timorl @timorl@qoto.org

@kino Same as with @freemo I'm curious of these instances. In particular are you sure these were actual leftists, not more trolls? If they were ignored it kind of... I don't know, sounds suspicious.

@freemo Huh, the last claim really surprizes me, Care to tell the story? I'd be quite interested.

If no innocents were accused of using it in a racist manner (which doesn't seem to be the case from what you are saying, but I still think it's an interesting argument in abstracto), then I'd say labeling it as a racist symbol was not entirely incorrect -- after all it was mostly racists talking about it, and no one should confuse people using it to just mean "OK" with racists. Contexts with hand gestures are not as clear as with spoken language, but they should be clear enough.
@kino

@freemo I actually didn't see that happen -- I know it was widely reported to be a white supremacist symbol, but I don't remember any innocent person being accused of being racist due to using it. And this makes some sense -- the contexts in which people are using this hand gesture normally are rarely ones in which you could confuse the message for "white power".
@kino

@freemo Side note, but the whole "👌" debacle is often represented in a way that doesn't quite reflect the reality accurately. The people who started the claim that it's a white supremacist thing were in part also white supremacists. I don't know what the exact proportions of just-for-the-lolz trolls to alt-righters were obviously, but there was enough of the latter, that I think this story can be described relatively accurately as "white supremacists adopting new symbol" rather than "trolls convincing journalists that white supremacists adopted a new symbol". I mean the trolls definitely thought they were doing that, so the truth is somewhere in between. And confusingly the white supremacists also thought they were trolling, as evidenced by the NZ mosque shooter -- he seemes to flash this symbol in some photos "ironically". But if you adopt a symbol "ironically" or "for-the-lulz" you still adopted the symbol...

@freemo
Isn't this a common trope in SF? Even Neon Genesis Evangelion uses it.

@freemo To weight in on the whole mumble vs jitsi debate I think you describe two slightly different goals, one better realized with every of those pieces of software.

Mumble is better for permanently hanging out. You can sit there muted and just wait for someone to join. There is a non-intrusive chat which can even be bridged to matrix (although the existing bridges would require some work to provide a nice user experience :/). The sound quality is extremely nice, the desktop client is lightweight, and even when many people attempt to talk at once the quality remains reasonable.

For a quick talk to resolve a discussion face-to-face jitsi is better, because you can actually see the faces (quite important when you want to empathize better). You can also create private rooms very easily and there is good encryption, so anything you say remains private (as long as no other participant records of course). Mumble has private rooms, but they are not intuitive at all. However, sound and video sometimes get desynchronised and laggy, especially under firefox (it's optimized for chrome) or in longer conversations with many people.

There is also a subtheme on nonverbal thinking and someone who claimed to have started thinking verbally halfway through college. A commenter stated that this story is obviously fake, as no one would be able to get that far in life without thinking verbally.

My wife (PhD in physics, still thinks nonverbally) was very amused by that comment.

An SSC post about the theory of mind as a technological invention. Extremely interesting.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/

@freemo The "rational" in "rational agent" has only a surface similarity to epistemic or instrumental rationality. It only requires following incentives, which seems to be part of human nature much more than actual rationality. Culture can modify mentality to add or remove various incentives, but I would be very surprized if it could remove "improve quality of live" from the list. So if less people manage to improve their quality of live, then either the US culture managed to change human nature significantly (which I very much doubt) or it became much harder to follow that incentive.

From what I can tell there are some reasons why the latter might be the case -- increased cost of education and medical care, lower wages in some sectors, other sectors either disappearing or becoming less accessible (deindustralization). All of those can be verified as facts (I had the impression that these are true, but I only looked for stats for a couple of them, so again I might be wrong). All of them mean that people have less resources (both money, time and also mental) to pursue quality of life improvements.

And regarding your stories of helping people -- although they are commendable, you gave them a very valuable resource in the form of your time and advice, so it doesn't relate strongly to solving the systemic problem. Considering your income, they couldn't really afford aquiring that resource without your charity. Maybe this approach could be scaled up (using more specialized, less expensive tutors; maybe as charities, maybe as government programs), but the attempts I am aware of failed to be effective. :/

@freemo Oh, also, I'm going to sleep, so I won't be answering for a while. This was already an interesting discussion, so thanks!

