Open Thread 2: Free Minds, Free Threads

Time for another Open Thread / Housekeeping Thread.

1. Commenter Lila wants to signal-boost the existence of psychiatric advanced directives, where you can write a (somewhat legally binding) plan for a future in which you become too mentally ill to make good decisions.

2. Ozy is looking for a part-time job better than camming – preferably one compatible with working from home and with occasional couple-day-long panic/depression attacks. So far we’ve got odesk.com and video transcription services as ideas to look into. Any other ideas would be welcome.

3. I’m going to be cracking down on comment sections a lot harder here in the near future. In particular, I want to cull the bottom 50%-90% of neoreactionaries. I like them, but I also like deer, and that doesn’t stop me from realizing that sometimes deer need to be culled. Having every thread with even the slightest opening turn into a full on neoreactionary feeding frenzy is tiring and driving other people away. I realize this is unfair, in that it’s not neoreactionaries’ fault that everyone else refuses to go to places where they are allowed to talk. Luckily, their whole ideology is that rulers have the right to optimize their territories for maximum productivity without regard for fairness to individuals, so I am sure they won’t object. Honestly I’d be pretty happy getting rid of everyone except maybe Nydwracu, Nyan, Konk, Athrelon, and Mai (apologies for inevitable people I forgot), but I won’t raise the banhammer until someone gives me at least a tiny bit of justification.

4. Also, if someone is sufficiently new that no one will complaint, I might just ban them silently and without record, to save myself the trivial inconvenience of doing it formally.

5. Every time I see someone describe this as “a blog about social justice” I die a little inside. I WRITE LIKE ONE POST ABOUT THAT A MONTH.

6. Highlighting interesting comments: Mai on ecclesiology, Sarah on ecclesiology. And an off-blog one: Mitrailleuse on Motte-Busting. Honestly motte-busting seems like a terrible idea to me, but knowing that other people endorse it as a strategy makes certain things fall into place.

PS: NO RACE OR GENDER ON THE OPEN THREAD THAT NEVER HELPS

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507 Responses to Open Thread 2: Free Minds, Free Threads

  1. Matthew says:

    I made myself a gravatar, but it’s not showing up here. Can someone tell what step I’ve failed to complete?

  2. Alexander Stanislaw says:

    Perhaps its time for a spam filter.

    • Andy says:

      Seconded. Captchas are annoying but so is spam, especially when you use the Recent Comments box rather than the comments feed.

  3. Steve Reilly says:

    Apparently Arthur Chu now thinks it’s ok to dowload evil worldviews and analyze them: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/01/occupying-the-throne-justine-tunney-neoreactionaries-and-the-new-1-percent.html

    • Ialdabaoth says:

      well yeah, a certified Minority has expressed them.

      If Scott would play up his Jewishness, he might get a free pass.

  4. Matthew says:

    The Moloch post has reminded me to ask this…

    After the last time Scott mentioned the series, I went and read Kushiel’s Dart. And I have to say that while it was great as pornography, it seemed pretty trite as fantasy. Does the series get better as it goes on, or am I likely to be unimpressed by the rest of them if I was unimpressed by the first one?

  5. Ialdabaoth says:

    So, I see you added ads! Awesome!

    Why do they keep coming up as Asian dating sites?

  6. buckwheatloaf says:

    why is the comment section so skinny. can we widen it up to normal width. the width of original comments feels a bit cramped by the margins as it is, but i can deal with it, but when people start replying to each other then their comments get too squished to the point where i will just ignore them. i had a tuna subway sandwich the other day (it was pretty tasty) and the dimensions of so many of the comments reminds me of that. for a sandwich those dimension are cool. for comments to a blog they’re not.

  7. Douglas Knight says:

    Scott,

    How about you close the comments on Map-Territory Distinctions? At the very least, it would be an experiment to learn if that would change the amount of spam, or just spread it thin.

    ━━━━━━━━━

    If I link to SSC, it thinks I’m a spammer. But if I give a relative link, it doesn’t.

  8. ADifferentAnonymous says:

    I just realized something I feel very foolish for missing about the steady GDP graph: not only does it say that women’s entry into the workforce had no effect on GDP, it says that nothing had any long-term effect on GDP. If we take this seriously, doesn’t that tell us that any policy we adopt to increase growth is misguided, since nothing affects growth?

    • More exactly, if the graph is sound, then nothing we know of affects growth.

      It’s hard to come up with a policy which both new and plausible.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      Scott Alalready made this point in his review of The Great Stagnation.

      There’s another thing that bothers me too, which is the sheer damnable linearity of the economic laws. The growth of science as measured in papers/year; the growth of innovation as measured in patents; the growth of computation as measured by Moore’s Law; the growth of the economy as measured in GDP. All so straight you could use them to hang up a picture. These lines don’t care what we humans do, who we vote for, what laws we pass, what we invent, what geese that lay long-hanging fruit have or have not been killed. The Gods of the Straight Lines seem right up there with the Gods of the Copybook Headings in the category of things that tend to return no matter how hard you try to kick them away. They were saying back a few decades ago Moore’s Law would stop because of basic physical restrictions on possible transistor size, and we worked around those, which means the Gods of the Straight Lines are more powerful than physics.

  9. Adam Casey says:

    I very much enjoyed Ozy’s post. Any plans to have more guest posts?

  10. Ialdabaoth says:

    So, on a lighter note, what other board and card games do readers or writers of SSC play?

    • Zathille says:

      Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Pathfinder, some Magic: The Gathering on the side and the sheer weight of childhood nostalgia is drawing my interest to Yu-Gi-Oh.

      On a related note, Roll20 is an amazing tool for Tabletop games.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        *nod* I’ve been looking into Roll20 a lot; I was somewhat frustrated with it last year but it sounds like they’ve made a lot of improvements. do they have a 3E-style distance calculator yet?

        • Zathille says:

          Try looking at other options in the page option menu. If anything, maybe Euclidean could be a good proxy. I remember Pathfinder/3.5 were options, as was 4th ed.

          I use Euclidean to play Warhammer on roll20, taking off the grid, changing units to inches and stuff.

          I digress, but the fact you can resize tokens to be proportional to the unit you set for distance measurement has allowed me to resize tokens to be just about the right size for the tabletop: 0.75 inches squared for infantry, 1.5 inches squared for monstrous units and 1 by 2 inches for cavalry. Very good stuff. Also sized the battlefield so it’s the equivalent of 6 ‘realm of battle’ table sets put together. The only problem is how zoomed out you need to be to get a good view.

          Roll20 is a powerful tool, with some creativity.

      • blacktrance says:

        I also play Yu-Gi-Oh, though I’ve been absent from the game for about a year and haven’t kept up with the meta.

    • lmm says:

      The games that keep me coming back are (riichi) Mahjong (skill, luck-pushing, inference, deceit, tradition. A game that has it all, as long as you’re willing to memorise a big scoring list amd have exactly four players, and don’t mind the lack of theme) and Tanto Cuore (an incrementally improved Dominion. Fast-paced, different every time you play, but with just enough interaction to make it interesting, pretty artwork, compact box (do not underestimate the importance of this). And a light-hearted theme that stops anyone taking it too seriously and encourages terrible jokes, although [REDACTED DUE TO DANGER OF BANNED TOPIC]).

      Honourable mention to Tokaido which is gentle and very pretty, and a good game to play with a group where you want to keep things friendly. Also Galaxy Trucker is great fun if you enjoy building spaceships and having them blow up, but I rarely get to play it because it’s rather big and heavy to transport.

    • Erik says:

      A lot of D&D 3.5e. (And derivatives, such as Mutants&Masterminds.)

      Many people say it’s shit, and while I usually agree with most of their arguments for why it’s shit, I don’t think the conclusion is justified. D&D 3.5e has a bunch of minor bugs like a ten-foot ladder costing less than a pair of ten-foot poles, suggesting that you should acquire your ten-foot poles by buying a ladder and hacking through the rungs. (If you are unscrupulous, you could try to buy a ladder, hack through the rungs, and sell the two ladder halves as ten-foot poles for profit. Be prepared to dodge objects thrown at you by an angry DM if you attempt this.)
      But that sort of micro-silliness doesn’t obviously disrupt the game when it’s consulted. If a D&D character wants to buy a ten-foot pole and the price is a bit too high, the worst it will do is stretch his purse. Whereas in (for example) Exalted 2e, which I do consider to be shit after having played it a few times, the descriptions and mechanics for a lot of things fail sanity checks in a way that badly affects the gameplay. For example, suppose a character has caught an infectious disease, and the DM wishes to determine if a kind samaritan catches the disease after helping the character. If you look at the Exalted 2e rules for disease transmission and the description of a common citizen, the citizen has a 60% chance of catching leprosy from being in the same house as a leper, and leprosy is the disease with the lowest infectious virulence in the rulebook. All other diseases have 100% chance of spreading to commoners and various other characters who become exposed to the disease without having raised their Disease Resistance skill above the starting value.

      As for most of the systems that are less shit than D&D, they also seem to have less content, but I’ve been positively experimenting with FATE/FUDGE for a while now.

      I also play some Settlers of Catan, Magic: the Gathering, Go, and Bridge.

      • Randy M says:

        I don’t think that is remotely the most serious critique of D&D 3.5. =P

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          not when there’s the Peasant Powered UltraHigh-Speed Rail, no.

        • Erik says:

          Perhaps the case of the Market for Ladders is not the most serious critique of 3.5, but I find it fairly representative nonetheless.

          The Peasant Rail is akin to reading a physics problem saying to disregard friction, and reasoning your way to a perpetual motion machine. You’ve taken a domain-specific simplification and assumed that the simplified factor (instead of friction, it’s the time interval between two actions on the same initiative count) remains negligible when scaled up indefinitely.

          Second, it doesn’t even work inside the game rules, because one can only ready actions in combat, and the peasants are not in combat, so they can’t ready an action to pass the parcel to the next person in line. (If you do put them in combat, they will rapidly cease to be a rail and become a mob of peasants.)

          Third, supposing you’ve selected a DM and selectively interpreted rules to get away with it, what you’re getting away with is basically Peasant-Powered Teleport, except you’re paying through the nose. It requires over a thousand peasants per mile (5280 feet), which translates to wages of 100gp per day per mile. Unless you’re in a big city, this will run out of peasants across any significant distance, and if you are in a big city, just hire a wizard to cast regular Teleport, which has a range measured in the hundreds of miles and is cheaper than the peasants at ten.

        • suntzuanime says:

          It’s representative of a class of nitpicking from people who want 3.5 to be even more 3.5 than it is, and patch the flaws in its physics engine. It’s not representative of the much larger group of people who think that a physics engine is a friggin’ stupid thing for an RPG to try to be.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Objection: Exalted 2E, when taken as an actual physics engine, is delightfully weird.

      • lmm says:

        One of the good things about lighter systems is that it’s pretty easy to use content from another system with them.

    • Matthew says:

      Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

    • Multiheaded says:

      I used to play a fair bit of Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader, and had an absolute blast, but first our GM dropped out, then I volunteered, then it went the way of every project I start… I still can’t quite be arsed to find a new group, even though I know where to look.

