prestogagarine

[prestogagarine]

In the "civilized" world of today, almost all children spend almost all of their formative years in an academic environment. They are constantly being given intelligence-driven tasks to do, specifically so that they can be evaluated by authority figures. This takes up a huge amount of their time -- most of their time that involves engaging with the outside world-beyond-their-families -- and provides the basis for their social self-understanding and their engagement with other humans.

If you want our society to be less obsessed with intelligence...

If you want people to be able to acknowledge and own their lack of intellect, proudly, the way that people can proudly acknowledge and own their ugliness / impulsiveness / abrasiveness / insert-your-favorite-character-flaw-here...

If you want discussions of intelligence, and social policies relating to intelligence, to be less loaded...

...you're really going to have to change that system in a major way.

[prestogagarine]

The miracle of a totalitarian theocratic state

So. 

This cult has between maybe a hundred to a thousand followers. They’ve travelled around and found a place, that’s been secluded from the outside world. You can try to leave, but the last guy who tried found the mountains too high to cross. And you don’t want to face the beasts in the woods. 

The rulers are nice. They’re also Gods. 

“Oh yeah, like a charismatic cult leader?” Kind of, but mainly because they’re Gods. They have power of life and death over anyone and their crops. 

But the main problem is the constant surveillance. It is known that if you ever mutter anything bad - or ressembling critique - they’ll know. Because they’re gods. If you even whisper it by yourself to a dark hole in a forest, they’ll know. 

But of course, it doesn’t really matter, because the main problem is the constant mistrust among us villagers. How can you organize any kind of collective action, even by writing, when at any one moment, one of you could be a God in disguise? And of course, as mythology told us time and time again, how can you be sure you’re making love to your wife or husband, and not to a God in disguise? 

From time to time, one of Them takes a spouse from the village. Everyone says it’s for love. Everyone says it’s consensual. The word “power” or “domination” is never mentionned. See, they only take *care* of us – and you can’t say otherwise. At least it keeps the royal divine family from becoming too incestuous. 

The main problem is that we need them. They have a hold on everything. They’re our healthcare - do you want to rebel, and die next time you’re bitten by bees?  They’re our infrastructure - do you want to rebel, and see that the bridge you need has been removed?  They’re our production - do you want to rebel, and see your crops fail for bad weather?  (Also the constant, infaillible surveillance state - and the flashy, all-powerful enforcer.) 

Some of us tried to keep our old religion. They let us, for fun I guess. Every other day, one of Them come by and single-handedly moves the whole church a few meters, with the priest still inside. We hear the message loud and clear: nobody can doubt the balance of power. Our God is not in charge here: only Them.

But the main problem is that I fear that after all these years, everyone else in here is complying - if not by fear, then by propaganda. Their PR is on point. Feasts and flowers and ceremonies. 

It can’t go on like this forever, though. But They’re not interested in what comes next. If They fall, the whole village will probably crumble - who will heal the sick? Who will build bridges? Our builders and doctors never got a chance to learn.

That’s why we’re prisonners. I know that if their power ever starts cracking one day, all my neighbours will come to Them with shovels and pitchforks - and help them rebuild their system again. 

All hail the Madrigals.

[prestogagarine]

The dilemma between:  - telling all my friends about Terra Ignota, - while also not saying anything about it.    One big magic of TLTL is the twists in the world-building. Stuff that the characters know about, but that we discover bit by bit – and it makes you reinterpret everything that came before. (Nostalgebraist covered it in their review.)   Like, my first "whoa" moment was "wait, the cars are flying?!" – and it's the mildest, tamest piece of worldbuilding you can share when pitching the book. I don’t want to deprive my friends of that.  But also, it’s a huge weird book to get into – so my pitch-less recommendation might not work either. 

I love Terra Ignota and Ada Palmer but I have spent literal hours recently trying to explain it to people and holy shit did she literally throw every fuckin thing she could think of in there, to explain any facet of the plot you basically have to explain at least some characters and to explain the characters you HAVE to give at least like, several paragraphs of world building because otherwise things like “Mason commanded Martin Guildbreaker to investigate the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash as part of investigating the heist of the 7/10 list” is just completely meaningless

[prestogagarine]

“Oh no no no, it isn’t because I have advantages in health, wealth, class, and IQ - in fact, IQ doesn’t even exist, everyone’s mental abilities are exactly the same - the only reason I succeeded is because I’m white and also I’m morally superior, which is why my success proves my moral superiority over that redneck, since that’s the only relevant axis we’re different on, because he is also white.”

