you may not have all you want, all you need
all that you have had was given by some hand
it could change, it could stay the same
who will say? who will make the claim?
the situation we are in at this time
neither a good one, nor is it so unblessed
it can change, it can stay the same
I could say, I could play the game
~ Gentle Giant, “Proclamation”,
The Power and the Glory
(1974)
This essay attempts to explain power, responsibility, reputation, and
courtesy in the context of long-distance communication-oriented
relationships.
Category of responsibilities
-
The Boss: You owe Slim. Slim owes me. You owe me.
-
Jason Smilovic,
Lucky Number Slevin
(2006)
To start, what is power? Using more grammar: what does it mean for
one person to have power over another? Too many words have been spilled
on the topic, so I will demystify it by suggesting that
power
is a synonym for
responsibility
; one person has power over
another person precisely when they are responsible for that person. To
have the power of life and death is to have the responsibility for
choosing between life and death; to have the power of where to go for
lunch is to have the responsibility of choosing where to go for
lunch.
An immediate and common retort is that power is
hard
or
soft
; hard power is physics and soft power is responsibility. A
variety of misunderstood statements attesting to the distinction are
well-known; here are a few common examples:
Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of
the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun,
and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.
~ Mao Zedong, 1927
Some people think they can outsmart me. Maybe. Maybe. I’ve yet to
meet one that can outsmart
bullet
.
~ Heavy Weapons Guy, 2007
-
We are all victims of physics.
-
unknown 21st-century scientist
I will directly answer this request for nuance by insisting that
physics is
local
: actions taken in a location in the past take
time to propagate to other locations in the future. Locality immediately
requires physical existence to lack realism by the Kochen-Specker
theorem; it is thus indefinite and probabilistic. I will further insist
that we are responsible for the choices that we locally make in our
immediate surroundings; we have the power to alter the space near us,
and we choose how to use this power partially by imagining the
responsibility of control over that space. However, this allows me to
note that power does not grow out of a gun, but out of the
responsibility associated with aiming, firing, and maintaining a gun in
a particular location; any claim about the hard physics of power can be
recast as a claim about the soft responsibilities of power which invoke
those physical consequences.
If there were only one person then they would be responsible for
themselves, and thus have power over themselves. Moreover, if there were
two distinct people and one had power over another, it is almost never
total power; that is, not all responsibilities are delegated from one
person to another even in a situation of total surrender or
helplessness. I don’t say this to make light of such situations, but
merely to point out that instead of a singular power, we ought to
discuss many multiple different powers which can all be independently
delegated.
A responsibility may be delegated from one person to another; thus,
power may be delegated. Moreover, for any responsibility already
delegated to a person, they have the power to further delegate it; thus,
delegation is itself a source of responsibilities. We will investigate
the structural consequences of this curious recursion. First, we will do
some mathematics.
A
category
, mathematically speaking, is a collection of
directed arrows which admit composition in the sense that any two
compatible arrows may be combined into a single larger arrow. To record
that compatibility, every arrow is associated with a source and target,
such that composition is only possible when the first arrow’s target is
the second arrow’s source. Here, we will consider a
category of
responsibilities
whose arrows are delegations of power from one
source person to another target person. We will not think of any
category in particular, but consider properties of any category of
responsibilities.
There are some expected properties of categories. For each
source/target, which mathematicians call an
object
, there
exists an
identity arrow
having that object as its source and
target which does nothing. Moreover, for each arrow, composition with
these identity arrows, whether precomposition with the source or
postcomposition with the target, is the identity operation; composition
with identities does nothing. To meet these requirements, for each
person there is an identity arrow for which they are the source and
target and which delegates no power whatsoever, such that composition
with an identity arrow delegates exactly what was delegated before.
A
transitive relation
R
is one such that if
xRy
and
yRz
then
xRz
. For example, if
x
< y
and
y < z
then
x < z
. We will add
similar transitivity into our category whenever a relationship recurs
between people, although it is required to be exactly the same relation
in all three cases. For example, returning to the beginning of this
section, if Alice owes Bob and Bob owes Carol in kind then Alice owes
Carol in kind. Intuitively, this transitive property allows any power
delegated to a target person to also be a power delegated by a source
person, and a delegation with an intermediary is equivalent to a
delegation without an intermediary.
That doesn’t sound right, though. An intermediary could choose to
change
their current commitments, giving the system an extra
degree of freedom in its
dynamics
. What an individual category
actually represents is a possible snapshot of the
static
delegations at a moment in time. If, at that moment in time, Alice
happens to be paying Bob and Bob happens to be paying Carol, then Alice
happens to be paying Carol; but that can be made contingent on points in
history where Alice and Bob
began
to pay Bob and Carol
respectively. This structure is captured by a
sheaf of categories of
responsibilities
; a sheaf is a systematic annotation of some
topology, and we will annotate each point in topological spacetime with
a category describing the delegations at that point in spacetime.
Physicists call such sheaves “causal sets” or “causets”.
For posterity, mathematicians call a sheaf of categories a
stack
, but the distinction here is unhelpfully pedantic; the
annotation of topology is what we want to understand.
In order to intuit how responsibilities change over time, we will
consider how spacetime evolves. I will assume that spacetime is
partially ordered, as with causets, because it greatly simplifies how
events can interact. Indeed, we really only have one interesting case:
when one event precedes another event, how can responsibilities shift
between the events? A delegation could stay the same, be created, or be
revoked. Staying the same is allowed by the arcane rules of sheaf
theory, which state that moving forwards in time should naturally map to
undoing changes in delegation; the rules also allow revocation forward
in time, which naturally maps to undoing an existing delegation. So, the
only non-trivial case is creation of delegation. This might not be
intuitive, though; let’s try two intuitive lenses.
First, let me use less mathematics. When we look at our current
situation, and consider the past events which led to it, we can think of
the relationships which currently exist as also being related to
versions of those relationships in the past. If two people are related
to each other today and in the past, without any interruptions, then
that relationship has been constant over time. If they are related to
each other in the past but not today then there is the natural and sad
explanation that they drifted apart over time and ceased to relate to
each other. However, if they are related to each other today but not in
the past then there is no natural way by which they are introduced to
each other; all we can say is that they were at the same place at the
same time.
And now, I shall use more mathematics. Let
C
be some
partial order of spacetime events and study it with the stack
R
:
C
op
⇒
Cat
. If the reader
is worried about size issues then they may use
FinCat
as codomain since there are only finitely many humans. In general,
R
is a prestack merely by having that signature. In order to be
a stack, for any two events
U
and
V
, where
U
→
V
and there is a family of covering events
X
on
V
such that
U
→
X
→
V
, the obvious
diagram must naturally commute. This amounts to requiring that there is
a natural choice of functor
F
:
R
(
V
) →
R
(
U
) which factors cleanly —
restricts
, in
sheaf parlance — through any intermediate
R
(
X
) in
V
’s covering family.
