Visst, framåtskridande och allt sånt. Men det är något extremt estetiskt tilltalande med förfall. Och med förvaltande av gamla, glömda framsteg.
***
Vad jag länkar:
Khalifen:
"The vibrance that Rand admired in science, in commerce, in every railroad that replaced a horse-and-buggy route, in every skyscraper built with new architecture—it all comes from the principle of surpassing the ancient masters. How can there be science, if the most knowledgeable scientist there will ever be, has already lived? Who would raise the New York skyline that Rand admired so, if the tallest building that would ever exist, had already been built?
And yet Ayn Rand acknowledged no superior, in the past, or in the future yet to come.
/.../
I admire Newton's accomplishments. But my attitude toward a woman's right to vote, bars me from accepting Newton as a moral paragon. Just as my knowledge of Bayesian probability bars me from viewing Newton as the ultimate unbeatable source of mathematical knowledge. And my knowledge of Special Relativity, paltry and little-used though it may be, bars me from viewing Newton as the ultimate authority on physics.
Newton couldn't realistically have discovered any of the ideas I'm lording over him—but progress isn't fair! That's the point!
Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals, they are passed milestones on our road; and the most important milestone is the hero yet to come.
To be one more milestone in humanity's road is the best that can be said of anyone; but this seemed too lowly to please Ayn Rand. And that is how she became a mere Ultimate Prophet."
SSC:
"One of the ways people like insulting smart people, or rational people, or scientists, is by telling them they’re the type of people who are attracted to Communism. 'Oh, you think you can control and understand everything, just like the Communists did.'
And I had always thought this was a pretty awful insult. The people I know who most identify as rationalists, or scientifically/technically minded, are also most likely to be libertarian. So there, case dismissed, everybody go home.
This book was the first time that I, as a person who considers himself rationally/technically minded, realized that I was super attracted to Communism.
Here were people who had a clear view of the problems of human civilization – all the greed, all the waste, all the zero-sum games. Who had the entire population united around a vision of a better future, whose backers could direct the entire state to better serve the goal. All they needed was to solve the engineering challenges, to solve the equations, and there they were, at the golden future. And they were smart enough to be worthy of the problem – Glushkov invented cybernetics, Kantorovich won a Nobel Prize in Economics.
And in the end, they never got the chance. There’s an interpretation of Communism as a refutation of social science, here were these people who probably knew some social science, but did it help them run a state, no it didn’t. But from the little I learned about Soviet history from this book, this seems diametrically wrong. The Soviets had practically no social science. They hated social science. You would think they would at least have some good Marxists, but apparently Stalin killed all of them just in case they might come up with versions of Marxism he didn’t like, and in terms of a vibrant scholarly field it never recovered. Economics was tainted with its association with capitalism from the very beginning, and when it happened at all it was done by non-professionals. Kantorovich was a mathematician by training; Glushkov a computer scientist.
Soviet Communism isn’t what happens when you let nerds run a country, it’s what happens when you kill all the nerds who are experts in country-running, bring in nerds from unrelated fields to replace them, then make nice noises at those nerds in principle while completely ignoring them in practice. Also, you ban all Jews from positions of importance, because fuck you."
And I had always thought this was a pretty awful insult. The people I know who most identify as rationalists, or scientifically/technically minded, are also most likely to be libertarian. So there, case dismissed, everybody go home.
This book was the first time that I, as a person who considers himself rationally/technically minded, realized that I was super attracted to Communism.
Here were people who had a clear view of the problems of human civilization – all the greed, all the waste, all the zero-sum games. Who had the entire population united around a vision of a better future, whose backers could direct the entire state to better serve the goal. All they needed was to solve the engineering challenges, to solve the equations, and there they were, at the golden future. And they were smart enough to be worthy of the problem – Glushkov invented cybernetics, Kantorovich won a Nobel Prize in Economics.