      I looked at the Dark Heresy 2.0 beta and frankly I’m highly disappointed; instead of fixing the stuff that needs fixing (e.g. people without a special rule about them being cannon fodder aren’t even debilitated when you put a laspistol up against their head and pull the trigger) it introduced more complicated and nonsensical bullshit. The first version needs a lot of houseruling, but it still has a certain elegance in its balance of gamism/narrativism/simulationism and the signature d100 system.

      I also played some 3.0 with friends way back in the day.

    • Sniffnoy says:

      Many, but recently I’ve been playing a lot of Space Alert…

    • Ialdabaoth says:

      My own gamelist:

      RPGs:
      – My very own D&D4E/2E hybrid (because stock 4E drove me crazy, and 2E/3E consistently made me sad)
      – Exalted 2E, heavily modified
      – My oWoD / nWoD hybrid (oWoD for flavor, nWoD for rules)
      – Shadowrun 4E, lightly modified

      Board/Miniature games:
      – Eclipse: New Dawn for the Galaxy
      – Descent: Journeys in the Dark, heavily modified
      – Battletech
      – Warhammer 40K

      Card Games:
      – Magic
      MechBrawl (an XCG I’m currently developing / playtesting)
      – Dominion sometimes

      Party Games:
      – Ladies & Gentlemen
      – Flux

      Unfortunately, right now I don’t really have any players who want to play with me, so my whole gaming shelf is just sitting in my basement, unused.

      • Armstrong For President 2020 says:

        Have you ever looked into Adventurer Conqueror King? I feel like it keeps the old school feel of earlier editions of D&D (its core is B/X by way of Rules Cyclopedia) while still using more modern gaming innovations that most OSR types refuse to touch. It’s not quite as combat optimized as 4e but it’s still only a few short steps from Chainmail so hardly a bad combat engine.

        Not to mention it’s the only RPG I’ve ever seen with verisimilitudinous worldbuilding built into the box, even sans official setting. The guy behind it is actually scarily obsessed with classical/medieval economics and it shows.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          I’ve heard a lot of good things about ACK actually; if I ever progress my system past level 10 I’ll probably start borrowing heavily from it.

      • Matthew says:

        With Skype and Vassal, you can play with people without being physically near them.

        I sympathize, though. I have several games that I’ve never played, bought on the hope that I will someday get the chance to do so.

    • Andy says:

      Not many board or card games, but I’ve been working up one that’s an unholy bastard of Warhammer 40K, Warmaster, and D&D, where players would take the part of sorcerer-generals of small magical armies – 5-6 units at the norm, no larger than 10 including summons. At current rate, I miiiiight have something playtestable by the time of the next Open Thread. Maybe. Finding a group of playtesters is going to be a challenge when I can’t stand boardgame forums in general.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        I’ll playtest yours if you playtest mine!

        • Andy says:

          That’s too good an offer to pass up. Trade emails at the next Open Thread? I’ve put a note into my Big Ugly Notes Document that you’re interested.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        Why wait? I’m brent {dot} j {dot} dill {at} gmail {dot} com

        • Andy says:

          Because it’s not ready to be seen by anyone but me. It’s still screaming and wailing and covered in its own fluids, and I have a lot of work to do yet. Hopefully by the next Open Thread it will be suitable for company.
          And I’ve been in no shape to critically look at anyone else’s work, and won’t be for a while.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Fair enough 🙂

      • Randy M says:

        I’ve got scraps of notes on several board games I’d like to design. At the rate I’m going, in a few months I’ll have scraps of notes on many board games I’d like to design.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          heh. I’d love to collaborate with other Really Smart People on making games.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          This seems to be evolving into a “talk about games we’re designing” subthread.

          *rubs hands together*

          All according to plan.

          So, lemme talk about the games I’ve already got mostly designed:

          MechBrawl is an XCG (Expandable Card Game, like Magic except the card packs aren’t randomized) where the cards represent components of a giant robot and/or maneuvers that your giant robot can perform to blow up other giant robots. MechBrawl has been sitting at ‘99% complete’ for almost a year and a half now.

          As build-and-play games go, it’s apparently pretty fun. A single 1v1 game lasts between five and fifteen minutes, so you can try lots of different things in a one-hour game session.

          Adventurers! is sort of like Descent: Journeys in the Dark, which is sort of like super-simplified D&D. Adventurers! is unique in that there is no DM – monsters and traps are controlled entirely by randomized card decks. It’s designed for 4 players, but should work reasonably well for anywhere from 3 to 8. Adventurers! is about 80% ready for playtesting.

          Kingdom of Flowers is a game explicitly designed to teach 6 to 10 year old girls deep strategy game concepts. You play one of four magical princesses wandering the kingdom, recruiting allies to defeat the evil Queen who’s trying to enslave everyone. Different allies are strong in Courage, Wisdom or Kindness, each of which is necessary to defeat certain monsters. Kingdom of Flowers is still mostly in the design phase.

        • Randy M says:

          “Kingdom of Flowers is a game explicitly designed to teach 6 to 10 year old girls deep strategy game concepts. ”

          Oh, well, that reminds me, I did have one game complete enough to play; it was basically a dumbed down and rethemed Smash-Up my daughter illustrated that I made for her to practice arithmatic. Punch lines were such as “My ghost, fairy, and kitten manage to ‘dig a hole’!” “Well my tiger and werewolf can ‘scare a human’!”

          Yours has my interest.

  11. moridinamael says:

    Is NRx just composed of Neal Stephenson fans, or is Neal Stephenson a Reactionary propagandist? Which way does the causality go?

    • lmm says:

      Is there even a correlation? I would expect many people in the demographic that seems to support NR to be Stephenson fans.

      Follow-up thought: what is the general NR view on literature? I’d expect that demographic to not have much truck with the “all good literature is pre-1970” school of thought, but that would fit the general NR ideology well.

      • moridinamael says:

        I’m really just churlishly pointing out that every interesting idea expressed in NRx was fully explored and in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, published in 1992 and 1995 respectively, regardless of whether neoreactionaries are aware of these books or not.

        • lmm says:

          I don’t think that’s entirely fair. The corporate governments were a background and the consequences barely touched on. Yes, the basic idea is pretty simple, but as with communism, the devil is in the details.

        • Leonard says:

          Actually most neoreactionary ideas are older, some of them being ancient. (Hence the “reactionary” part.) I.e., the East India Company predated Snow Crash by almost 400 years. The only really new stuff in NRx, at least in my view, is the idea to use modern technology to secure the state.

          All you need for reaction is old books. It’s why Mencius Moldbug calls Google books the “Sith library”.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          I don’t see anything reactionary in Snow Crash. It is about anarcho-capitalism. Moldbug was ancap before he was reactionary. The big divide among neo-reactionaries is whether ancap follows from reactionary ideas or whether it’s baggage that Moldbug carried along from his libertarian days.

          The Diamond Age is reactionary. Moreover, it has an important aspect in common with Moldbug, which is that it preaches reaction to a libertarian techie audience. I think that’s enough to simply call it neo-reactionary. Both it and Murray’s Coming Apart say that the upper class should preach what it practices. Neo-reactionaries preach those points, but also complains that the upper class preaches a lot of things that it does practice, but which the lower class cannot practice.

          But the central point of Moldbug, the central point of neo-reaction is how to view the current world, especially the current America. I don’t see much of this in Stephenson. I have heard people say that some of it is there, but I think it’s a small portion (not the popular portion) and buried pretty well.

        • Nornagest says:

          I don’t see much of this in Stephenson. I have heard people say that some of it is there, but I think it’s a small portion (not the popular portion) and buried pretty well.

          In The Beginning… Was The Command Line is, like, 60% “Western popular culture is decadent and depraved”, with most of the remainder being cheerleading for an Apollonian strain of geek culture. There’s not a perfect overlap with NRx, partly for reasons that I won’t elaborate on by request of our gracious host, but it does seem to share some important memes.

          Of his published fiction (that I’ve read), Anathem probably goes into this in the most depth, with The Diamond Age in second place.

        • Anthony says:

          Neal Stephenson can’t be reactionary, because to be reactionary, you need endings.

        • Sarah says:

          I think it’s a generational thing. Moldbug is his *contemporary.*

    • Erik says:

      Neal Stephenson fan here.

  12. James James says:

    Why is gravity not an anti-entropy force? It militates against a uniform distribution of matter, i.e. it appears to counter entropy. Why doesn’t the existence of gravity imply that entropy will not always increase?

    • anon1 says:

      (a) Gravity is not a new phenomenon. We basically started out with a minimal-entropy state and maximum compression and the universe is going to expand without limit from there.

      (b) Intuitively, when matter is gravitationally compressed, potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, raising the matter’s temperature. This opens up a whole new huge set of available microstates that satisfy the current macrostate, and it turns out that that this more than compensates for the fewer available positional states.

  13. Matthew says:

    Open thread seems like as good a place as any to raise the possibility of SSC-meetups. (I realize LessWrong already has meetups, but I suspect that meetups organized here might select slightly more for niceness, and also that the people gravitating here from LW may have slightly different interests than the ones who’ve stayed active there.)

    Anyway, I’m in Northern Virginia, and interested in the possibility of socializing with other astrocodecarians.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      As flattered as I am, I feel like schisming with a much larger movement that we have no real points of contention with is, like, the worst ecclesiology.

      • I’m wondering if there would be less risk of a bad fork if it were policy that SSC meet-ups include some information about LW meet-ups.

      • lmm says:

        I think the schism has already happened. There are people who comment proudly that they have nothing to do with LW.

    • von Kalifornen says:

      Also an SSC IRC would be cool.

    • Darcey Riley says:

      I will probably have a house in the easternmost part of West Virginia beginning in September or October this year, and I was planning on inviting internet-people over for dinner/socializing occasionally. If this actually ends up happening, you are welcome to attend, although it will not be any kind of official SSC meetup.

  14. Hainish says:

    Ozy: Consider freelance copy-editing/proofreading. The schedule is pretty flexible, but you do have to meet deadlines. (You’d also need some sort of English-y degree.)

  15. Armstrong For President 2020 says:

    Sounds like a sensible policy, but I’m a bit confused on one key point;

    Can commenters be banned for responses to flames by unbannable commenters?

    From my, admittedly skewed, perspective it seems like about a third to a half of bannable NRx / Reactionary content here is five to ten posts deep in a thread which starts with an ad hominem or explicit threat. If responding to that sort of bait means banning, I predict that will act as an incentive towards threadcrapping rather than the alternative.

    • Oligopsony says:

      If NRx shitposts are mostly troll-feeding, then that would presumably kill two birds with one stone.

      (Likewise I think James would serve as a nice sample for interested liberals of what reactionaries sound like when they’re not trying to seem reasonable to outsiders – it’s when the marks inevitably respond to him that everything gets derailed.)

  16. Tenoke says:

    Out of curiosity, what is happening with the technical improvement of SSC (specifically the comment section)? I remember that you were looking for someone to help you out, and I remember that there were some responses – did anything come out of it? If yes, should we soon expect some sort of a revamp of the commenting system? I assume that there are answers to those questions in a comment somewhere, but yeah, it is hard to sift through them here.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      So far nothing. No one recommended any good plugins I could use, and the site occasionally goes down when I install a plugin which makes me unwilling to experiment too much.