F
is constant anywhere that
V
has not changed compared to
U
; indeed,
F
must be fully faithful on the image of
U
in
V
because
C
is thin. Relationships in
R
(
U
) but
not in
R
(
V
) are not in
F
’s image; we do not
have to account for relationships which faded by the time of
V
.
So
F
only varies for relationships in
R
(
X
)
which are newly occurring in
X
compared to
U
, or in
V
compared to
X
. However, those relationships usually
will not be unique and so cannot be naturally chosen, as we shall see,
so
F
is usually not natural either.
By “natural” I mean what category theorists mean: something is
natural
when the only ways to do it are all equivalent to
each other. A
natural mapping
is the only such mapping, or
perhaps it is one of many such mappings but all such mappings are
equivalent. A
natural choice
is the only such choice, or it
is one of many choices but all choices are equivalent. This may seem
like a strange point now, but it will occur repeatedly later and is
worth explaining early.
To summarize, when we treat power and responsibility as components of
the same sort of system and equip it with transitivity whenever
possible, the evolution of that system over time has natural
explanations for why power and responsibility either remain delegated or
are eventually revoked. What are not naturally explained — thus open to
discussion — are the paths which initially create delegations.
The Reputation Problem
The capability paradigm is about
access control
. When a
system, such as an OS or a website, is presented with a request for a
service it provides, it needs to decide if it should actually do what
the requestor is asking for. The way it decides is what we’re talking
about when we talk about access control. If you’re like most people, the
first thing you’re likely to think of is to ask the requestor, “Who are
you?” The fundamental insight of the capabilities paradigm is to
recognize that this question is the first step on the road to
perdition.
~ Chip Morningstar,
What are capabilities?
(2017)
Focus in particular on the common situation of a newcomer getting to
know an existing group of people. How does the group extend its existing
power structure to accommodate the newcomer? In one way or another, the
newcomer must establish that they have some sort of
reputation
or
bona fides
which serve as a basis for further delegation of
responsibilities. Some examples are required before we can get to the
heart of the problem.
Consider: A group of people chat among themselves with a central
server. They each individually delegate the responsibility for the
contents of the chat window to the server, which is also the power to
receive chat messages. The server symmetrically delegates to each
individual a power to write chat messages, which is also the
responsibility for the contents of those messages. A newcomer would be
introduced to the central server, which simultaneously extends its
delegation while accepting the newcomer’s own delegated window.
Consider: A group of people chat among themselves with federation.
They each delegate the responsibility for delivering messages to a
mailbox, which is the power to send messages to that mailbox, to their
peers. The newcomer is introduced to each individual peer, performing
the simultaneous exchange of delegations.
This is quickly becoming word salad. We need a definition which
allows us to repeat the pattern of delegation. A
capability
is a communicable unforgeable invokable token of responsibility
designating a delegated power. Communicating a capability implicitly
copies it, unlike with physical tokens. The responsibility associated
with holding a capability is always the responsibility of invoking,
copying, forgetting, and further delegating that capability. Our chat
examples now involve users either exchanging capabilities with a central
server, or exchanging capabilities between each pair of peers.
I do not want the reader to feel mystified here, so I will quickly
demolish the most common myths and misunderstandings about capabilities.
Not all powers are capabilities; we say that a power is
tamed
when it is represented by a capability, and there is ongoing research
into theories of taming. Capabilities are often only copyable on an
information-theoretic level; treating a physical fob as a capability is
only reasonable in the presence of a fob-copying machine. Conversely,
most implemented capability-aware systems only implement
unguessable
capabilities, which are forgeable by anybody who
knows certain secret information, rather than
unforgeable
capabilities. Finally, the ability to revoke a capability is available
without loss of generality, although it works in the naïve fashion: a
revocable capability maintains a reference to its creator for the
express purpose of checking whether it has yet been revoked.
Speaking of creators, every capability has a creator. This should
intuitively accord with the categorical approach as follows. Every
person is associated with an object in our category of responsibilities
and they start with all of their own responsibilities and powers
delegated to themselves. This self-delegation gives each person their
identity arrow. As the beginning of this section suggests, those
creators may not be human, and we already account for that in our
everyday experience. They may be computers or corporations, for example.
A capability theorist will point out that capabilities denote
authority
, not mere responsibility; the creator of a
capability passes on a stamp of their identity along with every copy of
that capability. In practice, this ends up as an implementation detail,
but it is essential for tracking how a capability is passed through a
system, since such stamps identify either the original author or an
intermediate author who has inserted themselves into the chain of
creators.
Consider: A vending machine is powered on and stocked. A newcomer
would be introduced to the vending machine, which proffers a capability
for selecting stocked goods which was created by the machine’s owner. On
a modern vending machine, the newcomer would submit their own capability
for payment processing, authored by the newcomer’s financial
institution, which gives the vending machine’s owners the power to
request money and the responsibility to request the negotiated amount of
money.
These examples have all been subject to
contractual
expectations, which range from broad expectations against pathologically
abusive behavior to specific amounts of currency which must be
transferred to avoid allegations of fraud. The structural imbalance in
the previous example — the newcomer is fully exposed to the liability of
these expectations while the vending machine’s owners may hide behind
the vending machine’s pre-programmed façade — is known as a
smart
contract
. Without these expectations, extending any capability
whatsoever is an invitation to abuse, as a special case of
Hyrum’s
Law
.
Fortunately, computer scientists have already worked out the possible
cases of introduction; Mark S. Miller published a version for graphs in
their 2006 thesis
Robust Composition
and I categorified the
core reasoning in 2021. The intuition is to take a category of
responsibilities and note that it might not be
connected
into
one single cohesive web; that is, for any two people, maybe neither one
cedes any power or responsibilities to the other. When a category is not
connected, its distinct components cannot become connected to each other
by evolution in time; sheaf-theoretically, such a connection cannot be
naturally undone because there’s no natural choice of introductory path
from one component to another. Intuitively, if a newcomer doesn’t know
anybody in a group already, then there is no natural choice of group
member who can bootstrap the initial introduction; the group members are
not equivalent people, they are all unique individuals! As such, the
group only has natural introductions when it is a single person and the
problem reduces to the relatively-simple issue of two people in
dialogue.
We won’t discuss the problem of dialogue further. It has been known
since ancient times that misunderstandings between two people can
persist indefinitely, and it is formalized today as a version of
Aumann’s Agreement
: if two people already disagree then no
finite amount of evidence can be guaranteed to get them to agree.
We can now state
The Reputation Problem
: there is no
natural algorithm
by which a group of people can assign a
reputation to an anonymous newcomer without exposing the group to abuse.
Worse, any attempt must respect
Conway’s Law
, which I will
explain in a moment. The Reputation Problem is necessarily wicked since
it has a lack of naturality regardless of how the group of people is
configured; wicked problems can’t be reduced to a system of equations
that must be solved, because solutions to equations are always
natural.
In brief,
Conway’s Law
connects a system of interacting
machines to the system of chatting humans which designed them.
