Category Archives: Performing philosophy without a license

On Not Quite Fitting

Epistemic Status: I believe this to be an accurate description of how I experience the world. I am reasonably confident that it generalises based on what I know about peoples’ experiences, but I may be overstating how widespread it is a bit.

Credit: Thank you to various beta readers for this post. It’s always a bit stressful writing about this sort of thing.

Note from the future (2019-05-05): All of the general conclusions in this post holds true, but my dating situation is rather pleasantly different now.


If you talk to be people who fall under the LGBTIAQ* umbrella, one sense you will frequently get is something akin to the idea of “born this way” even if it’s not quite phrased as that – that their gender or sexuality is in some sense a deep seated part of their core identity and that trying to suppress it would be unbearably awful for them.

I have absolutely no doubt that the people saying this are telling the truth, but I think an underappreciated point is that this is still what you would see even if that were not the majority experience.

In particular, my personal experience is quite different.

I am bisexual. I tend not to make a big deal out of this, mostly because I do not date that much, but it turns out that your sexuality doesn’t magically go away just because you’re not doing anything with it.

I chose to be bisexual. At some point I decided that I was bored of describing my sexuality as “It’s complicated and not that interesting but I can give you the decision tree if you really want to spend the next fifteen minutes talking about it…” and that I should just use the commonly accepted word that was least inaccurate for my situation.

In a different life where I had had different experiences I probably would still consider myself to be heterosexual. I mean sure my brain would still occasionally go “hello, boys”, but it’s remarkably easy to ignore what your brain is telling you and just write it off as “brains do weird things sometimes” when it’s something that doesn’t fit your self-image.

Even if I had realised that this was genuinely a thing, there are definitely different circumstances under which I would absolutely not fess up to it in public. I decided to just be out about this in large part because I have social capital to burn and I thought it would be useful to people from a visibility point of view, and because secrets stress me out, but if I had less of the former and the costs of my being out were substantially greater then I’d probably shove myself pretty thoroughly into that closet. “Hello fellow hets. Just call me Straightvid McHetero. Yup yup. This here David is all about the ladies” (that’s how straight men talk, right?).

Honestly, that would probably have been OK for me. Especially with how little I date, my sexuality isn’t a huge part of my life. I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I could deal with it.

Before I go any further I want to emphasise that this is not universally true. There are many bisexuals for whom their bisexuality really is a deeply felt part of their identity and for whom passing as straight (or as gay) would be unbearable. The situation is even worse if you are gay and forced to present as heterosexual.

But it is my experience – the cost-benefit analysis for me personally is such that if I had to pass for safety reasons it wouldn’t be awful. My suspicion is that this experience, and variations on it, is actually quite widely shared.

The whole reason we have this notion of being in the closet is because society imposes a high cost to breaking its rules. Even the most liberal of societies we have today are still very heteronormative, and even more strongly cisnormative. If you go against these norms, you will be punished. It might be in big ways, it might be in little ways, and it’s certainly better than it was 50 years ago, but there absolutely is going to be a cost.

And what happens as a result is that people do a cost-benefit analysis (usually implicitly. Actually sitting down and going “Is the cost of publicly self-identifying as bisexual worth the benefit to me?” like I did is weird, but I’m like that). The people who are publicly out or otherwise visible as non-conforming are generally the people for whom the benefit of doing so is greater than the cost.

What this means is that for things where the cost is very high, the overwhelming majority of people you see who do not conform to some norm are people for whom the non-conformance is of sufficient importance to them that it’s worth the cost, or the cost of conformance is too high.

You can see this as more and more people feel comfortable coming out of the closet as things get gradually better – as the level of policing of people’s sexuality gradually goes down, the number of people for whom it is worth it to explore their sexuality goes up. This isn’t what a binary “you’re either LGBT or you’re not” split looks like, it’s exactly what happens when you have a continuous spectrum and everyone below some threshold is quietly pretending that there’s nothing to see here.

Centering gender and sexual politics and discussion on the people most strongly affected is absolutely the right thing to do, but I think it’s still useful to be aware that this spectrum exists and literally everybody is somewhere on it (that’s why it’s a spectrum).

This is important for a number of different reasons.

The first is simply that I’m pretty sure that it’s true. It’s good to believe true things. The world makes more sense that way. This model of how people are behaving is (as far as I can tell) extremely consistent with both the data and many many quiet conversations I’ve had with friends about their experiences.

The second is that I think it is extremely helpful to people to understand this about themselves, especially if they are in a  boundary area. Stressing about the question “Am I bisexual or am I just faking it?” seems to be an almost universal bisexual experience, and that’s not surprising given this dynamic! When most of what you hear is from people whose sexual identity is burned into their very soul, “I don’t know what’s going on but sometimes I feel like it might be nice to be able to kiss boys??” feels fake in comparison.

It’s also useful from a political point of view. There is strength in numbers, and understanding that the range of experiences includes a much more broad base of people who would experiment if given the option significantly increases our numbers. I’d much rather describe my sexuality as “Look over there!” followed by dropping a smoke bomb and escaping in the confusion, and my decision to identify as bisexual instead is in no small part a political one. I suspect there are quite a lot of others out there who could usefully do the same.

(Please note: If you actually feel you’re genuinely 100% straight don’t just call yourself bisexual for political reasons. I think the label becomes significantly less personally and politically useful if people start doing that).

