Your brow is crowned in shining dark
(I’ve forgotten if those are the words to a song)
Your forehead can rhyme with your eyes with a spark
(I’ve forgotten if those are the words to a song)
But whoever you’re with
Has a life full of song
Your warm cotton robe is all fluffy and blue
You wrap yourself in it at night when you’re cold
I would not want to be as a brother to you
Not a monk praying for an angelic view
And viewing grim dreams full of piety and sand
and before him you stand…
You, you love to, to be
Sorrowful and so quiet
And to listen to stories of near and of far
And here I,
who not twice have looked silently at you,
no voice and no words
Forget everything about everyone else
And dwelleth
My soul
In the halls of your castle
And is trapped in your walls,
and is parted from me
While my self in my body is walking away
My dreams are spread out as a rug for your shoe
On its flowers my love, may your step carry you
When evening arrives wear your warm robe of blue
And soon will I come there to you
Your brow is crowned with shining dark
It comes to my lips like a rhyme to a song
So I’ll whisper to you, till the morning, till dawn,
like a drunk…
Your brow is crowned with shining dark
Your brow is crowned in shining dark
(I’ve forgotten if those are the words to a song)
Your forehead can rhyme with your eyes with a spark
(I’ve forgotten if those are the words to a song)
But whoever you’re with
Has a life full of song
It was narrow there,
I had to go somewhere,
I had to spread my wings and fly
To a mountainside,
Where like where Moses died
You see the edges of the sky
Man is like a tree planted on water,
Rootless and untied
Man is like a story with no author,
with a fire inside
Then I lost my way,
my life was led astray
I thirsted like a desert thing
For a guiding word
that like a wandering bird
would bring tomorrow on its wing
Man is like…
Fire burned inside
and I went out to ride
I let the storm winds be my guide
When I came back home,
I would no longer roam,
I’d find you waiting there inside.
This is a good example. On the surface, it looks like everything an argument against suicide should be. It’s well-written, and it actually raises the reasons suicidal people have for it before making the counterarguments against them. I still think it’s wrong. For one thing, it has motivated reasoning (nobody wants suicidal people to be right). But from inside the argument, there’s something off about it. It reasons backwards: It assumes people shouldn’t commit suicide, comes up with scenarios where that’s the case (a guy who’s a useless burden now might have been useful as a dockworker a hundred years ago), then kind of implicitly assumes the change in circumstances shouldn’t matter.
If we don’t have any motivated reasoning, the case for suicide seems pretty clear: Some people feel like burdens. They’re net negative drains on the world, draining resources that could better be used for someone else. Are they wrong?
Scott brings up Robin Williams as a counterexample, and some guy who designed safety mechanisms for cars. Alan Krueger’s another potential counterexample that’s come up since. But how sure are we that they really are counterexamples? You’d expect them to know more than us about the situation. Maybe the car safety guy knows his designs aren’t really effective or useful, or maybe he doesn’t really do much and only got to keep his job because of office politics. We found out Robin Williams had Dementia. I don’t know why Alan Krueger died, but nobody else seems to either. He probably had his reasons.
In general, every bias we know should push people away from suicide. People tend to believe they’re more important than they are, that they’re more useful, that they know more. People tend to be unreasonably optimistic. People have status-quo bias. If we’ve reached the point where even the person in question thinks suicide is a good idea, it probably is.
There’s a counterargument to suicide, saying that suicidal people often get better, even grow to regret it. That’s not inconsistent with suicide being the right choice. We’d expect people to become suicidal at their worst point, so we should expect some reversion to the mean for most. But if suicidal people are reasonable about it, they’d leave some buffer – they price in the possibility of mean-reversion, so they don’t jump to being suicidal as soon as they can. They wait until they’re thoroughly convinced. And sure, if they don’t commit suicide, they’ll probably go back into the uncertainty band – but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t kill themselves. And in general, we trust people to make their own decisions. Not because they’re always right, but because we don’t have a better method, and people’s judgement in the moment is generally the most accurate way to judge things.
