Category: Ethics

What did you expect?

We make irrational demands and reject anyone that tells us what we don’t want to hear, thus we are stuck with alpha liars.

Sure, the government is a captured 1% puppet now, but we allowed it to get that way. And until we start making rational demands we’ll keep getting irrational representatives. And I’m not talking about a new round of punish thy enemy. I’m not talking about tough love for other people but magically you’re just fine.

I’m talking about giving up some shit you’re straight up addicted to.

The right in particular rose to power by telling people what they wanted to hear no matter how incorrect or cruel or narcissistic it was, and it still is that way. How many assholes get elected basically saying “I’ll make sure you can do whatever you want and force only other people to change/suffer.” All of them as far as I can tell. Right and left. Like the man said, you can always hire half the poor to kill the other half.

“Tough on crime” for example still gets votes. It’s basically just socially sanctioned sadism/racism/etc. The organized conflation of crime with criminals so that you can jerk off to all the modern equivalents of public flogging. (Crime shows and court TV much?)

What do we expect when we vote for those people? Unconditional compassion, patience, tolerance, these things are hard and require helping people we don’t always like. When you demand someone else have less freedom/compassion, don’t get all bitchy when suddenly yours gets taken away.

We love prison because we can imagine our enemies being beaten and raped. Then we get a police state.

We love school because we imagine our children turning out EXACTLY like we want them. Then we get teen pregnancy, school shootings, and bullying unto suicide.

We love “defense” spending because we imagine a death machine enforcing that will on all who disagree. Then we get drone wars and the NSA reading this post as I type it.

We love ignorant energy policy because we think windmills and solar panels are fashionable and we’re terrified of the dark magic of radiation. Then we get pipelines and coal inspired lung cancer.

We love the hope of patenting the letter E and dying a multi-billionaire and so we get the TPP and walmart on track to owning half of everything and Monsanto being handed a food monopoly.

We love marriage law because we damn sure want our ex girl/boyfriend fiscally and socially punished for breaking our hearts and we can’t possibly learn to share. Then we get domestic violence, atrocious music, sexual objectification, and the all too common homicide in a desperate attempt to avoid a costly divorce.

Bottom line, 99% of people are hypocrites and are merely experiencing the natural and logical consequences of their demands.

When you want to play with fire in the living room, sometimes the house goes up. Is it really the fault of the fire marshal with the nice smile you elected to tell you it was ok to do? Or was it your vault for handing power to someone who told you what you wanted to hear?

Critical Differences and Why I am Alone

 

“Once I am human I will talk to you about things that are of little or no importance! I will avoid religion and politics because if we disagree, you will not like me any more!”

~Mal, Borderlands 2

 

Most everyone I’ve ever lost so far I’ve lost due to disagreement. I don’t mean just mates. It’s the price of asking after things that truly matter.

If my mind was composed of ice cream preference and game strategy perhaps it would be easier for I and those I speak to to tolerate disagreement.

But I choose to live in spaces where choices matter. I choose to ask real questions, with real answers, that would have real consequences.

I did not have my self-esteem systematically crushed as the vast majority of my peers did. I am therefore incapable of flippantly dismissing my view of truth simply to fit in and play nice.

I only retain friends because they are in parity with me on the subjects that matter, or their awareness is superior to my own and they shape my opinion to match theirs, or I am unaware of a critical difference.

These differences mean life and death. Torture and joy. I cannot be friends with someone who ultimately, whether they are aware of it or not, are agents of death and pain.

I’m routinely called arrogant and a host of other negative things for this and my culture has seen fit to isolate me, leaving me in the hands of my family because of this. Offering only a trickle of food money as a token gesture of solidarity with me as a member of the species. Otherwise I feel like I’m in solitary confinement.

This sense of being alive, this sense of ethical responsibility, is openly treated as a mental illness. They tell me to treat life as a gift, but what they mean is juggle faberge eggs like they do, confident that either they are immortal, or that death and disaster will only arrive after they have left.

They prove this every time they get into a car. If they really thought life was a gift they’d act so differently. They’d act more like me. They’d respect the lives of others instead of dismissing the suffering of those same others.

It’s ironic and paradoxical, but one of the reasons disagreements with me are so critical is because I’ve trimmed the fat. I am more able to tolerate trivial and cultural differences than most other humans. Race, faith, social status, nationality, age—these things don’t matter to me as long as you are an agent of joy and life.

I am seen by some as cold and mean precisely because I feel so keenly and try so hard to be nice, not just to the people in my field of vision or those that “deserve” it, but all people, everywhere, forever.

Everyone is so quick to give me a life lesson or ignore me as a toxic failure precisely because I have so much to teach and have come so close to the ethical ideal.

All things considered, I believe I have averted more suffering and death, and enabled more joy and life on balance than anyone else could have under the same conditions. But the problem is so wildly complicated, and each life so unique, that I’ll never be able to prove it.

At best I can only hope that the tools I try to share are picked up by people under better conditions, sufficient to contribute to a positive feedback spiral, hopefully reaching, at some point, a suffering and death escape velocity.

Or I’m just wildly insane and full of toxic memes, and my culture is right to more or less quarantine me. And just in case that’s so, I always try to advocate for mercy and forgiveness for others. So that if that is the case I’ll be worthy of it myself, so that I can continue to be thankful, at least, for things not being much, much worse.

Update: 2016-04-22 0337 PM

I’ve been asked to make a list of those positions which tend to alienate.

Let’s start by saying that philosophically I’m essentially a Utilitarian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

For more complete less personal version of this list with reasons and links:

Emperor Innomen?

