Jan 29·edited Jan 29Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
The only thing keeping us chugging away as water-filled LLMs is societal pressure, which unlike conventional LLMs, we are free to reject (likely self-destructively) at any time.
Yeah I was on that in 2018 back on Medium. The thing that torques me off on the front end is our hubris for thinking that we run the planet, when we're obviously 2nd or 3rd in charge.
1. Your obvious/automatic ticket to SHOT Show images most of us very jealous. I got to go several decades ago, when it was in Atlanta, by serving as an unpaid representative of a small gun shop in Kansas where my brother-in-law worked part time. 😀
2. Conversation scripts are always boring because they never move the needle. Just part of the social convention.
Even when you do get somewhere that would move the needle, most people bail because they don't want their needle moved. If their needle moves they have to re-learn all new scripts.
Apologies to all for not catching the iPad autocorrect. For those of you of the old school, please make a pen and ink correction of the text to read "SHOT Show makes most of us". <shakes head>
> "and cannot even understand why people believe differently than them because they don’t have a shared language."
Ah, yes. I have this problem with anarcho-syndicalists. I've actually *tried* to understand how they think anything could possibly work out with their philosophy in the forefront, and I can't even manage to get past the part where we're using the same sequences of phonemes but they clearly have very different referents for us.
Per "Lessons" at the end, it sounds like HWFO has reached the point where it has the same barrier to entry or learning curve as LessWrong/Rationality does with "read The Sequences".
For better or for worse, establishing shortcuts for absorbing the content would seem to open the ideas to abuse or misapplication.
I'm confused about your comments wrt to the libertarian side of things? I have read most (if not all) of what you have posted in the last two years, and you are usually spot on. I'm just confused how you come to the conclusion user fees are less useful than taxation? I'm willing to learn and understand. This isn't a "script" for me. I just personally abhor non-voluntary takings. Maybe I'm missing something? Also if you aren't "libertarian"/independent, as I always assumed, what are you? Not that you have to answer.
I've moved from "libertarian" to "defending my property and children with firearms and eating popcorn while shit explodes." I'm allergic to all ideologies at this point, including libertarianism. It just so happens that libertarians still map closer to "allergic to ideologies" than most other ideologies do.
You'll notice that I'm a pretty successful gun author and have never mentioned the word "rights" once, as far as I can remember.
To your direct question, user fees could be more useful than taxation for many applications, but are more difficult to collect from individuals in the moment of suffering a disaster, so extracting them from a shared pool makes sense. The difference between optional and mandatory shared pools (insurance and taxation) bleeds together depending on application.
I managed to avoid this conversation on Saturday though, so perhaps that will give you enough to chew on for now.
Thanks for the response. I was generally looking to understand, not persuade your opinion, fwiw. I guess you could say I'm sort of in the same camp. My ideals are more aligned with the ancap/libertarian sphere, but I don't see any logical path to getting there. Anyway, thanks for indulging me.
The big failing of big L Libertarianism is it doesn't acknowledge/understand that the underpinning of Western society is Christian morality & norms, which used to be codified in the Anglo West's legal system. This used to have the principles of Old English Common Law (via Alfred the Great), but has since morphed and mutated over time into our current abomination (which is collapsing, thankfully).
Because of this, under big L libertarianism, it's permissible for kids into engage in prostitution, among other things which should be prohibited under threat of death.
I'm not sure I understand the leap there. Yes, legally we are making lots of things legal that shouldn't be. Although, imo (and many others like me), not that this matters this falls under the few useful things the government should be in charge of. Again, how I see society should be and how it is or will ever be are two wildly different things.
Whether something "should" be illegal is a moral judgment, and morals can be understood to be culturally relative. Human sacrifice was legal and encouraged by the Aztecs, etc. So then whether something "should" be legal goes down to cultural norms, and then the laws change with cultural norms changing / etc. Or they "shouldn't" because someone thinks that morals have a divine or natural origin instead of being a construct, and then they go down a path of arguing about things for which western philosophers have no actual answer, because there's several centuries of them bickering at each other over the topic.
