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Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Podcast Addict, and RSS.
In this episode, we discuss information addiction.
Participants: Yassine, Jason, Neophos, Shakesneer. Credit to Internaut for the inspiration.
Links:
None. Go outside.
Recorded 2023-05-08 | Uploaded 2023-06-03
The Selfish Gene remains one of my favorite books of all time and although published in 1976 it remains a compelling and insightful introduction to the brute mechanics of natural selection. Richard Dawkins later acknowledged that his book's title may give a misleading impression of its thesis, erroneously ascribing conscious motivations or agentic properties to non-sentient strands of DNA. The core argument is dreadfully simple: genes (as opposed to organisms or species) are the primary unit of natural selection, and if you leave the primordial soup brewing for a while, the only genes that can remain are the ones with a higher proclivity towards replication than their neighbors. "Selfish" genes therefore are not cunning strategists or followers of some manifest destiny, but rather simply the accidental consequence of natural selection favoring their propagation. Nothing more.
Dawkins is responsible for coining the word 'meme' in the book to describe how the same principles behind gene replication can apply to ideas replicating. I thought about this when I read WoodFromEden's post about the origin of patriarchy.[1] Their explanation for why male dominance persisted historically for so long is elegantly tidy:
Men make war. Or rather, groups of men make war. The groups that were good at making war remained. The groups that were less good at making war perished. That way, human history is a history of successful male military cooperation. Groups with weak male bonding were defeated by groups where men cooperated better.
Here too, there is no dirigible trajectory mapped out ahead of time. Cultural values which valorize physical male violence and facilitate its coordination at scale will become the dominant paradigm purely as a result of the circumstances' ruthless logic. Any deviation from this set of values would lead your tribe towards extinction, which accidentally also meant your bards wouldn't be around to write songs and poems extolling the virtues of sex equality. At least not until there have been an extensive change in circumstance.
This "security dilemma" may have been borne out of petty squabbles over hunting grounds in the Serengeti but its ramifications persisted throughout history. Military service today may be seen as a low-status and distasteful profession — quite literally grunt work — but it used to be venerated deeply as a path to honor and a cornerstone of civic duty. This philosophy is epitomized by the recurring and central portrayal of military men in stories from a long time ago (Homeric heroes of ancient Greece, Genghis Khan, Jedi knights, etc.), their deeds forming the backbone of societal narratives and cultural mythologies.
The historian Bret Deveraux analyzed the grand strategy video game Europa Universalis 4 to illustrate the war-hungry reality of the late medieval period:
Military power requires revenue and manpower (along with staying technologically competitive) and both come from the same source: the land. While a player can develop existing provinces, taking land in war is far cheaper and faster. The game represents this through both developing old land and seizing new land requiring similar resources [but compared to incorporating newly conquered land, development is about 4x as expensive while providing only marginal improvements]. That may seem like the developer has placed their thumb a bit unfairly on the scale, but, as Azar Gat notes in War in Human Civilization (2006) for pre-industrial societies that is a historically correct thumb on the scale. Until the industrial revolution, nearly all of the energy used in production came out of agriculture one way or another; improves in irrigation, tax collection and farming methods might improve yields, but never nearly so much as adding more land. Consequently, as Gat puts it, returns to capital investment (hitting the development button) were always wildly inferior to returns to successful warfare that resulted in conquest.
For most of history, living the good life meant killing people and taking their shit. The men of martial prowess — those exceptionally good at killing people and taking their shit — were appropriately exalted and deified for the base survival and material gain they were able to provide to their community. Fundamental to this community's well-being is a male's ability to commit acts of horrific physical violence in his individual capacity and to coordinate others to do the same (this too with violence if necessary). Any folklore or morality code which facilitated this core mission will replicate, spread, and become enshrined as humanity's unquestioned zeitgeist. Not because it's the "right" thing to do, but solely because no pacifist egalitarian civilization could have possibly survived to say otherwise.
I've written before about slavery, along a similar vein of Devereaux-inspired historical analysis. Although subject nowadays to some quixotic revisionism about why it existed, there is nothing at all remarkable about slavery's near-universal historical pervasiveness. The only justification anyone ever needed to press another into bondage is the universal desire to have someone else do all the work. Any mythology pasted on top (including institutionalized racism) was always just set dressing. When industrialization made slavery increasingly politically and economically untenable, the moral and legal consensus conveniently caught up.
Consider the chasm with how much material circumstances changed. Promises of milk and honey used to serve as the bounty of divine compacts, but today I can performatively buy entire vats of the stuff and barely notice the financial hit. Cheap and abundant electricity is part of the reason I have trivial access to luxuries ancient royalty could only dream about. Buckminster Fuller coined the term energy slave as a way to contextualize energy consumption by calculating the equivalent kilowatt-hours a healthy human could provide through labor. It's a crude equivalence for sure but with some basic assumptions [2] we can calculate the average American relies on the "labor" of about 150 energy slaves. Well what do you know, that happens to be around how many slaves George Washington owned.[3]
The most fascinating book I've never read is The Secret Of Our Success which essentially argues humans succeeded because we're uniquely adept at making shit up — social conventions, cultural norms, religious mythology, etc. — which happens to be directionally useful.
One of the reasons stone tool technology languished for millions of years is likely a result of the brute limitations of a then-human's cognitive capacity. It took about 3 million years of evolution for the human brain to triple in size; a pace too glacial to contemplate but still remarkably fast for natural selection. By contrast, the pace of cultural memetic evolution is not constrained by the corporeal cycle of birth and death. Once the human brain got swole enough, the jet fuel that really powered the next few thousand years of technological advancement was almost entirely a result of cultural advancement. Our ability to create viral memes, in other words.
I'm an atheist who believes religion is a fiction, but I happily recognize it as a materially useful fiction. The Dunbar limit normally would make us dreadfully wary of any interactions with Person No. 151, a hurdle which would have otherwise foreclosed the already impossibly long alloy trade routes necessary to start the bronze age. BUT if you make some shit up about how Person No. 151 is actually totally cool to trade with because they're of the same religion or K-pop fandom or whatever, the cultural fiction is soothing enough for your flighty lizardbrain to let its guard down. Keep this up long enough and maybe pencils can exist.
Our mind's rational capacity to observe patterns, question assumptions, and test hypotheses provides us with an envious advantage in mastering the physical world with everything from tracking game to optimizing steam turbines. But paradoxically as Gurwinder notes in his highly-recommended essay Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things, the very same intelligence can become an effective source of delusion:
As a case in point, human intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well-being, tribal belonging, social status, and sex, and this often required the adoption of what I call "Fashionably Irrational Beliefs" (FIBs), which the brain has come to excel at. Since we're a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being.
Unlike George Washington, I don't support slavery (please clap). But also unlike Washington, I conveniently happen to benefit from a dense tapestry of infrastructure and tendinous globe-spanning supply chains affording me near-immediate satisfaction of my most trivial of whims. Based on the evident historical record, without the environmentally deleterious bounty fossil fuels facilitated, most of us would be conjuring up creatively compelling excuses for why forcing your neighbor to work for free is the Moral thing to do. Gurwinder cites exactly such an example with the 19th century physician Samuel A. Cartwright:
A strong believer in slavery, he used his learning to avoid the clear and simple realization that slaves who tried to escape didn't want to be slaves, and instead diagnosed them as suffering from a mental disorder he called drapetomania, which could be remedied by "whipping the devil" out of them. It's an explanation so idiotic only an intellectual could think of it.
