It’s very demonstrably not even the case in most cases we deal with that everyone getting something acceptable is more fair than some getting their favorite. Maybe in a hyper-egalitarian situation that is the case, but in most cases there are some who have more at stake and are more vulnerable. It’s important to remember what it means for a situation to be fair, a situation that we would impartially approve of (say, by not knowing who we are in a situation and acting in our self-interest). In such a situation, you’d want those with the most at stake to get their way, even if they’re the 49% and the rest aren’t happy with it. If we don’t accept that then it’s really unclear why we anarchists give a shit about consensus.

In this case, everyone may find a particular choice acceptable, but find the overall decision-making situation unacceptable. Like, if you’re disabled, and you rarely get to eat foods that you enjoy, and your friends invite you out, you may find certain restaurants acceptable because they at least have fries or a salad you can eat without throwing up but you’d love to go to one of two restaurants. Your friends eat out every other week and can eat pretty much anything, minestrone, rotini, a whole plant-based ice cream cake each, whatever. You may find those acceptable restaurants acceptable, but find it unacceptable that your needs and desires don’t outweigh the others for this decision-making.

It’s not fair. It’s obviously not fair, even though everyone is getting the acceptable option. In this case, going where you want, even if the others would prefer not to go to those restaurants, is fair. And most group decision-making situations today are like this.

it used to study social choice theory a lot and so it was in the position you’re in now. In the end, it turns out most of the math is completely irrelevant because people don’t act according to rational incentives, but what they believe they’re incentivized to do. In most systems, people exhibit behaviors that lead to two-party systems and all the other problems with FPTP. That includes all the “good” systems like Condorcet, Borda, etc. with the exception of range voting, where people actively vote more for unpopular options thereby giving “fringe” options a chance.

Anyway, it isn’t really true that it matters to all voting. If you’re forming a consensus, that counts as voting since you’re documenting your preferences or your motivational profile, for instance.

Been reading Red, Black, and Objective: Science, Sociology, and Anarchism by Sal Restivo about power and science.

If you’ve taken a feminist philosophy of science course, a lot of the groundwork that the book tries to lay for you will have already been laid. But there’s a lot in here that it found very helpful. It’s a book about the folly of achieving scientific objectivity through cold reason, one of those myths that serves only the ruling class.

The book describes Friedrich Nietzsche’s gay science in a way that had never really been explained to it before, and makes it infinitely more compelling. If mathematics is dead, if science is dead, perhaps what we should pursue is a passionately joyous wisdom that shirks the myth of the cold light of reason altogether. One that truly affirms the life and passion with which we analyze a given problem, and through a comprehensive understanding of those passions we can truly understand the subject.

it thinks a lot of vegans, esp. marginalized vegans, at some point became acquainted with the death of science but there’s not really a clear alternative. You see how science is biased, and when it contradicts the status quo is when it’s at its least influential. So you leave behind bourgeoisie philosophy and science.

But then what?

Certainly some of the most valuable stuff it’s learned has been by listening to those who had the most reason to be outraged. Maybe that’s the right direction.

Ah that could be! Maybe a “See how cybernetics shows this kind of system is really stable and effective? Well, that’s how anarchist organizations are arranged.” That would explain entire sections dedicated to explaining very basic things but not so much as a sentence to the effect of “you’re probably thinking of computers, but this isn’t about computers.”

Please use it/its and not you/your. And yeah it was both extremely dense and just really not meant for anarchists. Again, extremely odd because it was apparently about what insights can be brought from cybernetics to anarchism. The first time it read it, it didn’t even know what was being proposed and it thought they were trying to describe how anarchists can use technology to better arrange themselves. That is, after all, what the likes of Stalinists like Paul Cockshott think when they talk about cybernetics-based socialism.

It was only by the third reading that it realized the paper was just talking about principles that cropped up from cybernetics, which usually has to do with humans interfacing with technology interfacing with humans. In this case, it was describing what those systems need to be like to interact with the world. And then, generalizing it to organizations more broadly, as a way to argue that anarchism is more effective.

Some clear thesis statement explaining all of this would not have been unwelcome. It was after that insight was unlocked that it was able to penetrate what the paper was saying on the way home from work.

Yeah it’s as surprised as you are! Very few modern board games feel anything like classic board games. Interestingly enough, it thought Scythe would work more as an expansion on a modern board game rather than a classic one. A lot of people get into modern board games and get into Catan, because it was the first Eurogame and got a big headstart on becoming popular. But plenty of games have been made since then using modern game design principles.

Catan has a lot of flaws and it read an article that said Scythe promises to address those flaws. That article was SO misleading. This game does not really capture the appeal of Catan. But it does capture the appeal of chess really well and a lot of the skills are transferable. If you’re good at making sure everything’s protected and making the most board control of your limited movement and know when to use strategy and when to calculate tactics, you’re golden. Just wish you didn’t have to study so many opening lines if you wanted to play this game seriously. Studying opening lines is so boring!!!

