Rules for Rulers initial comments

[Elliot Temple]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

1) transcript!

when you have a lot of attention (millions of views!) for an educational lecture video, provide a transcript. it's absolutely unreasonable and unserious for them not to offer a human-edited, high-quality transcript.

i totally sympathize with the lack of transcripts for small time stuff, made by unpaid people with no money. transcripts take time/effort or money, especially for the human editing required to make them polished. but there's no excuse for this video to lack a transcript.

if you have lots of money or audience, and you're seriously trying to communicate ideas and help educate people, provide a transcript.


2) Che! :(((((((((

the description opens with a link to buy a che guavara shirt.

so i'm just going to refuse to watch the video unless/until Max/anyone explains it's actually anti-che and it's some kind of joke, i guess? "Greyvara" just appears to be a combination of the dude's name ("Grey") with Che's name.

otherwise, no, i'm out, i have better things to do than watch pro-Che material.

or if someone wants to post an actual defense of Che i could reconsider, i guess. the video doesn't bother to include any "in case you hate Che, here's why you're wrong link". i guess they only want Che fans to watch, or they're too stupid to realize Che stuff is viewed as a badge of *evil* by many people? whatever, no thanks.


Elliot Temple
www.curi.us

[Max Kaye]

If you don't want to watch the video due to something predominantly
unrelated (a tshirt) - fine.

Here's the book. It's far more detailed, but will also take a lot longer
than 20min to read.

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845

On 14/9/17 4:30 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
>
> 1) transcript!
>
> when you have a lot of attention (millions of views!) for an educational lecture video, provide a transcript. it's absolutely unreasonable and unserious for them not to offer a human-edited, high-quality transcript.
>
> i totally sympathize with the lack of transcripts for small time stuff, made by unpaid people with no money. transcripts take time/effort or money, especially for the human editing required to make them polished. but there's no excuse for this video to lack a transcript.
>
> if you have lots of money or audience, and you're seriously trying to communicate ideas and help educate people, provide a transcript.

Transcript:
https://pastebin.com/zrakxeX7

How I got it:
Video menu > open transcript

The dropdown (under the transcript) is set to "English (auto-generated)"
by default but there's also what looks like a manual transcript (which
is just "English" in the language list), select that and there you go.

I probably found that transcript in less time than it took you to write
about why transcripts are good.

> 2) Che! :(((((((((
>
> the description opens with a link to buy a che guavara shirt.
>
> so i'm just going to refuse to watch the video unless/until Max/anyone explains it's actually anti-che and it's some kind of joke, i guess? "Greyvara" just appears to be a combination of the dude's name ("Grey") with Che's name.

I like how you didn't even watch the video before looking for reasons
not to watch it.

Ahh yes, let's ignore any possible information/knowledge here,
regardless of the content, because of the memes this guy uses to sell a
shirt.

Nobody's going to force you to watch it.

And yes, it is a joke. I do not for a moment think he is pro-che. If he
were pro-che, do you think he'd satirise Che with a t-shirt that
trivialises the other pro-che stuff out there? Maybe if you *actually
watch the video* it will give you some context for understanding whether
it's pro-che or anti-che. But I'm sure not going to waste my time
convincing you when you made a decision with so little information or
effort.

The video is self contained, the description is for selling things to fans.

> otherwise, no, i'm out, i have better things to do than watch pro-Che material.

Didn't realise your "initial comments" would be so "initial".

It's not pro-che, will take you less than a few minutes to realise that.

> or if someone wants to post an actual defense of Che i could reconsider, i guess. the video doesn't bother to include any "in case you hate Che, here's why you're wrong link". i guess they only want Che fans to watch, or they're too stupid to realize Che stuff is viewed as a badge of *evil* by many people? whatever, no thanks.

Who cares - he's selling shirts. _His viewers_ are the intended
demographic there - and they often aren't the most politically savvy
people (the video has 4.7m views - if you're selling stuff you pander to
the masses, else why bother selling things at all in that context?)

Moreover - the shirts are satire.

Like: replacing Che with a stick figure is somehow respectful? Doesn't
seem like it to me.


Max


PS. Just watch the damn video and criticise **that**.

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> If you don't want to watch the video due to something predominantly unrelated (a tshirt) - fine.

The video creator apparently considers it related.

> Here's the book. It's far more detailed, but will also take a lot longer than 20min to read.
>
> https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845

The blurb says:

> They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power.

So the book, by its own account, starts by assuming something I consider false, then builds on that.

Does the book have any advocates who will publicly, rationally discuss the issues to a conclusion? Fully, without limits? Because I don't see the value in reading something I think is bad which also has no advocates offering valuable discussion.

As a separate indication, an author of the book said things I think are bad:

https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_bueno_de_mesquita_predicts_iran_s_future

> Out here today, there are a bunch of people -- Ahmadinejad for example -- who would like not only to build a bomb, but test a bomb. That power disappears completely; nobody supports that by 2011. These guys are all shrinking, the power is all drifting out here, so the outcome is going to be the weapons-grade fuel.

he was wrong.

the whole talk is full of scientism. it's trying to get the prestige and authority of science for his political ideas. that's doubly bad. 1) he's trying to pass non-science off as science 2) his goal is to impress people with authority.

btw there were a variety of other prior indications to me that the Rules for Rulers video is bad, and that it'd be expensive to engage with. i brought up Che because it's clearer and easier to point out than the other issues.

> On 14/9/17 4:30 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
>> 1) transcript!
>> when you have a lot of attention (millions of views!) for an educational lecture video, provide a transcript. it's absolutely unreasonable and unserious for them not to offer a human-edited, high-quality transcript.
>> i totally sympathize with the lack of transcripts for small time stuff, made by unpaid people with no money. transcripts take time/effort or money, especially for the human editing required to make them polished. but there's no excuse for this video to lack a transcript.
>> if you have lots of money or audience, and you're seriously trying to communicate ideas and help educate people, provide a transcript.
>
> Transcript:
> https://pastebin.com/zrakxeX7
>
> How I got it:
> Video menu > open transcript
>
> The dropdown (under the transcript) is set to "English (auto-generated)" by default but there's also what looks like a manual transcript (which is just "English" in the language list), select that and there you go.
>
> I probably found that transcript in less time than it took you to write about why transcripts are good.

That isn't properly formatted as prose. It's not a serious effort at providing a good transcript.

>> 2) Che! :(((((((((
>> the description opens with a link to buy a che guavara shirt.
>> so i'm just going to refuse to watch the video unless/until Max/anyone explains it's actually anti-che and it's some kind of joke, i guess? "Greyvara" just appears to be a combination of the dude's name ("Grey") with Che's name.
>
> I like how you didn't even watch the video before looking for reasons not to watch it.

Sarcasm is mean and bad for clarity.

> Ahh yes,

Sarcasm is mean and bad for clarity.

> let's ignore any possible information/knowledge here, regardless of the content, because of the memes this guy uses to sell a shirt.

Ignoring would look like: [silence]

Expressing an objection, so that it may be addressed/discussed, is a Path Forward.

Expressing objections *early*, instead of building up an undiscussed pile of objections/misunderstandings/criticisms/etc, is *rational*.

> Nobody's going to force you to watch it.

I know that. Why say this? You should try to state what you mean clearly.

> And yes, it is a joke. I do not for a moment think he is pro-che. If he were pro-che, do you think he'd satirise Che with a t-shirt that trivialises the other pro-che stuff out there?

i think you're not making a serious effort to explain the potential joke. i don't think you have a clear understanding of it.

> Maybe if you *actually watch the video* it will give you some context for understanding whether it's pro-che or anti-che. But I'm sure not going to waste my time convincing you when you made a decision with so little information or effort.

you seem hostile, and not interested in taking the time to address objections to the content you recommend. shall i infer it's not a recommendation that means much to you, and forget about it? previously you communicated otherwise.

given your comments, i don't see that there's any available video fan to have a friendly, productive discussion with.

you encountered a discussion contribution which wasn't what you expected. did you react with curiosity? tolerance? patience? direct, to-the-point replies? no. if we continue discussing, i expect this to repeat.



If it was Hitler instead of Che, would you see my point? Stalin? Mao? Castro?

Will you link a clear statement about Che which you endorse? Or are you neutral or ignorant about Che?

Perhaps our problem is you're unaware of how bad Che is? Or you deny he's as bad as I think? Your reply leaves that unclear.

> The video is self contained, the description is for selling things to fans.
>
>> otherwise, no, i'm out, i have better things to do than watch pro-Che material.
>
> Didn't realise your "initial comments" would be so "initial".

Why state this?

> It's not pro-che, will take you less than a few minutes to realise that.

Why would a reasonable person do things liable to get him confused with a pro-che person? So I am doubtful the video creator is reasonable. And you seem uninterested in addressing that criticism.

And you're being too presumptive about how I should spend my time. You're presuming something like: you know that some activities are cheap, easy and harmless for me. Therefore (you wouldn't put it this bluntly or strongly, but it's along these lines) I must be resisting doing them out of malice, stupidity, irrationality or some such. You're mistaken.

>> or if someone wants to post an actual defense of Che i could reconsider, i guess. the video doesn't bother to include any "in case you hate Che, here's why you're wrong link". i guess they only want Che fans to watch, or they're too stupid to realize Che stuff is viewed as a badge of *evil* by many people? whatever, no thanks.
>
> Who cares - he's selling shirts. _His viewers_ are the intended demographic there - and they often aren't the most politically savvy people (the video has 4.7m views - if you're selling stuff you pander to the masses, else why bother selling things at all in that context?)
>
> Moreover - the shirts are satire.
>
> Like: replacing Che with a stick figure is somehow respectful? Doesn't seem like it to me.

Would you sell ambiguously pro-Stalin shirts?

If you did, would you associate those shirts with your serious ideas?

> PS. Just watch the damn video and criticise **that**.

Are you angry? You sound angry.

You're doing a poor job of persuading me that, if I watch the video and write what I think, I will get responses which I appreciate and which make it worth my while.

There's also an issue of how valuable responses would scale up as I invested more resources into the project. I don't think they would scale well. That kind of bound on how far to take the issue is unappealing to me.

Elliot Temple
Get my philosophy newsletter:
www.fallibleideas.com/newsletter

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 13, 2017, at 16:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 14/9/17 4:30 am, Elliot Temple wrote:

>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

>> 2) Che! :(((((((((
>>
>> the description opens with a link to buy a che guavara shirt.
>>
>> so i'm just going to refuse to watch the video unless/until
>> Max/anyone explains it's actually anti-che and it's some kind of
>> joke, i guess? "Greyvara" just appears to be a combination of the
>> dude's name ("Grey") with Che's name.
>
> I like how you didn't even watch the video before looking for reasons
> not to watch it.
>
> Ahh yes, let's ignore any possible information/knowledge here,
> regardless of the content, because of the memes this guy uses to sell
> a shirt.
>
> Nobody's going to force you to watch it.

> Didn't realise your "initial comments" would be so "initial".

> Who cares

> damn video

> But I'm sure not going to waste my time convincing you when you made a
> decision with so little information or effort.

This misunderstands the finality of judgements.

Perhaps Max is unaccustomed to dealing with tentative judgements and
people who easily change their minds. That's foreign to our culture.
Getting good with it takes study and a lengthy process of familiarizing,
practicing and integrating. And, typically, a gradual lifestyle shift
where one changes who and what one associates with.

There's another issue I think is involved:

> If you don't want to watch the video due to something predominantly
> unrelated (a tshirt) - fine.

It's not fine with Max. His comments communicate he's emotional about
it.

I think Max took Elliot's comments as *dismissive* and *disrespectful*,
rather than merely an intellectual judgement.

This made the judgement appear more final and less discussable.

This was difficult for Max because he then faced a clash between
different values. He respects and values Elliot's thinking (and the FI
forum) in some ways. But he also thinks of himself and his
recommendations as deserving the treatment he gets elsewhere (where they
are considered high value, and treated accordingly). Elliot's tone
didn't match how Max expects to be dealt with.

I think Max was *disappointed*, but didn't say so. He got his hopes up,
then got something he interpreted negatively.

I think the reason for Elliot's tone is along these lines: Elliot thinks
Che, like Stalin, shouldn't be treated with respect. He thinks he used
the rationally appropriate tone. He thinks that if he used more
tentative, benefit-of-the-doubt-giving phrasing, that would have been
inappropriate for the gravity of Che's evil.

It wouldn't be appropriate to respond to a shirt depicting Stalin, with
nothing overtly negative, by saying, "Please correct me if I'm mistaken,
and I'm really interested to hear other opinions on the matter, but I
think Stalin was actually a bad guy." That would misrepresent Elliot's
views on Stalin, and it's not the correct take on Stalin for a decent,
educated person.

Elliot may have overestimated Max's knowledge of Che, or his emotional
sensitivity, or his willingness to discuss differences in small steps.

I'm guessing Max thinks Che is bad, and thinks he knows about the
matter. But, I'm guessing, Max's opinion of Che is much higher than
Elliot's, so there's a large disagreement there, even though both their
views of Che are negative. ("Disagreement" may not be the best word,
because the issue may primarily be about ignorance.)

BTW, Che's badness is twofold. There's the stuff he did during his life.
And there's also his symbolic value today (his meaning in current
politics).

One aspect of Che's badness is Marxism. Marxism is a topic where, again,
I'm guessing Elliot and Max both have negative opinions, but Elliot's
opinion is significantly more negative than Max's.

I think Marxism merits much more negative judgements than are typical
because it slaughtered over 100,000,000 people. I could point out more,
but this one fact is sufficient to indicate something is wrong with the
mainstream take on Marxism.

BTW, I don't think mass killings are a joking matter.

> take you less than a few minutes

I think there's a misunderstanding here. Our culture takes for granted,
basically, that a few minutes doesn't really matter. (This is especially
common in an educational or learning context.)

I think Elliot is sensitive to doing anything he doesn't want to do,
even for 10 seconds. I'm guessing this is completely foreign to Max,
because it's completely foreign to most people.

One possible perspective on this is to be *inspired*. How can that be
possible? That sounds wonderful! That's not a typical reaction, but I
recommend it (if you have sufficient control over yourself to choose
your reaction).

Another perspective is to be interested in why marketing or content
fails on an atypical but especially rational person. It's possible to
get valuable feedback there.

> (the video has 4.7m views - if you're selling stuff you pander to the
> masses, else why bother selling things at all in that context?)

Pandering to the masses is not taken for granted here. It's actually,
following Ayn Rand, thoroughly rejected.

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 13, 2017, at 16:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> Like: replacing Che with a stick figure is somehow respectful? Doesn't
> seem like it to me.

Stick figures aren't negative in many contexts I've seen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGP_Grey

Note the top right image caption:

> The stick figure Grey uses to represent himself in his videos and
> elsewhere.

Grey draws himself as a stick figure, so it's incorrect to think a stick
figure shirt from Grey is negative.

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 13, 2017, at 11:30 AM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
>
> 1) transcript!

> 2) Che! :(((((((((

3) Plagiarism.

The end of the video says:

https://pastebin.com/zrakxeX7

> This video and its follow-ups are based largely on The Dictator’s
> Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alistair Smith

But tons of people stop watching 20 minute videos before the end.

The YouTube description thanks the authors by name without stating a
reason, and fails to mention the book.

4) What about persuasion!?

> Without power you can affect nothing.

What about persuasion!?

This is basically saying that *reason is powerless*. The implication is
don't concern yourself too much with reason. Nasty!

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 13, 2017, at 16:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845

says

> CGP Grey
> “Simply the best book on politics written…. Every citizen should
> read this book.”

Is CGP Grey making an intentional negative statement about the value of
Ayn Rand's books, or is he ignorant of other political books besides the
one he proclaims the best? Or does he mean "on politics" super narrowly
so it excludes most of the competition?

After writing this comment, I found:

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/ayn-rand-loves-torture.html

in which he's pretty open about his unargued hostility:

> even the most rabid fans of Ayn Rand must acknowledge [his criticism
> of her writing]

and his use of numbers in the post is dishonest. with "torture" he
includes variant words like "tortured", but with the other words he
doesn't. e.g. you can see "wait" with 113 instances, just a little below
torture's 114.

but the string "wait" shows up 371 times.

he's excluding "waiting", "waited", etc. (actually "waiting" and
"waited" are both common enough to show up on his chart on their own!)
he compared all forms of the word "torture" to one form of the word
"wait". that's a biased comparison.

"wait" is the only word i checked. i didn't have to look hard to find an
issue. i also, btw, found 114 instances of "wait" followed by a non-word
character, not 113. by that method, "torture" only has 80 results.

he presents his biased word counts as a way of combating bias, which is
a biased presentation of biased material.

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 13, 2017, at 11:30 AM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

The video creator has a history of intentional trolling rather than
trying to seek the truth:

https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/44gk0i/grey_germs_and_generalization/

> Gray: I have to confess, I have to confess, I did... I shouldn't have
> done it, Brady, but I did kind of like intentionally poke the
> historians a bit in, in my video, because I knew, I knew, they were
> gonna be some people watching the Americapox video who were, like,
> slowly having their blood boil as they, as they realize, like, what
> this video is about. I could just, like, imagine this person, like,
> the simmering is getting like, hotter and hotter and hotter as they're
> watching the video like, "He's going through Guns, Germs and Steel, I
> can't believe it!", which is why I like, I could not help myself in
> the end of that video, in the Audible ad, going, "This is the history
> book to rule all history books!", and I just love the idea of someone
> just losing it at their computer screen, like, "I can't believe that
> like, not only has he done this whole thing, but he's recommending
> this above all history books?!?"
>
> Brady: There is a perverse pleasure to be gained from that.
>
> Gray: This is the joy of trolling. This is the joy of trolling, as the
> word is supposed to be used. *Laughs* Like, I knew that someone was
> gonna be wound up by that and it's like, I can definitely see that
> some people just popped at that, which is why I had to put that line
> in there, even though I'm not even sure I believe it.

He wants people's blood to boil. He fantasizes vividly about their
suffering. He feels the "joy of trolling". That's his priority over,
e.g., integrity.

[Max Kaye]

Just to mention at the top: I give a 10 minute summary of the
selectorate theory (in the context of a talk on Flux) and there are no
pro-che materials around.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zq25UXc_ONg?start=516&end=1115&version=3

Not my best talk - but reasonably succinct.

On 14/9/17 10:54 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
> On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
>> If you don't want to watch the video due to something predominantly unrelated (a tshirt) - fine.
>
> The video creator apparently considers it related.

Sure, but the *motivations/philosophy* of the author don't necessarily
have anything to do with whether *the content has value*. Most
scientists have terrible philosophy, but they can still produce new
knowledge, and that knowledge still has value. Same here - don't watch
the video for the memes, watch it for the knowledge, and decide whether
it was worth it based on that.

I disagree (now) with a lot of the stuff Grey has said/produced [1], but
I still think this is a video that's definitely worth watching, partly
because it's entertaining, but mostly because this is the only theory of
power I've encountered that has deep explanatory potential.

[1]: mostly his moral take on voting systems, even though the
explanations of the systems themselves are quite good.

> The blurb says:
>
>> They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power.
>
> So the book, by its own account, starts by assuming something I consider false, then builds on that.

I don't think it's an assertion (even if the blurb says so) since it's
actually quite well explained. Essentially the explanation goes: power
dynamics have an evolutionary nature that means *in order to acquire and
hold power* you don't get to choose all your actions (power acts upon
you to force your hand sometimes). You might have options in which path
to choose, but many paths are eliminated simply by being in a position
of power. The result is that those able to acquire power are already
accepting on the premise that they'll need to do things they don't like
to maintain power. Moreover if they don't do what needs to be done,
there will be someone else willing to, and this can very quickly lead to
a situation where it's within key supporters' interest to replace the
ruler. Thus, rulers have to do whatever it takes to stay in power. That
doesn't mean they lose all autonomy though.

I go into a bit more detail in the talk I link at the top - happy to
discuss further if you still think it's incorrect.

> Does the book have any advocates who will publicly, rationally discuss the issues to a conclusion? Fully, without limits? Because I don't see the value in reading something I think is bad which also has no advocates offering valuable discussion.

Unsure. I'm interested in debating it, but I'm more (proportionally)
interested in running my business, the Flux movement, etc. Maybe that
doesn't fulfil the "to a conclusion? Fully, without limits?" part.

> As a separate indication, an author of the book said things I think are bad:
>
> https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_bueno_de_mesquita_predicts_iran_s_future
>
>> Out here today, there are a bunch of people -- Ahmadinejad for example -- who would like not only to build a bomb, but test a bomb. That power disappears completely; nobody supports that by 2011. These guys are all shrinking, the power is all drifting out here, so the outcome is going to be the weapons-grade fuel.
>
> he was wrong.
>
> the whole talk is full of scientism. it's trying to get the prestige and authority of science for his political ideas. that's doubly bad. 1) he's trying to pass non-science off as science 2) his goal is to impress people with authority.

Yeah, it is TED though. I don't think they're particularly good in terms
of academic quality.

> btw there were a variety of other prior indications to me that the Rules for Rulers video is bad, and that it'd be expensive to engage with. i brought up Che because it's clearer and easier to point out than the other issues.

What indicators do you have *that the explanation in the video* is refuted?

That's all I'm really interested in. I don't care if CGP Grey is a good
guy, or a good philosopher, or anything else.

Found this on Grey's twitter, though:

> Is there a futile revolution you’d like to join? Then you need this
Che Greyvara shirt from @DFTBArecords https://goo.gl/38bkrO

https://twitter.com/cgpgrey/status/791045503983185920?lang=en

So it doesn't sound like he _really_ has much respect for Che himself.

At the very least the discussion is definitely super pro:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HelloInternet/comments/59ht4b/new_grey_tshirt_che_greyvara_surprisingly_doesnt/

> is wearing this as bad as wearing a normal Che teeshirt?

> Don't worry, as the entrance to his work camp says "Work will make
you grey".

>> On 14/9/17 4:30 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
>>> 1) transcript!
>>> when you have a lot of attention (millions of views!) for an educational lecture video, provide a transcript. it's absolutely unreasonable and unserious for them not to offer a human-edited, high-quality transcript.
>>> i totally sympathize with the lack of transcripts for small time stuff, made by unpaid people with no money. transcripts take time/effort or money, especially for the human editing required to make them polished. but there's no excuse for this video to lack a transcript.
>>> if you have lots of money or audience, and you're seriously trying to communicate ideas and help educate people, provide a transcript.
>>
>> Transcript:
>> https://pastebin.com/zrakxeX7
>>
>> How I got it:
>> Video menu > open transcript
>>
>> The dropdown (under the transcript) is set to "English (auto-generated)" by default but there's also what looks like a manual transcript (which is just "English" in the language list), select that and there you go.
>>
>> I probably found that transcript in less time than it took you to write about why transcripts are good.
>
> That isn't properly formatted as prose. It's not a serious effort at providing a good transcript.

I copied and pasted it from youtube - hence the formatting. That said
this is a poor argument *on the whole*. Formatting is good for
communication and a nice convenience. If someone watched the video and
wanted to easily quote it, the above is 80% of the way to
as-good-as-it-reasonably-could-be.

>>> 2) Che! :(((((((((
>>> the description opens with a link to buy a che guavara shirt.
>>> so i'm just going to refuse to watch the video unless/until Max/anyone explains it's actually anti-che and it's some kind of joke, i guess? "Greyvara" just appears to be a combination of the dude's name ("Grey") with Che's name.
>>
>> I like how you didn't even watch the video before looking for reasons not to watch it.
>
> Sarcasm is mean and bad for clarity.

Fair.

>> let's ignore any possible information/knowledge here, regardless of the content, because of the memes this guy uses to sell a shirt.
>
> Ignoring would look like: [silence]
>
> Expressing an objection, so that it may be addressed/discussed, is a Path Forward.
>
> Expressing objections *early*, instead of building up an undiscussed pile of objections/misunderstandings/criticisms/etc, is *rational*.

Well, you were silent on the video - not on the other stuff. I agree
that expressing objections early is good, but you didn't express any
objections to the selectorate theory (the theory expressed in the video)
- you did express objections to watching the video at all. Maybe the
balance there is just taste.

>> Nobody's going to force you to watch it.
>
> I know that. Why say this? You should try to state what you mean clearly.

Sure, I meant that I felt like your original post ultimately had very
little value and didn't do anything besides signalling to the rest of
the list... something, I don't really know what you were trying to say,
besides "this is bad".

Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that you'd
so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when it
comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority. Maybe
that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I think
you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.

>> Maybe if you *actually watch the video* it will give you some context for understanding whether it's pro-che or anti-che. But I'm sure not going to waste my time convincing you when you made a decision with so little information or effort.
>
> you seem hostile, and not interested in taking the time to address objections to the content you recommend. shall i infer it's not a recommendation that means much to you, and forget about it? previously you communicated otherwise.

I was hostile - no doubt about that. I replied in haste this morning
before having to leave the house; so definitely didn't put the time I
normally might in.

That said, I didn't see any objections to the *content* I recommended; I
did see objections to

a) The t-shirt
b) The author

And I don't *really* care about debating those things too much - I don't
have a horse in *that* race, and I think the most morally repugnant
people (perhaps Che is a good example) are still able to produce
knowledge (or communicate it) - a point made in BoI too.

> If it was Hitler instead of Che, would you see my point? Stalin? Mao? Castro?

*That* point is valid. Maybe add Putin to the list.

> Will you link a clear statement about Che which you endorse? Or are you neutral or ignorant about Che?
>
> Perhaps our problem is you're unaware of how bad Che is? Or you deny he's as bad as I think? Your reply leaves that unclear.

I'm mostly ignorant, but I have no love for violent revolutionaries. I
don't deny anything you claim, I just don't have any view (or maybe: I
recognise any opinion I had on the matter would be uneducated, so don't
think they're worth offering).

>> The video is self contained, the description is for selling things to fans.
>>
>>> otherwise, no, i'm out, i have better things to do than watch pro-Che material.
>>
>> Didn't realise your "initial comments" would be so "initial".
>
> Why state this?

Two reasons: sarcasm (as before, and not something I'm proud of [2]),
and to point out that I thought you didn't give it any serious thought -
which I think goes against what you advocate most of the time.

While not equivalent, it's similar to me going to curi.us and saying
"this guy has a post about Bitcoin sucking, or about Trump, so I'm not
going to put in the effort until *some condition*"

It's just not a great reason.

>> It's not pro-che, will take you less than a few minutes to realise that.
>
> Why would a reasonable person do things liable to get him confused with a pro-che person? So I am doubtful the video creator is reasonable. And you seem uninterested in addressing that criticism.

Maybe, but as I mentioned I think this is largely irrelevant.

> And you're being too presumptive about how I should spend my time. You're presuming something like: you know that some activities are cheap, easy and harmless for me. Therefore (you wouldn't put it this bluntly or strongly, but it's along these lines) I must be resisting doing them out of malice, stupidity, irrationality or some such. You're mistaken.

Maybe I am being presumptuous. But given the time you spent going to
yotube, clicking links, typing up what you did, etc, I would have hoped
you'd at least watch the first few minutes of the video.

I do think claiming the video is *wrong* based on the Che thing would be
irrational, but you didn't do that. I think you were a bit dismissive
though, and in this case I think that's a mistake.

>>> or if someone wants to post an actual defense of Che i could reconsider, i guess. the video doesn't bother to include any "in case you hate Che, here's why you're wrong link". i guess they only want Che fans to watch, or they're too stupid to realize Che stuff is viewed as a badge of *evil* by many people? whatever, no thanks.
>>
>> Who cares - he's selling shirts. _His viewers_ are the intended demographic there - and they often aren't the most politically savvy people (the video has 4.7m views - if you're selling stuff you pander to the masses, else why bother selling things at all in that context?)
>>
>> Moreover - the shirts are satire.
>>
>> Like: replacing Che with a stick figure is somehow respectful? Doesn't seem like it to me.
>
> Would you sell ambiguously pro-Stalin shirts?
>
> If you did, would you associate those shirts with your serious ideas?

No.

And no.

But I'm also not interested in trying to capitalise on memes. Che shirts
will sell a lot better than Hitler shirts (but maybe not Putin, in the
right circles)

>> PS. Just watch the damn video and criticise **that**.
>
> Are you angry? You sound angry.

I was.

> You're doing a poor job of persuading me that, if I watch the video and write what I think, I will get responses which I appreciate and which make it worth my while.

Well, I felt the same way about your initial response this morning.

More like "why share things with the FI group if ET just dismisses it
due to mostly unrelated things?" or maybe more like "I'm being dissuaded
that sharing ideas here is actually that valuable." Now, I *do* still
find it valuable, but I definitely think there are a few reactions I've
seen on this list that aren't super rational / tainted with a bit of
emotion.


Max


[2] : A friend of mine put me on to an idea a few years ago: "living
without irony". Not irony in the sense of (say) dramatic irony, but in
the meta-hipster-angsty-teen sense. The irony that happens for the sake
of it. I sort of see sarcasm in the same light - not something that ever
really improves the conversation, or that's really that humorous at all.
The way I interpret that now is more like "live genuinely", and that
honestly expressing yourself is almost always the right way to go. I
didn't do that this morning (in my first reply). I don't really regret
it, but I do definitely see it as something to improve on.

[anonymous FI]

On 2017-09-14, 1:40 AM, Max Kaye wrote:

> I think the most morally repugnant people (perhaps Che is a good
> example) are still able to produce knowledge (or communicate it)

what do you mean here? what is Che a good example of?

do you mean that Che is a good example of someone who is morally
repugnant but still produced or communicated some knowledge?

[Max Kaye]

It's something I advocate but don't see very often, so yes, I'm
unaccustomed to this. (That also means that I have a ways to go in this
respect)

> There's another issue I think is involved:
>
>> If you don't want to watch the video due to something predominantly
>> unrelated (a tshirt) - fine.
>
> It's not fine with Max. His comments communicate he's emotional about it.
>
> I think Max took Elliot's comments as *dismissive* and *disrespectful*,
> rather than merely an intellectual judgement.
>
> This made the judgement appear more final and less discussable.

