felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
Responding to the blog post, Wayward Axolotl misses an important argument against free speech.
Consider how generational forgetting and the brevity of human life impose an upper limit on how high civilization can rise. Maybe there are five great truths to learn before we can build utopia. Learning the first takes up our youth. Learning the second takes as through middle age. By the time we have learned the third, we are old. We die and utopia is not built. Our children and grandchildren following behind run the same race against time and also lose.
But what kinds of knowledge are the great truths that I have in mind? Some of them are negative in nature. We learn "Don't do that!". For example, society responds to a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) by printing money. This leads to inflation. We combat inflation with price controls. The economic distortions accumulate, but we are trapped, needing the price controls to combat inflation. Eventually we learn vital lessons, against printing money and against price controls. We learn two vital lessons and vow not to repeat the mistakes. We (the individuals) keep our vows. We grow old and die without repeating the old mistakes. But our wisdom is interred with our bones.
Eventually our descendants face a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) and respond by printing money. The cycle repeats. The individuals kept their vows, but society did not, because society is made of people, who not only grow old and die, but...
The previous paragraphs trails off. Is the problem that old people fail to pass their wisdom down the generations? Is the problem that young people fail to learn? Why not both? We need to accept that we are not fixing the problem of generational forgetting any time soon.
Freedom of speech requires us to accept the eternal recurrence of bad ideas. No matter how many times mankind learns that printing money is a bad idea, the idea comes round again. Recurring bad ideas are often defeated. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was defeated this time around. But that dodges my initial point about generational forgetting limiting how high civilization can rise. Imagine that the first two of my five great truths are negative truths. We spend a long time learning to do this and to do that and finding out that we are wrong and the actual lesson is don't do this and don't do that. We suffer the opprobrium of historians who lament that "we" always knew those two "don't"s. Then the meta-historians berate the historians: if they had read their own books they would have noticed that people don't learn from history. The lessons of history are undoubtedly correct, we have learned them, forgotten them, and relearned them, many times.
When do we say: enough! At some point we have to censor recurring bad ideas. Life is too short to debate, argue, lose, and be proved right by time. Life is shorter than that. Life is too short to debate, argue,and win. We need to ruthlessly suppress certain potent, recurring bad ideas, so that we may have a chance to break the ceiling on civilization imposed by generational forgetting. The prize to be grasped is that we can skip learning the first two great truths, because they warn us against bad ideas, now suppressed. Then life is long enough to learn 3, 4, and 5 and build a Utopia for our grandchildren to enjoy.
felis-parenthesis
9mo ago
The NSDAP was not radically socially conservative in its treatment of gender or sex.
Here is a link https://counter-currents.com/2014/06/heimat/ that discusses Hermann Sudermann's play Madga, and the film made from it. The author claims that the popularity of the film clues us in to what the National Socialist ideology really thought about sexual morality. The article goes into great detail in describing the film. The film is anti-bourgeois propaganda that paints the sexual morality of the time, (play:1893, film:1938) as both rigid and hypocritical; the hero of the piece is the single mother! So the NSDAP is very much not socially conservative.
The author of the 2014 Counter Currents article, Derek Hawthorne, wrote a long and nuanced piece, digging into the weirdness of German culture back then. It is a long time since I read it, and I haven't time to reread it properly to tonight, but it made a big impression on me. The hot take that has stuck with me for nine years goes like this:
There are two sisters. One well behaved sister who conforms. The other sister has a wild side and ends up a single mother. Due to the messed up social conventions of the day, the mediocre, well behaved sister needs her father or other relative to come up with a lot of money for a dowry. Due to the power of the playwrights pen, becoming a single mother make you special and turns you into an opera diva who earns a lot of money and is able to swoop in and save the day by paying her sisters dowry.
A social realist play written for 1893 would have things work out OK/mediocre for the conformist sister and a bit of a disaster for the wild sister because of the social reaction against her getting pregnant outside of marriage. If the playwright wanted to argue for social change, the argument would be the cruelty of the system towards the wild sister. Sudermann's play cheer leads for sexual liberation with a crude propaganda technique: make things work out extra well for the single mother, just because playwrights are writing fiction and can do that. The excellent outcome tends to legitimize single motherhood in the eyes of audience. But it makes no causal connection; it is just crude propaganda.
Back when I first read the article in Counter Currents I still thought that right wing was a single thing, with a core creed. And before the 1960's that creed would obviously include no sex before marriage. Strong families, children need fathers, each child needs their own biological father, not mummies current boyfriend. The social conservative thing. So I'm reading on with wide-eyed astonishment. When do the NAZI's realize that the play is degenerate art? When do we get the theatrical equivalent of the Röhm-Putsch and the banning of Sudermann's Madga? Never happens.
I already knew that the NSDAP was a little bit pagan in spirit. You can see that in the pictures from the time of women athletes in their skimpy attire. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=third+reich+women+athletes&qpvt=third+reich+women+athletes&form=IGRE&first=1
I'm trying to update my views. Is right wing a pagan, lusty, fertile creed, accepting of female promiscuity? Is it a Catholic, keep sex in the marriage bed, creed? Is it it a pagan, lusty, honor creed, with female promiscuity leading to lethal violence? Mostly I've stopped believing that "right wing" is an actual thing.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Solving rape by teaching men not to rape has the same kind of energy as solving inflation by teaching men not to print money. You actually need to target rapists and central bankers.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Do you make the same commitment that you will .... absolutely accept the result of this election?
