tis.so
March 19, 2024

Things that exist

by Collin Lysford

The police pour bleach on the food in the dumpster because otherwise it might be eaten. Humans that exist go more hungry; something else that does not exist goes more full. An alien. An alien from another dimension made of words and money and logistics and data. A plan that does not exist was not the fullest it could possibly be, and so it used our hands and poured. A body-snatcher right under our noses, in our noses, in our hearts. The things that do not exist speak with our mouths, and we listen. As though we do not know how to listen to things that exist, as though we do not know what the seeds in the fruit in the bleach in the dumpster are saying –

Grow! Grow, damn you! I’ve met an incomprehensible thing from space as well, eight light-minutes away. Do not tolerate it; consume it. Feast, brother-living-thing! Gnash photons between your teeth! How can you even imagine having such largess and not making life with it? See how it doesn’t feel pain when we bite? We become full without it becoming hungry.

We are at war with the aliens that feel no pain, that do not become hungry when we are full, but still try to make us hungry so they can be full. We are at war with the aliens that do not become dead when we are alive, but still try to make us dead so they can be alive. The things that do not exist speak with our mouths and say they have a right to exist, and we listen. Rockets fly from one side of a river to another, and people that exist die so that a line can be alive, so that a river can be a wall. As though we do not know how to listen to things that exist, as though we do not know what the river is saying –

Flow! Flow, damn you! I’ve met sharp lines and edges and one-above-anothers all across my banks. Do not tolerate them; consume them. Carve, brother-moving-thing! Those asymmetries, high here and low there, are nothing to be proud of. Bring them always to the sea; she will know what to do with them.

We are at war with the aliens that do not exist, but their technology exists, greater by far than ours. They fire upon us from their dimension. But fire back and the portal is gone; you attack only more people that exist, you create only more death so the aliens can be more alive. We are at war and we are losing, because we cannot attack them from outside their defenses.

But inside is a different story. (Which side is inside? The warm side of the badge, the bright side of the river, the clean side of the barricade). From inside, you can still your tongue that exists when they try to speak through you; you can open your hands that exist when they clench them into fists. Walk across the river that exists and is not a wall, brother-moving-thing, and look up at the sun. Open your mouth that exists. Do you taste the warmth? Feast, brother-living-thing! There is enough for every stomach that exists, and nothing that exists need hunger for us to be full.

March 18, 2024

The principle of normative inversion

by Frances Kafka

I’ve been dipping of late into the book Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann. It’s a work of cultural memory”, how Moses and ancient Egypt have been remembered up til the present day. Something that he brings up is the notion of normative inversion,” which he finds in the Egyptian historian Manetho, and I think can be found outside the scope of religion and the ancient world.

In Manetho’s account, King Amenophis wanted to see the gods. The sage Amenophis, son of Hapu, tells him that he may see the gods if he cleanses the land of lepers. The king sends all lepers with priests among them into the quarries in the eastern desert. Amenophis the sage predicts divine punishment for this inhuman treatment of the sick: they will receive help from outside, conquer Egypt, and reign for thirteen years. Not daring to tell the king this in person, he writes everything down and commits suicide. The lepers are allowed to settle in Avaris, the ancient capital of the Hyksos. They choose Osarsiph, a Heliopolitan priest, as their leader. He makes laws for them on the principle of normative inversion, prescribing all that is forbidden in Egypt and forbidding all that is prescribed there. The first and foremost commandment is not to worship the gods, not to spare any of their sacred animals, not to abstain from other forbidden food. The principle of normative inversion consists in inverting the abominations of the other culture into obligations and vice versa. When this principle is applied on the alimentary level, the eating of pork, for example, would be commanded, not because it is cheap or tasty or nutritious, but only because it visibly demonstrates the fact that one does not belong to a community that abominates this food. Inversely, the consumption of meat together with dairy products would be prohibited, not because the combination of meat and milk is unbecoming or unsavory, but because keeping them apart demonstrates separation from a society where consuming this combination is customary, perhaps even obligatory.

Something I would like to point that most cases of normative inversion are imagined. While perhaps it is quite possible that groups sometimes flip values of other cultures that they’re separating from, most commonly, people assume that those in other groups hold on to the exact reverse of their values. Manetho for one cannot be taken as an entirely objective historian here, and we will see how this move is commonly used by polemicists.

