Rhetoric vs. Peasants

If it reliably lead to the truth, it would be called epistemology, not rhetoric.

Since the majority are incurably vulnerable to rhetoric, what they need is a personal rhetoritician, the way they have a personal doctor. If they change any non-ornamental beliefs, their rhetoritician vets the change. (If I'm not mistaken, this person used to be called 'pastor.')

However, it's also undeniable that a few do not need personal rhetoriticians. (The pastor, for example.) This is clearly the high-status behaviour. And the person most likely to say, "Buh! I don't need one either!" is exactly the person who needs one most.

In short the peasants are fucked. They can be oppressed for their own good, or they can be oppressed for fun and profit. They can be forced to have a rhetoritician, or they can function as snacks for any passing rhetoritician. There is no 'not oppressed' pathway on the table, which is why we call them peasants.

On Formalism

Formalism is supposed to prevent violence, but instead encourages violence, in particular rare but catastrophic large-scale violence. It is supposed to be the political-formula-free formulation, but cashes out to right of conquest.

unrelated galaxy cakes

It's Istanbul, not Constantinople, been a long time gone Constantinople.

— Lance Vader (@LanceVader) October 12, 2017

As a good formalist, we accept that it's nobody's business but the Turk's. However, this raises the question of why it's their business, and the answer is they marched a large army into Istanbul. Hence, formalism, far from being a solution to violence, actively endorses it. If you dislike a power distribution, all you need to do is formally declare war on it and win, whereupon the formalist will dutifully switch to your side.

Insofar as the war is indeed won, this is actually fine. It's a proof that the prewar formalist beliefs about who owns what was mistaken, and the war kindly corrected it.

The problem is that humans are manically optimistic. Wars frequently occur because of illusory opportunities. Hence, formalism in fact encourages the exact thing it is supposed to discourage. The only actual deterrent that's been found is to bodily threaten the person in charge of declaring wars. For example, pointing a nuclear missile at their face. (I suggest cryptographically signed assassination technologies as a cheaper and cleaner alternative.) Absent such deterrents, unwinnable wars are declared all the time, which cause vast destruction before the overoptimistic human in charge gets the message.

As a bonus, because political formulae are perverse, formalism encourages progressivism or other Sophist phenotypes. If you say coercion-legitimizing status comes from beating somebody up, then the true elite shows themselves by coercing someone without laying a finger on them and getting away with it, that is, using rhetoric.

By contrast, the anarchist formula of Exit (short ver.) implements the only other deterrent for war: disallowing coercion-legitimizing status and/or making the person who declares the war also pay for the war. War is obviously unprofitable; demand simply isn't high enough. I am curious to see how Exit's perversity would play out. If it's bad, I'm officially anarcho-pessimist.

As an aside, formalism also has two moral norms - violence is bad, and lying is bad. Moral norms have a poor track record as political engineering constraints. This is unsurprising given that moral nihilism obtains.

Why I Am Not a Nationalist

Nationalists want to be ruled by someone like them.

Problem: the plebs, always and everywhere, are fucked. If they could rule, they wouldn't be plebs.

The rulers aren't like you, even if they look like you and speak like you. Who do you think let in all the foreigners in the first place?

Ancien Feminism: Courtly Love

So, uh, fun fact: modern feminism is 900 years old. It's traditional.

As per my hobby horse, the 'dark' ages ended with the conquest of Toledo in 1085, which released Greek and Roman works from the library there into Christian Europe. The virulence of the Sophist virus can be seen in how very immediately the idea of Courtly Love infected the place. (As an aside, the first scientist also appeared, in the form of Robert Grosseteste.)

It is a mistake to blame Eleanor of Aquitaine (pictured) for the disaster. As soon as Sophism appears, there's a feminism-shaped hole in the world, which will be filled by a convenient woman. Doubtless there had been several similar attempts during the 'dark' ages, but without refined rhetorical arts, their ridiculousness was apparent.

I feel like I should have known about this. It's four years old, an eternity at internet communication speeds, but I didn't, so it's time for some antifisking. I'm actually glad I didn't find it earlier, because I can read far more meaning into it now than I could have four years ago. Do read the original, as I'm going to skip any part I can't add to.

The key thing is that these Troubadours were not some “traveling band” singing for their supper. Maybe later, but at this time, they were major nobles, from both the nobility and the higher noble classes.

Courtly love, as per the name, started as an ultra-high-class vice. It's only late in the game, mid 1700s, that it filtered down to the plebs, and the final collapse occurred fifty years ago. Feminism is the very opposite of an egalitarian grassroots movement, and is particularly poorly suited to the capacities of your average Jane.

The issue at the time, was that, as the historians state, that “Love as we know it did not exist. Marriage was as much as about land and politics as anything else”. It was said you “Married a fiefdom and a wife got thrown in the bargain”.

This, as it turns out, is a bad idea. Psychotic androcentrism results in psychotic gynocentrism. (Which results in psychotic androcentrism, which...) Proof: you've read the news before, yes?

On the plus side, high-functioning autism has few troubles reproducing in such an environment. (Low functioning autism gets infanticided, exposed, lynched, or burned as a heretic.)

And it was thought that due to the “wickedness” of women, it was probably superior to remain a virgin. And thus the idea of the “celibate” priest was born. He could not be “godly”, and should be suspect, if he allowed himself to come under the temptation of women.These guys were definitely the “Red Pill” writers of the time. The general idea was not so much that sex was bad, but women were so bad, and sex was lure, the hook, so they damned sex as a means to keep men from getting ensnared in the traps and wickedness that women lay for men. And the thought has a little bit of merit, I must say. 

So, think about this. The men in power at the time, saw some of the stuff we see, and they gave a huge “thumbs down” on women. Huge.

That is, autistics reproduce (and fail to fall for Sophism) unless you allow gay men to get out of the dynamic by agitating for celibate monasteries, which naturally attract scholarly-minded autistics. Remember, gay men find vaginal sex almost as disgusting as straight men find a gay blowjob. Basically, they'll do it in prison, and that's part of what makes it a prison. With sodomy strictly banned and marriage not particularly up to either bride or groom, gays will desperately agitate for a way out. In this cause, Paul's struggle with his nymphomania becomes a useful tool.

This is more of the overreaction-overreaction cycle. To put it bluntly, while women can indeed be troublesome, to react with doctrinaire celibacy is to be a beta cuck. Solve the problem, don't run like a worthless coward.

So, basically dark ages MGTOW. Shit's not new. That said, MGTOW is now a rational response to state distortions of the marriage market. Doctrinaire celibacy is not the same as a personal calling to celibacy.

So she accompanied him down there and was the defacto “regent” during his “minority”. [...]  

The same thing happened at the same time in about 3 other major places in the area,

Awfully coincident...or rather, proof that it happened all the time, but only after the reconquest of Toledo did it spawn disease.
Further, even before proto-feminism, Hajnal Europe didn't really have a problem with women becoming powerful. Psycho androcentrism isn't consonant with the European character.

“Women are the love. Women give praise to men and the power of that praise is the driving motivator of men. All good things that men do are only done in the true spirit of love to earn the right to the love that the woman confers to the men. Women define what is good. Women confer status on men by allowing them to receive the love they receive from women as a result of high character and accomplishment”.

There is a problem in that patriarchy is a fact. Men can oppress women whenever and to whatever extent they desire. A single man can often overpower an entire mob of women, sometimes simply by being willing to attempt it. As a result, courtly love must have something to offer men, and you can find it here.

"Women define what is good." Surely, this is almost how it works in heaven.

This has been a problem since the axial age, when men realized mere material success is a bit weaksauce. Physics is not the arbiter of the good. Since it is possible to combine material failure with nonmaterial success, how is the man to judge his own goodness? How does he avoid fooling himself into thinking he is virtuous when he is not? One requires an external standard. 

In heaven, a man who is in fact good is judged by an infallible judge, whereupon he is granted a wife whose beauty and devotion parallels his achievements. I'm not an expert, so do check with your local astronomer, but unfortunately I suspect we live on Earth, not the heavens. Most women are particularly terrible judges of character. Sexual success is a particularly monochrome version of material success.

(Do note my considered use of the word 'devotion.')

They actually created these things called “The Court of Love”. And these men and women, and you can imagine the men in those courts were the 12th or 13th century equivalents of Manginas, would literally “rule” on love.

