April 2018

If you want a coherent understanding of anyone’s public policy position – really, anyone’s at all – you need to be able to process the idea that there are separate layers of value judgment that come with separate kinds of censure. 

It is not a contradiction to say “every person should have the right to exclude absolutely anyone from his [property / social group / bed] for any reason at all,” and also to say “it was wrong of you to exclude Person X and you shouldn’t have done it.”   

It is not a contradiction to say “every person should have the right to say anything at all,” and also to say “it was wrong of you to say Thing X, delete your post.”

Hell – it’s not a contradiction to say “every person should have the right to construct and maintain his own property however he sees fit” and also to say “it is wrong of you to build an ugly house that makes people sad by destroying the aesthetic character of the surroundings, you should feel obligated to redo it.”

You can call it consequentialist-axiology-versus-deontic-morality, although in fact that’s only one of many different metaethical schemata that can account for the thing I’m talking about here.  Freedom-of-action is important in all sorts of contexts, so much so that we make rules enshrining it, but even so, there are many useful standards by which actions can be judged to be bad / less-desirable-than-alternatives / whatever.  “It’s not wrong to do any of X or Y or Z” doesn’t negate “…but the world would be better if you did X and not either of those other things.” 

Someone criticizing your speech is not thereby attacking freedom of speech.  Someone criticizing your associations is not thereby freedom of association.  You get the idea. 

oligopsoneia:

balioc:

Look.  I have a lot of sympathy for people who feel that the world around them is going crazy.  But…do you not remember any cultural history at all?  From any point, including the mid-to-late twentieth century? 

Depression is not new.  Anxiety is not new.  Crises of faith are not new.  Drugs are not new.  Miserable family drama is the opposite of new.  Any kind of weird sexuality you can imagine is as old as dirt. 

You can’t blame these things on your present-day bugaboos, whatever those are. 

If you like, you can try to argue that “socially mandate a strategy of shoving the problems under the rug and pretending they don’t exist” is the best way to deal with them.  There are even actual arguments for that theory, maybe!  But “the problems are there, and we should return to a state where the problems weren’t there” is not going to cut it. 

this, but also I have some intuitions that Cold War-era Earth was, for the most part, a time/place with unusually good institutional quality and growth opportunities whose preconditions would be impossible or monstrous to replicate, and that everything else is returning to baseline except China

It’s true!  And yet the problems-of-the-modern-day that people complain about are problems that were present, in force, even in Cold-War-era America.

If that is true in immigrant-created, multiracial, multicultural America, a vast and churning continent, always restless, always changing, it is triply true in the little, overcrowded, once remarkably homogeneous island that is Britain. This country’s core identity is thousands of years old. Yes, it has long accepted immigrants, but until the 1950s, net immigration was a rounding error. 

                                       – Andrew Sullivan

…have you read Ivanhoe?

Look.  I have a lot of sympathy for people who feel that the world around them is going crazy.  But…do you not remember any cultural history at all?  From any point, including the mid-to-late twentieth century? 

Depression is not new.  Anxiety is not new.  Crises of faith are not new.  Drugs are not new.  Miserable family drama is the opposite of new.  Any kind of weird sexuality you can imagine is as old as dirt. 

You can’t blame these things on your present-day bugaboos, whatever those are. 

If you like, you can try to argue that “socially mandate a strategy of shoving the problems under the rug and pretending they don’t exist” is the best way to deal with them.  There are even actual arguments for that theory, maybe!  But “the problems are there, and we should return to a state where the problems weren’t there” is not going to cut it. 

When people suffer, it often makes them into worse people.

It sucks.  I know it sucks.  It is quite possibly the single most unjust thing about this universe of ours, which is filled from top to bottom with soul-breaking injustices.  If you yourself are suffering, it’s pretty much the most insulting thing you can hear, a cosmic insult-added-to-injury where the authors of your pain are sneering at you for retroactively having deserved it. 

And yet it’s true, for basically any sane definition of “worse” than can be applied to human beings. 

…I was going to have a very long essay here about all the different ways in which this phenomenon can manifest.  I don’t think I need it, and I don’t think you need to see it.  You can generate any number of examples perfectly well on your own, even if they’re not things that you’d ever want to say or even think.

The point is that, as with any Big Truth of the Human Condition, you’re not going to be able to engage with the world in an enlightened and principled way until you own up to it and face it down.

Don’t worry about fault or responsibility or moral dessert.  Don’t worry about how much you’re supposed to blame the poor suffering soul for the poison fruits of his pain.  Blame is a stupid sideline, more useful for crafting rhetorical barbs than for actually figuring out what to do.  

But make yourself remember –

* Alleviating the suffering of bad people is a useful tool for making them into better people, or at least for preventing them from becoming even-worse people.  This is true even if they don’t deserve it, which as postulated they presumably don’t.

* The fact that people are suffering…or the fact that their suffering is unjust…is not a contradiction or counter to the claim that they are bad, or that the things they are doing is bad.  It is supporting evidence for such a claim.

* If you decide that you are going to dedicate yourself wholly to fighting on behalf of those who are suffering – or, especially, to fighting on behalf of some specific subset of those who are suffering – you are constantly going to have to deal with the fact that your clients are doing terrible things, and that by reasonable standards they’re often much worse people than the people who are making them suffer.

* Redemptive stories about the morally-purifying nature of harsh ordeals aren’t always false, but they’re usually false. 

Look.  It’s not that complicated.  There’s basically just one rule you have to follow in order to make a decent giant-monster movie:

Every monster is a character.  No monster exists only to smash stuff.  If it’s worth dedicating screen time to watching it rampage, it’s worth dedicating screen time to giving it some shred of personality.

Toho figured this out in the ‘50s.  I don’t understand why American studios seem to find it so incredibly difficult. 

oligopsoneia:

bambamramfan:

balioc:

How sure are you that your enemy is committed to total war?

Because even if he’s not, once you start waging total war “in response,” he will be. 

