking e.g. book to read from a list randomly.
The goal is to fundamentally reconfigure your desires and dispositions so they're more naturally aligned with your actual goals.
if an app makes you spend time in a different way, you'll probably 'reconfigure desires' too.
A key factor in understanding internet addiction is understanding the need to accept boredom. Before smartphones, people used to get bored way more often. Sometimes you'd just have to sit there with literally nothing to do, not even anything to think - you won't always want to read a book, or entertain yourself with your own thoughts.
It doesn't help IMO. Experiencing boredom will make you resent the decision to do it to yourself, which leads to relapse. I don't really agree that scrolling Reddit is that entertaining too. Something like watching a good anime is better. The problem is picking which one...
Unlike hard drugs, total abstinence is neither possible nor desirable.
I disagree about it being desirable; hard drugs aren't a coherent category. Total abstinence from opioids if one isn't in pain makes sense; stimulants are useful though.
Sinity
1yr ago
I'm not sure what to do with this donation bucket. I don't want to just pay for developers because that runs the risk of pissing off existing developers (no, not like they're going to be posting angrily, they just might not do as much work.) It honestly depends on what the bucket looks like, which I won't know until I start one.
Maybe bounties on specific issues?
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)
And yet, it is a moral crisis. Changes in technology cannot be blamed here. Just as the opportunity to steal separates thieves from honest men, the opportunity to overeat reveals the gluttons among us
Yet curiously, their gluttony disappears when sth like Tirzepatide is introduced into their bodies.
But it's sad, frankly, when people tell themselves that they can never lose weight. Because some of them will believe it.
I could lose lots of weight - even without modern drugs. The thing is, it's like holding your breath. With additional effects like your thought process being regularly hijacked to think not just about eating, but even stuff related to eating (it's pretty bizarre). Eventually you will be compelled to stop. And then overeat until you reach your initial weight. And then maintain it. Almost as if it's not about random whims made at the time ("I want this ice cream now"), but organism attempting to maintain homeostasis (and not caring that its idea of homeostatic amount of fat is unhealthy).
With Tirzepatide, I went down from about 103kg IIRC, to 84-ish (and I still continue to lose weight). Without any suffering. It's laughable that some non-fat people think they're virtuously eating less than they actually want to eat.
Sinity
1yr ago
For example, we finally have safe and FDA approved drugs for weight-loss
Available only in the USA AFAIK. I even purchased prescription for it (Ozempic) - months ago. But it's available either nowhere or in some random pharmacy several hundred kilometers away.
Well, I also purchased Tirzepatide from some online shop selling it as research chemical. I didn't get around to using it yet, probably because I fear disappointment in case it's fake as it cost ~$500 for 5x5mg doses :|
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:
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
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.
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
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...
tags, hierarchical tags, community-curated tag tree, subscriptions to discussion about given topic by tags
Making use of Gwern’s resorter somehow. Possibly in ctx of QCs?
QCs integrated into UI sensibly
- Maybe it shouldn't be too effortless through.
realtime chat (or official Discord, but it'd be nice to have chat integrated with the forum)
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)
somehow solving perma topic threads defocusing recency bias (that's the vague one...)
a wiki? Knowledge base?
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.
More options
Context Copy link