Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 47

Mapping the Dark Enlightenment

The Dark Enlightenment is a group of thinkers and blogs that has aroused a fair amount of controversy in the last several years. Most people who write about them from the outside piously dismiss them as a gang of crypto- and not-so-crypto- fascists, or a sort of grunting neanderthalism dressed up in intellectual clothes. The reality, as usual, is not so simple.

I’ve been meaning to write about them for a while, and the first question I’m going to raise is whether they meaningfully present a single subject at all.

Here’s a recent version of an affinity map that has seen wide circulation. External link, might go stale; if it does, throw “dark enlightenment map” in a search engine to get something similar.

Dark enlightenment map

Just looking at the map, someone unfamiliar with the players would be justified in wondering if there’s really any coherence there at all. And that’s a fair question. Some of the people the map sweeps in don’t think of themselves as “Dark Enlightenment” at all. This is notably true of the light green cluster marked “Techno-Commercialists/Futurists” at the top, and the “Economists” connected to it in yellow.

If I belonged on this map, that’s where I’d be. I know Eliezer Yudkowsky; the idea that he and the Less Wrong crowd and Robin Hanson feel significant affinity with most of the rest of that map is pretty ludicrous.

Note, however, that one of only two links to the rest is “Nick Land”. This is a clue, because Nick Land is probably the single most successful booster of the “Dark Enlightenment” meme. It’s in his interest to make the movement look as big and various as he can manage, and I think this map is partly in the nature of a successful con job or dezinformatsiya.

In this, Land is abetted by people outside the movement who are well served by making it look like the Dark Enlightenment is as big and scary as possible. Some of those people lump in the techno-futurist/economist group out of dislike for that group’s broadly libertarian politics – which though very different from the reactionary ideas of the core Dark Enlightenment, is also in revolt against conventional wisdom. Others lump them in out of sheer ignorance.

So, my first contention is that Nick Land has pulled a fast one. That said, I think there is a core Dark Enlightenment – mostly identifiable with the purple “Political Philosophy” group, but with some crossover into HBD and Masculinity and (possibly) the other groups at the bottom of the map.

Additionally, maps like this can sometimes reinforce existing affinities if people on both ends notice them and take them seriously. Even in my limited and occasional investigation, I think I’ve seen some signs of convergence between “Political Philosophy” and “Masculinity”, with people in both groups adopting each others’ tropes and language more than they were doing on my first exposure to either.

It would not at all surprise me if there is something similar going on with the “Ethno-Nationalists”, a group about which I know only a little (and most of what I know is pretty nasty). I’m unqualified to write about the “Christian Traditionalists”, about which I know nothing, but I suspect this may be another spurious link. Same goes for “Femininity”.

From my reading, I think we are on firmest ground speaking of a “Dark Enlightenment” if we zero in on the middle tier of the map: “Political Philosophy”, “Secular Traditionalists”, “HBD”, and “Masculinity”. The link density of the map backs this up. Land and other Dark Enlightenment maximalists, though willing to write in spurious connections to inflate the movement, don’t seem to be wrong about these.

My original plan was to write a sort of view from high altitude of the whole congeries, but I think I’m going to have to break that up into several themed blog entries. Watch this space.

How…does this even work?

Here is a curious fact.

My wife Cathy is using Duolingo to learn German; she wants to be able to read sources on Iron Age and Viking costume in the original.

Duolingo takes her through a lot of pronunciation drills.

I’ve learned something by listening to her – which is that somehow, somewhere, I have internalized a very precise understanding of German phonology and phonotactics. As in, I not only know right pronunciation from wrong, I give her detailed advice on how to match Duolingo’s model speaker that we can both tell is correct.

What makes this weird is that I don’t speak German. At all. Nor have I ever lived where it’s spoken; I’ve visited Germany once, German-speaking Switzerland once, and that’s it.

This raises questions in my mind:

1. How the fuck? I mean, I suppose it’s related to my knack for generating names in the style of any specified language, and I could handwave about Markov-chain models, but…how the fuck?