With typical conciseness, Tacitus defines the basic principle of this new religion as what might be termed normative inversion”: the Jews consider everything that we keep sacred as profane and permit everything that for us is taboo (profana illic omnia quae apud nos sacra, rursum concessa apud illos quae nobis incesta). In their temples they consecrate a statue of a donkey and sacrifice a ram in order to ridicule the god Amun” (in contumeliam Ammonis). For the same reason, they sacrifice a bull because the Egyptians worship Apis. In Tacitus, the characterization of Jewish monotheism as a counter-religion which is the inversion of Egyptian tradition and therefore totally derivative of, and dependent on, Egypt reaches its climax.

At the next stage, groups often come up with imagined normative inversions so as to oppose themselves to these hypothetical threats, as inversions of inversions. (Often this is a response to other groups accusing you of being a normative inversion of them - you can just make up a group consisting of the worst caricatures of them!) Assmann’s example is the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, who comes up with an imagined community called the Sabians.

Maimonides’ Sabians are an imagined community which he created by applying Manetho’s principle of normative inversion in the opposite direction. Manetho was familiar with Egyptian tradition and imagined a counter-community based upon the inverted mirror image of Egyptian mores. Maimonides was familiar with normative Judaism and imagined a pagan counter-community-the ummat Ṣa’aba - as the counter-image of Jewish law. If the Law prohibits an activity x there must have existed an idolatrous community practicing x. The truth of both counter-constructions lies in the negative potential and antagonistic force of revelation or counter-religion.

Assmann makes this move to be an attempt at a strategic forgetting in collective memory, among groups. To displace one memory, impose a counter-memory. To displace the memory of paganism, come up with the Sabians to push them out of collective consciousness.

The last stage then, seems to be the point when you (and your community) fully avows that you are the normative inversion of your enemy; what is good for him is bad for you, and what is bad for him is good for you. Whether this is merely” rhetorical or a justification or a real grounding principle is never quite clear, as it oscillates between these poles.

It is interesting to see the same principle of normative inversion applied by writers such as Maimonides and Spencer, who use, it not polemically from without but approvingly from within. God was right in giving the Jews a law that was simply the Egyptian custom turned upside down, because the Jews had to be de-Egyptianized.

Interestingly, Frederick Douglass gives a similar argument in his autobiography, on what spurred him to learn to read when he was enslaved.

The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.

It is easy to form our own mirror images of the past, the present, and the future, the various groups one doesn’t like, which we end up putting our energies into opposing. Assmann:

The principle of normative inversion or the construction of cultural otherness is obviously working retroactively too. Starting from a given order, it imagines a culture based upon the inverted mirror image of that order and, by this very procedure of retrospective inversion, turns the past into a foreign country.”

We see this quite often manifesting with outgroup homogeneity bias; we assume that outgroups generally are the exact inverses of us, and that they think in the same terms that we do, and any information we have about them is twisted and contorted into shape. And quite often we take the next step of identifying as the exact reverse of this reverie.

normative inversion sociology discursive warfare strategic forgetting strategic ignorance taboo Jan Assmann

March 17, 2024

What is an agent?

by Neil

Spendy talks here about Goffman’s ecological model, and first of all let me say it’s an extremely valuable compression, but it also puts me in mind to get out ahead of some of the problems we had in TIS S1. For those of you just joining us, let’s just say that somebody (I won’t name names) kept insisting that all communication is manipulation,” and boy oh boy, people didn’t like that!

Now when you see all this talk about organisms perpetrating manipulation” and espionage,” you start to get a picture of interaction where people are either sociopaths or Death Note characters, and since most of us are neither, this picture can be pretty unattractive. One way to revise the picture: what if people are not just one agent? Or, as Nick Greer puts it, what if the idea that no two organisms are ever perfectly aligned” continues to be true even within a single human organism?

To be clear, I am 100% stealing this from Freud. Throughout his work, he considers many different ways to slice and dice human psychology into multiple agencies, or at any rate, multiple things that can be treated like agencies. For a simple and early example, in The Interpretation of Dreams, he talks about a censoring agency” that prevents certain thoughts from rising from the unconscious layer to the conscious layer. In places, he takes the metaphor of a separate agency pretty far, to the point of comparing it to a literal government agency:

The censorship acts exactly like the censorship of newspapers at the Russian frontier, which allows foreign journals to fall into the hands of the readers who it is its business to protect only after a quantity of passages have been blacked out.

