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Inferential Distance: part 4 of ? Do You Think That's Air You're Breathing?
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
Part 3: Not So Special Agents
@DaseindustriesLtd writes...
...and to be fair, he and I have been going back and forth enough for long enough that I genuinely feel like I owe them an honest explanation. The short answer is that I am a genuine believer in this sub's core premise IE that "engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time". The long answer is to follow...
Long time readers will know that I've been going on for years about that Star Trek TNG episode Darmok and Jalad. For those unfamiliar, the premise and core conflict of the episode is summarized in this scene here. The idea being that without a shared narrative or frame of reference communication becomes difficult if not impossible. As observed by Dr Crusher, the image of "Julliet on her Balcony" would mean little to someone who has never been exposed to the works of Shakespear. An alternative for those more academically inclined might be to consider Wittgenstein's "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him". Long story short I actually agree with Wittgenstein here, but I also think that this is an obstacle that can be overcome and if anything, overcoming that obstacle is what this whole series is about.
As such, If you really want to understand what I'm doing here I urge you to watch Fight Club and The Matrix. These two movies were released about 6 months apart and came along at a very strange time in my life. My user-name "HlynkaCG" is, among other things, an obscure Fight Club reference. Hlynka/Hilinka being the Czech word for quicklime and a surname associated with makers of soap. These days the name is more closely associated with hockey but that too feels appropriate as an online "fighting nam". (See the old joke about going to a fight only for a hockey game to break out) In any case, being fresh out of high-school and just starting to realize that the vision that I had been harboring of my future was not going to come to pass, these films left me feeling "seen" in a way that I hadn't since I was a small child. This scene in particular had a profound effect on my outlook in life and it is one that I still find myself reflecting upon and seeing in new light over two decades later.
The extreme degree to which the modern secular mindset tries to insulate itself from the simple universalities of life and death is one of those things that I had never noticed it until it was pointed out to me, but once it had, I found it impossible not to notice. Every subtle (and not so subtle) "nudge" to accrue debt, consume [product], and engage with [latest thing], all seemed to come back to this impulse. The impulse to turn away from life. The Sheeple/NPC meme is rightly derided, especially when it's some angst riddled 19-20 year-old pushing it, but it feflected my sincere feelings at the time. I just couldn't understand how so many people could miss what now seemed so obvious to me. Could they not see where this path leads? Do those Raging Against the Machine not recognize that they themselves are part of it, that their whole existence depends on it?
Enter The Matrix.
I'm a huge fan of The Matrix, I'm even a fan of it's sequels. It is easily one of my favorite series. I'm not going to describe it as underrated or underappreciated because it's not. It was massively influential across multiple domains and basically set the tone of the early 2000s and 2010s. That said I do feel like it's often underestimated. There seem to be an endless stream blogposts and YouTube videos arguing something to the effect of "the Matrix is a lot smarter than you remember" or "the Matrix is a lot smarter than you remember" and they're both correct to some degree. The important and "underestimated" part in my eyes (and in the context of this post) is that the Matrix by presenting us with a narrative it provides the vocabulary needed to discuss a deep inferential gulf. the "red pill", the "blue pill", "cipher's speech", "freeing one's mind", No one can be told what the matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.
So to finally get to the meat of @DaseindustriesLtd's question, let's adress with the elephant in the room.
Identity politics is bullshit.
To be clear, I'm not saying that I don't like it, or that I disagree with it's policy proscriptions. I'm saying that it's bullshit, all of it. Identity politics is a load of incoherant post-modernist nonsense that actively diminishes an individual's ability to understand basic human psychology/behaviors and make accurate predictions about the world. In short, identity politics makes people stupider. It makes people stupid because as with a lot of other post-modernist academic fads it gets cause and effect, source and sink, exactly backwards.
