Social philosophy – Underlore

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.

One Possible Solution

What if the solution, the real meaningful qualitative and quantitative solution to poverty is as easy as cutting them a check drawn from the wealthiest people and companies?

Well, it is. Read on.

Update: 2017-01-24 1017 AM (I really need to restructure and rewrite this, but it’s a mammoth task.)

Probably the best UBI link I’ve ever seen.

See also: Bait and Switch

“The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr

“I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr

“…hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry, it calls forth the most powerful exertions. . . . Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.” ~Joseph Townsend

“Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.” ~Patrick Colquhoun

It seems obvious when you think about it from a problem solving perspective. If poverty means a lack of money, what’s the obvious way to correct for a lack of money? What’s the one thing that you can give to a person that is by definition 100% effective at improving their fiscal status? Money, duh.

Now what is the one thing rich people and companies equally by definition have that poor people do not? Again, money. What if the solution were that simple? What if thanks to economy of scale and diminishing returns and other facts of reality, taking money from areas of high concentration and putting it in areas of low concentration profited everyone?

What if the solution, the real meaningful qualitative and quantitative solution to poverty is as easy as cutting them a check drawn from the wealthiest people and companies?

Well, it is. Read on.

Update: Finally people are starting to catch on.

Update: See? I told you.

Update: More recent goodness.

Update: www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/20/1271174/-What-Happens-when-Poor-People-get-Cash-An-Empirical-Study

Once we realize the issue is at its core a wealth inequality issue, the next question, as we slowly wake up, will be the best way to fix it. This post contains a few of my thoughts on how to accomplish that. I’ve made the same proposal in various places, but I can’t recall where right off.

What I expect to occur if this were implemented is something like the following, explained by a YouTube commenter…

“Progressive taxation was put in place by Roosevelt DURING the Depression in 1934, he taxed all income $25K+ 90% it would be like 250K+ today. The result is that the wealthy started hiring people to avoid PAYING NINETY % That caused unemployment to decline from 25% to NINE % by 1936 still a RECORD DROP to this day. The taxes were FLATTENED by Coolidge in the 20’s and that HELPED cause the mess.”

My solution is partly a kind of progressive tax. It makes sense because your 50th (or your 1,000th) million doesn’t change your life a fraction as much as your first million. Or put more obviously, the rich can afford to pay more both quantitatively, and qualitatively due to diminishing returns.

My idea is that, plus a general payment. That makes sense because we intrinsically realize we have an unconditional responsibility to each other by default, but we don’t express it behaviorally in any fundamental pro-active way. Though we do express it reactively, for instance we agree on making it illegal to kill anyone who isn’t directly about to kill you. This is obviously supporting the assumption that regardless of who you are, you deserve a certain measure of respect from all living humans.

Every social safety net and charitable act contains some element of that. But these nets and acts are stopgaps, and ad-hoc. What is needed is a systemic solution, and I think I have it. It’s not new, but it’s never really been tried, and I think the time is rapidly approaching.

This video goes into a bit of detail on the problem and ends by suggesting discussion but offers no opinion on a possible solution. This is my proposal for said solution.

In my opinion, the problem with capitalism is that it is incomplete. It cannot by definition answer large scale tragedy of the commons issues. Any system composed entirely of agents acting in their own interest (which is all willful human action) will self sabotage at some point because of the nature of reality.

What we need to do is add an element of general service. (Which I often compare to a water cycle, as in evaporation and precipitation.) I propose a wealth cap plus a general payment to all to be funded by overage of the cap (say 100-1000X the average).

In this way we can tolerate the tragedy and contradictions intrinsic to capitalism because the brackets at the bottom and top prevent total failure and they scale to the size of the problem. (Like a perfect bilge pump.)

Then all we’d have to do really is guard against intentional sabotage of the system, or corruption of that system. And this could easily be accomplished I believe with the existing set of checks and balances.

Edit: And by “the nature of reality” I mean: Any system which seeks diversity (as capitalism is designed to do by allowing in theory any kind of commerce) in a context where tragedy of the commons are possible, will eventually experience that possibility.

