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On a pothead and notions of personal freedom.
What's TheMotte's opinion on the legitimacy of protecting individuals from inadvertent value drift? Or in other words: is it okay to let people degenerate, so long as every step is taken out of their own will? Is it liberating to just not let them? It seems to me like answers explain one of the core differences in conservative versus liberal schools of thought. This is rather low-effort, apologies.
I'm asking for a friend, so to speak. A few months after my (in retrospect, overly frantic) escape from Russia, most of my friends have deigned to abandon skepticism and reading «respectable sources» and followed suit. We've stopped in different places. The other day, I've talked to a guy who's happily stuck in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. I've known him for 10 years, talking less and less as time went by. He used to develop sensitive software for state corps; unassuming, vulgarly hedonistic, from a simple family, but reasonably smart and curious and kind. Too open-minded, perhaps, and... neurodivergent enough to have atypical reactions to chemicals – took a full milligram of LSD to get him to trip balls once. It seemed like he was tripping half the time – that is, when not playing PC and console games, working, cooking, learning work-related stuff, playing guitar, hitting on girls, hanging out with friends, building random contraptions as a hobby, listening to my bullshit or to music. More or less a normal modern manchild... That said, he had always struck me as distinctly American in spirit. Maybe it's about his BMI being like 38 and my prejudices – but, charitably, it's because he was too cheerful, and conspicuously non-suicidal considering his lot in life. Well, helped him get girls at least.
I digress. So, he's in Bishkek, I've written to him before the New Year. And the only thing he's interested in talking about is weed. Hash. Wax. Blunts. All the nomenclature. How hard it hits and how easy it is to get and how tolerant the local cops are of potheads. He's not even able to perfunctorily ask me about my situation or maintain a coherent dialogue. He doesn't notice the war any more. Hey dude, just come here, dis shit rules! They say in the summer it'll blow your mind! Do you even smoke? Ah, only DMT? Wha, you don't? You gotta try what they got here! Huh, talk about anything else you say? Uh... food's awesome too...
The tragedy is, this guy still works as a software engineer. But that's all he is now. He's a fat engineer who smokes pot and consumes food, and he can only talk about pot, food and a bit of engineering. His whole personality has been reduced to those three efficiently saturated domains: earning resources to convert into cheap utilons while modifying the state of consciousness to get more utilons and care as little as possible about anything else. It's a distilled, barebones functional version of his original, simplistic but not unloveable character. All the nuance that made him less than perfectly reducible to a one-track NPC just got pruned away.
Frankly, it's an almost demonic regression, the killing of soul, I guess in the same manner that the stipulated bug-peddling WEF NWO lords would like us all to undergo. I've known quite a few casual users and outright drug addicts, mostly stim types, but I haven't seen anything else destroy a human so thoroughly yet surreptitiously, with so little smoke to set off fire alarms (ahem). And yet, growing up, I've been inundated with messaging about «legalize» (легалайз), the noble fight of Rastafarians, the insanity of the war on drugs, with weed the Redeemer of all substances, the least harmful, Sacred Victim of brutish abuse. Now that I think back to it, a few of my pot-and-psychedelics openminded acquaintances display milder versions of this shift. How the hell did libs arrive at the idea that pot is harmless?
But it is. It doesn't cause significant bodily harm, and it doesn't compel, doesn't build anything like the crude physiological dependency loop of opiates. It only makes one a bit different, for a few hours. Alters emotion, cognition, perception, information consumption patterns, sense of reward from stimuli. Imposes a predictable vector of value drift. Allows exercising freedom in self-determination, really. Didn't Leary say it's a sacred right? Can a transhumanist take issue with that?
Like with freedom of speech that, according to many progressive arguers, is the matter of state censorship covered by First Amendment and not an ethical principle concerning the propagation of truths, one can think about the right to self-determination in legalese. Free choices are uncompelled choices; what else can there be!
I dare think my curious and open-minded friend 10 years ago would've been terrified of his current form, and perhaps would have asked for help to steer him off that path. He was failed by the society and the community, in that he was not provided a robust framework to anticipate this outcome, take it seriously, and build a behavioral scaffolding to compensate for his leanings. All he knew of religion is that it's a cringe grandma thing; all he wanted from tradition was insight porn for trips; all he asked from people around was good vibes and tolerance. He, like me, like all of us, was neatly cut off from ages past.
Of course, a keen reader has already noticed that the progressive view does recognize this problem, albeit for a different failure mode. Progs fret about right-wing extremists, and propose deradicalization. While their opponents believe that the natural tendency is for men to degenerate just as rocks roll downhill, progs worry that, if left to their own devices, men will drift towards fascism, the ur-illiberal doctrine, and so should be provided with a framework for steering back to mainstream (or, hopefully, being nudged into their camp). People's media feeds, their habits and states of mind, and perhaps even the popularity of substances modulating those, should be subtly influenced to that end. It is not coercion: it's just, say, providing an opportunity. Both camps claim to stand for the freedom of individual («in his or her pursuit of happiness», some add), and have philosophical treatises defending their notions of individuality and freedom – more religiously inspired and deontological on the right, more bluntly biodeterministic and utilitarian on the left.
I don't think it's neatly symmetric, though. In the end, conservatives act and talk as if a big part of the individual's genuine essence is embedded in the collective – or more to the point, family, lineage, community, parish, tribe, up to the entire nation, religion, the people or civilization. This essence is fragile, nurtured by the work of many generations and, effectively, seeks to be instantiated in a body, and has that right; so it can demand having an incomplete, raw individual be molded to accept it – in ways sanctioned by the tradition, by hook or by crook, with honest persuasion, sly conditioning or plain coercion. It is not denied (except by ways of complex theological argument, I guess) that this is a reduction in liberty, but it is equally not claimed that liberty of a raw individual is the point. «Spare the rod and spoil the child». The point is that children grow up all right.
