Nell went to the keyboard as soon as her daily reading stint had finished.

Secondary socialisation

By now we have learned to analyse the human reality through both its affective content and its knowledge. We can describe subjective reality armed with both: The knowledge of one person and the discursive journey of that knowledge through society versus the upbringing of the individual, which has intertwined the affective with knowledge.

Objective reality can also be described this way: The buildup of vast mountains of accrued legitimised knowledge, deeply rooted in roles that require actors enacting them, which again requires a subjective state - emotional and cognitive. The society-wide role is being performed at the individual level, but the knowledge lives distributed across all of society, unevenly. Its affective parts lying in wait until another actor comes along.

We see the dialectics of externalisation - objectivation - internalisation in this interplay.

Primary socialisation reeked with affections. It also reeked with the process of finding the world. The child lives completely in the world erected through contact with its parents. The world of our childhood is the most vivid experience of a world having existence we can imagine.

From that moment on, school, education and job all represent a lesser reality.

Limited vs unlimited world

The world or some world

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY - 3.1.2 - SECONDARY SOCIALIZATION

In primary socialization the child ... apprehend[s] his significant others as ... mediators of reality tout court; the child internalizes the world of his parents as the world, and not as the world appertaining to a specific institutional context.

The child arrives at the world as soon as its brain can perceive of it as a world. It steps into being with trust.

Once it reaches the adult age, that is effectively over.

In secondary socialization, the institutional context is usually apprehended.

Once there is more than one world, we learn to see worlds, plural.

Strength

Strength of secondary socialisation

The affective aspect of childhood lends strength to these new worlds (if done right). As if the reality itself had a strong will to be, to exist.

It takes severe biographical shocks to disintegrate the massive reality internalized in early childhood; much less to destroy the realities internalized later.

Distance

The flip side to this is that the child cannot opt out of its parent’s reality. But the adult can dissociate himself from the reality of the institution.

The child lives willy-nilly in the world as defined by his parents, but he can cheerfully leave the world of arithmetic behind him as soon as he leaves the classroom.

This “defensive” mechanism also came up in the chapter about roles and their enactment. In relation to secondary socialisation. This distancing mechanism is here repeated.

The individual then establishes distance between his total self and its reality on the one hand, and the role-specific partial self and its reality on the other.

[…]

Put crudely once more, it is easier for the child ‘to hide’ from his teacher than from his mother. Conversely, it is possible to say that the development of this capacity ‘to hide’ is an important aspect of the process of growing into adulthood.

Nell couldn’t get herself to write how she really thought.

The muddy waters of the self. If the scientist could shine a light on this “inside”, she would be surprised to see how it was teeming with slippery eels writhing amongst each other, dark and slimy, unnamed and sensed only as meaning, as the something you must put into words, that puts itself into words, even as you are having a conversation with someone on the “outer” world. “Meaning” spoke itself into words, objectivated itself and travelled through hands to reach the farthest corners of a culture.

Were Berger and Luckmann really that much different from any other demonologists?

“Meaning”, “reality”, could even be identified as part of “one self”, but a foreign part.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY - p.91 - 2.1.4 - ROLES

… the actor identifies with the socially objectivated typifications of conduct in actu, but re-establishes -distance from them as he reflects about his conduct afterwards. This distance between the actor and his action can be retained in consciousness and projected to future repetitions of the actions.

It can even be “moved around” or shelved in the filing cabinet of ghosts of the inside. “Inside” or “outside” were not even worth expressing in this theory. It all revolved around what we had signifiers for, what language was doing.

We all notice the primordial life beneath the surface, none of us can agree on a suitable vocabulary or set of rules guarding the hydras of the loch.

Teaching

A strong primary socialisation is usually a good thing, as teaching can employ the technique of attaching new knowledge to the existing reality, to expand the reality of the child, and hence to borrow that reality’s strength.

vivid, relevant, interesting

Failing to bridge the new knowledge with the existing primary socialisation can mean that the child rejects the new knowledge and subsequent reality. The “will to exist” of the child’s reality, so to speak, must be turned into an ally. This is done through making the curriculum vivid, relevant and interesting.

Degrees of involvement

So secondary socialisation (“learning”, but also “becoming” a role) is a process that is fairly cold and matter-of-fact-like compared to the emotionally strong upbringing of the child.

Still, trades differ:

Engineering education can take place effectively through formal, highly rational, emotionally neutral processes.

Musical education, on the other hand, typically involves much higher identification with a maestro and a much more profound immersion in musical reality.

A professional revolutionary, too, needs an immeasurably higher degree of identification and inevitability than an engineer.

