death so sweet

 (...if it's from old age. If it's a disease killing me, I'd feel robbed!)

Looking at suicide rates over the last decade I was touched to see that Covid pushed the rate up for age 85-and-above cohort. Touched, because I'm guessing that some of these are deaths of despair over the loss of a spouse. 

That was my first thought, but it's not likely to account for all of the uptick, since at 85, your spouse is likely to have died already before the pandemic. But imagine watching so many others in your assisted living facility dying. No one to talk to, play with, love or entertain. The thought occurs, well, better go, it's time. They are lovelorn. 

I don't know whether this is the explanation for the uptick, but the statistic seemed so sweet to me. When I think how hard it would be for me to give up on my life, the thought that one day I'll feel that there's nothing more to love, no one to engage with, and it's time to join the gone, that to me is sweet. 'Cause it's all about love, isn't it? It's all about love.

Forgive clinical talk now: if love is the driving emotion in a social species  then why shouldn't we want to give up when there's no one left to love, play and engage with? Anthropologists call it "cooperation" through our hunter-gatherer evolutionary period, but it's really just loving, wanting from each other. Let's be real, hunter-gatherers don't have a cooperation emotion, it's loving and enjoying and playing with and engaging with and endlessly talking to the members of their foraging band that is the emotion that natural selection has given them to keep them all together and survive. This uptick of suicides is the sweetness of our species nature. You ask (or let Lex Fridman the King of Kringe ask) what is the meaning of life? The answer is of course, love (which is probably why the Kringe King always asks it) -- wanting from each other. Even when we argue, we want something from each other, approval, agreement, respect. "Meaning" in "the meaning of life" is an abuse of the language (post on this a-coming), but still. Love and loss, and letting go. 

of mathematical beauty, crystals and potatoes: a Darwinian explanation

της τε ταυτου φυςεως και της θατερον (the nature of the same and the different -- Plato, Timaeus)

Potatoes are not pretty. They are also not mathematically patterned, not even symmetric. You may have noticed, they grow in the earth unseen, as if hiding how ugly they are. 

Well, that'd be one just-so story of why they grow unseen. Maybe it's not so silly. More reasonable would be the just-so story of natural selection to conclude that they lack mathematical order and its beauty because they grow underground where you cannot see them. Natural selection for patterns would be wasted on potatoes. True of all the roots, btw.

This is, of course, the key to why patterns are perceived as beautiful. Randomness is mostly useless for communication since you can't control the signal -- randomness can only communicate randomness, of occasional communicative value, but quite limited to signaling itself, "random", regardless of context. Only patterns can communicate distinct, controlled signals. To the extent that communication benefits species, patterning should be found throughout the biological realm of visibility. Natural selection has happened upon a means by which to communicate and even attract organisms, a simple means of patterning with simple recursive math. (Language, the quintessential communicative means, itself is a highly recursive mathematical patterning, and it's all about controlled signals -- super-controlled and highly distinct.)

So natural selection, which "had no option" of using randomness for communication, leaves all of us visual organisms susceptible to patterning. It might even explain why we love theorizing to explain patterns. The regularities are the only option for effective communication, and theories are a form of communication. We want patterns because that's all that's worth understanding, as I think we'll see. 

Randomness is not only uncommunicative, it's not predictive, and as temporal survival organisms, we want to predict future threats most especially, so we can avoid them. Natural selection again. Patterns, we love 'em. Randomness, not so much. It's nice for a change or a challenge. A mystery novel starts with the random, but we read to the end to bring it all into pattern. Timaeus' alternation of the same with the different, the pattern of the random with the predictable, has a special charm. We seem to be driven for prediction's sake to understand or find patterns in what seems at first random, but once understood, it's boring and we take it for granted. That's why news media leans towards threats and dangers, bleeding ledes. Cognition is not stable, it's a driven process. The familiar knowns are stable, and are soon taken for granted and forgotten, the oblivious obvious (post on this upcoming). The well of uncertainty that leads to distrust and fear seems bottomless: conspiracy theories are more fun than mere facts. 

You object, "crystals are highly ordered and beautiful to our eyes, yet they are mostly in the earth". Ah, but that's the perfect exception that proves the theory. Crystals are not organisms.

They can't intend anything, much less communicate intentions outside themselves. Lacking reproductive DNA, they don't engage in generational natural selection. They're stuck with fixed forms that either survive (continue to exist in their local context) or don't, no chance of evolving better. 

That crystals abound in the earth tells us that they are not signaling (and that organisms can, and can use patterning to accomplish this), they don't know what they're doing -- not a clue, and this is important for the panpsychists -- and that we're selected for liking patterns, that we see them as beautiful, or, to use more scientific language, we see them as attractive. It's a natural selection gimmick available only to reproductive generations. On this planet, that comprises the biological organisms. A distinguishing difference between the organic and inorganic is that inorganic patterns may be entirely unseen for their entire long duration; organic patterns are meant to be seen. 

To put it in the plainest terms, if crystals were organismic, they wouldn't be hiding underground, b****. :-)

the gnomiad: the science and sociology of life advice and their paradoxical puzzles

This post is a preliminary stub. I'm still working on the project, but here's a sketch of the science and sociology of gnomes (life advice). It's in three parts: 1) most surprisingly, the contrary pairing of life prescriptions show that they are empty, which implies that the benefit we seek from advice or theories of the world, while psychologically soothing or reassuring, is impractical and unaligned with the realities we actually face everyday; we seek a simplified, confirmatory world of fantasy while we actually make practical choices in reality, 2) the prevalence of one of the pairs, and absence of the other, in the culture raises many questions about cultural values or taboos or public reactions to those values and taboos, 3) most obviously, advice-giving influencers can be conveniently analysed politically and socially through their advice selection of one pair over the other. Finally, since philosophies and religions across the world are not only shot full advice but are often motivated by advice-giving and draw their audience from advice-seekers, the social psychology of gnomes affords a novel perspective on these theories and insights into their audiences' motives. 

