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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

shkspr.mobi

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Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#161

Post by Sha1rholder »

edot wrote: post #121
rayiner wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing The phrase "the right thing" is load-bearing, to steal a Claudeism. The Muslim Brotherhood that ran the country before El-Sisi thought they were doing "the right thing." El-Sisi also thought he was doing "the right thing." Egyptians mostly thought El-Sisi was doing “the right thing” during this time…

But who decides which rules are neutral? Even this is relative and subjective. Laws are not inherently neutral. A pH of 7 is only neutral because it is bounded by 0 on the left and 14 on the right. In a different system, perhaps it would be from 10 to 30 and thus a pH of 20 would be neutral.

Your pH example actually proves the opposite. pH 7 is not neutral because it happens to sit halfway between 0 and 14.

pH is not inherently limited to that range at all. Sufficiently concentrated solutions can have pH values below 0 or above 14. A solution is called neutral when the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions are equal, which happens to correspond to about pH 7 at 25°C. Change the temperature and neutral pH changes too. So if you arbitrarily changed the scale to 10–30, that wouldn’t magically make 20 “neutral.” Neutrality comes from the definition and the underlying conditions, not from being the midpoint between two numbers.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#162

Post by kioleanu »

decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

It’s the same in Romania where they use the system for every little thing from it’s raining heavily (often the alert comes during said heavy rain) or a nearby fire, or one infamous message saying something on the lines of “here comes the bear” when a bear was spotted within city limits. And it’s loud so a lot of people simply disabled the alerts altogether. But now that the real alerts are coming - see Russian drones entering the country, many people have them disabled

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#163

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #25
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beautifully said. I feel as if the society that we are living in does have a lot of implicit trust and if I may, I would like to add onto it with a few things. Trust works in a society when incentives are aligned with trust ie. you trust the society, the society trusts you back and you do the work with these principles and you are rewarded. Even this belief is something that you must trust that the society is fair. T…

People have given up on the very concept of society. Everyone is racing to shred the Social Contract and revert society back to Do What You Can Get Away With lawlessness. We're replacing institutions with individualism. We're replacing "We're all in it together" with "We're in it for ourselves." We're replacing collective stewardship of shared resources with "I got mine, fuck everyone else!" One's Community has stopp…

[deleted]

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#164

Post by petterroea »

This will be my new go-to article whenever I talk to someone about how technology isn't a silver bullet and their thesis is that "yeah it is, we just dont have that technology yet".

The use case outlined in this article should make it very clear to most that believing technology solves all our issues is at least wrong, and at worst dangerous. Technology cannot protect you from bad actors, the solution must be social.

Bitcoin fans in the "cryptobros learning why we have regulation any% speedrun" is another example that comes to mind.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#165

Post by petermcneeley »

tonymet wrote: post #70

no amount of rules will correct for bad people

It is strange how few understand this. Its as they think that what is required is the right structure or set of rules.

They probably dont know that most countries have the exact same political structures with radically different outcomes.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#166

Post by rmunn »

rayiner wrote: post #117
jameskilton wrote: post #3

A good article, but missing one very important word: trust. Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch ". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustwort…

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing The phrase "the right thing" is load-bearing, to steal a Claudeism. The Muslim Brotherhood that ran the country before El-Sisi thought they were doing "the right thing." El-Sisi also thought he was doing "the right thing." Egyptians mostly thought El-Sisi was doing “the right thing” during this time…

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing."

Not only that, but you're also going to have people disguising their personal, selfish ambitions for power or money (or both, those two ambitions are usually found together) by pretending to other people that they want "the right thing". Most politicians operate this way. (I can't say "all" because there are some examples in history of politicians who truly wanted "the right thing" and actually gave up personal power when it was necessary, for the sake of having "the right thing" happen. Cincinnatus is the often-cited example, for very good reasons.)

Which is another reason why legal structures such as the American Constitution, which constrains (or would constrain if actually followed, which is a whole other rant) the power of government to certain specific channels, are important to have. They limit what the power-seekers can actually do with that power once they obtain it, and provide ways for turfing said power-seekers out of office if enough people agree to remove them. (Then you probably end up electing another power-seeker, because those end up being the vast majority of the candidate pool... but sometimes you get really, really lucky and get someone like George Washington).

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#167

Post by Muromec »

coldtea wrote: post #43
californical wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything. And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises. And even in…

> I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything So? Why can't a 21st century country provide them with some at-least pod-like homes, so they are not fucking homeless?

Because having homeless people is a deliberate choice, a feature of said country. Same with "illegal immigrants".

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#168

Post by readthenotes1 »

bombcar wrote: post #85
9x39 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same society, some people personally experience that others are capable of robbery & much worse within days and some learn it within decades, and everything in between. Some may never have to confront this, all within the same city/state/country. We could represent time-to-reality on a number line.

You can turn a low trust society into a high one by just having nothing whatsoever worth anything.

So sayeth Epictetus after his prized lamp was stolen!

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#169

Post by Muromec »

ai_critic wrote: post #65
jacquesm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world the jails are for holding, the prisons are for convicted criminals and the homeless people (most of them anyway, because not everybody that is homeless is derelict, and the addicts) get whatever help they need. Because we actually can afford it.

> Because we actually can afford it. Can you, though? And for how long? With the current policymaking and demographic and economic trends? There is an argument to be made that the European social experiment has largely been indirectly funded by the largesse of the American hard-and-soft power strategy. As we're moving away from that (for various reasons, most idiotic), there is a question as to how it will persist. (…

>There is an argument to be made

If we are speaking about housing specifically, at my part of the swamp it's subsidises by more affluent people (they way our atheistic christian beliefs command) and the general idea predates the rise of America anyway. Dealing with homeless people and the like the European way is also /cheaper/ too, IRRC.

Not having crack junkies shit in my front and backyard and also not worrying about it is tax money well I believe.. It's up to the village council to decide to send coppers to beat them or medics to provide some free hits on a condition of having to take a shower.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#170

Post by thinking_cactus »

An interesting option that comes to mind would be having pre-specified codes that contain client-side (pre-baked in) messages, something like '1 - Wildfire alert: ...; 2 - Heavy rain; 3- ...; 1023 - False alarm: please disregard ...', possibly with another severity parameter to modulate messages etc.. Then at least no one could simply hijack the system to send arbitrary messages (only one of pre-chosen alerts).

"Sorry men with guns, the most we can do is send one of those messages."

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