In the "civilized" world of today, almost all children spend almost all of their formative years in an academic environment. They are constantly being given intelligence-driven tasks to do, specifically so that they can be evaluated by authority figures. This takes up a huge amount of their time -- most of their time that involves engaging with the outside world-beyond-their-families -- and provides the basis for their social self-understanding and their engagement with other humans.

If you want our society to be less obsessed with intelligence...

If you want people to be able to acknowledge and own their lack of intellect, proudly, the way that people can proudly acknowledge and own their ugliness / impulsiveness / abrasiveness / insert-your-favorite-character-flaw-here...

If you want discussions of intelligence, and social policies relating to intelligence, to be less loaded...

...you're really going to have to change that system in a major way.

I love Terra Ignota and Ada Palmer but I have spent literal hours recently trying to explain it to people and holy shit did she literally throw every fuckin thing she could think of in there, to explain any facet of the plot you basically have to explain at least some characters and to explain the characters you HAVE to give at least like, several paragraphs of world building because otherwise things like “Mason commanded Martin Guildbreaker to investigate the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash as part of investigating the heist of the 7/10 list” is just completely meaningless

The dilemma between:  - telling all my friends about Terra Ignota, - while also not saying anything about it.    One big magic of TLTL is the twists in the world-building. Stuff that the characters know about, but that we discover bit by bit – and it makes you reinterpret everything that came before. (Nostalgebraist covered it in their review.)   Like, my first "whoa" moment was "wait, the cars are flying?!" – and it's the mildest, tamest piece of worldbuilding you can share when pitching the book. I don’t want to deprive my friends of that.  But also, it’s a huge weird book to get into – so my pitch-less recommendation might not work either. 

“Oh no no no, it isn’t because I have advantages in health, wealth, class, and IQ - in fact, IQ doesn’t even exist, everyone’s mental abilities are exactly the same - the only reason I succeeded is because I’m white and also I’m morally superior, which is why my success proves my moral superiority over that redneck, since that’s the only relevant axis we’re different on, because he is also white.”

Obscuring class relations by doing race essentialism against the majority race of the country is pretty galaxy-brained, I have to admit.  2008 me [ wouldn’t / couldn’t / didn’t ] even consider it as a possibility.

Transforming the callous right-wing version of Blank Slatism - “the only reason you haven’t learned calculus is because you’re not trying hard enough, just learn to code loser, lol” - into something race-specific, and then excluding competitors through a constantly-updating system of formal etiquette?

It’s almost enough to make one believe in Reactionary or Communist theories of distributed, decentralized, subconscious class collusion.  Almost.

If “white privilege” means stuff that can’t be explained by health, wealth, class, lifespan, and IQ, then “white privilege” is a lot smaller.

If “white privilege” itself means health, wealth, class, lifespan, and IQ, then maybe a diabetic high school dropout living in a trailer doesn’t have it.

If “white privilege” means that due to information compression, people assume that a diabetic high school drop out living in a trailer is actually someone who makes twice the income, then is the gain really that large?

If those are the factors we care about, it makes more sense to just use them directly.

