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[tathur]

Who needs information when you're living on borrowed time

One of my objectives in writing all these things down is to map out a way of structuring or composing narrative that gets away from the standard linear causality. One approach that often does work is the "slice of life" genre, though I think it does so accidentally: slice of life tends to be the least teleological format (that is, slice of life often does not have some grand conclusion that the narrative is rocketing toward), so the fact that it's less prone to interventionist causality sorta comes for free.

For a less trivial example, it's worth delving into one of my favorite movies, Brazil. At a high level, the movie is an extrapolation about the future of Thatcher's Britain, particularly with how everything is dank, gray, and despoiled. Indeed, the name of the movie supposedly comes from an occasion in which Terry Gilliam (the writer and director) was standing on the gray beach of an iron milling town and figured that "Aquarela do Brasil" was the sort of song people would use to feel slightly better about that situation.

The plot of Brazil is a good example of one meaning of nonlinearity: outcomes are totally disproportionate to the events preceding them. The movie begins with a cockroach falling into a printer, and the ultimate outcome of that is the main character being tortured past the point of madness by his best friend.

The plot could still be called "interventionist" in the sense that, if that arrest warrant hadn't been misprinted, then the ensuing events would not have happened--and in that sense, the main difference between Brazil and a more ordinary story is that the causal connections making up the plot look more facially absurd. An arrest warrant gets misprinted, which results in the arrest, torture, and death of the wrong man (and even then, the "right" man's crime was repairing air conditioners without submitting the proper paperwork), which leads to challenges with reimbursing the costs of the arrest and torture, which leads the main character to happening to discover his (literal) dream woman... and so forth.

Another perspective is that the movie is merely a linear instantiation of a nonlinear plot. It's implied all around that minor events getting magnified into the torture and death of innocent people is an ordinary occurrence with the Ministry of Information; that it happened to originate with a cockroach in a printer this time is somewhat immaterial. In other words, this perspective is that Brazil isn't really about Sam and Jill, but about the Ministry--and one thing we know about the Ministry of Information is that outcomes are not tied to interventions in a way that could possibly be understood.

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On political taxonomy

I'm good friends with a philosopher--which should probably be obvious by now--and one result of that is that I've tended toward philosophical terminology. This becomes particularly strange and apparent when considering the dubious term "liberalism." In philosophy, this term is almost as chimerical as it is in politics: it refers to either the "classical" liberals like Mill, Locke, and Rousseau, who in spite of their focus on liberty, also believed in the sort of "liberty" pushed by modern libertarians--for example, Locke believed in money neutrality and thought that the only monetary job of the government was to verify the weight and purity of gold instruments.

In more modern times, philosophical liberalism used to refer solely to people like Hayek and Noczik and von Mises, who are in any case just modern reiterations of the classicals, and at least as bad at understanding the intersection between exchange and cognition. However, liberalism was forked around 1971 with John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, which used thought experiments surrounding a "veil of ignorance"--basically asking the question, "if you were going to be born into the world, but didn't know which uterus you'd emerge from, how would you like the world to be structurally arranged?" and continuing along to the obvious conclusion, "not in any way like the current one," and by extension, "not in any way in accord with Hayek's vision."

The politics on the left, at least in the earlier 20th century, was arranged on a spectrum between "progressives" like President Roosevelt and "socialists" like W.E.B. Du Bois. Even though socialism is not some thief in the night, as liberals (in the Hayekian sense) would have you believe, the name has been thoroughly discredited for no especially obvious reason; as for progressive, who knows. In any case, what passes for the left in the modern world is also called "liberalism," though it's a somewhat more recent claimant to the word.

Perhaps more importantly, liberals are more liberal than they'd generally want to believe: mainstream democrats (and labor politicians elsewhere) have largely bought in to market fundamentalism, and have largely abandoned using the government as a hammer to solve problems endogenous to the private sector. Worst of all is that the mainstream left has been convinced that we're always on the knife's edge of inflation, and that fiscal policy is a sort of chemotherapy, that needs to be balanced by proper levels of sacrifice and atonement. Owing to the modern left's general uselessness, my philosophy-friend and I have taken to referring to them as "libs," which is a sort of third-rate pejorative lifted from the political pissing match of Fark.com.

