1,546 karma · joined August 24, 2018
It cant for existing profitable business models. You couldnt ban the google owned nuclear SLBM fleet if it already existed and represent the most profitable sector of the economy. Inertia exists and the more profitable the topics the harder it is to break from a central position. It would be economic suicide on a national level.
You would get some paper tiger checks and balances entrenching googles nuclear fleet monopoly.
You miss my point completely and i am unsure how to reword it.
Yes they are exclusively big players already, thats why it wont work through top down regulation and requires user action.
We might be better off without them, but i dont see how that could ever happen through top down regulation. The economic and political incentives are way to strong and bureaucracies way to unwilling and incompetent. You cant destroy such profitable business models through regulation, they have to much pull here. At best you get regulatory capture. It will be another iteration of "safe/privacy on paper" allowing for higher profits and more entrenched monopolies for said megacorps.
Intention is not a valid metric, outcome is.
There is a giant industry here. Any attempt at top down regulation will fail at that and get either regulatory captured or poked holes through for the big players.
If you dont want one and keep your agency, be less dumb. This is a functional description not a moral argument. If somebody has to fix it for your, your say in the matter will drastically reduce.
This is really "our" problem. If the audience here doesnt find fixes its unrealistic to expect that of regulators. This is a systemic issue caused by the economic structure that cant be fixed by yet another law.
And failed yearly tests being ignored. It took the Ahr flood to actually do something about that.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/katastrophensc...
For example, depression is often characterized by black and white thinking and getting tunnel vision. You become so focused on the worst things you can come up with being true that you loose sight of your perspective being incomplete and the stress makes it harder and harder to snap out. Which results in either incomplete or erroneous conclusions you still hold with conviction. After all, you know X to be true and as a result that you are doomed to experience Y. So unless you are the only human not functioning this way, you have good chances of changing your experience without resorting to supression.
I think the difference in dealing with these patterns manifesting comes from insight. You can try to suppress that initial bad insight temporarily or you can come to terms what is happening to you and how much you should care about what at which time. A lot easier said then done sure, but going full suppression seems like really bad advice. Be it through distraction or a bottle, you sooner or later will be confronted with a distorted self image again.
At that point you are getting countermeasures for distortions and unrealistic expectations. You might get used to them, but they were just distortions. Getting used to them might have not been a good idea. Even if you reduce suffering, you are establishing a new higher normal.
I get that this sounds a lot like Freud, but i am looking at this more from a human error perspective. Its not much different from cognitive biases, its part of how the mind comes to erroneous / incomplete conclusions and how these can create negative feedback loops. Making the first step suppression instead of introspection seems really counterproductive. You are kind of stuck with your brain and might as well optimize some. Some agency is achievable and it often doesnt need to be hard. No sense in being sad about your brain being buggy. Brains just are.
Do you mean this as a nsfw warning?
I was more wondering about the advice to not visit the site because of the owner. I hold Daryl Davis in high regards and dont understand the notion of retreating into echo chambers.
Please elaborate why.
edit: To give just one example, /r/syriancivilwar had great discussions about armaments across as diverse of a political background as you can come up with. That is before they got overrun by propagandists ofc but the point stands. I rarely encountered caricatures among weaponry nerds while the allegation of bias often comes from people with very entrenched worldviews.
You will likely be able to check if that applies to you if you are able to word what bias you expect in such communities. And how much that matches caricatures your political ingroup spreads.
I am still considering the benefits and possibility of upfront structuring of information, knowledge, certainty and errors but information- and complexity overload is a real pain. Which also means i am keeping a bit of a distance to committing to how the end result should look. Especially as this is one of these projects that needs to be effortlessly integrated into an individuals existing process to be usable. At which point you might as well improve that process while you are at it.
Your approach on the other hand sounds quite practical, lets say combined with some hypertext structure like project xanadu or the hover boxes of lesswrong. The question would be how good the results get. Anyway, good luck, i think this could be quite beneficial.
Projects/Concepts you might (not) find interesting:
* Taiwan has a process called gov0 (gov zero), a communication channel aimed at re-framing proposed laws in a way that allow for reaching consensus. Currently done manually but consensus finding seems to be a key part of communication.
* Cognitive sciences / biases / warfare / behavior therapy. As well as processes aimed at capturing the human error, like crew resource management for pilots. All concerned with errors in our own perception and thinking * Juliane Gallinas TED talks
* Ontology vs epistemology, quite important for people with a CS background in my experience. I like to think of it in terms of complexity reduction in the context of information theory similar to an analog digital converter.
