Enjoying the Dangerous View from the Frontier
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Or, How I started reading Thomas Hutchinson's 1776 criticism of the Declaration of Independence titled: "Strictures upon the Declaration of Independence"
Sometime last year I found out about Urbit. It's an unusual open source software project. When I first started trying to see what this really intriguing little project was, I checked the wikipedia article and read about controversy with its founder Curtis Yarvin. He wrote some fucked up stuff on a blog called Unqualified Reservations, a lot of it is summed up on this wikipedia article about his Dark Enlightenment. It seems he's been more or less booted from the project (as much as is possible anyway, there are several anonymous contributors still). Needless to say, this put me off. I never downloaded the software to try it out, and promptly put it out of my mind.
Back in July I had an interaction with someone I follow on Twitter regarding the infamous (at least in the Bitcoin community) Bitcoin sign guy being a fan of Urbit. Fast forward to today, a "like" from someone from an account that posts Urbit "sygils" (it's hard to explain) popped up. The Urbit mind-worm was boring into my head. Out of pure curiosity I looked up the project again--a lot has changed. Following the white rabbit, I found myself looking through the source code for Urbit, which then took me to the contributors page where I found this guy who goes by the moniker "pcmonk".
Taking a step back for a second...this is the internet I remember from when I was a kid. Maybe 10 or so. It's dangerous and exciting and new and there's lots of information . Do average people still do this anymore? Do you guys do this? It's fun and exciting, and IMO it's anti-thetical to even something like Breitbart, which is mainstream for 'not being mainstream'. It's also the best part of physical exploration, the uncontrolled serendipitous encounters with people, ideas, and other information which can lead to adventures (in ones mind or otherwise).
Back to "Pcmonk," I came to a great read from his blog titled, "How to Find Frontiers." The blog posts gets to how he started working on Urbit, but I really enjoyed this bit about reading things for fun that aren't on many reading lists because they are, I guess, "obviously" wrong. (Obvious in scare quotes because I'm not sure anything is really obvious, it only seems so after being sufficiently distributed or memefied or whatever).
There’s one large red circle around most Islamic countries, where it’s difficult for westerners to understand what they believe and why, because we don’t know what their ancestor blue dots believed.
There are also red circles around isolated tribes, like those in Brazil and New Guinea. Their way of life looks incredibly foreign to us, because they descend from a very long line of blue dots. If you want to understand other paths that western civilization could have gone, study these blue dots. Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber and Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond are not bad places to start.
The linguistic version of this traces the influences very distinctly. If you want to learn about the nature of language, make sure to study dead and dying languages at least as much as you study Indo-European, Sinitic, and Arabic languages.
In politics, there are plenty of eloquent writings arguing for political opinions that are unthinkable now, but give you a much broader picture of the space of political theories. Want to read a 1680 argument for how the natural authority of fathers in a family means kings should have absolute authority? Try Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha. An argument against the US Declaration of Independence? Thomas Hutchinson’s “Strictures upon the Declaration of Independence” is quite readable. A more recent example that borders on red-circle ideas because the author is still alive is the Unabomber Manifesto. I agree with none of these works, but I’m glad to have read them.
Here's the image from the article for context:
From a Popperian fallibalist perspective, this makes a lot of sense. It's impossible to predict where the criticism that leads to new frontiers, new discoveries, will come from. We don't know what we shouldn't be 'allowed' to critisize. And usually, the ideas that some of the biggest discoveries come from are laughable at the time. So, sometimes looking back at some old text, like "Strictures upon the Declaration of Independence," can clarify and bring out some limitations to whatever "common sense" or rules of thumb we may be taking for granted.Democracy, though I don't agree with Yarvin's ideas at all, does seem to be one of those things that's kind of unnecessarily "common sense." I like the quote: “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” But, we're living in a weird time where lots of new types of governments ARE being tried. And, something tells me, one of those experiments is going to actually work, but we won't know it worked until it seems like common sense--at which point the people who are trying to find something better than that, will also be being laughed at.
