Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Dak]

Nick Land is reading Echopraxia by Peter Watts. He's already made a couple "quote posts" over at OI. It's caused quite a little stir in the comments over Watts's politics. But when it comes to science, I imagine that a lot of Watts's ideas complement Land's.

I rarely read the comments over there anymore (or anywhere really). I did see the Watts posts, maybe I'll go back by.

 

[Einherjar86]

I usually don't either, but I made a point to since I follow Watts's blog and know his political opinions. So I figured there would be some discussion of that. And there was, but it was fairly minimal - mostly just people commenting on how Watts writes really good SF but his politics are shit, others expressing surprise that he's a liberal, etc.

Honestly, I believe that Watts's recent post on police shootings has less to do with race and more to do with his deep-seated distrust of the police in general. Obviously he made race a factor in that piece, but Watts has been the victim of police brutality, so he knows it isn't directed only against blacks. That may also provide a bit of biographical info as to his whole "shooting back" scenario. I think a part of him actually just wants to see bad shit happen to cops.

In that light, it was probably one of his more emotional posts (and I think he may have mentioned that). He's also been outspoken in the past about the dangers of state control and bureaucracies, so I don't think he holds any control apparatuses in very high regard.

 

[Dak]

I usually don't either, but I made a point to since I follow Watts's blog and know his political opinions. So I figured there would be some discussion of that. And there was, but it was fairly minimal - mostly just people commenting on how Watts writes really good SF but his politics are shit, others expressing surprise that he's a liberal, etc.

Maybe I won't go read it, pretty much what I'd expect .

Honestly, I believe that Watts's recent post on police shootings has less to do with race and more to do with his deep-seated distrust of the police in general. Obviously he made race a factor in that piece, but Watts has been the victim of police brutality, so he knows it isn't directed only against blacks. That may also provide a bit of biographical info as to his whole "shooting back" scenario. I think a part of him actually just wants to see bad shit happen to cops.

I think I at least mentioned thinking this too in the other thread. Of course it was C&BP, not true "cops".

In that light, it was probably one of his more emotional posts (and I think he may have mentioned that). He's also been outspoken in the past about the dangers of state control and bureaucracies, so I don't think he holds any control apparatuses in very high regard.

Well I'm not a fan of bureaucracy, and I think most of it is make-work. But "law and order" is good, and requires some degree of enforcement - which requires enforcers. We can have Andy Griffith, or we can have ISIS, or the Mafia, or SWAT TEAMs, or what we have now, but there will be a public demand for order, and someone is going to supply it.

 

[Einherjar86]

Well I'm not a fan of bureaucracy, and I think most of it is make-work. But "law and order" is good, and requires some degree of enforcement - which requires enforcers. We can have Andy Griffith, or we can have ISIS, or the Mafia, or SWAT TEAMs, or what we have now, but there will be a public demand for order, and someone is going to supply it.

I agree completely.

Here's a really interesting post from R. Scott Bakker. A difficult one for people like me, but I've been following his "semantic apocalypse" theory for a while now. It's disturbing, but compelling.

https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016...n-how-the-academic-left-created-donald-trump/

More and more research is converging upon the notion that the origins of human cooperation lie in human enmity. Think Band of Brothers only in an evolutionary context. In the endless ‘wars before civilization’ one might expect those groups possessing members willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of their fellows would prevail in territorial conflicts against groups possessing members inclined to break and run. Morality has been cut from the hip of murder.

This thesis is supported by the radical differences in our ability to ‘think critically’ when interacting with ingroup confederates as opposed to outgroup competitors. We are all but incapable of listening, and therefore responding rationally, to those we perceive as threats. This is largely why I think literature, minimally understood as fiction that challenges assumptions, is all but dead. Ask yourself: Why is it so easy to predict that so very few Trump supporters have read Underworld? Because literary fiction caters to the likeminded, and now, thanks to the precision of the relationship between buyer and seller, it is only read by the likeminded.

But of course, whenever you make these kinds of arguments to academic liberals you are promptly identified as an outgroup competitor, and you are assumed to have some ideological or psychological defect preventing genuine critical self-appraisal. For all their rhetoric regarding ‘critical thinking,’ academic liberals are every bit as thin-skinned as Trump supporters. They too feel put upon, besieged. I gave up making this case because I realized that academic liberals would only be able to hear it coming from the lips of one of their own, and even then, only after something significant enough happened to rattle their faith in their flattering institutional assumptions. They know that institutions are self-regarding, they admit they are inevitably tarred by the same brush, but they think knowing this somehow makes them ‘self-critical’ and so less prone to ingroup dysrationalia. Like every other human on the planet, they agree with themselves in ways that flatter themselves. And they direct their communication accordingly.

