Nerd Gun Love

So, regarding the guff blown off some American nerds regarding guns addressed in the previous post. Nerds love guns for many of the same reasons other Americans do.

But nerds have a special relationship with guns, too. Libertarian nerdfather Heinlein wrote that "An armed society is a polite society". It's easy to see the emotional appeal of a gun to a social pariah- it solicits through the threat of violence the respect most people achieve through social acceptance. For those who've had trouble figuring out or conforming to the subtleties of human interaction, the "polite society" of Heinlein's imaginings seems like Utopia(1).

(To others, living under the constant threat of death from those around you is a nightmare.)

Besides the dream of enforced civility, there is also the siren song of revenge. A gun obliterates the differences between us. Strength and size, charm and wit are all the same to a gun. Depending on your particular fantasy, there doesn't even have to be a quick-draw contest, only well-justified murder.

All this, however, forms the subtext of the issue. The most striking and obvious aspect of nerd gun love is in its appeal to reason.

Intelligence is the source of a nerd's self-esteem, almost by definition. This can sometimes lead to an ironic mistake- assuming that those who are most intelligent are also the most reasonable. Conflating intelligence with other virtues has always been the original nerd sin, despite having separate INT, WIS and CHA scores clearly marked on D&D character sheets.

Guns belong the hands of the nerd, supposes the nerd, because they don't act irrationally. Aren't intelligent decisions usually the right ones? And who's better equipped to make those decisions?

To be a nerd is, on one level, to be rejected for making logical (geeky) decisions instead of illogical (socially acceptable) ones. By the time they've become adults, most nerds have learned to stifle their negative emotions in the face of rejection and even violence.

As if the mind were a zero-sum game, with the intellect crowding out the emotions. The impulse to abuse power is only available to the powerful- the revolutionary turned dictator, the citizen turned sadist, patriots turned torturers.

The notion that intelligence acts as a restraint to savagery has been thoroughly debunked by history. Humans are bad people, and nerds are human. Cho Seung-Hui was probably mentally ill, and that's a different ball of wax. But this dork isn't, and neither is this one.

Violence is seductive.

1) This might also explain the peculiar love nerds have for military organizations in science fiction. The dream is of escaping the vague but urgent social demands of day-to-day existence for a more rigid, but explicit and comprehensible social order.

Occam's Razor

Weirdly, after writing this essay about it, I was searching for some unrelated information about Anton Levoisier, an 18th century French chemist. While googling, I came across a strange, crank article about Georg Cantor, who discovered transfinite number sets.

I'm not qualified to comment on his primary objection, that Cantor's math requires a leap of faith. I don't believe it does- the diagonal proof is pretty easy to understand, but there might be subtleties...

I am comfortable identifying him as a nutcase, though.

His main point is that the problem of artificial intelligence could solved easily of if only computers could be taught math (1). To my ears, this sounds like "If only horses could be taught to run, they'd be cars."

What interests me is that he assumes arithmatic computation is what makes us conscious. The solution must be simple, and therefore, anyone who suggests that it's really complicated must be perverse. A comment on the article notes that the Nazis held the same opinion of Cantor's work that they held of Einstein's- Jewish science.

It's interesting because simplicity is usually a sign of sound thinking. Occam's razor is a good rule of thumb, and the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. But if applied inflexibly, it'll make you bonkers.

The cornerstone of conspiracy theory is the notion that it's all connected. A conspiracy, after all, is solvable. The Jews, Freemasons, Cantorists, Rightist Elements, can all be uncovered and thwarted. Creationists get a lot of milage out of the watchmaker theory for the same reason- it seems simpler than the Rube Goldberg mechanism of evolution by natural selection.

Here in China, and back in the US, the simplicity argument is often invoked by different factions of the government to smooth over complicated problems. The terrorists hate our freedom. China's too big for representative democracy.

A friend of mine recently heard from a Chinese colleague that,

"Other people evolved in Africa, but Chinese people evolved in China."

Makes perfect sense to me, but it's beside the point. What I mean to say is that you've got always to stay loose. Acting rationally requires a lot of guesswork, and knowing when to apply the rules is an art. Otherwise, you go nuts.

1) Of course, there are ad-hominem attacks against the mathematical community itself, which speaks to an unhappy postgraduate experience.