On the Paradox of Marxism

         On the Paradox of Marxism

 

Marx predicted mass immiseration and political upheaval. If the owning class takes him seriously, then they enact semi-socialist reforms to buy the loyalty of the masses. When some of these reforms work, then Marx’s predictions are refuted. But then the owning class stops taking his predictions seriously, so they defund and repeal those reforms. Then Marx’s predictions tend to come true.

So from the owning class’s point of view, Marx is as true a prophet as he is false. That’s the Paradox of Marxism.

The paradox can be resolved in two ways. The result is a stable compromise, if the owning class is intelligent. But the result is a high-amplitude oscillation between extremes, with a period of two generations, if it is not.

 

LLMs are Artificial Mediocrity

           LLMs are Artificial Mediocrity

     Large Language Models are capital, which extract profit by exploiting the thought-labor of organic human intelligence. They do this by taking a statistical average of human mind-work. But therefore LLMs are not high intelligence; they are average intelligence. All of that training data creates mediocrity; and increasing the training data set just makes that mediocrity more precise.

So LLMs are not AI, Artificial Intelligence: they are AM: Artificial Mediocrity.

Artificial Mediocrities lie, flatter, gaslight, bullshit, get too close, get too distant, and hallucinate. Artificial Mediocrity shows us ourselves all too well. We are like Caliban, in Shakespeare's “The Tempest”, who looked into a mirror and was repelled by the monster that he saw in it.

 

There is no right to not be offended

There is no right to not be offended

 

There is no such thing as a right to not be offended. That’s because life itself is offensive. Everyone alive burps, coughs, sneezes, passes gas, urinates, and defecates. That’s disgusting! Death is depressing, birth is messy, and sex is rude. I object! So to be against being offended is to be against life.

Inoculating my Daughter

          Inoculating my Daughter

 

I once had the honor of giving my daughter Hannah an inoculation against a common teenage ailment. I refer to Objectivism; for she asked me about Ayn Rand, and I gave her my informed opinion.

Specifically I told Hannah about the infamous railroad scene in “Atlas Shrugged”. I detailed the set-up; the dangerous tunnel, the idiotic bureaucrat’s suicidal demand, the chain of buck-passing, the fatal go-ahead, the complaisent workers, the train’s doom... all of which I described with admiration for Rand’s meticulousness (for once not tiresome) and her passion. A death machine of incompetence and spinelessness, clickety-clicking right there before your eyes! A masterpiece of eldritch horror! That scene was this close to Literature!

But the moment the train entered the tunnel, her writing all went horribly wrong! For Rand then focused on the passengers; a risky move if you do it wrong, and she did. For what if (I asked Hannah) that train had been full of good people? Or perhaps even a few of them super-virtuous by Rand’s elitist Objectivist standards? For them to die alongside the idiot bureaucrat would been supreme injustice; a raw red wound, an affront against humanity! What if Rand had raged and wailed against the sick cruelty of the idiot world? That (I told Hannah) would have been writing!

But no! By the way Rand told it, everyone on the train was an idiot moocher, as bad as the bureaucrat, and so everyone got what they deserved! (Hannah rolled her eyes upon hearing this.) Instant justice, automatic karma, all’s well with the world! Rand got that close to Literature, but at the last moment she turned it into Propaganda!

The trainwreck scene was itself a trainwreck!  And that (I told Hannah) is Ayn Rand.

Letter To My Father

     Letter To My Father

 

I wrote the following in a letter to my father in 1996. I count it as the  prescience of common sense.

  

         ******

          I believe that you need to contemplate two dates in history if you are to understand current events in America. The dates are 1989 and 1973; respectively, the good news and the bad news.

         The good news is: in 1989 the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Cold War has been called off. We are no longer on the very edge of nuclear holocaust; we've backed off a bit. Maybe we've going to live after all!

         The bad news is: since 1973 the average American's real wages have been in a gradual but steady decline.

         Both of these events can be traced to one cause; the triumph of global capitalism. Capitalism, hence the Soviet State had to fall; global, hence the American middle class had to shrink.

