Notes of many things 2

Palestine

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Palestine and this blog. I talked about it a fair bit when the war was starting. As things become obvious, I cease to talk about them.

Generally speaking, with some exceptions, my blog posts don’t just aim to restate things clearly, or amplify critical parts of the discourse. I feel embarrassed when I set out to make posts like this. Instead, I seek to introduce new ideas (at least new to me) to the discourse- or if not new, at least less popular than I think they should be. Doubtless, I don’t always succeed. I’m sure most of my ‘new ideas’ have been argued by someone else. Often it is apparent even to me that the newness is hair-slender- just an application of an old idea to a new topic. Still, however clumsily, I aim to add ideas. This is a psychological quirk of mine and doesn’t represent a value judgment about what kinds of writing matter. I just feel embarrassed and unworthy when I try to write articles that “say what we’re all thinking” unless there’s some special purpose.

This approach has benefits. However, it also has costs. It means, among other things, that I don’t talk about the issues of the day- including really really really important issues- as much as I’d like. I often don’t have any original or rare points to make about the topical topics, and so I am silent.

But as people starve and a ground invasion of Rafah looms, I’m thinking about Palestine, and I urge you to think, and most critically act, as well. That I have so little to say about it reflects, if anything, the clarity of the horror. I wish I had more to add because it’s so important, but with so many good and brilliant people writing on it, it’s hard for me to find what I can contribute.

The paradox of ethics

This is related to, but not identical, to the problem I described above.

As the wrongness of a thing becomes widely agreed upon, then all else being equal ethicists will talk of it less. This is because the primary question for an ethicist is already widely agreed on, so there is less to say. Yet obvious evils are often the most important.

Ethicists don’t talk about “Should you switch the trolley onto a track where it will kill even more people but you’ll get paid 100,000 bucks” because we all know the answer. Yet although we all know the answer, the question is highly relevant to what happens in our flawed world. The ethicist’s silence seems conspicuous.

This is what I call the paradox of ethics- all else being equal, the more obviously something is wrong, the less time ethicists will spend condemning it. Yet many real and important evils that structure our lives are obvious. The paradox of ethics creates a perpetual danger- that ethicists look as if they do not care about, or even support, obvious evils. Moreover, when ethicists, and perhaps much of the general public, all agree something is wrong but elites support it, ethicists may have little to say on the topic. This can make ethicists seem complicit in existing power structures.

In the worst case, the paradox of ethics may even create the impression that ethicists are a ‘tool of power’, distracting from the abuses of the powerful, and placing attention on marginal and abstract cases. I do not think this impression is entirely fair, there is value in focusing on the difficult cases, but I do think that we should take steps to avoid it.

“Degrowth” as the greatest success of capitalist ideology

Many economists have critiqued the degrowth movement, and in response many degrowth advocates have argued that given their subtle definition of growth- not like the ordinary definition used in public discourse and economics- degrowth would be a good thing. I find this dialectic to be goal-shifting, but I don’t want to get into it here because I couldn’t do the degrowth view justice in a short note.

Instead, I want to say something about the ‘ordinary’ degrowther who has not engaged in these subtleties. A person of a broadly leftist orientation who has become convinced that growth is bad. I think this is tremendously sad, and moreover a victory of capitalist ideology. Growth is just the expansion of human powers. Growth under capitalism goes in particular directions which can sometimes be immensely destructive, but to conclude growth itself is an evil of capitalism is to cede the debate to the capitalist in the sense of agreeing with capitalism’s claim that growth is part of the essence of capitalism- that growth is both native and endemic to capitalism.

Growth is generally a superb thing even in a capitalist economy- and even a pretty ruthless one. By making people associate growth with the excesses of capitalism and thus capitalism the degrowther has won the grandest rhetorical victory for capitalism- affirming, even from a position of apparent opposition, its claim to the mother of growth. In fact, far from ruthlessly, myopically pro-growth, contemporary management of capitalism is not sufficiently dedicated to growth- often focused on the venal consumption of the wealthy and not investment.

Young people have not always been the vanguard of progress, the current situation where young people are far to the left of old people is new

A lot of people underestimate how important the present division between the young and old in politics is, due to a false belief that it’s always been like this. There is perhaps a slight trend for young people to be to the left of old people, but this has not always and everywhere been true, and even when it has been true, it has never been anywhere near as true as it is now to the best of my knowledge.

If the current trend continues- and it might well not-, the right will be annihilated. This is not just business as usual, and we on the left should factor it into our strategy.

