Deeper Understanding of Arrow's Impossibility

Collective preferences do exist, the problem is there's no way to honestly communicate them, because real voting must be zero sum but real preferences are not.

Also consciousness per se.

Riffing off this, via 1, via 2 Isegoria somewhere, revisited due to Nick Land. I referred to Wikipedia for logical diffraction, but I don't recommend doing so yourself in this case.

First, to make sure we're on the same page and so I can audit my thought processes...

"Andy likes sprinkles on his ice cream.  Andy walks into the ice-cream shop and seeing that they have chocolate, strawberry and vanilla chooses chocolate.  Before the vendor has a chance to scoop the ice cream she says "Today, chocolate comes with free sprinkles."  "In that case," Andy says, "I'll have vanilla.""

This happens in runoff voting systems. Proof by example:
First round, six for vanilla, seven for strawberry, seven for chocolate. Vanilla is eliminated, and four voters change to chocolate, for the win.
But, sprinkles.
First round, two strawberry voters are converted, so it's six, five, nine. Now strawberry is eliminated, and  everyone left changes to vanilla, which wins.

As per Arrow's theorem, eliminating this problem only introduces others. I ask myself, what's the nearest runoff like model that obeys positive association or monotonicity?

I think it's quicker to skip to idealism and work backward. If we could measure preferences directly like a voltmeter, it would work. However, voters would have different total voltages in this case. Converting to less-ideal self-reporting, it runs afoul of strategic voting. Everyone will self-report their voltage as infinite, vote infinitely for their first candidate, which either reduces to one-man-one-vote or is undefined. By contrast, any scheme to limit their voltages by external measurements will end up reintroducing the original problem when preferences change and the external corroborate doesn't.

Even if you don't buy my proof that consciousness is ontologically subjective, it is epistemically subjective for all practical purposes. It can't be measured, but nevertheless, a true well-behaved aggregate preference exists.

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem would be a consequence of ontological subjectivity, Aristotle could have worked out ontological subjectivity, then derived Arrow's theorem from it. My proof is therefore useful even if not exactly true. But usefulness is usually correlated with veracity...

Notes on Fascism and the Future 1

I have a pet theory. The way to disown a pet theory, if it is in fact false, is to intentionally look for places it doesn't fit. Here are some of my failures to find such a place.

Here, via.

" Why, then, is “fascist” the buzzword of choice to this day for anybody who wants to denounce a political system? "

It does have a meaning. It means apostate sophist.

" More to the point, why do most Americans say “fascist,” mean “Nazi,” "

Hitler is Satan because he repented of sophistry, just as Satan repented of grace. He was democratic - got elected and all that - and then interrupted the sophist-power feedback loop.

" Since Mussolini was a former socialist who had abandoned Marx in the course of his rise to power "

Apostate abandons sophist saint.

" Some of the nastier details of postwar politics unfolded from that shared interest, and so did certain lasting impacts on political and economic thought. "

The layhuman is too gullible to have any worthwhile thought. If they're not fooled on purpose as they are in this case, they'll only be fooled by accident. This is not a recoverable error, except in breaking the habit of looking for wisdom in fools.

" Afterwards, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the existence of alternatives to representative-democracy-plus-capitalism, on the one hand, and bureaucratic state socialism on the other, became a taboo subject, and remains so in America to this day. "

It seems Greer agrees with me - do not refer to parties as 'left' or 'right.' It's a rhetorical trap, crafted intentionally. Don't go looking for a spectrum at all.

" Standing apart from the socialist parties were communist parties, which (after 1919) spouted whatever Moscow’s party line happened to be that week "

One of the problems with AIACC is that many have absorbed this layhuman definition of communist, and now wish to shrilly insist that it's the true definition. And indeed by that definition, AIACC is false.

" The tendency of most of these parties to further the interests of a single class became a matter of concern by the end of the 19th century, and one result was the emergence of parties that pursued, or claimed to pursue, policies of benefit to the entire nation.   "

The reason this is sophistry can be summed up by: Hayek. Even if you wanted to support a fair national interest, you couldn't. Not enough information. The rest can be summed up by hypocrisy. Nobody actually wants to. It's absurd and beyond absurd. Yet it was swallowed, hook line and sinker. This is not a recoverable error.

" National socialist parties argued that business firms should be made subject to government regulation and coordination in order to keep them from acting against the interests of society as a whole, and that the working classes ought to receive a range of government benefits paid for by taxes on corporate income and the well-to-do. "

You may notice that by this definition America is indeed socialist, even though Greer calls socialism a sneer word further up. He is correct.

