(The below text version of the notes is for search purposes and convenience. See the PDF version for proper formatting such as bold, italics, etc., and graphics where applicable. Copyright: 2022 Retraice, Inc.)
Re46: Bad Faith and the Bad Life
Retraice^1
The Midterms Part 4: There will be suffering, resentment and the `intent to deceive'.
Air date: Thursday, 10th Nov. 2022, 11:00 PM Eastern/US.
Deception
Bad faith (intent to decieve) applies to all the other things discussed below. Why the bad faith?
1. competition;^2 2. other incentives, e.g. profit.
If prices provide information about scarcity and an incentive to action,^3 and one form of action is deception, then scarcity can create an incentive, among other things, to deceive. Examples include every advertisement ever made. This incentive to deceive is not so different from other motivations to deceive. In our competition for mates, wherein the `price' of a mate can be thought of as their sexual attractiveness,^4 `showing off'^5 is a form of deception incentivized by that `price'. This is to say nothing of the big difference between stated and `revealed' or `demonstrated' preferences.^6
Dysfunction
1. What's going on that's making the elections a question of civil war and the end of U.S. democracy?^7 What's with the suffering and resentment?^8
2. Deaths of despair are going on:
+ Suicide and addiction (`accidental poisonings', i.e. drug over-doses, and liver disease, i.e. alcoholism) are up, life expectancy is down;^9 + The 4-year college degree is the major divider.^10
3. Suicide is what? (See `license to breed' below.)
4. "Addiction is the opposite of connection," says Hari:
"The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety. It's connection. It's all I can offer. It's all that will help him in the end. If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction. If you are loved, you have a chance."^11
5. Habit is the basis of addiction: addiction is a normal learned habit that happens when desire combines with repetition to form a "narrowing tunnel of attention and attraction," says Lewis.^12
Competition
1. Acquiring and controlling territory is a `license to breed'.
Dawkins says Wynne-Edwards' `group selection' and "genuine altruistic birth control" ideas are bad evolutionary reasoning, specifically the "altruistic" part, i.e. "for the good of the group", because genes cannot "see into the future" and do not "have the welfare of the whole species at heart." The better explanation is in selfishness--that fighting for territory, an expensive use of energy, has worse odds than waiting and hoping a competitor will die and free up territory, which sometimes happens.^13 So the idea that territory is a `license to breed' is true, in a sense, in that reproduction is optimized to available resources (`territory'). But the voluntary withdrawal is false. Yet the waiting-and-hoping explanation can't possibly apply to human suicides, because there is no chance of gaining anything after suicide. Compare this to addiction, where waiting-and-hoping is a plausible explanation.
2. If it's gradual, we adapt to degradation in our quality of life; if it's steep, we react.^14
3. Power trajectory (downward) is the best predictor of a group becoming violent.^15
(The two major predictors of civil war are moving toward or away from democracy, i.e. being an `anocracy' in the gray zone between democracy and autocracy, and factionalization.^16
Hope against technology
1. Hope for `betterment' (H7) is probably what addiction-hope and power-hope are `for'.^17
(Note: addiction is more hopeful than suicide.)
Betterment is probably a rate, not a state; and we notice acceleration and change in acceleration (jerk), not so much the rate itself.^18
But we also detect photons, people we can see who are doing well.^19
2. Hope for love:
+ But technology has separated us physically: no pheromones means women look for resource-garnering ability.^20 + But technology has consolidated the dating market, 10% 90%: Porsche polygamy.^21
3. Hope for money:
"Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever."^22
Most often in financial life, you're either earning interest or paying interest (hint: the poor aren't earning it). Warren Buffett likens interest rates to gravity in the financial world.^23
But technology is in a race with education: the widening gap is income inequality.^24
4. Technology is pushing against hope for love and money, though it's also pushing for these things. What's the net effect? What's the marginal cost-benefit of technology itself, as a whole?^25
Something is happening to us
If you accept all this, then you should accept that something is happening to us. All the bad guys didn't go to one side, and all the people on one side didn't become bad guys.
It's not that we don't have agency and control, only that these forces are way, way bigger and more complicated than we're acknowledging.
Something is happening to us. A hyperobject something. Nature is not F-ing around.
But neither are we, against it. We've been very successful against the parts of nature that are trying to kill us.
