Neocameralism vs. Demotism & AI vs. Amerika

Abstract:
Neocameralism appears to share the problematic feature of demotism.
Nevertheless, if we somehow implement natural selection in government by making it as easy as possible for governments to fail, we will get the best government.
Moldbug seriously embarrassed himself when he didn't discuss neocameralism's political formula.



Background:
You can have a government that's run for the benefit of the 'employees,' which is literally communism, always parasitic, and always fails because it either bleeds the subjects dry and starves, or loses their support.

Every government is at least a little democratic, in that it requires the resignation of the subjects. No government has ever been able to afford to suppress widespread dissent. (The key threshold is about 10% civil (or impolite) disobedience. If the autres refuse to be encourger, the government ends.)

Alternatively you can have government that's run for the benefit of the subjects, which is not-communism, but hasn't ever been tried. (Though the closer approximations have been better, just as closer approximations of communism have been more Infernal.)

The problem is what makes Moldbug come up with the 'primary property' distinction. As a matter of physical fact, groups do security better than individuals, meaning there's always going to be a principle-agent problem, and this one is the very worst because the agent can always physically seize the principle's entire capital, and the principle can do nothing because individuals are not a group.

We can imagine what is called today an 'enlightened dictator,' which used to be called a 'just king,' who knows not to slaughter the golden goose; who is a communist, an employee running the government for the benefit of the employees, i.e. themselves and their kids, but knows to have a light touch.

We can also imagine that God gives everyone a flying unicorn for a bar mitzvah present.



Because all governments must pacify their subjects vis a vis government rule, it requires a pacifier, which adults have taken to calling the 'political formula' to avoid the embarrassing truth. The political pacifier has a distinct effect on the character of the government using it. As per Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, of stable pacifiers, demotism is a particular awful specimen. The Divine Right of Kings transmutes to the Divine Right of Mob. (ProTip: Kings are noble. Mobs are not. They're both parasitic, but you as subject prefer one parasite over the other.)



Discussion:
While deeply confused about what Moldbug was trying to say, Brett Stevens raises all the salient points, passing an extremely high bar, statistically speaking, as a quality critic. I will thus politely ignore the confusion, and I hope you can too.

Neocameralism is Moldbug's attempt to produce a much better political pacifier than demotism. He does this by imagining the most ideal workable governance structure and ignoring the issue of pacification entirely. I extrapolate that he imagines a world of adults like himself, who recognize they can't change the government, and thus simply accept its existence without a specific pacification doctrine. Moldbug shows that neocameralist governance indeed theoretically aligns governor and subject interests, and thus behaving as an adult like himself is indeed rational.
(By 'theoretically' I mean theoreticians forget relevant factors all the time. However, if Moldbug has done so, nobody has been able to point out which factor he's forgotten. If he hasn't, it will turn out he is simply correct, because that's how logic works.)
Basically, while the neocameral CEO can indeed seize the entire neostate for himself, he demonstrably won't, for exactly the same reasons the CEO of Ford doesn't simply allocate all of Ford's production to himself and retire with like a million cars.
("Sir, we're running low on virgin's blood for your bath."
"Ah, Jeeves, just sell a few hundred more of the Pintos."
"Very good sir.")

Moldbug imagines that the sovcorps would leave their borders open, as a home you're not allowed to sell is less valuable than one you are allowed to sell, meaning closed sovcorps would have a lower stock price, and either get bought out, go broke and collapse, or shape up to prevent these things.

However, this means sovcorps have, if anything, even more of a democratic nature than democracies. Especially thinking of the most valuable citizens, if moving sovcorp is as easy as moving apartments, then we imagine a quite servile and solicitous 'king.'

they will flock to that which is more mentally convenient, thus ending up at liberalism.

(Noting his idiosyncratic though precise notion of 'liberalism.')
It seems sovcorps will pander to their subject's whims, generally speaking, the same way 'the customer is always right' often means you're allowed to verbally abuse your service provider. And the whole point of anti-demotism is the people's whims are kind of cataclysmically awful.

And you know what? That may indeed happen. However, you can no more prove it will happen than I can prove it can't happen.



I will nevertheless suggest as much.
 

right now people know that voting Leftist results in them paying more taxes and receiving less, and still they do it — why? Answer: because government is not the cause but the effect, and the cause is that under social systems, egalitarianism is the way to advance. Again, the problem is us.

Two differences.
First, 'good schools.' When someone is choosing something they have genuine control over and has a genuine effect on them, they don't signal, they, err, competence.

Voting is free and pointless, thus pure signalling. No, voting left doesn't really result in them paying more taxes. They are going to pay more taxes anyway, so you might as well vote left and be holier-than-thou, instead of voting right and being taxed for nothing.

Similarly, try to use political sophistry to convince someone of something false about their job. At least, if you enjoy being shut down the hardest you've ever been. Scamming someone is much, much harder than the voting booth makes it seem.

Second, what's actually mentally convenient is choosing the strong horse and ignoring all policy. Folk will move to the richest or most feared polity - the strongest, thus the healthiest. Sure at first it won't be clear who's going to win, and it will come down to policy. Likely a bunch of folk will voluntarily move to communisms. Then they will get jacked, and move somewhere they don't get jacked. (Equivalently, the polity will die out and become fallow.)



While the school thing suggests subjects will be relatively sane about things, let's imagine a few ways they might not be.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid. If a light-liberal regime can last long enough for sane regimes to go bankrupt, the 'strong horse' comparison becomes a broken-window fallacy of unseen benefits.

Citizens may choose redistributivist regimes out of guilt or virtue-signalling, then refuse to recant (move) out of embarrassment.

Violent (e.g. Islamic) regimes may outcompete regimes trying to be more peaceful, because violence pays off now but economic growth pays off ten years from now, again leading to a broken-window world.

There is an absolute lower bar for competent polity-scale leadership. It may well be that nobody alive passes that bar. (Or equivalently the smallest number of key supporters per capita is larger than the number of sane rulers per capita.) Genetic evolution tries everything. Humans can only try things that occur to them to try, meaning someone has to think it's a good idea to do the thing that's actually a good idea. The leading cause of corporate dysfunction is government regulation, but the runner-up is various forms of not thinking of the good idea as good or at all.

Once demotism is as discredited as divine right, we recognize that there is indeed demand for a political formula, and a neocameral selection stew is as good at selecting for sophism as for competence. They may come up with a really compelling novel lie, which will last another several hundred years.



Neocameralism is a specific model of what Steel Anarchism would result in. (Caveat: true anarchism formalizes Exit as pacifier, instead of simply hoping the incentives work out.)

Steel Anarchism is a prayer to Gnon.

"Dear Gnon, bestow upon us the best government, love, everybody." The fiercer the selection, the more graciously Gnon will grant our prayer. Anything that weakens the selection - namely, political pacifiers that aren't Exit - is a slap in Gnon's face. While Gnon is merciful (or perhaps lazy) eventually he will slap back. And his hand is bigger than yours.

However, it may well turn out the best government is still a net parasite. It's not up to you, or me, or us, and especially not to idealistic pro-state wishers. It's up to Gnon. We can thank Gnon it's not worse, or do that whole slapping thing. There aren't any other options.

Nitpick:
Brett Stevens is ontologically committed to anarcho-pessimism.

Until we get rid of the notion of equality, and replace it with culture and hierarchy, we are doomed.

Hierarchy == coercion => parasitism,

[prevent] government from being able to operate behind an ideological aegis which allows it to commit parasitism that cannot be criticized because its goal is theoretically noble.

Doing the substitution, "until we get rid of parasitism and replace it with parasitism, we are doomed." Coda: oh wait shit, we're just doomed.

Economics Scholarly Failure

Excuse me, I have to quickly outsmart all of economics here. (Again, this is to to economics' shame, not my credit.) When I see the word 'puzzling' I attribute it to self-inflicted stupidity. This was indeed the case this time.

both employment and wages fall due to decreased demand.

