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Late Night Thoughts

I've recently developed a new habit of waking up in the middle of the night and being up for an hour or two. Last night was a rough one and it took me a while to fall back asleep, but as I tried - I had two thoughts which, at the time, seemed profound enough to share.

If I ever go into a coma, I just know I'm going to play an entire game of dwarf fortress and wake up from the coma and begin to cry, realizing it was all a dream.

A joke on the supposed story of a woman who had a coma and in three years lived an entire life and had a family and everything. Now, I went researching to try and find out more about this story and it could very well be an Internet hoax as I couldn't find any verifiable information this morning.

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Happiness is our survival mechanism telling us we're living.

I fell down a rabbit hole where my tired brain backtracked the happiness through the feelings that define it, such pleasure, fulfillment, and contentment, as all being things our subconscious uses to pull us in positive directions. Which, in a world of survival, is a very good thing. Part of today's problems are that that has been weaponized against us such that we can literally have too much pleasure.

"Benign Violation Theory"

Discovered courtesy of my friend Lucas, here's the quote from the website about what this is:

In collaboration with Caleb Warren, McGraw has been developing and testing a general theory of humor called the benign violation theory. The theory builds on work by a linguist, Tom Veatch, and integrates existing humor theories to propose that humor occurs when and only when three conditions are satisfied: (1) a situation is a violation, (2) the situation is benign, and (3) both perceptions occur simultaneously. For example, play fighting and tickling, which produce laughter in humans (and other primates), are benign violations because they are physically threatening but harmless attacks.

A strength of the theory is that it also explains when things are not funny: a situation can fail to be funny because it depicts a violation that does not simultaneously seem benign, or because it depicts a benign situation that has no violation. For example, play fighting and tickling cease to elicit laughter either when the attack stops (strictly benign) or becomes too aggressive (malign violation). Jokes similarly fail to be funny when either they are too tame or too risqué.

The earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

James Baldwin

"Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on 'soft' fascism, AI & the effects of shamelessness in public life"

I haven't watched it yet, but saving it here.

The origins of the quote "The arc of the universe is long, but it curves towards justice."

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

The quote came up in conversation at Thanksgiving with some friends. I correctly attributed it's usage to Martin Luther King Jr., however, upon arriving home I hopped on Google to confirm my recollection and found the linked article which shares the history of the quote and attributes it to Theodore Parker.

The article cites the following excerpt from Theodore Parker in 1853 as the origin of the quote:

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.

It goes on to recount numerous usages over the years from 1853 all the way up to Dr. King's usage in his speech.

Quite an interesting read.

Reasonable Person Principle

From the Carnegie-Mellon CS department website. It feels older than 2014, but that is the earliest date which Internet Archive Wayback has for this url.

• Everyone will be reasonable.
• Everyone expects everyone else to be reasonable.
• No one is special.
• Do not be offended if someone suggests you are not being reasonable.

Reasonable people think about their needs, and the needs of others, and adjust their behavior to meet the goals of a common good for the community, i.e., expressing what you want to say, but accepting and accommodating the needs of others. Mary Shaw's explanation:

The Reasonable Person Principle is part of the unwritten culture of CMU computer science. It holds that reasonable people strike a suitable balance between their own immediate desires and the good of the community at large.

As applied to bulletin boards, this would include things like observing the explicit or implicit ground rules about subject matter or tone. These vary from one bulletin board to another but usually include sticking to the expected subject matter and refraining from personal attacks. There are exceptions, though. For example, cs.opinion is no-holds barred and often both agressive [sic] and personal.

Not all people share the same model of reasonableness, so disagreements inevitably occur. Under the reasonable person principle, the first thing to do is work it out privately (perhaps in person, since e-mail is known to amplify feelings). Indeed, many people would find it unreasonable to bring in third parties before trying personal discussion.

More generally, the reasonable person principle favors local, unofficial actions over formal administrative ones. It assumes that people will be responsive when reminded of a conflict or asked to re-examine their behavior. It encourages requesting rather than demanding. And it leaves some room for difference of opinion.

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. - Edward O. Wilson

I was listening to The Weekly Show, the podcast hosted by Jon Stewart. He had Ezra Klein and Tristan Harris on, and during the conversation Harris dropped the above quote as a reference during the conversation. I really like that quote and I had to look it up to learn more about its origin.

