Axis of Human rights v2.0

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Creating a framework for further social commentary on both tyranny, and human rights collisions.  A firm foundation to identify misuse of language to further tyrannical ends.

Landscape of economy of scale (the primary benefit of aligns with traditional centrist positions leaning toward Individualism.

Notice that left vs right are completely non-informational at this level of detail.  Claims of left or right tyranny in this language set are disingenuous at best.

Update 2/26/21: Understanding ideas graphically allow new ideas emerge.   I now know that focusing on what rights a law grants instead of what rights a law takes is corrupt and authoritarian.  A short path to a psychopathic government.

Update 2/26/21: Added ‘Bolster Prejudice’

Update 2/27/21:  Version 2.2 Annotated all sections with likely examples.

Update 2/27/21: It quickly becomes clear why Nationalism (a form of tribalism) is so revered.  It’s is a bellwether for the slide into Authoritarianism.  When it is no longer tolerated, the Overton window has moved toward tyranny.  BTW ALL authoritarian regimes pay homage to these levels of rights, even if they actively block citizen choice.  Try flying unofficial flags for your nation for example.

Update 2/28/21:  Version 2.3:  Been getting great feedback and that in turn is leading to my own ideas.  It seems left vs right is at it’s core a liberty level dispute over which natural human right is more important, property or currency.

Authoritarian’s Technology

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Authoritarians worship technology as a god. Technology is comprised of tools. A coffee mug, a manmade pond, a vehicle, a computer network, a government. An authoritarian values the output of the tool as it’s own end.

An individualist will see the tools as they operate. Measuring their utility based on how they accomplish a purpose. Function is directly derived from form. Recognizing the tool may contain compound decisions they may not or perhaps can not understand.

The authoritarian thinks they are benevolent. Standing on shoulders of giants. This could be true in some cases, but as complexity increases, so does the likelihood it is misapplied. The design data in the working tool is compound data. Narrow decisions made with broad data types for narrow applications. Because it is inexpensive and because it is simple to design as such. A tool can be, and will be, used in unexpected ways. Either as progress, or externalities. So in turn when the ‘applications’ of the tool are strictly followed, it blocks progress, or stymies adaptability to the inevitably unexpected or undesigned. Pure use can become a psychopathic, or top down, blockade to human rights

The individualist treats tools as suggestions. A machine who’s mechanizations were designed with a specific case in mind, perhaps with attributes or utility that were not foreseen. An individualist is a pragmatist in a tools limitations. Application, wear of use, maintenance, use as not intended. They spend their energy separating the compound data built into the design of the technology back into the most pure types available. It’s not that tools can not execute empathy when applied, it’s that it’s likelihood of doing so as time and externalities interact with it approaches zero.

A healthy society seeks empathy. Society will use some tools as intended. Good tool design strives for this. Some designs will be beneficial through unexpected utilities. Healthy society also gives people who will or can understand whatever technology, aka: the technocrats, the space to maximize that utility. It embraces expected outcomes while searching to elevate working knowledge. In other words it’s approach is as complex as is practical.

A healthy society may accept some authoritarian influence, but actively encourages individualism. Recognizing that tools and technology are a means to an end and not an end to themselves. The unexamined tool not only may begin as psychopathic in it’s applications required rigid hierarchy, but will certainly will become so with enough exernality and wear. Hierarchies that control and manipulate technocrats are the most suspect as ill design against a societies pursuit of empathy. A healthy society grants access to, or even provides technocrats with ownership of, all technologies. Early and often. Doubly so if they are the critical means of production on which all depend.

Authoritarians damage society by focusing on technologies strengths and ignoring their weaknesses, adding to corruptions gravity. A hierarchical structure is not a god. It can not be intelligent or empathetic in any lasting way.

The Axis of Human Rights

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When you realize that communism and fascism are just two different brands for the same product, this becomes obvious.  The game changing question is, how much of corruption’s gravity is comprised of psychopathy’s side effects.

Update 2/20 : Removed politically loaded libertarianism, for more inclusive individualism, which includes libertarianism,, anarchists, and populists, and possibly new systems.

Update 2/22: Added in tragedy of the commons.  It’s not always easy to reach, but individual rights can take rights from others.  More on countervailing forces to corruptions gravity in a separate post RSN.

