The limits of imagination, scifi, art and UFOs -- or: the intrinsic mediocrity of art

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

“Truth is always strange — stranger than fiction” – Byron

It’s widely assumed that the arts are imaginative while the sciences are too constrained by reality, by formalisms, by math and by logic for flights of imagination. What if we’ve all got this backwards?

One look at the history of the arts tells us that the arts are more imitative than innovative, otherwise it would be impossible to identify historical periods in the arts, and styles in the arts might be their most obvious trait, so much so that it can sometimes be difficult for an observer to tell one artist from another. This should not surprise anyone. It has a structural reason that is all too often ignored. Art is usually made for an audience. It is a game theoretic activity in which the artist must entertain the audience, which entails that the art work not lose the audience’ attention but continually communicate and engage. If the art is too innovative for the audience, there will be no communication and no engagement. This limitation on artistic imagination might be called the mediocrity of art or its frame of mediocrity beyond the bounds of which art cannot succeed.

That’s not to say that artists are slavish imitators of one another all catering to the least common denominator of the audience. There be many audiences, some seeking mere entertainment, others seeking more arcane discernment. And obviously there are many incremental innovations in the arts, otherwise period styles would never change. Often the innovators are the ones most memorable and famous, becoming the most imitated. But overall I think it’s a myth of our culture that artists are the great imaginators. The myth seems to trade on an ambiguity of “imagination” between “made up stuff that’s like familiar stuff but isn’t really there or wasn’t there” versus “coming up with unprecedented ideas.”

The arts prioritize manipulating the audience’s emotions and opinions. Those are skills that do admit of innovation. One-point perspective in the 15th century, key modulation in the 17th are two familiar such artistic innovations. But when has discovery ever been the goal of art? One finds a lot of idiosyncrasy which is a kind of originality, but it’s rarely at the expense of comprehensibility, and then only recently and very self-consciously and only for elite audiences. Most of the art that people enjoy — the music they listen to repeatedly, the movies they spend money to see, the graphic arts that attract them — may have something distinctive about them, but they are mostly crafty manipulations that can be learnt if not in art class then by imitating the models known to work best. Perspective and modulation both enhanced, not challenged, comprehensibility.

The arts are also limited by their materials. A drama requires a stage, so space ships populate scifi movies for no other reason. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing long ago observed that the distinctive material of each art determines its possible manipulations. That is to say, art is not, as we in our individualistic, narcissistic culture believe, about self-expression. It’s a skilled craftwork designed to affect the minds of others through some specific medium usually using illusions allowed by that medium. Crafty use of paint creates illusions of plausible places and more or less familiar things in them. Drama creates an illusion of a believable series of actions in the real world. Language symbolically represents illusions of plausible people, their minds, their actions and interactions, all not too far from our expectations. And skillful manipulation of sounds will directly manipulate emotions without even an illusionary stimulus, but music that strays too far from the organizing principles that manipulate the emotions, will lose its audience. Atonal music never caught on — audiences don’t feel manipulated emotionally by it, and it gives the composer too little power to manipulate. There’s just not enough mediocre content in it. 

Given a moment of thought, these two limitations, the audience and the material, become obvious — self-evident, even definitional. Every art is defined by a medium — paint, words, brick and stone or pitches in rhythm. And it’s all for the pleasure or entertainment of one audience or another.

The limitation to the audience’s expectation of the material to appeal readily to the ordinary imagination is familiarly expressed with “Truth is stranger than fiction” and the colloquial “You can’t make this shit up.” Art mustn’t be too strange otherwise it won’t be believed, and if not believed it can’t manipulate. It’d be just weird, not affective. Those familiar expressions also reflect our understanding that the sciences, based on reality, can be taken as true or accurate regardless how incredible. Believability plays no role in science and should play no such role. And can’t — if its conclusions depend on the audience, it’s not science anymore.

