What I've Been Reading; April 2022
More Engines of Cognition, Ted Chiang, and some video game lore
This last month I kind of lost track. I played a lot of video games - mostly Destiny, see the last entry in this month's fiction section for an introduction - because I had finished my assignments and the work on my thesis doesn't restart until, well, today. However, I still did get some reading in, though it was mostly fiction, so this post will heavily skew that way.
Nonfiction
The one non-fiction thing I remembered to take notes on this month was the Incentives book of LessWrong's 2019 Engines of Cognition series. Like the last book this one contained several essays worth highlighting, here are some of them; abramdemski's Mistakes with Conservation of Expected Evidence. Zvi's Moloch Hasn't Won (see the final fiction entry of this post for something strangely resonant), and Oliver Habryka's Integrity and accountability are core parts of rationality. This book was kind of a weird one, as several of the essays were focused around whether or not blackmail should be legal or not. Starting from the (I think common) position that it should not, it was strange to be dumped into an essay presuming that the reader had followed the LessWrong and related blog posts which had argued that blackmail should be legal.
Fiction
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang, is another exquisite showing of Chiang's story-telling skills. The first three stories in the collection, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, the titular Exhalation, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects are three completely different but all captivating stories. Chiang takes exhilarating ideas - a time travel gate, air-pressure based automata, sentient software pets - and carries the reader away on incredibly personal stories that touch you in so many ways. The Lifecycle - the longest of the three stories, rounding out at just above 100 pages - covers themes around asexuality, parent-child & owner-pet relationships, agenthood, and responsibility over your own actions.
Reading more short stories, I get more and more astounded every time at the incredible craft these authors display at weaving together character, theme, and idea in such a small amount of words. Along with the above three stories, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, is a story about technologically caused emfeeblement, but also our cultural understanding of truth, and the stories we tell ourselves and others. Omphalos is about crises of faith, purpose, meaning, and more. I could go on. I have nothing but the warmest of recommendations for this short story collection. You won't regret reading it.The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang, is a fantasy trilogy loosely based on China's Opium Wars. It contains some fantastical elements, but its main selling point is its focus on the fallout and horrors of war. The series uses its magical system, the setting, and the main character to highlight the brutalities of war and its aftermath, the way power seducts, and the way discrimination can worm its way into your brain. Though these things were well done, I couldn't help but feel that I had read similar things already, or things that connected more with me as a reader. Worm deals equally well with the practical sides of warfare - having to deal with food shortages and other civilian fallout. On the personal preference side of things, in Worm, the main character feels like she's constantly exercising her power and intelligence, while Poppy War's Rin is an angry, we're-told-she's-smart-but-not-really-shown-it, soldier, generally just following orders. It's not that the book doesn't deal with this aspect, as it is explicitly and adequately woven into Rin's character, but it just wasn't for me.
The Second Apocalypse handles warfare and its darker sides, in more realism (and, to be fair, more words) than Poppy War, but also contains more genuine warmth and affection than it as well. I can't help but feel like Poppy War suffers from some kind of audience mismatch. Several of the tropes in it feel like they were written for a YA audience - the way it plays on tropes like outsider village girl, a school arc, childhood friends, etc. - while simultaneously trying to deal with intense, adult topics like slavery, colonialism & imperialism, drug addiction, cannibalism, and more. These were the author's first books, however, and I think that, if there is a next one, I will pick it up.The Hidden Dossier is a piece of extraneous lore belonging to the video game Destiny 2. Destiny has been my favourite video game for a while. I can't quite say what there is about it that draws me, but there's a certain mix of worldbuilding, social elements, the raw feel of the gunplay, and difficult activities, that just draws me to it. Recently, it's had a good story as well, but it always had good pieces of writing that were found mainly outside of the game. Most of my love for this writing hearkens back to 2015 Destiny 1's Books of Sorrow: a set of 52 diary entries penned by the game's then main antagonist relating how she/he (at different points; it's alien stuff) rose to power (see this Kotaku piece for more), and the philosophy that grew alongside that power. That was in 2015 and since then, Destiny has kept expanding and the current "arc" of its story is unofficially officially called the "Light and Darkness Saga". The most bare bones story of Destiny is that a couple of hundred years into the future, we are visited by a spherical alien space ship (dubbed "The Traveller") and given the powers of Light. Then, the Darkness also came, and attacked us and the Traveller. The game starts somewhere in the aftermath of this attack, with several different Darkness-worshipping alien species in our solar system, and the players fighting against them.
