Pragmatic evidential semantic speech attitudes or something

There are more possible relationships between the content of your speech and your meaning than "serious" and "sarcastic".

1. I believe what I'm saying.
2. I kind of believe what I'm saying.
3. I said a thing that I believe in an unusual way so that you would understand how sincerely I believe it.
4. I would be surprised if what I was saying was mostly right, but we have to start with something if we are to compose a productive theory.
5. Some part of me believes what I'm saying, but I don't endorse that.
6. Some part of me doesn't believe what I'm saying, but I don't endorse that.
7. I believed what I was saying as I was saying it, but then I totally remembered or figured out that it was all wrong.
8. I don't really mean any of what I'm saying, but I'm saying it because of some impulse.
9. I don't strongly believe what I'm saying, but I'm still saying it because it's (funny | hurtful | interesting | a prank, mate | shit-posting | so random hahaha | expected of me | habitual | what someone else said | useful | phatic | ... ).
10. What I'm saying is literally true, but I don't mean all of the connotations that you're reading from it.
11. What I'm saying is literally false, but I meant the connotations that you're reading from it.
12. I don't know how to say a thing that I would mean, but what I'm saying gets close to the issue.
13. I know what I would like to say, but I'm saying something slightly wrong for sake of brevity.
14. I know what I would like to say, but I'm saying it with lots of indirection because you wouldn't respond well.
15. I'm not resolved yet as to whether I believe what I'm saying, but I will believe if someone finds a laudable reading of it or if lots of people seem to like it.
16. The state of affairs became true because I declared it.
17. What I'm saying is unrelated to my beliefs.
18. I thought I didn't believe the thing as I was saying it, but I have now been convinced by hearing my articulate argument aloud.
19. I believe what I'm saying, but not quite so much that I want to defend it while some asshole on twitter picks it apart.
20. I meant multiple readings of what I said, to different degrees toward different audiences, but I wouldn't normally try to simultaneously independently steer the beliefs of multiple audiences unless I were showing off to yet another audience.
21. I said the thing precisely because I thought you wouldn't know what it meant or if it meant something.
22. What I'm saying doesn't mean anything.
23. I meant the opposite of what I said, you butt.

Candidate Moral Imperatives

1. Do good. Achieve good. Maximize good.
2. Improve things, especially conditions for people and moral patients. Don't worsen things. Optimize everything. Depessimize everything.
3. Do wondrous deeds.
4. Be good effectively. Waste no motions. With every move, become closer to achieving the goal.
5. Make progress. Invest effort where gains will accrue.
6. Do the things you think you should be doing.
7. Do the least total harm. Prevent large harms.
8. Prevent bad and insufficient good. Prioritize preventing frequent and severe bad things.
9. Keep bad things small and infrequent.
10. Enable the least harm to triumph over greater harms.
11. Signal your moral character more effectively.
12. Summon good.
13. Avoid paths leading into hells.
14. Party on responsibly.
15. Create good. Create more and better good.
16. Cause the change you wish to see in the world.
17. Reduce the expected magnitude of potential harms.
18. Abstain from vice.
19. Be cautious in ever doing things that you consider sinful or which others widely consider sinful.
20. Don't just not do the thing, but leave a safe margin around doing the thing.
21. Preserve good. Destroy bad.
22. Act so as to best serve universal well-being.
23. Hack at the sources of bad.
26. Be good. Be good better. Be good ambitiously. Be virtuous. Be great. Become better.
27. Be so fucking rad.
28. Build good character.
29. Become an ideal. Do god's job. Become a savior.
30. Don't become a grotesque parody of yourself.
31. Become a superlative example of righteousness.
32. Don't be a dick.
33. Attach the self to meaning.
34. Continually strike envy in the hearts of men with the weight of your philosophical authority on righteousness.
35. Be reasonable, rational, prudent, wise.
36. Become the person.
37. Become the forerunner.
38. Find ways to become better.
39. Be less than the regular amount of terrible for a human.
40. Become proof that greater unimagined goods are possible.
41. Be just. Alter the distribution of benefits and burdens across people to be closer in accordance with the merits of those people? Be reputable. Keep promises? Be responsible. Make amends if you previously worsened things? Be scrupulous.
42. Be nice. Be excellent to each other. Be charitable.
43. Learn to want to follow whatever the correct standards are.
44. Learn skills.
45. Preserve parts of yourself which may be good.
46. Hold yourself to a higher standard.
47. Become good enough to justify the continued existence of the places you inhabit.
48. Don't continue becoming not good, if that's what you're doing.
49. Become terrifyingly formidable.
50. Become a person who seems to hail from a culture with greater moral and philosophical authority.
51. Become better, even knowing that better might not be good enough.
52. If you're an ok person, and you want to improve in some ways, and other people would want you to improve in those ways, become that person.
53. Become a person whose words show that you bear a great wealth of careful reasoning and relevant practice.
55. Cultivate a hunger to improve.
56. Commit to doing good. Pledge yourself to good. Comply with your past declarations of intent to do good.
57. Regain the ability to respond to the meaning of things.
58. Try to try.
59. Live in your name.
60. Adopt important responsibilities.
61. Cultivate an intrusive conscience.
62. Set your heart on a pilgrimage.
63. Maintain a desire to improve.
64. Do good relentlessly.
65. Don't look for reasons to do bad.
66. Act as though you care strongly about things that affect lots of people, even when you don't.
67. Occasionally cultivate a motivated disposition insensitive to goal feasibility.
69. Reinforce good. 
70. Help people to be good. Show gratitude when another person improves conditions for you or yours.
71. Coordinate with good. Affiliate with causes that are trying to do good.
72. Promote participation on solving important problems. Prioritize important topics that are hard to have opinions on.
73. Become a rallying point for good.
74. Create places for people to do good. Build reputable organizations for achieving good.
75. Seek and amplify the good processes that created the good parts of you.
76. Find and amplify the process that generates entities that heed meta-level advice such as this.
77. Evaluate goodness anew.
78. 
    