It's not socialist, it's sophist. This lie, as opposed to mutually exclusive lies, will reliably be bought, so it reliably wins liar championships.

" salonfähig "

Is a great word. Sadly I'll likely forget it.

" It didn’t lose that status until the Second World War and the Cold War reshaped the political landscape of the western world  "

'That' status? Greer would benefit by realizing it's all about social status.

Also, passive tense. The wars were not inevitable, nor were their particular consequences. While history is a chaotic system, some people - actual individuals with personalities and ideologies - got what they wanted by dint of effort. And they are to blame for the effects of those things.

Jim Accepts Basic Sophism Premise; Other Predictive Nonsense

Demotist "The North Korean regime is based on lies, [...]  The US regime is based on lies" is a subset of sophist. "Sophistry is the art of using the tools of philosophy to gull those dumber than you into believing lies that empower you."

Apparently my most effective persuasion strategy is shut up and wait.

"Moldbug blames the evil of the modern state on insecurity of power. His solution is security of power. I don’t believe it."

Yes he does. Lies are inherently insecure. Laws can be flawed but aren't inherently insecure. Power is an illusion only if you feel oppressed, as you would rise up if you could. If, as in most times and places, power is pretty much okay, it isn't an illusion.

It would be better not to call the power per se an illusion. It relies on the coordination barrier, which is real; it's not as if the individual rising up would succeed, as in a real illusion. The illusion is of general consent. I and my friends may think the anti-racists have gone round the bend, but when I speak up, everyone else shouts me down, so it's just us, right? It would be better to say that powers that rely only on a coordination barrier do not feel secure and indeed are not secure, and as a result constantly attempt tyrannical measures to attempt to shore up their power.

One efficient way to make the population feel oppressed is to institute a thought control system.



I also realized that sophist theory predicts universal sufferage and the war against the middle class including anarcho-tyranny.

"Lesser sophists, dumber, more gullible, less sophisticated, are pwned by greater sophists." Conversely, with a limited electorate, the dumbest in-group feels the need to conscript yet dumber proto-sophists as allies against the smarter sophists, because even the dumbest group in any subset eventually works out it is being had.

Pre-penultimately this process ends with a universal electorate all focused on opposing the top, smartest sophists. Penultimately, it ends with the smartest sophists fighting against the next-to-dumbest sophists for control of the underclass against everyone else, with the smartest sophists usually winning.

Ultimately, even the dumbest extant human works out he is being had, and the system falls apart.



In longer form...
Democracy arises in part because coercion is wrong and everyone knows it. Therefore, the state, the institute of coercion, constantly needs to justify itself. One way is to claim to govern as a representative of the will of the people or with the consent of the people; but this unavoidably means the people must be allowed to voice their will or grant their consent, and hence, voting.

Of course this is all a pretext. The point is coercion; if there's consent, it's not coercion and it would be unnecessary to evoke democracy or substitutes to justify it. Thus, limited franchise.

Sophists reliably choose the will/consent of people route because their expertise is in putting a ring through people's noses and leading them around by it. But once the limited franchise is established, the lowest echelon (once they clue up) can put rings through the noses of new franchisees, and dupe them into opposing the upper echelons not through rhetoric, but through this voting charade, and it works for a time because the uppest, top-out-of-sight class can't threaten the charade too directly. The new lowest yet numerically biggest echelon eventually clues in and rings up the next tranche. All the while, the most senior tranche is thinking up new ways to dupe the rebels into supporting what they think they're opposing.

Formal power ends up in the hands of the lowest possible intellectual echelon, who are easily puppeteered by the uppest class. All the intermediate tranches end up pairwise deadlocked. Sometimes the next-lowest echelon, by virtue of familiarity (anti-bubble virtue) can wrest the underclass away for a time, so of course they must be destroyed, but this releases the deadlock on the second-next-lowest class, who take their place. As far as possible, the underclass is expanded to consume everything between the uppest and lowest classes. The middle class is simply not that dumb, and resists mightily. It simply cannot be made as completely dependent as the underclass.

The underclass, being ultimately under the control of the top-out-of-sight class, is frequently forgiven all but its most egregious crimes. The middle classes, constantly threatening to dupe the underclass into siding with them,  are still a threat, and must be constrained over and over by rings of rules. They have to be demoralized, put in their place. They have to be shamed into not pursuing their own interest against that of the elite, or they would succeed.