Technology increases productivity, which causes deflation, effectively increasing wages. Since I'm not all of economics I can't get exact numbers, but it will be close to parity, netting no change in wages. Further, demand for raw materials actually increases. Employment only falls short term, because the market gets further away from equilibrium, temporarily.

This explanation may help us understand why we see steep declines in employment while wages remain steady

Mainstream economics exists to glorify what its paymasters wanted to do anyway. This means it's their job to not understand how a minimum wage works.

It's obvious now I've said 'minimum wage,' right? If wages must fall, but can't, you get unemployment, while wages remain steady.

Wages remain steady because there's a status cline that overrides wage compression. Have to pay the not-janitor a set percentage more than the janitor. If market wages fall below that for the not-janitor, since the market can't lower the janitor's wage, the market responds with rationing, which is equivalent to unemployment in this case. Specifically, it can only hire not-janitors with above-previous-average productivity, who are willing to work for less than their market wage. If humans weren't slow and stupid, minimum wages would entirely eliminate non-minimum-wage jobs at any point wages are falling.

But the quoted combination could happen anyway. Technological unemployment: wages down, productivity up:wages up. So, wages: no change, but unemployment.

None of this is to say that I don't think better productivity wouldn't cause leisure to substitute for employment. Further, that's a good thing. However, it raises another government boondoggle, which is regulatory overhead. The overhead for a half-time worker isn't half as big as a full-time worker. But, at the same time, hours over 40 cost 50% extra on the margin. Ergo, all wage employees must work exactly 40 hours, absent very strong contrary factors. All salary workers must work as much as they can be convinced to amortize their regulatory overhead. (On top of it already being a good deal for the employer.)

When there's less work, because more productivity, employers fire someone rather than reduce time worked, and thus wages. Or, the salaried worker works less for the same pay.

Right now, I’m gathering facts about the possible mechanisms at play, beginning with a hard look at time-use by young men with less than a four-year degree.

Viciousness in the population must be at fault, because our rulers are virtuous, not vicious. Everything they do is anointed.

I am currently working to document this phenomenon, but there is a real challenge in determining what the right policy response might be to address the underlying issues.

Boy, demonstrating the whiteness of black sure is tough.

Receptor Sensitivity Homeostasis

And for that matter, I’ve met a few people who never seem to develop tolerance for benzodiazepine sleeping pills. You see this same pattern for opiates used as painkillers. I spent so many years confused about whether people develop tolerance to these or not, and my final conclusion is that some people do and some people don’t and if you try to find a coherent universal pattern here you will go insane.

Essay writers all need physics and programming.

If the user repeatedly clicks the 'OK' button, some programs will crash and some don't and if you try to find a coherent universal pattern here you will go insane.

It's called a 'bug,' and someone suitably knowledgeable about the program and the language it's written in can find and fix the bug. The issue with benzos is the program is executed in proteins and the language it's written in is GATTACA.

I spent so many years confused about whether programs crash or not.

Yet it never occurred to him that 'programs' isn't a natural kind at this level of detail. Programs vary in their bugginess and thus their responses to input. Programs also vary in function and implementation, so the exact same input may produce, variably, good output, buggy output, and correct output that is identical to the buggy output due to the 'bug' being correct behaviour for that program, and 'fixing' it would break six other things.

I don’t know who first discovered that low-dose naltrexone could help potentiate the effect of opiates

This is one of the first things I would have thought of, because I know receptor sensitivity is homeostatically regulated. (I think I confirmed this from one of Sapolsky's behavioral biology lectures.) There's a target range of stimulation, and the body attempts to meet it. It can use impulses/behaviour, self-medication, hormone regulation, and if those don't work, it tunes receptor sensitivity. You can see this happen very quickly with taste and smell. However, since it's a range, it's possible to get stuck at the extrema. There's hysteresis.

Addiction is often the result of the target range itself getting deformed, so no reasonable amount of natural stimulation can hit it, even with maximally aggressive tuning. Alternatively, the tuning process can itself be buggy.

Naturally pain receptors are highly resistant to this effect, much the way sharks don't get cancer. It became well-tuned and stayed that way, and is now selected for being conservative.

Consciousness is Not PR Agent

It's said consciousness is the brain's PR agent, which implies the consciousness is largely a net cost to everyone else and should be ostracized, ignored, ridiculed, etc.

In reality, naive introspective access goes to the subconsciousness' PR agent, and the naive consciousness uncritically repeats it. It must be this way, because consciousness does hardly any thinking itself - it's largely a coding interface, which the rest of the brain compiles and runs. The consciousness can't come up with its own rationalizations. However, the consciousness can stop being naive, and look beyond its own surface appearance. Once the consciousness learns not to take the rationalization agent at face value, it can become a powerful and active member of the gestalt being. The subconsciousness' various single-purpose networks don't have to be isolated, as the consciousness can query them on purpose and synthesize their results.

Consciousness gets ridiculed by those who want you to be weak, so they can dominate you. (Neglecting mere repeaters.) I suggest not listening to them.

Dominance Perverts Justification

Christians describe demons as dominated by the need to dominate. Domination is indeed evil.

Monarchs had the divine right of kings. But who's really in charge, the monarch, or God? There's an easy way to find out: do something God definitely doesn't want done. If it works, the king really is the dominant one. They'll get a nice high and want another hit, so they'll do something God would dislike even more.

Presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors represent the will of the people and govern with their consent. Unless they're really in charge, in which case they can do something against the will of the people and survive. The most dominant can directly contradict the people's will repeatedly and emerge unscathed. Thus, they do precisely this.

Godel vs. Physics

Godel's first incompleteness theorem is not true but there's a Platonic ideal form that is true. Physics does in fact have a logical singularity as described by Godel - something true, but not provable.

Little known fact: physics is indeed a formal system, which is why theoretical physics works (e.g. Einstein).

Godel's first concludes that healthy formal systems include true but unprovable statements. I have no idea what this would look like for math - and you can try googling up an example yourself, let me know if you find any, and more importantly teach me your google-fu. However, in physics, it's quantum decoherence.

Without loss of generality, consider an electron in a superposition of spin up and spin down. Before collapse there is no fact of the matter regarding whether it will be spin up or spin down. After, it is true that it is spin down.

How does the electron know to pick spin down?

('How does it know' is a critical physics question. Easy example: the water knows to be held back because the dam's surface tells it to stop, and more importantly, where exactly to stop, and how much force is necessary to unstop.)

Picking up or down makes sense - it's aligning with a magnetic field. After it's picked we can just look. But how does the electron itself know it picked spin down?

We know nothing else picks for it, because then we'd be able to measure that thing and predict the choice. Without some internal process telling it which to pick, it should itself not know which to pick, and remain in a superposition...but this has the same problem, being as we could measure the process and predict it.

There is no process that tells the electron it has picked spin down. It is not a consequences of any law of physics. Yet, we can measure that it indeed did pick it, and it is therefore true.

Free Will is Analytically Impossible

So, the five answers: yes, no, I don't know, I don't care, and wrong question. Y/N/?/¯\_(ツ)_/¯/X
At first I found a strong sign of X on the libertarianism vs. determinism question when it turned out their consequences were identical. I've since found determinism isn't predictable and now it's time to show libertarianism is impossible. Mainly for perspective on how conflicted the original question was.

Either I can decide to pursue what I want, or I can't. Either I can choose what I want or I can't. These are mainly straightforward empirical questions - I would notice if I couldn't pursue the strategy I wanted, like I notice I don't control what I like or don't like. (Minimal control, anyway.) However, it doesn't matter, because either way free will is impossible.

Though I control my actions, my best action is determined/predicted by what I want. If it were not so determined, I would not be free - I would be doing something other than what I decide to do. Thus, I cannot be free either way.

In theory I could control what I want, but based on what? Look at the words - I would be able to want whatever I want. If I could fully control my wants, then how I arranged them would have to be determined by some not-me factor. The thing which I use to decide how I arrange things under my control is, by definition, my preferences. Having total control over my preferences is impossible, because there would be nothing to decide their disposition with.

