79. True Names and Cantor-Slashing Intersectionality 🔗

August 12, 2021

In which I use Cantor diagonalization and prime numbers as metaphors for irreducible identity — arguing that intersectionality strengthened what it should have subverted, that humans should aspire to be like primes rather than factorable composites, and that the Perfect Joke addresses True Names.

🔗

Human beings should be like prime numbers. If you can be factored into prime attributes shared with others, you’re kinda interchangeable.

Like husband x father x (founder)^2 x Broncos_fan can be replaced by (husband x founder x Broncos_fan) x (father x founder)

🔗

This is what kills intersectionality ontologically. As in, if we get a black lesbian for our movie, we get 0.5 credit for black and lesbian, plus extra credit for cross product. Humanity as unbundled and stacked combinatorial feature vector, then rebundled into Borg cube.

🔗

If it’s not in the product space of the legible feature vector, it can’t be modeled. The legibilizing conceit is that the combinatorial signature of included features is all or most of what matters.

🔗

Another math metaphor. Treat the True Name as an uncountable infinity and the intersectional identity as a finite or countable infinite quantity subtracted from it. You’ve taken away 0% of what the True Name points to. Your feature vector isn’t all or even most of you. It’s ~0%.

🔗

To identify by intersectional identity is to dehumanize. The only defensible pragmatic justification is to counter even worse dehumanization through worse frames. And that only as a temporary measure. To bootstrap towards primal True Name being.

🔗

Intersectionality was a short-sighted idea, and the best that can be said for it is that it was perhaps a desperate measure for desperate times, when far too much of too many people was being erased through homogenization.

🔗

This is only incidentally commentary on culture war. What got me thinking of this is asking the question, “who is worth winning for?”

The intuitive answer I jumped to was True Named people, not Box People.

When you win in a routine way at work, typically who else wins? What’s the broadest useful boundary.

Eg. If I “win” with a viral blog post, English-reading middle class wins with a bit of an insight hit.

If an Android engineer “wins” with a neat feature, 90% of the world wins.

🔗

Ie people who are at, or in the process of uncovering, their True Name, or prime-number, or infinity-nature. Equivalently infinite-gamers.

🔗

Let’s say you make a joke and people like or dislike it. If the partition can be nearly exactly described by a feature-based partition (eg “women like it, men don’t”) it’s a Box-people win. That’s why such humor is called “identitarian” and is low quality.

🔗

If otoh there is no discernible pattern to who likes it, you’ve found a True-Named joke. The joke can be incorporated into the true names of all who laughed, but in a weirdly entangled way. Your True Name is a function of all things you respond to in a “random pattern” way.

🔗

This is an approach to identity analogous to the sieve of Eratosthenes procedure for filtering out composites, leaving only primes. I’m straining at the limits of this metaphor. Throw away anything that’s explainable by legible features leaving only your random residual response.

🔗

The set of random/pattern-free pointers to you, is the irreducible residue that defines the illegible core of infinite being, the thing deserving to be uniquely named with a name like Pi. The part that cannot be reduced to a small shell script. Kolmogorov-incompressible kernel.

🔗

Now this joke, let’s call it the Perfect Joke. The one that makes a completely illegible random subset of people laugh. No matter how you slice and dice the audience, you cannot separate laughers from non-laughers with a finite set of attributes. Can you construct it?

🔗

It is similar to (perhaps isomorphic to) the existentialist idea of a truly random act. Can’t find a good ref for it.

But this Perfect Joke is an example of what to me is aspirationally the highest art. You’ll never actually hit it, but you can be closer rather than farther.

🔗

Btw, subtle trap: if your art repeatedly picks out the same random set, but nothing else does, you can become an attribute (“people who like X’s jokes” becomes a reductive prime feature like “black people”). So you need illegibility of temporal correlatedness too.

🔗

I said, in the thread QTed up thread, that the “Box people” who have responded to my writing over the years is basically English-reading middle class. And I do have consistent readership too, so by both measures, my writing is far short of existentially perfect/random art.

🔗

But it’s not bad. While I’ve found a few coarse vector features (readership is majority male for eg, and concentrated in the moving 10-years-younger-than-me window), it’s actually hard to detect patterns beyond those. Huge variance on most other variables.

🔗

Still, can do better. How do you get more random? It’s not enough to simply stop appealing to the Box side of people. You need imagination to appeal to True-Named side (everybody has both a Box they’re working themselves out of, and a True Name they’re growing into/uncovering).

🔗

I’ve made a lot of progress in the last year figuring out what I want to stop doing, and I’ve stopped almost all of it. The harder challenge now is identifying things to start/continue doing.

🔗

I recommend this challenge to everybody working in public: discover approximate instances of your Perfect Art by trial and error: things that appeal to maximally random subsets of your available audience.

Some version of this is likely possible in more private lives too.

🔗

Seeking out the primality in others is not the only way to progressively uncover the primality in yourself, but is probably the easiest.

Tldr: don’t reduce people; make them more whole. That’s what it means to “see” others — make them more whole, and be made more whole in turn.

🔗

The irony is… I think Crenshaw’s original intersectionality idea was actually motivated by a very similar ontological aim. Basically perform something like a Cantor diagonal on finite notions of identity. Except it went badly wrong because of an insufficiently expressive frame.

🔗

It was done in a way that strengthened what should have been subverted.

There’s probably a rigorously formalizable version of the argument in this thread but I’m not really interested in crafting it. I believe it enough I just want to use the result somehow.

🔗

What I’ve discovered so far about searching for Perfect Joke type art is that you have to filter out or subvert Box features of ideas, and tap as deep as possible into unconscious stream of consciousness to generate primality. Aka, formulaic exclusion, anti-formulaic inclusion.

🔗

Primality in work tends to draw out True Named sides of people. Mostly because you can’t dissect the object, the whole subject forms a response. It’s not a feature subset of you that’s laughing.

🔗

I’ll define a thing that may not exist: a super-perfect joke that makes everybody laugh. Nobody can resist laughing.

🔗

One of these days I’ll vanish past the event horizon of my own latent spaces like time cube guy

🔗

Update: creating or responding to perfect jokes make you slightly more true-named in an unpredictable way, breaking with box-predictable past, so even if nominally same people laugh each time, it’s mitigated by them getting slowly uncorrelated from past. More free/random.

🔗

So there’s an ergodic hypothesis here. Making 1 person laugh in a random way for n days is like making n random people laugh for 1 day. This allows you to apply idea to non-public work. With just family or an SO for eg. Grow more random together.