coercion
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20 linked references
July 31st, 2024
- links from Ivan afterwards
- times
- 0:00 intro, background context
- 03:40 can Ivan control Malcolm?
- 0:5:25 professional examples of interpersonal control
- 17:00 traps along the way
- 22:30 depression from stopping coercive motivation without already having joyful motivation
- 27:28 Roman use of "discipline" & "virtue"
- 32:40 how to measure motivational efficiency
- 34:15 coercion has goodhart built-in
- dishes example
- 41:40 jobs you love, jobs you hate
- 52:30 internal conflict causes stuckness & oscillations
- 58:00 pre-coercive culture got outcompeted
- 1:02:50 aiming for a new thing that feels better
- 1:07:45 propaganda against your animal
- 1:12:00 theology: does reality punish/coerce you?
- 1:16:20 early history of science
- 1:19:50 limits of cultural propaganda
- 1:22:00 cultural knowledge greater than individual - secret of our success
- 1:27:40 overcoordinated - overshoulded
- 1:30:00 cultural transition phases
- 1:35:30 research agenda: the shift
- 1:37:45 law of conservation of coercion?
- 1:41:30 our equiv of "drosophilia" for testing
- notes
- examples of control
- employment, salaried employee
- threat of "if you don't do what you're told, you'll be fired or some other terrible consequence"
- military
- other examples
- slavery
- communism
- "more or less coercive equilibria"
- Trinley
- ^22 mins in at 8:35, suggests start time of reco was 8:13
- essay from A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
- romans use of virtus & disciplina
- virtue - raw energy & courage
- discipline - thing that contains & channels it into [noble] end
- coercion has goodhart built-in
- compromise - halfway between goals, neither satisfied
- planetary scale vibe collapse
- andrew cutler - cultural diffusion
- wolf's conception of the abrahamic god as that which stands in for real reality
- punishment etc
- early history of science
- love - supercoop
- Secret of our Success
- existentialism is a humanism
- "I'm free to do whatever I want"
- cybernetics or computational model of coordination that is too vague in both of our minds for us to really get at the crux of our disagreement
- research agenda:
- can we characterize in a clear way, why it was that the coercive pattern won out over the ancestral vibe-based pattern?
- drosophilia / e coli
- parenting not mattering - maybe because monitoring causes masking
- whereas peers are where you develop naturally
- ---
- "this is what we're doing" is obviously faster than consensus
- but also you can have "someone just says this is what we're doing" without coercion
- you just need trust! but then how do you get trust
- I > if we rotated in other concepts, like "trust", other things get simpler
- externalities
- sources
- > Any social equilibrium will be unstable unless it contains some way of punishing antisocial behavior, otherwise the most selfish individuals with the shortest time horizons will prosper and prompt a general race to the bottom. A state can enforce its norms with fines, imprisonment, and execution. Civil society, on the other hand, has only “voluntary” tools like shunning and boycotts available. If it is difficult to imagine such measures having the same deterrent effect as prison, that is precisely the problem! With the possible exception of our immediate families, it is rare for us deracinated moderns to be part of a community so all-encompassing and vital to our identity (or simply our socioeconomic lives) that the threat of being severed from it takes on the same cast as the threat of prison. There are advantages to this rootless condition; for instance, it makes us far less susceptible to certain kinds of abuse. But it also means we must rely on the state to police and punish a wide range of behaviors that would once have been dealt with informally.
- interesting piece here... has something to do with exit & voice... and refusing to engage with someone is by default a boundary not a punishment
- > These aspects raise an uncomfortable possibility for libertarians: is there a sort of law of conservation of coercion in well-functioning societies? A community with a minimal state can only function if it is thick enough and homogeneous enough to enforce sanctions for antisocial behavior that are almost state-like in their severity, and, furthermore, can make them stick. Freeing individuals from their smothering parochialisms will lead to a compensating increase in the scope and reach of the state as people search for a new solution to social dilemmas formerly handled via informal means. Conversely, attempts to suddenly curtail state power may lead to chaos in the intervening period when social institutions have not yet reasserted themselves. Principled libertarians might still have good reasons to prefer the non-state forms of compulsion—among them the arguments from public choice economics and a federalist preference for decisions being made at the lowest feasible level, where actors are most likely to have relevant information. But “increased freedom” may not be one of them.