Then you also run the secondary parallel question of whether government has a vested interest in morality enforcement, or whether that should be done socially through other channels, such as church or Wokeness Enforcement Brigades or similar, and that argument could be made from the point of view of efficacy or uniformity or similar.
*cracks knuckles*
I can make all the arguments on both sides of these things, and in the end the only way to make none of it matter is move into the country and buy guns, thereby establishing a boundary within which I make my own rules.
At risk of spooling up another few hundred pages of arguments, whether or not something should be illegal (punished by violence via government) is not just a moral judgement but also a functional one. For instance, it is illegal to drive on the left side of the road in America not because it is immoral but because there is value in agreeing on the standard and adhering to it. One can argue that not adhering to the standard is putting people at risk, and thus immoral, but that's a rough row to hoe, seeing as how nearly everything we do puts others at risk, and so the question is how much risk vs how much reward vs how much cost to avoid that risk.
So then you have not just the relative moral aspect, but also the practical aspect, which of course also feeds back into our sentiments regarding morality.
With some careful rooting around one can come up with some "these are the minimal necessary conditions for humans to live, individually and as a group" that can kind of sort of serve as a basis for morality, and then are only left with the remaining 95% of crap we come up with to explain.
That's fair. However, doesn't whoever has the biggest "guns" make all the laws should they so choose? Similar to Rose Island being determined by the Italian authorities to be a "tax haven". Even running from them to your own island doesn't change being subject to the wills of the common or their government(s).
Nice article with entertaining photos. Hartsfield-Jackson is miserable. I live in Athens and the only thing worse than the airport is the two hour drive home after landing. You get a gold star for engaging in social activities, I try to avoid those like Hartsfield-Jackson.
Let's give credit where it's due, Hartsfield could not possibly be better designed or managed to perform its function. Anything miserable about Hartsfield flows from the function it's chosen to serve. Can you imagine how fucked Laguardia would be if someone tried to run Hartsfield level connecting traffic through it?
Touche. I give a massive amount of credit to the operational outlay of the facility. There is a Netflix documentary about the airport which dives into the management of facets ranging from incoming flights to luggage sorting which is quite interesting. I suppose Hartsfield-Jackson is my catch-all for air travel in post 9/11 America.
Good book review! Believe it or not, I had a similar experience talking to new folks at SHOT Show, and a similar desire to connect the tired old conversation trees to not-quite-as-old podcast episodes. Hard to do in real-time, but I appreciate you stacking your foundational layers of articles together after the fact.
I think Jon H. may be ahead of both of us on this with his Q&A GPT he's building for Phlster. :)
Have you thought about raking podcast transcripts, feeding them to a GPT, and seeing what comes out the other end? Might be a fun activity if you have the resources. I've thought about that for HWFO, but quite honestly don't currently have the technical skill nor the time to develop that technical skill.
Jan 31·edited Jan 31Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
If I had the resources, I think I would do what John is doing, and train on our entire customer service knowledge base instead, in hopes of creating an AI agent who would be able to answer weird questions about esoteric holster support. I am using Buzzsprout's AI transcriber and summarizer on the podcast, and it is occasionally good at picking out some core ideas. Accuracy still seems a bit random, though.
Not totally on topic but this put me in mind of my favorite lines from 'The Cocktail Party': "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
Libertarianism -- as well as Reaganoid conservatism -- failed because they both mistake freedom with liberty. Freedom, the ability to do, requires both liberty AND property. As Bob Black noted in "The Abolition of Wealth", most people get more direct orders from their boss than from the government.
The gutting of antitrust law, the unleashing of Wall St., and Nixon's changes in farm price supports have caused enormous concentrations in controlling the means of production. We thus become more ant like.
Those who love freedom should make common cause with the deep environmentalists and populists, to redivide the means of production. More small farms and businesses. More production moved back into the home. Lower efficiency; higher satisfaction. This the core of my just proposed Green Old Deal:
It hit me during a long night of putting campaign signs up at polling places. Stopping for coffee at a Dennys we got a talkative waitress complaining about how the churches were useless helping her out with her two adopted blind kids. It dawned on me that someone down so much financially in a "free" society would actually be more free in a Scandinavian style welfare state.