Agreed.

> This was difficult for Max because he then faced a clash between
> different values. He respects and values Elliot's thinking (and the FI
> forum) in some ways. But he also thinks of himself and his
> recommendations as deserving the treatment he gets elsewhere (where they
> are considered high value, and treated accordingly). Elliot's tone
> didn't match how Max expects to be dealt with.
>
> I think Max was *disappointed*, but didn't say so. He got his hopes up,
> then got something he interpreted negatively.

I pretty much agree with all of that [1], I was disappointed, and it's a
valid criticism that I didn't say that at the time.

[1]: the only thing I'd change is "deserving the treatment he gets
elsewhere (where they are considered high value" is more appropriately
put as "deserving of being taken seriously" - more like that I'm not
trying to waste anyone's time, I really do think there is good rational
knowledge in that video. I also don't put as much value on the context
something is presented in (not to say I disregard it, though) as I infer
ET to, and these in combination fed back into the other feelings.

> I think the reason for Elliot's tone is along these lines: Elliot thinks
> Che, like Stalin, shouldn't be treated with respect. He thinks he used
> the rationally appropriate tone. He thinks that if he used more
> tentative, benefit-of-the-doubt-giving phrasing, that would have been
> inappropriate for the gravity of Che's evil.

I'd argue Che is slightly different due to his meme-ification, so
there's just more to consider. In no way do I want to indicate that I
think either t-shirt would be okay, but it offers more insight into why
it was a Che shirt rather than a Stalin shirt.

That said, Grey could have come up with a flavourful anti-stalin shirt
in the same way, but it wouldn't have had as much meme potential.

> It wouldn't be appropriate to respond to a shirt depicting Stalin, with
> nothing overtly negative, by saying, "Please correct me if I'm mistaken,
> and I'm really interested to hear other opinions on the matter, but I
> think Stalin was actually a bad guy." That would misrepresent Elliot's
> views on Stalin, and it's not the correct take on Stalin for a decent,
> educated person.

That's a very fair point. As I mentioned in my other reply, I'm largely
uneducated on the matter (Che; I know more about Stalin). I don't know
if the US education system covers South American history much, but
Australia's does not much at all (there's a little bit about the
conquistadors). If that is a factor then it has some explanatory power.

> Elliot may have overestimated Max's knowledge of Che, or his emotional
> sensitivity, or his willingness to discuss differences in small steps.

Overestimate of my knowledge for sure. Also I'd just woken up, and I
think that contributed to my emotional reaction.

> I'm guessing Max thinks Che is bad, and thinks he knows about the
> matter. But, I'm guessing, Max's opinion of Che is much higher than
> Elliot's, so there's a large disagreement there, even though both their
> views of Che are negative. ("Disagreement" may not be the best word,
> because the issue may primarily be about ignorance.)

My view is much less informed, and that might contribute to my opinion
being "higher". This conversation has definitely helped in that regard
though.

> BTW, Che's badness is twofold. There's the stuff he did during his life.
> And there's also his symbolic value today (his meaning in current
> politics).
>
> One aspect of Che's badness is Marxism. Marxism is a topic where, again,
> I'm guessing Elliot and Max both have negative opinions, but Elliot's
> opinion is significantly more negative than Max's.

I see it as a great evil, but haven't spent much time reading or
learning about it (since I'm more interested in better ideas for the
future, and have already dismissed Marxism).

I did try to dabble at one stage (about 10 years ago, when I thought
anarcho-communism might work), and quickly realised that it wouldn't.
Also the communist manifesto is terribly written; I was never able to
get through it.

> I think Marxism merits much more negative judgements than are typical
> because it slaughtered over 100,000,000 people. I could point out more,
> but this one fact is sufficient to indicate something is wrong with the
> mainstream take on Marxism.
>
> BTW, I don't think mass killings are a joking matter.

I presume you're referring to Stalin there? I've never really associated
him super strongly with marxism (more leninism, though I guess they're
related). This mental different might contribute to me being less
negative towards marxism than some ppl on this list.

There are some side conversations about dealing with terrible situations
through humour that would be nice to have one day. I think it can be
valuable, but generally we shouldn't take those jokes seriously (though
some people do).

Also, not talking about frivolous / disrespectful jokes - more like what
I imagine this article would say:
http://www.holocaust-trc.org/humor-in-the-holocaust/

(Not endorsing it, found on google rather quickly)

>> take you less than a few minutes
>
> I think there's a misunderstanding here. Our culture takes for granted,
> basically, that a few minutes doesn't really matter. (This is especially
> common in an educational or learning context.)
>
> I think Elliot is sensitive to doing anything he doesn't want to do,
> even for 10 seconds. I'm guessing this is completely foreign to Max,
> because it's completely foreign to most people.

I'm personally down with not doing things we don't want to [*]. However,
I think part of my emotional reaction was due to the perceived effort of
even *replying at all* which I then perceived as comparatively less
valuable than actually watching the video for a few minutes and
potentially replying in a more substantive way.

[*]: There's some other interesting discussions re: when are you
obligated morally to do something - though maybe this is resolved
through "moral memes compel you to *want* to do something to fix a
problem" in which case there's no conflict with the idea of wanting to
do something.

>> (the video has 4.7m views - if you're selling stuff you pander to the
>> masses, else why bother selling things at all in that context?)
>
> Pandering to the masses is not taken for granted here. It's actually,
> following Ayn Rand, thoroughly rejected.

I'm not advocating that this is valid/good behaviour, but it is
contextually appropriate when understanding other ppls behaviour.


Max


P.S. As I site note that I thought of earlier: one of the reasons I give
less importance to context is the following situation:

* Had I removed all context by (say) reuploading the video or linking to
a full screen version, ET would not have made the criticisms he did.
* Should I then only link to things in this way?
* It seems like it would have been better outcome **for me** if I did it
that way
* If a different context gives a different reaction - isn't the context
then just a distraction from the actual content?

These are ret-conned, but I think they show part of my reasoning into
ignoring context as I do.

[Max Kaye]

Roughly yes, I added the Che parenthesis in after writing the rest of
it. Particularly that Che is/was morally repugnant. At the simplest
level if Che held a gun to someone and said "I'm going to kill you" I
would expect them to believe him. The knowledge isn't that useful, of
course, but demonstrates the point. It's just as applicable to higher
level explanations - if Che were able to explain and debate general
relativity well we should still believe him (about GR) regardless of his
other actions or beliefs.

The *main* point I wanted to make was that the value of an explanation
can be independent of its context.

[Justin Mallone]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:40 AM, Max Kaye m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On 14/9/17 10:54 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
>> On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>
>>> If you don't want to watch the video due to something predominantly unrelated (a tshirt) - fine.
>>
>> The video creator apparently considers it related.
>
> Sure, but the *motivations/philosophy* of the author don't necessarily
> have anything to do with whether *the content has value*.

If someone thinks Che is related to their video in a positive way, that bears on the content.

> Found this on Grey's twitter, though:
>
>> Is there a futile revolution you’d like to join? Then you need this Che Greyvara shirt from @DFTBArecords https://goo.gl/38bkrO
>
> https://twitter.com/cgpgrey/status/791045503983185920?lang=en
>
> So it doesn't sound like he _really_ has much respect for Che himself.

Imagine if someone said “Is there a futile attempt at saving the Aryan Race you’d like to start? Then you need this Based Adolf shirt.” and the shirt depicted a Stickman Hitler. How would you interpret that? More positive on Hitler than you’re comfortable with?

Invoking Che to use him as an example of futile idealism is a morally repugnant thing to do. People typically view idealism as morally virtuous and somewhat nice, if impractical when taking to “extremes.” That’s not a context Che deserves.

>
>>>> 2) Che! :(((((((((
>>>> the description opens with a link to buy a che guavara shirt.
>>>> so i'm just going to refuse to watch the video unless/until Max/anyone explains it's actually anti-che and it's some kind of joke, i guess? "Greyvara" just appears to be a combination of the dude's name ("Grey") with Che's name.
>>>
>>> I like how you didn't even watch the video before looking for reasons not to watch it.
>>
>> Sarcasm is mean and bad for clarity.
>
> Fair.
>>> let's ignore any possible information/knowledge here, regardless of the content, because of the memes this guy uses to sell a shirt.
>>
>> Ignoring would look like: [silence]
>>
>> Expressing an objection, so that it may be addressed/discussed, is a Path Forward.
>>
>> Expressing objections *early*, instead of building up an undiscussed pile of objections/misunderstandings/criticisms/etc, is *rational*.
>
> Well, you were silent on the video - not on the other stuff. I agree
> that expressing objections early is good, but you didn't express any
> objections to the selectorate theory (the theory expressed in the video)
> - you did express objections to watching the video at all. Maybe the
> balance there is just taste.

Learn to deeplink vids and give a timerange if you only want people to watch part

>>> Nobody's going to force you to watch it.
>>
>> I know that. Why say this? You should try to state what you mean clearly.
>
> Sure, I meant that I felt like your original post ultimately had very
> little value and didn't do anything besides signalling to the rest of
> the list... something, I don't really know what you were trying to say,
> besides "this is bad”.

You should be more inquisitive and less hostile when you encounter a big gap in perspectives like this.

> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that you'd
> so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when it
> comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority. Maybe
> that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I think
> you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.

Elaborate on self-righteous.

>>> Maybe if you *actually watch the video* it will give you some context for understanding whether it's pro-che or anti-che. But I'm sure not going to waste my time convincing you when you made a decision with so little information or effort.
>>
>> you seem hostile, and not interested in taking the time to address objections to the content you recommend. shall i infer it's not a recommendation that means much to you, and forget about it? previously you communicated otherwise.
>
> I was hostile - no doubt about that. I replied in haste this morning
> before having to leave the house; so definitely didn't put the time I
> normally might in.

Low-edit-time posts can be more honest IMHO.

Editing for clarity is fine. Editing for hostility is not a great sign.

> That said, I didn't see any objections to the *content* I recommended; I
> did see objections to
>
> a) The t-shirt
> b) The author
>
> And I don't *really* care about debating those things too much - I don't
> have a horse in *that* race, and I think the most morally repugnant
> people (perhaps Che is a good example) are still able to produce
> knowledge (or communicate it) - a point made in BoI too.

Perhaps there’s something you could learn here about being able to make better judgments of what to engage in based on limited information. This is a really important skill in a world where there’s so much possible information to engage with.

-JM

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 3:58 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 14/9/17 8:29 pm, anonymous FI wrote:
>>
>> On 2017-09-14, 1:40 AM, Max Kaye wrote:
>>
>>> I think the most morally repugnant people (perhaps Che is a good
>>> example) are still able to produce knowledge (or communicate it)
>>
>> what do you mean here? what is Che a good example of?
>>
>> do you mean that Che is a good example of someone who is morally
>> repugnant but still produced or communicated some knowledge?
>
> Roughly yes, I added the Che parenthesis in after writing the rest of
> it. Particularly that Che is/was morally repugnant. At the simplest
> level if Che held a gun to someone and said "I'm going to kill you" I
> would expect them to believe him. The knowledge isn't that useful, of
> course, but demonstrates the point. It's just as applicable to higher
> level explanations - if Che were able to explain and debate general
> relativity well we should still believe him (about GR) regardless of
> his other actions or beliefs.

Do you think Che had some good ideas we should learn from? Some valuable
knowledge? Or not?

Why is Che a *good* example of this category? I can think of people who
are morally repugnant but able to do some good work, have some good
ideas. E.g. some of the best writers about Apple are really awful
leftists (e.g. John Gruber and Daniel Eran Dilger).

Gruber and Dilger are good examples because both the positive value and
the immorality are pretty clear. So they suffice to make the point, and
they make it pretty clearly. With Che, the immorality is overwhelming
(which is a distraction that makes him a worse example) and I don't see
the positive value.

Even if Che is technically an example of this category (b/c you discuss
*more than zero* knowledge, instead of a good amount of knowledge), he
wouldn't be a *good* example unless he had something significant and
valuable to his name, e.g. a good essay.

> The *main* point I wanted to make was that the value of an explanation
> can be independent of its context.

"can be" is true but very weak. everyone knows a pearl "can" be found in
the muck.

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 3:53 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 14/9/17 11:59 am, anonymous FI wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

> [1]: the only thing I'd change is "deserving the treatment he gets
> elsewhere (where they are considered high value" is more appropriately
> put as "deserving of being taken seriously" - more like that I'm not
> trying to waste anyone's time, I really do think there is good
> rational knowledge in that video. I also don't put as much value on
> the context something is presented in (not to say I disregard it,
> though) as I infer ET to, and these in combination fed back into the
> other feelings.

i think you should view this discussion as your video recommendation
being taken especially seriously.

instead of glossing over aspects of it, people took it seriously enough
to comment on details.

the approach here is starting at the beginning and going really slow and
discussing everything. compared to rushing to only discuss the main
idea, this is a way of taking it much more seriously. this approach
treats it as if it was actually thoroughly good and important.

if anything, people took the recommendation *more seriously* than you
intended.

you only meant you liked some unspecified parts of the video which you
regard as the main ideas. that's basically what your recommendation
would mean from a normal person on Facebook.

but people here thought the best of Max and optimistically treated the
recommendation more like if Elliot had said it on FI. (this isn't just
incorrect judgement, it's a reasonable thing to regardless of what Max
intended. taking something extra seriously is generally more productive
and revealing.)

people thought: oh it's great? cool! something that should stand up to
total scrutiny! but then it didn't.

bothering with detail criticism, and trying to deal with the video
discussion as a sequence of potentially 50 gradual steps, is a sign of
respect.


also: of course you aren't trying to waste anyone's time, but those good
intentions don't mean you have any real understanding of what would be a
good use of various FI people's time.

>> I think the reason for Elliot's tone is along these lines: Elliot
>> thinks Che, like Stalin, shouldn't be treated with respect. He thinks
>> he used the rationally appropriate tone. He thinks that if he used
>> more tentative, benefit-of-the-doubt-giving phrasing, that would have
>> been inappropriate for the gravity of Che's evil.
>
> I'd argue

"I'd argue" is common filler which you should delete.

It's much worse than "ummmm" because it means the wrong thing. it means
you WOULD argue (like at some unspecified future date IF you were going
to argue WHICH you aren't doing now), not that you ARE ARGUING.

also "ummm" is an honest statement. people see it for what it is. but
"i'd argue" is a statement which fools people. they think it means
you're smart, when it actually means you're dumb (about this, not
necessarily dumb overall).

> Che is slightly different due to his meme-ification, so there's just
> more to consider. In no way do I want to indicate that I think either
> t-shirt would be okay, but it offers more insight into why it was a
> Che shirt rather than a Stalin shirt.

Che's use in modern culture is *super evil*. that's no defense!

>> It wouldn't be appropriate to respond to a shirt depicting Stalin,
>> with nothing overtly negative, by saying, "Please correct me if I'm
>> mistaken, and I'm really interested to hear other opinions on the
>> matter, but I think Stalin was actually a bad guy." That would
>> misrepresent Elliot's views on Stalin, and it's not the correct take
>> on Stalin for a decent, educated person.
>
> That's a very fair point. As I mentioned in my other reply, I'm
> largely uneducated on the matter (Che; I know more about Stalin). I
> don't know if the US education system covers South American history
> much, but Australia's does not much at all (there's a little bit about
> the conquistadors). If that is a factor then it has some explanatory
> power.

nah, the US doesn't educate people about this either. hence all the
clueless college students wearing Che shirts.

even if they put Che on the curriculum, the schools are run by leftists,
so that wouldn't help. plus, just like in other countries, the schools
aren't able to teach much of anything.

but what the US (or UK) education system covers is pretty irrelevant to
what knowledge you should expect FI veterans to have. they've all
pursued their education extensively outside of school.

>> I think Marxism merits much more negative judgements than are typical
>> because it slaughtered over 100,000,000 people. I could point out
>> more, but this one fact is sufficient to indicate something is wrong
>> with the mainstream take on Marxism.
>>
>> BTW, I don't think mass killings are a joking matter.
>
> I presume you're referring to Stalin there? I've never really
> associated him super strongly with marxism (more leninism, though I
> guess they're related). This mental different might contribute to me
> being less negative towards marxism than some ppl on this list.

Stalin counts under Marxism, but it's not a reference to one person. Do
you have any idea how many Mao killed? (btw the numbers are super
controversial, but I just mean the loose ballpark.)

> I'm personally down with not doing things we don't want to [*].
> However, I think part of my emotional reaction was due to the
> perceived effort of even *replying at all* which I then perceived as
> comparatively less valuable than actually watching the video for a few
> minutes and potentially replying in a more substantive way.

FI posting is way more fun than watching pandering video adaptations of
anti-FI-themed books.

>>> (the video has 4.7m views - if you're selling stuff you pander to
>>> the masses, else why bother selling things at all in that context?)
>>
>> Pandering to the masses is not taken for granted here. It's actually,
>> following Ayn Rand, thoroughly rejected.
>
> I'm not advocating that this is valid/good behaviour, but it is
> contextually appropriate when understanding other ppls behaviour.

I think I and others here understand the behavior – and then judge it
negatively.

this negative judgement clashes with your recommendation of the video,
if the recommendation is taken especially seriously instead of as just
loosely as "oh well some of it is pretty good. (just ignore the many
flaws)".

> P.S. As I site note that I thought of earlier: one of the reasons I
> give less importance to context is the following situation:
>
> * Had I removed all context by (say) reuploading the video or linking
> to a full screen version, ET would not have made the criticisms he
> did.
> * Should I then only link to things in this way?
> * It seems like it would have been better outcome **for me** if I did
> it that way

you would get caught and be critically questioned about hiding
information, and be accused of dishonesty. you would find that outcome
worse for you.

if you think there's a clash between the value of the video and the
presentation of the video (and a clash between the author of the video
and the content), that's interesting. e.g. it'd raise the question of
why has no one better made some better content? is CGP Grey exceptional
in some ways despite some other huge flaws, or is there not much
interest in the ideas, or what?

if you'd known it, you could have just said you know CGP Grey is an
anti-intellectual idiot who hates Ayn Rand and is totally wrong about
Che, and said that doesn't matter to the video which you judge as good
despite your awareness of those flaws. That would have been reasonably
credible if you knew all that in advance. sharing your judgement would
make more sense than hiding the issues with a reupload. on the other
hand, if you didn't know those things in advance, that says something
about your judgement (and knowledge) and/or your level of interest in
the content (which you had communicated as high).

i think it's reasonable and fair to expect people to include quick
disclaimers when linking very *mixed* material in a context where they
could easily be understood as major advocates who don't see it as mixed.

FYI, if you were going to do something differently, what I'd advise is
linking the book instead of the video. The book is the more serious
target for potential discussion, which is what FI cares about. For a
variety of reasons which I'm not going to attempt to explain at this
moment, the book would actually be less work to discuss than the video.

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:40 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> Just to mention at the top: I give a 10 minute summary of the
> selectorate theory (in the context of a talk on Flux) and there are no
> pro-che materials around.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zq25UXc_ONg?start=516&end=1115&version=3
>
> Not my best talk - but reasonably succinct.
>
> On 14/9/17 10:54 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
>> On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>
>>> If you don't want to watch the video due to something predominantly
>>> unrelated (a tshirt) - fine.
>>
>> The video creator apparently considers it related.
>
> Sure, but the *motivations/philosophy* of the author don't necessarily
> have anything to do with whether *the content has value*.

true, but "don't necessarily" is a really weak statement.

> Most scientists have terrible philosophy, but they can still produce
> new knowledge, and that knowledge still has value.

over 99% of the time, they DO NOT do good work BECAUSE they have
terrible philosophy. huge problem!!!!

most "science" is really, really, really bad.

when you find an exception – a scientist doing good work – you
will usually find he has much better philosophy than the others (even if
it superficially looks similar).

i bet if you posted a few examples of what you think is bad philosophy
plus good science, we could point out you're mistaken about every one of
them. either the science isn't actually so good, or the philosophy isn't
so bad.

(please don't instead reply by saying you meant "more than zero new
knowledge with more than zero value" – i'm trying to reply to the
substantive idea instead of the weak, hedged wording.)

> Same here - don't watch the video for the memes, watch it for the
> knowledge, and decide whether it was worth it based on that.
>
> I disagree (now) with a lot of the stuff Grey has said/produced [1],
> but I still think this is a video that's definitely worth watching,
> partly because it's entertaining, but mostly because this is the only
> theory of power I've encountered that has deep explanatory potential.

you're mistaken to expect FI veterans to share that taste in
entertainment.

also wrong to expect them to be as impressed by the content as you are.

just going by the book's amazon page, i can see that the material is in
categories where we already have views. some details may be new, but as
a whole it's not new to us. and it's stuff we disagree with and dislike.

you may not be emotionally or intellectually ready to face this – that
the ideas you value are actually deeply incompatible with BoI,
Objectivism, etc. and it'd be hard to explain it to you due to your lack
of background knowledge.

i think it'd be better to start with e.g. discussing FoR/BoI/FH/AS in
detail.

we could discuss those independently first, then apply to selectorate
theory later.

it's also possible to learn them in the context of learning selectorate
theory. that'd be a more just-in-time learning approach, but it's really
hard to manage that when there's so much background material to cover.
it's easier to do a just-in-time approach when you have enough
background that the tangents are just like a chapter at a time, rather
than tangents which take months or years. trying to deal with a
discussion structure with a top layer (about selectorate theory) with
multiple different multi-month tangents (some with their own multi-month
tangents under them) is hard and i don't think you could manage it.

so what you should do is be more like: "ok i understand that FI
disagrees with selectorate theory SO MUCH that they can reject it
without even watching a video or reading a book. their principles say
that much that they only need a tiny bit of evidence to know what's
going on. that's really interesting, so i will start methodically
studying FoR/BoI/FH/AS. their claim is rather amazing, but they do,
reasonably, say it also takes a massive amount of knowledge to do it. i
will start learning that knowledge unless/until i run into a problem in
the part i've learned. step by step the steps will either be wonderful
or i'll hit some part i disagree with and which is suitable for
immediate discussion without such massive tangents to cover background
knowledge."

>> The blurb says:
>>
>>> They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them
>>> in power.
>>
>> So the book, by its own account, starts by assuming something I
>> consider false, then builds on that.
>
> I don't think it's an assertion (even if the blurb says so) since it's
> actually quite well explained.

so you think the book is contradicting itself? doesn't that mistake
matter? or you deny it responsibility for its own self-summary?

> Essentially the explanation goes: power dynamics have an evolutionary
> nature that means *in order to acquire and hold power* you don't get
> to choose all your actions (power acts upon you to force your hand
> sometimes). You might have options in which path to choose, but many
> paths are eliminated simply by being in a position of power. The
> result is that those able to acquire power are already accepting on
> the premise that they'll need to do things they don't like to maintain
> power. Moreover if they don't do what needs to be done, there will be
> someone else willing to, and this can very quickly lead to a situation
> where it's within key supporters' interest to replace the ruler. Thus,
> rulers have to do whatever it takes to stay in power. That doesn't
> mean they lose all autonomy though.

Yeah we already know the parts of this which are true, e.g. that rulers
face *logic of the situation* (as DD would call it, following Popper)
pressures.

> I go into a bit more detail in the talk I link at the top - happy to
> discuss further if you still think it's incorrect.
>
>> Does the book have any advocates who will publicly, rationally
>> discuss the issues to a conclusion? Fully, without limits? Because I
>> don't see the value in reading something I think is bad which also
>> has no advocates offering valuable discussion.
>
> Unsure. I'm interested in debating it, but I'm more (proportionally)
> interested in running my business, the Flux movement, etc. Maybe that
> doesn't fulfil the "to a conclusion? Fully, without limits?" part.

Ideas rule the world. (Which is somewhat opposite to the Dictator's
Handbook perspective.) So your priorities are mistaken.

>> As a separate indication, an author of the book said things I think
>> are bad:
>>
>> https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_bueno_de_mesquita_predicts_iran_s_future
>>
>>> Out here today, there are a bunch of people -- Ahmadinejad for
>>> example -- who would like not only to build a bomb, but test a bomb.
>>> That power disappears completely; nobody supports that by 2011.
>>> These guys are all shrinking, the power is all drifting out here, so
>>> the outcome is going to be the weapons-grade fuel.
>>
>> he was wrong.
>>
>> the whole talk is full of scientism. it's trying to get the prestige
>> and authority of science for his political ideas. that's doubly bad.
>> 1) he's trying to pass non-science off as science 2) his goal is to
>> impress people with authority.
>
> Yeah, it is TED though. I don't think they're particularly good in
> terms of academic quality.

are you claiming he's a totally different thinker in

>> btw there were a variety of other prior indications to me that the
>> Rules for Rulers video is bad, and that it'd be expensive to engage
>> with. i brought up Che because it's clearer and easier to point out
>> than the other issues.
>
> What indicators do you have *that the explanation in the video* is
> refuted?

that it's totally in conflict with Objectivism and BoI b/c it
fundamentally downplays the power of ideas, creativity and persuasion,
and downplays the importance of morality, and downplays the complexity
of the human condition.

>> That isn't properly formatted as prose. It's not a serious effort at
>> providing a good transcript.
>
> I copied and pasted it from youtube - hence the formatting. That said
> this is a poor argument *on the whole*. Formatting is good for
> communication and a nice convenience. If someone watched the video and
> wanted to easily quote it, the above is 80% of the way to
> as-good-as-it-reasonably-could-be.

Transcripts aren't just about quoting. Another main purpose is reading.

>>> let's ignore any possible information/knowledge here, regardless of
>>> the content, because of the memes this guy uses to sell a shirt.
>>
>> Ignoring would look like: [silence]
>>
>> Expressing an objection, so that it may be addressed/discussed, is a
>> Path Forward.
>>
>> Expressing objections *early*, instead of building up an undiscussed
>> pile of objections/misunderstandings/criticisms/etc, is *rational*.
>
> Well, you were silent on the video - not on the other stuff. I agree
> that expressing objections early is good, but you didn't express any
> objections to the selectorate theory (the theory expressed in the
> video) - you did express objections to watching the video at all.
> Maybe the balance there is just taste.

the context of material is relevant to interpreting the material (e.g.
figuring out what the author meant by a statement). so it can be a good
thing to discuss early.

in this case, the Che shirt is evidence of the author's unseriousness.
whether the author is a serious intellectual or an unserious panderer is
relevant to interpreting his content statements. e.g. if you spot a
detail mistake, is that because the material is mistaken, or is it
because he's kind of person who isn't paying attention to details (a
different kind of mistake) and so he just inserts lots of random detail
errors into whatever he says?

>>> Nobody's going to force you to watch it.
>>
>> I know that. Why say this? You should try to state what you mean
>> clearly.
>
> Sure, I meant that I felt like your original post ultimately had very
> little value

do you think the entire discussion spawned from it has very little
value?

i think the discussion has lots of value, and this indicates you were
wrong about the post which led to that value. the initial post leading
to interesting discussion was no accident!

> and didn't do anything besides signalling to the rest of the list...
> something, I don't really know what you were trying to say, besides
> "this is bad".

you're trying to interpret actions in a conventional framework when
they're being done in an FI framework. this leads to misunderstandings.

> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that
> you'd so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when
> it comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority.
> Maybe that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I
> think you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.

what's bad about being self-righteous?

btw this is the kind of issue which is hard to discuss because of your
lack of background knowledge. it really immediately and directly leads
to tangents about Objectivism which, if you want to go into detail and
seriously get this right – lead to reading *and studying and
discussing* books, as part of the tangent, before returning to the
original issue.

it's possible to try to give you short summaries that work for people
missing background knowledge, but it's much harder and they'll be
considerably worse than what Objectivism has to offer.

similarly, FI already has a sophisticated understanding of authority,
power, etc. the ideas you're bringing up wouldn't fill a void for FI,
they would contradict ideas which have been extensively debated already
and which have hundreds of connections to other parts of FI philosophy.
that pre-existing FI knowledge is background knowledge informing some
people's contributions to the discussion, but not Max's, so it creates a
big perspective gap.


Regarding wanting approval, that issue is one of the themes of _The
Fountainhead_. FoR/BoI/AS/FH are so commonly relevant to so much. They
are the best books that exist. And yet there's only a handful of people
in the world who have put much effort into understanding those 4 books.
So sad! So much potential for comparative advantage for someone who
helps fills this void!


BTW Elliot quickly judges all kinds of things. He can do that because he
made slower judgements in the past, discussed them extensively, and
gradually got faster over time as he understood things better. One of
the keys to this is learning principles (ideas with lots of reach[2])
and how to apply them.

[2] "reach" is a technical word from BoI which means the amount of
applicability an idea has to other stuff. the degree of general
purposeness of an idea.

>> If it was Hitler instead of Che, would you see my point? Stalin? Mao?
>> Castro?
>
> *That* point is valid. Maybe add Putin to the list.

then are you conceding more or less everything? or are you denying that
Che is similar to them? (Putin is like them, but Che isn't!? Nah. So I
guess it's the conceding? But you don't try to talk about what you're
conceding and what it changes. So your current position is unclear.)

>>> The video is self contained, the description is for selling things
>>> to fans.
>>>
>>>> otherwise, no, i'm out, i have better things to do than watch
>>>> pro-Che material.
>>>
>>> Didn't realise your "initial comments" would be so "initial".
>>
>> Why state this?
>
> Two reasons: sarcasm (as before, and not something I'm proud of [2]),
> and to point out that I thought you didn't give it any serious thought
> - which I think goes against what you advocate most of the time.

Did Elliot make a statement/claim which was inadequately thought out?
Which one?

