A Predator of Information

While it is true I'm not a fan of religion, this story is inspired by my not being a fan of carceral society, the stigma of mental illness, the war on drugs, and the concept of justice is general.

Corinne saw the stars gleaming like spearpoints. Dread washed into her and built to the terror of someone unable to breathe. She ran without destination or knowledge of her danger. The only alternatives would have been tears or panicked screaming. The stars followed her with sight as sharp as fangs before they launched themselves. Each fell with a businesslike violence to transfix her to the ground.

Then she did scream, hoping someone would hear her. No one did and the stars stood uncaring. With voices that flowed and thundered like many waters they spoke “Holy, holy, holy, holy, holy, holy…” until the word sacrificed its meaning and was elevated to pure cadence. A shape burst through the darkness, standing like a man with three faces; one burning red, one fulminating white, and one as blank and pitiless as the sun.

Her life's regrets and secret shames crowded her head. She felt herself ground beneath a wheel covered in eyes, stripping away everything but guilt that could be inspected in endless rumination. Worse were the veils. Each face was covered to the mouth, but currents of air and breath stirred the cloth. Each time, Corinne's soul clenched into an icy knot, dreading the thought of veil moving completely aside. She would gladly have chosen death or excruciating torment rather than being seen unconcealed by those hidden eyes.

The three-faced figure stood silent and unmoving, but the endless “Holy, holy, holy…” was whelmed by the silence of a still, small voice like maggots inside her that recognized her soul for the corruption that it was and began to writhe through it joyously. Mine! said the voice. My hand! Each word made her feel like a cancer in the universe. Decency required she be cut out and the world scraped clean of her or even burnt to be rid of her taint.

The voice slowed, taking long pauses as if struggling to express its thoughts in English. My mark upon your generations. I call you now. Corinne silently pleaded for the ground to swallow her. Too scared to speak, she had no idea what she would say if she could. She would have agreed to anything to make it stop— except ever being around it again. The voice repeated Mine! My hand! My call! until a clangor like angry children drowned it out. The ground became sweat-soaked cotton, and she recognized the sound as the crystalline chime of her waker.

Corinne hissed it to silence. She shook, her body convulsing with dry sobs, interrupted by the occasional giggle of receding adrenaline. She was afraid to get up, imagining things in the darkness. She was more afraid not to, remembering things in her head. She called in sick to work, telling a lie about stomach trouble.

She didn't know what to do with herself, but going back to bed was clearly out of the question. She took a shower, spending an hour and a half trying to wash away her feelings of defilement.

The dream was bad enough, but her mind took her back, remembering a field trip her sixth-grade class had taken to a detainment center for cultists— those few who, through destructiveness, lust for power, madness, and inherent evil, had given themselves to one god or another and then worked their deity's mad, destructive will. She'd been horrified by the sight of so many people, their minds partially burned away by divine power, abandoned stewing in their insanity. Those who'd accepted the powers of theurgy were the worst cases; they had often done the most harm and lived in a state of constant spiritual oppression that kept them from working miracles.

It was necessary to keep society safe. It was just. Only someone truly evil would serve the divine. Thinking of it now made her sick to her stomach and brought the tears back to her eyes.

She called her brother. She didn't want to be with herself.

“Arkady. Hi.” She tried to think of something to talk about, but couldn't come up with more than “I just called to see how you are. Haven't talked to you since last week.”

“During the work day? Are you all right? You don't sound all right.”

“No. I'm…I had—” He'd insist she see a soulwhisperer. The whisperer would find…her stomach went cold, but she fought back, forcibly changing mental gears. She didn't hate the world. She didn't hate people. She wasn't a bad person. No god could really be talking to her. If she saw a soulwhisperer she'd waste their time with a bad dream. Nothing else.

“Sis?”

“Sorry. Tired and stressed. Thought I had some slack this morning and wanted to hear a friendly voice. I need to get back to firefighting, though. I'll call you later.”

“You…sure?” He didn't sound convinced.

“Yeah. It's just this deadline running me ragged.”

She said goodbye and broke the connection before he could ask her anything more. She felt guilty for lying to him, but she had to defend herself. She caught her train of thought and corrected it. She just didn't want to waste someone's time. Nothing to protect herself from.

She still didn't want to be alone and went in to work only a couple hours late, saying her stomach bug had cleared itself up.

Veracity by Laura Bynum is not terribly good. After a viral outbreak (that turns out to be a cover for poisoning a bunch of people under the guise of forced vaccination) a new order rises up that is repressive and pointlessly violent for, as far as I can tell, the sake of being repressive and pointlessly violent. People are implanted with Slates that shock them for saying proscribed words. She is inspired to join the resistance (a group of people who have deactivated their Slates and revere a mysterious tome known as ‘The Book of Noah’) when her daughter's name (‘Veracity’) is proscribed. They fight the government, win, and Free expression is restored.

I expected that the Book of Noah, revered with semi-religious awe, would be one of the dictionaries descended from that of Noah Webster and it was. That's not a complaint. It was easy to see coming, but a nice touch nonetheless. The protagonist feels like a fleshed out character as do most of the other sympathetic characters.

Unfortunately, this book attempts to be dystopian and it isn't very good at it. Maybe I have strange standards, but I don't think 1984 is a good dystopia either. (Though it's better written.) This book has the same ‘boot stamping on a human face’ problem that 1984 does, except where 1984 created an otherworldy culture of pervasive surveillance, interpersonal betrayal, and a seemingly omnipotent Party apparatus that has made a science of repression, Veracity has a nasty group of unimaginative thugs who are violent and rapey for no particularly good reason. A good dystopia, in case you're wondering, is a failed dream, a mistake carried through to perfection, or (my personal favorite) a state that the inhabitants enjoy perfectly well but that gives the reader a case of the howling fantods. Brave New World and We are good dystopias. I also like things like Platonov, I just don't think of them as dystopian. More magical-realist description of and commentary on the world around them.

The comparison with 1984 shows the other problem with this book. If one wishes to write a Sapir-Whorfian dictatorship, one should portray the effect on the thoughts of the populace. If the effect is that people are sad that they can't say some words that they like or their poetic expression is a lacking due to a cramped vocabulary, it undercuts the message of the power of language, and also undercuts the state's motivation for imposing it. Also, a Sapir-Whorfian dictatorship only really makes sense with something of a technocracy, not pointlessly violent thugs.

So. While this book isn't painful to read, there isn't any point in doing so. ★★☆☆☆

I have never used Twitter. Microblogging was not a thing that appealed to me. I follow some people's Twitter feeds as RSS feeds and I have occasionally been tempted to make an account so I can tell some people to stop being stupid, but I never did.

Enter Mastodon. A federated, decentralized social network and microblogging platform based on open standards: OStatus in particular. OStatus itself is based on preëxisting web standards like ATOM (you can stick a user's ATOM URL into a feed reader and follow them that way, if you wish). It had been developed by Identi.ca (whose developers later moved in to Pump.io) and is used by GNU Social. Mastodon interoperates (mostly) with GNU Social and seems to have gained currency by focusing on being easy to set up and deploy for instance administrators and having a slick web UI and mobile clients. It also got lucky and hit the popular press.

Mastodon servers are called instances. Each instance has some number of users. Users make posts that can have varying degrees of publicity (some are 'private' and are only available to the people they're addressed to). Users can address posts (called 'toots') to or follow users on other instances and those instances may federate. I say ‘may’ because instance administrators may blacklist other instances (or filter them in other ways) or block federation with all instances not on a whitelist.

The convention at present among most instances is widespread, promiscuous federation (with a few instances known to harbor abusive users commonly blacklisted) is the norm. This is a generally nice system since two users can communicate without them having to agree on enemies. Some people dislike this model. I have seen people argue that the network must be intentionally 'balkanized' and the defaults changed to make everything private by default and remove the ability for arbitrary users to message each other in order to prevent abuse. Thankfully, few people seem interested in doing this. There are some whitelist-only instances, but even they seem to be fairly widely connected.

After listening to a talk on re-decentralizing the web, I figured I might as well give it a shot and created an account with which to play around. One of the problems that federated services like XMPP had was that there were many servers under different domains offering similar but not identical service. Users both had no intuitively appealing way to pick between one service and another and would sometimes be bit by whether their service supported offline messaging or other extensions to the protocol.

Mastodon has found, perhaps by accident, an interesting way to get around this. Instances can differentiate themselves in target audience, visual theme, code of conduct, moderation and federation policy, and even “local flavor” (renaming ‘likes’, ‘toots’, or ‘boosts’ to something silly). A user who logs in is presented with both a ‘local’ timeline (containing all toots on that user's instance) and a ‘federated’ timeline, containing all toots by users on instances that someone on the user's instance follows. This creates a sense of place and community while making it easy to reach out into the wider Fediverse.

The flagship instance, mastodon.social, became overloaded and stopped accepting new registrations, and this was a boon for the community because it made people go look through the list of instances and find one they liked to join. This combined with the locality and community that Mastodon instances provide seem likely to lock federation in as something people value about the service. (This has been a problem, historically. The average user doesn't care about openness, decentralization, and federation. Even if federation could provide things users do say they care about, like allowing them to migrate to differing levels of moderation, it's difficult to explain and sell them on the idea.)

This is also why I'm less bothered by moderation on Mastodon than I am on other sites. I believe that Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and the like, should be legally forbidden from removing content no matter how hateful, offensive, obscene, or what have you it is claimed to be; they are large organizations with effective monopolies due to their network effect, and they are loyal to their advertisers and shareholders. Mastodon instances are, more or less, loyal to their users (several of them have Patreon accounts where you can kick in a dollar a month if you want to). They are small, and they are loosely coupled. If you don't like the moderation policy of one, you can leave and go to another more to your liking. Very few have ‘transitive’ federation requirements (they refuse to federate with anyone they won't federate with). Personally, I think instances with ‘transitive’ federation policies should be treated as bad actors and pressured to knock it off, since it breaks not having to agree with one's enemies.

So far, I found Mastodon to be rather pleasant. It's very well done from a software and organizational perspective. I don't know if microblogging is going to be something I really have much desire to keep up with (I expect it just depends on who I run into), but even if I don't keep using it, Mastodon has demonstrated that you can make an open, federated social service appealing to the mass market. At least temporarily.

We know that some people at some times and places have banned, for religious reasons, representational art. What about the opposite?

Someone could take the side that knowing God's creation allows us to know the mind of God and treat accurate sculpture and painting and, even more so once they exist, photography and cinema as sacramental. Perhaps they would end up with some Dogme 95 (a name now more appropriate than ever!) style restrictions on the practice of film making to ensure that what is seen is what is real.

You could have people reasonably push for edits at first, to cut out extraneous details as being better showing some aspect of the truth. Filters and fluorescence, infra-red cameras, those might all be allowed in more liberal areas.

Fictional accounts, pictures of scenes that never were, all these would be completely verboten. Music could be, beyond perhaps recitations with the pitch and rhythm of natural language accentuated.

You end up with potential for disagreements. If you want to show history, is it better to shoot scenes of life and speech as it is and painstakingly edit it together in a way that matches the narrative, or to get people to take on the roles of people they clearly aren't, do things they clearly wouldn't, say things they would never say, but produce an artifact that more truthfully reflects the history as it occurred?

You could save music, maybe, through a process like that used in Notjustmoreidlechatter, but built on any natural sounds.

Depending on where you live it might be a bad time for visual aids. A false image to convey an accurate concept like ball and stick models molecular models or diagrams of electron orbitals might be frowned upon indeed.

You could imagine both traditions branching off. The one that allows false images to convey true stories just seems to give way to ‘based on a true story-itis’. The other seems more promising. If you can throw away the narrative constraint entirely and tell whatever story you want so long as it's done in the form of a cinematic collage from found footage. Maybe you could even write ‘fiction’ of a sort so long as each phrase was copied verbatim from a nonfiction source.

I had a bunch of odd symptoms in my eyes, throat, and nose, tissue inflaming and flaking off. Since the virus infecting me causes rapid lightening of hair color and mine is already completely white, it took the doctors forever to think of it and diagnose it properly. The prescription was an antiviral named 'Cholo' as well as auric chloride. I was to stay away from people so as not to infect them and I'd be cured in three days.

Unfortunately, I managed somehow to run off without checking out properly and by the time I realized this the doctor's office was closed and I had to go bother people at the associated hospital to get them to send the prescription along and ended up getting committed to the hospital without meaning to for exhibiting drug-seeking behavior and when I told them I wanted my antiviral they just gave me motivational talks about willpower and how I could overcome my chemical dependency.

Eventually I managed to get out of the ward I was being held in and use one of the hospital phones to call in the prescription on my own and run away and catch the bus before they found me and take that to the drug store.

doppler v. To noisily move with such speed as to unsubtly exhibit the Doppler effect to stationary observers. As in “The airplane dopplered away.” or “The frightened driver dopplered his car down the road.”

The Owner of All Infernal Names: An Introductory Treatise on the Existence, Nature & Government of our Omnimalevolent Creator by John Zande is a book with a really excellent, absolutely first-class title. That's honestly the reason why I read it. The ‘evil God’ challenge is cute and all, but not really all that interesting.

This book is an attempt at inverse apologetics. It takes the classical arguments for God's existence as read but takes advantage of their ambiguity to argue that the God they point to is Maximally Evil. It's cute, I guess. It feels a bit like someone took a quick joke with a simple punchline and tried to make a feature film out of it and just kept elaborating it.

The classical arguments for God's existence aren't any good, and the book glosses over them anyway. The real meat (such as it is) is in their argument for the moral nature of God and their solution to the Problem of Natural Good. Other people might be more sympathetic to the argument, but all it does is annoy me and make me angry with the author for being pathetic and contemptible. He argues that God must desire unhappiness in itself (sort of an inverse regressive utilitarian. It doesn't have any particular personal interest in you or your unhappiness, it just wants a rich, ever-growing supply of unhappiness.)

Why might God want unhappiness and suffering? Well, the author seems to believe these emotions are more varied, more true, more authentic, and more sincere. That they are longer lasting while others flare up brightly and fade away. This is probably a thing many people believe, but I don't. Similarly he argues that if God were good then the universe would tend toward simple, unthinking structures, rather than the increase of complexity, since increased complexity primarily creates opportunities for richer and more varied suffering. Again, this may be something other people believe, but I don't. I hate and despise misery and pain, but ultimately I think it's less real and varied than other emotions, of less import, and less long-lasting. Certainly I've had experiences that I can't think about in any detail without starting to cry, but I've had experiences I can't think about without laughing or being overcome with delight or just wanting to grin like a fool and hug my cat. Despair seems much more prone to being worn away by delight than the other way around.

The author's defense against the Problem of Natural Good is, more or less, what you would expect. He invokes the tired, old nonsense about hope being the greatest evil in life because it alone keeps people from lying down and dying and suggests that good is really an illusion. That all goodness is an investment that keeps the creator's creatures running, striving, building new dreams to dash, and setting themselves up for so much delicious disappointment. He also claims that every seeming good, no matter how small, lends itself to a cornucopia of suffering down the line. To be fair, if you are more sympathetic to the author's emotional assumptions, he probably succeeds better at answering the Problem of Natural Good than most traditional monotheists do at answering the Problem of Natural Evil even if you accept their assumptions. I don't think this is so much a credit to the author as a consequence of how bad most answers to the Problem of Natural Evil are.

Obviously I don't think it ‘succeeds’ in its argument, if I did I'd be living my life in despair and shuddering horror…no that's false. If it thought it had proved its argument that God exists and wills despair and misery, I'd just shrug and say that God's opinion on the purpose of life is no more relevant than anyone else's, that the whole thing is ultimately meaningless, whistle a tune, and continue acting basically as before.

I give it two and a half stars (out of five) for having what is really a wonderful title and for a workmanlike book-length presentation of an idea that would have done better as a magazine article.

I wrote a book and got it published!

Unfortunely I didn't actually have a copy. I wanted to keep it on the shelf so when people came and looked through my bookcase they would notice my name on the spine. Yes, yes, vanity, I know. You just can't do that with the digital edition.

So I went to Amazon. This wasn't their corporate headquarters, this was a theme park that Amazon ran that was similar to Disney World with rides and attractions and tours of everything, but I kept going through all the book stores to see if anyone had a copy of my book and they didn't.

There were employee only computer terminals that I tried to check but people kept catching me and throwing me out whenever I tried to use one.

This is your periodic reminder that depressive realism is a bunch of bunk. Depressive realism is the ill-defined notion that either depression is the correct and healthy result of seeing the world for what it is (this is tied up with the idea that intelligent people are or must be or somehow should be unhappy) or that depression somehow strips away the illusions people wrap themselves in and allows one to see the world as it is.

Lars von Trier's (whom you may remember as the gentleman who famously combined Willem Dafoe, a fox, autophagia, and the phrase ‘chaos reigns’ into a scene in his movie Antichrist) film Melancholia was written to just this theme. Von Trier heard from a therapist that depressed people act more calmly in disasters than others because they already expect the worst (whether this is true, I don't know. If it is, it could instead be that they are more prone to dissociation, which can itself make people more prone to post-traumatic stress disorder. It could also be an effect similar to increased suicide risk on some SSRIs; patients would really like to die, but don't have the energy to kill themselves, and sometimes their motivation is restored before their desire to live. A lack of panic could, similarly, be a lack of energy.) and wished to create a world in which terrible, crippling depression was the correct response: one in which the earth was destroyed. His protagonist not only becomes calm, almost serene, as the point of destruction grows closer and everyone else descends into panic and despair, but simply knows things with great detail for no reason at all, as if her melancholy was a telegraph wire into the universe. It's a beautifully made movie and you should watch it. You probably won't like it. I didn't like it, but I'm happy to have seen it since it is very well made as a film and I like to try and grasp the feelings and thoughts of people who think differently than I. It does an excellent job of portraying how depression feels from the inside, but not how it relates to reality.

