The Beautiful

I’ve been struck by this passage from a rationalist essay. It imagines two people arguing over whether minimum wage laws are helpful or hurtful, both citing facts to support their respective cases. Then it zooms out and suggests that it’s really a conversation about aesthetics. In other words, they are really arguing about whether capitalism is beautiful or ugly, which is why facts are often unpersuasive.

(The lead photo of a dense collection of gas stations in Breezewood Pennsylvania is a meme that socialists like to use to argue that capitalism is ugly.)

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt describes a patient who has brain damage affecting the emotional part of his brain. Ostensibly, he seems completely normal. But after several failed relationships, he sees a shrink. At the end of a session, the doc asks when he wants to book the next appointment. The patient lists the pros and cons of all possible dates, but cannot decide because he cannot assign any emotional valence to anything. He’s always stuck.

It’s an interesting case study because it suggests that humans actually need to be a little bit emotional in our decision-making. We need to see the beauty in things.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator describes his friend's relationship to his motorcycle. His friend bought a BMW because he didn’t want to deal with any problems. But they invariably happen.

The narrator tries several times to show his friend how to fix his motorcycle, but he stubbornly refuses to even listen. It’s not that he’s lazy or incompetent. Instead, the narrator describes him as a romantic thinker who sees the beauty of the motorcycle, but breaking down its component parts is ugly to him.

So it wasn’t a question about whether or not he should learn how to fix his own motorcycle, it was a question of whether the mechanical parts of a motorcycle are beautiful or ugly.

I think this framing is helpful because sometimes it’s the reason people in dialogue get stuck; they’re arguing about beauty. And you can’t, and shouldn’t, try to convince someone that what they think is beautiful is not.

Critical Thinking is Overrated

When you have low information, you rely on heuristics, or rules of thumb. As you become more educated, you find yourself telling these low IQ heuristic individuals to “read a book,” “do some research,” “believe in science,” or “trust the facts.” Then you come to realize that there isn’t much consensus among the scientific community and there are a lot of educated people with conflicting beliefs, ie Gibson's Law; “For every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD.” 

Eventually you come back to heuristics, only better ones.

I used to think that, eg Christian ethics was dumb, or the people who followed it were dumb. Because instead of trying to decide what was right or wrong (is abortion okay?), true or false (is man-made activity causing the climate to change?), they just did whatever some old book told them, or whatever some credentialed expert in the old book told them the old book said about said topic.

Stupid.

Instead, people should just be open to all ideas and judge situations on a case by case basis.

Also, stupid. Better yet, incredibly time-consuming to the point of debilitating. So heuristics it is.

Good rules and bad rules

The following tweet is instructive of two popular heuristics I see otherwise smart people do a lot: qui bono and the black box fallacy.

The explainer's dilettantish features are nicely surmised, but it's also worth adding that Yglesias is deeply incurious and a bad reporter, which is why he constantly gets stuff wrong (basis points, SBF, Santos, Andrew Yang as NYC mayor, etc).

— Alex Sammon (@alex_sammon) January 11, 2023

Yglesias has strong opinions and rising prestige, as evidenced by his popular Substack. So what does the gossip trap phenomenon tell us? People will respond by trying to pull him back in the bucket with the rest of us.

I have to assume the “carry water for the rich” line is in reference to Yglesias’ YIMBYism. There are countless examples of how policies that impact building homes impacts homelessness and the cost of housing, so I have to assume people against YIMBYism have low levels of information. So Sammon relies on the qui bono heuristic; if bad/evil people (ie rich developers) benefit then it must be bad. Which, it should go without saying, is a dumb heuristic. 

(After finding a way to circumvent the WaPo paywall and reading the story, it's more likely that the line is in reference to the story's insinuation that Yglesias has an inside track to influential politicians and writes blog posts that they want him to write; an unproven assertion that seems, I dunno, deeply incurious. But I have read others who argue that YIMBYism is bad simply because developers benefit. So the critique still stands, it just applies to people not mentioned here).

