Originally published June 1, 2015
I've never been persistent or dedicated enough to get really good at
something. If you're into aesthetics about transience, like wabi-sabi or mono no aware,
you might find some kernel of beauty to appreciate here, but you know
what would have been more beautiful than this? The things I would have
done with persistence and dedication.
To this day this is the coolest thing I've ever made. It's not even that cool.
No one ever told me blogging had to be for an audience.
I've
given up on a lot of things. My dad tried to get me to learn a musical
instrument. I recently stopped practicing juggling. You should look at
the list of projects I've started and not done anything substantial with
before abandoning. This list doesn't exist; I'll never get around to
finishing it.
Okay, so I can't make art or other cool stuff. That's not actually a tragedy. There's plenty
of good art. It basically means I'll not be as cool and have a harder
time getting laid. What I see as actually important is that this lack of
persistence and dedication means I never learned lots of math or
physics or philosophy or programming or biology or whatever, so I can
never do important research.
Sometimes I wonder what my life
would have been like if I had, like, an older brother or something,
someone who always told me to keep going.
2016-12-07
It's Kind of Weird That We Use Base 10
Originally published February 27, 2015
Ten digits per human, so it makes sense that we use base ten for our number system, right? No, actually if we insisted on using all the fingers on both hands, we could have settled on base 11 or base 12, and base 11 makes the most sense.
Each hand has six possible states of information, the one with no digits out and the five with a different number of digit out each. Actually there are a lot more possible ones, involving ups and downs and whizbangs. You could even invent a whole language out of them. But for now let's assume there are six.
The fist, or alternatively the imitation of a tube, represents zero. Remember that the first digit of a number system is 0, not 1. That's why base 10 stops at 9.
The reason base 12 doesn't make sense is that since fist represents zero, the second hand displaying that state adds no information. Adding zero does nothing. It's like adding nothing, it looks like it's adding something, but is actually not contributing any information at all. Get it?
One potential solution to that is to have the fist mean something else when it's accompanying a full five-fingered hand. But then it would be ambiguous, which aside from being inelegant would also create practical difficulties and not just in edge cases.
So it makes the most sense to use base 11, in which we have a zero and then ten more digits for each finger. I don't really understand why we don't, unless each culture failed to take zero into account in the finger-counting system or they all had a preference for an even-numbered (or at least non-prime?) base.
Ten digits per human, so it makes sense that we use base ten for our number system, right? No, actually if we insisted on using all the fingers on both hands, we could have settled on base 11 or base 12, and base 11 makes the most sense.
Each hand has six possible states of information, the one with no digits out and the five with a different number of digit out each. Actually there are a lot more possible ones, involving ups and downs and whizbangs. You could even invent a whole language out of them. But for now let's assume there are six.
The fist, or alternatively the imitation of a tube, represents zero. Remember that the first digit of a number system is 0, not 1. That's why base 10 stops at 9.
The reason base 12 doesn't make sense is that since fist represents zero, the second hand displaying that state adds no information. Adding zero does nothing. It's like adding nothing, it looks like it's adding something, but is actually not contributing any information at all. Get it?
One potential solution to that is to have the fist mean something else when it's accompanying a full five-fingered hand. But then it would be ambiguous, which aside from being inelegant would also create practical difficulties and not just in edge cases.
So it makes the most sense to use base 11, in which we have a zero and then ten more digits for each finger. I don't really understand why we don't, unless each culture failed to take zero into account in the finger-counting system or they all had a preference for an even-numbered (or at least non-prime?) base.
The Reflexive Superrationality-Inspired Virtue Ethicsy Thing I Call Policy
Originally published January 18, 2015
The way I think about behaviors and decisions nowadays, both normatively and descriptively, would be impossible without this concept that I call policy because there is no better word. It's a simple, important concept, so I don't know why there's no standard term for it. Since there's no standard term, it doesn't get enough attention.
(In some places "policy" in the decision theory context means a function from situations to decisions. That is not what I mean. This is much more subtle.)
When you act a certain way in a certain situation, you reinforce the behaviors of acting in similar ways in similar situations. These effects can be very strong, even from subtle acts. I've been calling effects of this type "consistency effects", not knowing that this isn't a term in propriety. The thing to understand is that consistency effects and other things of their type aren't merely incidental side effects of a decision but the most important consequences of the decision. Let me explain.
Non-straw consequentialism takes knock-on effects into account. An agent's present self's influence on its future selves is a knock-on effect. In practice, with humans, making a decision now is really setting a policy of behaving that way forever. Which also means that most things people do are not decisions at all, but rather habits.
Consider these things:
In Newcomb's Problem it's good to have a policy of choosing the action that gets you the most money, rather than some policy that two-boxes.
In Parfit's Hitchhiker, when the driver (Paul Ekman, say) analyzes your facial expressions to determine with perfect accuracy whether you're lying, you want to already have the policy of keeping your promises, otherwise you die.
When Zvi Moshowitz passes by Famiglia Pizza and momentarily feels tempted to buy garlic knots that he doesn't want to want, he remembers, perhaps triggered by that very temptation, that what he chooses then would be the same choice he would make at other times under the same circumstances.*
One common thread here is a good policy does not incorrectly sever the causal or logical chain from its individual object-level decisions to outcomes it cares about. In Paul Christiano's terminology, a good policy is self-modeling. Causal decision theory has this property for direct, immediate causal links, but not for knock-on effects of the decision procedure itself, nor for logical ("acausal") implications of the decision or decision procedure. I want to claim that the way humans actually make decisions is also computation-aware (for instance, "Ugh I don't want to think about that...") and, sometimes, reflectively consistent.
I think people's fragmentary, intuitive, preconscious understanding of this concept is why they are suspicious of illustrative hypotheticals such as trolley problems. I used to think people's inability to reason within the assumptions of a hypothetical was just stupid, but part of what they're doing is rationally distrusting the usual no knock-on effects assumption, as well as the assumption that a human can be in the epistemic state implied by the hypothetical.
Now is a good time to read Cached Selves.
Policies don't have exceptions. If you claim to have a policy and you violate it at times, your actual policy is not your stated policy.
For some reason, I can't finish this post. Its unfinishedness is preventing me from writing other ones. I'm just going to post it in this state. Requests for clarifications are thus encouraged; I don't think this post is quite sufficient to adequately convey my notion of policy in people who don't already almost understand it.
The way I think about behaviors and decisions nowadays, both normatively and descriptively, would be impossible without this concept that I call policy because there is no better word. It's a simple, important concept, so I don't know why there's no standard term for it. Since there's no standard term, it doesn't get enough attention.
(In some places "policy" in the decision theory context means a function from situations to decisions. That is not what I mean. This is much more subtle.)
When you act a certain way in a certain situation, you reinforce the behaviors of acting in similar ways in similar situations. These effects can be very strong, even from subtle acts. I've been calling effects of this type "consistency effects", not knowing that this isn't a term in propriety. The thing to understand is that consistency effects and other things of their type aren't merely incidental side effects of a decision but the most important consequences of the decision. Let me explain.
Non-straw consequentialism takes knock-on effects into account. An agent's present self's influence on its future selves is a knock-on effect. In practice, with humans, making a decision now is really setting a policy of behaving that way forever. Which also means that most things people do are not decisions at all, but rather habits.
Consider these things:
In Newcomb's Problem it's good to have a policy of choosing the action that gets you the most money, rather than some policy that two-boxes.
In Parfit's Hitchhiker, when the driver (Paul Ekman, say) analyzes your facial expressions to determine with perfect accuracy whether you're lying, you want to already have the policy of keeping your promises, otherwise you die.
When Zvi Moshowitz passes by Famiglia Pizza and momentarily feels tempted to buy garlic knots that he doesn't want to want, he remembers, perhaps triggered by that very temptation, that what he chooses then would be the same choice he would make at other times under the same circumstances.*
One common thread here is a good policy does not incorrectly sever the causal or logical chain from its individual object-level decisions to outcomes it cares about. In Paul Christiano's terminology, a good policy is self-modeling. Causal decision theory has this property for direct, immediate causal links, but not for knock-on effects of the decision procedure itself, nor for logical ("acausal") implications of the decision or decision procedure. I want to claim that the way humans actually make decisions is also computation-aware (for instance, "Ugh I don't want to think about that...") and, sometimes, reflectively consistent.
I think people's fragmentary, intuitive, preconscious understanding of this concept is why they are suspicious of illustrative hypotheticals such as trolley problems. I used to think people's inability to reason within the assumptions of a hypothetical was just stupid, but part of what they're doing is rationally distrusting the usual no knock-on effects assumption, as well as the assumption that a human can be in the epistemic state implied by the hypothetical.
Now is a good time to read Cached Selves.
Policies don't have exceptions. If you claim to have a policy and you violate it at times, your actual policy is not your stated policy.
For some reason, I can't finish this post. Its unfinishedness is preventing me from writing other ones. I'm just going to post it in this state. Requests for clarifications are thus encouraged; I don't think this post is quite sufficient to adequately convey my notion of policy in people who don't already almost understand it.
It's Not a Telephone Game
Originally published December 21, 2014
When people spread degenerate versions of important ideas, it is usually because the version of idea in their head is only slightly less degenerate than the version they are spreading.
With each passing from one ear into another, an idea will randomly mutate, and creep closer toward preconceptions, cliches, less nuanced, and more viral versions. Why do ideas creep toward certain impoverished versions of themselves when mutating supposedly randomly? The answer is complex, and sure to be mostly misunderstood. I will give it anyway:
You would think the internet would stem the tide of memetic mutation, by preserving the original ideas. In fact it has had the opposite effect by allowing the less nuanced more viral things to propagate more freely, with progenitors helpless against increasingly disastrous misunderstandings.
