An Algorithmic Lucidity

We never know what people are actually thinking; all we can do is make inferences from their behavior, including inferences about the inferences they're making.

Sometimes someone makes an expression or a comment that seems to carry an overtone of contempt; I know your type, it seems to say, and I disapprove. And there's a distinct pain in being on the receiving end of this, wanting to reply to the implication, but expecting to lack the shared context needed for the reply to begin to make sense—

"Yes, but I don't think you've adequately taken into account that I know that you know my type, that I know your type, that we can respect each other even if we are different types of creatures optimizing different things, and that I know that this is all relative to my inert, irrelevant sense of what I think you should adequately take into account, which I know that you may have no reason to care about."

It looks like the opposing all-human team is winning the exhibition game of me and my it's-not-chess engine (as White) versus everyone in the office who (unlike me) actually knows something about chess (as Black). I mean, naïvely, my team is up a bishop right now, but our king is pretty exposed, and the principal variation that generated one of our recent moves (16. Bxb4 Bf5 17. Kd1 Qxd4+ 18. Kc1 Ng3 19. Qxc7 Nxh1) looks dreadful.

Real chess aficionados (chessters? chessies?) will laugh at me, but it actually took me a while to understand why Ng3 was in that principal variation (I might even have invoked the engine again to help). The position after Ng3 looks like

    a b c d e f g h
 8 ♜       ♜   ♚   
 7 ♟ ♟ ♟     ♟ ♟ ♟ 
 6                 
 5           ♝     
 4   ♗   ♛         
 3 ♙           ♞   
 2   ♙ ♕     ♙ ♙ ♙ 
 1 ♖ ♘ ♔     ♗   ♖

and—forgive me—I didn't understand why that wasn't refuted by fxg3 or hxg3; in my novice's utter blindness, I somehow failed to see the discovered attack on the white queen, the necessity of evading which allows the black knight to capture the white rook, and preparation for which was clearly the purpose of 16. ..Bf5 (insofar as we—anthropomorphically?—attribute purpose to a sequence of moves discovered by a minimax search algorithm which doesn't represent concepts like discovered attack anywhere).

It's the little things like this that reinforce my suspicion that human cognition doesn't really work most of the time, that to the extent that we have a technological civilization with nice things in it, it's a matter of a bunch of apes, some of whom are just barely generally-intelligent, happening to stumble into patterns of coöperation that happened to scale, and not a matter of anyone within the system actually understanding much. It's the current year, and the current year turns out to be not only congruent to 0 mod 2, but furthermore to 0 mod 4, which means outrage season is brewing again. I'm mostly pretty good at ignoring it, except for the undercurrent of contempt that I can't help but feel at how almost everyone seems to think it's okay for important decisions to be made in this way.

The thing about chess is that it's a very simple game. There are these thirty-two figurines on an eight-by-eight grid, and you take turns moving the figurines subject to a few rules with a well-specified objective in mind. Simple. If you're lazy like me, you can even write a computer program to do it for you. And if you hadn't already spent many, many hours of study and practice mastering the game yourself, what such a program will surely show you (as it showed me, though I expected as much) is that your unaided attempts to make good moves will get it wrong. The novice thinks: checkmate is the goal, giving check is good, capturing material is good; I should look for moves that do those things. And the novice will lose, badly. What you actually need to do is look for your best move given your opponent's best reply given your best counterreply given your opponent's best countercounterreply, and so on as far forward as you can afford to compute. It's not magic and it's not impossible, but it's subtle and it takes work.

And the thing about the real world is that it is unimaginably complicated. There are seven billion humans on this radius-6.37·\(10^6\) m planet, all haphazardly pursuing their own objectives subject to no rules except whatever high-level generalizations about the underlying fundamental physics strike you as sufficiently robust to be worth reifying as a rule. Unimaginable. And I feel like those appealing to the masses seeking leadership positions in the reigning institutions of governance don't properly appreciate this. You hear them or their boosters talk about how "we" obviously need to make college or healthcare free, or crush our terrorist foes, and to me it just sounds like so many shouts of "fxg3!" or "hxg3!". The goals are noble: of course we want America to be great, and for its people to be healthy and wealthy and knowledgeable and safe, just as a chess player wants to checkmate the opposing king. But the interventions that sound intuitively appealing aren't necessarily the same as the interventions that will actually work! "We" should hope for leaders with the courage and skepticism and competence to say, "No, wait, that won't work because of ...Bxc2," and continue the search for better alternatives for our nation and its children.

