Two Attempted Applications of Marcus

"Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet to-day inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. But I, because I have seen that the nature of good is the right, and of ill the wrong, and that the nature of the man himself who does wrong is akin to my own (not of the same blood and seed, but partaking with me in mind, that is in a portion of divinity), I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against one another therefore is to oppose Nature, and to be vexed with another or to turn away from him is to tend to antagonism." ~ The Meditations of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Book 2.1, translation from Greek sourced here. Emphasis mine.

Contemporary to writing, I have the slight perception, as per "The Cancelling of the American Mind" by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, a book I admittedly haven't read but am curious to, and from what I can glean from publicity interviews - in it's chapter "the Perfect Rhetorical Fortess" they allude to the lazy rhetorical shorthand employed that if someone is conservative, they can be dismissed without having to listen to them all.

There has been a rush of fools embracing the cosmetics of stoicism in recent years. Likely sold on the promise that it can make one manly and rich or some shit, in the same way elite female private schools in Melbourne and perhaps the world over use sanitary advertising to sell themselves as finishing schools to parents with a veneer that they are educating future titanic female leaders. Such that, I'm aware an invocation of stoicism for many is enough to be dismissed before even reading this far.

I can't help that, but thanks for reading this far. If you have a hard on for stoicism as some shortcut to being right in stupid culture war arguments, I invite you to enrich yourself by considering that Marcus didn't live up to his own stoic ideals, couldn't. He wrote his meditations as admonishment to himself and it is hard to point to anything from his reign that demarkates it as a particular golden era, with his most consequential act being the appointing of his son who came to be known as Commodus ("The toilet/latrine") co-emperor before his death being an utter disaster. As Sam Harris points out, all of us have the capacity to offer great advice to friends as though willpower were no great constraint, such that to be wise is to be able to follow your own advice. Marcus probably opens Book II with his daily reminder that people are people, given that Book I is what today many would call "Acknowledgements" because it was something he struggled with daily.

In some sense, provided you aren't so devoid of imagination that you can't extrapolate the meaning without "men" being expanded to "men and women" or "men, women and non-binary" which is to say, you have no power to include yourself and must beg inclusion from those you cast as superior, like the Torah, The New Testament and the Quran have nothing particular to say about Tik Tok, I'm going to attempt the conceit of pointing to two contemporary examples of mannish behaviour it is wise to accept and work with rather than against as Marcus appeared to perceive. Things people are going to do because they are fucking people. 

These are attempted applications of a principle only, applications I find useful:

People Who Think It Would Be Cool If Computers Were Cooler

Probably the simplest way to allude to the kind of people we needs must stoically accept the ongoing existence of is to describe two potential people: 1: People who enjoy the game of chess. 2: People who enjoy building machines that do things.

These two groups will have some overlap, such that naturally some component of the latter group will feel inspired to build machines that can play chess. Not only do they enjoy the game of chess, but they enjoy things that can play chess. They think it would be cool if not only can they build a machine that plays chess, but if they could build a machine grand master of chess.

So they do, and it doesn't destroy the game of chess. What happens, is that someone is faced with the question "why play chess when a machine can play it better?" they may even ask this of themselves. They arrive at the perfectly valid conclusion that the point of playing chess, is to play it. 

And so, I'm told, because I don't find chess that interesting or fun, that people are way more interested in watching Magnus Carlson play chess, than AI play chess. Playing against computers I'm also told, is how kids get good at chess now, and the internet has transformed the path to grand masterdom. 

Is it cool? Well that's subjective. It's also what has to be accepted. There are people who think it's cool that they built a powerful tool that makes humanity even better at chess, even if those tools are better at chess than humanity is.

It changes slightly, when someone sees a kid delivering pizza pies, and thinks "wouldn't it be cool if drones could do that?" or they see someone drive them across Los Angeles, and think "wouldn't it be cool if that guy didn't have to do that for me?" 

Now, when I asked my brother, who is much closer to the demographic of "wouldn't it be cool if computers were cooler" than I, and he thinks the dream of silicon valley is getting super rich really young.

So I'm possibly too generous in casting this demographic as naively thinking they are helping people who grumble about their job sucking. Besides, they already fixed the economy, we plebs just need to start using cryptocurrency because...fed prints money? Therefore profits. 