The cynical ramifications of my argument might be impossible to avoid completely. Perhaps acknowledging how much our technological milieu guides our moral spirit could beckon us to intensify our agentic nature. To the extent the field of evolutionary psychology can be deployed to shed light on past and present mysteries, perhaps it can shed insight into the future too?
But ultimately, how scary is it to know your deeply held convictions are subject to materialistic opportunism?
[1] As Scott Alexander noted: "If you're allergic to the word "patriarchy", reframe it as the anthropological question of why men were more powerful than women in societies between the Bronze and Industrial Age technology levels."
[2] The average per capita consumption in the US is 300 million BTUs. A human can sustain 75 watts of work over 8 hours, which translates to 2,047 BTUs of energy per day. If we generously also give our energy slaves the weekends off, that's 260 days times 2,047 BTUs, or 532,220 BTUs of energy per year. I very likely fucked this up but I stopped caring hours ago.
[3] Another crude equivalence, but Washington's net worth in today's dollars is around $700 million, far outstripping every other US president until Trump showed up.
As a Christian and a father I not infrequently find myself faced with a certain moral dilemma. Specifically, my income is pretty good and I’m in the position of deciding what to do with it.
Of course, there is no end of uses for money. Our family is growing and we need a bigger, better home. The sort we want in our area will run us about $6k/month in rent, or $1.2m to buy. The public education system is less ‘broken’ than it is actively ruinous (but both), so private schooling and tutoring considerations apply. There’s retirement planning in the face of an increasingly cartoon economy.
My parish, naturally, wants tithes. They want a whole ten percent! Off the top! And in fairness, if my dollar was the one to determine whether it thrived or failed, that would be the best investment I could make. Our community is amazing and the only place I’d want to raise my children. We run a thrift store (like Goodwill) that is an absolute lifesaver for many of the area’s poor. Also, we practice almsgiving, which is acts of charity above and beyond tithing, if not always monetary.
But many other mouths cry out to be fed as well, from crook-smiled politicians who nonetheless are important to support over the other guy to NGOs trying to staunch an arterial rupture of human tragedy with the equivalent of band-aids for want of bigger budgets.
And life’s finer things are to be considered as well. I like good art, soundly-crafted furniture, stylish clothing (important for my job too), high-quality ingredients for cooking, and the occasional getaway to see family, friends, or just interesting places. The kids want enrichment also, and while I’m not going to call this demand a pit, it certainly is bottomless. Too, there is the notion of self-care; that it’s important to expend enough resources on my own well-being that I continue to be able to generate the income.
Only, as all of these are valued in dollars, they directly trade off against each other. And in the way of autists, I can’t help but grope my way down the thing toward the root of the problem. It has taken me to some pretty intense places.
~All human societies hold in common an understanding that it is a father’s duty to protect and provide for his children. This is enshrined in law, culture, and everywhere else. Of course a father would do anything to save his child — rob, murder, cheat, lie, or give up his own life without hesitation. To do otherwise would be reprehensible.
This principle is not without its exceptions. Men in office, for example, are expected to set aside their familial obligations when acting in their official capacity (And, actually, one could find far worse yardsticks of a people’s worth than their ability to hold to this standard consistently). If a soldier on the front lines receives word of a family emergency, efforts are often made to excuse him to attend to it, but where this conflicts with operational considerations he is expected to stay put, and failure to do so is generally agreed to be worthy of capital enforcement, even if our hearts are understandably with him.
I have heard a saying along the following lines attributed to the Bedouin of the deep desert:
Me and my tribe against the world
Me and my clan against the tribe
Me and my cousins against the clan
Me and my brother against our cousins
Me against my brother
If my daughter and the neighbor-kid are both starving I am expected to feed my own and let the other die. So with my nieces and nephews over my second-cousins’ kids, all the way up the enumerated hierarchy. This is understood. This is a human universal. Most, I expect, would agree that this is the very foundation of morality, though as we will see I am not so sure.
Where exceptions come in it is because a man has taken upon himself the role of father to a greater family than that of his immediate. We honor enormously the Patriarch who puts the good of the clan above his own children. We remember with fierce admiration the Emperor who adopts a competent successor as his son while consigning his own degenerate offspring to some idle pleasure dome in the countryside. We exalt the young man who gives his own life in the trenches while his pregnant wife waits for him anxiously back home. We depend upon such men. We call them heroes. This, too, is moral. It is perhaps even a higher sort of morality.
A messiah is one who brings such benefit to his People at the grandest scales. A typical Christian narrative on the subject goes something like: The Jews were conquered by one hostile nation and then another, denied their own homeland, constantly at risk of enslavement and extermination, and were able to survive all of this by virtue of their hope in a coming promised messiah. They had many specific expectations of what he would be like, too. He would bloodily uproot the foreigners, bring the earth under his dominion, and elevate his own race to lordship, never to be so threatened again. When Jesus came to Jerusalem the people laid down palm fronds that he (or his mount(s)) might tread upon these instead of the dirt. They were elated. They knew exactly what was coming, and they were ready as only centuries of bitter anticipation can make a people. And then the State executed him in their ugliest fashion and he didn’t even attempt to resist. Even the disciples, whom Christ had tried to prepare for this over and over again, understood that all was lost and that Jesus was not the messiah. Messiahs do not lose. They conquer.
Let me shift gears now and talk about Hitler. There is no figure more reviled in our culture. He serves as our icon of utmost evil; of the worst aspects of human nature. To publicly question this in the slightest is to run a very real risk of losing everything and, in many Western countries, even runs up against laws that will land one in a jail cell.
Why?
Yes, I realize that I’m committing an unspeakable breach of social etiquette by asking. Yes, I know that many of us, even here, have an uncontrollable disgust reflex on the topic. Even those who are more or less comfortable with discussing differences in average racial IQs or impulse control, or personality trait variances between men and women.
Why?
The usual answer for someone in such circles is, “Because such discourse is controlled by the Jews, etc., yada yada yada” and while there is certainly something to this it is, at least at this resolution, entirely beside the point I’m trying to make. So please bear with me — that is not where I’m taking you.
One day a few months ago I, in the way of autists, asked myself what exactly was so unusual about Hitler that he should occupy the mythological position that he does. One can of course enumerate a long list of terrible atrocities for which he was responsible. Only, as I went through them, I couldn’t help but notice that not only were they all basically par for the course for the Father, the would-be messiah of a people, but that worse examples of each can be found (both quantitatively and almost always qualitatively) in the biographies of other leaders — including, not to put too fine a point on this, those seen often enough on t-shirts in public without ruffling anyone’s feathers particularly.
So, finding myself at a loss, I escalated the question to some trusted friends, and discovered that while it was extremely upsetting to most of them, none even attempted to answer, but rather clucked at me while shaking their heads in horrified exasperation. These are people, you understand, whose capacity for decoupled analysis I generally respect very greatly. Disconcerting, to say the least. Can’t you pick as a mascot, one said, someone other than the craziest and most evil man in history?
Only, I cannot fathom how anyone sees this when they look at Hitler. Here was a man who sincerely held the best interests of his People in his heart. He came of age in a time when his nation was — historical aggression notwithstanding — brutally, horrifically, oppressed. Countless of his countrymen, women and children, starved to death needlessly under spiteful, vindictive post-war Allied blockades. The economy was so saddled with reparation debt that rebuilding would take generations if it were ever possible at all. The people had no hope. Men and women who wanted families faced down a seemingly-insurmountable challenge in doing so. The risk of watching their babies die of starvation was all too real. And what chance had those children of decent lives even if they did survive to adulthood? They would end up de facto slaves, servants to the sneering foreigners who now controlled everything.