> While not equivalent, it's similar to me going to curi.us and saying
> "this guy has a post about Bitcoin sucking, or about Trump, so I'm not
> going to put in the effort until *some condition*"

That'd be *absolutely reasonable*. E.g.: "I think Trump sucks, and I've
written about it here, here, and here. I know of no refutations of my
views. I'm not interested in this Trump booster unless he will either
put up or shut up – that is, drop the unargued pro-Trump claims so we
can focus on something else, or else provide serious arguments for
them."

If I was saying it, it'd be "Hillary" instead of "Trump". But the form
of the argument is fine either way.

And it's *good* to challenge people on preliminaries like this or the
Che shirt stuff. It can quickly weed out people who are simply
unwilling to talk about any unexpected disagreements, or unable to
interact in a way that allows getting past a problem.

If you challenge a Trump supporter with the example quote above, and
they reply, "What are you, a Mexican? Why don't you self-deport?" then
that was productive, you quickly and clearly found out there wasn't
going to be a worthwhile discussion. It's better to raise issues like
this – and see if people are reasonable or not – instead of try to
ignore them. (In the alternative, the Trump supporter might say, "Sure,
here are 3 of my favorite books with arguments. I skimmed your writing
on the matter and see no mention of these well known books. Please
address them or endorse something which addresses them." Then, again,
you quickly learn something important about the potential for the
conversation, in addition to learning about your broad judgement [1]
that Trump supporters should be dismissed.)

[1] the judgement of the person in the scenario who challenged the Trump
supporter that way, not Max's judgement.

btw i *do* have a broad judgement of Hillary boosters as unserious,
unwilling to discuss, having shitty arguments, etc. if one proved me
wrong that'd be interesting, and i'd be happy to have found them and to
actually be able to ask some questions about their perspective and get
coherent answers!

> It's just not a great reason.
>
>>> It's not pro-che, will take you less than a few minutes to realise
>>> that.
>>
>> Why would a reasonable person do things liable to get him confused
>> with a pro-che person? So I am doubtful the video creator is
>> reasonable. And you seem uninterested in addressing that criticism.
>
> Maybe, but as I mentioned I think this is largely irrelevant.
>
>> And you're being too presumptive about how I should spend my time.
>> You're presuming something like: you know that some activities are
>> cheap, easy and harmless for me. Therefore (you wouldn't put it this
>> bluntly or strongly, but it's along these lines) I must be resisting
>> doing them out of malice, stupidity, irrationality or some such.
>> You're mistaken.
>
> Maybe I am being presumptuous. But given the time you spent going to
> yotube, clicking links, typing up what you did, etc, I would have
> hoped you'd at least watch the first few minutes of the video.
>
> I do think claiming the video is *wrong* based on the Che thing would
> be irrational, but you didn't do that. I think you were a bit
> dismissive though, and in this case I think that's a mistake.

i don't recall Elliot stating he *didn't* watch the beginning of the
video.

i bet you he knows what it says adequately to judge it.

>>> PS. Just watch the damn video and criticise **that**.
>>
>> Are you angry? You sound angry.
>
> I was.
>
>> You're doing a poor job of persuading me that, if I watch the video
>> and write what I think, I will get responses which I appreciate and
>> which make it worth my while.
>
> Well, I felt the same way about your initial response this morning.
>
> More like "why share things with the FI group if ET just dismisses it
> due to mostly unrelated things?" or maybe more like "I'm being
> dissuaded that sharing ideas here is actually that valuable." Now, I
> *do* still find it valuable,

there are many thousands of posts at FI. many receive no reply at all.
you need to be willing to get *no reply* on some points without giving
up if you want to use FI, *or* willing to be persistent and try bringing
up an issue in multiple ways.

there's no moderator here closing the thread and telling you not to open
more related topics. instead there is standard advice about FI: if you
think you said something important that got inadequate attention,
self-reply to it and write an explanation of why it's important. and if
that doesn't work, self-reply again and write a different explanation.
and if that doesn't work, ask why people aren't interested. and if that
gets zero replies, self-reply again and ask why no one is replying about
*any* aspect, and if there's anything you could do to get more
attention. etc.

> but I definitely think there are a few reactions I've seen on this
> list that aren't super rational / tainted with a bit of emotion.

which reactions? why don't you quote them and state your criticism,
rather than silently forming a potentially-overly-negative view of FI
without the possibility of rebuttal?

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 12:54 PM, anonymous FI

<anonymousfa...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:40 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

>> On 14/9/17 10:54 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>> On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

>>> As a separate indication, an author of the book said things I think
>>> are bad:
>>>
>>> https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_bueno_de_mesquita_predicts_iran_s_future
>>>
>>>> Out here today, there are a bunch of people -- Ahmadinejad for
>>>> example -- who would like not only to build a bomb, but test a
>>>> bomb. That power disappears completely; nobody supports that by
>>>> 2011. These guys are all shrinking, the power is all drifting out
>>>> here, so the outcome is going to be the weapons-grade fuel.
>>>
>>> he was wrong.
>>>
>>> the whole talk is full of scientism. it's trying to get the prestige
>>> and authority of science for his political ideas. that's doubly bad.
>>> 1) he's trying to pass non-science off as science 2) his goal is to
>>> impress people with authority.
>>
>> Yeah, it is TED though. I don't think they're particularly good in
>> terms of academic quality.
>
> are you claiming he's a totally different thinker in

oops. i forgot to finish this section. i meant:

are you claiming he's a totally different thinker in his TED talk vs. in
his book?

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 12:54 PM, anonymous FI <anonymousfa...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yeah, that's a serious accusation/criticism by Max. Details!?

People form so many undiscussed negative opinions of me/FI. What's to be done? If they won't reply to some quote and say what they don't like, how can I address the problem? (I get this *all the time*, and usually they won't ever followup seriously with details. They just don't like it and still don't want to discuss it just like when they initially silently formed that negative judgement.)

It's best to discuss problems as they come up. If you delay, you have to be willing to reread a lot of context to refresh your memory, and you may be asking other people to do a lot of rereading to answer you. (When replying to old stuff, you should be especially careful to quote exactly what people should reread, no more, no less. That matters way more for replying to stuff where people don't remember it, so they have to rely on your quotes.)

Most people don't even want to talk about problems with their spouse, so the FI approach to this is really different than how most people live their lives...

[Kate Sams]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 2:53 PM, 'anonymous FI' anonymousfa...@gmail.com [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> the approach here is starting at the beginning and going really slow and
> discussing everything. compared to rushing to only discuss the main
> idea, this is a way of taking it much more seriously. this approach
> treats it as if it was actually thoroughly good and important.

I’m unclear on something. This paragraph reminds me of like a school curriculum where you try to cover *everything* on a topic from start to finish.

So first, what do you mean by "starting at the beginning"? Is there a beginning?

And why discuss everything (or, more accurately, nearly everything having to do with a topic that is known, since I don’t think you can literally discuss everything)? Why not discuss *until you’ve solved your problem*?

How does this approach mesh with the idea that your learning should be PROBLEM-oriented based on what YOU care about the most?

What if you don’t want to explore a connection that someone brings up because you’d rather put more thinking into the main problem you are interested in solving? Is this attitude problematic for learning?

One thing you could do is say “I’m interested in X. I’m not convinced A and B are worth my time right now because blah-blah. Instead, I want to think more about X because blah-blah. Does anyone have any criticisms of my explanations?”

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 14:48 PM, Kate Sams <ksam...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 2:53 PM, 'anonymous FI'
> anonymousfa...@gmail.com [fallible-ideas]
> <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
>> the approach here is starting at the beginning and going really slow
>> and
>> discussing everything. compared to rushing to only discuss the main
>> idea, this is a way of taking it much more seriously. this approach
>> treats it as if it was actually thoroughly good and important.
>
> I’m unclear on something. This paragraph reminds me of like a school
> curriculum where you try to cover *everything* on a topic from start
> to finish.

It means everything the people in the discussion think is important. Not
skipping stuff.

BTW you can skip stuff *on purpose*. You can reply to something with a
reason you suggesting skipping it for now and, if necessary, some
procedures for how that will work (e.g. "I will grant X for the sake of
discussion rather than debate it right now."). That's different than
silently ignoring disagreements and hoping they somehow won't matter.

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:40 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 14/9/17 10:54 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>> On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:


> I give a 10 minute summary of the selectorate theory (in the context of a talk on Flux)
>

> https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zq25UXc_ONg?start=516&end=1115&version=3

the video discusses politics from within a framework that i disagree with (as do DD and Rand, FYI). it’s making lots of background assumptions (about philosophy, economics, morality, etc) from the outset (of the linked part).

has anyone written down the framework being used, and discussed it as a framework? (e.g. by comparing it to other frameworks they also understand and arguing about which is best. especially if they say anything about other frameworks I actually think are good.) that’d make it way easier to discuss and criticize.

it’s really hard to talk to people about frameworks they're unaware of, and which they haven’t consciously considered. it’s hard to identify and tell them what they think, in words, when they don’t even know it and often won’t recognize it even when you get it right. it's especially hard when their framework has contradictions and gaps – then you tell them what they think and they say “that doesn’t make sense” (which is *your* point) and refuse to believe it’s their own framework!

or, in the alternative, you can try to get them to forget their framework and come learn your better framework. but they usually don’t want to even though they can’t criticize your framework, nor point to any correct criticism of it, by anyone, that they endorse.

---

btw i agree with anon’s characterization of FoR, BoI, AS, FH as key books for the FI framework. i wrote a blog post:

http://curi.us/2040-the-four-best-books

i think Max doubts the importance of these books and wants more demonstrations of their important, previews of their contents, arguments relating important ideas to the books, etc. it’d be especially helpful if he offered *initial criticism* of the books. why doesn’t he prioritize them above everything else? there must be some things about them he thinks are not so good compared to what i think. but he hasn’t been sharing those disagreements.

but anyway, comparing and contrasting the FI framework to a rival would be one way to proceed. and to proceed with that, Max could supply the written documentation for his rival framework. or if that doesn’t exist, he could try to create it, rather than going through life with unknown, unexamined, un-critically-discussed guiding ideas.

>>> Nobody's going to force you to watch it.
>>
>> I know that. Why say this? You should try to state what you mean clearly.
>
> Sure, I meant that I felt like your original post ultimately had very little value and didn't do anything besides signalling to the rest of the list... something, I don't really know what you were trying to say, besides "this is bad”.

As usual, I was writing true, relevant stuff, not signaling.

> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that you'd so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when it comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority. Maybe that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I think you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.

I disagree with the “sometimes a bit” qualification. That’s an unargued criticism! I think I’m consistently self-righteous, like Roark, Galt, Rand. But why be irked?


Elliot Temple
www.curi.us

[Kate Sams]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 5:53 PM, anonymous FI <anonymousfa...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 14:48 PM, Kate Sams <ksam...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 2:53 PM, 'anonymous FI' anonymousfa...@gmail.com [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>> the approach here is starting at the beginning and going really slow and
>>> discussing everything. compared to rushing to only discuss the main
>>> idea, this is a way of taking it much more seriously. this approach
>>> treats it as if it was actually thoroughly good and important.
>>
>> I’m unclear on something. This paragraph reminds me of like a school curriculum where you try to cover *everything* on a topic from start to finish.
>
> It means everything the people in the discussion think is important. Not skipping stuff.
>
> BTW you can skip stuff *on purpose*.

Yeah. It’s a mistake to believe that you should always discuss everything that the discussion participants think is important to discuss.

They could be wrong! They might not know your problem situation as well as you.

Or you could be wrong! They might actually have *better* insight into your problem situation than you.

I think the answer here is that all of this stuff should be *discussed* and exposed to error correction. Then, you can better discover which topics and tangents deserve your attention.

> You can reply to something with a reason you suggesting skipping it for now and, if necessary, some procedures for how that will work (e.g. "I will grant X for the sake of discussion rather than debate it right now."). That's different than silently ignoring disagreements and hoping they somehow won't matter.

ok

[Max Kaye]

On 15/9/17 2:33 am, Justin Mallone wrote:
> On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:40 AM, Max Kaye m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
>> On 14/9/17 10:54 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>> On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>
>>>> If you don't want to watch the video due to something predominantly unrelated (a tshirt) - fine.
>>>
>>> The video creator apparently considers it related.
>>
>> Sure, but the *motivations/philosophy* of the author don't necessarily
>> have anything to do with whether *the content has value*.
>
> If someone thinks Che is related to their video in a positive way, that bears on the content.

So I think I understand where you're coming from - enough to appreciate
it as valid. I do want to continue that discussion another time though,
since there's still a gap in our understanding.

>> Found this on Grey's twitter, though:
>>
>>> Is there a futile revolution you’d like to join? Then you need this Che Greyvara shirt from @DFTBArecords https://goo.gl/38bkrO
>>
>> https://twitter.com/cgpgrey/status/791045503983185920?lang=en
>>
>> So it doesn't sound like he _really_ has much respect for Che himself.
>
> Imagine if someone said “Is there a futile attempt at saving the Aryan Race you’d like to start? Then you need this Based Adolf shirt.” and the shirt depicted a Stickman Hitler. How would you interpret that? More positive on Hitler than you’re comfortable with?
>
> Invoking Che to use him as an example of futile idealism is a morally repugnant thing to do. People typically view idealism as morally virtuous and somewhat nice, if impractical when taking to “extremes.” That’s not a context Che deserves.

Yeah okay. I don't think the Hilter example is the worst thing you could
do, but it's definitely something I'd feel was pretty bad taste. My lack
of appreciation for Che's evil probably contributes here, too.

>>
>>>>> 2) Che! :(((((((((
>>>>> the description opens with a link to buy a che guavara shirt.
>>>>> so i'm just going to refuse to watch the video unless/until Max/anyone explains it's actually anti-che and it's some kind of joke, i guess? "Greyvara" just appears to be a combination of the dude's name ("Grey") with Che's name.
>>>>
>>>> I like how you didn't even watch the video before looking for reasons not to watch it.
>>>
>>> Sarcasm is mean and bad for clarity.
>>
>> Fair.
>>>> let's ignore any possible information/knowledge here, regardless of the content, because of the memes this guy uses to sell a shirt.
>>>
>>> Ignoring would look like: [silence]
>>>
>>> Expressing an objection, so that it may be addressed/discussed, is a Path Forward.
>>>
>>> Expressing objections *early*, instead of building up an undiscussed pile of objections/misunderstandings/criticisms/etc, is *rational*.
>>
>> Well, you were silent on the video - not on the other stuff. I agree
>> that expressing objections early is good, but you didn't express any
>> objections to the selectorate theory (the theory expressed in the video)
>> - you did express objections to watching the video at all. Maybe the
>> balance there is just taste.
>
> Learn to deeplink vids and give a timerange if you only want people to watch part

I did at least do this when I replied to one of the other emails in this
thread - (embedded + start/end times), so I guess I'm learning :P

>>>> Nobody's going to force you to watch it.
>>>
>>> I know that. Why say this? You should try to state what you mean clearly.
>>
>> Sure, I meant that I felt like your original post ultimately had very
>> little value and didn't do anything besides signalling to the rest of
>> the list... something, I don't really know what you were trying to say,
>> besides "this is bad”.
>
> You should be more inquisitive and less hostile when you encounter a big gap in perspectives like this.

You're right. The meta situation here is interesting.

* ET posts with a criticism based on limited information (but also
practice around when to criticise early, etc)
* Max replies with hostility based on limited information

So there's definitely a difference in how I reply in that sort of
situation - a difference to improve on.

>> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that you'd
>> so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when it
>> comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority. Maybe
>> that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I think
>> you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.
>
> Elaborate on self-righteous.

Google's definition of self-righteous

> having or characterized by a certainty, ~~especially an unfounded
one~~, that one is totally correct or morally superior.

(I've tried to strikeout the "unfounded" part because I know ET's
opinions aren't unfounded)

An important note that this is about **my perception**, not objective
reality.

A few examples:

* In the "History of FI" thread ET asked me to "just drop" something -
which I was fine with, but wasn't really explained (though this is
difficult in personal situations, admittedly)
* When I commented on his 10m "good and evil" podcast recently, talking
about what I thought the deeper explanation was, and lamented ET didn't
include it in the episode.

Communication style comes into this, but my only real experience of FI /
CF before this list was DD's writings. DD usually explains things quite
deeply and ETs style is very different. That doesn't mean it's worse (ET
definitely can reach a wider reading audience at a comprehension level),
but one of the reasons I had such respect for DD was that all his
writing had this context of "I might be wrong, but I think have good
explanations, and here they are in detail". ETs style (at least here)
seems more like "I might be wrong, but here's what I think" and
sometimes that explanation isn't as deep.

That is what occurs to me as *sometimes* coming off in a "characterised
by a certainty that one is totally correct or morally superior". Now
there are some obvious caveats: this is FI after all, hopefully that
explains my perception enough to understand, though.

>>>> Maybe if you *actually watch the video* it will give you some context for understanding whether it's pro-che or anti-che. But I'm sure not going to waste my time convincing you when you made a decision with so little information or effort.
>>>
>>> you seem hostile, and not interested in taking the time to address objections to the content you recommend. shall i infer it's not a recommendation that means much to you, and forget about it? previously you communicated otherwise.
>>
>> I was hostile - no doubt about that. I replied in haste this morning
>> before having to leave the house; so definitely didn't put the time I
>> normally might in.
>
> Low-edit-time posts can be more honest IMHO.
>
> Editing for clarity is fine. Editing for hostility is not a great sign.

Yeah, I haven't deliberately observed whether I edit for hostility, but
if I do write something hostile I don't think I ever edit to *increase*
the hostility. It is something I'm going to start trying to observe
(though maybe that's in conflict with trying not to be hostile too). In
any case something to keep in mind.

Low-edit-time posts are almost certainly more honest, but that doesn't
mean they're more useful, and are almost certainly less resistant to
criticism. There's a place, just not everywhere, and my original reply
is an example of that.

>> That said, I didn't see any objections to the *content* I recommended; I
>> did see objections to
>>
>> a) The t-shirt
>> b) The author
>>
>> And I don't *really* care about debating those things too much - I don't
>> have a horse in *that* race, and I think the most morally repugnant
>> people (perhaps Che is a good example) are still able to produce
>> knowledge (or communicate it) - a point made in BoI too.
>
> Perhaps there’s something you could learn here about being able to make better judgments of what to engage in based on limited information. This is a really important skill in a world where there’s so much possible information to engage with.

I think there is (both the thing I brought up about the meta-situation
before, and also in general with outside media). Have either you or ET
written anything on that particularly?

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 16:02 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 15/9/17 2:33 am, Justin Mallone wrote:
>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:40 AM, Max Kaye m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas]
>> <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

>>> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that
>>> you'd
>>> so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when it
>>> comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority.
>>> Maybe
>>> that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I think
>>> you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.
>>
>> Elaborate on self-righteous.
>
> Google's definition of self-righteous
>
> > having or characterized by a certainty, ~~especially an unfounded
> one~~, that one is totally correct or morally superior.
>
> (I've tried to strikeout the "unfounded" part because I know ET's
> opinions aren't unfounded)

Google (and Apple) both use a pretty bad dictionary. (That definition is
so biased against self-righteousness.)

This one is usually better:

https://www.merriam-webster.com

The OED is usually better, too, if you have access.

merriam webster's definitions include:

> convinced of one's own righteousness especially in contrast with the
> actions and beliefs of others

> having or showing a strong belief that your own actions, opinions,
> etc., are right and other people's are wrong

> having or showing the attitude of someone who strongly believes in the
> rightness of his or her own actions or opinions

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:02 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 15/9/17 2:33 am, Justin Mallone wrote:
>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:40 AM, Max Kaye m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:


>>> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that you'd
>>> so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when it
>>> comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority. Maybe
>>> that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I think
>>> you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.
>> Elaborate on self-righteous.
>
> Google's definition of self-righteous
>
> > having or characterized by a certainty, ~~especially an unfounded one~~, that one is totally correct or morally superior.
>
> (I've tried to strikeout the "unfounded" part because I know ET's opinions aren't unfounded)
>
> An important note that this is about **my perception**, not objective reality.
>
> A few examples:
>
> * In the "History of FI" thread ET asked me to "just drop" something - which I was fine with, but wasn't really explained (though this is difficult in personal situations, admittedly)

That something is personal or private *is* the explanation. If you have a problem with that, you can state it. E.g you could say you think privacy shouldn’t exist or say this issue is so crucial that privacy should be broken.

It’s hard to comment because you’re misquoting and not providing adequate context – e.g. you offer no reminders of what the issue was.

The text “just drop” doesn’t exist in my search of the FI history thread (which you put the wrong name for in quotes).

i searched in two different mail clients with two separate email accounts in case of a mail client bug.

please don’t put stuff in quotes here unless you’re confident it’s literally, exactly an actual quote.

> * When I commented on his 10m "good and evil" podcast recently, talking about what I thought the deeper explanation was, and lamented ET didn't include it in the episode.

what’s the problem or issue?

is your complaint that the podcast should have been longer and said more? is making some short stuff self-righteous?

you got more info in email replies.

i have no idea what your complaint is.

> Communication style comes into this, but my only real experience of FI / CF before this list was DD's writings. DD usually explains things quite deeply and ETs style is very different.

You mean DD writes in depth in his books. That is, in longer pieces he provides more details without using external references.

Thousands of DD’s emails are a lot like mine.

> That doesn't mean it's worse (ET definitely can reach a wider reading audience at a comprehension level), but one of the reasons I had such respect for DD was that all his writing had this context of "I might be wrong, but I think have good explanations, and here they are in detail". ETs style (at least here) seems more like "I might be wrong, but here's what I think" and sometimes that explanation isn't as deep.

The explanations are available on every point, in full depth. If you can’t find them for some point, you can ask. I’m unaware of any issue in FI philosophy that you consider unaddressed and wish to be addressed.

Do you want me to frontload all the answers before you even say much? Just write 10k word chapters, or even books, in response to initial comments on a subject? Shall I tell you both what the questions are and the answers are, as DD’s books do? That isn’t discussion. And anyway I already wrote a lot about tons of the topics, so if you don’t want answers specific to you then just go search the archives and my websites.

If you want more info on some point, ask or search. Don’t expect me to guess everything you want and preemptively hand it to you. That’s actually a ridiculous method and is one of the many things wrong with books.

there are a million different details i could elaborate on. i don’t know which ones you’re interested in unless you tell me. if you want to learn more but don’t know any questions, and want to be guided and told some of the important questions in the field, just ask for that.

no matter what the format is – books or otherwise – no one learns much without taking responsibility for their learning, and pursuing it on their own initiative, with their own motor.

If you want to learn without discussing, I do actually have far more writing available than DD does. But that basically never works. E.g., as far as we know, no one has ever understood DD’s books (even like 10% comprehension) just by reading them, without participating extensively in the discussion community.

one of the main reasons I haven’t written books similar to DD’s is *that wouldn’t work*. DD’s books are useful as *supplements* to discussion, and are alright at marketing/outreach, but they don’t actually work well for anyone as a primary educational tool.

this is not a criticism of DD’s books in particular. most books are much worse. it’s just that sitting there and reading a book isn’t an educational method with enough error correction. not even close. (having a few chats with one’s friends is also totally inadequate.) plus there’s no way to include and exclude the right details for each reader cuz it’s one-size-fits-all, so there’s always tons of gaps you have to fill in yourself (or else misunderstand most of it).

DD’s books, like Popper’s and Rand’s, are a huge failure in a straightforward sense. if the ideas in those books were understood by lots of people, then it’d rapidly and dramatically change the world in huge ways. that isn’t happening. it’s not on the verge of happening. it’s not 5% of the way to happening. it’s *not working*.

if the ideas were *successfully communicated*, things would be totally different. the books almost entirely fail at that, while also obscuring the problem.

this is one of the problems i’m working on.

btw this doesn’t mean the books are worthless, even when read once alone. learning 0.0001% of a great book can be hugely beneficial for someone. people often do pick up a little bit and get some value. but that’s super different than someone actually understanding the book’s ideas in a somewhat complete, correct way.

> That is what occurs to me as *sometimes* coming off in a "characterised by a certainty that one is totally correct or morally superior". Now there are some obvious caveats: this is FI after all, hopefully that explains my perception enough to understand, though.

What’s the problem?

All I got is that I once didn’t want to talk about something which was none of your business, I once made a podcast in reply to Anne B’s question and it didn’t say everything you would have liked it to, and I don’t format my writing as books which fool you into thinking they’re complete when they’re actually at the *beginning of infinity* (thoroughly incomplete).

>>>>> Maybe if you *actually watch the video* it will give you some context for understanding whether it's pro-che or anti-che. But I'm sure not going to waste my time convincing you when you made a decision with so little information or effort.
>>>>
>>>> you seem hostile, and not interested in taking the time to address objections to the content you recommend. shall i infer it's not a recommendation that means much to you, and forget about it? previously you communicated otherwise.
>>>
>>> I was hostile - no doubt about that. I replied in haste this morning
>>> before having to leave the house; so definitely didn't put the time I
>>> normally might in.
>> Low-edit-time posts can be more honest IMHO.
>> Editing for clarity is fine. Editing for hostility is not a great sign.
>
> Yeah, I haven't deliberately observed whether I edit for hostility, but if I do write something hostile I don't think I ever edit to *increase* the hostility. It is something I'm going to start trying to observe (though maybe that's in conflict with trying not to be hostile too). In any case something to keep in mind.
>
> Low-edit-time posts are almost certainly more honest, but that doesn't mean they're more useful, and are almost certainly less resistant to criticism. There's a place, just not everywhere, and my original reply is an example of that.

I mostly write low-edit-time stuff (and make videos/podcasts where I do one take of un-planned-out, unrehearsed talking). I think it’s better to automate good thinking, communicating, etc. Integrate it into how you deal with stuff (initially) instead of keeping it as a separate, later step.

This also relates to do philosophical viewpoint of focusing on powering up and learning, and mostly doing stuff when you’re skilled enough that it's easy (cheap, efficient). Needing to edit much is a sign you’re doing something hard for you.

>>> That said, I didn't see any objections to the *content* I recommended; I
>>> did see objections to
>>>
>>> a) The t-shirt
>>> b) The author
>>>
>>> And I don't *really* care about debating those things too much - I don't
>>> have a horse in *that* race, and I think the most morally repugnant
>>> people (perhaps Che is a good example) are still able to produce
>>> knowledge (or communicate it) - a point made in BoI too.
>> Perhaps there’s something you could learn here about being able to make better judgments of what to engage in based on limited information. This is a really important skill in a world where there’s so much possible information to engage with.
>
> I think there is (both the thing I brought up about the meta-situation before, and also in general with outside media). Have either you or ET written anything on that particularly?

In Paths Forward stuff I think I talked about bringing up the FIRST criticism you have, then seeing how the criticism is addressed (if at all). It’s a big time saver.

Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 5:07 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:02 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:


>> Communication style comes into this, but my only real experience of FI / CF before this list was DD's writings. DD usually explains things quite deeply and ETs style is very different.
>
> You mean DD writes in depth in his books. That is, in longer pieces he provides more details without using external references.
>
> Thousands of DD’s emails are a lot like mine.
>
>> That doesn't mean it's worse (ET definitely can reach a wider reading audience at a comprehension level), but one of the reasons I had such respect for DD was that all his writing had this context of "I might be wrong, but I think have good explanations, and here they are in detail". ETs style (at least here) seems more like "I might be wrong, but here's what I think" and sometimes that explanation isn't as deep.
>
> The explanations are available on every point, in full depth. If you can’t find them for some point, you can ask. I’m unaware of any issue in FI philosophy that you consider unaddressed and wish to be addressed.
>
> Do you want me to frontload all the answers before you even say much? Just write 10k word chapters, or even books, in response to initial comments on a subject? Shall I tell you both what the questions are and the answers are, as DD’s books do? That isn’t discussion. And anyway I already wrote a lot about tons of the topics, so if you don’t want answers specific to you then just go search the archives and my websites.
>
> If you want more info on some point, ask or search. Don’t expect me to guess everything you want and preemptively hand it to you. That’s actually a ridiculous method and is one of the many things wrong with books.
>
> there are a million different details i could elaborate on. i don’t know which ones you’re interested in unless you tell me. if you want to learn more but don’t know any questions, and want to be guided and told some of the important questions in the field, just ask for that.
>
> no matter what the format is – books or otherwise – no one learns much without taking responsibility for their learning, and pursuing it on their own initiative, with their own motor.
>
> If you want to learn without discussing, I do actually have far more writing available than DD does. But that basically never works. E.g., as far as we know, no one has ever understood DD’s books (even like 10% comprehension) just by reading them, without participating extensively in the discussion community.
>
> one of the main reasons I haven’t written books similar to DD’s is *that wouldn’t work*. DD’s books are useful as *supplements* to discussion, and are alright at marketing/outreach, but they don’t actually work well for anyone as a primary educational tool.
>
> this is not a criticism of DD’s books in particular. most books are much worse. it’s just that sitting there and reading a book isn’t an educational method with enough error correction. not even close. (having a few chats with one’s friends is also totally inadequate.) plus there’s no way to include and exclude the right details for each reader cuz it’s one-size-fits-all, so there’s always tons of gaps you have to fill in yourself (or else misunderstand most of it).
>
> DD’s books, like Popper’s and Rand’s, are a huge failure in a straightforward sense. if the ideas in those books were understood by lots of people, then it’d rapidly and dramatically change the world in huge ways. that isn’t happening. it’s not on the verge of happening. it’s not 5% of the way to happening. it’s *not working*.
>
> if the ideas were *successfully communicated*, things would be totally different. the books almost entirely fail at that, while also obscuring the problem.
>
> this is one of the problems i’m working on.
>
> btw this doesn’t mean the books are worthless, even when read once alone. learning 0.0001% of a great book can be hugely beneficial for someone. people often do pick up a little bit and get some value. but that’s super different than someone actually understanding the book’s ideas in a somewhat complete, correct way.

