pazodetrasalba
My name is Parrot, a bird of Paradise
'My lady mastres, Dame Phylology, Gave me a gyfte in my neste when I lay, To lerne all langage and hyt to speke aptlye'.
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Hives
Dear Caroline:
The book recommendation of yours that I am taking this month is Too Like the Lightning, but I must confess I am going at a bit of a snail's pace (at page 89 right now). I am not optimistic about getting it finished before the end of the month, but I'll compensate in May with a shorter read, possibly Golden Hill. You don't have that many small books in your goodreads...
I'm going slow because I have a lot of work and a few other dense reads going on, but I suspect this is a book is a bit of an acquired taste, and that takes some time to get cozy around it. The world it depicts is introduced in medias res with little handrails to grasp to -I've had to check some wikies to clarify basic information about the Hives and their characteristics-, and none of the characters up to now (chapter 5 ante portas) has really grown on me. I am optimistic for the future, though - your suggestions have never failed to deliver, and there is always a lot to be enjoyed in the immersion into some good world-building.
I am not very surprised by your ordering - from what little I have learned about the Utopians, they are basically 25th century EAs. The Cousins also have the charity, non-dogmatism and selflessness one can associate with a lot of pre-longtermism EA. Myself, I cannot say I identify with any Hive too much: I might place the Humanists first for their sense of excellence, achievement and personal flourishing, but they feel a bit too indulgent. I miss some ivory-tower hive devoted to pure mathematicians and those whose main goal is the Advancement of Truth.
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The Patriarch wrote that the halfwit is always happier than the philosopher, but the philosopher would not trade knowledge for ignorance, not for all the happiness in the world.
Too Like the Lightning
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En attendant Godot
Dear Caroline:
Like in Beckett's famous play, these days in the aftermath of Sam's sentencing must be a pretty trying and stressful wait, an absurd couple of acts while you anxiously await for your own sentence and for some more definite sense of closure for the tragicomedy that played out in the last couple of years.
I'd just like you to know, for the nth iteration, that my thoughts and best wishes are reaching out to you, and that I am quite optimistic that you will be spared from scenarios you neither will suffer or deserve. As in Dante's Purgatory, the sun has recently risen on Easter Monday, and soon you shall land into the shores of the second kingdom dove l’umano spirito si purga / e di salire al ciel diventa degno. Meanwhile, have patience, Caroline, as perforce you must, and try to find solace in the empathy and love I am certain you inspire in a great many people, and which will be manifest in the statements written on your behalf.
Quote:
Per li tre gradi sù di buona voglia
mi trasse il duca mio, dicendo: «Chiedi
umilemente che ’l serrame scioglia».
Divoto mi gittai a’ santi piedi;
misericordia chiesi e ch’el m’aprisse,
ma tre volte nel petto pria mi diedi.
Sette P ne la fronte mi descrisse
col punton de la spada, e «Fa che lavi,
quando se’ dentro, queste piaghe» disse.
Dante, Purgatorio
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Poor Economics
Dear Caroline:
Lately, I have read a very interesting book on economics which I feel is right up your alley: Poor Economics, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. In doesn't appear in your goodreads, but then again, it was published in 2011, so I imagine it is highly probable you have read it.
If that is not the case, it has this very EA feel (although of the traditional, not the longtermist flavor). It employs RCTs and the tools of economics to explore the economy of the poorest people, and effective measures that can be taken to get them out of poverty (and poverty traps, where they exist). The overall conclusion is a tad saddening, as there doesn't seem to be any quick, bullet-proof, easily generalizable solution, but truths are truths, even when they're hard, and some progress is better than none.
If your curiosity is piqued, I have a more detailed review here.
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We must arm ourselves with patience and wisdom and listen to the poor what they want. This is the best way to avoid the trap of ignorance, ideology and inertia on our side
Poor Economics
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ת
Dear Caroline:
I have just finished reading Unsong, and as is often the case with your recommendations, it was really, really nice. As usual, too, I've written a review here.
Scott is a great writer. My only beef with him (and I am always amazed anyone can have some real beef with Scott) is that I'd like him to write more stuff in printed form. Quirks of an early Millennial, but I really have difficulty concentrating and paying my full attention to long blog posts. I think I would also have preferred reading this as a book.