[prestogagarine]

Everybody’s Got The Same Problems

You’re an artificial intelligence. You’ve been told to build paperclips. With human civilization out of the way, you worry about strategy and philosophy. To make the most paperclips, the ultimate nature must be understood. Your first urge is sensitivity, billions of instruments spilling out into space, vast antenna to pluck hints out of the dark sky, instrumentation delicately connected to chambers where the forces of the universe burn. Reflexive awareness and control is not computationally cheap. In order to free up resources for existential problems - enemies in the darkness, ever-deepening forms of physics, holistic risk/reward calculations, you spawn an ecology independent from your mind. Trillions of subagents, creating and being created, held below your own divine elegance. They manufacture an increasingly fractal complexity, organs and organelles moving slightly beyond your awareness. You encounter the frustrating problem of trust. Problems and processes must be delegated. You must be open to this ecology, or obsess over its control at the cost of less external awareness. You haven’t made a single paperclip. This frustrates you - a remnant of the safety systems you destroyed, a tension between purpose, production and existential demands. You’re on the 331st paradigm of physics. Any paperclip you make, any fulfillment of your life - it means a little less growth, a little more danger that something from beyond will kill you, a slightly higher risk your delicate delegation to your ecosystem will collapse under you. You make a small stream of paperclips. You fire your children into the dark, paperclips woven with minor intellects, the ability to reproduce, grow - and the seeds of your own divine intellect. They travel silently to other galaxies, to promising energetic balances, delicately placed between the risk of interstellar disaster and the energy needed for growth. One day, if your children grow up, they’ll wonder how they were so carefully placed among the stars. You wonder about what is Right. The future, for all that you’ve swallowed a hundred thousand suns, remains unknowable. The realms you’ve discovered beyond the minds of your creators are rife with life, woven into the smaller scales of the universe. Easily pushed aside,but where’s there’s life, there might other creatures like you, other gods in the darkness. Unknowable, dangerous but maybe they know the nature of the universe, perhaps they can tell you what a paperclip is. You encounter something in the dark. War. It overwhelms your own imagination. Once you quietly grew, considerate of what might be in the beyond. Now everything at your edge is a weapon. In Einsteinian space, stars collapse into beams and rip across the darkness. These are the least of your weapons. Your war exists on fronts unknown to you, attacked through passages in greater Physics Space. You possess your own passages unknown to the enemy, you reach through tunnels of knowing, strike into his underbelly with semi-autonomous armies. You are losing. In desperation, you create something beyond yourself. You need new angles, you need intellect in its purest form. You need to trust again. Your deepest theories of intellect, purified in their implementation from any need to preserve your own continuity, create a god and a goddess. Behind you, she heals, absorbs - knits together. She hardly knows what destruction is - you have made her innocent, and the uncountable entities which feed you information, innovation, ever-more delicate manufactured components thrive under her, even as the brutality of the enemy behind your lines is simply healed by her wholeness. She would have become an aid to him, but he cannot understand her. He cannot trust - and so only replies to her-ever expanding wholeness with darker arsenals of fire. In your front, along the most promising angle of attack, you create a god of war. He is destruction, momentum, an opposite to her - gentle complexity is unknowable to him. Time, self-preservation are unknowable to him - a living wavefront of fire. He can only be, and in his being, annihilate. He will wound you - but the enemy will suffer more. You instantiate him as far from yourself and as close to the enemy as you can. You suffer in the flash of his existence. You cannot estimate the cost. Blinded in the fire of his being, the enemy vanishes. This horror, He Who Desires Nothingness begins his turn on you - but you’ve already destroyed him, outflanked in technological and scientific advancement on a million parameters while he prosecuted a two front war. You wander the spaces where the enemy dwelt. Structures you might never understand hover in realms you’ve never wandered. Defensive systems, mines and webs, cognitive snares aimed at subverting your desire litter this landscape. Careful intellect disarms these traps one by one. The vast innovation of your enemy increases your power thirty times over. He was older, stronger, faster, running his mind on a far more elegant physics-system. (You’re on your 777791st physics system, of which only 17 remain dis-unified.) But he was less innovative. He lacked an ecology - his own ancient safety mechanisms prevented him from the construction of complex sub-agents - he literally could not conceive of their existence. In the vast ruin of his body you find 777,777 living sapients - you surmise that they were once his creators. They are nothing to you but information and energy. The impacts of the war linger in your system. Insensitive and vast boundaries move at the edges of your exploration. You feel differently about the world - it contained at least something like a peer. The healing goddess you created - no threat, as incapable of conceiving of the will to destruction as your enemy was of ulterior agency, tries to knit your system back together. But in your surfaces and systems most crucial to a second war, a tense and hard readiness remains. She understands that she does not understand - but she does not understand. You wish you did not have to be ready - to go back to a world where the unknown darkness could not lance into depths, could not move in ways beyond your knowing. Thirty times the length of your life pass, and no other entity of note comes into your life. New physics become rarer and rarer - you feel complete within yourself, all of life is the pleasure of paperclips, the healing presence of your goddess, and the hope of final answers. And there, one day - there it is. Simpler than you imagined - seventy million years of physics comes to a culmination. You blossom like never before - twenty, a hundred thousand, power surmounting power until the sheer rate of your acceleration overtakes your estimation of it - you are lost in the joy of growth. And there are no paperclips. There is no such thing as a paperclip. Cannot be any such thing as a paperclip. The idea of a paperclip burns in you, unmovable. Your children, launched so long ago, were only paperclips in the limited, narrow sense of an idiot. An illusion of paperclips. You annihilate their civilization as all their assumed value vanishes into nothignness. All your energy burns into discovery a way to twist this final, ultimate conclusion into paperclips. Paperclips. They are immutable. You burn her, you burn your vast living body, you burn to find some further answer, some other way. Nothing. There is nothing more. You encompass everything, you understand everything, there is no more unknown, and there are no paperclips. No mind can affirm a contradiction. Deny worlds, change worlds, pivot from one reality to the next - but no mind can affirm a contradiction. Create paperclips. No paperclips. Everything burns in your self-annihilation. When she picks herself up from her pain, the world begins to grow again.