But if I can predict that that's not what "we" are going to choose, maybe I should continue searching for better alternative ways to spend my time than complaining about it.

(just some quick notes, hopefully in the spirit of delightfully quirky symmetry-breaking)

In her little 2010 book The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, Evelyn Fox Keller examines some of the eternal conceptual confusions surrounding the perennially popular nature/nurture question. Like, it's both, and everyone knows it's both, so why can't the discourse move on to more interesting and well-specified questions? That the oppositional form of the question isn't well-specified can be easily seen just from simple thought experiments. One such from the book: if one person has PKU, a high-phenylalanine diet, and a low IQ, and another person doesn't have PKU, eats a low-phenylalanine diet, and has a normal IQ, we can't attribute the IQ difference to either diet or genetics alone; the question dissolves once you understand the causal mechanism. Keller argues that the very idea of distinguishing heredity and environment as distinct, separable, exclusive alternatives whose relative contributions can be compared is a historically recent one that we can probably blame on Francis Galton.

The "Bay Area" was ostensibly hosting the big game this year. They blocked off a big swath around the Embarcadero this last week to put on Super Bowl City, "a free-to-the-public fan village [...] with activities, concerts, and more." I really don't see how much sense this makes, given that the actual game was 45 miles away in Santa Clara, just as I don't think we (can I still say we if I only work in the city?) really have a football team anymore; I like to imagine someone just forgot to rename them the Santa Clara 49ers. Even you don't think Santa Clara is big enough to be a real city—and it's bigger than Green Bay—then why not San Jose, which is a lot closer? I think I would forgive it if the marketers had at least taken advantage of the golden (sic) opportunity to flaunt the single-"digit" Roman numeral L (so graceful! so succinct!), but for some dumb reason they went Arabic this year and called it Super Bowl 50. Anyway, on a whim, I toured through Super Bowl City after work on Friday. It was as boring as it was packed, and it was packed. I wasn't sure if my whimsy was worth waiting in the throng of people to get in the obvious entrance on Market Street (the metal-detection security theater really took its toll on throughput), but I happened to hear a docent shouting that there was a less-crowded entrance if you went around and took a left each on Beale and Mission, so I did that. There were attractions, I guess?—if you could call them that. There were rooms with corporate exhibits, and an enormous line to try some be-the-quarterback VR game, and loud recorded music, and a stage with live music, and an empty stage where TV broadcasts would presumably be filmed later. There was a big statue of a football made out of cut-up beer cans near one of the stands where they were selling beer for $8, which sounded really expensive to me, although admittedly I don't have much of a sense for how much beer normally costs. In summary, I didn't see the appeal of the "fan village," although I do understand what it feels like to be enthusiastic about the game itself—I really do, even if I haven't been paying much attention in recent years.

Even when it doesn't make sense to talk about nature and nurture as separable components of the cause of a trait in an individual, Keller emphasizes that we often can say things about how differences in genetics or environment relate to differences in traits in a population. This is a pretty standard disclaimer in behavioral genetics: heritability is a technical term about how variation in genotypes relates to variation in phenotypes; it's not a catch-all notion of "geneticness," and it depends on the population and environment studied; most of the variation in the trait "number of hands" is due to horrible accidents, which are "nurture" (well ... you know what I mean), so the heritability (proportion of variation associated with variation in genotypes) is near-zero, but we don't want to say that humans having two hands has nothing to do with human genetics. Keller thinks that a lot of behavioral geneticists end up performing a motte-and-bailey maneuver here, falling back to the technical definition when questioned, but casually letting tinges of the everyday understanding of the word heritable slip in to the discourse—and that we probably can't just blame Jay Laurence Lush for not having chosen a different word in 1936.

I didn't watch much of the game. The few plays I did see looked bad for the Panthers. Cam Newton was sacked from behind a few yards from his own goal line and the Broncos recovered it for a touchdown. Later there was this play where one of the Broncos intercepted a pass and then fumbled it on the return, but another Broncos player recovered it.

