Review of Sterling’s Zeitgeist, with some reflections on Post-Modernism

Derrida, Foucault, and international smack dealers

I recently re-read Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist, a book about “narrative,” consensus reality, language, and post-modernism, pushed to the point where turns into magical realism. Sterling is usually slotted as a sci-fi writer – because that’s what he usually is – but in Zeitgeist he’s getting the “There’s nothing outside the text” thing off his chest. As a sci-fi writer Sterling is over-rated, but Zeitgeist is, to put it plainly, good. It’s Sterling’s best work that I’ve read, and I expect and hope that if he’s still read 25 years from now, this novel will be the centerpiece of his canonical oeuvre. Note I didn’t say that I take postmodernism seriously. What I’m saying is that this is a fun novel anyway.

It’s set in 1999, and the novel’s main character says the change to the twenty-first century will be a kink point in the consensus narrative, a moment that will induce significant narrative breaks from the past.

The intellectual context

The intellectual background of all this is postmodernism, which I define as the view that it is impossible to escape from various mental prisons, particularly language. This notion’s roots extend far back in time before the post-moderns; I’m talking about the lefty academic version that was extremely hip for a while in the twentieth century, and still is in some quarters.

The basic idea is summed up by a quote often attributed to Jacques Derrida, “There’s nothing outside the text.” This was actually a mis-translation of Derrida’s French. Wikipedia suggests that it is Derrida’s critics who attribute this view to him, but that’s an outrageous lie. It’s not his critics; it’s his fanbois. As an example, here’s a quote of one Alex Callinicos – who is defending Derrida here, note:

“Derrida wasn’t, like some ultra-idealist, reducing everything to language (in the French original he actually wrote ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ – ‘There is no outside-text’). Rather he was saying that once you see language as a constant movement of differences in which there is no stable resting point, you can no longer appeal to reality as a refuge independent of language. Everything acquires the instability and ambiguity that Derrida claimed to be inherent in language.”

I added the emphasis to make it clear: The guy says Derrida wasn’t saying X, then in the next sentence interprets Derrida as saying X.

Here’s more:

“The only way to stop this play of difference would be if there were what Derrida called a ‘transcendental signified’ – a meaning that exists outside language and that therefore isn’t liable to this constant process of subversion inherent in signification. But the transcendental signified is nothing but an illusion…”

Again, this is a guy who’s supposed to be defending Derrida from a hostile misinterpretation that he claimed we cannot escape the prison of language.

Derrida was a deliberately obscurantist writer and his fanbois don’t like to let him be pinned down to making any particular claim – this is an infallible sign of an intellectual fraud. And in Linguistics the extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that humans cannot break out of language is no longer taken seriously and is not the consensus view.

Is language actually necessary for thought? Obviously not; consider e.g. Douglas Hofstadter’s example of the dogs, the bone, and the fence: “Imagine you’re a dog, and someone tosses you a bone, but it lands in the neighbour’s yard behind a very tall fence. At your far side is an open gate that gets you out of your yard and into the neighbour’s yard. But a few feet in front of you, behind the tall fence, is a tasty snack. How will you get the bone?” In real-word testing some dogs fail to solve this; some see the solution and go through the gate and back toward the bone.

If the idea of thought without language bothers you, get over it: plainly dogs who solve the problem are doing something, and plainly that something does not involve language. If it makes you feel better, use the term information processing instead of thought.

On to Zeitgeist

The PoMo perspective doesn’t have to be as dour as its leftish political versions. It is bullshit, but it doesn’t have to be dour bullshit. It can be amusing reflexive meta-narrative bullshit complete with car crashes, drug runners, international mafia guys, breathtakingly beautiful nightclub chanteuses, etc. And in Zeitgeist Sterling shows this by incorporating a large measure of humor and magical realism with the more dyspeptic PoMo stuff.

The main character is Leggy Starlitz, who figured earlier in some Sterling short stories (which I haven’t read). Starlitz is a gray-market hustler who’s always working some semi-legal scam. (That’s how I described him here, if you’re wondering why that sounds familiar.) As Zeitgeist opens he is, as a result of a drunken bar bet, trying to create a successful all-girl pop band with absolutely no talent whatsoever. That’s the bet. No singing talent, no dancing talent – though they sing and dance anyway – and no individual character. The band is called G-7 and there is one girl from each of the G-7 nations, but they’re just called the American One, the French One, etc. When one American One quits, Starlitz just finds a new American One and the show goes on without a hitch. G-7 does not sell any music; the profit is 100% from merchandise: Official G-7 perfume, official G-7 platform shoes, official G-7 “energy drink,” etc. It’s easy to get black-market copies of their music, a fact which the band’s management (i.e. Starlitz) regards with benign approval. Aside from No Talent, the other G-7 rule is that it shuts down forever at 11:59 pm on December 31, 1999.

The novel starts with the band’s world tour swinging through the Turkish-controlled part of the island of Cyprus. Things first get dicey when Starlitz’s ex-wife, now a West Coast lesbian hippie, somehow finds out where he is, travels to Cyprus, and hands off their eleven-year-old daughter Zeta to him. Starlitz had been vaguely aware that he had a daughter but has never seen her before. She’s a mammoth G-7 fan, which is great… until Ozbey starts throwing his weight around. Ozbey is Starlitz’s local contact in Cyprus. He is connected every which way to everyone, including Turkish banks, which makes handling the band’s finances easier, etc. Ozbey is in general quite the personality: young, good-looking, hip, dialed in to the Turkish government, the Turkish financial sector, the Turkish organized crime scene…

Unfortunately, Ozbey’s girlfriend Gonca is radiantly beautiful and can actually sing. She reduces a roomful of Turkish men to tears by singing a patriotic Turkish song. (Even the Finnish guys in the room are so moved that they forget to drink. Sterling’s a hoot.) Ozbey wants Gonca to be in G-7, which is incredibly infra-dig for her and of course would violate the premise of the group that it contains absolutely no talent. At this point Starlitz learns his father is dying, and he has to return to the US immediately to see him one last time. With his daughter in tow he leaves G-7 in Ozbey’s hands, after extracting a solemn promise from Ozbey that he will guard the girls’ lives as carefully as he would Gonca’s.

For reasons that will be explained shortly, meeting up with Starlitz’s father requires Starlitz and Zeta to walk around in the New Mexico desert for a while. During this interlude Starlitz tells Zeta about his post-modern French semiotic post structuralist, etc. etc. notions. He also tells her that while this is all deep truth (a profoundly stupid thing to say about a notion that denies there can be any such thing as truth), it will all become unfashionable when the clock ticks over to the 21st century: post-modernism is too identified with the 20th century. So “true” or not, it will die as an intellectual movement when the century flips. It will be over, stale, done, yesterday’s thing.

Some fun PoMo-cum-magical realism stuff happens here. The highlight is that Starlitz’s father turns out to be temporally smeared across the entire 20th century. This is because, due to an accident, he was inside the first nuclear bomb when it was detonated in New Mexico. (Yes, he was physically inside it.) Because that moment was pivotal in the narrative of the 20th century, Starlitz’s father is smeared across the century. He exists at every moment from January 1, 1900 through December 31, 1999, because those are the consensus narrative dates of the 20th century. (I don’t think those are actually the consensus narrative dates, which seem to me to be 1/1/1901 to 12/31/2000, but whatever.) Somewhere in New Mexico, in the vicinity of that first nuclear detonation, Starlitz summons his father by means of an ad hoc semi-magical ritual. His father is of indeterminate age and can speak only in palindromes, presumably because of his temporal indefiniteness. Zeta gets to meet her granddad, Starlitz and his father speak one last time, and then the man fades away.