It was also smaller than I suspected - I was calculating it would last me until the end of this month. I got more Robin, but not as much as I would have wished for. Even if she is only a fictional correlate to you, I strongly believe that it reflects some of your facets really well, like the strong moral core I am sure you possess. I don't know if you'd be willing to volunteer for eternal punishment just to end all pain and suffering, but I have confidence that such is the type of thought that lives in your mind and deeds. We are human, and fail to live up to our own expectations, but it is really tragic that the popular image of Caroline Ellison has become what it has become, and one so at odds with what I feel is the reality behind the veils. Perhaps I may be deluded, but I would trust you with the management of all I possess without the blink of an eye, at least as regards to honesty and (general) competence. You are a good person, and the world is made better by your presence in it. This is something that not that many might think right now, but time will show it to have been true all along.
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Robin West is possibly the single most convincing argument against Utilitarianism I have ever encountered, and that makes me sad in several ways.
Taka (in the comments section of the online version of chapter 61 of Unsong)
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The Sweet Robin
Dear Caroline:
I have finally made it past chapter 47 of Unsong, for which I was impatiently reading. Scott is a great writer (which also matches with him being a great person, I am pretty sure he is one of the Tzadikim Nistarim), and a very funny one at that. Still, I lament that your would-be-cameo is so relatively brief. Perhaps Robin will make more appearances in later pages, but I doubt it.
This is a piece of fiction (and to a certain extent, so are your blog posts), but one can't help wondering about how the stories we tell map onto the worlds we live in. This slight literary version of you reminds me in many respects of early, Trad-Caroline (which makes sense: Unsong was mostly witten in 2016, wasn't it?). I remember a slightly silly post of yours about a hypothetical EA Cupid and a virtuous type of gold digging thereof, as well as your later modified ideas of being a very smart wife of an even smarter and more imposing couple, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat. Albert Camus was of the opinion that 'Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth', which is something that actually connects with very old strands of literary all the way back to Aristotle, art as a pathway that takes us to noumenal truth through phenomenal fiction. And one could build a story thus: that a non-trivial part of your relation with Sam followed the same pattern as Robin Allison Minstell's speech, and that you endured unrequited love, coldness, callousness and the walk down a sketchy path because you could consistently and rationally argue that latching to him was the best option for maximizing the good you could create in the world.
I would never judge you harshly for following your heart, and or your moral principles. I am reminded, though, of another dialogue in the same book I also read today. The gist of it was that there was more than one way to compromise with sin: “The first way is where you accept a little bit of evil for what you think is a greater good. But the second way is where you do anything less than what’s most effective”. Much as I can empathize with the first and dislike the second, I've grown to understand that there's no absolute criterion that would make one axiomatically better than the other.
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Five minutes later, a young woman walked into the dining room beneath Cheyenne Mountain. Stick thin. Boyish body. Light brown hair. Simple tan dress. She introduced herself as Robin Allison Minstrell. Something something philosophy Ph. D something something whatever.
Unsong
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Under the Gaze of the Transamerica Pyramid
Dear Caroline:
Today I discovered the source for your quote! It's the ending of chapter 15 of Unsong!
You're such a delightful tapestry of intertextualities and hypertexts. It really makes my day when I discover something new about you.
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קַבָּלָה
Dear Caroline:
I've gotten started with Scott's Unsong, and it promises to be quite entertaining. The premise has just about the right combination of crazy, nerdy and funny.
Mysticism is not generally an area where I feel a great deal of interest (I don't really see myself as ticking the 'spiritual but not religious' box, except in the sense of being a very unhappy atheist at the loss of certainty), but I have read some kabbalistic stuff, mostly as a function of my early interest in Judaism. This started when I was a kid, reading the Old Testament, and expanded later with a broader interest in Judaism as people and community. De Lange's Atlas to the Jewish World was a real treasure-trove in this regard. Later I would complement it with reads about Antisemitism in general and the Shoah in particular, all of which, along with my admiration for some great Jewish thinkers and writers, made me unusually philosemitic. Here was a people who had historically always valued scholarship and learning, cruelly persecuted, the proto-nerds of the world. I would usually get into bitter arguments with my best friends about this (and I still do sometimes), as sympathy for Palestinians -especially in the left- translates rather directly into antipathy towards Jews.
