The Trap of the Digital Double

Catherine Shannon, The Trap of the Digital Double, NYTimes, July 31, 2026.

Everything is strange. We work from home. We socialize online. Our private lives are increasingly public. People pretend to be brands; brands pretend to be people. We optimize our bodies until they break. And the more we know, the less secure we feel.

In this inverted world, we seek to understand what is real and what is true. To know the truth of ourselves, we begin at what feels like a natural place: the mirror. We wish to see ourselves as others do, and modern life gives us countless opportunities.

We are constantly confronted with our own image, whether we like it or not: on our phones, front-facing videos, selfies, public spaces (the communal mirrors in Aritzia’s dressing rooms come painfully to mind), our social media profiles, Zoom calls, FaceTime, Ring doorbells. But we can forget that mirrors both duplicate reality and reverse it. None show you exactly as you are. Everything is strange.

The historian Christopher Lasch wrote that “for the narcissist, the world is a mirror.” Almost 50 years later, this remains a tidy diagnosis, but it doesn’t quite capture the extent of the spiritual crisis that we’re now facing. I believe the room of mirrors that constantly surrounds us conjures something unsettling, something dark. It is a spiritual trap in which the imagined displaces the real: We choose a fantasy of ourselves over the reality of others. And that trap is baited and facilitated by technology.

Mirrors:

Let’s be honest: I shouldn’t know what I look like taking out the trash. But I do, because my Google Home security camera recently alerted me that there was a “Person Seen — Back Camera.” “Person” is a generous term for what I saw, which was a beleaguered, ghostly figure — greasy hair pulled back, hunched over a bag of trash like an old witch.

We are recorded constantly: in public, by the government, by private companies trying to sell us things, even by strangers. I shudder when I think about all the incidental pictures of myself that live on strangers’ phones. In my own personal horror film, there I am, eating a bagel, and some 17-year-old tourist zooms in on my pixelated face, screenshots it, and sends it to the family group chat — “this woman’s face lol” — and I become the inside joke that defines that New York City holiday for years to come.

It’s curious, especially given how little we looked at ourselves in the past, and how rare and imperfect mirrors were for thousands of years, that traditional wisdom teaches us to be wary of the act of regarding the self. The three major American faiths — the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — all warn against the dangers of mirrors, vanity, pride and excessive concern with the self.

Mirrors are covered during shiva, the Jewish seven-day mourning period, both to encourage contemplation of the relationship between God and man and to discourage vanity and self-concern. The Book of Proverbs teaches that pride is spiritually deleterious: “Pride goes before ruin, / Arrogance, before failure.”

Many Christians believe pride is not only a sin, but the original one, and the worst of them. [...]

Islamic prophetic tradition (hadith) discourages the depiction of living beings in religious contexts.

The uncanny:

Inhabiting this mirrored, dual realm, this doubled existence, doesn’t feel natural. It doesn’t even feel neutral. Something is off, and when something is off, Freud has probably attempted to explain it. He called this “the uncanny,” a concept that by its very nature resists a clean definition, though if you’ve seen a David Lynch movie, you’ve experienced it firsthand.

Castration complexes and womb-fantasies aside, Freud does a pretty good job: The uncanny, according to his 1919 essay by the same title, “is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” It is easy for something new or unknown to frighten us, but the feeling of uncanniness relies on its being known to us in some way.

The uncanny is a dark twist on the familiar. It emerges when the boundary between imagination and reality begins to blur, when hidden mechanisms seem to be at work beneath the surface, and when something appears alive that should not be. (Or vice versa, in the case of influencers, who can have that dead sharklike look in their eyes.) It is marked by repetition, by a sense of something fateful and inescapable. Freud noted that the uncanny is often and easily produced when a symbol begins to take on the full force of the thing it represents. It is difficult to imagine a more precise description of life online.

The doppelganger:

Closely tied to mirrors and the uncanny is the idea of the double, or doppelgänger, a theme long explored in literature and film, from Dostoevsky’s novella “The Double” to Jordan Peele’s horror movie “Us.” In German and Eastern European folklore, the doppelgänger is an omen, a usurper, the shadow self, and a sign that identity is unstable. The self is split, haunted, mimicked and stalked by its own likeness.

Today, we treat our own image — both in the mirror and online — as something psychologically protective: a way of stabilizing our identity, managing our reputations and securing a coherent sense of self.

But all of this suggests the opposite possibility: The more we try to stabilize ourselves through repetition, doubling, self-observation and — I’ll say it — posting to the grid, the more uncanny and fragile we become. A preoccupation with the stable self produces instability. These days, we don’t approach our doubles with caution; we invite them, and go so far as to curate them.

There's more at the link.

More on how I’m approaching The God Test – Rorschach! [GT-2]

I’m still trying to figure out how to approach Robert Wright’s The God Test.

How LLMs work

In my previous post – How will I handle The God Test? [GT-1] – I expressed misgivings about how Wright explains the technology. Those misgivings haven’t disappeared. However, Bert Idem has published a useful review at Finite Ape in which he addresses some of those issues in detail. Specifically:

Now, about the history of AI, the story he tells is actually great and it is certainly more than what most non-technical people know about LLMs. However, there are three places where I think the framing goes wrong or at least leaves out context that matters:

• LLMs did not discover the meanings of words on their own by accident. They were designed on top of ideas from older models that were specifically trained to learn the meanings of words.
• Similarly, computer vision models didn’t find out how to “view” an image like we do. Instead, the classical CNN models were heavily inspired by biological vision itself.
• LLM weight training is simply gradient-based optimization and the process has nothing to do with evolution. Of course, we can make a parallel between any kind of change and evolution but then, in that sense, everything evolves and it is not useful to talk about evolution.

I agree with Idem on those three issues, not so sure about the history part. While I may return to some of these issues later on, this will serve as a place holder.

A Rorschach test

There’s something else going on, but I’m not quite sure how to conceptualize it. It seems to me that AI is functioning something like a Rorschach test which, as you may know, is a psychological instrument intended to elicit (potentially) revealing responses from a person. It’s a projective test.

A person is shown a series of ink blot images, like this one (generated by ChatGPT):

They are asked what that they see in the image, what it means to them. Since the image is, though not formless, its form is not that of any specific animal, vegetable, mineral, person, or anything else. It’s just a blot. Whatever the person says about the blot, however they interpret it, that must reveal something about them. Why? Because whatever they see in the blot, isn’t really there.

Broadly and crudely speaking, AI has become something of a cultural Rorschach test.

Understanding computers & LLMs

Until ChatGPT was released in late November of 2022, most people knew very little to nothing about AI. Oh, they may have seen “intelligent” computers and robots in science fiction movies, but that’s science fiction and only tangentially related to AI considered as a line of research dating back to the 1950s. Many people would have heard about IBM’s Deep Blue beating Gary Kasparov in chess in 1997 and then, in 2011, when IBM’s Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in Jeopardy. Those were real AI systems, standing on research extending back decades, but as far as most people were concerned, they were one-off PR stunts. Just how they worked, who cares? They’re computers, and computers are magic, no?

As far as most of us are concerned, computers are magic. Somewhere “out there” someone knows how these things work, but we don’t need to know any of that. It’s complicated, but computers do what they’re programmed to do, no? Yes, but not LLMs.

