Pleasure as an Organizing Principle

The organizing principle of the modern world is pain. 

Avoiding it, yes. But also trading in it, taking refuge in it, and using it to justify our actions. Pain has so many uses. Why would you ever give up such a versatile tool?

We trade in pain when we use it to bargain for progress. We assume that the bigger the impact we want to have, the more dramatic the change, the more we have to suffer. Isn’t that how it works? Isn’t the depth of my sacrifice a measure of how much I care?

But the pain of suffering can become its own metric, and get optimized to an extreme as all metrics eventually are. In the face of a stubborn world that doesn’t yield to our efforts, it can be easier to use the pain we are enduring as a proxy.

We take refuge in pain when we use it to hide from our problems. Pain is all-consuming, a powerful distraction from the things we don’t want to face. Pain is self-annihilating, temporarily turning off the ego that accuses us of not doing enough, not being enough. Pain can be a refuge where the overwhelming complexity of modern life is reduced to a simple, pulsating throb.

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Predictable Identities: 13 – Totalizing Ideologies

This entry is part 13 of 27 in the series Predictable Identities

One last quote from Peterson’s article:

“Totalitarian refusal to develop new skill and new modes of conceptualization when confronted with error makes life increasingly miserable.”

Who’s to blame for the misery inflicted by inflexible worldviews? The fault lies both in ourselves and in our memes.

The subconscious models in our brains know to stick to their limited domains. We have a model of how to catch balls, and the first time we apply it to a Frisbee it fails utterly. Our brains aren’t stubborn and quickly develop a new model of how discs fly.

But higher-level conscious models endeavor to become absolute and all-embracing. Religions are ostensibly about the divine, and yet rabbis must opine on every topic from eating your own snot (not kosher) to jaywalking (kosher). Political ideologies, whether progressive, conservative, or libertarian, end up providing answers to matters of pure science like climate change projections. And every philosophy answers the most important question: who’s with us (those who share the belief) and who’s against

Peterson himself is guilty of the cardinal sin of all philosophers — never refusing to pass judgment on a person or topic.

Philosophies evolve towards becoming totalizing ideologies by natural selection. A philosophy (or guru) that leave room for unanswered questions invite competition and will find themselves displaced by more totalizing rivals. After all, it is easier to remember a single ideology than many — or to watch a single YouTube channel.

A single meaning-making ideology is comforting, pleasant, and seductive. It provides easy answers as long as one doesn’t think too hard and keeps ignoring the discrepancies. But as the errors pile up, the ideology fights back, convincing the wavering believer that they are at fault for doubting the cosmic plan. Ideologies don’t disperse gently, they crumble in an avalanche of pain, fear, and confusion.

Predictable Identities: 12 – Fear, Myths, and the Outgroup, Part II

This entry is part 12 of 27 in the series Predictable Identities

In Neuropsychology of Group Aggression Jordan Peterson, before anyone knew or hated him, inadvertently describes why some people will passionately hate him when they find out.

The article talks about high-level models keeping anxiety and fear of the unknown at bay. When these models are challenged by new data, people whose frameworks are already straining will react to the challenge with hostility. They will engage in “confirmation extortion” and attack the messenger.

[…] the tendency to demonize evidence of conceptual insufficiency, or the bearers of that evidence, and to ‘morally’ attempt to eliminate it or them from existence.

Making a distinction between “reporters” and “journalists”, the latter’s job is not to describe facts but to interpret their meaning. Meaning-making involves applying stock narratives, the primary one often being “the outgroup is evil and all the same”. For journalists whose outgroup are conservatives, Peterson highlights the acute “conceptual insufficiency” of that narrative.

Conservatives are not supposed to be humanities professors at Harvard, but Peterson was. Conservatives are supposed to say that life begins at conception, but Peterson’s takes a full minute to think of what to say on abortion, and five more to say it.

In his most notorious interview, journalist Cathy Newman repeats “so you’re saying…” dozens of times as she tries to cram Peterson’s idiosyncratic worldview into a familiar narrative – quintessential confirmation extortion. When he’s not around to interview, journalists often engage in “moral elimination” by associating him with the worst of his fans.

Why not attack the worst of his arguments instead? I think it has less to do with the strength of Peterson’s arguments and more with the journalists’ own anxiety. The financial anxiety of a struggling industry, the status anxiety of alternative outlets stealing attention, and the ideological anxiety of their narratives failing in the face of a weirding world full of weird people like Jordan Peterson.

Predictable Identities: 11 – Fear, Myths and the Outgroup, Part I

This entry is part 11 of 27 in the series Predictable Identities

The first reason why I like the article Neuropsychology of Motivation for Group Aggression and Mythology is that it does what this blogchain hopes to, using predictive processing to explain at once rat behavior, ancient religious symbols, and war crimes.

