Digital minimalism seems to be the hip trend *du jour*. Whereas the consideration of how to engage with technology so as not to lose one's soul is definitely interesting and important, perhaps we should ask what do we get, tangibly, by refusing to submit ourselves to technology.

After all, technology is pretty cool. It feeds us, heals us, makes our lives more comfortable, allows us to move around and make new friends as well as retain old relationships, it lets us survive in difficult conditions and conquer our enemies. Indeed, the privilege of sloth is something that only few societies and peoples in history enjoyed and never before has it been enjoyed on such a global scale. Many of us have only recently started realising that it perhaps might not be a good idea.

There are many a reason why senseless engagement with technology is bad for you and many books of both digital and physical ink have been spilled over many its characteristics. The fact that social media applications are demonically designed to distract you from doing productive work and milk your endorphins and dopamine like a mangle is already very well known.

What we started to lose that is most important due to proliferation of technology is *trust*. Outside the internet, every productive and positive thing you do builds trust and integrity. In the  world of modern, fleeting relationships, this is rarely the case.

# Broker economy

I grew up in a world where trust was no longer a given. The rise of the internet, and especially the rise of peer to peer applications that connected people needing various goods and services, effectively killed all need for trust in communities. This, coupled with the pseudonymity of early internet that by its very nature prevented creating trust meant that you could get by without it, just on your own.

We still see this now, with residue of the peer to peer services like eBay (the middleman for commerce), Airbnb (for accommodation), Uber (for transportation). This sort of thing has been given the moniker of "sharing economy," a laughably inappropriate name because they serve more of an escrow role. Perhaps "broker economy" would be a more appropriate term.

A common issue when buying things over the internet in the early 00s over here was the issue of not getting what you paid for — you might have ordered a smartphone and got a potato. (This was far before anyone used his real name online, let alone the websites had any kind of [KYC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer) policy.) This issue was solved on various peer-to-peer marketplace portals by the introduction of a review system. This is a very simple method of creating trust: someone has a lot of positive comments, that means he is honest and you should buy from him. Someone has even a couple negatives, well, tough luck, he's probably out of the market.

Policing reviews so that they are honest and accurately reflect reality is not a trivial thing, so of course a service which provides this will charge a fee, usually as part of the value of the transaction. It is also not completely foolproof: one can think of a situation where a trusted seller loses access to an account and a malicious actor can start scamming based on good reputation of the victim. This already shows a certain cost associated with this model.

The services providing this kind of review systems eventually ended up being populated only by the biggest of merchants, capable of generating the largest amount of positive comments, whereas the smaller sellers were relegated to sites like Craigslist or OLX (which removed the necessity of trust because they are local), or required to pay more for "promoted" or "sponsored" listings.

Not just that, but the large merchants started to resort to dubiously honest marketing practices. I recall a situation where I had to buy a specific toy for my niece's birthday. I went online, picked the first thing, paid for it, promptly forgot. A few minutes later I got a phone call from the seller asking if it's okay if the product arrives in a few weeks because they had shortages. I said not really, asked him to cancel and then ordered from a different seller on the same site. Only after I had received the second invoice and a second phone call did I realise that it was the same company operating under different names, and listing dozens of the same product. All of the listings on the first couple of pages led me in the end to the same person.

# Solve tech with tech

This is but one instance of how technology eradicates trust. Another instance of this can be seen in the way we conduct interpersonal relationships these days. We text a lot. A decade ago, a text message's primary function was to set up a meeting in meatspace. This was, in part, due to the cost and space limitations of text messages. In 2003 the price of 160 characters of text was about 15¢, sending pictures was prohibitively expensive and there was basically no way to send any other kind of media. If you needed to have a longer conversation and it was impossible to meet in person, you'd call, both for prudence but also because people weren't as comfortable with texting as they are now.

This shows a slow and steady degradation of the quality of communication that we are accustomed to. Of course, the pandemic years did not help this one bit. They did however show that people will attempt to use technology to combat problems caused by technology. Video calls became a lot more prevalent in an effort to give isolating people a semblance of human contact.

There are benefits to asynchronous communication, the kind that does not require immediate response — such as the post or email. However, texting occupies an interesting, superposed niche, in that it can be synchronous and asynchronous at the same time, depending on the expectations and intentions of the people involved in the conversation. I have friends who reply to text up to once a day, I have other friends who get worried if I hadn't replied for twenty minutes.

