6 ms·

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made

73 points by longdefeat 3y ago

ninja-ninja 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't do this here.
  - ninja-ninja 3y ago
    got it, sorry
dang 3y ago
I've replaced the baity word "crookedness", which was likely to lead to uninteresting associations and arguments, with the phrase "crooked timber" (from Kant) that the article itself mostly uses. I know it's pretentious, but in a case like this, having the title be a bit of an obstacle is probably a good thing - and at least I didn't make it say "Embrace your crooked timber of humanity". Edit: never mind I've got a better idea - let's just put Kant's line in the title.
- sdwr 3y ago
  Crooked is a bait? I read the original quote > “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart.” as splitting the difference between physically uneven and morally flawed. Selfishness - we put ourselves first in our heart, tipping the scales in ways that are more obvious to others.
  - dang 3y ago
    It's not bait in the hands of an Auden! but it is in an internet title.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  OTOH, with that title I thought it was about the very long-running group blog[1]. 1. https://crookedtimber.org/ https://crookedtimber.org/
nologic01 3y ago
Wonderful post. I have this loose hypothesis that stacking a lot of crooked timber builds something that you could almost call straight. But it takes time and it may not be stable. In any case if biology gives you crooked timber you better become an expert carpender.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Conversely, a structure of crooked Timbers may be stronger due to its irregularity, it is just more difficult to understand and defies engineering. I'm reminded of Inca temples with a irregular stones, which due to their differences make the structure more resistant to earthquakes. I'm also reminded of biological diversity and variation, which enable species to evolve and adapt. If you want to get technical, think of the thousands of crooked proteins that make up our bodies, each with their unique properties, behaviors, and functions. Not even a proto-cell can be built with a uniform materials, only viruses and prions are identical.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  You just made me think that Fourier analysis is like your crooked timber stacks: add an increasing number of properly chosen’crooked’ functions to one another and you can get arbitrarily close to something very different.
coderintherye 3y ago
I think you can apply the author's thinking to also looking at how our societal and economic outcomes relate to our circumstances of birth. People want to delude themselves into believing they succeeded from "hard work" where others were lazy rather than recognizing that had another seed been planted in your place and nurtured with the same resources (or lack thereof) it'd probably have equal chances of having surpassed your success as it would have of having withered in failure.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  In a free country, the circumstances of one's birth matter the least.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  People still deserve credit or blame for their actions even if some percentage within their demographic will do more than them and some percentage will end up in jail. (Whether you deserve any credit for making money is another question...)
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    Indeed, even if you take a completely deterministic view of human behavior, you still have different people at the end of the day. Someone fated by circumstance to commit murder, is still a person that murders others. Someone fated by circumstance to saves lives is still saving lives. You have to figure out if you want to treat these people differently, even if you dont blame them for the things they do.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  How do you find that this relates to the article? Do you really think that hard work as a concept is a delusion? Buy your own metaphor, a different seed planted and nurtured the same has a chance of success or failure. The fact that chances at all implies that the seed matters and not just the environment, otherwise any seed would be expected to have an identical outcome. To speak plainly, children from the same parents with the same opportunities can and do have drastically different lives. The crookedness the article speaks of is unpredictable and unique to every tree. Seeds planted in an orchard of the same soil do not produce identical trees
renewiltord 3y ago
Sympathize with view in article. But straight things can be made from crookedness. Classic example: Single cake. Two crooked children. Greedy. But rule is one cuts; other chooses. Perhaps argue that humanity stripped. I think not. Of course, meta-problem: how to ensure that is technique? How to ensure exploitation of technique: "you cut" (because I know you can't cut straight). Still, meaningless for technocrat to feel "annoyance with the recalcitrant human element, which eludes their total mastery". Behaviour such as this is roughly modelable. First-order planning is "Here is a plan that will work if all will abide". Second-order planning is "Some will not abide. Here is a plan that will work given that". Third-order planning is "Some will not abide. Both the plan and compliance with it will alter the conditions of the plan. This is how the plan works given that." ad inf. You can hew great stability out of the unstable: A logical network reliable to some degree out of an unreliable physical network. Nothing is perfect: not knowledge (you can only reach some falsifiability), not networks (you can only get some reliability), not even logic or mathematics (since the proof is subject to our human fallibility).
