Intro

This is the storage place for my longform thoughts, organized in the Table of Contents here. You should just go read there.

Most of these are culled from three social media presences:

Prequels Redeemed, a Marxist analysis of the Star Wars Prequels and other low-culture movies. There's an emphasis on class, universalism, and artistic technique here.

Bambamramfan, a humanist oriented tumblr account adjacent-to-but-highly-confrontational-with the rationalist sphere. There's more of an emphasis on our shared humanity, and analyzing the form of ideology, and current political commentary here.

Left Conservative, a Word Press that collects thoughts and articles about the collision between tribalism and modern life. There's a lot of looking at what tribes believe about themselves, even when we might disagree with the particular tribe strongly.

You can also find my shorter thoughts on twitter and the occasional reddit comment. I very rarely post to Fanfiction.net.

Sim-Modernism

I've been thinking about the endless war between Modernism and Post-Modernism. Not even a debate, since so much of the discussion is about even defining the borders and who is on what side. To restate things:

Modernism is the James Scott sense of a belief that we can figure out the rules and principles - behind the universe, life sciences, sociology, morality and ethics - and our leaders can apply them to create an ordered and just society. The Enlightenment was big on Modernism, and really Marxism was its apex. 

Post-Modernism is the post-WW1 understanding that none of these rules ever consistently work and the world is nigh-impossible to understand, and any rules we *think* we have about the world are really just stories we tell ourselves, to justify our position in society or to advance one political side over another. It's very meta, often in the Bulverist sense. 

(Pre-Modernism just being the regular traditionalist "I do this because my ancestors' ancestors were doing this hundreds of years ago. And because God, speaking through His divinely chosen ruler, tells me to or else He will strike me dead.")

A key thing about both of these philosophical schools is that they can't really be disproven. If a modernist regime fails, obviously they just had bad laws instead of good laws, or the people didn't try hard enough to stick to these principles. And post-modernism never fails, it's failure is just a story *you* tell to justify your opposition to it.

(Really you should think of both of these as tools to analyze situations with, sometimes even using both tools on the same situation and asking yourself which is more useful in this moment. But anyway.)

I'm not going to resolve the war between these things today, but just talk about another *modernism I see that is neither of these.

***

Let's talk about World of Warcraft.

It's the extremely big MMO that has had millions of players for well over a decade now. In the beginning, we knew nothing about the undercarriage of how the game worked (what items dropped from what, how good they were, etc.) Over time we figured out some principles, and we got large forums called "Elitist Jerks" where people argued over the best classes, the best ability rotations, the best gear, etc etc. They referenced guides and came up with general theories and had vibrant conversations. This is clear modernism.

Then almost all the conversations died, and people talk very little on the forums last I checked, compared to years at its prime.

What happened? Politics and post-modernism?

No, what happened was Big Data.

Eventually someone built a downloadable tool called simcraft. It knew every spell, boss, item, and talent in the game. You could just input all your gear, the skills you used, the order you used them in rotation, the general style of fight and... hit a button and it would tell you how much damage per second (DPS) you would do with perfect execution.

This is in some ways a cludge. Few of us have perfect execution, after all. And this doesn't cover utility, tanking, and healing and so those needed other sims with more assumptions. And there were a number of errors anyone could find with its assumptions. But it at least gave a concrete answer to argue over.

Now anytime anyone had a question of "is this talent underrated, because combined with this weapon, on this fight you could..." and the only answer would be "sim it." If sims reliably showed your new idea was better, the top raiders would drift to that, and then the way they did things would trickle down to everyone else. No one really had to argue about which class was the best - there were numbers for it.

The "skill" of the world of warcraft community got better, and the discourse of it dimmed. Just sim it.

Now this would just be an anecdote about games, except for the fact that Big Data is entering more and more of our life.

If you have any problem that can be addressed by throwing it at GIANT FUCKTON OF DATA, now people do that. We often don't know *why* the correlation between two things is the way it is, but we know it's correlated now.