The French did garner a reputation as being good lovers, and you know what they say about stereotypes. It wasn't a pure waste.

And Gentlemen never demand sex. Which of course, all of this was bullshit.

I do like having these things spelled out, so let me spare you the link surfing to find it: this is a manual for creating beta orbiters and one anointed alpha fuckboy. Since everything is 'secret' the betas don't see that one tryst is not like the others. One of these trysts does not belong. Since gentlemen don't demand sex, then the alpha 'gentleman' must also not be demanding sex. Not that he needs to.

Meanwhile, a bunch of betas get to prove their restraint. Which is a genuine virtue...that nobody else cares about.

And we begin by rejecting unilaterally, out of hand, “love” for the pack of lies it is. [...]

And I say, no it doesn’t. It exposes the reality of the impossibility of “love” because “love” is entirely a manufactured ideal.  

Jordan B. Peterson says the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is about the awakening of human consciousness. One must feel before one can suffer. As the event which cast humans out of Eden, Christians have a habit of attempting to jam this genie back into the bottle. However, it is in consciousness that Man is made in the image of God. God is pure, perfect consciousness. Nous and Logos. Perception so intense it becomes direct power. Man is always surprised to find that trying to deny he has feelings, such as love, result in bestial outcomes.

Basically Satan loves it when you start thinking wisdom is merely the opposite of folly.

--

There's a wide range of companion pieces I could choose, but I choose this one, on the history of chivalry.

This is a link.

Note the pre-corrupt code of chivalry wasn't too hot either. It's impossible to con an honest man. Nobody is completely honest, but corrupting chivalry was just easy. However, there is this wonderful opportunity for amusement.
"Is chivalry dead?"
*Look confused.* "You want me to protect the Church and smash the infidel? Err...right now?"
Optional: comments about where to find a gun and one's ability to aim.
It's not like it's hard. A bunch of infidels have been imported, so you rarely have to travel far to find one to smash.

--

The synthesis positions is obvious, is it not? Practice Game within a strict marriage. Perhaps garnish with anti-slut certification. Also, very high status men are going to have more than one wife, whether it's allowed or not, so give it up and allow it.

Not Keen on Steve Keen Economics: Ricardo Stands

I doubt it will help, but let's murder Steve Keen a little, just in case I'm wrong.

This belief in the advantages of specialization lies behind the incredulity with which economists have reacted to the rise of populist politicians like Donald Trump in the United States, as well as the United Kingdom’s vote for Brexit. They have, at their most self-righteous, blamed the rise of anti-globalization sentiment on the public’s irrational failure to appreciate the net benefits of trade. 

Do I see where this is going? Keen is going to flagrantly ignore that price-controlled American labour is competing on a 'level' field with uncontrolled foreign labour. (P.S, he did.) In any case, official economists are shills, they're arguing that proggies should get everything they want. E.g. since State isn't allowed to meddle with domestic affairs, it has to entangle Americans with foreigners, so it can meddle indirectly.

he treated the specialized machinery in different industries as if it were equally as liquid (and so could be as easily repurposed) as the money with which it had been purchased

In reality factories are retooled all the time. It's not as liquid as money, sure. Money is a tool specifically optimized for liquidity. Further, regardless of how liquid such things are, the liquidity can be priced into the prospective profit calculation when they plan to build a factory. I guess Keen is signalling that he's such a rarefied academic that the existence of accountants routinely slips his mind.

The archetypal machines for cloth and wine manufacturing in Ricardo’s time included the spinning jenny and the wine press. It is stating the obvious that one cannot be turned into the other, but stating the obvious is necessary, because the easy conversion of one into the other was assumed by Ricardo, and has been assumed ever since by mainstream economic theory.

Hmm?

This is a confusion of monetary capital (which Ricardo, as a stockbroker by trade, knew intimately) with the physical machinery in factories (about which he knew very little).

Keen's list of things about which he knows very little; accountants, ships. Did you know you can put a wine press on a ship, and have the ship carry it to Portugal?

Machinery designed for one industry simply cannot move to any other, even in the same country; but machinery in one industry can (and frequently is) shipped between countries.

What? Oh, I see. Keen's not even wrong. This whole section had no point.

Had there been any English vineyards, they and their attendant machinery would have been rendered worthless and scrapped.

A straight contradiction. Shipping is possible. Also, when convenient, not possible. This is why, when you're engaged in sophistry, it's a bad idea to admit to knowing things. You can pass it off as an oversight if you haven't previously admitted to knowing that machines can be shipped.

Around this time a competent economist would have brought up the concept of shocks. Like any organism, the economy reacts poorly to shocks, no matter how liquid the capital stock under consideration. A sudden opening of trade is a bad idea, almost as bad as a sudden closing.

Whether the aggregate production of wine and cloth increased or decreased now depended both on economies of scale and the macroeconomic effects of changes in trade policy.

This is going to be a red herring, isn't it.

(P.S, it was. Keen does not appear to have any position on what the macroeconomic effects would be, other than that they would be low-status.)

If the Portugese wine fields have good economies of scale, then England would get cheaper wine. (Once the effects of the shock dissipate.) If they don't, then England's wine fields won't get scrapped in the first place.

It's far more likely that Ricardo did think of this, but didn't think it was worth mentioning. Because it wasn't. Keen is playing a dumb gotcha, and dumb gullible half-illiterates are all like, "Yeah, my enemies* should be punished! What Keen said!" *(read foreigners)

Economists have considered this issue to some extent (work in this area led to Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize in 2008)

>approvingly quoting Krugman
Face, meet palm. I think I need a pad on my desk to avoid head scars.

Ricardo set the standard in a tangential observation about one potential riposte to his case: if Portugal were genuinely better at everything than England, would not English industry simply decamp from England and move holus bolus to Portugal if free trade were allowed? He conceded that it could do so, but then asserted that, if this happened, it would be advantageous not merely to English capitalists but to English and Portuguese consumers as well:  

At least this is dumb in a complicated way.

Keen wants you to imagine that Ricardo is hypothesizing that all English industry moves to Portugal, and that the English simply sit around in fine linens sipping wine all day, with no tedious work to be done. Proven impossible by inspection, therefore Ricardo must be insane, right?

Ricardo already proved that this wouldn't happen if the only industries were wine and weaving. Keen did not attack this in any substantive way. Keen must be deliberately omitting critical context, to form a bait-and-switch.

On the issue of the relocation of production from high-wage First World to low-wage Third World countries, modern economists have pushed Ricardo’s Vice past even Ricardo’s limits. While he did contemplate the possibility of capitalists moving production offshore, Ricardo was of the opinion that this was both unlikely and undesirable:

"Ricardo was admirably xenophobic."

the fancied or real insecurity of capital, when not under the immediate control of its owner 

Accountants routinely price such risks into prospective profit statements.

Rhetoric does not decide whether Ricardo was correct or incorrect. If the risk of foreign investments, as accounted, does not overwhelm the additional profits, then the home country will monetarily profit by such investments. This is an objective accounting fact. Keen is implying that you shouldn't do it anyway, because foreigners are icky. You wouldn't want to be caught saying foreigners aren't icky, now would you?

The theory of comparative advantage would lead you to expect that in a world with very low trade barriers—basically the modern globalized world—most countries would have specialized trade profiles, so that they would score low in both ubiquity and diversity. This proved to be true of underdeveloped economies like Ghana, in which the top three exported products—fuels, precious metals, and cocoa—make up 81 percent of its exports. But it was not true of advanced economies like Germany,

Actually I wouldn't expect that, for myriad reasons.
This is a common trick, where Keen says something plausible, relying on the (reliable) fact the reader won't think about it carefully, if at all. And by 'common' I mean I expect better. This is low-class sophistry.

If you do think about it carefully, this fatally undermines Keen's point. He said earlier that open wine trade with Portugal would destroy England's (hypothetical) wine industry. (And this is bad because negative halo.) He says in this passage that the modern world has low trade barriers, as Ricardo wanted. Yet industries are not being destroyed. Uh, oops.

In short, "We need trade barriers to get complex economies, also, despite no trade barriers, we have complex economies." Yeah, great job Keen. Keep it up. (In reality trade barriers aren't that low.)

