Alright so this post/potential series of posts is a compromise with myself between the parts that can’t resist adding new information to old posts and the parts that think it’s dumb to stealth edit old posts because it won’t draw any new attention.
Every so often I get the itch to take a third crack at my retail pharmacy explainer but I’m now 3 years removed from chain retail and 2 years from any retail, which doesn’t sound like a lot but is actually eons. Can you believe they let technicians do vaccines now???
Not much to add here except to note that Scott’s book review of Deep Utopia is fresh at time of writing and touches on some of the same ideas. I mention it very briefly in Age of Eye, but I still hold that the most coherent form of simulation theory to me is the idea that I’m a future human whose idea of entertainment is living a softly constrained life as a totally different person. I’m vaguely-solipsistic-enough and my life has had so many weird positive coincidences that I’d be sort of surprised if this wasn’t true.
I had a thought the other day about how it seems like a narrative cop-out that in the Matrix the Architect asserts that humanity needs conflict to be made complacent. Like maybe this is saying a bit too much about me, but in exchange for access to biothermal energy I would be willing to accept probably a fairly modest level of an idyllic lifestyle. The disdain I have for token conflict on Twitter et al. suggests to me that you could make this a pretty mutually beneficial transaction by default without losing “entire crops”.
Anyways what makes this existentially terrifying more than anything else is that I really really like my wife and can’t imagine waking up as a different person with any memory of this life who would not be devastated by her absence. What dampens that somewhat is imagining that the same technology that makes this possible will have some sort of accounting for this built in, and we could guess there’s probably a pre-existing elegant solution to this problem. I have the same problem whenever I daydream about restarting my life with all present knowledge intact—oh god how do I ensure we end up together again!?
Irogination and Bridging simulacra and the stages of adult development are kind of sequence-y without having a needed third plus chapter continuing some of the unfinished lines of thoughts from the latter. Had a brief back and forth with Eigenrobot on the latter where he affirmed a similar difficult-to-explain intuition wrt a sort of thematic similarity between simulacra and the stages of adult development. My further point was that I don’t think level 3 & 4 simulacra are obligated to being nefarious (although reading it again now, I do give context-neutral examples for level 3 & 4), just that it tends to be the simplest of way of framing what is a much more abstract communication strategy. And furthermore, that I suspect operation at lower simulacra has a one-way directionality in the same way Kegan describes the stages of adult development—that those who have advanced to stage 4 can adopt stage 3 but not vice versa.
I’m half-tempted to do a wholesale recasting of simulacra theory on my own because I feel like there’s a little bit of contorting going on to fit it into two neat pairs.
I didn’t put this in that post either, possibly because I didn’t recall it at the time or possibly because it’s a very half-baked idea that I’m not sure I still think is coherent (and also, we’re honestly kind of bordering on casual racism here), but I’ve had thoughts before about how certain cultures seem to be in a mode corresponding to a level of developmental maturity. My examples were Mexican/Mexican-American culture, which seems to be thematically childlike (in the sense that they’re sort of joyfully unsophisticated with uncomplicated-but-surprisingly-high-quality food and entertainment preferences), and Japanese culture, which seems to be thematically adolescent (highly obsessed with an appearance of sophistication that frequently doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and a poorly suppressed beneath-the-surface-level horniness).
Aside from being slightly proud after the fact that All the nerds are undead, Anger at how other people waste their time as misplaced angst at not having personal claims on other peoples' time, and All the subcultures are undead make a very nice series of posts, I (re)discovered sometime after making the last one that there’s an applicable ACX post commenting on the same Chapman bit: A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures.
Scott seems to agree with me that Chapman’s original assessment doesn’t hold in many ways and describes his own take on it which, as per the title, suggests that subcultures work in cycles; in a nutshell, that subcultures have an early glut of picking out all the low-hanging social status fruits and then stagnates (or “involves”, as in involution) as avenues for status get more competitive. He thinks sociopaths as described by Chapman don’t really exist, in contrast to my idea that, as monetization via influencer content becomes more mainstream, they more seamlessly blend in with regular fans.