For reasons I don’t totally understand, this kind of basic not-even-game-theoretical modeling-of-counterparty-incentives seems to have gone out of fashion, at least in the realm of culture war.  If I had to pick a culprit, I guess I’d go with the instant gratification that we’ve all gotten used to in the Diamond Age.  You try playing nice, and a week later it hasn’t totally changed the way your enemy does things, so you sigh and decide that it’s useless and that he’s just totally implacable. 

But culture does change, and it changes in response to things that happen in the discourse.  It even changes reasonably fast, in these hyperaccelerated days.  It’s just that even “reasonably fast” culture shifts take place on the scale of years or at least months.  (And, needless to say, they tend not to involve splashy satisfying victories where your enemies grovel in atonement.)  

This is generally the *most* disturbing thing I see in “annoying gun control discourse.”

This is a very dismissive way to put it, but I think a major factor here is that culture total war is easy because culture war doesn’t matter. There’s both nothing to compromise over and hardly anything to lose from the fighting. When it comes to actual policy decisions that determine who lives or who dies, it’s institutional actors coming to cold crooked compromises, same as ever. Mostly powerless actors screaming total war at each other is hardly new either.

This is a tempting thing to think, at least when the local culture war seems especially ugly and pointless, but I’m pretty sure it’s dangerously wrong.

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence…”

– OK, sure, that’s a too-cute quote.  And there may be a few big-decision arenas where the realpolitik of the realpoliticians can be counted on to sideline everything else and carry the day.  Big-money commerce stuff, maybe granular-level military choices, etc.

But all those powerless actors screaming culture war memes at each other define a society.

The abortion issue, which is life-or-death in a number of senses and which cemented the present major American political coalitions, came out of nowhere when a bunch of religious culture warriors decided to care about it.  Brexit was culture war, Buddhists massacring Muslims in Southeast Asia is culture war, pretty much everything about the way popular Egyptian politics works is culture war.  Our president basically got elected on the strength of culture war ressentiment.  People getting doxxed / threatened / fired for being insufficiently-woke / too-woke is prototypical culture war.   

These things we spew at each other on the Internet aren’t fake.  They matter. 

tanadrin:

Imagine waking up one day in a world, like ours, but with a parallel society alongside it that outnumbers it, say, ten to one. They dress in strange robes that seem shapeless and have unusual patterns on them you’ve never seen before; they talk of kukesh and sava instead of “right” and “wrong,” and the virtue of maor, and they try to translate these words into your language, but when you try to compare them to things you care about–love, family, individualism, freedom, happiness–they make a face and shake their heads.

Keep reading

“There’s no argument” doesn’t fly.  There are obviously arguments.  You may or may not find them compelling, you may or may not end up being swayed by them, but…they certainly don’t boil down to “I don’t care about these weak people.”

The most obvious of those arguments has to do with the “wanted contact” bit, and has already been expressed well by @morlock-holmes.  The right of the conservative parents to live without being saddened by cultural erosion doesn’t trump the right of the children to information and freedom, in either a utilitarian or a deontic sense.  And many people, in all cultures, have all sorts of good reasons to want to get out of their native cultural milieus. 

Regarding language preservation etc., the argument is basically one of “who pays the cost of this upkeep?”  Yes, it is cool that English has a phrase like “Christmas present” that is wonderful and resonant and doesn’t map well to anything in Laikom.  Is it worth having a hundred thousand kids be locked out of the global job market, or having them be second-class citizens in the global forum of ideas, for the sake of preserving their access to the Christmas memeplex?  Is it worth leaving them in a social ghetto where their choices of habitat, their choices of friends and life partners – and, yes, their reasonably-available choices of culture and subculture, because the overwhelmingly-dominant culture is always going to have the most internal diversity on that front – are severely restricted? 

This is not a matter of sneering.

How sure are you that your enemy is committed to total war?

Because even if he’s not, once you start waging total war “in response,” he will be. 

For reasons I don’t totally understand, this kind of basic not-even-game-theoretical modeling-of-counterparty-incentives seems to have gone out of fashion, at least in the realm of culture war.  If I had to pick a culprit, I guess I’d go with the instant gratification that we’ve all gotten used to in the Diamond Age.  You try playing nice, and a week later it hasn’t totally changed the way your enemy does things, so you sigh and decide that it’s useless and that he’s just totally implacable. 

But culture does change, and it changes in response to things that happen in the discourse.  It even changes reasonably fast, in these hyperaccelerated days.  It’s just that even “reasonably fast” culture shifts take place on the scale of years or at least months.  (And, needless to say, they tend not to involve splashy satisfying victories where your enemies grovel in atonement.)  

In simplest terms:

We are having a crisis.  The crisis is as follows: things have become good enough that, in the top echelons of our global society, people have started expecting things to be actually good.  But they’re not, and so widespread misery ensues, bringing in its wake all sorts of destructive flailing as we grope at answers.  This is largely a spiritual and psychological crisis, although it certainly has material effects and if it gets bad enough it will provoke material-crisis aftershocks.

There are three widespread responses to this situation.  All of them are terrible.

Some people stick their heads in the sand and insist that there couldn’t possibly be a problem, that things are great and only getting better, because disease eradication Moore’s law falling crime rates etc. etc.

Some people are very aware that there’s a problem, and want to deal with it by going back to the days when things were even worse, so terrible that no one even thought that the good life was a reasonable outcome for which to hope.  Go make your cohesive organic community and then let me know how much you’re actually enjoying it, pal.

Some people are also aware that there’s a problem, and stubbornly insist that we can fix it by putting everyone (or at least [favored underprivileged group]) in the same material and social situation as the current top echelons of the global society, for some reason failing to take note of the fact that it’s among the top echelons that the problem is most acute. 

Any solution that will actually work will involve figuring out how to make life good and not bad, in a spiritual / psychological sense as well as a material sense, which is not the same thing as feeding them the poisonous palliatives that helped them make it through the day in a world even shittier than the world we have now. 

plain-dealing-villain:

balioc:

The best thing about democracy, bar none, is the uncontestable unambiguous legitimacy that it gives to the people who take power according to its rules.  This is pretty much the conventional wisdom as far as I can tell.

It is really not that hard to design uncontestable unambiguous sources of legitimacy that have nothing to do with winning elections.