In any case, the degradation of the quality of communication due to technology also caused many other, sometimes invisible at first blush, issues. We lost the ability to do small talk, at least many of us did. Very often the first thought when someone texts us or calls us is "what does he want?". Small talk fulfils a very important role of discovery, when we don't know what we want, but through the feedback loop of conversation we can reach something interesting that might fascinate us, something that maybe neither of us knew about when we had started talking. 

Friendships are great because they are a self-perpetuating feedback loop of ideas. Good friendships are the ones where you wish you didn't have to stop talking at three at night because you have to get up for work the next day. And because of their inherent worth, they are also a great vehicle for tangible, economic value.

Networks of social relationships predate "marketing" in the modern understanding of the word and it is unlikely that we will ever devise something as effective at discovering and fulfilling one's needs as a good, friendly conversation. Advertising is evil and eats away your soul and your wallet. Do you ever wonder why first class airport lounges never have any advertising in them instead opting for plants and flowers, whereas the plebeian waiting rooms are filled with garish posters for things you don't need?

It takes about two cents to make a can of Coke. The rest of its price is branding. People are spending copious amounts of money to drink garishly painted cans of well-tasting poison. Branding and advertising made us trust the wrong things.

Advertising might produce value for the company, but it has no value to you. It operates on the basis of psychological gimmicks to create a need and fulfil it, or better yet, pretend to fulfil it so that people can repeatedly pay for something that doesn't work. Every single valuable thing that I own and cherish, both material and not, has come to me through word of mouth with people I trust, not through advertising campaigns. 

# Anti-trust incentives

The incentive of the players in the broker economy is to eradicate trust as much as possible, so that they can step in and act as trust brokers.

It's better for Airbnb to foster the culture of novelty addiction and frequent travels to different places because once one finds a town one likes and makes friends with a landlord there, they no longer get your service fees. Strangers not trusting each other enough to hitchhike short distances is more profitable for Uber.

The disappearance of trust also fractured our interpersonal relationships and contributed to proliferation of people in many dubious professions such as therapists and psychologists. Most people don't need therapy per se, they need friends they can trust. Unfortunately, in the trust-less era of technology the only way to approximate a trustworthy friend is to pay a therapist.

The news rely on us not trusting our friends. The internet rationalists say that the information one gets from a friend is "anecdotal" and "unreliable". However, the news one gets from pundits on the internet are "fact-checked" and "trustworthy". We read them, we suffer from [Gell-Mann amnesia](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you), and then we trust them.

We throw away damaged things and buy replacements on eBay at overinflated prices from strangers because we don't trust anyone to fix them. We rely on real estate agents to buy or rent property. We don't listen to our elders. We don't trust the right people.

We don't have to live like this.

The key to successful, stable and fulfilled life is a high trust environment. No one can rely only on himself, we have to work with others, this is how our brains work. The "lone wolf" is a popular trope, but lone wolves in nature most often die or have to adapt. In a hyper-connected, technological world, in which as long as you have a digital skill that can make you money, you can outsource the entire Maslow's pyramid. What you get isn't meaningful fulfilment, but a commercially optimised proxy packaged as a product.

This is what is meaningful. Building a friendship, a house, a family, a clan, a community, a parish, a town. This is what is real, true and valuable. This is what you lose when you get enslaved by the screen.


High Trust Society

I've been attempting to read *Atlas Shrugged* for the past couple of weeks. The volume itself is quite daunting, but I've heard praise about Ayn Rand from many directions so it only seems proper to give it a chance. I should try not to level any substantial criticisms against the book before I am done with it, however so far I am very underwhelmed.

In any case, in preparation for reading such a hefty brick (the edition I've got has 1'174 pages, the title on the spine is printed horizontally and it could no doubt kill an unfortunate passer-by should I accidentally drop it out of the window) I acquainted myself with the rather controversial and original philosophy of Objectivism thought up by Rand. But to understand that, I had to figure out where it came from.

It's quite tough to find a proper summary of Rand's philosophy in the terms a know-nothing apprentice of the subject such as myself can understand because it's very original. In fact, if there is one thing that one should praise Rand for, is that Objectivism is a truly original construction, although whether that is good or bad remains to be seen.

> Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

The originality of Objectivism is not necessarily due to the focus on the value of the individual, because that has been apparent, known and accepted in western philosophy since Jesus and probably earlier, as evidenced by the quote from the Gospel of Matthew, although in a sort of inverse way from Rand. The value of an individual is not a recent discovery. What makes Objectivism unique is that it considers any form of altruism evil.

Put another way, the common way to understand "individuals matter" is that we should help those less fortunate than us. Rand says that they should instead be left alone.

I should definitely not consider myself well-read as far as Objectivism is concerned, I have not even finished her novel. However, from what I've read in secondary sources, the "read between the lines" summary is: "prevent whatever caused Soviet Union to happen by any means necessary". Rand certainly had her reasons to hate the Soviet regime, as does any half-educated person these days, but in doing this, I fear, there is a large amount of dishonesty.

The source of that dishonesty is the train of thought that might have started with something like: "since communism is bad, and communism is essentially the archetypical implementation of collectivism, we should pick whatever is the polar opposite of collectivism and construct a moral framework around that". Thus, what we ended up with is an unfettered praise of the individual, of laissez-faire capitalism and of reason. And from that flows a quiet, implicit and paradoxically coercive assertion that every reasonable individual should agree with Rand's philosophy, otherwise he would be unreasonable.

Thankfully I should never consider myself reasonable, so I am under no obligation to agree with Objectivism.

# Highway orthodoxy

Due to *Atlas Shrugged* being an overwhelmingly boring book, and in the spirit of trying something new, I downloaded a recording of G. K. Chesterton's *[Orthodoxy](https://librivox.org/orthodoxy-by-g-k-chesterton/)* from LibriVox to listen to on a long drive. I typically listen to music while driving instead of doing something "more productive" because the material I usually read is too dense for me to listen to (I typically re-read a page multiple times), but since I had already known Chesterton's writing style from an earlier collection of Father Brown stories, I figured it might be fine to listen to.

Two asides: first, there's nothing wrong with books being boring in itself. *[Nicomachean Ethics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomachean_Ethics)* is extremely boring, but it's also an extremely good book. Second, I would suggest against listening to Chesterton and actually [reading his work](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/130), it's much more enjoyable in that form, and much like another beloved classic of Christian apologetics *[Mere Christianity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_Christianity)*, *Orthodoxy* can be finished in two afternoons.

It appears that Chesterton is not a fan of Rand either, or at least he wouldn't be if he had any opportunity to engage with her and her ideas. I will skip over the concerns of heroism, individualism and politics for now (perhaps until I am done with *Atlas Shrugged*), only focusing now on Rand's idea that reason should be the only absolute.

My fundamental problem that leads to rejection of whatever Rand has to say is her assertion that everyone should pursue his self-interest by means of reason and reason alone. That would discard 66% of human experience and [means of gaining knowledge](https://intercaetera.com/2020-03-14-three-ways-of-gaining-knowledge/). Not only that, it fails to account for the fact that most people aren't capable of reasoning correctly. In fact, [*nobody* is capable of reasoning](https://intercaetera.com/2020-02-11-rationalism-is-the-modern-flat-earth/) correctly in every given situation, because we are never in possession of perfect information and infinite "computing power" in our brain that would lead to objectively correct conclusions. In fact, *every* time you come to a good conclusion as a result of an apparently rational process, you probably took a shortcut along the way, used a heuristic or referred to a tradition that is not strictly reasonable.

To reiterate: reason in itself is not bad, just as knives in themselves are not bad. It's a part of human experience, the same as knives are a part of human experience.

# Chesterton v. Rand

My critique of Rand's rationalism is fairly mild: I respectfully disagree that reason is or should be the only absolute. Chesterton goes a little further. Rand tells you that to be a proper functioning individual you have to believe in yourself, take heroic action, and use reason to guide you. Chesterton tells you that Rand is a *lunatic*.

> "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

"Let us begin," after Chesterton, "with the mad-house." I suppose reading about Dagny Taggart's exploits in a world defiantly turned against her is amusing for us, because to us it seems like the world is mad and she is sane. But, if the world of *Atlas Shrugged* was true, with each country short of the United States being a "People's Republic", surely it would be the other way around. After all, if reason is the only moral absolute, would it not be reasonable to join the unreasonable and, if egoism is the only value, attempt to subvert the system from within towards one's personal gain? If history teaches us anything, it's that [no revolution is permanent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon). I suppose history is unreasonable, too.