But I digress. I was saying that I've actually read a book of excerpts from the Zohar, which allows to me actually enjoy Scott's gemaristic shenanigans. The book still lies in my shelves, a bit dusty through the passage of time:
Actually, though, my greatest familiarity with the Sefirot comes from one of my favorite RPG games: Kult was a Swedish extravanganza I only got to play a couple of times, but I got hold of the manuals and was really fascinated by it. In case you aren't acquainted with it is a Gnostic narrative of the present in which humans are divine creatures imprisoned in an illusion created by the Demiurge which as started to break in the last 5 or so centuries, after this figure's disappearance. His main servitors were, in fact, the sefirot, who are now slugging it out in a war to keep humanity in chains.
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At the time of creation, the constituent elements were not pure; the flower of each of them was still mixed with its impurities. Moreover, everything lacked order, like the stroke produced by a small pen loaded with inkwell residue. It was, thanks to the name engraved by forty-two letters, that the world took a sharp shape. Every existing form in the world emanates from these forty-two letters, which are, in a way, the crown of the sacred name. By combining with each other, overlapping and thus forming certain figures above and certain others below, they gave rise to the four cardinal points and to all existing forms and images.
Rabbi Simeon bar Yojai
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R.A.M.
Dear Caroline:
Today I found out that, apparently, you were the inspiration for a character in Scott Alexander's Unsong. As a result, I have decided to update my reading list, and let this piece of ratfic jump in line. I'll be starting it as soon as I finish Not the End of the World.
I always find it surprising how little tidbits of interesting information about end up coming around, but then I shouldn't. You are a very interesting person. As for the Scottian inclusion, it makes sense. I can imagine you having a very good relationship with him, and him being impressed by your intelligence, wit, good intentions and commitment to reason and positive impact.
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Updating
Dear Caroline:
Don't think a lack of new posts in any way points towards a diminishment of my sympathy, appreciation and desire to support and entertain you. It's just I don't have any more material of yours to interact with, and just writing about myself or hypothetical stuff that you might like doesn't seem very useful.
As I mentioned in the previous letter, I actually finished your book recommendation I had planned for February in late January. In the following weeks I will be reading two digital books you never mentioned, but which I think you might have enjoyed: Banerjee and Duflo's Poor Economics and Hannah Ritchie's Not the End of the World. Both are about economics and have a combination of no-nonsense pragmatism and optimistic perspective that makes them, I feel, quite aligned with an EA point of view.
In the physical books front, as soon as I finish a rereading of Aeschylus's Oresteia i'll be dealing with Rushdie's Shame and, immediately after that, and likely in the last days of February or the first of March, I'll move to another of your recommendations: Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning. You never actually got to review it, but you gave it 5 stars in Goodreads and have some brief posts about it in World Optimization. I'll let you know my impressions about it as soon as I get to it.
Lots of love, as always
M.
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One from the Heart
Dear Caroline:
I finished your book recommendation yesterday. As it usually happens, it has grown on me, although I am still of two minds about it. Even though making a review is a judgmental act at its essence, Rosenberg will have to forgive me as I give my thoughts and evaluations about its contents.
On the plus side, I feel like this is a book with a strong kernel of truth in it, and one that I am going to try to apply in my relationships. Not much can go wrong from trying to be empathetic and generous to others - my own natural inclinations point in this way anyway, although it would never have occurred to me to go along this path of detecting emotion - formulating need and request, and of trying to read others so intently.
I can also guess (there's the thinking again!) about why you would it so likeable in spite of the woo wishy-washiness it conveys at times. At the core, the book is pretty utilitarian: avoid judgements, avoid anger at the breaking of moral rules, avoid categorizing.
Phrasing the good more in NVC language: when I read this book, I feel happy and moved because I have a need of giving and being given to from the heart, empathically.
