mitigatedchaos

[mitigatedchaos]

Recently, Republican Senator Tim Scott made a post celebrating his marriage. (Good for him.)

The actual contents of the replies aren't the problem, per se. This could apply to any political issue; this one is just particularly charged.

If you take a look at XCancel, it shows a wall of support. So far, so normal.

Trollish commentator Richard Hanania claimed the replies were proof of what evil conservatives post when the libs aren't around to censor them.

A New Right intellectual officer posted that it was a wall of support and what the fuck is Hanania talking about?

A self-identified Communist reported that he saw people hurling a slur I didn't even see and calling for murder. (This slur did come up under sort by 'likes'.)

I checked for myself and I saw a diverse range of hatred in all directions, from Democrats claiming Trump would end the marriage, to left-racists, to right-racists, to antisemites, with a sprinkling of support. Scrolling down past the first 20-25 posts reveals the ordinary posts mostly in support.

Sort by 'new' posts revealed less intense hatred, but mostly a firehose of low content posts.

This is beyond "one screen, two movies." It's not even one screen, and what causes the difference is very opaque.

Either Tim Scott is getting loads of entirely normal and typical congratulations on his marriage anniversary, or half a dozen factions are all lining up to fight each other to the death.

However, because the website doesn't tell you what it's doing, you can't compensate. (Lack of compensation is something I've complained about before.) At this rate, Grok should generate a banner at the top that reads, "You have entered BRAWL MODE." Anything else would be misleading.

[mitigatedchaos]

From the replies:

starfreak: Why is "No, im ignorant and complicit in hate" in the Skyrim font

daveedmee: Stormcloak website

Hahaha.

Anyhow I hate these things so much. If I ever go back on ADHD stuff I'd be tempted to make a browser extension that replaces them all.

starting a compilation of my favorite "no thank you" buttons from when they want you to subscribe so bad

[mitigatedchaos]

There are a number of parents online - and you have probably seen this - that say that the arrival of their first child is the reason that, if the option existed, they would never choose to go back in time. There are so many variables, of course, that they would never be able to reach that child again.

Every person becomes physically weaker as they age, although some become wiser. But if you have a child that you love, then as you are becoming weaker, they are becoming stronger.

Consider playing video games, not for 30 minutes, but for much longer. What I found is that when you come up for air, figuratively speaking, you'll be hit with the anxiety of what you are supposed to be doing... but are not doing. So you try to play the game harder, to cover it up. But it just doesn't feel as good. Either you become numb because the game's rewards are now your baseline, or in your subconscious, you know you are supposed to be doing something else.

So if someone were to say that their purpose on Earth is to do wine tasting as hard as possible, if that were not their Dao [1], if they were not trying to become the most powerful sommelier on Earth, I would simply not believe them.

To look back on a lifetime of adult coloring books and lobster dinners, to say that this is the best use of someone's limited period of write access to the universe... I just don't think that's true. Is this the highest expression of one's unique nature in their particular time and place?

I suspect that many who are wallowing are not actually content, but are held in such a state by fear - fear of change, fear of mortality, fear of commitment - and force of bad habit, compounding to create a bad environment.

I had mostly given up on developing a foundational theory of ethics. Many have attempted it, but the inability to build a universally compelling one appears to be part of a 'faith condition' - proving the existence of an objective moral system beyond all doubt would be effectively the same as proving deism. To reject it, under such conditions, would not be a matter of choice, but a matter of mental illness.

However, this class of ideological work might reveal reusable insights.

The above is a conceptual sketch, far from a complete system, of course. (Don't take it as a rejection of all leisure.)

[1] I have seen commentary on how there are multiple Daos, "whether making wheels, cutting meat, leading an army or ruling a state."

[ @arcticdementor ]

“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is hardly a novel approach to human mortality, now is it? What’s novel here is only the degree to which technological progress and economic growth have made it ever-more available to an ever-growing number. And if automation trends continue, why couldn’t it be expanded globally? To put it plainly: what’s so bad about the YKK outcome? Do you morn for all the various hominid species that went extinct to leave the world to us? Old species give way to new ones. That’s evolution, baby. So long as we all get to have fun and party as much as we can, why not let the robots inherit the earth? What’s wrong with spending all our time playing World of Warcraft — or whatever other entertainment is our “addiction” of choice — as machines do more and more of the work, and take care of us as we grow old, until we all die off? Who are you to judge? How would that affect you personally?

I mean, that's still not beating the "terrified of death" allegations.

It isn't enough to notice the cosmic joke that people who think like this will be replaced by people who don't; you apparently want me to write a new foundational theory of ethics - to rescue them.

[mitigatedchaos]

I've read Now Melt up to section 9 c and I guess I just want to give an update after sending an ask a while ago.

