are the animals that totally have no way of communicating any of their thoughts or attitudes in this room with us right now

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.

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.

it does not understand what you’re saying or where you’re coming from. Not sure what tankies have to do with this. You’re interpreting and speaking from a context that everyone else is missing and so what you’re saying does not make sense to anyone else. Like apparently there’s a tankie and an anarchist involved and there’s some kind of internet drama you’re referring to that involves your irl friend? But from its point of view it has zero point of reference for what you’re saying or what tankies have to do with either this website or your friend who runs the discord.

Well it does seem like you two started two communities with different and incompatible principles. That’s all it was pointing out. it isn’t in there so it’s not like it affects it but it’s just an interesting observation. it was confused but it wasn’t planning on dwelling on it.

it was super into this game as a teenager and it still comes back to it after getting a philosophy degree. Really, really bizarre experience.

it’s only ever been sent like three or four videos from Ed and they were all rather bad. It’s always possible the people who sent those recommendations just had terrible taste but nonetheless it has an aversion.

it would be happy to hear your thoughts if you read it, or have read it, once the month comes around. That said, it finds that convincing people to be vegan has gotten easy enough, and it usually has very little to do with forming good arguments or whatever. Where a lot of vegans seem to be lacking is the rest of the strategy. Okay, you’ve convinced a few folks to be vegan. Now what? Tons of different vegan organizations have tried developing their own strategies, like Anonymous for the Voiceless, or Vegan Effective Altruist orgs, or DxA, and their failures are well-documented. So what should we try instead, knowing that those are dead ends?

But that’s just its own interest. it’s happy to hear about what others end up reading or what they make of it.

A good theme for the next month could be “strategy” since this is a theory instance after all.