Here's a genuinely curious fact: Canada and America export substantial amounts of electricity to each other. I believe this is true of many other commodities. Trade must be sufficiently open, or they would be unable, yet regional specialization does not appear to be occurring, or if it is, it's occurring far below the scale of the federal jurisdiction. In any case, I certainly wouldn't have predicted it, and were Keen able to explain it, I would be grateful, despite his numerous intellectual sins. However, because I'm aware of this curious result, I wouldn't be so bold as to make specific industry level-prediction about English linens and Portugese wines in real life until I find out what's going on with North American electricity.

Keen isn't here for curiosity, though, he's here to make soldier-arguments for his side.

Steve Keen is not an economist. He is a Sophist. He employs economist-flavoured rhetoric, which politicians use if they dislike who he's throwing shade on. Keen chooses his shading targets based on who he wants to be friends with. If he ever says anything factually accurate, it's a coincidental accident.

I don't think Vox Day is actually dumb enough to fall for this nonsense. I believe he's exploiting the under-served 'foreigners are icky' propaganda market.

In the United States today, financial fraud is de-criminalized

Michael Hudson isn't such a great fan of banking:

In the 1960s, banks required a 25-30% down payment by the buyer, and limited the burden of mortgage debt service to only 25% of the borrower’s income. But interest is now federally guaranteed up to 43% of the home buyer’s income. And by 2008, banks were making loans no down payment at all. Finally, loans in the 1960s were self-amortizing over 30 years. Today we have interest-only loans that are never paid off.

So banks loan much more of the property’s market price. That is why most of the rental value of land isn’t paid to the homeowner or commercial landlord any more. It’s paid to the banks as interest.   

[...] 

The problem with the savings and loan crisis was mainly fraud! The large California S&L’s were run by crooks, topped by Charles Keating.  Many were prosecuted for fraud and sent to jail. By the 1980s the financial sector as a whole had become basically a criminalized sector. My colleague Bill Black has documented most of that. He was a prosecutor of the S&L frauds in the 1980s, and wrote a book “The best way to rob a bank is to own one”. [...] Fraud was the main financial problem, and remains so. 

[...] 

These were essentially junk mortgages, and once again it was fraud. Already in 2004 the FBI said that the American economy was suffering the worst wave of bank fraud in history. Yet there was no prosecution. Essentially in the United States today, financial fraud is de-criminalized. No banker has been sent to jail, despite banks paying hundreds of billions of dollars of fines for financial fraud. These fines are a small portion of what they took illegally. Such paymets are merely a cost of doing business. The English language was expanded to recognize junk loans. Before the financial crash the popular press was using the word “junk mortgages” and “Ninjas”: “No Income, No Jobs, no Assets”. So everybody knew that there was fraud, and the bankers knew they would not go to jail, because Wall Street had become the main campaign contributer to the leading politicians, especially in the Democratic party. The Obama Administration came in basically as representatives of the bank fraudsters. And the fraud continues today. The crooks have taken over the banking system. It is hard for Europeans to realize that that this really has happened in America. The banks have turned into gangsters, which is why already in the 1930s President Roosevelt coined the word “banksters”. 

[...] 

Most of the houses that were foreclosed on have been bought out by hedge funds for all cash. In the wake of 2008, by 2009 and 2010 hedge funds were saying “If you have $5,000,000 to invest, we’re going to buy these houses that are being sold at distress prices. We’re going to buy foreclosed properties for all cash, because we can make a larger rate of return simply by renting them out.” So there has been a transfer of property from homeowners to the financial sector. The rate of home-ownership in America is dropping.

The economy itself has not recovered. All economic growth since 2008 has accrued only to the top 5% of the economy. 95% of the economy has been shrinking by about 3% per year… and continues to shrink, because the debts were kept in place. President Obama saved the banks and Wall Street instead of saving the economy.

Don't get your hopes up about his solutions, though.

Government Successfully Evades Blame

To my surprise, I've collected all the ways the government is directly causing America's most serious employment problems, and blaming automation and foreigners taking your jobs. (Logically equivalent to automation.) Alternatively, blaming capitalism in general.

Fun fact: automation increases wealth. More stuff / same number of people = more stuff per person. Alternatively you can make the same amount of stuff in less time, but have more leisure. E.g. 30 hour weeks for everyone, but with the same standard of living as the previous 40.  Equally foreigners. If they're making all your stuff, you can relax or do something else on top of having all your stuff. Of course that's not what we're seeing. The problem is the government has made productive work illegal. 

Automation's effect on wealth causes deflation. Same number of dollars / more stuff = fewer dollars per stuff. That includes your wage, so you should be taking a pay cut. However, the minimum wage exists, so you can't take a pay cut. "I don't work for minimum wage!" Doesn't matter. The programmer has to be paid more than the roofer who must be paid more than the janitor. Otherwise, why not simply skip the skill investment and take the simple indoor job? Because the janitor can't take a pay cut, the roofer can't take a pay cut, which means the programmer can't take a pay cut.

Your wage is price controlled, meaning there's a glut of labour on the market, or equivalently a shortage of jobs. Your employer wants to replace your overpriced ass with a machine, or with foreign non-controlled labour. The wage cut is taken on average instead on each individual, by firing roughly that percentage of the labour force. The government successfully blames this on the automation which the employer uses in response to the anti-human government policy. (Anthrophobic?)

--

The government is continually raising regulatory overhead. Either your employer sells your widgets for the same price and takes compliance costs out of your wage, or they sell fewer widgets and must shrink, disemploying the lowest productivity employee, which one day will be you. As mentioned previously, you can't take a pay cut, so they have to shrink. The government is continually shifting jobs 'out of the money' so to speak, in this fashion.

Because much of this regulatory overhead is a fixed per-employee cost, there's a very strict band of competitive hours per week for wage labour. Used to be exactly 40 with no overtime, and now it's a half-inch below the Obamacare full time guidelines. When available leisure increases, hours cannot change, meaning the leisure is taken on average instead, just like the pay cuts are taken on average. The unemployed 'benefit' from 100% of the leisure increase, while the wagecuck gets nothing.

In addition, the government simply outlaws low-status jobs from time to time, such as when the EPA's clear stream act made it impossible to mine coal. (Trump is supposed to have reversed it.)

--

The other price control is interest rate control.
Take out an interest to start or fund a business. Pay 2% interest, because ZIRP. The firm makes 7% profit, and at sufficient scale the 5% is plenty for paying executive salaries and other dividends. The problem is real inflation is 10%, so the firm is actually losing money. Their gross revenues won't pay for new inputs. This is a wealth furnace. They will have to roll a new loan to pay for operating costs, which the bank is only too happy to provide. They're taking valuable inputs and producing less valuable outputs. They're lighting wealth on fire and the resulting heat makes the GDP look good.

Because it's anti-automation, it's less stuff / same amount of people = inflation. Their operations will cause their profits to drop over time, until they go out of business. When enough of these firms go out of business at once, there's a recession. The econometrics catch up to the reality that the economy has been shrinking, and as the metrics quickly move toward reality, it looks like a sudden event. (This is what Mises etc. mean by praxaeology and first principles being superior to naive measurement. If you rely on the econometrics you will never figure out what's going on or how to fix it.)

The bank itself is one of these wealth furnaces. The bailouts show that they indeed go out of business from time to time, whereupon the government subsidizes their operation. Overall it's a complicated scheme for turning taxpayer money into sinecures.

Twitter and Reddit are exactly these wealth-furnace corporate welfare schemes, they will last as long as the government feels like subsidizing them, and exactly that long. That's more or less why they're radically left-wing. There were more right-wing corporate welfare proposals, but the government decides not to subsidize those ones, so they go out of business. Similarly, Twitter knows that if it veers too far right, it will lose the coercive sponsor. By contrast, Gab must fund itself through donations.

--

Finally, the government is nonproductive, and is now growing faster than the economy in absolute terms, but is still arrogating wealth to itself. Cancer be growing, yo. Meaning, less wealth distributed to the productive sector / same number of people = less wealth per producer. Meaning a pay cut in terms of lifestyle not dollars, instead of a cut in dollars not lifestyle.

As a bonus, as lifestyle drops below the welfare line, previously-productive individuals are shoved into the nonproductive sector, creating nothing but still getting welfare, creating an accelerating positive feedback loop of wage destruction.

Don't forget all these wealth furnaces, which get partial credit for nonproductivity and being part of the government.

--

Summary.
The automating employer can't choose to make more stuff but with the same people, it has to choose making the same stuff with fewer people. The leisure is distributed unevenly, and involuntarily.

