https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5675 Shtetl-Optimized The Blog of Scott Aaronson If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel. Also, next pandemic, let's approve the vaccines faster! --------------------------------------------------------------------- << Striking new Beeping Busy Beaver champion On blankfaces For years, I've had a private term I've used with my family. To give a few examples of its use: No, I never applied for that grant. I spent two hours struggling to log in to a web portal designed by the world's top blankfaces until I finally gave up in despair. No, I paid for that whole lecture trip out of pocket; I never got the reimbursement they promised. Their blankface administrator just kept sending me back the form, demanding more and more convoluted bank details, until I finally got the hint and dropped it. No, my daughter Lily isn't allowed in the swimming pool there. She easily passed their swim test last year, but this year the blankface lifeguard made up a new rule on the spot that she needs to retake the test, so Lily took it again and passed even more easily, but then the lifeguard said she didn't like the stroke Lily used, so she failed her and didn't let her retake it. I complained to their blankface athletic director, who launched an 'investigation.' The outcome of the 'investigation' was that, regardless of the ground truth about how well Lily can swim, their blankface lifeguard said she's not allowed in the pool, so being blankfaces themselves, they're going to stand with the lifeguard. Yeah, the kids spend the entire day indoors, breathing each other's stale, unventilated air, then they finally go outside and they aren't allowed on the playground equipment, because of the covid risk from them touching it. Even though we've known for more than a year that covid is an airborne disease. Everyone I've talked there agrees that I have a point, but they say their hands are tied. I haven't yet located the blankface who actually made this decision and stands by it. What exactly is a blankface? He or she is often a mid-level bureaucrat, but not every bureaucrat is a blankface, and not every blankface is a bureaucrat. A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions. A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare--a blank stare that, more often than not, conceals a contemptuous smile. The longer I live, the more I see blankfacedness as one of the fundamental evils of the human condition. Yes, it contains large elements of stupidity, incuriosity, malevolence, and bureaucratic indifference, but it's not reducible to any of those. After enough experience, the first two questions you ask about any organization are: 1. Who are the blankfaces here? 2. Who are the people I can talk with to get around the blankfaces? As far as I can tell, blankfacedness cuts straight across conventional political ideology, gender, and race. (Age, too, except that I've never once encountered a blankfaced child.) Brilliance and creativity do seem to offer some protection against blankfacedness--possibly because the smarter you are, the harder it is to justify idiotic rules to yourself--but even there, the protection is far from complete. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Twenty years ago, all the conformists in my age cohort were obsessed with the Harry Potter books and movies--holding parties where they wore wizard costumes, etc. I decided that the Harry Potter phenomenon was a sort of collective insanity: from what I could tell, the stories seemed like startlingly puerile and unoriginal mass-marketed wish-fulfillment fantasies. Today, those same conformists in my age cohort are more likely to condemn the Harry Potter series as Problematically white, male, and cisnormative, and J. K. Rowling herself as a monstrous bigot whose acquaintances' acquaintances should be shunned. Naturally, then, there was nothing for me to do but finally read the series! My 8-year-old daughter Lily and I have been partner-reading it for half a year; we're just finishing book 5. (After we've finished the series, we might start on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality ... which, I confess, I've also never read.) From book 5, I learned something extremely interesting. The most despicable villain in the Harry Potter universe is not Lord Voldemort, who's mostly just a faraway cipher and abstract embodiment of pure evil, no more hateable than an earthquake. Rather, it's Dolores Jane Umbridge, the toadlike Ministry of Magic bureaucrat who takes over Hogwarts school, forces out Dumbledore as headmaster, and terrorizes the students with increasingly draconian "Educational Decrees." Umbridge's decrees are mostly aimed at punishing Harry Potter and his friends, who've embarrassed the Ministry by telling everyone the truth that Voldemort has returned and by readying themselves to fight him, thereby