Almost No One is Evil. Almost Everything is Broken.

We will never know their names.

The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it – victim of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done – humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.

It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria. It killed in Moscow.  In India, five million dead. It killed a thousand Europeans every day in the 18th century. It killed more than fifty million Native Americans. From the Peloponnesian War to the Civil War, it slew more soldiers and civilians than any weapon, any soldier, any army (Not that this stopped the most foolish and empty souls from attempting to harness the demon as a weapon against their enemies).

Cultures grew and faltered, and it remained. Empires rose and fell, and it thrived. Ideologies waxed and waned, but it did not care. Kill. Maim. Spread. An ancient, mad god, hidden from view, that could not be fought, could not be confronted, could not even be comprehended. Not the only one of its kind, but the most devastating.

For a long time, there was no hope – only the bitter, hollow endurance of survivors.

In China, in the 10th century, humanity began to fight back.

It was observed that survivors of the mad god’s curse would never be touched again: they had taken a portion of that power into themselves, and were so protected from it. Not only that, but this power could be shared by consuming a remnant of the wounds. There was a price, for you could not take the god’s power without first defeating it – but a smaller battle, on humanity’s terms. By the 16th century, the technique spread, to India, across Asia, the Ottoman Empire and, in the 18th century, Europe. In 1796, a more powerful technique was discovered by Edward Jenner.

An idea began to take hold: Perhaps the ancient god could be killed.

A whisper became a voice; a voice became a call; a call became a battle cry, sweeping across villages, cities, nations. Humanity began to cooperate, spreading the protective power across the globe, dispatching masters of the craft to protect whole populations. People who had once been sworn enemies joined in common cause for this one battle. Governments mandated that all citizens protect themselves, for giving the ancient enemy a single life would put millions in danger.

And, inch by inch, humanity drove its enemy back. Fewer friends wept; Fewer neighbors were crippled; Fewer parents had to bury their children.

At the dawn of the 20th century, for the first time, humanity banished the enemy from entire regions of the world. Humanity faltered many times in its efforts, but there individuals who never gave up, who fought for the dream of a world where no child or loved one would ever fear the demon ever again. Viktor Zhdanov, who called for humanity to unite in a final push against the demon; The great tactician Karel Raška, who conceived of a strategy to annihilate the enemy; Donald Henderson, who led the efforts of those final days.

The enemy grew weaker. Millions became thousands, thousands became dozens. And then, when the enemy did strike, scores of humans came forth to defy it, protecting all those whom it might endanger.

The enemy’s last attack in the wild was on Ali Maow Maalin, in 1977. For months afterwards, dedicated humans swept the surrounding area, seeking out any last, desperate hiding place where the enemy might yet remain.

They found none.

35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.

This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world – was destroyed.

You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the world.

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day.

Epistemic status: pretentious. What do you mean that’s not an epistemic status?

The space of all possible minds.

You move through it, slowly. Every moment your mind is slightly different. Sometimes it undergoes rapid change. “You” is the curve through mindspace being traced out as you live your life.

When you zoom out to see other people, your curve almost looks like a point.

If you could zoom out, or view it at all. Person space has many dimensions and probably doesn’t lend itself to a Euclidean interpretation.

You can project some features of person space into a lower-dimensional space, and notice that people form clusters, correlations among various characteristics. In one projection might see a binomial distribution, though not a binary, corresponding to gender. Not everyone is near a cluster. No one has to be. For the clusters we care about – human experience, empathy, emotion, hope – we’re all pretty tightly clustered.

You alone do not determine your path through mindspace. Environment nudges and tips you; genetics yank you around from the very beginning; neurochemistry alters your velocity and sleep deprivation may introduce a pseudorandom wobble.

And this is how I think about identity and labels and continuity of self and empathy and cooperating with past and future selves. It’s not a big insight, but its become so ubiquitious in how I think about everything involving people that it seems like a good idea to write it down. It seems obviously true, and is useful for me to resolve confusion when people talk about identity and labels and similar topics.

Anyway, that’s why my tagline is “Thoughts expressed by (time=t)!Jai may not reflect the thoughts of (time=t+n)!Jai as n→∞”

Pick a source of salary discrimination. For illustrative purposes, suppose that a left-handed person only makes $0.70 for every $1.00 a right-handed person makes doing the same job.