But let us take a step back. I said I should hesitate to venture into the plot details of the book, so let's stick to philosophy. I suppose it logically follows that if every person should be reasonable, he should have a reason for each of his actions. Not just a reason, perhaps, but a good reason. In a perfect world of Randian heroes everyone would always do everything for a reason, and nothing for no reason. Chesterton tells you that this is a *mental disorder*.

> "The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle."

For one reason or another, there aren't many active and functioning lunatic asylums anymore, and those that still exist try to avoid the connotation. (I suspect the movie *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest* is to blame for that.) So perhaps, many of those people ended up not in [Hanwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bernard%27s_Hospital,_Hanwell) or [Narrenturm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrenturm_(asylum)) but they are still among us.

> "If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's."

This is why a world in which reason is the highest and only absolute requires that every one be a *psychopath*. Because it is not normal and not sustainable to always be reasonable and to always be kicked into gear. It is normal to expect that there will be people who would want to do that (and they should be incentivised and not obstructed, of course!), but those are exceptions and not rules. Most people are not crazy, much like most people are not geniuses.

That is precisely the reason why I find Rand's book so boring. The positive characters are one-dimensional psychopaths, the negative ones are negative because they grew tired of playing a losing game, and the case against altruism is aimed at a strawman. It might be inspirational to identify with these heroic go-getters and hustlers when you are eighteen and full of vigour. It is exhausting if you are forty — it's difficult to pursue your self interest if you have children.

# Zen and the art of shrugging

There is one quite rational author on the list of books I have already read, he was a hero of many posts on this blog. Indeed, the man was so rational that he reasoned himself out of rationalism, for which he has my deepest respect. Chesterton wrote of him (or, more accurately, of people like him, because he was unfortunately not a contemporary of his):

> "Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze."

This is of course a description of Robert Pirsig, the author of *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*. Pirsig himself (spoilers for *Zen*) ended up in a psychiatric institution, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with electric shocks. Yet his rational faculties seemed to work well, very well in fact, connecting the dots that would be very difficult to notice for ordinary people, at the most general level, close to the fundamentals of the human existence and close to the foundation of western philosophy. Pirsig wrote:

> "If all of human knowledge, everything that’s known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all."

To ordinary people this "high country of the mind" is accessible only for short periods of time, in brief periods of clarity, as it should be. Those who claim to inhabit it permanently are actually one of three things. They are either only beginning their journey and mistake the road ahead for the destination, falsely thinking they have reached it and actually just circling the central issues; they are on the verge of madness because these central issues are impossible for a sane rationalist to grasp; or they are lying and think they are rational while only deriving their group identity from reading some contemporary guru such as Dawkins.

I was, at some point in my life in all three of these groups, until I realised that one can live his life completely happily without visiting the "high country of the mind" or even thinking about it. The solution is to accept that if you allow a little bit of mysticism in the centre of your world-view, everything else can become straightforward. A rationalist has to continually circle the drain, so to speak, because the centre of it is where reason fails him. A Christian allows himself to have the centre of his faith be in darkness, so that everything else can be illuminated.

Chesterton puts it like this:

> "As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. (...) For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers."


Circling the Drain

Who, Dear Reader, do you see when I ask you to think of a "simple medieval man"?

Do you see a farmer peasant, who without a word of complaint toils every day in the field, who has been told that one day he has to work in the field of his master? Do you see an infantryman, running into battle with a pike on orders from his lord, ready to die in a minor feudal dispute, expecting his reward to come in the afterlife? Do you see a burgher merchant, travelling in rain with a couple barrels of Bavarian beer to the Imperial Court in Prague, expecting a generous payment?

Perhaps you see one of these, or a similar image. Now, you ask me: what do I see when you ask me to think of a "simple contemporary man"?

I don't think of anyone in particular when I think of a simple contemporary man. But there is one quality, that, in my view, all simple men have these days, and I think it's contemptible.

They all seem to *love* science.

# The future is now

The first time I encountered the cult of science must have been in the early 2010s, the beautiful time when Facebook was just getting popular in my circle of friends. Nobody, really, used the internet much except the biggest nerds (including yours truly) and kids still went out to play football outside every now and again (also including yours truly, even though the 2020 me finds this hard to believe).