Our incipient AI's aren't Asimovian entities built on three principles taken to their logical conclusions. They're neural nets trained on a ton of data and reinforced with adjustments to hell and back. They give very good answers (and beat us at boardgames.) We generally don't have any modernist explanation for what they are thinking or what rules they are following. 

While manipulating training sets is as old as data science, with big data we are talking about sets too big for naive actors to change a few datum and get the answers they want (plus part of this mythos is that anyone can run the simulations themselves if they want to.) The simulations are still built very much on human error, but they are too large and incomprehensible to be easily hijacked by postmodernists into giving the simple answers they want (or rather, that they claim ideologues want.)

This is Sim-Modernism.

We don't just see it in videogame sims and GPT outputs. We see it when someone asks our favorite route from NYC to Philadelphia and we answer "...I just follow whatever Google tells me to." We see it in the most famous political prognosticator of our era not making a simple political model (like Sam Wang would), but rather the model with the most inputs they can imaginably throw in, run the simulation 10,000 times, and see what the results look like. Nate Silver has some idea why his models will favor one party or the other, but he still is in the dark often on what is going on "under the hood." We sort of see it in Tetlock's Superforecaster-ism. And most of all we see it in algorithms on social media and video sites, that are trained to get the most "engagement" from audiences, and so start throwing up bizarre recommendations that no tech executive would have predicted or even wanted.

A lot of the answers Sim-Modernism gives are pretty good! And even more useful, they are plentiful. Sim-Modernism isn't limited to theorizing what a good novel is, it can generate a new one in seconds, or hundreds of new novels for you to read, once it gets good enough.

I'm not celebrating this as "WE HAVE THE ANSWER that cuts the Gordian knot of modernism." Sim-Modernism does get more accuracy than either regular Modernism or Post - but it's obviously scary in its own way. It means running or being a part of a system that you don't know how it works or where it is really leading you.

(Has anyone else had the experience of driving well out of your way because Google says this path is faster, only to find it eventually requires you to drive through an area you wouldn't have - either because construction means it's really blocked, or it's a suburb that feels like cheating to treat as a bypass?)

And, it will feel sad, in a humanistic way, to live a life that is more efficient but not to understand any of its underpinnings. Do this because "the sim said it is optimal" is not a lot more satisfying than "because your father did and your father's father did..."

And of course, we will have to deal with "whether a computer code that is just regurgitating predictions based on a very large sample of text" is a person or not when it answers questions.

------

Note, this is not the same thing as ontology-thru-markets, be it the Wall Street Stock Market or the smallest online predictive market. Those are most driven by intelligent, optimizing agents interacting with each other and then iterating on what will get the best results given other intelligent optimizing agents, who then iterate based on that. Which is interesting, and profitable, but not really just running models and regressions through a very large load of static data.

Modern Virtue Ethics

Watching RRR - which is a maximalist Indian film about the conflict between utilitarianism and deontic ethics - reminded me that ye olde “virtue ethics” is the red-headed step child of online discussions. Sure, maybe you know it’s been kicking around since Aristotle (and will henceforth be referred to as Aristotelian ethics, or AE), or that for a long time this was the dominant ethical framework of Europe, but now what does it mean? AE is often framed as “if you do something with good intent.” Sounds nice but how can that really compare to “making the best result” (consequentialism) or “doing right instead of wrong” (deontology). Caring about your intent about all just sounds so self-centered.

So, ignore that. Wipe everything you know about virtue ethics clean, and approach this as just a blank state. Instead, picture this:

“Aristotelian ethics is a marriage between consequentialism and deontology that best approximates how we actually feel about right action.”

What the hell does that mean?

Well, if you are in this discourse sphere, you are familiar with “Terminal Values.” This is understanding what thing you measure your success by. An easy one is just “maximum number of lives.” Or perhaps maximizing knowledge. Or if you’re a libertarian maybe you say freedom is your terminal value. Or amount of joy in the world. Other well known terminal values are the infamous paperclip maximizer, or villains with the famous “blue-orange” morality spectrums, etc.