It seems the origin of the quote comes from Wilson's book: The Origins of Creativity. I haven't read it yet, I'm going to add it to my towering to-be-read pile.

I also came across this interview with Wilson on The Big Think. The video on the website is quite short, here is the transcript, the last paragraph which I've bolded is the main thesis of it:

When we address human creativity I think what we are dealing with right from the start is what makes us human, and there has been a great shortcoming in the humanities in explaining themselves in order to improve the creative powers of the humanities.

By that I mean most considerations of human behavior, its origin, and its meaning within the humanities, stops about the time of the origin of literacy when we can deal with symbols and with the first written languages and understand them. Or perhaps it goes back 10,000 years to the beginnings of Neolithic civilization.

But that's just an eye-blink of time in the origin of the emotions and the setup of the human brain that's permitted our understanding of the humanities and then ultimately science, to the bottoms of their depths.

And this then brings us to what I like to call—an acronym—PAPEN, P – A – P – E – N. And that is a designation of the areas of science that are most relevant to the humanities when they address the origins especially of the human species and the appearance of modern Homo sapiens some several hundred thousand years ago.

And PAPEN, P – A – P – E – N, stands for paleontology, anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology and neural biology. These are the branches of science that need information on the origin of humans, and the deep history of pre-human existence is needed to explain the origins of creativity in modern human beings, and the ways and the reasons our emotions exist and rule us, leading to the way that I have tried to put it in saying that modern humanity is distinguished by paleolithic emotions and medieval institutions like banks and religions, and god-like technology. We're a mixed up and, in many ways, still archaic species in transition. We are what I like to call a chimera of evolution. We walk around and exist in this fairly newly made civilization that we created, a compound of different traits, of different origins and different degrees of forward evolution.

Everybody says disciple is so important. But they never want to tell you why. I'll tell you why discipline is so important. It's the strongest form of self love. It's ignoring something you want right now for something better later on. Discipline reveals the commitment you have to your dream. Especially on days where you don't want to. The future you is depending on the current you to keep the promises you made yesterday.

"Jacob's Dream" - Lunch with the QAnon Shaman, the author delves deep in a shallow lake

I am loathe to give these burgeoning characters more attention, but this article on Harpers is excellent. The author sits down for lunch with Jacob, and truthfully the content is like 1/8th of the article, the rest is delving into past philosophy, logic, and conspiracy.

A quote about Jacob from the article:

Which would include January 6. When he reached the west side of the Capitol, he moved as if in a dream, gliding onto the Senate floor as if he were some fabulous pooh-bah whom no one had ever heard of yet. He ambled down the center aisle of the Senate chamber, past one hundred abandoned desks.

“Fuckin’ A, man,” he said.

“What then is the American, this new man?” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur asked in 1782. At long last, Jacob provided the answer: He is a pagan straight out of central casting, a bro tripping on the hidden figures of the cosmos, a natural man convinced of his own self-evident truths, a hero ready to fight for his blessed fatherland, notwithstanding the fact that he still lived with his mother. Jacob stepped onto the dais, looked out on the sea of marble columns, and flexed his naked biceps.

A cop asked him to leave.

“I’m gonna take a sit in this chair,” he said. “’Cause Mike Pence is a fucking traitor.”

And on the inherent issue with overcoming the conspiracy theorist mindset, even when fact is against them:

With this intellectual lineage, conspiracy theorists are not about to back down from their truths, because their own scientific method possesses a historical claim as deeply entrenched as ours. And they have a point: their spooky correspondences, their spheres of influence, their invisible forces, their gravities and their magnetisms, their parsing of the invisible effluvia—without these, there never would have been any science at all. And that’s the reason reason has yet to dent the citadel of MAGA, and never will.

Religion is the opiate of the masses

I really appreciated this brief highlight by Ash Sarkar about what Marx meant by that iconic line.

Delving into the meaning of the Ubuntu philosophy

Bringing people together is what i call 'ubuntu,' which means 'I am because we are.' Far too often people think of themselves as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity. - Desmond Tutu

I have known of the term of ubuntu for years. Largely since it's rise as the name of a Linux distro in the 2000s. However I was re-introduced to it for its philosophical meaning as I continue listening to 'How to be Perfect.'

