jack: (Default)
Several countries got the number of infected people almost back down to where they started, and are cautiously considering relaxing restrictions. This means they need to *quickly* lock down any areas with a new infection until they've traced and tested any contacts, but hopefully they will be able to do so.

I can't help but wish more countries had been able to jump to that point from the start without having an infection get out of control and need a more serious lockdown first. I guess that's similar to what Taiwan and New Zealand did?

Conversely the number of infected people in the UK has levelled off but not really gone down. And now the government is talking about relaxing restrictions. It seems like even sensible, desirable relaxations, or proposed future relaxations, will overall make people less cautious, which in this situation will make the number of infection go up again. Which will make it take that much longer to get down to a safe level again even if effective measures are found. So any plans or June need to be based on, "when the infection rate goes up, will the government reverse direction and lock down harder again? Or will they go on pretending everything is fine while the situation gets even more out of hand?"

I hope that's wrong. Fiends I trust to be sensible ARE talking about what will happen in June. I agree lockdown can't last forever. But where is it wrong? What will happen instead?

What would I do if I were in charge? My best guesses would be:

* Have regular announcements announcing advice stricter in some ways but less strict in others. E.g. allow people to go to the park with relatives 2m apart, but offer more precise restrictions in other areas to show "we need to take this seriously" not "ok, relax".
* Have different advice for different regions.
* Don't focus on the minutiae of people working from home and mostly not seeing people. Work out what's supposed to happen for the biggest obstacles, companies that need people to work safely, what guidance is there? People with children, don't wish away the problem, offer government support to work part time, or allow people to share childcare within a small, fixed group of families.
* Hand a big check to someone in the NHS and say "sorry we fucked up procurement for treatment and testing. go organise it however you would usually organise it".
* Have a series of milestones for relaxing lockdown. E.g. "infection rate below X", "test and trace infrastructure is working"
* Have a plan for phased return to normal life. Pay attention to the people for whom the current situation is most difficult. Make it transparent. You could just copy France's.
* Stop hinting contradictory things. Decide what the strategy is. Decide what messaging communicates that. Communicate that clearly through all channels, regular announcements, adverts. Force newspapers to communicate it clearly, and not to communicate confusing hints.

What happens after that? I don't have an "after" yet. My best guess is that a sufficiently effective test-and-trace infrastructure will slowly allow normal life to resume with local lockdowns when necessary. Or maybe some other scientific breakthrough. Probably not a vaccine, but maybe quick home tests. Or some research breakthrough in how it spreads and can be prevented. Etc.
jack: (Default)
A few times I've noticed I seem to have a problem playing with inexperienced GMs. It feels like I shouldn't, I usually feel excited to engage with the bits they're good at, and happy to handwave rules away.

I think part of it is just, an inexperienced GM is just always going to have a bumpier game, and even less smooth with a bunch of players they're not already familiar with. But it feels like I get on worse than other people, and I wasn't sure why, so I did some introspecting.

I think my problem is, I'm happy to play with different rules, when they're something someone consciously knows, and can explain or be asked about. But I'm not good at situations where I don't know what I can do and what I can't. I'm the same with board games, or buying things in shops: I'm happy with any particular set of rules if I can work out what they are in advance and go along with them. But if I have a fireball spell, and the GM's never adjudicated one of those before, even if I have the spell description and a variety of "how people usually treat this in practice" at my fingertips, I still don't know, will the GM want to follow the rules literally, or go by GM's intuition for how many enemies it affects, etc, even before you get into edge cases like "do you target a square or a point". And I don't want to provide too much info and overwhelm the GM or make them feel like I'm rules-lawyering.

Or to put it another way, I'd be happy to play a game where we've explicitly said either "lets follow the move-attack-act-move rules exactly" or "lets not overthink it, don't complicate a turn basically do one attack and we'll handwave how much movement you get", but if we haven't said, I find it hard to "fit in" with what we've converged on.

Basically the right model is, "take simple actions, try to follow the more complicated rules once, if it gets bogged down, don't do it again". But my brain doesn't cope with that. It feels like, I shouldn't have got it "wrong" even once, even if "wrong" isn't against any agreement, just going too much by the book when no-one else was and it didn't really matter. And it feels wrong avoiding things which are "allowed" by the official rules, if we haven't explicitly agreed not to.

I have a similar problem with board games with people from different board game cultures: I'm happy to agree any variation to the printed rules, but I'm slow at picking up, "we never explicitly said so, but we just don't do that, it feels too mean" (even if I agree with it).

And now I SAY that, I don't know why I hesitate so much. I think I usually have a fair idea what someone else is going to think is reasonable. So I can go with that, and what happens is a little better or worse than I expect, that's fine, and sometimes I guess wrong what they considered reasonable and they think my proposed fireball isn't reasonable or is suicidal, I can say, "oh, ok, can I do something else, then".