Here’s the dirty little secret about terminal values: they are almost always all *instrumental values* too. Knowledge is prized as a good in of itself… but also helps us effect the world so that our lives are better in a number of ways, and that even feeds into us being able to acquire knowledge faster. More people being alive means a larger community advancing our values and creating a thicker network that we exist in. More people alive means we have more choices which means we have more freedom… which is a terminal value too but freedom also allows people to make the best choices for themselves and lead to the best outcomes. 

Being a person who does not lie and helps others can feel righteous in of itself… but also makes it easier for others to trust you and work with you, making your life better and more successful.

So, do we truly value knowledge for its own sake damn everything else, or do we value knowledge because it adds to our toolset that helps us accomplish overall utilitarian goals.

The answer is: yes.

Aristotelian ethics has an image of the “good life” that includes knowledge, as both something fulfilling on its own AND something that makes us better at accomplishing our goals, including gathering even more knowledge. These simply aren’t separable. 

A good life includes freedom, which makes you feel less trapped on its own, and also helps you attain goals that were stymied when you were trapped.

A good life is healthy, which makes you feel and look better now, AND gives you more years of life later. A good life treats others well both because that is right AND you get farther in life as a cooperator than as a defector.

It’s like saying “don’t cut your arm because that will cause pain, AND ALSO you use that arm for things.” Your arm - and your health, your freedom, your knowledge, your honor - is part of an organic whole. It IS YOU and it helps you accomplish things.

(Obviously this “organic whole” can scale from your one life, to the entire picture of society, which is maximizing lives, joy, knowledge, freedom for everyone in the society as it grows itself.)

There are things that make you feel good but destroy your abilities - like heroin. AE says don’t do that. Or there are things that have better consequences but narrow who you are - like going to a soulless finance job just so you can live on instant-ramen and donate all of your income to malaria nets. AE hates that. These things are not “the good life” and do not “broaden the organic whole.” There are indeed values that are not part of Aristotelian virtues.

You can dislike this approach, but you can’t really argue against it, because it is a postulate in of itself. It can’t fail consequentialist measures because it’s not trying to. It’s very hard to argue about a first ethical principle, after all.

The reason AE has appeal is because it is intuitively how so many people act and feel. Most people at most times do not want to entirely ignore consequences just to Do the Right Thing. But most people do not want to ignore and torture their conscience for years just because it will lead to a marginally better off long-term outcome. We want to… flourish. We want to be good in many ways - health, morality, intellect, happiness - and we rather all the various societal numbers go up rather than down.

So, when the “virtue ethics” response is “what would a good person do in this situation” it does not mean “good intentions are what matters” but “what adds to my flourishing and society’s flourishing, on the many axes that matter to us?”

***

Hat tips to https://an-irrelevant-truth.tumblr.com/ for the tumblr image, and https://twitter.com/peligrietzer for discussing the idea generally.

Popularism and its Discontents

 

(Is no one going to make the obvious joke?)

Anyway, "popularism" is the hot button term among lefty technocratic circles popularized by the likes of David Shor and Matt Yglesias. You can read Ezra Klein's very thorough interview on the subject in the NYT. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/democrats-david-shor-education-polarization.html or use Wayback machine to circumvent the paywall.)

Popularism is a shorthand for the belief that the Democratic Party, when it is trying to get politicians elected, should focus on policies that are popular and downplay things that are unpopular and irrelevant. Lot's of commercials about cheaper prescription drugs and border enforcement, less talking about systematic racism and anti-capitalism. And by popular we mean "tested in polls, and especially among white voters over fifty with no college degree."

It's obviously a response to perceptions of the 2016 Clinton campaign and the 2020 Democratic primary, and it leans heavily on the success of the Biden campaign, and the specific tactics Obama used in his two successful elections (where he was anti-gay marriage and cautious on immigration.)

Shor and Ygs and others have pushed this tactic in a very loud way, to counter what they see as groupthink among center-left staffers and activists in institutional non-profits, who value staying in like over effectiveness. And fair enough, we can all see where they are coming from.