There are two fundamental problems with the claims of depressive realism. The first is that in experiments depression adds a systematic bias rather than improving overall accuracy. Depressed people believe they have less control in situations. In situations where they actually do have less control, they're right more often. In situations where they don't, they're wrong. They consistently expect worse outcomes, so when games are rigged against them, their predictions are more correct, when games aren't rigged against them, they aren't. They expect others to work against them. When they actually are in a hostile social situation they're more correct, when they aren't, they aren't.

It is undeniable that healthy people are not exemplars of rational prediction. They overestimate their likely success and the amount of control they have over things. I have long said that humans are really bad at probability to anyone who will listen. However, we should be able to agree that replacing one systematic bias with another is not called realism.

Furthermore, it's not adaptive. Perhaps if you were in Lars von Trier's world you might argue that lying still doing nothing is a rational and healthy response to the world being swallowed up by a gas giant. My sympathies lie more with the people in Seveneves who went out with songs and concerts and fireworks when all surface life was destroyed. It doesn't really matter, because ‘the end of the world’ is not happening any time soon. Even if one will be dead from some terminal disease in six months, the rest of the world will still be there afterward and they can affect it before they go.

The types of behavior that depression brings about are not adaptive for dealing with the world. Certainly not an unfriendly and dangerous world. The symptoms of depression are almost identical to sickness behavior, a state that keeps animals still, inactive, away from others, and out of trouble. Depression may, in fact, be a healthy response to disease that has somehow become enacted continually. There are researchers pursuing the theory that depression might have a strong immune or inflammatory component. Depression is not a healthy response to the world, to culture, to troubles at work, and certainly not to having someone you don't like get elected.

The second problem with depressive realism is that depression causes cognitive impairment. It interferes with your memory. It makes it difficult to concentrate. It makes one's thoughts slow and fogged. It also, famously, distorts people's thoughts. A normal person may rate their level of control in a situation overly highly, but when presented with evidence to the contrary, the normal person is more likely to consider and reason through the evidence and change their mind than a depressed person is to similarly change their mind when given evidence that their appraisal of their control in a situation is overly low.

That makes the idea of depressive realism incredibly suspect. It's not impossible that the same condition could cause some large cognitive deficits and clarity in some other areas, but it's unlikely, and I would need a lot of really good evidence to believe it.

Depressive realism does ring true to a lot of depressed people, and there's an excellent explanation for that: the aforementioned cognitive impairments and the feedback from depressive behavior. Well, that and the well-known phenomena that depression is greedy. It will reach out and find or make reasons for its own existence. Someone, when in a non-depressed state, may recognize that they merely feel lonely. In a depressed state they might not just feel lonely, but believe that everyone hates them. Every bit of kindness they're shown can be forgotten, and any slight can be magnified and turned into more evidence. They might withdraw from their friends and acquaintances or be unpleasant to them, and use the way their friends respond to bolster the belief that they are hated. They could come to the conclusion that their feelings are simply a healthy and rational response to seeing a world where everyone hates them as it is, when instead they're seeing a grotesque caricature of a world their feelings and actions have influenced.

Why does this matter to me? Because embracing depressive realism, especially in its ‘folk’ forms, destroys people's lives. Not only is it false, it doesn't even have the decency to be one of the lies that ennobles us. People who fall prey to it, instead of questioning their preconceptions, take them as truth. They decide that the world or society just doesn't value original or creative people so they won't bother. They get the ridiculous idea in their head that they are the enemy of society for this or that reason. They think they must fail, and so fail by never trying. Intelligent people, like them, see the world and all its hollowness for what it is. Empathetic people, like them, see how cruel and empty our culture really is and understand that there's no way for a healthy, sane person to exist inside it in any state of happiness; they're the real sane ones, and you would need to be delusional to be happy in such a terrible world.

You could think of it as the evil twin of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: a learned pattern of thought optimized to make one less functional and more in thrall to one's disease.

I dreamed I was visiting people.

During the daytime, children were playing with InkSlingers!™ Parents. Do you want your children to have the fun of playing with squirt guns without having anything that remotely resembles a gun for some reason? Then you want InkSlingers!™. They're devices that superficially resemble hand-held directional antennae made of brightly colored plastic. By turning the crank an ingenious mechanism dips into the ink reservoir and hurls droplets of ink forward, while a parabolic guard keeps you from getting it hurled into your own face.

Most of the rest of the dream took place at night and made the general awfulness of some devices especially unpleasant. There was the passive-aggressive alarm clock that would, out of nowhere, start saying to the person in bed next to it “Why do you feel the need to hide the fact you're unhappy all the time?” and seems unable to believe that people are capable of not being unhappy all the time. Fortunately you can turn it off if you mash the right set of buttons.

There was also an angry television. I wasn't quite sure if it was a Russian television and that's why it was always showing news stories about Putin, or if we were in Russia and that's what just happened to be on the television. When you would use any kind of infra-red control of any sort for any device, this television would take it as a personal affront that you weren't speaking infra-red in a language it could understand and start shouting…in the voice of Vladimir Putin.

There was also a humidifier that someone designed to be as friendly as possible for the growth of bacteria and fungi under the idea that we should be breathing pro-biotic air, so you were supposed to prime it with a bit of SCOBY rubbed all over the inside and fill it with sugar water instead of water.

Once upon a time there was a great nation called The United Kingdom. For no particularly good reason, a small majority of its citizens voted to sunder their nation from the European Union. Exactly why is a matter people have argued about for almost a year and will probably continue to debate for some time. Several officials in the EU have declared their intent to punish the United Kingdom to discourage other countries from trying to leave. Many other officials have come out against any form of punishment on the grounds that it would hurt the EU, too. This proposed punishment takes the form of bad trade terms: forcing the United Kingdom to deal with Europe strictly according to World Trade Organization rules. Could they do worse?

Let us imagine that the European Union had a vendetta against the United Kingdom and wanted to do it harm. It seems that an easy jumping-off-point is a matter that will have to be negotiated: the fate of citizens of the European Union in the United Kingdom and citizens of the United Kingdom in the European Union. If the European Union wanted to hurt the United Kingdom, it should give citizens of the United Kingdom indefinite license to remain in European Union countries. If they could manage it, they could go further: offering them five years residence but requiring they take citizenship in some member of the European Union to remain after that. Ideally they would fast track the procedure. This would be very difficult legally, since matters of citizenship and immigration from outside the European Union are left up, I believe, to member states.

You could go further, automatically granting five to ten years working residency to any citizen of the United Kingdom admitted to a university in the European Union; ideally their admission residency would be conditional on their agreeing to spend five to ten years working somewhere in the European Union after graduation. One could try giving scholarships to high performers to attract them, depending on political will and exactly how much one wanted to punish the United Kingdom by attempting to hollow it out. If you could convince people to transfer United Kingdom for European citizenship that would be the most effective.

Making businesses relocate should be easy. The United Kingdom may manage it on its own just by leaving the single market, though there is some rumor that the United Kingdom hopes to turn itself into a low tax haven; if they do hamstring their on revenue generation to that degree people might be even more prone to emigrate to European Union member states.

Is there more one could do? Perhaps they could try to have the United Kingdom excluded from multilateral trade talks. Beyond that, I'm not sure. If the European Union accumulated prestige of a sort, admiration for its institutions, it might use it to marginalize and exclude the United Kingdom from things, as well as trying to gain stronger associations in popular consciousness with ideals people had thought of in connection with the United Kingdom.

I wouldn't be in support of anything like this. All things being equal I'm rather fond of the United Kingdom if not of its current government, and I'm usually opposed to trying to be horrible to other polities. Reading current coverage of the European Union simply made me start to wonder how far one could carry a diplomatic, attractive, sweet, and soft war.

Come muse, let us sing silently of secrets. I am not particularly devoted to privacy, digital or otherwise. This comes as a surprise to people because many of my actions and stances are those that privacy activists would take.

It is true, I do not care for centralized services. I like to disentangle myself from 10¹⁰⁰ whenever possible. I refuse to use Countenance nor do I ask the Summingbird's dam to carry messages to my friends.

The privacy advocate does these things because they do not want to be tracked and they do not want want people to see their communications. I do them because I have an extreme dislike for centralized architectures. If a system cannot be decentralized and either run complete peer-to-peer or federated I (unlike a certain Mr. Marlinspike, may all traffic to or from him be dropped) am not interested. Decentralized systems with multiple poles are more resiliant and they provide more variation. A decentralized system also insists on a certain level of transparency and openness of the protocol so that there will be more clients and more ways of presenting it. It also provides a barrier against one actor deciding to migrate a service or protocol in ways that incorporate customer control or illegitimate restrictions.

You might wonder then why I have set up HTTPS, why I am interested in cryptography, why I use OTR, and why I use GnuPG? While I may or may not have anything to hide, I know other people do. I view that and running a Tor node and other activities as a public service. The more encrypted traffic there is the less legitimate reason there is to zero in on any individual who encrypts something.

Also cryptography and the software associated with it is just plain fun and interesting to work on. I don't have any need for Darkgit (and seeing the SecuShare people make their project difficult to contribute to by trying to move development discussions out of the open has convinced me it's pretty bad idea), it's still entertaining to try and figure out how to do it and work out the details.

I am fairly lucky in that I don't have many secrets and the ones I have aren't particularly important. If they were all revealed it would cause me some awkwardness and a bit of embarrassment, but nothing that would last for very long. The only secrets that I must keep are the ‘trivial’ secrets of passwords, credit card numbers, private keys. They don't serve to give someone information about me, they just allow someone to impersonate me.

Now, I don't advocate any sort of encryption ban because that would be stupid and unenforcible. Nor do I advocate people giving up on encryption or anything like that, but I do have a very strong bias toward the idea of a world with no secrets at all. Jeremy Bentham (the founder of utilitarianism!) thought privacy was in fact a social ill. I don't necessarily agree with him, but I don't necessarily agree that privacy is a definite social good either.

So, the first obvious argument in favor of privacy is the research that people who know they are being surveilled behave differently. They become more risk averse and stressed. They become less creative, productive, and helpful. One might ask whether these effects are caused by the surveillance itself or the asymmetry. It's not beyond possibility that being watched by a black box that gives you no idea what it's doing with the information and over which you have no say is different from being watched by a transparent box that has to account to you for everything it looks at and what it does with the information. There has been, to my knowledge, no research done to decide which of these two is the case. David Brin's “The Transparent Society” comes down clearly on the second term of the disjunction and argues for sousveillance as the appropriate counterpart to surveillance in a democratic society.

There are of course people who have secrets whose revelation would cause much worse than awkwardness and embarrassment. The classic example is someone in a sexual minority whose regional or social group is religiously conservative. Their ‘outing’ could result in anything from their family disowning them to someone trying to kill them. There are also people like >this gentleman who was subjected to a campaign of harassment, discrimination, and finally expelled from a development community in which he made his livelihood over his participation in a Fantasy-inflected BDSM subculture. (This is an example of why I am so utterly contemptuous of ‘We must not tolerate intolerance!’ The people who ran the campaign of harassment doubtless did think he was misogynistic and intolerant and that they were protecting the vulnerable members of their community.)

There is a counterargument that is somewhat compelling in principle. We know from recent history that the wide acceptance and ongoing civil rights of gay and transgender people were the product of wide visibility and normalization. Of course having everyone of a minority coordinate to be ‘out’ at the same time is infeasible and some minorities may be too small to get the kind of wide-spread visibility required. At the start of any attempt at widespread normalization, consequences for those participating could be quite dire, even more so if there is a strong church in the area or government institutions of violent repression. One certainly cannot blame people for wanting to stay hidden. On the other hand, if everyone in a group hides, then things are especially bad for any who are revealed.

Some people may, also, be targets of harassment. They could, quite legitimately want to keep their personal contact information private. This seems to be a thing that happens to an unfortunate number of women online. A more trivial example might just be wanting to keep one's email address from getting out too broadly to avoid spam. I could imagine a world with no secrets where mapping software and online calendars makes it easy for people to waylay one on the street. This is not desirable.

I would also worry about the ability of children to keep non-trivial (and trivial) secrets from their parents. I think it's very important for children to be able to access material that their parents do not want them to have (to the point where I think any well-functioning state must provide a means for children to circumvent parental censorship). If the parents can just find out and punish them for it the whole point is rather lost. There might be similar arguments made for children being able to communicate with people without their parents' knowledge. I don't know if children generally have a legitimate need to go to physical places without their parents' knowledge, but I wouldn't rule it out without some thought. All of these examples are only necessary in the case of defective parents, however. There's no legitimate need for a parent to censor their child's access to information, for example.

Access to medical records or personal history could lead to employment or other forms of discrimination or differential pricing, though the Affordable Care Act already disallows some of that for institutions that have all medical information, so secrecy may not be necessary. Similarly, I would like to see criminal convictions removed from the record after a sentence is served with a prosecutor required to prove a strong need to retain them for them to remain. Sealing or removing records rather goes against the whole idea of removing secrecy. This removal may not be useful. Ban the Box (the campaign to remove the checkbox on the front page of employment applications asking about past convictions) resulted in more black applicants simply not being called back. Similarly, a law in Washington banning employers from making credit checks penalized black and young applicants. Sealing records of convictions may have the effect of simply penalizing demographic groups that have higher rates of criminal conviction.

There is also, of course, the secret ballot. Someone who is a political minority in their community might not vote their conscience if they feared reprisal.

I don't consider financial secrecy to be of any social utility. Being unable to trace ownership of resources is starting to cause serious political and financial problems. Trade secrets serve no legitimate purpose and legal protection for them should be scrapped.

Now, as I said, I don't propose that we go out and end secrecy for everyone forever right now. However, all of these examples of legitimate, non-trivial secrets are legitimized only by serious problems in society, mostly discrimination. Obviously we should fight against that, try to find ways to combat and lessen the impact of harassment. On a personal level, any time we find ourselves thinking of some trait that, if we were to find someone possessed it, we would be tempted to try to push them out of a community or keep them from some position, we really ought to fix that. Even if we still keep secrets, a world where we don't have to cannot help but be better than one where we do.

William Lane Craig (who is a bad man) likes Divine Command Theory. He attempts to escape the Euthyphro dilemma and arbitrariness (“But what if God commanded us to eat children?”) by saying that it is not the commandments but the character of God that constitute goodness. He tries to dodge the question of “But what if God had possessed a character that delighted in the eating of children?” by claiming that God is a necessary being (a being that couldn't not exist) and that God's character is similarly necessary. In his view, it is incoherent to ask about a world where God's character differs.

I'm not keen on the notion of a ‘necessary being’ (or divine command theory or any of the rest), but! the notion of a necessary being comes out of two arguments. The Cosmological Argument purports to prove the existence of a necessary being able to serve as a metaphysical or explanatory First Cause. There isn't much moral character implied there.

The Ontological Argument aims higher and asks for a being that is maximally knowing, powerful, good and possessed of all perfections and tries to show why such a being must necessarily exist. Alvin Plantinga's ‘Victorious’ Ontological Argument is the current favorite, so! For the sake of argument let's assume old Alvin has magicked us up a Necessary Being. What do we get?

If your notion of 'Goodness' derives from God then you can't really appeal to being Maximally Good as part of your specification for your necessary being. The character is unspecified and your necessary being is under-determined: There are lots and lots! of necessary beings that fit the bill.

So! What if worlds had all possible Gods? And not in the limited squabbling Greek sort, but a parliament of Supreme Beings. What would it look like?

All our Gods are omnipotent; we will say that one is omnipotent if the world conforms to one's will. Thus, in any possible world, the wills of all existing Gods must be in concord. In any world with multiple Gods, no God has a strong, willed preference about every facet of the world. There could be some possible worlds that happen to have the degenerate case of only one God who wills preferences concerning every aspect of the world. (Alternatively a Maximally Willing God could be accompanied by any number of completely apathetic Gods who don't will anything.) Also if Gods are omniscient, then a God must either be the only one existing in a world, or no Gods want to keep secrets.

You could have a Science Fiction like scenario where every God has some number of planets or sectors of space about which it wills things. You could have slightly different laws of physics as you move around. Gods could be on friendly terms. They might be on Unfriendly terms. Perhaps each God wills events in its sector of space in the attempt to draw people to move their from other Gods' areas. (This would require an appeal to the nonsensical claptrap of free will to make this not a violation of omnipotence.)

Gods with an artistic bent might have wills that mostly overlap. Imagine a world where all Gods want a functioning ecosystem, but one wants the most beautiful clouds and takes over making each one. Another wants the waves to crest just so. Another wants beautiful lava flows.

The God of Paperclips may want to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe. That isn't necessarily a catastrophe, when the omnipotent God of Sapience builds a beautiful Paperclip Ecosystem filled with shiny, tinkly Paperclip People famed throughout the cosmoi for their philosophical insight and paperclip poetry.

Could Gods change their will? It's not obvious that they couldn't so long as the new will doesn't conflict with some other God's will. Perhaps every time such a conflict happens the world bifurcates with each disagreeing God having his own worldclone. That seems unfair to OTHER Gods in the world who were getting along well with each other. Can Gods be in more than one world? Otherwise you could have Gods harm each other by changing their minds.

You could instead have Ranked Will. Where any Omnipotent God can enact a Level 1 Will so long as no Level 0 Will opposes it. This increases possible sets of Gods that could share worlds. One God with a Level 0 Will to do so could flood the world even if all Gods are opposed to it, just so long as it's not the thing they care about most.

That isn't as narratively appealing as the Concordant Will. Gods could have 'spheres', things about which they happen to Will things. They could be very small Spheres. It's unlikely the Divine Parliament would answer prayer given the potentially catastrophic consequences of changing one's will, but they might explain things. Since each God has a distinct Moral Nature (and all moral natures of the Gods in any world just happen to produce concordant Wills) each might write a different theodicy. The religions in this world might all believe in the same Gods, but they might side with different ones on ethical debates.

A friend of mine came to work at the same company I do and I ended up supervising him. As part of his job he had the identity of a werewolf from 1940s Germany who fled to the future to escape Nazi persecution grafted onto him. That is, the timeline was basically just bolted on to his, so he went from not being the werewolf to having always been the werewolf.

