Tag: technocracy

I Absolutely Loathed “Sapiens”

I finally finished the slog through Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.

Perhaps I should say thankfully, as it was easily one of the worst books I have ever subjected myself to in fifty-odd years of being able to read.

Why is this? Let me recount some of the ways (some of which I have already touched on here and here):

  • Harari is among the smartest of Very Smart Boys – and as happens with Very Smart Boys, he has to demonstrate frequently how clever he is. Again and again, he will state something that appears to be either factually incorrect or an unwarranted extrapolation or conclusion, and then set it aside – until a paragraph or three later when he will come back to it and explain he was right on some specious technicality or very special interpretation. “Oh, you didn’t think I would akshully say something so wrong, did you?” It’s a gimmick that gets old very quickly.
  • Similarly, he goes off on tangents – almost rants, at times – on some subject, using language which in context implies that these are his actual personal opinions. These digressions are typically controversial or outré, and often presented with the passion of a true believer…before being casually attributed to someone else or passed off as mere noodling: ‘That’s what some people think, anyway’, ‘That’s a depressing line of thought, if true‘, ‘Imagine if people really believed that’, etc. The funny thing is, these digressions seem like his own opinions because they are in almost every case congruent with what you’d expect his own opinions to be, based on his reputation. Where the habit in the first bullet is apparently meant to show how clever he is, this habit can be read as a contrived edginess – a cowardly edginess dulled by plausible deniability.
  • A running theme throughout the book, and especially in the last two chapters, is that humans are nothing special, have nothing to be proud of (and a great deal to be ashamed of), and in fact live in a world of delusion about their abilities, importance, value, and the very nature of their existence. Everything we think we know is delusion, in fact, and everything we value is imaginary and arbitrary. All of which would grate on its own, but it’s especially repulsive when presented in a breezy, matter-of-fact tone – nihilism with a smile, or maybe just a puerile smirk. Which made me wonder why, when he thinks so little of humanity (or rather, “Sapiens”, since in making it clear we’re nothing special, he repeatedly makes the point that we’re not the only “humans”), that he chose to write “The” book about us?
  • The answer may lie in one of the later chapters, where he goes off on a long tangent about Buddhism, one which is unsurprisingly uncritical given his own personal experience with elements of it (Vipassana). If one accepts the premise that nothing in the human world – indeed the world as a whole – is real, or meaningful, or important, or known, indeed is just an impediment to happiness and a fuller understanding of reality, then consistent application of this premise would produce exactly this kind of nihilism. (The answer might also just be a naughty schoolboy glee in stomping on the beliefs and certainties and values of others, the way capital-A Atheists do, with no more purpose than that.)
  • The book’s structure and organization are terrible. His chapters seem to follow a corrupted “five paragraph essay” format, in this case: “Follow an oh-so-clever ‘hook’ with a thesis statement kinda related to the oh-so-clever chapter heading in some way, proceed to ramble through a bunch of anecdotes or stories or study findings somewhat related to this thesis statement without really connecting them to it or each other, and conclude with assertions about the thesis that all the rambling didn’t really set up or support”. Whatever their other flaws, the professors at JMC would never have accepted such shoddy work on a bluebook test.
  • Did I mention he’s an especially obnoxious Very Smart Boy?

I could go on, and probably will at some point in the future. But…bleh. Suffice to say it was a terrible read, and not even close to being worth the time spent on the chore.

Even Less Impressed With Our Technocratic Overlords

Sapiens just gets worse the more I read.

The theme of the most recent section can be summarized as: “Unless you can prove a moral principle or element of civilizational organization is a direct expression of some unquestioned aspect of human biology, it has no basis in reality, and is therefore arbitrary, and therefore cannot be justified.”

Which is a fun bit of nihilism, and further confirms my read that Harari has a fundamental hatred for humanity: everything humanity has done as a species from the point we started to express traits unique (or unique in degree) to humans has been a mistake, and a tragedy – not only for all other species, not only for the planet as a whole, but for humanity itself. Agriculture, industry, complex social organization, property, specialization, technology as a whole, culture as a whole, civilization as a whole: all bad ideas, any cherry-picked “benefits” far overshadowed by their pervasive negative consequences.

I know I’ve criticized Sagan here, but Harari is his philosophical inverse. Sagan may have smugly dismissed what he considered unscientific or irrational views and those who hold them, but he didn’t breezily discredit everything that makes us human and the entire legacy of human history.

Which makes me wonder if “technocratic” is really a suitable adjective for Harari…

Not Impressed With Our Technocrat Overlords

I’ve been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. 

My reaction so far has amounted to, “This is what so much conspiratorial hubbub is about?” I’m about 50 pages or so in, and finding the writing style insufferable – such that every time I put it down, I swear I’m done with it.

The prime offense is that it reads like it was intended for an audience with an eighth-grade reading level – if that. Harari uses short, simple sentences. He waters down complex concepts. He uses some big words, but not too big. And a lot of repetition. Did I mention the simple sentence structure?

Yeah. He’s no Carl Sagan, let alone a Silas Hudson.