It starts by noting that fear and anxiety are not emotions that animals need to learn, but are the default reaction to any novel situation. A rat placed in a new cage will first freeze in fear, then sniff and look around cautiously, and only later will dare to move about and explore.

“[T]he organism is only calm, habituated, free of stress, and well-adapted when cortical [predictions, plans, desires] and brainstem [sensory information from the outside] input match.”

This applies to physical space, and even more so to the social environment. We react negatively to familiar people who break social norms and to “strangers, [who] offer equivalent threat. No one knows where they fit, what they think, or what they are likely to do. Thus, they threaten the integrity of the social and psychological structures that inhibit fear.” The symbol of the chaotic unknown in many ancient traditions is a reptile – unpredictable people literally creep us out.

We’re not fans of ideas that challenge our high-level models either. According to psychologist George Kelly: “. . . a major revision of one’s construct system can threaten with immediate change, or chaos, or anxiety.” Often, people will either willfully ignore challenging data or force it to conform to their pre-existing narrative, what Kelly calls “confirmation extortion”.

One such challenge is admitting that a person we’ve dismissed as an enemy of our tribe or a buffoon who is safe to ignore, may actually have good ideas. And this brings me to the second reason I like this article – but more on that in the next post.

The Age of Diffraction

There’s a state of mind that’s been increasingly common for me lately, which I can only describe as a sense of being outdoors in time during inclement temporal weather. I’ve been searching for the right metaphor to describe this feeling, and I think it is the feeling of being diffracted. Like being a hapless, innocent electron being tortured through the famous double-slit experiment. Here’s a cool animation I found on Wikipedia (physics would have been so much more fun if these sorts of animations had been available when I was learning this stuff).

Animation by Jean-Christophe BENOIST at French Wikipedia. [CC BY-SA 3.0]

If your state of mind is normally like that of a particle — you are here and now, thinking about this, doing that, with some uncertainty around it all — being diffracted is feeling like a wave. Like you’re in multiple states at once, with those states interfering with each other in ways that creates subjective dyschronia or timelexia.

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Predictable Identities: 10 – Big Updates

This entry is part 10 of 27 in the series Predictable Identities

When the world conforms better to your expectations, whether through effective action or improving models, it feels great. When the world slides towards unpredictability, it sucks. So how does changing your mind feel? That depends on whether the change improves or breaks your predictions.

Look at the image below until you can make out what it is.

Got it? The moment when the picture resolves feels good because it resolves into something familiar. Random blobs are unpredictable, but you know what a cow looks like and what to expect of it.

How about this one?

Changing your mind about communism is much harder than about a picture of a cow. Whatever your current view of communism, it is a high-level model with multiple associations. It impacts many concrete predictions about nations, politics, your life and career choices, and what sort of person you will get along (i.e., cooperate) with: the Ethiopian lady picking the coffee or the Londoner consultant dude drinking it.

Updating a high-level model is a risky undertaking because it immediately breaks all the predictions that depend on it. You must have an entire alternative system of smaller beliefs and connections in place that fit the new model – then it feels like an epiphany or a long-needed paradigm shift. To convert someone to atheism, it is better first to convince them that atheism doesn’t necessitate immorality or a belief in transforming monkeys.

Without this scaffolding, adopting the new idea will promptly make the world less predictable even if it may be a better-predicting model in the long term. This feels bad, and your brain will pull out all the stops to avoid it: confirmation bias, isolated demands for rigor, flat out denial. And if the new model’s messenger is too insistent to ignore, shooting the messenger is always an option too.

Predictable Identities: 9 – How to Change

This entry is part 9 of 27 in the series Predictable Identities

You’ve changed your mind and who you want to be. Your social web is having none of it. What to do?

One option is to simply power through. Stick to your (new) guns and admit that your mind is indeed changed. The “zeal of the convert” is important here: it takes extra commitment to convince those who knew the old you to change their story.

A savvier approach is to leverage common tropes and adopt a role that entails transformation. If you want to switch from layabout to responsible professional, or vice versa from workaholic to self-caretaker, it may help to have a romantic partner break up with you. “Area person reassesses life priorities after heartbreak” is a familiar story that people can get behind. “Area rationalist reassesses life after Hamming circleisn’t, even if that’s what actually happened.

But the easiest option may just be to GTFO and change the scene. I’ve reset my social web several times, usually with positive results.

By the time I learned how to be funny in elementary school, everyone had decided that I’m a boring nerd. I moved to a new city for high school and did better as the clever class clown, but these traits were not in high demand when I enlisted in the military. I eventually grokked professionalism, but it was too late to gain the trust of my officers. I emigrated. I did better in my next two stops but blew through my weirdness budgets and couldn’t shake off my reputation as a weirdo.

Finally, I came to New York, where I did not know a single soul. I took my craziest opinions out of the office and onto the internet. I started acting like the person I wanted to be seen as, not who I was before.

It works, for now.