Finally, the biggest reason I think that this is important to talk about is because that’s how we beat pluralistic ignorance – the phenomenon where a norm is publicly enforced by the majority of people but also privately rejected by a majority of people.

Imagine an extremely oppressive society in which presenting as anything but straight is completely not an option (sadly this probably does not require much imagination). Now wave a magic wand and everyone wakes up one morning as a 50/50 split bisexual. What happens?

Well, almost nothing. Possibly enforcement of the rules gets even stricter, because now people are terrified of being found out as bisexual themselves. Although everyone is bisexual, they each think everyone else is straight.

I think it is extremely likely that we are in a less extreme version of this scenario, with almost everyone failing to quite fit the mould that society wants them to but still being complicit in enforcing the accompanying social rules on others.

(Some people benefit enormously from the current state of society, but both things can be true at the same time).

I really do mean almost everyone, because this isn’t a problem confined to sexuality (although I do think that for a sufficiently broad definition of bisexual there are a hell of a lot more of us out there than is commonly supposed, so maybe it’s even a majority if you just stick to sexuality). The human experience is full of spectra – gender is probably one or more spectra, there are a whole variety of neurodivergences which certainly are, and a whole variety of less obvious preferences and traits that society forces us to fit into.

As a result, I believe most people are spending their lives being made vaguely miserable by an attempt to conform to rules that describe an ideal that almost nobody actually wants to conform to. If we could all take a step back and just decide not to enforce some of those rules, we would be more able to express ourselves in ways that make us more comfortable.

Talking about this problem won’t make it go away on its own – some of these rules are due to genuine value differences, and some of the people being made miserable would actively choose to enforce the rules even if given the option not to – but I think it’s a good first step.

By acknowledging that we all experience these degrees of variation, and that nobody quite fits in, maybe we can start to broaden the range of behaviours that society accepts and make it easier for people to experiment and find out what actually works for them.


If you would like to read and learn more about this, I can highly recommend “Queer: A Graphic History” by  Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele. Foolishly I read it right after rather than right before writing this post, so it did not directly inform it, but I think there’s a lot of overlap nevertheless.

This entry was posted in Feminism, Performing philosophy without a license on by .

Shaping the World

I gave a keynote at PyCon UK recently – it was mostly about the book “Seeing Like A State” and what software developers can learn from it about our effect on the world.

I’ve been meaning edit it up into a blog post, and totally failing to get around to it, so in lieu of that, here’s my almost entirely unedited script – it’s not that close to the version I actually got up on stage and said, because I saw 800 people looking at me and panicked and all the words went out of my head (apparently this was not at all obvious to people), but the general themes of the two are the same and neither is strictly better than the other – if you prefer text like a sensible person, read this post. If you prefer video, the talk is supposedly pretty good based on the number of people who have said nice things to me about it (I haven’t been able to bear to watch it yet).

The original slides are available here (warning: Don’t load on mobile data. They’re kinda huge). I’ve inserted a couple of the slide images into the post where the words don’t make sense without the accompanying image, but otherwise decided not to clutter the text with images (read: I was too lazy).


Hi, I’m David MacIver. I’m here to talk to you today about the ways which we, as software developers, shape the world, whether we want to or not.

This is a talk about consequences. Most, maybe all, of you are good people. The Python community is great, but I’d be saying that anywhere. Most people are basically good, even though it doesn’t look that way sometimes. But unless you know about what effect your actions have, all the good intentions in the world won’t help you, and good people can still make the world a worse place. I’m going to show you some of the ways that I think we’re currently doing that.

The tool I’m going to use to do this is cultural anthropology: The study of differences and similarities between different cultures and societies. I’m not a cultural anthropologist. I’ve never even taken a class on it, I’ve just read a couple of books. But I wish I’d read those books earlier, and I’d like to share with you some of the important lessons for software development that I’ve drawn from them.

In particular I’d like to talk to you about the work of James C. Scott, and his book “Seeing like a state”. Seeing like a state is about the failure modes of totalitarian regimes, and other attempts to order human societies, which are surprisingly similar to some of the failure modes of software projects. I do recommend reading the book. If you’re like me and not that used to social science writing, it’s a bit of a heavy read, but it’s worth doing. But for now, I’ll highlight what I think are the important points.

Unsorted binary tree

Binary Tree by Derrick Coetzee

Before I talk about totalitarian states, I’d like to talk about trees. If you’re a computer scientist, or have had an unfortunate developer job interview recently, a tree is probably something like this. It has branches and leaves, and not much else.

If you’re anyone else, a tree is rather different. It’s a large living organism. It has leaves and branches, sure, but it also has a lot of other context and content. It provides shade, maybe fruit, it has a complex root system. It’s the center of its own little ecosystem, providing shelter and food for birds, insects, and other animals. Compared to the computer scientist’s view of a tree it’s almost infinitely complicated.

But there’s another simplifying view of a tree we could have taken, which is that of the professional forester. A tree isn’t a complex living organism, it’s just potential wood. The context is no longer relevant, all we really care about the numbers – it costs this much to produce this amount of this grade of wood and, ultimately, this amount of money when you sell the wood.

