Norms of discourse as a public good

I had a conversation with a young activist today who argued that violence on account of the marginalized is appropriate because it is effective. Here's my take on that.

Non-violent discourse norms are a public good. The fact that you can go out and express your ideas without fear of violent repercussions is something that everyone benefits from. At the same time, everyone is incentivized to claim the right of free expression for themselves and deny it to others. So there are two equilibria: The nice one, where we can express ourselves freely and we punish people who try to deny others that right, and the not so nice one, where everyone can expect violent repercussions for their speech.

Now clearly, there are some cases that are so dire that we must be willing to sacrifice our discourse norms for a greater good. Maybe, for example, violence used to suppress Nazi speech was justified in pre-third reich Germany.

Supporters of violence directed against speech will typically claim that their situation is sufficiently dire to justify their chosen means. Thugs will claim the same thing, though. One would expect that a sufficiently intelligent thug would argue that speech norms, as important as they are, must take a backseat to the pressing issues of the day.

One would think that an intelligent supporter of legitimate violence would go to great pains to signal to others that they are not just an ideologically opportunist thug. Yet such signals aren't very common, signals often go very much the opposite way, and derision and hatred is directed towards liberal speech norms.

What puzzles me is not that people behave in this way, humans have the capacity to act in deeply thuggish ways. What does puzzle me is that people behave in this way and expect to be granted the moral high ground. If you want to live by the sword, go ahead, I can't stop you, but to expect others to cheer you on requires a significant lack of self awareness.

The case for informed wireheading

Imagine an optometrist giving you an eye exam. You're sitting in a chair looking through trial frames. The optometrist picks a lens, slots it into the frame and asks you to look at an eye chart. You decide whether your vision is better or worse with the new lens and the process repeats, potentially starting from a new baseline.

Now imagine a version of this exam that involves a "neurometrist", a neuroscientist adjusting your state of mind with a combination of drugs, transcranial stimulation and/or brain implants and then alternately showing you what the world feels like with and without the adjustment. If you consider your altered state of mind an improvement your neurometrist locks it permanently in place the process is repeated.

People make bad choices with the mind-altering technology available today, so we should generally be wary of incremental hill-climbing when it comes to our psychological state. For some people ([though surprisingly not everyone](http://smartdrugsmarts.com/episode-154-addiction-maia-szalavitz/)), taking heroin temporarily feels like an improvement. You could picture an evil neurometrist injecting people with heroin slowly leading them into a life of misery and addiction.

So, for the thought experience, assume that our neurometrist is not evil and in addition smart enough to avoid letting you slide into a local optimum. You can trust that the gains you make in the procedure will be permanent, and that that there are no states you'd be likely to find that are substantially more pleasurable or subjectively meaningful than the one you find yourself in after the procedure.

But while our neurometrist is not evil, he is also thoroughly agnostic about what constitutes a meaningful life. If you would truly prefer to be a brain in a vat having its pleasure centers stimulated rather than living a life of meaningful toil, than that's where you'll end up.

So the question is: How should you choose whether to accept a change that the neurometrist presents to you? Should you simply go with what feels better in each step, or reflect whether a given change aligns with your values and notions of a meaningful existence?

I would argue that you should go with what feels better and that you should not be concerned with whether the change aligns with your values. Your values may simply be parochial byproducts of human evolution. Our eternal values may simply be particular strategies for survival and reproduction. In this case, why should the loss of your values be any more meaningful than the loss of, say, the physical body, or the leaving behind of traditional social structures?

If on the other hand, some values are intrinsically meaningful in the sense that sustained meaning can only be derived by instantiating those values in your life, then the process the neurometrist would put you through should steer you towards those values.

I vs S

One of my favorite random tidbits of information on the internet is how your preference for analysis or algebra (assuming you have one) may predict how you eat your corn. Algebraists tend to follow the patterns inherent in mathematical structures and - so goes the theory - also tend to follow the structure of the corn while eating, which means that they eat in neat, typewriter-style rows. Analysts don't care turn the corn while eating, which is arguably more efficient.

Being the pattern-obsessed, algebra-loving, typewriter-style corn eater that I am, I think this observation can be explained in terms of the perception axis of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator:  Intuition vs Sensing,  which reflects your preference patterns vs ground-level data. The MBTI is a typology based on Jungian psychology. It's not as reputable as the Big Five and seems to be more popular in self-help and business circles rather than academic ones, but at least intuitively (hah!) I feel that it captures an important distinction between how people think and what they pay attention to.

Only about 30% of the population are I types. I don't know if IQ has any bearing on the distribution, but I would guess that the percentage of smart I people is also at around a third. I think because of this imbalance, quite a lot of S folks can get away with not taking I-style cognition seriously. In system-builder style professions, I think that Is who can keep their propensity for generalization in check have an edge, unless the time horizon for measuring success is short.