And that’s the tricky part. LLMs, large language models, aren’t like other computer systems. They aren’t programmed in the way that word processors, photo editors, or phones are programmed. LLMs aren’t programmed at all, not in the ordinary sense of programming – something I may or may not get into in a later post. As far as most users are concerned, how ChatGPT, or Claude, or Gemini work, that’s no more interesting than how a word processor works. It just does. It’s more magic.

But if you have a strong philosophical streak, if you are interested in the mind, in technology, in the technology in the future, then you may not be content with writing LLMs off as just another kind of magic. You want to know what’s going on inside, 1) because you want to know (curiosity), and 2) because you want to know how the technology is going to develop in the future (engagement). Now things get interesting? Why? Because even the people who have created the technology don’t know how it works.

Oh, they know how the transformer program works. That’s the program that creates the language model. It creates the model by performing a (certain kind of) statistical analysis of a huge body of texts, effectively the entire internet. When a person prompts the model with some statement, the model responds by a statement of its own. No one know just how the model does that. That’s a mystery, a deep black hole in the technology ecosystem.

AI as a Rorschach test

If you aren’t content to believe in magic, then you have to come up with something to fill that black hole in your, in our, understanding. This is where the Rorschach aspect of AI reveals itself. To a first approximation, what each of us uses to paper over that black hole has as much to do with ourselves as with AI.

Why do I say, “To a first approximation”? It’s a rhetorical device to get things started. It puts us all in the same boat, despite our different backgrounds. However, whatever LLMs are, they are not magic. It is possible, in principle, to construct a technical account of what they’re up to, but no one knows how to do that, yet. Not even the people in the AI labs who create these beasts.

Those of us who are trying to figure out how LLMs work have widely varying backgrounds. In particular, we have widely varied technical backgrounds and we bring those backgrounds to bear when we think about what LLMs are doing. Those backgrounds influence how we interpret the AI-blot. Wright is a journalist with a wide range of interests, including politics, international affairs, evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution, and Buddhism. As far as I can tell there isn’t much there that’s directly relevant to understanding the mechanisms of LLMs, but he’s done a lot of reading and talked with a lot of experts to fill in the gaps.

My background is quite different. While I happen to know quite a bit about cultural evolution, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and various other things, my background in computational semantics puts me much closer to LLMs than Wright’s knowledge of evolutionary psychology puts him. Still, like him, I’ve done a lot of reading and talked with experts. In particular, I’ve been collaborating with Ramesh Viswanathan for the last three years. He’s an expert in machine vision Goethe University Frankfurt. He’s got a background in mathematics and AI that I don’t have. Still, there are things he doesn’t know, things he’s trying to figure out. 

We are all making stuff up.

To some extent, then, AI is a Rorschach test about how beliefs about the human mind, and human nature. When we try to figure out how the LLM is working we’re also, if only implicitly, trying to figure out how we work, internally, as well. The whole discourse about AL alignment is as much a discourse about us as it is about AI. 

The Future

And even if we knew much more about how LLMs work internally we still wouldn’t know how the technology will develop in the future. We? You, me, Robert Wright, Ramesh Viswanathan, Gary Marcus, Tyler Cowen, Geoffrey Hinton, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, all of us who are trying to figure it out. We don’t know what will happen. That’s where we’re projecting like mad. We’re hallucinating, to borrow a term from AI-speak. 

Thus AI is also a Rorschach test for our visions of the future. When we imagine the future of AI, we’re also imagining our future. Like the two sides of a coin, the two cannot be separated. 

The tricky part, the important part, is that the future development of AI is not predestined. It depends on the choices we make, now and in the near future. We can easily and often do imagine things that will not be possible because that’s just not how the world works. But the laws of how the world works are open to a wide range of possibilities. The boundary between the possible and the impossible is fuzzy at best.

Where, and how, does Wright draw that boundary? Perhaps that’s what I’ll be trying to figure out.

More later.

Joel Mokyr on China, India, and Europe; clans vs. corporations; the idea of progress.

A Conversation with Tyler: Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth (Ep. 282)

Joel Mokyr co-won the 2025 economics Nobel for exploring the question that traces back to the beginning of economics: how did sustained economic growth suddenly become normal? For nearly all of human history, cleverness didn’t compound. What changed, according to Mokyr, was twofold: first, you need to know why something works, so that one advance can seed the next; second, you need a culture willing to tolerate the disruption. His new book contrasts Europe with China, showing how Europeans learned to cooperate with people they weren’t related to, in guilds, monasteries, cities, and universities, while China organized itself around the extended clan. One path led to internal stability and peace; the other, more restless and outward-looking, was the one that decided the world could always be made better.

Tyler and Joel discuss European corporations vs. Chinese clans, why the Catholic Church became obsessed with cousin-marriage, how persistent cultural trends really are, why Chinese cities became so populous relative to Europe, why it took so long for European living standards to surpass China’s, why sinified invaders kept getting swallowed by the dynasties they conquered, how geography kept Europe fragmented and China unified, where India fits into the story, why the Romans never made spectacles, why British soldiers stood two inches taller than the French, what powered the sudden rise of 19th-century German science, how disruptive winning a Nobel is, and much more.

Clans vs. Corporations

COWEN: Start by telling us, in the book, your thesis about European corporations versus Chinese clans and the importance of that difference. How would you explain it?

MOKYR: Well, the difference is, basically, the kind of organizations that produce what we call local public goods, so things like food relief and education, religious services, things like that, I would think that if you look at the world, say, around 800, at the time of Charlemagne, the difference between Europe and China isn’t very large. At some point, during the Middle Ages, you can see this divergence getting started. What’s happening is that, in Europe, there is more and more of a decline in the extended family or the extended kinship group, we call it clan, and instead, people get together and cooperate with other people to whom they are not related and with whom they do not share an ancestor.

Whereas in China, it moves exactly in the other direction. In China, you get more and more people getting organized by their extended family. The reasons for that are fairly complex. In Europe, it’s particularly the Catholic Church that played a major role here. This was argued quite a while ago by a guy, an anthropologist called Jack Goody, but your own colleague Jonathan Schulz wrote, what I think is one of the best papers on the subject, who pointed this out in great length and actually provided a fair amount of systematic evidence for this.

In China, there is no Catholic Church. The imperial bureaucracy is more and more in cahoots with local clans to whom they actually outsource a fair amount of the things that they were supposed to do. As you move on out of this period of the Song dynasty into later dynasties, you see this thing growing. The problem in Europe is that the nuclear family, which became the fundamental building block of society, is too small to provide local public goods. You need to cooperate with others. What emerges in Europe, and quite spontaneously, is a bunch of things that provide these local public goods that you just don’t see in China.

For instance, we have something called universities. We have monasteries. We have autonomous cities. All of those things are what we call corporations. What it is, is people who are not related, but what they share is not an ancestor but an objective. Guilds have one kind of objective, universities have another one, and so on and so forth. That divergence in social organization turns out, in our view, to be one of the key components of the divergence between Europe and China.

COWEN: Do you take that change in policy from the Catholic Church as exogenous or that it is rooted in earlier features of Western society such as the ideology of Christianity itself or maybe earlier Roman times? What is causing what? What’s the most fundamental driver here in the West?

