Always Autocompleting

Why we're not ready for Ultra the Multi-Alien

Today I heard a YouTuber point out that if you know someone’s stance on one aspect of the Culture War™, you can’t predict their other stances because people are not divided into two and only two camps, Woke and Antiwoke. Someone who sides with the Woke on one issue may side with the Antiwoke on others, and vice versa.

Let’s put aside the Culture War™ which I regard as a waste of time.

Let’s focus on the issue of predictability.

While it’s true that all sorts of combinations of stances are possible, not all of them are equally probable.

In my - needless to say, finite - experience, everyone I know in the USSA¹ is either on Team Orange or Team Blue. That isn’t to say every individual I know is in absolute alignment with Trump or … who is the archetypal Democrat these days? But there do seem to be two big clusters without much overlap.

Of course I’m aware there’s more to the memetic universe than just those clusters. I’m outside both of them, as are a number of others on Substack. Alas, my stance is “ultra niche” according to

Neoliberal Feudalism

whose viewpoint is very similar to mine.

He and I are as rare as intersex people:

Intersex people are people born with any of several sex characteristics, including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies".

Sex assignment at birth usually aligns with a child's external genitalia. The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 1:4,500–1:2,000 (0.02%–0.05%).

People within our ultra niche are highly diverse (though not in the approved Woke way). I don’t know anyone within it with my exact stance. And I can never be sure I won’t offend someone within this ultra niche because there is no shared script - just a common vague outline.² I don’t feel guilty making assumptions about most people. But probability goes out the window when dealing with the dissident microminority.

I’m reminded of a post by the neocon (bear with me) James Lileks:

I was suddenly reminded of those horrible moments in single life, when you realize your date has just revealed some belief or characteristic that not only makes her completely unsuitable as a Partner for Life, but makes you want to suddenly juke left and run away. One of those moments where your date, who’s previously admitted that she loves classical music AND new wave, AND she smokes, AND she adores Star Trek, AND believes the nation should turn its financial resources towards space exploration, and do you want another drink? Why not? She leans back and grins and rubs a foot up your leg, then leans forward and whispers: has anyone ever told you about Scientology?

Lileks did not see that coming.

Humans are like autocompleting machines. We try to guess what’s next.

Sometimes that’s easy. Japanese politeness is so ritualized that I can type どうも dōmo in Windows, and it will autocomplete it as どうもありがとうございました。dōmo arigatō gozaimashita ‘thank you very much’.

But within my ultra niche it can be hard to guess the whole from just one part. We might be like Ultra the Multi-Alien.

We see one limb, think ‘he’s like us’³, and are disappointed to learn that the rest of him isn’t.

We are isolated. Desperate for another. Optimistic at the slightest sign of similarity.

But as I recall NF writing in a note I can’t find, a shared rejection of CONvid has little predictive power. Almost everyone who saw through CONvid in the USSA seems to have fallen for MAHA.

I didn’t see that coming.

I’m a poor predictor. I have to refine my model. NF explains how:

make predictions about the future based upon your current understanding of the world, and to the extent those predictions are wrong, go back researching into the past to find ways of updating one’s worldview to account for the incorrect predictions and then issue new ones. Do this over and over, recursively, and over time one’s understanding of the world and one’s predictive powers for future developments will substantially increase. It’s not magic and it doesn’t require insider knowledge.

Understand the past to see the future.

1. I don’t claim to ‘know’ anyone on Substack where I am anonymous. I am speaking about people who know my real name.

2. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I don’t want a script that would only impede our investigation. We’re trying to find the truth, not recite lines to virtue signal. An ideology is a script - a straitjacket: warm, comfortable, confining.

3. I prefer to use they as a generic pronoun, but here I think he is justified because my microniche is almost exclusively male.