The normal program
A sprawling network of hypotheses for the new normal regime. First edition of many.
I would love to blog and blog about the dozens of ideas my brain has pushed to me in the past couple weeks, often as a result of conversations with an endless succession of lovely and fascinating people, but… I just don’t have time. So I’m going to list out all the things that I think are true and important to say right now, without making the usual effort to fully contextualize and structure them. They’ll also be stated with a minimum of maybes and I-thinks and other qualifications. I’m calling this the normal program, by pretentious analogy with the Langlands program in mathematics. Both programs are about making a bunch of stuff up that’s kind of related, has some ineffable common theme, then trying to prove or disprove the stuff you made up.
I will probably update this post many times, or make entirely new versions, so I’m getting off on the right foot for once and calling this the first edition of the normal program.
Since this material is especially raw, comments and discussion will be especially interesting.
Moral philosophy
Note: Social norms as classifiers (SNaC) is prerequisite reading to much of the below.
Enlightened long-term utilitarianism
Inspired by a conversation with X account Naozymandias. Long time horizons and associated stability considerations defeat Nozick's utility monster and experience machine critiques of utilitarianism. Kelly betting is probably a useful illustration of how to do utilitarianism right.
The prosocial power tower
Prosocial strategists use multiple levels of control against cheaters.
Cheaters infiltrate every level with prosocial behavior.
Cheaters who seek power at the top level can even mimic sophisticated moral behavior and pretend to — or even genuinely, at some level — care about mistakes at a deeply internalized moral level.
The hope remains that cheaters can be "converted", that it's a mutable behavior not an identity.
Honest and dishonest misunderstandings
this builds heavily on SNaC
in modernity, we need to evaluate honest vs dishonest mistakes in the epistemic arena
theorized examples of dishonest misunderstanding of science, from less to more speculative
tobacco lung cancer denialism of the 50s
climate change denialism (and climate change communism)
many kinds of marketing, e.g. shoddy science supporting claims on supplements
Human Biodiversity in the political arena
junk psychology, e.g. over-interpretation of the implicit association test
Soul movie review
22 is fundamentally prosocial because she prosecutes herself in the court of love
the helicopter seed which says we enjoy life first before having purpose, is an assertion of the standard explore-exploit algorithm
math, evolution, psych are all deeply connected, as they must be, and the connection is in fact legible to us through the lenses of science and literature
existential purpose. internally developed
other disney movie reviews: Big Hero 6, Encanto.
Encanto = family journalism. potentially a completely new genre of fairy tale
Workplace psychology
Get the car on the rail
to engage executives in informational meetings you need to explain upfront why your material matters
needs to be a simple observation, first O in OODA, based on summarizing all your work
upfront cognitive burden is a big issue here. imagine a railcar that needs to be pushed onto a rail. static friction of buying into a context switch needs to be overcome
your upfront explanation must avoid detail as much as possible. more detail is a RISK
synthetic example: insist upon elevator pitch
techie OCD control
technies (incl me) have a tendency to compulsively attend to detail
this can be at odds with strategic presentation and decision-making
knowing this is different from doing it
synthetic example
why doesn't the business know what it knows?
sometimes tech can be a problem
org nerves are made of people; it's YOUR job to connect
this is supposedly facilitated by IRL but remote is actually better when supported with high-quality digital comm tools and culture
if roles are transparent and the business has a public, documented, well-promulgated model of itself, then people solving problems naturally go ask for help from the relevant roles
synthetic example
Education
Teaching kids about relevance - I’m very excited about this one. Very excited. Just read it.
Eristics
This front in the program is better developed in the resources below, so I’ll be brief here and put it at the very bottom, even though in some sense it may be the most important part of the normal program.
Resources
Eristics and psychology wiki - our nerve center
The eristics test - the scariest personality test you’ll ever take
Value proposition
Eristics helps people see themselves, and this can help us solve our thorniest personal problems. If we know that we are systematically biased in a certain way, we are more disposed to make the potentially big personal investments necessary to solve the problems created by those biases.
Personality profiling
The precision can be enhanced by direct measurement of full beats rather than multiple halfbeats.
Eristic archetypes should be supplemented, and eventually replaced, by profiles that represent us in terms of our alignment to all beats, including self doubles like dark triad.
Interventions
eristic beat profile tailored psychotherapy
"light therapy" - for people who are basically mentally healthy but need a tune-up. GPT, blog posts.
Backlogged but important
These projects are very dear to me but I’m unable to prioritize them right now due to the eristics wiki and, like, the fact that I can’t seem to keep up with my brain’s firehose these days
directionality in music
a hidden dimension of music that really captures what i like
directionality is about knowing exactly what you want and going after it full tilt
the opposite end might be called “experimental” and is good too, but i do have my bread buttered on the one side
paradigmatic examples
Do It Well by J. Lo
Lose My Breath by Destiny's Child (those drums 🥵)
The Hand That Feeds by Nine Inch Nails
this is the “purest” example of directionality that i know
In Motion from the movie The Social Network
this one does the best job of directly legitimizing the concept of directionality, since it’s the soundtrack for Mark Zuckerberg when he has just figured out exactly what he wants and is going at it full tilt
The chorus of Forgot about Dre is the anthem of directionality
Nowadays, everybody wanna talk like they got somethin' to say
But nothin' comes out when they move their lips
Just a bunch of gibberish
And motherf***ers act like they forgot about Dre
The unique flow of this entire track remains frankly unrivaled by any other rap track, even within the other work of the formidable artists involved. It is perfect. A Bach fugue in a hoodie, loitering, back to the wall, a menacing expression on its face. Don’t f*** with me is a message we all need to hear sometimes. The music itself balances this message with a quiet subtext: …but keep it together. stay in control.
it’s not necessarily about high-tempo or rage or a dark soundscape
Just Like You Imagined - Nine Inch Nails
every a capella performance in the Pitch Perfect movies
everything Joe Hisaishi
IMHO, directionality was the basis of a lot of the appeal of nü metal, especially Linkin Park, who professionalized it and are the only ones anyone really remembers anymore
Miscellaneous
tech has yet to acknowledge that families exist e.g. no family accounts, demanding biometrics for a single owner on shared accounts
AlphaMath, AI, SHIP breakthrough
deeper dives on the new normality saga
"the essential scott alexander" curation / handbook
The myth of Ra and Horus
The myth of Ra and Horus - by S. R. Constantin. This guy’s whole blog is actually pretty important. Key quote:
Ra is a specific kind of glitch in intuition, which can roughly be summarized as the drive to idealize vagueness and despise clarity.
Thanks for sharing! I like being able to see all the different areas you're interested in. I have also been thinking a lot about the challenge of helping a business know what it knows recently, and interested in your approach to the eristics stuff.