Since then, the story has grown and eventually, the players started to investigate more about the other alien races, the Light, and the Darkness. We learned that one of the antagonistic alien races; the Fallen - or in their own tongue, the Eliksni - were also granted powers by the Traveller, and that it abandoned them to the Darkness. They had been chasing after it to regain what they lost. We encounter emissaries of the Darkness, characterised by sharp angles (many, many triangles) in contrast to the Traveller's roundness, and the players are granted Darkness powers as well. As the series goes on - and with this latest dump of lore - we learn that Light and Darkness are merely forces in the universe, and that their agents - The Traveller, and the still-mysterious "Witness", respectively - are merely (highly powerful, paracausal,) mortal and fallible beings. The Traveller is not "Good"- it might have done wrong in leaving the Eliksni to the Darkness - and that it is the ends to which these forces are used that matter most. In the story, these revelations are a shock to many; dealing with the realization that this alien being that you had worshipped as a god not only makes mistakes, but also is not entirely aligned with humanity's goals and values, taking in refugees from the Eliksni and making martial alliances with a faction of the Cabal (another one of the antagonistic alien races) are but some of the story beats in recent months.
That was all an introduction and a tangent in order for me to actually talk about The Hidden Dossiers. The Hidden Dossier is a series of missives penned to and from Ikora Rey, a prominent figure in Destiny and the leader of the good guys' information-gathering organization (dubbed "The Hidden"). The different letters talk about different things, heading into evolutionary game theory, Tegmark hierarchies, the explanatory gap, and more, but eventually Ikora writes down her thesis about the nature of the Light and the Darkness (and I fear this post is already long enough to bore you). I leave you with this extended quote;
[...] let me tell you something I have told no one else. I know that in the end, the Darkness can win. Do you understand what I mean? By its very nature, the Darkness is the judge of what will exist and what will pass away. In the end, there may be only Darkness because all that exists will remain only by its consent.
But the Light grants us freedom from existence alone as the measurement of our worth. Oh, evolution has made us afraid of nonexistence, certainly; and it is good to fear and to avoid nonexistence because without existence, we cannot experience joy. The idea that death is an escape from suffering is a trap. Death is not an escape from anything. It is a wall, a cessation, meaningless. I do not ask anyone to embrace death. There is no possibility in death; life is our only chance to live.
Darkness helps us avoid death. It helps us to go on existing. It is necessary. We must remember what hurt us so that we will not be hurt again.
But Darkness alone points to an eternal existence of mere survival—to a universe where the only judge of a good existence is the ability to go on existing. It is the grace of the Light that grants us the dignity to choose a finite life of compassion and common good over an eternity of competitive subsistence.
The Darkness, or the being that speaks for it, claims that the extermination of all those who choose the Light is inevitable; that the universe will be inherited by morally impoverished advantage-seekers like the Vex and Hive. Logically, I cannot see an escape—so long as I accept the Darkness’s logic.
But this is exactly why we fight, Sen-Aret. Not to preserve our own lives, but to preserve the possibility that we represent. When all choices are measured by their fitness pay off—by what they do to benefit the continued existence of the chooser—the Darkness has won completely.
The most important thing we can do, the most formidable blow we can strike against our true enemy, is to offer irrational grace: to choose unreasonable hope and unreasoning compassion even if it goes against calculated advantage.
It is only by disregarding the logic of mere survival that we can create a possibility of existence outside that logic.