Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality doesn't really "characterize" individual Dementors but they are basically just horrible holes in reality, which seems proper since the death of persons should be rejected as having no proper place in a fully happy and healthy ordering of a world where all the Big Problems have been Solved.

Also in the TV version of Good Omens he's basically just bad. In the book this portrayal is softened a bit.

I upvoted you both because I appreciate the apparent honesty!

However, surely you agree that the world has gotten much sociologically worse in the last 15 years?

Friendship rates are down. Birth rates are down. Happiness rates are down. Distrust is up. Etc.

Having grown up in a small town in northern California full of aging hippies, where the idea that "almost everyone is in almost everyone else's ingroup (and the people who aren't tend to be literal psychos who literally commit robberies or literally murder their parents or whatever (and visible social separations could be grounded in coherent individual failures at basic ethics))" was normal...

...I find it really sad to see a world arise where the idea of distrust and tribalism is so socially real that we can no longer joke about having transcended it successfully.

When I was growing up, my father was in the Rotary Club (which almost eradicated polio via an international network of voluntary cooperators) and they had a vision for World Peace built on friendships between people traveling around the world being virtuous with each other. Some nights, the club would have all the members bring their family to a Thursday Dinner, and we'd hear a speech by someone from the Philippines (or where ever (sometimes it was just the High School principal from the town one valley over (or whatever))) who happened to be visiting my little town in the redwoods, after having been a President of his local Rotary Club in a little town on the other side of the planet, and it was nice and it seemed normal to me.

Not more than three months ago, I saw a slideshow at the my father's church, about a trip deep into a jungle, to a place that has zero roads, and can be reached only part of the year, to help build a community center for a community in decline, and deliver bundles of christmas presents to the community's children. Then we took a collection for doing that again for a new town.

Following scholars like Putnam, I believe that civic engagement is essential for the civic virtue that makes a constitutional democratic republic possible.

All of this feels consonant and consistent with themes of sociological happiness and success and progress going back at least as far as Tocqueville.

You two seem to share an "anti-ingroup vision" of virtue and happiness and systematically good outcomes that is NOT just a joke... and I'm wondering if you could unpack how you think that works so that I could learn to participate in your novel-to-me and hypothetically learnable culture?

From my perspective, if you guys are being entirely literal, and not joking, then... I kinda predict that your society will be a sad place that loses cohesion and falls apart, rather than being a community that grows, and links up, and aims for common goods with all, in a spirit of friendship and reason?

If >80% of humans don't love and trust >80% of humans, in some very abstract and yet very deep sense, based on our shared humanity (ie based on our shared genesis as children made by the same God in the image of universal reasoners?), and our shared belief that humanity is pretty darn OK, then... why have a country together? Why aim for world peace? Why pretend that justice is possible? Why be against racism, or imagine that open borders could ever be a good idea? Why tolerate interstate travel? Why should any city let infectious people enter that city? Why unify Europe? Why keep India together? Why keep China together? Why have cities are all? Why not "social nihilism"?

I feel like you might be missing (1) a really important principle for manifesting utopia inside of history with existing humans, and also (2) you're missing (or not tying together?) key facts that undergird this principle and make its hopes into something other than cope, but rather make the hopes practical and realizable on both a local and global basis.

In the same way that I've offered (1) three links that point to political theorists from past centuries, past decades, and also some friendly voluntary associations living up to those ideals in living memory, and then (2) three more links reiterating "morally universal" conclusions from Christian ethics without actually citing any Christians such as to put the ideas on a more worldly and secular and scientific basis...

...I wonder if you could offer three links to substantive material that hangs together to describe the theory and practice of the "vision of the good" that you are preaching here, so that I could learn to sing along with whatever song you are singing that is similarly hopeful and similarly real but which somehow gives the opposite advice on "being friendly to strangers (by calling them ingroup or any other joke term), and telling jokes about human nature, and trying to make friends"?

In good faith, I hope that you have such a theory and I am open to learning about it.