Predictable Identities: 7 – Weirdness Budget

This entry is part 7 of 27 in the series Predictable Identities

Social life needs predictable people who conform to expectations. There are common expectations which apply to every person in the group, and personal expectations based on one’s perceived role and past behavior.

Deviating from common expectations costs idiosyncrasy credits. Dressing differently, eating strange diets, watching documentaries that no one else does and not watching the show everyone talks about – these all exhaust a limited budget of nonconformity. The budget accrues to people who conform or are popular; the two often go hand in hand.

As Homer Simpson noted: “Marge, I can’t wear a pink shirt to work, everybody wears white shirts. I’m not popular enough to be different.”

When someone exceeds their idiosyncrasy budget, their opinions will get dismissed on grounds of absurdity bias and the horn effect. If you want to tell your millennial friends about crazy ideas like unfriendly AI or Ribbonfarm, make sure you are otherwise appropriate.

Personal expectations include playing out roles and simply being the same person over time. Even changes of mind that don’t violate group norms, like hating a movie that you liked last year, can be grating. If you’re not changing in ways that are fun for your friends, you’re just making yourself hard to model and get along with.

Imagine a conversation with just a few people. When deciding whether to tell a joke, you have to consider your friends’ likely reactions to the joke. But you also have to consider their reaction to everyone else’s reaction, and what it implies about everyone’s relationships and status, and so on down many layers of metacognition. If you can’t rely on heuristics of shared group expectations and consistency over time, the computational effort is overwhelming. You’re likelier than not to go look for a more predictable group of friends to joke with.

Predictable Identities: 8 – Roles People Play

This entry is part 8 of 27 in the series Predictable Identities

We fit strangers in stereotypes, and we like strangers who fit our stereotypes and act congruently. Dealing with people we know allows for more personalized modeling, but we still want associates and companions to stick to their roles.

Most everyone in most every office resembles a character on The Office, not just in the broad strokes of the Gervais Principle but down to details of job, dress, and personality. Husbands and wives have played out “if it weren’t for you” patterns long before Games People Play described them.

The main difference from predicting strangers is that dealing with familiar people allows for active inference: enforcing others’ conformity to prediction. Valentine Smith describes this in his excellent essay The Intelligent Social Web:

You move away [from your family] and make new friends and become a new person […] But then you visit your parents, and suddenly you feel and act a lot like you did before you moved away. You might even try to hold onto this “new you” with them… and they might respond to what they see as strange behavior by trying to nudge you into acting “normal”: ignoring surprising things you say, changing the topic to something familiar, starting an old fight, etc.

This nudging is effected by thousands of small actions perpetrated by dozens of people. We receive small negative reinforcements when we do something unpredictable that causes others’ models to momentarily fail, and positive rewards when we conform to our roles. The social life of an office or a family is too complex to compute without stable roles assigned to people, the same way a brain can’t cohere a visual scene without the expectation that visual objects remain stable.

Life in the social web means that growth and change are harder than they appear. Hard, but not impossible.

Weirding Diary: 7

This entry is part 7 of 11 in the series Weirding Diary

The lament that the United States is turning into a third-world country is at once too pessimistic and too optimistic. What is actually happening is that a patchwork of post-industrial first and fourth-world conditions is emerging against a second-world backdrop.

Here are my definitions:

  • First world: Small, rich European countries. Islands of gentrified urbanism in the US.
  • Second world: Suburban/small-town America, parts of larger European countries, small Asian countries, parts of the Soviet Union before it collapsed, parts of China today.
  • Third world: Countries in global south that began modernizing a century later than Europe, and still have relatively intact pre-modern societal structures to backstop the shortcomings of incomplete industrial development.
  • Fourth world: Parts of the developed world that have collapsed past third-world conditions because industrial safety nets have simultaneously withered from neglect/underfunding, and are being overwhelmed by demand, but where pre-modern societal structures don’t exist as backstops anymore.

The fourth world emerges when large numbers of people fall through the cracks of presumed-complete development, and find themselves in worse-than-third-world conditions: More socially disconnected, more vulnerable to mental illness and drug addiction, with fewer economic opportunities due to the regulation of low-level commerce, and less able to stabilize a pattern of life.

Schemes like LBJ’s Great Society failed to fulfill their promises, but still prevent those facing impoverishment from fending for themselves. The fourth world is the worst of all worlds; an artifact of failed authoritarian high-modernism. A condition of pervasive dependency on non-dependable systems that eliminate old alternatives and limit the growth of new ones. The underbelly of zombie monopolistic safety nets that lack the autopoietic potential to endure through political and economic cycles as living social systems. The functionality withers away, but the negative externalities don’t.

The Great Weirding is revealing that modernization and development are not the same thing. It is a mistake to govern under the presumption that entire populations must necessarily arrive at stable 100% first-world conditions after a transient “development” period. Modernization is the evolution of both wealth and poverty into newer technological forms.

Systems designed for the lowest strata must not assume those strata will eventually go away.