On Worshiping and Compression

For a long time, one of the most helpful books I've read is Arnold Kling's Three Languages of Politics. He described conservatives as seeing the world through the civilization vs. barbarism axis, which really helped me understand the way they think.

It's a very Hobbsien view that says the default setting of humanity is sinful ("idle hands are the devil's tools"). In the absence of the institutions that uphold civilization (police, military, church, etc.) we will naturally devolve into barbarism and sin.

Kling described progressives as seeing the world through the oppressor vs. oppressed axis. It's a very Marxist view that views the world as a zero-sum conflict with constant battles for power and resources. 

Although Kling never says so, what both groups have in common is the idea of a default setting and the need to fight against it. In fact, I'm starting to think that most views are some version of this. 

For example, I think Ibram Kendi, and the successor ideology at-large, think the default setting of America is racism. In How to be an Antiracist, he describes the birth of the "conjoined twins" (capitalism and racism) in 1450 Portugal, tracing it to the founding of the United States. 

The 1619 Project makes a similar claim, that America was founded on protecting slavery. In this view, the only thing to save us from falling back into slavery, and allowing racism to grow like metastic cancer, is the constant practice of antiracism in the face of the institutions that uphold racism (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.).

I could make the same case for Enlightenment liberals, who believe our default setting is tribalism. The only thing that keeps society from falling into civil war is humanism, liberalism, reason, and Enlightenment values. Here's Scott Alexander proving my point:

"Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully."

Thine Own Self

For David Foster Wallace, the default setting is solipsism:

"Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence....  It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of."

His solution was the practice of self-awareness and exercising the agency to choose what to worship.

"This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self....

"Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience....

"The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it...

"This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship." 

(In fact, the only people who don't fall under this view are free-market fundamentalists, who think the absence of government is our default setting and any tinkering with the market will set us on the path to communism.)

Implicit Compression

At the college where I work, our DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) officer keeps stressing to us that we need to be aware of our biases and microagressions. This type of practice requires constant vigilance, but it's important if we want to be an ally. In other words, harmful implicit biases are our default setting and we need to be aware of them and check our privilege as we strive toward the work of antiracism.

But there is a tradeoff that comes with defining one's default settings and choosing how to fight against it.

In "Wokeness and Myth on Campus", Alan Jacobs uses the term "lossy compression" to describe how the mind works.

"The term “lossy compression” comes from the encoding of computers files, typically images, video, or audio. Non-lossy encoding — that is, encoding that captures all available sonic or visual information — results in enormous, unmanageable file sizes. So the challenge for programmers has been to reduce file sizes in ways that lose some information (thus “lossy”) but retain vital information to ensure that audio files don’t sound fuzzy or images appear blurry — think of how your streaming Netflix video degrades over a bad Internet connection. Lower-fidelity encodings allow for smaller files that are easier to transfer and store; higher-fidelity encodings offer better quality, at the cost of slower transfer, more costly storage, and more processor resources to perform computations on them, like object and facial recognition. "

So small, compressed files are easy to send but look crappy; large files look crisp but take forever to process. He then goes on to show how lossy compression is a good metaphor for how the mind processes information.

"a recent article by Sarah E. Marzen and Simon DeDeo, 'The evolution of lossy compression,' is very useful in this context. The article argues that all living things need to “extract useful information from their environment,” but to do so without imposing overly great cognitive burdens on themselves:

'… evolved organisms are expected to structure their perceptual systems to avoid dangerous confusions (not mistaking tigers for bushes) while strategically containing processing costs by allowing for ambiguity (using a single representation for both tigers and lions) — a form of lossy compression that avoids transmitting unnecessary and less-useful information...'

I like the example used here. Mistaking a tiger for a lion isn't that big a deal; either way you need to run. But mistaking a tiger for a bush will get you killed, you cannot afford to compress and fast-track that mental processing. 

"For it is safe to say that no human beings have ever lived in a more cognitively complex environment than we do. Faced with the constant inflow of information, we grow increasingly reluctant, if not actually unable, to make subtle distinctions."

Daniel Kahneman called this system one and system two. System one involves mental shortcuts, heuristics, and intuitive thinking. System two is the more rational part of our mind. We use system one to answer 1+1=2. That equation is committed to memory, we don't actually calculate it. We use system two for 247+49. System one works fast. When it cannot process the information, it switches over to system two, which moves much slower. His book is appropriately named Thinking Fast and Slow.

Buffering

This is another challenge of living in a multicultural society with no common values: there are multiple groups of people telling you to process their information in high fidelity, in system two. There is an obvious tradeoff that none of these prophets or DEI officers ever mention: the slow melt of human cognition. With all non-lossy encoding and slow thinking, the mind gets overwhelmed. We can't exist solely on system two. No one would ever leave their homes because they could not stop wondering how each step they took was oppressing some group. Something has to get compressed, but no one is telling you what.

When I used to go to a Zendo, after we had finished meditating and before we all left, our Zen Priest would tell us "take it with you." In other words, take the mindfulness you cultivate during meditation into all aspects of your waking life. In Buddhist philosophy, our default setting is for our ego to control our actions and thoughts, and mindfulness is a way of fighting against that. So it's not enough to just sit once a week at the Zendo, or by yourself once a day. You have to practice mindfulness when you're driving, exercising, talking, writing, etc.

Here is my point: I don't think I can practice zazen and "take it with me" while also focusing on how my unconscious biases might lead to harmful microagressions against persons of color. We can choose what to worship, but we can only worship one God.

By telling someone: "You need to focus on checking your privilege/asking 'what would Jesus do'/avoiding logical fallacies" you are also telling them that everything else is unimportant and should be compressed.

I think some give and take with your religion makes sense. If I'm a Buddhist, that doesn't give me license to pretend systemic racism doesn't exist. If I'm on a search committee, it makes sense to give a second look to a resume with a black-sounding name, knowing that research shows they get fewer call backs. But I've also been told that "fit" is a racially-charged term I should avoid, as in "refer someone you thing would be a good fit," which I think is ridiculous and I will be adding that to my compression bin.

I wrote about a blog post that contrasted two workplace cultures. The author's conclusion was that workplaces should be transparent about what type of culture they are and potential employees could self-select and find their best fit. I think the same solution is necessary here; people need to be in an environment where they can choose, without fear of getting cancelled, what information to compress and what to focus on. 

Wallace was right, life is about choosing what to think about - what to worship - in order to combat our default setting, which isn't always suited to modern life. If I were to rephrase Wallace's point I would say this: We should choose what to worship with our System Two, rational minds. Because if we do not, our System One minds will choose it for us.

Once we have made that decision, the next step is finding a culture that accepts that which you worship and, more importantly, that which you compress.