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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".
the missionary is acting as though there is a law to be followed, when there obviously is not. The checkpoint guard is a potential threat, the "service charge" is not optional, and these realities must be engaged with. The missionary is thinking there's some system in place such that these realities are Someone Else's Problem, that the proper response is to file a complaint form and let the system handle it. He's blind to the fact that there is no system, that this is the way things are.
The cat lady is doing the same thing. She acts as though there's a system to enforce her will over and above her immediate actions. She apparently thinks there's a system that prevents the cat from walking out an open door, ignoring that no such system exists. She wants such a system to exist, ignores the fact that it does not, and so suffers the consequences.
The "dishes" poem (one of my favorites, by the way) illustrates the disconnect between cooperative systems of the type the people in these two examples are imagining exist, and the reality of individual choice. Washing the dishes is supposed to preclude breaking them, but there's nothing innate to the task to actually prevent this. What prevents breaking dishes is something entirely different, a whole other complex of assumptions and interactions with no actual connection to the act of dish-washing itself, and the existence of those assumptions cannot simply be assumed when it's time for dish-washing.
Assuming the above is correct, let's see if I can extend the pattern.
This scene from The Wire is all about the divide between the power of a hypothetical system and the power of material reality. The guard wants it to be one way: his whole job is in fact to be that system, that's the whole reason he's there, the reason he draws a paycheck, he has a uniform and everything! And yet, it's the other way: the system doesn't actually exist, even though he wants it to, even though he's paid to implement it, because at the end of the day, cooperation has to either be consented to or enforced, nd mechanisms of enforcement are both very expensive and quite limited in what they can achieve. Stanfield refuses to consent, and the guard, and the people the guard represents, aren't actually prepared for enforcement. They're bluffing, and Stanfield calls it. The guard's response is to try to guilt-trip him over his defection, as though Stanfield doesn't understand what he's doing, as though he's just making a mistake, and once this is pointed out he'll fall in line with the system. This doesn't work because Stanfield is not making a mistake, has no intention of cooperating, and knows that neither the guard nor the people behind him have any way of enforcing the system they're claiming exists. In reality, he has all the cards, and recognizes no reason to pretend otherwise. He is able to inflict emotional whiplash on the guard at will, by allowing the guard to pretend the system exists, and then demonstrating that it does not.
Applying it to the Culture War, there's the argument I've made for a long time here that the Constitution is dead, or that it is ink and paper, or that it is whatever five justices say it is. The point of all these statements is to highlight different ways that this system vs reality disconnect applies to the system of the Constitution: the document itself is not the power, the justices aren't even the power. The paper and ink and the justices interpreting it are just coordination mechanisms. The power comes from the social consensus that they exist to coordinate, and that power can be manipulated in a whole variety of ways that have nothing to do with a fancy piece of parchment or five people in silly black robes. A foolish person might imagine that their ignition key is what powers their car: they turn the key and the car starts! But of course, the ignition key is only indirectly connected to the car's engine, and if there's something wrong with the engine the key certainly isn't going to help.
This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.
I agree with your overall characterization. To be clear my objection "the constitution is dead" rhetoric has always been that something must have actually been alive at some point in order to be "dead". As for "the constitution is whatever five justices say it is." I feel that this is aptly covered by my closing observations on laws and kings.
Now carry your extension of the pattern even farther...
I've previously likened many of the anti-woke posters here on theMotte to people who are still in the Matrix. They may have taken the red-pill but they haven't freed their minds. They're still trying to model the world in terms of systems of inductive logic, they're still trying frame things in terms of where they sit in the intersectional stack, they still have not grasped the true implications of the "replication crisis" and apparent fact that the bulk of academic inputs are garbage, they still buy into obvious nonsense like "elite theory" and "external loci of control". In short, they still think that's air they're breathing.
A fair point. There was a big post I've tried to write a couple times about exactly this, how the partisan politics of my youth deeply ingrained an idea that the system actually ran things, that the key powered the car. And this is in fact how I grew up thinking about the constitution, as though the paper and ink had a life of their own, as though the social system that emerged from them was as dependable as gravity. I think a lot of people still think of it that way.
Thinking about it, though, wasn't that the point? Weren't the Constitution's authors attempting to create an instinctive, unquestioned norm, something where compliance didn't have to be enforced on a case-by-case basis, but could simply be assumed? My church seems "alive" to me, because we don't argue about whether God exists, whether Jesus died for us, or whether our goal is to serve him. If those were live issues within my church, if the preacher and the elders considered them live issues of debate, I'd be looking for a new church, because I would consider my current one to be "dead". Ideally, wouldn't it be the same for the constitution?
This was me, for a long, long time, as you no doubt noticed, and the temptation is still there.
There's a deeper thread I wish I had more time to follow; briefly, the systems, when they work, make things a lot easier for everyone involved. Certainly that's how it was for me. I didn't want to accept that there wasn't a systemic answer available, because non-systemic answers seem riskier and scarier than systemic ones. Probably it's no more complicated than the difficulty of distinguishing prudence from cowardice; the latter will always frame itself as the former, one can always say that that any risk is too great.
A scene from one of my favorite films:
Tommy wants a plan. He wants a systemic answer that assures him everything is going to be fine, that risk is minimal. He wants lines to color inside and the assurance that as long as he does his part, everything will work out. A lot of people are like Tommy. I certainly was, and still am to at least some extent. Freedom is scary. You changed my mind pretty significantly by having a similar conversation once upon a time, but for this reality to sink in one has to be willing to accept the possibility of considerable losses. There's another effort-post I've been considering, looking at rationalist and proto-rationalist fiction, stuff like HPMOR and Ender's Game, and the way certain Enlightenment assumptions bleed through every part of the narrative: there's a right answer, there's a winning move to find if you're clever enough, there's always a way out, a way to fix things, a way to get what you want. The same idea comes through in a lot of Scott's and Yudkowski's writings. They look at the world and imagine there's a system to manipulate, a right answer to parrot back, a solution. Hence Utilitarianism's attempts to "solve" morality like a math problem, and all the absurdities and atrocities that result. My experience is that this idea is very attractive, and it dies very hard.
This is the sort of magical thinking that we almost inevitably engage in because our minds are a tiny subset of the enormous universe that they are trying to model, so our minds inevitably have to simplify almost everything about reality.
Another such simplification, for example, is the idea that there is such a thing as "the left" and "the right".
Another is viewing the economy through abstractions like "the market" or "socialist planning" rather than viewing it as an immensely complicated system of land, physical materials, people who all have their own motives, computers, communications flying every which way, and so on.
It often is for a long time until it isn't.
Lenin: "there are decades in which nothing happens and weeks in which decades happen".
But it is difficult to function without the belief in this dependability, even though to be convinced of the dependability would again be magical thinking. So again, our minds simplify in order to face reality.
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