Man As A Rationalist Animal

  • Most of us presuppose that failure is caused by malice
  • This is actually the optimistic view
  • The pessimistic view would be to acknowledge that failure is inevitable, regardless of our intent
  • Seeing Like A State seeks to examine why large state schemes fail even when they’re guided by the best of intentions
  • How does state power work?
    • State has a plan
    • In order to execute that plan, the state needs information
    • In order to gain information, the state needs to be able to query its population in a standardized way - the population must be made legible
  • The process of making a population legible to the state invariably involves a transfer of power from the periphery to the center
  • This transfer of power invariably provokes resentment and resistance, even if the end state would be better off for all involved
  • All too often, however, the legible system is less efficient than the illegible system, and so people are worse off
  • The key problem of requiring legibility is that the language of metis and the language of epistemic knowledge are mutually incomprehensible
  • Practictioners with metis will be able to say what they do, but will not have “rational” reasons for why
  • Authoritarian high-modernism
    • Results when a state disclaims metis entirely and sees the world through only epistemic knowledge
    • Fascism and communism are the extreme examples of this
    • Authoritarian high-modernism assigns anything it doesn’t understand a value of zero
  • So how does this apply to our community
    • Rationalists making fun of Christian fundamentalists closely parallels in form the way that high-modernist central planners spoke about the metis of tribespeople
    • The difference is that the power gradient isn’t as pronounced
    • Religious communities have a significant community-building metis that isn’t explicitly codified anywhere
    • When religion dies in these communities the communities fall apart
    • Moreover, attempting to replace the benefits of religion with state benefits fails because state benefits fail to capture the second and third order effects of having close-knit community
    • Legibility problems didn’t die with the end of the high modernist era - we will have problems with legibility as long as we assume that all variables necessary for human existence can be captured, quantified, and traded off
  • When the government persecutes an illegible group, it’s not perceived as persecution
  • When a group complains angrily about losing some institution, they’re often not complaining about losing the institution itself, but rather they’re complaining about losing the second and third order effects of that institution

Kindness Against The Grain

  • Most kindness is incentivized - people are kind towards those who will be in a position to reciprocate that kindness in the future
  • One of the heuristics we use to determine who we should be kind to is sympathy
    • Sympathy provides a nice emotional gradient that incentivizes kindness
    • You feel distress when a sympathetic person is in trouble
    • You feel good when you help that person and they’re no longer in trouble
  • The problem with using sympathy as our sole heuristic for kindness is that sympathy is not perfectly correlated with suffering
  • We feel less sympathy for:
    • Outgroup people (strangers, social deviants)
      • To receive sympathy, you must be weak in the moment, but demonstrate potential for becoming strong later
        • People with permanent issues are permanently weak and we don’t feel like our aid will actually help them
        • People who are overly self-reliant are seen as being able to help themselves, and thus not deserving of sympathy
  • Cooperation without sympathy
    • Peaceful win-wins where one of the parties isn’t sympathetic don’t feel like win-wins
    • Helping someone who is valuable but unsympathetic doesn’t feel like a good investment
    • In practice the best way to gain cooperation in these situations is to reframe the issue so that one side does seem sympathetic
    • However, this is not always possible - can’t change social context by yourself
    • In order to cooperate without sympathy, we must take the global view
  • Forgiveness and the very-long-term
    • Forgiveness is choosing not to call in a debt
    • Local loss, but hopefully global gain
    • The rationale behind forgivness is that accepting an ocassional defection prevents the two parties from getting stuck in a circle of defections
    • In the long term, nothing is permanent and everything is mutable
      • If someone is under “permanent” suffering, thinking of the very long term can help turn their permanent suffering into temporary suffering (for a large value of temporary)
    • Forgiveness can be easier to implement than cooperation without sympathy

See The Dark World

  • Many people, upon an undesirable state of the world, put forth reasons to make the undesirable state acceptable
  • Tolerification is toxic to intrinsic motivation
  • If you find yourself tolerifying an unacceptable situation, try the following:
    • Ask yourself, “what if I lived in a world where these facts were both true and unacceptable. What would I do?”
      • Asking yourlsef the question allows you to determine a future course of action, rather than locking yourself into accepting the world as it is

A Nihilist’s Guide To Meaning

  • Meaning for materialists
    • Meaning is a feeling or perception that people have towards the objects, events and experiences in their lives, not an inherent property of the objects themselves
      • Certain events (weddings, etc) feel more meaningful than others
      • A thing X will be perceived to be more meaningful in context C if X has lots of connections to other meaningful things in C
      • This definition is somewhat circular - requires an ultimate arbiter of meaning
        • This role is often filled by religion
      • If meaning is defined by connection, meaningness isn’t wholly subjective
      • The feeling of meaningfulness is a heuristic that informs us as to whether the task we’re working on is strongly connected to our long-term goals
  • Memento Mori
    • Prospect of death throws meaning into high relief
    • What does it mean for something to be “meaningful in the grand scheme of things”?
    • The least meaningful life is the one where nobody notices when you die
    • The most meaningful life is the stereotypical Hero’s Journey, where the fate of the entire cosmos rests on one person’s shoulders
    • If meaning is correlated with connections, the more connections = more meaning
    • This definition of meaning implies that we will not be able to satisfy our desire for meaning by engaging in activities that don’t build connections
    • Either we strive to make connections in the world or we retrain ourselves to find peace in simply being
  • Meaning creation and destruction
    • Children, ancestors, create meaning
      • Tight knit communities create meaning
      • Capitalism and bureaucracy destroy meaning by severing connections and turning us into interchangeable units (alienation the feeling of doing meaningless work)
      • Science can take away meaning, but can also add meaning - depends on interpretation