Evils and Designs in the Hearts of Men
Everyone here should grapple with Evils and Designs, by JC Bennett. Its I, Pencil the horror story. And also a commentary on the Word of Wisdom.
The key insight here is hyperstimulus plus impersonal leaderless systems.
Quote
If you’re a food scientist at Frito-Lay, your job is to make Doritos as broadly & intensely enjoyable as possible (subject to a handful of constraints – more on that later), & the closer you get to directly manipulating the brain’s reward systems – the closer you get to a high-potency opiate – the more successful you will be.
And everything is Doritos.
I met a guy on my mission who bragged to us that he had logged 12,000 hours in World of Warcraft. This was late 2008, & we did the math – it amounted to roughly 8 hours a day, seven days a week, since the release date of the game four years prior.
This guy had a job, a pretty wife, & a baby girl. He balanced the job & his WoW habit with methamphetamine, & his teeth were a row of black nubs. If I could have prevailed upon him to quit one of those things, I would have picked the video games.
Quote
Surely you’ve noticed that the people “ruling” you don’t feel or seem much like rulers, even as they ostensibly have greater power to observe & manage behavior, & enforce compliance, than any ruling class in human history. If anything their behavior feels much more predictable, much more constrained, than ours is.
Please do not comment here until you’ve read the whole thing.
We have met the paperclip maximizer, and it is us.
My Comments
He’s on to something though I wouldn’t take it too far. Clearly there are evil people out there. Good people too.
The dynamics he describes exist but he simplifies them to make his point clearer in the article. Frito Lay isn’t even maximized to produce Doritos, not entirely. There are also non-human systems internal to the company, office politics married to bureaucracy and group think, that lead it in inexplicable directions. And non-human systems external to the company like woke politics that do the same. The systems are evil but also insane.
A natural question for a Christian who discovers some evil but insane systems that no human is in charge of is whether there are non-human entities in charge. My view is yes and no. It would be a huge mistake to think the fallen aren’t evil and real and involved with more than just individual temptation. It would also be a mistake–this is my own view, others may differ– to attribute to them supernatural levels of intelligence and competence and coordination. The key meta insight of the Screwtape Letters is that hell is itself the ultimate in evil, insane, leaderless systems.
Whereas heaven is the opposite. ‘Because God says so’ is the most reassuring thing you could possibly hear–it means a Person made the decision. Consider Jesus Christ, the ultimate in real human personality!
Patrick Henry
September 6, 2021
I was just telling someone that the ultimate end of HLvM (High Low v. Middle, which happens in competitions for power or status or politics or whatever) is that there are no Highs or Middles left, just lows. Everyone ends up a pawn.
Bookslinger
September 6, 2021
Wow. At the link, a lot of Bruce Charlton there, with a little Atlas Shrugged at the end.
Bookslinger
September 6, 2021
The specific BC post I’m thinking of is:
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2014/03/cock-up-or-conspiracy-fake-dichotomy.html
Zen
September 6, 2021
Like G, I was reminded of the impersonal AI that strip mines planets to make more paperclips, but instead of consuming whole planets, it is focusing on advertising and making delicious paperclips. It is the same problem, but the Terminator does advertising instead of shooting people.
There is certainly an impersonal aspect that is Satanic, but perhaps we are letting the people at the top off a bit too easily as well. As D&C 89 points out, this is because of the hearts of conspiring men.
John Mansfield
September 8, 2021
It would have been about 2002 when the little company I worked for at the time (a couple dozen employees) actually did some work for FritoLay. A potato chip factory was having trouble with a fryer. It was a tough problem that required repeated visits by our test engineers, and I analyzed the fluid dynamics of the situation.
—BEGIN DIGRESSION—
The chip fryer was a long trough, and chip dough on a conveyor belt would enter the fryer at one end and exit the other end as fried chips. A limiting factor of a commercial frying operation is how long hot oil can remain unspoiled. Exposure to oxygen turns the oil rancid, so the fryer was covered with a hood and steam was released under the hood to displace oxygen out of the space. However, steam would make the chips soggy, so at the spot where the dough-laden conveyor belt enters the hood and dips down into the oil, and at the other spot where the conveyor belt rises from the oil and exits the hood, there were pipes spraying out nitrogen to keep steam away from those areas. Keeping the flows of steam and nitrogen just right was a job.
—END DIGRESSION—
FritoLay was one of several large corporations that contracted that little engineering firm. For many years now, I have been employed by an organization that is quite vast in extent, worldwide operations employing half a million people. When I started this job I was disoriented by the scale of it. I came to realize, though, that my current situation is not so different from when I worked at a company of a couple dozen people.
The group of people I directly work with is limited. The tasks we work on, though having widespread impact, are administered by a limited body of leaders and administrators. I work with and for people with names and faces. The Darwinists or Marxists or such would like us to think we are all pawns without agency of an inhuman system, but we are excusing ourselves too much with that.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a large organization. Millions of living members, tens of thousands of congregations, a worldwide mission to bless every soul living or dead, and generations to come. We do that work as free individuals and as members of a few small bodies at a time: our families, our quorums, our wards, our missions.
Rusty
September 8, 2021
I enjoyed his bit at the end about building something and carving some living space that is not based on algorithms. I would love to understand more about how to do that, particularly since it seems like folks are more and more dependent on those systems to socialize and communicate with each other.