      • Andy says:

        Can you set up a non-public-facing copy of the site? This was a trick that worked well when I was setting up map services – we’d have a second service, called “Test” or “Dev,” experiment on it until it looked good, then copy the code and setting exactly to the “production” (customer-facing) side. I’d offer, but the languages and processes our services used are totally different from a WordPress site.

        • Anonymous says:

          The problems seemed to have to do with performance under load, not the correctness of the code under test conditions. It is possible to simulate load, but I don’t think Scott is going to do that.

      • I just went searching for WordPress plugins that let visitors rate comments using upvotes and downvotes. I couldn’t find any to definitely recommend, but there are a few you could try.

        One possible one is UpDownUpDown. It hasn’t been updated since 2011, so it might not work, but a 2013 blog post said that it still worked at that time, so it might still be worth trying.

        I also found a few plugins that integrate comments completely with a third-party commenting system. Someone commented above that you had had problems with the Disqus plugin, which is a pity. I don’t know what those problems were, but maybe you wouldn’t have those problems with its competitor IntenseDebate. There is also a Facebook Comments plugin, but that would require all commenters to to sign in with a Facebook account, so I don’t recommend it.

        All other plugins I found had various problems:

        • the link was broken; the plugin had been removed from the WordPress plugin repository
        • the plugin only provided voting on posts, not on comments
        • the plugin integrated with a third-party site to store the ratings data, and the third-party site had only a limited free plan
  17. switchnode says:

    [delurks]

    I have an odd hypothetical question that it seems like you might be interested in and/or have some idea about.

    I have no visual imagination whatsoever (resembling Galton’s case 98). The same goes for sound, smell, etc. Even my dreams are completely asensory, and for this reason I can always distinguish them, without effort, from real life. (I had heard of lucid dreaming as a child, but the idea of having or needing tricks to distinguish dreams from reality, and the ‘dream control’ aspect, were always totally bizarre to me.)

    Suppose that I develop schizophrenia, or start taking a drug with unfortunate side effects, or become highly stressed and sleep-deprived. Am I capable of hallucinating? At all? What would it even be like if I did?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I have no real evidence for this, but I would guess you would. My basis is that schizophrenics describe their hallucinations as totally unlike auditory imagination, and in fact indistinguishable from real voices.

      (you may not be aware that for most people, being able to imagine sounds, and the “voice in your head” that thinks thoughts, sounds very different, in a hard to describe way, from real sounds)

      Also, the most interesting explanation I have heard for schizophrenic voices is an extreme bias in favor of interpreting background noise as signal, which doesn’t seem to require imagination at all.

      • nydwracu says:

        I sometimes get auditory hallucinations right before going to sleep. (My mother does too, though she’s never said whether her parents did.) They register as real sensory input — I once got out of bed to find out who was speaking Spanish right outside my window, but no one was there.

        • subforum says:

          During my own hypnagogic state, I’ll sometimes hear the voices of people I know in a way that registers as “real,” although in my case I remain aware that they’re coming from within my own head rather than elsewhere in the room. I don’t control the content of their words, and it feels as if I’m passively “hearing” them with the same faculty that perceives external sounds, as opposed to actively recalling the memory of their voices.

          I don’t know enough about the brain to make an informed guess as to what’s going on, but I suspect that it has something to do with volitional control over memory having shut down while awareness of being awake rather than dreaming remains operative.

        • Tom Womack says:

          I get those, though they’re usefully relaxing: I’ll have been lying tossing and turning, I get an auditory hallucination of a great big bell going ‘bong’ and pretty much immediately get to sleep.

      • rsaarelm says:

        I’d describe the difference in imagining visuals or sounds as re-experiencing recognizing a sensation (a visual sensation as a face, an auditory sensation as a tune) without re-experiencing the actual sensation.

      • Anonymous says:

        >you may not be aware that for most people, being able to imagine sounds, and the “voice in your head” that thinks thoughts, sounds very different, in a hard to describe way, from real sounds

        Hmm…well, they seem all the same to me (imagination, dreams, and real senses) except in vividness, and the fact that I know that imagined ones are imagined in the same way I know when I’m moving my own hand vs. when other people move my hand.

    • Oligopsony says:

      What’s an asensory dream like?

      • AspiringRationalist says:

        I have them occasionally, but not commonly. Other people’s experience with them may differ.
        For me, I have the mental experience of being in a particular situation and I mentally process the situation, but I just don’t have any sensory data. When I have asensory dreams, I don’t notice the lack of sensory data; it seems normal.
        The experience is not that different from reading fiction and imagining what it would be like to be in the story, just not imaging what things look like.

        • Both halves of what you said back a notion I’ve got– that part of what’s going on in dreams is what I call tags. If you were reading a wonderful book in a dream but don’t remember any of it when you wake up, you may have activated the “wonderful book” tag– you didn’t read any of it (or what you read wasn’t special) in the dream.

    • Anonymous says:

      You’d probably still have disconnected thought processes, imagine situations that didn’t happen (false memories), and delusions concerning what was occurring around you?

  18. michael vassar says:

    I’m curious as to what the major downsides of camming are.
    Uber/Lyft driver sounds to me like the new flexible job that would work well for most people.

  19. >I realize this is unfair, in that it’s not neoreactionaries’ fault that everyone else refuses to go to places where they are allowed to talk. Luckily, their whole ideology is that rulers have the right to optimize their territories for maximum productivity without regard for fairness to individuals, so I am sure they won’t object.

    Yep. Nothing like public mass executions of heretics to keep a polis sane and productive.

    Thanks for placing me in the “not harmful” branch of NRx. I’m surprised; my comments here are not exactly what I’d consider my best work.

  20. caryatis says:

    I suggest Ozy consider legal transcription. Good job for someone with a big vocabulary who can type fast (ideally a bit of a perfectionist). You can work from home with flexible hours. Downside is that it can be dull and you need to be able to meet deadlines. An established company would likely pay more than someone on Odesk.

    • AJD says:

      I suggest Ozy consider legal transcription.

      Probably a better idea than illegal transcription, at least.

  21. JME says:

    You probably have a big backlog of post ideas already, but for what it’s worth, I’d like to see a good analysis of the case for public support of the fine arts. It’s not a matter of great budgetary importance compared to, say, the military, but I’d be interested in seeing an analysis from someone more capable of understanding prima facie incomprehensible viewpoints than myself.

    Background: I have people in my family who are classical symphonic musicians, generally left-leaning. Some of them and their friends seem to regard public support for the fine arts as so self-evidently right that only a philistine or right-wing reactionary could oppose it.

    I remember a conversation about this that went something like this (arguments are not necessarily in order; trying not to strawman or steelman, but my memories are imperfect; also, there were two people, who basically agreed with each other but may have made subtly different arguments (one a family member, one not) whom I’ve merged under “art support advocate”):

    Art Support Advocate: Every great civilization has supported the arts. Whether we abandon great art or continue to ensure its survival is a defining aspect of whether we are civilized people or not.

    Me: I don’t know how true that is, but just because others have done something historically doesn’t strike me as a high recommendation, except as a conservative argument. Why can’t things like symphonies be supported privately?

    ASA: Not everything should be left to the free market, and some things have value beyond dollars and cents. Symphonies never really cover their own costs. Private support isn’t a real alternative: the real alternative is letting music die.

    Me: I didn’t mean to say that everything should be based on the free market; just that a specific case is needed for public support unless you have a socialist/command economy where everything is a state enterprise by default. In general, I don’t think the fact that something has high costs compared to revenues is good case for public subsidy. I suppose I could see the case for preserving classical symphonic music if it were really on the verge of extinction as an art form, at least to retain knowledge of it in a symphony or two or three, but surely you don’t mean music as a whole? I mean, hip-hop and country music generally aren’t publicly funded, and can do well privately, nor do you advocate publicly funding them.

    ASA: Well, pop music is a general sign of how uneducated and undiscerning the masses are. Its listeners are poor ignorant low-class people.

    Me: I’m lost as to why the tastes of the upper class are worthy of special subsidy.

    ASA: It’s not about subsidizing the tastes of the upper class. It’s that classical symphonic music ans the fine arts have intrinsic value.

    Me: Well… if classical music had some properties that made it objectively superior to other forms of music, maybe that could be a case? Like, I seem to have some vague recollection of a study where rats listening to Mozart learned faster than rats in silence, and rats in silence learned faster than rats listening to Iron Maiden?

    ASA: I don’t know about studies like that; it sounds dubious to me. That’s not what I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about intrinsic value.

    Me: I also suppose that with certain publicly available art forms, like public broadcasts or murals in public places, you could make the case that the art is a kind of public good, with no real way of charging for the service — that doesn’t apply to concerts in symphony halls, though, which are conventional rival and excludable goods.

    ASA: Public support is needed for concerts in symphony halls too.

    I’d be interested in seeing your thoughts — ideally, presenting the positive case for public support of the fine arts more sympathetically than I have without straying too far from actual advocates’ views.

    • lmm says:

      Arguments I might make:

      If you give someone $15 tonight, they go to a bar. But if you ask them to choose something worth $15 to receive in three months’ time, they pick symphony tickets. What we want isn’t always aligned with what we enjoy, but it’s also not always aligned with itself. Markets are bad at satisfying certain kinds of preferences.

      Some people value being part of a tradition. This preference is at a historical low, which makes it at least plausible that it might be higher in the future. But if we stop maintaining these traditions today, there is no way for future people to make them into traditions again.

      • Desertopa says:

        I can certainly believe that given the opportunity to receive something worth $15 in three months, the same people who would often spend that same money on bar attendance would choose to spend it on something else, but I find the assertion that they would or do choose to receive symphony tickets surprising. Do you have a source for that?

        • lmm says:

          I can’t find the result I saw on LW (am abroad on phone). Even assuming I’m remembering it correctly, what I said was a rhetorical exaggeration – but there was a result that people choose a more highbrow art when choosing for themselves in 3 months than when choosing for themselves now.

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          I think what Desertopa is saying is that as stated, this argument is heavily privileging the hypothesis. For the case to support subsidies to highbrow art, you would need evidence that people choosing what to do in three months frequently choose highbrow art from among all possibilities. Choosing highbrow art in a binary decision between lowbrow art and highbrow art, or between highbrow art and the bar, isn’t enough.

      • JME says:

        Hmm… I find the “tradition-preference might increase in the future, so we should preserve traditions now even if we don’t see their value appropriately now” argument very interesting. It seems somewhat like an argument for ecological conservation, but applied to culture. Thanks.

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          Though a possible counterargument is that people can also enjoy reviving traditions. I think it’s fair to say that the modern elite would much rather partake in a decades-defunct tradition than a continuing one. If tomorrow’s masses are like today’s elite, the nicest thing to do for them would be to kill off every tradition we can.

      • Nornagest says:

        But if we stop maintaining these traditions today, there is no way for future people to make them into traditions again.

        “Make some shit up” seems to be a popular option, even when there are legitimate traditions around to adopt.