Liberals disdain the notion of supra-individual spirits or essences, either as nonsense or as apologia of parasitism and mutilation; humans are whole by birthright, and their freely made choices are theirs, no ifs and buts; sans coercion, deception and a few edge cases perhaps, they cannot be meaningfully moved off their organic path, and should be allowed to figure it out in mutual respect.
And Progressives come part of the way back to the starting point: they propose guardian spirits of sort, ones that should be implemented by organizations and protect unwitting plebs from contagious evil ideas, accidentally powerful yet worthless memes; or perhaps, alter plebs to make them immune. But those spirits are said to exist only to make real liberalism possible.
Progressives have their wisdom – as any reactionary who's noticed he's reinventing bits of Derrida or Foucault may attest. My personal belief, in these terms, is admittedly close to the progressive one (rejoice, Hlynka) – with a humble twist informed by my notion of Death. I think supra-individual mental structures are only deserving of power inasmuch as they increase human freedom, with freedom imprecisely defined as the capacity to make diverse and spontaneous choices. Humans can be goaded, conditioned and coerced today if that allows them to be freer tomorrow, help them not mode-collapse into degenerate flanderized versions of themselves, not die a little. In this sense, the ethos of «legalize» was illegitimate, and the prudish ethos of contempt for deadbeat junkies is valid and, ultimately, liberating.
It's an egoistic point of view, of course. Were the latter more powerful, maybe I'd still have had one more friend.
What's yours?
This seems like a pretty powerful scissor post, for this forum at least. "Is it acceptable to intentionally underachieve?" might be a succinct version.
My 2c would be 'yes, of course, even if everyone had the same utility function, which they don't'. Perfect vs imperfect duty & all that.
Also there's the practical side, ie. Trying to harangue your freind into closer alignment with your values is likely to result in him pushing you away. I've seen this pattern repeat many times, people will 'come to Jesus' when they're ready and not one second before.
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I have a lot of thoughts on the use of weed and other substances to manipulate mood, that have spiraled out into an effortpost I'm drafting now, but I want to interrogate this line of thinking separately.
What percentage of curious and open-minded 20 year olds do you think would look forward to their 30 year old selves and be terrified of their current form and asked for help to steer them off that path? If you think through your friends, do you notice correlations between substance use/abuse and regret?
When I look at my closest friends, the ones I can assess best over that time, the number where our 20 year old selves would have said "Wow, you fucked up bad" are pretty high. There are moments where I might put myself among them in some ways, though not in others (after all, I'm with the same woman and have the same best friend and I'm living up the street from the same house listening to the same college radio station on a Sunday night before we eat the same traditional family New Year's meal, it's tough to be too harsh).
Hell it hasn't even been ten years yet, and if I took half the 1Ls from my law school class and showed them what they were doing now, they'd jump off a bridge! And it spirals out from there: The people who have gotten fat who would have sworn they'd still be hot at 30, the people who have married the wrong person, the people who failed to marry the right person (occasionally spectacularly so!), the people who have failed professionally, the people who have succeeded professionally but in ways that their 20 year old selves would find hopelessly crass and boring, the people who still haven't found God, and the atheist 20 year olds who at 30 have found God.
They come in a million varieties, and some of those used drugs and some didn't, but I honestly fail to see much correlation in my own set. I'm curious if you feel yours is different.
I don't mean to accuse you of anything or psychoanalyze you, but part of me feels like you and I are Billy the Kid in Young Guns II. We used to shoot the shit at all night dorm-room bull sessions, philosophizing and theorizing. Some of our friends have moved on, they have lives and jobs or families, but we're still living intellectually rough by the gun out on the range. The world is ending and we shall finish the game.
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This is the key point. This sort of value drift only happens in societies that fail to support others, and let people drift along on their own. Many can’t help it because they have their souls destroyed by the alienating and humiliating forces of our modern capitalistic world. If man can’t have dignity and meaning in his day to day life, he will reject the idea of dignity and meaning altogether.
This is not to excuse your friend’s behavior, but I do believe that substances such as pot are useful. The problem, once again, is that they are primarily useful with a telos such as reducing pain or studying one’s own psyche. If left to do drugs with no strong sense of why they are doing drugs, the plebeians will ruin themselves.
To engage with the larger point, I believe we should let people drift their values if and when we build a healthier society. One in which people aren’t stressed and traumatized by their day to day life.
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Ok lets work through his previous life in detail:
Presumably he still does this.
Does a war refugee who is not intending to stay in his current locale have a decent kitchen, supply of ingredients, and a reasonable belief that learning how to adapt his cooking to local ingredients is worthwhile?
I like making fancy cocktails. I have an extensive bar in the US. I'm visiting my family in India and I gave up this hobby - why bother when just finding ingredients is massive effort and I'm leaving soon?
He just moved to a country which - as per Wikipedia - is 90% Muslim and about 1/3 of the country actually speaks Russian (not necessarily well). It's possible Kyrgyzstan is one of the rare Muslim countries with a moderately liberal city where hitting on girls won't get you into trouble. (The only one I know of specifically is Turkey.)
Figuring out where to go to hit on girls in a new country, and the patterns of doing so, actually takes time and is difficult. A very good looking guy I knew took 6 months to get laid in India (where we lived at the time) before he figured out how things worked here. What chance does your fat friend have?
How many of his friends live in Kyrgyzstan?
Did he bring his workshop to Kyrgyzstan? Does it make sense for him to build a new one, given that he probably aims to leave as soon as possible?