* The 5 level explanation series from WIRED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raHM3k-uR0E
Especially the last one is a great example that communication is likely not a matter of finding THE description, but one of connecting your perspective to a topic/concept. Here it works through iterative reduction/increase of complexity, but working from related concepts should also be possible. Lets say one explanation for an engineer and one for a psychologist.
The post itself is also a good example for the the difficulty of communicating (after identifying and isolating) what is relevant and the necessity to cut what isnt. Which will differ depending on ones perspective and goals. I suspect the same effect does occur if you ask people to define the vocabulary they use themselves. Thus the focus on agreeing on the meaningful difference/overlap instead.
Be that as it may, there is a big difference between not wallowing and ignoring/suppressing something. Especially if you leave Freud out.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppress
Suppression implies force and a struggle. Its quite different from not dwelling.
I am pretty sure we are talking two ends of the same spectrum with an upper and a lower bound. The reason its worth pointing out is that the simplification otherwise creates new problems due to overcorrecting. While not pointlessly dwelling on negative stuff is certainly good advice, it doesnt mean suppressing negative stuff you havent dealt with is a good idea in the long run. Suppressing the knowledge of information that create negative emotions is a bad idea since its very likely valuable information you will need in the future to not repeat your mistakes. One is a problem with agency over emotions and reactions, one is a practical functional problem.
I think the reference to Freud and suppression might be a not thought through attention grab on part of the authors. Different to what their press statement says, what they have found does not run counter to accepted narratives. While i sympathize with the need for funding, this is a dumb spin.
However, i think the topic overlaps with (outer) alignment. Even if its just so you have a shared reference point (goals) from which you can make sense of meaning. If you dont every dictionary entry will need to stand on its own with information overload likely showing up fast. A minimum approach should further help to prevent trying to build another babel tower.
>There's nothing further for me to learn from the situation
its unlikely that you are suppressing anything. To be at that point you have to had dealt with it already and are just not getting hung up on the past anymore. Which you arguably shouldnt, having dealt with the situation means you know what to look out for in the future to not become that version of yourself again. There is nothing left to suppress here, people arent a static entity through time.
Suppression for me implies not having dealt with the situation and not having learnt its lessons. Otherwise you wouldnt need to suppress it.
The whole thread is really a great showcase for assumed attribution of meaning and the inherit loss in complexity in language.
The way out is agency over how you deal with reality, not better blindfolds in the short term.
Just because stuff isnt nice doesnt mean its safe to ignore. Its worth mentioning that dealing with negative thoughts and experiences is part of how we grow as people. Its why Bambis mother got shot in a Disney movie. Because sooner or later, kids have to deal with harsh stuff. Unfortunately adults do too.
Their example, a parent with covid in a hospital, is a good one. This is serious stuff you need to come to terms with. If that seems overly harsh or depressing, i find Stanley Kubricks words about the indifference of the universe quite helpful. (Starting from "If life is so purposeless, do you feel it’s worth living?") https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/07/26/stanley-kubrick-pl...
In the end all we can do is decide how we want to deal with reality. Unless we want to later deal with the consequences of not having done so.
With no safety checks to remain this way. Intent doesnt overrule outcome. And tor isnt a sufficient safeguard.
You were also always free to stop looking, nobody is trying to force you to do that.
The problem is that we now are at the point at which it becomes a practical end to self hosting. Not because everyone is convinced and one of the good guys now but because the power structure that is in place. That dissonance to your intention is where the risk comes from and what i am trying to warn you about. You are describing a mechanism of making communication impossible through applying pressure.
Thats less my object of concern then your willingness to overlook the risks doing this poses by focusing on intention over outcome . While tbh i do take offense to attempting the first, the later is where the giant danger is at. You are doing something that fits the definition of totalitarianism and with it you are faced with its risks. Not safeguarding against them means its extremely improbable that you end anywhere but in a dysfunction nightmare. Which means that weapon able to end self hosting will get into the wrong hands reliably which has good chances result in a quite horrific echo chamber. Which in all likelihood means i will be able to use the downtime between work through extermination sessions in the reeducation camp to argue that being sorry unfortunately has similar impact on reality as the initial good intention. But maybe we can then figure out how we prevent yet another repeat after the new regime hopefully burned itself to the ground.
I am hard pressed to not compare the whole situation to an overconfident and careless cave diver getting lost predictably. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRarNBAG6HY The idiot is fine, but the nature of the way we interact with the world means we get less and less direct feedback from the dysfunctional paths people take. After all, they are quite the downer. Which results in a drastic underestimation of the risks some aspects of reality pose.