Empirically, the 'want' part of the brain can be damaged, producing caricature vulcans. These folk don't make decisions, because there's no ought from is. Ultimately, to change what I want, I have to have some core value to use as a fulcrum to lever around the values lower in the hierarchy. (Or shallower in the onion.)


Hence, the desire for 'free will' is an evopsych thing, not a philosophy thing. It's about not being in physical chains. It's about my values not being overridden by someone else's. Not being in logical/causal chains is impossible.

Official AI Position on the Holocaust

The topic is too politically charged to safely discuss even anonymously. AI therefore not only holds no position regarding any detail of the Holocaust, but refuses to even acknowledge the question or admit to knowing a definition of 'Holocaust.'

Answers to the Five Most Intractable Problems

Problems judged by Julian Baggini.



1. How does science work?

Identical things are identical, logic implies things, and observation is possible. Similar things are similar, implying the possibility of being similar but not identical.

If we see a blue cube, and note it has certain properties such as having sharp edges, then we can safely infer that the next cobalt hexahedron we see will have the same properties, because e.g. the sharp edges are implied by the cubishness. Or, if similar, will have similar properties.



2. Why should we be moral?

First point: moral nihilism is true. The correct question is, why should we cooperate?

Cooperation is positive sum. Defection is negative sum. As a result, cooperation is always more profitable overall considered in a wide enough scope. It is further analytically provable that cooperation is always possible.

Incidentally, cooperation's profitability + the fact of self-defence implies don't steal, don't murder, etc.



3. How do people of different values live together?

By using the correct transformations. In general, people with different values should ostracize each other, except where boundary-specific rules can be negotiated. Though in practice, non-ostracism boundary-specific rules are almost always negotiable.

Cooperation implies property rights. What you value goes, for your property. Thus, don't eat meat at a vegan's house, and similarly the vegan cannot object to meat eaten at your house. If one of these is not acceptable, then the vegan's only valid recourse is ostracism, as anything more proactive is defection. Defection implies the meat-eater should, rationally, neutralize the vegan before they act.



4. How is consciousness possible?

The correct question is 'how is physics possible?' The Cogito generalizes: consciousness is undoubtable, because identical things are identical.

If they mean how Descartes' metaphorical pineal gland possibly works, it works because parts of physics are undecidable purely by the physical laws, but still observably have outcomes. The outcomes are possibly due to consciousness deciding the outcome, meaning the entities partake of both substances. Presumably a symmetric undecidability exists on the consciousness side, allowing the chain of causality to be properly linked both ways, obeying Newton's third law.



5. Do we have free will, and if so, what is it?

That's backwards. We must figure out what it is before we figure if we have it.

Given that identical things are identical, if we reach a crossroads we've seen before, then we can recognize and predict the outcome, and take the other fork. Out of curiosity, or out of disliking the previous result, or whatever. A counterfactual past can be brought into existence in the future. (Credit to Baggini for this wording.)

Pragmatically, free will is being able to take the same fork as last time, or not. It is perhaps better to call this property agency. Yes, we have it. If you did not have this free will, it would be immediately apparent, because your body would contravene your decisions. You would decide to turn left and would instead go right. Pragmatically, you want things, and you can always decide to pursue those things.

Alternatively, you think free will is something else. We may or may not have that.



Solutions to Common Objections / Commentary

1.
You can observe wrong, this doesn't mean identical things aren't identical, it means you mistakenly thought an identical thing was dissimilar or vice-versa.
Observation has to be possible, as part of the generalization of the Cogito.

Black swans are an invalid critique of the essential method. The error is mainly in group handling. If we call all members of the 'swan' group white, then rather than telling us anything about swans, it only tells us about our grouping. Grouping like this is only useful if the property in question is logically implied by a membership requirement of the group. All fire is hot, for example, because fire is necessarily an exothermic reaction. If you found a cold or cooling flame, you'll find it's not an oxidation reaction, or it's not self-sustaining, etc. 

Cubes inherently have edges, so by seeing a cube shape I can infer I will feel a sharp edge. Swans do not inherently have any colour. Indeed the swan = white thing is a back-definition. It defines membership of the group 'swans' as 'white swan-shaped birds,' meaning a black swan-shape isn't a swan. At best we end up with white swan_1 and not-white swan_2. And indeed, the black swan is not the same species as the white. (Unlike black leopards or jaguars.)

2.
Cooperation is ethitropism. Oversimply, it is not imposing your values on someone else.

3.
In mathematics, any two maps can be defined in terms of their transformations to each other. So, three objects: the maps and the transformation. Values work like maps. Getting them to work together is the transformation - how the boundary rules are best arranged is determined by the shape of the transformation going from one map to the other.

Values that inherently involve anethitropism are not valid values. The rational response is roughly to request, then if necessary cajole, then if necessary neutralize the anethitropes. Anethitropes, like polar bears, just aren't compatible with modern urban living.

4.
If you find the existence of consciousness mysterious, you should find the existence of matter equally mysterious. Existence is kinda mysterious, you guys. Existence is a far more intractable problem than these five.

5.
It's more that I can find the answer this one, rather than I have answered it. There are therefore many possible objections.

I will note being free is not being random. 

Most likely the desire to claim to have free will has to do more with evolution than with philosophy. It's about not being chained up with physical chains, rather than chains of logic. In the purely objective universe, free will and determinism are indistinguishable, so the emotional attachment to freedom can't possibly have anything to do with this question. E.g, whether you're 'responsible' for your decisions or not has nothing to do with how anyone else should react. (Do we jail someone because this will cause other criminals to not commit, or because it will deter other criminals from committing? In either case, bars are involved.)

A free will you cannot detect the lack of is almost certainly a difference of no difference. 

Experimental subjects who behave worse if they believe in determinism are being irrational. Their conclusion doesn't genuinely follow from their premises.

Quick refresher: it's you if, when it's cut, you feel bleeding. Perhaps you want to say free will is you being in charge of your decisions. Well, duh, of course - look at the wording, you = your. If you weren't in charge of it, it's not your decision, by definition.

The question of determinism is often phrased as, 'you could have decided differently.' Then you can get compatibilism - being as you had some definite series of properties at the time of the decision, the decision itself was, in principle, predictable. You forced yourself to make the decision you made. (Well, yes? Of course?)

Being predictable is considered an insult. However, compatibilism isn't being pragmatically predictable. The mind is a closed system, so the only entity with the necessary information to predict the decisions is the thing making the decision. Only predictable by itself - and prediction requires overhead, so that's pointless inefficiency.

If you really could have decided differently, then there is no fact of the matter about how you will decide. This could even be not-random by having no fact of the matter about the distribution either. However, it is hard to see how such a fact gets created. It's not a coincidence that this is only possible in a situation that's called, in logic, undecidability. This is the difference between pragmatic unpredictability and in-principle unpredictability. (Incidentally physics as a whole is pragmatically unpredictable.)

There's also a small galaxy of uncommon but reasonable-ish objections which I won't go into here.

Definitions Considered Meaningful

My monster comment may give you the impression that handling definitions are important to doing philosophy. This is because they are.

Philosophy getting tricky on you? Not sure what's up with chicken eggs? Try definitions! Definitions make life easy.

I have catchphrases. One of them is, "If you have a definition, the answer is trivial, if not, the answer is undecideable."

Definitions are the logical equivalent to mathematical coordinate systems. The underlying facts - whether your triangle has three sides or whether it's isosceles or not does not depend on the coordinate system, even though all the numbers describing the triangle do depend on the coordinate system, and it's impossible to describe a particular triangle without said numbers. Similarly, the facts of chicken existence don't depend on the definitions, but whether you say 'the chicken came first' does depend on your chicken definition.

First, let's take evolution as true. Let's say 'chicken' means 'viable organism whose equilibrium is a chicken.' The equilibrium bit is so young chickens are still chickens. In this case, the egg and chicken arrived at the same time, because the chicken embryo is a chicken. If instead we use 'organism that lays eggs that grow into chickens,' then chickens came first, because the last proto-chicken laid a chicken egg, and was thus itself a chicken. If we decides chicks are too different to really be chickens, then chicken eggs appeared before chickens.