This is a very profitable view of a tree, but it runs into some difficulties. If you look at a forest, it’s complicated. You’ve got lots of different types of trees. Some of them are useful, some of them are not – not all wood is really saleable, some trees are new and still need time to grow, trees are not lined up with each other so you have to navigate around ones you didn’t want. As well as the difficulty of harvesting, this also creates difficulty measuring – even counting the trees is hard because of this complexity, let alone more detailed accounting of when and what type of wood will be ready, so how can you possibly predict how much wood you’re going to harvest and thus plan around what profit you’re going to make? Particularly a couple of hundred years ago when wood was the basis of a huge proportion of the national economy, this was a big deal. We have a simple view of the outcomes we want, but the complex nature of reality fights back at our attempts to achieve that. So what are we going to do?

Well, we simplify the forest. If the difficulty in achieving our simple goals is that reality is too complicated, we make the reality simpler. As we cut down the forest, we replant it with easy to manage trees in easy to manage lines. We divide it into regions where all of the trees are of the same age. Now we have a relatively constant amount of wood per unit of area, and we can simply just log an entire region at once, and now our profits become predictable and, most importantly, high.

James Scott talks about this sort of thing as “legibility”. The unmanaged forest is illegible – we literally cannot read it, because it has far more complexity than we can possibly hope to handle – while, in contrast, the managed forest is legible – we’ve reshaped its world to be expressible in a small number of variables – basically just the land area, and the number of regions we’ve divided it into. The illegible world is unmanageable, while the legible world is manageable, and we can control it by adjusting a small number of parameters.

In a technical sense, legibility lets us turn our control over reality into optimisation problems. We have some small number of variables, and an outcome we want to optimise for, so we simply reshape the world by finding the values of those variables that maximize that outcome – our profits. And this works great – we have our new simple refined world, and we maximize our profit. Everyone is happy.

Oh, sure, there are all those other people who were using the forest who might not be entirely happy. The illegible natural forest contains fruit for gathering, brush to collect for firewood, animals for hunting, and a dozen other uses all of which are missing from our legible managed forest. Why? Well because those didn’t affect our profit. The natural behaviour of optimisation processes is to destroy everything in their path that isn’t deliberately preserved or directly required for their outcome. If the other use cases didn’t result in profit for us, they’re at best distractions or at worst impediments. Either way we get rid of them. But those only matter to the little people, so who cares? We’re doing great, and we’re making lots of money.

At least, for about eighty years, at which point all of the trees start dying. This really happened. These days, we’re better a bit better at forest management, and have figured out more of which complexity is necessary and which we can safely ignore, but in early scientific forestry, about 200 years ago in Germany, they learned the hard way that a lot of things they had thought weren’t important really were. There was an entire complex ecological cycle that they’d ignored, and they got away with it for about 80 years because they had a lot of high quality soil left over from that period that they could basically strip mine for a while. But the health of the forest deteriorated over time as the soil got worse, and eventually the trees were unhealthy enough that they started getting sick. And because all of the trees were the same, when one got sick it spread like wildfire to the others. They called it Waldsterben – forest death.

The problem that the German scientific foresters ran into is that complex, natural, systems are often robust in ways that simple, optimised systems are not. They’ve evolved over time, with lots of fiddly little details that have occurred locally to adapt to and patch over problems. Much of that illegibility turns out not to be accidental complexity, but instead the adaptation that was required to make the system work at all. That’s not to say all complexity is necessary, or that there isn’t a simpler system that also works, but if the complexity is there, chances are we can’t just remove it without replacing it with something else and assume the system will keep working, even if it might look like it does for a while.

This isn’t actually a talk about trees, but it is a talk about complexity, and about simplification. And it’s a talk about what happens when we apply this kind of simplification process to people. Because it turns out that people are even more complicated than trees, and we have a long history of trying to fix that, to take complex, messy systems of people and produce nice, simple, well behaved social orders that follow straightforward rules.

This is what James Scott calls Authoritarian High-Modernism – the desire to force people to fit into some rational vision of the world. Often this is done for entirely virtuous reasons – many authoritarian high-modernist projects are utopian in nature – we want everyone to be happy and well fed and fulfilled in their lives. Often they are less virtuous – totalitarian regimes love forcing people into their desired mould. But virtuous or not, they often fail in the same way that early scientific forestry did. Seeing like a state has a bunch of good examples of this. I won’t go into them in detail, but here’s a few.

A picture of a building with multiple windows bricked up.

Portland Street, Southampton, England, by Gary Burt

An amusing example is buildings like this. Have you seen these? Do you know why there are these bricked up windows? Well it’s because of window taxes. A while back, income tax was very unpopular. Depending on who you ask, maybe it still is, but it was even more so back then. But the government wanted to extract money from its citizens. What could they do? Well, they could tax where people live by size – rich people live in bigger buildings – but houses are often irregularly shaped, so measuring the size of the house is hard, but there’s a nice, simple,convenient proxy for it – the number of windows. So this is where windows taxes come from – take complex, messy, realities of wealth and pick a simple proxy for it, you pick a simple proxy for that, and and you end up taxing the number of windows. Of course what happens is that people brick up their windows to save on taxes. And then suffer health problems from lack of natural light and proper ventilation in their lives, which is less funny, but so it goes.