(I plan to read the rest at a later date since that section was difficult to read as someone who opposed both anti-lockdown and BLM protests but everything else has been a really good read).

I want to say while I originally accepted your explanation about health care rationing I believe I now properly understand your reasoning and why I initially didn't.

(I believe my difference is that I don't care about racism (against minorities or majorities) as much as you do plus a general foreigners aversion to Trump (our Trump clone party got 2% of the national vote here). I also ended up voting for our right wing party here for nuclear power reasons too though.)

(It hasn't solved my lack of understanding of your refusal to prove that you read philippesaner posts yet though but it does explain your rankling at my use of the phrases 'take down' and 'blew it')

a.

I've read Now Melt up to section 9 c and I guess I just want to give an update after sending an ask a while ago.

(I plan to read the rest at a later date since that section was difficult to read as someone who opposed both anti-lockdown and BLM protests but everything else has been a really good read).

Opposing both sets of protests is consistent under the rule "no mass gatherings during a pandemic."

Also, while I say Now, Melt has a 2 hour reading time, that's mostly to establish that it's shorter than really long works like The Wealth of Nations (apparently 300,000-400,000 words). It's quite dense, so it makes sense not to read the whole thing in one go to begin with.

I believe my difference is that I don't care about racism (against minorities or majorities) as much as you do plus a general foreigners aversion to Trump (our Trump clone party got 2% of the national vote here).

I think there's more at stake than a few university seats or medical waiting lists, but that's a much longer post for another time.

b.

(It hasn't solved my lack of understanding of your refusal to prove that you read philippesaner posts yet though but it does explain your rankling at my use of the phrases 'take down' and 'blew it')

I'll try to keep this short. I can lengthen it if you request.

[ read more ]

I named three issues where I thought that Democrats should compromise with the electorate (discrimination, immigration, and censorship), and said that Argumate was treating these issues as "not negotiable" due to Democratic support.

Philippe interpreted this as claiming that "Argumate is a Democratic party loyalist."

Argumate is not a Democratic party loyalist. In fact I think he has a fair bit of contempt for the party, like most left-wingers. The idea that he'd rearrange his own ideology for their sake is frankly laughable.

I did not say that Argumate is a "Democratic party loyalist."

The reveal as to what's going on here doesn't occur until later:

If you think that someone decides what's negotiable based on what the party has committed to, you think they're a loyalist. Obviously.

I made a pretty detailed argument that Argumate was bending his principles to accommodate left-wing racism because it's supported by Democrats, since otherwise he should have just flatly agreed it was an electoral drag for Democrats.

What Philippe is doing is making a special category: [Democratic party loyalist].

(a) Only a [Democratic party loyalist] can ever support a position just because Democrats support it.

(b) And, a [Democratic party loyalist] must support every position Democrats support.

Philippe wants to argue that because Argumate disagrees with Democrats on at least one issue, Argumate is not a [Democratic party loyalist].

Because Argumate is not a [Democratic party loyalist], the theory goes, it is therefore impossible that he is supporting any position (such as left-racism) just because Democrats support it.

Of course, that doesn't follow, because the Philippe's special category is fake. Someone could be a Left-YIMBY and support default Democrat positions on every issue except YIMBYism, either because he hasn't investigated them, or to maintain good standing with the party. That's not a particularly "out there" example.

So, when Philippe demanded a strict yes or no answer...

(If you feel the need to give a long answer, make sure it starts with "yes" or "no" or "I disagree".)

...why did I ignore his instruction?

He got way too hung up on this "Democratic party loyalist" label earlier in the discussion, ignoring my response to the substantive basis of his criticism.

Why was it so important whether Argumate was officially a "Democratic party loyalist" or not? It wasn't necessary for my argument at all.

I judged it likely that Philippe was planning to do something like this when he made that yes or no demand.

That was why I refused to go along with it.

The response was a fork. The post treats him seriously, as an intelligent reader, and addresses the substantive basis of his criticism. It only doesn't work if he's trying to pull this maneuver... which he did.

[mitigatedchaos]

[mitigatedchaos]

[ @arcticdementor ]

“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is hardly a novel approach to human mortality, now is it? What’s novel here is only the degree to which technological progress and economic growth have made it ever-more available to an ever-growing number. And if automation trends continue, why couldn’t it be expanded globally? To put it plainly: what’s so bad about the YKK outcome? Do you morn for all the various hominid species that went extinct to leave the world to us? Old species give way to new ones. That’s evolution, baby. So long as we all get to have fun and party as much as we can, why not let the robots inherit the earth? What’s wrong with spending all our time playing World of Warcraft — or whatever other entertainment is our “addiction” of choice — as machines do more and more of the work, and take care of us as we grow old, until we all die off? Who are you to judge? How would that affect you personally?

I mean, that's still not beating the "terrified of death" allegations.