@freemo I don't believe you can explain that much with mentality. People follow incentives most of the time, and it's not that easy to hide the incentives from them. I mean, that's the whole reason free market systems work at all -- people follow incentives closely enough to be a decent enough approximation of the theoretical rational agents. And the places where the system breaks down are usually related to broken incentives -- tragedies of commons and such. If people's actions could be changed that much with mentality, then centrally planned communism would be achievable...

@freemo Yeah, I think we have hit our core disagreement here. I sincerily doubt the culture has shifted that significantly without the opportunity ecosystem changing. I have never been to the US, but "poor people are just lazy" seems like a terribly silly explanation.

@freemo That is the wrong statistic for this problem. The issue is how many people start out below middle class and stay that way, and what they get out of the system. The people who end up extremely rich are a statistical fluke from that perspective (not to devalue their work, they just make up a miniscule portion of society).

From what I understand the US social order used to include a relatively likely path from lower class to middle class, which was slowly getting less accessible over the years. (I haven't checked any statistics on that, but this is my impression from reading about US history. Please correct me if I'm wrong.) This was essentially a part of the social contract -- as you point out, this can be acceptable for the poor. But it no longer seems to work, so with this part of the contract gone it gets less appealing etc.

It's not surprizing you like the social contract when you get more out of it, symmetrically to what the poor people feel. I think this is "selfish" to about the same extent. You don't like changing the contract in ways which would make you take a pay cut, they don't like keeping it as it is in ways that keep them poor. And note the quotation marks around "selfish" -- I suspect you would accept changes to the social contract that would cost you a bit while increasing social mobility (if that was possible of course), and the rioters probably would have accepted some changes like that too (although they would have had to happen in the past). The fact this didn't happen is a coordination problem, 'cause politics is hard. :/ It didn't happen, and now we have cities burning.

@freemo Yeah, I wasn't expressing myself clearly and in that example revolting was the only possibility. The riots in the US are not really a revolt, that would need organization which is missing. The feudalism example would have to be significantly altered to reflect the riots better.

I mean there is this whole social contract which, in the US, concentrates on protecting property. If you have enough property to live comfortably (i.e. you are at least middle class) you get quite a lot from the contract and have good reasons to accept it. However, if you have significantly less than that, then the social contract gives you... not much. Not completely nothing, the US is not completely... anarcho-capitalist? But the cutoff where they get little enough to not accept the contract on good grounds is pretty high in the US. And if the social contract is bad for them, why should they feel obliged to follow its conventions anyway?

I should still stress I don't the riots are the correct way of enacting change -- in fact I very much doubt they will. I'm only trying to explain the surprizing support for them. People don't feel the social contract is fair, so they reject it or at least are not very bothered if it's broken. I postulate that if the social contract included more "terms" providing for people without much property, they would still feel obliged to uphold the parts about property being important despite not owning much themselves.

@freemo Bon appétit :)

@freemo Oh, and despite the extreme examples I don't mean extremes here. I'm trying to point out that the balance in the US is much more geared towards "property first" while in most of Europe it's much more geared toward "solidarity first". Neither are on the extreme end of the spectrum, and Europe doesn't have significantly more communal property than the US (I think?), but the social contracts are still visibly different.

@freemo I understand that perspective, but I feel it still ignores the core of what I mean (or maybe just disagrees with it on a very fundamental level). If you think of a social contract as a, well, contract, then people shouldn't be forced to accept it if the terms are ridiculously unfafourable to them. You wouldn't really call someone selfish for refusing to accept a contract with very bad terms. It's not quite the same with social contracts of course, but the perspective is not completely invalid either.

As a pretty extreme example consider feudalism. It concentrates on protecting the property rights of the monarch (for simplicity lets say in the Russian sense of owning everything in the country). The peasants get little out of this contract -- at best they get some protection from outside threats and the possibility to live relatively peacefully. I would say in this case they can break the contract (by revolting) without being labelled unusually selfish.

I'm not saying this is the main thing fueling the current US riots (and definitely not saying the current US social contract is as bad as the extreme feudalism example!), only it's an interesting perspective as to what form they are taking.

@freemo Oh no, that wasn't my point at all. I mean, I agree that this is related to selfishness, and someone completely selfless wouldn't do any of that. But my point was rather that countries/cultures in which social contracts concentrate less on protecting property and more on e.g. economic solidarity have people more hesitant to break the rules.

I encountered this concept fist in a discussion of homeless people shitting in streets. Since the social contract does not give homeless people literally anything (this was true at least for some of them in the context of the discussion) why would they feel the need to abide by even its simplest requirements? I think this situation is similar, although the contribution from this effect is relatively smaller.