Robert McNamara, former businessman and Secretary of Defense, gave his name to the McNamara Fallacy — the fallacy of privileging only what can be measured. Also, every quote from the guy makes him sound like a supervillain.

Watching Twitter stroke out and Tumblr engage in a fever dream the Godfather of homoeroticism based on a pair of bootleg shoes gets boring, so I’ve dug up the third – honestly, more important and more interesting – trend of the mainstream realizing that the wealthy are less logical and competent than most people. Whether it’s the soft eugenics of the pronatalist movement, or the crash of a crypto exchange being run by a cadre of Effective Altruists (“earn to give” types) who have been tied to a tumblr blog advocating for “Imperial Chinese Harem” polyamory and race science, (and no one’s commenting on the fact that the individual behind the blog worked under the handle “Fake Charity Nerd Girl”). The last of those now involves a class action suit against Larry David, Tom Brady, and Shaq.

This isn’t just a stew of reactionary race science and competitors for world’s most divorced man, though, but one could be forgiven for thinking that.

No, this is the veneer of rationality chipping away to reveal the idiocy underneath. What we have here is the fruit of a deprived reason finally coming to harvest – the same reason that claims that the STEM fields are inherently superior to the humanities in the academy, but shuffles people into business school more than STEM, anyway.

While I place the main source of this problem in the academy, it is a pervasive issue that can be felt in nearly every part of our culture: the privileging of the quantitative over the qualitative.

To illustrate the difference, allow me to invoke a classic example: that of the sand dune. The quantitative eye does not see it – it can only see a raw number of grains of sand. If you have a single grain, then adding another does not make it a dune. There is no set threshold at which it changes from X quantity of grains of sand into a dune, but something about the aggregation changes it into one.

We could also create a three-way split by changing the example to a snow drift: at some point, the number of flakes becomes a drift, but likewise, there is no set point at which it becomes a drift. Either way of looking, however, ignores the distinctiveness of the individual snowflakes. It is this second example that I think is most important to understand, though: because the individual geometries are distinctive and worth examining, though it is not immediately apparent that it fulfills a utility.

Still, even if we were to limit ourselves to pure utility, we could not write off the sand dune or the snow drift or, indeed, the individual crystals of snow. It is not always directly apparent what information will be useful in the future, so it is necessary that someone seize upon that information and add it to the totality of human knowledge. This is a big part of why blue sky research is so important in STEM fields, and why the pace of technological development is slowing: because there is less and less money for blue sky research.

A big part of this is tied up in the topic that I want to write about today: the fact that we’ve let a group of deluded people sit in the world’s driver seat for far too long.

I.

Problem Statement

I’m not sure that producing dystopian fiction is worthwhile. Inevitably someone comes along and tries to make it true.

If we look at the pronatalist piece up above (written by Julia Black for Insider; I saw it referenced in a reply on Twitter and then the original piece was removed, as the original post referenced Twitter’s CEO, which encouraged me to hunt it down and read it in full) we see a profile of a couple that believe that they have an ethical duty to reproduce because birth rates are declining. This couple believe that human evolution needs directing (red flag) and that the best way to do that is to make sure that they reproduce more often (second red flag) because they are so self-evidently superior, and are loading the dice through a company they’re closely tied to (I read it several days ago and am skimming it now; I believe they’re on the finance side of it) that provides genetic testing for embryos. They used this technology to produce their three children: Torsten, Octavian, and baby daughter Titan Invictus (so many goddamned red flags).

Part of their rhetoric around this is summed up by Black in the paragraph

The Collinses worry that the overlap between the types of people deciding not to have children with the part of the population that values things like gay rights, education for women, and climate activism — traits they believe are genetically coded — is so great that these values could ultimately disappear. (emphasis added.)

This, right here, shows part of the problem. It’s pure finance-brain, because these people believe in a type of genetic determinism that no actual, scientifically-literate person with a background in biology would. Consider: while taste in food might be shown to be genetically-derived, based on twin studies, there is absolutely no reason to believe that values are genetically coded. If they were, then there would be no dissidence in repressive societies, a fact that current events in Iran belie. It is not nature or nurture alone that determines a person’s character, but both in concert.

