The Progress Paradox

It starts with a thought: I don't so much mind being poor, so long as my child is free to pursue wealth.

I believe this concept is referred to as 'social mobility' but my experience of when this term is (rarely) invoked, the emphasis is on mobility upwards. Poor people's ability to penetrate the strata of the rich.

Then to borrow and mutilate a phrase of the Jerry Seinfeld of Economics James Maynard Keynes 'social mobility is rigid downwards/sticky downwards' 

That then would describe a world that sounds something like this 'I have succeeded, but it will be all for nought if my children can fail and lose everything I have.' 

I'm aware of a similar paradoxical statement, from the world of cycling: 'Brakes make you go faster.'

This I find easier to expand upon. The ability to decelerate (slow down) quickly and effectively allows you to maintain higher top speeds. I feel most people would not attempt to ride a bike with no brakes, but it can be done, and safely. It just means you have to ride at max speeds so low that you will lose momentum quickly and/or be able to use your feet to brake and come to a full stop. This is kind of the default of skating though parts of the board, the feet and riding the skateboard on a diagonal all function as brakes.

But if you can just squeeze a trigger and basically come to a dead stop descending a steep downhill, then you can fearlessly pursue speed.

Shifting over to another analogy borrowed from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and bringing us back to the more general progress paradox; if you wanted to lose weight, it would be absurd to demand that our weight simply never increase. Fasting aside, people at the very least require hydration, and it would be pointless for a person to weigh themselves after their morning ablutions (shit) and then eat breakfast and weigh in again and chastise themselves for gaining weight.

Our weight is going to fluctuate over the course of a day, weight loss may involve a series of days where we both gain and lose weight. The more weigh ins we do, the less likely we are to observe the desired outcome. Nassim Nicholas Taleb then talks about the likelihood of realizing a profit decreasing the more frequently we check our share portfolio's performance.

Alas, I want to get back to the progress paradox. Which is people who dogmatically insist on progress, hinder progress. 

One of my core heuristics is: failure must be an option.

Elsewise, we are in the root of all evil that is rigging. 

I don't actually want to live in a world where my progeny can't fail. To be protected from their own performance.

Sure time and chance happen to us all, but one such example of a progress paradox, an inefficiency in a market is private schools.

Ignorant as to where you might be reading this from, including the future, in Australia 'private schools' are the expensive schools well-heeled people send their progeny too. And to wax cynical they also offer full scholarships to students who need their services the least in order to look like they can do more for their prospective customers.

The main thing my own private school did, was have a virtually unlimited photocopy budget to hand its senior students phone book sized practice exams that with an application of effort, allowed us to ace subjects like maths and physics.

But a more insidious form of rigging by private schools I will call the 'further maths' scam. 'Further Maths' was a VCE subject designed to give students that were weak in mathematics some rudimentary mathematical skills that might pay off in later careers. On the flipside there was a highly selective subject 'Specialist Mathematics' that taught students to calculate the concentration of salt in a brine, prove that triangles have no right angles, and do hypothetical equations involving the square root of -1. 

Our school, and I would presume many other private schools, took the students expected to do 'Specialist Maths' and heavily encouraged them to do Further Maths. That is, put all the most talented maths students into the subject that was a last ditch effort to teach maths to people with almost no aptitude. 

I did not participate in this scheme, somewhat aware that my life was finate, my youth even more so and I didn't want to spend a precious fraction of a year essentially waiting for a perfect score when I could be doing Studio Art. But I had many friends that derisively laughed at their essentially free perfect score, and subsequent improved odds of obtaining a scarce university position.

This is a common and flagrant gaming of a system for allocating scarce tertiary places. Though I increasingly speculate that in the future it will be only poor kids that go to University while rich people's kids will be bought a bakery to manage when they turn 18 in the future; this isn't so much what the progress paradox is, as how a progress paradox can manifest.

Namely, it was my experiences attending both a public and private secondary school in Australia that left me struggling for ethical grounds as to why private schools should exist. I mean I would cynically say that private schools do exist to: ensure your child is not judged on their merits.