Computer illiteracy is destroying democracy

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‘lies, damn lies, and statistics.’

You’re a monster. An authoritarian undermining democracy. Yes, yes, this is hyberbole. But is it? How did this happen? Odds are you are at least luke warm to democracy in theory. Yet you follow and support trends that rip into it’s flesh. Like some jungle predator with a face full of blood. A low information werewolf, who seems normal enough on a regular day. But periodically on a clear night, when the moon is full you are asked to vote. To support some idea put to the public. You wake up in torn clothing, covered in ‘I voted’ stickers, your integrity cut and bruised.

Generation X may well be the only generation who can see it. Anyone can be shown it, I hope, but only Generation X has a firm footing in both worlds. Generation X was the first generation to grow up with computers. They grok both automation and networks in a special way. Kids of the 80s remember seeming retail shrink wrap software and air gapped computers. Everywhere. There was no shortcuts. Your data quality defined your output. Type in the wrong numbers and get wrong answers out. Garbage in, garbage out, burned into our subconscious with toil.

Our computer world, before the internet world was lit ablaze with the web, mirrored the rest of the world. Statistics were garbage, or at least they could be. Open a newspaper, and some huge dramatic number would adorn page two. How many dead, how many tons of material, how many days until a trend reached a record. It may sound like our world now, but there were many such page 2s. The next week another chart, painfully explained would contradict it. It was understood that even one basic assumption change, either in the data or the formula changed everything. Boomers got this, the greatest generation got this, and so did Xers. We grew up in a self aware, analog world. A common culture.

Boomers didn’t grow up with computers. They knew what they were, sort of. Sure the tiny minority of computer professionals in that generation may share X’s perspective, but their youth was more rocked by the introduction of transistors, literally. X had a supercomputer sitting on their desk. Not cheap, not small, but a single desktop would have been worth waging war over just twenty years prior. They had the freedom to explore it, and more importantly, explore how people reacted to it.

Data inherently must have focus. Scope and scale matter. Forget that and you run out of memory, or bits in your data type. Ram and hard drives were tiny. Just big enough for an algo and some subset of data. You could only reiterate as many times as you can store. It was elegant and efficient or it failed. Eventually you realized, at some level, that elegance was a trade. Conflated data types. 3d perceptions smashed into 2d sprites. You made assumptions and you knew it. Everyone knew it. The bad assumptions were glaring. Mashed pixel art were unrecognizable and made games unplayable. Spreadsheets that wouldn’t produce even basic known outcomes with known good data. Programs looped forever. Generation X was computer literate, or in some cases they were forced to know they weren’t.

Along with the internet came more resources. Computers were still finite but growing faster than programmers could reduce their assumptions. Modems connected the world to mountains of code and data. An endless landscape of shared ideas and effort. Many mountains of garbage, but some with beautiful parks atop them. The children forever after would grow up in this connected world. Limited resources never explored, self reliance never tested. Air gaping was out of the question. The greatest became the latest. Not because younger people are lazy, as is often postulated, but because they can’t keep up. The mountains grow faster than any one person can shovel. You can copy someone else’s mountain in the blink of an eye, or if it’s big, the consumption of a cup of coffee.

An individual explorer may transverse the many mountains, but when a civilization builds a city atop, it collapses. A crash and screaming panic as sinkholes swallow up whole skyscrapers. It happened with Nazdaq founder Madoff, it happened with the USA Office of Personnel Management, It happened with Solar Winds, and it happened with first Diebold and now Dominion voting machines. Disasters unforeseen as cyber-security flies air patrols high above the skylines build atop faulty un-scrutinized code. The insider threat. Not from any one person, though they may participate, but built up from faulty assumptions. The mountains of un-examined code and data are the ultimate insider,

How did the ground under our feet become the an insider just waiting to defect? Conflation. Shortcuts, cheats and correlation without causation. Not scrutinizing the details because there are too many of them. An explosion of assumptions. The shoot from the hip idea that because there are experts, and they present detail, that detail is sufficient to understand all the important problems. People are drawn to the tallest, shiniest building, not because it has a firm foundation. It is un-examined. Instead it is a landmark in a rapidly changing skyline. A compass needle in a landscape so poorly planned that people run from landmark to landmark, lucky each time their presence is not their integrity’s grave.