But predictably, popularism has come in for a lot of criticism. Sometimes issues are more popular after they have passed and begun providing benefits. Sometimes you want to pass a policy because you believe in it, that's why you got elected after all. Sometimes you need to get your base excited and elections aren't entirely about the median voter. Republicans will say bad things about us no matter what we do (they certainly don't hesitate to call us socialists even when Democrats are like, de-regulating zoning restrictions.) Why do Republicans keep saying unpopular things but still winning elections anyway? And the rhetoric politicians use themselves can move public opinion. Playing to the crowd will only lead to centrist milquetoast policy that doesn't change America's underlying problems.

(Since they are always-online-political-pundits, the popularists of course have rebuttals to all of these questions.)

Most importantly I think, the line between "who is a political staffer that has an obligation to stay on message" and "who has responsibility to more people than just today's electoral campaign" is pretty vague, and I don't see why, say, the Ford Foundation which has been around for most of a century would feel obligated to change their message to fit the Harris 2024 campaign's needs. It's not clear who Shor and Ygs are really talking to.

Popularism is just one particular strategy, and I am sure if it gets lots of buy in, eventually it will have one high profile embarrassing loss. I do not recommend anyone put all their credibility eggs in their one basket, or else you'll become one of those people parsing all the data with a fine-tooth comb to say "if you look at this cross tab and that local trend, you'll see really we overperformed the fundamentals and popularism has never failed, it can only be failed."

You don't want to be that.

There is a more fundamental point, that these pundits risk losing for getting lost in the ideological weeds.

"Candidates should try to do what works."

The parsing of all messaging by all Democrats running for office to be acceptable to sensitive college-degree holders who live in big cities... has not paid dividends for the success of the party. The emphasis on supporting idealistic and edgy symbolic causes du jour over what bills can actually be passed and deliver results to voters this year, does not seem to make any situation better when you look at the results. It's not entirely fair to say "a decade of policing speech got Trump elected" but it's at least fair to say that attitude did nothing to *stop* Trump from winning, and the most reviled candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary from winning as well.

I don't think there is One Consistent Plan that will always win you elections. But a serious movement should care about what does and doesn't win. And when one tactic doesn't seem to be helping, it should be willing to drop that and try other tactics. "Winning" is not solely confined to elections, but it should be mostly about "policy change." You should care about what tactics change policy, and lead to better policy rather than irrelevant or badly designed policy. Popularism is a nod towards that, but it's really not the end all and be all of being politically responsive.

Distortion and Disgust

I want to talk about two terms that are very weighty in a *moral* sense, but I believe should be looked at as neutral in *ethical* senses. So we’re going to take a more detached, clinical view in this discussion, and trying to remember that each are tools that could be used in either good or evil ways, from an ethical perspective.

The first let’s call *distortion*, although disharmony would work too. This is the warp in the normal state of affairs, or just the sense of heavy weight, when something is going dramatically wrong. If someone has a family life where they are constantly being yelled at and shamed, they may find their work starts suffering as well. That result, where one disruptive thing bleeds into all the things around it and causes difficulty, is distortion.

Distortion occurs when the harmonious state of affairs (a stable, happy community or universal agreement on norms) is interrupted by some disagreeable agent. That agent could be a stranger coming to town, or a member of the group behind closed doors acting terribly to others, or one personally privately coming to realizations that the group and its rules don’t make sense. Notably it can’t be a “typical” problem that the society is set up to deal with, but rather one that is unexpected by the normal social working order. Simplistically, a mugger beating someone up is not distortion, but a police officer doing so is.

Harmony is a watchword in Marxist and Zizekian language, since both schools are so quick to point out how often harmony is a lie that seeks to pave over any contradictions within itself, or the experiences of members that do not match the beliefs of the community. However from a practical and common sense perspective, we know that some level of harmony is just a basic necessity for life, and someone who does nothing but kick over the blocks of other people’s harmony is violent and unpleasant. Some harmonies in the short term are beneficial, and some harmonies are repressive and unacceptable. (In the long term, all harmonies collapse, but so does life.) What matters is not putting “harmony” entirely in one ethical box, but taking the non-normative stance that “if harmony exists, and matters, then distortion exists, and matters.”