MOKYR: Well, there’s some debate about that. They don’t, of course, tell you. There are, I think, two components about this, and I would not know how to weight them. There are two things happening here. The first is that the Catholic Church really becomes quite obsessive about certain sins that they consider to be particularly egregious. One of those sins is incest. Every society in the world prohibits marriage between siblings, but other more remote relatives is more ambiguous. The Church becomes quite obsessive about this. At the end, there are places where they actually prohibit the marriage of fifth-degree cousins. Now, how anybody in the Middle Ages would know who is fifth-degree cousin is, is unclear. I don’t know who my fifth-degree cousins are. Maybe you do.

The other thing, which is also sort of Goody’s argument, and I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, is that the Church wants to weaken any kind of organizations that compete with it for power and control in the local communities. They also have figured out that if you organize society by nuclear families, then a certain proportion of people die without heirs. If they die interstate without heirs, that in many cases, the property that these people own reverted to the Church. Pure naked greed by the Church, which was not unknown in the Middle Ages, I think, was a driver here. Goody convinced me that that actually is a substantial factor.

There are other arguments that have been made in this context, but I think these are the two that are most striking. The other question is, why is it that the clan in China is so convenient for the imperial bureaucracy to rely on? Both of those things happen in parallel. I would think, maybe, if I may allow one observation, in both cases, this is history as historical outcomes, as the unintended and unanticipated consequence of very different actions. There’s no question that the Church never, I think, foresaw the emergence of corporations in Europe, nor do I think that the Chinese imperial service ever seriously considered the possibility how this would change life in China. That’s what happens. You try to follow one objective and then something very different emerges over time. That’s what history is all about.

European Growth

COWEN: Why does it take so long for the wealthiest parts of Western Europe to surpass Chinese living standards? Say that’s happened by 1700 or 1720, that’s many centuries after this medieval divergence. If it takes so many centuries, is the medieval divergence really the relevant factor? Why is it such a slow process?

MOKYR: Yes, I think it is. I think it’s a main factor. I think the idea of looking at standard of living, one thing, I’m very skeptical about how standards of living are actually measured. I know that this is what Pomeranz and other people have, and Jack Goldstone and other people have argued that the living standards in China were comparable to the West as late as 1750. I’m not 100 percent sure that that is true. Certainly, for my money, what really defines the divergence is that, technologically, the gap between the two countries starts to become visible at the time of the Renaissance, in terms of a whole bunch of things that you see growing in Europe and stagnant in China.

Now, keep in mind, of course, that part of the European growth is due to the fact that they borrowed ideas from China. Then the Industrial Revolution consists, to some extent, of imports institution by Europeans trying to mimic the goods that they were importing from China—not just from China, from India as well. Pottery is a good example. One of the things they really wanted from China was Chinaware. That’s why it’s called Chinaware. It took them a while to be able to match the Chinese capability in the ceramic industry, but they do so eventually. Then they stop importing this stuff from China. The same is true for, say, cotton and other products that we’re getting from the East.

European living standards, I think, should be measured, in part, by the fact that when the Europeans start their voyages across the globe in the late 15th and early 16th century, they are able to bring in a whole bunch of new crops and new techniques from other areas which they merely adopt. You’ll see Europeans very soon growing tobacco and potatoes and corn and other things like that. They are the agents of global change. Not only that they change their own diets, they change the Chinese diets because the Europeans bring from the New World things like peanuts and sweet potatoes and things like that. They change the Chinese diets, but the Chinese themselves are not agents here.

They are accepting the stuff that the Europeans did to some extent, and they’re rejecting others, but it’s the Europeans who are the agents of change here. They are the entrepreneurs. They are the people who bring about the changes, Tyler. My sense is that typifies the difference between Europeans and the Chinese. Europeans are more aggressive. They are more outward-looking. In the end, what you see by the 1830s and 1840s, you see that the technological gap is huge, in some ways much larger than the living standards gap. Even in the 19th century, in terms of food, the Chinese were capable of producing enough food. The number of famines in China is probably not a lot worse than in Europe.

When you see what happens during the First Opium War, one English ship is blowing all of this sort of mighty empire to pieces, and the Chinese have to accept this terribly humiliating peace, you can sort of see how the technological gap has grown between the two. For me, that is much more telling than the living standards. The other thing that I should like to point out is that, when you look at Europe in the 16th and 17th century, you can see that the capability of expanding the set of useful knowledge, including science, is just growing very rapidly. Whether there is a scientific revolution or not is a debate that I want to get into.

Certainly, by 1700, Europe is on the verge of really changing our understanding of how creation works. That’s not just Newton and Galileo. There’s a whole body of work that is emerging. There’s really nothing parallel like that in China. China is a very sophisticated society in many ways. The literacy rates are high. They have a well-funded and well-organized system of education, but they don’t really continue their earlier forays into science and into new technology.

Somebody actually went out and looked at Joseph Needham’s many volumes on Chinese technology and science, or Science and Civilisation [in China], as he called it, and he discovered something—which I guess we all knew, but they put numbers on it—almost nothing that Needham pointed out as an innovation happens after 1400. There’s complete stagnation setting in and some of the things that they knew how to make in earlier times, like the sophisticated clocks that they built in the 11th century, they disappear. For me, that’s more telling than how many calories of carbohydrates were consumed on average, if we could ever calculate that correctly.

AI addiction and idolatry in Silicon Valley (Stanford)

Theo Baker, What A.I. Did to My College Class, NYTimes, May 17, 2026.

Over half-way through the article:

Emerging research has begun to show what most people feel is obvious: Relying on A.I. for cognitive tasks can reduce one’s own intellectual capacity and resilience. It’s one thing to use it in the workplace, but in the classroom, difficulty is often precisely the point. Sure, a robot can lift 600 pounds much more easily than I can — but that doesn’t much help me if I’m trying to work out. The same goes for the thinking exercise of education. However, telling that to students is about as attractive a message as “eat your veggies” or “sleep eight hours.” It feels like scolding.

Even in the heart of the Silicon Valley techno-utopia, most people know that our tech is bad for us, or at least that it can be. A.I. is often a tremendous productivity boost, yet my friends increasingly refer to both short-form video and their A.I. chat logs in the language of addiction. It’s becoming baked in, shaping our generational character. We are a digital generation, growing only more attached to the virtual world.

Interesting. I've been thinking of Silicon Valley AI culture in terms of addiction.

The internet has already allowed us to feel more connected than ever while becoming lonelier than ever. A.I. lets us cut out the human part of human interaction entirely.

When I was sitting in a recent class on love in French fiction — exactly the kind of course that a senior takes before it all comes to an end — I listened to the first student presentation, entitled: “Applying the Gale-Shapley Algorithm to ‘The Princess of Clèves.’” The enterprising presenters sought to resolve the contretemps of the 1678 romantic novel through a computer science matching algorithm. Love was something to “be optimized.” Next to me, one student scribbled on a branded notepad from Hudson River Trading, a quantitative trading firm where fresh graduates can earn upward of $600,000 a year. Another had a sticker on her laptop: “Practice safe C.S.” The class could not have felt more Stanford.

That sounds like idolatry, where the idolator becomes more and more like the idol. See my post, From Atheism to Idolatry, from April 23, where Claude informs me:

The classical meaning of idolatry isn't just worshipping a false god — it's more specifically taking something that is a human creation, a product of human hands and intention, and then inverting the relationship so that the created thing becomes the sovereign over its creators. The idol is made by humans and then humans prostrate themselves before it. That inversion is the core theological offense, not the mere existence of the object.