Ubuntu is an Nguni Bantu term meaning "humanity". And the philosophy it represents, as Desmond Tutu speaks to above, is "I am because we are." Which I absolutely adore.

From its Wikipedia page, the most recent definition of ubuntu from the African Journal of Social Work:

A collection of values and practices that people of Africa or of African origin view as making people authentic human beings. While the nuances of these values and practices vary across different ethnic groups, they all point to one thing – an authentic individual human being is part of a larger and more significant relational, communal, societal, environmental and spiritual world.

We are not individuals. We are part of a larger entity and we cannot be our true selves without it.

This speaks so much to my way of seeing the world and I am excited to dig deeper into it and look for books from African authors discussing it.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I'm currently listening to 'How to be Perfect' by Michael Schur as an audiobook, and he mentioned this resource as one they used during The Good Place.

"The Radical Theology of Mr. Rogers"

This is from the Substack of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. I've followed her on various social media and just came across her Substack. As an ardent fan of Mister Rogers, this was a good read and interesting to delve into the religious underpinning of his drive for bettering the world for children.

Fred Rogers was a Presbyterian minister whose life's work was, I believe, built almost entirely (if not entirely) around Leviticus 19:18:

"Love your neighbor as yourself: I am God."

Hence... the neighborhood.

In practice it that looked like this (all of these are his words):

"To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way [they are], right here and now."

and

"Everyone longs to be loved. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving."

Rogers' love of love was so intense that his favorite number was famously 143—since it corresponded to the number of letters in each word of "I love you." In fact, a few years ago his home state of Pennsylvania declared the 143rd day of the year—May 23rd—to be "143 Day," a day of kindness "inspired by PA's favorite neighbor."

"Love is like infinity: You can't have more or less infinity, and you can't compare two things to see if they're 'equally infinite.' Infinity just is, and that's the way I think love is, too," Rev. Fred Rogers

"Why the Idea of Western Civilization is More Myth Than History"

So I asked him—casually, I thought—why he was so interested in the ancient Greeks. He beamed up at me with an angelic smile and answered, "Because that's what you study, Mama."

At this point, my heart nearly burst with parental pride. I am a Professor of Classical Archaeology and the ancient Greeks are, quite literally, my bread and butter. But my heart sank when my son added as an afterthought, "and because the Greeks gave us Western Civilization." Buckle up, kid, I thought, you're in for a lecture.

I wanted to tell him that the ancient Greeks did not give us Western Civilization. That there is no golden thread, unfurling unbroken through time from Plato to NATO. That we in the modern West are not the heirs of a unique and elevated cultural tradition, stretching back through Atlantic modernity to Enlightenment and Renaissance Europe, and from there through the darkness of the medieval period and ultimately back to the glories of classical Greece and Rome.

[...]

But if the West and its history was invented in the imperial capitals of seventeenth century Europe, the notion of Western Civilization was born in the eighteenth century on the battlefields of revolutionary North America.

From Adams to Washington, the founding fathers found inspiration in the classical world not only for their revolutionary fervor, but also for how to justify the inconsistencies at the heart of the revolutionary movement—the cry for a freedom that permitted Black slavery, and the rejection of imperial shackles whilst continuing to impose them on others. It was the privileged inheritance of Western Civilization, the cultural and intellectual correlate of race, that justified the differential treatment of different groups of Americans.

Western Civilization is therefore not just a myth in the sense that it is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false. It is a myth that was invented to justify slavery, imperialism, and oppression. As such, it served the ideological needs of the time of its invention, reflecting the core values of the society that produced it.

From "Noël" episode of The West Wing

A beautiful story, and one of my favorite moments from The West Wing. It's told by Leo McGarry (the President's chief of staff) to Josh Lyman, who works for him. Josh is suffering from PTSD and has just been officially diagnosed after a particularly difficult week. It's a story about friendship and dealing with trauma.

This guy's walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can't get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, "Hey you, can you help me out?" The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up "Father, I'm down in this hole, can you help me out?" The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. "Hey Joe, it's me, can you help me out?" And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, "Are you stupid? Now we're both down here." The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before, and I know the way out."