I don't want to give examples, because then this essay will be about them instead of the more important general point. I will give one anyway: behold the censure of The Bell Curve, a sober, neutral book examining the nature and consequences of variation in intelligence. It does not make any strong claims about whence cometh the variation; to the contrary, it concludes that any confidence thereof the reader might have is misbegotten. It doesn't emphasize race. No one thinks of it that way. People think of it only as "that racist book about how whites are genetically superior."
...
People I talk to are sometimes frustrated or confused when I openly try to pre-empt miscommunications where someone is inevitably going to convey a mistaken understanding to someone else. They wonder why I'm trying to stifle conversation. "It's an interesting topic," they'll say. "I want to hear what he has to say. I think it'll be interesting."
It is at this point that I grab them by the shoulders, ferociously shake them, and scream, "THERE IS AN INOCULATION EFFECT WHERE MISTAKEN IDEAS TAKE THE PLACE OF THE CORRECT VERSIONS OF THOSE IDEAS."
Whereof one can only speak incorrectly, thereof one must remain silent. It is better to give no idea rather than the wrong idea. A hole can be filled; one that has been filled with the wrong stuff must be painstakingly dug up. It is harder to undo these mistakes than it is to make them.
It is not a telephone game. It is telephone in real life. It is not some toy academic principle that only appears in the lab. It actually happens, in real life, all the time, everywhere.
I have never seen anyone other than me try to do anything about it. It's not like nobody cares. All the time I see genuine experts lament the idiocy of laypersons who think they understand. I feel a kinship with Douglas Hofstadter in this talk, because throughout it I sense an attitude of, "Please try to actually understand the things that I am saying instead of rounding it all down by superficial analogy to ideas you already hold." Maybe experts mostly despair of the possibility of making the situation any better. And maybe they are not wrong to do so. But more likely is that it never occurs to them that they can minimize the likelihood, and furthermore the impact, of misconstruals.
How?
When I first read this post, I didn't understand it. How did I know I didn't understand it? Venkat does several things right:
There are other things you can do. When speaking, you can ask the people you're talking to whether they understood what you meant by some phrase. Last time I did this, the whole group of five said no (I expected most of them would get it). Even when people realize they don't understand, they seldom seek understanding.
As an audience, you should ignore anything that is framed as, "You need to be outraged at this thing." You should be especially wary of, "You need to be outraged at the people who aren't outraged at this thing," which is something that people actually say nowadays. Outrage is almost the opposite of understanding.
I am sort of breaking character by thinking seriously about practical solutions to a problem instead of just complaining about it. I really want to make a dent in this one.
This is all preliminary and unfocused. I don't know where to go from here. Maybe I should read more urticator; he seemed to think carefully about memes before disappearing.
Now is a good time to reread Wiio's Laws.
Sometimes really smart people, perhaps because they are harried or busy, help perpetuate badly flawed models of important ideas. Memes that get traction because they are easy to repeat, not because they are right.—Venkatesh RaoIn context, the quote may well be spot on. But in general, it is far too optimistic.
When people spread degenerate versions of important ideas, it is usually because the version of idea in their head is only slightly less degenerate than the version they are spreading.
With each passing from one ear into another, an idea will randomly mutate, and creep closer toward preconceptions, cliches, less nuanced, and more viral versions. Why do ideas creep toward certain impoverished versions of themselves when mutating supposedly randomly? The answer is complex, and sure to be mostly misunderstood. I will give it anyway:
- The more precise an idea is, the less space it takes up in the cluster structure of thoughtspace. So when a very small, precise idea changes slightly in some random direction, there is no reason that subsequent changes will be exact reversals of this first change. This is a very general principle and closely related to the reason why genetic mutations are almost universally deleterious.
- People can't really remember the entire content of what they learn, so they (must) employ compression heuristics which naturally bias them toward thinking in terms of the worldview they already have. It is easier to remember something if you relate it somehow to the things you think about every day.* We are seeing through a lens of preconceptions.
- Related to the previous reasons is that both speakers and audiences prefer counterproductive oversimplications and worthless speculations over nuanced construals. If this isn't obvious to you, consider how many non-physicists think they can talk about quantum mechanics.
- Also, minor misunderstandings do happen. 'Understanding' is not a binary variable. There's a lot between bellyfeeling and grokking. A smart person with a headache is slightly less able to understand things than the same person otherwise.
- Most important is the not-quite-tautological observation that more viral forms of a meme spread and less viral forms disappear. And lower-fidelity copies of a meme are more viral than higher-fidelty copies.
You would think the internet would stem the tide of memetic mutation, by preserving the original ideas. In fact it has had the opposite effect by allowing the less nuanced more viral things to propagate more freely, with progenitors helpless against increasingly disastrous misunderstandings.
I don't want to give examples, because then this essay will be about them instead of the more important general point. I will give one anyway: behold the censure of The Bell Curve, a sober, neutral book examining the nature and consequences of variation in intelligence. It does not make any strong claims about whence cometh the variation; to the contrary, it concludes that any confidence thereof the reader might have is misbegotten. It doesn't emphasize race. No one thinks of it that way. People think of it only as "that racist book about how whites are genetically superior."
...
People I talk to are sometimes frustrated or confused when I openly try to pre-empt miscommunications where someone is inevitably going to convey a mistaken understanding to someone else. They wonder why I'm trying to stifle conversation. "It's an interesting topic," they'll say. "I want to hear what he has to say. I think it'll be interesting."
It is at this point that I grab them by the shoulders, ferociously shake them, and scream, "THERE IS AN INOCULATION EFFECT WHERE MISTAKEN IDEAS TAKE THE PLACE OF THE CORRECT VERSIONS OF THOSE IDEAS."
Whereof one can only speak incorrectly, thereof one must remain silent. It is better to give no idea rather than the wrong idea. A hole can be filled; one that has been filled with the wrong stuff must be painstakingly dug up. It is harder to undo these mistakes than it is to make them.
It is not a telephone game. It is telephone in real life. It is not some toy academic principle that only appears in the lab. It actually happens, in real life, all the time, everywhere.
I have never seen anyone other than me try to do anything about it. It's not like nobody cares. All the time I see genuine experts lament the idiocy of laypersons who think they understand. I feel a kinship with Douglas Hofstadter in this talk, because throughout it I sense an attitude of, "Please try to actually understand the things that I am saying instead of rounding it all down by superficial analogy to ideas you already hold." Maybe experts mostly despair of the possibility of making the situation any better. And maybe they are not wrong to do so. But more likely is that it never occurs to them that they can minimize the likelihood, and furthermore the impact, of misconstruals.
How?
When I first read this post, I didn't understand it. How did I know I didn't understand it? Venkat does several things right:
- He lists common misconceptions and explains why they are wrong. I had trouble distinguishing these from his correct conception, which wouldn't have been the case if I understood.
- He gives pop quizzes. These are annoying and therefore reduce virulence. But they are a useful tool for the reader: I couldn't answer the questions, so I knew my understanding must have been poor.
- He fluently navigates the ladder of abstraction. I don't know whether this generic writing virtue increases audience meta-comprehension. It might. (Pop quiz: what is meta-comprehension?)
There are other things you can do. When speaking, you can ask the people you're talking to whether they understood what you meant by some phrase. Last time I did this, the whole group of five said no (I expected most of them would get it). Even when people realize they don't understand, they seldom seek understanding.
As an audience, you should ignore anything that is framed as, "You need to be outraged at this thing." You should be especially wary of, "You need to be outraged at the people who aren't outraged at this thing," which is something that people actually say nowadays. Outrage is almost the opposite of understanding.
I am sort of breaking character by thinking seriously about practical solutions to a problem instead of just complaining about it. I really want to make a dent in this one.
This is all preliminary and unfocused. I don't know where to go from here. Maybe I should read more urticator; he seemed to think carefully about memes before disappearing.
Now is a good time to reread Wiio's Laws.
The Monster
Originally published December 16, 2014
It has many names: akrasia, apraxia, weakness of will, autistic inertia, an insufficiency of spoons, the wall, the hole, being a non-player character, chaotic inversion, absence of purposefulness, too busy to think about life, the inner Bruce, the need to lose, unstructured procrastination, the infungibility of scarce time, lack of agency, sphexishness, revealed preferences, executive dysfunction, the rarity of absolution, effortful decision-making problems, the valley of bad rationality, the collapse of feasibility of default roles, the route-eater, severe Algernon tradeoffs, broken OODA loop, tropisms toward negative life outcomes, Matryoshka principal-agent problems, the Catch-22 foundry, intelligence level 0, perversely-incentivized intuitive game theory modules, the unaccusable accusation-garnerer, the Preventer, the invisible self-reinforcing restrainer, picoeconomic dislocation, breakdown of will, hidden motives, innocent failures, multiply-fractured executive ego, bad meta-habits, corrupted hardware, the machine of actively self-mislabeling self-control handles, the complex maladaptive system, the mirror maze miseryhouse...
The monster is my new name for my lifelong inability to do things on purpose.
My 12th grade English teacher assigned heavy, time-consuming assignments at the end of the schoolyear after the AP exams were already over. Everyone protested, except me because I didn't do them. Her response to the complaints was unexpectedly wise, something like, "If you can't get yourself to do these assignments now, what makes you think you'll be able to do your just-as-hard assignments in college?" It was an eye-opener for me: I realized that my habit of never doing assignments was not going to magically disappear.
It occurred to me that going to college would be a very bad idea. It actually occurred to me. But I still went, because it was the default path. I lazily applied to one and only one mediocre ("good") school and got accepted. I dutifully went and dropped out after failing all of my courses the second semester and now I am in debt. The monster won.
