Well said. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that I really really don’t trust most governments, and especially not the US government to implement this tech sanely. There are too many short sighted, or flat out unjust laws on the books.
To me, a canary in the coal mine is drug laws. A free society does not outlaw them, at most it limits availability and creates strong incentives to stop using them (incentives like free rehab and a support network, mandatory risk education, etc, not incentives like “we’ll imprison you for having this drug”).
I don’t either. Safety is merely the excuse for grapping more power.
I have to disagree with the drug law example. All kinds of hedonistic behaviour will likely be legal in the future, why wouldn’t it be? The old pressure against things like drugs was downstream of religious morality. That doesn’t exist anymore. The modern morality is that you’re not allowed to discriminate against any groups which hold power. What the media tells you is that you’re not allowed to discriminate against the powerless, but this cannot possibly be true. If a group had no power, then trivially, it would be socially acceptable to harm them. If it’s a social taboo to harm you, then that’s a type of power.
All super-stimuli and wire-heading you can think of will become legal, and there will only be a pushback if it gets so bad that it starts literally giving people brain damage (we have yet to see just how bad the consequences of giving babies ipads are). If these things are not legalized, people won’t be able to vent their frustrations, and they will instead start fighting back.
The set of things which will become, and are becoming illegal, includes anything which makes you unpreditable, illegible, hard to control, or able to influence people around you in a way that the public consensus does not approve of. I find that freedom of speech is a much stronger canary. Of course, they will argue that it still exists, by changing the definition of it over time “it only applies to the government”, “hate speech is excluded”, “misinformation is excluded”, “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences”, and other poor arguments.
A thing to keep an eye out for is your ownership over things. It will all turn into subscription services, so that your access can be revoked at any time (for instance, if you oppose somebody in power or engage in behaviour which a company doesn’t like)
“If it’s a social taboo to harm you, then that’s a type of power.”—that thrid to last word is crucial. Throughout that whole paragraph you’re treating power as a binary which a group either has or doesn’t have and then using that simplification to argue that the power (of any kind) held by one group is equivalent to the power (of any kind) held by another group. Just because a group has some non-zero power afforded to them by a social taboo doesn’t mean that other groups don’t have far more power over them through any number of other means.
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.
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.
Well said. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that I really really don’t trust most governments, and especially not the US government to implement this tech sanely. There are too many short sighted, or flat out unjust laws on the books.
To me, a canary in the coal mine is drug laws. A free society does not outlaw them, at most it limits availability and creates strong incentives to stop using them (incentives like free rehab and a support network, mandatory risk education, etc, not incentives like “we’ll imprison you for having this drug”).
I don’t either. Safety is merely the excuse for grapping more power.
I have to disagree with the drug law example. All kinds of hedonistic behaviour will likely be legal in the future, why wouldn’t it be? The old pressure against things like drugs was downstream of religious morality. That doesn’t exist anymore. The modern morality is that you’re not allowed to discriminate against any groups which hold power. What the media tells you is that you’re not allowed to discriminate against the powerless, but this cannot possibly be true. If a group had no power, then trivially, it would be socially acceptable to harm them. If it’s a social taboo to harm you, then that’s a type of power.
All super-stimuli and wire-heading you can think of will become legal, and there will only be a pushback if it gets so bad that it starts literally giving people brain damage (we have yet to see just how bad the consequences of giving babies ipads are). If these things are not legalized, people won’t be able to vent their frustrations, and they will instead start fighting back.
The set of things which will become, and are becoming illegal, includes anything which makes you unpreditable, illegible, hard to control, or able to influence people around you in a way that the public consensus does not approve of. I find that freedom of speech is a much stronger canary. Of course, they will argue that it still exists, by changing the definition of it over time “it only applies to the government”, “hate speech is excluded”, “misinformation is excluded”, “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences”, and other poor arguments.
A thing to keep an eye out for is your ownership over things. It will all turn into subscription services, so that your access can be revoked at any time (for instance, if you oppose somebody in power or engage in behaviour which a company doesn’t like)
“If it’s a social taboo to harm you, then that’s a type of power.”—that thrid to last word is crucial. Throughout that whole paragraph you’re treating power as a binary which a group either has or doesn’t have and then using that simplification to argue that the power (of any kind) held by one group is equivalent to the power (of any kind) held by another group. Just because a group has some non-zero power afforded to them by a social taboo doesn’t mean that other groups don’t have far more power over them through any number of other means.
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.
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.