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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.
We’re still waiting for one of your high-effort “Inferential Distance” posts to produce a single new insight or argument that hasn’t already been repeated by you in tons of smaller comments over the years. This was literally just a long-winded (and full of misspelled words and poor grammar) restatement of the exact same argument you’ve made 10,000 times.
You mock people who want to “consoom product” on the one hand, but on the other hand the only new content you produced in this post is extolling the supposedly profound insights of two massively-popular Hollywood films.
You brought up the Wittgenstein quote about how if a lion could speak, we would not understand him. Well, the lion also would not understand us! We could maybe glean an interesting window into the thought processes of an alien mind, if we really cared to listen and to parse things out over iterated conversations; meanwhile, there are entire constellations of subject matter which intelligent humans could try and make the lion comprehend - particle physics, the principles of compound interest, comparative linguistics - and he just wouldn’t have any hope of grasping any of it. Firstly because his brain simply does not have anywhere near the level of raw computing power that even a below-average human’s brain does, but also because he would find all of it utterly uninteresting and would not bother to try and grasp it.
I’m not saying you’re as dumb as a mere beast, Hlynka. But I am saying that your posts on this topic grow more and more tedious each time, because you continue to fail to demonstrate that you’re even making a cursory attempt to understand, or learn anything from, or synthesize, any of the counterarguments we offer. You can shout “identity politics is bullshit” three trillion times into the void, but if every time some smart person offers a sophisticated rebuttal and you don’t integrate that rebuttal into your worldview at all, people will justifiably begin to lose interest in you.
Yes, that's the joke. And here you are getting angry about how said alien mind stubbornly refuses to conform expectations. What a prick. Why cant they just be "reasonable" IE not alien.
This isn’t about being “reasonable”, it’s about the fact that you keep repeating the same argument over and over, providing little to no additional scaffolding to support it, and basically never respond to specific criticisms of specific claims, nor show any sign that you’re even listening to the actual words any of us are saying. Your problem isn’t “Inferential Distance”, it’s an “Inferential Moat”. You intentionally insulate yourself from our attempts to bridge the inferential distance, content to lob infinite reiterations of the same tired general-purpose argument over the carefully-constructed mental fortifications you’ve erected to avoid ever having to grow or have your mind changed about anything by anybody from your hated outgroup.
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Yeah dude, do you get tired of @SecureSignals constantly reiterating the same talking points over and over 10,000 times? Or do you eagerly wait for his next epistle on why you should hate the Jews?
This is not a mod warning, because you're allowed to criticize people and tell them you don't like their posts, but it's borderline, because if all you have to say is "I don't like you and I don't like your posts," maybe you should just skip them instead of writing a tirade. You get a pass because at least you picked at a few specific things to refute. But I also noted the "I’m not saying you’re as dumb as a mere beast, Hlynka" apophasis.
This was not an apophasis at all, but merely a way to proactively head off that interpretation at the pass. I understood the way that the lion analogy might be perceived, and I was genuinely attempting to make clear that the intent was not to call Hlynka stupid. I have made no secret that I find Hlynka’s oeuvre tedious and of very little intellectual value, but I don’t think it’s because he’s not smart enough to do better. If I thought he was too dumb to learn, I wouldn’t keep replying to him in an attempt to get him to learn.
Say what you will about SecureSignals, but every time somebody refutes or challenges on of his points, he has a well-sourced and effortful response that addresses the specifics of the challenge. I myself have argued with him multiple times, and I’ve explicitly told him that he has failed to adequately meet challenges to some of his claims. He also has many users here who take shots at his claims, and who are far more knowledgeable about the subject matter than I am; are you suggesting that I’m not allowed to argue with Hlynka unless I also spend equal time arguing with every other user?
Mostly, he has responses full of lies and terribly-sourced claims. I'll take someone writing about their own beliefs over someone distracting away from their lies with even more lies any day.
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