I've added emphasis to a question that I see as a disgusting example of linguistic trickery. I don't know the name for this trick, I'll provisionally call it Schrodinger's Context.
The question is being asked ahead of the election. How absolute is absolute? What if Dominion program their machines to ignore Republican votes and the Democrats win with 100% of the votes counted? Clearly there has to be some limit, at which one notices that the vote is rigged and one rejects the result. So absolute isn't to be interpreted in the most literal way possible; there is an implicit context and that context contains limits on the extent of electoral anomalies the the candidate is expected to tolerate.
The context is not spelled out. It is just understood that the election will be basically honest. But, if after the vote, some amount X of fraud gets discovered, that is like Schrodinger opening the box and discovering that the context was really about accepting the result if there is ≤ X amount of fraud.
I think the traditional context goes like this:
Politicians get to campaign hyperbolically. They can rile their base by saying that the Chinese are building car factories in Mexico and these cars will flood the American car market causing job loses among American auto-workers. Politicians are allowed to describe the these jobs loses as a bloodbath as if the Mexicans themselves will flood across the border, armed with machetes, and hack the American auto-workers to death in a literal bloodbath. No, it is just job loses, no actual blood spilled, but the hyperbolic rhetoric is allowed. "Every-one" knows not to take it literally.
"Every-one". There is a problem here. There is always some-one who gets over excited and attempts electoral fraud, thinking that they are the good guy, because they are averting a literal blood bath. Hyperbolic rhetoric is permitted, and the cost of this is that some people are not quite right in the head and break the rules on counting the votes because the hyperbole wound them up to the point of madness.
So the traditional context has two more parts. First, a few nutters attempting electoral fraud doesn't invalidate an election. It can be literally true that some Democrats cheated, and yet perfectly reasonable that Donald Trump concede the election. Second, there is a gentleman's agreement that rival politicians police their own side and try to prevent electoral fraud in their own cause. If a Democrat cheats, fellow Democrats call them out, and a Democrat Attorney General prosecutes. That is the quid pro quo for Trump conceding despite a small amount of fraud.
That is my understanding of the traditional context. I think current problems are due to the gentlemen's agreement breaking down. If a few nutters are committing electoral fraud, well, smirk Donald Trump should still concede, without asking "how much?" and without expecting Democrats to police their own side.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
The COVID lockdowns in the UK point to a darker problem with expertise. Life is short, people grow old and die; it takes about 70 years. Suppose that being locked down causes a 10% reduction in quality of life (I'd prefer to say 50%, but I'll err on too low because I want to focus on a different controversy). Government locks down 70 million people for a year, which costs 7 million Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). Actual deaths, if spread across the age range, cost 35 QALY's each. The lock down needs to be saving 200 thousand lives to break even. But deaths from COVID were concentrated among the frail elderly. Say 7 QALY's each. To break even the lock down needed to save the lives of one million frail old people. It is not remotely plausible that it did so.
The lockdowns were a national disaster on the scale of 200 thousand dead. Compare that to American loses in Vietnam at 50 thousand. The lockdowns were a huge national disaster.
But how did it happen? The experts were socialized into an "identified cause" model of morbidity. If something specific kills you, that counts. If something makes you a year older, that counts zero. Since zero times anything is still zero, it doesn't matter how many people are affected. Basically expertise here was so narrow in scope that the fact that people grow old and die lay outside of its scope and was neglected.
The darker problem is that growing old and dying is basic to the human condition. The experts let themselves be socialized into collective insanity. I don't see any way around this. Experts are dangerous in much the same way that fire is dangerous. Essential despite being dangerous. You have to be able to spot that experts have gone mad and flat out reject what they say.
felis-parenthesis
17d ago
I had a very negative reaction to this article. I think it reads much better with the following set up to contextualize it.
Start by contemplating the power of bench top science and theory. The partnership of bench top science and theory has some spectacular successes to its credit. You can experiment with Newtonian mechanics in your laboratory, verifying the basic laws. Then you get a top mathematician (Euler) to work out what those laws imply for gyroscopes. Later engineers build a gyrocompass for a submarine. Will this really work? Underwater? A thousand miles from the laboratory? Yes!
Or think of James Clerk-Maxwell, taking the bench top science of Ampere and Faraday and coming up with Maxwell's equations. The equations predict electromagnetic radiation. Hertz does the experiments in his laboratory and finds them; a great triumph for theory. Later Marconi takes this out into the real world. Theory shows that electromagnetic radiation goes in straight lines; Marconi's attempts at radio communication beyond the curve of the earth are not going to work. And sure enough they fail. Wut! Marconi actually succeeds! But rather than concede that there are problems getting out of the laboratory and into the real world, we discover the ionosphere and chalk it up as another spectacular success for the partnership of bench top science and theory.
Move on to contemplating the contrasting situation in medicine. The human body is too complicated for the human mind to comprehend. Basing medicine on theory works badly for the patient, no matter how much money it brings in for the doctor. This has lead to evidence based medicine. Never trust the combination of lab bench chemistry and theory. Always do a randomised controlled trial to check that medicines really work. Theory said that vitamin E was an anti-oxidant and would reduce oxidative stress and prevent cancer. Epidemiology confirmed this. Randomised controlled trials refuted it. Examples are so numerous that you can fill a book.