Fixed that for you.
Anyway, as far as I can tell both liberal and conservative traditions generally believe that people trapped in foreign lands in transient situations sometimes adopt bad behaviors as cope. They have different methods of reintegrating such people when they return, both of which have some value.
Well this went poorly.
You, @TIRM, @BorfRebus, @huadpe, @raggedy_anthem seem to have an exceedingly high impression of your ability to see holes in the presented narrative, psychoanalyze not just strangers but adumbrated characters, and deduce that it's really about a transient shock and inconvenience of a poor uprooted refugee in a foreign Muslim land (do you lot have any idea of how Russified Bishkek is? That's our backyard, they use our services, they come to work in our cities; modulo Islam, and there's plenty of Islam in Russia too, it's more like Mexico for the US than Iran or whatever) rather than a decade-long simplification of personality, even though I've already addressed much of that suspicion here for @aqouta – which makes me, in turn, suspect some motivated reasoning around casual drug use, and gluttony, and the ethos of Nietzschean last men.
Should we really be doing that? There's a rule: «Be charitable. Assume the people you're talking to or about have thought through the issues you're discussing, and try to represent their views in a way they would recognize. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Beating down strawmen is fun, but it's not productive for you, and it's certainly not productive for anyone attempting to engage you in conversation; it just results in repeated back-and-forths where your debate partner has to say "no, that's not what I think".» If you believe that the crux of my story, to wit, the value drift under the apparent influence of weed, is implausible on its face, you could as well skip the nitpicking and talk about why.
Admittedly I could flesh out his history better. And the remark about suicidality could be left out, since it seems to make people think (or just attempt to sneer?) that it's about him lacking pretense and not writing meandering essays on TheMotte, whereas my idea was more that the baseline suicidality, or less inflammatorily, low hedonic tone and pessimism, in Russia in his cohort is higher – among people who are not suffering health complications of obesity in their 20's already, do not live in a shit environment, and have any positive direction in life. It's markedly not common for a guy like him to be cheerful like some bubbly character from a Western cartoon or sitcom.
This can be taken as a failing of our culture. On the other hand, we don't do this ghoulish Anglo hellohowareyou-imfineandyou routine, especially to friends. When we bother to ask как дела (how's business), we can expect a genuine status check, down to financial reports and epicrises. I know what's going on with my friend, you do not.
In Poland, when asked „co u ciebie?”, you are pretty much supposed to complain. This means that you know better what is not going well in their lives than what is.
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I don't know what responses you expected. General speculation, pointing out that he sounds like the maximal case of anomie and is maybe coping for being a refugee, etc. It seems like the kind discussions I would have predicted.
Obviously, yeah. But if I have some point about self medication or the lack of community based support in the condition of anomie, then I'm going to make it.
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I feel like the definition of deadbeat junkie has moved from parasitic freeloader who has debts to...software engineer not living his best life.
And not to psychoanalize a stranger on the other side of the world: but this guy fled his home and is alone as a refugee in a foreign country. He may be self medicating.
He is in fact not living his best life. Also he's leaning on weed and food too much.
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My view is that you failed yourself when you let a friend go to seed like that, but also that such failures are not generally preventable. Nevermind society's or your friend's interests; you lost an asset in your life and thus it's your problem first of all. But it's too difficult to stop people from ruining themselves, especially when it comes to habits and addictions.
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As you noted, a marijuana addiction is far less insidious than many other choices. A town of potheads faces far less severe problems than a town of heroin addicts. Your friend has a job, and while he may only use that job as a means of acquiring more weed and food, he is still a productive member of society - and his weight will cause pressing issues for both himself and society far sooner than the weed will.
Sure, The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come could have probably swayed your friend 10 years ago with visions of his present self, but he's ultimately not really hurting anyone other than himself right now. And "hurting himself" in a kind of nebulous, philosophical way.
I think liberals underrate the importance of the collective, but I really can't get over my innate libertarian streak here. I would wager that your friend has about as much capacity for free will with regards to weed intake as any other addict does (very little). But does it really warrant more heavy-handed intervention? Weed is a plant and mild narcotic, a weed addict is positively harmless in the grand scheme of things. For me, any government or societal measure against something has to overcome my inherent aversion to such a thing. Who the fuck are you, Mr. Legislator/Pressure Group, to tell me what I can and can't do? I didn't vote for you, it is not my neighbor's business what I'm doing in my home if it doesn't harm them, so on and so forth, you get the picture.
So heroin? Sure. My neighbor being a heroin addict is probably going to concern me at some point. As with any drug that hijacks its users minds and causes them to steal and harm to feed their habit. Weed's not that kind of drug though, so I really can't bring myself to support action against it, even if it can hollow someone out. And this is from someone who had a close friend go down that very same path your friend did.
With all that said, I think there's an important facet to this particular topic that's missing. Your friend is doing wax and dabs and talks about potency. The hits your friend regularly takes would probably knock a hippie from the 70s on their ass. Still (probably) ultimately harmless, but I think the common ideas and thought processes about weed and its use hasn't really caught up with the sheer strength of the stuff today.
No, not really. Unless someone eates themselves into super-morbid obesity BMI- of 60-80, the reckoning will most likely come after age 55 or so. Dead by 65 if he doesn't turn it around then.
Weed may cause people to go schizo, there are rumors of coming out of California of extremely potent new strains of weed causing something like schizophrenia in heavy users.
This is kind of what I was getting at with the last paragraph. Sentiments like this from the OP;
I think are largely cultivated from the days of significantly more mild marijuana that was smoked in joint form. It is now a brave new world of concentrates and high potency stuff, and the cultural conceptions of weed haven't really caught up from what I can tell. Perhaps it is the case that this entire conversation needs to be reframed.