However, given what we now know about epigenetics – which is basically the knowledge that it is important but a complete bafflement as to the myriad effects it can have – then we can clearly state that even if it were all about nature, they would still be wrong.

This is something that they even partially acknowledge: they named their baby daughter “Titan Invictus” to test nominative determinism. I cannot tell you how baffled I am about the idea that there is a baby girl out there in the world with the name “Unconquered (male) Titan”, and while I don’t believe in nominative determinism, I hope that this child is normal enough to ask her friends to call her Vicky, should the nominative determinist thesis they’re testing not bear out that he’s actually transmasculine.

What I see here are a bunch of reasonably intelligent people assuming they’re geniuses and taking in bad information that agrees with their assessment.

Now, let’s turn our eyes to the FTX event. The only article I have to do with this is the Decrypt article, which contains a link to an archive of her Tumblr. Of course, this is only one of ten people involved in the decision making behind FTX, and the Behind the Bastards linked up above is a great primer on the central figure of this particular shit show.

What strikes me as notable here, though is that the Tumblr of Caroline Ellison references Effective Altruism, Mencius Moldbug (specifically under that name, not under “Curtis Yarvin”), and Nick Land. This, of course, brings to mind Neoreaction a Basilisk, a book that both Edgar and I have read and which Edgar wrote an appreciation piece about some time back.

The title essay of that book dealt with the set of ideas orbiting Moldbug, Land, and a third man, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Sandifer herself put all of them in the same bucket, which she admitted was more a way of writing the book than anything else, saying:

This book is born out of a frustration with the genre of sprawlingly mad manifesto-like magnum opuses in this area, a genre that at times seems dominated, at least in terms of practical influence, by an AI crank, a racist technolibertarian, and a literal madman philosopher (literally). I do not mean to suggest that these constitute the entirety of significant eschatological thought, and certainly not the best of it. Indeed, I find all them at best unsatisfying and at worst loathsome for a variety of reasons, generally ones born of political leftism. Nor is it to suggest that there is some sort of coherent position these three thinkers map out; their influences on each other are substantial, and there’s an entire school of thought (generally known as “neoreaction”) that’s heavily influenced by all three, but they are three distinct thinkers who have different and ultimately irreconcilable goals.

In short, while these three don’t necessarily have much to do with one another, it isn’t unusual that a wealthy cryptocurrency enthusiast with a penchant for arcane race science casually drops references to the three of them in her blog that, once again, freely labels its writer as “fake charity nerd girl.”

I do not intend to retread Neoreaction a Basilisk, but I can’t help but feel that it’s going to crop up a bit in the course of my analysis here. I do not intend to write a critique of manifestos and the personalities that produce them; what I am hoping to look at here is the damage that arises from the tendency to look at the world through a solely quantitative lens.

Let’s start by addressing the most easily-articulated problem.

II.

The Effective Altruism Trap

Peter Singer, luminary of Effective Altruism, in 2013.

The FTX thing is driven by the philosophy of Effective Altruism, which can best be thought of as a kind of Statistical Utilitarianism. The most persuasive way I have heard this said is as follows: imagine you are wearing an expensive outfit, a suit that cost you $100, say. In the course of your day where you’re wearing this, you see a child drowning in a pond, and no one else is nearby who can help, but doing so would ruin your suit. Clearly, you help. Saving the child’s life is easily and unquestionably worth more than $100.

So, if these are the stakes, then obviously, if you are aware of people suffering in the global periphery, whose lives you could save by donating money for the purchasing of mosquito nets. At this point, I’m still generally onboard: in the absence of some major change, it is generally good to donate money for purchasing mosquito nets, among other things.