Take 1000 people of the sort who would read BoI.

Give them FoR and BoI to read. Result? 0/1000 understand much.

What if, instead, DD talked to each person individually for 1000 hours and they also spent 1000 hours reading books of DD’s choice?

Result: probably 0/1000, might get lucky and find 1.

What if instead of 1000 hours of discussion, it’s *up to* 1000 hours of discussion, or else it stops when the person doesn’t want to discuss anymore? And they can veto the reading. Way more realistic. And now you’d see most of the people only wanted to discuss for single digit hours, unless DD was manipulative and kept lots of his points hidden, OR the person saw DD as an authority/teacher and was willing to bear with him, at extreme length, while learning basic stuff (including e.g. grammar, reading comprehension, some math, some programming, some logic, some physics, how to write). If the person was willing to just learn whatever topics DD chose then he could pick less offensive topics and delay getting to the points that alienate people. However no one wants to do that – they’d only want to begin a 1000 hour learning process if they were told at the beginning what the end point is and they already thought that looked good. there’s no way, in general, to just avoid telling people *where this discussion/educational-process is going* and have them be interested anyway for hundreds of hours. “just bear with me and we’ll get to the conclusions about your life later” doesn’t work well, people run out of patience very fast (a little less fast if they think you’re a prestigious authority, but well, i’ve observed many, many discussions where DD had very little ability to hold the attention of fans of his books who did not want to learn from him.)


DD basically doesn’t know how to persuade people of his ideas. Yet he wrote books. Isn’t that weird? Shouldn’t you figure out ways of explaining ideas to people which work over 0.1% of the time in extended discussion before you take on the much harder project of educating people via a book with no discussion?

This isn’t a problem with lay people or people who aren’t smart enough or anything like that. DD has talked with plenty of (supposedly) super smart intellectuals, scientists, etc. Whoever the intellectual elite is (as opposed to like celebrity actors), DD has had the opportunity to talk with lots of them. The success rate is similar to with lay people. Some things tend to go better, but others worse. I too have talked to a variety of people like that without making much headway.

It’s not just DD. Rand may have millions of fans, but very few know much. And I don’t know how to explain this stuff to people either.

at least i’m trying a wide variety of stuff. why did DD write a second book after the first one didn’t work well? he didn’t want to critically discuss that. perhaps he was pessimistic about doing better in some other way and didn’t want to keep searching for solutions. perhaps he likes impressing people with polished, long writing. perhaps he thinks people are too stupid and annoying to talk to much. perhaps he thinks people sabotage discussion so it’s better to leave them out of it (but they sabotage reading too).

Highly-iterative, asynchronous, written discussion is the best medium because it’s the best for ongoing *error correction*. (That’s why DD used it heavily before deciding everyone sucks too much to talk to, or something like that.) More iteration allows errors to be caught earlier, with less built on top of them. And small chunks are easier to work with and modify. And a web of little connected pieces is way better than a monolith that you can’t restructure.

and i haven’t even gotten into irrationality. into people’s *blind spots* which discussion at least can try to talk about.

BTW I’ve tried to get people to write a larger number of shorter posts, with little success. e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql8OsBb_QvU&index=7&list=PLKx6lO5RmaesaCfm2dXGUfbycDYEXJoU9



Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Max Kaye]

Replying to a few Anon FI posts at once:

On 15/9/17 4:08 am, anonymous FI wrote:
>
> On Sep 14, 2017, at 3:58 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
> Do you think Che had some good ideas we should learn from? Some valuable
> knowledge? Or not?

I don't know whether he does. I just don't know enough about him. So
'no', but only by default.

> Why is Che a *good* example of this category? I can think of people who
> are morally repugnant but able to do some good work, have some good
> ideas. E.g. some of the best writers about Apple are really awful
> leftists (e.g. John Gruber and Daniel Eran Dilger).

He might not be. Lack of knowledge, etc, from my side.

> Even if Che is technically an example of this category (b/c you discuss
> *more than zero* knowledge, instead of a good amount of knowledge), he
> wouldn't be a *good* example unless he had something significant and
> valuable to his name, e.g. a good essay.
>
>> The *main* point I wanted to make was that the value of an explanation
>> can be independent of its context.
>
> "can be" is true but very weak. everyone knows a pearl "can" be found in
> the muck.

Fair.


-----------

On 15/9/17 4:53 am, anonymous FI wrote:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
>

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 3:53 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>> [1]: the only thing I'd change is "deserving the treatment he gets
>> elsewhere (where they are considered high value" is more appropriately
>> put as "deserving of being taken seriously" - more like that I'm not
>> trying to waste anyone's time, I really do think there is good
>> rational knowledge in that video. I also don't put as much value on
>> the context something is presented in (not to say I disregard it,
>> though) as I infer ET to, and these in combination fed back into the
>> other feelings.
>
> i think you should view this discussion as your video recommendation
> being taken especially seriously.
>
> instead of glossing over aspects of it, people took it seriously enough
> to comment on details.

I hadn't considered that, and it's a good point. Thank you.

> the approach here is starting at the beginning and going really slow and
> discussing everything. compared to rushing to only discuss the main
> idea, this is a way of taking it much more seriously. this approach
> treats it as if it was actually thoroughly good and important.

This isn't a method I'm particularly familiar with - I definitely rush
into things usually. Will be sure to keep that in mind.

> if anything, people took the recommendation *more seriously* than you
> intended.
>
> you only meant you liked some unspecified parts of the video which you
> regard as the main ideas. that's basically what your recommendation
> would mean from a normal person on Facebook.

That's curious, and not something I've considered before (in any context).

> but people here thought the best of Max and optimistically treated the
> recommendation more like if Elliot had said it on FI. (this isn't just
> incorrect judgement, it's a reasonable thing to regardless of what Max
> intended. taking something extra seriously is generally more productive
> and revealing.)
>
> people thought: oh it's great? cool! something that should stand up to
> total scrutiny! but then it didn't.
>
> bothering with detail criticism, and trying to deal with the video
> discussion as a sequence of potentially 50 gradual steps, is a sign of
> respect.

So in future, how much weight should I give to context in this sort of
situation?

Is it something where I should take care to remove context to show only
(and exactly) what I intend to?

I think I'm asking because I don't quite understand this process (the 50
gradual steps) yet. I don't think I've seen it play out so far. Since I
don't quite understand it I can't use the model to inform how I should
prepare content to be best suited to that discussion.

The criticism of the context is still something that frustrates me, but
I am also starting to understand why it's useful / employed here. I
guess it's a difference in two points of view:

* I am looking to discuss one thing in particular: the selectorate
theory, but I didn't link to that, I linked to *more* than I intended
* ET (and FI) look at it in the usual way, which (my guess is) by
looking at it *as a whole*, and stepping in slowly.

My analogy to explain what I mean about "the usual way" is this (in the
context of a garden):

Instead of rushing to look at the central feature of the garden (roses)
slowly take a single step inside and examine the first rock, and the
first daisy, and as you come to each, understand it, and its purpose,
and once you have, continue moving on. If that process goes well
(resists criticism) then you know the roses are high quality. But if
that goes badly (is able to be refuted) then it's likely the roses
weren't as good as you had hoped anyway, so move on to a better garden
instead of persevering with this one.

Is that getting closer?

> also: of course you aren't trying to waste anyone's time, but those good
> intentions don't mean you have any real understanding of what would be a
> good use of various FI people's time.

That's true, and as ET mentioned before, I should be less presumptuous
about how he (and the FI community) *should* spent their time.


-------


On 15/9/17 5:54 am, anonymous FI wrote:

>
> On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:40 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>> Most scientists have terrible philosophy, but they can still produce
>> new knowledge, and that knowledge still has value.
>

> over 99% of the time, they DO NOT do good work BECAUSE they have
> terrible philosophy. huge problem!!!!
>
> most "science" is really, really, really bad.
>
> when you find an exception – a scientist doing good work – you will
> usually find he has much better philosophy than the others (even if it
> superficially looks similar).

I agree that scientific output is better with good philosophy.
Intuitively this seems more true in "more emergent" sciences (e.g.
psychology) than things like physics. However, I do acknowledge they
play a role in both.

> i bet if you posted a few examples of what you think is bad philosophy
> plus good science, we could point out you're mistaken about every one of
> them. either the science isn't actually so good, or the philosophy isn't
> so bad.
>
> (please don't instead reply by saying you meant "more than zero new
> knowledge with more than zero value" – i'm trying to reply to the
> substantive idea instead of the weak, hedged wording.)

I appreciate you trying to engage more with the substance. I don't doubt
that any example of "bad philosophy good science" would be able to be
criticised. The premise implies that is possible.

I guess I do believe there's a middle ground. Stephen Hawking doesn't
seem to have good philosophy (based on his ideas on climate change, AI,
non-human civilizations, etc), but he definitely has contributed to
physics: hawking radiation, firewalls around black holes, holography, etc.

That's more what I'm aiming for - there's definitely near-zero knowledge
creation with very bad philosophy, and I'm less interested in that.

>> Same here - don't watch the video for the memes, watch it for the
>> knowledge, and decide whether it was worth it based on that.
>>
>> I disagree (now) with a lot of the stuff Grey has said/produced [1],
>> but I still think this is a video that's definitely worth watching,
>> partly because it's entertaining, but mostly because this is the only
>> theory of power I've encountered that has deep explanatory potential.
>

> you're mistaken to expect FI veterans to share that taste in
entertainment.
>
> also wrong to expect them to be as impressed by the content as you are.
>
> just going by the book's amazon page, i can see that the material is in
> categories where we already have views. some details may be new, but as
> a whole it's not new to us. and it's stuff we disagree with and dislike.

I've seen a bunch of views on here about politics in general (or at
least in ET / JM's writing), but not on the nature of political power in
general.

DD sort of engages with this in BoI (optimism / choices), but I don't
think his understanding of power goes far enough. I agree with him _on
the whole_ but also think that he doesn't engage with a bunch of the new
ideas since Popper. Granted, most of them are terrible, but things like
the selectorate theory give us a better insight (IMO).

One example is DD's criticism of PR and defence of Pluralism. Reading
that was the first time I actually held an explanation for why pluralism
might be okay, and why PR can do evil via what I used to think was a
feature, not a bug (compromise).

However, the selectorate theory gives us enough insight to understand
that _the same sort of compromise_ can easily occur within a ruling
party since _their administration is no longer based on a consistent
explanation / framework_. This arises from a leader's need to satisfy
keys supporters and their diverse interests.

Thus authority is misused in pluralism in the same way as PR - though
perhaps to different extents.

Moreover, it shows that regardless of the framework you use, if you have
(what I call) static majoritarianism you necessarily require the misuse
of authority in this way. **Corruption is a tool** and refusing to use
that tool means you are more easily replaced (since the voter base / key
supporters are more ready to change team).

We saw this with the *rise* of Trump (existing key supporters switching
teams), and we're seeing it with supports now leaving him.

E.g. Ann Coulter recently retweeted:
https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/908176374074155009

> If he does not build the wall, he simply will not get reelected. If
he does build it, he will win 2020 by a landslide. It is that simple.

Whether _he should or shouldn't build the wall_ is besides the point
here; this is *corruption as a tool* in action.

> you may not be emotionally or intellectually ready to face this – that
> the ideas you value are actually deeply incompatible with BoI,
> Objectivism, etc. and it'd be hard to explain it to you due to your lack
> of background knowledge.

Well I definitely believe that *most* of the ideas I value are
compatible with BoI - it's been a very integral part of my life since
reading it (have read most chapters a 2+ times), and I try to filter
_everything_ through the lessons I've picked up.

I've also abandoned many views I *used* to have.

Now, that doesn't mean I don't have a long way to go, but **I'm very
committed to fallibilsm**. BoI gave me the tools to reject (and
understand why I should reject) all other competing philosophies, so
between a choice of the ideas (outside fallibilism) and fallibilism,
I'll take the latter. That also doesn't mean that journey will be easy.

Another way of looking at that is that there's nowhere else for me to go
besides *through* that criticism.

> i think it'd be better to start with e.g. discussing FoR/BoI/FH/AS in
> detail.

I know FoR/BoI - is FH Hayek? Or (FH) the Fountainhead and (AS) atlas
shrugged?

> we could discuss those independently first, then apply to selectorate
> theory later.

Fair - though I guess my impatience wants me to push for the selectorate
theory earlier. Mostly that's a time constraint thing and that I expect
reading AS particularly would take too long.

> so what you should do is be more like: "ok i understand that FI
> disagrees with selectorate theory SO MUCH that they can reject it
> without even watching a video or reading a book. their principles say
> that much that they only need a tiny bit of evidence to know what's
> going on. that's really interesting, so i will start methodically
> studying FoR/BoI/FH/AS. their claim is rather amazing, but they do,
> reasonably, say it also takes a massive amount of knowledge to do it. i
> will start learning that knowledge unless/until i run into a problem in
> the part i've learned. step by step the steps will either be wonderful
> or i'll hit some part i disagree with and which is suitable for
> immediate discussion without such massive tangents to cover background
> knowledge."

Okay, so this seems like a reasonable plan. As I mentioned before,
though, I'm not aware of any writing (FI / ET / JM) that talks about
this sort of thing particularly, and if it's rejectable outright I'd
like to know why as soon as possible (at the very least this would free
up more time to read FH / AS).

If there are any essays out there on this I'd appreciate anyone pointing
me to them.

>>> The blurb says:
>>>
>>>> They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them
>>>> in power.
>>>
>>> So the book, by its own account, starts by assuming something I
>>> consider false, then builds on that.
>>
>> I don't think it's an assertion (even if the blurb says so) since it's
>> actually quite well explained.
>

> so you think the book is contradicting itself? doesn't that mistake
> matter? or you deny it responsibility for its own self-summary?

I am not sure the author's wrote that blurb. It's on Amazon, and I found
it at [1] too, but from my understanding it doesn't sound like something
the authors would say.

[1] : http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/book?isbn=9781610390453

>> Essentially the explanation goes: power dynamics have an evolutionary
>> nature that means *in order to acquire and hold power* you don't get
>> to choose all your actions (power acts upon you to force your hand
>> sometimes). You might have options in which path to choose, but many
>> paths are eliminated simply by being in a position of power. The
>> result is that those able to acquire power are already accepting on
>> the premise that they'll need to do things they don't like to maintain
>> power. Moreover if they don't do what needs to be done, there will be
>> someone else willing to, and this can very quickly lead to a situation
>> where it's within key supporters' interest to replace the ruler. Thus,
>> rulers have to do whatever it takes to stay in power. That doesn't
>> mean they lose all autonomy though.
>

> Yeah we already know the parts of this which are true, e.g. that rulers
> face *logic of the situation* (as DD would call it, following Popper)
> pressures.

Is there a reason to believe that the *logic of the situation* does not
lead to the conclusion that *rulers must do whatever it takes to stay in
power or risk losing power*?

>> I go into a bit more detail in the talk I link at the top - happy to
>> discuss further if you still think it's incorrect.
>>
>>> Does the book have any advocates who will publicly, rationally
>>> discuss the issues to a conclusion? Fully, without limits? Because I
>>> don't see the value in reading something I think is bad which also
>>> has no advocates offering valuable discussion.
>>
>> Unsure. I'm interested in debating it, but I'm more (proportionally)
>> interested in running my business, the Flux movement, etc. Maybe that
>> doesn't fulfil the "to a conclusion? Fully, without limits?" part.
>

> Ideas rule the world. (Which is somewhat opposite to the Dictator's
> Handbook perspective.) So your priorities are mistaken.

Why isn't BoI more popular then?

Certainly various meme-plexes are deeply ingrained in our culture, but
is there a reason there aren't *laws of power* like their are *laws of
physics*, or *laws of economics*?

(Granted, all knowledge is fallible, so *laws* might be too strong a
word, but you can replace it with *theory*, *misconception*, etc if you
like)

>>> btw there were a variety of other prior indications to me that the
>>> Rules for Rulers video is bad, and that it'd be expensive to engage
>>> with. i brought up Che because it's clearer and easier to point out
>>> than the other issues.
>>
>> What indicators do you have *that the explanation in the video* is
>> refuted?
>

> that it's totally in conflict with Objectivism and BoI b/c it
> fundamentally downplays the power of ideas, creativity and persuasion,
> and downplays the importance of morality, and downplays the complexity
> of the human condition.

I don't see it like that. Ideas play a big role in the selectorate theory:

* Which key supporters do you adopt?
* Which keys do you eliminate?
* What compromises do you make to stay in power?
* How do you distribute the treasure?
* How do you satisfy your voter base and *their* ideas?

All of these things require explanations, and staying in power requires
*good* explanations that that. Granted they're often used for evil, but
part of rising to that position is being able to better create and
instantiate those explanations.

It's also not a theory that explains *how to improve the world*, it
tries to explain *why we see the behaviour we do*. And given that
morality / fallibilism / creativity are not things that are explicitly
expressed in historical power dynamics is it a surprise that explaining
those past dynamics doesn't involve them?

Most importantly, when I try to apply *my* understanding of it the ideas
I generate seem to be resistant to criticism and seem to persist (at
this preliminary level).

I haven't encountered any criticisms yet that I'm convinced by.

>>>> let's ignore any possible information/knowledge here, regardless of
>>>> the content, because of the memes this guy uses to sell a shirt.
>>>
>>> Ignoring would look like: [silence]
>>>
>>> Expressing an objection, so that it may be addressed/discussed, is a
>>> Path Forward.
>>>
>>> Expressing objections *early*, instead of building up an undiscussed
>>> pile of objections/misunderstandings/criticisms/etc, is *rational*.
>>
>> Well, you were silent on the video - not on the other stuff. I agree
>> that expressing objections early is good, but you didn't express any
>> objections to the selectorate theory (the theory expressed in the
>> video) - you did express objections to watching the video at all.
>> Maybe the balance there is just taste.
>

> the context of material is relevant to interpreting the material (e.g.
> figuring out what the author meant by a statement). so it can be a good
> thing to discuss early.
>
> in this case, the Che shirt is evidence of the author's unseriousness.
> whether the author is a serious intellectual or an unserious panderer is
> relevant to interpreting his content statements. e.g. if you spot a
> detail mistake, is that because the material is mistaken, or is it
> because he's kind of person who isn't paying attention to details (a
> different kind of mistake) and so he just inserts lots of random detail
> errors into whatever he says?

Is it also possible that he's just mistaken about Che and the badness of
the shirt? Given we haven't delved into his video much yet, I don't
think we have enough information to figure out which mistake it is, and
that is very important here.

It's possible to be mistaken about Che's badness without being mistaken
about an abstract theory. I was definitely mistaken about Che (still
have to go educate myself on that)

>>>> Nobody's going to force you to watch it.
>>>
>>> I know that. Why say this? You should try to state what you mean
>>> clearly.
>>
>> Sure, I meant that I felt like your original post ultimately had very
>> little value
>

> do you think the entire discussion spawned from it has very little value?
>
> i think the discussion has lots of value, and this indicates you were
> wrong about the post which led to that value. the initial post leading
> to interesting discussion was no accident!

I think this conversion definitely has value **to me**. But that's also
because of *my* mistakes in my first reply.

I am not sure it has value to anyone else, though I do appreciate the
discussion and learning.

>> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that
>> you'd so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when
>> it comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority.
>> Maybe that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I
>> think you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.
>

> what's bad about being self-righteous?

The google definition again:

> having or characterized by a certainty, especially an unfounded one,

that one is totally correct or morally superior.

The "unfounded" part is definitely bad. However, that's
self-righteousness in general, and particularly excluded that section
before.

Here are some ways it might cause mistakes:

* Tainting what you say in the eyes of someone else - essentially extra
information that might distract from the point
* An unwillingness to reconsider one's opinion (though this is FI so I
don't think it'll happen here)

Other than that, I don't really know. I suppose this was a bias in me
that this is a negative thing, maybe because I associate it with undue
arrogance or the like.

> btw this is the kind of issue which is hard to discuss because of your
> lack of background knowledge. it really immediately and directly leads
> to tangents about Objectivism which, if you want to go into detail and
> seriously get this right – lead to reading *and studying and discussing*
> books, as part of the tangent, before returning to the original issue.
>
> it's possible to try to give you short summaries that work for people
> missing background knowledge, but it's much harder and they'll be
> considerably worse than what Objectivism has to offer.

Fair enough. Will have to check out FH / AS.

> similarly, FI already has a sophisticated understanding of authority,
> power, etc. the ideas you're bringing up wouldn't fill a void for FI,
> they would contradict ideas which have been extensively debated already
> and which have hundreds of connections to other parts of FI philosophy.
> that pre-existing FI knowledge is background knowledge informing some
> people's contributions to the discussion, but not Max's, so it creates a
> big perspective gap.

From my perspective thus far I don't think it contradicts ideas of
authority put forward in BoI - I think it looks at selective application
of authority to some cases, and more importantly *how that acts on the
wielder* as opposed to the philosophical implications. I don't think
they're opposed to one another - though maybe I need some more training
in objectivism.

> Regarding wanting approval, that issue is one of the themes of _The
> Fountainhead_.

Noted.

>>> If it was Hitler instead of Che, would you see my point? Stalin? Mao?
>>> Castro?
>>
>> *That* point is valid. Maybe add Putin to the list.
>

> then are you conceding more or less everything? or are you denying that
> Che is similar to them? (Putin is like them, but Che isn't!? Nah. So I
> guess it's the conceding? But you don't try to talk about what you're
> conceding and what it changes. So your current position is unclear.)

I'm conceding. I've come around.

>>>> The video is self contained, the description is for selling things
>>>> to fans.
>>>>
>>>>> otherwise, no, i'm out, i have better things to do than watch
>>>>> pro-Che material.
>>>>
>>>> Didn't realise your "initial comments" would be so "initial".
>>>
>>> Why state this?
>>
>> Two reasons: sarcasm (as before, and not something I'm proud of [2]),
>> and to point out that I thought you didn't give it any serious thought
>> - which I think goes against what you advocate most of the time.
>

> Did Elliot make a statement/claim which was inadequately thought out?
> Which one?

No, it was the *focus* of his statements that I took issue with.

>> While not equivalent, it's similar to me going to curi.us and saying
>> "this guy has a post about Bitcoin sucking, or about Trump, so I'm not
>> going to put in the effort until *some condition*"
>

> That'd be *absolutely reasonable*. E.g.: "I think Trump sucks, and I've
> written about it here, here, and here. I know of no refutations of my
> views. I'm not interested in this Trump booster unless he will either
> put up or shut up – that is, drop the unargued pro-Trump claims so we
> can focus on something else, or else provide serious arguments for them."

Okay, I previously considered it unreasonable. My reasoning is:

* We're all fallible
* So we all hold some ideas that are wrong and some that are right
* And so I shouldn't focus on the wrong ideas as much as the right ideas
if I'm interested in maximising learning over time

Perhaps my mistake there is **to head straight to things I agree with**.

> If you challenge a Trump supporter with the example quote above, and
> they reply, "What are you, a Mexican? Why don't you self-deport?" then
> that was productive, you quickly and clearly found out there wasn't

> going to be a worthwhile discussion. It's better to raise issues like
> this – and see if people are reasonable or not – instead of try to

> ignore them. (In the alternative, the Trump supporter might say, "Sure,
> here are 3 of my favorite books with arguments. I skimmed your writing
> on the matter and see no mention of these well known books. Please
> address them or endorse something which addresses them." Then, again,
> you quickly learn something important about the potential for the
> conversation, in addition to learning about your broad judgement [1]
> that Trump supporters should be dismissed.)
>
> [1] the judgement of the person in the scenario who challenged the Trump
> supporter that way, not Max's judgement.

This is a good point, and something I haven't internalised well enough yet.

>>> And you're being too presumptive about how I should spend my time.
>>> You're presuming something like: you know that some activities are
>>> cheap, easy and harmless for me. Therefore (you wouldn't put it this
>>> bluntly or strongly, but it's along these lines) I must be resisting
>>> doing them out of malice, stupidity, irrationality or some such.
>>> You're mistaken.
>>
>> Maybe I am being presumptuous. But given the time you spent going to
>> yotube, clicking links, typing up what you did, etc, I would have
>> hoped you'd at least watch the first few minutes of the video.
>>
>> I do think claiming the video is *wrong* based on the Che thing would
>> be irrational, but you didn't do that. I think you were a bit
>> dismissive though, and in this case I think that's a mistake.
>

> i don't recall Elliot stating he *didn't* watch the beginning of the
video.
>
> i bet you he knows what it says adequately to judge it.

Fair, I hadn't considered that.

>> but I definitely think there are a few reactions I've seen on this
>> list that aren't super rational / tainted with a bit of emotion.
>

> which reactions? why don't you quote them and state your criticism,
> rather than silently forming a potentially-overly-negative view of FI
> without the possibility of rebuttal?

Fair. I will start trying to note them, and that will either show me
they don't exist or give me something to post about.


Max

[Max Kaye]

I don't know.

I was claiming that TED talks are not constructed to be criticised, and
definitely have a "deferring to authority" overtone. Or at least that's
the impression I get.

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 17:48 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> So in future, how much weight should I give to context in this sort of
> situation?

Weighing ideas is a mistake refuted in BoI and more fully in Yes or No
Philosophy.

[Max Kaye]

On 15/9/17 7:37 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
> On Sep 14, 2017, at 12:54 PM, anonymous FI <anonymousfa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:40 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
>>> but I definitely think there are a few reactions I've seen on this list that aren't super rational / tainted with a bit of emotion.
>>
>> which reactions? why don't you quote them and state your criticism, rather than silently forming a potentially-overly-negative view of FI without the possibility of rebuttal?
>
> Yeah, that's a serious accusation/criticism by Max. Details!?

Yeah. I mentioned in the other thread that I'm going to start taking
notes, and in that process will either have something to talk about or
prove myself wrong.

> People form so many undiscussed negative opinions of me/FI. What's to be done? If they won't reply to some quote and say what they don't like, how can I address the problem? (I get this *all the time*, and usually they won't ever followup seriously with details. They just don't like it and still don't want to discuss it just like when they initially silently formed that negative judgement.)

I guess I'm a bit guilty of this. BTW, it's by no means my *whole*
opinion of you/FI, just a small part. The other threads I've replied to
go into a bit more detail on my thoughts.

> It's best to discuss problems as they come up. If you delay, you have to be willing to reread a lot of context to refresh your memory, and you may be asking other people to do a lot of rereading to answer you. (When replying to old stuff, you should be especially careful to quote exactly what people should reread, no more, no less. That matters way more for replying to stuff where people don't remember it, so they have to rely on your quotes.)

I agree. If I have a problem/criticism like the above in future I will
bring it up.


Max

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 17:48 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> Is it something where I should take care to remove context to show
> only (and exactly) what I intend to?

In general, don't remove context. Instead, state what your focus is and
stuff you aren't interested in. You can also clarify that later if a
problem comes up, rather than doing it preemptively.

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 17:48 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> I think I'm asking because I don't quite understand this process (the
> 50 gradual steps) yet. I don't think I've seen it play out so far.
> Since I don't quite understand it I can't use the model to inform how
> I should prepare content to be best suited to that discussion.
>
> The criticism of the context is still something that frustrates me,
> but I am also starting to understand why it's useful / employed here.
> I guess it's a difference in two points of view:
>
> * I am looking to discuss one thing in particular: the selectorate
> theory, but I didn't link to that, I linked to *more* than I intended
> * ET (and FI) look at it in the usual way, which (my guess is) by
> looking at it *as a whole*, and stepping in slowly.
>
> My analogy to explain what I mean about "the usual way" is this (in
> the context of a garden):
>
> Instead of rushing to look at the central feature of the garden
> (roses) slowly take a single step inside and examine the first rock,
> and the first daisy, and as you come to each, understand it, and its
> purpose, and once you have, continue moving on. If that process goes
> well (resists criticism) then you know the roses are high quality. But
> if that goes badly (is able to be refuted) then it's likely the roses
> weren't as good as you had hoped anyway, so move on to a better garden
> instead of persevering with this one.
>
> Is that getting closer?

yes but it's sometimes a good idea to persist despite flaws. e.g. some
people are just like "Rand is an inductivist". but that doesn't prevent
her work from having tons of value.

this approach works best in discussion. you can point out the first flaw
and see what the reply is. if the reply is "that's not a flaw" then you
can discuss it. if the reply is "we don't care about flaws" then you
should consider looking elsewhere. if the reply is "i agree that is a
flaw, but X and Y parts are good anyway" then a good option is to look
for the first mistake you think you find in the X or Y part.

you can judge a lot (though not necessarily everything) about idea
quality by how bodies of knowledge take criticism, handle error
correction.

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 17:48 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> I guess I do believe there's a middle ground. Stephen Hawking doesn't
> seem to have good philosophy (based on his ideas on climate change,
> AI, non-human civilizations, etc), but he definitely has contributed
> to physics: hawking radiation, firewalls around black holes,
> holography, etc.

I don't know a lot about Hawking in particular, but what's usually going
on with stuff like this is:

The person segregates different areas of ideas/life into different
boxes, and then uses different methods for different boxes.

So I bet you Hawking wasn't using the same thinking methods for AI (let
alone dating) as he used for the accomplishments you list. (i also don't
know how good those accomplishments actually are. we'd have to ask DD or
Alan. Alan can you comment?)

Sometimes the area where people use good thinking methods is very small,
e.g. only one tiny sub-field of physics. I don't know how big it is for
Hawking. (and btw it could easily be a bunch of different little boxes,
rather than one big box, that he thinks well about.)

[Max Kaye]

true, Let me rephrase:

In future, how should I best deal with context that distracts, or that I
think detracts from a more robust, core argument?

