Apr
23
Giving up Control
I know I don’t post anymore really, but wanted to post this for my friend who just found out he’s going to be a dad.
TheGreatCompromise
Creating awareness around modern slavery and advocating for the most vulnerable minority - the individual - by promoting the idea that the best way to protect one's human rights is to secure those human rights for everyone.
Jan
10
“Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
Martin Luther King Jr. (via dagestaniprincess)
(via thefreelioness)
Jan
9
Ben Swann REALITY CHECK for Piers Morgan Gun Stats (by ARSONomics)
(via disaffected-libertarian)
“Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority.”
Milton Friedman (via catharsisdiaries)
(via thefreelioness)
“These aren’t merely cases of some people having more stuff than you do. They’re cases in which some people are systematically empowered to dictate the terms on which other people live, work, and trade. And we generally take it for granted. But it’s not obvious that things have to be that way.”
Roderick T. Long, How Inequality Shapes Our Lives (via c4ss)
(via andryushacx)
“The militarization of American police forces is a nationwide trend, one that has been carried out in concert with the rest of the warfare state. Radley Balko writes that, “A number of federal policies have driven the trend, including offering domestic police departments military training, allowing training with military organizations, using “troops-to-cops” programs and offering surplus military equipment and weaponry to domestic police departments for free or at major discounts.” For years now, the war abroad has been coming home, with police acting less as “peace officers” and more as soldiers.”
Nathan Goodman, End War at Home, End War Abroad (via c4ss)
Dec
30
“As a genuine free market libertarian, I want labor to receive the full value of its product, without paying tribute to big landlords and usurers or the holders of artificial “property” rights like patents, copyrights and licenses. I want the prices of goods and services to be driven by competition down to the real cost of supplying them, without state-enforced artificial scarcities to enclose technical progress as a source of rents. I want the average work week to reflect the time actually required to produce our standard of living, without the monkey of rentiers and subsidized waste on our backs.”
Kevin Carson, Social Democracy as High-Overhead “Socialism” (via c4ss)
Kevin Carson
Free Markets
Anarchy
Socialism
Dec
20
The Cooperation Instinct
In a dog-eat-dog world, people still cooperate, collaborate, and help each other out. Our species’ urge to work together has remained an evolutionary paradox, seemingly at odds with Darwinian theory—until now.
…The prisoner’s dilemma focuses on the choice between cooperation and selfishness. Superficially it seems quite simple: You and another person have been caught by the police on suspicion of criminal activity and are being held in separate cells. The prosecutor visits each of you separately and offers a deal. If you confess and incriminate your accomplice while he or she remains silent, you will be convicted of a lesser crime, serving just one year in prison while your accomplice serves four. In the parlance of the game, you have “defected” from your friendship.
If you and your accomplice both refuse the deal and stay true to each other—remaining “cooperators” in the game’s lingo—you will both be convicted of a lesser crime and serve two-year sentences, since the police do not have enough evidence to convict either one of you of the more serious crime. If you both testify against each other—that is, if you mutually defect—then the police will convict both of you for the serious crime but give you only three years, since you provided some evidence.
Clearly, the best choice for you as an individual is to defect. You get only one year in prison if you rat on your accomplice and he doesn’t rat on you. Even if you both rat on each other, the penalty is three years, not the maximum sentence. It is only the sucker who doesn’t defect while his accomplice does who spends four years in the slammer, the maximum sentence. On the other hand, both prisoners are worse off when they turn on each other than they would be if they both kept silent.
Nowak was fascinated by the prisoner’s dilemma because it provides a mathematical way to study human behavior and, more broadly, the evolutionary costs and benefits of cooperation. Each round of the game generates numbers (the number of years in prison can be considered points), there can be different results based upon different strategies, and all of this can be turned into calculations. With the prisoner’s dilemma, Sigmund said, one could use math to examine the thorniest conundrum of our social lives: how to weigh personal gain against the common good.
For the rest of the alpine weekend and all the way back to Vienna, Nowak talked to Sigmund about the game. He visited him the following day at his office at the Institute for Mathematics in Vienna, which shared a building with a seminary, the priests on the first floor and the mathematicians on the second. “It was total tranquility,” says Nowak, a Roman Catholic who holds fast to his faith. “In biochemistry, we were always breaking things, and there were bad smells. But here there were just empty corridors with someone occasionally walking by, deep in thought. I was amazed that someone could make a living just by thinking.”
In 1987 Nowak decided to do doctoral work with Sigmund on the mathematics of evolution. Their focus was the prisoner’s dilemma and its endless iterations, now parsed with computers and math.
Others had already studied cooperation using the prisoner’s dilemma, notably political scientist Robert Axelrod, who held virtual tournaments in the 1970s. Scientists around the world sent Axelrod strategies for the “prisoners”—instructions for when they would cooperate and when they would defect—to wield in round after computerized round. Each round, the strategies received points; the shorter the prison term, the higher the score.
Over the course of hundreds of computerized rounds, the winning strategy was one called Tit for Tat: Whatever you did in the last round of the game, I will do to you in this round. This strategy relies on direct reciprocity and abounds in the real world, especially in communities where creatures have a history with one another. For instance, Neighbor Jones is more likely to change a flat tire for Neighbor Newell if Newell helped fix Jones’s broken lawn mower last week. It holds true in the animal world as well: A vampire bat is more likely to share a blood meal with others in the cave if those others shared a blood meal with it the last time it failed to find prey…Read More
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