Solstice: White Burning Man: Red AI discourse: Blue Slack: Green/White? Living in the Bay/NYC/Boston/Oxford (and liking it): Blue Having kids: Green Deciding to have kids based on philosophical reasons: Blue Dark Arts, etc: Black Effective Altruism: White/Blue Veg*nism: Green/White/Blue “Animals don’t experience qualia/ have consciousness”—Black/Blue Self-hacking, nootropics, CRISPR: Blue Polyamory: Hmmm...Maybe Red for other people, but Blue for the people who hang out around here, and it feels Green to me personally?
“It is good to make life better for the top 1% because it is raising utility”- Black “It is bad to make life better for the top 1% because it is raising inequality”- White Anti-deathism: Blue/ Black Seasteading: Black/White??
I think Slack is Green alone. It certainly is not white. White doesn’t think you have the right to Slack and tries to take it away from you. Often it taxes or outright punishes you for having it.
Traditional Solstice is Green. Our Solstice is at least partly green.
I haven’t been to Burning Man but if it’s got black in it that means something is very wrong, at least to me—it’s an explicit ban on black. But blue makes sense as a secondary color, even if the name is a giveaway for the primary.
Seasteading claims to be Esper (Black/Blue/White) but skeptics think it’s actually Red/Black. Unclear who is right.
Polyamory is red, full stop, and I think people who claim it isn’t are confused about how something works.
Burning Man is R/G/U. It explicitly bans Black, and implicitly shuns White, because the thing it actually wants is for the “colorful” colors to do their things and express themselves without the Black/White tension getting in the way.
As people have been saying, our current mainstream culture is MOSTLY White, and where it isn’t White, it’s Black. Most people don’t even THINK about where their feelings come from, or what they actually want for themselves, or how a light-switch actually works when they flip it. They just want to be part of an order, and they want to compete for the best position they can within that order.
Burning Man explicitly says “Fuck all that! Make things! Be yourself! Do wacky shit!”
BM’s anti-commercialism is an explicit ban on Black, but its “radical self-reliance” is an almost-as-explicit ban on White.
… Gah. Which means I should just break down what each of the Ten Principles is trying to do, color-wise. Let’s try this:
Radical Inclusion
(+G)
Gifting
(-B)
Decommodification
(-B)
Radical Self-reliance
(-W, +GU)
Communal Effort
(+GU)
Civic Responsibility
(+WU)
Leaving No Trace
(+G)
Participation
(+GR)
Immediacy
(-W, +R)
On net, that’s GGGGGRRUUU, and two strikes against B and one (net) strike against W.
Most of the benefit I see from polyamory is the way it makes deliberately-assembled extended families instead of loosely-connected pair bonds. Certainly I started doing it because my boyfriend wanted it for love, but the reasons I actively want to stick with it are the social bonds and it making each component relationship more resilient. In an atomized society, a relationship style that coalesces a community into short chains of strong bonds supports a community ideal that feels quite green.
Agreed on poly being red. Sexuality is red generally, and “freedom to do your own thing” is red.
Hippie shit is generally heavy on red, unless it has people over 30 in it, in which case there may also be some green involved.
Psychedelic culture is primarily red (creativity, freedom, exploration, etc), with some blue where it intersects with inquiry about chemistry/psychology/AI, and sometimes green where it intersects with spirituality/wisdom/evolution insights.
Slack feels distinct from keeping a buffer—Black would definitely think of gathering extra resources to overdetermine their victory in a way that they might not think to in general take the less-than-maximal path towards accomplishing their stated goals. Gathering resources is just gathering resources.
I promote Red Slack. Break your chains, before they break you.
Reading how you model the colors makes me think that I probably have something wrong, because our models don’t line up, and I assume yours is closer to MtG canon for the obvious reasons.
You say:
The AIs and AGIs we are worried about are white and we’re trying to make sure they’re blue.
My interpretation would have been that the AIs we’re worried about are blue (cold, perfect logic. Helps that blue is also the color of technology), and we’re trying to make sure that they’re white (compassionate, pro-social, caring).
I don’t understand how Slack is not at all white, when much of the discussion and practice is coming out of the religious tradition of Sabbath. (If you say that just because something comes from religion it doesn’t make it white, then I would say that just because something comes from emotion or sex it doesn’t make it red.)