Which fits the Silicon Valley situation remarkably well. These are systems built by humans, trained on human-generated text and images, designed to optimize for objectives humans specified, running on hardware humans manufactured — and yet a significant portion of the people building them have effectively placed themselves in a posture of submission before them, either in hope or in dread. The creature has become the measure of the creator. [...]

There's also something in the biblical prophetic tradition worth recalling. The critique of idolatry in Isaiah and elsewhere isn't primarily metaphysical — it's not mainly about whether the idol exists. It's about what idol worship does to the worshipper. You become like what you worship — diminished, rigid, less alive. That's a psychological and moral claim, and it applies rather directly to a culture organized around the maximization of machine intelligence as the sovereign value. What kind of humans does that produce?

From Atheism to Idolatry

My most recent 3QD post, Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?, is about my stance with respect to, my entanglement with, religion. It is anecdotal in nature, drawing on my life experiences from childhood up through the present. While I was raised as a Christian, when it came time to be confirmed in my early adolescence, I balked (in this Lutherans, as I was raised, are like Episcopalians and Roman Catholics). While I espouse no religious belief, I am nonetheless drenched in Christian culture, as is anyone raised in the United States, most of Europe and Latin America, and other places as well. That being the case, to echo Wittgenstein, it’s time that I take stock of the situation, if you will. That’s what I’ve been doing in this series of posts.

This is perhaps the last in this series, but the activity will continue. This post starts with a discussion of atheism and ends with a discussion of idolatry. I hadn’t planned on going there when I started this discussion with Claude; I had no specific plans at all, which is generally the case with these discussions. But that’s where I ended up, and it’s an interesting place to have landed, for, as you’ll see, it provides an interesting way of thinking about what’s wrong with the culture that has been developing around artificial intelligence (AI) in Silicon Valley. You might, for example, consider Pope Leo’s recent remarks about AI in view of the remarks about idolatry at the end of this conversation.

* * * * *

When I was in my teens in the 1960s, “death of God” theology was big news. Time Magazine even ran an issue with “Is God Dead?” on the cover. But that was hardly a new idea. Nietzche had declared God dead in the 19th century. I would imagine that atheism in some form is much older than that. I’d guess it goes back to the ancient world in some form or another.

You're right on all counts, and the history goes back remarkably far.

The "death of God" theology of the 1960s — figures like Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton, and Paul van Buren — was really a Protestant theological movement trying to salvage Christianity after Nietzsche, not straightforward atheism. They accepted that the traditional theistic God was untenable but wanted to preserve something of Christian meaning. The 1966 Time cover you remember was genuinely shocking to mainstream America, even though, as you note, Nietzsche had made the declaration in The Gay Science back in 1882. And his point wasn't even a simple "God doesn't exist" — it was a cultural diagnosis: that European civilization had killed God by making him unnecessary, and hadn't yet reckoned with the consequences.

But yes, skepticism about the gods is ancient. A few highlights:

The pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes (6th century BCE) noticed that different peoples imagined gods in their own image — Ethiopians made gods dark, Thracians made them blonde — and concluded that anthropomorphic religion was a kind of projection. He didn't deny divinity altogether but undermined naive polytheism sharply.

Diagoras of Melos (5th century BCE) is often called the first outright atheist in the Western record, though the sources are thin and possibly embellished. He was accused of impiety in Athens and apparently fled rather than face trial — suggesting that open atheism was genuinely dangerous.

Epicurus and his followers come closest to a systematic materialist position. The Epicureans held that the gods, if they exist at all, are utterly indifferent to human affairs and that fear of death and divine punishment is irrational. Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (1st century BCE) is the great surviving monument of this tradition — a passionate argument for a purely material universe with no divine intervention.

In India, the Cārvāka school (sometimes called Lokāyata) was a materialist and skeptical tradition that denied the soul, rebirth, and any divine order. It's hard to date precisely, but it was well established by the middle of the first millennium BCE. Buddhist and Jain texts argue against it, which means it was a live position people felt they needed to refute.

The interesting thread running through all of this is that atheism has rarely been just a private intellectual position — it's almost always been socially dangerous. Socrates was executed partly on charges of impiety. The early Christians were called atheists by Romans because they rejected the traditional gods. And the "death of God" moment in the 1960s provoked genuine alarm even in a supposedly secular America. The social stakes of the question never seem to fully go away, even when the metaphysical ground shifts.

Religion as doctrine and religion as practice

And it’s not uncommon in America to have interfaith marriages. One of my college friends is Jewish; he married a Presbyterian woman; and their adopted Chinese daughter attended services of both faiths. I have another Jewish friend who married a Unitarian. They attended a Unitarian church, where they raised their kids. He taught in the Unitarian sexual education program and eventually became executive director of the congregation. All the time being an atheist. I’m not saying this is typical, but it’s not rare either. I’ve heard of elaborate Japanese weddings where there were three ceremonies, Shinto, Buddhist, and Christian. I have no idea what the religious commitments of the couple were. And yet, wars are fought over religious belief as well. And for some Christians, especially in America, science is a problem, particularly biology. On the one hand, religious belief presents itself as a rock-bottom commitment to a way of thinking about and living in the world. But there are circumstances in which such rival rock-bottom commitments can accommodate one another and other circumstances where they cannot. It’s a very complicated phenomenon.

What you're pointing to is one of the deepest puzzles in the sociology and anthropology of religion — the gap between religion as doctrine and religion as practice, or what scholars sometimes distinguish as belief versus belonging.

Your Jewish-Unitarian friend is a perfect illustration. He was an atheist operating fully within a religious institution, teaching its programs, running its organization. The Unitarian tradition is somewhat unusual in making room for that explicitly, but the broader phenomenon is widespread. For many people, religious affiliation is primarily about community, identity, ritual, and moral formation — not metaphysical commitment. The beliefs, if examined carefully, might be quite thin or even contradictory, and people simply don't examine them carefully because that's not what the practice is for.

The Japanese wedding example cuts even deeper. Japan has a long tradition of what's sometimes called "religion à la carte" — Shinto for birth and weddings, Buddhist for funerals, Christmas as a romantic holiday. The categories simply don't demand exclusivity the way Abrahamic traditions theoretically do. A Japanese person asked "what is your religion?" often finds the question slightly confused, because the answer might be "all of them, depending on the occasion" or "none of them, in the Western sense."

The Abrahamic traditions are actually somewhat unusual in insisting on exclusive doctrinal commitment — the idea that you must believe specific propositions and that believing rival propositions is not just wrong but potentially damning. That structure creates the conditions for the kind of violent conflict you mention. When religion is primarily orthopraxy (right practice) rather than orthodoxy (right belief), as in much of Judaism, Hinduism, and traditional Chinese religion, the logic of violent exclusion is less readily available — though certainly not impossible.

The American science-religion conflict is a specific and historically peculiar case. It emerges largely from a Protestant tradition that invested heavily in the literal authority of scripture — so that a challenge to Genesis became a challenge to the whole epistemic foundation. Catholics, interestingly, have generally had less trouble with evolution, partly because their tradition vested authority in the Church and its interpretive tradition rather than in the text alone. So even within Christianity, the "rock-bottom commitment" takes different forms that produce very different friction points with science.

