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.

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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.

Geeks, MOPS, and Sociological Essays

David Chapman wrote a famous essay called Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths that looks at the lifecycle of geek subcultures as an arc from innocent creators to being overtaken by cynical exploiters.

This concept was also expanded by Benjamin Ross Hoffman http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/ and Aella https://knowingless.com/2017/05/02/internet-communities-otters-vs-possums/

These essays are all hitting on *something* but doing so in such a morally loaded manner that they start missing the Real early on. The best form of essay like this starts with an idea based on their observations, but instead of just inductively growing from that idea, sees how it can lead to explaining OTHER observations. They just sound pretty judgy and tell us why we should dislike the sociopaths etc so much (even if they nominally say “I’m not saying these people are evil.”)

Here is instead the bambamramfan modification:

1. Geeks are obsessive creators who make a new thing, that every so often catches fire with other obsessive creators, and they make a super-charged circle of people making awesome stuff. It can be a new artistic movement, or people playing with computers in their garages, or competitive rubix cube solving. This category includes people who aren’t creators, but just really love that thing.

If you have read the famous Infamous Brad essay, this includes both Dream Nazis and Authenticity Policy https://bradhicks.livejournal.com/128514.html

2. Mops are people drawn to the POSITIVE ENERGY of this. Being around a bunch of people who are excited about something is itself very exciting. There’s just a magic in the air, the group is breaking boundaries and forming bonds and it is all very intense and creative. Even if you don’t care about the thing qua the thing, it can be fun to just be around that community. This includes the third part of Bard’s trichotomy, the Fun Mavens.

Hakim Bey talks a lot about this in his landmark essay Temporary Autonomous Zones. https://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont

Note this really applies to political groups too. It’s *fun* to be in a revolution. It’s fun to think you’re overthrowing the patriarchy/the SJW bureaucracy. This is all the dark-web or pirate-radio stuff. They are not only exploring new intellectual territory, but they’re also having fun while doing it. This attracts people who… just like fun.

On a purely economic level of course, you can see this as the transition from “people who program for the love of programming” to “people who realize you can make a fuckton of money from this.”

3. Systematizers. (Shockingly, “sociopath” is a really bad word here for any hope of clear communication.) These people see the geek subculture, and the positive energy and think… this could be better if only they got organized. The political geeks could actually be organized into activists. The tech geeks could get venture capital and HR. The art geeks could modify their product just a little and then I could sell it on the mass level.

This is usually not experienced as a cynical ploy. They see something wonderful, that’s just ordered dysfunctionally, and they want to help by bringing their logistical skills. Maybe they’ll take a cut for the value add they bring, but it’s not the primary motivation: the motivation is to “spread BLANK to the masses.” And of course, the original geeks and mops love that. Being part of an organized thing means validation after all.

But one can not serve God and Mammon. Once you’re doing what the Systematizers advise, then you become more dependent on the value they’re trying to mine, and anything that threatens that value (money or public acclaim) has overwhelming pressure to make the geeks shut up and get in line.

(Even social justice, I believe, is a very good geek idea that has been completely taken over by systematizers who use it to sell their website and increase their twitter presence. Let alone how this played out with say, comic books.)

***

This is the part of the essay where all the above authors say “and HERE is how you can stop it, and keep your group pure.” Well go back and read TAZ more closely: you can’t. It’s an endless process of creation, rise, and decay. Either you group dies or it ossifies. Die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Am I cliche enough yet? There’s no stable system where you don’t grow like that, anymore than you can tell a colony of fruit flies “don’t eat all the nutrients in your environment or else the colony will die.”

What you have to do is embrace the rise and fall. Don’t tie yourself to rationalism or battle-bot-building, thinking “it will always be about the music.” Enjoy the Mops and their energy. Resist the Systematizers for a while. But once they’re deep enough in… just go somewhere else. Make a new geek source of energy. Enjoy it while it’s small, and don’t spend all your time dreaming of how great it would be if EVERYONE was part of it.

What is Rationalism?

I am not a rationalist, but this blog makes many references to being in dialogue with the rationalist community. So the few people who AREN'T rationalists, might appreciate an explanation of what the hell I am talking about.