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  I think the author would agree with you based on their conclusion: >... we can imagine that our crookedness likewise reflects our history: the communities we’ve belonged to, the friends we’ve made and lost, the chance happenings, heartbreaks, losses, and triumphs, the stories we’ve internalized about the world and about ourselves. All that has pulled and tugged on us, worn us down, nurtured us, broken us, and lifted us up. That is our crookedness. The crookedness we must learn to love within ourselves and in one another.
- dang 3y ago
  > Single cake. Two crooked children. Greedy. But rule is one cuts; other chooses. Unlike a lot of more complex models, that one really works in practice. Game theory rises to the level of Solomon. Has it ever failed?
  - fragmede 3y ago
    It works for uniform cake. The failure mode is when the cake is non-uniform, and the children want different things. In this scenario the top of the cake has two pieces of fruit, a slice of kiwi and a slice of strawberry. It's a soft cake, so the fruit can't be split or cut. Child A cuts the cake into two slices, each with one piece of fruit. Which slice does Child B choose? If you're lucky, A likes strawberry and B likes kiwi, and B chooses what they want. If you're not, A likes strawberry and B is an asshole that doesn't care about fruit, so B chooses the strawberry piece knowing that A likes strawberry, and picks that piece just to ruin A's day. That's over the top, mean and spiteful you say? Have you met children!?
jongjong 3y ago
The sad part is that there are plenty of good people. The problem comes down to the system itself. The system selects for crookedness and propagates it. Evil always has the upper hand in controlling the system because evil people have access to a far broader range of tools and techniques to achieve their goals since they don't need to concern themselves with moral or even legal hurdles. Evil can pull the trigger with ease whereas good hesitates; that's why evil has the upper hand.
- josephg 3y ago
  Life isn’t like children’s cartoons, where there’s “goodies” and “baddies” and we need to figure out who is who, then lock all the baddies up in jail forever. To quote Solzhenitsyn, “The line separating good and evil passes through every human heart”. Your philosophy is shared by all the people who committed the most evil acts of the last century. All of them have tried to stamp out the “evil people” in their societies. They only disagree about who the evil people are.
  - jongjong 3y ago
    I disagree. There is a spectrum and some people are much more evil (in the sense; more harmful to society) than others and the concentration of evil is higher near the centers of power. I suspect that many of the attempts at social cleansing are natural (though not necessarily just) reactions to other less visible evils carried out over longer periods of time by those in power. Clearly the Bolsheviks in Russia were not happy people... There was a process that had been occurring for centuries prior which made them unhappy enough to carry out a revolution. It is known that Russia's feudal system had been particularly harsh on peasants for centuries. The French royals were so detached from the misery which they caused that it seems somewhat unsurprising that they couldn't even keep their heads physically attached to their bodies in the end. Their metaphorical heads were already quite detached from reality before the guillotine made the separation literal.
    - josephg 3y ago
      > some people are much more evil (in the sense; more harmful to society) than others and the concentration of evil is higher near the centers of power. I’d similarly argue that some people are much more good (in the sense that their work actively makes society better). Their concentration is also higher near the centers of power. An awful lot of people go into government out of a genuine love of their country.
h0l0cube 3y ago
If you liked this essay as much as I did, you may also like another of his thoughts about what was lost when quants took over baseball: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-optimization https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-opt... HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27671502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27671502
A_Duck 3y ago
>> if a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it This is a great heuristic for life. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics does not apply to human behaviour and simple answers to social problems are almost always oversimplified. If people use your system then get comfortable with many levels of adjustments and tweaks. y=mx+c isn't gonna cut it. This cognitive bias often manifests as a desire to do a greenfield refactor of an old system, ignoring the value of all the tweaks and shims added over the years to accomodate the real world.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Reductionism is a hazard, but overcomplication can also be an unhealthy sign. Epicycles come to mind.
  - A_Duck 3y ago
    Perfect example. For minds trained on physics and chemistry where mathematics is unreasonably effective, epicycles are a 'code smell' to be eliminated — there must be a simpler expression of the system. This instinct has to be discarded when working with messy complex human beings.
    - HPsquared 3y ago
      There are a lot of faulty heuristics indeed, reductionism is only one. Sometimes human behaviour can be explained better, that is more reliably and with less "over-fitting", by a simple model with the right perspective and vocabulary, than a really complicated explanation that is missing a key insight.
sobkas 3y ago
There are two types of people, those who have principles and those for whom ends justify the means. First most likely can't achieve their goals because they can't use every trick against opponents. While second acquire taste for means so to achieve ends would end their excuses for the means. To not get trapped by either of those is hard and in many cases impossible.