2. What dialect of German have I templated on? Could there be any way to tell?

3. What other entire language phonologies have I swallowed … without … me … actually … noticing …

4. Does this happen to other people?

The human brain is a very odd thing.

Down the feminist rabbit hole

I fell down a rabbit hole today. By reading this: An Incomplete Guide to Feminist infighting. Bemused, I chased links and read manifestos and counter-manifestos for a couple of hours until the sources just began to repeat themselves. But in some respects my confusion was just beginning.

As I was falling through all these diatribes like Alice wondering how deep the rabbit hole goes, one of the thoughts uppermost in my mind was Poe’s Law: “Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”

There was no humor down this rabbit hole. I found myself in the land beyond parody. On this evidence, I suspect it would be nigh-impossible to write a literate spoof of modern feminism that even many of its disputants wouldn’t blithely mistake for a real ideological position. And I found myself thinking of the Sokal Hoax.

Somebody, I thought, really ought to go all hermeneutics-of-quantum-gravity on these women just to see what happens. And then it hit me: maybe someone already has! It is impossible to tell how many of these women are ironists being “performative” (one of their favorite words) because all of them sound so precisely like an anti-feminist’s cruelest parody of the movement.

I mean, are they even women, really? On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. Could these feminist twitter wars be an elaborate fiction accidentally generated by beer-swilling men in wife-beater T-shirts, each a master of the art of satire but utterly convinced by circumstances that everyone else in the flamewars is a sincere paragon of feminist outrage with immaculate activist credentials?

Fucked if I know. Sure, there are external checks one would apply – some of the disputants report having jobs at identifiable institutions. My point is that I can’t tell how anybody could falsify the wife-beater hypothesis going strictly on the rhetoric. That’s how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Actually, in a way it would it would be nice to think the wife-beater hypothesis is true and real feminists are off doing something healthier and more useful. Alas, I doubt this is the case; I suspect what we see here is what we get. So, under that depressing premise, what does it look like down the rabbit hole?

The most conspicuous thing is that these women ooze “privilege” from every pore. All of them, not just the white upper-middle-class academics but the putatively “oppressed” blacks and transsexuals and what have you. It’s the privilege of living in a society so wealthy and so indulgent that they can go years – even decades – without facing a reality check.

And yet, these women think they are oppressed, by patriarchy and neoliberalism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and there’s a continuous arms race to come up with new oppression modalities du jour and how many intersectional categories each player can claim.

While these children of privilege are filling out their victimological bingo cards…elsewhere, women are treated like chattels. Raped under color of law. Genitally mutilated. But none of this enters the charmed circle of modern American feminism. So much safer to rage at the Amerikkan phallocracy that provides them with cushy jobs writing about their outrage for audiences almost as insulated from reality as they are. Not to mention all those obliging men who will grow their food, fix their plumbing, mow their lawns, and know their place.

There were pictures. Such pictures! They all look alike, from the cutesy white chicks with hipster glasses to the black WOCs with dreadlocks. It took me a while to figure out why, but I got it eventually. It was like browsing some Renaissance painter’s gallery of fin-de-race noblemen. Such arrogance, such entitlement, all those faces suffused with a a bland and unimpeachable conviction of their own superiority and righteousness. No wonder they fight each other like cats in a sack!

I cannot do justice to the sheer, pluripotent absurdity revealed by these twitter wars; it would take the powers of a Jonathan Swift to do that. I think I may have some light to shed on how it got so hilariously you can’t-make-this-stuff-up awful, though.

Years ago, I wrote about kafkatrapping, and uttered this warning: “At the extreme, such causes frequently become epistemically closed, with a jargon and discourse so tightly wrapped around the logical fallacies in the kafkatraps that their doctrine is largely unintelligible to outsiders.”