Now let's take creationism as true. God goes 'parp' and there's a chicken. Chickens came first. Or maybe God goes 'parp' and there's some eggs. Eggs came first. Programmers can exactly simulate this with spawn_chicken(), making pixel images resembling chickens. Perhaps they instead use spawn_chickens_and_eggs(20), and then eggs and chickens came at the same time. Twenty of them, specifically. 

Trivial.

If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? Well, do you mean 'soundwaves' or do you mean 'audio cortex recognition'? Again, the answer is trivial.

The only real difference is dire apes tend to get attached to particular definitions, but not to particular origin points.

A bowl is supposed to hold soup. But then there's no bowls in space, or else gourds are now bowls. Cracked bowls aren't bowls.

There's an attachment to the bowl-shape definition. This is not normally a problem for bowls, but is a problem for selfishness. However, it's a problem for bowls too, because there no useful non-fuzzy definition of 'bowl.' We can't go down to the quantum level, because a bowl will instantly stop being a bowl after a thermal fluctuation, but not going down that far means the definition is necessarily imprecise.

In practice dire apes have an archetype 'bowl' which is precise within natural instrumentation limits, plus a scalar 'similarity to' function. Bowls which are more than a little dissimilar get a modifier, like 'tall' or 'shallow.' A broken bowl is called 'broken,' and so on. It's not a bowl when there's a different archetype with a higher similarity scalar. If it's about equal it gets called something to the format of 'bowl-cup'.

Dire apes don't seem to like this system of theirs, however. They want precise boundaries, rather than appreciating the scalar as it is. This is the sorites paradox. Further, philosophers straight-up have to use precise definitions. Though, for philosophers at least, the answer is simple. The soros is never a heap, because there's no such thing as bowls. Definitions, like coordinates, are arbitrary, and so while there's no spoon, there is a definition 'spoon' which particular clusters of sense-data match sufficiently.

However, this means philosophy does a thing backward to the intuitive way. Having proven an implication of 'bowls' or spoons or heaps or George Washington or chocobos, the proof doesn't actually apply to bowls. It applies to the particular definition, which we happened to call 'bowls.' Let X = bowls. We prove X has a bunch of properties. X may be very bowllike, but since it is necessarily precise and bowls are necessarily imprecise, they won't be quite the same thing. The proofs will have a domain of validity, defined by the definitions used. If I prove a bunch of things about flatware for eating soup out of, it will not be valid for bowls in space, except by coincidence.

This is why I wish academics were still performed in Latin. It would mean philosophers could get on with it without disrupting native meanings of words like 'selfishness.' Since Latin is now out, for preference I'd re-start with ancient Greek, it being strictly more tasteful.

Ascended Comment - Lunatic Activism

http://www.xenosystems.net/lunatic-activism/

Primary point:
If you can reliably kill an unarmed woman in the street, there is no need to do so. State your threat, which is now a promise, which will achieve compliance with your aims, without actually having to kill anyone. (On average.) Indeed carrying out the threat will be counter-productive. (On average.)

Killing people unreliably is chaos. Chaos is - get this - not order.



Do not feel sorry for this woman. She was not your friend, she was certainly not your vassal, and she was not your responsibility. Her life or death is meaningless to you and should be treated accordingly.



That the perpetrator thinks he was a neo-nazi does not make him a rightist, even if you accept nazis as right wing, which I don't. Crazy people believe crazy things. At best you'll find he was to neo-nazism as a lapsed Catholic is to Christianity. More likely it was a loud statement with little to no grounding in behaviour, taken to justify a pre-existing desire to murder someone.



I'm skeptical of the claim it's a propaganda win for anyone. Everyone who was friends with the woman, and thus likely to think badly of her killer's group was already not even relatively right-wing. As for the other side...look, humans are murderous. The idea of killing the inconvenient comes naturally to us. Nobody sympathetic to the other side is going to be beat up about her death, and thus unlikely to grow in antipathy to other side.

What I'm seeing is a massive waste of time all the way around the table.

Gnon's Judgement

Intriguing, you say?

UPDATE: WF has an intriguing thought:

Evil is always ultimately self-destructive, suggesting the latter, when found in a system, likely indicates the former. In other words, if a system  (ideology, structure, philosophy, individual, or thought) contains within it the seeds of contradiction, be it internal or external, or systemic collapse, it's a good bet it is against God and therefore evil. This is just as true for individuals with unresolved or incorrectly resolved cognitive dissonance, for example.

This is because God is both real and Creator of reality, and all that is in conflict with reality is necessarily in conflict with Him, too.

Well...yes. Evil = self-contradiction = bad logic? Sure, I'll go with that. But it's not safe for Christians to go around saying things like that. Christianity is guaranteed to have errors, but is not susceptible to error-correction. (This is Pride, fyi.)  This is why e.g. Catholicism is failing. Naturally, slower than Progressivism, because there's fewer errors, but failing all the same.

States reliably fail on a ten-generation clock, for comparison, if they don't die to violence. 

Hard Floors for Social Status

Proggies have a remarkable ability to change what's high and low status almost at will. See: gay marriage. Indeed, this would be a useful technique to steal from them. However, I want to get properly on the record predicting certain hard constraints.

First: pedophilia.
Can't be acceptable. (Not ephebophilia, that's historically and archaeologically normal.) The revulsion is hard-coded and is reinforced by the obvious selfish threat to their own children.

Total public nudity.
Wifmen will always have a body part which the showing thereof means 'have sex with me,' and they will for some bizarre reason insist on covering it. (Caveat: hardcore exhibitionists.) While I'm skeptical, I hear in some cultures it's the belly button rather than the other couple obvious choices.

Tolerance of different behaviour.
Different appearances are apparently easily tolerated. Used to be clothes counted as behavior, but they don't anymore. See also: dyeing, tattoos. While clothes still mark class and phyle leanings, most will tolerate odd dress as long as they strictly behave according to the code. At no point will odd but harmless be genuinely tolerated - being odd will always count, in and of itself, as being harmful.

Suggestions for this list are appreciated, though note I'll be skeptical to a comical degree.

Trump Specifics

Want to get properly on the record here.

Summary: Trump being President kills democracy, but even odds it won't happen.



I believe Trump will win the popular vote for President. 90%, and the only reason I'm going higher is I think I have a lot of unknown unknowns.

I predict, however, that the votes will be defrauded sufficiently that he does not officially win. I call it 55-60% chance of this.

Because the fraud will be so widespread, it will be vulnerable. The system can only stretch so far before it's obvious. Trump could use this to expose it. However, I expect that he, like I, will realize this would destroy democracy in America. Once legitimacy goes, it's only a matter of time. Trump will side with his fellow elites over his voters. Call it 70-80%.

In this case, democracy may limp along a while yet. Trump's voters will be very angry, they will probably (85%) realize in their guts they were cheated, but America's aristocracy-suppression system is working very well. They will swallow this indignity, as they have every other, as long as the panem-et-circenses regime continues to provide diversions and dinners. 



In the case that Trump exposes the fraud, they may do the equivalent of a filibuster, and America will lack a President the way Belgium did. He may or may not become President at the end. If they don't, he will be President more or less immediately. I don't see democracy in America surviving either event - the only question is whether we see a sudden explosion or a lingering death.



In the case the votes are not defrauded, Trump wins. This spells the doom of democracy in America.

To get his wall built, Trump will have to steamroll the bureaucracy, and Harvard by proxy. While they could roll with this punch and survive, they have become too cocky, too paranoid, and too brittle. They will shatter, rather than simply wait 8 years. Their death throes will be spastic, and will cause widespread destruction - most likely abstract, in social trust and so on, possibly actual riots etc.

Alternatively, Trump fails to get the wall built. This will reveal the impotence of POTUS imperatives. It will become common knowledge that the election is theatre. It's a liar championship, held for circus value. They may try electing a 'bring back POTUS' candidate once or twice before they finally give up on their government, and kill democracy in America.

