Let’s start with debunking the narrative that “dragons are a myth”.
The liberal media would have you believe that the Welsh, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Greeks, and even the Eskimos independently invented identical myths about giant fire-breathing reptiles who live inside bodies of water and are the source of chaos in the world. Right. And I’m the Queen of England.
“There’s no archaeological evidence,” they say. False. First of all, every single one of us has a snake reflex. If you see a snake on the floor, or something that looks like a snake, you will involuntarily and instinctively jump backwards. Even Eskimos have a snake reflex (and a dragon so-called myth for that matter). There are no snakes in Alaska.
Obviously, the so-called “snake reflex” is ancient genetic programming that developed as a survival mechanism to avoid burns from the fire breath of dragons. This reflex is very low-resolution, and is simply misfiring on snakes, because they happen to look similar to baby dragons. Most snakes are not venomous, so it doesn’t make sense that we would have evolved an instinct to avoid snake bites.
Second, dragons have been documented to cause earthquakes in China as recently as 2019, as seen in this photograph
This is how liberal media suppression works, by the way. They usually just don’t report stories that break kayfabe. Or if they do report the story, they shoehorn the fact pattern of the story into the context of the kayfabe narrative.
For instance, Mothership (a Singaporean fake news outlet) reported the Chinese dragon story as “Man in China arrested for doctored photo & rumour saying Sichuan earthquake caused by giant dragon”.
At no point in the story do they debunk the claim that the dragon caused the earthquake. They instead just use the word “rumour” (spelled incorrectly) to hint to your brain that the claim is false, without actually saying it.
This is an important linguistic technique to understand, called [Russell conjugation] or [emotive conjugation]. Bertrand Russell observed that there are pairs of words that literally mean the same thing, but that invoke opposite feelings when we hear them. We love people who have convictions, and hate those who are stubborn. Americans overwhelmingly support the Affordable Care Act and also despise Obamacare. They feel sympathy for undocumented immigrants and harbor contempt toward illegal aliens.
They did the same thing with the phrase “doctored photo”. “Doctored” could mean anything. It could mean he cropped the photo. It could mean he changed the white balance. It leads you to the conclusion they want you to make (the dragon was fake) without explicitly saying it.
This begs the question: why are they reporting on it at all? Well, if you read my Preference Falsification article, then you probably have already guessed why: it’s message violence.
Briefly, [preference falsification] is a social phenomenon where people lie in public about what their private beliefs are. It can be as innocuous as lying to a survey about the number of condoms you purchased last year, in order to make yourself look better to the girl taking the survey. On the other extreme, you have communist regimes that derive their power almost entirely from preference-falsification-at-scale. Privately, nobody (at least nobody who matters) really believes in the whole communism thing. But if you say that in public, your family disappears.
This brings us to [message violence]: this is where those who derive some sort of utility from preference-falsifcation-at-scale brutally punish people in public who dare to break kayfabe. The point is not to punish that one person, it’s to send a message to anyone else who might be thinking about doing the same thing.
We used to just say “making an example out of someone”. But now in the soft politically correct feelings-over-facts world, we have to use phrases like “message violence”. Sad.
But now you understand. The important part of that anti-dragon propaganda is that the man was arrested. It serves a dual purpose. You might raise an eyebrow and think “well that’s a bit of an extreme reaction.” But in the next breath, you’ll think “Well it’s the CCP. They’re retarded.”, and dismiss the thought that would have led you down the rabbit hole.
But to someone like me risking my life to bring you the truth about dragons, that article is bone-chilling. A man who dared to break the kayfabe about dragons is rotting in prison, and the liberal media is smearing him.
If you read the article, it only gets worse. The man who shared the dragon photo was forced to give a false confession and write a fake letter of apology.
The man confessed that he “did it just for fun” and he was “simply puffing”.
He even wrote a letter of apology in light of the incident.
The article is also sprinkled with tons of little social cues (i.e. rhetorical microaggressions)
Some reactions to Zhang’s photo include:
“It’s photoshopped but I believed in him.”
“My grandma told me about this. She was upset after I told her that it was fake, saying that other people have seen it, and that it’s my problem for fooling her.”
Others who did not fall for it, naturally pointed out how the image has been poorly edited.
“It’s so obvious that it’s fake. Why would people still believe it?”
“It’s more like an IQ test.”
The message there is: other people are going to laugh at you and think you are stupid if you believe your lying eyes. That may not be the message your brain consciously receives. You’re probably laughing along at the retards who fell for the dragon story. But subconsciously, your brain is registering “people who believe in dragons get laughed at.”
Everything said in that article was techincally correct. The man was arrested. The man spread “rumours”. He probably did actually “doctor” the photo somehow. People probably did laugh at the dragon story. But it’s framed in such a way that your brain assembles a completely false map of the situation. But most importantly, it sends a message to dragon truthers: cower in fear or be crushed. I refuse.