The regulated employer can't choose to make the same stuff but pay you less, so it makes less stuff and must involuntarily distribute more leisure unevenly.

Productive firms cannot compete with nonproductive firms exploiting the price-controlled interest loophole. Economic activity on average starts destroying stuff - lowing real wages - instead of creating it. Ultimately the wealth furnaces even destroy themselves, again unevenly and involuntarily distributing leisure.

The government directly makes your job unprofitable by growing, involuntarily distributing leisure to you, and distributing wealth away from your slightly more productive peers.

Eventually the government will strangle the economy entirely, and we'll see something like feudalism, state collapse, and, where the voters are really dedicated, famine.

--

This is not progressivism. This is not even democracy. This is the natural incentives of every coercive government with the technological capacity to do this. Getting folk put out of work for no reason and getting away with it means you're high status, and gets you laid. Imposing regulations without having to pay for them gets you laid. Raising the minimum wage means you have more dependents and bossing folk around gets you laid. Artificially buggering interest rates gets you a class of sycophants who depend on your largesse and can be expected to obey in return, which gets you laid. Bragging about getting away with having a useless job where you don't have to work gets you laid.

The only reason e.g. China isn't buggering itself these way is because it's busy buggering itself in different ways. When it gets tired of them, it will move on to these sooner or later. Putin resists many of these incentives by force of will. Unless Russians luck out with having an endless series of benevolent psychopaths seizing Putin's position, they will end up buggering themselves like this too.

I begin to speculate that upper-class monogamy substantially slows this process. All this stuff gets you laid, but it's not much use if you're not allowed to get laid by anyone who you're not already getting laid by. Still, the genes think it will create new reproductive opportunities, so it will be pursued regardless, if at a lower intensity.

Prewar Science Was Right About Black Holes

Black holes don't really exist. They are very dark grey approximations of black holes, with no event horizon. I discovered this independently, and found out it was consensus for prewar physics.
I saw credible complaints about my last explanation being unclear, so I'm going to try again.

Postwar science believes objects can cross a black hole's event horizon and join the singular mass. From the infalling object's perspective, this isn't too wrong. However, all prewar physicists /facepalmed simultaneously, because no outside observer - e.g. an astronomer - will ever see an object cross the event horizon. Whether they can cross or not is irrelevant to black hole ontology. As the object approaches the horizon, time dilation increases infinitely. It literally takes forever to touch down. The same thing from another perspective, length contraction approaches infinity, so the object (from our perspective) must cross an infinite amount of space to reach the event horizon.

By symmetry, the infalling object will see the rest of the universe appear to speed up infinitely, and thus see its end before it manages to strike the singularity. All decay mechanics will run to completion, including the decay of the black hole it is falling into. If some analogue of Hawking radiation exists, the falling object will see the black hole retreating from it faster than it can fall in, finally disappearing before it strikes.

The mass originally constituting the black hole also counts as an infalling object. Time dilation increases faster than density as it approaches the critical density. While arbitrary mass can get it arbitrarily close to its Schwarzschild radius, it cannot actually cross before the rest of the universe ends. No black holes can form in the first place.

The objects called black holes are dark because, along with time dilation and length contraction, spatial distortion causes redshift. As the mass approaches arbitrarily close to the critical density, emitted light is redshifted arbitrarily close to nothing. Similarly, any object that's on a path to strike the superdense matter will join its infinitesimally close approach to temporal stasis and redshift oblivion. Equivalently, due to the massive time dilation, the time between each individual photon emission approaches eternity. The flux of conventionally emitted energy falls below the measurement error of any conceivable instrument.

A few consequences: no you don't have to worry about LHC black holes, as it's just regular if superdense matter. There is no information conservation paradox. There is no singularity that needs to be shielded. In other words postwar scientists have managed to make themselves a tremendous amount of unnecessary work.

The Alrenous Power Redistribution Impossibility Theorem

Democracy is socialized power. Instead of a small group being in charge, everyone has a micro slice of being in charge, which add up to some decision when added together. Democracy is impossible.

It isn't natural for power to be evenly distributed. It must be redistributed. Someone must then have the power of redistribution. If they have the power of redistribution, they could redistribute it all to themselves. They are the sovereign.

IF the vote exists THEN power was redistributed THEREFORE power was not redistributed. Impossible by contradiction.
IF the vote doesn't exist THEN democracy does not obtain.

Democracy is logically impossible. The people cannot rule.

Of course the logician can go wrong. I could have accidentally divided by zero somewhere. So let's check.
Sovereigns have a reliable source of security. A sovereign voter would be able to unilaterally defend their right to a vote. As a result it would be impossible to prevent such a person from voting, for any reason. Felons. Noncitizens. Children. Nonhumans.
It would be impossible to recant on the vote procedure. No Hitler. No Stalin. No Kims. No juntas at all, actually.

Checksum complete. There's another one which shows that were democracy real, it wouldn't have to be implemented on purpose. It would simply happen, which is historical nonsense.

It is logically necessary that the vote is an illusion of power. The redistributor maintains the illusion purely to hide their sovereignty. They rely on the fact that doing roughly what the vote says will provide parasitism opportunities disguised as charity. (Ctrl-f 'siphon'.) Modern states are highly sophisticated machines for appearing to do what the vote says while doing things as distant as possible from what the vote says, should the redistributor be in the mood.

(Only the tiniest apologies to Chamley-Judd.)

You Don't Care About Other People's Children

How does a psychologically normal human react to having their innocent child splattered? I will be ignoring the parts where common sense is correct.

First, the denial. They will appear to double down on clinging to the ingroup. It's a reflex: in times of trouble, don't rock the boat. Appear particularly loyal. Similarly, beliefs have some inertia. They do not change immediately even against overwhelming force.

However, it will quickly be clear that the ingroup is offering no substantial support. Words and theatre is all they have. This will feed the previously-repressed feelings of betrayal.

Now it's time for the anger and spite. They will defect on the ingroup and join the rebellion. They will join the KKK or the unironic Nazis, as the only groups that seem harmonious with the hate they now feel. It will be years before they realize this isn't working, so I'll stop the story there.

If humans genuinely cared about other people's children like their own, there would have been a semi-spontaneous mass violent uprising after the first terrorist act that really counted.

Some don't count. The very first one gets written off as a fluke. Weird things happen sometimes, it's best to forget about them. There are more weird one-off events than normal events, a normal human can't spend time thinking about them or that's all they would do. The second one triggers the denial phase. They realize it's a pattern but they hope someone else will deal with it. But the third or fourth one would have brought down the government.

At the very least there would have been mass civil disobedience, after everyone simultaneously became a Nazi under a noticeably non-Nazi government.
"Hey neighbour, you paying your taxes this year?"
"Ha! Not if I can avoid it."
"No? Perhaps I won't either."
The IRS cannot deal with 70% of the country paying their taxes. It would be an undeniable vote of no confidence in the government as a whole.

First problem: modern humans are not psychologically normal. Prussian school is designed precisely to lay waste to all facets of normal psychology. (Homeschoolers are darkly funny. "If I implement Prussian school at home, it will be different, right? Poison administered by the ingroup is different than poison administered by the outgroup, you see.)

Second problem: nobody gives a shit about other people's children. Well...they're small and easy to kill, plus killing the outgroup's kids makes more room for the ingroup, so it doesn't besmirch your cooperator credentials. And killing is fun. But beyond that nobody gives a shit about other people's children.

Final problem: modern populations have been bred for millennia to be extraordinarily cowardly in the face of state decrees about what is and isn't high status. The Romans managed to outnumber the brave races who would have resisted, and subjected them to Roman Peace. The brave minorities in broadly cowardly races were systematically weeded out. They will join the Nazis in their heart. But they won't dare to so much as tell anyone.

There are some other indicators. If your child dies, you worry about the mental health of their siblings. If it's your grandchild, you check on the parents from time to time as well. Where are the repeated newspaper articles about how the children are recovering, or not? Where's the frankly troublesome avalanche of letters asking about it? Why don't the survivors have hundred or thousands of offers to take them on a trip into town to help take their mind off things? Where's their legions of volunteer bodyguards?

It's taken for granted that nobody gives a shit about other people's children...except when it's time for us all to pretend to care, in service of whatever selfish impulse can be served.