In this blag (and this post will likely serve as a reference point), I'll largely be using "liberal" to refer to things like market fundamentalism, money neutrality, monetary policy worship, and a belief in hyper-rationality (or rationality at all). I'm sure this'll cause confusion, but it's probably for the best.

[tathur]

Saved by the retcon

One of the reasons I can't stand mainstream economics (meaning, neoclassical along with those classical-Keynesian kludges, like whatever Paul Krugman believes) is that it always hinges on a belief that the world is filled with supermen. I don't even mean this in the Atlas Shrugged sense, where the world is populated solely by Mary Sues, hangers-on, and pure scum. I take exception with more fundamental things, like the efficient market hypothesis.

The ideology backing the efficient market hypothesis is that prices represent the culmination of all relevant information--for example, common stock prices are supposed to represent some sort of prediction about the company's next dividend payment. The predictive tools that are available are not exactly uncommon (and far less controversial than they should be), though the much faster summary would be to say that it's the same sort of out-of-place ceteris paribus reasoning that makes people believe the mirror universe makes sense. In other words, the methodology for getting at an individual prediction can't possibly work, because it always has far too many simplifying assumptions (and how could it be any other way?), so instead the efficient market hypothesis is more like an appeal to the "ask the audience" lifeline, with the exception that on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, you have some reason to believe that at least some people know the right answer.

So if I don't believe in analytical finance, what do I believe in? The short answer is, the somatic marker hypothesis. This neuroscientist, Damasio, did several decision-making experiments using people who have specific brain lesions associated with severe emotional impairments. (The guy who got a railroad spike driven through his head is related, though that happened before neuroscience really took off.) Anyway, what Damasio found is that the emotionally impaired people were also really extremely bad at risk assessment--exactly the opposite of what you'd expect from the ultra-rational dictates of mainstream economics.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it, though. Say you're going to buy a car, which is supposed to be one of the more rational things most people do. You're trading in one car that you like, and buying another car that you've test-driven once. You've got two numbers: the price the dealer will buy your car at, and the price at which they'll sell you their car. What's a fair price--or if you want to be slightly more accurate, what's a fair spread? I somewhat recently sold a Mazda MX-5 to buy a Subaru Forester, so I have some recent experience on this question, and if one is honest about how these dealings go down, the answer is this: the dealer will quote you prices based on a combination of the cat-biting-its-own-tail of market prices (e.g., the Kelley Blue Book) and the amount of markup they think they can get away with; you, meanwhile, have feelings associated with the car you're selling, and how you imagine you'll feel owning and driving the car you're buying, and that drives you to seek a level of price spread concessions from the dealer until you feel like the concessions are commensurate with your feelings about the car. Which is to say, I almost certainly got a better deal on the Subaru because of how attached I was to the Mazda--after all, who really knows the money-price of being able to drive (with style or reliability or safety or towing capacity or whatever)?

To get to the real point, this made it somewhat disconcerting when I played Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. If the Nobodies really don't have any emotional reactions, as we're told, then you'd expect them to also be seriously cognitively crippled. Now, of course, Nomura didn't want to have a game entirely about people with blunted affect (i.e., monotonous speech and stiff faces), so he played a strange gambit: the main Nobodies have "memories of emotions" that they appeal to when they feel like (heh) a response is appropriate. Roxas starts the game with no memories either, because Sora's still using them (and memories are globally unique in Kingdom Hearts, which I'm sure is a point that could make for its own blag post), so not even that works. Admittedly, Roxas starts the game fairly blunted, but the speed at which he gains emotive-like responses is way faster than the rate at which he gains Sora's memories.

Thankfully, Organization XIII was saved by the retcon: I guess even Nomura realized that there's a problem with really saying that a bunch of characters who plot, scheme, betray, and make and break friendships don't have any emotions.

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So worthless, it has to be worthwhile

There's a class of games called "explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate," or 4X for short. Most prominently, this genre includes the Civilization series, along with its much better offshoot Alpha Centauri. I haven't really been able to handle playing a game of this sort for quite a while, because I just can't handle their approach to monetary theory anymore.

Cue the world's smallest violin.

The problem with these games is that your state acquires money by taxing--which is what most people believe, except that belief overlooks a fundamental contradiction: if the government issues money, while taxes constitute an appropriation of previously issued money, then taxes cannot be the fundamental source of the public purse. The key insight that will, if you let it, totally unravel your views of economics is the fact that public spending must necessarily precede taxing, or else there wouldn't be any money to tax.

