I have no idea what Impressionism is (I am not necessarily proud of this ignorance, since for all I know it does mean something important). Do you think that a panel of artists would be able to tell who was and wasn't "Impressionist" and mostly agree with each other? That does seem like a good criterion for whether there's sensory data that they're reacting to.

On the other hand, using such "toxic" comparisons is valuable because due to their very toxicity, everyone believes the same thing about them. You can't argue "but on those grounds, slurping your soup would be permissible"--after all, some people do think that slurping your soup is permissible, so on those people, the analogy would fail, and some other people have no opinion on soup-slurping and will insist that you prove that it's not permissible before they'll accept it in an analogy. Godwin's Law, which is a variation on this, has a similar problem: often a Hitler comparison is the best kind of comparison to make because everyone agrees about Hitler.

Jeremy Bentham used the above arguments. I used to agree with them, before I turned 19 (I say this not to condescend by indicating that I think the arguments are terrible or demonstrably stupid, but to note that I've undergone a transition in thinking since then). I still ate meat even though I agreed with them, but I slightly reduced the amount of "high-on-the-foodchain" meat I ate, because I rationalized the temporary suffering of the animals as superior to the suffering they'd experience if they were killed by predators and parasites, in nature.

Later I realized that, primarily, I didn't mind causing animals far lower than myself on the foodchain some brief suffering, in exchange for the value their meat conferred upon me (competing values). Today, I find the suffering of animals to be somewhat disagreeable, and would like to alleviate that suffering in the way suggested by Kurzweil: grow the meat as muscle tissue, and leave out the suffering, concentrated pesticides in fatty tissues, arachidonic acid, etc. Also, this value would increase if I realized artilects found it difficult to distinguish between humans and lower animals, based on our relative capacity to think.

Should ultra-smart predator and prey animals ultimately get along with each other? Should predation and parasitism end? (Ending predation and parasitism would effectively end the existence of the predator and parasite species, leaving humanity with fewer resources to draw on in possible conflict with alien races, sociopaths, and/or "evolutionarily-restored" or "re-invented" sociopaths. Also, it would take all kinds of proteins and other substances out of circulation for medical treatments and drug development.) Grazing animals on the veldt endure far crueler deaths at the claws and fangs of lions than human-raised cows endure.

Intelligence would likely reduce niche-diversification, crowding prime real estate. Do we just admit that some animals are made to suffer? How do you make a slug appreciate its place on the food chain? Is it cruel to allow a slug to be intelligent? Where do we draw the line? Do we supermodify bacteria? Do we exterminate all mosquitos? Do we alleviate the suffering of mammals, but leave reptiles to the nasty, brutish, short lives afforded by their nature?

I once met a man in Alaska who believed that swarms of anti-mosquito microbots or nanobots were inevitable within ten years. Perhaps he believed this because mosquitos really bothered him. Though horses (and deer, etc.) can't "think" as well as we can, clearly they're bothered by insects, as indicated by their tails and dust-rolling. Do we have mercy on them? Clearly they remember suffering, because they avoid areas plagued by insects, and respond with ferocity to the sounds and feels of insects, even before the bite.

There is suffering all around us. Do we care more for cows than for humans caught in the sociopaths' cages? There are over 1.44 million people now in prison for victimless crimes ("mala in se;" crimes with "corpus delecti;" crimes with no "injury" + "intent to injure" anyone else). Caring about animals when this is the case strikes me as sociopathic itself. Even outside of the prisons, entire communities are treated as animals, through selective enforcement of (immoral, self-contradictory, and unconstitutional) laws.

One very good solution might be to encourage people to eat lower on the food chain. When I was in Bangkok, I found that the people preparing insect dishes actually really knew what they were doing. I ate silkworm, grasshopper, and cricket stir-fries, and found them to be delicious. (I didn't brave the venomous water beetles.) Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman indicate that such dishes are also healthy and optimal in most ways (assuming the bacteria is killed).