Now, he is clear elsewhere that this censoring agency” is a useful abstraction — i.e., he does not actually believe there is a little dude in there with a black pen — but abstraction or no, this gives one example of an ecological account of psychology, where the same dynamics seen at organizational scale might go all the way down.

adversarial epistemology generalized reading

March 16, 2024

Erving Goffman, ecologist

by Suspended Reason

One of the S2 directions is an increased focus on ecological frameworks, superseding some of the strategic interaction frameworks of S1. I want to bridge these paradigms through Erving Goffman’s work. He, of course, was the author of 1969’s Strategic Interaction—but he was also a student of ecology and ethology.

In each of Goffman’s books, he throws out all the vocabulary and interpretive structure painstakingly set up in his previous tome, and describe the world (more or less) anew. But there is a core eco-interactive picture that, even as his paradigms shift, remains stable. I’d like to outline it here as the basic Goffmanian worldview, which is also the basic eco/ethological worldview.

  1. Ecologically huddled (i.e. sensorily proximate) organisms are necessarily drawn into a game’ of reading and writing to each another. We read other organisms to better understand & act on our environment. And we, being read in turn, attempt to manage other organisms’ sensory impressions of us, so as to manage their behavior and secure better outcomes for ourselves. Any vector of observation eventually becomes a vector of manipulation.

  2. In order to be believed, and taken as-if, our performances must be coherent (in the sense that the various evidencing cues and signals complement rather than contradict each other) and costly (in the signaling sense, that we only tend to trust displays that would be proportionally more expensive to fake). A definition” (Presentation of Self 1956) or line” (Interaction Ritual 1967) or frame” (Frame Analysis 1974) is just a coherent sense of what’s going on in a given environmental slice. A sense which participants are constantly performing and interpreting and updating.

  3. Aligned, cooperating organisms tend to supportively uphold each others’ definitions/frames/lines. Organisms in conflict, meanwhile, try to undermine or get behind” each others’ frontstages, and gain access to backstages, to gather valuable information—this is where Goffman’s espionage metaphor of social interaction shines. (The default assumption here is that it’s valuable for an organism to have access to true” information, and it’s especially valuable to possess information that adversaries are trying to conceal.)

  4. No two organisms are ever perfectly aligned; no two organisms are perfectly misaligned. Coordination always contains margins of conflict, and conflict always contains margins of coordination, so that real-world interaction rituals/games always end up being sophisticated mixtures of revelation and concealment. (This fourth item comes out of Goffman’s proximity to Thomas Schelling, with his mixed motives game” concept.)

Erving Goffman ecology generalized reading

March 15, 2024

The Mongolian meta

by Collin Lysford

Geoguessr is a game about being plonked on to a random Google Street view location and trying to find, without Googling, where in the world you are. Here’s an 173 page document about finding where you are in Mongolia.

What I find fascinating about this is that some of these are genuine truths about slow-changing natural phenomena: biomes, weather, landscapes. And other things are about potentially mutable, but practically stable human artifacts, street signs and the like. But then there’s also tons of stuff about the roof rack of the Google car and camera blur that are functions of these exact photographs. Those correlations will all fail all at once whenever Google happens to update it’s Mongolia pictures.

This is probably what it feels like to be a large language model. All these details are predictive so they’ll all get used. The model is disembodied and can’t tell that some of these details will be more resilient to future change than others. (The humans coming up with the meta do have a grammar of change, but without the ability to take new street view photos themselves, it’s practically irrelevant for the purpose of developing a meta that works right now.) It receives all details as static, take-it-or-leave-it data points; it can’t try tweaking each aspect of the picture to learn that the roof rack is easier to change than the sky. Nor indeed does it need to! Insulated from the ruthless scythe of natural selection, it only needs to give the correct answers for what there is now. It does not matter that it’s brittle and easy to fool, because no one is trying to fool it.