Trump deciding against building his wall after all is not significantly different in disillusioning outcome.



There is also a small chance, under 10%, that Trump is somehow disqualified. I believe he would already be disqualified if they could find a non-democracy-killing way to do it. They may find what they think is one that isn't, which will reveal the rigged nature of elections, even in America. Again, Trump could easily exploit this to defeat the official press, but doing so would destroy democracy in America, and I believe he will side with his fellow elites instead.



Bring it, Reality. Take the 'third' option, entirely out of left field.

The Venezuelan Former State

I would have told Venezuelans to reject Chavez and Maduro. Resist now, because it's only going to get more difficult later. I'm hardly alone in this advice.

Venezuelans instead listened to someone foolish. They have reaped the consequences.

Alternatively, Venezuelans had no choice. In other words, they were not responsible. In other words, they were children, no matter their age. They had no right to endorse Chavez or Maduro, because they never had an option of rejecting them. There cannot be any legitimate ruler of Venezuela, so it might as well be ruled by me or you.

So which is it? Can I force whatever regime I happen to enjoy on Venezuelans, because otherwise they'll be captured by someone worse, or are they responsible for what's happened to them? Cnut's law: it has to be one or the other.

I repeat: if you claim the correct answer isn't an invading army, you are ontologically committed to blaming Venezuelans for their problems, in which case there's really no answer but the fires of annihilation.

Consciousness Contradiction Hunting 3: Prey Found

My theory states both that minds should be perfectly isolated & that it should be so easy to brush other minds that it can be done by looking at someone.

My theory states the mere addition paradox is resolved as consciousness is qualitative and thus not mathematical & that it's possible in principle to put exact dollar values on all your preferences. (Would you prefer a pear, xor $1? How about a pear, xor $2? Induce as necessary. Thus trade is possible.)

My theory posits that quantum particles have a quantum of consciousness & that the machine talking to the consciousness can swap particles without changing minds. How does the consciousness know what machine to hear? (When your visual cortex swaps in fresh neurons, how do you know to keep seeing with your eyes?)

I have grave doubts about Godel's first incompleteness theorem & my theory posits that consciousness/quantum indeterminacy represents a Godel incompleteness in physics, and there will be a symmetric indeterminacy in consciousness, plugged by physics.



I don't expect these contradictions to sink the theory, but I do expect the resolutions to require dramatic changes. Either way, they must be resolved.

The novelty of these contradictions, as Stanford et al could not help, suggests the theory is itself novel. However, as it is a straightforward extension of Descartes, it also suggests I'm working alone.

Philosophy/Magic in Demotism

Nazis have racist views of Jews. Proggies have racist views of whites. These are of course completely different, which is why the Nazis will destroy/save us all. Yes, I just noticed. I got to wondering if it was a coincidence, and it's not. I can't explain it mechanistically, though. It seems to be pure logic/magic.

A car is based on explosions. Fire is what makes it go. Thaumaturgically, it should be loud and hot. But we can put a radiator and a muffler on it, and it's not that bad, unless it's been sitting in direct sunlight.

Demotism is based on envy. Thing about envy is you can't have it flopping around untethered. Have to have a target. Hence, market dominant minorities. Kulaks, Jews. Or, in the proggie's case, market dominant majorities. Not merely handy, but vital. Envy is what makes it go, but there's no such thing as a sociological muffler.

Marx tried to do it with classes. If you have racially pure nations, you work with what you got. Classes aren't really that unmistakeable, though, so it's not great. Further, immigrants always have a strong vote bias, so the party they vote for always wants to import them. Skin colour: now you're cooking with gas.

Even if proggies manage to prison-camp every white, inevitably they will want to import someone of a different shade of brown. They will try to exploit the envy of the original shade of brown, and the cycle will repeat. As always, as politics approaches communism, citizens must approach equal. The envotaic force must be allowed to do work. However, we are all equal if and only if we are all dead.

Hume's Freshly Sharpened Guillotine

Rocks cannot benefit. The surprising consequence of this is Hume's guillotine. The psychological barrier will be that if there's no ought from is, there is no ought. (Except in that if you want Y, and only X leads to Y, you ought to do X. And the surprising consequence of that is the standard moral rules.)

Rocks are not conscious, so for rocks to benefit, benefit has to be objective. This means it must be measurable. Not only must there be a benefit-measuring instrument, it would have to be necessary to take this measurement to correctly predict how a rock would behave.
Humans occasionally project minds onto mindless things, such as thinking that a rock resists breaking and is sad if it is hit hard enough to crack. However, some rocks would suffer more, others less, and the cloven halves of one rock would behave differently than another. Modus tollens, there is no benefit, and thus benefit is not objectively real.



Because benefit is subjective, value is subjective. Insert being shocked, shocked. At this point there's still a possibility of logically relating preferences to each other and finding a logic crystal, from which right and wrong could be refined. However, such a right would necessarily be objective, which would therefore have to be measurable to be real, as above.

Hypothesis/Query: Decadence Essentially the Opposite of Independence?

First, I need a single word that refers to the state of being independent of excessive oversight and of taking responsibility for your own actions both prospectively and morally.

I then suppose: is decadence the opposite of this virtue? Of relaxing into slavery and disdaining responsibility? Seems to be. What do you think?

Unmistakeable Evidence

(Previously.)

Nobody argues that men are, on average, the same height as women. One could at least argue that they should be, that it's sexist nutrition or something that's keeping women's heights down. They don't, because it's just too stupid - the argument is over the evidence event horizon.

Logically speaking, the fact that there is one sexual dimorphism all but proves that every trait will be sexually dimorphic. It's merely a question of degree at this point. Signalling eclipses logic so what's logically sound does not predict espoused beliefs, but it's not a total eclipse - there is a floor beyond which things are simply too implausible. I call this floor unmistakeable evidence. Can't argue that an orange ball is in fact green, can't argue that most of the women in the room are as tall as most of the men, but not all these floors are so obvious.



Proofs are often taken from what's called 'first principles.' Problem: easy to disagree on what counts as a first principle. Ask Decartes. Ask Hume.

The event horizon between plausible lies and implausible lies gets created by social agreement in the first place. I now use unmistakeable evidence instead of first principles.



There is also a top horizon, which are implausible due to complexity.

Are proggies the real sexists? Yes, yes they are.
If it's demeaning to say women are physically weaker than men, then reality is sexist.

In a 1993 study exploring gender differences in muscle makeup, female participants exhibited 52 percent of men's upper body strength

Biology can't be changed. Attitudes - whether it's demeaning to be physically frail- can be. Hence, the proggies have chosen to demean women as they actually are. Consider: the average woman will hear, "it's demeaning to be weak," and will notice all the men she knows are stronger than she is. What will she conclude? Proggies are not kind people.

However, this argument involves what, four logical steps? About three too many to be rhetorically effective. The lies about the ball are implausible, but in this case it's reality that's implausible. This makes it a prime target for sophists.

Truth Machine Blueprint

Materials:

Humans
Failure


Tools:

TBD, requires the ability to engineer subcultures.

There is no discrete physical truth-machine. No veritometer. Whether a belief is held to be true or not always depends, ultimately, on human judgment. It is thus time to stop pretending otherwise, and appoint a Judge. Or rather, to note the Catholics already did this and appoint a Pope. More precisely, allow a Pope to appoint themselves.

Catholicism obviously hasn't worked out in the end. To repair this design flaw, I introduce at least one competing Pope, and thus introduce Darwinian selection.

Each believer will be able to follow their conscience toward whichever Pope strikes their fancy, whereupon they are required to believe whatever that Pope chooses to require of them. Generally believers will not be considered competent truth-seekers: instead the Pope determines the true answer to all questions according to whatever method their conscience dictates. If it is strictly impossible for a believer to follow an existing Pope, they shall themselves start a congregation, appointing themselves as Pope, thus increasing competition, thus selection, and thus the accuracy of the machine as a whole.