Of course the government is fully aware of all this. Being well-socialized, they know that, like themselves, nobody cares about other people's children. The rulers know everyone is amazingly cowardly, just like they are. The rulers know there's not going to be a mass wave of tax revolt just because the government isn't doing what everyone pretends their job is. The rulers are pretending too. They know.

Doomcore is The Way Out

Doomcore is perhaps the most powerful seditious propaganda. Proggies cling to power because they think it can be saved. If it became widely known that Western Civilization in its modern constitution is doomed, they become sad, backward-looking relics.

Hopeless desperation is not high status.
Pointless effort is personally demoralizing.
They would surrender without having to kill everyone.

the future will feel like this

There is no other way out that doesn't involve mass death. Civil war: half every country is dead or enslaved. Economic collapse: farms with no electricity or fertilizer; famine, down to preindustrial levels. Welfare families have expanded beyond their self-sustainable levels and if it is interrupted they will die back to the sustainable levels. Sans vigorous suppression, xeno'phobia' is apt to lead to lethal pogroms levelled at unassimilated immigrants and anyone who looks like them.

The challenge: doomcore is dark knowledge. If Western Civilization in its modern constitution is doomed, that includes you. You must personally divorce your own culture. Everything you learned growing up in suspect. Most of it is probably trash. Every habit, every project, every impulse must be re-examined, and you will find most of them were counterproductive. Can you do that? Yes. But you don't think it's necessary. You will realize it's necessary only too late, because humans' true species name is homo hypocritus hubristis.

It's time to give up. It's over. It isn't, just barely, too late to start over. The only good news is the critical mass of fundamental dissenters isn't very large, and the above personal divorce is all they need. However, the mass death will scale with the percentage of clingers.

Most of Civilization is rotten, but rot can be scraped off, and the seeds of what once was healthy can still be rescued. If you want a more precise metaphor, we can feed the corpse to the scavengers and use the fertilizer to grow something new. Elements can be recycled. But first we have to admit the thing is dead. We have to admit we don't know exactly what killed it.

The left? The right existed before our left. And lost.

Christianity? Christianity existed before democracy. And lost.

Bad parenting? There's a case to be made for the black death making too many orphans. But if so, bad parenting is already very old, not new. I personally bet on it going all the way back to Pandora's Seed.

Every single habit, from personal to international, must be tested with horrifying stringency. Only a few will survive the meatgrinder. There will be holes, in which new habits must be created. The new habits will then have to be tested, because by God it is time the West learned it can't decide for itself what Gnon likes. The West was demonstrably too weak. This isn't even the first time.

The West, everywhere, in all its forms, deserves to lose confidence. In this, Progressives are absolutely correct. However, it must be a controlled descent, or it will crash into foreign armies. It is necessary to lose confidence intentionally, specifically for the purposes of deserving to have confidence again.

The Ancestral Sophist

Much of my gene pool is obviously inherited from a proud defecting tradition. My conscience is unmistakably dissonant with and foreign to most of my impulses, I constantly 'forget' rules that go against me but rarely the ones that support me, I oppose physical bullying but not intellectual bullying, and so on.

Much of my moral philosophy is figuring out how to restrain myself. I observed the behaviour of certain blood-related individuals and really didn't like it, but I was wise enough to realize I'm apt to behave the same way.

Note that isn't a virtuous impulse. I happen to really enjoy feeling superior to those folk via not behaving like them.

Currently, my moral philosophy pretty simple: cooperate with cooperators, defect on defectors.

Result: my brain threw up, "Anyone assuming I'm stupider than they are is defecting on me." More or less carte blanche. Thanks brain.

Steel Anarchism: Absurdly Short Version

The State is defecting on you, therefore you should defect on the State.

If the State were not defecting, it would be able to use a voluntary agreement with you. It would gain legitimacy and emotional investment by doing so, in the same way a volunteer army is better than a conscript army.

Any group who does not collectively understand this point is ultimately doomed. It will be defeated by the first group to develop resistance to the parasite. As long as the parasite exists, it creates pressure to develop resistance, guaranteeing that sooner or later an ideology or species that resists it will arise.

A Tale of Two Economic Interventions

Tale One: Luddites.

Luddites suffered an economic setback. The demanded minimum wages, pensions, etc.

Response:
Kill the Luddites. Luddite activities were outlawed upon pain of death.

Result:
Textile jobs exploded. After the adoption of the machines, the textile industry's growth demanded orders of magnitude more employees.



Tale Two: 1930s.

Stock exchanges suffered an economic setback. Just like the Luddites, they demanded the government solve the problem.

Response:
The dole, the disguised dole in the form of make-work, free loans, and eventually a minimum wage.

Result:
Ten years of economic hell.

Basilisk Incident: Dumb or Smart?

On the face it's really fucking dumb.

Humans can't even get good birthday gifts for conspecifics. How are they supposed to know the desires of a superintelligence defined as being unable to communicate with them? Doing tests instead of trusting your first guess is kind of the point of science. Can't do tests on future entities.

On the other hand...

Yudkowsky and co. seem highly convinced that the basilisk meme has nonzero effectiveness and produces donations to MIRI (etc) up to the level of self-destructiveness. It is implausible that Yudkowsky didn't know about the Streisand effect, as the term was coined five years before the basilisk theory.

A truly deviant machiavelli who benefits from donations to AI research would then try to maximize the amplitude of the Streisand effect by maximizing the amplitude of the attempted suppression, on the assumption there's a positive correlation.

Yudkowsky reacted with maximum plausible emotions and repression only restricted by diminishing returns.

So either he's a true defector, or he's really, really, really dumb. Also, plz into emotional continence.

--

More dumb:

For it to be possible to defect on me, I have to define 'me' as including sensations I do not perceive, namely the sensations of future simulations of me. Or, alternatively, I do feel those sensations, meaning it's not acausal, it's just interaction across spacelike separations, such as time travel. Because that wouldn't break the universe or anything.

Yudkowsky accepts that causal decision theory concludes you should defect in the prisoner's dilemma. In other words Yudkowsky could have discovered that conclusion is untrue rather than trying to invent a whole new theory which incidentally creates the apparent possibility of basilisks.

"Since there was no upside to being exposed to Roko's Basilisk, its probability of being true was irrelevant."
Xeno's paradox was a brilliant dig at the idea that Greek philosophy understood physics, motion in particular. Equally, the basilisk shivs Yudkowsky's decision theory. But there's no upside to knowing Yudkowsky's theory has holes in it, now is there?

Classical decision theory already resists blackmail, it simply requires the theory investigator to not stop when they find an emotionally valent conclusion, but to continue until the logic stabilizes.

--

Yudkowsky's sequences are pretty okay. I want to know whether applying logic consistently really is that hard or if Yudkowsky isn't even genuinely trying. Also, plz into emotional continence.

Democratic Decay

Democracy punishes the responsible and rewards the irresponsible, the responsible die and the irresponsible thrive, and the population degenerates until it is so irresponsible infrastructure starts suffering obvious, unmistakeable failures.

If properly husbanded, the decay can be slow enough to last centuries. However, the decay is monotonic and inevitable as long as Democracy, the Demon Prince, holds power.

Folk Epistemology: Granularity

Example from here, via.

The last point is not a trivial one, since although our country is only about 13 percent black, according to a 2001 Gallup survey most people thought the figure was 33 percent, with the average non-white putting it at 40 percent.¹⁰⁴ This was roughly confirmed by the GSS respondents in 2000, who also believed that nearly 18 percent of Americans were Jewish, a figure more than eight times too large.¹⁰⁵ A very recent 2012 survey found that Americans believe Protestants outnumber Jews in this country by only 2.5 to 1, when the actual ratio is ten times greater.

From the perspective of the average mind, there's often nothing between 0 percent and 33 percent. The other options are 66 percent and 100 percent.
There are more than zero blacks in America, but it's not a majority, so that's 33%.

Essentially this is all confabulation. They have little to no idea what statistics mean, and trying to get quantities out of their fuzzy magnitude estimates is always going to be a pointless exercise in inaccuracy.

The average mind has broad categories. "None," "almost none," "a few," "some," "a bunch," "a whole bunch," and so on, based purely on the emotional experience of what they see in front of them. And why would they bother being more precise? They don't need to take a census, they just need to 'bond' with other average minds by having similar experiences. And maybe sometimes avoid places with "a whole bunch" of blacks.