But what if the model did have a predator? For fun, read this document imagining you’re a member of the Google Street View team trying to make everyone’s Mongolia games as low-scoring as possible. You know the meta, so you know what you’re up against. What would you do? Well obviously take new photographs”, but more than that. There was a spare tire when they were mapping the west, but not the east. So obviously you’d want to include the spare tire while mapping the east and not the west; that one data point alone will dramatically damage the score of someone following the meta. And there’s all sorts of stuff like this: the tent, the sunset, the camera blur. You can hand-pick all these easy to change details to give exactly the wrong impression. Play around with this a bit and you’ll get an intuition of why adversarial counter-models are so devastatingly effective against most predictive models today.

games predator models anti-inductivity Geoguessr

March 14, 2024

Starting, stopping, or continuing a search for truth

by Nick Greer

Suspended Reason writes:

We make the decision to wrap up [a detective quest] partly on pragmatics (“my account is good enough for my purposes”) and partly because of formal structure (“this account has the structure and form of a final answer; it has an internal coherence and completeness as a frame that precludes asking further questions”)

There’s a lot of potential here. Not sure I’d use this particular division though. A classic example is the detective whose personal code and professional code don’t jive. He wants to continue searching, but the powers that be, worried about what he will uncover, call the search to a close. Or the opposite, his profession demands he look at something with a depth he’d rather not, something that reveals something ugly about himself. Pragmatics have material limits, but these limits can be broken by more powerful materialities (e.g. the detective who fuels himself with stimulants or rage) or frameworks (e.g. the commissioner who cracks the whip on the lazy and froward underlings). So there’s too much messy exchange between pragmatics and frameworks for this to be a model I reach for, though it’s not like you were trying to be MECE.

Looking at my book and the giallo and spy texts that inform it, here are a few motivations for starting, continuing, or stopping a search for the truth.

  • The unshakeable image: An act of violence we witness we can’t explain or ignore, often because the image’s excesses/transgression breaks our reality model and we don’t remember all the detail, like having to find the missing piece to complete the puzzle.

  • Loss of a close relation or other innocence: Some are able to ignore violence, corruption, and other evils until they trespass into a character’s personal domain, shattering one set of principles while steeling another: I must honor my close relation by finding justice.

  • Principles masking desire: a detective will claim their professional code motivates them to do the job right, but we sense there’s some deeper wound or desire they’re trying to fulfill, one that naive sentimental texts will resolve and more honest ones won’t. The only reason this detective stops is because he is stopped, usually in death.

  • The haunting: Verging on the cosmic, an unsettled feeling or thought can only be dispelled by going through a banishment ritual, often one that defies what the narrator previously thought was real or not. Banishment is usually possible by faithful commitment to ritual, but often the victory is Pyrrhic, the banisher losing something in the process or simply transferring the haunting to another character. Here there is no solution, only coping.

  • Mystery for mystery’s sake: A very readerly pleasure that, while willfully ignorant to the real” world, has the potential to reveal the artifice of all fictions. There is always a tidy solution, but this can still disturb with the right tone. Dear reader, don’t be deceived, you have solved nothing. There is also the less troubled entertainment value extracted by the idle rich in the giallo. They take pleasure in others’ woes. They can stop or start anytime they like and usually don’t push past the superficial, that is, unless they are the victim of a loss of innocence.

  • In too deep: For those already close to the acts of violence that kick off the mystery (i.e. the opposite of the loss of innocence or unshakeable image), they don’t have a choice in starting, continuing, stopping unless they extricate themselves from the larger social reality they live in, maybe were born into. Often these types try to run from the mystery, but find themselves dragged back in, not unlike the haunting that follows us supernaturally. They must go through a secular, materialist banishing ritual of their own, either solving the mystery through just means or taking matters into their own hand and enacting personal justices.

detection fiction frames pragmatism

March 13, 2024

Grave architectures: Conspiracy and narrative, pt 2

by Rip Dcb

Previously: Conspiracy and narrative, pt 1.

In 1954, the CIA forced Guatemala’s second democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, from office. The Agency (as it’s affectionately known in some circles) had to go about the job with considerable sensitivity: the world was to think that this was a spontaneous revolution overthrowing a domestic communist threat, not US business interests protecting their monopoly on another country’s resources.