As I gain more professional experience, I find that my I-type skills turn out to be my most valuable strengths, primarily because there is a real need for them in my field and they are relatively scarce. It can be tricky though to find a work environment where such skills are both needed and appreciated.

Real lives are stake, this is no time for abstract thought!

Here's an archetype of a conversation I've had in variations throughout my life:

Friend: I believe X is the right thing to do so we can all be happy. 

Me: Ok, but what if X were a Y, or if the situation was Z? Or what if the people you disagree with were advocating a minor variation of X, would you still agree? 

Friend: I distrust and am personally insulted by your attempts at analysis. You sound like one of those people who doesn't want others to be happy. 

Me: No, no, no. I like the happiness part, I'm just not sure about your specific suggestion of X. I'm simultaneously trying to find out why you think X will be effective and trying to relate X to a universal moral framework to ensure that doing X would be fair.

Friend: Real lives are stake, this is no time for abstract thought!

I'm fascinated (in the car crash sense) when people reject analysis because of the real that can't be captured by analysis. I mean it's a fair enough point that experience is richer than the symbolic, but if not for concepts, how are you going to talk about the real, and if you're using concepts anyway, wouldn't it be better if they were marginally consistent?

Of course the tumblr activism take is that consistency is just The Man's way of trying to oppress you and demands for logic and argument are really just expressions of power by the privileged within a system of deep seated and invisible oppression. Even if we were to grant that point, what's the answer? Abandoning logic to give completely free reign to your biases? Creating a new system not based on logic that nobody has thought of but works much better on a modern scale? Please try that over there and if I don't see ominous smoke clouds within a year, I may go check it out.

While I don't want to overinflate the importance of tumblr activism, it is useful in that it expresses a common tendency that many people share to some extent in unusual clarity. I'd like to dig deeper into that in future posts.

 

Coalition building across ideological octaves

I think one of the problems in political discourse is that we have a tendency to oversimplify complex issues by mapping a wide variety of disparate viewpoints onto a small number of political factions.

I think this the result of our tendency to be tribal creatures first and rational creatures second. The primary distinction is whether you're in my in-group or my out-group. Rational discourse is secondary and also optional. Especially in political interactions, people will generally scrutinize you for tribal markers to find out if you're one of the Good People. This may take precedence over other concerns, such as trying to accurately understand your point of view.

Expressing political ideas serves as a flag that signal group affiliation in addition to being a contribution to public discourse. People may emphasize these functions differently. A lot of politicking revolves around strategically choosing where to plant your flag keeping in mind how other coalitions will react to you. For example, if your coalition is unpopular, you may choose to rally around an idea that most people will agree with. This forces your opponents to deny the stance, which goes some way towards delegitimizing them. Alternatively, if your cause is generally viewed as just, you may choose a slightly unreasonable idea as a flag, so you can more easily identify and target people that sway from the orthodoxy. (I think this is one of the reasons why social justice and nerds often don't mix.)

In some cases, the same flag can match coalitions that don't fundamentally have much in common, but that come to the similar conclusions on highly visible issues. For a group, this creates the choice of whether to explicitly distance itself from nearby groups at the cost of losing coherence and visibility in public discourse, or to risk being associated with those groups.

I think an example of this can be found in libertarianism, where very different motivations can lead one to argue libertarian viewpoints, but the general public generally sees a large ideological blob. One the one hand, libertarian ideas derive from a position that seeks freedom from coercion, a classical liberal project that aims to establish a society is held together by win-win cooperation and only resorts to coercive methods in extreme cases. Such a viewpoint is compatible with welfarist ideas as long as they have an opt-in component. As an example, one may imagine a libertarian charter city that uses European style welfare models, but where people are free to leave, limited only by contractual obligations they explicitly agreed to. On the other hand, libertarianism can also be an expression of the concrete desire to abolish existing coordination mechanisms and sharing arrangements. These two kinds of libertarianism, one which seeks to rebuild a strongly cooperative society on the basis of non-coercion and the other which would prefer to see society reshaped along less cooperative and more individualistically competitive lines, are very different in nature, yet look a lot alike when seen from outside.

I think a similar thing is happening with neoreaction and the alt-right. Neoreaction could be a post-post modernist rediscovery of order and structure that is informed by both the failures of naive, rigid modernism and the self-serving and dangerously ineffectual dispersions of post-modernism. The alt-right on the other hand is a more old-school nationalist or ethnocentric movement. From the outside they sure look a lot alike.

Blog - Reactivate

I've decided to try and reanimate this blog.

I've been meaning to put my writing into a more organized and less transient format than Facebook rants and reddit comments. Given the sheer amount of written content I've produced online, I find it surprisingly hard to sit down and write something that is not in reply to someone else, so I'm going to take it easy and try to start out with 200 words a week.