Computers fail fast. So fast, that failure is the model. Instead of science and engineering, with both time tested models and scrutiny, computer code and data is slapped together. No loving examination is practiced. It’s a great model. A personal favorite. The wild west. Full of mystery and exciting puzzles. Chaos incarnate. Irresistible to the smartest humans suffering from perpetual boredom. Trying to find a solution, any solution, to any problem that temporarily blocks your goals.  Lewis and Clark mapping out the wilderness over and over. Subject to skill and talent, but also to random luck. So random that massive signs and tourists celebrate the rare occasion that explorers mapped out a path worth keeping as a superhighway later. Except with computers the analogy of time and pavement breaks down. The first path that works is the path the entire world uses. No additional exploration is attempted. The computers follow the trail at light speed, it’s path rarely explored again.

Thee data dumps and code fragments are not the product of scrutiny, but instead junky fragile prototypes, forced into production. Piled up in massive hills and mountains adorned with the structures of democracy. No one person can own the exploration of such a hill, nor can the structures on it be easily moved aside, so no one does this impossible work. It’s all great fast fun copying these broken structures, but it’s not a game. Real lives hang in the balance.

A computers code can be engineered as their hardware often is. Designed with degrees of precision. Understood from the bottom up. Scrutinized not just by someone, but anyone who has an interest. An effort including the entirety of the world. It should be the whole world, because human civilization pays the price when it is not. When a skyscraper or a city falls into a pit of chaotic or un-scrutinized code the world falls with it. That’s their city too. Same bad data, same bad code. Democracy needs scrutiny. Not only of it’s data, but it’s twisted winding algorithms. It can be played like a game but it’s not. If any system ever had malicious externalities, defectors with real menacing goals against a society, it’s democracy.

Psychopaths, foreign actors, and other profit motivated defectors can use the chaos of top down computing as subterfuge, but that’s not democracies worst problem. Many democracies have faced complex and inept bureaucracies before. It’s the problem of both speed and ignorance. Speed as poor or subversive ideas can become critical infrastructure in mere months, and ignorance, that a closed source code system allows this. I single out generation X as the lone guardians not because newer generations can’t know better, but because they can, and don’t. Nothing drills a point home like toil and suffering. Struggling to make the limited resources of tiny ancient computers sing for you. You can see the compromises plain as day. It seems people who did not have to make due, don’t know what they don’t know. An unknown unknown. Younger people think you can trust any computer code that works, and they are dead wrong. The biggest danger to the whole system is they don’t even know there are risks.

It’s not that network babies can’t demand open source code, or limited use computers, or code audits. I’m hoping it’s that they never even thought about the problem. They never once had to look at a computer and say, this isn’t doing what I need, and had to solve it by understanding the problem with more depth. They are drowning democracy in their unjustified trust of the machines that they depend on. Having been educated in a system that never questions authority, so long as it feigns casual support for individualism. Individualism that computers and their twisted code, doesn’t know or care about. If it feels good, it must BE good. A write once paper log of operations doesn’t make network babies feel good. The better than genetics certainty of digital signatures doesn’t raise their confidence because they were taught not to be skeptical in the first place.

It’s doesn’t end with ignorance of the unknown unknowns. The real tragedy is the technocratic elitism. The same exact system that produces the blindly trusting, produces their captors with the same exact philosophies. As feel good generations filter out their geeks with the knack for code, and socially isolate them from shared social experiences, they quickly come to believe that the rabble is grossly ignorant. Thinking they understand safety and scrutiny, they use it to justify subjugation. The shared delusion that all people are one behavior set tells the technocrats that the sometimes intelligent but misguided have had every opportunity to distrust and scrutinize their world. They must be managed, or even worse, re-educated. Technocrats who are elite from youth categorize their less adept social peers as if they were Non Player Characters in some simulation, dehumanizing them.  They need computerization to marry their misguided complex rules to their different in practice counterparts.  To thwart natural law and enforce their chosen norms.  The same norms that drive individual sovereignty and it’s derivative democracy.  Don’t just take my word for it, look how badly political polling fails for example. If the model worked, the projections would be more accurate.