Essentially, if I think an author makes one *good* argument, but does
something like misuse it to justify bad values, how do I deal with that
in a discussion such that we talk about the issue I'm concerned with?

It feels like I should definitely not deny the context, and should
acknowledge in some way that the author makes mistakes. I guess it's
also important to consider that *everyone else's* interpretation /
accumulation of knowledge is just as important as mine, and so denying
the context outright is wrong. It might also be wrong to focus too much
on *what I'll get out of it* vs what everyone else can get out of it.

Is it best to reframe the argument in my own words and remove the author
from the discussion? It's entirely possible that I've misunderstood what
the author was originally trying to explain, but that the explanation
I've create is better (fixes some mistakes / iteration of the meme) so
this re-framing *could* have value. It also feels somewhat disingenuous
to remove the author entirely, though maybe that's a parochial
misconception about ego and ownership of ideas (no-one owns a meme,
after all)

This is also relevant to the Dictator's Handbook discussion (though will
reply later to those threads in more detail).

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 5:48 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 15/9/17 4:08 am, anonymous FI wrote:
>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 3:58 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:



> I've seen a bunch of views on here about politics in general (or at least in ET / JM's writing), but not on the nature of political power in general.
>
> DD sort of engages with this in BoI (optimism / choices), but I don't think his understanding of power goes far enough. I agree with him _on the whole_ but also think that he doesn't engage with a bunch of the new ideas since Popper. Granted, most of them are terrible, but things like the selectorate theory give us a better insight (IMO).

DD is aware of and rejects that type of thing, but didn’t manage to write something good enough to include in the book before the publication deadline. It’s hard to explain to people why it’s wrong, especially while e.g. not discussing liberalism or Rand.

> One example is DD's criticism of PR and defence of Pluralism. Reading that was the first time I actually held an explanation for why pluralism might be okay, and why PR can do evil via what I used to think was a feature, not a bug (compromise).
>
> However, the selectorate theory gives us enough insight to understand that _the same sort of compromise_ can easily occur within a ruling party since _their administration is no longer based on a consistent explanation / framework_. This arises from a leader's need to satisfy keys supporters and their diverse interests.
>
> Thus authority is misused in pluralism in the same way as PR - though perhaps to different extents.
>
> Moreover, it shows that regardless of the framework you use, if you have (what I call) static majoritarianism you necessarily require the misuse of authority in this way. **Corruption is a tool** and refusing to use that tool means you are more easily replaced (since the voter base / key supporters are more ready to change team).

DD already has far more advanced views than this, but they’re very hard to explain to people who don’t understand tons of background knowledge that the more advanced views build on.

> We saw this with the *rise* of Trump (existing key supporters switching teams), and we're seeing it with supports now leaving him.
>
> E.g. Ann Coulter recently retweeted: https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/908176374074155009
>
> > If he does not build the wall, he simply will not get reelected. If he does build it, he will win 2020 by a landslide. It is that simple.
>
> Whether _he should or shouldn't build the wall_ is besides the point here; this is *corruption as a tool* in action.

How is it corrupt to promise to build a wall, and then to be judged by whether you kept your #1 campaign promise?

Besides promising the wall, Trump also explained why the wall is a good idea. His voters agreed – they judged the wall should be built. Whether the wall should be built *is* the point people thought about, and the idea it should be built persuaded enough people to win the election for Trump.

> > you may not be emotionally or intellectually ready to face this – that
> > the ideas you value are actually deeply incompatible with BoI,
> > Objectivism, etc. and it'd be hard to explain it to you due to your lack
> > of background knowledge.
>
> Well I definitely believe that *most* of the ideas I value are compatible with BoI - it's been a very integral part of my life since reading it (have read most chapters a 2+ times), and I try to filter _everything_ through the lessons I've picked up.

i appreciate that the interest is more than most people.

If you post beliefs or questions to FI, we can go through lots of them and you can be informed of how they are different than the DD/BoI perspective.

You have issues with gun control and have sympathy with universal basic income, IIRC. That’s so far from DD’s views.

common topics that people are unwilling to consider from anything like DD’s perspective are parenting/education and relationships/marriage. have you read any of DD’s writing on those topics? have you worked out some unconventional views about them that you think are implied by BoI?

BTW when I talk about DD’s views, I’m often referring to the person who wrote FoR and BoI, and what he thought when we talked a lot, rather than his current views. Recently, he has changed significantly in ways that contradict many of his previous values and beliefs (and he doesn’t want to critically discuss the matter, explain how actually it doesn’t contradict, etc).

>
> I've also abandoned many views I *used* to have.
>
> Now, that doesn't mean I don't have a long way to go, but **I'm very committed to fallibilsm**. BoI gave me the tools to reject (and understand why I should reject) all other competing philosophies, so between a choice of the ideas (outside fallibilism) and fallibilism, I'll take the latter. That also doesn't mean that journey will be easy.
>
> Another way of looking at that is that there's nowhere else for me to go besides *through* that criticism.

dozens of people have said similar stuff. they rarely last long. but good luck, best wishes.

> > i think it'd be better to start with e.g. discussing FoR/BoI/FH/AS in
> > detail.
>
> I know FoR/BoI - is FH Hayek? Or (FH) the Fountainhead and (AS) atlas shrugged?

The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

>
> > we could discuss those independently first, then apply to selectorate
> > theory later.
>
> Fair - though I guess my impatience wants me to push for the selectorate theory earlier. Mostly that's a time constraint thing and that I expect reading AS particularly would take too long.

AS and FH are on par with BoI and FoR. so it’s like saying you think reading BoI would take too long.

AS/FH are very different than FoR/BoI though.

it takes a certain type of person to be able to read FoR and BoI and get much out of them. they don’t work well for everyone. AS and FH are the same. some people love them, some find it's really hard to engage and get the point.

i don’t know if you’re the kind of person who’d like AS and FH now. it’s possible you’re hesitant to read it because you have some vague guess that you wouldn’t love it.

you should read a a bit and see. do a test. it’s cheap to try a little and see if you have a good time or a bad time. you might just enjoy it a lot and want to continue.

both books have a key scene near the beginning which some readers would really like. i think FH’s scene is better, so i’d suggest trying FH over AS. also FH is shorter and less complicated. the scene is when Roark speaks with his dean. don’t skip ahead to it. but DO skip preface kinda material and just go straight to the actual story.

> Is there a reason to believe that the *logic of the situation* does not lead to the conclusion that *rulers must do whatever it takes to stay in power or risk losing power*?

people frequently choose to risk losing power.

and anyway, there are other ways to keep power than basically trying to bribe the right people. you could implement good ideas and persuade people they are good... the whole worldview involved with the Dictator’s Handbook is so anti-morality and anti-reason.

> > Ideas rule the world. (Which is somewhat opposite to the Dictator's
> > Handbook perspective.) So your priorities are mistaken.
>
> Why isn't BoI more popular then?

because it’s not understood, and because it’s hostile to many of the BAD ideas which currently rule most of the world.

> Certainly various meme-plexes are deeply ingrained in our culture, but is there a reason there aren't *laws of power* like their are *laws of physics*, or *laws of economics*?

we don’t normally call things “laws” unless they’re really fundamental. and if you had some fundamental and correct “law of power” it’d really just be a law of some of the fundamental fields like economics.

but that’s terminology. the bigger issue is:

the approach of the Dictator’s Handbook is wrong and gets wrong conclusions. much like: there can something along the lines of laws of psychology (whether or not you want to call them laws), but lots of books in the field are totally wrong about what the laws of psychology are and use bad approaches.

> (Granted, all knowledge is fallible, so *laws* might be too strong a word, but you can replace it with *theory*, *misconception*, etc if you like)
>
> >>> btw there were a variety of other prior indications to me that the
> >>> Rules for Rulers video is bad, and that it'd be expensive to engage
> >>> with. i brought up Che because it's clearer and easier to point out
> >>> than the other issues.
> >>
> >> What indicators do you have *that the explanation in the video* is
> >> refuted?
> >
> > that it's totally in conflict with Objectivism and BoI b/c it
> > fundamentally downplays the power of ideas, creativity and persuasion,
> > and downplays the importance of morality, and downplays the complexity
> > of the human condition.
>
> I don't see it like that. Ideas play a big role in the selectorate theory:
>
> * Which key supporters do you adopt?
> * Which keys do you eliminate?
> * What compromises do you make to stay in power?
> * How do you distribute the treasure?
> * How do you satisfy your voter base and *their* ideas?
>
> All of these things require explanations, and staying in power requires *good* explanations that that. Granted they're often used for evil, but part of rising to that position is being able to better create and instantiate those explanations.
>
> It's also not a theory that explains *how to improve the world*, it tries to explain *why we see the behaviour we do*. And given that morality / fallibilism / creativity are not things that are explicitly expressed in historical power dynamics is it a surprise that explaining those past dynamics doesn't involve them?

people behave according to their judgement, so the key issue is what ideas do they find persuasive and why?

people don’t just blindly seek treasure, they think about moral and other issues. they try to use reason. some fail and block-vote for treasure to be distributed to them, but many others don’t. the reason America works in general is because the majority of American voters aren’t trying to vote to give themselves treasure, they are trying to vote for rationally and morally good policies in an OBJECTIVE way.

some countries are dominated by much worse ideas. the more people are controlled by static society memes, the more you can approximate and predict behavior with economics/math/etc type modeling. (even then, those societies routinely reduce material wealth (treasure) in accordance with some moral code or religious ritual.)

the dictator’s handbook says all the people in all the countries and cultures are the same. this is totally wrong and neglects the massive differences in ideas of a typical American or Syrian. the West is civilized and Somalia isn’t. civilization involves various stuff including material wealth, but most of all ideas about how to live.

> > i think the discussion has lots of value, and this indicates you were
> > wrong about the post which led to that value. the initial post leading
> > to interesting discussion was no accident!
>
> I think this conversion definitely has value **to me**. But that's also because of *my* mistakes in my first reply.
>
> I am not sure it has value to anyone else, though I do appreciate the discussion and learning.

i think more or less everyone here is more interested in this discussion than the video. observing critical discussion in action is value. lots of examples!

i, in particular, want to understand how to persuade people. *that* interests me. the video doesn’t interest me (the book is a bit more interesting).




> Here are some ways [being self-righteous] might cause mistakes:

>
> * Tainting what you say in the eyes of someone else - essentially extra information that might distract from the point

which of my statements (quote them) would cause such tainting? or just try to point one out in the future if you see one.

> > similarly, FI already has a sophisticated understanding of authority,
> > power, etc. the ideas you're bringing up wouldn't fill a void for FI,
> > they would contradict ideas which have been extensively debated already
> > and which have hundreds of connections to other parts of FI philosophy.
> > that pre-existing FI knowledge is background knowledge informing some
> > people's contributions to the discussion, but not Max's, so it creates a
> > big perspective gap.
>
> From my perspective thus far I don't think it contradicts ideas of authority put forward in BoI - I think it looks at selective application of authority to some cases, and more importantly *how that acts on the wielder* as opposed to the philosophical implications. I don't think they're opposed to one another - though maybe I need some more training in objectivism.

BoI barely discusses politics and economics. DD simply doesn’t say most of the applications of the BoI epistemology to those fields. He also omits their applications to parenting, education and relationships, among many other things.

> >> While not equivalent, it's similar to me going to curi.us and saying
> >> "this guy has a post about Bitcoin sucking, or about Trump, so I'm not
> >> going to put in the effort until *some condition*"
> >
> > That'd be *absolutely reasonable*. E.g.: "I think Trump sucks, and I've
> > written about it here, here, and here. I know of no refutations of my
> > views. I'm not interested in this Trump booster unless he will either
> > put up or shut up – that is, drop the unargued pro-Trump claims so we
> > can focus on something else, or else provide serious arguments for them."
>
> Okay, I previously considered it unreasonable. My reasoning is:
>
> * We're all fallible
> * So we all hold some ideas that are wrong and some that are right
> * And so I shouldn't focus on the wrong ideas as much as the right ideas if I'm interested in maximising learning over time
>
> Perhaps my mistake there is **to head straight to things I agree with**.

Trying to find and correct errors is the most important focus in order to get things right.

>
> > If you challenge a Trump supporter with the example quote above, and
> > they reply, "What are you, a Mexican? Why don't you self-deport?" then
> > that was productive, you quickly and clearly found out there wasn't
> > going to be a worthwhile discussion. It's better to raise issues like
> > this – and see if people are reasonable or not – instead of try to
> > ignore them. (In the alternative, the Trump supporter might say, "Sure,
> > here are 3 of my favorite books with arguments. I skimmed your writing
> > on the matter and see no mention of these well known books. Please
> > address them or endorse something which addresses them." Then, again,
> > you quickly learn something important about the potential for the
> > conversation, in addition to learning about your broad judgement [1]
> > that Trump supporters should be dismissed.)
> >
> > [1] the judgement of the person in the scenario who challenged the Trump
> > supporter that way, not Max's judgement.
>
> This is a good point, and something I haven't internalised well enough yet.

Paths Forward stuff like this is the kind of thing which is implied by the BoI philosophy, but which one shouldn’t expect to independently (re)discover (it’s rather foreign and difficult in the current cultural context).

> >> but I definitely think there are a few reactions I've seen on this
> >> list that aren't super rational / tainted with a bit of emotion.
> >
> > which reactions? why don't you quote them and state your criticism,
> > rather than silently forming a potentially-overly-negative view of FI
> > without the possibility of rebuttal?
>
> Fair. I will start trying to note them, and that will either show me they don't exist or give me something to post about.

great



Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[anonymous FI]

my objection to the TED talk is the content of the ideas, not the style
or presentation.

[Alan Forrester]

On 15 Sep 2017, at 02:08, 'anonymous FI' anonymousfa...@gmail.com [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 17:48 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
>> I guess I do believe there's a middle ground. Stephen Hawking doesn't
>> seem to have good philosophy (based on his ideas on climate change,
>> AI, non-human civilizations, etc), but he definitely has contributed
>> to physics: hawking radiation, firewalls around black holes,
>> holography, etc.
>
> I don't know a lot about Hawking in particular, but what's usually going
> on with stuff like this is:
>
> The person segregates different areas of ideas/life into different
> boxes, and then uses different methods for different boxes.
>
> So I bet you Hawking wasn't using the same thinking methods for AI (let
> alone dating) as he used for the accomplishments you list. (i also don't
> know how good those accomplishments actually are. we'd have to ask DD or
> Alan. Alan can you comment?)

Hawking made good contributions to general relativity, quantum field theory and quantum gravity. But he is one of many people who have made interesting contributions. His role has mainly been to work out consequences of theories invented by others, such as general relativity. As a result of this research he has revealed problems with those theories. For example, he discovered that black holes emit thermal radiation. This has led to questions about how quantum theory is compatible with Hawking radiation. The problem is that thermal radiation can’t undergo interference. But you could drop a system that could undergo interference into a black hole. So then the information that enables the interference apparently disappears somehow when the system is dropped into the black hole.

Hawking did not invent firewalls or holography, although Hawking radiation problems led to their development.

> Sometimes the area where people use good thinking methods is very small,
> e.g. only one tiny sub-field of physics. I don't know how big it is for
> Hawking. (and btw it could easily be a bunch of different little boxes,
> rather than one big box, that he thinks well about.)

He thinks well in one fairly big box.

Alan

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 17:07 PM, Elliot Temple <cu...@curi.us> wrote:

> no matter what the format is – books or otherwise – no one learns much without
> taking responsibility for their learning, and pursuing it on their own
> initiative, with their own motor.
>
> If you want to learn without discussing, I do actually have far more writing
> available than DD does. But that basically never works. E.g., as far as we
> know, no one has ever understood DD’s books (even like 10% comprehension) just
> by reading them, without participating extensively in the discussion
> community.

It depends how you count comprehension.

There's *the way DD thinks about each statement in the book*. 10% of *that* would be a ton to get from BoI. That's very hard without talking with DD (including indirectly via others who talked with him).

I tend to think of that as what BoI's saying. It's largely the same thing as the way I think of the statements myself. It includes lots of applications, connections and implications.

There is a very real sense in which you don't understand an idea well if you don't know much about *using* it. Ideas are tools. Just being able to recite them, and use them in ways BoI explicitly describes, is a poor goal.

A different way to count comprehension would be to look at what's *literally stated* with ZERO reading between the lines or filling in gaps by thinking about what the book *means*. 10% of *this* would be way more achievable for someone very smart who read the book several times on their own.

This lower bar is a bad way to think about it. The reader should digest the content and try to understand the point of it and how to apply it.

One could imagine some sort of "reasonable effort" to figure out the book's points, call that the reasonable bar for reading comprehension, and measure that way instead of by understanding it as DD would.

A piece of writing consists of *hints* to *aid* learning. The reader still has to create the knowledge himself using guesses and criticism (schools really don't understand this). The primary issue is creating knowledge, *not* specifically creating the knowledge the author intended.

An example is: does BoI say this point about writing is hints to aid learning?

Here's some of what DD wrote:

> SOCRATES: I see. It must come from within ourselves. It must be a guess. Though, until this moment, it had never even remotely occurred to me that I had been guessing.
> HERMES: So why would you expect that anything different happens when you do understand someone correctly?
> SOCRATES: I see. When we hear something being said, we guess what it means, without realizing what we are doing. That is beginning to make sense to me.

and

> In reality, the communication of new ideas – even mundane ones like directions – depends on guesswork on the part of both the recipient and the communicator, and is inherently fallible.

This does not state what communications (like writing) *do* consist of. It says you have to guess at their meaning. It doesn't say they are hints to help your guessing. But is that implied? Something a reader could figure out for himself? Something the books hints at? Something the book aids one in learning?

Communications are also *evidence* one can use to help criticize his guesses of the meaning of the communication. The facts of the communication (e.g. that it includes particular letters, sounds, words, etc) are one thing that must be explained by the interpretation.

Does BoI say that? Imply it? Hint at it? Leave it out?

It doesn't really matter. What matters is the idea, and the ways in which one may learn the idea. Most readers of BoI don't understand it, and so they're missing out on something relevant and good.

Repeat that kind of missing out a 10,000 times and their takeaway from the book is very unlike what DD would like them to have learned. It's not the only problem, though.

There are more glaring issues, too. Here's an example from the FoR discussion list: a longtime member and active discussion participant claimed that FoR doesn't mention or criticize solipsism.

solipsism is actually one of the major topics of the book. the amount of indexing is an indication of this:

> solipsism 58, 70, 80, 81, 137, 287
> and the angel theory of planetary motion 88
> central thesis of 81
> defence of 81–2
> and explanation 97, 142, 233
> as indefensible 82, 84
> and intuitionism 231, 232, 233
> joke 81
> as realism disguised 83–4, 97
> refutation of 97, 102
> variants 85

The word "solipsism" is in the book 40 times not counting the index.

Here's an excerpt from late in the discussion:

(BT in double quotes, ET in single quotes)

>> This mail is in response to a challenge I had privately;
>> that I had once said there was no mention or criticism
>> of solipsism, in FoR.
>>
>> When I finally got a copy to re-read, I saw immediately that there
>> was quite a bit said, as a mere glance at the index will show.
>
> You act like you discovered that. You didn't. I told you. I posted that fact.
>
>> I had already mentioned this on-list, so my challenger
>> must have missed that post.
>
> No. You're bullshitting. I told you that, not vice versa. Then you stopped discussing.

...

> I said that FoR covers solipsism. You said it wasn't in the book. You were wrong. Then you refused to admit you were wrong. Then much later you said offlist that you hadn't been wrong.

people suck. but isn't that amazing? an FoR fan who participated in discussions for years claimed, "no mention or criticism of solipsism, in FoR". People's understandings of books is frequently just plain not factual.

previously this was posted:

ET:
>> If you want to debate the topics of Fabric, without being familiar with the book,

BT:
> No need to get snotty! I have read the book several times, and still do not recall any major (or minor) comments on solipsism, so I must assume they were very peripheral at best.

he read it *several times*!

here's him denying reality again:

(ET double quoted, BT single quoted):

>> e.g. he [Bill] insisted, repeatedly, that there are no arguments about solipsism in the book tFoR.
>
> And there weren't!

this kind of thing went on and on at length.

you may think he's especially bad, but he isn't. he made a fool of himself in his comments on the book. most people would make fools of themselves if they commented on the book, but they won't talk.

[Justin Mallone]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 7:12 PM, 'anonymous FI' anonymousfa...@gmail.com [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sep 14, 2017, at 16:02 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
>> On 15/9/17 2:33 am, Justin Mallone wrote:
>>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:40 AM, Max Kaye m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas]
>>> <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
>>>> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that
>>>> you'd
>>>> so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when it
>>>> comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority.
>>>> Maybe
>>>> that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I think
>>>> you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.
>>>
>>> Elaborate on self-righteous.
>>
>> Google's definition of self-righteous
>>
>>> having or characterized by a certainty, ~~especially an unfounded one~~, that one is totally correct or morally superior.
>>
>> (I've tried to strikeout the "unfounded" part because I know ET's
>> opinions aren't unfounded)

"Unfounded" seems like a good example of the philosophy of support being built into the language at a deep level (as explained in Elliot Temple's world-class educational product "Yes or No Philosophy" http://fallibleideas.com/yes-or-no-philosophy)

From Apple dictionary for "unfounded":

> unfounded |ˌənˈfoundəd|
> adjective
> having no foundation or basis in fact:
> [example of use in a sentence] her persistent fear that she had cancer was unfounded.

let's do "foundation" too:

> an underlying basis or principle for something:

and now let's do "basis":

> the underlying support or foundation for an idea, argument, or process

hey we literally got support! lol.

we sure hit epistemology pretty quickly!

The fear of the woman in the example for "unfounded" did actually have a "basis" in fact, in the sense of having facts consistent with it. For example, cancer exists & women get cancer. What it also presumably had, though, was some CRITICISM.

-JM

[Justin Mallone]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 7:02 PM, Max Kaye m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On 15/9/17 2:33 am, Justin Mallone wrote:
>
>> On 14/9/17 10:54 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>> On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
> An important note that this is about **my perception**, not objective
> reality.
>
> A few examples:
>
> * In the "History of FI" thread ET asked me to "just drop" something -
> which I was fine with, but wasn't really explained (though this is
> difficult in personal situations, admittedly)
> * When I commented on his 10m "good and evil" podcast recently, talking
> about what I thought the deeper explanation was, and lamented ET didn't
> include it in the episode.
>
> Communication style comes into this, but my only real experience of FI /
> CF before this list was DD's writings. DD usually explains things quite
> deeply and ETs style is very different.

Elliot has written, emailed, blogged, and recorded looooooonng explanations of various topics.

He also does shorter ones. He also chats. He also tweets. He even did askfm until they went censorhappy. He does many things. He utilizes a variety of formats and styles. What's the issue?

Also BTW, @DD, his tweets are often very unclear from the point of view of a general audience. If people get any idea of what DD's on about, it's often cuz someone else jumps in the thread to explain. Take this tweet for instance:

https://twitter.com/daviddeutschoxf/status/906890657045909504

There's so much of a perspective gap there between DD and everyone else on Twitter (not on FI List) that DD really needed to link an essay to have any hope of people even figuring out what the nature of the disagreement was.

> That doesn't mean it's worse (ET
> definitely can reach a wider reading audience at a comprehension level),
> but one of the reasons I had such respect for DD was that all his
> writing had this context of "I might be wrong, but I think have good
> explanations, and here they are in detail". ETs style (at least here)
> seems more like "I might be wrong, but here's what I think" and
> sometimes that explanation isn't as deep.

There's a difference between the explanation as it exists in Elliot's mind or in stuff you haven't read yet vs the part of the explanation you can see based on reading or listening to a 10 minute podcast.

You gotta ask questions and take the initiative instead of assuming that the stuff Elliot said in one small thing you happened to read or listen to are his total thoughts on some subject.

> That is what occurs to me as *sometimes* coming off in a "characterised
> by a certainty that one is totally correct or morally superior". Now
> there are some obvious caveats: this is FI after all, hopefully that
> explains my perception enough to understand, though.
>
>>>>> Maybe if you *actually watch the video* it will give you some context for understanding whether it's pro-che or anti-che. But I'm sure not going to waste my time convincing you when you made a decision with so little information or effort.
>>>>
>>>> you seem hostile, and not interested in taking the time to address objections to the content you recommend. shall i infer it's not a recommendation that means much to you, and forget about it? previously you communicated otherwise.
>>>
>>> I was hostile - no doubt about that. I replied in haste this morning
>>> before having to leave the house; so definitely didn't put the time I
>>> normally might in.
>>
>> Low-edit-time posts can be more honest IMHO.
>>
>> Editing for clarity is fine. Editing for hostility is not a great sign.
>
> Yeah, I haven't deliberately observed whether I edit for hostility, but
> if I do write something hostile I don't think I ever edit to *increase*
> the hostility. It is something I'm going to start trying to observe
> (though maybe that's in conflict with trying not to be hostile too). In
> any case something to keep in mind.
>
> Low-edit-time posts are almost certainly more honest, but that doesn't
> mean they're more useful, and are almost certainly less resistant to
> criticism. There's a place, just not everywhere, and my original reply
> is an example of that.

One thing I'm trying to think through here is this:

Premise 1: people should take a break instead of posting while hostile. hostile posting does not add value to the list.
Premise 2: people should get criticism on the things they actually think, including when they are hostile, instead of hiding their thoughts.

One thing you can try is writing whatever but then not sending it while hostile. Then you can have the text you wrote in the hostile state, and get some perspective on it later. You could even still send that, but in "quotes" as it were, like quoting yourself from a different mental state and saying some stuff you see wrong with it. And maybe you could get other criticisms on it from different people, which would help you more thoroughly refute the hostility-generating ideas than just your own self-crit.

hostile posting by itself does not add value to the list†. however, CRITICIZING hostile posting definitely can add value. and if someone takes the initiative of doing self-criticism on their hostile stuff when they are calmer and have perspective on it, that's a good sign that they'd welcome external crit.

†(hostility can be mixed with good content, but the *hostile* part of it isn't adding value)

>>> That said, I didn't see any objections to the *content* I recommended; I
>>> did see objections to
>>>
>>> a) The t-shirt
>>> b) The author
>>>
>>> And I don't *really* care about debating those things too much - I don't
>>> have a horse in *that* race, and I think the most morally repugnant
>>> people (perhaps Che is a good example) are still able to produce
>>> knowledge (or communicate it) - a point made in BoI too.
>>
>> Perhaps there’s something you could learn here about being able to make better judgments of what to engage in based on limited information. This is a really important skill in a world where there’s so much possible information to engage with.
>
> I think there is (both the thing I brought up about the meta-situation
> before, and also in general with outside media). Have either you or ET
> written anything on that particularly?

I think a big thing here is principled thinking. If you understand principles deeply, and understand how stuff connects to other stuff, you don't have to keep dealing with minor variations of things as special cases.

I think Rand in general is good on this issue.

Here's Leonard Peikoff saying something about Rand's principled thinking in "My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir" (published in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, and also available in audio form):

> Ayn Rand started thinking in terms of principles, she told me once, at the age of twelve. To her, it was a normal part of the process of growing up, and she never dropped the method thereafter. Nor, I believe, did she ever entirely comprehend the fact that the approach which was second nature to her was not practiced by other people. Much of the time, she was baffled by or indignant at the people she was doomed to talk to, people like the man we heard about in the early 1950s, who was calling for the nationalization of the steel industry. The man was told by an Objectivist why government seizure of the steel industry was immoral and impractical, and he was impressed by the argument. His comeback was: “Okay, I see that. But what about the coal industry?”

More from same piece:

> I use the term “overview” deliberately, because I always felt as though everyone else had their faces pressed up close to an event and were staring at it myopically, while she was standing on a mountaintop, sweeping the world with a single glance, and thus was able to identify the most startling connections, not only between streaking and literature, but also between sex and economics, art and business, William F. Buckley and Edward Kennedy. She was able to unite the kinds of things that other people automatically pigeonhole into separate compartments. Her universe, as a result, was a single whole, with all its parts interrelated and intelligible; it was not the scattered fragments and fiefdoms that are all most people know. To change the image: she was like a ballet dancer of the intellect, leaping from fact to fact and field to field, not by the strength of her legs, but by the power of logic, a power that most men do not seem fully to have discovered yet.

Here, you seem to not understand the connection Elliot made between the peddling of a specific shirt and a judgment about the likely quality/content of a video. I think your perspective here is a typical perspective. "It's just a shirt, it doesn't really matter" would be a very typical attitude here.

But there was an infinite universe of possible things to try and sell. The specific shirt was chosen out of that infinite universe of possibilities for a *reason*. The person choosing it acted on an *idea*. And the reach of ideas cannot be easily constrained. And the same ideas and decision-making process that led to the selection of that shirt to sell will inevitably effect other things, such as the content of the video.

I think people frequently have a *strong preference* to limit the reach of ideas. Because then they can save a bunch of stuff in their life they don't wanna reconsider while pretending they are still being rational. I think this explains the strong *emotional* negative reaction/hostility people experience when having stuff they like surveyed from Ayn Rand/ET's mountaintop. Because they see AR/ET's criticism as a threat to their carefully-crafted system of disintegrations. And they're right to.

