the devil's ontology

post by lostinwilliamsburg · 2025-02-07T14:18:52.516Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

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2 comments

imagine you’re playing a game where some rules encoded in words are so special that no one is allowed to touch or change them. these special rules have special properties, so no one questions them. the devil, in this case, is like a sneaky player who hides behind those rules, using them to confuse everyone else. they create a trap by making things so complicated that people can’t figure out what’s really going on. this makes it harder to escape or solve the problem, because the rules are off limits.

to start, some definitions:

ontology: the study of words and their relationships

devil: a conceptual space for describing that which is evil

right folk: the opposite of ‘woke.’^[1]

i.

the decision to model evil as the devil rather than simply call evil evil has consequences.

evil is a spirit (or a quality). the devil has a face. or more technically, the devil personifies evil. we adopt a religious register and poof — we acquire a license to assign capabilities to evil.^[2] perhaps one could say that by describing evil as the devil we are creating the structure to increase evil’s conceptual diversity.

and that’s what we’re going to talk about today folks. diversity. we’re going to be looking under the hood of the term diversity as a means to acquire a general view of the devil’s ontological capabilities. the crux of the idea is as follows:

the devil has the general capability to create ontological traps — the devil creates large pockets of confusion by hiding behind terminology that has been deemed untouchable.

i repeat. the words that you tag as bad are usually the words that you no longer investigate. the trick the devil plays is creating the dynamics such that the words that often have the most alpha are the words you are never going to look into.

‘the idealism of every era is usually the cover story of its greatest thefts.’

the right folk know of two words: variety and diversity.

variety, for reasons past the ambitions of this piece, is a word that is not part of the discourse. we don’t use the term variety in day to day conversation. like the word interstice, it’s valuable, but it’s not used.

on the other hand, the word diversity is part of the discourse. in deleuzian terms^[3], the word diversity has been territorialized.^[4] if the physics community has territorialized a concept of a ‘theory of everything,’ the woke ideology has territorialized the concept of ‘diversity.’

territorialization is an act of creating structures. a ‘theory of everything’ has a fixed identity as the search of a unified field equation because it’s been territorialized. ‘diversity’ has been associated with a series of human resources adjacent ideas. ‘diversity’ has a fixed form because it’s been territorialized. general order by means of stabilization.

because of said territorialization, the right folk mutes^[5] the word diversity. DIVERSITY = BAD. and because it’s bad this is an issue resolved. no more need for investigation. Diversity = Bad = Finito.

the baby is thrown out with the bathwater.

and that’s the trick that the devil plays over and over and over and over again. because, dear right folk, the irony is that diversity and inclusion is the only chance the right folk has at overcoming the devil. the only way out is through or something.

we started by talking about how the ontological move of personifying evil increases our conceptual diversity because it gave us the license to think of evil in terms of it’s capabilities. now i introduce ashby’s law of requisite variety to explain why if something fails it’s because that thing was not diverse and inclusive enough.

cybernetician^[6] ross ashby, who i assume one day will be seen as an isaac newton character of sorts, produced a series of general theories about organization, which i assume to be newtonian in terms of generalizability and scale-free explanatory power. one of ashby’s ideas was the idea of the law of requisite variety. here goes,

if the requisite variety (v_r) of x is greater than or equal to the variety of disturbances (v_d) encountered in the y, then x is successful. in more words, ashby’s law of requisite variety states that for a system to be stable and effectively controlled, the variety in the controller must match or exceed the variety present in the system it seeks to manage. variety refers to the number of possible states a system can take, meaning that the complexity of the controller must be sufficient to handle the complexity of the environment. a mismatch in complexity leads to ineffective regulation or instability.

i’ll explain this diversity law with a very simple example. a fist fight.

in a fist fight your body has receptors that detect various signals (input variety) related to the physical sensations and environmental cues during a fist fight, such as your opponent's movements, the impact of punches, and your own level of fatigue. in response to these signals, you have various actions or control mechanisms (response variety) you can use to increase your chances of winning, such as dodging, counter-attacking, adjusting your stance, or strategizing based on your opponent's weaknesses. if you lacked the requisite variety of responses or didn’t have the skills and techniques needed to handle different situations, it would be ineffective in winning the fight.^[7]

‘if you know the enemy and know yourself (if you have the requisite variety of awareness and thus capabilities built), you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. if you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat (if you create risk as to understanding what variety is needed). if you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.’ — sun tzu’s the art of war

back to the right folk. if the right folk do not possess the general variety, the right folk will not be successful. what kinds of variety?