I digress too much, need to get back on the old trackola:

Mrs. Doyle says it best, though that needn't be the pathos motivating all. Much of the world is fucked up, telling some international student they don't need to deliver pizzas on an e-bike anymore, may not help the international student delivering pizzas on an e-bike. You just made the world slightly more fucked up for him by selling a fleet of drones to Door Dash. 

The guy willing to pick you up from LAX at 5am to drive you to Santa Monica, I would hazard a guess isn't doing it as a favour to his cousin who owns Uber. I suspect he is out working those hours to make a living because it is sparing him from work he finds much worse.

With some economics training, I am open, even perhaps a believer in the general trend of automation providing massive productivity gains for all society.

I'm also open to the idea, that the washing machine was more impactful than the internet. I'm open to the idea of enshittification, a more general "tech-hype" that is unwarranted, and I am reasonably confident that the music industry was irreparably damaged by digitization even, if it ironically means that music will be easier to preserve from an archival perspective.

You would be correct to point out that phenomena like enshittification and the pitfalls of monopolies aren't so much the progeny of computer nerds as running companies to the exclusive interest of shareholders. 

What must be accepted, is that enough people out there just want computers to be cooler and they'll help make that happen because they can't help themselves.

Now, as for subjectivity:

Image taken from Yahoo! News, for the purpose of commentary only.

I'm perfectly willing to accept that for some chair moistening neckbeards out there in internet land, you are convulsing with incredulity saying "you think those guys aren't cool, they captain the top League of Legends teams in the world!!" and yeah the winning team won $445k so like, in 2023 a team of athletes win the equivalent of the loser of the US Tennis Open's Women's/Men's singles quarterfinals loser.

I'm tempted to get into the economics, because I am interested in whether young attractive women are learning to be attracted to the e-athletes in their high school, but there's just too much going on, and I don't want to commit a conjunction fallacy - it seems plausible to me, that someone who spends a lot of time playing video games, might be more likely to land a lucrative IT job than someone good at kicking or throwing a football, but it isn't necessarily so. Such that I would guess that LoL contender e-athletes' can consider themselves lucky to have girlfiends at all still.

The thing I would point out, is that I believe the avenue is there, to take an esports tournament and market it to a broad audience in the exact same way that the Simpsons' marketed Soccer/Associated Football to a US Audience, which is to say, condescendingly. I look at the photo of the LoL champions and can't help but wonder which country is the greatest in the world Mexico or Portugal?

So what I need to accept is that it's okay for kids to want to spend time with computers, enjoying every minute but for the desire that computers somehow could be even cooler. I also need to accept, that those computer hipcats won't accept my nigh total disinterest in how cool computers are. I use them, sure, but for fuck's sake, I'm still blogging in 2024.

Recently I watched "Devs" and even more recently the 1st season of "3-Body Problem" giving me pause to reflect that I do not enjoy a genre loosely described as "hard sci-fi". 

It doesn't begin there though, hard sci-fi probably goes back to Jules Verne, I've read 10,000 Leagues Under The Sea which compared favourably to a text-book on marine biology and not much else. It's a tedious book with an interesting scene in which electric bullets are used to kill marine life. Upon reflection, the most charming thing about 10,000 Leagues, is that the characters, being French, eat absolutely everything. But I also reflect that that's going too far back into the genre of hard sci-fi.

Both Devs and 3-Body Problem had the same problem for me. Devs more so because it is a smaller story. I can't relate to any of the characters and was indifferent to any of them dying, hence, for me the show had no stakes.

3-Body Problem is most interesting because it is sci-fi written by as near as I can determine a Chinese Chauvinist, it is on my to-do list to learn more about contemporary Chinese Intellectuals, but obviously this was Netflix's English Language adaptation, so I'm sure getting a taste of Chinese sci-fi was heavily filtered. 3-Body Problem I would concur, is mostly boring and despite being hard sci-fi, I'm reasonably confident its science doesn't work at all.