At the extremes, wealth differences become power differences. "Do what I say or starve" isn't that much different from "Do what I say or go to jail." And history is full of instances of people voluntarily selling themselves into slavery or serfdom for this reason. One of the Friedmans (Milton or David; I forget which) even proposed that college students finance their education by selling shares in their future income instead of taking loans. Partial slavery.
Many in the Dissident Right now get it. They notice billionaires and Chinese companies buying up farmland. They see a small clique of Wall St. powers imposing ESG on nearly all public corporations. They see how a few Silicon Valley superpowers can nullify the First Amendment to a shocking degree.
The difference between near monopoly capitalism and socialism isn't all that much. The World Economic Forum vision of pod people eating bug meal is a vision of extreme wealth concentration, not government ownership of the means of production.
Smaller case in point: I have far more control over my property living in a small town than I would living in a typical contractual community.
The inscription on the Liberty Bell comes from Leviticus 25. An important chapter, that.
I see. It is somewhat interesting how the Dissident Right starts to sound a lot like the hard left and Marx over time, equating freedom with the ability to do what you feel like without making tradeoffs.
Could you explain why you think that the equating of freedom with the ability to do what you like without making tradeoffs is a strawman? Perhaps you haven't noticed that when someone says "Do what I say or starve" it matters a great deal whether or not you are asking them to fee you or they are preventing you from trading with other people for food. That is a really big difference between "Do what I say or starve" and "Do what I say or go to jail."
You are correct that monopoly and socialism are basically the same thing. What you are missing is why: both have to be enforced by violence. Freedom is not generally defined as "the ability to do" because there are infinitely many things we can't do, and we decide many of those limitations ourselves by the choices we make. If you define freedom as the ability to do, no one is free, ever, because they cannot do everything. People have to trade off between choices, that's just the nature of reality. However they can be free from other people using violence to impose choices on them.
And why you think I am thinking in "one dimension?" I think you and I have interacted enough that you should recognize that isn't likely the case.
I wrote that you are thinking in one dimension because you equated what I wrote with Marxism.
Yes, Marx and other socialists/progressives/feudalists/defenders of negro servitude all noticed the brutal working conditions of the 1800s. Their solutions differed. So do mine. The landlord problem and the backward bending supply curve for labor are issues that go back to ancient times. Feudalism arose by more than just conquest. It also arose by contract. And agrarian societies throughout history have degenerated into some kind of serfdom like arrangement. It takes active measures to preserve a free yeoman class.
The Old Testament solution was to outlaw alienating your descendants from their share of the family farm, plus a few labor laws, gleaner rights, and a release of debt slaves every 7 years -- with startup capital. The only professional government during the time of the Judges consisted of the Levites, and their role was ceremonial, maintaining the archives, and enforcing public health regulations. That was it. Israel during that time was as close an approximation to anarcho capitalism as you fill find that wasn't on an isolated island.
The yeoman farmer or independent craftsman is not completely free. No one is completely free. Reality has rules. Duh. But the yeoman farmer doesn't have a supervisor; neither does the independent craftsman. Reality and customers are the constraints, not bosses or bureaucrats.
Democracy and limited government don't work unless a large enough fraction of the electorate is free.
The only thing keeping us chugging away as water-filled LLMs is societal pressure, which unlike conventional LLMs, we are free to reject (likely self-destructively) at any time.
Go ahead. You can quit whenever you want to.
I thought I was the only person who saw the 'monkeys become ants' thing; thanks for spreading the word much better than I can.
http://allegedwisdom.blogspot.com/2022/02/why-you-are-psychologically-screwed-up.html
Yeah I was on that in 2018 back on Medium. The thing that torques me off on the front end is our hubris for thinking that we run the planet, when we're obviously 2nd or 3rd in charge.
1. Your obvious/automatic ticket to SHOT Show images most of us very jealous. I got to go several decades ago, when it was in Atlanta, by serving as an unpaid representative of a small gun shop in Kansas where my brother-in-law worked part time. 😀
2. Conversation scripts are always boring because they never move the needle. Just part of the social convention.
Even when you do get somewhere that would move the needle, most people bail because they don't want their needle moved. If their needle moves they have to re-learn all new scripts.
