Power probably ought to be considered multi-dimensional, but don’t let that be an excuse against updating your intuition. Some people think that feminism is the most popular in countries where women are oppressed, but the relationship is the exact opposite. In countries where women are the most oppressed, feminism doesn’t succeed as a movement, and in countries where women hold a lot of power, it ends up being very popular. There’s largely no victims of injustice in society who are recognized as such, for those who are recognized as victims already enjoy protection through that recognition. The fact that this is not well known is also a testament to how power allows you to decide what’s true.
In any case, the least misleading definition I can give you is “the most powerful are those who win”, and a good proxy is “those who hold power over you are those you’re not allowed to insult”.
Do you not think this sort of social power is the most important? I find that physical power isn’t worth much in the modern world, and that intellectual power can only protect you from individuals. Scott Alexander is smart, but that didn’t save Slate Star Codex. He had to publicly defend his innocence and assure people that he held the same political views as the general public. Despite the right-wing being about as popular as the left (necessarily true since Trump won the election), the social power between being associated with one over the other was enough to terrify Scott. I think it would have gone even worse for him if he didn’t have such standard values and opinions, and if he didn’t have social power himself (famous people speaking out for him and a large count of followers).
Do you not think this sort of social power is the most important?
I kind of think the power to actually kill people—legally via state imposition, or illegally, both made far easier with money, etc. matters far more. We’re just not used to worrying about being subject to that power. Correctly, for most of us.
But the implication of “we don’t need to worry about a type of power others won’t / can’t apply” is that excess use of social power is also largely irrelevant for those who don’t fear it. And it’s largely relevant to more socially powerful people—most humans don’t ever need to worry about the NY Times “exposing” them.
What would you categorize such power as? I think it’s in-between social power and good old crime. But the former will be much more terrifying in the future (it’s only slightly scary now), especially for intellectuals who do more than merely read popular research and regurgitate it to less intelligent people. If a truth seeking person never goes outside the overton window, then they’re a fraud.
Manycalled for me to be kicked out of society a few years ago because I refused to take the Covid vaccine, as it wouldn’t prevent me from getting infected (despite the media claiming otherwise), because Fauci kept moving the goalpost on the herd immunity threshold (never getting it right), and because I knew it wasn’t 100% safe.
Kicking people out of society (which effectively kills them) will be possible soon. Maybe “bad people” (non-conformists and those who still use ‘the r-word’) like myself are the first to go, but once it’s in place it will be easy for whoever is in power to use it on whoever is not.
You might have noticed that some people can get fired for what they do or say in their private life, and that you often don’t need to break the rules on a platform to get banned from it, breaking rules off-platform is sufficient. You can even be punished if the people you associate with are unpopular. My point is that norms are changing towards everything getting tied together. Imagine criticizing the government, and then finding that your car won’t start. And that you can’t access your bank account. And that you can’t even leave for another country because you’re on the no-fly list. Even worse, you’re also banned from your local supermarket so you can’t buy food. Where you previously had X things that you could lose access to, with one misstep costing you access to exactly one place, you now have X places in which you can lose access to everything all at once. The merging of different contexts is causing problems like context collapse. What’s acceptable to say traditionally depends on the local environment, but if what you’ve said leaks to another environment, you might be attacked for it (especially if it’s taken out of context maliciously). Everyone breaks the law, but we can still be flexibleabout it locally, being judged only in that local context at that time. This is changing, and it will get worse with the death of hidden information and the forced legibilization of society.
I wouldn’t say social power irrelevant to most. If you Google “Young people don’t dance” you’ll find that cringe culture (fear of being judged) is deemed to be a main cause. Irony and ironic humor is also on the rise (together with Bathos) and that’s actually a defense mechanism against judgement.
I would like to at least say that, although the vaccine was less than perfectly safe, not taking it was (and is) bad risk management: given the likelihood of eventual infection, it’s safer overall to get a vaccine than to risk a COVID infection in an unvaccinated state. And being vaccinated probably at least reduced the amount that an infected person would spread the virus. (Fauci’s “less than honest” communication was still both terrible and morally wrong.)
If you did catch the virus while unvaccinated, though, you’re in roughly the same position as people who got one dose of vaccine anyway.
One also needs to “move fast and break things” when discussing ideas if they want to learn with any efficiency. It’s a waste of both mine and others time to write “I think” and “in my opinion” in front of every statement. Besides, this place claims to be truth-seeking.
I present too many ideas at once, but I’m not exactly wrong. I think people dislike me because I seem to have different values and didn’t use examples which resonated with them (like death of privacy making it easier for ICE to deport people), but I’m getting the disagree downvotes.