In the study of ancient texts, where two copies exist of a lost original, one that makes perfect sense and the other weird and unlikely, it is the rule of thumb that the common sense text is probably furthest from the original, and the weird one is likely a faithful copy. That’s for the obvious reason that reality can be utterly weird while copies tend to “correct” in the direction of common sense, the mediocre mind of limited imagination. If there is a goal of the arts, it might be characterized as correcting the unaccountable world to make sense of it. Good guys vs bad guys might be too simple for some artworks, but a sense of what is good and what is undesirable is almost always present. Excessive realism can leave us cold since there’s no interpretation of the subject. What’s the point of all that effort painting if it’s no more interpretable than the object being depicted. The artist is supposed to be a kind of bad, manipulative copyist, appealing to the audiences’ expectations, giving them a world that will satisfy them. 

Compare science with the “imaginative” fancies of religions. The deities look just like people or just like parts of people or parts of animals, or have moralities and intentions just like ours. There doesn’t seem to be any imagination at all in them. All mere distortions of the ordinary, mimicry, recreations of what’s all already in front of us. Even the mysteries are the familiar mysteries. The goal is to appeal to the audience and satisfy the audience. 

It’s even worse with science fiction. Why would anyone think that extraterrestrial beings would travel across planetary systems in hardware like so many buses or mobile homes, let alone the space ships of scifi movies that resemble giant flying commercial buildings? If an extraterrestrial intelligent species could travel across solar systems, its technology would have to be unimaginable to us, not only in their traveling but in every aspect of their behaviors and if their technology were so far more sophisticated than ours, surely they would not bother carrying hardware, including their own physical bodies, from place to place. That we could detect them or that they would crash into the earth and leave remnants is strictly for the unthinking gullible who've watched too many movies.

The inability to imagine the technology of the future is not alone to blame for beliefs in flying saucers. It’s that the drama in scifi movies requires a stage, and that’s the spaceship. There is just no other reason for such spaceships-of-the-future. Conspiracy theories of UFOs have proliferated solely because screen writers needed a stage. We will believe anything however stupid as long as it’s within our limited imaginations. Most likely space travel will be more some kind of informational exchange, not physical busing around. Information is faster, its baggage is lighter, and it interferes not at all. There won’t be any “grabby” aliens, as Hanson speculates based on his libertarian idee fixe. I see no reason why advanced aliens won’t be undetectable because, for one thing, they won’t need to travel at all, and information is a passive receiving, not a generating that consumes energy. 

Science is not such a game theoretic activity with an audience. Audiences play no role in the value of the sciences. Technology, of course, is for audiences, especially buying audiences, but the moment an audience pressures a science, that’s the end of the science almost by definition. That’s not the knowledge of science. That’s letting people believe what they want to believe — that’s art again. Many sciences are entirely opaque to the lay observer, some so arcane that they are beyond the capacity of even the tutored. Scientific discoveries are often far beyond what anyone would imagine. It’s the great draw of science that it is so full of weirdness, so contrary to the obvious and disruptive of all stability. What could be more unbelievable than that the earth could be spinning or that we all stand all over a globe without falling off, or that the sun doesn’t travel across the sky. In linguistics, the notion of the phoneme — an abstract object never heard or pronounced but still motivating the sounds and perceptions of language — is such a weirdness. It’s not what you hear. It’s what emerges when you analyse and categorize the data of what you hear. Grice’s principles of conversation — that speakers and addressees interpret utterances under the assumption that everything said is exactly relevant, that what we say is exactly the truth as we know it and say it in the most efficient way — completely counterintuitive principles, are another such weird surprise. Yet the power of that unbelievable contrary-to-fact-and-common-sense theory explains not just how we interpret conversation, but the existence of conversation itself, it’s the evolutionary explanation for language and the explanation for many of our cognitive limitations compared with our primate relatives, and our counterfactual beliefs like religions. 

In David Deutsch’s first book, he maintains that there are four essential theories of the universe: reductionist physics (quantum physics), natural selection, computational theory, and falsificationism. I’d add two more, semiology, the science of symbols, and game theory including Grice’s principles of conversational cooperation and the game-theoretic character of sexual selection and extended phenotype that can result in selection for altruism, for example.

Reality is interpreted through our symbols, and those symbols have a science of their own, distinct from all other sciences. Every other science holds to Aristotle’s causes, things being defined by their properties and individual interactions. Symbols have no such intrinsic properties, and their interactions depend not on themselves but on the structures they belong to.

