This bit is so dead on I was fist pumping in my head:
“It is notable that one of the favorite rhetorical tricks of self-styled Special People is to point to something in incredulity and pretend to be aghast at how weird it is; how against “common sense” and “reasonable” and “first principles” understandings of the world. Those words and phrases are always suspicious, and extra suspicious — suspicious-squared as Pratchett might have said — when used by Chosen One types.”
Only one thing I have to quibble with: Carrot is very very special — he’s just such a very good person that he does everything he can not to oppress people with that specialness
He tries to be normal out of courtesy to everyone around him, which is almost even more special
indeed - and I think he is also explicitly the Chosen One. It is to me quite joyous how Pratchett plays with the concept - he proves his chosenness by refusing to embrace it.
All the Chosen One readings of TLOTR miss the core of kindness in the books. But I agree it’s a super silly thing to model your worldview on :) You can see the silliness on plain view in many of the Tolkien riffs spawned over the last several decades. I understand why they appeal to teenagers though.
Frodo volunteers to carry the Ring because he sees the need; you might argue that Gandalf has arranged the whole thing, but the choice is yet Frodo's. It's a narrative about a *Choosing* One, and that's a bit different.
The book argues against pride and selfishness at every turn. Greed and gold-lust have undone the Dwarves; the Elves have selfishly decided to retreat behind their borders and trust to the Girdle of Melian. Gondor has decayed into a backbiting political quagmire, with Boromir feeling that he deserves more than he's gotten. His own lust for power nearly destroys them all.
In particular, none of the "heroes" are effective: only the ordinary hobbit and his manservant are able to get to Mordor...and even then, Frodo fails at the last moment, which should be quite enough to undo any ideas of a "chosen one."
I'm leaving out the almost impossibly rich web of allusion and literary reference in LOTR, a context completely missing from most "fantasy stories", but baby steps.
Of course, most techbro readings of literature are the equivalent of asking Grandma about distributed software architecture in an uptime-critical environment. The adoption of Girard by the SV crowd is, in my opinion, one of the strongest signs we're actually living in a simulation.
The entire Aragorn subplot is chosen one and he plays a crucial role keeping Sauron and his army focused on the big battle. Sure, Frodo subplot is not Siegfried of Wagner’s ring cycle, but that’s like a subgenre difference. And note that the Baggins family are elites in hobbit society even if the hobbits are too a humble species. And the Ring arguably chooses Sméagol, Bilbo, and Frodo one after the other to try and get back to Sauron. And though he is an atypical hero, Frodo is definitely a hero. His noble qualities are praised and glorified through out. He is nothing like Rincewind for example. He’s a bit like Vimes perhaps. I stand by my reading of LOTR as a chosen-one story. It is also a criticism of other kinds of Chosen One stories, which is irrelevant here. Marvel heroes are also different from DC heroes. As for other stuff like literary allusion etc., sure. Good stuff. Makes it an elevated, superior sort of fantasy story. Fine dining restaurants and fast food restaurants are both still restaurants.
Terrific post. I'm currently reading LoTR for the first time in an effort to understand why Thiel (who reportedly has read it 10+x) holds it in such esteem. I'm deeply concerned by the level of humourlessness a person would have to have in order to take this book seriously. It is mindbendingly earnest. It's a long drawn out repressed gay bathhouse narrative. Their desire to simply relax in bed together naked is thwarted by the call to resist a powerful erotic urge to put their fingers into a ring in the seat of their dear friend's trousers. There's also a lot about swords, sword size, and forging a bigger sword. And of course there is a hunger for a Great Man at the End of History to banish these urges into a purifying fire.
I may not have the strength to continue trudging through the endless descriptions of how dreamy all these men are. Special Circumstances operatives should be dispatched immediately to blast this dam of repressed energies, homoerotic and ironic alike.
I feel like all of your recent work has been building to this post. Truly some of your best ever. Super helpful for me anyway.
