I’m not quite sure how I want to put this, but one of the many things that makes the “high/low” fiction divide strange to me is just how complicated and hard to understand a lot of “popular fiction” is.
Not all popular fiction. I’m not talking about James Patterson and Dan Brown here. But take, say, Homestuck. When I discovered Homestuck, one of the things that was startling to me about it was that something so intensely complicated and confusing and reference-driven and generally inaccessible had a giant fandom. It seemed like some sort of category mistake.
I’m not sure that Homestuck or the Lymond Chronicles are really any more accessible than Ulysses or Infinite Jest, even though they occupy very different cultural spheres. In fact, on content alone, those four works look like members of a similar category: long, somewhat aggressively (trollishly?) inaccessible, full of id-satisfying treasures for the patient reader, big extravaganzas of multi-colored fun (and, sometimes, tedium). Some works in this category are much more likely to appear in tumblr sidebars than others, but I don’t think there’s any intrinsic reason for that.
To look at things the other way around: since I started reading “difficult” books, I’ve repeatedly discovered that a lot of them are much less difficult, and much more fun, than is often let on. “Homestuck is kind of like Ulysses” is not some sort of wacky makes-u-think culture-clash comparison – there really is not much of a difference there.
There are people (I know, because I use Goodreads) who strongly self-identify as “people who read difficult books.” But i don’t think this is really any sort of distinctive trait. Everyone who’s read Homestuck all the way through is 95%, maybe 100% of the way there already.
I was thinking about this a while ago, how so much quote unquote dumb stuff is actually absurdly complicated. The Michael Bay Transformers movies have plots that are almost incomprehensible and impossible to follow. So do the “Saw” movies. So does pretty much every superhero comic.
And most sports are just endless sets of rules and conditions and special cases that people nevertheless absorb without a problem.
Heck, even the drive-through menu at McDonalds is pretty dang difficult to decipher.
It reminds me of how much easier it is to learn about, say, the fictional history of Middle Earth than the history of real, actual England. For whatever reason, certain sorts of details just seem really easy to absorb.
Scott Alexander wrote a cute post at some point about how it was much easier to remember character relations in Game of Thrones than to remember biochemical pathways (or some academic topic like that), and about how it might be possible to write a complicated fantasy story that “encodes” academic knowledge, to make it easier to learn.
(For a long time I’ve nursed a similar idea about encoding the rules of basic arithmetic and calculus in video game mechanics, but I eventually decided that there were insurmountable problems to doing this in a satisfying way – there was a conversation on this tumblr a while ago about it)
Anyway – I agree with you, although part of what I’m talking about in the OP (which I didn’t make clear) is more than just being complicated. Superhero comics stories are incredibly complicated, but (I think?) that’s largely the result of the comics running for many years with many different writers, each writer inventing new retcon devices or contrivances to overwrite the parts of their predecessors’ work they don’t personally like. It’s not like there’s a “grand design” there with a unity of vision – in fact the complicatedness comes entirely from the lack of a unity of vision.
Where something like Homestuck or Ulysses is extremely messy and complicated, but contains at least a sort of “grand design” – there are brick jokes that last many hundreds of pages, there are things you’ll only notice on your second or third reading, etc. (You could probably phrase this in terms of entropy and compression – metaphorically these are very large files that are relatively compressible, or something like that.) This kind of grand design / re-readability is a quality that’s often deemed a hallmark of great art – one commonly heard sketch of a definition of literature is “books you’ll want to re-read instead of enjoying and then never looking at again” – but in fact plenty of popular art has precisely this quality.
(Tolkien is another obvious example – cf. Jenny Turner’s comparisons between Tolkien and Joyce)
Re: math game mechanics; can you provide a link or keyword?
Thanks to the magic of siikr I was able to find it – the original post is here and I seem to have invented a tag for it which I only used twice.
(via disconcision)
A lot of Peter Woit’s argument against string theory in Not Even Wrong goes like this: “one of the main motivations for string theory is that it might reduce to a supersymmetric theory in the right limiting cases, but actually supersymmetry is very awkward and unlikely to be true, so this isn’t a point in string theory’s favor.”
How fair is this? It sounds damning, but I can’t imagine there would be such confidence from string theorists if the best justification they had for their idea was “it might imply a thing that is probably wrong anyway.”
Here’s my current understanding:
* supersymmetry looks “nice” enough and generic enough that we probably should expect any quantum theory to have it unless we have a specific reason not to (…but this might be because of string theory?)
* supersymmetry is “broken” in many theories, meaning that supersymmetric particles/effects are not apparent in processes below some energy scale
* this energy scale may be as high as the Planck scale, which would make supersymmetry essentially undetectable. Or it could be much lower, which would also (for reasons I’ve forgotten) help explain the apparent “unnaturalness” of the Standard Model. Or in between, I guess.
* the LHC has ruled out the “natural” SUSY-breaking energy scale. Alas.
So this is why people are saying “supersymmetry is screwed” (they really mean natural or possibly detectable SUSY), and why Woit’s argument is still probably bullshit.
Supersymmetry is increasingly unlikely to help solve the naturalness problem, but Planck-scale supersymmetry is perfectly plausible, and it’s certainly not awkward! It’s so pretty!
EDIT: huge point I forgot to mention: supersymmetry is not a main motivation for string theory, but detectable SUSY was one of very few observations that could have given evidence for it, so string theorists were reeeaaally hoping to see it at the LHC.
@su3su2u1 or @bartlebyshop might be able to help more. I’m not entirely confident in this answer.
So if you ask “I like Lorentz symmetry, but can I expand it in some non-trivial way?” Pretty much the only answer to that is super symmetry. So that seems sort of elegant “now it’s the biggest possible symmetry! We like symmetry!”
The problem is, what we observe is obviously not super symmetric. So we need to break super symmetry in some way, and now suddenly we have a lot of choice in how we do that, and things no longer look elegant at all. The minimal super symmetric model has roughly a zillion free parameters.
There were some small reasons to expect LHC scale SUSY stuff (if you add symmetry so that the lightest super partner can’t decay, it could be a dark matter candidate, for instance/having a fermion for every boson in a loop solves some renormalization/naturalness problems).
Woit’s book was written before the LHC results, so that’s not one of the inputs to his argument.
Woit lists four standard arguments in favor of SUSY (I don’t really understand any of these, I’m just repeating what Woit says in my own words):
(1) Witten’s hierarchy argument: in a GUT there are two energy scales which have to be very far apart to agree with experiment, but GUTs generically tend to put them too close together and it’s hard to get them far apart without lots of “fine-tuning.” SUSY could provide a solution to this problem by pairing the Higgs boson with a fermion whose mass has to be zero because of its chiral symmetry.
(2) In a GUT the three interaction strengths should all be equal at the grand unification scale, but if you extrapolate from experimental data they aren’t. But if you do the extrapolation using a SUSY model the results are much closer (although this requires a “desert hypothesis”).
(3) SUSY might allow us to unify fermions and bosons – but Woit says this “simply doesn’t work at all,” and is “completely invalid,” because SUSY would relate “bosons and fermions that are in the same SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) representations” and “pairs of this kind do not occur in the standard model.”
