Notes

Geneva is evil.

It's overpriced, loud, and dirty. Paying ten francs for a medicore street taco is no way to live life. God forbid you visit the city center during the day, and stay as far away from Geneva station as you can. I thought the air was supposed to be good in the Alps?

But above all, it reeks of fakeness.

It calls itself the "Peace Capital", claims it's too good to have twin cities, and prides itself on its cosmopolitanism. On what grounds? Before Hitler's fall, Geneva's only claim to facilitating international diplomacy was hosting the League of Nations -- admittedly the best international governing body we've had thus far, but still. After, every international organization and their shadow backers clamored to have their headquarters (or at least their European headquarters) in Geneva. The UN, WHO, UNHCR, Red Cross, WTO, WIPO, WMO, ILO, ...

Did you know that the largest non-financial services industry in Geneva is watchmaking? Rolex, Patek Philippe, etc. have factories just outside of Geneva proper. To be fair, 'financial services' also excludes commodity trading, of which Geneva is to oil, sugar, grains, and coffee as Rotterdam is to metals. Vitol & Trafigura both have their headquarters in Geneva (and one must wonder whether or not this is for convenience or to take advantage of lax Swiss banking laws...remember Marc Rich?)

Two-thirds of the corporate tax in Geneva comes from commodity trading, banking, and watchmaking. These international organizations? Don't contribute to the economy. (Yes, they bring people & these people use services & this allows Geneva natives to benefit from the overwhelming amount of NGOs and international bodies in their city. Still.)

Tragically, Geneva once had a soul. The 'Protestant Rome' which once served as the birthplace of the Calvinist Revolution was annexed by Catholic France & revolted as a response. The city had opinions that informed its identity -- not a pseudo-identity formed from undeserved arrogance & globalism.

Demographic shifts (mostly French immigration to French-speaking Switzerland) led to Catholics forming the largest religious group in Geneva today, followed by atheists. (I am not blaming immigration for Geneva's soullessness! it is just another piece of the puzzle). This, along with its absurd emphasis on being a truly international city, undergird the sense that Geneve has lost its way.

And the Jet d'Eau... really? Geneva really had to take the self-masturbatory imagery to another level...

One recounts that Washington Irving, who was traveling in Spain at the time, suggested the name to his brother, a local resident; this explanation ignores the fact that Irving returned to the United States in 1832. Others award the honor to Two Stickney, son of the major who quaintly numbered his sons and named his daughters after States. The most popular version attributes the naming to Willard J. Daniels, a merchant, who reportedly suggested Toledo because it 'is easy to pronounce, is pleasant in sound, and there is no other city of that name on the American continent.'

- The Ohio Guide on the naming of Toledo, Ohio

I found myself in Toledo one night.

I was trying to get from Ann Arbor to Boston via Amtrak (I had no working photo ID, and at the time I didn't realize that TSA takes IDs up to one year expired as valid for domestic travel) and for some reason my connection was in Toledo. Bus from Ann Arbor to Toledo, train from Toledo to Boston. Simple.

(it actually was quite simple --- this won't be some sort of beginning to a trashy horror story. Pinky promise)

Abandoned Factories 1967: Super Bowl 1, Apollo 1 blows up, Ali fights the draft, Thurgood Marshall rises to the court, and Detroit dies.

Woe befell America's automotive capital with the long, hot summer of '67 and some of the bloodiest race riots in American history. Eventually LBJ used the Insurrection Act to send the National Guard to quell the riots, but it left the west of Lake Erie a shell of its former self.

Today, Detroit is almost a ghost town. It's defaulted on its debt (and gone bankrupt!), has the 4th highest murder rate in major cities in the USA, and its former mayor was convicted on 24 felony counts and sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Luckily, I wasn't in Detroit! So you can imagine how surprised I was to find a ramshackle paper mill right next to the train station. And next to that was a junkyard, and next to that was another unused factory, and next to that was... you get the picture.

If you were in front of an abandoned factory at 3AM I would certainly hope you at least took a look around inside. Not that I would ever do such a thing, but it seems like such a missed opportunity...

[pictures incoming! in future updates :D]

Apparently the dereliction of Detroit's manufacturing capacity took Toledo (and eventually, the rest of the Midwest) with it.

Fellow Travelers Mainstays on the Amtrak: Mennonites, punks, and wannabe vagabonds.