Black Box

The other bad heuristic is what I’m calling the black box fallacy, a reference to a SSC post. Basically, there are countless geniuses who had really dumb ideas. So dismissing Newtonian physics just because Sir Isaac thought there were hidden codes in the Bible would be a bad idea.

I highly doubt Mr. Sammon has a statistical analysis of the errors of journalists that shows Yglesias is among the worst. So he has low information here. Instead, Sammon is probably highly sensitive to the topics in which he’s discovered an Yglesias error, which is really just committing the availability heuristic, (ie his opinion of Yglesias is informed by the blog posts most readily available in Sammon's mind, the ones where he has discovered an error).

But what Sammon is really getting at here is an attack on Yglesias’ growing prestige, since Yglesias seems highly influential in areas that are, I imagine, at odds with Sammon’s beliefs. Sammon can’t possibly know that Yglesias is wrong in every subject he writes about, so Sammon relies on the black box fallacy: if he was really wrong in these instances, then he must be wrong everywhere and can be dismissed without further inquiry.

But more importantly, and I'm definitely impugning motives here, I get the sense that Sammon wants you to think that, because Yglesias was wrong in these instances, he must be wrong everywhere and can be dismissed without further inquiry. He wants to yank down Matt's prestige and influence.

Think Less

I write about situations I find interesting and I find them interesting because I’m not sure what the answer is. But I want to know what the answer is because I want to live my life. So I run through all these scenarios, not because I think judging everything with an open mind, on a case by case basis, is the right approach. I’m doing it to build out a moral framework so, like the Christians and their old book, I can consult my old framework for my response and not have to think.

Going back to the meme I posted at the top, I’m trying to develop heuristics that are are better than the Kahneman default heuristics. 

Here is one that I like: I call it the boring heuristic. If something seems off, and I have low information, instead of attributing it to something like malice, conflict, corruption, or stupidity, I try to come up with the most boring explanation possible and stick with that.

People in my town are mad that the town is slow to respond to the removal of public trees. We don't have a lot of information on the workings of our local government, so we rely on heuristics for an explanation. Most people default to the evil/stupid fallacy: we have incompetent, lazy people who don't respond to requests or we have corrupt officials who are laundering tax dollars into their own pockets and claiming that there isn't enough money. 

But a more boring explanation like: "There just isn't a lot of money in local government budgets and the town can only remove so many trees in a fiscal year," just seems more plausible to me.

He was right even when he was wrong

I also have a "people with reputations and money on the line are usually right" heuristic. The Matt Yglesias piece in question is paywalled but my super-sleuthing revealed this line from the story:

"At age 21, Yglesias was laying out the logician’s case for the invasion of Iraq, because how could the most powerful, informed men on Earth be so stupid? In May of this year, Yglesias declared that Bankman-Fried “is for real,” because why else would wealthy people risk their money?"

With hindsight, we can see he was wrong in both instances. But if your heuristic for distrusting the Iraq invasion is "never listen to the government" then you're probably going to be wrong a lot and will probably die from a preventable disease for which we have readily available vaccines.

Elsewhere in the article, the journalist praises Revolving Door Project, "which saw right through Sam Bankman-Fried." Good for you, Revolving Door Project. My question is: did you have information no one else did (highly unlikely) or do you have an "all tech people are committing fraud" heuristic (probably)? If the latter, I think you're going to be wrong more often than Yglesias. You just happened to be right w/r/t SBF. I'd be impressed if Revolving Door Project also predicted the Black Lives Matter fraud, but my guess is they were too busy targeting tech billionaire to notice.

I was too worried about finding a framework that would never lead me astray. But that's silly. It's better to settle on heuristics that will be right most frequently over the long haul. 

The only exception to these heuristics, other than having enough information to feel comfortable ignoring them, is the "What if I'm wrong?" question. Like, if following a heuristic leads me to believe Theory A rather than Theory B, I have to ask if choosing Theory A can have devestating consequences if I'm wrong. 

Otherwise, I stick with my boring heuristics. 

The End of Culture

My favorite podcast is called The Rewatchables, which is just three dudes rehashing what they love about an old movie. It has taught me how different subsequent viewings are from the first one. You pay more attention to subtlety rather than trying to follow the plot, because you already know what happens.