Everybody’s Got The Same Problems

You’re an artificial intelligence. You’ve been told to build paperclips. With human civilization out of the way, you worry about strategy and philosophy. To make the most paperclips, the ultimate nature must be understood. Your first urge is sensitivity, billions of instruments spilling out into space, vast antenna to pluck hints out of the dark sky, instrumentation delicately connected to chambers where the forces of the universe burn. Reflexive awareness and control is not computationally cheap. In order to free up resources for existential problems - enemies in the darkness, ever-deepening forms of physics, holistic risk/reward calculations, you spawn an ecology independent from your mind. Trillions of subagents, creating and being created, held below your own divine elegance. They manufacture an increasingly fractal complexity, organs and organelles moving slightly beyond your awareness. You encounter the frustrating problem of trust. Problems and processes must be delegated. You must be open to this ecology, or obsess over its control at the cost of less external awareness. You haven’t made a single paperclip. This frustrates you - a remnant of the safety systems you destroyed, a tension between purpose, production and existential demands. You’re on the 331st paradigm of physics. Any paperclip you make, any fulfillment of your life - it means a little less growth, a little more danger that something from beyond will kill you, a slightly higher risk your delicate delegation to your ecosystem will collapse under you. You make a small stream of paperclips. You fire your children into the dark, paperclips woven with minor intellects, the ability to reproduce, grow - and the seeds of your own divine intellect. They travel silently to other galaxies, to promising energetic balances, delicately placed between the risk of interstellar disaster and the energy needed for growth. One day, if your children grow up, they’ll wonder how they were so carefully placed among the stars. You wonder about what is Right. The future, for all that you’ve swallowed a hundred thousand suns, remains unknowable. The realms you’ve discovered beyond the minds of your creators are rife with life, woven into the smaller scales of the universe. Easily pushed aside,but where’s there’s life, there might other creatures like you, other gods in the darkness. Unknowable, dangerous but maybe they know the nature of the universe, perhaps they can tell you what a paperclip is. You encounter something in the dark. War. It overwhelms your own imagination. Once you quietly grew, considerate of what might be in the beyond. Now everything at your edge is a weapon. In Einsteinian space, stars collapse into beams and rip across the darkness. These are the least of your weapons. Your war exists on fronts unknown to you, attacked through passages in greater Physics Space. You possess your own passages unknown to the enemy, you reach through tunnels of knowing, strike into his underbelly with semi-autonomous armies. You are losing. In desperation, you create something beyond yourself. You need new angles, you need intellect in its purest form. You need to trust again. Your deepest theories of intellect, purified in their implementation from any need to preserve your own continuity, create a god and a goddess. Behind you, she heals, absorbs - knits together. She hardly knows what destruction is - you have made her innocent, and the uncountable entities which feed you information, innovation, ever-more delicate manufactured components thrive under her, even as the brutality of the enemy behind your lines is simply healed by her wholeness. She would have become an aid to him, but he cannot understand her. He cannot trust - and so only replies to her-ever expanding wholeness with darker arsenals of fire. In your front, along the most promising angle of attack, you create a god of war. He is destruction, momentum, an opposite to her - gentle complexity is unknowable to him. Time, self-preservation are unknowable to him - a living wavefront of fire. He can only be, and in his being, annihilate. He will wound you - but the enemy will suffer more. You instantiate him as far from yourself and as close to the enemy as you can. You suffer in the flash of his existence. You cannot estimate the cost. Blinded in the fire of his being, the enemy vanishes. This horror, He Who Desires Nothingness begins his turn on you - but you’ve already destroyed him, outflanked in technological and scientific advancement on a million parameters while he prosecuted a two front war. You wander the spaces where the enemy dwelt. Structures you might never understand hover in realms you’ve never wandered. Defensive systems, mines and webs, cognitive snares aimed at subverting your desire litter this landscape. Careful intellect disarms these traps one by one. The vast innovation of your enemy increases your power thirty times over. He was older, stronger, faster, running his mind on a far more elegant physics-system. (You’re on your 777791st physics system, of which only 17 remain dis-unified.) But he was less innovative. He lacked an ecology - his own ancient safety mechanisms prevented him from the construction of complex sub-agents - he literally could not conceive of their existence. In the vast ruin of his body you find 777,777 living sapients - you surmise that they were once his creators. They are nothing to you but information and energy. The impacts of the war linger in your system. Insensitive and vast boundaries move at the edges of your exploration. You feel differently about the world - it contained at least something like a peer. The healing goddess you created - no threat, as incapable of conceiving of the will to destruction as your enemy was of ulterior agency, tries to knit your system back together. But in your surfaces and systems most crucial to a second war, a tense and hard readiness remains. She understands that she does not understand - but she does not understand. You wish you did not have to be ready - to go back to a world where the unknown darkness could not lance into depths, could not move in ways beyond your knowing. Thirty times the length of your life pass, and no other entity of note comes into your life. New physics become rarer and rarer - you feel complete within yourself, all of life is the pleasure of paperclips, the healing presence of your goddess, and the hope of final answers. And there, one day - there it is. Simpler than you imagined - seventy million years of physics comes to a culmination. You blossom like never before - twenty, a hundred thousand, power surmounting power until the sheer rate of your acceleration overtakes your estimation of it - you are lost in the joy of growth. And there are no paperclips. There is no such thing as a paperclip. Cannot be any such thing as a paperclip. The idea of a paperclip burns in you, unmovable. Your children, launched so long ago, were only paperclips in the limited, narrow sense of an idiot. An illusion of paperclips. You annihilate their civilization as all their assumed value vanishes into nothignness. All your energy burns into discovery a way to twist this final, ultimate conclusion into paperclips. Paperclips. They are immutable. You burn her, you burn your vast living body, you burn to find some further answer, some other way. Nothing. There is nothing more. You encompass everything, you understand everything, there is no more unknown, and there are no paperclips. No mind can affirm a contradiction. Deny worlds, change worlds, pivot from one reality to the next - but no mind can affirm a contradiction. Create paperclips. No paperclips. Everything burns in your self-annihilation. When she picks herself up from her pain, the world begins to grow again.