It isn't enough to notice the cosmic joke that people who think like this will be replaced by people who don't; you apparently want me to write a new foundational theory of ethics - to rescue them.

(This sounds harsher than I mean it.)

[mitigatedchaos]

.

And that any person who thinks they want something different is wrong about their own desires, because they’ve been tricked, brainwashed, led astray by the myths and social pressure of illiberal cultures.

Where do you even find these people?

I want to go train on them in real life. I want to read their vibes as they're saying these things.

This strikes me not as a position held by someone who is indifferent about death, but as a position held by someone who is terrified of death, and is trying to argue his way out of it.

What is this guy even doing with his time, anyway? Like, what are the chances that he's just a World of Warcraft addict?

[ tumblr user ]

Damn, one rejoinder to "the future belongs to those who show up" is "why the fuck would I care about the future if I'm not there".

That one's a trap. The right-wing argument is that people will care more about the future if they have children... so people who don't have children don't care about the future, will not maintain institutions, and therefore should not have the same level of voice in the discussions about how society should be run.

I don't think that's the right approach to society, but "I don't care about the future" is a rake.

[mitigatedchaos]

the "nazi bar parable" is about how if you don't have strict border enforcement you'll be overrun by unassimilable aliens from an inferior culture

[mitigatedchaos]

Right, but I mean at the level above this.

Is the media output of Japan... healthy?

I know Tumblr users were very excited for Dungeon Meshi, and people love Frieren and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and certainly but is this the missing storytelling depth that people were looking for?

Manga and anime tend to be, subtly, quite Japanese. e.g. In 2010's Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, which is ostensibly based on American cartoons (but sexed up), the evil spirits are formed from grudges (this pattern shows up so often in anime/manga that it probably has a basis in Japanese folklore or religion (and you can see why it would!)), it's a monster of the week show with talking monsters rather than a recurring cast of antagonists (compare a super sentai show to She-Ra and The Princesses of Power (which is OK)), and the religion the angels are following is definitely not Christianity, despite the priest's robes.

Don't get me wrong. Clearly the authors of PSG like America, and they're pulling from impressions of America and American sources. But it's a Japanese show; Americans wouldn't be that casual about the topic of sex in an animated show. (Those that want it casual also want to strip out what makes it special, treating it as 'just a bodily function'.)

The Venture Bros, by contrast, is quite American. The "lost promise Jet Age," the old world being intense and charismatic but not environmentally friendly or safety conscious, these are American themes. It reflects a kind of "waking up from the dream of the 20th century." However, The Venture Bros recently ended its very long run, and it's unclear if anything similar would be made today.

I checked in on that Netflix Elvis show (2023), and I'm clearly not the target audience. Captain Fall (2023) was awful, not even as a matter of taste. If that were all that were on TV, I wouldn't own a TV. Netflix's vampire movie, Day Shift (2022) was a fumble, but it was more watchable than either of those.

The American Ghost in the Shell adaptation (2017) needed a different author with more focus on geopolitics.

On the other hand, Inside Job (2021) was... okay? But that was written by someone who knows what "the Singularity" is. Likewise, Altered Carbon (2018) was solid.

I get vibes about something like The Expanse (2015), and people like it, but I just don't feel like I'm going to learn anything from it (or be especially entertained), so I haven't bothered to look up much about it, and that's the case for a lot of media today.

I may have set the bar pretty high, there. Examples of shows I learned something from include Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex (2002) and Gundam Unicorn (2010). Something like BNA (2020) was good, but I didn't learn anything. I now have a better understanding of what Psycho-Pass (2012) was saying, but I don't think I realized it at the time.

At this point, I sometimes look up a series's twist before I even start it, to make sure it's good enough.

So, like. I dunno, man.

First, are we getting good stuff and not noticing it because there's just so much media now?

Second, are many of us just more experienced now, and thus have higher standards?

Third, I personally may be a bad measure. Dungeon Meshi's level of analysis comes off as the basic default for me, but a number of Tumblr users were quite impressed.

Fourth, is this actually a result of the quality of the writers' room, or does it reflect a change in market composition (with many people playing video games instead)? (In fact, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a neat test case here: both the game and the TV show are quite compelling!)

Still, I think there is something to the OP's theory on this one. I think it's reasonable to lower housing prices and see if it helps.

one side effect of a labor market where you have to be trained from birth to do one thing is the art sucks because, one, you have to have specced into art, which is bad meta for comp and will consequently attract those who are bad at the game and not just apathetic toward it, and two, you can't have specced into anything else, and will consequently be unable to write intelligently about it or anything resembling it. who is mark twain without steamboats. this shakes out to failprogeny vanity projects, advertisement, things made of cliches, and engineers deciding to fictionalize their time at Chabuduo Technologies with all the craft and delicacy that would suggest

[mitigatedchaos]

I've thought about something like this for a while. It sounds plausible.

