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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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In the medium term wiping out better stock hurts the worse stock more than letting them rule over you.

What of the long term? What of the short term?

Good in the short term as the worse stock gets to expropriate the creations of the better stock, even worse in the long term compared to the medium term as your country falls behind the rest of the world due to your lower human capital and lack of rule of law leading to nobody external with any sense investing even a single cent into you.

And the kinds of people who prioritize the short term over the medium/long term are basically almost definitionally the ones you want nowhere near the levers of power.

Better stock humans are God's gift to worse stock humans (as a class, not individually, no single person should think of themselves as "God's gift to humanity" because they are not, but as a class of human beings it's absolutely true), without them the low quality stock would be living in even worse conditions than they do at the moment (compare American blacks vs Liberian blacks). Shooting them with bullets is like killing the golden goose and the lower classes need this simple fact repeated to them multiple times until they finally get it.

Game theoretic punishment of defection, in general, requires you to be willing to destroy good things and make the world worse. This is a necessary trait in order to get optimal outcomes. As they said, "unless we're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." This is bad for you, but it's good in the counterfactual case where the threat motivates cooperation.

A game theoretic agent that won't ever defect isn't a "good guy" but a "resource". I believe the lower classes understand this very well.

There is no defection going on here from the superior stock, upper classes don't benefit at the expense of lower classes at the moment, instead in the west it is lower classes that benefit at the expense of the upper classes (regardless of whatever trivially false jeremiads they like to tell themselves) and what you are proposing is basically blackmail: "give us even more of the surplus you generate or we will hurt you".

The solution to blackmail is, as you said, punishment, and I absolutely agree that western lower classes are in dire need of some serious punishment to set them straight, and I would be open to burning some our our surplus value to get them to see straight (you could argue cultural change due to mass immigration is indeed this, the higher classes do have to pay a cost to avoid the consequences, but it is indeed a very effective method of punishment for the lower classes who can't afford that), however I would say that wasn't what you were talking about.

We're just using different terms. You say "blackmail", I say "punishment"- they're the same concept. "Obey the law or we put you in jail" is structurally indistinguishable from blackmail, also taxation is theft. These are disagreements of emotional valence, not fact.

Game theory doesn't have an opinion about who should win, just about how to win the most effectively. (Though if it comes to it, I would like it to be known that I'm with the underclass.)

Is cooperation structurally indistinguishable from submission as well? What about domination? Are all equilibria "structurally" exactly the same, irrespective of total payoff and underlying conditions determining optimality of strategies? You sure find it easy to smudge borders of categories when it serves a narrative. I really like this unabashed postmodernism, @fuckduck9000 would do well to meditate on it.

Game theory does offer something of a moral judgement, implicitly – by imposing an objective unidimensional yardstick of an agent's performance. He who cannot make peace with the thought that his payoff is the smaller one, and makes it even less, burning commons out of pure spite, is irrational; thus, evil.

(Mistake theory posits that people doing that are not «evil», they are just literally too dumb to tell whether they are diminishing their payoff. This certainly is often the case for a fraction of players).

Is cooperation structurally indistinguishable from submission as well? What about domination?

I mean, yes. There's a bunch of arguments for situations where you should not extract the maximum you can in the short term from a relationship, but they're all founded in maximizing your long-term payoff, not in "being a good person". Even decision theories like TDT/superrationality, where you occasionally leave money on the table, are based on this - in sum, the TDT agent walks away with more utilons than the CDT agent. A decision theory that systematically ended up with less utilons than it could would just be bad.

He who cannot make peace with the thought that his payoff is the smaller one, and makes it even less, burning commons out of pure spite, is irrational; thus, evil.

Utility, being unitless, is not comparable between agents. All theories that allow comparing payoffs do so on the basis of axioms, like pretending that every other agent is a copy of you ("putting yourself in their shoes"), or normalizing all human preferences to a common bound (humanism). Money is arguably also a way to do this. Though all variants of the ultimatum game depend on some way to compare utility between agents to converge, that comparison has to be agreed upon by some other mechanism such as relative capacity to destroy whatever your opponent values. Utilitarianism has no opinion on what the "correct" exchange ratio is. (Though it does advise that you should follow an algorithm to find it that maximizes your payoff. It says that a lot.)

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