Perhaps, as some anonymous commenter on the post noted we should just "simply be content with enjoying the view from the frontier." Since the frontier is full of discontent, though--I'd say that's easier said than done, though.
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Yes, “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” is a good one. Although, like so many things, the practical application of democracy is open to all sorts of undemocratic influences. Things 'work' until they don't work, and nothing works for everybody. The next experiment that 'works' will follow the same pattern. The only constant is change. You can't please all the people all the time. When the pleased have enough clout the status quo holds. When the balance shifts so does the prevailing wind. And that includes the frontier. Shifting, shifting. Lol
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Indeed.
Systems of cooperation are biased towards replicating the conditions that trust for the cooperation is built on. Most leaders rely on existing explanations to convince people to elect them. The exceptions with novel explanations that actually play out, are generally very powerful, but rare when considered amongst all leaders offering novel paths, and even more rare when we include all leaders who apply to lead. So, it hardly matters who leads, because it’s impossible to determine where a fresh conjecture that replaces the status quo will come from, so long as any leader is easily removable. Political error correction. In the context of Democracy, for example, the only important thing it contributed was the ability to remove leaders non-violently. As modern as we think our political system is, that basic functionality was invented by the Greeks, right?
So, for example, while it's sort of in-vogue to favor systems like "proportional voting" right now, the most important argument against it is that it reduces accountability and allows political game players to stay in power by appeasing the party, their coalition, and not constituents (skip to the section on Proportional Voting, though the whole article is often prescient). This makes it harder to error correct, and harder to trying new things where someone is accountable.
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When I hear of the musings of political pundits on this subject surrounding democracy, it's failings and flaws, as well as it's merits, the book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker comes to mind, in which the Pinker argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred. One of those explanations is the increase in human empathy across tribal lines. I think a lot of the current types of governments have risen out of the need to satisfy human's ever increasing consideration for their fellow human being. One can certainly make a valid claim that on the whole, humans have a much fairer world to live in in 2021 than they did in 1921...and 1921 was certainly a fairer world than 1821. But the blemishes persist.
Democracy, in my opinion, is lacking one crucial element that should be at it's very foundation...The Cake Cutter Principle.
The Cake Cutter Principle is the principle that says whoever cuts the cake gets the last slice of the cake. The idea is that the person should evenly divide the cake or risk getting the smallest slice when all other slices have been distributed. Applying this to government, legislation and institutions as a whole may seem daunting, but not so in my opinion. I will elaborate if asked, but I just wanted to throw my two cents into this hat.
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We always get a nice cake for the kids' birthdays. There are 6 of us in the house but a cake is easy to cut into 8 slices. So, when it comes to toppings of fresh strawberries and dollops of icing, they usually come in eights. The baker also throws in a few custom-made chocolate placards or macaron characters and even an odd number of macarons on the side.
We do use the Cake Cutter Principle which means I usually cut the cake. I don't mind having a smaller slice but, of course, that's not all there is to it. Who gets the first pick? That's pretty easy to decide if it's your birthday...unless you have a twin. My mom and sister share a birthday too. I guess they managed but I'm not sure how much of their current mother/daughter rivalry can be attributed to cake cutting.
When it's not someone's birthday, it's even trickier to decide. Our kids usually point to the one they want on the count of 3. If two kids pick the same slice, the matter is settled à la Rochambeau.
The really tricky part starts with those dollops of icing and fresh strawberries. Who gets the extra two? Nami doesn't like strawberries so there are three extra and she thinks she should be entitled to an extra macaron. There's an argument to be made that her own pickiness is to blame. Not so for someone with an allergy I suppose.
Of course we usually manage to work it out so that everyone is reasonably satisfied. After all, we're talking about cake here. An extravagant desert that we struggle to finish with our bellies so full after a large meal. But my point is this; Cakes are complicated.