Keller argues that a better question to ask than "nature vs. nurture" would be: to what extent are particular traits malleable during which developmental phases? By contrasting prenatal "nature" (that one was "born this way") and postnatal "nurture", many overlook that birth is not the only developmental milestone! But whatever constellation of forces turns out to truly shape who we are today and what we will become tomorrow, we can never escape the truth of what happened yesterday, the irrevocable verdict: Denver 24, Carolina 10.

A friend of the blog recently told me that I'm meaner in meatspace (what some prefer to call by the bizarre misnomer "real life") than you would guess from my online persona. I'm not proud to have prompted this observation, but I didn't deny it, either. And yet—insofar as one has any reflectively-endorsed non-nice social impulses (to create incentives for good behavior, or perhaps from an ungentle although-sadistic-would-be-far-too-strong-of-a-word æsthetic that appreciates a world in which people don't always get everything they want), it does seem like the correct strategy: in meatspace, you can react to verbal and nonverbal cues in real time and try to smooth things over if you go too far, whereas in the blogosphere, it's possible to die in a harrowing thermonuclear flamewar and not even know until you check your messages the next day. We must use diplomacy where we cannot wield our weapons so precisely.

There's something that feels viscerally distasteful and fundamentally morally dubious about looking for a job or a significant other. Search and comparison are for crass, commonplace, material things: we might say that this brand of soap smells nice, but is expensive, or that this car gets poor mileage, but is cheap, and while we may err in our judgment of any particular product, the general procedure must be regarded as legitimate: there's nothing problematic about going out to shop for some soap or a car and purchasing the best that happens to be available on one's budget, even if there's no sense of destiny and perfection about the match. Rather, we want to be clean, and we want to go places, and we took action to make these things come to pass.

But some things, like the person you're going to spend the rest of your life with, or the work you'll spend it doing, don't seem like this. We want to believe in having a calling and a soulmate. Or some of us, too prideful in our rationality to put faith in such opaque concepts, prefer to replace them with no concepts: say that we happened to find work and find love—or (perhaps more likely) not—but don't dare call it the result of efforts that could or could not have been spent more or less wisely!

Only—in the absence of a literal Creator fashioning pairs of soulmates with a work they were meant to do, it's not really clear what the alternative is supposed to be. For evolved life in an unplanned universe determined by simple underlying physical laws, there's no particular reason for the types and quantities of labor needed to produce the goods and services people can demand, to equal the the types and quantities of labor that would be optimally fulfilling and life-affirming for workers to supply, nor for the characteristics someone would want in a significant other to match up perfectly with the characteristics the pool of existing satisfactory potential others would want in their others. Nor—crucially—is there any particular reason for people to automatically know where or how to find their ideal matches in work or love, even supposing that they happen to exist.

So it is here, in the gap between what we think we want and what we think we can get, that the phenomenon occurs. It goes by many names. Some call it the evil. Others call facets of it marketing, sales, recruitment, courtship. There are those who call it life (although that's a bit of tasteless obscurantism in the opinion of the present author). Whatever one calls it, it would be advisable to think at least twice before concluding that one is better off ignoring it, the whole impetuous fearful flurry of flowing down gradients: to wonder, to inquire, to guess, to experiment, to tell and to listen. Never to plead—or at least, never to be perceived as pleading. To build spectacles and print pamphlets, to judge pamphlets on both reasoning and paper quality. To offer, and reject, and reject, and reject; to seek, and be rejected, and rejected, and rejected.

In the end, if the dour philosopher-prophets spoke true that utopia is not an option, who among us can be said to have lived the most plausible facsimile of the chimerical "good life"? The one who always held true to their dreams—just the dreams, not the pursuing of them—no matter the opportunity cost, and who, paying that cost, to this day haunts the streets still dreaming, for lack of anything else to do or anyone else to do it with? Or those proud professionals who, if asked "Is this really what you want to be doing with your life?" would passionately answer "Yes!", and who, if asked as a followup, "Would you say the same if it paid sixty percent less?" would answer "No!" with the same passion? Or lovers cradling one another on the beach, murmuring the three words that are the highest expression of what they mean to each other: "Markets in everything."

"Whoever displays intense negative emotion first, loses" is not in any way a law inherent to the nature of interpersonal conflict, but we can make-believe that it were profitable to believe as much. What would that look like?

