thread

questions to maybe address:

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

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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

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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

In the movie Groundhog Day, the protagonist wakes up again and again on the same day, repeating the same mistakes until he finds the right way to relate to his situation and then time moves forward.

I haven't seen the movie, but that won't stop me from using it as a metaphor!

idk whether success =
- do the day perfectly without mistakes
- accept that he's going to do things that upset people or cause whatever problems, & just do them anyway because that's his life, rather than regretting them and trying to change them

Either way, there's a lesson!

The lesson of the "make no mistakes" version is that with enough practice, you can perfect things (to some standard). You can learn and grow and change and become the sort of person who doesn't make the mistakes you used to.

The lesson of "accept your mistakes" is that you DID make the mistakes you made, and you have to start from there. Tomorrow is a new day—you can do something new, which could include repairing yesterday's mistakes, or might involve choosing to focus your energy on something new.

We're a month into 2023. Is the year going how you wanted?

Did you even take some time to envision what you might want? Do you wish you did? Did you resolve to exercise every morning and you've already fallen off?

The power of doing something every day isn't because 365 days is the magic number of times to do something every year. It's because it creates clarity that the answer to "am I going to exercise this morning?" is always yes.

And you can start that any day, not just January 1st. But you do have to take some time to consider what you want and why, in order to get that clarity.

God sees everything you do, but "watching" is misleading, since it implies God sees it from the outside. God sees it in first person, out of your eyes.

What makes it like watching though is that God isn't steering, you are. That's what it means for there to be a you!

God is taking all the paths. God IS taking-all-the-paths.

And You take all the paths of your life, but you takes only one.

Choice is not about which story plays out. In some sense, they all play out. Choice is about which story you want to see play out. Which story you want to live in.

Sometimes I've started to think "fuck I made a mistake here" but some part of me senses that there's more of the story I need to watch before I try to undo the mistake.

Like, "maybe this part of my story is a tragedy, but worse than watching Romeo & Juliet die is if the play gets called off in act 3 due to rain and you never see the ending at all"

cookie-style, lets talk about what happens when you remove each of these ingredients

EVERYTHING that's relevant: if certain key pieces systematically can't be surfaced, then

everything THAT'S RELEVANT

this part of twitter → these parts of twitter

we're undergoing a transition atm

what unified "this part of twitter?"

the main thing, from my perspective, was a kind of self-awareness that we're creating the culture ourselves on here, and so we can make it serve us rather than just complaining about the birdsite

we needed a dense enough pocket in order to experience that together, which for awhile meant just a few thousand people, more or less central to the whole thing, and each with a wide variety of interests and approaches

we're now reaching a point where there are enough people around here that we can't all know each other

this mindtown is finally becoming a proper mindcity

and this means that pockets will start to emerge, of clusters of people with different variations on the same underlying cultural platform

my pocket:

"positive sum" is necessary but not sufficient

we're looking for win-win / omniwin 💞

if I put in 5 units of value/work,
& you put in 5,
& 10 are generated
↳ that's positive sum! 💠

but
if I get to keep 19/20 units of output,
& you get 1…
↳ any ape knows that's bullshit 🤬

now, only *with* a positive sum can you have a win-win

zero sum means my profits are your losses, & vv

then there's negative sum
if I put in 5,
you put in 5,
and 2 are destroyed,
↳ …I might be able to exit with 6, but that leaves you with 2

no way to have a win-win

back to the original example:
we each put in 5, 10 are generated
↳ positive sum! 💠

but now
if I get to keep 14/20 units of output,
and you get 6…
↳ we both gained from our 5, but why did I get 180% gains and you got 20%? 🧐🤬

Note that there are also situations such as Stripe, where without them or an equivalent service, apps can't process payments at all. They play a vital role but it's in some sense tiny compared to me actually making something worth selling, so they only keep 3% of the payments.

This has all been super abstract, but hopefully you get how each of these scenarios would *feel*.

If unclear how value gets "generated" beyond what we put in....
twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1357042731340587010

The next tweets appear to dunk on capitalism but I want to be really clear that it's not personal, just the obvious example. Communism has the same issues.

No large-scale system has solved the problems I'm pointing at here. Nothing ending in "ism" (or starting with "anti").

twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1170076505474551815

capitalism is a positive-sum system*

and it produces more win-wins than some systems
but it's shit at producing deep win-wins
and people can tell
and they hate it

twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1356802785619009540

Consider an entrepreneur, whose company employs thousands of people. Some of those people are more replaceable than others, in the sense that someone else could be trained to do the same job. If sufficiently replaceable & desperate for any deal, might be able to offer 5-in 4-out.

These simple "value units" have different types, & if you have no food, then you might trade grueling hours now & long-term health for food for you & kids this week, by doing a job that pays shit & exposes you to asbestos. Net negative, but if you've no better deal, you take it or die.

This means that an uncaring employer, whether a literal sociopath or an empathic person shielded emotionally &/ logistically from the details of what's happening, can set up a situation where people put in more than they get out and the company pockets their loss as well as whatever is generated.

More commonly than people literally net-losing from their jobs like the extreme example above, they put in 5 units, and the company is able to multiply the value into 20 units, and they get back like 6-10. Seems like a good deal, but why does management get to keep 10? Again, people don't have better deals.

Minimum wage laws, worker safety laws, etc, are an attempt to limit how bad the deals are allowed to get. As someone (@ESYudkowsky?) pointed out somewhere though, this can end up converting into other kinds of power, like being able to hire only employees who will tolerate abuse.

In negotiation, one of the most important factors is someone's "BATNA" or "Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement". In other words, if no deal, how screwed are they?

#unfinished

I didn't start this thread intending to shill universal basic income, but it follows directly from what I've said so far, on 2 levels:

Adequate UBI would mean nobody needs to take a losing deal in order to survive the month. That solves the problem so much more deeply than trying to make losing deals illegal to offer.

Also, the resources exist to pay it.

*caveats:
🌞the negentropy has to come from somewhere, but the sun has plenty it's constantly giving away whether we use it or not

<something about externalities>

This thread may be *more* true for autistic people, but I think it is true for almost everyone: that at the times when others feel most threatened by us, we feel most vulnerable and afraid. And vice versa: those attacking us, on the inside, often feel profoundly powerless.

As a source, I'll share this book, whose basic thesis is about exactly this dynamic. People internalize powerlessness as kids, then as adults explode with dangerous rage *while feeling powerless*.

The author figures this is what generates cycles of abuse.
twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1193425546681688064

The truth of this (and it's only a partial model - it probably doesn't, for instance, apply to sociopaths) is what underpins the way in which protectiveness doesn't actually work as a stance, because it produces/escalates Arms Race system dynamics.

twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1338544751163817984

AND! Protectiveness is not wrong, but necessary and sacred. What I'm saying here is not "be vulnerable" but "generate an internal strength that, over time, learns how it can be safe without being guarded."



twitter.com/AskYatharth/status/1338213675811938304

The stance that I seek to embody instead is one that is profoundly respectful of all protectiveness.

twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1338428941116182528