 

[Dak]

The latter part is no new criticism of any entrenched group (and probably accurate in almost if not every instance.)

The opening paragraph and a half though is something that seems painfully obvious now to me, after the last 3-4 years of reading and observation (painful in that I was ignorant of it before).

 

[SentinelSlain]

Is it wrong and sexist for men to be sexually attracted to women's femininity?

 

[CiG]

Probably.

 

[Dak]

https://mises.org/blog/we-need-more-borders-and-more-states

Mises.org blog says Patchwork.

 

[Dak]

http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/07/12/sucker-summer-every-stephen-douglas-current-year/

That is to say, history will either forget or vociferously mock people like Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal,who look to Donald Trump and lament, “It would be terrible to think the left was right about the right all these years,” then go back to writing books about how America should have a more robust foreign policy so as to be the world’s policeman.

If Hillary Clinton wins, in one hundred years, no one is going to say, “If only the Republicans of 2016 had just made a much bigger deal about invading Iran, then America’s descent into egalitarian managerial bureaucracy would have been abated.”

No southern nationalist wishes the Democratic ticket hadn’t been split in 1860. Hell, no one in the GOP even regrets nominating Barry Goldwater. Furthermore, the Clinton administration won’t need allies in George Will and Lindsey Graham, any more than the anti-war left of the George W. Bush years needed allies in Justin Raimondo and Pat Buchanan. If Donald Trump wins, every Stephen Douglas is out of luck. They’ll either have to trade their “principles” for power or become men without a party.

Perhaps they could all go and work for “moderate” think tanks and live off direct-mail donations. Stephen Douglas did not have such a nice safety net as an option. When the war broke out he became a staunch supporter of the his former rival Abraham Lincoln; but he died of typhoid a few weeks into the war. John Bell, that other moderate of the Constitutional Union Party, joined the Confederate cause, survived the war, and died shortly thereafter in relative obscurity. His old friends never quite forgave his treason, and the Confederates had organic heroes to idolize. This is America after all, “to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”

Finally, no one remembers the election of 1860 as the year the Democratic Party lost its mind and nominated a crazy secessionist racist in John C. Breckinridge, devoid of the “principles” of the Democratic party’s earlier candidates. History sees the Breckinridge candidacy as the last electoral hurrah of a particular people (southerners) before they had to up the ante in a desperate last attempt to survive. Middle Americans are the same with Donald Trump. It is their last electoral hurrah, not an inexplicable deviation from an abstract set of principles. Should Trump lose, Middle Americans will likely feel (and perhaps be) as defeated a people as were the southerners. But there is dignity in loss in way that there simply isn’t any dignity in being a Quisling, and even less in being a Stephen Douglas.

So as the current year marches on, whether the multicultural globalists win or the working-class ethno-nationalists win, each and every Stephen Douglas out there is undeniably the sucker of the summer. In the city streets of our country, this summer might well be another 1968, but in the suites of Washington, D.C., that are the homes of Conservatism Inc., this summer is 1860.

 

[Dak]

http://www.unz.com/freed/ready-new-rossiters-universal-robots-toward-a-most-minimal-wage/

I've been grappling with this personally for some time. I really don't think the UBI is going to "work", but I don't think a lack of it is going to work either, at some point in the future. There are other alternatives, but they would require such a radical and painful change across classes, races, space, and any other category, that they simply will not be pursued until the weight of modernity collapses on itself At best a UBI/robotic world manages to eventually trundle along in a foul dystopian mess, possibly punctuated by tiny islands of "psuedo Victorians".

 

[Dak]

https://www.wunderground.com/news/c...ive-los-angeles-sewage-spill?__prclt=kEjPGhXf

More and more incidents like this are headed our way in the next 40 years unless serious attention is paid to infrastructure.

 

[Elric of Melniboné]

They're massively upgrading the sewage infrastructure where I live so I guess that's good news.