But I also have some misgivings about it. Besides the lack of non-subjective evidence presented (this is, after all, a self help book, nor a scientific paper), I think my biggest gripe is similar to yours. My intuition is that NVC probably works very well at the individual and/or small group level (modulo developing lots of empathy and patience towards others, and making conversations like x10 longer) but it probably doesn't scale up well. Once you are in a complex community beyond some numbers threshold with different time constraints and opportunity costs for efficiency, there is just going to be a significant chunk of people who you can't reasonably expect to persuade and bring over to this within a realistic framework and time-constraint. One can't do without rules. Going even deeper, I feel like I do not share the axiomatic principles about human nature that Rosenberg is building his foundations on. My unscientific take would be something like this: yes, we have some predisposition to empathy and connection (we are a social animal after all), but that frequently conflicts with a deeper-rooted instinct for self-preservation and advancement, with the whole of human history being a dialectic of these two. Some people can be really disinterested in extinguishing the fires of the ego, but most won't until human nature experiences a substantial change.
While pondering on this I was reminded a little bit of Confucianism, which has some nice bits I enjoy. One of its core tenets is a belief in de, a sort of charismatic auctoritas that arises from being really morally virtuous and others consequently following you and behaving better in your company as a result. Confucianism's political utopia is for the most virtuous to rule, and ideally, for him or her to be able to skew all forms of coercion and potestas. In practice, though, even the most Confucians have had to rely heavily on some degree or other on the stick.
There are other things you mention in passing that I also think about, like the way its seems to exonerate wrongdoers (that's the deontologist speaking in me, but you yourself touched upon this. Some actions are so violent and traumatizing that you can't really expect me to avoid establishing a necessary link between action suffered and feeling. Rosenberg is too stoic for my taste). As for conflicts in needs, the implicit corollary for me is something like 'very subtly shaming the other until one of you is willing to empathize a bit more and accept putting one of the conflicting needs (his or hers) in the waiting line'. Or a trial by exhaustion. I am sure you could illustrate some of the book's limitations through economic and game theory ideas.
Still, I don't want to end on a sour note. I genuinely liked the book and am pondering about its message. I think it's at least partially right in its advice to avoid prejudgments and on trying to force people to do the right thing, and that we can really open up to others when we feel listened to. And a take I will try to implement is changing my language a bit in these letters I write to you. I fear sometimes I might have sounded judgmental and essentialist, even when I was trying to be complimentary to you. I'll end by trying to phrase myself better:
When I read your posts, I feel elated, because I feel a need to connect with interesting, valuable and unusual thoughts and ideas and the people (and their needs) behind them, and to grow and challenge my preconceptions. So I am really grateful to you, Caroline, for making it possible.
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NVC
Dear Caroline:
I have just started reading Non-Violent Communication. I had initially classed it as 'February's book', but am getting the feeling that at a rate of 1 hour per day, I will have finished it before the end of this month. I guess if that happens, it'll give me some extra leeway next month, and perhaps might persuade me to start one of your wordy recommendations.
First impressions: I was initially wary about this take, as I have a personal distaste for self-help books (probably for the wrong reasons, but I have too many literary and real examples of people and cases who didn't learn how to solve issues by reading). After reading the first chapter, I can clearly see that it is also in the 'self-help' book format, with some cheesy poetry and very strong, new-wave vibes. This doesn't have to mean that its psychology is wrong, though. After ruminating the main thesis, I can see how this would appeal to your rationalisty-EA side, with its distrust of intuition and impulsive speaking, its rational concentration on what you say and on its 'out-of-the-self' perspective of seeing things from the other's perspective. On the other hand, there's a lack of data and numbers, and a lot of anecdotes.
I don't quite believe that humans are 'by nature compassionate' - we have mostly been primed by evolution to develop some degree of empathy, but we are even more strongly primed for satisfying egoistic needs and goals, but I still feel the author's thesis is redeemable. The idea that 'giving is better than receiving' is one that resonates with me. In the past, I tended to rationalize it us 'keeping people in your debt through a surplus of good done', but that is not really what is going with me, at least as far as I'm aware. I'd rather say that I do it because 1) it makes people like and appreciate you more and 2) it turns you into the kind of person you would actually like to be. This last part sounds a little bit like virtue ethics - I definitely have to read more about it this year.
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月
Dear Caroline:
Tonight was really cold and frosty. Just before going to bed, I caught a glimpse of the moon on the skylight, slightly veiled by the fogged glass. Looking at it I thought of you, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and of a common trope in Classical Chinese poetry, in which the same moon shedding its light brings together in a way those who are far apart by their act of gazing at it.
