felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Why go to all the trouble? The question reminds me of a thread on Hacker News about Islamic Terrorism. A comment noticing
But this is what's strange with terrorists : they strike me as utterly incompetents. There is so many easy ways to fuck things up, and they always do the inefficient and hard things.
got the response
Every-one thinks that they are the good guy. That isn't just a quirk of psychology, it is also a constraint.
People lives their lives according to different narratives. There is a fire-and-sword Muslim narrative, a quiet-life Muslim narrative, various Western narratives. Some-one living their life according to the fire-and-sword Muslim narrative is a bad guy by many other narratives. But that doesn't liberate them to be a bad guy by their own standards. They still have to be the good guy in their own head.
They have to be the hero, not the ass-hole. They cannot just be a nihilist who wrecks stuff to make things miserable for every-one. There has to be a sense that they are a warrior, fighting bad guys.
Perhaps it is as simple as attacking a cafe where they serve alcohol or a venue where the music is haram, or a business district where they charge interest on loans. I don't really get the inner logic, but I'm sure there is one and it constrains the kind of attacks they can make.
I think that Reddit Admins are just as much constrained by the need to be the good guy in their own head as Islamic Terrorists or any-one else. They must have a reason. They can cope with ignoring that it is fake reason that they manufactured themselves (humans are good at that kind of cope); but they must have one.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Seconded. I think that the words transwoman and transman are the wrong way round.
Whenever I read the word transwoman, the image that pops into my mind is Dianne Keaton playing Annie Hall. Then I have to mentally stop and engage reverse gear; the text I'm reading is almost certainly using the word transwoman to refer to a man who has gender dysphoria and picked wearing a dress as their best coping strategy.
But reading on is a struggle. I feel that I've been had. Conned into assenting to "transwomen are women" because I reflexively imagine a woman with gender dysphoria and a prescription for testosterone. And feeling that this wasn't an accident. The words were deliberately made the wrong way round to trick me into accepting that "transwomen are women" only to later reveal that I've signed up to a man in a dress being a woman.
I've seen Gender Critical folk use TIM: Trans-Identified Man instead of transwoman.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Consulting the 1899 edition of the Century Dictionary I find an unhelpful entry for reification
Materialization; objectivization; externalization; conversion of the abstract into the concrete; the regarding or treating of an idea as a thing, or as if a thing.
The definition of reify is simpler
To make into a thing; make real or material; consider as a thing
and the use of the word is illustrated with a long quote, referenced as J. Ward, Encyc. Brit., XX. 78.
Encyc. Brit. = The ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1875-1888. It is in 24 volumes, so my guess is that XX means volume twenty. Perhaps 78 is page 78 of Volume XX. And J. Ward must be the name of the author of the entry and this man That is perhaps a lead on English usage. The quote in the Century Dictionary is
The earliest objects of thought and the earliest concepts must naturally be those of the things that live and move about us; hence, then --- to seek no deeper reason for the present --- this natural tendency, which language by providing distinct names powerfully seconds, to reify or personify not only things, but every element and relation of things which we can single out, or, in others words, to concrete our abstracts.
Going back to 1880ish a psychologist was using reify (and presumably reification) without a Marxist slant.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Err, yes, but...
In the context of COVID, we naturally compare it with the 1918 Spanish Flu. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill the young and old, with a higher survival rate in-between, but this pandemic had unusually high mortality for young adults.
and also
The virus was particularly deadly because it triggered a cytokine storm, ravaging the stronger immune system of young adults,...
When COVID started, there was much to fear. It might be a repeat of 1918 and clobber young adults, disrupting everything. But it rather quickly became clear that COVID was not that kind of pandemic.
Notice how poorly counting deaths works. Death for death, the Spanish flu cost at least ten times as many Quality Adjusted LIfe Years. Sticking with death counts, rather than estimating life years lost, exaggerated the severity of COVID by a factor of ten or more.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
If you have a thousand years of history behind you,...