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What's nebulous and philosophical about it? I could call it common sensical and immediately intuitive: you're becoming absorbed in cheap pleasures at the cost of living up to your potential.
It comes down to your own personal value judgements. I agree with your position, but there are others who think this kind of life is perfectly fine and legitimate. I've met a handful of people who would see no problem at all with this lifestyle.
I can think of more down to earth reasons. Bad habits aren't entirely self-regarding acts. If you're not a hermit than you're going to find yourself in positions where people you care for are in need of your help, and you can either succeed or fail at that. Sometimes failure is out of your control, but as often it's something straightforward where you can track the failure to a particular bad habit or the absence of a good one. There's a reason why communitarian ethics place such an emphasis on things like this.
I've met some people who have thought about it long and hard and have decided to take it easy, but I think it's rare that people are being honest with themselves, and the excuse making is often a more harmful habit than the behaviour. I've found it to be a useful mental trick to frame it in terms of affirming the trade-off and say something like "I love gaming so much I'm going to stay up all night doing it instead of studying tomorrow, and I'll do the same the day after too". I either end up finding my actions ridiculous (which gives inherent motivation to stop doing them) or I find that I'm happy with the trade-off.
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Right. One could consider it a fuck you to Marie Kondo striver culture, a "laying flat" as the Chinese under-zeitgeist has it.
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Of course. But the same can be said about many things. In fact very few people live up to their potential. Do we need to enforce “living up to your potential?”
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That's still bad for him though. Interesting and complex life -> productive slob slurper. Imagine Omega converted themotte.org into https://old.reddit.com/r/trees/ . Is something lost?
In the sense of 'the state sends guys with guns to shut down his weed dealer', or the sense of 'his friends try to convince him to stop being worthless'? Certainly the latter.
I meant the former, although perhaps less extreme. His friends have already tried to convince him, and it didn't work. Personally, the answer to "is it okay to let people degenerate, so long as every step is taken out of their own will?" in this case is...maybe? Depending on how you're defining "let" and what you've already done. If intervention from friends doesn't work, what's left?
Assuming we mean using criminal law to discourage this? Armed government squads kicking in doors and dragging people like him off to the rape cages.
Or we could make it merely a civil infraction and then there'd be a small chance he'd have to pay a fine every now and then. Not exactly effective coercion or paternal guidance from the state. The state's tools are too crude.
Being in a community that could guide (or coerce) him could work. In a different, non-atomized world, this guy's church elders could have a man-to-man talk with him. But as a refugee in a foreign country he's left any possibility of that behind. Accepting the facts of modern anomie, traditional conservative community based solutions are irrelevant.
Or just fight 'the war on drugs' more aggressively. Like "it's impossible to fight an insurgency" - force any sophisticated modern state has could almost entirely stamp out drug-dealing, they just don't want to do it, for complicated reasons.
You don't need a 'non-atomized world' for smoking weed to be very shameful, or become less common. I have a few friends who smoke weed very regularly, and many more who do occasionally, yet none who smoke cigarettes. 80 years ago, it'd be reversed.
Back in 1994 the CDC's Director of the Center for Injury Prevention said something about this:
Yeah, so maybe decades of propaganda and control over the schools could let them make smoking or owning guns dirty and low status. But then they already tried that for weed and it didn't work. And gun owners really don't like some bureaucrat trying to make them low status and ban their favorite stuff.
We could have a society where smoking weed is shameful and completely unacceptable for any upstanding person. But we don't and the government's attempts to push us that way didn't work.
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Is Russia, let along Kyrgyzstan, a modern state with the capacity to stamp out things it really wants to, the way the US is? It doesn’t seem like it is.
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Well ultimately one's reaction to OP's story rests partially on how much you take his description at face value.
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Normal doesn't imply "good", and wanting to be greater than "normal" is good.
Much of the most "worthy" intellectual, as judged by mainstream thought, were convoluted essays about obscure topics! That is more worthy than smoking pot and consuming food. The sneer about 'utilons' is weird given utilitarianism is a significant part of philosophy, with a major proponent described as "One of the most influential thinkers of classical liberalism"!
Should we just look away from the filth? Should we lead the flock of civilization to become 380lb tokers, typing away at some job to pay for the munchies? Is criticizing that entitled?
The best experiences, or highest duties, one can find aren't found in banging other 300lb girls, eating takeout, or smoking pot, they're found in complex, often adversarial intellectual, artistic, political, economic, etc acts / projects / explorations. Any time someone goes a bit from the former to the latter is good, any time the reverse is bad - both for them and everyone else (leaving capability/contingency/selection aside).
It's just a bad sneer if "meandering essays about utilons [or] degeneracy" are things genuinely worthy intellectuals have done.
Taking this at face value - I could say both are bad, both should be trying to do more consequential or interesting work. I don't think that's your argument though.
Writing essays on stuff can be useful - even if you're wrong, learning to argue your point might eventually lead you to figure out why it's wrong. Maybe you come across another argument that wakes you from Kant's "dogmatic slumber". Probably neither happen, but it's better practice for things of consequence than smoking pot and jerking off.
Again, much of that exposition was the "before: when things were better" part. console games, working, cooking, learning work-related stuff, playing guitar, hitting on girls, hanging out with friends, building random contraptions as a hobby. This wasn't even mostly a putdown. Playing guitar shittily and having sex with a few random people isn't much, but there's clearly a path from there to greater things that isn't there with "yo dude weed".