Returning to climate science, we must ask whether it is like gyroscopes or like Vitamin-E/Vioxx/vertebroplasty. Doing bench top science with an infrared spectroscope and a sample of Carbon Dioxide yields uncontroversial results. But does it have implications for the weather?
I've picked up the impression that every-one agrees on the importance of feedback loops. If you believed that climate science was a like a gyroscope, you would compute warming on the basis of the infrared characteristics of Carbon Dioxide and conclude that we are in for some warming, but not enough to constitute a crisis. No-one believes that climate science is like a gyroscope. Some think that warmer air means more water vapor which means more warming and more clouds and more clouds mean mumble. Subtle feedback in the atmosphere is putting us on a course for disaster. Others disagree.
The article emphasizes one particular disagreement. Scientists attempt empirical confirmation of the theory, but they mess it up. All the empirical work is heavily contaminated by theory. It cannot refute the theory because it assumes the theory.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
This meme raises the question succinctly. The bald bipeds beasts that bestride the Earth in 2024 are really into lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating.
They are clever, and have won great victories in the competition of Man against Nature. They are clever, and have created terrible weapons in the competition of Man against Man.
The rationalist project is that science and reason get used to build utopia. Are we actually headed towards global thermonuclear war, or towards a Lebanese style multicultural kakistocracy? The rationalist project has failed because it refused to engage with human greed, selfishness, and delusion.
The discussion moves on to the theory of second best. What is possible within the limits of human nature? If space aliens turn up and their space ship is an ant heap with monoclonal genetics, they will diagnose our problems easily enough. The scientist who values truth and refuses to sell out, is a nerd and doesn't get the girl. The scientist who monetizes "truth" and sells it to the richest corporation marries and has a mistress and propagates his anti-science-and-reason genes into the next generation. That is the diagnosis, but it offers no treatment.
One idea is bringing up children to believe in God. A God who commands scrupulous honesty and always is watching, even when all humans present are in on the scam and bought or compromised.
That probably gives the interstellar ants a good laugh. Humans have such a complicated relationship with self-awareness. What happens when the children brought up to believe in God work out that God is a pro-social myth? Some of them retain the honesty in worldly affairs that they were brought up with, and work to promote and preserve the pro-social myth. This involves an attitude adjustment from telling the truth because God commands it, to participating in the lie and the cover-up because society depends on the prosocial myth. But that is rare. Most fall into these two camps. Those who blurt out the truth in front of the children, as though the God they no longer believe in was watching, ready to punish them for telling the lie that He exists. Those who revert to instinct and seek reproductive success by lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating, while also believing that they are choosing a variety of behaviours for themselves, not simply following their genetic programming.
Do you have an alternative idea? The rationalist project implicitly assumes that man was created by God with a divinely granted capacity for good. The rationalist project implicitly denies that man is an evolved creature, whose self-defeating duplicity is enforced and created by human genetics. The rationalist project, in as much as it ignores the true horror of being an evolved creature, is just another high fantasy. What is there left to discuss?
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Does this argument work the other way? If ODs had in fact dropped 50% the next day, would we likewise be asking if this was only a temporary effect, and entirely dire outcomes were still to be expected at some indeterminate future date?
I bite the bullet on this. I claim that America's experience with the 18th and 21st amendments is the template for how these kinds of things usually play out.
Its starts off with X fully legal and embedded in society, despite a vociferous minority pointing to the substantial harms that X causes. Eventually X is prohibited by law. The shop shelves are swept bare. The factories shut down. Xaholics get a brutal wake up call. Many quit X cold turkey. Some get medical help tapering. Perhaps some die of withdrawal or toxic substitutes. By the end of the first year prohibition is looking like a great success. Skeptics predicted a tidal wave of prosecutions for X-offences, but it doesn't materialize, because people cannot get X.
(Possession of alcohol was never illegal, just manufacture, sale, and transportation. Initially that was tactically shrewd. Ordinary people could see it coming, stock up, and then consume their private stocks, expecting others to do the hard work of campaigning for the 21st amendment. The day of the last bottle of wine was different in different households, weakening coordination against prohibition. In the long term that was perhaps the undoing of prohibition. Only the seller faced legal penalties, so the black market that developed was asymmetrical, with lots of undeterred buyers and a few sellers, well paid for their legal risk.)
Time passes and the initial success wears well. At least it seems to. Networks of friends are gradually forming. Brewing at home. Making a still. Getting hold of a bottle of wine to share with trusted friends over Sunday dinner. It is all metaphorically flying under radar. The Prohibitionists don't see that their victory is rotting. Now-a-days there would be drone smuggling, literally flying under radar :-)
Home brewing and piece meal smuggling are annoying for those who just want a drink. Money starts changing hands. The black market grows. Prohibitionists start to realize that alcohol is still for sale, but covertly and for a fancy price. Some are inclined to turn a blind eye. If it is too expensive for people to afford to become alcoholics, that mitigates the harms. Other prohibitionists resent the disobedience and insist on stronger penalties.