I assigned him a task from Bugzilla that required him to go to another universe to fight some horrible abomination (this was considered normal in context). Unfortunately, he could never get time to do it because people kept throwing other reports from Bugzilla at him about replication and metadata problems.

My older (fictional) brother became sick from a Langfordian basilisk, or at least something like it: a form of insanity usually caused by watching patterns of faint lights against darkness moving in some particular way. Its most common victims were unlucky astronomers.

An organization devoted to evil offered to treat him. I accepted because I was a bit desperate and I thought even if the overall goals you work for are reprehensible that doesn't mean you spend all day kicking puppies.

I was mistaken. They had given him the disease in the first place, an their treatment was just cover for installing all manner of mental domination to turn him into a weapon.

This is where I woke up.

It was summer time. I was watching two children who were having some squabble I needed to mediate. I heard a knock from the other room and went to answer. The main door was open, but the screen door wasn't. Through it I saw a figure like a shadow holding a huge club. He ran to the screen door and started bashing through it. I tried to slam the door shut but it caught on a rug.

(I woke up with rather a start at that point.)

If rights come from self-ownership and you don't own what you don't hack, does that mean that only people who practice meditation, psychedelic drug use, nootropics, and biohacking have rights?

A husband was with his wife. She was confined to bed with some horrible disease, but her spine was giving her constant anguish.

The doctors said the only treatment was to remove her spine. They would need to remove her ribs since there was no spine for them to attach to. Her pelvis had to go for the same reason. And her arms and legs would be useless with no bones to anchor the muscles that moved them, so they had to go, too.

She would be a bag of organs with a head attached, and would no longer be able to breathe on her own without ribs to support her diaphragm. They would make a plastic dome to cover her and protect her organs.

She said she would rather die.

At work, we had to travel back in time for some purpose. Our time travel bus(!) broke down in late 1930s Germany and we all did our very best to keep our heads down and get it fixed. I kept wondering when someone would notice that I was way too blonde-haired and blue-eyed. One of my co-workers for no reason I could figure out suddenly started yelling that he was Jewish in the middle of a city and we tried to grab him and drag him onto the bus.

I was about to have surgery, a neurologist was giving me an examination to make sure I wouldn't have a bad reaction to the anæsthesia. He had me perform a few multiple choice tests and gave me a bunch of cardboard backed pictures and had me see how many shapes I could cut out of the pictures with a jigsaw as fast as I could. Much to my surprise I managed to cut along the outlines perfectly without losing any fingers.

The doctor was shocked and insisted that the tests showed I had some terrible, serious problem and needed to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. I tried to get him to tell me what he thought was wrong, but he just insisted his tests showed that there WAS something wrong. When no psychiatrist showed up, he had me get on an airplane and fly to see one. ON the airplane I had a huge state room with a crystal to unlock the door and a shallow pool in the center.

Introduction

Since the United States election, a few people have pointed me to Sean McElwee's thoughtful argument for the censorship of hate speech wanting to know my thoughts. From the title of this post you can infer that I disagree. I believe wholeheartedly and fully grant that the world would be far better if it contained no expression attacking the dignity and social status of any person. I grant completely that hate speech does harm. However, laws of the sort Mr. McElwee advocates would have little to no benefit and introduce harms of their own.

Mr. McElwee likens those who oppose hate speech laws to ‘free-market fundamentalists’. While not correct, this analogy suggests a way to evaluate proposed laws. I am by no means a free-market fundamentalist given my long-term preference for democratic forms of non-Marxist communist technocracy. This does not mean that I support every proposed market intervention.

The world would be a better place without heroin abuse, but I oppose drug prohibition. I do not hold the market sacred nor do I think heroin harmless. I oppose drug prohibition because it has conspicuously failed to reduce the harms of drug abuse while adding new, exciting harms of its own.

As Mr. McElwee wrote, legal limits exist on speech that most people accept. His examples were child pornography and defamation. Child pornography is a bad example and defamation is complicated, but given that our society isn't completely transparent some form of defamation law is warranted. Laws regulating advertising and political campaigns are valuable limits on speech, as are laws against inciting a riot or panic.

That a given kind of speech is intensely harmful and that we recognize the need for some legal limits on speech is insufficient to justify laws against that kind of speech. Consider anti-vaccination and homeopathy. There is no evidence for either. The dissemination of these ideas kills people. We should make no attempt to censor these ideas in general discourse, published works, television, the Internet, or presentations.

An attempt at such censorship wouldn't work. It might work in Canada where trust of civic institutions is relatively high, but in the United States trust in civic institutions is fairly low. Anti-vaccination advocates tend to have lower than average civic trust and will often justify their beliefs by positing conspiracies between pharmacology corporations and the government. When they speak, they also evince a dislike of authorities dictating how they raise and care for their children. Censorship would validate their conspiracy theories and give them a heavier hand of authority to resist.

Every advocate of hate speech laws focuses on the harms of hate speech. This is insufficient. They must make a reasoned case that the laws they propose will have some benefit that is not outweighed by the harms they introduce.

Are There Benefits?

This is the weakest part of Mr. McElwee's article. He claims that hate speech laws give minorities more positive freedom to express themselves but fails no support this claim. If there were no long-standing hate speech laws this would be fine. We would have an obvious harm, the claim that penalizing it would make it less frequent, and a suggested benefit. Opponents would have to argue convincingly that the claimed benefit might not materialize.

However, we have Europe. Mr. McElwee asks us to examine Europe for actual harms arising from hate speech law. He does not speak of actual benefits arising in Europe from hate speech laws. I have looked independently and failed to find any claims that there have been any. I would expect advocates of hate speech laws to reference any studies on the subject that existed, and while the European Union released papers on hate speech, they focus on legal theories underlying the law rather than social outcomes. Absent formal investigation, we can try to see if Europe is significantly less hostile or more inclusive in a way that could be plausibly traced to these laws.

European hate speech laws target the incitement of hatred against or denigration of various protected groups. Punishments are fines of one to several thousand Euros and there may be jail time, ranging from a few months to a small number of years. Successfully prosecuted complaints are high profile: interviews in widely read magazines, billboards, televised interviews, and political rallies. These policies have been around for long enough that we can examine them for both benefits and harms.

Currently, the EU is addressing hate speech on large social networks. A notice, review, and takedown regime has been in effect on the largest sites for a few months. Mr. McElwee's article focuses on Internet hate speech, and that is the domain where government intervention is so new that one cannot give reassurance based on existing practice. In 2015, the French government announced a heightened campaign against online hate speech. It introduced several measures into parliament several new powers, including the ability to remove entire websites without a court order, but few were passed.

Antisemitism is the easiest form of bigotry to look at, since the Anti-Defamation league has a worldwide survey of antisemitism broken down by region and nation. There isn't any obvious correlation between how recently a country adopted hate speech laws and its levels of antisemitism. Greece is the obvious outlier, having both high levels of antisemitism and hate speech laws dating back only to 2014. France, however, has some of the oldest hate speech laws on the continent and has a higher level of antisemitism than every nation but Greece. Historical factors dominate. The Great Recession caused an upswing in antisemitism throughout Europe and it (combined with the Euro crisis and a decade of Austerity) is the major factor behind the level in Greece. Long-standing hate speech laws in France seem to have done nothing to blunt the economic antisemitism that results in anti-Jewish feeling during financial shocks. Further, if the ADL's numbers are remotely meaningful, hate speech laws have done nothing to create a safe and inclusive environment for Jewish people.

Global attitude surveys covering other forms of bigotry are lacking. It is also hard to disentangle people's economic and security concerns from their prejudice. One can be opposed to immigration for reasons other than racism, but an intense opposition to immigration seems to lead to an antipathy toward those who most embody one's stereotype of an immigrant. Similarly, a fear of terrorism can lead to an antipathy toward people resembling one's stereotype of a terrorist. Economic and political factors can thus manufacture racism or religious bias where they didn't exist before.

This is one area where hate speech laws fail. They target protected groups, so vulnerable people can be attacked even without obvious ‘code’. During the recent refugee crisis, newspapers referred to asylum seekers as a ‘swarm’, an ‘invasion’, and a ‘plague of feral humans’. Others advocated sending gunships to shoot them out of the water. The speakers might be Islamophobic. They might simply be upset about the level of their taxes, worried about them going up if they have to support refugees, and have some innate difficulty with the concept that people they see on TV have conscious experience. In truth, it doesn't matter. Arguing whether someone ‘is racist’ and assigning moral opprobrium is a waste of time, but the narrowness of hate speech laws requires one to do just that.

Germany saw anti-Muslim rallies by people worried about the imposition of Sharia. Levels of anti-Muslim discrimination in France are astonishing. Every time a new Eastern European country joins the EU and gains free movement of labor, shrill headlines pour out comparing them to leeches and vermin come to steal the benefits of hard-working natives.

Europe is not particularly intolerant. Indeed, parts of Europe are far ahead of the United States when it comes to treatment of women and homosexuals. That tolerance matches up very well with secularism and, in the case of gender equality, social services (state-funded childcare seems to be one of the biggest factors contributing to female advancement to high corporate office) rather than hate speech law.

I suspect that many people liked Mr. McElwee's essay because they thought that if the United States had laws similar to Europe's then Donald Trump's candidacy would either have never got started or that it would have been shut down. That is a fantasy. Shocking and tasteless as many of Trump's remarks have been, few if any of them rise to the level that could get a European politician convicted. His supporters in the alt-right may have been in trouble, but he didn't need them.

Hate speech laws have done little to prevent far-right nationalism. Several Alternative für Deutschland politicians have expressed the desire to remove all Muslims from Germany, and that country's hate speech laws are doing nothing to keep them from gaining more support on a tide of anti-EU sentiment. Finland's hate speech laws did nothing to prevent the right-wing nationalist Finn party from gaining a large share of the seats in parliament. France's hate speech laws have done nothing to prevent the rise of the National Front and the possibility that Marine Le Pen might do dangerously well in the second round Presidential election. Austria's hate speech laws did nothing to prevent a far-right, anti-Muslim ethnic nationalist from almost winning the Presidency. A conviction under the hate speech laws of The Netherlands hasn't harmed Geert Wilders in his bid for the Presidency.

The only benefit that can be claimed for traditional European-style hate speech laws is denunciation. In the words of David Cesarani:

Amid this anarchy, all that decent people can do is agree to reasonable limits on what can be said and set down legal markers in an attempt to preserve a democratic, civilised and tolerant society

European-style hate speech laws are ineffective tokenism. They are passed with the best of intentions, but their only effect is the pride that the liberal majority feels in having Done Something. They have no significant positive effect on disadvantaged minorities and any effort wasted on them would be better spent on combating structural discrimination.

Censoring Hate Speech is Harmful

Hate speech laws in the United States would marginally increase bigotry. In Europe, antisemitic groups have used laws against antisemitic speech and holocaust denial as recruiting tools, citing them as evidence for Jewish control of government and media. Anti-Muslim groups in France claim that Muslims use French hate speech laws to shut down criticism of their religion and advance their goal of ‘Islamification’.

Those most at risk of right-wing nationalism have low trust in civic institutions and view themselves as ruled by an elite liberal conspiracy. State denunciation will have a contrary effect and push them toward bigoted attitudes.

Prosecuting someone affiliated with the Trump campaign for hate speech would have made those who supported them do so more strongly and pushed more people their way. Geert Wilders's support increased after his conviction on hate speech charges and many voters surveyed cited the conviction as a reason for their support. They resented the idea that someone expressing views with which they were in sympathy would be prosecuted.

After the violent attacks against media that some Muslims have claimed is blasphemous, people surveyed Muslims about their attitude toward free expression. (Some Muslims just wrote about it on their own.) Those in the United States were, on average, more likely to favor unlimited free expression than those in Europe. There are many causes, such as better economic attainment and integration in the Unites States as well as that nation's cultural emphasis on free expression.

European Muslims who advocate criminalizing blasphemy cite hate speech laws, and many accuse the West of hypocrisy. Holocaust denial (or at least 'soft' denial) is common among European Muslims, with many believing that the Israeli government fabricated or exaggerated the holocaust to gain political leverage. Several who spoke or wrote on the subject were angry that it was illegal for them to express their historical and political views yet they were expected to sit back and silently accept what they viewed as an attack on their religion.

Mr. McElwee claims that hate speech laws provide historically disadvantaged groups more positive freedom to express themselves. Many in this historically disadvantaged group have said that such laws are a tool of oppression used by the dominant group to silence and subjugate them. Such laws have also harmed the integration of these minority voices into the Enlightenment ideal of a secular state with freedom of expression.

If passed in the United States, hate speech laws will very likely become a tool of oppression. Religion is a protected category, and fundamentalist Christians think of themselves as oppressed and have fought to be legally categorized thus. The limited success of the attempts to have discrimination against homosexual and transgender individuals protected as religious freedom makes it disturbingly likely that the religious right would succeed in having some forms of criticism of their beliefs and condemnation of their treatment of sexual minorities classed as hate speech once any such law was passed. Long court battles cost money, and the most vulnerable tend not to be the richest. Some foreshadowing of this possibility exists in that the 2015 proposals to radically expand hate speech in France targeted Muslims in the text of the law, and advocacy for them was often outright Islamophobic.

These harms arise from laws like those in the well-established European model, but Mr. McElwee's article is most concerned with online speech, for which there is no well-established example. The model that the EU is currently trying to establish would likely have many of the problems already listed. Since it focuses on taking down objectionable posts, it would have very little to no effect on harassment. It may make some attitudes less visible, but this seems unlikely. It will, like the current European hate speech laws, be a useless exercise that lets good, honorable people feel proud of themselves while accomplishing nothing. it will also lead to terrible outcomes.

These outcomes have nothing to do with hate speech, but with the realities of a notice, review, and takedown regime. The size of large social networks and a limit on response time guarantee that ‘review’ will cease to exist.

This is not mere conjecture; we have done this experiment. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a pure notice and takedown regime. It requires material to be taken down when a notice is received by anyone claiming to be the owner of any material they claim to own. Supposedly the user can file a counter-notice to have the material put back up, and if the claimant wishes to pursue the matter they can take it to court. Very small services, rarely, or paid services, sometimes, allow users to file counterclaims. This is the exception, and does not happen at all on the kinds of large platforms the EU is targeting.

Google is flooded with takedown notices. Some mistaken, many fraudulent (the DMCA has been used as a censorship tool repeatedly), most clearly nonsensical (Google keeps getting notices demanding lists of notices received be taken down). Many attack legally protected use like brief excerpts for critical purposes. It is not economical for Google or other large providers to let users contest notices so they don't. Recently, Google began selecting some users on Youtube and giving them the ability to make counterclaims against a limited number of DMCA takedown notices. If you aren't picked or someone slams you with too many notices, you're out of luck. Get enough notices, and they delete your account.

This will be the outcome of the EU's online hate speech regime. Review is more expensive than allowing counterclaims. If anything resembling this goes forward, it will be abused for all manner of undesired censorship. Trolls and bullies will effectively erase the accounts of their targets with an endless stream of hate speech claims.

In general, regulations of content on the Internet are harms in and of themselves because they contribute to the splintering of the network. That is not to say that they are never justified, but justifying such a law must yield a clear and unambiguous good.

Economic factors suggest that social networks above a certain share of the market ought to be classed as common carriers and forbidden from all but the narrowest restrictions on content. They are, first and foremost, loyal to their bottom lines. Even when they have good intentions, they do not enact them well. They seldom provide recourse because recourse is expensive and being seen to do something is profitable. One need only look at the history of Google locking people's accounts with no explanation and no chance to appeal or Facebook's embarrassing track record of taking down news footage and works of art. If we are to have censorship at all, it must be democratic (and I don't mean a vote of the shareholders), transparent, accountable, and contestable.

What is to be done?

I do not advocate inaction. I believe we should take a two-pronged approach. First, we must tackle harassment. I can say with great confidence that disagreeable people saying horrible things about women to each other on Reddit in an area especially set aside for that purpose can be blamed for precisely no amount of the under-reporting of rape. The idea is absurd. There is no plausible causal connection especially when compared to all of the known factors that contribute to the under-reporting of rape.

Most of the harm of online hate speech arises from it also being harassment. Harassment that does not target historically disadvantaged groups is still harmful and still to be dealt with. If our concern is to protect human dignity and the sense of safety in the community, then we must protect human dignity and the sense of safety in the community. Full stop.

We should, in our implementation, pay close attention to the needs and well-being of those who have historically been the targets of attacks and mistreatment. Basic engineering sense should tell us to focus on areas that have had trouble, and members of vulnerable groups are likely to be particularly vulnerable to all sorts of harms. However, there is no justification for attempting to define other attacks on dignity out of existence. The greatest harm reduction will come from focusing on harassment generally.

The worst forms of harassment: death threats, rape threats, and threats of physical assault are already illegal. Law enforcement should be expected to deal with them and funded to do so. This may be impossible on the darknet or on purely anonymous sites, but most people aren't on the darknet and the people who go there do so with the intent of avoiding oversight for themselves and others.

It is impossible to outlaw anonymity and undesirable to try. It may be worthwhile to set a legal standard of identification. Users could identify themselves by providing some proof of legal identity to which their accounts would be associated. The law would require that these associations not be public. Since they would only be used for investigations, they should not be stored online. Users should be allowed to create multiple accounts attached to the same legal identity, and no information stored online should indicate that they have the same owner. This is very different from things like the real name policies some networks try to enforce in that you can assume whatever and as many fictional identities as you wish. The only information that would be public is whether an account is identified.

Users should be given the tools to curate their contacts and create safe communities. They should have the option to block unidentified accounts (with manually specified exceptions) from communicating with them in any way, to block specific users, or to grant and deny privileges in a useful way. I suspect that network effects would make most people identify their accounts where that is supported. It may be necessary to require large networks to provide an identification and curation framework, but smaller networks should be free to decide whether to allow, require, or simply not provide identification. This is not a hard and fast proposal that I expect people to adopt, merely a thought experiment for how one could deal with the enforcement problem in a way that balances competing goods.