Both scott and moldbug's big blogs started as discussing stuff on the internet, posting comments, and small blogs. The big hits are valuable, and it's useful for many people to try to get there, even if only a small few do anything useful with it. This isn't true of video games, or even competitive sports, nothing significant is gained when the top .0001% of competitive game/sports players filter to the top and win their competitions.
Also, something that 'justifies a hobby' can still be true. You're stating / assuming the thing being contested (is posting about politics and ideas useful), and then saying "you just believe as a justification for ", without proving it. Why should that be convincing?
I think a look at the history of mathematics or philosophy thoroughly disproves this. A lot of worthwhile activities had justifications much, much more abstract.
how is me claiming i'm enlightened relevant here? And where, or when, did I claim that? We started with "lazing around smoking weed is bad", and then you brought up "but discussing politics is just as bad, so you can't criticize weed" (... how does that make it less bad?), and then "you're trying to show your superiority / enlightenment by lording your writing over the poor weed-smokers" (but you brought up the writing!). Is any attempt to stop someone from wasting their time, or thinking it's dumb they do that, necessarily wrong because of psychoanalytic contortions?
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Thanks.
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Is this like the town where all the children are above average?
All children are improving their math scores, knowledge, etc as they learn and grow - for any given cohort, most are near or below average, but the cohort's average grows. And it's also good that a few have much more than the average.
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What makes a choice "diverse" and "spontaneous"?
Well, here's why it's an imprecise definition.
The point isn't really spontaneity, it's just one proxy metric of unpredictability. The point is non-reduction of those properties, not having a person run into cul-de-sacs where he dies or is reduced to some short, gimped algorithm, and not having sections of the world irreversibly closed off to him.
My idea of life and freedom, were I to succeed in rigorously defining it, would probably be similar to «empowerment gain» in this theoretical ML paper (did I mention already that software engineering is applied philosophy and computer science is just philosophy?):
You get the idea.
Doesn't determinism, or wave function being linear, or something like that, mean this metric doesn't physically work? i.e. the actual states, or microstates, or continuous-state-space, or whatever, doesn't distinguish between "you are in a cage and wiggle a bit and that disturbs the air atoms" and "your army crushes the other army". i.e. in order to say which macrostates are more interesting than other macrostates you just ... restate the original question
I agree with 'good ~ power, capability, complexity, accomplishment in the far future', although without the 'self' or 'agent' sense. But a physical measurement of that, in a 'here is the goodness number' sense, doesn't work
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This doesnt do what you want it to do.
First, its defined in terms of what the agent could do in the future, not what it will actually do. So if the pothead could do something productive but had his values shifted to where he doesnt want to any more, that wouldnt limit his empowerment in the sense defined there.
Also its defined for discrete finite outcome states, and adapting it to the continuous case requires an additional parameter, most simply a measure on the outcome space which tells you how valuable granularity of control is in different parts of that space relative to each other.
It does not address the value drift, yes. But on the other hand I do not think humans can have a capacity intact despite completely giving up practice, so a close variant of this approach that accounts for a humanlike decaying architecture would compel the agent to sometimes check if the capacity is still available, no?
It depends. Presumably you can also regain the capacity by practicing it again, for example, and in that case the longer time-horizons wouldnt care it went away. And if you set it up in a way where it did matter, then probably your capacity to slavishly obey someone would matter in a similar way. The formalism youve found just isnt particularly related to your problem, and if you find a way to make it do what you want it will be mostly your additions that are doing that work.
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What's the saying? Enlightenment is hard, which is why so few people will ever reach it, and none can be forced?
My position is that self-discipline is is a good thing, but that enforcing discipline others is to be avoided as possible outside of broadly agreed upon contexts because of it's propensity to abuse by people without self-discipline. There is no system of evaluation or screening that ensures only self-disciplined will have power for pretty much the same reasons there's no way to ensure that only Good Kings will reign- not only is it not reliable for the (wo)man at the top, but it's the system from top to bottom that matters. Insert the ever-useful insight about self-righteous tormenters, the people who would censor information, the rationalization of self-interest by those who see themselves as enlightened, etc. It's all old hat, and if you weren't convinced before, you won't start now.
Value drift occurs. It's a part of life in all directions and connotations. You yourself refer to your own with what you call an overly frantic escape from Russia. This is a characterization / connotation that can only exist due to value drift brought on by perspective- at the time, while you were certainly in a maniac-depressive state, your values were different. In the coming months/years, there is liable to be future developments and worsenings in Russia that may make your escape seem wise and insightful in a way you don't credit it now. As the fable goes, this too shall pass. There is never a point in your life where you will have the 'correct' value perspective and insight to be qualified to decide it for others.
Instead of top-down impositions, lasting changes to individuals come from the bottom-up, from affecting the common culture of shared beliefs and values. But culture is shared beliefs and values, not the values you compel someone to state. Nearly all deliberate social engineering efforts struggle with this, as the values they claim to espouse are not the things actually motivating behavior or being shared- hence the common refrain of the those being loudest about their selflessness are really most out for themselves, and that's the values being taken. You can ask for someone's consideration of your values, you can share your values, but you can't force it on the unwilling.
There's an old internet poem, probably not actually adopted from a Christian monk but with plenty of regional/cultural variations, that's long stuck with me that seem relevant to this topic.
“When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.
I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.
When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.
Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.”
In this comparison, you are the man-who-is-not-yet-old. I note in your piece, while you spend considerable words on how he has so much less to say, you make only a passing note on that you have talked with him increasingly less over the years. I do not know what you have talked about, if/how you have raised concerns with him directly, but per your own mutability as seen over just the last year, you still have the opportunities to change yourself, and thus impact your family and friends, and through them, more.
