[FRIAM] the arc of socioeconomics, personal and public: was VPN server

[glen ☣]

On 04/13/2017 12:36 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> *I* DO care why someone voted for Trump.  If that someone is someone I know, I am interested in how that factoid (voting for Trump) effects my other dealings with them.   Many anti-Trump folks will virtually excommunicate a friend or colleague for the act of Trump-voting.   I find that in perhaps 20% of my Trump-voting acquaintances that their specific *reasons* make it somewhere between tolerable and honorable for me.   It isn't always arrogance or ignorance or fear-of-crooked-hillary that made them vote for Trump... 

Right, that's what I said.  If you're familiar with a person, you probably do care.  I agree.  Actually, I'd go even further.  If I've met a person in meat space, then I care.  Those I've only met electronically, then what I know about them is so out of context, it would be difficult to even define "care".  (I was once called an "online autistic" by a good friend ... perhaps others are not like me in this way.)

> I'm not clear what you mean "do I really care why?".  I suppose if the "I" in this sentence is a marketing profiler, then it may not matter, though if you realize they voted for Trump because they think he's a white supremicist  or homophobe or mysogynist, you can then further target them for products, services or memes aligned with those ideals?

Well, sure.  But the point is not the essentialist attribute (homophobic or intellectual or whatever).  The point, the purpose, is to predict behavior.  I, personally, don't care so much about predicting the behavior of my friends or family.  But I do care about their essence.  But if my purpose were behavior prediction, then I don't care at all about someone's essence, only whatever good enough models allow me the prediction.  A completely wrong model would be fine as long as predictions from it work.

> In the arms-race (a biological metaphor would be better, but I think most of those are couched in the military metaphor anyway) of cyber-privacy it seems that "something a bit deeper" will be necessary *soon* if not already.   I hate that we have to go there, but it is part of the larger pattern that requires it I think.

I agree that I _want_ something deeper.  I don't agree that it's necessary because we'd have to ask "necessary for what?"  I admit that I'm dying and will be dead soon.  If the people younger than me are willing to give up their privacy in exchage for whatever it is we're getting, then why would deeper privacy methods be necessary?

> I wonder if there is a model of the evolution of individuals in political state-space.

I suspect there are lots of (bad) models out there.  Being a professional simulant myself, my question would be: To what ends would such models be put?  And are those ends ethical?

> I wonder how your self avowed move toward democratic socialism

Whoa, hold the horses, there!  I'm moving toward social democracy, not democratic socialism ... different beasts, I think. >8^D

> fits with the implied value of self-governance and autotelism?

I now (not 5 years ago and probably not 5 years hence) believe socialism reduces degrees of freedom.  I haven't thought deeply enough to know whether anarchism (which kinda implies socialism) escapes that ... i.e. perhaps only statist socialism reduces degrees of freedom.  As such, I'm not moving toward socialism.  I am moving toward democracy, though.  To whatever extent we must, it's reasonable to qualify democracy with socialist infrastructure.  I think that's necessary to mitigate against buffoons like Trump _and_ the tyranny of the majority that we'd get without something like the electoral college.  So, given those extra words, wiggling between neoliberalism and social democracy should make sense.  Clinton and Sanders are both social democrats, I think, just to differing extents.

> I find that the social media which I only oblique engage in does seem to support a migration of the distribution toward distality.   It is so much easier to keep track of friends distant in time, geography or sociopolitical views than ever, and impersonality of facebookery and twitting seem to *distance* close friends.  "Why did I have to learn on FaceBook that you were pregnant!?" or "You never call, you never write, I have to keep up with you by reading your FaceBewk Posts!  WTF, I thouhgt we were friends!?".

I'm not so sure.  My conception of my meat space friends is colored/augmented by cyber space signals.  But the latter don't cause me to spend less time in meat space with them.  But, again, maybe most people aren't like me.  How would I know?

> yes to all of the above...  My ex sensitized me nicely to noticing any sentence with "Just" in it.   I think you are much more than a hypersensitive, delicate snowflake, which is your charm in my estimation... the foreground AND the background of that statement!

I like to think of myself (and all people) as fairly resilient, redundant, Rube Goldberg machines, rather than delicate snowflakes.  I also like the butterfly metaphor better than the snowflake metaphor.  Some of us are butterflies and crude handling will kill them.  But most of us adapt to the crude handling well enough.  Bunions and scar tissue are wonderful things.


-- 
☣ glen