barkayb

UPB doesn't present rape and murder as axiomatically bad. It doesn't depend on these to make the claim. Is it preferable to rape? Yes, probably for some people. Is it preferable to be raped? Nope, by definition. Would you like to be raped? (that is, sexually acted upon in a situation that you would refuse if it was voluntary) Since it's not preferable to be raped, then the proposition of rape isn't universally preferable. For a behavioral proposition to be universally preferable, it must be preferable by both the actor and the subject. (Preferable means "could be preferred"). UPB is mostly (a less vague) an expression of the golden rule -- don't do to others what you would have not liked done to you. You can test your ideas, at least most of them, in a situation where someone else was to run the scheme and you are the subject rather than the actor. You can definitely measure what things harm you. These things that would categorically harm you will harm others too, and if you do these then others will not trust you, just like you wouldn't them. Ultimately, harming others comes with a cost to your reputation. Harming your reputation is harming how well the environment receives you -- whether you're in jail, what sort of circle of friends you're in, which jobs you can get, who and how much they are willing to invest... Harming your reputation is harming yourself. No emotions required to figure this out. I personally like to see behavior between humans as a protocol scheme between nodes in a distributed system as an engineer. If implementation of a behavior will break coherence then it is invalid. How can the task be achieved while maintaining coberence in such system? Hopefully this contributes some inspiration

I think what bothers me is just that. The way that they hijack the terms. It makes it dangerous to use these terms to present yourself. I used to say that I was an atheist until I discovered it comes with more meaning than just non theistic. So now I present myself as secular, maybe at my own peril because I can't know what that means or what meaning it will carry in the future. To illustrate the distinction, if we versioned the ideas or postfixed them to disambiguate differences between each group that joins in, then for example, I would likely have no problem with people who took on Libertarianism 1-3, Communism 1-3, Atheism 1-3, etc.. But I would have a problem with the people who take on Libertarianism 4+, Communism 4+, Atheism 4+, Feminism 4+... Assuming that these have mostly lost any philosophical relation with the original idea. Here in Israel we used to have a lot of communities called Kibbutzim (many Kibbutz), some of these still exist today. A Kibbutz is basically a communist group that exists within the free market, in a voluntary fashion (you can join or leave). A Kibbutz offers some social benefits for members such as housing, food and the like, and will keep caring for them when they're older. A Kibbutz finances itself, by the works of its members, like a company does. I don't have a problem with this type of communists. They're great. Some people like this lifestyle and they don't live at anyone's expense but their own. (That is just to show that even communism might not be at its essence what we get served with, and that when reasonable people do it, it's not bad at all.)

I agree with the leader/follower perspective that you've presented, except for one part: I claim that at each growth iteration, the new follower "leaders" actually ambiguate/divert the original direction of the group, to satisfy the collective fantasy, which makes it easier for a new mind category to join in, and that in turn shifts the collective fantasy to become less and less rational, in a cyclic fashion. So in my claim, they don't strictly adhere to the original front, they actually move that front away from the original with every step, while using the same label. If someone tells me that they are Feminist today, I dont know what they believe: maybe they just want no gender references in the law? But likely, they believe that women should get as much money as men do while working less. Because that group is bigger and uses the same name (despite the significant differences in their ideas of promoting women) We now see a rise in popularity toward Libertarianism. Whole groups of people who have nothing to do with voluntaryism who took upon hating the state. It's very interesting to see where this will go. An exact clone of Stefan Molyneux, goes by a different name though. Born out of a late-night brain fart Thanks for the correction.

Every now and then we see Stefan talking about how he was wrong about [insert ideology here]. What I propose is that Stefan is not really venting about followers of the ideology in particular, but rather, followers of a strategy of choosing an ideology. It's the same category of people that get the intervention. Most of these popular ideologies begin with a good idea, that is not so easy to consume at the time and goes against popular opinion. At that early stage, it is very intriguing for people of cognitive depth who can understand the argument and see the truth in it, but very hard to consume for people who lack in that regard. So at that point the tiny ideology group is made up of very philosophical, high-confidence, rational people who are unable to contradict the new truth that they have discovered and will sacrifice for moral consistency without being backed by anyone, with no movement to follow or to get support from, or socialize with... As the group grows, it slowly becomes more accepted (or less rejected) and its idea becomes lighter to consume because there are more people who explain it and convince others to join in. Each layer of "recruits" depends on the previous and enables the next layer, and comes with an increasingly higher rate of people who aren't joining in for the truth and consistency of the ideology, but rather, for example, for reasons of appearance, association, novelty, originality, and other such fallacious appeals. Eventually the same people who we didn't like in the other groups, who behave aggressively and irrationally, carry the new label, and they become the majority of the group. For instance, these same religious people who were aggressively imposing their religion on others are now doing the same thing while calling themselves atheists, distributing invalid arguments for atheism and picking on believers. They saw religiosity "losing" to atheism so they switched. For each person that I like, I'd like them just the same if they happen to be religious or atheist or socialist or libertarian... And for each person that I dislike, I wouldn't like them more if they change their minds -- they'll be just as irrational and aggressive and unempathetic no matter what they associate themselves with. Any popular or "winning" group is going to get filled up with the same group of switchers, and will become largely irrational and aggressive. What do you think?