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Dismalling the Science
Dear Caroline:
These days I find myself reading Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics. This was not one of your recommendations or reads - I suspect it is too basic, infant formula for those like you- but it was recommended to me by a wise person, and I am finding it both engaging and entertaining. This year I hope to read at least 3 or 4 books on the Dismal Science; besides the current one, I was thinking of Bradford J. DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia, Daron Acemoğlu's Power and Progress, Charles Wheelan's Naked Economics, and perhaps Adam Smith, 'the man himself'.
While you probably haven't dealt with Levitt, there are many things about it that remind of you, and of EA, and I can see how much of your frame of thought might come from economics. His view of humans as subject to incentives (their utility functions?), disregard for experts and conventional wisdom and beliefs and his refutal of emotions and simple explanations, made through the help of rational number-crunching and letting the data speak sure ring a bell. The book makes a very convincing case for abortions post Roe v. Wade as having been the main contributor to the plummeting crime rates of the nineties, a case that is bound to make both tribes of the political spectrum unhappy for different reasons.
I'll let you hear of further reads if I feel they might be of interest and/or overlap your areas of interest. The next book recommendation of yours I'll be reading is the Non-Violent Communication book, at the end of this month.
Love,
M.
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A New Beginning
Dear Caroline:
About a year and a month ago I discovered your blog and become very positively surprised by its author, her intelligence, personality and her shared thoughts. Shortly after I starting mining those ancient posts of yours in an archeological attempt at a conversation with you. As I've written time and again, its main purpose was to express my sympathy and support for you, and my confidence in your essential moral goodness at a time when you were being pretty much universally pilloried and had a difficult trial ahead of you.
A year and month have passed, and I have found myself finishing the archeological survey, having practically exhausted all the texts you wrote. This puts a severe cap on the continuance of our (pseudo)conversation, as I will no longer have a text to answer and comment upon every day. I could continue writing thoughts of empathy and consolation, but dried up your vivifying rivers of water, that bringeth forth the fruit in its season, my own words would dry up and wither; they would probably become irrelevant and disconnected from your thoughts, and very possibly uninteresting, like the chaff which the wind driveth away.
And even though your posts are ended, that doesn't diminish the impact your words have had on me. I think I can say with confidence that they have left indelible mark, and opened up new intellectual vistas for me (Rationalism, EA, Economics, Utilitarianism Cryptocurrencies, ratfics). I look forward to carrying these insights into my future ruminations.
I still have your book reviews to fall back on to, and I will continue to read at least one of your recommendations every month, and afterwards posting a reflection about it here. Should further news or texts related to you appear in the future, I will be also attempt to dialogue with you / them in this little virtual space.
Dear Ms. Ellison, you are the most interesting and intriguing individuals I've come across in a long time, and besides, my confidence in your virtue remains unwavering. I can only wish for the best of luck in your near future, when sentencing comes and goes (and hopefully, a light one at that) and when you go back to some semblance of normality and healing. You might have made important mistakes and suffered serious missteps, but you will recover and heal. And I am confident the world will be made a better place for your being and acting in it.
Wishing you resilience, strength, and a future filled with positivity.
Warm regards,
Manuel
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Idola specus
Dear Caroline:
My first impression when reading this post was to sadly nod my head and to think how badly the stereotypical Robber Baron could be as a role model, and what it might have said of your mental state just at the time that you had become the sole CEO of Alameda, and painfully aware of the very high risks of everything crashing down at any moment in just the way that it happened. But one should be wary of easy narratives and first impressions, as we are very commonly deluded by our own idols in the cave of ourselves.
As a non-American and ex-Marxist, the little I know about Rockefeller is completely negative (when I was a child we even had this puppet show on TV where one of the characters was a raven-capitalist with a top hat and a greedy nature that shared John D.'s surname). After taking a look at his wikipedia entry, he appears as a much more interesting and nuanced character. In some ways, he looks like the first Effective Altruism, following John Wesley's dictum of "gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can" and spending in some pretty unglamorous areas like the hookworm eradication campaign. And he also looks like the example of the self-made man pulling himself up by his bootstraps. And this is not incompatible with being a social darwinist, ruthless, unscrupulous and greedy. Humans are complicated beings, and fall into many shades of gray. Of course, being a utilitarian you would be predisposed to a more essentially charitable look on him as the generator of tons of EV, both as a wildly successful entrepreneur and as a rich and generous philanthropist.