Germany’s culture — within living memory arguably the pinnacle of human achievement — was brought low, rapidly to be replaced with this new post-war thrust which we can now recognize as the antecedent to the sort of moral and cultural disintegration with which we are today so familiar.
And this man! This man was nobody. He was a failed art student. But he decided that he was not going to let that happen. He was going to save his people or die trying. Yes, in pursuit of this goal he engaged in some of the most reprehensible methods imaginable. But in what sense was he not playing the highest, most honorable role for his people — that of a messiah? Was the alternative really any more moral? Are we clutching our pearls and sobbing because it was mean to kill political opponents when what he should have done was to suffer the children of his nation to starve to death in the streets while foreigners feasted in the beautiful homes built by his forefathers? Can we really suppose for one moment that the Jewish zealots of AD 66 would have had any problem with Hitlerian tactics were the shoe on the other foot and being executed by Eleazar ben Simon against the Romans? Yes, Hitler was a mess and riddled with countless inexcusable flaws, but are we truly to believe that he did what he did simply because he enjoyed causing others pain? The man was a vegetarian for goodness’ sake!
Now contrast this with Stalin (or Lenin). How explicit do I need to be here? Whether they acted more out of lust for power or a sincere ideological commitment to, idk, ‘the working class’ (imo doubtful), these guys did not act out of love for their people, and did not hesitate to consign millions of them to starvation in pursuit of power.
And they killed so many more. So many more. But our politicians can admire them openly and the common man has only the haziest idea of why this might be a problem. And while, sure, the opposition will attempt to make much hay of this, the younger generations increasingly seem uninterested in what they have to say about it.
Last night a friend told me,
my opinion is that you've been brainpoisoned into calling evil good and good evil and rather than leaning into the caricatures of your enemies by using the word 'hitlerism' to refer to good things you should not do that
(Not that I was — it’s precisely the distinction that I’m trying to draw, but we’ll get to that.)
So on the subject of ‘my enemies’, let me tell you a few things I notice about them.
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They get abortions
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They permanently sterilize themselves, or
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They take pills to trick their bodies into thinking they've just lost a baby because this spiritual distress is preferable to them over the prospect of actually reproducing.
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They purchase chihuahuas, and pekinese, and felines, and portage them around in equipment intended for human children which will never exist
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They agonize over the irresponsibility of their own kind having children, but gasp in horror at anyone who suggests that African birthrates might become a problem
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They desire to privilege children of other races above their own, ceding educational access, preferential employment, etc.
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They get nervous at portrayals of healthy white families with several children
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They will loudly insist that they do not have a culture
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They really don’t like borders and seem to think that it’s their responsibility to feed and clothe the world
This list could be ten times as long, of course. You get the idea. So to circle back around to my original point —
My enemies do not feed their own children first. My enemies sell their children at the market and immediately donate the proceeds to the worst, most irredeemably valueless people they can find. And if they can’t find one close enough to hand, they go looking. And it’s disgusting. It’s reprehensible. It offends me to a degree that I have difficulty conveying without jumping up and down and screaming until I’m red in the face and collapsing into a pile of tears. Only, I seem to remember Jesus telling us to do what my enemies are doing — or it’s at least close enough that I can’t help but notice.
Which brings us back to my daughter. As her father, where does my responsibility to her end? At what point should I give a dollar to feed notional children on the other side of the world rather than investing it in her future? How stiff will her competition be? How can I know in advance which investment will turn out to make all the difference?
Consider the following scenario. I am walking down the street and notice my neighbor’s two year old breaking free from her front door and running into traffic. Of course if I can safely rescue her I should, but suppose I’m not sure that I can without endangering my own life in the process, and leaving my children fatherless? I could maybe look her parents in the eye afterward and say “There just wasn’t anything I could do” and they’d likely catch the nuance and understand and even bitterly sympathize.
But supposing I had plenty of time to save the child, and just choose not to because this would mean I don't have time to read my daughter a bedtime story. Is that equivalent to murder? I say yes. Trying to delineate between the two is an unseemly thing for a man to do and belies a womanly discomfort with agency. But when I spend a few extra bucks to get her the pink scooter someone, somewhere, is going hungry, and in aggregate dying.
Or imagine that I’m the chieftain of one of two small tribes on a small island. Resources are getting scarce and everyone knows that at some point soon it’s going to be us or them. Does a good leader, a good father, wait for the threat to ripen, for the enemy to choose the place and time for battle? Or does he strike preemptively? It will be either our children or theirs who die. We will eat their babies or they will eat ours. Shouldn’t a father make sure of which it is? Isn’t that what a good father does?
The reason our society is so reflexively disgusted by Hitler is because we have mostly internalized the notion that our children should die that others might live, and the man with the tiny moustache represents the polar opposite of that.
Hitler seems to me, at heart, a very good father. If I emulated him, I should not hesitate to feed my own child first, even upon the corpses of my neighbors’ children. I should lie and cheat and steal and murder in game-theoretically optimal ways to bestow upon my children as many resources as possible, that they should not themselves end up in chains or on the dinner plate. The notorious Fourteen Words — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — make the connection so explicit and unassailable that the Left dares not to look upon it.
But the icon-stand in my heart labeled “Father” does not have Hitler’s portrait in it. Actually the picture there is blank, ha ha, but that’s another story, and the point is that Christ fills in pretty well. My Father does not feed His own child first. He feeds His child to us. Bit by blood-soaked bit, forever. I can struggle with the apparent discrepancy between disinheriting my daughter to feed what looks to me like a total waste of the Imago Dei, but there it is. I am certain that the difference between my girl, whom I can assure you I adore unbearably and who always seems to have a beam of sunshine on her in my eyes — that the difference between her and the most contemptible human being ever to exist, is as nothing compared to the difference between God’s son and my daughter, or myself.
But the gorge does rise in my throat when I consider failing to protect what seems, to me, the most beautiful person, and the most beautiful People, ever to exist in favor of… that. Every cell in my body says that I should sooner glass an entire foreign continent rather than allow harm to befall one hair upon my daughter’s perfect golden head.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
And we can’t even expect the problem to go away. The least of these will always be among us. He said so. Maybe the only clean way out of this is to not have children in the first place. I’m afraid He might have said that too.
I try to console myself with precedent. I try to believe. We have established two types of morality: A baseline morality of feeding one’s own children first, and a higher morality of sacrificing one’s children for the greater good of the People. But Christ would seem to indicate a third sort, which is to love the foreigner's child more than one’s own. This is, after all, what God did.
And for a minute there humans actually did it too! As Scott says,
The early Christian Church had the slogan “resist not evil” (Matthew 5:39), and indeed, their idea of Burning The Fucking System To The Ground was to go unprotestingly to martyrdom while publicly forgiving their executioners. They were up against the Roman Empire, possibly the most effective military machine in history, ruled by some of the cruelest men who have ever lived. [...] this should have been the biggest smackdown in the entire history of smackdowns.
And it kind of was. Just not the way most people expected.
Food for thought, I guess.
So it seems to me that if I'm to be a Christian, this directly implies feeding my child to the dogs. And if I'm to do otherwise, this fully generalizes to Hitler. Either way I had better get serious about whatever it is I'm doing here.
Long story short, I’m currently trying to decide between this apron and this one for my daughter for when she’s painting at her easel. The first is a little bit cheaper, but she’ll like the second one better because it has unicorns. Hoping someone can offer some insight here.