Across the Anglosphere, housing prices are fucked in major metros in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. That doesn't leave a lot of slack, seeing as rent is positional and can easily soak up any surplus.

To test this theory, we'd need a developed country with a housing market that isn't completely fucked for comparison. South Korea is having some sort of insane gender war, which might throw things off. That gives us... Japan.

Reportedly, there are loads of small, specialized shops in that country, because the real estate is cheap enough that sole proprietors can afford to run them. There's something very human about that. It feels like it should provide some cultural texture.

Does that carry over to the media market?

one side effect of a labor market where you have to be trained from birth to do one thing is the art sucks because, one, you have to have specced into art, which is bad meta for comp and will consequently attract those who are bad at the game and not just apathetic toward it, and two, you can't have specced into anything else, and will consequently be unable to write intelligently about it or anything resembling it. who is mark twain without steamboats. this shakes out to failprogeny vanity projects, advertisement, things made of cliches, and engineers deciding to fictionalize their time at Chabuduo Technologies with all the craft and delicacy that would suggest

[mitigatedchaos]

I wonder when the earliest date that something like this happened was.

Like, very loose definition, it could have happened to cave men. ("Thaag knock over rock, scare off deer.")

Under stricter definitions, we have bookkeeping from thousands of years ago on clay tablets. This seems like it would be a pretty universal or general pattern, but it would depend on more than just writing. There would have to be both a written contract and a written report.

Writing report and have to mention something the contractors fucked up. Feels funny because I can choose just how bad I want them to look. Done want to make it too bad and poison the relationship but need to make it clear THEY screwed up and not US.

[mitigatedchaos]

Ad quality on Tumblr just picked up.

[mitigatedchaos]

UK/EU regulation requiring that all thought experiments in which the number of creatures exceeds the number of atoms in the universe be labeled "FOR SPORT ONLY; NOT FOR MORAL SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT" (punishable by $10 fine).

I think the most anti-rationalist stance I have is that I could not care less about debating if you would save 10^100 shrimp or one human. You aren't gonna do either. No one faces those tradeoffs. Your intuitions or even models about how to spend the marginal dollar *do not scale into infinity* and that is completely fine. Anything learned from this debate is accidental, or at least highly inefficient.

[mitigatedchaos]

Just some notes for scale.

The United States has about 330 million people. If the odds of someone being Adam Smasher are 1 in 1,000, then there will be 330,000 Adam Smashers in the United States, about the size of a notable city Americans have heard of, like Orlando, New Orleans, or Cleveland.

You only need two 1 in 1,000 filters combined in order to produce 1 in 1 million odds. This would give a pool of 330 Adam Smashers for the United States.

Just three 1 in 1,000 filters combined gives you 1 in 1 billion odds, which would mean there were roughly 8 Adam Smashers globally.

This means that if you are selecting for criteria that are sufficiently narrow, you might only find a handful of guys that fit those criteria globally.

So, to provide an example, there is an obsolete form of digital storage media called a floppy disk (or 3.5" diskette) that hasn't been in widespread use since the 1990s. (An image of it is commonly used as the 'save' icon in computer software to this day.)

If you go online, you will find seemingly dozens of listings for 3.5" diskette drives, and these listings are basically split into three categories: (1) new old stock, (2) discontinued items that are still listed, (3) new devices that all look strangely the same except for the logo.

Assume there is a market for 24,000 new diskette readers per year (based on 2x the estimate from the primary listing on Amazon), with a profit of $3 per unit (generous). In China, the GDP per capita is about $12,000, so this is enough money to support... 6 employees.

Global GDP is higher. The total global market for new diskette drives might support as many as... 23 employees.

As such, it would make sense that all the new diskette drive listings on Amazon look like they're just rebranded versions of one device. If only 23 people are manufacturing new diskette drives, that's really only enough to support one factory.

So it appears that there is currently only one factory, in the entire world, that makes these things.

Probably some enterprising individual [filter] realized that this was a narrow opportunity to corner a niche market [filter], decided to execute on it [filter], and then used his business contacts to secure funding [filter] and purchase leftover manufacturing equipment from a major manufacturer exiting the business [filter].

So my 14 year old has an idea that he's calling the "Million Adam Smashers" argument. The reference is from Cyperpunk 2077, where there is a character, Adam Smasher, who has turned himself into a living tank, a complete cyborg in which the only thing still human is his literal brain. My son's argument is this: as a creator--a writer, game designer, manga artist, whatever--you need to ask yourself, why is this guy unique? Why are there not a million Adam Smashers? All you need is money, connections, and a specific mindset that allows you to cope with or disregard your supposed lack of "humanity", and you too can be Adam Smasher. And he's right; there should be dozens, hundreds of rich assholes who might otherwise get into racing or yachts or something but if you can become a terrifying cyborg capable of stopping a car with one hand, at least some people, out of the billions in the universe, would choose that. Why don't Arasaka and Militech just have twenty Adam Smashers apiece?

