A plan for this blog

This blog is a place to develop idiotic and pretentious ideas. That's great. It would also be great to have a little more structure so I don't forget articles half way through writing them or have to sort through 100 posts an jumbled topics years later.



Da Plan:

• Being a good person
• How to think
• How to feel
• How to treat others
• Philosophy
• Problems in philosophy
• Bullshit
• Over-complication
• Idiocy
• i.e: rawls
• My crazyness
• Timless/existancless Ethics
• The casual prison/determinism
• Axiomatic beliefs
• Politics
• Collective Action Problems & why they matter a lot
• Moties
• Corruption
• Lying
• Lies. The value of dissent and achieving intellectual independence
• Culture as central to society
• Why we should prepare for collapse
• STC's
• A Democratic mind.
• Germany and fascism
• Self-doubt and acceptance of dissent
• New-Fascism from the left
• Consulting
• Common types of organisational stupidity.

• Meta
• Narrative/Frame and it's importance to theorizing
• Disparate pieces come first, then the links and the purpose
• for me:
• Random philosophising about edge cases --> something about the future
• The importance of thinking about how to think, who to be.
• The most important decision should not be left to fate.
• Big Themes
• Timeline independent ethics
• What is life?
• same patterns. Different lives with own value? Don't think so.
• life as a pattern. The deep roots of ideas(childhood throwback).
• Free will and Determinism
• how to escape causality?
• Escaping our utility function
• How to treat other utility functions

• Other Ideas
• The very long run and pushing the frontiers of philosophy
• Evolution as an existential threat
• The Dark Forest Hypothesis & Potential Solutions
• Dealing with OCP's

Story: 10 weeks of life.

A person works in a menial job. They lead an ordinary life. They save their money and, once a decade, go somewhere else for a few weeks of escape. Film/Story is split equally between time in the girding, mundane life and time in the brief excursions. The ordinary life is a life lost. At first, time is spent thinking of where to go next and ignoring reality. The person lives in their own bubble, with only fleeting contact with others. The first trip is to somewhere isolated. Maybe arctic/tundra etc... Long shots of open skies, horizons, day and night. No dialogue. No indication of persons thought processes. When they come back, life continues. Ageing is visible.


Gradual progress in character through multiple trips

• Isolated, living in fantasy, stupid/happy look
• Social interactions as facade, still obsessed with trips, life is a shadow
• Begins to break out. Questions life path sporadically.
• Has/Meets child. Still no marriage.
• Realizes greater obligation to mankind. Less selfish and individualistic. Questions what was forgone. Questions whether normal life was for them. Talks to child. Shares story.
• Last years. Meets partner. Relationship gives ome meaning. Not perfect.
• Final voage is on deathbed. It's not to the arctic. A reconciliation of the two personas. Sees her young self walking into the distance. Follows

Themes and ideas

• A good person is not concerned with their self only (eventual discovery, gradual)
• Life can be wasted. 
• Detachment leads to insight, but that comes at a price. Not every waste is a waste. 
• How much wonder there is in one life.

In defence of extreme tolerance.

Would you rather have a universe in which many different kinds of life thrive, each maximising their own utility function, or would you rather have a universe where only we and those who think like us live, where others were exterminated long ago.

[Let's assume (idiotically) that if we're in a position to decide their fate, the others don't pose a threat to us.]

Most people prefer option 1. After all, isn't letting others live in  peace provided they let us do the same good and genocide evil?

It's not that simple.

Some people are evil. Really evil. Maybe that doesn't phase you. Maybe like me and a few others, you believe in freedom of conscience and thought. It's not that easy. Some kinds of evil require the suffering of others. There can be no masters without slaves. What then? Do you still believe in tolerance? Even when it means tolerating suffering and subjugation, hate and horror? In the words of a close friend, would you accept the existence of planet ISIS and minorities on that planet for the masters to abuse?

At this point, most say no. No planet ISIS. No preference satisfaction where preferences conflict.

The problem with this kind of reasoning is twofold. One is that, applied generally, it leads to a world where the strongest satisfy their utility function at the expense of the weak. Might should not equal right, at least not from my utility function. The second is broader. Deciding that certain forms of interactions are bad, that diversity is good but only up to a certain point means no diversity at all. The boundaries you draw between "private" and "public" issues, even on the galactic scale, are not universal or rooted in reality. They are the product of a specific chain of causation leading to a specific utility function. Your decision to impose on others based on that value is no different than the decision of a paperclip maximiser to impose on you when the opportunity cost in terms of paperclips of your existence become too high.