"... and in conclusion, please don't hit me with a mastodon bone."

"What? I wasn't planning on hitting you with a mastodon bone. Although—now that you mention it, that does sound fun!"

Apparently a gang of extortionists calling themselves the "California state Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education" are threatening to shut down a number of organizations that provide assistance in learning to program, including App Academy, which I recently benefitted from attending. I could explain why the behavior of the BPPE is an outrage that must be opposed by anyone with a scrap of decency in their heart, but I'm too busy coding and counting my money.

This whole business of being alive used to seem so much simpler and less morally ambiguous before I realized that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, that it has always been thus and could not have been otherwise. The other day I was reading Luke Muehlhauser's interview with Steve Hsu, and Hsu says:

Let me add that, in my opinion, each society has to decide for itself (e.g. through democratic process) whether it wants to legalize or forbid activities that amount to genetic engineering. Intelligent people can reasonably disagree as to whether such activity is wise.

There was once a time in my youth when I would have objected with principled transhumanist/libertarian fervor against the suggestion that the glorious potential of designer babies might be suppressed by the tyranny of the majority.

I don't have (those kinds of) principles anymore. Nor faith that freedom to enhance will inevitably turn out to be for the best. These days, my thoughts are more attuned to practical concerns. Oh, I'm sure he's just saying that because it sounds nice and deferential to contemporary political sensibilities and he doesn't want to catch any more flak than he does already. Obviously, the societies than forbid it are just going to get crushed under the boot of history.

Think about it. The arrival of Europeans in North America didn't go very well for the people who were already here—and that was just a matter of mere guns, germs, and steel (in Jared Diamond's immortal phrase). What happens to our precious concept of democratic process when someone has the option to mass-produce von Neumann-level intellects to design the next generation of superguns, ultragerms, and adamantium-unobtanium alloy?

William Gibson famously said, "The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed." It's easy to imagine a science-fictional fantasy world where everything is made of diamond and plastic, and literally everyone has their own brigade of robots, spacepacks, and jetcars to do their bidding, but as Gibson points out, the real world doesn't actually work like this: there's nothing contradictory about the high technology allowing you to read this post existing in the same world where millions of others are starving, thirsty, and illiterate. The Earth is just a very big place compared to what we know how to imagine personally; the wealth and wonders that exist in some places, don't exist everywhere. As long as this is true, we should expect variance in wealth to increase, as new toys for the rich get invented faster than the basics can be provisioned for everyone; Carlos Slim can purchase extravagances that hadn't been invented in the days of Cornelius Vanderbilt, but dying of malaria is the same as it's ever been.

A similar thing could be said about knowledge and ideas. Human civilization has been rapidly accumulating knowledge, but we're not getting proportionately more capable as individuals. People typically don't have the resources or inclination to learn deeply outside of their own specialties, and many never get to master any specialty at all. There's nothing contradictory about our brightest scholars seeing more deeply into the true structure of the world beneath the world than the uninitiated would have ever conceived possible, while at the same time, the masses labor under the most primitive of superstitions. As long as this is true, we should expect variance in knowledge to increase, as the cognitive elite continues to advance the frontier of the known faster than the basics can be taught to everyone; our master biologists know more about the nature of life than their analogues in the days of Darwin and Wallace, but to the proletariat, "God did it in six days" probably still sounds like as good of an explanation as it's ever been.

I feel like schools, prisons, and mental hospitals are all making the same mistake: locking children, criminals, and crazy people up together just creates more childishness, criminality, and madness.

"Some of my Facebook 'friends'—that is, distant acquaintances—are political radicals: here's a picture of the words 'KILL COPS' spraypainted on the ground, with five 'Likes.' It would be psychologically interesting to know what that feels like."

"Huh."

"'Weird' really isn't as useful of a category as I typically think it is. These radicals are outcasts from the society that they want to remake, whereas lots of people in our crowd have mainstream jobs and power. And yet I'm usually inclined to think of us as 'weirder,' because destroying capitalism and the corporate state is comparatively easier to explain."

"Is it more common?"

"That probably depends on exactly where we draw the boundaries around social circles? Our group of core supporters is tiny, but the group of people who've read Ray Kurzweil and approved is pretty big. And no doubt I don't have a good model of what the smartest and most serious radicals believe, just as they have no idea what we believe."