Some other stuff happens. Then Starlitz gets a phone call: one of the G-7 girls has died. And Ozbey has replaced her with an Islamic girl. Starlitz and Zeta hop on a plane to Turkey. Before they can meet up with Ozbey again another G-7 girl dies, and is replaced with another Islamic girl. Then the Japanese One apparently tries to commit suicide and is in critical condition in a hospital. Starlitz catches up with Ozbey in Turkey.

Ozbey, somewhat drunk on alcohol, and power, confesses that he broke his promise to protect the girls and doesn’t regret it. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a bad guy. We suspected that before; we were a little worried about Ozbey, but now we know. Exultant, Ozbey says he cannot be killed by someone like Starlitz; the narrative doesn’t allow it:

“I can’t be merely killed: I can be only martyred.”
Starlitz: “You’re spreading yourself way too thin here. You’re all over the map. The master narrative can’t take that cheap, gratuitous shit. You can be the Ascended Guru Master, or the Dapper Don with the showgirls, or the Secret Spymaster with the smack, but you can’t be all of those at once and stay sustainable.”
“That is your version of the narrative, not mine.”
“We are in my narrative, man.”
Ozbey: “No, we’re not. You are in my homeland and my culture, and this is my narrative.”
Starlitz: “We are speaking fucking English. You’ve got nothing more to say. You can’t argue with me because my language defines the terms. You can’t discuss it any further.”
Ozbey stared at Starlitz in rage. He opened his mouth, and struggled for his confounded words with a distant, muted squeak.
Something snapped in the realm of the unspeakable. Ozbey bent double in silent pain. He began to heave. A fifty-caliber bullet fell wetly to the carpet. Then came another. They were huge things, with thumb-sized slugs and big brass mil-spec cartridges. The big wet bags of heroin were worse. These weren’t the standard balloon courier bags. These were serious, tape-and-poly, kilo smack bags, big fat bricks. Ozbey was heaving them up from his visceral core.

Ozbey is quieter in the aftermath of this incident, but he’s not permanently defeated…

We get more magical realism, including an NSA guy who’s anywhere he wants to be, but invisible and inaudible, built into the fabric of things at the hardware level, just like the real NSA. At a crisis point, when Starlitz is out of options, the NSA guy pops into the scene and actually announces himself as a deus ex machina. The machina part of this is literally true, since the NSA’s power comes from computer and surveillance hardware, and the statement is also a wonderful piece of reflexive fourth-wall-breaking meta-commentary. What Sterling does here is chef’s kiss perfect.

Starlitz extracts himself from his peril with the NSA guy’s help. He does not defeat Ozbey, but he is there, as a kind of narrative witness, as Ozbey dies in an extremely twentieth-century-celebrity way.

Speaking of which, a key moment occurs near the end when Starlitz’s daughter tells him,

“The twentieth century was never as important as you thought it was, Dad. It was a dirty century. It was a cheap, sleazy century. The second the twentieth century finally went under the carpet, everybody forgot about it right away. [Notice she’s already speaking about the 20th century in the past tense, even though this is taking place in December 1999.] In the twenty-first century we don’t have your crude, lousy problems. We’ve got serious, sophisticated problems.”

When I first read this passage years ago I took it at face value. On a second reading I thought that Sterling is doing a bit of lecturing here through the mouth of this character. Now I think what’s happening here is more subtle than either of those things: Sterling is satirizing the entire human race. We always think those sheltered naifs from previous times had silly, low-level problems, and that we have serious, sophisticated problems. Of course that’s wrong: they’re always serious, sophisticated problems. (The French Revolution, for example, was a serious business, even though we might not feel that as we look at it from a safe remove of more than 200 years.) Here Sterling is simply continuing with the novel’s theme, the ubiquity of narratives in human life. The 20th century had its key narratives – the Cold War, etc. – and narratives narratives narratives will continue. Sterling, writing in the late 1990s, tells us that once the 20th century is in the books, its narratives – even its breathtaking, world-history-shaking narratives – will be boring historical artifacts, and people will move on.

And perhaps there’s one more little joke that Sterling slips in here: Recall that Sarlitz told Zeta, while they were wandering around in the New Mexico desert, that post-modernism, a 20th century narrative, will die with that century. Now she is spitting this back at him, with complete sincerity! She’s giving him “Yer century is lame and outmoded; I’m part of a cool new modern century.” Thus ever youth to parents. And thus the 20th century, when it was young, to the 19th. And so it goes…

But I’m making too much of the “century” thing. In general the novel is Sterling having fun with post-modernism and magical realism. (For another attempt at this, but longer and with a lot more sex and drugs, try Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy.) Zeitgeist, if there’s any justice, will become Sterling’s flagship novel.

As to post-modernism, is there anything of value that can be extracted from that mound of horseshit? No, I don’t think so. But there is an important insight that is PoMo-adjacent: the importance of not taking any model too seriously. One should be able to switch back and forth between different models as is helpful in different situations. Physicists haven’t been able to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, though each model is extremely useful in certain problem domains. More prosaically, sometimes we ignore the curvature of the earth, e.g. in walking around at the mall, and sometimes we have to account for that, e.g. in flying across the Pacific ocean. Post-modernism, if one could squeeze out the 95% of it that is deliberately obscurantist bullshit, could be a useful handmaiden to the many intellectually serious people who remind us that “A model is just a model” and that no one model should ever be taken too seriously.

Evaluating Relative Evidence for Different Ideas

At Founding Questions today (April 8, 2024) the host Severian said, “There’s a LOT of truth to what the Communists said. J.A. Hobson, for instance, was deservedly famous for Imperialism: A Study (1902), which lays out the case for the-Empire-as-racket in excruciating detail.”

Whoa, Nelly! Big disagree-o. But wait, who cares? Communism has been stone-cold dead for decades. So why take any notice? Because this raises broader and more interesting issues of methodology and epistemology. (Don’t worry; I’ll be brief.) Not only are these important and interesting, they also give me an opportunity to use my “Epistemology” tag, which helps me get up the skirts of intellectual chicks.

Here’s my test applied to Marxism. (I’ve never gotten a chance to ask a Marxist this, alas.) Is there any statement in Marxism that satisfies all three of the following desiderata?

1. Empirically meaningful. (Not just rhetorical hot air like “The workers are exploited.”)
2. Empirically true.
3. Unique to Marxism.

On that last one, here’s something that doesn’t count: Marx observed that capitalism creates unceasing disruptive innovation, but everyone from Adam Smith to Joseph “creative destruction” Schumpeter to Ayn Rand to every tech-sector venture capitalist has a theory consistent with that.

I can’t think of even one statement in Marxism that satisfies all the above, let alone enough such statements to give Marxism any credibility.

