Oh! Those crazy kids! What’s it like to be a pilot whale? [With apologies to Thomas Nagel]

Scott Alexander imagines Every Bay Area House Party, Astral Codex Ten, May 2022. Here's a passage pulled not-quite-at-random from the text:

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!”

There's much more at the link. 

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See yesterday's post, Bay Area Meme Space.