| Stuff |
[May. 4th, 2011|10:41 pm]
Scott
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So, uh, just to make it clear to everyone, my last post wasn't trying to say "Killing Osama is just as great as if we suddenly discovered nuclear fusion." It's trying to say "Killing Osama is just as unexpected as if we suddenly discovered nuclear fusion." As I mentioned to  ciphergoth (who got it exactly right) the cluster being pointed to was "Things that sounded like they should be simple, then we learned they were so difficult that they became practically a synonym for fruitless wastes of time, then they succeeded unexpectedly."
Moving on, the comments to my last post, cactus_rs wrote in response to my cheerfulness at the death of Osama that:
"I'm surprised at your reaction. As far as people I casually stalk on the internet (ie, LJ and Facebook), you are the first out of the "intelligent, reasoned and thoughtful" group to be uncomplicatedly happy about this development and not to be, say, disgusted at the reactions of the other 90% or so."
This amused me, because I remembered my exact thought process when opening Facebook after reading that Osama had been found. I was thinking back to my old Less Wrong post about contrarians and meta-contrarians and how I already knew how this was going to play out.
I could post something like "Hooray! We killed the bastard! In your face, terrorism! Go USA!" to signal patriotism either for America or for some more generalized Western Civilization or Forces of Good and to ingratiate myself with conservatives, military-types, and the innocent who think the world is exactly how it seems.
Or I could post something like "I can't believe my friends are posting things like 'Hooray' or 'Go USA' today when after ten years, 8 trillion dollars, two wars, 5,000 dead Americans, and 200,000 dead foreigners, we killed one old guy with kidney disease. Woo-frickin-hoo." This would signal that I was smarter and more rational than the people in the first category, and ingratiate myself with liberals who show their sophistication by hanging out with other people wise enough to know Things Are Never Just Black And White.
Or I could post something like "You know, at first I was thinking of writing something snarky and sarcastic ending with 'woo-frickin-hoo', but after thinking about it this really does give closure to a lot of people Osama has harmed, and maybe it will allow us to finally wind down the War on Terror. So I'll cut out the snark and be cautiously optimistic." This would have signaled superiority even to the people in the second category: I'm smart enough to understand the arguments for why it's not black-and-white good, but I also appear wise and graceful enough to make them seem small-minded. theferrett pulled this one off masterfully, and remains one of my favorite bloggers.
But I really don't like signaling when I know that I'm doing it. So instead I didn't write anything, and then later when I was walking and reflecting on how crazy the whole situation was (I'd been 95% sure Osama had been dead for years and we were just carrying the search for appearances' sake) and it came to me that it was as unexpected as if we went and won the War on Drugs, and so then I came up with a few similar metaphors and turned it into a post without feeling guilty, because I was pretty sure it was an actual thought I was having and not the output of any signaling process.
I don't know to what degree everyone else's responses were output by the same signaling process. But I will note I was able to predict what they would be and who would be saying them before opening Facebook, which is more than I can say for before Robin Hanson converted me to a signal-based understanding of human interaction. |
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