I think that is almost exactly what has happened here. While I had certain varieties of feminism in mind when I wrote that, it now appears that I grossly underestimated the degree to which closure had taken hold or would do so. While I wasn’t looking, they went from incestuous to plain ridiculous.

And to return to an older theme – I think this sort of bitter involution is what eventually and inevitably happens when you marinate in left-wing duckspeak for long enough. (Clue: if you find yourself using the word “neoliberal” as non-ironically as these women do, you’re there. For utter lack of meaning outside of a dense thicket of self-referential cod-Marxist presuppositions disconnected from reality, this one has few rivals.)

Accordingly, George Orwell would have no trouble at all identifying the language of the feminist twitter wars as a form of Newspeak, designed not to convey thought but suppress it. Indeed, part of the content of the wars is that some of these women dimly sort of get this – see the whole argument over “callout culture”. But none of them can wake up enough to see that the problem is not just individual behaviors. Because to do that they’d have to face how irretrievably rotten and oppressive their entire discourse has become, and their worldview would collapse.

Ah well. This too shall pass. The university system and establishment journalism are both in the process of collapsing under their own weight. With them will go most of the ecological niches that support these precious, precious creatures in their luxury. Massive reality check a’coming. No doubt the twitter wars will continue, but in historical terms they won’t last long.

FOAD 2014 Party Pre-Announcemrnt

This is a pre-announcement of the second third Friends of Armed & Dangerous party.

FOAD 2014 will be held at Penguicon 2014, in Southfield, MI, almost certainly on the evening of Saturday May 3rd (but we don’t have a confirmed party-floor booking yet).

I believe John Bell is planning to run a Geeks with Guns the Friday before, so come equipped. Yes, personal weapons are considered an article of proper attire for the FOAD party – especially firearms or swords.

More details as they become available.

Dragging Emacs forward

This is a brief heads-up that the reason I’ve been blog silent lately is that I’m concentrating hard on a sprint with what I consider a large payoff: getting the Emacs project fully converted to git. In retrospect, choosing Bazaar as DVCS was a mistake that has presented unnecessary friction costs to a lot of contributors. RMS gets this and we’re moving.

I’m also talking with RMS about the possibility that it’s time to shoot Texinfo through the head and go with a more modern, Web-friendly master format. Oh, and time to abolish info entirely in favor of HTML. He’s not entirely convinced yet of this, but he’s listening.

You might think “Huh? Emacs already has a git mirror. What else needs to be done?” Quite a lot, actually, starting with lifting Bazaar commit references into a form that will still make sense in a git log listing. Read the recent emacs-devel list archives if you’re really curious.

Fixing these things are important to me as part of a larger project: cracking Emacs out of an encrustation of practices and history that has made it seem insular and archaic to a lot of younger hackers who grew up with the faster pace and the techniques of the web.

RMS did too good a job. Because Emacs can be a total environment that you never have to step out of, the culture around it has tended to become inward-looking and hold on to habits that smell two decades old now.

My favorite quote about this is from Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings:

Emacs: Fangorn

Vast, ancient, gnarled and mostly impenetrable, tended by a small band of shepherds old as the world itself, under the command of their leader, Neckbeard. They possess unbelievable strength, are infuriatingly slow, and their land is entirely devoid of women. It takes forever to say anything in their strange, rumbling language.

Fortunately, RMS recognizes that this points at a real problem. Some of his senior devs don’t get it…

And if the idea of RMS and ESR cooperating to subvert Emacs’s decades-old culture from within strikes you as both entertaining and bizarrely funny…yeah, it is. Ours has always been a more complex relationship than most people understand.

Tackling subjectivity head on

In a response to my previous post, on Acausality and the Scientific Mind, a commenter said: “The computationalist position necessarily entails that subjectivity does not really exist, and what looks like subjectivity is a mere illusion without causal force.”