I think the problem was, my head pretends like, I'm "entitled" to any amount of asking for clarification, but "oh, can I take that back" feels like asking for a favour I'm not entitled to. And I don't know why, because it's probably a lot more accurate to say, you're entitled to 1/N of the GM's time, whatever that ends up being taken up with, so get the most fun/effectiveness/whatever you can with that time. Which involves guessing "what interpretation is ok" and then rolling with whatever the GM says, and proposing differences only if it seems to really matter.

Basically, treating a social situation the way I (eventually) learned to treat any other uncertain situation, of accepting that I needed to take best guesses factoring in how much time I spent thinking, the way I (eventually) did with board games where the best strategy wasn't obvious from the start, or life where you have to guess as best you can what's most important when you can't ever have the time to know for sure.

Or in other words, I know the DnD social protocols ok, but I was missing a lot of "normal" social protocols...
jack: (Default)
There was an article recently about how "eye-contact" was used to indicate turn taking in conversation, which led to a lot of reactions. But I didn't actually read it and I'm not sure how much it was talking about what I think of as "eye contact" (mutual face-looking however briefly) and how much it meant "looking at someone's face". And I realised I wasn't totally sure if I did that instinctively, or if I didn't do it at all.

I'm going to describe how I perceive things, and then ask people both neurodivergent and neurotypical what their experience is. And then maybe talk what else goes into who's turn it is. And some cultural differences.

Eye contact

I'm used to being aware of how much someone wants to speak, from cues like "shifting in their chair", "leaning forward", "having an expectant expression", up to and including "starting to talk and getting cut off" or (occasionally) asking for a chance to talk. And I think my brain has some magic neurotypical dust that does some sneaky cross-correlating with things like "did they do that when someone just said something they're likely to want to say something about" and "does it happen more than once" and just generally distinguishing miscellaneous shifting about or other expression changes from "wanting to speak".

My experience of... presumed normal people, is that these are all heuristics with a reasonable amount of flex in them. People misinterpret. People notice signs slowly. The "system" such as it is works when this communication *mostly* works it doesn't need to work reliably. Some people are particularly good at noticing. Some people can notice, but are bad at noticing, or bad at caring, or pessimistic that they'll actually be interested in what someone says.

So, my experience includes "being aware of someone's face cuing they might want to jump in and speak". But not a sort of mutual recognition, of "ok, message received". Now I describe this, I think this happens subconsciously: if someone looks to being paying attention to me and other people while they're talking, I'll subconsciously assume that they'll know if someone else wants to speak and be less concerned about it; and I will hopefully notice if someone is eager to speak, and subconsciously orient on them more to indicate "I'm interested in you shortly".

But I'm not sure that's what happens, because I think it's partly subconscious or automatic. And I think it works well enough without as long as people know each other well enough to expect they'll all get a chance to talk.

But now I'm saying all that, I'm really interested in what other people think. Does that sound right? Or does that sound like I've completely missed what everyone else does? Or somewhere between?

Other turn taking and cultural differences

What I described above is basically a lowest level handshake protocol for "who's turn to talk next". I think the biggest cultural difference is, some groups expect people to interrupt much sooner, like, as soon as you get the gist of a sentence, jump in to show support, and others much later, like, let someone develop several paragraphs and be sure they're done done before trying to interrupt

And there's also stuff like, who should speak next, which is going to be too long for this post. I think I'm average-ish at that. I do keep being confused, but I think that's because the actual protocol DOESN'T really work. And maybe a bit I don't notice status enough?

Opinions? Experiences? Observations?
jack: (Default)
Currently we have:

Physical money
- partially traceable
- no way of undoing transactions

Bitcoin
- partially traceable
- no way of undoing transactions
- is destroying the planet

Traditional banking
- mostly user friendly
- transactions can be rolled back if there's fraud
- lets the government spy on you
- for weird historical reasons, "consumer protection" and "get credit for everyday use" are bundled together

New faux-banking (including both things like paypal and cryptocurrency exchanges)
- perform many of the roles of banks
- some of the convenient, some of the protection, but sometimes not
- race to see how fast existing banking legislation covers them

There's a natural two tier system. Banking is built on top of money (originally physical money, now electronic money). Most significant bitcoin transactions use an exchange, even though someone can in principle make the transactions themselves.

Bitcoin was an ingenious technical innovation which unfortunately made so much unneeded cryptographic calculation it significantly impacted global warming with farms of graphics cards :( Probably it won't last.

Likewise, as with many "disruptive" technologies, the new banking systems had some benefits (you can just send someone money by doing so, without giving VISA veto power over whether your purchase looks kosher or not) and many problems (they started deciding for themselves whether to claim your transaction was fraudulent and keep your money, and were a power grab by people hoping to put the power in the hands of random tech companies, instead of governments)

So, "traditional money and banks bad, new fake money and banks good" is not a convincing narrative.

But in my opinion, "the new systems are destined to fail, therefore everything is fine as it was before" isn't convincing either.

There are extensive problems. If you're a small organisation, can people make small purchases from you? In person yes. Online, only if it's socially acceptable and you give patreon or VISA N%. Can you travel without the government knowing exactly where you go? Only if the transport takes cash, or TFL start taking anonymisation seriously. New systems helped temporarily with some of those problems.

