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On the way to surgery number x
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Natural Aristocrats hire lawyers with their UBI – then get murdered by Bolsheviks – The fifth Atlanta Slate Star Codex meeting notes
The fifth Atlanta SSC meetup was a success – there were two new faces for a total of five. We met at the usual place (Hodge Podge) and discussed:
- Industrialization – in a generic sense
- Technological unemployment (a lot)
- Inequalities in the criminal justice system
- Universal Basic Income (a lot)
- Gulag death rates – originally quoted as 5% – but that seems to be deceptive – see this link for more (short version – the numbers were juked – they would move the inmates about to die out of the camp when they were near death)
- Negative rights
- Humanism (I think described as socialism)
Thoughts that occurred to me after the meeting
- Is there any evidence that UBI creates something other than the negative social attributes attributed to welfare dependency – I think Native American tribes have something like this with gambling revenue, and Alaskans have something like this with oil – is there any evidence based on that?
- The government has a monopoly on the supply of law enforcement and criminal justice. Given how a person feels about that does that make you more or less inclined to give government a monopoly in health care, or anything else? Does that alter one’s opinion on extending government health care, or socialism in general?
- Is there a bias to being innocent in the courts? If so, then the point made about publicly funding criminal lawyers weakens.
There were many other topics – there was more ideological diversity at this meetup, but I’m too late in publishing this anyway. We shall begin the next meetup by creating useful definitions of socialism and communism before any other discussion.
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Yet another proud parenting moment
I put Doc Watson’s first album on Marleigh’s mp3 player. She’s been listening to it all day and I guess she just got to the W’s. She just came running over to me (in my office) and said (somewhat breathlessly, in a happy way) “Daddy, listen to this!”
A proud parenting moment!
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Quote of the day – yet another Williamson
From this blog post
What do the progressives want the authorities to do? Build a prison cell inside his prison cell and another one inside of that to create a turducken of felonious intent?
Turducken of felonious intent is one of the greatest word sequences ever.
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Crouching Dragon, Reading Daughter
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Overhead at the bank
Teller: but not Monday as it’s a bank holiday
Customer:what holiday?
Teller: Presidents Day
Customer: Huhmph, not this one
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John Boyd pegged the problem with technologists perfectly
I was listening to the sometimes great Hanselminutes podcast while working and sadly his “Algorithms of Oppression” interview came on. Put broadly it was about how how algorithmic bias can “shape the world”. It was terrible and it occurred to me that while every good technology podcast interview is good in a different way, every bad technology podcast interview is bad in the same way, namely the interviewee talks about their personal opinions on something, sometimes named as
- “their worldview”
- “the way the world really works”
- “the big picture
I’m reminded of John Boyd’s notion (paraphrased) “You must eventually choose to do something or to be someone, but not both”. To be notable in technology one has chosen to do something and when they talk about themselves (i.e. the way in which they “are someone”) their forced to talk about themselves (or worldview/paradigm/etc) and it comes up very lacking.
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Tin Foil Hats are Comfortable – the Fourth Atlanta SSC Meetup
Last Saturday we had the fourth Slate Star Codex Atlanta meetup, with two new members (yay) for a total of five. We rambled on for about three and a half hours. Topics included
- Guns
- The math of revolutions and violent uprisings (historically more likely than I’d ever actually thought)
- Negative effects of smoking cessation (one of my pet theories)
- Creating a regional form of government between states and the federal government (the more I think about this the more I like it)
- LARPing
- Nootropics
- Relations between police and the citizenry
- And many more
The title line of the meetup came from new member BJ. The next meetup will be in three weeks or so, probably in the same place.
Here are the links
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Disturbing google autosuggest
While searching about IIS settings
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Selective Lack of Sentiment is the Value-Add of Ideology
Kevin Williamson kicked off the thought process with this paragraph – referring to the Nation and Mother Jones magazines
Rather than bring out the best in them — the muckraking, the unsentimental view of American life made possible by a politics not excessively burdened by patriotism — President Donald Trump and his merry men have driven the Left deeper into daft identity politics and vague conspiracy-mongering. Where once there was Christopher Hitchens, now there is the “interactive privilege simulator.” That is not progress.
Which does raise the thought that it is the unsentimental side of an ideology that has value.
That would break out to
Liberals (not the populist left) contribute insight onto
- The military
- Foreign Policy
- The criminal justice system
- Come to think of it, anything involving flags and guns
- What life is actually like on the bottom
Conservatives (not the populist right) contribute insight into
- Education
- Poverty/anything even remotely resembling an underclass
- Anything involving the “intersectional/priviledge” – though that is probably a recent development
Libertarians (there are no populist libertarians) contribute insight into
- The actual working of the state, and it’s victims
- Insight about the planning fallacy, and central planning – that probably includes all of the insights libertarians have