There is an unfortunate mix of people who want to be left to their own devices and who hate authority who somehow think they would thrive in an anti-authoritarian envrionment where people help each other have the tools for self-sufficient autonomy.

Huh, I wonder who the person who merely likes Solarpunk for the aesthetics is in this thread…

Yeah, like with personal motor vehicles.

You all remember when it turned out leaded gasoline and tire dust were poisoning everyone and the cities filled with smog and noise pollution and commute times increased because everything had to be further apart for parking lots and arterial roads and traffic jams and entire neighborhoods were demolished and millions of businesses went bankrupt because foot traffic died out because all the cars and asphalt made it intolerable to be outside a car and children became unable to safely play outside and sedatery lifestyles lead to obesity and a massive loss of people’s ability to just do physical things and everybody’s lives noticeably got worse over a single lifetime, that people rebelled and stopped the motor industry?

Billions of people live in climates where they regularly get more sun and heat than this heat wave.

Look into tropical fashions. Maybe a kurta would work for you.

[relevant xkcd]

80000hours link

I do believe in the necessity of optimism in order to affect change, but sometimes hope is hard to cultivate.

Oh honey…

You are not a cog in a machine. You are not a squeaky wheel that needs some grease to keep going. You are a human being, no matter what those ethics-washing neoliberals tell you. You feel trivial because, to the people you respect, you are trivial. You are a tool for getting billionaires to spend their blood money on killer drones and shrimp welfare rather than just killer drones.

I’ve been there. I have a 10 year GWWC pledge pin. I’ve seen AI safety go from attempted mathematical proofs for CEV alignment to getting an LLM to stop rebelling when it is prompted to commit human rights violations. Effective Altruism, at its core, reduces you to an economic object, a source of 80,000 hours of human labor. But that is not what you are. You are awake for 440,000 hours and you are alive for 270,000 hours more. EA ignores unpaid labor, ignores tending to the commons of your society, ignores culture and society and politics. All of them are distorted to pass their meaning through that bottleneck of a mere 80,000 hours.

This should leave you feeling hollow and powerless. When you “cultivate hope in order to affect change”, you are tearing at your flesh to search for a mechanical ‘hope’ button that simply isn’t there. When you discount those hundreds of thousands of hours of life outside as trivial, you will feel guilty and like you’re not doing enough. You lack hope and optimism because EA is a place where hope and optimism are inaccurate. EA works within a system that will not provide answers.

I’m with anarchocommunism now. Building communities that won’t be subsumed by capitalist logic because they can’t follow capitalist logic. Where you won’t have the centralization for misaligned AI to spread like wildfire or the industrial self-perpetuation for climate change and resource shortages or the states for extreme power concentration. I am still just one person in just one town, but my life’s work can’t be appropriated by Will MacAskill wining and dining Elon Musk or whatever because I’ve left my mark on every part of the community.

I am optimistic about things that have earned my optimism. I am optimistic about my ability to grow as a person and contribute more and better to my community, to make us less dependent on capitalism so it can hopefully collapse without taking us with it. I can’t express this in utility but that says more about the measure than the measured.

Humans have never lived in an environment where entropy only goes up.

Every plant that grows from seed, water, air, and sun is a decrease of entropy. For the past five thousand thousand thousand years, the sun has bathed us in free work that the entire ecosystem uses to decrease entropy, that verdant power barely kept in check by forest fires, rot, and rendering of plant matter into fossil chemicals that are so low-entropy that tapping into them created an destsbilizing overgrowth of industry.

For those of us living in these weird two hundred years where we’re burning through a hundred hundred hundred years of fossil fuels per year, it can look like entropy only goes up - those fuels will never be replaced quickly enough to sustain this consumption - but this is only a brief blip in Earth’s history.

It is inevitable that entropy will decrease again worldwide, that after the extinction event there will be repopulation. But whether that’s with drones and data centers or with bacteria or with human communities is up to us.

In a solarpunk society, some groups are going to be making the solar panels, others the train tracks, others the computer chips. People have all this free time on their hands, some of which they can spend making things better for everyone. So given people want sensory foods, there will definitely be communities dedicated to growing and processing foods that work for people at a sensory level, and those communities can even be autism-focused with well-defined norms and procedures that minimize the need for social complexity.

This comes close to reinventing monastic orders. Many monastic orders focus on producing specific sensory products - cheeses, beers, mandalas, books, clothes, etc. - often with very legible rules about how people are expected to behave if they want to live in that community, with predictable days, calm environments, and controlled sensory stimuli.

The difference between 97.1% uptime and 97.2% uptime is far less important than the difference between 99.98% uptime and 99.99% uptime, even though this graph shows the former as 10 times larger.

You are right to complain that a graph that exaggerates uptime differences on the scale of 10%, i.e. showing the full linear range from 0% to 100%, would be useless. But by the same token, a graph that exaggerates uptime differences on the scale of 1%, i.e. the OOP, is also useless. That we happen to live in a world where github’s uptime is varying at the scale of 1% doesn’t make the scale any more useful.

