Conversation

Can you imagine a civilization that knows how to build rockets and spacecraft and has mastered orbital mechanics, but holds a consensus belief in astrological interpretations of the universe? Ie they can get to Mars, but their reason to go there is to meet the god of war?
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This seems absurd to me. A civilization that has mastered such an advanced means must necessarily have abandoned primitive ends along the way (at least among the principals involved in both the what and how if missions). Means-ends impedance mismatch.
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Either your means will stall at the limit of your primitive ends (you’ll pray to the war god) or belief on the primitive end will fail as your means evolve (Mars gets demoted from war god to dirt ball)
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But mismatch has to be very severe, and both means and ends have to be at similar levels of abstraction. One way to mitigate the dissonance is to make one more abstract. Like imagine war god being merely an ineffable presence around dirt ball rather than a guy in a palace there.
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Often both get abstracted away. The Hindu ritual to launch projects (from new factories to space missions) is to crack a coconut as an offering to Ganesha in his role as obstacle-remover god (Vighneshvara). It’s a nonspecific prayer that can later be used to explain good luck.
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Reason I’m thinking about this is that under digital modernity, since ~2000, our means have vastly expanded. There’s a vast ecosystem of how-to instrumental education around everything from SEO and blogging to machine learning and startups. But our ends-thinking hasn’t budged.
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We approach the potential of the internet like a spacefaring culture of literalist astrologers. Where space missions are planned seriously at the level of “Crewed Dragon mission launched by a Falcon Heavy with 5 mission specialists and one cult-of-Mars priest”
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Eg. What should you do: “follow your passion!” How should you do it: “Learn how to build websites, run Kickstarter campaigns, fine-tune conversion funnels, and use agile methods to iterate quickly, testing rigorously along the way” See an impedance mismatch there?
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Much of internet tech is a means to access inner space. You can become more kinds of very different person. If your life were a space mission, with different destinations being different possible versions of future you, you should probably construct better maps of becoming.
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Currently possibility space for future you are described by the following “planets”, each with a better-than random playbook for heading there, but Mercury: god of follow-your-passion Venus: god of fuck-you-money Mars: god of Medium-post spiritual journeys
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Asteroid belt: god of Waldenponding Jupiter: god of gig-economy Saturn: god of reach and freeze peach Uranus: god of awokening Neptune: god of gonzo shitposting Pluto: god of nerddom and nerdsniping Kuiper belt: chadvirginstacy
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These goal-gods who induce ends to match overpowered means are kinda silly but they are better than nothing if they get you moving. Superstition is a symptom of grasp exceeding reach (cf “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for” which is backwards)
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Having any reason to go to Neptune is better than no reason, but a good reason is better than a nonsensical one, and more likely to catalyze success by a meaningful means-ends chicken egg virtuous feedback. Having an accurate sense of ends helps refine the means and vice versa
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Or: Study under the brightest minds of our era in order to make a lot of money coming up with a slightly better algorithm to manipulate people into buying stuff.
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Wait but harnessing rationality and scientific thinking to the improvement of human well-being is meant to be the goal of The Enlightenment. Is the real problem here just insufficiently embracing mediocrity?