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Inferential Distance Part 3 of ?. On being a not-so-special agent.
It's 2012 or maybe 13 I'm honestly not sure, but the 15 year-old border guard keeps his AK on safe as he inspects our paper-work and negotiates the customary 'service charge'. In reciprocity I keep the revolver concealed in my jacket pocket pointed at the dirt instead of the kid's groin and quietly pray neither of us will get shot today.
This post is an installment of an ongoing series.
Part 1: Knowing Right from Left
Part 2: Minsky's Marvelous Minutia, why I'm bearish on AI
I've started writing this post at least a dozen times now and each time I have hit a wall and stopped. There's an idea/feeling I want to convey but I don't have the words it for in part because it is the water I swim in. At the same time the a number of recent posts/threads have left me thinking I really need to just say fuck the wall and kool-aid-man my way through it. I freely concede that the rest may come across as nonsense but I swear there is is point to be had.
Anyway, as we pulled away from the impromptu border checkpoint on the A3 outside Liboi I notice that the young med-students volunteering for [International NGO] and the Mormon Missionary that I'd been charged with chauffeuring are giving me odd looks. As I re-stow the Brazilian-made Smith & Wesson clone in the center console the missionary begins to hammer me with questions "have you had that gun the whole time?" "yes". "Were those real cops?" "Real enough". "What do you mean 'real enough'?" "Just that". "Did you bribe them?" "No, I paid a service charge". "Were you really going to shoot them" "Not if i didn't have to". "Who sets the service charge" "the guys running the checkpoint". "Are you sure it's not a bribe" :Now Faintly exasperated: "Yes, if it were 'a bribe' it would not have been included as a line item in your travel budget because that would be illegal"
10 years later I'm in the back yard talking to my elderly neighbor who lives in the other half of the duplex. She's angry that her purebread indoor cat that she spends a fortune on premium cat-food for has gotten out out of the house yet again and has been running around the back yard, getting dirty, eating table scraps, and having sex with the local stray. She makes some vague insinuation that my kids are somehow to blame. I calmly point out that she had left her kitchen door wide-open and that's probably how the cat got out. "But that was to get some fresh air in the house not to let the cat out" she explains. I nod and pretend to understand, but I don't. Instead I am reminded that missionary on a dusty African highway a decade ago.
Can you see the common thread? If not, perhaps a third example will help clarify...
I don't know if you're seeing what I see here, but in my mind all three of these examples, the missionary's questions, the my neighbor complaining while the cat does as she pleases, and the Silverstein poem all seem to trip the same breaker in my hindbrain and gesture towards the same underlying feeling. They are simultaneously nothing alike, and the exact same picture.
If I had to distill it down to a single sentence it would be "the sensation of agency" but that doesn't quite cover it because a major component is also the awareness of the pressence of other agents in the environment and like water for a fish (or air for a human) most people never consider it's presence unless confronted with it's absence.
On a related note, I think one of the more valuable lessons another person ever taught me was "Never give an order that will not be followed". It was part of an NCO leadership course that I attended prior to my second deployment. The course itself is something I've been meaning to write about at somepoint because the material was almost the polar opposite of what you might expect from an official military curriculum or formal "leadership" course and yet I can say with confidence that it made me a better leader, a better folower, and 15 - 20 odd years later arguably a better parent and boss. The dude who taught the course was a crusty old fuck in his late 50s who'd served from the end of the Vietnam War through the fall of the Berlin Wall and then continued to work for the DoD as a civillian employee through the 90s and into the early 2000s which when our paths crossed.
Those of you who've been around for a while may be aware of my claim that despite endless protestations to the contrary the US military is oddly democratic in the sense that that much of the actual power and decision-making is concentrated in "the Demos" IE the enlisted rank and file. Much like my neighbor's cat, Marines are gonna do Marine shit regardless of what you want them to do and it's on you to adapt to them rather than vice versa. The point Mr. Young was trying to impress upon us as future Platoon, Company, and Detachment leaders was essentially the same one that Tywin Lannister/Charles Dance is trying to impress upon his grandson in this scene from Game of Thrones back when it was still good. As rigid as the military hierarchy may be portrayed, it is far more flexible in practice. It is important to remember that those under your command are agents in thier own right. They have thier own objectives, their own opinions, thier own desires, and they are fully capable of making thier own decisions about who what to do, and who to listen to. The key to being obeyed is understanding what orders to give. The best orders are those that your subordinates will understand and want to follow in their own right. Any officer or NCO who finds himself appealing to authority is effectively inviting mutiny. Hence the admonishment to "Never give an order that will not be followed" and the observation that a man who needs to keep reminding people that he is in charge is not truly "in charge".