To put it more mathematically and thus neutrally, the attack/defence asymmetry is growing, changing the payoff matrix in a undesirable way. To explain how social tyranny is tied to government tyranny, China’s social credit system serves for a good example and aligns with my arguments.
Can you provide more information as to what the problem is? This response only seems to prove my point, but I may actually be overlooking something important.
I’m not talking about a lack of hedging. Being too busy to think through and clearly present your thoughts wastes the time of others. And not following community norms isn’t bravery, nor is your lack of tact.
Frontpage comment guidelines:
Aim to explain, not persuade
Try to offer concrete models and predictions
If you disagree, try getting curious about what your partner is thinking
Don’t be afraid to say ‘oops’ and change your mind
It’s quite clear to me, I even added links to be transparent about the “background knowledge” I was refering to. Of course, it will be unclear to somebody unfamiliar, but that’s how it’s meant to be. There’s conversations on LW that I can’t engage because I lack familiarity, and explaining something in a way that even children can understand requires about 10-15 times more text.
I’m following those community norms. I explain myself, make predictions about the future, offer concrete models (physical, intellectual and social power as categories), and asked what category he’d put murder in. The overton window statement is an unpleasant truth at worst, but this is a website where we frequently discuss the end of humanity.
It wasn’t snark to call myself a non-conformist, I was essentially saying “even if my examples are all about people getting punished in ways that you agree with, the mechanics behind are neutral and may be used against you all the same”. I could just have quoted that poem “First they came for the X, but I did not speak up, for I was not an X” but that has been done to death. I have to disagree both that I lack tact, and that the topics warrants it. And a topic being taboo only results in public opinion being stuck in the stone age in regards to their understanding of it anyway (like mental health in the early 1900s).
When I get a response which is entirely incompatible with my own message, like the one by David above, I tend to guess at what they mean, and to present every conflict between our models, and this is probably a bad habit. Even here, I have to guess which parts of my messages people might have a problem with
I think there’s value in phrasing some statements as “I think X” instead of just “X” because “I think X”, in practice, is a less confident assertion that doesn’t imply “and I expect you to also believe X” nearly as strongly. 🤷♂️
Power probably ought to be considered multi-dimensional, but don’t let that be an excuse against updating your intuition. Some people think that feminism is the most popular in countries where women are oppressed, but the relationship is the exact opposite. In countries where women are the most oppressed, feminism doesn’t succeed as a movement, and in countries where women hold a lot of power, it ends up being very popular. There’s largely no victims of injustice in society who are recognized as such, for those who are recognized as victims already enjoy protection through that recognition. The fact that this is not well known is also a testament to how power allows you to decide what’s true.
In any case, the least misleading definition I can give you is “the most powerful are those who win”, and a good proxy is “those who hold power over you are those you’re not allowed to insult”.
Do you not think this sort of social power is the most important? I find that physical power isn’t worth much in the modern world, and that intellectual power can only protect you from individuals. Scott Alexander is smart, but that didn’t save Slate Star Codex. He had to publicly defend his innocence and assure people that he held the same political views as the general public. Despite the right-wing being about as popular as the left (necessarily true since Trump won the election), the social power between being associated with one over the other was enough to terrify Scott. I think it would have gone even worse for him if he didn’t have such standard values and opinions, and if he didn’t have social power himself (famous people speaking out for him and a large count of followers).
I kind of think the power to actually kill people—legally via state imposition, or illegally, both made far easier with money, etc. matters far more. We’re just not used to worrying about being subject to that power. Correctly, for most of us.
But the implication of “we don’t need to worry about a type of power others won’t / can’t apply” is that excess use of social power is also largely irrelevant for those who don’t fear it. And it’s largely relevant to more socially powerful people—most humans don’t ever need to worry about the NY Times “exposing” them.
What would you categorize such power as? I think it’s in-between social power and good old crime. But the former will be much more terrifying in the future (it’s only slightly scary now), especially for intellectuals who do more than merely read popular research and regurgitate it to less intelligent people. If a truth seeking person never goes outside the overton window, then they’re a fraud.
Many called for me to be kicked out of society a few years ago because I refused to take the Covid vaccine, as it wouldn’t prevent me from getting infected (despite the media claiming otherwise), because Fauci kept moving the goalpost on the herd immunity threshold (never getting it right), and because I knew it wasn’t 100% safe.
Kicking people out of society (which effectively kills them) will be possible soon. Maybe “bad people” (non-conformists and those who still use ‘the r-word’) like myself are the first to go, but once it’s in place it will be easy for whoever is in power to use it on whoever is not.