Marcus Aurelius admonishes us to look upon each particular thing and ask what is it's nature? IE what does it do? where does it come from? How does it behave? The answers you get are what that thing is. Scott wrote about this idea at length in The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories but veared away from the what ought to have been the logical conclusion at the last moment rather face it squarely. Identity, to the degree that it represents something meaningful and real, exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified. Dylan Mulvaney can identify as woman all he likes but it but it wont make him a biological female any more than my identfying as a LGM-118 Peacekeeper Missile means that the US government must report on my movements in accordance with the START treaty.
Dase asks from whence "my predeliction" comes, and my reply is whether someone identifies as a progressive or expresses loathing towards "the woke" is not the point. The point is how do they behave? what beliefs do they espouse? and where do they come from? My position is that somebody who behaves like a progressive, comes from a progressive background, and who argues progressive talking points, is for all practical intents and purposes a progressive regardless of how they might identify. Identity exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified.
Which brings us back to the Matrix. The reason that various flavors of failed progressive seem to gravitate towards an ideology resembling early-mid 20th century fascism (as opposed to some flavor of conservatism) is that fascism is a fundamentally progressive ideology. They might take the red pill but they never manage to free thier minds. They want to continue believing that the world runs on inductive logic when any game involving multiple agents is going to be anti-inductive. They want to quibble some group's position within the intersectional stack rather than question the validity of the stack as a concept. They cling to psuedo-marxist nonsense about group/class consciousness and group/class differences to salve their own wounded pride. They still seem to think that they can appeal to some non-existant higher authority with words like "academic consensus" and "studies show". In other words they still think that's air they are breathing.
At the risk of eating another ban I think that it is quite possible for both of the following statements to be true...
The median east African has a room temperature IQ.
The median east African is more intelligent than most posters here on TheMotte.org including myself.
The thing that struck me about Africa when I was living there back in 2012-13 was that everyone had a hustle or three, the people who didn't have some sort of hustle going were bums, as in literally destitute. There's nothing like neccesity to narrow one's focus. Truth is I don't think guys like Bryan Caplan or Elizer Yudkowski can even hold a candle to the average Kenyan Cabby, in terms of observational astuteness, number of languages spoken, or real-time problem solving ability and there is no study you can cite that will convince me otherwise because the entire institution of social science is a fucking joke.
Truth is that primary goal of academia is not to educate, it is to sort winners from losers on the basis of academic aptitude and ability to flatter one's professor. The reason your professors graded on a curve was that your professors were lazy and stupid. After all "Why go through the trouble of designing your test so that only X% of students can answer 90% of the questions when you can just hand out the test as is and set the threshold for an A at the Xth percentile of correct responses?". At the end of the day it is much easier to get students to compete amongst themselves than it is to accurately grade their understanding/uptake of the material. This in turn comes back to what I've said before about how it is combativeness, not consensus, nor the desire to please that produces truth.
Don't take it as a personal criticism when I say that I hate shit like this.
This naive optimism of "rah rah face the pain, ride the tiger, you'll come out stronger for it". For the most part, this line is only repeated by people who have never faced true terror before. People who haven't faced up to the gravity of the problem.
Now, I am not saying that we should simply crumple in the face of tragedy, or that it would be better if we could simply eliminate it. There is a tension that I must navigate here because, as I have intimated elsewhere, my fundamental project is to argue, contra utilitarianism, for the necessity of (the possibility of) pain, even terrible pain, even the worst pain, as a precondition of anything that could be called "meaningful". But I recognize full well that this is a fundamentally insane proposition, at least prima facie. Any person with any sense at all should be running for the safety of the experience machine once they comprehend what horrors are "out there", in "reality". Overcoming this eminently reasonable proposition will require the marshaling of the most advanced and subtle resources at our disposal. This puerile pollyannaism of "ah, bring it on, I can handle it, because I'm tough!" is simply not up to the task. There is a limit point where things simply break. Only beyond this limit does the problem of pain actually begin to present itself.