(4) It’s possible that the low-energy limit of a superstring theory is a SUSY quantum field theory.
Examining these three, (1-2) involve the idea that SUSY could solve problems that come up when you try to make a GUT, (3) is invalid, and (4) is only an argument for “if string theory, then SUSY,” so it’d be circular to use (4) in favor of string theory. (I.e. “string theory could give us SUSY, which we know we want, because string theory could give us it” is circular.)
So the impression I get from Woit is that the main appeal of SUSY is that it could fix some problems with GUTs. But Woit makes it sound like there’s no particular reason to think a GUT is a good idea either, both because there isn’t hard experimental evidence for one and because all of these problems arise when you try to work them out. So the situation is like “well, we came up with something (GUTs), but it has lots of problems, but maybe we can patch it up with something else (SUSY) that also has problems; there’s no empirical reason to think either of these things are true, they’re just the best we’ve come up with.” This doesn’t sound very appealing – maybe the correct theory is not a GUT and has no SUSY but it just so happens that no one has thought of it yet.
As for the alleged “problems” with SUSY itself – Woit goes on to talk about the minimal supersymmetric model and how ugly and full of free parameters it is, since, as su3 (the tumblr user, not the group) says, you need to add extra stuff to break the supersymmetry. Woit certainly does make this all sound very awkward and unpromising.
(Although there is a bit of his argument that I don’t understand – he complains that the MSSM has 105 free parameters, then says that the MSSM allows for all sorts of phenomena that disagree with experiment “unless many of the 105 parameters are chosen to have very special values, something for which there is no known justification.” But there is a justification – the experimental results! And taking those into account pins down some of the parameters, which should be a good thing, if we’re saying having 105 free parameters is too many.
This feels like it could be a general recipe for making any theory look bad – add extra terms with associated parameters, complain about there being too many free parameters, then complain further that these parameters have to be “tuned” to get back the original [perfectly good] theory. For instance, say I fit a data set quite well with a linear trend. But now someone comes along and complains that I am using a special case of “general polynomial fitting,” which they don’t like, because it has lots of free parameters [the coefficients for each monomial term]. Worse, they say, in order to fit the observed linear trend, the coefficients on x^2, x^3 etc. have to be “fine-tuned” to zero! Terrible! But of course this isn’t an argument against a linear model at all.
I guess I don’t entirely understand what physicists mean when they talk about “parameters.” It seems like it is considered bad both to have free parameters and to have “fine-tuned” parameters, when the latter is just a parameter that is no longer free – so really it’s bad to have parameters at all. The idea seems to be that a good theory of nature should not have very many specific numbers in it. It is not clear to me why this should be the case; we have no problem with allowing symmetry groups to be “fine-tuned” [SU(3) instead of some other group, say], but not numbers? Aren’t the choice of symmetry groups a sort of “parameter”? Is it a discrete vs. continuous thing?)
Finally, I’d like to hear about the main motivations for string theory (that aren’t SUSY), because Woit makes it sound like it’s mostly just SUSY.
Ok, a few big things to clarify here:
First, Woit has one enormous problem with pretty much everything he writes, in that he constantly conflates three completely distinct things: the String Phenomenology research program, the idea that the world is ultimately described by string theory, and the value of string theory in general.
The majority of string theorists, in my experience, do not particularly care whether string theory ultimately describes the world. For those people, the main motivation behind string theory is to have a UV-complete, nonperturbatively defined quantum field theory that allows one to derive relationships between lower-dimensional quantum field theories in different perturbative regimes. (This is a pretty jargon-heavy paragraph, if anyone is interested I can unpack it/link to blog posts where I unpack parts of it.)
For those string theorists who do believe that string theory ultimately describes the world, the main motivation is that it seems to be the only viable quantum theory of gravity. Loop Quantum Gravity can’t figure out how to get a flat-space limit, and the various other contenders give the impression of being hokey or ad-hoc in various ways. This is the primary motivation even among the more bombastic proponents of string theory; nine times out of ten it’s the argument Lubos Motl makes.
String Phenomenology was a very popular research program…when Brian Greene was in grad school. These days there are still people who do it, but it’s comparatively minor. String phenomenologists are the only people motivated to use string theory to constrain/derive low-energy SUSY.
In terms of arguments for low-energy SUSY, Woit seems to be omitting the naturalness problem, but that may be because he dismisses it as a non-issue elsewhere (indeed, I believe he does so on his blog). As a very rough explanation, if you do quantum field theory naively the mass of the Higgs should diverge, due to its interaction with the tau particle. In practice, we use renormalization, which means we assign an infinite contribution to the bare mass of the Higgs to cancel out the infinite contribution from the tau. The general philosophy these days is that neither contribution is actually infinite, that some high-energy physics cancels out the divergence. The problem is, generically the higher energy this physics is the bigger the formerly divergent term ends up being, so you end up with a large cancellation (which is what people mean when they say the Higgs mass is fine-tuned). Supersymmetry makes that cancellation a lot softer, and is one of the only known ways to do this. However, it still gets worse as it gets shoved to higher energies, as the LHC is currently doing.
I get what Woit is going for with point (3), but he’s kind of off-track. The point isn’t that SUSY unifies currently observed fermions and bosons, but that it unifies fermions and bosons in general, and makes it possible to generate both from the same set of parameters.
In terms of parameters and fine-tuning, the relevant distinction is between parameters fixed by the theory and parameters fixed by experiment. For example, the Standard Model has 25 free parameters, and at this point we know (experimentally), the values for all of them. That doesn’t make it stop being a theory with 25 parameters, since we still don’t know why any of those parameters take the values that they do.
Being fine-tuned, meanwhile, isn’t about being fixed or unfixed, but about how “generic” a parameter’s value is, compared with experiment. Essentially, it’s the problem of large cancellations I mentioned earlier.
(In this case, I’m not sure quite what Woit is referring to with respect to the MSSM…before the LHC results, I don’t know what sort of fine-tuning people were complaining about. At this point, I know there are enough constraints that people don’t favor the MSSM anymore, and SUSY phenomenologists generally go for more complicated models.)
Thank you, this is very helpful!
I would be interested in hearing unpacked versions of your third paragraph. (Obviously, I’m an amateur in all of this – I did an undergrad physics degree but I have never formally studied QFT, much less the Standard Model or string theory.)
Woit basically makes it sound like SUSY is one of the main appeals of string theory, so I’m very interested to hear about applications of string theory that don’t care about SUSY, and aren’t just “I’m studying this because it’s the least bad quantum gravity research program we have.”