And the LotR tech philosophy is *checks notes "our dwarf daddies were so much better at making big beautiful hammers... Then we got greedy and drilled down on shareholder value, which woke a Wokemob, a monster that make leading edge hammers unattainable and basic infrastructure unaffordable".
My claim is not that LotR is gay. It is hilariously repressed and painfully earnest.
Um I realized I haven't seen this argument written anywhere so here it is...
2nd law of thermodynamics says "in a closed system, entropy has to go up". Maximum entropy principle says "and moreover entropy goes up at the maximum allowable rate". This sounds like a seemingly minor difference, until you start thinking about what drives entropy up.
To make entropy go up faster, you have to have some kind of mechanism that drives it up. But mechanisms imply order! So you have to drive entropy down *inside* the matter of the mechanism in order to drive it up everywhere else.
Now if you really wanted to make entropy go up even faster, what would you do? Well you'd make a mechanism that not only drives entropy up, but can get bigger and bigger, probably by making copies of itself.
And whatever mechanism you started with probably isn't ideal, so you wouldn't just want to make exact copies, the way to drive entropy up as fast as possible is to run some kind of search for improved mechanisms that are even more efficient at driving up entropy, even more efficient at making more copies, even more efficient as searching for new mechanisms.
The good news is that the process of spewing entropy into the environment (which is the whole goal) is also exactly the process by which you can extract useful work from the environment. So the mechanisms have a really obvious source of fuel to drive themselves, running down the entropy gradient.
Now what does this kind of a thing sound like? Self-replicating mechanisms that maintain their own low-entropy state internally and learn by variance and selection -- basically the definition of life under evolution. And to do it even more effectively and efficiently requires intelligence, so it's actually intelligent life.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics is the "telos" of the universe, to the degree it has one. So somehow a slightly boosted version of the 2nd law of thermodynamics implies that the evolution intelligent life is part of that telos. Our "job" is to burn the gradient faster.
This can turn into a stupid e/acc worship-the-entropy-god thing but that's not actually what it implies. Evolution doesn't overfit like that. If you assume that there are always better and better ways to grow and live, that there is more intelligence and more possibility than you have imagined, then you have to ask "what is the guide?" Because the guide isn't burning as much fuel as you can today, it's learning the fundamental nature of the universe to be able to Dyson-cap stars, or build singularity engines, or whatever. And it turns out that the guide to that kind of growth is not single-mindedly mining at "get more energy" but rather ... interestingness. The thing that great scientists who make breakthroughs actually follow is their own curiosity. The great scientists themselves rely on instruments invented for all kinds of bizarre and seemingly unrelated reasons, no Newton without Kepler, no Kepler without Brahe, no Brahe without brass cannons and clocks and the Age of Exploration, no Age of Exploration without the Renaissance...it's all connected and the guide is interest.
Intelligent life is the machine the universe uses to blend itself, is one way to put it. But looked at another equally valid way the telos of the universe is to unfold along a path of maximum-interesting-ness. Because trying to maximize your self, your society, your world for maximum interestingness over time exports maximum entropy globally, they are the same thing.
Hmm. This is a clever argument, though I’m not sure it’s the only way the maximum entropy principle can be cashed out. I’m reminded of prigognine type arguments that allow for a variety of far-from equilibrium trajectories, not necessarily just ones exhibiting something analogous to narrative intelligence.
Here is something abit naive bit that I find helpful when thinking about our individual behavioural norms: if your only goal is to survive, you're screwed from the word go.
This bit is so dead on I was fist pumping in my head:
“It is notable that one of the favorite rhetorical tricks of self-styled Special People is to point to something in incredulity and pretend to be aghast at how weird it is; how against “common sense” and “reasonable” and “first principles” understandings of the world. Those words and phrases are always suspicious, and extra suspicious — suspicious-squared as Pratchett might have said — when used by Chosen One types.”
