Hiding in a shrubbery
hamnox
Karma: 1,153
this is a problem with you rather than a problem with ads
Oh, I absolutely agree that this is a problem with me rather than with ads. But the problem with me is that my brain is human. I can’t totally fix the exploits in the human brain that ads target.
Given that this is a society of humans, ads seem contraindicated. I do try to avoid them, but ads are going out of my way to expose themselves to me in a way sodas mostly do not (except insofar as they are advertised).
Third funding model: You pay with contributed labor value
Consider how amazon turk employs people to work on small problems for small payments.
Google maps engages users to answer questions and write reviews for places they have been, for free. What if instead, occasional contributions to updating the map was the price for using it?
What if more online resources worked on a torrent-ish model where those accessing it contribute to hosting it for others? Wouldn’t that be grand?
Correct. Though the latter depends on what someone means by “never be fixed”; trauma is always going to leave a mark but it does not have to remain debilitating nor defining.
We were forced to ‘play outside’ for hours most days and even longer on weekends. I was not even allowed to bring a book outside though sometimes I would hide them outside at night and find them the next day.
Oh stars, this gives me flashbacks. Being forced outside was the worst.
Amazingly my mom made fun of her children for being weirdos.
My mom was also a bigger bully than I ever encountered at school or in the neighborhood, figuratively and literally. It looms even larger in my head, because I had to give a damn about what the person in charge of my life thought.
ps. fiskkit review, it’s a thing I’m trying out.
Faerie Ring meet #2: At Gather.Town
also signing Dath Illan’s nonverbal language, because why would you only make use of the visual modality when you happen to have access to a pen and writing surface?
Intuitive and non-intuitive findings of systems theory, like what adding a second queue does or increasing the variability of a flow rate or changing the size of a buffer.
Because rationality is not just winning! Its about winning systematically rather than by fluke, about narrowing the diff between reality and your model of it such that the forecasted wins you aim for correspond to actual wins.
Overall agreed that metacognitive is better branding. I like rationality as in-community jargon for the thing that cognition should aim for.
fwiw I don’t think rationality has much connotation of agency, except for what it’s achieved by dint of association with us.
I don’t expect these to go longer than 1.5 hours, though it’s possible people want to hang out on the line.
I do kind of see it as being the responsible action, I just do not think this is the same thing as it being the right or even reasonable action.
It’s trying to be “responsible” despite not actually having the kind of control over the situation that makes things your responsibility.
Decentralized Networks Thoughts
Scuttlebutt, IPFS, and DatNetworking can be demonstrated with people as an anology, and it usually works except for how the speeds are magnitudes off and people naturally handle errors more gracefully.
And the way we currently structure internet applications is analogous to, like, a command economy. All the locus of decision exists in one spot, in a server. It may delegate, but it doesn’t ever truly *co*-ordinate. And there’s no way that’s computationally efficient. The internet allows to access a distant computer with our own, and that’s *all* we’re doing most of the time. It’s exactly like having a whole country of self-interested intelligences close to their individual problems, and trying to make a handful of government officials solve it instead. (And remember: computers handle their errors even less gracefully than people do.) We aren’t using most of the compute we have at our fingers!
So that’s my focus in decentralized technology. Instead of central coordinators, make swarms of individually capable nodes that can interoperate. Put the controls where they can react meaningfully to local conditions.
An example of this is moderation. Social media moderation teams have to deal with SO much shit, all the concentrated filth in the world lands on their head. They can barely keep up. And we *still* need to have a individual blocking & mute tools, because they can’t hope to react appropriately to local need.
Contrast this to the moderation models for scuttlebutt and cabal chat
TBC
You could try to start your own ring, there’s templates for it on that page, or I could put you down to invite in for the second meeting. (provided we’re not full up then)
Faerie Ring: A Small Gather.Town Call
Faerie Rings
This is what I wanted Jester’s Court to be. An iterated kickstarter for trust and competence, of self and of others.