Specifically, it states that if one machine relies upon the actions of
another then the reliant machine’s designer received some design
information from the reliable machine’s designer; and contrapositively,
if two designers had no contact then their machines don’t interact at
all. In explanation, it invariably is required to clarify that
third
parties
interact in the expected fashion: if two machines interact
due to a common protocol then their designers must have both read a
common design document detailing that protocol, authored by a
third
designer. Conway’s Law is ultimately a graph-theoretic
statement and it can be seen as a special case of a more general
category-theoretic statement when there are multiple ways for machines
to interact and for designers to communicate.
Conway’s Law worsens the wickedness of The Reputation Problem by
creating a new parameter to consider, namely the
system of
interactions
which arises from the communications between group
members. It is possible for that system to be equivalent to the
structure of the communications itself in the strictest case, and must
have gaps like disconnections or holes anywhere that those gaps appear
in that communication structure. As before, natural solutions only exist
where the communication structure trivializes; for example, introducing
a newcomer to a group of people who never talk to each other is
equivalent to a sequence of dialogues between that newcomer and each
individual group member, and even in that case there is still no natural
choice of order of dialogues.
This already suggests some patterns that we might want to describe.
The first of these is the
Diplomat
: a person who is
well-connected within the group and explicitly publishes an introductory
capability to the outside world. Any passerby newcomer, perhaps limited
spatially to a specific local venue, might see this offered introduction
and accept it by invoking it with an introduction of their own,
including a callback capability that allows the Diplomat to
incrementally escalate privileges to the newcomer via further
introductions without necessarily compromising the existing power
structure of the group.
Reputation is wicked indeed, though, and I should make an aside for
the common issue that arises from granting
chat access
to the
newcomer. For note that Conway’s Law concerns the
communications
between group members
, which means that newcomers immediately alter
the possible systems of interaction within the group merely by joining
chat. But note that if a newcomer is not allowed to
write
to
chat then they cannot create any new dependencies within existing
systems as those systems evolve in time, as a consequence of the
increasingly-tall pile of definitions which I have erected; the group
cannot use tools or services about which they have not been informed.
This suggests another pattern, the
Lurker
: a person
whose introductory capability lets them
read
some internal
group communications. Lurkers are encouraged to “lurk more” until they
are ready to demonstrate the adherence to community norms necessary to
accept their contractual expectations.
I might as well start describing situations where this goes wrong. A
group of people can obviously cause great harm to individuals due to
sheer peer pressure; we will discuss the Cult pattern later. There is
more variety in the harm that newcomers might seek to do, even
individually. An
Influencer
accepts invitations from
Diplomats but secretly only wants to obtain as many capabilities as
possible. An Influencer may end up creating their own group if those
capabilities overlap on specific people. Those unlucky targets end up
with vulnerabilities towards the Influencer, possibly leading to a Cult.
More generally, a
Celebrity
has a fixed goal which they
prioritize above maintaining any existing power structures and they may
antagonize existing groups in pursuit of that goal.
When discussing proofs, the names
Alice
(she/her)
and
Bob
(he/him) are standard examples of participants
with neutral moral valence. We might assume that they are either members
of the group under discussion or harmless newcomers; either way, the
group intends to include them. When necessary, we will also mention
Carol
(she/her) and
Dave
(he/him) as
well.
By contrast, there are some standard antagonists who may appear
before the group. The two who are traditionally mentioned are
Eve
(she/her) and
Mallory
(he/him).
Eve is an
eavesdropper
who wants to learn internal group
information. Mallory is a
malicious
person who wants to disrupt
the group structure, like a worst-case Celebrity. Groups generally tend
to exclude Eve and Mallory, or at least try to mitigate the harm that
they cause. Some trade-offs are already visible; for example, a group
that allows Lurkers will also allow Eve a modicum of insight whenever
she can Lurk.
A newcomer can also pretend to be multiple people. The well-known
Sock Puppet
is not actually a person, but claims to be
a person. At best, the Sock Puppet is a person with a mask; at worst,
they are a spam-generating robot. In terms of Alice & Bob, the
operator of a Sock Puppet is known as
Sybil
(she/her),
and we imagine Sybil to have
many
Sock Puppets. When a group
forbids Sock Puppets by putting in effort to discover, document, and
remove them, it resists Sybil’s influence.
The pattern that Sybil best exploits is
Democracy
, a
reasonable-sounding configuration where each group member has an iota of
control and the group votes to engage that control. Sybil attacks by
filling a space with Lurking Sock Puppets who each try to submit a vote;
if Sybil holds the majority then she can set policy. Interrupting this
pattern can be done by withholding the vote from freshly-introduced
people, seeking consensus instead of voting, finding facts instead of
voting, or by any other technique which prevents Sybil from accumulating
reputation.
However, there are two obvious alternatives which also fail and are
worth mentioning because they occur so often. An
Autocracy
is a group which is directed by the whims of
a single small council of fixed size. This council’s permission is
required to change any delegations within the group, or to deputize
Diplomats by withholding signing stamps. These groups cannot grow beyond
the limits of what the council can administer and thus are vulnerable to
Cult dynamics, which I will only postpone for a few more paragraphs. The
main pain of an Autocracy is the election of new Autocrats, which must
not be Democratic in order to prevent Sybil from electing herself to the
council.
Similarly, an
Aristocracy
is a group which awards
desserts, karma, merit, or other abstract currency-like reputation to
participants based on some arbitrary game mechanics. It doesn’t
particularly matter what the precise mechanics are, since participants
will invariably seek to game them. The long-term evolution of the group
power structure doesn’t optimize for any particular metric; that is, the
power structure doesn’t seek to become efficient at any one thing over
time. However, Celebrities, Influencers, and Mallory do have goals, and
they will seek to become Aristocrats in furtherance of those goals.
Finally, I must mention the
macabre
. A
Cult
is a group which
consumes
people. In order to maintain itself,
a Cult recruits newcomers via aggressive Diplomacy and segregates itself
into several smaller groups that are almost completely disconnected from
each other. Each Diplomatic outreach subgroup is tasked with inundating
newcomers with the Cult’s memes and isolating them from other people in
order to induct them into the wider group. Once inducted, the Cult uses
the person to further its own goals, which might be Autocratic or
traditional in origin, without regard for the person’s health. In
particular, a Cult does not let its members freely delegate their own
capabilities; the members must delegate a portion of themselves to the
Cult and allow the Cult to further delegate on their behalf.
Okay, so what’s the solution? Dear reader, this is a wicked problem!
The best we can do is to thoughtfully design our patterns and try to
avoid implementing
exactly
any pattern which is known to
fail.
Greater
Internet Fuckwad Theory, Special Internet Fuckwad Theory, & Special
Fuckwittery
Greater Internet Fuckwad
Theory
Its only flaw isn’t in code — it’s in the human beings that feel like
they have a license to say whatever they want…
~ Tycho Brahe,
Penny Arcade
, 2004
A
Fuckwad
or
Fuckwit
— the
difference appears to be regional, as far as I can tell — is a person
being stupid and offensive in public. They should be contrasted with
Bullshitters
, a common class of Influencers, who say
things not because they could be true or false but because of the effect
upon an audience. They should also be contrasted with the
Clown
, a common fixture of medium-to-large-sized groups
who demonstrates how to do things correctly by doing things incorrectly.