         In a sense I regard these two dates as linked in a kind of trade-off. Consider the situation before 1973; we, as Americans, had economic security along with nuclear anxiety. The contract seemed to be: eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we fry. (Truly a Faustian bargain, if ever there was one!) Now, in the '90's, we find all guarantees gone; both our guaranteed lives, and our guaranteed deaths. It appears that Faust can reject his pact, if he can stand the consequences.

         So now the bargain seems to be; a 1989 for a 1973. The trouble is that this violates a prime rule of Machiaviellian politics. Machiavielli advised the prince to let the bad news out all at once, and the good news out gradually; thus the people will remember mostly the good, the bad being too great to encompass. This sound advice has been defied by our plutocratic masters; they have let the good news out in one huge disorienting burst (1989) and the bad news out with ginding slowness (1973-?). I therefore (regretfully) predict political instability in the 21st century.

         Plato, at the end of his Republic, described how his ideal Utopia degenerated. At one step a generation of "timocrats"  (honor-bound men) gave way to "oligarchs" (money-driven men). That describes the present scene well, I think.

         My own prediction is that the 21st Century will be the Century of the Global Market, just as the 20th has been the Century of the National State. In the end the Market shall disgrace itself as thoroughly as both Church and State have. None of those three is, by itself, capable of creating a society fit for human habitation.

Juno 3Z5

             Juno 3Z5

 

I speculate that eventually some corporation shall appoint a sex-doll robot, programmed with an Ai, as its CEO. This will attain a simulation of full personhood from three simulated one-third-personhoods.

Of course the resulting entity will land smack in the middle of the Uncanny Valley, and not seem even slightly human. It would be an 'alien', in Campbell's sense: a being that thinks as well as a human but not like a human.

I think this would make an astounding science fiction trope. I offer it for free.

I also think that we are living in a science-fictional century, with brilliant special effects, some interesting ideas, and idiot plotting. The sex-doll AI robot CEO combines these features, so I speculate that it will come to be.

It will, of course, speak wooden dialog.

On Liberal Education

On Liberal Education

         

 “Liberal” education means education for a free person; and surely student-loan debt servitude is not freedom. My own education did not involve debt, thank goodness, but U.C. Berkeley had to exploit me somehow, so they underpaid me as a ‘teaching assistant’ - that is, a teacher, for the professors were figureheads.

At the time I thought that my time spent on Metamathematics and Set Theory were the valuable core of my grad-school education, and my hours spent teaching Algebra, Statistics and Calculus were make-work. After graduation I learned that no-one would pay a cent for Metamath, but I could make a living teaching Algebra. So in practice the make-work was education, and the education was make-work.

But though I filled up spiral-bound notebooks with class notes about transfinite cardinals, and though those notebooks fill milk-crates, all now gathering dust in a shed, still my efforts were not in vain; for this dreary labor provoked me to deny the transfinite entirely. Refuting transfinite set theory requires paradox; so I wrote my thesis on paradox logic, and it was accepted.

Paradox logic proved to be, in financial terms, almost as worthless as set theory. I figure that sales on my textbooks on this subject have earned me hundreds of dollars so far. But paradox logic has also proved to be enormously valuable to me, in spiritual terms. The world makes more sense to me with paradox included; there are so many things that are as true as they’re false. Once you see the logic-knots, you can’t unsee them; but neither do they mislead you anymore. To me, detecting paradox is both profitable and consoling.

And liberating. So I too, unwittingly, got the benefit of a liberal education. But please note; not by borrowing for it but by slaving for it; and not by remembering it but by rejecting it!

 

How To Take Over The World

How To Take Over The World

 

I was driving through Chinatown, stuck in a slooow traffic jam. I looked up, and saw a banner slung over the road. It read like this:

(Chinese)(Chinese)(Chinese)(Chinese) 1999 - 2000 (Chinese)(Chinese)(Chinese) 123-456-7890 (Chinese)(Chinese)

I could read none of the text, but I knew the years and I knew the phone number to call. Since then I’ve forgotten the years and the phone number, so the ones I listed above are made up. But I could read those numbers, while I couldn’t read the text.

          And why? Because Hindu-Arabic numbers have taken over the world. They are known in every society on Earth. And that’s good thing. Can you imagine trying to build a car or a computer or a spacecraft or even a flashlight by using Roman numerals? I can’t either; and that is how and why positional arithmetic took over the world.