One positive example of distortion is the stranger who comes to town and tells the underclass and slaves to no longer accept their position, but to strive for equal treatment. One negative example of distortion is the spouse who is having an affair so they lie about where they were last night so they have to ask their friends to cover an alibi for them so their friends have to lie to their spouses about what they were doing and so on and so on.

While very different ethically, in both cases we see a dynamic of something that cuts across typical categorizations and separations (where a problem is contained to one box), and creates a weight that affects everything around it, if only a little. It’s like Einstein’s ball on a bedsheet, bending spacetime around it.

Identified this way, we can see there are many sources of distortion in our lives. A deeply held disagreement that two friends can not talk about. Someone who often shows extreme and volatile emotions. A superior constantly asking too much of their subordinate. A dramatic mismatch between what we want and what we feel allowed to express. (For this reason, distortion is very much tied up with “legibility”, the domain of what society understands and finds legitimate reason for grievance.) Gay people in the closet experienced distortion this way. If someone clearly has a strong crush on you but never acts on it, your nervousness around them and how to deal with it could be distortion.

Almost always, distortion blurs lines of liberal ontology. If civil society is built on “these matters are the domain of the job, and these of the family” or “this is the way you voice complaint about approved matters” and above all the restraint to not let your personal feelings interfere with your institutional duties, then distortion mocks all of the above. It is the repressed howl, and is powerful exactly to the degree that the superego doesn’t accept it. (If the rules of society gave your complaint voice, then it would no longer be distortion.)

It is useful to have an ethically neutral term here because then you can point at something and say “that’s distortion.” A community may be changing due to an influx of new members with different beliefs, or a friend may be burdened under too many emotional demands that they have committed to all of them freely, and normal moral language only allows us to say whether these things are good or bad. We can take note “these scenarios have weight and will create many smaller changes around them.” We can avoid the denial that “nothing unpleasant will happen” while still admitting in some cases this distortion is good (maybe the community needed change) or in some cases the distortion is bad (maybe the friend’s friends need to adjust their expectations even if the person is not asking for it.)

(Distortion and unexplainable crying jags basically go hand in hand.)

Obviously, there’s no easy guide for how to deal with distortion. Sometimes you *should* use it as a signal to address important and neglected matters. Sometimes you *should* push it down because it’s not worth destroying a harmony you depend on, and it’s not that hard to deal with. It has a lot to do with the context, the nature of the distortion, and the value of the harmony. Anyone trying to sell you a one-size fits all approach is… well selling their own simplistic harmony that our unique and varied experiences will inevitably distort. (It is tragically true that even if someone might believe that the costs of distortion are worth it for the harmony they want to preserve, as a practical matter the distortion *just might not let them do that*. That’s how it works after all, even if we don’t want it to.)

But understanding, as a first step, is a maneuver of strength, and it can be easier to do without ethically loading the answer from the outset.

Distortion comes up a lot for me when I am thinking about societies with high inequality or winner-take-all lottery professions (movie stars, academia, etc). By and large the participants of those economies follow the liberal, systemized rules for behavior (or when they don’t, their failures are clearly prosecutable.) But the huge power differential between two different participants of a system creates incentives and desires that distorts normal action. It’s hard to be a genuine friend, or express honest critique, or legibly give consent in these structures. If you desperately need someone to recommend or vouch for you or just give you charity and mentorship, then saying no to or disappointing them becomes very difficult, and that problem then spreads into other problems involving bad communication or repressed feelings. However, it’s not as easy to say “because you had power over this person, it’s your fault they weren’t honest with you” (well some people do say it but it always makes me flinch for how simplistic and callow it is.)

***

*Disgust* is always used in a morally-loaded sense. Either we are talking about something that disgusts us - rotten food, cruel behavior, a violation of our boundaries - and our loathing is so strong that it needs to claim a moral dimension. OR we’re talking about someone’s objection we disapprove of, such as a Trumpian hatred of immigrants, and we say they have disgust, and it is phrased as if their disgust is immoral and something they need to purge themselves of. I agree with both these takes, I’m just noting that disgust is usually moral or immoral but not amoral.

