Samzdat

I don't look at Medium blogs that often. Some great blogs not hosted by Medium: - http://samzdat.com - http://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com

Quite a lot of people try(ied) to buy it with blood and still fail(ed) : https://samzdat.com/2017/06/01/the-meridian-of-her-greatness/ (Note how depending how one (mis)reads what you wrote, this is human nature, and there no escaping it, and you would likely be miserable if you tried.)

Samzdat has an absolutely excellent article on the distinctions between state-level (often technocratic) knowledge and on-the-ground knowledge, and the difficulties of communicating between the two and acting on them. It's part of a discussion of the book Seeing Like A State. I think you'd find it stimulating. https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/

Unrelated: Is there any connection between the author and the other sam[]zdat who writes about society and other intriguing topics? https://samzdat.com/

https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-witho… samzdat makes similar points in this article -- esoteric but insightful

Slate Star Codex is a foundational blog for me. "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" is a good place to start: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-t… Then the rest of the best-of: https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ Lately I've been obsessed with Samzdat on Seeing Like a State: https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/

i strongly recommend this link, which explores these ideas philosophically: https://samzdat.com/2017/06/19/the-use-and-abuse-of-witchdoctors-for-l… and if you have a little spare time, a previous book review that provides extra framing for what the author is getting at, as well as expanding on the notion you mentioned: https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ > In the [cool kids scene] of the 2000’s, opposition to Christianity was a given. No subject was more likely to unite than a good old bashing of fundamentalists. Marxists, Anarchists, Libertarians, Liberals, Randians – it crossed political borders. (I’m from California, if that helps.) > It was hard not to – it’s not like the fundies had any coherent reasons they could articulate. Every other day some [class indicator] pastor would announce opposition to “the gay agenda” or seek to return to “a Christian nation” as though that were a desirable thing that had ever existed (like, deism duh, etc.). If that wasn’t bad enough, when pressed for an explanation, they’d just read some passage from John or Corinthians. “And? Was that all?” Readers take note: if someone is busy mocking you for your holy book, justifying your actions based on your holy book is a terrible rhetorical strategy. > Standard interpretation: “The olds are lamenting the loss of an oppressive institution that has no objective value, right?” Right? > So this is what churches do in our language: they’re probably the single most…

Oh, and as far as misalignment of government and citizens' desires in democracies... You may want to read "Seeing Like a State" by James Scott, or https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/ for an illustrative review if you don't want to read the whole book. Some of the examples in the book are from totalitarian regimes, but Brazil is a democracy and still ended up with some of the same failure modes, and the blog post gives a hypothetical but oft-repeated in practice example of a less-local (city-wide or larger) government trampling all over people from a particular part of the city, all with the best of intentions, because it thinks (possibly correctly!) that it can't accomplish those intentions without making its job easier by destroying the local communities. Democratic government does help avoid excesses like mass deaths due to obtuse state action, of course, and this is a pretty darned good endorsement given the history of the 20th century. But it certainly doesn't eliminate obtuse state action.

See also this piece from 2017, of the same title and commenting on the same book https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-witho… This is part of a series of articles called "Uruk Machines" -- https://samzdat.com/the-uruk-series/ -- which profoundly changed how I see the world. Use caution.

See also, also, this interesting but sometimes long-winded essay / review / examination of Seeing Like a State, and similar literature[0]. It's part of a series that goes through subjects like rationalism, narcissism, and tribal knowledge. Fair warning, it's almost the length of a novel! https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/

I’m generally sceptical of attempts to quantify concepts like ‘internet freedom’.⁰ However, the conclusion is probably right, insofar as it’s meaningful to refer to internet freedom ‘around the world’, even going on a qualitative approach. The long-term trend is the spread of China-style internet controls at the very least in non-democracies.¹ There is not much stopping this process except bureaucratic inertia. It is in the interests of the zhongnanhai not to have to interact with a world set on democratic norms contrary to its interests. It is in the interests of local governments to be able to control the threat of dissent on the internet. Although there are some unsung victories (e.g. in Malawi, Zambia, and maybe Sudan) in which incumbents were thrown out at least partly by movements in support of constitutional democracy, just as many countries are slipping away from constitutional democracy, so the pool of dictatorships open to Chinese-style internet controls is at the very least not shrinking very fast. In the West, it’s very hard to find principled defenders of freedom of expression in any political party, and the same applies to internet freedom. If the legal situation is right, judges are more attached to it. 0: for the reasons outlined at https://samzdat.com/2018/03/26/enter-a-search-term-e-g-democracy/ 1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-internet-surveillance-idUSKC…

When I finally took the time to learn how the proof of The Halting Problem worked, I was fascinated by just how "edge-case" it actually is: it's less a general principle, than a proof that a black-hat exploit can always exist that will break any given halting-prediction algorithm. With the caveat that I'm a Chomskyan free-speech absolutist, and I generally agree with you: it's not hard to apply the same Halting Problem concept to free expression. Such an exploit can manifest many ways: QAnon, Red Guards, literal Nazis, Woke "Neo-Marxists", etc; but regardless, scale the intersection of extremist ideology and human social behavior until they approach infinity, and it's easy to see how they can (and historically have) resulted in a systemic collapse of free expression and free thought. (This was what Popper was trying to capture in his now-oft-quoted Paradox of Tolerance, which is now ironically over-applied as a lever of pre-emptive intolerance of challenges to orthodoxy!) I do agree that it's both a categorical and strategic mistake to succumb to an epidemiological model of memetic extremism. Even to the extent that model applies, extremist ideas only spread under social preconditions of susceptibility (as described by Hoffer [0]), and I don't think pre-emptive idea suppression is either right, or wise, or helpful. Extremist ideological infection is more a symptom than a root cause. And yet: we can still recognize that certain taboos might exist for a reason, such as the…