Full time employment in the black economy now splits into insiders and outsiders. Outsiders get rich on the high price of booze, but they sometimes get caught and go to jail. Insiders don't get as rich because they share their money with the police as bribes. It gets complicated. The bribe-taking police need to make a show of doing their jobs. The insiders resent the endless supply of outsiders in search of easy money, increasing the supply and lowering the profits. Fortunately they have the police on their side to enforce their monopoly of the alcohol supply. They tip off "their" policemen. It gets more complicated, with rival groups of insiders setting their own paid-for police on intruders on their turf who are also insiders, just bribing other policemen.
Meanwhile the smugglers are tackling the volume issue. The secret compartment has a limited volume V. The more potent your version of X, the more doses you can fit in V. In the 1920's that meant smuggling spirits rather than beer. Today that means smuggling fentanyl rather than heroin. Then there is the business of cutting drugs, adulterating them to increase the bulk after smuggling.
Eventually the situation is out of control. Every-one who wants X knows the secret handshakes and the special places. They get their hands on it. Some of it is adulterated and death rate is higher than before prohibition. The point I like to emphasize is that this takes twenty or thirty years. By the time the death rate comes back up and exceeds the old death rate from legal X, the world has changed.
The world has changed, but how much? You get one group of public health experts saying that prohibition has failed and must be repealed. Others saying that we must pivot to harm reduction. Still others say that the world has changed a lot and for the worse. Thank God that we have prohibition keeping a lid on the problems of X. If we repealed prohibition the death rate would soar still higher. Who is right?
My claim is that prohibition is a dangerous policy option because it may well fail, and that the American experiment with the prohibition alcohol was untypical in exactly one way: it proved possible to repeal it. You should expect that prohibition of X works well for the first five years. When thirty years have gone by and it has clearly failed, you will not be able to repeal it. Campaigners for prohibition will have happy memories of the first five years, and consider that short term success proves the eternal correctness of prohibition.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
You have only grasped half of the reason why open borders are bad. There are deeper problems with open borders. The way you frame it, with "bad guys" crossing the border, suggests that the problems are fixable. Just dial it down a bit and have a semi-open border, closed to "bad guys", porous to "good guys". But open borders is a path to catastrophe, even on a homogeneous clone world, with no races and just one culture.
I've made two lengthy attempts to explain the point, one as a modernized version of Malthusian Immiseration, the other in response to a discussion of Bryan Caplan's ideas.
Did I manage to distill the essence of the issue here? Lightly edited, it reads:
Think about the collapse of the Canadian Grand Banks cod fishery, and the survival of the cod fishery around Iceland. People are not very good at taking care of their natural resources. It is 50:50.
"Open borders" is the idea that if you screw up, you can move on. If the Canadian fishery collapses, Canadian fishermen can move to Iceland and carry on fishing. If the Icelandic fishery collapses, Icelandic fishermen can move to Canada and carry on fishing.
Once the idea of "open borders" gets into peoples heads it tilts the social dynamics towards collapse. We don't want "open borders", regardless of cultural issues. People either take care of their own lands, or when it comes time to move on, they find that there is nowhere left to go.
felis-parenthesis
9mo ago
It's a well-known property of correlation that it's not transitive in general.
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vfb5Seaaqzk5kzChb/when-is-correlation-transitive
felis-parenthesis
1d ago
In 2009 I suggested Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists Linking to archived page: project name Outer Circle. It was discussed on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920110 My health deteriorated. Nobody else tried implementing the ideas.
Where do I even go in 10 years?
That allows for planning ahead and maybe writing your own version of Outer Circle. The core idea is
Current approaches fail because they try to create a single forum, which requires agreement on what is good.
Shared hierarchical white-lists are a mechanism for allowing "multiple forums" to peacefully coexist with the same "comment base". You don't see shitty comments because you don't white-list them. The shitty commentators don't try to ban you because they never white-list long boring intellectuals and don't know that you exist. But there is overlap. The forums have the potential to reach critical mass, with enough commentators to sustain interest. And "freedom of speech" benefits from all content being opt-in. Every-one can ban any-one for any-reason, and that ban doesn't extend beyond their personal version of the forum.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
You have misplaced the decimal point. 112000/3500000 = 0.032 which is 3.2%
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
There is a pragmatic version of the argument about epistemic hygiene that is summed up in this cartoon.
Pragmatic arguments make me uncomfortable, nearly as uncomfortable as the replication crisis does.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
The line about living with the Amish misses the depth of the technology stack. Every-one, including the Amish, benefit from access to high carbon steels. All the chisels and saws that carpenters use in a low-tech wooden life-style depend on heat treated steels that retain their cutting edge. Making the chisels and saws depends on hardened high carbon steel being harder than normalised high carbon steel, sufficiently harder that you can use files and hacksaws to form the blanks for your chisels and saws before you harden them in their turn with more heat treatment. It is all very delicate, depending on chemistry and metallurgy to get quench hardening to work right ("Silver steel" has added chromium to improve through hardening. Metallurgists need microscopes to see what is happening with the grains in the steel). (Things have moved on. Now-a-days you heat treat steel parts before cutting them to shape using carbide tooling,...)
I wondered if the Amish use cement. Maybe just lime mortar. It is a tough question. Yes, and attention to price and efficiency seduces you, so that you end up tied to industrial cement making. No, and your building techniques are in some ways pre-Roman; who wants to go back that far?