(I’m pretty wary of that kind of argument when used to claim string theory is correct, because the space of possible theories is so vast, and I don’t see any reason to discount the possibility that there’s a better theory out there that we just haven’t thought of, because surely the theories we’ve actually thought of must be, so to speak, a set of measure zero in the space of possibilities. I’m sure this analogy has been made a zillion times and that everyone hates it, but it reminds me of attitudes toward the luminiferous aether before 1905 – “yeah, we keep having to add awkward contrivances to this to make it work, but hey, do you have a better theory?” This would have been an OK argument for working on aether theories in this period [although I’m glad not everyone did so], but it would have been a terrible argument for “aether theories are clearly correct and anyone working on anyone else is deluded.” [And now I’m trying to envision the 1900 equivalent of Lubos Motl, ranting about how aether skeptics are all probably violent anarchists hopped up on nitrous oxide. This … might make a good short story, actually])
Anyway, Woit talks about the hierarchy problem but doesn’t discuss “naturalness” per se, and searching his blog, it indeed looks like he thinks lack of naturalness is a non-problem, although it’s hard to find posts where he says precisely why.
I see what you mean about “fine-tuning” – it is not just about setting parameters, it is about two seemingly independent things having large cancellations. I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around why anyone thinks this is problematic; the laws of nature are just what they are, and one can’t object to them requiring “coincidences” if there’s only one universe and hence no way of defining what counts as a “coincidence.”
In other words, you need a probability measure on “possible” laws of physics to define whether something is unlikely or not, but there’s no clear way to get such a measure unless you postulate a multiverse. So “if fine-tuning, then multiverse” (as Nima Arkani-Hamed and others argue?) seems wrong to me – it’s essentially saying “I have one datum, and it feels subjectively ‘unlikely’ to be, so in order to ‘explain’ that, I’m going to invent a probability distribution and say this datum is just one of many draws from it.” But if you don’t have a probability distribution, there is no such thing as being “unlikely,” so there is no “unlikeliness problem” which would require postulating a distribution (i.e. multiverse) to begin with!
To put it another way, I’m still confused why physicists feel that certain things – parameters not of order one, large cancellations – are “unlikely” or “unnatural” and in need of explanation, while other things – like physical states being vectors in Fock space (why Fock space?) or dynamics being given by a Yang-Mills theory (why a Yang-Mills theory?) involving certain Lie groups (why those groups?) – are not in need of such explanation.
(The very term “naturalness” feels strange. Who am I going to trust about what’s “natural” – some physicist’s aesthetic intuition, or the laws of nature themselves? The average person’s “naturalness intuitions” deem Newton’s Laws unnatural [PDF link], but in that case I’m happy saying that they’re just plain wrong about nature.)
(Again, I am a total amateur in this stuff and I have no idea whether any of this is a real philosophical disagreement as opposed to me just not getting the point)
(via 4gravitons)
a tone argument (in the other direction this time)
I started reading Theodore Dalrymple’s book Second Opinion. (No, I don’t know why either.)
I find Dalrymple really interesting, although not for the reasons he intends. He’s interesting because of the startling juxtaposition of his views and his tone. Dalrymple sees himself as a voice in the wilderness: a rogue doctor willing to expose the cold, hard, right-wing truths about the failures of Britain’s medical system (that it enables drug-seeking addicts, hands out sick leave for no good reason, etc., and that these excesses of “compassion” actually hold the underclass back).
A serious human being with this sort of view would presumably think that things would be better – really, materially better, with real-world human impact – if other people agreed with them. They would want to make other people agree, and would take on a tone – serious but ingratiating, radiating sincere concern, and so forth – likely to make the man in the street say “wow, this is totally contrary to received wisdom and also pattern-matches to ‘heartless and evil,’ but y’know, this ‘Theodore Dalrymple’ seems like a stand-up guy, a real sincere concerned citizen, so maybe I should hear him out.”
Dalrymple goes hard in the other direction. His opinions are, stereotypically, “cold” and “heartless,” and he writes as though he is in fact a cold and heartless person. His writing oozes disdain and contempt for his patients – not just for the poor or mendacious choices he is supposedly revealing, but for their fashion sense, their dialects, their lack of old-school erudition. His humor is arch, dry, removed. He sounds like a pompous ass, or perhaps more precisely, he sounds like he wants to sound like a pompous ass. His persona is tweedy and snooty and old-fashioned to the point of being a caricature; he is not just pedantic but self-consciously amused with (and unashamed by) his own pedantry.
Now, what is interesting about this is that this makes me much less likely to trust anything Dalrymple says. This is for a slightly subtle reason. It’s not that I think he can’t be right about anything just because he’s a pompous ass. 2+2 is no less 4 even if Theodore Dalrymple says so.
No, the problem is this one: if Dalrymple really believes what he says he believes – that everyone is deluded about the medical system, that there is an important truth only he can publicize – why on earth does he write like this? Perhaps I, gritting my teeth and using all of my Principle of Charity Points for the week, can (if I really try, if I really want to, just for the principle of the thing … ) admit that someone as obnoxious as Dalrymple might be right – but is the average man on the street going to do so?
Either he is (1) monumentally incompetent at rhetoric, or (2) he does not really believe what he says he believes.
To get to the point: we often say that the tone and content of an utterance can be separated. This comes up in political contexts: so-and-so is “angry,” yes, but 2+2 is no less 4 because someone shouted it through a bullhorn, etc. Okay. But people making political arguments are rarely relying just on universally accepted axioms. They rely on things like personal experience which the listener cannot directly verify. You need to trust them. (Dalrymple relies on this massively: his general-purpose response to critics is “well, have you had years of experience as a doctor treating the destitute? I didn’t think so.”)
And when you want to decide whether or not to trust someone, you have to ask yourself: “would they be speaking this way if they believed what they said they believe?” Someone who sounds like Dalrymple could be correct, but anyone who believed what Dalrymple claims to believe would not sound like Dalrymple.
Note, again, that this isn’t just some failure on my part to be maximally “charitable.” The point is that no one can rely on only reaching charitable ears, and so when faced with someone who does not tailor their speech to uncharitable ears, even the charitable person has to wonder why. “This person doesn’t seem very interested in convincing people. Why is that? Could it have implications for how much I should trust the aspects of their writing I can’t directly verify?”
The implications for activism on the left are left as an exercise for the reader, but I don’t think it’s a very hard one.
Postscript:
Even as someone who’s read a number of Dalrymple columns and knows his schtick pretty well, I found this sentence – from early on in Second Opinion – startling:
One day last week my first patient sat outside my room accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter, who was quite pretty in an incipient slut kind of way.
My objection here (i.e. the objection that is relevant to the above) isn’t that this is sexist, or quasi-pedophilic, or anything like that. It’s that it’s leering and indecent. What the fuck kind of doctor talks about his patients and their children this way? One doesn’t have to be any kind of “leftist” to find this sentence baffling and/or nauseating; one just has to be an ordinary human being. (Or, well, that’s a sufficient condition, if not a necessary one.) Isn’t Dalrymple trying to shift the current of an entire culture, here? Why shoot himself in the foot with this kind of crap?
The answer seems to be that, like many ideological writers, Dalrymple writes for a very specific subculture which is so taken with his views that, so long as he goes on holding those views, it does not much matter what else he says. His audience, so to speak, Requires Only That You Agree.