"...mystery, miracle and authority..." -- the Grand Inquisitor 

1. the complementarity of gnomes

Life advice is everywhere on social media. It has obvious appeal, but an objective look at advice -- objective in the sense of not looking for advice but just looking at advice as a phenomenon or set of phenomena -- reveals paradoxes and puzzles. First among them is the pairing of contrary advice. A piece of popular advice and its contrary advice can both be equally useful, wise and true. "Better safe than sorry" is just as good a piece of advice as "carpe diem" (seize the day) or "fortune favors the brave" that is, don't be safe or you'll be sorry. Even more puzzling, why do people find any of these gnomes inspiring, when their opposite should be equally inspiring? 

A moment's reflection on this complementarity of gnomes -- their tendency to come in contrary pairs -- shows that gnomes are little more than familiar, even banal definitions. "Better safe than sorry" is little more than a definition of what "safe" means; "seize the day" merely defines, metaphorically, "opportunity". And yet more puzzling, every English speaker already knows the definitions of these words and are familiar with the ideas they denote. Everyone already knows the benefit of safety and when safety is useful, and the same for opportunity and risk. We all know that we must assess risk and safety case by case. So what is the appeal of the advice?? Is it like quoting one's favorite song lyrics instead of using one's own words? Or is there something more going on? More, no doubt, as we'll see.

If life advice adds no useful information in practice, is the appeal purely psychological? Suppose it's just a way to make life seem simpler even though it has no practical value in decision-making. It's a kind of psychological soporific, a soothing reassurance to smooth away anxiety just a little bit. Grasping one of the complementary gnome pairs provides a way through the complexity of everyday life. And choosing that principle no doubt confirms what one wants to believe about oneself and one's place in the world.

I think this is one of the revealing surprises of what I want to call the gnomiad, collecting the range of advice (tongue-in-cheek hat tip to Wolfram), and gnomiology, the study of advice. Gnomiadry -- thinking about gnomes and their world -- tells us that our imagination of life is distinct from the life as we live it and that this imaginary has emotional value even though it has no other practical value. Isn't that what religion provides as well? Could it be that philosophical and political systems supply the same confirmatory reassurance and soothing simplicity? And what about science and its laws dependent on ideal situations? Don't these theories or narratives, understandings and explanations of the phenomenal world reflect a deep and basic species need? Put into predictive mind (Friston, Clark), isn't this what defines an organism -- creating a theory of its environment & itself to predict its future and preserve its free energy? Ironic that for humans, preserving our free energy from the wastefulness of anxiety and stress leads us to false beliefs (like many political beliefs or fringe theories) and partial, one-sided beliefs like life advice.

So the pairing of gnomes lead us to understand them as vacuous, familiar tautologies and then to a question, what's their appeal? Gnomiology has an answer that reaches deeply into our organic nature. 

2. asymmetry of gnomes

Here's a second question. Many gnomes have contrary complements that do not have any appeal and are not to be found in the culture. There are dozens of versions for "be yourself", "don't measure yourself by others", "don't live by other's opinions", "don't live your life trying to be someone else", "follow your truth" -- this advice is everywhere. But "conform!", which is, if you  think about it, very good practical advice, is nowhere to be found. Why? Does that tell us something about our culture -- that we're narcissistic? Or does it tell us something about our resistance to our culture or upbringing or the oppressiveness of our culture? 

There are structural pressures on advice as well. People seeking life advice are for obvious reasons looking for personal solutions, so introspective advice "discipline yourself" , "be yourself", "know yourself" should be more common than say, Chaucer's "out of thy stall!" or Aristotle's "contemplate the universe" by which he meant, learn to understand the world outside yourself. The human inclination to confirm rather than to investigate the full range and experiment predicts that people looking for personal solutions will end up with introspective advice -- "stress is the source of your troubles", for example, not "introspection is a waste of time and a harmful aggravation of one's troubles; engage with the world or with others and you'll forget your troubles soon enough". Advice seeking may be a self-selection of introverted, self-affirming gnomes. 

3. advice-givers, the politics of the self-help industry

Finally, there are trends in advice unevenly distributed. So the anti-woke espouse stoicism which seems to be a philosophy constructed almost entirely of personal advice. Aurelius' Meditations is one gnome after another (and people love it for this!). The stoic trend is all very political, or more accurately, politically apolitical: its politics is, "don't be political; attend to yourself." It's consistent with a lot of Christian morality including "give unto Caesar what is Caesar's" and "my kingdom is not of this world", and you can see it in Jordan Peterson's confluence of stoicism and Christianity. And I'm not trying to be clever here. Peterson is quite clear that his apoliticist advice is political, especially when it comes to social justice and Marxism. He is a partisan anti-Marxist and anti-woke. Those are strong political stands, as stubborn as political stands typically are. 

So the choice of gnomes culturally and individually tell us a lot. In the case of individual choices we get a picture of our political divides. I'm not sure what the cultural selection tells us, but a sociology of gnomes promises to be revelatory as all sciences are. 

4. gnomes vs practical advice

All of the above gnomiadry applies only to life advice. Practical advice doesn't have any of these paradoxical puzzles. This again shows just how strange and useless yet appealing life advice is. 

Gnomes can even be empty tautologies. "Be humble" might be the most common advice on how to overcome confirmation bias. It's perfect question-begging rephrasal of the problem to be solved: "if you don't want to prioritize your own beliefs, don't". Here's a post on practical advice to overcome confirmation bias -- use Bayeseian reasoning by looking for the base rate, we tend to be oblivious to the    unthreatening normal so don't focus on the rare threat at the expense of the frequent, look for disconfirmatory evidence, not confirmation, question metaphors, assumptions and intuitions. That's a program. List the items and apply. Practical. 