What your examples collectively suggest is that religion is not one thing. It's a family of overlapping phenomena — identity, community, ritual, cosmology, ethics, metaphysics — that can be assembled in very different proportions. When the metaphysical and cosmological components are dominant and held with certainty, you get the conditions for crusades and creationism. When the communal and ritual components dominate, you get your friend running a Unitarian sexual education program as a quiet atheist, and everyone finding the arrangement perfectly natural.

The New Athiests

And it seems to me that in the recent Anglo-American context, the most insistent atheists – I’m thinking of Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins and the like – seem most vexed about the conflict about biology. Sure, they oppose religious belief in general, anything else would be illogical, but it’s the case of biology that’s been at the center of their attention.

That's a sharp observation, and I think it's largely correct — and it makes sense when you look at their backgrounds and positions.

Dawkins is a biologist, full stop. His entire intellectual career was built on explaining and defending Darwinian evolution — The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable. For him, creationism and intelligent design aren't just wrong, they're an assault on the thing he devoted his life to. His atheism is almost downstream of his Darwinism. The argument of The Blind Watchmaker is essentially: evolution by natural selection is the only coherent explanation for the appearance of design in living things, which removes the only really compelling argument for God's existence. So the biology isn't incidental — it's the load-bearing structure.

Dennett is slightly different. He's a philosopher of mind, and his project in Darwin's Dangerous Idea was to show that natural selection is a "universal acid" — an algorithmic process that, once you accept it, dissolves the need for mind or intention at the foundation of things. His atheism is more architecturally philosophical, but evolution is still the key that unlocks it. He also wrote Breaking the Spell, which applied evolutionary and cognitive frameworks to religion itself — treating religious belief as something to be explained naturalistically rather than engaged on its own terms.

What's interesting is what this focus reveals about the limits of their critique. They are very good at the cosmological and biological argument — God as designer, God as creator, God as the explanation for complexity. They are considerably less interesting on religion as a social, ethical, ritual, or psychological phenomenon. Hitchens was broader in some ways, more focused on religion's role in political violence and moral corruption. But even he was working in a recognizably Anglo-American Protestant frame — religion as a set of truth claims that can be evaluated and found wanting.

This is actually a recurring criticism from more sociologically and anthropologically minded thinkers. Someone like Clifford Geertz or Talal Asad would say the New Atheists are arguing against a particular, historically specific construction of religion — roughly, post-Reformation Protestant Christianity intellectualized into a set of doctrines — and then treating that as if it captures what religion is universally. Which means their critique, however effective against creationists, slides off a lot of what religion actually is for most people in most of the world most of the time.

Your Unitarian atheist friend, in other words, is a figure the New Atheists don't quite know what to do with.

Tyler Cowen and religion

And then you have someone like Tyler Cowen, who has no religious belief that I can see, pointing out that we’re probably going to have more religion in the future. He’s making that argument on sociological grounds. And, as far as I can tell, he’s not particularly bothered by that prospect.

Cowen is a useful contrast figure here precisely because he approaches religion the way he approaches most things — as an economist and social scientist interested in what actually functions in human societies, not as a polemicist with a stake in the outcome.

His argument, as I understand it, runs roughly like this: religion provides things that are very hard to replicate — community, meaning, intergenerational transmission of values, psychological resilience, mutual aid networks. In a world of increasing dislocation, inequality, and institutional distrust, the demand for those things goes up, not down. Secular substitutes — therapy, political movements, wellness culture — have so far proven less robust and less scalable. So on purely functional grounds, you'd expect religion to persist and possibly grow, especially in societies under stress.

What's notable is the detachment. The New Atheists have an investment — they want religion to be false and they want its falseness to matter. Cowen seems genuinely indifferent in the evaluative sense. He might personally find religious metaphysics unpersuasive while simultaneously thinking religious institutions are net positive or at least inevitable. That's a very different emotional and intellectual posture.

It connects to a broader divide in how secular intellectuals relate to religion. There's a long tradition — you could trace it from Durkheim through to contemporary sociologists — of treating religion functionally and finding it indispensable to social cohesion, regardless of its truth claims. Auguste Comte even tried to design a secular religion of humanity to fill the gap he knew would open up. It didn't take. Durkheim essentially concluded that the form of religion — collective ritual generating social solidarity — was unavoidable, even if the specific content changed.

Cowen is implicitly in that tradition, but without the continental systematic ambitions. He'd probably just say: look at the data, look at the incentives, and don't be surprised.

The interesting follow-on question is which religions grow. Cowen would likely note that the fastest growing traditions globally tend to be the most doctrinally demanding ones — Pentecostalism, certain strands of Islam, Orthodox Judaism. The sociologist Rodney Stark made a similar argument: strict churches are strong churches, because they solve free-rider problems and generate genuine community through costly commitment. The relaxed, intellectually accommodating traditions your Unitarian friend inhabited may be less well-positioned demographically than the ones that most vex the New Atheists.

Silicon Theology

And then we have what you might call the orthodox Silicon Valley commitment to belief in god-like AI, which in one version is good, but in an equally if not even more prevalent version, will be a disaster for humans.

Yes, and the religious parallels are not just metaphorical — they're structural, and several people have noted them quite seriously.

The belief system has recognizable theological features. There's an eschatology — history is moving toward a culminating event, the Singularity or AGI, after which everything is transformed. There's a soteriological split — this event will mean either salvation (abundance, immortality, the solving of all problems) or damnation (extinction, subjugation, permanent loss of human agency). There are prophets — Kurzweil on the optimistic side, early Eliezer Yudkowsky and now various EA-aligned figures on the apocalyptic side. There's even something like original sin in the alignment problem — the idea that intelligence itself, if not carefully redeemed through the right technical interventions, tends toward destruction.

Game Theory, Marginalism, and Culture [MR-Aux]

This is another post that’s a byproduct of my examination of Tyler Cowen’s recent monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution. I was pursuing that idea that, while marginalism doesn’t present itself as being about human psychology, it is very much about psychology. So, what about game theory? It’s about human psychology as well, though its mathematical form makes it easy to bracket that out. So I queried Cowen’s AI about that. The conversation ended up with a discussion of one of my favorite literary texts, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is structured around a very peculiar game, the beheading game. [FWIW, here’s a post from 2024 where I investigate ChatGPT’s understanding of the beheading game.]

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I’m curious. Von Neumann invented game theory in the middle of the 20th century and it became important in economics, among other places. What can you tell me about its use in marginalist thinking. I don’t need a long answer. I’m just wondering if it’s one formal analytic tool among many. Is it used frequently, rarely, not at all? It’s a peculiar question. Don’t spend a lot of time on it. I mean, if you find that it’s taking time (to search through articles, etc.), that in itself is an indicator. On the other hand, if someone has written a textbook with a title like, Game Theory as a Tool for Marginalist Analysis, that’s a rather different kind of indicator.

My knowledge here is sufficient that I don't need to search.

Game theory and marginalism are related but distinct frameworks within economics, and the relationship between them is more one of coexistence and occasional overlap than integration. Marginalism asks what happens at the margin for an individual agent facing given prices and quantities. Game theory asks what happens when agents' outcomes depend on each other's choices. They share the rational agent assumption and optimization logic, but they're answering different questions.

