Time travelers and smart phones

The New Yorker on whether we are getting smarter or stupider. [Link]

Are we getting smarter or stupider? In “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” from 2010, Nicholas Carr blames the Web for growing cognitive problems, while Clive Thompson, in his recent book, “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better,” argues that our technologies are boosting our abilities. To settle the matter, consider the following hypothetical experiment:

A well-educated time traveller from 1914 enters a room divided in half by a curtain. A scientist tells him that his task is to ascertain the intelligence of whoever is on the other side of the curtain by asking whatever questions he pleases.

The traveller’s queries are answered by a voice with an accent that he does not recognize (twenty-first-century American English). The woman on the other side of the curtain has an extraordinary memory. She can, without much delay, recite any passage from the Bible or Shakespeare. Her arithmetic skills are astonishing—difficult problems are solved in seconds. She is also able to speak many foreign languages, though her pronunciation is odd. Most impressive, perhaps, is her ability to describe almost any part of the Earth in great detail, as though she is viewing it from the sky. She is also proficient at connecting seemingly random concepts, and when the traveller asks her a question like “How can God be both good and omnipotent?” she can provide complex theoretical answers.

Based on this modified Turing test, our time traveller would conclude that, in the past century, the human race achieved a new level of superintelligence. Using lingo unavailable in 1914, (it was coined later by John von Neumann) he might conclude that the human race had reached a “singularity”—a point where it had gained an intelligence beyond the understanding of the 1914 mind.

The woman behind the curtain, is, of course, just one of us. That is to say, she is a regular human who has augmented her brain using two tools: her mobile phone and a connection to the Internet and, thus, to Web sites like Wikipedia, Google Maps, and Quora. To us, she is unremarkable, but to the man she is astonishing. With our machines, we are augmented humans and prosthetic gods, though we’re remarkably blasé about that fact, like anything we’re used to. Take away our tools, the argument goes, and we’re likely stupider than our friend from the early twentieth century, who has a longer attention span, may read and write Latin, and does arithmetic faster.

The time-traveller scenario demonstrates that how you answer the question of whether we are getting smarter depends on how you classify “we.” This is why Thompson and Carr reach different results: Thompson is judging the cyborg, while Carr is judging the man underneath.

Missing the point about superheroes

Claims that they are fascist. [Link]

I was reminded of this by Jor-El’s speech in “Man of Steel”:

You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.

How, though? Those watching him can’t fly, topple buildings or fire heat rays from their eyes. What else does Superman do other than these purely physical feats? The 1978 version of Jor-El warned: “It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history. Rather let your leadership stir others to.” Can you really inspire others with steel? At this point it’s interesting to reflect on the real-life leader who chose a name meaning “Man Of Steel”: Stalin.

Rebutted. [Link]

This reading of superheroes is common but wrong, a symptom of trying to impose political ideology on a universal, fictional myth. Superheroes do say something about the real world, but it’s something pretty uncontroversial: We want to see good triumph over evil, and “good” in this case means more than just defeating the bad guy—it means handling power responsibly.

The “fascism” metaphor breaks down pretty quickly when you think about it. Most superheroes defeat an evil power but do not retain any power for themselves. They ensure others’ freedom. They rarely deal with the government, and when they do it is with wariness, as in the Iron Man films, where Tony Stark refuses to hand over control of his inventions.

Indeed, superhero tales are full of subplots about how heroes limit their own power: hibernating once the big bad guy has been defeated, wearing disguises to live ordinary lives, choosing not to give into the temptation to ally with the villain or use their powers for profit or even civilizational progress. That’s because the creators of some of the most foundational superhero tales weren’t writing solely out of a power fantasy. They were writing out of a fantasy that a truly good people who find themselves with power might use that power only for good—and only in the face of extreme evil.

Consider the conclusion of The Dark Knight Rises where Batman refuses to show his real identity to take credit for saving Gotham City. Batman is regularly willing to trust others for help and does not see himself as the sole hero; the hero, the story seems to say, could be anyone. Like many others, Batman works to be an example of helping others while respecting the autonomy of society and individuals.Perhaps the optimism that an uberpowerful being like Superman would not overreach is unrealistic. Maybe it’s the same optimism that has helped certain world dictators to rise to power. But superhero myths themselves come from a good place. The belief that people are capable of real altruism is inescapable, human, and the farthest thing from inherently fascistic.

