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sol


Ctrl+V your thoughts IV: new experimental technologies

151 2022-05-14 13:11

>>149
This is a variant of survivorship bias that I don't think has a formal name, so I'll simply call it the discriminatory paradox.

Let's use genocide as an example. How many genocides have occurred throughout history? We don't know. Why? Because the perfect genocide leaves no trace. The near perfect leaves little trace that must be discovered. In real terms, if you're talking about "genocide" you're talking about _attempted_ (namely, failed) genocide. Successful genocide doesn't leave advocates nor a record.

Leaving genocide aside, consider ideological death (eidocide?): the burning of books and burying of scholars in ancient China during the Spring and Autumn period. There were nominally one hundred schools. This may be an exaggeration of number, but we'll never know, as the only surviving records come from historians and schools that survived the cull.

Let's consider another example. Who is really oppressed in the present? True oppression, like genocide and eidocide, affords no advocates and no traces. Who is not allowed to exist in America? We can't _really_ know, but we can point out a few categories that approach that point: neo-Nazis and pedophiles. Even these have hidden enclaves and a minority of public advocates.

We don't know if the Greeks, or anyone else in the ancient world, both intentionally and successfully erased anything except to the extent that it left a lacuna. Even then, the lacuna itself is proof of the failure. We have examples of heresies, histories, and people that were extirpated with lacunae, but not heresies, histories, and people that were extirpated without a lacuna.

This has a more direct influence on your present reality: you are the child of survivors and survivors alone. You are winning and the children of winners. No one actually cares or can care about the anonymous victims of erasure. You can't consent to or even know of their existence, necessarily and by definition. You don't, can't care about the children; you can only care about the Kid.

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