An instagram video gives this advice to those who ask "what kind of gloves should I buy for street calisthenics". The answer:

"it doesn't matter what gloves you wear, it's what's in the gloves that matter." 

Now, that's a kind of life-advice, frequent among exercisers: it's a form of "just do it!" (It's also a faint hint of an insult: You are asking about trivialities. Be a man and get down to your 6,000 push-ups!) The contrary complementary advice to "Just do it!" might include "discipline -- struggling with yourself -- is a losing battle, but simply structuring your time to include exercise may help you get you to it". But "What gloves should I buy" also has a practical answer without any contrary complement. Here it is:

For calisthenics you should buy gloves with a grippy palm on the outside and also on the inside so the glove will not slip on the bar and your hand won't slip in the glove. Warning: avoid cheap rubber that will degrade quickly into a sticky surface, which will stick the glove to the bar. This can be lethal if you wear them while riding your bike as the gloves will stick to the handlebars whenever you try to lift a hand from the handlebar, and that will unintentionally steer the bike (and you) unpredictably into a truck or over a cliff or other places you'd rather not be. 

Such practical advice has no contrary. It's not empty tautologies like 'if you want to do calisthenics, just do it!" It's substantive, if boring, practical advice. It's the kind of good advice you look for in consumer reviews. 

What's so interesting about gnomes is their bizarre paradoxical puzzle and appeal. Useless, its opposite just as useless, and yet appealing. It has the mystery of religion, hasn't it? What did Ivan's Grand Inquisitor say, "mystery, miracle and authority"; that's what we're all looking for. Gnomes, not the plain bread of practical advice.

Gnomiology also plays into cultural confirmation and confirmation bias. A lot of calisthenics advice extols discipline -- do it even though you don't like it. The complementary contrary is equally sound and maybe even more practical "discipline is a battle with yourself that you will lose; if you enjoy something, you'll do it; if you don't enjoy it, find something that you do enjoy". Discipline, the strength to overcome one's weaknesses, is consonant with our gender norms. Enjoyment isn't. Discipline plays on the inspiration of being masculine, and, no surprise, that's a lot of what calisthenics is for. 

the morality of gnomes?

"Health is wealth", popular among the calisthenics movement, seems undeniable and without contrary until you realize that health actually isn't wealth, and lack of money-wealth statistically leads to poor health, and money-wealth correlates with better health outcomes. But there's no gnome, "wealth is health!" 

There's something morally prudish about all of this. "Fortune favors the cut-throat competitor" and "money will bring you health" are too crass and crude, let alone "fortune favors an a**hole". They violate our be-nice morality. The cultural notion of wisdom and sagacity are inconsistent with crassness regardless however practical. Even "Just do it!" doesn't imply any harm to anyone. "Cut in line if you can" might have practical value, but unless you're Peter Thiel, you'd never publicly advise it. It's anti-social. And yet, "be yourself" is hardly social. It's again the self-selection of self-help that underlies much of the gnomiad. 

a dynamics of advice?

Contradictory pairs of advice are by nature structured as a decision tree. Go with daring then you've abandoned safe. Since time is unidirectionally always forward, this decision tree looks Markovian -- that is, it goes from one position to another and can't go back without loss of time. 

It already seems that the role of time plays a really important one, and generates its own advice. "Time is money." There's no regaining time. And there's no complementary contradiction to that one unless it be the empty truism "live in the present" or "don't fret over spilt milk", both imperfect complements. "There's no regaining time" is itself a truism. Does it imply "choose carefully" or "follow your gut instinct"? "Don't fret over spilt milk" also has a complement, "learn from your mistakes". 

But is the tree really Markovian? What if the choice of "be brave" applies only to youth? We need a push-down machine for this tree and a time tracker. 

Of course I'm plagiarizing Chomsky and Wolfram, but these are the tools available. Maybe we can discover more as we go along. 

You can imagine what's next. Contexts other than youth/age can apply -- "daring" might apply to careers, "safety" in relationships or marriages. What about long-term goals, ends prioritizing all other decisions? And "keep your yes on the prize" contrasts with "be flexible" and "life is what happens on your way to your goal". These also depend on time and context. At what point should you abandon a goal and "cut your losses" instead of "be constant, perseverant, dedicated"? 

Work on these contradictions begins to seem futile. All the advice is like conflicting religions. From afar, they all seem foolish since they each purport to be true, but deny each other. "Don't heed advice, learn for yourself!" of course is the paradoxical limit. It seems on the face of it an empty truism -- one can't learn for someone else without learning oneself. But there's always the contrarian "be skeptical" and its paradoxical complement and consequence "be skeptical of being skeptical". Aristotle the Wise: moderation in all things. It sounds like a cop out too good to be true, but moderation has the virtue of being without paradox. But he should have said, moderation in most things. Which things? We still need context. 

When asked for life advice in an interview, a famous actor replied, "I don't give advice. People have to face things themselves." Respect. 

"free will" doesn't depend on determinism. it's a logical self-contradiction, an oxymoron. so what's the debate about? this:

Okay, this should be easy. 

If an action is willed, then it's not free -- it's determined by that will; that's what "willed" means. If the action is free, then it's not determined by anything including a will. "Free will" is a contradiction in terms: If it's free it can't be willed, if willed it can't be free. 

There's no third option in that logical space. It doesn't matter whether the world is deterministic or indeterministic, god or no god, whether personality is determined by genes or culture or upbringing or early traumas, it doesn't matter if personality is free of any such influences. Free will is self contradictory regardless. 

