Scott Alexander describes Every Bay Area House Party.

You walk in. The wall decorations vaguely suggest psychedelia. The music is pounding, head-splitting, amelodious. Everyone is struggling to speak over it. Everyone assumes everyone else likes it.

You flee to the room furthest from the music source. Three or four guys are sitting in a circle, talking. Two girls are standing by a weird lamp, drinks in hand. You see Bob.

“Hi, Bob!”

“Hey, good to see you again!”

“What’s new?”

“Man, it’s been a crazy few months. You hear I quit my job at Google and founded a fintech startup?”

“No! What do you do?”

“War insurance!”

“War insurance?”

“Yeah. We pay out if there’s a war.”

“Isn’t that massively correlated risk?”

“Yeah. The idea is, we sell war insurance to companies who do badly if there’s a war – tourist attractions and the like. Then we sell the same amount of peace insurance to military contractors. As long as we get the probabilities and costs right, we make the same profit either way.”

“Neat idea, how’s it going?”

“Great! Ayatollah Khameini just bought a ten billion dollar policy.”

“Of the war version or the peace version?”

“Can’t say, confidentiality agreement.”

“Did I hear someone talking about fintech?”

A man with a buzz-cut. His shirt had an incomprehensible symbol – his favorite band’s symbol? His company’s logo? A chaos magic sigil? and he was carrying a half-decayed slice of pizza.

“I’m Ramchandra,” he said. “I’m working for a fintech startup. Love to hear from anyone else in the business!”

“I’m Bob, good to meet you. Who do you work for?”

“You know ViraCoin?”

“No, tell me about them.”

“New crypto. You mine it by promoting about it. Once every eight minutes, a decentralized algorithm searches for tweets containing the word ‘ViraCoin’ with a positive sentiment score, weights them by number of likes, and then picks one at random to award a ViraCoin to.”

“Sounds…awful.”

“No, you don’t understand. This is just the first step. Once we make it super-big, we’ll introduce other things into the algorithm. Charities. Political causes. We’ll have millions of people competing to praise UNICEF in order to get that next million-dollar ViraCoin drop. If you think about it, all problems are caused by lack of awareness. We’re an at-scale solution to awareness. Solve that, and you solve poverty, inequality, racism…”

You wander off. There’s an open bedroom, with a few people sitting on the bed talking inside. A woman in a blue dress is saying something about how she’s trying to build a secular scientific interpretation of Buddhism.

“There’s no alpha left in secular scientific interpretations of Buddhism,” says the guy on her right, a thin white man with a carefully trimmed beard. “Half of California spent the past hundred years trying to create secular scientific interpretations of Buddhism, you can’t throw a stone without hitting one.”

“You don’t understand,” says the woman, “they stopped halfway. There are a bunch of Buddhist doctrines nobody’s ever come up with secular rationalist versions of. Like reincarnation. You ask those Californians about Buddhism, they’ll say it’s all just about brain waves and mindfulness, but change the topic when you get to reincarnation, or say it’s all an ignorant myth.”

“So how do you come up with a secular scientific interpretation of reincarnation?”

“Have you ever heard about the quantum suicide thought experiment? Suppose that there are near-infinite parallel universes. There are versions of you in some of them – people who are exactly identical to you and each other. It’s meaningless to ask which of them ‘you’ ‘are’” – she made the scare quotes with her hands – “because you’re all of them at once. ‘You’ are the mathematical pattern, not the atoms, anything that instantiates that pattern is you. So if you shoot yourself, you won’t die, because you can’t have the experience of not existing. You’ll just find your thread of consciousness ‘waking up’ in those universes where the gun jammed. Or where a sudden gust of wind knocked you over and out of the bullet’s path. Total immortality.”

“How does that imply reincarnation?”

“Cause I don’t believe in infinite parallel universes, or infinite versions of you. But your consciousness can transfer to a being that’s slightly different from you. That happens every moment, the atoms in your brain never stay in exactly the right place. So when you die in our universe, which is the only one you are, your consciousness ‘wakes up’ into the other being whose internal pattern is most like yours.”

“Then how come people don’t all have each other’s memories?”