Didn’t have words for it.
anatomy of a summer solstice talk. comments?
anatomy of a solstice talk- Dig your roots deep, and spread your leaves wide
- We sometimes associate summer with passion, with fire and flash. As we celebrate today, I say lean into this. Let’s have fun. Let’s have passionate joy. Let’s dive head-first into the gut sense of living at its best. Not to stoke burning hot coals of determination, just to enjoy it. Take in the warmth and light for its own sake. Life is not just abstractly good and important, it’s viscerally so.
Pretty good theme. Have fun, be wild. I could end my speech there.
Instead, I’ll ask you to think about a tree. A tree with roots going deep into the ground, and leaves spread out to catch as much sun as it can. Hold that tree in mind, I’m gonna speak more about that in a moment.
The other solstice, we often reference the dream of leaving the earth and solar system under our own power. That’s an important goal. It’s not, however, immediately achievable. We are, for now, pretty tied to pale blue dot we were born on. And when we leave, we will take much of it with us. Much of it intentionally, because we’re sentimental like that, but also it will come in the marks of *the kind of beings it has made us*.
I want summer to be a time that we think about the environment that we live in, how it shapes us and how we shape it. We ought to know the soil we grow in, and know it well. A general purpose rationality must produce local knowledge, specialized to the time and space and life you are living. We must dig our roots deep, and spread our leaves wide.
We talk a lot about the general theory of rational agents. It informs a lot about how to learn true things and make good choices. But we are not the general example of an agent. Our minds did not spring up from first principals. Evolutionary history, cultural memetics, and an academic tradition also inform the way you learn true things and make good choices. That which is at our roots can affect what the truth and good choices even are, thousands of years later, whether you are aware of them or not.
The tree is a metaphor. There are grand forces of optimization that have existed before you, and will exist after you. Seek them out. Use what they can give you. Dig your roots deep.
And spread your leaves wide. Catch every ray of sunlight and harness it. Drink in the present moment, and turn it into something awesome. Plants are often portrayed as passive; that’s incorrect. They move. Their movement is more efficient, and slower, but they move a great deal to catch the sun. In the same way, you don’t have to chase after every opportunity. You can position yourself well and take in the chances that come your way. Have patience, not passivity. and spread your leaves wide.
Now for the audience participation bit.
- I’ll give you five minutes to think. What’s something you know about the environments that you live in, or that shaped you? Your city. your ecosystem. Your history. Your economy. Your community. Just write down some facts, or some questions. After those five minutes, I’ll take contributions from the audience. With these, I want to paint a collective picture of where we are rooted, and how deeply. This is the first time I’m trying this, so.
- As an example. California is more environmentally conscientious than most US state governemnts. We have a few extra restrictions on cars and plastics. Native tribes maintained the forests around here with regular burns, and I want to know if they maintained the forests in other ways or if they still do in some areas. There’s a lot of resentment towards people moving in for jobs who don’t really have roots or interests in the people they’re displacing, and the rationalist community is a small part of that.
- If you want to share but don’t want to speak, write down what you want to say and hand it to someone. It can keep getting passed along until it hits a person willing to read it aloud. It can be anonymous this way, or you can write your name.
- TIME
- I encourage giving silent responses in ASL or gesture. False. True. Yes. No.
- READ
- Another five minutes, let’s talk about opportunities. What serendipitous chance might you hope to catch, today? What would you be prepared to act on if it happened?
- TIME
- READ
Have you considered the possibility that people do not list first-order effects to individuals because huge swaths of the political establishment do not actually care about people they don’t know?
The water they swim, the air they breathe: Bringing up how something affects the outgroup’s feefees is not “obvious” or “direct”, it’s bringing up Nth-order civil breakdown effects in the most vague and indirect way possible, with figuring out all the critical details left as an exercise for the listener.
We live in a society; aka we have a tenuous contract to be copacetic and trade resources with others. They give the smallest amount of fucks about the outgroup’s happiness because an unhappy outgroup may have second-order effects in breaking down civil society with associated third-order effects on them and theirs.
I agree, but I think what you are doing is a fairly noncentral example of “working in advertising”. You are helping to add good constraints on a probably-bad process.