fipindustries:

nostalgebraist:

Heard Philip Pullman on the radio the other day promoting his new book, and he was talking about how he didn’t like A. A. Milne (in his role as editor of Punch) because he promoted a nostalgic adult vision of childhood, whereas, you see, actual children are not innocent and content with childhood, actual children want to grow up quickly and do adult things, apparently

What is it with this dude and the idea that every human being goes through the exact same developmental trajectory, seriously, between this and the daemons??

curious, what’s wrong with the daemons?

I have the same objection to daemons – they are a fantasy concept corresponding to a certain idea of what growing up is like, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with that, I got the impression that Pullman thinks growing up just is that way.

I felt like I was supposed to look at the daemons being protean in childhood, and settling into one form during adolescence, and think “ah, what a wise metaphor for the fundamental experience of growing up,” rather than what I actually think: “but what about people who follow some other course instead?  people like me, or my friend so-and-so, or hell, half of the people I know, really”

In general, those books seemed to place an outsize importance on the biological phenomenon of adolescence, conflating it somewhat with the actual growth of knowledge, self-awareness and so on that happens (or sometimes happens!) between childhood and adulthood.  I think Pullman does this because he is trying to invert the standard Christian association of sex, knowledge and sin (as in a very common reading of the Eden story).  But instead of saying “hey, actually life is messier and more complicated than that, and by the way sex is just this cool facet of life and doesn’t have vast cosmic moral weight,” he just does an extremely literal inversion of the Christian stuff, so that in HDM “original sin” actually exists but it’s good instead of evil and we still have a vast cosmic force centering on sexual awakening but in this case sexual awakening is Pure Good instead of Pure Evil.

I think that any fantasy world which turns a psychological or moral concept into a real force acting in the world is bound to have a lot of fridge horror (see: Floornight).  Pullman does a lot of this (daemons, dust) and I don’t think he really thought through the consequences – he thought that as long as the forces are aligned with his morality and view of people, everything would work out fine, which is just not the way these things work.  It’s not the way things work, period, in real worlds with humans in them.  (I linked it a few days ago, but @thesublemon‘s post on speculative fiction, particularly the last paragraph, is relevant here.)

But then, I haven’t read a word of any of these books since I was 12, and maybe these things (like how daemons work for people who grow up “unusually”) were explored more than I remember.

(via fipindustries)

trickytalks:

nostalgebraist:

Heard Philip Pullman on the radio the other day promoting his new book, and he was talking about how he didn’t like A. A. Milne (in his role as editor of Punch) because he promoted a nostalgic adult vision of childhood, whereas, you see, actual children are not innocent and content with childhood, actual children want to grow up quickly and do adult things, apparently

What is it with this dude and the idea that every human being goes through the exact same developmental trajectory, seriously, between this and the daemons??

Wanting to be adult and do adult things describes my childhood experience, and I’m actually pretty surprised it doesn’t describe yours since I thought it was more common. Especially considering how often it appears in fiction.

How were you different? And do you know how common your perspective is, or of any other perspectives?

I don’t know how common any of these patterns actually are.  So, much of my frustration is not with inaccuracy so much as insufficient concern with accuracy, I guess?

The worry is that “kids wants to be adults” is just another cultural narrative that “everyone knows,” the way “everyone knew” kids were innocent and happy with childhood in an earlier (Victorian to Edwardian?) age.  You mention that it appears in fiction a lot, which is one of the ways that “things everyone knows” can be established.  Pullman was complaining about the sort of cutesy cartoons that Milne would publish in Punch; I’m worried that fiction using this trope is our age’s equivalent of those cartoons.  In neither case do we really know how common one pattern is relative to another; we just have our narrative.

I think I’ve most often heard the “wanting to be adults” theory invoked to explain stereotypical teenage behavior, but I’ve also heard it challenged (I remember some psychologist saying, “if teenagers really wanted to be adults they’d be fascinated by office jobs and doing taxes”).  My own best guess is that adolescence makes people act differently because they’re flooded with new quantities of certain hormones, and the psychological gloss (“wanting to be an adult” or something else) is determined by how these hormones interact with the teenager’s particular psyche.  There may be general trends in what this interaction looks like, but the psychological part isn’t causal; one takes more risks (say) because of the hormones, then interprets that behavior after the fact in one way or another.  But that’s just my own guess.