It's a lot less heady and gratifying than ambitious reform, but it's there.
A seductive thought, but still wrong. If the young man had changed himself, it would have been merely to be a cog in the machine, with no impact and not having changed anything at all. Railing against the machine may have no effect, but so does self-modifying to fit into it.
Without defining this injected 'machine,' or what qualifies as 'impact', 'change', and 'effect', this means nothing in a way that demonstrates the claim is wrong.
Railing or raging against the machine is a common idiom. The machine here is hydroacetylene's "machinery of civilization", what's often called "society". The promise of the little story is that if its protagonist had simply changed himself instead of attempting to change the world, he could have thus changed the world. That's a lie and an obvious one; if you change yourself, you won't change the world because you no longer want to.
Whether it's a lie or not it's certainly not obviously so. I interpret that story as: by changing yourself for the better you inspire others to be better, and when enough people better themselves the world will improve as a result. You could interpret it as encouraging people to become cogs in the machine, but IMO that's an overly-cynical interpretation and incorrect.
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Convincing young men to be a cog in the machinery of civilization is the entire point of that story. Liberalism rails against this, conservatism half-asses trying to do it, and progressivism wants to throw out the machinery of civilization and replace it with something entirely else(I, uh, can't steelman what they want to replace the current structures with, so I'm not going to try).
Perhaps, but it's still a lie.
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We disagree here in small but frustrating methodological detail.
Clearly, I wasn't thinking very straight in the first weeks of the invasion, but I maintain that this was a proper reaction to have, given the information available at the moment. That information suggested a decent chance for effective or official border closure from either side in days; that I, in that condition, pegged that chance at like 90% and not some conservative figure like 35% would have been crucial for betting, but not very substantial for decision-making with life on the line. In fact it was probably necessary to subjectively overestimate it, to act appropriate to the true expected value. Rational irrationality or something.
Russia did ultimately declare mobilization; it is only a further failing of the Russian leadership that they did not do so in March. With the way the war's going they'll close borders too, probably. As you note, the mobilization was a strategic blunder in any case – but with their apparent goals and model of the situation, it would have made more sense for them to close borders and throw as many people into training as possible, as early as possible, rather than after losing much of their territorial gains, personnel and materiel. There may be other issues to consider, like higher risks of insubordination or economic shock or more drastic Western actions, which perhaps have diminished in the course of the war; but then, I think they just overestimated those factors – and my expectation was for them to not make this error.
Facts don't change retroactively. I did have more time, ergo I moved out too frantically. My leave won't become any wiser in the future. I also won't regret it, because, as already said, that was the best call I could have made with available data. Were I in a more equanimous mood, my rationally charted Yud-approved Bayesian strategy would've been the same. I had no way of anticipating the real outcome with sufficient certainty to accept the risk. The main lesson here is to strive to have better data.
Mental state can affect values, but my values, with regard to minimizing chances of getting drafted for the invasion of Ukraine at least, are consistent.
But that's not germane to the topic.
If no lasting changes by social engineering were achievable, would conservatives have any reason to fear CRT in schools and their other bugbears?
As you can see, here's a small wrinkle (emphasized): even allowing that this is true, you can't force your own values on people, but you can force, top-down, the adoption of some trivially bad values, accordingly pushing out others – likely those salt-of-the-earth bottom-up organic ones. The fact that the latter is doable and there are parties attempting the former is sufficient grounds to ask about countermeasures, which automatically implies some equivalent of a social engineering effort, even if devoid of conspicuous High Modernist elements.
And the next reasoning step is that the decent common folk who share their good values horizontally are at a strategic disadvantage against systems with pooled resources and specialized tools for propaganda, even if they achieve higher normalized transmission fidelity.
And the next – that those systems would seek to discourage organized resistance, perhaps by promoting nice simple stories about monks changing themselves, and the need to clean your room before networking and seeking to deplatform the outgroup...
I did omit the «Libertarian» perspective, a variation on the Liberal one, which is, to my understanding, that organizations are not trustworthy enough to be endowed with social engineering capacities for two reasons: due to unknowability of an a priori «good» social engineering scheme and value set (thus, risks of a catastrophic lock-in or some other hard failure), and due to fallibility of people tasked with executing it. So the question is moot: we can only do what seems to be right on our own, and hope that good values at the societal scale evolve as a result. That's pretty compelling.
The issue is one of perspective. There was one Utopian, heavily centralized, social engineering project known as Communism. It had successfully reformatted hundreds of millions of people – in ways, perhaps, not intended by its authors, but profound nonetheless. In my view, it was stopped, pushed back and then crushed by a competing and more intelligently ran system, not by the power of friendship and mutual respect and bottom-up good values and all that jazz.
All that jazz helped, to be sure.
I did, almost at every interaction – who wouldn't tell their friend that they should lay off drugs, or wouldn't try to help? I wasn't the only one, too. But there's only so much that words of a peer can do, and only so much tolerance for sermonizing among moderns. As you say: can't force on the unwilling. I opted to assume he's a grown-up, «respect» his choices, and hope for the better; what was the alternative?
The alternative, of course, is a society that recognizes such outcomes to be bad and systematically decreases their odds. And, one way or another, by holding on to what is being pushed out, or by inventing new ramparts, or by pouring old wine into new wineskins, or by seeking entirely new solutions, that amounts to social engineering.
A related quote:
And to hang a quote off your quote:
I always thought forcing RadFems to hook up with RedPillers, Hoteps with White Nationalists, etc. would be good for society...
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No need to be ashamed, better to take action too early than too late. Whole world expected Masterminds of Kremlin(TM) instead of what we got.