Another very classic example that also comes from taxation is the early history of the Cadastral, or land-use, map. We want to tax land-use, so we need to know who owns the land. So we create these detailed land-use maps which say who owns what, and we tax them accordingly. This seems very straight forward, right? But in a traditional village this is nonsense. Most land isn’t owned by any single person – there are complex systems of shared usage rights. You might have commons on which anyone can graze their animals, but where certain fruit trees are owned, but everyone has the rights to use fallen fruit. It’s not that there aren’t notions of ownership per se, but they’re very fine grained and contextual, and they shift according to a complex mix of circumstance and need. The state doesn’t care. These complex shared ownerships are illegible, so we force people to conform instead to the legible idea of single people or families owning each piece of land. This is where a lot of modern notions of ownership come from by the way – the state created them so they could collect more tax.

And of course we have the soviet union’s program of farm collectivization, which has the state pushing things in entirely the opposite direction. People were operating small family owned farms, which were adapted to their local conditions and what grew well where they were. A lot of it was subsistence farming, particularly in lean times – when you had excess, you sold it. When you didn’t, you lived off the land. This was hard to manage if you’re a state who wants to appropriate large quantities of food to feed your army and decide who is deserving and who gets what. So they forcibly moved everyone to work on large, collective, farms which grew what the state wanted, typically in large fields of monocultures that ignored the local conditions. From a perspective of producing enough food, this worked terribly. The large, collectivized, farms, produced less food less reliably than the more distributed, adapted, local farms. The result was famine which killed millions. But from the point of view of making the food supply legible, and allowing the state to control it, the system worked great, and the soviets weren’t exactly shy about killing millions of people, so the collectivization program was largely considered a success by them, though it did eventually slow and stop before they converted every farm.

But there’s another, more modern, example of all of these patterns. We have met the authoritarians and they are us. Tech may not look much like a state, even ignoring its strongly libertarian bent, but it has many of the same properties and problems, and every tech company is engaged in much the same goal as these states were: Making the world legible in order to increase profit.

Every company does this to some degree, but software is intrinsically a force for legibility. A piece of software has some representation of the part of the world that it interacts with, boiling it down to the small number of variables that it needs to deal with. We don’t necessarily make people conform to that vision, but we don’t have to – as we saw with the windows, people will shape themselves in response to the incentives we give them,as long as we are able to reward compliance with our vision or punish deviance from it..

When you hear tech companies talk about disruption, legibility is at the heart of what we’re doing. We talk about efficiency – taking these slow, inefficient, legacy industries and replacing them with our new, sleek, streamlined versions based on software. But that efficiency comes mostly from legibility – it’s not that we’ve got some magic wand that makes everything better, it’s that we’ve reduced the world to the small subset of it that we think of as the important bits, and discarded the old, illegible, reality as unimportant.

And that legibility we impose often maps very badly to the actual complexity of the world. You only have to look at the endless stream of falsehoods programmers believe articles to get a sense of how much of the world’s complexity we’re ignoring. It’s not just programmers of course – if anything the rest of the company is typically worse – but we’re still pretty bad. We believe falsehoods about names, but also gender, addresses, time, and  many more.

This probably still feels like it’s not a huge problem. Companies are still not states. We’re not forcing things on anyone, right? If you don’t use our software, nobody is going to kick down your door and make you. Much of the role of the state is to hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, and we don’t have access to that. We like to pretend makes some sort of moral difference. We’re just giving people things that they want, not forcing them to obey us.

Unfortunately, that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of power. Mickey Mouse, despite his history of complicity in US racism, has never held a gun to anyone’s head and forced them to do his bidding, outside of a cartoon anyway. Nevertheless he is almost single-handedly responsible for reshaping US copyright law, and by extension copyright law across most of the world. When Mickey Mouse is in danger of going out of copyright, US copyright law mysteriously extends the length of time after the creator’s death that works stay in copyright. We now live in a period of eternal copyright, largely on the strength of the fact that kids like Mickey Mouse.

This is what’s called Soft Power. Conventional ideas of power are derived from coercion – you make someone do what you want – while soft power is power that you derive instead from appeal – People want to do what you want. There are a variety of routes to soft power, but there’s one that has been particularly effective for colonising forces, the early state, and software companies. It goes like this.

First you make them want what you have, then you make them need it.

The trick is to to basically ease people in – you give them a hook that makes your stuff appealing, and then once they’re use to it they can’t do without. Either because it makes their life so much better, or because in the new shape of the world doing without it would make their life so much worse. These aren’t the same thing. There are some common patterns for this, but there are three approaches that have seen a lot of success that I’d like to highlight

The first is that you create an addiction. You sell them alcohol, or you sell them heroin. The first one’s free – just a sampler, a gift of friendship. But hey, that was pretty good. Why not have just a little bit more… Modern tech companies are very good at this. There’s a whole other talk you could give about addictive behaviours in modern software design. But, for example, I bet a lot of you find yourselves compulsively checking Twitter. You might not want to – you might even want to quit it entirely – but the habit is there. I’m certainly in this boat. That’s an addictive behaviour right there, and perhaps it wasn’t deliberately created, but it sure looks like it was.

The second strategy is that you can sell them guns. Arms dealing is great for creating dependency! You get to create an arms race by offering them to both sides, each side buys it for fear that the other one will, and now they have to keep buying from you because you’re the only one who can supply them bullets. Selling advertising and social media strategies to companies works a lot like this.