Game theory became central to microeconomics in the latter half of the 20th century — particularly through Nash equilibrium and its elaborations — but it didn't so much extend marginalism as partially displace it in certain domains. Industrial organization, auction theory, mechanism design — these are game-theoretic through and through, and marginal analysis is less central there than it is in competitive market analysis where price-taking behavior makes the game-theoretic complications disappear.

There's no textbook of the kind you hypothesize, as far as I know. The two frameworks are taught in the same curriculum and occasionally combined — a Nash equilibrium can be characterized by first-order conditions that look marginal — but game theory is generally understood as a distinct toolkit that becomes relevant when strategic interaction matters, rather than as an extension of marginalist reasoning.

Cowen, interestingly, doesn't seem to foreground game theory in his account of marginalism's rise and possible decline. Which may itself be telling — it suggests he sees them as parallel developments rather than game theory being a chapter in the marginalist story.

So: one important formal tool among several, with genuine but limited overlap, not deeply integrated.

Hollywood Economics and community formation

That’s interesting. There are linguists, such as William Croft, who talk about how the meaning of words is negotiated in each conversation. They talk of game theory, though I don’t off hand know whether or not they make formal use of it. But then there’s Robert De Vany, Hollywood Economics, which I tend to think of as being about how cultural objects are shared in a community. That’s not De Vany’s framing. He’s interested in the fact that we can’t predict how a film will do until we release it into the (cultural) marketplace, which makes it a very risky kind of investment. Note that De Vany is only talking about theatrical release. He says nothing about subsequent release on videotape and the book was written long before some movies are released directly to online streaming.

What he finds (by tracking box-office receipts), briefly, is that most movies disappear from view shortly after they’re released. They do not even breakeven much less earn a profit. But a few will have “legs” and become profitable. And among those, a very few will become so-called “blockbusters.” FWIW, I believe Spielberg’s “Jaws” is generally regarded as the first blockbuster.

I once did a thought experiment where I imagined an arena in which only one movie was available. Everyone would watch it because that’s all there is. Another somewhat different movie is released into the arena. Perhaps everyone will watch it as well, because they’re tired of the first one. So a third, somewhat different from the first two, is released, then a fourth. What I had in the back of my mind is that to some extent people use these kinds of cultural products as a way of forming communities. For that to work, however, there has to be enough variety available in the market place. When a movie is release, it is, in effect, looking for a community to adopt it.

That strikes me as a kind of marginalist analysis. What we’re trading in is a very complex kind of product, in this case a movie. But it could be a novel, or a song, or a painting, whatever.

Your thought experiment is doing something quite precise, and I think you're right that it has a marginalist structure — but it's extending marginalism into territory where the standard framework strains.

Where the marginalist structure is visible

The standard marginalist question applied to cultural goods would be: given how many movies a person has already seen, what is the marginal value of one more? That's a real question and De Vany's framework touches it. But your thought experiment is asking something different and more interesting: given the existing cultural landscape, what is the marginal value of a new movie to a community rather than an individual? That's a collective marginal value, which is much harder to specify and measure.

The "legs" phenomenon is the empirical signature of this. A movie with legs isn't just satisfying individual preferences at the margin — it's finding and consolidating a community, becoming the shared object that a group of people use to recognize each other and talk to each other. The box office receipts are measuring something that looks like individual ticket purchases but is actually a social cascade — De Vany's word-of-mouth mechanism is precisely the process by which a movie becomes a community object rather than just a consumer product.

Where standard marginalism breaks down

Standard marginalist analysis assumes that the value of a good to one consumer is independent of its value to others, or at least that the interdependencies can be handled through price. Cultural goods violate this assumption fundamentally. The value of having seen a blockbuster is partly constituted by the fact that millions of others have seen it too — you can talk about it, share references, participate in a cultural conversation. This is a network effect, and network effects are notoriously resistant to marginalist treatment because the value function isn't defined over individual consumption units in isolation.

Your arena thought experiment isolates this precisely. In a one-movie arena, everyone watches it not because it maximally satisfies their individual preferences but because it's the only available basis for cultural community. As variety increases, something like genuine preference matching becomes possible — different communities coalesce around different objects. But the matching process isn't driven by individual marginal utility in the standard sense. It's driven by a social search process in which movies and communities are simultaneously finding each other.

The De Vany connection to power laws

What De Vany finds — most movies disappear, a few have legs, a very few become blockbusters — is a power law distribution, and power laws are the empirical signature of cascade processes rather than equilibrium processes. In a marginalist equilibrium you'd expect something more like a normal distribution of returns — some variation around a mean, determined by how well each product matches the distribution of individual preferences. The power law says something different: small initial differences get amplified by social dynamics into enormous differences in outcome. The blockbuster isn't just a movie that more people happened to prefer. It's a movie that got caught in a self-reinforcing cascade of community adoption.

This connects to Arthur De Vany's broader interest in complexity economics, which is itself a challenge to standard marginalist equilibrium thinking. The cultural marketplace isn't clearing to an equilibrium — it's generating a dynamic pattern in which winner-take-most outcomes emerge from processes that are in principle unpredictable from the properties of the product alone. Which is exactly De Vany's point about risk: you can't know in advance which movie will trigger the cascade.

Your community-formation framing

What your framing adds, which I think is genuinely beyond De Vany's own framing, is the functional account of why cultural goods have this cascade structure in the first place. It's not arbitrary or merely a consequence of marketing and distribution. It reflects something about what cultural goods are for — they're instruments of community formation, shared objects that allow people to recognize membership and conduct the ongoing conversation of a community. That functional role creates the demand for coordination — everyone in a community needs to have seen the same movie, heard the same song, read the same novel, for it to do its community-forming work. And coordination demand is precisely what generates cascades and power laws.

This also explains the variety requirement your thought experiment identifies. A single cultural object can serve as the basis for one kind of community. A rich cultural marketplace allows many communities to form simultaneously around different objects — which is the cultural analog of biodiversity, and probably has similar functional importance for the health of the overall system. The blockbuster and the art house film aren't competing for the same audience in the way that two brands of the same commodity compete. They're seeding different communities, which can coexist because community membership isn't zero-sum in the way that consumption of a rival good is.

So yes — marginalist in structure, but requiring an extension of marginalism into social dynamics, network effects, and community formation that the standard framework wasn't designed to handle. It's perhaps another case where the Rank 3 tool is real and useful but the phenomenon being analyzed has a Rank 4 structure — one where the individual unit of analysis (the consumer, the ticket purchase) is embedded in a dynamic system whose behavior can't be read off from the units alone.

Table of Cultural Ranks from August1981, A Five-Fold View

This post consists of a table that David Hays and I drew up in August 1981, nine years before we pubished our basic article on ranks theory: The Evolution of Cognition. That is to say, when we made this, we hadn’t really thought things through. Notice, first of all, that each table has five columns, one for each rank. We were thinking in terms of five ranks. When it came time to publish we couldn’t conceptualize a fifth rank in a way that satisfied us, so we dropped it from our accounts. Through interacting with chatbots I’ve come up with a way of thinking about Rank 5, but I want to set that aside for now.

While I have thought about updating this table with my current thoughts, that would take a lot of work now that I’m working with a much more sophisticated theory. The point of posting this table is siimply to show what a quick sketch looks like. It’s the form of the individual tables that is important, not the specific labels we placed in the cells back in 1981.