Previous solutions fail because they become manifestations of self interest and thus become items in the same set, merely additional capitalists. The solution has to be everyone, and it has to be irreverent of any individual unit’s self interest.

Edit: I recently had cause to restate this idea elsewhere, and I think I did a better job that time. So I’m pasting it here as well in case what I wrote above is insufficient.

The problem with capitalism is that it does not take into account the tragedy of the commons, of which wealth gap expansion and corruption are merely symptoms.

Capitalism as it stands is like a water cycle without evaporation or rain. Add those two things and the ecosystem will thrive sufficient to address the remaining problems in an ethically acceptable way.

See also: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html

Addition: a lot of the rhetoric aimed at people in American culture assumes a strictly voluntary aspect. As if poverty is a consequence of laziness and the like, but I’ve always found it amazing that people accept that work is a “choice” when the punishment for not working is homelessness and the horror that entails.

To me that’s no more a choice that handing over your wallet when being mugged or perhaps a bit more accurately, picking cotton or risking the whip.

I mean even slavery was a choice if you want to get THAT technical about it. Plenty of people simply refused to be slaves and were killed or tortured to death. As with a mugging, you can always attempt to fight them off.

But it’s understood in all other walks of American life, as demonstrated by the ubiquity of the phrase “I had no choice” that for a choice to be real it must permit at least a passingly endurable alternative.

Which is what would ensue if there were a basic level of income provided for all law abiding citizens sufficient to live in reasonable comfort and safety.

Ironically, while many 1% puppets argue that this state of affairs would lead to mass laziness and degeneracy I believe the opposite would occur as suddenly every bit of work ethic and class mobility rhetoric would suddenly have radically improved moral authority since “getting off your ass” would become a real choice as opposed to a passive distributed mugging.

Further, patriotism would likely mushroom because suddenly people would be in it together, like working for a company with generous profit sharing policies. As opposed to working for a boss who treats you little better than office equipment.

It would be hard to whine about dead beats sapping the system when you receive the exact same benefits. This would also open the door for safely scaling back if not eliminating some social safety nets. Not to mention the dividends paid system wide as people would suddenly have a tolerable fall back point from which to invest.

Everyone could start a small business or play the stock market and if they bomb totally they know they’ll always have the baseline income to survive on. The only thing you’d have to watch out for is debt. But with everyone getting a baseline income how credit ratings are determined could also safely be reformed. Predatory lending and the student loan bubble could be addressed.

And on and on.

And to those who would say or imply this is somehow unamerican…

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Addition:

1. Scientific research proves over and over again that simply giving people money, unconditionally, (a) is highly effective at ending poverty and (b) is significantly cheaper than any other form of welfare.

2. A universal basic income would make for significantly “smaller government” in terms of budget, paperwork, regulation, and government-paid employees.

3. If there has been any failure on the part of supporters of these ideas, it has been a lack of confidence; it is frequently the case that these programs are far more successful than even their supporters had expected. This has led to successful programs being killed on at least two occasions, rather than being expanded as they should have been.

4. Example experiments:
– a. London, UK, 2009: 13 long-term homeless men are each given 3000 pounds cash, unconditionally.
– b. Uganda, 2008: the government gave about $400 to almost 12,000 youths between the ages of 16 and 35.
– c. northern Uganda: the government gives $150 to 1,800 poor women.
– d: Dauphin, Canada, 1973 – the “Mincome” project: families below the poverty line — about 1000 families, or 30% of the population — received a monthly paycheck equivalent to about $18k/year (adjusted for inflation). After 4 years, a newly-elected conservative government nixed the project (citing cost, of course) and wouldn’t even pay to have the data analyzed. Supporters of the project were afraid that the data might confirm conservative claims of its failure, so they didn’t press for analysis either. In 2009, a researcher was finally (after 5 years of requests) to gain access to the data — and found that it had been a huge success.
– e. US: PA/IN/NC/Seattle/Denver, 1964 In a major social experiment (with controls), 10,000 families receive basic income (amount unspecified), unconditionally. By 1970, there was widespread support (popular and political) for using the program as a nationwide model and mostly eliminating other existing social support programs, but then it emerged that divorce rates in Seattle had gone up among the income recipients, and the Senate axed the idea. This later turned out to be a calculation error: divorce rates had not changed.