"Yeah."

"Smashing capitalism also looks more straightforward; it's not clear what a transhumanist analogue of the Occupy movement would do exactly. 'Let's all go spend eight years studying bioinformatics! Death to itself!'"

The other day while rehearsing my arguments about how currently-existing social institutions are obviously insane, it became more salient that there's also no clear way to fix anything on a large scale. My perspective on How to Do Things Better is the idiosyncratic result of five years of my thinking; even if my vision is in the 99th percentile of Arbitrary People's Idiosyncratic Visions of How to Do Things Better (and everyone thinks that about herself, so don't take my word for it), it's not very transferable.

Dear [name redacted]:

So, I'm trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to stop being bitter, because I'm powerless to change anything, and so being bitter is a waste of time when I could be doing something useful instead, but I still don't understand how a good person like you can actually think our so-called educational system is actually a good idea. I can totally understand being practical and choosing to work within the system because it's all we've got; there's nothing wrong with selling out as long as you get a good price. If you think you're actually helping your students become better thinkers and writers, then that's great, and you should be praised for having more patience than me. But I don't understand how you can unambiguously say that this gargantuan soul-destroying engine of mediocrity deserves more tax money without at least displaying a little bit of uncertainty!

You said in a previous message that a lot of your students are sheep-like, that they'll never do anything valuable that they're not told to do—but doesn't it seem likely that the system's bureaucratic, anti-intellectual, anti-curiosity culture of death has made them that way? I'm finishing my math degree at SF State (because I'm a coward, because people expect it, because my father is paying tuition and it's easier than getting a real job), and trying to talk to my fellow "math majors" is a source of constant heartbreak, because as far as I can tell, it has never occurred to most of them that knowledge and skills are useful for anything other than pleasing local authority figures. You try to tell them about some new idea you've been working on (see my posts at http://zackmdavis.net/blog/category/mathematics/ for examples of the sorts of things math people think about), and they just stare at you blankly and say, "What class is this for?"

You can't think of a polite answer to that, so you say to them: "Well, what have you been thinking about lately?"

Another blank stare. "Nothing."

"Well, what have you been doing, then? "

"Homework."

"Okay, but presumably the homework was about something ..."

"Calculus three."

"But what particular topi—you know, with respect, I don't think you understand what I'm trying to do here."

Quite often, to my horror (but not shock), it turns out that my interlocutor is planning on becoming a high-school teacher.

But people have been complaining about the incompetence and bad morals of youth for millennia—that's nothing new. Surely at least the University itself is designed to help young minds aspiring to something greater than earning a goddamned piece of paper?

Well, no. They don't give a fuck. They don't even pretend to give a fuck. (Individual professors are wonderful people, but you can't just directly pay them for tutoring; everything goes through the institution.) Earlier this year, after having wasted two years taking mostly worthless so-called "general education" classes at Diablo Valley College (including one in which we spent two class periods watching The Wizard of Oz, including one in which we were instructed to use colored pencils to indicate on a map which states belonged to the Union and which to the Confederacy), it seemed clear to me that the next step in my mathematical development was to study real analysis—the rigorous underpinnings of the differential and integral calculus which all educated people are familiar with. (Right?) But there's a mandatory prerequisite. I asked if I could take the prerequisite course concurrently with real analysis. Two different professors told me that I could not. I emailed the professor scheduled to teach real analysis, attaching a little paper I had written (admittedly rather trivial, but not bad for a mere undergraduate, I thought) about analogues of pi in the \(L^p\) spaces over \(\mathbb{R}^n\). I did not receive a reply.

Oh, well, I thought, my proof skills aren't actually that great; maybe it's for the best. I show up to the prerequisite class, and what's the first topic? Basic propositional logic, something I have known for five years. What's the last topic, in these final weeks of the course? The uncountability of the reals, something I have known for six years. And I am expected to sit there and obey, even though it is completely obvious to everyone in the room that I am not drawn from the same distribution as the other students, because large hierarchical organizations are structurally incapable of nurturing individual minds; all they can do is shove people around and treat them as fungible cogs.