The third is you can sell them sugar. It’s cheap and delicious! And is probably quite bad for you and certainly takes over your diet, crowding out other more nutritious options. Look at companies who do predatory pricing, like Uber. It’s great – so much cheaper than existing taxis, and way more convenient than public transport, right? Pity they’re going to hike the prices way up when they’ve driven the competition into the ground and want to stop hemorrhaging money.

And we’re going to keep doing this, because this is the logic of the market. If people don’t want and need our product, they’re not going to use it, we’re not going to make money, and your company will fail and be replaced by one with no such qualms. The choice is not whether or not to exert soft power, it’s how and to what end.

I’m making this all sound very bleak, as if the things I’m talking about were uniformly bad. They’re not. Soft power is just influence, and it’s what happens every day as we interact with people. It’s an inevitable part of human life. Legibility is just an intrinsic part of how we come to understand and manipulate the world, and is at the core of most of the technological advancements of the last couple of centuries. Legibility is why we have only a small number of standardised weights and measures instead of a different notion of a pound or a foot for every village.

Without some sort of legible view of the world, nothing resembling modern civilization would be possible and, while modern civilization is not without its faults, on balance I’m much happier for it existing than not.

But civilizations fall as well as rise, and things that seemed like they were a great idea in the short term often end in forest death and famine. Sometimes it turns out that what we were disrupting was our life support system.

And on that cheerily apocalyptic note, I’d like to conclude with some free advice on how we can maybe try to do a bit better on that balancing act. It’s not going to single handedly save the world, but it might make the little corners of it that we’re responsible for better.

My first piece of free advice is this: Richard Stallman was right. Proprietary software is a harbinger of the end times, and an enemy of human flourishing. … don’t worry, I don’t actually expect you to follow this one. Astute observers will notice that I’m actually running Windows on the computer I’m using to show these slides, so I’m certainly not going to demand that you go out and install Linux, excuse me, GNU/Linux, and commit to a world of 100% free software all the time. But I don’t think this point of view is wrong either. As long as the software we use is not under our control, we are being forced to conform to someone else’s idea of the legible world. If we want to empower users, we can only do that with software they can control. Unfortunately I don’t really know how to get there from here, but a good start would be to be better about funding open source.

In contrast, my second piece of advice is one that I really do want you all to follow. Do user research, listen to what people say, and inform your design decisions based on it. If you’re going to be forming a simplified model of the world, at least base it on what’s important to the people who are going to be using your software.

And finally, here’s the middle ground advice that I’d really like you to think about. Stop relying on ads. As the saying goes, if your users aren’t paying for it, they’re not the customer, they’re the product. The product isn’t a tree, it’s planks. It’s not a person, it’s data. Ads and adtech are one of the most powerful forces for creating a legible society, because they are fundamentally reliant on turning a complex world of people and their interactions into simple lists of numbers, then optimising those numbers to make money. If we don’t want our own human shaped version of forest death, we need to figure out what important complexity we’re destroying, and we need to stop doing that.

And that is all I have to say to you today. I won’t be taking questions, but I will be around for the rest of the conference if you want to come talk to me about any of this. Thank you very much.

This entry was posted in Performing philosophy without a license, Python on by .

Reality is a countably infinite Sierpiński cube

I was thinking out loud on Twitter about what weird beliefs I hold, after realising (more or less as I was writing it) that my philosophical positions are practically banal (at least to anyone who has thought about these issues a bit, whether or not they agree with me).

I came up with a couple, but probably the most interesting (if very very niche) that I thought of is that one true and accurate mathematical model of reality is  time cube a closed, connected, subset of the countably infinite Sierpinski cube.

I consider this opinion to be not that weird and more importantly obviously correct, but I’m aware that this is a niche opinion, but hear me out.

Before we start, a quick note on the nature of reality. I am being deliberately imprecise about what I mean by “reality” here, and basically mean “any physical system”. This could be “life the universe and everything” and we are attempting to solve physics, or it could be some toy restricted physical system of interest and we are trying to nail down its behaviour. This post applies equally well to any physical system we want to be able to model.

Consider an experiment. Let’s pretend we can have deterministic experiments for convenience – you can easily work around the impossibility by making countably infinitely many copies of the experiment and considering each of them to be the answer you got the nth time you ran the experiment.

Also for simplicity we’ll assume that experiments can only have one of two outcomes (this is no loss of generality as long as experiments can only have finitely many outcomes – you just consider the finitely many experiments of the form “Was the outcome X?” – and if they have infinitely many outcomes you still need to ultimately make a finite classification of the result and so can consider the experiment composed with that classification).

There are three sensible possible outcomes you could have here:

  • Yes
  • No
  • I don’t know, maybe?

Physical experiments are inherently imprecise – things go wrong in your experiment, in your setup, in just about every bloody thing, so set of experiments whose outcome will give you total certainty is implausible and we can ignore it.

Which leaves us with experiments where one of the answer is maybe. It doesn’t matter which answer the other one is (we can always just invert the question).

So we’ve run an experiment and got an answer. What does that tell us about the true state of reality?

Well whatever reality is we must have some notion of “an approximate region” – all of our observation of reality is imprecise, so there must be some notion of precision to make sense of that.

So reality is a topological space.

What does the result of a physical experiment tell us about the state of reality?

Well if the answer is “maybe” it doesn’t tell us anything. Literally any point in reality could be mapped to “maybe”.