When I was younger, I read a bit about deep ecology and I found it ludicrous. Accepting nature means accepting the way nature trades off values? Why? What if everyone involved, animals and humans alike, dislike the system as it is. What if the constant death tournament that is evolution leads to a cycle of suffering and death, to the end of intelligence and to a solar system covered in a writhing mass of worms struggling to get closer to the sun only to drown and be devoured by others. Am I meant to accept this simply because it happens to exist? The answer then seemed to be no. I still think the deep ecologists were idiots. The right answer means little without the reasoning to back it up. [Maybe. Maybe reasoning or lack therof should be judged solely by the answers it produces].

My views now are in flux. I still hold contradictory beliefs as I continue to walk down both paths, but one path leads to a future where my species act as guardians of diversity, maximising the kinds of life and environment.

Further research:

• Beyond Planet ISIS: Diversity and allowing the existence of literal hells?
• The impossibility of escape. lock-in to our own utility function
• Beyond our utility function: Life is subjective. "Life exists on scales and in forms we do not recognize"

The pretence of certainty: Risk, Probability and the Justice System.

Idiots trade in certainties. Wise men in probabilities.

Imagine a hedge fund manager walks down to his risk department, and asks for their assessment of a certain share. Their assessment is that it will certainly loose all it's value.The manager is surprised they are so certain, but takes them at their word and goes back upstairs.

A few days pass, and again the manager takes the lift to the risk department. He asks for an assessment of another share. The response is that the share will certainly increases in value substantially. Elated, he goes back upstairs and that night, over dinner with his boss, he talks about what a great deal he found. The grizzled CEO feels a tad uneasy. After all, he's never heard of the number cruncher in risk being absolutely certain of anything, let alone two things in succession. He tells his younger colleague to hold off on the purchase for a while while he sniffs around.

The next morning, the CEO goes down to risk. He presents them with the same share, and gets the same response. He asks the risk team how they can be certain that the share will rise. Their answer is simple. They performed their usual analysis, and determined with 90% certainty that the share will rise. Hence, their assessment is that there is 100% certainty of a growth in price. The manager is furious. These idiots cost him millions. Expected payoff = predicted_payoff*risk. Setting risk to 1 throws away valuable data and wastes millions in doing so. He fires the risk team, shuts the business down and moves to California where he uses his wealth to buy a surf shop which will work in for the next twenty or so years. A year in, he meets his future wife. Three years and his first child. He's not as rich as he could have been, but he is happier. Yet, his happiness comes at a cost. The company he led was very good. It would not have survived otherwise. It did excellent research, allocated funding efficiently and made a profit by doing so. It's purpose was to generate wealth, but its function was to manage the flow of money through society, to direct resources to where they could be used best. Now the company gone, those which step into it;s place are a bit worse at the allocation, the use of resources a bit less optimal, and the quality of life for the millions and billions of people in the interconnected global economy, that tiny bit harder, shorter and poorer than they could have been.

It's hard to know what the right thing to do is, especially when it comes to balancing your desires against the good you can do by forgoing them.

It's also usually dumb to ignore reality because simplicity is easier. The courts do this when the split people into Guilty or Innocent. Maybe a better system would be one where a probability of guilt is assigned and punishment = assigned_punishment*probability_guilt. We could still keep a baseline level of guilt necessary in order to prevent abuses of power. i.e: reasonable_doubt = 95% and no punishment below that threshold. If the edge case is troubling for our intuitions, we can smooth it out by gradually increasing the punishment from nothing at 95% to 0.96*sentence at 96%,

Vigilantism in lowsec societies. A social STC for anarchic situation..

The conventional view is that Vigilantism is bad. Why?Because they do a worse job. Why? Because

• Individual vigilantes have worse judgement than a legal system
• worse at determining guilt
• less likely to assign appropriate punishment
• Vigilantes are more prone to corruption/abuse of power

I don't agree, In many societies, the legal system is non-functional for a broad range of people. From the poor to those of the wrong religion or ethnicity, often there is no meaningful official recourse. Ditto for victims of organised crime. In these cases, and some others like them, I think that widespread vigilantism is good because the alternative, utter helplessness and domination of the good by the evil, is worse.

The other side:

• Vigilantism provokes a crackdown (i.e: Christians in pakistan)
• Vigilantes become worse than the criminals they replace (mexico/columbia)
• Vigilantes respond to an imaginary threat