Slate Star Codex, by Scott Alexander, is pretty clearly the most famous and public-friendly face of the rationalist movement at the moment.

• The Control Group Is Out Of Control on the weakness of a lot of modern scientific research and statistics.
• I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup on a general framework for thinking about tolerance vs prejudice.
• Toxoplasma of Rage on how the media works and why stupid topics keep coming up again and again.
• Meditations on Moloch, on the way efficient systems and ideas can grow and take over everything.

A lot of his thoughts come from the Less Wrong movement, best known for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. You can google them if you want more content, but Scott puts a much nicer and more humane face on them.

One tumblr that defends rationalism but with an extremely compassionate and thoughtful face, that most of my dashboard at least respects greatly, is The Unit of Caring.

I don't know any particular post of her to recommend that summarizes her (which is "rationalism but nice about it"), but this is a good recent post about "how to be nice." 

https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/169490044251/how-do-you-do-it-how-do-you-ooze-compassion-and

And here is a post about prison reform from her https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/170390580301/as-someone-with-a-brother-in-law-and-federal

Rationalism and Art

So now is a fine time to talk about what the heck is up with Slate Star Codex, right?

So on the plus side, he recently wrote a review of a book that showed a fantastic understanding of art.

Someone once said that the point of art is to be more real than reality. The House Of God is way more real than reality. Reality wishes it could be anywhere close to as real as The House of God. This is a world where young people – the kid just out of school, the blushing new mother – die. Even normal old people – your grandmother, your grandpa – can die. But the most decrepit, demented people, the ones for whom every moment of artificially-prolonged life is a gratuitous misery and you pray at every moment that God will just let them find some peace – somehow they never die. They come into the hospital, they go back out to nursing homes, a few weeks later they’re back in the hospital, a few weeks later they’re back in their nursing homes, but they never die. This can’t be literally true. But it’s the subjective truth of working in a hospital. The Fat Man is right. I’ve been working in medicine for three years now, and I have seen my share of young people tragically cut off in the prime of life, and yet as far as I can remember I have never seen a gomer die. The magical realism of House of God describes the reality of medical professionals infinitely better than the rational world of hospital mortality statistics.

I bolded "subjective truth" because that's exactly the type of terminology you should be bringing to these discussions. Given the impossibility of achieving objective knowledge, most of how we describe the world (whether we admit it or not), is subjective explanations. He sounds like he really understands this stuff. (A friend of mine comments that Scott isn't really a rationalist writer, but rather he uses the style of social justice writing, just applied to rationalist causes.)

So what the hell is up with Unsong.


(Unsong is SSC's grand rational fic work, and it's very well polished and thought out as that genre goes.)

To rudely make the subtext text, Unsong probably thinks it is making fun of literary criticism similar to this blog. Or at least, of the phenomenon apophenia, seeing patterns in cloud where they aren't there. It's tag line is an extremely sarcastic "Nothing is a coincidence."  The repeated motif is to take a bunch of words or letters, pull out kabbalistic values from them, and say they have greater meaning from those arrangements (ie in terms of magical power, or just interpreting the world.) This reaches absurd heights, and the ending will probably be extremely critical of kabbalistic interpretation within the universe.

Sometimes this sort of parody is amusing. But sometimes it becomes fairly dark and bitter. For instance, in the chapter about Miss America Pie.

“I do not know so much about American culture,” said Ally, “but I thought that this song was about a history of rock n’ roll.”

“THAT’S WHAT WE’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL HIM,” said Erica, at the same time I muttered “Et tu, Ally?”

“Exactly,” said Bill. “For example, the next verse references Helter-Skelter, Eight Miles High, and The Birds. Helter-Skelter is a Beatles song, the Byrds are a rock band, and Eight Miles High is a song by the Byrds.”

“The verse goes,” I said, “Helter-skelter, in the summer swelter, the birds flew off with a fallout shelter eight miles high and falling fast. Is there a rock band called ‘Fallout Shelter’? Is there a Grammy-award winning song by that name?”