Amen. Something about "the unexamined life" seems appropriate here.
Apologies to all for not catching the iPad autocorrect. For those of you of the old school, please make a pen and ink correction of the text to read "SHOT Show makes most of us". <shakes head>
> "and cannot even understand why people believe differently than them because they don’t have a shared language."
Ah, yes. I have this problem with anarcho-syndicalists. I've actually *tried* to understand how they think anything could possibly work out with their philosophy in the forefront, and I can't even manage to get past the part where we're using the same sequences of phonemes but they clearly have very different referents for us.
Per "Lessons" at the end, it sounds like HWFO has reached the point where it has the same barrier to entry or learning curve as LessWrong/Rationality does with "read The Sequences".
For better or for worse, establishing shortcuts for absorbing the content would seem to open the ideas to abuse or misapplication.
I shall raise my hand and join the cohort of people who never made it through The Sequences.
At a minimum, it needed more jokes.
I'm confused about your comments wrt to the libertarian side of things? I have read most (if not all) of what you have posted in the last two years, and you are usually spot on. I'm just confused how you come to the conclusion user fees are less useful than taxation? I'm willing to learn and understand. This isn't a "script" for me. I just personally abhor non-voluntary takings. Maybe I'm missing something? Also if you aren't "libertarian"/independent, as I always assumed, what are you? Not that you have to answer.
I've moved from "libertarian" to "defending my property and children with firearms and eating popcorn while shit explodes." I'm allergic to all ideologies at this point, including libertarianism. It just so happens that libertarians still map closer to "allergic to ideologies" than most other ideologies do.
You'll notice that I'm a pretty successful gun author and have never mentioned the word "rights" once, as far as I can remember.
To your direct question, user fees could be more useful than taxation for many applications, but are more difficult to collect from individuals in the moment of suffering a disaster, so extracting them from a shared pool makes sense. The difference between optional and mandatory shared pools (insurance and taxation) bleeds together depending on application.
I managed to avoid this conversation on Saturday though, so perhaps that will give you enough to chew on for now.
Thanks for the response. I was generally looking to understand, not persuade your opinion, fwiw. I guess you could say I'm sort of in the same camp. My ideals are more aligned with the ancap/libertarian sphere, but I don't see any logical path to getting there. Anyway, thanks for indulging me.
The big failing of big L Libertarianism is it doesn't acknowledge/understand that the underpinning of Western society is Christian morality & norms, which used to be codified in the Anglo West's legal system. This used to have the principles of Old English Common Law (via Alfred the Great), but has since morphed and mutated over time into our current abomination (which is collapsing, thankfully).
Because of this, under big L libertarianism, it's permissible for kids into engage in prostitution, among other things which should be prohibited under threat of death.
*popcorn*
I'm not sure I understand the leap there. Yes, legally we are making lots of things legal that shouldn't be. Although, imo (and many others like me), not that this matters this falls under the few useful things the government should be in charge of. Again, how I see society should be and how it is or will ever be are two wildly different things.
*activates moral relativism vs absolutism argument tree*
*activates government interest argument tree*
(comes back in three days)
I'm not sure I understand.
Whether something "should" be illegal is a moral judgment, and morals can be understood to be culturally relative. Human sacrifice was legal and encouraged by the Aztecs, etc. So then whether something "should" be legal goes down to cultural norms, and then the laws change with cultural norms changing / etc. Or they "shouldn't" because someone thinks that morals have a divine or natural origin instead of being a construct, and then they go down a path of arguing about things for which western philosophers have no actual answer, because there's several centuries of them bickering at each other over the topic.
Then you also run the secondary parallel question of whether government has a vested interest in morality enforcement, or whether that should be done socially through other channels, such as church or Wokeness Enforcement Brigades or similar, and that argument could be made from the point of view of efficacy or uniformity or similar.
*cracks knuckles*
I can make all the arguments on both sides of these things, and in the end the only way to make none of it matter is move into the country and buy guns, thereby establishing a boundary within which I make my own rules.