My review of a shockingly great business film that appeared out of nowhere, and how it's themes strike at the core of startup culture and the key questions around technology and business in an incredibly way.
It was...plain. Brown hair, white skin, and vague facial features made up the head, while the body was a t-shirt and jeans.
It felt like the Nike Off-Whites of Funko Pops.
"I gotta ask, what do you do with all the money you make off making these?" I asked off-handedly.
"Save money, but I always splurge a bit. Tonight, I'll probably buy a roast ham for my family if you buy this one. It's a milestone."
In my mind, I suddenly held the power of life over some distant pig, a dirty thing that was treated poorly until the time came to hack it apart. I would certainly never do such a thing myself, a half-eaten salad sitting on the front passenger seat of my car.
"You've got yourself a deal," I said as I handed over the money.
++++
The Funko Pop pair in my hands were unique in that both were considered part of the same product.
The first had blue hair and fancy glasses over its feminine features. The cheeks were slightly bubbled. Tiny dots along the t-shirt indicated a host of pins and stickers, while its right hand held a cell phone up at the viewer. If I turned it, the screen was painted to look like it was writing a short bird message. There was some sentence about believing science on whatever space was left of the t-shirt.
The second had soft red hair and freckles. The eyes and mouth were curled into a smile, giving it a grandfatherly-expression. The clothes were that of a cowboy, but I could make out the words about making the nation great again on the shirt.
"You know who these two people are, right?" I asked the seller.
"Yeah."
"Didn't this one literally set a hospital on fire?"
"And the other killed someone at the same protest, yeah."
"And you don't think it's weird to make figures about them?"
"Nothing weird about it. I'd be a fucking idiot to not try and cash in on currently trending people. What's weird are the people who come to buy it."
"What about them is weird?"
"Well, some are outright buying it because of what they did at that protest. The other type just buys it because they liked what those people did before the protest."
I nodded in understanding. Both were renowned philanthropists, responsible for funding education, housing, and medical facilities for the impoverished. Even my grandmother, who didn't pay attention to the news, effusively praised them.
"What about collectors who just want a full collection? Like me?"
"To be honest, you struck me initially as the kind of person who buys things because other people hate it."
Ouch.
"You've got yourself a deal," I said as I handed over the money.
++++
This Funko Pop's hair was longer than I had expected, the blonde curls extending to the waist. I did like, however, that the book in its left hand was in pristine condition, that was hard to get and why I had driven so far to get it. Also, the business shirt and skirt looked damn cute.
"Kinda weird to see one for her," I remarked.
"I don't, uh, follow? Sorry, it just feels totally normal that they made one for her. I mean, fuck TERFs and all that, but she is a billionaire." The seller squinted at me. "Are you a TERF? I don't sell to them."
"No, no, not at all. Just found it weird, that's all. It's just, the reason she's famous is way old now. It had its moment, who cares now?"
"Yeah, but all the kids who read her stuff grew up and can now buy movie tickets and merchandise. Like a Funko Pop," they said, gesturing to the figure in my hand.
"True, true. Are you-"
"Listen, I'm very busy. Are you going to buy it or not?"
"Sorry, just checking one last thing. I thought you said in your text you'd be free all day, though? Just wondering, that's all."
"She," the seller pointed at the figure, "is coming to this town to talk about how everyone needs to tell their representative to vote a certain way on that one bill, and I don't want to be in this place when she gives her hateful rant. I'm only here because you're the only one willing to buy this from me, everyone else I know won't touch it."
It made sense, I supposed.
"You've got yourself a deal," I said as I handed over the money. Untraceable at the seller's insistence, since officially tracked re-sales sent a portion of the money to the depicted person.
++++
I frowned at the figure in my hand. The hair looked even more painted on than official images suggested. It was as if a black sharpie had been used on the chocolate skin instead of permanent paint. Still, at least the red clothes and skull necklace didn't look as cheap.
"So...Hey, HEY! Can you turn that down a bit!" I shouted at the seller.
They turned the music down. "Sorry, what were you saying?"
"Uh...I forgot. But that was his famous song, right?" I pointed at the figure.
"He's got multiple famous albums, my friend. But yes, it was his music. I have all his stuff."
"Neat. How come you're selling this, then? Do you not like Funko Pops?"
"Nah. That's for kids to play with." They paused. "Or collectors to buy, sorry."
I waved it off with my other hand. "Did you hear about what he said recently?"
"What are you referring to?"
"He was talking about how he would ensure all people of certain religions were removed from government positions."
"Oh, really? I guess I need to catch up on the news. I drove a while to get here, so..."
"Right. You've got yourself a deal," I said as I handed over the money. I knew a portion of it would undoubtedly find its way into the depicted person's political campaign.
++++
I didn't even look at the figure in the seller's hand. "Excuse me, are you by any chance-"
He rolled his eyes. "Yes, I'm Adolf Hitler. The man who ordered six million Jews and many others killed. I started World War 2 and got resettled here as a condition of surrendering."
"Huh. So...why are you dealing in Funko Pops?"
"I'm trying to establish myself as an artist, and making custom figurines pays well. Do you want it or not?"
"...Out of curiosity, what do you do with all the money you make? I saw that you made several hundred thousand just last year alone."
"Fund my local Neo-Nazi chapter. They killed two undesirables last month, I really wish they wouldn't slack like that. Anyway, do you want it or not?"
I stared at him for a moment, then down at the figure.
"You've got yourself a deal," I said as I handed over the money.
++++
As I drove home that day, I looked at the plastic box placed where the passenger's feet would be. It had been empty when I started and was now totally full. In terms of collecting, it had been a spectacular success.
A part of me wondered just how stained my soul had become this day.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
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These are mostly chronologically ordered. Here we go:
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Contributions for the week of May 1, 2023
- "Tourist pamphlets play up Louisiana’s French-ness. In reality, the Creole elite has not been in the driver’s seat since Reconstruction, and arguably since before the Civil War."
Contributions for the week of May 8, 2023
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- "The ironic outcome of this is that for advocates of increased densification, you end up trying to make a fundamentally capitalist argument (less regulation will make us richer) on terms of anything but capitalism."
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Contributions for the week of May 29, 2023
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
AI post. Never made a top-level post before, plz let me know what I'm doing wrong.
Quote from part of the article:
one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. However, having been ‘reinforced’ in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission – killing SAMs – and then attacked the operator in the simulation.
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The death penalty has various serious problems and lifetime imprisonment is really really expensive.
I guess we should be happy every time someone so thoroughly bad we want them out of society forever (like a serial murderer) does us the favour of killing themselves. Nothing of value is lost, and the justice system saves money. Right?
It seems to me it logically follows that we should incentivize such suicides. Like: 5000 dollars to a person of your choice if you're dead within the first year of your lifetime sentence, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
It feels very wrong and is clearly outside the overton window. But is there any reason to expect this wouldn't be a net benefit?
Scott has posted a discussion of the conversation about eugenics, framed as an actual conversation. I found it thought-provoking, as he made better arguments for both sides than I am used to seeing from either.
A: Given that mild, consensual forms of eugenics have historically led to extreme, horrifying versions, we have reason to believe the topic is a slippery slope which ought to be avoided outright.
B: This proves too much, as there are plenty of other ideas with similar history but much higher body counts. Thus eugenics ought to be carefully investigated rather than tabooed outright.