Interesting points. I particularly find that sentence near the end bizarre. As you say, that’s not just a dog whistle for pissing off liberals. If anything, it seems like it would especially offend a great many conservatives; when one looks at conservative values in a larger, demographic sense, propriety and respectability are high on the list. And for all that some of those with a strong interest in propriety might agree with Dalrymple’s negative judgment of the girl’s appearance, I can think of very little that would annoy them more than a description like “her 14-year-old daughter, who was quite pretty in an incipient slut kind of way.” “We are decent people here, and we have no use for doctors who ogle their underage patients and then write about doing so in a public forum.”
I think someone writing things they think are obvious in a blatantly uncaring-for-sensitivities way is a lot more evidence that they believe what they say in a consistent way than people who only communicate in euphemism.
As for rhetoric, part of dalrymple’s view is that high-minded rhetoric is exactly what got us into this position in the first place. It should be no surprise that he would prefer a more conversational/confrontational tone. Pulling punches about slutty looking 14 year olds would only undermine his claimed straightforwardness.
I also think it’s kind of pernicious to say that rude language or unpersuasiveness is evidence that someone is full of shit. Not everything needs to be written for PR and minimal offense-giving.
“Uncaring for sensitivities” vs. “communicating only in euphemism” isn’t really the axis I’m talking about here. It’s not that I think Dalrymple ought to be more euphemistic.
The problem is that he mixes together criticism of his patients’ irresponsible and destructive behavior (which is what his central points are about) with a sneering, palpable distaste for them as people. This conflicts with his claim (in Life At The Bottom) that the underclass are really just victims of liberal intellectuals, and that we should reserve our contempt for the intellectuals. He certainly holds liberal intellectuals in contempt, but he also holds his patients in contempt.
This doesn’t serve his message well, in particular since he portrays the intellectuals in question as sheltered upper-class types only to write about his patients in a sheltered upper-class persona. (I’m not saying that he’s actually sheltered – clearly he isn’t – but that he is going out of his way to sound as though he is. He has treated hundreds of lower-class patients but describes each encounter as though he’s some sort of boarding school dandy who’s had to set foot in the same room as one of … those people … for the first time.)
I also don’t think that Dalrymple really claims to be “straightforward” or to not pull punches. In Life At The Bottom, he writes,
On being asked whether I make it all up, I reply that, far from doing so, I downplay the dreadfulness of the situation and omit the worst cases that come to my attention so as not to distress the reader unduly. The reality of English lower-class life is far more terrible than I can, with propriety, depict.
So on the one hand you have this whole “I believe in propriety and self-restraint and old-fashioned values like that” deal, and on the other hand you have the sentence about the 14-year-old. They don’t really fit together. In particular, Dalrymple wants us to believe that the problem of the underclass is that they think anything goes and no longer have values restraining them – but this means that Dalrymple shouldn’t be completely “straightforward” and unashamed about his own worst tendencies, since doing so is exactly what he opposes.
I agree that not everything needs to be written for PR, but I think some things need to be written for PR, if anything is to change. Dalrymple writes a great deal, and in everything I’ve read by him, he’s got roughly the same persona. On this margin the most effective thing for him to do is surely write something more PR-ish. (If he really believes what he says, that is.)
I think he might be signalling honesty (like @slatestarscratchpad on PUAs: They’re saying unpleasant things because their audience is fed off with pleasantries). Basically he’s going for an audience fed up with leftie approaches to poor people, and he’s contemptful of them precisely because a leftie wouldn’t be. He’s doing the same thing neoreactionaries are doing, so I’m confused why you’re so confused.
I see what you’re saying, but there’s a difference here, in that the neo-reactionaries are much more theoretical, while Dalrymple’s entire pitch is that he has personal experience to tell you about. Since we all know personal experiences can be filtered through one’s own biases in various ways, Dalrymple will be a lot more convincing if he portrays his own experiences in a way that makes it look like the “unpleasant” conclusions are fairly direct implications of the basic content of the experiences – that he didn’t just come to those conclusions between he went in looking for them, i.e. because he went in with heavily right-wing-tinted glasses.
By contrast, neo-reaction is pretty much explicitly about “going in with heavily right-wing tinted glasses.” The idea (on Moldbug’s blog, etc.) is to re-examine a bunch of familiar history and current social phenomena on the premise of “hey, what if the far-right is correct about all of this?” (Moldbug often explicitly says that he’s trying to look at things with right-wing-tinted glasses – all of the “here at UR we know that if leftist academia says X, we should investigate ~X“ stuff.) I don’t need to evaluate whether or not I “trust” Moldbug to let the experiences drive the ideology and vice versa; almost none of what he says comes from his own personal experience, and the ideological bias is right there upfront, as the point of the exercise.
(By contrast, Dalrymple’s pitch “I’ve worked as a doctor with hundreds of members of the British underclass and also in various third-world countries and I have things to report” would be much less compelling as “I’ve worked as a doctor with [etc. etc.], and I have things to report, all of which are tinted heavily by my extensive preconceived notions, which happen to be identical to my eventual conclusions.”)
(via earnest-peer)
a tone argument (in the other direction this time)
I started reading Theodore Dalrymple’s book Second Opinion. (No, I don’t know why either.)
I find Dalrymple really interesting, although not for the reasons he intends. He’s interesting because of the startling juxtaposition of his views and his tone. Dalrymple sees himself as a voice in the wilderness: a rogue doctor willing to expose the cold, hard, right-wing truths about the failures of Britain’s medical system (that it enables drug-seeking addicts, hands out sick leave for no good reason, etc., and that these excesses of “compassion” actually hold the underclass back).
A serious human being with this sort of view would presumably think that things would be better – really, materially better, with real-world human impact – if other people agreed with them. They would want to make other people agree, and would take on a tone – serious but ingratiating, radiating sincere concern, and so forth – likely to make the man in the street say “wow, this is totally contrary to received wisdom and also pattern-matches to ‘heartless and evil,’ but y’know, this ‘Theodore Dalrymple’ seems like a stand-up guy, a real sincere concerned citizen, so maybe I should hear him out.”
Dalrymple goes hard in the other direction. His opinions are, stereotypically, “cold” and “heartless,” and he writes as though he is in fact a cold and heartless person. His writing oozes disdain and contempt for his patients – not just for the poor or mendacious choices he is supposedly revealing, but for their fashion sense, their dialects, their lack of old-school erudition. His humor is arch, dry, removed. He sounds like a pompous ass, or perhaps more precisely, he sounds like he wants to sound like a pompous ass. His persona is tweedy and snooty and old-fashioned to the point of being a caricature; he is not just pedantic but self-consciously amused with (and unashamed by) his own pedantry.
Now, what is interesting about this is that this makes me much less likely to trust anything Dalrymple says. This is for a slightly subtle reason. It’s not that I think he can’t be right about anything just because he’s a pompous ass. 2+2 is no less 4 even if Theodore Dalrymple says so.
No, the problem is this one: if Dalrymple really believes what he says he believes – that everyone is deluded about the medical system, that there is an important truth only he can publicize – why on earth does he write like this? Perhaps I, gritting my teeth and using all of my Principle of Charity Points for the week, can (if I really try, if I really want to, just for the principle of the thing … ) admit that someone as obnoxious as Dalrymple might be right – but is the average man on the street going to do so?
