The Cocktail Party

Synthesis of prior HWFO material within new contexts leads to lessons not to share it

This post shall serve as an index of prior HWFO social analysis material by explaining why I didn’t talk about any of it at a cocktail party last night. Hopefully the yarn spun herein is funny and fast paced. If not, close the tab. It’s not like you’re paying for this shit anyway.

Midnight

I read a book on the plane to and from SHOT Show last week. This is the book.

hartsfield-jackson betrayed by the ranks of delta branded vertical stabilizers

Midnight Simulacra may be the most referential book I have ever read, and I’ll admit up front part of my engagement with it comes from how referential it is to me. If Neal Stephenson was 30% smarter, attended Georgia Tech during the 90s at its peak years of oppressively stressful mentally damaging student policy known among its victims as “The Shaft,” and became as or more involved in its underbelly drug culture as I did, then Stephenson may have attempted to write this book. If I’m a Volume 7 individual, the main character in this book is a Spinal Tap 11 with all too familiar life experiences. This gave me some incentive to meet the author.

One of my readers knows the guy, from which I received the book recommendation, another reader knows him well, and the man who currently runs my old WREK radio show did proof on two chapters of the book, from whom I elicited an invitation to the release party last night. Nick Black seemed pretty cool, and the people there seemed to think he was extra cool. He’s certainly a well known hot shit programmer with far more money than me.

Should you read this book? Maybe. There are enough out-jokes to overcome the in-joke ratio, the central narrative seems engaging, and it’s one of the most vocabulatorily (that isn’t a word) challenging books I’ve ever read, so it will keep you sharp at a minimum. You can buy it here:

But we’re done speaking about this book, and shall instead speak of the party, at which I knew one person initially.

Simulacra

Once it became apparent that this party was going to be largely populated by former Georgia Tech alumni, never known for their social acumen nor for comparable male-to-female ratios, I lapsed into my prior GT social modes without any real awareness. I left my friend and former radio compadre and approached the two cutest girls there. Like at Georgia Tech, they were having their own sequestered conversation as if to erect an ephemeral social barrier between them and the nerds, but unlike at Georgia Tech they were law/law-adjacent, and both married. Thus is the state of affairs in your forties. I walked headlong into the timeless classic topic “whether libertarianism is good or bad,” with a successful blonde civil rights attorney and former Ron Paul delegate taking the “good” position and a successful brunette civil-historian-who-works-on-superfund-sites taking the “bad” position. Vaguely speaking.

I don’t have this libertarian argument with anyone anymore. I’ve already run every branch of this conversation tree down to its limit, with the most extreme libertarians and Marxists imaginable as interlocutors and observers, so it interests me not. I know the trunk, the branches, and the twigs. This is a solved argument. P-complete. When this argument erupts in my vicinity I mostly just observe, using it to gather data on the speakers.

“Hi. I’m BJ, and I can tell I’ve walked into a doozy over here.” Minutes later, “in full disclosure, I was raised a Quaker and a contentious objector to war but I’m currently the lead policy writer at RECOIL magazine.” I did not disclose that I’m the only policy writer at RECOIL, making me a '“leader” of one. Nor did I disclose that the main reason I can’t get in touch with my RECOIL editor is he’s apparently doing off-books stuff in Ukraine.

That’s fine. Unnecessary details don’t engender good party conversation.

These two ladies went on deeply reenacting the “fire department” argument, wherein the interlocutors postulate the relative demise of modern society should taxes be collected (or not) and dedicated (or not) towards community fire protection (or not). Possible conversation trees: volunteer fire departments, whether they’re community supported, whether that community support counts as taxes, whether the world was unendurable prior to government funded fire departments, the relative efficacy and efficiency of voluntarism, and such. Likely outside this discussion: scaling issues, the Dunbar number, and the valuation of human life in terms of tax expenditure, both in terms of dollars spent, dollars collected, or dollars borrowed at interest.

It occurred to me that if I entered into this discussion, I’d merely be running conversational scripts. Perhaps these scripts had been honed over time, through similar discussions, and perhaps I was good at them, but they’re scripts nonetheless. I thought back to my time in competitive policy debate in high school, where my success on the affirmative team was literally about writing these scripts, and scripts for every possible response to my script, and then running them. I thought about the bad Arby’s sandwich I’d ordered earlier, the lady at the window repeating a script to me, I repeating mine back to her.

We were robots. Caricatures of people, human simulacra attending an event about a book with that very word in the name. I have a sense of what Mr. Black was going for with his word choice in the title and this certainly wasn’t that.

only pro hackers leave their mixed drink on their stickered up laptop

Doyle

Black read from the book. Funny and entertaining. I learned things the nuclear regulatory commission probably considers classified, but which certainly weren’t actionable in my own personal life. A man approached me, asked if I was BJ, and introduced himself as someone from the HWFO Slack server, which you too can join by subscribing via the green button below. Let’s call this man “Mike Doyle” because I’m lazy and don’t care enough to anonymize him. Now I have four people I can talk to including my WREK friend, and an even M/F ratio to boot. Much better party.

