aninhumer

The end result probably looks like us burning most of the modern world to the ground, literally, but that's where game theory is taking us.

Has it ever occurred to you that if people are willing to burn it to the ground, the "modern world" might not be quite as good for them as it is for you?

What we are seeing today are people who have long felt grievances talking to each other and discovering that they're not alone, and that the civil institutions which are supposed to address those grievances systematically do not do so.

And when people are given no other options to correct injustice, conflict is all that's left to them.

If you want to stop the world from burning, don't blame the people for fighting, blame the system for making it necessary.

Except the actual left has been complaining about centralised capitalist control of the media for decades. Indeed, it's precisely because of that control that you've apparently never heard anything other than liberal centrists talking about access to speech.

This new political "anything goes" trend is going to be awful for anyone not already in the Fortune 500. But I guess that's the point, isn't it?

Yes of course. Welcome to Capitalism.

When the system starts to break down from the inevitable inequality it causes, capitalists turn to fascism to maintain control. It happened in the Weimar Republic, and it's happening again now. We're seeing business news outlets openly talking about the "investment opportunities" in Brazil as a result of the election of an overt fascist.

And all for a petty, temporary victory over a fringe political group!

The left celebrates this, not because the control is good, but because the threat of fascism has become so overt that this is the best we can hope for right now.

Ah yes, you're correct, I got confused by the first-name/surname thing.

I would still question the validity of this approach, and more generally, I don't think you can meaningfully isolate class and race, since they're so inter-related in the US.

They acknowledge that the names may not be strong signals, but the very reason that's the case is that people are less likely to associate black people with high socioeconomic status in the first place.

I said power dynamics (i.e. power imbalances) should be opposed, not the abstract concept of power itself.

If they can choose not to help they're not "helping you to live", they're choosing not to kill you.

And if they choose whether to kill you based on whether you do what they want, that's violent coercion.

If someone helps you live when otherwise you're going to die, you should tolerate more of his weirdness.

Yes, if someone has control over your life or death, you should probably do what they say.

That is what most people call "violent coercion".

You either believe in capitalism and thus meritocracy as its twin, or neither.

Well, quite...

This only makes sense if you assume the organisation's interest is only to maximise productivity in the short term.

An open source organisation may explicitly be interested in attracting marginalised people into the tech sector, to improve equality in society as a whole.

Or even from a cynical perspective, a profit-led corporation may desire to increase their ability to hire competent but undervalued (and thus cheaper) employees in future.

So looking at their methodology, they chose the "high class" black names ("Anderson" and "Thompson") (EDIT: I misread, these aren't the black names) based on census proportions, but that doesn't necessarily mean those names are actually read as "black" by most people.

Moreover, using census results ignores exposure to foreigners with these names. My own strongest association for "Thompson" is the white police officers in Tintin, and more generally for white English people. (Although I'm British so that may not be representative.)

As long as "low class" black names are more readily associated with blackness than "high class" ones, this methodology isn't really isolating anything, just doing a slightly more intersectional analysis.

Life creates a power dynamic which can be abused in this way.

And such dynamics should be acknowledged and opposed wherever they exist.

Have some minimal set of rules

Except as I said, these rules are frequently ignored or applied less fairly in one way or another for those with "merit".

I just always have trouble imagining the end game of that kind of thinking - even in Stalinism, people with higher abilities were selected for various more demanding tasks.

Rejecting meritocracy doesn't mean not acknowledging ability, it means not structuring power hierarchies around it.

Those most able should be chosen for tasks because those involved in the work agree collectively, without the coercion of power dynamics, that it's best to assign them that task.

The simple fact is that people who have power tend to abuse that power, but that has nothing to do with meritocracy as a concept.

Except that by definition, meritocracy creates a power dynamic which can be abused in this way. Those with "merit" are trusted and respected more than those without. This means that complaints about their behaviour are more often ignored or dismissed. And even when bad behaviour is too blatant to ignore, the punishment is often lesser, for fear of chasing away their "merit".

In theory, one could define "merit" in a way that recognises behaviour alongside technical contributions, but in practice that is rarely how the term is interpreted by tech communities.

Humans have a sleep cycle driven by circadian rhythms, and most jobs in a country work similar clock hours in order to coordinate with other companies more easily.

So in fact, it's much easier to change what the clocks say than it is to change either of these.

There is no way to implement verifiable voting which is not vulnerable to voter coercion. If you can verify your vote, so can the person threatening you.

The way to ensure the ballot is secure is to have a fully publicly verifiable end-to-end process. You should be able to watch the ballot box from the moment you put your vote in, all the way to the count.

For the majority of people, their share of the vote is a lot more powerful than their share of the dollars.

You're not advocating for encouraging STEM graduate immigrants, you're advocating for the exclusion of any other immigrants.

Unless you're also advocating for the deportation of non-STEM graduates, your position is explicitly discriminatory based on where someone is born. It's bigotry.

The parent was not suggesting subsidies, they were suggesting nationalising the entire energy industry and managing it to address the problem directly.

A carbon tax might work in theory, but the political reality is that as long as fossil fuels are a profitable business, any such tax will be fought tooth and nail at every step of the way.