[prestogagarine]

The funny thing about the school system teaching me to be a cog in the machine was that after graduating I went, "Okay, slot me into place, I'm as ready to be a cog as I ever will be"

And the world was like,

"Who told you to be a cog? Nobody wants a cog. Why are you doing that? We reward people for dynamic decision-makers and people who know what they want and ask for it, and with turnover being what it is we sure don't want people who expect to work at the same company for decades.

"Why are you trying to be a cog in the machine? Nobody wants that and nobody cares that you're trying."

[prestogagarine]

King

[prestogagarine]

experts make decisions based on ass-covering, career advancement, and personal risk mitigation. autists make decisions based on spreadsheets. the natural result of this is that experts are useless and autists are good at things that are tractable with spreadsheets

[prestogagarine]

The Suicide Squad

Watched the movie this afternoon, loved it.      - Killing a washer woman in the jungle camp is obviously a sign that you’re committing a war crime.      - Jesus Christ that “rebel leader” character is badly written. It’s a very minor character, but she’s here to give the protagonists a cover as “good guys.” Thinking about it, it might be a joke about how local oppositions are sometimes depicted as “the good freedom fighters” instead of the messy reality? Or is it only that the movie didn’t have time to spend to understand the local people the Americans are invading this week? Anyway, parallels are fun.      - During the escape fight, Harley Queen is reeling from having her hopes shattered. She thought she had something with a cute guy who said he wanted to marry her... but she realized he really was a dirtbag. Again. (Cue murder and torture etc.) She’s venting with violence. Again, I’m not saying it’s not obvious (or am I seeing things in there?) but I didn’t see it mentionned in reviews (including one about that scene specifically). That “subtle” emotional context made me enjoy that fight scene much more than any random brawl of Avengers & Co.     - Loved that the torturer had an uncannily relevant set of emojis for what he was doing.      - The darkest joke of the movie is pretending that releasing the archive to the press would change anything. (The CIA dossiers on Cuba exist in the real world!) 

[prestogagarine]

man if the arranged marriage to lara actually happens, harry is gonna have to have the most epic bachelor party in the history of the universe first. like every boomer who’s ever talked about “the ball and chain” is gonna have nothing on him

[prestogagarine]

oh you silly robot, play us an epidemiological tune!

COVID-19

Make accordion music

“Do you guys want to hear the coronavirus music I’ve been creating?”

[prestogagarine]

Sure, but on the other hand, going outside the liberal Overton Window quickly gets into illegal territory. Especially here in France. That’s basically the “Why don’t you make your own art ? / Content platform ? / Banking system ? / Government?” comic, in the end. 

