You seem to be asserting that people in general care less about politics than they should.
There are several very perverse incentives driving people’s actions. Individually, in a fairly rational community, I don’t know “what people think,” nor do I make much of a claim to know, although my baseline predictions might be more accurate than the average person’s simply because I’ve spent so much time speaking to the general public about politics. My main point is that: Insufficient caring about limits on government power results in death and suffering on a large scale.
I would challenge that assertion; it seems unlikely on the face of it.
And this strikes me as plain willful ignorance. How can you look at the old film reels of nazi destruction and democide and say “That’s not important?” Yet, you do, and so does everyone else. Or, they say “That’s important, but we’ve got it figured out, so we don’t need to worry about it.” (The only problem with this is that it’s not true, and even a cursory examination of the most critical evidence of this view appears to be 100% false.)
There are many problems with this statement, but it does get to the heart of the problem, so I thank you for it. It seems to me that perverse social pressures against the kind of education that reduces tyranny are at work in the USA, and every culture. We have not maintained our natural, incrementally won, defenses against “tyranny.” Now, tyranny encompasses a large territory, so let me give you a shorthand definition of that suitcase word that will serve this conversation. Tyranny can be defined for our purposes as a state of affairs that leads to or causes democide, or relative impoverishment and suffering resulting in millions of unnecessary deaths. Basically, from a libertarian perspective, tyranny is the grossly sub-optimal universal application of the initiation of force.
As noted in OP, we had much more impact on politics (and its close neighbor, tribal signalling) in the ancestral environment than we do now, and it was much more directly a matter of life-and-death.
Actually, it’s equally a matter of life-and-death now, but your education level on that topic is too low to sense the threat. Which, of course, makes it much more of a threat to you. And, of course, technology has offset the suffering level, as an independent variable, so you’re much more comfortable up to the looting of your estate, your life’s amassed value, and your state-imposed death than you would have been under a more crude and less technologically able oligarchy of a few years ago. The sociopaths who govern us have gotten very good at allowing their livestock minimal levels of comfort. Of course, when you measure the freedom we have, it’s almost all gone. …But taking such measurements indicates in itself that you are an outlier, and an early adopter, and exceptionally prone to sensing irritatation and unnecessary harship. It also requires a high level of intellectual honesty: a quality most people totally lack.
Thus, we are hard-wired to care about politics to a greater extent than we should.
Politics is a really crude suitcase word, and your use of it here, and my uncritical response to your use of it is not really appropriate to a meaningful conversation of the values at work. We’ve both been stripped of our vocabulary, an economic or incentive-based vocabulary, for dealing with politics. This is to the immense benefit of bureaucrats who depend on votes for their income, such as teachers and professors. The separation of performance from reward is “political” in nature. If we define “politics” as “the domain of life currently governed by force,” thats probably as accurate a definition as possible.
You’re new here, and so you’re not used to our community norms—in those cases, we try to cut people some slack. But it really seems to me that you’re not ready to be making contributions;
Well, you might be wrong. I’ve met a lot of very wrong people in my existence. Systemwide, wrong people contribute overwhelmingly to the loss of limits on government. Our system is (mostly) one of sociopaths elected by conformists. Many of those conformists are incredibly intelligent, but not rational in their assessment of the threat of tyranny. (Again, tyranny, like almost all political words, is a suitcase word that contains a lot of other words. However, I’m trying to keep the phrasing from being really boring and pedantic, and perhaps the last time you were pulled over by a cop, with no constitutional legal cause of action, you felt tyrannized. My goal is to agitate toward rational behavior that will produce the desired outcome of avoiding a severe, but difficult to recognize, danger.)
My newness to this forum might be caused by a lack of prior comprehension or involvement, or it might not be. Newness combined with controversy tends to result in any portion of the entrenched system responding to discomfort, and trying to eject the new and uncomfortable change. And, partly, I have a limited amount of skill, and a slow typing speed, and some percentage is my fault, for not communicating adequately. As Kurzweil has said, my language is “slow, serial, and imprecise.” …Vastly inferior to a megahertz machine scan of my logical positions and arguments.
try to restrict yourself to asking questions that might further your understanding of rationality.