80. Go meta first.
81. Seek whence.
82. Act in a way that greater commands your own endorsement.
83. Don’t do things that prevent people from offering you good opportunities.
84. Don’t do things that spoil people's ability to reach the Pareto frontier.
85. If you should simply do well what you were meant to do, only figure this out by being meant to figure well.
86. Do correctly whatever you have been (self-)created to do.
87. Do things for which you and members of your outgroup would both want to be remembered.
88. Do the things which a better version of you wishes you would do.
89. Act by universalizable principles.
90. Act by principles which everyone can rationally will that you act by.
91. Act by principles which no one can not reasonably reject that everyone act by.
93. First take the plank out of your own eye.
94. Keep your identity small.
95. Make no graven image capable of suffering.
96. Reduce suffering generally.
97. Reduce existential risk for anything which should exist.
98. Find new ways to quantitatively estimate how good some possible courses of action are.
99. Prevent the heat death of the universe. Avoid the loss of resources generally.
100. Enter situations where you can act decisively.
101. Do not boil a young goat in its mother's milk.
102. Write fresh scripture. 
103. Stay out of your own way.
104. Don't shoot yourself in the foot. 
105. Eat mostly plants.
106. Don't believe everything you hallucinate.
107. Help people to analyze the failures of their self-analysis.
108. Try to identify what things might pave a slippery, sloping road to hell.
109. Harvest baboon organs.
110. Analyze incentives producing coordination problems.
111. Over-chlorinate not thy neighbor's pool.
112. Cast no aspersions on ants.
113. Love and serve one another.
114. Be the aliens you wish would contact the world.
115. Become the friend you want to talk to.
116. Become someone who lives on their own terms. Become the creator of products you love. Become the mentor you never had. Become the child you wish you had. Become the parent you wanted to grow up with. Become the spouse you want to be with.
117. Have fun. Do not hurt people. Do not accept defeat. Strive to be happy.
118. Attain knowledge of Causes and secret motions of things. Enlarge the bounds of Human Empire to the effecting of all things possible.
119. Be a simple kind of man. Be something you love and understand.

Reading Moldbug - "Why I Am Not A Libertarian"

Content: I summarize the core of Moldbug's blog post Why I Am Not A Libertarian. This is a first impression. Usually I keep my distance from political philosophy, but tonight I needed a distraction from other things.

Liberty, like peace, is a desirable outcome. Reforming a government to restrict itself, in conformance with the desires of its constituency, is not an effective way to achieve that outcome, because the government can abandon those restrictions at any time, and probably will do when it becomes profitable. People do not behave morally alone by conviction and remembrance of sacred principle, and neither will government.