Democracy as a system is rapidly dying. It’s no surprise as it’s a system of cooperation. Computers make bad decision making possible at a blinding and still increasing pace. Both in the design of the computer software, and in enforcing broken social paradigms sold as science. There is a solution, but tales, myths of another time, block it from taking hold. During generation X’s youth the public was not aware of how important computer literacy would become. Many companies won a lottery as rare ‘ordinary’ employees were promoted into roles where they revamped their companies computer code and data. The companies in question got lucky. They hired personnel that had not yet recognized skills, who in turn, returned the companies investments many times the worth of their salaries. They stumbled onto a gunslinger, just made for the wild west. This turned into a hiring spree, and then a crisis. Politicians the world over have made it a top priority to find every single geek that they can identify through programs like STEM. It’s exhausted the supply, isolating would be technocrats from interacting with their broader societies.

It’s time to recognize the truth. The public has few top gunslingers. Don’t take my word for it, test yourself. Make some time. Examine some code or some data. Make it behave the way you want. If you can’t that’s fine. I and nobody else should think less of you for it.

Stop trusting the technocrats. They can’t provide you with solutions to democracy, it’s not practically possible. Their system of design is semi-random and they can not audit it in detail, even if they wanted to, which they probably don’t. Big tech and big data did not grow, or was not designed in your interest. Know what you don’t know. I don’t care if you put computer specialist on your resume, but don’t you believe it. Don’t believe the tall tales of gunslingers of the 80s and 90s still apply.  Demand tangible proof of markets, votes, stats and anything MIGHT influence any sort of vote. Do not become someone else’s useful idiot. If they can’t prove it demand the code and the data. If you can’t understand it, and they can’t explain it where you deeply understand it, don’t vote for it.  Or with it.  Until they make a simpler model you can understand.   If you can’t grok the code, and you can’t see the data, the only way to protect democracy is to assume it isn’t sufficiently vetted, or honest.

There is a chance democracy can be saved. If you realize the truth. Democracy REQUIRES more skeptics than our society requires technocrats. They are vital to peace and progress.  It doesn’t even matter if you are not genuinely a skeptic, but democracy can’t function if you don’t act like one.  Your smallest culture doesn’t make you better, and that goes double for the technocrats because of how their business model operates. That criticism and doubt from common society isn’t just important to democracy, it’s the only thing that keeps it alive.

Hegelian dialectic can be used to manipulate voters into tyranny

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The deeply unscientific idea that all people are potentially ‘good’ undermines and distorts modern societies.  While many conflicts between humans are learned, some are genetic and can not be unlearned.   At best they can often (not always) be restrained with continual effort.

With the shelter of the inaccurate pure ‘nurture’ or pure nature, intractable differences in behavior beget intractable differences in opinion.   Including in matters of life and death.  Like any systemic lie an opportunity for the unscrupulous (and a trap for the unskilled) is presented.

Hegelian dialectic can be used to manipulate voters. Here is how.   

1. THE LONG CON (perform infrequently):  Two groups of voters who oppose each other on life or death issues are needed.  Create a 2 way false dilemma with life and death stakes.  The stakes should be real, their opposition to each other (or exclusivity) need not be.  You can’t keep a group together on the premise of opposition alone, they must also have their own equally grave identity.  One group is for A and against B and the other is for B and against A.  Use guilt based on their own culture against them to manage defection rates.

2. REINFORCE CONFLICT:  Since most politicians will support either A or B to win the entire voting block, the only group in play are independents.  It doesn’t matter who the independents are or how many there are, just that roughly equal parts consider A and B ‘their one issue.’  Ideally A and B should not reflect your meaningful goals.

3. ATTRACT ATTENTION:  Independents inherently reject A and B as a valid dilemma, since that’s what makes them independent.  Poll independents to find out what their current common desires are.  Big events may be needed to quell their typical skepticism of authority.

4. CREATE/ALLOW A STRAWMAN:  that wants to take away independent desires. Keep a bullpen of strawmen are always ready.  This may take a while as independents are more savoy and will reject a cartoonishly evil strawman.  Their motives and their threat must look real.  A real but manageable threat is just as effective with less risk of discovery, so if one does arise, allow it.