-JM

[Kate Sams]

topic: connections between supposed mistakes should be explained

On Sep 15, 2017, at 9:52 AM, Justin Mallone just...@gmail.com [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> Here's Leonard Peikoff saying something about Rand's principled thinking in "My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir" (published in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, and also available in audio form):

>> I use the term “overview” deliberately, because I always felt as though everyone else had their faces pressed up close to an event and were staring at it myopically, while she was standing on a mountaintop, sweeping the world with a single glance, and thus was able to identify the most startling connections, not only between streaking and literature, but also between sex and economics, art and business, William F. Buckley and Edward Kennedy. She was able to unite the kinds of things that other people automatically pigeonhole into separate compartments. Her universe, as a result, was a single whole, with all its parts interrelated and intelligible; it was not the scattered fragments and fiefdoms that are all most people know. To change the image: she was like a ballet dancer of the intellect, leaping from fact to fact and field to field, not by the strength of her legs, but by the power of logic, a power that most men do not seem fully to have discovered yet.
>
> Here, you seem to not understand the connection Elliot made between the peddling of a specific shirt and a judgment about the likely quality/content of a video. I think your perspective here is a typical perspective. "It's just a shirt, it doesn't really matter" would be a very typical attitude here.
>
> But there was an infinite universe of possible things to try and sell. The specific shirt was chosen out of that infinite universe of possibilities for a *reason*. The person choosing it acted on an *idea*. And the reach of ideas cannot be easily constrained. And the same ideas and decision-making process that led to the selection of that shirt to sell will inevitably effect other things, such as the content of the video.

if the content of the video was affected, specific criticisms of the *video content* should exist. right? (more below)

Note: I haven’t watched the video, nor have I read the relevant posts. Consider my comments hypothetical. I’m bringing up a general point.

> I think people frequently have a *strong preference* to limit the reach of ideas. Because then they can save a bunch of stuff in their life they don't wanna reconsider while pretending they are still being rational. I think this explains the strong *emotional* negative reaction/hostility people experience when having stuff they like surveyed from Ayn Rand/ET's mountaintop. Because they see AR/ET's criticism as a threat to their carefully-crafted system of disintegrations. And they're right to.

i agree that ppl frequently try to keep their system of disintegrations safe. they evade the connections.

however, consider:

you CAN derive huge value from people, books, videos, etc even if the creators make other errors.

consequently, you should ask for explanations of these mountaintop-view connections between supposed errors. what a valid criticism should do is EXPLAIN the connection. it should explain how the idea behind a t-shirt here **leads to** specific ideas behind the video content being bad there.

you shouldn’t refute the video content without actual criticisms of the video content. (again, consider this hypothetical.)

or suppose someone wants to disregard Rand’s moral philosophy since she thought induction existed.

what a valid criticism should do is EXPLAIN the connection. it should explain how Rand believing induction existed here **leads to** a bunch of mistakes in her moral philosophy there.

you shouldn’t refute Rand’s moral philosophy without actual criticisms of her moral philosophy.

[anonymous FI]

yes. the Che shirt argument was about the topic of what to spend time
on, not directly about the video content.

the Che shirt argument was also about the context of the video –
especially the creator's ideas – which is relevant to interpreting the
video.

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 14, 2017, at 16:02 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 15/9/17 2:33 am, Justin Mallone wrote:
>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:40 AM, Max Kaye m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas]
>> <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

>>> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that
>>> you'd
>>> so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when it
>>> comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority.
>>> Maybe
>>> that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I think
>>> you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.
>>
>> Elaborate on self-righteous.
>
> Google's definition of self-righteous
>
> > having or characterized by a certainty, ~~especially an unfounded
> one~~, that one is totally correct or morally superior.
>
> (I've tried to strikeout the "unfounded" part because I know ET's
> opinions aren't unfounded)
>
> An important note that this is about **my perception**, not objective
> reality.
>
> A few examples:
>
> * In the "History of FI" thread ET asked me to "just drop" something -
> which I was fine with, but wasn't really explained (though this is
> difficult in personal situations, admittedly)

you should be more pushy with stuff like this. don't silently drop it.
complain, object, criticize.

if you hold your tongue (and thereby prevent errors in your complaint
from being corrected via people responding), you have no right to hold
the slightest grudge.

this is different than other forums where people get offended and try to
be tactful and carefully, passively avoid trampling on anyone.

here it's: stand up for yourself, and don't assume others are fragile.
this isn't a safe space or even 10% of a safe space. (tons of forums
aren't exactly a safe space, but are like 50% that way.)

you can write very short posts if you prefer. it only takes a couple
sentences to communicate an initial statement of a point.


Also you made a complaint about *irking* self-righteousness. But when
asked for examples, you gave one "which I was fine with". "fine" and
"irked" are incompatible, so that's a topic change.

[anonymous FI]

it doesn't fit people's existing expectations. it's not organized around
facilitating their normal methods of (failing to) learn.

> There's a difference between the explanation as it exists in Elliot's
> mind or in stuff you haven't read yet vs the part of the explanation
> you can see based on reading or listening to a 10 minute podcast.
>
> You gotta ask questions and take the initiative instead of assuming
> that the stuff Elliot said in one small thing you happened to read or
> listen to are his total thoughts on some subject.

it's the same with DD's books. they just give some incomplete hints and
the reader has to take initiative and ask questions to find out more.
they don't give DD's total thoughts on the subject. unfortunately, books
don't answer questions, so the reader has to think of the answers
himself or go find an online forum or something.

the important thing is using formats and methods with Paths Forward.

an underlying principle is that communication and learning need error
correction. books have pretty limited ability to provide error
correction. they don't have space to address most potential errors. they
aren't designed to give feedback on the reader's interpretation of the
book.

it depends on how disruptive the hostile person is being.

and some people are just kinda yelling, and then afterwards they are
going to never speak of it again. there won't be introspection and
review. not very productive!

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 15, 2017, at 1:19 PM, 'anonymous FI' anonymousfa...@gmail.com [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 16:02 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
>> * In the "History of FI" thread ET asked me to "just drop" something -
>> which I was fine with, but wasn't really explained (though this is
>> difficult in personal situations, admittedly)
>
> you should be more pushy with stuff like this. don't silently drop it.
> complain, object, criticize.
>
> if you hold your tongue (and thereby prevent errors in your complaint
> from being corrected via people responding), you have no right to hold
> the slightest grudge.
>
> this is different than other forums

and IRL

> where people get offended and try to
> be tactful and carefully, passively avoid trampling on anyone.

this happened to me yesterday. i was talking to someone and I felt like they were taking too long. so i chimed with a non-tactful “so what’s the point?”

they initially got offended by this. i asked if they’d prefer i keep my thought / implied complaint to myself. they said “no", but they wished i didn’t have the thought at all.

well, that’s hard. on the one hand, I could probably learn to be more patient and let ppl communicate how they want to communicate. but, otoh, what’s wrong with just being honest and sharing that you find the current tangent boring and that you are ready to hear their point?

[Elliot Temple]

they want their thoughts (and related verbal comments) to be interesting.

they don’t want to face the reality of their mental flaws.

they don’t want to take responsibility for learning better ideas. they want you and everyone else to help put on a fake show to protect them from reality. in return, they’ll help put on the same show for you. then you can all have fake, fragile self-esteem.

Elliot Temple
www.curi.us

[Max Kaye]

On 15 Sep 2017, at 8:04, Elliot Temple wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:40 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>> On 14/9/17 10:54 am, Elliot Temple wrote:

>>> On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>> I give a 10 minute summary of the selectorate theory (in the context
>> of a talk on Flux)
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zq25UXc_ONg?start=516&end=1115&version=3
>
> the video discusses politics from within a framework that i disagree
> with (as do DD and Rand, FYI). it’s making lots of background
> assumptions (about philosophy, economics, morality, etc) from the
> outset (of the linked part).
>
> has anyone written down the framework being used, and discussed it as
> a framework? (e.g. by comparing it to other frameworks they also
> understand and arguing about which is best. especially if they say
> anything about other frameworks I actually think are good.) that’d
> make it way easier to discuss and criticize.
>
> it’s really hard to talk to people about frameworks they're unaware
> of, and which they haven’t consciously considered. it’s hard to
> identify and tell them what they think, in words, when they don’t
> even know it and often won’t recognize it even when you get it
> right. it's especially hard when their framework has contradictions
> and gaps – then you tell them what they think and they say “that
> doesn’t make sense” (which is *your* point) and refuse to believe
> it’s their own framework!
>
> or, in the alternative, you can try to get them to forget their
> framework and come learn your better framework. but they usually
> don’t want to even though they can’t criticize your framework, nor
> point to any correct criticism of it, by anyone, that they endorse.

I actually had a transcript prepared recently (after joining FI) for the
talk I linked [1].

When you say "within a framework that I disagree with" - which
particular framework are you talking about? The selectorate theory
itself, or the foundations of the theory (if so, which foundations?)

I’m asking this to figure out a name for the framework you think I’m
working within (or it’s qualities) and which framework is better (if
it has a name). I’m also asking to know what you’d like written
down. You mention later on "the FI framework" —- if that’s the
framework you advocate in this case, then what I’m trying to build is
meant to be a *bridge* between what exists now (and things that are
practicable now) and what I’ve thought the FI / BoI / CF framework is
up to this point. I might well be wrong about the FI framework, but what
I’m advocating isn’t meant to be *the* objectively best system,
though it does want to understand the current system and dynamics
objectively, and use that understanding to bridge into something
that’s *closer* to FI. I don’t think any system can actually force
people into FI, it always has to be a choice, but I do think that some
systems can encourage moving towards FI more than others.

There are a bunch of assumptions baked in - I talk about some problems
with *static majoritarianism* at the beginning (my term for any system
where the voting body stays the same over time, or changes very little:
rep democracy, liquid democracy, direct democracy, etc), and I talk
about my take on fallibilism after that section in the video.

> ---
>
> btw i agree with anon’s characterization of FoR, BoI, AS, FH as key
> books for the FI framework. i wrote a blog post:
>
> http://curi.us/2040-the-four-best-books
>
> i think Max doubts the importance of these books and wants more
> demonstrations of their important, previews of their contents,
> arguments relating important ideas to the books, etc. it’d be
> especially helpful if he offered *initial criticism* of the books. why
> doesn’t he prioritize them above everything else? there must be some
> things about them he thinks are not so good compared to what i think.
> but he hasn’t been sharing those disagreements.
>
> but anyway, comparing and contrasting the FI framework to a rival
> would be one way to proceed. and to proceed with that, Max could
> supply the written documentation for his rival framework. or if that
> doesn’t exist, he could try to create it, rather than going through
> life with unknown, unexamined, un-critically-discussed guiding ideas.

Well, I’m pretty sold on the DD books, but maybe I still underestimate
their importance. Rand is far more in line with what you suggest. I have
been listening to your podcast on the reading list (with JM) and some
browsing of fallibleideas.com, though haven’t started reading FH yet.

The prioritisation thing (above *everything* else), well I am thinking
more and more about it. Should I abandon other responsibilities?
(Coding, running a business, Flux, etc) I don’t want to abandon those
things, they mean a lot to me, or should I take a more measured approach
and say "reading FH for 60 minutes a day while taking notes" is good?

I guess in many ways I don’t know how I *should* prioritise it.

I’m finding there are things I didn’t know I didn’t know, and that
might be one reason for not sharing those disagreements: I didn’t know
I had them.

I also *thought* I was pretty aligned with the FI framework, but it
seems like ET disagrees. In part I’m not sure where I should go to
improve that besides back to DD’s books (and maybe FH and AS now that
I know about their relevance here).

>>>> Nobody's going to force you to watch it.
>>>
>>> I know that. Why say this? You should try to state what you mean
>>> clearly.
>>
>> Sure, I meant that I felt like your original post ultimately had very

>> little value and didn't do anything besides signalling to the rest of
>> the list... something, I don't really know what you were trying to
>> say, besides "this is bad”.
>

> As usual, I was writing true, relevant stuff, not signaling.

>
>> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that
>> you'd so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful
>> when it comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of
>> authority. Maybe that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's
>> because I think you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.
>

> I disagree with the “sometimes a bit” qualification. That’s an
> unargued criticism! I think I’m consistently self-righteous, like
> Roark, Galt, Rand. But why be irked?

I laughed when I first read that sentence. It was not what I expected!
But thinking about it, I don’t know why it should irk me, or why
self-righteous-ness is bad at all. It might be bad for someone who’s
wrong, or isn’t able to correct errors very well, but if those two
things are checked off I don’t think I actually have a reason to argue
that it’s bad.


Max


[1] : This is just the section on the selectorate theory:
https://pastebin.com/uB2dKvCR - I have the rest but it’s not very good
(though I guess you get what you pay for - was cheap via fiverr). Full
transcript: https://pastebin.com/EpzgsAsX

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 15, 2017, at 6:29 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 15 Sep 2017, at 8:04, Elliot Temple wrote:
>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:40 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>> On 14/9/17 10:54 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>>> On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>> I give a 10 minute summary of the selectorate theory (in the context of a talk on Flux)
>>>
>>> https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zq25UXc_ONg?start=516&end=1115&version=3
>>
>> the video discusses politics from within a framework that i disagree with (as do DD and Rand, FYI). it’s making lots of background assumptions (about philosophy, economics, morality, etc) from the outset (of the linked part).
>>
>> has anyone written down the framework being used, and discussed it as a framework? (e.g. by comparing it to other frameworks they also understand and arguing about which is best. especially if they say anything about other frameworks I actually think are good.) that’d make it way easier to discuss and criticize.
>>
>> it’s really hard to talk to people about frameworks they're unaware of, and which they haven’t consciously considered. it’s hard to identify and tell them what they think, in words, when they don’t even know it and often won’t recognize it even when you get it right. it's especially hard when their framework has contradictions and gaps – then you tell them what they think and they say “that doesn’t make sense” (which is *your* point) and refuse to believe it’s their own framework!
>>
>> or, in the alternative, you can try to get them to forget their framework and come learn your better framework. but they usually don’t want to even though they can’t criticize your framework, nor point to any correct criticism of it, by anyone, that they endorse.
>
> I actually had a transcript prepared recently (after joining FI) for the talk I linked [1].
>
> When you say "within a framework that I disagree with" - which particular framework are you talking about? The selectorate theory itself, or the foundations of the theory (if so, which foundations?)

Foundations.

It's hard to specify other people's unstated frameworks!

https://pastebin.com/EpzgsAsX

> So the first part is basically the winning strategy at democracy today.


it's a winning strategy within a certain model of how democracy works. that model is part of the framework behind this statement.

there's also the question: why does one want to "win" at democracy, and what does winning consists of? and does it mean others lose?

and there's a question of constraints, e.g.: are we excluding violence from the allowed strategies to win? any assumed constraints are part of the framework being used.

i'm NOT saying all this should have been addressed in the talk. you can never go through and explain all your background knowledge. but it's good to consider it sometimes and have material about it somewhere. (material you endorse, but you don't have to have personally made it). and then that material should have its own deeper material addressing its own background assumptions, and so on. you can't have infinite layers of this but you can go pretty far and be pretty thorough about addressing problems that our society knows about.

(i find lots of material unsatisfying because i know about lots of problems that aren't common knowledge. so then those aren't addressed.)



the selectorate theory has some background ideas like that people want power and treasure. i haven't read it carefully but something along those kinda lines. these require substantial explanation. e.g. what counts as treasure? is it just material wealth? or is it also social status? what about other stuff people want like to feel like they accomplished something worthwhile, or to feel entertained, how does that fit into the model of the world? i don't know if selectorate theory addresses stuff like this somewhere.


btw, there are a bunch of popular, bad ideas about frameworks.

Popper's essay "The Myth of the Framework" argues against the view that people with different frameworks can't understand each other, can't learn from each other, can't cross the gap between frameworks and have productive discussion.

Some relativists say truth is relative to frameworks, and the choice of framework is arbitrary.

Some people say your language has massive influence over your thinking, and kinda mind controls you a bit. (Your language, like English, is a framework in which you do thinking.) That's too strong a claim.


> And our three people in this case are Alice, Bob and Charlie. Alice wants all cars to be yellow, Bob doesn't want any cars to be yellow and Charlie just really hates -. Now charlie is a bit of a practical guy; anything if I don't make a deal, if I don't swap my votes with other people then I can't be sure my policy is going to pass. However if I can create a sort of alliance with someone and they vote for my thing and I vote for theirs then I can ensure that my policy passes and because I don't care about cars I may as well go with that. So here's Alice, Bob and Charlie; Charlie says hey does anyone want to trade votes, you vote for my policy not up yours?

there's no mention here of discussion or persuasion. there's some kinda model being used in which people have immutable, arbitrary preferences and then try to get their way. something like that. it's treating democracy somewhat like a competitive board game, like Risk, where you just try to win within the rules and you can form alliances with other players for the purposes of the game but they don't have intellectual content. why do France and Germany become allies in this particular game of risk? b/c the players thought it was good military tactics. there's no ideas about liberalism, no values and ways of life that differ between countries, no good guys or bad guys. the real world is different than that kind of model. when using highly simplified models, one has to be really careful about what's being left out, and what difference it could have made if it wasn't left out.

>>> Maybe that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I think you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.
>>
>> I disagree with the “sometimes a bit” qualification. That’s an unargued criticism! I think I’m consistently self-righteous, like Roark, Galt, Rand. But why be irked?
>
> I laughed when I first read that sentence. It was not what I expected!

I know. A previous draft of that sentence began "This is funny because..."


Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 15, 2017, at 6:29 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 15 Sep 2017, at 8:04, Elliot Temple wrote:

>> btw i agree with anon’s characterization of FoR, BoI, AS, FH as key books for the FI framework. i wrote a blog post:
>>
>> http://curi.us/2040-the-four-best-books
>>
>> i think Max doubts the importance of these books and wants more demonstrations of their important, previews of their contents, arguments relating important ideas to the books, etc. it’d be especially helpful if he offered *initial criticism* of the books. why doesn’t he prioritize them above everything else? there must be some things about them he thinks are not so good compared to what i think. but he hasn’t been sharing those disagreements.
>>
>> but anyway, comparing and contrasting the FI framework to a rival would be one way to proceed. and to proceed with that, Max could supply the written documentation for his rival framework. or if that doesn’t exist, he could try to create it, rather than going through life with unknown, unexamined, un-critically-discussed guiding ideas.
>
> Well, I’m pretty sold on the DD books, but maybe I still underestimate their importance. Rand is far more in line with what you suggest. I have been listening to your podcast on the reading list (with JM) and some browsing of fallibleideas.com, though haven’t started reading FH yet.
>
> The prioritisation thing (above *everything* else), well I am thinking more and more about it. Should I abandon other responsibilities? (Coding, running a business, Flux, etc) I don’t want to abandon those things, they mean a lot to me, or should I take a more measured approach and say "reading FH for 60 minutes a day while taking notes" is good?
>
> I guess in many ways I don’t know how I *should* prioritise it.
>
> I’m finding there are things I didn’t know I didn’t know, and that might be one reason for not sharing those disagreements: I didn’t know I had them.

yeah that's typical.

i make lots of FI stuff way more overtly challenging to people than FoR/BoI to intentionally try to raise disagreements. despite that, misunderstandings are routine. a major source of misunderstandings is that people interpret stuff more in line with convention then i mean it.

people rarely want to have conversations with the following method: first we both quickly state positions on a bunch of major issues. then we take all the disagreements and talk about those!

> I also *thought* I was pretty aligned with the FI framework, but it seems like ET disagrees. In part I’m not sure where I should go to improve that besides back to DD’s books (and maybe FH and AS now that I know about their relevance here).

priorities are tricky because they're fluid. if you get hungry enough, you should prioritize eating. if tired enough, prioritize sleeping. priorities change with the situation.

when people talk about their top priority, they often mean they will choose it in their free time over alternatives. that's a decent approximation of the issue.

but the free time approximation has flaws. maybe someone ought to switch to a 4-day work week. that's something that could be considered, but which isn't addressed by the free time framework. or maybe they should stop taking for granted all the time they spend doing their hair, and start considering that hairstyle a use of free time rather than just a part of daily life.

> I also *thought* I was pretty aligned with the FI framework, but it seems like ET disagrees.

it's hard to tell. i think it's *unknown*.

plus it depends on what "pretty aligned" means. how aligned, to what precision, is that? it's hard to quantify, anyway.


a way to test it would be to discuss what you think about parenting. (a similar test could be done with some other subjects. in general with most adults, parenting is the area best suited for finding disagreements, the most challenging test. but some people are more committed to conventional views on psychiatry, environmentalism, marriage, etc...)

the strong way to do the test is: try to apply the FI/BoI philosophy to parenting on your own, without reading our material on the subject. this would be super challenging and i would expect it to reveal many ideas which do not fit with the FI philosophy.

the weaker way to test is: read some TCS material and see what you think of it. this makes it way easier to fool yourself about 1) how much you already agreed before reading it 2) how much you understand and agree after reading it.

the weaker test can be revealing, e.g. you may disagree with or be uncomfortable with some TCS ideas. most people are! there are Critical Rationalists who, when confronted with the idea that spanking kids is irrational, will continue to advocate spanking and argue against TCS.

> Should I abandon other responsibilities?

not abruptly. but i'd recommend being cautious about significant increases in investment or commitment to them. hopefully they're in a somewhat stable state which allows a significant amount of discretionary time/energy. lots of people have either an unstable state or a really time consuming life setup which makes it hard to get into philosophy.

you should also be cautious about making significant changes (like dropping something already established in your life) even if you want to. people often *get persuaded* of something, and act accordingly ... and screw up. they didn't think it through enough.

people's standards for being persuaded are too low. they don't challenge ideas enough before accepting them. (or perhaps they challenge ideas in the wrong ways.) they think they agree with something, then if they actually try to go do/use it, they often run into difficulties they didn't anticipate.

people don't know all the reasons why they like stuff, or all the ways it's important in their life. they don't know everything that'd have to be replaced if they dramatically changed lifestyles.

the way your life works, and how it integrates with societal traditions, is more complicated than you understand. in some ways, traditions are wiser than you and have better judgement. (it's the same with government. the government traditions contain knowledge which often guides politicians who don't even understand how it works. and some politicians are humble about this and try to respect traditions and be cautious about change. and others are more reckless and arrogant about the power of their own reason.)

it's better to make step-by-step changes which address specific problems. this allows testing the consequences in small chunks and reverting back a step if something goes wrong.

ideas can have big consequences, some of which may be unwanted, and it's your responsibility to be careful. i try to give advice and warnings sometimes, but you can't rely on me to watch out for you. i often just talk about ideas without much about how to fit them into your life. integrating ideas into a life is a big issue which you're welcome to ask questions about. it's hard to talk about in general terms because people's lives are complex and vary a lot from person to person. and many people don't want to share personal info in order to avoid critical discussion of it.

the actual substance of how to deal with tradition and reform is complex and brief warnings and tips can't replace it. this is awkward because (for many life situations) it's hard to learn tons of stuff before changing much (e.g. to free up more time), but it's also dangerous to change much before learning it... and there's so many important things to learn, so some have to wait for later.


there are major efficiency advantages to doing some things ASAP like getting better at speed reading or error correction, and learning the best existing major ideas so you can start using them. however, disrupting your current life has major downsides which can be a bigger issue than the value of getting some efficiency gains *marginally* sooner. (the issue to consider is e.g. the downside of going an extra month without the benefit of some knowledge, NOT the whole value of the knowledge.)

marginal stuff is an economics concept i don't know if you're familiar with. and it applies more broadly than most economists talk about.


Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Justin Mallone]

On Sep 15, 2017, at 10:36 PM, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 15, 2017, at 6:29 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
>> On 15 Sep 2017, at 8:04, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:40 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I give a 10 minute summary of the selectorate theory (in the context of a talk on Flux)
>>>>
>>>> https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zq25UXc_ONg?start=516&end=1115&version=3
>>>
>>> the video discusses politics from within a framework that i disagree with (as do DD and Rand, FYI). it’s making lots of background assumptions (about philosophy, economics, morality, etc) from the outset (of the linked part).

...

>> I actually had a transcript prepared recently (after joining FI) for the talk I linked [1].
>>
>> When you say "within a framework that I disagree with" - which particular framework are you talking about? The selectorate theory itself, or the foundations of the theory (if so, which foundations?)
>
> Foundations.
>
> It's hard to specify other people's unstated frameworks!
>
> https://pastebin.com/EpzgsAsX
>

...

>> And our three people in this case are Alice, Bob and Charlie. Alice wants all cars to be yellow, Bob doesn't want any cars to be yellow and Charlie just really hates -. Now charlie is a bit of a practical guy; anything if I don't make a deal, if I don't swap my votes with other people then I can't be sure my policy is going to pass. However if I can create a sort of alliance with someone and they vote for my thing and I vote for theirs then I can ensure that my policy passes and because I don't care about cars I may as well go with that. So here's Alice, Bob and Charlie; Charlie says hey does anyone want to trade votes, you vote for my policy not up yours?
>
> there's no mention here of discussion or persuasion. there's some kinda model being used in which people have immutable, arbitrary preferences and then try to get their way. something like that. it's treating democracy somewhat like a competitive board game, like Risk, where you just try to win within the rules and you can form alliances with other players for the purposes of the game but they don't have intellectual content. why do France and Germany become allies in this particular game of risk? b/c the players thought it was good military tactics. there's no ideas about liberalism, no values and ways of life that differ between countries, no good guys or bad guys. the real world is different than that kind of model. when using highly simplified models, one has to be really careful about what's being left out, and what difference it could have made if it wasn't left out.

In the international relations field, there are some people who view international relations as kind of a risk board model (they are often called "realists" or some variant.) One thing they have trouble explaining, though, is the relative peacefulness between liberal democracies.

Note, this problem doesn't mean that realist analysis is useless. There can be situations where it's useful. But it matters whether you're trying to apply the realist analysis to decide how to act in some dispute between despots in the middle east vs how to treat the UK or Israel.

A core premise of the rules for rulers/selectorate stuff seems to be that it explains the operation of governments *generally*. So that is a problem.

-JM

[Max Kaye]

On 15 Sep 2017, at 10:07, Elliot Temple wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:02 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
>> On 15/9/17 2:33 am, Justin Mallone wrote:
>>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:40 AM, Max Kaye m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas]

>>> <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Why say it? Because I was frustrated (and a little insulted) that
>>>> you'd
>>>> so quickly dismiss something I perceive to be *very* useful when it
>>>> comes to understanding power dynamics and systems of authority.

>>>> Maybe
>>>> that's because I want your approval, or maybe that's because I
>>>> think
>>>> you're sometimes a bit self-righteous and it irks me.

>>> Elaborate on self-righteous.
>>
>> Google's definition of self-righteous
>>
>>> having or characterized by a certainty, ~~especially an unfounded
>>> one~~, that one is totally correct or morally superior.
>>
>> (I've tried to strikeout the "unfounded" part because I know ET's
>> opinions aren't unfounded)
>>

>> An important note that this is about **my perception**, not objective
>> reality.
>>
>> A few examples:
>>

>> * In the "History of FI" thread ET asked me to "just drop" something
>> - which I was fine with, but wasn't really explained (though this is
>> difficult in personal situations, admittedly)
>

> That something is personal or private *is* the explanation. If you
> have a problem with that, you can state it. E.g you could say you
> think privacy shouldn’t exist or say this issue is so crucial that
> privacy should be broken.

Yeah I think that’s fair. I don’t have a problem with it. Part of
the context that was lost in the dialog since then was that it wasn’t
clear from the start that it was personal. I agree that 'it’s
personal' is a good enough explanation most of the time (esp. in cases
where it doesn’t affect me).

> It’s hard to comment because you’re misquoting and not providing
> adequate
> context – e.g. you offer no reminders of what the issue was.
>
> The text “just drop” doesn’t exist in my search of the FI
> history thread (which you put the wrong name for in quotes).
>
> i searched in two different mail clients with two separate email
> accounts in case of a mail client bug.
>
> please don’t put stuff in quotes here unless you’re confident
> it’s literally, exactly an actual quote.

That was my mistake. What I meant to quote was "i know what i'm talking
about here (rather than being uncautious), but let's drop it."

Will avoid paraphrasing-as-quoting in future (or make it well known
I’m paraphrasing)

>> * When I commented on his 10m "good and evil" podcast recently,
>> talking about what I thought the deeper explanation was, and lamented
>> ET didn't include it in the episode.
>

> what’s the problem or issue?
>
> is your complaint that the podcast should have been longer and said
> more? is making some short stuff self-righteous?
>
> you got more info in email replies.
>
> i have no idea what your complaint is.

I thought your words in that podcast came off as self-righteous because
you didn’t include the deeper explanation linked to objective reality.

**I** would prefer something with that deeper explanation, but we’ve
already discussed when this is and isn’t appropriate in another
thread, I think, or you address them further in this email.

>> That doesn't mean it's worse (ET definitely can reach a wider reading
>> audience at a comprehension level), but one of the reasons I had such
>> respect for DD was that all his writing had this context of "I might
>> be wrong, but I think have good explanations, and here they are in
>> detail". ETs style (at least here) seems more like "I might be wrong,
>> but here's what I think" and sometimes that explanation isn't as
>> deep.
>

> The explanations are available on every point, in full depth. If you
> can’t find them for some point, you can ask. I’m unaware of any
> issue in FI philosophy that you consider unaddressed and wish to be
> addressed.
>
> Do you want me to frontload all the answers before you even say much?
> Just write 10k word chapters, or even books, in response to initial
> comments on a subject? Shall I tell you both what the questions are
> and the answers are, as DD’s books do? That isn’t discussion. And
> anyway I already wrote a lot about tons of the topics, so if you
> don’t want answers specific to you then just go search the archives
> and my websites.

No, of course I realise that’s not tenable. I’ve definitely come
around a lot more after reading this passage (and the other emails in
the Books thread so far).

I think with the podcast thing I imagined it to be more self contained
and less about a discussion. This is actually a bit silly though, since
it’s deliberately labeled as a Q&A podcast (i.e. discussion based to
some degree).

> If you want more info on some point, ask or search. Don’t expect me
> to guess everything you want and preemptively hand it to you. That’s
> actually a ridiculous method and is one of the many things wrong with
> books.

I agree, and I do try to ask.

> one of the main reasons I haven’t written books similar to DD’s is
> *that wouldn’t work*. DD’s books are useful as *supplements* to
> discussion, and are alright at marketing/outreach, but they don’t
> actually work well for anyone as a primary educational tool.