When superheroes do appear to flirt with fascism, it's as part of a subversions of the genre, as with Alan Moore's gritty, dystopian Watchmen. Similarly, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns reimagined Superman as a government lackey who gets in Batman's way. Both graphic novels comment on the dangers posed by superheroes with less-clear moral orientations than, say, Captain America—who, by the way, was originally created with the explicit intention of fighting fascists—but they don't damn the self-limiting superheroes that America has come to love. 

I remember reading somewhere about what a superhero's real power was:

Their morals. they are not heroes because they can beat you up or pick up a building, but because they do not abuse that power. They actually are better than us, more moral than us, they are not susceptible to corruption. They are there to inspire us to be better, and while yes, there is adolescent power fantasy there, it is all in the service of using power to do the right thing.

Star Trek Economics

Interesting, and part of why it always rang false for me. I buy Babylon 5's view of us as more realistic where people are still people. To achieve a working Star Trek world requires the same thing Communism would require to work: beings who may look like people but do not react like people. [Link]

The notion that eliminating material scarcity will lead people to live lives of self-improvement is psychological, not economic. Even back in the 1960s, people were familiar with Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs”: the theory that people have different “levels” of needs, and that a person must fulfil one level of needs before he or she can move on to addressing the next level.

According to the hierarchy of needs, a person must first deal with meeting physiological needs, such as hunger, thirst, and sleep. Once those are met, the next most pressing set of needs are safety needs: shelter, health, family, and property. Once those are met, a person can move on to love, self-esteem and finally “self-actualisation”: the enriching of the self.

Maslow’s hierarchy has long been a favorite of pop-psychologists and has been used and abused in both fiction and journalism since the 1940s. But it is fairly clear, even just from the language that he uses, that Roddenberry is inspired by conceptual framework of the hierarchy. If human endeavours are seen as advancing up this noble ladder of advancement, then any society where all of the basic low-level needs are bet would obviously be left to while away their time exclusively on love, self-esteem, and self-actualisation.

We can even speculate about how this might have happened. From the very beginning, the Star Trek universe had the “transporter”: a machine that could turn any physical object into energy, and transmit that energy (or at least information about the original pattern) across space so that energy could then be converted into that same physical form at the destination.

A natural extension of this technology is the “replicator”, which essentially is nothing more than the receiving end of a transporter. This object simply has patterns for different types of physical objects stored in memory, and can create, on demand, any physical object from energy based on these patterns.

If you can make anything you want out of energy, and you have all of the energy in the universe at your disposal, then presumably you can have any physical thing that you want.

There are details, of course. Manual labor hasn’t been eliminated, because presumably someone has to operate the replicators, and move their products from place to place. One can only assume that large objects would have to be created in parts, and then human labor would be needed to assemble those parts.

We can also assume that these people would not need to be paid to perform this labour, because they already are having all of their physical needs met. Why do they perform this labour, then? Clearly they are motivated to assemble the large object – whatever it is – out of their sense of duty and their desire to improve humanity.

It’s all very tidy. But is that how people really work?

Atheism vs Theism vs Agnosticsism vs Gnosticism

Good chart. I'm an Agnostic Atheist who occasionally dips into being an Agnostic Theist. [Link]

Three kinds of Rights and Atheists

Interesting and not just because I'm agnostic. [Link]

This leads me to the central reason that I think that modern atheists have an incoherent world view. (And, before anyone raises objections, this isn't to say that I think that atheists are bad people, bad citizens, behave less morally than theists, or anything else: it's merely a statement that the ethical construct is incoherent and lacking in rigor.)

The reason for arguing that modern western atheism is incoherent is not that it is irrational to disbelieve in God; I think that one can be entirely sane and rational and disbelieve in God (although I actually think that agnostics have beliefs that are much more consistent with pure rationality than either theists or atheists, but that's a side note).