The case of the 4X games is actually stranger than that, though. The real purpose of money is to serve as a unit of account, which just means that money is a way of expressing prices, and prices ought to represent some sort of consensus about value. In other words, money exists primarily to standardize our perception of the value of goods. Much like one kilogram represents so many atoms of a particular substance, one dollar represents so much value of that substance. (The other purposes of money that are often brought up--medium of exchange, store of value, and so forth--are dependent on the monetary system under consideration. Money as a unit of account is the only property that's true of all monetary systems.)

From a capitalist state perspective, money ought to represent the extent to which the government can purchase labor and resources from the private sector. If there are unutilized resources, then the government can purchase them without trouble, and without taxing; on the other hand, if there are no free resources, then the only way the government can purchase them is to prevent the private sector from buying them first. Taxes reduce the purchasing power of private actors, and as a consequence, free up resources for public consumption.

The trouble with the 4X games is that they already have a representation for this. In Civilization, the representation is "shields," which simply show the productive output of workers based on the land they're working. So what's going on with gold in Civilization? You accumulate it, then it allows you to "hurry" production--but if the shields actually represented the productive capacity of your workers and capital, then any injection of gold would just be inflationary. And if your workers or capital were underutilized, then taxing money away from the private sector just removes its purchasing power for no particular gain, since the money is hoarded by the state rather than concurrently utilized for the public good.

It sounds strange to say that this keeps me from playing 4X games, but on the other hand, if for example an open-world RPG had a Body Remix quest out of the blue, the ensuing dissonance would probably cut into the average player's enjoyment. So I guess what I'm saying is that taxing-to-spend is the metal penis of my video gaming experiences.

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Superpowers that've read the DSM

On something of a lark, I watched a few episodes of a show called Haven. It's another of a somewhat long and not especially prestigious line of what one might call "supernatural procedurals"--stories that have fantastical mysteries that are sorted out by law enforcement (or, at least, characters molded from a whodunnit prototype). For example, The X-Files, though I'm sure there are older and better-written examples.

Anyway, I mostly watched Haven because it's set in Maine, which may sound like an obscure reason, but it's not as bad as it sounds. For one thing, I always respect a story that has the sense to limit its scope to a manageable size: my favorite open-world RPG is set on a single island that's lost contact with the outside world due to a sudden apocalypse. (While I say it's my favorite of that subgenre, it's still a game about which I'll have quite a few things to say.) Small-town Maine is an especially obvious scope for a supernatural procedural, though mostly because New England was a common setting for Lovecraft and Poe.

So anyway, for its first five or so episodes (which is all I've watched), Haven plays the procedural angle worryingly straight, which brings up a basic realization: the genre simply doesn't work. Really good procedurals allow the reader/viewer to play along, but when the means and opportunity are pulled directly out of the writer's ass, the only way to stand a chance is to be the writer's gastroenterologist.

But I've got a more specific thing to talk about here. In one episode, a character has a power that makes insane characters sane and vice versa. In discussing this topic, though, it's useful to first take a trip all the way back to Ancient Greece and talk about the bane of pre-20th century western philosophy (and of undergrads studying the subject): the question, "what exactly is a table anyway?"

It's a tricky question, because it's hard to come up with unifying properties of tables that also exclude other, non-table objects. For example, not all tables have legs, and not all objects with flat surfaces are tables. Plato argued that the tables we actually interact with are merely instantiations of a divine concept of tables; the way this ends up being talked to is in terms of objects having essences independent of their physical form.

As a more revealing thought experiment, at what point does a tiger stop being a tiger? If you shave off its fur, most people would say that the fur isn't the tiger, so it's not about outward appearances. Taxidermy shows the same: even making a reasonable facsimile of a tiger (using its hide for the outer covering) doesn't really capture the tiger-ness. The Platonic view is that tigers possess the essence of tiger-ness, and that this essence is a non-physical thing, and glimpsing the essence of things is how we make sense of the objects that populate the world.

Even though all this sounds a bit arcane, it does provide a hint about how deranged most of the ordinary discussion about the world is at its core. Take the notion that a character in a supernatural procedural can make insane characters sane: it's the sort of plot that, even if it sounds dumb, doesn't sound incomprehensible. That is, we all know what I'm talking about with that description, even if social mores make us not necessarily want to admit it.