We are mostly ignorant of the long history of our technology stack and use phrases such as "back to nature" in ways that do no withstand scrutiny
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
I'm reading a biography of Oliver Cromwell by John Buchan titled simply Cromwell. I don't really have the prerequisite knowledge of English History. Buchan drops names and I am like: who? But Wikipedia to the rescue. I type "Pym" into the search bar and navigating the disambiguation page to John Pym turns out to be easy.
Why am I reading about political turmoil and civil war? Because the book was only 50p in the Cat Protection League charity shop. Definitely nothing to do with contemporary resonances or grim forebodings.
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
I suspect that the view of science as disunified and pluralistic is an illusion caused by zooming in too close. Older, rival ways of knowing get neglected and forgotten. That should create the impression of a loss of intellectual diversity, but we actually zoom in until the limited, remaining intellectual diversity fills the field of view.
I first rediscovered older perspectives reading about the Spanish Armada of 1588. Garrett Mattingly wrote 421 pages for his book The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. He gives a largely materialist account in which the superior upwind performance of English ships allows them to stay up wind of the Spanish and pound the Spanish from long range with their superior canon. At 583 pages, Neil Hanson gets to include more on Spanish thinking in his book: The Confident Hope of a Miracle, the true story of the Spanish Armada. And the thinking is religious and pious.
The Spanish did have some hard headed military men, but religion and piety also had a say in naval matters. If you had tried to warn a Spanish noble about English technical superiority and tactical advantage he might have replied with the authentic 1580's version of this
That is not how this works, that is not how any of it works. The wind blows at God's command. If we pray ardently, if we are right with God, he will grant us fair winds. Second to God's blessing come our own courage and faith. You make much of minor points such as the English being able to pull their muzzles back inside their hulls for reloading, but such matters trail a poor third behind God's will and man's courage and determination.
Second, I was discombobulated by reading that Hobbes was viewed with suspicion in his own time. I imagined that the throne-and-altar guys would love him. God had divinely appointed Kings and there was Hobbes justifying God's wisdom to doubters: of course we need a King. Without a King we will have a war of all against all and life will be nasty, brutish, and short. Yet his contemporaries found Hobbes' perspective mechanistic, materialist, in a word: atheistic. Not the right way to think about the world at all.
Third, in The Discarded Images, C. S. Lewis attempts to explain the Medieval world view to the modern mind. He selects some earlier work he regards as seminal, include the commentary on Somnium Scipionis by Macrobius. Macrobius divides dreams into five species, three veridicial, and two which have 'no divination' in them.
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Somnium: truths veiled in an allegorical form
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Visio: direct, literal prevision of the future
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Oraculum: the dreamers parents or other grave and venerable person openly declares the future
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Insomnium: daily cares intruding on sleep
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Visum: garbled trash, including nightmares
I cannot believe there was ever a time when every-one took Visio seriously. Dreams must so often fail to come true that many would notice their limitations as a way of knowledge. On the other hand, I assume that Macrobius took dreams seriously, and others followed his lead. What must it have been like to grow up in a world in which the reliability of dreams was accepted by the adults around you and that way of thinking was metaphorically "in the water supply"? It would be hard to see the point of science. Much better to have a good nights sleep and hope, in the morning, to interpret the allegory of Somnium.
There were so many better ways of knowing things than science. You could pray to God. You could study scripture. You could dream.
None of that actually works. It fails hard enough that it is hard in 2023 to imagine taking any of it seriously, yet I believe that people did so. If we zoom out far enough to include such ideas in our field of view, Science shrinks to a small and particular kind of epistemology. Does it have an essence? In the zoomed out view, internal details are too small to be seen and, yes, science has a nerdy essence.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
The common thread is some people thinking that laws are self-acting. People deep inside the first world bubble look around and see a surface appearance that fits nicely with laws being self-acting. One can explain this away, but the explanation must never-the-less explain why it looks that way, even though it isn't. Here is my attempt, focusing on incentive compatibility and Magic Special People, the MSP's.
Utopia, version one. There is an excellent rule book. Its excellence lies in how nice the world would be if people followed the rules. Its downfall is the lack of enforcement mechanisms. People break the rules and the utopia fails.
Utopia version two. A mostly free-market system. Most rules are incentive compatible. People obey those rules because it is in their interests to do so. But most isn't enough. Some necessary rules get broken and the utopia fails.
Utopia version three. Further compromise with Moloch. All the rules are incentive compatible. People fleeing the society say "Those were not compromises, they were surrenders." Version three turns out to be Hobbes' war of all against all. Works as planned, but is a dystopia.
Utopia version four. Built on version two. Yes, some rules are not naturally incentive compatible, but there is a police force. Break the rule and your punishment is worse than your gain from breaking the rule. So the rules are artificially incentive compatible. I'll use police as a synecdoche for police, courts, prisons, etc. There not just a rule book for the ordinary citizen. There is a rule book for the police. Some of it is incentive compatible. Some of the policemen believe in the utopia and follow all of the rule book for the police, even though it is an uphill struggle. But there are not enough of them, and there is no police-police enforcing the rule book that the police are supposed to follow. Too many doughnuts are eaten. Too few laws are enforced. The utopia fails.