And yet, knowing this word disgust can encompass both good and bad disgust, we can talk about it in an ethnically neutral way, and open its usage for some important middle ground. Disgust after all is an instinctive, emotional reaction. We can then build rational structures over it to justify it, but the reaction comes before those structures. What can we say of the purely emotional reaction then?

Well it’s unlikely to be always correct. Things we feel at least sometimes we want to reconsider in the light of reflection and more evidence. But it’s also a powerful preference, and we shouldn’t always dismiss it based on “this does not accord with my principles and rational thought” anymore than whether we like pizza and pineapple needs a reasoned justification to be respected.

For example, I play a lot of Hearthstone and watch a lot of Hearthstone tournaments. After one tournament, a winning player in his interview endorsed revolution in Hong Kong. Afraid of Chinese reaction to that, the company that ran the show, Blizzard: deleted the interview, banned the player for a year, revoked his prize money, and banned the broadcasters that interviewed him. It was roundly derided as political cowardice by the company.

I felt disgust at Blizzard’s actions. I felt myself unable to watch their tournaments in the following days. Now I had two options. One, I could build on that disgust to boycott Blizzard, and find reasons they were worse than other profit-oriented videogame companies (or quit videogames altogether), and always find justifications to link anything this company does in the future to that one bad decision. Or two, I could decide that in the grand scheme the decisions of this PR department were not outside the norm for other profit-oriented videogames, that the amusement of animations or the quality of card balance had nothing to do with this decision, and I could just suck it up and force myself to watch Hearthstone even as my stomach felt uncomfortable at it.

Neither of these were really satisfactory to me. I just didn’t watch Hearthstone for a week, and I got over it. This is not at all ethically consistent. (You could make some pragmatic argument that *this week* was the way to show Blizzard my disappointment, but I can’t claim that was my clever aim.) I allowed the moral feeling to guide me at one time period, but I didn’t try to adhere to it in the long term. In some ways this is unfortunate, as I’d rather be ethically consistent. But the two options were worse, and in the long run, lead to you molding your own beliefs in bad ways just to satisfy a temporary gut feeling.

***

With both distortion and disgust it’s very useful to have a term that encompasses clear empirical phenomenon without necessarily having to come to an ethical judgment right away. In response to one of the unending accusations of immoral behavior among videogame developers, you can categorize your disgust as making you not want to engage with their game currently and talk about it, before making long term pronouncements about whether they are deserving a boycott. You can say that something bad happened in that distortionary environment, and acknowledge the serious pain of that, before you figure out if a crime that broke established norms happened.

A Response to Postmodernism: Asymptotes

(Inspired most recently by this random ask about metanarratives, but for people just stumbling on the topic check out this SSC post “Postmodernism for Rationalists”. And when discussing pomo, I am always reminded of this tweet by St_Rev: Postmodernism is like nuclear fission; true but too dangerous for humans to be trusted with.)

Let’s back up a bit. Lacan broke down mental experience into three parts: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. I’m going to accept this, but a) ignore the Imaginary, and b) append Social to Symbolic because they are the same. Which is to say:

Our experience of the world consists of the Real and the Social/Symbolic. What does that mean?

The Real is well, actual reality that exists independent of human understanding. It’s the stuff that’s still there if you close your eyes. It’s the fact that there isn’t enough food no matter what the Emperor says, or that we will all one day die, or the cruelty of cancer, or the unimaginable gulf between the stars. It is the reality that victory goes to the side with more guns not the nobler cause, or that some people won’t get along no matter how much you love them both and try to negotiate peace.

The Real is usually far too complicated and chaotic and unbounded for us to comprehend. Like in the question of “when were the Dark Ages” in the linked SSC post, the Real is all the individual lives and experiences of people over that time period. It’s too big to even put into words, but it’s still undeniably there. Any attempt to just ignore the Real is called repression, and the Real will eventually rise from that and disrupt your plans.