If chess is the Chaturanga variant that introduces the powerful queen, Scythe is like if every piece was a queen but took more work to get active on the board beyond just moving a pawn out of the way.

This is not very accessible as a great deal is simply left unexplained (and instead, very basic things like “ELI5 anarchism” get a whole section), but after a few reads, here’s what it seems to be saying.

There’s a field called management cybernetics, closely related to organizational cybernetics. This field was introduced by Stafford Beer. The field takes important cybernetic principles and uses them as inspiration for how to think about organizations. The fact that these principles are important in cybernetics seems to be where the relationship to cybernetics begins and ends. From there you can just ignore cybernetics and focus on these principles and the model that was formed out of them.

For a system to remain internally stable and adaptive to a changing context, it must be flexible, autonomous.

Such a principle apparently leads to a particular model, which describes systems that are internally stable and adaptive. It’s known as the Viable System Model. In the VSM, you have:

• An environment and a bunch of niches in that environment. That is, the world that a system interacts with and significant parts of it.
• Units that immediately interact with parts of that world, niches in that environment. These units or groupings of units can be autonomous and still be coordinated and stable provided they have some means of interacting with one another to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.
• Some means of interacting with one another to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.
• A mechanism that makes sure that all of the units not only align with each other, but that they are overall aligned with the system as a whole.
• A means of collecting all of that information, as well as information from the environment, and how the overall system is changing and interacting to that environment.
• A way of processing all of that information and making long-term decisions based on that information.

The environment is just called the environment. The rest of these bulletpoints are subsystems of the overall system (they’re just numbered in the paper, system one, system two, etc.). This understanding of systems can also be applied to organizations, which are systems. And for organizational anarchists, this is important. That is the thesis of the paper.

Then the paper talks about how one criticism is that this appears to be anti-anarchist because it proposes a description of a system at the top of the organization that decides strategy, and a bunch of systems at the bottom who have to follow that strategy, that sorta thing. This criticism can be defanged, so says the paper, because this model doesn’t describe the structure of the organization. Instead, it describes a hierarchy of plans and actions. So rather than a group of individuals at the top of an organization dominating groups of individuals at the bottom, you instead have high-level decisions which constrain and control low-level decisions. You can still have a totally horizontal organization do this.

The paper only notes that for an organization to be viable–that is, be flexible enough to adapt while being stable enough to stay true to its ends–decisions and actions must follow this structure.

it’s gotta say, as a thing that is sympathetic to especifismo strategies, it’s pretty ambivalent about this. There are, on the one hand, a lot of connections between the VSM and especifismo. The VSM is largely just a description of a unity of strategies and tactics. If you take a look at the VSM diagram in this paper and the diagram for Rosa Negra’s program in “Turning the Tide,” you’ll find they’re easy to map onto each other.

But really only if you take some liberties and are looking for it. There are some huge differences, and the differences basically inform all of its criticisms of what this paper is proposing. For instance, the sub-system dedicated to processing all of the information and making huge decisions is not really broken down further. So, the ultimate objective, the general strategy, and the structural analysis are all rolled into one sub-system, which can be influenced by every other sub-system. How are we preventing instability then? For especifismo, what cybernetics calls ‘stability’ is obtained through having ultimate ends that can’t be interacted with, and a structural analysis that can’t be interacted with (something it has critiqued elsewhere in its post history, but ignore that for now).

How does the VSM solve the problems it purports to solve? This paper doesn’t make it clear, even though that is, like, the main thesis of the paper. If there’s a mechanism by which the units interacting with niches can influence the very highest level of decision-making, can’t the organization be influenced by the niches to become liberalized?

This could honestly be elaborated on in a whole post unto itself. So it’ll cut itself short there and resign to having explained the paper. But yeah, not sure if this paper is teaching us something useful. Though it is interesting (if rather inaccessible and overwhelmingly inter-disciplinary with little contextualization), and interesting things often lead to useful things down the line.

Starting today, right? Do you need someone else to post?

Thank you to both you and @db0@[email protected] for discussing this. This does match with what others have said. That said, it’s okay with roleplaying too, it often hosts roleplaying-only Twilight Imperium IV games, or one-shot TTRPGs (D&D is banned, Pathfinder is banned, any other system is okay).

But yes, a much bigger hole in its heart is competition. Girls just like to have fun, and for some girls, that means merciless (but trauma-informed and respect towards boundaries around competition) competition.

There are some multiplayer roleplaying video games. Baldur’s Gate 3 has been quite engaging. Sometimes just one of us watching the other play Disco Elysium is enough. But competing strategically without it becoming unpleasant…that’s a harder find outside of board games.