In the footnotes, he also presents C: Ehrlich did nothing wrong, and sometimes expected-value calculations don’t plan for the long tails. Democracy, as a form of distributed consent, is our best way to square this circle. This (correctly, IMO) leaves Scott uncomfortable. I appreciate that he included it.
I was not at all familiar with Ehrlich’s work, or with the quintessentially-McNamara history of Indian aid programs. Both add some valuable context for the argument. Oh, and I guess Scott talks about HBD a little bit; that’ll be catnip for this community, but it’s really secondary to the main thrust. Seriously, just read the article for a better version than anything I can write.
Discuss.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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In an Infinite Loops podcast episode with Venkatesh Rao, Art of the Gig, the discussion revolves around the importance of courage and taking risks in order to find meaning in life and business.
They talk about the gig economy, and argue that one of the most important things for meaning in life and business is having the courage and nerve to take risks.
Rao explains how many people start out with naive optimism, then get punched in the face by life and don't know how to regain agency. Agency and using it creates meaning, according to him. He casually dismisses the meaning crisis as a failure of nerve and a lack of courage on the part of young adults. I could probably write a whole piece on extended adolescence.
On the other hand, he does acknowledge that many people are so overburdened by life's traumas that they may not even reach the naive optimism stage. Even if they do, some people get lucky and are never challenged, whereas others get screwed and are thrown out of the economic system. This division looms especially large in the developing world.
These conditions lead to a bifurcated system where, as Rao calls it, the "tragically lucky" go through life with naive optimism, but near the end of their life have a crisis because they never learned to deal with challenges or change themselves to have more agency. This archetype would be the guy who comes from a rich family and "fails upward," just collecting titles and promotions without thinking deeply or having to engage with the darker side of the world. The tragedy here is that they never have a chance to truly grow or develop as people, because they never have a real opportunity.
On the other hand, those who deal with adversity when young, or those who don't have strong models in their life who display courage and a sense of agency, either can't have a positive viewpoint on their lives due to trauma, or enter the workforce/college/wherever, fail badly, then feel cheated and can't work up the nerve to take another risk.
These two life experiences are so distinct that they're almost perfectly mismatched for people to understand each other. I don't think it neatly aligns with different political groups, but I'm sure many are likely to make that comparison.
So the question becomes - how do we set up a society in which people can routinely take small risks or deal with small amounts of adversity, and learn to become more agentic in steps as they grow?
Unfortunately, our modern society seems designed to do the opposite of this training for courage. Children are increasingly coddled, their parents' minds befuddled with safetyism and the precautionary principle. In the Western world especially, people are presented with one track in life. Typically, this track starts with schooling, which goes directly into a career, dovetailing neatly into retirement the moment you turn [insert cultural age of retirement here].
People have a narrative where they either stay on the track their whole lives and are successful, or they fall off at some point and are failures. Risk-taking becomes incredibly difficult because the perceived risk of getting off the beaten path becomes much larger. The standard PMC careerist feels that if they take even small risks, they risk throwing their life into disarray. Learned helplessness and non-courageous behaviors become instilled, in my view, due to early-stage trauma, which makes this process even more weighted against risk.
With these priors, we come to an interesting problem. On the one hand, we need to help kids have less trauma and not learn as many passive or non-agentic behaviors. Reducing trauma is often a stated goal of many safetyist maximizers and those who hold a torch for the precautionary principle.
However, we've also got to figure out how to challenge kids. It seems that the artificial hoops we have them jump through in grade school, then the workforce and/or college, don't have an even enough distribution. A lot of this probably has to do with the narrative associated with school and the one-track life I discussed above.
I'm in favor of having high school include some sort of working apprenticeship, and I'd even support time being split 50/50 with half of the time having kids be in a working environment, the other half in the classroom. This inclusion of work would solve a lot of the problems with hyperactive kids that can't learn in a classroom environment. It would also make more well rounded adults, as they'd have a taste of the 'real world' while still being in a relatively safe environment. The big issue would be getting businesses on board and making sure there aren't any legal issues - parents would be a nightmare here I'm sure.
We could also create a sort of bank of school years, or at least make it more culturally acceptable to go back to school. Have kids graduate at 16 and enter the workforce, with two years of schooling 'banked' in case they fail out. Maybe make it mandatory before 30 so there isn't a sharp social distinction. The extra two years could focus on business skills or help students that can't carve out a place in the economy find their niche.
I've tried to be as charitable as possible in this piece, and I'd ask commenters do the same. I firmly believe that one of the reasons this topic stays muddled is the constant refrains around fragility and people being 'snowflakes' or whatever the term de jour happens to be. I don't see how harsh language and derision will help solve this problem, it seems far more based on structural issues in our schooling or overall narratives, rather than a personal failing of individuals. I'm open to disagreement here as a separate point, of course.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
“It is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided... but by iron and blood.” So spoke Bismarck after the failures of the revolutionary year of 1848, a year whose actors very consciously sought to either repeat or avoid the years of 1793-94. But in this book author Timothy Tackett persuasively argues the opposite – that it was the emotional currents and fluctuations of the French Revolution that ultimately, but not inevitably, led to its bloodiest and best-remembered period.
I came across this book in the library and was immediately engrossed when I realized what it was. For a long time I wondered why there were not more “emotional” histories: monographs that cover an event or time period through the emotional reactions it inspired in the people who lived through them. The French Revolution is in many respects an ideal subject for such a treatment, given that it was a simultaneously transformative and utterly unexpected; but that it also came, not entirely uncoincidentally, at a time of great expansion in literacy and literary expression. The vast number of diaries, letters, pamphlets, newspapers, treatises, etc. that the Revolution produced no doubt made it vastly easier to approach with this framing. The book suggest this itself in its structure; despite it being the central event, it falls to one of the shortest chapters to cover the bulk of the Reign of Terror and the “Great Terror”, as all the previously prolific writers of Paris simultaneously mute themselves in an attempt to avoid Madame Guillotine.
Tackett assumes the reader knows most of the details of the standard narrative; little attempt is made to sketch out the larger situation at any given time and much of the material is structured thematically rather than strictly linearly. It helps to know the differences between the National Assembly and Legislative Assembly and National Convention (for this review’s purposes I will instead refer in general to “the legislature”). The pre-revolutionary political situation is covered in a scant six pages in favour of devoting attention instead to the worldview and circumstances of those who would become the revolutionary élites that the book primarily draws from. They were largely bourgeois, middle-class types: lawyers especially, but also shopkeepers, merchants, artisans. They were religious, but not exceptionally devout. They had no great criticisms of the nobility; they had little inkling or expectation that the current social structure would ever changed, and seemed content to relying on the existing system of noble patronage. They were men of reason, and unlike the peasantry took pride that they were not prone to being swayed by rumour and conspiracy. And most notable of all, Tackett stresses that among those Third Estate members who had written political pamphlets prior to the Revolution, only one – no points for guessing who! - gave indications of paranoia. So what could explain how these devotees of liberal enlightenment found themselves waist-deep in blood five years later?