But if the answer is yes then this should tell us only imprecisely where we are in reality. i.e. the set of points that map to yes must be an open set.

So an experiment is a function from reality to {yes, maybe}. The set of points mapping to yes must be an open set.

And what this means is that experiments are continuous functions to the set {yes, maybe} endowed with the Sierpiński topology. The set {yes} is open, and the whole set and the empty set are open, but nothing else is.

Now let’s postulate that if two states of reality give exactly the same answer on every single experiment, they’re the same state of reality. This is true in the same sense that existing is the thing that reality does – a difference that makes no difference might as well be treated as if it is no difference.

So what we have is the following:

  1. Any state of reality is a point in the cube \(S^E\) where \(E\) is the set of available experiments and \(S = \{\mathrm{yes}, \mathrm{maybe}\}\).
  2. All of the coordinate functions are continuous functions when \(S\) is endowed with the Sierpinski topology.

This is almost enough to show that reality can be modelled as a subset of the Sierpinski cube, not quite: There are many topologies compatible with this – reality could have the discrete topology.

But we are finite beings. And what that means is that any given point in time we can have observed the outcome of at most finitely many experiments.

Each of these experiments determine where we are only in the open set of some coordinate in our cube, thus the set that the experiments have determined us to be in is an intersection of finitely many open sets in the product topology on that cube, and thus is open in that topology.

Therefore the set of states of reality that we know we are in is always an open set in the product topology. So this is the “natural” topology on reality.

So reality is a subset of a Sierpiński cube. We now have to answer two questions to get the rest of the way:

  • How many dimensions does the cube have?
  • What sort of subset is it?

The first one is easy: The set of experiments we can perform is definitely infinite (we can repeat a single experiment arbitrarily many times). It’s also definitely countable, because any experiment we can perform is one we can describe (and two experiments are distinct only up to our ability to describe that distinction), and there are only countably many sentences.

So reality is a subset of the countably infinite dimensional Sierpiński cube.

What sort of subset?

Well that’s harder, and my arguments for it are less convincing.

It’s probably not usually the whole set. It’s unlikely that reality contains a state that is just constantly maybe.

It might as well be a closed set, because if it’s not we can’t tell – there is no physical experiment we can perform that will determine that a point in the closure of reality is not in reality, and it would be aesthetically and philosophically displeasing to have aphysical states of reality that are approximated arbitrarily well.

In most cases it’s usually going to be a connected set. Why? Well, because you’re “in” some state of reality, and you might as well restrict yourself to the path component of that state – if you can’t continuously deform from where you are to another state, that state probably isn’t interesting to you even if it in some sense exists.

Is it an uncountable subset of the Sierpinski cube? I don’t know, maybe. Depends on what you’re modelling.

Anyway, so there you have it. Reality is a closed, connected, subset of the countably infinite dimensional Sierpiński cube.

What are the philosophical implications?

Well, one obvious philosophical implication is that reality is compact, path connected, and second countable, but may not be Hausdorff.

(You should imagine a very very straight face as I delivered that line)

More seriously, the big implication for me is on how we model physical systems. We don’t have to model physical systems as the Sierpiński cube. Indeed we usually won’t want to – it’s not very friendly to work with – but whatever model we choose for our physical systems should have a continuous function (or, really, a family of continuous functions to take into account the fact that we fudged the non-determinism of our experiments) from it to the relevant Sierpiński cube for the physical system under question.

Another thing worth noting is that the argument is more interesting than the conclusion, and in particular the specific embedding is more important that the embedding exists. In fact every second countable T0 topological space embeds in the Sierpinski cube, so the conclusion boils down to the fact that reality is a T0, second countable, compact, and connected (path connected really) topological space (which are more or less the assumptions we used!).

But I think the specific choice of embedding matters more than that, and the fact that we the coordinates correspond to natural experiments we can run.

And, importantly, any decision we make based on that model needs to factor through that function. Decisions are based on a finite set of experiments, and anything that requires us to be able to know our model to more precision than the topology of reality allows us to is aphysical, and should be avoided.

A statement of philosophical principles

Epistemic status: This is my philosophy. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It is not anything especially unusual or particularly sophisticated.

I’ve noticed in a couple of discussions recently that my philosophical positions are both somewhat opposed to what might be considered normal (at least among non-philosophers) and may seem internally contradictory.

It also occurred to me that I’ve never really properly explained this to people, and that it might be worth writing up a short position statement.

So, here is the philosophical basis on which I live my life. You can think of it as a rather extreme combination of moral relativism and mathematical formalism.

  1. Words, and the concepts behind them, are made up and have no objective meaning or basis.
  2. Statements cannot thus really be “true” or “false” (though they may be deductively true in the context of a certain set of premises and logic).
  3. Reality exists only because if it doesn’t then exist is not a useful word, so existing is defined mostly by reference as the thing that reality does.
  4. Perception of reality is intrinsically flawed and what we perceive may be arbitrarily far from what “really” exists (if we accept our senses, then empiricism shows us that it’s quite far. If we don’t accept our senses, we’re already there).
  5. We are probably not ever going to be capable of accurately modelling or predicting the universe. Even if it’s in principle possible we’re probably not smart enough.
  6. All value systems are subjective and culturally determined.
  7. Morality is some complex mix of value system and prediction, so it’s certainly subjective and culturally determined, but also probably beyond our ability to actually formalise in any useful way even once we’ve already pinned down a value system.

