jack

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.

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?

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... )

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).

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.

"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".

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.

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".

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.

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.