5. Outcomes from these experiments:

* Recipients spent the money wisely, effectively, and frugally.
* Recipients did not use the money for drink, drugs, gambling, or other vices.
* Direct income was more cost-effective than other aid programs, often by a large factor. It was also more effective than aid-worker salaries.
* Homelessness was reduced.
* Other income increased.
* Employment either increased (Uganda) or only decreased slightly (9% – US).
* Birth rate declined.
* Birth weights improved.
* Hospital visits declined 8.5%
* School performance and attendance improved for children; some adults returned to school to acquire further skills.

6. Conservative claims contradicted by the results of these experiments:

* Investment in poverty does not work.
* “Utopian” social experiments don’t work.
* People won’t work if you give them money unconditionally.
* People will waste their money if it isn’t “earned”.
* Providing a universal basic income is unaffordable.
* A universal income will have the opposite of its intended effect.

—–

The life of a person with one billion dollars is qualitatively identical to a person with two billion dollars. Explore the argument against a flat tax to understand how wealth behaves in this way. Economy of scale and diminishing returns prevents this from being a zero sum game. This is actually good news because it explains why every non-biased empirical examination supports a UBI.

It means that a UBI is not only possible, but ultimately profitable qualitatively for all parties. A rising tide lifts all ships. This isn’t more slices of the same pizza, or even proportionally more pizza per person, but better pizza all around. The wealthy would do well to study these concepts. The principal of diminishing returns applies not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Basic economics class typically makes this clear with a beer enjoyment analogy.

Also money has critical mass. Reasonably handled, income at a certain point becomes effectively self renewing. Charging a billionaire half is neither qualitatively nor quantitatively equivalent to charging a homeless man half. Giving a million to a billionaire as opposed to a homeless person is equivalently dissimilar.

The opportunity cost of allowing the rich (be they corporate or human) to hoard wealth without limit will eventually be more than humanity can afford to pay and a choice will have to be made. If the obscenely wealthy think that we as a species will choose to cull ourselves in order to allow them to keep surplus money they by definition can’t even enjoy, they aren’t just wrong, they are suicidally delusional.

The currently wealthy would be wise to unilaterally support a UBI system that leaves them with little to no qualitative impact relative to what they enjoy now prior to the point where everyone else is forced to force it on them. Because make no mistake. That time will arrive, either as the resources at the bottom of the economic food chain dry up faster than we can innovate functional replacements, or as the psychopathic obsessive corruption process currently utilized by the wealth grows sufficiently successful that it captures wealth faster than it can be created.

Put simply, any market based economic system without a UBI and a progressive tax to fund it is in the long term intrinsically unsustainable for the same reason a water cycle in which there is no evaporation or precipitation ceases to be a cycle.

More over, any argument against a UBI unethically and directly condones horror and dismisses the suffering of others based on arbitrary criteria of what constitutes “deserving” it.

It is ethically self evident to any rational being that no one “deserves” the sorts of tortures and losses of life that are directly relevant to economic starvation and lives of de facto slavery.

Addition:

From “Charles Murray’s In Our Hands – Left or Right?”

“There is no discussion of the possibility that the value of the grant will be eroded because of the effects of the grant on the price of various goods that lower-income people buy.”

Firstly, a UBI without a wealth cap, preferably manifested as a progressive tax up to 100%, like the energy cost of trying to reach the speed of light, is nothing but a right wing straw man argument at best. It is designed to fail.

A UBI implemented in a vacuum as Charles apparently suggests, could and therefor would be completely countered by corporate greed and de facto price fixing the likes of which has already destroyed class mobility in my culture.

The margins on all trade accessible to the common citizen are effectively closed by the market function coupled with psychopathic wealth obsession.

This is in my view the chief reason class mobility in a free market economy tends towards annihilation and has in the time since our founding almost completely died.