It does however feature perhaps the very epitome of "wouldn't it be cool if computers were cooler" in the form of it's "sophons" which, is a photon sized supercomputer, depicted in the Netflix adaptation as a photon that is "unfolded" into 2-dimensions making it incredibly large and then presuming some alien technology, engraved with a planet sized circuit board which can run a sentient computer software, before being collapsed back into a 11 dimensional photon or whatever and entangled with another sophon and then sent at the speed of light to earth. Pretty cool huh? No.

In 3-Body problem you don't get Ripley taping a flamethrower to a pulse rifle and climbing into an exo-skeleton to take on the Xenomorph Queen. You get physicists in shapeless khaki pants calculating how far away super colliders would have to be to prevent two sophons from disrupting all scientific experimentation and spying on the Earth's counter-invasion leadership while they plan for an invasion 400 years from now.

Benedict Wong is good though. He usually is.

Devs, what can I say, the actress playing Lilly actually gives a compelling performance as someone I do not give a shit about and do not want to know. Nick Offerman gets to play someone who isn't Ron Swanson, but the overall plot again, I am guessing is supposed to appeal to people who think it would be cool if computers were cooler. Because they have a quantum computer, which I'm under the impression, scientists the world over are still trying to find something they are capable of, that ordinary computers aren't.

Again, my brother explained to me that it is hard science in so far as apparently the Universe is either deterministic, or it has many worlds. 

This show could have been in some sense "brilliant" even with unlikeable characters I do not care about. If it was making the same point, and it really flirts with this point, that "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story" was making - that tech-popes of silicon valley are stupid. If I had any confidence that that was the point of Devs, I would consider it redeemed.

I have no confidence.

Let me give it to you straight, if you didn't see Lilly throwing the gun out of the elevator, not necessarily specifically, but just using the computer's prediction of the future to make an alternative choice, you are an idiot. You are a fucking moron if you reacted like the in universe morons who had their minds blown by Lilly breaking their illusion of determinism.

At that moment, the show had the opportunity to be brilliant, because they'd set up everything to be brilliant - these tech morons thought they'd made a computer that showed them the future, believing it to be determined they did in the future what the computer said they would do, and due to psychological anchoring, these morons never bothered to test whether they could defy the predictions. 

Lily sees a prediction that she will get into an electromagnetic lift with Nick Offerman, holding him at gunpoint and then shoot him with that gun, causing herself to be killed by radiation or some bullshit. This also plausibly explained why the computer couldn't predict anything beyond that point, because it was forecasting that it would be shut down. Yeah we can predict things happening after our death, like I predict there will still be crabs hanging out at volcanic vents under the ocean after I die, but whatever.

As soon as Lily demonstrates that they all have the agency to not do what the computer told them to do the bad guys, who were misguided into being bad guys, realize they are culpable for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, obstruction of justice, desecration of a body etc. 

Beyond Lily breaking determinism, by using a prediction to determine her non-compliance with the pre-determined prediction, manifest by her throwing a gun out of an elevator so she couldn't shoot Nick Offerman; none of that potentially brilliant and satisfying conclusion happens. 

Instead, Lily and Nick Offerman are resureccted in a quantum computer simulation of all possible worlds, and living in Silicon Valley with resurrected loved ones is deemed by Nich Offerman to be "paradise" (which it probably is for Lily and he, because they are normcore) but newsflash: it isn't for most people. It also heavily implies that simulated Lily with her illusion of consciousness, is but one of a multitude of simulated Lilys many of whom are experiencing simulated breast cancer, simulated early onset dementia etc. It's fucking stupid and the whole show is stupid.

There's a particularly painful scene where Alison Pill explains determinism to Lily, that I think assumes that the audience for this show are absolute morons. This scene could have worked, if it was intended to establish that Alison Pill, Nick Offerman et al. were all morons with a really cool computer. I'm not left with the impression that that was the intent. I'm left with the impression that its target audience was meant to be all like "whaaaaaaaaaaaa...[mind explodes]" when they have determinism explained to them - poorly. That they are tellingly supposed to identify with Lily as maybe good at maths, good at coding, but like Lily who somewhat satisfyingly again and again plays herself with her own plans by not thinking them through - do not think things through.

Bringing me full circle, to the need to accept that I share this planet, and society, with people who think it would be cool if computers were cooler. Because such a demographic is not in my experience, reflective, imaginative or thoughtful. I cannot emphasize enough that the impression I am given is an almost monomaniacal obsession with it being cool if computers were cooler.