Either he is (1) monumentally incompetent at rhetoric, or (2) he does not really believe what he says he believes.
To get to the point: we often say that the tone and content of an utterance can be separated. This comes up in political contexts: so-and-so is “angry,” yes, but 2+2 is no less 4 because someone shouted it through a bullhorn, etc. Okay. But people making political arguments are rarely relying just on universally accepted axioms. They rely on things like personal experience which the listener cannot directly verify. You need to trust them. (Dalrymple relies on this massively: his general-purpose response to critics is “well, have you had years of experience as a doctor treating the destitute? I didn’t think so.”)
And when you want to decide whether or not to trust someone, you have to ask yourself: “would they be speaking this way if they believed what they said they believe?” Someone who sounds like Dalrymple could be correct, but anyone who believed what Dalrymple claims to believe would not sound like Dalrymple.
Note, again, that this isn’t just some failure on my part to be maximally “charitable.” The point is that no one can rely on only reaching charitable ears, and so when faced with someone who does not tailor their speech to uncharitable ears, even the charitable person has to wonder why. “This person doesn’t seem very interested in convincing people. Why is that? Could it have implications for how much I should trust the aspects of their writing I can’t directly verify?”
The implications for activism on the left are left as an exercise for the reader, but I don’t think it’s a very hard one.
Postscript:
Even as someone who’s read a number of Dalrymple columns and knows his schtick pretty well, I found this sentence – from early on in Second Opinion – startling:
One day last week my first patient sat outside my room accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter, who was quite pretty in an incipient slut kind of way.
My objection here (i.e. the objection that is relevant to the above) isn’t that this is sexist, or quasi-pedophilic, or anything like that. It’s that it’s leering and indecent. What the fuck kind of doctor talks about his patients and their children this way? One doesn’t have to be any kind of “leftist” to find this sentence baffling and/or nauseating; one just has to be an ordinary human being. (Or, well, that’s a sufficient condition, if not a necessary one.) Isn’t Dalrymple trying to shift the current of an entire culture, here? Why shoot himself in the foot with this kind of crap?
The answer seems to be that, like many ideological writers, Dalrymple writes for a very specific subculture which is so taken with his views that, so long as he goes on holding those views, it does not much matter what else he says. His audience, so to speak, Requires Only That You Agree.
Interesting points. I particularly find that sentence near the end bizarre. As you say, that’s not just a dog whistle for pissing off liberals. If anything, it seems like it would especially offend a great many conservatives; when one looks at conservative values in a larger, demographic sense, propriety and respectability are high on the list. And for all that some of those with a strong interest in propriety might agree with Dalrymple’s negative judgment of the girl’s appearance, I can think of very little that would annoy them more than a description like “her 14-year-old daughter, who was quite pretty in an incipient slut kind of way.” “We are decent people here, and we have no use for doctors who ogle their underage patients and then write about doing so in a public forum.”
I think someone writing things they think are obvious in a blatantly uncaring-for-sensitivities way is a lot more evidence that they believe what they say in a consistent way than people who only communicate in euphemism.
As for rhetoric, part of dalrymple’s view is that high-minded rhetoric is exactly what got us into this position in the first place. It should be no surprise that he would prefer a more conversational/confrontational tone. Pulling punches about slutty looking 14 year olds would only undermine his claimed straightforwardness.
I also think it’s kind of pernicious to say that rude language or unpersuasiveness is evidence that someone is full of shit. Not everything needs to be written for PR and minimal offense-giving.
“Uncaring for sensitivities” vs. “communicating only in euphemism” isn’t really the axis I’m talking about here. It’s not that I think Dalrymple ought to be more euphemistic.
The problem is that he mixes together criticism of his patients’ irresponsible and destructive behavior (which is what his central points are about) with a sneering, palpable distaste for them as people. This conflicts with his claim (in Life At The Bottom) that the underclass are really just victims of liberal intellectuals, and that we should reserve our contempt for the intellectuals. He certainly holds liberal intellectuals in contempt, but he also holds his patients in contempt.
This doesn’t serve his message well, in particular since he portrays the intellectuals in question as sheltered upper-class types only to write about his patients in a sheltered upper-class persona. (I’m not saying that he’s actually sheltered – clearly he isn’t – but that he is going out of his way to sound as though he is. He has treated hundreds of lower-class patients but describes each encounter as though he’s some sort of boarding school dandy who’s had to set foot in the same room as one of … those people … for the first time.)
I also don’t think that Dalrymple really claims to be “straightforward” or to not pull punches. In Life At The Bottom, he writes,
On being asked whether I make it all up, I reply that, far from doing so, I downplay the dreadfulness of the situation and omit the worst cases that come to my attention so as not to distress the reader unduly. The reality of English lower-class life is far more terrible than I can, with propriety, depict.
So on the one hand you have this whole “I believe in propriety and self-restraint and old-fashioned values like that” deal, and on the other hand you have the sentence about the 14-year-old. They don’t really fit together. In particular, Dalrymple wants us to believe that the problem of the underclass is that they think anything goes and no longer have values restraining them – but this means that Dalrymple shouldn’t be completely “straightforward” and unashamed about his own worst tendencies, since doing so is exactly what he opposes.
I agree that not everything needs to be written for PR, but I think some things need to be written for PR, if anything is to change. Dalrymple writes a great deal, and in everything I’ve read by him, he’s got roughly the same persona. On this margin the most effective thing for him to do is surely write something more PR-ish. (If he really believes what he says, that is.)
(via drethelin)
a tone argument (in the other direction this time)
I started reading Theodore Dalrymple’s book Second Opinion. (No, I don’t know why either.)
I find Dalrymple really interesting, although not for the reasons he intends. He’s interesting because of the startling juxtaposition of his views and his tone. Dalrymple sees himself as a voice in the wilderness: a rogue doctor willing to expose the cold, hard, right-wing truths about the failures of Britain’s medical system (that it enables drug-seeking addicts, hands out sick leave for no good reason, etc., and that these excesses of “compassion” actually hold the underclass back).
A serious human being with this sort of view would presumably think that things would be better – really, materially better, with real-world human impact – if other people agreed with them. They would want to make other people agree, and would take on a tone – serious but ingratiating, radiating sincere concern, and so forth – likely to make the man in the street say “wow, this is totally contrary to received wisdom and also pattern-matches to ‘heartless and evil,’ but y’know, this ‘Theodore Dalrymple’ seems like a stand-up guy, a real sincere concerned citizen, so maybe I should hear him out.”
Dalrymple goes hard in the other direction. His opinions are, stereotypically, “cold” and “heartless,” and he writes as though he is in fact a cold and heartless person. His writing oozes disdain and contempt for his patients – not just for the poor or mendacious choices he is supposedly revealing, but for their fashion sense, their dialects, their lack of old-school erudition. His humor is arch, dry, removed. He sounds like a pompous ass, or perhaps more precisely, he sounds like he wants to sound like a pompous ass. His persona is tweedy and snooty and old-fashioned to the point of being a caricature; he is not just pedantic but self-consciously amused with (and unashamed by) his own pedantry.