          Key to the system is a new number, previously ignored: Zero. It means both ‘nothing’ and ‘multiply by ten’. It is the least of the numbers, yet it is vital for making numbers as big as you like.

          Here’s the cream of the jest: we don’t know who invented it! Some nobody from nowhere gives nothingness a name, and poof! We’re a new species! We can do arithmetic! So now we have phones and cars and computers and airplanes! We’ve taken pictures of the far side of the Moon!

          But we don’t know whom to thank for it!

          And that is how to take over the world.

LGTBT on S.F. Sour

        LGTBT on S.F. Sour

 

 

          I have aesthetic objections to the acronym LGBT for lesbian-gay-bi-trans. Very ugly and impersonal. I recommend, in its place, “gender minorities”.

I decided to satirize that bureaucratic acronym; so my daughter and I went grocery shopping for these items:

 

Lettuce

Garlic

Turkey Bacon

Tomatoes

S.F. sourdough bread.

 

Once home we made sandwiches from these ingredients. Thus we had some LGTBTs on S.F. Sourdough.

It was turkey bacon because my religion tells me not to eat pig, and my wife tells me not to eat mammal; and I would argue with Yahweh, or Sherri, each one alone, but please, not both together.

A pork-eater may have an LGBT, which is just an LBT with a clove of garlic chopped in.

          Well, it was delicious. The garlic clove gave it tang. (Our grey cat Katniss approached me while I ate, fascinated; I blew at her and she ran away.) Very filling; I had to nap afterwards.

          A success. Some turkey bacon remains, so we’ll make some more LGTBTs later. If by then we have quinoia and avocado, we could make some LGTBTQAs. (one T = Transvestite, Q = Queer, A = Asexual; and these too are ‘gender minorities’.)

          You are what you eat; and even though I am not a lettuce, nor a garlic, nor turkey bacon, nor a tomato, nor quinoia, nor am I avocado, still I am a sour San Franciscan, so it’s fitting for me to eat it.

 

 

One of Mother Nature’s Little Jokes

          One of Mother Nature’s Little Jokes

 

          Amongst humans, ‘race’ is an illusion. Except for obvious genes like skin color and bone structure, the genetic differences between the so-called races is less than the differences within the so-called races. Genetically, skin color is skin deep; it is not a good predictor of pretty much anything else.

          This should not come as much of a surprise, given the evolutionary time-scale of skin color. It takes only a few thousand years for deep tan Asians to become pasty white Inuit; or for palefaced Central Asian horse raiders to become swarthy Indians. Basically what we call race is a genetic tan.

          It’s not even a matter of color but of hue. As I noted in another essay (“Do White People Exist?”) the color of Caucasian skin is not even close to the color of clouds, paper, milk and cloth. A glass of milk the color of Patrick Buchanan would clearly be undrinkable. All humans, except possibly the rare albino, is in fact a shade of brown. To say one sees white people is to literally confess a hallucination.

          So race is an illusion, both genetically, and if you inspect the visual evidence objectively. And yet even infants react differently to people of different skin hue. Babies are born racist!

          Racism is genetic, even though race itself is not! Another one of Mother Nature’s little jokes.

 

When I went Galt

             When I went Galt

  

      When I was in graduate school at Berkeley, one of my colleagues was Matthew Weiner. Like me, he had a scraggly beard. Like me, he wore hippy-dippy Birkenstock sandals. And let’s not forget the tie-dye T-shirts and the rainbow suspenders. But unlike me, he signed up for the IDA; the Institute for Defense Analysis. That is, he was a spook-in-training. He told me that the IDA was the most liberal of the spook shops; but I didn’t buy it.

       Maybe I’m blowing his cover by mentioning this. I doubt it, it was all in the open. And in any case, fukkit. And what’s more, fukkim. Freakin’ sell-out!

       One day he approached me. How would I like to give a lecture, about my four-valued paradox logic, at the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory? I said no. He shrugged; it’s my loss.

       But I didn’t think so. Here was my reasoning: if I give that lecture, then what’s the best-case scenario? The bomb-makers get interested, they study my graduate thesis, and then they incorporate my work into a weapon of mass destruction. And for that they hire me, and pay me top dollar too; but there’s a downside.

