The Tower

Part I

  • If you read the Bible, you’ll see that the Tower of Babel wasn’t a tower built to allow Man to reach the heavens
  • It was a tower built as a symbol, to draw people together
  • When a people are of one language, there is nothing they cannot do
  • God descended to Earth and scattered the people, because he was scared

Part II

  • Why don’t people choose to be happy
    • Assume that there’s a perfectly safe, non-addictive machine, which stimulates your brain in a way that produces perfect happiness, joy, etc
    • Would you hook yourself up to such a machine?
    • Alternative formulation: assume you were offered a high-fidelity VR trip to a paradise
    • But, once the trip ended, all memories of the trip would be erased – you would wake up with nothing more than a bit of an ache from having sat so long
    • Would you take the trip?
  • The fact that a large number of people would not choose to hook themselves up to the machine or take the VR trip means that people don’t automatically choose happiness in the moment
  • Kahneman reasons that this is because people distinguish between the experiencing self and the remembering self
  • The experiencing self experiences happiness in the moment, but the remembering self wants a life that it and others will look back on and say was a good life
  • Only Kahneman doesn’t take the idea far enough
    • Look at the motivations of kamikazes and suicide bombers
    • They’re not optimizing for their remembering-selves, they’re optimizing for others’
  • This ties into memetics and cultural evolution
    • Our remembering self has a collection of memes which create the value system by which we remember an event and assign meaning or moral worth to it
    • Our “free will” is merely a reflection of the memes that have colonized us

Part III

  • The first dichotomy, according to Freud, separates ego-instincts from object-instincts
  • Ego-instincts are necessities
    • Hunger
    • Thirst
    • Respiration
    • Fatigue
    • Crude sexual desire
  • Newborns treat the entire world as an extension of their ego-instincts
  • Object instincts are those that develop as we realize our abilities and direct them outwards
  • Freud’s second dichotomy divides object instincts into two categories
    • Eros: Love
      • Not just love, but more like belonging and acceptance
      • The feeling of being truly recognized and accepted by another
    • Thanatos: death
      • Not so much death as control - ananke
      • Self-destruction is the ultimate form of self-control
  • According to Freud, the id is what we want and the superego is how we go about wanting
  • While everything we do must satisfy the id’s desire for eros and ananke in the moment, to some extent, it’s the superego, the remembering self, which looks back on actions and answers the question, “Did I do what I really wanted?”
  • The remembering self doesn’t care which goal you pick, only that there is a goal
    • Minimum wage jobs are unsatisifying because there is no goal
    • No reward for doing better, and no opportunity to improve if you’re doing poorly – you’re just fired and replaced with the next willing worker
  • The way to a well-lived life is to pick a goal and pursue it
    • The role of adolescence is to explore and find a goal
    • The role of adulthood is to switch to exploit and pursue that goal
  • Happiness and meaning are sometimes compatible and sometimes conflicting
  • There is no right choice between happiness and meaning, but one needs to be careful of the multitude of choices that give you neither
    • The id is terrible at long-term hedonism
    • The superego, by default, is colonized with lots of harmful memes that will have you pursuing goals that will look pointless in retrospect
  • We all have some degree of protection from malignant memes, either by virtue of cultural isolation or from the protective memes inculcated in us by parents and society
  • However, very few people take adequate precautions when dealing with new memes
  • Judaism is an interesting religion because it tries to enforce memetic hygiene
    • Large number of arbitrary seeming rules ensure that memes have to pass through an obstacle course before they reach the people
    • Strictures against proselytizing reduce exposure to foreign memes
  • A free flow of information reduces memetic hygiene – equivalent of a suppressed immune system
  • Memetic selection is even less likely to induce cooperation than natural selection
    • Unlike genes, memes aren’t spread in chromosomes, and thus have no pressure forcing them to act in concert

Part IV

  • References gwern’s Culture Is Not About Esthetics
    • The argument in Culture Is Not About Esthetics is that given the accessibility of the cultural products of the past today, why should we continue to subsidize the creation of new art
    • People are primed towards novelty, and every new piece of art saps attention from older, better art
    • In the limit case, maybe we should even ban the creation of new art
  • There are some flaws with this argument
    • Assumes you can rank art along some kind of unified scale that is time invariant (i.e. Mozart is always better than Eminem)
    • If you ban the creation of new art, then what will people do in their spare time after consuming all this old excellent art? Art begets art
    • If people give up reading sensationalist fiction, they will read sensationalist non-fiction, which is worse
    • Finally art teaches moral lessons – art gives us a manual on how to navigate the moral dilemmas we face every time we interact with other human beings
    • Moderns works of art translate ancient lessons into modern language, making them legible and understandable to a modern audience
  • Art is compressed communication – the limitations of an artistic form force the artist into using abstractions, which allows the artist to transmit the impression of a greater pattern to the viewer or listener