The Effective Altruist takes it further, though. They think: if this is a good thing to do, and would save uncountably more lives, then I should donate the majority of my money to purchase mosquito nets and to engage in similar crowds. At this point, they’re starting to lose me, but I admit that’s principally self-interest at this point. It’s the next step that completely loses me.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the owner/operator of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange (read: bank) that didn’t even have an accounting department. (image taken from Reuters)

So the most ethical thing you can do is earn the most money you possibly can and donate it to charitable causes. Of course, here we have hit the problem: the global periphery – what most people call the third world – isn’t poor, it’s been robbed and is being robbed, largely by the firms that allow you to make the most money by working for them and the predecessors of such firms.

If we allow ourselves to treat things as equivalent (and the EA crowd clearly is comfortable doing this, equating the destruction of a $100 suit with a $100 charitable donation for the purchase of mosquito nets) this effectively means that they have argued themselves into the position of saying we should rob people so we have the resources to give charitably to those same people.

Which is, quite obviously, a ludicrous statement – all you have done is extract transaction costs from these people and robbed them of choice. These transaction costs are then used to support an unproductive bureaucracy that exists to goose its own metrics, justify its continued existence, and collect donations which means that – over time – less and less money goes to the actual cause and more and more goes to maintain the charity.

This would be a problem if they didn’t also count giving to Effective Altruist causes as charitable donation. They give to themselves and those who evangelize their beliefs and act as if this is a selfless act of service instead of simple robbery.

The problem here is that they accept the system as it currently exists as a given – it doesn’t occur to the vast majority of Effective Altruists to suggest that the current system is not just bad but actively generating many of the problems that they suggest they have calculated a method to solve.

Image used to signify malevolent AI, and also to test whether Harlan Ellison can sue someone from beyond the grave.

Of course, followers of this belief system tend to worship their own intellect, so they don’t tend to just leave it there: they continue to think about it like a dog worrying at a shoe. This tends to lead many of them to anticipate hypothetical long-term problems. The most common is that which Sandifer talked about in the course of her portion on Eliezer Yudkowsky: the problem of unfriendly superhuman artificial intelligence.

Never mind that artificial intelligence does not exist, and artificial intelligence as we tend to think about has not even been proven to be possible (largely because, Alan Turing, genius that he was, still equated what computers do to what brains do, something that I’m willing to accept for the purposes of fiction, but which I am not in any sense convinced of). Of course, this technology doesn’t need to be HAL9000 to prove dangerous – consider the thought experiment of the “paperclip optimizer.”

The idea here is simple: imagine, in the future, they manage to invent something that can improve itself iteratively in the pursuit of a goal. If it needs something off of a high shelf, it will “decide” to design taller and taller machines to get it, so on and so forth.

Let’s say it is given the goal of making as many paperclips as possible, and some idiot forgets to program any limitations on it. If not caught before the “on” switch is flipped, this could result in the non-malicious destruction of all life: if it can design its own tools and make itself smarter and smarter and its tools better and better in the pursuit of its end goal, it will eventually make itself smart enough to make paperclips from the iron and carbon in the human body, it will strip-mine the planet and turn it into a cloud of paperclips, that will eventually collapse back into itself in a paperclip planet – if it doesn’t manage to get rockets off to Mars in the mean time.

This is intentionally ridiculous. But the point is simple: a self-improving system, not given constraints or stop conditions, will not simply destroy itself and everything around it, but it will do so quickly and violently.

Of course, even people within STEM fields (the link is to the blog of an immunologist, and while I’ve had bad experiences with some doctors in the past, I do tend to think that medical doctors are generally better at the human side of things than, say, mathematicians) have identified that this is essentially a disavowed analysis of capitalism. Not “disavowed” as in “concluded to be incorrect” but as in “psychologically repressed because it cannot be dealt with.”

In short, every capitalist firm is a “fauxtomated” paperclip optimizer, and many of the people involved in the fauxtomating process are screaming about how scary the “real” thing is, not understanding that they cannot run from what they themselves are.

In short, by claiming to be “earning to give”, these people are just serving the monster they claim to be fighting, hastening the future they seek to forestall.

III.

The Academy

Literally the first image to come up when one googles “Dark Academia” on Google. My experience is a lot less tweed and layers and a lot more buzzing fluorescent lights and hot-desking.