I've never watched a single Lex Friedman clip, and felt a reassuring "good, I'm glad that guy is a bulwark for humanity while he works hard at disrupting things." I feel Lex Friedman is some kind of idiot savant, personable enough to enjoy his podcast success, and his audience, I cannot credit with the savant or personable part.

Why are they a problem at all? Alain De Botton in a BBC series adapted from his "consolation of philosophy" book, went out into London traffic with a commercial driver, and he really demonstrated the practical application of stoicism, by consoling the frustrated driver that his rage at shitty drivers was born of hope - that today of all days - would be the day that everyone on the streets of London will drive competently and considerately. He points out that getting frustrated with bad driving is irrational because bad driving is the norm.

Consider, that cars are a powerful technology, that many societies actively turbo-charged the public adoption of them - with subsidies for manufacturers and lax lending standards for financing new vehicles. People who think it would be cool if computers were cooler, that's largely what they helplessly facilitate in our society - putting powerful tools in the hands of idiots and incompetents. They aren't the only culprits - industrialists did this first, and I have similar opinions of financial tools like superannuated retirement funds.

Nice People Who Want Things To Be Nice

I guess these people are the antithesis of "Realpolitik" or "Realism" maybe they could be succinctly described as "Unrealpolitik" but that might have you thinking too Kafka-esque.

This was certainly my experience: In highschool, sometimes the population of my year level would effectively be halved for two weeks. The reason being, one half of the year was sent off to school camp, then the following week, we'd switch places.

My school had fairly arbitrary "houses" and that was what determined who went which week. This could disect some cliques, leave some inseparable friends temporarily separated or even remove some cliques in totality. Everyone would likely notice that social dynamics changed, and that it wasn't necessarily bad.

You might get more attention from the girl you had a crush on, because your romantic rivals were gone. You might get relief from the anxiety of possible rejection because your crush was away on camp. Someone who normally caused you angst, chilled out because they were relieved of the need to impress someone they normally did. 

The sudden halving of the population, more generally just reconfigured a bunch of dynamics, but reliably in my experience, always provided an opportunity to experience what life would be like if some quantity of dickheads you usually had to live with, were gone.

"Gee," you would muse, "some people are like clouds: once they are gone, its a beautiful day." 

Of course, all this reprieve was only temporary, because the fact is those dickheads aren't gone they are merely away. They still exist. They come back. 

Sure, in life, some dickwads get expelled, some might even get arrested, some die. But a hell of a lot of dickwads we have to endure, because they are just dicks, they aren't doing anything so bad that we can justify not tolerating them.

All of which, is calibrated by the sensitivities of an individual.

I think nice people who want things to be nice are largely fantacists. These are the people stuck musing, stuck painfully musing how good life would be if we could just remove all the bad people and keep the good people.

Their fancy might be that their children never cry, never suffer. Their fancy might be that comedy:

"Excuse me, ma'am. Do you like to laugh?" "Oh, yes. As long as it's tasteful. And never at someone... or with. And not-". ~ Marge Simpson, The Simpsons.

Graduating from highschool now, my first real encounter with a nice person who wants things to be nice, was sitting around as a student council for my residential college that was struggling, and we struggled, to field teams in intercollegiate events.

We were an if not the international residence. The population was 50/50 local/international students. Our perennial problem was that domestically the residence was marketed as a multi-cultural melting pot for the then largely generalist ideal Australian high-achievers. It was marketed internationally as a safe place to send your kid where they wouldn't get pregnant, be exposed to drugs and alcohol and could study under lock and key 23 hours a day. 

The result was a bunch of exhausted 18-22 year old Australian kids who wound up having to play every sport, simultaneously, run every social event, sew sequins onto everyone's costumes and the reward was often failing a semester of Uni and having to repeat it.

I suggested that in the future we might stipulate that as a condition of residence, one had to participate in a sport or cultural event of some kind each semester. 

A nice person who wants things to be nice attempted to shut me down - not with an argument about the legality or feasability of my proposal, but because they hated that in highschool.

I tried counterempathising, that at first I had hated compulsory extra-curricular activities, but had come to really appreciate it as one of the most enriching things in my life.