Since I'm too lazy to find a new name for a blog, I've decided to reactivate this old blog of mine (which, amazingly, 40000 people have visited in the meantime). The content will be different though, instead of torrenting tips, you will find my armchair musings on topics such as technology, futurism, consciousness, spirituality, game theory, video games, politics and whatever else comes to mind.

Buy steam games from abroad

I recently had trouble buying games on steam while traveling. The problem was that steam would automatically redirect me to the European store, where I was unable to buy games using my UK steam account.

I contacted support and they replied by giving me this link, which takes you directly to the UK steam store.
http://store.steampowered.com/?cc=GB

I assume that you can switch out "GB" with a different country code to go to different county's steam stores.

Lion Mail 5.0 can't send e-mails through Gmail SMTP

I just had the following problem: Whenever I would send a mail in Mail 5.0 it would go straight to outbox and stay there forever without being sent.

Every once in a while a message popped up asking me to reauthenticate with my password, but doing so did no good. The connection monitor (found in the menu "Window") showed mail trying to connect to the gmail smtp server for long periods of time, but without success.

I finally resolved it by forcing the port for the SMTP server connection to be 587 as is suggested here.

MacOS: Fast key repeat

I do a lot of coding in VIM, which involves scrolling the cursor around with the keyboard. One thing that bothered me quite a bit when switching to a Mac was the slow key repeat rate in Lion, which makes using keyboard-based editors very cumbersome. Key repeat rate can be configured from the menu System Preferences / Keyboard, but I found that even the fastest setting was still too slow for my taste.

Changing key repeat speed from the command line

I’ve seen the following solution proposed on Mac world, but for some reason it didn’t work for me, but you might want to give it a try:

Everybody knows that you can get a pretty fast keyboard repeat rate by changing a slider on the Keyboard tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel. But you can make it even faster! In Terminal, run this command:

  defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 0

You can increase the last value to any integer to slow down the key repeat. A value of 2 corresponds to the maximum speed that can be obtained from the System Preferences.

Setting a flexible key repeat speed with keyremap4macbook

What worked for me was setting a flexible key repeat via the keyremap4macbook application. After installing, you can flexibly set key repeat speed to as fast or slow as you like, as shown below.

I’ve had some trouble getting this to work with Lion’s press & hold menu (the one that allows you to choose variations of a letter, such as umlauts). I recommend switching off press & hold and reenabling key repeat by entering the following from terminal.

    defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

You’ll need to log out and in again for this setting to take effect.

MacOS: Force torrents to use only your VPN connection

Using a VPN connection is a popular way to hide your IP address when downloading torrents. Unfortunately, you run the risk of exposing your real IP if your VPN connection drops since your torrent client will immediately reconnect using your default, insecure network connection. This seems to be the standard behaviour in Windows, MacOS, and Ubuntu, and is, in my opinion, a massive security flaw: Once a VPN connection has been enabled, the OS should NOT switch back to an insecure connection until the user has been notified. To my amazement, few people seem to share my opinion, and so I have to find ad-hoc solutions every now and again to make sure that my network activity remains secure when using a VPN.

Windows has a very powerful application-level firewall, which can be used to block any application from using an insecure connection. The process is described in this post. I've also solved the problem in Ubuntu, although I'd have to do some digging to find out how (leave a comment if you want to know).

The last couple of days I have tried to find a way to block torrent downloading over insecure connections for MacOS, and encountered a couple of challenges:

• The application level firewall of MacOS is a complete joke. (Found under System Preferences / Security & Firewall)
• ipfw, the ip-based firewall that comes with a mac can only be used to block ALL non-VPN traffic.
• There seem to be no free application level firewalls for MacOS, although if you have the money to spare Little Snitch seems to be a decent piece of software. (edit: I'm not sure if Little Snitch is powerful enough)
• My torrent clients of choice, µTorrent and Transmission are not very configurable.

After a lot of searching I finally found a solution using the highly configurable torrent client Vuze (formerly called Azureus).

Step-by-step guide to forcing your torrent downloads to only use VPN on MacOS:

1. Download and install Vuze. Make sure you do not install the additional software they push on you during the installation process. 
2. Connect to your VPN service
3. Open Vuze
4. Go to Vuze / Preferences / Mode and activate advanced mode. (See picture below.)
5. In the preferences, go to Connection / Advanced Network Settings. Find the name of your VPN network interface in the text box (e.g., "ppp0"). Enter the name of the interface into the text box "Bind to local ip address or interface". (See picture below,)
6. Tick the option "Enforce IP bindings ..."
7. Click save and exit the configuration screen
8. Try out whether it works: Start downloading some torrent for testing purposes in Vuze, e.g., a Ubuntu installer disk image. The download should only work if your VPN is enabled. If you disconnect the VPN, the connections should fail, and the download should cease.
9. Success. You have now configured your torrent client to securely download over VPN.