Professionally, I’ve been an educator longer than I’ve ever done any other job, and before that I spent a long time in college. I was an English Major, and have heard all of the jokes. I did this for reasons that are both qualitative – I genuinely enjoy writing, and I would like to get to write more of my own fiction some day and would like to share more of it with you – and quantitative – my university offered me a $2,000/semester creative writing scholarship, and that was back when that kind of money mattered for getting an education.

However, despite not really having a head for math, I still took the time to become literate in statistics and engage in the soft sciences. I made a promise to myself to take a different introduction class every semester, and I feel that’s one of the smartest decisions I ever made. It might not make me an expert in every topic, but it simultaneously gave me the appreciation for how complex these topics are and enough vocabulary to ask questions that weren’t complete nonsense.

One of the chief problems with higher education right now is the fact that everyone is encouraged to get an “applicable” degree and focus on how they’re going to make the most money. To an extent, this is necessary, because getting a college education costs as much as getting a house used to cost, and the interest rates are predatory. However, it shows a certain ignorance about what college actually is.

Étienne Colaud’s “The Meeting of Doctors at the University of Paris”.

You see, the University – like the Mafia and the Catholic Church – is a particular kind of anomaly in the modern world: it is a medieval holdout. Specifically, it is built along the lines of the medieval guild system, with journeymen and masters and attaining the rank of master requires that you produce an utterly unique “masterwork” (read: thesis) that shows that you are worthy of the rank. A set number of those Masters then go on to be recognized as higher masters skilled in the art of teaching (Latin: doceō, meaning “I teach”).

In practical terms, though, the University evolved over the course of the modern area into the place that does just the sort of blue sky research mentioned above. At its best, the academy is a haven for just the sort of unsupportable and eccentric individual that has no place trying to run a business but who has the sort of expertise that’s considered generally useful. This was built into the medieval University, in the form of “academic privilege.”

Of course, this changed with the increased tempo of privatization in the 1980s (though this trend started in the 1960s, as part of President Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative, which allowed private universities to benefit from Pell Grants). The balance of power shifted from the academics to the administrators, and the administration of schools began to balloon. Of course, it’s important to note that this isn’t necessarily the fault of the administrators: they’re brought on to manage the increasing financialization and bureaucratization of the university, as a sort of Academic Rationalization took root: most of the funding came from endowments and tuition, but alumni giving – as noted in the book Weapons of Math Destruction – is essential for University ranking.

However, as that same book notes many times, the problem is often that we assume that what can be counted is what matters, i.e., that quantitative reasoning holds true.

Of course, this coincides with the shift away from the Humanities towards Business and STEM, which have a number of issues. For example, it’s been relatively well-established that MBA degrees make you better at cutting wages, not at business, and more well-established that there is a correlation between terrorism and engineering education.

Now, we can’t exactly say that the decline in humanities education and the global rise in fascism are necessarily tied. That would be silly, honestly, especially as the world’s most punchable Nazi has a BA in English Literature and an MA in Humanities (from the University of Chicago, so there’s at least a fascist connection there).

However, I do think that one’s education shapes how one thinks, and the fact that we’re seeing certain patterns – a misplaced faith in finance, a distrust of critical thinking, the belief that The Great Gatsby is somehow a good book, etc. – that are opportunistic infections of the psyche, partly driven by a lack of humanities education. This lack is also the result of such things – No Child Left Behind tied school funding to test scores, which privileges subjects that are easily examined through standardized tests.

Of course, I would personally guess that embracing these policies (even its updated Common Core version) is actively malicious – the Education Secretary under the prior president (Betsy DeVos, who is the sister of Eric Prince, owner/operator of the Private Military Contractor Blackwater and daughter-in-law of the guy who founded Amway) was actively hostile to the idea of public education, and sought to replace it with charter school education, which siphons public funds into private hands while removing labor protections and delivering worse education. And this isn’t even touching the School-to-Prison pipeline.

In short: many of the problems with the American educational system hinge on the privileging of quantification over the assessment of qualities. Everything must be counted, measured, weighed, bureaucratized, and systematized.

