Hyperparasites, illustrated by gambling

Consider a gamble house. The ones running the gamble house are parasites upon the gamble addicts.

The moderate gamblers, those who gamble for a little fun, arguably derive more pleasure from the gambling experience than pain of losing money, so the gambling house and the moderate gamblers are mutualistic.

The professional gamblers, the card counters, those who can earn money from the gamble house, are the hyperparasites on the gambling house.

Then there are those hired by the gambling house to catch the card counters. Those are the hyperhyperparasites.

Thus we obtain an ecosystem with:

• Gamble addicts: the hosts.
• Gamble houses: the parasites
• Moderate gamblers: creatures that are mutualistic with the parasites.
• Professional gamblers: the hyperparasites.
• People hired to catch the professional gamblers: the hyperhyperparasites.

Causal Anthropocentrism

There is a pattern of thinking that has annoyed me. Today I found the name for it: "causal anthropocentrism".

What triggered this post is a quote by Xi Jinping:

There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.

The Thucydides Trap describes this unhappy pattern: as a hegemonic power grows weaker relative to an emerging power, war often results. This concept worried Graham Allison a lot, and you can find him talking about it in books and lectures. This does not concern this post.

What annoyed me about Xi's quote is the part

they might create such traps for themselves

The final solution

It is often said that the universe does not care.

But it does: try breaking quantum mechanics. You will fail. The universe cares about quantum mechanics.

We care too much, about the wrong things, but we are getting better.

The evolution of morality is effectively a convergent dance, with what we care about converging towards what the universe cares about. With accelerating abstraction, we encode what we care into what the universe cares.

• The universe cares a lot about obstructing prime factorization attempts, so we encode trust into the RSA crypt.
• The universe cares a lot about numerical consistency, so we encoded fairness into certain processes of interpreting and using statistical data.
• The universe cares a lot about thermodynamics, so we encoded parts of our life-preserving morality into rules on energy use and greenhouse gas emission, forced by the looming climate change.

There are hints of this kind of moral development in one person's life. As a person develops, they adjust their expectations to reality, including their morality. No longer do they demand the impossible, such as for friendships to last forever, or for childhood to last forever, or to blame others for things they could not have foreseen, or to demand "unreasonable" effort from others. In short, they learn to be reasonable. How "unreasonable" is unreasonable, of course, is finely calibrated to reality, and changes from time to time, with new information technologies, heat engines, social conventions, and so on, changing the boundary of the "reasonable". 

They pretend that it's consistent with previous moralities. That in developing such a morality so finely attuned to reality, they were merely remembering what morality they once saw in a higher plane of existence (like Plato claims). Or perhaps they claim that the seed of morality has been buried when they were just starting to think, and they were simply growing out the full branches and leaves of the tree of morality.

However, this explanation is a fabrication. There is no Platonic plane of existence, and there is no seed of morality. Instead, morality is like water, taking the shape of its container, which is (material, social, informational) reality.

Now imagine scaling this up to moral development in humanity's history.

Complex encodings develop to close the gap between our hopes and the world. From our dreaming brains, tentacles of thought extend out, bifurcating, reweaving, gripping reality by a thousand little physical contacts.

The perfection of moral encoding transforms morality into equivalent natural laws. At this perfect point, we would finally stop striving to be moral -- we would have no choice but be moral, when morality (after encoding) becomes a subset of physics.

The end point of moral development, then, is the end of moral striving. Moral thoughts and actions become compulsory, automatic, and the world is beautiful just the way it runs.

A very unexpected 333 that I found in math

While studying about dynamical systems theory for my ergodic theory course, I came across the extremely unexpected number 333. From Resonances and small divisors (Etienne Ghys, 2007), chapter 10 of Kolmogorov’s Heritage in Mathematics:

In 1962, Moser succeeded in accomplishing the feat of proving the theorem in the space of infinitely differentiable functions [Moser, J. On invariant curves of area-preserving mappings of an annulus (1962)]. 

In fact, Moser used functions which are 333 times differentiable and the topology of uniform convergence on these 333 derivatives... The mere fact that it is necessary to use as many derivatives shows the difficulty of the proof. Nowadays, it is known that the theorem is true with 4 derivatives and false with 3 [Sur les courbes invariantes par les difféomorphismes de l'anneau Herman, Michael R. Astérisque, no. 144 (1986)].

333 is half the number of the devil. Moser probably cut half of a deal with the devil.

The ghost of morality in science

Simply put, morality is a ghost that doesn't like to be scienced, and science has been trying its best to make morality go away.

The basic point from the scientific viewpoint on morality is that it does not do anything. Morality by its definition resists scientific explanation. If there's an explanation to why we do things morally, it becomes imaginable that we do something else morally, or not, and either way, "morality" can be seen as a ghost that doesn't do anything.

Think of the marital morality of the praying mantis. Is it moral, or not, for the female mantis to eat the male mantis after marriage? It is in their nature, with a deep reason. Praying mantis evolved to have this kind of strange and cruel (viewed by a human) morality. If they evolved in some other way, they would have a different morality.

Self-awareness in to-do lists

I was trying out Google Tasks, a to-do list app, and it just asked me to download an app of it on my phone, and on the bottom it says "add to task". I clicked it and it added "download the tasks mobile app" to the to-do list.

I found this amazingly life-like in its self-serving purpose. It's self-referential and trying to survive. It's asking me to keep its existence using its own to-do list powers.