So e.g. on Empire as a racket: Well, sure, obviously. But you don’t have to be a Marxist to see that. Even Vox freakin’ Day – not a Marxist! – has been hammering that point lo these past few years.

In contrast, consider the concept of the holiness spiral, an important piece of intellectual apparatus in political science. (Not in current conventional political science, as far as I know, but in any political science that aspires to be empirically engaged.) This predicts and retrodicts (roughly, explains ex post) political developments that are not predicted or retrodicted without it. For example, it explains the movement from decriminalizing homosexuality to de-pathologizing it to advocating gay marriage to trying to destroy prominent people who don’t advocate gay marriage. Thus whoever came up with the concept of the holiness spiral created a genuine advance in political science.

Now “holiness spiral” is a concept; it’s not an all-encompassing worldview/ideology like Marxism. But I trust my point is clear: Sciences or ideologies that incorporate empirically predictive concepts are – other things being equal – better than ones that don’t. In contrast, incorporating the notion that the sun rises in the east or that capitalism involves technological change doesn’t create any extra credibility compared to competing ideas that also say that.

The Legitimate Purposes of Consensus Narrative

I just finished re-reading Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist, a book about “narrative,” consensus reality, language, and the whole post-modernist (Po-Mo) thing. It got me cogitating, by God.

Consensus reality has several purposes. A main one, which the Po-Mo crowd ignores as far as I know, is establishing protocols for coordination and communication.

(Or if they do acknowledge it, it’s only to cast it in the most malign possible way: “The power structure perpetuates itself, locking us all into the social reality of the white male capitalist heteropatriarchy!” Pshht, I wish.)

Look, bitches: It doesn’t matter which side of the road we drive on, but we have to pick a side and everyone must drive on the same side. Similarly, it doesn’t matter, within reasonable limits, what constitutes a normal, polite speaking volume (as opposed to hostile shouting). But it does matter that we all agree on this so that we can talk to each other without half of us thinking the other half is trying to start a fight. Same for the normal physical distance between people talking to each other. How close can two men get before it becomes rude and an attempt by one of them to get into the other’s space and start a fight? Or how close can a woman stand to a man before it becomes an attempt to seduce him? Within certain limits, there’s no One Right Answer to these questions. What is important is that we all agree on an answer so we can communicate with each other without social chaos. You probably want to be able to converse with me without my punching you in the face or grabbing your tits because I misunderstood your intent.

Another example: I read that hundreds of years ago in Europe, rolling one’s eyes did not indicate exasperation, but lust. LOL, just imagine the zany hi-jinks that could result from that particular misunderstanding.

This is one of the things that consensus reality accomplishes. (It does other things too, some good and some bad.) If the consensus narrative identifies Mao Tse Tung as A Bad Person, then if I say, “That politician is just like Mao!” then you understand that I’m saying, “He’s bad!” You may not agree, but you comprehend my point. Similarly, if the consensus narrative identifies Mother Theresa as A Good Person, then if I say, “You’re just like Mother Theresa!” then you understand that I’m complimenting you, not insulting you or making some mysterious point about fluid dynamics in an antimatter plasma. By the way, apparently Mother Theresa was arguably not all that “saintly” and perhaps something of an attention addict who would metaphorically hop in front of any camera in her vicinity. But with a well-understood consensus narrative, it doesn’t actually matter whether that’s true; you still understand “You’re just like Mother Theresa!” as a compliment and not an insult. It helps us communicate.

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As a footnote to all this: 99% of the “affirmative consent” stuff that is apparently screwing up young people’s sex lives these days is evil leftists deliberately being socially destructive, getting off on totalitarian bossiness, and trying to get to the left of other leftists in the leftist holiness spiral. But I suspect 1% of it comes from socially clunky people trying to deal with the communication protocol problem by means of what amounts explicit contractarianism. The whole “May I now caress your left buttock?” thing – GOD, THAT’S SO FUCKING AWKWARD! – may be the only perceivable solution for people who are uneasy with the fact that social reality has a certain inherent fuzziness and ambiguity. Consensus reality is a large part of the solution to that communication problem because it (for example) establishes what is normal, routine physical contact – the handshake, the high-five, etc. – and what is seductive physical contact. It functions better than the explicit consent approach because it’s fluid, flexible, and involves more communication channels than just the verbal (tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, etc.). Also it doesn’t have the painfully clunky, inhuman, and robotic, “May I now kiss your neck?” etc., which is like an 800-series Terminator trying to be seductive. Human beings cannot become aroused by behavior that’s so mechanical.

The explicit consent crowd will say, “But what about the truly ambiguous cases? They exist; you just admitted it!”

Yes, they do exist… which is why normal, traditional seduction proceeds slowly. That gives both parties enough time, and several occasions, to back out.

The reason we didn’t have the explicit verbal consent thing before circa 2010 isn’t that society was one big rape prison for women; it’s that the human race had learned its way to a set of conventions that worked for actual humans. Those conventions differed from society to society, naturally, and that’s the main part of my point. But no society settled on “May I now fondle your breasts?” (ugh!) because that doesn’t work for human beings at all.

“My god is stronger than your god!”

Severian at Founding Questions has recently been thinking about Julian Jaynes’s “bicameral mind” theory. Halfway through the book I’ve decided I’m not a fan of Jaynes – his logical leaps based on irrelevant evidence can be quite, er, impressive. But as he notes, his theory has different parts, and some may be sorta true for some people even if other aspects are completely false. One part is that people in olden times used to hallucinate voices which they interpreted as instructions from gods or kings.

This part could apply in particular to leftists, by which I mean street-level leftists (not the leadership). Leftists were hit with the tag “NPC”— “non-player character”— for a reason. They can’t think, they have no desire to think, they don’t even know what thinking is. They just look around for authority to obey.

(Women are particularly notorious for this, among red-pilled men, but it’s a general phenomenon on the left.)

Leftists only care about which god/king is the strongest, and which god/king is the strongest is decided by which one has more adherents.

(Or perhaps it’s power-weighted adherents that matters. One famous sports star has as much weight as ten regular people, or whatever.)

This certainly could be one way of accounting for leftists’ baffling and infuriating total indifference to fact, truth, common sense, or even internal consistency. They simply don’t care about those things. They’re just looking around for the most powerful god. And the most powerful god is the one whose voice is most powerful. This accounts for the fact that to them, what’s on TV is what matters, pretty much by definition. TV is the voice of the god in modern society. If you’re saying something that’s opposed to TV, you’re opposing the only thing that matters, the voice of Authority. Leftists are utterly baffled by why you’d want to do that.

This is one of the reasons that their opposition to President Trump was so shriekingly disproportionate. Imagine that nothing matters to you but obeying and publicly repeating what Authority says. As long as Harvard, the New York Times, and the President all speak with one voice, no problem. But if Harvard and the New York Times say one thing and the President says the opposite… Disaster! Catastrophe! The end of the world! Two camps, both of indisputable Authority, saying opposite things! You don’t know whom to obey! This is what leftists have in place of cognitive dissonance. And it’s agonizing for them. Hypocrisy obviously does not bother them in the least. Saying that white people who flee black neighborhoods are evil, while being a white person fleeing a black neighborhood, doesn’t even register with them. But not knowing who to obey, that is the worst emotional and intellectual torture that it is possible for them to experience. And yet… of course they know that really it was Trump who was out of step with True Authority: He disagreed with what “journalists” and college professors said! That is literally the most heretical of all possible heresies! But still, the Presidency is nevertheless very real, undeniably important and valid Authority. Anything to stop this pain of divided Authority!

