A simple message

What's needed is a way for people who want unemployment to be fixed to convey their support of this message to skilled workers with high incomes, including the working wealthy. I saw some serious posts on 9gag but not sure if there is a better way.

There is an important difference between people with high incomes and people with low incomes, which leads to misunderstanding: people with high incomes see money as a way to increase status, which leads to being happier. Some psychology research on the topic:
http://peerreviewedbymyneurons.wordpress.com/2012/06/13/how-money-can-buy-happiness-if-youre-rich/
http://psych-your-mind.blogspot.com/2012/07/happiness-chronicles-iii-does-status.html

Importantly, this causes people with high incomes to assume that making as much money as possible is the best way to make other people think they're happy. In contrast, people with low incomes are more likely to see money as the means to an end, and that there is little point in working more if you already have enough money to buy what you want. This leads to people with low incomes not trusting those with high incomes, but it also leads to a culture among highly skilled people where working more is seen as a positive thing regardless of actual productivity.
http://mikethemadbiologist.com/2009/07/27/on_work_and_time_in_science/
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/4/

Working more is not a selfish thing to do, even though it is the primary reason for high unemployment. It is bad for some groups of people but good for others. If we want to change this culture, people who can't find a job or whose job does not offer a fair wage, or those who just couldn't afford to complete college (see: http://www.epi.org/publication/webfeatures_snapshots_20051012/) need to say loudly and clearly that highly skilled people should help people by working less, instead of helping people by working more.

If this happens, we will see...
-lower unemployment
-less inequality due to more bargaining power for workers and purchase of luxury goods

But these groups will be 'harmed':
-owners of capital will have less income due to lower corporate profits
-people who sell to the rich will have less purchasing power
-the US as a whole will not benefit from printing money if the budget is balanced
-an end to inflation could lead to stock market prices falling and people who made poor investment choices will lose money to other people who made better choices
-lingering prejudices could lead to negative stereotypes of people who work less

Current stereotypes can be seen from these links:
http://occupywallst.org/forum/in-mike-bloombergs-nyc-white-felons-have-a-better-/
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/1-percent-wives-are-helping-to-kill-feminism-and-make-the-war-on-women-possible/258431/

When someone who acts in a way which employers perceive a "good" worker would act it changes stereotypes of that person's race or gender. This is why people need to assert that fixing unemployment is important, so if a highly skilled person wants to work less their boss will not see it as reflecting negatively on people with similar attributes, but rather will see it as a positive thing.

The second, and possibly less important issue is that we don't need more education. If we say we do need more education, it implies that unemployed people can fix their own problems and other people do not need to worry about it. This helps people who already have a job, especially those with a well-paying job who could afford to pay higher taxes or work less. Conversely, if we agree that we already have enough people going to college it helps unemployed people by transferring responsibility for problems to the owners of wealth and capital and the highly paid workers who benefit from the existing ownership of wealth.

Proof we have enough education:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/reader_feedback/public/display.php?thread=746178&direction=DESC&column=rating
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-pushes-for-more-scientists-but-the-jobs-arent-there/2012/07/07/gJQAZJpQUW_story.html

The reason this hasn't been fixed before is people are distracted by the national debt. Even the current President has implied in the past that we borrow most of the debt from foreign nations like China, when in fact China only holds 8% of the US public debt or a bit more than $1 trillion (see: https://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+ownership+of+us+debt), which is about as much student debt as exists in the US now.

It isn't clear whether the message that people will say they support needs to talk about wage rates, or whether highly skilled people would be able to accept a linear reduction of pay as they work less. A new wage system seems necessary to make the idea of working less stable, instead of just an emergency response to high unemployment where people feel less need to use the concept as unemployment decreases. So imagine three graphs of time spent working vs total compensation received:
-on the first graph, you receive 1.0x the normal rate up to 40 hours, and then 0x after that so it becomes flat. Or it's just a flat line at a monthly salary no matter how much or little time spent working.
-on the second graph, it's 1.0x rate up to 40 hours and then 1.5x after that, with a sharp bend upward in total compensation.
-on the third graph, it's 1.2x rate up to 20 hours and 0.8x after that, or a smoother curve with the same general shape.

You can see how with the first two systems, people will tend to settle on 40 hours worked or maybe their employer will force them to work as much as possible. If working "full time" leads to benefits then compensation has a bump at that point and it's clearly the best for workers, which is why people generally want full-time jobs (see: http://lifeinc.today.com/_news/2012/06/04/12049830-full-time-jobs-are-getting-harder-to-find?lite). But with the third graph, there is no way to agree how much time people should work.

It's a bit like the Sorites paradox, where you remove one grain of sand at a time from a heap of sand and are asked when it's no longer a heap. If a dictionary defined a "heap" as 1000 grains or more it would be easy to answer, just as the second graph lets people say that working 40 hours is full-time. But in the third graph, most people will just say they want to work at least 20 hours but less than 60, and so people can choose to work less without feeling like they're violating any convention. Maybe they feel they don't need the newest iPhone, or maybe they don't treat college like vodka, judging its quality solely on the price and brand (see: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/meet-the-high-priest-of-runaway-college-inflation-he-regrets-nothing/263032/).

The central message, again, is that "highly skilled people should help the unemployed by working less, instead of helping a different group of people by working more". Even people who are not unemployed or at risk of becoming so can support this message.


Since no one reads this site it would take more effort though. If more people had read this I wouldn't have talked about personal things. Since I am not contacting anyone new, no one I have contacted is willing to support it, and I am not discussing this on forums anymore either there is no chance that posting this will have any effect on the world. If anything, the purpose of this post is so that people like Fauna, and "person who deleted a blog", feel they would know how to get people to use this idea if they wanted to. (I feel a little like this person in saying that...)

And since no one reads this I'll link random videos.~

The Meaning of Strength

I have not really made any identifiable mistakes during this process.

This was the other possible outcome for the 'blame the middle class' posts. If I did not underestimate the ability of the average person, then it means I correctly judged it. I was going to say, but somehow just never got around to it, that one of the songs I linked which was meant to be in the memory of someone who had 'died' could be seen as referring to the me with limited potential.

This is important when it comes to people mentioned in a previous post. If I had made a mistake, such as incorrectly judging the ability of other people, you could say the Person A or Person B in that post are not interested in me, and that they would be happy without me. Theoretically it would possible for me to then end up with just one other person. However due to past events it would also mean that whoever I ended up with had also made a mistake, or that I am so severely unable to understand reality that I am unable to avoid concluding that they had made a mistake when it was not actually the case.

So I am forced to conclude that if I live, I will be with at least two other people since otherwise I wouldn't be able to think they're happy. It then becomes necessary to look at why culturally this is not encouraged within most societies.

Part of the reason is definitely economic—when it comes to "marriage", it is much more common for a male to have multiple female partners than for a female to have multiple male partners. Since males have traditionally been seen as the primary source of paid work in Western culture for the last few centuries, a male person generally has to have significantly higher income than average to have more than one female partner, and this generally means not using the strategy of offering low prices. To the extent that selling at a high price is seen as "greedy", the attitude that multiple female partners is wrong is a way to discourage selling at high prices.

To the extent that the idea on this site would make it unnecessary to feel morally obligated to offer low prices, it would also remove the economic rationale behind the discouragement of multiple female partners.