Anything similar to consumer banking will need regulation the way consumer banking does now for the same reasons. Fraud will happen and there needs to be answers. Sufficiently large transactions probably do need to be scrutinised by the government for illegal activity.

But it would be nice if there were a more systematic approach. If there was an easy "just pay cash" equivalent where you accept a small risk of fraud in exchange for convenience. Where transaction fees didn't make small transactions so hard. Where everything you'd ever done wasn't stored in a convenient database one damoclesian law change away from being audited for "is this person sufficiently 'our kind of people'". But I don't know how we get there.
jack: (Default)
With puzzles or mysteries, there's a big benefit to consuming ones that are just on the edge of what you can work out.

But what it took me a while to realise was that the same applied to a lot of stories (and maybe real life as well). Like stretching your comfort zone, stretching your understanding by reading things you can follow but only if you work at it, is useful because it gives you practice at understanding things, and *feels* good because it feels like you worked things out.

Not all the time! It's good to read things you can follow easily, for various reasons, and to read things that are beyond you occasionally to see what you can get out of them. Lots of book-loving or precocious children are like these, hoovering up stories they only partly get, but getting a lot of out it.

But there's some particular techniques that rely on the same process, but because they can fail with too much understanding just as much as too little, they only work for some readers.

What Harry Potter Got Right

Read more... )
jack: (Default)
Welcome to your unscheduled rant. I've been watching a bit of Aaron Sorkin's sportsnight. Mostly it's pretty good, Sorkin's strengths of emotional heart, endearing and slightly klutzy characters, witty banter and optimistic dedication are prominently on display. West Wing was about a more serious topic, but on the other hand, West Wing was sharply constrained by not departing too far from reality. And I hear newsroom was well written but tried to be more serious and was even more pompous.

But there's one vile plotline in the first series, which sadly came on almost exactly the one or two episodes I happened to watch when Liv was in the room to see. Sorry about that.

Read more... )
jack: (Default)
This is perhaps obvious but something I've only slowly put into words.

Learning typically isn't about ONLY doing something right. It's by trying different ways and SEEING which work and if not, how they fail. I think my brain naturally gravitates towards topics like maths where there IS a right answer, and knowing the right answer is valuable.

But even then, you understand a problem much better if you've seen simple examples of it, if you try various ways of proving it and see where they prove insufficient, then if you just start with someone giving you a proof.

I think because I have a great tendency to feel bad about making mistakes. I often need to make an effort to give something a go, if I know not immediately succeeding will seem like a failure -- even though I find experimenting and playing with something without pressure to succeed fun like most people.

I have as many examples from fictional protagonist-and-mentor relationships as from real life, but I'll try to be specific.

This is why children need both good/safe behaviour modelled, but also, to have times when they can (within reasonable limits) experiment with making decisions for themselves. Both in how to interact with the physical world and how to interact with other humans.

I naturally found code switching difficult, because I naturally felt there should be a "right way" that would just always be ok (I know, I know :)). But it makes sense to have space to say, "ok, go and do whatever and adults won't police it much unless it goes too far". But that doesn't HAVE to be, the adults saying "don't do this" and then ignoring infractions provided they meet the unstated scope, which is what I find hardest. That's merely a common way the situation arises naturally, when adults (or people's bosses, or citizens' law-makers) make good-in=abstract rules and then compromise when it seems to make sense, it could happen deliberately instead (except that more of the exceptions would be people who assume you can always go 30% beyond what the rules allow learning that you can't, instead of people who assume you always need to keep the rules never learning anything).
jack: (Default)
I'm so used to reading about the ways beta colony is utopian, I've often not stopped to add up the ways it isn't.

People elsewhere in the galaxy talk about it as one of the most progressive places -- certainly in comparison to Barrayar.

Many of the downsides are -- as you might expect -- in increased conformity, like how in Sweden sex equality is overall better, but there's a big public database of everyone's salary.

Read more... )
jack: (Default)
So, stellaris is clearly not an accurate model of reality, but it can still generate interesting observations.

Balancing the economy is a pain. You need energy and minerals to build anything else. But the more buildings you have, the more energy they use, the more population you have, the more food and consumer goods (made of minerals) you need. And you need to build surface mines/power plants or mining stations to get *more* energy and minerals, but they themselves cost minerals to build and energy upkeep. I think I am actually generating a surplus which is going on technological improvement and so on, but it's also possible I've just expanded a bit much and am only treading water, despite originally having a reasonable energy and mineral surplus.

And you need a military at least defensively, but that also sucks up a lot of upkeep. It is sadly easy to resent everything that costs...

I'm not sure what the right balance was, between researching technology first before expanding much (often recommended online), just sitting in place accumulating a surplus of energy and minerals whenever you run short, vs ploughing everything you can into expansion and hoping for the best.

