Let The World Answer

Sitting by the river long enough.

A lot of things I understand internally but often struggle to communicate these things to other people. Here is one that I just found another way to describe. It is the part of the reasoning behind my Stoicism and my political abstention.

One of the mental markers I keep on this matter is the character of Ra’s al Ghul. He is a fictional character in the DC comic universe who was the person who transformed Bruce Wayne into Batman. Al Ghul was his warrior mentor, and the reason Batman has the character of the Dark Knight. Batman is angry and vengeful because the world, and especially Gotham City is full of cruel, evil, despicably vile predators. Al Ghul saw the world the same way and so wanted to hasten the fall of civilization.

Keyphrase: al Ghul lets the world burn.

Now let us review the Abstention Principle:
A simple moral principle: when a future change is framed as a problem which we might hope our political system to solve, then the only acceptable reason to talk about the consequences of failing to solve that problem is to scare folks into trying harder to solve it. If you instead assume that politics will fail to solve the problem, and analyze the consequences of that in more detail, not to scare people but to work out how to live in that scenario, you are seen as expressing disloyalty to the system and hostility toward those who will suffer from that failure.

Generally speaking, I don’t care a whit for domestic politics. I care about matters of war and peace, but I’m not a globalist, and I don’t think we’re destroying the planet so much as living like slopped hogs in several dozen high density cities.

So this basically means, I don’t want the world to burn, but I expect political candidates, policies and parties to be entirely misfit and thus turnover as they fail. So I’m not engaged or involved with the screaming dialog that our two parties live by. It is entirely beneath me. We are beyond the Orwellian and moving towards the Kafkaesque. I’m not trying to vote for someone in The Castle.

So here Adam Savage finds a moment in which he has a dispute with someone he needs to work with. Generally speaking, they work together, and I loved their show, as did my kids. But he describes the time when they disagreed about something with fairly substantive consequences if done wrong. But he decides to relent and stop trying to prove his theory correct. He says “OK let’s do it your way, we’ll let the world decide.” By world, he means the rules of physics. The laws of nature. The mind of God. The way of the Universe, because the Universe doesn’t play dice with itself.

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How Your Mind Works
It has been several years since I read Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality. There’s no easy way to describe the whole thing outside of the gist of what I got from it. Fitness Beats Reality. Which is to say, we humans didn’t evolve to understand the Universe. That’s why certain animals and machines can do things that are hard to wrap our brains around - things we can only understand in theory with patterns we vaguely grok but don’t fully comprehend.

Part of the corollary to this is that language is insufficient to describe what we experience. Combine this with some of Stephen Pinker’s explanation of how our minds recreate experience and we find ourselves extremely limited in our ability to be precise.

Man Vs Machine
For example, I don’t know exactly where I got the idea the Bruce Wayne studied under al Ghul, but I know they became arch enemies because Batman wanted to save the world. I have been telling people that I caught a fish on New Years Day of 1977 when Anthony Davis ran a 98 yard kickoff return for a touchdown at the Rose Bowl. Wikipedia says it was 1975 and Anthony Davis didn’t play that game. But I am certain that I had eggs and trout that morning and then watched the Rose Bowl. But the man who took me fishing that morning is dead.

I have forgotten, several times, the name of a group and song that I fell in love with in the early 80s. So I had an interactive chat / prompt session with ChatGPT and it took me 90 minutes to assemble my clues to yield the correct answer. The AI gave me six or seven wrong answers, some of which were somewhat close and others which were way off. When we together got the right answer, it acted like it knew all along and I was just asking the wrong questions. This was just a month ago and even now I cannot remember the name of the group. So I ask my stupid computer to remember the one phrase ‘bizarre triangle d’amour’, and it can’t find it. Excuse me… I lost it again.

St. Tropez was the name of the group and the track was ‘Femmes Fatales’ and even though the song was first released in the early 1980s only the compilation album exists in the interwebz and that was published in 1995. The group disbanded in 1983. They were Vennette Gloud, Carmen Twillie, Mona Lisa Young and were produced by Laurin Rinder and W. Michael Lewis. You won’t find it on Spotify, but Qobuz has it.

The point is that I know what I was talking about, but couldn’t put my finger on it, and I needed another kind of intelligence to discover this incredibly trivial thing that matters so much to me.

I pay a lot of attention, as someone who has built scores of decision support systems over the years, to the gaps in intelligence that make us think incorrectly, or the long way around things that are ultimately solved in a second - like NYT crossword clues that you know, as compared to those you know that you couldn’t possibly know.

While I’m on the subject, there’s one more story tangential to this which I have tagged [unfortunately] to John McWhorter’s characterization of the intellectual weakness of Dr. Claudine Gay. It wasn’t him, but some particular expert was talking about their intellectual mentor who was legendary in his field. After that person died, there simply wasn’t anyone else who could possibly replace him, and that entire field of study has never been as rigorous since that day. Yet the institution at which he held the chair persists, and somebody who is fit for the position fills it, even though that replacement is further from the truth of insightful discovery than their predecessor. Or as I thought about it casually this morning, nobody today sings as well as Whitney Houston. Sure there’s Beyonce and Taylor Swift, but really? They are fit, but they’re not the Truth.

Our minds, especially our young minds, focused as they are in engaging the act of procreation, have no patience for truth. We just want be fit and to fit.

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So what has this got to do with letting the world answer?

Thinking On Your Feet
Literally, it’s about doing those things we have evolved to do best with only the slimmest concession to the sorts of conveniences our tools have given us. So let us consider the number of enticements and rewards we have in support of participation in aggregative systems. Like the warrens of the town Kafka writes about, and the labyrinthian corridors of the Castle, there are every sort of twisted argument and justification for fitness that has nothing to do with the truth.

HUMINT over SIGINT.
This is a reiteration of that matter of trust being the fundamental currency of civilization. If we come to trust machines and signals in the ether that need machine translation, we’re going to go afoul of our human relations. Yes, it hurts more when we are betrayed by humans we trust, but at least we know precisely who to take revenge upon, whereas we make revolutionary idiots of ourselves trying to burn down ‘The System’.

When we are prepared to let the world answer, we give humans a chance to find out on their own without an immediate battle. That helps them trust us, and helps us trust them. We don’t have to let their world burn, and we’re not to blame if and when it collapses. We are not, and needn’t be the enemy action.

If we want to fight, we can fight machine intelligences. Like I do with the NYT crossword, because I’m certain they use a machine to help build them every day. Leave a little love for your neighbor.