This explains the enraging tendency for leftists, noted by pretty much every person on the right, to be utterly immune to fact and logic 99% of the time… and if you do, miraculously, manage to wrest a concession about some issue from them, the next time you see them they’ll have done a complete memory wipe of the debate and tell you they kicked your ass in that debate. All the facts, logic, reason, arguments that you marshaled will have been forgotten, absolutely forgotten. Why? And how? Simple: They don’t actually care about any of those things. The voice of Authority is telling them something different from what you proved yesterday, ergo you cannot have proved it.

Today you get one of them to admit that, say, government policies were the preponderant cause of the mortgage bubble and collapse of circa 2008. “Thank God!” you think. “That took seven hours of debate but at least I made a tiny dent in leftism.” But lo and behold! When you see him the next day he tells you that you proved no such thing and that the mortgage collapse was entirely caused by greedy white male capitalist loan officers. He totally denies everything that he conceded less than 24 hours before, to an utterly shameless extent that would be gaslighting if he were doing it on purpose. But that’s not really what’s going on; he’s not thinking “Bwah ha ha; I shall now gaslight this person.” What’s going on is that within 5 seconds of leaving your presence he reboots and reinstalls the Official Party Line of Authority, and the Official Party Line of Authority is that the mortgage meltdown was caused by greedy white male capitalist loan officers.

(If he’s not totally goodthinkful leftist— that is, if facts sorta enter his head, in a dim way, once or twice a year— the rebooting may require that he hop onto the Net and read a sentence or two of some Op-Ed that appeared on CNN’s web site, which reminds him of what Authority’s official position is.)

Authority’s official position is a substitute for the truth in his little leftist NPC mind. It is isomorphic to the truth in the NPC mental topology. We have truth; they have “what Authority says.”

Authority’s Official Party Line is not necessarily truth— which does not exist in any important sense in the leftist mind— rather, Authority’s Official Party Line is What We Are Saying. What We Say is what Authority Says. Repeating What Authority Says is What We Do and the truth of the claims assertions propositions strings of words is not even a question that it occurs to leftists to ask, let alone care about.

We have truth; leftists have What Authority Says.

An example. Remember when you got up this morning. Think about the shirt you’re wearing now (shirt, dress, blouse, whatever). Remember how, before you put it on, you counted every thread in it to make sure that it doesn’t have a prime number of threads? Wait, what? You didn’t do that? It didn’t even OCCUR to you to do that? The thought never even entered your head? That’s how leftists are about the truth of the claims wordstrings they repeat. It literally never enters their heads to care whether they’re true or not. If they think about it at all, they think WE’RE the weird ones because we care about truth!

This also accounts for the bizarre leftist tactic in debate of saying “No one else agrees with you.” To them this is a devastating nuclear bomb. They expect you to be crushed. Or at least to care. That we brush it off and go on talking about facts probably baffles and frustrates them as much as their total indifference to facts baffles and frustrates us.

So we won’t make progress in defeating the broad mass of the leftist cadre until we take over the educational system and the media. Yikes. That’s not going to happen short of a no-foolin’ civil war. Luckily— “luckily,” snort— the left is bumbling us into one with their insanity and hysterical refusal to compromise about anything ever. Also, the domestic situation will be shaken up enormously, natch, if we get involved with a war with Russia, the world’s largest nuclear power. And that could happen if our insane NPCs don’t back off. And so far they’re refusing to back off…

An observable characteristic of p-zombies

In case you’re not familiar with this concept: p-zombies is short for philosophical zombies. This does not mean zombies who are interested in Aristotle. It means biological robots who are human in every respect except that they have no consciousness. They are not self-aware, just very sophisticated robots made out of flesh. The concept is used in philosophy, neuroscience, etc. as a foil for thinking about consciousness.

The standard view of p-zombies is that they’d be observationally indistinguishable from humans as we know them. This is because, if we take a purely materialist view of consciousness, consciousness does not actually do anything; it’s just “along for the ride” as they say. All the neural structures that support cognition can do so without requiring that there be any subjectivity involved. (That’s one theory, anyway.) So p-zombies would talk, laugh, do mathematics, have sex, fight, etc. There just wouldn’t be anybody home inside their skulls.

But I was thinking about this recently because I’ve been reading Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind (due to the fact that Severian at Founding Questions has been talking about it). And it occurred to me…

There is something normal humans do that p-zombies wouldn’t: Talk about consciousness. P-zombies can talk about anything that’s empirically observable in the classic positivist sense of observable, e.g. they can say “red” when electromagnetic radiation of a certain wavelength hits their eyes. But there is no consciousness in a world of p-zombies. There’s nothing for them to observe, no empirical phenomenon to provoke any kind of response from their nervous systems. No talk about consciousness could occur on a planet inhabited by such beings.

If, by assumption, there is no consciousness, then there is no analogue of “light of a certain wavelength” for p-zombies’ nervous systems to respond to.

This is not like saying that p-zombies couldn’t talk about centaurs because centaurs don’t exist. Sure they could; they could combine the ideas of horse and a person. But a notable feature of consciousness is that it’s not observable (in a classical positivist sense). Consciousness is not like centaurs.

(Consciousness is sui generis; that’s why there’s a philosophical and scientific problem of consciousness but no philosophical and scientific problem of centaurs.)

The situation is fragile, though. A planet inhabited by nothing but p-zombies could never invent the term “consciousness,” but it would only take one normal human to exist and start saying things like “I have a subjective consciousness” to get the p-zombies to start uttering similar sentences by imitation. So the very existence of word-concepts like “consciousness” is proof that somewhere, somewhen, there has been at least one self-aware human. Paraphrasing Heinlein from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: “Are humans self-aware? Well, I don’t know about you, tovarisch, but…”

“I Fucking Love Science!”

(1) People who fancy themselves “rationalists” or “lovers of science,” or, to use an older and now dorky-sounding term, “secular humanists,” wanted to join a community of rational people who would get everything right. Or at least, they’d get everything rightER over time, because they were committed to the right methods—logic, the scientific method, etc.—and that’s what matters, yes? Their notion was “We’ll shed horrors of the past like (literal) witch hunts based on ignorant religious beliefs” and they’d obtain all the benefits of keeping up with the latest discoveries in nutrition, etc. And— whether they admitted this to themselves on a conscious level or not— at the same time they’d receive the emotional and social benefits of joining a church. And all this while exorcizing the demons of irrationality! Awesome!

But that’s not what happens. What happens is that the minnow swallows the whale. What happens is that humans are humans, and so the demons of irrationality assimilate the “rationalistic pursuit of truth” so that that becomes just another empty slogan. The slogan is more-or-less immediately turned toward vicious witch hunts.

Instead of pointing at people and screaming Witch! “scientific rationalists” now point at them and scream Mask denier!