I guess if I actually sprawl out into all the currently unclaimed systems around, I would outrace the other empires in size. But that would mean, I'd need to spend everything on expansion first, fall behind in tech, and maybe be easy pickings militarily. Ideally I'd establish some bulwarks to block off future territory. But how many bulwarks can I afford, would I be able to hold them?

Geopolitics

The relations with other empires are very abstract, an opinion (and a few related metrics) measuring how they react to you. A positive opinion means they're more willing to agree things, including things that improve opinion over time.

But if there's a really valuable choke point or something... I feel the urge to claim it for myself to just be on the safe side. Or to grab the uninhabited systems between me and Furry Napoleon, even if it temporarily increases tensions. After all, if I have a superior strategic position, I can be nice, but if they do, I don't *know* they'll be nice.

If we had a high trust already maybe we could play nice together. Especially for things like choke points if we trust each other to keep the borders open. I can trust their high opinion is not going to suddenly vanish, just like a trust actual people in the real world if they show themselves trustworthy. But there's no easy way of enforcing "this is my space even if I haven't built anything here" and the ethical thing of letting them have some and trusting them to be future allies not enemies is scary when you have no way of enforcing that.

Multiculturalism

What I *can* do is seek reciprocal free-movement-of-people with other friendly empires, giving me more varied population, and hopefully fewer xenophobes. I'm excited to see who turns up! And my empire is set to accept refugees -- I'm not sure when that happens, but I'm welcoming ready. More population is usually good.
jack: (Default)
I saw someone on tumblr say "Be virtue ethicist toward yourself, a deontologist towards others, and a utilitarian towards policy". I can't find the link now, I don't think I have the words exactly right.

But the more I think about it, the more I think, "isn't that the perfect description?"

Types of ethics

I tend to think of myself as utilitarian, even though I know it isn't perfect. In fact, I tend to think of *everyone* as utilitarian, as I think most people find the good thing about an ethical system, that it makes things better for themselves and others. Even if there are people who genuinely don't think that "I will do the right thing even if I'm damned for it".

However I think a big dollop of the other ethical systems is helpful in practice.

Self

The thing is, most of the time you're not facing a stark choice, "A or B." You're facing an endless series of choices, some small, some big, and will never get them all right, from a mix of "I don't have the energy to decide every case perfectly" and "I'm not that much of a saint (even if I should be)."

So cultivating a habit of choosing a virtuous choice is most of the time, more useful than agonising over the individual choice. A lot of good happens because of people who try to always be compassionate and are compassionate when it matters. A lot of harm happens when people think, oh it doesn't matter that much, don't I deserve something for myself, and get caught out when it DOES matter.

Others

When it comes to how you treat others, you want to follow your virtue ethics, but you need to default to some deontological rules too, because consistency is beneficial: e.g. usually not imposing on people who don't want you to, even if you think it would help.

And when it comes to your opinion of other people's morals, you can judge their intentions, and please do, help them if you can, but in practice, you often need to judge their actions: if they act harmfully, you may need to protect yourself, them, or others, regardless of WHY they act harmfully. If they act virtuously, it's not productive to second guess them.

Utilitarian

And when you're considering policy, you often don't have the luxury of doing what seems right, if something else is proved to be more helpful in practice, directly or indirectly.

Hm, now I'm not sure it made as much sense as when I first saw it, but I still keep thinking about it.
jack: (Default)
"Oh, it wasn't offensive. It was a joke!"

How the fuck is this a thing? I mean, like, 100% of the blame is on bigoted knobheads who seize on any opportunity to run their mouths off at other people's expense and get away with it. AS WITH TOO MANY OTHER FUCKING THINGS IN SOCIETY! But, like, why is there a loophole here for people to exploit.

Them: Ha ha [racism]
Me: Don't say that. That's horrible.
Them: Oh, it's ok. I wasn't setting out to hurt people for no reason.
Them: I just wanted to hurt people because it's amusing to me that I can.
Me: Oh well, that's ok then NO IT'S NOT THAT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE HOW IS THAT BETTER IN ANY WAY?? SCREW YOU!!

Like, if you asked people, "can a joke be offensive" or "if someone made fun of you, is that usually ok?" or "if someone threatened you, but then laughed at you for it, would that make it ok?" they'd pretty clearly know the answer. But somehow "no offence, it was a joke" is a thing?

I think the thing is, it's sometimes a thing. Teasing friends is something most (but not all) people do some of the time, of mildly criticising things about their friend, or criticising imaginary things about their friend, with both people knowing it's not actually a criticism, is a way people often do friendship. But because human brains are cobbled together with rules of thumb and primate neurons, people do things without understanding them. So someone who makes fun of their friends (ok) or their friends who don't actually like it but they don't listen (not ok) or people they're don't even pretend to like but are bullying (not ok) or just everyone indiscriminately (no, still not ok) can kind of look the same if you don't turn your brain on for three seconds.

It can be hard to explain what's ok when, if people are used to just learning the code of behaviour for one social situation, and don't have the basic human empathy and decency to think "wait, maybe this was ok for person A and B but NOT for person C who constantly tells me how much it hurts them begs me to stop". But people should understand the difference.