I need to emphasize how damaging this incidental inability to act correctly or intentionally was. During the first half of the first semester I was subjected to a tyrannical sociopathic roommate whose attitude toward me was "haha, why haven't you gotten over your stupid social anxiety, obviously I should expertly, Machiavellianly arrange for the consensus to be that what we and your involuntary instincts do to you is your fault, hahaha". My effortful, coordinated attempts to switch rooms or something were useless; no official would have any of it. After the very stressful Incident whereupon I was freed from his company the worst thing that could have ever possibly happened did happen, and I was gone. I never recovered from the roommate or from Connie's death. I spent the second semester alone, feeling guilty about not doing my coursework instead of doing it. The monster wouldn't let me do it.
The default view that people take and I don't mean hypothetical people this actually happens is that if you fail at college or at finding a job, it's because of something culpable about your conscious game-theoretic homunculus, rather than other things like involuntary perversely-incentivized rejection-related neurosis, or some moderately-incentivizable non-conscious thing like Handle or Vladimir_M talks about, or the bottom falling out of the economy, or being inappropriately assigned to college though it's an infeasible default role, or not being in contact with normal sources of culture and advice that would provide the breadth of context to point out that you might need attention from the disabled students office from day one, or horrible mixed-message logical entailments of culturally propagated expectations...
I sleep for around twelve hours a day. When I awaken, it takes me at least three hours to get out of the car. Tasks that ordinary men can do instantly take me years to finally get around to, if I don't eventually give up on them. And they keep piling up, so I lose track of some; things fall apart; all descends into entropy. I don't shower or brush my teeth very often. I do laundry once every three months maybe. Homelessness makes each of these problems worse. In 2013 someone bought me a microphone, which I wanted to use to record audiobooks, and I when it arrived I found I couldn't plug it into my laptop. It still awaits an adapter. That sort of thing happens all the time.
Nothing has ever held my interest forever. I first started animating in 2000 with cute flipbooks, animating on and off, mostly off, for subsequent years, and finally gave up on it when I realized in 2014 I didn't have the motivation to do a series of movies I've wanted to for a long time. That lasted longer than anything else. Even things I'm completely addicted to, like League of Legends, can't hold my interest. I played that game obsessively for a year, and one day stopped and never started again. In that case I didn't want to start again, but even when I want to start again it doesn't matter; the monster won't let me. The most virtuous thing I've spent my time doing was spending late 2013 to April 2014 independently learning the calculus. I didn't mean to stop, but I did. I kept trying to start again and couldn't. Dozens of times I've tried to learn programming and involuntarily crumbled at the first or second hurdle.
The monster does not feel like an absence of some ability. I call it the monster because it feels like an active, evil presence blocking me from doing what I should. It lives in everyone to some degree, but in me it has grown very strong. In growing strong the monster has grown strange. Where in most folk the small monster manifests only in temporary procrastinations and mild social aversions, in me it has consumed all.
For instance, it has compelled me to pre-emptively either provoke my rejection out of, or directly reject myself out of, all the communities through which I might have had a real support network. There are tropisms, correlated effects from shared historical causes, that prevented many potential relationships and which caused me to sever the most important connections I did have. I am angry at my past for building up a set of bad habits and failing to build up good habits which people normally acquire and use to kludge together a social life. What I do have are a very few people who arguably care about me but are almost as dysfunctional as I am, or superficial acquaintances who feel vaguely guilty about their proximity to my self-perpetuating horrible problems but won't try to help me with them.
I can't approach girls. I spend most of my waking moments in agony from the mix of sexual privation, lack of intimacy or affection, and plain multifarious lonesomeness. Yet despite, and also because of, the severe pain, I cannot even try to screw up the nerve to do the one thing that could theoretically alleviate it. It isn't fear that stops me. When I tell people about this inability to even try to try, let alone try, let alone try and succeed, they always assume the only possible explanation is fear. Yes there is sometimes fear when the situation arises, but that's just the wrong explanation. The psychological state I enter does not seem to be one that other humans can relate to, one of being physically incapable of taking an action that one is not afraid of taking. ("Fear" is in part a fake explanation that people use to mask their ignorance of what's really going on, which is certain to be much more complicated than a single word.)
What is actually going on then? when I want to approach but doing so feels like an error message is blocking my path and the OK button is grayed out. In 8th grade I was diagnosed with Asperger's, but I don't think that really suffices or even captures any of the dynamics. I don't know what the monster is made of, but this particular inability feels like it comes from the same place as my inability to learn the calculus or programming, and my inability to go to the DMV on my own, and my inability to walk into a pharmacy to get heartburn medication, and my inability to focus on a non-video-game task for more than 15 seconds, and my inability to gather allies, by which I mean the monster causes all of them.
When I bring it up, people are very quick to pretend that there is no such thing as the monster in anyone ever, in part because it represents a convenient excuse to be lazy. But this is flatly denying reality; you can see it in anyone, and of course in some people it will be stronger than in others. Even when all I'm trying to do is claim that I did not choose to fail at life as hard as I did, that I did not knowingly and willingly decide to let things fall apart so hard, that I failed because I didn't have as much control over my life as they want to believe everyone has, because otherwise how horrible would the world be, a place where people's lives are routinely ruined and it's not even their fault...
I don't even disagree with the sorts of meta-policies that lead to a cultural norm of pressuring people to shape the fuck up and get a job or whatever. But the forces that have to exist to keep such a norm stable—the Schellingian game theory about punishment of non-punishers, interest of elites in promoting the norms, etc.—lead to Triversian self-deception in which people make themselves believe false things about how draconian application of the norm is likely to affect other people's future likelihood of shaping the fuck up, so as to avoid social repercussions and weakening the structure in which the norm is embedded*. People in the actual society are mostly worked to the point of constant low-level misery, which not only creates resentment of people not subjected to that exact kind of misery but also implies that they themselves are already under enough pressure that they're willing to work the amount of time and effort that makes them that miserable. The combination of all of these things makes it impossible to realize that trying to elicit the same amount of effort from me by applying that pressure, outside a setting where my executive ego doesn't have to be involved in generating and choosing to continue to follow plans, I collapse.
(Argh, I'm so bound-up by various internally conflicting incommunicable fetters, incompatible precommitment-like devices, introspectively inaccessible aversions, and unspeakable preferences, that I can't say anything at all on the object-level. The things I'm trying to do with this mess-bundle feel subjectively so important and urgent all the time and people keep not treating them that way and that feedback results in me getting even more desperate and broken and bound... The correct-according-to-a-nonexistent-but-useful-standard move in this situation is to JOotS, as Hofstadter would say, to go meta and explain the bound-upness. But that's no good either; I'm bound-up on all the higher meta levels too. How did this even happen!? There is no use even trying to explain. Best to just call it part of the monster.)
Part of the mechanism is that the sorts of things people suggest I do to deal with the monster are things I could only do if the monster were not there.
Consider that my father's understanding of why I fail is, "my belief that I will fail causes me to fail." ...Really, that's his understanding. Why does he stop at the basic, easily corrected mistake of getting the order of causality backwards, instead of even bothering to come with a subtler, more defensible-seeming wrong understanding? I want to call it an excess of just-world alief leading to Triversian self-deception, maybe something about principal-agent problems involving unresolvable payoff matrix asymmetries, but in truth I don't know. My own father.
People sometimes ask me, if I'm so incapable of ever doing anything about my horrible situation, why don't I kill myself. The monster won't let me.
When I think about what the monster is trying to do by blocking me at every turn, I don't get far. It may be related to problems with emotional attachments resulting from my mother disappearing and being murdered soon after I was born ("i need to make sure nothing can ever be that bad again") and Connie dying unexpectedly and for no reason, and subsequently being abandoned by every romantic partner and several important acquaintances, occasionally in ways that left me feeling extremely hurt and bitter for years.
In desperation for worthwhile attachments and acceptance, the monster causes abject isolation. It's astonishing; it cannot be chanceful; it's like something is hounding me... It's like someone is trying to get the monster (or me or something) to admit that the effects of its actions are directly opposite to the goals in terms of which it lashes out with those actions.
It took me a very, very long time to admit that it's a disability. I cannot slay the monster, any more than you can choose not to suffer your excretory system. No matter how vigilant I am, it grows stronger faster than I do. I have a disability.
I am usually very angry at society for letting it come to this, for letting my bad habits fester and coagulate into a powerful monster feeding off the absence of virtuous interruptions of this feedback loop, letting me become a homeless unemployable chronically lonely sexless birdless worthless wretch, instead of turning me into the person I could have been if I'd had proper interventions sufficiently long ago. On top of this, society also makes it nearly impossible for people like me, who've been failed by it, to opt out, to kill themselves safely, painlessly, and in a way that won't get us imprisoned in a mental hospitalprison in the event of failure ("Attempting suicide doesn't get you sent to regular jail, so it's legal!" no fuck you) as punishment for violating a sacred taboo. I've been hospitalized against my will twice just for talking about being suicidal, and FUCK THAT. P.S. if you're reading this don't try to get me imprisoned a third time. I will never forgive you
Part of this anger seems to be the perception that society tries hard to frame the situation in such a way that it's impossible for me to plausibly claim that I am doing the best I can with severely limited resources over insurmountable stumbling blocks. The perception is that society is trying hard to finally open a long-lusted-after crack in my fortifications and say "A-ha! You never really cared about being a virtuous, useful, good person at all," in order to expropriate my identity and take away my last claim to personhood, while claiming, either knowingly falsely or without consciously understanding the distinction at all, but without any way for me to call them on that, that I knowingly chose to deserve it. This is how I felt when I was libeled recently by some cruel vagueblogs, absent from which was any apparent remembered realization that I am still a person who appropriately cares about and takes into account other people's welfare, in a way that successfully made it impossible for me to defend myself, and with no one else out there willing to defend me.
This is parallel to, for instance, "If I don't retaliate against the person who cruelly derided one of the only beings that actually properly cared about me yes this actually happened someone made fun of me and my bird because I am sad that she died, it will just cement everything's excuses to abandon me for disloyalty."