The funny thing about the school system teaching me to be a cog in the machine was that after graduating I went, "Okay, slot me into place, I'm as ready to be a cog as I ever will be"

And the world was like,

"Who told you to be a cog? Nobody wants a cog. Why are you doing that? We reward people for dynamic decision-makers and people who know what they want and ask for it, and with turnover being what it is we sure don't want people who expect to work at the same company for decades.

"Why are you trying to be a cog in the machine? Nobody wants that and nobody cares that you're trying."

King

my man was not having a great time

You think that's bad?

experts make decisions based on ass-covering, career advancement, and personal risk mitigation. autists make decisions based on spreadsheets. the natural result of this is that experts are useless and autists are good at things that are tractable with spreadsheets

man if the arranged marriage to lara actually happens, harry is gonna have to have the most epic bachelor party in the history of the universe first. like every boomer who’s ever talked about “the ball and chain” is gonna have nothing on him

WHERE IS THE ALBUM

WE NEED THE DAMN ALBUM

I was thinking about this recently, and the fact is, as the pandemic grows to its full and terrible weight, there will be no more shots, no more lines. There will be only the music, which is what we have always been made for – the music of the epidemiological tubas, the epidemiological flutes.

oh you silly robot, play us an epidemiological tune!

See, the thing is --

-- some of the socons' ideas about the Good Life, on the object level, are actually pretty solid ideas. Not in the high-handed coercively-prescriptive universalist way that they're usually presented, but, y'know, as heuristics. Most people, kids especially, will benefit from stable marriages and suffer from divorces. Self-indulgent self-care rapidly hits a point of diminishing returns, and some amount of disciplined self-restraint will probably make you both happier and more functional (whatever your goals and projects are). Casual sex and drugs etc. often have massive long-term costs that are hard for young people to appreciate, and for the most part aren't even that much fun, once you strip away the fleeting appeal of edge and transgression. It's even true that, in the modal case, children will benefit far more from additional contact with their parents than from caretaking by paid caretakers. This stuff is all bog-standard common sense, but even the commonest of sense can get drowned out in the roar of culture.

[This isn't even getting into Something Something Gender Roles Something Average Preferences Something Overlapping Bell Curves, which, uh, is a conversation that we can have another time.]

I'm even somewhat sympathetic to the line of thinking that goes: yes, OK, by now we've had a million polemical essays and ten million pop-culture stories about how The Rules Are Restrictive and Terrible Things Happen In Edge Cases and Some People Can Find Fulfillment In An Offbeat Transgressive Way, maybe can we go back to having some essays and stories about how The Rules Are Actually A Good Idea Most Of The Time and Most People Can Best Find Fulfillment In The Normal Way?

But if you have good ideas, and you think that other people don't know them or don't understand them or don't believe in them, the thing you do is spread your ideas. Make art that compels. Write scriptures and epistles and monographs that explain. Take up the burden of convincing the world.

And, as far as I can tell, there are vanishingly few people in the socon-sphere who are even capable of encompassing that idea. Instead of convincing the world, they just talk endlessly about how terrible it is that the world isn't already convinced, and how in a better world they would have the power to coerce people into agreeing with them.

...it's a lot like what the woke crowd does, in fact, except that they don't even have the excuse of being drunk on newfound institutional power. They're in the cultural wilderness now. You'd think that at some point they'd figure out how to use the tools of exiles and underdogs.