Obviously people tell bigoted jokes because they can get away with it :( But why can they get away with it? Apparently because "it was a joke" is an explanation and implicit apology in one situation, people's brains just randomly imagine it excuses some completely other transgression. Like, just saying something that completely superficially sounds like a reasonable apology, and apparently that helps? Even though it has nothing to do with what they actually said?

Talking about offensive topics

In general, how might people talk about anti-X bigotry? Well, they might just say something bigoted about X people. That's obviously wrong. Or they might be an X person complaining that people say bigoted things about them. There's nothing wrong with that (although it would be better if they didn't have to).

Or someone might be talking ABOUT bigotry without actually SAYING those things. That's not inherently immoral, but you should exercise caution wrt (a) are you inadvertently perpetuating the stereotypes even if you're debunking them? and (b) are you forcing the topic on X people who might not want to relive all that right now. This is where advice like, "if it's YOUR pain it's usually ok to talk about, but if it's SOMEONE ELSE's pain, you should consider them first before jumping in with what you think" comes from.

And, surprise, EXACTLY THE SAME applies to jokes. Is a joke where the main content is "X people have negative characteristic Y"? I mean, that's a joke. It's not not a joke. But it's a joke specifically for people who have bigoted opinions. The problem isn't "it's a joke" or "it's not a joke", the problem is BEING BIGOTED.

Is it a joke, by X people, for X people, about bigotry X people experience? Well, not all X people will want to hear it, so step lightly, but X people generally get a say, and most people have at least some jokes about ways they're badly treated (mildly or seriously).

Is this a joke? Or is it offensive? WTF people? Is a tiger dangerous or is it stripey? Is the moon round, or white? People should stop being bigoted ALL THE TIME. INCLUDING when telling jokes.

When is this genuinely confusing?

Well, ok, I admit, there are SOME situations when you need a cursory knowledge of the topic in question. Like, if you tell a joke about a MILD criticism of someone, or a major criticism intended not to be taken seriously, or a tendency which is in theory neutral but you make a big deal of. Well, take a look. Is the joke only funny if you hate them and think they're worthless? That joke is probably NOT OK. If you described "why the joke is funny", would they mostly say, "yeah, that's me *self deprecating laugh*" without feeling coerced to do so? Then you should check with them, but you've passed the first hurdle to "should I even think this".

Tattling

Apr. 25th, 2018 11:05 am
jack: (Default)
A common thread on advice columns I've been reading is "don't think of something as tattling". But I'm going to unpack that a lot.

I think when that notion makes sense is when you *should* be able to fix something yourself. Like, whether you're dealing with children or employees, if A has a small-ish problem with B it's reasonable that they should start by asking B about it, not by asking someone in charge to intervene.

In retrospect I lagged behind at this pretty basic skill most of my life. But it is something it's good for people to learn (although as with many skills, it may help if you actually explain to A what they should do, not just say "not asking me" and leave them helpless until they spontaneously realised for themselves what they're supposed to do). And that sometimes A can't handle what you expect and you need to deal with the situation differently.

I don't exactly like "tattling" as a descriptor, but it basically fits the scenario that you should be able to handle this without intervention from authority. Although I wish there was a clearer separation between "asking for help because you're not as good at getting people to behave reasonably as average" and "asking for help because whenever someone makes a mistake less than perfection, you try to get them into trouble for it". To me those are quite different, even if they both involve the person in authority having to pay attention to the issue.

But the other dichotomy might be, where are you on a scale between "we're all in this together each doing our own role" and "we knuckle under authority because we have to." If the authority is unfair, violent, evil, etc. the de facto rule might sensibly be "don't involve them, except as a nuclear option". Think, if the police are likely to treat everyone involved badly, invoking the law isn't a clearcut decision. If the authority is fair and care about the people (like a parent hopefully is), you hope that involving them will help in any case where it seems useful, even if your peer is in trouble.

But obviously, people can have divergent ideas where a typical office job falls on this scale. Some people's viewpoint is very much, "just get a paycheck," and if their colleague is successfully scamming the boss, then more power to them -- they probably need the money and the ultimate owner's don't deserve it. Other people, whatever they think of the ultimate owners, hope the employees are functioning as a team, and deliberately doing a good job in expectation of being rewarded for it, and carrying someone who's not doing their share isn't something to automatically put up with.

Unsurprisingly the advice I see looks more to the second viewpoint, but I'm not sure when I should dismiss the first viewpoint or when I shouldn't.
jack: (Default)
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/

Axiology, morality and law

I'm not sure how standard this is? But Scott described a three-way breakdown between axiology, morality, and law. Axiology being "which actions are right and which are wrong". And morality being a set of rules for "which principles should you follow, such that you have correct axiology as often as possible"? Partly from a "I can't evaluate each situation from scratch" standpoint, and partly a "we need rules that let us coexist with other people even when we disagree" standpoint. And law being "which principles should be codified and imposed on people".