“Even in Buddhism, reincarnation isn’t a transfer of souls. It’s a transfer of karmic bundles. Suppose that you’re violent and greedy your whole life, and then you die. You ‘wake up’ in the consciousness of the most similar being you can find. Maybe it’s a wolf, or a praying mantis. But suppose you use your reason and really lean into the purely human virtues. Then you’re basically guaranteed to ‘wake up’ as another person. Not that they’ll have your memories or anything. They’re just whose qualia you’ll be experiencing.”

“So your thread of consciousness can never wink out of existence?”

“Of course it can, that’s the whole point of Buddhism. You need to become nothing, gradually, naturally, in a way where each step is causally linked to the step before. Then, when you die, your consciousness won’t continue at all. It’ll just stay nothing. Nirvana! Seems pretty straightforward to me. I don’t know why everyone else keeps saying that Buddhism has ‘supernatural elements’ or parts that are ‘hard to square with modern science’.”

She’s gathered a small audience now. “What about the Pure Land stuff?” asks a guy in a beret. “If you say the words Namu Amida Butsu ten times, then when you die Amida Buddha will pluck your soul from the aether and ensure it gets reborn in his heaven dimension. Still doesn’t sound very scientific to me.”

“No,” she says, “come on, that makes perfect sense. Imagine you’re a group of benevolent superintelligent aliens. You know all this stuff about reincarnation, so you want to help. You tile your home solar system with trillions of sentient beings living in a heaven dimension, and you make sure that every so often, they all say Namu Amida Butsu at some super-high rarefied level of consciousness. There are so many entities, of such high consciousness, who are so associated with the phrase Namu Amida Butsu, that any consciousness that has ever said the words at all inevitably pattern-matches to one of those. When that consciousness ends, it ‘wakes up’ as one of the entities in the heaven dimension whose information-patterns are correlated with it through the focus on those words.”

“In this hypothetical, how do the aliens know Japanese?”

“They don’t! We’re talking about information-patterns! The signified, not the signifier! They’re focusing on the concept of I call upon some powerful entity that has seized control of the cycle of reincarnation to draw my soul into their heaven dimension, and the closest human-language equivalent to that is Namu Amida Butsu. So by saying it, your information pattern shortens the distance to their information pattern!”

“I still don’t think this is what the Japanese intended,” says Beret Guy.

“Oh,” says the woman in the blue dress, “and you’re some kind of expert on Japanese Buddhism, I suppose?”

“Mmmmm, kind of? I was really into Zen in college. I would sit zazen for two, three hours every day. A few years after I graduated, I took the plunge and quit my job at Google to study a Zen monastery near Kanazawa. The first day I was there, the master said ‘This very world is the Pure Land, and each one of you is already enlightened.’ I was really relieved, because I’d thought I would have to stay at the monastery like ten, maybe twenty years to get enlightened. So I thanked him and went off to pack my stuff. He ran after me, asked ‘Where are you going?’ I said that honestly I wasn’t that into the Zen aesthetic and I was just there to get enlightened – but if I was already enlightened, then mission accomplished and I might as well go back to Google. I spent a couple days seeing Kanazawa, then flew home.”

“You moron, that’s just a cryptic riddle. You have to spend the years at the monastery in order to appreciate the sense in which you’re already enlightened.”

“Nah, I got an email from the Zen master a few months later telling me that I was the best student he’d ever had.”

The discussion is starting to get heated, so you wander back into the first room. Bob and Ramchandra are still talking about fintech, but there’s a person of ambiguous gender sitting alone, playing with a fidget spinner. You strike up a conversation:

“Hey, nice to meet you.”

“Hi,” they say, “I’m Wind, they/them pronouns.”

“Please tell me you’re not in fintech.”

Wind steals a glance at Bob and Ramchandra and laughs. “Oh god no. I’m an artist slash philosopher.”

“What . . . does that involve?”

“Right now I’m lying naked on rocky beaches until I almost die of dehydration.”

“Is . . . that the art, or the philosophy?”

“Both! It all started when I learned about pilot whales. See, we used to think that humans had the biggest brain relative to their body size, and that’s why we were so smart. But it turns out there are loads of animals with bigger brain:body ratios. So it’s got to be something more complicated. People have come up with a lot of measures for calculating animal intelligence: encephalization quotient, neuron number. If you combine them all together, you can get one that mostly makes sense, with the dumbest insects at the bottom and humans on the top. The only exception is pilot whales. However you calculate it out, they should be smarter than we are.”

“Huh.”