In a perfect world, this problem can get fixed by selfishness. I’ll premise this by saying that there are a lot of reasons this *wouldn’t* exactly work, but the basic idea might be worth exploring:

So FooCorp is paying lefties 70% of what they pay righties. You’re an amoral entrepreneur with no interest in justice or fairness – but you do want to break into the Foo business, and you’re planning to launch AppFoo, which takes all the things you love about Foo and makes it cloud social. You know that you’re going to need some experienced Foo professionals to get this off the ground, and you want to get it done as inexpensively as possible so you can spend your remaining gold on various other amoral pursuits (I dunno, superyachts? Robot sharks?). Then you remember: FooCorp is underpaying all those lefties! You invite all the lefties at FooCorp to come work for you at 80% of what the righties are making (gotta save that shark money) – still a big raise for them. Soon you’ve got all the lefties in the Foo industry at your command and AppFoo is a success, rapidly taking over the Foo market thanks in part to your lower labor costs.

Until iFoo comes along and offers all the lefties 90% of what the righties are making…FooFoo offers 95%…and soon handedness-discrimination is lost in the noise of an infinitesimal difference.

The point is, any time you see systematic discrimination, that’s a weakness on the part of the discriminators. Even if you don’t spend your evenings laughing maniacally as robotic sharks circle your superyacht, you can improve the world *and* damage discriminators just by being somewhat less discriminatory.

Disclaimer: An incomplete list of real-world things which would keep this from working perfectly, but not necessarily render it worthless: Labor costs are often a small fraction of business costs, and may not provide a significant advantage. Figuring out exactly how much people make is hard. People are often reluctant to change jobs for a lot of very good reasons, even if the new job offers better pay. Reality is not an Econ 101 textbook.

(Like most things I write now, this came about after I read an SSC post.)

What if sexuality really was a choice?

When you turn 13 the sexuality fairy knocks on your door, and you get to choose: How would you like your attractions to be distributed across the space of possible people? Would you like to be attracted to some subset of the people in the “male” cluster of the binomial distribution of gender, or the “female” cluster, or mostly in-between, or neither, or mostly one but sometimes the other depending on the phase of the moon?

In this world, Lady Gaga writes a song called “Chose This Way”. Maybe social conservatives talk about how predilection towards choosing nonstandard sexualities is a defect you’re born with, not a choice, and people need to be rescued from these horrible sexualities they’re inflicting on themselves.

The point is, nothing about the basic ethical rule of “everyone deserves equal rights and respect regardless of who they choose to engage in consensual relationships (of any kind) with” changes. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with whether it’s a trait determined at birth or by the puberty fairy or anything else – there is exactly no reason for society to get in the way or your joyful consensual relationships, and every reason to encourage and celebrate them (to the extent that you’re comfortable with that – I don’t know how you chose when the introversion fairy came to your house, after all).

It looks like the whole idea of “born this way” came about as a defense mechanism against fears that not making nonhetereonormative people miserable could result in more people becoming nonheteronormative. The correct answer is, of course, “so what?”, but that’s a hard sell when you’re trying to get past people’s unconscious flinches and you just really want to visit your partner(s) in the hospital.

The really funny thing is that it looks like, in our reality, genetics account for about one-third of the variance in sexuality. Whatever determines gender and sexuality, it’s probably not a completely static circuit, soldered at birth and left nascent until puberty. There are Complicated Things going on, and I’m willing to bet that the proportion of self-identified nonheteronormative people goes up along with acceptance and tolerance. (That’s an actual offer. If you think that won’t happen, we should discuss terms and pick a judge for our bet.)

So let’s compare this to some other traits: you’re “born with” your sexuality (~35%) less than you’re born with your height (60-90%), IQ (45-85%), conscientiousness (~45%), happiness (~65%), or weight (75-85%) (percentages are best estimates of heritable contribution to variance). And I feel like these are all things where society keeps screaming “You can change this if you believe in yourself! You can be happier, or smarter, or harder working, or in better shape! You can do it! Come on! Why aren’t you trying?!” And pretty much everyone (+/- I-live-in-a-bubble) now recognizes how insane and harmful it is to say these things about sexual orientation, and understands that it’s better to build a society that accommodates a wide variety of orientations and identities than torture people into trying to be something they’re not.

Of course, the true and really-good reason for tolerance is that people’s relationships and feelings should be respected, whether or not the tendencies underlying those relationships were chosen or fell out of the sky. But to the extent that the “born this way” argument makes sense, it makes even more sense for all the other traits that are even-more-heritable. We shouldn’t build a society that is hell for people with low IQs or low conscientiousness, and then comfort ourselves by saying that it’s their fault for being “dumb” or “lazy”. We should be searching for ways to help and accommodate people with low baseline happiness, not just scold them for being “gloomy”. We should be building a world that accommodates people’s sizes, or even better allows people to choose what size they want to be (see Transhumanism is Simplified Humanism).

tldr: Be nice to everyone.