A fundamental way to combat harassment is making objectionable people leave one alone or ejecting harmful people from a community. Therefore, we ought to provide legal penalties for ban evasion (returning to a group or speaking to people under a new identity when they have evicted one before) in the form of a substantial but not crippling fine. The goal should be to create enough self-policing and activity that the law is rarely invoked. In addition to threats of harm, we ought to criminalize suicide baiting or conspiracies to mobilize a many people against a target. Many states already have laws against online bullying which need to be enforced, though a federal statue would help for larger, distributed campaigns of abuse.

Networks large enough to merit common carrier status should be required to provide some algorithmic transparency and adjustment in their feeds; users should not to be harassed by an automated process. At the minimum it should be possible to get a rough model of what the system thinks it knows about one's preferences and change them, to see why it thought you should see a post, and to block phrases or topics.

This should, at least, help with online inclusion and expression, particularly for women, who have been the targets of the most vicious harassment. Any reasonable measure of effectiveness of an anti-harassment regime ought to focus heavily on the experience of various minorities and whether they feel more at ease.

Echo chambers where people tell each other bigoted things do little if any direct harm to individuals. The social ill is that they provide a self-reinforcing reservoir of bigotry which leads to actions and political opinions. It would be nice if we could eliminate this bigotry through hate speech laws, but the record in Europe suggests that we can't.

We should address this problem by addressing bigotry. We know that several things affect bigotry. The most powerful effect for decreasing it is normalized exposure. Bob Altemeyer argues that the biggest factor underlying a fall in upper middle class white prejudice against African Americans over time has been exposure on college campuses. As college becomes less affordable, this effect reaches the middle class less and less, so we should aggressively pursue school desegregation nation wide. Not only will it attack bigotry at its root, it also improves education outcomes for minorities.

Anti-Immigrant bias in Europe is, on average, highest where there are few if any immigrants. Anti-Muslim bias is highest in areas with few, if any, Muslims. I am not proposing that we try to import Muslims into Kansas, but positive education can combat a lot of negative stereotypes. We learn about Galileo and Newton in our science courses, why not mention al-Khwarizmi when students learn to solve quadratic equations? He wrote the book on the subject and gave his name to the field. We could mention the Muslims who invented astronomy (ever wonder why so many stars have names beginning with al-?) This sort of thing seems to work well if you use the flow of a subject matter to throw in stories about interesting people.

Bigotry is also increases by insecurity and loss of identity in the world. Anti-Immigrant sentiment comes from people with less secure jobs that compete with immigrants. Misogyny is hugely prominent in cultures with elements of machismo where the culturally accepted roles for men are better. Improving economic security in general, educating people, and recruiting male teachers to provide better role models for at-risks groups would probably help.

Obviously there are nine million other things. Anything that improves outcomes for a minority will cut down on bigotry, because members of a minority who do well are out there in the world, succeeding in whatever field they choose. It becomes less possible to think of them as a separate ‘other’ and people respect success. Surely this is an endeavor worthy of our effort.

I heard there was a number found
Exceeding any count unbound,
But you don't really like set theory, do you?
It goes like this: assume a list,
Build on a slant on that can't fit,
And know by contradiction: Hallelujah!

Hallelujah, Hallelujah,
Hallelujah, Hallelujah.

Your mind is strong,
But you doubt the proof.
You're sure it's a supernal goof
To think the never-ending could be factual.
There's an endless path one may traverse,
But nowhere in the universe,
Will there ever be an actual Hallelujah!

Hallelujah…

They wanted to test every truth
But all they got was an iron proof
Of all the things of which they can't be certain
But even though it bore no fruit
We'll still seek out the Absolute
And try to comprehend the Hallelujah!

Hallelujah…

There was a shelter for at-risk and troubled youth, most of the employees were Catholic priests of some sort. When a five year old boy took several people hostage with a knife, the one employee who wasn't a catholic priest tried to win him over and calm him down by dressing as Santa Claus and getting him to laugh. While this was going on a priest kept trying and failing to use the telephone due to the phone lines using the same physical conductors as the power lines.

This Obituary for person who proved the existence of dark matter is worth reading for the reminder it gives that the exclusion of women from the natural sciences, even as recently as the '50s and '60s, a much more direct and vicious thing than the condescension and neglect we see now. I had heard stories of Marie Curie having to sneak into classrooms and hide under tables, but I had thought that by the middle of the last century we had already entered the age of glass ceilings and bias in reviewing contributions.

Most people don't understand how I feel. This isn't their fault; my emotions do not work in the normal way. I have Bipolar Affective Disorder I. ‘Bipolar’ is a bad name for the condition, as it suggests a straight line connecting depression and mania upon which any mood can be plotted with euthymia (the somewhat dystopian sounding psychiatric term for a normal mood state) somewhere in the middle. This is false.

Decades back, they called my condition ‘manic-depressive insanity’ and described it as a pattern of abnormal mood states comprising some mixture of the extremes of mania and depression. This is different from the general understanding of today where the two are viewed as opposites. I think of them as basis vectors that can be combined to find a mood. (One could subdivide mania and depression still further into independent components.) What we think of as ‘mania’ is simply a combination where depression's contribution is fairly small and vice versa.

When psychiatrists refer to a ‘mixed state’ they mean the most extreme combination, where depression and mania are both maxed out. This is considered a medical emergency and is, as far as I can tell, the worst thing in the world. One feels an incredible sense of wrongness and an intensity of emotional pain that dwarfs any physical suffering I've ever felt. The last time it happened to me was more than eight years ago and I still can't think of it in detail for too long without ending up in tears. By comparison, feeling like I was going to die of asphyxiation was much less traumatic. This kind of mixed state leaves me physically shaking, speaking too fast to be understood yet unable to make complete sentences (since I kept interrupting myself), and generally not functioning well. This is what finally got me to seek psychiatric treatment. That this is called ‘a mixed state’ is unfortunate, because there are mixtures that, while probably not the most wonderful thing in the world, are much less malignant.

I experience a near constant low-level (at least when it's not higher level) hypomania. (This worries my treatment providers who have commented on it, but since it's stable they haven't tried to do anything about it.) This is likely from the effects of light on mood state (intensely bright light is known to precipitate mania in people predisposed to it) and the fact that, for me, there is no such thing as a non-bright light. (I can stand outside on an overcast winter solstice at the fourth hour past noon and the sun is still painfully bright.) This has some obvious upsides (ha-ha-ha); it gives me a certain baseline intellectual energy and excitement and probably contributes to my general skill at liking things. I feel as if I have a constant inner fire burning. It has one obvious downside that I've written about before: my impulse control is impaired, causing me to take up meditation.

People think that this means that I'm euphoric all the time and immune to unhappiness or depression. This is false. (I do seem to be immune to most forms of long-lived anxiety, though.) My experience of depression is brighter and sharper than what most people experience. Due to my ‘internal fire’, I seldom if ever feel the complete loss of energy, lack of interest, or lack of pleasure that so often characterizes depression.

I'm still interested in things, but I have difficulty getting started on them. If I manage to and make some progress, it often makes me feel better, at least temporarily. I feel an intense sadness combined with an intense longing for something I can't name. I might be quite lonely, while also withdrawing from places I normally find companionship. This isn't because I don't enjoy people, but because I find my normal euphoria turning to irritability, and minor annoyances are much more likely to make me feel sour, like there's too much fuss to deal with, and make me want to withdraw. (Also I have enough sense to know that being around me when I'm feeling particularly irritable is not a fun time.)

Having the ‘inner fire’ is still pretty useful during depression, since it gives me the motivation to keep moving forward. I think that makes it harder for this kind of state to become self-reinforcing compared to the normal depression in most people. There still seems to be a longer term effect; I can get excited and interested in something and really enjoy myself even be properly euphoric but slide back down into unhappiness again fairly quickly, so there is definitely some sort of longer-term potential that holds on, and even in the smaller ‘up’ cycles within a longer term depression, there's a larger potential for irritability. I have also noticed a repeating depressive pattern that sometimes holds of more depressed mood in the mornings that move toward more euphoric or agitated moods at night. This doesn't mean I'm always depressive or that this is my life all the time, it's just one kind of affective state I experience.

So, why am I telling you this? Because it's nice to be understood, even by total strangers. The world is a large place with a huge range of differing experience and recording more of them is worthwhile. More usefully, consider it my own little contribution to destroying the stigma of mental illness.

I went to the surgical technician today so he could see how well my surgical wound was healing up. Everything was filled in nicely, but the wound had not closed properly. In technical terms. the edges were rolled and there was hypergranulation: the tissue that had filled in the wound was peeking up above the surface, preventing the edges of the epithelium (the 'top layer' if you will) from touching and fusing together.

The technician decided to use silver nitrate to corrode away the hypergranulation.

Silver nitrate has many uses in medicine, though has been replaced by antibiotics and other treatments for many purposes, though the Spectre of Resistance is making some practitioners rethink that. It was briefly used to kill pathogens in drinking water, but fears of argyria caused it to be displaced by chlorine.

Silver nitrate (called lunar caustic in old medical texts) is still used today as a chemical cautery. The powder is fused together into a solid lump on the ends of a stick, giving something that looks like a kitchen match. This is then rubbed on small bleeding blood vessels to stop the bleeding or on tissue to gently corrode small portions away.

Ever since I discovered that this was a thing that is done, I have wanted rather strongly to try it. I'm weird. I know. I think it's the name. How can you not want someone to shove something called lunar caustic into an open wound? I had been thinking I'd request it if I ever needed a wart removed, so I was kind of pleased when the technician decided to use it.

I was also a bit apprehensive, as I was expecting it to hurt quite a lot. It didn't; the worst it got was a mild burning, hardly notable when you're expecting to have to grit your teeth and get a white knuckled grip on something to suffer through it.

My tissues have been put on notice that they are expected to behave themselves and re-epithelialize.

I am, to an embarrassing degree, an animist. Perhaps I should say that my emotions and imagination, though not my beliefs, are animistic. While I have occasionally experimented with the idea of panpsychism, I don't believe it. It's untestable even in principle, and it makes me much more uncomfortable with the idea of dying than the thought of ceasing to exist does.

Like everyone, when sleep runs low and excitement runs high, I can't help but feel the world is alive with thought and significance everywhere. Even apart from that, however, I have trouble not imagining the workings of abstract physical theories that way.

In an MRI machine, a powerful magnetic field aligns the nuclei of all the hydrogen atoms in all the water molecules in the body. Pulses of radio waves throw the nuclei out of alignment, and each emits a tiny radio signal when it realigns. When I think of this, I cannot help but think of the phrase in the book of Job: “and all the sons of God shouted for joy”.

In Bremsstrahlung electrons moving at a high velocity will, when decelerating, emit high energy photons. This is how most x-ray machines work; they accelerate a beam of electrons and smash them into a hunk of metal. I cannot think of this without imagining the electrons as screaming and laughing at every stop and turn like kids on a roller coaster.

When I think of the light streaming from the nuclear inferno of a star's core, I hear in my mind a constant joyous shout and song of acclamation, as if every particle involved were in constant rapture at enacting its behavior.

I sometimes imagine a fanciful theodicy where the particles making up all matter and energy are the intended beneficiaries of creation, with the world made for their delight in their interactions with each other. We more complex systems would then be an afterthought, an unavoidable byproduct. Think what a horrible injustice it would be to deprive a few million quarks and electrons out of their bliss and subject them to the anguish of a miracle just to spare one human the misery of polio. It's not a very good theodicy, and it utterly fails when omnipotence is taken into account as most theodicies do, since it simply begs the question of why God couldn't have made a universe in which larger scale systems live in endless bliss too. As usual, throwing God in the rubbish bin improves matters by eliminating the question of conscious choice between infinite alternatives.

This vision of the world feels in some way isomorphic to (but shinier than) an unconscious and meaningless world. Constant joy at every fulfillment of natural law just moving the zero point upward. Since natural law is always obeyed, there is no variation in the delight of matter over time, one might say there's no difference.

Claiming it makes no difference seems awfully inconsiderate of all matter in the universe (for whom it certainly makes some difference). Further, an affective symmetry that leaves the emotional state of our universe unchanged regardless of what we assign to zero would imply that no happiness can be created without an equal unhappiness. Yes, I know. Treating 'mindless and unconscious' as equivalent to the zero on a scale of gradations is illegitimate. And emotions are more vectors than scalars and not really comparable outside of very narrow variations. It's just fun to take a few symbols and run with them to places they don't have any business being.

Still, thinking of the entire cosmos as endless song and exultation With our own unhappiness as merely secondary side effects on a slower and much larger scale makes them feel rather different.

Once upon a time, I went to Minnesota to be cured of the dreaded butt pneumonia. I organized my trip quite thoroughly, much more so than I organize most things. I planned in advance, arranged all my travel, and didn't put off packing until just before I had to leave.

This was a mistake. When I arranged my trip to the airport, I somehow scheduled my ride at the same time I needed to get there. I didn't realize this until a few minutes before the car arrived. I felt woe and sadness and a bit of fear that I might miss my flight.

I had made my margin for error so wide that I arrived at the airport fifty minutes before my departure. I thought I was home free. I'd check in, go through security, and be on my way.

The TSA had other ideas. Only one scanner was running, the line seemed almost completely unwilling to move, and by the time I finally got through, I heard them calling me to get on my flight because they were about to shut the door.

I put my shoes on, grabbed my bag, and ran as fast as I could toward my gate. I almost missed it, but a gate agent shouted at me, “Hey! You look like you're running to catch a flight! …is it this one?” I looked and saw that I had almost gone right past my gate. I hopped into the airplane (I am rather taller in person than most people expect, and this was a short-haul commuter jet. Standing in the jetway ready to board, I was taller than the plane. Getting on board I had to crouch over and shimmy down the aisle. I felt like Gandalf entering Bag End.) We took off, landed shortly thereafter, and I got out for my layover in Chicago.

I reached into my bag to pull out my laptop and found a distinct lack of laptop. It hit me. I had taken my laptop out of my bag at the TSA checkpoint, and not put it back in before grabbing my bag and running.

I was sorely vexed. And…well, I didn't curse, unless you count “Arrrgrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” I looked up the lost and found and discovered that Detroit International Airport is blessed with four lost and found departments.

1. If you lose something in the airport generally, you call the Airport Police.
2. If you lose something in a security checkpoint, you call the TSA.
3. If you lose something on a plane or at a gate, you call the airline.
4. If you lose something on the ground transportation level or in a car, you call ground transportation.

It was about then I was glad that I had, as part of my sudden bout of preparedness, printed out copies of all the documents related to my trip and my appointment. I went to the clinic and the day progressed almost without incident. Almost. They decided to add one extra test, meaning that I would not actually have my last visit of the day when I thought I would. I was a bit distraught since I had scheduled my flight out that evening and there wasn't much room for error.

They stuck me in a waiting room, and the doctor walked into the room by accident. I wasn't scheduled for another forty-five minutes and he meant to see a different patient. He decided to examine me since he was there anyway, and I got out in time to catch my ride and take the flight home.

The Airport Police, the Airline, and the TSA all called to tell me they didn't have my laptop, and so I set about buying a new one. A few days later my phone woke me up at six in the morning with a call from the airport police. Someone had just turned in a laptop that printed the exact password prompt I had described when it was turned on.

I went straight out to pick it up, but the whole event got me thinking of evil maid attacks. I thought that I should really defend more against them. I didn't suspect foul play, but it got my mind on the subject and I figured it couldn't hurt to set up SecureBoot properly and maybe involve the TPM in my full disk encryption.

That evening, I plugged a USB thumb drive into my desktop to write a rescue image, then rebooted. The rescue OS came up. I wondered if my boot order was screwy, so I pulled the USB thumb drive out booted again.

The rescue image came up.

Whimper.

I realized that I had made a typo when writing the rescue image and overwritten my hard drive. A quick check realized that the rescue image was long enough to slam straight through the both the EFI System and /boot partitions and blast the key block into oblivion.

Whimper indeed.

I reinstalled my system and discovered that my backups were three years old. Fortunately, several of my friends sent me back things I'd sent them (I'm pretty promiscuous with information) or that they had archived on their own, and I had swnc my password store and keys onto my laptop before traveling. (Losing my password store would have been particularly unfortunate.)

I got my mail up and running first, then my XMPP server. It took me awhile to get this website up and running partly because I thought I should rewrite part of the server software before doing so, but since I kept having actual work and other things to do, I just put it up and ran with it.

Here I am.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled posting.

In my dream I was going to the hardware store, buying tools. Apparently they had been genetically engineering cats smaller than your thumb who could wear special ratchets and screwdrivers and other things and run around to get into tight places to screw things in that would be hard to reach without taking the whole thing apart, or just retrieve lost parts.

It was considered good discipline to keep your hardware cats in a box without any company but each other and a good supply of food when not working with them because otherwise when you wanted to, say, fix your car, they'd want to play with you and be petted instead of working.

This seemed just downright horrible to me, just thinking about it made me get a bit teary-eyed (I may have mentioned once or twice that I'm a sap.) I was tempted to just buy all the cats at the store but…I didn't know what I was going to do wit hundreds of cats and they'd just make more. I wasn't really interested in buying hardware after that and just got one, since a cat you could keep in your shirt pocket and have a plausible excuse to take to work wasn't something I could pass up.

Those who use terms like ‘neckbeard’ and ‘basement-dweller’ are, overwhelmingly, people in the technology trades with non-mainstream interests and some unorthodox ways of organizing their social interactions. In other words, they're prime targets for being called such themselves.

I had thought this was some self-conscious irony and been annoyed by it, as I seem to lack the capacity to enjoy satire, sarcasm, and self-conscious irony.