> If this provides incentive to build it, good.
Leaving out the very obvious risk of it not being feasible, few people are willing to overlook the risk of creating something that has the potential to create quite a horrific future and very direct and individual harm. As well as the very predictable reactions. The only promise accelerationism can make is misery. Unguided reactions are not a viable plan and failures arent predictable or necessarily timely. That might be the path towards a proper dystopia.
Either way, its still further escalation in a tribalistic struggle that brings out the worst in people. I dont want to end up in an extreme and disfigured opposition to a caricature. This is just stupid.
>Sometimes someone just sucks, y'know?
You are free to do so already. And a bit off topic, good decision for your mental health. But this isnt about the value that person offers but your ability to communicate vanishing completely. Picture finding a manual reading "To easily revert from catastrophic failure ■■■■■■■■■". That very likely happened to some apparatchik with a case of emergency contact never having existed after the last purge. The second and third order effects always bite you. And the utterly horrific stuff that can happen when a powerful apparatus capsules human misery and censors the reports about it can be seen in stuff like the soviet cannibal island. Or any other big atrocity throughout time.
In the end even feudal kings had jesters around to not drift off into a parallel reality. Reality isnt less important then peace of mind. Willfully ignoring this is really hard to frame as good intentioned.
I choose what you frame as might lead to totalitarianism over being in totalitarianism any day of the week. The moment it becomes practically impossible to self host you are very likely to be on the slope with no way to tell how much further till mass graves. That likely will be the case if Josh ends up at the point at which Kiwifarms cant be turned back on again. Thats why people reference them as a canary. They are among the first that you can expect the wave to hit. With no way to tell up front how the wave is going to look this time around.
Communication channels cant be closed. If this form of mob controlled free-market censorship (or any form ) is here to stay much much harder to censor means of communication will start popping up to keep the kinetic breaks from engaging. Which will get a lot more disgusting then kiwifarms due to tribalistic reactions and people weaponizing the moderation burden, which will speed up the conflict cycle and the race to the bottom even more. Its still not optional. Thats what i meant when i said reactions quickly turn fascist. Making sure that it doesnt is an almost impossible task if you are far enough down the cycle.
The more we even need to talk about this, the more dangerous it becomes. What ever you are doing or trying to do, cutting communication channels can not be the likely outcome.
That distinction you hope for does not exist. We arent talking about your frame of digital neighbors but an end to self hosting. How ever nice your story sounds isnt more important then its predictable consequences.
Authoritarian means with righteous sounding justifications safeguarded by only good intentions and an assumption of competence arent safeguards against totalitarianism, its its description. You cant create an authoritarian entity where you just keep the mean people away from the wheel. Thats how almost all totalitarians describe their perspective, including when some of my older relatives can be believed my great grand parents with NSDAP membership cards. You are making the exact same argument. By insisting on how competent, well intentioned and justified you are, you verifying this assumption. You acknowledge that you are unable to recognize that that isnt enough. Which means less and less people are going to tell you this. Because its really dangerous, on an individual and a societal level.https://sproutsschools.com/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity/
When the acoustic breaks are gone the kinetic ones will need to be engaged. Thats not a bug, they have to, there is genocide and existential risk waiting at the bottom of the slope and you dont have the ability, let alone intention, to break yourself. Which is really bad as its a very safe indicator that stuff is soon to become horrific. With anyone who tried the acoustic breaks unable to engage the kinetic ones. Which means fewer and fewer will even try communicating this. We cant allow that to happen. There is no way totalitarianism isnt going to end horribly. If we loose the ability to communicate we are collectively done for.
The only thing your intention influences here is your feelings about yourself. Which when coupled with an echo chamber gets you the typical righteous totalitarian fever that allows ignoring the costs and risks in favor of the nicely painted frame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Please listen to the panicky sounding German, what ever you think you are trying to do here, do it without destroying the acoustic breaks. You not liking the sound they make doesnt mean we can do without them.
I gave you are very direct example for a totalitarian echo chamber becoming murderous. The Soviet and Chinese famines. The officially dictated story became beyond critic and millions died as a result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
I also mentioned Dallaires pleas to the UN for access to radio equipment to be allowed to air a counter narrative to the genocidal government aligned ones. Something he addressed special weight to in his "Shaking hands with the devil". Which should say a lot about its importance.