I'm thinking that there is a problem right there. Jesus is supposed to come back. As the Nicene Creed puts it "and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead;". But it has been a long time, two thousand years. I don't think any-one expected having to wait that long.
Christianity got a big boost in its early days from the sense of urgency. Nobody knows when the second coming will happen. Don't dilly-dally about converting to Christianity, you might leave it too late! But there is a price to pay. It gives Christianity a soft expiry date. As the century tick by, it gets awkward.
Continuing to talk about the second coming sounds odd. People keep looking forward to it; and keep getting disappointed. When will they learn that it isn't going to happen?
But quietly dropping it also comes across as odd. It was a big deal. And the faith is a one-off, final revelation; you cannot drop bits that age badly.
Perhaps the problem is me. I am "not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought". But Ratzinger sees it as a "clown costume" kind of problem, rather than an "its been too long" kind of problem. That is missing the time dimension; the problem is getting worse as the years tick by, in a way the "clown costume" problems don't.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I'm a lurking volunteer. I just had https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/54744?context=8#context given to me to rate. I felt a three way conflict.
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It is a superb piece of satire, obviously good.
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I'm satired-out. There is a lot of satire on the internet. Too much, give me a break. Gut says: puke!
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I like the https://www.themotte.org/rules#Disagreement rule, which the comment is breaking. That should be a warning.
I went with "bad". The instruction do say go with your gut.
I think that the disagreement rule is a good rule that we should uphold, partly for the stated reason, partly for my point 2. It might be easier for the volunteers to uphold it if there were a button with a label that was the terse version of "Brilliantly funny sarcasm, but bad, because brilliantly funny sarcasm is fentanyl for discussion."
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I'm happy to join in disputing the "fact that the nazis were far right" but I would emphasize the worthlessness of the left/right spectrum.
Reactionaries, those throne and altar guys like the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, are right wing. Florian Geyer had "no crown, no cross" scratched on his sword, the sword that he used to fight for peasants during the Peasants Revolt; not right wing. Hitler thought Florian Geyer a hero and was happy to have an SS regiment named after him. I'm thinking that Hitler and Stalin had rival takes on how to stick it to the Kings and Priests, but both thought of themselves as acting on behalf of the workers and the common man.
If one really wants to have Hilter->right and Stalin->left, then one gets into trouble with reactionaries, monarchists, and integralists. All the classic right-wing positions have to be kicked off the spectrum to make room for Hitler. You even have to horse-shoe Florian Geyer and get him to the right to have Hitler think him a hero.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I struggle to intuit the tone of this comment, but even if it is facetious, I see it as a pithy portal to profundity. I believe in long term social dynamics and think that the world works something like this parable:
One day there is a religious revival and the Church of Universal Love grows big. Young people flock to its message of unconditional kindness and charity. They marry and have children. Thirty years on those children are the new crop of adults. They are unconditionally kind and full of charity; it was how they were brought up. And thirty years on a new grift culture emerges to take advantage of them.
Sixty years on from the religious revival sees another new crop of adults. They look at their parents with dismay: how can intelligent people so lack street smarts? Why do they fall for every scam and grift? I picture @RococoBasilica as one of this second generation, looking back on sixty years of history and noticing the earlier parts of the causal chain leading to the rise of grift culture.
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
11mo ago
You've got to mention Walter Lippmann and his 1922 book Public Opinion
That makes it 101 years, justifying the full century rhetoric :-)
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
I think that you have got that backwards. If the police are scrupulous about treating crime and punishment as strictly individual, there will be no racism apparent as the cases are investigated and prosecuted one by one. But compile national statistics and racial differences jump out at you. If you believe in individual justice and judging people by their character, not the color of the their skin, you just have to shrug and say "races really are different."
