131–140 of 162 posts
I would love for there to be an actual open source/wiki government model that we could try. I haven't done much research on what is the current state of the art thinking about this. I bet people here know loads about it - where should I start after the wikipedia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance
even wikiepdia has a hierarchy. there's no easy way
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The war in Afghanistan[1] was on the spending side, on the income side was the double whammy of oil price and (because oil is denominated in it) dollar decline. I think Fahd probably deserves a bit more credit for kneecapping the USSR than he commonly gets. Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttzAsH1yM6E&t=60 (along the lines of: officers, you brought sons back to their mothers) [1] I remember back when the T…
War in Afghanistan was a proxy for the cold war where primarily US and UK (but also China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) backed the mujahideen (including Taliban) to keep USSR spending a vast amount of money in the region while also cutting their income. They succeeded in their intent and the fall of the USSR was so sudden that hundreds of soviet tanks were abandoned on the field http://www.artificialowl.net/2008/08/uss…
If you're really motivated try looking up офицеры текст песни ("officers text of-the-song") and use machine translation from there. Afghan war songs is a major genre.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time magazine once bragged on its cover how the US helped Yeltsin win the election: https://off-guardian.org/2018/02/19/yanks-to-the-rescue-time... He was essentially Russia's Trump although a) probably a lot more in America's pocket than vice versa and b) it's difficult to overstate how much Russia suffered under him. They suffered enormously in the 90s - quality of life and life expectancies declined enormously. No…
> They suffered enormously in the 90s - quality of life and life expectancies declined enormously. If you lived in the Potemkin village №1 — Moscow, then yes. Having myself lived in a part of Russia where light wasn't shining back in soviet times, nineties were such a giant breath of fresh air, and opportunity. For most of people there, it was a never before seen opportunity to change their predicament to live in the…
It sounds like you're a generation or so too young, but do you have any opinions on КИНО? Any recommendations for Vladivostok (or general Pacific) music groups I should look up?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. Rural areas have farms, and there are plenty of government regulations about farming - and your money is tied to these. Government is less convenient too: Just a trip to the DMV or courthouse might take 30-60 minutes of driving. I think the parent was correct: Cities tend to have more diverse populations. Rural areas tend to have less, which means less folks to challenge your notions of the world (and m…
And pretty much all developed nations have subsidy programs for farmers who are a well organised political bloc.
I would love for there to be an actual open source/wiki government model that we could try. I haven't done much research on what is the current state of the art thinking about this. I bet people here know loads about it - where should I start after the wikipedia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_governance
even wikiepdia has a hierarchy. there's no easy way
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm inclined to agree it's not limited to government, but what's incredible about fringe theories is that the very same people who espouse "trust no-one" also lend enormous amounts of credibility to terrible sources. Disclaimer: I think hacker communities have some soul-searching to do here: "trust no one" and "gubbermint bad" enjoy far too cosy an acceptance, in vast disproportion to the reasoning or evidence behind…
The meme war between the two camps on either side of the conspiracy theory divide is quite interesting if you're able to view it from a truly disinterested (disable your priors) and abstract (observe the nature of the discussions, not the topic) third party perspective. The anti-conspiracy-theory camp can read an individual conspiracy theory and identify erroneous assertions and logic, with ease. Similarly, the pro-c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The meme war between the two camps on either side of the conspiracy theory divide is quite interesting if you're able to view it from a truly disinterested (disable your priors) and abstract (observe the nature of the discussions, not the topic) third party perspective. The anti-conspiracy-theory camp can read an individual conspiracy theory and identify erroneous assertions and logic, with ease. Similarly, the pro-c…
could you out forward a hypothetical example of say a flat earther and a mainstream earth is round camp finding common ground in the middle?
1. I believe that it is not a productive use of mental energy (for myself, or others)
2. My account is rate-limited on HN, so I have to use the few posts I am allowed per day wisely (and yes, I am aware of the irony in this statement)
3. Due to the nature of how the mind seems to work, I believe this runs the risk of allowing minds who are looking for "an escape" from the above an opportunity to resume normal "all is well, nothing to see here" operations
Rather, I encourage people who are "reckoning about the problems of the world" to spend less time thinking (and arguing) about relatively trivial object-level matters like this (instances of problems), and spend more time in a more abstract, systems analysis and decomposition mindset (what is the nature of these problems), with an end goal of gaining greater understanding of how the system we've built for ourselves to live in actually works (as opposed to our axiomatic beliefs of how it works)...and just how and why it is that it seems to produce so many outcomes (some of them plausibly existential risks) that are counter to the true, innermost desires of most people who are living within the system.
This overall situation seems like a rather large paradox - my wish is that more people could find a way to become curious about it, and approach it with the same engineering mindset (but applied at the abstract level) that we use every day in our respective lines of work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will call this a "Elzin Effect": — When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake — Yes, that Boris Yeltsin. In 1989 the future first president of post-Soviet Russia visited Houston, and what most impressed him wasn’t NASA. — It was a Randall’s grocery store, where the Houston Chronicle saw him “nodding his head in amazement” at the fish, produce and frozen pudding pops: — “He commented that if the Soviet p…
That Yeltsin story is a great anecdote but surely the Soviets did enough (and way more) spying to know basic and everyday facts about the US, like whether supermarket shelves are stocked. I mean, how much does it take to know this fact?
Authority rests on information control. High status roles generally depend on access to and control over the dominant communication channels of the time. [...] Of all social roles, those of hierarchy are affected most by new patterns of information flow. The loss of information control undermines traditional authority figures. Further, because information control is an implicit rather than an explicit aspect of high…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm inclined to agree it's not limited to government, but what's incredible about fringe theories is that the very same people who espouse "trust no-one" also lend enormous amounts of credibility to terrible sources. Disclaimer: I think hacker communities have some soul-searching to do here: "trust no one" and "gubbermint bad" enjoy far too cosy an acceptance, in vast disproportion to the reasoning or evidence behind…
The meme war between the two camps on either side of the conspiracy theory divide is quite interesting if you're able to view it from a truly disinterested (disable your priors) and abstract (observe the nature of the discussions, not the topic) third party perspective. The anti-conspiracy-theory camp can read an individual conspiracy theory and identify erroneous assertions and logic, with ease. Similarly, the pro-c…
Everyone is mostly a somewhat crappy model based on time and brain constraints. People can be viewed as a graph of agents collecting information about subjects along with meta information about other agents needed to construct a much larger pool of information.
Conspiracy theorists who come into a discussion with a default disbelieve position on a particular agent are likely to spend much more time finding fault and may actually be more accurate at identifying correct faults the same way you are I are more apt to correctly identify a variety of conspiracy theorists as kooks and find immediate fault with their arguments.
Unfortunately kooks are apt to have a broken model of whom is trustworthy and to have built up a large collection of incorrect facts. A particular challenge is the fact that they are possessed of a large collection of "facts" that they aren't learned enough to have come up with in the first place and don't really have an accurate model of. See the moon landing truthers as a particular example. It's trivial to collect "facts" that require only a small amount of bad understanding to "get" but require a substantial understanding of science to actually refute. Since they can't build an accurate enough model of the world to actually understand they would have to accept the expertise of others as valid in order to correct their model of the world. Having already rejected such there is no hope for them.
These "facts" act like prions corrupting their model. When they see people providing true and valid info they are predisposed to discard that agents information as corrupted because it contradicts prior beliefs. Since their prior beliefs predispose them to believe bad agents and disbelieve good agents their model inevitably gets worse until it is unrecoverable.