OWS is a nice example. Clearly, OWS is about the 2% trading places with the 1% by recruiting the 98%. While I can't speak for the non-writing parts of the 98%, at least half of those who do write seemed to think it was cool. If OWS weren't fighting the last war it would have worked. It would have recruited the 49% against the 1% and successfully traded places, with nothing in it for the 49%. (But they were fighting the last war, 'democracy' as political formula has moved on quite a bit from my simple story, following its railroad into deep sophistication. E.g. elected representatives have voted their power away to permanent bureaucrat buddies, so they can retire from politics and get hired by their buddies into the new, now-powerful, but electorate-immune, positions.)

All of this because somebody wanted to lie their way to power through rhetoric.

Mining the Anti-Reactionary FAQ

I may edit this post.

Cited Source: Pinker, via hbdchick

The overall violence rate kinks up twice. First time, just before 1800. The second kink is the first time all the component curves move in unison. It looks like it starts in, what, the 60s? It's as if a long-term global decline in violence was overwhelmed by something, in every country, at the same time.

This may be just a coincidence. At some point the parade of coincidences must be taken seriously.

Does anyone know why Italy and Scandinavia responded to the revolutions? Or perhaps did they respond to the same causes the revolutions responded to?

Notably, because we have this kind of graph, we can use it to proxy propensity-for-violence. Using this factor, we can adjust historical war deaths downward, just like we adjust historical dollars upward to adjust for inflation. Given our lower propensity to kill each other, how many wars should we have had, or how big should they have been?

Less Wrong vs. Evidence and Scholarly Virtues

It is not surprising LW went off the rails, because respect for authority and voting are both scholarly anti-virtues. Authority is a time-saving hack for non-scholars, and the only vote that counts is Reality.

Global warming is a better test of irrationality that theism. (No quote necessary.)

Trusting Expert Consensus. (Via: 1, 2.)

"Sometimes I regret not knowing the climate controversy as well as I know the evolution controversy, but what I've seen so far makes me think it's extremely likely that if I did study it in greater depth, doing so would just confirm the evolution-climate change parallel."

Meanwhile, because Reality loves the skeptics,

Carbon emissions have been higher than expected. Measured temperatures have falsified every model. The measurements have simplified the argument - it isn't necessary to think enough to understand how the models could never work. In retrospect, this was inevitable. There is only one way to get any kind of measurement match out of the crude things it pleases climate 'scientists' to call models. Overfitting. Every climate model will reliably diverge in the short term, and due to the pro-warming bias, they will all diverge upward.

Being wrong is not a scholarly anti-virtue. The usual scientific practice is to shower false models with jeers - see phlogiston, etc. This is not only unnecessary, it is counter-productive; a large part of secular anti-consciousness is due to consciousness smelling like vitalism.

Failing to correct, however, is not just an anti-virtue, it is a crime against the laws of epistemology.

Carbonic warming's spectacular flaming crash has undermined not only LW's argument for AGW, but its respect for evolution, and doubtless other fields as well. To be clear: the current correct answer for Hallquist, if asked whether he believes in evolution, is "I don't know." He needs more data or analysis.

The scholarly virtues are deriving things for yourself and voting via experiment. Just as macroevolution follows from things like thermo #2, the impossibility of modelling climate follows from chaos theory. (Have you done the derivations? If not, then your correct response is either "I don't know" or to renounce scholarhood.)

If there was ever time for drastic correction, it is now.

We will not see drastic correct. We probably won't even see slow correction. Even hoping for an embarrassed evasion of the topic feels optimistic to me.

I'm posting this to challenge Reality to prove me wrong. Show me that LW converges on the truth. Perhaps it is I who will have to drastically correct.

Two Envelopes Paradox

Just for spice, let's look at academic philosophy getting it right.

"We want to compare the amount that we would gain by switching if we would gain by switching, with the amount we would lose by switching if we would indeed lose by switching. However, we cannot both gain and lose by switching at the same time. We are asked to compare two incompatible situations." 

And yet,

"God help us if, after the fourth round of drinks, someone brings up the two envelopes paradox." (Here, via) 

La Wik's phrasing needs work, so in my own words:

When first looking at switching, it seems I must switch, as the expected payoff is 5/4 A. However, now I've switched, I can't re-define the amount in the new envelope as A - it's still 5/4 A, and thus switching back must be a loss. At first this feels like I've unjustifiably broken the symmetry - before I pick an envelope, the expected value must be equal - but since I've added an assumption asymmetrically, it would instead be weird if the symmetry remained.