(It would also remove the wage premium for work which people might see as "unethical", while maybe also allowing changes in the legal status of prostitution and so on. As an earlier post pointed out, it becomes easier to trust people when everyone has other reasonable options that allow them to avoid doing things which others see as harmful in some way. Lack of opportunities are a major reason behind illegal activities of all types, but this could also include not having an option to earn a "fair" amount of income for work done. Earning closer to average income can be a way to gain more self-respect (this isn't the blog I remember reading once), but this wouldn't be a problem if the idea on this site were used. /endtangent)


...what was I talking about. Oh, so last year I didn't want to imply I felt that this idea was important for people to use. I did want to find someone who I felt was as smart as me who would have the same chance of getting people to use it.

However, I did not find anyone I felt matched that description. This seemed to result in conflict, precisely because of the possible time cost of trying to get people to support this idea. I mentioned Person B before but the problem's origins were earlier than that. It seemed like it might be possible for Person A to blame herself for the first time I failed the Japanese language test because she had asked that I be online more. But then it seemed like Person B might blame herself for the second time I failed it because of certain actions which may have caused me to avoid using auditory study material for much of the time that I was ostensibly studying Japanese language. This would not have been a problem though if Person A had reacted differently to learning that I had failed the Japanese language test a second time. But for those reasons I felt I had to make it clear that I considered it the result of my own decisions.

The idea on this site threatened that idea by reducing the time I would theoretically have had available to study the Japanese language. If I had spent more effort and people used the idea as a result, my lack of educational credentials would no longer have been an excuse and I might have ended up with Person B, and Person A might have felt it was her fault for influencing my behavior in a way that she could have felt contributed to me failing the Japanese language test the first time, and that my inability to prevent that outcome meant I didn't care about her. As it turned out I failed it a third time but no one could have said it was anything but the result of my own decisions.

So I have spent an equivalent amount of effort and learned about as much during the past several months as I would have if I had seriously tried to get people to use the idea last year. I don't think the time spent is as important though as the conclusion that "stupidity" is an accurate explanation for why problems exist in society at this time.

I don't think I would be in my current situation if I had found someone last year who could understand the idea on this site, or if I had been able to avoid conflict between the observed reality that I had not found such a person and my previous goals. In this sense, the uncertainties of my physical security represent a possible loss for Persons A and B resulting from the specific level of capabilities of people who were aware of this idea last year which prevented them from comprehending it or having confidence in its benefit to the world.

Paul Krugman's big mistake

It really helps when I have someone to talk to about things. For example, I sent a link to an article urging increased funding for gifted schools to someone who had done their high school senior-year project on the negative consequences of an unchallenging environment. One of the reflections they offered in response was that if secondary education was more challenging to gifted students, it might just postpone the teenage rebellion and disillusionment stage to during or after college.

So this let me make a comparison between trends in college and the World of Warcraft. Probably like many other people, I assumed WoW would became the "MMO for stupid people" when it became evident the designers were reacting to popular opinion and were either not aware of or not interested in suggestions that would have kept the quality of the game high by maintaining accurate measures of skill. This would allow intelligent people to play other MMOs while WoW distracted stupid people from joining other games.

But not only did other MMOs do even worse, the trend toward an easier difficulty and obsoletion of content did not actually attract more people. Many people came back for the Northrend expansion but much of that was probably for the story, and the developers openly admitted that subsequent increases in difficulty in the expansion following it were because the "easy" difficulty was not as popular as they had expected. Being able to faceroll content was not enough to attract stupid players to an MMO. It was clear that achievements had value only because they were based on truth—people with actual skill and determination who were playing the game.

College is the same. As it becomes more expensive and fewer people see it as a good investment, intelligent people will begin to decide that it isn't worth going and the underlying reality which the 'signal' of a college degree is based on will change. (Complicated though...)

And 'being wealthy' as a signal for ability is the same way. If highly competent people choose to work less, the signal of income or wealth will also decay. But the factors reducing the likelihood of this happening were described in the previous post.

So this might accurately describe the present:

1) OWS did not display willingness to support the idea that "the middle class is to blame for the recession". Posts in early June, as well as previous forum topics on OWS website which led up to it.
2) summary posts on this site which conveyed the message "logic has failed", while suggesting that problems still exist. What this could have been seen as meaning: "the middle class is dishonest but they still have good intentions", and therefore it is morally acceptable to support the idea on this site.
3) what it might actually have been seen to mean: "I have failed and everything on this site is wrong." Evidence, working from my history...

• Think of the Children
• Continuing to suggest subsidies of peripheral EU states instead of those countries just raising taxes. (Also see: Spanish local governments spending more than they have to get votes.)
• Completely refusing to say anything controversial. (Comment about this column.)

The first of two vacations was announced shortly after I commented on recent posts, after having avoided reading the site once Paul Krugman mentioned his schedule was taking him to Seattle.

This could have been intended to mean that ... Paul Krugman was uncertain of my motives, or something. (Maybe someone could have interpreted a later comment to mean I was not interested in getting people to use the idea, but it was after this happened.) I really don't know. I have always seen the most efficient way to get people to use the idea on this site is to have it be supported by economists. I sort of hoped that the person mentioned at the start of this post, who studied economics, would get people to use the idea maybe but when they didn't immediately reply, I tried contacting various professors listed on Wikipedia (who seemed like they might be interested) and so on. The person I mentioned said that even professors did not have much influence on politics, and linking a study on the number of citations in different academic disciplines and its implication that actual usefulness or relevance to real-world problems is not valued as much as getting published I said that maybe it's because professors do not care if they can't affect politics, but I did not outright reject the academic conception of success as accurately measuring ability.

That was a few hours before... no, less than 24 hours after I wrote the bananas thing. I also linked to the BBC prison study in the same email.

But I still think my characterization of economists as "only interested in GDP" was accurate at the time I made it. See for example, this post about actual vs potential GDP... though I don't know what relation, if any, it had with a comment I made the previous day. Should note that potential GDP only measures what it would be if less people were unemployed, so if most people decided to work less then "potential GDP" would decrease just as it would increase if more people decided to enter the workforce.

A line from the song Alchemy by Girls Dead Monster is about "wanting to brighten everything I touch as I go". Also Gangnam style by Psy is finally showing up in Youtube's Most Liked charts lol, at twice the second place video. Favorites are broken at the time of writing though, all videos have 0 favorites in their statistics and the top list.

So the conclusion is that Paul Krugman made a mistake about whether I had a "backup plan" in case OWS didn't support the 'blame the middle class' argument, or whether I expected a favourable outcome for myself if OWS had done so. Oh what I was going to mention earlier: the first email I sent out, addressed to the Obama administration, I included everyone in the "To" field. This was to suggest distributed responsibility. The next one I sent out to everyone on my contact list had everyone in the "Bcc" field, because the fact no one really responded to the previous one and it had no real-world effects suggested that people were aware of the perceived conflict etc., and were more interested in helping people they knew by avoiding the ethical standard of supporting change than helping strangers they did not know and who they suspected might be using the "selfish" strategy of choosing one's own benefit.

With that situation, allowing people think that 'someone else will take care of it' by showing everyone's email address would not benefit the world.

If OWS had supported the 'blame the middle class' argument and this led to people using the idea of working less, it would have meant I underestimated the competence of the typical person (including OWS supporters)... as seen by the video I linked at the end of the "Why economists are wrong" argument (first seen here). A given change in the world will be seen as having a certain benefit by any specific person. It may be possible to manipulate their perceptions so they overestimate this benefit but this is not an honest thing to do. Meanwhile, understanding that change will incur a specific cost for someone. Smarter people have a lower cost for understanding things. This is the time and mental cost but also implications for other people and situations, which is why intelligent people are less likely to be traumatized after undergoing a traumatic event, because they are more able to integrate unexpected events with a view of the world where people are still 'good'.