As an aside, they don't do that anymore. There were three improvised football pitches outside of my building. Two have been since turned into a car park, the third grew over with tall grass and eventually the goals were removed.

That's when the modern popular science boom started (or at least that was when I was getting conscious enough to notice it). NASA started putting up pictures of distant stars and galaxies for everyone to see. New breakthroughs in medicine and genetics heralded that the defeat of cancer and obesity were just around the corner. Interesting insights into human behaviour were uncovered and available to everyone with internet. And pop-sci pages aggregated all the most interesting things and ensured that you were always, every day, fed new scientific breakthroughs in real time. The future is now. It's happening. You no longer have to pay money for obscure magazines or books, it's interspersed between your friends' drunk party pictures. And you're the first to know, because you *really love* science.

Of course, we know now, this is all fake. Space is cold and dark and there's nothing there, and the NASA photos are all touched up, coloured, photoshopped, artificial. Cancer still kills you, and from sitting all day scrolling through the Facebook feeds filled with science you got a bad back and arthritis and no amount of pills help. You can't use game theory to predict human behaviour, and you ruined your relationships when you tried to use it. And for some reason, all the pop-sci pages turned political when they realised that people no longer find them that interesting.

What went wrong?

# The future was then

This is, of course, nothing new.

Like many terrible things, it started with the terribly named "Enlightenment". There were rationalists before then, of course, but that was (to my best knowledge) the first time reason tried to be applied to the public. The Enlightened did not need God, because with reason and science everything was solved. Everything was illuminated, for we have discovered the Book of the Universe, and we understood its language and characters. The Book of the Universe was "written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures ... without which one is wandering in a dark labyrinth."

As we know from history, this is all fake. Look around. Numbers are fake. They don't exist. Likewise, the geometric figures. In nature, does anything have the shape of a perfect circle, or square? And yet, the Enlightened had over 2,500 people guillotined in Paris alone. We saw what turning the society into a scientific experiment brought. And the French needed a truly exceptional man to, at least temporarily, knock these ideas out of their heads and institute a sane system of government at least for a bit.

In the twentieth century, we forgot our lesson once again. In the twentieth century, God was dead. God was dead, we killed him, and there was not enough water in the universe to wash down the rivers of blood. But the cult of science attacked with even stronger force. They proliferated their ideas in society, creating centrally planned economies. They reasoned that there was no reason for men to not be rational, therefore they could predict the future just by applying numbers to a model. Their scientific experiments on the public caused millions to starve, and further thousands to die for criticising them.

Of course, the twentieth century science brought us fantastic inventions. We have telephones, aeroplanes, vaccines, crystal meth. But at what cost? Does it comfort you, Dear Reader, that the price for your Internet is an everlasting threat of complete nuclear destruction at the push of a button?

I hear the simple man's scream: but religious wars killed so many people! Religion is the true source of evil in the world! We ought to get rid of the churches of the world, so that all may finally live in peace under the guidance of science!

Isn't it science and technology which gave us, overgrown monkeys with opposable thumbs, the ability to potentially wipe out millions in seconds?

# Driving with sat-nav

Should we now then turn on science? Should we profess that Earth is flat, because we see it that way? Should we burn the universities, turn away from engineering and abandon reason? Should we claim NASA is a conspiratorial psyop?

Much like rationalism should be relegated to where it is applicable, so too should science. Science does not belong in the hands of the everyman. The individual is incapable to understand the implications of what science is, at no fault of his own.

The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. The world is not as it seems. The world that you see is merely a projection that your brain creates to make sense of it. You create, in your head, a structure of the world as you perceive it, with abstractions and metaphors. You know the world for what it is in a very limited capacity, if at all.

And science is something that exists on the map, not in the territory. It's an abstraction, a generalisation. It's not a book of the universe with numbers and geometric figures. It's a fake.

It's a fake like everything else you are told, read, reason about and experience.

On top of that, while being a part of the map, it also is not something that lends itself to easy explanation. Science, by its very nature, requires above average ability to understand it and use it, it requires a degree rigour of expertise that the average person does not have. To make science popular, one has to rid it of its nuance and make it digestible. Which, again, would be fine, if pop-sci was considered just a form of entertainment and not something used to guide life or, worse, political decisions.