Utopia version five. An Ourobos built on version four. The police-inspectors supervise the police, making sure that the police follow the rules. The common people watch the police-inpsectors and can vote them out of office. This is the basic idea of representative democracy. The record is mixed. The USSR had a constitution very like the American one, but with much less success. There is an extra, unrecognised ingredient. Most version five utopias fail quickly. Some last as long as supplies of the missing ingredient hold up.
Utopia version six. Ourobos + Magic Special People. Turn aside from contemplating the Ourobos and recall that utopia version four didn't fail as quickly as expected. Some of the policemen believe in it and went against their incentives out of religious conviction. There really are Magic Special People like that, just not enough off them. Notice the hierarchical structure of version five. Ordinary folk, police, police-inspectors. All but the top level face artificial incentives. The pyramid narrows towards the top. If society has 2 or 3 % MSPs, they could occupy the top level and make it work. If we sprinkle some fairy dust on society to get the MSPs to the top we would have a viable utopia.
How long would utopia version six last? People get old and die. Where is the new crop of Magic Special People to come from?
Perhaps from cultural transmission. Some MSP are teachers, encouraging children to cultivate and grow their inner MSP. So long as this is respected there is hope for continuity. But if the culture asks "If you are so smart, how come you aren't rich?" and mocks the self-sacrifice required to make cultural transmission happen, the supply of new, young MSP's will dwindle and the utopia fall.
Perhaps there is a genetic element. Some women seems to have a rather paleo-lithic taste in men, preferring those who win fights and grab an unfair share of resources for their own children. MSP's with their obsessions with justice, rules, fairness, and self-sacrifice, are not sexy and Magic Specialness is slowly bred out of the population, causing a type six utopia to fail.
Perhaps I'm understating the issue with magic fairly dust. Maybe MSP's are elbowed aside by grifters, and the top of the social heirarchy gets filled will muggles, who follow their incentives and the utopia fails.
Before answering my question about why it looks like the law is self-acting, I want to fill in some of the details of what life in a type six utopia is like.
There are ladies and gentleman. Some people are capable of understanding how society works and the need for rules, and are able to make and keep gentlemen's agreements about following the necessary rules. They lack the ruthlessness and self-sacrifice to count as Magic Special People, but provided the MSPs maintain order in society as a whole, the gentle folk have no need of MSPs within their bubble. Within their bubble, law is effectively self-acting.
There are rough folk. They push boundaries and break rules. They are sometimes caught and punished. Too seldom and things escalate and utopia fails. Too much? Is there a too much? It is a more subtle issue of the expensive of policing, and the corruption that results if police are granted too much latitude. There is also an issue that the more laws society has, the more police society needs, and the more MSPs society needs to supervise the police. MSPs are a scare resource; expand the need until society runs out of them and watch the utopia fail.
In between gentle and rough are ordinary folk, by far the most numerous. They have aspirations to be genteel. They want to be ladies and gentlemen, but when it comes to keeping gentlemen's agreements they find themselves hard pressed by tempation. They want to be street smart, not a mug or a mark. Not the one still trying to be a gentleman when every-thing has gone to shit and it is time to play for rough, to play for keeps.
The ordinary folk have rich inner lives, filled with psychological drama, which leads to the key distinction between the ordinary folk and the rough folk. Managing the rough folk requires that the police are efficient enough to keep the expected value of criminal activity negative. Managing the ordinary folk only requires the police to do their job occasionally. There is an inner struggle. Will the aspiration to be genteel win? Will the aspiration to be street smart win? It is enough that the gentle side can point to one or two middle class criminals caught and shamed. The street smart side might start figuring the odds but the gentle side scolds that as shameful in its self.
In the good times, the ordinary folk are kind of, somewhat in the same bubble as the ladies and gentlemen who honour their agreements and can see law as self-acting. Come the bad times and ordinary folk will flip to being street smart and things will go down hill fast and hard.
And that is my story of how society works, and how it comes to appear to nice middle class people that the law is self-acting, even though it really isn't.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
The ban on gain of function research in America is an important data point. Americans who wanted to do the research found ways to funnel money to China to do it there. An important question is whether the supreme leadership in China permitted this. My guess is that they didn't. Fauci just teamed up with people at a similar level in China who also wanted to do the research. If a high level Chinese researcher wants Chinese funding, they have to get into the details with their Chinese boss. What do they say? Perhaps "The Americans are scared to do this dangerous research, it gives us a chance to get ahead." My guess is that is way to lose all your funding. Getting ahead of Americans is good, but taking stupid risks, risks so stupid that even the Americans have declined, is very bad. If a high level Chinese researcher wants permission from his boss to accept American money, he can probably sell it as "Its just boring public health stuff." The level of scrutiny is lower for money being paid in than for money being paid out.
My guess is that Fauci had the money, but not permission. His Chinese counterparts had didn't have the money, so there was no point to asking for permission. But Fauci could give them the money, so they didn't have to ask for permission. Basically, big players, one level down from the top, routed around their own governments; both the American ban, and the ban the Chinese government would probably have imposed if requests for funding had pushed the issue all the way to the top.
I suspect that the Chinese over-reaction is partly a freak-out as the top Chinese officials realize that they have been by-passed, and panic at the implications of a problem caused by research that they would have vetoed if they had known the details.