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What is the cake, though? Pleasure. Mmmm, that's the stuff. The knowledge of making cake is the real winner here, for humans. For animals without self-awareness the winner is genes. Cake tastes good, almost everyone likes it, if we didn't have self-discipline and ate the cake before dinner, we may not eat dinner at all. Systems of cooperation, like Democracy, or abstract ones like pain and pleasure, have a goal of replication of 'good' knowledge. In the case of the cake, for example, pain and pleasure are tools that evolution created to solve knowledge replication problems. That is to say, if it hurt, it was something correlated with less gene replication, and with more gene replication for pleasure. Those are vestigial measurement algorithms created by animal cells cooperating and replicating, knowledge about the universe instantiated in a water and carbon based substrate.Because humans are self-aware, though, we know that the cake is pleasurable. This complicates matters. Though, to be fair, what evolution did with pain and pleasure is also incredibly complicated--it just seems like "common sense" in the hindsight of consciousness. But anyway, we choose to eat it or buy it or make it for many more reasons than an animal eats it. Well, I'm sure there's some animals that don't like cake, but the explanation still follows. When we talk about cutting up the cake, we've assumed cake is a good thing, and already made the cake, or paid someone to make the cake. That thing we're glossing over is "utility." I think JS Mill was right with utilitarianism, despite the shitty elitist rhetorical tone of the text, except that he didn't know about information replication and resilience in the context of physical reality. It's all information, there's no magic in our mind that we're not capable of understanding and replicating. Repliction is where error correction comes from, and error correction makes knowledge more resilient. And that's the goal, I think, to be resilient in the harsh face of reality.
An aside: Kind of an ironic thing that stoicism misses the point on. Cancelling "pain and pleasure," in the same of resilience and strength is hilariously ironic, given knowledge of where pain and pleasure come from. Kinda makes it's followers actually look like weak little bitches, IMO. Whereas, like, a Buddhist BDSM MILF would seem more resilient to me. But anyway.
Democracy, is also a form of cooperation, and has much the same purpose: to aide in knowledge creation, replication and resilience. So, as far as dividing up the cake. We gotta make sure that the cake is what we need to encourage knowledge growth and resilience for all our (ideally) voluntary participants. But, because we don't know WHERE the best new knowledge is going to come from (which person), as soon as we have to talk about how to divide it up, we've sort of already lost:
When you are forced to use utilitarianism you know your knowledge of the problem is not good enough.
We're not at the store, and no one has any money, so we gotta cut up this cake and share it. The person who wants to cut up the cake is volunteering to do something they already know is bad: unfairly and inefficiently distribute stuff. They may want to do it because they think the can do it more fairly than others, or they may want to try and take advantage of the cutting up. Examples of the latter in history are evidence of why they should get the last slice while everyone watches. But Office Space shows another example that fails in reality. A practical example in reality is how much of the money printed in the US in the last 4 years went to El Salvador. But, I think I know Josh, and I'm pretty sure I've in the past heard you utter something like, "Look, we're all getting cake, I don't want to hear it," in situations like this. Which is a totally different option, because then it's like "oh, yeah, we're arguing about how much pleasure we all get to have," at least in the case of the cake. But that kinda breaks our metaphor at scale.
The scary thing about dividing the cake up to me is this: It rhetorically focuses the conversation to people being consumers of shit. It's not false, and there's centuries of evidence to support it. Seems better, right? More stuff made in ways we are comfortable making it, divided as evenly as possible. But, on top of assuming (or not even considering) we know where the best new ideas are going to come from (we don't), it's also assuming that we're living with existing ideas and existing resources forever. This in turn leads to justification for population control on an individual level when choosing to have kids, for example, but also on a national level in the case of, say, China or India (where men outnumber women through government and culture incentives), or dare I say involuntary inflation. When, on the flip side, what we need is MORE people, making decisions for themselves.