If the cost of understanding a change exceeds the expected benefits, then there is no reason to think someone will support a change or that they will try to get their friends to support it. It is easy to assign value to economic changes to one's situation but more difficult for things like "not being accused of being greedy by people with less money than you", especially when people feel they can compensate for inequality by associating only by people with similar amounts of money and thereby maintain the perception that there are no significant problems in the world. And people who do see value in the non-economic changes are generally intelligent enough to fall into the 'feedback gap'.

So I am just a little afraid that pointing out someone's mistakes will make them ignore the idea on this site by letting them tell themselves that someone else will take care of it. By now I have pointed out mistakes of basically everyone involved in the situation, multiple times even... and I am not sure how people would feel about this if they read it.

This post was supposed to be a refutation of the assertion in the previous one that the situation could only be fixed if taxes were raised on the middle class, giving them an incentive to care about what happens to the poor. This time by attacking the system of credentials for economic expertise.

But then people might expect me to be interested in the topic! And what would I do then?

Another of these

The following was sent to Paul Krugman, the most widely-followed blogger about economics. I think it is important to distinguish between the idea that the rich have failed in something where you can still think of them as better than other people (spending all of their money, or finding ways to productively give it away, since there is no reason to think anyone else would do better) where you (and OWS) can still say that the rich are "responsible" for problems, and the egregious way of 'failing' described below where the rich as a group are defined as being worse than other people in that stupid people think they are mean and are unwilling to help them.

In other words, the standard for achievement here is "not letting stupid people think you're mean". At least a critical mass of stupid people... who have enough confidence to cause things to happen.

As they say, when something is found it is always in the last placed looked at. (usually)

The single business person who replied to me before, has not responded since I contacted them several days ago. Another business person has not replied to me at all, though (>.>) the pattern of their Twitter activity suggests they think the idea is important. This was checked before writing the most recent post: http://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/2012/09/rich-does-not-mean-competent.html

I'm not bothering with trying to write a 'guest post' because, well, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/who-to-listen-to/

I mean because I'm lazy. I think this is a case where [writing to the correct] audience is very important.

The idea of "pay people a higher rate when they work less, and a nonzero but lower rate for extra work" is important, it seems, for ensuring there are people willing and able to work more without having to be paid overtime rates (in case of an emergency where someone else works less) for lower-income people, but using that specific concept is necessary to convince higher-income people to work less only so they don't feel "selfish" for doing so. So higher-income people might not be using it themselves, but the knowledge that lower-income people who avoid buying iPhones can also choose to work less without being fired allows higher-income people to do so without feeling like they are supporting an inaccurate standard of achievement.

So it's a necessary condition for high-income people working less, yet not a sufficient one due to the "lack of wealth" and "income = skill" ideas, and to a lesser extent the "money will flow to the right places" idea...

Unfortunately still no fancy mathematics, just the tiny bit of arithmetic for the 'bargaining power' argument.

If I had a chart (other than the 'ipod effect' http://s122.photobucket.com/albums/o245/Taemojitsu/?action=view&current=theiPodeffect.jpg which is a term that has been used for many things >.>) it would be of the shape of the wage compensation curve, and how (given general preferences for time worked, most people don't want to work 80 hours/week) company and individual preferences "push" the amount of time worked in certain directions at various points on the graph. [Edit: so it would be time on bottom, total compensation on the side.]

Then there is a sort of momentum where people look for a good place to stop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_%28game_theory%29).

So with standard overtime, the company naturally pushes people to keep working... up until 40 hours, where it pushes people down who are working more than that.

UNLESS, of course, wages are too low and the graph too flat, in which case it will keep pushing people upwards ("uphilll" to the right, or trying to push people lower-right with time worked on the bottom axis) until they begin to resist as time continues to increase.

Meanwhile, with people generally trying to push their location "upwards" (...this time in an absolute location sense, not uphill) and slightly to the left, they will keep going until they hit 40 hours and the downward pressure stops them. It makes more sense to think of them as being on top of the line in this case, so despite wanting to go uphill they can't overcome the company's pressure.

Then with the new wage system, it's more unstable. People generally want to work more than where the inflection point is from high wage rate to lower, but for many people it is also somewhat of a local maximum... the company helped them up the steep initial climb and wants to keep pushing them to the right once they're past it, but their resistance gradually increases even if the wage rate stays constant after that (which it doesn't need to, but that's the simplest way to describe it).


With this image, maybe it's easier to see how the normal overtime system allows people to be "lazy" in deciding how much to work... similar to how in computer UI design, the edges and corners of a screen are very fast to reach because the cursor is bounded at those points. With the new wage system, there is no natural delimiter and people have to think about how much they want to work, and if they really want to work another 5 hours (by registering that preference with their employer, in case of changes in demand or the total number of employees) to get the new iPhone 5 with 40% of the sale going to gross profits and Apple's $100b cash pile.

(Which itself wouldn't be a problem if people would let the government spend more money when rich people are collecting money... which they don't let it do since rich people still accept higher prices leading to inflation. Which wouldn't be a problem if enough people were sensitive to prices to alter the demand curve and make lower prices more profitable despite the "rich idiots". Or as Hobbes said, http://worldofcalvinandhobbes.blogspot.com/2008/01/calvin-fooled.html)

Summary:
"lack of wealth" is the general agreement.
Low-income people don't want to appear lazy, and when they think of "people working less" they think of people they know, and not higher-income people whose motivations they are unfamiliar with. If higher-income people want to work less, they would sign it, they assume.

Higher-income people feel like they contribute more to national income, but also are competing for promotions (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/the-having-it-all-crisis-isnt-about-women-its-about-the-1/258894/). Since CEOs work hard, those under them just follow the example.


Higher-income people would generally be fine with lower-income people working less, even if they unconsciously would still classify anyone who did as "lazy" or "unmotivated". The standards would change over time but for most lower-income people the short-term costs of discrimination do not justify the gain in free time in the current system. Lower-income people do not understand why higher-income people would feel the need to emulate CEOs, since to lower-income people money is about buying things, not about status, and earning too much money is "selfish". Lower-income people do not understand the idea of money, or very high compensation, as socially desirable because they use a completely different social standard (http://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/2012/05/occupy-movement-is-wrong-about-rich.html). This is what allows them to think they are "above average" in most performance categories because they do not feel like income generalizes to skill.

As a result, lower-income people misjudge why higher-income people have not supported the idea of working less, and getting them to accept the true reason would require rejecting moral values about "offering low prices".

The required change in worldview, and admission of error in the construction of that worldview, is too great. Lower-income people will not admit that "income = skill" is valid, which is necessary for rejecting the standard by proposing that people with demonstrated skill in the old system transfer to the new one ("working less"), because it would cause them—lower-income people—to be redefined as low-skill, and they have no way to quickly fix this by earning more money (lack of jobs or access to overtime). This was actually mentioned in, um... http://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/2012/07/hidden-gardens.html

However, if higher-income people accept the idea of working less as a way to fix the economy and a new standard of achievement, they generally can immediately "win" in the new standard by working less.


I don't expect higher-income people to understand why lower-income people haven't supported the idea. The idea that high-income people are selfish prevents lower-income people from recognizing the "income = skill" idea; attempts to convince OWS that this was not true were a failure (http://occupywallst.org/forum/ows-doesnt-have-a-plan-for-jobs/ ; http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-occupy-movement-is-wrong-about-the-rich/ as mentioned before; and the more specific description of http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-inflation-scam/ etc.. as well as the "blame the middle class" posts).

However, just as obviously, high-income people are not motivated to understand the reason for problems either, especially when everyone says that raising taxes on the middle class is bad and it's either tax the rich or no one at all. This is what contributes to middle-class people spending their money on iPhones.