And the interpretation of those symbols is not complete in their own structural code definitions or values. They are interpreted and reinterpreted through conversation, the equilibrium of meaning between conversants. 

These two — symbols and games — are necessary for understanding of the universe. Symbols interpret all of reality for us including our sciences of reality, and these symbols have a science of their own distinct from the essence-property science of all other knowledge (posts upcoming on "information faster than light" and "the hierarchy of data sets in the sciences"). How could such a science and such a set of objects be omitted from a complete understanding of the universe? And game theory takes these interpretive symbols making them sharable between minds.  

There’s a seventh science, that of consciousness, but that’ll take a post all its own. 

An addendum on Hanson’s grabby aliens

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

An addendum on Hanson’s grabby aliens:

If we were to assume that all of human futures are determined by those elements of human nature that have persisted through history, we might conclude that we will continue to expand our influence on nature, organize it, harness it etc. This seems to be the assumption Hanson makes in predicting that aliens with advanced technology will be grabby — they will succeed by Darwinian selection over their environment, dominating it, organizing it, harnessing it just as we have in our Darwinian selection here. Darwinian libertarianism is Hanson’s idee fixe which he applies to everything. But as David Deutsch likes to say, not without some (though not entire) justification, we can’t predict the technology of the future. More important, technological advances have been the great game changers in human history. They are changes in our relationship with our environment, and in our selection. Reliance on physical environment, like reliance on slaves, will last only as long as no technology replaces it as fossil fuels and machines have been replacing slavery. Besides, humans, unlike most organisms, do not have as our essential environment something in non human nature. The essential environment of humans is other humans, and that relationship is mediated through language, a symbol system denoting information, not bits of physical nature.

A social species depends on cooperation more than competition. Consider that language is itself a form of cooperation and it is by far a away the most important, pervasively transformative technology we’ve ever acquired, to such an extent that it compensates for shocking downsides among which is our credulousness. For an informationally dependent social species it would be natural for the future technology to develop as informational and representational, not physical hardware. The future is likely to be one of seeking information in symbolic and non symbolic forms and organizing those with efficient means that don’t require disturbing anything at all. It seems pretty easy to predict that the future would be knowing, seeing, understanding, and not doing, moving, destroying or transforming anything but ourselves. Why travel with our burdensome bodies that require replenishment and produce waste, when we can travel through information, — like virtual reality but far more sophisticated and comprehensive. Hardware is just cumbersome, a clumsy start to a universe that began with physics instead of symbols. And lucky too, since without physical things there’d be little to symbolize, no one to symbolize and no one to understand them. 

You can see this move towards information already in the metaverse. Virtual reality already has advantages over physical travel, and we’re only at the beginning of its development. Several months after scoping out the streetview of a city I hadn’t actually visited — observing carefully the bus stops and the people waiting there, the stores and restaurants and the people sitting at the street cafes, the view from the city’s heights, the waterfront scenery — in talking on the phone to a resident there I mistakenly recalled that I’d been there. I could not for the life of me tell whether I’d actually been there or not, the memories were so vivid, normal and memory-lifelike.

That’s the easiest explanation for the Fermi paradox. Aliens will not travel and will generate little effort. Information is lightweight and efficient. We can’t find them because they’re all at home quietly sitting on the couch experiencing information pure. If they want to exercise, if they’re still stuck in bodies, they can bring out their retro tech and ride a bike. 

Where is the mind and what’s a thought?

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

If you’ve been to the movies you know how it goes. You buy your ticket, you enter the theater — giant, spacious room with lots of chairs. You walk up the aisle to the very back of the room where you find a narrow door. You open the door. Walking through, you find a steep staircase, almost a ladder. When you get to the top, not far, maybe ten feet, you’re in the projection room. You bring up a chair, sit down and watch the film — that narrow band of plastic on a big spool — feed through a light and lens. After watching the spool spin around for 90 minutes or so, if you’re lucky not longer, til the entire film has passed through the projector and the projector stops and goes dark. You get up and if you’re with a friend you complain that all the movies made today are all alike.