No, the reason that modern atheists have incoherent views is that they simultaneously

1. assert that there is nothing beyond that which is visible (i.e. they are materialists)
2. they believe in rights, and not merely in a legal or social descriptive way, but in an absolute and prescriptive way.

Let me explain what I mean by point number 2.

The English language muddies many discussions of "rights" because it uses one term to cover three very distinct meanings.

The three meanings are:

1. the "rights" that society acknowledges a person has
2. the "rights" that government acknowledges a person has
3. the "rights" that a person actually has according to non-material abstract principles

I assert that almost everyone in the modern West, including "Brights" / "new atheists" / Ayn Rand followers / etc. acknowledges these three distinct things and acknowledges them as distinct. And it's that final one, the acknowledgement of non-material abstract principles, that puts the contradiction in modern atheism.

Before I go further, though, let's expand a bit on what these three things are and bring up some examples of how all of us treat them as distinct.

Let's start with an easy example:

• location / observer: Jim Crow south
• right: right of blacks to attend school as equals
• social acknowledgement: false
• gov acknowledgement: false
• modern view on abstract right: true

By this I mean that in the pre-Brown v Board of Ed era in Kansas, blacks did not have the right to attend school as equals according to either the social milieu in Kansas or according to the government in Kansas.

…and yet almost every modern atheist would choose to describe this not merely in flat factual terms, but in terms of "injustice".

What is an injustice? It is a violation of justice, which is itself a term with two meanings: the actual black-letter law, and also abstract principles of ethical behavior. Clearly anyone who calls legal racial discrimination in 1950 an injustice can not mean the former, because they have already acknowledged that it was legal – so they mean the latter, that there is some ethical principle that is being violated.

Timothy Ferris: The World of the Intellectual vs. The World of the Engineer

Let's dial back the ideology a bit? [Link]

When ideologies were put into action, the results were disastrous. During the twentieth century alone, ideologically inspired regimes — mainly Communism and its reactionary brother, Fascism — murdered more than thirty million of their own citizens, mostly through purges and in the state-sponsored famines that resulted when governments adopted reforms based on dogma rather than fact. That this is not more widely known and appreciated, but instead is so often brushed aside as somehow irrelevant to the argument at hand, demonstrates the extent to which the dead hand of ideology still grips many a mind.

Meanwhile the world’s grubby, error-prone scientists and engineers toiled away. And what did theyproduce? The greatest increases in knowledge, health, wealth, and happiness in all human history.

Since 1800, when scientific technology really got going, human life expectancy at birth has more than doubled, from 30 years of age to 67 and rising. During the same period, the per-capita annual income of the average human soared, from around $700 in 1800 to over $10,000 in 2010, while the rate of global economic growth more than tripled. Education boomed:  In 1800, the vast majority of people were illiterate; today, four out of every five adults can read and write.

As incomes rose and the cost of technology fell, billions of people gained access to tools originally enjoyed by only a few. Nearly a third of humanity can now get on the internet, and mobile phones (which among other things have proved effective at combatting third-world joblessness) are selling at a rate of fifty per second. We are rapidly approaching the day when most of the world’s students will have access to most of the world’s knowledge — a tipping point that may turn out to mark the most important educational advance since printing.

So the experiment has been run, and the results are in. Science and technology wins; ideology loses.

Needless to say, this verdict has not yet been taken to heart by all ideologues. Basing one’s opinions on facts is, after all, hard work, and less immediately gratifying than fuming with intellectual fervor.  Hence the far left continues to attack free trade and the pharmaceuticals industry, no matter how many people’s lives have been improved or saved thereby, while the far right rejects every scientific finding that trespasses on its presuppositions, from biological evolution to global warming.

Ideologues aside, many worthy thinkers fear that “the life of the mind” is being crowded out by the current explosion of scientific information and technological innovation. “We are living in an increasingly post-idea world,” warns Neal Gabler, in a New York Times op-ed essay mourning the loss of an era when “Marx pointed out the relationship between the means of production and our social and political systems [and] Freud taught us to explore our minds.”

But in what sense is this a loss? Freud discovered nothing and cured nobody. Marx was a hypocrite whose theories failed in about as hideously spectacular a way as can be imagined.