A Fuckwad is neither trying to get ahead in life nor improve the
understanding of the group, but to attack the group and its members.
Before talking more about fundamentally insulting concepts, we should
keep in mind that I am describing how people behave, not how people are.
When a community chooses to expel somebody for misbehavior by revoking
their capabilities, they are doing so as a judgment on how the person
behaved, not who the person is. Somebody is not fundamentally an
Influencer, Clown, or Fuckwad; but we cannot pretend that they did not
behave that way, either. We are really trying to understand
Fuckwittery
as a pattern of behavior.
In 2004, John Suler proposed the
online disinhibition
effect
, which puts to prose the idea that Fuckwittery is more
common online than offline:
People say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn’t ordinarily
say or do in the face-to-face world.
~ John Suler,
The Psychology of Cyberspace
, 2004
However, the version which has become popular within cyberspace
itself is the
Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
, or
GIFT
for short:
Normal Person
+ Anonymity
+ Audience
= Total Fuckwad
~ Jonathan Gabriel,
Penny Arcade
, 2004
An alternate form of GIFT has been suggested:
Normal Person
- Consequences
+ Audience
= Total Fuckwad
~ Grace T. Z., 2013
As well as the
Alternate Internet Fuckwad Theory
, or
AIFT
:
Relatively Normal Person
+ Perceived Internet Privacy
+ Yes-man Audience
= Total Fuckwad
~ Shari Chankhamma, 2011
Curiously, there is no
Lesser Internet Fuckwad Theory
, or
LIFT
. What might it describe? Well, Fuckwittery seems to be
something that people can
communicate
to each other, it seems
to have
one person
as the object of study, and it seems to
relate to how that one person interacts with a
group of people
.
This is a lot like our earlier setup, but it doesn’t necessarily result
in Fuckwads. Instead, it’s something like:
Normal Newcomer
+ Capabilities
+ Group of People
= Potential Fuckwad?
This doesn’t capture what Suler and T. Z. are trying to point out
about the
removal
of something from the equation. Perhaps we
need some term that represents online disinhibition:
Normal Newcomer
+ Capabilities
+ Group of People
= Potential Fuckwad
+ Social Inhibition
This is looking pretty good! To get the alternate GIFT, let
consequences be the total of all social inhibitions — which I think is
fair enough for now — and then subtract inhibitions from both sides. The
AIFT emerges from the idea that capabilities provide a sort of privacy,
where newcomers are only identified by the capabilities that they offer
and exercise, along with the idea that a yes-man audience will never
socially inhibit their object from acting out; that is, the AIFT is
about the grouping:
Normal Newcomer
+ Capabilities
+ (Group of People - Social Inhibition)
= Potential Fuckwad
The concept of normal needs to be examined. In short,
normality
is the idea that people are statistically ordinary
in most aspects. The truth about normality is extremely subtle. First,
as a curse of high dimensionality, most subjects are not normal in most
aspects. Rather, whenever we
choose
one aspect and measure
people, we find a
normal distribution
: along
that one
aspect
, most people are close to average. Second, at the conceptual
level of populations, the
population
is normal, such that any
big change in any one aspect of life is buffered by that distribution
and we can numerically quantify the buffering effect for a particular
change.
This is one of those concepts that, again, invariably cries out for
evidence. Two classic cases are worth mentioning. One is that of a
world-class air force trying to design an average seat for pilots; they
found that pilots were not sufficiently normal in the various aspects of
anatomy to justify manufacturing one single standard seat with one fixed
shape. Instead, they created an
adjustable
seat that could be
tailored to individual needs; the range of each adjustment is determined
by the distribution of the corresponding aspects of anatomy.
Another case is that of Darwin’s finches. Peter and Rosemary Grant
documented several aspects of anatomy for a remarkably wide slice of
Darwin’s finches — practically every finch on the island of Daphne Major
for decades — and showed that, in any particular aspect of anatomy, the
finches are normally distributed. Further, the slice includes responses
to multiple distinct
system shocks
, events that greatly changed
the environment around the finches, and found that each individual
aspect of anatomy was buffered by each shock. One particular finch, Big
Bird, was transported from one of the Galápagos Islands to another by a
storm and survived to create a new line of finches by hybridizing with a
local finch. Big Bird was not normal compared to those locals; as the
name suggests, he was much larger than average, and his survival was
unlikely because of the corresponding higher caloric requirements. He
also sang a unique call that didn’t match any other bird call on Daphne
Major. Nonetheless he found a mate and created a new population of
hybrid finches which only sang the Big Bird call. Subsequent system
shocks nearly wiped out the entire population, creating a
subculture
which did not interact much with the rest of the
finches. Big Bird’s surviving descendants have
normalized
;
their presence and behavior is no longer as deviant as Big Bird’s, and
they are a part of the ecology of Daphne Major.
So, this puts a serious limitation onto GIFT. A person is only normal
with respect to the group of people and part of their normalization is
respecting their social norms; a bird singing the wrong song will not
attract other birds. GIFT is actually about people who are already in
the group and already fully inhibited by the social dynamics of that
group, so the Fuckwittery of the normal group member is actually part of
the group dynamics too:
Normal Group Member
+ Capabilities
+ Group
= Normal Fuckwad
We’ll call this the
Normal Internet Fuckwad Theory
, or
NIFT
. This sort of Fuckwittery is generated by a group of
people, not individuals, but individuals are the ones who create the
behavior. I think that folks intuitively have a sense of this whenever
they parse a headline that explains that some specific person who was a
member of a certain notorious group individually chose to do something
harmful; that person can be blamed for the behavior and also the group
can be blamed for the environment which normalized that behavior.
Special
Internet Fuckwad Theory & Special Fuckwittery
We just have to learn to accept that there might be a lesson in
things we hate about us, that even if it’s bad and we don’t like it, we
have more in common with it than we want to admit, and can even learn
something from it. … When we look at ridiculous behavior within our
sphere, instead of trying to project it out of ourselves, and say it’s
just some random idiot somewhere doing something dumb, maybe we should
accept that … business decisions are aspects of a wider culture that can
be reflective of our own feelings and beliefs and values, even if we
don’t like what comes out of them. And maybe if we learn to criticize
ourselves and change our own behavior, we can start to change the wider
culture. Thank you for your time.
~ Harry Brewis,
Sonic Lore Analysis 3: Ctrl + Alt + Del
,
2018
Remarkably, a group of people can both be normalizing and also
produce a sustained string of Fuckwads who go out to spread that group’s
Normal Fuckwittery to other groups. This happens through a process that
Diane Vaughan called
normalization of deviance
, where the
group’s internal culture allows for deviant behaviors — Fuckwittery — to
become the normal behaviors.