There are, I’m sure, many vulgar and stupid versions of computationalism that have this as a dogma. But it is not at all difficult to construct a computationalist model in which there are features that map to “subjectivity” and have causal force. Here is a sketch:

Human beings have minds that are persistent information patterns of very high complexity. These patterns evolve over time, incorporating memory (both memories about sense data and memories about features of past mental states). The path can in principle be modeled as a computation in which the inputs are the present mental state and sensory inputs, and the result is a succeeding mental state. (The last sentence is the computationalist position.)

The computational path of a mind in the space of its possible mental states is chaotic, in the sense that its future has sensitive dependence on unmeasurable features of its present state (it is not significant to my argument whether the indeterminacy is quantum, classical, or due to computational intractability). The mind is therefore, as a whole, intractable to prediction.

Now we face the procedural question of how we identify a mental state. We do this in the same way we identify the state of a collection of matter: by measuring observable consequences. We observe that mental states of different people can be grouped into equivalence classes by observable consequences. (If this were not so, language, art, and communication in general would be impossible.)

Next, we observe that important features of our mental states are not intractable to prediction. We know this because people can form predictive models of each others’ mental states; in fact people rely so heavily on this ability that there is a strong case we evolved into sophonts in order to get better at it.

It is important, and bears emphasizing at this point, that we now have a model of mind in which (a) some features of its state at any given moment are tractable to prediction, (b) other features are not tractable to prediction, and (c) the tractable and intractable features are causally entangled with each other and are both inputs to ongoing computation.

Now I propose a definition: the “subjectivity” of a human being is that portion of his or her evolving mental state which is intractable to prediction by any observer.

I think it is not difficult to see that this definition accords with our intuitive notion of “subjectivity”. But here is the important point: As so defined, subjectivity is not a mere epiphenomenon or illusion. It has causal force because it is an input to the computation of future mental states which have observable consequences.

See, that was easy. Subjectivity reconciled to computationalism in less than 20 minutes of writing. A lot of philosophers of mind seem to be remarkably thick-headed.

Acausality and the Scientific Mind

There is enough right about David Gelernter’s essay The Closing of the Scientific Mind to make it important to recognize where he has gone wrong. His willingness to call out certain kinds of widely popular modern errors is admirable, but does not preserve him from having made some rather more traditional errors of his own.

The problem is not in Dr. Gelernter’s indictment of reductive materialism. In his terms, I’m a materialist myself, but I sympathize with his complaint. I cringe, sometimes, at the clumsy eagerness some materialists display to throw out subjectivity and anything else that they fear might let the camel’s nose of religion back into the tent.

What Dr. Gelernter has right is that the reductionists have overreached, tending to hammer flat the texture of human experience as it is actually lived and to react with wholly inappropriate fury when someone like Thomas Nagel suggests that there may be phenomena of consciousness that can only be understood from within a frame that includes consciousness.

Thomas Nagel may be right or he may be wrong – but the questions he is trying to ask and formulate are important ones, not to be dismissed out of what Dr. Gelernter describes (with some justice) as “cowardice”.

But Dr. Gelernter’s rebuttal suffers from overreach of its own. He writes as though the reductionists are merely having some inexplicable sort of tantrum, rather than being energized by the terrifying reality behind the camel’s nose. It is 2014 and religious suicide bombers have shrapnel-stormed schoolbuses full of children so often that we have grown numbed to the horror. More prosaically, creationists are trying to ban the teaching of science. Wholesale revulsion against faith-driven thinking is more reasonable – and the reductionist excesses it motivates as a reaction correspondingly less unreasonable – than Dr. Gelernter is willing to admit.

A graver problem is that Dr. Gelernter’s counterargument smells like an attempt to smuggle religious particularism back into the tent while pretending he is talking in a philosophically neutral way. It is hard not to suspect this when he sets up his argument in part by speaking of “religious discoveries” as though we are all expected to believe this is a combination of words that makes obvious and actual sense.