At risk of spooling up another few hundred pages of arguments, whether or not something should be illegal (punished by violence via government) is not just a moral judgement but also a functional one. For instance, it is illegal to drive on the left side of the road in America not because it is immoral but because there is value in agreeing on the standard and adhering to it. One can argue that not adhering to the standard is putting people at risk, and thus immoral, but that's a rough row to hoe, seeing as how nearly everything we do puts others at risk, and so the question is how much risk vs how much reward vs how much cost to avoid that risk.
So then you have not just the relative moral aspect, but also the practical aspect, which of course also feeds back into our sentiments regarding morality.
With some careful rooting around one can come up with some "these are the minimal necessary conditions for humans to live, individually and as a group" that can kind of sort of serve as a basis for morality, and then are only left with the remaining 95% of crap we come up with to explain.
re: your conclusion: It's more fun to do that with your buddies IMO, but yeah.
That's fair. However, doesn't whoever has the biggest "guns" make all the laws should they so choose? Similar to Rose Island being determined by the Italian authorities to be a "tax haven". Even running from them to your own island doesn't change being subject to the wills of the common or their government(s).
First, you have to understand Old English Common Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_book
Which actually IMO is the best book title ever
Nice article with entertaining photos. Hartsfield-Jackson is miserable. I live in Athens and the only thing worse than the airport is the two hour drive home after landing. You get a gold star for engaging in social activities, I try to avoid those like Hartsfield-Jackson.
Let's give credit where it's due, Hartsfield could not possibly be better designed or managed to perform its function. Anything miserable about Hartsfield flows from the function it's chosen to serve. Can you imagine how fucked Laguardia would be if someone tried to run Hartsfield level connecting traffic through it?
Touche. I give a massive amount of credit to the operational outlay of the facility. There is a Netflix documentary about the airport which dives into the management of facets ranging from incoming flights to luggage sorting which is quite interesting. I suppose Hartsfield-Jackson is my catch-all for air travel in post 9/11 America.
Good book review! Believe it or not, I had a similar experience talking to new folks at SHOT Show, and a similar desire to connect the tired old conversation trees to not-quite-as-old podcast episodes. Hard to do in real-time, but I appreciate you stacking your foundational layers of articles together after the fact.
I think Jon H. may be ahead of both of us on this with his Q&A GPT he's building for Phlster. :)
Have you thought about raking podcast transcripts, feeding them to a GPT, and seeing what comes out the other end? Might be a fun activity if you have the resources. I've thought about that for HWFO, but quite honestly don't currently have the technical skill nor the time to develop that technical skill.
If I had the resources, I think I would do what John is doing, and train on our entire customer service knowledge base instead, in hopes of creating an AI agent who would be able to answer weird questions about esoteric holster support. I am using Buzzsprout's AI transcriber and summarizer on the podcast, and it is occasionally good at picking out some core ideas. Accuracy still seems a bit random, though.
If I was able to carve off some time one week, could I swing by your operation and check it out? I'm not that far away - north of Atlanta.
Absolutely!
Did someone say deterministic convergence and the obviation of free will? Here, have this!
https://open.substack.com/pub/argomend/p/a-look-at-epicurus?r=28g8km&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcome=true
I don’t suppose Nick’s book has an ebook edition?
Also, do you know Hans Schantz? Fellow GATech alumnus.
I don't know about an ebook. My WREK buddy had a PDF but that was a preliminary draft sent out for editing and comment. I'm not familiar with Schantz.
I think you'll like him https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/coming-soon
Not totally on topic but this put me in mind of my favorite lines from 'The Cocktail Party': "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
If I'm an LLM in meatspace, then how am I able to write back into my own code?
This isn't a serious rebuttal, I'm just trying to make you chuckle, in a pinch, it's a cinch, but perhaps I'll spark a kerfuffle.
You know how people ask Hal the LLM to pretend he's a pod bay door salesmen and needs to show Dave how one opens?
Like that. You don't rewrite anything, you just keep adding new training data every moment of your life.
Mmmmaybe, but LMMs don't have NDEs, OOBs, precognition, remote views, past life recollections, etc..
Best book review...ever.
Libertarianism -- as well as Reaganoid conservatism -- failed because they both mistake freedom with liberty. Freedom, the ability to do, requires both liberty AND property. As Bob Black noted in "The Abolition of Wealth", most people get more direct orders from their boss than from the government.