_
References
Case, A., & Deaton, A. (2020). Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton University Press, Kindle ed. ISBN: 978-0691199955 (probably a misprinted ISBN in the eBook). Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Deaths+of+Despair+case+deaton https://www.google.com/search?q=Deaths+of+Despair+case+deaton https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040360
Dasgupta, P. (2007). Economics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0192853455. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780192853455 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780192853455 https://lccn.loc.gov/2007297583
Dawkins, R. (2016). The Selfish Gene. Oxford, 40th anniv. ed. ISBN: 978-0198788607. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780198788607 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780198788607 https://lccn.loc.gov/2016933210
Dixit, A. (2014). Microeconomics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0199689378. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780199689378 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780199689378 https://lccn.loc.gov/2013953432
Dyson, G. B. (1997). Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence. Basic Books. ISBN: 978-0465031627. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0465031627 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0465031627 https://lccn.loc.gov/2012943208
Freedman, L., & Michaels, J. (2019). The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, 4th ed. ISBN: 978-1137573490. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781137573490 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781137573490 https://lccn.loc.gov/2019934815
Hari, J. (2015). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Bloomsbury, Kindle ed. ISBN: 978-1620408926. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781620408926 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781620408926 https://lccn.loc.gov/2014021633
Koch, C. G. (2007). The Science of Success. Wiley. ISBN: 978-0470139882. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780470139882 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780470139882 https://lccn.loc.gov/2007295977
Lewis, M. (2015). The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease. PublicAffairs, Kindle ed. ISBN: 978-1610394383. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9781610394383 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9781610394383 https://lccn.loc.gov/2015940383
Retraice (2022/03/07). Re17: Hypotheses to Eleven. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re17 Retrieved 17th Mar. 2022.
Retraice (2022/10/10). Re19: Nature Is Not F-ing Around. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re19 Retrieved 12th Oct. 2022.
Retraice (2022/11/06). Re42: News -- Wealth, Wildcards, Computers. retraice.com. https://www.retraice.com/segments/re42 Retrieved 8th Nov. 2022.
Simler, K., & Hanson, R. (2018). The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780190495992. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780190495992 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+9780190495992 https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004296
Tinbergen, J. (1974). Substitution of graduate by other labour. Kyklos, 27(2), 217-226. Jan. 1974. https://repub.eur.nl/pub/8084 Retrieved 8th Nov. 2022. Paywalled source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1974.tb01903.x
Walter, B. F. (2022). How Civil Wars Start. Crown. ISBN: 978-0593137789. Searches: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=978-0593137789 https://www.google.com/search?q=isbn+978-0593137789 https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040090
Footnotes
^1 https://www.retraice.com/retraice
^2 Simler & Hanson (2018) chpt. 2.
^3 Dixit (2014) p. 2.
^4 Simler & Hanson (2018) p. 34.
^5 See p. 40 for examples.
^6 Dasgupta (2007) p. 144; Koch (2007) p. 34; Revealed preference, wikipedia.org, retrieved Nov. 11th, 2022.
^7 Walter (2022); H5 in Retraice (2022/03/07); Retraice (2022/10/10) on blue-and-red (B&R) politics.
^8 Case & Deaton (2020); Hari (2015).
^9 Case & Deaton (2020) pp. 1-2.
^10 Even this observation seems inadequate to us. Is the 4-year degree really enough? Is grad school the divider now? See Retraice (2022/11/06) on Tinbgeren and below.
^11 Hari (2015) p. 293.
^12 Lewis (2015) loc. 47 of 4394.
^13 Dawkins (2016) pp. 142-154.
^14 Freedman & Michaels (2019) p. 17, quoting Liddell Hart on air raids during World War II.
^15 Walter (2022) p. 63. Note also `hunger' for community (p. 219). Cf. addiction and `connection' above.
^16 Walter (2022) pp. 11, 214.
^17 Retraice (2022/03/07).
^18 Walter (2022) p. 63 on `downgrading'; cf. p. 175 on `accellerationism,' when groups try to hasten downfalls, and p. 153 on Republican self-reported power status.
^19 FIXME TODO Who? On how we care only about relative inequality, not global or absolute.
^20 Scott Galloway on Real Time with Bill Maher, Sep. 9th, 2022. FIXME TODO: This really needs a better source.
^21 Scott Galloway on Real Time with Bill Maher, Sep. 9th, 2022. FIXME TODO: This really needs a better source.
^22 Brooke Gladstone expressed this sentiment at some point on On The Media, but James Baldwin wrote it in 1960: Fifth Avenue, Uptown, James Baldwin, esquire.com, July 1960, retrieved Nov. 12th, 2022.
^23 The Fed is poised to hike interest rates this year. Warren Buffett has compared rates to gravity -- and said they `power everything in the economic universe', Theron Mohamed, businessinsider.com, Jan 22nd, 2022.
^24 Tinbergen (1974); Retraice (2022/11/06).
^25 Dyson (1997) might have answers.