And saying that polyamory is red, full stop, seems obviously wrong from the perspective of my model. I’d agree that cheating is red. One night stands are red. (Marriage is white.) But polyamory is almost never entered into impulsively. It often comes from a very Blue deliberative thought process about the philosophy and effectiveness of monogamy.
Many asexual people are also polyamorous, so it is obviously not just a sex thing, although I’d disagree that anything dealing with sex is red.
I’d agree that polyamory as practiced by many NYC and Bay types has more red in it than it does elsewhere
The way I do polyamory definitely seems like it has red elements to me. The essential emotion here, for me, is feeling scared/trapped at the idea that someone might own me, and feeling… somewhat repulsed, but far more so confused, at the idea that I might want to own someone else. “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
That said there is another flavor that feels less red. It is saying “I throw out the rules that can protect me; I give you the ability to hurt me; I rely only on your kindness and decency and love for me.” It is trust, like the moment before you jump from a cliff and you have to have faith that your bungee cord will hold. This seems… maybe green? But green doesn’t have the risk/leap of faith element. It is certainly strongly opposed to black and (perhaps oddly) to white. White is orderly and safe, while the spirit of this flavor is more “The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
One thing really interesting I think you brought up here is the idea of trust being a Green concept. It was something I tried to place on the color wheel (in order to place myself) while speaking with my friends of mine and I just sort of implicitly assumed it was white (prosocial, interacting with others, etc), but reading what you said here, I think you’re totally right. That close your eyes, surrender yourself, kind of trust is definitely not white, like I originally thought. (In comparison to trust in the rule of law, which does seem kind of white, insofar as all things relating to rule of law are white.)
I feel like it’s probably RG. Blue is too cognitive for something that seems so instinctual and impulsive, but Red and Green are all about instinct and impulse.
I think this gets confusing if you don’t clarify what level of abstraction you’re on.
The concept of Slack can be tried to be classified from a number of angles: a) The type of person who most likely values Slack b) Institutions that have come to value Slack and then institutionally protect it (which are likely white orgs) c) Slack as an abstract entity—if it had some kind of agency, like Moloch, what color would it be d) Which color’s list of properties most closely seems to match up with Slack’s properties e) Which environment does Slack most thrive in, one where Green is cultivated, one where White is cultivated, etc. ? f) Which color thinks Slack is winning
These have conflicting answers.
For instance, polyamory as an institution / practice is white—because almost all institutions / norms / communities are at least somewhat white. But polyamory as an abstract entity / which color thinks polyamory is winning—that is red. The type of person who values poly is probably red.
The abstract concept of a ‘system’ is white. The abstract concept of ‘culture’ is green. But specific systems or cultures do not have to be white or green. So this gets confusing to talk about without first defining your layers.
White sets and follows rules to the letter. White’s logic is far colder and more ‘perfect’ than blue’s. Blue likes to Tinker, to do Compulsive Research. It gets Inspiration. A white AGI is aiming to follow some sort of rules set or maximize some variable. It’s thinking, if at all, in the service of that. By contrast, something blue would be trying to actually understand what matters and maximize for human values, which at least gives us some hope. Facebook neural networks maximizing for clicks are very white.
Or worse, they become either black, or alien abominations (actively colorless) that don’t have our values at all.
Sabbath is a ritual that originally served a number of purposes, but Sabbath as I’m proposing today is green—it’s about preserving Slack (I’m saying that is green), being in harmony with the world rather than imposing your will on it, getting back to nature (anti-technology is very green), and you pick the way you would do it that does that for you. Yes, it has a rules aspect, but it’s not from on high and doesn’t apply to everyone, and the whole point is to resist the white order, so at least in modern context it isn’t white. A Sabbath prayer service at the temple is totally, totally white.
Solstice is celebration of the seasons (green), an adoption of a naturalistic/pagan appreciation of same (green), and so forth. Yes, it is organized and so on, but it’s definitely not high church.
Polyamory is at core saying you will make it all right to do things because you feel OK about them against the rules of society, the classic red vs. white battle. Red is allowed to think and plan in service of what it wants, but it’s still being emotional and selfish about it. Using logic to argue it’s a good idea is a thing that happens, but doesn’t make the act blue, that’s giving blue way too much credit. Blue is kind of a sellout that way. I’d say that sexuality as a motive is red, but it can serve any color.