And the more we do that, the worse it gets.

IV.

Propaganda

Of course, a big part of how things shake out in culture isn’t driven by education, it’s driven by the media, and they’re burning the midnight oil down at the consent factory. There are somehow still people who are convinced of the intelligence and ability of the billionaire class, despite the fact that they simply managed to become billionaires during a time when money was free for those who knew how to ask.

You’ll note that not a one of the most visible billionaires are self-made. They all had support from intergenerational – one could easily say dynastic – wealth and then created a myth later on that they had amazing abilities that justify the wealth they possess. This shows a certain failure of critical thinking on its own: you know what a Public Relations firm is; why do you believe that the ultra-wealthy aren’t benefiting from these services?

And somehow, this is the best they can make themselves look.

However, we cannot simply acknowledge that there is no reason to believe that any of these people are more capable than any of the rest of us. They lucked into wealth none of us can ever dream of, and they’re spending a modicum of it to convince us that they somehow deserve it.

This is, at least partially, the explanation for little baby Titan Invictus from part I. Instead of understanding wealth as patrimony, there are people who seem to understand it as the result of good genes. If any one of the billionaire class, these people say, were to have an identical twin adopted out to a family in Moldova, then that twin would quickly become the first Moldovan billionaire, because this capability is clearly the result of genetics.

It’s just the medieval cult of the special boy farcically returned: my family is rich therefore my family is special; my family is special, therefore I am special.

Transform money into power, and you have here nearly every significant plot line in popular culture. Note the emphasis on bloodline in Star Wars and Harry Potter and superhero films: it the same brain bug rewritten over and over, often without money as the central portion (though, of course, Rowling left the money in to do an antisemitic bit, because I’m reasonably certain she didn’t know about trans people yet, though transphobia is all over her Robert Galbraith books).

This is, frankly, an amazing misconception: if the decision is always between nature and nurture, this is people picking nature every single time for things where that isn’t even a sensible answer to the question. This makes sense, because we – as a culture – tend to privilege the individual over the collective, and it is simply due to the fact that the culture that developed writing did so.

V.

Facts and Feelings

It’s an oft repeated point on the right that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” and it’s often a scab-picking pastime on the left to analyze how the people who use this phrase tend to be more driven by emotion than anyone else, simply that they are in love with the aesthetic of rationality.

Of course, the aesthetic of rationality is often just the aesthetic of quantification. When you attach numbers to something it becomes rational, just ask the author of the website Time Cube. Many of the people who tend to talk about the efficiency of capitalism, or discuss crime rates, or the immanence of ubiquitous self-driving cars, or our future partnership with artificial intelligence, make as much sense to me as Time Cube does.

You know, Time Cube. I dare you to tell me that any of Lacan’s diagrams make any more sense.

The reason is that these people look at the numbers, but they don’t look at where the numbers come from, and never consider the idea that – just perhaps – the people who gave them these numbers had a motivation for arranging them as they did, or producing them as they did.

For example, let’s take the crime rate. Generally speaking, the crime rate will follow police surveillance: where the cops are, there is the place that crime will be noticed. If they tend to spend time in black, latin, lower-income, and immigrant neighborhoods, and only occasionally respond to crimes when called to a wealthier area, where do you think the distribution of crime will fall?

Obviously, it follows the police – therefore, what we don’t have is a Real Crime Rate, what we have is an Observed Crime Rate, and the observation is motivated by biases in the policing system – biases often intentionally installed in rookie police officers by their trainers (see final interview in this episode of the original season of It Could Happen Here).

Or consider real wages: we have averages, we have medians, but at no point have modal wages by $100, $500, $1,000 or any other increment ever been given. While I suspect, partly, this is because the sort of people who use these numbers don’t consider such information to be useful, another part of me suspects that it’s because the vast majority of Americans are making very little money, which makes it somewhat hard to believe in the American Dream. Consider the more than $3,000 negative skew on the numbers here, and the fact that it says that “The top 1% of wage earners in the US contribute 20% of American annual income.” Which would suggest that – to skew things so negatively – far more people would have to be making far less than the average.