And it looks like if I contact any rich people (usually not practical, either they can't be contacted or they haven't expressed interest in economic problems, or maybe they could be contacted but only by someone with credentials who can get through mail sorters) they don't have the confidence to support the idea either, because they are not the #1 wealthiest person in the world. And aren't friends with anyone who is. Or at least don't feel comfortable passing along an uncredentialled message.

So this situation would otherwise be expected to probably continue until taxes go up on the middle class due to revolt of the lower classes, or welfare keeps people pacified while nothing really happens; or rather changes, since things are always happening.

Anyway can you like publish something about the idea of working less on your blog, or even link to the blogspot site, as a like favour or something. Thanks

Rich does not mean competent

(From yesterday)

The image upon learning of the importance people place in standards is that at times, standards must be followed. Once the decision is made to change a standard, it must be struck with sufficient force and at the correct angle to completely destroy it.

In other words, "knowing which patterns to break, and which to adhere to is itself a form of skill that can demonstrate competence".

contents:
- declaring one's shortcomings vs others doing so
- discrimination example
- (notes)
- affirming new standard

born rich
consumption
reputation (and human element)
end of problems (having money fixes many problems; lack of political conflict fixes most others)

(all about rich people working less... $300 million compensation instead of $500 million)

status: most people cannot change their own value with no cost, since it would imply that everyone they know is 'good'. therefore following the crowd is seen as more beneficial to the individual, and this is used to define stories as well. 'synchronization'.

___

Explanation: skilled people might think that if they work less, this will hinder them due to "exponential" growth in success, similar to how corporations retain profits to be able to expand (even through buying out competitors). This requires examining why anyone would want to earn a lot of money.

For children? The film "Born Rich" by Jamie Johnson shows how not having any validation from work can actually be quite boring or even lead to depression.

For items? Not much more the rich have access to. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204632204577128230588463516.html Someone who has $1b uses Firefox, IE or Chrome just like anyone else.

"End of problems": people might say they want to get rich so they can become a "philanthropist". Anecdotally this is not as effective as people expect. Making decisions on what people need is only somewhat effective, as say immunizations come second to having food. And then there is the saying about giving someone a fish vs teaching them to fish. http://occupywallst.org/forum/if-you-give-me-a-fish-you-have-fed-me-for-a-day/

So working less might require acknowledging that yes, really, people with money from an adequate job don't need outside help. People who want to help others can do so in other ways. This can include spending money (see Ubuntu, which I use... the controlling organization was created by someone with lots of money since fixing bugs and "polishing" can be boring for unpaid people to do) but it is up to the individual to make that choice, and would certainly not be a moral issue if people have other alternatives due to having money; for example, if not for Ubuntu I could have used another Linux OS or even Windows/Mac.

To the extent that people who become CEOs of large companies are judged based on living a "moral" life (see: the Microsoft? person who claimed some credential they didn't actually have), recognizing this basic fact that having money fixes most problems might be something people will need to be reminded of.

"reputation": as I said, media organizations are just not likely to accept a submission on this topic from someone with no credentials. But this is probably partly because people who work for the organization, not just the ones looking at submissions but also those who control the standards or who would be affected by anything that contradicted those standards, are not interested in submissions on important topics from people without credentials because they themselves have those credentials. An organization might benefit from a risky decision to publish, but individuals have no reason to make that decision themselves since they would not be rewarded for it—it isn't their job to "break the rules". (The Wikipedia article on the German army's mission-based command talks about how violating orders was essential to getting the system to work.)

[Personal message omitted]


A CEO of a large company who works less might be making the same number of critical decisions (based on http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Recovering_from_information_overload_2735). But there is no real way to tell if they would have made even better decisions if they work more, and so it should be reasonable for business culture to agree that it should be possible for CEOs to work and earn less. Letting people at lower levels in an organization be paid at a higher rate when working less just lets CEOs use the system system, so someone might work half as many hours and be paid $30m, down from $50m, instead of $25m. They might be still contributing $50m of value to the company but, among other things, a decision to do this would indicate that the CEO thinks the extra $20m is not really important.

Meanwhile, some people directly below in the hierarchy might be paid $2m instead of $1m for doing extra work when the CEO is working less; the company would be saving money but again not really important as just a nominally "fair" distribution based on decisions to work more or less, which of course might mean going from 20 hours/week to 30 instead of from 40 to 50.

The final note, "status", is why the original message in a conversation is important. In the recent work-life balance debate, it was someone with an important job title publishing something in The Atlantic, a well-known site. If she had published it anonymously on a blog it would not have had nearly as much discussion.

The above is a plan for convincing people that rich people should work less. It was not used because I don't really have a way of contacting large numbers of rich people.

From an unpublished post:

People with high incomes are usually more skilled than average, which can help with capturing sales from clients who can afford the highest quality. In this sense, working less can slightly decrease national income. But what that income is spent on is also important. All too often money which enters the country through selling high-quality products or services leaves the country via the same route.

The solution to this problem requires explaining several things.
1) Working less will lead to more people with jobs and also lower inequality.
2) Getting people to work less is as simple as changing the wage system.
3) Doing this will "help the world".

Addressing the last point since it is the most difficult to prove, when a society faces an existential threat it is much easier to agree on goals. The US felt like it had an ideological enemy in the form of the USSR during the Cold War, where there was a risk that a centrally-planned economy that curtailed individual freedoms could be more 'successful' and threaten the validity of US culture, but the main threats now are changes in our environment like global warming and resource depletion.

This means that greater industrial capacity is not a useful group objective and conclusions about changes to society should be based on other factors. Staying on topic, creating jobs by working less would address the accusation that the top 1%, or privileged people in general, are exploiting the rest of society and manipulating the political system in unethical ways.

It wasn't really clear if the audience was the skilled top 20% of income earners or the top 1% who set an example; it was either too long or didn't explain the essential details of motivation.

A lengthy example (400 words) which showed the intermediate stages between working less and hiring an additional employee was not published. I think it is a little interesting the similarity it has to a suggestion about overly "quantized" threat in an MMO... just as things work better when the range of conditions where 'things can happen' in an MMO is larger, the economy works better when a "job" is not thought of as a thing with a domain of responsibilities of immutable size.

A simple example showing why working less is potentially more viable than other ways of creating jobs. The other ways are generally about creating inefficiency, which might have some other small benefit but mostly has the "purpose" of just creating jobs.

Option 1: government spending to create jobs, financed through taxation (since people are opposed to inflation).
Option 2: preferential spending on inefficient local people, who are known to be "nice", instead of buying from corporations which leads to corporate profits.
Option 3: working less.

Government spending would be accomplished through voting. An individual vote may benefit someone very little, but it benefits everyone else the same amount. Social norms are how to influence outcomes with group benefit (though opinions may differ based on honesty).

Cost of taxes: $1 (thousands of other people also pay $1).
Benefit from taxes: ~$1 (thousands of other people also benefit), but some people might see it as $0.50, others as $1.50, and people who don't understand the concept of bargaining power might say that wasteful government spending gives them negative utility by increasing "unfairness" in the world.

Local spending would be buying from someone who takes 30 minutes to handcraft an object instead of from a corporation where someone makes it in 10 minutes. Sometimes people are just not aware that the local product is better or cheaper but this is less common.

Extra cost of local product: $1 (an individual decision at the margin).
Benefit from local product: $0.01 due to more bargaining power from lower unemployment, less crime, etc. (hundreds of other people also benefit). Some people have an additional 'personal knowledge' benefit of $1 or more, while others might feel the opposite.