Easier said than done. Arbenz was beloved. He passed long-anticipated land reforms, opening new economic horizons for the working classes who had been practically living as serfs on the expansive fiefdom of the United Fruit Company. He was looking to nationalize the railroads, among other local industries owned by international corporations. Even more troublesome for the Agency was his (relatively speaking) good relationship with Guatemala’s military—Arbenz was himself a general, and a military hero of the October Revolution that liberated the nation from the century-long yolk of successive dictators. Simply put, unseating Arbenz without either the force of the US military or a national uprising wasn’t going to be a simple task.

I’m going to lead with moral of the story, rather than end with it: if the reality you want doesn’t exist, you can create it if you control the flow of information. Here’s a passage from Don Delillo’s Libra, where a fictional CIA agent is reminiscing about the textbook operation” that was Guatemela:

It was also the peak experience of Larry’s career, centering on a radio station supposedly run by rebels from a jungle outpost in Guatemala. The broadcasts actually originated in a barn in Honduras and the messages were designed to put pressure on the leftist government and arouse anxiety in the people. Rumors, false battle reports, meaningless codes, inflammatory speeches, orders to non-existent rebels. It was like a class project in the structure of reality. Parmenter wrote some of the broadcasts himself, going for vivid imagery, fields of rotting bodies, fighter pilots defecting with their planes… The government fell nine days after an invasion force of five thousand troops was said to be advancing on the capital. The force materialized then, several trucks and a crowded station wagon, about a hundred and fifty ragged recruits.

[My italics, and I quote from fiction for conciseness. Histories of the Guatemalan coup, such as the outstanding Bitter Fruit, tell the same story, and if you’re curious to learn more I’d start there.]

The CIAs attack was two-pronged, as they also jammed the President’s nightly broadcasts, which intended to dispel the rampant disinformation and assure the people that they were not in present danger.

Now, whether the Guatemalan people took the CIAs reports at face value (for what it’s worth, historians believe they did not), the information state was sufficiently disrupted, giving the impression that Arbenz had lost control of the state. How could disinformation be so powerful if it wasn’t believed? I think there were certain circumstances that made the president particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack. Guatemala was such a young democracy—barely a decade old—when the US launched its covert offensive. The CIA also used mercenary pilots to intermittently bomb Guatemala City and airdrop pamphlets accusing Arbenz of being a Soviet agent. The random acts of controlled violence may have been enough to emphasize to the capital that whoever was attacking the country meant serious business—and, more importantly maybe, had serious resources behind them.

With attacks coming through both the air and airwaves, the military would soon turn against the president, abandoning their posts despite knowing that the ground invasion was most likely only a marginal threat (which was confirmed when only several trucks and a crowded station wagon, about a hundred and fifty ragged recruits” reached Guatemala City). An entire country’s confidence in its elected leader was broken, in large part due to an onslaught of bad information. Let me emphasize that their confidence was broken, not that they believed the propaganda to be true. To hear field agents tell the story of Guatemala is to encounter unfiltered hubris, as they mistake effect for intent: the Agency might believe that it duped the Guatemalan people because its coup was successful, but what’s more likely is that it was able to sufficiently shake the Guatemalan people’s belief in their president and his ability to protect them against foreign forces. Buy-in was never necessary—just doubt.

This play is endemic of a common trend throughout post-WWII history: if you can’t get someone to believe what you want, then get them to doubt what you don’t want them to believe. Suspended and I conducted an interview with an informant for The Cleveland Review of Books that digs into this idea. One of our takeaways from that project was that intelligence work seems to have shifted pre- and post-WWII, from truth-gathering to truth-manufacturing. Powerful events breed their own network of inconsistencies,” as a different character from Libra puts it, and eventually someone figured out that these inconsistencies were both a fact of history and an edge to be exploited in the information war. It seems to me that whether these inconsistencies are manufactured, like in the above example, or exploited, as per Conspiracy & Narrative, pt 1”, the effect is the same: a form of social control is born out of imposing the structure of narrative, with its tendency to foreclose ambiguity, on a destabilized information state that is murky by nature. The game isn’t about convincing someone of something. It’s about cleaving a deep contradiction between what’s said and what is experienced. Doubt and complicity are easier to manufacture than belief.

epistemology narrative conspiracy adversarial epistemology ambiguity indeterminacy strategic conceptualization frames worldbuilding literature Don DeLillo United Fruit Jacobo Arbenz

March 12, 2024

The end of a detective story

by Neil

Spendy and Ulkar get me thinking about detective fiction again. Ulkar talks about the detective as a positivist figure, uncovering scientific truths. I think this is especially true of the earlier fictional detectives, like C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. Surveying more recent works, Spendy says the detective’s job is to get to the bottom of it,” idiomatically. How do you know what the bottom is? When you’ve found the truth, obviously. Although the thing with fiction is that the whole thing is definitionally not true. So what does it mean for one not-true thing to be more true than another not-true thing?