Since the idea of one person can improve the lives of all people, maybe it is a good idea to have more people instead of fewer. (and we don't know, and can't know, which person--I'd add)
This is the real tension between theory and practicality, to me: when we admit we don't understand the problem well enough and have to use some tool we already know could be greatly improved. It's also why I hate the Japanese phrase "しょうがない".
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is a nail, everything looks like a hammer.
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First of all, I'm taking back the Cake Cutter Principle from you. You've distorted it and morphed it into analogies of your own making. The Cake Cutter Principle has NOTHING to do with whether or not people actually like cake, how it's topped and who doesn't mind having a smaller piece since they've already had a big dinner. It's basic idea is that you have something that multiple people have agreed to share equally. Once you propose anything beyond that, you have left the Cake Cutter Principle.
Edit: I just realized that it was Josh's post, not Cody's, that I was reclaiming the principle from.
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The idea is that the person should evenly divide the cake or risk getting the smallest slice when all other slices have been distributed. Applying this to government, legislation and institutions as a whole may seem daunting, but not so in my opinion. I will elaborate if asked…
I’m asking.
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Systems of cooperation, like Democracy, or abstract ones like pain and pleasure, have a goal of replication of 'good' knowledge. In the case of the cake, for example, pain and pleasure are tools that evolution created to solve knowledge replication problems. That is to say, if it hurt, it was something correlated with less gene replication, and with more gene replication for pleasure. Those are vestigial measurement algorithms created by animal cells cooperating and replicating, knowledge about the universe instantiated in a water and carbon based substrate.
The idea that knowledge existed before the brain and even in the primordial ooze is an extremely broad definition of 'knowledge'. However, matter does seem to find ways of organizing itself into more and more complex systems. The idea that pleasure and pain drive the system of gene replication is interesting. Gene replication is just one (really great) means of perpetuation.
Which ever spark hit which ever carbon molecule to get 'life' going might have been the most basic form of instantiation that the human mind could grasp but the spark and the molecule came from something smaller that we still struggle to understand. And as we grapple with biomimicry, gene modification, artificial intelligence etc., it becomes just as difficult to define for life as it is to define for knowledge where it began or where it will end up.
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Originally Posted by Josh >
I’m asking.Universal Basic Income implemented
Federal tax rates on the wealthy implemented and or loopholes closed
Government insured home loans(FHA) built-in racism corrections
Single-payer government health insurance
Estate taxes on the wealthy adjusted to where it was in the 1950's and 60's.
Personal political campaign fundraising outlawed. Replaced by a central campaign funding mechanism that distributes equally among eligible candidates.These are some of the resource throughways that can be controlled or adjusted (cutting the cake). Cody may remember sometime back that I had said "Billionaires should not exist". To which I think he misunderstood me as meaning an attack on billionaires, or something like that. What I mean is if the cake cutting had been done fairly, there wouldn't be any billionaires. Billionaires should not exist if a society with a government of cake cutters is doing their job. Billionaires are a sort of sore or infected blister that should tell us our society and government system is unwell.
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The principle:
The Cake Cutter Principle is the principle that says whoever cuts the cake gets the last slice of the cake.
Where it could be beneficial:
Universal Basic Income implemented
Federal tax rates on the wealthy implemented and or loopholes closed
Government insured home loans(FHA) built-in racism corrections
Single-payer government health insurance
Estate taxes on the wealthy adjusted to where it was in the 1950's and 60's.
Personal political campaign fundraising outlawed. Replaced by a central campaign funding mechanism that distributes equally among eligible candidates.Let's just look at UBI, because it's the first one on the list.