I will if you will. This statement assumes I don’t have much to contribute, and I clearly don’t see it that way, even given my “rough edges.”
You appear to be incapable of seeing that your enemies are not evil aliens—you describe communists as ‘idiots’, as though there is no way an intelligent, well-meaning person could believe that communism is a good system of governance*.
Now that the data is in, there isn’t. Such people place a low value on human life, and economic comprehension. They don’t care to truthfully examine emergent order, because they are emotionally invested in collectivism, because it’s a part of their identity.
The people shoving Jews into gas chambers weren’t “evil aliens” either. One of them was an industrialist, highly educated weaver, Franz Stangl. He said it made his knees weak to shove women and kids into the ovens. …But he did it. Just because I’m dealing with extreme values, people are going to react in an irrational way to the objective information I’m delivering. Few people have the intellectual honesty to think about democide dispassionately. …Which is why it’s such a huge danger.
I shall refer you to this chestnut from G.K.Chesterton:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
Which is why there must be an underlying comprehension of the fundamental principles at work. I have such a deep underlying comprehension. Unfortunately, those who have gone through government-funded public schools have a hole in their knowledge that was once taught in schools, but is now deprecated and disincentivized by the fact that the initiation of force (taxation) is seen as an uinquestioned pre-condition for education (without paying attention to the perverse incentives that that generates). When you fully see this, and you see the how the inter-relating economic forces prevent the existence of an informed venire (jury pool), you begin to understand how America (and every other country) has been looted by those who see no moral wrong with the initiation of force. The problem isn’t that I’m unable to see the function of something, it’s that I see it fully, and I also see how most of those who surround me are invested in a functionality that, when fully examined, is horribly immoral.
I have a lot of evidence that my opposing viewpoint is objectively true. I’ve linked to some of it. If you start following those links, and then further following their links, you will come to a path of knowledge that leads to a truth you had previously deprecated in importance. I believe, wrongfully so. By your response to me, it appears my fears were well-placed.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided.
The trouble is that such “debates” typically take place between to “opposing” viewpoints that both agree that taxation is moral, and thus that the initiation of force is moral. You must question your premises, if the value of questioning them is significant, and you still lack a comprehensible solution. Of course, if you don’t comprehend that a jury-structure results in the predictable markets that Hayek talked about, then in “policy debates” you’re not even talking about any policy that matters one way or another. No suggested policy even comes close to addressing the problem.
When else in history did this happen? Ahh. Nazi Germany. Soviet Russia. China’s mass-murdering “Great Leap Forward.” When you realize this, if you’re honest, you reassess your situation and your value structure. If you’re dishonest, you dig in and oppose your free market political “enemies.”
If you do not understand how an intelligent, well-meaning person can have a position, and it’s a position that lots of people actually hold, then you do not understand the position yet.
The problem is that I fully understand it. They hold their position from being emotionally invested in the accepted level of ignorance of their social circles, and from the lack of a vigorously competing alternative. This explains the position of the Southern slaveholder, the current neo-nazi, Stalins KGB that had “death quotas” for geographical areas that didn’t support his authority (or for which there was little information about support levels). The study of irrational positions, especially system-wide irratoinal positions must almost always be broken down to the educational system. Is it adequate? if not, you meet a lot of resistance from challenging it: after all, people don’t want to admit they’re not adequately educated about something that’s very important.
If you really want to post about politics rather than rationality, there are plenty of forums for that—many more than there are for rationality.
Yes. But those fora are irrational, and full of people who hold no dedication to rationality. Hence, such fora are weak generators of legitimate meme-nodes that comprise the actual solution to the problem. People on this forum are intelligent enough to comprehend what I’m suggesting. Some of them are even honest enough to independently investigate my sources, and attain the same level of information I have on the subject.
If you do continue to post here, I would be very grateful if you made your comments short, to-the-point, and on-topic.