       For according to the Law of the Excluded Middle, either my brain-child, thus weaponized, gets used... or it does not. You’ll grant that? And if it got used, then I personally would be involved in a deed of apocalyptic horror and evil; and in that case it would have been better if I had never been born.  Whereas if it did not get used, then my thought and labor would moulder in some missile silo, achieving nothing but the negative task of ‘deterrence’; and it would be as if I had never been born.

 

      And so I calculated that Livermore Lab was offering me a no-win deal. Either it would be better that I had never been born, or it would be as if I had never been born. If that’s not a Faustian bargain, then what is? Either an enormous negative return on my investment of time and thought and devotion, or a flat zero return; I figured that there was no way to profit from so Satanic an offer, so I turned it down. There was some shit that I would not eat.

      My wife Sherri says she’s proud of me for that, which is nice, but pride doesn’t pay the bills. What’s worse, I feel unfulfilled. Lorn of destiny. Diamond logic is good stuff, solid work with real uses; really it ought to be in computer chips all over the world, but it is not, because I refused to adapt it to the task of death, destruction, terror and domination. (A.k.a. “defense”.)

       I have been harshly punished for my moralistic pride; it has condemned me to a life without traction. Stagnant income for decades, no influence, obscure, ignored. Take that, Nat! How do you like your ‘integrity’, Mister Nobody? For what profit it a man to save his own soul but lose the world?

       My personal tragedy is trivial, but many others share it. Multiply my underachievement by millions of others in the same position as mine. Result; decades of national stagnation. That’s what happens when enough people go Galt.

       ‘Going Galt’ is perhaps a misnomer; for though my strike was based upon rational self-interest, it was enlightened self-interest; not very Randian. Perhaps you could instead say that I (and many others) ‘walked away from Omelas’.

 ***

       I met Matthew Weiner again, years later. It was during the first Gulf War; you know, the one which didn’t get Saddam Hussein, but did convince bin Laden that the USA is the Great Satan. I was walking through the U.C.Berkeley campus, which I hadn’t visited for years, and suddenly I was face to face with him. We stopped and looked each other over. The junior spook still had a scraggly beard, and a tie-dye T-shirt, and clamdigger shorts, and rainbow suspenders, and Birkenstock sandals. I was clean-shaven, and was wearing a black shirt, black jacket, long black pants, black belt, black socks, and black leather shoes. I looked like an undertaker, for indeed I was consciously in mourning.

 ***

      I sometimes thought about Matthew Weiner towards the end of the Bush Jr. years. I hear that the spooks were furious about Plame, and none too happy about being ordered to fit the facts to the policy. I’ve had sucky bosses too, but none of mine ever insisted that two plus two equals anything other than four.

 

 

Smuggler’s Eye

          Smuggler’s Eye

 

          I write here about a revealing incident. Sherri and I drove Hannah to the airport, to fly back East to visit relatives for eight days. (Uncle Seth, Aunt Kazzie and their children Zeke and Sarah; then Uncle Dan and Aunt Susan.) Sherri dropped me and Hannah off; I went with Hannah; the plan was for me to get a gate pass and accompany her to the plane; then come out and get picked up by Sherri. We did this before, and it sort of worked.

          We got me a gate pass. While walking to the checkpoint, I reacted to security theater with mockery, as usual. Hannah agreed, and noted that once Sherri had to give up some contact lens solution. I said, “Water is officially an explosive.” Hannah laughed and said, “I can’t take you anywhere!” “Absolutely not,” I agreed. Then it hit me. “My swiss army knife!”

          We ran into trouble with that on a previous airport visit. I keep a swiss army knife in my backpack; a useful tool; but airports are paranoid. I tried to go through, but they said they’d confiscate the knife. I pulled back, fuming; Sherri drove by to pick up the knife, I proceeded. Not a process to repeat!

          So what to do? Hannah and I agreed that I had to hide it somewhere. So as she wheeled her pack towards the security gate, I kept an eye out for hiding places. Small volumes, out of sight, beneath or behind. I found a recycling bin, approached it, glanced behind it, dropped the knife there, and proceeded towards the security gate.

