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

[Steven A Smith]

On 4/13/17 3:06 PM, glen ☣ wrote:
> 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 think the distinction in our conversation above is the general 
definition of "to care".  I used it mostly in the sense you elaborate 
further down as "ability to predict".   But I also use it in the sense 
of trying to elaborate my own mental model of that person, including 
(especially?) a meatspace friend.  Not just because I want to predict 
their behaviour, I might want to adopt that part of their memome into my 
own?  If YOU for example, indicated that you had voted for Trump, I 
would be very interested in your thinking, the feelings that lead to 
that.  I find your various motivations to be highly coherent, albeit 
eclectic.  I value those as I apprehend them and am motivated to learn 
from you your motivations because *sometimes* they inform me in a nicely 
nonlinear or at least unexpected way.   This is how I "use" many of my 
friends as good (counter?)examples for my own evolution.
>> 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.
I suppose my version of this is that I have already built an envelope of 
predictability around my friends and family which I consider "safe 
enough"... for the most part I don't choose friends or associate with 
family who I believe are likely to murder me or someone else in my 
presence.   To some extent *that* is part of their "true essence" as I 
apprehend it, but I may be begging the issue here.
>    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.
I think you are using the notion of "their essence" in the sense of 
"modeling for comprehension" vs "modeling for prediction"... It seems 
that you might not allow that "modeling for comprehension" is real?
>> 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?
Agreed, I was just referencing the natural value of (sometimes) leading 
a moving target.  If the target is likely to be out of frame soon, why 
bother?   I'm dying and I don't know how soon, but fear/hope I have 
another dodecade (I just cranked over 60 on my odometer) which given the 
last 20 years, seems like plenty of time for the world to do  couple of 
major flip/flops.  Maybe not quite a Kurzwellian Singularity, but 
perhaps another World War, a Climate Inflection, an Economic or Social 
Collapse.   I'm hoping against all of those, but vaguely planning for 
their possibility (FWIW I'm not hoarding ammunition or food or medicine).
>> 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?
The ends I would put a "good" model to is comprehension, trying to 
understand the world as it appears to be evolving, trying to understand 
if we are about to have some kind of social inflection or inversion... 
for example, might all the pinko-commie-fag haters who have proclaimed 
that any effort to provide social justice/security/equality is an evil 
plot be waking up to wanting a universal health-care and maybe even 
economic security (unemployment/pension) plan that provides for they and 
theirs in a context where 
rugged-individualistic-exploitive-or-at-least-extractive activities are 
no longer viable means of self-support?   The point of me seeking such 
understandings would be to divert whatever resources I might be using to 
*blunt* what I *fear* is their efforts to undermine the development and 
maintenance of a healthy "commons" to increase my own contributions to 
said commons?
>> 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
I misread your statement:

    teetering on the edge of social democrat (despite knowing democratic socialism is more coherent)

to suggest that you held democratic socialism higher (more coherent?) 
than social democracy and were perhaps aspiring to move on through from 
the latter to the former?

>> 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.
I do believe that socialism reduces degrees of freedom, the statist 
version doing it perhaps harshly and arbitrarily and the version that 
*could* grow up out of anarchism being at least more organic and 
possibly hierarchical (meaning here that the degrees of freedom all 
still exist but some are in practice subservient to the others...  such 
as "I shall not kill".... "unless it is for the good of the group")
>    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.
Very packed paragraph here.   I think you just said you are preferring a 
democracy which (happens to/naturally) chooses to have a strong social 
infrastructure?   In the second part, it isn't clear that the Electoral 
College mitigates us against buffoons "like Trump" since all indications 
are that the Electoral College actually *preferred* the buffoon over the 
???? .

I can't help but pull out my soapbox and suggest that "ranked voting" is 
much more likely to achieve the results than the mere "chunking" of the 
electoral college which seems very subject to Gerrymandering.   And it 
seems that 2016 and 2000 make it clear that the Electoral College's 
effect on "tyranny of the majority" is to increase the chance of a 
"tyranny of the MINORITY"?

I think a ranked voting system with higher thresholds for "mandate" 
would make for a much better Democracy than what we have now... at least 
the "majorities" would be more robust?
>    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 think you are correct, though I think the latter is a great deal more 
sincere in those sentiments than the latter who might have lost touch 
with reality on most social issues along the way (albeit nowhere near 
the level of the extant Buffoon in Chief).
>> 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?
I agree that *I* don't let social media undermine my meatspace life much 
but I DO observe that it seems to *sometimes* cause frictions that would 
not have existed without the odd public/private nature of things like 
FezBewk.
>> 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.
I agree.  I was just riffing on your self-description as a snowflake... 
ultra-unique... and highly ephemeral under many conditions?   I like JD 
Krishnamurti's description of the soul as a piece of paper and the 
experiences we have as foldings in that paper and the residual wrinkles 
being the "self".   A bit like your bunions and scars perhaps?



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