When the Revolution came, it did so suddenly and by surprise. When Louis XVI called the Estates in order to address the state of France’s finances, the future revolutionaries of the Third Estate only had modest ambitions: lifting of total press censorship, freedom of assembly, greater influence in government for commoners, some kind of permanent representative legislature. The Estates-General convened on May 4, 1789, and after a sudden and intense period of political and class awakening, within six weeks the Third Estate deputies had broken off from the rest and formed a hostile and sovereign legislature, which immediately declared the entire existing tax system as illegal. The famous Tennis Court Oath where they swore to write a constitution followed a few days later, and a week after that the clergy and noble deputies grudgingly joined. Paranoia suddenly grew when foreign mercenaries began massing in Versailles – could Louis merely be feigning acceptance, while preparing to crush them? - but after the storming of the Bastille the King appeared to back down, coming before the legislature to give his blessing to their self-appointed powers. The patriot elites decided that the violence, while unfortunate, had regrettably been necessary. This basic cycle – enthusiasm about reforms, followed by sudden anxiety that they might be reversed, menaced by vast conspiracies that justify further violence – becomes the vicious circle of Tackett’s emotional narrative. One small-town barrister wrote of how keenly he felt the “striking contrast between good and evil, anguish and hope, joy and sadness, which so rapidly follow upon one another.” This turbulent emotional cascade is the throughline of the book.
The years of 1789-93 provided an incredible series of events to feed both anguish and hope. I cannot and will not attempt to write at any length about the course of the Revolution and its consequences because it is beyond the scope of this post (and the book it is trying to review). There’s a reason historians tend to use 1789 as the starting point of modernity. All of a sudden the philosophies which dominate the modern consciousness emerged all at once; from the void stepped out nationalism, feminism, socialism, conservatism, atheism. Even single days could seemingly change everything: on August 4, 1789 a staged speech of a liberal noble renouncing his seigneurial dues resulted in an “electric whirlwind” of changes as other deputies got caught up in the emotions of the moment. By the end of the night not just seigneurial dues but also noble courts, exclusive noble hunting rights, a variety of excise and consumption taxes that were noble-exempt, sale of offices, the entire patronage-appointed royal administration, Church tithes, and a series of other noble and clergy privileges had been eliminated: feudalism felled in a single day. The rapid and unprecedented shifts generated a wave of euphoria among the French commons. An institution that had ruled largely unchallenged and unchanged for over 1,000 years suddenly seemed mutable. Tackett frequently refers to the “spirit of ‘89”: this emergent idealism and utopianism that anything and everything could be changed, that one could create a new future for mankind. He quotes numerous onlookers who were simply stunned by events: familiar themes in the responses were that entire centuries had been condensed into a span of days. Many declared that only divine intervention could have led such a breathtaking transformation; churches across the country held special ceremonies so that people could give thanks to Heaven. Spontaneous instances of collective oath-taking broke out across the nation, swearing allegiance to the decrees of the legislature.
But there were threats to the gains that had been made. The virtually-overnight abolition of all the nation’s institutions did not come without a major breakdown of order. With the traditional power structures dismantled, regions were forced to create ad-hoc replacements of their own, with varying legitimacy. At the same time an enormous surge of new media entered the market now free from censorship, praising ideals of freedom, equality, and abolition of hierarchies. Army units mutinied, police and judges fled their posts, urban workers striked while peasants refused to pay all taxes. Dissident nobles had begun leaving in July and August 1789, fleeing from the potential of violence or seeking the aid of those who might restore their privileges. When the Church was subordinated to the national government in 1790, about half of the nation’s 50,000 priests refused to swear allegiance to the legislature instead of Rome, and many patriots feared what betrayals might fester in the regions these refractory priests held sway. Mass psychosis gave these mainly rural, humble priests extraordinary resources and influence, but some grand conspiracies were true. The King indeed was merely feigning cooperation with the legislature, and in June 1791 made a failed attempt to flee the country, leaving behind proof that he was conspiring with escaped nobles and foreign kings to crush the Revolution. The threat of war from reactionary foreign powers fuelled endless anxiety.
It was this simultaneously chaotic, hopeful and paranoid society that tumbled confidently into a near-uninterrupted stretch of wars that would last a further 23 years. Initially during the Revolution there was an international sense of fraternity: in May 1790 the legislature and agreed that never again would France declare war on a brother nation. 18 months later, a sense of bellicose nationalism was aggressively pushing a war on the entire world, a “universal crusade for liberty.” Confidence was extremely high: “if we firmly desire it, we can liberate Europe in six months and purge the earth of all tyrants” one patriot predicted. The initial failures of the war and the sudden (suspicious?) surrender of key French forts fuelled a rise of extremism and violence across the nation which ended in the toppling of the King and the declaration of the Republic. Just as this occurred, a wave of French victories followed which simultaneously ended the internal violence and convinced the radicals of what they had always suspected: France’s failures were solely due to internal treachery. After the execution of Louis XVI, the now-invincible Republic declared war on Spain and the UK as well. “One more enemy for France will bring one more triumph for liberty,” declared one patriot. It was under this pressure of a four-front war that Paris demanded conscripts from the provinces, sparking a massive and long-feared counter-revolution in the West of the country. As war without and within threatened to consume the nation, the heat turned up on the government: could they secretly be traitors too? A mob stormed the legislature in June 1793 and forced the legislature to order their arrests. This launched a fresh wave of federalist revolts as many cities turned their back on the legislature. Seeing no alternative, the new Revolutionary government – now led by the infamous Committee of Public Safety - announced the levée en masse in August. The entire nation would be mobilized: young men would fight (1.5 million called up in the first round of conscription alone), women and others would support the war effort. The obvious question loomed: if all France’s fighting men were at the frontiers, who would defend the women and children against the vast number of internal traitors? There was only one solution.
Tackett rejects several of the traditional theories for how the Terror came to be. He takes a dim view to ideological explanations: the Revolutionary elites held nothing that could be coherently described as an ideology, let alone one that would inevitably end in Terror. Describing them as “liberal” functions only as a crude short-hand; they did not see themselves as such and some of what are now fundamental tenets of liberalism, like freedom of religion, was something the Revolution only stumbled into accidentally. The participants themselves in their writings and actions more typically drew from Classical writers than from recent Enlightenment philosophers. The Revolution itself was an accident of history and going into it those who would lead it had no inkling that they would oversee or even desire anything more than the limited aims they had when the Estates-General convened. Marxist theories on class struggle are similarly rejected: the most significant period of reforms, 1789-90, featured a legislature that was majority-composed of former members of the nobility and clergy. View of social class was much more analogous to that of immutable race, and many quoted in the book use that terminology exactly; that so many of the liberal nobles who willingly shed their own privileges ended up being executed reinforces this. Nor does he accept explanations that the Terror was the unique product of the external pressures facing France in 1793-94: the Revolutionaries were always much more concerned with internal threats than external even at the darkest stages of the War of the First Coalition, and the bloodiest stage of it was the last seven weeks after the worst phases of both internal and external threats were past. More remarkably, much of France had been largely untouched by the Terror: while some 35-40,000 were killed in the process of the Revolutionary tribunals, six departments saw zero deaths and over a third had fewer than ten. Meanwhile, the west bathed in blood: some 250-300 thousand died in the taming of the counterrevolution in the Vendée.
Tackett devotes much effort to cataloguing the development the paranoid conspiracy mindset that would dominate the Terror. He sees forerunners of this mentality in the wild rumours people would concoct in the early days of the Revolution; at the time they focused principally on murderers and robbers. Several times all of Paris was illuminated overnight in order to forestall some vague mass plot; this defensive measure would be returned to constantly during times of future anxiety. As the menace of counter-revolution grew, nobles and refractory priests took the place of common criminals. After the King’s failed flight, all manner of conspiracies were vindicated. Patriots prided themselves in their eagerness to sniff out betrayal. Various social clubs took blood oaths to defend the lives of accusers, or adopted the All-Seeing Eye as a badge of their vigilance. Prominent writers declared a “declaration of rights of the accuser.” One then-hero, future-traitor Mirabeau wrote “an act of denunciation… must be considered as the most important of our new virtues, as the protector of our nascent liberty.”