Actually, once you get to the point where science starts to influence politics you get into the dangerous point where you no longer do science for its intended purpose, that is: *curiosity*, but rather political power and prestige. Once you reach that point, you will get pseudoscientific ([after Feynman](http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf)) disciplines posing as science in order to siphon off some of that prestige — and it will be in nobody's best interest to point this out, because why would anyone want to give up that prestige?

The simple man, of the science-loving type, is like someone driving a car staring at his sat-nav instead of the road, the pedestrians and the traffic signs. He trusts completely that science has solved his life and he can just follow it to the end.

# Know the world...

"Why should I not follow science, though? After all, it describes the world!"

Because science will not tell you how to live a virtuous life. It might give you the tools to do it, but more often than not it will present you with an even greater number of tools you can use to ruin your life. Science is not guidance.

Science also is not a description of the world. It doesn't say how things are. If anything, it says how things are *not*. The scientific method does not confirm truths, but eliminates falsehoods and contradictions if applied well. By generating new hypotheses, iterating with experimentation and finally drawing conclusions it might rule out enough options to say with a degree of certainty that a particular phenomenon is as it seems.

In the words of Pirsig (*[Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance](https://archive.org/details/zenartofmotorcyc00pirsrich/mode/2up)*, Chapter 24):

> Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past.

However, yet another hint that science is a part of the map and not the territory is that [science works only in specific circumstances](https://intercaetera.com/2020-03-14-three-ways-of-gaining-knowledge/). Since the foundation of science is rationalism, and rationalism requires a starting point of certain assumptions or axioms, so too does science. Not only that, but it also requires a reproducible environment to conduct experiments. It requires elimination of variables to provide reproducible experimentation environment.

There are too many variables in real life to make any real use of the popular science you read about on the internet. Economics is not science. Medicine is not (strictly) science. And as a rule of thumb, anything that has to justify itself by having "science" or "studies" attached to it is also not science.

The simple man will eventually be disillusioned by science, when he tries to apply the science he saw on the Internet in real life. He will look into the sky and see that it is black. He will get his blood tested and be told that everything seems fine even though he's been feeling worse every day. He will be unhappy, because he never accomplished anything outside of consuming the pop-sci media. No beauty. No virtue. Just science. That's the plight of the rationalist, the simple man.

It's tragic when you apply science to an individual, because everyone's mind and body is different. It's even worse if you apply it to society (French Revolution), a political system (famines resulting from centrally planed initiatives, totalitarianism), economics (nobody can predict the next stock market crash) or climate (nobody actually knows anything about climate change).

# ...for what it is

Focusing your life around science is in the same way tragic and unfulfilling as focusing on any other individual thing. We have souls not to be consumed by a single topic, and a single way of thinking. We are humans that ought to apply the best tool for the job at hand. This is the same point I made in my [criticism of reason](https://intercaetera.com/2020-02-11-rationalism-is-the-modern-flat-earth/), but this boils down to the same thing.

The thing about rampant scientism that makes it sadder than pursuit of pure reason is that it is completely unfulfilling. It eliminates the beautiful, the philosophical, the mystical and the religious in favour of numbers, vectors, constants and models. All that, gone, except one thing ­– the myth of endless scientific progress and of constant progress. Moving upwards. And what's there at the end of it all?

Heat death of the universe.

Scientism is a grim way with a dead end, but science and technology still permeates our lives, otherwise you would not be reading these words. I would offer one, middle-of-the-road solution to acknowledge that fact, applicable to the simple man: to treat all science that's not been realised as engineering as mythos.

Engineering is tangible science. One that's been sufficiently generalised to be useful. Not once has science influenced anyone's life before it was realised by engineering in real life. It's a filter, a test of metal. Not one that only lets good ideas through, but one that definitively filters the really bad ones.

(Aside: if you are an engineer yourself and it is your job to realise science through engineering, apply this rule of thumb to science that is outside your particular field).

Don't be a simple man. Live for more than just science.


The Cult of Science

Purely functional programming in JS is quite difficult if not impossible. This is primarily due to the lack of language features we come to expect from functional languages like Elixir, features such as [conditional expressions](https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/case-cond-and-if.html) or [immutable collection manipulation functions](https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Enum.html).

The truth, though, is that JS has those, but they are quite arbitrary and not as robust as their equivalents in Elixir. However, we can manually work around them with some creativity.