There's "several times" more Protestants than Jews. (Assuming they even share the surveyor's idea of a "Protestant.") Three is several times, isn't it? If it was 25 times, there would be "almost no" Jews. There's clearly "a whole bunch" of Jews in some places, so that can't be right, can it?

More than half of America can barely grasp what numbers mean when it comes to balancing their chequebook. (Do folk still do that? Did they ever, really?) Why do you think they're going to take the effort to not be 'ignorant' of the correct demographic-statistical ratios?

It's not like they actually can't into numbers at all. Carpentry is not a high-IQ profession. It's just work, an experience the average surveyor could never imagine. However, asking for work from folk who have already been to work and would rather be having dinner is not going to end as the surveyor expects.

This is however a problem when politicians consult the public on things like airplane crashes and terrorism. Emotion drives out reason, even if they were into the work necessary, and you'll get two broad factions: those who say planes "never" crash and those who say 33% of frequent fliers will die in a plane crash. The solution being, predictably enough, don't do democracy.

Long Yet Still Very Short History of Sophism

Early hominids* evolved to kill other hominids in conflicts by having bigger groups. Especially after evolving throwing and activating Lanchester's Square Law, (PDF warning) having a bigger troupe was crucial. This required bigger brains, which incidentally makes you smarter.

*(Yes I'm starting that far back.)

For completeness I'll also mention that secondarily, good killer instincts evolved and solidified.

Having become smart and deadly, hominids become not only ecologically successful, but ecologically dominant. The only real selective threat was other hominids. This resulted in a troupe size arms race. However, this had an unexpected result: troupes became so big that most members would spend the bulk of their time interacting not with other troupes or the environment, but other ingroup members.

Thus hominids started to form three castes; the warriors, for dealing with outgroup conspecifics; the shamans or priests, for dealing with the nonverbal, nonstrategic environment; and the merchants, who dealt primarily with internal exchanges.

Surface area being what it is compared to volume, merchants are the most numerous caste. For them, the most important resource-acquisition skill did not involve contact with reality, but opposingly with fooling other ingroup members into thinking defection was cooperation, and of course of detecting and defeating the others' efforts to do same.

Result: the arms race stopped being group size, and become liar-liar competition. Humans now practice lying instinctively. Humans have exquisitely sophisticated lying assistance adaptations, such as the consciousness/subconsciousness compartmentalization. However, necessarily, this makes you smarter, and as a result of these two chained smartness arms races, human brain size has increased blisteringly fast over evolutionary history.

Perhaps the pelvic limits on brain size also helped shift the war from group size to liars. Brain spent on having a bigger troupe doesn't help as well for lying and detecting lies, and ditto neurons spent on killing instinct, so there's a tradeoff there.

Result: lying is natural. Agriculture thus inherently creates an environmental niche for a guild of liars. Expert craftsmen at exploiting lies for mind control. This guild will have its own subculture, techniques and tricks, and I call it Sophism, of which the earliest clear record is Protagoras. They are a perversion of the shaman caste: they use their grasp of reality, but are treating conspecifics like a natural problem to be manipulated, instead of as peers like the merchant caste do. Instead of shamans of the forest, they are shamans of the human.

For completeness I'll mention that super-Dunbar sized groups necessarily require anthropology; the science of being human; the shaman type very similar to Sophism.

--

Sophism has a problem. There's responsible folk, who will have stuff, and irresponsible folk, who are easy to fool, but little overlap. Irresponsible folk irresponsibly waste their windfalls and return to equilibrium. Responsible folk who hit hard times have a tendency to turtle up and survive them.

Humans have strong egalitarian instincts from back before money evolved. With no way to store wealth and troupe size being critical to survival in war, every individual counted and hoarding was pure waste. Similarly, because a strongman is a defector, and defection harms the whole group, anyone who made themselves out to be too dominant was quite rationally torn down by a coalition.

Sophism, the apotheosis of natural lying instincts, can appeal to natural egalitarianism to propose an equal-sounding form of government: democracy. In theory everyone is in charge, but we still get the benefits of division of labour, by making someone else do the actual ruling.

Of course the wealthy know that it's two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. Though in reality the wealthy are the wolves, thus two sheep and a wolf, and in reality the sheep are monkeys, so it's a wolf versus a monkey troupe. Before agriculture, troupe size mattered. After, army sized still mattered a whole lot even though armour disabled Lanchester's Square Law, and so the wealthy wolves tended to surrender to Sophist sophistry. Not to mention it soothes their own egalitarian guilt.

(And thus democracy is an envy/spite engine.)

Thus Sophists establish democracy, to establish a siphon between rich and poor, and skim some off the top. It's not like the irresponsible poor are going to notice there's some missing. Plus hey, free stuff.

--

Sophism first appears clearly in the historical record in Greece. From there it spread around, reaching most of the world within a couple centuries. Folk contaminated by Sophism lost their kings or suffered similar problems.

When Rome fell, we entered a 'dark' age, where Sophism was lost. However, Islam kept (and subsquently suffered from, when Al Ghazali Sophisted them to death) enough texts for the Sophism virus to re-appear in Europe around 1100. Whereupon demogogues started reappearing, you got St. Francis, Luther etc. causing chaos, and ultimately...they lost their kings.

What is Progressivism? It is our particular strain of Sophism. Given a Hajnal folk who believe in Christianity, the easy lies are predictable. These lies get laid down as culture, and then new niches for lies appear on top of them, and thus Progressivism is largely predictable.

--

For now, I'll be brief about mentioning Sophism resistance, also known as Philosophy. Sophism is parasitism, so sooner or later the population adapts to resist the parasite. Lies are unstable form of predation, as they require the prey to trust the predator. No matter how well adapted, the predator cannot make the prey trust them.

Philosophy's root is the art of checking your facts. Generalized due diligence.

--

Democracy is socialist redistribution of power. Power is often used to acquire wealth. Democracy thus implies socialism of wealth.

Or more generally, democracy is in itself the defeat and surrender of wealth. The responsible are punished, and the irresponsible rewarded. The responsible etiolate, while the irresponsible multiply. As per Plato et al, the electorate degenerates, moving leftward, becoming ever more vulnerable to Sophist manipulation.

Full socialism is communism. Full communism is full equality. We are only equal in death. 

--

As part of Sophism resistance, the responsible right starts noticing the irresponsible left voters are a problem, especially as responsibility declines so much that infrastructure starts to break down. For now, they're not realizing that responsibility is a spectrum. There's always a left half of the bell curve, who will suffer envy and independently be more vulnerable to Sophism. Even Massachusetts votes right 40% of the time. Only DC is pure, and that's probably due to filtering.

The Left is not the enemy. Even if the electorate was subject to drastic action and radically shifted right, there will still be a left half. The mind control parasites are the enemy.

More accurately, egalitarian hubris is the enemy. Envy is the enemy. Pride is the enemy. Lies and the lying instincts are the enemy. These ideas may be familiar...

Cthulu's Leftism Summary

As long as you accept that leftism == irresponsibility, it's simple. Democracy punishes the responsible. You get less of what you tax, more of what you subsidize. So, as per Plato et al, democracy degenerates the population, making them increasingly irresponsible. Hence, further left, in a positive feedback loop.

Cthulu always drifts left, says Moldbug. But here at casa AI, we insist on proof.

This is a highlight of a key section of a near-future post.

Progressivism is a parasite culture. It exists to use mind control via lies to siphon off resources for the minimum of effort. But it has a problem: the irresponsible folk, who are easy to fool, are poor. Responsible folk, who are hard to fool because they into due diligence, have all the stuff. Progressives must find some way to empower the irresponsible to take the responsible folk's stuff.

Hence, democracy. Let everyone, responsible or irresponsible alike, have one equal vote. The irresponsible naturally envy the wealth of the responsible, and it's easy to partition the electorate such that the bottom half siphons off the top half. Progressives simply skim some off the current - it's not like the irresponsible are going to run the numbers and find the accounts don't line up. (The responsible have already lost, so if they run the numbers it's easy to make them look like sore losers.)

Thus, being responsible is selected against. In the new election cycle, the whole electorate has shifted to be more irresponsible - further left. However, envy is zero sum. The poor are now poorer, the rich are now poorer (except the top 0.01% or so) so it's eternally possible to partition the electorate so that the bottom half can siphon off the top half.

Badly husbanded, it collapses immediately, such as when Russia liquidated the kulaks. Properly husbanded, this siphoning can run for centuries. However, inevitably responsibility drops so low that basic infrastructure starts failing. Ten generations is a rule of thumb for the limit. The end comes at the next economic shock.