Bottom line: the liberal media is factual but not truthful.
Now that we’ve established that dragons are real, and that there’s a global anti-dragon preference falsification conspiracy, let’s talk about
- what do dragons mean?
- how do you make dragons angry?
- what happens when you make them angry?
- why is the CIA enforcing the global anti-dragon preference falsification conspiracy?
- how do we make dragons less angry?
Survey of Dragon So-Called Mythology
There’s a great deal of variation in dragon so-called myths, but way less than one would expect if dragons were fake. Dragons tend to be fire-breathing serpents that live in bodies of water, and are the source of life and/or chaos. It’s not a strict tradeoff. The biggest difference is whether dragons are interpreted as good or bad.
In oriental dragon so-called mythology, dragons are good. Dragons are the source of life. The emperors are descendants of dragons. Dragons in oriental so-called mythology seem (to my untrained eye) to play the same role as the Old Testament God does in western mythology.
In western and near-eastern mythology, dragons are bad. Dragons are animals that reek chaos. The so-called mythology tends to have the dragon representing some source of unfinished business. The unfinished business creates externalities that make everything worse for everyone. The hero restores order by taking upon the challenge and slaying the angry dragon.
In every dragon so-called myth, dragons represent chaos. It’s not the BLM brand of artificial chaos. Dragons represent the subtle, omnipresent, implicit background chaos that is just part of the world we live in: asteroids, floods, economic collapses, etc. Black swans.
Crucially, you can’t escape the chaos of dragons. Dragons are going to do their thing no matter what. We can’t control them. However, we can make them angry or make them happy.
Chinese dragon so-called mythology
Chinese civilization developed in the floodplains of their three river systems: the Yellow, the Yangzhe, and the Pearl River Delta.1 Almost every city you’ve heard of in China is on one of these three rivers. Chongqing, Wuhan, the Three Gorges Dam, and Shanghai are on the Yangzhe River. Hong Kong and Guangzhou are at the foot of the Pearl River system. Beijing is near the Yellow River, but not on it.
By the way, two of those river systems have their headwaters in the mountains of Tibet. It is of vital strategic importance for Beijing to control the headwaters of their river systems. This is why the CCP is willing to bear the bad publicity and ridiculous financial cost of occupying Tibet.
Anyway, managing floods is the core idiom of Chinese civilization. Which is why they’re so good at it today. The first emperor of China became emperor by building a dam. The CCP builds dams constantly and mostly needlessly. Because in Chinese culture, building a dam is how you legitimize your power.
The flipside of this is the concept of the “mandate of heaven,” which is how every emperor derives his legitimacy. Chinese culture interprets catastrophic floods as “the emperor has lost the mandate of heaven.”
Dragons live in the water, and the emperors are the descendants of the dragons. When the dragons get angry and decide to effect a flood, it’s time to overthrow the emperor.
The liberal fake news media will tell you that this mythology black-boxes away the idea that “if you can’t even handle the most basic thing our civilization demands in order to survive, it’s time for you to go.”
In sum,
- dragons live in the water
- water is the source of life
- water is also the source of disaster
- the emperors are descendants of the dragons
- when the dragons get angry they effect floods
- when great floods happen, it’s time to overthrow the emperor
Your shitty code makes the dragons angry
Every dragon so-called myth basically goes “if you are being retarded, the dragons are going to get pissed off and fuck up everybody’s life, and it’s your fault for being retarded.”
I wonder if that’s the real story of Eve biting the Apple (which today we call the “red pill”). It wasn’t a snake. It was a dragon. Or Noah’s flood. Maybe God is a dragon.
I think I nailed the idea in the virdism post. The post is a thought experiment: what if you held a religious belief that the sky is green? The crucial implication is that there are a lot of other interesting things about the world that you would never be able to discover, because your sky-is-green belief leaks into every adjacent conversation.
That’s similar what angry dragon problems are. [Angry dragon problems] are when a poor abstraction introduces sprawling uncontrollable complexity in a system. Usually it is only evident once everything already depends on the poor abstraction.
It’s adjacent to, but meaningfully distinct from the concepts of [technical debt] and [virdism].
I led with the geocentrism gif
The idea there is that the incorrect assumption leaks upward, and therefore imposes substantially more complexity than the correct assumption.
If you want to learn the geocentric model, you have to learn about 8 different curves just to model our solar system. In the heliocentric model, you learn about 1 type of curve. And that one curve is simpler than 7 of the 8 geocentric curves.
This situation is not unusual. This case is typical. For some reason, correctness is elegant.