“Not everything has to…”

“Everything has to!” I said. “Nothing is ever a coincidence. Look. The Bible contains a clear example of a fallout shelter related to divine judgment. Noah’s Ark. God decided to destroy the world for its wickedness, and Noah built something to survive the apocalypse. That’s a fallout shelter. It’s even eight miles high. The floodwaters covered the earth to a depth higher than the highest mountain. Everest is six miles high, the floodwaters had to be above that, leave a little margin of error, that’s eight miles. And falling fast, because after forty days and nights God opened the portals of the deep and the waters flowed back in. According to the story, Noah sent forth a raven and a dove to see if they could find dry land. In other words, the birds flew off, with the fallout shelter eight miles high and falling fast. The raven can’t find any dry land. But the dove can. It lands, fowl on the grass. The jester is Jesus is the Son is the Song is divine mercy, but it’s on the sidelines in a cast because at this point divine mercy has been suspended – even wounded – and divine judgment allowed to have free rein.”

“Oh wow,” said Zoe.

“You skipped the part about the players trying for a forward pass,” said Bill.

“The players are all the people and animals, trying to pass their genes forward to the next generation. The marching band which is trying to interfere – well, think about it. There are two interesting facets of a marching band. They play music. And they march. Who does that sound like? Right. The angels. The heavenly choirs and the heavenly hosts. So the players – created mortal beings – are trying to take the field. But the angels and nephilim refuse to yield – they’ve seized control of the earth. So ‘do you recall what was revealed’? How do you say ‘revealed’ in Greek? Right. ‘Apokalypsis’. The angels tried to control the earth and wouldn’t make room for humans, so God called down an apocalypse. That’s why this is in the verse that talks about Noah’s Ark.”

This... this is anti-knowledge. The reader laughs along with the exasperated friends, as they try to assure themselves that this song is "only" about rock and roll history, and not related through complex symbolism to biblical stories. All of Aaron's deciphering is laughable and unbelievable.

Just because one interpretation is terrible, does not mean that interpretation is a lost cause. The approach exemplified in this chapter is just anti-thetical to knowledge and communication, saying we should all relax and accept "what everyone knows" instead of trying to figure it out on our own. It's just dumbfounding to read, like straight out of the most cynical political cartoon.

Yeah, Miss American Pie is about rock and roll. Why can't it also be about religion? And not just because some numbers in the song parallel some numbers in the Torah - but because rock and roll isalso about religion.

I mean what was rock and roll, but a folk movement of people trying to rebel against the system, finding ecstatic highs, and eventually selling out and becoming the system when popularity tempted and corrupted them.

The subjective truth of the aging and loss of rock legends is to the writer like a religious apocalypse. These people really really cared about their music, in a way we can't really fathom in our modern age and careers. "Bigger than Jesus" was not (just) a joke. The imagery he reaches for is biblical and that's not a coincidence.

Yes, the lyrics reference specific 50's rock songs. This was in part because he chose more religious references, and in part because a lot of 50's rock songs were talking about religious feelings.

(Don McLean famously answered when asked what Miss American Pie means "It means I don't ever have to work again if I don't want to." What better description of how selling out has ruined art and the spirituality there in could there be.)

And do you have faith in God above, if the Bible tells you so?Now do you believe in rock & roll?Can music save your mortal soul?

Guys, I think this song has some religious content. I think McLean might have been suffering some spiritual angst.

***

Anyway, better music historians than I have picked apart Miss American Pie. It's a classic song for a reason.

The point is that we can understand art. It can have real themes that we are capable of reading, particularly art that does not explicitly say them but does leave us breathless with some sublime feeling. And sometimes SSC seems to really get that, but in his biggest project he seems to be throwing that to the wind, and it's very confusing.

***

I should be fair that Scott did reply, and I posted a reply to that here.

*Explanatory Phenomenon, Not Terminal Values

Okay that title sounds really boring, but this is really important. We like to describe ideologies, particular our enemy’s, as being about some different fundamental moral goal than what we want - those Nazi’s want an Aryan state, those Communists are ethically committed to equality, those patriarchs just want male power, those feminists just want… etc etc. This is called a “terminal value” and most people who are reading this know that terminal values aren’t a thing you can argue over. If your utility function is just based on maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe, then that’s all that matters to you and there’s no logic or evidence that will convince you otherwise.

