Juxtaposition VII: Narcissism, But Also Tribes and Epistemology

I get uncomfortable when a labelled tribe and I agree about everything, because then I can't tell the difference between reaching conclusions because they're true and reaching conclusions so as to acquire social rewards. Though come to think, shared premises are more important, and if I'm reaching conforming conclusions, I've probably flinched away from questioning the premises enough.

It looks like self-labelled anarchists do not recognize me as anarchist, and moreover for reasons I see as consistent with other anarchists. Excellent.




I took anarchist theory and then kept going. I often do this first, as a way of checking for contradictions. Here I was able to fix the contradictions, but it turned out that a true anarchy, in the Greek sense, could easily look like the status quo, because contracts aren't inflexible. I just have serious doubts that anyone would sign the necessary contracts - I certainly wouldn't.

And because I'm addicted to snarking, I'll add that if anyone seriously believed the 'consent of the governed' nonsense, shouldn't they conclude that getting those contracts signed would be easy? Shouldn't they think that my system would exactly reduce to their system?




Ideologies and reality differ in characteristic ways, but sadly I don't know how to describe them, I just recognize the intuitive readouts that correspond to the difference. Though if you want you can watch me grope towards a rational understanding. I could try to supply examples, but I think the mind-feel is definitive: reality does not feel human and familiar, or even human and creepy; it does neither what you want nor what you fear; it feels alien.

Civic Theory vs. a Startup Idea

How can you tell that politics isn't what it you've been told it is, without leaving the armchair?

"Mancur Olson, in his book The Logic Of Collective Action, highlighted the central problem of politics in a democracy. The benefits of political market-rigging can be concentrated to benefit particular special interest groups, while the costs (in higher taxes, slower economic growth, and many other second-order effects) are diffused through the entire population."

This, unfortunately, cannot possibly the whole story or even a large part of it.

Here's my startup idea: political insurance. It would charge some incredulously low amount, like $4 a year, and promise to stick it to special interest groups. The basic product would end up being political stability. It would profit on a percentage of the difference between the costs of special interests and the bribes the special interests are willing to pay. These are guaranteed to be very different, thermo #2 itself says that the interests cannot efficiently extract their benefits. It defeats the rational ignorance problem, as the costs of research can be centralized, the results cheaply distributed, and is robust against cheating due to spot checks by individual customers. It is entirely legal, it is simply the anti-special-interest special interest.

This idea is ludicrous. It makes betting on snowballs in hell look like a rewarding hobby. I know it, you know it, it can't possibly work.

Okay, but why not? We know it instinctively, not rationally.

Here's a non-reason: there's a user bootstrapping issue. To charge the really low numbers, it would need a really large number of subscribers. This, however, is just a marketing problem. Marketing problems get solved all the time. Worst case scenario, the idea needs a few goes in different guises before it lucks out and takes off.

Imagine that instead of this sentence, I bored you with several other apparent obstacles that just aren't all that.

So, would special interests not manage to get countered by a firm dedicated solely to efficiently converting their deadweight costs into profits? If so, how?

Or, are special interests just yet another scapegoat? If so, for whom?

Perhaps the whole political system would rise up in an orgy of corruption and make it illegal? How do you convince politicians to outlaw the business model of bribing them more?




I think I've exceeded a lifetime quota; patience with intellectuals who don't take the consequences of their own theories seriously. (E.g, so you won't admit you think it is ludicrous? So...when's your appointment with the venture capitalist? This is easily a multi-billion dollar market.)

If only this were the only part of civic theory with that flaw...

Perception and the Parrot

I found a thing about being about a parrot. I have finally figured out what it is. It's what non-narcissism looks like.

"She did not look like she was gathering up courage to pet it or imagining it in the role of a chase-able dog or cat. She was just looking at it."

The author of the piece appears as a character, but it is not about the author. The other people and the other objects and creatures not defined by their relationship to the author, or indeed by their relationship to anyone else. They're allowed to exist in themselves, as themselves.

"The little girl presented a clearer display of authentic engagement of the parrot than all the adults."

What's authentic is the reaction to the parrot. Everyone else reacts to what the parrot symbolizes. "Parrot flits too quickly [past] the face to be noticed, and is replaced by more normal cognitions." In the case of Ithaca, the symbolism is about what the parrot means about their relationship with other things and other people.

"Their carefully layered oversized sports clothes and reversed baseball hats demanded attention. I suppose spectacles, be they man-parrots or a group of swaggering young black men, do not supply attention, but demand it."

They don't wear clothes as clothes. They wear clothes only because of how others' relationship to them is mediated through the clothes. They're not wearing clothes, they're trying to wear an idea or a relationship or a role. The problem is that ultimately, they're wearing clothes. The problem is that ultimately, a relationship involves someone else. They're trying to demand a particular relationship, which means they'd have to demand a particular person. Are you like that person? I'm not.

