Criticism Round Up, Path Going Forward, Other Thoughts
How I Became Obsessed with my Own Stupidity/Stupidity in General
In the sixth grade, my class held a math competition. Two students stood at the whiteboard and all the other students formed a line. The teacher read out a problem and announced that the first student to solve it correctly would win. The loser would go to the end of the line and the winner would face the next student at the front of the line. The winner would continue until defeated.
There is no not slightly smug way to say this -although for context, I can add I was born in a logging town where the mathematical aptitude was certainly not high and the skill gap I’m about to share certainly shrunk by the time I got to college- but after I got my chance at the board I cycled through the rest of the class a little over three times. There just wasn’t anyone who could execute as fast as I could. Left to right, following the steps, machine-like, no distractions. In this particular activity, I was at an extreme advantage relative to my peers.
Then, the special needs students returned to class from their breakout instruction period. The teacher demanded that I face each of them, and announced that if none of them could beat me then we would finally be allowed to go to recess. I’m trying to limit personal anecdote somewhat because having been born and raised in a logging town I come from a markedly different culture than most Americans and I don’t want it to distract from the ideas, but I was actually part of the special needs class for about a week. I’d had a panic attack during a placement test and given nonsensical answers. When I was re-tested at my mother’s insistence it was discovered I was only emotionally, not mentally, handicapped so I’d been returned to the normal class. All of that is to say that I knew all of these students quite well, had never really shaken the sense that I truly belonged among them, and felt very bad that my teacher was making me face them.
My first adversary was a boy of my approximate height, with red-hair, who exclusively wore red sweat-suits to school, and had once confided in me that he could talk to birds with his mind. He spent several minutes of each recess staring at a flock of seagulls, trying to will them to follow his mental commands. He was also not considered to be very good at math.
My teacher read out a problem. I wrote it down. It was significantly longer and significantly harder than all the other problems. The entire class began to chuckle. I dutifully began working the problem from left to right. I estimated this one might actually take a full minute to solve.
My adversary made a few sounds of distress, laughed, and then said, “Zero!”
Our teacher confirmed this answer to be correct.
I lost.
At the end of the entire quantity, we had multiplied the total by zero. Which, because I worked everything from left to right, I had not even bothered to notice.
It took me several years to really fully understand this, but I had not lost because I understood the underlying concepts less well than my adversary. I lost because I understood them better. In this context, given the way that I thought and the way that he thought, understanding the concepts in too much detail was a significant handicap. I approached the problem with needless complexity. He hadn’t even been able to attempt all the operations in the middle of the bracket, so he’d stepped back, applied the one rule he did happen to know, which was that anything multiplied by zero is zero, and beat me. In that specific context, the things that made me “smart” were stupid, and the things that made him “stupid” were smart.
Another quick story, this one involving an innumerate individual I met on a drilling rig in New Mexico during a particularly ill-advised summer job as a roughneck. While replacing chain links, I discovered that he was not able to count above five or six. He simply could not seem to keep track. One day, our work truck broke down in the middle of the desert. An axle cracked, which seemed pretty unfixable. I determined the only thing to do was to try to get a cell phone signal and call for help. While I wandered around for about an hour holding my phone at various angles, he crawled under the truck and used a chain winch, with a skill that can only be described as artistic genius, and applied inward pressure until the axle was straight enough and sturdy enough we could drive to a service station. Even relating this years later, I’m still not quite sure how he made this work. I had dismissed the whole endeavor as impossible and so had never even tried. I had even gone so far as to dissuade him from wasting his time.
The older I get the more I resonate with the idea that we are all born with about the same amount of “mind stuff” and that it just gets optimized differently. For some unfortunate people their optimizations don’t have a lot of useful contexts in the modern era. But it’s important to remember that no one, or at least very few people, are truly stupid. You never know when you’re going to stumble into a context where someone you dismissed is suddenly wiping the floor with you in an intellectual capacity.
I often think of intelligence as a kind of searchlight, shining out in the darkness to illuminate possible paths to possible futures. It’s important to remember that the darkness is too vast for any searchlight to illuminate everything, so it doesn’t only matter how bright your light is, but what you choose to point it at. As the darkness is so vast, you have no choice but to be as productively ignorant as possible… and yet you can never be sure of what you may have overlooked. We’ll discuss this analogy in significantly greater detail at a later date.
Another moral to take from these stories is that it’s not enough to have the capacity to solve a problem, you also have to have the right context and the right fit to solve it. And there’s generally no real way of knowing whether or not you do have such a fit until you make the attempt. The only way to mitigate against this is to have a good team, with different ways of thinking, and a good coordination strategy. If you’re reading this, I’d like you to consider yourself as being part of my team.
Path Going Forward
I am beginning to suspect that writing a comedy was “not the best” -polite self-talk for “pretty shitty”- way to explain the functioning of an Algorithmic Republic. I confess I struggled a lot with figuring out where to jump into it as it’s such a bizarre thing to discuss. Creating governmental structures is a sort of island of conversational topics, with few segues. I have almost never been able to have a conversation on the topic, and I feel deeply odd for having spent so much time on it, even as a hobby. I also think I’ve simultaneously tried to do too much and too little. I’m hitting a bit of an intelligibility hurdle.