There are surely more options than causing burnout and encouraging everyone regardless of what they’re doing. If someone creates yet another veganism organization with conditions conducive to abuse and oppression, obviously they should be criticized regardless of whether they ask for it or whatever. Like if someone is stomping on someone else, it makes no sense to let them because they don’t consent to you stopping them.

Be supportive, yes. Show solidarity, yes. But never if it is only reinforcing and instantiating dominance structures.

It’s hard to say much more without a concrete example of what you mean, but there are surely ways to be supportive of your peers without uncritically supporting literally anything they do. Sometimes you need to let a friend know they’re doing something fucked up and they need to cut it out. At some point you have to look at the fact that every Food not Bombs chapter is run by abusers and think, maybe aversion to criticism makes like no sense. Not to mention that many of the things you should criticize and resist would themselves cause burnout for more vulnerable activists if they aren’t.

A factoid is basically a junk food proposition, it can be false or it can be true but insignificant. Just like how junk food refers to both foods with a lot of empty calories (and so are unhealthy) as well as ultra-processed foods (which need not be unhealthy, but aren’t beneficial either). The individual you’re replying to is using the term correctly.

Oh right you had by two years ago encountered one of its swine names, okay, yes. it thought you had only known it as edible by that point.

As for you/your, it is generic in the same way they/them is generic, but it/its is what affirms its identity so you/your serves as degendering in the same way that they/them’ing transfems is. And because it’s often done punitively for transfems it can be intensely triggering to be you/your’d or they/them’d. In fact, a local Queers for Palestine chapter punitively degendered it and doubled down on it, which split the group into those who supported transmisogyny and those against it, just the other week (obviously with most members supporting transmisogyny). Such things are common enough in its life and often fresh that it’s a pretty fresh wound whenever it gets referred to with you/your or they/them, and in general it’s found that others who use it/its first and third person are anywhere from ambivalent to preferring second person it/its.

That seems to be a reasonable inference but one rather unfair thing it’s noticed with neopronouns is that inferences that we make naturally with traditional pronouns don’t really apply to neopronouns. A lot of folks who use fae/faer have noted how people make all kinds of bizarre assumptions about them on the basis of these pronouns, like that they’re deceptive. And then, we naturally infer that if someone uses she, they also use her, hers, herself, etc. But a similar kind of extrapolation is someone using certain first and third person pronouns to using a corresponding set of second person pronouns, like if someone refers to faerself as “this fae thinks…” then it seems like a reasonable inference that fae may want “would this fae like to…?”

You may have noticed some of this yourself, but these are some of its own observations of neopronouns and the current state of affairs over the past few years.

Oh its second person pronouns are it/its now.

it had no idea it was so recognizable? What about the name is reminiscent of it?

Neat! it may be something that ghosted you several years ago due to leaving behind its Discord due to abuse. Was very astounded to see you again in another life.

A question that’s been burning for half a week now: Are you the same naeva that was on the VFCJ Discord once upon a time?

Use it/its, please!

Arcs is too new! Not appealing to the tastes of a patient gamer! But also, it is a bit biased against Cole Wehrle :)

Will check out those two games some time, thanks for the recs!

If you think that’s the worst of it, you’re in for a surprise! But yeah, people do lose out on a shitton of science and production because they think generating Great Merchants doesn’t come with a completely random opportunity cost to their science and production. Nonsense game design decision.

Use it/its and not you/your, please. its heard Stellaris has great narrative elements but it’s very hard to play in a reasonable amount of time and there’s some balance issues that can make competition feel really unfair. Maybe will still get around to it some day.

Civ 5 was fun but despite its harsh review Civ 6 is kind of better in every way. The lekmod for Civ 5 is so pervasive and totally changes the game, which is necessary for balance and so the game is a bit more reasonable. Civ 6 on the other hand has the BBG mod which changes far less and remains basically the same game. Civ 6 also makes certain things more intuitive, like movement. Initially, moving from 5 to 6, it had a lot of trouble with the movement but once it understood it it loved how intuitive it was. You can only move if you have enough movement points left. Simple as that. No “ending on a hill” or other counter-intuitive tricks you have to remember and do in Civ 5 every single turn.

Civ 6’s big big flaws are that on release it was broken due to infinite production exploits they wouldn’t fix, and it came with spyware which they did not apologize for so you shouldn’t buy it or anything from Firaxis from that matter.

Civ 5 was fun though. it wrote a huge, one hundred page document on how to play it well to catch its friends up. A lot of it was just detailing random counter-intuitive bullshit. That’s the big issue. Both games are fun, but their limitations require just so much patience it isn’t really sustainable and pretty soon, competition becomes more frustrating and a chore than fun.

Also, one thing not included here is the AI problem. The 4X games with the best and most challenging, clever AIs, perfect for training competitively when you can’t get together with all your friends, are also single-player. Ditto for 4X games that randomize tech trees and policy trees and the like to make the game more principled.