Then there is working less.

Cost: $1 (lost wages); currently another ~$1 in discrimination costs (lower chance to be promoted, more likely to be selected for downsizing due to perceived lower motivation).
Benefit: ~$1 (value of time); another person at the company gets the ~$1 in greater promotion prospects; $0.01 due to lower unemployment (hundreds of other people also benefit).

As pointed out before the company does not really benefit from a culture where highly competent people who work fewer hours are not eligible for promotion. Someone higher up in management might benefit though, if costs and rewards from working more are not properly allocated. But that would be because managers don't want to openly delegate since it might affect their promotion chances in the current culture.


We can conclude that wealth does not accurately denote ability because people do not trust the intentions of the wealthy. Accordingly, they prefer to remain silent about something which would benefit the wealthy socially because they think the wealthy are selfish. Rich, high-income people could have pointed out that their ability to earn money exceeds their ability to spend it, and that this is a failure of capabilities and not of intentions. But instead they talk about being the "engines of the economy" and imply that income really is an accurate indicator of competence. In normal times this might be excusable, but people are consistently saying that the lack of jobs is the most important issue for the nation and so the inability of the rich to understand the reality of the situation indicates they are not as competent as they say they are—or that the ones who do understand it are staying quiet and do not mind if the situation changes.

Now, if the rich just said "it's too much for us, we can't handle it" they might not know what to expect from people's reactions, especially given the persistent idea that the national debt is an indication of a lack of wealth. Similarly, some rich people might suspect that the situation does have some kind of purpose—such as selection for 'nice' people or something. But it has been proved that the middle class as a group is about as competent as you would expect them to be, and there is no grand conspiracy about this.

Anyway, the conclusion is that we can no longer say that wealthy people are going to save us, since they have been revealed to be flawed as a group. Those who were aware of the coming 'change in metric accuracy' have not been motivated to prevent it. (This is a bit like when the Raid Finder was introduced in WoW and clearing a raid went from something that could take weeks to complete to something you could do while away from your keyboard, and then casuals started collecting items like anyone else.) While there will still be variations in competence in all social groups, we can say that wealth, and even status such as job position, is irrelevant to knowing how to fix problems with the economy and society.

(I may have been assuming this all along, and if attempts were made to contact rich people it was only because I expected people would anticipate conflict from an idea that reduced inequality and having the rich support the idea was the best way to prevent this, but that's the point: 'incidentally' repudiating the idea that income = competence is not enough, and the course of the narrative must change to directly address this assumption. In a way this is a test of the awareness of perceived conflict and the use of "overestimation of the self" as a way to avoid the problem, as mentioned above.)

The new standard of competence is simple: avoid unnecessary work or spending decisions which lead to high corporate profits. This includes indirect effects when buying from a "nice" person who is not aware of or does not use this standard and so uses the money they gain to buy from corporations at high prices. Being self-sufficient is still the goal, as has always been the case in the United States, but if you can afford to you should accomplish your goals while doing as little paid work as possible. If this includes being in control of a large corporation, then it should be done with as much delegation as possible while taking a reduced paycheck and smaller bonuses. If governments come to accept this standard then we could even see a part-time US President who gets paid less than the normal amount for full-time work, while the US Vice President takes on a more substantial role than is typically the case.

Failing the Plausibility Test

Assume that all workers are underpaid and overworked. (This is not true for skilled workers but let's assume it is true.) One reason might be that everyone has bought into the idea that "The US is lacking in wealth, as evidenced by the national debt" and this is why they are willing to take a pay cut ... and I just randomly discovered that many people would accept a reduced salary in exchange for more flexibility.

Now let's ignore other implications this would have, like how it would lead to most prices and rents falling so that US workers were competitive with China...

And only examine the conclusion we would reach that "no one can afford to work less since everyone feels they need all the money they are currently earning." Note that you can maybe arrive at this mental model of the economy by assuming that all 'good'/moral people use the assumption that lowering their prices is good for the economy (poor people's thinking). Someone might think that if the idea on this site helps society, then only 'good' people have a reason to support it and they also might think that all 'good' people already give away their extra money to charities, or something.

So if people do not have the time to think about complicated arguments, the only way to quickly disprove the idea that all workers are underpaid is... to show that there exist people who would be willing to support this idea and work less.


This post is to acknowledge that if lower-income people would be willing to support this idea, it will only be if rich people have poor intentions (they don't want inequality or unemployment to be fixed) or there is a problem of capabilities in that I am not able to convince rich people that setting an example by working less would be good for society due to their existing prejudices.

This site has asserted that there is no problem with intentions of the wealthy, but has also not stated that I have failed to convince the rich to support this idea. Most of the arguments have been addressed to the typical person or activists like OWS... or to the President of the US, or experts on the economy or politics.

Why is this? A number of reasons.
1) At first, it was not clear that people in the US were really interested in helping the world, or that people who understood negative externalities would be willing to support changes if inequality and unemployment were fixed. This tendency was demonstrated most recently in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

2) I felt my older brother's decision to join the military was evidence of trust in the intentions of the US public, instead of 'accumulating wealth' to keep inequality high and limit the consumption of resources like gasoline. The first public message was to test whether other people felt the same way.

3) Due to a later event... actually someone text messaged me... I felt it was appropriate to assume that the first attempt might have failed due to people's inability to understand it, instead of that it wouldn't work, and so sent two copies of a letter to Berkshire Hathaway based on the idea that wealth was an accurate measure of ability, and so one of the richest people in the world should have hired people who were able to identify correspondence with potential value.

4) Since no one really seemed to be willing to admit they understood it, and how many people base their decisions on common standards of achievement despite their inaccuracy, it seemed possible that the letters sent to the White House might have been ignored because experts on the economy did not have a sufficiently advanced grasp of the subject. This resulted in the second public message (the second half of which came later on as a result of reading about countersignalling and the nerfing of raid content in the World of Warcraft) which explained this.

5) ... most of the rest has already been documented on this site. It just seemed like people with reputations were not willing to support the idea without knowing at least a little about me, but I felt like this conflicted with my benefit in a way I was unable to resolve. Since the economic effects of the idea are the most certain and easiest to describe, I felt that change should be possible by convincing people who stood to benefit economically from this idea.

It is commonly understood that money does have some influence in politics. Certain corporations profited greatly from the recent military adventures of the US, the duration of which might at least have been shortened if the outcome of the 2004 US Presidential election had been different. If people had gathered support for this idea which promised to fix many fundamental problems with society, it would have implied that inaccurate metrics were the reason for previous problems and that, for example, the influence of money in politics was not important because people could accomplish a goal regardless of the actions of the rich.

So, convincing rich people to work less.

Also, considering that I don't have any credentials, if it had been important for anyone to know more about me and they rejected the idea due to lack of credentials that would have implied a mistake had been made in the past regarding why I never really went to college. Unless, of course, the results of using the idea on this site aren't really all that important and someone rejecting this idea due to my lack of credentials does not really imply any conflict with society and no 'knowledge cost' for this prejudice. So far no such determination has been made though.

Mistakes of Smart People

In a comment someone acknowledged the existence of this blog but said that its self-indulgence made it boring and too difficult to understand what it was about. Coincidentally that was the name of my first blog!

So this blog entry is because, among other reasons, Jamie Johnson might have deleted a comment I made on his last column where I said that "I tried" and linked to this site, and because Yoko Ono waited several days at least before deciding not to publish a comment saying that "the conventional approach was a failure" and linked to pastebin.com and similar for another comment where I simply linked to the change.org petition, at which time she said on Twitter that peace was "very close".