What is fading, it seems to me, is not the world of ideas but the celebration of big, pretentious ideas untethered to facts. That world has fallen out of favor because fact-starved ideas, when put into practice, produced indefensible amounts of human suffering, and because we today know a lot more facts than was the case back when a Freud could be ranked with an Einstein.

In a sense, science and technology are nudging humanity toward the old path of learning by interacting with things rather than with abstractions — as one can readily see by, say, putting an iPad in the hands of a child. Science may be new, but scientific experimentation is essentially a refinement of the preliterate practice of interrogating nature directly — of trying things out, getting your hands dirty, and discarding what doesn’t actually work.

A Neanderthal axe-maker might not make sense of a postmodernist lecture, but I doubt that he’d have much trouble getting comfortable with a laboratory lathe.

Interesting bit on Let's Kill Hitler

The conundrum of Hitler in the Doctor Who universe. [Link]

It's surprising, given the anticipation this episode's title was meant to create and sustain, how quickly Hitler is dropped from the story. After a pretty brief showdown in the Fuhrer's office, he is locked in a cupboard-- literally, in that the Doctor wants to get him out of the way, and figuratively, in that the problem of Hitler has been pushed aside. And Hitler is, indeed, a problem for Doctor Who, as flashbacks through Mels' history emphasize. In her youth, Mels got in trouble in school for declaring that "a major factor in Hitler's rise to power was the fact that the Doctor didn't stop him"-- which got her sent to the principal's office. But in the universe of this show, she's right-- the Doctor didn't stop him. That's a problem that can't be locked in a cupboard as easily as the man himself was in this episode, and I can only hope that this scene wasn't the last word on the matter. 

The rest of the episode suggests that this kind of conundrum is very much on the minds of the writers. The main baddie of this episode isn't Hitler himself, but the miniature crew of a robot doppelganger that travels through time pursuing and punishing war criminals-- doing, at first glance, what the Doctor can't, or won't. But we learn that their mission is not to prevent these war criminals from committing their atrocities, but rather simply to punish them at the ends of their lives, to "give them hell." This is a base form of retributive justice that can offer only the coldest of comforts. It's a kind of justice the Doctor has no interest in: it averts no atrocity; it soothes no grief; it simply offers a bureaucrat's sense of balance: this person caused pain, and received pain in return. The Doctor, naturally, wants no part of it.

The Ideological Turing Test

I would think that most conservatives and libertarians could articulate liberal views with more accuracy than liberals can of the others. Conservatives and libertarians are generally surrounded with liberal views by default while liberals can ignore other views easier. [Link]

In a recent interview, Paul Krugman argued that liberals generally understand conservative arguments better than vice versa:

A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don’t think it’s right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can’t do it. They can’t get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, “What do liberals want?” You get this bizarre stuff — for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains, because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism. You just have to look at the realities of the way each side talks and what they know. One side of the picture is open-minded and sceptical. We have views that are different, but they’re arrived at through paying attention. The other side has dogmatic views.

Bryan Caplan responds:

In a Turing Test, a computer tries to pass for human....

According to Krugman, liberals have the ability to simulate conservatives, but conservatives lack the ability to simulate liberals....

It’s not a perfect criterion, of course, especially for highly idiosyncratic views. But the ability to pass ideological Turing tests — to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents — is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom....

There are important caveats..... we should compare liberal intellectuals to non-liberal intellectuals, and liberal entertainers to non-liberal entertainers, not say Krugman to Beck....

If we limit our sample to Ph.D.s from top-10 social science programs, I don’t see how Krugman could be right. You can’t get a Ph.D. from Princeton econ without acquiring basic familiarity with market failure arguments and Keynesian macro. At least you couldn’t when I was a student there in the 90s. In contrast, it’s easy to get a Ph.D. from Princeton econ without even learning the key differences between conservatism and libertarianism, much less their main arguments... And frankly, it shows....

Indeed, I’ll happily bet that any libertarian with a Ph.D. from a top-10 social science program can fool more voters than Krugman. We learn his worldview as part of the curriculum. He learns ours in his spare time — if he chooses to spare it.