The degree to which an animal thinks (and is beneficial or neutral to me) is the degree to which I prioritize ending its suffering. Therefore, ending the suffering of my fellow man takes, by far, the greatest precedence. (Which is also rational from the standpoint that artilects may well observe us before they engage us, either constructively, ambivalently, or destructively).

In my opinion: Even the sociopaths should not suffer. (They should simply be actively prevented from causing suffering, with the worst of suffering prioritized for first-attention.)

A sociopath lacks mirror neurons: Bentham's "need and suffering"-based hierarchy places the sociopath at the level of a reptile (consistently applied). And he also, being a bleeding-heart empath, believed that "All punishment is mischief; all punishment in itself is evil.”
― Jeremy Bentham

I have some sympathy with this view, although I don't completely agree that it's the optimal view to possess at this point.

I also think that Bentham's other views were basically stupid and totalitarianism-enabling, such as his desire for a "Panopticon" (prison), prior to the abolition of unjust sentencing. Views that wrongfully prioritize the inessential also allow for sociopaths to 1) profile the person with the inessential priority as stupid-enough-to-be-manipulated
and
2) thus offer them a force-based "solution" to their wrongly-prioritized "problem" that will render them corrupted and ineffectual in prioritizing more legitimate problems (such as ending well-organized looting, tyranny, and oppression) 3) maintain and popularize the myth that problems are soluble via government force (the government has fought a "war on drugs" for over 40 years, but hasn't made any "progress," and has actually made the problem of drug abuse far worse, by getting rid of accurate dosage labels on dangerous drugs)

I feel that the prioritization of animal suffering above human suffering is a problem caused by intellectual dishonesty. People far smarter than myself believe that animal suffering is really important, but they are generally not honest, and provably dishonest, by Socratic questioning. Ultimately, they are led to a position in their argument that causes them to contradict themselves. They then will do anything they can to call off the debate, and run away. Only (life/pleasure/ optimization)-appropriate threshold values prevent this sort of thing, and I don't know of anyone whose nerves are informed enough by Bayes' theorem to even rise to marginal human decency if they are not already intellectually honest.

I think it would be a bad idea to "grow" a general interest in rationality, especially using the existing Lesswrong model, for the reasons I posted on the open . Memes are made powerful by transmission. Incremental changes are easier to make than large ones. Without this being the case, we'd live in a totalitarian dictatorship (and even with this being the case, human government might not get much better than totalitarianism, even if that totalitarianism gets smaller and smaller. After all, our government still kills and imprisons people who are technically, legally, innocent --using a proper understanding of the word).

Universally, all social groups that grow beyond a miniscule size do so by appealing to people's emotions. It's possible to grow Lesswrong into a large group, however, it's not possible to do so without appealing mostly to their emotions. Rationality need not conflict with emotions, but with this group "in charge of karma" and meeting face-to-face, it will.

Why not have Karma as money? The Kochs are paying me to generate negative karma here ($1,000 per point), why not pay for positive Karma and woo me away from them? I definitely need more on my plate. Instead of being paid for honesty points, I'd be more than happy to just agree with the people who got here first. (As long as better money was involved.)

If you could write up an intelligent post arguing for progressivism, then you would probably get a lot farther on convincing the far-right faction of this site than by telling them they are evil for holding their beliefs without giving reasons as to why.

I doubt this very much. The differences between the far-right faction and the progressives (among whom I count myself) on this website are not primarily of the sort that can be bridged by intelligent argument, for a number of reasons.

If Multiheaded wrote a post of the kind you recommend with the intent of convincing LW conservatives, it would be a wasted effort. Also, I'm pretty sure a post of that sort would be heavily downvoted, and not just by people who disagree with him politically.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is brilliant, terrifying and useful. It's been at its best fighting against governmental intrusions, and is often quoted by journalists and even judges. It's cultural impact has been immense. And, hey, it's well written. But that doesn't mean it's accurate as a source of predictions or counterfactuals.

I think it's better as a source of counterfactuals than predictions. Orwell wouldn't have testified before HUAC if he thought that totalitarianism was a foregone conclusion. He may have been pessimistic, but his pessimism about government the nature of government has largely been proven right. What remains indeterminate is whether government, as a sociopathic institution, will prevail over voluntary institutions (markets, proper democratic institutions, etc.).

