Тег: Taleb

If you vote, be responsible!

Perhaps you have read the latest book by the famous philosopher Nassim Taleb, “Skin in the Game“. If not, let me remind you of its main idea: in order for a person to have the motivation to carefully consider their action and its consequences before acting, they must not only benefit from the action but also risk something valuable (be prepared to face negative consequences).

The most famous example is the difference between a business owner and a hired manager. If the owner makes an important decision, they can either make a good profit or bankrupt the company, leaving themselves without means of subsistence. A manager is a completely different story: if they make a profitable decision, they will receive a substantial reward from the owner, but if they make a mistake, the company will go bankrupt, while they personally will lose, at most, their job and will most likely quickly find employment at a new company. Understanding this asymmetry of risks, business owners often offer managers stock options so that they are more invested in the fate of the company, “risking their own skin” by losing money if they screw up.

The same idea from Taleb’s book applies to politics. Every time you vote in elections or referendums, you are exercising violent coercion against all peaceful people in society while risking nothing. Suppose you believe that casinos should be banned in the country. If you were acting independently, you would have to go to every casino in the country and force their owners to close. Obviously, you wouldn’t do that—the very first casino owner you approached would simply shoot you. But it is a completely different matter when you, like some vile, cold-blooded pedophile, take advantage of the uneven balance of the potential for violence (BPV) between a casino owner and a stationary bandit (the state). You anonymously vote in a referendum to ban all casinos, pay a vanishingly small portion of your own income in the form of taxes (the enforcement of a specific ban that benefits you personally costs 0.01% of the total taxes you pay), and meanwhile risk nothing personally (you don’t have to go to each casino owner personally and risk being killed; the security forces will do it for you).

It is clear that such behavior leads to the degeneration of society. It is like giving maniacs free rein to rape children without risking meeting resistance. This must not continue… and it won’t! Participating in voting is not like receiving a billion bucks in your bank account; it is just a small moral satisfaction from the possibility of trying to coerce your neighbor for free. Since the satisfaction is small, the negative stimulus needed to deter participation in voting needs only to be tiny.

A fairly simple scheme emerges for how to raise the costs of complicity in initiating violence against one’s neighbor by participating in some vote. Did you find out that Vasyan from the next entrance voted for “United Russia” in yesterday’s elections? Pay 100 rubles to local hooligans and they will write “A maniac lives here” on his apartment door or post a flyer with his photo in the entrance saying “This person from your building rapes children.” The photos end up on social networks, and in the next elections, members of the election commissions sit in proud solitude. Coercing one’s neighbor has become “too expensive,” so one has to learn how to negotiate with them.

For the mass application of the described scheme, it is possible to create a crowdfunding service analogous to the previously described service for the deanonymization of officials and security forces. Harassing Vasyans will be a thousand times cheaper than harassing a well-guarded official, so one can count on mass appeal.

Bitarch

Your opinion on nap.world?

Valya

As Mikhail Svetov, the creator of nap.world, claims, medium is the message. The one who speaks is part of the message. Therefore, it is not enough to examine the proposed text of the non-aggression pact; one must look at the person proposing it.

Mikhail’s rhetoric is hate speech. Even in his New Year’s greeting, he wishes torment and death to all “bad people.” It is important to understand: the proposal to conclude a non-aggression pact is not a declaration of peace. It is a declaration of war. A war against everyone who does not sign the pact. To Mikhail and his supporters, everyone outside the NAP agreement is not a legal subject.

Most likely, you are under no threat as long as you do not draw their attention. But if you initiate violence, or even publicly approve of someone else initiating violence, that’s it—you become a permissible victim. Lies will be told about you. Your counterparties will be discouraged from cooperating with you. If you have done something illegal, a report will be filed against you. But they will not physically lift a hand against you.

What does this remind us of? To me personally, it resembles the tactics of radical feminists or SJWs. They will find any instance of harassment or racism and broadcast it loudly. They will peck at you for any approval of such things. They will twist the facts about you and do everything in their power to make you persona non grata.

Feminists started before Svetov, and we can see where such tactics lead. They lead to the world becoming less sexist. Harassment turns out to be dangerous. Sexist jokes are laughed at less. Sexist advertising sells worse. The vile feminists, whom one wants to recoil from in disgust, make the world better. For them, it remains just as dirty, patriarchal, and unjust. It becomes better for us, the more moderate ones.

The Bitarch proposes using antifragile tactics (according to Taleb) to fight the state—that is, tactics that only grow stronger through opposition. If everyone whom the state prosecutes for victimless crimes declares that the state is a bandit and that they do not recognize its jurisdiction, it will undermine the legitimacy of the state, and the wider the repression, the stronger the delegitimization. Is this an antifragile tactic? Yes. The first such cases will receive wide publicity, and the prisoners will be seen as political. As the movement develops, attention will not be as intense, but this will be compensated for by the scale of the movement. However, such blatant disrespect for the court will more often lead to longer sentences, so it will be difficult at first to decide to bring politics into one’s case.

But what if an irreconcilable community actually forms around the idea of signing the NAP and intimidating everyone who hasn’t signed it? Let’s look again at Taleb, the book Skin in the Game. He shows how an inflexible, irreconcilable minority, evenly distributed in society, gradually imposes its rules on a flexible majority. In the US, political correctness became a norm recognized by the majority. In Russia, the example of implementing an accessible environment for the blind is more obvious. You won’t find a blind person on every street, but every traffic light beeps, and everyone trips over tactile paving: this is a norm imposed by an inflexible minority. Those who shame NAP non-signatories have a chance to achieve the same effect.

First, they will purge the ranks of decision-makers. Then they will intimidate the liberal opposition. Next, they will begin to harass those who approve of the actions of security forces—and then the security forces themselves. And at this stage, the idea of massively refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of state courts looks like a completely natural progression.

In short. The nap.world project as executed by Svetov is aesthetically repulsive to me, but if he gathers enough fanatics, the world around me really might become better. And after that, it would be good if they lusted themselves. Like the djinn from Andrzej Sapkowski’s story “The Last Wish.”