TPOI and Thinking Machines
Just two nights ago I had a fairly pleasant evening at the Langton Labs. Lunging into social situations like that is something I should do more often, on balance. I found out about the get-together via circuit_four, who's a friend of raxvulpine and her pal eredien, who are in turn acquainted with baxil. So there was a basis for acquaintance, but precious little. I had a pretty decent time there and was reasonably charismatic and personable. I had a good pattern of walking up to people who weren't talking and getting them to talk about themselves. I may have had to act nosy, but I think that's okay - I just asked nice softball questions and tried to find things that people liked talking about. It is good for me to practice this skill.
I worry about my ability to properly interact with social situations. Networking and making yourself part of social groups well is a very important life skill. People pick up some degree of that automatically, but there are two issues with that. One is that if you're acquiring a skill like that unconsciously, then you're also very likely to be picking it up uncritically and accepting possibly unwanted memetic baggage. The other is that you probably won't be as good at it as someone who's put some serious effort and study into the matter. I don't think I've picked up as much as the average person. This is bad because it can leave me at a social disadvantage. On the other hand, that means that I have the chance to improve with less baggage than other people. Despite the Computer Tribe's high autism-spectrum disorder rate, social skills are very important. They're important in any serious professional field, naturally - it's just that the Computer Tribe tends to have some ideas about meritocracy and being able to objectively measure it since the work is all machine stuff, it's all quantifiable. Those ideas tend to unduly downplay the importance of social skills: all that work is still being done by humans.
The fact that it's being done by humans mean that the monkey brain is still a central part of the equation. This brings me around to a line of thought that I haven't had for a while: maybe programming and becoming a Wise One of the Computer Tribe is not for me. I like computers an awful lot and it is very satisfying to be able to get them to do interesting things. That said, the business of computers is, in a sense, the business of giving humans new and interesting tools to think with. Just as le Corbusier described a house as "a machine for living in," a computer is a machine for thinking with.
"A machine for thinking with" is a phrase that resonates with me.
Computers and writing are where I've always sought work because they're where I've always spent my time when I'm not getting paid for it. A pen, too, could be thought of as a machine for thinking with. It was one of the premier tools for thinking with for a long time, and it's still a very important one. There's a lot more to the machinery of thought, especially the internal part, but if you want to do thinking in a group over a significant distance, the computer and the pen are champions.
However, looking at the historical record, with interesting tools for thinking, what do people think? Their thinking changes, often, but the same flaws in their thinking keep cropping up. In different ways, Jared Diamond's "Collapse" and Robert Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians" both point to this. The external thinking machinery is great, but using it guarantees very little about the quality of your results. Logic, one of the most powerful internal thinking-machines, is still a thing of humble results. Logic promises only this: if you use it properly, you will not reduce the truth-value of the thoughts that you use it on. That's all. Computers and writing can't go even that far.
I love computers to pieces, but I'm worried. Computers, like virtually all thinking-machines before them, do not guarantee better thinking - they just enable it. At this point in history, human thought, collectively, has a huge influence on the world. The world is in danger of being made uninhabitable for humans because of the state of human thought. We have thousands of years of progress in thought-machines, but the same flaws in our thinking keep coming up. The flaws in human thought responsible for the murder of abortion providers and transfolk, evolution denial, fascism, conspiracy theories, and a wide variety of big and small problems, are generally the same problems that were present in human thinking thirty years ago and three hundred years ago and three thousand years ago.
This suggests that while our thinking-machines are very good for many tasks, there are areas where the task is not really one that they're suited for. The global task of thinking better is one that requires different tools and a different use of the tools we have. In light of that, I want to use the thinking-machines that I love, the pen and the computer, and use them for a big question: why do people think what they think, how can we change what people think, and to what degree is it possible to really change what someone thinks?
One of the terrors in my life as a thinker is the advertising industry. Advertising and politics are two of the fields that invest the most time and effort into answering the question I just posed. Tragically, the fruits of investigation are often used by vile people for evil ends. I try not to be an angry person, but one of the things that absolutely enrages me about American discourse and political life is the way in which malicious people have purposefully poisoned its ability to debate sensibly about anything at all and on certain critical questions have put the whole nation at risk by injuring the population's ability to think properly. This is evil: I wish every curse and every injury on the perpetrators, as well as whatever posthumous punishment they may believe in. Some of the foremost perpetrators of this evil are currently at the helm in America, and this is a dangerous thing for the nation and the world.
The question, therefore, is important.