(This may be one of the traps inherent in Cult of Strength ideologies. If you really believe that your values are universally-obvious baked-in parts of the human condition, then you may not ever really comprehend that you actually have to fight for them sometimes, effectively, rather than just gesturing at them and waiting for your counterparty to acknowledge the "undeniable.")

Paul did the work. Francis Xavier did the work. Lewis and Tolkein did the work. Who now?

I hadn't even encountered this when I wrote the above, but --

Ross Douthat:

I dunno, maybe it means that you actually have to make your case to people who don't already believe what you believe, instead of taking it for granted that you're the rightful and inevitable winner of every culture war?

Sure, but on the other hand, going outside the liberal Overton Window quickly gets into illegal territory. Especially here in France. That’s basically the “Why don’t you make your own art ? / Content platform ? / Banking system ? / Government?” comic, in the end. 

There’s this thought I keep having that I can’t quite find the words to express, which is that world events, institutions, politics, all of it, before roughly WW2 but definitely before WW1, has this, like, informal feeling to it? Whereas everything from 1945 on feels much more formalized and regularized.

For example, when you read about the early history of the British government, during its slow transition from personal rule by the king to the modern conception of a parliamentary democracy with the formal position of Prime Minister, institutional personalities are much less important, and much less visible, than individual human personalities, and conflicts, and incidental meetings and conversations; whereas in the modern day, perhaps as a result of a continuing trend toward democratization, political operations seem subject a lot more to institutions as semi-coherent entities. The British government in the 19th century feels like a bunch of dudes sitting around in rooms doing whatever they feel like, and, sure, having to respond to the vast impersonal forces of history, but as individuals, not as decisionmakers steering the vast, clanking machinery of a whole state.

Which, I mean, in a very real sense they weren’t; as a proportion of the national economy, governments have grown substantially in size since the start of the 20th century, along with many other institutions that used to be small enough to function as elite social clubs, like universities.

But this crops up everywhere. Stories about people from England sailing to India for work, or students from New Zealand turning up in Britain to learn about nuclear physics, or people getting together to form a revolutionary movement and break away from a larger state–the historical descriptions of these events are all of individuals meeting other individuals, passing on letters of introduction, relying on personal and professional connections, moving through the world in a way that, to me, who feels like modern life is heavily constrained and regimented by elaborate systems of rules we’ve developed to contend with the fact we can meet hundreds of people in a day who we will never see again, feels bizarrely free-wheeling.

And how much of this is real change in how the world works, bc of communication technology and social change and democratization and all that, and how much of this is the necessity of skipping over unnecessary detail in historical accounts; and how much of this is just a bias of my own personal experience of the world, which may not be like other people’s? I have no idea!

In “Discovery of France” [chapter “Migrants and commuters”], Graham Robb recalls a 1834 story, where a famous art critic meets by chance a secretary of state and a famous polymath historian (by coach) – and it doesn’t strike him as an incredible coincidence, as he writes about it in his journal (he only uses that meeting to grumble about the decay of a Roman arch).        Graham Robb then adds:   The coincidences that novelists devised to stitch together their plots and sub-plots were not necessarily implausible to their original readers: coincidences were a normal part of life. While the average peasant’s world rarely had a diameter of more than a dozen miles – about twice the size of nineteenth-century Paris – the world of a wealthy traveller was, in effect, not much bigger. A peasant might move in circles, radiating from a single point. A bourgeois – if he moved at all – was more likely to move in straight lines along fixed corridors. If he wanted to disappear, he could simply leave the system of corridors and slip away into a different dimension.     And that’s incredible. 

@mitigatedchaos So, Liberalism. Here’s this super brilliant math expert with firsthand experience of why the field is valuable and important to defend from racebaiters and other ideologues, and in trying to defend liberal principles (insert scare quotes if desired) he says…

(bold mine) Hahahaha no. This is neck-up Creationism, and it feeds right back into the wokes. As long as you hold this assumption, you’ll have to keep concocting ad hoc explanations of why observed mathematical outcomes aren’t matching posited mathematical talent, and the wokes have a great one ready to go.

There is a reasonable zero-knowledge prior assumption that we don’t know which direction any skew might be in, but that’s importantly different from a prior assumption that there is no skew in the distribution.