I personally believe: (In/That)

  • Nuclear power is the safest best form of power so far.
  • AI should be preemptively given full citizen rights.
  • Universal suffrage.
  • Genetic engineering/GMO/Synbio.
  • Geoengineering.
  • A UBI.
  • A cap on wealth.
  • Cloning and cloned meat for food.
  • Selling sex should be like selling any other service.
  • The removal of race, religion, age, and gender status as policy designations.
  • Nationalizing infrastructural enterprises that are too big to fail.
  • Permitting unlicensed fully disclosed medical care.
  • Corporate execution as a legal judgement option.
  • Cryogenics.
  • Punitive prisons are bad policy and ethically repugnant.
  • Political parties should be treated legally like religions.
  • Officially enforced monogamy and all marriage law should abolished.
  • Gun law should be abolished.
  • Drug law should be abolished.
  • Patents and copyright should be abolished.
  • State and local law should be abolished.
  • Crime should be treated as only mental illness and/or desperation.
  • The wage gap is more a product of disposition than oppression.
  • LNT model is wrong.
  • Vengeance is wrong.
  • Life likely didn’t originate on Earth.
  • Communal schooling should be abolished.
  • The brain in some can act like an organic transceiver.
  • Time is an illusion.
  • The hidden variable theory is correct.
  • There is no free will.
  • The MRA movement has many legitimate grievances.
  • Democracy objectively might not be a good idea.
  • Deterrence is mostly a fig leaf for sadism.
  • Some species should be wiped out or reduced to freezer samples/records.
  • Parents do not own their children.
  • Children are oppressed second class citizens deserving of full rights.
  • The animal kingdom needs to be radically reshaped to end suffering.

This list is likely incomplete or will change over time.

Why we’ll always need currency.

Where does currency come from? Ultimately it comes from the need to exchange items indirectly. Why indirectly? Because direct exchange is barter and has limitations which create (or are) resistance. Money comes from the needs created by the weaknesses of direct barter. Barter in turn comes from the mammalian strategy of communication and socialization. Organization itself is a step towards diversity because that’s where advantage is found.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-benefits-of-a-long-childhood

Organizational life implies interaction. Interaction is always an exchange. Even a hug or a hand shake has a cost. There will always be supply and demand, since not all demands are material there will always be diversity of supply which means a basis for trade, the long term intolerable weaknesses of barter can only be overcome by currency of some sort or by stasis/homogeneity.

Any optimal society has money/currency. A way to render an abstraction as tangible. A way to externalize commitment and desire. A contract for example is a form of barter. Sure you could try to tolerate the weaknesses of barter but you’re only setting yourself up for either universal stagnation (as a result of trying to prevent…) or re-capture by covert capitalists. (What do you think the mafia/yakuza/triads are? They are competing governments.)

Economy is just an abstracted way of saying movement. Typically expressed physically as matter or energy traveling from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration along the path of least resistance.

Creating these paths in advance and waiting for reality to take them according to an imagined superior state, leading to an objective, leading to a plan for accomplishing that objective, is how one controls and shapes reality. Each of these steps can be debated forever. That’s why we have to actually try stuff.

Societies without money have been tried. They were first after all. It only works in conditions of extreme homogeneity, because only at the simplest levels can barter suffice because of a lack of diversity among goods/services/demand. Simple of course need not mean small, or boring. You can have simple and entertaining huge things. There have been massive barter economies. But they were intrinsically disadvantaged and quickly trumped by the greater diversity tolerance/exploitation of competing systems. Systems which developed from within the older systems. Even the church was forced to adapt or die.

History can be seen as a constant war and progression. A war between social inertia and innovation created diversity. A progression of capabilities growing out of growing tolerance for diversity. Progressiveness vs conservatism. Diversity will always win over the long term because it produces new opportunity/ability or exploits previously unexploitable opportunity.

http://swankivy.com/shenanigans/labels/evolve.jpg

But of course one can reject the earth as it is or ever has been as an argument. One can have faith in imagined superior alternatives because being an imaginative construct it is flawless and infinitely malleable.

So instead of going up in scale, let’s go down. To start with, life is activity. And activity is movement. Like movement explained above. A rock is lifeless because no part of it changes or moves “on its own” (whatever that ultimately means philosophically.) I can’t sit on a rock and get it to hatch, I can’t plant a rock and get a tree. If I could, then it wasn’t a rock, it was an egg or a seed.

The moment it sprouted roots or started to hatch it, by definition had to have an economy.

But let’s go a little lower. If it moved/reacted at all it still had an economy, even if it wasn’t alive. Like if it was made of dry ice and I dropped it in water. Now you have a temperature exchange and phase/material/chemical economy. Go lower and everything has an economy, because it’s all moving.

The lack of economy is a perceptual limitation or an illusion. Like when a tree appears to not be growing because it’s not happening fast enough for you to register. Or when pitch appears to be a solid because of its rate of flow.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/07/18/pitch_drop_experiment_video_science_world_aflutter_after_experiment_pays.html

or lower…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

It can be argued that existence itself is movement, or vibration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

Are you hearing me yet? If you eliminate movement at any point you merely create an insulator around which movement must occur. This is the base reason why external discipline is always doomed to fail and why prohibition creates black markets and why it takes more voltage to get around, or through resistance, etc etc etc, including why you can never dispense with economy/movement/money without hideous cost. (Like saying becoming an inert chunk of rock.)

http://www.lifegem.com/ Ironic really, the only way to mostly escape the economy is to become something often used as a form of currency. XD

Even the body has an oxygen economy. How that oxygen is distributed changes based on the needs of the market/organism as a whole.

Sure, you could make an organism that doesn’t need oxygen. Anaerobic bacteria for example, which in turn just have a simpler and far less capable/diverse economy.

The planet’s surface has a water economy, upon which I modeled my economic solution (ubt/cap) because it’s a proven system. It also has a magnetic economy powered by fission, which is great for us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field#Importance

All of it is running out. This movement appears to be unidirectional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

The entirety of observable reality is the progression or movement from one state to another. The only point at which we can be free of this is the last point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Big_Freeze_or_heat_death

The “my yard, my rules” argument.