Mennonites & the Amish are often mistaken for each other. Both practice a certain amount of technological ascetism (more extreme in the conservative branches), both are Anabaptist derived, and both use the Amtrak as a form of transportation. But you probably see the conservative Mennonites (given their distinctive dress -- 1850s cowboy vibes), especially given that large numbers of them settled in the Midwest.

Punks are interchangeable. Spiky pink hair, silver chains, black skinny jeans, relationships with inappropriate age gaps -- always the same. Entertaining, in small doses.

Wannabe vagabonds: me! :D

Highly, highly recommend talking to the person sitting next to (or in front of, or behind) you on the train. Americans like talking to people, and you probably have nothing better to do. The WiFi is atrocious.

Why Is The Station So BIG MLK Plaza is Toledo's station. It is massive.

Four floors. Gothic. Nearly a century and a half old. A multimillion dollar investment in the mid-20th century. To serve an area that is now dead.

At least National Train Day is a week early in Toledo. The city probably needs the consolation.

Microcosm Walk around Toledo at night. See the emptiness. Feel the emptiness. Get in touch with the dying Rust Belt. And maybe visit the first ever hippoquarium exhibit in a zoo.

Would rec.

In English

A boring, colloquial way.

"Almost all the eggs are gone!" (as half a dozen remain)

Not-Finite-ness

A slightly-less-boring mathy way.

"Almost all prime numbers are odd!"

There are infinitely many primes. There is exactly one even prime number (2). Infinity minus one is... infinity.

"Almost all natural numbers are larger than one-hundred thousand quadrillion quadrillion vigintillion! (10^83)"

There are infinitely many natural numbers. There are infinitely many natural numbers larger than one-hundred thousand quadrillion quadrillion vigintillion. No practical difference between 10^83 and 1 (other than that one is an upper bound on the number of atoms in the universe).

You formalize this with sets: if you have some (infinite) set, a subset whose complement has a finite cardinality encompasses almost everything in the set. We call this cofiniteness.

Probability ~One

A way to quantify surety.

"Almost all the people will lose money at the casino!"

I'm not sure what the exact rates are, but I'd bet money on this being true.

"Almost all numbers are composite!"

It is well known that the number of prime numbers below \(N\)is approximately \(N / \ln N\). In the limit as \(N\) goes to infinity, the ratio of primes to non-primes numbers goes to approximately zero. So if you choose a random positive integer, I would bet my life savings that it's composite.

"Almost all graphs are asymmetric."

An intuitive explanation: if you take all possible combinations of nodes and vertices and let the number of each tend towards infinity, you should expect chaos to triumph over order. (sorry Ramsey). This does depend on a certain definition of symmetry, however, and a clearer statement would be "almost all graphs have only one automorphism."

The Lebesgue Measure is Not-Zero

A straightforward-yet-strange way for real numbers.

The Lebesgue measure is what you get when you try to generalize length, area, and volume to \(n\)-dimensions. It forms the basis for our current understanding of integration, and helps us figure out how big stuff is.

Something with zero volume basically doesn't exist anyway.

"Almost all real numbers are irrational!"

Well yes, all the rationals have measure zero. All countable sets have measure zero, and the rationals are countable.

(Measures are nice: they're a neat generalization of physical scales (mass, volume, etc.) to arbitrary mathematical objects. They're particularly useful for dealing with continuous things we love Lebesgue measures)

"Almost all real numbers are noncomputable!"

Well yes? Of course an arbitrary real number can't be computed to arbitrary precision by a finite algorithm? Computable numbers are countable, remember? Nevermind that basically all the numbers we deal with are computable, this is obvious.

(Measure zero stuff basically doesn't exist, even if they're the only things we use on a daily basis)

"Almost all real numbers aren't in the Cantor set!"

Well yes, of course! Even though the Cantor set is uncountably infinite, it still has measure zero! It's a weird pseudo-fractal embedding of the real line that somehow manages to lose everything in translation but still keep all the relevant information.

(Idk, the Cantor set is weird)

It is Contained in a Nonprincipal Ultrafilter

A filter \(\mathcal{F}\) on an arbitrary set \(I\) is a collection of subsets of \(I\) that is closed under set intersections and supersets. (Note that this means that the smallest filter on \(I\) is \(I\) itself).

An ultrafilter is a filter which, for every \(A \subseteq I\), contains either \(A\) or its complement. A principal ultrafilter contains a finite set.

A nonprincipal ultrafilter does not.

This turns out to be an incredibly powerful mathematical tool, and can be used to generalize the concept of "almost all" to esoteric mathematical objects that might not have well-defined or intuitive properties.