You might have noticed that some people can get fired for what they do or say in their private life, and that you often don’t need to break the rules on a platform to get banned from it, breaking rules off-platform is sufficient. You can even be punished if the people you associate with are unpopular. My point is that norms are changing towards everything getting tied together. Imagine criticizing the government, and then finding that your car won’t start. And that you can’t access your bank account. And that you can’t even leave for another country because you’re on the no-fly list. Even worse, you’re also banned from your local supermarket so you can’t buy food. Where you previously had X things that you could lose access to, with one misstep costing you access to exactly one place, you now have X places in which you can lose access to everything all at once. The merging of different contexts is causing problems like context collapse. What’s acceptable to say traditionally depends on the local environment, but if what you’ve said leaks to another environment, you might be attacked for it (especially if it’s taken out of context maliciously). Everyone breaks the law, but we can still be flexible about it locally, being judged only in that local context at that time. This is changing, and it will get worse with the death of hidden information and the forced legibilization of society.
I wouldn’t say social power irrelevant to most. If you Google “Young people don’t dance” you’ll find that cringe culture (fear of being judged) is deemed to be a main cause. Irony and ironic humor is also on the rise (together with Bathos) and that’s actually a defense mechanism against judgement.
I would like to at least say that, although the vaccine was less than perfectly safe, not taking it was (and is) bad risk management: given the likelihood of eventual infection, it’s safer overall to get a vaccine than to risk a COVID infection in an unvaccinated state. And being vaccinated probably at least reduced the amount that an infected person would spread the virus. (Fauci’s “less than honest” communication was still both terrible and morally wrong.)
If you did catch the virus while unvaccinated, though, you’re in roughly the same position as people who got one dose of vaccine anyway.
Your profile says “My writing is likely provocative because I want my ideas to be challenged.”
I’m sure there are places that would work for you, and you should probably go to those places, instead of here.
One also needs to “move fast and break things” when discussing ideas if they want to learn with any efficiency. It’s a waste of both mine and others time to write “I think” and “in my opinion” in front of every statement. Besides, this place claims to be truth-seeking.
I present too many ideas at once, but I’m not exactly wrong. I think people dislike me because I seem to have different values and didn’t use examples which resonated with them (like death of privacy making it easier for ICE to deport people), but I’m getting the disagree downvotes.
To put it more mathematically and thus neutrally, the attack/defence asymmetry is growing, changing the payoff matrix in a undesirable way. To explain how social tyranny is tied to government tyranny, China’s social credit system serves for a good example and aligns with my arguments.
Can you provide more information as to what the problem is? This response only seems to prove my point, but I may actually be overlooking something important.
I’m not talking about a lack of hedging. Being too busy to think through and clearly present your thoughts wastes the time of others. And not following community norms isn’t bravery, nor is your lack of tact.
Frontpage comment guidelines:
Aim to explain, not persuade
Try to offer concrete models and predictions
If you disagree, try getting curious about what your partner is thinking
Don’t be afraid to say ‘oops’ and change your mind
It’s quite clear to me, I even added links to be transparent about the “background knowledge” I was refering to. Of course, it will be unclear to somebody unfamiliar, but that’s how it’s meant to be. There’s conversations on LW that I can’t engage because I lack familiarity, and explaining something in a way that even children can understand requires about 10-15 times more text.
I’m following those community norms. I explain myself, make predictions about the future, offer concrete models (physical, intellectual and social power as categories), and asked what category he’d put murder in. The overton window statement is an unpleasant truth at worst, but this is a website where we frequently discuss the end of humanity.
It wasn’t snark to call myself a non-conformist, I was essentially saying “even if my examples are all about people getting punished in ways that you agree with, the mechanics behind are neutral and may be used against you all the same”. I could just have quoted that poem “First they came for the X, but I did not speak up, for I was not an X” but that has been done to death. I have to disagree both that I lack tact, and that the topics warrants it. And a topic being taboo only results in public opinion being stuck in the stone age in regards to their understanding of it anyway (like mental health in the early 1900s).
When I get a response which is entirely incompatible with my own message, like the one by David above, I tend to guess at what they mean, and to present every conflict between our models, and this is probably a bad habit. Even here, I have to guess which parts of my messages people might have a problem with
I think there’s value in phrasing some statements as “I think X” instead of just “X” because “I think X”, in practice, is a less confident assertion that doesn’t imply “and I expect you to also believe X” nearly as strongly. 🤷♂️