Update: Made a steam community opposing this crap:

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/CasualVendetta

What follows is a modified and linked up version of an argument I had on steam which I will not link because I do not want to ever see it again. (Despite my willingness to speak, the hate does as a matter of fact hurt me. I’m no emotional masochist I just have an over developed sense of responsibility to speak up on macroscopic issues.)

I see servile pandemic myopia everywhere. Anytime someone complains about anything there seems a disproportionate and ready supply of enablers eager to make apologies for whoever is the most oppressive in the room. At first I thought it was just plants, sock puppets, and insiders, but I realize it’s much scarier than that.

So they say it’s my choice to participate and that absolves them, so therefore it’s as if I’m fair game for anything they are permitted to do by those with more power and ALL COMPLAINT must therefore be invalid. How convenient for everyone with a single scrap of power over anyone in any context eh? Awful lot of people getting screwed in this culture “by choice” by that logic. Like the homeless apparently since they “choose” to not work.

Bait and Switch

It’s like no one is permitted to speak anymore unless it is to kiss the ring. Spineless wretches.

Let me be clear about something. Yes I personally hate try hard masochists and other variants of the “hardcore” gamer. I emotionally wish they’d change or vanish, but again, the point, which I was taught as a child and apparently no one else was, is that my freedom should end where yours begins. While I may desire X from them I will not force X from them nor will I argue that others with more power should force X from them on my behalf unless that force is required to protect freedom at the larger scales.

That is the core difference between every argument I make in most any context and its clash with the obsequious mob. Every argument I make is in favor of either adding freedom, or opposing the removal of a freedom. The only exceptions are those cases where a given freedom on balance leads to less freedom at the larger scale. Like for example the freedom to acquire infinite wealth.

One Possible Solution

To oppose me therefore is by definition to oppose someone else’s freedom because that is how I formulate my positions and arguments. The only possible exception is if I were in error and X argument I am making actually leads to less freedom, in which case the only counter argument is to show/explain how Y argument is superior in the net freedom context thus exposing my error or offering a superior (greater net freedom at one or more scales) alternative.

Most importantly I am always willing to give counter evidence and logic a reasonable hearing.

Apologists are constantly finding new ways to say that freedom is worthless and I should be happy to have less of it.

Games are thought experiments. Hypothetical worlds from which we can learn and through which we can teach. So far the vast majority of lessons taught are subsets of might makes right, at both the direct and meta level.

You can most clearly see this trend of volition manipulation as expressed by preemptive surrender and corporate exploitation apologism in the gaming community because being a “trivial” or “non” issue that trend is allowed full freedom to bloom under IPL’s monopolistic glow. They are exceptionally good at making principled arguments on the net seem futile, especially in gaming contexts because they are monopolistic autocracies all. For profit, and interestingly filled with school attending children.

Arguments in gaming contexts are a window into what the future will look like when this more servile crowd is finally released into the world to use these same arguments to defend corporate and government behavior outside the world of games.

The direct level of game world argument is not so important. The game world can after all be changed at the whim of the coder.

The meta level however is the real world. Game aren’t typically a diary or a private garden, they’re a public park. Into which they invite the public in exchange for the opportunity to make a sale or to which they have sold a ticket. The rights you grant them get you into the habit of thinking a certain way about what is legitimate business practice and how it interacts with your human rights and everything built on those rights, such as your rights as a paying customer, your access or lack of, to recourse, and how disputes should be handled.

Since these people are often young, being gamers, this mental habit is all the more important.

Clearly many are of the disturbingly large camp that is of the opinion that no one above them can do wrong, ever. That simply because we can leave, or because pay is not being extorted (if not then as well) they are therefore ethically unencumbered and ALL complaint is therefore evidence of a personal flaw in the complainer. (This is the function of bullies. To enforce meta-rules and punish free thinkers and anyone else not in line.)

This is a question of social faith ultimately. It’s a kind of prosperity doctrine which they implicitly accept because it is hammered into their minds by virtually every piece of media on earth produced during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Especially the entrepreneurial media, which accounts for the vast majority of all media you see.

“How Should Artists Get Paid?” Isn’t a Question, it’s an Insult

That freedom is only exclusive to the coders of a given game is because of a rifle. (Actually a whole army ultimately.) In a sane world, not populated by boot licking drones, publicly exposed code would have to be open for the same reason ingredients must be displayed on the food boxes and cans. And in that world I would be able to fork their project if I didn’t like what they were doing with it and all who agreed with me could use that fork and all who didn’t could do as they individually pleased.

But as it stands they have a monopoly, and in the apologists mind those monopoly powers somehow absolve monopolists of responsibility instead of creating it. Trying to parse the psychological alchemy required to arrive at this perverse conclusion makes my spine ache.

In a gaming context silence is best obtained by pretending or asserting that any issue is a trivial issue, expressly because it’s “just a game” when it only is trivial in the sense that it’s the tip of a very large iceberg. It’s far more comfortable for apologists to try and dismiss the messenger because the message is pretty horrifying, and to be honest disastrous at the personal immediate level to internalize. Every day children are spanked/beaten/tortured or worse and men are beaten and raped for allowing their thinking to conflict with their masters’. For daring to ask the dangerous questions like “what gives you the right?” and “why should I?”

I don’t blame them really. Who wants to face the fact that they are totally captured? Who wants to face that a cartel of media companies and a generation of corrupt politicians have custom written large parts of their subconscious expressly to keep them working/primping, obeying, and spending without complaint?

I don’t expect you to consciously respond. In a sense I’m not even talking to you. I’m talking to your amygdala. And it won’t get the message for at least 48 hours due to the interaction between memory and sleep cycles, if the message gets through the noise at all.