    • caryatis says:

      There’s a –gasp– social justice argument for support of the arts. If there were no public funding, I don’t think symphonies would disappear, but they would almost certainly get more expensive. No more free museums or discounted tickets to the theatre, maybe no public libraries. Some low-income people who want “high” culture would have no access to it.

      Of course, one could argue those people don’t really exist outside the ranks of broke students.

      • lmm says:

        You still need to explain why it’s more important to have access to high culture than to, say, flashy sports cars.

      • blacktrance says:

        Why is this a case for supporting the arts, rather than for taking that money and giving it to poor people in cash? If their first choice for spending that money is on art, then it’s equivalent to a subsidy, and if they’d rather spend it on something else, then the subsidy would’ve been wasteful.

      • caryatis says:

        Agreed. The only argument I can think of there is that people need high culture, regardless of whether they think they need it. But since I don’t buy this I’m probably not the best person to argue for it.

      • 30 seconds-of-thought counterpoint is that democratizing art access lowers the quality that the market will accept and thus lowers the quality of the art. (Assuming quality of art one appreciates is correlated with wealth)

    • Andy says:

      Another argument is that symphonic musicians might not be terribly good at working in the private sector, and thus should be supported as a sort of WPA-ish jobs program. I can even see a NRx argument for this, a la the Moldbug point (sourced secondhand from the Anti-Reactionary FAQ) that Royal California could pave its roads in brick rather than asphalt, thus supplying meaningful jobs to many who would not otherwise be employed. This also provides a net gain, since those bricklayers (or musicians) go on to buy food and clothes, and thus employ many more people and keep the whole system running.
      Though I’d like to see symphonies employ other means of funding, including broadcasting symphonies on the Internet Pay-per-view or even into movie theaterss, or Kickstarter/Indiegogo, before drawing on the public coffers. But yes, I support public funding for the arts, including symphonies.

      • von Kalifornen says:

        Also useful in the modern world where all art can be copied (photographs of physical works, ubiquitous recorded music and video, etc) and it’s nigh-impossible to charge money for recordings.

    • Anthony says:

      This is something which Scott could profitably farm out to an actual reactionary (or neo-reactionary). The idea that the government should support good art is actually a pretty easy case to make for a non-libertarian rightist.

      Of course, a reactionary republic would have standards regarding the art it supported. The symphony musicians would probably do fine, so long as the music director stayed away from that weird atonal shit. Unless the director of the National Endowment for the Arts had really sophisticated taste, they could probably even play Copland and Stravisnky on the government dime.

  22. Andy says:

    A topic for the more Reactionary crowd: I’ve been interested by the state-as-corporation model, but I’d like to see it explained in a relatively concise fashion. Any sources?
    And I have a science-fiction/space opera concept brewing, but I’m running into some problems when writing a constitution. The primary nation is intended to be a blending of Progressive and Reactionary ideas – for example, there’s a monarch with very strong power, but the right to recall and depose the monarch is written into the Constitution. There’s a semi-feudal nobility with a local monopoly on violence (the local baron always has the biggest guns around, unless Royal forces intervene) but there’s a procedure to let peasants petition to recall their local noble, and the Royal Guard, which is dominated by commoners, ensures a fair election. It’s an unholy mess, but I have so far that the system evolved out of a massive slave revolt against a corporate state, followed by a period of anarchic civil war, ended by the first king beating down or co-opting all the other warlords. But I’m having trouble figuring out a good way to bring for-profit corporations into the governance structure without letting them have too much power. I’ve been playing around with the idea of a tricameral legislature – hereditary nobles, elected commoners, and corporate delegates – but I’ve been stuck on what powers should go to the corporate delegates, who would be the weakest of the three. The Nobles have the power of the purse, writing regulations, and ratifying treaties, the Commons have the power to confirm or deny Royal appointees like judges and semi-executive positions like the Chancellor… which doesn’t leave a lot for the Chamber of Commerce types to do. Any ideas?

    As a palliative to all this constitutional blather, I give you a verse and chorus from the anthem of the Star Kingdom of Arcturus. The tune is the same as “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

    They march upon the mountains, and they march across the plains
    To where the wicked oppressor is secure in their domains
    They’re loosing all the shackles, and they’re breaking all the chains,
    Justice is marching on.

    Glory, glory, Justice marches!
    Glory, glory, we will be free,
    Glory, glory, hear the footfalls!
    Justice is marching on.

    • Erik says:

      Best source I know of is Moldbug, but he’s not concise. Let me try summing up the state-as-corporation model first, and I can comment on your political setup later.

      There are two kinds of property: sovereign or primary property, and secondary property. Sovereign property is that which Bob holds, owns, controls, etc. because Bob has a big stick and will hit people who dispute his property. Secondary property is that which Bob holds, owns, controls, etc. because someone other than Bob has a big stick and will hit people who dispute Bob’s property. This “someone other” is often called things like police or government, and often also has the power to seize Bob’s property. Often they promise not to use this power, and being able to make this promise credible is a good way of keeping Bob happy.

      When a government nibbles at the edge of this promise, it may be called “eminent domain”; when a corporation does similarly, it’s usually with a clause along the lines of “Terms of Service may be subject to change without notice”.

      Most of what necessarily separates a government from a corporation is that a corporation holds secondary property. That corporations are usually organized for profit is an incidental, not a necessary, difference, and governments would in many cases be better off organizing for profit in a corporate manner. A private property restaurant organized for the profit of its owner, for instance, will generally make good food, because it has to sell good food in order to get customers in order to get money, as it can’t just beat customers up and take their money. (In theory. Semi-efficient market hypothesis, etc.)

      But, doesn’t sovereign property mean that a state can in fact beat its customers – its citizens – up and take their money? Well, yes, but that’s not actually profitable in the long run. In the Fnargl thought experiment, we suppose that the gold-hungry immortal Fnargl arrives on Earth a millennium ago to set up the Thousand-Year Fnarg enforced at the point of his alien death ray. If Fnargl simply enslaves everyone and orders them to start digging for gold on penalty of being zapped with the death ray, he’s going to also want farmers to keep the slaves fed, cheerleaders to keep slave morale up, doctors so the slaves keep reproducing and don’t die young… in the end, it’s probably less disruptive and more enriching if Fnargl just takes over the world, leaves the system mostly as is, imposes a tax payable in gold, and tries to speed up the advancement of civilization a bit so people can get around to inventing motorized excavators and the like. As a side effect, Fnargl will have a strong incentive to keep down crime, accidents, etc. because these reduce the amount of gold he’ll get in the long run.

      Governance by a corporate person allows for rulership by a fnargl-like semi-immortal who will have the right sort of very long planning horizon, (this is the part where state-as-corporation starts to get very optimistic, IMO) and also aligns people’s incentives. Right now the bureaucrat who writes a stupid law is practically impossible to fire (per Foseti) and will never see consequences of the stupid law; the elected representatives can blame “the bureaucracy” or “my voters” and dodge consequences quite well too since their pay isn’t tied to national tax income or anything else that the stupid laws might affect. Under corporate governance, stupid acts would result in financial penalties for the corporation, showing up directly in the internal corporate accounting as a sign to stop doing that. Thus, if we convert various countries and/or split them into city-states to be owned and run as corporations, they’ll probably do better.

      • JME says:

        In the view of reactionaries, what went wrong with the Congo Free State (or, to a less graphic extent, the British East India Company) that made their endeavors in for-profit government so infelicitous to their inhabitants?

        Alternatively, are there good models of for-profit government that got it right in reactionaries’ views?

        • Erik says:

          In the view of reactionaries, what went wrong with the Congo Free State (or, to a less graphic extent, the British East India Company) that made their endeavors in for-profit government so infelicitous to their inhabitants?

          Before the main answer, I wish to state my agreement with the underlying assumption that the Congo Free State went wrong. This is something [neo]reactionaries should account for, not try to wave away.

          The very cynical part of a reply: Insufficiently secure property rights, market illiquidity, lack of enforcement ability, and an utterly retarded incentive structure mangled through layers of bureaucracy. Going by parts –
          The Scramble for Africa and colonial disputes meant that Congo wasn’t a secure possession, but something of a quasi-commons which Belgium happened to be sitting on, so it was best to extract maximum resources now before someone else did.
          When Belgium started going into debt, it wasn’t able to borrow against the future income from the CSF, partly for the above reason, and partly because there wasn’t enough of a rubber market and cash flow available to monetize the future income stream properly. This meant that Belgium was pressed to cover the debt by extracting even more resources now at the cost of the long term.
          King Leopold was sitting a thousand miles away from the Congo and a hundred years away from our live video feeds and omnipresent cellphone cameras; if he got a lie from one of his colonial administrators, checking it was a convoluted process where he had to hire a detective squad and send them across half the world to investigate. Following it up was similarly hard for reasons of dealing with large swaths of recently-colonized land in a hostile environment (and that’s not a slur on the natives; I’m talking about the heat and malaria and so forth).
          Low-level soldiers on the spot were supposed to be there to keep the peace; what they got watching them was a bean-counter checking how many bullets they’d spent and rebels they’d killed; their means of counting got mangled into how many hands of alleged rebels they handed in with spent cartridges. The resulting incentive was paying soldiers to go out and shoot people and bring back a basket of severed hands. I’m fairly confident that this does not actually maximize profits for the government, so it should go in the “fuckup” category and not the “nasty things profit-maximizing governments would do to people” category.

          Speaking of fuckups, I will move on to the more combative part of a reply: What went wrong? Not much, really. Since we’re comparing the worst, what went wrong with Soviet Russia, Cambodia, Nigeria, North Korea, Nazi Germany, Turkish Armenia, Rwanda, Sudan, and a dozen other non-profit government places? Shit happens, and Belgian Congo is an outlier compared to, say, British Egypt. The Congo wasn’t even the site of a malevolent deliberate genocide, but an atrocious bungle during colonial uplift.

        • Erik says:

          JME wrote:

          Alternatively, are there good models of for-profit government that got it right in reactionaries’ views?

          Radish suggests Belgian Congo, a generation later.

          TIME Magazine wrote:

          In little more than a generation of intense economic effort, the Belgians have injected 20 centuries of Western mechanical progress into a Stone Age wilderness. The results are staggering: in forests, where 50 years ago there were no roads because the wheel was unknown, no schools because there was no alphabet, no peace because there was neither the will nor the means to enforce it, the sons of cannibals now mine the raw materials of the Atomic Age.

          Congo was briefly functioning at the level of a European country in various respects. Today, it has to a great extent collapsed. There are many terrible statistics on things like the civil wars and rape squads and low life expectancy and low literacy so forth, but one that stood out to me as marking a deeper regression than a mere outburst of violence is that the amount of paved road remaining in Congo is steadily falling and is now less than the diameter of Congo.

          edit: dangit, I’ve tried blockquote cite=JME and blockquote cite=”Time Magazine”, why is neither showing up? Added vulgar attributions.

        • Deiseach says:

          That’s a lovely notion: poor King Leopold miles and miles away in Belgium completely unaware of what the nasty low-level functionaries on the spot were doing.