Part V

  • A good working definition of “privilege” is “the ease by which one’s art can be understood”
  • This explains why people pursue wealth even when happiness saturates with wealth at around $75,000 in the US
    • Althought happiness saturates, “life satisfaction” does not
    • What’s the difference?
      • Happiness is a marker of the experiencing self
      • Life satisfaction is a marker of the remembering self
    • Wealth can be used to both acquire novel experiences and also to in acquiring references to allow one to communicate one’s experiences
    • Both of those satisfy our remembering selves – we can look back on novel experiences, and we know that we’ve communicated something unique about ourselves to others
    • Rich people are seen as cultured because the know a lot of culture, and can express their experiences by referring to cultural artifacts that are inaccessible to poor people
  • This means that money is good as an absolute good, not just a relative good, insofar as it allows more people to break from routine and have novel experiences
  • Belonging to the dominant race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. confers the same sort of privilege as wealth, but by a different mechanism
    • People relate to you more readily and are more willing to hear what you have to say
    • While wealth makes it easy to speak, being a part of the dominant class makes it easy for others to listen
  • Stereotypes
    • Stereotypes are necessary to function in a society that’s bigger than a family or tribe
    • Most racists are actually culturists – they don’t inherently hate a particular race or religion, they hate what that race or religion is correlated with
    • Race and gender may be social constructs, but the things we associate with those races and genders are real
    • However, until we can learn to speak in pheromone, all of our interactions will be mediated by stereotypes
    • This is why the standard “don’t be racist” framing fails – it tells us which stereotypes we should not use, but not which we should use
  • Microagressions are behaviors that are consistently linked to particular stereotypes
  • Stereotypes and microagressions are harmful even when they’re broadly positive – they prevent others from remembering you as an individual, rather than an example of a stereotype

Part VI

  • If globalization is the primary phenomenon of the 21st century, then immigration will be the primary political conflict
  • Immigration, here is used in a broad sense – referring to both immigration of people and ideas
  • Stereotyping applies just as much to lower-class whites as it does to underprivileged minorities – “the y’all class”
  • At the core of the rebellion that led to Trump was a desire for respect – an acknowledgement that they are also human beings struggling for their values
  • When conservatives talk about “the gay agenda”, they’re not talking about an actual conspiracy to force homosexual relationships upon everyone
  • They’re talking about the sort of rhetoric that says that they’re on the “wrong side of history”, which tells them that it doesn’t matter what they think, they will soon be steamrolled by Progress
  • This rhetoric is especially important for the working class, because in order to advance, they have to impress managers from the upper-middle class
  • So, for them, when society changes its views on social issues, that’s a threat to their economic livelihood
  • The way that the media has spoken about race and culture has made this problem worse
    • Loudly proclaimed the end of “white America”
    • Created a vague set of ever-shifting rules around etiquette and appropriation

Part VII

  • Affirmative action is good, but it promotes conformity of mindset while promoting racial/gender diversity
  • Debates about who should attend and whose opinions should be heard at universities miss the point – the real question is, “Who made universities the place where opinions are heard?”
  • Everyone acknowledges that class is hereditary, but those who oppose the hereditary class structure the most are those who benefit from it
  • The old aristocracy has transmuted itself into the “media elite”
    • Once the Industrial Revolution erased the aristocrats’ traditional sources of wealth, they used their advantages in culture to form an industry around telling others what to read and who to listen to
    • Schools have bought into this mindset – more concerned with teaching the answers to “why” questions than the answers to “how” questions
    • Do this even though knowing how to do things is far more useful than knowing why things are the way they are for the average person
    • In this way, schools are adapting to economic reality – the primary qualification for working in the new service industries is inoffensiveness, so schools focus on churning out people who are as inoffensive as possible

Part VIII

  • The neoreactionaries think we are living in the end times
  • They think that democracy is a memetic virus that’s tearing its way through civilization, and, as a result civilization will soon fall
  • However, neoreactionaries miss that the current state of affairs one that has occurred cyclically all throughout history
  • Civilization always comes together, and it always comes apart
  • However, just because this process of coming together and falling apart has occurred in the past, it doesn’t mean that it will be pleasant to live through