In the United States, with existing tools (link is for lols), there's only two ways to pay for UBI: "the US budget"(taxes) and inflation. Since the FED is separate from the US government, I doubt the FED will want to just print money directly to citizens of a given (or all) jurisdictions it caters to. This is why when they "print money," like for quantitative easing, it goes through banks/companies to get into the economy. So, the logical choice for a government to source funds for something like UBI should be the former: the US budget (as supported by taxes and other economic tools). Taxes go to the US treasury, which controls all assets and debts for the US government. There are various instruments/tools they can use to change how that money flows (bonds, debt ceiling etc). But, ultimately it relies on collecting at least SOME dollars from citizens.
Regarding the "last slice of the cake," for UBI, what does that mean? If "tax dollars" are the cake, then UBI isn't the end of the cutting. The slices aren't for people, they're the programs themselves. So the people slicing up the cake, whatever coalition/group is in power at the time, is partitioning tax dollars for programs. UBI would just be one of those programs.
To re-iterate: The cake is the US budget (incl. various tools like debt ceiling, investments and tax collection), the cutters are politicians, and the slices are government programs. If there's something I'm reading wrong here, please correct me.
"Whoever cuts the cake gets the last slice of cake"...?
So those politicians who strive hard get elected and choose how the tax money gets used should be the last ones to get money for the programs that their constituents voted for them to prioritize?This isn't even getting into what it means to "raise the debt limit," what it means when the FED changes interest rates, what GDP means and how and if it grows.
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The idea that knowledge existed before the brain and even in the primordial ooze is an extremely broad definition of 'knowledge'.
Knowledge is:
- Information which, once instantiated, tends to cause itself to remain so. (The information is useful [it solves a problem])
- Information can be instantiated on any substrate that has a few "counterfactual" properties. (like a lighthouse light can:
- turn on and off
- copy other on and off signals
- can be interchangeable with other systems that can encode bits
The commonplace definition of knowledge relies on experience, which is where the "problem of induction," comes in. Experience is based on observation, and all observations are theory laden--so that existing definition of knowledge is broken. This is what Karl Popper aimed to correct.
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Universal Basic Income implemented
Federal tax rates on the wealthy implemented and or loopholes closed
Government insured home loans(FHA) built-in racism corrections
Single-payer government health insurance
Estate taxes on the wealthy adjusted to where it was in the 1950's and 60's.
Personal political campaign fundraising outlawed. Replaced by a central campaign funding mechanism that distributes equally among eligible candidates.Based solely on your platform, you'd have my vote. I wouldn't even expect you to explain exactly how to implement all that. I'd just assume that you must be more knowledgeable and dedicated to get the job done than the last guy who gave it a shot.
My idea of cake cutting in Washington isn't that the cake cutters get a slice of the cake they cut. It's that they get entire cakes of their own just for cutting other peoples' cakes and telling them which slice (crumb) to take and what to do with it. That's after they figure out how to make a cake in a kitchen that doesn't have any milk or sugar and 30 amateur cake chefs are bumping elbows and dipping their dick fingers into the batter to get a taste. One of them even tries to slip psychedelic mushrooms in there. Finally they get one baked but they don't have a knife or a table so one chef holds it while the other tries to cut it with a skewer and, "Oops!" And, "Oops, my ass!" Now there's blood on the cake and the cake's on the floor and the people are outside beating on the door. "Fuck it, we'll take it with blood on it, sure!"
I might write the next Titus by the time I'm done with this cake analogy. Anyway, Cody I'm still dealing with a layman's definition of knowledge. I'll reply to you once I've read up a bit.
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Originally posted by Josh >
Based solely on your platform, you'd have my vote. I wouldn't even expect you to explain exactly how to implement all that. I'd just assume that you must be more knowledgeable and dedicated to get the job done than the last guy who gave it a shot.Well, some of this has already been done in other European countries. It'd basically just be a copy and paste. The hurdle is and always has been misinformation and partisan politics.