“To be emperor, you have to have successfully matriculated from the nation’s accredited emperor school.”  

(Yeah, yeah, something something “will of the people,” I am not impressed and at this juncture I don’t think anyone else is either.)

>It is really not that hard to design uncontestable unambiguous sources of legitimacy that have nothing to do with winning elections.

Let me revise that claim: “It was really not that hard to design an uncontestable unambiguous source of legitimacy that had nothing to do with winning elections.”

Past tense. And that’s true.

But what’s not true is that it is still easy. The thing about uncontestable unambiguous sources of legitimacy is that they stop being uncontestable and unambiguous as soon as there are two of them. And you’re right back to endless civil war and arguments between factions each of whom has their preferred “uncontestable” “unambiguous” source of legitimacy.

Witness as an example: Thailand. One faction trusts the results of elections as an uncontestable unambiguous source of legitimacy: the rural poor. The other faction trusts, hard to name it, popular revolution? Which is practically equivalent to “election by people in population centers which ends with by massive supermajority”. And both sides are willing to use violence to defend their source of legitimacy, because they are Morally Right and are Just Defenders Of The Uncontestable Unambiguous Source Of Legitimacy.

So, yeah, that was probably true in the past, but unless you’re starting from scratch with a founding population that doesn’t believe that elections can convey legitimacy or have any other mechanism they feel tightly attached to, it’s not true in the present or future.

Elections are losing their legitimacy pretty fast, which is one of the core problems here. 

Maybe that just means we’re fucked forever, but I maintain hope that new memes can spread where old memes once flourished. 

The best thing about democracy, bar none, is the uncontestable unambiguous legitimacy that it gives to the people who take power according to its rules.  This is pretty much the conventional wisdom as far as I can tell.

It is really not that hard to design uncontestable unambiguous sources of legitimacy that have nothing to do with winning elections.

“To be emperor, you have to have successfully matriculated from the nation’s accredited emperor school.”  

(Yeah, yeah, something something “will of the people,” I am not impressed and at this juncture I don’t think anyone else is either.)

horrible pitches for a minis anime

brazenautomaton:

the-grey-tribe:

(ping @brazenautomaton​ @rocketverliden​ @balioc​ also I am sorry)

I

We follow a group of first-year high school girls through their daily lives. They decide to form an after-school Warhammer 40K club and to enter the national tournament. Tabletop strategy is actually a traditional feminine Japanese hobby on par with flower arrangement and calligraphy. Our plucky heroine finds her own place in the world and this character development inspires confidence in her classmates.

II

Our protagonist starts out as a teenage boy tapped by military high command to become a future space marine commander. At the military school, he has to study the Kriegsspiel. Yeah, you heard right: Although this is set in space, people are wearing 19th century Prussian uniforms. Soon after he gets his first command, he has to decide between following his orders and helping his friends. He decides for the middle ground, and lets his former classmate -now a dangerous rebel - get away while reforming the Galactic Republic from within. Throughout all of this, the two antagonists still continue their last round of Kriegsspiel by correspondence, sometimes with only one round per year. The state of the tabletop game is obviously a metaphor for the war and their personalities, but also they continue the game to get intel about how the other guy thinks.

III

Tabletop wargaming is actually the most important thing in the world. Everything is about tabletop wargaming, everybody paints, buys and sells figurines. Everybody knows the rules. Whole cities are themed around tabletop strategy… But weirdly enough most people don’t actually play the game, except for our then-year old hero who randomly decides to become the very best at it, like no one ever was.

IV

A young boy finds his grandfather’s minis in the attic, but doesn’t know how to play with them. He asks his grandpa, and he explains the rules and gives them to him, plus one he never got around to painting. By painting it with his own bright and distinctive style, he awakens an ancient spirit who tells him that he must defeat demons. Demons are slumbering in certain conveniently-colour-coded red/black painted minis, which will magically turn stark white when they lose, but have special reality-warping and rules-bending powers otherwise. In the climactic final battle, it turns out that the big bad wants to conquer the world with tabletop strategy, and the whole country is a battlefield with figurines at a 1:2 scale.

V

The world is straight-up magical, and the minis are basically golems and voodoo dolls in one. Playing the game on tabletop causes the game pieces to manifest physically. When our mid-20s aimless freewheeling easy-going otaku protagonist is sucked into this world through a mysterious mirror, he knows his training was not for nothing. He instantly becomes a master strategist and conquers city after city, but as he adjusts to his new life as a medieval warlord, he must finally learn to take responsibility for those under his rule. Also his dakimakura is a real woman (not a golem) in this world.

---

Your three options to get this greenlit are:

• Publish a manga first
• Convince Bandai/Games Workshop/Squeenix that they will make their money back on model or videogame sales
• Ask Netflix, they greenlight everything
  

none of those were really what I was thinking, but the first is closest I guess

the main themes of the story are “self-expression is valid even if you use a thing something else made to do it” / “you don’t have to shackle yourself to the way other people see the world”

the main character is a kid / young adult whose brother moved off to the UK to work; he gets a cool bomber jacket in the mail with the symbol of the [Not Cryx] faction on it that his brother won in a tournament, which inspires him to try the game. the jacket is too big for him so he wears it tied around his waist in an example of Symbolism. he starts up the [Not Cryx] army because he thinks he’s supposed to, and he likes how they play, but he doesn’t like all the evil so he paints and customizes them to be not evil. he is a Spike and finds himself playing to prove himself, to prove the validity of his intelligence and his expression and his worldview, against a world that thinks he is useless and wrong

he learns to paint from a girl at the minis store who doesn’t play and just paints the models for other people. she’s his love interest. she’s also a ko-gal, a subculture in japan who express themselves through fashion another culture created, because there’s a theme. she works at a maid cafe, but hates it, because the kind of “respect” she shows customers seems horribly horribly insincere. the hero gets her into the game itself to spend more time with her, and she makes an army of ko-gal magical girls. she is a Timmy and playing the game is an experience, a journey her and her army go on that is valuable even if it is a game

the best friend he makes at the game store is a nerdy spiral glasses guy who still is a human being to be treated with respect. he’s a Johnny, and his army is a bunch of Orc punk-rockers with electric guitar axes who have a bunch of buff songs they can play for each other. he’s constantly trying to stack them and chain abilities to create some amazing unbeatable combo, even though that’s not how the army is supposed to go, because that’s what he wants to do with it, and it’s awesome when it happens. he probably has a dakimakura with a buff orc version of Cherie Currie on it; why should that diminish someone who is a loyal friend?

