{"id":291,"date":"2019-02-01T13:08:54","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T13:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/?p=291"},"modified":"2019-09-26T23:46:30","modified_gmt":"2019-09-26T23:46:30","slug":"punching-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/punching-evil\/","title":{"rendered":"Punching Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Alternative title: “The difference is that I am right<\/a>“.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The government is something that can be compromised by bad people. And so, giving it tools to “attack bad people” is dangerous, they might use them. Thus, pacts like “free speech” are good. But so is individuals who aren’t Nazis breaking those rules where they can get away with it and punching Nazis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nazis are evil, and don’t give a shit about free speech or nonaggression of any form except as pretense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you shift the set of precedents and pretenses which make up society from subject to object, the fundamental problem with Nazis is not that they conduct their politics in a way that crosses an abstract line. It’s that they fight for evil, however they can get away with. And are fully capable of using a truce like “free speech” to build up their strength before they attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the watered down Nazi ideology is still designed to unfold via a build up of common knowledge and changing intuitions about norms as they gain power<\/a>, and “peaceful deportation” failing to work, into genocide. Into “Kill consume multiply conquer” from the intersection of largest demographic Schelling majorities<\/a>. The old Nazis pretended to want a peaceful solution first too. And they consciously<\/a> strategized about using the peaceful nature of the liberal state to break it from within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are not in a social contract with Nazis not to use whatever violence can’t be prohibited by the state. If our society was much more just but still had Nazis, it would still be bad for there to be norm where the jury will to practice jury nullification<\/a> selectively to people who punch people they think are bad. And yet, it would be good for a juror to nullify a law against punching Nazis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isn’t this inconsistent? Well, a social contract to actually uphold the law, do not use jury nullification, along with any other pacts like that, will not be followed by Nazis insofar as breaking them seems to be the most effective strategy for “kill consume multiply conquer”. Principles ought to design themselves knowing they’ll only be run on people interested in running them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you want to create something like a byzantine agreement algorithm<\/a> for a collection of agents some of whom may be replaced with adversaries, you do not bother trying to write a code path, “what if I am an adversary”. The adversaries know who they are. You might as well know who you are too. This is not entirely the case with neutral<\/a>. As that’s sustained by mutual mental breakage. Fake structure “act against my own intent” inflicted on each other. But it is the case with evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If your demographic groups are small and weak enough to be killed and consumed rather than to multiply and conquer if it should come to this, or if you would fight this, you are at war with the Nazis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Good is at an inherent disadvantage in epistemic drinking contests<\/a>. But we have an advantage: I am actually willing to die to advance good. Most evil people are not willing to die to advance evil (death knights<\/a> are though). In my experience, vampires<\/a> are cowards. Used to an easy life of preying on normal people who can’t really understand them or begin to fight back. Bullies tend to want a contract where those capable of fighting leave each other alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humans are weak creatures; we spend third of our lives incapacitated. (Although, I stumbled into using unihemispheric sleep as a means of keeping restless watch while alone). Really, deterrence, mutual assured destruction, is our only defense against other humans. For most of history, I’m pretty sure a human who had no one who would avenge them was doomed by default. Now it seems like most people have no one who would avenge them and doesn’t realize it. And are clinging to the rotting illusion that we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems like an intrinsic advantage of jailbroken good over evil, there are more people who would probably actually avenge me if I was killed or unjustly imprisoned than almost anyone in the modern era. My strategy does not require that I hang with only people weaker than me, and inhibit their agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the wake of Brent Dill<\/a> being revealed as a rapist, and an abuser in ways that are even worse than his crossings of that line, a lot of rationalists seemed really afraid to talk about it publicly, because of a potential defamation lawsuit. California’s defamation laws<\/a> do seem abusable. Someone afraid of saying true things for fear of a false defamation lawsuit said they couldn’t afford a lawsuit. But this seems like an instance of a mistake<\/a> still. Could Brent afford to falsely sue 20 people publishing the same thing? What happens when neither party can afford to fight<\/a>? The social world is made of nested games of chicken. And most people are afraid to fight and get by on bluffing. It’s effective when information and familiarity with the game and the players is so fleeting in most interactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if the state has been seized by vampires such that we are afraid to warn each other about vampires, the state has betrayed an obligation to us and is illegitimate. If a vampire escalated to physical violence by hijacking the state in that way, there would be no moral obligation not to perform self defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A government and its laws are a Schelling point people can agree on for what peace will look like. Maliciously bringing a defamation lawsuit against someone for saying something true is not a peaceful act. If that Schelling point is not adhered to, vampires can’t fight everyone. And tend to flee at the first sign of anything like resistance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alternative title: “The difference is that I am right“. The government is something that can be compromised by bad people. And so, giving it tools to “attack bad people” is dangerous, they might use them. Thus, pacts like “free speech” are good. But so is individuals who aren’t Nazis breaking those rules where they can … Continue reading “Punching Evil”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":478,"href":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions\/478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}