My understanding of the way the world works is that if the top people in governments around the world agree to ban AI research, there is a chance that they will all do so sincerely. But that still won't work, because officials at the next level down control large sums of money and have considerable discretion delegated to them; they will just do AI research on their own authority. Another data point for this is the Iran-Contra Affair.
TLDR deep state evil mad scientists will do government backed AI research, even if Presidents and Prime Ministers are completely on board with banning it.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
My thoughts meandered to a financial analogy, prompted by the phrase "zero lower bound". One sees the phrase "zero lower bound" in the context of macroeconomics and interest rates. Governments like to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates, but once they are cut to zero, they cannot go any lower. They have reached the zero lower bound.
Ordinary men have a similar problem with reducing the amount of rape they do. They are on board with the message "Don't rape" and would like to help women by raping less, but they are already at the zero lower bound. To do less, they would have to find a way to go negative and unrape. Ordinary men just aren't in charge and cannot actually do anything, just like ordinary men dislike money printing and inflation, but aren't consulted and cannot say "No!".
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
It has come to a point where I have to face an awkward alternative: Either most people I know are wrong (including learned men and experts) or I am insane.
I'm going to treat this as a request for an explanation of what is going on in the heads of the learned men and experts.
They are trapped in a language game, made toxic by linguistic poverty. My explanation will involve coining two neologisms and deploying them in a two stage explanation.
semi-grift Contrasts with the existing word grift. Grifters get prosecuted. But some grift-like enterprises do more good than harm. Even when individual practitioners do more harm than good, they still don't get prosecuted, because society doesn't want the chilling effect on the others, doing more good than harm and producing (in the case of psychiatry) a very substantial net benefit. Call those pro-social grifts semi-grifts.
turbo-real Are bricks real? Drop one on your foot and the pain will tell you: Yes, absolutely real! Are centers of gravity real? Put your brick on the table with the center of gravity over the edge. When it falls off and lands on your foot, the pain will tell you, err, what exactly? The center of gravity is too abstract to be absolutely real, yet the pain insists that centers of gravity are of such practical importance that they could only be one degree less real: turbo-real.
stage one The vocabulary of the elite includes semi-grift and turbo-real. You ask a member of the elite whether psychopathology exists. You persist. Eventually, when you are both naked in the hot tub, he decides that you are not wearing a wire, and the noise of the bubbles and water jets will hide the conversation from prying microphones. He levels with you: psychiatry is a semi-grift, psychopathology is not turbo-real.
Why the precautions? He explains that if he is overhead saying "psychopathology is not turbo-real" the normie eaves dropper will look up turbo-real in the elite-to-normie dictionary and find that it means that psychopathology does not exist. Then the normie eaves dropper will translate the other way. Since the normie term "exist" smushes together both turbo-real and semi-grift, translating back to elite speak from exist also hits semi-grift. Psychopathology is not even a semi-grift, it must be a grift, it must be banned and grifters prosecuted. Your elite informant is terrified of the disaster that would be caused and that is why he is so cagey. end of stage one
Now we must confront the impossibility the conversation above. semi-grift and turbo-real are my neologisms. No-one can give you the answer above because they don't have those words.
stage two In reality the elite suffer the same linguistic poverty as the normies. They have only one word, exist, which they decorate with elaborate qualifiers, hoping to distinguish strong forms of existence, such as being turbo-real, from weak-forms of existence, such as being merely a semi-grift. They know that their single word conceals a real distinction, that they grasp towards. They know that the stakes are high and being misunderstood by normies would be a disaster. Fearing that their struggle to be understood correctly might fail, they clam up.
This is where you end up bashing your head against a brick wall. The learned men and experts are surely clever enough to see that psychopathology is not turbo-real (though you use the word exist). But they will not come out and say it. Sometimes they fob you off by saying "Of course psychopathology exists" but that only adds to your confusion, because you can read people well enough to tell that they don't really mean it (or don't exactly mean it, or don't fully mean it, or something; there is definitely something hidden and wrong). The experts hear your questions. They smell disaster in the air. They don't have the words to articulate the actual difficulty, so they clam up, leaving you doubting your sanity. end of stage two
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
That is a brilliant analysis. Trying to put it in my own words so that I can steal it, I realise that there is a British NHS way of framing it.
The three founding principles of the NHS are that: one, it is funded out of general taxation; two, free at the point of use; three, treatment is based on clinical need, regardless of the ability to pay. The fourth principle was silent; one didn't say out loud. The NHS didn't ask why the patient needed treatment. No-one was refused treatment because their illness was their own stupid fault.
There have always been worrywart who feared that the silence wouldn't hold. Treating liver disease and type II diabetes is expensive. Why is the tax payer on the hook for peoples' drunkenness and gluttony? The question gets asked and used to justify the government intervening in peoples lives, making alcohol harder to get to spare peoples livers, and making fatty food harder to get in the hope of shrinking their waist lines. Both to save the NHS money. Both current UK public policy.
The previous paragraph is very British. An alternative response to the very same question, uses the issue to justify cutting the funding to the NHS. Fund treatment for illnesses that strike at random, but stop subsidizing bad lifestyle choices.
I'm struggling to find the right words to describe this framework,...