In my own case, well, we should probably split things into before and after puberty.  (IIRC the cutesy cartoons involved prepubescent children, so before puberty is probably the most directly relevant.)  Before puberty, I don’t remember any specific drive to grow up.  Adulthood was strange and mysterious, and I knew it would come with more freedom, but I also knew it would come with responsibilities whose nature I didn’t grasp.  And more importantly, the only way to become an adult was to go through adolescence first, and I’d heard all about how “teenagers” were these horrible goblins who took stupid risks and became unreasonably rude to everyone.  So when I thought about this at all, it was mostly to hope that I wouldn’t go through this goblin-metamorphosis I’d heard about.  (Not that I would never hit puberty, just that puberty wouldn’t be like that.)

Then, when I really did hit puberty, things were unusual because I was already on Risperdal, and it (or perhaps some inherent tendency of mine, who knows) prevented me from adapting to new social circumstances.  I still hung around my old friends, but they themselves had changed a lot, and I found this alienating and withdrew into myself.  At this time, I was mostly scared that I wouldn’t be able to get a college degree (since I already found high school so hard), that I wouldn’t be able to thrive on my own and would have to live with my parents forever, etc.  So I was scared of becoming an adult, but due to some specific personal circumstances (Risperdal) that don’t generalize.

It’s possible that there is some normal trajectory that is overwhelmingly common without outside interference like Risperdal.  But if so, well, I imagine “outside interference” of some kind is very common.  And even then, I didn’t yearn for adulthood even before I started taking Risperdal.

Heard Philip Pullman on the radio the other day promoting his new book, and he was talking about how he didn’t like A. A. Milne (in his role as editor of Punch) because he promoted a nostalgic adult vision of childhood, whereas, you see, actual children are not innocent and content with childhood, actual children want to grow up quickly and do adult things, apparently

What is it with this dude and the idea that every human being goes through the exact same developmental trajectory, seriously, between this and the daemons??

maxiesatanofficial:

How come period pieces are almost always dramas, anyway? I want to watch a sitcom about a dude in renaissance-era Tuscany trying to get rich quick by scamming the local merchant princes.

(via averyterrible)

It’s funny how much it’s possible to dissociate fascination with the conversation around a work from enjoyment of the work itself – to have one in pure form without the other.  An example of this, with me, is James Bond.

I don’t actually like anything about James Bond.  The franchise seems to mostly differ from completely generic action thrillers by starring a character who lacks the nobility, or the salt-of-the-earth gut appeal, of most action heroes – a cold, suave, cruel guy who’d normally be cast as the villain.  I don’t watch many action movies to begin with, and this is even worse to me than the baseline.

But reading about the franchise is a wonderful aesthetic experience – it’s like I have a sixth sensory modality devoted to experience stuff like this.  The different actors and eras, each having their/its own internal arc and relation to the others, the various takes on the character and their relation to the original novels (a whole other layer) … the amazing titles!  It’s the kind of thing I wrote this about.  On the rare occasions when I see a Bond movie, I don’t enjoy it much as a movie, and yet I enjoy it as a part of this other thing, this structure, this wonderful web.

I wrote this post in February 2014 and (as far as I can tell) never posted it publicly, probably because of all the talk about my family.  I recently discovered it sitting on my hard drive and was like “wow, this is one of the best things I’ve ever written,” so I’m going to post it.

OK to reblog despite all the family talk, because you know what, I’m 29 years old and treading oh-so-carefully is probably not as adaptive as habit as it once was.  What was it they said back in 2014 – “you only live once”?  Something like that

(All of this is still cosigned, but words below this line are by 2014!me)

As a child I was told many things about myself, but one embedded itself more deeply than the others: my defining quality is my obliviousness, and this quality morally taints any action I might choose to take, no matter how small.

I learned this from two sources, unrelated in origin but conspiratory in effect: one familial and one pharmacological.  The latter is easier to sum up.  I was on Risperidone for five years and it prevented me from reliably paying sustained attention to anything for more than a few minutes.  I couldn’t pay attention in class.  I couldn’t read books.  I was dependably incapable of paying attention for the duration of a movie, and when I would see movies with people – even the kind of movies people would call “dumb” and “brainless” – I would find myself having to bullshit afterwards, saying as little as possible to avoid letting on that I hadn’t followed the plot.