The trouble starts if you insist that the national statistics need to be race balanced. To make the national statistics come out race balanced requires fiddling the individual cases, convicting innocent white men, acquitting guilty black men, and doing the racist thing of telling an individual "we aren't going to judge your case on the actual facts, but on skin color, because we've a quota to fill."
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
I found the that thread very interesting. Reading between the lines and over thinking until I can see what isn't really there, I see two big issues.
First, QC sees the issues of cognitive bias and running on untrusted hardware as specificially human issues. Yudkowsky is a space alien, of a superior species, so he is unaffected by these issues. His takes on AI risk are gospel truth.
Second, I'm reminded of testimony before Congress about unconscious racial bias. The witness claims that every-one harbours unconscious racial bias. The Congress man asks: which races are you unconsciously biased against? This leads to a deer-in-headlights moment rather than an answer. I want to ask QC whether his own judgement is subject to cognitive biases and whether his mind runs on untrusted hardware. Specifically, is his judgement that Yudkowsky is telling the gospel truth from a position of superiority, also the gospel truth? QC seems to think that he too is a space alien, free from human failure modes.
The thread seems like a living-out of the Zen parable about the Dharma being a finger pointing at the moon. QC has studied hard and knows all about the finger, its joints, and its nail.
What I have written comes across as unsympathetic to QC. Or does it? The impression of a lack of sympathy comes from inferring that I see myself as a space alien, of a superior species, unlike Yudkowsky and QC, who are merely human. Actually, I think that I suffer from cognitive biases and am running on untrusted hardware. I'm writing from a position of despair. How do we know anything? Epistemology is difficult. Epistemology is harder than that, we read the sequences and still don't get it. We encounter arguments about AI risk and never stop to think: Well, that has been crafted by Moloch to suck me in, maybe I should stay away and leave it to less vulnerable people to wrestle with the issue.
My antidote to epistemological despair is reading the history of science. There are ways round biases. The double blind, randomized controlled trial is one route, available to a well funded team. There are other instructive stories. I particularly like Blaise Pascal's 1647 pamphlet on barometers. One of the experiments involved a six foot tall mercury barometer. Why six feet, when three feet tall is tall enough? So that he could fit a three foot tall mercury barometer inside it, and watch the mercury run out when the inner one was in the vacuum. The mad lad actually went the extra mile to check what was really going on.
I don't see a clever hack that lets me cross-check AI alarmism to see if it is for real. I'll wait. For me, the core of "rationality" is studying clever cross-checks. Get a feel for what we can know despite cognitive biases if we are willing and able to do the extra work. Get a feel for what we cannot know, and learn patience.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
We have a rule against sarcasm. One advantage of adhering to the rule is that it imposes an intellectually interesting exercise.
Write a sarcastic comment. Remember the rule. Now what?
You can start over and write the comment directly. The story goes: err, actually I'm not touching that story, I'm all sarcasmed out
Giving up on the particulars, sarcasm generally works as a cognitive tax. Enough effort gets wasted on the inversion, writing as well as reading, that little is left over to notice dangling threads. One creates/latches-on-to the opposite meaning to become one of the in crowd that makes/gets the sarcasm, and one misses the telling details that are worth exploring.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
4. Many home owners analysis the social collapse as a scam. The way that the scam is theorized to work is this: First engineer social decline. This reduces the price of office blocks. Second, buy a $300million office block for $60million. Third, reverse course on social decline. Fourth, patience, it takes a while for your "$60million" office block to be worth $300million again. Fifth, sell, and walk away with $240million profit.
The home owners don't want to be victims of this scam. They don't want to sell cheap at the bottom of the market, only to see prices recover as part of some-one else's plan. Perhaps too many people are in on the scam and they are propping up the housing market. Perhaps they are not in on the scam, they have merely noticed the avarice and evil of American political economy and feel confident in guessing what is going on. Perhaps it isn't even a scam, it is just that with American political economy being so avaricious and evil, people assume that its a scam. The realization, that social dynamics are playing out with no-one in charge and exercising agency, has yet to dawn.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
Watering my grass seed every day and seeing it germinate. Newly sprouted grass is a particular shade of green (joyful green?) that lifts my spirits.