Or maybe those are just excuses. As Machiavelli said, "A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise."

Right. So what I would like to avoid is a Hitler-style "life quest" that involves putting off other goals but gives other people hope that it will eventually be completed.

Number one reason to conclude that everything on this site is wrong: my current situation.

Which includes people not talking to me. If not for that, you might be able to say that this has all just been an elaborate way to test whether certain people care about me in order to reduce future risk.

So, the mess I am in: I have mentioned the possible consequences if my name were to be associated with this idea.

A little about me: like my older brother, I scored a 1600 on the old SAT (on my second attempt). After taking two AP tests in 10th grade and three in 11th grade, I took seven in 12th grade including several which I did not have time to study for and passed all of them with a score of 4 or 5, which would have been sufficient for course credit at basically all colleges. But this was basically because my high school did not really have a more accelerated program, and I nearly failed several classes (including ones where I passed the AP test) while doing this. Compared to other people it was not very impressive.

Upon entering the military I had a 150 GT score, which is used to determine eligibility for 'smart' job types like intelligence analyst. This might be the highest possible score although some people report scoring higher in the past. (I should mention that in the military my primary responsibilities were sweeping floors, burning classified documents in a metal barrel and doing repetitive tasks with Powerpoint™.)

Meanwhile, Person A (whose last name I am not sure of, and whose appearance I have never seen and voice I have never heard) started college when she was 14 after a break of a few months to play World of Warcraft, which she asked me to also play. She reached Rank 14 on one or maybe two characters, and was given an account with another Rank 14 I think, though she didn't reach that rank on her main character.

Through a series of events that could have been prevented, Person B offered to share food with me. I refused but then it seemed like this outcome wasn't expected.

So after accidentally discovering this method by which inequality and unemployment could be reduced without 'wasteful' spending by anyone, there were two possibilities: either it would be possible to convince people to use it on a short-term timescale, or it would not be possible.

The situation had become more complicated because Person A had said something which suggested that Person B might be interested in me. Since Person A had previously said things which could have been interpreted as meaning they were no longer interested in me, basically my only excuse for thinking Person B wouldn't be interested in me was that I had no money (or hardly any), and no educational certification which is necessary to be considered for many high-paying jobs, or in the current economy maybe to get any job at all.

Since I had previously expressed interest in Person A, if society was such that it would be possible to convince people to use this idea of working less on a short-term timescale it would strongly imply that I was unsuccessful in my previously stated goal of being with Person A because my lack of educational certification would no longer be a valid excuse for not having "tried harder" with person B.

It seemed unreasonable that someone who could not control their own future could have thought up something which might prove important to many people in society, and so the more likely possibility was that society was not such that people could be convinced on a short-term timescale to use this idea or that no one who had knowledge of the idea would be able to convince people to use it.

So anyway, Person B's actions were consistent in making them appear to be a "nice" person, or selfless, or placing priority on the goals of other people. This included having confidence in using a decisive approach to determine her own value without imposing on other people.

It was less clear than Person A was using the same strategy but this was understandable because when we met she thought I was a girl and even named a kitten after me, which turned out to be male. The fact I didn't reveal my gender until a year had passed could easily have been interpreted to mean I was using the "selfish" strategy, as well as attitudes toward memory and so on.

If this is making any sense, the point of this site and previous efforts was to either succeed in a goal which according to polls on unemployment should benefit society, or in failing to 'disentangle' motives by forcing me to do something which could reasonably be concluded to be selfish. The length of time it has taken to do this has had the result of strengthening confidence toward the feasibility of the idea on this site through the evidence of attitudes expressed by other people, such as toward memory. This complicated method is intended to prevent certain people from being perceived as unhappy if I fail in, well, surviving; because the unreasonable length of time and situations I have put myself in mean that an ordinary person should not have faulted anyone who agreed to remove me from this situation even if it meant that the idea on this site wasn't used by society.

As you can see even this is kind of an excuse, since if people had agreed to use this idea much earlier, such as last year, I would have been saved all this effort.

Anyway this message is to convey that I have run out of money, and am forced to admit that I will need to try something new. Since I am supposed to have died somewhere along the way, such as when someone wouldn't reply to an email within a certain amount of time, or when certain things happened, or when I said I would be moving away from a building within definite time limits, ... etc, I feel it is very selfish for me to keep on trying to survive.

Also, Clannad. -_- (Someone who was 'spiritually attached' to a certain location, and SPOILER ...something happens, or did it happen at all?! The show is not clear.)

The Economy has been Fixed

This is true for the US... it is not as true for the world but only because of energy. No matter how high the GDP of the US it is not about to start exporting energy and, given prior observations about the cost of energy in food vs the cost of energy from other sources like fossil fuels, not all countries might be able to fix their economies due to this scarce resource despite offering to work for low wages.

For many countries though, including the US and also China, there are plenty of people buying luxury goods from foreign sellers and by working less those countries could cause more money to circulate internally and create jobs while reducing inefficiency from wasteful spending by the rich.

As I said in a forum post... well not exactly what I remembered, but I did say there were no "important challenges" in the world. At the time the evidence I had was somewhat weak; now it is stronger. The most recent concise explanation of the idea on this site is that it would increase the bargaining power of workers and raise wages; the reason unemployment has been allowed to exist is that people think that the government would just waste money if it raised taxes and that most of the national debt is financed by other countries, a view which in the past has been supported even by the current US President.

But back on topic. The economy has been fixed, since no one is interested in supporting changes to it. Furthermore this implies that every other problem has been fixed.

This includes the problem which the conservative ideology is meant to address: stupid people being unable to determine which standards, or 'signals' are accurate and therefore do not know what actions they should take to accomplish a goal. This is especially important when it comes to situations where an accurate perception of the limits of one's own value becomes important, such as interpersonal relationships.

I dislike saying it, but in other words this is about why rapes occur and why, since in the majority of cases there was previous social contact, there is so much emphasis placed on the idea of consent and that "no means no".

According to this idea, the lack of a solution to the problem of inaccurate standards means that people with high ability should avoid 'countersignalling'—in other words that they should pay attention to existing metrics and standards of achievement instead of just ignoring them and doing whatever they want.

So people are not willing to support a change that would allow people to adhere to metrics without causing other types of harm to society and we can only assume that even this issue of avoidable misunderstandings is not an urgent problem.

What it does mean though is that we can expect intelligent people who use a strategy designed to cope with this existing problem to have a lower success rate in finding a relationship. While people as a whole have not demonstrated any great support for eliminating unemployment and increasing metric accuracy, someone should still have an incentive to 'selfishly' cause these changes if only so that their own goals and strategies do not conflict with those of other intelligent people.

The hypothesis that people have not been supportive of the idea on this site because they perceive I don't 'want' them to, or that it in some way creates a 'better story', does not really seem to hold up. It could be though that they are trusting in the statement that "the future... [is] in the hands of the people" from the last message on pastebin.com and the assertions on this site that it should have been possible for change to happen if only people had supported the various petitions that were started.

Anyway the above means that there should be no complaints if, for example, males accept the idea of gender equality and avoid working if it is not necessary for them to do so. If people wanted to prevent this outcome they would have supported job creation using the idea on this site.

This means, for example, that male friends should not be prejudiced against someone who does not work, so that a male person does not avoid this type of relationship because their friends would see them as being less 'masculine'. It also means that female people who have been "too successful", a phenomenon which is happening in many countries such as the US and China, should not feel they are lowering their standards by being with someone who has a lower income than they do. Since many male people only make money to attract female companionship, this should help to reduce the excess supply of labour and raise living standards for the poor.