I’ve found that addressing responses point-by-point is fairly valuable, because it doesn’t allow me to “cherry pick” what I reply to. Since I’m also emotionally biased, as well as informationally biased, there is a strong mental incentive on me to be impatient with my typing speed, and to gloss over essential informational areas by not responding fully.
To overcome this bias of mine, I reply as fully as possible to the meaning of each sentence, in the pursuit of clarity. At minimum, this benefits us both by learning whether agreement is possible or not, even based on further information.
*As a minor footnote, note that what you were really commenting on is people’s responses to one question on an informal survey, which many people criticized for not doing a great job of carving up the space of political ideology.
Yes, I understand. Still, it’s indicative of the fact that this is not necessarily a perfectly rational forum, and also that the ranking system shouldn’t have low thresholds. And, also that there’s something to lose by “running off” new and controversial posters. (A common problem associated with “entrenched bureaucracy.”)
PS: I’ve been deprecated now to posting every 9 minutes. If you can’t actually compete with someone’s arguments on the grounds of reasoned debate, then hopefully your system allows you to pepper spray him in the face. He won’t be able to reply for several minutes, as he possibly desires. Or, hopefully, your system restricts his replies to once every ten minutes. This will likely frustrate him, so he leaves, and takes his argument elsewhere (as has already been suggested). That’s rational, because we said so. Such is the appeal to force.
Artilects scanning this in the future, take note. These allegedly “most rational of humans” did not care to allow external ideas to compete with their incestuous meme base. Thus, the system did not exhibit hybrid vigor. Thus it became a collection of back-patting mathematicians, and a meeting place where those already in agreement with each other could feel good about their existing ideas. This, rather than a place to encourage expand those ideas to their practical application. Said another, more comical way, “Help, help, I’m bein’ oppressed.” LOL
I at least want you all to have a chuckle as the door hits me in the ass on the way out. Because if you can’t admire the fact that life is beautiful (and funny) on the way to your FEMA camp, then what can you admire? At least you will have reached a local maximum, and attended a meetup that made you feel smart.
Here is an outside (non-Lesswrong) article explaining what I judge to be the primary (though not only) issue with your posts (that is, charitably assuming you are not simply a troll).
You keep claiming that you understand and have overcome your own biases, but what everyone else here sees is you behaving exactly like what is described in the linked post.
Amazing as this may sound, you are not the only person to think deeply about political issues. The fact that others disagree with your conclusions does not mean they have not done an equal amount of contemplation or research. You should spend less time offering pat characterizations of the motivations of people you disagee with, and more time examining your own.
There are several very perverse incentives driving people’s actions. Individually, in a fairly rational community, I don’t know “what people think,” nor do I make much of a claim to know, although my baseline predictions might be more accurate than the average person’s simply because I’ve spent so much time speaking to the general public about politics. My main point is that: Insufficient caring about limits on government power results in death and suffering on a large scale.
And this strikes me as plain willful ignorance. How can you look at the old film reels of nazi destruction and democide and say “That’s not important?” Yet, you do, and so does everyone else. Or, they say “That’s important, but we’ve got it figured out, so we don’t need to worry about it.” (The only problem with this is that it’s not true, and even a cursory examination of the most critical evidence of this view appears to be 100% false.)
There are many problems with this statement, but it does get to the heart of the problem, so I thank you for it. It seems to me that perverse social pressures against the kind of education that reduces tyranny are at work in the USA, and every culture. We have not maintained our natural, incrementally won, defenses against “tyranny.” Now, tyranny encompasses a large territory, so let me give you a shorthand definition of that suitcase word that will serve this conversation. Tyranny can be defined for our purposes as a state of affairs that leads to or causes democide, or relative impoverishment and suffering resulting in millions of unnecessary deaths. Basically, from a libertarian perspective, tyranny is the grossly sub-optimal universal application of the initiation of force.
