Meditations on Moloch (2014)
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I especially enjoyed this part:
"The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.
Well, we have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And we have the Internet. So we’re kind of screwed."
Are you referring to people who attended the Trump rallies or the protestors against racism?
There are some things that people judge to be more important than the risk of Covid-19. Whether you find that reasonable or not, may say a lot more about your priors and priorities than about the logic of the people gathering.
This is not a left vs right thing, it's a liberty vs autocracy thing. If the popular autocrats win, they punish the people who have "mindsets that are different from" their supporters.
... Idk why you chose to use liberals in your example when their push for woke political correctness is nothing short of autocratic thought control.
I'm sorry but I need to whip out this quote from SSC once again:
"Here is a story I heard from a friend, which I will alter slightly to protect the innocent. A prestigious psychology professor signed an open letter in which psychologists condemned belief in innate sex differences. My friend knew that this professor believed such differences existed, and asked him why he signed the letter. He said that he expected everyone else in his department would sign it, so it would look really bad if he didn’t. My friend asked why he expected everyone else in his department to sign it, and he said “Probably for the same reason I did”.
From SSC, of course
The idea that I don’t worry about morals and livelihoods because I’m a liberal is another dangerous meme. Not once in my post did I suggest censorship as the solution; you’re applying the liberals wanna censor meme.
So you’re shutting down thinking because you had preconceived notions from media you saw: thanks for proving my original point.
I certainly don't think it's wise to ignore the problem, and pretend the internet is merely Printing Press 2.0; but neither is realistic to cut it off at the source (even the printing press was not without side effects). The call is coming from inside the house (the human nervous system and its emergent inter-networked social incentives).
> even the printing press was not without side effects)
Understatement of the Year award, right here.
I did briefly consider the possibility of being both left and right authoritarian at the same time, but since this ideology is rarely seen outside the state of Gilead in the The Haidmaid's Tale, took a calculated risk. You're right, my apologies. (And if you haven't seen the Hulu series, it's kind of fascinating: extreme religious conservative sexual repression but with solar panels and EVs and post-money command economy. The show fills this out a little more than the book did).
This is true and important (and I'd add that if it doesn't make you uncomfortable... either you haven't taken in the full depth of it, or your mindset is very different from my own).
At the same time, though, there's already research that shows mindsets can be at primed by language, stories, even sensory experience. It's unlikely that people can be remote controlled, but it does appear they can be manipulated and have their mindset moved at least marginally by as minor an intervention as holding a warm drink, and I don't think anyone has a good idea of how far that can go for large-scale long-term information environment efforts.
If the point of this "meditation" is to show that freedom of speech is bad, then they need to prove the assumption that a lack of freedom of speech leads to higher quality information and less manipulation of the truth. History has proven otherwise.
If that were the case then the entire advertisement industry would be rendered moot.
I do agree with you that certain individuals are "immune" to these sorts of viruses.
Or can we? I think there are a few cases where we have, cases where we have used law or religion or spiritual awakenings or technology or bureaucracy to countermand the emergent will of the mindless collective of history, economy, and ecology. But somewhere along the way we listened to those who equate is with ought and gave up on such attempts, or we listened to the cynics who say the whole endeavor was a waste because it was only 70% successful not 100% successful.
BTW I think conspiracy theory is a folklore level awareness of game theoretic and emergent properties. Conspiracy theorists posit invisible canals behind these things. They are right about the effect but wrong about the cause. The agenda is real but the cabal does not exist. The cabal is all of us and none of us.
I also notice random acts of kindness from people, spontaneous corporation amongst rivaling tribes or companies, and things a strict self-interested agent-based analysis will tell us it's not possible.
It's an insightful model of the world but it's too simplistic and pessimistic.
> Somewhere in this darkness is another god. He has also had many names. In the Kushiel books, his name was Elua. He is the god of flowers and free love and all soft and fragile things. Of art and science and philosophy and love. Of niceness, community, and civilization. He is a god of humans.
> The other gods sit on their dark thrones and think “Ha ha, a god who doesn’t even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!”
> But somehow Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of unfortunate accidents.
> There are many gods, but this one is ours.
>4. The Malthusian trap, at least at its extremely pure theoretical limits. Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced onto a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art (you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH).
>You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten thousand.
That being said, I do not necessarily agree with Scott about the conclusion that we really can't coordinate unless some super-AI "helps us destroy Moloch".
Maybe Moloch is catching up to open source. We read regularly of open source maintainers who are poor, burned out, and quitting. A lot of the open source work that happens is actually controlled by for profit corporations. Despite Chrome and Android being open source, it is optimized for advertising revenue for Google. Successful open source projects are incorporated in a SaaS offering, often cutting out the original developers. Other open source projects are acquired by large corporations and are shuttered. There still is not a reliable strategy for open source developers to support themselves, other than trying to use that notoriety to get hired by a big corporation, or try to upsell to non-open source add ons.