And in the end, they never got the chance. There’s an interpretation of Communism as a refutation of social science, here were these people who probably knew some social science, but did it help them run a state, no it didn’t. But from the little I learned about Soviet history from this book, this seems diametrically wrong. The Soviets had practically no social science. They hated social science. You would think they would at least have some good Marxists, but apparently Stalin killed all of them just in case they might come up with versions of Marxism he didn’t like, and in terms of a vibrant scholarly field it never recovered. Economics was tainted with its association with capitalism from the very beginning, and when it happened at all it was done by non-professionals. Kantorovich was a mathematician by training; Glushkov a computer scientist.
Soviet Communism isn’t what happens when you let nerds run a country, it’s what happens when you kill all the nerds who are experts in country-running, bring in nerds from unrelated fields to replace them, then make nice noises at those nerds in principle while completely ignoring them in practice. Also, you ban all Jews from positions of importance, because fuck you."
***
En postapokalyps är alltid mer estetiskt tilltalande än en skön, ny värld; en dystopi alltid mer intressant än en utopi.
Khalifen (dvs. LessWrong's Yudkowsky) noterar att stora delar av historien är en nostalgisk affär. Han skriver att
"a key component of a zeitgeist is whether it locates its ideals in its future or its past. Nearly all cultures before the Enlightenment believed in a Fall from Grace—that things had once been perfect in the distant past, but then catastrophe had struck, and everything had slowly run downhill since then".
Även renässansen var, att döma av Antropofagis ytliga kunskaper, en längtan tillbaka till det stolta antiken. (Jag skriver "även", eftersom renässansen ändå var en produktiv och i många bemärkelser framåtskridande epok, som banade vägen för upplysningen.)
Khalifen noterar även att nazismen snarare är "förvaltande", eller i alla fall bakåtsträvande och mytologiserande, än framåtsträvande:
"Like any educated denizen of the 21st century, you may have heard of World War II. You may remember that Hitler and the Nazis planned to carry forward a romanticized process of evolution, to breed a new master race, supermen, stronger and smarter than anything that had existed before.
Actually this is a common misconception. Hitler believed that the Aryan superman had previously existed—the Nordic stereotype, the blond blue-eyed beast of prey—but had been polluted by mingling with impure races. There had been a racial Fall from Grace."
***
Tech priest är ett koncept inom Warhammer 40k-universumet:
"A Tech-Priest is an Adept of the Adeptus Mechanicus of the Imperium of Man who is generally responsible for maintaining all of the advanced technology of the Imperium, enlarging the Imperium's stocks of technical knowledge and conducting what little new scientific research occurs within the Imperium since the end of the Horus Heresy. Tech-priests are members of the Cult Mechanicus, the Cult of the Machine, a priesthood which forms an ecclesiastical hierarchy for the Cult Mechanicus of technicians, scientists, and religious leaders who believe that knowledge represents the only true divinity in the universe. The Tech-priests provide the rest of the Imperium with its technicians, scientists and engineers. Though their bodies often incorporate many inorganic components as bionic replacements, Tech-priests are fully human, unlike the cybernetic Servitors created by the Adeptus Mechanicus that carry out most of the heavy labour for all of the Imperium's myriad organisations and Enterprises."
Enligt Antropofagis ringa förståelse och felbara läsning av källorna, går detta prästerskaps uppgift ut på att förvalta befintlig teknologi snarare än att driva framåtskridande vetenskap. Åh så tufft!
På så sätt kan Warhammer 40k-universat ses som en framtida analogi till vår medeltid. Antiken har passerat, kunskaperna är glömda och förtryckta av kyrkan. (Visst, klostren hade en viktig funktion i att bevara kunskaper etcetera men det går väl knappast att förneka att Vatikanen var rätt vetenskapsfientliga och att det snarare var arabvärlden som förvaltade t.ex. antikens matematiska framsteg.) Alla bara traskar på i leran. Stjäler sten av romarnas gamla viadukter i syfte att bygga svinstior. Dör av mögelsvamp på veteskörden istället för att knarka skiten.
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