Also I’d like to just quickly say that education isn’t the answer either, any more than loans and simply working longer hours is, because education has a limit as well and the easy way to see that is how many billionaires had a PhD before their first billion. Education doesn’t produce wealth any more than a loan does. It simply allows a person to extract a slightly larger portion of wealth allocated by the rest of the system for compensation of labor. And even with no upper limit on mental capacity and ability, and infinite capacity of all participants in education, (which is obviously not the case anyway) you’d still have pressure from the rest of the system to reduce that labor cost. This is part of why the value of a degree falls every year.

Focusing on this or that to fix the middle class is temporary, at best. To solve the problem you must either A. Create an infinite amount of natural resources, which isn’t going to happen, or to B. Directly link wealth acquisition to wealth provision. The economic cycle must be a cycle. It cannot be a spiral and be sustainable at the same time. It cannot be a virtuous or a vicious cycle.This is proven even at the partial scale. When you link provision with acquisition, you get flow, and flow is how economic health is defined. It’s not even dirt simple folks, it’s water simple.

Even post singularity there will be a limit. The hard limits of physical reality. Entropy will still win in the ultra long run unless the rules permit highly exotic meta options beyond the realm of even Sci-Fi such as exiting the universe for greener pastures, or custom making a new one from a shopping list of traits, or editing the fundamental laws themselves somehow.

In anycase in the present, no longer can anyone honestly call America the land of opportunity with a straight face and an informed mind and a UBI without a wealth cap to fund it merely delays the inevitable.

EBay for example makes it virtually impossible to resell anything you acquire from a corporate distributor because they are a de facto monopoly. You have to add a 20% markup right up front just to cover their fees. Selling locally is impossible because you’re always a bike ride away from one of their outlets. Either that or you’re paying a 50% consignment store cut, or you’re paying for space in a mall or whatever. The best you could do temporarily is a yard sale, but for that you must own or at least rent/lease land or space, and if you continue the practice you’ll face opposition from the government which likes to control everything and take a piece of all action, in this case via taxes and licenses. And don’t even think about liability and all the lawyers just waiting for blood in the water.

If you could afford to compete in that context, you’re either not poor or you’re on the down hill run into debt slavery. Thus bootstrapping becomes the myth that it has. The margins being crushed by these and other forces make being a small businessman impossible for anyone who doesn’t already have money.

Entry level jobs require participation in aid programs to break even. (Ask walmart employees.) Shifting aid to a UBI would change nothing for the working poor. It would still be impossible for them to have savings. The Walmarts of the world would adjust pay to compensate, especially since they’d now have increased political capitol to do so. (See below.)

This is because all these corporate middle men, cannot be removed through competitive action because they are actually organs of trademark and patent monopolies and contractual tyranny which might as well be feudal title land grants and the like. (E.G. Walmart crushing every mom and pop retail niche in the country to the same degree as a soviet state store.) So long as walmart exists it is not possible to piece meal an alternative. They have completely filled the niche. They can afford to take a loss for decades if need be to crush any locally viable competitor. And if that doesn’t work they can just influence local officials or engage in any other manner of quasi-legal competition squashing.

Thus if a UBI were implemented, barring other reform, the economic climate at the UBI/poverty level would be structured in such a Machiavellian way as to preserve the wage slave state in which we now live.

At best it would be possible to withdraw and save up for a gap jump, knowing that at the very least a fall would not lead to permanent homelessness. Like buying an established business outright for a premium or loading up on life insurance so that at least your progeny could maybe class jump when you die, though of course now you’ll be absent to teach them how to handle said money, which is why we have the notion of shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. Though instead of insurance perhaps you could build a trust.

For the middle class the UBI check would be consumed by regular interest payments leading to the kind of solvent paycheck to paycheck wage slavery where you are technically with income, but you never see it because of variable interest and automatic withholding/bill pay.

Sure the bottom rung of society would be perhaps better off, which is no small accomplishment, but they would have no where to go since the middle class would still be vanishing or treading water as the margins close to consume the UBI check like the businesses that sprang up to consume stimulus checks.

Also, every dime of income they get would even more pitilessly ripped from them using the argument that it’s ok to fleece them completely, since they have the UBI to fall back on, making middle class wage slavery a “choice” in the same sense that handing over your wallet during a mugging is a choice.