They hated it, and that was that.

This is the thing that needs to be stoically accepted, nice people who want things to be nice, waste our time. 

They are a demographic that basically see conflict as illegitimate, everyone should just chill out, go with the flow, mind their own business. 

As I am attempting to phenotype them "nice people who want things to be nice" (npwtbns/nipweebs?) generally have the consistent personality trait of assuming that issues are much simpler than circumstances suggest they are. 

An example I came across today was in a video talking about how Comedy Specials were killing comedy. I watched it because I agree with the broad thesis, but the video maker was fixated particularly on what we would hopefully both use scare quotes to describe as "edgy" comics. 

He had a bit in his video essay which I'm reasonably confident was meant to mock "edgy" comics, rather than nipweebs. The bit went thus:

Comic: What's the deal with trans people?

Heckler: They're just trying to live their lives.

Comic: Oh...

While I'm sure that the heckler's characterization is broadly true of most trans people. To me it reads as largely in line with my own position - that gender rights are human rights in the domain of freedom of expression. But if that is your take on why the culture is obsessed with the issue, you are probably an unhelpful nipweeb.  

It is the distinct combination of holding as the loftiest ideal "niceness" a kind of edgeless, cornerless, toothless ideal fundamentally free not only of struggle, but discomfort, combined with the wantoness the sheer avarice for things to just be nice that make this psychographic so necessary to endure.

These people are paradoxically incurious as regards everything they perceive to be "not nice" and yet are for their wanton nature are quite obstructionist, active. They do not just nicely mind their own business.

So if the issue is a more perennial and ubiquitous one like bullying, the nitweeb in the room performs the role of - say someone suggests disciplinary action, even powers being extended to teachers, the nitweeb says "no I used to hate when a teacher yelled at me at school, they are so big and tall and intimidating." okay, someone else suggests that they've heard researchers find if you give the bully a special role like welcoming all the other students to the class, it satisfies their need to dominate and the bullying behaviour can actually stop. "No!" says the nitweeb, "That's rewarding them for being a bully! I'd feel awful if I was in his class and saw him getting recognized and rewarded when I was a good student."

Okay, the facilitator says "don't be stern, don't be nice, no carrot, no stick, what do you suggest nitweeb?" and the nitweeb's practical suggestion is: "They should stop being a bully."

It puts me in mind of the days I spent down at the Ballarat Library, they had a series of introductory paperbacks like "Introduction to Zen Buddhism" "Introduction to Nietzsche" and "Introduction to Wittgenstein." etc. In one of these short illustrated books, one on one of the eastern philosophies, came an account of a Chinese Emperor meeting with a Buddhist Monk and asking what the essence of Buddhism was the monk replies: "Cease to do evil, learn to do good, purify your heart." and the Emperor is like "Even a child of 7 knows to do that." and by my recollection of the tale the Buddhist monk replies "Then why can't you do it?"

Similarly Soljenisky memorably wrote:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

In terms of disorders like narcissism and psychopathy, I would have to say I'm a believer that while not simple, society could do a great deal more to protect itself from these personality disorders - it would do well to keep such personalities out of positions of real authority.

Beyond that though, recognize how unhelpful the simple ideas of good and bad are, and subsequently we can recognize what a tiresome pain in the arse nipweebs are with their impractical and useless suggestions combined with their oppositional defiance of any more practical attempts to address their genuine complaints (people shouldn't harass trans people, kids shouldn't be bullied, racial slurs shouldn't be thrown, fat women should be able to buy and wear bikinis to the beach etc.) 

I propose that accepting the fact, even inevitability of their existence means appreciating their ability to provide useful friction to deter overexuberance if no real insight, and work around them. 

For example, if there's a meeting about bullying, take the response to a vote after open discussion, not a consensus. Take the nice person who wants things to be nice's ability to shame and coerce others into polite solidarity with them away by making the voting process anonymous. 

There is no need to be driven nuts by these people, as per Marcus Aurelius, the tedium of nitweebs is literally born through their "ignorance of real good and ill." 

Like Marcus, I often fail to live up to my own ideals, but I endeavour to respond to nitweebs not with ire and frustration but curiosity. 

Anybody who has not thought things through is curious to me.