Mike later walked into another discussion between the two ladies I’d met. Mike wore an “obvious libertarian signaling” shirt, although I admit to not remembering its exact wording. Something black and individualism or independence themed. “Nice shirt” comments the blonde civil rights attorney, and we are off to the Non-Aggression-Principle races. This then grows awkward for me, as a former flag waving libertarian, because I can’t really engage the discussion without laying too much groundwork for a party format. Mike probably hasn’t read half the HWFO stuff he needed to, and the blonde has never heard any HWFO crap at all, so where to begin?

2012 flag waving evidence

In a blog format, I can back-reference. I can start by indicating that societies evolve in the same way animals evolve, only faster because humans have white space in their brains and the rate of different ideas is higher than mutated genes. I can remind them that the fundamental tension between traditionalists and progressives has to do with the rate of change of this evolution, and whether the changes cause more harm than good. I can also point out that in this evolutionary march we the apes are turning ourselves more and more into ants, because the ants actually rule the planet anyway.

In a blog format I can point out that this empty human brain-space becomes a substrate on which different cultural programming grows, and spreads. The rules and indoctrinations and myths that form the fabric of a culture are no more than behavioral instructions written like software into this space, by a wider entity. The culture uses the humans as tools to propagate itself, and what matters in the end is not whether any particular culture is “right” or “wrong” or “ethical” or “not.” All that matters is that the culture is effective at spreading itself.

In a blog format I could explain that the most effective way for this entity to spread itself is by hijacking the reality of the humans infected with the cultural programming, often by hijacking language itself, in such a way that similarly infected humans band together for aid and support, and cannot even understand why people believe differently than them because they don’t have a shared language.

In a blog format I could point out that those of us with religion-friendly brain wiring outcompeted those of us without it, which gives our entire species a propensity to adopt cultural mores often thoroughly disjointed from reality, because adopting them makes us feel good. Even atheists do this, and their blindness to the fact that they’re doing it becomes their greatest intellectual downfall.

In a blog format I could dust off my Eric Hoffer and plug him virtually into the modern space, referencing his material to identify two major groups of True Believers running this sort of programming today.

In a blog format I could point out that as we individuals continue to outsource our thinking to our smart phones and the internet, we are participating in and being influenced by a morality hive mind. An Egregore, which exhibits all the indicators of being a naturally emergent neural network using each of us as neurons to create a self-updating culture.

In a blog format I could use the absurd behavior of most of planet earth during 2020 as an example of how this works.

In a blog format I could explain that the actions of distributed Egregores look like conspiracies from a central cabal when viewed through the eyes of a conspiracy theorist.

And that they have to have a current-thing to draw on for energy, so when one disappears they grab another.

And that they are not and perhaps cannot be controlled.

And when this all was done, and I’d had all the foundations laid, only then could I turn to the blonde civil rights attorney and tell her that justice itself is a social construct, that nobody has any rights they don’t seize with blood, that war is a Nash Equilibrium of Game Theory, that mankind is evolving to emulate ants, that nothing can stop it other than self-extinction, and that everyone they know, perhaps she, and Mike, and I as well, are all just LLMs running programming. Free will is a lie and volunteer fire departments probably don’t have ladders long enough to reach us here on the 17th floor pool deck so we need taxes to buy the extra long ladders.

Not only are the Egregores one level up from us, they may be the only intelligent thing there is. Imagine she replies “Oh, like that XKCD cartoon?”

610

Only after hours of groundwork would my response to her comic allusion make sense. That not only are they indeed sheep, we probably all are. Each of us are LLMs trained on our own experiences. All our interactions entirely determinate. Maybe even real sheep think the other sheep are sheep.

Then the blonde might look at me and say “yeah, nah, you’re full of shit, Rule 30.”

And there I would stand, four hours later, tail between my legs, party dissipated, Nick Black millionaire hacker author vacuuming the common room of his own party sweating and laughing at the spectacle.

So I didn’t say any of that stuff. I smiled and exchanged business cards.

Lessons

I draw several lessons from last night, and my thoughts about it today.

1. Popular ideas are ideas which are fully explainable in a cocktail party setting. The stuff we talk about around here may be of value in sense-making operations when the world seems confusing, but it cannot become a popular way of looking at the world because of the format. “Those who read 2000 word blogs” make up a miniscule fraction of the population.

2. Therefore don’t try, especially at cocktail parties.

3. Don’t get frustrated at folks who don’t get it yet, because the foundational reading list really is quite awful.

Anyway, Midnight Simulacra is a pretty good book and Nick’s a great author.