I would agree that subculture generation is, in a sense, cyclical but I’m imagining more of a spiral, where very often the old stuff still exists and still maintains a fandom while constantly throwing out offshoot mutations or latching onto new intellectual properties.
In addition to the Exoprimal example, there’s another good recentish example I want to highlight without spinning it off into an entire post: INDIKA.
INDIKA does kind of an unusual thing by being a pretty conventional almost-a-walking-simulator narrative-type game, except it occasionally breaks things up to be a video game for a little bit. It’s not all pointless because the game is trying to say some subtle things about how faith is kind of like score-keeping in a video game in that it could either not matter or be the only thing that matters, depending. The presentation is clumsy in a lot of ways IMO because of how discreet the walking simulator vs oh yeah we’re a game segments kind of are, but I extremely appreciate that the game was trying and it elevated what would otherwise be a pretty by-the-numbers experience.
(Also Pathologic 3 was just announced!)
Sympathetic Opposition also has a fresh post on the gender-flipped side of the mad-as-coping-strategy coin, again utterly fantastic at putting a wonderfully humanizing explanation on seemingly hostile behavior.
One element that I think I should/would have included, but hadn’t thought much about before writing this, is free time. I spent a lot of time recently following Team Liquid's 11.0 Race to World First (RWF) and one of the highlights is Maximum’s post-mortem streams and podcasts.
One of the things Maximum mentions when asked about what it takes to get to a point where someone is at a level where they’re capable of competing in a RWF guild is that most players at that level had a time in their life where, by circumstance, they were free to have the time to get really good. He explains that if you’re focused on schooling or have a job that obligates much of your time and attention, you’re just never going to be able to compete with people who don’t, all else being equal.
Arguably, this is still a luck thing, but it’s one that’s external relative to the other innate skill + innate passion components. It’s also harder to comment on in a way that isn’t just accepting the excuse that it’s another shot you might have missed beyond the circumstances of your genes.
But anyways, this is to say my model of “what makes the best the best” now includes a freedom of time element.
There’s probably varying degrees across disciplines to which this is critical. For talents that naturally transition into a vocation such as for many varieties of athletic and musical talents this is largely a game of getting to the point where the talent carries you into the monetary sustainability. And while you could argue the same applies to, say, streaming or professional gaming, my take is that these are pursuits with a larger social component that requires a level of temporal availability to cultivate (in the former case especially) and/or only hit a level of sustainability at the extremes (in the latter case especially).
Maximum’s videos on raid leading (especially the one on officers which is not on that playlist for some reason) are great footnotes to On Teamwork, both in an absolute sense and inasmuch as it’s relevant to the story of how I bombed my own go at guild leadership. Also I feel more free now, after having hit send on Prison & Pharmacy (3/3), to point out that this entire post is a subtweet at my PIC from the state prison, who was so bad at his job he made me willing to think I should take a crack at it and thus inspired most of the thinking behind that post.
Violating the post’s title a little but I also have a few things sitting in draft hell that I at least want to comment on. Have dead gaming-related posts on the Caligula Effect (as foreshadowed by this post), Melvor Idle (plus a separate post on “decision-making” as a game genre), and playing games with guides. Have probably-dead pharmacy-adjacent posts on USP 800 and CPAP machines (titled “Sleep Apnea and Boomer Tech”), might come back to either of these because, respectively, I think it’s important that the pharmacy profession doesn’t forget what the USP tried to pull on us with USP 800 and I think there’s fertile ground to say things about how my parents’ generation has left a low-quality/hostile information environment for later-age health issues). Have severely-in-limbo cultural commentary posts on Zvi’s Moral Mazes sequence, something I’m calling “sphere of interest”, and the relationship between venture-capitalist-like mindsets and auteurs wrt propping up losing bets.
My next most-likely-to-actually-get-finished project is an explainer on pain and pain management but, as always, we’ll see.