The Bay Area Metaverse

A pair of hilarious articles by Scott Alexander of AstralCodexTen

Every Bay Area House Party

You walk in. The wall decorations vaguely suggest psychedelia. The music is pounding, head-splitting, amelodious. Everyone is struggling to speak over it. Everyone assumes everyone else likes it.

You flee to the room furthest from the music source. Three or four guys are sitting in a circle, talking. Two girls are standing by a weird lamp, drinks in hand. You see Bob.

“Hi, Bob!”

“Hey, good to see you again!”

“What’s new?”

“Man, it’s been a crazy few months. You hear I quit my job at Google and founded a fintech startup?”

“No! What do you do?”

“War insurance!”

“War insurance?”

“Yeah. We pay out if there’s a war.”

“Isn’t that massively correlated risk?”

“Yeah. The idea is, we sell war insurance to companies who do badly if there’s a war – tourist attractions and the like. Then we sell the same amount of peace insurance to military contractors. As long as we get the probabilities and costs right, we make the same profit either way.”

“Neat idea, how’s it going?”

“Great! Ayatollah Khameini just bought a ten billion dollar policy.”

“Of the war version or the peace version?”

“Can’t say, confidentiality agreement.”

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The stories that guide us

“…Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry—that stoic, red-skin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast flowing tears of the child and the man—Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s Day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon—these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.”

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“I do not know what young Catholics today actually learn, but my brief experience with teenage preparation for Confirmation suggests that it is nothing much beyond vague sentimentalities about God’s love…. Hooper would be barely sensible to the shipwrecks of Paul, the exile of Athanasius, the trial of Formosus, the conversion of Augustine, and the death of Joan of Arc. Annoyance and sentimentality are the only passions left to the Hoopers of the world. Greatness is quite literally unimaginable to them, whether that greatness be heavenly or hellish; Paradise is bland and the Inferno desolate. Heroism and hedonism alike hold no appeal for Hooper.”

— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

We humans are a talking breed. Language and story are inextricably mixed, and it seems clear that the stories we tell eachother around the campfire—the narratives of our lives and imagination—are what define us as moral and ethical beings.

Life provides us with various types of existing narratives. There are the stories of our childhood, the teachings of religion, the tales of heroes. We learn from these what it is to be good, true, courageous, loyal, stalwart, cunning, indomitable, kind. We hear how to rise from defeat, how to withstand trial, how to protect others, and how to sacrifice ourselves when all else fails.

And most of all, we learn how to judge behavior—our own and everyone else’s. We explore what it is to be a coward, to be the object of shame. We internalize these judgments, and that helps keep us from shaming ourselves and makes us reliable and trustworthy members of our communities. As the stories tell us, there are always people who fail to live up to these standards, as we do ourselves from time to time, but at least there is a general consensus about what we’re aiming at, or trying to.

But that was then.

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The limits of autodidacticism

When I was 10 years old (5th grade), circa 1963, I thought I might have discovered some new principle of numbers, but it was almost impossible for me to find out. There was no one to ask, and no references I could find.

My father would take me to his office (attached to a flour milling operation) on the weekend to give my mother a break, and there I would wander around entertaining myself by admiring the sailfish mounted on one man’s wall, and the manual plug-in switchboard. There were, of course, many desks in an open area for clerical work, and many of those desks had calculators.

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God is in the dice

Escher-NatureWe are part of nature, an animal like other animals, and our minds preserve that heritage.

I’m conscious of this every time that I’m startled by a grouse shaking the bush along my path when it erupts and I take an involuntary step backward, preparing to fight or run, once I determine what threat is coming my way. My rational mind knows it’s ridiculous, but I’m the product of thousands of ancestors who decided that sometimes it really is a lion, and it’s better to treat it that way, and laugh about it afterward. The ones who didn’t, after all, were sometimes wrong enough that they left no trace.

What do animals do? They observe. They watch the behavior of their mother and siblings, the way their herd, or pack, or flock treats its members. They watch their prey, if they are predators. And vice versa.

Humans, well, we watch everything. We’re fascinated by animals from our very earliest age. Not just our own family and tribe, but all animals. We can spend hours and days just watching them.

What do we learn when we watch animals? We learn, species by species and circumstance by circumstance, just what they are likely to do — depending on the season, the environment, the weather, their state of health, or lust, or maternity. We know they make their own choices, within circumscribed limits. We might not know why, exactly, but we know what — they’re like us, or they seem to be, even the alien ones like bugs. We learn how to predict what they will do. We are wired, I would say, to pay attention to animals this way, just as they pay attention to each other. They have agency, and we want to understand how they work.

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The hidden personal cost of your computer ecosystem

TechEcosystemI’m an early adopter of technology, esp. software. It’s an essential component of my self-image that began with mathematics in grade school. Back in the 70’s I entered early computer businesses after college and made my entire career in a variety of young companies in the software, support, and consulting wings of the tech industry.

Outside of business, in my personal tool kit, I eagerly embraced home computers for general use, and specialist devices and software for hobbies like music and photography. I immersed myself in evolving standards for good user design and knowledge management philosophies. I studied the engineering principles of mainframe operating systems. By today’s standards I may not be a tech expert, but I am, by god, an experienced technology user.

And I am paying for it. Every day. With the only currency that matters — time.

And so are you.

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