Thing is, that’s not how any of these ideologies work. For instance, that’s not how you work, is it? You don’t want to just increase one thing to the exclusion of all else. (Unless you’re going to say something nebulous and complicated like “happiness” or “life”.) You’re a sensible person who wants things overall to get better on a number of fronts. You want people to be less angry at each other. You want there to be less death and starvation. You want the economy to improve. You want, well, you want a lot of things but they are all reasonable things and none of them outranks all the other things you want so much that you can ignore them. When you have political beliefs, it’s not because “this is my terminal value” but just because “this makes the world better off overall.” If you’re right wing (ha) you think personal responsibility is good, because that makes people satisfied with their life and grows the economic pie. If you’re left wing (more likely) you think giving people their basic economic necessities will reduce their anxieties and make them more willing to trust and get along with other people.

Yes, you can be a Yudkowskian Rationalist and be aiming for super-AIs and conquering the galaxy as the transcendental fate of humanity… but let’s be honest it’s much more likely that you are an Alexandrian Rationalist and just see rationalism as offering some good tools for seeing through the irrational bullshit generated by dumb institutions and rage-fueled culture wars. You kind of want a happy normal life for everyone, and whatever political philosophy you currently hold, it’s because you think that will lead to everyone being better off in many ways.

This is how all the ideologies see each other. This is why @theunitofcaring notices that both MRA’s and SJW’s seem to want the same things. Hell even Nazi’s and Communists basically wanted the same things: a comfortable, stable lifestyle for the average person (defined as either the proletariat, or the volk.)

Where ideology comes in is it tells you that yes, you can have this normal idyllic world with moderate reward for all… once the person who’s ruining it go away. For Nazi ideology, the person ruining everything is the Jew. For Stalinist Communism ideology, that person was the class-traitor. For rationalist ideology, that person ruining things is the lazy bureaucrat who won’t “do the math” (or the tribal culture warrior). In all of these ideologies, the idea that this figure has legitimate differences from the group is dismissed - they must just be greedy or lazy or possessed of some other moral deficiency. And the ideology constructs an intellectual framework that lets you connect the common everyday sins of this person (which are easy to find) and the terror of truly horrible crimes (like betraying a country in war, gross assault, rampant cruelty) which are rarer but devastating. So the Nazi ideology says “that Jew who set up shop next to you was actually part of the conspiracy that turned on us in WW1” and therefore responsible for all the evil in the world: your local competition, the failure of the German state, intra-culture fighting, crime, everything can be pinned on this figure.

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Back in the infancy of social media (with the blogs and the livejournals) a common debate was “what do libertarians believe”, since there seemed as many different dogmas of libertarianism as there were trolls in the comments section arguing for them. Does a libertarian concern themselves only with government rules, or all forms of power? Do they want a government that can strictly enforce some rights (like private property)? Do they want a slim, efficient government where one CEO-like person makes decisions, or do they want a close-to-the-roots government where many local legislatures are responsive to the people? Is legalizing pot the most important, or getting lower taxes? It just wasn’t clear what saying “I’m a libertarian” meant – except it was pretty clear it meant *something*. Is liberty a deontic goal - something we should value for its own sake - or a consequentialist goal -  whereby larger goals could be better accomplished by maximizing liberty. All these proponents had some sort of liberty thing in common, we just couldn’t tell what.

And that was an ideological explanation; libertarianism is the belief that every “real” problem, no matter how big or small, is caused by people restricting the liberty of others - in ways both big and small. So that teacher who banned a book in school is responsible for rising crime, or the minimum wage is part of the reason no one you know makes rational decisions. You’re not 100% sure what “freedom” is, but you do know that saving it from people who want to limit it is the most important goal of your life. And if you succeed, that will make everything better - the economy, crime, your daily life, harmonious relations between your neighbors, etc.

I understand TUOC (and somewhat @balioc) that it’s tempting to say these ideologies want the same thing and can hopefully find a way to work together for them. But the explanatory phenomenon are really important. They are the things people are defining their entire identity and praxis around. Without that part of ideology the world doesn’t even make any sense. Getting people to give that part up is psychologically wrenching.

[Further back and forth on this can be found in the original tumblr thread.]