More broadly, he's making a point about fictional characters, usually main characters--is what makes them special, you know....actually special? Are they the main character because these things happened to them, or did these things happen because they're the main character? Why are they Adam Smasher, and not someone else? It's a test; a check to make sure you're not favoring the character because you're enamored with that character.

I think it's an interesting mental exercise. Take a good look at your universe and your characters and make sure that if there's only one Adam Smasher, only one Captain America, only one Rock Lee, only one Joker, there's a good reason.

[mitigatedchaos]

"Hey, so, cyberpsychosis is real."

"But... we don't even have cybernetic implants yet?"

"Yeah so it turns out that some people either haven't been reading enough science fiction, or have been reading too much science fiction, so a businessman, for example, can get one-shotted by an auto-generated SCP Wiki article."

"Well. Fuck."

"Yeah."

[mitigatedchaos]

I have now read Now, Melt and was surprised that most of it was very obvious observations which are uncontroversial among people who know what they're talking about. It seems to largely be aimed at the social justice advocates you speak of in the text.

However your description of social justice seems ironically severely lacking in dimensionality- attempting to describe it as one unified doctrine, when really it is a loose cluster of ideas and arguably an imagined community that sometimes wholly contradict each other, and always have many competing variants. In trying to fit this into a coherent picture you end up having to make auxiliary assumptions, which aren't present in the actual social justice milieu, and which are quite objectionable, not just to the average person, but also to the average person who identifies themselves with social justice.

E.g. in 6f the example of 'opening a case' against an entire student body rather than 30 bigoted students the notion of a collective punishment of all students which you suggest is not something I think many would accept (even if the victim was excluded from punishment), and seems to come from an ad-hoc syncretisation of two threads within social justice. 1) More systems-oriented social justice advocates- who would decentre the question of individual guilt for the bigotry, and instead look for institutional or whole cultural explanations for the bigotry, which pressure could be exerted to change (whereas you can't very well change individuals)- and so would conclude that the culture of acceptance of bigotry is at fault (after all, that can potentially be changed, whereas the attitudes of the 30 bigots can't). This group may thus describe the student body as anglophone supremacist, as their analysis of the problem. On the other hand 2) more individually-oriented social justice advocates, who don't think in systems, would identify the problem as those 30 students being anglophone supremacists, and who are concerned with punishment, and would say that anglophone supremacists need to be held accountable for their bigotry. Combining these views gets you to a view 'the entire student body should be punished for anglophone supremacy' that no social justice advocates support.

I am also simplifying here, because social justice advocates do not generally fit into either category, but will mix and match views between systemic and and individual orientations, often in quite incoherent ways. Occasionally, this mixing may result in someone saying something outlandish like that the entire student body should be punished (or in a real example, that all white people should be punished) but upon probing it will invariably become clear that the person did not think this through before they said it.

This also means that while many of the critiques of social justice are true of many adherents, they are not true of the more defensible variants of social justice ideas, and are better viewed as a critique of the culture/movement of social justice than the ideology (as the people who make these mistakes are not thoughtful people, and not ideological trendsetters)

The examples give an impression of lacking awareness of the more structural orientation within social justice- this seems to be a flaw of the approach of choosing minimally political examples, as it means choosing examples where there are no feedback loops into more harmful inequalities within society, so that more structurally oriented social justice advocates would tend to say either that it's not a problem. E.g. women not caring about monster trucks is presumably downstream of harmful attitudes about what are 'girl things' and 'boy things', but not upstream of anything, so there is no reason to adjust anything upstream to even out participation. Whereas if the example was an optional physics class taking steps to equalise participation would be important to address downstream inequalities (access to high paying jobs, etc.)

You seem to be attributing views to your political opponents that they are not guilty of, where ignorance or confusion is often the real explanation. Unless you are speaking of the more thoughtful social justice advocates and there is a much more robust version of your critiques of social justice that also applies to the more robust social justice ideas, which your essay leaves out.

(~3,000 words)

a.

[ deaths-accountant ] (emphasis mine)

I have now read Now, Melt and was surprised that most of it was very obvious observations which are uncontroversial among people who know what they're talking about. It seems to largely be aimed at the social justice advocates you speak of in the text.

Now, Melt isn't aimed at people who are currently confident followers of social justice.

The essay is aimed at people who are not yet social justice advocates, people who have become disillusioned with the social justice movement, and people who came up in an environment where the contemporary New Right were the only perceived viable alternative to social justice.

The local blogger Vrisker posted a clip from some substack recently. To better describe the problem, I will share it with you.

There are many people who would describe this passage as "fascist," I think. When I look at it, what I see is a kind of nihilistic despair.