But epistemically, I fear that I will hear no such theory, and maybe, rather, if my epistemic predictions are born out... then perhaps, morally, I have a minor imperfect duty to offer to teach you my theory, so your praxis can become happier and friendlier and more conducive to helping the world get better outcomes than otherwise... if that's even what you want?

One of the things I love about this is that the people who I appreciate the most might very well downvote it, to prove that they haven't been tricked by all the flattery.

Those people are the most ingroup of all, and I can express my appreciation for them by being humbly grateful for their downvotes.

Their downvote-to-show-understanding is a sort of an echo of my meta-pandering-OP <3

A little piece of me wishes I could get a list of the people I'm being humbly grateful to, but part of the joys of timeless coordination is that you don't have to do all that expensive interpersonal hand-shaking every time you want a single pitiful bilateral link in a coordination network to not fail.

Maybe some of my downvoters are downvoting without irony or awareness, but... I'm OK with that too <3

The real question is how many (and how large of) cliques there are around these parts that do have powers of multi-step inference, and have done N(N-1)/2 bilateral handshakes, such that the entire clique, thrown into a standard one-shot 0-to-100-scaled p-beauty contest with each other, would all justifiably bid zero.

One thing I would want to point out to people who "don't get the joke yet" (so they feel "called to learn more" rather than "getting an ego bruise") is to learn that humans-in-general do almost zero steps of serial processing, but rely almost entirely (even when doing math proofs from scratch) on cached thoughts, and so one of the best methods they could have to understood this joke (or "get gud" at the math) is almost only by having already been exposed to this kind of joke (and the math that undergirds it) in the deep past, so the relevant stuff was in their cache.

Luckily, we are still in the deep past relative to the massive amounts of chaos and need for coordination that probably exists in most possible futures.

So they can read the two links I've offered, and ponder them, especially in conjunction, maybe re-reading them both again after pondering how they might be related.

And in meantime, in the short term, I hope (but believe it is unlikely) that there are many "zero bid beauty contest cliques" among my readership, and I hope they make sure to keep my vote count decently low, and I hope each one also elects a leader to send me a Direct Message :-)

This is, of course, unlikely... but it is slightly more likely to happen in good timelines, and it is important to have hope.

If a officer (serving as a trusted component in a coherent social machine serving an important telos) doesn't resign when their deontics are violated, then why the fuck were they even trusted with such power in the first place? Someone has to be the grownup. You can't have "nothing but idiots and children" if you want good things to happen, on purpose, at scale, with high efficiency. The worst possible outcome is for actively bad things to happen, on purpose, at scale, with high efficiency.

I could write a long response, about "conventional morality that runs on vibes and makes sense to consumers of governance" vs "post-conventional morality that runs on logic and is necessary for producers of governance" but the succinct response is: you left out the MOST IMPORTANT PART of the instructions, which was to resign if the early steps of Saying No To Evil don't work.

Given the context here (you voted to 0 so far, and me prone to writing too much) I've DMed you with a few more words, that might be specifically helpful <3

The public is too uneducated to know better. Even many in the FDA are too uneducated to know better because they are insufficiently interdisciplinary.

The question is: how should the handful of smart and good people react to this state of affairs?

I say: high level operatives within medical bureaucracies should understand the price theory of economics, the germ theory of disease, and have a working definition of jurisprudential integrity. If asked to do evil, they should educate in a face saving way, then disagree pointedly if that doesn't work, then remonstrate, and, at length, they should resign and blow a whistle.

Broadly, they have a duty to correct the public, and elected officials, and anyone who is actually wrong... or at least they have a duty to not enthusiastically conform to the public's stupid, and self-harming, and commercial-propaganda-based opinions in a totally blind and stupid way, and the opposite of their duty would involve going to work, later, for the mobsters, as political lobbyists for those mobsters.

Narrowly, if they weren't just good bureaucrats but good medical bureaucrats, and they understood Koch's Postulates and the real telos of public health systems, they would understand that Racism is not a disease with transmissible causative infectious agent that can be grown in a petrie dish and then physically put into a person to cause the person to "become Racist" somehow... and so they would never say things like "racism is a public health crisis".

