Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

July 31st, 2024

edited 2024-07-31 · open in Roam
  • "The Tools" by Stutz &, supposedly good for apollonian/disciplined motivation
  • my threads on twitter - on fundamental freedom
  • coercion: coercion is inefficient — convo/debate w Ivan Vendrov
    • 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
  • the ways in which coercion is a necessary solution (at least at present)
    • sources
      • The Conservation of Coercion
        • > 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.
        • > 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.