What then should be the design of a government? Moldbug introduces two principles, called formalism and neocameralism.

Before stating them, a digression into the nature of property, which will help us to define government: In contrast to the usual normative incidents recognized by western property law, let us say simply and summarily that a person has ownership of a resource if they control it. Then property is a system guaranteeing persons exclusive stable control of resources.

A government is an organization that controls property, stably and exclusively, through the use of military force (or through the threat of its use). A government also leases property to its constituents in exchange for rent, which practice is called taxation. In addition to securing its own resources against foreign militaries and domestic paramilitaries, the government seeks to prevent involuntary property transfer among its constituents. Now we are ready to introduce Moldbug's first principle of government design.

Formalism: A government should prevent involuntary property transfers among its constituents, regardless of whether the distribution of resources satisfies the egalitarian preferences of the constituents, or is in accordance with some conception of natural or contractual property rights, et cetera. Moldbug hints that this principle derives from his desire, and his engineer's realism about what is required, to reduce violent conflict.

Moldbug identifies two components to the practice of formalism, which are really two fronts on which deterrence is waged: the government maintains control of its property through military force, and it prevents involuntary transfers of rented resources among its constituents through the enforcement of law. In both cases, the government must make clear to parties that the distribution of property is secure against involuntary transactions: that a party attempting to produce an involuntary change in the distribution of property would fail in their attempt and incur costs of the conflict. This is of course not sufficient to deter human parties from violence generally, but it's a good start, and formalism remains an interesting principle, akin to legal positivism.

Before we state the second principle (neocameralism) another digression is in order. 

Why do observed governments restrict liberties of their constituents, in excess of what is needed to maintain a military force, collect taxes, and perhaps enforce laws to limit involuntary property transfer? Why do government prohibit some activities, when they could instead tax those activities and gain revenue (putting aside that we've here introduced quite a new form of taxation)? 

Moldbug poses an analogy: these prohibitions by current governments are like the poor customer service offered by companies controlled by employees. In contrast to joint-stock corporations, employees of such companies (and employees of governments) operate with "no capacity for unitary financial or managerial planning" and "no local incentive to steward the equity of the entire operation".

The principle of neocameralism is simply that governments should be designed like joint-stock corporations. Governments should be publicly owned, and their shares traded. Instead of elections, executives would be hired, because that's the effective procedure that markets have found for making corporations profitable. Moldbug suggests that this project could start through the founding of private cities.

One place I wish Moldbug had expanded this post is in addressing an objection to neocameralism that he mentions: that the sovereign corporation "might restrict not immigration but emigration, converting itself into a sort of large open-air prison or slave camp." His reply to the objection is this: "I invite the reader to imagine the effect that this decision might have on property values, or to think about how profitable it has proven for North Korea". Truly, I have heard more persuasive rhetoric.

If Moldbug has more principles of government design, I look forward to reading them some day. If these are the core of his philosophy, I look forward to understanding why he has selected these two for special attention, and what relationship he sees between them. On the whole, this post was surprisingly light on the obscurantism that I expected of Moldbug, perhaps unfairly?

The Endorsed Toxidrome

When I'm fucked up, that's the real me. 

When I'm fucked up, that's the real me. 

This lyric is sung by The Weeknd in The Hills. Hearing it, I wondered what was going on in the mind of the lyricist. Why would a person identify more strongly with a substance-intoxicated form of themselves than with their sober form?

One possibility is that the intoxicated man reliably outperforms the sober man on a criterion which the sober man values. A causally interleaved trio of common biological effects of recreational intoxication seem likely to enable this: elevated self-concept (including elevated estimates of one's social appearance, skill, and the task-adequacy of one's holdings), decreased anxiety relating to expected social persecution for potential violations of respect- and etiquette-based social conventions, and a generally elevated, euphoric mood. This trio of effects together produces greater motivation, reward-seeking approach behaviors, and attentive physiological arousal. In short, the sober man may find himself inhibited from following desired courses of action, of which inhibitions his drugs relieve him.