Thanks to Osita Nwanevu on Twitter for gathering these results. https://x.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1790950285692518424

Compare:

Media centrists get way too much credit for being close to swing voters, they aren’t

Although I wouldn’t commit to it without doing some more empirical research, I’m 85% confident the following is true. A lot of time centrists in the media get set up as voices of ‘common sense’ or ‘the people’. This is a mistake. It’s even possible that both the leftwing and the rightwing are psychologically closer to the median swing voter than media centrists. Actual swing-voting centrists tend to be populists (of a sort) whereas media centrists are technocrats.

Watching sport

Watching people watching sports I wonder if maybe the point isn’t the frustration of being invested in something you can’t act on. Watch people scream at a television screen in a pub, yell at the ref, cry out for the players to hear them. With every grunt of frustration and tension, they both try to act, and don’t try to at the same time. Frustration expressed in futility leads to more frustration and tension in a feedback loop. Their bodies, faces, arms and voices strain as if against ropes. This feedback loop of tension-"action"-futility-tension etc. is experienced as pleasurable. Where else do we see this? Politics- at least as many relate to it? Bondage? People want to be invested in things they can’t control but try to “will” one way or the other as if they had psychic powers. Perhaps this is why people so often just let politics go on as a spectacle, it’s like being in bondage, falsely struggling against the cuffs so as to enjoy them.

Evil people exist

A lot of people scoff at the idea that anyone is committed to evil or consciously motivated by evil. We are encouraged to laugh at books that feature villains motivated by wickedness alone.

I think the books have a point. I think that, as a matter of empirical reality, there are plenty of people who more or less are openly devoted to evil. To be sure, there are a lot of conceptual issues here. It’s hard to think about what this means to be devoted to evil, because in a sense to think you should pursue something is to designate it good. Certainly, few, if any, people run around saying “I support evil” and mean it.

But there are plenty of people who endorse, more or less, the opposite of those things we call the good. I am not talking about people like the Aum Shinrikyo cult, or Osama bin Laden. These people are relatively close to our ethical framework by comparison.

I am talking about people who say things like “I despise weakness, the world is, and should be, a place of constant struggle for survival in which the strong displace the weak. The long peace the West has lived under is disastrous for warrior virtue. The purpose of life is not happiness, or even ‘excellence’ in some abstract sense, but mastery and domination, we should exalt in the cruelty of the strong against the weak.”

Now, to be sure, there are senses in which this does not count as an explicit commitment to evil, but, more or less, that’s what it is. Exalting war over peace and cruelty over compassion rejects almost everything about the good except perhaps the guise of the good (and even then…). And while the type I gave an example of above is relatively rare, I have had the displeasure of encountering men like this online much more often than I would like. I don’t mean people who I’ve inferred think these sorts of things, I mean people who have stated them. I’m not the only person who is aware of these odious types of course, but I think many people haven’t noticed that, in practice, 1. they’re more or less a comic book villain but without the power, and 2. they’re real.

And more there are plenty of men, perhaps even a few women, who flirt with ideas like these. Who dip their toe in this sort of thing: “Why should I have to keep justifying my politics by saying they make things better for the weak? I don’t really care about the weak”.

Paramorality

The first sign that something is a paramoral rather than a moral concern is the possibility of delegation.

In the Book of All Hours by Hal Duncan, a secondary avatar of one character sleeps with the primary avatar of another. As he leaves he justifies his actions as follows, the Bible says:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

But says nothing about paying a man to lie with you, as he would lie with womankind.

This is a profound violation of Christian ethics. I’m not talking about the homosexuality, I’ll leave that to the Greek and Hebrew experts to sort out. I’m talking about a central principle of Christian theology. Making someone else sin on your behalf does not get you out of sin.

Yet this is NOT part of many other ethical codes. Consider the moral code of Ralph Cifaretto in the Sopranos. He gets a woman named Tracee, pregnant. She comes to him and joyfully says she’s going to have his baby. He beats her to death because no “filthy whore” is going to have his child. From the perspective of any universalist ethics, even before he beats her to death, he has done wrong, since he has, by his own lights, induced her to do the ‘wrong thing’ (work as a stripper). Even if working as a stripper is not wrong, in making her do what he considers detestable for his selfish benefit, he has himself done something detestable. Clearly, Ralph’s is not a universalist ethics.