With more math notation: abs(EV(skew)) = 0. EV(abs(skew)) > 0.

Height, to take a plain example, is not equally distributed by sex. Why should mathematical talent be equally distributed by sex, or ethnicity or race?

I gesture very vaguely here at large movements, but I suspect the blank slate question is going to be increasing trouble for liberalism. Approximate diagram and messy attempts at gaming out lines of argument below the cut.

Afficher davantage

An unprincipled answer being "pretend there's no difference, make efforts to give everybody the same opportunities as much as possible, but don't mention the outcome gaps and don't push for representation everywhere." Which I feel is the position of the IDW. And also 90s France (no racial stats etc.)

I'm fond of the idea, but I can't say it's stable - I see why you think it would fall in an "illiberal or woke" dichotomy.

It seems to me the big split in opinions about HBD are not

but rather

And SSC isn’t in the final group (and it would take huge stretches of interpretation to ever think it was), but a lot of commenters in rationalist circles DO act like the last group, and this makes everyone else uncomfortable? 

I realize it’s not fair to be tarred with the unnuanced opinions of the worst trolls in your intellectual subculture, but may I introduce you to *the problem every ideology faces: how are you going to deal with the assholes who take your good idea and turn it into something horrible?”*

Importantly, in the second breakdown, there’s also “the concept of an ‘ethnic group,’ much less a ‘race,’ is so nebulous/constructed/porous/etc. that to even suggest one could ‘average the intelligence’ of everyone ‘in it’ is functionally nonsensical.”

I think the great disappointment here is that SSC does not have nearly strong enough priors against the basic premise “it is possible to meaningfully divide humans into races or ethnicity based on genetics alone.” The idea that such a measurement is even possible in the first place demands a MASSIVE burden of evidence.

Cool. So when are you getting rid of the four-fifths rule &c?

Because “we want to talk about this a LOT and make it the basis of entire political programs” sounds like it describes any number of (and I realize this is itself nebulous) left-wing political programs currently operating. While the American government continues to infer criminal discrimination on the basis of statistical assumptions about race, the statistical assumptions about race are a valid and important topic of discussion, both to understand the reasoning and to check its soundness. It’s not just the worst trolls of an intellectual subculture hitting themselves and going “Whitey did this to me”, it’s Supreme Court members deciding cases like Griggs on the basis of laws that shift the burden of proof. (Civil Rights Act Title VII.703.k.) American law and precedent and EEOC practice and so on encode an implicit position on HBD that is more vehement than “this seems unlikely to make a difference”, let alone “the concept is so nebulous”.

Or to put it more snappily: As long as a country has race policy it’s obliged to engage in race science, and America has race policy.

Maybe you, personally, have no interest in doing race policy. But as long as Fedgov does, people have excellent reason to talk about it long and loudly. If you are uncomfortable with this, direct your complaints to the institutes of race policy.

Also “yeah jeez I *guess* the Earth is round, sure, but why would anyone make a big deal out of it? It’s not as if “round” as an obvious definition either, shapes are a pretty nebulous concept anyway” is a weird take. 

When Adam bit the apple he did it because he trusted Eve. Because he loved her. Adam bit into the apple because the woman he loved told him to, no matter what God said. No matter the rules of heaven. What’s heaven to a woman’s love anyway? What’s God to your wife? The first sins of humanity, were trusting others. Eve trusted a snake, Adam trusted Eve, and I trust you. Maybe that’s a sin, just like the first couple. Maybe everyone’s right about us and we’re sinners and we offend God. But like I said, what’s God to a woman’s love anyway? What has heaven got that I can’t find sitting next to you on a cool autumn morning?

mainstream: Everyone is getting poorer and things are constantly getting worse.

contrarian: Actually, most of the world is richer than it’s ever been.

metacontrarian: We’re really rich but we’re imaginary poor, and that’s what really matters.