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
11mo ago
I see paragraph structure as creating what a computer scientist would think of as a "scope". My sentence
Life is too short to debate, argue,and win.
is local to the paragraph, and part of the discussion of potent, recurring bad ideas.
I'm happy enough to debate Socialism_2.0. If I argue against Socialism_2.0 and win, I will consider the time well spent. But I notice that most advocacy for Socialism is for Socialism_1.0. It is advocacy for a straight repeat of policies that have failed and are doomed to fail. To argue against Socialism_1.0 and win is a terrible waste.
Perhaps you are uncomfortable placing yourself in my shoes. Fair enough. Try instead walking a mile in the shoes of those who advocate for Socialism_2.0. They notice that the arguments over Socialism_1.0 suck the oxygen out of the room. They cannot recruit opponents. They would like moderate push-back. If opponents take Socialism_2.0 seriously and point out flaws, that opens the way to correct the flaws, create Socialism_2.1 and see it adopted. They cannot recruit allies. Young people who are Socialist inclined have no patience for understanding why Socialism_1.0 will never work, nor for mastering the intricacies of Socialism_2.0 nor indeed for creating the intricacies of Socialism_2.0. In the world of endlessly recurring bad ideas, advocates of Socialism_2.0 are marginalised. There is no formal apparatus of censorship, and yet the ends towards which such an apparatus would be directed, are mysteriously achieved.
That said, what am I doing here? We both joined in September 2022. You have made 640 comments, I have made 17. I am not much "doing here". I am defeated by age and ill health. And also by the sense of the futility of political engagement. It is all so "Oh no! Not again!". I'm haunted by a comment that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, eleven years ago.
I want this site to stop feeding its trolls and would prefer a community solution rather than moderators wielding banhammers, and I want this site to focus its efforts positively rather than in amazing impressive refutations of bad ideas which is a primary failure mode of any intelligent Internet site.
Yudkowsky is concerned with the failure of websites. But what of the failure of whole societies? Do we need to focus our efforts positively? Does society as a whole need a banhammer to limit the costs of repeating impressive refutations of bad ideas?
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
I half agree that the idea of censorship is a bad idea that ought to be suppressed. The factor of two in the denominator comes from splitting the concept of censorship into two. One of the rival positions is monocensorship. The other position is bicensorship.
Monocensorship is the traditional notion of a unitary system of censorship, with a Chief Censor who is a kind of Monarch. This is a much worse idea than it initially appears. The Chief Censor has three kinds of power: ideal power, armour power, network power.
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Ideal power is the power to suppress bad ideas. It is what the Office of Censorship is for. Obviously this works badly. Some good ideas are suppressed because humans cannot reliably tell good from bad. Worse the Chief Censor is unsupervised. Yes, there are rules. This is to be blocked. That is to be permitted. But nobody gets to see what is blocked, so the Chief Censor gets to please himself and block whatever he disapproves of. It is built into the structure of Monocensorship that people don't know that permitted material is being blocked, because they don't get to see it.
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Armour power. Criticism of the Chief Censor is the second victim of overreach. If you find out that your permitted political opinions are blocked, you will complain, and your complaints will also be censored
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Network power. After a hundred years, the seventh Chief Censor gets a circle jerk going. The lazy and incompetent government bureaucracy make the lives of citizens miserable. If you complain, you get censored. Why? Try complaining about the Chief Censor. Your interactions with the bureaucracy will get even worse. The quid pro quo of the Chief Censor protecting the bureaucracy from criticism is that the bureaucracy retaliates against critics of the Chief Censor.