This tendency is further on display in Dr. Gelernter’s attack on Ray Kurzweil’s transhumanism. Whether Kurzweil’s predictions are right or wrong isn’t any more the point here than whether Thomas Nagel’s attempt to rescue subjectivity nails all the details. No: the problem is that when Dr. Gelernter writes sentences like “Whether he knows it or not, Kurzweil believes in and longs for the death of mankind.”, Dr. Gelernter is presuming an authority to define “humanity” that he does not actually posess.

I have a friend who, after cataract surgery, can see into the ultraviolet. And several others with cochlear implants that use microprocessors to feed sound into their auditory nerves. Are these not humans? There are other people experimenting with artificial senses even as we speak – as one example, with coated implanted ball bearings inserted under the skin of fingertips giving them a useful ability to sense magnetic fields. Are *these* not humans?

Where, and on what principles, does Dr. Gelernter propose to draw a line? If his hypothetical “man with stainless steel skin, a small nuclear reactor for a stomach, and an IQ of 10,000″ were to appear and assert himself to share the condition of humanity, what position would Dr. Gelernter be in to deny this? And, as an observant Jew who necessarily lives in the shadow of the Holocaust, does Dr. Gelernter really want to be in the position of denying the humanity of any being that claims it?

Behind Dr. Gelernter’s outrage about the supposed inhumanity of Kurzweil’s vision there lurks, rather obviously, the religious notion that [sic] “mankind” is created in the image and likeness of God, and what Kurzweil desires to construct as our future is a species of blasphemy. Without this covert religious premise – without the horror of blasphemy and Godlessness – Dr. Gelernter’s essay dissolves into a disconnected ramble among trends not obviously connected except by Dr. Gelernter’s dislike of them.

This is unfortunate, because it damages Dr. Gelernter’s credibility in arguing a case that genuinely needs to be made. There is something gone very badly wrong when science and philosophy banish the primary data of human experience and emotion from the discussion and ignore the embodiedness of our consciousness. Dr. Gelernter’s plea for cognitive scientists to attend to what he calls “subjective humanism” is much the best-argued and strongest part of his essay. It is a damned shame when a critic of their failure as sharp and well-equipped as Dr. Gelernter then promptly exiles himself to the box marked “religious conservative – epistemologically insane – ignore”.

To actually be in the game, Dr. Gelernter needs to do better than merely attacking what he calls “computationalism” – because there really isn’t anywhere else to land. If the mind and brain are not entirely computational machines causally entangled with the material universe, what else are they? What else could they be, even in principle?

I have shown elsewhere, in my essay “Predictability, Computability, and Free Will”, that the intuitive model of human minds as containing some sort of autonomous uncaused cause, anything that would make them other than computational machines, rapidly leads to nonsense. We can, it turns out, purchase ontological specialness only at the cost of losing any warrant to believe in reliable causation at all.

Therefore, the true challenge before us is to construct a respectful, humane account of subjectivity and “sanctity of life” that fits with computationalism. Dr. Gelernter is right to blast large swathes of computer science, philosophy, and cognitive science for ducking this problem by chucking subjectivity out the window – but he can be no help in fixing this as long as the answer lurking behind his critique is “the breath of God”.

This may sound like a specific objection to religion, but it is not. The real problem with the breath of God, if there is such a thing, is that it’s an uncaused cause that intrinsically destroys our ability to form predictive theories. Even if Dr. Gelernter were to disclaim his religion, any attempt to locate some special cause of subjectivity outside the mechanism would have the same problem; it could succeed only to the extent that it destroys our ability to do any science at all.

My challenge to Dr. Gelernter, then, is to choose: are you a scientist or a believer in acausal miracles? You only get to choose one.

Reposturgeon and Santa Claus Against The Martians!

Here’s a late New Year’s gift for all you repository-editing fiends out there: the long-awaited and perhaps long-dreaded reposurgeon 3.0.

In Heads up: the reposturgeon is mutating! I described the downside of a strategy of incremental small language changes aimed at preserving compatibility: you can wind up trapped by suboptimal early decisions. Sometimes, you have to bust out and do the big redesign, which I did and why there’s a bump in the major version number (the last time that happened was when reposurgeon got the ability to read Subversion dump files directly).