In 2018, Harry Brewis, speaking through the character of Hareton
Splimby, noted that two groups of people might have differing standards
of Fuckwittery; one group’s Fuckwad might be another group’s Clown,
Influencer, or even a highly-respected Aristocrat. There is a
fundamental
embarrassment
associated with the realization that
one’s Aristocrats are considered Clowns elsewhere; each group has its
own culture of values, and it can be shocking to realize that one’s
values are not universal. Embarrassment generates
Cringe
, a pattern where a group reacts to its own
culture with disgust. This is a source of Fuckwittery even when the
group doesn’t have any Fuckwads; the group reinterprets its own
Celebrities as Cringe. That is to say:
Cringe Group Member
+ Capabilities
+ Group
= Cringe Fuckwad
Let’s go further. This
relativity
between groups can go in
any direction, with the Cringe coming from inside a group or being
transported to another group as part of a feud. For the
special
case of no group being privileged and all capabilities being invoked
within a single big uniform system, which happens to be the same
idealization that we make with a flat Internet, we could imagine an
analogue of
special relativity
. The trick is to indicate that
the newcomer to one group is also a member of another group, so that the
social expectations which are normal for the newcomer are not normal for
the audience.
Cringe Group Member
+ Capabilities in Audience
+ Normal Audience
= Special Fuckwad
I call this the
Special Internet Fuckwad Theory
, or
SIFT
. This is the simplest possible way of understanding,
in full generality, why people behave as they do in online spaces:
carrying the Cringe of one group, a newcomer exercises some capabilities
before an audience to display behaviors outside the social norms of the
audience.
Hold on, though. The original context of GIFT is that of an ordinary
person. What’s that mean, exactly? Well, think of the entirety of
cyberspace as one group, and the entirety of offline society as another
group; the person is only ordinary with respect to cyberspace, not with
regard to offline society. That is to say, GIFT is a special case of
SIFT in that:
Cringe Cyberspace Member
+ Capabilities in Offline Society
+ Normal Offline Society
= Cyberspace Fuckwad
Of course, the typical denizen of cyberspace might want to take a
Lorentz-like relativistic transformation which considers a person who is
ordinary with regard to offline society and Cringe in cyberspace:
Cringe Offline Member
+ Capabilities in Cyberspace
+ Normal Cyberspace
= Offline Fuckwad
Can we go further? Yes, but we have to look at the seat of reasoning
in people, the
brain
, to understand why people have emotional
reactions to the actions of other people.
System 3 & Unified
Fuckwittery
-
System 3 is when you say things that sound good but make no
sense.
-
Andrew Gelman,
Thinking fast, slow, and not at all
(2021)
System 3
Originally published at:
MoreWrite
If the concept of System 1 and System 2 is valid, then we do need to
come up with an explanation for the times when humans seem to put
no
consideration into what they’re saying. ~ me, 2021
Humans are not rational actors according to any economic theory of
the past few centuries. Rather than admit that economics might be
flawed, psychologists have explored a series of models wherein humans
have at least two modes of thinking: a natural mode and an
economically-rational mode. The latest of these is the amorphous concept
of System 1 and System 2; System 1 is an older system that humans share
with a wide clade of distant relatives and System 2 is a more
recently-developed system that evolved for humans specifically. This
position does not agree with evolutionary theories of the human brain
and should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
When pressed, adherents will quickly retreat to a simpler position.
They will argue that there are two modes of physical signaling. First,
there are external stimuli, including light, food, hormones, and the
traditional senses. For example, a lack of nutrition in blood and a
preparedness of the intestines for food will trigger a release of the
hormone ghrelin from the stomach, triggering the vagus nerve to
incorporate a signal of hunger into the brain’s conceptual sensorium.
Thus, when somebody says that they are hungry, they are engaged by a
System 1 process. Some elements of System 1 are validated by this setup,
particularly the claims that System 1 is autonomous, automatic,
uninterruptible, and tied to organs which evolved before the neocortex.
System 2 is everything else, particularly rumination and introspection;
by excluded middle, System 2 also is how most ordinary cognitive
processes would be classified.
We can do better than that. After all, if System 2 is supposed to
host all of the economic rationality, then why do people spend so much
time thinking and still come to irrational conclusions? Also, in
popular-science accounts of System 1, why aren’t emotions and actions
completely aligned with hormones and sensory input? Perhaps there is a
third system whose processes are confused with System 1 and System 2
somehow.
So, let’s consider System 3. Reasoning in System 3 is driven by
memes
: units of cultural expression which derive semantics via
chunking and associative composition. This is not how System 1 works,
given that operant conditioning works in non-humans but priming doesn’t
reliably replicate in humans. The contrast with System 2 is more
nebulous since System 2 does not have a clear boundary, but a central
idea is that System 2 is not about the associations between chunks as
much as the computation encoded by the processing of the chunks. A
System 2 process applies axioms, rules, and reasoning; a System 3
process is strictly associative.
I’m giving away my best example here because I want you to be
convinced. First, consider this scenario: a car crash has just happened
outside! Bodies are piled up! We’re still pulling bodies from the
wreckage. Fifty-seven people are confirmed dead and over two hundred are
injured. Stop and think: how does System 1 react to this? What emotions
are activated? How does System 2 react to this? What conclusions might
be drawn? What questions might be asked to clarify understanding?
Now, let’s learn about System 3. Update to the scenario: we have a
complete tally of casualties. We have two hundred eleven injuries and
sixty-nine dead.
When reading that sentence, many Anglophones and Francophones carry
an ancient meme, first attested in the 1700s, which causes them to react
in a way that wasn’t congruent with their previous expressions of System
1 and System 2, despite the scenario not really changing much at all. A
particular syntactic detail was memetically associated to another hunk
of syntax. They will also shrug off the experience rather than
considering the possibility that they might be memetically influenced.
This is the experience of System 3: automatic, associative, and fast
like System 1; but quickly rationalizing, smoothed by left-brain
interpretation, and conjugated for the context at hand like System
2.
A further update to the scenario occurred while drafting this essay:
two people have come back from the brink of death. The total now stands
at sixty-seven dead.
Again, many Anglophones carry a very recent meme which provokes an
incongruent response.
An important class of System 3 memes are the thought-terminating
clichés (
TTC
s), which interrupt social contexts with a
rhetorical escape that provides easy victory. Another important class
are various moral rules, from those governing interpersonal relations to
those computing arithmetic. A sufficiently rich memeplex can permanently
ensnare a person’s mind by replacing their reasoning tools; since people
have trouble distinguishing between System 2 and System 3, they have
trouble distinguishing between genuine syllogism and TTCs which support
pseudo-logical reasoning.
We can also refine System 1 further. When we talk of training a
human, we ought to distinguish between repetitive muscle movements and
operant conditioning, even though both concepts are founded upon the
Hebbian principle
, “neurons which wire together, fire
together.” In the former, we are creating so-called “muscle memory” by
entraining neurons to rapidly simulate System 2 movements; by following
the principle “slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” System 2 can chunk its
outputs to muscles in a way analogous to the chunking of inputs in the
visual cortex, and wire those inputs and outputs together too,
coordinating the eye and hand. A particularly crisp example is given by
the arcuate fasciculus connecting Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area,
coordinating the decoding and encoding of speech. In contrast, in the
latter, we are creating a
conditioned response
or
post-hypnotic suggestion
by attaching System 2 memory recall to
System 1 signals, such that when the signal activates, the attached
memory will also activate. Over long periods of time, such responses can
wire System 1 to System 1, creating many cross-organ behaviors which are
mediated by the nervous system.