“So I looked up what pilot whales did, and the answer was mostly that they seem to swim up onto beaches and die of dehydration unless they can flop their way back into the sea. Nobody knows why. I sure don’t. But I figure, if they’re smarter than we are, there must be some reason for it. Maybe it’s The Good. You know, like the moral law. I’m not sure. I just feel like it’s an underexplored possibility. So I’m traveling to beaches across the world so I can lie naked on them and almost die of dehydration. And if I learn something important, I’ll write an article about it.”

“How did you get the money for this?”

“Same place every young would-be philosopher who’s overly confident in a crazy idea gets money . . . ”

You and Wind say it together: “ . . . Peter Thiel!”

It looks like the food had arrived, so you head to the kitchen. A couple of guys are trying to clear off the table and get the food and drinks set up. You ask if they need help, they say yes, and you find yourself walking with them to their van to bring in more boxes.

“What do you do?” you ask.

There are two of them, a blond guy and an Asian guy. Blond guy speaks first: “We’re the caterers.”

“Oh. That makes sense. What’s it like?”

“It sucks,” said Asian guy. “We’re just doing it to make money after my restaurant startup failed.”

“Too bad. Tell me about the startup.”

“Oh, it was a great idea. You ever read Harry Turtledove? Yeah? We named it after him. Turtledove’s Alternate History Cafe. What would Southern comfort food be like if the South had won the Civil War? Or how would Mexican food taste in a world where Europeans never discovered America?”

“How would it taste?”

“Some parts would be surprisingly similar! You take your basic taco, and you can keep the tortilla – corn, of course – the tomato salsa, the beans, and the guac. But the cheese and sour cream have got to go – that’s an import from cultures with lactase-persistence. And you can’t have beef or chicken – the typical Aztec meats were rabbit, lizard, and – if you can believe it – axolotl. A common spice was culantro, which is actually noticeably different from Old World cilantro. We think that with time, the Aztecs would have expanded into North America and added bison, and established trade routes with the Inca and gotten potatoes. The conditions in the Mexican Plateau were almost ideal for…sorry, I’m quoting our literature. All our dishes came with a pamphlet explaining when the world-branch it came from diverged from our own and how it differed.”

“Well if you served axolotls, I’m not surprised you couldn’t get customers.”

“Oh no, we were booked solid every day.”

“Then why’d you fail?”

“The city shut us down.”

“Are axolotls endangered or something?”

“Oh no. We asked ourselves – what would modern cuisine be like if the Axis had won WW2? So we made up a whole menu of German-Japanese fusion fare – teriyaki bratwurst, beer-battered sushi, stuff like that.”

“What’s wrong with teriyaki bratwurst?”

“The waiters had swastika armbands and said ‘Heil Hitler!’ when they took your orders.”

“Oh, yeah. I guess that would do it. You going to try again?”

“Not sure,” says the blond guy. “John here wants to. I think we should try something else.”

“Any particular ideas?”

“When we were planning the Axis menu, I told John it would be fine, people had a sense of humor. Then it got us shut down, and I said I really had to eat some humble pie. That gave me an idea. We have all these food metaphors. Eat humble pie. Eat crow. Eat my hat. There’s so much alpha in food metaphors. Imagine – you’re an executive and you steer your company the wrong direction, nobody gets bonuses. As an apology, you take your employees out for dinner at our restaurant and order a crow sandwich. Now they can all see you literally eating crow.”

“What would the employees eat?”

“Well, we have a lot of teriyaki bratwurst we need to get rid of. That stuff keeps forever.”…

RTWT

————————-

And then he does it again:

Blaise Pascal said all human evil comes from inability to sit alone in a room. Your better nature – your rational soul – tells you that nothing good has ever come from attending large social events. But against that better nature stands the Devil, wielding a stick marked “FOMO”. If you don’t go to social events, maybe other people will go and have great times and live fuller lives than you. “As the dog returns to its vomit, so returns the fool to his folly”, says the Bible. And so you find yourself mumbling thanks to your Uber driver and crossing the threshold of another Bay Area house party.

“Heyyyyy, I haven’t seen you in forever!” says a person whose name is statistically likely to be Michael or David. “What have you been working on?”

“Resisting the urge to go to events like this”, you avoid saying. “What about you?”