5. PRESENT THE RINGER:  Present the actual target politician or law as a solution to the strawman.

6. PERFORM MAGIC:  All magic is distraction or misdirection.  The politician(s) will openly advocate for more power in the sectors LEAST important to independents at the time.  This needs to be presented as winner take all or a prisoners dilemma.  The core idea is if you don’t support the the Ringer, you support the strawman.

7. CONSOLIDATE POWER, REASSESS: ‘Vanquish’ the Strawman.  Verify the long con is still viable.  Work to preserve it as long as you can, as a new long con may take an entire generation to become stable.  If the long con is viable return to #2.  If not build a new long con.  Return to #1.

8. CONQUEST:  Eventually independents will have cycled through the all the powers that matter to you, the would be dictator/oligarch, and the system, their power, and rights will be yours.  The entire system will now be pegged at authoritarianism, and left/right swings will be at your discretion.

Voters can beat this slow march to tyranny.  

A. NEVER BECOME A SINGLE ISSUE VOTER:  (A not B, or B not A).  The A/B group (often single issue voters) have NO influence unless extraneous events end the effective dilemma.  If you can’t manage this, don’t vote.  A vote for externality is a vote for fantasy.  Deny the temptation at simplification.  Always be an independent.  Always have AT LEAST 3 key issues define who and what you will vote for.  There are hundreds with life or death stakes, you can find three.

B. REJECT BINARY CHOICES:  Always demand a third way.  A third bill.  A third party.  Alternatively, not now, later, is also a third way.  Procrastination has power.  Deadlock can stall the machine on step #7 IF the strawman is not a real threat.  Demand more information. Democracy dies in darkness, sometimes from stalled strawmen who turned out to be a legitimate threat after all.  Approval voting can greatly reduce winner take all, gerrymandering, and negative character (potentially strawman) politicking.

C. REJECT CALLS TO AUTHORITY AS VALID ARGUMENT:  The purveyor of an argument should have NO bearing on it’s qualities.  This is the significance of truths being self evident.  This is how power structures are used retain the power stolen from independents.

D. LIMIT TERMS:  Maintaining A/B dilemmas and managing the bullpen of strawmen is complex and expensive.  The longer the consecutive term, the easier it is to influence and front run social change.  An illicit funding channel is most likely to be discovered at it’s onset.  Further, the black market to nurture that funding may be complex and fragile.  Both short terms and and approval voting create opportunities to add externalalities to defectors hence protecting democracy.

Why this matters now, and hopefully never again.

When number one, or the long con has been damaged or dismantled there is an opportunity to reject the next long con.   In my opinion this has happened in 2020.  For three generations Americans have fought over two life or death issues in pro-choice/pro-life and right to bear arms/gun control debates.   A false dilemma, used for the long con.

Time to form a new debate.  A debate to end strawmen.  How best to avoid corruption, and how to protect us from economic collapse while reducing it.  If we don’t people will react the same way they always have during massive corruption.  Folding their arms and sacrificing economy of scale in order to starve the corruption out.  Except this time, it all ends in meltdowns of the hundreds of nuclear power plants and the death of the planet.

All people are not good.  And you can’t detect who is not with your five senses at a distance.

Time to recognize currency as a human right.

The death of facts

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trusted

 

Them’s the facts jack. Facts are facts. Or are they. Fact checkers love to write their own checks, but who checks them? Other fact checkers? That’s a tangled web, and at any scale sovereignty, and then authority, begins with you. As always the most important question isn’t who, but how. How we determine what the facts are, determines the quality of our reactions.

Many people care about facts as weapons. A way to zing their enemies. The repugnant selfish theater better known as politics. They don’t contemplate broader risks. Absurdities enable atrocities. The fields of facts are filled with Pyrrhic victories. Battles won at cost of humanity’s common war against risk. The truth and the broad shield it provides us is damaged. What does truth shield us from? Many interim horrors, but ultimately, mistakes we can not come back from.

Inherently, there can be no greater risk than irreconcilable error, should facts go awry. All risk ends there. Facts are important, possibly the most important to a shared social system. The only thing that can correct irreconcilable error is externalities. Waiting for some black swan to save you is inherent failure. Not because saviors don’t exist, but because you learn nothing and therefore accomplish nothing if you strictly wait for them. Trying and failing to understand still often makes progress. You need to act even if the facts do not favor action.