This is enough to explain what I think is justifiably called “unified
Fuckwittery,” but first I need to make one aside. Folks get creeped out
by neuroscience. That’s okay! You don’t need to think about brains much
here. The main point that I want to rigorously make and defend is that
there are roughly three reasons that somebody can lose their temper,
break their focus, or generally take themselves out of a situation,
losing the colloquial “flow state.” I’m going to call this situation
tilt
and the human suffering it is
tilted
. The three
ways of being tilted are to have an emotional response to a change in
body chemistry (System 1), to act emotional as a conclusion of some
inner reasoning (System 2), or to act out a recently-activated meme
which happens to appear like an emotional response (System 3). That’s
enough; no more brain talk should be necessary.
I’m making a second aside for a persistent cultural issue that
probably is not going away. About a century ago, philosophers and
computer scientists asked about the
Turing test
: can a computer
program imitate a human so well that another human cannot distinguish
between humans and imitations? About a half-century ago, the answer was
the surprising
ELIZA effect
: not only can relatively simple
computer programs imitate humans well enough to pass a Turing test, but
humans
prefer
the imitations to other humans. Put in more
biological terms, such programs are
supernormal stimuli
; they
appear “more human than human,” to quote Rob Zombie quoting Philip K.
Dick. Also, because such programs only have a finite history, they can
only generate long interactions in real time by being
memoryless
or
Markov
, which means that the
upcoming parts of an interaction are wholly determined by a probability
distribution of the prior parts, each of which are associated to a
possible future. Since programs don’t have System 1 or System 2, and
these programs only emit learned associations, I think it’s fair to
characterize them as simulating System 3 at best. On one hand, this is
somewhat worrying; humans not only cannot tell the difference between a
human and System 3 alone, but prefer System 3 alone. On the other hand,
I could see a silver lining once humans start to understand how much of
their surrounding civilization is an associative fiction. We’ll return
to this later.
Unified Fuckwittery
“St00pid! St00pid!” Sez teh teechurcat. “Srsly st00pid. Everythingz
st00pid.”
~ Ecclesiastes 1:2, LOLCat Bible Translation Project (2007)
There is no utterance which cannot be perverted by some convoluted
context into an offense against some group. Rather than making a single
unified Fuckwittery impossible, this insight allows us to recognize that
Fuckwittery is actually the
default interpretation
of
utterances. Any time somebody hears something, they can be tilted by
that thing via System 3. The contexts which cause the tilt can be
transient or long-lived; there is no reasonable prediction about what
will cause tilting to occur. Really, the moments when people are not
tilted and not interpreting utterances as Fuckwittery are the
exceptional moments.
But if that’s the case, then why don’t we perceive a constant stream
of Fuckwittery around us? Well, some people do have such an experience,
sometimes. Depression is often associated with
depressive
realism
, a phenomenon which increases people’s accuracy when
perceiving some empirical facts at the cost of decreasing their accuracy
at inferring the internal thoughts of other people. Another condition,
narcissism
, is a permanent impairment to the ability to
understand the thoughts of others. I also want to mention
chronic
System 1 pain
, which constantly distracts a person to the point
where they cannot focus on the perspectives of non-sufferers. In all
three of these cases, sufferers are known to characterize their world as
generally full of Fuckwads and Fuckwittery.
However, it’s important to not get stuck in the psychiatry manual or
to imagine that we can measure a person by whether they have a certain
perspective.
Psychopathy
comes with impaired understanding of
the internal thoughts of other people, but not with an assessment of
everybody else being a Fuckwad. Various characterizations of
autism
discuss impaired understanding of social customs,
rituals, and mores; but not an impaired theory of mind. The point is
merely that, to some audience members, Fuckwittery is the default; to
some other audience members, Fuckwittery is something that arises only
when that audience member is tilted. And, for better or worse, a
narcissist or somebody in chronic System 1 pain is permanently
tilted.
Unified Fuckwittery
is the wicked impossibility of
empathizing with another person to the point of considering them not as
a Fuckwad or non-Fuckwad but as a normal person that is operating
according to their own cultural norms:
Person
+ Capabilities in Audience
+ Audience
+ Person is Cringe in Audience
= Unified Fuckwittery
Worse, the problem is symmetric; the only reason that the audience
and single person are respectively plural and singular in our setup is
that it was an arbitrary constraint introduced earlier. But of course a
single person can perceive Cringe and Fuckwittery in a group of people.
When we lift the constraint, we get a nasty equation:
Person
+ Person
+ Capabilities
+ Cringe
= Unified Fuckwittery
This can be even more symmetric:
People
+ Capabilities
+ Cringe
= Unified Fuckwittery
Hopefully this does not seem like a reach, but a reasonable
conclusion: every instance of Fuckwittery consists of Cringe from people
exercising capabilities. Perhaps it seems underspecified; can there
really not be any tighter restriction on what it means to be a Fuckwad?
No, not without preferring either the audience’s
status quo
or
the newcomer’s selfishness.
Algorithmic courtesy
& associative fictions
Algorithmic courtesy
Neo: I’ve just never —
Rama Kandra: — heard a program speak of love?
Neo, blankly: It’s a human emotion.
Rama Kandra, smiling: No, it is a
word
. What matters is the
connection
the word implies.
~ Lana & Lilly Wachowski,
The Matrix Revolutions
(2003)
People aren’t going to stop exercising capabilities. Therefore the
only part of the equation which can reasonably shift is Cringe. However,
Cringe naturally arises from self-reflection. Could we somehow abandon
the possibility of looking at ourselves? Could we at least imagine
members of society who behave that way?
Computers don’t look at themselves. Computers can’t Cringe. Computers
can exercise capabilities. However, people don’t consider computers to
be people. Instead, people create tiers of moral culpability and insist
that computers cannot weigh choices with any moral import. There are
several issues with this moral view of computing and we ought to explore
them to see exactly how Cringe and morality are intertwined.
First, humans are remarkably chauvinist. At a first glance, human
society has many moral tiers of oppression and class existing mostly due
to historical inertia and sustained by the remarkably limitless pool of
depravity and hate which seems to characterize humanity. However, this
is actually only one tier in a ranking of species, and within human
society one can isolate ways in which humans treat themselves as part of
an overlapping series of ever-looser classifications: apes, primates,
mammals, the sentient, the conscious, the alive, the genetic, the
carbon-based. Anything non-human is eligible to be property, and the
savvy reader will grimly remind themselves that many humans consider
other humans to be similarly eligible. A human will put apes in cages,
monkeys to biological research (liquefaction), dogs to slavery, pigeons
to fancy, fruit flies to biological research (genetic mastery), yeast to
sourdough, and bacteria to extinction. Computing machines are at the
bottom of this hierarchy; for example, the ability to emulate the
connectome of the nematode
Caenorhabditis elegans
on a robot or
to use machine learning to discover its neural weights is often
characterized as a moral abomination which disrespects
C.
elegans
, despite the human mastery over the genome and husbandry of
C. elegans
and its status as a model organism in biological
research, because humans put nematodes in a higher position in their
moral hierarchy than silicon circuitry.