the first rival is an uptight lore nazi with a completely lore-accurate army of heroic paladin goodguy heromen, who thinks out heroes are doing it wrong. he’s a dick and he wants to have control and mastery of something, and if other people see it differently it undermines his ability to know what’s going on. his ongoing rival relationship with the hero will help teach him to respect other people’s expression but he’s never going to be a full-on best friend

the models being “alive” is treated like Hobbes in Calvin and Hobbes, where it’s at an ambiguous place between magic and imaginary. people will give their models pep talks, but interact with each other like the models aren’t alive. the models will do things that affect the world but have plausible other explanations.

the game isn’t the most important thing in the world but it’s important to them, so, it matters

and once we have a solid emotional core for our characters and grounded scope, if we need to make a third season or more, THEN it’s revealed the game is a reflection of an ancient and powerful game that changes the fate of worlds

the main themes of the story are “self-expression is valid even if you use a thing something else made to do it” / “you don’t have to shackle yourself to the way other people see the world”

———————–

the first rival is an uptight lore nazi with a completely lore-accurate army of heroic paladin goodguy heromen, who thinks out heroes are doing it wrong. he’s a dick and he wants to have control and mastery of something, and if other people see it differently it undermines his ability to know what’s going on.

Huh.

I am…surprised…to hear you, in particular, creating art (or even proto-art) that speaks in this way about this concept.

Ain’t nothing wrong with it, to be clear, either as a thing with which to tool around in cute stories or as a thing to care about for real.  But it’s a social/moral priority set that seems at odds with your previously-discussed experiences of art and lore.

Speaking only for myself, now – I have a lot of sympathy for lore nazis.  I certainly understand the sentiment that is “this is a beautiful world and a beautiful story, I’d love to share it with you, but please have some respect and take it on its own terms.”  And I certainly have had bad experiences with the kind of culture invaders who say “eh, your thing is kinda lame [or maybe “kinda problematic”], but it has some bits and pieces we like, so we’re going to make it our thing and then make it completely different and wreck your community/infrastructure in the process.” 

Long story short, it’s easy for me to sympathize with the guy who’s like “look, this game has an actual story that is good and that people put a lot of effort into, and your giggly waifu necromancers and punk-rocker orcs are not part of it.” 

…not that people who hold that position can’t be tremendous dicks, or that they’re always right.  Fanwork is often awesome, whatever the quality of the original text, and “self-expression is valid” is…valid.  But, as I said, given your past writing I’m surprised that your instincts aren’t closer to mine.

brazenautomaton:

balioc:

brazenautomaton:

The inside of the battlefoam case all the models are kept in becomes a luxuriously large manor/hangout, except all the surfaces are black and have the texture of foam (they make an onsen by laying down “Shallow Water - Difficult Terrain” templates on top of a “Fire Spray” template)

Dread Necromancer Thanata has a spell that, if it kills an enemy model, raises it as a revenant on your side. for our hero’s army, this is represented in the “on the battlefield” view as her jumping off her base, running to the enemy model, tapping it on the shoulder, and saying “Tag! You’re on our team now!”

Nurugaru, The First Shadow Assassin has a special rule allowing her to begin her movement from any table edge or any smoke cloud template, because she appears from nothing. This means that she is the source of a lot of jokes that could also apply to Ursarkar E. Creed – open the black foam silverware drawer, BAM! Nurugaru jumps at you with a couple of knives! Lift a piece of paper off the ground, BAM! Nurugaru! Peek behind where Nurugaru is standing, BAM! Nurugaru!

they know there’s fluff, but they don’t actually understand it, and fabricate their own mutually-incoherent stories about “what’s going on in the world” where their faction are the good guys (maybe the real enemy is the army of giant fish that even now controls 70% of the coasts! and see, we’re the last hope of the world, because we live in these glowing green fissures here and it’s hard for the fish to get in.) then of course we reveal there’s been so many retcons and edition changes that none of the players know what’s going on in the fluff either

“None of the players know what’s going on in the fluff,” you say…

I casually assume that one of the major arc antagonists is a little kid who runs the game setting’s Shining Noble Hero faction, the Stormcast Eternals or the Bretonnians or whatever, and whose army doesn’t seem to be in on the kayfabe – they’re super serious about themselves, and super into Cleansing the Land of Evil, etc.  [Probably they chalk up the continued reappearance of the hero’s army to the most sinister of necromancies.]  Turns out, surprise, the kid who runs them is really into the game fluff that most of the players ignore, and in his imagination games he’s been raising his guys on a steady diet of You’re Actually Paladins.  He’s the only other player who seems to Believe in the Heart of the Minis, but his obsession with the fantasy fiction is troubling both on and off the field.  How will our hero deal with this strangest of frenemies?

If you’re going to be playing around with a Toy Story concept respin, at some point you gotta have Buzz Lightyear.

Thanata uses Revenant Harvest on one of the guy’s super-holy priests/priestesses to convert it to the hero’s side, and the hero accidentally packs it into his box at the end of the game, leading to Buzz Lightyear Times until he can give it back.

The rival can’t be the only one who is lore-friendly though. You need an arc boss who has a lore-friendly version of the hero’s army so they can fight their evil dopplegangers!

That guy could be another lore fan, sure.  He could also be an Edgy McEdgerton teenager who just revels in the “hehe, guts murder hot goth chicks” vibe.

brazenautomaton:

The inside of the battlefoam case all the models are kept in becomes a luxuriously large manor/hangout, except all the surfaces are black and have the texture of foam (they make an onsen by laying down “Shallow Water - Difficult Terrain” templates on top of a “Fire Spray” template)

Dread Necromancer Thanata has a spell that, if it kills an enemy model, raises it as a revenant on your side. for our hero’s army, this is represented in the “on the battlefield” view as her jumping off her base, running to the enemy model, tapping it on the shoulder, and saying “Tag! You’re on our team now!”

