One of nature's many attempts to evolve a crab.
A few months ago I pointed out something on twitter that is worth expanding on. (Thanks @sarahdoingthing for reminding me!)
While there’s plenty to go into on each of these topics, they all kind of hinge on the last one. What does it mean for something to “exist”? What does it mean for something to be “real”? The answer is nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.
Imagine that you’re faced with a problem, and some other agent X is involved in, or at least adjacent to, that problem. You suspect that X is oppressing you. How can you be sure?
Continue reading “How to Tell Whether You Are Being Oppressed”
The social construction of jewelry is a remarkable, concrete example of virtuality or effacement, which perhaps explains why no critical theorist ever tried (AFAIK) to come to grips with it. Jewelry’s ancient role as a store of easily concealable, relatively liquid wealth has been completely erased, overwritten by its role as a signifier of wealth which is nearly valueless as wealth, difficult to resell at even a fraction of its original price.
An essential part of this murder of the real by the virtual has been the passivity, or complicity, of the consumer, who enters into a sort of negative knowledge: willingly absorbing an education on the subject of precious stones–particularly diamonds–that is deliberately and perniciously incorrect. Learning enough to even know that jewelry made with interesting but cheap synthetic stones is an option would require breaking this glamour (in both senses). Some people want lab-grown diamonds, but these people are ‘no one’ in the context of the Spectacle.
The word “crab” brings to mind a snapshot (or perhaps a scuttling mental video) of the surface appearance of an adult crab. Like most nouns, “crab” is a metonym for a complex system of processes that are concealed by the snapshot-in-time and surface appearance connotations of the word. Some processes are internal to crabs, such as respiration, digestion, and the Krebs cycle. Other processes are impossible to localize in the space and time of a crab snapshot. The adult coconut crab (Birgus latro) is evidence of a complex reproductive process, in which crabs mate and drop their eggs into the ocean on a rocky beach at dusk; the eggs exist as plankton, then as small hermit crabs; eventually some re-emerge on islands to grow into adult coconut crabs. They also interact with human processes, such as fishing, cars, and perhaps occasionally the deceased female aviator process.
Boxer crabs carry anemones in their claws and use the toxins in the anemones’ tentacles for defense; the anemones feed on the crabs’ scraps. The boxer crab process is inseparable from the anemone process. Wider processes are relevant to crabs as well, including the weather effects from long-term astronomical processes, ocean currents, asteroids, and evolution itself. Some processes are inseparable; others have limited interaction; some are completely separate, although subtle interdependencies are often hidden.
The physical shape of the adult crab represents the successful interaction of many processes. Carcinization is the process by which diverse non-crablike life forms adopt the shape of a crab – indicating that the crab shape is a kind of attractor, a particularly viable form given all the relevant processes within the system.
Roko’s Basilisk is a class 1 acausal epistemic threat which preys upon novice decision theorists. It poses no danger to those who disbelieve in it, do not understand the prerequisite decision theory, or are aware of an appropriate defensive technique.
If you have studied Timeless Decision Theory, acausal trade, or AI safety and you have not yet encountered Roko’s Basilisk, this post may be an information hazard. If at any point you become afraid you have been personally targeted or co-opted by the basilisk, take several deep breaths and relax. You can get rid of it, repeat the protective charm until it goes away.
Why study Euclid?
Euclid’s geometry shows you that you, personally, can know truth without taking anything on faith.
You don’t have to believe Euclid, you just have to walk the same road that Euclid and millions of others have walked, and see what’s there: truth that’s available to everyone, that doesn’t rely on faith, popular consensus, or opinion. The truth found in geometry is not an expression of power relations; it was constructed by people of many cultures but isn’t “socially constructed”. It is not moral, it does not demand obedience, it does not yield to hegemony, it does not submit to authority. You can only attain it by your own efforts, but you can still communicate it and share it with others.
Knowing this kind of truth, and knowing that you can know this kind of truth, is a power that can be gained no other way.
I. Chasing ergodic crabs
Yes! Ergodicity is interesting and very useful. At least in statistics. Don’t ask me what physicists do with the thing though. Those guys are crazy. The problem with ergodicity is that it’s pretty complicated. Go ahead, take a look at the Wikipedia page, I’ll wait a minute.
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Ok, good. The math geniuses are gone now. You know the type – they can look at some math they’ve never seen before and understand it in minutes. Right now they’re busy proving theorems about ergodic flows on n-dimensional locally non-Hausdorff manifolds. And twitching at that last sentence. You and me? We’re going to learn about ergodicity with a pretty crabby extended metaphor.
