All-Purpose Guru

The backblog here at The Spiral Staircase has many examples of my crabbing about Jordan Peterson’s irritating remarks, behaviors, and rhetorical style. He has parlayed his fame (and infamy — no such thing as bad press) into blanket punditry, a sort of all-purpose guru for those prone to hero worship. His two legitimate areas of expertise are human psychology and interpretation of cultural stories and symbols, especially Christian ones. But when he holds forth on biology, Marxism, economics, politics, or the climate emergency, I’m far more skeptical about his claims and assertions delivered overconfidently as facts. Instead, I seek understanding from experts on those topics.

Peterson’s most recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, as usual, careened all over the topic map with Peterson in high didactic mode. He so overwhelmed Rogan with the familiar Gish gallop that Rogan was reduced to interjecting a few gestures of incredulity and exasperation (whoa, omigod, geez, wow, sheesh) while trying to absorb everything. The obvious next question after each brief pause prompting Peterson to launch into yet another soliloquy — a question I’ve learned to loathe — was “what can we do to fix this?” Seeking solutions is natural enough, but as I understand both historical and modern problems that exist at the societal level (to say nothing of indelible aspects of human nature), solutions are exceedingly difficult to identify and implement if indeed they exist at all. Yet there always seems to be a Man with a Plan (or product), typically an entrepreneur or politician. (I never possess confidence enough to propose grand solutions; problems that consume my thought are of such scale they appear intractable.) So of course Peterson, the all-purpose guru, steps up to the plate to swing at the ball, teasing Rogan (and podcast listeners) with transformational plans he can’t disclose fully just yet. While I continue to believe Peterson is earnest in his endeavors, I can’t help noticing he uses the techniques of a conman.

In fairness, however, the podcast did include one valuable insight, which was probably tangential but then quickly taken up and developed on the spot by Peterson. That, too, is a familiar Peterson approach: exploring ideas not really intended for discussion (squirrel!). However, that’s how conversations run, so my drawing attention to that diversion is not really a criticism. Indeed, because the insight (waves of social contagion) was worthwhile, it will form the basic of a later blog post.

Offered Without Comment 20

From the May 2022 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Hari Kunzru’s “Easy Chair” column:

These days, I rarely have to delay the gratification of my cultural desires. I expect them to be met, if not instantly, then with all reasonable speed. I am grumpy to find that some obscure documentary is only available on a streaming service I don’t subscribe to yet. If I want to know the source of a lyric or a line of poetry, I type the words and am annoyed if the answer doesn’t appear right away. My hungry young self would consider me incredibly spoiled.

In most ways I prefer this to how things were, but with the enormous gain in access, something has been lost. Scarcity produced a particularly intense relationship with culture, and gave deep significance to subcultural signals. When you found something you loved, something that had taken time and work to unearth, you clung to it. Often you felt as if it was your secret, your talisman. If you met someone else who liked it, it was both exciting and threatening.

Chatbots Gone Wild!

Although I’m not paying much attention to breathless reports about imminent strong AI, the Singularity, and computers already able to “model” human cognition and perform “impressive” feats of creativity (e.g., responding to prompts and creating “artworks” — scare quotes intended), recent news reports that chatbots are harassing, gaslighting, and threatening users just makes me laugh. I’ve never wandered over to that space, don’t know how to connect, and don’t plan to test drive for verification. Isn’t it obvious to users that they’re interacting with a computer? Chatbots are natural-language simulators within computers, right? Why take them seriously (other than perhaps their potential effects on children and those of diminished capacity)? I also find it unsurprising that, if a chatbot is designed to resemble error-prone human cognition/behavior, it would quickly become an asshole, go insane, or both. (Designers accidentally got that aspect right. D’oh!) That trajectory is a perfect embodiment of the race to the bottom of the brain stem (try searching that phrase) that keeps sane observers like me from indulging in caustic online interactions. Hell no, I won’t go.