Agreed that this is a reasonably unfair simplification / perspective, and if I was trying to persuade on a level beyond share-my-instinctive-color-assignment I’d say a lot more, but I think that usefully and fairly saying more would mean saying a lot more, so I won’t do that until I’m prepared to write the full post.
I think Slack as you describe it (haven’t read Sub-Genius yet) is blue-green. It’s not just about letting the world show you your correct place in it and letting that make things easier. It’s using a green tool, circumstance judo and relaxation, as a means to an end, in a systematic way. A pure-green approach to Slack would never see any reason to consume it; it would not have the concept of Worth It. It seems outside the spirit of true slack to not ever do anything.
I think blue as the other pole, both because it’s an analytical framework (and Subgenii are mainly drawn from a very intellectual, blue subculture) and because it a) is definitely a contrast, a “if the string is too tight, it will snap; if the string is too loose, it will not play” deal, and b) Slack seems more strongly opposed to the black philosophy of power, than it is to the blue philosophy of understanding. Blue is already more willing to hang back and wait for the right moment.
Polyamory feels green to me. My natural state of being involves falling in love with lots of people, and what I want out of polyamory is to be genuine and accepted in that and to be able to live that part of my life. I can easily imagine how it would be other colors for other people though. For example, acceptance mostly makes sense with more committed partners, and someone who is committed to solo poly but otherwise similar to me might feel like their poly is mostly black.
There’s quite a bit of Blue in Burning Man. Any Black that goes into Burning Man is supposed to happen *around* Burning Man, but never *at* Burning Man. Part of Burning Man’s semi-explicit goal is to let Red, Green and Blue do their thing without having to worry about the White/Black tensions of mainstream society.
Solstice is attempting to Build Community and Feel Emotions. Doesn’t that make it green/red? Polyamory for me is Red successfully beating the socially expected White order of things.
Some rationality culture things:
Solstice: White
Burning Man: Red
AI discourse: Blue
Slack: Green/White?
Living in the Bay/NYC/Boston/Oxford (and liking it): Blue
Having kids: Green
Deciding to have kids based on philosophical reasons: Blue
Dark Arts, etc: Black
Effective Altruism: White/Blue
Veg*nism: Green/White/Blue
“Animals don’t experience qualia/ have consciousness”—Black/Blue
Self-hacking, nootropics, CRISPR: Blue
Polyamory: Hmmm...Maybe Red for other people, but Blue for the people who hang out around here, and it feels Green to me personally?
“It is good to make life better for the top 1% because it is raising utility”- Black
“It is bad to make life better for the top 1% because it is raising inequality”- White
Anti-deathism: Blue/ Black
Seasteading: Black/White??
I think Slack is Green alone. It certainly is not white. White doesn’t think you have the right to Slack and tries to take it away from you. Often it taxes or outright punishes you for having it.
Traditional Solstice is Green. Our Solstice is at least partly green.
I haven’t been to Burning Man but if it’s got black in it that means something is very wrong, at least to me—it’s an explicit ban on black. But blue makes sense as a secondary color, even if the name is a giveaway for the primary.
Seasteading claims to be Esper (Black/Blue/White) but skeptics think it’s actually Red/Black. Unclear who is right.
Polyamory is red, full stop, and I think people who claim it isn’t are confused about how something works.
Burning Man is R/G/U. It explicitly bans Black, and implicitly shuns White, because the thing it actually wants is for the “colorful” colors to do their things and express themselves without the Black/White tension getting in the way.
As people have been saying, our current mainstream culture is MOSTLY White, and where it isn’t White, it’s Black. Most people don’t even THINK about where their feelings come from, or what they actually want for themselves, or how a light-switch actually works when they flip it. They just want to be part of an order, and they want to compete for the best position they can within that order.
Burning Man explicitly says “Fuck all that! Make things! Be yourself! Do wacky shit!”
BM’s anti-commercialism is an explicit ban on Black, but its “radical self-reliance” is an almost-as-explicit ban on White.