Regarding the correct name for the mobsters that BAD bureaucrats might eventually go to work for (until law enforcement properly cleans up a group of bad actors, investigating, prosecuting, and convicting some people people (who should generally get the presumption of innocence (at least by non-investigators, and non-DAs, prior to a procedurally correct conviction))) "a mobster" will often be called something like "the CEO of the City's Sanitation Company who some allege has ties to organized crime" or some such. De facto.

Ideally, "oligarch" might be better than "mobster" since it intrinsically connotes venality (the pursuit of money for personal uses up to or past lines of propriety) and indicates the properness of "a general sense of suspicion by default" by normal people. Very few people are oligarchs, and oligarchs are weirdly powerful.

I think that a properly ordered society would contain some oligarchs, but only as one small part of a free society, with free markets, where the accumulation of personal wealth in hypothetically morally valid ways is a presumptive goal for the society. "The pursuit of happiness" and "the common wealth" are positive goods, and oligarchs are winning at that (insofar as wealth can cause happiness, which seems to be the case).

There can be good oligarchs (who commit no major fraud while vigorously pursuing validly selfish private benefit), and bad oligarchs (who violate just laws and/or coherent morality as they accumulate enormous wealth)... but also, having outright oligarchs run an essential bureaucracy (whose internal procedures inherently require jurisprudential integrity in its day to day administration) would sort of obviously be insane.

Yay for good oligarchs! But boo for bad oligarchs! And boo to the idea of appointing or electing any oligarchs as judges or public benefit administrators or bureaucrats who are funded by taxes (and often empowered to investigate and prosecute criminals).

Congress should repeal Kefauver-Harris so that "treatment X has not been proven efficacious by a wildly expensive high church effort at proof" stops being a valid reason for the FDA to ban something (the way it is (and has been since 1962) in the status quo).

The FDA's ban on "treatments of unproven efficacy" has never been coherent, never helped people, and slowed medical innovation way way way down.

The FDA's ban on "treatments of unproven safety" should be much much cheaper, and slowly scale up based on the size of the N who have tried a treatment, and it should only involve an attempt to measure the lack of safety, so that informed consent can be brought to bare in specific cases, by a trusted clinician, about how much danger is "worth it" in a specific case.

Chemotherapy, for example, is often brutal, and the side effects can be fatal... its just that this is a clinical cost worth clinically paying in some cases, for some cancers, with some prognoses. It isn't "safe" it is just "probably safer than letting the cancer run to completion, and hopefully better than alternative treatments that the doctors even know about, contingent on the specific personalized diagnosis, by one or more doctors, regarding a specific tragic situation".

For some diseases, nothing can save you from "doctor has low skill". Medicine is intrinsically dangerous.

The FDA is a fig leaf on this... and it is a very very heavy fig leaf, that mostly only mitigates anxiety in exchange for OCD rituals, even while the form and cost of the rituals harm science and medicine and technology and "the production of more consumer surplus for patients (by getting them highly effective treatments at competitive prices based on an economic race to the marginal cost of providing the treatment)".

The rent on health is too damn high. The FDA needs more judges, and tort lawyers of high integrity, and economists, and data scientists running statistical clearinghouses... not more molecular biologists.

This would be a huge change, and it would also probably work.

That seems nice. I have not acquired steadfastness (yet (growth mindset?)) but perhaps "find things from which I could justifiably draw steadfastness as a resulting apparent trait" would be a useful tactic to try to apply. I have mostly optimized for flexibility, such as to be able to react to whatever happens, and then be able to nudge everything closer back towards The Form Of The Good... but the practical upshot doesn't look like steadfastness from the outside, I don't think.

Mom would have approved of less "apparent chaos from a distance without the ability to see the causal details" in my life. One of her folksy mantras was "be normal and good" and it was a family joke that my brother and I would always object "we can't do that! look at the world, you have to pick one!"