Because I know the monster lives inside me, I know that the paths by which I might have done direct good myself are cut off. So the only remaining subjectively compelling routes for doing a lot of good in the world are of two classes. The first involves being a good influence on others, who themselves would do more good, and less harm, than they otherwise would. But the monster has eaten this route as well; even the people who believe they should be influenced by me are generally influenced in the wrong direction or not at all. The monster interferes with my ability to interact with people. It makes everything wrong.*
The second class involves an unprecedented level of altruistic assistance from someone else. I keep thinking that if a miracle were to occur, if someone were to rescue me from this Hell and bring me to a stable situation where I could practice arete, the monster would weaken, and partial recovery could begin. It is far too late for me to become the person I should have been, too much irreparable damage has been done, but I still think that I have some potential to reanimate into something worthwhile, if only... if only someone would get past my surliness, and ignore the weirdness and inconvenience of the type of altruistic act that would be required... I frequently inspire a transient velleity to help me out of the hole, but needless to say, that has never resulted in actual help.
The ordinary reader is still unconvinced and still wants to denounce me with some foolishness like "It's all in your head." Why is the ordinary reader still here? I don't know. An equally vicious class of reader wants to give condescending advice. A better class of reader sympathizes and wants to give me a hug (which would not help) or say something comforting and non-judgemental (which also would not help). Be assured that there is no reaction you can have that I have not already seen. I've had the conversation hundreds of times, and part of why I wrote this blog post is so that I never have to have it again. I have heard all the dismissals, seen all the advice, and failed to pretend to appreciate all the bromides. No one has ever yet responded with "Come stay at my place for as long as you want."
The previous paragraph is very unpleasant. I wanted to intrigue people about the possibility of cooperating with me in a nonstandard way to help me get on my feet, but what I did was manufacture a new way to repel people. I am leaving it in as another example of how the monster manifests. You could say the monster wrote that paragraph. Maybe it wrote this one. Is there anything left of me?
In me the monster has consumed all. There are no longer any routes whatsoever by which I may attain absolution. Absolution isn't for everyone. Not everyone gets the chance to do good with their life. The only things awaiting me are suffering and death.
It has many names: akrasia, apraxia, weakness of will, autistic inertia, an insufficiency of spoons, the wall, the hole, being a non-player character, chaotic inversion, absence of purposefulness, too busy to think about life, the inner Bruce, the need to lose, unstructured procrastination, the infungibility of scarce time, lack of agency, sphexishness, revealed preferences, executive dysfunction, the rarity of absolution, effortful decision-making problems, the valley of bad rationality, the collapse of feasibility of default roles, the route-eater, severe Algernon tradeoffs, broken OODA loop, tropisms toward negative life outcomes, Matryoshka principal-agent problems, the Catch-22 foundry, intelligence level 0, perversely-incentivized intuitive game theory modules, the unaccusable accusation-garnerer, the Preventer, the invisible self-reinforcing restrainer, picoeconomic dislocation, breakdown of will, hidden motives, innocent failures, multiply-fractured executive ego, bad meta-habits, corrupted hardware, the machine of actively self-mislabeling self-control handles, the complex maladaptive system, the mirror maze miseryhouse...
The monster is my new name for my lifelong inability to do things on purpose.
My 12th grade English teacher assigned heavy, time-consuming assignments at the end of the schoolyear after the AP exams were already over. Everyone protested, except me because I didn't do them. Her response to the complaints was unexpectedly wise, something like, "If you can't get yourself to do these assignments now, what makes you think you'll be able to do your just-as-hard assignments in college?" It was an eye-opener for me: I realized that my habit of never doing assignments was not going to magically disappear.
It occurred to me that going to college would be a very bad idea. It actually occurred to me. But I still went, because it was the default path. I lazily applied to one and only one mediocre ("good") school and got accepted. I dutifully went and dropped out after failing all of my courses the second semester and now I am in debt. The monster won.
I need to emphasize how damaging this incidental inability to act correctly or intentionally was. During the first half of the first semester I was subjected to a tyrannical sociopathic roommate whose attitude toward me was "haha, why haven't you gotten over your stupid social anxiety, obviously I should expertly, Machiavellianly arrange for the consensus to be that what we and your involuntary instincts do to you is your fault, hahaha". My effortful, coordinated attempts to switch rooms or something were useless; no official would have any of it. After the very stressful Incident whereupon I was freed from his company the worst thing that could have ever possibly happened did happen, and I was gone. I never recovered from the roommate or from Connie's death. I spent the second semester alone, feeling guilty about not doing my coursework instead of doing it. The monster wouldn't let me do it.
The default view that people take and I don't mean hypothetical people this actually happens is that if you fail at college or at finding a job, it's because of something culpable about your conscious game-theoretic homunculus, rather than other things like involuntary perversely-incentivized rejection-related neurosis, or some moderately-incentivizable non-conscious thing like Handle or Vladimir_M talks about, or the bottom falling out of the economy, or being inappropriately assigned to college though it's an infeasible default role, or not being in contact with normal sources of culture and advice that would provide the breadth of context to point out that you might need attention from the disabled students office from day one, or horrible mixed-message logical entailments of culturally propagated expectations...
I sleep for around twelve hours a day. When I awaken, it takes me at least three hours to get out of the car. Tasks that ordinary men can do instantly take me years to finally get around to, if I don't eventually give up on them. And they keep piling up, so I lose track of some; things fall apart; all descends into entropy. I don't shower or brush my teeth very often. I do laundry once every three months maybe. Homelessness makes each of these problems worse. In 2013 someone bought me a microphone, which I wanted to use to record audiobooks, and I when it arrived I found I couldn't plug it into my laptop. It still awaits an adapter. That sort of thing happens all the time.
Nothing has ever held my interest forever. I first started animating in 2000 with cute flipbooks, animating on and off, mostly off, for subsequent years, and finally gave up on it when I realized in 2014 I didn't have the motivation to do a series of movies I've wanted to for a long time. That lasted longer than anything else. Even things I'm completely addicted to, like League of Legends, can't hold my interest. I played that game obsessively for a year, and one day stopped and never started again. In that case I didn't want to start again, but even when I want to start again it doesn't matter; the monster won't let me. The most virtuous thing I've spent my time doing was spending late 2013 to April 2014 independently learning the calculus. I didn't mean to stop, but I did. I kept trying to start again and couldn't. Dozens of times I've tried to learn programming and involuntarily crumbled at the first or second hurdle.
The monster does not feel like an absence of some ability. I call it the monster because it feels like an active, evil presence blocking me from doing what I should. It lives in everyone to some degree, but in me it has grown very strong. In growing strong the monster has grown strange. Where in most folk the small monster manifests only in temporary procrastinations and mild social aversions, in me it has consumed all.
For instance, it has compelled me to pre-emptively either provoke my rejection out of, or directly reject myself out of, all the communities through which I might have had a real support network. There are tropisms, correlated effects from shared historical causes, that prevented many potential relationships and which caused me to sever the most important connections I did have. I am angry at my past for building up a set of bad habits and failing to build up good habits which people normally acquire and use to kludge together a social life. What I do have are a very few people who arguably care about me but are almost as dysfunctional as I am, or superficial acquaintances who feel vaguely guilty about their proximity to my self-perpetuating horrible problems but won't try to help me with them.
I can't approach girls. I spend most of my waking moments in agony from the mix of sexual privation, lack of intimacy or affection, and plain multifarious lonesomeness. Yet despite, and also because of, the severe pain, I cannot even try to screw up the nerve to do the one thing that could theoretically alleviate it. It isn't fear that stops me. When I tell people about this inability to even try to try, let alone try, let alone try and succeed, they always assume the only possible explanation is fear. Yes there is sometimes fear when the situation arises, but that's just the wrong explanation. The psychological state I enter does not seem to be one that other humans can relate to, one of being physically incapable of taking an action that one is not afraid of taking. ("Fear" is in part a fake explanation that people use to mask their ignorance of what's really going on, which is certain to be much more complicated than a single word.)
What is actually going on then? when I want to approach but doing so feels like an error message is blocking my path and the OK button is grayed out. In 8th grade I was diagnosed with Asperger's, but I don't think that really suffices or even captures any of the dynamics. I don't know what the monster is made of, but this particular inability feels like it comes from the same place as my inability to learn the calculus or programming, and my inability to go to the DMV on my own, and my inability to walk into a pharmacy to get heartburn medication, and my inability to focus on a non-video-game task for more than 15 seconds, and my inability to gather allies, by which I mean the monster causes all of them.
When I bring it up, people are very quick to pretend that there is no such thing as the monster in anyone ever, in part because it represents a convenient excuse to be lazy. But this is flatly denying reality; you can see it in anyone, and of course in some people it will be stronger than in others. Even when all I'm trying to do is claim that I did not choose to fail at life as hard as I did, that I did not knowingly and willingly decide to let things fall apart so hard, that I failed because I didn't have as much control over my life as they want to believe everyone has, because otherwise how horrible would the world be, a place where people's lives are routinely ruined and it's not even their fault...
I don't even disagree with the sorts of meta-policies that lead to a cultural norm of pressuring people to shape the fuck up and get a job or whatever. But the forces that have to exist to keep such a norm stable—the Schellingian game theory about punishment of non-punishers, interest of elites in promoting the norms, etc.—lead to Triversian self-deception in which people make themselves believe false things about how draconian application of the norm is likely to affect other people's future likelihood of shaping the fuck up, so as to avoid social repercussions and weakening the structure in which the norm is embedded*. People in the actual society are mostly worked to the point of constant low-level misery, which not only creates resentment of people not subjected to that exact kind of misery but also implies that they themselves are already under enough pressure that they're willing to work the amount of time and effort that makes them that miserable. The combination of all of these things makes it impossible to realize that trying to elicit the same amount of effort from me by applying that pressure, outside a setting where my executive ego doesn't have to be involved in generating and choosing to continue to follow plans, I collapse.