If it's willed, you say, then that will might be free? Well, again either that will is free in which case it's not willed by anyone -- it's as it were, just random, not the will of anyone's intention -- or it's willed, in which case it's not free, it's determined by that will. And that will is either free-random or willed-determined, etc. You can see where this goes. It's not that this is an infinite regression. It's that it's always either free-random or it's willed-determined, it can't be both free and willed: because "free will" is self-contradictory. 

So why is there any debate about this, and why has it persisted for millennia? Several things. One is that without free will it's hard to blame people or require that they take responsibility for their choices, and that's not just a moral philosophical problem, it's a practical legal one. How can we punish anti-social behavior if we can't blame it on the perpetrator? 

Second, we don't generally have access to our own motivations. We live with imperfect knowledge of our selves, so we can't know exactly why we choose. It gives us the impression that our choices are authentic and autonomous, since we can't trace the causal train. All we know is that our choices emerge from us -- our body. That looks like freedom, and it looks like our will, but it's really just ignorance. What's more, if we suppose that our choices are determined we're led into an impossible paradox, so we're stuck with this ignorant oxymoron. "I am writing this sentence because it was determined that I would" leads to an infinite recurrence -- I could have chosen not to write it, but that would have been equally determined, so both writing it and not writing it would both be determined, so how to decide which is the necessary determination? Which is mine? Similarly, if I suppose my choices are not determined, where do they come from? They'd be just random, not from me. So how do I choose from me? Trying to figure these puzzles out is an infinite waste of time, so it's easier just to own the "choice" of writing as if it were freely willed. The oxymoron is just a practical way of moving on in life, pretending to be an agent. 

Also there's an important historical issue: the Christian god can't be both almighty and good if there's no free will. Why only the Christian god? Well, the Old Testament god says in a book called "Job" that he isn't good in the human sense. He's just bigger and stronger and greater than you; he does whatever the hell he pleases regardless however evil it may seem to you. He's the creator, you wouldn't exist were it not for him, end of story. Morality is not his problem, it's yours, you puny, pathetic thing. He's not a nice guy.

[You can read Moby Dick to get a thorough sense of just what a nasty bastard he is, and how much fun it is to complain about him in a lofty, poetic, beautiful, hefty, metaphor-rich story.]

But the Christian god is supposed to be good, and if he created some people whom he determined from the start would not only be evil in themselves, but cause harm to others, and then send them to eternal damnation -- that could not possibly be a good god at all. Create evil people to cause suffering everywhere? That'd be one nasty, unnecessarily wicked motherfucking god. So the created people must have free will so they can be responsible for their own damnation. Hence we have this oxymoron (that actually makes no sense at all) to save the soul of the deity and the religion. 

What's an oxymoron, btw? Just what it sounds like. It's a contradiction in terms, an expression that contradicts itself, like a "circular square", and because it is self-contradictory, only a moron would believe it, hence an oxymoron -- the "oxy", from Greek, just means 'acutely': acutely moronic, impossibly stupid, or, most important in this discussion, impossible -- logically impossible -- because contradictory. It's a bit like the word "tolerance" which entails tolerating the intolerant, and you can see that contradictory intolerant actions will follow from such "tolerance". Sorry to say, you're fooling yourself if you think there's a consistent way to be tolerant. We all have limits ... of what we allow. But there's no limit to our arrogance -- some imagine themselves tolerant for whatever identity signaling reason. So oxymorons have plenty of social currency as signals. They are still contradictory and therefore impossible in reality. Signals are social. Reality is, well, just how it is.

And I repeat, and this is most important, "free will" is contradictory not only if the universe is deterministic. "Free will" is contradictory even if the world is non deterministic. "Free will" is contradictory if the mind is determined by genes or by culture. "Free will" is contradictory if the mind is not determined by genes or culture or anything else. "Free will" is contradictory even if the universe or the mind act with complete randomness. "Free will" is contradictory even if there's no such thing as cause and no relation of cause & effect. "Free will" is an oxymoron if a god exists, it's an oxymoron if no god exists. "Free will" is an oxymoron, so there can be no such thing. 

Why, then, is there any debate over this acutely stupid expression?  How could it be that for thousands of years philosophers -- and maybe even intelligent thinkers -- troubled over this oxymoron? I want to say, "beats me", but I am compelled to say, "people must be really really stupid. Or unthinking. We humans will believe whatever we want to believe, whether it's true or false or, as in the case of an oxymoron like free will, something that cannot possibly be true, something not just false but logically false. We want to believe that we're agents, and we all act as if we are agents, and in particular we want to take credit for the good things we do (not for the bad ones so much, we'd just like to forget those except when we want to punish ourselves), and we particularly want to punish people who harm us, so we want to believe that they are agents responsible for their own harmful behaviors. But this is all wishful thinking." It's wishful thinking not because actions are determined by genes or culture or upbringing or any cause. It's wishful thinking because free will is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, so there isn't such a thing, and couldn't ever be such a thing no matter how deterministic on non deterministic the world and people may or may not be. 

Wasn't that easy? Not convinced? I know you think it can't be that easy, given all the thousands of years of debate. Let me try again. 

Suppose I bite into an apple. Did I will that action? If I did, then that action was willed. Was the will free? Suppose it was. Then there was no will behind my willing to take that bite. Now, let's think hard and clearly about this. If there was no will behind that choice, that means there was no desire to take that bite. Or if there was such a desire, that desire did not determine or will my choice. That lack of will or desire must be true of any impulse to take that bite -- not liking apples, not seeking health, nor assuaging hunger. If it's free, then it's free of all of them, including every possible motivation. One way to view it is that this leaves us with randomness. If my "choice" to bite the apple is free, it has no will of any kind behind it. It's random. That's free. But it's not willed. 