Unknown unknowns

How do you act without or in the face of apparent facts? The temptation may be to vette the facts further. It seems like a positive action, and it could be. But as the earliest politician showed, fact finding can become a fool’s errand. If your premise, or other contributing facts are flawed your result will be skewed, possibly multiplicatively. A trace of poison can ruin the whole water supply. Finding facts objectively, at a glance, seems improbable.

There are a few structures by which to find facts. Only in rationalism can facts be found objectively through strictly logical constructs. Empirical evidence depends to a degree on perspective, and attributes and quality of the senses. A rubber ruler at best. Skepticism can never create a test it can pass, because it’s nature is to doubt everything, including the test itself. You can’t create a useful system of rules, you inherently can’t trust. Determinism can indicate there are immutable facts, but you can’t measure inevitability, only likelihoods approaching inevitability. It may be true, but we can’t measure it completely, so we can’t create a fact with it. So rationalism it is.

Determinism while maddening can be useful. There are no determinists. There are only people who think determinism is the most likely explanation for events and attributes, by a very wide margin. They can’t know every quantum outcome at the sub-atomic level that create the molecules in their brain cells, they can only imagine the parts at that scale working together on an impossible to simulate universal scale. It’s too big for simulation or calculation. Which reveals our final opponent to rationalism, pragmatism.

While many people treat facts as deterministic, they can be, and are pragmatic.  What actually performs and gets good results?  Based in an incalculable world, all things deterministic are in fact an odds game and actually pragmatic. This presents a problem for rationalism. Scope. Just like determinism can only approach the probability that it is true, rationalism can only approach the totality of relevant facts. It may, and mathematically will, miss facts. But don’t just take my word for it, rationalism died with the renaissance man. Once humanities best minds determined the entirety of human knowledge is not knowable to any one person  more than a century ago, it follows that nobody can have or even honestly claim to have, all the facts. The concept of incontrovertible facts died, when the scope of human knowledge exceeded one very smart person.

As this is Civgene, I can’t help but present a second argument. The real way I knew to look for the death of facts. I know all the most intelligent human behavior is partly driven by rationalizing subconscious impulse. Our conscience, indicated by our lack of psychopathy, is a probability engine. Churning out likely answers to puzzles by comparing unlike things in our memories and nudging us. We then in turn rationalize or externally explain these insights. Reason without conscionable  impulse is just rationalism, and that psychopathic fashion of seeking truth is, incomplete at best.

Known unknowns

So we know facts can be false, and can’t be proven completely true, but we have to act. What to do? We should use facts, but we should encourage competing facts. How can they compete? By shrinking the scope of society so that sets of competing facts can play out. Experiments when possible, but predictions when not, can scientifically vette facts. It is healthier to act, than to simply wait for a system of incorrect facts to grow large enough to induce a catastrophic failure. By letting people choose their own results, you prevent moral hazard to truth, or disintegration of the idea of objective truth. Whether it’s distortions originate from gaslighting or subtle errors, top down facts chip away at the viability of approaching objective truth.

An idea oriented fact finding process should be encouraged, not a blame based one. Since all people with imagination have ideas, consensus facts should be shared. Consensus is when the vast majority of people see a fact as true, not only people whom you agree with. Some ideas may conflict. To progress materially or spiritually, you may need to limit the scope of people who are considered for your consensus. People outside this technocracy’s scope should not be considered when achieving a local consensus, but also should not be indoctrinated by the technocracy. Attempting to achieve broader consensus through ideas can expand your scope, but if blame encourages a faux consensus, it damages the viability of objective truth. Smashing anyone, much less your political enemies, in the face with truths they can’t understand hurts the viability of future consensus, and creates castes or classes, the quick road to oppression, oligarchy, and massive inefficiency.

Again as this is Civgene, I must point out civgene had predicted this. Behavioral pairs (consionable humans compared to the animal kingdom) indicate that human rights originate from the differences between humans and all (possibly most) other animals and psychopaths. Primarily adding a time component, future, present, and past to current animal social structures. Property, investment, freedom, friendship, currency and their derivatives, money, markets, specialization, and economy of scale all indicate a right to fork. Allowing hierarchies, like oligarchy and technocracy to interfere with these rights, denies people the opportunity to act naturally human, and benefit maximally from it. Faulty (or false) facts compete with and even eliminate these behaviors. Bringing us closer to psychopathic simple animal behaviors as cumulative distortions grow.