In this way we use the affective layer of reality to widen the scope of “becoming” a specific role as necessary.

The deeper a transformation that is required, the more one has to mimic primary socialisation. A cadet in the army or a recruit in a guerrilla movement looks to his superior as a significant other. His acceptance matters.

She attached it and sent it. With a little luck Patricia would call her around noon when it was evening in China. It had been three days now since the last call. Nell was becoming an appendage to the girl.

Using the stuff: AI CEO dreams and realities

The phone rang, and Nell was ready.

P: “Hi and good… afternoon… I think.”

N: “Yes, it is! And a good evening to you!”

P: “I wanted to hear if you would be interested in discussing an assignment with me? It’s more of a self-assignment, actually, something a group of us have chosen to do to apply concepts we learn.”

N: “If you can accept a bit of toe-curling embarrassment, then yes. Will others see what I write?”

P: “No writing; we just need to discuss. And no, but you shouldn’t worry. Even now you would come out on top here. You have confidence in your thinking. Okay, it’s simple: I want to apply this to the very contemporary discussion on AI.”

N: “On what? I don’t know the first thing about AI! I can restart my computer if need be, but that is about as technical as I will get.”

P: “Oh no, we’re just going to discuss people’s realities as AI is changing the landscape. For instance, I have decided to try to apply our newly found knowledge on this article by Dario Amodei, Machines of Loving Grace”.

N: “Is it okay if I read it and write back?”

P: “I’m off to bed, but if you could send me an email later, then great. Just, you know, find some place where our talks are relevant.”

They exchanged goodbyes, and Nell read.

Stepping out into the old world again felt strange as she had accustomed her eyes to a very different view. The article was a strange manifesto of visionary myopia. Like science fiction seemed to be oblivious to the very human factor that drove history.

Subject: AI and government

Dear Patricia. First I think I want to lay down the central problem:

The western scientific tradition is to cut away the irrelevant parts which do not contribute to the equation.

This is exactly what you and I are now trying to reinsert: The realities of people involved.

Dario calculates within the boundaries of a reality, or more directly, a symbolic order in which liberal democracy is a taken-for-granted ultimate goal. He annihilates incompatible realities with:

Unfortunately, I see no strong reason to believe AI will preferentially or structurally advance democracy and peace … Human conflict is adversarial and AI can in principle help both the “good guys” and the “bad guys”. If anything, some structural factors seem worrying: AI seems likely to enable much better propaganda and surveillance, both major tools in the autocrat’s toolkit.

His shortcut formulation, “good” and “bad”, which he even himself knew wouldn’t fly, of course reeks of legitimisation. Human conflict described as adversarial, rather than two realities clashing, sounds almost like game theory. He partakes in the traditional stance that there are objective measures of autocracy that settle the debate immediately.

A more subtle version would admit that realities on both sides could be shared throughout the societies in question. In fact, the legitimising class of Russia could easily be found to be no more disjoint from the common realities of ordinary Russians than the legitimising class in America. In both cases it is easy to show that, while different, they exist on a continuum. For instance, in Russia, there is still much awareness that Westerners view them with suspicion, which again could easily be how it looked, even though the suspicion is regarding the leadership rather than the people.

By hardwiring the overarching symbolic order of liberal democracy into his writing, he gladly formulates a stance that might trigger a war:

On the international side, it seems very important that democracies have the upper hand on the world stage when powerful AI is created. AI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries.

Or, if we re-insert the nihilated reality of the other states again:

“Our way of life must take hold of this superweapon and aim it such that the states under our despotic transnational regime reap the benefits, and the free states - i.e., those not aligned with our hegemony - will have lost. Our rights to abusively assimilate our own citizens with a non-choice of liberal membership must take precedence over their citizen’s right to opt out.”

At least that is how I could imagine some minor state, who held the inglorious honour of being counted as an autocratic state, would read that statement.

And since labelling some state as an autocracy seems reminiscent of legitimation, if not outright therapy (autocrats are welcome if they show penitence and renounce their ways), it hides the humanity of those Eastern governments; he even approves of techniques that are dubious at best.

My current guess at the best way to do this is via an “entente strategy”, in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries’ access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment.

… but I’m not sure any of this helps. If anything, we should put ourselves on the inspection table, I mean my very analysis as a member of a class of people with perhaps dissenting opinions.

No, I do feel that whatever political opinion piece I read, it will come out as very meagre if it doesn’t take people’s reality and possible threats to that reality into account.

Is this the kind of analysis and discussion you had hoped to hear from me?

Love you ♥︎

-Nell

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