What are your thoughts on *other people’s* discussion? Still worth it?
(Example: a podcast where 4 ppl talk about a chapter of a book each
week).

> DD’s books, like Popper’s and Rand’s, are a huge failure in a
> straightforward sense. if the ideas in those books were understood by
> lots of people, then it’d rapidly and dramatically change the world
> in huge ways. that isn’t happening. it’s not on the verge of
> happening. it’s not 5% of the way to happening. it’s *not
> working*.
>
> if the ideas were *successfully communicated*, things would be totally
> different. the books almost entirely fail at that, while also
> obscuring the problem.
>
> this is one of the problems i’m working on.

What are your thoughts on constructing a system in which people are
*encouraged* to adopt FI thinking? It could be any type of system: a
game, politics, economics, social, etc.

It’s true that *reality itself* can be seen as such a system, but if
the timelines are too long then other things get in the way.

Is such a system possible? Are you interested in building one? What
would it look like?

>> That is what occurs to me as *sometimes* coming off in a
>> "characterised by a certainty that one is totally correct or morally
>> superior". Now there are some obvious caveats: this is FI after all,
>> hopefully that explains my perception enough to understand, though.
>

> What’s the problem?
>
> All I got is that I once didn’t want to talk about something which
> was none of your business, I once made a podcast in reply to Anne
> B’s question and it didn’t say everything you would have liked it
> to, and I don’t format my writing as books which fool you into
> thinking they’re complete when they’re actually at the *beginning
> of infinity* (thoroughly incomplete).

TBH, now, I don’t think there is one.

> In Paths Forward stuff I think I talked about bringing up the FIRST
> criticism you have, then seeing how the criticism is addressed (if at
> all). It’s a big time saver.

That’s fair, and with the discussion over the past few days I
appreciate that method a lot more than I used to. Have only had a
cursory glance at paths forward, so will need to look into it a bit
more.


Max

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 17, 2017, at 1:51 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 15 Sep 2017, at 10:07, Elliot Temple wrote:



>> one of the main reasons I haven’t written books similar to DD’s is *that wouldn’t work*. DD’s books are useful as *supplements* to discussion, and are alright at marketing/outreach, but they don’t actually work well for anyone as a primary educational tool.
>
> What are your thoughts on *other people’s* discussion? Still worth it? (Example: a podcast where 4 ppl talk about a chapter of a book each week).

I’m skeptical of verbal (or any synchronous) discussions with more than 2 people. Each extra person adds more complexity to the discussion structure (that’s rough to organize in real time), more waiting for the participants, and more different preferences about where the discussion goes next.

waiting for someone to complete saying one thought, and then you get to say your thing, is an issue. waiting for it and then having to wait for a whole ‘nother person to speak before you (and possibly get replies) is a much more severe issue.

---

how well discussion works for others depends a lot on the style. people sometimes try to find some important point, quote it, and then write a general interest reply. that works great for audiences. other times they get into the fine details of some particular person’s views, and audiences mostly lose interest. (btw it’s good to read some stuff like that to learn about how to argue details.)

>> DD’s books, like Popper’s and Rand’s, are a huge failure in a straightforward sense. if the ideas in those books were understood by lots of people, then it’d rapidly and dramatically change the world in huge ways. that isn’t happening. it’s not on the verge of happening. it’s not 5% of the way to happening. it’s *not working*.
>>
>> if the ideas were *successfully communicated*, things would be totally different. the books almost entirely fail at that, while also obscuring the problem.
>>
>> this is one of the problems i’m working on.
>
> What are your thoughts on constructing a system in which people are *encouraged* to adopt FI thinking? It could be any type of system: a game, politics, economics, social, etc.
>
> It’s true that *reality itself* can be seen as such a system, but if the timelines are too long then other things get in the way.
>
> Is such a system possible? Are you interested in building one? What would it look like?

I am interested in a web forum design which encourages better discussions. More on this below.

I have issues with “educational” games in general, and gamification. They’re basically full of fake, arbitrary incentives/rewards determined by the authority.

a type of system that could benefit from FI stuff is *internal company policies*. e.g. most meetings could be transcribed and posted on an internal website where anyone in the company can read and comment. (you’d have to worry about leaks, but most meetings aren’t that sensitive.) or, more extreme, most meetings could be replaced with asynchronous discussions with nested quoting which the whole company can view and comment on.

a different idea for a company is to encourage a large proportion of employees to run public blogs (during work hours) about their work. writing about what they’re working on would help them think it through. some of them would get large audiences which quickly point out some mistakes they make and give good feedback.

another thing a company could do is recognize that knowledge workers can typically do around 3 hours per day of really high quality serious knowledge work. so first of all, don’t be one of those startups with 10 hour work days! 8 hours is enough. then think about what the less-hardcore hours can include that’s still productive instead of the employee just fucking around on reddit/twitter/facebook and reading offtopic online articles. e.g. blogging or internal company discussion participation are things programmers could fit in after they’re tired and becoming less efficient at programming anyway.


# Forum

I think a good-discussion-encouraging web forum is possible. I use Yahoo Groups because it *allows* good discussions. They’re *possible* here, as opposed to e.g. Facebook which does not allow them [1].

Facebook is full of features to direct people to certain types of discussion. For example, writing more than ~250 characters gets your comment collapsed and people have to click to expand. This discourages longer posts.

Hacker News has algorithms to penalize posts (so they rank lower on the front page, or not at all) that get too many comments. This is from memory from a few years ago, but it’s something like that. The concept is to penalize controversial posts that generate heated arguments. Hacker News also hides the “reply” link on nested comments temporarily (it shows up after a delay and the amount of delay increases for each level of nesting). This again helps discourage back-and-forth discussion and, more intentionally, debates in which anyone might get upset.

Ann Coulter’s forum is a reasonably normal phpbb style forum. It allows nested quoting, though it’s very inconvenient to split a quote into several pieces and reply separately (you have to keep typing out forum quoting codes, you don’t get software support). However, nested quoting more than 5 levels is banned by the software and your post won’t submit until you delete some quoting. (and it doesn’t have any automated feature to delete the too-deep quotes for you, which wouldn’t be that hard to code). this is an attempt to make discussions better by limiting the amount of irrelevant junk people quote, but it also gets in the way of good uses of quoting (including ones where you manually edited the quotes down to be very short, or were having a highly iterative discussion in the first place. 5 levels of quoting could be only 5 sentences which is a low limit!).

lots of forums have systems with upvotes, feedback emoticons, etc. lots of forums have stuff to discourage continuing old discussions. also there’s moderation and posting rate limits.

Looking at popular forums, you’ll find the designs are full of incentives to make discussion *less like* FI. I think you could come up with some stuff that works in the opposite direction. merely having *quote coloring* helps encourage people to use quotes well. they’d be even more encouraged to quote well if readers could hover their mouse over any quote to see the author, rather than having to refer back to the top of the email and count quote levels. (this would be a pretty easy feature for email clients to add which would usually work correctly, but i’m unaware of it ever existing.)

As a positive example, I think I saw some Stack Exchange site, or something similar, have a text-field where you write display some short advice before you start writing. It automatically disappears when you go to write, so it’s not in your way. It helped give people a reminder. Similarly, I’ve seen Stack Exchange sites do something like automatically search the archives for threads that might already be the same question you’re asking and show them to you. That’s good to help encourage people not to post repeat questions (and if you still think your question needs posting, you can, it doesn’t stop you, it just makes sure the search gets done without it being a hassle or manual step).

i haven’t put a ton of thought into forum design because i don’t want to spend my time coding one or hire a programmer to make one. it’d be nice but it’d take a lot of resources and i have other priorities.

also the kind of people who make good FI participants are the same kind of people who tend to ignore forum-design nudges and do what they think is best on their own initiative. forum design has a much larger effect on more passive people.



[1] Except with major inconvenience. FB allows posting plain text, so you could technically just post the same thing as FI emails on FB and have people copy/paste them off of FB, into appropriate software, for reading/writing.


Elliot Temple
www.curi.us

[Max Kaye]

On 15 Sep 2017, at 12:20, Elliot Temple wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 5:48 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
>> One example is DD's criticism of PR and defence of Pluralism. Reading
>> that was the first time I actually held an explanation for why
>> pluralism might be okay, and why PR can do evil via what I used to
>> think was a feature, not a bug (compromise).
>>
>> However, the selectorate theory gives us enough insight to understand
>> that _the same sort of compromise_ can easily occur within a ruling
>> party since _their administration is no longer based on a consistent
>> explanation / framework_. This arises from a leader's need to satisfy
>> keys supporters and their diverse interests.
>>
>> Thus authority is misused in pluralism in the same way as PR - though
>> perhaps to different extents.
>>
>> Moreover, it shows that regardless of the framework you use, if you
>> have (what I call) static majoritarianism you necessarily require the
>> misuse of authority in this way. **Corruption is a tool** and
>> refusing to use that tool means you are more easily replaced (since
>> the voter base / key supporters are more ready to change team).
>
> DD already has far more advanced views than this, but they’re very
> hard to explain to people who don’t understand tons of background
> knowledge that the more advanced views build on.

Maybe, but I haven’t heard anything convincing. And the selectorate
theory already explains a lot, *and offers additional unrefuted
criticisms of pluralism* that aren’t dealt with AFAIK.

>> We saw this with the *rise* of Trump (existing key supporters
>> switching teams), and we're seeing it with supports now leaving him.
>>
>> E.g. Ann Coulter recently retweeted:
>> https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/908176374074155009
>>
>>> If he does not build the wall, he simply will not get reelected. If
>>> he does build it, he will win 2020 by a landslide. It is that
>>> simple.
>>
>> Whether _he should or shouldn't build the wall_ is besides the point
>> here; this is *corruption as a tool* in action.
>
> How is it corrupt to promise to build a wall, and then to be judged by
> whether you kept your #1 campaign promise?

Because of the *reason* he’s building it - because it’s appealing.
He’s not doing it because it was a carefully calculated way to deal
with the issue.

*Maybe* it is a good policy, but doing it for the wrong reasons
indicates that *not all good policy* is able to be enacted, just *good
policy supported by the selectorate*.

> Besides promising the wall, Trump also explained why the wall is a
> good idea.
> His voters agreed – they judged the wall should be built. Whether
> the wall should be built *is* the point people thought about, and the
> idea it should be built persuaded enough people to win the election
> for Trump.

I definitely wasn’t convinced of that. BOTE calculations put the cost
in the $10-20 billion range.

Is that the best way to deal with the problem with that amount of money?
What about building interim communities (border cities sort of thing)
that allow prospective people time to adjust to the American culture,
get out of whatever they were running away from, and pick up new skills,
do work, etc? You wouldn’t give them residency or the same rights,
btw, it’s okay to demand that be earned.

That $10b+ is not very productive. It stimulates the economy like broken
windows do, so that’s not a good reason for building it. It does keep
people out, but they’re still going to want to get in, they’re
crafty, and it’s an incredible ongoing liability (just staffing alone
is incredibly expensive). 1 person per mile over 2000 mile 24hrs a day
at $10/hr (with no overheads) is $500k per day; nearly $200m / year.
Without overheads (bureaucratic, weapons, equipment, transport, etc).

You also get an escalating cost/reward situation like the war on drugs -
it’s just a bad use of money that doesn’t actually do what it
intends to do, except with huge expense and probably collateral damage.

It doesn’t increase the prosperity of the US much, and it doesn’t
increase the prosperity of any Mexicans.

Not good!

>>> you may not be emotionally or intellectually ready to face this –
>>> that
>>> the ideas you value are actually deeply incompatible with BoI,
>>> Objectivism, etc. and it'd be hard to explain it to you due to your
>>> lack
>>> of background knowledge.
>>
>> Well I definitely believe that *most* of the ideas I value are
>> compatible with BoI - it's been a very integral part of my life since
>> reading it (have read most chapters a 2+ times), and I try to filter
>> _everything_ through the lessons I've picked up.
>
> i appreciate that the interest is more than most people.
>
> If you post beliefs or questions to FI, we can go through lots of them
> and you can be informed of how they are different than the DD/BoI
> perspective.

I will, in time. As it stands I have a massive backlog already to reply
to.

> You have issues with gun control and have sympathy with universal
> basic income, IIRC. That’s so far from DD’s views.

I don’t think UBI will work. I don’t have sympathy with it. I have
empathy for the people who think it’s a good idea (though not
sympathy). UBI ideas can be useful in other contexts (i.e. particular
economic constructs) but I don’t think they work in normal economics.

Gun control is something I am willing to talk about. Curious as to DDs
views. [1]

One thing I am willing to concede is that gun control is an expression
of authority, and authority is *objectively bad*. *However*, I also
think that authority is a *necessary evil as we transition **out** of
it*. We can’t jump from 1 to N, we need to go incrementally, and if we
accept that authority exists now, and is incremental, then we should (if
we understand morality) have some views on how that authority is used in
the interim. I know I do have such views, even though I honestly believe
we’re transitioning into a more free less authoritarian society.

Aside: I also believe we’ll (probably) always need some authority in
governance, but it will be restricted more and more to the 'fringes',
with a sort of 'centre of freedom' in the middle. That’s because
problems are inevitable, and some problems are about governing ourself,
and if we haven’t solved those issues yet we (in some cases) will
require rules, law, force, etc. I’d be very happy for that not to be
true, though.

I *definitely* think there’s a lot of bad philosophy on "pro-gun" side
of the debate. But willing to admit there’s a lot of bad philosophy on
the "pro-control" side too.

> common topics that people are unwilling to consider from anything like
> DD’s perspective are parenting/education and relationships/marriage.
> have you read any of DD’s writing on those topics?

I have, though not much (mainly when looking into TCS over the past few
years). They sit well with my views on non-coercion, open transparent
communication, and problem solving. I have never liked how children were
raised, and so TCS was a breath of fresh air.

> have you worked out some unconventional views about them that you
> think are implied by BoI?

I think so, but I’m also far more aligned with that style of thinking
so am not as aware of the "unconventional" parts as much as other ppl
might be.

I can’t remember where I first heard about TCS - a quick search in BoI
doesn’t turn anything up.

I did find the "because I say so" argument quite compelling, and maybe
that was the first time I really thought authority over children was
*evil*.

> i don’t know if you’re the kind of person who’d like AS and FH
> now. it’s possible you’re hesitant to read it because you have
> some vague guess that you wouldn’t love it.

They’ve been on my reading list for a while, and I’m definitely open
to them. That said that hesitancy is real, to some degree, too.

> you should read a a bit and see. do a test. both books have a key

> scene near the beginning which some readers would
> really like. i think FH’s scene is better, so i’d suggest trying
> FH over AS.

Will do. Embarassingly I haven’t read FoR yet (though have owned it
for ~3 years) so I’m just starting that. Thinking of posting thoughts
on chapters as I read through it. FH after that (unless you think FH is
worth prioritising over FoR considering I’ve read BoI a few times)

>> Is there a reason to believe that the *logic of the situation* does
>> not lead
>> to the conclusion that *rulers must do whatever it takes to stay in
>> power or risk losing power*?
>
> people frequently choose to risk losing power.

Any choice risks losing power. I agree that sometimes leaders do what
they think is "right", and it is not uncommon for them to be turfed out.
Churchill, for example.

Also, since losing power in a democracy means going on to have a long
and happy life, there’s less incentive to keep it absolutely (unlike
in a dictatorship, where you probs end up dead).

> and anyway, there are other ways to keep power than basically trying
> to bribe the right people. you could implement good ideas and persuade
> people they are good... the whole worldview involved with the
> Dictator’s Handbook is so anti-morality and anti-reason.

The right people are voters, and the way to bribe them is with ideas
suited well to them. (There are other right people too, and policy plays
a similar role).

Persuasion works over long time scales, but isn’t particularly
productive over short time scales. How often have people given up
talking to you, even though you’d be persuasive if they stayed?

>>> Ideas rule the world. (Which is somewhat opposite to the Dictator's
>>> Handbook perspective.) So your priorities are mistaken.
>>
>> Why isn't BoI more popular then?
>
> because it’s not understood, and because it’s hostile to many of
> the BAD ideas which currently rule most of the world.

Bad ideas like "I should do whatever it takes to stay in power?"

>> Certainly various meme-plexes are deeply ingrained in our culture,
>> but is there a reason there aren't *laws of power* like their are
>> *laws of physics*, or *laws of economics*?
>
> we don’t normally call things “laws” unless they’re really
> fundamental. and if you had some fundamental and correct “law of
> power” it’d really just be a law of some of the fundamental fields
> like economics.

You could frame the selectorate theory in terms of decision-making
theory and other things related to economics. I don’t know enough to
do this though, besides via intuition.

> the approach of the Dictator’s Handbook is wrong and gets wrong
> conclusions. much like: there can something along the lines of laws of
> psychology (whether or not you want to call them laws), but lots of
> books in the field are totally wrong about what the laws of psychology
> are and use bad approaches.

People can be right for the wrong reasons (and we expect this to happen
occasionally, too, due to the pervasiveness of objective truth).

Absolutely most psych books are bad, but not all of them are *useless*,
and some ideas are good (though admittedly this is not as common in
fields like psych).

Treasure and objective good aren’t always orthogonal; there is plenty
of overlap. But objectively good policies are hard to come by.
Quantitative easing, housing subsidies, baby bonuses, poorly managed
healthcare (both public and private), discriminatory policy (affirmative
action, lack of same-sex marriage / unions), legislative privilege
(stock market in Aus for example - we only have 1, essentially, the ASX;
the ISP industry in the US; Australia’s "National Broadband Network"),
poorly thought out surveillance laws, and the list goes on.

Even more damning is that entire groups (statistically) aren’t taken
into account when it comes to policy, even if those people were trying
to rationally examine policy [2].

> some countries are dominated by much worse ideas. the more people are
> controlled by static society memes, the more you can approximate and
> predict behavior with economics/math/etc type modeling. (even then,
> those societies routinely reduce material wealth (treasure) in
> accordance with some moral code or religious ritual.)

Absolutely. And that hurts them. But many of those countries have
systems of democracy too, including two party systems and pluralism
(instead of PR).

> the dictator’s handbook says all the people in all the countries and
> cultures are the same. this is totally wrong and neglects the massive
> differences in ideas of a typical American or Syrian. the West is
> civilized and Somalia isn’t. civilization involves various stuff
> including material wealth, but most of all ideas about how to live.

I agree this is a criticism of the book, but I don’t think it is a
criticism of the selectorate theory, since it’s easy to expand it from
first principles to take advantage of those differences and help explain
behaviour of rulers.

>>> i think the discussion has lots of value, and this indicates you
>>> were
>>> wrong about the post which led to that value. the initial post
>>> leading
>>> to interesting discussion was no accident!
>>
>> I think this conversion definitely has value **to me**. But that's
>> also because of *my* mistakes in my first reply.
>>
>> I am not sure it has value to anyone else, though I do appreciate the
>> discussion and learning.
>
> i think more or less everyone here is more interested in this
> discussion than the video. observing critical discussion in action is
> value. lots of examples!
>
> i, in particular, want to understand how to persuade people. *that*
> interests me. the video doesn’t interest me (the book is a bit more
> interesting).

It’s funny that I sort of feel a sense of pride reading that - not
about my original post, ofc, but that this has lead to productive
discussion and that I’m (hopefully) contributing to that.


- Max


[1] : All I could find:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beginning-of-infinity/4vooa4Xmrh0

[2] : this Princeton study:

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

>> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized
>> groups representing business interests have substantial independent
>> impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and
>> mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
>> The results provide substantial support for theories of
>> Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but
>> not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian
>> Pluralism.

[Max Kaye]

On 15 Sep 2017, at 23:52, Justin Mallone wrote:
> On Sep 14, 2017, at 7:02 PM, Max Kaye m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas]
> <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
>> On 15/9/17 2:33 am, Justin Mallone wrote:
>>
>>> On 14/9/17 10:54 am, Elliot Temple wrote:
>>>> On Sep 13, 2017, at 4:59 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

(Note, some quotes were lost here, I’ve added my bits back in)

> Max Kaye:

>> I haven't deliberately observed whether I edit for hostility, but
>> if I do write something hostile I don't think I ever edit to
>> *increase*
>> the hostility. It is something I'm going to start trying to observe
>> (though maybe that's in conflict with trying not to be hostile too).
>> In
>> any case something to keep in mind.
>>
>> Low-edit-time posts are almost certainly more honest, but that
>> doesn't
>> mean they're more useful, and are almost certainly less resistant to
>> criticism. There's a place, just not everywhere, and my original
>> reply
>> is an example of that.
>
> One thing I'm trying to think through here is this:
>
> Premise 1: people should take a break instead of posting while
> hostile. hostile posting does not add value to the list.

Agreed with the second part, in terms of taking a break… (will address
in a mo)

> Premise 2: people should get criticism on the things they actually
> think, including when they are hostile, instead of hiding their
> thoughts.

Also agreed.

> One thing you can try is writing whatever but then not sending it
> while
> hostile. Then you can have the text you wrote in the hostile state,
> and get some perspective on it later. You could even still send that,
> but in "quotes" as it were, like quoting yourself from a different
> mental state and saying some stuff you see wrong with it. And maybe
> you could get other criticisms on it from different people, which
> would help you more thoroughly refute the hostility-generating ideas
> than just your own self-crit.

I think this is actually a really good idea. So don’t necessarily take
a break (which is hard sometimes to realise that you should, anyway) but
realising you shouldn’t *send* it in that context is important.

Then self-quoting is good. Often (IRL) ppl seem to take this as ~"I want
to say this but I don’t want to be *responsible* for saying it". I
imagine it can be different here, though.

>>> Max Kaye:

>>>> That said, I didn't see any objections to the *content* I
>>>> recommended; I
>>>> did see objections to
>>>>
>>>> a) The t-shirt
>>>> b) The author
>>>>
>>>> And I don't *really* care about debating those things too much - I
>>>> don't
>>>> have a horse in *that* race, and I think the most morally repugnant
>>>> people (perhaps Che is a good example) are still able to produce
>>>> knowledge (or communicate it) - a point made in BoI too.
>>>
>>> Perhaps there’s something you could learn here about being able to
>>> make better judgments of what to engage in based on limited
>>> information. This is a really important skill in a world where
>>> there’s so much possible information to engage with.
>

> Max Kaye:

>> I think there is (both the thing I brought up about the
>> meta-situation
>> before, and also in general with outside media). Have either you or
>> ET
>> written anything on that particularly?
>
> I think a big thing here is principled thinking. If you understand
> principles deeply, and understand how stuff connects to other stuff,
> you don't have to keep dealing with minor variations of things as
> special cases.

Yes, but you also need good explanations to know when and how to apply
principles. For example, I think (initially at least) some of Elliot’s
principles prevented him from engaging with *the quality parts* of the
selectorate theory / dictators handbook / rules for rulers. Those
principles are "less important" than his principles on error correction,
though, so he’s willing to continue the discussion (which is good).

The point here is that those principles *can* cause mistakes, and if I
wasn’t here to keep engaging the error correction process isn’t able
to take effect. (Whether either of us are right here is not the point,
we should discover that through the error correction process).

> Here's Leonard Peikoff saying something about Rand's principled
> thinking in "My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir"
> (published in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, and
> also available in audio form):
>
>> Ayn Rand started thinking in terms of principles, she told me once,
>> at the age of twelve. To her, it was a normal part of the process of
>> growing up, and she never dropped the method thereafter. Nor, I
>> believe, did she ever entirely comprehend the fact that the approach
>> which was second nature to her was not practiced by other people.
>> Much of the time, she was baffled by or indignant at the people she
>> was doomed to talk to, people like the man we heard about in the
>> early 1950s, who was calling for the nationalization of the steel
>> industry. The man was told by an Objectivist why government seizure
>> of the steel industry was immoral and impractical, and he was
>> impressed by the argument. His comeback was: “Okay, I see that. But
>> what about the coal industry?”

I think I identify with this sort of thing - definitely the notion of
'truth seeking' has been something I picked up very early (including the
idea of not being able to 'choose' the truth); I’ve been an
objectivist *in potentia* for a long time.

> More from same piece:
>
>> I use the term “overview” deliberately, because I always felt as
>> though everyone else had their faces pressed up close to an event and
>> were staring at it myopically, while she was standing on a
>> mountaintop, sweeping the world with a single glance, and thus was
>> able to identify the most startling connections, not only between
>> streaking and literature, but also between sex and economics, art and
>> business, William F. Buckley and Edward Kennedy. She was able to
>> unite the kinds of things that other people automatically pigeonhole
>> into separate compartments. Her universe, as a result, was a single
>> whole, with all its parts interrelated and intelligible; it was not
>> the scattered fragments and fiefdoms that are all most people know.
>> To change the image: she was like a ballet dancer of the intellect,
>> leaping from fact to fact and field to field, not by the strength of
>> her legs, but by the power of logic, a power that most men do not
>> seem fully to have discovered yet.

This definitely has a greater relevance here (comparing ET and my
behaviours)

> Here, you seem to not understand the connection Elliot made between
> the peddling of a specific shirt and a judgment about the likely
> quality/content of a video. I think your perspective here is a typical
> perspective. "It's just a shirt, it doesn't really matter" would be a
> very typical attitude here.

This is true, I didn’t understand it at the time.

*However*, this sort of overview can definitely help us understand
*other ppl’s anti-rational memes*, but to judge the selectorate theory
itself we need to go deeper, and connecting too many of these points can
give a false-negative (again, why error correction is so important).

> But there was an infinite universe of possible things to try and sell.
> The specific shirt was chosen out of that infinite universe of
> possibilities for a *reason*. The person choosing it acted on an
> *idea*. And the reach of ideas cannot be easily constrained. And the
> same ideas and decision-making process that led to the selection of
> that shirt to sell will inevitably effect other things, such as the
> content of the video.

Possibly, but the reach of many of these sorts of ideas *are*
constrained in ppl’s minds. In another thread we talked about Hawking
having multiple "boxes" with which to think, and his "physics" box is
quite good, whereas his "social problems" box is not.

In this way, I think there’s the possibility that CGP Grey has
multiple boxes, and whatever box Che Guevara is in might not be a good
box, but the box he uses to analyse the selectorate theory *might* be
good. But we can’t understand which boxes he’s using without delving
into the topic far more, and particularly learning about *him*.

> I think people frequently have a *strong preference* to limit the
> reach of ideas. Because then they can save a bunch of stuff in their
> life they don't wanna reconsider while pretending they are still being
> rational. I think this explains the strong *emotional* negative
> reaction/hostility people experience when having stuff they like
> surveyed from Ayn Rand/ET's mountaintop. Because they see AR/ET's
> criticism as a threat to their carefully-crafted system of
> disintegrations. And they're right to.

I agree, but I also think those views can be fallible, and can give
false-positives / false-negatives as I mentioned before.


Max

[Max Kaye]

I completely agree with this. Bad ideas generating other bad ideas lead
to contradictions (an ever increasing amount the more you go on; one
reason why anti-rational memes actively *prevent* the creation of *most*
new knowledge).

>> I think people frequently have a *strong preference* to limit the
>> reach of ideas. Because then they can save a bunch of stuff in their
>> life they don't wanna reconsider while pretending they are still
>> being rational. I think this explains the strong *emotional* negative
>> reaction/hostility people experience when having stuff they like
>> surveyed from Ayn Rand/ET's mountaintop. Because they see AR/ET's
>> criticism as a threat to their carefully-crafted system of
>> disintegrations. And they're right to.
>
> i agree that ppl frequently try to keep their system of
> disintegrations safe. they evade the connections.
>
> however, consider:
>
> you CAN derive huge value from people, books, videos, etc even if the
> creators make other errors.
>
> consequently, you should ask for explanations of these
> mountaintop-view connections between supposed errors. what a valid
> criticism should do is EXPLAIN the connection. it should explain how
> the idea behind a t-shirt here **leads to** specific ideas behind the
> video content being bad there.

I do think there might be some latitude to not put forward the *entire*
criticism up front. ET posted before about some of the problems with
books, and that the idea of writing a 10k word response to one question
is probably a waste of time in many ways.

But definitely that explanation *has* to exist.

> you shouldn’t refute the video content without actual criticisms of
> the video content. (again, consider this hypothetical.)
>
> or suppose someone wants to disregard Rand’s moral philosophy since
> she thought induction existed.
>
> what a valid criticism should do is EXPLAIN the connection. it should
> explain how Rand believing induction existed here **leads to** a bunch
> of mistakes in her moral philosophy there.
>
> you shouldn’t refute Rand’s moral philosophy without actual
> criticisms of her moral philosophy.

Exactly - one mistake does not automatically invalidate other theories,
and explanations that are good can be supported by *both* bad and good
explanations. This is one of the reasons we can make progress at all:
that our current (bad) explanations can still lead to us getting closer
to objective truth.


Max

[Max Kaye]

In this case (it being personal) I’m willing to accept ~"it’s
personal" as a reason to finish up the discussion on that particular
topic. As ET pointed out, I do think privacy is a good thing and we
should have the right to have it. Now, that can be misused, so there are
definitely some times where I’ll push it, and there are times when
"it’s personal" *isn’t* good enough, and those are worth pushing
too.

This wasn’t one of those times, though. (As far as I could see - there
wouldn’t be any benefit from me pushing it)

> if you hold your tongue (and thereby prevent errors in your complaint
> from being corrected via people responding), you have no right to hold
> the slightest grudge.

That’s fair - but I also think it’s fair for me to reply something
like "it bothers me that you’ve used 'it’s personal' in this case
because X, but I’m also willing to skip over this at this time".

> here it's: stand up for yourself, and don't assume others are fragile.
> this isn't a safe space or even 10% of a safe space. (tons of forums
> aren't exactly a safe space, but are like 50% that way.)