Suppose instead that it is willed. In that case, either that will has some will or determination driving it, or it is free of any driving cause. If it is free of any driving cause, then it may be free but it's not willed. If there is a driving cause, then it's not free, it's willed by that cause. Let's call this the "drive or no drive" logic. You might say, but there is a will behind the will behind the choice to bite and that will is mine and free. But the drive or no drive logic applies to that will too. And to every will behind that one. They are all either free & unwilled or willed & not free. It's turtles all the way down, folks. 

But wait, what if the action is sort of partly motivated by a will, and partly sort of random and free? 

Okay, no problem. It's a random action that's been partly guided (?) by a will that is random or determined or partly random and partly determined. That doesn't mean that actions are the result of a free will. It just means that actions are influenced partly by determined will and partly by randomness. Such an act cannot, obviously, be the result of free will, because "free will" is contradictory, but it can be partly random and partly determined -- like breaking billiard balls that roll on the board, not everywhere in three dimensional space; it's partly random, partly limited by the board. Those turtles also go all the way down. There's just no coherent meaning to "free will" anymore than there is "square circle". 

So why do people believe in free will? I think it's because, or partly because, we are unaware of what motivates us, so we, blithely ignorant as we are, just assume that we somehow make our choices from our "free" selves. If you think about that, it's kind of comical. You don't know why you're choosing what you're choosing, so you come to the conclusion that it's "me -- I'm choosing that!" Actually, you're just an idiot. I mean, a pawn, a pawn of some will you're unaware of. Any psychologist will tell you that. That's what the science of psychology is all and only about. But that's on a deterministic view of your choices. On the non deterministic view, you're not a pawn (what a relief!), you're just an idiot. 

Free will is a sometimes useful illusion, no doubt. And being free from external constraints, like not being compelled to work at a boring job, or having lots of culinary choices, is usually a pleasure, though there's a lot to be said for structure and limitations that prevent us from our own excesses. But the popular notion of authenticity -- that there's a me inside my body that generates free choices, that's a chimera. It's responsible for many confusions and absurdities like the ghost in the machine -- my choices are generated by a "me" inside me, and how does that "me" inside me make decisions? Oh because it has a "me" inside it etc. None of it makes sense. Free will is just an illusion of consciousness, and consciousness (as I've written elsewhere) must be a passive observer, not an active agent. There's just no such thing as free will, Can't be. 

Once you get rid of this chimera, it all makes sense. All the science, I mean. We make our choices beyond our awareness. We learn about it as we act and we justify ourselves after the fact. The reasons for those actions are usually consonant with our justifications after the fact, so we don't get too confused, but there is systematic conflict all the time. I want to be thin, so I want to avoid ice cream, I say to myself as I buy a pint of ice cream, then eat it and feel regret and decide I'm a failed person. It happens everyday, multiple times a day. 

What should we all do about that? Now there's a big and useful debate. Too big for this post. Too big for any post. It's a debate that must be engaged continually as society confronts its challenges and attempts to resolve them. But holding on to acute stupids won't help. 

Btw, the question of blame or responsibility was addressed often by Dostoevsky. It's not about having authenticity, it's about asserting the dignity of one's authenticity. It's an old existentialist move. Are you an authentic agent? Probably not. Do you want to appear to be? Do you want to be remembered as one? Then claim your acts as yours. It's a tragic claim, since it's really a delusion. Embrace it. In full disclosure -- and I'm not giving advice here, just saying where I stand on this delusion -- I embrace the purpose of my life as understanding. When I was 19 or 20, a Greek friend, also 20 years old, told me that humans are here to understand the world. It's an Aristotelean perspective, but also consistent with Darwinian selection -- we're selected for cognition, and we alone among species on earth, maybe even the universe, capable of understanding the universe and everything in it. We have a symbolic language capable of handling any idea, and we're lucky to have opposable thumbs to make all sorts of stuff to test out how things work. We're alone in that, so far as we know. So figuring out how the universe and everything in it is what we should be doing. If you're not doing that, you're underachieving. And here's my lame advice: forget about yourself and focus on understanding the world, and that includes understanding your own psyche -- not focusing on your troubles, but understanding your psyche as a system out there in the world. That's interesting and engaging. Focusing on your troubles is at best navel-gazing, at worst, dwelling and aggravating your troubles. Liberate yourself! Free your will! lol

ENTROPY AND TRUTH

Why is simplicity the measure of truth in science? 

On the face of it, it's obvious. Of two theories, both equal in the accuracy of its predictions, the simpler is obviously preferable. 

Okay, but why is the simpler preferable? A friend says, "fewer parts". That's question-begging: "fewer parts" is one definition of "simpler". The simpler is preferable because it's simpler!! But why should fewer parts be preferable? Because it's simpler. I want to show that the "fewer parts", though it can't be the answer, is a key to the answer, but it's important first to recognize that there really is a problem with simplicity=true. Short answer: scientific theories are about probability, not truth. 

So let's get started. 

"Simple" and "true" are not synonyms. They appear to be quite distinct properties. And yet Occam's Razor and theoretical economy, sometimes called theoretical beauty, parsimony -- these are all expressions of simplicity in science, and in choosing between two theories, one complex, the other simple, we scientists insist that the simpler must be true or closer to truth than the complex one even if the two theories have the same predictions. Bu' Y?

There are other metrics as well -- the relation to other theories, that is, does the theory fit smoothly into other well-established theories? -- but even this is a kind of simplicity measure. Can the different theories be reduced to a comprehensive one or do we have to tolerate many sources of prediction for many categories of phenomena? 