          Unfortunately, it’s a load of tosh.

          Leopold ran the Belgian Congo as a personal possession (not as King of the Belgians but as his own personal money-making enterprise) since 1885. Complaints from various quarters, including missionaries on the spot, had been making their way back to Europe for quite some time.

          In 1903, the British Consul Sir Roger Casement visited the Belgian Congo and wrote what came to be known as the Casement Report. He’s a major minor figure in Irish history, if I may put it that way, so his name is still known in Ireland at least, which is how I know about it.

          This finally forced the Belgians to do something other than ignore the problem. However, there is a work from 1909 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, regarding how “improved” conditions were after this, titled The Crime of the Congo. You may be interested (or not) in the frontispiece of photographs of some of the persons with their hands chopped off – but then again, this is but the price to pay for “colonial uplift”, is it not?

          “Atrocious bungle” is, I fancy, a rather euphemistic way of putting it. I am steamingly angry that you or anyone can think to brush it off as “Ah, but it was so far away and long ago, how was anyone to know?”

          It was at the tail-end of the 19th century, the century of explosion of science, technology and progress. Africa as a continent was chock-full of European explorers (for instance, Stanley of ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’ fame had reported on the Congo and the potential for trade and development there, part of which was precisely that the natives were accustomed to trading and economically ambitious, that drew the interest of the Belgians).

          Missionaries amongst others were thick on the ground. Reports, letters, articles in the newspapers, photographs even were all flooding back to Europe about conditions. But huge profits from exploiting and mistreating the natives were also flooding back.

          Turning a blind eye to what was happening to savages as long as the money was coming in and Belgium was holding her own as a colonial power amongst the other European powers was not, therefore, that unusual a response. They had no excuse for not knowing what was going one; even in 1904 after the outcry caused by Casement’s report, they set up their own independent commission of enquiry which upheld the findings.

          (On an unrelated note, I am grimly amused by how often I find that I, who regard myself as a socially and religiously conservative centre-rightist in politics, am a flaming liberal and even leftist by American standards. If the above posts are a sample of neo-reactionism or whatever the damn thing is called, I am most definitely not a neo-reactionary).

        • Erik says:

          Deiseach: I didn’t say Leopold was “completely unaware”, I said verification was difficult (Leopold did eventually set down a commission which returned a negative verdict) and I wasn’t brushing anything off. “Atrocious bungle” isn’t euphemistic, in my opinion – would you rather I swear more? – euphemism would be something like “unfortunate accident”, and I agreed with JME that something went wrong with the Congo Free State, so I’d rather you didn’t paint me as some sort of whitewasher.

          I don’t contend that the Belgian exploitation of the Congo was some kind of acceptable price to pay for progress. I do contend that the Belgian exploitation of the Congo is an exceptional case which fails to demonstrate that for-profit governments are all-destroying forces, and that if for-profit government has blood on its hands, its alternative and competitor is arguably knee-deep in the stuff.

      • Troy says:

        in the end, it’s probably less disruptive and more enriching if Fnargl just takes over the world, leaves the system mostly as is, imposes a tax payable in gold, and tries to speed up the advancement of civilization a bit so people can get around to inventing motorized excavators and the like. As a side effect, Fnargl will have a strong incentive to keep down crime, accidents, etc. because these reduce the amount of gold he’ll get in the long run.

        Even if we assume that the incentives are as you suggest, some people are irrational, and will think that they can turn a profit through mistreatment of their citizens. True, such people will be punished by the market. And in many ordinary harmful business transactions (e.g., irrational discrimination in hiring) the positive effects of regulation are not worth the cost, and so I can understand leaving it to the market to punish people for those. But in the case of whole countries the potential for harm is on the scale of the Congo Free State, and I’m not okay with leaving it up to the market to punish rulers whose policies kill 10 million people.

        • Andy says:

          A second problem with the Fnargl parable: Fnargls don’t stay in place. One of the plot lines have a general idea for, the crescendo to the concept, was the necessary overthrow of a new King who refuses to enforce the law in favor of “natural hierarchies” put in his head by an adviser with Evola-ish philosophies – Tradition oriented toward a Platonic ideal outside time and space rather than “the facts on the ground,” led by his sister, who regrets the necessity of fighting her brother but goes forward anyway because if she seizes leadership of the rebellion, she can keep it from spiralling into a new age of chaos. It will be a great deal of fun to write.

        • Arguably, history punishes sufficiently bad governments, but it’s awfully slow.

      • Ken Arromdee says:

        There seems to be this persistent idea that if something is inefficient, the market will get rid of it.

        In fact, what happens is that a state beats its people (or does other inefficient things). Because of his inefficiency, it doesn’t last as long as a more efficient state. But by the time it dies, another state has arisen that didn’t learn the lesson and beats its people too.

        You end up with a steady state where states pop into and out of existence all along, the ones that beat their people pop out faster, but there’s always a consistent percentage of them and this percentage depends on how likely they are to begin as well as how long they last once they’ve begun.

        This is also true for, for instance, inefficient companies.

        The equivalent works for natural selection because reducing the number of inefficient organisms gets inherited and the next generation starts out with a lower percentage of inefficient organisms. It doesn’t work when the inefficient things are created from scratch in each generation.

    • Erik says:

      I’ve been stuck on what powers should go to the corporate delegates, who would be the weakest of the three.

      You might be interested in borrowing ideas from Nick Land, who wrote a bit about a trichotomy (and speculative post-collapse trichotomy-ocracy government) of ethno-nationalists, theo-traditionalists and techno-commercialists. The techno-commercialists would be fairly close to corporate delegates.

      You could start by splitting up “power of the purse”. I see at least three components it could usefully be reduced to: power to set/veto taxes, power to collect taxes, power to spend money. Extra possibility: all taxes (and tariffs, use fees, etc) are temporary by constitutional mandate, up for renewal or dismissal every N years. Possibly there’s a hard upper bound on N to avoid “forever minus one day” cheats – or maybe there isn’t, just custom and a social contract. Either way, the Foobar tax is up for renewal, the Plutocrats threaten to veto any proposed Foobar tax over a small percent, the Nobles counter with a threat to cut security spending and sit behind their private armies, the Plutocrats say that under the present circumstances they’ll accept one year of high Foobar taxes as a temporary measure, the Nobles demand at least a five-year planning horizon… is this giving you ideas yet?

      You could go with the historical standby that the particularly rich end up buying noble titles from incompetent noble families/heirs, so over time there’s a slow meritocratic-plutocratic drift from the Chamber of Commerce into the House of Lords or whatever.

      As a passive power, the corporate delegates (how are these selected? Income, market share, capitalization, brand recognition?) might be entitled to immunity from all new taxes during their term of service. This would prevent short-term money grabs. It would also tend to shift lawmaking towards the end of terms, so you’d want the terms of corporate delegates to be staggered, perhaps even semi-randomized. Though if given enough say in a particular new law, or various other compromises, they may opt to selectively waive this immunity, perhaps even because they want to demonstrate that they are supportive loyal citizens.

      • Andy says:

        (this is the part where state-as-corporation starts to get very optimistic, IMO)

        Very optimistic, I agree. And in the background of this, I do know this state was founded when peon-level workers of the Orion Company, a state-as-corporation fond of breeding and genetically engineering its workers, decided “enough!” and rose up in bloody revolt. So as a result, corporations are regarded as a kind of necessary evil, the way many Americans feel about government. I do know corporations are forbidden from owning lethal weapons, under pain of treason and royal seizure and redistribution of assets. Corporations also can’t own land, and so have to lease or rent it from the nobles who do. Thus, the local nobles are the ones who are employing force in the case of something like a nasty labor dispute. Since nobles are also the ones setting and enforcing local labor and safety regulations on their lands, they have the ability to get corporations to not abuse their workers, or to get workers to calm down and go back to work. To use the terms you referenced above, corporations have secondary property, nobles have semi-sovereign property, and the Monarch has very sovereign property, a very big stick, and the willingness to use it on any noble or corporation that gets uppity. As my main character starts off as a minor noble, holding a mineral-rich frontier area, these issues get explored a fair bit.
        For the corporate delegates, I was thinking the Chamber of Commerce has a limit of 50 shares that can be bought and sold, but only by corporations headquartered in the Kingdom. Corporations owning shares are ineligible for any government contracts or tax breaks. The corporation then selects a delegate or delegation to represent it in the Chamber, though there’s some variety there – at least one corporation, I think, will assign one of its shares to a person elected in terms by all of its workers, who may or may not agree with the rest of its delegates. But for the majority of corporate delegates, it’s determined that they are voting by the will of the corporation’s power structure.
        And I had a perception of the flow from the Chamber of Commerce to the House of Nobles (with King Hank I’s original revolutionaries being quite mixed in gender makeup, many offices in government have gender-neutral titles, this is the closest I will intentionally get to race and gender in this thread, sorry Scott) working both ways: not only do corporate executives occasionally get ennobled for charity work or something (though military service is the more common route), noble scions who aren’t in line for a fief might go into the private sector after publicly forswearing any inheritance of land or title, and making sure their company isn’t doing major business in the lands of their relatives. FE if John Huerta, second son of Duke Huerta, gets a job offer from StrexCorp, he can get a public contract swearing that StrexCorp will publicly obey exactly the same laws, and agrees to cooperate with random unannounced audits by the Royal Chancellery, to ensure that StrexCorp isn’t getting special favors from his family for as long as he works for them.
        Splitting the power of the purse is interesting. I’m also pondering the idea of nobles being confirmed for their fiefs after being nominated by the Monarch. And this can be streamlined – if the Baroness of Glass Dome is fairly sure she wants her oldest son to succeed her, she can get that ratified before she dies or abdicates in order to have a smooth transition when that time comes.
        Because I’m mostly an action author, rather than political intrigue I’ll be looking for ways that can go wrong violently and with explosions that can be fought with giant walking robots. Partly because why not robots, partly because I have A Grudge against Battletech authors. Definitely going to have a struggle over the throne at some point, hopefully much better-written than the FedCom Civil War.
        The point about the great distance from King Leopold to the Congo caught my eye, especially because I’d already pinpointed the Royal Guard, the elite commoners-only arm of the military, as a potential failure point in the system whereby nobles could be recalled and replaced by a majority of their subjects. If an incompetent or corrupt local Royal Guard commander, at a distance from the Monarch doesn’t bother to report that a petition has been made, or suppresses it, thinking that the commoners will get over their issues without needing to involve the Monarch, the populace might just boil over into full-out rebellion, thinking that the Monarch is ignoring their needs and desires in violation of the social contract. That’ll be a good hard mess for the Royal forces to sort out, combining counterinsurgency with systems theory to sort out the problems. And lots of explosions in between the yelling-at-each-other.

        • Erik says:

          Because I’m mostly an action author, rather than political intrigue I’ll be looking for ways that can go wrong violently and with explosions that can be fought with giant walking robots.

          Well then!

          Corporation gets abusive. Local noble A withdraws military protection from corporation. Violent commoners begin looting corporation and outlets. Corporation hires mercenary company from some other noble B to fend off commoners. (Speculative aside: what’s the status of mercenaries and “hired violence” and the like?) Nobles begin clashing too, A asserting that B is trampling on his fief, B asserting that A isn’t doing his job.