Sleeping Beauty is Easy

Some very clever arguments for making it much harder than it actually is.

The Monty Hall problem is easy if you simply write out the possibility tree and count the final nodes. If I get fancier than counting, it gets tricky. I got this one wrong too before I checked using the dumb counting method.

Though there's a trick depending on what I care about.

The options above the line are 50% each. All I can do is change the weightings of the possibilities below the line, which must also sum to 50%.
The brain gets confused because there's more Ts in the lower half. However, since they must sum to 50%, they're worth less. More on this at the bottom.

If you run the experiment once, then it is kind of hard to think about. Instead, run it a thousand times.
If I think the probability of tails is 1/2, I will report it half the time, and my probability will match the number of times I'm right.
If I report tails all the time, I will be right half the time. If I report heads all the time, I'll be right half the time.
If I think the probability of tails 2/3rds, I will report it more often in the bottom, but less often than in the top, and be right half the time. (1/9 + 1/9 + 4/9 = 6/9 = 2/3. 2/6 + 1/6 = 1/2.)

I dunno. Doesn't seem like I need a whole big book of calculus to solve the problem. I just have to put aside my pride long enough to do the dumb counting thing.

Self-location information? Conditionalization? Principle of indifference? Imagine rule? Impressive, clever-sounding things I don't need to know or care about. I just make a stupid picture and look at it.

The trick being my choice of perspective. If I want to be right, I can pick whatever I want, as I'll be right half the time. If instead we're talking about the number of reports the experimenter sees, then it's different. If the observer is writing down each report separately, and I want to generate as many 'matching' entries as possible, it favours reporting tails. Tails causes double the records, effectively doing the experiment twice on that branch.

Carving Reality, Not Butchering It

I've found the Less Wrong description to be profoundly disappointing, so let's do better.

When you talk about a group for a purpose, the label used for that group should be causally relevant to the purpose.

I am hungry. I have a stick, a carrot, a steak, and a mug. I can carve up this group in various ways.
"Let's eat something natural."
"Let's eat something fleshy."
"Let's eat something long and thin."

Technically, if I have the correct background knowledge, any of those would work. In this example, were I sharing my dinner with you, any of those, while a bit stilted, are perfectly understandable and we could continue a discussion and ultimately sit down and dine.

However, when doing something difficult, we need every advantage we can get. Apparent understandability is not good enough. If I want to eat something, I should start by considering an edible property. We can say, "Whites are outbred," but 'white' is not a relevant property, and leads to interminable arguments about whether slavs or jews are 'white.'

When investigating, it's entirely possible that nobody knows the relevant background information. If I say, "Long thin things are edible," even formally restricting it to a simple set like above, we may end up trying to eat a stick.

Hajnal Europeans are the set living behind the Hajnal line, and thus have a history of manorialism and Catholic social engineering against the clan and in favour of itself. These things have a causal relationship with outbred nuclear families, which has a causal relationship to democracy resistance and lack of corruption and so on. Their colour, like the shape of the fleshy thing above, is coincidental.

Politicians/sophists love doing this wrong, precisely because it leads to confusions which they can exploit to get you to serve their interests instead of your own.

Attitudes to Math vs. Logic

Modern Western culture is often considered pathological because of Progressivism. Progressivism == Modern == disease. While the previous identity is true, ultimately Progressivism thrives due to deeper, nonpartisan diseases.

If you google 'curl operator' you find a precise description and plenty of handles for googling more if you need to practice how it's done.

Learning critical thinking is exactly as mechanistic and objective. However, if you google a particular method such as 'look at something from multiple perspectives,' it is obvious that the pages were not written by a critical thinker, but instead consist of fluffy virtue-signalling. Or, in the best case, virtue-signalling with complicated obfuscations.

Progressivism took root because Hajnals were already the kind to leave the field of 'critical thinking' to the politicians.

Who Keeps the Laws?

Do they realize this is 100% authentic Steel Anarchism? (Via.)

However, respect for the law does not enforce itself.

At one time there was a place where the respect for rule of Law ran so deep it became true, and Law ruled. A nomoarchy. The King could be tried, and found guilty, and punished. And God's hands reached down and cradled those humble and glorious people. However, this respect did not last, and that land now affords Satan comfortable and well-appointed apartments.

Respect for the law does not propagate itself. The law does not enforce itself. As such, what is Law, from the perspective of the transgressor? Law is whatever the Lawkeeper says it is. If I want the Law on my side, I need a Lawkeeper on my side. I must Secure a Lawkeeper, who in turn must Secure my property.

To Secure my property, the Lawkeeper must have enough weaponry to force other Lawkeepers to respect it.

The problem then is to get a just Lawkeeper. In practice, dire apes are easily tricked, and occasionally directly prefer sick Lawkeepers. As example, American slaves were sold by their Lawkeepers to the Lawkeepers of America, and were primarily slaves as punishment for crimes. If indeed we can hang a werman until dead for transgression of the Law, a fortiori we can merely enslave* him. Indeed, give him the option and let him pick his preference.

(*Any lifelong slaves need to be sterilized.)

The typical dire ape knows nothing of the Law and will never know the Law. It is probably this that killed the respect I saw above. The Lawkeeper bent the Law, said it was not bent, and all agreed. But, inevitably, the bent Law was not worthy of respect, and still ignorant of the delta, true Law and bent Law were discredited both.

Yet, quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Neither can the Lawkeepers be trusted to pick just Lawkeepers.

Peterson's Truth

Abstract: Peterson is saying we can't know what's really eternally true, so it's pragmatically a waste of time to worry about it. What we can do is arrange our beliefs in such a way as to serve our goals.

When I studied the idea of truth, I found enough constraints on what it could be that I concluded the definition isn't arbitrary. (E.g. the exact boundary of 'red' doesn't have to be in any particular place, but the boundaries of all ideas in the vicinity of 'true' form contradictions unless they're in a particular spot.)

Peterson closely approximates this definition, but fails to explain his reasoning. Like all but a few moderns, he finds discipline impossible, and as a result misuses language. Thus I will explain on his behalf. I will try (but fail) to leave the steelman for another time.

Timestamps will be late & wrong because I'm too lazy to rewind repeatedly.

--

Let's start with an example, because this topic is fraught with negative knowledge.
33:15
Peterson says atomic theory is wrong. What Peterson means is atomic theory is incomplete.

He would say it's irretrievably entangled with moral considerations. I would say you have to not get bogged down in the weeds. You're making a hydrogen bomb, in Peterson's tale, to prove atomic theory, but why are you proving atomic theory? Largely, for sex and survival. Don't get bogged down in the short-term parochial goal of proving a particular atomic theory.

This particular (exploding) proof, according to Peterson's unexamined priors, decreases the odds of survival. It is therefore quite literally fatally incomplete. Much as the belief [ammonia and bleach produce an interesting chemical reaction] is fatally incomplete if I decide to realize the interest of this reaction in closed quarters.

Peterson may or may not believe we should pursue atomic theory or atomic weapons. If he examined his priors and learned some game theory, he would realize it is inevitable.

At no point does Peterson claim or imply that mass is not energy, that electrons don't form a probability cloud around the nucleus, etc. What he's saying is if you try to fly a test plane without a rudder, you'll justify the insurance company's high premium for test pilots. Atomic theory is the lifting surfaces, but morality and consciousness is the rudder that stop you flying into the ground. Engineering can stop the bomb literally blowing up in your face, but it can't stop the existence of bomb technology metaphorically blowing up in your face.

--

To repeat, Peterson is saying we can't know what's really eternally true, so it's pragmatically a waste of time to worry about it. What we can do is arrange our beliefs in such a way as to serve our goals.

For example, if you're concerned about eternal truth, you start arguing about whether social justice is really 'justice' or some kind of perversion. If you're not, the discussion ends in about ten seconds when you ask, "What is it for?" and then, "Okay, what kinds of things in fact lead to that purpose?" Instead of an interminable Wittgensteinian sin, you end up with a concrete testable prediction. You try the thing and go look and see if it leads to, for example, lower crime and racial harmony, or higher crime and [politics reference redacted]ism.

Because of this, if we run across a theory which is less true in some objective detail, but better for survival, then Peterson says we should adopt this theory, even though it's 'provably' false. (I go into this with the smallpox below.) If the latter theory is better for survival, the previous theory is in fact the more false one. The new theory must have something new and true in it, even though we can't put our finger on it.