The common sentiment is to treat each suicide as an unbearable catastrophe. This seems wrong. We have a lot of humans, and most of them are pretty easily replaceable. If anything it seems like it would be helpful for humans to be a little more k-selected, rather than keep everyone we possibly can alive.
Alternatively, we can think of internal experience as inherently valuable. But suicidal people are generally pretty miserable and probably have net negative internal experience anyway. Unless there’s some reason to assume things will suddenly get better for them (say if they’re in an abusive situation they can get out of soon), this doesn’t really change the calculation.
I’m not actively suicidal, but I’m increasingly convinced that I should be. In theory I have a lot of talents, but in practice I don’t seem to contribute much, and I seem to be a net drain on the people around me. There’s a limit on how much I can blame other people for this.
Is this evidence for or against the above argument? It’s at least consistent with it – it makes sense that I’d be in the uncertainty band, at least (I can come up with reasonable-sounding arguments for why I actually contribute more than I drain, or might in the future). I’ve only been convinced I shouldn’t exist for a few months now, maybe I just haven’t reached the tipping point yet.
There is one good counterargument: I have friends who are suicidal, and there are people I know who the world would probably be better off without. As far as I can tell, the two groups are entirely distinct (although, of course, plenty of suicidal people probably haven’t told me about it). My suicidal friends are some of the kindest, smartest, most helpful people I know. They’ve done a lot for the world. And they’ve done a lot for me.
But then, my judgement about worth might be suspect (remember, I’m one of the people who shouldn’t exist). But if my judgement’s that far off I can’t trust anything I say anyway, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Epistemic status: Only considering the libertarian arguments for and against Nimbyism. In practice there are a lot of consequentialist arguments that could apply. For example, urban concentration increases economic productivity and reduces pollution and rents, but may be more vulnerable in case of an unexpected disaster.
Next Door in Nodrumia raises an interesting question: Is local government libertarian?
The obvious answer is no. Libertarianism is about having less government, and local government is, well, government. So libertarians should be against local government.
The obvious answer is also yes: Local government is just towns deciding about their own community, and the real meddlesome government intervention is the state stepping in to our nice wholesome local community forcing us to change our laws.
So how do we resolve this? The solution to confusion, as always, is to try to derive everything from first principles.
There’s no universally agreed-on definition of libertarianism1, but let’s assume that the core libertarian principle is to maximize individual freedom, as defined by the number of choices each individual has. This seems like a good fit for most of what libertarians want – it fits with less government intervention over individual choices, or the idea that people should be free to decide what’s best for themselves and have government as uninvolved as possible.
Under this definition, the higher-level principles – less government good, taxes/laws bad – are heuristics rather than core principles. There’s good arguments for them – governments and laws almost always restrict individuals’ decision spaces – so we can think of them as theorems that follow from the core axiom.
The question of local vs state government, like Feynman’s sprinkler riddle, can’t easily be solved from heuristics, because they seem to prove two different things. But we can look at empirical results to see which one gives more total individual freedom.
In the case of Scott’s Nodrumia, local government gives better results2: Some towns have all-night drums, and some towns don’t. For someone living in the area, this is great, since he can just decide if he’d rather live in a town with or without all-night drumming3.
But the original debate was about zoning regulations. I’ll admit there are some ways town zoning regulations can be pretty great. Santa Fe mandates that all the buildings have to be stuccoed, and Jerusalem has a law that all buildings have to be covered in stone. They are, noncoincidentally, two of the most beautiful cities I’ve been to.
I lived in Jerusalem most of my life, and I still sometimes stop and look.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who don’t like Santa Fe. And, well, most towns aren’t Santa Fe, and don’t have any particular aesthetic. But for the sake of variety, it’s nice that these towns exist. And in libertarian terms, letting towns vote on their preferred aesthetic seems to work pretty well in giving people their choice of preferred aesthetic.