          King decides to experiment with setting up Special Economic Zone locally relaxing some of the restrictions on corporations. Corporations in zone start arming themselves. Nobles opine that this is verging on treason, then clash with the Royal Guard in attempt to shut down the zone and end this bullshit.

          Variant: Nobles opine that this is verging on treason, minutely examine the relaxed regulations of the zone, find loophole they can drive tanks through. Nobles call up their tanks and go to town on the corporations in that zone. Royal Guard mostly responsible for containing the violence.

  23. Multiheaded says:

    @Nancy: that’s mostly true of MM (although he’s often inconsistent and hypocritical). For 90% of NRx, that’s the motte, but the bailey is an utterly imaginary 18th century Europe with an ideology of total dominance for the set of people sufficiently like white tech dudes. For example, NyanSandwich is a really edgy and thoughtless bigot who imagines that trans people are there to be controlled and suppressed first, graciously allowed some scraps from heteronormativity’s table second.

    • Leo says:

      Could you please link to some of Nyan Sandwich’s writing about trans people? Not sure if looking to challenge my beliefs or feeling masochistic.

      • Yeah, seconding this. Where have I taken that position? I suppose I have a position that could be misconstrued as such if you really disliked me, but I wonder what my most “edgy and unthinking” public writing on the subject is.

      • I guess it was probably you who asked the latest question on my tumblr, but in case it was not, I’ve answered it with my official psoition.

        • Drake. says:

          since i don’t have a tumblr and am confused: what did you mean when you said

          I think the same “pretend to be normal” thing should be done in gender, with (less of but still some of) the same unofficial time and space for deviation.

          ?
          one interpretation (“people should act like their identified gender without making reference to the fact that they’re trans except when relevant”) seems fairly defensible, but another (“people should all conform to their sex so other people don’t have to bother thinking about it”) seems pretty, well, edgy and thoughtless.

          EDIT: aaaand apparently you posted it below. goddamn.

    • I think you’re being a bit over the top with your characterization of me. In reality I have trans friends, am civil to trans people, always use people’s desired pronouns unless I’m deliberately being an asshole or am instructed otherwise by the owner of a space, and have nonevil politics towards trans people (see below).

      That said, the factual content of your accusation is at least roughly correct. I do think degenerates (eg trans people) ought to be “suppressed” in favor of heteronormativity:

      To steer off the explicit gender angle, analogize to professionalism in the office. It is a fact that most or all people are not mentally conformant to the professional rational agent model that we use in business culture in that we have anxiety, irrational fears, feelings, laziness, etc. But to make things work smoothly, we “suppress” all that stuff and pretend to be professional, and nearly everyone is capable of making a convincing go at it. It works a lot better when everyone does so pretend than the alternative where it’s total chaos because everyone is a unique snowflake and it’s everyone else’s responsibility to tiptoe around frailties rather than everyone’s own responsibility to route around their own nonconformities. And then of course outside the professional environment, we have time and space for deviating from that model in private with friends, so that we are not fatigued by constantly pretending.

      I think the same “pretend to be normal” thing should be done in gender, with (less of but still some of) the same unofficial time and space for deviation.

      Leo, you can take this as my official hopefully not-too-hurtful position, without having to expose yourself to any previous unthinking bigotry.

      Scott, if this is too close to “no gender in the open thread”, please delete the whole thread.

      • Vulture says:

        Although your argument sounds not unreasonable, I don’t think the word “degenerate” is doing you any favors here.

      • Andy says:

        Scott, if this is too close to “no gender in the open thread”, please delete the whole thread.

        Seconded. Multi, in future it would probably behoove you to have an example of someone’s specific beliefs, perhaps linked with a content warning, as I’ve done in the past when dredging up specific examples of Jim’s.

        Although your argument sounds not unreasonable, I don’t think the word “degenerate” is doing you any favors here.

        Also seconded. Perhaps the word “non-conforming person” will sound nicer, and less like you want to inflict violence on trans people for being trans.

      • Multiheaded says:

        am civil to trans people, always use people’s desired pronouns unless I’m deliberately being an asshole or am instructed otherwise by the owner of a space

        have nonevil politics towards trans people

        Hahahahaha… Pistols at dawn! :slap:

        Someone make us a google group or another space where we could hang out, and then I’ll really lay down the hurt on this bullshit, and the liberals who tolerate such intolerance (arguing from my understanding of social dynamics, psychology and, like, a decade of personal experience). Andy, Nancy, vK and lmm are especially invited, as are any and all queer folks.

        I apologize to Scott again, that’ll be the last of this stuff ITT.

        • Zathille says:

          Notice how he replied civilly and without insulting or calling out anyone. You may disagree with his views, but could you try and do so without such hostility?

        • LRS says:

          I’ve registered #nyanmultithunderdome on irc.darklordpotter.net for this purpose. If nobody shows up and says anything for a week or so, I’ll probably abandon it.

        • Multiheaded says:

          @LRS: thanks! I’ll see if I can drop by today or tomorrow at about 18 UTC, if that’s all right with Nyan and others.

          without insulting

          This, and the underlying liberal assumptions, is part of what I would like to challenge.

        • a seal says:

          @Multiheaded

          (I would welcome a transcript / copy of your position, in case you end up writing it, now or at any later point (and on virtually any topic you feel like writing about). Link here / to my mail / wherever you want is fine.)

          /fanboi

        • a seal says:

          (….which is nyarlathocat at gmail dot com, because it doesn’t show up, apparently.)

        • Multiheaded says:

          :blushes:

          Ok, I’ll mail some thoughts to you.

        • Well, excuse me for being a liberal, but when the owner of a NRx space explicitly says “we refer to person X as “he” here”, and the policy makes sense given the demographics of the space, I’m not going to raise a fuss. I guess you don’t even have to try very hard to be considered evil these days, you just have to be insufficiently left-militant. #jimwasrightagain

          And I reserve the right to say arbitrarily hurtful things when I have deliberate intent to harm, as I reserve the right to bear arbitrarily powerful weapons.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          I also request a transcript.

        • I’m interested in a transcript. Would it make sense to post a link to the transcript in this thread?

        • Multiheaded says:

          I’m on IRC, but feeling tremendously uninspired. I’ll see what I can come up with.

        • lmm says:

          I’m travelling for the rest of the week and my phone doesn’t really IRC, but the invitation is appreciated and I’d love to see the transcript.

        • Multiheaded says:

          Ok, here are the relevant bits of a log from today, + some irrelevant ones. I don’t want to open the mail, so I’ll just put this up! (So far it has been me ranting at Erik and Nydwracu, with Nyan absent. Highlight: me remembering a recommendation for Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, linking and quoting from it.)

          http://pastebin.com/PmqP5r0N

        • nydwracu says:

          and here are the really important bits http://pastebin.com/5rNwpLcq

        • lmm says:

          Looks like pastebin is banned in Turkey. I’ll catch up when I get home.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        The third paragraph here is the kind of NRx writing that I wouldn’t mind seeing arbitrary amounts of here–it’s like you’re writing to persuade rather than to shock. The position is, in itself, potentially upsetting, but your presentation doesn’t make it more so. Kudos.

    • von Kalifornen says:

      My own view is that queer identities should be identified and integrated into heteronormativity. (The Laws of Queer Galantry is not a joke!)

  24. Andy says:

    Not if anti-Reaction posts like the FAQ link to some of the lunacies of Reaction like some of Jim’s wilder moments. Also, there are the records of past comment positions such as “scientific progress stopped in 1972” or “fire departments no longer rescue people” or other Reactionary lunacies that we anti-Reactionaries can pull out if y’all start looking too smart.
    I think Reactionary positions have some sanity to them, and can even be fitted into a broader Progressive framework. Prepare to be assimilated.

    • Something big happened in 1973 that looks a lot like a decline or halt in technical ability.

      Also, Jim is saner than he appears.

      • Andy says:

        Do you have a citation to this outside the NRx fermentation tank? Because I am surrounded by counterevidence – my desktop, my phone, my Kindle, the laptop I am typing this on, as well as the 4-day Geographic Information Systems conference I just got back from (4 days for us ordinary users – the advanced stuff for the hosts’ VIPs and partner networks continue on the weekends before and after the main events), which was saturated with new technical ways of displaying information, and included a number of very interesting ways to process data that were not around in 1973. The counterexamples I remember from that comment thread were the Concorde and the SR-71 Blackbird, as well as the lack of new supertall buildings, all of which had counterarguments based on the idea that these things weren’t as efficient as they needed to be to justify the additional performance. IE, despite being technically more sophisticated, the Concorde was generally a poor investment – not enough people willing to pay extra fly on it to recoup its costs. And modern planes outstrip older planes in terms of fuel efficiency and navigational accuracy, so forgive me if I say that this seems like a line of argument fabricated in order to make the modern world look worse than it is, and make NRx sound less loony.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        my desktop, my phone, my Kindle, the laptop I am typing this on, as well as the 4-day Geographic Information Systems

        Note that these are all computer technologies. There have not been similar developments in transportation, medicine, space travel, energy, or civil engineering.

      • Andy says:

        Note that these are all computer technologies. There have not been similar developments in transportation, medicine, space travel, energy, or civil engineering.

        Yes, there have, even if there haven’t been the kind of quantum leaps (or low-hanging fruit, possibly) that we’ve seen in the computer field lately. Let’s go sector by sector.
        Transportation – in addition to my above point about planes being more efficient, modern cars are safe and much more efficient than they used to be. Also, self-driving cars are pretty damn cool, and while they were probably being worked on in 1973, we’re pretty close to having them to market. Container ships are also more fuel efficient than they used to be.
        Medicine – forgive me for laughing out loud at this point. Cancer survival rates, alone, would blow this claim out of the water, but also stem cell research, the entire field of HIV/AIDS research, and I have no idea how many new medicines and devices.
        Space Travel – Here I’ll concede the sole exception, but I’d argue that since space travel is generally seen as a high-risk, low-immediate-reward field, people and companies have little inclination to invest in it. It may need to wait for technologies in other fields to advance sufficiently for space travel to be attractive enough to invest serious technological resources in.
        Energy – I’m just going to link Wikipedia’s Timeline of Solar Cells which includes a number of advancements made after 1973, including thin-film solar cells, the dye-sensitized solar cell, and solar converters of 20 and 30% efficiency. And something I found with a 30-second Google search.
        Civil engineering – here we go a little more obscure, and less easy to Google, but I’d argue that the GIS stuff I’ve just spent most of the week drooling over represents a serious advance in being able to plan and model cities and infrastructure. However, that’s mostly been better computers and awareness in the field (getting engineering departments to give up their precious stacks of paper for a nice efficient computer system is harder than it looks, and even harder to get a city council to pay for it)
        Actual improvements are slower to roll out in civil engineering both because governments in the US have been fairly cash-strapped, and advances have to have a very high profit ration in order to overcome the sunk costs of our previous infrastructure. So advances are slow to replace current infrastructure. But I’ve found several advances in concrete composition that don’t get widely noticed, such as Tiocem, a concrete that has air-purifying properties, developed in the 90’s. It also sorta cleans itself.

