Much of the progress in modern anti-racism has been about persuading more people to think of racism as a structural, systemic issue rather than one of individual villainy. See: https://transliberalism.substack.com/.../the-revolution...
purrtrandrussell
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The historic popularity of socialism has been brought up as an argument for epistemic modesty. It’s important to take into account the historic broadness of the term “socialism.” This wasn’t the entire intellectual class collectively jumping for centrally planned economies created by a vanguard party. Socialism has included a wide variety of schemes that weren’t capitalism inc. mutualism (market economy but with worker’s coops), guild socialism (high medieval city economy except modern tech), anarchocommunism (everyone lives in a decentralized network of kibbutzim, basically) and “libertarian communism” (planned economy but decentralized). Heck, Benjamin Tucker, ideological ancestor of modern anarcho-capitalists, considered himself a socialist because he believed the best economy for workers would be a laissez faire market economy. Like this was a bunch of different ideas on how to change society, most (if not all) of which wouldn’t have worked, but many of which would have likely failed far more gracefully. For example, socialisms that were voluntaryist, nonviolent and/or gradualist. Mutualism isn’t that improbable of a model, like, modern worker’s coops exist in our economy and they function and have high worker’s satisfaction rates. I don’t think it’s that far-fetched that the world would be a better place if they were the primary or exclusive form of corporation. A world where Proudhon won the argument at the first international and all the historic energy that went towards Marxist-Leninism went to founding worker’s coops and credit unions would have been quite a bit better and such a history branch wasn’t that improbable. And many socialists at the time of Lenin decried Leninism (Rosa Luxemburg), correctly predicted that it was going to go to shit(Bertrand Russell and Emma Goldman), and even lead rebellions (Kronstadt Rebellion). This isn’t me saying socialism is good, this is me saying historic intellectual support for “socialism” is complicated and not as homogeneous as it may look initially.
I’ve increasingly moved towards the position that, regardless of whether or not the ideal society has a state or is stateless, the US is at serious risk of self-destruction and, in addition to trying to prevent said self-destruction, people should create non-state governance structures to prevent the default outcome of state collapse or at least mitigate it
What something symbolizes is an empirical sociological question, not a moral one. Trying to determine communication intent in symbolism prescriptively rather than descriptively does not bring you closer to truth.
when you goodhart on ~ideological diversity~ you create a subsidy for bullshit in the marketplace of ideas
the Internet causing shunning and boycotting to become more effective (ex. me too, canceling) causes me to wonder if it might be possible to move towards a society where we primarily enforce law-level norms(not raping people, not stealing, not refusing to serve black people at a lunch counter, not selling fraudulent medications, etc.) via decentralized economic/social (cutting off access to payment methods, firing, boycotting) rather than violent centralized (incarceration, execution, fines, etc.) or violent decentralized (feud law) methods.
I agree, this is a failure mode that rationalist often fall into, not a prescriptive suggestion
To go meta on meta vs object level , often when rationalists try to discuss things on the meta level they end up coming up with takes that amount to categorically refusing to defect against defectors because on the meta level the right move is to cooperate.
trying to think of ways to disentangle antifa’s (in the sense of the Torch Network, Popular Mobilization and One People’s Project) impact on authoritarian right organizing from law enforcement impact and non-antifa anti-authoritarian-right organizing such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and various faith groups.
My current moral framework consists of a positive-liberty maximizing consequentialist sub-agent, a hedonic utilitarian sub-agent and a preference utilitarian sub-agent making moral trades with each other. I don’t have a formalization of this. When I say “positive-liberty maximizing consequentialist” I am trying to put the moral intuitions behind rights into an ordered series of world-states rather than deontological injunctions. Positive liberty maximizing consequentialism is somewhat similar to the capability approach in development economics(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/) but at a higher level of abstraction. It’s not a statement about what object level decisions should be made but a moral philosophical claim about what goodness is. We talk about “freedom of speech” and “freedom of association” and other freedoms in the language of laws and rules but there’s consequences that we are trying to point to using those principles are heuristics towards, and I think it can be framed in the amount of options available for a given agent.
Our information about the world gets filtered through a hilarity bias: people are more likely to share information that is amusing. This sounds mild, but it could be quite bad. People being foolish is funny. This is especially true when the outgroup is being foolish or when people are being foolish in a way that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. Hilarity bias may be a significant component to misanthropy, lack of trust in others and polarization
traditional somali law and pod-to-pod transformative justice seem rather similar, except pod members take the place of clan judges and the alternative to mediation is shunning/cancelation rather than feuding.
I’ve been on-and-off working on compiling and examining actually-existing examples of governance that existed without using a monopoly of legitimate force. Some examples include: mutual aid societies, some charities, embedded legal structures such as traditional Romani law, the mafia in early 90s Moscow, Common Ground Collective, guerilla road repair crews, #metoo and other decentralized shunning campaigns, and transformative justice pods.
The degree of tolerance of directness varies culture by culture. The term anthropologists use is high context for less direct cultures vs low context for more direct cultures. The United States is fairly low context but it isn’t the most low context culture. For example, both Israeli and Finland have more direct communication as a cultural norm. What Americans see as rudeness is just normal communication in some places.
The problem with trying to “address obesity” is that we’ve already been trying to do that for decades now. The bottleneck isn’t lack of social will; it’s lack of scientific knowledge about what interventions reliably cause someone to both lose weight and keep it off.