This may require some reminders about rhetoric from February and March 2020 which turned out to be politically inconvenient and so has been memory-holed. In case you’ve forgotten: In February and March 2020 the standard leftist line on masks was that masks were somehow a fascist plot of then-president Trump. The argument was never made coherent, but the basic structure was clear:

1. Trump might support masking.

2. ?

3. Therefore, Fascism.

Soon after that the left executed one of its impressively disciplined U-turns, from declaring on date X that anyone who supported masking was a fascist to declaring on date X+2 that anyone who did not support masking was a fascist.

My point: If any of these people who claimed “I fucking love science!” actually cared about science they would have taken to heart the traditional rhetoric of science, which declares that all knowledge is provisional, subject to future revision, etc. (Whether this is literally always true doesn’t matter; it’s true at least a large fraction of the time.) Thus they would have been less quick to accuse pro-maskers of being Trumpian fascists in February 2020, and would have been hesitant about declaring anti-maskers to be Trumpian fascists in April.

Which episode demonstrates that…

If you make science your religion substitute you don’t get a “rational belief system.” You get all the worst aspects of religion assimilating the intended rationality.

Why the worst? (Why not the best?) Because traditional religions have been around for hundreds or thousands of years and (a) have had their most destructive moral fires burn out long ago, and (b) have learned certain lessons about real-world humans over time. Thus they’ve accumulated brake pedals, negative feedback mechanisms, procedures for cooling down excessively fervent new converts, etc. New religions, whether of “pure reason” or Marxism, etc., don’t have any of that. They’re pure moralistic assholery, which is why they do things like murder people by the tens of millions in the name of peace and enlightenment.

You cannot have a religion, or religion substitute, based on science or rationality.

Fundamentally, trying to have a religion based on (the search for) pure truth is a category mistake: It’s like expecting that taking a music class will give you big muscles or that lifting weights will teach you about music. And that category mistake, in which all that happens is that your hopes are disappointed, is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is worse, oh so much worse. See: the French Revolution, the entire twentieth century, etc., etc.

(2) Suppose you could get people to take the pursuit of truth seriously. Humans being humans, a holiness spiral would start on that, sooner or later. (Translation: Sooner.)

Think you can’t holiness spiral on the value of truth?

You work in the lab searching for truth 17 hours a day. I say everyone should be forced to work in the lab 18 hours per day!

You only found the mass of the electron out to 11 decimal places! I say we should never rest until we’ve figured it out to 12 decimal places! A thousand decimal places!

Etc.

(3) A certain amount of social coordination might require some false statements. I’m not sure about this; it’s just a hypothesis.

But suppose it’s snowing out and I say “It’s snowing out.” You say, “Yes, indeed it is.” We’re not doing anything but noting a fact.

Suppose I say, “Snow isn’t white; it’s orange with green polka dots.” If you say “Yup, it sure is,” something else is going on. Plainly we don’t have this exchange to note a fact. I’m basically saying “I’m a member of the Orange Snow Cult” and you’re saying, “Hey, me too!” This is a social function that has nothing to do with sharing observations about empirical reality.

And it’s a really strong signal of shared group membership precisely because its so obviously false.

Comprehension quiz: Why does Catholic doctrine say the bread is actually, literally, not metaphorically the body of Christ? Why is it not an important aspect of Catholic doctrine, or any ideology, that snow is cold? (Explain your answer, 10 points.)

If we’re going to create a world with a sane public ideology/ religion/ cohesiveness-fostering memeplex, we need to consider this aspect of communication verbal behavior. I haven’t yet given up on the idea that a state religion could consist solely of (a) prescriptive statements (“Don’t steal”), (b) empirically true statements (“Snow exists”) and (c) safely meaningless statements (“The Transcendental is infinite.”) But it’s possible that we’re going to need some flagrantly false ones too, to facilitate social cohesion. In fact history rather strongly suggests that’s the case. (Fuck me sideways, but humans are weird.) If it is necessary, then we should devote some thought to blatantly false statements that are harmless. Something like “Snow is orange with green polka dots.”

We’ll have to navigate between a Scylla and Charybdis: We want to avoid statements like “Men and women are equal” that stupid people might take seriously, or evil people might pretend to take seriously. But at the same time, “Snow is orange with green polka dots” plainly won’t do: it’s not nearly grand-sounding enough. We need something that sounds important like “Men and women are equal”—something which, if it were true, would be important. At the same time it can’t actually be important because then it lends itself to being taken seriously and holiness spiraled. On the other hand, “Snow is orange with green polka dots” does not lend itself to being holiness spiraled, because it’s obviously fanciful, but for that very reason it won’t win any hearts and minds. No 17-year-old is going to become a fervent Orange Snower the way they become fervent Christians or Marxists or Objectivists etc. We need something that’s grand-sounding like “The Transcendental is infinite” but less vague. It must sound like it might actually mean something.

In the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series some aliens have a problem. Billions of years ago they created an enormous computer to find the Ultimate Answer, the answer to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After calculating for a long time, it comes up with the answer, which is 42. However, it doesn’t know what the question is. The two aliens who are supposed to convey the Ultimate Answer to the rest of their species try to just bluff their way out of this by making up a question.

“The only thing we can do now,” said Benjy, crouching and stroking his whiskers in thought, “is to try and fake a question, invent one that will sound plausible.”

“Difficult,” said Frankie. He thought. “How about, What’s yellow and dangerous?”

Benjy considered this for a moment.

“No, no good,” he said. “Doesn’t fit the answer.”

They sank into silence for a few seconds.

“All right,” said Benjy. “What do you get if you multiply six by seven?”

“No, no, too literal, too factual,” said Frankie, “wouldn’t sustain the punter’s interest.”

Again they thought.

Then Frankie said: “Here’s a thought. How many roads must a man walk down?”

“Ah!” said Benjy. “Aha, now that does sound promising!” He rolled the phrase around a little. “Yes,” he said, “that’s excellent! Sounds very significant without actually tying you down to meaning anything at all. How many roads must a man walk down? Forty-two. Excellent, excellent, that’ll fox ’em. Frankie, baby, we are made!”

We need a “How many roads must a man walk down?” The challenge is that we are not writing comedy SF but trying to design a workable state religion. We must be cynical and not cynical at the same time. We must be cynical because we are trying to design a state religion that will work for actual humans. And we must not be cynical because we’re the good guys and we’re trying to design a state religion that is sane and good.

Well… no one can accuse us of insufficient ambition in our goals!

Political Philosophy and the Theory of Martingales

My political philosophy is the theory of martingales.

A martingale is a dynamic stochastic process which— don’t fucking freak out. “Dynamic” simply means changing over time and “stochastic” means having a random component. In other words, dynamic stochastic processes are Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Anyway, a martingale is a generalization of the concept of a random walk, a dynamic stochastic process which has an expected change of zero. That’s all, no biggie. If you can’t handle this go look at some funny cat videos on YouTube and I’ll see you for my next post. Besides, I’m shuffling some ignorable technical asides off to the footnotes.(1) Maybe that will get this published in USA Today; they fucking love the theory of dynamic stochastic processes.

It’s trivially easy to prove that the evolution of a rational person’s beliefs over time is a martingale.(2) Basic idea: If you’re rational you’ll have anticipated all future events that are anticipatable, so the only thing left over to change your beliefs over time is events that weren’t anticipatable. That is, you cannot predict the future evolution of your own beliefs.

