Three Things #47: December 11, 2022

Reality Bites

I’ve written a lot about technology and Spacemesh lately. I’ll keep doing that, but I want to take a hiatus to write about something else, something a bit deeper and more philosophical that’s been on my mind lately.

I’ve always been fascinated by the question of truth, and of whether or not there is such a thing as objective truth. Of course epistemology is a huge topic and thousands of books have been written about it, but I just want to examine one tiny corner: the question of social vs. objective, observable, empirical truth.

Humans are social creatures and much of our world is socially constructed. At the risk of sounding obnoxious, one could say that things like nations and political borders, race and gender, and money and marriage don’t “exist” in a hard, objective way. They “exist” because we all believe the same story and act as if they do. They do, however, exist socially: they are social constructs, but this doesn’t make them any less real.

We live in a “post-truth era” where preference falsification is rampant: people don’t say what they really think, and they say things they don’t really believe because they think they have to and are afraid to do otherwise. We’re lied to, constantly, by everyone. Devious folks have capitalized on this situation, taken liberties with the idea of social truths and pushed this to the extreme, trying to fabricate alternate realities that conflict with or replace actual reality. We often refer to this process, tongue-in-cheek, as “memeing something into being” or “seizing the memes of production.” Billion-dollar projects have come about through this process, built on no substance at all. Years later some of them are even still around. This phenomenon explains, more than anything, how Donald Trump became president. And TikTok and YouTube “influencers” build brands, personas, and businesses through use of this craft every day. We’ve truly achieved peak propaganda. (Propaganda, marketing, advertising, social engineering, call it what you will. It all amounts to precisely the same thing: constructing social realities.)

But hard, objective reality does exist. Nature does exist. It’s always there below the social surface. Social constructs can be built on top of it, can obscure it, can distort it, and can sometimes even refute it, but only for a time. Social constructs that are out of touch with nature never last, because objective reality always wins in the end. Nature always wins. Always.

We’ve seen a lot of examples of perfidious, poorly-constructed social realities come tumbling back to earth recently when they ran headlong into the brick wall of objective reality. I want to examine three categories of objective reality and give recent, relevant examples from each category.

“In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.”
- Chapter III, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Thought Police,” created using Stable Diffusion 2. You don’t want these guys coming after you.

Thing #1: Accounting

I chose not to call this thing Money because Money is a social construct. Forms of money have changed many times throughout human history. Money changes all the time, and new forms of money appear and disappear often (especially now, thanks to cryptocurrency). Money isn’t “hard” because you can go off in a corner, do something clever, and invent money out of thin air.

Money is merely a means to an end. That end is purchasing power, which is a far more objective metric. Not all money has purchasing power! Purchasing power is a cold, hard, economic reality: the ability (or lack thereof) to acquire things of value. You either have the purchasing power (in some socially acceptable form) to buy your next meal, or you don’t. Accounting is how we record and reason about purchasing power.

You can build all sorts of fancy, smoke-and-mirrors constructs on top of money, such as derivatives, swaps, rehypothecation, debt, accounts receivable, accrual basis accounting, etc.. (Also, most of the crypto ecosystem.) None of these things have any objective reality since they all depend upon some underlying economic reality. They’re just financial engineering. And overly creative financial engineering has gotten us in trouble more than once.

In the world of business, there’s a famous concept: follow the money. At the end of the day, if you want to understand what’s actually going on, you need to dig all the way down to the bottom to find the actual dollars and cents. Where are they coming from, where are they going, and what are they being used for? You’d be surprised how many financial mysteries can be resolved this way. And you’d be surprised how many sophisticated-seeming operations don’t hold up to this sort of scrutiny.

As a financial operator you can fake it til you make it and bluff for a while, but if you keep bluffing and it isn’t backed by substance then, eventually, gravity is going to catch up with you.

Companies either have the wealth to pay off their creditors, or they don’t, as Sam Bankman-Fried and the many, many, many creditors of FTX found out last month. SBF and his posse told many stories and constructed a masterful social reality around themselves, but it simply wasn’t grounded in hard, objective reality.

For more: “Follow the money” in the FTX case. Where did those billions of investor dollars and deposits wind up? Seriously. Let me know if you figure it out.

Thing #2: War

In fictional Oceania in George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-four, the Party bends everything to serve its purposes: language, propaganda, even history. The Party regularly changes history, sends the evidence down a memory hole, and then pretends things were always that way. Everyone else falls in line and toes the party line.

The only exception, where science and objectivity win, is the Thought Police because they need to be ruthlessly efficient. War belongs in that category, too: as Emmanuel Goldstein points out, war has historically been “one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality.” Leaders can use fancy words and bluster all they want, they can enact bad policies that are out of touch with reality, they can pander to the populists, but at the end of the day, if and when war actually happens, they can’t bluster their way out of it. As Goldstein goes on to explain, however, Oceania’s wars are not war as we know them. They’re never-ending, theatrical, and carried out not for glory or victory but rather to destroy excess wealth and thus keep the people in line, to keep them desperate and hungry.

In the real world, however, war doesn’t care which leader is more popular or who used fancier words. It doesn’t care whose cause is right or more just. War cares only about hard, objective reality: who has the better weapons and who deploys them better. Who has the better strategy and tactics. Who has more economic ability to sustain the fight. Of course, social realities play a role here too! A war that’s fought for a just cause, or an army led by a popular hero, is more likely to prevail—but only inasmuch as those social realities impact objective reality. E.g., a just cause excites more men to fight which results in a bigger, stronger army, other things equal.