“Oh man,” says Michael or David, “The most exciting startup. Just an amazing startup. We’re doing procedural myth generation with large language models.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. We fine-tune an AI on a collection of hundreds of myths from every culture in the world. Then we can prompt it. A myth about snowflakes. A myth about mountain-climbing. A myth about lunch.”

“How do you make money?”

“So think about it. Myths aren’t just old stories. They’re methods for understanding and relating to the universe. Have you ever listened to Jordan Peterson’s lectures on Genesis? They’re life changing. Myths are our psychic motor, our source of inspiration, the way that we make sense of our world. Without them we’d be spiritually adrift. Well, it stands to reason that if we had more of them, we’d be more inspired, and we’d be able to make sense of our world better. So far we’ve been limited by the number the Greeks or Norse or whoever passed down to us. But if we could generate new myths on demand, man, we’d be unstoppable. That’s why I’m pitching this to corporations. Imagine if your competitor’s still working out of Bulfinch’s Mythology, but you can generate thousands of myths, on any topic, whenever you want. You’d be unstoppable!”

“I know people say myths give life meaning,” you say, “but I think it’s just cope for galaxy-brainers who are too obsessed with the classical western humanities tradition. I definitely don’t think you can make life have extra meaning just by making more myths.”

“See, that’s the kind of negative talk that used to get me down. I would have given up. But now I just think to myself – did Jesus give up when the Minotaur kidnapped his daughter? No! He set out through the Fiery Forest to find the magic helmet that would bring her back! And that’s why I’m not going to give up either. See! I’ll let you have that one for free.”

Maybe Michael or David senses your skepticism. His tone becomes more confrontational. “And if myths are really just for ‘galaxy-brainers who are too obsessed with the classical western humanities tradition’, then explain why my startup has already gotten $10 million in funding from Peter Thiel!”

Rather than be forced to answer that, you push further into the party. You curse the Devil bitterly for tricking you into coming here. But like Jesus in the middle of the Fiery Forest, it’s too late to turn back now.

Bob and Ramchandra are on a colorful bean bag, arguing something something stocks. “Hey,” you say. “Still doing finance?”

“Oh yeah,” said Bob. “The crypto crash hit us pretty hard, but now we’re back on our feet. Ramchandra and I have started a financial communications consulting company.”

“What’s financial communications?”

“Like, one JP Morgan analyst talking to another JP Morgan analyst. It’s all got to be done over special recorded channels, because the SEC wants to be able to comb it over for evidence of crimes. And we’re not pro-crime, but – you know what they say, even model citizens commit three felonies a day by accident. And it’s more like thirty when a dour government bureaucrat is reading everything you say verbatim. The big banks used to solve this by holding all their important discussions in person, but now remote work makes that impossible and they’re having to follow basically impossible compliance standards. That’s where we come in. We’re going to leverage CA Bill 2799 for legal security enhancement. You heard about it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s the one about rap lyrics. Rappers are always performing songs bragging about all the drugs they’ve sold and the murders they’ve committed. But then sometimes they become suspects in drug murders, and the police use their lyrics as evidence in court. And this is unfair and racist because, you know, maybe they meant hypothetical drug murders. That’s why the new California Assembly Bill 2799 makes it extra hard to use rap lyrics as evidence of crimes. And that means financial analysts can just relocate to California and communicate by rapping. That’s where we come in. As finance industry veterans with a rap background, we’re in a perfect position to teach them how.”

“Can you really communicate complicated financial concepts in rap?”

“Oh yeah, definitely. Ramchandra, you want to demonstrate?”

Ramchandra took a plastic cup off the table, put it to his mouth like a microphone, made some beat box noises, then began:

Yo! TTE is down to 43
Sounds good to me! But it ain’t ESG.
Wanna tell Blackrock to suck my cock
But if they fuck us over we can’t sell the stock
So here’s what we do – fudge the CO2
You think that that pinko Fink will have a fucking clue?
We’ll feed them lies, keep our eyes on the prize
And our ESG will stand for Eat Shit, Guys.

“That’s . . . definitely a rap” you say, then repeat “Yeah, uh . . . definitely a rap. Do you think finance companies will go for this?”

“Oh yeah,” said Bob. “We’re thinking we’ll approach Goldman Sachs first. Their CEO is a DJ himself, so it’ll be an easy sell.”

“Yeah,” you agree. “Sounds like an easy sell.” …

RTWT again.