Is it really 'justice?' Who cares, it's doing what you want. Is your theory about why it's doing that correct? Who cares, it's doing what you want.
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His goal is to justify religion, though I have to ironically note the heresy involved in this path.

If believing Jesus is God and died for your sins reduces crime over the competing theory, who cares if Jesus in fact existed or still exists? Let's say for the sake of argument it's pure fantasy. However, the mechanistic theory leads to higher crime. It must be false in a way we can't figure out, and Christianity must likewise be true in a way we can't figure out, and on balance mysterious desert sky gods is more true.

The only advantage to a truer theory, and thus the only purpose for pursuing truth in detail, is when it does what you want even harder. In other words, if you're only making a mangonel, use Newtonian physics. It's true enough. Doing a full Einsteinian treatment is a waste of time unless it's a GPS enabled silicon-age mangonel.

Peterson has the further specific claim that science is trying to use Newtonian morality to launch a moral GPS, and it's going to point your moral compass in the wrong direction. Quite possibly to civilization-ending results.

The Greek skeptics have never been widely accepted to have been refuted. Science is often said to be based on the idea that everything can be questioned; that all theories are merely our current best guess, and downright likely to be completely overturned in the future. By the lay definition, a thing that must be overturned isn't true.

Perhaps there is some way to rephrase the supposed scientific respect for contradictory evidence such that the scientist culture in fact respects it instead of resists it. Or there is at the least a way to prove there is no such rephrasing, and the cultural resistance is inevitable.

Even if we had access to eternal truth, it's not an end to itself. (Well, for me it is.) We access this truth for some purpose, and it therefore philosophically behooves us to keep this purpose in mind. Especially as our minds are limited - we must cull some knowledge, not access all of it - we're apt to make complicated versions of the [mustard gas reaction for fun] thing.

Anyway a few more details, then I'll try to sum it up again.

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45:38

Peterson is of course correct that leaving out subjectivity is fatal. I've written about this extensively.

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45:48

"I think about science as a tool instead of a description of reality."

Science defines itself as a tool and not a description of reality. This, however, is a motte-and-bailey thing. Scientists and Harris think of science as a description of reality, and as a matter of fact this makes them resist the overturning they say they support. This is the sort of pragmatic 'not true enough' thing which Peterson is trying to point out.

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47:45

Harris thinks he doesn't discount subjectivity. I'm genuinely laughing out loud at how deluded he is.

"No Plato, these shadows are totes real! See, that one right there is green!"

>You look at the ruddy shadow. There's a little post-it note. It says 'green' on it.

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59:52

Peterson is correct. Harris is ontologically committed to agreeing with Peterson. Harris' brain is too broken to realize it though.

--

After this my patience was utterly exhausted. Spot checks makes it looks like Harris continues to repeat the dogma as if Peterson hadn't heard it millions of times before, and Peterson continues to repeat his failure to communicate in various different ways.

I did find a thing about smallpox that might be a good example.

--

So there's a lab of good people who don't understand smallpox, and a lab of bad people who do.

Harris wants to say the bad people believe something true about smallpox.

Peterson is saying neither is true enough. Both of these sets of beliefs end up with smallpox epidemics that kill enough people to disrupt civilization. "But the bad folks have correct biology." Good for them. So what?

What you want is a theory of smallpox-and-morality, and these things aren't disentangleable the way Harris thinks they are, which leads to no smallpox epidemics. If it gets the smallpox biology wrong, then so be it. It beats the bad lab with good biology.

Note - Harris is ontologically committed to communism. "But the first lab had good intentions!" Right. Just like Lincoln and FDR had 'good' intentions. Do you want to ban medical malpractice lawsuits, or do we condemn FDR and Lincoln for their results?

If Harris wanted a discussion, he would have said something like, "But we can in fact combine good biology and no epidemics. Indeed in reality (not thought experiment) it should even make it easier." And indeed this is the case. But the priority is the no epidemics. Scientists do not have this prioritization, and neither do their funders.

Christianity might be patently false. There should be a theory that's not false but doesn't lead to ennui, alienation, atomization and crime. But we don't know what it is. (I might know what it is. Certainly, neither Harris nor Peterson know it.) The problem is having Christianity widespread is incompatible with having Progressivism widespread. They're self-entangled in complex ways. Trying to have it a la carte doesn't work: we can't simply combine non-genocidalism with good smallpox biology like we easily can with the lab. You can have Democracy or Christianity, but they cannot coexist.

The further problem is that Christianity is incompatible with widespread Philosophy as well. The Bible has logical contradictions. If we are to seek the truth, then both Christianity and Progressivism must fall. However, in the meantime, Christianity is clearly the more true of the pair, and should be kept around, even if you don't accept that Progressivism is philosophical sin.

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Tangents


Talk about being bogged down in the weeds. What is this conversation for? At which point do we accept that our theory about how conversation works has been falsified, because we have comprehensively failed to do whatever it is for? If you're talking to me, it takes substantially less than an hour and a half.



By the way, in short Harris' problem is he's not trying to understand what Peterson is saying, he's trying to convert Peterson to Harrisism. Peterson is likewise trying to evangelize and has zero interest in being converted, and thus unproductivity ensues.

As a judge I find in favour of Peterson, as the host has the power. When you invite a guest you're executing the guest in the sense of a program. If Harris did not invite Peterson for the purpose of activating him, he did a dumb, and Gnon punishes him accordingly. If Harris listeners don't already know what Harris thinks, they're beyond help, but they're curious about what Peterson thinks, and Harris' failure is not being curious on their behalf. If he could not bring himself to be curious, he should have recused himself.

Political Formulae are Perverse

Every political formula ends up promoting its opposite.
#anarcho-pessimism
Not-exploitable because the point of political formulae is to sound aesthetically pleasing to dire apes.

Simply, because 'impact.'

"The conventional word is impact. Impact implies social status: it determines how often you get laid, and with whom. [...] To have impact, you must have an effect, and that effect must not have happened without you. [...] there is no impact unless you (a) produce some change, and (b) do so against some resistance."

Democracy is supposed to lead to policies that the governed consent to. But what kind of loser does what they're supposed to? You know you're really high status if you can provoke maximum dissent and get away with it. Thus we have a competition to implement the most pointless yet destructive policy.

Divine right leads to satanic kings. Sure you can do what God probably wants, but you know you're really high status if you can embody pure heresy and get away with it.

Aristocracy, the rule of the most virtuous, leads to rule by the most depraved reprobate.

Right of conquest is more stable, as it's pretty hard to argue that you weren't beat up when you were. Plus if you argue too hard you get beat up again. This leads to rule by wordy priests. You know you're really high status if you manage to rule without laying a finger on anyone, so as soon as the conquistadors become demoralized or tired, priests seize everything. (You are here.)

Pure ethno-nationalist democracy is worse. Not only will they compete to make pointless yet expensive policy, they'll compete to be as foreign as possible. The Cathedral's core is still mostly white...do you really want to see what a mature ethnat Cathedral would look like?

Pure plutocracy would probably lead to rule by priests again. You know you're really high status if you can tell folk what to do after taking a vow of poverty. You wanna give it a shot? For Science? Maybe it would be warriors beating folk up again instead. Thug intimidates rich dude until he's appointed Evil Vizier. Fuck accountability, am I right? Of course I'm right.

Neocameralism is probably a special case of plutocracy. If you're rich enough you can buy the corporation/country. Hence, the game becomes how few stocks you can own and still get the CEO to do what you want. Alternatively, sabotage the CEO's reputation with the owner, thus getting them fired, until they go so far down the list your buddy gets to be CEO.

Finally we come to Exit.
Exit is still pretty good. Like conquest, it's hard to argue that North Koreans can leave if they want to. Similarly, even in NK, it's hard to restrict the movement of the more important members of society. Nonetheless, if Exit is the formula, the game becomes how much of a prison state you can construct and get away with it. And since everyone will be trying it, there will be a sort of voiceless collusion.

Basically you want your formula to be 'a legitimate state tortures and imprisons everybody.' However, this isn't a viable formula for legitimizing coercion: it doesn't seem legit to anybody. Hence the non-exploitability.



The solution is to convince dire apes that coercion is evil.
(Is the joke sufficiently clear?)