And if there's an overwhelming axiological imperative, that can override morality (eg. in general you shouldn't do something bad in order to promote a greater good, but if the good is REALLY REALLY REALLY good and you're REALLY REALLY REALLY sure, maybe you should make an exception and feel really bad about it later). And an overwhelming moral imperative can override the law.

But that it's definitely useful to have a law, even if it's not perfect, and to have a morality, even if there are cases where it doesn't work perfectly.

And many moral dilemmas are essentially, "do you have a precise cut-off for when a general principle should override the immediate benefit in a particular situation" (spoiler: no, if it was codified it would already be a principle).

Philosophy

I assume this is one of the cases where everyone who's read more philosophy than me says, oh yes, that's obvious, we just didn't explain it clearly before because you didn't know to ask. And also one of those where Scott's not exactly completely right, but brings up important principles I wasn't previously thinking about.

Offsets

Confusingly, this was brought up in the middle of a post about offsets which I thought was interesting but imperfectly explained.

He's talking about when you can make up for a bad thing by doing more good things.

He disagrees with someone elseweb, who says "you can do it for small bad things but not for big bad things". I'm with him so far.

He uses the example of carbon offsets, which is where I'm confused, because to me that's not offsetting the morality, that's offsetting the *action*. If you emit some carbon and then capture it again, I don't think you can cancel that out entirely before considering its moral weight at all. (Whether the carbon offset WORKS as advertised might be a trickier question.)

Then he goes on to say, you can't usually offset morality, because keeping moral rules is useful for its own sake (in cultivating the habit of doing so, in setting a good example, in a stable society), so if you break one, doing more good things is better, but doesn't really make it ok.

But he theorises that doing something forbidden by axiology but not covered by a more general rule in morality, *could* be offset by unrelated good actions. And that sounds like a reasonable guess but I'm far from sure.
jack: (Default)
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/09/the-lizard-people-of-alpha-draconis-1-decided-to-build-an-ansible/

Scott wrote another short story. As is usually the case, it's intriguing but there's also much to critique :) The aliens in the story develop great technology, and build an ansible out of negative average preference utilitarianism.

I have a lot of different thoughts inspired by this story. I don't think it's the sort of story where knowing what happens is a problem for reading it, but I will cut a detailed discussion just in case.

Spoilers )
jack: (Default)
I've had several conversations about why "secondary" is such a loaded concept in poly relationships and feel like I'm slowly getting how people feel. But still, I feel there's a lot that's important to people I'm missing.

1. Not enough

It seems like many people are starting from the assumption that nobody *wants* to be a secondary, and the concept is basically synonymous with "I'll probably want more but I'll settle for what I can get". And yes, if that's how you feel, then that might be ok, but there is an inherent source of tension which is likely

I never had that assumption, only as I've met a wider variety of relationships have I started to understand it. It seemed to me, some people had many parallel relationships (either a small number of permanent partners who are equal priorities in organising your life whether or not they're different in other ways, or varied relationships each negotiated individually etc). Or they had one or two main partners, and other partners as well, usually people who themselves had many other partners, or had other major commitments, or otherwise were at a point in their life where a relationship *might* become much more, but they weren't looking for more, they were looking for something which fit their life right now, even if they had limited time and energy.

But if every relationship is "I fall deeply in love" then it makes sense that anything other than deep and permanent is really hard. Likewise, if you only have room for one relationship, it's a very painful choice to be with someone who wants to be with someone else more, if that's not what you want, and either "they need to have room for their relationship with you to grow" or "they need to realise that they may not be kind by having a relationship with you" may be issues.

With the benefit of hindsight, that looks to me like, "here's a form of relationship that suits some people but not others, don't choose it if it doesn't suit you". But if you have no experience of possible relationships, and the only model you have is "A and B are the love of each other's lives, and C is there too but is treated with absolutely zero respect", it's easy to fall into that model, and come out feeling like it should be burned to the ground.

2. Negotiating from a position of weakness

The other thing I had to say is, it's common for a relationship (not romantic, any form of association) to involve people with different amounts of power. Sometimes that's seriously unfair, as in a bad boss and an employee who needs the job: the boss has every opportunity to take advantage, to not just be unfair but to manipulate the interactions to their advantage by changing the rules all the time.

Sometimes it's completely fair, as in A wants to date B and B doesn't want to date A: then B deservedly has completely control over who they want to date, and they may reject A politely and compassionately (if A is not a jerk) or harshly (if A is a jerk, or if B is for that matter).

"Fair" doesn't mean "half and half". Although in most healthy ongoing relationships, jobs, romance, etc, both sides get comparable good things out of it.

A relationship can be unequal. Say, A has young children, another partner, and many other commitments. And they have a fortnightly date with B, whose commitments are a lot more flexible. That's just how their lives are, no-one is deliberately being unfair. But it does turn out, B has more flexibility than A, so they end up rearranging things more often.