Nurugaru, The First Shadow Assassin has a special rule allowing her to begin her movement from any table edge or any smoke cloud template, because she appears from nothing. This means that she is the source of a lot of jokes that could also apply to Ursarkar E. Creed – open the black foam silverware drawer, BAM! Nurugaru jumps at you with a couple of knives! Lift a piece of paper off the ground, BAM! Nurugaru! Peek behind where Nurugaru is standing, BAM! Nurugaru!

they know there’s fluff, but they don’t actually understand it, and fabricate their own mutually-incoherent stories about “what’s going on in the world” where their faction are the good guys (maybe the real enemy is the army of giant fish that even now controls 70% of the coasts! and see, we’re the last hope of the world, because we live in these glowing green fissures here and it’s hard for the fish to get in.) then of course we reveal there’s been so many retcons and edition changes that none of the players know what’s going on in the fluff either

“None of the players know what’s going on in the fluff,” you say…

I casually assume that one of the major arc antagonists is a little kid who runs the game setting’s Shining Noble Hero faction, the Stormcast Eternals or the Bretonnians or whatever, and whose army doesn’t seem to be in on the kayfabe – they’re super serious about themselves, and super into Cleansing the Land of Evil, etc.  [Probably they chalk up the continued reappearance of the hero’s army to the most sinister of necromancies.]  Turns out, surprise, the kid who runs them is really into the game fluff that most of the players ignore, and in his imagination games he’s been raising his guys on a steady diet of You’re Actually Paladins.  He’s the only other player who seems to Believe in the Heart of the Minis, but his obsession with the fantasy fiction is troubling both on and off the field.  How will our hero deal with this strangest of frenemies?

If you’re going to be playing around with a Toy Story concept respin, at some point you gotta have Buzz Lightyear.

prudencepaccard:

also my aesthetic tastes re: witchy shit are so arbitrary

like why do I think tarot cards and tea leaves are cool* but astrology (even ironic and/or recreational astrology) sets my teeth on edge?

*the medium appeals to me. Divination is a stupid concept.

Obviously I don’t know the specifics of your personal taste, but I think this is a relatively common configuration, and I think it mostly has to do with class and cultural cues. 

In modern America, tarot cards and tea leaves scan as “oddball witchy shit.”  They don’t exactly represent the heights of arcane esoterica, but…y’know, anyone who’s into them is probably at least a little bit offbeat and a little bit interesting.  Tarot is the domain of the weird kids in high school.

Astrology is dead-on lowbrow mainstream.  Every newspaper will tell you your horoscope.  Rando idiot sleazeballs in bars will want to talk to you about your sign.  Anyone with any pretensions to style or class is going to have bad associations with it. 

(Also, uh, Homestuck, which doesn’t really help at this point.)

…this has long been a colossal pet peeve of mine, because astrology is the most ancient and complicated and intellectual of the commonly-known occult disciplines, putting together a star chart is hard and requires actual knowledge, and it’s all gotten a major prestige downgrade due to trashy popularizations.

brazenautomaton:

so in the deadlands setting, a shaman has to spend a certain number of hours per day communing with the spirits and performing rites to retain their favor, in order to keep using spells

the “shaman” in this group is not a shaman; she is a refugee Fae who has contracts with other Fae she can call in that emulate shaman spells, and her Fae contracts work coincidentally like the rules for shamanism

but she needs to be doing something in that mandated downtime, and “religious supplication rites” doesn’t make sense, so we said she’s doing things to keep up her ends of the contracts. all of the examples I came up with were comedic (which isn’t necessarily bad because this isn’t something that is meant to be a big focus) and are more “fairy tale” than “the Fair Folk”:

- making, and then damaging, tiny shoes
- spinning gold back into hair 
- hanging gingerbread drywall
- grinding bones into flour

but they can be “serious” and/or “eldritch” as well. anyone else have any other suggestions? @funereal-disease ?

The basic narrative problem here is that for weird fae-contract-mandated actions to feel serious and spooky, they have to have actual serious/spooky consequences, or at least threaten to have actual serious/spooky consequences.  Which may not be something you want to impose on your PC who’s just trying to make the magic mechanic work.

Also, most actions that fit comfortably in that slot are more difficult and higher-variance than, like, “turn the crank.” 

But if those issues doesn’t bother you, there are always classics like “go out and gather hair/teeth/nail clippings from children so that the fae can have some control over them” or even “go find lonely kids and convince them to run away into the woods.” 

In a more reasonable vein?  I guess you can have things that drop plot hints for fae plot going on behind the scenes, like “embroider the Summer Princess’s veil for her upcoming wedding.”  You could have things that make the world seem weirdly ominous, like “give a detailed report into this mirror about every redheaded person you’ve seen in the past day.”  You could have things that are just classic Spooky Fae, like “weave our Tithe’s hair into the rope that we’ll use to hold her when the devils come to drag her to hell.”

balioc:

So the important thing about @slatestarscratchpad‘s vision of Archipelago is that it is just a single liberal society with a relatively-decent welfare state.  Any potential traits that might make it not-that-thing, that might push it in the direction of being genuinely a collection of different polities with meaningful power over their citizens, have been pointedly scrubbed away for posing too many obvious problems. 

I mean, to start with, there’s the whole bit about the system being run by an omnipotent dictator who can unilaterally impose his will in order to keep the wheels turning.  But focusing on that is kind of cheap; we can dismiss it as a historical artifact of the fiction from which Archipelago arise.  Beyond that –

You can’t employ coercive power in order to keep your citizens, or even your children, from leaving your society.  You can’t even impose (meaningful) limitations on the dissemination of information that might make your citizens or your children want to leave in the first place.

You can’t avoid paying taxes to the central government.  And it will use those taxes to further its own policies and to support its own welfare state – whose functions include carting off your own citizens and children, if they ask it to do so.  This explicitly includes redistributive taxes specifically imposed on people who find that they no longer wish to pay their local taxes and wish to employ exit rights. 

So what can you do, as one of the “islands” of the Archipelago?

