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...