(Argh, I'm so bound-up by various internally conflicting incommunicable fetters, incompatible precommitment-like devices, introspectively inaccessible aversions, and unspeakable preferences, that I can't say anything at all on the object-level. The things I'm trying to do with this mess-bundle feel subjectively so important and urgent all the time and people keep not treating them that way and that feedback results in me getting even more desperate and broken and bound... The correct-according-to-a-nonexistent-but-useful-standard move in this situation is to JOotS, as Hofstadter would say, to go meta and explain the bound-upness. But that's no good either; I'm bound-up on all the higher meta levels too. How did this even happen!? There is no use even trying to explain. Best to just call it part of the monster.)
Part of the mechanism is that the sorts of things people suggest I do to deal with the monster are things I could only do if the monster were not there.
Consider that my father's understanding of why I fail is, "my belief that I will fail causes me to fail." ...Really, that's his understanding. Why does he stop at the basic, easily corrected mistake of getting the order of causality backwards, instead of even bothering to come with a subtler, more defensible-seeming wrong understanding? I want to call it an excess of just-world alief leading to Triversian self-deception, maybe something about principal-agent problems involving unresolvable payoff matrix asymmetries, but in truth I don't know. My own father.
People sometimes ask me, if I'm so incapable of ever doing anything about my horrible situation, why don't I kill myself. The monster won't let me.
When I think about what the monster is trying to do by blocking me at every turn, I don't get far. It may be related to problems with emotional attachments resulting from my mother disappearing and being murdered soon after I was born ("i need to make sure nothing can ever be that bad again") and Connie dying unexpectedly and for no reason, and subsequently being abandoned by every romantic partner and several important acquaintances, occasionally in ways that left me feeling extremely hurt and bitter for years.
In desperation for worthwhile attachments and acceptance, the monster causes abject isolation. It's astonishing; it cannot be chanceful; it's like something is hounding me... It's like someone is trying to get the monster (or me or something) to admit that the effects of its actions are directly opposite to the goals in terms of which it lashes out with those actions.
It took me a very, very long time to admit that it's a disability. I cannot slay the monster, any more than you can choose not to suffer your excretory system. No matter how vigilant I am, it grows stronger faster than I do. I have a disability.
I am usually very angry at society for letting it come to this, for letting my bad habits fester and coagulate into a powerful monster feeding off the absence of virtuous interruptions of this feedback loop, letting me become a homeless unemployable chronically lonely sexless birdless worthless wretch, instead of turning me into the person I could have been if I'd had proper interventions sufficiently long ago. On top of this, society also makes it nearly impossible for people like me, who've been failed by it, to opt out, to kill themselves safely, painlessly, and in a way that won't get us imprisoned in a mental hospitalprison in the event of failure ("Attempting suicide doesn't get you sent to regular jail, so it's legal!" no fuck you) as punishment for violating a sacred taboo. I've been hospitalized against my will twice just for talking about being suicidal, and FUCK THAT. P.S. if you're reading this don't try to get me imprisoned a third time. I will never forgive you
Part of this anger seems to be the perception that society tries hard to frame the situation in such a way that it's impossible for me to plausibly claim that I am doing the best I can with severely limited resources over insurmountable stumbling blocks. The perception is that society is trying hard to finally open a long-lusted-after crack in my fortifications and say "A-ha! You never really cared about being a virtuous, useful, good person at all," in order to expropriate my identity and take away my last claim to personhood, while claiming, either knowingly falsely or without consciously understanding the distinction at all, but without any way for me to call them on that, that I knowingly chose to deserve it. This is how I felt when I was libeled recently by some cruel vagueblogs, absent from which was any apparent remembered realization that I am still a person who appropriately cares about and takes into account other people's welfare, in a way that successfully made it impossible for me to defend myself, and with no one else out there willing to defend me.
This is parallel to, for instance, "If I don't retaliate against the person who cruelly derided one of the only beings that actually properly cared about me yes this actually happened someone made fun of me and my bird because I am sad that she died, it will just cement everything's excuses to abandon me for disloyalty."
Because I know the monster lives inside me, I know that the paths by which I might have done direct good myself are cut off. So the only remaining subjectively compelling routes for doing a lot of good in the world are of two classes. The first involves being a good influence on others, who themselves would do more good, and less harm, than they otherwise would. But the monster has eaten this route as well; even the people who believe they should be influenced by me are generally influenced in the wrong direction or not at all. The monster interferes with my ability to interact with people. It makes everything wrong.*
The second class involves an unprecedented level of altruistic assistance from someone else. I keep thinking that if a miracle were to occur, if someone were to rescue me from this Hell and bring me to a stable situation where I could practice arete, the monster would weaken, and partial recovery could begin. It is far too late for me to become the person I should have been, too much irreparable damage has been done, but I still think that I have some potential to reanimate into something worthwhile, if only... if only someone would get past my surliness, and ignore the weirdness and inconvenience of the type of altruistic act that would be required... I frequently inspire a transient velleity to help me out of the hole, but needless to say, that has never resulted in actual help.
The ordinary reader is still unconvinced and still wants to denounce me with some foolishness like "It's all in your head." Why is the ordinary reader still here? I don't know. An equally vicious class of reader wants to give condescending advice. A better class of reader sympathizes and wants to give me a hug (which would not help) or say something comforting and non-judgemental (which also would not help). Be assured that there is no reaction you can have that I have not already seen. I've had the conversation hundreds of times, and part of why I wrote this blog post is so that I never have to have it again. I have heard all the dismissals, seen all the advice, and failed to pretend to appreciate all the bromides. No one has ever yet responded with "Come stay at my place for as long as you want."
The previous paragraph is very unpleasant. I wanted to intrigue people about the possibility of cooperating with me in a nonstandard way to help me get on my feet, but what I did was manufacture a new way to repel people. I am leaving it in as another example of how the monster manifests. You could say the monster wrote that paragraph. Maybe it wrote this one. Is there anything left of me?
In me the monster has consumed all. There are no longer any routes whatsoever by which I may attain absolution. Absolution isn't for everyone. Not everyone gets the chance to do good with their life. The only things awaiting me are suffering and death.
Generalized Mount Stupid
Originally published December 6, 2014
People habitually conflate their ability to talk about something with their knowledge of it. Mount Stupid grows as you approach gender, race, nootropics, IQ, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, theology, metaphysics, consciousness, psychology, etc.
Robin Hanson points out that Mount Stupid is a global maximum for contentious but settled issues:
Why?
Actually knowing things is hard. Bullshitting is easy. People say whatever they think will create the best impression, which is unrelated to what they know. People are disingenuous as a rule.
But even the rare folk who don't bullshit all the fucking time are mostly on Mount Stupid most of the time. It'd be disingenuous of me to pretend I know all the reasons for this. T.S. Eliot points to part of it. Part of it is that humans automatically conflate familiarity with understanding.
Mount Stupid isn't limited to conversations and arguments. The oft-quoted Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect:
"Don't believe everything you read."
"Don't believe everything you think."
These things are read with approval and then ignored. Reading those words produces no change in epistemic behavior. Surely neither will this blog post change its readers in the way that it should.
If all you want is to have "interesting" conversations, then you will ignore me, you will go on bullshitting unaware that you are bullshitting and buying everyone else's bullshit. But if you want to believe truly, and wisely allocate your epistemic humility, then maintain a socially unviable level of lack of opinion on most things.
Quoth Gwern:
SMBC #2475 by Zach Weiner
The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.—T.S. EliotThis is rather important.
People habitually conflate their ability to talk about something with their knowledge of it. Mount Stupid grows as you approach gender, race, nootropics, IQ, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, theology, metaphysics, consciousness, psychology, etc.
Robin Hanson points out that Mount Stupid is a global maximum for contentious but settled issues:
I have had this experience several times in my life; I come across clear enough evidence that settles for me an issue I had seen long disputed. At that point my choice is to either go back and try to persuade disputants, or to continue on to explore the new issues that this settlement raises. After a short detour to tell a few disputants, I have usually chosen this second route. This is one explanation for the existence of settled but still disputed issues; people who learn the answer leave the conversation.Why is it so awful?
Why?
Actually knowing things is hard. Bullshitting is easy. People say whatever they think will create the best impression, which is unrelated to what they know. People are disingenuous as a rule.
But even the rare folk who don't bullshit all the fucking time are mostly on Mount Stupid most of the time. It'd be disingenuous of me to pretend I know all the reasons for this. T.S. Eliot points to part of it. Part of it is that humans automatically conflate familiarity with understanding.
Mount Stupid isn't limited to conversations and arguments. The oft-quoted Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect:
Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)It's easy to debunk casual bullshit in print, but people never do, even smart people. The ubiquity of Mount Stupid bothers me so much because it's so easy to believe what people say. It's so easy to believe the specious thoughts you think and say aloud.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
"Don't believe everything you read."
"Don't believe everything you think."
These things are read with approval and then ignored. Reading those words produces no change in epistemic behavior. Surely neither will this blog post change its readers in the way that it should.
If all you want is to have "interesting" conversations, then you will ignore me, you will go on bullshitting unaware that you are bullshitting and buying everyone else's bullshit. But if you want to believe truly, and wisely allocate your epistemic humility, then maintain a socially unviable level of lack of opinion on most things.
Quoth Gwern:
It’s worth noting that the IQ wars are a rabbit hole you can easily dive down. The literature is vast, spans all sorts of groups, all sorts of designs, from test validities to sampling to statistical regression vs causal inference to forms of bias; every point is hotly debated, the ways in which studies can be validly critiqued are an education in how to read papers and look for how they are weak or make jumps or some of the data just looks wrong, and you’ll learn every technical requirement and premise and methodological limitation because the opponents of that particular result will be sure to bring them up if it’ll at all help their case.