The conventional demonstration that strong AI has arisen (e.g., Skynet from the Terminator movie franchise) is the Turing test, which is essentially the inability of humans to distinguish between human and computer interactions (not a machine-led extermination campaign) within limited interfaces such as text-based chat (e.g., the dreaded digital assistance that sometimes pops up on websites). Alan Turing came up with the test at the outset of computing era, so the field was arguably not yet mature enough to conceptualize a better test. I’ve always thought the test actually demonstrates the fallibility of human discernment, not the arrival of some fabled ghost in the machine. At present, chatbots may be fooling no one into believing that actual machine intelligence is present on the other side of the conversation, but it’s a fair expectation that further iterations (i.e., ChatBot 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc.) will improve. Readers can decide whether that improvement will be progress toward strong AI or merely better ability to fool human interlocutors.

Chatbots gone wild offer philosophical fodder for further inquiry into ebbing humanity as the drive toward trans- and post-human technology continue refining and redefining the dystopian future. What about chatbots make interacting with them hypnotic rather than frivolous — something wise thinkers immediately discard or even avoid? Why are some humans drawn to virtual experience rather than, say, staying rooted in human and animal interactions, our ancestral orientation? The marketplace already rejected (for now) the Google Glass and Facebook’s Meta resoundingly. I haven’t hit upon satisfactory answers to those questions, but my suspicion is that immersion in some vicarious fictions (e.g., novels, TV, and movies) fits well into narrative-styled cognition while other media trigger revulsion as one descends into the so-called Uncanny Valley — an unfamiliar term when I first blogged about it though it has been trending of late.

If readers want a really deep dive into this philosophical area — the dark implications of strong AI and an abiding human desire to embrace and enter false virtual reality — I recommend a lengthy 7-part Web series called “Mere Simulacrity” hosted by Sovereign Nations. The episodes I’ve seen feature James Lindsay and explore secret hermetic religions operating for millennia already alongside recognized religions. The secret cults share with tech companies two principal objectives: (1) simulation and/or falsification of reality and (2) desire to transform and/or reveal humans as gods (i.e., ability to create life). It’s pretty terrifying stuff, rather heady, and I can’t provide a reasonable summary. However, one takeaway is that by messing with both human nature and risking uncontrollable downstream effects, technologists are summoning the devil.

Pliable Privilege, pt. 03

I continue against my better judgment listening in fits and starts to Jordan Peterson on YouTube. No doubt he’s prolific, influential, interesting, infuriating, and by all accounts, earnest. I often come away frustrated, recognizing how I’ve been fed an extended line of BS in some sort of confidence game run by an overconfident intellectual bully. Because he’s the host inviting others onto his own platform, at least of late, everyone is very polite and disagreement — if it occurs — is quite tame, which allows Peterson to elide corrections smoothly. (Live conversation runs that way: piling on top of what was already said displaces and obscures ideas because memory is limited and the most recent utterance typically assumes primacy.) I avoid some topics on Peterson’s webcasts because they’re simply too far outside his expertise to be worthwhile, which he openly admits then stomps right in anyway. For example, Peterson has a series with the caption “Climategate” (putting the conclusion before the discussion, or is that biasing his audience?). Episode 329 (which I do not embed) is titled “The Models Are OK, the Predictions Are Wrong.” His guest is Dr. Judith Curry. I should have avoided this one, too. In the course of the 1.5-hour episode, Peterson repeatedly offers a characterization of some aspect of the climate emergency, to which Dr. Curry responds “I wouldn’t describe it quite that way.” Better characterizations may follow, but that’s neither the tone nor the takeaway.

One of Peterson’s contentions is that, if indeed humans inhabit and treat the surface of the planet problematically, the best way to address the problem is to raise out of poverty those billions of people still struggling to survive. Then they, too, will be ontologically secure and positioned to start caring more about the environment. Sure, just like all those secure, multimillionaire CEOs care while running corporations that extract resources and pollute. (Incidentally, someone in a recent DarkHorse Podcast Q&A asked if Peterson’s hypothetical solution makes any sense. Disappointingly, and perhaps because DarkHorse hosts are chummy with Peterson, they said it depends on how the solution is implemented, which I take to mean that the stars must align and everyone start rowing in unison. Yeah, right.) Peterson follows up his climate solution with the indignant question “Who are we to deny those struggling to raise themselves out of poverty their chance?” Which brings me round to the title of this multipart blog.