I forgot things and forgot about forgetting them.  Forgetting is an especially frustrating error for the one who commits it, because by definition it isn’t willed.  You can write yourself notes, you can turn something into a mantra that you repeat over and over … but, ultimately, if you forget something, you don’t feel like you made a choice to forget.  You can chastise yourself for bad choices, and resolve to do better next time.  But how do you resolve to “not forget next time”?  The choice to “not forget” was never presented to you, you weren’t mentally “there” to take it – that’s the whole problem!  To be told you’ve forgotten something is to feel as though you’ve fallen afoul of so-called “moral luck”: you’ve done something truly wrong, but purely by accident, not by choice.  This is the worst kind of guilt, because you still feel bad, but there is no way to take steps toward ensuring that you won’t err again.

I wasn’t so stupid as to not learn from experience.  I soon learned to forecast before the fact that, wherever I was, whatever I was doing, I probably would soon be told I had forgotten or neglected something.  This didn’t help me remember – it just produced a completely general sense of ironic resignment toward the probable wrongness of any action I took.  It  didn’t matter how seemingly unassailable the choice was, because all sins of honest omission feel that way until you remember what it is you’ve left out.  Getting out of bed, putting one foot in front of the other, brushing my teeth: any of these could secretly be sins.  Yes, their sinful nature would have to inhere in occult, subtle reasons.  But to be a person in an antipsychotic haze is to be forever confronted with reasons that seem occult and subtle to you and perfectly obvious and ordinary to everyone else.

No motion, however tiny, is without the potential for harm.  The Whos were people, and they lived on a mote of dust.  The oblivious person is a clumsy giant in a world of inhabited specks.

All this only emphasized, though, what I had already learned from my father.  My father is the sort of person who views other people fundamentally as obstacles to his own goals.  That’s not to say he’s amoral or selfish; in fact, his own goals are often altruistic ones.  But his altruism is of a purely, well, “paternalistic” kind.  He believes firmly that he is more qualified to make decisions for other people than they are.  (I’m not sure there is anyone in his personal life who is an exception to this rule.)  He believes that everyone but him is essentially a dumb machine, acting on simple and unsubtle rules – and he believed this long before I went on Risperidone and began in fact to approximate such a creature.  Discussing and negotiating with the machines is pointless; he can only try to predict their unthinking behavior and then plan around it.

Like a noble villain from a sci-fi cartoon, he devises secret, elaborate plans, which depend on numerous shaky predictions about the behavior of people around him.  Since the plans are secret – too subtle for the robots’ understanding – none of his predictions can be guaranteed by turning them into explicit requests or demands.  So he lives in a world of endless disappointment, and to know him is to find yourself endlessly disappointing him for, yes, occult and subtle reasons.  You were just minding you own business, yes – but he had expected you to mind your own business outside the house (let’s say) rather than in it, and his plans – never mentioned to you – depended on you being outside.  No choice presented itself to you, and yet you have failed: moral luck.

When this happens he always takes the high ground, paints himself as a stoic martyr.  It’s not your fault, he reassures you (paternal, oracular, exuding warm Dumbledorean wisdom somehow even as he seethes with finally released, delirious rage – you can’t know how bizarre this is until you’ve experienced it).  It’s his fault, because he should have anticipated that you would fail.  You simply aren’t reliable in the way he wanted you to be, which is fine (the voice conciliatory, finely controlled, oozing paternal virtue, the sort of perfectly pitched speech you’d expect to see excerpted on TV right after the family drama it’s from wins Best Picture).  He should have known better.  He screwed up.  But of course he’s really praising himself and insulting you.  The sci-fi villain’s tragic flaw was his too large heart; he simply had too much faith in humanity.  His Rube Goldberg utopia failed because we failed him.

When I was 12 or 13, my parents and I went to the bar mitzvah of the son of one of their friends.  The party after the ceremony was a dance party designed for 13-year-olds, with terrible, blaring pop music.  We left after a little while.  When we got home, it became clear that my father was very angry with my mother, because he had asked her if she wanted to leave several times before we finally left, and she had said she wanted to stay for a bit longer.  This was bad because my father had an ear infection and, as it happened, the loud music was causing him incredible physical pain.  Every moment was virtually unendurable.

