@pixelpusher220 regret, or inform?
i regret to inform you.
@DetroitDan @SteveRoth (One interesting bit from the piece was the suggestion that solitary confinement actually serves as a form of protection for leaders of prison gangs. It seems like a horrific sacrifice at a human level, and the piece points out these are organizations most people prefer not to advance in, but so brutally "punishing" the worst may be counterproductive to discouraging well-organized, brutal gang activity.)
oh, but i saw a thread once debunking that.
“You can’t define a word that means nothing with a term that also means nothing. That’s like me saying, ‘Well, we know what flarpitude is, it’s a form of horticultural Taoism.’” https://flip.it/seeMo0 ht @Bwheatnyc @CassandraZeroCovid
@djc i suppose when we’re paperclips it will all make sense.
@djc is compatibilism smart or sort of reconciliation of apparently incompatible positions by mere assertion or a kind of redefinition?
@djc it’d be fun to engage the conscious paperclip maximizer on the question of its own free will.
@admitsWrongIfProven the “and” was supposed to be “than”. editing!
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @SteveRoth (this is the very first time i've encountered her.)
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @SteveRoth well, i kind of favor bloggish prolix sloppy writing myself!
@admitsWrongIfProven The traditional political establishment is burdened with the duty of creating authority, which often they do tendentiously or shoddily, but which is nevertheless a challenge of construction, of engendering and defending credibility, which requires much more information and organization than mere deconstruction.
Compare "Cocytarchy" with kakistocracy.
from #Kulak https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/cocytarchy
ht Thom A & @SteveRoth
hierarchy (lowerarchy?) as a pit rather than a pyramid certainly is evocative.
putting aside the grander comparisons (the army and civil service stuff seems a stretch), if you take the description of prison gangs seriously, reforming prisons to become smaller, to form communities governable and governed in a more civilized way, should be a first-order tough-on-crime priority!
@mattlehrer there is always some difference between a (hypothetical) perfectly neutral truth-seeking exercise and the social processes that engender authority. some of those differences may be corrupt, self-dealing, harmful. others may be necessary and useful to productive coordination. but authority requires we (nearly) all behave “as if” a thing is true, and that becomes hard to maintain the more frequent and clear evidence that would contradict it seems to emerge.
@mattlehrer “intent” is a trickier question (in a sense a fabrication). does it make liars any better (in an ethical rather than theatrical sense) if they mislead themselves first? i think a relatively small share of the corrupt, harmful, self-dealing kinds of authority involve people “intending to deceive”. at an individual level (as Upton Sinclair famously pointed out) our own truth-finding processes are not independent of interest.
there’s a game of thrones in play between a clique of tech plutocrats and aspects of the traditional political establishment. the tech plutocrats strategy is to undermine traditional approaches to social coordination by undermining the credibility of as much information as possible that might otherwise become authoritative. (remember authority and truth are distinct ideas, but social coordination depends upon authority and works best if it’s reasonably though never perfectly aligned with truth.)
whether or not the paperclip maximizer has achieved consciousness is a little bit beside the point.
@admitsWrongIfProven me too ! i fell asleep!
@admitsWrongIfProven it’s a pleasure to meet you!
@josh so youuu’re the one who’s doing that!