#smac-talk

Much of what we humans do is, in a medium-long term evolutionary survival sense, not necessary. If you just want your line to exist, you can be a Gelada and eat grass in the mountains of Africa for ten thousand years.

Other animals don't have castles, and they don't have writing, and they don't build cars, and for the most part, they get by anyway. An animal species can do nothing but sit in a swamp all day and eat whatever is stupid enough to fall in, and do that for millions of years.

As human beings, we have access to higher and more abstract levels of meaning. We have the option to be a jet fighter pilot, for example. These categories have meaning, because even if their causal power is fuzzy, they have causal power. The world will proceed differently with a jet fighter pilot in the cockpit of a plane as compared to someone who has never flown a plane before in his life. These categories are, in a way, features of our reality; if aliens from a gas giant planet who had never heard of boats before came to our planet, they would invent a boat, and then they would decide on a term to name it for convenience.

We can choose to push against the environment in order to increase or maintain our dimensionality, through working, reading, exercising, solving problems and pursuing challenges. Alternatively, we can choose not to, and to fall back towards the nature of simpler organisms, or even non-organisms.

Our desires and drives, as part of our animal nature, can work in either direction.

We can also push against each other.

Suppose that the second-greatest musician in a city murders the greatest musician in that city, so that he might win an upcoming music contest (perhaps bonking him on the head with a clarinet and sealing him away with a cask of amontillado).

We each have a nature, in our time and place, and we each have potential, different ways that we can express that nature. Our choices, what we do with what we have, reveal who we are.

What our murderer revealed is that we he values is not the noble pursuit of the state of being of the greatest musician in the city, for he has thrown away his rival to practice on. What he values is fame, or money, or the prestige of being known as the greatest musician, without truly being the greatest.

These things are all lesser. To follow fame, or money, or prestige can locally point a man towards greatness, but these things are not greatness. Seeking fame can lead to greatness if a man also follows a set of rules that is more than just seeking fame, directing the force inwards, producing strength. Otherwise, fame, money, prestige, and greatness come apart at the tails. They are of lesser dimensionality.

Thus, in seeking the reward without following the reward as guidance towards strength, some forms of evil may be like wireheading.

This is not a complete system of morality. We could imagine a conqueror, his horde galloping across the plains on horseback, testing his strength through seeking out challenges. This cannot explain why he is wrong (although he acts as a point of opposition for the martial greatness of others), but we could see someone would admire him more than they might admire a man who allows a conquest to take place in his name through mere apathy.

Our murderer, however, is on his way back down to being an alligator.

The meaning of labor in a low-capital world is direct and obvious; you work to produce corn, or hammers, or trucks, or machine tools, either necessities of life, or devices with obvious utility.

Yet capitalism moves towards equilibrium. "Meaning," they might say, "is included in total comp." The capitalist economy functions through the conversion of desire into labor.

What does it mean to be a skateboard manufacturer—or a skateboard brand ambassador—working to sell a device which is enjoyable, but not necessary? Can you sell the experience of a summer breeze by the sea in Maine? Would you cook a gourmet meal, with all the necessary spices and sizzle, only to serve it to a dog?

Can you call that a meaningful life, or is it simply too absurd?

Does it become meaningful if you become the best dog chef in the entire world—if you pursue greatness through work in a category which is, itself, somewhat absurd, let it transform you, and become strong in some strange way never before imagined? Is the best roller coaster engineer in the world only valuable for the potential work he might do on machines other than roller coasters?

Previously...

[ @arcticdementor ]

First, I write all that, and this is the only part you comment on? Second, I didn’t think that was what I was trying to do. I keep bringing up Caplan and Smith — really, it’s Smith’s “Billion Immigrants America” that I’d really like to see you comment on and address — because so many of your arguments here (much like your arguments about birth rates) seem to rely upon those you are addressing caring about their fellow man. Appeals to the negative consequences of importing the Taliban mean nothing to the rational egoist who will “yes, and…” them by freely acknowledging it will make the country he lives in so much worse… but for him, the personal benefits outweigh the personal costs. Yes, even when you add in the politics. I mean, Nathan Smith basically just wants to live the life of a citizen of the UAE. What do you tell him?

In general, your entire style is set up to hit with a thunk and be enraging, not in the sense of generating outrage at you, but in the sense of generating a sense of overwhelming rage at others. You carefully distill the possible, though impolite, potential motives of people in such a way as to encourage punching them in the face.

I thought you knew this and were doing it on purpose. You set up a fork and put a tremendous amount of pressure on people, lining up (for a hypothetical example) the wrongs enabled by the British government, and then arguing that there is no way to overcome those wrongs through conventional means.

I'm exhausted for reasons unrelated to discourse, so let's address this quickly.