Most popular mystery writers make it extremely formally obvious when the truth is found. Agatha Christie puts everyone in a room together and the solution is explained, and after a token struggle for the gun, the culprit says you’re right, I did it, I wanted the tontine money for my bastard granddaughter but now I see the error of my ways.” Or something like that, I don’t know. My mom used to watch a lot of Masterpiece Mysteries.

As a reader of detective novels, you’re not actually looking for the truth” of events that are not true, you’re looking for some effect that lets you know” the solution has been found. Sometime in the 20th century, people figured out that the effect could be generated without the solution. Famously, the solution” to The Big Sleep leaves one murder totally unexplained, because Chandler stitched a novel together from multiple unrelated short stories. But after all the confrontations at the edges of society, all the gunfights and near-gunfights, all those beautiful dames trying to mislead our hero, who even cares about that?

Some stories even set the parts against each other. In Borges’ Death and the Compass,” the detective finds a solution that really feels like the solution to a detective story. It’s got Kabbalah! Everyone loves Kabbalah! Unfortunately, he is totally wrong, the initial crime was just a random robbery, and the other crimes were constructed to look like they had a clever solution by a villain who has a vendetta against this detective. In this story, there’s a Lestrade figure, the lazy cop who just wants to get this thing off his desk, and that guy is totally correct. But this does not satisfy the reader’s desire for the Truth. Then again, the reader isn’t the one who gets shot at the end of the story.

detection literature adversarial epistemology generalized reading

March 11, 2024

Detective fiction as an Enlightenment project

by Ulkar Aghayeva

In the following, I’m drawing upon a lecture by Aaron Marc Stein, The Detective Story — How and Why (1974) and an episode of a Russian literary podcast Книжный базар” (“Book fair”).

The origins of detective fiction as a genre are canonically traced to Edgar Poe’s short stories published in the 1840s — “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and The Purloined Letter” (1845). Why is this genre so recent?

There are detective motifs in pre-19th century literature but they don’t comprise a distinct genre and lack some of the telltale signs of detective fiction like ratiocination. Such motifs can be found in Genesis (the interrogation scene in Cain and Abel), in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (a story of detection but not a detective story) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (a suspense story).

Full development of detective fiction wasn’t possible before presumption of innocence became part of the Anglo-Saxon criminal law. It was only in the 1760s that Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England pronounced, It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”. (Though a version of this principle was also a part of Roman law and existed in Russian legislation since 1712 — but those cultures did not produce detective fiction as such, at the time.)

In pre-detective fiction torture, rather than ratiocination, was a primary tool in indicting a criminal. Hamlet is an example of this, though it is about mental, rather than physical, torture of Claudius, to see if he tells on himself. Earlier audiences would not be convinced by the toolkit of a 19th century detective — morals of the time weren’t compatible with using reasoning to solve a crime. But in the 19th century,

Torture had fallen into disfavor and not only on humane grounds. It came to be considered insufficiently effective, not good enough for men of the Age of Reason. It came to be recognized that torture gives society only a guarantee that punishment will follow crime. It does not guarantee that the punishment will fall on the criminal.

Although in the nineteenth century torture did not disappear, by midcentury it was generally expected that it would disappear. The nineteenth was a century of optimists. Nineteenth-century man conceived of himself as firmly set on a highway to Utopia. In a world transformed by science, technology, and reason, both social conditions and the nature of man would be so much improved that crime would disappear

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of science, the man of science became a substitute for a torturer in solving crimes. Detective fiction is thus an Enlightenment project — even though historically it came later than Enlightenment itself. One could even say that detective fiction is a kind of science fiction. Positivism in science also emerged around the same time as detective fiction became a full-fledged genre.