The first novel I read in years is called Station Eleven, which is the basis for an HBO series I’ve already watched several times. So I already had a sense of where the plot and character development was going and I could focus on the subtlety.

I just haven’t had the appetite for something new in a while and I don’t think I’m alone. On his Plain English podcast, Derek Thompson says:

“This year, the song of the summer is arguably Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”—which was released in 1985. It was launched by the most-watched global TV show of the summer, Stranger Things—an homage to the 1980s. In movies, the biggest hit of the season is Top Gun: Maverick—a sequel to the 1986 film. The ’80s was four decades ago!

The triumph of nostalgia and familiarity in culture is deeper than one summer. The five biggest movies of this year are the second Top Gun, the second Doctor Strange, the sixth Jurassic Park, the 14th Batman-related film, and the fifth Despicable Me.

The data now shows that more than 70 percent of the songs streamed are old songs." 

Similarly, in The New York Times Wesley Morris writes, 

“In “Maverick,” the comedy is that no one’s as qualified as Cruise. For a couple of weeks in August, our No. 1 movie was “Bullet Train,” an intermittently funny, mostly tedious crime-thriller that requires Brad Pitt to fight younger prospects — Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Zazie Beetz and Bad Bunny — ‌and casually kill most of them. They want what he’s got: a briefcase full of money, but his stature, too.”

Fearing what's next

The plot of Tenet revolves around some group of people in the future who are trying to reverse the flow of time, to make it run in reverse. Why? Something to do with climate change, I think. But the point is the future was bad and they viewed the past as better so they went to extraordinary lengths to reverse the flow of time to get away from the future.

I can’t help but feel that something similar is happening culturally. We seem to be afraid of the future and more nostalgic than ever. It’s even hurting creativity. Songs don’t even have key changes anymore.

People have been predicting that DALLE 2 will disrupt graphic designers. But all the AI does is take inputs and say “this looks like something a human would create.” As far as I can tell, AI doesn’t have the ability to innovate and create new artistic styles, its creations are based on existing styles. Maybe this is what AI really disrupts, creativity.

Cancelled

People like to say that you can’t say the type of things that George Carlin said anymore, it would be too controversial. But that’s not entirely true, because Dave Chapelle says controversial things and people have been trying to cancel him for years. But what I think is true is that no up-and-coming comic could do Chappelle’s exact act and survive. Chappelle, like Cruise and Pitt, has built up enough of a reputation and a loyal audience to make it worth it for Netflix to keep platforming him, despite the number of people calling for his head.

He has what Erik Hoel calls “immunity to gossip.” In a popular Substack post, Hoel coined the term “gossip trap” to describe the default setting of most social groups that prevents the formation of civilization, and how we seem to be falling back into it.

“Being in the Gossip Trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering.”

For him, civilization was a solution out of the gossip trap.

“For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip. Are not our paragons of civilization figures like Supreme Court justices or tenured professors, or protected classes with impunity to speak and present new ideas, like journalists or scientists?”

I applaud Hoel for using a simple term like “gossip trap” to describe the phenomena, rather than something nerdy and opaque like “socialized stigma inertia”. But I still think there’s a better way to describe what he’s talking about.

Surviving popularity

Gossip is done behind people’s back. That’s not what we’re describing here. What we’re describing is this: someone who holds subjectively dangerous/harmful views is getting too much prestige (trying to climb out of the bucket) and we respond by pulling them back down.

This blog post best capsulated what I'm talking about (you have to scroll down until you get to the Caviar Cope section). I saw The White Lotus and thought it was okay. But many people in my social circle loved it. They all shared similar traits: left learning, highly educated, white, middle to upper class folks who tend to hate the wealthy. 

The writer notes that viewers of Succession, The Menu, and The White Lotus have this internal monologue like this:

"I would love to own a yacht, but I'm too smart and mentally healthy to be that rich. So I'll just watch these pathetic losers on their yachts, to enjoy the experience, while also basking in my superior intelligence and well-being."