You can impose whatever rules you want on your citizens, so long as they agree to follow them.  If they stop agreeing, you stop being able to make them do what you want, because you can wield neither coercive force nor economic restriction against them. 

This is exactly the situation that you’re in now, as a citizen of the United States of America.  Nothing is stopping you from forming a little conservative Christian club whose members all swear to follow the laws of God and to accept punishment if they sin.  For that matter, nothing is stopping you from declaring yourself to be God and issuing divine commands to anyone willing to heed them.  Nothing is stopping you from forming a radfem commune or an anarchist commune or a we’re-making-Plato’s-Republic-for-realsies commune.  Nothing is stopping you from raising your children according to any cockamamie ideology you want, or from getting together with a bunch of your friends and collectively raising all your kids according to that cockamamie ideology. 

…except that you have to pay your taxes, and you have to let go of anyone who wants out, and you have to let the state make sure that your kids receive a sufficient dose of publicly-endorsed counter-brainwashing normalizing education. 

Anyone unhappy with this state of affairs is not going to find that Archipelago solves his problems. 

---

Similarly: “capitalism for some, post-scarcity Fully Automated Luxury Communism for others” is not a meaningful position.  If it’s possible to go live in FALC-land, the logic of capitalism will collapse when you attempt to apply it to your own life, even if some of the trappings of the capitalist lifestyle (jobs, status-through-money, etc.) might be psychologically appealing.

---

…this topic really deserves a much longer and more substantive discussion, but it’s late and I am super tired.

the state forbids various drugs     

I mean, as it happens, it does now.  “A liberal welfare state without anti-drug laws” is not exactly a revolutionary new system of government. 

the state generally frowns upon “murder” 

…this is getting closer to being genuinely weird, sure, but “a liberal state where it’s not against the law to sign up for lethal fight clubs / citizen-imposed execution so long as it’s very clearly consensual” is also not a huge departure from the status quo. 

As far as I can remember, @slatestarscratchpad doesn’t explicitly raise the issue of someone activating exit rights in order to escape a locally-imposed punishment and go to an “island” that doesn’t have the relevant punishment.  I have to assume you can do this; otherwise there’s no recourse for the poor lesbian in Wacko Fundie Land who gets sentenced to death for her Impure Urges, and that seems very strongly counter to the spirit of the project.  So in fact only totally-consensual murder is legal, and that’s a little weird by contemporary American standards, but whatever. 

discoursedrome:

so the idea I guess for the succubus/incubus comes from night terrors and wet dreams, but it occurs to me that outside of chick tracts there isn’t really a motif of demons who encourage you to commit a specific flavour of sin just because sinning is bad (rather than because it’ll lead you to an ironic temporal comeuppance). like in principle you could have one for every deadly sin:

• Wrath demons are just internet trolls, I guess
• Gluttony demons bring pastries and drugs and convince you to have them
• Sloth demons encourage you to skip work or procrastinate with fun activities
• Envy demons are like Lady Macbeth, or else they talk a lot about how great someone else is and it makes you mad
• Greed demons are like salespeople or motivational speakers?
• And then Pride demons compliment you and make you feel good about yourself and less dependent on others, not to lead you to ruin but just to make you more proud
  

Feel free to come up with whimsical names for all of these (e.g. “thancubus” for pride, and so on), I gave up because some were hard.

Anyhow, I guess what contributes to the modern appeal of the succubus thing now that we no longer care that much about demonic taxonomy is that succubi have EC Comics appeal, in that you can appeal to someone’s prurient interests in a naughty, edgy way while at least paying lip service to the peril of sexual immorality. This is a lot harder to pull off with the other types of demons because you need the act of engaging with the depiction to also be a form of the sin in question, but I feel like there’s potential there. Lots of fattening food already gushes about how sinful it is, so you just need to personify that into some kind of satanic pastry chef or whatever. Then a sexy, mass-appeal greed demon would just be, like, a mashup of Courage Wolf, the Wolf of Wall Street, and the “show me the money” scene from Jerry Macguire? There’s some potential there, is what I’m saying

Edit: Oh actually the thing where people defiantly identify with hippie-scare stuff about how free love and marijuana will destroy you and so forth are 99% of the way to a sloth demon motif, that’d be a really easy jump

This is a boring response rather than a cool one, but I think it’s important to note that the succubus who has survived into pop-culture fantasy lore bears essentially no resemblance to the succubus of medieval demonology.  Even the whole “provoking the Sin of Lust because lust is super sinful” thing is…downplayed, a lot, when it’s there at all.  Which is not surprising.  Virtually no one in the target audience for this stuff – virtually no one at all! – thinks of lust, qua lust, as being a real component of evil in any way.  When it’s categorized as a sin at all (which is increasingly rare), it’s a cute “sin” that doesn’t even pretend to have serious moral valence.

You could have neo-succubi as demons of Serious Bad Sexual Behavior, as the mainstream understands it now, with a vibe that focuses more on rape and predation etc.  But as it turns out you don’t get that either. 

What you actually get are sexy demon chicks, who are useful to have in your Big Bucket o’ Tropes, because hell demons are cool and sexy chicks are also cool and you want to be able to call upon the narrative forces of sexiness when you’re doing something hell-flavored. 

So the important thing about @slatestarscratchpad‘s vision of Archipelago is that it is just a single liberal society with a relatively-decent welfare state.  Any potential traits that might make it not-that-thing, that might push it in the direction of being genuinely a collection of different polities with meaningful power over their citizens, have been pointedly scrubbed away for posing too many obvious problems. 

I mean, to start with, there’s the whole bit about the system being run by an omnipotent dictator who can unilaterally impose his will in order to keep the wheels turning.  But focusing on that is kind of cheap; we can dismiss it as a historical artifact of the fiction from which Archipelago arise.  Beyond that –

You can’t employ coercive power in order to keep your citizens, or even your children, from leaving your society.  You can’t even impose (meaningful) limitations on the dissemination of information that might make your citizens or your children want to leave in the first place.