If you’re a functional programmer, you frequently have the experience of
- having very complicated and messy code
- tweaking or redoing the data representation
- suddenly the procedural code is extremely obvious and writes itself
(Oopers will never have this experience! Sad!)
This is a remarkable property of our universe: The truth is simple. The truth is compact. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason the universe should be this way, but empirically it is.
This is the idea I want to get at here: things that are complicated are probably wrong, because things that are definitely correct have a strong track record of turning out to be simple.
(While writing this, I was looking for a quote from Jim Keller along the lines of “all great ideas are simple,” and found this podcast clip in which he articulates a lot of these ideas very well.)
In fact, it’s more subtle than that. Because strictly speaking, geocentrism isn’t wrong. In the same way that your shitty code isn’t wrong. The two models are equally consistent. Your shitty code works.
It’s just that heliocentrism is simpler. Heliocentrism is [white]. Geocentrism is [niggerlicious].
Whiteness is elegant. Negritude is anti-elegant.
WF Algebra is white. Boolean Algebra is niggerlicious.
Rational trigonometry is white. CIA trigonometry is niggerlicious.
Prefix or RPN grammar is white. Infix grammar is niggerlicious.2
Syntax is white. Notation is niggerlicious.3
Rational arithmetic is white. Floating-point arithmetic is niggerlicious.
scheme@(guile-user)> (equal? 0.3 (+ 0.1 0.2))
$1 = #f
scheme@(guile-user)> (equal? (/ 3 10) (+ (/ 1 10) (/ 2 10)))
$2 = #tFunctional programming is white. Object-oriented programming is niggerlicious.4
Markets are white. Central planning is niggerlicious.5
And now it’s obvious why the CIA doesn’t want you to know the truth about dragons. Their regime relies upon a populace unable to think clearly and thoroughly indoctrinated with antisense. That’s why they’re so concerned with “misinformation” and “hate speech.” That’s why they created public schools, feminism, birth control, child labor laws, and the age of consent. And it’s why they told you that dragons are a myth.
Well I’m here to help.
How to calm the angry dragons
People suffering from angry dragon problems tend to be acutely aware of their suffering, and at the same time completely unaware of the cause. It is rarely clear to such people that their beloved abstraction is the cause of their suffering, and they will even get angry when you try to explain the problem to them. It’s literally battered wife syndrome.
If you don’t belive me, try your hand convincing an ooper that OOP is not only a bad idea, but is the principal cause of his suffering. Or convince a mathematician that real numbers (which are fake), completeness, infinite sequences, limits, and angles are not only unnecessary concepts, but actually make his life harder.
It’s better to intercept the youngins and redpill them before they get their minds poisoned by the likes of oopers and glowies. That’s why I do things like call my fork of mathematics “QAnal”. Because really my target audience is bright 13-year-old boys.
I don’t think you can do anything to calm an angry dragon. And there’s a lot of technical debt that we are going to have to live with for the foreseeable future because the cost of deviating from it is prohibitive.6
We’re not getting rid of x86_64 any time soon. Until Lisp machines or quantum computing displaces x86_64, C will remain the king of programming languages. People are still paid to maintain software in Perl and COBOL. JavaScript is probably here to stay. Engineers 50 years from now are probably still going to have to learn trigonometry with sines and cosines and arctangents.
What we can do is the following
- Recognize the symptoms of angry dragon problems.
- Investigate the problem with an open mind.
- Be willing to reject an arbitrary amount of conventional wisdom.
- Provided that you’re convinced it’s wrong.
When great floods happen, it’s time to overthrow the emperor.
- I skimmed the entire Wikipedia page on Chinese dragon so-called mythology, and even once read the first 3 chapters of a book on Chinese history. So I am an authoritative expert in Chinese culture, politics, history, and mythology. Please do not attempt to “correct” me in the comments.↩︎
- This is probably the most extreme and subtle case here. I will go so far as to claim that the greatest handicap in the history of human knowledge is the fact that the European mathematical renaissance happened to occur mostly in verb-medial languages. More on this later.↩︎
- Rant on syntax versus notation coming soon. If my idea here took off, it would be the most significant advancement in mathematical communication since Hindu-Arabic number notation.The fact that you can’t just Google unfamiliar mathematical notation because it’s all glyphy bullshit is absurd. We’re going to put a stop to this.↩︎
- This take is not unique to me. Joe Armstrong wrote about this. SICP contains a very thorough dissection of this. Rant coming soon with lots of references to other people’s rants.↩︎
- This one has been played to death but maybe I’ll write about it. von Mises’s explanation is probably similar to mine, but I’m probably going to articulate it more sharply and put it into a larger framework.(I have never read von Mises. Just interpolating from what other people say his ideas are. He’s on my reading list.)↩︎
- Many such cases!↩︎