One Strange Morning in California

post by Jacob Watts (Green_Swan) · 2024-03-13T22:25:52.543Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

This is a creative writing piece and I don't feel like I can really give a tldr that would preserve much meaning. 

Maybe just listen to this song instead, do a little nonviolent civil disobedience, pick up some trash, tell people you love them, run around a bit, touch grass instead or something, idk. In fact, that might even be better than reading this lol. You do you, audience person <3.

I'll might try to get an audio version of this post going soonish because I like oral, but we'll see how it goes. It ends up kind of turning into a monodialogue I guess, but I didn't know I was going to write that until I wrote it. 

Hope you enjoy!

(Also, anyone else is allowed to record; human voices preferred. Or at least using human written code please # PauseAI)

---

So, I woke up today to realized that the world could end at any time or I could die from dumb reasons instantly. Also, we have a lot of stuff that we don't really organize very efficiently at all. 

Fortunately, I am surrounded by other hominids who seem to give a shit about similar things. Okay, cool cool. Hominids are smart as fuck; we'll probably be good.

But, wait what the hell? A few generations ago some weird stuff started happening and now it looks like many of the hominids have fallen into some kind of mass hysteria where they think that an invisible hand will fix all of their problems for them despite it very clearly not doing that and allowing ~infinite unchecked evil.

A lot of good people are doing a lot of bad things that they don't enjoy doing all the time. That seems weird. They even say stuff like "I don't want to do this". But then they recite some very serious sounding words or whatever and do it anyways.

Somehow, we all kind of know that this shit is killing us and yet nothing changes. We put poison in the health food, we cover everything in single use garbage, we hide our manufacturing designs from each other because we don't want it to be easy to make the stuff we are trying to make. 

If you try to eat the food, they start shouting something about "property" or something. They make you give them these weird rectangles first or something. I suggested that we should make more of the rectangles so that they could have as many of them as they wanted and we could just eat the food or whatever.

They all looked at me very confused. A few of them chuckled and told me that what I just said was very stupid. They were kind of mean about it and it made me feel bad. 

I didn't know what to think. I decided that they were probably right because, frankly, it's not like I could really explain a good way to do everything. I mean, shit, the world is complicated. If the other hominids say that's how things work, I must just be missing something.

I decided to go to the place I had woken up. I guess there was some food there probably. It was a little hard to find for some reason, but I figured out where some food was. It was all covered in this weird stuff. I showed it to someone and they said it was called "trash".

To my surprise, I had to do a quite a bit of reading to even tell which stuff to eat. There were some things that looked a lot like food, but had all these strange poisons in them. I could hardly tell from the trash on them. It was quite a puzzle. 

Fortunately, there were some rice and beans sitting around. SCORE!!! Plus, in the fridge^[1], there was yummy broccoli. I used the machine on the wall to broadcast radio at it or something until it was all nice and muchy. Fuck ya! Fuck ya! Monkey eat! Monkey eat good! Oooo oooo aaaa aaaa!

I was muching around the place and I found a strange piece of glass and metal. It also did weird radio radio stuff or something I'm told, but idk quite how it works. Nobody thought it was worth telling me ^[2]. Anyways, there was a man who looked just like me standing there. 

He would say things like "I AM VERY WELL INFORMED AND AUTHORITATIVE; YOU NEED TO TRUST ME" and other strange stories. He told me stories about how all the trash in the oceans was actually the most efficient thing to do if you really turn your head and squint.

He told me that he had gone to college. "Einstein went to college I think, now you have a cell phone. This is like that. I speak the TRUTH". 

Huh, something seemed off.

I asked him about all the people that were dying and starving and un-sheltered and stuff. I asked why they didn't get to come inside the buildings and eat the food and stuff. He said something about how "mental illness is a tough problem, but what can you do?". He also blamed a type of chemical for being, like, possible to make I guess?

"But what about the other ones, in the other places?" 

"What?"

"They live far away and they look different. They have darker skin than us. Surely you've heard about this?"

"Oh ya, oh. Ummm. Ya. That's a whole can of worms. Very sad. Very tough problem. Maybe if the market gets big enough, then it will spread there and help them."

"Huh. Is the market like the money thing?"

"Ya. The thing with the invisible hand and the money and property and stuff."

"Oh ya, like how we say that the one strange man gets to say what to do with all the stuff because of, like, what did you call them shares or something?" 

"Shares, stocks, equity, property, ummmm. I don't even know if I know all the terms right off the top of my head. That's how complicated it is. There's tons of math and the whole procedure looks very serious."

"Math?"

"Ya, it's a way of speaking precisely. Sometimes if you assume stuff is true and then if you assume that other stuff is true, you can show that the math is true."

"Oh, huh."

"Ya, plus Einstein used it and now we have phones."

