Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 122

@kensanata the incoming #NZLabour government recently raised the student allowance by about $50 and all the landlords who own student housing put rent up by ... you guessed it, $50. Any #UBI scheme needs a mechanism to prevent it becoming a subsidy to landlords.
@rick_777

These guys write about #UI design from a developers POV. This could be very useful to app developers from engineering backgrounds who find building a user-friendly GUI frustrating:
https://refactoringui.com/

@clacke we agree that religious fundamentalism is a problem. Like the author on LW, you blame religion, I blame fundamentalism. Flatland (to borrow #KenWilbur's more colourful term for reductionism) falsely assumes that religion is about specific claims of *truth*, rather than *usefulness*. This is true whether you're on the side believing that useful but unproven (and perhaps unprovable) ideas are facts, or the side dismissing all religion because some people do that.
@Angle

@clacke as I said in the follow up posts, seeking to wipe out competing discourses is a symptom of fundamentalism. Scientism is, amongst other things, the use of Science (TM) or Reason (TM) as the stated doctrine of - and justification for - fundamentalism. So the goal of the article, however indirect the method used, is classic scientism. Just as the Quiverful movement remains fundamentalist, no matter how indirect their intended method of becoming more than 50% of the population.
@Angle

@Angle ironically, I totally agree with this. The program of general education, as laid out in that page, seems very useful. It's just that the goal is wrongheaded, and the program is unlikely to achieve it. It's more likely to produce more enlightened instances of existing religions, and more alternatives to them (Discordianisms etc, which is all to the good.

@Angle As Richard Bach explains it in 'One', every religion begins with a group who have discovered useful truths, and another group who have learned them, and become convinced that everyone else should too. When this doesn't happen, they conclude it must be the existing orthodoxies that are blocking the Good News of the new truths, and that the solution is to wipe them out. Thus begins the next holy war. Any advocacy of Science or Reason that cannot co-exist with religion *is* religion.

@Angle oh and one of the many intriguing links in Moloch is this one from #LessWrong
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline

It's disappointing to see this kind of call to #scientism jihad on Less Wrong.

Would it change the social psychology of social media if we replaced the terms "follow" and "followers" in the UI with "listen" and "listeners", or "read" and "readers", or some other set of terms with a less ... well ... culty ring to them?

"There are many individuals who are liberated or who appear to be so. Some of them seek disciples because they have not heeded Nietzsche, who said, "What? You seek followers? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred, by a thousand? Seek zeroes!" Remember this and know that any system of liberation may work once, for one individual." - Zen Without Zen Masters, Camden Benares:
http://www.skepticfiles.org/weird/zen.htm

@CharredStencil Moloch is a *long* piece, I've responded in three posts. I'd be curious to know how you respond to my argument as laid out in all three
@Angle

@pootz
> rather public investment as a public good.

I agree, but getting it to happen has proven ... difficult. I think there's a place for hybrid models that are non-market, but are based on individual decisions. To make that work, you need to pitch the value of the payment to the common good (not the payer), and to make the payment as quick and simple a calculation as possible (for reasons discussed in other posts, and strongly influence by Shirky's writing on the subject)
@alcinnz @cookie

@Angle one thing #AdamCurtis gets right in his 'Machines of Loving Grace' doco series is that Game Theory was invented by a paranoid schizophrenic, working in a Cold War military research lab. It useful as a set of thought experiments, but it's applicability to anything that happens in actually existing societies is extremely limited. As the inventor says during his interview in the doco.

@Angle So I'd posit that in each of the cases he covers, there's a similar strange attractor (akin to homeostasis / empathy) that organically overcomes Prisoners Dilemma situations,
beyond the 4 reasons he gives for how we're avoiding then so far. Also, that only a perfect storm of negative conditions can provoke a race to the bottom. If so, there's good reason to be a lot more hopeful about the prospects for conscious human evolution (forgive me if I'm wrong in pronoun use here)

@Angle the Moloch piece is an amazing read. But I think it ignores an important fact; cancer is not the norm in organisms. It only manifests in organisms that come under severe and chronic physiological and/or psychological stress. And while Pinker gets it entirely backwards in 'Angels ...', the weight of the anthropological literature agrees with him that war (esp. total war) is an aberration among humans, not the default state.

@Blort it helped to tell myself that going to Disneyland is like dropping acid; once you've committed to an all day pass, there's no going back, and the only way to avoid a bad trip to is to relax into it, and enjoy the ride ;-)

@LPS my understanding is that Taler can only work for people with an account at a bank that runs the part Taler that runs at the bank end. Finding more banks (#CreditUnions) willing to do that would be a great help. Figuring out how to integrate the post that runs at the vendor end into a branch of F-Droid would be immensely helpful. Even as a way of supplementing the existing donation mechanism in F-Droid that would be useful (as banks start to support it)
@adfeno

@pootz
> rather public investment as a public good.

I agree, but getting it to happen has proven ... difficult. I think there's a place for hybrid models that are non-market, but are based on individual decisions. To make that work, you need to pitch the value of the payment to the common good (not the payer), and to make the payment as quick and simple a calculation as possible (for reasons discussed in other posts, and strongly influence by Shirley's writing on the subject)
@alcinnz @cookie

@pootz this is a cool idea too. I used to shop at an organic shop where they started putting names and photos of the growers by each item of produce, and bio info about them and their properties up as wall posters. But it still needs to be combined with making the payment as easy as dropping a coin in a hat, or visiting a cash register in a shop.
@alcinnz @cookie