The more precise statement of this explicitly mentions events’ probabilities, but it’s the same idea.

Sample path: Rational agent’s belief over time in 2-space.

I briefly discussed some implications that this fact has for politics in one of my first posts, The Mind Cannot Foresee Its Own Advance, and I want to return to this theme. Despite the opening sentence of this post, my entire political philosophy is not really the theory of martingales; I just wanted to open with a strong statement. Like Beethoven’s famous duh duh duh DUH.

Now the human race (SPOILER ALERT) is not rational, but we are learning over time in way that involves paying attention to data. (Some of us are, anyway.) This is true at least for subjects that aren’t too politicized, e.g. astronomy, and for pretty much all subjects in investigations and discussions outside of our formal institutions (which are hotbeds of reality-hating dogmatism).

But note that crucial caveat: for subjects that aren’t too politicized. We need to keep the “politicize everything” crowd disempowered and at the margins of society so they can’t step on the human race’s ability to advance. Things must be kept as loose as possible so we can continually follow the unpredictable martingale of our evolving beliefs toward the truth.

I mentioned astronomy as a subject that’s not too politicized, but of course no subject is safe from the left. Apparently the USSR had a Marxist dogma about whether the universe is finite. I forget which way Marxist dogma landed on that, but the point is, the dogma didn’t come from data; it came from some notion about whether an infinite universe was consistent with dialectical materialism. (LOL, WTF?) And of course there was the Lysenkoist period, which— according to a Soviet biologist in the Gorbachev era— set Soviet biology back by at least a decade.

Obviously neither astronomy nor anything else is safe from the increasingly insane left, a mob that has decided that acronyms are racist and the statement that 2+2 = 4 is western cultural imperialism.

Not that further examples are needed these days, but an example of how this insanity affects hard science: Bill Nye the Science Guy used to have a video explaining how XY and XX determine a person to be male or female. Netflix censored that video. Nye himself, apparently quite the screaming pussy, disavowed reality and embraced “gender fluidity” theory around that time.

These are examples of the human race moving backwards, but it’s not enough to not regress; we need to advance. And no dogma can ever say “We’ve figured it out; no further intellectual innovations are valid,” because the future evolution of our beliefs is unpredictable.

This doesn’t mean you can’t hold the opinion that certain matters are for practical purposes settled. Often the probability of further significant revisions is small enough (based on current information) that that’s a reasonable belief. But it does mean that no person or group should ever be allowed the power to stop other people from investigating the allegedly settled subject.

Einstein sure as shit wasn’t predictable based on Newton. If future discoveries were predictable they wouldn’t be discoveries.

I’ll return again (probably ad nauseam) to a theme of this blog: The things that many of us used to believe about women were largely the exact opposite of the truth. God forbid that we not be allowed to revise our beliefs over time! I won’t get into specifics much— I rehash them enough— but let me mention that some of this body of knowledge about female psychology is relevant for a single man on the dating market and some of it is relevant from a point of view of “social policy.” (A lot of it is relevant for both.) An example: That a lot of women want to play a game of “Let’s you and him fight” between men, including groups of men at a societal level, has existential implications for the survival of our society. That’s something I never could have foreseen when I was 15, or probably when I was 25.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky said in a lucid moment: “Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf.” This is nothing but a poetic formulation of the martingale proposition.

Does all this imply that free speech absolutism should be non-negotiable? Actually, yes, in principle that’s exactly what it implies. But. We have seen in the last 75 years or so that that may not be a long-run stable situation. Total freedom of speech, as well as providing enormous benefits, also provides malign power-seekers unrestricted opportunity to coordinate and plan with each other. This is a problem because (along with 99 other reasons) when they acquire power one of their first moves is to crush all ideas they don’t like. So it’s possible that level-1 censorship might be necessary to prevent level-10,000 censorship. E.g. we might have to exclude communists from universities because if we let them in, they’ll soon take over and exclude everyone but communists.

Or maybe it’s not that simple. There are enormous practical problems with ceding anything to the idea of censorship because that abandons the clearest Schelling point on the issue. Maybe the best formulation of the problem is not “Choose zero censorship,” because that might not be a long-run tenable situation, but “Choose the minimum sustainable level of censorship.” Not to cop out, but: It’s complicated.

In any case…

The human race faces fearsome challenges, as it always has and always will. We must be free to have our beliefs changed unpredictably by new evidence if we are to learn, adapt, and overcome the tests.

Or to put it more tersely: Rational learners’ belief revisions are mean-zero, so kill all the censors!

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(1) A martingale is a generalization of the concept of random walk because the only requirement for a variable to be a martingale is that it have an expected (mean) change of zero. A random walk, at least the versions that I’m familiar with, also typically assumes that the probabilities are symmetric about that mean and indeed, frequently assumes that the probabilities are Normal. It also assumes that the probability distribution governing the dynamics is constant over time. A martingale allows the probability distribution to mutate all it wants, provided that one feature, the mean-zero change, always holds. For example, a martingale needn’t have a constant variance.

(2) It’s an immediate consequence of the Law of Iterated Expectations. Here’s another way of seeing it: If you’ve ever studied Statistics, you’ll remember the obvious fact that a rational forecast algorithm has zero-mean forecast errors. So if you’re rational, then the mean revision to your beliefs as you correct your forecast errors will be… See? Not that hard.
By the way, note that if Joe has data that Jill doesn’t, then Joe can predict how Jill’s beliefs will change when she gets the data, but Jill can’t predict that. She has to wait until she gets the data.

(3) Invisible bonus footnote only for those who read the other two! If all this sounds vaguely familiar but you can’t quite place it, it might be because you once read about the Efficient Markets Hypothesis in Finance. Note the EMH assumes rational market participants. Its random walk implication is an example of the point I’m making in this post. I exposited this idea here.

Thoughts from a Random Sampling of Beyond Good and Evil

A pic of Nietzsche from before his moustache grew to the point where it had its own detectable gravitational field.

Since I’ve read Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil a couple of times I allow myself the liberty of dipping back into it at random every now and then when I have some free minutes. Here are some reactions from a random sampling from June 2020:

1. Nietzsche as Frenchman

The opening of the Preface:

Supposing truth is a woman— what then? Are there not grounds for suspecting that all philosophers, insofar as they have been dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness and clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won— and today every kind of dogma is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all!

My first reaction: Interesting opening. Unfortunately the book does not consistently live up to this opening, though it has its moments.

My second reaction: How very French! If you didn’t know N. was German, you’d probably guess that was written by a Frenchman. You can see why post-moderns like Nietzsche: For stylistic as well as substantive reasons.

Also, note the red pill knowledge here: The gruesome seriousness and clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart. Indeed. The essence of seduction is obliqueness.

Speaking of French sensibilities, try this from Section 1:

The will to truth, which will still tempt us to many a hazardous venture, the famous truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect— what questions has this will to truth not laid before us! What strange, wicked, questionable questions! It is already a long story— yet it seems as if it had hardly begun. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That we should finally learn from this Sphinx to ask questions too? Who is it really that puts questions to us here? What in us really wants “truth”?

Indeed we made a long halt at the question about the cause of this will—until at last we came to a complete stop before a yet more fundamental question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want the truth: Why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?