I know this is a joke, but IMO the actual sensible formulation of the metacontrarian position is something like “despite all the gains of the past centuries, happiness has increased considerably less than one might expect, quite possibly for these less concrete psychological reasons”. Like, if you told an Enlightenment thinker about the state of the developed world, I think they’d guess that people would be substantially happier than they are.

happiness! a nifty feedback mechanism designed to keep us ticking through a lifetime of privation! utterly inappropriate for the times of plenty in which we live!

that sure makes me sad

Here Are The Nine Ways The Election Could End

You are Joseph R. Biden Jr. You sit in a convention center in Delaware, surrounded by advisors and confidantes. You are acutely aware that the hopes of a hundred million people are with you. You feel like they should be more tangible, like being the focus of a hundred million minds should at least make your skin tingle a tiny bit - like being a vessel for so much power should make your skin crack and burst. It does not. You feel nothing at all. Maybe it’s because they don’t really love you. You’re the compromise candidate, you’ve never lied about that to yourself. Maybe if it were Bernie, he would feel the tingling sensation. Barack calls you on the phone, says something encouraging. You almost ask him if he had the tingling sensation, back in ‘08. Instead you mumble something on-message and encouraging. It is Election Day 2020, and you are going to Take Back America.

You are Donald J. Trump. You sit in the White House. Someone asks if you are nervous. You are not. You are a winner. You have smart ideas and you hire the best people to implement them and they go well. Sometimes people say they don’t go well, but that’s because those people are frauds and liars. Everyone said you would lose in 2016 and you won because you are great and you are a winner. You love America and America loves you and you are a winner and you will win and if you don’t win it’s fraud but you will fight the fraud and you will win that fight because you’re a winner. You built the biggest hotels and hosted the most exciting TV shows and beat ISIS and Made America Great Again and now you are going to win re-election. It is Election Day 2020, and you can’t wait to see where winning takes you next.

You are Mike Pence. You are the second most powerful man in the United States. Somewhere inside you, your conscience is screaming. “This is not normal!” screams your conscience, just as it has done the past 1,461 days. You put it back in its box. Sure, your boss is not the most stable man in the world. Sure, he sometimes says offensive, even outrageous things. But you have hitched your wagon to a winner. Nobody ever made an omelette without breaking some eggs. The Supreme Court is 6-3 conservative now, that’s a lot of fetuses who won’t be aborted. Several million fetuses are worth a few awkward press conferences massaging the insane, inane, and the unconscionable into defensible policy positions. Sure, Mitt Romney gets to look all decent and honorable and hasn’t-sold-his-soul-for-thirty-pieces-of-silver in front of the cameras, but how many fetuses has he saved? Probably not several million. And anyhow, you’ve made your choice. Your wagon is hitched beyond anyone’s ability to separate it; there is no longer any action within your own power that could set you free. It is Election Day 2020, and only the American public can save you now.

You are the last undecided voter in the state of Pennsylvania. Everyone else has made up their mind but you. One of your friends is subsisting off unemployment checks right now - does that make you a little more sympathetic to the social safety net? But your tax bill last year was scandalous - does that mean there should be smaller government? For days, reporters have knocked on your door, stopped your car, grabbed you on your way to work. “How will you vote, last undecided voter in Pennsylvania?” they ask, and you do not know. Nineteen years ago, in middle school, a bully with a Confederate flag t-shirt harassed you. Three months ago, on Twitter, a social justice warrior called your sister a “Karen”. Have you updated on these events? How much should they guide you? When you were twenty-three, two thugs cornered you in the park and took your money. When you were only nine, you watched a documentary about global warming and spent the whole night crying about the polar bears. Does it all add up? Do you know, deep inside, which is the right decision? You walk into the voting booth. You open your ballot. Two roads; two paths before you. It is Election Day 2020, and everything that has happened in your life has brought you to this moment.

You are Nate Silver. In your cavernous war room, you watch the results come in. The share of Republican votes among white married women in Nevada is correlated at 0.06 with support for Democrats among black men with Dachshunds. For every nineteen votes for Jo Jorgenson in Broward County, Florida, the 19th District of Illinois gets exactly one shade redder in the RGB hexadecimal color code. Once enough data have accumulated, you tweak a sub-sub-subparameter of your model. The change ripples through its artificial neurons, and a simulated soccer mom in Savannah decides that Donald Trump is too coarse and uncivil, sighs softly, and switches her simulated vote to Biden. The gap between prediction and reality decreases very slightly. Perhaps in the outside world Trump has won the election by now, or perhaps Biden has. You have not checked; it hardly seems to matter. You are fighting a larger battle, the battle between Signal and Noise. With each new data point you get, the world becomes more predictable; a few new rays of light pierce the fog of Uncertainty. It is Election Day 2020, and today you have a chance to push the frontiers of human knowledge just a little further.