That’s what you do at the movies, no?

No? But you came to see the film. The film is in the projector. No??

A common answer to the question “where is the mind” would be “in the brain”. Cartoon thought bubbles don’t attach to the character’s foot or hand or bottom, but to the head. It wouldn’t have always been so. The Greeks thought the mind was housed in the heart. After all, the mind is always at work, and so is the heart. The emotions, they thought, were generated in the neck and that’s why the neck swells with arteries when we’re really angry. But did they suppose that the mind and emotions were actually in these organs of the body? Seems like an odd notion.

In our culture, the sciences have taken on the role of explaining and interpreting all the world and everything in it. There was a time when whales were fish. If you swim in the ocean, and you have fins and a tail, you’re a fish. No one had a problem with this simple, transparent definition. I don’t see any problem with it. Whales were fish. Makes obvious sense. But now they’re not.

It’s not that the whales have changed. We categorize things differently since Darwin. We’ve got a theory that explains more than the simpler what-you-get-is-what-you-see category. The Darwin story not only explains all sorts of differences between whales and other fish, but also relates them to an explanation for all life forms, much more powerful than ‘some things live and swim in the water, other things walk on land’.

And the same with the mind. The ancients thought the brain was useless jelly — worse than useless, it can’t be preserved so mummification had to exclude the brain. Presumably that’s why the afterlife is so full of zombies and why zombies are always in search of brains. Now we know that the heart doesn’t produce ideas, but the brain does. And this schema of brain=mind has been expanded in our computer age. The brain is a machine that computes the mind inside the skull. And the skull, which had been thought an insensible, inflexible rock devoid of life and thought, has a reason for its inflexible, insensible hardness — to protect that priceless jelly, the one piece of our body that can’t be replaced. No such thing as a brain transplant. You is that brain.

But is the mind inside the brain? This is a fundamental misconception of our culture. I say fundamental because what could be more fundamental than the mind? It’s the all in all of you. And yet we’ve located in the wrong place entirely. That’s a big misconception, not a minor one. And it’s probably why we’re confused about whether computers can be intelligent. If you’ve got a completely wrong notion of where your mind is, how could you come up with a good understanding of machine intelligence beyond the Turing Test, this behavioristic expression of despair over this very misunderstanding? 

But this brain=mind schema is all wrong, as you can see when you go the movies. The film is in the projector, no question. But the movie is not. The movie is on the screen. The mind is not at all in the brain. The film and the movie are two different categories of matter. There’s a causal relation, but cause and effect can be of very different things. The paint spread over a stencil has no relation to the meaning of the symbol it causes. No relationship: you could use a different color paint, or you could use dust, or you could generate the same symbol by holding the stencil in front of a shining light, or write the symbol by hand without the stencil at all or type it on a keyboard. Whatever in your brain is generating mind, it is of a different and unrelated kind, just as paint or ink are different in kind from the meaningful symbol.  

So if the movie is not in the projector, where is the mind? Well, it’s obvious. The mind, of course, is everything we see, hear, touch, think about and even our physical sense of self, our balance or proprioception — everything we sense and think about. The mind is the world we see and experience around us. The mind is that experience. That experience is a mental illusion produced or projected by the brain (see the upcoming post “The easy answer to the hard question, and a research program for it”) through natural selection to help you navigate the real world out there, what Kant called the noumenal world, the things in themselves, which we never get to see, since they are not visible — they don’t have colors, those are just wavelengths. Seeing and colors are our brain interpretation, designed by natural selection to keep us from falling off cliffs and such. Experience — the world we sense, including our sense of ourselves — is just a natural selection accommodation between the noumenal world and our needs in it.

You might add the emotions, since these are also given to us by natural selection to navigate away from the saber-toothed tiger (fear/flight) or engage with an enemy competitor (fight/hate). [Why we have sadness is the great mystery. None of the explanations I’ve heard are persuasive. I’ll try my hand in a later post.] The emotions don’t seem to be in a where. The growing consensus is that emotions are states of physical arousal or lack of arousal, associated with elements of experience and symbolically interpreted.