The problem of the value of truth came before us—or was it we who came before the problem? Which of us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks.

Not sure what the hell all that means, but it sure sounds profound if you don’t think about it too carefully. And oh so French.

This part again: The problem of the value of truth came before us—or was it we who came before the problem? That sounds like a low-brow person’s stereotypical image of “intellectual bullshit spewed by ivory tower eggheads.” Nietzsche’s not doing intellectuals any favors here.

Nietzsche employed his style… or did his style employ Nietzsche? Which is the artist here, and which the art? Or is this questionable question too dangerous to ask? Perhaps it will take harder men, sterner philosophers of the future, to look this question in the eye and (blah blah).

I had a friend who maintained that N. took himself way too seriously. I think not even N’s fiercest partisans can deny his guilt on that count. Here is a relatively mild sampling, from the end of the same section:

It almost seems to us as if the problem [of the desirability of truth] had never been put so far— as if we were the first to see it, fix it with our eyes, and risk it.

2. Nietzsche as Stereotypical “Nietzschean”

The first sentence of Section 29:

Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong.

That sounds like something that stereotypical Nietzsche would say. There actually is a lot of justice in Nietzsche’s popular reputation. What people like Otto from A Fish Called Wanda miss is that N’s interest in strength and independence were primarily about emotional and intellectual virtues.

3. Nietzsche as Post-Modernist

From Section 38:

The French Revolution… noble and enthusiastic spectators all over Europe have contemplated it from a distance and interpreted it according to their own indignations and enthusiasms for so long, and so passionately, that the text finally disappeared under the interpretation. So a noble posterity might once more misunderstand the whole of the past, and in that way alone make it tolerable to look at.

Or rather, isn’t this what has already happened? Have not we ourselves been that “noble posterity”? And isn’t now precisely the moment when, insofar as we comprehend this, it is all over?

In this passage, especially the emphasized part— the emphasis is in the original— one again can see why the post-moderns liked N.

4. Nietzsche as (Possible) Social Darwinist

From Section 62:

The hitherto paramount religions… are among the principal causes which have kept the type of “man” upon a lower level: they have preserved too much that which should have perished… when they had given comfort to the sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless, and when they had allured from society into convents and spiritual penitentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what else had they to do in order to work systematically in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in deed and in truth, to work for the deterioration of the European race?

It’s not clear to me whether N. is actually talking about genetics here or purely cultural effects. But he is obviously saying that coddling the weak is bad.

5. Nietzsche as Intellectual and Would-Be Prophet

From Section 212:

The philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has ever found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today.

A fun perspective on intellectuality… but it has been the source of much mischief in the last 100 years. Think of Marxism, for example, with its hordes of genocidal disciples convinced they were leading humanity into the future.

Also, this quote exemplifies a hilarious theme in Nietzsche’s thought: he’s a real believer in progress! This from the guy who sees himself as a provocative Loki, running around questioning everything, kicking out the legs from the sanctified beliefs of his day by means of radical skepticism! In the passage I quoted from Section 1 he even goes so far as to question whether truth is valuable. Yet he believes it’s possible to anticipate the future’s major beliefs. (Or perhaps he saw himself as creating those beliefs.) The guy who sees himself as a sort of epater le bourgeois crusader, attacking with glee the cherished beliefs of his day as the horrified gentility look on— that guy couldn’t even see through the 19th century belief in Progress! My God, that is funny! That. Is. Hilarious.

N’s belief in progress is in fact a major theme of all his writing, manifest in his constant talk about new philosophers coming up. E.g. the end of Section 2: “One must await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as will have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto prevalent—philosophers of the dangerous ‘maybe’ in every sense of the term. And to speak in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers beginning to appear.”

6. Nietzsche as Actual Prophet

Nietzsche, writing in the 1880s, looks forward to the twentieth century:

From Section 251:

I have never yet met a German who was favorably inclined to the Jews; and however decided the repudiation of actual anti-Semitism may be on the part of all prudent and political men, this prudence and policy is not perhaps directed against the nature of the sentiment itself, but only against its dangerous excess… That Germany has amply enough Jews, that the German stomach, the German blood, has difficulty (and will long have difficulty) in digesting even this quantum of “Jew” …is the unmistakable declaration and language of a general instinct, to which one must listen… “Let no more Jews come in!” …thus commands the instinct of a people…

A thinker who has the future of Europe at heart, in all his perspectives concerning the future, will figure the Jews, as the Russians, as above all the surest and likeliest factors in the great play and battle of forces.

Well! After World War II and the Cold War, that seems pretty damn prescient!

From Section 208:

I do not say this as one who desires it, in my heart I should rather prefer the contrary—I mean such an increase in the threatening attitude of Russia, that Europe would have to make up its mind to become equally threatening—namely, to acquire one will, by means of a new caste to rule over the Continent, a persistent, dreadful will of its own, that can set its aims thousands of years ahead; so that the long spun-out comedy of its petty-statism, and its dynastic as well as its democratic many-willed-ness, might finally be brought to a close. The time for petty politics is past; the next century will bring the struggle for the dominion of the world—the compulsion to large-scale politics.

This passage prefigures the Cold War and the European Union project!

One could also do a section on “Red Pill Nietzsche” or “Nietzsche on Women” or something, but that topic deserves its own blog post.

Straightening out the “Anthropic Principle”

This is my second and presumably last post on the anthropic principle. The first one is here.

The anthropic principle per Wikipedia is the “philosophical consideration that any data we collect about the universe is filtered by the fact that, in order for it to be observable in the first place, it must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it.” In popular discourse, this notion often manifests something like this: “How is the outrageously unlikely fact of our existence explained? Well, if the universe weren’t consistent with human life, we wouldn’t be here to ask that question!” I have beaten this formulation with a big heavy stick before (see the foregoing link) and I’ve now figured out how to frame the issue in a different but equally clear way.

First note that probabilities from your point of view depend on how much you know. For example, there’s probability that it will rain on any random day in Boston, given no other information. Then there’s there’s probability that it will rain today in Boston, given that it rained yesterday. These are generally going to be different probabilities.

Stat folks say “conditional on” instead of “given that.” E.g. where a normal person would say “the probability that it will rain today, given that it rained yesterday,” a Stat person would say “the probability that it will rain today, conditional on the fact that it rained yesterday.” And the probability that it will rain on any random day, given no other information, is called the unconditional probability.

On the “anthropic principle”: When people ask things like, “How is the outrageously unlikely fact of our existence explained?” they are interested in the unconditional probability that the universe has properties that can support human life (and that human life actually did evolve, but let’s just stick with the first part). Whereas the “anthropic principle” answers the completely trivial question, “What is the probability that the universe can support human life, conditional on the observation that human life actually exists?” The answer to that utterly trivial question is 100%, obviously.

Literally no human being ever, in the history of the world, meant to ask, “What’s the probability that the universe can support human life, given that it actually does support human life?” Yet that is the question that the so-called “anthropic principle” answers. Seriously, here’s the Wikipedia formulation again: The anthropic principle is the “philosophical consideration that any data we collect about the universe is filtered by the fact that, in order for it to be observable in the first place, it must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it.” That is literally saying, “The probability that the universe can support life, given that there is life to observe it, is 1.”