The above procedure is not ideal since it forces you to use Vuze, which is a big fat piece of bloatware, but it will at least make sure that you do not inadvertently expose your IP address when loading a torrent. If you know of a way to force µTorrent and Transmission to only use a VPN in MacOS, let me know.

As an aside, if you use a pptp based VPN you should also consider disabling ip6 to ensure security.

Sending free faxes to US destinations

For some weird reason, a company recently required me to put an order with them via fax instead of e-mail.

I found this very thorough FAQ, which describes a number of ways to send faxes from the internet via free or commercial services. It seems to be very up to date.

Latex: Unmatched braces in tikz matrix node

I just struggled to get some tikz code working which looked approximately like this:

\matrix { a & b & c \\ d & e & f };

This fails to compile with warning:  "Missing } inserted."


The problem turned out to be that the matrix command in tikz always needs to end with a new line, that is:

\matrix { a & b & c \\ d & e & f \\};

LAN Syncing Dropbox between Ubuntu & Windows, Wifi & LAN

My favourite cloud syncing app Dropbox has a nifty LAN syncing feature, which detects when two computers are on the same local network and transfers files directly between them, instead of taking the scenic route via your internet connection.

Unfortunately, this does not always seem to work. In my home setup, I have my Windows 7 box connected to the router via ethernet, while my Ubuntu 11.04 laptop connects via wifi. In this setting, LAN syncing did not seem to work. I "fixed" this problem by connecting my laptop via ethernet and deactivating wifi. Clearly not ideal, but at least I can sync my 2.5gig Dropbox folder without downloading my files at 0.1kb/sec from the Dropbox servers.

August Presentation Clicker LP107T and Ubuntu

A while ago, I bought a wireless presenter from a company called August at amazon. Upon arrival, I found that it didn't work with my laptop running Ubuntu 11.04. I was a bit surprised to find this, since the device basically pretends to be a USB keyboard, and hence should run out of the box on any operating system.

A short search led me to this bug report which explains that the linux kernel patch 2.6.37 inadvertently breaks support for the presentation clicker by adding support for the (rather bizarre) Yurex leg shaking sensor. The two gadgets share the same device ID. Since by default Ubuntu let's you choose from a list of recent kernel versions during startup, a simple fix is to choose a pre-2.6.37 kernel version or update your system in case the problem has been fixed in the meantime.

Bison crashing with memory error: "bison: double free or corruption (!prev): ..."

After a Ubuntu upgrade I had bison constantly crashing with the following error message:

*** glibc detected *** bison: double free or corruption (!prev): 0x0000000000e139c0 ***

This blog post provided a solution. Simply type the following on the terminal:

sudo apt-get install bison

It seems that I accidentally had the bison++ package installed instead of bison.

I would also suggest:

sudo apt-get install flex

Since I was missing that package as well.

Tracking your 2011 MacBook Air for UK orders

About a week back, I decided to indulge myself and ordered the new 2011 MacBook Air with a i7 custom-to-order (CTO) configuration. I received a shipping notice 3 days after ordering, and have since then spent half my waking time on the Apple order tracking page, only to be stuck with the following, rather vague information:

Estimated Delivery Date (Subject to change)	09 Aug 2011 (Subject to change)
Current Delivery Status	In Transit to Customer - Shipment on Schedule

and

Carrier Tracking Number

In transit to final destination - carrier details to be updated shortly.

Assigned Carrier

In transit to final destination - carrier details to be updated shortly.

Dammit! I need to know where my MacBook is right now! What's the point of buying a luxury product if you can't indulge your inner 5-year old with pointless requests for information.
A quick internet search reveals that a webpage called apecode is supposed to be the answer to my suffering. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, apecode is down. Further googling brought me to this thread on a Dutch message board which seems to list a number of logistics companies that Apple is known to use for shipping to Europe.

Indeed, the first link worked out for me: The site at expo.expeditors.com allows you to enter the number that shows up on your order tracking page under "Our delivery reference number" and receive a tracking update. I got the following info:

Criteria:	Tracking Number: XXXXXXXXX
Data as of:	01-Aug-2011 19:37:18 GMT

Ready for Delivery - #XXXXXXXXXXX

SHANGHAI, CHINA TO LONDON, ENGLAND

Import Customs Release: 01-Aug-2011 11:23:00 GMT

It seems my MBA is napping in Heathrow at the moment, together with 231kg of other Apple equipment. Fingers crossed I might get it before the weekend.

If this post helped you out, leave a quick comment. This blog is an experiment to start posting my solutions to all the little everyday problems I solve after an hour of googling in order to speed up the process for other people, so I'm curious whether anybody finds their way here.

Edit: Just for your information. My macbook arrived in Oxford on the 3rd of August, 5 days before Apple's estimate and 2 days after customs release at Heathrow.