Bruce Schneier hosts "Reimagining Democracy" in a two day workshop

Bruce Schneier is, in my opinion, one of the biggest names when it comes to security analysis online. He apparently held a two-day event to imagine creating a new country:

The idea is to start from scratch, to pretend we’re forming a new country and don’t have any precedent to deal with. And that we don’t have any unique interests to perturb our thinking. The modern representative democracy was the best form of government mid-eighteenth century politicians technology could invent. The twenty-first century is a very different place technically, scientifically, and philosophically. What could democracy look like if it were reinvented today? Would it even be democracy—what comes after democracy?

I've had a very similar idea for years, though I came at it from the game design angle, thinking of finding a system or evolution of current structures where game designers aim to align incentives for people and government despite different political and philosophical positions.

Schneier published a very long set of notes out of the event on the linked page. Here are a few notable excerpts as I read through them.

On the failure of languages in modern society as a barrier to modern democratic systems:

Zoe Hitzig: Experts corrupt the language we use to describe our social goals.

Josh Fairfield: Law is the sharpened end of the language we use to talk about the world we want to live in together…. Language evolves between us when we are speaking to another human as a function of context. we’re not developing language in the way we have been

Nils Gilman: Even if fungus cannot speak, we still need ways to include their voice—we need experts who are equipped, like the Lorax, to speak for the trees. Not necessarily scientific experts, could be indigenous—pluralize idea of expertise.

In regards to the waning fundamental discursive and epistemic boundaries:

What does modern governance mean if “we have never been modern”?

I really like this question. Many view today's government as modern, despite it being a stone's throw (if that far) from what was designed 250 years ago.

They then move into the area which more closely mirrors my thinking for setting up a group like this:

Any system can be gamed and hacked; how can we bring both anticipatory and retrospective/historical thinking to designing robust and resilient governance systems?

• Bruce Schneier on hacking: A hack is something a system permits that’s unintended by the designers. Subversions of rules that change the system. What happens when AI starts doing that kind of thing? Idea that AIs can become a creative force to find loopholes and exploit them.
• Lessons of history (Ada Palmer—We should always ask, what will happen when this system inevitably becomes encrusted with corruption, polarization, demagoguery, and threats from the outside?)
• Lessons of science fiction (Jo Walton walked us through several democratic imaginaries from science fiction of the past seventy-five years).
• Judith Donath: Lots of technologies were invented to deceive people. What kind of a society do we want to have? What is our relationship with truth and honesty?
• Disinformation is not a technology problem (though obviously made worse by it) but actually the default state of humanity. How do we build systems with the knowledge that the production of facts is fragile and rare?

Next, money.

Resisting financialization and the deleterious effects of optimizing for economics

• Let’s not pretend we live in a world that has arisen from a rational pursuit of relevant facts. Money and power pervade everything. Many “governing”/state systems are actually about protecting property.
• Sorcha Brophy: Our economic system shapes what’s possible. Students have trouble imagining beyond the perverse incentives of capitalism.

100% on this. It is hard to imagine things and systems different from our capitalist/consumerist reality for many folks.

Ethan Zuckerman: These [business] models are only fifteen years old. We’re pretty new in the surveillance hypercapitalism sphere. Governance feels locked in stone because these platforms are huge. We are thirty years into Thatcher and Reaganism. If we could get back to public investment, we could see change very quickly.

I would like to think Ethan is correct. Maybe we'll get to find out one day.

The notes are hard to follow, definitely missing context.

Later on in a section about the implementation of governance, though this next note feels relatively unrelated:

Ada: I spend a lot of time convincing my students that things used to be worse. Despair is how we lose.

And that was all day 1 stuff, next we move to day 2.

Feasibility vs. what the future calls for (where are we vs. where we want to be); CAN we directly seek abolition of (national) borders, (epistemic) boundaries, and (surveillance) business models? How does the conversation change if we are necessarily adapting from current conditions?

• Eli: Let’s imagine in 2050, we have flourishing multicultural multipolar democracies—“I can’t tell a story of how we get there with incremental small reforms.”
• On the one hand, we have valuing nonhuman intelligence, considering the lens of the future, learning from history, planning for future generations’ enjoyment and thriving.
• On another hand, we have toxic individualism and commitment to economic and property-based conceptions of what government is for.
• The above might be a false binary, but the point that we’ve jumped in seems past the point where you ask a basic question about what society is for, or at least what government is for.