Known knowns

If faced with opponents to your facts, approach them with ideas of process for resolution (ideally scientific), or don’t approach them at all. If a fact is rejected, the blame lay with the explainers understanding of the fact, not the challenger. Many things can be, and have been wrong with specialized and local consensus facts. Deception or defection for power or political gain, scope errors or missing information, empirical errors, or simply low intelligence actors may have forced superficial consensus before a broader population could be brought in through understanding. The highest orders of industry, government, science, and other hierarchies have been disastrously wrong about facts for centuries, before. Destroying public trust. Pushing a fact you can’t explain can have subversive results on our very ability to agree on anything, and possibly our health and safety. An obscure fact is safer for the social fabric than a profound distortion. An obeyed dictate, posing as fact, is possible, but comes at difficult to reverse cost. Destruction of trust.

Much good has been done by small groups of technocrats using a common base of facts to discover new truths. Find like minds. Mankind’s greatest discoveries languished for decades in obscurity, even when in common use, or while enjoying tremendous financial success. All based on facts that still to this day do not share a public consensus. Who, what, when, why, and especially how, can all be wildly changed by the tiniest change in the underlying facts. The truth does not suffer from a lack of attention. Only you do. You can not conquer this problem alone, so seek like minds to build on your facts and compare your performance to other societies technocrats, with different assumptions, I mean ‘facts.’ The public mind is a contest of ideas, and the only sure way lose it is to attack the contest itself.

Cult deplaforms, uncult replatforms

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replaformed-4-f

What is a cult? It is a faith based organization that disallows exit. The open secret is that faith need not be supernatural, but can easily be theoretically provable, and yet still be just faith. Since human science controls are typically unethical, political organizations are faith based. Even worse, fundamentalist political organizations that are both corrupt and more focused on rules than identity may make exit impossible, becoming a stealthy cult.

The human conscience grows stronger to recognising risk as it is exposed. In some cases opponents may be few, but unanimous political support at scale indicates oppression. People then carry the flag of their faith based organization as though it gives them wizardly powers of truth, joyous in their lack of opposition. In reality they are supporting an organization that limits opportunities for external criticism and has removed the opportunity of exit of their perceived opponents. There are always externalities, a lack of their observers indicates the absence of freedom.

When a rule focused hierarchy faces opposition of it’s procedures or plans, it’s mechanizations slow. Warnings elicit groans and frustration from committees and meetings as the cost of ordinary business begins to rise. Risk/impact analysis can elude even well meaning actors and resources are squandered. If a hierarchies leaders are flawed through incompetence, naivete, or actively defecting, the hierarchy can suffer and ultimately fail.

If they hear every risk, resources are squandered, but if they miss even one high impact risk, the result is the same. Hierarchies need to get this right. High frequency risks have high currency(social or monetary) rewards for discovery, a feedback loop is naturally created. The low frequency risks are the ones that pose typical systemic threats.

Cults are dangerous because the low frequency risk examination is blocked with ultimate authority, or in other words, physical force. Just like any hierarchy it blocks the disruptions caused by low frequency risks to cut costs (or something worse from corrupt psychopathic defectors) You have been deplatformed, so you can not repair the system, and because it is an ultimate authority, you can not exit it. Traditionally, all non mainstream thinkers are trapped in cult.

This systemic risk has been accepted because of a lack of resources to correct it. Books and widely distributed publications, and the freedom of speech that protected them, have been the only externalities. These publications require enormous resources to utilize them. A lifetime can be spent popularizing a single externality enough that public pressure forces the review of it’s risk. Thanks to technology, this limitation is no longer the case.

The Internet has the power to be the uncult. It can identify the intent of ‘cost cutting’ to ignore or externalize low frequency risks. Risks without feedback loops no longer need to be deplatformed, they can be replatformed. Hierarchies can no longer hide behind natural resource limits. A simple address, redirecting people to low frequency risk resource sites can be employed for no cost, rather than cutting them off all together.  Use their old platform to point to their new one. Allowing people to explore the risk for themselves, possibly leading to a failure avoiding fork.