Looking at emergent or higher-level sciences like psychology or semiology, where there really are many theories unrelated to the reductionist science of physics, the need for the emergent laws is also driven by simplicity. Reductionist physics -- like quantum physics -- can describe the shape of a statue's nose, but not explain why it has that shape. To explain how that nose came to be we need higher-level sciences like psychology and anthropology and art history, sciences that are in many ways independent of physics (see the post on understanding and explanation). The emergent science -- whether psychology or the anthropology of arts -- is not adding complexity, it's winnowing away the irrelevant complications of the reductionist details. 

A purely physical explanation might work if it started with the origin of the universe, detailing every moment until it arrived at the sculpting of the nose, but such a description would not only be a huge task, it would have to have developed all the emergent sciences along the way, and it will be those emergent properties that will explain the nose, not the physics, so the entire project would be useless. We already have those emergent sciences, so it's just simpler to cut to the chase. It's the quandary of reductionism described in Borges "On the Exactitude in Science" where the map is as large as the city it maps. Reductionism isn't useful in understanding emergent properties.

And there's actually no reason to believe that physics would be able reconstruct the emergent properties that explain the form of a statue. After all, historically the sciences of psychology or neurology did not begin with physics. They began with observing emergent entities like human behaviors and brains. If we lived in a LaPlacean dream, we could retrace the world to its original state, but that would take us many billions of years before we'd reproduce the entire development of that bronze nose. 

Emergent sciences, though less accurate and less predictive than an entire reductionist history of the world, are vastly simpler. 

Notice that here simplicity overrides accuracy (truth). The value of an emergent science is the simplicity of its understandings (commonly called "explanations") at the expense of truth. IOW, simplicity in emergent sciences is preferable to truth. lol

So I was puzzled, in my stupid, slow way, by this prima facie obvious equivalence between truth and simplicity in the sciences -- Occam's Razor, parsimony, elegance, beauty. It seems so obvious and natural, yet when you think about it, why should it be so? The more you think about it, the more you realize that truth shouldn't have any relation to simplicity. These two, simple and true, are clearly not synonyms, so why the relation? 

I like asking stupid questions. They often lead to the most surprising answers. Why does gravity work over distances? Space-time. Why does time go in one direction? Probability in an entropic universe. There are stupid questions about politics, and stupid questions about psychology and stupid questions about language Their answers reveal the most wonderful surprises about political views, psychology and language. Judging crowds out learning, and so does assuming the obvious. 

It occurred to me recently that there is an obvious answer to the simplicity metric in science: simple things are more probable than complicated things, all other things equal. In an entropic world, where even time's arrow is nothing more than the probability of increasing entropy is vastly higher than decreasing (though I have questions about this in a system being fed by an energy source like the sun; why isn't the direction of time reversed in natural selection evolution from simpler high entropy to lower entropic complexity? -- seems like the time's arrow theory is question begging too), a likelihood metric for the sciences makes perfect sense. Coordinating complexes is vastly much less likely than coordinating fewer elements. The math is exponential for just the number of elements, and if there's an ordering of elements, the possibilities are even greater and if there's any recursion in the elements, the possibilities are infinite. The simplicity metric is really just a probability metric in an entropic universe. It's not just fewer parts. It's that fewer parts are more likely to be coordinated, given entropy. This answer is not question-begging. It's a practical result. 

This explanation has several interesting implications. For one, it implies that we're not assessing truth in science at all. We're assessing likelihoods. I believe that those of us in the sciences already hold this view, but it might be good to be more explicit about it. Scientists are well aware that science is not a body of knowledge but an ongoing investigation, and any scientific theory is not The Truth but merely the best approximation to The Truth currently available. Maybe we should shift that a little bit: a successful scientific theory is the most likely theory currently available. No mention of truth is needed. It's just likelihood -- its predictions are more likely, but even when the predictions are the same, its terms are simpler, so more likely than an equally predictive but more complex theory. It's all just probability. 

Another interesting implication: it aligns theoretical value with two other basics of physics, time and the path of least resistance. All three can be subsumed under probability: time, path of least resistance, theoretical simplicity. 

All three of these share a kind of puzzling obviousness. Why should time progress in only one direction? Why should nature's path be the simplest and least obstructive? Why should truth be simple? Three stupid-sounding questions. How could these phenomena be any different that they obviously are? 

Well, they are not stupid questions and their answers seem to be the same or closely related. There is no actual physical law of time's direction, no law of path of least resistance and nothing special about simpler theories. It's all just the probabilities of entropy or the probabilities of paths converging. The quantum physics that explain the convergence to the path of least resistance is over my head, but I can understand enough of Feynman to see that this is again a reductionist probability answer. And for time, the probabilities don't require any math to understand. It is vastly more likely that a dropped egg will break than a broken egg will jump up and put itself together. As I learned when I was teaching undergrads, the possible wrong answers are infinite, right answers are few, so two identical wildly wrong answers in submissions of two students can be a red flag of cheating, if the exam question was not a trick. 

Talk about tricks, the title of this post is one. The post's actual content is about simplicity and entropy. It's intent is not to explain truth at all, but to replace truth in the sciences with probability. That's not to abandon all truth. There are two uses of truth (or "true"), one metaphysical used in the sciences, and another used in communication -- in conversation. There are many posts on this blog dealing with the communication function of truth and "true". The subtitle of this blog (de-perplex) mentions "interactive cognition" and this is one case of it. This interactive notion of truth cannot be abandoned. 

Probably.

 

the sociology of false beliefs

Background (if you find this familiar and boring, skim to the next section which is the meat of the post)

Here are two mutually distinct sets of believers in our society: believers in gov't propaganda (weapons of mass destruction, e.g.) tend to dismiss fringe conspiracy theories, and believers in fringe conspiracy theories dismiss gov't propaganda (obviously, since an important component of fringe theory is distrust of gov't propaganda). 