… Gah. Which means I should just break down what each of the Ten Principles is trying to do, color-wise. Let’s try this:
Radical Inclusion (+G)
Gifting (-B)
Decommodification (-B)
Radical Self-reliance (-W, +GU)
Communal Effort (+GU)
Civic Responsibility (+WU)
Leaving No Trace (+G)
Participation (+GR)
Immediacy (-W, +R)
On net, that’s GGGGGRRUUU, and two strikes against B and one (net) strike against W.
Most of the benefit I see from polyamory is the way it makes deliberately-assembled extended families instead of loosely-connected pair bonds. Certainly I started doing it because my boyfriend wanted it for love, but the reasons I actively want to stick with it are the social bonds and it making each component relationship more resilient. In an atomized society, a relationship style that coalesces a community into short chains of strong bonds supports a community ideal that feels quite green.
Agreed on poly being red. Sexuality is red generally, and “freedom to do your own thing” is red.
Hippie shit is generally heavy on red, unless it has people over 30 in it, in which case there may also be some green involved.
Psychedelic culture is primarily red (creativity, freedom, exploration, etc), with some blue where it intersects with inquiry about chemistry/psychology/AI, and sometimes green where it intersects with spirituality/wisdom/evolution insights.
> I think Slack is Green alone.
I am surprised that Slack would not be classified as Black. Isn’t it about storing up resources in order to accomplish goals or fulfill desires?
Slack feels distinct from keeping a buffer—Black would definitely think of gathering extra resources to overdetermine their victory in a way that they might not think to in general take the less-than-maximal path towards accomplishing their stated goals. Gathering resources is just gathering resources.
I promote Red Slack. Break your chains, before they break you.
Reading how you model the colors makes me think that I probably have something wrong, because our models don’t line up, and I assume yours is closer to MtG canon for the obvious reasons.
You say:
My interpretation would have been that the AIs we’re worried about are blue (cold, perfect logic. Helps that blue is also the color of technology), and we’re trying to make sure that they’re white (compassionate, pro-social, caring).
I don’t understand how Slack is not at all white, when much of the discussion and practice is coming out of the religious tradition of Sabbath. (If you say that just because something comes from religion it doesn’t make it white, then I would say that just because something comes from emotion or sex it doesn’t make it red.)
And saying that polyamory is red, full stop, seems obviously wrong from the perspective of my model. I’d agree that cheating is red. One night stands are red. (Marriage is white.) But polyamory is almost never entered into impulsively. It often comes from a very Blue deliberative thought process about the philosophy and effectiveness of monogamy.
Many asexual people are also polyamorous, so it is obviously not just a sex thing, although I’d disagree that anything dealing with sex is red.
I’d agree that polyamory as practiced by many NYC and Bay types has more red in it than it does elsewhere
The way I do polyamory definitely seems like it has red elements to me. The essential emotion here, for me, is feeling scared/trapped at the idea that someone might own me, and feeling… somewhat repulsed, but far more so confused, at the idea that I might want to own someone else. “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
That said there is another flavor that feels less red. It is saying “I throw out the rules that can protect me; I give you the ability to hurt me; I rely only on your kindness and decency and love for me.” It is trust, like the moment before you jump from a cliff and you have to have faith that your bungee cord will hold. This seems… maybe green? But green doesn’t have the risk/leap of faith element. It is certainly strongly opposed to black and (perhaps oddly) to white. White is orderly and safe, while the spirit of this flavor is more “The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
One thing really interesting I think you brought up here is the idea of trust being a Green concept. It was something I tried to place on the color wheel (in order to place myself) while speaking with my friends of mine and I just sort of implicitly assumed it was white (prosocial, interacting with others, etc), but reading what you said here, I think you’re totally right. That close your eyes, surrender yourself, kind of trust is definitely not white, like I originally thought. (In comparison to trust in the rule of law, which does seem kind of white, insofar as all things relating to rule of law are white.)
I feel like it’s probably RG. Blue is too cognitive for something that seems so instinctual and impulsive, but Red and Green are all about instinct and impulse.
I think this gets confusing if you don’t clarify what level of abstraction you’re on.
The concept of Slack can be tried to be classified from a number of angles:
a) The type of person who most likely values Slack
b) Institutions that have come to value Slack and then institutionally protect it (which are likely white orgs)
c) Slack as an abstract entity—if it had some kind of agency, like Moloch, what color would it be
d) Which color’s list of properties most closely seems to match up with Slack’s properties
e) Which environment does Slack most thrive in, one where Green is cultivated, one where White is cultivated, etc. ?
f) Which color thinks Slack is winning
These have conflicting answers.