What probably ought to be the prime offense, however, is his extensive use of unsupported (because unsupportable) conjecture, presented as fact. Sure, I understand where he’s ultimately going with his assertion that prehistoric foragers led more rewarding or satisfying lives than we moderns (they owned nothing and were happy, you might say), but he can’t possibly know this as fact. It’s not something that can be known as fact when comparing two different extant cultures, where those who make up those cultures can be interrogated extensively about how contented they are – there are simply too many ways to look at the question to establish who is in fact happier.

I’m disappointed. I was expecting a more noodly piece of writing, with much to chew on with regards to technocracy and transhumanism and the like – so much so that I bought Sapiens bundled with Homo Deus and 21 Lessons. Now I’m going to have to decide whether to waste my time reading them or waste my money by not.

 

“Believe the Science”

Can’t find it now, but earlier today I read a social media post somewhere to the effect of: “Believe the science” is not science, that’s not how science works. 

Social media being social media, this was followed by a hundred or more comments of varying degrees of conversational intensity, falling largely into the following categories:

  • Non-content-adding amens;
  • Non-content-adding dismissals;
  • Concurrence from those in scientific fields;
  • Demurral from others in scientific fields;
  • Huffy replies from those who wholly missed the point;
  • Sneering replies from those who willfully ignored the point;
  • Pedantic performatism from those harping on a tangential (but oh so smart!) point;
  • Reductionism from capital-A Atheists trampling the point astride their hobby horses.

None of which adequately addressed what I saw as the point of the original post: the phrase “believe the science” (and “trust the science”) in the context in which the public is familiar with it is in fact a method of social and political manipulation.

It’s little more than an Appeal to Authority in a lab coat.

The phrase is not infamous for its use by honest scientific professionals, after all (who might rightly refer to e.g. the provisional acceptance of research results), but as a rhetorical tactic by politicized scientists and the politicians and technocrats they serve. It uses the public prestige built up by real science* in order to imply a finality of knowledge about the subject in question, and a certainty of the practical (even moral) rightness of the approved narrative and the inescapable truth of specific policies and actions derived from it.

The tell is how it’s used not only against the uneducated hicks and faith-based hayseeds who lack the smarts to even begin to understand the Eternally True Science™ of the Moment, but against specialists in the same or adjacent fields, often those with equal or superior credentials, who dissent from an approved narrative.

When one must “believe the science”, those who perform real science are heathens and heretics.

* — I see this prestige as attributable less to abstract scientific research they probably never encounter and more to the practical applications of real science via engineering, since engineering is the “science” that the public interacts with daily. Being an engineer, I am of course biased in that regard, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

 

 

 

Silas Hudson on the Obsolescence of Technocracy

Technocratic managerialism conditioned its subjects to crave accurate and reliable guidance, while leaving that craving unfulfilled. Its experts were compromised by their biases, ambitions, and wishful thinking in ways that sim ints could not be – and could not be reliably programmed to replicate.

Sim ints quickly came to do a better job of providing accurate and viewpoint-neutral information than human experts. The itch technocracy had created found a superior scratch, one that made technocracy itself obsolete.

— Silas Hudson

Silas Hudson on Shiny Utopian Futures

Perhaps the most effective persuasion against technocracy was its own literature, especially science fiction depicting futures of pure reason and socialist brotherhood. These bright imaginary utopias of endless scientific progress stood in embarrassing contrast to the drab and stultifying reality that emerged from every attempt to implement in the real world the means by which these new orders were to be established.

— Silas Hudson

Silas Hudson on Thinking Outside the Box

There is often merit in ‘thinking outside the box’ for new and improved ideas and options. But when doing so is framed as ‘setting aside old perceptions and conventions’, or ‘moving beyond old ideas’, or ’embracing progress’ as ends in themselves – throwing away the old because it is old, in favor of the new because it is new – that is cause for caution.

It is often observable in such cases that what is presently known, though useful and effective otherwise, is ‘bad’ precisely because it doesn’t give those seeking to dispose of it the predetermined outcome that they desire, or merely fails to flatter their desired self-image as intelligent and insightful.

It’s a cheap shortcut to a self-interested paradigm shift. Denigrating the existing reality-congruent paradigm as backward, stagnant, or regressive opens the door to replacing it with their new, ego-flattering and ideologically-congruent paradigm without having to refute the old on its merits.

— Silas Hudson

Back to the Quote Mines

Holidays are over, family has gone home, and I’ve handed off the time-consuming part of my job to a new hire – time to pick up where I left off.

Easing back into things, I spent a half hour or so every day this past week extracting from my commonplace books anything that could serve as a Silas Hudson quote. The original idea was to publish it as a standalone piece akin to Heinlein’s Notebooks of Lazarus Long.*

Whether or not that happens, it will at least be a useful background resource. Much of the material ascribable to Hudson concerns technocracy, a personal hobbyhorse and one of the themes of Book 2 and especially Book 3.

The unexpected part of this side project is discovering that I have plenty of material to do the same for both Aaron Jacobsen and Martin Beech and the themes they represent. It’s an imposing amount of material to sift through: 30+ commonplace books and 1800+ index cards. And then there are all the books with margin notes…

* – Looking at the fulltext on the Baen website, I see I’m going to have to fisk it at some point. Long’s “wisdom” seemed a lot wiser when I was lot naiver.