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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.
It sometimes feels like the biggest inferential distance for me is between the typical motte poster you describe and myself, despite the hugely similar surface level appearances.
I'm on OG motter, I came over as a moderator from the culture war thread on slatestarcodex. You know this, because (for those who don't know) you were there with me.
I'm a systematizer, I liked reading some of Elizer's fictional works, Bryan Caplan has long been an intellectual north star for me, I often dislike getting my hands dirty, I doubt I would have made it through a week of boot camp, and I'd certainly be lost and hopeless in a foreign country etc etc.
Still, I read your posts and I never think "that is me he is talking about". It is like describing to a fish that a fish is creature that swims in water. The fish looks around and sees other fish and thinks "oh those things".
Anyways weird personal feelings aside, or maybe because of them, I feel like I've already grokked these insights you have to bring.
Humans are adaptive. And when we live in a world of systemetizers we shall get good at systemetizing. When we live in a world of multilingualism, multi-businesses, and multi-cons we shall get good at that too.
To a large extent I think the world of academics and systemitizing has not arisen out of anyone or anything's desire for control, but as a natural competitive process among humans. Our big useless brains are peacock feathers. Adaptiveness is hot and sexy, and to be so adaptive that you can waste a bunch of resources on something that is not adaptive is even hotter! The original academics were all bored out of their minds landed aristocrats. Pick almost any philosopher / thinker / scientist from the 17/18/19th century and they were nearly all independently wealthy. Those aristocrats had won the game of life so badly that they had to invent a new game just to keep playing.
The enlightenment was a great accident. A result of man's competitive nature hitting a wall. A wall that meant that the best of them had all sort of won. Or at least couldn't figure out how to clearly win any harder than they already had. The new game they created was enlightenment about the physical world. Eventually they seemed to tire of that game as well, and they went back to killing each other to prove who was best. We ended up with the absolute tragedy of the world wars, and a century of the elites trying to strut their dicks around like fucking cavemen. A tragedy, but a predictable, and expected one.
I think of all the competition in the modern world as a game. Its not really for survival, unless someone chooses to make it about survival (which they often do). And I fully get that I am playing a game, and that it is very different than the struggle that is survival.
It is fathers day. My father has always epitomized a yearning to have that struggle for survival. He joined the army just as the vietnam war was ending. He was disappointed that he wouldn't get to go over and kill the [ethnic slurs]. He loved camping, hiking, cross country running, collecting knives, hunting small game, carpentry, and construction. I use past tense because he is old and does fewer of these things nowadays, and has mellowed out with the copious amounts of marijuana he consumes.
He was always terrible at playing "the game". He always managed to be on the wrong side of office politics anytime there was cleansing. There was always a bitterness he carried through life as he never seemed to understand why he kept losing at the soft things in life.
In contrast, my mother plays politics like a champ. Well enough that I can't always tell if she knows what she is doing, or has just been doing it so long it is second nature. She was nearly in the c-suite at a company that had billions in revenue a year before she retired.
So I get it when guys watch fight club and the matrix get that feeling that the world is fucked up. We are animals damnit! Our instincts and our bodies are not meant for these soft games of politics! We are meant to fight for survival, to truly struggle, and to be beaten by the world not by our fellow people! I get it. I feel the same way.
But I grew up watching my dad yearn for that world that doesn't exist, and I think it broke him hard enough to make me and my brother come out pre-broken. I'm not gonna live wishing for a world that doesn't exist. I've got the world as it is, and I don't plan to be a sucker that loses to the soft men and women of the world. And by being unwilling to lose to them, I have become a soft man myself.
Long rambling to say, we won too hard at the struggle of survival. Now everything is just games of competition, and losing isn't fun.
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