Survival is by no means an idle notion but poses a struggle everywhere, even in the affluent West. Just ask the burgeoning homeless population or those laboring frantically to keep mortgages or rent paid so they don’t also become homeless (unhoused is the new euphemism, fooling exactly no one). Even a casual look history reveals that competition among peoples and nations to survive and prosper has wildly uneven and shifting results. Some “succeed” earlier than others or not at all and winners may in time lose their preeminence. Never has there been an all-men-are-brothers approach to competition, though temporary alliances may form. Someone (us, not them) or something (profit, not unspoilt nature) is inevitably privileged. In this context, Peterson’s “Who are we to …?” question is a non sequitur, though it may pull on heartstrings because of quite recent embrace of the idea of equity. A glib answer might be that “we are we, not them,” so of course “we” get available spoils before anyone else. Doesn’t the leader of a pack of wolves eat first? Isn’t that dynamic repeated throughout nature? Aren’t humans embedded in nature just like all other species? Don’t we privilege human life above, say, food animals we farm for sustenance? (We eat them, they rarely eat us until we die and microbes — but nothing else — consume us. Or we give ourselves up to flames, denying even the microbes. We’re selfish that way.) It’s also why the rare individual who gives away all his or her money to charity and winds up penniless is regarded as mental. For nearly all of us, it’s always me (or my progeny) first. Another way to put this that Peterson should understand is that hierarchies exist in nature. Hierarchy and privilege are impossible to disentangle, and attempts to redistribute equitably borne out of ideology tend to devolve into tyranny.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I heard another webcast where the interviewer (Nate Hagens I believe) asked his guest what do you value (i.e., privilege) above all other things? (The word all invites an unbalanced reply.) The extended answer rather took me aback. The guest values life in all its profundity yet declined to privilege human life. In the context of the webcast, which was about the climate emergency and anticipated human die-off and/or extinction, that answer sorta made sense. Should humans survive, even if we eventually sacrifice everything else (our current operational strategy)? Or do we leave the Earth to hardier competitors such as cockroaches and rats? Most people (humans) would unhesitatingly choose us over them as, well, um, always. It’s a strange hypothetical to ponder. Taken to its extreme, if one doesn’t privilege one life form over another, then what’s the problem with criminals, scavengers, and parasites winning the battle for survival? Or more colorfully, why not give zombies and vampires their bite at the apple? They may be undead but their basic strategy for propagation is undoubtedly a winning one.

Pliable Privilege, pt. 02

Continuing from pt. 01, the notion of privilege took an unexpected turn for me recently when the prospect inevitability of demographic collapse came back onto my radar. I scoffed at the demographer’s crystal ball earlier not because I disagree with the assessments or numbers but because, like so many aspects of the collapse of industrial civilization, demographic collapse lies squarely beyond anyone’s control. My questions in reply are basically Yeah? And? So? Do a search on demographic collapse and it will reveal a significant number of reports, with reporters themselves (including the worst contemporary media whore and glory hound who shall forever remain unnamed at this site) freaking out and losing their collective minds, on the hows, whys, wheres, and whens population will crash. The most immediate worrisome aspect is anticipated inversion of the youngest being the most numerous, the usual state of affairs, to the oldest being the most numerous and flatly unsupportable by the young. This has been the basic warning about Social Security for decades already: too few paying in, too many granted benefits. See also this documentary film being prepared for imminent release. I suspect supporting annotations will appear in time.

Probably not fair to call capitalism and its support structures a Ponzi scheme (latecomers to the scheme supporting earlier entrants), but the desire to perpetuate historical demographic distributions (as opposed to what? yielding to the drift of history?) is clearly part of the perpetual growth mentality. Traditionally, prior to the 20th century in the West, when the vast majority of people participated in agrarian and/or subsistence economies instead of the money economy, children were desirable not least because they provided free labor until they were grown, were positioned to take over family farms and businesses, and cared for oldsters when that time came. Intergenerational continuity and stability were maintained and it was generally accepted that each generation would supplant the previous through the seasons of life. The money economy destroyed most of that. Many young adult children now exercise their options (privilege) and break away as soon as possible (as I did) in search of economic opportunity in cities and form their own families (or don’t, as I didn’t). Estrangement and abandonment may not be complete, but families being spread across the continent certainly limits extended family cohesion to holidays and occasional visits. Oldsters (in the affluent West anyway) are now typically shuttled off to (euphemism alert) retirement homes to be warehoused prior to dying. Easier to pay someone to perform that service than to do it oneself, apparently. So if older people are currently privileged over the young (in some ways at least), that condition is being reversed because, dammit, children are in short supply yet needed desperately to keep growth on track.