73 points by longdefeat 3y ago

ninja-ninja 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Please don't do this here.
- ninja-ninja 3y ago
  got it, sorry

dang 3y ago

I've replaced the baity word "crookedness", which was likely to lead to uninteresting associations and arguments, with the phrase "crooked timber" (from Kant) that the article itself mostly uses. I know it's pretentious, but in a case like this, having the title be a bit of an obstacle is probably a good thing - and at least I didn't make it say "Embrace your crooked timber of humanity". Edit: never mind I've got a better idea - let's just put Kant's line in the title.

sdwr 3y ago
Crooked is a bait? I read the original quote > “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart.” as splitting the difference between physically uneven and morally flawed. Selfishness - we put ourselves first in our heart, tipping the scales in ways that are more obvious to others.
- dang 3y ago
  It's not bait in the hands of an Auden! but it is in an internet title.
tuatoru 3y ago
OTOH, with that title I thought it was about the very long-running group blog[1]. 1. https://crookedtimber.org/ https://crookedtimber.org/

nologic01 3y ago

Wonderful post. I have this loose hypothesis that stacking a lot of crooked timber builds something that you could almost call straight. But it takes time and it may not be stable. In any case if biology gives you crooked timber you better become an expert carpender.

s1artibartfast 3y ago
Conversely, a structure of crooked Timbers may be stronger due to its irregularity, it is just more difficult to understand and defies engineering. I'm reminded of Inca temples with a irregular stones, which due to their differences make the structure more resistant to earthquakes. I'm also reminded of biological diversity and variation, which enable species to evolve and adapt. If you want to get technical, think of the thousands of crooked proteins that make up our bodies, each with their unique properties, behaviors, and functions. Not even a proto-cell can be built with a uniform materials, only viruses and prions are identical.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
You just made me think that Fourier analysis is like your crooked timber stacks: add an increasing number of properly chosen’crooked’ functions to one another and you can get arbitrarily close to something very different.

coderintherye 3y ago

I think you can apply the author's thinking to also looking at how our societal and economic outcomes relate to our circumstances of birth. People want to delude themselves into believing they succeeded from "hard work" where others were lazy rather than recognizing that had another seed been planted in your place and nurtured with the same resources (or lack thereof) it'd probably have equal chances of having surpassed your success as it would have of having withered in failure.

WalterBright 3y ago
In a free country, the circumstances of one's birth matter the least.
whatshisface 3y ago
People still deserve credit or blame for their actions even if some percentage within their demographic will do more than them and some percentage will end up in jail. (Whether you deserve any credit for making money is another question...)
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Indeed, even if you take a completely deterministic view of human behavior, you still have different people at the end of the day. Someone fated by circumstance to commit murder, is still a person that murders others. Someone fated by circumstance to saves lives is still saving lives. You have to figure out if you want to treat these people differently, even if you dont blame them for the things they do.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
How do you find that this relates to the article? Do you really think that hard work as a concept is a delusion? Buy your own metaphor, a different seed planted and nurtured the same has a chance of success or failure. The fact that chances at all implies that the seed matters and not just the environment, otherwise any seed would be expected to have an identical outcome. To speak plainly, children from the same parents with the same opportunities can and do have drastically different lives. The crookedness the article speaks of is unpredictable and unique to every tree. Seeds planted in an orchard of the same soil do not produce identical trees

renewiltord 3y ago

Sympathize with view in article. But straight things can be made from crookedness. Classic example: Single cake. Two crooked children. Greedy. But rule is one cuts; other chooses. Perhaps argue that humanity stripped. I think not. Of course, meta-problem: how to ensure that is technique? How to ensure exploitation of technique: "you cut" (because I know you can't cut straight). Still, meaningless for technocrat to feel "annoyance with the recalcitrant human element, which eludes their total mastery". Behaviour such as this is roughly modelable. First-order planning is "Here is a plan that will work if all will abide". Second-order planning is "Some will not abide. Here is a plan that will work given that". Third-order planning is "Some will not abide. Both the plan and compliance with it will alter the conditions of the plan. This is how the plan works given that." ad inf. You can hew great stability out of the unstable: A logical network reliable to some degree out of an unreliable physical network. Nothing is perfect: not knowledge (you can only reach some falsifiability), not networks (you can only get some reliability), not even logic or mathematics (since the proof is subject to our human fallibility).

