Politics Discussion Thread September 2012

-1 Multiheaded 05 September 2012 11:27AM

The last thread didn't fare too badly, I think; let's make it a monthly tradition. (Me, I'm more interested in thinking about real-world policies or philosophies, actual and possible, rather than AI design or physics, and I suspect that many fine, non-mind-killed folks reading LW also are - but might be ashamed to admit it!)

Quoth OrphanWilde:

  1. Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments. 
  2. Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised.  This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it.  If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both.  If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both. 
  3. A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. 
  4. In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

[Link] RSA Animate: extremely entertaining LW-relevant cartoons

3 Multiheaded 23 June 2012 01:51PM

It's a brilliant idea: a lecture by a cool modern thinker, illustrated by word-by-word doodles on a whiteboard. Excellent at pulling you along the train of thought and absolutely disallowing boredom.

The lectures' content is pretty great too, although there's a definite left-wing, populist bent that's exploting today's post-crisis hot button issues (they got Zizek, for god's sake) - some might not like it. Regardless, it's all very amusing and enlightening. Been linked to before in a comment or to, but it deserves a headline.

You can start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI&feature=relmfu (But they're all worth watching!)

I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions

26 Multiheaded 25 January 2012 05:43PM

You folks probably know how some posters around here, specifically Vladimir_M, often make statements to the effect of:

 

"There's an opinion on such-and-such topic that's so against the memeplex of Western culture, we can't even discuss it in open-minded, pseudonymous forums like Less Wrong as society would instantly slam the lid on it with either moral panic or ridicule and give the speaker a black mark.

Meanwhile the thought patterns instilled in us by our upbringing would lead us to quickly lose all interest in the censored opinion"

Going by their definition, us blissfully ignorant masses can't even know what exactly those opinions might be, as they would look like basic human decency, the underpinnings of our ethics or some other such sacred cow to us. I might have a few guesses, though, all of them as horrible and sickening as my imagination could produce without overshooting and landing in the realm of comic-book evil:

- Dictatorial rule involving active terror and brutal suppression of deviants having great utility for a society in the long term, by providing security against some great risk or whatever.

- A need for every society to "cull the weak" every once in a while, e.g. exterminating the ~0.5% of its members that rank as weakest against some scale.

- Strict hierarchy in everyday life based on facts from the ansectral environment (men dominating women, fathers having the right of life and death over their children, etc) - Mencius argued in favor of such ruthless practices, e.g. selling children into slavery, in his post on "Pronomianism" and "Antinomianism", stating that all contracts between humans should rather be strict than moral or fair, to make the system stable and predictable; he's quite obsessed with stability and conformity.

- Some public good being created when the higher classes wilfully oppress and humiliate the lower ones in a ceremonial manner

- The bloodshed and lawlessness of periodic large-scale war as a vital "pressure valve" for releasing pent-up unacceptable emotional states and instinctive drives

- Plain ol' unfair discrimination of some group in many cruel, life-ruining ways, likewise as a pressure valve

+:  some Luddite crap about dropping to a near-subsistence level in every aspect of civilization and making life a daily struggle for survival

Of course my methodology for coming up with such guesses was flawed and primitive: I simply imagined some of the things that sound the ugliest to me yet have been practiced by unpleasant cultures before in some form. Now, of course, most of us take the absense of these to be utterly crucial to our terminal values. Nevertheless, I hope I have demonstrated to whoever might really have something along these lines (if not necessarily that shocking) on their minds that I'm open to meta-discussion, and very interested how we might engage each other on finding safe yet productive avenues of contact.

 

Let's do the impossible and think the unthinkable! I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.

P.S. Yeah, Will, I realize that I'm acting roughly in accordance with that one trick you mentioned way back.

P.P.S. Sup Bakkot. U mad? U jelly?

 

CONCLUSION:

 

Fuck this Earth, and fuck human biology. I'm not very distressed about anything I saw ITT, but there's still a lot of unpleasant potential things that can only be resolved in one way:

I hereby pledge to get a real goddamn plastic card, not this Visa Electron bullshit the university saddled us with, and donate at least $100 to SIAI until the end of the year. This action will reduce the probability of me and mine having to live with the consequences of most such hidden horrors. Dixi.


Sometimes it's so pleasant to be impulsive.

 

Amusing observation: even when the comments more or less match my wild suggestions above, I'm still unnerved by them. An awful idea feels harmless if you keep telling yourself that it's just a private delusion, but the moment you know that someone else shares it, matters begin to look much more grave.

Why would a free human society be in agreement on how to alter itself?