And since the existence of a solution to the problem of inaccurate standards means that it is not necessary to assume that memory is the cause of mistakes, spending extra effort to convince someone you care about them should not be necessary.

I haven't been doing much lately, just reading about dysphoric mania (the claim at the start of the last page was proved to be false). While looking up 'only my railgun' I discovered it was released with another song, but it turned out to be the type of song that isn't as interesting if you don't understand its lyrics. Contrast for example much of Korean pop music by girl groups. But maybe that's just me being lazy, and of course context matters too!

Info post

(Random Youtube videos:

• Centipede vs. Grasshopper Mouse
• MANTIS vs. BLACK WIDOW SPIDER (Monster Bug War) AWESOME!
• Leopard Slays Its Most Feared Enemy The Baboon

It's always only males represented in the demographics... don't know why ._.)

Long-term strategy for change would probably be based on the idea of deliberately reducing government tax revenues and spending. Working less means paying fewer taxes. Takes advantage of perception of government corruption and involvement of money with politics; less spending means less corruption. If done through OWS, would allow working with Tea Party instead of popular perception of organizations with opposing ideologies.

Incidentally, also gives people within the system an excuse for their failure: corruption is the problem as deceptive intentions, no need to point out shortfalls in capabilities by anyone.

(Alternately, "since both government and private industry could not think of ways to productively spend money, deficit spending minimizes the wasteful spending needed by government to create a certain number of jobs by allowing rich people to wastefully spend instead." Just a restatement of non-zero effect of lowering taxes though.)

Links that were worth bookmarking:

• snopes.com: Obama on the Debt Limit
• It’s Mitt’s World - NYTimes.com
(idea of borrowing from China, "all debt is external")
• Romney’s ads against defense cuts treat military spending as a jobs program. - Slate Magazine

There were some pretty pictures of inflation in various categories but nothing really new. It is worth pointing out that inflation in things like health care and college tuition are a direct result of inequality and large amounts of money entering the economy, and hoping that wages will go up without a simultaneous rise in interest rates on debt is too simple of a view.

Notes (just restatement at this point, the first would be using lower inflation as an argument for working less due to externalities from imperfect price discrimination):

inflation based directly on price changes. consumer sensitivity to prices, both at 'high' and 'low' ends.

the 'debt borrowed from foreign countries' idea allowed to remain despite incorrect because more money going to the rich (not removed through taxes) means more consumption and jobs.

Knowledge specialization, last post?

View counts for the most recent posts, including me and Google bot and maybe other bots: 7, 8, 7, 8, 13 ... for the posts made on August 6, the more recent one had maybe 10 views a day or two after being posted but the one posted a few seconds earlier only had 2 views. I linked to the earlier post on the OWS forums and its view count is now 37, but the thread didn't really get any replies.

I am not sure if a certain person read the post on August 28, all I can say is I am very self-centered and always think things are about me even if most of the evidence is to the contrary.

Random song:


(Lyrics)

What could be a motive for making posts without assurance they are being read? Since the view count is a function of previous actions, one reason is a strategy that anticipates failure and assumes everyone else is more competent than they really are.

I think the drama linked above had something to do with this. At the very beginning, the male protagonist is shown to be dying while the female protagonist walks away.

So I have been receiving spam email messages from a certain address as well as Yahoo messenger add requests from random names and occasionally instant messages. The spammy emails would usually redirect to ways to make money online by working at home, while the instant messages (can be sent to someone offline) would usually redirect to untrue.com. Maybe some of the emails redirected there too, though more recently the redirection has been to free adult webcam sites. Soon after posting notes on how to fight against stupidity, I discovered that I had two emails at an older email address. These redirected like others, but the name of the html file on a hacked website that did the redirection was titled "attack"(.html?) in one case and "success" in another.

I should note, I received an email reply saying that several people in the NYCGA, a part of OWS, were very interested in the isn't getting better message and asked if I might be able to rewrite it as an article, but I read and responded to that email several weeks late and did not hear back from them. People are very reluctant to talk about solutions that do not involve discarding the idea of capitalism.

No one in discussions has ever suggested that this specific way of determining compensation when working less needs official support or that economists should have thought of this idea before... the closest I have seen is criticism of the idea that tax cuts have the same effect on the economy as an equivalent amount of government spending, which was in an article in some notable publication that also included other criticisms. However, this is probably because people see economic policy as a partisan issue, where it is impossible for people to agree.

So I think it's possible for change to happen through a popular movement in this particular case... I just don't think it can happen quickly, or more importantly that it can happen without a definite conclusion that the system is broken or without a leader, or leaders, who can give people confidence in this complicated topic of economic ecosystems and a possible reduction of military capabilities.

No one within the OWS movement seems willing to make that determination and lend the idea of working less their support. Not totally surprising.

I, on the other hand, have been interpreting all evidence at face value—that people do not care if the human race is evil, that unemployment and inequality are not urgent problems requiring discussion, that getting a job is not worth upsetting anyone by raising taxes, that even being killed is just part of how the world is, or of course that the prospect of a 10% increase in wages is not worth embarrassing yourself by responding to or forwarding a message which explains how to fix unemployment.

If any reasonable social goal can be linked to this idea of working less, then the lack of support means that people are willing to let someone else attempt to match goals with outcomes even if they are not completely aware of goals and must trust people to have accurately conveyed their wishes.

These posts always get so long! I have not been doing much lately, like not reading recent posts by certain people, partly because the Seattle library was closed for a week and partly because if there was anything very important to be said it would have been said before the library closed.

One of the last things I read was an opinion piece criticizing the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for taking his ideas from a work of fiction, or more accurately pointing out that this was the case and subtly hinting there might be something wrong with this. The person who wrote that piece has talked about having selected their current profession based on science fiction novels. None of the comments I read pointed that out, even though many of them expressed a negative opinion of the article.

So here is a promise: if I am still alive, I will try to help anyone who supports this idea of working less. I will be able to provide that help for at least a few weeks.

Risk Aversion

The song version of "only my railgun" which was probably illegal for me to download has a series of clicks at the beginning and end, unlike the official music video which has images show with no sound. Okay that should be enough for people to not take this post seriously.

People will generally agree that problems exist in the world, like poverty, crime, war, and even famine. But it is more difficult to determine whether the existence of these problems serve a useful purpose, for other groups of people or the world as a whole. So people might avoid commenting on something which seems it might fix these problems. It seems like it might be possible that 'mean' people would end up fighting against each other, wasting effort, and possibly even causing evolutionary selection for being 'nice' if good intentions prevent these problems from causing harm.

This assumption falls apart if pretending that problems don't exist does not actually stop them from affecting you, in which case 'mean' and 'nice' begin to look similar. In that case, to the extent that someone being seen as 'mean' does cause harm to society due to people's unwillingness to help mean people, it is necessary to prove that someone who is seen as being mean is, in fact, just stupid.

Since in the theory of reality where many mean people are actually nice is one where being mean is a signal of being 'locally most intelligent', by implication it is also necessary to prove that most other people are also stupid in order to verify the provisional use of the strategy of appearing to be mean. This provides some evidence of the theory's correctness which shows it is acceptable to help people who appear to be mean and proves that 'everyone being nice' is not by itself an acceptable solution—that the distribution of human intelligence is such that the concept of authority is necessary but so is an awareness of the limits of that authority.

