[Meta: now that I’ve departed Facebook, I’ve (slightly) lowered the bar for what I consider worth sending out through Substack; some of the longer and more philosophical things that were previously my longest FB posts will now become my shortest Substack posts.]
Me: "Duncan suggests watching a 2.5 hour video? Well, I'm obviously not gonna actually do that right now, but I'll just watch like the first 1 to 3 minutes to see if it seems like something worth digging a bit more into later." (immediately proceeds to watch the entire thing)
I'm really happy that I can now read this type of post! (As I deleted my facebook two years ago.) The main thing I missed from this particular post is some kind of conclusion, instead it seemed to end rather abruptly.
My personal answer to this problem would be to try to live a more mindful life even in the middle of encitification: instead of seeking ever more higher highs, find wonder and excitement in everyday things and interactions. But this is mostly an individual solution, and I don't know how to work towards a more systemic one.
I think another piece of the puzzle (that emerged in conversations in other places) is something like ...
"Encitification does a good job of improving the worst 10% and the best 10% of your life. It makes you die of cancer less, and it lets you have rollercoasters and psychedelics. But this often comes at the cost of frogboiling your middle 80% worse and worse and worse. Just being aware of that, such that you can try to ameliorate it, probably helps a lot."
There seems to be a different issue that I thought you'd talk about, which is that the delta between best and worst is experienced myopically by individuals. So I never really compare by worst day to what people experienced even a century ago. (During the great depression, say, living off of cat food when I could scrape together money, not eating anything otherwise. And that's still better than medieval peasant levels of food insecurity during a bad season!)
Instead, encitification means I compare my worst days to my best days, or worse, to the best days of people I know, or celebrities I have a parasocial relationship with, as CJ discusses, and so my intuition is that the world is really bad. As you note, the delta grows without bound, in a repugnant-conclusion like way, where we keep accepting a tradeoff with larger and larger deltas, trading very slight disimprovements for hugely better best-days. (And this is far worse when the choice is made over populations, so that it's a distributional unfairness, and we're picking some people having amazing lives over others having just slightly worse ones.)
thoughts on you going much faster, with less background etc:
this still seemed good.
i expect that i would have like the fleshed out full duncan essay version better, but that trades off against other things. i think that only writing fleshed out full duncan essays is probably a mistake, doing so probably means "a lot of things don't get written" rather than "everything gets written as a full duncan essay".
even if it did mean that everything got written as a full duncan essay, it seems unlikely to me that everything is worth doing that for. the time and energy could be better spent elsewhere.
with regards to encitification; i think the claim your making is basically correct, but i also think a lot of the awful things about cities aren't nearly so inextricable with the good things as this post implies.
often the awful things in cities are just people making foolish errors, and then those errors taking a long time to be acknowledged and not being easy to fix quickly. an example of this would be america making a habit of putting highways through the middle of cities, and largely abandoning rail transit.
rather than thinking of the wonderful and awful aspects of cities as being inextricably linked, i feel like a better model is thinking of the possibility space for cities as being very wide, with configurations that involve a lot of awful things being more frequent.
given that cities are expensive to build, and expensive to make large scale changes to; and given that cities are inherently collaborative, and the difficulties with aggregating opinions and desires; it makes sense that the exploration of that possibility space would sometimes go astray, and then be slow to correct.
which i know isn't that different from what you said; but it emphasizes things in different ways, and feels more aesthetically pleasing to me ;p
Me: "Duncan suggests watching a 2.5 hour video? Well, I'm obviously not gonna actually do that right now, but I'll just watch like the first 1 to 3 minutes to see if it seems like something worth digging a bit more into later." (immediately proceeds to watch the entire thing)
Almost every video by CJ is a 9/10 or a 10/10 fwiw, and none lower than 6/10 in my opinion.
holy shit you weren't kidding
I'm really happy that I can now read this type of post! (As I deleted my facebook two years ago.) The main thing I missed from this particular post is some kind of conclusion, instead it seemed to end rather abruptly.
My personal answer to this problem would be to try to live a more mindful life even in the middle of encitification: instead of seeking ever more higher highs, find wonder and excitement in everyday things and interactions. But this is mostly an individual solution, and I don't know how to work towards a more systemic one.
I think another piece of the puzzle (that emerged in conversations in other places) is something like ...
"Encitification does a good job of improving the worst 10% and the best 10% of your life. It makes you die of cancer less, and it lets you have rollercoasters and psychedelics. But this often comes at the cost of frogboiling your middle 80% worse and worse and worse. Just being aware of that, such that you can try to ameliorate it, probably helps a lot."
There seems to be a different issue that I thought you'd talk about, which is that the delta between best and worst is experienced myopically by individuals. So I never really compare by worst day to what people experienced even a century ago. (During the great depression, say, living off of cat food when I could scrape together money, not eating anything otherwise. And that's still better than medieval peasant levels of food insecurity during a bad season!)
Instead, encitification means I compare my worst days to my best days, or worse, to the best days of people I know, or celebrities I have a parasocial relationship with, as CJ discusses, and so my intuition is that the world is really bad. As you note, the delta grows without bound, in a repugnant-conclusion like way, where we keep accepting a tradeoff with larger and larger deltas, trading very slight disimprovements for hugely better best-days. (And this is far worse when the choice is made over populations, so that it's a distributional unfairness, and we're picking some people having amazing lives over others having just slightly worse ones.)
thoughts on you going much faster, with less background etc:
this still seemed good.
i expect that i would have like the fleshed out full duncan essay version better, but that trades off against other things. i think that only writing fleshed out full duncan essays is probably a mistake, doing so probably means "a lot of things don't get written" rather than "everything gets written as a full duncan essay".
even if it did mean that everything got written as a full duncan essay, it seems unlikely to me that everything is worth doing that for. the time and energy could be better spent elsewhere.
with regards to encitification; i think the claim your making is basically correct, but i also think a lot of the awful things about cities aren't nearly so inextricable with the good things as this post implies.
often the awful things in cities are just people making foolish errors, and then those errors taking a long time to be acknowledged and not being easy to fix quickly. an example of this would be america making a habit of putting highways through the middle of cities, and largely abandoning rail transit.
rather than thinking of the wonderful and awful aspects of cities as being inextricably linked, i feel like a better model is thinking of the possibility space for cities as being very wide, with configurations that involve a lot of awful things being more frequent.
given that cities are expensive to build, and expensive to make large scale changes to; and given that cities are inherently collaborative, and the difficulties with aggregating opinions and desires; it makes sense that the exploration of that possibility space would sometimes go astray, and then be slow to correct.
which i know isn't that different from what you said; but it emphasizes things in different ways, and feels more aesthetically pleasing to me ;p