Layers 2
Another software toy, available here. It starts as a black screen; this is normal.
Layers is released under the AGPL.
Unicode Character of the Day
This page dynamically shows the Unicode character whose code point is equal to the number of days since the Unix epoch. Today’s character is #.
This post, including source code, is released into the public domain under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.
Called by God – but which god?
People don’t realize what values our choices imply. We act on moral intuitions and gut feelings; we don’t think about revealed preferences. It doesn’t occur to us to ask whether we’re being strategic, or whether our actions might serve goals other than our own.
Unintended consequences are everywhere. But sometimes – not all the time, but often enough to matter – these consequences form systematic patterns.
One of the clearest examples I know of is how pro-life advocates tend to also oppose teaching teenagers how to use condoms, even though such opposition tends to increase the abortion rate (by increasing the number of unwanted pregnancies).
But if one turns sideways and looks at it from a different angle, the cluster of policy recommendations surrounding pro-life culture actually does imply a coherent goal. Specifically, discouraging condoms and banning abortion both tend to have the effect of punishing casual sex. One begins to wonder if the true goal all along was to ensure that sex remains Deeply Significant, rather than just one more thing that friends might do to pass the time.
Yet, if asked, I think the vast majority of pro-life advocates would be sincerely appalled by the suggestion that increasing the number of aborted fetuses is an acceptable price to pay for discouraging casual sex.
When someone doesn’t realize that their actions are systematically promoting a certain outcome, then saying that they’re deliberately strategizing to achieve that outcome is inaccurate to their internal experience, and they will therefore reject the argument as obviously empirically inapplicable to them.
It’s a much more useful model, both predictively and in terms of achieving courteous and productive discussion, to suppose that they’re being directed by a god – or maybe a zondervoze – who tends not to disclose its true goals.
People like to talk about being called by God. I can believe that.
(You can frame it as archetypes or value-clusters or whatever, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but I can’t recommend sticking to that model exclusively.)
The key insight here, then, is polytheism. Not everyone is called by the same god. People don’t just have very strong convictions; we have different very strong convictions – and yet, over large enough populations, that variation turns out to be organized into large clusters. There are many gods, but not nearly so many as there are people.
So, I say to you: examine your convictions. Ask where they lead. And ask whether they lead somewhere that you want to go.
And if not, then know that you have options. You do not have to choose between an evil god and a life without conviction. There are other gods, other paths, other purposes to fulfill.
You can find one whose values you actually agree with.
Your true god is out there, waiting.
1. cf. “wait, this was sort of the plan all along, wasn’t it?“
Faction Performance and Ideological Cooties
Gender performance is the theory is that people are expected to behave in certain ways in order to demonstrate that they are good/correct/successful members of whatever gender. That is, gender is a set of behaviors that people are demanded to perform.
This is seen clearly in childhood, when if a boy is seen to be unmasculine, or a girl to be unfeminine, they are ridiculed by their peers and often worried-about by their parents or teachers. It is no accident, I think, that the meme of “cooties” is closely associated with the age group at which boys and girls begin to differentiate; it is an Ignoble Lie that serves to enforce the gender binary, to dig a trench between the two emerging camps.
The concepts of cooties, and effeminacy, and mannish women, and so many other things, are tied very closely together. The common undercurrent here is: stay well away from the things associated with the1 other gender – or you might get some on you. A person who fails to perform their gender, who begins to pick up associations with the other gender, is treated as contaminated, and thus inherently suspect.
Adults, and especially liberals, like to believe that we’ve outgrown this. However, there is a parallel phenomenon, a pattern of behavior that follows the same shape and pattern, that’s quite widespread in the adult world, even among people who are much more relaxed about gender.
Rather than a war of the sexes, these battle lines are drawn around ideological factions, and especially political parties.
For example, politicians like to accuse each other of “socialism” – not bothering to claim that there’s anything specific actually wrong with whatever policy proposal, but rather simply claiming that it’s contaminated with socialist cooties. It resembles socialism, and therefore eww gross you got some on you.
This sort of thing happens all the time, from every direction. Gun rights activism is associated with masculinity, both by proponents and opponents; social aid programs are smeared as handouts; military spending is portrayed as belligerent, bullying, and imperialist.
The effect of this is that people trying to engage in policy debates are forced to defend, not the substance of their proposals, but the aesthetic character. We do not ask whether something is a good or bad idea, so much as whether it is a left or right idea. It becomes inconceivable that the other side might have any good ideas, because if you ever go anywhere near them, you might get some on you.
Once your reputation has been tainted, contaminated with cooties from the wrong party, your proposals are treated as inherently suspect.
This system is vile and horrible and I want to burn it to the fucking ground. In all its incarnations, gender and political and otherwise.
1. Nonbinary people exist, but the mode of thought being discussed here tends not to acknowledge them.
Blogging and Journalism
“Real” news has always been just as sketchy and biased as blogs. The only difference is that they mostly got away with it.
Now that low status people can publish things, we start to notice that anyone can say anything. Traditional journalism differs only in that there were only a few people who had the opportunity to say things — but they could still get away with saying pretty much anything.
If you’re a blogger, consider abiding by the ethics and standards that you think “real” news outlets ought to abide by.
