[FRIAM] unplanned [sen|obsol]escence

Wed Sep 29 16:30:07 EDT 2021

Yes.  The worker-friendly protected labor markets that Sanders or Nader care about are just another sort of Elysium.  At some point one has to address the fact that moving the gates around (or literally building fences) doesn't change the underlying reality that others have it worse than us, and that there will be ways those differences are exploited that can come back to bite us.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2021 11:15 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] unplanned [sen|obsol]escence

I think I understand the model you (Marcus) are using here and think it makes a lot of sense to me... 

Maybe the eco/SJ-warriors blow the dam/gates when they get the chance, no matter whether the reservoir is full and no matter who is living downstream... or maybe they let the more level heads work to dismantle such things... it requires a LOT of long term, broad thinking and patience.   When things get past a certain point, patience becomes difficult to maintain.

I'm surprised at how many ways I live below some "dam" or behind some "gate" I wasn't aware of.   I think the WhiteLash crowd is experiencing the same thing but have a more ready target for their fear/blame.   The radLeft has it's own version of this, but my biases (by definition) are less judgemental about their (potentially) misdirected fear/anger.   I have better stories to justify theirs.

On 9/28/21 2:39 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> To the extent there is a difference between the US and the global alignments, there must be membranes that prevent mixing.   Property rights provide a basis for membranes.   Immigration law describe how others membranes behave.   Religion, ethnicity are further membranes that people adopt to set themselves apart.  Reducing inequality of opportunity means increasing mixing, or at least understanding how to reliably navigate membranes, e.g. moving to a country with a lower cost of living but also a lower income.  The Proud Boys, etc. are certainly not for mixing.   They are for guarding certain membranes that they expect to exist to ensure their (ever diminishing) status in the U.S..
>
> I honestly don't know what will motivate people to stop this other than disorder.   Globalization is one brutal way to break up the membranes.  When equivalent quality labor is available at 1/10th the price in other countries, things kind of take care of themselves.   I think it makes sense to open up the border and release as much of the potential energy as possible.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2021 1:01 PM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] unplanned [sen|obsol]escence
>
> Well, of course. But like with SteveS' call for a more concrete criticism of these popularized "quantitative self" devices, it's difficult to criticize a *particular* instance of value misalignment without at least considering the whole space of value alignment. ... or maybe my assertion isn't so much that it's difficult as that it's myopic. If we reword your question to "How does value alignment between a society like the US and a demographic within that map to value alignment between the global population and any given (or all of the) demographic(s)?"
>
> The answer is the same: Figure out how value alignment happens in a variety of cases, scales, circumstances, then hypothesize, design, build, and test. Unfortunately the "business consultants" conflate value sharing with value alignment, which is why conversations about AI safety seem more useful. And, in my ignorance, the only work I know of being done is akin to Stanley's "novelty-only search" idea ... i.e. remove explicit (ambitious) objectives and search for some deeper structure like diversity.
>
> In some ways, neoliberalism has done this for us. When I can walk into a Walmart and buy tires along with my milk and a pair of Levis, it's similar in some ways to a GenZ surveying the array of drugs available and choosing, say, modafinil & nicotine for their nootropic effects over alcohol. But diversity, alone, doesn't seem to be solving the values alignment problem. And the typical macho anti-crybaby accusations of "snowflake" and calls to "toughen up" (or Jordan Peterson's "clean your room") just gloss over the problem, rather than solving it. While I agree these have the *flavor* of Sagan's pale blue dot or Zaphod Beeblebrox succumbing to the total perspective, neither really solve the problem.
>
> On 9/28/21 12:25 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> How special can we really be, one of 7.6 billion people?   The sense of entitlement is the problem, not the humiliation that comes from its denial.
>>
>>  
>>
>> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Gillian 
>> Densmore
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, September 28, 2021 12:13 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>> <friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] unplanned [sen|obsol]escence
>>
>>  
>>
>> nailed it! 200% nailed it!, Yes yes yes the proud boys. I'd speculate that they came about because people generally don't like to feel shoved around and pushed aside and marginalised. Even if it's in their head.  Perception does count for something.
>>
>> I had totally forgotten about Gen Y  being in the mix  to be honest. Vaping like you brought up has a lot of  problems. Not the least of which is what's vaped may not be legal or safe.
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 12:51 PM uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     I generally regard GenX as born within 1965-1980. But there's some flux, obviously. There's some confusion between the phrases "GenY" and "Millenials", I guess. But it seems safe to make them the same.
>>
>>     I'm glad you brought up energy drinks and alternative drugs that I wouldn't have normally thought about. I'd guess vaping is similar. It dovetails nicely with both the anti-vax stuff and the supplement craze, including things like Soylent, lab-grown meat, etc.
>>
>>     But it seems clear to me that, while it's easy to "other" AI and spend hours talking about "AI Alignment", we don't spend enough time "othering" groups like the Supreme Court. The kerfuffle about them being "partisan hacks" <https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-09-19/supreme-court-justices-amy-coney-barrett-politics <https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-09-19/supreme-court-justices-amy-coney-barrett-politics>> speaks directly to the work that's been done by moral philosophers (or moral psychologists if you buy the difference) for a very long time. It also speaks to the underlying claims of "predictive processing", simulation vs. emulation, explainable vs. interpretable AI, intra-species mind-reading, etc.
>>