Now, what is interesting about this is that this makes me much less likely to trust anything Dalrymple says. This is for a slightly subtle reason. It’s not that I think he can’t be right about anything just because he’s a pompous ass. 2+2 is no less 4 even if Theodore Dalrymple says so.
No, the problem is this one: if Dalrymple really believes what he says he believes – that everyone is deluded about the medical system, that there is an important truth only he can publicize – why on earth does he write like this? Perhaps I, gritting my teeth and using all of my Principle of Charity Points for the week, can (if I really try, if I really want to, just for the principle of the thing … ) admit that someone as obnoxious as Dalrymple might be right – but is the average man on the street going to do so?
Either he is (1) monumentally incompetent at rhetoric, or (2) he does not really believe what he says he believes.
To get to the point: we often say that the tone and content of an utterance can be separated. This comes up in political contexts: so-and-so is “angry,” yes, but 2+2 is no less 4 because someone shouted it through a bullhorn, etc. Okay. But people making political arguments are rarely relying just on universally accepted axioms. They rely on things like personal experience which the listener cannot directly verify. You need to trust them. (Dalrymple relies on this massively: his general-purpose response to critics is “well, have you had years of experience as a doctor treating the destitute? I didn’t think so.”)
And when you want to decide whether or not to trust someone, you have to ask yourself: “would they be speaking this way if they believed what they said they believe?” Someone who sounds like Dalrymple could be correct, but anyone who believed what Dalrymple claims to believe would not sound like Dalrymple.
Note, again, that this isn’t just some failure on my part to be maximally “charitable.” The point is that no one can rely on only reaching charitable ears, and so when faced with someone who does not tailor their speech to uncharitable ears, even the charitable person has to wonder why. “This person doesn’t seem very interested in convincing people. Why is that? Could it have implications for how much I should trust the aspects of their writing I can’t directly verify?”
The implications for activism on the left are left as an exercise for the reader, but I don’t think it’s a very hard one.
Postscript:
Even as someone who’s read a number of Dalrymple columns and knows his schtick pretty well, I found this sentence – from early on in Second Opinion – startling:
One day last week my first patient sat outside my room accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter, who was quite pretty in an incipient slut kind of way.
My objection here (i.e. the objection that is relevant to the above) isn’t that this is sexist, or quasi-pedophilic, or anything like that. It’s that it’s leering and indecent. What the fuck kind of doctor talks about his patients and their children this way? One doesn’t have to be any kind of “leftist” to find this sentence baffling and/or nauseating; one just has to be an ordinary human being. (Or, well, that’s a sufficient condition, if not a necessary one.) Isn’t Dalrymple trying to shift the current of an entire culture, here? Why shoot himself in the foot with this kind of crap?
The answer seems to be that, like many ideological writers, Dalrymple writes for a very specific subculture which is so taken with his views that, so long as he goes on holding those views, it does not much matter what else he says. His audience, so to speak, Requires Only That You Agree.
brazenautomaton asked: Is it over the line to ask you about what you would like from a game with a moral system about being/doing good?
Not over the line since I’m not going to talk about Undertale directly. The probably disappointing answer is “I don’t think it can really be done, because if you encourage the player to identify ‘being moral’ with ‘maximizing the in-game morality metric,’ then people will start thinking in ways that are very different from real moral reflection.”
Like, real moral reflection involves one’s own values and moral emotions, but unless the game’s morality metric just so happens to perfectly reflect those, you’ll get into situations where people think “hmm, I don’t think this is good but I’ve figured out that the game thinks it’s good and this is a game about ‘being good’ as defined by the game, so I suppose I should do that, instead of actually following my conscience.”
Of course there are various ways out of this. One can make a game that isn’t just about being “good” or “bad,” but about which of several different moral systems you follow, so that a player obeying their own conscience will end up with a set of not-inherently-judgmental scores saying “hmm, it looks like your conscience looks like this.” (Obligatory nod to Moral Foundations Theory.) I’m not sure this would actually be at all interesting, though.
You could also have a game that judges the player on a good/bad axis but discourages you from thinking that “being good is the right way to play.” But at that point, why is the morality system even there?
I think the most promising way to “involve” morality in games is to not represent it mechanically at all, but to have mechanics like “unique, procedurally generated characters” and “no reloading from saves” that make players feel like their actions have real consequences for irreplaceable beings. If you hurt a game character, you’ll feel bad because you hurt the game character, not because your Official Ethics Score decreased by 5 points. (You’ve mentioned that roguelikes are already a lot like this, and I think there’s fertile territory in making roguelikes with more complicated non-combat interaction, more involved plots and themes, etc.)
What about for things like tabletop games? The most obvious thing coming to mind is Humanity and derivatives from the World of Darkness games. Systems like those, good or bad?
I wasn’t familiar with those, but after Googling – yeah, that kind of thing seems like a whole different kettle of fish, and I have no problem with it.
By “that kind of thing” I mean systems where morality is actually part of the (meta)physics of the game’s fictional world, so when you do bad things you’re “increasing your bonds with the Forces of Darkness” or something. Which is perfectly fine – it’s a mechanic that’s appropriate for the setting.
I do think that settings like this are weirder, and more disturbing, than often acknowledged – the idea that the universe could be giving you a “moral score” is weird for all the same ways that it’s weird when a game gives you a moral score. (”Dammit, what if I just think the God of Pure Good is an asshole? What then?”) But if a game is giving you a moral score because its universe gives you a moral score, then it’s just depicting the universe faithfully.
(I made a post a long time ago about how stories where “love” is a physical force are disturbing to me in a similar way – to me, the concept of love is inherently tied to trusting people even though you can never really know for sure what someone else is thinking or feeling, so it’s really jarring to imagine being told “yep, you’re Officially In Love, we can tell because you just generated a Love Beam and blasted the bad guy.”)
“increasing your bonds with the Forces of Darkness” – well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. The stat Humanity replaces, for normal people, was called Morality (though now in 2nd ed it’s called Integrity), and it’s really more like a sanity gauge for how good/evil you are than an externally enforced karma meter. Each rank lists a level of unacceptable conduct, and doing that or worse risks losing Humanity. At Humanity 10, unacceptable conduct is “selfish thoughts”, at Humanity 1, it’s “mass murder”. Normal law-abiding human average is 7, vampires (who we are using as our example) are expected to stabilize around fivish. Humanity gives you the ability to do certain things better, namely acting like a human who doesn’t have your vampire weaknesses; losing Humanity risks giving you a mental illness as your mind fractures from suppressed guilt in true Gothic horror tradition, and at Humanity 0, you’re too much of a monster to even be a player character. You have a chance to lose Humanity when you do something forbidden at your current Humanity or lower, and this die roll is explicated as “if you succeed, your characters feels bad about her actions but still has that bit of moral compass; if you fail, your character rationalizes it away as being okay, not really mattering, not needing to follow that rule any more.” You do that a lot, and you’re more removed from how normal human beings think and find it harder to relate to them; further, you find it harder to remember why you’re trying.