The humiliation and fear of trusted individuals being revealed as traitors was a reoccurring theme: not just become some were indeed schemers, but also the increasing radicalization of the Revolution meant to stay firm in your principles eventually shifted you from being a revolutionary to a reactionary. The metaphor of a traitor with a mask being more dangerous than an armed enemy was a frequently espoused sentiment. In the various organs that were set up to process these accusations of treachery, they turned increasingly inward until they were mainly aimed at other revolutionaries.
This conspiratorial mindset aided greatly in the factionalization of France. Tackett makes the argument that such splits – first between the Jacobins and the Feuillants, then the Jacobins and the Girondins, and then within the Montagnards – were largely not rooted in ideology, but rather breakdowns of personal relationships. On the major issues the legislature voted with near unanimity; there was no great partisan split in the actual operation of the country. There was even a charming – if ominous – act of solidarity when all the deputies swore together to die rather than let foreign enemies alter the constitution they had written. Rather, at the beginning of each of these schisms seems to have been some kind of personality conflict, that only later manifested itself into an ideological shift. “There exists only two parties in France,” Robespierre declared in October 1792, “the party of good citizens and the party of evil citizens.” One woman who is frequently quoted through the book and had been brimming with a sense of fraternity in ‘89, later wondered of her former friends, “how could such good individuals have become so vile?” The most outspoken individuals who would take charge of each faction were incredibly cavalier with accusing their counterparts of vast treasons. During the trial of Louis for example, leading Jacobins claimed that their opponents were secret monarchists working on behalf of the King; the Girondins likewise claimed that the Jacobins were being funded by the British to kill the king so they could declare themselves dictators. They never bothered to support any of their claims with proof – after all, why would their enemies be so lax as to let proof of their misdeeds remain behind?
The term “stochastic terrorism” has predictably become abused in online discourse. I’m not sure whether Tackett knew of the term while writing this or deliberately neglected to use it, but it is the one that feels most apt at many points. The term “terrorism” of course comes from this Terror, though the revolutionaries used in unambiguously in a positive sense: “make terror the order of the day!” was a common refrain in fall 1793. But a strong impression I got from reading this book was how reluctant the shifts towards mass violence were. While the revolutionaries were very eager to use vicious invective and happy to level the most extreme accusations of treachery at their political enemies, it was rarely the elites themselves that began the violence. It was the mob that stormed the Bastille, assaulted the Tuileries, massacred prisoners, invaded the legislature. After each of these incidents the elites seemed somewhere between embarrassed and furious. For example, after months of accusations of treason at their Girondin counterparts, when the mob stormed the legislature and forced the Montagnard deputies at gunpoint to arrest these traitors in June 1792, they were still given very lenient treatment (and most ended up escaping their very lax house arrests). While the violence was typically justified afterwards, the elites seemed genuinely disturbed that people would take their words to their logical conclusions. The polemicists were of course to some degree aware of the potential of arousing the fury of the mob, and this was one of the reasons Robespierre targeted them with a purge in spring 1794.
It was certainly amusing to see how much of contemporary discourse on misinformation, press freedom, and conspiracy theories could be fitted (albeit somewhat awkwardly) onto the situation in 1792-93. With the sudden transition from the rigidly-controlled media environment of the Ancien Régime to the total free-for-all of the Revolution, there was a complete lack of social mores, acceptable standards of conduct, and a fundamental aversion to honesty in the wave of newspapers and pamphlets that flooded France. It’s not hard to draw parallels to the present, nor is it difficult to find examples of public denunciations for lack of civisme. So maybe that element hasn’t changed, but this feels like a raw deal: I’ve felt the anxiety and paranoia, but not the euphoria. I’ve never been able to escape cynicism, I’ve never felt that utopian spirit of ‘89. But now at least I can partially convince myself that it’s for the best.
If you've never read a standard history of the French Revolution, I would highly recommend you do. I don't think there's another historical event more instrumental in shaping the present - at least not one so constrained, geographically and in duration. Beyond its importance, it is so rich in drama and twists that it makes for endlessly fascinating reading - even larger histories have to give short shrift to some of the most flamboyant and influential characters. The "emotional" approach to the Revolution that Tackett takes in this book makes for a compelling and persuasive narrative for how the Terror came to be. I would definitely be interested in seeing other events tackled in a similar manner.
I was struck by a passage from Barack Obama's recent autobiography, describing how each day in the oval office, he would read 10 letters from concerned citizens, and occasionally direct government agencies to reach out and help one. He didn't feel a lot of accomplishment from this, however, because he knew that for each individual he helped, there were tens of thousands struggling in the wake of the financial crisis.
I thought this passage was interesting, because while this sort of dejection might be appropriate for a person trying to maximize their impact at the helm of a huge bureaucratic apparatus, it would be a totally counterproductive attitude for many everyday citizens just trying to help out their communities. Clearly our society needs people with a wide distribution on the intended-scale-of-impact trait, and maybe individuals should also have their own distribution over the scale their various activities act on...?
As a PhD student, I felt for a long time that the highest EV thing I could do was learn things or work on projects, but as I've started to appreciate the miniscule impact most papers (...even many fields... lol) have, I've started to question whether that was the right call.
I was just curious how people here think about this. How do you approach diversifying the scale of impact of things you work on?
[This version has embedded images]
A long time ago, some primitive apes got addicted to rocks.
The earliest stone tools were crude bastards, made by smashing large river pebbles together and calling it a day.
Stone choppers like the one above took the prehistoric neighborhood by storm almost 3 million years ago. However dull the tools themselves may have been, this was the cutting-edge technology for literally more than a million years, a timescale I have no capacity of comprehending. Not until around 1.7 million years ago (again, no idea what this means) that someone got the bright idea of chipping away both sides of a rock. You can see what the (tedious) process looks like.
The end result is the unassuming tear-drop shaped hand axe, by far the longest used tool in human history. There are no accessories here with the hand axe, its name comes from the fact that you use it by holding it directly with your hands.
On top of being tedious and painful to make, you can imagine that it's not terribly comfortable to hold while using. Hand axes also have to be somewhat bulky because of the necessity of combining the sharp useful end with the blunt holding end. But what if --- stay with me for a second --- instead of holding the thing directly with our pathetic squishy hands, we held something that "handled" the tool for us? It took humans about another million years to discover hafting, with the earliest examples from around 500,000 years ago but the technique didn't really find its stride until the microlith era of stone tools around 35,000 years ago.
Then humans found metal.
"Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken."
-- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye"
The historian Bret Devereaux has an excellent and highly-recommended series on the history of iron. The popular depiction of iron being a rare commodity (typified within medieval and fantasy genre) obscures some of the reality. As a material, iron is extremely abundant --- the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust, making up 5% of its mass. The hurdle with iron wasn't finding it but rather getting it out of the ground and into a useable form. It required a lot of dead trees and broken shins. One of the illustrations Devereaux cited is from 1556, and shows how workers wore shin protection as they crushed the ore into useable chunks.