>>     The exploitation of our underclasses, including younger generations, by the normative establishment *is* a derivation of ought from is ... like justifying Fraternity hazing ... or Pinker's claim that incremental progress is reason for continuing with the status quo.
>>
>>     How do we re-align the values of society so that they line up (not shared, but aligned) with Millenials and GenZ? My typical medium- to long-term answers are inadequate (e.g. ranked-choice voting, electoral college reform, universal healthcare, etc.) in the context of your immediate expressed needs. But what can we do? Now?
>>
>>     On 9/28/21 11:28 AM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
>>     > Before the conversation goes much more off the rails from the OP. That first of all how are you defining GenerationX? if you meen people born about  1980-1990. Last I read that had gotten chunked into millennials or something. So lets start with the basics. people now 35-40+ and drinking? the data isn't entirely their. Last I read on that the amount of alcohol being drunk has on average gone down about 15-20% . It's part of why   Budweiser, and Miller (for instance) are struggling to find a hook for people to drink.  Part of why is being significantly more health conscious then previous generations. And yeah money as well. My parents drink a lot more than I do, and my grand parents drank even more yet.
>>     > That has been exchanged for a seriously unhealth apatite for energydrinks though. Which causes all kinds of problems on its own.  That's entirely because of the economic clusterfuck we've been settled with, the true employment rate and a having to fucking struggle just to scrape by. Energydrink and coffee consumption on average has nearly tripled. The consquences include chronic fatiigue and serius, kidney and heart problems. Covid isn't helping with that. Having to  have to maintain on average 2 or even 3 jobs for a typical single person simply because minimum fucking wage, and lot of people from another generation stuck in a past that never even existed. Minumum wage at a whoping 10 or even a pathetic 8.50 an hour. you guys have PHD's some even more than one. you can do the math. So  sufficed to say that their is a refresh of alcholics is far from surprising. Maybe we can, oh, I don't know unfuck the economy and reduce our di-stressers and absolute panic inducing
>>     stress and
>>     > anxiety from about 99 thousand  god damn problems we, literaly, got born into. Not the least of which are a god damn string of lunatic POTUS's and now one with an entire leg into the grave from being as old or older than most of this mailing list.
>>     >
>>     >
>>     > On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 3:45 PM uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>>> wrote:
>>     >
>>     >     I still don't know how you bring "basis spaces" into the discussion. It seems a bit math-istic ("mathy")? However, if we argue directly about Hume's Law, that does seem a bit mathy. The essence is that, in axiomatic deduction, you can't validly derive sentences about values from sentences about the world. In rejecting Hume's Law, we could simply reject the idea that axiomatic deduction is faithful to real-world reasoning. (Perhaps part of why we need "natural deduction" with introduction and elimination rules?)
>>     >
>>     >     But I wouldn't even go that mathy. We can allow Hume's Law to stand (and require values introduction) but still talk about the mechanisms by which values are lined up outside of inference. In other words, regardless of the logic, the way values are aligned is with shared behavior ... mimicry. The child learns to fear snakes because the mother fears snakes ⇒ shared value "you ought to be afraid of snakes". And that's regardless of whether snakes are dangerous or not, in keeping with Hume.
>>     >
>>     >     The "antifa affiliated" person who shot Tiny and Reinoehl are/were (slightly?) misaligned with Antifa values. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if other "antifa affiliated" actually turned him in. Such actions produce an alignment of values. But the Proud Boys who assaulted Alissa were expressing values very well aligned with the rest of the Proud Boys. You can hear it in the clip: https://twitter.com/mxtaliajane/status/1434307985359114245 <https://twitter.com/mxtaliajane/status/1434307985359114245> <https://twitter.com/mxtaliajane/status/1434307985359114245 <https://twitter.com/mxtaliajane/status/1434307985359114245>> with "get her", "fucking bitch", maniacal laughter, and "fuck antifa".
>>     >
>>     >     I could easily be wrong, of course. There's a strain of antifa who do intend to commit violence. But they aren't as prominent in the ranks of Antifa as those Proud Boys (like Tiny) who take pride in their commission of violence.
>>     >
>>     >     On 9/25/21 11:10 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>     >     > I maybe understand Glen's use of several terms more better now.  
>>     >     >
>>     >     > I heard "value alignment" to refer to the general alignment between
>>     >     > basis spaces of roughly self-aligned groups and other similar (but
>>     >     > different) groups.   I think I hear now that Glen was giving the PB
>>     >     > crowd credit for having a coherent presentation with others while acting
>>     >     > in public.   I don't know what their private discussions/meetings look
>>     >     > like, they may be near anarchy, but by the time they are on the street
>>     >     > the present as a coherent, disciplined group.  
>>     >     >
>>     >     >
>>     >     >> Yes, this seems really important to me:
>>     >     >>
>>     >     >>> That "antifa affiliated" guy who shot Tiny is probably susceptible to peer pressure to *stop* carrying his gun to town, much like the Proud Boys coach their participants not to start fights and always cooperate with the cops. The more organized Antifa groups, like Rose City *do* coach their participants more than the less organized groups do. But the difference in both value alignment and tactics is obvious. If you're like my colleague, you'll claim this is a "distinction without a difference". But the difference is palpable if you're actually present.
>>     >     >> Living sometimes in Atlanta, where the past of a civil rights movement that was purpose-driven, sophisticated, strategic, and disciplined has been kept alive a bit more than other places, I watch historical footage from the 60s, of strings of people singing quietly and clapping in time various religious songs while being herded into police vans, and I am awestruck at the dignity and the self-control.  If the current movements could get to that, at the scale of the many-more people that they include today, we could solve a lot of these problems.
>>     >     >>

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