I think education in general is inefficient and not very effective. I recently saw Steven Pinker allude to the phenomena that most people could not resit and pass an exam one year after graduation. I believe education is primarily there to test for trait conscientiousness-industriousness, because this is what is largely demanded by the labor market, and secondarily/incidentally can test for intelligence.

Private schools rout both tests, nominally through a process known as 'spoonfeeding' with failure being unacceptable more resources are simply thrown at students so they look on paper to be conscientious, industrious and/or intelligent. When left to their own devices, such as a busy and stressed employer might, they are not necessarily any of these things. Or they may simply have poor judgement, like industrious, intelligent people that are protected from the consequences of getting black out drunk two nights in a row.

I believe in inequality, and am for it. Where I take issue with inequality, is how that inequality is allocated. Like I don't think everybody should have equity when it comes to the production of birthday cards. I think some talented creatives should be able to make gift cards that they mass produce and other people pay for. That kind of shit I'm totally cool with.

I am happy for risk-takers to receive a risk-premium. I'm happy for the opportunity to win an Olympic Gold medal to go to the fastest athletes. etc. etc.

What I can't abide, but can understand, is when a brilliant, talented person who has generated immense value for their community and been compensated for it; can somewhat reproduce their genes and cannot reproduce the environment etc. that rendered them a brilliant, talented person capable of generating immense value for their community.

In other words the crucial difference between 'How do I leave a better world for our children?' (as in the next generation of everyone's children) and 'How do I leave a better world for my children?'

So...so, so, so, so, soish... Malcolm Gladwell I think introduced me to this question in sporting analysis which is: 'what's most important? how good your best player is or how good your worst player is?' in Soccer the skill level of the worst player has a bigger impact than the skill level of the best player vs basketball the skill level of your best player has a greater impact than the skill level of the worst player. 

So too, I feel is progress much more impacted by the question 'how poor is poor?' than 'how rich is rich?'

Because in the abstract I am philosophically okay with my progeny winding up under a bridge sucking cock for crack money; emotionally I am probably not okay with being confronted by such a reality.

This in turn makes it understandable why the wealthy are most preoccupied with status and wealth and success. People in general are more loss averse with something like losing $50 having a greater emotional impact than winning $100. 

In some ways, its a kind of abstract perversion of the kind of calculus many young people contemporarily face in their 20s. Live with the parents or go rent, because often their parents houses are much nicer, cheaper and more conveniently located. The question becomes 'what is the price of dignity?' even though personally I feel that 'dignity' is a bit of an illusion, given what I understand of the housing market.

I digress. 

It's just that... to put it bluntly... useless fucken turds exist, and it is often not even their own talents that design the wealth lock-in mechanisms that keep the market from evaluating them as such. Sure sometimes nepotism will actually put a completely unqualified person in charge of a business that they then run into the ground ruining not just their family wealth but the lives of those in the community that depended on that business being profitable, but there's also a vast amount of economic rents, which is where somebody collects 'rent' not by virtue of doing anything useful, but simply because they own stuff.

An attempt to impress me, and certainly made an impression upon me, early on by a Christian friend was the following joke: 'A scientist says to God 'we don't need you, science can do everything you can.' and God says 'go on then, make Man then.' so the scientist starts scooping up some clay to fashion a man and God says 'hey! get your hands out of my dirt!''

Ha ha ha. God's a mean spirited prick, tell me more about this Jesus. Anyway, this problem of multi-generational squatters is the essence of the progress paradox. There's people sitting on the stuff people need to make progress and they basically need to be paid off to do anything. 

There's people who need to lead, follow or get out of the way. Instead, for fear of their own regress, they hinder progress. Progress can only be made so long as their historical progress can be preserved.

So tohm? what's your problem with dismantling white supremacy and rebuilding an equitable society from the ground up? 

Mainly that it's not necessary. We just need 'shit or get off the pot' mechanisms. 