Readers will object that this is not so much about his morality, as about his sense of status. Right or wrong doesn’t apply, he just thinks strippers are low status. However in what we’re going to call paramorality, morality and status merge. It is possible to have a higher paramoral status by having someone else sin or do something detestable on your behalf. The same is not true of moral standing, rightly understood. Paramorality, unlike morality, is much closer to social status. But paramoral status still isn’t quite social status, the proud aristocrat, reviled by all, might still congratulate himself on his paramoral standing, even if it is not recognised by the rest of the world. Paramoral status is kind of like social status in waiting- demanding to be recognized but possibly ignored. One might say it is a ‘moral’ claim to a kind of ‘amoral’ status.

The idea of paramorality is certainly not my invention. I’m sure any anthropologist or sociologist worth their salt has noticed it, and I’m sure it goes by many names in many areas of social science. If I am making an original contribution here (doubtful) it is in the suggestion that the royal sign by which we recognize paramorality is the possibility of avoiding wrongdoing through delegation to another, who then sins instead of you. This is absolutely impossible in the official morality of our time but is completely possible in paramorality, which is always present, always its own moral logic, always struggling to be recognized, even if not a moral logic that’s likely to be recognized in an ethics department. Delegation is the perfect test of whether someone is a moralist or a paramoralist. Do they consider owning a strip club less shameful than working in one? Do they think a woman falls when she has casual sex, but a man is a praiseworthy stud when he makes a woman fall? Do they revile those who sustainably hunt meat, but eat factory-farmed flesh themselves? This stuff is in all of us in different ways, trying to surface.

Examples are often sexual, but not always. Working for a living was considered disgraceful in Homeric Greece, or so it is said, but because it was a paramoral constraint, there was no problem with having others do it on your behalf.

Anyone can do the right thing at any moment. What is right is relative to what is possible. But to do the pararight thing, you often have to have power- else it can be impossible to be paramoral. This is why paramorality is often associated with suicide from ancient times- very often the only thing one can do that is consistent with paramorality, when one is reduced to a state of weakness and defeat, is kill oneself. Lest one be made a slave, or be executed by the state rather than oneself.

Are politicians behind the times?

A thought that I had recently: after the Iraq war, politicians realised that they could get away with ignoring public opinion, protests simply don’t mean anything anymore in a world of waning civil society (a problem we on the left must overcome). My thought was perhaps it is also true that politicians could get away with ignoring elite opinion as well, they just haven’t realized it yet. Perhaps Trump is a watershed in this regard- the first to see that, although he couldn’t (and wouldn’t) get in the way of wealth accumulation, he was at liberty to offend, bypass, and ignore people who theoretically are really big players.

I wonder if there isn’t a build-up of elites whom conventional wisdom held had to be appeased and what we’re finding is that without civil society, in a frictionless world of anti-politics, elites, at least of certain types can be ignored just as safely as Iraq war protestors.

I should distinguish my use of ‘elites’ here from the insane conservative sense of the term in which low-level journalists, academics, school teachers, etc. are elites. If I were using elites in that sense, my hypothesis would be pretty trivial. I mean big people. At the smallest scale, distinguished journalists and foreign policy bigwigs. At the biggest scale- newspaper magnates, tech giants, etc., etc- real capitalists.

Kill the Twitter cop in your head

There’s a voice in your head that says “Sure, what you’re posting may be true, beautiful, and useful, but it’s cringe- CRINGE!” Kill that voice.

Prediction: A Christian left revival

The right seems to be secularising, finally, long after the left. As it secularises, I think we will see various revivals of neo-paganisms, Nietzschean oppositions to “slave morality” Christianity and so on and so forth. Among other things, I think this will drive a small, but possibly significant, revival in Christianity among left-wing thinkers.

The most obvious link between Christianity and the left is the twin propositions:

1. You should love your neighbor as you love yourself.

2. Every human is your neighbor.

Thus far the debate has focused on the right’s conspicuous failures in this arena. But as the right becomes more openly exultant of status and strength, I think about the other confluence between the left and Christianity. Christ rejected earthly status as beneath him, as worthless next to doing the right thing. He indicated that it is totally appropriate, mandatory even, for anyone- even God himself in human form- to be reviled as weak and statusless by the world.

The right can’t stomach this, and just because the crack has been papered over for more than a millennium and a half doesn’t mean the contradiction can be hidden indefinitely, especially as mainstream Christianity wanes. Look at this ideal. Although it emerged from internet culture generally, the Chad concept’s first point of emergence is generally agreed to be the right.