The gutting of antitrust law, the unleashing of Wall St., and Nixon's changes in farm price supports have caused enormous concentrations in controlling the means of production. We thus become more ant like.
Those who love freedom should make common cause with the deep environmentalists and populists, to redivide the means of production. More small farms and businesses. More production moved back into the home. Lower efficiency; higher satisfaction. This the core of my just proposed Green Old Deal:
https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/a-green-old-deal
Defining freedom as "the ability to do" is a very unusual move. Why do you choose to do so?
It hit me during a long night of putting campaign signs up at polling places. Stopping for coffee at a Dennys we got a talkative waitress complaining about how the churches were useless helping her out with her two adopted blind kids. It dawned on me that someone down so much financially in a "free" society would actually be more free in a Scandinavian style welfare state.
At the extremes, wealth differences become power differences. "Do what I say or starve" isn't that much different from "Do what I say or go to jail." And history is full of instances of people voluntarily selling themselves into slavery or serfdom for this reason. One of the Friedmans (Milton or David; I forget which) even proposed that college students finance their education by selling shares in their future income instead of taking loans. Partial slavery.
Many in the Dissident Right now get it. They notice billionaires and Chinese companies buying up farmland. They see a small clique of Wall St. powers imposing ESG on nearly all public corporations. They see how a few Silicon Valley superpowers can nullify the First Amendment to a shocking degree.
The difference between near monopoly capitalism and socialism isn't all that much. The World Economic Forum vision of pod people eating bug meal is a vision of extreme wealth concentration, not government ownership of the means of production.
Smaller case in point: I have far more control over my property living in a small town than I would living in a typical contractual community.
The inscription on the Liberty Bell comes from Leviticus 25. An important chapter, that.
I see. It is somewhat interesting how the Dissident Right starts to sound a lot like the hard left and Marx over time, equating freedom with the ability to do what you feel like without making tradeoffs.
The "without making tradeoffs" thing is a strawman attack.
Stop thinking in just one dimension. See the political maps here: https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/populism-is-the-way
Could you explain why you think that the equating of freedom with the ability to do what you like without making tradeoffs is a strawman? Perhaps you haven't noticed that when someone says "Do what I say or starve" it matters a great deal whether or not you are asking them to fee you or they are preventing you from trading with other people for food. That is a really big difference between "Do what I say or starve" and "Do what I say or go to jail."
You are correct that monopoly and socialism are basically the same thing. What you are missing is why: both have to be enforced by violence. Freedom is not generally defined as "the ability to do" because there are infinitely many things we can't do, and we decide many of those limitations ourselves by the choices we make. If you define freedom as the ability to do, no one is free, ever, because they cannot do everything. People have to trade off between choices, that's just the nature of reality. However they can be free from other people using violence to impose choices on them.
And why you think I am thinking in "one dimension?" I think you and I have interacted enough that you should recognize that isn't likely the case.
I wrote that you are thinking in one dimension because you equated what I wrote with Marxism.
Yes, Marx and other socialists/progressives/feudalists/defenders of negro servitude all noticed the brutal working conditions of the 1800s. Their solutions differed. So do mine. The landlord problem and the backward bending supply curve for labor are issues that go back to ancient times. Feudalism arose by more than just conquest. It also arose by contract. And agrarian societies throughout history have degenerated into some kind of serfdom like arrangement. It takes active measures to preserve a free yeoman class.
The Old Testament solution was to outlaw alienating your descendants from their share of the family farm, plus a few labor laws, gleaner rights, and a release of debt slaves every 7 years -- with startup capital. The only professional government during the time of the Judges consisted of the Levites, and their role was ceremonial, maintaining the archives, and enforcing public health regulations. That was it. Israel during that time was as close an approximation to anarcho capitalism as you fill find that wasn't on an isolated island.
The yeoman farmer or independent craftsman is not completely free. No one is completely free. Reality has rules. Duh. But the yeoman farmer doesn't have a supervisor; neither does the independent craftsman. Reality and customers are the constraints, not bosses or bureaucrats.
Democracy and limited government don't work unless a large enough fraction of the electorate is free.