I’m going to finish the comedy relatively quickly, warts and all. It’s already drafted and close to done. I’ve started to realize that when the baby is asleep at 3am, I just need to push through and get things done if I want to get them done. No excuses. Once done, I’m going to wait for additional criticism and go back and revise. Between the feedback period and the revision, I’m going to focus on writing essays and case studies explaining how the Index and the Forum should function.
I cannot stress this enough: please, please feel free to leave honest and critical feedback. I have made products of medium complexity in the past and while I am pretty good relative to baseline at getting all the pieces generally where they need to go, no one is ever perfect.
I got an excellent comment the other day -thanks OddAnon! Also I may be reading too much into it but I did wonder if you had an EvenAnon account based on the thread I believe you found me from- reassuring me the ideas were getting across, although needing to be more fleshed out in certain respects, and pointing out some definite spots for improvement. All such comments are welcome.
While I have written quite a bit before, it’s mostly been narrative non-fiction, comedy, or horror. Trying to use story-telling as a vehicle for sharing specific ideas is fairly new to me and I’d be surprised if I got it all perfect on the first go. If anything is distracting from the ideas, I am off target even if it’s making you laugh. I promise that it is basically impossible for you to hurt my feelings if you have any hang-ups on that front. -To break my own rule on personal anecdote only a few hundred words later, I come from a culture where if you were to cut off your finger, the first thing people would do is laugh at you and tell you that you’d deserved it for being careless. The second thing they’d do is sing you the Mickey Mouse Club song to celebrate that you now only have three fingers and a thumb. This is appropriate in a setting where you have to rely on people not crushing you with a piece of industrial equipment because they are having an off day.- I find brutal honesty to be refreshing. I’d like to use such comments to go back and heavily edit the story somewhere around the June timeframe to see if I can make it more accessible. I can already see I did way too much for my own amusement.
I received another useful comment about demography and jury selection that I will work to expand on later. I had answers for this in my head but realize I have not bothered to put them down anywhere -this is a big problem I have- and will try to include it in one of the case studies.
To repeat ad nauseum: If you have a significant problem with anything in the presentation, please let me know!
Time Share Reality Bubbles
My wife applies a value multiplier of several billion times to gift cards. Because of this, I have been to a truly depressing number of time-share presentations. Only one got really pushy, in Las Vegas. Part of the reason I think my wife also enjoys these is that she finds it amusing when I explain to the sales person that I genuinely dislike going on vacation.
On the positive, I have found Time-Share presentations to be an amazing case study in reality bubbles. Everyone has a certain goal that transcends all other concerns: selling time-shares is good. No other reality is allowed in to compete with that goal.
So when the salesperson sits you down and starts explaining that, basically, he’s asking you to pay for a hotel reservation whether or not you actually use it, and also you’ll have to still pay for it on top of your monthly fees, and you can’t just not keep paying for it if you want to cancel, he will simply refuse to understand any of your objections that you could just invest money on your own and then take it out when your wife finally demands that it’s time to go somewhere.
That’s how I feel when I argue with people about politics. Except there, the transcendent truth is that reality is either a Republican or a Democrat and the best way for us to determine which is to disown our dissenting family members on social media and also cheer for whatever mob of morbidly obese schizophrenics throwing firecrackers at random passersby in an Arby’s parking lot -paraphrased from comedian Tim Dillon- happens to be wearing a shirt that has a political slogan you support.
You just can’t get anywhere.
The hardest thing to see is the water that you’re swimming in.
The Problem of Kings
What’s always surprised me about kings is how the known problem of their existence would continually reproduce through history. A bit like how things tend to evolve into crabs.
Back in the days when the only way to overthrow the king was to pick up a really sharp object and then get close enough to your political rivals to stab them with that sharp object until they were dead, while they were trying to do the same thing to you, you would have thought there’d be more incentive to innovate.
First Medieval Guy: “So we have this structure where we all just personally know one another, and then we report up to a guy who personally knows a bunch of other guys, and then maybe there’s a few more levels of that, until the last level or lords or whatever report put to the king and he gets to be in charge of everyone under him in that chain.”
Second Medieval Guy: “That seems like a lot of responsibility for one person.”
First Medieval Guy: “Well, when there were only 150 of us, it seemed pretty manageable but this is England now so he can’t really keep track of a million people. It’s a pretty tough job.”
Second Medieval Guy: “Yeah, seems like you’d need a bunch of people taking little bits and pieces of that job so it would be small enough they could really get in there and focus on solving specific local problems.”
First Medieval Guy: “Totally. Plus think of all the perks the king gets! I also think being a king turns you into a jerk.”
Second Medieval Guy: “Well, we’ve killed the old king because he was making bad decisions in the job we all said was unmanageable and prone to corrupt whoever held it, now what are we going to do?”
First Medieval Guy: “How about we make Ron the king? But hold on, we’ll call him the Good King Ron because Ron is a good man.”
Terry Pratchett once wrote that humans have a defect in their knees that make them want to bow before a king. We kept fighting them for thousands of years and when the time came to do something new, to try to do something to control the sheer magnitude of our speech in online spaces, the limit of our imagination was a new king.
All of this is to say: I shouldn’t be surprised that in almost all other proposals for how we should handle social media, I almost never see someone propose democracy.