The brain is the one location of all locations where you can’t find the mind. Someone stabs you in the brain, you won’t feel anything in the brain. It has no sensory nerves. You’ll experience the stab as something else — memory loss, a sudden pain in the foot — something in experience, not in the brain.

It seems astonishing to me that we have this schema of mind-is-in-the-skull. Your mind is, of course, your experience, what you sense, what you see, what you feel. The mind is the world you perceive, including the perception of your body and yourself and your reflexive perception of your mind (not that you dwell on such reflexivity unless you’re smoking up weed for the first time or you’re a Hofstadter stoner). The brain is just the projector. The movie is on the screen, not at all in the projector. Who would ever mistake the two?

For the longest time I was puzzled by thoughts. Okay, I know where the mind is, the mind is everything out there, all of my experience, but what about thoughts? Where are they? Seems so much more elusive than the rest of the mind. You can record and store a thought in symbols on a page, but that’s a representation of the thought, not having a thought. It’s just a means for readers to interpret the symbols so the reader can have the thought.

Okay, we can record or store thoughts in symbols like writing, but that’s not the thought, it’s just a representation of it. Thoughts — the grasping of thoughts, in Frege’s sense — don’t seem to have a where. “Where?” doesn’t apply to them, even though the mind very much does have a where and when — it’s here around me now. As a student of mine said, “Thoughts have no home.” Poetic, but true.

A brilliant programmer friend — I’d name him but he doesn’t like attention — mentioned that Jeff Hawkins had a take on the thought that made sense to him: that the brain is modeling the world. This modeling is what we call thinking. This seem right to me if it’s extended to relations. So, model two buildings one small one large. This can stand for the relation of big and little. After using such models of big and small, two buildings, a plum and a blueberry, an elephant and an ant, a learner applies symbols for these relations “big” and “small” and there you have it. The symbols instantly recall the models that are now as familiar as one’s own thumb. Where are thoughts? They live in the association between the models, which are part of experience, the mind, and the symbols for them. They are not in a where; they are a bit like memories, rehearsed bits of experience abstracted and tied to a symbol. They are a process, a kind of computation: Jerry Fodor’s language of thought and Frege’s grasping of the thought.

No doubt non humans can have thoughts as well without symbols. These too are, I suppose, habits of models, and are associated with emotions derived from natural selection. I’m guessing a dog will know the leader of the pack because dogs have a model of leader of the pack and an instinctual response to it. We humans have the advantage of the mental flexibility to combine our models using symbols and grammars to think all sorts of things about those models. That’s our language of thought. Humans are unusual in our degree of independence of instinct. It’s a property that allows us to be so flexible and adaptive. We follow culture and deliberation along with our instinctual fixed responses.

Where is the thought? It’s a process, the process of reading those strings of symbols and responding to our models that have become second nature.

There’s more to it than that, but that’s enough for this post.

A note on the Great Stagnation

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

It’s ironic that The Great Stagnation was coined by a libertarian, since the problem seems to be one of market incentives. In the private sector, we get the innovations that make money easiest. Even more ironic to hear a Peter Thiel place blame on the university, the one institution where those cheap incentives are least present and most easily overcome and where the structures are in place to overcome those cheap incentives. The university is not without structural flaws, and private sector incentives have found a place in it. But non private incentives are also encouraged, and inquisitive minds looking beyond private incentives justifiably seek the university as a home for their research. In any case, the private sector is not well equipped to overcome market incentives and the history of the last half century tells us that it increasingly finds ways to bury itself in those incentives until it can’t dig itself out of its own dysfunctions or the shit it excreted with which it has covered itself and everyone else, whether that’s externalities like pollution or the multiplication of inessential gadgets that pile the waste heaps higher and higher.

The new libertarian, overcome by bias

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

If Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is the core text that defines libertarianism, then today’s libertarian isn’t libertarian. Smith was concerned about government intervention in markets, but not the way today's libertarian is.