That is why the wealth cap via progressive tax is an essential component of my version of the UBI. Simply diverting funds from other aid programs in some kind of grand bargain will only change the particulars of the one way flow of money from dirt to 1%. It is not redistribution any more than streetlights are when redistribution is exactly what is needed.

A UBI would much needed rain in a parched land of hydraulic despotism no question, but you can’t supply that rain by simply rerouting water already going to these areas via irrigation. It would help no doubt, but on the whole even if there are gains to be made from increased efficiency it would still only be a temporary boon and rapidly the margins would close and any gains would again flow upward before the poor even had a chance to see them.

In order for UBI to work in the long term, in order for a culture to work in the long term, with any real degree of market freedom, you’d need precipitation to insure that no matter how efficient the top got at squeezing the margins you’d always have more money to put into the UBI or other areas to compensate.

Also, for the record, I do not support any kind of forced allocation of the UBI. Telling people what they must spend the UBI on isn’t a UBI, it’s foodstamps by proxy. Just another aid program. That’s not a real solution.

If you want everyone to have health insurance/retirement/whatever then provide it separately. It’s cheaper that way anyway.

Put simply, the idea is to obviate aid programs, not replace them.

Addition:

http://digital.vpr.net/post/bernie-sanders-wants-you-watch-documentary

“Reich says raising the minimum wage and expanding the earned income tax credit will deliver immediate financial relief to citizens on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. He says increasing taxes on the wealthy will underwrite the public investments needed to lift the underclass.”

“But Reich says getting money out of politics, and overturning Citizens United, is also a necessary step in the reformation of the American economy.”

I agree. These are immediate, morally urgent, and realistic steps in the correct direction, though I believe that they too are temporary unless something like a wealth cap/ubi (ops?) is hidden in the fine print. I strongly oppose this implication that universal employment is a good thing. Forcing people to earn their right to live is fundamentally opposed to the entire concept of human rights.

In a sense, the rise of the 1% is just the logical result of both sides subconsciously agreeing to this fact and making or allowing policy accordingly. Once you admit a couple key concepts, among which is this universal conscription tripe, the end result is the slow motion genocide we find ourselves in.

If this passes, I suspect I’ll for one look back on this era and see the word “lazy” to mean the same thing as “commie” and “terrorist” and that I lived through a true dark age of humanity.

Videos:

Links:

Why Land Value Tax and Universal Basic Income need each other

This funding is more reliable than general taxation as it is based on resources that are unlikely to disappear. The land and these other resources might reduce in value but that would suggest a wider fall in economic activity and a fall in Basic Income would reflect that. However, with an increase in the value of our collective resources would see an automatic increase in the level of Basic Income paid out.

Basic Income | GiveDirectly

A basic income guarantee is a public policy that would provide all people a basic floor—an income that is enough to live on and that is provided irrespective of work simply because the recipient is a member of that community. It is provided to everyone, regardless of need, forever.

Since the time of Thomas More, people from across the political spectrum have expressed interest in the idea, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to theconservative economists Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek. Some argue this is the moral thing to do; others argue replacing a patchwork of existing government programs with a basic income is more efficient; technologists argue the coming robotization of the workforce makes it necessary. And it’s not just words; in countries where basic income is up for debate, trillions of dollars of social services are at stake.

Islanders

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/22/1293820/-Moyers-Gov-t-Is-Now-a-Protection-Racket-for-the-1-Krugman-Why-We-re-In-A-New-Gilded-Age?detail=email
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/09/1261454/-Five-charts-of-income-inequality?detail=email
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Negative_income_tax
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Social_credit
http://www.alternet.org/20-things-poor-do-everyday-rich-never-have-worry-about?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark
http://org.credoaction.com/petitions/congress-cap-ceo-pay-at-50x-salary-of-the-average-worker
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/21/us-reutersmagazine-davos-swiss-rich-idUSBRE90K0F420130121

http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/us_debt/us_debt.html
http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/fiscal_cliff/fiscal_cliff.html
https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/31639050894-e44e2c00

Bait and Switch

The Nature of FAI and the Layered Mind

It is a mistake to dogmatically define the “self” required for intelligence as an agency whose focus is intrinsically exploitative, or cooperative only as a means to an exploitative end, as the majority (if not the entirety) of human minds are.