Any normal person would have simply said this to his wife at the time, and ended the pain instantly.  But to expect sympathy from a robot like my mother would be, according to my father’s principles, futile.  Instead he merely asked her if she’d like to leave and then, when she said no, stoically endured the pain while lamenting that his wife did not just intuit the problem – lamenting life in a world of robots incapable of moral action, where he was the only one with empathy, the only one who saw hidden pains, who heard Whos.  At home he and my mother had a shouting match in which he told her that anyone who was really in love with him would have known he was in pain without being told.  But (of course) that was all right.  "We’re not in a love relationship, but a lot of married couples aren’t, and they can still have basically happy and harmonious households.“  This kind of reassurance is clever, because if its addressee denies the premise – as my mother did, by suggesting that she and my father might be in love after all – they can be accused of being ungrateful.  I’m being so nice; I’m trying so hard to help you accept the truth – why would you be so callous as to send us back to square one?

And so the kind of mentality produced by living with such a person is a grim fatalism, a sense that you are – not in a cold thoughtless cosmos – but in the worst of all possible worlds.  The gods exist, and they hate us.  Every outcome is fined-tuned for maximum irony.  No step is safe; demons lurk in the marshes around our feet.  As in a dream, the most mundane of actions – like saying you might want to stay at a party for a little while longer – reveals through a sudden knight’s move of logic that you actually do not love your loved ones.  The motions by which you get out of bed, take one step after another, brush your teeth and make your breakfast, are – by an occult principle of identity too subtle for robots and the Risperidoned – also the motions by which you nail Christ’s body to the cross.  The patronizing say: "forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  But this only seems to underscore the speaker’s large-heartedness.  It doesn’t really exonerate you.

As someone defined by obliviousness, I’ve never liked ambiguity.  Into any space left for interpretation, I can read my own hideousness.  And I’ve always been terrified of logical jumps, massive claims, sweeping ideologies.  I can’t even trust the smallest steps, so any giant leap is bound to seem like a trap set by the snickering gods to ensnare the foolish.  Believing in small things already makes me feel horrible.  I’m trying to work my way up to big things, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get there.

But there was a moment of salvation, a moment where I began to feel as though I could own my own hideous flaw.  As though obliviousness could be made into a virtue.

I never considered myself especially good at math.  I’d fallen one or two years behinds my friends in the subject while on Risperidone, and it’d become something of a sore spot for me.  When I stopped taking Risperidone, I noticed I was becoming much better at it.  This fit fairly well into my narrative about obliviousness and my own worthelessness.  After all, math at the high school level is just a set of simple operations, something even a robot or a moron can train himself to do.  They permitted no ambiguity, involved no humanity.  (The rhetoric of “humanity” seems very closely related to the rhetoric of “obliviousness.”  I’ve often thought that my father views himself as the only really human person in the world.)  These equations, these vapid sentences of arithmetic, these tautologies, were the native tongue of the oblivious.  No wonder I had acquired a passing competence.

But then, on a whim, I signed up for 12th grade physics.  The class required calculus, which I hadn’t taken, and which I had always thought of as the kind of Real Math that real, non-oblivious humans do.

I bought a calculus book and read it over the summer.  It was easy, astonishingly so.  Calculus was just another set of idiot rules to learn.  I could teach myself rules.  But that didn’t really mean anything.

But here is what I learned in 12th grade physics: the fundamental logic of the oblivious is the fundamental logic of the universe.

I’m not sure how to convey just how surprising this is, how much of a unexpected boon it is.  It could have been otherwise.  It’s often said that the laws of classical physics are so simple they can “fit on a t-shirt.”  There was no reason to expect, at the outset, that the motions of the planets and of our own nerves and muscles could be described at the most basic level by a set of statements short enough to fit on a t-shirt.  Attempts at scientific psychology and sociology have failed to find such simple laws.  Fundamental physics is a happy accident: we tried the simplest ideas, and they worked.

This was astonishing.  Theorems and equations seemed like an escapist world, safe because of their lack of ambiguity – no crevices for demons to lurk in – but unreal for precisely the same reason.  What my high school physics class taught me was that the very same equations I’d thought of as an escapist paradise were in fact the fundamental logic of our world.

When you eat of the fruit of calculus-based physics, you do not become like gods.  The gods become like you.

“Escapism and reality are simply one in the same after all.  You’ve felt inferior your whole life, but your inferiority comes with a special gift.  You can bend material reality to your will.”  It was the closest thing a real teenager can get to a letter from Hogwarts.

In The Fever, his masterpiece of queasy self-loathing, Wallace Shawn wrote:

Shouldn’t we decorate our lives and our world as if we were having a permanent party? Shouldn’t there be bells made of paper hanging from the ceiling, and paper balls, and white and yellow streamers? Shouldn’t people dance and hold each other close? Shouldn’t we fill the tables with cake and presents?