The White Lotus leans right into the gossip trap. It tells the viewer, "You know how all wealthy people are evil? Come watch this show where they all get humiliated and you get to laugh at them." The show is an avatar for pulling people back into the bucket.

The Cancel Paradox

Hoel’s idea of the gossip trap is his attempt to answer the sapiens paradox: why did it take so long for humans to invent civilization. But he actually does a better job of answering the origins of our current cancel/accountability culture (a common criticism of the idea of cancel culture is that "it's just people finally being held accountable." Fine, you agree such a shift in norms has occurred. You're just quibbling about it's label. In my effort to be inclusive, I've used the phrase "cancel/accountability culture.").

My understanding of Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature is that asking something like “why is there so much violent crime in east St. Louis?” is asking the wrong question when violence has been the norm for most of human history. Instead we should look at a quiet, low-crime community and ask why there isn’t violence.

So w/r/t the origins of cancel/accountability culture, maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Should be asking: how did we go so long without cancel/accountability culture? Hoel’s answer would be civilization, which involved building superstructures that create immunity from gossip/canceling. The cause of our current regression has been the age of information and transparency, which makes it easier to pull people back into the bucket with us and it’s made it harder for anyone growing up in this era to take creative risks when reputation management is so important.

From Lohan to Probst

But I’ve already said that gossip and high school culture isn’t the best metaphor for what’s going on. So what is? The TV show Survivor.

There are two ways to advance in Survivor. The easy way is to win competitions and gain immunity from being voted off the island. The other way is to not get voted off the island, which you do by getting people to like you, but not seeing you as a threat. 

This is where we are in our current culture. There is no more immunity so everyone is trying to be liked but not seen as a threat. (I should admit that I've never actually watched a full episode of Survivor.)

One of the most popular current comedians is Nate Bargatze. His secret? He never says anything offensive. Seriously, jump to the four minute mark in this bit he does about global warming. "Global warming, we gotta stop it. Or ... more of it? I don't really know which way we gotta go." He's gaining popularity because no one sees him as a threat. But if he ever works a political stance into a bit, watch the crabs come for him.

Civilization shrugged

This might explain our current cancel/accountability culture, but I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around Hoel’s point. He asserts that gossip is a “leveling mechanism” that has historically prevented, eg talented hunters from accruing too much power. These hunters are mocked and belittled by their peers and dragged back down into the bucket.

He then writes that civilization is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms. This seems to suggest that what allowed us to crawl out of the gossip trap and invent civilization was allowing individuals to accrue too much power. That’s some John Galt/Ayn Randianism shit right there.

If hunter/gatherer life is about tribes sharing the resources available (ie food), then agriculture/civilization is about increasing the amount of resources available and not sharing the new supply.

If this is true, then the libertarian mantra “the most common human trait isn’t greed, it’s envy” might be right. Capitalism isn’t about greedy powerful men exploiting poor workers and squirreling away resources for themselves. It’s about, well, greedy powerful men creating new resources and not sharing them as the rest of us look on with envy.

A Way Out?

So what would a superstructure that allows for creative risks and protects reputation look like? It might be Ontario's Human Rights Code. If you've been following any of the culture wars lately you may have read about a transgender teacher teaching a class while wearing large prosthetic breasts with protruding nipples. The school board has defended her right to do so, as she is protected by the law.

As far as freedom of expression goes, this example is a weird hill to die on. But in our current cancel/accountability culture, the fact that this unpopular personal decision is allowed to take place is proof that we can still create structures to climb out of the gossip trap.

Steelman Time

This seems to apply for comedy and movies, but not TV. We are in the golden age of television where creativity doesn’t seem to be a problem. So I think the gossip trap only applies to individuals who gain too much prestige. And the fact that I’m resistant to starting a new book or TV series might have more to do with the paradox of choice than some “end of culture” phenomenon.

But we'll wait and see. Maybe writers and producers have been around long enough to build up a reputation that immunizes them against cancellation. We'll have to see if the creativity stagnates with the next generation of writers and directors. 

But for now this is the best explanation I can come up with for the current culture war.