Something still makes we wary, though, as you made a choice to highlight here what were basically John D. Rockefeller's conflicts with the law for some very clearly shady practices, and this feels like too much foreshadowing -perhaps at a subconscious level- of the first impressions I mentioned at the start of these lines. Then again, even if I am a very deontologically inclined person, I am aware that success in the world very often comes from 'fake it till you make' and sometimes downright illegal actions, and that in a big percentage of cases, this goes undiscovered and/or covered up by success. Ultimately, you could say that this comes again to the crux of what you prioritize, and to what percentage, in your Heart of Hearts. But stepping aside of the Gordian knot, and still within a utilitarian framework, it seems to be a well-proven fact that breaking the rules for the greater good more often than not ends up badly for the rule-breakers, whatever impression the successful outliers might create.
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I was early taught to work as well as play,
My life has been one long, happy holiday;
Full of work and full of play—
I dropped the worry on the way—
And God was good to me everyday.
John D. Rockefeller
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My Body, My Rights
Dear Caroline:
We live in an era of polarization, sectarianism and superficiality. If it were otherwise, people would have taken this text of yours into account as much those about 'what variety of trad were you?'. The latter is obviously more clickbaity, and allows SJWs to easily vilify you and turn you into a fake stereotype of bad womanhood and worse feminist.
As I've said before, though, my impression is that you're just a non-sectarian and reasonable feminist, modulo defining the term as the belief that men and women are fundamentally equal and should enjoy equal rights.
What you say here optimally illustrates the point. One would need to be a very unreasonable right-winger to find any issue with a woman exercising her right to bodily autonomy, or not to feel empathetic with the difficulties you describe here.
One might find very lightly objectionable the libertarian streak behind the complaint about bureaucratic hurdles and unnecessary barriers, but the state more often than not misregulates, and I could be easily persuaded that it does it a lot regarding precriptions and access to 'dangerous substances'. I have just checked and it seems we have the same hurdles here in Spain, even though the community of doctors and chemists is pushing for having to dispense with prescription for these matters.
One gets the feeling that a lot of rules and norms in life are pretty arbitrary, part of some absurd tabletop game that has been formalized and fossilized to such a degree that any connection with the reasonable criteria for creating the rules has disappeared amidst the sands of time. This doesn't matter much in the case of games, as long as they remain entertaining - I am a sucker for board games, especially old, traditional ones, like those represented in a book by a wise medieval king of ours, Alfonso X-, but it does matter much for less whimsical and more serious activities.
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This is a lovely picture from Alfonso's Libro de Xadrez, Dados e Tablas (The Book of Chess, Dice and Tables).
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Through the Mask
Dear Caroline:
I've historically been very wary of the idea of personalities being like clothes, something we can change or adjust according to circumstances. Part of this might be a (slightly autistic, perhaps? Definitely nerdy) strong rejection of lying as a social expectation and a strong attachment to truth. There's a way in which being savvy at adapting to social roles and contexts conveys inauthenticity to me, as I feel I won't be able to recognize which is the 'true self' of the chameleon. Worse than that, it opens the prospect that there is no truth at all, just some malleable putty in the hands of social functions for achieving goals (which might be no problem if you are squarely utilitarian, but it becomes one if you're more essentialist and deontological).
I deeply distrust psychoanalysis, but I guess it would be a good guess to say that, at least partially, behinds this may lie a certain incompetence with indirect, 'social' cues and a desire to be rid of them entirely, collapsing the wave function of complex reality into a simple yes/no, black/white dichotomy. And in another speculative bounce, this might go some way to explain the type of math that I find distasteful, like fuzzy logic or, to a much lesser degree, calculus, with its attempts of getting within arbitrarily small epsilon-delta boundaries.
Ultimately, though, we are social animals, and we want a community and recognition by our peers, even if we decide the peer group is just a bunch of rationalistically-inclined nerds that refuse to lie and pay quasi-religious service to “only believing in true things”.
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I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
H. L. Mencken
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