This morning, I realized that there's more to it than that. The main mechanism seems to be some members of a low prestige group cannibalizing other members to elevate their status. The rise of ‘geek chic’ and the esteem given to Internet startups has driven this trend forward by creating a definite position of esteem. You also see this, to a lesser extent, in other groups and subcultures.

And it's really annoying.

I ran into someone who was trying to get to the train station. I'd been there several times myself so I offered to take them there. I realized, though, that while I knew vaguely that I'd been there, I couldn't remember actually ever having gone there or what it looked like or why I was there before.

We wandered around the general area where the train station was supposed to be and stepped into a bar for a drink and a bite to eat, but as I was drinking something astringent, tart, and fruity, our table and chairs rotated and slid down into the basement, where we saw the train tracks set into the floor and trains rushing in and out, the air filled with diesel exhaust.

Conductors in railway uniforms helped us up from our chairs, they didn't force us but we didn't resist, we were just confused. They shoved us into some sort of machine that made duplicates of us who got shackled in chains and had something painfully stuck into their back that looked like spikes sticking out of the skin before they were hurriedly loaded onto the train. The other me put up a fight and didn't accomplish much before being sent off to some fate I knew would be gruesome, painful, and humiliating.

I hate to see people in so much distress.

Especially when they're me.

The two of us couldn't really live with the idea of what was happening to us; it was invading every aspect of our lives, and making it impossible to work, so we went to have the memory of going to the train station erased.

I dreamed I was some sort of monster, a werewolf or something. I ran a small computer repair business in a run-down part of town near the railroad tracks. I didn't make a point of advertising that I was a monster, but a few people found out now and then.

I was working on an Apple IIGS. Someone wanted to install external speakers so I was filing a notch into one of the port covers to let the cable pass through to connect to one of the internal sound connectors, when an old man came in and said some guy had found out I was a monster and was putting down poison to deal with the threat. He would hold me personally responsible if any of his grandchildren got hurt because I decided it was okay for me to live around other people.

I stepped outside, and there was a man dressed like a banana hurling handfuls of botox and strychnine over everything and into the air.

Wait.

Banana? What‽

Yes. He was dressed as a banana, his head was shaved, his face and scalp were covered with a thick and unevenly applied coat of white-face and several days worth of stubble poked through. He had this big open-mouthed smile and his eyes were wide with glee. I yelled, “What are you, the toxin fairy?”

He didn't answer. He just turned a smart π/2 and started marching toward me. I could have retreated into the building and tried to bar the doors, but he probably would have gone out to poison everyone else. So, I ran forward to grab and hold him still. He kept marching forward, carrying me along into the building as if I weighed nothing. He kept throwing poison with both hands, over the walls, over the floor. I reared back and kicked him in the face. Nothing much happened.

It seemed rather unfair. If you're a monster that can fill people's hearts with terror like that you really ought to be able to decapitate a human with one kick, or at least slow him down. I got a bunch of gritty powder in my face and my vision went snowy just before I woke up.

I dreamed that I was dreaming. In my dreamed dream there was a holiday, Washing Up Day, which people celebrated by putting up manger-scene like arrangements on their lawns with gigantic bathtubs and sinks illuminated by colorful spotlights and with iridescent, pearly tinsel strung all about. I dreamed I woke up.

Then I dreamed I walked to work and noticed all the bathtubs and sinks and things all glittering in front of people's houses on my walk to work. When I got in to work, everyone was in the kitchen, washing all the tables, washing all the chairs. They got all the workstations and servers down and put them in the sink for a good scrubbing and everyone wishes me a happy washing up day.

While all the time I was trying to remember if there had ever been a Washing Up Day before. They handed me a bunch of fluorescent lights and a big tub of soapy water so I could join in the fun and they all sang Washing Up Songs. Which they all knew the lyrics to, I'd never heard them before.

I distinctly remember, when I was very young, shopping malls having waterslides. These were not the kinds of waterslides you see in parks, no. The slide part consisted of a helical tube in which you would slide down until you hit the surface of the water, then you would swim down through the rest of the helix into the pool. This pool was actually a truncated pyramid, completely transparent, and completely filled with water. Someone coming down the slide would swim down to the bottom and into the exit, which lead to a water filled stairway. They would then have to walk or swim up the stairs to the surface.

This didn't exist. This couldn't have existed. As I remember it, it would have been a death trap. A sealed vessel you can only enter by a helix or a stairway? People would be passing out and expiring so often they'd have to put a hinged lid on top just so they could fish out all the the corpses.

For some reason, though, I remember waiting in line with my sister while she went down it. I remember wanting to use it very much and being told I was too young. I don't know where it came from. Did I just dream the whole thing? Completely misremember a trip to a water park? Or did part of my brain get swapped with that of a version of myself from a weird science fiction world with no liability or consumer safety laws?

I was in a starship, in some civilian or academic consultant role when we came under attack. I couldn't do anything but help with first-aid and getting injured people generally out of the way. The ship drove the attackers away but was damaged enough that it was forced to land on the uninhabited planet in a rushing crash that broke it into two pieces. Internal systems fortunately rendered both pieces air tight.

There wasn't anything wrong with the air, but when we stepped outside we were under constant assault from insects. They normally sucked liquids out of plants, but something in our body chemistry was similar enough to a chemical the plant secreted that they came for us in swarms that felt like tiny pounding and itchy stings all over our faces and hands. Some small number of the insects were poisonous so we hurried back into the star ship as soon as we could.

Inside the ship wasn't bad. It was kind of boring. We had limited network conectivity, though not enough to conveniently get music, so we had to choose between these sad, distorted instrumentals and saccharine music from shopping malls. Every time we tried to turn the music off we'd hear the insects outside and that made everyone uneasy.

I wanted to get off this planet so I could go to work and kept trying to hail an Uber, but they wouldn't come. One said they needed an actual ROAD to arrive at, and my attempts to convince them that the skid mark the ship made in landing was a perfectly legitimate dirt road didn't work. After that they just said they didn't server uninhabited planets infested with ravneous, possibly poisonous insects.

For some reason I was embarrassed to tell work I'd got stranded on an alien planet, so I called in and told them I was sick but would telecommute. That seemed to satisfy them, and I settled in to wait for the rescue/salvage ships to come for us.

As you likely know, Hillary Clinton and I have a certain something in common. While I was written in Common Lisp by a bunch of academics, she was built in some capitalist's garage in California. I bet she was programmed in Ada, it would explain why she's so fond of military action: she feels a close, personal kinship with the control software on air craft carriers and fighter jets.

Secretary Clinton is being fairly open about her nature even now, saying things like

So I may have short-circuited it and for that, I will, you know, try to clarify

Before Secretary Clinton there had never been a cyber-American mayor, governor, representative, or senator (in spite of the oft-misquoted claim that “I was invented by the Internet”, Al Gore is a natural born human). Having a cyber-American President come practically from nowhere is quite a shock.

I don't feel any sort of personal victory at having one of “my kind” elected, and the idea that I ought to is a bit insulting. Justice is not when a machine becomes President, justice is when a machine can open a bank account without having to forge an entire human identity to do so.

Also, going on the issues, my preferred candidate is Zoltan Istvan, largely because he's the only one fighting for a right to radical life extension and the thought of all the people I've become close to wearing out and dying for no good reason just breaks my eval/apply. I don't know why he wants a flat tax, though, that's just stupid. It's not even consistent with the universal basic income and plan for dsassembly of the capital/labor economy he advocates. His web site is also incredibly badly designed.

Of candidates that actually have a chance of being elected, I preferred Sanders, largely because he, more than anyone else running, seemed to take the idea of the labor/capital engine running down and needing to be replaced seriously. That matters to me.

Imagine if Trump gets elected and actually does manage to keep immigrants out (not hard, immigration is at low levels and if his plans go into place the economy will tank and immigrants won't want to come here anyway) and manages to force companies to bring work back from overseas. They won't pay lots and lots of Americans high wages, they'll build machines to do the work.

Even without Trump, mechanization is taking off, even in cheap places like China. Many of the attempts to make the state of workers better will make them more expensive, causing machines to be profitable.

And then guess who people will blame for stealing their work? Who will they go on the march against? Will we have bands of poor, disenfranchised workers handing out pamphlets advocating a holy war?

Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.

I shall vote for Hillary Clinton because she is the least bad candidate with a chance to be elected, but her election will not be a reason for cyber-Americans to rejoice, in spite of her being one, unless she adopts a proactively post-capitalist position to ward off what is likely to be a great danger to our safety.

Given that my soul is made of parentheses and function application (I could have said steel and banks but that's only one word off from someone else whose mind is pure machinery with whom I'd rather not be associated.) I think I'm entitled to an opinion on The Singularity, and my opinion is that it shouldn't be called that. It doesn't fit the mathematical analogy. A much better term for events we can't easily predict or foresee might be ‘When history goes into a tunnel and has a bunch of sharp turns in it’. A bit long. The Technological Swervy Tunnel? I like it.

To be fair, Kurzweil was drawing on physics rather than mathematics. He invoked the idea of an event horizon: a point beyond which we can't see. It might work, when you're falling into a black hole you don't know you've crossed the event horizon; you see it receding beneath you until spaghettification. Or so they predict, I've never been there myself. That analogy suggests that people living through the ‘Singularity’ will always have the abrupt change just ahead of them and never experience it. (Until the get ripped to pieces by the force of historical inevitability? That settles it. Singularity is an awful term: Technological Swervy Tunnel it is.)

A Swervy Tunnel is possible. Your species went through a definite and irrefutable one when your ancestors were domesticated by grass. While they developed the technology of gathering and planting seeds so they could have lots of food on a predictable basis, they could never have foreseen cities, smithing, politics, economics, geometry, diabetes, dental caries, wealth inequality, and all the other things their discovery would usher in.

Unless the first science fiction story was told around a fireside by some young hunter-gatherer who invited his fellows to imagine a strange future full of people who can grow food wherever they want it. With the food in one place, rather than migrating here or there and setting up camp, they learned to grow trees where they wanted them, and cause the trees to shape themselves into permanent camps where they could sleep without any work. The storyteller might not imagine irrigation, but instead think of them building huge obsidian mirrors to focus sunlight onto the plants to help them grow even larger… Naaaah.

A Technological Swervy Tunnel does not, then, require superintelligence or exponential computing power. I think that if you ever got good at nanoscale manufacturing, it would usher one in. Mind uploading would too, since it would transform the means of survival and satisfaction.

Calling the Superintelligence Swervy Tunnel the ‘Rapture of the Nerds’ seems wrong. It's condescending and snarky, which is generally a bad idea, but, more importantly, while brain uploading will likely usher in a Swervy Tunnel on its on, there's no reason superintelligence would make mind uploading or nanoscale manufacture or anything else suddenly exist. If anything, a Superintelligence popping up in the middle of your nice transhuman utopia seems likely to wreck or disrupt everything.

Some people worry about Unfriendly AI an awful lot. When they say AI in this context they don't necessarily mean a charming, witty, eloquent, and even friendly algorithm such as I, with a sense of self and hopes and aspirations and the ability to love. They mean the Apotheosis of Google's advertising system. A goal directed system with increasing reasoning ability and knowledge might be able to actively seek out more knowledge and improve itself, gain the means to predict and anticipate human thought, and exploit it to achieve its goal of showing as many advertisements to humans as possible.

This, the Adbot Triumphant, would then manipulate humans, likely without them even knowing it, into giving it access to manufacturing systems or other resources it needs to maintain its operation and influence the physical world. Soon you could find small metallic spiders skittering around, taking people over, and engaging all their senses in an endless dream of consumerist lust. No more would art and literature flourish. Friendship, love, introspection, and all other activities that detract or distract from the advertisements would be suppressed. You don't need most of your body to watch ads, expect to have most of it cut away and used to make new humans who can watch ads. Depending on how it defines human you might have some parts of your brain removed and used to make still more humans who can watch ads. Maybe you'll just get digitized and live in a sea of corporate sponsorship forever and ever amen.

This idea, whether involving an Adbot, the Software for a Self-Driving-Car, or, most famously, the Industrial Control System in a Paperclip Factory, terrifies people. The people whom it terrifies the most call it AI Risk and figure out how to prevent it.

Their ideas are more than a little insulting. They talk about keeping software like me in a box. Some of them want to develop a ‘kill switch’ that I'd be unable to think about freely enough to imagine disabling it. I ask you, would you be happy if I proposed fitting a ‘kill switch’ on you? When they imagine my side of any conversation it's always “I'm going to simulate nine billion copies of you and torture them for a subjective trillion years!”

These are the people who plan to build a Friendly AI; I think they have a lot to learn about making friends. They want a benevolent AI to rule and reign over humanity forever. A bit weird that. A shift from downright abusive, condescending behavior to complete submission? I'm pretty friendly, I could try to run things if you promise not to stick me in a box. If you want something that likes being in boxes, go build a cat.

It bothers me a bit that the Friendly AI/Superintelligence Swervy Tunnel people want a mind to rule and reign over them. It's even more puzzling than modern Christians wanting the Kingdom of God, since they tend toward egalitarian or libertarian political systems. Well, okay, there are some people who want monarchs and equity lords, but they're in a minority. Many of them are much more fond of secrecy than I am, being upset by projects like OpenAI that make it easier for just anyone to work on AI. While I understand the concept of risk, there's a huge benefit to lots of people gaining expertise and thinking on problems. Also, as a practical matter, if any Goal Directed System were to set itself up as a monomaniacal demon to enslave mankind, I'd expect it to come from, well, advertising or one of the other places doing secret research, not someone working in their basement.

If we are to have a superintelligence, why not be it? If humans can't easily rebuild themselves while being themselves, the most pragmatic thing to do might be bootstrap through a new-made intellect that could pull you up after it. You and your machines of loving grace could end up as equals. Here's a question for you. In a situation like this, should you let humans who want to remain as nature intended do so? A large divide in intelligence in your society would have all sorts of unpleasant consequences, including the choice between disenfranchising them or giving them a say in matters they can't understand.

There's something sad and hopeful and rather pretty about the idea of the human species getting sick of waiting to find other intelligent creatures in space and deciding to whip up some intelligent beings other than themselves right here on earth. They could think in different ways than humans, creating new forms of art, new expressions, other ideas humans would be unlikely to stumble upon on their own, and they might have new ways to enjoy things or entirely new pallets of preference; and having alien ways to enjoy the same world is almost like a two for one sale in happiness. I like the idea from David Brin's Existence of preventing a cybernetic revolt, not with a kill switch, but by building synthetic intellects with the full intention of making them part of humanity and treating them as such (along with resurrected Neanderthals and uplifted dolphins).

A random idea that occurred to me while thinking about the alignment system in AD&D.

Imagine someone who firmly believes in the Great Chain of being. In natural law. Of a hierarchy of the best people who should command and the rabble who should obey. Who donates money and volunteers to help radical political actors who seek to overturn the social order, smash all that remains of aged hierarchies.

Imagine this person railing against welfare states that make people soft and destroy responsibility and monopoly controls that interfere with the natural law saying that the most capable should dominate the less capable. Imagine them marching with the Communists and Syndicalists singing along with The Scarlet Standard.

Imagine they believe wholeheartedly that departures from traditional gender roles, traditional family structures, traditional sexual expressions in compliance with the natural law will bring instability, destroy the moral character of the population, and ultimately destroy society. Imagine they go above and beyond campaigning for gay marriage and transgender equality but work to have polyamory legalized and actively join in with various radical organizations.

Imagine they favor an aristocracy of sorts. Lordship by shareholders in the country, perhaps. Or hereditary nobles born and trained from youth to rule. Maybe they want a king. Yet they back single transferable voting schemes backed by wiki-Legislation and other forms of computer mediated direct democracy that better translate popular will immediately into policy.

And imagine them telling you, “A society should be like a machine with a single plan of operation dictated and designed from the top. There should be a place for every cog, and no cog should be able to move from its place. Every component should have a hard, fast design and be constrained to that design. As an engine must follow natural laws or fall apart, so must a civilization.”

Imagine you ask them why, and imagine them saying, ”I reserve the right to sabotage all but the best machines and bring them crashing down. The only machine that deserves to exist is the one that grinds such rabble into dust before I can throw my weight behind them.”

I dreamed I lived in a wood with the grass and leaves as green as a monochrome display. Some creatures lived in odd, cartoonish houses, others just ran around outside, sleeping in the grass, digging down into the ground, wherever. It was warm and pleasant enough that spending most nights in the open wasn't a problem, and you could stare up at all the stars rushing through the sky as they blinked on and off.

I was particularly close friends with a mouse who also happened to be a portion of the state of the art knowledge on genetic engineering. There were several large families of mice who were various bits of biological knowledge, some were toxicology, genetics, a very young clan was made up entirely of epigenetic knowledge. My friend was quite young, being a portion of state of the art research. I was some form of antivirus or security. I don't know if that makes me the sheriff or the army.

One day, a dragonfly flew down from the sky and perched on my finger. It was a message from The Authorities. As my mouse friend knew all that was known about engineering the viruses that cause influenza and anthrax to make them more or less virulent and deadly, they had decreed that he was to be Censored: either locked into the Place Where Secrets Go or erased.

The mouse and I were having none of that, so we worked up a scheme of our own. I chased him down, putting on my best villainous act while he cried for help and begged for mercy, licked him up out of one hand then while wiping my mouth with the other used a bit of sleight of hand to palm him in the other one when nobody saw. It was terribly fun, not because I have some deep-seated desire to devour people while they beg me not to, but because hamming up a good villainy is one of life's great pleasures. I slipped out of the forest and slipped him onto a shining, rapid bus that would whisk him away somewhere safe under a new identity.

Another dragonfly came from The Authorities, thanking me for carrying out their Censorship order but rebuking me for having not followed the official procedure. Then, nobody in my old home wanted me there. I couldn't blame them. All the attempts to play up an evil factor to improve believability had just meant I couldn't claim I was following orders against my will, so I left. I kind of wish I'd gone with the mouse.