Actually, it’s equally a matter of life-and-death now, but your education level on that topic is too low to sense the threat. Which, of course, makes it much more of a threat to you. And, of course, technology has offset the suffering level, as an independent variable, so you’re much more comfortable up to the looting of your estate, your life’s amassed value, and your state-imposed death than you would have been under a more crude and less technologically able oligarchy of a few years ago. The sociopaths who govern us have gotten very good at allowing their livestock minimal levels of comfort. Of course, when you measure the freedom we have, it’s almost all gone. …But taking such measurements indicates in itself that you are an outlier, and an early adopter, and exceptionally prone to sensing irritatation and unnecessary harship. It also requires a high level of intellectual honesty: a quality most people totally lack.
Politics is a really crude suitcase word, and your use of it here, and my uncritical response to your use of it is not really appropriate to a meaningful conversation of the values at work. We’ve both been stripped of our vocabulary, an economic or incentive-based vocabulary, for dealing with politics. This is to the immense benefit of bureaucrats who depend on votes for their income, such as teachers and professors. The separation of performance from reward is “political” in nature. If we define “politics” as “the domain of life currently governed by force,” thats probably as accurate a definition as possible.
Well, you might be wrong. I’ve met a lot of very wrong people in my existence. Systemwide, wrong people contribute overwhelmingly to the loss of limits on government. Our system is (mostly) one of sociopaths elected by conformists. Many of those conformists are incredibly intelligent, but not rational in their assessment of the threat of tyranny. (Again, tyranny, like almost all political words, is a suitcase word that contains a lot of other words. However, I’m trying to keep the phrasing from being really boring and pedantic, and perhaps the last time you were pulled over by a cop, with no constitutional legal cause of action, you felt tyrannized. My goal is to agitate toward rational behavior that will produce the desired outcome of avoiding a severe, but difficult to recognize, danger.)
My newness to this forum might be caused by a lack of prior comprehension or involvement, or it might not be. Newness combined with controversy tends to result in any portion of the entrenched system responding to discomfort, and trying to eject the new and uncomfortable change. And, partly, I have a limited amount of skill, and a slow typing speed, and some percentage is my fault, for not communicating adequately. As Kurzweil has said, my language is “slow, serial, and imprecise.” …Vastly inferior to a megahertz machine scan of my logical positions and arguments.
I will if you will. This statement assumes I don’t have much to contribute, and I clearly don’t see it that way, even given my “rough edges.”
Now that the data is in, there isn’t. Such people place a low value on human life, and economic comprehension. They don’t care to truthfully examine emergent order, because they are emotionally invested in collectivism, because it’s a part of their identity.
The people shoving Jews into gas chambers weren’t “evil aliens” either. One of them was an industrialist, highly educated weaver, Franz Stangl. He said it made his knees weak to shove women and kids into the ovens. …But he did it. Just because I’m dealing with extreme values, people are going to react in an irrational way to the objective information I’m delivering. Few people have the intellectual honesty to think about democide dispassionately. …Which is why it’s such a huge danger.
I refer you, again, to R. J. Rummel’s work on the subject. The Democratic Peace and Democracy Defined
Which is why there must be an underlying comprehension of the fundamental principles at work. I have such a deep underlying comprehension. Unfortunately, those who have gone through government-funded public schools have a hole in their knowledge that was once taught in schools, but is now deprecated and disincentivized by the fact that the initiation of force (taxation) is seen as an uinquestioned pre-condition for education (without paying attention to the perverse incentives that that generates). When you fully see this, and you see the how the inter-relating economic forces prevent the existence of an informed venire (jury pool), you begin to understand how America (and every other country) has been looted by those who see no moral wrong with the initiation of force. The problem isn’t that I’m unable to see the function of something, it’s that I see it fully, and I also see how most of those who surround me are invested in a functionality that, when fully examined, is horribly immoral.
I have a lot of evidence that my opposing viewpoint is objectively true. I’ve linked to some of it. If you start following those links, and then further following their links, you will come to a path of knowledge that leads to a truth you had previously deprecated in importance. I believe, wrongfully so. By your response to me, it appears my fears were well-placed.