(One of the coolest uses of nonprincipal ultrafilters is in the construction of the hyperreals, post forthcoming).

Let \(\mathcal{U}\) be a nonprincipal ultrafilter over the natural numbers. It obviously contains no finite sets, but we run into a slight issue when we take the set 

\[E = {2,4,6,8, \ldots }\]

 and its complement 

\[O = {1,3,5,7, \ldots }.\]

 By the filter axioms, only one of these can be in \(\mathcal{U}\), and one of them has to be in \(\mathcal{U}\). And thus, we can safely say:

"Almost all natural numbers are even."

by Geoffrey Clive

Well. I am definitely rereading this in a year.

Clive has a style of writing in which reference is made to numerous sources casually and without introduction throughout the book. He makes reference to Mozart, Hume, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Melville, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Socrates, Marx, Kant, and others constantly, and keeping up with the fruits of his obvious hyperlexity is quite difficult without the necessary prerequisites. As I am unfamiliar with many of these works, I can't particularly comment on much of the book (specifically the sections dedicated to Hume and William James, and to a lesser extent Dostoyevsky and Kafka).

His thesis is as follows: the union of Romanticism and Empiricism from the time of Bach to Kafka gave rise to greatness, and its breakdown has occurred (really from the time of Nietzsche's insanity, but only readily apparent in the 20th century). Examples include the rise of "scientism" and of modernity more generally (he views modern science as an outgrowth of the Renaissance, which in and of itself was an overreaction to the repressive nature of the Middle Ages).

(his takes on the modern scientific approach seem to be superficially Feyerabendian. I will compare this to Against Method)

The ancients (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) maintained a level of mystery about the world, walking the careful line between espirit de geometrie and the espirit de finesse such that they could create a more perfect union. However, in modernity, the "daemonic" has been rejected by the thinkers of today (he blames Rousseau & Voltaire for this). Empiricism has no room for the supernatural.

He also uses this framing to explain Robespierre's excesses in the French Revolution as a blinding worship of the virtues of the man-made state and belief that perfect systems could be created from first principles without reference to the past (lacking in common sense). The "daemonic" is described as the explicit divorce of feeling and reason, the natural extension of the separation of lust and love, and the distortion of an act into its opposite. It was the impetus for the Reformation, when Christians could no longer differentiate between the voices of God and Satan, and could explain other political movements as well (fascism was the cult of Hitler, communism was the cult of the Party, liberalism was the cult of good intentions, and socialism was the cult of the masses) as one of the manifestations of the daemonic was idolatry. And yet, it is necessary to accept and understand the daemonic, rather than excise it.

It is peculiar that Clive chooses Mozart as the composer who correctly integrated the daemonic into their masterpieces. Perhaps because he wrote this during the time of Mozart's intellectual revival, but he uses Bach and Mozart as a counterpoint to Haydn as Christian (or Christian influenced) composers who managed to convey the heights of joy and the depths of despair in the same works. I only consider Mozart's darkness to come to light as he aged, with his Grand Mass in C Major, his Fantasia, and of course his famous Requiem, and Beethoven seems like the more obvious choice of champion? Bach is perhaps more suited to be the standard-bearer of the wedding of reason and faith, with his contrapuntal fugues and the sweeping glory of his passions. But on the point that music handles this dichotomy-not-dichotomy perfectly, I agree.

For modern Western man it often seems that the only conditions under which religion can be existentially illuminating are those of absurdity where religion is existentially denied. Goethe's Faust, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, Melville's Captain Ahab, Kierkegaard's Seducer, Kafka's K. - these, not the insipid moralizers of so-called religious fiction, testify to the glory of God, even in hell. (pg 105-106)

The entire work thrives in ambiguity, and excels at identifying dichotomies where the existence of the dichotomy is the problem.

There is a genuine sense, as it were, in which Hitler's supporters were much guiltier than their idol. The Underground Man, this much must be said for him, would not have stood on his "ignorance" or his right of security. He despaired "bravely." (pg 127)

Worthiness pops up once again as a moral "virtue" - where does this come from?

The best known type of offense in the modern world is not that of the Cross, but of capitalism. (pg 133)

A section is dedicated to man's relationship to "offense": the offense taken when one has unsatisfied desires (unrequited love), a lack of meaning, has been excluded from a group, meets someone who is virtuous, confronted with mortality, or has faith. Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Melville's Captain Ahab, and Milton's Satan are prime examples of characters who have embodied offense (and despair as a result).