In this respect, it’s a lot like the feuds in biblical criticism over issues like whether Jesus existed, or the long philosophical debate over the existence of God. There too is an incredible amount of material to cover, by some really smart people (what did geeks do before science and modernity? well, for the most part, they seem to have done theology; consider how much time and effort Isaac Newton reportedly spent on alchemy and his own Biblical studies, or the sheer brainpower that must’ve been spent over the centuries in rabbinical studies). You could learn a lot about the ancient world or the incredibly complex chain of transmission of the Bible’s constituents in their endless varieties and how they are put together into a single canonical modern text, or the other countless issues of textual criticism. An awful lot, indeed. One could, and people as smart or smarter than you have, lose one’s life in exploring little back-alleys and details.
If, like most people, you’ve only read a few papers or books on it, your opinion (whatever that is) is worthless and you probably don’t even realize how worthless your opinion is, how far you are from actually grasping the subtleties involved and having a command of all the studies and criticisms of said studies. I exempt myself from this only inasmuch as I have realized how little I still know after all my reading. No matter how tempting it is to think that you may be able to finally put together the compelling refutation of God’s existence or to demonstrate that Jesus’s divinity was a late addition to his gospel, you won’t make a dent in the debate. In other words, these can become forms of nerd sniping and intellectual crack. “If only I compile a few more studies, make a few more points - then my case will become clear and convincing, and people on the Internet will stop being wrong!”
But having said that, and admiring things like Plantinga’s free will defense, and the subtle logical issues in formulating it and the lack of any really concrete evidence for or against Jesus’s existence, do I take the basic question of God seriously? No. The theists’ rearguard attempts and ever more ingenious explanations and indirect pathways of reasons and touted miracles fundamentally do not add up to an existing whole. The universe does not look anything like a omni-benevolent/powerful/scient god was involved, a great deal of determined effort has failed to provide any convincing proof, there not being a god is consistent with all the observed processes and animal kingdom and natural events and material world we see, and so on. The persistence of the debate reflects more what motivated cognition can accomplish and the weakness of existing epistemology and debate. Unfortunately, this could be equally well-said by someone on the other side of the debate, and in any case, I cannot communicate my gestalt impression of the field to anyone else. I don’t expect anyone to be the least bit swayed by what I’ve written here.
So why be interested in the topics at all? If you cannot convince anyone, if you cannot learn the field to a reasonable depth, and you cannot even communicate well what convinced you, why bother? In the spirit of keeping one’s identity small, I say: it’s not clear at all. So you should know in advance whether you want to take the red pill and see how far down the rabbit hole you go before you finally give up, or you take the blue pill and be an onlooker as you settle for a high-level overview of the more interesting papers and issues and accept that you will only have that and a general indefensible assessment of the state of play.
Compare and Contrast Comments on Offense
Originally published December 1, 2014
The two best blog post comments ever written were both about the social game theory behind offense.
Vladimir_M:
Both of these comments were responses to Yvain. Maybe after that second one he'll have gotten it.
The two best blog post comments ever written were both about the social game theory behind offense.
Vladimir_M:
Yvain:Handle's comment explains the same idea in much more detail:The offender, for eir part, should stop offending as soon as ey realizes that the amount of pain eir actions cause is greater than the amount of annoyance it would take to avoid the offending action, even if ey can't understand why it would cause any pain at all.In a world where people make decisions according to this principle, one has the incentive to self-modify into a utility monster who feels enormous suffering at any actions of other people one dislikes for whatever reason. And indeed, we can see this happening to some extent: when people take unreasonable offense and create drama to gain concessions, their feelings are usually quite sincere.
You say, "pretending to be offended for personal gain is... less common in reality than it is in people's imaginations." That is indeed true, but only because people have the ability to whip themselves into a very sincere feeling of offense given the incentive to do so. Although sincere, these feelings will usually subside if they realize that nothing's to be gained.
This is the dream time.How do you immunize against offense reactions?To answer that question you need a theory of what feelings and displays of offense reactions are for and where they come from.
Naturally, the answer is pretty complicated, especially since there is an element of the strategy of escalation and conflict involved, and there’s an incentive for deceptive bluffing about levels of precommitment. But it’s pretty clear that they don’t bear much stable relationship to the actual content of provoking stimuli, so it’s extremely social context-dependent.
In my model, people have a little subconscious social-game-theory module that is constantly busy calculating and working all the angles. A very important factor is when the game-theory module detects that they are in a situation in which intentional lying or exaggeration would be beneficial to their interests.
But because most of us express ‘tells’ in our body language when we consciously lie, and other people have decent subconscious ‘intuition’ systems that translate these tells into emotions of suspicion, it helps if one doesn’t actually have to consciously ‘lie’, which has to involve an element of subconscious self-deception.
So the game-theory module completely bypasses the ‘elephant-rider’ consciousness (which might threaten to evaluate any major reaction as being completely unreasonable and totally out of proportion), and sends a signal directly to the emotional centers to pump up the chemicals that generate the genuine experience of extreme outrage, insult, and offense.
Instead of fighting this urge, the much-slower-to-the-game consciousness takes the emotional state as a given and presumptively ‘valid’, and just plays clean up and retrospectively invents patently ridiculous narratives that try to rationalize why an outburst was ‘justified’. It somehow applies a dose of rationality anesthetic like a mosquito does when it bites, so that one just simply accepts this story when it is in one’s social interests to do so, no matter how facially absurd it is.
A prediction of this model is that the loudest complaints and strongest passions of offense would occur at precisely the places where there is least likelihood of offense, and where they would be of the smallest magnitude – like elite Academia. Or the UC-system education and law schools in that Heather MacDonald article. How else would you explain it? People develop genuinely thinner skins when they subconsciously grok that it serves their interest to do so.
The question becomes how does the game-theory module determine this interest by evaluating observations and environmental and social cues? What it is really trying to probe for, as usual, are any deviations between the ‘true’ status and social ranking (“who would beat whom, or support whom, in a fight”) and the currently formally accepted hierarchy.
“I’m a beta male now, everyone thinks that and treats me like that. But I’ve been getting stronger, and the old chief (or silverback) is getting older and weaker. Am I strong enough now, such that if I bait him and pick a fight, I’d come out on top and be the new alpha?”
The game-theory module is looking for situations just like this, and when it’s time to pick a fight, it doesn’t make you think “It’s time to pick a fight to test the waters”, it makes you feel “God dammit the way that silverback treats me – with a lack of respect – is infuriating!” and then you just impulsively lash out in sincere rage.
And one of the easiest things to look for is the reaction to conspicuous displays of offense by people like you and who are similarly situated, and towards people who formally hold high status and authority.
If you observe that when challenged, the people who are supposed to have all the status and authority (like faculty and administration), and who one would instinctively expect to swiftly and severely push back against such probative mau-mauing by purportedly lower-status people (like students), instead always back down immediately, no matter what, and do whatever they can to placate their accusers, refuse to contradict them, and to defuse the situation and make it go away as quickly as possible, then you have found your deviation. Your little game-theory module says, “Aha! That’s what I figured. The real status ranking proves I’m the one who is really on top. If it’s not because of me, then it’s because they recognize that the strength of my political coalition is such that the people who have my back can destroy them, whereas they cannot touch me.”
But in the natural world, a successfully picked-fight will flip the social positions of the combatants, which will tend to calm the situation. However, in our world, after one of these outbursts of offense, everyone just goes back to their former social positions and following the same rituals of interaction, which is absolutely guaranteed to cause a perpetual, unstoppable explosion of similar incidents.
Furthermore, if there really is no possibility of pushback, then there is no logical limit to the kinds of things that can and will generate real, intense offense. The claims will become increasingly trivial as you progress from actual impolite behavior to ‘negligent, unintentional microaggressions’ until finally you reach the extreme case where any action (from, say, a professor to a student) that fails to conspicuously demonstrate the utmost respect, deference and submission will cause real feelings of humiliation and anger.
It will devolve into the equivalent of classic bully behavior, “Are you questioning me?!” Or, “What’s that face? Did you just look at me funny?!” And even into imagined states of mind, “I think that he thinks that he’s better than me. How dare he!?”
Of course, our society signals to everyone that the universally accepted rationalized justification for all this is hate, prejudice, and X-ism, which leads to more frequent and increasingly delusional and spurious claims that it is a broader and deeper problem than ever before in exactly the places any sane person would least expect to find it.
The “Are you questioning me?” scenario is exactly what happened in those incidents cited by MacDonald, and is the most dangerous manifestation of the problem because it makes it impossible for anyone to defend themselves through discourse or dialogue. To defend yourself requires that you find some error in the accusation which means that you win in a status fight because you are right and the accuser is wrong. But the status fight was the whole problem, so the questioning itself must itself be wildly outrageous to the accuser.
If it is also evil (i.e. offensive, hostile, threatening, aggressive) to even question the assertions of the person accusing you of evil, then you’re toast. (This is what just happened between Smith and Hanson, by the way).
And without any limit, you are also on a slippery slope. The fact that every savvy person in charge of these institutions recognizes the fact of this impossibility of defense is why there is never any pushback or attempt at defense, and instead prefer to throw some perfectly innocent scapegoats on the pyre in the hopes that it will satisfy the angry gods. This is what creates the obvious lack of even the possibility of negative consequences (notice the school wouldn’t even reveal a hoax to save itself) that is the cause of the whole problem. So you get a positive-feedback loop which sets up the vicious cycle to singularity.
And this is why pushback is essential, and why it needs to be swift and severe. Nice people think they are being enlightened and caring are trying to be polite and considerate and compassionate and ‘welcoming’, and go out of their way to indulge their underprivileged fellows and not cause offense or hurt feelings. But instead, the little subconscious game-theory modules of those fellows are correctly interpreting all this – and especially the supine hypersensitivity to accusations of sin – to be ‘weakness’, which means it’s a good time to pick a fight, which leads to hair-trigger hypersensitivity that is salivatingly eager to detect any hint of offense, no matter how implausible.