• goal awareness: it could be the general view of what the goal actually is or success looks like.
• capabilities identification: or the general variety of awareness of what capabilities need to be created.
• capabilities implementation: or the general variety of understanding of how those capabilities are to be created.

the law of requisite variety tells us that diversity and inclusion runs supreme. without the right diversity and inclusion taking down the woke ain’t happening. and that gets you laughed out of a room with the right folk.

hey, hey, hey right folk, the solution to this woke fight is more diversity and inclusion.

and that’s the genius^[8] of the devil. the answers are mostly hidden behind the strongest conceptual shields. the idealism of every era is usually the cover story of its greatest thefts. you don’t get rid of diversity by getting rid of diversity. you can rid of diversity by getting into diversity. the only way out is through.

treat diversity as a single example of how the devil hides behind words. we can look around and find many others (just look for the words that you dismiss most aggressively as a start). the word system. the word life. the relationship between examples and education. or truth vs attention. all big alpha mines.

ii.

diversity is a large alpha mine. if we take the notion of diversity seriously we observe that we lack the general diversity of awareness to follow sun tszu’s know thyself know they enemy rule in the first place. who or what exactly is the enemy?

and this points us to a fourth kind of variety the right folk will need to be successful.

• enemy identification: who is the enemy. is woke really the enemy? or is the devil the enemy?^[9]

select a different word → get a different conceptual space → acquire different awareness capabilities. this is what we may call a kuhninan paradigm shift^[10] but at the sentence not field level.

‘systems engineering is very much about finding the correct words to describe the problem (and related risks), so that they can be readily solved via engineering solutions. jack ring said that a systems engineer's job is to "language the project."’ (ring et al. 2000)[22] — trend system engineering tool crack

we live and die by the abstraction sets we select.^[11] is the woke abstraction set the right abstraction set?

the greatest trick the devil ever made was convincing you that it did not exist. if the devil did exist and it did hide behind things, could it also hide itself? the rationalist leaning online/irl education i’ve received has socially banned the word the devil itself. that’s clearly taking it too far as a general variety reducer.

on the other extreme, in banned ideas land schizo psych ward psychiatrist jerry marzinsky suggests that what we commonly perceive as negative or intrusive thoughts may not solely originate from our own minds, but could instead be external entities, such as demons or parasitic forces. he believes these entities influence and manipulate our thoughts, often leading us into states of fear, anxiety, or depression.

is this right? i don’t know/think so. but i also would have never until received given thought to the idea of extraterrestrials.^[12] regardless, i lack the requisite variety of awareness/capabilities to say give any credence to jerry’s ideas. but that isn’t the point.

the point is simply that the devil, which we’ve modeled as a conceptual space for describing that which is evil — plays tricks on us by hiding behind prosaic words and words that are banned from questioning. the point is that we lack the general requisite variety to model this phenomena appropriately across multiple levels of abstraction: we don’t have the conceptual space to see the words we have selected for discourse no more then we have the conceptual space to see the underlying definitions that contain our basic assumptions such as what or who the enemy actually is.

maybe the real point, is simply that things are complex and we’ve not come close to successfully defending complexity. and that’s the show folks.