Take a look at today's libertarian concerns. The argument against government intervention today is as much a defense of possession — property and the unlimited acquisition of property — as it is an argument that markets are more efficient than legislation. And the fiercest argument over legislative meddling is about wealth distribution — appropriating property. Possession again. Opposing taxation has become the central principle of the new libertarian, whether because it is an easy electoral issue, or because Americans have lost trust in their government or become remote from it, or because they simply fail to understand their government and what it does and gives them or fails to give them and for what reasons. Yet they understand their annual tax bill well enough. Taxation has become the issue to argue against, and freedom, easily embraced by American mythology since America’s childhood and the childhood of Americans, is the stronghold of defense against the IRS.

This defining of libertarianism by what it opposes changes the focus of libertarianism, since the opposition today is not what opposed it when Adam Smith wrote. The role of legislation in wealth redistribution from rich to poor was not his concern. It was government intervention in favor of local commerce, not the poor, that troubled him most. The book is mostly a defense of free trade, not a defense of the rich. He has nothing good to say about the property-rich, and only scathing criticism of their role in the economy. He thinks they produce little, they remove potentially productive labor from the labor force for the sake of having servants who, like the rich themselves, produce little but the personal conveniences of the rich and only the rich, not for the wealth of the nation.

Libertarianism, in other words, has fallen victim to our current cultural polarization in which one side wants the government to intervene in a woman’s own body and choice of pronoun and the books her children may have access to as long as no tax funds are involved, and the wealthy deserve to be defended, defending wealth, deploring wealth redistribution, defending the right to bear arms and deploring the right to personal privacy, defending religion and the death penalty, deploring immigrants and people of color — the whole inconsistent constellation of so-called conservatism, opposed by those who defend wealth redistribution, deplore gun ownership and insist we do something to prevent climate change even though we manifestly can’t (see the post on Fool’s Errand Attachment), defend free speech but censor select speech, defend scientific pronouncements from liberal establishments but never criticize them scientifically — the whole inconsistent constellation of current so-called liberalism.

Even the often brilliant and innovative libertarian Robin Hanson falls victim to this polarization. In his pervasive Social Darwinism he deplores encouraging the weak but ignores the weakness of the wealthy. Privilege is conveniently exempted from his Social Darwinism. Privilege weakens as much as struggle strengthens, although it’s worth knowing that competitive struggles will take advantage of any means to win, and the results can be devastating to the society as a whole. It’s easy to forget that the unit of selection is not the individual but the gene or species. A selection for an individual can be destructive to the future of the collective. Monopoly is one such means of success for an individual. Also the use of influence to obtain legislative favors, another observation of Smith’s that greatly troubled him. To prevent such influence would require regulation, but again, today’s libertarian is anti-regulation. They’re just pro-make-money, not at all a Smith interest.

Smith prioritized production, not possession. It’s wealth of nations, not wealth of individuals. Smith objects to gov’t intervention in markets that curtail production. It’s all about the benefits of free trade, especially across borders. What would he have thought about taxing as wealth distribution? He doesn’t say.

In his Age of EM, Hanson warns that the middle classes have a low fertility rate compared with criminals. He describes this with the word “maladaptive” — a term of art in genetics. Reading between the lines in the context of his Darwinism, he’s implying that criminal genes are proliferating and successful genes are not. The enthymeme here is the assumption that becoming middle class is an effect of genes, and criminal behavior is also genetic. I would be surprised if either were true. Using his own social Darwinism, I’d expect the criminal to be smart, risky, fast and aware, the average middle class member more security-seeking, more risk-averse, less aggressive and more dependent on the state, on law, on protection from above. Exceptions will abound, but I’d expect the causes of criminality in a class society would be differences of socio-economic status, upbringing, education, cultural values, and opportunities far more than genes, as if there could be a gene for criminality. And let’s not forget the illegal and legal criminality in the corporate world. 

Hanson is a strange hybrid of fox and hedgehog. He has one theory to explain everything, but he has the great talent of finding surprising details. But they are always consistent with his one narrow idee fixe, social Darwinism.

So he points out that whenever we try to improve ourselves, we choose inequality. This is a bit loaded, since taking it as a Kantian categorical, it just means all boats will rise. But there’s no mention of which kinds of inequalities might be be costly with little benefit compared with inequalities that provide great benefits to all, and few downsides. Nor does he take into account the value of the incentive for the improvement. It matters: do you want doctors who seek wealth or doctors who are genuinely interested in medicine or helping the ailing? Surely these incentives should be on the table for discussion, not merely the fact that we all at some point want to improve regardless how unequal that makes us.