Don’t think that just because you’re blind, the world is dark. Try hards ruin just about every game in the long term and they utterly dominate the thinking of modern era developers who because of the IPL social flaw mentioned before, are sickeningly profit motivated. We perversely even equate income with legitimacy. Never mind that that income has exactly nothing to do with skill, but rather perception which is almost entirely based on context.

http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/bell.asp

And if there is a group that’s easy to squeeze money out of it’s insecure male try hards and their legion of enablers and thetas. The ones that eventually sign up to be cops and soldiers and are eager to hurt others to achieve better standing within the hive hierarchy, to win the girl and to pay the bill. Hence the staggering success of COD/WOW. If you can make a place for try hards to dick race, they will pay (preferably per month) to use it. And anything you do to create the impression of seriousness and accomplishment (need I say prestige?) will be rewarded with praise and cash.

Meanwhile back in the real world, an entire generation of kids is covertly trained to never question the rules and to mock and humiliate any who attempt to persuade them to think like leaders for 30 seconds. Kids who literally don’t even know what freedom is, let alone how to acquire or defend it, even in contexts where they collectively have absolute power, near immortality, and an immunity to pain. The game world.

And we wonder why back in the real world, where you can be ritually or spontaneously beaten, tear gassed, and raped for standing up and speaking truth to power, that barring the rare and transient protest, that same generation can’t/won’t be bothered to vote, and couldn’t name a single congressional figure from their state with a shotgun pointed at their heart.

If begging for more content was all I was doing, here or anywhere else, I wouldn’t get the hate that I get from random drones eager to protect the hive mentality. Educators just to cope with the ever expanding ratio of students to teachers, and society’s refusal to revisit the idea of communal education generally, have forced said educators to become extremely adept at manipulating students to internalize the rules they wish to enforce, since they haven’t a prayer of directly enforcing them themselves when they are outnumbered 30 to 1. The problem is, that mode of thinking never stops, and kids walk around well after school and college enforcing hierarchical, bell-slave, class stratified behavioral standards without even being aware of it.

The number one function of school today is to make kids conclude that obedience is their good idea and that anyone who encourages them to be a true threat ideologically or otherwise is to be ignored or mocked, at best. Beaten, murdered, or driven to suicide at worst.

It was not like this on the net, even 10 years ago, let alone 20. But of course 10 years ago, what and who moderated their contact with the world? School administrators? Collaborator parents too scared of lower pay to stand up to people they themselves were beaten/conditioned to apologize for and to?

Why do I even bother. I’m effectively trying to talk you out of not knowing how to ride a bike or talking a marine out of a repetition conditioned reflex. How is a handful of conversations supposed to expose, let alone compete with an expertly crafted programming regimen that costs billions a year and has been constantly refined for 200 years?

http://adamcurtisfilms.blogspot.com/

I play games to try and escape the world as it is, the specific elements I am escaping are in large part a result of pandemic preemptive submission and will of the ruler internalization. I get mad, because even in a setting where we are 100% free to dispense with all that baggage we (you) go out of our way to code it in and then spend huge amounts of effort defending it as if it’s a feature not a bug.

Maybe one day I’ll quit trying to be helpful or assuming the best and I’ll just be able to silently endure the antics of a generation eager to preemptively enslave itself, not only in the shared lucid dream of the game world, but the real world as well.

Why I Oppose the “Venus Project”

TLDR:

Unless you plan to annihilate all forms of uniqueness there will always be need for currency of some sort to allocate access to that which cannot (or should not) be reproduced. (Such as an individual’s time or use of a specific radio frequency range.)

Material post scarcity is of course possible and coming. That’s easy really:

We can acquire a high degree of ubiquitous material wealth if we do three things:

1. Reform IPL to make all code free as in speech and beer. Privacy could still easily be respected. In fact copyright enforcement and privacy of correspondence are mutually exclusive. (To program the robots.)

2. Deploy nuclear reactors quickly to provide the bottom of an anthropocentric materials economy food chain. (To power the robots.)

3. Develop an open source humanoid robot, recharged by the reactors, and instructed by ever evolving shared open code above, to automate any labor task we need done yet are unwilling to do personally. (To have the robots.)

But you’ll still need both authority and currency to manage things like frequency allocation and to evade tragedy of the commons situations at the macroscopic emergent level.

Best way to allocate the funding is via a steeply progressive tax and a UBI.

Main post:

TVP to me is just one of thousands of positive liberty (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/) global proposals that require too much (however gentle) forced (via “education”) homogenization and indoctrination.

I stipulate that TVP is materially feasible and logically consistent, but then again an ant hill is materially feasible, and most religions are, internally at least, logically consistent. A good global plan requires more than that. We cannot simply ask if we can do something, we must ask if we should.

Simply improving on the situation now is insufficient if the method annihilates better possible futures. Indeed some have formally defined intelligence is the evasion of future constraints.

The opportunity cost must always be considered. An improvement alone is insufficient justification for any course of action. (Much like how a UBI is incomplete without a wealth cap.)

TVP is ethically sub-optimal, if not actively wrong. Global order through unity of mind, delivered by “education” is one of the more insidious (precisely because it could work) facets of any proposed global social system.

The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

And without question TVP would require, an admittedly benevolent, compulsory schooling system. That alone is a deal breaker for me. Any system that requires it is in my view an ethical and ultimately biological threat. Diversity is strength for a reason. You can’t just looks at snapshots in time you have to look at the whole of it.

I imagine myself being transported to the TVP future. I don’t like what I see. It would have to exile me, ignore me, or force me. It really has no other options. The founder said in a video that it has to be global. Think about what that means. EVERYONE has to agree or it won’t work. So what do you do with the people that don’t agree?

You educate them out of existence or you quarantine them (psycho-socially or physically) until they die and are replaced by “properly” educated citizens.

But really that’s just ideological icing on the cake, the real death stroke for TVP is the fact that humanity is not going to fundamentally be the same species in 50 or so years. Altering that baseline would require a complete reevaluation/redesign of all the TVP materials.