Now here's the distinction. At the moment A doesn't really have the power to offer a lot more time to B. But they do have the power to make arrangements respectfully, by being clear in advance what commitments they can and can't make. By being honest about what time they have. By being upfront that occasionally emergencies will happen but that won't be a default. By not changing plans at short notice and expecting B to cope, can we emphasise that one.

Maybe B *could* cope with that if they had to, but if A forces them to for no reason, or for unfair reasons like, "My other partner is jealous if I spend ANY TIME WITH YOU AT ALL so rather than talking about it I'm just going to constantly jerk you around in the hope that eventually they're happy", then A is not treating B at all respectfully.

The reason I mention this particularly is that it seemed to be a common complaint from people familiar with certain sorts of history, that A had apparently logical reasons why they needed to constantly change stuff around. But it's possible for A to be unfront about what's not really changeable, while also being respectful and communicative about everything.

This is obvious in some relationships: most people with friends know that sometimes a friends' job or partner need them right now, and most friendships, if you move away your friend will usually stay with their job or family, not move with you. And that's just normal: almost all humans have many relationships and give different things to different ones. But it's also normal that friends are not jerks about it, and (a) don't constantly talk about how something else in their life is more important than you and (b) make time for you sometimes and don't just cancel all the time without telling you.

Postscript

Hopefully this is obvious, but this is, me trying to understand many thoughts I've heard from different places, and not about any particular relationships of anyone (especially not anyone I know). Hopefully that postscript isn't needed, but I know it's possible for me to post "thoughts on X" and people to worry "is this about me".
jack: (Default)
Every so often I hear someone talking about modelling traffic jams as waves travelling in a queue of cars. After some thought, I came to some tentative conclusions, without having actually tried any modelling or anything.

Imagine a long long stream of cars along a somewhat congested motorway without much overtaking.

The first observation is, whatever you do, you can't really affect the car in front as long as you're driving legally/safely. And whatever you do, you don't end up significantly behind them: if there's any sort of traffic, the average speed is much under the fastest speed you could drive in an empty road, so you can always catch up with them. So whatever you do, *you* will reach your final turnoff shortly after the car in front.

However, over a long run of cars, it seems plausible (I haven't double-checked the maths) that cars driving at 30mph have a greater throughput than ones alternating 60mph and 0mph, mostly due to needing more than twice the distance between at 60 than at 30. That means that if traffic is dense, there's a natural tendency for small disruptions to sometimes get magnified, when each car reacts a little slowly to the car in front, and hence makes a slightly larger correction. Whereas if you go a bit slower and give yourself a bit of extra space when the traffic in front of you starts of but you suspect it's more stop-start, hopefully the traffic behind you will experience *less* disruption.

I'm not sure, does that sound right?
jack: (Default)
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/11/sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/12/clarification-to-sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/

Almost everything Scott posts is interesting, even when I disagree with it. Sometimes I decide I absorbed an important idea anyway despite superficial disagreements. Sometimes I decide he's just wrong, but said interesting things along the way.

Here he describes a case where a student group invited a couple of deliberately controversial speakers as a pro-free-speech point. This is probably a bad idea for a variety of reasons, whether it was well meant or not. But he and I were thinking of the details about *why* it was a bad idea.

Was that effectively pro free speech whether or not it caused harm in other ways?

His point was, separate to which ideas *should* be covered under free speech, deliberately choosing controversial ones uses up people's tolerance and moves us a notch closer to associating free speech with mostly being used for horrible things and make everyone dislike it.

And I'm sort of torn. Because on the one hand, that sounds completely true. Things that are sufficiently harmful are NOT covered under free speech (morally or legally depending on culture or country), and this is deliberately expanding that category by making potentially-harmful things a lot more of a problem.

On the other hand, defending horrible things as legal if undesirable feels like it sets a standard for free speech: we know other speech is ok, because we allow this.

Did it cause harm in other ways?

Everything above is true whether you chose speakers you personally sympathise with but don't want to say so, or speakers you massively disagree with but want to engage with. However, there's definitely an awful trend that when talk about free speech, they don't mean "lets invite some communists" or "lets burn some american flags". No. They mean, "lets find some supposedly-intellectual research which has been seized on by a rallying cry by the alt-right".

People attacked by the alt-right have done MORE THAN THEIR FUCKING SHARE of being attacked with little recourse. If you're convinced that inviting speakers who are incredibly threatening to a certain proportion of people on campus is necessary, can you at least choose some DIFFERENT subset? Invite some revolutionaries who want to guillotine people with inherited wealth. Invite some over-the-top animal rights types who want to bomb all non-vegans. Or, preferably, find views which are *controversial* but not *immediately threatening* to make your point with.

I originally tried to list some views which were very controversial to the point I can easily imagine protests etc about them, but (a) from all over the political spectrum and (b) not personally threatening. Some of which I secretly agreed with, some of which I hated. But I decided that would just cause a worse argument right now.