…but if we take any of that too seriously we’ll never get anything useful done, and even if there’s no objective value to getting useful things done, subjectively I’m quite fond of it, so…

  1. We should use words in a way that achieves a broad consensus and seems to be useful for talking about what we observe.
  2. Accept a reasonably large body of knowledge as a useful working premise, but occasionally backtrack and note that you’re explicitly doing that when it leads you astray or causes disagreements.
  3. Treat reality as if it exists in a naive objective sense, because it hurts when you don’t.
  4. Don’t worry about it too much. If there’s an all-powerful demon faking your perception of reality, there’s probably not much you can do about it. Also see previous item – that reality which you perceive exists (even if any given perception may not be valid), because otherwise exists isn’t a very useful word.
  5. We can do a surprisingly good job at our current level, and just because we can never achieve perfection doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to improve what we’ve got.
  6. But I like mine, and it includes a term for a certain amount of forcing itself on other people (“hurting people is bad and I don’t really care if you think you have a culturally valid reason for doing it”).
  7. Doing the right thing is hard. Do the best you can. Don’t sweat the grand theory of morality too much, but pay attention when it comes up.

So as a result I temper the extreme relativist stance with a solid dose of pragmatic instrumental reasoning and pretend that I believe in philosophical naive realism because it’s much better at getting the job done than refusing to even acknowledge that such a thing as a job might exist and that it could be done if it did.

A lot of these theses are for me much like the way in which I am an atheist: I consider them to be obviously correct as a sort of “ground state” truth. It’s not that they’re necessarily right, it’s just that in the absence of evidence to the contrary they seem like a good default position, and nobody has provided evidence that I find convincing (and in some cases I’m not sure such evidence could exist even in principle). Maybe there’s a platonic realm of ideals after all, but formalism works perfectly well without it and if such a thing existed how could we possible know?

I probably got very excited and/or angsty about all this at one point as a teenager, but eventually I realised that maybe I just don’t care that much. Does it matter if the table I stubbed my toe on really exists? Does it matter if there is actually such a thing as a table? Either way it still hurts, and if I want something to eat my meals on I’m going to struggle to buy one from ikea without acknowledging the concept of a table. For most things I actually care about, life is just easier if I go along with naive realism.

But it’s important to me to understand that I’m just pretending. Particularly because it makes it much easier to acknowledge when I’m wrong (which I’m not always good at, but that’s not surprising. Just because I have a philosophy doesn’t mean I’m good at following it), and to understand where other people are coming from – politics is much easier to understand if you understand that value systems are subjective and arbitrary. No reason that I have to accept those values, mind you (my culturally determined subjective values frequently strongly prefer that I don’t), but it’s helpful to know where they could be coming from.

And in general I find there’s a certain useful humility to affirming that I have no access to any objective source of truth nor ever will, and that that’s OK.

This entry was posted in Performing philosophy without a license on by .

Truth and/or Justice

Disclaimer: This post is obscure in places. I apologise for that. Reasons.

Everyone likes to think they’re the protagonist of their own story. And as a hero, we need a cause. On the left and those morally aligned with the left, that can often roughly be summed up as “Truth and Justice” (we generally leave The American Way to people who wear their underpants on the outside).

(Some people are more honest, or less moral, and instead are fighting for survival, or for self-interest. This post is not about those people. Some people are less morally aligned with the left and fight for things like purity and respect for authority too. As a devout moral relativist, I acknowledge the validity of this position, but I still struggle to take it seriously. If this is you, you may get less out of this post but the broad strokes should still apply).

Unfortunately, you can’t optimise for more than one thing. Truth and Justice is not a thing you can fight for. You can fight for truth, you can fight for justice, you can fight for a weighted sum of truth and justice, but you cannot reliably improve both at once.

Often we can ignore this problem. Truth and Justice frequently work very well together. But at some point (hopefully metaphorically) the murderer is going to turn up at your door and you’re going to have to decide whether or not to lie to them. Unless you’re prepared to go full Kant and argue that lying to protect another is unjust as well as untrue, you’ll have to make a trade off.

So what’s it going to be? Truth or Justice?

It’s not an absolute choice of course – depending on the circumstances and the results of a local cost/benefit analysis, almost all of us will sometimes choose truth, sometimes justice. and sometimes we’ll make a half-arsed compromise between the two which leaves both truth and justice grumbling but mostly unbloodied.

But I think most of us have a strong bias one way or the other. This may not be inherent – it’s probably in large part driven by factionalisation of the discourse space – but certainly among my main intellectual and political influences there’s at least one group who heavily prioritises truth and another who heavily prioritises justice.

That’s not to say we don’t care about the other. Caring about justice doesn’t make you a liar, caring about truth doesn’t make you heartless. It’s just that we care about both, but we care about one more.

Personally, I tend to flip flop on it. I find myself naturally aligned with truth (I hate lying, both being lied to and lying myself), but I think I’ve historically chosen to align myself with people who prefer justice, usually by denying that the trade-off exists.

But recently I’ve been feeling the pendulum swing the other way a bit. If you’ve wondered why I’ve gone quiet on a bunch of subjects, that’s part of what’s been going on.

One of the reasons I think about this a bunch is in the context of labelling.