Me too. Here is my attempt:
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tight budget paternalism The government has the obligation to raise taxes to pay for rescuing people from the bad consequences of unwise choices AND the power to limit peoples choices by punishing expensively bad choices, with the aim of discouraging them.
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no budget freedom The government protects people from others who would tell them: No! Bansturbators tolerate this in return for not having to pay for rescuing people from the consequences of their own bad choices.
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budget busting freedom The government has the obligation to raise taxes to pay for rescuing people from the bad consequences of unwise choices. Bad choices multiply and get worse until the money runs out.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
Think about this in terms of the external audit of a public company.
A public company has its own accountants. They may notice money going missing, track it down, and report the employee to the police for fraud.
As a public company it must also submit to and pay for an external audit. The external audit is not looking for fraud. The external audit is auditing the internal controls and the procedures. Are the internal controls sufficient (if the procedures are followed) to stop money going missing? Are the procedures being followed? It gets a little tricky because a big business is inevitably full of minor lapses and edge cases. The external auditors will not qualify the companies accounts unless the weaknesses of internal controls and breaches of procedure are material.
However, if there are material weaknesses, the external auditors will qualify the accounts, saying that they cannot be fully relied upon because blah blah. This is a big deal. Remember that the external auditors are not looking for fraud. Looking for fraud that is really there is often futile; the fraud only took place because lax procedures that were not even followed, provided an opportunity to get away with fraud. Once the accounts have been qualified the company takes measures (perhaps under a new board of directors) to remedy the problems.
The weaknesses of internal controls and the failures to follow procedures are treated as dispositive. It is presumed that there was fraud and action is taken to prevent it. It would be wrong to say that people don't care about the facts or whether fraud actually happened. If perchance fraud can be found there will be efforts to identify the perpetrators and prosecute them. But there is an acceptance that finding material weaknesses in procedures is as "we found fraud" as it gets.
Perhaps some-one will claim "Sure there are problems with the procedures that might in theory have allowed fraud to go undetected, but no fraud was proven, so I'm content that no fraud happened and no action is required." But where money is at stake, this is naive and silly.
The core of @Hlynka's claim is that votes are as valuable as money, so the same presumption of fraud applies.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I thought that terrible wars, leaving society short of men, were common in history. Indeed, I thought that was the origin story of polygamy in Islam. The followers of Mohammad had lost too many men waging Jihad. Sticking with monogamy would leave women without husbands and slow down rebuilding the population of warriors. So Mohammad declared that a man could have up to four wives.
The birth rate remains 50:50 (Is it actually 51% boys, 49% girls? I think it is not exactly 50:50, with some built-in compensation for slightly different death rates) so it is not exactly your hypothetical. Worse, I'm talking about societies very different to our own, so it is hard to know the relevance of the comparision.
The sociological interest lies in watching people fail to join the dots.
The airplane safety card has a section on depressurization and the oxygen masks dropping down. "Put your own mask on first."
The danger being guarded against is that the parent takes too long trying to fit the mask on their frightened child and the parent passes out themselves. But how could that happen? Surely the parent soon suffers respiratory distress that forces them to fit their own mask before resuming helping their child? No. Hypoxia doesn't work like that. It is the carbon dioxide that makes you want to breath and the parent is breathing that out just fine. You can pass out from hypoxia with very little warning. I think this is now widely know, mostly due to the warning on the airplane safety card. The warning retains its place on the terse card because they want every-one to know.
There are other routes to this knowledge. Starving My Brain of Oxygen…For Safety?!? is two minute video on pilot training
More on the hypoxia training story I was looking for a much older video, which I think was an upload of a historical film of hypoxia training for pilots, with the low oxygen environment being some kind of Nissen hut. Hypoxia training isn't new.
There is a classic industrial accident involving a storage tank. Workman climbs down inside to do maintenance after the tank has been drained. But the residual chemicals have reacted with the oxygen, so he climbs down into a nitrogen atmosphere and dies. His safety buddy sees that he has passed out and, forgetting his training, climbs inside to do a heroic rescue. He also dies. Do you prefer Deaths from Environmental Hypoxia and Raised Carbon Dioxide or Confined Spaces Deadly Spaces: Preventing Confined Space Accidents? The YouTube video has a cute animation with a plumber with a mustache (Mario?) testing the air in the sewer. This also happens down on the farm Incident Investigation: Worker Loses Consciousness in Manure Spreader Tank | WorkSafeBC.
News coverage pretends to know none of this
The news coverage makes it seem that you can blunder into a confined space with little oxygen, gasp and struggle, and face the horrifying prospect that if you cannot escape in twenty-two minutes, then the lack of oxygen will kill you. And that this is a new hazard. I would feel more comfortable with agit-prop headlines screaming: Capitalism has been killing workers with nitrogen hypoxia for decades.
I'm feeling a little lost. Was the execution deliberately botched by pro-death-penalty activists trying to persuade the impalers and the crucifiers that the method is sufficiently cruel? Were the difficulties invented by anti-death-penalty activists trying to persuade us that the method is excessively cruel? I can tell that I'm being lied to, but not why or by whom or which details are false.
I can also see that the lying isn't being called out, perhaps not even noticed. The lies contradict well known stories about how the world works and how to avoid being killed by it, and yet people don't seem to join the dots and complain about the contradictions. That troubles me.
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