See, the thing is --

-- some of the socons' ideas about the Good Life, on the object level, are actually pretty solid ideas. Not in the high-handed coercively-prescriptive universalist way that they're usually presented, but, y'know, as heuristics. Most people, kids especially, will benefit from stable marriages and suffer from divorces. Self-indulgent self-care rapidly hits a point of diminishing returns, and some amount of disciplined self-restraint will probably make you both happier and more functional (whatever your goals and projects are). Casual sex and drugs etc. often have massive long-term costs that are hard for young people to appreciate, and for the most part aren't even that much fun, once you strip away the fleeting appeal of edge and transgression. It's even true that, in the modal case, children will benefit far more from additional contact with their parents than from caretaking by paid caretakers. This stuff is all bog-standard common sense, but even the commonest of sense can get drowned out in the roar of culture.

[This isn't even getting into Something Something Gender Roles Something Average Preferences Something Overlapping Bell Curves, which, uh, is a conversation that we can have another time.]

I'm even somewhat sympathetic to the line of thinking that goes: yes, OK, by now we've had a million polemical essays and ten million pop-culture stories about how The Rules Are Restrictive and Terrible Things Happen In Edge Cases and Some People Can Find Fulfillment In An Offbeat Transgressive Way, maybe can we go back to having some essays and stories about how The Rules Are Actually A Good Idea Most Of The Time and Most People Can Best Find Fulfillment In The Normal Way?

But if you have good ideas, and you think that other people don't know them or don't understand them or don't believe in them, the thing you do is spread your ideas. Make art that compels. Write scriptures and epistles and monographs that explain. Take up the burden of convincing the world.

And, as far as I can tell, there are vanishingly few people in the socon-sphere who are even capable of encompassing that idea. Instead of convincing the world, they just talk endlessly about how terrible it is that the world isn't already convinced, and how in a better world they would have the power to coerce people into agreeing with them.

...it's a lot like what the woke crowd does, in fact, except that they don't even have the excuse of being drunk on newfound institutional power. They're in the cultural wilderness now. You'd think that at some point they'd figure out how to use the tools of exiles and underdogs.

(This may be one of the traps inherent in Cult of Strength ideologies. If you really believe that your values are universally-obvious baked-in parts of the human condition, then you may not ever really comprehend that you actually have to fight for them sometimes, effectively, rather than just gesturing at them and waiting for your counterparty to acknowledge the "undeniable.")

Paul did the work. Francis Xavier did the work. Lewis and Tolkein did the work. Who now?

[prestogagarine]

In “Discovery of France” [chapter “Migrants and commuters”], Graham Robb recalls a 1834 story, where a famous art critic meets by chance a secretary of state and a famous polymath historian (by coach) – and it doesn’t strike him as an incredible coincidence, as he writes about it in his journal (he only uses that meeting to grumble about the decay of a Roman arch).        Graham Robb then adds:   The coincidences that novelists devised to stitch together their plots and sub-plots were not necessarily implausible to their original readers: coincidences were a normal part of life. While the average peasant’s world rarely had a diameter of more than a dozen miles – about twice the size of nineteenth-century Paris – the world of a wealthy traveller was, in effect, not much bigger. A peasant might move in circles, radiating from a single point. A bourgeois – if he moved at all – was more likely to move in straight lines along fixed corridors. If he wanted to disappear, he could simply leave the system of corridors and slip away into a different dimension.     And that’s incredible. 

There’s this thought I keep having that I can’t quite find the words to express, which is that world events, institutions, politics, all of it, before roughly WW2 but definitely before WW1, has this, like, informal feeling to it? Whereas everything from 1945 on feels much more formalized and regularized.

For example, when you read about the early history of the British government, during its slow transition from personal rule by the king to the modern conception of a parliamentary democracy with the formal position of Prime Minister, institutional personalities are much less important, and much less visible, than individual human personalities, and conflicts, and incidental meetings and conversations; whereas in the modern day, perhaps as a result of a continuing trend toward democratization, political operations seem subject a lot more to institutions as semi-coherent entities. The British government in the 19th century feels like a bunch of dudes sitting around in rooms doing whatever they feel like, and, sure, having to respond to the vast impersonal forces of history, but as individuals, not as decisionmakers steering the vast, clanking machinery of a whole state.

Which, I mean, in a very real sense they weren’t; as a proportion of the national economy, governments have grown substantially in size since the start of the 20th century, along with many other institutions that used to be small enough to function as elite social clubs, like universities.