Digression: I agree with the thinking of Vernor Vinge that it is somewhat silly to conjecture what much more intelligent entities would act like, but this topic is similar to the description of a book I haven't read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Problem

But um, what this post is supposed to be saying is that this site hasn't really done much to answer the question. Thus the Aurora shooting. But to the extent it has offered a logical explanation for mean people's actions so that people who might not have been able to are able to explain problems in the world as the result of capabilities instead of intentions, it might have documented something useful. The fact that people have not supported the several efforts that should have been able to lead to change suggests that they do think it falls under the job responsibilities of economists and government people to think about solutions even if they wouldn't lead to higher GDP. According to the first post on this site, this kind of misunderstanding about responsibilities is a natural result in a society that does not know how to prevent it.

However, economists are very aware that fixing economic problems is as simple as giving people money, whether or not it also involves removing money from people with lots of it to prevent inflation. Unlike the version of reality where 'nice' people help each other and therefore succeed, economists are much more aware of the amount of inequality that exists in society and the number of 'mean' people with lots of money. This might even include everyone in the United States, where even homeless people have access to free emergency room visits and food from charities while thousands or millions of people in other countries starve.

So this means to morally justify the idea on this site might require showing that problems are the result of a failure in capabilities. But the first post on this site should have suggested that the more detailed explanation existed and so this is just another side issue.

I have been trying to allow other people to be in a position to support this idea with certainty that it will be used to fix the problems this site claims it will fix. There are many things I have not done, such as own a car, have a driver's license, drive a car in the US (I have driven an M577 on a dirt road), be successful in a job search, use any type of health care service on my own, be in another country for more than a day other than the Middle East, or make a direct suggestion that is used in that form for something important (one suggestion about an aesthetic issue might have been used).

Therefore, while the economic effects of this idea are relatively easy to understand and based off of readily available statistical information like 'marginal propensity to consume', the popularity of expensive brands even among the middle class and the apathy by same toward measures to shift more of national income to workers, it is less certain that it would help 'nice people' more than it helps 'mean people', if mean people actually exist. The argument that it would improve signal accuracy could also be wrong. But beyond this, even if it were correct it might not be possible to state the idea in such a way that people would support it.

While I wouldn't be in my current position if I did not feel the idea was viable, my confidence in my assessment is dependent on attitudes of other people. As mentioned before this is mostly the ability to pick similar strategies and predict outcomes. However, if two people are both using a strategy meant to ensure that mistakes are concluded to be the result of 'overestimation of the self', in some cases they will naturally disagree on the interpretation of results even if the strategy reflects the same underlying situation.

The result is an impasse, and external measures of value become unreliable. This can decrease confidence.

As I suppose I am the originator of the idea on this site, despite my lack of experience with some things in the world I should have had the most confidence about its chances of success. However, my situation was and is one where it is difficult to say I can answer any questions about what aspects of the world caused me to conclude that this idea would work. But that's just another excuse!

So, this post has only taken me about four hours to write. Before that I was going to make a short post referencing the Nightwish song Ghost Love Score—just its general idea—and the game/visual novel "Crimson Spider" which I won't link because it is not safe for everyone to look at and also in Japanese. But it seemed it would have been ineffectual as the message, "a problem exists", has already been stated on this site.

~food break~

I was optimistic about the accuracy of people's understanding of society and the economy and their ability to reform their opinions based on new evidence. If it is not rude to mention it, even my older brother—who scored a 1600 on the old SAT, the maximum score—questioned how standards of living would go up if skilled people worked less, resulting in the final question in the FAQ for the idea which answered this concern.

As a result, people who encounter this idea decide that the verification of whether it would work is the responsibility of economists. It is like deciding what type of nuclear reactor is the safest and most efficient once the world runs out of fossil fuels—for experts to decide, or for government leaders to evaluate the various proposals and approve the most attractive one. The average person in society only needs to say that things need to be fixed.

It is not without risk to support something which is contrary to the military-fueled economic focus of the past century or so. I began this post with the intention of saying that "the reason no one supported this idea earlier on is that they might have failed, and I would have felt bad, but now I accept that possibility" but it's difficult to say.

Boring Personal Details

Why I am posting this:

Jamie Johnson stopped his column at Vanity Fair. I am unsure if the unbanning of my account earlier this year was intentional or accidental.

John Irons discontinued his blog and became a managing director for the Rockefeller Foundation. In a comment, which I can't find and might not have been published, I asked how he would spend $1 billion in an effective way, then continued the line of thought by asking how to spend $10 billion.

After I submitted some comments to Robert Reich, it was observed that his next post mentioned being in Washington, D.C. and asking Democratic lawmakers why they were not trying harder to create jobs. Some other events but not as important; commenting on a Wall Street Journal article was my first exposure to the fact that many people are just interested in scoring points in an online debate and not in actually finding solutions.

Someone stopped appearing in Gmail chat after I linked the 2011 Norway shooting to 'signal decay' in World of Warcraft in an email I sent to several people around April 13 or 14. As of about three weeks ago they have been visible on chat again though.

Jared Bernstein stopped his 'Friday music' feature for about a month. Mike Konczal started blogging at an organizational website instead of Wordpress. Paul Krugman might have avoided posting music concerts too, I honestly can't remember. After visiting Seattle in May, Paul Krugman posted ten videos of music performance -_-

Yoko Ono said some things on Twitter, but I did not read most of them. One thing that I remember is that someone said something every day to her.

I recently learned that Roger Ebert published a book last year but I have no idea if it was related.

(Just a note, the "lack of wealth" or "national debt proves lack of wealth" idea seems to be a good explanation for most people's lack of acceptance of working less, and if ignoring luxury goods purchases by the rich would also explain why people might agree to lower wages but not to working less. Corporate profits—from trade?—would magically be converted into gasoline for the working poor instead of private islands and foreign cars for rich people.)


I thought about sending this as an email but it seemed that this would leave people with questions about why change could not happen more quickly, as documented above. This site really should not have been necessary. While I have explained various results of fixing problems and the errors that many people make about the economy, the theoretical benefit and cultural viability should have been clear from the explanation about flows of money, the one with the bananas.

So as these things often go, there was a girl. She was Japanese but I think born in the United States, so if she spoke the Japanese language it was not very well.

According to this scenario, there are two possibilities: I died in Iraq, or I forgot about her or was made to forget about her. Since I was roughly aware of her birthday to within a 10-day period, this second possibility did not seem as likely.

One conflict which has not been explained on this site is the implications of whether lack of explanation does, in fact, make values placed in things more difficult to remember. If it does, then this could imply that a culture that does not emphasize the need to give reasons for holding something in esteem is one where people have agreed that the reason for mistakes is the tendency for people to forget things.

This would then explain why problems exist in the world if the dominant strategy is not, in fact, a selfish one, while also avoiding the idea that inaccurate standards are the cause of problems.

Contradicting this perspective on memory leads to conflict by implying that there is a serious underlying problem and this can, and should, be fixed. Living one's life in accordance with the idea that memory is the reason for mistakes is therefore, in a sense, the 'nice' thing to do.

However, if it is possible for the problem to be fixed, then these definitions become reversed. Of course, this hinges on whether there is a stable solution to inaccurate standards so that attitudes toward memory and honesty by one generation are applicable to the next one.

So my situation is very ambiguous. Certain details suggest this girl had greater understanding of this than I did, and has been avoiding doing anything that might seem selfish or anything that would contradict the narrative that I had died.

If you search for her name, Elyse Sugimoto, it doesn't turn up much. One is a song I linked before. So I don't know how she would feel if this idea was used and my name was associated with it. Up until now, I feel that everything I have done was with intentions that were consistent with her benefit. I don't have her email address.

I am not sure I would still be able to say that about my intentions if change happened more slowly and I allowed myself to leave my current situation before then.