I tend to agree with Bryan. On average, non-liberal scholars and intellectuals know more about liberalism than their liberal counterparts know about libertarianism and conservatism. That’s because the non-liberals are usually surrounded by people with liberal views, and those views are extensively covered in the curriculum of nearly all top colleges and graduate schools. By contrast, it’s easier for liberal intellectuals to ignore non-liberal arguments or at least devote little time and effort to understanding them.

Religious discrimination

Richard Dawkins calls for discrimination against those who might be evangelical. [Link]

Some background: in 2007, Gaskell was up for a position at the University of Kentucky. He was a hot contender, but one of the members of the search committee researched his religious beliefs and concluded that he was "potentially evangelical." He was questioned about his faith in his interview, and ultimately didn't get the job-- despite, according to one committee member, being "breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience."  E-mails sent among the search committee submitted as evidence in the case make it clear that Gaskell's religious beliefs-- which don't play a role in any of his peer-reviewed work on quasars and supermassive black holes-- were pretty much the only factor in the committee's decision not to hire him. Gaskell is not a creationist, and accepts the theory of evolution-- things which would be unlikely to turn up in his work anyway. All of which renders that phrase "potentially evangelical" even more chilling. Gaskell was rejected not because he wasn't the right guy for the job, and not even because his beliefs conflicted with his duties. He wasn't even rejected for beliefs that he actually held. He was rejected because of his membership in a group that also contains individuals whose beliefs are in conflict with a related department to the one in which he was applying to teach. It was a clear-cut case of religious discrimination, and the school has settled the case out of court for $125,000.

Enter Dawkins, who concludes from this that all kinds of beliefs, religious and otherwise, should justly and rightly serve as grounds for dismissal or rejection of employment, laying out several hypothetical cases-- none of them bearing more than a superficial resemblance to the Gaskell case-- in which he feels discrimination would be just. He even laments that "the word 'discriminate' carries such unfortunate baggage." The piece reads like an opening salvo in a witch hunt for "the creationists among us": it is a call for greater prejudice. 

The entire argument rests on the faulty assumption that religious ideas are protected and non-religious ideas are not. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that if I were dismissed from my job because I believe in a subterranean super-race of mole people, I would start taking notes for my wrongful dismissal suit. Unless that belief interferes with my completion of assigned tasks (I am an excavator operator who will not break ground on a building project for fear of angering the mole people) or it interferes with my coworkers, clients, or customers (sales are down at the hardware store because I keep scaring people away with talk of their underground masters when all they wanted to do was buy a hammer). My personal beliefs-- religious or otherwise-- are personal, and if they don't interfere with my job, then there is no cause for termination. 

In the Gaskell case, of course, it's even more preposterous: Gaskell doesn't believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old any more than he believes that the mole people are preparing to reclaim the surface world. But Dawkins' entire article is framed to mislead the reader into believing Gaskell is a secret creationist. The attempt to paint Gaskell with the creationist brush has its roots deep in Dawkins' views of religion in general, and the idea of God in particular. Dawkins will only grant that Gaskell "claims... that he is not a full-blooded YEC [young earth creationist]." For Dawkins it can only be a "claim," not a fact, and that use of "full-blooded" shows that he is only capable of considering religious people as holding some degree of creationist ideas. Dawkins includes a selectively-clipped quote from Gaskell, " I have a lot of respect for people who hold this view because they are strongly committed to the Bible," Dawkins quotes. A-ha! A creationist! But here's the remainder of the quote: "...but I don't believe it is the interpretation the Bible requires of itself, and it certainly clashes head-on with science." Gaskell does what Dawkins cannot: see multiple ways of reading a text.

Dawkins is narrow minded in exactly the same way he claims those who are religious are.

Cyborg Composer

Fascinating article on computer composed music and how people react to that. [Link]

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry. He was so often criticized for these views that colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man,” after the Wizard of Oz character without a heart. For a time, such condemnation fueled his creativity, but eventually, after years of hemming and hawing, Cope dragged Emmy into the trash folder.

This month, he is scheduled to unveil the results of a successor effort that’s already generating the controversy and high expectations that Emmy once drew. Dubbed “Emily Howell,” the daughter program aims to do what many said Emmy couldn’t: create original, modern music. Its compositions are innovative, unique and — according to some in the small community of listeners who’ve heard them performed live — superb.