Bicensorhip is the idea of sacrificing the old to protect the young. There are two classes of people, Elders, say the over forties, and Juniors. Twenty-something Juniors hear rumours of Communism. They go looking and find tales of Gulags and Terror Famines and not much else. They notice the censorship and get told "you'll get the full story when you are an Elder."
Twenty years later our twenty-something Junior goes to his Elder Initiation and gets his access-all-areas pass. What was the full story of Communism? By the time he is forty, he has lived out the story of good intentions and bad consequences in his own life. He gets to read the positive advocacy for Communism and it seems a little off. How do they not see that it is going to end badly?
But what do I have in mind with "sacrificing the old to protect the young"? Think about Breatharianism, the idea that one can live on light, no food required. Some young people believe it. Mix together naivety, wishful thinking, and a touch of mental illness; some young people starve themselves to death. Censoring Breatharianism protects young people. Age and experience partially protect the Elders. But once in a while, an Elder gets his access-all-areas pass, discovers Breatharianism, becomes a believer and starves himself to death.
Don't old people deserve protection from bad ideas? Shouldn't we change from Bicensorship to Monocensorship to protect every-one, young and old? Think about the social dynamics of Bicensorship. There will always be a temptation to make the qualifying requirements for being an Elder a little bit stricter, and a little bit stricter, and a little bit stricter, until after a hundred years it has turned into Monocensorship. The social dynamic pits news stories of Elders being corrupted by uncensored pornography or reading Ted Kaczynsky and turning into primitivist terrorists, against abstract principles of having a large body of people with access-all-areas passes to keep an eye on the censors.
We see that Bicensorship and Monocensorship are mortal enemies. Those who believe in Monocensorship want to protect everybody, young and old. (The cynical take is that they fancy themselves as Chief Censor and hate Bicensorship because it cripples the power of the Chief Censor.) Those who believe in Bicensorship answer the call of duty and willing undertake the work of an Elder, exposing themselves to bad ideas to keep the Chief Censor in check and preserve young peoples access to good ideas that the Chief Censor doesn't like. (Cynically, you cannot abolish Eldership, because Elders love their weird porn, even as they accept that it is too weird for young people.) I could see the social dynamics of Bicensorship being stabilized by ruthless censorship of the idea of Monocensorship. Stories of Elders being corrupted by uncensored pornography are kept out of the news. The whole idea of protecting Elders from bad ideas is missing from common discourse. Those who advocate Monocensorship run into a brick wall:"censorship is about sacrificing the old to protect the young" is the thought terminating cliche that the NPC's chant back at them, and the idea of protecting the old from bad ideas gets no traction, even when it can evade censorship.
The fun part of this comment is normifying "A system of Bicensorship preserves itself by censoring the concept of Monocensorship.". Since normies hate neologisms, they have to merge Bicensorship and Monocensorship into just censorship. This leads to the normie version: "A system of censorship preserves itself by censoring the concept of censorship." Which sounds weird. If you force it to make sense you probably come up with a notion of censorship censoring the concept of censorship so that people don't have the words to understand what is going on. That changes the meaning. When Bicensorship protects itself by censoring Monocensorship all of the Elders are in on it and know what they are doing and why. Sometimes you really do have to coin new words and split an old word in two.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
I see an ambiguity in the notion of learning the lesson of history.
One version involves people poring over the history. Doing X didn't work last time. It didn't work the time before either. People make adjustments, informed by the past. They do X version 3. It doesn't work. Merde! Some commentators claim that the adjustments were silly and stood no chance of making a difference to the outcome. People knew the history and did X anyway because they don't learn from history.
An alternative version involves people ignoring the history. A few point out that X didn't work last time. One more knowledgeable person points out that it didn't work the time before that either. The naysayers get told "this time is different". The people saying "this time is different" know nothing of last time and know of no difference between this time and last time. But they want to do X and "this time is different" are the magic words that let you do X. They repeat X version 1 and it fails the same way it failed the previous two times.