First, being shuttled between islands of safety, stuck indoors all day, while being unable to use national parks or public roads, and not having reliable services, is actually incredibly fucking stupid.

We'll combine your representation of these two guys together into a guy called 'Bryan Smith.'

"(a) The national parks will be filled with roving bands of guerillas? (b) Well, fortunately, I don't want to go to national parks!"

The idea that Bryan Smith will never, personally, suffer any negative consequences from political destabilization, is not based on some sort of impersonal analysis by Bryan Smith.

Second, if men of virtue and intelligence do not develop their powers and govern society, then they are, statistically, more likely like to be ruled by men who are either less virtuous, less intelligent, or both. I've heard that this idea was stated as far back as Aristotle.

There are two ways to view this.

We can view it as a cosmic joke. It's simply one of those funny things about the structure of reality as it relates to human beings. Markets have a Dao-like flow, and species benefit from constrained diversity, so it's not as uncommon as it might seem.

Alternatively, we can view it the way that the men of old might have viewed it. Talents, or aptitudes, are something that men did not earn. They are gifts bestowed by Heaven. If a man does not develop the talent given to him, then he will be punished. If the men of a nation do not collectively develop the talents given to them, then they will be punished. And if a nation do not adequately develop the talents of the next generation, and include them, then the nation shall be made vulnerable, and will be punished.

Men must develop these talents, and develop themselves, and become what they can be, and give freely to the next generation, without knowing for certain if they will be rewarded, or if the reward will be worth the effort, on faith. If men collectively choose to do this, then the nation is likely to flourish, although this is not guaranteed. If they refuse, and generation upon generation refuse, then it shall wither and die.

This ties back to the first point.

"(a) The public roads will be beset by bandits? (b) Well, I guess I'll just always travel by helicopter, then!"

Sentence (b) isn't a legitimate, impersonal evaluation of the situation. It's a refusal to face what I have laid out in the second point, due to the subconsciously-perceived psychological burden. It is the low-energy path back to the equilibrium, rather than performing a costly update of the entire ideological network.

One of the reasons that, before my recent sequence of posts regarding open borders, I asked if Argumate was pursuing "some supremacist notion," was to draw an implicit IQ supremacist position, if he was holding it, out into the open. An open borders world which is safe for Bryan Smith, even if it isn't safe for other people, would rely on solidarity of the vast majority of high-IQ elites, or of elites in social control of the greatest supply of IQ.

I don't see why we should assume that that's a given. Why is every country on Earth not already an anarcho-capitalist paradise if elites have total solidarity? And if they don't have total solidarity now, why would they have total solidarity under open borders?

And if they start off with total solidarity under open borders, why should we believe that it would be maintained indefinitely, particularly intergenerationally?

Without virtuous action (of the kind that Bryan Smith is uninterested in), and virtuous development (and thus the ability to make peace and adapt a system to changing circumstances), the default of a system should be expected to be decay, as individuals act in their local interests at the cost of the organization as a whole. The tools of punishment for defectors are themselves such a system.

>[not accounting for demographic dynamics and cultural hostility in 2025] bruh, we are so cooked

This will be a bit rambling.

I think that a number of people, Argumate included, follow a philosophy that's mostly Utilitarian, but relies heavily on an unspoken rule.

There are others who like the "be born" part, and aren't that broken up about the "die" part, but don't want to work or have children.

Many "conservative" positions are correct in a boring, obvious sort of way. "Work hard and save money for retirement." "Have 2.1 children so the species doesn't go extinct." "Arrest criminals for committing crimes." That sort of thing.

[...] Ultimately I think everyone knows we're culturally in a state of arrested adolescence but it's bad form to call it out, or call out anyone in particular for contributing to it, so on The Death of Taste rolls. Maybe one day it will be cool to be David Foster Wallace again.

Overall, good post.

Can't reblog the thread, but in terms of whether there is 'objective taste' or not, in 'High Culture and Hyperstimulus,' economist Cameron Harwick argued that it's a matter of 'solved stimuli.'

This is part of why my longest essay focuses so much on human dimensionality. This is also the topic of the (much shorter) Gelada post.

On my sideblog, I laid out the idea that there were things that the British discovered and used, and so some people think of these ideas as "British," but really, they could also be used and discovered by others, going all the way back to Confucius. My sense is that a new cultural network for civilization is under construction, although, as appropriate for our digital age, it's not in any specific physical place. I consider Razib and Harwick as likely to be members of this network.

These concerns, about saturation of signals, and reduction of dimensionality, will be major ones, I think. Due to its reducing effect, the generation of arbitrary signals negates its own reason for being, but in a high-energy society, controls will have to be implemented consciously, rather than relying on practical difficulty.