I suspect Clive's sweeping analysis of the Romantic Enlightenment will become more clear to me once I can understand most of the references the work makes. At the moment, much is inscrutable. Very interesting takes however.

At a rationality workshop I ran an activity called “A Thing.” Not only because I didn’t know what to call it, but because I didn’t know what to expect. In retrospect, I've decided to christen it "Directed Babbling."

It was borne out of a naive hope that if two individuals trusted each other enough, they’d be able to lower their social inhibitions enough to have a conversation with zero brain-to-mouth filter. I thought this would lead to great conversations, and perhaps act as a pseudo-therapeutic tool to resolve disputes, disagreements over emotionally charged topics, and the like. However, it turns out this isn’t necessarily the best use case for a conversation where you simply say the first thing that comes into your head.

As with any writing trying to describe social dynamics, this may be somewhat inscrutable. However, I will try my best to explain exactly what I claim to be a useful conversational tool, for use-cases  from “solving hard technical problems with a partner”, to “diving off the insanity deep end”. 

Background

Alice and Bob are having a conversation. Alice says X, which Bob responds to with *Y, * in the context of the conversation (the previous things that Alice and Bob have said to each other) and the context of the world (Bob’s priors). Typically, Bob’s System 1 formulates Y and Bob’s System 2 “edits” it (for lack of a better term) - in most cases, the final output has more to do with System 1 than System 2. However, most of the time in discussion is spent with these System 2 “add-ons” - formulating ideas into sentences, making sure that the vocabulary is appropriate for the conversation, etc. 

Hypothesis: if you intentionally remove the System 2 filters from the conversation between Alice and Bob, then you get a rapid feedback loop where the System 1 responses are simultaneously much faster and shorter than the original, which lets the conversation have a much higher idea density. 

Setup

We paired participants and asked them to come up with a topic to start their conversation on. Following that, their instructions were to say “the first thing that came into their head” after hearing their partner, and see where this led. After fifteen minutes of this, we checked in and had a discussion on how this went. Repeat about 6 times. 

Observations

Individuals did not report a loss in the ease of communication or a lack of nuance - rather, they reported being much more tired than normal and that their perception of time was quite dilated. Someone likened it to “having a 40 minute conversation but feeling that only five minutes had passed.” Generally, sentiment was extremely positive at this being an alternative method of communication.

A few concrete things that some individuals did:

• Consciously refused to talk in sentences, and only in key words
• Chose a “spiciness” level before hand (think hotseat 1-10)

Other variations included choosing to talk about either technical or emotional topics, focusing on responding to the last thing the person said vs. the first thing that came into their head, etc. 

Use Cases

The most surprising outcome was that this method of conversation seems to be quite useful for technical discussions when both individuals have similar levels of intuition on the subject. It was counterintuitive for me when I tried this: I expected technical conversations to be driven much more by System 2 than System 1, especially when compared to other types of conversations. But when discussing some mathematical proof, it turns out the System 1 responses represent much more the *motivations *for certain logic than the actual logic itself, and this is what allows for the partner to understand better. See here.

As an introspection tool, it also seems quite useful. If both you and your partner are interested or confused by some social phenomenon, lowering your System 2 filters removes a lot of the implicit restrictions we place on our speech with regards to social contexts, and it opens the door for more valuable conversations.

Failure Modes

The obvious failure mode is a conversation in which  Alice and Bob decide on a topic they both feel strongly about, disagree, and then one or both leaves feeling hurt/ having a worse opinion of the other. While you can’t eliminate this risk entirely, some safeguards make it much less likely:

• Setting a “spiciness” level for the conversation before it begins.
  • Mutually arriving at what exactly a level “7” means is probably necessary.
• Only talking about emotionally charged topics with individuals you trust to handle it maturely.
• Having extremely low barriers to exit the conversation. Making it a social norm to get up and leave one of these at any moment is the bare minimum.

A subtler failure mode is a conversation which waffles between topics without any substance being exchanged between the participants. Such as:

Alice: "Do you prefer London or New York?"

Bob: "Purple."

Alice: "Clouds."

Bob: "Steak."

… and so on. I personally find these to be very entertaining, but it is a good idea to set expectations beforehand of exactly how unhinged you would like the conversation to be (some calibration is necessary).

Directed Babbling seems to have much higher idea density and not much information loss compared to typical conversation. I would recommend that you try this with someone sometime, especially if you’re stuck on a technical problem with a partner. If you do end up trying this, please let me know how it went! My sample size currently is quite small, and more data is always great!