So while computers and writing are what I love to use, what I want to do with my life is to investigate that question of changing minds and to use the results for good and against evil. That's a question that's worthy of devoting a lifetime to. Not coincidentally, it's also one that you'd expect to take rather more than a lifetime to answer definitively, if a definite answer is even possible. Computers and writing are very important thinking-machines, but I want to find a way to think better, and to spread that method. I want that more than I want just a career in writing or in computers.
I'm still young enough to be young and foolish. I want to live for something big.
I worry about my ability to properly interact with social situations. Networking and making yourself part of social groups well is a very important life skill. People pick up some degree of that automatically, but there are two issues with that. One is that if you're acquiring a skill like that unconsciously, then you're also very likely to be picking it up uncritically and accepting possibly unwanted memetic baggage. The other is that you probably won't be as good at it as someone who's put some serious effort and study into the matter. I don't think I've picked up as much as the average person. This is bad because it can leave me at a social disadvantage. On the other hand, that means that I have the chance to improve with less baggage than other people. Despite the Computer Tribe's high autism-spectrum disorder rate, social skills are very important. They're important in any serious professional field, naturally - it's just that the Computer Tribe tends to have some ideas about meritocracy and being able to objectively measure it since the work is all machine stuff, it's all quantifiable. Those ideas tend to unduly downplay the importance of social skills: all that work is still being done by humans.
The fact that it's being done by humans mean that the monkey brain is still a central part of the equation. This brings me around to a line of thought that I haven't had for a while: maybe programming and becoming a Wise One of the Computer Tribe is not for me. I like computers an awful lot and it is very satisfying to be able to get them to do interesting things. That said, the business of computers is, in a sense, the business of giving humans new and interesting tools to think with. Just as le Corbusier described a house as "a machine for living in," a computer is a machine for thinking with.
"A machine for thinking with" is a phrase that resonates with me.
Computers and writing are where I've always sought work because they're where I've always spent my time when I'm not getting paid for it. A pen, too, could be thought of as a machine for thinking with. It was one of the premier tools for thinking with for a long time, and it's still a very important one. There's a lot more to the machinery of thought, especially the internal part, but if you want to do thinking in a group over a significant distance, the computer and the pen are champions.
However, looking at the historical record, with interesting tools for thinking, what do people think? Their thinking changes, often, but the same flaws in their thinking keep cropping up. In different ways, Jared Diamond's "Collapse" and Robert Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians" both point to this. The external thinking machinery is great, but using it guarantees very little about the quality of your results. Logic, one of the most powerful internal thinking-machines, is still a thing of humble results. Logic promises only this: if you use it properly, you will not reduce the truth-value of the thoughts that you use it on. That's all. Computers and writing can't go even that far.
I love computers to pieces, but I'm worried. Computers, like virtually all thinking-machines before them, do not guarantee better thinking - they just enable it. At this point in history, human thought, collectively, has a huge influence on the world. The world is in danger of being made uninhabitable for humans because of the state of human thought. We have thousands of years of progress in thought-machines, but the same flaws in our thinking keep coming up. The flaws in human thought responsible for the murder of abortion providers and transfolk, evolution denial, fascism, conspiracy theories, and a wide variety of big and small problems, are generally the same problems that were present in human thinking thirty years ago and three hundred years ago and three thousand years ago.
This suggests that while our thinking-machines are very good for many tasks, there are areas where the task is not really one that they're suited for. The global task of thinking better is one that requires different tools and a different use of the tools we have. In light of that, I want to use the thinking-machines that I love, the pen and the computer, and use them for a big question: why do people think what they think, how can we change what people think, and to what degree is it possible to really change what someone thinks?
One of the terrors in my life as a thinker is the advertising industry. Advertising and politics are two of the fields that invest the most time and effort into answering the question I just posed. Tragically, the fruits of investigation are often used by vile people for evil ends. I try not to be an angry person, but one of the things that absolutely enrages me about American discourse and political life is the way in which malicious people have purposefully poisoned its ability to debate sensibly about anything at all and on certain critical questions have put the whole nation at risk by injuring the population's ability to think properly. This is evil: I wish every curse and every injury on the perpetrators, as well as whatever posthumous punishment they may believe in. Some of the foremost perpetrators of this evil are currently at the helm in America, and this is a dangerous thing for the nation and the world.
The question, therefore, is important.
So while computers and writing are what I love to use, what I want to do with my life is to investigate that question of changing minds and to use the results for good and against evil. That's a question that's worthy of devoting a lifetime to. Not coincidentally, it's also one that you'd expect to take rather more than a lifetime to answer definitively, if a definite answer is even possible. Computers and writing are very important thinking-machines, but I want to find a way to think better, and to spread that method. I want that more than I want just a career in writing or in computers.
I'm still young enough to be young and foolish. I want to live for something big.