It will begin as cures for genetic disorders, then it will become a new type of vaccine, then it will become performance enhancements, and finally it becomes recreational and biohacker territory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biohacking

I own my own genetic code. I have the right to edit that code. I just currently lack the tools and map.

http://www.hedweb.com/confile.htm

I’m a larvae waiting for the tools and opportunity to pupate. And I’m not even close to alone.

I expect the human baseline to explosively branch off. (The furries alone when given the option of actually becoming animal hybrids of every possible combination will do so with gusto.) And that’s relatively bland compared to the kind of experimental chimeras I expect to see.

In 100 years you won’t even be able to find a single objective biological classification that will encompass all humans who have ever lived. There will be or have been extreme examples of neo-human in every known niche of macroscopic life.

There will be aquatic anaerobic humans living around deep sea vents. (http://www.feedbooks.com/book/974/starfish) There will be humans that have forgone gender and adapted themselves to breed parthenogenetically. (As per the whiptail lizard.) There will be humans that have become reptilian, insectile, fungal, and those are just the experimental or obsessed individuals.

There will be actual vampires (within the realm of physical possibility), actual werewolves, actual vulcans and elves and hobbits and trolls and dragons, because people will modify themselves to suit. Do you really see that level of diversity all living in neat little domes, sitting in neat little rows learning how to be “technicians?” Or would you just outlaw genetic engineering?

TVP can’t cope with nor tolerate that level of diversity because, Fresco is completely overlooking the feedback impact loop of transhumanism. Even his geometry fails in that regard. (What about the humans that want to be 10ft tall or the ones that want to be 2ft tall?)

Very few people have any real idea what the future will look like.

Don’t misunderstand, I sure as hell see where TVP is coming from. But the problem is that TVP is a package deal. I can’t back it for the same reasons I can’t just say I’m a democrat and be done with it.

Freeing people from slavery is a fine goal, and I certainly believe that material scarcity can and will be annihilated. Also, currency needs deep reform as well, just not abolition.

99% of TVP adherents have their heart in the right place, and really to me that’s all that matters so long as they remain, like you, open minded and critically aware. To the degree that TVP actually promotes the scientific method and not a self serving corruption of it, it is an excellent idea(s).

Currency isn’t the problem:

But TVP’s attacking the wrong thing primarily. You don’t need to annihilate currency to annihilate slavery.

Bait and Switch

One Possible Solution

Explore bitcoin, and how it is different from fiat money. Currency is a tool, a technology. And like any tool or technology it is not intrinsically good (useful) or evil (harmful). Anyone working to annihilate money is wasting their time.

Currency isn’t about reward and punishment. That’s merely one way to deploy currency.

Currency is about externalizing priorities. Making objective show of your subjective intent. (“Putting your money where your mouth is.” or “Voting with your wallet.”) Currency represents a share of the planet. How we allocate those shares is a political, ethical, and economic question.

In effect he’s looking at a pizza and in order to share it fairly advocates the abolition of slices. It’s nonsensical. Even if you eliminate slices you still have to divide up the pizza. Even if you refuse to say that’s what you are doing, there’s no way to escape it.

Currency in the future will be about prioritizing your desires. The idea is to give everyone enough to be healthy and comfortable and informed. (Not via education but just by eliminating the slavery of compulsory schooling or employment.) Human curiosity will do the rest.

I’m a glutton. I love me some good (and junk) food, it’s just in my nature. Thus I’d spend more of my share on different foods, and traveling to experience those foods. (I want to fly to Vietnam and have a couple bowls of Pho for example.)

Other people aren’t going to care as much as I do. Other people might want a larger share of the planet than I have for reasons of their own, and I might be willing to give up some of my portion of X for some of their portion of Y. Allowing them to engage in enterprise to convince the rest of us to fund them so they can accomplish that goal has to be possible or else humanity loses a critical avenue of adaptation and diversity.

Maybe they want to pool resources for some objective. Like a space program for example. Or some kind of kickstarter project.

Currency is about equitably dividing up whatever there is to divide up and there will always be stuff to divide up, thus there will always be a need for currency of some sort. Even if it’s not declared. Something will function as currency even if it’s just hours of your day. You’ll spend them on X to get Y and how badly you want X will determine how many you spend.

Side topic about credibility:

You likely don’t think it’s possible for me to be “smarter” than him 🙂

http://talentdevelop.com/articles/WIIA.html

They want you to think that way.They want you to believe that you don’t have the right to speak against him unless you can play the education/skill/experience card.

But given his age and life focus, that’s hardly fair for a consensus friendly movement. In actuality it’s just a way to arbitrarily exclude potential opposition.

That’s why the first thing you see in “Future by Design” is Larry King telling the world what a super genius this guy is because of all his technical skill.

Specific Responses:

Since the kitchen sink approach has failed so many others, let me focus on a couple things the guy said in the 8 minute video above. Not the FAQ, not what other people say he meant, let’s focus on the leader and his words.

How is that fair? Because if you disregard the leader then you might as well name your own movement.The leader while he is alive defines the movement, and after he dies whoever can best manage the perception of being true to that vision controls the movement. (That’s why north Korea is saturated with past leader mythology and why American politics is so full of speculation and debate over what the founders meant or thought or said.)

That’s why I focus on policy fragments/elements (like the UBI) not policy collectives (like nations, parties, or ideologies).

“It has to be global.”

This has two problems.

Firstly it’s like saying “I have a great way to live but it’ll only work if you live by yourself.”

Secondly, it has a very clear “my way or the highway”  implication to it. No matter how gentle and palatable you make that highway and the journey to it.

Thirdly it betrays a deep misunderstanding of war and its causes. War isn’t about resources ultimately, war is about perception. As an example explore this little area of the planet.