The Einstein Challenge

 "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." ~ Albert Einstein

Lately I've been struggling to finish a post. I have ten posts in draft form that I've variously written, rewritten and abandoned. Often I've abandoned a topic because 'it's too large' and then go to write a post on a simpler thought that I optimistically think I can just bang out  in an hour or two like my good old days only after 4 days time to declare it 'too large' a topic. 

I suspect this indicates that I used to produce more posts because I was both more ignorant and more confident. I also used to write basically the same two posts over and over again - God doesn't exist and Mike Patton is God.

Recently I've also felt a degree of redundancy, while trying to figure something out for myself some author will come out with a book and do an hour long podcast interview who knows their stuff.

Anyway, a lot of the topics I think about fall under an umbrella of counter-enlightenment thinking, and it seems a process of having to try and solve labyrinth after labyrinth to prove the labyrinth has no solution.

For a clear example of redundancy I would point you to a project called 'translations from the Wokish' in fact that seems a good point for me to start the Einstein challenge:

Social Justice Encyclopedia/Translations from the Wokish

A massive undertaking to counter a near-universal rhetorical tactic 'You disagree/are skeptical because you don't understand, and I'm offended you would think I should explain it to you. You need to read [insert incredibly onerous text(s)].' by reading all the onerous texts and critiquing their application.

Global Pandemic 2020~present day

When the population of the world was forced onto a fully booked, delayed, Economy-class long-haul flight together where a critical mass of passengers have not yet ascertained that the situation is just shit, but it's the situation we are all in, and that the only thing in their power to do is make the situation worse. 

Rigging.

When failure isn't an option. The most likely cause of any given injustice or 'evil' or problem is that somebody has arrested the ability to actually test and determine. On an individual basis rigging manifests as cognitive dissonance.

Reality

That which persists when you stop believing in it. A constraint on which beliefs can be held without insults from reality.

Knowledge

A subset of beliefs that are tentatively justified to the highest degree of confidence. Reliably immune to insults from reality. Beliefs with predictive power, eg. 'I believe I have $20 in my wallet.' predicts $20 worth of bills and/or coins in the speaker's wallet.

Pseudo Reality

When a non-fact is asserted to be a fact, that creates a pseudo-reality, pseudo-realities can be sustained over the short term but it's an energy intensive undertaking, incredibly inefficient (see North Korea) requires 'rigging' the predictive power of claims about pseudo-reality. The truth will out. Unless the non-fact is indeterminate, unfalsifiable or inconsequential like: there's a bowl of Thai Green Chicken Curry on the surface of Venus.

Epistemic Exclusion

Epistemology = how you come to know things, the method you use to know shit. The good use of 'epistemic exclusion' is a complaint where a lesser esteemed epistemology (like folk tradition) arrives at the same conclusion as a highly esteemed epistemology (like empiricism or the scientific method) but doesn't get the credit. (think ethnobotany vs pharmacy). Please note that truly non-overlapping magisteria is very rare, there isn't much that sound epistemologies like empiricism can't investigate.

The misuse of epistemic exclusion is where sound epistemologies produce knowledge/conclusions the complainant doesn't like and wants to use an unsound epistemology to arrive at a more desirable conclusion. For example genetics says your fiancé is your first cousin, oral tradition says she's no relation, just the girl next door. 

The Economy

An emergent property of society that cannot be comprehended in its operation and effect by any one individual and as such is one of the most common concepts invoked to defend/justify actions a person feels intuitively to be wrong. eg. letting a bunch of old people die horrible isolated deaths.

Cryptocurrency

1. A handy proof that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

2. A contemporary example of the pitfalls of utopianism.

3. An idol worshipped by the most annoying people you know. 

4. Is encrypted, almost never used as currency.

Fashion

An interest in seasonal styles is one of the best predictors of the answer to the question 'If I had lived in Nazi Germany, would I have been a National Socialist?/If I had lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution would I have joined the Red Guard?' the answer most likely being 'Yes' regardless of personal convictions. See inspiration for Kill La Kill

Paradoxically high-fashion (garments worn by fashion models and nobody else) and fashion trends are produced almost exclusively by people who cannot fit in and do not swim with the tide, for people whose social survival and/or safety depends on fitting in and swimming with the tide.