War causes death and destruction, and makes the lives of survivors miserable. It destroys the built environment, progress, knowledge, trust, and hope. In this respect, along with death, war serves as the ultimate reality check. It’s all fun and games until the guns come out and the war starts. Then it’s not funny at all anymore. The threat of war, and especially the threat of defeat in war, is, as Goldstein points out in Nineteen Eighty-four, a reality check that historically has kept rulers honest—at least, the good ones.

This brings us to a closely related topic which is also a great reality check: energy. Governments can print as much money as they like, but they cannot print energy. Energy is the single most important factor in industrialization, development, and overall human thriving. Take it away, or make it more costly and less accessible, and life quickly becomes dismal, as the unfortunate residents of Ukraine are finding out. Energy is also, of course, vitally important for waging war: the most powerful countries and kingdoms throughout history have been the ones with the ability to marshal and sustain the greatest energy resources.

War is never pleasant or desirable, but in this respect it’s at least useful: it provides a useful tether to reality. Countries and peoples that haven’t faced any meaningful conflict in a long time are those most likely to elect bad, populist leaders and enact bad, unrealistic policies. Someday war, too, may become virtual and thus less tethered to reality. I remain hopeful that we can find other, less brutal ways to maintain this tether—but I’m also skeptical.

For more: Understand the reasons for Russia’s abject failure to swiftly decapitate Ukraine. Compare the bluster and perception of Russia’s army before the invasion with the reality of today.

Thing #3: Biology

If war and purchasing power don’t care about fancy words or politics, biology cares even less. There are two obvious examples of how biology has been acting as a reality check lately.

The first and most obvious example is the Covid pandemic. Some world leaders decided to ignore Covid completely. Some declared that there was no Covid within their borders, or that their citizens were protected by god, or by other mysterious forces. Some chose not to promote vaccines, some chose to promote quack remedies, and some chose to promote vaccines that didn’t work very well. Many, perhaps most, put in place bad policies that in the best case had little to no impact, and in some cases had a very negative impact.

These decisions were driven not by objective science and medical necessity but rather by subjective policy and bluster. In many cases these decisions were in fact based on bad science. Many leaders and politicians responded to the pandemic not primarily out of a desire to help or protect others, but rather out of a selfish desire to protect their reputations, to be seen to be doing something, no matter how silly or ineffective.

Of course the biggest and most egregious example is China, which has stubbornly persisted in its attempt to eradicate Covid completely via a misguided “Covid zero” initiative that’s looking increasingly impossible and foolish. Xi Jinping can bluster as much as he likes about the superiority of China and its Covid response, but the virus keeps honey badgering on and doesn’t care one whit about politics, borders, or ethnicity.

World leaders who initially took a non-scientific approach to Covid were proven wrong and forced to face reality (albeit with the help of euphemisms). The same reckoning is coming for China, which just this week announced that it’s relaxing its harsh zero Covid restrictions, which will likely lead to a surge of cases and deaths. It remains to be seen whether, in the face of such a surge, the government won’t reimpose harsh restrictions. Either outcome will be catastrophic for China’s image and soft power, and the longer the decision is postponed, the greater the damage and the less control the country’s leaders will have over the ultimate outcome.

The other example of biology coming into conflict with social construct is sex and gender. We live in a time when anyone can choose any gender expression, or change their gender expression at will. The list of genders one can choose from is continually growing. Gender identity and expression are, of course, also at least partially social constructs, but they’re rooted in biological reality: sex. And, contrary to what some activists may suggest, sex is not something that people can choose or change at will. In my mind, there’s a clear line between these two, sex and gender, and attempts to bend or blur the distinction are dangerous and irresponsible.

People can (rightfully) change their genders or even their sex markers legally, and gay and trans people can (rightfully) marry legally in many places, but two biological men or two biological women cannot produce a child without resorting to extraordinary measures like sperm or egg donation, IVF, and surrogacy. A trans woman, born a male and without female reproductive organs, cannot become pregnant or deliver a child. That’s about as close to hard, objective reality as it’s possible to get. (Who knows, someday this may be possible, but at least for now uterine transplants aren’t a thing.)

Of course, marriage and childbirth are personal, private affairs that have hardly any impact on others, but a far more interesting social question is whether trans women, in particular, should be allowed to compete against cisgender women in sports when many have the advantage of having gone through puberty as males, giving them larger muscles, greater strength, etc.. This question has come up quite often recently and the current situation is mixed: the International Swimming Federation has decided to ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s swimming, while the International Olympic Committee has gone the other direction. It’ll surely remain a hot topic for some time.

I don’t care at all what gender someone chooses to present as, which pronouns they choose, which hormones they choose to take or block, or which surgeries they choose to undergo. These are all private, personal choices and they’re none of my business. But I do care when someone’s choices impact other people around them unfairly—as is likely the case when transgender women go head to head against cisgender women in certain sports (the jury’s still out on this one since there’s an overall lack of conclusive evidence either way). This is another case of social constructs coming into contact with hard, biological reality.

Reality itself can change over time. The situation around sex and gender is quite fluid. It’s complicated, there are no easy answers, and these decisions will have to be reevaluated in the future as techniques and norms develop. But it’s important to recognize that there are certain biological realities that, for now at least, we cannot work around.

For more: Read about this gender-bending case of a trans man, married to a woman, who had a child.