Of course, the people who produce this information are probably not consciously hiding this information, but I find it telling that it’s not available anywhere, and I often say that a thing is what it does. What these numbers do is paint a positive picture using quantitative information, selectively gathered, presenting a story that might be difficult to push qualitatively.

VI.

Metis and Techne

One of the books I’ll be reviewing in my next batch is James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State – a book that hit me like a brick through a plate glass window. In this book, Scott analyzed a number of problems, but they all boiled down to the question of why so many efforts by states to improve the human condition failed to do so. His starting point was properly Deleuzoguattarian: examining the violence of various states in the insistence that nomadic peoples must settle down and adopt a sedentary, agricultural way of life.

He begins, as many strong arguments do, by examining ecology, and the violence done when forests are turned into lumber plantations, the destruction wreaked on local ecology by pruning back and eradicating various species in the service of creating what he referred to as a “legible” forest.

Scott then connects this to the various auto-colonizing efforts engaged in throughout Western and Southern Europe near the start of the Modern period. The imposition of standardized weights and measures, the attempted eradication of minority languages and the imposition of a standardized central tongue (a process that was much more successful in the British Isles than on the continent), the imposition of patronyms and surnames for the standardization and measurement of the populace.

The book makes the point that this is all done to make the actions of the people visible to, and understandable from, the central position of authority. One need only look at the way that roads and transport are ordered in France to see this: it is often much easier to travel from Point A to Point C in France through the one Point B allowed: Paris. Every journey in that country, made along the path of least resistance, is a lambda with Paris as the vertex.

Odysseus giving wine to the cyclops. He is often treated as an example figure of Metis.

This type of epistemology, this way of seeing the world, Scott called Techne, it is universal, standardized, and regularized. He contrasts it with Metis, which is particular, adaptable, and fluid. Techne is the language of the term paper and conference, Metis is the language of the street and the back steps.

Moreover, within its proper context, Metis will outperform Techne every time. It is only when that proper context is destroyed that Techne – opportunistic weed of the mind that it is – can take over. Of course, the problem is never that Metis and Techne are incompatible: oftentimes, they can reinforce one another and achieve things that could never be achieved by either on their own. The problem is that – almost by definition – Techne must be subordinated for this to happen, because it is a despotic and monocular view of the world.

VII.

Sclerosis of the Despotic Signifier

The primacy of Techne comes from the fact that it is the epistemology of power. The more centralized authority is, the more towards Techne it skews. This system is driven by what Deleuze and Guattari called the Despotic Signifier: the symbolic order of the people, the polis, the nation, the empire, all centralized on an office or individual vested with that power, which is the focus of a civic religion.

And it’s in the process of dying.

What needs to be acknowledge is that Techne was once Metis, as maize was once teosinte. Just as we have created monocultures of maize, stretching from horizon to horizon, so has techne become an epistemological monoculture, and just as the model forests that Scott discusses in Seeing Like a State, or the potatoes that were the principle food source of the Irish before the opportunistic genocide of the Great Hunger, or the now-vanished Gros Michel banana, it is vulnerable to opportunistic infection.

This is exactly what is happening here.

We are witnessing the failure of the standardized model of thinking – the centralized authoritarian thought patterns that people claim are absent in capitalism (of course, just because your central planner works in a board room and has a cocaine habit doesn’t mean he’s got any more foresight than a party aparatchik.) Which ignores the fact that the small business is simply the result of democratizing tyranny and making the role of despot accessible to a select few individuals.

If we think of things like Fascism, Neoreaction, Eugenics, Effective Altruism and the like as opportunistic pathogens that prey on the capitalist mindset, I think that everything becomes much clearer, and I think that the same logic should apply for combating it. Uproot the host and the infection dies.

I do not mean, obviously, the people who hold these beliefs. However, I do think that these beliefs – the real substrate for the infections – need to be combated and driven back. We need to find a way out of the mindset that makes us vulnerable to these morbidities so that we can actually begin to build a future worth living in.

※

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Techne, Metis, and the Ghost of Robert McNamara