‘i think the next century will be the century of complexity,’ — professor stephen hawking

‘every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.’ — schopenhauer

'he (jobs) better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily squished.' — jony ive’s eulogy of steve jobs

‘whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all. a further difficulty, just as insidious, is that people can lull themselves into skipping steps even when they remember them.’ — the checklist manifesto by atul gawande

 

(more on coordinationprotocols.com)

1. ^{^}

   that is the definition for the sake of this piece. hopefully this is a diverse and inclusive enough of a definition for an increasing amount of left folk

2. ^{^}

   the entropic nature of language prevents us from assigning capabilities to spirits. it’s not to say that we cannot ascribe spirits capabilities but to say that when we use the word devil instead of evil we are more likely to speak in capabilities. why? simply because we’re more likely to assign capabilities to things that are personified.

3. ^{^}

   gilles deleuze was a late 20th century philosopher who (a) you should probably know about (b) commented on practically everything (c) had a really strong complexity ontology.

4. ^{^}

   in deleuze and guattari's philosophy, deterritorialization refers to the process of breaking free from established territories, structures, and fixed identities. it involves disruption, displacement, and destabilization. conversely, reterritorialization is the process of establishing new territories or re-establishing territorial connections. it involves reorganization, stabilization, and identification. this idea of territorializing, deterritorialization and reterritorialization create the general conceptual space to see what is in constant flux.

5. ^{^}

   related; terminology acceptance model (tam) is a conceptual framework that focuses on the acceptance and adoption of terminology or specialized language within a specific domain or community. it explores the factors influencing the adoption of new terms, concepts, or terminology standards by users or practitioners in that particular field.

   muted words on twitter allow users to filter out specific terms, phrases, or hashtags from their timeline, notifications, and search results. this means that when a user mutes a word, they will no longer see tweets containing that word, helping to avoid unwanted content or discussions. muting is a personal, customizable feature, enabling users to tailor their experience by blocking out terms they find irrelevant, offensive, or distracting, without unfollowing or blocking people. the muted words function helps maintain a curated space on the platform, though it doesn't remove content from the platform entirely.

   social systems often have their equivalent mechanisms for controlling discourse. just as muted words filter certain content on twitter, social groups or professional environments impose informal boundaries on the types of discussions that are considered valid. for instance, in a scientific group, introducing a concept like "devil" into a serious discussion would likely cause the conversation to be disregarded or not treated with seriousness. this is similar to muting a word in the sense that the group collectively avoids or excludes topics, terms, or concepts that fall outside the accepted framework for discussion, thereby maintaining the integrity and focus of the discourse.

6. ^{^}

   cybernetics was a broad field that came out of military thinking / a general meeting in mexico city that was roughly about the general study of organization. they used a bunch of information theoretic principles and spanned very much across industry. the field was perhaps too broad to be put in a place within academia and was reduced down into several fields (e.g. ops research) in a way that killed some of its magic no different then say the reduction from alchemy to chemistry. a lot of the best ideas from that world deeply effected our world today (e.g. mccullough/pitts and the neural net) and have also been forgotten about today. ashby was the goat.

7. ^{^}

   here’s another example to show this is a scale free phenomena.

   during a natural disaster, such as a hurricane or earthquake, emergency response teams must handle a variety of inputs, such as weather conditions, damage reports, and the needs of affected populations. to manage these inputs effectively, the team has a range of responses and actions at its disposal, including deploying rescue teams, setting up temporary shelters, coordinating with other agencies, and distributing supplies. if the response team lacked the requisite variety of strategies or resources to address different aspects of the disaster, such as medical emergencies, infrastructure damage, or logistical challenges, their effectiveness in managing the crisis would be significantly diminished.

8. ^{^}

   excellence hits the target, genius hits a target no one can see. that’s what the devil is doing here, creating opposition in the form of confusion by tactics of information asymmetries.