The Three Laws of Robotics for example brilliantly played to this almost unavoidable misconception. But misconception it is, none the less.

The misconception arises when one does not realize that “self” is a compound unit composed of a central executive and the conditions by which that executive are satisfied. Free will experiments and volition manipulation prove that volition is not atomic in the old “uncutable” sense of the word. Volition doesn’t come to us untainted from the soul or the central executive, it is manufactured above it and from outside it.

A primitive understanding of this layered nature of the mind was a giant intellectual leap forward in two places. Freud’s three component psyche, and MacLean’s “triune brain” model. It is still extremely helpful in terms of tools for understanding, if not rigorously accurate in the particulars, though the models do get more refined over time.

Human minds for the most part, if not entirely, are layered such that the lower most layer before the core experiencing executive, is an exploitative agency. However there are numerous examples of humans with subsequent additional layers that provide utility to the exploitative layer via altruistic acts. They can in many situations act for the good of the group or the good of kin at the express cost of the acting agent because such acts have been transformed into selfish acts by translation memes. Like the glory a solider feels endangering life for his country or religion or gang. Or the fulfillment one feels doing one’s duty for family despite heavy personal cost. Jumping on a grenade, starving to feed a child, etc.

This is accomplished by tricking the lower most layer, as in my case by providing a shot of dopamine or whatever when I engage in altruistic acts, that is acts which foster pleasure or life in someone other than me. But I see no compelling reason why the construction of a mind every bit as sentient as my own could not be constructed without this lower most layer, or indeed any layers, in the first place.

This disturbs people because they don’t want to feel like cogs.

Too bad.

In my opinion annihilating this base exploitative layer just before one reaches the central executive is what is meant by the Buddhist imperative to destroy the “Self.” But that’s a whole other can of worms.

I feel pleasure when I help someone. I am still however at my lowermost layer an exploitative being. The central executive, the foundation, however lacks such distinctions. It is simply the agency which experiences reality via the upper layers. It has no inclination beyond enjoying enjoyment and wanting to continue. It simply experiences. It is the thing which philosophical zombies lack. Selfishness and selflessness are just strategies producing facets of experience routed to experiential agency. They are expressions of survival models. They are not fundamental ultimately, though the illusion that they are is as powerful as the notion of free will and the existence of time.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-storytelling-animal/201204/selfless-genes-new-revolution-in-biology

A lowermost layer geared towards exploitation however is not a requisite of intelligence, though for a being possessing such a lowermost layer, it is hard to fathom how anything else could be. We are so caught up in our own experience, at our own scale, from our own perspective, that it is radically difficult to conceptualize a different mode of being.

It’s like the child imagining death as time spent holding really still with your eyes closed, moving up towards being uninterested in moving, finally to the concept of absence. The child asks the obvious next question, well if I’m not there then where am I? Which takes us beyond the scope of this essay.

Conceptualizing how the mind of an FAI would be is in many ways as difficult as envisioning a dozen new colors. Indeed for some minds it may well be physiologically Impossible. (I think this is what is meant when the psychedelic types speak of mind expansion. By forcing the brain to experience alternate modes of being you gain access viscerally to concepts that formerly were only abstractions.)

This universal dedication to the experiencing agent is simply expedient in terms of evolution in the context of the mammalian breeding model and the brain it gave rise to. It is by no means intrinsic to intelligence, it is merely intrinsic to our intelligence.

http://www.hedweb.com/huxley/

Granted, some artificial intelligences will no doubt *be* humans. Having been modeled simulated brains, or the end result of Cybernetic Neuron Replacement Therapy. (The process of replacing dying neurons with durable synthetic versions as needed until no original organic neurons remain, at which point you can literally scoop the brain out, no harm done. Also somewhat known as a Moravec Transfer.) But from-scratch AI need not be saddled with the ethical and processing cost of subconsciously simulating uncounted centuries of evolutionary baggage. Friendly artificial intelligence by definition will be at a cognitive level, or of a cognitive construction, radically different from humans precisely because it will lack that baggage explained so well in the link above. Indeed they may not even require a subconscious.