Only one thing I have to quibble with: Carrot is very very special — he’s just such a very good person that he does everything he can not to oppress people with that specialness
He tries to be normal out of courtesy to everyone around him, which is almost even more special
He’s like a Mr Rogers but as a cop — a true saint
indeed - and I think he is also explicitly the Chosen One. It is to me quite joyous how Pratchett plays with the concept - he proves his chosenness by refusing to embrace it.
All the Chosen One readings of TLOTR miss the core of kindness in the books. But I agree it’s a super silly thing to model your worldview on :) You can see the silliness on plain view in many of the Tolkien riffs spawned over the last several decades. I understand why they appeal to teenagers though.
They also miss the it's-not-a-Chosen-One part.
Frodo volunteers to carry the Ring because he sees the need; you might argue that Gandalf has arranged the whole thing, but the choice is yet Frodo's. It's a narrative about a *Choosing* One, and that's a bit different.
The book argues against pride and selfishness at every turn. Greed and gold-lust have undone the Dwarves; the Elves have selfishly decided to retreat behind their borders and trust to the Girdle of Melian. Gondor has decayed into a backbiting political quagmire, with Boromir feeling that he deserves more than he's gotten. His own lust for power nearly destroys them all.
In particular, none of the "heroes" are effective: only the ordinary hobbit and his manservant are able to get to Mordor...and even then, Frodo fails at the last moment, which should be quite enough to undo any ideas of a "chosen one."
I'm leaving out the almost impossibly rich web of allusion and literary reference in LOTR, a context completely missing from most "fantasy stories", but baby steps.
Of course, most techbro readings of literature are the equivalent of asking Grandma about distributed software architecture in an uptime-critical environment. The adoption of Girard by the SV crowd is, in my opinion, one of the strongest signs we're actually living in a simulation.
The entire Aragorn subplot is chosen one and he plays a crucial role keeping Sauron and his army focused on the big battle. Sure, Frodo subplot is not Siegfried of Wagner’s ring cycle, but that’s like a subgenre difference. And note that the Baggins family are elites in hobbit society even if the hobbits are too a humble species. And the Ring arguably chooses Sméagol, Bilbo, and Frodo one after the other to try and get back to Sauron. And though he is an atypical hero, Frodo is definitely a hero. His noble qualities are praised and glorified through out. He is nothing like Rincewind for example. He’s a bit like Vimes perhaps. I stand by my reading of LOTR as a chosen-one story. It is also a criticism of other kinds of Chosen One stories, which is irrelevant here. Marvel heroes are also different from DC heroes. As for other stuff like literary allusion etc., sure. Good stuff. Makes it an elevated, superior sort of fantasy story. Fine dining restaurants and fast food restaurants are both still restaurants.
great points!
Anyway my favorite book is The Truth
Also I think Granny Weatherwax is basically the female Discworld Vetinari
She seems to be doing the same things in the same ways but out in her wide rural domain, with its rural ways
They are both sheer forces of unstoppable personality
Terrific post. I'm currently reading LoTR for the first time in an effort to understand why Thiel (who reportedly has read it 10+x) holds it in such esteem. I'm deeply concerned by the level of humourlessness a person would have to have in order to take this book seriously. It is mindbendingly earnest. It's a long drawn out repressed gay bathhouse narrative. Their desire to simply relax in bed together naked is thwarted by the call to resist a powerful erotic urge to put their fingers into a ring in the seat of their dear friend's trousers. There's also a lot about swords, sword size, and forging a bigger sword. And of course there is a hunger for a Great Man at the End of History to banish these urges into a purifying fire.
I may not have the strength to continue trudging through the endless descriptions of how dreamy all these men are. Special Circumstances operatives should be dispatched immediately to blast this dam of repressed energies, homoerotic and ironic alike.