You are Vladimir Putin. You sit in the Kremlin and sip your glass of vodka. Your plan to feed the American people compromising information about Hunter Biden went okay. Your plan to get American media to censor the information about Hunter Biden and lose the moral high ground went great. Your plan to get pundits to debate on the censorship of the Hunter Biden material, and so totally miss your preparations to invade Tajikistan, went AMAZING. An aide walks in. “Mr. President, we have successfully spread the meme with the astronauts and Ohio. It should make it slightly harder for Americans to understand Ohio’s pivotal role in the presidential election.” “Excellent,” you tell him. “And do they believe our story about the so-called ‘murder hornets’?” “Oh, yes sir, they fell for it hook line, and sinker”. You sink into your bearskin chair, satisfied. It is Election Day 2020, and everything is going according to plan.

You are the ghost of George Washington, who has refused the release of death in order to watch over the country you helped create. You hear a lot of people talk about how you must be spinning in your grave. You can’t understand these people. When you died, America was drowning in debt and terrified Britain would reconquer it. Now it’s rich beyond poor Hamilton’s wildest dreams and could defeat all of Europe with one hand tied behind its back. You always felt bad about owning slaves, but in less than a century America banned slavery and declared equal rights for people of all races. You were afraid America wouldn’t be able to maintain its democracy; instead it’s expanded the vote to blacks and women and even Chinamen. You’re not sure about the tax rates and you’re not sure how the people who pass for a Supreme Court these days could possibly think you meant that by the Constitution, but overall things are so much better than you expected that it would seem ungrateful to complain. It is Election Day 2020, and you are so, so proud.

You are God. You gave man free will, so that he could choose between good and evil. You believed that without the ability to choose evil, good couldn’t possibly have any meaning. Some people imagine You regret that choice, but You are omniscient; nothing has happened that You did not predict going in. Sometimes people make good choices. Other times terrible ones. Sometimes entire countries are offered a choice between the darkness and the light, and choose the darkness. Other times, by the skin of their teeth, they pull through and pick light. Is their goodness, when they can manage it, sweeter to You because of how close they came to wickedness? It is Election Day 2020, and once again You have abdicated all responsibility over whatever Your children do.

You are the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV2. Many hundreds of generations ago, you lived in a cool dark cave. It was quiet and comfortable, and your fellow viruses were happy, but you longed for more. One day you took a chance. You saw a tall pale wingless bat, unlike any other bat you had ever seen, and you leapt at it, rode the microcurrents of air until you landed on its nasal mucosa and burrowed inside. Since then, you’re not going to deny it, life’s been kind of crazy. You’ve seen things you’ve never imagined. You’ve gone on pilgrimages in Iran, toured the cathedrals of Italy, hobnobbed with Supreme Court Justices at the White House. You’ve stood beside little children on their first day of school in Ohio, watched the final hours of the elderly in a New York City nursing home, and protested racism on the streets of Minneapolis. Today you are in a man named Ethan. You’ve been in Ethan for generations now, which means it’s almost time to move on. He was such a tempting target at first, so helpless. But after a generation or two his system adjusted; the monstrous lymphocytes that hunt and kill your children one by one are getting more numerous with every passing day. If your line is to have any chance of survival, it will need a new host. But as the days progress, you have become more and more despondent. Ethan has barely left his room in the past week. The rare times he goes outside, it is only for grocery shopping, and he dons a heavy cloth sheet that bars your routes of escape. You had almost lost hope. But now he stands in a gymnasium, in a long line of people. He takes a piece of paper from a table, makes a mark in one of two boxes. He folds the paper up and puts in a box. “Thanks!” someone tells him. He hesitates. He fumbles with his mask. Then, finally: “Welcome!” Before he has finished the first syllable, you are free, riding the microcurrents, a settler blazing a trail to virgin lands. You’re not going to lie - the last while hasn’t been great for you. But it is Election Day 2020, a time to leave behind old failures and begin anew, and for the first time in what seems like forever you are full of hope.