"But it's kind of a language thing?"

"It's all very complicated and serious, I assure you."

"So they use this to do the, uh, the money thing with the property thing and that's why a lot of the darker skin hominids are starving?"

"You're not supposed to mention that they have darker skin."

"Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to be rude. I just thought it was relevant given the history of the whole thing and the apparent lack of empathy and stuff. It just seems interesting to point out that some of them look different and that affects how they're treated. I'm kind of a visual person."

"Um, ya. That's a problem. But actually now things are better mostly I hear, so it's okay now."

"Oh, okay. Ummmmmm. Huh. There's a lot about this world I don't understand."

"Ya, it takes quite a bit of serious stuff to understand. Most people aren't smart enough."

"Ya, I remember that in school we would say that the children weren't smart sometimes if they didn't do enough sitting still and symbol manipulation and repeating back. That was called ummm... catechism or, wait, uh.... there were flash cards uhhh... oh ya, memorization. Ya, sometimes I didn't want to do that and I wanted to play with my friends and make stuff. They would say I was bad because of that."

"Ya, you must not be very smart. It's a tragedy of life, but I guess it means that I should make the decisions for both of us."

"I don't really think that's how it works. You're me too."

"Oh, shit, ya. Well, ya, I guess you're right. We're both completely useless. We're not smart and we should probably just do what the other hominids are doing. This stuff is all too serious and complicated."

"I actually used to do the stuff they said because I didn't want to be invalid. I wanted to be smart. I mean, not all the stuff, but I at least tried to half-ass it enough that they would write on the papers that I did good. That way I could tell other people that I was smart."

"Well, there's no other way for people to work together effectively without a high quality evaluation process like that. Plus, think of all the stuff you know."

"There was some cool stuff. I liked when they let me and my friends play with the robots and computers and laboratory stuff. Holy fuck, do you remember the circuits and microscopes and stuff, that was cool."

"That's a dumb thing to like. You're supposed to like the talking and the homework or you're lazy and bad."

"The learning was cool, but all of the sitting still and trying to force my mind around kind of sucked."

"That was the learning."

"Huh, I think we're using that word differently"

"Anyways, the school you went to is invalid."

"I went there cause of my circumstances."

"Ya, everybody has circumstances, but the smart people rise above them and go to the nice schools and that's how you know they are smart. You are not as smart as them so stop trying to do the world different. We've already figured it out. It is all very very serious and a lot of great, brilliant, unimpeachable thinkers have already said how the world should work, so just drop it okay!"

"..."

"breath in; sigh"

"..."

"..."

"What about the AI stuff?"

"Ya, that stuff is great. It will make everyone happy forever. Plus, it's impossible. Either way, we need to build it now."

"I meant more about how we don't really know what we're doing and how we're risking a lot of people's well being who don't even have a say in the process. To be fair, even many of the serious people say that."

"Well, ya. Maybe there is a better and worse way to do it, but you can't tell people not to do something. That is bad. That isn't market. That isn't even money. WE HAVE TO BUILD IT. And anyways, you can't tell people what not to do. That's not market."

"I can't tell people not to do ... violence?"

"What?"

"Violence. Right? Cause they are endangering people non-consensually."

"The market doesn't allow violence."

"Say that to the Rohingya people."

"It's not the market's fault if they don't understand our technology."

"I thought you said it kind of was though. I thought it was, like, a money thing."

"Hahaha, that's cute but it's different. This is all very serious and there is a lot of math involved. If you have a problem with the way we are thinking of things, then feel free to read 100s of unreadable papers that are dozens of pages each and then write your own unreadable paper that nobody will read."

"Why wouldn't I just make my thing more, like, I don't know... readable."

"Not serious enough. Also, you should try to make up some math."

"To speak precisely?"

"No, the math just makes it more serious"

It was at this point that I finished the ball of rice I had been munching on and I suddenly came to my senses.

I stepped away from the mirror and went to go much some broccoli. I jumped around a bit or something I think. I sang a song I liked and was friendly to people. I spent time with loved ones (people seem cool). 

Then I sat down at this strange box, got very confused, and typed this out. I have no idea how the rest of my day will go. 

[REMINDER TO COME BACK AND PUT SOME VERY SERIOUS MATH HERE]^[3]

Happy Ramadan fellow people! <3

 

1. ^{^}

   ya I know what a fridge is, fuck off, I don't have to be consistent lol <3

2. ^{^}

   I'm gonna say that I still went to college in this timeline and everything. I have exposed myself to a lot of words on that sort of thing to still have no actual understanding lol. Anyone know if the Feynman lectures are good still or dated?

3. ^{^}

   I want to link to that one part of that Peter Singer book where he estimates that the cost to, like, end extreme global poverty is, like, not even that many rectangles.

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