As the purpose of truth is to control the world, the wisest congregation will tend to succeed. More deluded congregations will tend to empty out or perish. Frivolous congregations will be seen as such. The network of competing Pope-lead subcultures constitutes a truth machine.

Grey Goo Already Happened

Except it was green. Evolution is smarter than you. If it were possible to convert Earth to self-replicator mass due solely to self-replication, it would have already been converted to biomass.

The two companies could get into a stable loop and end up tiling the universe with steel and mining-robots without caring whether anybody else wanted either. Obviously the real economy is a zillion times more complex than that, and I’m nowhere near the level of understanding I would need to say if there’s any chance that an entire self-sustaining economy worth of things could produce a loop like that. But I guess you only need one.

You have self-replication. You have the second law of thermodynamics. Hence, this economy has evolution. Meaning even if it does have the potential to tile Earth in mining and steel-smelting, it will evolve a smelter/miner predator which will halt the process. 

More generally, doing stuff costs energy. If it were possible to tile the Earth with something, it would have happened. And it did: moist carbonic photosynthesis has tiled the Earth. It mostly wasn't that bad. Indeed oxygen (or an equivalent) is a necessary prerequisite for brains to evolve.

A steel/miner loop, or indeed any such loop, competes with this already-existing tiling for energy. It starves to death unless the steel/mining loop somehow maintains positive EROEI the entire way. The moist carbon is already evolving to eat plastics. It probably won't evolve to eat steel, though, because steel weathers too fast - that is, the air eats it before it's around long enough for bacteria genomes to notice it.

Speaking of evolution, if we add a 'mine coal' step, we're going to find that the steel forging has no particular use to the coal miner. Even if that is a stable loop, it won't tile Earth, it will tile the coal deposits, the way undersea volcanic vent life works. Only it will die when the coal runs out and then be dead.

Notably, moist carbonic life doesn't truly self-replicate. Almost all such life depends on an environment of other life forms. Only the system as a whole self-replicates. Even a perfectly isolated self-replicator, by itself on a lifeless planet, would likely evolve to specialize and thus lose its independence.

Some Irrationality is Disguised Rationality

A large chunk of opinions that appear to be logic-resistant are in fact the camouflage to real opinions that aren't stated. Logic relevant to the stated opinion will not be relevant to the real opinion - at best, it causes the camouflage to shift.

E.g. Zootopia. (Via.) Proggies genuinely believe that the facts about IQ will cause riots. Proggies genuinely believe that if one race is materially differs from another, it is sociologically inevitable for the higher status race to enslave the lower.

When an proggie denies the laws of biomechanics, they are actually trying to deny riots and apartheid. No amount of arguments about Nobel prizes by skin colour or Raven's matrices is going to change their mind, because they don't address the proggie's actual issue. They may themselves be unaware of their real issue, and thus unable to articulate it. It will show up to them as an intuitive sense of 'no, that's wrong,' as indeed it is, and will appear externally as the leopard spots smearing themselves around.

I find the idea of the riots historically absurd. The slavery less so, but I note that the majority certainly would vote against it, and in such a climate it shouldn't be hard to find some kind of alternative.

When they're not straight-up lying, that is. Naturally it is impossible to convince a liar of the truth, as they already believe it. These may be the self-serving kind or the noble lie kind. The noble lie kind is aware of how stupid they sound if they say, "Our society can't withstand this science," and try to come up with something respectable to say instead. (Unfortunately for them, they make movies and tell us anyway.)

Naturally, this flaw is hardly limited to progressives, any more than it's impossible for Asiatics to commit crime. It's simply more common in proggies because they have more beliefs they can't cop to.

Basic Income Impossibility Theorem

Assume everyone needs $100 a month for room and board. 
Assume a free universal basic income of $100 is implemented.

On the margin, someone will stop working. There will be less wealth. With less stuff bidding for a fixed dollar amount, the price of money will fall. Inflation occurs. Room and board now cost at least $101, and unemployed UBI recipients are now either getting evicted or starving. Notably this only occurs if UBI is national. Having a limited test run won't shift the inflation needle beyond the noise.

Right, so let's start a little higher, yeah? Start at $120. On the margin, someone will stop working. This will cause inflation. Meaning $120 will only buy, say, $115 worth of stuff. This widens the indifference margin between working and not-working, so someone else will stop working. This will cause inflation. Which will widen the not-working margin. Und so weiter.

(Indeed subsequent rounds of inflation are all but guaranteed to be higher, as a roughly equal mass of stuff is being removed from a smaller pie.)

I've mentioned serfdom before. If the guaranteed income came with some kind of cost, being universal only in availability rather than in concrete application, the damage would in all likelihood be negligible.

Effects of Price Fixing on Labour

Not controversial: price controls are bad.
Minimum wages are price controls on labour. Price controls prevent markets from clearing.

The labour market in particular needs to clear. Labour is literally the only input that every business needs, so labour mispricing affects the entire economy.

Precisely because labour is so critical, the price floor isn't quite as destructive of jobs as it should be. Replacing labour isn't as easy as switching from black pepper to red pepper. However, there's a flip side: in the long term the floor is even more destructive.

When labour supply grows and labour price should fall, the wage-floored economy generally has no spare capacity of inputs it can swap for labour, having already used them up.

Immediately, extra supply a free market could absorb instead goes into unemployment. 
Further, the price of labour does not fall, causing the wage-floor price derangement to propagate all the way up the labour price schedule. All labour is now overpriced, leading to a shortage. More intuitively, the number of jobs bidding for labour drops, causing unemployment across the wage spectrum.

Because there's a shortage of jobs, there's a shortage of wealth creation. Wealth per capita drops, and the price of money drops - we see inflation.

Because poverty is on the rise, politicians promise to fix it by increasing the minimum wage. Because labour is relatively slow to adapt to market conditions, this seems to work for a moment, but in the long term the cycle repeats until we reach full communism except there's no factories, no jobs, and everyone who doesn't physically hold a farm starves to death.

Monetary Supply Fundamentals

Macroeconomics can't be done by official economists because it's too easy, not too hard. It's high school at the hardest, meaning can't impress your smart friends with it. I'm about to go from spherical-cow game theory to the business cycle in a couple pages, skipping only the justification of prices(supply, demand). Compare going from quantum chromodynamics to how your liver works - could easily take a million pages.

I welcome corrections, either below or here.

 Inflation is decrease of the price of money.
Deflation is increase in the price of money.

Fundamentally, inflation is caused by decreasing demand for a currency, or increasing supply.
Deflation, by increasing demand or decreasing supply.

The price of future money is always discounted. This discount is usually called 'interest,' but this is misleading. The market interest rate has three non-price factors, the combined effects of future time orientation, future instability, the net expected inflation/deflation rate. Finally, interest includes the supply/demand balance, and therefore price balance, of present money versus future money.

(It's counter-intuitive to think of demand for money in terms of goods rather than the other way around, but doing so has no economic flaws.) 

The market is not clairvoyant. The supply of money it sees is whatever demands goods, not any sort of total supply, meaning savings and debt affect the apparent supply. Saving more money sequesters it, causing deflation. (Essentially, saving creates a velocity discrepancy.) Lending out more money increases the apparent supply, thus causing inflation in addition to altering the present/future supply/demand balance.

Average velocity does not affect the price of money. While greater velocity increases the supply the market sees, it simultaneously increases the demand the market sees. The absolute velocity, $/second, being neutral to supply and demand is the reason any amount of money is enough to run any economy, subject only to being sufficiently divisible. In addition, the relative velocity, %/second, is neutral.




As I understand it, under fractional reserve, consumer banks can deposit physical bank notes at their federal account, and lend out ten times that amount to consumers. Further, they can lend out ~90% of anything deposited with them. Since the amount they poof into existence will get eventually get deposited at a bank in most cases, the math works out such that they can lend out roughly 100 times whatever they deposit with the Fed. (Capital requirements are a different way to the same goal.)