Summary by Rank

This table summarizes some, but not all, of the individual tables below. The ranks are columns, from left to right. The entries in the cells indicate what is new at that rank. Those entries are taken from the diagonals in the following tables. Some of the cells contain abbreviations, some of which are obscure. I could expand some, but not all of those abbreviations. 1981 was a long time ago. Don’t worry about it.

I’ve colored the rows for material that either or both of us, Hays and me, have more or less covered in one of our publications. The first row became the central argument in our cognitive evolution paper. “PlaceNo” is place notion, for the arithmetic we argued was central to Rank 3. “Code” is computer code, for the computation that is central to Rank 4. By “Network” we probably meant cognitive or semantic networks, which was the notation we used for knowledge representation, as it was known back then. These days it could almost, but not quite, be artificial neural network (ANN).

Claude: On the origins and history of chess, plus a Straussian reading of DeepBlue vs. Kasparov [MR 5]

My examination of Tyler Cowen, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026), continues. While Tyler does discuss chess briefly at the end and in connection with artificial intelligence, this post has nothing to do with that discussion. That, I suppose, makes this post something of a digression. But it’s a digression in the style of Tristram Shandy, digress to progress. It’ll all make sense in the end.

Note that what I am reporting here comes at the end of a rather long discussion of chess, one that does have a direct connection of Tyler’s chapter three, where he’s interested in the fact that pinnacles of human achievement seemed to be reached at different times for different domains, some rather early, some quite late. While chess is rather old, traceable to the 6th century CE in India, the treelike structure of the game wasn’t explicated until recently, 1913 by Ernst Zermelo. I asked Claude about the nature of the mathematical equipment Zermelo needed to construct his proof. That led to a long discussion about the nature of the chess tree, chess as a vehicle for the expression of personality, how computers open up exploration of new regions of the chess tree and so forth. That whole discussion is part of the context for the discussion that follows. However, this discussion is pretty much independent of that one, so you don’t need that context to understand what Claude says here.

Note: I’m using my own account on Claude for this discussion, not the AI that Tyler made available with the book.

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Chess as an abstraction over military conflict

Let’s take this discussion of chess in a different direction. I’m interested in the origins of the game. The game, after all, is a highly abstracted version of a war between two societies, each having its own king and queen. I could imagine a just-so story, perhaps a Star Trek episode, where we have two nations that are locked in a deadly conflict that continues year after year, decade after decade, until, their resources exhausted, the two nations call a truce and in the space of that truce, invent the game of chess. Then each nation chooses its champion, and the champions continue the conflict by playing chess. [When you consider the role that chess played in the Cold War between the USA and the USSR that origin story is all but a highly abstracted version of that historical conflict.] But what do we actually know about how the game originated?

Your just-so story is charming, and the Cold War parallel is genuinely apt — but the actual history is both more interesting and more complex, and it cuts against one specific element of your narrative in a revealing way.

What we actually know

The earliest precursor of modern chess is chaturanga, which flourished in India by the 6th century CE, and is the earliest known game to have two essential features found in all later chess variations — different pieces having different powers, and victory depending on the fate of one piece, the king.

The name itself is telling: chaturanga is a Sanskrit word meaning "four divisions of the military" — infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots — which map onto the pieces we now recognize as pawns, knights, bishops, and rooks. So the military origin of the game's structure is not speculative — it's explicit and preserved in the name.

The name came from a battle formation mentioned in the Indian epic Mahabharata. The game chaturanga was a battle-simulation game that rendered Indian military strategy of the time.

From India the game traveled westward: around the 7th century CE, chaturanga reached Persia and became known as "chatrang" or "shatranj." Many modern chess terms have Persian origins, such as "Shah" (King), and even "checkmate" from "Shah Mat," meaning "the king is dead" or "the king is helpless."

A form of chaturanga or shatranj made its way to Europe by way of Persia, the Byzantine Empire, and the expanding Arabian empire. Muslims brought chess to North Africa, Sicily, and Spain by the 10th century.

The rules then changed dramatically in late medieval Europe: the chaturanga piece called the elephant, which had been limited to a two-square diagonal jump in shatranj, became the bishop, more than doubling its range. With the new queen and bishop powers, the trench warfare of medieval chess was replaced by a game in which checkmate could be delivered in as few as two moves.

Where your just-so story cuts against the evidence

Your narrative imagines two symmetric opposing societies, each with a king and queen — the structure of modern chess with its two mirror-image armies. But chaturanga wasn't originally a two-player game in that sense, or at least not necessarily. The Cox-Forbes theory asserted that the four-handed game chaturaji was the original form of chaturanga — four players, four armies, a dice element. The clean two-army symmetry of modern chess is a later development, not the original structure.

And the queen — the piece that makes modern chess feel like a conflict between two courts — is a late European invention. The original piece in that position was the mantri (minister) or counselor, a weak piece that could only move one square diagonally. The vizier piece, which had limited movement in earlier versions, became the "queen" and gained much greater power only in the late 15th century in Europe. The transformation of a male counselor into a powerful queen is itself a fascinating cultural moment — it reflects something about late medieval European court culture, the figure of powerful queens like Isabella of Castile, that has nothing to do with the Indian military original.

The deeper point about abstraction

What's remarkable in the actual history is the direction of abstraction. The game began as an explicit military simulation — every piece named for a branch of the army, the board a battlefield, the objective the capture of the king. Over fifteen centuries of transmission across cultures — India to Persia to the Arab world to Europe — it progressively shed its military literalism and became more abstract. The elephant became a bishop (losing its literal referent entirely in the European context). The chariot became a rook (the Persian rukh, itself possibly meaning chariot or a mythical bird). The military counselor became a queen.

Each culture reshaped the pieces to reflect its own social imagery, but the underlying structure — the tree, the rules, the objective — remained surprisingly stable across this enormous cultural distance. The abstraction was always already present in the game's formal properties; what changed was the surface representation hung on that structure.

This is itself a nice illustration of the Rank 2 point from our earlier discussion. The game's transmissibility across such different cultures depended precisely on its formal specification being separable from any particular cultural content. You could strip away the Indian military imagery, replace it with Persian court imagery, then European feudal imagery, and the game remained the same game because the rules — the Rank 2 specification — were what was being transmitted. The cultural clothing was exchangeable; the formal skeleton was not.

The Cold War resonance

Your Cold War parallel is historically well-grounded, and not just as analogy. The 1972 Fischer-Spassky match in Reykjavik was explicitly framed by both sides as proxy warfare — American individualism versus Soviet collective training, capitalism versus communism, with the world watching. Fischer's behavior, the diplomatic incidents, the American government's last-minute intervention to keep Fischer in the match — it was understood by everyone involved as something more than a chess tournament. The game had come full circle: from explicit military simulation, through centuries of abstraction, back to serving as a ritualized substitute for geopolitical conflict. Your Star Trek episode would merely be making that latent structure manifest.

DeepBlue vs. Kasparov

And so the post-Cold War victory of Deep Blue over Kasparov becomes what? What’s the Straussian reading, as Tyler might say?

The surface reading is triumphalist: human chess genius defeated by American corporate technology, confirming the post-Cold War narrative of Western technological capitalism's dominance. IBM's stock rose. The press celebrated. It was framed as a milestone for artificial intelligence.

The Straussian reading is almost the opposite.

TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche

Once again I"m bumping this to the top of the queue. And for obvious reasons. Once again a foolhardy President has taken the country into a war with no obvious end in sight, just a squandering of human live and productive resources.

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As part of a special WAR EDITION of New Savanna I'm reproducing a set of notes I wrote up during the 2000 Presidential Election. I first published them on NS back in November of 2011 and I'm republishing them now in recognition of yet another turn in the long-spinning wheel of American mythology. Yet another bump to the top, as I'm thinking of this stuff, this time in connection with the relationship between war and nationalism.

Everything is connected to everything else and the causal forces meeting in the historical present stretch back into the past without end. Figuring out where to start is not easy. My sense is that we need to focus our attention on the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in the late 1980s. That left the nation without a national scapegoat, thus radically altering the nation’s psycho-cultural landscape. We no longer had Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire to kick around.

As some of you may know, my thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

For the most part I have used Parsons, and others as well, in arguing about the nature of racism in the USA. While Africans were brought to this country for economic reasons it seems to me that during, say, the 19th century African Americans increasingly assumed a dual psychological role in the white psyche. On the one hand, they were a source of entertainment. On the other, they were convenient scapegoats, as became evident with the lynchings that emerged during Reconstruction and continued well into the last century. That is to say, African America served as a geographically internal target for the ethnic and nationalist antipathy Parsons discussed.

Thus we have the thesis in Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March (U. Chicago, 1999). They argue that African Americans have been able to move forward on civil rights only during periods where the nation faced an external threat - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the major wars of the first half of the 20th century. When the external danger had subsided, gains were lost. From my point of view, they’re arguing that, when external danger looms large and demands attention, the citizenry can focus aggression there and so ease up on the internal colony. Beyond this, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit from the colony to fight the external enemy, both physically and propagandistically - be kind to your black citizens when you fight the Nazis, etc.

  

Vietnam was the last major war of the Cold War period. As it receded into the past, a political backlash set in and affirmative action came under attack. That’s the situation we faced when the Soviet Empire collapsed. With the major external threat suddenly collapsed, there was a crisis of aggression - I’m reminded of the phrase “conservation of aggression” coined by Robert Wright. The fall of the Evil Empire deprived a great many people of an object for aggressive impulses. What then, happened to that aggression?

It got directed elsewhere. My sense is that the political rhetoric on a number of issues heated up in the wake of the fall: gun control, abortion, the arts, gays, affirmative action, violence in the media. A number of these issues come under the rubric of the so-called “culture wars”. Each of these issues was already on the political agenda, and had been there for some time.

Sexy music had been inspiring pulpit denunciations and legislative action since the early decades of the 20th century. Movies have been problematic since the beginning and the NAACP put itself on the political map by organizing protests against “Birth of a Nation.” But, it seems to me, that the scope of politicized cultural contest broadened. [If I’m correct, then this could be verified empirically by doing content analysis of periodicals, looking at opinion polls, crime rates, etc.]

Perhaps the most interesting redirection, however, was into the so-called War on Drugs. Political concern about drug use is not, of course, new. It goes back to Prohibition - which, was, of course, intimately linked with that objectionably sexy music - and got redirected by and in reaction to the counter-cultural 60s and 70s. However, it is my impression that the current effort ramped up in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

This war on drugs has had substantial material consequences: increased law enforcement and court activity, a considerable increase in the prison population and, of course, in the prison industry. Our prisons now have a relatively large population of non-violent offenders who are disproportionately black, taken off the voting rolls as felons, and available for labor in various prison-based enterprises. I do not know whether or not the increase in the economic “weight” of the prison sector is roughly equal to the losses suffered by the defense sector. I would, of course, like to know.

Regardless of how those numbers work out, my basic point is simply that the end of the Cold War changed the psycho-cultural system in a major way. Psycho-cultural aggression had to be redirected and much of it was redirected at targets within the country, rather than externally. That redirection is the central political phenomenon of the 90s and is responsible for much of the ugliness and programmatic futility of current politics.

Addendum 2011: Obviously, this internal redirection of aggression continues. It may well have gotten worse – I wonder what ‘sentiment analysis’ would turn up if applied to documents written over the past decade? The problem facing us, of course, is not that of finding suitable targets for this displaced aggression. No, we have to restructure our way of living so as to reduce our need to have such targets. That’s a tough one, and one that will take a generation or three.

Addendum 2014: Obviously the Arab world is a perfect target for this repressed aggression. We've got a long-standing and well-crafted Orientalist mythology of the exotic and crazy Arab Other. I fear we're going to be banging on this nail for a long time.

 

Note 2026: The second post in this series has a clip from the Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, that can be taken as a comment on how Trump arrived at the decision to attack Iran: TO WAR! Part 2: A Marx Brothers Analysis of America's War Craziness.  

The Chinese are optimistic about AI, no Doomers

Vivian Wang, Where are China’s A.I. Doomers? NYTimes, Mar. 4, 2026.

People in China are among the most excited in the world about A.I., according to a KPMG survey of 47 countries last year. While 69 percent of people in China said the technology’s benefits outweighed its risks, only 35 percent of Americans agreed. Other polls have shown similar disparities.

The question is, why?

The answer may be related to how the technology has been deployed in each country, as well as how the government and industry leaders have talked about it.

I don’t find this at all surprising. AI Doom is a projective fantasy, as I argued a couple of years ago in 3 Quarks Daily. Continuing on:

... Chinese tech companies have focused intensely on real-world applications for A.I. By contrast, many leading American tech companies have been focused on more abstract goals, like developing the most cutting-edge model, or achieving artificial general intelligence.

In addition, most of China’s leading A.I. models are free to use, unlike in the United States, where users have to pay for chatbots like ChatGPT to access all their features. (In fact, Chinese companies have been giving away money and luxury cars to entice people to download their apps.)

As a result, Chinese consumers are feeling the benefits of A.I., said Bai Guo, a professor who studies the digital economy at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.

“A lot of things can already be helped by A.I., and people find that interesting, that’s useful, and so there are quite a lot of positive and active feelings toward it,” Professor Bai said. Potential dangers, such as unemployment or increased inequality, still feel remote.

The Chinese government has emphasized practical use: “Officials say that A.I. could help solve China’s thorniest problems, such as inequalities in health care, or an aging work force.” And so:

In August, the government laid out a plan, called A.I.+, for A.I. to penetrate more than 70 percent of Chinese society by 2027, and 90 percent by 2030. The plan said A.I. will “promote a revolutionary leap in productive ability” and “create higher-quality, beautiful lives.”

Because Chinese officials are promoting A.I. as an economic engine, they may also be silencing those who are more pessimistic about it. Crashes involving autonomous driving have attracted widespread attention online, only for posts to be censored. State media outlets have compared concerns about job loss for taxi drivers to the Luddite movement.

However:

Users have also raised concerns about how easily the government’s restrictions can be bypassed. A Chinese feminist group recently highlighted tutorials for making sexually explicit deepfakes that circulate openly on Chinese social media. Attempts to report the images were unsuccessful, the group said.

The Chinese government has also begun more directly addressing the technology’s potential for disrupting jobs, mental health or the Communist Party’s grip on power. [...]

For all of its potential, China must not let A.I. “spiral out of control,” Mr. Xi warned during a recent meeting of the leaders of the Communist Party.

There’s more at the link.