- > In the absence of trust, every private commercial or social interaction becomes just a little bit more expensive, a little bit less efficient, and a little bit less likely to happen at all.
- this gestures at coercion is inefficient
October 27th, 2023
- questions to maybe address:
- what's the difference between material coercion and incentives?
- could say it's about whether you're bluffing, but a bluff definitely has moves in the existential dimension.
- oh, it could be something about the outsizedness of the punishment—something about that feels right. not "this is a reasonable cost that you might choose to pay" but "technically you can do whatever you want but obviously you will want to follow orders because that's better than dying"
- what's the difference between existential coercion and the social contract?
- I find myself thinking that there's something similar here. a healthy social contract has appropriately-sized consequences for things, and is open to deviance and new ideas to the extent that this variance can be integrated into the whole
- there's a kind of groundedness/sovereignty where you are immune to existential coercion, but where ofc someone might still be able to get you to hand over your wallet if they have a gun
- ---
- this thread was inspired by @RichDecibels tweeting about non-coercion and being surprised by how much people talk about self-coercion rather than other-coercion
- it seems to me that we don't generally materially coerce ourselves—is it even possible? maybe not.
- ahh tho maybe, riffing on Core Transformation, we might posit that parts withhold states of joy/bliss/pleasure/oneness, as a carrot/stick
- 0000
- it comes from recognizing your fundamental freedom—seeing this:
- something about ego feels relevant here; relates to being open to dying
- ---
- it also seems to me that it's in some sense impossible for us to be existentially coerced by someone else without existentially coercing ourselves
- you can practice not getting existentially coerced by yourself, then it translates to others
December 4th, 2022
I'm thinking about that case study where they made a fine… › but another part of what was going on is that the fine fo…
- which is coming from my recent recognition of the relationships between coercion and expanding awareness
December 2nd, 2022
- this is related to my what is coercion? writeup, among other things
September 3rd, 2022
- one thing I was tempted to publish is the "what is coercion?", which I think I might rerame as "a PCT articulation of coercion" or something like that
- so that it's more consciously being a lens rather than making a claim
- I like that
- and then it also makes it feel better that it's incomplete
- I think that more things being lenses is probably good
Podcast summaries
- Keywords - brain hemispheres coercion what is coercion? productivity scapegoat Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings everyone is constantly overgeneralizing Conversation As Medium make shared or different frames explicit shared train of thought do people naturally self-regulate how deep they're willing to go? commitment/choice is a confused way to relate to stances/mindsets dream mashups Unlocking the Emotional Brain IFS partswork what might a healthy community look like? doing community well The Master and his Emissary intro left hemisphere right hemisphere Behavior: The Control of Perception Perceptual Control Theory Hemisphere DharmaChange doesn't just happenHemispheres & Self-improvement left hemispheres aren't made for interfacing with other people Perceptual Control Theory control systems
December 10th, 2021
- > i am not a "snake oil salesman." i am merely making information about various snake oils available to you
- more discussions with friends re what is coercion?
- friend > Another note: coercion can be subjective???
- me > Are you pointing here to how like two people in a given situation might experience it one as coercive and the other as not? Yeah what I would say to that is essentially all coercion is like... It's possible to get in a space in your own mind where no matter what happens externally you sort of fundamentally can't be coerced like you are always doing what you in fact want given the external constraints rather than being kind of subject to whatever power dynamics are happening.
- me > And there's an extreme version of that (enlightenment lol?) but it can also show up in more specific situational ways where one person might sort of be like well this is just a thing I'm just going to do this I'm going to surrender to the fact that this person currently has power over me and like deal with it until we're free.