I feel like all of your recent work has been building to this post. Truly some of your best ever. Super helpful for me anyway.
lol I definitely didn’t parse it as gay erotica :) my claim is limited to it being bad as tech/society philosophy. As a basic fantasy tale it’s great.
And the LotR tech philosophy is *checks notes "our dwarf daddies were so much better at making big beautiful hammers... Then we got greedy and drilled down on shareholder value, which woke a Wokemob, a monster that make leading edge hammers unattainable and basic infrastructure unaffordable".
My claim is not that LotR is gay. It is hilariously repressed and painfully earnest.
If you believe the maximum entropy principle, our universe runs on narrativium too
How so? I don’t follow
Um I realized I haven't seen this argument written anywhere so here it is...
2nd law of thermodynamics says "in a closed system, entropy has to go up". Maximum entropy principle says "and moreover entropy goes up at the maximum allowable rate". This sounds like a seemingly minor difference, until you start thinking about what drives entropy up.
To make entropy go up faster, you have to have some kind of mechanism that drives it up. But mechanisms imply order! So you have to drive entropy down *inside* the matter of the mechanism in order to drive it up everywhere else.
Now if you really wanted to make entropy go up even faster, what would you do? Well you'd make a mechanism that not only drives entropy up, but can get bigger and bigger, probably by making copies of itself.
And whatever mechanism you started with probably isn't ideal, so you wouldn't just want to make exact copies, the way to drive entropy up as fast as possible is to run some kind of search for improved mechanisms that are even more efficient at driving up entropy, even more efficient at making more copies, even more efficient as searching for new mechanisms.
The good news is that the process of spewing entropy into the environment (which is the whole goal) is also exactly the process by which you can extract useful work from the environment. So the mechanisms have a really obvious source of fuel to drive themselves, running down the entropy gradient.
Now what does this kind of a thing sound like? Self-replicating mechanisms that maintain their own low-entropy state internally and learn by variance and selection -- basically the definition of life under evolution. And to do it even more effectively and efficiently requires intelligence, so it's actually intelligent life.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics is the "telos" of the universe, to the degree it has one. So somehow a slightly boosted version of the 2nd law of thermodynamics implies that the evolution intelligent life is part of that telos. Our "job" is to burn the gradient faster.
This can turn into a stupid e/acc worship-the-entropy-god thing but that's not actually what it implies. Evolution doesn't overfit like that. If you assume that there are always better and better ways to grow and live, that there is more intelligence and more possibility than you have imagined, then you have to ask "what is the guide?" Because the guide isn't burning as much fuel as you can today, it's learning the fundamental nature of the universe to be able to Dyson-cap stars, or build singularity engines, or whatever. And it turns out that the guide to that kind of growth is not single-mindedly mining at "get more energy" but rather ... interestingness. The thing that great scientists who make breakthroughs actually follow is their own curiosity. The great scientists themselves rely on instruments invented for all kinds of bizarre and seemingly unrelated reasons, no Newton without Kepler, no Kepler without Brahe, no Brahe without brass cannons and clocks and the Age of Exploration, no Age of Exploration without the Renaissance...it's all connected and the guide is interest.
Intelligent life is the machine the universe uses to blend itself, is one way to put it. But looked at another equally valid way the telos of the universe is to unfold along a path of maximum-interesting-ness. Because trying to maximize your self, your society, your world for maximum interestingness over time exports maximum entropy globally, they are the same thing.
Hmm. This is a clever argument, though I’m not sure it’s the only way the maximum entropy principle can be cashed out. I’m reminded of prigognine type arguments that allow for a variety of far-from equilibrium trajectories, not necessarily just ones exhibiting something analogous to narrative intelligence.
It is always good to be kind but not to those who see themselves as Chosen Ones. They must be defeated.
Yes! I was expecting you to get this. I knew you were going to get this
Here is something abit naive bit that I find helpful when thinking about our individual behavioural norms: if your only goal is to survive, you're screwed from the word go.