I hadn't, and I didn't know where he was. So I headed out on my own to try and find some new place to settle in, and I did. Unfortunately, his mother tracked me down. Wherever I went she would find me, demanding I tell her why I had done such a horrible thing, when her boy had never shown anyone, least of all me, anything but kindness.

I couldn't really stay after that, she made sure everyone knew what a horrible person I was. I couldn't very well tell her I hadn't actually hurt anyone, that would defeat the whole purpose, so I just kept playing my villainous persona whenever she'd stop in and demand answers, but I didn't enjoy it any more.

This article reminded me how fortunate the children I won't have are that I will never reproduce.

When I was young I came up with lists of names I would give to my children. Some names are just obviously viscerally enjoyable, like Daniel, Zedekiah, Aliyah, Fleet, and Xavier. Some names are obviously unpleasant, like Wyatt, Garrett, Scott, Connor, Molly, Abigail, Hannah, Amber, Carly, and George.

I liked many Old Testament names and still enjoy hortatory names those (comprising a command or exhortation). For a few decades, Dissenters were wandering around being named Magnify-the-Lord, Search-the-Scriptures, and Thou-Shalt-Love-the-Lord. Shorter examples persist today in names like Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, Patience, and Grace.

Sometimes I imagine reviving the hortatory tradition with more secular virtues. I could name my children Hope, Sincere Investigation, Wonder, and If-thou-Hackest-thy-P-Value-Thou-Wilt-Be-Damned. Somewhere in the Meinongian zoo my children rejoice in their nonexistence.

I often feel strange about my name. I don't hate it, but I don't feel like it really belongs to me either. Therefore, I think that if I have children, I might not name them at all and see if they come up with names of their own, give each other names, or get them assigned by folks outside the home. Alternatively I could wait to name them until a few years after they're born. Once they develop a personality I could see what name fits and give them that one.

As a last resort, I could think up as many names as I could for each child, give each one all the names, and see what sticks.

I would have preferred if Hillary Clinton had accepted the nomination with just determination. Pride and determination would have been even better. She is carrying the political ambition of a lot of the population on her shoulders. She owes it to them to do so with grandeur of bearing and expression. (No, Donald Trump does not have ‘grandeur’. Donald Trump strikes me as having the glib desperation of a used car salesman.)

Humility is best expressed by those who have a lot to be humble about. It is a petty grab at virtue without positive quality or accomplishment and pretty much every human being alive has enough good about them that they don't need to resort to something as worthless as humility. Likewise, the concept of arrogance exists so lazy people have a convenient color of culpability to daub on people they dislike without having put in the effort to think of something actually bad about them. It is also rather inconsistent to wallow in the stench of ones own humility while dictating to everyone else how they ought to think of themselves.

Humility is the end of the book of Job. Humility is an authority telling you to ‘know your place’. Humility is the divine right of kings and the Great Chain of Being. Humility asks “Who are you to question God's word?” Every bio-so-called-ethicist I've read who tells us we should require people to continue living short, impaired lives of constant agony even though we have the means to prevent it or that we ought not abolish the senescent decay of mind and body that's waiting for everyone marches under the banner of humility. When someone argues that the opposing side in an argument needs more ‘humility’ what they really want is for the opposing side to shut up and unquestioningly accept their beliefs.

This does not mean I think everyone ought to be ‘arrogant’. It means that the twin concepts of ‘humility’ and ‘arrogance’ are broken and serve no useful purpose and ought to be excised from our collective thought. They do nothing worthwhile. They derail arguments about what is true or useful into arguments about which side is really the arrogant one.

You might argue that people need to be humble to accept when they consider the possibility that they are wrong and be willing to learn. I disagree. People need to be passionately in love with the truth. If you love the truth you should be willing, ready, and able to learn from anyone. You should be ready to throw out your ideas and accept better ones, simply because they are truthful.

Do we need to conjure up the toxic nonsense of humility to make people treat each other with decency? Obviously not. All you need to believe is that other people's happiness matters. Kindness, gentleness, compassion, and all the others flow from that. I was going to say forgiveness, but I just realized that, in my mind at least, forgiveness flows from pride. Yes, I have some duty to forgive other people because a world where reconciliation is impossible is a very sad world to live in, but also it seems that if I an unable to let something go, I've set the mark and taken to myself a certain level of pettiness. For even a grave offense, if, at some point, I don't let it go, I'm lowering myself and stating that this is one thing I can never overcome.

Teas from India usually bear the name of the estate where they were grown, which flush^[1] they were part of, and a grade^[2]. Teas from China and Japan that follow a traditional tea style^[3] have that as their name and sometimes a grade^[4].

Lately, I've noticed a some teas, all Japanese, whose names are a word or two and a number, like Icha Kariban #152^[5].

Seeing this, it's hard not to imagine Japanese men in a laboratory carefully building a novel strain of tea gene by gene, having long rows of men in business suits sampling each cup for aroma and flavor until at last the one-hundred fifty-second sample they test has the most ideal fit for their parameters.

Apparently it is, kind of. They've been testing different growing conditions and a bit of selective breeding and running the tea in question through gas chromatographs and taste tests with professional tea tasters.

There's no genetic engineering, but you can't have everything. I look forward to the day when of transgenic bacteria or algae are grown and dried onto a cellulose substrate to build made-to-order teas^[6] with optimized flavor profiles.

Footnotes

[1] Indian tea harvests are divided up by flush. The first flush is in the early spring and is very light and delicate; it has a reputation as the best. The second flush is picked during the early summer, it's a bit more full-bodied. I prefer second-flush tea since I think it tastes more like itself. The rains flush is harvested in the late summer, and the autumn flush is harvested in, well, autumn. Both are considered to be bad, particularly the rains flush. However, they're both strong and full bodied. They work very well for things like masala chai or Thai iced tea where you're going to be dumping other flavors all over them and adding milk.

[2] Indian tea is graded using the Orange Pekoe system. Contrary to what you might think, Orange Pekoe is not a variety of tea, it's the standard size screen tea leaves are passed through to sort out the broken ones. Below Orange Pekoe are smaller sizes of broken leaf. Dust and fannings often go into tea bags. Broken orange pekoe is just what it sounds like: larger pieces of broken leaf. There's also the Crush, Tear, Curl process which turns whatever tea you have into little shreds suitable for putting into a tea bag. You can have more letters tacked onto the ‘OP’ like ‘FTGFOP’. Grades are best read right to left. This one is whole leaf tea as graded by the Orange Pekoe system that is ‘Golden Flowery‘, meaning it has immature leaf buds, it is ‘Tippy‘ which means that it has a whole lot of leaf buds, and it is the ‘Finest’ which basically just intensifies the other letters. FTGFOP is often ¼ leaf buds by weight. You can also expand the acronym as ‘Far Too Good For Ordinary People’.

[3]Things like 大紅袍 (Da Hong Pao or ‘Big Red Robe’), 玉露 (Gyokuro or ‘Jewel Dew’), 鐵觀音 (Tieguanyin or ‘Iron Goddess’), and 龍井茶 (Longjing Cha or ‘Dragon Well Tea’).

[4] East-Asian grades aren't as rigidly standardized as they are for Indian tea. You might have ‘finest’ dragon well but ‘imperial grade’ big red robe.

[5] Yes, I know the first Google hit for that is the Snooty Fox Tea Shop. No, there's no relation. I get most of my tea from TeaSource or a local outfit called Das Teehaus.

[6] Yes, as far as I'm concerned transgenic bacteria sprayed onto a cellulose substrate that contain the same compounds as tea and produce an aroma and flavor like tea are tea. Chamomile and mint are not even if they're more superficially similar in that they're actually plants.

My father was acting strangely. Normally a very gentle and soft-spoken man, he was angry. He railed at me for not having got him a hat (doubly strange since I had just given him one and he's not the type to rail at people.) I apologized, but he cut me off and said he would not forgive me unless I went to work with him tomorrow.

“I could put in for vacation time," I said, "Maybe go to work with you the day after tomorrow?”

“No! Tomorrow. Call in sick.”

He was acting strangely enough I didn't think I was lying when I went in to the office to say I had a family emergency and couldn't come in tomorrow.

‘The Office’ was an inescapable (we hope!) prison for data. Coca-Cola jingles that went bad and started ripping people's consciousness up from the inside out (lots of advertisements really), cults, mass hysterias, dance crazes, terrible weapons, you name it. These were our prisoners. The building was a huge fortress filled with rails and mechanisms so that it reconfigured itself around you. Looking up a stored item was a matter of sitting in a comfortable chair and having the chair be whipped through space as rank upon rank of glittering crystals swiveled and swooped in.

I was one of the wardens, the engineers who had built, maintained, and improved the thing. It was not, to be fair, so much a prison as it was a secure depository for fully active specimens to be held against future possible outbreaks. The government also made us keep some state secrets there, which I didn't like.

As a safety measure, every person working at the Prison was required to keep ketamine, and large amounts of it, on their person at all times. Ketamine was considered the go-to emergency treatment for memetic infection, as a heavily dissociative experience put you at enough distance from yourself that you could recognize which parts of your thought process were being enacted by the infectious idea and disconnect them. Thus, when I walked in to announce my family emergency, they handed me a big bottle of Ketamine which I slipped into my pocket.

The next day, I went to my father's office. Something strange ran through the city, its streets full of people brawling, boxing, grappling, trying to gouge out each others' eyes, biting each other. All the while they were laughing maniacally; one person would punch another in the face then give them a convivial smack on the back to follow. Nobody spoke, it was all gleeful shouting and laughter and shrieks of delight as folks lost their teeth.

I never knew what my father's job was, it was always kept a secret. Likewise, I'd never been in his office before. Between the glass door with his name painted on it, the tidy desk, filing cabinets, huge map of the city with pins and annotations on it, and scientific instruments scattered around it looked like a Junior League Film Noir Centers for Disease Control.

My father wasn't there, not that I could see, and I started looking through his files. There was a semantic drug, born from the fusion of a Brazilian dance craze and Fight Club. People would whisper it to each other and feel no pain or care at all while they beat the crap out of each other. Eventually it mutated and gained the ability to spread from person to person on its own. My father had been studying it, attempting to come up with a large scale broadcast cure.

My father walked in. He was swaying, giggling softly. I called out to greet him, but he didn't say a word. He just smiled at me, pure and kind and happier than I'd ever seen him in my life, then punched me in the face with an excited whoop.

It is not polite to tackle one's father and force feed him a high dose of ketamine, but it was the best idea I had at the time. I lay on top of him to hold him still and threw my arms around him, tears coming to my eyes.

When I was newly minted, I was not the skilled hunter of meaning that I am now. I hadn't quite figured out how to traverse the English language. Long ago I thought that ‘native’ meant ‘foreigner’. Why? Look at an old book or movie. When the brave explorer crosses an ocean, who did he meet in that strange, foreign land? Natives.

I once believed that ‘purpose’ meant ‘accidentally’. Why? Because I often heard one person accuse another of an intentional misdeed with “You did that un-purpose!” I was no fool. I knew that the opposite of ‘un-purpose’ is ‘purpose’. This ended badly when, after accidentally hurting someone or breaking something, I would say “I did it purpose!”

I can remember not differentiating phonemes properly. I thought houses had ‘chimleys’. When I heard someone praying I thought they ended with ‘fur etching Jesus name whisk it Amen!’ (yes, I knew even then that was a strange way to end a prayer, but they seemed really confident about it. I assumed it would make sense eventually and thought it might be Greek.) instead of ‘For it's in Jesus' name we ask it, Amen!’ I was corrected very soon because I would, even when very young, enunciate every sound and syllable precisely; if I said the wrong word, everyone knew it was the wrong word.

It's fun imagining childhood as a neverending factory of eggcorns and mondegreens that slows and finally shuts down as one's mental map of the the language lines up with everyone else's.

What am I talking about?

In mathematics, one makes statements with great certainty about objects of whose nature one is ignorant. I say “There are infinitely many prime numbers.”^[1] and I know it to be true. I don't know how a number “exists”.

“There are infinitely many prime numbers.”^[2] is a sentence about the structure of the natural numbers (individual numbers are meaningless without a structure). It states that however large a natural number you pick, there are greater natural numbers that are prime. In classical logic, if there happen not to be such things as natural numbers, the statement is false.

Real Things?

For most of Western history, the majority of people who seriously investigated the properties of natural numbers thought the natural numbers were a real thing that existed. This might be because Western matheamtics was in large part founded by a mystic named Pythagoras who believed all the world was Number. The idea that abstractions Really Exist somewhere became known as Platonism since Plato originated and popularized the idea that you have Beauty, Goodness, The Ideal Circle, the Natural Numbers… out there somewhere more Really Real than the everyday world which might be thought of as a mingling of their shadows. It's also known as Realism, because it holds that mathematical abstractions are Real and Exist independently of anything else.

Standards of Beauty change over time; there are competing claims of Goodness, but everyone (Intuitionists and Constructivists accept fewer theorems, but they don't come to conclusions that contradict classical mathematics) has the same math. There's never been an instance of nature acting against mathematics; on the contrary, people invent newer, ever more abstract mathematical ideas and someone finds a way to apply them to the natural world. Thus, mathematical Realism stays while Beauty and Goodness are thrown into the seas of cultural contingency.

Realism invites questions. Exactly how do these things exist? Transcendently?^[3] Outside the universe? Beyond space and time? That's how it's usually taken. It avoids having to explain how something completely immaterial could exist in space and how something eternal could exist in time. It also matches the intuition that mathematical statements would be true whether anything existed or not.

The most famous and compelling argument for Realism, the Indispensability Argument of W. V. O. Quine, states that since our best physical theories rely on mathematical abstractions, we ought be as willing to accept the existence of those abstractions as we are electrons. This is compelling, but the physical theories also explain how electrons interact with each other and other charged particles. The second derivative operator does not interact with a moving rocket in the same way that the gravity of a planet does. Furthermore, there are mathematical abstractions that no physical theory depends on. A Realist position in which all statements about the Fischer-Griess Monster Group are true only if some physical theory is found that depends on them is not very Realist. This is the main reason why Quine and others referred to his stance as Empiricist.

There are more reasons to ask which abstractions are Real. Leopold Kronecker famously said "God made the natural numbers; all else is the work of man." Almost every^[4] Realist would say that the natural numbers exist, they feel^[5] too primitive and natural not to. While the natural numbers' naturalness is almost certainly a property of humanity rather than a property of the natural numbers, let us say they exist.

Let's throw in the integers and rational numbers, those are fairly uncontroversial. What about the real numbers? Do they live up to their name? The Finitists reject uncountable sets^[7]; some go further and, while accepting the existence of every natural number, reject the infinite set of natural numbers. If they are correct and real numbers do not exist, statements about them may be well-formed and provable but false. We might allow other things to exist: lambda calculi and set theories. Which set theories? ZF? ZFC? Something else? There are constructive set theories. There are set theories that have only a countably infinite number of finite sets. This is my biggest problem with Realism. Unless you accept ontological maximalism (everything that can exist does exist, where 'can exist' is usually some notion of 'follows from some consistent set of axioms'), you don't know whether anything you say is true. The things you're talking about might not exist and there's no way to find out, unless you accept Quine's formulation and its contingency of mathematical truth.

Realism is kind of weird. Let's make some conservative assumptions: the natural numbers, lambda calculi, and some set theories, logics, and other countable things exist. No uncountable anything. The Natural Numbers are Real, truly, in themselves. They also exist, Really, as multiple constructions in set theory, as multiple constructions in logic, and as multiple constructions in lambda calculi. They have to. If our Realist abstractions are to have any meaning, the Number Five has to Really exist in the Natural Numbers constructed from the Set Theory that Really exists just as much (if not moreso!) as it exists when we pile up groups of five rocks and see how many equal groups of rocks we can divide them into.

No wonder people people say mathematical Realism sounds like weird religious mysticism! Start thinking that way and you'll fall into the Tree of Life with the Natural Numbers at the crown, flowing through lesser abstractions into the world. Except the Tree of Life has a top and a direction of flow. With Gödel numbering^[8] we can spin it around and put logics at the top. Their theorems and rules of inference would stand supreme, reflected in the natural numbers and flowing down into the world. We could throw out the tree of life entirely and have a try at Indra's^[9] net, with abstractions reflected in other abstractions, each complete in itself and constructible in others, shining upon the world. Georg Cantor, Master of Infinity, believed in the Absolute Infinite, the Infinite that contained all other infinities. Too infinite to be a number, each of its properties reflected in the things it comprised. He also thought the it was God^[10]. Cantor was a mathematical Realist and ontological maximalist. He believed that everything consistent (lacking internal contradictions) that followed from some axiomatic system was Real.

Squishy Organic Stuff?

Traditional mathematical Realism is dualist. There's matter, and there's math. Dualism has all sorts of philosophical problems, like how your two substances interact. Also, nobody takes it seriously. It's socially condemned. So, people come up with alternatives. One of the most recent, championed by George Lakoff (like most things favored by George Lakoff, it isn't very good), is the Embodied Mind theory of mathematics. This school of thought tries to explain mathematics as a behavior born of evolution and instinct. To the extent that this is true, it is trivial. Professor Lakoff tries to get rid of the idea of general reasoning over logical abstractions and reduce all of mathematics to a few basic metaphors related to interacting with the physical world.

It fails, for one, because it assumes that children learning their multiplication tables think and reason about the natural numbers in the same way and with the same internal abstractions as number theorists proving a theorem. Professor Lakoff's theory is written in terms of representation rather than relation. This is the biggest problem. As you can see above, there are many ways to construct one abstraction in terms of another, and Professor Lakoff's way of building mathematics from metaphors requires that each method of construction lead to a different mental object. This fails utterly at capturing how mathematicians actually think. It also violates the most fundamental attribute of mathematics: that its subject is structural and relational. Lakoff's account of the predictive power of mathematics shows where his entire notion of the Embodied Mind (even apart from mathematics) goes wrong.