"But you cannot really compete with a parrot. The parrot is entirely unaware that it is competing."

The competition is in the minds of the observers, it is not a real thing out there. You can't compete with the parrot because the parrot is not in a competition. To put it in competition, the minds have to create the competition through physical action.

"To my list of profundities, I will add the following: a free mind is one which the parrot can occupy easily, and stay in as long as it chooses."

Narcissism, like the obsession with symbols and meaning, shackles the mind. I'll add that obsession with 'should' excludes appreciation of 'is.'

"Now, the little black children engaged the parrot as completely as the little white girl. So if the little kids are born free and demonstrably remain free until at least age six, as demonstrated by the parrot"

I don't think any of my age peers in school survived the trip from adulthood. Though, instead of them being removed from the world, they removed the world from themselves. Rather, had it forcibly removed. Since I went to the same school, and have to spend a lot of my time resisting the habit.




I could go on, but in any case I really like The Parrot.

True Elites are Not Upper Class; Instead Top-Out-of-Sight

Nydwracu mentioned that a high school, with great accolades, is dysfunctional. My reply:

"Which school? I want to compare it to my theory that actual elite schools don't show up on these kinds of lists."

More generally, real elites are smart enough not to show up in the news, or answer surveys, or much of anything similar. If you're lucky, they show up in tax receipts.




Eleanor Roosevelt High School is famous, lauded, and not even close to deserving it. I used John Taylor Gatto as a reference for schools to compare.

Philips Andover, Episcopal, and St. Albans.

They have 'notable alumni' sections. Eleanor graduates athletes, entertainers, and Sergey Brin, who is clearly an outlier. So do the others, but Gatto's information is accurate - they also have congressmen, law professors, CEOs, activists, chief editors for the Atlantic, and several other influential professions.

St. Albans is famous.

"A 2004 article in the Wall Street Journal found that among U.S. schools, St. Albans had the 11th-highest success rate in placing graduates at 10 selective universities. [...] The school opened its new Upper School building - Marriott Hall - in 2009–2010. The firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill LLP, designed the new building, which has been the subject of articles in numerous publications,"

However, only Eleanor's article reports any awards at all.

"Roosevelt has received numerous prestigious academic awards throughout its thirty-four year history. The school is a rare two-time awarded National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence for 1991 and 1998; a 1991 and 1998 Maryland Blue Ribbon School; a 1999 New American High School; a recipient of the 2002–2003 national Siemens Awards for Advanced Placement; and was named a 2002 National School of Character by the Character Education Partnership. Eleanor Roosevelt is regarded as one of the most academically challenging high schools in the nation, and for years has consistently ranked as the highest performing school in Prince George's County, averaging the highest combined SAT score in the county of 1570 out of 2400. Roosevelt also has more students enrolled in Advanced Placement courses---with more students receiving a passing score of three or higher---than any other high school in the county. Roosevelt was recently named #382 on America's Top 1,500 Public High Schools list for 2009, by Newsweek Magazine and was also recognized as a Silver Medal School by U.S. News & World Report, in 2008."

This been-in-the-news standard predicts that St. Albans is the least elite of the three examples. Phillips, which hides its 'notable alumni' section behind a link, is the most elite. To check - indeed, it graduated an actual President, both Bushes. Its history section specifically mentions it is geared toward Yale and Harvard. Episcopal should be in the middle, and indeed it had a bit appear in Time Magazine - over seventy years ago. Andover is mentioned in a recent article, but only in passing, there is no detailed account.

I'm surprised they have wiki pages beyond a stub.




One of the consequences is that if you've heard of someone, they're probably not that influential. Conversely, you did your own research, but if you can find someone to discuss them with, they're not that influential. Being blamed by a journalist and being responsible for the screw-up are mutually exclusive, generally. Net result is that everyone, even the upper classes, are obsessed with nobodies.

For example, Sergey Brin seems decently influential. It's easy to go one better - who were Google's venture capitalists? Who picked Brin as a winner? And who invested with that capital firm? Do the names Michael Moritz or John Doerr mean anything to you? More importantly, do you know whose money Moritz and Doerr represent, and thus who has effective hire-and-fire over them?

Democratic Experiments

I thought it was unlikely that anyone would forgo having a president, but then Belgium did it. Again, thanks Belgians.

The next check on the disconnection of voting mechanism and ruling mechanisms is to suspend voting entirely in one of the G20. I predict no noticeable difference in governance, and only token resistance from the population - little in tax protests, for example.

If governance does anything more than skip a beat, or the former voters do something beyond nuisance, I will have something to explain.

Utopianism? Hypothesis: Broken Discourse

That voters are ignorant comes as no surprise to anyone who isn't themselves ignorant.