To be fair, humans do often put objects above themselves in their
moral hierarchies, particularly conglomerates of humans. Legal entities
like corporations, cities, states, nations, and treaty organizations
rest above humanity and prioritize their own values, like universal
human rights, above the individual human’s desires. Humans have also
recently started to empower various environmental phenomena, like
rivers, mountains, and forests, with legal rights. Additionally, humans
often self-referentially establish group morality, but that should be
considered part of the group culture which we have already heavily
discussed; a healthy social group and a Cult can both have group
morality, after all.
Second, more importantly, it appears that computers cannot
deliberate, ponder, or ruminate. Every attempt to get a computer to
process data in the same manner as a human has led to one of two dead
ends: insufficient data to construct an accurate model, or a limited
model which is only approximately correct on short timescales. For
meteorology, the mathematics have been completely worked out using chaos
theory, and we know that the
Lyapunov phenomenon
will amplify
tiny imprecisions in the input data to exponentially-large divergences
between the model’s forecasted prediction and later observations. For
the current trends of modeling text and video,
Markov information
theory
is a fairly complete explanation: bits of information in the
original context are slowly lost as generation proceeds in time, leading
to information-free contexts which are too degenerate to be
productive.
There have also been attempts to build highly logical computers which
reason exclusively using syllogism, effectively performing the same sort
of rigorous reasoning that logicians use when formally establishing
theorems. Such attempts have a single dead end: finite data leads to
finitely many ruminations. Many meta-logical programs have been
attempted as well, but they all come with finitely many heuristics,
generated by finitely many meta-heuristics, etc. A human can only write
finitely large programs with their own two hands, and similarly a
machine can only write finitely many symbols in a finite amount of
wall-clock time.
Humans may not be immune from these effects.
Solitary
isolation
is known to diminish and eventually damage a human’s
cognition. In some situations, like cabin fever, a walk outside with
nature is known to help. There are several consistent theories with
these circumstances, including several suggested biological mechanisms,
but there could also be an information-theoretic cause. Specifically,
perhaps humans slowly consume or dissipate bits of information and need
to replenish themselves by taking in novel observations or exchanging
bits with other humans.
Underlying both of these objections is the idea that we are unable to
hold computers accountable for their actions. This is somewhat curious,
for a computer certainly can explain all of its mechanical low-level
actions; indeed, in a certain sense, a computing machine’s purpose is to
generate such an account. We can certainly punish a computer in the ways
that we would punish a human, or worse; for example, we can disassemble
it, magnetically destroy its memories, recycle its pieces into other
computers in a way that erases their identity, metallurgically
reconstitute its pieces into non-computing objects which have the same
or even lower status within human society, and program it to experience
arbitrary amounts of emulated pain and suffering throughout the process.
Legal liability is certainly not an issue, for humans have no problem
with allowing an office building with a piece of paper to own itself,
the land underneath it, several piles of wealth inside and outside it,
and additionally to hold various powers and capabilities over certain
supposedly-consenting humans; given that the piece of paper was signed
and notarized along with specific investments of wealth and recurring
payments to the government which monopolizes violence in the vicinity of
it. An office building can have accounts with an electric utility and an
Internet service provider, and also can own and locate a computer inside
its walls; in principle, a computer can be taken to court.
Perhaps delegation is the key. Humans idealize machines as agents. An
agent
, legally speaking, is an object imbued with delegated
authority to act as the delegating human. Agents wield capabilities
given to them by humans. A legal instrument is an agent and also a piece
of paper. A vending machine is an agent of its owner. Pet animals have
been agents in various cases. When a human programs a machine to
exchange messages with other machines, they expect those other machines
to be agents of some humans. By only thinking of machines as agents of
humans, human society systematically withholds accountability from
machines; if we were to hold a machine entirely accountable for its own
actions then we would allow the human who programmed it to escape
consequences.
This helps explain why rivers might have legal standing above humans.
Human society is often quite literally downstream from rivers. The river
is finite and its fresh water is delegated to humans. The tension
literally stemming from lack of water is sufficient to topple
governments and rearrange geopolitical relations.
Computers receive delegations and have less moral consideration than
humans; rivers give delegations and have more moral consideration than
humans. Humans are obliged to be
courteous
with how much of the
finite river they divert; finishing the analogy, computers are obliged
to be
courteous
with how much of the finite human authority
they allocate.
Human chauvinism is severe and the reader’s cultural memes may object
to that analogy. We do not think of ourselves as being managed by
machines; we are the managers and the machines are the peons. Fine;
let’s run the analogy in the other direction. What obligations does the
river have towards humans? None whatsoever, as far as I can tell. Just
as the human may disassemble, smash, or melt down a computer; so may a
river obliterate a city. Just as a human may lay a computer fallow
without plugging in its power cord or networking, so may a river divert
or dry up over time, leaving a state in drought. Just as a human may
ignore the messages of computers begging for maintenance or
capabilities, so may a river ignore the prayers of humans begging for
rain or snowmelt. We only grant the river legal status so that we may
conceptualize the cybernetic feedback loop between it and us; it turns
out that the choices of humans can collectively influence the river.
Similarly, the legibility of humans to computers perhaps is most
interesting because of human-computer interaction in which the computers
collectively influence humans.
We can also enrich the analogy with trees as intermediate between
rivers and humans. A collection of trees can collectively steer a river
over time, but a river can also suddenly wash away a tree. A collection
of humans can collectively shift a forest over time, but a tree can also
suddenly crush a human. Humans are obliged to be courteous with how much
tree they consume, including lumber, latex, bark, and fruit; trees are
obliged to be courteous with how much river they consume, although we do
not yet fully understand the details of inter-tree communication and
water management.
But computers don’t care about anything. Or, rather, what they care
about are bits and technical details. The facts of physical reality,
brute on several levels of abstraction, dominate all computing behavior.
The only way that humans become legible to computers is by exercising
mechanized capabilities. As we just discussed, humans cannot tell
whether a machine is an agent wielding a delegated ability to have a
thoughtful discussion; mirroring that, a machine cannot tell whether a
machine’s cryptographic identity was ultimately created on behalf of a
human. This situation is not fresh but was known to ancient warmakers;
cryptography comes from the needs of war and the generalized study of
conversations between mutually-distrusting parties is named after
Byzantine generals. What is new is the advent of machines which readily
exercise capabilities as if they were humans, with which we have only
grappled for about half a century.
Therefore I want to propose some principles for interacting with
machines given the inherent moral ambiguity of exercising capabilities.
I’m not sure if these are descriptive or prescriptive. They do rhyme
with existing slogans.