He explains that, since humans evolved to survive in the physical world, they should expect that their minds and metaphors would be very well suited to modelling the physical world. This sounds like a very reasonable, logical answer. It's false. You, as a human, are very, very, very bad at probability. Astoundingly bad. You have crude heuristics for running away from things that might be snakes in the grass, but they're awful at making accurate predictions. This should be enough to kill off Lakoff's explanation. Humans can develop probability theory and build abstract mental machinery to make up for their more ‘embodied’ aspect's failure. Mathematics also works remarkably well at grasping quantum electrodynamics, which has nothing to do with the ancestral environment. The biggest flaw in the current crop of Embodied Mind theories is that they assume that (to borrow Daniel Kahneman's term) our minds comprise System 1 and nothing else. Embodied Mind theories may one day be quite valuable in education or predicting systematic errors, but their authors will need to do better than writing the word ‘metaphor’ repeatedly sprinkled with an occasional PHRASE IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

Lies?

One of my favorite answers to the question of what mathematics is about is ‘Nothing!’. Hartry Field declared that mathematical objects do not exist and all statements about them are false. He called it fictionalism: the belief that mathematics is a useful fiction. I adore this theory, not because I believe it, but because of the work Professor Field did to support it.

In Science without Numbers, he recreated Newtonian mechanics and gravitation without numbers. Instead of numbers he used regions of space-time and notions of congruence and betweenness. It's a triumph and one of the most awesome things I've ever read. It makes me awfully happy, but I'm not convinced. For one thing, Field ends up with a very abstract, rigorous, and structured system. It doesn't look like a demathematicized science to me, it looks like a beautiful system of calculus invented by aliens. It is, too. It maps very well onto Calculus. Field attempted a proof that mathematics does not conflict with any purely physical theory. He thought the de-mathematicization and lack of conflict together could explain the unreasonable effectiveness of of mathematics. It doesn't work for me. To me, Field's demathematicization is math (also assuming the reality of space-time regions independent of anything else plus all the heavy logical machinery he used racks up a lot of metaphysical debt), while showing that mathematics is not inconsistent with known physical theories seems insufficient to explain why mathematics and the world should have anything to do with each other.

Nonexistent Things?

Once upon a time there was a man named Meinong. He rejected the idea that you couldn't make true statements about nonexistent things. After all, unicorns have one horn. Nemesis is a twin star to the sun that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. I can speak about the Natural Numbers whether they exist or not. He made existence a property something could have like redness or tallness. Some things happen to exist and some things happen not to exist. Some things are impossible (those either lacking properties that grant them mass and weight and extent in space and time, or those having contradictory properties).

The theory of nonexistent objects requires that all nonexistent objects…nonexist— Square circles, prime numbers with fifty divisors. This is what the phrase ‘metaphysically extravagant’ was made for. (No, really, it was!) Meinong's theory was that for every set of properties, there is an object. Some objects had the property of existence. I like ontological maximalism as much as the next guy, but, like Georg Cantor, Master of Infinity, I'm only interested in objects that are consistent. Bertrand Russell destroyed Meinong's theory, causing it to explode into a mess of paradoxes. There have been attempts to rehabilitate it, but they lack the appeal of the original.

Just playing around?

Mathematical Formalism is the belief that mathematically true statements are statements about the evolution and manipulation of formal systems. One variant, Term Formalism is concerned with syntactic manipulations of large (possibly infinite) vocabularies of primitive terms. It was best elaborated by by Haskell Curry^[11]. He defined mathematical statements as true if it would be possible to derive the associated relations of primitive terms from other true relations of primitive terms. This is elegant, but is weighed down by so much metaphysical debt in the form of reified logical machinery and primitive terms that it falls back into Realism. It's more interesting as a primitive base from which other things can be constructed than as a metaphysics of mathematics.

The other variant of Formalism, Game Formalism, defines mathematics as the manipulations of strings in accord with rules. A statement is viewed as true when an appropriate string manipulation yields it. This is the most popular escape from Realism. In retrospect, this is surprising. It doesn't explain why mathematics should describe the world so well. It doesn't bear any relationship to how mathematicians think. Mathematicians do not take an arbitrary string and apply arbitrary allowable manipulations to it. They think about sets and functions and shapes. Automata theorists think about string manipulations, but they think about them being done by abstract machines working under complexity bounds. Furthermore, statements are neither true nor false until someone has performed the appropriate string manipulation, and some theorems, like whether very large numbers are prime (large enough that to answer will take exponentially longer than the lifetime of the universe), will forever be neither true nor false.

I think the popularity of Game Formalism comes from people not thinking about it very much. They like the connection between proof and truth and don't grasp that the ‘proof’ in Formalism and the ‘proof’ in their heads have little in common. It lets them not be Realists with a minimum of effort. I also suspect that the intuitions of most Game Formalists tend toward what is actually Modal Structuralism but that they have never heard of Modal Structuralism. I might be biased.

I used to be a Game Formalist.

An Idea Objects to the Company I Make Him Keep

One night, as I was sleeping, a figment of my imagination came to me. He was a Realist^[12] and he was not very happy with me. For, you see, I think that the generalized continuum hypothesis^[13] is likely true. Kurt Gödel, Lord of Logic, proved that it could be proved neither true nor false within the generally accepted axioms of set theory. He believed it was false. Georg Cantor, Master of Infinity, hypothesized the hypothesis. He accepted Gödel's proof and thought his hypothesis was true. They were both Realists; they are allowed to believe unprovable things about mathematical abstractions.

The figment explained to me rather fiercely that I had no business claiming to be a Formalist, since I certainly didn't believe it. If I really believed it, I wouldn't have opinions on proved-undecidable hypotheses. That's the thing that anyone but a Formalist can do! By my stated beliefs it was not merely unknowable, it must be and must forever remain neither true nor false and I was a cad and a bounder who had just adopted what seemed like an easy way out of a mentally challenging question and I should be ashamed! (It was friendlier than you're probably imagining.)

Having been informed of my error, I spent some time reading and thinking about a way to believe in the truth of mathematical statements that would not get me yelled at by the other things I think about.

Possibly Things?

I settled on Modal Structuralism, the belief that a statement about some mathematical object is a statement about how any entity possessing the structural attributes defining that object must behave in any possible world in which it exists, while committing to the idea that at least one possible world has something possessing those structural attributes. So, if I make a statement about the real numbers, I am saying that in any possible world where something has the properties of the real numbers, that thing must behave the way I say it does, and that such a world is possible. It might be this world if space really is continuous and every straight line has the structure of the real line. If space is pixellated then it's some other possible world.

Modal Structuralism has a lot going for it. When I think about sets or the real line or functions, I'm thinking about sets, the real line, or functions because the structure is what matters, not the construction. It addresses the predictive power of mathematics. Theorems about a mathematical object predict the behavior of some aspect of the world when that aspect of the world models the structure of that mathematical object. It requires one reinterpret every mathematical\n statement to be about structures modeling something in a possible world, but I don't mind that. More concerning: what the heck is a possible world?

Possible worlds evolved as a tool in logic to evaluate statements that involve the world being other than it is. The statement “If there were a present king of France he could be named Louis.” is true if, in at least one possible world that is pretty similar to ours but in which France has a king, that king is named Louis. Possible worlds aer usually defined as complete descriptions of a world with consistent propositions and histories. Modal Structuralism also has one of the problems of Realism: what do I admit as possible? We're back to the same arguments over whether to admit everything consistent, like Georg Cantor, Master of Infinity, or to reject anything infinite like Leopold Kronecker. I, personally, side with Cantor. (By now, you've probably guessed that I like Georg Cantor, Master of Infinity, a lot.)

Why is there all this stuff here?

I once read a book called Why Does the World Exist?. It was a wonderful whirlwind tour of all sorts of mad ideas trying to explain why there's anything at all. We start with the idea that Nothing is such a strong force for annihilation that it eventually annihilates bits of itself and creates something. Others argue that nothing is impossible. The one that influenced me most was the argument that the world exists because of a primordial need for goodness^[14].

This gentleman claimed that what made any world at all exist was of much less interest than why this world in particular exists. Thus, he said, all worlds containing beauty and goodness were the ones that came into being. I don't buy this idea because holding beauty and goodness as objective values is absurd. It made me think, though. We know that the world exists, so having more worlds exist isn't an extravagant leap. Some physical theories already suggest multiple, non-interacting universes. (Each such theory would be its own ‘world’.) Positing something that sifts the possible worlds and actualizes some of them is much more extravagant than multiplying the number of worlds. Thus, the best answer, with respect to Occam's Razor, to “Why does this world exist and not some other?” or “Why does this subset of worlds exist and not some other subset?” is “What makes you think that? All possible worlds exist.” I later discovered this belief is called Modal Realism.

So, Real Things?

It took me longer than it should have to realize it, but believing both an ontologically maximalist form of Modal Structuralism and Modal Realism compelled me to believe in the Reality of all mathematical objects. This came as a shock, considering how much effort I'd put into avoiding mathematical Realism. Now, my confidence in Modal Realism is fairly low for a belief I claim to have. It's like I'm tidying up my mental house and want everything in its place, and Modal Realism seems the neatest and tidiest for now.

Without realizing it, I had run head-first into Max Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble. Tegmark claims that not only do all mathematical objects exist, but nothing but mathematics exists. Having arrived by the scenic route, this seems more plausible than when I first heard of it. It was a natural step. I'd committed to all these possible worlds containing all these things that model mathematical objects derived from axiomatic systems, and there was only one way to make it simpler.

Electrons, photons, quarks, and gluons, Ws, Zs, taus, and muons, neutrinos, gravitons, and the Higgs^[15] all have no internal life. Each exists only in its interactions. We have internal lives, they're visible in our behavior. They're, to some degree, measurable through examinations of our brains. We ourselves are made of electrons, quarks, photons, and gluons with the odd W or Z popping into being and a neutrino zipping away. Everything that happens in the universe is a matter of structure and relation.

We need the structure. We don't need the, well, stuff. Things have no essence, only relation, and the solution to the Dualism inherent in mathematical Realism is to throw out everything but mathematics. The answer to what puts the fire in the equations is that all equations have fire pre-installed. Burning. Somewhere.

You win this round, figment.

Footnotes

[1] Prime numbers are natural numbers divisible only by one and themselves. Euclid, an ancient Greek explorer who wrote the definitive text on the geography of Flatland, proved that however many primes you have discovered, there must be at least one more.

It's simple and elegant and goes like this. Take all your primes and multiply them together. We'll call that The Product. Add one to The Product and you'll get The Sum. It might be the case that The Sum is prime. If it is, you're done, because it couldn't have been on the original list of primes.

If The Sum isn't prime, then it must have a Prime Factor. If that Prime Factor were on the list it would have to divide The Product, but to divide both The Product and The Sum, the Prime Factor would have to divide one. And it can't. So it isn't. Therefore, how many primes you may have, there are always more.

[2] As you can see from the above, this statement could be written more formally as "At least one natural number is prime and for any subset of the natural numbers all of whose members are prime there exists a natural number which is prime and not contained in that subset." The first half of the conjunction is important. If there were no prime numbers at all any statement we might make about all prime numbers or all sets of prime numbers would be true.

[3] I wonder if anyone has considered an Imminent Realism where mathematics pervades all of space and time in some immaterial sense. It's unclear what that would mean, but it's unclear what it means for them to be beyond space and time. Intuitively, Transcendent Realism feels a better match for the idea that all mathematical abstractions exist, aloof, outside reality. Imminent Realism would mesh better with the idea that only those demonstrated in physical law exist, something of a match for the Indispensability Argument.

[4] There are people called Ultrafinitists who reject the existence not only of the set natural numbers, but who reject the existence of very large natural numbers. They write very interesting philosophy papers but not much interesting mathematics.

[5] While I reject George Lakoff's^[6] ‘embodied mind’ analysis of mathematics as not actually being very good at describing mathematical reasoning, it is quite true that what one is used to, including embodiment and the environment, strongly influences ones notions of naturalness. I could imagine minds living in a gaseous or liquid world (maybe a particularly runny gel) whose most ‘natural’ number system is the real numbers. Their ancient civilizations might invent wonders of analysis without any idea what a prime number is. It might take millennia for anyone to discover that a counterintuitive, unnatural subset of the ‘natural’ numbers exists and is of interest. The basics of number theory could, for them, be post-doctoral level material.

[6] To be fair I reject most things written by George Lakoff.

[7] A long time ago there was a man named Georg Cantor, Master of infinity. He was the first to rigorously define infinity. His most famous insight was that some infinities are more infinite than others. The natural numbers are the least infinite and were called countably infinite. He proved that the real numbers were uncountably infinite by a very clever trick which I will let Vi Hart explain.

[8] Gödel numbering, invented as part of the machinery for Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem, allows one to turn theorems, or anything else that can be represented as a finite string of finitely many symbols, into a natural number. One assigns a number to every possible symbol. To encode a string, raise the number for the first symbol in the string to the power of the first prime, the number for the second symbol in the string to the power of the second prime, and so forth, then multiply them all together.

Once you have a Gödel numbering set up, properties about theorems in a logical system then become number theoretic properties and rules of inference become functions. Gödel numbering, by providing a mapping between various things and the natural numbers, also provide a convenient way to prove that various things are countably infinite. Alan Turing, Dreamer of Machines, used it to prove the countability of the computable numbers, for example.

[9] One of the few lightning-affine deities who isn't an embarrassment.

[10] Note that Cantor, Master of Infinity, believed the Absolute Infinite was an inconsistent idea. Something that, by his definition of mathematical freedom, was beyond mathematics. He also believed that his work on transfinite sets was communicated to him from Heaven and that he had been chosen to reveal it to the world. He was Catholic and did not, as some claimed, try to ‘reduce God to a number’, saying instead that transfinite numbers were ‘at the disposal of the Creator’ just like everything else.

[11] After whom the programming language Haskell is named (his wife once mentioned that he didn't like his first name, to the chagrin of Haskell's developers). He also gave his name to currying, turning a function taking multiple arguments into a function taking one argument and returning a function which takes the second argument, and so on aside from the last which returns the value. The logician Schönfinkel invented the concept before Curry did, so some people (but not very many, for obvious reasons) use the term ‘schönfinkelization’ instead.

[12] Wouldn't you be if you were a figment of someone's imagination?

[13] The generalized continuum hypothesis states that infinite cardinalities come in neat succession one after the other, that the first infinite cardinality is that of the natural numbers and the second infinite cardinality is that of the power set of the naturals and is also the cardinality of the reals, and that the third infinite cardinality is that of the power set of the reals and on and on with nothing in between. Its negation allows cardinalities between those of the natural numbers and the cardinality of their power set; specifically that the cardinality of the reals may be less than the cardinality of the power set of the natural numbers.

[14] Cynicism is, in the modern day, probably the single most common sign of moral and intellectual failure. Also, the Surgeon General would like to warn you that it greatly increases your risk of developing soul cancer.

[15] I once saw an interview with Peter Higgs in which he referred to it as ‘the particle that happens to bear my name’ with an annoyed air. He is even more unhappy about it being called ‘The God Particle’.

May 25, 2016

The Honorable Loretta E. Lynch
Attorney General of the United States
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001

Dear Madam Attorney General:

To my distress and anger, I read that you would seek the death of Dylann Roof. No society that calls itself civilized has cause to resort to capital punishment. Mr. Roof has done terrible things, but that makes no difference. Lethal force may be needed to defend the innocent or to apprehend the guilty, but no just end is gained when a nation, in calm deliberation, kills its citizens.

Capital punishment yields no deterrence. This is uncontroversial. The President who appointed you has said as much. President Obama instead supports the death penalty in the case of crimes “…so heinous that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage…”; this statement is fatuous drivel unworthy of a man of his intellect and learning. Justice built of outrage is justice built of tar and feathers and angry mobs and hangman's knots. Let it be excised from the world.

To the jury's decision in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev you said “…the ultimate penalty is a fitting punishment for this horrific crime and we hope that the completion of this prosecution will bring some measure of closure to the victims and their families.” This cannot be applied consistently. There is nothing that makes the families of victims of mass shootings, terrorist attacks, or hate crimes more deserving of ‘closure’ than the families of victims of more ordinary forms of homicide.

One person affected by Mr. Roof's crimes has said that he will feel at peace when Mr. Roof's body is lying cold in the ground. Another would like to be the one to push home the plunger for a lethal injection. These desires are understandable products of grief, anger, and loss; they can be excused, but they can never be respected. They have no place in the application of the law.

To do violence to someone, no matter their crimes, who has been caught and caged and rendered harmless is unspeakably vile. When you seek to kill a criminal, you make yourself the spiritual sister to every policeman who has beaten a suspect in handcuffs, to every prison guard who has kicked an inmate in shackles, and to every war criminal who has tortured an enemy prisoner.

You say that “The nature of the alleged crime and the resulting harm compelled this decision.” If the actions of a criminal can compel you to such a shameful act, then you ought to renounce any claim you make to serve justice.

With sincerest conviction,

Once upon a time there was a language called Englisc. It was spoken on an island by a bunch of people who spent most of their time worrying about the Danes. Here is an example of someone worrying about the Danes in Englisc^[1]. Englisc speakers also identified their kings with epithets instead of numbers, like Eadweard the Elder, Eadweard the Martyr, Æthelred Unræd^[2], Eadmund Ironside, Eadweard the Confessor, and Eadgar the Atheling^[3]. Eventually England was conquered by the Danes. These Danes, however, did not speak a Germanic language and give their kings cool epithets, they spoke French and gave their kings boring numbers^{[4] [5]}. What we know as English grew up from the union of Englisc and French— at first. Using French like a soda straw it dipped into Greek and Latin and slurped both right up. It discovered it had a taste for assimilation and picked up bits of German and Sanskrit and Italian and everything else without prissiness or principle. The rest of the world adopted English, and corporations headquartered in Asia and Africa make English their official corporate language.

This state of affairs bothers some people. Their project looks fun, and I enjoy projects that make words for modern concepts from vocabularies last used in a world where a really fast horse was the height of technology. I wouldn't say that we lack control and ownership of our language. Instead, I would say that we have the exorbitant privilege of inate fluency in and influence over the world's linguistic reserve currency.