Which brings us to the flip side of the course and what I have in mind when I describe the course as "the opposite of what you might expect from an official military curriculum". That being formal training in the esoteric arts of "Malingering" and "Malicious Compliance". As a senior NCO your job is two-fold, to keep the enlisted men on task and to punish the stupidity of officers. Simply put, the ability to recognize and implement such techniques is a core competency for both jobs. The word "No" is one that should be used sparingly precisely because it is powerful. "No" is not a teaching word. However following an order to the letter
evenespecially when doing so will get your superiors in trouble is a teaching moment because it teaches your superiors to think carefully about the orders they give.I've heard through the grape-vine that the old Navy/USMC NCO curriculum developed during the Vietnam War was superseded by something "more contemporary" not long after I completed the course. I can't imagine that this is a good thing because I feel like this intrinsic conceptualization of "the contested environment" not just between ostensible opponents, but those who are in theory at least on the same side is something that is sorely missing from modern commentary.
As I've said before I feel like the left's dominance of academia and traditional media has effectively left a Hobbes-and-Burke-shaped hole in the discourse. We have users here saying things like "the only wardrobe that allows CCW in New York is a police uniform" because the possibility of a human being choosing to disobey the law is just not something that exists within their philosophy even as they complain about rampant criminality. Would it have been legal for me to shoot that teenage border guard? No of course not. Was anyone at anytime under the impression that this legality or lack there of played any role in my ultimate decision not to shoot him? No of course not.
Yet another one of those core points of inferential difference between woke urban progressives/rationalists and the mainstream right is this distinction between law and social hierarchis as a means vs as an end. The difference between "we follow this man because he is the king" and "this man is the king because we follow him".
I was planning on berating you for not doing a trailer post first, so I appreciate this.
That aside, this is kinda cheap -
I mean, you could be right - you aren't about nybbler as he mentions below, but stripping away the hyperbole I have met people who seemed to think illegal = flat out impossible before. I don't think they're hanging out on the motte though. We pretty much have to talk in legalities about legal issues because the law is a shared baseline we might not all agree to, but we all agree exists. Arguments like "New York doesn't allow private citizens to concealed carry!" "Heh u still can 😎" don't really go anywhere.
Perhaps they should though.
As @crushedoranges observes down thread there seems to be this paradoxical complete confidence in the power of the state while simultaneously existing in a world where public defecation and getting attacked on the street are just things the public are expected to tolerate. The only reasonable conclusion from my perspective is that the citizens of New York want to live in filth, that they want to live in Hobbes' state of nature, and this is what I mean when i say that there seems to be a massive Hobbes/Burke shaped hole in the discourse.
Edit to add.
I think the "illegal = flat out impossible" conceit is much more common here than you give it credit for. At the very least it seems to be a reasonably common failure mode of the "systematizing" personality type in general, and rationalists in particular. I actually think it's a large part of the whole "rationalists as quokka" meme. There seems to be this endemic belief in the fundamental correctness of "systems" and "inductive reason" that is simply not supported by observed reality because any scenario involving multiple actors/agents is by its nature going to be anti-inductive and actively resist systematization.
All "laws" must ultimately reduce to the consent of those governed by them.
Ah, I actually think that kind of "you will eat the bugs bigot" doomposting follows the recognition of that truth, but also the next step - that consent can be manufactured and 90% (charitably) of the populace are incapable of seeing through it.
After living through Australian covid I know that it doesn't matter if you sit someone down and walk them through it - 'yes Anastasia Palecek said masks and lockdowns and vaccine mandate, but she can't actually stop you from going to the shops, let alone force you to get drugs injected - and the only reason she is getting away with it currently is because you let her, if everyone walked outside right now and set their masks on fire she would have to accept that Queensland no longer tolerates masks.' they might agree with you in principle, but they will turn around two minutes later and tell you you need a mask if you are going driving.
Did I consent to any of that shit? No, the closest I got was malicious compliance when absolutely necessary. Did it change anything? Yes, dozens of people I once considered friends now refuse to talk to me on the grounds that I am The Joker. Anything in the nature of covid management? Not a thing. None of the people in charge will ever be held responsible.
And if it happens again - maybe this time China weaponises eczema and we all have to handcuff ourselves behind our backs so the infected don't scratch themselves to death - everyone will do as they are told and give me disappointed looks when I tear my hair out wondering why they play along. What else can I do but doompost?