TVP’s solution is the same as Cosmos in essence. He wants to destroy money because he fears what Cosmo calls _”its most powerful ability.”_ Marx and Lennon did as well but they realized more accurately what money is, what it facilitates, and why destroying it wasn’t possible, or necessary.

But they, and he, were wrong for the same reason the drug war is futile and why gun law is unenforceable. Diverse desires cannot be moderated effectively by authority. Authority itself is perception management. So is money in a sense. Control of perception can control the flow of money and the value of money, that much is obvious, but money, value itself, are just perceptions.

TVP ultimately proposes and is/would be defined by and as a command economy. the problem is that no central command (silicon or carbon) can compete with distributed parallel processing and barring totalitarian technological despotism, the collective computing power and sophistication of the group will always outstrip the computing power of any center.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…” ~Yeats

“…we announce on TV what is available and what is not available at the time…”

He intends to replace money entirely with “technically competent” and “scientific” command.

That will not work. Even if you make the entire population technicians, which he clearly expects to occur as demonstrated by his back to school rhetoric.

However, freeing the population from the slavery of work is a noble goal.

“If you have a million sincere people that have no technical competence I can assure you nothing can be accomplished.”

Really, this tells me all I need to know. He doesn’t understand humanity at all. He needs to watch this show: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/james-burke-connections/

He also need to really think about the following quote:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” ~Albert Einstein

Knowledge can be systematically acquired. Indeed it’s something machines can do.

https://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5923/85.abstract

Those 1000 imaginations are far more valuable than 10,000 highly skilled but dull technicians. (Or programs.) This isn’t a matter of opinion or doe eyed sentimental claptrap, it’s one of those ironic paradoxical but universal truths. We’ve scientifically confirmed that science isn’t all that important.

That’s why facts and reason don’t convince people. That’s why showmen are always in charge, not scientists. That’s why charisma is more powerful than reason.

It’s also why appearing irrational conveys advantage.

Click to access refs4375.pdf

(https://www.google.com/search?q=game+theory+appearing+irrational)

He fundamentally fails to parse the importance of the subjective. He makes the same mistake Nash did, he assumed a mercenary/rational base of human action. (By his own description his vision of what defined a rational player in part depended on his own mental illness.)

Words

“They could be shown the mastery of their minds and bodies, so that they could achieve the full expression of their powers, not spend their lives like ineffectual ghosts trapped in a marvelous machine beyond their skill to operate. They could break the domination of pain, so that it became a sentinel and not a tyrant, sending messages which the rational mind could accept or ignore as it pleased. Above all, they could choose to die only when they wished; they would be shown the many paths that led beyond the grave, and the price that must be paid for immortality in all its forms. A vista of infinite time would open up before them, with all its terror and promise. Some minds could face this, some could not; here was the dividing line between those who would inherit the universe, and those who were only quick-witted animals.” ~Arthur C Clarke

I am a creature of words.

I picked up reading and writing very quickly, though my pedantic instructors were more hung up on my spelling skill and handwriting than my writing style and fidelity of expression. Like modern math instructors are irrationally focused on arithmetic (raw number crunching) over mathematics (interaction and theory).Put simply, in my opinion, writing is better than talking and becomes a form of action. What I do with writing is something that I do, not something that I say. It is the building and perfecting of something. Not merely the discussion of it. School did it’s very best to hide this fact from me, because school is about making little industrial revolution era robots, not enriching the lives of new people.

On the subject of broken education, it’s amazing how they are sneaking us towards a more stratified and classist society, almost caste oriented even. The real top players of our culture were almost universally born into it, and not just by inheritance, but my parental choice. Tiger Woods didn’t choose golf, his parents did. Basing training on early aptitude is one of the advantages indirectly acquired by self directed learning and unschooling.

I’m always trying to step back and see the big picture so that I can find the weakest root problem to attack but a large enough frame of reference can become paralyzing, so while I am open minded, I am also clear about my current conclusions and I try to always have a solution proposal attached to any complaint.

I realized in grade school when I thought about how I was being treated by my peers and the faculty that there was something wrong here, something pervasive, and I tried to find out what. The only people who were ever nice to me were the lunch room people and the custodial people and while I knew they outranked me by whole worlds being “adults” I also knew they were treated like machines by all the other adults. That was the beginning of my social exploration from an investigative/scientific/macroscopic standpoint.

Before I continue I’d like to say that I suspect things are going to get slowly better for awhile as reform is championed and there after things will get suddenly, drastically, better as a result of key disruptive technologies.

The real achievements of humanity are and were subjective and organizational. And those are the areas where our most recent achievements are most obvious. The smart phone for example is just an insanely efficient connectivity tool, a synapse converting each human brain into a wildly complicated neuron, interconnecting them to form a more advanced higher order mind, the culture itself.

Put simply, charisma and people management are more important than any technical skill unless that skill directly leads to a disruptive technology for the craftsman/technician/whatever. Economy of scale assures this. I’ve wasted my life mastering logical debate and objective policy evaluation type skills under the mistaken impression that people are persuaded to change their actions based on these things, when they aren’t.

 

Nothing taught me this lesson harder than when NO ONE whom I personally know would listen to me about bitcoin back when it was 5$ a coin. No my family not my best friends not people who called me a genius otherwise. Facts. Don’t. Matter.

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” ~Max Planck

Those best able to create the impression that wealth is a reward for ability in the minds of their peers are the ones that became leaders over others who were more fit to lead but “chose” not to. Think about it. Who gets the better deal? The best fighter who is constantly having to prove it or the best liar who convinces everyone he’s the best fighter without even having to fight?

these new leaders set those terms in the first place, or were able to set terms based on what they could meet. Like a squad of Trek fans convincing people that the best way to assert fitness is though a kirk vs picard debate. Cultural rules gain emphasis as members of the culture allocate command based on them. Which is why seemingly absurd things persisted long past their contextual significance relevant to objective reality. The caste system is a good example. Religion as well. Cultural inertia.