The second version, where I actually open the envelope, also breaks the symmetry. Sadly this one is still best analyzed by throwing all the academics in a lake.

Your daughter has some terrible eye-melting but curable disease, and you are poor. The opened envelope has $10 000 in it. Do you switch? Obviously not - it's not risking five grand, it's risking your daughter.

Your daughter is fine. You're thinking of buying a new car. The opened envelope has $10 000 in it. Do you switch? Obviously so - no matter what, you get a nicer car, we're just haggling about whether you also get to pad your retirement fund.



Seems clear to me. But why the lake? Have fun trying to find even one academic who will make this clear. The real world and applications are low status, don't ye know.

Second, I've tried to respect intuition. Nobody analyzes these things entirely abstractly. It is passed to the subconscious and the subcon uses concrete examples, usually whatever the availability bias spits out. (E.g. think of a cat - no no, not a cat with fur, an abstract cat. [Mine's an adult tabby. {Side view, facing left, tail erect, front right paw (white) lifted, looking a bit surprised.}]) This will naturally lead to very different intuitions based on things like how rich you currently are or how secure you currently feel.

Additionally, expected value is not the whole story, and one other consideration is whether you can absorb the possible loss. Your intuition will consider this and you can't tell it not to without training.



Completely unrelated, this article taught me a new rule of thumb. "Though Bayesian probability theory ..." The translation: "We are now going to talk out of our ass." Any paragraph or section explicitly calling itself Bayesian is not worth reading. Presumably one calling itself frequentist would be just as bad, but I haven't seen one of those yet.

Self-Reference, Logical Positivism, and Existence

It would appear Reality wanted to spot-confirm my hunch, as per my last post, that respect for self-reference is too high.

Logical positivism has been discredited by feeding itself to itself.

"Logical Positivism is the view: "The only meaningful statements are those that can in principle be verified empirically.  Logical Positivism fell because it cannot itself be verified empirically thus it is meaningless by it's own standard."

Or what I found:

"Therefore, LP is meaningless. I don't know what you mean when you say that meaning can only be ascertained by the possibility of an experiential proof as that statement has no possibility of an experiential proof." [1]

Let LP be f(proposition) = 1 if proposition is meaningful, and 0 otherwise.
Solve for x: f(LP) = x.
Substitute f(proposition) for LP, but proposition = LP, so f( f(LP) )) = x. Et cetera.
In other words, Green, Brown, and everyone who thinks like them have made a critical logical misstep when they concluded that LP self-disproves. Properly appreciated, the argument looks like this:

• Assume LP
• biowhjtn4ali;buah.wevkjask;rbhafb
• Therefore, f(LP) = 0. 
• Therefore, by contradiction, LP is false. 

This doesn't prove that LP is not meaningless. Similarly, Godel's first incompleteness theorem is true, despite having a faulty proof. A system cannot prove its own consistency, as that would be circular reasoning - and it cannot prove its own inconsistency, either.

I'm not a logical positivist and had to look this stuff up. Instead I believe something, generalized from my formal study of physics, that can apparently be confused with logical positivism. I believe existence is defined by interaction.

As it can be confused with logical positivism, I can be certain LP should have been repaired, not discarded, and as a result this corner of philosophy has been in a blind alley for several decades.



It has come to my attention that philosophers don't understand existence. Let's pretend I can change that.(Again. [2])

Because a system cannot prove or disprove itself, we can be certain that we need an external framework to evaluate any system, and the framework will necessarily be strictly more powerful, as it contains the system in question. The problem is there's a strictly most powerful framework: existence itself.

We can be certain of this even using only diction. Look at how I must start the proof: if a strictly more powerful framework than existence existed... I call this the principle of existence. It seems to have the property of being self-justifying, indeed it seems that a self-justifying framework can be defined as existence.

Though proving this is impossible.

First problem, existence is the most powerful framework. Second problem, since everything is subject to the principle of existence, logic is inherently less powerful than existence. Existence is the framework by which I evaluate logic; it is not valid to use logic to evaluate the statement 'existence is the most powerful framework,' or that 'existence is self-justifying.' (It bemuses me that I can even state or communicate the idea.) Conversely, I can't use logic to invalidate the ideas either, and both these restrictions also apply to evidence.