But it’s not really shown as succumbing to an external force; vampires talk about “resisting The Beast” but said Beast is something completely internal and is just a name for strong violent or fearful impulses. “Giving into the Beast’ maps entirely to “giving into the darkest parts of yourself”. The game presents a list of things you’re not allowed to do, says that doing them makes you a worse person, and quantifies it into a scale, and gives you penalties for being a worse person. So it would appear not to match your criteria for “acceptable”.
But, part of the assumption of the game is that I shouldn’t be using “you” and “your character” so interchangeably and part of the game is going to BE your character’s morality falling apart and her losing touch with humanity. And there are mechanical advantages to being “evil”, in that you are doing things that are way more effective at accomplishing your goals if you aren’t concerned with what’s good and what’s evil. It’s more difficult to do what you are trying to do without going with the “easy path” of killing, but since it’s a tabletop game, that process is you figuring out how to make a plan to get what you want without committing murder, not guessing which of the options presented to you is the “right one”. And the levels of Humanity are presented as broader rules you do or do not find morally compelling, it’s not a matter of individual actions being given options that assign Evilness Points and you have to guess which is which. So, I was wondering if those made it okay for you, or not.
One of my own psychological land mine wounds involves such a game, with such a scale, that needs to accomplish much the same things while being built around the assumption that you are sincerely a good person who is trying to do good, and I want to avoid the class of stuff that sets off scrupulosity triggers in folks like you, so I want to gather information on what’s good and what’s bad about similar systems.
Thanks for asking about this. All of that does sounds fine to me – not that I’d necessarily like playing such a game (although I might), but if it has problems it’s not the ones I was complaining about in the OP.
“Part of the (meta)physics of the setting” was too restrictive, or too unclear, a criterion – I’m mostly talking about stuff like “this is understood as A Thing by the characters in the setting, even if it’s mostly or entirely a psychological thing.” You could make some sort of game about some sort of entirely real psychological phenomenon like “being stoic vs. giving into temptation,” and as long as the in-game depiction maps roughly onto the actual thoughts people in the setting might have about these things, it’s OK.
I mean … it would still have the potential problem of the player not necessarily agreeing that the developer has captured the concept well. There might be conflicts between “being actually stoic vs. being what the developers think is stoic.” But I think these things do work a lot better for me if there’s a link between the sort of psychology you’re role-playing and the sort of psychology being represented in the system – if, say, the story is about temptation and you’re making temptation-related decisions and then getting rated on a mechanical temptation scale, that’s a lot better than if you’re just doing stuff in general and then incidentally getting rated on how good a person the developers think you’re being.
What makes Undertale in particular set off triggers for me is a combination of things, at least one of which is that it does the opposite of what I described in the previous paragraph – it actively misleads you about how the game mechanics connect to morality and to your own “role-playing,” so that in fact it’s supposed to be about things like “detached leveling and save/loading vs. investment in the game world” but the mechanics are structured so that it looks like you’re not “role-playing” this tension. It’d be hard to even do this in a tabletop game, because generally in a tabletop game, players should be able to read the rulebook without it “spoiling the experience.”
The closest equivalent might be a table-top game in which players’ OOC comments (even if clearly marked as such by the players) are treated as in-world instances of strange behavior, and this is only revealed at the end of the quest, in which it “turns out” that “all along” you were “actually” role-playing the act of trying to stay in character – even though, if you’d been told the game was like this at the outset, you’d of course have been much more careful with OOC comments, which you had assumed were just being sent to /dev/null. (A game like this which revealed the mechanic at the outset might be interesting; a game like this which sprung it as a twist ending would be inane and infuriating.)
(The other aspect of Undertale that fucks with my head, as I was carping about yesterday, is that the tension it wants you to role-play is “the tension between being a pacifist-saint who Spares everyone, even people who are harming you and would never think to Spare you, and being anything else” and I think this is actually a terrible goal to aspire to. But that’s such an extreme, weird morality that the objection doesn’t generalize to most moral mechanic systems. Just don’t do … that … and you’ll probably be fine)
That’s not really an extreme, weird morality. “Sparing” someone is not the same as not fighting against them, nor is it the same as not punishing them for bad acts. In the context of the game you’re talking about, it’s literally, only “not murdering them after they’ve given up fighting.” You could beat almost every enemy to death’s door and then spare them, and still get the best ending. Except that the game doesn’t have a provision for accidental or unavoidable deaths, you could apply the same basic system to a game about being, say, a police detective.
It’s also the only ending that actually marks you as evil is to actively commit genocide. There is not a distinction between “being a pacifist-saint” and “anything else.”
It’s not that I think your criticisms are totally off-base here. But I think you played a game that triggered your anxiety, and that’s leading you to misconstrue its elements as much more crude than they actually are. And you’re posting all of this to the game’s tag. So forgive me for still thinking that you are hate-playing this.
I started disliking the game a lot more since we last talked about this, and now I’m not playing it at all.
You’re absolutely right that it’s triggering my anxiety and that I’m probably not responding to the systems as intended – but the systems are ambiguous and I think the sort of response I’m having is a valid (or at least not-clearly-contradicted-by-the-game) way to interpret them, if not one that most people will take. I guess I’ve been posting about it in the tag for that reason – I don’t like to bracket off my reactions as “well, I’m just interpreting the game in light of my own personal issues, so this isn’t a ‘real’ reading that fans of the game might care about,” when, say, someone who responded to the game positively while interpreting it in light of their personal issues would still be seen as contributing a “real” reading.
This is an emotional response the game is producing in a person, as a (presumably unintended) consequence of artistic decisions; if we want to talk about the types of responses the game produces in players, that “goes into the bucket” along with all the other responses it produces.
But I’m not really interested in defending my reading of the game any further, mostly because I just don’t want to think about it any more than I have. Apologies if that seems like a cop-out.
ETA: to make it a bit less of a cop-out – I take your point about the Spare mechanic, but again, what bothers me is the asymmetry between the player’s position and the monsters’. In ordinary situations the monsters never Spare the player (although there’s one situation where a monster does Spare you, indicating that this isn’t just incompatible with the game’s symbol language – Sparing you is a conceivable action for the monsters, but they don’t take it!).
brazenautomaton asked: Is it over the line to ask you about what you would like from a game with a moral system about being/doing good?
Not over the line since I’m not going to talk about Undertale directly. The probably disappointing answer is “I don’t think it can really be done, because if you encourage the player to identify ‘being moral’ with ‘maximizing the in-game morality metric,’ then people will start thinking in ways that are very different from real moral reflection.”
Like, real moral reflection involves one’s own values and moral emotions, but unless the game’s morality metric just so happens to perfectly reflect those, you’ll get into situations where people think “hmm, I don’t think this is good but I’ve figured out that the game thinks it’s good and this is a game about ‘being good’ as defined by the game, so I suppose I should do that, instead of actually following my conscience.”
Of course there are various ways out of this. One can make a game that isn’t just about being “good” or “bad,” but about which of several different moral systems you follow, so that a player obeying their own conscience will end up with a set of not-inherently-judgmental scores saying “hmm, it looks like your conscience looks like this.” (Obligatory nod to Moral Foundations Theory.) I’m not sure this would actually be at all interesting, though.