-1 Multiheaded 29 December 2011 11:49AM

So I've been grappling with these discussions on the plausibility or implausibility of redefining cultural boundaries of several sorts to (as the radical example of self-alteration by Eliezer goes) make non-consensual sex as tolerated and tolerable as non-consensual conversation. Said discussions being quite separate from EY's largely accepted underlying statement of principle; "Something in a world better than ours is likely to creep us out, at least purely emotionally."

Then I suddenly saw a plot hole in the source material. The story outright mentions that internal disagreement was present at all points in its culture during the transition from 20th century sexual mores to the end result. So... why didn't anyone who saw the trend of self-modification and couldn't accept it for themselves or their children, DO anything about it? To use another locally popular example, if Gandhi knew that his children, whom he had begun to raise in pacifism, were to be given pills that'd make them enjoy killing in self-defense*, why the hell wouldn't he and his followers split off? And, supposing that a large amount of Indians and others at the time disliked that slippery slope, wouldn't their forked culture make a considerable impact on the future's "mainstream" society, such as a much greater level of catering to pacifists in all areas of life than e.g. the visibility of Jewish kosher goods and services in today's West?

In other words, why didn't the story mention its (wealthy, permissive, libertarian) society having other arrangements in such a contentious matter - including, with statistical near-certainty, one of the half-dosen characters on the bridge of the Impossible Possible World? I strongly suspect that this blow to suspension of disbelief, while swallowed by most commenters who began talking about the implied binary choice (modify entire culture to tolerate rape/society at large stays frozen in stone), added a great deal of needless, irrational controversy, fueling the already incensed emotions and such.

 

 

 

 

*(I know the real Gandhi didn't totally abhor self-defense, but that's beside the point)

[fic idea] Rationalist Gurren Lagann?

0 Multiheaded 07 July 2011 05:27AM

(If you don't know what Gurren Lagann is, don't hesitate to google & watch it, unless you have an aversion to anime in general, in which case ignore this altogether.)

I feel that a fanfic like HPMOR but with Gurren Lagann's setting and characters could be 1) absolutely kickass (given EY-level writing) and 2) in fact better suited to treatises on rationalism, logic and science than Harry Potter. The premise I saw on /a/, an indeterminate time ago, without any connection to HPMOR (hell, it was probably before HPMOR), but it struck me then as surprisingly well-conceived. It went like: "The heroes relieve the entire history of science, first inventing the scientific method, then examining specific fields, one per arc, for useful and creative stuff to use against the powers-that-be keeping humanity down through their ancient, rigid knowledge." Now, this is easy enough to fit into the specific setting of TTGL, first using older tech and basic rationality against Lordgenome, then, after the timeskip, going for current and speculative science to bring down the vastly more powerful but anti-creative Anti-Spirals, ultimately aiming for FAI. The divergence point could be, like in HPMOR, Simon's upbringing, e.g. his parents surviving and teaching him the few remaining scraps of the Lost Arts... then Kamina convinces him to improve on it, think freely, try new methods instead of just new applications, etc.

I should also make it clear that I'm not writing that anytime that could be reasonably defined as "soon", and am in fact looking to force the idea onto someone of you fine folks.

Well, discuss!

Possible structure:

v001

- ep. 1: Divergence point, state of humanity. Fallacies & biases: "It can't be any other way", "Must be a good reason for us to be kept underground".

- Kamina makes his first breakout attempt. Village Elder makes a very early point about heedless risk, existential or otherwise. Contrarianism. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

- The Beastman-driven mech falls down, kills Simon's parents. World-shattering event from outside the box. Kamina drags Simon kicking and screaming into battle, makes a point: why no-one truly wants to just die on an unfair universe.

- They figure out how to start up and control Lagann. Black box. Basics of experimentation.

v002

- Simon's parents had an archeotech laptop, so, besides knowing a tiny bit of BASIC, he had played a couple of RPGs; when Yoko arrives on the Beastman's heels, he tries to tank while she snipes; extrapolation from fictional evidence nearly fails, as he screams that reality is unlike any kind of game, his spiral power starts failing as he circles back into despair and blacks out, but it has already (barely) worked - the Fallacy Fallacy.

Beastman pilot bails out; they haul his mech to Yoko's village; she shows them basic cryptography & related as they figure out Lagann's interface I'm not sure what Yoko's rationalist power set should be, suggest please. Simon wallows in despair, lampshades being an expy of Shinji. Strategies for dealing with nihilism.

The potentially universe-destroying Spiral Nemesis IS the Happy Death Spiral, of course!!! This only really comes up in the final arc, but what a glorious EY shoutout. [pause] No cult.

(to be continued)

 

Still on it, just really preoccupied atm.