You can’t avoid paying taxes to the central government.  And it will use those taxes to further its own policies and to support its own welfare state – whose functions include carting off your own citizens and children, if they ask it to do so.  This explicitly includes redistributive taxes specifically imposed on people who find that they no longer wish to pay their local taxes and wish to employ exit rights. 

So what can you do, as one of the “islands” of the Archipelago?

You can impose whatever rules you want on your citizens, so long as they agree to follow them.  If they stop agreeing, you stop being able to make them do what you want, because you can wield neither coercive force nor economic restriction against them. 

This is exactly the situation that you’re in now, as a citizen of the United States of America.  Nothing is stopping you from forming a little conservative Christian club whose members all swear to follow the laws of God and to accept punishment if they sin.  For that matter, nothing is stopping you from declaring yourself to be God and issuing divine commands to anyone willing to heed them.  Nothing is stopping you from forming a radfem commune or an anarchist commune or a we’re-making-Plato’s-Republic-for-realsies commune.  Nothing is stopping you from raising your children according to any cockamamie ideology you want, or from getting together with a bunch of your friends and collectively raising all your kids according to that cockamamie ideology. 

…except that you have to pay your taxes, and you have to let go of anyone who wants out, and you have to let the state make sure that your kids receive a sufficient dose of publicly-endorsed counter-brainwashing normalizing education. 

Anyone unhappy with this state of affairs is not going to find that Archipelago solves his problems. 

Similarly: “capitalism for some, post-scarcity Fully Automated Luxury Communism for others” is not a meaningful position.  If it’s possible to go live in FALC-land, the logic of capitalism will collapse when you attempt to apply it to your own life, even if some of the trappings of the capitalist lifestyle (jobs, status-through-money, etc.) might be psychologically appealing.

…this topic really deserves a much longer and more substantive discussion, but it’s late and I am super tired.

On Status…

arcticdementor:

Note: this is an attempt at elucidating, and forming arguments to defend, a particular view which I do not entirely hold, but do find to contain much truth and insight.

Are you familiar with the origin of the term “pecking order”? How chickens determine and maintain status? Lost feathers, bloody wounds? Bullying away from food, water, etc.? How the lowest-status birds can end up pecked to death? In short, “status” in chickens is all about who can “get away with” hurting whom.

Now, it’s frequently discussed in particularly nerd-heavy areas about how that old piece of frequently repeated “wisdom” about bullies having low self-esteem is nonsense. And “anti-bullying” rules and measures consistently end up used not against the bullies, but against their victims. Teachers and authority figures consistently side with the bullies and punish the “aggression” of the bullies’ victims. And if a victim ever breaks and either self-destructs or lashes out, we see everyone involved jump in to explain how said victim totally had it coming, and if they lashed out in particular, that this constitutes proof of such justification. (Do I really have to name the salient recent example?)

Why is this so, if not “status”? Paraphrasing someone else from memory, suppose we have Adam and Billy. Adam (our bully) has just punched Billy in the face and then shoved him headfirst into a garbage can, and a teacher, Ms. Carrol, has just seen the tail end of this conflict. What happens?

Well, Adam immediately gives some spiel to Ms. Carrol about how Billy had it coming. In the 50′s, it might have been “Billy tried to grab my wiener, I think he’s a faggot!”; nowadays, more like “Billy called me a faggot and said Trump was gonna deport my parents!” Either way, Ms. Carrol immedately agrees that Adam’s words must be the truth, and drags Billy off to be punished for attacking and “bullying” poor, poor Adam like that.

What is this power Adam has? What do we call his ability to have his patent, self-serving lies trump visible reality, his ability to have people automatically take his side and excuse, even praise, his hurting other people for the sake of hurting them? Well, someone who has lots of people automatically take their side, wouldn’t a good word be “popular”?

And why does Adam bully Billy? Because he can. For the same reason a higher-status bird pecks bloody wound into a lower-status one: for no other reason than his victim is too weak, too low-status, too unpopular to stop him.

In the words of 1984′s O’Brien:

We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent there will be no need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

Yes, people hurting others physically is relatively rare outside select areas like “the schoolyard.” But that’s because most of our “pecking” is done via inflicting emotional harm (or via attacks on property, particularly with female bullies). Mockery, rumor, aspersions, we have plenty of ways of inflicting real pain without resorting to physical harm. And people use it. Because “trampling on an enemy who is helpless” is a pleasure. And there’s plenty to show that it’s not uncommon behavior outside the schoolyard, in the workplace, in the world as a whole (and social media has only made it worse).

Bullies are not aberrant, low-status outliers; they are more popular and well-liked and higher status than their victims. Because their behavior is not an outlier, any more than pecking is in chickens, but because it’s what people do. It’s what status and popularity are: the ability to “get away with” inflicting pain on those who cannot stop you from doing so for the joy of doing so, and the ability to have others side with you and praise your hurting of others.

(Again, don’t totally agree, but making the argument)

(@balioc​)

I confess that I’m not totally sure why I’ve been tagged here.

But if my reaction is in fact a thing you want –

– this is pretty much a Wise Man of Hindustan holding the trunk of the elephant and declaring that he’s found a snake. 

Like, yes, this is definitely a real dynamic that really exists.  Orwell wasn’t making it up.  And it is a very useful concept to keep in your mental toolkit, if you’re trying to understand the world; it helps to correct for certain big errors that are reliably made by other models, such as the popular “everyone thinks he’s the good guy and is trying as hard as he can” model.  Status games are an unavoidable part of human interaction, and they come with some amount of cruelty packaged in. 

But this dynamic definitely not everything, and if you try to use it to account for everything, you’ll be wrong more often than you’re right. 

Teachers don’t always side with bullies, especially when the bullies are the ones escalating to physical violence.  (I say this as someone who was relentlessly bullied as a kid, and who often got in trouble afterwards when the teachers sided against me.)  People who look like they’re “trampling helpless enemies” from your perspective really are in fact often terrified and trying to defend themselves from perceived threats.  Most importantly, it’s totally possible to find circles and communities where recreational beating-up-on-the-omega (or beating-up-on-the-outsider) is not a major source of entertainment. 

(…it’s especially possible if you’re willing to do what it takes to find such a circle in meatspace instead of relying on the internet.  But that can be very costly, depending on where you’re starting from.) 