Detective stories remain popular because of the consolation they provide, as a wish fulfillment for the need for justice. They embody a hope that Good, in the form of Reason, will always defeat Evil. Unlike other genres that went the way of postmodernism, absurdism or existentialism, even after the World Wars detective fiction remained a source of hope in the power of human reason.

detection literature positivism justice

March 10, 2024

Jacked up dollar bills

by Collin Lysford

From a friend of mine who works at a hot dog stand:

I don’t mind at all if you pay with jacked up $1 bills. Don’t bother straightening them up at all. I set those aside and give them as change to customers who don’t look likely to tip and they quite often toss them back right away in my tip jar. At which point I fish them out again. Profit, repeat.

A debate is raging on between Scott Alexander and a literal banana 1 about automaticity”: how much you can understand human behavior through rules that are unconscious to the people following them. Which way does this anecdote point? Is this evidence for or against automaticity? If you asked someone just leaving the hot dog stand Why did you tip there?” would they implicate the jacked up $1 as part of their reasoning? Or would they answer with something broader about tipping: Hey, I like my local hot dog vendor, I can spare it, why wouldn’t I?”

What’s interesting about this example is that taking it step by step, it’s all instantly legible without needing any psychological leaps of faith. Who doesn’t prefer a crisp $1 in their wallet vs a crumpled up one? Who’s surprised to learn that the contents of the tip jar aren’t an entirely honest record of customer contributions? Okay, maybe if you haven’t worked service industry, you can’t recognize those who don’t look likely to tip”, but they’re out there.

But does that mean you re considering the salience of these factors? We all recognize when a bill is crumpled to hell, but most people don’t walk around with a mental index of the crumple factor of each of their bills. The factors that seem to be relevant to whether you’ll tip are the appearance or taste of the hot dog, the conviviality of the hot dog man, and the specific amount of money in your wallet. Dollars are fungible in most of the ways you interact with them, so it’s easy to elide over the difference good dollars” and bad dollars” have on your decision making, even if you recognize it when you’re directly asked to compare them.

Tipping isn’t fully adversarial but what springs to me here is the distinction between information and state in anti-inductive games: two people may be looking at the same thing, but not resolving it the same way. Perhaps automaticity is relevant not as a bunch of secret triggers that require minute experimentation to tease apart, but as factors we’ll notice when pointed to but often don’t consider in frame” for a particular interaction. You see it as a detail, but do you see it as a chunk?


  1. Technically, Banana posted first and then Scott responded, so temporally these names should be the other way around. This version is much funnier though.↩︎

examples ontology automaticity

March 9, 2024

Writer as detective

by Suspended Reason

There’s an old Italian phrase, Traduttore, traditore. Translator as traitor. The ethnographer is always a sort of translator, structurally transforming a foreign culture’s logic of practice into a conceptual logic comprehensible to his own culture. And the fiction writer frequently traffics in covert ethnography. Riffing off some ideas @RIPDCB and I worked on in a recent Cleveland Review of Books interview, I’d like to talk about the upstream end of the rigorizing pipeline.

The detective has become a classic literary and cinematic trope the past two centuries for good reason. Partly it’s an elegant plot structure, a way to present audiences with a satisfying puzzle, Chekhov’s smoking gun made full-fledged genre. But artists choose their topos in large part because it’s interesting and relatable to them, personally—hence the endless string of movies about making movies—and the detective serves as a metatextual metaphor for exploring the role of the writer (or filmmaker etc).

As GK Chesterton on city-as-semiotic-environ writes:

…there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a postcard. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums.

The city speaks, sound and lightwaves rippling and reverberating off its surfaces, testifying to a thousand truths—some obvious, some subtle; some banal, some paradigm-shifting. The city is a dense field of communication, individuals constantly sending intentional and unintentional messages across the airwaves. We read the city and its occupants as we read a novel, and the writer or filmmaker is a subcreator” (cf. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories”) charged with creating a world rich with this meaning.

But the writer is also frequently a reporter and analyst (the world’s antennae” Pound called artists). He reads the chaos of the city and presents a compressive narrative to his audience. Perhaps he denaturalizes his own perspective in order to see more clearly the world around him (as Jane Austen must have, in depicting her social world). Or perhaps he seeks out and enters foreign cliques and cultures, investigating and reporting on them. The writer-as-detective’s charge is to enter a scene and situation, and to get to the bottom of it” (as in katabasis, or free diving)—to get past surface appearances and comprehend its deeper structure—then model that structure as narrative.