Hypothesis: most discourse is broken, not just layhuman discourse. I expect any working discourses to work by accident, not by design.




Test: let's have a discussion about utopianism and revolution. My general impression is that anti-utopianism is opposition to legitimately broken political philosophy by way of strawmen. It supposes that utopian philosophers suggest a flawless, suffering-less society is possible, and in the process tend to be not anti-Progressive, but anti-progress. (Agree that proggies are probably utopian...we'll see, as below.)

Can I get a summary of how I might recognize a utopian system, and why I can be sure that these features predict that the political philosophy is self-defeating?

Juxtaposition VI: How Broken is the Public Discourse?

Health insurance is not insurance. Most of the stuff you can buy is like food insurance.

What are the odds that someone could convince voters to stop calling it insurance? That, unless you choose a policy according to a plan of never making a claim against it, you only manage to pay extra for routine stuff?




On the other side of the fence,

"Interesting that yet again, the wise [via] of the world are foolish, while this guy, surely representing the dregs of humanity, sees through the charade."

Dailymail should probably have never allowed comments.

"I know I shouldn't laugh........so I HOWLED instead.......poor police, imagine calling that in on the radio ( assuming it still worked) "unable to pursue suspect......all cars crushed" ....a bit like their pride I should imagine :-)" (Rated +710, Via.)

"You see this more and more. This is what progressive government will bring in America. You can't take away people's life long liberties one at a time, and tax them more and more, and expect that they are going to tolerate it. America needs to turn away from this path or it will be a civil war again." (+210.)

If it were a random pattern of insight and foolishness, I wouldn't worry about it. I suspect even the insight is dominated by foolishness. Would that third quoted guy actually pick up a weapon without social pressure? Or: why isn't there already racial civil war in South Africa? Does #2 think voting will fix things, and can anything convince them otherwise?

Juxtaposition V: Reality vs. Presentation.

One hundred tons. (Via.)

Fifteen hundred tons.

Winner: one hundred tons.




To me, the distinction between reality and presentation is unmistakable. The presentation edits out more information than they leave in. The main character is the narrator. The second character is the Navy, the third, Communism. Indeed it seems like the physical events they're supposedly describing are only included grudgingly, as an excuse, because they're not allowed to go full-blown narcissist.

Net result: presentations are boring, as they're all almost identical. Aside from the comparison, there's no need to watch that second video, a couple sentences of description covers everything that isn't copypasta. (See also: nearly everything on the BBC. They even have one decrying the style while still using following it exactly.)

The narrator spends a lot of time telling you how you should feel about the events. I mean, you do have your own opinion, right? Your reaction to the first movie is not, "Okay, but what does this mean?" is it?

Yet, the market consistently rewards presentation over reality. I wouldn't begrudge them that if they didn't begrudge me my reality. Are layhumans really that fascinated by stories they already know? To the point where networks deliberately edit out anything unfamiliar?




In the direct representation of reality, three quarters of the video is dedicated solely to the event. It is allowed to be itself. At least, it is allowed to speak whatever it wants to the available measurement instruments.

For me, this is well symbolized by the movie-ricochet noises. Whenever I see a detail like that, I begin to think it might not have been massaged to within an inch of its life. Which detail, amusingly, I've never heard in a movie after an explosion. Real things don't conform to the rules of drama, do not support clean political narratives, and have unexpected details. Every real event is a little surprising, every new object just a little different. It asymptotes toward zero with familiarity, but even my cream cartons are never exactly as I expect them to be.

In retrospect, I never believe in movie explosions. Before now I didn't have enough reference material to notice that's what I was feeling, but now I recognize the pattern. Movie; "There was an explosion!" Me: "No there wasn't, you're lying." Why? Because they're exactly what I'm expecting.




I wonder if 'inhuman' would be a good summary.
All real events - even real artifacts and e.g. bureaucracies - are a little alien. A little unintuitive perhaps? They don't neatly slot into instinctive concepts or causal relations. Perhaps best illustrated by the exceptions, things like one-on-one sociology. The instinctive categories work perfectly for figuring out how another human will categorize, and therefore understand, an event. Similarly, the explosion is exactly what I was expecting, which means it is exactly how I would portray an explosion - if I weren't aware of this alienness principle.

Another exception: rocks, trees, and water. (I find this especially disappointing because they could be interesting, but almost never are.) Or perhaps not; when mining or growing trees, you'll find them doing many unexpected things.




I think the key thing is the category thing. New events never fit neatly into old categories, even in combination. Real events are mind-expanding. Events I have no built familiarity with should not seem familiar. I don't usually encounter explosions, that goes double for military instead of controlled, and therefore I shouldn't find depictions of them familiar.

This is one of the reasons I think I have a solid grasp of logic. It is, by now, rare that I see an argument that doesn't fit neatly into my existing experience.