Yeah, one thing I’ve had some trouble with recently is being too FI
like in non-FI situations, where other’s *are* more fragile, and where
it can be deeply insulting or damaging to offer unbound criticism.

> Also you made a complaint about *irking* self-righteousness. But when
> asked for examples, you gave one "which I was fine with". "fine" and
> "irked" are incompatible, so that's a topic change.

This is also a good point.

What I should have said is that I was irked by the original
self-righteousness, questioned it, and then was fine with the result
(though not satisfied, just willing to let it go).


Max

[Max Kaye]

On 16 Sep 2017, at 12:36, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us [fallible-ideas]
wrote:

Yeah - that’s fair. It’s also hard to write down frameworks well for
the same reason it’s hard to write books that enable error correction
- I don’t know what you don’t know, or what you already disagree
with.

A "from first principles" has been on my to-do list, though. Instead of
one big essay I’m thinking of many smaller essays, which hopefully
enable a better error-correction process.

> https://pastebin.com/EpzgsAsX
>
>> So the first part is basically the winning strategy at democracy
>> today.
>
> it's a winning strategy within a certain model of how democracy works.
> that model is part of the framework behind this statement.

Yup, point taken.

In this case the base assumptions are pretty simple:

1. **pure** direct democracy (like what is used within a house of
parliament - yeas vs neys)
2. People want the policy they proposed to pass (self-interest).

Within that framework, the optimum strategy is to become the biggest
group provided that none of the group prevent you from (2), or if it
does to some degree, that this is an acceptable compromise (e.g. that
you can only pass 50% of the policies you want; which is much better
than 0%)

> there's also the question: why does one want to "win" at democracy,
> and what does winning consists of? and does it mean others lose?

1. The power to prevent other ppl from passing policy
1.1. even a small amount of power in static majoritarianism [1] can be
used as leverage, so it’s still useful
2. The power to pass your own policy

Winning in this case means significant control over the static
majoritarian democracy (house + senate, for example) and since that part
is zero-sum you prevent your opponents (who are the ppl passing policy
you don’t want passed) from (2)

> and there's a question of constraints, e.g.: are we excluding violence
> from the allowed strategies to win? any assumed constraints are part
> of the framework being used.

In this case there are good reasons for not using violence (i.e. that
you destroy some of the productive capacity you want to take advantage
of or that is important to your life (quality, freedom, etc))

Otherwise, generally speaking I’d say 'anything legal' is within
constraints. Sometimes ppl go outside that, but in western democracies
this is less common.

> i'm NOT saying all this should have been addressed in the talk. you
> can never go through and explain all your background knowledge. but
> it's good to consider it sometimes and have material about it
> somewhere. (material you endorse, but you don't have to have
> personally made it). and then that material should have its own deeper
> material addressing its own background assumptions, and so on. you
> can't have infinite layers of this but you can go pretty far and be
> pretty thorough about addressing problems that our society knows
> about.

It is sometimes hard to endorse material if the author has some
anti-rational memes included, because it distracts others from the
content you want to endorse 😛

One question I did have is to what extent should we endorse content with
such things, instead of re-writing it in our own words without the
author’s original anti-rational memes?

> the selectorate theory has some background ideas like that people want
> power and treasure. i haven't read it carefully but something along
> those kinda lines. these require substantial explanation. e.g. what
> counts as treasure? is it just material wealth? or is it also social
> status? what about other stuff people want like to feel like they
> accomplished something worthwhile, or to feel entertained, how does
> that fit into the model of the world? i don't know if selectorate
> theory addresses stuff like this somewhere.

In this case, "treasure = anything that is desired and able to be
provided" is pretty accurate.

Treasure can be passing something altruistic, if you really value
altruism, for example.

> btw, there are a bunch of popular, bad ideas about frameworks.
>
> Popper's essay "The Myth of the Framework" argues against the view
> that people with different frameworks can't understand each other,
> can't learn from each other, can't cross the gap between frameworks
> and have productive discussion.

I agree with popper, though I do understand why *some* ppl can’t do
that easily.

> Some people say your language has massive influence over your
> thinking, and kinda mind controls you a bit. (Your language, like
> English, is a framework in which you do thinking.) That's too strong a
> claim.

Knowing that we’re universal understanders / explainers (and that
language itself has universal reach in terms of the ideas it can
express) refutes that idea.

That said, as is explored in books like 1984, if you can keep people
from using certain ideas (instantiating an anti-rational meme via
language design) you can hurt their ability to correct errors.

>> And our three people in this case are Alice, Bob and Charlie. Alice
>> wants all cars to be yellow, Bob doesn't want any cars to be yellow

>> and Charlie just really hates {clogs}. Now charlie is a bit of a
>> practical guy; {and he thinks} if I don't make a deal, if I don't

>> swap my votes with other people then I can't be sure my policy is
>> going to pass. However if I can create a sort of alliance with
>> someone and they vote for my thing and I vote for theirs then I can
>> ensure that my policy passes and because I don't care about cars I
>> may as well go with that. So here's Alice, Bob and Charlie; Charlie
>> says hey does anyone want to trade votes, you vote for my policy not
>> up yours?
>
> there's no mention here of discussion or persuasion. there's some
> kinda model being used in which people have immutable, arbitrary
> preferences and then try to get their way.

In this case I’m applying a simple model of democracy where ppl
aren’t able to successfully persuade each other. I think this is
fairly accurate when considering modern democracies - since non-partisan
persuasion does not seem to be much of an active force.

> something like that. it's treating democracy somewhat like a
> competitive board game, like Risk, where you just try to win within
> the rules and you can form alliances with other players for the
> purposes of the game but they don't have intellectual content. why do
> France and Germany become allies in this particular game of risk? b/c
> the players thought it was good military tactics. there's no ideas
> about liberalism, no values and ways of life that differ between
> countries, no good guys or bad guys. the real world is different than
> that kind of model. when using highly simplified models, one has to be
> really careful about what's being left out, and what difference it
> could have made if it wasn't left out.

Yes, the real world is more complex, but in micro-democratic theory (to
borrow the similar use from micro-economics) rarely do values play into
it. Having had a bit of hands-on experience with minor parties and
preference deals in Australia (there are some unique quirks that give
minor parties a good shot at winning in some states), values go out the
window precisely *because* you can’t do anything if you don’t get
bums on seats. You *need* to be pragmatic.

Have any of you (who are reading this) had personal experience with
politics at a high level? My experience is pretty cursory compared to
many of the ppl out there, but I have to say: pragmatism is a winning
strategy.


Max

[anonymous FI]

On Sep 17, 2017, at 18:28 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 16 Sep 2017, at 3:19, anonymous FI wrote:


>> here it's: stand up for yourself, and don't assume others are
>> fragile. this isn't a safe space or even 10% of a safe space. (tons
>> of forums aren't exactly a safe space, but are like 50% that way.)
>
> Yeah, one thing I’ve had some trouble with recently is being too FI
> like in non-FI situations, where other’s *are* more fragile, and
> where it can be deeply insulting or damaging to offer unbound
> criticism.

that's hard.

in a broad way, there are 2 lifestyles.

1) the open society, BoI lifestyle of constantly making rapid progress,
and doing problem-solving/error-correction.

2) the static society lifestyle

if you choose (1) and someone else chooses (2), you will get
progressively more incompatible over time.

but it can be hard to tell what people are choosing. some people think
they're choosing (1) when they're actually choosing (2). they fool
themselves. (this includes you – you may not end up genuinely choosing
(1).)

some people try to choose (1) for a while (with some degree of honesty,
effort, seriousness, etc. and it's hard to actually judge what that
degree is.) but then things don't work out and they later choose (2)
(usually dishonestly).

you want to give people a chance at (1). you want to tell them about it
and have some patience and tolerance while they consider their options,
consider if your view of the world is right or not, are busy doing other
things, do some initial tests to see more about what (1) is like, etc

in the meantime, you'll want to be careful about how you communicate to
try to avoid misunderstandings.

but you'll also want to try to be honest and to stand up for your own
values. you want to be careful about compromising, appeasing, pandering,
etc...

[Justin Mallone]

That's not a ton for the govt. we spend some multiple of that on food stamps.

> Is that the best way to deal with the problem with that amount of money?
> What about building interim communities (border cities sort of thing)
> that allow prospective people time to adjust to the American culture,
> get out of whatever they were running away from, and pick up new skills,
> do work, etc? You wouldn’t give them residency or the same rights,
> btw, it’s okay to demand that be earned.

What? The problem we're trying to solve is illegal immigration. We don't want to make it *easier* for people to come in illegally and help them "adjust." We want to make it harder.

> That $10b+ is not very productive. It stimulates the economy like broken
> windows do, so that’s not a good reason for building it. It does keep
> people out, but they’re still going to want to get in, they’re
> crafty,

Hungary: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/09/16/hungary-builds-a-wall-cuts-illegal-immigration-by-over-99-per-cent/
Israel: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/13/ron-johnson/border-fence-israel-cut-illegal-immigration-99-per/

> and it’s an incredible ongoing liability (just staffing alone
> is incredibly expensive). 1 person per mile over 2000 mile 24hrs a day
> at $10/hr (with no overheads) is $500k per day; nearly $200m / year.
> Without overheads (bureaucratic, weapons, equipment, transport, etc).

walls are good at passive defense. they provide big value just sitting there.

also i dunno what the specific personnel plans would be. but just thinking about it, with some cameras + vehicles, you should be able to have relatively few people patrolling relatively large sections.

> You also get an escalating cost/reward situation like the war on drugs -

what's the escalation? 31 foot ladders for 30 foot wall? ;)

-JM

[Justin Mallone]

On Sep 17, 2017, at 9:19 PM, 'Max Kaye' m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> On 15 Sep 2017, at 23:52, Justin Mallone wrote:
>
>> Here, you seem to not understand the connection Elliot made between
>> the peddling of a specific shirt and a judgment about the likely
>> quality/content of a video. I think your perspective here is a typical
>> perspective. "It's just a shirt, it doesn't really matter" would be a
>> very typical attitude here.

[...]

>> But there was an infinite universe of possible things to try and sell.
>> The specific shirt was chosen out of that infinite universe of
>> possibilities for a *reason*. The person choosing it acted on an
>> *idea*. And the reach of ideas cannot be easily constrained. And the
>> same ideas and decision-making process that led to the selection of
>> that shirt to sell will inevitably effect other things, such as the
>> content of the video.
>
> Possibly, but the reach of many of these sorts of ideas *are*
> constrained in ppl’s minds. In another thread we talked about Hawking
> having multiple "boxes" with which to think, and his "physics" box is
> quite good, whereas his "social problems" box is not.
>
> In this way, I think there’s the possibility that CGP Grey has
> multiple boxes, and whatever box Che Guevara is in might not be a good
> box, but the box he uses to analyse the selectorate theory *might* be
> good. But we can’t understand which boxes he’s using without delving
> into the topic far more, and particularly learning about *him*.

ideas *do* have implications. that someone doesn't *see* the implications of one idea for another part of their thinking doesn't mean that that idea doesn't have impact on their thinking.

Let's also be clear: ideas that cause one to give an affectionate portrayal of a mass-murdering communist thug can reasonably be expected to have implications for one's analysis of political systems. We're not talking about some great leap here.

-JM

[Justin Mallone]

On Sep 17, 2017, at 9:23 PM, 'Max Kaye' m...@xk.io [fallible-ideas] <fallibl...@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
> On 16 Sep 2017, at 1:47, Kate Sams wrote:
>> topic: connections between supposed mistakes should be explained
>

>> you shouldn’t refute the video content without actual criticisms of
>> the video content. (again, consider this hypothetical.)
>>
>> or suppose someone wants to disregard Rand’s moral philosophy since
>> she thought induction existed.
>>
>> what a valid criticism should do is EXPLAIN the connection. it should
>> explain how Rand believing induction existed here **leads to** a bunch
>> of mistakes in her moral philosophy there.
>>
>> you shouldn’t refute Rand’s moral philosophy without actual
>> criticisms of her moral philosophy.
>
> Exactly - one mistake does not automatically invalidate other theories,

one mistake actually *is* fatal to a theory. a single mistake doesn't make a whole body of ideas worthless though, but you have to be clear on what's mistaken, how to correct the mistake, etc. you can't just accept something with tons of mistakes cuz it's pretty good.

To the extent Objectivism is defined as an integrated system including induction, Objectivism is refuted. Does that mean Objectivism is worthless? Absolutely not.

> and explanations that are good can be supported by *both* bad and good
> explanations.

Support is false, please see: http://fallibleideas.com/essays/yes-no-argument

-JM

[Kate Sams]

yeah

> Let's also be clear: ideas that cause one to give an affectionate portrayal of a mass-murdering communist thug can reasonably be expected to have implications for one's analysis of political systems. We're not talking about some great leap here.

yeah, it's reasonable to expect that.

however, one key issue is what you want to DO with that expectation.

if you want to use that expectation to refute the video content *while lacking actual criticisms of the video content*, then that would be a mistake.

if you want to use that expectation to skirt around the issue of providing an explanation connecting the bad T-shirt ideas to the video content, then that would be a mistake.

if you want to use that expectation to help you look for flaws in the video content and to help you look for connections between the bad T-shirt ideas and the video content, then that would be wise.

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 17, 2017, at 6:50 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 16 Sep 2017, at 12:36, Elliot Temple cu...@curi.us [fallible-ideas] wrote:
>
>> On Sep 15, 2017, at 6:29 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:


>> https://pastebin.com/EpzgsAsX
>>
>>> So the first part is basically the winning strategy at democracy today.
>>
>> it's a winning strategy within a certain model of how democracy works. that model is part of the framework behind this statement.
>
> Yup, point taken.
>
> In this case the base assumptions are pretty simple:
>
> 1. **pure** direct democracy (like what is used within a house of parliament - yeas vs neys)

i thought this stuff was supposed to apply to all governments, including dictatorships and republics.

> 2. People want the policy they proposed to pass (self-interest).

most people don't propose policies. i'm guessing you mean something you haven't said.

and even people who propose policies often change their mind about what's best. e.g. someone proposes a variation on their policy, and they like it more than their original policy.

> Within that framework, the optimum strategy is to become the biggest group provided that none of the group prevent you from (2), or if it does to some degree, that this is an acceptable compromise (e.g. that you can only pass 50% of the policies you want; which is much better than 0%)

this is useless. get allies who only help you and don't prevent you from getting your goals. ok but which allies will work out that way? you have to analyze what your ideas are, and what their ideas are, and what's objectively true, etc, to figure out what alliances make sense.

and you don't necessarily have to form a group at all, you can just propose a policy and then PERSUADE people it's a good idea. your approach is to ignore persuasion and just talk about groups as if all policies are rationally and morally equal and the issue is mostly just which alliance is the most powerful (like playing the board game Diplomacy).

>> there's also the question: why does one want to "win" at democracy, and what does winning consists of? and does it mean others lose?
>
> 1. The power to prevent other ppl from passing policy
> 1.1. even a small amount of power in static majoritarianism [1] can be used as leverage, so it’s still useful
> 2. The power to pass your own policy
>
> Winning in this case means significant control over the static majoritarian democracy (house + senate, for example) and since that part is zero-sum you prevent your opponents (who are the ppl passing policy you don’t want passed) from (2)

i don't want to be a ruler like that. that'd be bad. that's authoritarian. i want a system in which persuasion wins, not me. i want ideas people think are good to be policy, NOT what i think is good.

like all decent, civilized persons, i'm interested in OBJECTIVE policies, not personal power.

>> and there's a question of constraints, e.g.: are we excluding violence from the allowed strategies to win? any assumed constraints are part of the framework being used.
>
> In this case there are good reasons for not using violence (i.e. that you destroy some of the productive capacity you want to take advantage of or that is important to your life (quality, freedom, etc))
>
> Otherwise, generally speaking I’d say 'anything legal' is within constraints. Sometimes ppl go outside that, but in western democracies this is less common.

i think there's assumed constraints on the creation of new knowledge.

>> i'm NOT saying all this should have been addressed in the talk. you can never go through and explain all your background knowledge. but it's good to consider it sometimes and have material about it somewhere. (material you endorse, but you don't have to have personally made it). and then that material should have its own deeper material addressing its own background assumptions, and so on. you can't have infinite layers of this but you can go pretty far and be pretty thorough about addressing problems that our society knows about.
>
> It is sometimes hard to endorse material if the author has some anti-rational memes included, because it distracts others from the content you want to endorse 😛

yes, then it's your job to make better material or figure out how to clearly specify subsets of material that you endorse. or else your position just doesn't actually exist in the world as a thing that has been specified.

> One question I did have is to what extent should we endorse content with such things, instead of re-writing it in our own words without the author’s original anti-rational memes?

if you can separate off good pieces, do so. if it's too tightly connected to the bad ideas so you can't find any good parts that work independent, then, well, it sounds bad.

>> the selectorate theory has some background ideas like that people want power and treasure. i haven't read it carefully but something along those kinda lines. these require substantial explanation. e.g. what counts as treasure? is it just material wealth? or is it also social status? what about other stuff people want like to feel like they accomplished something worthwhile, or to feel entertained, how does that fit into the model of the world? i don't know if selectorate theory addresses stuff like this somewhere.
>
> In this case, "treasure = anything that is desired and able to be provided" is pretty accurate.
>
> Treasure can be passing something altruistic, if you really value altruism, for example.

that's not what the word "treasure" means.

>>> And our three people in this case are Alice, Bob and Charlie. Alice wants all cars to be yellow, Bob doesn't want any cars to be yellow and Charlie just really hates {clogs}. Now charlie is a bit of a practical guy; {and he thinks} if I don't make a deal, if I don't swap my votes with other people then I can't be sure my policy is going to pass. However if I can create a sort of alliance with someone and they vote for my thing and I vote for theirs then I can ensure that my policy passes and because I don't care about cars I may as well go with that. So here's Alice, Bob and Charlie; Charlie says hey does anyone want to trade votes, you vote for my policy not up yours?
>>
>> there's no mention here of discussion or persuasion. there's some kinda model being used in which people have immutable, arbitrary preferences and then try to get their way.
>
> In this case I’m applying a simple model of democracy where ppl aren’t able to successfully persuade each other. I think this is fairly accurate when considering modern democracies - since non-partisan persuasion does not seem to be much of an active force.

you're wrong, non-partisan persuasion is a HUGE FACTOR in politics. Trump wouldn't have won the election without persuading some center-left folks.

look at slavery in the US. most people were in favor of it (especially Democrats) and then today everyone is against it (including Democrats).

most people aren't mindless block-voters – and that's why the country actually works OK. people think about things and sometimes change their minds in non-partisan ways.

the majority of Americans aren't trying to be partisans. they keep voting the same party, year after year, cuz they keep agreeing with it (intellectually), not b/c they are committed to it or b/c it's bribing them. they didn't learn something new to change their mind in a big way (though they often change their mind on some individual policies, and sometimes their party also changes position on individual policies, or has internal debates about them).

the Dictator's Handbook framework is giving you a bad way to look at the world which is mistaken.

>> something like that. it's treating democracy somewhat like a competitive board game, like Risk, where you just try to win within the rules and you can form alliances with other players for the purposes of the game but they don't have intellectual content. why do France and Germany become allies in this particular game of risk? b/c the players thought it was good military tactics. there's no ideas about liberalism, no values and ways of life that differ between countries, no good guys or bad guys. the real world is different than that kind of model. when using highly simplified models, one has to be really careful about what's being left out, and what difference it could have made if it wasn't left out.
>
> Yes, the real world is more complex, but in micro-democratic theory (to borrow the similar use from micro-economics) rarely do values play into it. Having had a bit of hands-on experience with minor parties and preference deals in Australia (there are some unique quirks that give minor parties a good shot at winning in some states), values go out the window precisely *because* you can’t do anything if you don’t get bums on seats. You *need* to be pragmatic.

pragmatism is philosophically wrong and does not work. Objectivism has addressed this at great length.

minor parties have fucked up incentives and should largely just stop existing. they aren't what's good about democracy or what makes the good countries actually work reasonably well.

persuasion and values are the dominant forces in large scale US politics. (i'm offering no comment on local government, stuff with only small numbers of people involved).

models which aren't focused on this core stuff – IDEAS – are counterproductive.

> Have any of you (who are reading this) had personal experience with politics at a high level? My experience is pretty cursory compared to many of the ppl out there, but I have to say: pragmatism is a winning strategy.

experience is interpreted by ideas (as Popper taught us), so it doesn't trump ideas.

Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Elliot Temple]

On Sep 17, 2017, at 5:30 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 15 Sep 2017, at 12:20, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>> On Sep 14, 2017, at 5:48 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>
>>> One example is DD's criticism of PR and defence of Pluralism. Reading that was the first time I actually held an explanation for why pluralism might be okay, and why PR can do evil via what I used to think was a feature, not a bug (compromise).
>>>
>>> However, the selectorate theory gives us enough insight to understand that _the same sort of compromise_ can easily occur within a ruling party since _their administration is no longer based on a consistent explanation / framework_. This arises from a leader's need to satisfy keys supporters and their diverse interests.
>>>
>>> Thus authority is misused in pluralism in the same way as PR - though perhaps to different extents.
>>>
>>> Moreover, it shows that regardless of the framework you use, if you have (what I call) static majoritarianism you necessarily require the misuse of authority in this way. **Corruption is a tool** and refusing to use that tool means you are more easily replaced (since the voter base / key supporters are more ready to change team).
>>
>> DD already has far more advanced views than this, but they’re very hard to explain to people who don’t understand tons of background knowledge that the more advanced views build on.
>
> Maybe, but I haven’t heard anything convincing. And the selectorate theory already explains a lot, *and offers additional unrefuted criticisms of pluralism* that aren’t dealt with AFAIK.
>
>>> We saw this with the *rise* of Trump (existing key supporters switching teams), and we're seeing it with supports now leaving him.
>>>
>>> E.g. Ann Coulter recently retweeted: https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/908176374074155009
>>>
>>>> If he does not build the wall, he simply will not get reelected. If he does build it, he will win 2020 by a landslide. It is that simple.
>>>
>>> Whether _he should or shouldn't build the wall_ is besides the point here; this is *corruption as a tool* in action.
>>
>> How is it corrupt to promise to build a wall, and then to be judged by whether you kept your #1 campaign promise?
>
> Because of the *reason* he’s building it - because it’s appealing. He’s not doing it because it was a carefully calculated way to deal with the issue.
>
> *Maybe* it is a good policy, but doing it for the wrong reasons indicates that *not all good policy* is able to be enacted, just *good policy supported by the selectorate*.

the wall (and some related policies like ending anchor babies and rejecting amnesty) is a carefully calculated way to deal with the issue, which is objectively good policy.

Trump likes America. broadly, he's doing this for good reasons. he wants to improve America. his presidency is more about improving America than being famous or rich.

Trump only won the election because many people (including myself) were persuaded of this.

Obama, who i loathe, was an idealist. Obama wanted to implement policies to change the country according to an intellectual-idealogical agenda. it wasn't about personal power for him.

The Bushes wanted to make the country better, too. They (mostly) kept trying to do what they thought was the objectively right thing.

Bill Clinton was a petty criminal, not much of a thinker. But he wasn't THAT bad. He generally liked America and mostly tried not to fuck it up in big ways, and he generally preferred objectively good policy and made some efforts in that direction. Bill Clinton's conscience allowed him to commit many small crimes, but not to betray his country or knowingly harm a ton of people in a big way or anything awful like that.

Hillary is similar to obama. she's a true believer who wants to change the country according to the anti-American ideas she's persuaded of. although she's a bit of a criminal and has enriched herself by crime, it's not primarily about personal glory, power or wealth for her. for example, like obama, she thinks (in a twisted way) that socialized healthcare is part of the path to utopia. she's (like obama) after a vision of utopia and she's willing to hurt a lot of people in the process, and this is the dominant thing about her that determines her actions far more than her personal interests.

>> Besides promising the wall, Trump also explained why the wall is a good idea.
>> His voters agreed – they judged the wall should be built. Whether the wall should be built *is* the point people thought about, and the idea it should be built persuaded enough people to win the election for Trump.
>
> I definitely wasn’t convinced of that. BOTE calculations put the cost in the $10-20 billion range.

did you read Adios America or other key persuasion-education material for the wall? do you know about Israel's border wall and its results?

maybe you weren't convinced because you didn't learn a lot about the issue and relied too much on leftist-dominated media.

>> i appreciate that the interest is more than most people.
>>
>> If you post beliefs or questions to FI, we can go through lots of them and you can be informed of how they are different than the DD/BoI perspective.
>
> I will, in time. As it stands I have a massive backlog already to reply to.

ok

>> You have issues with gun control and have sympathy with universal basic income, IIRC. That’s so far from DD’s views.
>
> I don’t think UBI will work. I don’t have sympathy with it. I have empathy for the people who think it’s a good idea (though not sympathy). UBI ideas can be useful in other contexts (i.e. particular economic constructs) but I don’t think they work in normal economics.
>
> Gun control is something I am willing to talk about. Curious as to DDs views. [1]

DD's views on gun control are basically the same as me, Justin, PAS, and Alan.

DD and i had largely identical views on politics (and most everything else) when he was writing BoI. (DD shifted left after he stopped participating in discussions and started trying to be more friendly with various prestigious leftists, but there's no way that shift would include gun control.)

> I *definitely* think there’s a lot of bad philosophy on "pro-gun" side of the debate.

examples?

>> common topics that people are unwilling to consider from anything like DD’s perspective are parenting/education and relationships/marriage. have you read any of DD’s writing on those topics?
>
> I have, though not much (mainly when looking into TCS over the past few years). They sit well with my views on non-coercion, open transparent communication, and problem solving. I have never liked how children were raised, and so TCS was a breath of fresh air.

cool

>> you should read a a bit and see. do a test. both books have a key scene near the beginning which some readers would
>> really like. i think FH’s scene is better, so i’d suggest trying FH over AS.
>
> Will do. Embarassingly I haven’t read FoR yet (though have owned it for ~3 years) so I’m just starting that. Thinking of posting thoughts on chapters as I read through it.

oh, that would be a good idea.

> FH after that (unless you think FH is worth prioritising over FoR considering I’ve read BoI a few times)

i would suggest reading FH through the *roark talks with the dean* scene immediately, just so you have a clue what the book is like. it'll give you at least a ballpark idea when people mention the book.

>
>>> Is there a reason to believe that the *logic of the situation* does not lead
>>> to the conclusion that *rulers must do whatever it takes to stay in power or risk losing power*?
>>
>> people frequently choose to risk losing power.
>
> Any choice risks losing power. I agree that sometimes leaders do what they think is "right", and it is not uncommon for them to be turfed out. Churchill, for example.
>
> Also, since losing power in a democracy means going on to have a long and happy life, there’s less incentive to keep it absolutely (unlike in a dictatorship, where you probs end up dead).
>
>> and anyway, there are other ways to keep power than basically trying to bribe the right people. you could implement good ideas and persuade people they are good... the whole worldview involved with the Dictator’s Handbook is so anti-morality and anti-reason.
>
> The right people are voters, and the way to bribe them is with ideas suited well to them. (There are other right people too, and policy plays a similar role).

persuasion isn't bribery with treasure. totally different concept.

one difference is the creation of new knowledge.

> Persuasion works over long time scales, but isn’t particularly productive over short time scales.

totally wrong. one speech mentioning Mexican rapists had a big persuasive effect on a timescale of days.

> How often have people given up talking to you, even though you’d be persuasive if they stayed?

they give up because of various disagreements that they aren't persuaded about. they have policies for what to spend time on.

there's a difficulty in getting adequate attention to explain difficult ideas to people with limited skills for understanding ideas. that doesn't mean persuasion only works on long time scales. if you say the right things you can get attention now. and if you get some attention, you can persuade people of stuff fast.

>
>>>> Ideas rule the world. (Which is somewhat opposite to the Dictator's
>>>> Handbook perspective.) So your priorities are mistaken.
>>>
>>> Why isn't BoI more popular then?
>>
>> because it’s not understood, and because it’s hostile to many of the BAD ideas which currently rule most of the world.
>
> Bad ideas like "I should do whatever it takes to stay in power?"

no, that idea is very unpopular in the West. e.g. it was believed by no recent Presidents. if it was believed by any recent Presidential candidates who lost, even in the GOP or Dem primaries, i'm unaware of it.


the bad ideas that prevent the spread of BoI include telling kids "because I said so", the idea that children need "discipline", the idea of punishing people so they "learn their lesson" (punishment as education), and the frequent treatment of children's confusion/doubts/questions as dissent/disobedience.

>> people behave according to their judgement, so the key issue is what ideas do they find persuasive and why?
>>
>> people don’t just blindly seek treasure, they think about moral and other issues. they try to use reason. some fail and block-vote for treasure to be distributed to them, but many others don’t. the reason America works in general is because the majority of American voters aren’t trying to vote to give themselves treasure, they are trying to vote for rationally and morally good policies in an OBJECTIVE way.
>
> Treasure and objective good aren’t always orthogonal; there is plenty of overlap. But objectively good policies are hard to come by. Quantitative easing, housing subsidies, baby bonuses, poorly managed healthcare (both public and private), discriminatory policy (affirmative action, lack of same-sex marriage / unions), legislative privilege (stock market in Aus for example - we only have 1, essentially, the ASX; the ISP industry in the US; Australia’s "National Broadband Network"), poorly thought out surveillance laws, and the list goes on.

what's that a list of? that isn't a sentence, it's a fragment. you left out the statement of purpose.

> Even more damning is that entire groups (statistically) aren’t taken into account when it comes to policy, even if those people were trying to rationally examine policy [2].

what do you mean by taken into account? in what way do you think they should be taken into account? i ask b/c i don't want compromise policies.

> [2] : this Princeton study:
>
> https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

this looks like the same style of thing as The Dictator's Handbook.

Elliot Temple
www.curi.us