Thought experiments conceal more than they reveal
A lot of thought experiments strike me as a kind of mind viruses which spread incredibly well with people who are prone to being nerd-sniped, which is probably why they do so well on social media. They are both utterly disconnected from any real issues at hand which a real person could tangibly work on, and also seemingly point to "deep" conflicts about human beings and choice, such as this one:
Choose the blue pill or the red pill? Knowing that:
1. If >50% of people choose the blue pill, then everyone lives
2. If not, then people who chose the red pill live and those who chose the blue pill die
What a dilemma! Surely, only an intelligent person could solve such a tricky question, using concepts from game theory like the Nash equilibrium! And how relevant it is to our daily life, filled with constant compromises between the common good and individual interests! Except that real intelligence, as I outlined in my essay on Atomized Intelligence, is good at noticing the current context and what tools and approaches are suited to it, including the approach which consists in not turning to the mind at all and trusting one's instincts.
There is no context in thought experiments, which is why they are so good at prompting people to turn to abstract thinking and make sweeping generalizations. In reality, the “dilemmas” of society are:
It doesn't matter what people actually think within our system, because its demands outweigh what individuals think. As such, even though corrupt politicians and businessmen certainly exist and have more influence than the average person, ultimately the system has its own momentum and its own demands.
For instance, when steam power was invented and turned out to be significantly more powerful than horsepower or human power, then of course manufacturing industries would to take advantage of it, because it increased their productivity by a tremendous amount. But then, more and more parts of society needed to fit to the changes brought by steam power, such as a development in metal production, in railways to transport all the coal, and the excess energy brought by its development trickled down in all aspects of daily life. On a more subtle level, such a radical change in the social landscape also affected people's views of the world and their internal life, since they spent more and more time working with machines.
This has happened with steam power, as well as with oil, cars, the internet, and possibly more inventions in the future, and what it shows is that human decisions aren't in control of the system, it has its own direction of growth, which no one can go against because no one with a significant amount of power would ever want to willingly give it up. This is how egos relate to the world and one another: always more, more and more, no matter the cost, and never less, which is considered backwards, insane.
Going back to thought experiments, I would say that one of their appeal is that they give people the illusion of agency, by manipulating abstract situations, because control over one's life is so rare in the modern world, where people have to routinely engage with layers upon layers of bureaucracy and regulations to get anything meaningful done.
Another reason why they spread so well is that decontextualized conversations are particularly good at making people disagree with one another, as can be seen from online political discourse. It leads people to argue and come to realize the wildly diverging conclusions they have on the same topic, which is inevitable considering how differently people see the world.
In a low-scale environment, differences in ways of living are not just fine, they are expected, and lead to the natural soft boundaries which emerge between cultures, language, and even individuals. In the incredibly high complexity of our times however, mixed in with the coercive nature of the system, fundamental disagreements are not allowed to exist? Why? Because they get in the way of scaling coordination, which is the game of the system, as opposed to helping human life flourish.
The large-scale collectives that surround us maintain themselves with rigid decision-making, because they are so big that they cannot directly perceive reality, and instead must create proxies to interface with it. For instance, no one can know what the economy is, because it is far too big and interconnected, and individual agents have interests to hide their agenda. 1 As a result, people do not think about the economy as a whole, but about proxies of it, such as metrics, for instance GDP, inflation indexes, 2 mortgage rates, government bonds, etc.
Those proxies are then used to come up with policies, which is to say a form of rigid decision-making, one that must be applied all the time no matter what the context is, because allowing human decision making to enter the picture opens the gate to an array of issues, such as:
All this to say that humans naturally come to disagreements, but that in a highly complex and coercive environment such as the technological system, fundamental differences are not allowed to exist, and are steamrolled under the agenda of growth of the system. This is why people disagree so much about politics, because fundamentally, there is no such thing as a large-scale system which can solve its problem, because such a large-scale can only be maintained with highly-complex technology, which has its own agenda of homogenization, and which makes collectives rigid, out of touch with their context, coercive to humans and nature (in order to maintain the growth of the system), and all of this explains why every civilization before ours has collapsed.
Thought experiments give people the illusion of solving fundamental structural problems about our system, but they don't. Abstract thinking is part of the problem, because it can fundamentally never solve the problems created by a collective which emerges as a need to maintain an abstraction, such as growth 3, at all costs. Losing track of what is even real at the expense of thinking about a narrow, disconnected, aspect of reality, can legitimately be qualified as demonic, and the fact that thought experiments are so good at gathering attention on the internet for the wrong reasons is a sign to me that, in many ways, the internet is actually demonic.
1 People constantly talk about having more transparency in our system, but rarely think about why opacity arises in the first place, the main reason I see being that it is a major way that power concentrated in the hands of a few can maintain itself.
2 Which are themselves proxies of the real inflation rate, since tracking the inflation of the entire economy is impossible
3 Obviously we are getting more fancy technology in the material world, so “growth” isn’t an abstraction per se. But just think about what the endgame of all of the activities of the technological system are pointing to? Is it human flourishing? I know very few people who actually enjoy their job, and when they are not working, they are bored, stressed out, tired, lonely, depressed, apathetic. If that is the type of world that “growth” leads to, then there is clearly a large disconnect between this ideal and the reality that people inhabit.
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2024-12-14