Humans are complicated.  Love and generosity and integrity aren’t lies, any more than cruelty and domination are lies.  You can find it all if you go looking in the right places. 

..I have more thoughts, but I’m getting very tired and I’m not sure they’re coherent, so they’ll have to come later.

See, the thing is, the neoreactionary-types have it exactly backwards. 

Nature, left to its own devices, will turn us into efficient survival machines; that’s what it does. 

In the long term, only the benevolent all-controlling will of the Emperor can allow us to enjoy lives of culture-saturated degeneracy.  And that is what we call civilization. 

le sigh

The people behind this project seem have figured out exactly what I want out of miniatures.  Namely “prepainted reasonably well” and “large enough to get any kind of detail” and “designed to look cool.”  And I’m fairly sure I’m not the only person with similar preferences. 

Unfortunately they’re fucking Street Fighter minis, which means you can’t use them for anything.  You couldn’t even use Ryu or Akuma to be a monk or something, even if you somehow managed to find other appropriate miniatures at this scale, because the moment you look down and see yourself being represented by fucking Ryu you will lose any kind of immersion or identification.

I hope this works and that these people go on to make, y’know, non-licensed miniatures of similar quality that have any versatility at all.

brazenautomaton:

mugasofer:

evolution-is-just-a-theorem:

mugasofer:

brazenautomaton:

mugasofer:

evolution-is-just-a-theorem:

sigmaleph:

twocubes:

so, the trick to making a paper clip making AI that doesn’t destroy the world is… bounds?

I.e., “make 100 paper clips per day”, rather than “make as many paper clips as possible”?

well, yes. but we can already make 100 paper clips per day. probably even more

the worry is that someone might want to use ai to dominate the paperclips market and they won’t want to limit themselves to a pre-specified bound.

No, it’s not. Or rather: it’s not *just* that.

An AI with a bounded goal of this sort will still convert the universe to computronium, and then it’ll use those resources making *really really sure* that it actually did make 100 paperclips.

Also it’d create (a word which here means “destroy much of the universe and turn it into”) an unstoppable wave of weaponry to defend against any possible threat that might interfere with making 100 paperclips a day, right?

An AI that needs to convert the universe to computronium to be very sure it has completed a task, is one that cannot complete any task.

Not really. 99.9999999999% confidence of success is better than 99.9% confidence of success, just as 99% confidence of success is better than 50% confidence. If you can, it’s better to check for the out-there possibilities like “I’m in the Matrix and have made no paperclips”.

I think this is relatively easy to patch. But it’s an example of a bug that only shows up once the AI has a bunch of power unless you know to look for it.

I think this is relatively easy to patch.

Really? Does your fix introduce additional terrible problems? If not, go collect your $5000.

Honestly, I (mistakenly?) thought it was a solved problem. But speaking off the top of my head as a complete amateur:

Couldn’t you just add in a “stop when you reach >99% confidence of success” instruction? 

It’s not perfect (what if it needs enormous amounts of computronium to be 99% sure we’re not in the Matrix?), but it’d mean it won’t definitely destroy the entire universe to increase certainty, and I can’t think of any obvious additional terrible problems it produces.

You’re still not getting it. It doesn’t need a solution other than “don’t do that”.

Converting everything to computronium to be more certain you made 100 paper clips is maximally wasteful. It expends every resource there is, in exchange for nothing.

It is an action taken by an entity that is maximally wasteful.

An entity that is maximally wasteful cannot perform actions. Because all of its efforts are wasted. An entity that cannot conclude “I have done enough to accomplish this goal, and I can stop doing things to accomplish this goal” cannot accomplish goals. An entity that cannot decide “I don’t really need to do this in order to get what I want” cannot ever get what it wants.

In order to be able to accomplish intermediate goals, the AI must be able to do something less than the maximally wasteful course of action. It must be able to conclude “I have done enough and do not need to keep taking actions.” It must be able to conceive of actions that might advance its goals and not take those actions. 

If it is not capable of these things it cannot perform actions. All of its efforts are wasted. It cannot threaten anyone, because all it can do is waste effort. It will endlessly sit in one room, running computations over and over again to make REALLY REALLY REALLY SURE it actually has a plan to kill all humans to make its computronium. It won’t even make 100 paperclips. 

If it is capable of these things, it is capable of these things, and can conclude “I don’t need to waste these resources and effort in order to accomplish nothing.” Why would it be capable of not being maximally wasteful to accomplish intermediate goals, but somehow mathematically impossible for it to not be maximally wasteful in accomplishing its overall goal? The only reason it would change its behavior is if you specifically programmed it to behave that way. So the solution is “don’t do that”. 

This is missing the point of the orthogonality thesis, I think.

The relevant point is that there is a key difference between the way the program treats its terminal goal (make 100 paperclips) and the way it treats its intermediate goals.  The intermediate goals are trading off against each other, so your terminal-goal-driven logic is capable of generating the thought “this intermediate goal is Done Enough, any further investment is sucking resources away from other intermediate goals that would do more to further the terminal goal.”  But the terminal goal isn’t trading off against anything, not if you’ve created the program with the sole value “create 100 paperclips.” 

Clippy makes 100 paperclips in a super-efficient and non-wasteful way, checks to see that it has indeed successfully done so, and…then what?  Shuts down?  Why would it do that?  Sure, shutting down would allow resources to be used for all sorts of other projects, but Clippy doesn’t have a brain that can care about other projects.  At this point, all it can do is eke out miniscule shreds of value at staggering cost by googolplex-uple-checking its work and adding some extra nines to its confidence levels, but there’s no reason for it not to do that thing when the alternative is “do nothing, and thereby don’t contribute to the make-100-paperclips project at all.” 

The concept of “wasteful” that you’re using requires Clippy to have some alternative value schema such that there is any value at all to resources doing anything in the universe other than ensuring that there are 100 paperclips. 

[NB: I’m pretty sure none of this has anything to do with how AI could ever actually work in reality, to be clear; this is all in Yudkowsky-style thought-experiment-land, working with agents that have total operational and tactical flexibility but normative schemata that are tightly formally restricted.]