>If I understand you correctly, you appear to be making the argument that if we kick certain groups off the public communications fora, they will meet in secret and become an unseen force that overthrows society.
No, quite the opposite. Trying to ban people you dont like from communicating will result in a totalitarian echo chamber. Thats a slope and you willfully ignore the need for breaks. That quickly turns murderous. Because determining what should and shouldnt be censored and its second and third order effects is an infinitely complex problem that you cant address with intention alone. And will quickly be exploited for monetary/ personal / political / tribal profit. Trying to control discourse is a slope and by making self hosting impossible you are destroying the possibility to erect warning lights. You are willfully heading for a cliff.
Your error stems from being focused on the who of the story and at the same time ignoring practical limits. I am telling you if you are at the point in which communication is restricted enough, there will soon bee armed men and horror if your only safeguards are good intentions. There is a causal relationship, power becomes uncontrollable and slip from your hands as the official story and reality collide more and more and you become incapacitated by it. You trying to solve this with feeling competent enough and more armed men / state control is how that always works. Those are usually the same people who drag you off into camps. After all, you ignored safe use in favor of feeling good about the story and somebody like Stalin or Hitler doesnt mind taking over. The German justice system is a great example, many judges just continued to do their job with their career spanning Weimar, the third Reich and West/East Germany.
Even if you are delusional enough to think that your totalitarian echochamber will be the first one able to overrule reality, people will reliably react and that reaction being unguided as well can easily turn fascist. It was already visible with the various stay behind organizations throughout Europe that were intended as a safeguard against a totalitarian power grab. Or with the KPD as a major topic for NSDAP election run up. Caricatures and bogeymen pose the threat of becoming the lesser evil if the situation deteriorates enough. This isnt a matter of tribalism but one of guaranteed conflict and atrocities. There is no acceptable or safe version of totalitarianism, its by its very nature corrupt, self destructive and brings out the worst in people. Even if "your side" ends up on top, it will be a distorted, corrupt and dysfunctional monster. Or do you think there are many fans of Göring even among Nazis? Large parts of the admiralty of the soviet pacific fleet dying in an overloaded smuggler plane is another good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Pushkin_Tu-104_crash
It cant work. Those blind spots cant be detected, managed or compensated for. They are like a metastasizing cancer.
That blind spot is at the core of totalitarian regimes. Group think sets in and suddenly your farmers are told to plant the crops closer together to utilize the proletarian solidarity between the plants. Anyone who doesnt gets gulaged and the rest starves.
Its worth mentioning that my local constitution has a clause that simplified means anyone trying to get the society to e) can be shot by anyone. How ever much of a paper tiger this is, having had two murderous totalitarian regimes in the last 100 years its generally considered a good idea and the way back out.
That you have to rely on a extremely thin argument like it probably being necessary to uphold the rule of law should have you reflect. You are arguing with an abstract model of what ought to happen according to your favorite ought-to-be model while i am telling you what will happen if you dont prevent it. We have seen it times and times again, if you dont try something different the results will replicate. Acting in denial of reality is totalitarian. Thats how we got all those mass graves. They werent created by evil caricatures but stupid people caught up in a drunk fever and Zugzwang with disabled breaks.
The difference here is that its impossible to push society into a censored echo chamber through banning censorship. You cant create the dangerous blind spots this way that are at the core of totalitarian risks.
You really should read up on totalitarianism. Your definition is quite distorted and you hit a lot of the marks when ignoring consequences in favor of frames. I can recommend Meerloos Rape of the Mind.
Just wanting this to work is not a valid strategy. You can and should know better.
Thats framing that doesnt change the end result. There wont be any cleaving but anything differing from dominant doctrine no longer available. With no regard for who determines that other then the currently loudest screaming mob. That describes a totalitarian society in which truth has lost all meaning because people favor signaling despite knowing better.
I find it highly irresponsible to push for defacto censorship with a complete disregard for very clear threat, namely the power to censor not only getting abused but being by its very nature uncontrollable. Especially in this form. Nobody being able to even describe how this could function without ending in tragedy means its likely impossible. Which should surprise nobody.
edit: China described it as the peoples will as well if i am not mistaken. Which meant having a set ratio of the population that had to confess their reactionary thoughts in front of a screaming mob before being thrown into Gulags.
>I think the burden is on those who think it should be a common-carrier system to justify why that's societally beneficial
Thats a really easy way out of having to address how this isnt going to end in a totalitarian echo chamber. Unfortunately just ignoring it and feeling right isnt a promising strategy.