      • Erik says:

        I am surrounded by counterevidence – my desktop, my phone, my Kindle, the laptop I am typing this on, as well as the 4-day Geographic Information Systems conference I just got back from (4 days for us ordinary users – the advanced stuff for the hosts’ VIPs and partner networks continue on the weekends before and after the main events), which was saturated with new technical ways of displaying information, and included a number of very interesting ways to process data that were not around in 1973.

        This is a little vague on which specific ways of processing data you are discussing, but I’m going to guess that a lot of them had already shown up in 1968, when Engelbart gave the Mother Of All Demos, showing off [precursors to] hyperlinks, document search, multimedia files with interactable graphics, collaborative editing, screen sharing, version control systems, videoconferencing, and a hell of a lot else.

        I won’t come on so strong as to say technological advance stopped, but somewhere around 1970-1973 there does seem to have been a shift to refinement of existing things.

      • von Kalifornen says:

        Jim is amazingly bad at seeing things from other people’s points of view, in any case. Not only is he bad at it plus belligerent, but he also doesn’t even have the common progressive Fake Open-Mindedness (having a rote list of Other Points Of View To See.)

        A lot has happened since 1972. But there does seem to have been a huge collapse in *power* as opposed to *control*. Jetpacks have become a joke, and nuclear power is fading away with no serious attempts to use it in space applications. OTOH, high-powered computing is unlocking whole new ways to use and manipulate energy. SpaceX has not yet succeeded in doing anything fundamentally new. The most interesting new power technology is lithium batteries. But control will only take us so far (unless you believe in the Singularity.)

      • Andy says:

        I won’t come on so strong as to say technological advance stopped, but somewhere around 1970-1973 there does seem to have been a shift to refinement of existing things.

        I agree with this point, but I think it’s more of a natural part of scientific progress – we have periods where there’s a lot very rapid quantum shifts, and then there’s periods where we figure out how to do a few new things with the new tools brought by the quantum shifts. Rapid advancement and consolidating ground, if you will.
        But in my view, this differs wholly in spirit and detail from the line of “science stopped in 1973!” and neoreactionaries should stop using that line if they don’t want to be mocked out of existence.
        It feels a bit like “science stopped!” is the bailey, and “there haven’t been massive, rapid advancements, we’re figuring out how to do new things with older tools,” is the motte. Too bad, because I really want to tear down that motte, nuke the bailey, and sow the whole thing with salt.
        Something is still an advancement even if it doesn’t make your socks roll up and down, even if it’s not something we were promised in the Jetsons, even if it’s an incremental advance building on top of others. You do not get to redefine Science because it helps to make your point, and those who attempt to do so should be mocked for very bad argumentation.
        “There are two kinds of scientific progress: the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries. Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn, nonetheless, for the latter.”
        Source

      • Erik says:

        I’m fairly sure this isn’t motte-and-bailey, it’s internal dissent. Nydwracu disagrees with Jim, citing public-key cryptography and the Oculus Rift if I remember correctly. Nick B Steves argues that science is at least advancing far more slowly than various extrapolations would suggest, as there are more humans, more tools and more wealth around than a hundred years ago, so the recent lack of cubically more inventions suggests some limiting factor, and most of the candidates for limiting factors are very worrying. Nick Land is still happily optimistic about bitcoin, which he expects to set off some kind of transhuman machine economy with self-enforcing code-contracts. Various pessimists suggest that we’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit (or all the medium-hanging fruit, or all the fruit available without a ladder…)

        I’m tentatively working out a position, but I continue to boggle at Engelbart’s demo. “Yer a wizard, Douglas!” The man was showing off computing systems that I feel are comparable to core elements of Word, PowerPoint, Skype, Google Docs, Google Maps, Github among others 45 years ago, and most of the improvement since then feels like it’s been more detailed maps, bigger screens to show the more detailed maps on, and extra bandwidth to send the more detailed maps with.

        One thing that makes me tentative is that it’s very hard for me to say what “should” or “would” have been invented in a counterfactual history of faster scientific advance, or I’d be inventing it myself. One thing I think is a good development is high-level programming languages and high-level programming tools which are starting to become so powerful and abstract that they step away from feeling like a language. RPG Maker Vx Ace is a very powerful tool for a certain kind of game design, and I’d love to see its equivalent for program design.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Medicine – forgive me for laughing out loud at this point

        The question is not whether I’ll forgive you, but whether I’ll have to forgive myself for ignoring this warning sign.

        Cancer survival rates, alone, would blow this claim out of the water

        Cancer survival rates are a lie (flash graph w/o: 1 2), 95% due to early diagnosis, completely unrelated to cures.

        • Slow Learner says:

          And how have early diagnosis rates improved? By the advance of science: knowing what to look for, better tests &c.
          So even if it’s all diagnosis, no treatment, the very fact that survival has improved tells you something is being done better.

          Equally, look into combat medicine; the amount of shit that would have killed people even ten years ago that now lands them in Headley Court for some hardcore rehabilitation is astounding.

      • Andy says:

        Cancer survival rates are a lie (graph), 95% due to early diagnosis, completely unrelated to cures.

        Okay, I stand corrected, that was a bad example. But it doesn’t wipe out the advances in early diagnosis, especially the genetic screening bits.
        And it really doesn’t wipe out all the other advances made since the early 70’s – the artificial heart, mass-produced insulin, better DNA sequencing, the ongoing mapping of the human genome, the entire field of HIV/AIDS research I mentioned earlier, joint transplants, stem-cell research, and I don’t know how many new compounds and proteins and bits of the human body we’re still discovering. I still think medicine has more than enough advances on its own to debunk the Reactionary claim of a decline in technical ability, unless you want to move the goalposts to “we haven’t had SUPER QUANTUM LEAPS therefore the modern world is corrupt!”

      • Douglas Knight says:

        Actually, it does wipe out the “advances” in early diagnosis of cancer. The vast majority of things labeled cancer are completely benign and shouldn’t be treated. Early diagnosis is early false positives. Mammograms are bad for you.

        If you mean BRCA, yes, it’s useful to know that you have a completely broken BRCA, but Myriad will also tell you that you have a 10% higher chance of breast cancer, which is worthless information, if it’s even true. Completely broken BRCAs only apply to 1 in 10,000 women. Genetics has advanced, but the only practical consequence is insulin.

        Also, it should worry you that your first recourse is not only an example of lack of medical progress, but an example where medicine fabricates progress.

  25. Vulture says:

    I know that a vote-sorting system is infeasible here, but does anyone know of a WordPress plugin which would allow a “like” button or equivalent? Especially for comments along the lines of “I don’t know about anyone else, but my experience in this area has been…”, I think it would be nice to be able to see a rough agreement measure

    • lmm says:

      +1

      It doesn’t even need to do anything, but I’d like to have a button I can press when I would otherwise feel like making a dumb +1 post.

  26. Would it be possible to have the reply-to-comment feature in email notifications go to the comment in its context rather than to the top of the comments?

  27. Lavendar bubble tea says:

    I recently found out that a site is selling a reasonably priced (compared to other models for this…) home sensory deprivation tank. So for about the price of a pool or sauna (or possibly even less) you can have your very own sensory deprivation tank. I’ve wanted to try using one of these tanks for a while but haven’t been able to receive access to one. So I’m excited for the possibility of it becoming more widespread. I’m sharing it here because I think that we should all go on a new age retreat, have drum circles and work out all collective differences between leftists, liberals, neo reactionaries and conservatives in the most stereotypical and saccharine way possible. some mind hackers/meditation fans might really like it/I suspect SSC has a lot of readers in the core demographic of sensory tank owners.

  28. Erik says:

    This neoreactionary approves of your plan to swing the banhammer some more. I’d like to see a bit more detailed reasons in the future, though, such as a note of which specific gates were failed.

    • Andy says:

      This anti-neoreactionary seconds the notion of a public declaration of which gates were failed.

    • Anon says:

      I feel like it’s important for personal blogs to retain the ability to ban people for being detrimental without taking the time and effort to list specific reasons which could then be rule-lawyered. For personal blogs, comments policies are norms, not laws.

      • Andy says:

        Yes, but for those of us who A) like to argue vociferously, and B) have some social anxiety toward the possibility of defying rules or Ruining The Walled Garden, having very clear notices like “DID NOT CITE SOURCES” or “USED THE NONCENTRAL FALLACY TOO MUCH” or “INSULTED RAPE SURVIVORS” attached to severed heads helps us learn Not To Do That.

      • Erik says:

        I quite agree that Scott retains and should continue to retain the ability, right, power, and so forth to arbitrarily ban people from his blog, including banning them for rules-lawyering. I’ve been a DM myself and I have a form of floating errata for one of the most common categories of stupid rule interpretations: no getting infinite anything. (Which itself is not entirely literal. “No getting unbounded exponential-or-greater anything in linear time” would be more accurate.)

        But there are pitfalls beckoning on either side of the road: the jobsworth and the man of lawlessness.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      I’d like to see absolutely no claims about why people are banned, beyond which particular comments triggered it. It would be terrible if Scott confabulated reasons.

      • lmm says:

        Isn’t that a fully general counterargument? I agree that Scott should reserve the right to ban people for any reason or none, but any guidance Scott is willing to give would be beneficial, I think.

  29. Is selecting the best something like steelmanning?

  30. bad at pseudonyms sorry says:

    I’m not a neoreactionary, but when you ban me, send me an email. I promise to be less incoherently frustrated with you over private communications. (but still frustrated, of course.)

    • Randy M says:

      I sense that this is a good/devious strategy because Scott seems likely to both be turned off by the trivial inconvenience and unable to turn down the polite reply.

  31. Mostly I’m impressed that I managed to make the list of Good Neoreactionaries (or at least Acceptable Neoreactionaries), since I’m fairly new here and don’t actually comment that often, and I wasn’t sure that anyone was paying attention. But maybe “not commenting that often” is part of the trick.

    Anyway, I came here after the anti-reax faq, but I stayed for the articles about the therapeutic effects of fish oil, and I’m not even joking about this. So keep up the good work, Scott.

    • Multiheaded says:

      You seem a nice enough person and I like you. I have a problem with Nyan being on the list, though, due to… a personal grudge (coughtranscough).

      • Vulture says:

        [tumblr-in-action-style joke about “transcoughs” goes here]

        Not to dig up what is apparently the source of a personal grudge, but I have to say that I wouldn’t have expected neoreaction to take much of a position on transgenderism in general. It seems like an issue that would just fall under “keep healthcare at modern levels”, at least to me.

        • My guess is that neoreactionaries want everything held stable, including gender roles. The one big change is for them (or people they agree with) to be in charge, and then stasis forever.

          If neoreaction took hold in a society where trans people were accepted as normal, neoreactionaries might well be neutral about trans people (especially if trans people were slotted into a hierarchy), but we aren’t in that society.

        • Erik says:

          Doesn’t this subject fall foul of the “no gender on the open thread” rule?

          Emailing my digressions on the topic to Nancy.