- friend > Also like, if someone identifies you as having something they really need or want, and can't see how to get it without you, they may experience you as coercive
December 8th, 2021
- what is coercion? - from a group chat:
- as for what I mean by coercion, I'm still working on a write-up of this but my current best gloss is that coercion is "the exploitation of the scarcity of another, to force the other to behave in a way that you want"
- so if people have a scarcity of food, you can coerce them by feeding them conditional on them doing what you want (this is usually called slavery, and requires you physically prevent them from feeding themselves any other way)
- (in general, use of coercive strategies means preferring that the other continue to be generally in a state of scarcity, because otherwise you would be unable to continue to control them)
- most people in our societies have a scarcity of money, and many jobs involve taking advantage of people having such scarcities, in order to get them to do whatever the boss wants them to do (to the extent the boss can actually measure this)
...it's pretty clear to me and I think to most people that this is pretty limited in how well it can motivate people to do anything remotely creative or hard to measure - this is to be contrasted with someone who is technically skilled and enjoys their work and has lots of job opportunities—such a person is somewhat immune to such exploitation because they can seek out self-directed work they would want to do anyway, rather than bending to serve someone else's will even though they don't enjoy it, because otherwise they'd starve
- but by and large a lot of the coercion that occurs isn't with any readily-quantifiable resource like food or money, but rather with social regard: people feel a scarcity of social well-being, love, respect, and interpersonal okayness more generally, so others can control their behavior by withholding these social goods until/unless the person does what they want.
- but again, use of such a coercive strategy requires that the person be in a chronic state of not-enoughness; otherwise you can't control them. this is incompatible with enlightenment and advanced stages with development, as far as I can tell, not to mention being at odds with overall health & well-being
- meanwhile, people have other noncoercive motivations for wanting to do the sorts of things we think we need to coerce them into:
- 1. personally if I'm in a circle and someone points out that I'm doing something that's getting in the way of group coherence, then I want to untangle that for entirely selfish reasons: group flow is fucking ecstatic and wonderful and I want to experience it as much as possible
- 2. if someone I'm living with wants me to be quiet at night so they can sleep, then even though I love loud music and staying up late, I'm inclined to find a way to satisfy them (while also satisfying myself as much as possible) because I want them to be happy and I want them to enjoy living with me and my life is better to the extent that the people living with me are happy overall and glad to be living with me
- and to the extent that my motivation is oriented towards actually making group flow work and actually making my housemate or partner happier, from intrinsic motivation, not just avoiding shame, then I'll be creatively attempting to actually find win-wins here, rather than goodharting, virtue signalling, and/or trying to avoid getting caught doing the thing people don't like
December 7th, 2021
- case study of getting someone to watch a video
- super bad but maybe not coercion - pinning them down clockwork orange style
- obvious coercion - paying them to watch it
- subtle coercion - "what, you haven't seen X?!" - exploiting scarcity of social
- not coercion - "oh this video relates to this thing you mentioned, I can send you a link"
- Jared Lucas > yeah, algorithms on social media
- Daniel Schmachtenberger was saying that one thing to optimize for might be "the inverse of addiction"
- in order for a system to be unexploitable, attempts to exploit it must inevitably wind up serving it
December 1st, 2021
- Toward a Theory of Coercion
November 26th, 2021
- tons of amazing stuff in MESM convo today
- connection with in the meantime
- further thoughts on this:
- mechanisms of control
- fear
- guilt
- shame
- case studies:
- partner dance
- contact improv
- west coast swing
- other partner dance styles
- parenting
- infants
- kids
- teens
- jobs & UBI
- BDSM
- slavery
- animals
- notes from convo w a friend
- I feel like I understand it quite precisely: the attempt to control another's behavior by withholding something they want or need until they do what you want them to do
- (well, or your own behavior)
- ah yeah, maybe put better is something like "creating a problem for someone until they do what you want"
- (reward is just the temporarily relief of chronic punishment, in terms of conditioning)
- & where withholding comes in is that you may not have actually *created* the problem for them, you might just be taking advantage of it
- eg if someone starts out poor or lonely, and you aim to coerce them by saying you'll give the money or friendship but only if they do what you want, you didn't create their problem in the first place but you're sort of exploiting it
- another complexity is that like, some things are sort of structurally conditional?
- like maybe you're happy to cook me dinner but only if I buy the ingredients
- is this coercive? I thiiiink there's a way to disambiguate it
- if you're completely broke, and I offer to buy you food on the condition you cook it for both of us, that's.... maybe-probably coercive
- but I think in no other circumstances is this coercive unless there's guilt/shame-based manipulation going on under the hood
- because like, neither of us has to
- it's just like "hey, would this be a win-win?"