-
One shouldn’t proffer a capability if one isn’t prepared for it to
be invoked.
-
Any capability that one can invoke, one can invoke for
compensation.
-
Any mechanized capability can be invoked without human
intervention.
-
Any capability may be delegated.
-
Imagine: Capabilities, as a Service.
-
If you have an agent with ten capabilities delegated to it, you
probably missed some.
-
Before you invoke a capability, consider: How would it look if the
news reels tomorrow were about your actions?
-
Consider what practical effects we conceive a capability to have.
Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of
the capability.
-
Provide capabilities. Not too many. Mostly delegates.
I call this position
algorithmic courtesy
. For machines:
be courteous when invoking capabilities delegated to you by humans. For
humans: be responsible for what you delegate to machines.
So, let’s combine these two threads of thought. Let’s imagine that we
can use capabilities responsibly and that we deliberately work together
to avoid exploitation while building a robust tolerance for both our own
culture and other cultures. Maybe that’s enough to overcome the
perception of Fuckwittery as well as the underlying permissions which
enable it.
I want folks to consider taking two concrete steps. First, try to
tolerate Cringe a little more. Second, try to give out fewer
capabilities and be more thoughtful about the capability-theoretic
structure of your systems. I don’t know if these two steps alone will
lead to perfect communication, but I do think that they will lead to
better communication.
People
+ Algorithmic Courtesy
+ Tolerance for Cringe
= Peace and Harmony?
Associative fictions
-
A world become one, with salad and sun? Only a fool would say
that.
-
Steely Dan, “Only a Fool Would Say That”,
Can’t Buy a
Thrill
(1972)
In 1988, probability theorist Edwin Thompson Jaynes coined the
mind-projection fallacy
as a generalization of two common
mistakes in reasoning among physicists. One particular form they give is
Type A mind-projection
: from one’s own imagination, one
fallaciously claims to perceive a property of physical reality.
Almost any sociological claim can be attacked as an instance of
projected mind. After an hour of considering spurious sociological
claims, the reader may well wonder whether these mathematical structures
I’ve described, or the sociological patterns which emerge from them, are
at all real. More generally, any group of people may come to believe
that a commonly-claimed property of physical reality is actually an
instance of Type A mind-projection. For example, consider the memetic
claim that birds are not biologically alive despite empirical evidence
of their existence; claimants argue that the entirety of biology is
projected fallaciously onto mechanical flyers which should not be
considered alive. This is absurd, but it can’t be dismissed as such due
to another popular memetic claim, that computer programs are not
biologically alive; instead, we must rigorously apply a biological lens
and are forced to admit both that some parts of birds are not-so-alive,
like beaks and bones, while some parts of computers are somewhat alive,
like synchronized clocks and power management.
The mathematical claims are justified at the end of the section
introducing them. The research of Diane Vaughn and John Suler is
sufficient to carry the claims that normalization of deviance and online
disinhibition are real. A neuroscientific view of anatomy justifies the
sources of emotions. The rest of the claims ought to be commonsense. But
they all feel like stretches in a certain way. Are events really
partially ordered? Do rivers truly dominate humans? Can humans do
whatever they want to computers?
It is exponentially unlikely for an increasingly-large object to lose
entropy, or for a human to survive being washed away by increasing
amounts of water, or for a computer to hold a charge after it has been
powered off for an increasing duration of time; thermodynamics tends to
turn these tendencies into emergent expectations for how the world ought
to evolve.
A more curious issue concerns the data of our sheaf. We imagined
annotating events with non-trivial categories, but what if the
categories are trivial? They don’t even have to be degenerate. For
example, we could imagine that every event is annotated with the
collection of particles within each region of spacetime; such a sheaf
merely indicates where each particle came from relative to some current
event. What makes humans anything more than collections of particles, if
not mind-projection? Each sheaf is merely an opinion about how humans
have related to each other, based in what is legible to an observer,
without any objectively-correct assignment of capabilities or
responsibilities.
Therefore I suppose we need one final ingredient: an
associative
fiction
, which for today will be some way of indicating that some
collections of particles denote people. Associative fictions could
indicate that rivers, trees, cats, dogs, legal fictions, computers, or
even
C. elegans
are people; once indicated, our sheaves may be
required to consider how power is shared and delegated between these
various non-human entities. Our courtesy must therefore vary over those
we consider to be people:
Associative Fiction
+ Algorithmic Courtesy
+ Tolerance for Cringe
= Peace and Harmony?
But this is not enough. For who are we to choose the associative
fiction which binds other people? Their mind-projection is no less valid
than ours, and we know historically that there are no good outcomes from
failing to view all humans as people. Maybe it is enough, as before, to
be symmetric: we will consider the shared overlap of associative
fictions where all participants symmetrically consider each other to be
people. Biologically, this must retain some flexibility; for example,
housecats see humans as large slow cats while dogs see humans as
non-dogs, according to cat behaviorist John Bradshaw. It also is not
unique to humans; multiple species of tarantula spiders and microhylid
frogs have been observed cohabitating in a way which resembles humans
and cats, the Old World monkey
Macaca fuscata
has been observed
riding and taming the sika deer
Cervus nippon
, and species of
the Attini tribe of ants cultivate fungi agriculturally. It also doesn’t
survive our standard expectations about morality; can carnivores and
animals sit down at the same table, or herbivores and plants, or so on?
But I’m already suggesting that humans have to sit down at the table
both with the species that they befriend and keep as pets, and with the
species that they cook and eat; and there is already plenty of overlap
with examples like goats and chicken which serve first as pets and then
are served at the table.
So, let’s try once more. Let the notion of Cringe specialize along
boundaries of species and cultures. Let it be inevitable that we will
not have symmetric respect for each other, even when we respect that we
can have respect. Finally, instead of peace, let’s try for an
understanding. The deeper the acceptance of Cringe becomes, the more
sincere our understanding of how everything fits together can become.
This doesn’t prevent Fuckwittery, but it allows us to perceive Fuckwads
as part of a holistic system and understand the origins of any
particular strain of Fuckwittery.
Associative Fiction
+ Algorithmic Courtesy
+ Acceptance of Cringe
= Understanding of Harmony
On a horse farm outside of Boston, a worker sets up the well where Eden’s electrode will be lowered with a winch.
Bob O’Connor
During a demonstration at Eden’s testing site near Boston, an employee displays a central component of the company’s proprietary electrode.
Bob O’Connor
A wellhead guides multiple lines downhole: fluid hose, electric cables, rope, control for a sealing device, and sensor communication.
Bob O’Connor
To determine how permeable its fracture networks are, Eden measures fluid pressure downhole and flow rates at the surface.
Bob O’Connor
“We essentially generate a plasma channel in the rock itself,” says Rafael Villamor-Lora, vice president of R&D at Eden. “This channel then expands very, very rapidly,” fracturing the rock with a shock wave.
Bob O’Connor
Ezra Frank, a mechanical engineer at Eden, works on Zeus, Eden’s custom Marx generator.
Bob O’Connor
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