A long time ago now I wrote “You Are Not Your Labels“, about the problem of fuzzy boundaries and how we tend to pick a particular region in the space of possibility that includes us, use a label for that region, and then defend the boundaries of that label zealously.

I still broadly stand by this. You are not your labels. I’m certainly not my labels.

But we might be.

One of the places where truth and justice play off against each other is when you’re being attacked. If you’re under fire, now is not really the time to go “Well the reality is super complicated and I don’t really understand it but I’m pretty sure that what you’re saying is not true”. Instead, we pick an approximation we can live with for now and double down on it with a high degree of confidence.

There probably isn’t “really” such a thing as a bisexual (I’m not even wholly convinced there’s such a thing as a monosexual) – there’s a continuous multi-dimensional space in which everyone lies, and we find it operationally useful to have words that describe where we are relative to some of the boundary points in that space that almost nobody experiences perfectly.

There are as many distinct experiences of being bisexual as there are bisexuals (though, as I keep finding out, being extremely confused and annoyed by this fact seems to be a pretty common experience for us), but it sure is difficult to have an “It’s Complicated” visibility day, and it seems surprisingly easy for people to forget we exist without regular reminders.

The approximation isn’t just useful for communicating infinite complexity in a finite amount of time, it’s useful because we build solidarity around those approximations.

(This is literally why I use the label bisexual incidentally. I’m much happier with just saying “It’s complicated and unlikely to impact your life either way and when it does I would be happy to give you a detailed explanation of my preferences” but that is less useful to both me and everyone else, so I no longer do)

Another truth/justice trade off in the LGBT space is “Born this way”. I am at this point confident of precisely two things about gender and sexuality:

  • They are probably the byproduct of some extremely complicated set of nature/nurture interactions like literally everything else in the human experience.
  • Anyone who currently expresses confidence that they know how those play out in practice might be right for the n=1 sample of themself (I am generally very skeptical of people’s claims that they understand what features are natural things they were born with and what are part of their upbringing. I present the entire feminist literature on privilege as evidence in defence of my skepticism, but I also don’t find it useful or polite to have arguments with people about their personal lived experiences), but are almost certainly wrong, or at least unsupported in their claim that this holds in generality.

I would be very surprised to learn that nobody was born this way, and I have an n=1 personal data point that there are bisexuals who would probably have been perfectly able to go through life considering themselves to be straight if they hadn’t noticed that other options were available. I think it likely that there’s a spectrum of variability in between, I just don’t know.

I think among ourselves most LGBT people are more than happy to admit that this stuff is complicated and we don’t understand it, but when confronted with people who just want us to be straight and cis and consider us deviants if we dare to differ on this point, born this way is very useful – it makes homophobia less a demand to conform to societal expectations (which would still be wrong, but is harder to convince people of) and more a call for genocide. The only way to stop LGBT being LGBT is to stop us existing, and that’s not what you mean, right?

(Historically there have been many cases where that was exactly what they meant, but these days it’s harder to get away with saying so even if you think it).

Even before the latest round of fake news we’ve had in the last couple of years, demanding perfect truth in politics seems like a great way to ensure that political change belongs to those less scrupulous than you. At the absolute minimum we need this sort of lies-to-normies to take complex issues and make them politically useful if we want the world to get better.

So: Truth or Justice?

To be honest, I still don’t know. My heart says truth, but my head says justice, which I’m almost certain is hilariously backwards and not how it’s supposed to work at all, but there you go. This is complicated, and maybe “Truth or Justice” is another of those labelling things that don’t really work for me. Hoisted by my own petard.

My suspicion though is that the world is a better place if not everyone is picking the exact same trade off – different people are differently placed for improving each, and it’s not all that useful to insist that someone inclined towards one should be strongly prioritising the other. It is useful to have both people for whom justice is their top priority, and people for whom truth is their top priority, and a world where we acknowledge only one point on the spectrum as valid is probably one that ends up with less truth and less justice than one where a wider variety is pursued. Monocultures just generally work less well in the long run, even by the standards of the monoculture.

Given that, it seems like a shame that right now most of the justice prioritising people seem to think the truth prioritising people are literally Hitler and vice versa.

(To be fair, the truth prioritising people probably think the justice prioritising people are figuratively Hitler).

Calls for “Why can’t we get along?” never go well, so I won’t make one here even though you could obviously ready into this article that that’s what I want even if I didn’t include this sentence as disclaimer, so instead I’ll end with a different call to action.

I wish we would all be better about acknowledging that this trade-off exists, and notice when we are making it, regardless of what we end up deciding about the people who have chosen a different trade-off.

If you’re justice-prioritising you might not feel able to do that in public because it would detract from your goals. That’s fine. Do it in private – with a couple close friends in the same sphere to start with. I’ve found people are generally much more receptive to it than you might think.

If you’re truth-prioritising, you have no excuse. Start talking about this in public more (some of you already are, I know). If what can be destroyed by the truth should be, there is no cost to acknowledging that the truth is sometimes harmful to others and that this is a trade-off you’re deliberately making.

Regardless of what we think the optimal trade-off between truth and justice is, I’m pretty sure a world that is better on both axes than the current one is possible. I’m significantly less sure that we’re on anything resembling a path to it, and I don’t know how to fix that, but I’d like to at least make sure we’re framing the problem correctly.