That’s what Randy M means by, “I’d say stop reflexively honoring them.” If you incentive offense, you will get more of what you’re subsidizing. The way to actually generate less offense is to make it clear that complaining about unmeasurable feelings won’t usually get you very far, and that false or trivial complaints will get you ostracized.
I’d imagine that the typical person’s model is that the behavior of others causes feelings in a victim, and so then, when people are treated disrespectfully or bullied by jerks, they’ll still experience the same amount of psychological trauma, but now they’ll have to suffer in silence and bite their tongues lest anyone make fun of them for being a weakling weenie.
But no, that’s not how it actually seems to work most of the time. Instead, when people see that there’s no point in complaining, they genuinely do not have nearly the same level of emotional response, and much more stoic, and are less subconsciously tempted to hysterically blow something out of proportion and make mountains out of molehills. In other words, the true model is incentives cause feeling cause rationalizations about the importance of other people’s behavior and whether or not one is a victim.
This model would predict counter-signalling, and that the same insults poking fun at the same attributes when made by a person who won’t back down if challenged with an escalation of, “I’m offended!”, will produce no actual feeling of offense. The well-known rules of comedy in terms of who can poke fun of whom for what (or use certain expressions without being accused of hate or ‘appropriation’) also follow.
The logic of this case is extendable to all kinds of emotional responses to social interactions, and is certainly the cause of much of the shift in observed and reported sensitivity to certain kinds of incidents that is correlated with overall social, political, and ideological change.
More outrage at more trivial ‘slights’ isn’t a result of more progress and increased refinement of sensibilities, but simply the result of everyone’s intuitive and subconscious understandings of who really holds status and power and the ability to impose negative consequences.
Finally, to the extent one accepts my psychological model, one has to ask whether this is a usual case of the typical progressive reaction to try and make things better for less privileged groups by making things easier for them only ending up having the unintended consequence of making things worse for them by negatively altering their decisions and conduct when their behavior adjusts to new incentives.
The obvious analogy is to giving blacks welfare only to notice that within 20 years their communities are beset with social pathologies not as a coincidence, but as a consequence, because we gave a man a fish instead of creating a world in which he could and would fish for himself. (I’ll use blacks as an example, but the logic applies more generally)
In this case, in our effort to help blacks succeed in school and feel as comfortable as possible we have committed ourselves to detecting, investigating, and eradicating every last possible trace of anything that anyone claims could possibly be racist. In case we missed anything, we agree to take seriously any and all claims of offense and bend over backwards to remedy the situation, accommodate the complainants, and purge the sin.
But what that has done is put the little game-theory modules in all their heads on constant reality-status-deviation five-alarm emergency mode, which has warped their brains, made them completely race-obsessed and hateful of those in ‘oppressor’ groups, and given them perpetual chips on their shoulders the size of redwoods.
They’ve all become Anthony Fremont from The Twilight Zone episode It’s A Good Life. People that have been granted God-like powers of personal destruction if they ever decide to target someone.
I view modern faculty members as the adults in that show. They may even be Anthony’s parents and love him, but still, Anthony will kill them for nothing and they can’t escape. So they are constantly terrified and sweating and walking on eggshells lest their masters start to imagine that they’ve been thinking bad thoughts about them.
Nobody wants to hang around someone like that – it’s like walking through a minefield. Eventually you’re going to do or say something and off goes the mine. Naturally, that is going to exacerbate, not alleviate, social isolation and mutual distrust.
But the real ironic tragedy is that all this offense-obsessiveness steals from most talented black students the opportunity to achieve conventional career success in their professions, which was supposed to be the original intent of all this effort. Instead, a huge portion of them end up diverted into being permanent, professional salesmen in the race-card printing industry. They are consumed with their own blackness and on related subjects.
I’m amazed and depressed with how standard it has become for a black graduate student to write their thesis on some impact of racism or, well, just ‘being black’, and then going on not to teach chemistry or practice law, but to become diversity specialists and inter-cultural dialogue lecturers, and critical-race-theory scholars and so forth. And, of course, when it becomes professional, there is constant pressure to find and theorize about ever more subtle examples of racism. In other words, they are employed to supply the insatiable demands of the confirmation-bias market with ever more narratives of rationalized justification. What a disaster.
And this, too, only intensifies the problem of representation in other professional fields, and feelings of oppression and outrage.
Until we get to where we are today, where our society is the least bigoted it’s ever been, but is experiencing the highest wave crests ever in a perfect storm of delusions about prejudice.
Both of these comments were responses to Yvain. Maybe after that second one he'll have gotten it.
Engaging the Only Reasonable Meat-Eaters
Originally published December 1, 2014
People who have even slightly non-terrible and reflective reasons for their decisions are so rare they statistically don't exist. Even so, I pay attention to a really select crowd, so among them I have discovered an entire three people whose nonvegetarianism is reasoned and principled: Robin Hanson, Katja Grace, and Paul Christiano. It's no coincidence that they are these; they are deeply influenced by each other.
Make no mistake, dear reader: I am talking about you. You do not have good reasons for eating meat. If you don't eat meat, you almost certainly have terrible reasons for that. I am not interested in engaging with terrible people and their terrible reasons. Yes, this does mean I am not interested in engaging with almost anyone.
I am socially (though not epistemologically, you'll note) obligated to explain something in the previous paragraph. I am not an advocate nor an ideologue; I just want myself and others to make the right decisions for the right reasons. I will not try to be convincing as opposed to correct. Almost all vegetarians are vegetarian for stupid reasons, like "dignity of animals", or an aversion to intentional killing. As a rule they don't even know their true reasons. Even David Fucking Chalmers has crazy reasons for his vegetarianism. Getting the right answer for the wrong reason scores zero ethics points. That's just moral luck. Of course, meat-eaters have even worse reasons. I am not interested in engaging with terrible arguments that seem good. Just actually good ones. Now then.
Actually I'm going to put yet another caveat here. You won't find in this post a single argument that eating meat is wrong. Only arguments that these people's arguments that eating meat isn't wrong are wrong. Please try to understand this.
From Hanson's Vegan Compromise:
Let us seek principles that can account for most of our acts, then try to change the other acts to conform with such easier principles.This is explicit that his conclusions are based on weaker, easier principles than ones he could have adopted. I'd be tempted to remove Hanson from my short list of reasonable, principled nonvegetarians if not for a much stronger reason of his. Anyway one of his weak principles is "We don’t care much about most animals, even smart ones." It's wrong to use this as an unexamined principle. By default you should care about things that can suffer. This is a basic is/ought confusion.
But that's not Hanson's strongest argument. This is. Hanson believes animals live lives worth living. I strongly disbelieve this. Humans don't even usually live lives worth living. Suffering in the world outweighs joy. Arguing the previous sentence is beyond the scope of this post. Don't believe the opposite because I'm not doing so. Robert Wiblin posted a cursory examination on Robin's own blog. For more see The View From Hell and Utilitarian Essays. It is possible for reasonable people, such as Hanson, to agree with Hanson and not me here.
So much for Robin Hanson.
Katja Grace:
The real question is not whether the cost to you is small, but whether you could do more good for the same small cost.Read the post; I can't do it justice by summarizing and cherrypicking.
Similarly, when deciding whether to donate $5 to a random charity, the question is whether you could do more good by donating the money to the most effective charity you know of. Going vegetarian because it relieves the animals more than it hurts you is the equivalent of donating to a random developing world charity because it relieves the suffering of an impoverished child more than foregoing $5 increases your suffering.
My imaginary vegetarian debate partner objects to this on grounds that [I, Grognor, will not be using]
[...]
However whether you can trade being vegetarian for more effective sacrifices is largely a question of whether you choose to do so.
I agree with the premise that a limited inconvenience budget should be spent as wisely and efficiently as possible, modulo something about the inconvenience of spending more effort on allocating inconvenience. (Although it's not clear to me that inconvenience is really so limited; a better model might be that vegetarianism is a "one-time cost" of a transition period after which things return to baseline level of ambient inconvenience.) But this is absolutely the wrong way to frame the problem. Here is an alternative framing:
Be the change you wish to see in the world.—SomeoneYes, I am employing that quote. Not every cliche is wrong. The way out of an enormous collective action problem isn't to ignore it and focus on less terrifying and less inconvenient problems. It's to stop contributing to the collective action problem. Activists love to compare meat-eating to slavery, so Hell, I'll do it too. Slavery didn't end just because technology rendered it obsolete. There were people at various points in history who, for various reasons some of them moral, consciously decided not to participate in slavery. And because there were those people, others were able to abstain. A VIRTUOUS CASCADE. There was a virtuous cascade.
No, this is not a great framing. And yes, there is a nonzero but non-negligible extent to which this is orthogonal to Katja's... point. It's still a much better framing than the one she chose, and it's easy to see classes of framings which would be better than hers. Another framing is that the extra inconvenience from vegetarianism as opposed to other things strengthens the ethical bargaining position, which Grace herself explained. Consider this:
Another way you might accidentally lose more value than you save is in spending little bits of time which are hard to measure or notice.Miraculously, the post attracted an actually good comment, by kpier.
I get the impression that she subconsciously chose this rare framing instead of the mainstream one or a different rare one as an amazingly subtle rationalization for her newfound nonvegetarianism. It's a very well hidden in her case. So much for Katja Grace.
Paul Christiano is someone who is so many levels above me that I can't actually comprehend how much better at reasoning he is than I am. If I were a lesser man I would confuse this situation with him valuing the wrong things. Christiano (and Hanson) has spent a lot of time thinking carefully about the degree to which we are in a causal bottleneck. I get this from his blog. In particular see My Outlook and Against Moral Advocacy but I would recommend the whole blog wholeheartedly if his writing style weren't stupefyingly boring.