[ read more ]

In the oppressor/oppressed model, the moment a man gains enough strength to no longer be oppressed, he becomes an oppressor, a valid target for conflict. There can be no neutral parties and no breathing room, and thus, no peace. This simply what that looks like moving in the other direction.

While there are some people who naturally desire power, or who are naturally predisposed towards cruelty, I think that a number of people were essentially told, out of nowhere, "You shouldn't exist," and shocked by this, they lost trust in the world, and went into despair.

I want them to melt. I want to restore their grasp on morality, to see that they have been lied to by the people who claim, implicitly, that "morality" just means them giving up everything they have and getting nothing in return.

Argumate-style liberals, somehow still drunk on liberalism's victory in the late 20th century, have interpreted liberalism as inevitable, and thus do not see the danger that the liberal project is in.

b.

[ deaths-accountant ] (emphasis mine)

I have now read Now, Melt and was surprised that most of it was very obvious observations which are uncontroversial among people who know what they're talking about. It seems to largely be aimed at the social justice advocates you speak of in the text.

Now, Melt is very unusual for an essay, in that it provides guidance for how to read it in the first three sections. In fact, it tells you that the contents are likely to be obvious in section 2:

From my perspective, the function of the blog Mitigated Chaos is to explain things that are obvious, in clear language.

Something like basic organizational and capital theory (10.c) may seem unusual to bring up in a political essay, but my experience is that people routinely make arguments or hold political positions that imply a lack of a solid grasp of basic organizational or capital theory.

On a certain level, one of the most important political movements of the past decade - YIMBYism - is about the idea that supply and demand apply to housing, or, beyond that, the idea that basic arithmetic applies to housing.

To borrow Yudkowsky's phrase, to achieve peace, one must "raise the sanity waterline," so that others can see it. The primer content on information limits to discussion is necessary in order to open up the idea of there being more than two options.

What may have been tripping you up is that the essay starts with an anti-dunk.

Mr. GhostPalmTechnique’s party has lost the election. He has decided to lose weight about it.

Good.

The first two lines appear to be setting up some kind of 'fat loser' joke. The third line subverts this. In this pattern, there would usually be some kind of counter-intuitive fourth line that turns the sequence back into a joke/dunk - but it never comes.

When Mr. Ghost is mentioned again in section 6, it is to criticize him for his partisanship and inflexibility. This is a dunk, and it lines up the shot - the 2024 election was a historical loss for Democrats, with declines in support across many demographic categories and in counties all over the country.

But his weight is not mentioned, and he isn't directly called a loser. Instead, the weight of the election loss is setup to hit his argument like a freight train. This plays into the first three lines: he got surprised by reality, so he decided to adapt. This flexibility is healthy and good.

Beyond that, I think you may be overestimating just how obvious this content is.

To take an example of shared cultural background, many of the Rationalists, Rationalist-adjacent Tumblr users, and Post-Rationalists, are either computer programmers by profession, or have engaged in computer programming. To them, ideas like how much information can fit in a byte, working out how to fit real-world concepts into more-limited digital representations, or lossy compression, aren't just a matter of textbook theory, but a matter of regular practice.

Software development is the art of abstraction, and many of them may have read something like Joel on Software's Law of Leaky Abstractions. Growing up in different era, even younger programmers may not have seen it.

Many in the Rationalist diaspora may have also read Scott Alexander's review of Seeing Like a State, which spread the concept of "legibility" among the community.

Based on my observations of younger Tumblr users engaged in discourse, I feel like someone or something out there is training them wrong - probably YouTubers - or that they aren't being trained at all and are trying to cobble something together from their surroundings.

In a shorter response, I wrote...

As I recall, I was halfway through writing a long response to one of your other posts when I decided to ask if you'd read it, since I was thinking that the contents of my long response would have followed logically from the principles outlined there, but maybe even with that background the reply I was drafting wasn't as obvious as I thought.

It sounds like what you want is more intermediate logic, something above the foundations but connecting them to more specific positions. I suspect this means that I tend to leap farther than you in connecting ideas.

c.

However your description of social justice seems ironically severely lacking in dimensionality- attempting to describe it as one unified doctrine, when really it is a loose cluster of ideas and arguably an imagined community that sometimes wholly contradict each other, and always have many competing variants.

Perhaps the same could be said for all ideologies.

One of the reasons I didn't go as heavily into criticism of the Social Justice movement in 2017 was that I can see the case for the subtler, higher-bitrate version of what might be called "Social Justice."

From section (6.d) of Now, Melt:

There are many people out there who have trouble imagining things beyond their own life experience. People flatten things. They forget information. They overgeneralize from a small number of examples. (Some people say that they are progressive and then flatten everything out anyway.) Liberal left-identitarianism can act as a counter-force to these tendencies, when it is rooted in truth.