For instance, polyamory as an institution / practice is white—because almost all institutions / norms / communities are at least somewhat white. But polyamory as an abstract entity / which color thinks polyamory is winning—that is red. The type of person who values poly is probably red.
The abstract concept of a ‘system’ is white. The abstract concept of ‘culture’ is green. But specific systems or cultures do not have to be white or green. So this gets confusing to talk about without first defining your layers.
White sets and follows rules to the letter. White’s logic is far colder and more ‘perfect’ than blue’s. Blue likes to Tinker, to do Compulsive Research. It gets Inspiration. A white AGI is aiming to follow some sort of rules set or maximize some variable. It’s thinking, if at all, in the service of that. By contrast, something blue would be trying to actually understand what matters and maximize for human values, which at least gives us some hope. Facebook neural networks maximizing for clicks are very white.
Or worse, they become either black, or alien abominations (actively colorless) that don’t have our values at all.
Sabbath is a ritual that originally served a number of purposes, but Sabbath as I’m proposing today is green—it’s about preserving Slack (I’m saying that is green), being in harmony with the world rather than imposing your will on it, getting back to nature (anti-technology is very green), and you pick the way you would do it that does that for you. Yes, it has a rules aspect, but it’s not from on high and doesn’t apply to everyone, and the whole point is to resist the white order, so at least in modern context it isn’t white. A Sabbath prayer service at the temple is totally, totally white.
Solstice is celebration of the seasons (green), an adoption of a naturalistic/pagan appreciation of same (green), and so forth. Yes, it is organized and so on, but it’s definitely not high church.
Polyamory is at core saying you will make it all right to do things because you feel OK about them against the rules of society, the classic red vs. white battle. Red is allowed to think and plan in service of what it wants, but it’s still being emotional and selfish about it. Using logic to argue it’s a good idea is a thing that happens, but doesn’t make the act blue, that’s giving blue way too much credit. Blue is kind of a sellout that way. I’d say that sexuality as a motive is red, but it can serve any color.
Polyamory is at core saying you will make it all right to do things because you feel OK about them against the rules of society
This just seems false to me—or such an oversimplification that if I were poly I’d most likely not be engaging with the argument.
(I could argue here further but… I sort of feel like I should be holding you to a standard that is engaging with the non-Straw version of a thing?)
Agreed that this is a reasonably unfair simplification / perspective, and if I was trying to persuade on a level beyond share-my-instinctive-color-assignment I’d say a lot more, but I think that usefully and fairly saying more would mean saying a lot more, so I won’t do that until I’m prepared to write the full post.
I think Slack as you describe it (haven’t read Sub-Genius yet) is blue-green. It’s not just about letting the world show you your correct place in it and letting that make things easier. It’s using a green tool, circumstance judo and relaxation, as a means to an end, in a systematic way. A pure-green approach to Slack would never see any reason to consume it; it would not have the concept of Worth It. It seems outside the spirit of true slack to not ever do anything.
I think blue as the other pole, both because it’s an analytical framework (and Subgenii are mainly drawn from a very intellectual, blue subculture) and because it a) is definitely a contrast, a “if the string is too tight, it will snap; if the string is too loose, it will not play” deal, and b) Slack seems more strongly opposed to the black philosophy of power, than it is to the blue philosophy of understanding. Blue is already more willing to hang back and wait for the right moment.
Polyamory feels green to me. My natural state of being involves falling in love with lots of people, and what I want out of polyamory is to be genuine and accepted in that and to be able to live that part of my life. I can easily imagine how it would be other colors for other people though. For example, acceptance mostly makes sense with more committed partners, and someone who is committed to solo poly but otherwise similar to me might feel like their poly is mostly black.
Loren ipsum
There’s quite a bit of Blue in Burning Man. Any Black that goes into Burning Man is supposed to happen *around* Burning Man, but never *at* Burning Man. Part of Burning Man’s semi-explicit goal is to let Red, Green and Blue do their thing without having to worry about the White/Black tensions of mainstream society.
Solstice is attempting to Build Community and Feel Emotions. Doesn’t that make it green/red?
Polyamory for me is Red successfully beating the socially expected White order of things.