Civilization

A large group of people who frequently forget that everything depends on agriculture.

The Green Revolution

One of the most impactful revolutions that I was not taught about in school, and ignorance of which makes it hard to understand the state of the world. A technological revolution not a political one, hence its success and unexpected consequences.

Stylish

An undertaking in presenting oneself well, that is handicapped by the more difficult undertaking of knowing oneself.

Latinas

People who through a combination of certain genetically inherited traits and economic constraints can successfully pull off pretty much any outfit thrown at them, for some reason do not even attempt the styles that most people of predominantly European descent persist in trying to pull off. See 'Crocs'

Cuisine

A collection of prepared dishes that sit on a frontier where any subtraction or addition to the recipe produces a worse dish. Preparation can vary, see 'my mum makes the best lasagna/chocolate cake', but adding wagyu beef or truffles are generally just a cash grab wank, or largely payoff on instagram not the tastebuds.

The Future

Unknowable, but most energy is put into constructing a kind of 'now plus' where the future will be wonderful because caramel is salted, social media has a new user-friendlier interface, macaroons have replaced choc chip biscuits/cookies, your car exhaust now has a chrome finish and a new profile, your washing machine is now connected to the wifi and you have more options for your online dating profiles.

Public Intellectual

Someone whose attention and influence is merited on some specific expertise. They then face the constant temptation to comment on ever more general matters and the near constant peril of receiving enough rope to overconfidently hang themselves - for a highly contemporary example see the Weinstein brothers Brett and Eric.

Influencer

An economy based on vicarious living where many individuals transfer small amounts of attention or money to a single recipient who can then use this to demonstrate a certain lifestyle is possible. Frequently this is a lifestyle where a young white woman wears a wide brim hat with confidence, maybe paired with an oversize cardigan and white pants. Supporting an influencer is usually cheaper than buying and wearing a hat. Not everyone can be an influencer.

Conspiracy Theorist

1. When a group of children are presented with a large basket of toys, select some, maybe fight over some and eventually divide up to play with whatever toys they can obtain that interest them or cry over in disappointment; a conspiracy theorist is somebody who for emotional reasons cannot infer that the children are reacting to environmental stimuli and must presume coordinated intelligent design.

2. A religiously minded person who asserts a powerful external locus of control which is motivated by the comforting thought that an agent can be identified, exposed and everything would then be alright and to abrogate personal responsibility by not examining the possibility that we might unwittingly contribute to our own suffering.

Intelligent design

The default least likely explanation for any given phenomena, though for many the most desirable and compelling.

Ancient Astronaut

An uncompelling and unfascinating belief that is compelling to a psychologically fascinating group of people.

'Game B'

The admirable undertaking of figuring out how humanity can live sustainably on Planet Earth without recourse to expanding our civilization into new frontiers (like space) and subsequently kicking the unsustainable can up the road for future generations to deal with. Unfortunately game b is played almost exclusively by well intentioned volunteers who are precisely the people you don't want 'playing game b' (people who use terms like 'mytho-poetic' and 'metamodernism' see also 'conspiracy theorist'), with almost all the people we do want 'playing game b' preoccupied in the non-theoretical, non-hypothetical private and public sectors.

Lobbyist

A paid professional whose job is to attempt to gain overrepresentation in policy - to break the 'one man one vote' principle, could theoretically be benign but is usually malign or at best unnecessary.

Made dangerous by the confluence of competence and compensation.

Activist

A volunteer lobbyist who is often cash-poor but time rich, tends to attempt to gain overrepresentation in policy for causes they are passionate about - in the benign form activists attempt to influence voters to care about a cause and thereby influence policy, in the malign form they attempt to skip the voters and try to influence risk averse decision makers to not wait to see if the cause gains traction with the public.

Made dangerous by a combination of confidence and ignorance.