NENSLO "hateword" http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/rants/X0022_Nenslo_...
FWIW, we have simple, easy solutions to all our physical problems. (Ask me about "aircrete".)
Alright, what about aircrete and how can it solve all our physical problems?
Air-crete is basically foam (like dish soap foam) mixed with concrete. It can't solve all of our physical problems but it's pretty useful: It's fire proof (you can build a furnace out of it), water proof (you can build a boat out of it), also bug- and mildew-proof. It's lightweight, strong, durable, and non-toxic. You can work it with hand tools. It holds nails and screws. It can be formed in blocks or panels or columns or poured into molds. The machinery to make it can be assembled from off-the-shelf parts for a couple of hundred dollars. You can use plain ol' concrete mix and dish soap for the foaming agent.
I heard about it years ago (Christopher Alexander wanted to use it with his Pattern Language generative architecture) but it seems that there's been a recent bloom of interest and applications with the invention of the small backyard-scale foamer/mixers. People can and are using aircrete to make all kinds of homes and other buildings. One group is teaching workshops on making cool spherical homes that cost a few thousand dollars, can be built by a handful of people in a couple of weeks, and will last for decades or even centuries.
This is just one example of a really keen solution that's (as yet) underutilized. I collect ideas the way stamp collectors collect stamps, and I've "seen things you people wouldn't believe." (I.e. ever heard of a phase conjugate mirror? You point your flash light at this mirror and the light is reflected back into the bulb.)
That does sound pretty cool.
But what was the reasoning behind your statement that "we have simple, easy solutions to all our physical problems" (even if not all those solutions come from aircrete)?
> But what was the reasoning behind your statement that "we have simple, easy solutions to all our physical problems" (even if not all those solutions come from aircrete)?
Thanks for asking! Let me see if I can compress and express the kernel of what I mean.
First, let me specify that, by "physical problems", I mean provisioning food, water, shelter, waste recycling, clothing, transportation, electric power, etc. as contrasted with political, ideological, social, and spiritual problems.
I'm a fan of a school of applied ecology called "Permaculture" (I recently learned of a parallel evolution of the same ideas called "Syntropic" agriculture.) It's been demonstrated in farms and projects all over the world by now. We can transform deserts into forests and meadows.
That accounts for food, water, waste recycling, and clothing, as well as some building material. Also many medicines can be grown in the garden.
If you mine lime, etc., you can make aircrete and that accounts for a tremendous amount of shelter. You also grow wood and bamboo for construction purposes.
If you integrate alcohol fuel production with your food forest you have a carbon-neutral fuel source. That accounts for electric power (along with renewables, solar, wind, hydro, etc.) and your much of your transportation costs. (You still have to mine metal and stuff for the vehicles themselves, of course.) ( http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/sitemap )
To sum up, if we "reboot" agriculture using what we now know about ecology (the science) we can provide for our needs in a way that is ecologically harmonious (and can therefore continue long enough that maybe we can sort out the other problems too, eventually.) Also, it's fun! And you can make money at it. (The Syntropic agriculture founder grows the best cocoa beans in the world, and gets 3x per acre as conventional cocoa farms, with no inputs. He mimics the natural forest.)
Also looks like someone combined them into one ebook: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hkbfj4/all_...
Thank you for posting these links, and thank you to the people who created these ebooks.
P. S. Fuck New York Times for fucking with Slate Star Codex.
This explains why I think China is currently "winning at economy" and will do so even more in the future, simply because they can see long term since the removal of the two-term limit of their president[1], and other[2] tactics[3].
From a "god’s-eye-view", countries should not withdraw democracy & freedom from the hands of their citizens. But logically, I think this gives an incentive for all other countries to also take this unfair advantage (become capitalist dictatorships) in order to compete with China. But I'm not sure how logically this will play out in the next few decades.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/26/xi-jinping-chi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Railway_(1990)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Hong_Kong_extradition_bil...
From a "god’s-eye-view", countries should not withdraw democracy & freedom from the hands of their citizens. But logically, I think this gives an incentive for all other countries to also take this unfair advantage (become capitalist dictatorships) in order to compete with China. But I'm not sure how logically this will play out in the next few decades.
And yet I see articles positing strategic mistakes and unforced errors on the behalf of the Chinese.
Mostly, I am of the opinion that outsiders don't know what's really going on in the country because the truth of China is distorted by propaganda and censorship regime they built up over generations and lack of independent abilities to verify anything.
Maybe even the government don't know what's going on either.
At least everyone is equally in the dark.