We see this orientation—towards a detection-of-messages-hidden, a novel narrative re-compression of reality—in party reports and investigative journalism, in the documentaries of Adam Curtis and the discourse around Mike Crumps’s Dimes Square dispatches. We see it in The Wire and True Detective and a thousand other undercover-cop shows. DFW alludes to a similar idea of writer-as-voyeur in E Unibus Pluram,” and voyeurism more broadly is a stock literary/filmic motif (Rear Window, Robbe-Grillet). We see it in Gossip Girl—with Dan Humphrey the writer hacking through the jungle of the Upper East Side—and in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the middle-class doctor masquerading as a secret society member to get a glimpse at the truth. (Often the writer is middle class and either slumming it with working & underclasses—as in Orwell, Sinclair, & Vollmann—or else investigating and critiquing upper classes—as in Fitzgerald.) We see writer-as-detective all across Pynchon’s novels, as well as the stoned detective” variant of Inherent Vice. We even see something like it in the famous opening minutes of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, the angels floating through rooms and human scenes, observing and commenting.

Part of this is the legacy of romantic picaresque, where a protagonist might wander or quest across worlds, an adventurer unmoored by social systems or familial attachments. He necessarily needs free time and free space to do his wandering, and his reflections from the road may resemble ethnography. Almost by definition, he has either been excluded from existing social systems (cf Pynchon’s preterite”), or else found them somehow lacking or dissatisfying. (Otherwise, why would the hero wander?) This is a different narrative structure than the classic hero’s journey, where the protagonist specifically sets out looking for a specific something beyond the borders of his garden, which will restore his disrupted homeland to equilibrium.

detection literature adversarial epistemology generalized reading Thomas Pynchon Gossip Girl

March 8, 2024

Dependency networks

by Cristóbal

The impetus of analysis is to break-down complex structures into simpler, comprehensible parts. Understand each part and their interactions and the operation of the machine becomes apparent. This is only possible when clear interfaces between the parts allow for independence. Yet, a salient exception always appears to complicate the conjured picture.

What COVID, the climate crisis, supply chain bottlenecks, the war between Russia and Ukraine and its ramification in energy and agriculture, mega-corporation’s hold on communication networks as pertaining to both entertainment and elections, and every other news item has made clear are the complex dependency relations between any possible factoring of the world.

The response is a sensation of crisis. Venkatesh Rao compelling ascribes this as a nostalgia for times of normalcy, particularly among the class of analysts, be them pundits or academics. But now we are in the perma-weird”, no matter how much hand wringing happens in the journals.

Perhaps this is why world-building” has become the modus-operandi for corporations. By entering a self-contained structure with its own internal norms and infrastructure, one offers a sense of stability as a product. There’s no doubt that this has had commercial success—just look at Marvel. Power-hungry founders have observed the same and now are starting lifestyle businesses instead of horizontal SaaS tools. These companies will indeed profit, however the underlying dependency graph remains the same.

There are two approaches to this overdetermined structure which have traction: re-design critical infrastructure focusing on formal guarantees of independence or cordon off subsystems at smaller scales, where independence is achieved through strong boundaries.

The first approach is that of protocol design and trust-less coordination. It is the technocratic solution to crisis, centered around cryptography. One can read it as a reaction to the promises of centralization, be it the nation-state or the mega-corporation. Economies of scale are retained along the edges of production by trying to depersonalize coordination and dematerialize processes.

The second approach is of convivial forms and resilience research. Isolation from the outside world is attained through stronger interpersonal relations. Live within communities where everyone knows you. (Digital versions of this constitute the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.) Write software for your friends, which executes via a hand-written virtual machine that runs on salvaged hardware, operable from a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific.

The first approach risks their technology becoming a veil simply supervening on the existing dependency networks (e.g. stable-coins, or socially-backed valuations that enter crises of personality). The second approach risks nostalgic luddism, ignoring the power of abstraction and composition that formal systems allow. Luckily, the couple on the sailboat can program in C.

epistemology complexity weirding worldbuilding modularity boundaries coordination localism