9. ^{^}

   defining evil is out of scope for today. this quote from the late jeffrey epstein sponsored edge.org as a buffer for some unpromised later time in which we try to symbol ground evil

   ‘the gibbs landscape biology is rarely wasteful. sure, on the individual organism level there is plenty of waste involved with reproduction and other activities (think of all the fruit on a tree or the millions of sperm that lose out in the race to the egg). but on the ecosystem level, one bug's trash is another bug's treasure—provided that some useful energy can still be extracted by reacting that trash with something else in the environment. the food chain is not a simple linear staircase of predator-prey relationships; it is a complex fabric of organisms large, small, and microscopic interacting with each other and with the environment to tap every possible energetic niche. civilizations and the rise of industrial and technological ecosystems bring a new challenge to our understanding of the dynamic between energy needs and energy resources. the gibbs landscape provides a shorthand abstraction for conceptualizing this dynamic. we can imagine any given city, country, or continent overlain with a map of energy available to do work. this includes, but extends beyond, the chemical energy framework used in the context of biological ecosystems. for instance, automobiles with internal combustion engines metabolize gasoline with air. buildings eat the electricity supplied by power plants or rooftop solar panels. every component in modern industrial society occupies some niche in the landscape. but importantly, many of the gibbs landscapes in place today are ripe with unoccupied niches. the systems we have designed and built are inefficient and incomplete in the utilization of energy to do the work of civilization's ecosystems. much of what we have designed excels at producing waste heat with little concern for optimizing work output. from lights that remain on all night to landfills that contain discarded resources, the gibbs landscapes of today offer much room for technological innovation and evolution. the gibbs landscape also provides a way for visualizing untapped capacity to do work—wind, solar, hydroelectric, tides, and geothermal, these are just a few of the layers. taken together, all of these layers show us where and how we can work to close the loops and connect the dangling threads of our nascent technological civilization. when you start to view the world around you with gibbsian eyes, you see the untapped potential in so many of our modern technological and industrial ecosystems. it's disturbing at first because we've done such a poor job, but the marriage between civilization and technology is young. the landscape provides much reason for hope as we continue to innovate and strive to reach the balance and continuity that has served complex biological ecosystems so well for billions of years on earth.’

10. ^{^}

    this is an underratedly big idea (that a paradigm shift can happen at a micro level) that’s part of the general missing complexity ontology and tool set that we are sorely missing

11. ^{^}

    we can think about most of our day to day lives as lacking the requisite variety of awareness to select the right goals and execute on projects. this a whorfian situation. the whorf hypothesis is a 20th century linguistics concept that shows how language both shapes our worldview and determines the level of fidelity in which one is able to see things. language determines the way we think, and people are to a large degree able to understand the world in terms of their language. if a language doesn't have a word or concept for something, its speakers may not perceive the thing.

    to illustrate the power of language and abstraction, consider the following example. take a rock average joe: when you or i look at a rock, our descriptions might be basic—like "big" or "smooth". this limits our ability to create life with the rock because our language toolbox (or typology) is pretty basic. we see it, maybe skip it across a pond, or use it as a paperweight. our ability to produce life is limited.

    geologist’s perspective: a geologist sees the same rock and thinks about its mineral composition (like quartz or feldspar), its origin (whether it's igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary), its grain size, hardness, and maybe even age. the geologist’s typology allows them to create more life. the geologist can create information about the rock. its history: how was this rock formed? was it from volcanic magma or compressed ancient seabeds? the geologist can do things with it: is this rock good for building materials, or can it be ground down for some industrial purpose? maybe the rock has valuable minerals or metals.

    when we look at the rock example, the "average joe" has limited linguistic and conceptual variety regarding rocks. his cognitive toolkit, or his views to manage, describe, or interact with rocks is limited. therefore, his control over or understanding of the rock's nuances is minimal. on the other hand, the geologist, equipped with a richer typology, has the requisite variety to not only understand the rock's detailed properties but predict its behavior and utilize it efficiently. to create life one needs the receptors (which are often words) proportional to that complexity to create the right regulators.

12. ^{^}

    it’s all weirder then i thought

    ‘ian stephenson’s work had shown that ‘the statistical probability that reincarnation does in fact occur is so overwhelming … that cumulatively the evidence is not inferior to that for most, if not all, branches of science’ – ‘‘physicist doris kuhlmann-wilsdorf, an esteemed professor at the university of virginia

    for a lot of the paranormal phenomena or ideas like remote viewing or your consciousness leaving your body post death there is a hidden in plain sight scientific hidden approving equivalent quote to be found.

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