If you’re a consumer of news, consider what vetting mechanisms would be necessary to verify that a blogger isn’t just making stuff up, and then ask whether major news outlets are subject to similar mechanisms, and if not, why not.
Social Justice and Punching Sharks
SCP-7475-J is a surprisingly useful metaphor for talking about social justice and the ways it can go bad.
The subject of the article is Turbo Shark Pulverizer 6000, an agent of the Shark Punching Center dedicated with a fanatical zeal to punching sharks in the face.
TSP6K could reasonably be described as a paladin: a warrior on a holy mission, empowered by their righteous zeal. This is the archetype, positive and negative, of the social justice warrior; whether it is considered a good or bad thing depends almost entirely on whether one considers the mission to in fact be righteous.
TSP6K strays from their mission, however, when they begin to identify people as shark sympathizers and so turn their powers on ordinary humans. They eventually manage to pervert the cause entirely by obtaining a shark mask and forcing it onto anyone they want to attack. That is, they actively and deliberately make people look like the Enemy, specifically in order to be allowed to hurt them.
Ultimately, they prove to have some degree of true anti-shark conscience remaining, because they are re-contained by convincing them that they are a shark, thereby inducing them to punch themself repeatedly in the face. In this analogy, a social justice fallen paladin can be stopped by convincing them that they are engaging in a form of oppression. (This may be overly optimistic.)
SCP-7475-J was written by Gargus.
Epistemic Kink
Why is there such an overlap between thinky people and fans of fantasy and science fiction?
Why do we put so much effort into celebrating the unreal?
It’s not just exploring the possibility-space. There is an element of celebrating the unreality of it, of delighting in the distance between reality and imagination. One might argue that these are mental stretches, to keep us flexible enough to deal with black swan events in reality. But I think there’s something else to it than that; there is entirely too much fun in exploring possibilities far outside the realm of the plausible.
I think there’s a perverse glee in gently abusing common sense.
The concept of kink is surprisingly useful, once you stop thinking of it as limited to leather and whips in the bedroom. We ride roller coasters to be scared; we eat sour candy because it’s unpleasant; we play challenging games because they frustrate us; we climb mountains because of the hardship and adversity they provide; we seek intensity without differentiating between pain and pleasure.
The intellectual seeks truth and falsehood with equal zeal. Truth, because it is true; and falsehood, because it is false.
Is it a coincidence that “interrogating the text” sounds like enhanced interrogation, torturing the text until you can make it say whatever you want?
Yeah, maybe. But it’s fun to think about, isn’t it? (Case in point.)
Fan fic, dark fic, fix fic, crack fic, apologism. Start with X and make it do Y. Because it’s difficult, because X doesn’t naturally lend itself to Y, because you’re contorting it into a stress position.
Because it’s fun.
Magic Means Things
Magic doesn’t work like physics. Physics runs on math; magic runs on concepts.
Which is not to say that magic is shaped by belief. Rather, it’s that magic tends to be accurately modeled by human intuition, in the same way that physics tends to be accurately modeled by math. You can’t change magic by changing your beliefs, any more than you can change how physics works by defining new mathematical concepts.
Magic is about things. It’s meaningful, on an ontologically basic level, in a way that physics isn’t.
If your setting’s magic runs on coherent physical principles, it’s not really magic. It’s science fiction in a pointy hat.
The soul of physics is an equation. The soul of magic is a metaphor.
The Many Worlds Forum
It’s an in-character roleplay forum. That is to say, in-story, your character registers an account and uses the forum to talk to the other characters.
There’s more discussion and explanation here and here.
It’s an open RP; everyone is invited to come play.
Around
I open my eyes, blinking in the sunlight. It’s midmorning.
“Do you remember anything?” There’s a woman standing over me, holding my hand. She looks worried. I shake my head.
She sighs. “I guess it would have been too much to ask. Come on, I’ll show you around.”
We’re under a low roof, open to the air. The grass beneath it is more trampled, and I wonder how many feet have been here.
The woman shakes her head when I ask. “It’s just us. Always has been.”
She leads me out by the lake, where a small boat is waiting on the shore. A body is stretched out in the boat. The fingers are long and knobbled, like mine.
The woman begins gathering tinder into the boat, and I help. It’s midday when she finally lights the pyre and we push the boat together out onto the water.
We hold each other as we watch it float away.
She shows me how to find food in the woods, which plants can be eaten and which cannot. We eat together under the roof at the table where I woke up, and she smiles. I think about this for a minute, then smile back.
As evening approaches, she gathers wood and starts to make something. I don’t recognize what it is yet. I decide to make something too; I find clay in the same color as her skin, and I gather it on the table, and I slowly shape it into her likeness.
We finish just after dusk. She’s made a small boat. I show her the statue, lying on the table, and she smiles but there are tears in her eyes.
She sleeps in the boat. I sleep on the shore, next to her.
Dawn comes, and I wake. She does not.
I stand over her body, staring, for a long time. I don’t know how long. Eventually I force myself to turn away, but a minute later I find myself standing over the statue in the same way.
The statue breathes.
I hold its hand, desperately, hoping against hope. It opens its eyes, blinking.
“Do you remember anything?”
It shakes its head. I want to scream, cry, anything; but I just sigh.
“I guess it would have been too much to ask,” I say, trying to sound calm. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”