Yes, but we can’t have celebrations in the very same room where groups of people are being tortured, or groups of people are being killed. We have to know, Where we are, and where are the ones who are being tortured and killed? Not in the same room? No—but surely—isn’t there any other room we can use? Yes, but we still could hear the people screaming. Well, then—can’t we use the building across the street? Well, maybe—but wouldn’t it feel strange to walk by the window during our celebrations and look across at the building we’re in now and think about the blood and the deaths and the testicles being crushed inside it?

It’s hard to truly have a party when you can’t ever stop thinking about the horrible things you might not know about.

My 12th-grade physics teacher was one of the funniest, most exuberant people I’ve ever met.  Talking to him was like having the kind of joyous party Shawn’s protagonist is talking about.  To most of his students this seemed an endearing contradiction – how funny it was, that this weird old guy was so passionate about something so boring.  But to me it made perfect sense.  He was exuberant because he had learned that he could be.

We can’t have celebrations in the very same room where groups of people are being tortured.  We can’t forget that the gods hate us, and that our expressions of joy are offensive to the wise and the righteous.  Unless, perhaps, we erect some sort of a magic sigil by which we can ward off the demons …

In mathematics, when you finish a proof – having finally written out the conclusion, now inescapably and logically demonstrated for all time – you write the letters “QED,” which stand for quod erat demonstrandum, “which was to be shown.”  Or, if you want to be more stylish, you can just write a little rectangle, like this:

□

A closed shape, for a closed system.  By justifying our steps we justify our joy; having said only what any thinking mind must be allowed to say, we achieve a sort of perfect legitimacy.  We have proceeded dumbly, obliviously, one foot in front of the other, eschewing ambiguity and complexity.  Reasoning that can be capped with a □ has no crevices for demons and no dust habitable to Whos.  With this magic we can create a place into which fatalist guilt cannot intrude.  Occult rules of the heart cannot be invoked.  Oscar-worthy performances cannot be cashed in for logical errors.  (Yes, dad, but which of the steps in the proof is wrong?)  The clear light of reason banishes all dream logic.

This would all be a sterile and escapist game – simply a way for people like me and my physics teacher to not feel like shit once in a while – if it weren’t for the correspondence between it and fundamental reality.  When I descended into escapism and sighed with relief, people didn’t say I was running away from the world.  They said, “wow, physics?  Now there’s a major you can make money with.”

Blessed are the oblivious, for we have already inherited the earth.

The reason I write things like this is that I’ve never felt at home in the usual rhetoric surrounding concepts like “reason,” “emotion” and “humanity.”  There’s a default assumption, buried so deep it’s hard to get rid of it even in my own speech, that ambiguity = human = warm = pleasant.  The universe of fundamental physics is popularly described as “cold” and “unfeeling,” presumably in contrast to a warm Christian God who loves you.  What’s left out is the other alternative.  A mechanical universe means that the gods can’t hate us, because they don’t exist.  It means we’re not rubes in a story written by a cruel satirist.

The most common modern version of the Christian God have never really been a possible part of my emotional landscape.  I see something a lot more recognizable in some of the stories I read in other mythologies – including the Old Testament – in which the gods seem like monsters.  An unfeeling universe has no secret reasons of its own and thus it can be comprehended, progressively, by any plodder who puts one foot in front of the next.  If your life is not a story, because physical law is not narrative, then it does not have to be a story of ironic failure.

I know what I look like: another nerdy white guy with a science fetish.  I suppose that is what I am.  And, because of my emotional investment, I sometimes go too far in the defense of these things.  But I’m trying to convey that it’s an emotional investment, that to me the ideas of science, logic and reason are the best therapies in existence.  They’re responsible for any self-confidence I have as an “oblivious” person, and I feel a kinship with people who go further than me in their science fetishes.  It can feel good to, for once, celebrate your obliviousness – to simplify things down to equations and logical implications.  The conventional wisdom is that this is cold and inhuman, but try as I might I can’t help but hear that as “you are cold and inhuman.”

You’re not supposed to leave anything out; you’re supposed to be subtle and complex.  That’s the way to be nice, decent, welcoming.  But subtlety and complexity and the insistence on not leaving anything out have always been the things that make me feel horrible.

It feels so, so good to be able to leave something out, once in a while, and not have a trapdoor immediately open beneath me.

G.K. Chesterton On AI Risk →