Iconoclast

An iconoclast is someone who while not necessarily on the wrong side of history, is almost certainly (by definition) on the wrong side of historians. Alternatively an optimistic type of activist movement that believes in the modern era they can succeed where the Ancient Egyptians failed with Pharaoh Akhenaten.

Religious

A person motivated to believe that anything is possible, that beliefs constituting knowledge cannot be constrained by a material reality.

Religion

1. A system of belief that survives largely on received wisdom, appeals to authority and informed attributes. (see tatamae also)

2. A belief system that becomes more benign the less seriously it is taken but paradoxically if taken very seriously can result in deconversion. Also paradoxically benign non-serious believers will often hold the belief that it would be good if they took their religion more seriously and will often dangerously defend and protect people who take their beliefs dangerously seriously. It is possible to be incredibly pious while not taking your religion seriously at all (ie. not reading your own holy texts), all that is required is belief.

Theologian

Someone who's methodology begins with a conclusion and then rationalizes why it must be true. A field that in its oldest traditions have stagnated, producing an asymmetry such that it can take tertiary or postgraduate studies to be able to make the arguments in support of theism, but an amateur deconverted youtuber can use google to thoroughly debunk.

Theologians generally believe in a god that lay believers don't care about.

Atheist

Somebody who reliably doesn't understand religion, often not for lack of trying. Despite admittedly 'not getting it' often are upstanding moral agents via secular humanism, a commitment to truth, skepticism etc. yet cannot synthesize many of the benefits of organized religion, like mutually supportive community network see attempts like 'the Sunday Assembly'.

Comes in two notable but overlapping clusters - deconverted Athiests and raised secular Athiests the two have generally noticeable difference in politics.

Igtheist

A rarely used term that describes an atheist that when having a theist scoff at them and remark 'I don't believe in the God that you don't believe in' has taken it in good faith and tried earnestly to understand what God believers do believe in and found the answer completely abstract and unintelligible, and very often indistinguishable from a universe without a God.

Fragilista

A term coined by 'Antifragile' author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that didn't catch on but usefully describes people in society that are trying to eliminate all risk, randomness and unpredictability and subsequently increasing the incidence of catastrophes. Hence they 'fragilize' our world.

"Spiritual-but-not-religious"

A religious person who has given up/unburdened themselves of any obligation to render their beliefs coherent to themselves and or others. An incurious person.

Identity Politics

A politics where ad hominem is permitted. Example if I asked: 'Mr. Q hires an employee based on the color of their skin. Is this racist?' or 'A doesn't pay B any money for the work they did for them, is this moral?' under identity politics we don't have enough information about the identities to answer these questions. 

Progressives

People characterized by an intolerance for the incremental progress a society is making, and frequently favor a complete overhaul of a society in order to arrive at the desired destination immediately. A misnomer.

Revolution

A strategy that has timeless appeal and an abysmal history of generally making everything worse for everyone, but particularly its proponents. Exceptions include the American Revolution, and the Haitian revolution.

Reform

Gradual, unsexy but with a  much more promising history than revolution. Revolution is to scoring a golf hole-in-one as reform is to curling.

Systemic/Structural Racism

Grounded in truth, a truth manifest in growing inequality and perhaps best understood not by critical theorists but a minority of economists that understand political economy, rent seeking etc. and sadly not the most animated proponents of systemic racism and anti-racism whose characterizations appear even with scrutiny - juvenile.

As near as I can determine, the assertion of systemic racism is that if people were really committed to ending racism they would gladly drastically and immediately restructure both a society and economy they do not understand to make up for the ills of the past. 

Patriarchy

A nebulous concept that needs to exist in order to dismantle it. 

1. Shorthand for the inert description that things are unequal between men and women, most notably in terms of wealth and occupying executive positions.

2. Shorthand for a conspiracy theory that men double as a secret society that actively and consciously cooperate to oppress women. This definition has the drawback of bearing no resemblance to many men's lived experience, hence it is valuable if pressed to revert to definition 1 which almost everyone can agree with.