Working with sensors and deriving meaning from from them by writing code sort of gives you this view. Yet, he dangerously makes a disconnect there between your experience and what's there. We can build machines that error correct or error detect via cross-validation, and as a human you do that as well. Your view of reality is certainly coherent with what's there. You cross-validate this with other humans, via machines that aren't even human, with the multiplicity of your own sensors (you see, and feel a thing). He's talking about representation, but representation is meaningless -- the mere distinction between things and the ability to create sub-meanings is what matters. So yeah, maybe your green is another person's red, so while you look at the same object, you see green, and the other person sees red, but you both call it green, because his red is everyone's green. I ask, what does this representation matter for? So to me, this is an interesting idea but it's not useful for anything, it's just a belief that connects to nothing actionable and that has no impact on any other belief.

Seems like there's a title trend going, I'm not the one to break it My name is Ben, I've been programming since I was about 13, and with that, finding common denominators in things and universalizing patterns/hypotheses/algorithms/reason has been a way of life for me. Not sure which led to the other, but I most certainly appreciate coherence as means of narrowing down on truth. I also contribute to one of the most popular relationship advice chatroom/channels as a moderator and have had the chance to examine hundreds of stories from people who experience the same range of problems manifesting in various forms. This provides me with a certain level of cross-validation to the propositions made by Stefan on his show. My immediate hope is to use this forum as an outlet for receiving scrutiny/feedback for my ideas, thoughts and personal discoveries. Thank you for reading.

In a previous topic of mine, I've started a discussion regarding the idea of keeping value from being slice-able by governments (or any third-party, like Mafias, I guess). The main example was pro-bono work, which is indivisible and arbitrary in value, thus making it difficult to tax or inflate. An idea of mine which I'd like to discuss, but has a many-to-one relationship with the aforemened post is making pro-bono work divisible, and perhaps somewhat more secure, but still maintain value arbitrarity. An "obfuscated" certificate would be a promise for work or goods, for example. If I am a jewel-maker, then I can perhaps issue a certificate that looks as follows: John Doe Jewels Promise for 5 x Light jewelry work category Authenticity details: [Promise hash] [QR code] You can use the QR code to check for current ownership, and perhaps predicate change of ownership based on that another certificate is similarly predicated, or issued thus commencing safe trade. These certificates are not very divisible, but they still are somewhat divisible (more so than whole products), and they still maintain arbitrariness in terms of their value. They could be inflated, of course, but that can be prevented (along with scam businesses) by having co-signers which insure or partake in the formation of the certificate: John Doe Jewels Promise for 5 x Light jewelry work category OR Mary Jane Bakery Promise for 20 Medium Baked Goods OR ... Authenticity details: [Promise hash] [QR code] So in this example, Mary Jane Barkery, a business which trusts and affiliates with John Doe Jewelry is co-signing the certificate by saying "These 5 x Light jewelry... - Are worth 20 of my medium baked goods, and if John Doe won't take the cert, I will, for the specified goods.", therefore each of these businesses are insuring the customers of each-other, thus forming trust in that the promise will be followed. What do you think? Are there any intrinsic problems besides the value ambiguity with this sort of trade system? What would it take to make this sort of trade system illegal? I am hoping for that expressing illegality for it would be extremely difficult without making it illegal for children to exchange candy, or making it illegal to serve dinner to family. Do you have other better ideas? Similar historical attempts that have failed? (Or, succeeded?)

Hello everyone, For a while now, I've had some thoughts that mostly take off from the idea that the entire manifestation of the state, and all of the social programs rely on the participation of the working class, and the ability to freely slice purchasing power off of people -- through inflation of the currency, taxation and the like. This in some sense places all of the state's eggs in one basket. If you could form a single unit of this collective, then they would have all of the argumentative power in any discussion -- that unit could say "Nah, I'm not funding this." and that would be the end of it. We are the investors/stakeholders in this -- without our participation, there's no more juice for the state, and if we decide to invest in something else, then that something else will then become the thing in power. Obviously, I am not deluding myself into the idea that we're all going to go on strike, or stop paying taxes, or that it's even desirable that we do central planning in that regard -- that's just the thing we want to fight against. But consider this: If I write you a piece of software, and you pay me by hand-crafting me a fancy table. How can tax be derived from this? The government isn't interested in 20% of my lines of code, nor do they want one leg of that table. Obviously pro-bono work isn't a new idea, but it gets me thinking. Maybe if we can come up with a system that makes it inherently difficult to derive currency amount against value, and shift more trade to it, then we can incrementally, without asking for permission, and without the need to convince those with a conflicting interest, take power away from the state and keep it with the "makers".

Actually, it is not ICANN that has been changing hands. It is IANA. IANA stands for Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. This means that whoever gets control can also control IP address allotments. To overcome censorship would basically either require that you connect to a VPN that has a IANA IP (and even then, Internet will be sort of split between these subnets), or that another authority is uniformly chosen by all ISPs (obsoleting IANA). As far as named addresses go, if DNS is replaced with other services its very likely to take a long vetting time until one becomes a de-facto standard and its likely that you'll see lots of new (free or opensource or otherwise) startups looking to fill in that gap. Just wait and see what happens. IANA won't be replaced so quickly. Maybe if they let you keep digital property that would have been banned under new regime, you could actually be sitting on gold, if you'd need a hit of optimism There's no prediction for what's going to happen there really.