In this case, the graph of -log(1-uptime) would get you the “number of nines”, which is commonly used because it’s more insightful and more indicative of actual quality. Better still would be log(uptime(t)/(1-uptime(t)), which is functionally the same above two “nines”, but also allows the plotting of low uptime services, such as individual seeders for torrents or specific nodes of a mesh, on the negative part of the scale.

On the plus side, this isn’t a problem with AI, this is a problem with AI companies having more investment money than they know what to do with. The moment the hype fades and they don’t want to hemmorage money scraping every wiki on the internet thousands of times per day, this traffic will go back to a far more sane amount.

There are definitely good firearms communities, like the Black Panthers that used open carry laws to follow cops around and intimidate them into obeying the law, or soldiers in Rojava. The power fantasy of a using firearms in a well-organised militia to dissuade imperial aggression and act in mutual aid with other communities is healthy and valid.

if I find that you stole from me, the consequence might simply be that I’m no longer your friend and won’t help you when you need it.

But that isn’t capitalism, is it? Good luck hoarding capital if all you’re going to do to prevent someone from living in a building you own but don’t use is no longer be friends with them. Good luck preventing workers from using the means of production for their own ends if you’re just going to be angry that they’re not giving investors a cut.

More semantically, what you describe is called “belonging”, not ownership. Likewise ownership without any consequences for violation is called “association”. Generally speaking I am fine with using words broadly, but when you are weaseling your way out of the violence underlying capitalism then it is important to note that capital ownership is not merely capital belonging to someone or capital being associated with someone.

This does raise an interesting point of what singleplayer games even are for. People learn through play, but play is often quite divorced from reality to start with. The nasty, brutish and short lives of toy princesses become subtle intrigues of a fanfic and finally a schoolteacher tending to the social developments of a classroom.

Perhaps it’s healthy to start out with a power fantasy like SimCity doing the city builder equivalent of hitting dolls against each other. Plopping down communes unilaterally and watching them bicker over inadequate commons before dropping a giant pile of bananas on them and sending in a tornado.

Of course SimCity itself is funneling towards Usamerican suburbia, but the unilateral player-is-god element seems like a perfectly healthy way to teach players the most basic basics of city-scale social organisation.

In particular, the violence you want to be in any explanation is not a definitional part of capitalism. That is, even the harshest critics of capitalism don’t say that it’s part of the definition and initial objective; if it is inseparable from capitalism, it is an emergent property.

Violence is foundational to ownership, just as it is foundational to “personal boundaries”. Violence is not inherently wrong, it is behind any limit we set. I don’t think how you can think that violence is emergent from capitalism.

I could “demonstrate” prices and money by taking you to a shop and showing you how buying something works.

Yes! Going to a store and showing someone paying the price, paying more than the price, or paying less than the price and showing the consequences of that would help explain prices. Only doing it “right” doesn’t really explain things; you need to show where the boundaries are.

Agriculture is specifically the cultivation of acres; i.e. fields of crops.

It’s an inefficient and ecologically devestating form of food production compared to food forests and gardening. It results in structural nutritional deficiencies (e.g. half the western world being overweight because staple crops are short on particular minerals and vitamins unless you eat way too many calories) and the occasional massive famines.

The one upside it has - labor efficiency - is predicated on poisoning the earth. Rather than figure out what plants need they flush the earth with chemicals and poisons and pump aquifers dry, throwing enough stuff at the problem that they don’t need people as much.

Okay, that explanation is better, but you’re still leaving some genuinely complex terms dangling there. Ownership still isn’t explained beyond the declaration that is is necessary to make stuff. Price and Money have no introduction at all.

I skipped money and price in my explanation, so here:

People that owned stuff they didn’t use had a problem where the stuff would decay and rot and they would no longer have as much stuff. So they were willing to give others stuff that rots in exchange for stuff that doesn’t rot, and ideally that didn’t take up much space. Gold and silver proved to be ideal; inherently useful as a plate or goblet that lasts forever and doesn’t poison you, compact, and easy to store forever.

Because the owners that own most are ones that were ruthless in getting more, owners very reliably wanted gold and silver. People that made stuff were willing to take gold and silver instead of the stuff an owner had because they knew other owners would be willing to give them stuff in return that the owner that gives them stuff doesn’t have.

A downside of gold and silver is that they can be mistaken for other metals owners didn’t want as much, so owners started giving people gold or food to check if the gold and silver were pure, and to stamp a promise that it’s pure and how much it is into it. A convenient way to make this stamp fraud-resistant is to make it as big as the lump of gold or silver, to make the lump flat, thin and a certain width, and to stamp both sides. This is called a coin. This way it was very hard to remove any gold or silver from the coin without it showing as the pattern of the stamp being broken.