Karen

But one proof of 'the narcissism of small differences'

White Supremacy

A once concrete concept that entailed a belief in the intrinsic superiority of white people, that is now nebulous but needs to exist in order to dismantle it. Contemporarily somebody is a white supremacist if they do not dedicate every waking moment to dismantling white supremacy.

Sex Worker

Someone employed in the sex industry. 

'Sex Worker'

When an employee comes to their manager with various complaints such as a toxic work culture, workplace bullying, job insecurity, management undermining frontline employees in front of clients, wage theft, unsafe workplace, breaches of safety protocols, unsanitary conditions etc. and management come back and say 'we've listened to your complaints and we think we have the solution - we're going to change your job title.'

Critical Theory

Almost universally boils down to a complaint that 'life could be easier' plus solipsism. Since everyone's life could almost certainly be easier, the theorising is largely trying to work out why one set of lives should get easier and others harder. Very zero-sum. Critical theory perhaps hopes to be confused with critical thinking ie non-opinion.

Libertarian

An irrational belief system that appears to ignore the historical role of cooperation, if not history itself including personal history.

Concept Creep

A tactic to sneak around consent by redefining the terms of something somebody already has agreed to. For example, people generally agree that hate speech is not protected free speech so redefine 'hate speech' to include referring to you as 'Ms.' X instead of 'Dr' X even though you have a PhD in Chemical Engineering and no medical training.

Cancel Culture/Cancelled

A paralegal method of activism where risk averse organizations are pressured to remove targeted parties without due process. Given the variance of guilt/innocence and variance of consequences including but not limited to duration, potentially qualifies as 'cruel and unusual' punishment. 

While not restricted to the left-extreme is their preferred method for recruiting talent to moderates and conservative causes and organizations

Alternative Medicine

Medical practices based entirely on anecdote, to the extent that when data that contradicts an anecdote is presented the data is rejected (often by employing an anecdote). Any system of medicine that is every part the equal of Western Heroic medicine. Historically some alternative medicines outperformed western medicine because they are completely ineffectual outside the placebo effect (see Homeopathy) whereas many western medical practices were worse than no treatment at all.

Where 'western medicine' can be dismissed entirely for historical failures like Thalidomide and Lobotomies, or for its failure to easily and painlessly cure cancers, virtually nothing is disqualifying for alternative medicine short of the premature death of its enthusiasts.

Anti-Various (masks, vaccines, lockdowns)

People highly sensitive to any threat to their personal freedoms. Freedoms won through the tremendous sacrifice of ancestors that variously fought the Napoleonic Wars, the American Revolution, the Great War (WWI), WWII and endured events like the great depression. So appreciative are they of the fruits of their forebears sacrifices, that they will not make the great and terrible sacrifices of staying at home and being bored and restless for a few months while being supported by future generations through government debt, wearing a mask out, or getting two to three injections. Very successful at prolonging restrictions on everyone's liberties. See Global Pandemic 2020~present

Antifa

An unrepresentative, unelected and unaccountable 'idea' that reserves the power to both define fascism and the unlimited powers to oppose what it defines as fascism. Plays the crucial role of embodying the very threat that fascists appeal to, to increase their power. Has a symbiotic relationship with fascism/right-wing tyrannophiles.

Middle-class

How everyone describes their economic standing.

Coalition

Large coalition systems (like democracies) produce better outcomes than small coalition systems (like dictatorships) though large coalitions can treat outgroups virtually identically to small coalitions. See 'The Dictators Handbook' and 'Deterring Democracy'.

Artist

Somebody who produces art.

Professional Artist

An artist that creates a connection with an audience.

Iago

A shit-stirring character in Shakespeare play 'Othello' who in the guise of an ally, creates all of Othello's problems by convincing him they exist.

Social Sciences

A branch of Academia that has increasingly come to resemble the function of Iago. see Iago.

Media (Inc. Social Media)

An institution that has increasingly come to resemble the function of Iago. see Iago.

Media Savvy

Someone who is unaware they have increasingly come to resemble the character of Othello.