But what does "insane" mean? Clinical psychology, as a field, has been largely shamed into making mental disorder an exercise in stamp collecting. For example, schizophrenia is a disorder in which a person experiences at least two of delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, disorganized behavior, blunted affect, and so forth. There may be some notion of what's going on "under the hood" with schizophrenics, but as far as calling someone mentally disordered, it's a determination based on presentation of certain symptoms.

The choice of symptoms is largely about, so to speak, the number of ways you can k-means a cat. It's not that there's some schizophrenia-thing that has been studied in a controlled manner; rather, there are people who have importantly similar behavioral characteristics, and respond to similar sorts of treatment, and schizophrenia is what we name those similarities.

So, apparently, the superpower that lets a guy cure and cause insanity must come with some pretty intense study and certification--or else, this is a good example of how essentialism isn't all it's cracked up to be.

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Spock's and Jennifer's Beards

In one of the most iconic episodes of Star Trek, a transporter accident sends Kirk, Scotty, McCoy, and Uhura to an alternate universe, in which Starfleet is the blunt instrument of the evil Terran Empire. Thematically, the main point of the episode is somewhat typical Roddenberry fare: cooperation is better than competition, and ruling by fear is inherently unstable.

One thing that seems not to really be thought about, by writers or fans, is the fridge logic involved in mirror universe causality. Something different happened in the past, and it was dramatic enough to turn the United Federation of Planets into the Terran Empire. Yet, in spite of that, not only was the flagship of the Terran Empire coincidentally named Enterprise, but its officer positions were all filled by people who were physically identical to and had the same names as the officers on the primary universe's Enterprise (Spock's beard notwithstanding, of course).

The extent to which this plot is flawed is in fact made accidentally clear by Deep Space Nine: in the mirror universe, Ben Sisko was a rebel with a heart of pyrite, and Jennifer Sisko was a stuck-up and self-deluded scientist of the sort only latter-day Star Trek writers could create. They seemed to only be married because prime universe Ben and Jennifer were married and it created more dramatic tension this way, but their marriage was both loveless and fruitless. Similarly, "Smiley" O'Brien never met Keiko, so there's no bearded Molly. In other words, in the mirror universe of Deep Space Nine, the entire current generation found a way to have the same genetic makeup, while the entire next generation simply doesn't exist.

But this blag isn't really meant to be about plot holes in the most kludged-together television canon short of Dallas. What's interesting here is what was going on in the heads of the writers, and in the heads of the fans. The problems with the mirror universe are fridge logic to the extreme: you only notice them if you really stop and think about them, or else if you're primed to think about them.

Overall, any foray into a mirror universe comes down to what is sometimes called counterfactual thinking, which is just a technical name for our ability and tendency to imagine how things could've gone differently. Counterfactual really means not factual, so the phrase refers to thinking about things that are not real. Alternative scenarios happen to be the most obvious and most useful non-real thing we think about; of course, the terminology becomes shaky when talking about counterfactuals of fiction, but let's run with it anyway.

"Mirror, Mirror" is a good example of the how of counterfactual thinking, which is more about the primary limitation of our imaginations. Our main objective when engaging in what-ifs is really about causality: we want to know how specific changes would be reflected in reality, as in the classic question, "what could I have done differently?" Thus, we imagine how changes in circumstances would lead to changes in outcomes, or in the case of "Mirror, Mirror," how a change in the ethos of the Federation would be reflected in the rest of the universe.

The difficult part of this exercise is picking out the elements of a situation that are relevant. For the sorts of things Roddenberry was trying to say in the mirror universe, the identities of the characters was not a relevant consideration, so they weren't changed. Fans tend to have the same view of things, which is why they don't tend to notice.

The easy part, which is to say, the part where everything goes terribly awry, is the way we actually construct causality once we've got some considerations. The scientific term is ceteris paribus, which is Latin for a more well-known phrase, "all things equal." We tend to "force" considerations we think are irrelevant to stay the same between the factual and the counterfactual. This is the real reason for the construction of the mirror universe: "what would happen if the Federation were an overbearing empire, all other things equal?" The answer to that question is a mixture of good television and total nonsense.