Orwell's belief that "British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war" was wrong. Nineteen Eighty-Four did not predict the future course of communism.

It's not over yet. Orwell did help to make the expressly-stated goal of "communism" (total forcible control of the individual by the collective) a taboo. However, this possibly just improved the language of totalitarianism (as he predicted would happen, with "Newspeak"). Ironically, because he warned us about propaganda being changed into "public relations," he helped bring about the transition.

Other names for boots stomping on human faces have indeed become trendy in the USA. The police state here operates similarly to the police state in Soviet Russia, but to a far lesser extent. (I'm fully aware of the fact that it isn't as bad here as it was there, yet.) Even in Soviet Russia at its worst (the enforced starvation of the Ukraine) the people being murdered were called "bandits" by the state. This helped the state-supporting conformists rationalize the murder of innocents, and to predict that, if they chose to personally take up arms against the state, noone would sympathize with their cause, the cause of "banditry."

There is no evidence that anything like the world he envisaged could (or will) happen. Which isn't the same as saying that it couldn't, but we do require some evidence before accepting Orwell's world as realistic.

I would say "no evidence" is overstating the case quite a bit. There are now 2.4 million people in prison in the USA, we have an AMA, FDA, MIB (medical information bureau, which serves to unite the protected insurance companies with the government, and ensure that they do not begin to circumvent the AMA and FDA-approved treatments) and DEA that have effectively eliminated medical freedom (so a lot of people are forced to accept medical treatments that are nowhere near the cutting edge of medicine, or life-extension). So far, the only insurance company that expressly condones Alcor's life-extension program (to my knowledge, as of 2007, when I was last licensed to sell insurance) is New York Life.

Yet from this book, a lot of implicit assumptions have seeped into our consciousness. The most important one (shared with many other dystopian novels) is that dictatorships are stable forms of government.

Robert Freitas has written intelligently about this subject from an alternate point of view in his essay "What Price Freedom?". As Freitas notes, one of the primary stabilizers of dictatorships is the health and awareness of the dictator and his enforcement apparatus. Given sufficient longevity, and several "backup networks," a dictator could remain in significant health and awareness for several generations. One of the primary destabilizers of dictatorships is the military control apparatus that is closest to the dictator (which they depend on to project force). Those who have proven faithful to the dictator are either also sociopaths or highly likely to sympathize with the people and be disloyal (they have to be, in order to be willing to "rule with an iron fist" to prevent "insurgency" or "rebellion"). In order to be safe from them, and prevent them from seizing power, the dictator must regularly kill all of the people closest in power to him, who could otherwise mount a coup (just as Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein both did). A successful adaptation of (falsely) democratic totalitarianism is to ensure that future dictators retire happily and securely (as a means of avoiding dangerous and costly infighting amongst sociopaths). This allows sociopathic control structures to hand off power from one generation of sociopath to the next(in the prior link, the "professional with ASPD" is called a "professional psychopath").

Note the "forever" in the quote above - the society Orwell warned about would never change, never improve, never transform. In several conversations (about future governments, for instance), I've heard - and made - the argument that a dictatorship was inevitable, because it's an absorbing state. Democracies can come become dictatorships, but dictatorships (barring revolutions) will endure for good.

My own personal belief is that limited transitions are possible and tolerated, as production improves -the sociopaths only wish to be dominant and unchallenged. So long as they have a large enough advantage over the rest of humanity, they can be content. Although, any sociopath-dominated system is likely to steadily decay into democide, this isn't necessarily so (perhaps rising production enabled by the Singularity will either supplant sociopathic rule, or reverse its destructiveness and scope).

And so the idea is that if revolutions become impossible (because of ubiquitous surveillance, for instance), then we're stuck with Big Brother for life, and for our children's children'c children's lives.