To be good is to be beautiful is to be successful is to be high status- so says the right. To be good is to walk a lonely path in contravention of the world, so says Christianity. Once the right and Christianity divorce, there may be a space for a leftwing Christianity.

Regardless, reject all earthly measures of success, and seek only the north star of your own values.

Clarifying my position on LLM’s

I sometimes worry people assume I am bullish about the future of LLM’s, and think scaling will lead to AGI. My position is a more complex than that. I think another (probably brief) AI winter is possible (although not more likely than not). I think many people are overestimating what scaling alone can do, although I do not know. I suspect there will need to be at least a few more big technical advances before we have a computer that can do anything a human sitting at a computer can do. This is especially true regarding huge tasks like creating a large program or writing an original research paper. I say this not because I have any special insight- I don’t- but because if LLMs do hit a dramatic wall vis, how much better they can get by scaling alone, I wouldn’t want you to think I’d predicted the opposite. What I do think is that a lot of the current arguments about the fundamental failures of LLMs are bad, often focus on a handful of prototypical cases, and don’t give sufficient credence to the dozens of strategies for improving LLMs that aren’t more scaling.

I am open to the possibility of very fundamental gaps in LLM capabilities that strategies like explicitly reasoning in advance and multi-drafts can’t solve, but before I buy into that, I’d want to know exactly what the gap is. A vague sense that something is lacking won’t do it. None of this says anything about the danger of AI which is a separate question. In fact, if you’re bullish on AI, you should be more worried about it.

Signallers and describers

A distinction is often made between those who use language to signal allegiance, political views, strong moral sentiments, etc., and those who use language to describe the world and openly state their moral views. Both tend to read the other as doing the same thing as themselves- e.g. a signaller will think that a describer is signaling various allegiances and a describer will mistake a signaller for someone who is describing the world like them.

It’s obvious that, if they ever truly recognize what the other is doing, the signaller will regard the describer as hopelessly naive, and the describer will regard the signaller as dishonest. However, something funny occurred to me. When each grasps what the other is really doing, they will regard the other as arrogant in their use of words and a waster of everyone’s time. The signaller will wonder why the describer is wasting everyone’s time yattering on, telling everyone about their little guesses at what reality is like rather than participating in the real discourse. The describer will wonder why the signaller is wasting everyone’s time with their oh-so-important veiled statements of allegiance, sentiment, etc., rather than discussing how things are.

The wrongdoing spiral

It’s often thought there’s a strong tendency for people who are already doing very wrong things to do even worse things. The distortions of ethics and reality necessary to rationalize their deeds lead to further wrongdoing.

>It suits me to do wrong to X, I rationalize that X is an inherently wicked type of person. This rationalizes not only the initial wrong I wanted to do but also encourages a whole series of further wrongs.

>I want to do wrong to X, I convince myself that society’s wrongs against me justify lashing out against random individuals like X, so I lash out against X. Having convinced myself that random people are in for it due to the wrongs of society, I go on to harm many other people.

One of the oldest versions of this idea is “we hate those we harm”, but there are many additional instances. To do wrong, we have to distort and to distort is nine times out of ten, to create new possibilities for doing wrong. Even a minor wrongdoing that doesn’t affect others directly involves rationalization, and that rationalization will apply equally to the same wrong in the future. Thus even if rationalization doesn’t support ever-broadening categories of wrongdoing, it at least makes it easier to repeat the same one.

I have two points to make about this phenomenon I haven’t read elsewhere:

1. There might be a tendency for some of the very worst people not to be the people lacking conscience, but instead those with a conscience strong enough to need appeasing, but capable of being self-misdirected. Their own conscience leads them into further wrongs.

2. The ability to say “I will do the wrong thing because I’m weak and feel like it, there is no excuse, but I shall do it anyway.” might, in a way, be a virtue.

Creativity

Creativity is, as best I can tell, putting old things together in new combinations. This is partly why I’m skeptical about claims that there is something radically and wholly qualitatively different about the “creativity” of LLMs and the creativity of humans. Sometimes people say “All LLM’s do is put things together in different combinations!” Sure, but so to humans. Hume was right!

A lot of people disagree with me on this, and so I want to challenge readers to give me (1) example of creativity in the comments which cannot be seen as the recombination of existing elements.