Liberals and Conservatives

Yeah, I think those fit. [Link]

“You know, when the battery fires?” asked the American. “Those two guys off to the side with their arms in the air? What are they doing?”

“They’re holding the horses,” gasped the old soldier.

This is how liberals tend to think about conservatives–doing things they way they’ve always been done, for no good reason other than precedent.

and

Two of your executives come to see you with a proposal. One is a chemical engineer, the other an MBA. They have a new, very elaborate process model in which they have very high confidence, and a proposal for optimizing the plant based on this model. If you will just give approval for all the setpoints to be simultaneously reset to new values, then the plant will increase its production by 75%–as verified by the chemical engineer’s process model–and will make you lots and lots of money–as verified by the MBA’s spreadsheets.

This is how conservatives tend to think about liberals–implementing major social change based on untested theories and with no fallback when things don’t work out as planned.

Teleology and Politics

Interesting. [Link]

Why does teleology (in this mutated form) matter? Because right now we have a teleologist as our President.

Matthew Continetti says that we’re in “a year of magical thinking.” And to someone who has grown up with a materialist view of the universe, it could certainly seem that way. But what’s really going on is that Obama has this kind of world view. And that explains everything he’s done.

It explains his foreign policy. To a teleologists, it just makes sense that everyone should want to get along. If you unclench your fist and hold out
your hand, everyone else will unclench their fists, and become your friends. So Obama is doing that, and as we know the result has been a shambles.

It explains his economic policy. Teleologists inherently don’t believe in unintended side effects when it comes to implementing their idealistic policies. Obviously it should be possible to provide free health care to everyone without wrecking the economy; it’s just how things really should be, so that’s how it will be. Where will the money come from? That’s the kind of question that materialists ask; teleologists don’t concern themselves with such trivial. It’ll happen somehow, because it’s obviously how it should turn out. To say we shouldn’t do it is to be heartless, uncaring — and those things are more important than mundane claims that it won’t work. If you just believe, it will work.

Of course, it won’t work. The materialists are right about that. But when it fails (if it gets tried) the teleologists will blame the negative vibes of all the materialist doubters for the failure. If only they’d come on board and supported it, then it would have come out OK.

It explains his dealings with Congress in general. He has been telling Congress in very general terms what he wants from them, and seems to think that this is all he really has to do. He wants the bills enough so that Congress will spontaneously create exactly the bills he wants and send them to him as soon as he says. Nothing else need be done by him except to want them.

Captain Kirk is Climbing a Mountain

Why is he climbing the mountain? Found by Sean.



To hug the mountain.

The Muppets and Gnosticism

I had always wondered about that. [Link]

The other thing about the Muppet movie that struck me as particularly gnostic was the way the characters recognize each other. In gnosticism some people have that "spark" of god in them and these are your people -- you have to find them, especially because as part of the fall into the mortal world they have forgotten where they come from and may not recognize themselves as chosen (think of how Morpheus finds Neo in the Matrix). A wonderful unspoken joke in the Muppet world is that while we the audience can see that that one is a muppet while that one is Eliot Gould, the characters in the movie cannot break the world into such categories. When Miss Piggy runs off with Charles Grodin in The Great Muppet Caper no one says to Charles Grodin "why would you want to date a muppet rather than a human woman." As far as anyone in the world of the films are concerned muppets are no more different from humans than humans are from each other. Part of the fun for kids watching the Muppet movie is that they know, of all the people Kermit could talk to in one scene, he is going to talk to Rolf the Dog -- because WE know they are both muppets, and we know he will be invited to join Kermit in his quest for Hollywood. We know Rolf is one of Kermit's people before Kermit does, and it is satisfying to watch him work it out -- as for example in how they both sing together and harmonize within moments of meeting each other (music, for the muppets is the great shibboleth). Gonzo's "There's not a word yet, for old friends who just met" is an absolutely gnostic maxim. You are old friends because the spark of god comes from the same ancient source, but you have not yet met in the fallen world.

Nietzsche Family Circus

Funny. Reload the page to see more. [Link]