Yeah that's fair. I always assume they are getting carried away with their arguments and forgetting is/ought, because I do that a lot, but that's the other thing I do too much - typical minding.
I sympathize.
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I think a lot of people end up cowed because they at least perceive they have something to lose by defecting. If you’re PMC especially, the prospect of jail is much more scary because it’s not just jail, but a complete economic and social death sentence. You’ll lose most of that comfortable lifestyle, the good job as an apperachnik, the nice house, the nice car, respect and social standing. Rebellion takes that, if you’re arrested. Felons have very few options— most of them terrible— for work. Respectable places don’t want you. The wages (n.b. The felon generally must take an hourly wage) is generally barely a survival wage. Most respectable people don’t hang around with felons either.
With that much to lose, most of those raised PMC are raised with a very strong dose of “obey the law and be a good boy.” Other classes don’t. Someone who’s in the working class thumbs their nose at authorities all the time. They aren’t really the worse for it. If you worked for a survival wage at QuikTrip before you got arrested, you aren’t that much worse to work at QT afterwards. Your shitty house and car aren’t going to get worse. As such the hold the system has on you is much lighter. And at least in America, the bulk of the COVID rebellion came from such stock — people with nothing much to lose.
And quite possibly a literal one, depending on which facility they decide to put you in. Defend yourself too vigorously during the trial and you might find yourself becoming the newest bitch at Five Points.
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It is possible both to be above the law, and below it.
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They do not. To think that there is some "must" there is to make the same mistake as the lady with her cat.
Laws can and often do just reduce to whoever has the most power, consent has nothing inherently to do with it.
You've got that backwards It is those who appeal to silly abstractions like "power" and "legitimacy" who are making the same mistake as the lady with her cat, because a cat is always going to do as the cat pleases. You're appealing something that does not exist.
The only way to prevent a cat from walking through an open door is ensure that the cat does not want to leave the house in the first place. IE to attain the cat's consent.
Legitimacy is an abstraction but power is not. Power is very real. A man who holds a gun to another man's head has power over that man. If cats understood language and understood what guns do, you could also prevent the cat from walking through the open door by telling it that you would shoot it if it did.
No he doesn't, or at the very least only in so far as the man being threatened chooses to allow it. That's kind of what I'm trying to get at. You're imagining that "the system" (or whatever you want to call it) is self-acting when it manifestly is not.
The man with the gun does have power over the other man. In some very unusual sense -- the sense in which "your money or your life" is a free choice -- he does not have the power to force the other man to act as he wishes. But he does have the power to force the other man to choose between acting as he wishes and dying.
I know what I'm about to say is a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason.
We are all dying. we are all going to die.
Even the retarded Yudkowskite who achieves his dream functional immortality by of uploading his consciousness to a block of computronium is doing to die when the last embers of the universe burn out, assuming the molecular structure of his processor didn't get melted down and repurposed long before that.
Death is not the end of things.
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Well, the vagrants have nothing to lose. They have no property that can be confiscated if they commit a crime. Being behind bars might even be an upgrade.
A taxpayer on the other hand is leading a life and owns property and actually stands to lose from state punishment. Even though you can just eat the fine or jail time, the state reaching in to screw you doesn't really seem like a state of nature to me.
Sort of. They have nothing to lose that society is willing to take from them. They have their lives and their freedom (for some definition of those things). They can absolutely lose those things, we're just not willing to take them.
We can solve vagrancy tomorrow, it's just an "atrocity". If it becomes a big enough problem, people will start to look for real solutions, and most of them are pretty bad.
They have their lives but their freedom is worth almost nothing to them, I suspect. Prison is probably better than living on the street.
No, they do value their freedom at least in the moment; if you confine them they will attempt to escape.
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Of course it is; the state of nature is all versus all. If you proclaim yourself free of the state, at the same level of actor of the state, then you have opened yourself up to be legitimately screwed by the full might of the state, because a state of nature has no rules but "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must". And the state is strong and you are weak.
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The ordinary citizens of New York don't have that much say. Every few years they get a vote between people all of whom will either not solve the problem, or cause other problems even worse, or both; that's all the say they have (besides exit). The government has decided it's OK for homeless people to live and shit on the street and terrorize subway passengers; it has decided it's not OK to harm these homeless people (even when they're acting threatening) nor to carry a gun. And it has easily enough power to achieve these ends. It is true that the government COULD decide otherwise; it certainly has the capacity to do it (except in as much as it is constrained by higher-level governments, which is in fact a great deal). But it does not want to.
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