I specifically lay out that I think a liberal left-identitarianism can be useful in overcoming information losses from compression (or ignorance).

My opinion is that liberal left-identitarianism was already part of 2008-era pre-SJ liberalism. From this perspective, what distinguishes Social Justice from liberalism is not the left-identitarianism but the illiberalism.

Some liberal left-identitarianism has been included under the label of Social Justice in the past decade, but in my opinion, due to the epistemically corrosive ideas that are also under the umbrella of the Social Justice label, liberal left-identitarians who are "doing Social Justice, but correctly" should just ditch the SJ label and call themselves liberals.

While in 2019's The Monster of Castle Von Wokenstein, I described political coalitions as internally divided (in congruence with the focus on splitting coalitions in Now, Melt 9.b), I also stated that their outputs are experienced by the outsiders as one relatively-unified body of policy.

In the follow-up (also 2019), Von Woken-Who?, I wrote:

Now on Tumblr, it’s pretty easy to find a self-identified feminist that will just straight up say that they think men are inferior. Outside of Tumblr, a lot of feminists will say that they don’t. But the vector of the messages received by men won’t necessarily match up with that, as they receive both the messages about how “women are as good as any man” and “men are uniquely oppressive and violent,” even though those messages may have different speakers.

To borrow the monster truck rally example from Now, Melt (6.e), a Social Justice person will generally either criticize the monster truck rally for its lack of gender parity, or else be silent { -1, 0 }. They generally will not attack another SJ-identifying person in response to an SJ attack on the monster truck rally { -1, 1 }, even if they would disagree on what the appropriate terminology for transgender people is.

Thus, from the perspective of an outsider, a Social Justice person is someone who attacks them for their hobbies, unless they personally know a number of Social Justice people who are chill.

While my compression would not be adequate for an 80,000-word book on the history of the online Social Justice movement, I think it is fair for the purposes of my essay.

This is also because...

In trying to fit this into a coherent picture you end up having to make auxiliary assumptions, which aren't present in the actual social justice milieu, and which are quite objectionable, not just to the average person, but also to the average person who identifies themselves with social justice.

...actually-existing institutional Social Justice focuses on allocating medical treatments, positions, farm aid, and so on explicitly by race, and is willing to platform junk science such as "[X race] doctors are killing [Y race] babies."

If you mentioned this in a debate back in 2014, a supporter of Social Justice would claim you were being absurd. I think I understand the reasoning: "[Even though the principles don't prohibit this,] we would never be that mean! We have good intentions! You are just being paranoid."

Even now, people on this site discuss "bad discursive norms" and refuse to acknowledge the attempts at discrimination.

In my opinion, over the past 10 years, a lot of SJ Critical writing has been just demanding, over and over and over again, the Social Justice people adopt explicit limiting principles.

And of course, every time, they refuse.

I believe that this is partly because they believe that it might get in the way of closing outcome gaps, and partly because they have no means whatsoever to collectively bind their fellow SJ enthusiasts to the deal.

So, I would say, historically, "this is favored by SJ precepts" has been gradually winning over "social justice people currently consider this objectionable." Adopting a limiting principle and then holding to it would help get around this, but I think if you do that, then it stops being Social Justice.

Combining these views gets you to a view 'the entire student body should be punished for anglophone supremacy' that no social justice advocates support.

I would say that, in practice, SJ advocates do, in fact, support explicitly group discriminatory policy as a "corrective."

I don't see an ideological structure within Social Justice that constrains the adoption of bad combinations of ideas.

d.

I am also simplifying here, because social justice advocates do not generally fit into either category, but will mix and match views between systemic and and individual orientations, often in quite incoherent ways. Occasionally, this mixing may result in someone saying something outlandish like that the entire student body should be punished (or in a real example, that all white people should be punished) but upon probing it will invariably become clear that the person did not think this through before they said it.

I don't think they're thinking through their policies before writing them, either!

This also means that while many of the critiques of social justice are true of many adherents, they are not true of the more defensible variants of social justice ideas, and are better viewed as a critique of the culture/movement of social justice than the ideology (as the people who make these mistakes are not thoughtful people, and not ideological trendsetters)

Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo's books became quite popular, so I don't believe that the view, "low-quality SJ is not trendsetting," is accurate.

Carefully-feathered equity policy was, I think, more common before 2014-2022. Afterwards, I think that if you try to handle things carefully, you end up being accused of being insufficiently radical.

The examples give an impression of lacking awareness of the more structural orientation within social justice- this seems to be a flaw of the approach of choosing minimally political examples, as it means choosing examples where there are no feedback loops into more harmful inequalities within society, so that more structurally oriented social justice advocates would tend to say either that it's not a problem.

Noticing how minimally political the examples are is insightful. Yes, people aren't already angry about monster trucks, so they make a suitable example.