It is now far too late to expect the market to turn itself around. If we want to fix the problem, we need to take away the power that maintains it.

Are you really suggesting that anybody in the world who wants to walk into the USA should be allowed to?

Maybe block known criminals and bad actors, but otherwise yes. If your argument as to why we should exclude people is based on the idea that it would make standards of living worse for people here, that's a) probably not true and b) only makes sense if you think the wellbeing of the people here is more important the wellbeing of people elsewhere.

It seems like that nullifies the existence of the nation itself. Why have a border?

Not really, there'd still be a government and a system of laws that apply within the border.

But beyond that, why specifically do you think it would be bad to nullify the existence of a nation?

Why have a military to protect that border?

In as far as a military is necessary, it is to protect against other militaries, not non-violent civilians entering the country.

The thing with YouTube alternatives is that they have to be at least as good as YouTube. Creators will only go where their audiences will go, so a site that doesn't offer a good user experience will immediately be off the table.

Why do you assume they have to choose?

A creator could upload to YouTube to get access to their audience, but then also encourage people to use PeerTube to get their videos.

Your analysis is numerical nonsense.

Work is not divided into even units completed at a constant linear rate over the course of the day. It's a wide variety of different actions, and the time taken to complete each will vary wildly depending on tiredness, stress and morale.

Some tasks may take the same amount of time regardless, but some can drastically reduce. A well rested developer may realise the solution to a bug in a few minutes that would take them hours to solve on less sleep. Or indeed, avoid causing the bug in the first place.

Because working out if someone is a competent doctor is hard and expecting every single person in society to work it out for themselves, regardless of their level of free time, education, or access to information, is a massive burden.

That someone can earnestly suggest that going 48 hours without sleep is somehow an effective way to address an outage is an indictment of a messed up work culture.

People need sleep to think straight, and no amount of money or responsibility is going to change that.

This means they can't process the payment, but it doesn't necessarily cancel the subscription, and if not, you still owe them the money legally, even if they can't get it easily.

Socialists usually also argue from a utilitarian point of view.

The utility a person experiences as a result of increasing access to resources is sublinear, i.e. there are diminishing utility returns to an individual as they acquire resources. Therefore an unequal resource allocation is less efficient at creating utility than an equal one.

It is argued that the inequality creates incentives that result in more being produced, but many socialists are highly sceptical of this claim, and especially sceptical that the level of inequality that exists is worth the loss of utility it causes.

Personally, I think after a certain level of comfort is reached, people seem to be far more motivated by self-actualisation than ever increasing material wealth.

I suspect the reason he doesn't want that job is that he doesn't want the stress and responsibilities associated with that job, not that he doesn't like being creative.

It's not about physical capability. Obviously people aren't getting exhausted moving around 5lb laptops instead of 3lb ones. It's about comfort and ease of manipulation.

If sales increase when it is thinner, it stands to reason that customers want thinner devices.

No it means consumers think they want thinner phones, not that they actually prefer using them in practice. That's what marketing means.

And of course, the reason they think thinner is better is also marketing. Keep repeating something and people will internalise it without criticism.

It's not really surprising that the only part of the UK that gets significant investment is the only part that's able to make any money.

So you are adding more epicycles.

Not really? I don't conceive of consciousness experience as something that can be meaningfully separated from the perception of that consciousness. For a consciousness, perception is experience.

However, I can imagine a perceiving system which does not have any consciousness, and thus experiences nothing.

Will it not change your behavior when you'll notice that you are confidently calling very similar colors by very different names and cannot say why are you doing that?

In this hypothetical, the "partial p-zombie" cannot distinguish them consciously, so they would not do that. This is the closest thing I can conceive of to what you described.

I am pretty sure I can't change whether the rock is conscious or not by the power of my imagination.

But the rock exists within your imagination, you have total power over it?

The p-zombie thought experiment entails the p-zombie world thought experiment, where a universe evolved with nothing but p-zombies, and this world is identical to our own.

No? I don't see I need to imagine a parallel universe. I can just imagine a p-zombie existing in our own world.

I certainly can't without allowing what seems to be absurdity or inconsistency. I'm not sure how you manage to do it.

"absurdity or inconsistency" do not limit my imagination. I do not think such things are realistic, but that doesn't mean I can't imagine them. For a similar example, most ideas of time travel end up inconsistent if you inspect them closely, and yet nonetheless I can imagine them.

I was talking about partial p-zombie, which doesn't experience red color only.

Ah sorry I missed that part of the argument. Yes, I agree that I can't imagine such a thing, because I don't think experience can be subdivided in that way. Anything a consciousness can perceive, it must experience.

I could however imagine a person whose brain perceived and reacted to the colour red in certain ways, but never became conscious of that perception, and merely experiences vision with all red things having the same qualia as another colour. It's quite a weird thing to imagine, but if you're trying to assert that it's impossible, I will do so to disagree.

You can't imagine p-zombie, you imagine someone with attached label "There's darkness inside" (as Chalmers had put it).

Can you imagine a non-conscious rock? Or does the rock just have a similar label attached? If you believe one can imagine such a rock, then I can imagine such a human in the same way.

If not, then your imagination must be teeming with errant consciousnesses.