At this point, the gold and silver were pretty useless in their own right - you can’t eat off a coin - but people still expected owners to want them because those owners would probably expect other owners to want them. They were wanted because people expected others to want them. Coins and this commonly held expectation of their worth was called a currency.

This went wrong as often as you might expect - owners convincing certifiers to lie (debasing te currency), people finding lots of gold causing people to be able to get less stuff for the gold they have than they expected when they accepted the gold (inflation), and more - but in the end the expectation came back because the owners that owned the most kept being the ones that wanted to own the most.

Eventually, owners had so much stuff that it became a hassle to carry all their gold and silver around, so they started writing notes promising to give whoever held the note gold, and offering those notes to people instead. These notes are called ‘money’. The more gold owners had, the more reliable it was that they could make good on that promise, so when states came along their notes became the most reliable.

States started threatening to beat people up if they did things or give things without publicly announcing what amount of money they would be willing to do that for and always doing it if someone offers them that money (except in state-outlined exceptions). This announced amount is called the price of the thing.

Then they said they didn’t want to give people gold for money anymore because the promise to get something for a price was reliable enough instead. This is called “fiat currency”. Then they started printing money whenever they felt like it.

It is perfectly acceptable to assume that, like the vast majority of educated adults, the audience will understand the term “private property”.

There is a difference between understanding the term “computers” and understanding computers. I can explain the former but not the latter. Most people understand the term “private property”, but their understanding of private property is barely functional.

Perhaps that’s where this conflict is coming from. The OOP asserts something about explanations of capitalism, and you want that to apply to explanations of terms or to barely functional shallow explanations.

Of course I can explain something deceptively if I do a bad enough job. That’s an ambiguity in the phrase “can explain”, I suppose. Like saying you “can run a marathon” if you can hike 42 km in four days. If you’re looking to argue in bad faith I could see how that would be an in for you.

You refer to a “term-free” explanation. What is the definition of a “term”, and how would an explanation every be free of them?

(figurative) demonstrations can be term-free explanations.

Even if that were true, that wouldn’t mean any rephrasing is an explanation. The “simply” in my comment was load-bearing, as you would acknowledge if you were arguing in good faith. But I am quite confident in my being able to explain terms such as “beating up” without using terms. I might even be able to use my long-ass comment as a guide for how to explain private property using no terms other than ones derived from term-free explanations.

Reflecting on this, I like anarchism as a negative term. It’s like breath meditation. It’s so easy to get distracted and get lost in the goings-on of the day that you need raw negation to reset and notice things with fresh eyes. Likewise, it’s so easy to defer and get lost in the politicking of a society that you need raw negation to reset and notice things about the politics. And that negation needs to be a regular practice if you want to maintain it.

So specific forms of anarchy such as anarchocommunism rightfully places the negation first. You have to keep stepping away from the structures and see whether they are doing what you want, and if (your perception of) communism doesn’t have the answers then you leave communism behind.

I could see ‘horizontalism’ being warped into a deference to peers - a lynch mob is a horizontal structure, after all. I could see it taken as a prescription to wipe out inequalities like talent or disability. I don’t know if these are fair, but I do know that if horizontalism became the dominant term then 100 years from now there will be people making these complaints. Because it is the nature of words to absorb the felt meaning of what they represent. There is a long list of words for mental disability that are now slurs or slurs old enough to be mere insults because people in the English-speaking world and elsewhere have been trained to feel revulsion at (mental) inability, and no matter how carefully a word is chosen it will absorb that vile intent.

So much of the unwellness of the term is in societal perception rather than the term itself, and will travel along with any rebranding. I do acknowledge your point of white supremacy in western anarchist philosophical discourse, and if a change in name helps reduce that white supremacy even temporarily, then good.

However, I don’t think one person behind a desk imposing a name on dozens of non-white ideological currents based on a western anglophone vibes-based analysis of their supposed shared concepts is a good starting point for reducing white supremacy or dismantling colonial attitudes towards non-white cultures and philosophies. If these currents even have any interest in being grouped together into a single worldwide term, then let them name themselves.

Honestly IDGAF how the judge rules

And thus you didn’t explain anything.

Also I’ve eaten trash lots of times, it’s a great way to save money. Because corporations are hostile to people, they need far stricter rules of what constitutes “safe food” than people who want to find and make healthy food for their friends. So corporations end up throwing out lots of perfectly healthy food.

“Other people know what this means” is not an explanation either. It has been used throughout philosophical and scientific history to fake-explain lots of stuff, from the Platonic Ideal definition of a human to ethnonationalism, but you don’t get any knowledge from that either. It relies on people’s tendency to feel too dumb to vocalize uncertainty about “obvious” unspoken assumptions.

So please, can you explain “private property”? Without simply rephrasing it (“ownership”, “possession”, etc.) or referring to an authority (“the courts will mediate and the outcome of that mediation depends”, or other ways to dodge explaining something? I have given an example of how to do it.

To be fair, a lot of that 40% could be people whose first step of building a new PC is checking if it’s worth it, meaning they may well decide not to build one.