Can we map these false beliefs -- like beliefs in gov't or partisan propaganda and fringe conspiracy theories -- onto the social pyramid or other social places like gender or religion or urban or rural? Can such socially located false beliefs tell us about those social places and vice versa, do the social places tell us about the beliefs? Answering those questions is my goal: a sociological explanation for who believes what and why.

Cognitive psychology, from Tom Gilovich and Daniel Kahneman to Jon Haidt, tells us that our choice of beliefs (see "Fool's Errand Attachment: a cognitive bias" and "the free will oxymoron" posts among others on this blog) are not rationally motivated at heart; we believe whatever we want to believe, regardless of facts. The crucial word is "want". There is always some emotional desire motivating our choices, which we hide behind a veneer of rational justifications to defend and hide our selfish motivations from others -- and from ourselves, since honesty is easier than lying, deceiving ourselves makes it easier to deceive others. 

Our rationality seems to be in the service of two emotional drives, one a selfish personal interest, the other an interactive social interest. A liberal Democrat might provide lots of rational justifications for being a liberal Democrat, but it's mere rationalizing, our behavioral cognitive psychologist says, a public show hiding some deeper emotional commitment. It may be, following Jon Haidt, a seeking for approval from one's chosen peers -- the virtue-signaling of the liberal. Or following Robin Hanson, it's a creating of one's identity within one's social context -- holding a respected or prestigious ideology, in his words "good-looking ideas". Or it may be, following Rob Henderson, the luxury ideas that signal high socio-economic status. On the other hand, it may be driven by cognitive dissonance over personal gain, not at all an interactive choice but a merely self-serving one: I'm paid to teach in a public university, so I'm inclined to favor a candidate who endorses public higher education, and I then defend my choice by scraping around for other justifications for voting for that person. 

To the extent that we hold our beliefs for reasons other than their superficial public rational justifications, our beliefs are falsely held, regardless of the truth value of those beliefs. We should expect, then, to find many false beliefs held for no reason but personal and interactive reasons alone. If personal interests and interactive social interests depend on social identity, false beliefs should tell us about social locations including distinctions of class, rural vs urban location, even race or gender. In this post, I'll start with two classes, the professional class (the educated elite) and the non elite or anti-elite(?) class. I'll start with the interests and emotional commitments of the professional class and their investment in partisan propaganda.

the professional class -- the virtue-signaling class -- and their beliefs

The following is a very broad-brush picture. It's meant to describe a statistical inclination among the members of a class. 

Members of the professional class can be identified easily. And quickly. Within five minutes of meeting one, they will tell you what they do for a living. They have a career that they are proud to announce, "I'm a partner with Bellstein and Whistle", "I teach at Superior T U" or "I'm a physician with a clinical practice in insurance-guaranteed pharmaceutical FDA-approved remedies and addictions -- a branch of government finance, you should know". Humor aside, they perceive themselves to be, and are, privileged. They live in safe, clean well-served neighborhoods; their children go to fancy schools. They themselves attended fancy schools and have fancy degrees with fancy letters before or after their names. Their interactive position is one of respect, and they perceive themselves as the beneficiaries of the many goods that their society affords. 

They are, crucially, deeply invested in their society that gives them so much, including respect. The last thing they want to see is a socio-political revolution in which they'd risk losing everything. They are the defenders of the faith. They want to believe that their gov't and social structure are basically good or at least, better than any alternative, or at the very least, worthy of upholding. 

However, they also perceive that a vast non elite public does not reap all these social benefits. They have two responses to this inequality. One is self-justification, holding the belief -- perhaps false belief -- that they deserve their benefits. They worked hard for their fancy degrees, their education has given them an appreciation for fine culture, a superior understanding of the world, of politics and of economics and science, whereas, they believe, the non elite are without all of this. According to elite perception, the non elites don't appreciate culture, abuse and debase the heritage of the language, and understand so little of politics that they vote against their own material interests (ignoring that liberalism is defined by voting against one's material interests in order to benefit society as a whole -- see the post on Hochschild vs Stanovich and the liberal blind spot). They believe that the non elites are concerned only in creature comforts so they are naturally lazy and unambitious, lacking all merit. 

That strategy is widespread -- you see it in the regular publication every couple of years of a new book describing how the plebes are destroying the English language. It's almost comical how something so trivial and misguided (I'll post on this soon, but Pinker did a great job with this in his The Language Instinct) is the source of so much pride, while ignoring that the liveliest, subtlest and most beautiful linguistic innovation is ceaselessly created at the social non elite bottom. I digress. It's the linguist in me. 

This strategy of superiority, though widespread and deep, does not however alleviate the educated elite from feeling any less dickish. If anything, it makes them feel more dickish. They need another strategy to alleviate, resolve or hide the dick. It's virtue-signaling, social and financial liberalism, in Phil Ochs' 1966 words, "love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal". 

As every news venue must find and cater to an audience market share to serve up to its advertisers, the NYTimes, Atlantic and NPR provide the desired information -- including false beliefs -- to the educated elite. The NYT reader reads the NYT not only because it has prestige, but also because it tells its audience what it wants. Your gov't, essentially good but imperfect, can be improved by voting Democratic. If you vote for the Democratic Party, it will take a bit of your taxes, not too much, but some, and redistribute it to The Poor. Then your conscience will be clear. And if this doesn't work and doesn't save the society that you get so much from, blame it on the evil Republicans. It's a tidy, neat package wrapped in a pretty blue ribbon. 