The only coherent argument against this policy in general, is the lack of people’s ability to govern themselves in democracy, which I wholly reject. Democracy works because hierarchy attracts psychopaths and their behavioural spectrum, and the furthest people from that center are the least likely to harbour opportunistic ill intent. Make a personal change, absent clear and present danger, only accept the uncult. Hierarchies that replaform instead of deplatforming. It’s free, so anything less is a rejection of the viability of democracy itself.

The peril of hope.

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When is hope helpful? A simple explanation of hope is a wish. Wishes, ungrounded, lend to magical thinking. Magical thinking being when insight or intuition is used without attempting to apply rational knowledge and logic. More specifically hope is projection of bliss into the future.

Future bliss sounds noble. It is desirable for all humans and animals. Everybody wants bliss. While the utility of perpetual bliss is unmeasurable, it’s likelihood is not. Even in perfect systems life is subject to random events. Scarcity and suffering, to at least a small degree is inevitable. Never ending bliss is practically speaking, a fantasy.

The human conscience is a risk engine. The wider the variety of data, both positive and negative in perception, the better it is at assessing risk. Negative events do not need to be directly experienced, though, those are more powerful. Humans can learn from others negative experiences, if we have access to them. Hope is a strictly positive spectrum. It’s lens filters out negative experiences. While a person is still forming emotional prototypes, the fewer negative experiences they have, the more poorly they will handle them.

The conscience catalogues our memories as an emotional timeline. Rational recall of memories evoke emotional states and emotional states evoke memories.  Magical thinking, most typically in children, is a lack of reason. Rational thinking does not reliability examine’s the conscience’s insights. Until the ‘age of reason’ (typically 8 years old) children can not reliably process their own insights and check them for provability or even explain-ability. A lie told to a young child is a lie believed, wished and hoped.

A conscience tuned with exhaustive reasoning usually provides a moral compass for the future. Hope sidelines this process. It provides a seemingly moral workaround, but only justified by a hope coloured incomplete risk engine. As adjunct to faith (knowing something you can’t prove) it bolsters ideas that have already survived reason. Without reason and faith, hope is effectively magical thinking.

Unreasonable and reasonable hope

  • Unreasonable hope: Insight(bliss) -> logical mind -> bliss based rationalization -> more bliss
  • Reasonable hope: Insight (a blend of bliss, despair and will to action) -> logical mind -> rationalization -> faith or fact (successful reason) -> faith (facts don’t need hope) -> reasonable hope (hope that’s been through the process of reason)

Hope is self perpetuating, and inferior to reason driven and inherently sceptical faith. It may occur if no emotional rewards are provided to children for challenging magical thinking at the age of reason along with emotionally negative events. It is impossible to weigh risk without negative examples for comparison. All scenarios do not need to be personally experienced, that’s both cruel and rejects the validity of imagination and empathy, but without some personal loss, imagination has no prototypes by which to scale despair.

Hope’s legitimate utility is a stand in for faith, in those too young or innocent to reason.

Reject hope as a substitute for reason by exposure to limited experiences with pain. Ideally in small, short, doses. Such as quality parenting allows. Once your prototypes are formed, seek limited exposure and understanding to the worst humiliations of others. Not habitually, but enough to maximize the risk calculating yield of your own failures. No level of competence is above failure. Infallibility is a sign of hope substituting for faith, and that is a hope based fantasy. Periodically go to your fear. Ground your hopes in faiths both provable and unprovable. Understand the pain of carrying truth alone. Now your conscience has been seasoned with realistic risk. If you don’t, your conscience has no idea what you are in for.

EDIT: A Warning about faith.   A healthy, stable society can help steer you away from poorly rationalized faiths (via shared faiths), but that can fail.  They can be destructive too.  Faith without quality reason is a setup for witchhunts, cult, and every downside to both logic, and hope.  Only active curation of the metamind(the conscience) can result in reason, and ultimately that curator must be you.  Know yourself.  Start small and focus on the most inclusive compassion ethics and logic allow.  Think long and often, act deliberately, and face, ‘The ends don’t justify the means,’ before you act.