Demographers point to a number of factors that have conspired to create the crisis (one of many interlocking crises some intellectuals have begun calling the polycrisis). The two main factors are declining fertility and reproductive choice. My suspicion is that the toxic environment, one result of centuries of industrial activity with plastics and drugs now found in human bodies where they don’t belong, accounts for many fertility issues. Add to that poor food quality (i.e., malnutrition, not just poor diets) and it’s easy to understand why healthy pregnancies might be more difficult in the 21st century than before. I’m not qualified to support that assessment, so take it for what it’s worth. Reproductive choice, another recently acquired female privilege (in historical terms), is a function of several things: financial independence, educational attainment, and availability of birth control. Accordingly, more women are choosing either to defer having children while they establish careers or choose not to have children at all. (Men make those choices, too.) Delays unexpectedly leave lots of women unable to have children for failure to find a suitable mate or having spent their best reproductive years doing other things. As I understand it, these correlations are borne out in some harrowing statistics. As the polycrisis deepens, a philosophical choice not to bring children into the world (just to suffer and die young) is also a motivation to remain childless.

Keep on Listening

This post was going to be a review of David Hurwitz but became more an appreciation than a review. Hurwitz is an author and music critic who reviews classical music recordings both on YouTube and online at ClassicsToday.com. I hear quite a few of his YouTube videos but pay scant attention to the website. I also don’t comment; he has an engaged commentariat already. Hurwitz signs off from each video with the exhortation “keep on listening,” which I’ve adopted as the title of this blog post.

Aside: Before I get started (and this will run only slightly long), let me admit fully that classical music is a niche cultural offering rooted deeply in Western historical practice but which does not speak to many people. Everyone has their tastes and predilections and no apologies are needed when preferring one category or genre over another. However, I’m not such a value relativist to lend support to the notion that all things are created equal. How one defines art or indeed high art is a contentious issue, not unlike what counts as religion or philosophy. I hew to a relatively narrow traditional standard that admits poetry, literature, music, architecture, sculpture, and painting but eschews martial arts, culinary arts, cinema, theater, and video games. Not an exhaustive list on either side of the divide and no need to argue. Caveat: my standards are my own and should not impeach or diminish anyone’s enjoyment of his or her own passions.

Further aside: Also, the recording industry is a latecomer in the history of high art (and for that matter pop culture) and has already undergone numerous transformations as physical media shifted from the long-playing record (the venerable LP) to CD before going virtual as electronic files and streaming media. In a nutshell, competing forms of recording and distribution make up the so-called format wars, which are by no means settled. The entire idea behind making a recording is to memorialize a performance for repeat listening and posterity, as opposed to a live performance in a concert venue. The anachronistic term record calls back to that origin, though the term is arguably less applicable with each passing decade as everything is recorded and memorialized somehow. In addition, recordings grant access to ensembles and repertoire that would be prohibitively expensive or impossible if experienced solely in live concert. Through recordings, I gained a deep appreciation of many orchestras and lots of repertoire never once heard live in person. The same effect doesn’t really apply to reading a book or watching a movie. Lastly, and unlike a lot of my musician peers, I became an aficionado of recordings in parallel with performance activities.