My unjust and misleading summary is: Paul Christiano really thinks that long-run values won't be influenced much by the social fashions we can easily influence in standard ways, e.g. by being a social justice warrior or whatever. I don't have a strong response to this. My response is to say that there's enough structural uncertainty that moral improvidence is unjustified. But if there's anyone who's given the question its due, it's Paul Christiano. So much for him.
This post was written mostly in anger. It is mostly unedited. It's not written well. I am just hopelessly shouting into the void. To get it on the record. This post will never convince anyone of anything.
By the way, I know of two people who have good and not just socially viable reasons to be vegetarian: Brian Tomasik and Robby Bensinger.
The Crank Aesthetic
Originally published November 26, 2014
The premise is that badass former assassin Chev Chelios gets poisoned with amagic
Chinese substance that will kill him by inhibiting his adrenaline, so
he has to constantly do exciting and badass things to keep himself
alive. So far so awesome. Just the things that happen to him on his romp
through Los Angeles would have killed anyone in the real world, but
Chev refuses to die before he can avenge his own death.
Crank is full of video game references. This isn't pandering to the audience; it's important to the aesthetic that Chev be a video game protagonist. He's a character whose health and rage meters are the same bar that constantly depletes and can only be refilled by fighting. One example is he cuts the hand off of one opponent, and instead of reeling in pain the opponent keeps fighting. Another is he bluffs his way out of being shot just before the climax with a finger-gun he doesn't know is actually going to work. He also has sex in public to get a powerup. Twice. These things are too ridiculous for the movies. They only happen in video games.
I will watch any number of movies about a character who is cursed to die and goes on a rampage to break the curse.
Anyone who's a distance runner, or who's gone insane periods of time without sleep, or who's been in a fight that lasted longer than their stamina, has felt a second wind. I love second winds. They feel so heroic and manly. I love third and fourth winds too. Crank has more winds than I can count.
If I had to describe the aesthetic, which I rather wish I didn't and am upset at you for insisting I do, it would be the aesthetic of angrily growling "Not yet..." regarding a curse that must cause one's demise, forcing oneself to stay alive through sheer force of will, and succeeding, ideally breaking the curse and proving one's immortality by fire. You need to be badass enough to keep your heart beating even if you get killed five or six times.
I see about 50% of the aesthetic in Crypt of the NecroDancer, an enjoyable and also good combination of roguelike and rhythm game. The "plot" is that the protagonist, Cadence, falls a long way into a hole. Instead of letting her die from the impact, a necromancer pulls her heart out and forces it to beat to the music. The Crank aesthetic is implemented directly in the gameplay. The player can die instantly upon making a single mistake, and mistakes are easy to make. The player doesn't (usually) die just on missing a beat, but missing a beat does incur a penalty. The premise recalls the inferior Crank sequel, wherein Chevy's heart is removed and replaced with an artificial one that he has to keep recharging.
It seems important that Chelios and Cadence both spend a lot of their time inflicting themselves on the world while suffering their curse and trying to remove it. Chelios kills a lot of people. Cadence kills a lot of monsters.
I see maybe 11% of the aesthetic in Rhythm Doctor, a game about keeping patients' heart beating. Beat beat beat beat beat beat beat.
I see maybe 7% of it in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, in which the protagonist spends the majority of the game literally running from his own demise in the form of a deity out to fix the damage he's done to the timestream. By killing him. This plotline inspired the final act of a stick figure comic I made long ago.
I hear at most 6% in Help I'm Alive by Metric. I don't like the song, but I do listen to it sometimes just to keep my heart beatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeating like a hammer.
I hope I've made it obvious that this aesthetic is real. But it seems that Crank is the only real instance. Crank pulsates with it. Everything about it is it. If you know of any other equally good instantiation, let me know.
Chev Chelios walks into a bar and instantly dies.Crank is a very enjoyable movie. In addition, it is a good movie, which is a higher standard. It's good because it creates and exemplifies a really cool aesthetic.
The premise is that badass former assassin Chev Chelios gets poisoned with a
Crank is full of video game references. This isn't pandering to the audience; it's important to the aesthetic that Chev be a video game protagonist. He's a character whose health and rage meters are the same bar that constantly depletes and can only be refilled by fighting. One example is he cuts the hand off of one opponent, and instead of reeling in pain the opponent keeps fighting. Another is he bluffs his way out of being shot just before the climax with a finger-gun he doesn't know is actually going to work. He also has sex in public to get a powerup. Twice. These things are too ridiculous for the movies. They only happen in video games.
I will watch any number of movies about a character who is cursed to die and goes on a rampage to break the curse.
Anyone who's a distance runner, or who's gone insane periods of time without sleep, or who's been in a fight that lasted longer than their stamina, has felt a second wind. I love second winds. They feel so heroic and manly. I love third and fourth winds too. Crank has more winds than I can count.
If I had to describe the aesthetic, which I rather wish I didn't and am upset at you for insisting I do, it would be the aesthetic of angrily growling "Not yet..." regarding a curse that must cause one's demise, forcing oneself to stay alive through sheer force of will, and succeeding, ideally breaking the curse and proving one's immortality by fire. You need to be badass enough to keep your heart beating even if you get killed five or six times.
Mook: The best thing for you to do is to find some nice, dark, quiet place and... just die.The best way to understand this sort of thing is with extensional definitions. Crank is both the primordial and the ultimate example, but it's not the only one.
Chev: *contemptful smirk* Just die? What, do you think I've got "cunt" written on my forehead?
I see about 50% of the aesthetic in Crypt of the NecroDancer, an enjoyable and also good combination of roguelike and rhythm game. The "plot" is that the protagonist, Cadence, falls a long way into a hole. Instead of letting her die from the impact, a necromancer pulls her heart out and forces it to beat to the music. The Crank aesthetic is implemented directly in the gameplay. The player can die instantly upon making a single mistake, and mistakes are easy to make. The player doesn't (usually) die just on missing a beat, but missing a beat does incur a penalty. The premise recalls the inferior Crank sequel, wherein Chevy's heart is removed and replaced with an artificial one that he has to keep recharging.
It seems important that Chelios and Cadence both spend a lot of their time inflicting themselves on the world while suffering their curse and trying to remove it. Chelios kills a lot of people. Cadence kills a lot of monsters.
I see maybe 11% of the aesthetic in Rhythm Doctor, a game about keeping patients' heart beating. Beat beat beat beat beat beat beat.
I see maybe 7% of it in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, in which the protagonist spends the majority of the game literally running from his own demise in the form of a deity out to fix the damage he's done to the timestream. By killing him. This plotline inspired the final act of a stick figure comic I made long ago.
I hear at most 6% in Help I'm Alive by Metric. I don't like the song, but I do listen to it sometimes just to keep my heart beatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeating like a hammer.
I hope I've made it obvious that this aesthetic is real. But it seems that Crank is the only real instance. Crank pulsates with it. Everything about it is it. If you know of any other equally good instantiation, let me know.
The Black Belt Bayesian
Originally published November 24, 2014
From 2007 to 2009, Steven Kaas wrote the nowadays defunct and destroyed blog Black Belt Bayesian. In those days, he was a lot more actively transhumanist, singularitarian, atheist, and more of a futurist than he is today, and anyway managed to cleave an insight path that still today is all too seldom trod.
I recommend reading the entire archive, which if you're a slow reader like me shouldn't take more than three hours. All of the material is still available via the Wayback Machine, but it can be hard to navigate, so this post is a sort of course that makes it as convenient as feasible to see every post.
I'm a fan of reading things in chronological order. These pages put the older posts at the bottom, so you should read them bottom-to-top.
From 2007 to 2009, Steven Kaas wrote the nowadays defunct and destroyed blog Black Belt Bayesian. In those days, he was a lot more actively transhumanist, singularitarian, atheist, and more of a futurist than he is today, and anyway managed to cleave an insight path that still today is all too seldom trod.
I recommend reading the entire archive, which if you're a slow reader like me shouldn't take more than three hours. All of the material is still available via the Wayback Machine, but it can be hard to navigate, so this post is a sort of course that makes it as convenient as feasible to see every post.
I'm a fan of reading things in chronological order. These pages put the older posts at the bottom, so you should read them bottom-to-top.
- July 2007, chronologically oldest page
- Second page of July 2007
- Third page of July 2007. This is where the blog starts growing its beard. This two-paragraph post is still the best introduction to anthropics. I still sometimes find myself needing to link to this one.
- August 2007, first page
- Second page of August 2007
- September 2007 Only one post. A good one.
- October 2007
- December 2007
- January 2008
- February 2008
- March 2008
- May 2008: The first three posts of this month are unavailable in the standard archive. However they are available at the top of this page. Time travel is weird sometimes.
- Second page of May 2008
- July 2008. DH7 is really important.
- August 2008: The first two posts are unreachable from the standard archive, but you can read them at the bottom of this page. The line "[P]romoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires, because they’re Nazis or whatever. Specifically, don’t do it to yourself." is often quoted. Quoters usualy miss the point. It's not an approval of full exceptionless radical honesty. It's adopting the attitude that deception is an act of sabotage. There are times when you should lie, such as "because they're Nazis or whatever". Also sad is that the line is usually stripped from context. Meet the Groovies is an important post.
- Second page of August 2008
- September 2008. Make sure to read all of Aumann and Stability.
- January 2009
- February 2009. This is the best month. Causal Bottlenecks is the most impressive post in the whole archive. Shiny Pitchforks is important for multiple reasons. Make sure to read all of Second Nature.
- March 2009
- May 2009
- July 2009. I really like the paper linked in Quantum Wildlife.
- October 2009. The blog is already old and graying. So very sad.
- December 2009, the swan song.
old things return
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