Dialogue, Marriage, and other complex systems

I’m revisiting Michael Sugrue’s lectures on Plato. The man’s passion is contagious. My first experience of the material left a mark during the pandemic. This time I’m listening to the full dialogues. Mostly while cleaning for thirty minutes a day. It’ll take a while. The audiobook format still feels like cheating, especially for Plato. I haven’t read a book in years.

Socrates blurs into absurdist folklore. His weird dogma suddenly feels so close to AI enthusiasts spiel. Compress human reasoning into patterns, scale the prediction machine, and somehow intelligence will emerge. The parallel with the old man asking endless questions, hoping for triangle-shaped answers, is uncanny. Those urging to unleash AI sounds like the politicians of Athens, shoving us into endless wars and dubious ideals of prosperity. Another overconfident empire I suppose.

Tech hype makes last month feel like antiquity. A little Plato flips the script. As we’re outsourcing a fair bit of intellectual autonomy, Plato is healthy intake: fibrous, unsweetened. Not to be taken literally but the substance aged quite well. It makes me sympathize with the “reverse centaur” theory of AI biting us in the butt because of a few billionaire bozos. Having to be a machine assistant is an awful role. Hearing friends and neighbors rehash the AI narrative grosses me out. A tree went down in the neighborhood and they have less to say about it than the latest model they are toying with. But somehow this is exactly what needs to happen. Hanging out at a block party revealed how everyone is floating somewhere between escapism and delusion.

I’m not innocent. I suck in person. My small talk is sluggish. Two minutes into conversation I’m already sweating. “How’s fatherhood so far?” – Rewarding was the easy, honest, universal answer I should have given. I should have left my eyeballs and greying hair tell about the challenge. The broader malaise is the missing sincerity in my relationships. Perhaps my humor keeps getting more cryptic. I just want to preserve my autonomy, and avocado toast. That’s a lot of drama for toast. At this point the calories of my toast produce more intelligence than those billions in compute power. My own 12-watt fatty CPU might be saturated, but it still recognizes the difference between statistical inference and thinking.

I’m not asking for superintelligence, world peace, infinite power, or even a cold beer. I just want to walk around and shoot the shit. My blog is basically a memory palace. A place to store fragments of thought before they evaporate. Writing publicly forces slightly more rigor than dumping notes into a private folder. My parents told me not to talk about myself. I failed spectacularly. But the human condition I’m experiencing is too funny. Some people though try really hard to make things stale and oppressive, which ends up comical. My wife 7000 words post about her childhood friendzone experience was one of these. It’s comically tedious until she asks me what I thought of it. I’m not being silly for show, neither is she. The content of my stream of consciousness is a clusterfunk of comedy, sometimes hiding behind a curtain of gloom. I spend several minutes everyday contemplating, Homer Simpson style, my subconscious yelling “jeezus chroiiiist” in the void my skull.

If it’s not funny, I’m not interested. Luckily pretty much everything has a fair bit of humor to give.

Take privacy.

Money, health, and information are now largely handled via applications. Data privacy is a recurring topic that has gone nowhere so far. Every time I read about it I hit the same wall: I care far less than the author desperately wants me to. That’s probably privilege talking. Wealthy enough. Semi educated. Living in a still-relatively-functional democracy. Conceptually I get why it’s important as an organ of democracy. Often a rich emotional and social life seems to require some privacy. How much is up to each of us to decide. That’s where we enter opinion territory. Where expertise makes a massive difference and where my dumb-dumb thought should stop. I’m overstimulated and irrelevant. Which is absolutely fine. Except for my ego. So on I go.

Now that I’ve poked around in a few AI software’s they can’t stop nagging me about my weight. My wife nags me about it, my mom used to, all my doctors did… To be honest I’d put my BMI, weight, age as public. Anyone in the street could get that just from looking at me. Again, my privilege is speaking. Perhaps a bit less privacy would help humanize the internet and make us all more honest about our digital egos. Having a public database with everyone’s income would probably not help with social cohesion. Total privacy probably leads to something closer to the darknet. That sounds like fast lanes to a communist reboot or some kind of riot… so we have to dance between transparency and some necessary opacity. Privacy in its applied sense is mainly about consumer freedom, “user rights” as it’s called.