Consider the case of Elisabeth Fritzl, an Austrian woman who was imprisoned by her own father in the basement of their house for 24 years. She was never once allowed to leave her prison chamber in that time period. She was raped repeatedly and delivered several children while in captivity.
Would you go to her in that basement and tell her "stay with the pain, don't shut this out"? Would you tell her "what you're feeling is premature enlightenment"?
She did end up surviving and is doing remarkably well now, but of course she would have had no way of knowing that while the ordeal was actually going on. As the years ticked on, she would have faced nothing but crushing uncertainty every day, the knowledge that every day could be her last. And of course she just as easily could have died; there could have been no happy ending. What then? In that case, there are no scars to serve as monuments of your victories; there is only a terrible waste of life.
As has been pointed out to you multiple times, the policy prescriptions proposed by the far right and progressives are wildly different. Fascists want to railroad women into being housewives, they want to make pornography and other types of sexual "deviancy" illegal, and they want to build a wall to keep immigrants out. Progressives don't want these things. The two camps want to build two different types of societies that are obviously different and would feel different to live in. Given these numerous disagreements, any assertion of similarity between the two ideologies in terms of alleged shared metaphysical or epistemological presuppositions seems rather moot.
Can you give a quick rundown of what your alternative looks like? What is your proposed belief system that does not depend on these concepts like "group difference" that you find problematic?
I think there is some benefit to “riding the tiger” in a controlled way. It builds the muscles that let you face the worst. It’s really pretty obvious. We’ve never had it so good, yet we have so much anxiety and depression that we didn’t have back before this kind of living was possible.
In my view, the confidence and ability to handle what life throws at you is a muscle. The people who can bounce back from terrible things, failures, and disappointment are people who have done exactly that on a small scale and in safe circumstances. This is why athletes do so well in life. They’ve learned how to win, how to brush off a loss, and (depending on the sport) that a little pain isn’t fatal. These things pay dividends because, first of all, being able to learn to bounce back from failure and setbacks also teaches that setbacks are not permanent. A kid who doesn’t make the team this year tries again next year. And often in the process learns the values of hard work and preparation— because quite often the reason he didn’t make the team was that he hadn’t worked on his weaknesses enough. Either way, learning to fail and try again makes the idea of bouncing back after a setback possible in his mind.
Can we not abuse the metaphor of "riding the tiger"? The significant thing about riding the tiger isn't that it's difficult, it's that once you start it's really damn dangerous to stop (because the tiger will eat you).
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Isn’t this merely arguing the difference in aims is sufficient to say progressivism and fascism is different even if the methodology / thought process is the same?
If we are talking about movies, I think the progressive / fascist mind is the Alliance whereas the libertarian or perhaps conservative mindset is Mal’s in serenity. Specifically this scene https://youtube.com/watch?v=1VR3Av9qfZc
The aims are what matter in a political system. People will be more subservient to the aims than to the method. Frequently, one’s choice of method is just a post hoc rationalization of one’s pre-reflective, extra-rational aims.
Immediately in the wake of Hegel’s death you had left Hegelians, who ultimately spawned Marxism, and right Hegelians, who were politically conservative. Both claimed to be following Hegel’s dialectical method, but they had radically different aims. Any analysis that claimed that the left and right Hegelians were somehow “the same” because they both claimed to be inspired by Hegel would obviously be missing the point. They’re obviously not the same, because one side wanted a communist revolution and the other didn’t.
Aims matter to a degree. While not quite the same, there is an almost red queen problem for progressivism/ fascism. They believe they are playing chess but don’t realize even the pawns make moves on their own.
So both systems run into the problem that the outcomes are due to human actions but not human design. Thus the aims may become much less important than the actions and the kind of actions.
I’ll ask you the same question I asked Hlynka: what is your alternative, an alternative that avoids these problems that are allegedly shared by progressivism and fascism?
I don’t really understand what your comment is getting at here, but maybe you can help me understand by giving me an example.
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