Originally posted by Josh >
My idea of cake cutting in Washington isn't that the cake cutters get a slice of the cake they cut. It's that they get entire cakes of their own just for cutting other peoples' cakes and telling them which slice (crumb) to take and what to do with it. That's after they figure out how to make a cake in a kitchen that doesn't have any milk or sugar and 30 amateur cake chefs are bumping elbows and dipping their dick fingers into the batter to get a taste. One of them even tries to slip psychedelic mushrooms in there. Finally they get one baked but they don't have a knife or a table so one chef holds it while the other tries to cut it with a skewer and, "Oops!" And, "Oops, my ass!" Now there's blood on the cake and the cake's on the floor and the people are outside beating on the door. "Fuck it, we'll take it with blood on it, sure!"Yeah, I'd probably start with the second sentence, which I have italicized. That's lobbying. It is the basis of almost everything that prevents progress of progressive agenda...and centering legislation around a cake cutter principle. Lobbying would go out the window with personal political campaign fundraising being outlawed. It's nothing more than legalized bribery and you'll find that a majority of Americans would favor getting rid of it.
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Originally posted by **Cody >
**Knowledge is:- Information which...
I had to plant a flag right there. I cannot go any further because we will not agree on your definition of knowledge as you have omitted the word "acquired".
The only definitions I can accept for "knowledge" are as follows...
1. facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
2. awareness or familiarity acquired by experience of a fact or situation.
3. sexual intercourse.Originally posted by **Cody >
** The commonplace definition of knowledge relies on experience, which is where the "problem of induction," comes in. Experience is based on observation, and all observations are theory laden--so that existing definition of knowledge is broken. This is what Karl Popper aimed to correct.Popper is talking about flaws in how knowledge is acquired. He does not suggest a new definition for "knowledge" sans "acquired".
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You don't have my vote...Still waiting for a response to this:
"Whoever cuts the cake gets the last slice of cake"...?
So those politicians who strive hard get elected and choose how the tax money gets used should be the last ones to get money for the programs that their constituents voted for them to prioritize?And as for:
I had to plant a flag right there. I cannot go any further because we will not agree on your definition of knowledge as you have omitted the word "acquired".
I'm going to have to plant a flag right there. Observation and experience are both interpretation, forms of conjecture. "Acquired" through experience is not how new knowledge comes into being, it comes into being through conjecture. Acquired means copied (or interpreted and re-instantiated in the case of humans minds, which is ALSO a form of conjecture--even in the "copying"), in this existing definition of knowledge. Copying is an important property of information substrates, but it does nothing to explain or take seriously the growth of knowledge, or knowledge about knowledge (epistemology). You may experience "new" knowledge to you, but it was not experienced by the person who conjectured it before they tested it. But, it was still (objective) knowledge at that time (when they conjectured it and before they tested it). It was also (objective) knowledge when someone copied (interpreted) it for the first timebut before they tested it. Testing and experience aren't what makes knowledge true. Just because somethings been around for a long time, like a foundation with lots of evidence, doesn't mean it's infallible. A hard-to-vary explanation only becomes obvious once it's already been conjectured a bunch, before then there's been practically infinite "evidence" otherwise. [Related: "That the truth consists of hard-to-vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It's a fact that is itself unseen, yet impossible to vary."]
I already covered this here, though:
The commonplace definition of knowledge relies on experience, which is where the "problem of induction," comes in. Experience is based on observation, and all observations are theory laden--so that existing definition of knowledge is broken. This is what Karl Popper aimed to correct.
Show me an observation that's not theory laden and I'll show you a charlatan.
We like to turn scientific discovery into a narrative/story that makes it centered on observation: eg Newton's Apple, Einstein's bathtub. But those are just stories (look it up, they're unsubstantiated), the tree that dropped the apple didn't do shit, someone still had to conjecture (make a guess) about how to solve some problem. Copying knowledge (acquiring) is a fun thing to study, too. But the question of consciousness, and the history of science and knowledge, is one about conjecture. We already know how evolution conjectures: by being relying on the best replicable knowledge, letting random mutation guide knowledge growth. How do people conjecture? We don't know yet. We'll have to conjecture about it to find out.
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