Since I’m a terrible shopper and even worse socialite, I don’t feel close to the topic. The internet is fine, people are fucked. The internet is basically a supermarket—overwhelming and under-regulated. It’s getting better at the speed of regulation. That’s why need (more) people like Cory Doctorow finding the words to make us care. Privacy makes me appreciate expertise and process knowledge. Appreciating expertise without personally relating to it is surprisingly difficult. My instinct is to simplify everything down to philosophical gut reactions -aka- “my values”. That often sounds pretentious. To me most of the tech debate says more about the moral decay than technology.

This is exactly the kind of shallow thinking that reminds me of my cognitive limits.

Haciendo el mejor que puedo. I don’t speak Spanish but I understood this aspirational bumper sticker in a second. I clearly don’t have the same aspirations as the owner of the huge GMC truck yet the rhetoric landed just right. A bigger house invites more stuff. A bigger car invites more stickers. A nicer bike invites a harder crash. A blog invites you to make a fool of yourself in public like owning a gun increase your chances to shot yourself. Statistics are for accountants and machines. Extrapolating significance is an absurd process we call science. Useful, but not true. Pragmatism aside, it’s pure comedy to my ears.

Intellectual homeostasis pushed me towards the realm of the absurd. A world of bumper stickers, memes and all sorts of farts. Seeking calibration, my value compass spins around.

My own “best” isn’t particularly impressive. But neither is anyone else’s.Is a government a nation’s best? Is a book an author’s best? No, and no. Yet it’s the best we have right now. The exercise of considering how I am surrounded by everyone’s best work is pure comedy. On top of the comedic tune, there is the fact that what seems like carelessness is often having the sun in the face, or being a bit sick, not properly hydrated, too hot, sitting on a full bladder... None of us are fully primed.

Giving up this struggle is signing up for another one. Yet, most work days I hit an existential wall. Work feels like a strange voluntary pregnancy. I chose it, but I never know how the day will unfold. It’s going to bite for sure.My patience collapses every time I read about ADHD research. Before we all spent half our lives staring at screens, some problems were less common. Apparently that doesn’t imply causation. Do we really need another study?

I can vividly remember becoming obsessive when I got my first computer. Granted I was 16, I had a lot going on. Now I depend on this stuff like everyone else. Coping is the name of a game that had more and more side effects. Managing screen addiction with more gadgets feels like fighting fire with fancier fire. And today I have to add token anxiety to the list? The voices of moderations tell me to consider that I’m clothed and well fed. No need to drop out, I should simply readjust my standards. Modern life is interdependence and we already have very little autonomy. AI and ADHD pairs exquisitely well with the current dynamics of the day.

At least cardio still works. Feelings often seem to simply be muscular tension anyway. Stress in the gut. Anger in the chest. Screen-induced anxiety somewhere below the belt. That matches Alan Watts observation about the sense of self. Freaky monkey here I am again.

The sound of the rain needs no translation.

I made my wife cry, again. I’m not proud of it. Mea culpa. I talk too much and listen too little. My instinct is always perspective. Somewhere, someone has it worse. That logic works for me. It doesn’t work for her. Two painful pregnancies left some marks. What she wants is empathy, not philosophical relativism. Pointing out that other people suffer more is understandably insensitive. To that end, I’m an asshole. Yet the same woman is constantly challenging me to read more and think broadly. Which inevitably leads me back to perspectivism. Whataboutism is upsetting in most context. Though experiments sound like shitty rhetoric when the pain is real. My biggest flaw is lack of tact. Fortunately trust compensates. My marriage is basically two people doing the best they can with each other’s nonsense. Most of it is feelings: illusions and muscular tension. But the conversations are real. Long silences. Heated debates. Half-finished arguments. There’s something Socratic about the intellectual exertion. Whether the topic is pain, family gossip, a blog post, or the news, dialogue drives our life together.

Que será, será.