s1artibartfast 3y ago
I think the author would agree with you based on their conclusion: >... we can imagine that our crookedness likewise reflects our history: the communities we’ve belonged to, the friends we’ve made and lost, the chance happenings, heartbreaks, losses, and triumphs, the stories we’ve internalized about the world and about ourselves. All that has pulled and tugged on us, worn us down, nurtured us, broken us, and lifted us up. That is our crookedness. The crookedness we must learn to love within ourselves and in one another.
dang 3y ago
> Single cake. Two crooked children. Greedy. But rule is one cuts; other chooses. Unlike a lot of more complex models, that one really works in practice. Game theory rises to the level of Solomon. Has it ever failed?
- fragmede 3y ago
  It works for uniform cake. The failure mode is when the cake is non-uniform, and the children want different things. In this scenario the top of the cake has two pieces of fruit, a slice of kiwi and a slice of strawberry. It's a soft cake, so the fruit can't be split or cut. Child A cuts the cake into two slices, each with one piece of fruit. Which slice does Child B choose? If you're lucky, A likes strawberry and B likes kiwi, and B chooses what they want. If you're not, A likes strawberry and B is an asshole that doesn't care about fruit, so B chooses the strawberry piece knowing that A likes strawberry, and picks that piece just to ruin A's day. That's over the top, mean and spiteful you say? Have you met children!?

jongjong 3y ago

The sad part is that there are plenty of good people. The problem comes down to the system itself. The system selects for crookedness and propagates it. Evil always has the upper hand in controlling the system because evil people have access to a far broader range of tools and techniques to achieve their goals since they don't need to concern themselves with moral or even legal hurdles. Evil can pull the trigger with ease whereas good hesitates; that's why evil has the upper hand.

josephg 3y ago
Life isn’t like children’s cartoons, where there’s “goodies” and “baddies” and we need to figure out who is who, then lock all the baddies up in jail forever. To quote Solzhenitsyn, “The line separating good and evil passes through every human heart”. Your philosophy is shared by all the people who committed the most evil acts of the last century. All of them have tried to stamp out the “evil people” in their societies. They only disagree about who the evil people are.
- jongjong 3y ago
  I disagree. There is a spectrum and some people are much more evil (in the sense; more harmful to society) than others and the concentration of evil is higher near the centers of power. I suspect that many of the attempts at social cleansing are natural (though not necessarily just) reactions to other less visible evils carried out over longer periods of time by those in power. Clearly the Bolsheviks in Russia were not happy people... There was a process that had been occurring for centuries prior which made them unhappy enough to carry out a revolution. It is known that Russia's feudal system had been particularly harsh on peasants for centuries. The French royals were so detached from the misery which they caused that it seems somewhat unsurprising that they couldn't even keep their heads physically attached to their bodies in the end. Their metaphorical heads were already quite detached from reality before the guillotine made the separation literal.
  - josephg 3y ago
    > some people are much more evil (in the sense; more harmful to society) than others and the concentration of evil is higher near the centers of power. I’d similarly argue that some people are much more good (in the sense that their work actively makes society better). Their concentration is also higher near the centers of power. An awful lot of people go into government out of a genuine love of their country.

h0l0cube 3y ago

If you liked this essay as much as I did, you may also like another of his thoughts about what was lost when quants took over baseball: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-optimization https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-opt... HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27671502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27671502

A_Duck 3y ago

>> if a thing is made straight it will be because humanity has been stripped out of it This is a great heuristic for life. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics does not apply to human behaviour and simple answers to social problems are almost always oversimplified. If people use your system then get comfortable with many levels of adjustments and tweaks. y=mx+c isn't gonna cut it. This cognitive bias often manifests as a desire to do a greenfield refactor of an old system, ignoring the value of all the tweaks and shims added over the years to accomodate the real world.

HPsquared 3y ago
Reductionism is a hazard, but overcomplication can also be an unhealthy sign. Epicycles come to mind.
- A_Duck 3y ago
  Perfect example. For minds trained on physics and chemistry where mathematics is unreasonably effective, epicycles are a 'code smell' to be eliminated — there must be a simpler expression of the system. This instinct has to be discarded when working with messy complex human beings.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    There are a lot of faulty heuristics indeed, reductionism is only one. Sometimes human behaviour can be explained better, that is more reliably and with less "over-fitting", by a simple model with the right perspective and vocabulary, than a really complicated explanation that is missing a key insight.

sobkas 3y ago

There are two types of people, those who have principles and those for whom ends justify the means. First most likely can't achieve their goals because they can't use every trick against opponents. While second acquire taste for means so to achieve ends would end their excuses for the means. To not get trapped by either of those is hard and in many cases impossible.