Finally, don’t forget that natural selection does not ensure that any species of the moment will not go extinct. Extinction is very much a part of the process. What might make a species successful in one environment may be disastrous in another. Uncurated ecologies lose species, and weeds will thrive. If our essential necessary environment is each other, then it’s up to us to learn how to live with each other, and that includes dealing with our inequalities. If that means eliminating wealth, well, the Smith of Wealth of Nations would applaud. What’s wrong with the goal of rising to the level of competence but not beyond?

Privilege is the dark secret of the libertarian think tanker. Every libertarian should deplore it, but the think tankers protect it. Privilege, socially supported, is not Darwinian success, any more than a monopoly is a free market efficiency.

I’d like to see an educational program that will separate the elite from the economically privileged. Our current private education system replicates inequalities by syphoning the privileged into positions of power through their elite educations. What we need are educated elites without privilege. 

The narcissism of rights, freedom, equality

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

Freedom, equality and individual rights are not three distinct values. They entail one another — can’t have one without the other. That raises the question, is one of them the goal, the others just necessary conditions, or is there an underlying motivation driving the whole package? Here’s one way to think about these:

Equality is a necessary condition for individual freedom. If someone can wield greater power than you, then you can’t be entirely free.

In a world of inequalities, socially enforced individual rights are a necessary condition for individual freedom. The collective — the law — will ensure the equality of rights regardless of any other socio-economic inequalities.

So if we want freedom, say, to own what we want, we’ll have to accept some inequalities, and in our world of inequalities, equal rights will be necessary for freedom, everybody compromising a bit to maintain a fair distribution of as much freedom as possible. Equality, rights, fairness and freedom are a single package. Can’t have one with out the others and in particular, equality and rights are the necessary conditions for freedom, which implies that freedom is the motivation for the whole package. But why do we want freedom?

Jon Haidt’s answer here is that we in the West are narcissists. We want the freedom to pursue consumption and sex and willfulness, and the deal we’ve made with the collective is to respect other consumers of willfulness as long as they don’t interfere with our desires. The whole edifice of liberal democracy, freedom, equality and rights, is just a bargain each of us contracts with the collective so I can do whatever I want regardless of someone else’s sensibilities, as long as I don’t encroach on anyone else’s freedoms. 

He also thinks that this narcissism has turned sick. Our protection of the individual has given us a society of identities without any civic or collective anchor. Identity is all self-aggrandizing showing off. Social media showing off has turned identity toxic. 

Here’s a comic (imagine the drawings)

Jon Haidt: Americans have been so coddled that they can’t function. Social media is killing them. They’re suicidal. We need to help them!

Robin Hanson: “Help them”? You mean coddle them more? You’re overcome with your liberal bias. What we need is not to help them at all. If they kill themselves the next generation will be better selected to their social media destiny.

Haidt: Wait, who’s “we”? And what’s this destiny?

Hanson: We, me, of course. What are you thinking? Why think about someone else, silly liberal? As for destiny, if social media exists, it must be an optimal selection. That’s destiny.

Haidt: So’s extinction.

[Final frame, empty desert landscape.]

Selection does not guarantee against extinction. Whole species go extinct all the time. Besides, not every regulation is limiting. Hanson underestimates human spirit and flexibility. Some regulations encourage growth. Pruning. Art forms. Irrigation. Should I stop? A world of weeds produces — … a lot of stifling weeds and few fruit.

Stay tuned

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, June 14, 2022

I haven’t posted in quite a while, but I’m working on a series of posts including one on a cognitive bias I’ve named the Fool’s Errand Attachment (the attachment to a program to the extent to which a solution is urgent not to its effectiveness — where there is no solution, grabbing and holding onto a program that won’t work) that can identify a difference in ethic between utopianists and conspiracy theorists, an explanation for why there’s more imagination in the sciences than in the arts, why game theoretic interactions should be included in machine learning, and the difference between gender as language and gender as oppression. Stay tuned!