You could also have a game that judges the player on a good/bad axis but discourages you from thinking that “being good is the right way to play.” But at that point, why is the morality system even there?
I think the most promising way to “involve” morality in games is to not represent it mechanically at all, but to have mechanics like “unique, procedurally generated characters” and “no reloading from saves” that make players feel like their actions have real consequences for irreplaceable beings. If you hurt a game character, you’ll feel bad because you hurt the game character, not because your Official Ethics Score decreased by 5 points. (You’ve mentioned that roguelikes are already a lot like this, and I think there’s fertile territory in making roguelikes with more complicated non-combat interaction, more involved plots and themes, etc.)
What about for things like tabletop games? The most obvious thing coming to mind is Humanity and derivatives from the World of Darkness games. Systems like those, good or bad?
I wasn’t familiar with those, but after Googling – yeah, that kind of thing seems like a whole different kettle of fish, and I have no problem with it.
By “that kind of thing” I mean systems where morality is actually part of the (meta)physics of the game’s fictional world, so when you do bad things you’re “increasing your bonds with the Forces of Darkness” or something. Which is perfectly fine – it’s a mechanic that’s appropriate for the setting.
I do think that settings like this are weirder, and more disturbing, than often acknowledged – the idea that the universe could be giving you a “moral score” is weird for all the same ways that it’s weird when a game gives you a moral score. (”Dammit, what if I just think the God of Pure Good is an asshole? What then?”) But if a game is giving you a moral score because its universe gives you a moral score, then it’s just depicting the universe faithfully.
(I made a post a long time ago about how stories where “love” is a physical force are disturbing to me in a similar way – to me, the concept of love is inherently tied to trusting people even though you can never really know for sure what someone else is thinking or feeling, so it’s really jarring to imagine being told “yep, you’re Officially In Love, we can tell because you just generated a Love Beam and blasted the bad guy.”)
“increasing your bonds with the Forces of Darkness” – well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. The stat Humanity replaces, for normal people, was called Morality (though now in 2nd ed it’s called Integrity), and it’s really more like a sanity gauge for how good/evil you are than an externally enforced karma meter. Each rank lists a level of unacceptable conduct, and doing that or worse risks losing Humanity. At Humanity 10, unacceptable conduct is “selfish thoughts”, at Humanity 1, it’s “mass murder”. Normal law-abiding human average is 7, vampires (who we are using as our example) are expected to stabilize around fivish. Humanity gives you the ability to do certain things better, namely acting like a human who doesn’t have your vampire weaknesses; losing Humanity risks giving you a mental illness as your mind fractures from suppressed guilt in true Gothic horror tradition, and at Humanity 0, you’re too much of a monster to even be a player character. You have a chance to lose Humanity when you do something forbidden at your current Humanity or lower, and this die roll is explicated as “if you succeed, your characters feels bad about her actions but still has that bit of moral compass; if you fail, your character rationalizes it away as being okay, not really mattering, not needing to follow that rule any more.” You do that a lot, and you’re more removed from how normal human beings think and find it harder to relate to them; further, you find it harder to remember why you’re trying.
But it’s not really shown as succumbing to an external force; vampires talk about “resisting The Beast” but said Beast is something completely internal and is just a name for strong violent or fearful impulses. “Giving into the Beast’ maps entirely to “giving into the darkest parts of yourself”. The game presents a list of things you’re not allowed to do, says that doing them makes you a worse person, and quantifies it into a scale, and gives you penalties for being a worse person. So it would appear not to match your criteria for “acceptable”.
But, part of the assumption of the game is that I shouldn’t be using “you” and “your character” so interchangeably and part of the game is going to BE your character’s morality falling apart and her losing touch with humanity. And there are mechanical advantages to being “evil”, in that you are doing things that are way more effective at accomplishing your goals if you aren’t concerned with what’s good and what’s evil. It’s more difficult to do what you are trying to do without going with the “easy path” of killing, but since it’s a tabletop game, that process is you figuring out how to make a plan to get what you want without committing murder, not guessing which of the options presented to you is the “right one”. And the levels of Humanity are presented as broader rules you do or do not find morally compelling, it’s not a matter of individual actions being given options that assign Evilness Points and you have to guess which is which. So, I was wondering if those made it okay for you, or not.
One of my own psychological land mine wounds involves such a game, with such a scale, that needs to accomplish much the same things while being built around the assumption that you are sincerely a good person who is trying to do good, and I want to avoid the class of stuff that sets off scrupulosity triggers in folks like you, so I want to gather information on what’s good and what’s bad about similar systems.
Thanks for asking about this. All of that does sounds fine to me – not that I’d necessarily like playing such a game (although I might), but if it has problems it’s not the ones I was complaining about in the OP.
“Part of the (meta)physics of the setting” was too restrictive, or too unclear, a criterion – I’m mostly talking about stuff like “this is understood as A Thing by the characters in the setting, even if it’s mostly or entirely a psychological thing.” You could make some sort of game about some sort of entirely real psychological phenomenon like “being stoic vs. giving into temptation,” and as long as the in-game depiction maps roughly onto the actual thoughts people in the setting might have about these things, it’s OK.
I mean … it would still have the potential problem of the player not necessarily agreeing that the developer has captured the concept well. There might be conflicts between “being actually stoic vs. being what the developers think is stoic.” But I think these things do work a lot better for me if there’s a link between the sort of psychology you’re role-playing and the sort of psychology being represented in the system – if, say, the story is about temptation and you’re making temptation-related decisions and then getting rated on a mechanical temptation scale, that’s a lot better than if you’re just doing stuff in general and then incidentally getting rated on how good a person the developers think you’re being.
What makes Undertale in particular set off triggers for me is a combination of things, at least one of which is that it does the opposite of what I described in the previous paragraph – it actively misleads you about how the game mechanics connect to morality and to your own “role-playing,” so that in fact it’s supposed to be about things like “detached leveling and save/loading vs. investment in the game world” but the mechanics are structured so that it looks like you’re not “role-playing” this tension. It’d be hard to even do this in a tabletop game, because generally in a tabletop game, players should be able to read the rulebook without it “spoiling the experience.”
The closest equivalent might be a table-top game in which players’ OOC comments (even if clearly marked as such by the players) are treated as in-world instances of strange behavior, and this is only revealed at the end of the quest, in which it “turns out” that “all along” you were “actually” role-playing the act of trying to stay in character – even though, if you’d been told the game was like this at the outset, you’d of course have been much more careful with OOC comments, which you had assumed were just being sent to /dev/null. (A game like this which revealed the mechanic at the outset might be interesting; a game like this which sprung it as a twist ending would be inane and infuriating.)
(The other aspect of Undertale that fucks with my head, as I was carping about yesterday, is that the tension it wants you to role-play is “the tension between being a pacifist-saint who Spares everyone, even people who are harming you and would never think to Spare you, and being anything else” and I think this is actually a terrible goal to aspire to. But that’s such an extreme, weird morality that the objection doesn’t generalize to most moral mechanic systems. Just don’t do … that … and you’ll probably be fine)