A second possibility is that the man is dissatisfied with himself when sober and that recreational intoxication inhibits this judgment, but without producing an elevated self-concept as before. This could be achieved by a different cluster of effects of recreational intoxication; that of sedation, numbing, insensibility, blunted affect, and disorientation (including derealization and depersonalization).

A third explanation, this one pragmatic: the man maintains separate peer groups; in one group he claims credit for his sober behavior, and in the other group he claims credit for his intoxicated behavior. One benefit of this arrangement is that the man has opportunities to act according to one group's standards or the others', as suits him, without losing as much face if he did the same without the excuse of intoxication (respectively, without the excuse of sobriety).

One test of this third explanation, as a strategy of general human use (because of course I'm looking at this through the lens of CEV), is to see whether people endorse, in restricted social contexts, other personal conditions of diminished capacity which could excuse them from bearing credit for their acts. People often maintain distinct peer groups wherein they are credited for their youthful acts versus their mature acts. Fatigue, I think, does not present such a strong confirmatory case, maybe because fatigue is too (common, transitory, graded, ...?) for the one to join a group of peers for its occurrence and other peers for its remission. Duress of a limited kind does fit here I think; for example, people can claim as an excuse that they were acting under familial social pressures. The condition of physical disability doesn't fit here, but I'm sure it would if people went through regular phases of physical ability and disability. Mood disorders with phases do fit, I think. Automatism doesn't fit, which is weird from the perspective I used a second ago because it's kind of like a transitory form of disability. "When I'm habituated, that's the real me / When I'm habituated…" I'll have to think about that one more, later. Lycanthropy, though fictional, would certainly fit if it existed. I should probably do a better job unifying the cases where excuses don't fit, especially by analyzing automatism and fatigue, but for the moment this is a satisfying list.

I welcome any alternative explanations of why a person would, at least sometimes, endorse their intoxicated behavior.

Edit: Someone who is more often intoxicated than not might identify more strongly with their more familiar mental state. The lyricist could either be in such condition or wish to persuade others of that he is. This part of the edit I like. The next part is crap.

I don't know my Evo Psych, but I pattern-match this attempt at persuasion as consonant with a certain reproductive strategy; trying to piece my half-thoughts into a full sentence of a theory, it comes out something like this: impulsiveness\risk tasking, criminality, and sensation seeking are, for a man, marks of high testosterone (or high testosterone sensitivity?), which promotes seeking of mates and aggression\competitiveness in domains of male-male conflict (territoriality, mate guarding, food competition), while reducing the individual male's investments into mates and offspring.

The reasons why this testosterone-promoted strategy of high mating investment and low parental investment works...are even more tangled in my mind, and probably causally-disordered. It's clear that men who appear to have a lower mutational load or higher genetic parasite resistance, being more valued by women, can afford to offer less support to those women and to their offspring than can men of lower apparent genetic quality.

"The eugenic man can purchase sex at a lower price" is the usual case. There might be confounding factors relating to, like, seasonality of reproduction, or selection pressures that vary with the prevalence of high versus low parental investment in a breeding population, or...whatever. But with the usual case being usual, if a man's genetic status is known by his potential mates to be quality, or even if his genetic status is uncertain to potential mates, then being neglectful, unfaithful, criminal, impulsive, et cetera, are behaviors to be expected.

I'm not impressed with this as even a micro-theory of human male sociosexuality, but I also don't know the reasons why it's wrong. One problem is that it doesn't account for the unemployment of some other possible counter-signals, like maintaining poor nutritional status. Even if the sociosexual counter-signalling idea were right, the connection to the song lyric is tenuous. Grr.

I'd still appreciate hearing any alternative explanations of the lyric, or pointers for putting the micro-theory aright.

Edit 2: Will Newsome provided two more explanations on twitter. First, the mind of a frequent drug user might be more lethargic when they're sober and more creative when they're drunk or high. The second explanation I'm producing verbatim because I don't trust myself to summarize all of his nuances:

"but there's a moral dimension to the utterance as well that is important. He sees himself as tragically flawed"
"the weeknd is all about being hedonistic to cope with pragmatic-lesson-teaching tragedy, certain kind of chick crack"
"(thereby creating a powerful mate of a man who otherwise would have been expected to remain a genetic contractor so to speak)"

These are good points, and they make me want to write a piece on authenticity and forgery of social appearance in the context of negotiating dyadic intimacy.