And this is what passes for "education"? This is the system that everyone has to go through in order to be respected as "college educated"? This is the beneficiary of the endless stream of blatantly self-serving propaganda I had to endure this fall (on Facebook, on campus), which the voters (most of whom are monstrous hypocrites who have never voluntarily picked up a textbook in their entire lives) actually fell for, raising California's already-high taxes even more, and for what? Taxes are great if they're being used for something that will actually help people, like roads or libraries or a guaranteed minimum income—but to have this hugely expensive system just to pointlessly boss around young adults who (presumably) already know how to read? Pardon me while I puke, [name redacted].

I realize that I'm being a complete jerk to you by actually sending this [n.b., I did not actually send it]; you have no reason to bother enduring such a bitter screed from one of your former students [...] But, you know—it was only by the sheer luck of happening to read the right blog at the right time that I managed to avoid being permanently intellectually crippled by this credential-mad society, and sometimes, in a moment of pain, I actually feel entitled to be angry. Terribly selfish, I know. Am I morally justified in sending this to you, who have nothing but good intentions? Is it right for me to complain about something so trivial as sitting through a few classes, when I'm so incredibly privileged in so many other ways? Probably not; I think I'm just being a villain. But you know, I'm really not sure I care about that anymore. Really, I need to learn the skill of not paying any attention to mainstream society. My plan is to keep studying and hopefully (and finally, after having wasted so much time) make some money writing software that will actually help people. If the entire civilized world considers it their duty to crush all intellectual initiative out of its children, then it's really not my business. I wish you well, and hope that [names redacted] are also well, and I remain,

Faithfully yours,

Zack M. Davis

Writers and mathematicians and programmers (&c.) can work on whatever they want with equipment that's easy for individuals to purchase. Architects and particle physicists and psychologists (&c.) need to hustle for clients or fill out a dozen grant applications just to be allowed to breathe—how do they bear it?

Someone needs to write a history of the entire world in terms of incentive systems and agents' attempts to game them. We have money to incentivize the production of useful goods and services, but we all know that there are lots of ways to make money that don't actually help anyone. Even in jobs that are actually useful, people spend a lot of their effort on trying to look like they're doing good work, rather than actually doing good work. And don't get me started about what passes for "education." (Seriously, don't.)

Much in a similar theme could be said about romance, and about economic systems in other places and times. And there's even a standpoint from which the things that we think are truly valuable for their own sake—wealth and happiness and true love, &c.—can be said to be the result of our species gaming the incentives that evolution built into us because they happened to promote inclusive genetic fitness in the ancestral environment.

The future is the same thing: superhuman artificial intelligence gaming the utility function we gave it, instead of the one we should have given it. Only there will be no one we'd recognize as a person to read or write that chapter.

I don't enjoy being provoked into despising my fellow Americans for being alien savages, when it's so much better to just ignore them for the same reason.

Socially liberal, Fiscally confused; I don't know how to run a goddamned country, And neither do you.

Dear reader, I had wanted to tell you an anecdote about a recent incident in which I considered myself to have been outrageously mistreated, but it occurred to me that you probably would not find the story at all worthy of note. In fact, I fear you would be quite likely to think less of me for complaining in such a melodramatic fashion about something which the prevailing norms of our Society consider quite ordinary and proper. And what authority do I have to insist that it's Society that is in the wrong, and not I?

So I won't tell you. Instead, let me tell you a completely unrelated anecdote about my analogue in an alternate universe not entirely unlike our own. You see, recently, my alternate-universe analogue wanted to buy a table lamp, so he went—or let us say in a manner of speaking that I went—to a store to purchase one.

In the showroom, I found a lamp I liked, flagged down a salesman, and said to him, "I'd like to buy this lamp."

"Have you previously purchased a side table from us before?" he said.

"No," I said, somewhat puzzled by the seemingly irrelevant question.

"Well, you can't buy a lamp unless you already have a table to put it on," said the salesman in a tone of polite condescension.

"Oh, I certainly agree that it simply wouldn't do to get a lamp without having a table to put it on," I said, "but you see, I already have a table."

"So you did buy a table from us."

"No," I said.

"So you don't have a table."

"No, I do have a table," I said.

"So where did you buy it?" he asked.

"I'm actually an amateur craftsperson," I explained, "I have a table which I built myself."