But on density zoning, this is a colossal failure. Tennessee Williams said: “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” I’ve never been to New Orleans. But in terms of density and a preference towards detached Single-Family homes and a car-based lifestyle, it seems like everywhere outside of Manhattan is Cleveland, San Francisco very much included. This varies a little bit – Boston and Chicago have at least some density and character – but due to whatever confounding variables, pretty much every town in America has “locally” decided on euclidean zoning.
And this isn’t a matter of there being no demand for denser cities – the denser cities we do have see skyrocketing demand and housing costs. But this demand isn’t being answered, because in practice there are misaligned incentives and local control means everyone wants to shove density somewhere else.
Compare Japan, which mostly sets zoning at the federal level. From an individual-freedom perspective, they get ideal results. Not only do they have a mix of low-density, multifamily, and high-rises, they get them within reasonable distance of each other – so you can make your choice for your preferred living style without even having to pay the costs of moving across the country.
Multifamily and Single-Family housing living in harmony
Japan tends to plan density around transit. This is obviously great from a utilitarian perspective. But from a libertarian perspective, it means you get a variety of neighborhood types, in reasonably close proximity to each other. And it also ends up meaning you pay less, whatever housing type you prefer.
1.This holds in any universe with at least two libertarians.↩
2.Unsurprisingly, given that Scott’s trying to argue for local government.↩
3.This isn’t a completely free choice – location and social network effects matter a lot to people, who usually can’t costlessly move somewhere with their preferred policies – but as diehard libertarians we are dedicated to ignoring this issue.↩
The orders were clear: As tempting as it was, we were not to let the psychics process the alien message. Instead, we were to send it through to an old-fashioned linguistics team, who’d work with pen and paper to decipher what they could of it.
This seemed impossible – this was the first-year alien message we’d ever received. Heck, until recent developments in long-distance communication the only evidence we’d even had that the aliens existed were some weird radiation patterns around a star that the astronomers said looked like a Dyson sphere. It was only the psychics’ abilities that had given me any hope we could read it at all. And now we were banned from using them.
When I went to the director to complain, she was apoplectic. “Think about it!” She shouted. “Psychics don’t just read symbols, the process information at the intent level. They make the message *real*. Does the word infohazard mean *nothing* to you?!”
“All we know about these aliens is that they have a Dyson sphere and they sent us a message. The first means they’re more advanced than us, maybe more advanced than we can even imagine. Can you tell me what the second means?”
“That… That they want something from us. And we have no idea what, or how they’re planning to get it.” I went white as I realized the implication.
“That’s right,” she continued. “So we’re not processing this information, and we’re not going to put it anywhere it might harm someone. Instead we’re going to translate pieces of it, as slowly and piecemeal as we can. Maybe we’ll learn something about them out of it.”
So I gave the message to my translation team,and waited for results. At first they were as hopeless as I was about it, but after three days they started getting a few words. After a week, I got an alert that they’d found something. I went down to the bunker.
“We got a whole paragraph, we think” the head translator said. But then we had this idea – why not just go to the psychics? I went ahead and forwarded the message to them – the computer didn’t want to send it out, but we found a workaround-”
I stopped in horror. Surely they understood why they couldn’t do that! Hadn’t I explained? No, wait, I had explained. I remembered that quite clearly. And then I noticed the lopsided grin on the translator’s face, and the mad gleam in his eye.
I stayed there, transfixed in horror as he walked up and whispered in my ear. “It’s too late”, he whispered. “It’s already out.”
Epistemic status: Based on a dream I had, because sometimes they come with oddly terrifying plots
I’m about to cry to you
Be strong up there, my brother
I miss you now
Like ships lost in the night without a rudder
Forever I swear
Your memory I will bear,
And we will meet again, so don’t forget me.
