The Whole City Is Center
Article
The Whole City Is Center is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 03, 2021 and June 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “If you’ve read The Fallacy of Gray or The Whole City Is Center”; “This feels to me suspiciously like the position I mocked in The Whole City Is Center”; “ion I mocked in The Whole City Is Center”. It most often appears alongside @VividVoid_, Alex Jones, Cadillac.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 03, 2021
- Last seen: June 12, 2024
Appears In
- If You Can Be Bad, You Can Also Be Good
- Nobody Can Make You Feel Genetically Inferior Without Your Consent
Related Pages
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- @VividVoid_ (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Jones (1 shared issues)
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- Cadillac (1 shared issues)
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- cystic fibrosis (1 shared issues)
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- fossil fuel lobby (1 shared issues)
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- fossil-fuel-industry lobby (1 shared issues)
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- global warming (1 shared issues)
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- Lance (1 shared issues)
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- low IQ (1 shared issues)
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- rationalist community (1 shared issues)
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- Reddit (1 shared issues)
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- schizophrenia (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
If you’ve read The Fallacy of Gray or The Whole City Is Center, you probably already know how I feel about this kind of argument. But it’s still popular. So let’s try coming at it from a different direction.
Inline links: The Fallacy of Gray, The Whole City Is Center
Source: @VividVoid_ This message clearly resonates with a lot people. But what does it mean? There are certainly people who are better than me in all the usual measurable ways. I have a friend who is smarter, richer, more attractive, more charismatic, and better at helping others than I am. Let’s call him Lance. Am I inferior to Lance? One possible answer is the one I tried to close off above - probably I’m better at Lance at some trivial thing. I’ve probably memorized more 19th century poetry than he has. If we define “inferior” to mean “inferior in literally every way” then I guess I’m not inferior. But that’s a kind of dumb way to define it. Most people would interpret it to mean “inferior overall, if we add up all the good things and bad things according to some kind of importance-weighting”. Another possible answer: I’m inferior to Lance in all normal quantifiable ways, but we both have equal value as human beings. I’m not sure this one is true either, at least not for any meaningful definition of “equal value”. Suppose we’re both trapped on a crashing airplane and there’s only one parachute? Who should get it? I think any reasonable person would give it to Lance, since we already agreed he’s better at everything (including improving the lives of others) than I am. I would give it to Lance in this situation. So if a judge should choose to save Lance over me, in what sense do we have “equal value”? Another possible answer: we’re both equal before the law. We both have equal rights. This seems . . . really unsatisfying? It’s a claim about the US legal system. “The US legal system has decided not to disprivilege you in court cases.” Why am I supposed to feel cosmically reassured by this decision? Another possible answer: fine, in every real world test we can dream up, Lance is superior to me, but there’s still some utterly unreachable and indefinable metaphysical sense in which we’re both equal before the throne of God or something. This feels to me suspiciously like the position I mocked in The Whole City Is Center. The best that I can do is to appeal to the argument above about genetics. There are - you could say - two different questions here: “Is Lance taller / smarter / faster / stronger than I am?” is a question that I might ask to (for example) assess my chances if I were competing against Lance for the same job.