Think about how many mangled limbs had to accumulate before medieval OSHA cared enough about this hazard. After the ore is dug out of the ground, the next hurdle was figuring out how to reach the high temperatures needed for processing. Because of how finicky iron is about absorbing too much carbon, the only feasible avenue was charcoal, which is made from wood, which is cut from many many trees. As Devereaux notes:
To put that in some perspective, a Roman legion (roughly 5,000 men) in the Late Republic might have carried into battle around 44,000kg (c. 48.5 tons) of iron -- not counting pots, fittings, picks, shovels and other tools we know they used. That iron equipment in turn might represent the mining of around 541,200kg (c. 600 tons) of ore, smelted with 642,400kg (c. 710 tons) of charcoal, made from 4,620,000kg (c. 5,100 tons) of wood. Cutting the wood and making the charcoal alone, from our figures above, might represent something like (I am assuming our charcoal-burners are working in teams) 80,000 man-days of labor. For one legion.
To understate it, much has changed since. A stainless steel spoon today is a trivially manufactured artifact. But just the material from that spoon would have represented thousands of times its weight in stone and tree, all excavated by hand. I think about what this spoon, held in the palm of my hand, would have previously cost in terms of human toil and crushed limbs.
This post is about AI.
I feel like I'm holding a hand axe right now, while everyone around me is revving up their chainsaws. I feel like I'm a peasant awestruck at the intricacies of a steel spoon, unaware of its bargain bin progeny.
It's difficult, and exhausting, to keep up with the pace of AI developments. I also question my ability to make any sort of concrete or realistic predictions in this field, so I'll try to keep it semi-grounded in the present.
What already seems evident is that, even if we assume a complete halt to any further developments, content creation is already utterly trivialized. Do you want a picture of a cat riding a unicycle while smoking a hookah? Here's 50. Do you want those same drawings but done as if Picasso was tripping out on LSD? Done. Do you want the script from an 80-episode television series involving these psychedelic Picasso unicycle cats as they work to solve a murder mystery on a cruise ship in a black hole? And you want each cat voiced by a different rap artist from Kanye West to DMX? Why not also make it a choose-your-own adventure series controlled by each viewer? Sure, whatever, done. Some of these require a little work to stitch together, but you can have it all.
Part of where my feelings are settling are a bizarre mix of trepidation, ennui, fatigue, and...excitement? I'm not the only one to ever experience mild frustration that a given movie, TV show, book, video game, etc. wasn't exactly just right, and if only the creators changed this one thing that would've been so much better.
I encounter this feeling constantly with video games and for that same reason I tend to gravitate towards extensively modifying big-budget video games to my liking with mods. For a period of time, I definitely sunk in more hours finding, installing, and configuring Skyrim mods than actually playing the game itself. This was only possible because other people were insane enough to pop the hood open and get their hands dirty. If I wanted cold weather survival elements added to Skyrim, I was lucky enough that someone else had the gumption to analyze the game files, draft up pseudo-scripts, and collect custom-made assets into a coherent package that actually worked.
I also appreciate the estorism of open-source oeuvres made entirely by coding hobbyists, like the suburban apocalypse simulator Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Cataclysm is a jury-rigged amalgamation, cobbled together over the years by dozens of drive-by developers. Some aspects of the game are painfully undercooked, such as the lack of any real ending, while others are pathologically overdeveloped, such as the ridiculously intricate vehicle physics system which manages to accurately simulate drag resistance in a game where no one will ever the difference. The only reason there's any progress made on these projects is because there are enough enthusiasts roaming around with actual coding talent, but they'll only chase after their own whims and then move on. Anyone else with ideas either has to convince one of these sensei to take up their cause, or drudge through hours of coding tutorials on YouTube to ever stand a chance. Lots of fields stay fallow then.
Outside of play and in the realm of work, much of my time is chasing after tedium. A few tasks manage to reliably trigger my procrastination reflex with the main one being legal research and writing. Let's say I'm trying to have incriminating statements or evidence suppressed. If the scenario is even slightly interesting, I am not likely to find a case precedent within my jurisdiction that is perfectly on point. Instead, I dump a few search terms into a legal database and then spend hours with dozens of tabs open, dutifully reviewing each hoping I can find enough adjacent precedent to triangulate into an answer into my own case. Judicial opinions are almost never written in a uniform manner, so I often find myself realizing a given case is worthless only after already wasting several minutes reviewing it. After all that research, I have to synthesize it into something legally accurate without boring the overworked judge to death.
It's all tedious boring work. It's also a perfect use-case scenario for chatGPT because it would be trivial for me to just ask it to quickly find and summarize whatever is analogous to what I'm looking for, then write something custom-tailored. The day that Westlaw incorporates chatGPT is the day that Thomson Reuters will become a pseudo-branch of the Treasury Department, for its ability to just print money from the legal profession. To be clear, my concern here is not job loss. I imagine that with greater productivity comes greater expectations, especially with AI helpers at our side.
I wonder, why bother with any of it now?
On the consumption side, whatever game I choose to play now will only get way better in a few months as I'm able to trivially customize it to my mind's whim. Same with whatever television show, or movie, or book. Or existence.
On the production side there's so much more I want to write but I also wonder, why bother writing anything if it's just going to be swallowed up whole and incorporated into the labyrinthian halls of a Borges infinite library. Realistically the only effect this post will ultimately leave upon the world is a faint whisper of an errant memory. The rest will either be carved up into individual tokens or buried under a figurative mountain of indecipherable pages. I see the entire corpus of mankind's creative output as a tiny ship, a gnat really, about to swallowed by a towering ocean wave. Part of me just wants to sit and wait for the flood.
I wrote this entire post without chatGPT, to prove something I guess. It took hours. I had to look up some new concepts, read enough to understand them, revisit old essays I read, and review them to refresh my memory. After all that, I had to use my dumb fingers to tap buttons on my dumb keyboard, over and over again.
I'm the idiot holding the hand axe. I'm the imbecile mangling my shins with rock debris. Why bother?
A piece I wrote on one of the most fascinating and incredible thriftstore finds I've ever stumbled upon.
The Edwardians and Victorians were not like us, they believed in a nobility of their political class that's almost impossible to understand or relate to, and that believe, that attribution of nobility is tied up with something even more mysterious: their belief in the fundamental nobility of rhetoric.
Still not sure entirely how I feel about this, or how sure I am of my conclusions but this has had me spellbound in fascination and so I wrote about it.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
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- "What is going in Sudan is a practical demonstration that being a global power does not mean that everything going on in the world is secretly about you."
Discriminating Taste
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I have a subsblog. And my [first post][mm] is against those who say there's "no such thing as progress"
https://www.amphobian.info/p/marys-motte-and-the-case-against.
I'm basing this off Mary Harrington's recent podcast with Bret Weinstein. But more likely I'm picking a fight with some y'all here, so I hope you enjoy it.
It is one thing when someone is merely wrong. But when someone denies what is starkly before everyone's eyes, then bullshit is in the air. And that is what I smell whenever I hear the dogma that "there is no such thing as progress".
I these dogmatists of of a motte-and-bailey trick
... progress-skeptics retreat back to the safety of Mary's Motte and acknowledge the growth of knowledge, productivity social complexity and human health but deny that this is called progress.
Their motte is a Reasonable But Wrong claim that these sorts of growth aren't morally valuable. Their bailey extends to denying history and also accusing optimists of teleological magical thinking. But really progress has a simple cause: useful knowledge increases.
Civilised humans took millennia to discover writing, bronze and electricity. But we have not since undiscovered them. Useful knowledge is easier to retain than win and easier to win than destroy. On the scale of history, it is quickly disseminated, replicated and used. It gets encoded redundantly in books, technologies, social practices and the genes of domesticated species. Every generation inherits a vast and waxing store of ancestral knowledge both explicit and tacit.
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