Social alphas do not earn their status. They are born into it. People have always been (thus far) the real height of technology. Specialists. But now the culture is the technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room In a sense it knows more than we do, especially as the number of people within the system act with little to no understanding of (or interest in) the the larger picture. We are as ignorant by and large as the individual neuron is.

The dawn of agriculture had the impact it did because it allowed human beings to behave like cells in an organism and differentiate to the point of inability to survive outside said organism.

The impact of this cannot be overstated. It’s like going from 175 pounds of homogeneous algae to a human being. Allowing for a diversity of cells that could be deployed in concert despite individual weaknesses created a whole new order of qualitative difference. (Compare the cells in my hand vs the cells in my brain or liver.)

The industrial revolution had hardware, but all the software was in the brain of whoever operated the machine. To a degree skill could be built into the machine and process but it would be many decades before that really started to reach its true potential. (Ford, McDonald’s)

Some believe that notions of intelligence and education are biased as they are towards mechanistic black and white thinking out of ignorance of any alternative, and seek to correct this problem by cleverly relaying facts in an attempt to cure this ignorance.

I see a more conspiratorial and exploitative option. The system was set up for, by, and directed at, these mechanistic bookish fact obsessed people because they aren’t a threat expressly because of their obsession with facts. They can be handled like livestock from above without their awareness more easily. That’s why science has never ruled society, yet technology has always been the most directly powerful thing in society. Even I took decades to see this and I’ve basically spent my life studying it. (I’m expected to try and sell this information instead I’m asking for donations. No doubt you’ll indirectly punish me for this.)

Specialists need protection and support from outside to allow them time to focus. Also as the focus on the smaller scale deepens, oblivity to the larger scale proportionally grows. Males in particular when they specialize and focus lose the opportunity and the inclination to examine the bigger picture.

http://www.amazon.com/There-Anything-Good-About-ebook/dp/B003WT26I0

One could easily argue that understanding this larger picture is itself a kind of specialty. Which is where, in my opinion, familial autocrats come from. A good king needed to be trained from childhood for the job. (Like what it took to make tiger woods a golf master. Or the Spartans. The best specialists aren’t trained, they are grown.)

The mythical golden age of our rapidly evolving past ended from our perspective because around the end of that time the advancements slipped outside the default human cognitive spectrum, like the pitch of a sound rising beyond the ability for the human ear to detect. At that point the only real evidence the average person had of advancement was the word of specialists and the technology they eventually produced.

The vast bulk of new words added to the human language between then and now are scientific and technical specialist terms not used outside labs, scholarly journals, and industry publications.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emx92kBKads (Yes it’s dated, but that’s part of the point. In less than 6 years it comes to look ancient. In a sense, humanity’s greatest asset is the speed at which is becomes accustomed to what in the past would have been, if not actually was, astonishing. This is also why the profit motive is bullshit. People don’t need to be forced to do the needed things. They will do them out of sheer boredom if nothing else.)

The support for a kitchen sink method of education supported by the vast majority of the west’s inhabitants and their resulting puppet cultures is a symptom of top heavy governments not knowing how to deploy the option of focused education and attempting to take all of them to hedge the (lack of a) bet. A kind of institutional argument from moderation. Which is a mistake ultimately because it pushes us back towards that algae-like homogenization. In attempting to empower the first wave of educated people with a “well rounded” (read as, indecisive, unfocused) education they damaged diversity, which is specialization, which is that thing that means the difference between roaches and termites, algae and people, solitary wasps and a planet spanning ant supercolony.

Indeed, but the conflict is between, as it always has been, altruism and psychopathy. Homogeneity and diversity.

People in power are often educated but correlation does not denote causation. They have degrees because they are in power, not power because they have degrees. A rich kid is best served by college because of it’s networking value and because it is a place for them to deploy the real advantages they were born with by being surrounded by a bunch of children under the delusion that class mobility is open to them if only they work hard.

 

But those middle class children never had a chance. The curse of middle management. All responsibility, no authority to make strategic changes. Again, as above, we’re getting too top heavy. The middle is shrinking, the top is getting more dense, and the bottom is getting more voluminous. It’s going to either collapse or fall over unless technology changes the game, which I believe it will again, as it did when the press was invented, and when the plow was invented, etc.

The problems are those which impede the flow of information and criminalize the deployment of technology. Everyone has an opinion about how to “fix” education. Don’t confuse incompetence with a covert agenda. Don’t project your assumption of agenda onto a snake with no head. It is a system run by psychopaths, who have at best a fragmentary and transient awareness of the larger scale, and then only parsed as a threat/opportunity matrix. A stimulus response machine. A human with a lizard or insect mind. A philosophical zombie.

Assuming the point of an organization is to solve a problem, as opposed to create one for the profit of a different system is often a mistake. Think about the example of a jobs program being deployed to fix municipal plumbing. Is the point to fix plumbing? Create jobs? Or get candidate X more votes than candidate Y? Or any other number or combination of goal and meta goal?

When it fails is is due to ineptitude? Or is it as I said, that they simply lack the strategic authority? That’s what I do. Point out strategic solutions that obviate entire swathes of other secondary problems. (Like how libertarians, gays, and atheists could band together and kick the state out of the religion enforcement business, solving many of the secondary issues they all care about by attacking the root problem.) My goal has been to mine down to the axiomatic ethical bedrock and from there trace upwards to the deepest social problem. (And I have.)

We must choose. Do we want slavery or don’t we? If we don’t we must act as I suggest in the link above. There really is no middle ground that can work in the long term so long as humans are as they are physically/neurologically.

Again, don’t confuse incompetence for agenda. No one wants to hear the truth it seems because the truth, carried to the end of the logic chain means that their entire life’s work make be futile, or worse.

