Links

• Raahem Alvi’s “Think of Me Before I Disappear” is a good short story about someone suddenly discovering their lover is an android. I like this quote:

  Love is a crisis. One long, stretched out, and maddening crisis.

• A friend linked me this blog post defending the use of XML in new systems, specifically the IRS’s Tax Withholding Estimator. I’d still be reluctant to choose XML over JSON even for the use case described there, but the more important lesson is how valuable it can be to reify complex rules into a standard data structure. And it’s really cool to see the government doing that (though I assume only partially) with the tax code!

• Another friend roped me into thinking about how the possibility of an infinite (in time and/or space) universe interacts with consequentialism, and sent me Bostrom’s 2011 paper on the topic, which is really interesting.

One rough thought on infinity and utilitarianism

Suppose time is infinite and there are going to be an infinite number of happy people throughout history. Also suppose you’re a utilitarian, and you’re trying to decide whether or not to kick a puppy. Because of the aforementioned glut of happy people, let’s assume the net value of the universe will be +infinity whether you kick the puppy or not. Clearly it’s wrong to kick the puppy, but on what basis can a utilitarian say so?

Utilitarianism is a conclusion reached based on other intuitions, not a starting point. It’s not like we care about individual instances of happiness/suffering because we care about aggregate welfare. Rather, we care about the aggregate because we care about the individual instances. If the aggregate value is undefined or is equal across all options, we still care about the individual instances. The fact that suffering is bad is still sufficient reason to choose (infinity happy people, 1 happy puppy) over (infinity happy people, 1 sad puppy); the aggregate value does not come into play.

And if you had to choose between (infinity happy people, 1 happy bunny) versus (infinity happy people, 2 happy kittens), then it seems like a concern for individual instances combined with a desire to weigh each instance’s value equally should lead you to choose the 2-kitten world. The moral claims of the infinite-set-of-happy-people upon you are satisfied either way, while you satisfy the moral claims of fewer sweet animals in the 1-bunny world. You don’t need to calculate aggregate values for each world; you only need to consider the difference your action will make, which is finite. (But maybe this depends on whether you consider the two possible worlds to have the same infinite set of happy people or two different sets of different infinitely happy people?) My friend pointed out that this line of thought leads more or less toward what Bostrom calls “the causal approach”, discussed in section 3.2 of the paper linked above:

Instead of maximizing the expected goodness of the world, we could aim to maximize the expected goodness of the causal consequences of our acts. (p. 25)

One of the downsides Bostrom sees to this approach is that

…the spirit of aggregative consequentialism is compromised to some degree. The restriction of the domain of aggregation to the causal consequences of our actions entails that an action might be definitely right or wrong even though it is known to have no impact whatever on the total value of the world. (p. 41)

I’m not sure that’s necessarily a big blow to “the spirit of aggregative consequentialism”. In a finite world, the kind of thinking I described above—where you choose the happy-puppy world and the 2-kitten world in order to come as close as possible to showing proper respect for all the morally relevant elements of each option—will drive you to maximize total net value. So maybe the idea that we should maximize total net value is just a convenient approximation of what our intuitions are really pointing toward, and the need for the “causal approach” once infinities come into play is just a natural result of that approximation breaking down, as opposed to any kind of ad-hoc watering-down of the ideal theory.

...or maybe not, idk. This post is kinda half-baked. Also this does nothing to address the other problem Bostrom discusses in section 3.3.

re: activist social-science primer Change of Heart

This book is a grab-bag of info from psych studies, meant to help activists advocate for social change more effectively. It was published in 2010, before the replication crisis entered the zeitgeist, so I’d be hesitant to take any of the research findings seriously unless you do further investigation on them—which I haven’t done. There are some general points I appreciated though:

• “Getting others to be in agreement on an issue is not the same as creating measurable change. Generating agreement may be a necessary first step in a campaign, but it should never be an end goal.” (p. 51) And sometimes there are ways to skip straight to “changing a person’s behavior without worrying about their attitude”(p. 60), which may make them more prone to then change their attitude.
• Along with convincing people to change, we should also put thought into: “how can we help [them] maintain their commitment?” (p. 179, emphasis added)
• Identity and self-expression can pull us in directions that are counterproductive to the cause. To illustrate, Cooney tells a clever story which he attributes to Dan Firger:

A long–time environmental activist was speaking to an enthusiastic group of young environmentalists at a rally. He warned of the precarious situation the environment was in, the toll that corporate greed had taken on forests and the dire consequences that lay ahead if serious changes were not made. He then shouted out to the crowd,

“Are you ready to get out there and fight for the environment?”