So much for the “anthropic principle.”

So what’s the honest answer to the unconditional question? I don’t see how anyone could know, because to answer this we’d need to know the probability distribution from which the actual universe was drawn. We don’t know that. Of course one can put forth if-then propositions about it. A common one is, “Suppose all universes which are physically possible exist. (The many worlds hypothesis.) Then the probability of any particular universe existing (including ones with humans) is 1.” Sure. But we don’t know whether the many worlds hypothesis is true.

On the Possibility of Having True Beliefs

I vaguely recall a blog in which people were debating the role of self-confidence in pickup. (I forget whether it was a Game blog or a “rationalist” blog.) One person in the comments made the well-known point, a la Heartiste, that it’s better to be irrationally self-confident than rationally pessimistic, because with confidence you’ll do better with chicks.

Some doofus disputed this, saying it’s not good, because then “you’ll have beliefs that are demonstrably false.” Who cares, doofus? I’d rather have the false belief that I’ll score with 99% of chicks, which self-confidence leads me to score with say 20% of them, than have the belief that I’ll only score with 1%, if that pessimism would be a self-fulfilling prophecy and lead me to score with 1% of them. Or even worse, what if you had the belief that you’d score with zero chicks, and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy?!

The second commenter missed that while having true beliefs is good, there are other things that are also good. Like sex, for example.

Nietzsche: “Knowledge for its own sake”—that is the last snare laid by morality: we are thereby completely entangled in morals once more. The opening sections of Beyond Good and Evil engage with this in more depth. Old Fred was an interesting guy.

I could just stop right there, but I want to springboard from here to make a broader point about beliefs and outcomes. Consider general situations in which beliefs affect reality. For example self-fulfilling prophecies (SFPs) are common in economics, e.g. if enough people think a recession is coming, that can make them freak out and behave in ways— cutting back on consumer spending, laying off workers— that bring on a recession.

You can also have the opposite of an SFP. Example: I hear tell that chicks don’t like wearing the same dress as other chicks. Let’s suppose that every chick who’s going to a certain party tonight believes that lots of other chicks will be wearing a certain off-the-rack dress. Since they hate wearing what other chicks are wearing, none of them wears that dress. So the belief prevents itself from coming true.

In general beliefs can affect reality in ways more complex than self-fulfilling prophecies or self-blocking prophecies.

Here is my main point: In situations in which beliefs matter, it’s not at all obvious that there always even exist equilibrium beliefs, that is, beliefs that are both true and game-theoretically stable.

In math-speak, the item of interest is the mapping between beliefs and reality and the question is, Does that mapping even have a fixed point? That is, are there any beliefs that are self-confirming? It’s far from obvious whether the answer is always Yes.

(In the pickup example, a fixed point would be any SFP about your success rate. E.g. if you think you’ll score with 60% of chicks and that level of confidence causes you to indeed score with 60% of chicks.)

It’s possible that there are kinds of interactions in which any given belief is like the dress belief, in the sense that any particular belief will prevent itself from being true. In this kind of situation, hectoring someone because he has beliefs “which are demonstrably false” is even more idiotic, because it’s not even possible to have beliefs which won’t be demonstrably false!

(In theory an external observer— someone who’s not going to the party, in the dress example— could make correct predictions about the situation, but my focus here is the beliefs of people involved in the situation, e.g. you’re a guy going to a bar to try to pick up a chick and that’s what you’re forming beliefs about. By the way, even an external observer can’t form correct predictions without knowing all participants’ beliefs. That would require reading people’s minds, so no.)

On this claim that equilibrium beliefs may not be possible, people familiar with game theory may say “Ha! Nash’s Theorem, bitch!” But of course Nash’s Theorem makes certain assumptions about the environment, and uses a fixed-point theorem to prove the existence of equilibrium. If the mapping from beliefs to outcomes isn’t continuous, standard fixed point theorems don’t apply so that kind of proof doesn’t work.

(Note to nerdlingers: Nash’s Theorem deals with the continuity problem by letting agents’ moves be chosen probabilistically; this makes the relevant strategy sets continuous. But here, an agent’s “move” is his belief. The beliefs are about probabilities, but the beliefs are not themselves chosen probabilistically. There is a difference between (A) believing that a certain coin has a 0.5 probability of coming up heads, and (B) randomly switching between believing that it has a 100% probability and a 0% probability of coming up heads. If agents change their beliefs randomly, Nash’s Theorem might apply, but that’s not what we mean when we talk about beliefs, and certainly not rational beliefs. Changing your behavior with a random component can be rational, in adversarial games where you don’t want to be predictable, but changing your beliefs at random is not rational.)

The relevant mapping doesn’t even necessarily fill up the entire space. (Nerds: The mapping needn’t even be a surjective, i.e. “onto” mapping.) Indeed, there’s no man in the world who can be guaranteed to score with every woman in the world if he tries. Doesn’t matter if you believe you’ll have a 100% success rate; you won’t. So not all success probabilities are even in the range of the mapping.

“Damn it, Neuropoison; you’re really ass-raping my attention span here!” Okay sugar-tits, look at the pretty picture:

A mapping from believed probabilities (horizontal axis) to actual probabilities (vertical axis).

The diagram has the same variable on both axes, probabilities in [0,1]. Thus the entire admissible space is a 1 x 1 square, though I prefer to call it a “2-dimensional hypercube” as that helps me to score with intellectual chicks. Any point on the identity line is a fixed point, a self-confirming belief about the probability of some event. The issue is that the mapping from beliefs to reality is not continuous, so there isn’t a fixed point. That is, there are no self-confirming beliefs.

Just eye-balling it, it looks like if your belief is 100%, the reality is about 60%, and that’s as high as it gets. If this described your F-close rate with chicks, your best belief (if you could choose your beliefs purposefully) would be that you’d score with 100% of chicks you hit on, which would lead to a success rate of 60%. Obviously I just pulled these numbers out of my ass, but the point is, anyone who says, “Your beliefs are demonstrably false” should be given a wedgie for various reasons, among them there are no beliefs which will self-confirm as demonstrably true anyway.

Now that I’ve finished writing this I’m wondering whether it’s mathematically robust. It seems to be, but did I miss something? Is there some way to do a Nash on this and guarantee that everything is actually continuous in the relevant way, thus guaranteeing at least one fixed point? If not, it’s unsettling, as it illustrates that there can be situations in which having correct beliefs is not even theoretically possible.

UPDATE a few days later: It turns out I was right. Nerdlinger explanation: The reason you can’t “do a Nash” on this is that Nash’s theorem applies to game theory, in which all players are best responding to other players’ moves. (From now on I’m going to write playahs because that amuses me.) That is, each playah’s move is his best option given the other playahs’ moves. And “best responding” means optimizing, which (with other features of Nash’s setup) allows the Theorem of the Maximum to be applied. And that theorem implies the continuity of best-response mappings, which in turn implies the existence of at least one fixed point. But here, there is no optimization/best responding. You believe some probability, then cause and effect kicks in and results in some actual probability. There’s no other playah who is choosing the actual probabilities to optimize some goal function. Therefore, nothing prevents the relevant mapping from being discontinuous, so there is not necessarily a fixed point.