No we actually want to hear them, we're not just being controversial for the sake of it, honest

Scott talked about, if you actually *want* to hear a speaker, you should use different criteria than if you're trying to air controversial views. If you're being controversial on purpose, I feel you need a greater weight on "not harming people" in addition to "does this help or hurt freedom of speech".

But if you really want to hear a speaker, even one I find vile, I generally don't think banning them is that useful -- provided you do sensible things like, advertise to people who actually want to hear them, and for fuck's sake don't try to make it at some mandatory event, or even some organisation-wide event, to show you just want to have a speaker, not that you want to force a speaker on people who will be harmed by it. Most of the "bans" have been because people have been deliberately bullying people they expect to object, not because they were genuinely trying to have a quiet meeting and then got invaded by protesters.

Introverts

Jan. 18th, 2017 11:37 am
jack: (Default)
I've kicked this idea around before as a possibility, but I've been thinking more about it since.

People have a great tendency to expect to find underlying truths. Introverts and extroverts are *really* like this underneath. Men and women have blah blah bullshit different brains. Etc.

But my idea of introversion is almost the reverse. I speculate that it's best understood as a catch-all for people who are less social for whatever reason. Two axes I think of (I don't know if this makes sense for other people) is "how much you NEED interaction with other people" and "how EASY you find interaction with other people".

And some of that is who you are, and some of that is circumstance: lots of external factors can make socialising easier or harder, which forms a self-reinforcing feedback loop in how easy you find it. This would predict that some people who aren't that interested, some people who naturally find it difficult, and some people who are prevented by circumstance, are similar in many ways.

And it also ties into the "extroverts gain energy from interaction, introverts spend energy on it" idea which many people endorse. In my way of thinking, that's more of a consequence than a root cause, that you need it a certain amount, and it takes a certain amount of effort to do, and if it refreshes you more than it costs, it leaves you net positive on energy and if it's the other way round, you need a reserve of energy to spend on it.

For instance, I notice with Liv and I, when we're interacting with each other, we need quite similar amounts of time. We can spend a *lot* of time just interacting, but we both need a certain, not that large, amount of time having a break from it too. But it seems to me, Liv is like that with *more* people. Whereas the number of people I can interact with basically indefinitely is quite small.

So my theory is, some people don't *need* that much social interaction, whether or not they find it easy when they need to do it. And other people find it difficult to varying degrees, but act quite similarly when they're with people they *can* interact easily with, but vary in how often they are.

But I don't know if that sounds like it applies to other people, or just how it helped me to think of it.
jack: (Default)
I sometimes think of things I enjoy doing, just like things I need to be able to do, as skills. Not that the main enjoyment of reading a book is the challenge, but I think *some* of it is. I enjoy reading books where I DO have to work to follow what's going on, even though I enjoy that less often than I enjoy reading books that aren't as hard work.

But that partly means, I'm always slowly getting bored with the sort of books I used to like. Because if you can read the first few pages and say, "right, I bet the tough protagonist talks like an asshole but actually always does the right thing and the female lead flirts with him for some reason and the morally ambiguous manipulators switch sides several times but end up essentially working with the protagonist in the climax even if he doesn't like it", and all that happens, the only bits I'm really experiencing are the bits that *don't* fit into that mold.

And it also means, reading books in a different genre can be *difficult*, I need to consciously practice in order to follow when much more of the book is new to me. But rewarding, because a bit of practice can open up a lot of other books.

And it also means, "how much do you like this book" can vary a lot, "it's good, but only if you're familiar with that sort of thing" or "it's good, but you may have read it all before", can be the norm, not the exception.
jack: (Default)
Did I talk about this before?

Sometimes people you share a society (or a household) with are wrong about really important things. But it's usually best to say, if they're not harming *other* people, to allow your views to be known, but mostly simply let it go. For several reasons:

* Partly practical reasons, that changing someone's mind is often a difficult or impossible, so haranguing them is likely to make you feel better but not actually help, and mutually agreeing to suspend the haranguing unless you have time to talk about it properly is better for both of you.
* Partly humility, you can't be right about EVERYTHING, and how are you going to improve if you don't listen to other people?
* Partly morality: that imposing your opinion on someone else, even if you're right THIS time, erodes people's right to decide for themselves in lots of other cases.

Unfortunately, it's rarely that simple, because often people ARE harming other people, and you SHOULD try to fix it, but sometimes you're forced to compromise for now anyway just because there's only one of you and lots of other people and you can't overpower all of them instantly, and it's hard to find an acceptable compromise, but necessary to try to live in a society with other people at all.

However, whenever I recap the argument for tolerating opposing viewpoints in my mind, I always ask myself, "But what about people who DON'T agree to let it go and allow people to decide for themselves, people who insist their views MUST be imposed on you (whether for good reasons or not)?" As a practical matter, if you don't want to capitulate, you have no choice but to resist. But only recently did I admit, I basically had to accept, tolerating OTHER views as long as they didn't harm anyone else, but that itself was an exception, you had no choice but to impose "tolerate other views as long as they don't harm anyone else" on people if you can, even if you disagree...

Active Recent Entries