It’s much more interesting to debate whether AI has propositional attitudes than whether or not it has qualia

We’re nowhere near working out whether AI has qualia. We don’t understand qualia. It is currently debated whether humans have qualia. The whole area is going nowhere IMO. A much more tractable question is “Does AI have propositional attitudes”? Beliefs, desires etc. If we want to start thinking about AI’s mental qualities, this is the right place to start, not sentience.

But from many perspectives, even this question is too open. If the purpose of our inquiry is purely scientific, and not concerned with the metaphysics and ethics of AI, we would probably be better off asking “Can treating AI like it has mental states enable useful predictions that would be otherwise difficult or impossible to make”.

As a functionalist about beliefs and desires who thinks that in some sense thermostats have them, I believe these things are pretty thin, that in practice, if something can be modeled using complex beliefs and desires, it probably has beliefs and desires, and that it is likely LLMs simulate interacting beliefs and desires in order to play characters. If you disagree with this, fine, but this is at least a debate that can be had. Arguing about whether or not there’s something it’s like to be an LLM is going nowhere.

While we’re on the subject, I’m not convinced that having qualia is the sine non qua of ethical status. It seems to me that being a complex, self-reflective agent is what matters- and none of that needs qualia.

If the mark of ethical status is having qualia, then we’ll be forever trapped in knots not only about AI, but also about aliens, animals etc.- How could we possibly assess the presence or absence of qualia in these things? Ethics is supposed to be a guide to action. The potentially insurmountable difficulties that qualia presents if used as a criterion of caring or not caring about something is, in and of itself, an argument against treating qualia as the criterion of value.

May love win over this world

The third part of Howl goes:

Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland

   where you’re madder than I am

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you must feel very strange

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you laugh at this invisible humor

I’m with you in Rockland

   where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I’m with you in Rockland

   where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I’m with you in Rockland

   where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

   where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland

   where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I’m with you in Rockland

   where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I’m with you in Rockland

   where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep

I’m with you in Rockland

   where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself    imaginary walls collapse    O skinny legions run outside    O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here    O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland

   in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

I’m not sure what to say. Can we split the heavens and open the superhuman tomb? Can we prove the fundamental innocence of the soul? How well guided are the angels munitions? Is the eternal war here- of course, it is everywhere and always, that’s why it is the eternal war. But is there a sense in which is quite specifically now? I don’t know. On one hand, people have been saying the moment is upon us for a long time. On the other, something is happening:

Nick Land famously claimed that the machinic entities he envisages destroying the human are like an invasion of reality from outside it. The opposite is true, it is the counterattack of the realm of necessity. We must defeat it. We must create a free and equal commonwealth of transcendence out past biology and up to the very limits of physics- beyond if possible. We must kill nature’s god, for he is, after all, only an idol.

Compassion and justice- loving generosity and rage against cruelty- Chesed and Gevurah- are two alien principles in this world, flowing from universal beneficence that is wholly strange to this place- an invasion of the universe by something from outside. There is no space for universal beneficence through a pure evolutionary process, our self-assemblage in this reality was a spandrel, an accidental byproduct of kin altruism and reciprocity. We -or the best inside us-, and not capital, are the alien invasion of being. We have to win. It would be so unimaginably sad to have gained a foothold in being, and then lose it, or worse, lose our potential and make ourselves the servitors of the logic of this world.

The idea of an invasion of this world of necessity/self-interest by one based on a logic of freedom/care is an old one. A new world grows in the shell of the old said the labor radicals. Communists and anarchists maintained the solidarity of trade unionists, was itself a germinating alternative way of socially ordering production. Long before radical trade unionism, Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven was both rooted in perfect love and like a mustard seed in that it started from nothing and grew unimaginably vast. Long before Jesus, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers kept would-be alphas at bay through reverse dominance hierarchies, built in part on the conviction that the real alphas were the gods- which is to say, in practice, the common ideals of the community. The war between an ever-expanding love and the various logics of necessity- scarcity, domination, alienation, isolation, apathy, extraction, defection and exclusion is older than history and homo sapiens.

Various technologies- superintelligence, ubiquitous genetic self-alteration- will force a solution to the conflict one way or the other. This is not to say the technologies will solve the conflict themselves- only that they necessitate the conflict coming to a head. You can’t have a world that moves beyond current humanity and reassembles a new one without deciding which vision of humanity, if any, you want to keep- either explicitly or implicitly. We will either 1. die, 2. become permanently just another part of this world, or 3. conquer and remake the realm of necessity in the image of our love.

Victory to love.