Forum Post: Status update

(Crossposting, Yoko Ono and Paul Krugman)

I really don't care who supports the idea as long as it gets used. My main concern at this point, since people don't view the economy as broken enough to support changes, is James Holmes' rescheduled trial date next month. I am assuming his 'halfhearted suicide attempts' were to avoid entering a plea.

Re: "Give Peace a Chance" — the need for proficiency in conflict is from people being aware of the signal accuracy and nice strategy interaction, what the Church of Satan calls "psychic vampires", and then assuming that other people don't know about this interaction and consequently overestimating their own abilities. As a provisional strategy this overestimation is the moral thing to do, but the appearance of conflict then becomes necessary to 'sort' people by ability and allow people who lost to get on with their lives.

Someone who does not understand this is not able to react correctly to many situations. This is evaluated as lower competence and leads to being less persuasive. The question was whether people who did understand this situation and accepted its implications were also able to attain positions of influence, and furthermore whether it would be possible for me to become aware of them and contact them.

The most important result of the current situation, with lack of awareness of varying signal accuracy, is that ability becomes hard to judge.

So, I could not conclude (in July/August of last year) that the distribution of ability in the world was not such that I could find people who were less likely to fail.

However, when Yoko Ono did not publish or act on the comment I made, I was forced to conclude she did not have any greater understanding of the distribution of ability in the world. Since no one had indicated the situation was urgent and my own situation was unfavourable, I put it on hold.

(More accurately, the conflict results in the conclusion that "it's hard to be nice". When the individual has priority as in US culture, it is assumed that other people follow the base moral guideline of being selfish and are therefore of lower ability; when society has priority as in China, it is assumed that other people are selfless, despite this being difficult, and so they have higher ability than the self.)

I can't really generalize from my situation because I am not sure whether to consider myself as being alive right now, but I find it unlikely I could find anyone more suited to the role through previously having attained greater understanding and so I have no objections. I view my thoughts as bouncing around... since Yoko Ono didn't act on it today, it is back to Paul Krugman.

The guiding principle is that "no one should feel obligated to do something costly to themselves because of a deficiency of ability in someone else". This does require being able to judge what constitutes high or low ability, with the standard of 'behavior consistent with the strategies of both selfish and selfless behavior' being important here, but it means there is no conflict when someone could be spending time improving themselves but chooses not to.

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Also, random song! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-3kRuCh6F4 (lyrics)