Having written the above, aside from the risk of bank runs, I now realize this has already caused any damage it can. Essentially, the banks own a hundred times as much cash as they 'really' own. While this was doubtless a huge boon to banks at the expense of everyone else, it was a windfall and is now over.

In combination with this, the government frequently backs various securities with the printing press, which the market knows enough to treat as money - however, the market learns about the inflation non-instantly, thus producing an exploitable inflation gradient.



Under non-fixed interest rates, the feedback is negative. Agents know net interest = gross interest - inflation. Inflation caused by increased loaning is countered by lowering interest rates discouraging loans. Inflation caused by decreased saving is countered by the inflation itself filing away loan profit margins. Deflation caused by increased saving is countered by increasing interest rates encouraging loans. Deflation caused by decreased loaning is countered by the deflation itself discouraging loan buyers.

There's a buffering effect from this that absorbs shocks in supplies of goods to a degree. The price of money and level of deflation ends up relatively stable.


Fixed interest rates lead to gluts and shortages, much as any fixed price, to the extent the price differs from the market price. This is annoying, but rarely dangerous.

The dangerous issue arises with artificially low interest rates. It is possible to destroy wealth but make money. If inflation is 20%, and interest rates are 5%, then it is possible to spend the loan on materials that can be sold for 110% of their price, and make enough money to cover the loan and profit. Normally this cash return wouldn't be enough to pay for a full set of new materials, but the revenue demonstration can back a larger loan, and the cycle repeats.



A little over 600 words and we reach the Austrian business cycle. Below-market interest rates destroy wealth until there is no more free-floating wealth to destroy, whereupon even the pretense of production shuts down.

Once the businesses stop existing and thus demanding loans, the money supply contracts, causing deflation. This causation is reversed by official economists, who believe deflation causes economic contraction. They say it's from increased saving, which is plausible, and even true - the banks are saving their 100x poof money. However, it's not by choice, it's from debtors defaulting faster than the banks can find new debtors. Noting the exact same vicious effect happens in hard-money regimes with fixed interest prices.

A shock is easily defined - it's an event that takes the market far from equilibrium. During a banking shock, the amount of goods being made becomes disjunct with wages, causing poverty and oversupplies. Many employees paying money to nondestructive firms lose their jobs, cutting the artery, and the market cannot adjust as quickly as the cuts. Without these oversupplies it's likely the deflation shock would be even more shocking.

Deflation increases the net interest rate, leading to positive feedback. As debts are not rolled over to re-lent out, fewer can afford loans, meaning the money supply contracts further. Normally this would be countered by lowering interest rates, but as the rates are fixed, they can fall neither as fast nor as hard as they need to.

However, even unfixing the interest rates cannot completely solve the problem, as it was caused in the first place by interest rates being too low. Crashes caused by Fed mismanagement cannot be fixed without severe pain, as they require interest rates to go up, to fix the problem, but also to go down, to avoid catastrophic fiscal shocks. Have to shoot yourself in the foot, but you get to pick left foot or right. (Or, past coercion usually can't be resolved without future coercion.)

In practice, we see the Fed reliably chooses to lower interest rates, causing another round of business investment in wealth-destroying activities. In the short term, money is delivered to productive individuals, who can support productive businesses, while in the long term the economy becomes even heavier with parasitic seedcorn-eating businesses. Official economics cannot distinguish between malinvestment causing malproduction, and real wealth increases, because their job is to justify whatever the Fed wanted to do anyway, meaning it's their job to not understand reality.

Freeing interest rates would, in the short term, cause tremendous hardship as technical debt is repaid. In the long term it would prevent economy-wide recessions from occurring, barring innovation in ways to bugger the price system. Sector-specific recessions would still occur, as unexpected drops in necessary production necessarily occur, which in retrospect reveals recent investment as malinvestment.

Property vs. Parental Rule

My theories of property were explicitly tested against these kinds of situations. I find it interesting to show how twisted up they are, and it's clear following my theories leads to much less twisted lifestyles.

Nevertheless, my mother guarded Soul Blazer with no small amount of jealousy such that for some time nobody played it. I do not begrudge her this, more out of an aversion to the spectacle of a thirty-three year old man being angry about the level of access he had to a video game more than twenty years prior than anything. And beyond that, what grounds would I have? The game was, in point of fact, hers. Any decision to restrict access to it was inherently justifiable, and any objection based on the perceived unfairness of this could reasonably be countered by declaring the exercise a life lesson of some sort.

It does bother me that progressives, immersed in sophism, will mix together separate topics even when they're not trying to beguile you. Less so now I've figured out how to centrifuge them out with some minimum elegance.

Nevertheless, my mother guarded Soul Blazer with no small amount of jealousy such that for some time nobody played it. [...] The game was, in point of fact, hers. Any decision to restrict access to it was inherently justifiable, and any objection based on the perceived unfairness of this could reasonably be countered by declaring the exercise a life lesson of some sort. [...]

What is striking about it in my memory is the inherent pointlessness of it - the fact that there was not actually any productive desire or motivation. Nobody actually wanted the game to sit shrink-wrapped for months.

Of course it's her right. It's rational, but meta-irrational.
Given that his mother did feel this jealousy or equivalent, guarding it was probably satisfying and thus the correct choice in the moment. However, it was a mistake to have let it be a correct decision so far into adulthood.

Basically she thought she needed to demonstrate control. (Or something. It varies.) To prove to herself that she could control her life and thus she would be able to deal with future disasters, and she was likely to lead a life with some minimum amount of satisfaction.

Keeping the shrink-wrap on is fundamentally cargo-cult control. Controlling a thing contested by nobody but a child proves nothing. Controlling the game could not be a means, only an end - her satisfaction was based on an illusion, unless she really loves shrink-wrapped SNES cartridges. It certainly didn't improve her relationship with her children, for example. It was a demonstration of how she was not in control, because the thing she was grasping and manipulating was not reality.

The solution to this is not to abrogate the rules of property. That causes more harm than good. In these cases, a kindly priest might offer some advice from the stool in the confessional, but beyond that there's no way to solve the irrationality but to let the fool continue in their folly till it teaches them otherwise.

Further, formalized property rights would have eased this insecurity. She would stop trying to control things she in fact has no control over, and would be able to take an accurate inventory of things she could control. Moreover, she would have had such an inventory long enough in advance to improve it were it deficient. E.g. she could have put certain housecare or childcare duties as papa Sandifer's in the marriage contract. (Even though she'd likely have got it wrong and ended up trading them away again.)

I do not begrudge her this, more out of an aversion to the spectacle of a thirty-three year old man being angry about the level of access he had to a video game more than twenty years prior than anything.

The child clearly resented it. This was predictable - the parent should have known it would cause resentment. The parent was in control. By combining control and knowledge, they are responsible for causing it. Was it needful? Did this act come from a place of kindness and maturity?

I'm not saying parents need to be perfect all the time. I do say that 'the best they could' appears to mean 'everything they did was always justified,' which is flatly ridiculous.

regarding the Super Nintendo itself, which had been a gift to me as surely as Soul Blazer had been to her. If she had attempted to play the game and I had responded by denying her access to the system on which to play it, the end result would have been the Super Nintendo being taken from me.  

Except everyone involved knows it wasn't a gift. Young Sandifer and mama Sandifer are both aware control continues to rest with mama Sandifer. 

It was a pretend gift. 

The rules of private property were ones that could only be used against me, as opposed to by me.

It is difficult not to see, in this, the seeds of later politics [...] my version of this resentment was directed outwards at the ruling class. Such are the engines of history.

It's not property's fault that his parents were part of a culture that lies about its gifts to its kids. And not his parents' fault they can't resist their enculturation. These lies do reliably lead to discrediting what the lies are about, though. 

Notably these lies were started, as far as I'm aware, by authoritarian right-culture parents, not left-culture parents. Left-cultural opposition to authority is hypocritical, so they find the lies useful. They especially like the part where we pretend everyone can equally own property. Not coincidentally, the result is semi-true believing socialists. 