defying the Ministry's head-in-the-sand policy. Anyway, I'll say this for Harry Potter: Rowling's portrayal of Umbridge is so spot-on and merciless that, for anyone who knows the series, I could simply define a blankface to be anyone sufficiently Umbridge-like. --------------------------------------------------------------------- This week I also finished reading The Premonition, the thrilling account of the runup to covid by Michael Lewis (who also wrote The Big Short, Moneyball, etc). Lewis tells the stories of a few individuals scattered across US health and government bureaucracies who figured out over the past 20 years that the US was breathtakingly unprepared for a pandemic, and who struggled against official indifference, mostly unsuccessfully, to try to fix that. As covid hit the US in early 2020, these same individuals frantically tried to pull the fire alarms, even as the Trump White House, the CDC, and state bureaucrats all did everything in their power to block and sideline them. We all know the results. It's no surprise that, in Lewis's telling, Trump and his goons come in for world-historic blame: however terrible you thought they were, they were worse. It seems that John Bolton, in particular, gleefully took an ax to everything the two previous administrations had done to try to prepare the federal government for pandemics--after Tom Bossert, the one guy in Trump's inner circle who'd actually taken pandemic preparation seriously, was forced out for contradicting Trump about Russia and Ukraine. But the left isn't spared either. The most compelling character in The Premonition is Charity Dean, who escaped from the Christian fundamentalist sect in which she was raised to put herself through medical school and become a crusading public-health officer for Santa Barbara County. Lewis relates with relish how, again and again, Dean startled the bureaucrats around her by taking matters into her own hands in her war against pathogens--e.g., slicing into a cadaver herself to take samples when the people whose job it was wouldn't do it. In 2019, Dean moved to Sacramento to become California's next chief public health officer, but then Governor Gavin Newsom blocked her expected promotion, instead recruiting someone from the outside named Sonia Angell, who had no infectious disease experience but to whom Dean would have to report. Lewis reports the following as the reason: "It was an optics problem," says a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services. "Charity was too young, too blond, too Barbie. They wanted a person of color." Sonia Angell identified as Latina. After it became obvious that the White House and the CDC were both asleep at the wheel, the competent experts' Plan B was to get California to set a national standard, one that would shame all the other states into acting, by telling the truth about covid and by aggressively testing, tracing, and isolating. And here comes the tragedy: Charity Dean spent from mid-January till mid-March trying to do exactly that, and Sonia Angell blocked her. Angell--who comes across as a real-life Dolores Umbridge--banned Dean from using the word "pandemic," screamed at her for her insubordination, and systematically shut her out of meetings. Angell's stated view was that, until and unless the CDC said that there was a pandemic, there was no pandemic--regardless of what hospitals across California might be reporting to the contrary. As it happens, California was the first state to move aggressively against covid, on March 19--basically because as the bodies started piling up, Dean and her allies finally managed to maneuver around Angell and get the ear of Governor Newsom directly. Had the response started earlier, the US might have had an outcome more in line with most industrialized countries. Half of the 630,000 dead Americans might now be alive. Sonia Angell fully deserves to have her name immortalized by history as one of the blankest of blankfaces. But of course, Angell was far from alone. Robert Redfield, Trump's CDC director, was a blankface extraordinaire. Nancy Messonnier, who lied to stay in Trump's good graces, was a blankface too. The entire CDC and FDA seem to have teemed with blankfaces. As for Anthony Fauci, he became a national hero, maybe even deservedly so, merely by not being 100% a blankface, when basically everyone else in the US with visible power was. Fauci cleared a depressingly low bar, one that the people profiled by Lewis cleared at Simone-Biles-like heights. In March 2020, the fundamental question I had was: where are the supercompetent rule-breaking American heroes from the disaster movies? What's taking them so long? The Premonition satisfyingly answers that question. It turns out that the heroes did exist, scattered across the American health bureaucracy. They were screaming at the top of their lungs. But they were outvoted by the critical mass of blankfaces that's become one of my country's defining features. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Some people will object that the term "blankface" is dehumanizing. The reason I disagree is that a blankface is someone who freely chose to dehumanize themselves: to abdicate their human responsibility to see what's right in front of them, to act like malfunctioning pieces of electronics even though they, like all of us, were born with the capacity for empathy and reason. With many other human evils and failings, I have a strong inclination toward mercy, because I understand how someone could've succumbed to the temptation--indeed, I worry that I myself might've succumbed to it "but for the grace of God." But here's the thing about blankfaces: in all my thousands of dealings with them, not once was I ever given cause to wonder whether I might have done the same in their shoes. It's like, of course I wouldn't have! Even if I were forced (by my own higher-ups, an intransigent computer system, or whatever else) to foist some bureaucratic horribleness on an innocent victim, I'd be sheepish and apologetic about it. I'd acknowledge the farcical absurdity of what I was making the other person do, or declaring that they couldn't do. Likewise, even if I were useless in a crisis, at least I'd get out of the way of the people trying to solve it. How could I live with myself otherwise? The fundamental mystery of the blankfaces, then, is how they can be so alien and yet so common. This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2021 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Nerd Interest, Rage Against Doofosity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 16 Responses to "On blankfaces" 1. John Newton Says: Comment #1 August 2nd, 2021 at 3:44 pm The word for "blankface" in England is "jobsworth" as in, "it's more than my job's worth to let you swim here". 2. Rollo Burgess Says: Comment #2 August 2nd, 2021 at 3:50 pm You are right. Dolores Umbridge is the apotheosis of evil; she is far more loathsome than Voldemort... and there are plenty of people like her in the world. 3. Domotor Palvolgyi Says: Comment #3 August 2nd, 2021 at 4:01 pm I've recently finished reading the HP series with my 8-year-old daughter too, she loved it. I think Rowling would deserve a Peace Nobel for teaching kids about totalitarian dictatorships. Make sure you also read the Ickabog, we started with that, it's much easier. 4. asdf Says: Comment #4 August 2nd, 2021 at 4:05 pm I hate recommending videos because they are so much more time consuming than reading, so I wish this one was available as a written article. But if you want to understand what is wrong with the original Harry Potter series, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mxgSq1wiPk It describes how the Potter novels are a product of the Tony Blair era that (per Francis Fukuyama) assumed that Blairite neoliberalism was the endpoint of politics and would go on forever. Thus the embrace of consumerism like the Nimbus 2000 vs. Firebolt broom rivalry. Regarding HPMOR, it has some very cringey parts but also some great parts. Unfortunately the beginning is pretty bad, so lots of people get turned off right there. If you want to see the Potter villains including Umbridge get their comeuppance, read this deliciously evil fanfiction (age gated because Harry Potter goes on a murder spree in the story, but no sex or really graphic violence): https://archiveofourown.org/works/6334630/chapters/14514247 Fun stuff. 5. Joshua Zelinsky Says: Comment #5 August 2nd, 2021 at 4:11 pm If we're allowed to recommend other Harry Potter STEM-adjacent fanfic, you should definitely also check out Arithmancer and its sequels https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10070079/1/The-Arithmancer . It stars Hermione but a Hermione who is very good at math, and not quite as annoying as Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres. I actually cried at the very end scene of the series. 6. philh Says: Comment #6 August 2nd, 2021 at 4:35 pm Some people will object that the term "blankface" is dehumanizing. The reason I disagree is that a blankface is someone who freely chose to dehumanize themselves: to abdicate their human responsibility to see what's right in front of them, to act like malfunctioning pieces of electronics even though they, like all of us, were born with the capacity for empathy and reason. Ehn, I'm suspicious of this reasoning, it sounds too much like "yeah but they deserve it though". Like, to you human responsibility means X and so someone who denies X has dehumanized themselves so sure, we can use a dehumanizing term for them. To someone else, human responsibility means devotion to God, or dedication to learning, or or or... (That said, the word doesn't feel especially dehumanizing to me, though I can see where that comes from.) 7. Jon Awbrey Says: Comment #7 August 2nd, 2021 at 4:36 pm The Leaden-Eyed Let not young souls be smothered out before They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride. It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull, Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed. Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly, Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap, Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve, Not that they die, but that they die like sheep. Vachel Lindsay 8. asdf Says: Comment #8 August 2nd, 2021 at 4:39 pm Joshua #5: I found myself reading other Potter fanfiction (most of it much better than the Rowling novels, which I disliked) after HPMOR. I wasn't crazy about The Arithmancer, whose main idea is that Hermione is a maths whiz, but unfortunately the story doesn't give any real picture of what that is like. It's what TV tropes calls an informed ability: we're told rather than shown that she is good at math, because the author doesn't know how to actually show it. HPMOR does a much better job of showing what smart and nerdy characters are like, though people legitimately claim that the main character (Harry) is extremely annoying at times. 9. James Miller Says: Comment #9 August 2nd, 2021 at 4:40 pm If you believe in the signaling theory of education, the primary way college professors like us act as blankfaces is by upholding academic credentialism. If a student came to you and said "I need to get a good grade in your course or an equivalent one to get the job I want, but studying the material in this class has no relevance to such a job. Therefore, will you please stop being a blankface and give me an A without forcing me to do work that's worthless for my human capital accumulation?" 10. gmh Says: Comment #10 August 2nd, 2021 at 4:44 pm As John Newton points out, not only do the British have the phrase "jobsworth" for what you're calling "blankface", but we've had it since at least the 1960s. Has it really taken an extra 50 years for this phenomenon to emerge in the US? (I seem to recall the Simpsons in the early 90s piling in on the DMV.) It'd be surprising, and disappointing, if some linguistic subculture, somewhere in the US, hadn't nailed it decades ago. 11. Jackson Jules Says: Comment #11 August 2nd, 2021 at 4:44 pm This reminds me of an AstralCodexTen article from earlier this year: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ why-is-it-hard-to-acknowledge-preferences There is a key idea that unites both your post and Other Scott's post: Why are people so bad at being utilitarians? The answer is a depressing one: because they aren't trying to be utilitarians. Most people don't understand the conceptual difference between "doing the right thing" and "doing what's expected of them". That's what leads to blankfaceness. Most people don't think "what action should I take to maximize the amount of good in the world". That's why Effective Altruism is controversial-even though it shouldn't be. (It's fine if you disagree with the actual number-crunching and decisions that EA makes, but it blows my mind that anyone disagrees with idealogical principle behind EA.) 12. Jon Awbrey Says: Comment #12 August 2nd, 2021 at 5:00 pm The Leaden-Eyed Let not young souls be smothered out before They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride. It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull, Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed. Not that they starve; but starve so dreamlessly, Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap, Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve, Not that they die, but that they die like sheep. -- Vachel Lindsay 13. asdf Says: Comment #13 August 2nd, 2021 at 5:03 pm Moving beyond fanfic, I'll try to read the Lewis book, but I have to ask whether it said anything about Scott Atlas, who sounds more like a Voldemort than an Umbridge. His immortal line was "I want them all infected!", i.e. he wanted to create herd immunity by letting the virus run rampant. If you saw the fantastic movie The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T and remember the line "I want him disintegrated!, that's the voice I hear Scott Atlas saying that in. 14. Carl Lumma Says: Comment #14 August 2nd, 2021 at 5:06 pm See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobsworth 15. Carl Lumma Says: Comment #15 August 2nd, 2021 at 5:10 pm "The chief advantage that Berkshire has had in accumulating a good record is that we have avoided the pompous bureaucratic systems. We've tried to give power to very talented people and let them make very quick decisions." - Charlie Munger 16. Sniffnoy Says: Comment #16 August 2nd, 2021 at 5:10 pm I can't really recommend HPMOR, but I have to disagree with asdf: The beginning is great! However eventually it just kind of drags on and gets tangled in sidetracks and plot snarls, unfortunately... 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