 

[Einherjar86]

https://www.wunderground.com/news/c...ive-los-angeles-sewage-spill?__prclt=kEjPGhXf

More and more incidents like this are headed our way in the next 40 years unless serious attention is paid to infrastructure.

Fucking poor management. This is one area where I mostly agree with you.

Boston has had a hell of a time the past year and a half, ever since the snowstorm two winters ago. The public transit system nearly shit the bed entirely due to a serious mismanagement of funds.

 

[Dak]

http://www.roadsbridges.com/former-nc-governor-guilty-raiding-highway-fund

North Carolina has more and more road issues because of the highway fund being repeatedly raided to make up for spending problems elsewhere.

https://www.wired.com/2016/07/cash-strapped-towns-un-paving-roads-cant-afford-fix/

I expect more and more of this. This is what decline looks like.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

http://www.unz.com/freed/ready-new-rossiters-universal-robots-toward-a-most-minimal-wage/

I've been grappling with this personally for some time. I really don't think the UBI is going to "work", but I don't think a lack of it is going to work either, at some point in the future. There are other alternatives, but they would require such a radical and painful change across classes, races, space, and any other category, that they simply will not be pursued until the weight of modernity collapses on itself At best a UBI/robotic world manages to eventually trundle along in a foul dystopian mess, possibly punctuated by tiny islands of "psuedo Victorians".

I don't see the need for such pessimism. There are plenty of useful, difficult-to-automate, and currently-underpaid jobs that can be subsidized with the profits of automation: education, government, social work, mental health, elderly care, beauty/spa services, etc.

I agree that paying people to do nothing is a bad idea. I'd like to see gaps closed in our current social safety net, but I don't think we should dramatically expand it.

 

[Dak]

I don't see the need for such pessimism. There are plenty of useful, difficult-to-automate, and currently-underpaid jobs that can be subsidized with the profits of automation: education, government, social work, mental health, elderly care, beauty/spa services, etc.

Right this minute yes. I think you're underestimating the speed of progression.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

I think you're overestimating the capabilities of artificial intelligence and/or underestimating political barriers to new technology.

There's value to human touch, intuition, and face-to-face communication that can't be replicated by computers, unless we're speculating on the viability of human-machine hybrids, which raises immense political, social and ethical challenges.

A great example of how much government can slow down a perfectly good technology is autonomous vehicles, which could probably make road transportation much safer and efficient right away if government lifted all the barriers it currently has in place. So far, only a small number of those vehicles are street legal -- only in California and Nevada, to my knowledge, and often in very limited situations, like highway driving. What's more, governments are requiring years of monitoring before they allow expanded usage.

 

[Dak]

I think you're overestimating the capabilities of artificial intelligence and/or underestimating political barriers to new technology.

There's value to human touch, intuition, and face-to-face communication that can't be replicated by computers, unless we're speculating on the viability of human-machine hybrids, which raises immense political, social and ethical challenges.

A great example of how much government can slow down a perfectly good technology is autonomous vehicles, which could probably make road transportation much safer and efficient right away if government lifted all the barriers it currently has in place. So far, only a small number of those vehicles are street legal -- only in California and Nevada, to my knowledge, and often in very limited situations, like highway driving. What's more, governments are requiring years of monitoring before they allow expanded usage.

We aren't talking about "AI". We are talking about algorithms and robotics.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

Then I'm not seeing the connection you were drawing between algorithms/robotics and the job markets I listed. If your main point is that the pace of progress could be so disruptive that society won't be able to adjust in time to avoid a crisis, sure that's possible. You were also suggesting, though, that the ratio of jobs to people will decline over the long term, and there I think society's ability to create new job markets or expand existing ones could be better than you expect.

 

[Dak]

Then I'm not seeing the connection you were drawing between algorithms/robotics and the job markets I listed. If your main point is that the pace of progress could be so disruptive that society won't be able to adjust in time to avoid a crisis, sure that's possible. You were also suggesting, though, that the ratio of jobs to people will decline over the long term, and there I think society's ability to create new job markets or expand existing ones could be better than you expect.

Well that's the historical precedent, but nothing replaced horses - until it did. The ratio of jobs that are doable/economical by those <+1SD on the IQ bell curve compared to those who fall into that bracket are in grave danger within the next two decades - the change is already underway. Further along - those in +1SD< will be in danger. You aren't safe, and neither am I in the long run - and it doesn't depend on an AI breakthrough.