So, have I tried to put 'existence is interaction' though the wringer of itself? I have. I found it's a bit stupid and felt silly.

Despite this, I will pretend to argue for it. If you can figure out how this relates to the fact that arguing is invalid, kindly let me know. (I'll probably understand eventually, but it would be nice not to have to do it all myself.)

Because it isn't an argument, it isn't unreasonable to hold a contradictory axiom. However, it is unreasonable to think any alternative can be logically defended.



The purpose of truth is prediction. I don't really care about truth per se, I care that when I go to make tea, the tea leaves and hot water are where and how I think they are. The purpose of prediction is to control my own subjective state. (How this invalidates caring about BIVs and the external world is left as an exercise.) For example, being able to experience tea when I want to experience tea. As another, experiencing nourishment so that I don't experience starving to death and thus termination of experience. Truth allows me to predict and thus fulfil these goals.

Something that cannot interact with me cannot affect my goals. If it cannot affect my goals, as far as I'm concerned, it does not exist.

Nevertheless, existence is the ultimately axiomatic axiom. As it's not an argument, this is a suggestive story. (Mmm, tea.)



Ironically, Brown says, "it is the hope and intent of this work that once people come to really understand Hume and the Bullshit Nature of Rational Philosophy, they can start working on an axiomatic philosophy," apparently unable to see that LP only functions as an axiom.

Rack this up as another place where philosophy has gone off into the weeds so deeply that a single individual can outflank the entire academic class. Of course, I don't actually think I have some superhuman insight. I think anyone can do this if they have enough dedication. It's a process of discarding chains more than acquiring skills, and not giving up by concluding it must be impossible. Having a PhD in philosophy is such a massive millstone that even the middlebrow can pass them if they set their mind to it, and lesser qualification are merely lesser millstones to be overcome. 



In this case, I apparently independently re-derived a better version of logical positivism. (I certainly didn't read any Wittgenstein or Russell.) I can tell because my phrasing is different and the logical geometry is just a bit off. Sadly you can't tell - I might have deliberately rephrased it specifically for the purposes of foisting this metric off on you. But, were you to embark on a similar expedition, you know what to look for in yourself.

By the geometry, I mean I don't seem to need empiricism or meaning as concepts. If they appear, they appear as consequences of the principle, rather than having to be injected. Interaction-existence and LP as concepts can't quite be superimposed neatly. I don't use the idea of statements either, and though I tend to have to add that to get any use out of interaction-existence, because it isn't native it becomes modular - if you don't like statements and can come up with an alternative, it works fine.



[1] Careful, Brown's mean free path between contradictions in this piece is maybe 20. Go here if you want to see him inside his domain of expertise. It's the detail view of what Moldbug mentions about models. In the LP piece, roughly all the implications he ascribes to LP are embarrassing misunderstandings. Or sheer mendacity - I found one insult he flings that he later straight-up contradicts the basis of. Unfortunately, this sort of thing seems typical of modern academics.

[2] I like repeating myself, because if I've made a mistake, every repetition increases the likelihood I'll make a different mistake which will show up as a detectable contradiction. It also allows the reader to do logical diffraction if I'm correct: each slightly different iteration has slightly different interpretations, and you can eliminate the possibilities that don't overlap and reinforce.

Self-Referential Sentences such as the Liar Paradox

I appear to have a novel solution.

In mathematics, some numbers may be consistently defined recursively, though they must pass convergence tests. In logic, it seems convergence is impossible.

Let f(x) = 0 represent 'this statement is false.' To resolve what it means, I must substitute the statement, 'this statement is false' into 'this statement,' or f( f(x) ) = 0. Trying resolve this new statement, I get f( f( f(x) )) = 0. And so on.

The liar paradox is not a statement. It is nonsense. It can be neither true nor false.



As I've mentioned before, I should not be able to outflank the whole of professional philosophy. Their combined brainpower should find all the solutions my single brain can, just by chance. Their mistakes alone should outweigh my contribution, even if they had systematic bias against it.

Considering that both Godel's incompleteness theorems and the halting problem proof depend on these kinds of non-resolvable statements, I expected scholars to at least address the objection in passing. I expected to find I took the idea more seriously, not that I am apparently the first it has occurred to.

Explaining this bungle demands some strange ideas. Do I have superhuman insight, or are professional philosophers capable of seeing the real solution well enough to avoid it?