## Pattern one: rest removal

The situation: we have an object and we want to immutably remove some of its properties (i.e. receive a new object with some properties removed). JS has a keyword for this: [`delete`](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/delete) but it mutates the object, so it's no good for our purposes.

Languages like Elixir have methods like [`Map.drop/2`](https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Map.html#drop/2) that do this explicitly. In JS, however, we can use the `...` [rest operator](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/Destructuring_assignment) and object destructuring to get rid of the properties we don't want.

```js
const author = { name: 'Anna', surname: 'Komnene', dob: 1083 }
const { dob, ...authorWithoutDob } = author
console.log(authorWithoutDob) // => { name: 'Anna', surname: 'Komnene' }
```

Also, if you use this pattern with ESLint, you might find the [`ignoreRestSiblings`](https://eslint.org/docs/rules/no-unused-vars#ignorerestsiblings) option for `no-unused-vars`  quite useful.

## Pattern two: logging in arrow functions

The `console` object in JS is the most powerful tool in your debugging toolbelt and it's worth knowing how it works, primarily because it effectively eliminates the need for a dedicated debugger. When you're doing more functional programming in JS you will very often use the feature of arrow functions that immediately allows you to return a value:

```js
const plusTwo = x => x + 2
```

To inspect the value received into this function normally would be quite difficult because we would have to wrap the function in curly braces, put in a `console.log` and explicitly return the value. Too many keystrokes, and difficult to undo in Vim!

Thankfully, `console.log` (and other console functions) always return `undefined`, which is a falsey value. We can combine it with the or (`||`) operator to inject a console log before the return value.

```js
const plusTwo = x => console.log(x) || x + 2
```

This pattern is most useful when inspecting values coming in from fetches and other asynchronous requests, as well as in Redux actions.

## Pattern three: avoiding nested ternaries with functions

Let's say we have to create a variable whose value is computed conditionally from another value. At first it might be tempting to use the ternary operator:

```js
const distanceInKm = 30
const deliveryPrice = distanceInKm > 15 ? 3.99 : 5.99
```

However, this becomes problematic when we have multiple conditions.

```js
const distanceInKm = 30
const deliveryPrice = distanceInKm > 15 ? (distanceInKm > 30 ? 8.99 : 5.99) : 3.99
```

This is very difficult to read, though, and doesn't scale for even more conditions. At this point, we might be tempted to use a switch statement or an if, but these are not expressions (like in Elixir) so we would have to convert our variable to `let`:

```js
const distanceInKm = 30

let deliveryPrice
if (distanceInKm > 30) deliveryPrice = 8.99
else if (distanceInKm > 15) deliveryPrice = 5.99
else deliveryPrice = 3.99
```

However, in functional-style JS, `let` is lava because it opens up our value to be accidentally reassigned later down the line and it will not be caught by the linter or the interpreter. The solution is to refactor our conditional out to a function (and as a bonus we can use something approximating guard clauses by returning from ifs):

```js
const getDeliveryPrice = distance => {
	if (distance > 30) return 8.99
	if (distance > 15) return 5.99
	return 3.99
}

const distanceInKm = 30
const deliveryPrice = getDeliveryPrice(distanceInKm)
```

# Summary

I picked these patterns because I use each one of them at least a couple of times a day when working on real-life commercial projects and I still find people who are surprised when I point these out. Hence this post — I hope it has been useful for you as well.


Three intermediate functional JS patterns

"He suffered under Pontius Pilate,  
Was crucified, died, and was buried.  
He descended into hell  
And on the third day, He rose again from the dead.  
He ascended into Heaven."  

— Apostles' Creed

## I

The endless, grey fields of the Duat glistened in the glow of the dimming light. The sun god finished his daily voyage through the land of the dead and soon darkness would fall over the plains while the men on the surface would welcome a new day. The lands, devoid of colour, were static; only shaken every now and again by the disorderly trembles of Apophis, the great ashen snake of chaos.

Duat. The place of the final judgment of souls, the vestibule of the afterlife. The lands spoken about in hushed voices by men, except for only those convinced of the purity of their own heart and the lightness of their soul. Yet, still, no one could ever know what awaited them past the gates to the palace of Osiris. The everlasting glare of Isis, the divine guide of the Duat, compelled them to walk through the shadowy plain to reach their final test.