Is American school indoctrination really so superior, could American schools make CRT and 666 gender LGBTQ+ values stick (while Soviet school teaching Marxist-Leninist values totally failed)?
As I understand it, these "cultural marxist" values are spreading horizontally from peers and "influencers" through tiktok, not vertically from school teachers. Am I wrong?
This. Even if you see The Devil Weed(TM) as The Coming Menace (TM), you could expect Russian government fight it as efficiently as it fights Jewish Nazi Satanist homosexuals in Ukraine. No idea about capacity of government of Kyrgyzstan.
Yes, instead of creating perfect communist man working selflessly for the common good, the result was ultimate capitalist predator, willing to do anything for profit.
(in this funny tweetstorm Kamil Galeev blames ... Marx for post-Soviet gangsterism)
In the same way, to get back to original topic of this subthread, effect of century+ old war of drugs was to make drugs by several magnitudes deadlier than before. If drug warriors of old who panicked about opium saw fentanyl, they would not be amused.
If your effort produces great effects, but exactly opposite to what you (publicly) intended, you could not be called succesfull.
Yea. What defeated communism? "Thirty glorious years" post war, when (social democratic) capitalist West provided better alternative to Soviet system and delivered what Soviet propaganda promised, so better than even life of top 1% of USSR was dismal compared to ordinary Western middle class citizen, so better that all Soviet propaganda was rendered null and void, that everything Western was seen as superior, that even empty cans of Coca Cola or Western beer were collected and worshipped like holy relics.
According to theory, it was supposed to happen the other way - communist science fiction described with relish future where communist world achieved true Star Trek fully automated luxury communism, while capitalist world collapsed into grungy gangster ghetto.
(one classic example is this, grim dystopian cyberpunk future created in ... 1970's East Germany)
In all secret squirrel skullduggery, USSR had always upper hand, and it, ultimately, did not mattered.
Even hard core conspiracy theorists who believe that Gorbachev and Yakovlev were CIA agents who deliberately wrecked Soviet Union, would have problem claiming that everything was going swimmingly at the time, that USSR was going to overcome and surpass the capitalist world as originally intended.
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What precisely do you even want out of your friend? I am certainly not the right person to say this and you've had the experience more intimately than I ever will but dude, seriously, your friend has abandoned his homeland, way of life and the majority of his friends and family. He is coping with something large. Even if you are able to weather it this it is the type of thing that breaks people. Even strong people.
What is his actual failing here? That he wants a little escapism not even a year after becoming a refugee while still supporting himself with work? What cogent thing is your lost friend supposed to be saying about the war? If what you say about his pre-war habits is accurate then I find it incredibly strange that you think the main change here is the weed. Is this the right time to be writing off friends?
People get used to the war quickly – even Ukrainians sort of do, and we're perfectly unharmed in comparison. You overestimate how it feels after so many months.
That was at the beginning of our friendship. Why do you think we were gradually losing contact?
7-8 years ago he was a reasonably cool interlocutor who could surprise me, or help out in need. 5, 6 years ago I would, albeit reluctantly, invite him to a party with people whose opinion matters to me. 2-3 years later, that'd have been embarrassing, and we barely ever talked because he was unable/unwilling to maintain a long-context dialogue and already getting into the current form – but when prodded, he'd still output a spontaneous humanlike reaction, on a restricted range of other favored topics, like girls or some PC holywar or music. When war started, he was shocked of course – worried about his future earning potential, the risk of draft and access to weed in a fully fascist state (no kidding; I thought he was). Now he's the happiest he's ever been, there's just no interest in anything other than drugs – and the picture has clicked into place, retroactively.
It's, mutatis mutandis, the same picture as here. I recall there was a good interview with an articulate heroin addict linked on /r/slatestarcodex but can't find it.
No, I don't think he's lost anything he cared about when leaving. Wait, he did: there's an online drug store of some repute, and they're only selling in Moscow. (Ask me how I know about it. Well, you've probably guessed).
You're free to not believe me of course.
If Russia becomes true fascist state, do not expect it to gain Japanese/Singaporean efficiency overnight, something that looks like Iran is more probable.
It looks that your friend had nothing to worry about.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-40397727
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/01/24/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-old-irans-revolution-drug-policies-and-global-drug-markets/
......
maybe this?
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/l23le2/when_getting_high_is_a_hobby_not_a_habit_review/?depth=20
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So, what your proposal means in practice?
Cannabis is already illegal in Kyrgyzstan where your friend lives. He was able to easily evade these laws.
Therefore, valiant law enforcement of Kyrgyzstan should be more active and less lazy, should be given more power and really put their remaining gloves off, should double, quartuple and octuple their efforts.
Kyrgyzstan needs more arrests, more early morning raids, more prisons, more torture, more rape, more gouging of eyes and cutting off tongues, more skinning people alive, more boiling people alive in cauldrons. For great justice, for great freedom of free choices.
East Asian countries managed to do it, you would say. Japan, Singapore etc. are, for all practical purposes, drug free paradises.
True, and they are also completely gun free countries - something you, if I remember your stance correctly, very much disapprove of.
(IIRC, you strongly supported gun ownership not only for mainstream self defense reasons, but as a mean for the people to independently and preemptively hunt down bad hombres, very much in @KulakRevolt style. Someone with such attitude also supporting War of Drugs is not something I can grok.)
And this is connected. You cannot have war on drugs when everyone is armed, if you want to sent people to hell prison if they ingest the wrong substance, you need to disarm them first to the last nail clipper.
My view? Old timey internet view, I had no reason to update.
Drugs are bad.
Drug dealers, drug gangs, drug cartels are among the worst scum of the world.