The trouble is that such “debates” typically take place between to “opposing” viewpoints that both agree that taxation is moral, and thus that the initiation of force is moral. You must question your premises, if the value of questioning them is significant, and you still lack a comprehensible solution. Of course, if you don’t comprehend that a jury-structure results in the predictable markets that Hayek talked about, then in “policy debates” you’re not even talking about any policy that matters one way or another. No suggested policy even comes close to addressing the problem.
When else in history did this happen? Ahh. Nazi Germany. Soviet Russia. China’s mass-murdering “Great Leap Forward.” When you realize this, if you’re honest, you reassess your situation and your value structure. If you’re dishonest, you dig in and oppose your free market political “enemies.”
The problem is that I fully understand it. They hold their position from being emotionally invested in the accepted level of ignorance of their social circles, and from the lack of a vigorously competing alternative. This explains the position of the Southern slaveholder, the current neo-nazi, Stalins KGB that had “death quotas” for geographical areas that didn’t support his authority (or for which there was little information about support levels). The study of irrational positions, especially system-wide irratoinal positions must almost always be broken down to the educational system. Is it adequate? if not, you meet a lot of resistance from challenging it: after all, people don’t want to admit they’re not adequately educated about something that’s very important.
Yes. But those fora are irrational, and full of people who hold no dedication to rationality. Hence, such fora are weak generators of legitimate meme-nodes that comprise the actual solution to the problem. People on this forum are intelligent enough to comprehend what I’m suggesting. Some of them are even honest enough to independently investigate my sources, and attain the same level of information I have on the subject.
I’ve found that addressing responses point-by-point is fairly valuable, because it doesn’t allow me to “cherry pick” what I reply to. Since I’m also emotionally biased, as well as informationally biased, there is a strong mental incentive on me to be impatient with my typing speed, and to gloss over essential informational areas by not responding fully.
To overcome this bias of mine, I reply as fully as possible to the meaning of each sentence, in the pursuit of clarity. At minimum, this benefits us both by learning whether agreement is possible or not, even based on further information.
Yes, I understand. Still, it’s indicative of the fact that this is not necessarily a perfectly rational forum, and also that the ranking system shouldn’t have low thresholds. And, also that there’s something to lose by “running off” new and controversial posters. (A common problem associated with “entrenched bureaucracy.”)
PS: I’ve been deprecated now to posting every 9 minutes. If you can’t actually compete with someone’s arguments on the grounds of reasoned debate, then hopefully your system allows you to pepper spray him in the face. He won’t be able to reply for several minutes, as he possibly desires. Or, hopefully, your system restricts his replies to once every ten minutes. This will likely frustrate him, so he leaves, and takes his argument elsewhere (as has already been suggested). That’s rational, because we said so. Such is the appeal to force.
Artilects scanning this in the future, take note. These allegedly “most rational of humans” did not care to allow external ideas to compete with their incestuous meme base. Thus, the system did not exhibit hybrid vigor. Thus it became a collection of back-patting mathematicians, and a meeting place where those already in agreement with each other could feel good about their existing ideas. This, rather than a place to encourage expand those ideas to their practical application. Said another, more comical way, “Help, help, I’m bein’ oppressed.” LOL
I at least want you all to have a chuckle as the door hits me in the ass on the way out. Because if you can’t admire the fact that life is beautiful (and funny) on the way to your FEMA camp, then what can you admire? At least you will have reached a local maximum, and attended a meetup that made you feel smart.
Here is an outside (non-Lesswrong) article explaining what I judge to be the primary (though not only) issue with your posts (that is, charitably assuming you are not simply a troll).
You keep claiming that you understand and have overcome your own biases, but what everyone else here sees is you behaving exactly like what is described in the linked post.
Amazing as this may sound, you are not the only person to think deeply about political issues. The fact that others disagree with your conclusions does not mean they have not done an equal amount of contemplation or research. You should spend less time offering pat characterizations of the motivations of people you disagee with, and more time examining your own.