To which they answered an enthusiastic,

“Yeah!!”

“Are you ready to get arrested and go to jail for the environment?”

“Yeah!”

“Are you ready to give your life for the environment?”

“Yeah!!”

“Are you willing to cut your hair and put on a suit for the environment?”

The crowd fell silent… (p. 13)

re: Sense and Sensibility

…that sanguine expectation of happiness which is happiness itself.

I found a very cute edition of this at a used book shop and decided to find out whether Jane Austen’s writing would charm me as much now as it did when I last read anything by her a decade or two ago. Not quite—I’m not gushingly in love with it—but I still enjoyed it a lot.

I think when my younger, clueless self read Austen novels, I just took for granted that the financial details which come up constantly must, despite being totally foreign to me, be perfectly representative of what normal life had always been like for elites in, y’know, old-timey times. But my older, still-clueless-but-marginally-more-aware-of-my-own-cluelessness self was fascinated by how everyone in this book seems to (a) know everyone else’s net worth and (b) have a shared understanding of exactly how much income a given net worth will generate. According to Gemini, this state of affairs was pretty specific to Regency-era Britain and was a consequence of the extraordinary reliability of a kind of bond called the consol.

re: Dungeon Crawler Carl books 1-3

The Algorithm™️ was so sure I’d be a Dungeon Crawler Carl fan that I was seeing Instagram ads for “GODDAMNIT DONUT” merch before I’d ever read the book. The Algorithm™️ was correct. Super fun audiobooks. I’ve flown through the first three so far.

And I do want to stress how great the audio versions, in particular, are. Like some other listeners, I felt compelled to double-check that it genuinely was just one guy playing all the characters (with a minor exception in book 3). Check out Jeff Hays doing a live reading from book 6 or repeating Carl’s catchphrase in various voices; he’s fantastic.

A friend’s review complained that “in this book we get to partake in exactly the kind of prurience that it supposedly derides” and, given that I just last month complained about the violent fantasies implicit in a Supergirl comic, I’ve been thinking about why I didn’t have a similar negative reaction toward these books. I don’t have a great answer; perhaps I’m just more positively disposed to them because they made me laugh a lot and they have endearing characters.

re: the memoir Raising Hare

I was looking for something calm and not-mentally-demanding to listen to during a long walk the other day, and this book served the purpose perfectly. It’s a sweet memoir about a woman taking care of a baby hare she found in the country. The hare continued to visit her and even felt safe enough with her to later surreptitiously hide its own babies in her house. (Apparently there’s a word for a baby hare: leveret.)

re: Mega-Man-inspired roguelite 20XX

I loved the Mega Man X Super Nintendo games when I was a kid. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to adapt them into a roguelite (one of my favorite genres!) but it works pretty well. In a top-tier roguelite like Hades, the random differences in each run push you to adopt a wide variety of strategies and playstyles; 20XX gets stale faster because the variation between runs feels less important—I mostly just blasted/slashed my way through with each character’s primary weapon. But it was still a great way to keep my hands occupied while listening to an audiobook or podcast. I intend to pick up the sequel at some point.

re: the Thursday Murder Club movie

I really enjoy the Thursday Murder Club books and I figured I’d check out the movie before my single-month Netflix subscription expired. Now, usually I don’t mind when a film adaptation deviates from the book. The book is one piece of art, the movie is another piece of art, and each should be appreciated (or not) for what it is in itself. The trouble with the one big deviation in this adaptation, though, is that it totally ruins one main character’s storyline for no obvious reason. The Bogdan of the novels is physically intimidating, self-possessed, and highly deliberate. His murder of Tony is a principled choice meant to bring justice for someone Tony murdered, and Bogdan is not ashamed of it.The Bogdan of the movie is less intimidating (…at one point he visibly struggles to move a tarp (though to be fair, probably less than I would)) and displays much less moral agency; the murder is an accident and he even seems to briefly consider killing Stephen to cover it up. And in the movie, unlike the book, he’s arrested for the murder. Not only is this problematic for any adaptation of the plots of the sequels, it also takes much of the edge out of Elizabeth’s character—we no longer see her choosing to befriend a killer. (Apart from that, I enjoyed it.)

re: the Project Hail Mary movie

The book this was based on had two main points of appeal: 1) a rapid-fire cycle of presenting some problem and having the hero figure a way out using science, and 2) a heartwarming friendship between the human protagonist and the alien. It’s hard to translate the science stuff to film, so I think putting more focus on the emotional elements was the right call, and they did an excellent job of it. There are also lots of delightful visuals, which I think owes more to the filmmakers’ creativity than the source material.