Also don’t assume class mobility or any kind of broken meritocracy. The people at the top didn’t work their way up or “earn” it. They are there because of options their ancestors exploited which now no longer exist. Options that may have however only been exploitable by certain groups. As an example, how many currently wealthy families are so because of shrewd use of the depression?

In any case, the issue in this context is how society allocates command authority and scope. Of which religion, finance, and government are subsets. A dollar after all is just an order of strength proportional to the market context. 100$ will buy me a hamburger crafted to my most exacting specifications, but will buy me an oven that might well kill me.

I believe humanity is and always has been ruled, since the invention of culture which permits ruling by definition, by those with only one real skill, the skill to manipulate.

As culture grew and became more peaceful, the emphasis of advantage shifted away from altruism and towards psychopathy. In epochs past this would mean a period of fragmentation during and after which altruism would be revalued.

“Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” ~Edward Osborne Wilson, (The Father of Sociobiology.)

Suppose you asked “How does selfishness confer advantage in groups?” My response is that a cooperative group is defined by denial or at least delay of fulfillment of individual need in favor of group needs.

A good example is planting seeds instead of eating them. If I’m given the town’s supply of grain to plant but instead I make bread for myself I thrive and everyone else starves.

It seems to be an intrinsic facet of the universe that exploitative behavior is inherently profitable in certain contexts. (Which is why capitalism ultimately will need leg braces in the from of a UBI and a wealth cap.)

Think about 3 kids growing up alone in the woods. One kid is selfish, one kid is apathetic, one kid is generous.

As they grow the generous kid will give away more of his food, the selfish kid will steal/take, and the apathetic kid will have his food stolen but also get free food from the generous kid. The selfish kid being better fed will get bigger leading to superiority in those contexts while the other two would wither or remain average.

The selfish kid dominates within the group.

Now imagine another group of 3 but these kids act as a team. Economy of scale grants these kids an effective food supply of 4 or 5 kids so that each of them is larger than the average of the first group. The groups collide. The 3 coordinated kids beat the larger leader of the first group and absorb the other two kids, if not the bested leader as well.

The sharing culture beat the selfish culture, but only when the cultures had the opportunity to clash.

Because game theory:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdk

Because selfishness:

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/evolving-robots-learn-lie-hide-resources-each-other

This story has a happy ending. There is a required fragmentation of the larger group (world wars) that brings value back to altruism by creating groups to compete with each other. However, the context of the fragmentation can, and I believe will, be rendered non-violent in future iterations. (Anti-trust laws and the organized splintering of large organizations foreshadows this truth.) Indeed world wars have already been replaced by what previous generations would have called mere skirmishes. The great powers don’t wage all out body depleting physical war really anymore. In a sense we killed world war when we (humanity) detonated the first atomic bomb. The next great war was a cold one fought on an entirely different battleground. That’s no coincidence.

You’ll notice the USSR experienced its re-fragmentation event, and is now starting to move past us in altruistic areas. The USA and the west generally avoided this breakup by A “winning” the cold war and B strengthening the homogeneity of euro union member states. But now both of them are falling behind in human rights issues and care for the poor because as altruism pays off less and less, psychopathy comes to dominate the allocation command authority more and more. Also notice how each of the major powers dance on the edge of fragmentation and unification. United States, China and it’s many provinces that were once nations, the EU… While the ones that commit to either a hard core fragmentation or a hyper focused unity fail in some critical way to acquire power.

I think in the vast majority of cases where leadership incompetence appears to be the case, the reality is that the leadership placeholder is merely a psychopath and rather than incompetent, simply doesn’t care about the long term issues and is doing whatever is required to stay in power or acquire more power.

The idea that authority comes from ability is a myth created by people in power to keep it by giving workers something to feel superior about as opposed to revolt/reform.

Authority comes from the ability to convince the group that you deserve it. Granted as stated above, it is technologically possible to dominate the entire group, but never for long. Use of a technology on a population, or the delegation of its use to others always means its eventual escape or acquisition by the group at which point the question shifts back to the basic diversity/homogeneity domain.

I’ve spent my life trying to share and refine these truths. But I lack the funding (command authority) to invest in greater command authority. In short, no one gives a damn what I have to say because of who and what I’m not backed by. (No degree, no status, no power, no wealth, no group identity, etc.) And therefor I lack funding entirely.

I’ve studied this my whole life. If you can, trust me. Odds are very much in our favor that we’ll be fine as a group. I’ll see a martian colony in my lifetime. That alone doubles our chances for survival.

It will be the people best able to manage the chaotic mob that rules. The guy that can found a town, not rebuild its water supply. Even if none of the survivors can do anything, a competent public relations man can direct and select people to learn the required skills. (See Lost, Walking dead, any other group vs disaster movie.)

I don’t have the ability to make them feel as they need to before they’ll listen. They must feel it before they can think it. I can only speak to the facts and logic. I gambled and lost :/ I did write a book. I unpublished it because no one listens.

I believe I see what needs seeing, but I’m open to seeing more always. I tried to write two books so far. No dice. And as I grow more and more poor and old, I’m in no position to try again.

But despite this I feel the need to share my findings, despite knowing they will be ignored. The solution, as with avoiding the problems of a command economy, is to let those people themselves determine their usefulness.However, psychopaths do rise to the top precisely because they are unencumbered by ethics and can thus manage people without having to rely on reality for backing. (Kind of like how the most successful currency on earth is based on a lie.)There are three camps that matter here, two, depending on where you place the zero. Camp one, are those who axiomatically believe that life and joy are the ultimate good things. Camp two believes that death and pain are ultimate good things. (Religion, social Darwinism, self serving sadism, etc.) And camp three, the ones who don’t have any ethical axioms at all because they lack ethics entirely. For camp three, ethics are merely something that must be faked where being caught and punished are an issue. (Pol pot for example and other proponents of positive liberty schemes by any means necessary up to and including mass extermination and wholesale torture.)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/

I could go on forever.