War on drugs (started century ago for openly and proudly racist reasons and on completely false pretenses that make WMDs in Iraq look like pinnacle of transparency) is worse by several magnitudes, on every metric you can imagine.
How hard is it to simply shoot the drug dealers? Their whole revenue model is based upon getting access to the least valuable, least intelligent sections of society. That's also the recruiting base for the rank and file. In one case I'm aware of, the idiot drug dealers did their whole meeting/buying and selling under a visible, working CCTV camera.
The stupidest, drug-addled people are able to find drug dealers! Why can't police, with their wiretapping, forensics, drones, satellites, training and organization?
I've brought this up before and people say 'it can't be done', that we can't credibly threaten death for anyone who doesn't rat out their supplier, that billion-dollar bureaucracies can't just force their way up the supply chain and root out the whole network, killing anyone who doesn't comply.
Well it can be done! Shooting drug dealers is not hard. Rival gangs understand how to do it, that's how they secure their market share. They intimidate dealers from other gangs so they won't sell in their turf. States can do it, the Chinese did it. Opium is not a big problem in China anymore.
The war on drugs is not a serious effort, I agree. But it does not follow that serious efforts are impossible.
It is simple and easy to root out drug trafficking for rich, well-organized countries if they make a genuine effort. Even a moderately wealthy, organized country can manage it. It is only that American-style liberal democracies struggle with this fairly simple concept - these are the same states who managed to lose a war against impoverished, illiterate Afghan goatherders with no backing from anyone. That's because we didn't know what we wanted to do or why we were there, it was a clusterfuck of trying to manipulate the media, massage interest groups, make things look good, spend money on clients, reduce casualties. The war on drugs is the same.
Easy. Without shooting whoever-is-disliked-by-local-police? Hard.
We already have 'shooting whoever is disliked by local police and planting weapons on the body'. That's why they put body cameras on police, to prevent that sort of thing. I'm not saying that body cameras are a bad idea. Maybe there should be a camera drone with a recharging port on the car that police can use as well. It could also provide another angle for oversight - all too often these cameras are turned off when they're actually needed.
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Cartels and gangs presumably aren't overly worried about getting the wrong guy once in a while.
We're already getting the wrong guy once in a while, it's rather similar to the 'collateral damage' in Afghanistan. There's collateral damage, yet no chance of victory. We're already reaping the rewards of drug addiction, organized crime, policing costs, second order impacts. There are enormous numbers of youths leaving society via overdose. More and more new and exciting drugs are coming online - fentanyl and similar. There's no obvious sign that this trend will change.
If we turn the 'war' into a war, we would be able to win as opposed to spinning our wheels in the mud, wrecking a great many people's lives without even achieving our ostensible goals.
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The amount of guns has very little to do with overall violence. Homicide rate in the US white population (1-2 guns per citizen) is about the same as in Czech Republic (.2 gun per citizen, only 1-2% of population licensed to own guns, illegal guns are rather rare).
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With that, do you think you deserve any charity at any point hereafter, or would I be justified in writing you off as a two-bit leftist crank?
Tone that down, yo. Yes, the logical leap they're making is questionable, but that isn't justification for this kind of antagonism.
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If you wish the end (of drug free world) you must wish the means. There is no third way.
If being skeptical about war on drugs narrative makes me "leftist", so be it.
BTW, happy new year to you, hopefully it will be better than this one.
This fictional dialogue sounds absurd, because you are not engaging the actual arguments for drug war and penal system in general. Here, check out this one instead.
Now, you might of course dispute the effectiveness of the prevention effect, or argue that it is wrong to sacrifice someone to serve as an example, even if it will prevent great amounts of suffering, but if you prefer to insist that it is just about pure sadism, and there is nothing more to it. instead of engaging the argument, you might as well go back to Reddit.
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Claims that one's outgroup is motivated by sadism instead of whatever they claim their motives are should be a warning sign about the state of one's epistimological soul, as there are many more occasions where one wants to believe it than when it is actually true.
My outgroup...
Who is the outgroup here?
1/People who support war on drugs?
Official purpose of this enterprise is protecting life and health (one of original purposes more than century ago when WOD began was to stop race mixing, this had been, for some reason, dropped).
Now, does it work? It does not seem to work. After century of war, drugs are more plentiful and more dangerous than ever, drug fueled violence and death is higher than ever all over the world, drug powered organized crime groups, bot state and non state, are more wealthy, powerful and influential than ever.
Reasonable people would reconsider their premise, reasonable people would ask: maybe we are doing something wrong? And people who do not want to reconsider, people who want to continue the course - there can be some doubt about their real motives.
2/People who support prisons, especially American prisons as they currently exist?
Official purpose of prisons is to make prisoners into better people, turn them into good law abiding citizens.
This is obviously not happening. Now, people who know well what is going on inside and heartily approve of it, people who love witty prison rape jokes? There is absolutely no doubt possible what motivates them.
Try 1914, with the Harrison Narcotics Act.
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Official primary purpose of prisons is to keep criminals out of public and keep them from doing various crimes against the non-criminals. Prisons would look very different if their official primary purpose were rehabilitation.
Official secondary purpose is to turn criminals into non-criminals, and it would take a lot more money to do that. Would it be worth it? Depends on efficacy of methods used. Study which prisons worldwide release good people at end of sentence, which ones release recidivists. Copy the formers’ methods, not the latter… but correct for confounding factors! Note prison demographics of “best” prisons: all factors and mixes/combos of factors, regardless of whose biases they affirm.
Also remember that prison gangs basically run America’s criminal underworld. Correct for that.
Thought you were going to link this piece from our own Kulak.
I would have if I could have found it. That’s actually the piece I was thinking of.
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