However, from my perspective, the rise of the Social Justice movement marked a motion away from systems thinking.

Let's say that you're engaged in systems thinking. You would then, assuming that agents are responding to the environment, model...

[group behavior] -> [group reputation]

You could then do a feedback loop, where...

[group reputation] -> [group behavior]

However, if you have any wisdom at all, you're not going to model [group reputation] as 100% tractable, and you will model [group behavior] as having inertia.

Therefore, to gain maximum traction on the problem, even assuming a blank slate mindset, it makes sense to use [message control] on [group reputation] while simultaneously using [discipline] on [group behavior].

Or, consider crime. We could adopt a blank slate mindset in which crime is increased by a shorter expected lifespan, as an individual values his own life less the more he expects to lose it, and this also devalues conventional punishments.

In this case, by committing homicide, criminals decrease life expectancy in an area, leading to an increase in homicide, which causes more homicide.

Therefore, the Utilitarian thing to do is to arrest the criminals (assuming that they commit multiple crimes), thereby reducing the rate of homicide, thereby increasing the expected lifespan, thereby further reducing homicide.

So, even assuming a blank slate mindset, if we are doing systems thinking, it makes sense to support both discipline and arrests as methods to improve group outcomes and group reputation.

However, I think if you support those, you get socially kicked out of Social Justice.

You haven't abandoned the blank slate. You haven't abandoned the pursuit of equitable outcomes. But the moment you start being so reasonable, it's no longer Social Justice and you're just a liberal (or a conservative liberal (or even a Marxist)).

I think if you're doing any sort of serious structural analysis, it is almost, but not quite, by definition not Social Justice.

This is also why Now, Melt contains a few paragraphs on moral alternation (6.c) - a lot of the positions that 2014-2022 SJ progressives would take up aren't even Utilitarian.

e.

E.g. women not caring about monster trucks is presumably downstream of harmful attitudes about what are 'girl things' and 'boy things', but not upstream of anything, so there is no reason to adjust anything upstream to even out participation. Whereas if the example was an optional physics class taking steps to equalise participation would be important to address downstream inequalities (access to high paying jobs, etc.)

Ah, but it is upstream... of women not having prestigious jobs as monster truck drivers, and it is perpetuating "the harmful idea of boy things vs. girl things"! Really it just depends on what a political entrepreneur wants to get up to. If the field of monster truck driving has not been problematicized, that is because it has been deemed unattractive (like working on a garbage truck).

When I think about a "helpful" or "uplifting," nuanced version of Social Justice, I don't think it's merely a matter of doctrine.

What is actually valuable is the combination of intelligence, tolerance, wisdom, and charisma. A little bit of extra knowledge and procedure help (like "colorblind people exist"), but are not fundamentally the thing in itself.

Intelligence allows us to predict outcomes and see solutions. Tolerance allows us to coexist with others. Wisdom allows us to understand others and avoid common errors. Charisma acts as a lubricant for social situations.

With those four things, and a little humility, the desired policy will emerge naturally from dialogue. (Of course, there are wicked or immoral people out there, which is why Now, Melt contains a section on justice (6.c).)

This isn't to say that it isn't work, which is why the most important section of Now, Melt is concerned with "the labor of peace" (11.b), which is part of the labor of governance.

We have little control over intelligence, therefore, the thing to do is cultivate the other two virtues (tolerance and wisdom) and the one strength (charisma).

Training charisma is a bit outside the scope of Now, Melt, although it does describe a lot of social reasoning. However, embracing key concepts in the essay, like relative dimensionality, should lead to greater tolerance, while basic organizational and capital theory should lead to a greater understanding of the world, and greater wisdom.

f.

Unless you are speaking of the more thoughtful social justice advocates and there is a much more robust version of your critiques of social justice that also applies to the more robust social justice ideas, which your essay leaves out.

Basically, my opinion would be that if you are doing really solid, systems-focused, thoughtful, nuanced work... it isn't Social Justice, it's just sparkling liberal left-identitarianism.

I'd rather split all the good work off the label, and then replace the broader movement with something better, although it's unclear how to do that, as compression, lack-of-personal-development, and more structural factors like clickbait bullshit, contributed to the main body of the 2014-2022 being a tire fire.

I've shifted towards the development and cultivation of strength in the weak as a presentable alternative. However, I have not conducted an analysis of the system under compression.

[mitigatedchaos]

I don't mean, "Don't be in Anerica."

Rather, on the matter of changing ideology at a high level of abstraction, one way to 'win' a fight is to just not have it.

[ general-cerberus ]

Even if you believe that current thing is worse than last thing (a valid opinion), last thing is the reason current thing is happening and if we go back to last thing we’re just gonna see a stronger and more entrenched current thing later on

This has me thinking about the survivability onion. Particularly, I'm thinking of the outermost layer, "Don't be there."