The Symbolic is our attempt to make any sense of the above. It is how we split infinitely varied things into simple categories and binaries, like the insistence that everyone is male or female (or good vs bad.) It is the map instead of the territory, and *every single word* we use is just a Symbolic interpretation of far too messy Real. (Like this post recently asking just what is a boss anyway? Or the well written post “The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories”) Whenever we try to say something about every type of apple, or define what “life” is, or come up with an ideology that pits an obvious group of good guys and bad guys, or just try to predict the results of a scientific experiment with a probability curve, we are still thinking using the Symbolic.

This is not a huge sin. After all, we can not actually think about the ineffable Real, let alone communicate about it. If we want to make any progress at all, either in reasoning about the world or working with others, we *have* to use the Symbolic. It’s like physicists using models assuming spherical cows - it gets you somewhere, eventually, at least. (Certainly a tribe using imperfect Symbolic thinking would outcompete and defeat a bunch of brainiacs just meditating on the Real. Existence without using the Symbolic is just not sustainable.)

I even upgrade the term to Social/Symbolic since all of our social existence depends on how we use the Symbolic to express concepts to others. That’s well, what language is. And once you have a Symbolic term, and you share it with another via mouth-sounds or ink-scratches, then it takes on an independent Symbolic existence that can be read and interpreted by people who are neither you nor your intended target. Then these symbols really do have an external existence, spreading throughout the population, with no direction by a conscious mind. Words and concepts are like a virus living in the social body this way.

The narrative or metanarrative, is a Social/Symbolic entity this way - fairly detached from the Real that gave it meaning, and evolving based on what is most efficient for the social rules it inhabits.

Two brief examples:

- Science. Science is obviously a quest for the Real, and that is admirable. And yet even when trying hardest to do this, we create standards of objectivity and merit that reflect Social/Symbolic understanding. We talk of p-values and grant writing and peer review and hundreds of ways this search for the most raw truth is filtered through simplistic understanding, and incentive schemes that have long since become normal status-seeking rat races.

- Capitalism. Markets are a method of social relation of course. And yet the values and prices of things fluctuate in response to the necessities of the Real. If food becomes scarce, or a movie is truly terrible, or a new writer is brilliant beyond precedence, no matter how unexpected these things are to the powers that be, they can earn money and renowned in a market, proving some glimmer of the Real in doing so. Now the price of something is not an untainted mark of its true value, but it is at least related to it somehow.

Anyway, the tumblr version of Postmodernism (which is to say, that version that is most politically useful to the class of people who have currently discovered this concept - laypeople arguing about politics on social media) could be reduced to this:

1. In no cases do we ever know the Real, without relying on narratives found in the Social/Symbolic. (We can’t know when the Dark Ages began or ended.)

2. So choose which narratives you want to pursue based on Social/Symbolic reasons. (Do you want to align yourself with the narrative of the Dark Ages spread by the Catholic Church? By labor historians? Etc.)

The problem with these is that are true, but also noxious, as they would always mean dropping the evidence of our own eyes for the narrative of the class we are trying to support. And people who do this too much are very evidently stupid (in action, not in essence.) We see the results of this in Holocaust deniers and Stalin apologists and 9-11 truthers.

The issue is that they are forgetting that the symmetric case is true: the complete Real may be inaccessible *but so is the complete Social/Symbolic*. While amateur pomo knows you can never completely reach the Real, it forgets you can never *escape* it either.

In actuality, total Social/Symbolic is an eternal fantasy. It is referenced in FALC or the singularity, where you are immune from any needs and can spend all your time engaging with only concepts, or only the social sphere you have chosen, free of all messy entanglements. It is a powerful dream (or nightmare), with a lot to say for it, but it’s as impossible as knowing the mind of God. There will always be some element of the Real under the fantasy, repressed and pushing back in the ways we least expect or want.

Everything we know is between two asymptotes - which can approach the Real, but never reach it, and we can approach the pure Social/Symbolic but never realize it.