The biggest change is that the command language syntax has mutated from VSO to SVO. What? You’re not up on your comparative linguistic morphology and gave no idea what I’m talking about? That’s Verb-Subject-Object to Subject-Verb-Object.

Before 3.0 the order of syntactic elements in a command was: action verb first, then (for most commands) an event selection set, then (for some commands) an object like a directory or repository name. Now the selection set always comes first, followed by the action verb, followed by any object-like arguments.

This change makes the syntax more regular and easier to describe. Easier mainly because there is no longer any of the previous confusion, when a selection set was present after the command verb, over what the first argument of the command was. The selection set, or what came after it? (Correct answer: what came after.)

In making this change I am moving closer to a Unix design archetype that had already influenced reposurgeon pretty heavily: ed(1). ed had a horrendously awful UI by modern standards, but it was (and still is) great for scripting. If you think of ed as a record editor for which the records are text lines, and study its selection syntax, the influence – and the reasons ed makes a useful model for what reposurgeon is doing – should be obvious.

A significant new feature is that reposurgeon now has a user-definable macro facility. I have written in the past that these are generally a bad idea and I still think that’s true in general. (One representative major problem with them is that when macro expressions cross certain kinds of syntactic boundaries in the base language they often become a serious impediment to readability and maintainability.)

But I found I wanted macros while converting the groff repository, and reposurgeon’s base language is simple in some ways that make the obscuring effect of macros less dangerous. There are no analogs of the “++” postfix operator which in C makes “#define square(x) (x)*(x)” such a wonderful way to generate unanticipated side effects. (Hint: consider what happens when you say “square(a++)”. How many times will a be incremented, again?)

Many small irritations in the language have been fixed. “delete” now really means delete and is no longer overloaded with several variants of a commit-squashing operation; that is now “squash”. (Yes, this adopts some git terminology.)

Pathset syntax is now simpler and more powerful. For starters, pathsets now match not only commits touching matching paths but the content blobs that the paths point at (you can select either subset by qualifying with the =C or =B selectors). This is particularly useful in connection with the ‘filter’ command, which allows you to modify comments and blobs by passing them through a user-specified filter.

There are lots of other changes as well. If you have worked with reposurgeon before you’ll have a bit of relearning to do. Sorry about that, but experience has taught me that (when you can get away with it at all) one big, obvious compatibility break is kinder than a long-drawn-out series of little ones that leave everybody wondering what the feature set of the week is,

The Lost Art of C Structure Packing

My first gift of the new year. Read it here.

Announcing cvs-fast-export 1.0

Not long ago I pulled the plug on one of the two CVS export utilities I was maintaining. One consequence of this is that I decided I needed to get the other one out of beta and into a state I would be willing to ship as 1.0.

And lo, it has come to pass. I just shipped cvs-fast-export 1.0. It has been well field-tested; a couple of weeks ago I used it to rescue the history of Gnu Troff.

There are several CVS exporters out there that suck pretty badly. (To be fair, the perversity of CVS is such that doing an even half-decent job of lifting CVS histories into a modern version-control system is quite difficult.) Now that this one is shipped I know of exactly two that don’t suck. The other one is Michael Haggerty’s cvs2git, which I’m working with him on improving.

Tradeoffs: cvs2git is slow and a bit clunky to use (I’m improving the latter but can’t fix the former). cvs-fast-export is blazingly fast (like, 3.7K commits a minute) but has a hard repository-size limit – above it you run out of core and the OS reaps the process in mid-flight. (Very few projects will hit this limit.)

For each tool there are weird CVS edge cases that it gets wrong. The sets of edge cases are different. cvs2git’s may be smaller, but I’m not sure of that; we haven’t set up head-to-head testing yet. Most projects will not trip over either set of problems.

cvs-fast-export is better documented, especially around error conditions.

Help stamp out CVS in our lifetime!