I appreciate David Hurwitz for being among only a few people (to my knowledge) giving honest and entertaining assessments of recordings (not just new issues), as opposed to what passes for music criticism columns in newspapers and online devoted to live performance. Hurwitz explains, compares, teaches, and jokes about recordings with concentration on German symphonic repertoire, which is also my preferred musical genre. His erudite remarks also enhance my listening, which ought to be the chief goal of criticism — something lost on columnists who draw undue attention to themselves as flowery writers and auteurs. Hurwitz also has at his disposal rooms full of CDs, which I’m guessing are either sent to him for review by the record companies or otherwise acquired in the course of his professional activities. Lots of them are giant box sets of the entire recorded oeuvre of a particular conductor or conductor/orchestra/label combo. Thus, his breadth of coverage is far greater than my own. I’ve made numerous purchasing decisions based on his reviews and streamed lots more for a quick listen to hear what’s so remarkable (or awful) about them.

Final Aside: When I was much younger, I stumbled into a record shop (remember those?) in Greenwich, Connecticut, that had in inventory essentially the entire current catalogs of the major classical music labels. That richness of options (pre-Internet) was quite atypical and unlike any other record shop I’ve known. Accordingly, I was feverish with excitement, looking at all those big square LP jackets with their enclosed vinyl and attractive cover art. Back then, the only way to hear something was to purchase it, and my limited budget demanded prioritization. Decisions involved a mixture of pain (financial sacrifice and awareness of those many LPs, now CDs, left behind) and anticipated pleasure that has hardly faded with time. How someone like David Hurwitz ends up as a full-time music critic surrounded by rooms of CDs is a puzzle, and I sometimes sometimes envy him. Sports fans who grow up to be sportscasters might be a similar track. Who can predict who will be fortunate enough to enjoy fandom as a career?

Pliable Privilege, pt. 01

Buzzwords circulating heavily in the public sphere these days include equality, equity, inclusion, representation, diversity, pluralism, multiculturalism, and privilege. How they are defined, understood, and implemented are contentious issues that never seem to resolve. Indeed, looking back on decade after decade of activism undertaken to address various social scourges, limited progress has been made, which amounts to tinkering around the edges. The underlying bigotry (opinion, motivation, activity) has never really been eradicated, though it may be diminished somewhat through attrition. Sexism and racism in particular (classics in an expanding universe of -isms) continue to rage despite surface features taking on salutary aspects. Continued activism use the buzzwords above (and others) as bludgeons to win rhetorical battles — frequently attacks on language itself through neologism, redefinition, and reclamation — without really addressing the stains on our souls that perpetuate problematic thinking (as though anyone ever had a lock on RightThink). Violence (application of actual force, not just mean or emphatic words) is the tool of choice deployed by those convinced their agenda is more important than general societal health and wellbeing. Is violence sometimes appropriate in pursuit of social justice? Yes, in some circumstances, probably so. Is this a call for violent protest? No.

Buzzwords stand in for what we may think we want as a society. But there’s built-in tension between competition and cooperation, or alternatively, individual and society (see the start of this multipart blog post) and all the social units that nest between. Each has its own desires (known in politics by the quaint term special interests), which don’t usually combine to form just societies despite mythology to that effect (e.g., the invisible hand). Rather, competition results in winners and losers even when the playing field is fair, which isn’t often. To address what is sometimes understood (or misunderstood, hard to know) as structural inequity, activists advocate privileging disenfranchised groups. Competence and merit are often sacrificed in the process. Various forms of criminal and sociopathic maneuvering also keep a sizeable portion of the population (the disenfranchised) in a perpetual and unnecessary state of desperation. That’s the class struggle.

So here’s my beef: if privilege (earned or unearned) is categorically bad because it’s been concentrated in a narrow class (who then position themselves to retain and/or grow it), why do activists seek to redistribute privilege by bestowing it on the downtrodden? Isn’t that a recipe for destroying ambition? If the game instead becomes about deploying one or more identifiers of oppression to claim privilege rather than working diligently to achieve a legitimate goal, such as acquiring skill or understanding, why bother to try hard? Shortcuts magically appear and inherent laziness is incentivized. Result: the emergent dynamic flattens valuable, nay necessary, competence hierarchies. In it’s communist formulation, social justice is achieved by making everyone equally precarious and miserable. Socialism fares somewhat better. Ideologues throughout history have wrecked societies (and their members) by redistributing or demolishing privilege forcibly while hypocritically retaining privilege for themselves. Ideology never seems to work out as theorized, though the current state of affairs (radical inequality) is arguably no more just.

More to unpack in further installments.