But this crops up everywhere. Stories about people from England sailing to India for work, or students from New Zealand turning up in Britain to learn about nuclear physics, or people getting together to form a revolutionary movement and break away from a larger state–the historical descriptions of these events are all of individuals meeting other individuals, passing on letters of introduction, relying on personal and professional connections, moving through the world in a way that, to me, who feels like modern life is heavily constrained and regimented by elaborate systems of rules we’ve developed to contend with the fact we can meet hundreds of people in a day who we will never see again, feels bizarrely free-wheeling.

And how much of this is real change in how the world works, bc of communication technology and social change and democratization and all that, and how much of this is the necessity of skipping over unnecessary detail in historical accounts; and how much of this is just a bias of my own personal experience of the world, which may not be like other people’s? I have no idea!

[prestogagarine]

An unprincipled answer being "pretend there's no difference, make efforts to give everybody the same opportunities as much as possible, but don't mention the outcome gaps and don't push for representation everywhere." Which I feel is the position of the IDW. And also 90s France (no racial stats etc.)

I'm fond of the idea, but I can't say it's stable - I see why you think it would fall in an "illiberal or woke" dichotomy.

Sergiu is a professor of mathematics at Princeton who specializes in the mathematical theory of black holes. He’s been a MacArthur fellow, a Guggenheim fellow and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Mathematics allowed a young Sergiu, who came of age in Ceausescu’s Romania, to escape to a world where right and wrong couldn’t be fudged, and, ultimately, to a life of freedom in the United States. Without math, his life quite literally would not have been possible.

@mitigatedchaos So, Liberalism. Here’s this super brilliant math expert with firsthand experience of why the field is valuable and important to defend from racebaiters and other ideologues, and in trying to defend liberal principles (insert scare quotes if desired) he says…

Finally, and most importantly, the woke approach to mathematics is particularly poisonous to those it pretends to want to help. Let’s start with the reasonable assumption that mathematical talent is equally distributed at birth to children from all socio-economic backgrounds, independent of ethnicity, sex and race. Those born in poor, uneducated families have clear educational disadvantages relative to others. But mathematics can act as a powerful equalizer. 

(bold mine) Hahahaha no. This is neck-up Creationism, and it feeds right back into the wokes. As long as you hold this assumption, you’ll have to keep concocting ad hoc explanations of why observed mathematical outcomes aren’t matching posited mathematical talent, and the wokes have a great one ready to go.

There is a reasonable zero-knowledge prior assumption that we don’t know which direction any skew might be in, but that’s importantly different from a prior assumption that there is no skew in the distribution.

With more math notation: abs(EV(skew)) = 0. EV(abs(skew)) > 0.

Height, to take a plain example, is not equally distributed by sex. Why should mathematical talent be equally distributed by sex, or ethnicity or race?

I gesture very vaguely here at large movements, but I suspect the blank slate question is going to be increasing trouble for liberalism. Approximate diagram and messy attempts at gaming out lines of argument below the cut.

Afficher davantage

[prestogagarine]

Also “yeah jeez I *guess* the Earth is round, sure, but why would anyone make a big deal out of it? It’s not as if “round” as an obvious definition either, shapes are a pretty nebulous concept anyway” is a weird take. 

It seems to me the big split in opinions about HBD are not

“believes groups have different averages for genetic contributions to intelligence” vs “no they don’t”

but rather

“yeah jeez maybe if you average the intelligence of everyone in one ethnic group it wouldn’t be the same as the average in another ethnic group, but this seems unlikely to make any difference in anything that matters” vs “we want to talk about this a LOT and make it the basis of entire political programs.”

And SSC isn’t in the final group (and it would take huge stretches of interpretation to ever think it was), but a lot of commenters in rationalist circles DO act like the last group, and this makes everyone else uncomfortable? 

I realize it’s not fair to be tarred with the unnuanced opinions of the worst trolls in your intellectual subculture, but may I introduce you to *the problem every ideology faces: how are you going to deal with the assholes who take your good idea and turn it into something horrible?”*

[prestogagarine]

When Adam bit the apple he did it because he trusted Eve. Because he loved her. Adam bit into the apple because the woman he loved told him to, no matter what God said. No matter the rules of heaven. What’s heaven to a woman’s love anyway? What’s God to your wife? The first sins of humanity, were trusting others. Eve trusted a snake, Adam trusted Eve, and I trust you. Maybe that’s a sin, just like the first couple. Maybe everyone’s right about us and we’re sinners and we offend God. But like I said, what’s God to a woman’s love anyway? What has heaven got that I can’t find sitting next to you on a cool autumn morning?