I believe in both versions. Sometimes there is a real, but unsuccessful effort to learn from history. We say that people didn't learn from history, because we judge by results. But there was an honest effort. I see no reason to censor such efforts. Other times, only a few people study the history. They are unanimous: don't do it! But they get out voted, and X gets done with foreseeable bad results. If you were paying attention, you notice that the bad results were actually foreseen. We would be much better off if we censored those saying "We should do X. This time is different."
Well, that is my claim. I don't think it fails because it is hard to learn the correct lesson from history. I think that there are cases were a policy doesn't work in theory, doesn't work in practice, and those in the know, know. There are low hanging fruit, ripe for plucking. Society screws up because people ignore the history because they don't care.
But is my claim true? I think that the weakest point is that the power to censor is a power honey pot that will attract a lot of wasps. I'm talking of technocrats carefully selecting the low hanging fruit. But society is run by chancers and grifters who don't care whether the fruit hangs low or is ripe. They want power. They want money. If there is an Office of Censorship, they will fight to control it, planning to censor any-one who blocks their route to power and money. I don't know what to do with this insight. It proves too much. If I take it seriously I end up an anarchist and reject government and power structures entirely.
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
11mo ago
I suspect that a great complication comes from the layering of hierarchical structures.
A platoon of ten men can do the "kill people and take their stuff" thing to individuals
A company of one hundred men can do the "kill people and take their stuff" things to platoons of ten men
A battalion of one thousand men can do the "kill....stuff" thing to a company of one hundred men.
And yet a battalion of one thousand men has internal structure, it is ten companies of one hundred men coordinating and not fighting among themselves. While each company of one hundred men is ten platoons of ten men each. Somehow no platoon of ten goes rogue and kills a member of a company due to seeing them as an individual.
Mutinies, rebellions, revolutions, I think elaborate structures of rules are going to arise, just because of the numbers involved. Ethical principles about say "look after you parents in their old age" are an extra complication, perhaps enabled by by getting rules for large numbers of violent young men in place.
felis-parenthesis
10mo ago
My expectations for bio-security for gain of function research go like this:
Use two small remote islands: Research Island and Quarantine Island. Researchers parachute into Research Island. At the end of their six month tour of duty they sail to Quarantine Island. After a month, a plane lands on Quarantine Island to collect them.
In reality Biosafety level four, the top level, is still situated in a building in a city. It seems odd that we site nuclear power stations in remote locations, or at least, outside cities, yet the much more dangerous, create-a-lethal-plague technology, is conveniently sited so that researchers can go to the theater or the food market after work. Is there a consensus among biological researchers about this?
felis-parenthesis
10mo ago
I call this issue "Tower Jumpers" versus "Arm Whirlers". I'm taking the names from Inventing Flight by John D. Anderson, Jr. The book is mostly about the Wright brothers. It starts with a discussion of the early history, with brave men inventing wings, strapping them on, and jumping out of towers. Jumping to their deaths. Others were more cautious and built gadgets to help them understand wings and lift. Wind tunnels were invented late. Before wind tunnels they used the whirling arm apparatus.
A theme of the book is that outsiders were taken by surprise by the success of the Wright brothers. Outsiders only got to hear of the passion and tragedy of the Tower Jumpers, who were making no progress. Only insiders knew of the Arm Whirlers with their gradual accumulation of knowledge and slow progress.
The distinction helps us understand "skin in the game". If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers. Insisting that they have "skin in the game" will ensure proper caution. If you cannot tell which is which, insisting on "skin in the game" will have an uneven record, with the Tower Jumpers ruining your safety record and their own skin.
The trickiest question is: how much skin in the game? Insist on too much and the Arm Whirlers will stay away; they were the risk averse ones. Then you only have Tower Jumpers and insisting on "skin in the game" will help you not at all.
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
Retaining my Reddit handle (defparameter *fur-name* "felis-parenthesis" "the cat who codes in Common Lisp")
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