Conditional gifts are not contrary to property rights, but the conditions need to be stated explicitly. In a sense, Sandifer clearly knew the conditions anyway, so they went without saying, but just as clearly we can see this leads to pathological thinking in the child, which, left untreated, leads to pathological adults. He attributes the wrongness of the informal/formal breach to property per se. He doesn't consciously recognize informal property as property, because as a child it was only the formal system that was called property. 

If you're not willing to explicitly state the conditions to your child's face, then you should be even more unwilling to enforce those conditions; it's a reliable sign that doing so is contrary to your explicit values. Most of the rest is knowing the kids will object to the conditions and having no answer to those objections.

If you feel the need to fool your kids with hypocritical rules, then at least don't wonder where all your authority went come adolescence.

or perhaps just seeds of a chronic inability to let things go.

Thing is these lies tend not to be one-off. If it was just the SNES, then it sounds like a grudge. However, this wink/nudge system would likely have extended to everything. It would be more surprising if it didn't have a negative effect.



Though more precisely, it was a gift in a sense that the SNES was bought knowing young Sandifer would be the primary beneficiary. Young Sandifer clearly didn't know this, and it's likely Sandifers senior would be unable to articulate it if asked. The correct words are roughly, "This is mine, but I bought it for you, enjoy." Though there is an issue where kids will start thinking it's theirs by adverse possession if the parent never use it themselves.

Hypothetical Unified Theory of Cuckservatism

Proggies are post-theist Christians, meaning they have an all-important axis of good/evil, but don't want to admit they believe in good/evil - they're apparently-nihilist crypto-moralists. Thus it was mapped to politics, namely left/right.

I'm not exactly the first to note that s/Satan/Hitler/g. Hagiographic Hitler defines 100% rightism.

But what does this mean for Republicants? They don't deny they're on the right - that they're like Hitler. Hence their continuing defeats. Vote for not-evil, duh.

But why not? Why would anyone willingly admit/imply they're Hitleresque, at least less un-Satanic than their enemies?

This ties into a seemingly separate question: why do Republicants accept such a tiny fraction of the monetary rewards that Demobrats get? Why not convert to Demobracy?

The answer is guilt. They feel particularly holy when flagellated. Republicants, fundamentally, think they win in the next life by abasing themselves in this life. They loudly admit their wickedness so as to demand to be punished for it. Demobrats are delighted to self-righteously provide the shaming they so crave.

This is also why Republicants are so ashamed of their voters, and so tentative when they do gain office. Their voters vote for them unironically! Such sin!

Also ties into 'no enemies to the left.' Obviously, someone gooder than you isn't your enemy, and everyone more sinful than you is to be despised. If the gooder ones decide to throw you under a bus, well that can't possibly be from self-interest, it must be for the greater good.

When Walker Bush wins an election, it's as a slave running against his master. "Oh master, you have become decadent. Reflect on your failings and return to nobility." And the master reflected, summoning from within himself Obama. There was much rejoicing, and Populi saw it was Left. Not only POTUS, but the voters would be redeemed from sin rightism.

But now Trump's here to ruin the game.

Social Justice War, Very Short History

Some free-wheeling folk converge on Tumblr, and start calling themselves warriors for social justice.
This spills beyond Tumbr.

Their behaviour, though effective, is so abhorrent that SJW immediately becomes a term of abuse.

SJWs try to backpedal from the name and get on the euphemism treadmill, but their antics keep them in the spotlight, so nobody forgets. They can't help themselves. They constantly deny that they use the tactics they in fact use, but can't even coordinate enough to produce a lull to let the backlash subside a bit.

Vox Day instigates a list naming SJWs as SJWs, where inclusion requires they perform the kind of actions they openly call for.

Social Justice Warriors initiate plan: losing their minds.

Sophists everywhere are terrified of anyone calling a spade a spade. Their tactics are effective in the short term.

What Reality Is

What is is-ness per se?

He has argued that we must decouple what we observe from whatever underlying reality may be generating those observations. In other words, there are (at least) two levels of reality: One consists of the rules and regularities of the physical world, which science can access and measure. But the other level, the ultimate source of those rules and regulations, science can never even access, much less come to know.

Delightfully succinct. (Via.) I remember when I used to think the same thing.

Problem: the 'underlying' reality is Russel's teapot. If science cannot access it, then it cannot be accessed. Its properties cannot be described, and it does not affect predictions. It does not, in fact, exist. While there is clearly a metaphorical external world, some objective truths that don't go away if ye stop believing in them, it is not at all clear that there's a literal external world. The solution to Kant's noumenon/phenomenon split is to remove the noumenon, leaving only curiously consistent phenomena.

There is no underlying reality. The observations constitute reality. If they arise from anything, they arise from each other.

To digress, it is possible to observe a multiverse via logic. Scientists are thinking there is one because they believe it's logically necessary from the rules they've observed. This isn't genuinely good enough, because there are still alternatives. Rather it's the well-known scentific bonus arrogance about whatever model happens to be in fashion.

Inequality vs. Morality

It is great that women are what they are and men are what they are, otherwise I would have an absolutely terrible sex life.

Can't change just one thing. Were wereman/wifman relations different, you would be different in unpredictable ways.

In fact there are several animals with superior kinds of mating pacts. It is probable even other human subspecies had better mating pacts.

It is good that men should lead, and women should follow.

Alternatively, children could not require both parents to trigger all the environmental development cues. However, as it is, someone needs to lead. It probably does need to be the more expendable gender.

It is great that whites are superior to all brown and black races in intelligence and prosocial conduct.

Depends. If the playing field can be levelled upward, then no. Otherwise, the alternative is not that browner races are more competent, but that paler races are less competent, which would be clearly inferior.

East Asian men are not all that overrepresented among competent engineers relative to white men, whereas east Asian women are way overrepresented among competent engineers relative to white women. 

Korean video gaming shows Korean men having markedly higher reaction times than white men. Reaction time strongly correlates with IQ.

However, they lack creativity and/or independent thinking. E.g. white hobbits learn from the Fall of Rome. E.g. the average person knows seizing power through force is to usurp, which is why Western armies don't take over Western countries, but the Chinese have not learned from China's bicentennial civil wars. E.g. Chip fabs are largely Chinese these days, but chip fab designers, even in China, are almost all white. E.g, this guy.

When I say white men are naturally more manly, manliness reflects both environment and racial nature. Prewar Japanese were the most manly of men, postwar Japanese among the least manly of men.

There's an inverse relationship between racial IQ and baseline testosterone for both genders. The most feminine women are asian, the most masculine men are black. This is why if you have the races of a miscegenating couple, you can almost always guess the genders.


That said, nerds have solved manliness. The thing to do now is give engaged men manliness classes under the term 'how to keep your woman.' Do that and could probably leave divorce as no-fault. Not a great idea, but it would be good enough.

It is great that white males are better warriors than east Asian males, regardless of whether east Asian males might be slightly smarter. 

Again, it matters whether the alternative is levelling up or levelling down.


Is it great that whites are prone to using and being used by sanctimonious moralizing?

Is it great that whites take words so lightly it's almost impossible to have a frank conversation?

Is it great that whites will work so hard they effectively flee their own family and community?

Is it great that whites are reliably ashamed of using violence to defend themselves?

Is it great that whites are so 'altruistic' that they can't tell the difference between being kind to strangers and enabling terrorists?

Is it great that whites are so individually proud they can be easily flattered, and find it all but impossible to acknowledge their betters as better?

We should love what we are, rather than conceding that the left is morally superior for wishing reality away.

Thing is, morality don't real. They can't be morally better because there's nothing there to be better at. Or worse, for that matter.

This means there's little difference between preferring your own race and having goodwill for all races.

On the other hand, progressives refuse to cooperate with most whites, meaning it's imprudent to cooperate with progressives while being white. Progressivism only continues to live because these other whites don't cut them off. Apparently due to a combination of pride and vulnerability to hysterical moralizing.



Let's see if I can guess this post's URL: http://alrenous.blogspot.com/2016/04/inequality-vs-morality.html