I don't know of anyone who makes this strong of a claim, but Freitas makes the claim that it's possible and that some precursor events might even make it likely. Tyranny or totalitarian-style police aggression do have the ability to negatively shape a possible Singularity, for instance, by killing those who would have made AGI "friendly" or aggressing against innocents to the extent that an AGI becomes violently retaliatory.

But thinking about this in the context of history, this doesn't seem credible. The most stable forms of government are democracies and monarchies; nothing else endures that long. And laying revolutions aside, there have been plenty of examples of even quite nasty governments improving themselves. Robespierre was deposed from within his own government - and so the Terror, for all its bloodshed, didn't even last a full year. The worse excesses of Stalinism ended with Stalin. Gorbachev voluntarily opened up his regime (to a certain extent). Mao would excoriate the China of today.

The people being executed by today's Chinese government, or being sent back to North Korea to die by today's Chinese government would probably not see today's totalitarianism as any gentler, kinder or less repressive. It's just totalitarianism with a narrower scope. I was recently in China, and I also noted that the repressive control of the internet and the suppression and jailing of dissidents there is still very grotesque. Also, they regularly put people to death for failed business transactions. Moreover: life extension "there" is only for those wealthy enough to travel to Portugal (as under most of the world's governments, including the repressive, but not yet totalitarian, government of the USA).

Britain's leaders in the 19th and 20th century gradually opened up the franchise, without ever coming close to being deposed by force of arms.

Have you ever seen video of Sinn Fein candidates being silenced while speaking on TV? "Elections," even in the USA are not open, free, and proper. They are only open, free, and proper to the extent that they are forced to be by public scrutiny, which pretty much doesn't exist in any nation that has primarily government schooling. In 1998 in Illinois, for example, the Libertarian Party collected the prohibitive number of signatures required for "third party ballot access" (for which the requirements are different than for "major party ballot access"). The state didn't allow them on the ballot, because they wanted a Republican to be elected that year, so that the electoral process wouldn't appear to be rigged. So the state board of elections simply ruled that they not be included on the ballot (because polling indicated they would cost the "Republican" candidate the election). ("Republican" George Ryan went on to win the election by half-of-one-percent of the vote.) In most states, elections in the US operate like this with the D and R versions of the central bank party regularly increasing the ballot access requirements and decertifying the minor parties which offer alternatives to "government growth toward totalitarian as fast as possible without revolution."

The dictatorships of Latin America have mostly fallen to democracies (though revolutions played a larger role there).

I agree that Latin America has gotten better over the last several years. There is still nothing there that approaches individual freedom, but they are beginning to look more attractive than the USA.

Looking over the course of recent history, I see very little evidence the dictatorships have much lasting power at all - or that they are incapable of drastic internal change and even improvements.

I suppose I agree with this statement of yours. I do think that any improvements in the USA will be likely to be because of an internal competing political movement that is primarily non-electoral (at first), or external pressure. I don't think that the very completely-infiltrated-and-controlled third parties will produce any significant change. I also don't think the Democrats and Republicans will produce any significant change (unless it's of a the superficial and cosmetic in nature, as were the allegedly "significant change" brought about by Reagan). I also don't think any "Independent" candidate will produce any significant change all independents and third party races in "opportunity years" are infiltrated and then internally-sabotaged in the USA. I don't expect anyone to just "take my word" for this, but it does seem to be true: recommended reading is on Russel Verney(Perot 1992, Barr 2008), Douglas Durham (Wounded Knee), and Brandon Darby (Environmental Activism).

Now, caveats abound. The future won't be like the past - maybe an Orwellian dictatorship will become possible with advanced surveillance technologies. Maybe a world government won't see any neighbouring government doing a better job, and feel compelled to match it by improving lot of its citizens. Maybe the threat of revolution remains necessary, even if revolts don't actually happen.

I obviously tend to agree with these caveats more than what I see as "Pollyanna" optimism.

Still, we should refrain from assuming that dictatorships, whether party or individual, are somehow the default state, and conduct a much more evidence-based analysis of the matter.

I think "totalitarianism" is a better term than "party dictatorship." One man is never the problem, but rather just the symptom of the problem of an uncaring, comfortable, and uninformed populace. My .02.