If the NYT reports gov't propaganda the NYT reader will believe it. Weapons of mass destruction is the classic case. NYT readers believed this propaganda even though anyone with their eyes open knew it was a dog and pony show from the start. Kofi Annan knew it. Hans Blix exposed it. Nevertheless NYT readers believed it. And today, now that we know that the NYT failed to present the propaganda as absurdly false, the educated elite still read the NYT. NYT readers are original victims of Murray Gell-Mann amnesia. The professional class -- educated elite -- are prone to false propaganda beliefs. It's their emotional investment in a society that provides them with all good things, especially their interactive social value -- respect -- that drives their beliefs. It's their need for virtue and virtue-signalling to cleanse their conscience. 

the non elite distrustful and respect-signaling class

So much for the professional, educated elite class. [Once, when I was arguing that the educated elite have high voting rates because they believe in the voting process, the person I was talking to objected that there are too few of them to make a difference in elections. It dawned on me that on the street "elite" now refers to a cabal of CEOs or a small cohort of Skull & Bones members or Bilderburg members or Illuminati.  Conspiracy theory has overtaken the language. In this post "the educated elite" refers to the professional class and those that identify with it or aspire to it.]

The non elite have no need for virtue-signaling. They do not perceive that they are privileged within their society. They actually do get a lot from the gov't, but it is in the form of subsidies, so they can't claim them for respect. On the contrary, subsidies are signs of inequality, of the injustices of the society. Subsidies do not argue for an investment in the society, they demonstrate its injustices of its economic structure.  

What the non elite want and don't get from the society is respect. They know that the professional class looks down on them. They don't have careers, they have jobs. They have subsidies, not fancy degrees. It's in this world of want that conspiracy theories and distrust of gov't thrive. Respect is available only from their peers. The essence of conspiracy street cred is "Those educated professionals, they believe gov't propaganda. I know better. The gov't at every turn is lying to them and they believe it. Not me. They vote, those chumps. They've been had, losers." A flat-earther once used those very words to me. "You think the earth is round? You've been had." 

The sense among the non elite or anti-elite that gov't is inaccessibly remote is a kind of structural violence. Not physical, but a psychological violence. Its consequence is distrust of gov't and social distrust of "the elites", the perennial target of their conspiracy theories. 

the outcome

There are many false beliefs that can be mapped onto social spaces and class structure. The post on the Liberal Blind Spot focuses on religion and fictional political narratives in urban vs rural social locations. This current post has focused only on the mutually exclusive conspiracy theories and gov't propaganda beliefs. 

Those who believe propaganda dismiss conspiracy theories as stupid and dangerous. Those who believe in conspiracy theories dismiss propaganda believers as fools. 

The virtue-signaling class expect gov't to solve social problems, and they support change. They are prone to the Fool's Errand Attachment bias. 

Conspiracy believers do not expect progress. Their baked-in distrust expects only harm from legislation and the corporate world's manipulations, harm in the form of agricultural poisoning, vaccines, surveillance, indoctrination, war. They are political fatalists (see the post on the Fool's Errand Attachment). However, they are often found helping the people around them. Who is more dangerous, the non voting flat-earther sharing lunch with a homeless migrant and finding him a discarded winter coat, or the voting, unquestioning NYTimes reader? Obviously, each thinks the other is more dangerous. Outside of the US, especially among the ordinary people in the so-called global south, the US Democratic Party is viewed as extremely militaristic and dangerous. Something for the liberal Democrat to think about. 

true but wrong

My favorite statistic: 

some years ago I came across Citigroup's Global Economic Outlook & Strategy. In it I found a page on revolutions! According to their research, a revolution in a nation on average will induce a 14% decline in that nation's GDP. And if it is coupled with a civil war, the dip is likely to be twice as great!! 

I love this statistic. I think it's safe to say that this decline in GDP is hugely important and no doubt more or less true. And yet it also misses everything important about a revolution. From the perspective of the revolutionary and social justice, it's strictly irrelevant. It's totally true, and utterly wrong. 

When we consider theories and explanations and understanding, do we check to see whether we've got the right truth or the wrong one? Is there a bigger picture than the narrow truth? Is there a biggest picture? 

I know it's common to complain that, say, scientific theories are too narrow, that they may be true, but still wrong. I think these complainers are the narrow ones. Their view of the potential of the sciences is limited by their anti-scientism. There are many narrow scientific theories, but I think there are also scientific biggest pictures. 

The Citigroup statistic is narrow truth. The justifications for a revolution are also a narrow truth. A bigger picture is, obviously, a cost-benefit-plus-risk analysis, weighted by some values like justice, human rights etc. You can maybe see when the biggest picture is intuited by the public. If the regime is extremely repressive, it can be because it knows the public wants to take that risk. But a small radical military faction can also induce extreme oppression from the regime. A civil war following a revolution might also indicate a public rejection of that radical faction. Everyone involved is intuiting what Citigroup has measured in a number. Of course, Citigroup's statistic is addressed not to regimes nor to the public nor to the revolutionary. It's addressed to the investor, indifferent to them all. 

The anti-scientismists complain that science can't give us our values, our aesthetic sense, our emotions. But surely everyone knows that's not so. As E.O.Wilson pointed out, our moral values are the ones that natural selection selected for us as a social species, the values that conduce to social species survival. Same with emotions, and there's a post here on why mathematical beauty is beautiful to us, and it's all about natural selection of reliable signals. So could we retire this anti-scientismism? 

Ah, but once you know the scientific explanation for some value, will you still hold the value? That's a real problem, since some illusions are practically helpful and useful. Cleave only to truth and you're left with no reason to live at all. Except for your naturally selected values and emotions. 

So I say, don't worry about truth undermining your values. The values that science shows you are yours are in fact the ones you want. Don't worry, be happy. I mean, don't harm yourself, be engaged in something engrossing outside yourself.