- and there's also something like, even in that situation, if I'm like "I really want you to be able to eat... hmm... I don't have time to make food, so I'm currently spending money on eating out, but I could save that money and thus afford more groceries, if you can prepare it"
- then there's a sense in which I'm strategizing to find a way to solve your problem that might work for you
- whereas if I'm like "hmm I definitely want a chef, hey who's someone who's desperate enough that I can get them to cook for me?"
- but even there it's pretty subtle, and there's also nothing wrong with wanting to solve your own problems
- AH! the point is something like,
- in the coercive world, I *prefer* for the person to exist in a state of desperation,
- so I can keep exploiting that situation (/person)
- whereas in the collaborative/creative world, I prefer for the person to exist in a state of abundance,
- from which I expect us to be able to find even better win-wins
- friend > desperation ↔ coercion
- me > sounds right yeah
November 24th, 2021
- I had a really great articulation related to noncoercive parenting
- sort of a response to something Selentelechia asked about
- re changing diapers and noncoercive parenting
- and about how coercion is different from control
- using the lens of control systems & PCT
- withholding stuff
- constraints are also different from coercion
- (in the context of eg creativity)
September 28th, 2020
- Wrote something in relation to coercion & David Deutsch's fun criterion (originally in a chat to a friend)
- I've gone through many layers & loops around type stuff, disagreeing with my past self, agreeing again, and coming to a loosely held larger picture at this point I think.
- a few perspectives:
- 1. discomfort (of any magnitude) is not intrinsically a threat, although our belief that it is a threat makes it a genuine threat because it causes us to undermine ourselves to make it go away, which means that we naturally fear encountering such discomfort in the future because we know it will tend to result in us undermining ourselves - this is a huge part of how coercive memes are maintained, and unlearning this is vital to shifting into collaborative / Game B
- 2. forcing someone else to face their discomfort doesn't generally work - even when well-intentioned, it's usually a common mode of the coercive dynamic
- 2b. same with forcing yourself to face your own discomfort
- 3. however: attempting to avoid discomfort also doesn't generally work
- 3b. for instance: the only method I'm aware of to unlearn anxiety or panic attacks, is to welcome them. anything that tries to make them go away reinforces the basic root cause - even if it works in the moment! because they're caused by being afraid of ones' own fear, which causes a runaway feedback loop. welcoming the fear breaks that cycle.
- 4. sadness, anger, fear, etc, are natural feelings, both in the course of sensible everyday life and especially in working with internalized coercive schemas, trauma etc. rejecting them when they arise (in oneself or others) is not the answer
- 5. no feeling is incompatible with the thing that I think is the generator of what David Deutsch is calling fun:
- I can be feeling sad and also welcoming & enjoying that sadness.
- I could be feeling terrified on a rollercoaster and also having a peak experience of ecstasy.
- 6. processing trauma can be a ton of fun (I tasted this a bit at the Bio-Emotive retreat last summer, then a bit more this summer and I am extremely fuckyeah about it, and have done some unlearning about the idea that it is (or should be) necessarily sucky/scary/isolating/etc)
- 6b. however, one doesn't have to avoid processing trauma if one wants to, just because one doesn't know how to "make it fun" yet.
- "this ought to be fun" has an ought in it, which is basically a should.
- there _is_ a non-shouldy way of holding something like this but anyone in the Game A→Game B transition process is not going to start by knowing what it is, and attempting to embody "this ought to be fun" will likely result in them blaming themselves or others for it not being fun, one way or another, or feeling entitled to things being fun (entitlement being part of Game A)
- If I were to try to come up with a better phrase to use for the learning process, here's a first attempt:
- "can I make this fun? [without trying to make it go away]"
- it doesn't assume you already know how ("can I make this fun?")
- it assumes agency ("can I make this fun?")
- it assumes a transformation, not that it should already be fun ("make")
- it attends to what is so ("this")
- it doesn't try to reject reality ("[without trying to make it go away]")