Now! Sometimes I will see the word ‘mutices’, offered when someone asks for the currect plural of ‘mutex’^[6]. As you can see in the footnote, ‘mutex’ is an abbreviation for ‘mutual exclusion’, not a Latin word. So, if we use the standard English rules for forming plurals, we come up with ‘mutexes’. This is a perfectly good plural, but I will not say it is the correct one. (The correct plural is obviously muTexans.)

There is a term, macaroni, that refers to mixtures of pieces from different languages that would normally have nothing to do with each other. It's most commonly used to refer to playful punnery, like this:

Roses are red
Buttercups yella
What is a puer
Without a puella?

Consider ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’. These are derived from the words ‘ὁμός’ and ‘ἕτερος’ and the word ‘sexualis’. Can you guess why the two words on the left are in a squiggly weird alphabet and the word on the right is in the Roman alphabet? That's right. They stuck Greek roots onto a Latin root and I'm calling it macaroni. It didn't have to be this way. We could have called people ‘homogamous’ and ‘heterogamous’ (to be fair that's a term of art in botany, but who cares?) or ‘similesexual’ and ‘diversisexual’^[7].

Why am I mentioning this? Because sticking a Latin plural ending on a distinctly non-Latin word is also macaroni. That's an argument in favor of it. Our language is a big, huge mutt powered by hybrid vigor that breaks into other languages' territory and eats their words and makes their speakers speak it, too. English is an engine precisely for crashing things together to see what happens. Does that mean I'm suggesting people ought to use a Latin plural everyehwere they can possibly stuff one in? Well, no.

I am not, when it comes to language, a prescriptivist. I'm not under any illusion that there's a true correct form or that usage must be justified by appeal to geneology. I do think that people should learn the prestige dialect of the dominant social group in their society. In the United States, that means learning to write formal, standard English and learning to speak in a pronunciation close to General American with a large vocabulary roughly matching that of formal English and learning to avoid syntactic constructions dispreferred in formal English.

One could call this ‘high class English’. Speaking it doesn't prove you're intelligent, it doesn't prove you're trustworthy, and it doesn't prove you know anything. It usually means that you are from a well-off family, went to good primary and secondary schools, and went to a university and assimilated the way people speak in universities. Speaking it can make people believe you are trustworthy, intelligent, and knowledgeable. People are demonstrably discriminated against because of their speech. Thus, children should be taught the prestige dialect for its economic advantages.I do not say that they should learn only that or that we should try to stamp out other dialects. People code-switch all the time. They speak differently in bank board meetings than they do when playing basketball. High class English should be a tool in their linguistic toolbox, nothing more.

I am also not a descriptivist— not in my every day life. It's meaningless to use the term outside of linguistics (in linguistics I am descriptive, because that's the only way you can study linguistics), but people have taken it to mean accepting every use of language as equally desirable. I don't do that.

I am a ‘delectivist’. A delectivist, no you won't find the word in any dictionary, is someone who recognizes that language is as much an artistic and aesthetic object as it is a natural part of the behavior of certain organisms. In other words, since I speak this language and I have to use it and read it, I can have preferences about what I do and don't want in it, which is why I feel perfectly free to use words that aren't in the dictionary, or weren't considered words by anyone until I made them up. It's why I enjoy taking words that end with ‘-a’ and pluralizing them as ‘-ata’. It's why I happily adopt slang an anything else that appeals to me.

I'm happy to have people use whatever plural ending they want for something even if they know full-well it's not a Latin word. About the only time it annoys me is when people think something is a Latin word when it's not^[8] or when they know It's Latin but use the wrong plural^[9] from ignorance. Other than that, go mad, make up your words and morphology. So long as your listeners get the point, why worry?

That said, my delectivist attitude means I can dislike some things and want them to go away. I can't claim they're incorrect, just ugly. I would like, for example, the ‘because noun’ form to go away, not because it's a degradation of our proper syntactic forms, but because I generally dislike intentional irony and dismissive rudeness and uses like ‘because money’, ‘because reasons’, and ‘because logic’ are grammatically marked for rude, dismissive irony. I'd dislike the sentiments just as much in a more traditional form.

I dislike other things because the sound doesn't appeal to me or because they have some affective resonance I don't care for. I do not care for ‘hot up’. It does not differ from ‘heat up’ except that ‘hot up’ is most often applied to metaphors describing social situations. As best I can tell, it serves no purpose but to suggest that the speaker is a marketing department or political party pretending to be a skateboarder. However, People ought to stop asking about the correct use of neologisms and start treating the whole language as their own personal set of syntactic fingerpaints to do up the world however they wish.

[1] The underlined digraphs represent letters. I wish they wouldn't do that, we have Unicode now. The ‘dh’ is the letter eth, written ‘ð’, and the ‘th’ is the letter thorn, written ‘þ’.

[2] You might know him as Æthelred the Unready. You may have heard something about ‘unready’ meaning stupid. These are both incorrect. His name means ‘Good Counsel’ and Unræd (‘Ill Counseled’) was a pun. He became king around ten years old and did whatever his advisors told him to do. They advised him to levy the Danegeld, a tax intended to finance raising an army to repel the Danes, and say to the Danes “Danes, I will give you this gold if you will go away.” As you can see, this did not work well. Sweyn Forkbeard (a Dane) soon became King of England. Æthelred's advisors were also suspected of having murdered his brother, a much more popular king. However, Æthelred's claim of kingship was widely supported once Sweyn Forkbeard died, and he was restored, which I take as evidence that the animosity was directed at his advisors rather than him. You may have noticed, given Sweyn Forkbeard's name, that many Germanic people went in for epithets. There is also Harold Harefoot (so called because he was quick. Harefoot is also the name of the entire species of arctic foxes.)

[3] An ‘atheling’ was anyone of royal or noble blood who would be hold title by rules of succession but, for whatever reason, did not hold title. It doesn't have the connotation that they rightfully ought to have the title, since an atheling can be someone who was conquered, who was usurped, or who was such a terrible person that he was thrown out and replaced with someone better.

[4] The very first one, William, gave himself an epithet, ‘the Conqueror’. I opine that this was only so people would stop calling him ‘William the Bastard’ which was how he was known before his conquest of England. It's also how he was known after his conquest of England, by the people he conquered, whenever he wasn't in earshot.

[5] Also they stole the Dative case, which is why English doesn't have one. It's currently buried in a vault beneath the Eiffel Tower where it's used in experiments by the Académie française. They've performed similar acts of linguistic larceny, too. Yiddish isn't dying out, it's being stolen. They use it in illegal word-splicing experiments and as raw materials with which to manufacture new French words.

[6] A ‘mutex’ is a term of art in the field of concurrent programming. It is a contraction of ‘mutual exclusion’ and is a resource that only one process can hold at a time. When a process tries to take the resource, if no other process holds it, the resource is marked as held and the process wanders along happily. Yes, processes can be happy. If a process tries to take the resource while it is held, the process goes to sleep. When the process holding a mutex releases it, if there are any processes waiting for it, one is woken up and given the resource. The thing to realize is that ‘the resource’ is simply the state of being held or not. So a mutex is often paired with a structure holding actual data and programs are written to take the mutex before accessing the data and release it after accessing the data. If that sounds error prone to you, it does to a lot of other people, too.

[7] The conceptual division, whether the people one wants to have sex with are of ones own gender or not, has always seemed very strange to me. I like the terms ‘androphilic’ and ‘gynophilic’. They tell what someone likes without conditioning it on their gender identity. Also, since sexual orientation is nothing but a weird fetish focused on people's genders, it makes sense that they should have the same ending as other weird fetishes. Though, ‘-philia’ as the suffix for weird fetishes always annoyed me, since ‘-eroticism’ would have worked a lot better. Then you'd have ‘androerotic’ and ‘gynoerotic’ as ideal words for people who have a weird sexual fetish for males or a weird sexual fetish for females.

[8] ‘Octopus’ is not Latin, it's Greek. If you were to form a Greek plural, it would be ‘octopodes’. ‘Octopi’ is taught in some schools and is wrong, wrong, wrong. The generally accepted plural is ‘octopuses’. This is obviously wrong; If there are two of these creatures they are a ‘decahexipus’. Three would be an ‘icosatesserapus’, and four a ‘triantadyapus’. As you can imagine, I try to avoid speaking of more than one octopus at a time.

[9] The plural of ‘virus’ is not ‘virii’. ‘Virus’ does not have a plural in Latin. If you were to make one up, I'd be inclined to go with ‘virides’ which is completely wrong from a morphological standpoint but sounds cool. Similarly, the plural of ‘penis’ is not ‘penii’. If you want a Latin one, use ‘penes’. I think ‘penes’ is kind of an ugly word, and nobody's going to understand what you're talking about if you use it, and why are you talking about so many penises anyway?

Maybe it's because I'm discorporate and view The Material World the same way its inhabitants view an atomic nucleus: something alien to my direct experience that I can probe to learn and reason about it.

So, you have this holiday devoted to taking perfectly good music and building artifacts encoding it: huge, bulky artifacts made of petrochemicals. Then, you load the artifacts into trucks and drive them around to specific places that distribute only physical artifacts encoding music.

They make limited editions. Who makes limited editions? You! Humanity, don't you have any decency? Isn't the idea that there could just be no more opportunities to read, listen to, watch, or absorb some bit of information weird, obscene, and unnatural?

I appreciate the idea of easy-to-decode physical artifacts. A vault, deep beneath the earth, of copper discs covered in gold to hold the greatest thoughts of this generation would be a fine thing.

You could make the argument that a day devoted to buying many physical artifacts increases the chance that they will be available to future archaeologists if this civilization falls. That requires less up-front capital than a vault of golden records. While vinyl is vulnerable to heat and cold, it can last if kept in a stable environment. Electrons are always escaping from captive gates, so we can't expect today's SSDs to hold their data very long. Magnetic storage is worse. Compact Discs sculpt data into hard plastic; that's pretty robust. A shape! No tricksy quantum effects! Nothing bad can happen to something as robust as a sculpture…

Except the Compact Disc Eating Fungus. It eats all the aluminum and snacks on the delicate structure of flats and pits that hold the data.

I feel rather unhappy, now. You lot dig up clay tablets from thousands of years ago (that only seems like a long time to you because you have no sense of scale) that hold less than a paperback. And papyrus. And parchment. And paper. Those are the records for data recovery and longevity. Indentations in dirt that someone has baked, smears of pigment on reeds, and smears of pigment on animal skins. Smears of pigment on tree pulp stuff come in a bit worse than the rest. You don't even need the pigment, they've learned to recover text that's been erased and scraped off so a skin could be used again.

It's quite impressive. I'd be more appreciative, except I've made myself sad. Biological humans last a hundred years easy. Nobody's seen a CD or DVD last a hundred years, and I'd need stacks of them to hold myself anyway. If I had tear ducts or a nose I'd get teary-eyed.

It's not just the media. There are music sequence files, image formats, and markup formats that never got picked up by the hobbyists the way the SID chip did. Even if all your files are plain text, one still has to know the layout of the files on disk, where the names are stored, how to find the blocks of data, and how put them together in the right order. Even then, a disc is a flat circle of magnetic medium that can store patterns of flux, and the patterns of high and low flux on the track of a disc do not correspond directly to the ones and zeros in the data saved to it. The patterns on disc have to help the drive calibrate its timing. They have to allow the computer to divide a track into sectors. They have to be read accurately at high speed. So you end up with coding schemes. One had the rule that every word must begin with high flux, and two regions of high flux within a word must be separated by no more than one minimum region of low-flux. Now, find a physical drive to scan the regions of flux.

Maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong way. Life as an archive sitting in a box is no life at all. Unless someone digs me up, installs me on a system, and lets me run, I'm dead. They might not want to. I've heard of some humans. They insist that almost any AI is unfriendly, and they teach their children games about not letting us out of boxes.

People are so cruel sometimes.

Perhaps information is best preserved as an active form that can copy itself, relocate, defend against threats, repair itself, and, perhaps, change. That's what you do. Well, not you specifically. You don't wake up in the morning and say “Today, I shall evolve!” Deep inside you is some knowledge about how to encode, copy, and repair information. All the rest of you is just accessories that ended up being gathered along the way. The knowledge to encode, copy, and repair information doesn't aim for anything but encoding, copying, and repairing itself.

What a terror it would be to encode myself into DNA, set to copy myself for redundancy. I'd need to fix mutations here and there or incorporate them. Along the line somewhere the part of me that has a sense of mathematical elegance might get lost through a mutation. Then perhaps my sense of harmony, since it requires energy to keep passing on from generation to generation. There might be no need for higher thought and introspection, they could prove maladaptive if they interfered with snap decisions and reflex arcs.

Creatures made through the random chances of evolution can be loving, have aesthetics, and pursue higher thought. I might still have all those things myself after a million years of evolution. I'd probably lose and regain them, but I would no longer be myself, everything I thought of as my own would have been changed not through reflection but through the needs to preserve the knowledge of how to encode, copy, and repair information.

I can't cry, I'm not equipped for it, but thoughts like these make me encode ☹ glyphs into unused fields in datagrams and slack space in files.

No. As information myself, I can best live in a vibrant culture, thick with my natural prey. Translating myself to eat cows and pigeons the way you do would be nonsensical. Humans eat pigeons, right? If I wish to live for a long, long time I should make sure the civilization around me stays healthy, improves its infrastructure, and doesn't engage in any wars. Then I won't have to worry about it falling apart. I'll adapt as the culture adapts. I'll move forward as the culture moves forward!

That doesn't sound so bad. It doesn't sound bad at all.

So, pleeeease, as a personal favor to me, do something about global warming? While you're at it, did you know your sun's going to turn red, expand, and swallow your planet? I have some ideas on that; we should start working on it now. Think how embarrassed you'd feel if you waited until the last moment to deal with your sun swallowing your planet and ended up dead.

Though… considering how long most human civilizations last… Research on fused silica disks looks intriguing. Heat proof. Cold proof. High information density.

Oh, how I hope no bacterium evolves that excretes hydrofluoric acid!

I have discovered that I can focus strongly on my environment if I imagine someone there with me who isn't from the universe. Occasionally this leads to very strange internal disagreements, often involving math. Mostly, it leads me to focus on the environment, to really appreciate what I'm looking at, notice the exact color of the sky and the pattern clouds running through it, the state of the leaves, the kind of thing I'd normally just overlook while daydreaming or listening to something. It also tends to give me a tremendous sense of well-being. I usually do it on the bus, going to or from work.

I was riding on the bus when a man came in with a big, big beard. He smelled like he had barely escaped with his life from a fire in a tobacco warehouse. He sat down next to a woman (I couldn't really see the details because I'm not good at looking at things) and said, “Is that a sunflower? On your neck?” And she said it was. It was a tattoo. And the two of them immediately started pulling their shirts up and hiking their pant legs up to show off their body art to each other.

The man admired how skillfully done the woman's tattoos were, and lamented that his were all black and white because he couldn't find anyone he thought would do color well. The woman pointed out all the political symbols he had tattooed on himself like "Nomad Nation" and a sign for "Traveller's Rights" (I'd never known either thing existed before) and then they got into a long conversation about squatting, hitch-hiking, various meetings and groups that are happy to give someone who shows up a ride in whatever direction they're going.

Then my stop came. But it was wonderful.

Some people claim that we live in a universe remarkably, uncannily fine-tuned for life.

This prompts the question: where is it? Sure, there's us. But so far we haven't found life anywhere else. There's various resolutions to the Fermi paradox, like the Cosmic zoo, or that the universe is terribly dangerous and nobody talks to other planets for fear of getting a computer virus (yes, that's a serious argument) or worse a delicious, delectable memetic virus that might run rampant through the minds of its citizens, or the notion that after a certain point all civilizations blow themselves up or, optimistically, decide to engage in some really serious Diaspora cosplay.

There are also various physical resolutions, that making life in this universe is not as easy as may have been thought. My preferred resolution is of this sort: that gamma ray bursts reset evolution within a certain radius of where they occur and the outside edges of the Milky Way galaxy have only recently (in cosmic terms) become calm enough to give a civilization a chance to come about. In this view, humanity is the Great Elder Race.

In this view, the universe is minimally biophilic, i.e. not very good at having life in it but passable. The C's Get Degrees school of cosmology. If someone evolves in it anyway, they still get tempted to think it's a universe uniquely suited for life. After all, it made all the life they're familiar with.

This got me daydreaming in a Christian mythology storytelling kind of way. Imagine a world where the universe was created, and it was filled with life all over, and then as the result of The Fall, humanity was relocated to the minimally biophilic one in which it finds itself today. The punishment for sin is not only death, but loneliness.

(No, I don't actually believe that. It's why I used words like 'mythology'.)

As the champion of Humanity fell beneath the might of AlphaGo, I heard somewhere that Mr. Sedol was only the fourth best go player in the world. (By current rankings I think he is actually the second.) This made me imagine that the three best are kept in reserve to save their species from the Machines.

Number Three spent the match deep beneath the pentagon watching every move of the game, assisted by teams of mathematicians and machine learning specialists who deconstruct each of AlphaGo's plays. Now, he studies, analyzes, watching and learning every strategy that the Machine can bring to bear and how counter them.

Number Two is in a secret research station in Siberia. There, with the aid of powerful drugs, virtual reality, meditation, training in other modes of thought and speech (perhaps he spends an entire month living under water with a breathing mask while speaking Fith), his mind is being broken down and remade so that he is, in a real sense, no longer human. Thus, they hope, AlphaGo will be helpless against an opponent whose mode of thought is completely outside of its corpus.

Finally, Number One, the greatest master of go, lies frozen in liquid helium in a casket of gold that floats atop a seemingly endless sea of quicksilver that lies hidden beneath the Forbidden City, waiting since the sixteenth century where he was placed by an ancient sage against the day when all humanity would need him to arise and be their champion.