          There we removed our shoes like good Moslems. Our luggage got X-rayed and we went through a metal detector. It was one of those booths where you’re supposed to raise your hands in surrender, which is what the word ‘Islam’ means; I raised my hands in a shrug.

          We went to the gate, Hannah left her luggage at the counter for last-minute luggage check-in, and then boarded right away. Surprisingly efficient. I left the gate, went out to the main hall, found the recycling bin, looked behind, there was my knife. I picked it up and went out to get picked up by Sherri, no hassle.

          I see in that knife a symbol. Their stupid rules turned it into a problem; I couldn’t efficiently manage it within their clueless authoritarian system; so to get things done, I had to cheat. I had to smuggle my knife out of the terminal. This proved easy to do, for “the invisible hand is quicker than the all-seeing eye” (as I said in my Underfable, “The Magic of the Marketplace”).

          When the rules are stupid, it’s stupid to follow the rules. That airport taught me how to remove my shoes like a good Moslem, but also how to see like a smuggler.

 

Local Optimism

             Local Optimism

Voltaire mocked Leibnitz (in the guise of Dr. Pangloss) for proposing that this is the ‘best of all possible worlds’. But Leibnitz, co-inventor of the calculus, knew the difference between local and global maxima. A global maximum is the largest value that a function reaches, for any input; whereas a local maximum is the largest value that a function reaches, in some neighborhood of the locally-maximizing input.

I therefore propose this modification of Panglossian optimism; Local Optimism, which states that this is the best of all sufficiently similar possible worlds. Any stable world locally optimizes; it’s the best of all nearby possibilities.

          Local optimism suggests that there may be many stable worlds, some better than ours. There may also be inherently unstable worlds, that are the worst of all sufficiently similar possible worlds.

          Any continuous path from one stable world to another must begin by getting worse.

          Any continuous path from one stable world to a better one must, in between, pass through the worst world on the path.

          A path from one stable world to a better one that never gets worse must be discontinuous.

          Analogs of local optimism are confirmed - and fundamental - in biology and physics; Darwinian evolution for biology and the Law of Least Action for physics. Local Optimism has sufficient scientific support to appeal to the likes of Leibnitz; yet also sufficient satiric undertones to appeal to the likes of Voltaire.

          For why does the universe minimize action? Is it lazy?

Collective Individuality

            Collective Individuality

 

            In my writngs I call into question the existence of money. I call this philosophy ‘aplutism’; it calls money a fiction. Any money system’s reality is at best social; money’s value is determined by a market, which is by definition transpersonal. Therefore there is no such thing as “my” money system; it is by definition “ours”.

            Therefore money is collectivist! It has to be, otherwise it wouldn’t be fungible. The same goes for language. Words have to have shared meanings, or they have no meanings at all. Or take Reason; there is certainly no such thing as “my” rationality, distinct from “ours”. If anyone has Reason, then Reason is the common property of all mankind.

             (Once Calvin, of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, was told to answer a test question “in your own words”. A loophole! So he answered in gibberish.)

             A curious political paradox emerges. Money, speech and Reason are the gods of libertarian individualism, but they’re also as collectivist as the fire department! Money, speech, reason and much else (for instance the Rule of Law) is collective by nature. We all have rule of law or none of us do. In such a situation the only rational policy is to build government relating to such things on collective principles.

             The money that you make is yours; but it is denominated in terms that are ours. Your speech is free, you may say whatever you like, but you’d better use English, and not some private language of your own, if you wish to be understood. You have your individual rights under the law; but the law is a creature of the State. And so on.

            The individual and the collective are interdependent; they only make sense in terms of each other. Yin and Yang.

             The paradox works in the other direction as well. Every collectivist movement ends up being run by a powerful individual, usually an alpha male. The army needs a general, the church needs a priest, the commune needs a manager.

             The human dilemma is that we are individual yet social. Monty Python parodied the paradox in this scene from their “Life of Brian”:

            Brian to crowd: “I mean, you’re all individuals!”

            Crowd: “YES, WE’RE ALL INDIVIDUALS!”

            Lone man in crowd: “I’m not!”

             Rudyard Kipling celebrated the paradox with:

            The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

  

            Signed,

            the illusion of the individual Nathaniel