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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.
That's fascinating, because I saw the movie and then sought out the book, and both seemed very male to me, the movie in particularly - a young man's vision of the world, when he's drifted into adulthood and so cannot rely on his parents shielding him from the world any longer, but without roots or attachments (like marriage and family) to anchor him.
So it really is - to me - a young guy going "wow, real truths!" but give him another ten to fifteen years of life and he'll grow out of it.
EDIT: That scene is also pointless damage. Yes, learn to face pain and endure, but that scene ends up with a suppurating wound which will need to be treated or else he will suffer more damage and may even lose the use of the hand. Ridiculous vaunting for the sake of it, not for achieving anything.
The damage in this seen is far from pointless, it is intensely meaningful. Tangentially I think Moby Dick is an excellent book that is mostly wasted on highschoolers because you have to have been in a failed relationship and had a brush with death (or three) for its themes to really start resonating.
You say "give him another ten to fifteen years of life and he'll grow out of it" but what do you think is the mechanism here, because it's clearly not simple age. An argument I get into on a semi regular basis here is where someone will say something to the effect of "a man with a gun to his head never has a choice." and I will respond "a man with a gun to his head always has a choice". As Tyler says "First you have to give in. First you have to know, not fear, know you are going to die." This acceptance is crucial (especially for men as the disposable sex) to becoming a functional adult and agent in one's own right. Without getting into spoilers for a two-decade old movie, it's worth noting that Jack ultimately rectifies his issues with Tyler by letting go of his fear of death.
His alter ego pours lye on him in order to teach him to endure pain, but by sitting there and letting the base burn him, instead of seeking a way to remove it, the character is not learning to endure and be strong and steadfast, he is self-harming.
That is not healthy psychological coping mechanism.
It may be I am indeed more female than I generally feel like, in that there is a vast difference between the bravado of this ultimately useless scene (he gets a scar for nothing, it is not a scar won in battle or from performing any useful task or action) which does seem like the sort of thing to appeal to young men who have no means of otherwise expressing how Manly and Tough they are (they're white collar middle class white boys), and how women would think about this.
(I speak as someone who managed to get concentrated sulphuric acid spilled on the back of my hand in one early job and rushed to wash it off, but by some fluke the acid was so concentrated it was too oily to penetrate and I've come away without a scar. I certainly would not have sat there gritting my teeth and 'toughing it out' for any silly show of machismo, there's enough real pain in life to learn how to put up with it).
I don't want to just say "what @FCfromSSC said" but at the same time i kind of want to want to reply with "what @FCfromSSC said"
You keep describing the pain and damage that jack endures as "useless" and "meaningless" and my reply is that it is anything but. In both the book and film the moment jack chooses to face the pain and trauma head on rather than turn away is a critical moment. It is the moment that Jack begins to take charge. Prior to the burn he has been acting purely as a spectator, It is only after the burn that he begins to act as an active participant.
And I would contend that it is the willingness to "turn in to" that pain that makes him an agent in the proper sense.
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How much? I went to a private high school that was hard-core about chemistry, and at the start of the year the teacher said something on the lines of "if you don't use more than the recommended quantities, the only thing we do here that can actually permanently injure you is alkali in the eye". A few drops of conc. H2SO4 on the hand was considered a nothingburger - it stang a bit. The same amount of conc. HNO3 was embarassing because your hand would be yellow for a few weeks. The worst accident we had was when someone filled the lab with hydrogen sulphide and we had to evacuate.
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The narrator's entire existence has been self-harm. He's lived his entire life to that point reactively, instinctively, to the point that he's incapable of choice, only scripted response. He's dead inside, a walking corpse, a moral nullity, neither satisfying his desires nor living for something beyond them. A chemical burn is the least of his worries, and the pain can be instructive. Specifically, it's pain he chooses, pain he accepts and endures rather than being driven by.
The whole point of the film is that for the characters, there isn't enough real pain, at least not in the forms they need. The reason it continues to resonate to this day is because that's true in the real world too: we are anesthetized to the point of catatonia by a culture of relentless, lazy hedonism while our lives slowly drain away a minute at a time.
The point isn't that it's super-cool to get a chemical burn. The point is that excessive comfort is deadly to the soul.
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