        • lmm says:

          Could you set up a Google Group or something (it’s not many clicks, though trivial inconveniences and all that)? I’m interested to see what you said.

        • Oligopsony says:

          I suspect the position of any given individual is going to come down to temperament, but the recommendation of the principles would seem to extend to tolerance towards degenerates of whatever stripe as long as they don’t get too uppity and political about it, while also upholding the right of the paterfamilias to throw children out in the streets (appropriately extending this up whatever meta-levels of uncontested governance.)

      • >I have a problem with Nyan being on the list, though, due to… a personal grudge

        Wat? Please explain, good sir.

    • Lavendar bubble tea says:

      The fish oil articles are really cool. The more recent one on how fish oil was accepted as something insurance could cover was actually one of the few article I’ve shared with people unlikely to find this site. I tend not to comment as much on those articles since I feel like other people have it covered/have better things to say, but a lot of times I’m tempted to just to write “Awesome article” in the comment section.

      I still don’t really know much about about a lot of the regular commentators so I’m also impressed that you were able to make that list. (Not sure if I agree with it because I don’t really know many people on here)

  32. Nestor says:

    Is banning someone from an open comment system a solved problem nowadays? Because back when I used to run a few wp sites there was no clear mechanism to do this. Ip banning someone on a dynamic ip… complicated.

    I got banned from 4chan recently (A proud achievement) and it took about 30 seconds to circumvent by resetting the router.

  33. Kiboh says:

    There was a thread on 4chan about possibilities for working at home; I saved one of the more useful posts. I’ll summarise it here:

    .There is a thing called ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ which pays around twice minimum wage and lets people work from home. Basically, employees look at search engine results (ideally, search engine results related to topics they have qualifications for) and work out how useful the results are. LeapForce, ButerHill and Lionbridge are companies which do this.

    .Talk2Rep and CallSource are hiring customer service representatives. Pay is only ~$9/hr and it presumably involves talking to people (some of whom will be unpleasant) over the phone, so probably not the best option, but still worth mentioning.

    .A company called Uber is hiring ’email support techs’. Only requirement is a college degree and ‘experience using Zendesk’. Since you can download a free trial of Zendesk online, and since it’s insanely simple to understand, you can take a few hours out of your day and have all the ‘experience using Zendesk’ you’ll ever need. Or you can just blatantly lie to the recruiters and watch a Zendesk tutorial on Youtube: it basically amounts to the same thing.

    .Data entry jobs exist.

    • Ragnhild says:

      There is a thing called ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ which pays around twice minimum wage and lets people work from home. Basically, employees look at search engine results (ideally, search engine results related to topics they have qualifications for) and work out how useful the results are.

      What? SEO is rewriting a website so that it ranks higher in search results, usually by adding words to the ‘head’ part of the HTML files.

      When somebody says “There is a thing …” in 4chan they are usually lying, and intend to laugh at anyone that takes them seriously. Unless you already know enough about something to tell lies from truth you can’t learn about it from 4chan.

      • Leonhart says:

        I have worked in SEO for about a decade. (Thankfully, I now do other things as well.) Your description kinda ceased to be accurate long before I entered the industry 🙂

        You are, however, more correct than 4chan here.
        What Kiboh is describing sounds more like search engine quality assurance – that is, something the search engines themselves would do to assess the quality of their output. That’s no doubt still a thing, and it’s indeed about the optimisation of search engines, but it’s not SEO, which means “the industry outside of search engines that tries, implicitly or explicitly, to reverse-engineer them”.

      • Kiboh says:

        That’s actually my fault, not 4chan’s. The post itself didn’t include any details on what SEO meant, so I decided to be a good samaritan and do some research on my own. Unfortunately, it turns out that speed-reading the (highly biased and euphemistic) website of exactly one SEO company doesn’t produce the most reliable results. (who knew?)

  34. Ben says:

    I’m amazed that when you spoke of ‘culling’ the neoreactionaries, they didn’t all start talking about gulags and crocodiles. Or did you just delete those comments?

    • Erik says:

      I think it’s a combination of honesty and objectivity on Scott’s part at work here. This neoreactionary is happy about Scott being open about who he’s banning from his site and why. Compare Theden: The SFWA is Full of Crocodiles. The SFWA didn’t just cull Vox Day, it lied about the reason for culling him, lied about culling him, and tried to prevent Vox correcting their lies on his own site to boot. Jibes about how badwrong Vox is replaced arguments why Vox is wrong. As one might expect if one were familiar with the Principle of Explosion, this stack of falsehood and incoherence laid the ground for the Janus-faced second act of some people trumpeting the SFWA’s diversity and inclusivity while other people trumpeted the SFWA’s progressivism and shat over everyone in the general political vicinity of Vox Day. (Also, those matters which shall not be mentioned on the open thread.)

      “Gulags and crocodiles” are terms, is my impression, to be deployed when the powers that be are behaving in underhanded (not necessarily violent) and totalitarian (not necessarily authoritarian) ways. They’re not general complaints about [micro]rulers that one dislikes.

      Now, if Scott were to start featuring particularly retarded neoreactionary comments in posts dedicated entirely to smearing and jeering, painted these as representative, misquoted neoreactionaries and deleted their original remarks, and tried to get moderators elsewhere to deny neoreactionaries a platform also on unrelated matters, then I’d call him a crocodile.

      • von Kalifornen says:

        What are these things you are talking about? Who did what?

        • Erik says:

          What are these things you are talking about? Who did what?

          I’m not sure if you’re merely being humorous about gulags, lies and censorship here. If you’re not, please clarify what it is you want to know more about, and how much you want me to recap things already covered by Theden et al.

        • Matthew says:

          Non-tendentious backgrounder via various links here:

          see the views section.

          ETA: someone with wikipedia editing privileges should trash the bs “personal life” trolling section.

        • Anonymous says:

          Matthew, why were you banned from editing wikipedia?

        • Matthew says:

          I’m not banned, but I’m not registered either, and don’t really feel like doing so. It gives me a message that unregistered editors make their IP address publicly visible, and I am… disinclined to get myself into the middle of this poo-flinging contest.

        • Anonymous says:

          Oh, good! We can have a fight about the definition of “privileges,” always topical.

      • von Kalifornen says:

        No, I’m just confused by your grammar.

  35. nydwracu says:

    Now that Roko’s Basilisk has hit Slate, someone should write a general theory of basilisks so I don’t have to.

    (They’re not really basilisks; they’re cockatrices. A true basilisk would operate by inducing perception of oneself as low-status, leading to suicide. Things like Roko’s, I suspect, operate by inducing paralyzing fear, though I can’t say if that’s really what’s going on without an insider account written by someone capable of accurately describing their mental states: what does it feel like from the inside to get Roko’s-Basilisked?)

    • Multiheaded says:

      A true basilisk would operate by inducing perception of oneself as low-status, leading to suicide. Things like Roko’s, I suspect, operate by inducing paralyzing fear

      No to both. What you’re describing is memetic hazards; a “true” basilisk would be an actual infohazard, meaning that it’s objectively dangerous to people who understand its logic, regardless of any emotional state it might or might not induce. This is speculated to be possible through weird acausal considerations.

      • Leonhart says:

        Here’s an example that doesn’t involve acausality.

        Consider a universe ruled by a God modelled loosely on the God of Christianity. Salient properties of this God: it demands belief; it demands that the belief be purely out of faith. If you were argued into your belief, then into the lake of fire you go!

        Suppose that this universe also contains a valid and correct argument for the existence of God. You read it and understand it, you’re fucked. Basilisk.

        • Anonymous says:

          A less fantastical example: you know a secret that a powerful unscrupulous person would rather not be let out.

      • nydwracu says:

        “Objectively” requires metaphysical calls.

        Roko’s Basilisk is objectively dangerous if you believe the objective claims about it. So is hell. Abstracting away from that would make the concept a lot easier to use.

    • MugaSofer says:

      Now that Roko’s Basilisk has hit Slate

      … ah, crud. Of course it has.

      When did this happen?

    • A basilisk is an idea with the potential causal properties of, via it’s understanding by individuals, actualizing a disproportionate disadvantage for late adoption.

      At least that’s how I’ve been using the idea.

  36. Anonymous says:

    I’d really appreciate an expansion of this section.

    > 5.1.1: The conventional wisdom among libertarians is completely different. I’ve heard of a study saying that people in the lower class are more likely to end up in the upper class than stay in the lower class, even over a period as short as ten years!

    > First of all, note that this is insane. Since the total must add up to 100%, this would mean that starting off poor actually makes you more likely to end up rich than someone who didn’t start off poor. If this were true, we should all send our children to school in the ghetto to maximize their life chances. This should be a red flag.

    Or not. People could die. In particular if the rich die more because the rich/poor divide is just a “younger people are poor, then the grow up and get rich, then they die” divide, this would make sense. (I don’t believe that this is the case, but I think it’s a common enough belief lately that you should address this in the section.)

    • Nornagest says:

      First of all, note that this is insane. Since the total must add up to 100%, this would mean that starting off poor actually makes you more likely to end up rich than someone who didn’t start off poor.

      The most likely option here seems to be that class is being defined in some nonstandard way, like for example in terms of debt burden. I have no idea what the actual population economics look like, but if everyone with a ton of debt either claws their way out or (more likely) declares bankruptcy inside ten years, then we could get the specified behavior as long as there’s a large enough supply of people falling into serious debt from the upper classes (which seems plausible). Conversely, people can limp along on moderate-but-not-extreme debt for quite some time.

  37. rsaarelm says:

    Adding a “read more” cut after the first few paragraphs of the very long slatestarcodex articles would make the front page much nicer to view. Now you need to scroll over the entire recent very long post to get over to the slightly less recent post.

    • Anon says:

      C-f “Posted on”

    • blacktrance says:

      I think it would make the front page less useful, because when you’d want to catch up on posts, you’d have to open more windows instead of reading it just there. It’d be a minor inconvenience, but still an inconvenience.

      • von Kalifornen says:

        IDK. Many people’s strategy these days is to Open All The Windows.

      • lmm says:

        I don’t find the front page useful except as a list of posts. If I’m going to read a post then I want to read the comments. Trying to find an old post that I want to check for replies to my comments (because there’s no good way to be notified of such) can be frustrating.

        • Randy M says:

          The best thing about Less Wrong is the highlighting of posts new since the last visit to the thread.

        • lmm says:

          I’d say the best thing is notifications when people reply to your comments, but yeah that’s also a good thing.

    • Anonymous says:

      Try using the feed instead of the main page.

    • anon says:

      Seconded.

  38. suntzuanime says:

    Well-kept gardens die when you pour herbicide on them. This seems like a bad move for the quality of the comments section; perhaps you are more interested in preserving your respectability among “decent folk”, though.

    • Anon says:

      Don’t know why you think the analogy is relevant. I have a strong belief that this is a major positive for the quality of the comments section, so… I guess our posts cancel out, neither offering any particular reason to side with us.

      • Drake. says:

        he was refering to the lw post “well-kept gardens die by pacifism”, wherein eliezer advocates for strict moderation because bad posting drives off good members (you might already be aware of this, your comment doesn’t really indicate one way or the other). i th