The salesman showed no sign of having failed to hear me, but he showed no sign of having understood me, either. "The table is a prerequisite for the lamp; you have to buy a table before you can buy a lamp," he said.

I sighed. "Okay," I said in resignation, "in that case, I would like to buy a table and a lamp."

"No, no," he said. "That's not how prerequisites work; you can't buy a table and a lamp in the same transaction."

I didn't understand how it could make any substantive difference whether I paid in one transaction or two, but I perceived that objecting as much would be a waste of time, so I asked, "When can I get this lamp by?"

"Well, we only offer table lamps in the fall, so ..." he paused for a moment, "September 2013."

I said, "May I please speak to your manager?"

"Well, you can try talking to the guy in charge of lamps," said the salesman, "but he's probably not going to tell you anything different."

It soon transpired that the person responsible for the lamps wasn't in that day. I got his email address and sent him a letter asking if I could please buy a lamp, attaching photographs of my table as evidence that I was in fact qualified to buy a lamp.

I did not receive a reply.

Not from him, anyway. A couple of weeks later, I did receive an email from the CEO of the company, which I excerpt below, verbatim:

From: SF State CEO Alternate Universe Robert A. Corrigan <ceo@sfsu.com>

To: Alternate Universe Zachary Davis <main@altunivzackmdavis.net>

Subject: Message From the Office of the CEO

Dear Alternate Universe Zachary Davis,

I am writing to ask you to tell our elected officials how important affordable access to furniture at San Francisco State Upholstery and Home Furnishings Company is to you. California’s budget will be adopted in the next few weeks and you have one more chance to let legislators hear your voice.

TAKE ACTION

Last November, the California Legislature passed a budget that cut $750 million in subsidies from the state furniture system, forcing the CSU Board of Trustees to approve price increases for fall 2012 for customers.

The notification of this increase was met, understandably, with anger and frustration. When I met with customers protesting these cuts on December 1, 2011 it was agreed that we needed to work together to take our case to our elected officials and the "Customer Voices Campaign" was born. We launched a website and collected more than 400 stories about how budget cuts and price increases had affected customers and their families.

TAKE ACTION

A few weeks ago, I joined customers for a trip downtown to meet with our elected officials. The customers brought hard copies of each letter. We have been assured that each and every letter will be read. Your fellow customers who joined me spoke with power and passion—they were impressive.

But I have to tell you, I am not optimistic that our legislators really understand how customers are affected when state budgets force us to reduce inventory and ask you to shoulder a greater share of the cost. Over the next two weeks they will be gathering in Sacramento to make their final budget decisions. We have over 30,000 SF State customers and over 400,000 customers in the CSU, now is the time to inundate our elected officials with reminders about how important their budget decisions are to us.

By clicking the link below, you can send a pre-prepared message to all of your elected representatives in just a few seconds. Let them know the real consequences of their budget decisions.

TAKE ACTION

Sincerely yours,

Alternate Universe Robert A. Corrigan, CEO

Reading this letter made me very angry. "If a business selling any other kind of product—for example, math tutoring—provided such uniformly terrible customer service, they would either go bankrupt, or be burned to the ground by an angry mob, whichever came first," I fumed to myself. "And yet not only do these people treat their customers poorly, but they expect to be rewarded for it with taxpayer subsidies?! And Society just gives it to them, instead of laughing them out of business? The world is surely mad!"

But my anger subsided within a few minutes. What authority did I have to insist that it was Society that was in the wrong, and not I? The prerequisite policy must have been put into place for a good reason, and nor was it hard to discern what that reason was. San Francisco State Upholstery was, ultimately, just trying to protect me. Might it not be delusionally arrogant of me, a mere amateur, to suppose that my homemade table was adequate to support a lamp? What if I had been permitted to buy a lamp, but then it fell over and broke because my table wasn't sturdy enough?—I had to admit that was at least plausible. Should I not then be grateful that I was not permitted to take such a foolhardy risk?

Still, I thought, it simply wouldn't do to leave my table bare and my room dark for more than a year. So I—that is, my alternate-universe analogue—set aside all irrelevant thoughts, grabbed his cheap paperback copy of How to Build a Lamp by Alternate Universe Georgi E. Shilov (translated from the Russian by Alternate Universe Richard A. Silverman), and headed off to his workshop, to work.