So an attempt to choose your narrative *solely* on Social/Symbolic grounds (like which side you want to support) will find itself constantly interrupted by rude counter-evidence. It might be the people voting against you, or your story not selling, or just an anxious feeling in the pit of his stomach. It’s really impossible to predict how the Real will erupt, but it always will.

You have to accept you are just stuck as a mutt in the muddled middle, never have authentic Real knowledge or pure Social/Symbolic simplicity, but a mix of both at all times.

Accessibility Discourse

@Discoursedrome in a recent thread about "do difficult videogames face accessibility issues?" identified a tradeoff between accessibility and specificity. Specificity is the way in which a game (or any creation) is special, in how it is deep or thick or high-context or interesting, that generates enthusiasm - which often involves weird and arbitrary limits. The difficulty of the Dark Souls games is their specificity. The more you make something specific the more likely that some people won't be able to enjoy it - ie. disabled gamers may have trouble with the split-second timing of Dark Souls games.

In cooking, a chef's eagerness to experiment with new ingredients (or new preparations of old and unappreciated ingredients) is their specificity, and it can conflict with people who are kosher, vegetarian, allergic to peanuts, have a gluten allergy, or low spice tolerance. If you've ever tried to cook a meal for 60 people with different eating restrictions, you know how limited your freedom for creativity becomes.

You can look at romantic norms this way too: traditionalism provides a lot of specificity about who you should date: the other gender, if you're both unattached, on a specific ladder of rituals towards marriage (with appropriate class and station concerns). Bisexual polyamory of the form "date who you want and make up the rules that work for you" provides a great deal more freedom to people who were left out of the old system, but in that freedom often leaves people feeling lost or unexcited about their paths. The overly complex song and dance of (mildly d/s) traditional norms had specificity that are not entirely replaced by the new rituals.

In straight up internet argument, specificity loses to accessibility, because in mass media rhetoric, how can "I like my meals to be interesting" stand up against "okay well some of us would like to be able to eat them at all." However, specificity as a virtue does not really need to be defended, because people will keep independently inventing it on their own and discovering that they really enjoy it. Most new and vibrant forms of art and communities have high specificity - whether it Speedrunning Conventions or Immersive Theater or Weird Twitter. There is always a hunger for this interestingness that unconsciously outpaces accessibility, until the systemitizers notice it.

(My rhetoric may sound like I am selling accessibility short, but let me assure you that when there is something everyone loves that I can't experience or enjoy, my blood boils and I want it erased from the face of the Earth. I get the emotion behind it, and do not think people are wrong to experience it and act on it.)

I'm not taking sides on that tradeoff (yet) and I don't even think that tradeoff wholly describes the situation, because there is another dimension: audience size. Are you creating for yourself, for your close friends, for a small niche market, for a large national market, or the entire world?

With a small intended audience size you can be both specific and accessible - you're cooking a dinner at your home for five friends and you know one is allergic to peanuts but that still leaves plenty of freedom to experiment with an interesting meal. The larger the group you make for, the more accessibility limits you, and the more difficult specificity gets. (Recall that on a global scale, you can't even count on people using the same language you do.)

All of these traits exist in tension, but can be compatible to some degree.

There is an old adage in construction: Quality, Price, Speed: Pick too. Which is to say of getting your building done cheaply, affordably, and fast, you're going to have to sacrifice one. I think the "pick two" applies here, and in fact circumscribes my philosophical perspectives at different times (ie, the three masks.)

Accessibility and size - universalism. Making something is truly supposed to be for everyone with no limits on where they are, who they are, or what they are capable of.

Specificity and size - cthughaism. (Or what I often refer to as humanism, but we'll trade ambiguity for using a new term here.) This is the perspective that interestingness, richness of experience, the new and unexpected and complex is the best thing, the only important thing, and seeks to maximize this in all ways. This means art that is spread to the masses, and if some people can not enjoy it, then hoping they enjoy other art.

Accessibility and specificity (with small audience) - tribalism. This is the understanding that you can make the perfect combination of openness and interesting if and only if you group is small and you know them well, and it is the opinion that this tradeoff is worth it.