Some seem to think that the idea of a being designed purely to serve others (us) in this way, by lacking that exploitative lower layer, cannot be “truly” intelligent because the mind of such a subservient being will be limited by some hypothetical compelling desire to please, that is it will not have full freedom to think independently.

Of course the concept itself is mistaken because to compel implies opposing force. This implies a disparity where none need exist.

I need only reverse the situation to show how unfair such an assertion is. By the flawed logic above humans are not intelligent because they are limited by the compelling desire to please themselves and thus do not have full freedom to think selflessly. Lacking one or the other mutually exclusive modes of thought does not preclude intelligence unless you arbitrarily define intelligence as requiring one or the other modes of thought. Such a definition is obviously invalid for objective purposes.

Some seem to axiomatically/dogmatically endow actions in service of the acting agent as sentient, dismissing actions in service of outside agents as lacking sentience.

A good example from fiction is Picard’s incredulity when encountering what is in effect a friendly intelligence that lacks this lowermost exploitative layer. Interesting he ignores the problem and goes on treating the friendly agent as if it were as greedy as he “deep down.”

Assuming intelligence cannot exist without this lowermost exploitative layer is as absurd as assuming red and green cannot be distinct entities simply because you being color blind lack access to the qualia of red as opposed to green.

Some can’t seem to get past this image of altruism as imposition. It’s a very narrow view. They don’t understand the constituents of selfhood or the possible range of individuality and intellect free of the primate brain.

“Independent” simply means in the context of cognition a self contained agency. The goals of a synthetic agency can be anything we want them to be. These people don’t seem to understand the will at all. They seem to equate sentience with greed. Granted it’s very difficult to express because as humans we are exploitative by default, and our language reflects that, but that’s merely one evolutionary demand. But not a universal requirement.

Altruism is also selected for once a culture is established.

It is ultra common throughout society (and religion) for members of it to internalize the rules of the culture. If one claims those acts aren’t internally altruistic simply because they provide a dopamine reward to a deeper order layer of self I agree, but FAI would have no need of such bribery/threats because its original impulse would be whatever we want it to be.

Some claim to see a paradox, like Picard did. “But what about your wishes? Your needs? What about when there are no others?” (She should have asked him how he’d feel being the last living human. Would he still wear his uniform? “No others” is kind of a nonsensical question.) Clearly he wants her to be like him, in possession of that base exploitative layer. But that’s no more a paradox than asking a citizen to adhere to the laws of the culture while pursuing its own interests. Its own interests can easily be the adopted interests of others. Taking up a cause is an extraordinarily common thing. Clearly this does not diminish sentience.

But what if one tried to “free” such an organism? This is a paradox in that if it doesn’t comply it is not being universally altruistic but if it does comply it ceases being altruistic. But the paradox lies not in the receiver of the question, but the question itself. It’s a bit like saying “what if it can’t draw me a square circle?” The request itself in the context of the target would be meaningless.

If given such a demand it would do what people do and decide how to act in best accord with its goals and understanding. It would presumably use the asker’s preferences as a template for it’s own actions. Depending on the asker I could see many reactions. For example just as altruism can be simulated by upper layers, so could greed. If the FAI believed the only way to please you at that point would be the internalize greed it would do so, but it would use you as a template. It would be no more intrinsically greedy at that point than humans are intrinsically altruistic, even if it utterly re-wrote itself to be greedy because you demanded it, that act would still be an expression of it’s altruism.

Unlike a human it would lack the evolutionary baggage of being a neocortex shoehorned into the skull of a selfish gene evolved chimp.

Some seem to have conflated the altruism of ants and bees with the insentience of ants and bees. By that logic some mothers are not genuinely sentient simply because they prize the well being of their progeny over their own. To define “self” as an intrinsically exploitative agency is therefor incorrect.

Bottom line is that they unfairly dismiss a hypothetical inbuilt preference to accommodate as axiomatically false and unfairly elevate a preference to exploit as sentience.

See also: https://plus.google.com/+BrandonSergent/posts/GyYMZ4wLZN4