Later on in a section labeled "Participation vs. Expertise":

Claudia: We’re not talking about direct democracy, we’re talking about a different form of representative democracy. Not getting rid of expertise, but creating the right epistemic conditions to be able to make forward progress.

And in the final note of the first segment of notes is this reference to the late Aaron Swartz and how he represented a different mentality for Silicon Valley:

Henry: Aaron Swartz as a linkage between Rob and Tim[’s debate about Silicon Valley style optimization]—a different path that could have been taken by Silicon Valley—piecemeal democratic engineering—no grand plans, but figure stuff out on the fly, iterate iterate iterate. Would love to see coming out of this, a project of piecemeal democratic engineering.

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The notes continue quite a bit further. I haven't finished reviewing them. Definitely some interesting insights from this group, but it also had a fair bit of philosophizing and, it feels like, circular conversations. But yeah, glad to see these sort of things happening and curious to see more.

There are only two religions

I don't know how it knows, but TikTok always hits me with these crazy philosophical post as I'm getting ready for bed

Casey Neistat has moved back to New York

I doubt this means the daily VLOG is back, but I enjoyed this video. It's a good think about what is home, what it means, and more. I especially appreciated his friend's line about "If you aren't changing, you're not pushing yourself hard enough."

I definitely feel that.

Seth Godin on Feature Creep

It's a short post so I'd be basically reprinting it in full if I pulled an excerpt, you should just go read it. While I think he draws correlation as causation for his Yahoo & Google example but, in general, I support the belief and the core point. Too often we accept feature creep in our lives as a whole and need to be better at removing older features.

"Poverty is not being poor; poverty is wanting more." - Seneca

To be clear, this is not meant to say "why are poor people unhappy"? Especially in the capitalist society of today. But it is a point in regards to the ability for someone who is objectively poor, but still able to be happy. If you have what you need and want, while it may be less than what others have, it's perfectly reasonable for you to be happy and content.

Bertrand Russell on Lying

Take again the question of lying. I do not deny that there is a great deal too much lying in the world and that we should all be the better for an increase of truthfulness; but I do deny, as I think every rational person must, that lying is in no circumstances justified. I once in the course of a country walk saw a tired fox at the last stages of exhaustion still forcing himself to run. A few minutes afterwards I saw the hunt. They asked me if I had seen the fox and I said I had. They asked me which way he had gone and I lied to them. I do not think I should have been a better man if I had told the truth.

I completely forgot I was still working on The Conquest of Happiness in today's reading list. Whoops.

"The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on the Art of Noticing and What Artists Can Learn from Naturalists"

Maria Popova's blog is among my favorites as she highlights wisdoms, insights and takeaways from great minds. Today's post from John Burroughs is no exception:

Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often amused myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on opening eye after eye to the number say of a dozen or more. What would he see? Perhaps not the invisible — not the odours of flowers nor the fever germs in the air — not the infinitely small of the microscope nor the infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require, not more eyes so much as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but would he not see with augmented power within the natural limits of vision? At any rate some persons seem to have opened more eyes than others, they see with such force and distinctness; their vision penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a spent or impotent bullet.

Please go read the full entry for her highlights and quotes from the great naturalist.

The 10th Man Rule

I was introduced to this framing of the concept in a Tik Tok, but a Google search turned up this write up that I thought was informative - and with the bonus of World War Z framing.

If nine of us who get the same information arrived at the same conclusion, it’s the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem. The tenth man has to start thinking about the assumption that the other nine are wrong. - Mossad Chief Jurgen Warmbrunn, World War Z

The Tik Tok I saw framed it as "a moral imperative" for the tenth man to be the opponent and search for weaknesses. They were coming at it from military experience and so when building battle plans it's obviously very important.

From Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness:

There is an element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much excitement, and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty. I do not want to push to extremes the objection to excitement. A certain amount of it is wholesome, but, like almost everything else, the matter is quantitative. Too little may produce morbid cravings; too much will produce exhaustion. A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.

I just took Elwood out for a late/very early walk. I'm back in bed reading and Russell's passage here, in a chapter all about boredom jumps out at me. How smartphones, the internet, and especially social media have largely removed one's ability to be bored except to be such very purposefully. And how doing so floods our brains with dopamine, deadening them just as he wrote.