Some said that the gaze of Isis haunted them even during their lives. Words of the old legends would say that those who saw the dark eyes of the goddess in their dreams, or in sickly feverish delirium or ravings after long days of exposure to the sun in the deserts and floodplains surrounding the great river would soon be called to the colourless expanse to fulfil their mortal destiny. The rightful Queen of the Nile, whose Hedjet-bearing sons ruled Egypt, called for her subjects.

The goddess observed the souls passing through Duat. Whether the sun god moved through the land of the dead or the land of the living, the procession of souls ceaselessly proceeded through the plains, to the palace of Osiris. She had called each one of them, she had gazed upon them while they had still been above. Now, she carefully regarded each soul moving past.

First walked children, followed by their mothers with infants in their hands. Then, young men, called to Duat prematurely by unfortunate accidents. One limped — his foot had been crushed by a falling stone. Another walked covering his side with his hand, wounded by a stray horn of a half-tamed beast. Next, a group of fearless soldiers walked past, reunited with their brothers and enemies after a battle. After them, scholars, priests and sages, those called because of invisible illnesses or, simply, of old age.

The procession moved further. She felt the dread of every one man and woman. They each avoided looking into the big, forever open irises of the goddess. What awaited each of them past the gates of Osiris's palace, she did not know. The legend went that their heart would be weighed against a feather of Maat. The ones found lighter would be granted a pass, through to the lands of eternal bliss; the others destroyed, forever denying them the grace of afterlife.

Such was the fate of her people. Life in perpetual fear of death. Even her sons, the pharaohs, each awaited the day they would see her glaring eyes with anxiety. A peasant or a king, a thief or a healer, a soldier, merchant or priest, each would suffer the same fate, each would at some point see the deep and dark pupils calling them to their destiny.

The goddess scarcely wondered why the world was made this way.

## II

The last man was different.

He followed the procession like the rest but did not keep his eyes fixed on a point on the horizon where others expected the palace to appear. Instead, he glanced around every now and again, with a soft and charitable look clearly searching for something or someone specific. He also seemed far more battered than the rest, more so even than the warriors or the man grazed by a bull.

His long, brown hair was glued together with dried up blood and ichor, and marks of individual red streams flowed down his face from open wounds on his head, finding their estuaries in his unkempt and bushy beard.

Deep wounds ran across his back as well, inflicted by numerous lashes. The whip which administered them was of a different kind and purpose than the ones used by foremen driving slaves to work in the Nile delta. Those known to Egyptians were long and narrow, intended to cause precise, sharp bites, and left no marks. The scourge that had hurt the man must have been made of long strands of leather that chewed deep into the skin, tearing off the flesh and leaving the wounds grievously open.

Inspecting him further, the goddess saw four gaping holes in the man's hands and feet, each the size of a stater coin. Grim remnants after some kind of a barbaric torture display, one that the goddess had never seen and wished never to witness. The people of the Nile had invented various ingenious ways of inflicting unspeakable hurt to each other, but the way this man was treated would have been unbecoming to any son of Kemet.

Further even more, a broad cavity in the right side indicated a vigorous strike with a spear or another kind of pole-arm. Unlike every other one, that wound was clean, with no visible signs of blood around it. The life-giving scarlet liquid had ceased to flow in the Duat — in the land of the dead there was no flow — but even before the man's descent it was clear that there had been not enough blood left, or that it had been cleaned with another substance.

The divine guide wondered who could have possibly inflicted such pain on the man. As soon as he noticed her, he broke out of the procession. A feeling of surprise overcame Isis. The surprise was later replaced with concern, then with fear.

The massacred man walked towards her. Despite his wounds, he seemed regal, seemed greater than any and all of the souls who came before him. He looked straight into her eyes. His face displayed no emotion that she knew or could name, and unspeakable terror soon clamped her throat. Was this man a god greater than her?

They both stood there, for brief seconds that felt like aeons. She tried averting her eyes, but could not. For the first time, the goddess that inflicted fear of death into all of her subjects was terrified of something herself.

Finally, the man spoke in a language she did not understand. His tone was captivating and sweet like honey, unlike anything she had ever heard before. He gazed deeper into her eyes. The fear went away and she succumbed to the words of the man, even though she did not understand them.

He placed his bloodied forearm over the eyes of the goddess and whispered another sentence in an unfamiliar tongue.

The goddess blinked. And as she blinked, the man disappeared. And along with him, the fear of death in the people of the Nile.


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