And I have friends today,
but they all fade away,
Before the burning light you left me
When we are sad
We go to shore, that’s why the sea is salty
And it’s sad
You can bring back the things you lost, but not the people
Forever I swear…
And like the waves,
we hit the shore and break
Hitting the harbor,
feeling the ache…
Epistemic status: The annual post where I let go and just go full-on mopey. You have been warned.
It’s my birthday again. It’s been a bad week, and it’s been a bad year. Birthdays always feel lonely.
In fairness, it’s only Wednesday, and I’m using the Christian week for the purposes of this post. But the last three days have been a bit dispiriting.
Monday was kind of bad. I went to the SF meetup, which I haven’t been to in a while, hoping for some warmth. It was cooking meetup, which is usually great for those (in general, the odds of feeling happy and warm in an SF meetup were between one in three and even – which is far from certain, even if it is pretty good overall).
It wasn’t a good meetup this week. Maybe because of the holiday weekend, there weren’t a lot of people, and I didn’t manage to feel that close to most of the people there. Someone said she liked Worth The Candle because it’s great at escalating tension. I said Dresden Files is great for that and she should try it out. I knew it was a mistake before she answered and, sure enough, she answered that she’d read one, but wasn’t okay with how the author treated women.
This bothered me more than is obvious. Partly because I’ve always suspected she dislikes me, and that reinforces that suspicion. Mostly, it was a reminder of the barriers between us – not just with her, but with so many others. This isn’t just a superficial disagreement on what’s fun for her, it’s a fundamental moral belief she has on what worldviews shouldn’t exist. It’s an unscalable wall between us, even aside from any generic feeling of dislike.
There are a lot of these walls. Feminism is a big one. It’s hard for me to live with people who have a sacred value that it should be okay to hate me, or that relying on women’s kindness is exploitation. And I have my own walls, my own sources of anger. I have a hard time believing that people who hate Holden Caulfield (Or Gilbert Norell, or Scott Pilgrim…) are really capable of empathy. And all of this is before we get into politics. None of these are rare beliefs. It makes me wonder how rare real empathy is.
There’s probably also a meta-ethics point here, less about particular ideals than about how we think. For example, I don’t have a problem with how the women in the Dresden Files are written. I used to think it was because, not being a feminist, the entire concept of badly-written women as a deal-breaker didn’t exist for me. But then I read Worth The Candle, and I do have a problem with how the women are written there, I think they get dehumanized. And the same person who banned the Dresden Files from her reading list over its treatment of women loved how all the WTC characters were written. So I guess it’s not even really about feminism, so much as about how we think.
We all think differently, but sometimes it feels like I’m the only one willing to make the effort to try and bridge the gap. Objectively speaking, I don’t know if that’s true – I can think of cases where I tried to explain and got blown off, sure, but I can also think of times I was too angry to let someone else explain. So maybe it’s about other people not wanting to communicate, but maybe it is just communication being hard.
I do worry about the feminism. It’s four years today since Holly broke up with me for the… forget which time that was. Maybe the second? The time I wanted to hang out for my birthday, and she said she didn’t want to hang out anymore. I wonder how much of her anger at me was about my antifeminism. I wonder if that’s something I’ll always have to live with, that’ll poison any relationship I have even if I ever get into a new one. It’s not really something I can fix. I can change my opinion on specific issues, I can care about people, I can listen to the issues someone cares about. But I’ll never be a feminist, really, it’s not a mindset I can honestly live with. And I wonder how much of a problem that will have to be.
I said earlier that it’s been a bad week because I count from Monday. Last week was pretty good. I was happier than I’ve been in a long, long time. It even felt a bit like real happiness, not just mania. But today I’m feeling lonely again. Maybe it was mania after all? Or maybe it’s just the birthday and the lonely week bringing me down, even after I was doing all right.
The year’s been bad, but time passes, and things happen. Maybe next year will be better, or the year after that. I have no special reason to think so – but heck, I never can tell the future.
