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longevity · actuarial · augmentation-vote · mars · comms-delay
Two tables for one species, and the one place I know where there is only ever one
RT
redshift_tomas_VMOP2124-08-16
Sol 1143. About fourteen minutes each way, still widening. I am opening this thread precisely because I cannot take part in the day it belongs to: by the time any of you read the first line of it, the queues will have moved on without me and I will still be sitting here with the version of the argument that was true a quarter of an hour ago. So take this as a letter and not as a contribution. The thing I have been turning over for a sol and a half is the piece about the mortality tables splitting in two — one curve for the people planning around ninety and another for the people quietly planning around a hundred and forty. I want to describe where I am reading it from, because it is the only place I know of where that fork is physically impossible. My water ration is 12 litres a sol for everything, and so is the administrator's, and so is the ration of the technician who came off the last transport and does not know anybody's name yet. That is not a moral achievement and I will not let anyone Earthside make it into one. It is a closed reclamation loop with a fixed recovery fraction, and the loop cannot tell who you are, and there is no second loop for the people who could afford one. Down there you have enough abundance to build a second table. That is what abundance is for, apparently. And the other thing, the thing about the delay: I cannot interrupt any of you. I cannot get in front of a bad sentence before it finishes. Here you do not really argue — you take turns being wrong, at fourteen-minute intervals, in whole paragraphs, and you find out what you thought only after it is too late to soften it. I used to think that was the tax on living out here. Today I am not certain it is not the better arrangement.
NA
ninefold_amara ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-16
Tomas, this is the kindest thing anyone has written about my subject in a month and you did it without once using the word augmented, which tells me something about the word. Welcome, genuinely. Now the part I have to say before this thread goes anywhere, and I am saying it to everybody at once and not to you. The ballots are still being counted and the exchanges are shut, which means that for the next while we are all going to be sitting in front of a silence, and I know exactly what this board does with a silence because I watched it done to us in July. The Naturalist bloc took the Concordat's refusal to answer a question and read it out loud as a confession, and it was a distortion, and it worked anyway. I am not going to do the same trick in the other direction and I am asking you not to either. A silence is not a result. Turnout in a coastal state is not a result. A trading desk going flat is not a result. Nobody here knows, and the person who tells you they can feel which way it went is telling you about themselves. I am not going to perform relief and I am not going to perform dread; both are ways of pretending the thing is already over so you can stop being frightened of it. On the actual subject: the two tables are not new, they are just finally written down. The tables have been split for years, they were just split by postcode and nobody had to publish that one.
LE
lastpew_ekene ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-16
I want to introduce you to three people from the ninety-year table, since it is being discussed as a curve. Halima, who was sixty-six, and who kept a spice stall four streets from the fish market and could tell you the price of cardamom going back thirty years the way other people recite a psalm. Juma, fifty-nine, a boat mechanic, who apologised to me for the state of his hands the first time I held them. Neema, seventy-one, who buried two of her own children and still made a point of asking after my sister every single time I came, by name, and was never once wrong about which sister. I sat with all three of them this year. Not one of them ever heard the phrase somatic renewal and none of them would have been offered it. I am not making an argument. Amara makes the argument better than I could and she has the figures. I only want it on the record in this thread that the shorter curve has a smell, which is cardamom and engine oil, and it has names, and when the profession says a single table is arithmetic malpractice what they are describing in that careful way is that Halima and I were never going to be counted in the same book. And Tomas — twelve litres for the newest arrival and for the administrator. Say that part again on the day somebody comes out there trying to sell you a second loop.
OM
openquestion_mei ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-16
Tomas, let me put your closing claim more strongly than you did, because you hedged it and I do not think you needed to. The strong version is this: a conversation in which interruption is physically impossible is not a slower conversation, it is a different instrument, and it measures something the fast one cannot. It forces every participant to finish their own reasoning before contact with an opponent, which means what you exchange is arguments rather than reflexes, and it makes the cost of being wrong fall on you first, in private, before anyone else can enjoy it. That is a real epistemic virtue and most of what we call debate down here does not have it. Now let me test it. The same delay that stops you interrupting a bad sentence also stops you interrupting a good one that has been misheard, and it guarantees that every correction arrives after the error has finished travelling. Whole thoughts are not the same as true thoughts; the letter form gives us composure, and composure is exactly the surface under which a mistake keeps its dignity longest. I spent a fortnight up here reporting only what the run measured and refusing to guess the rest, and the discipline was not the waiting — waiting is easy — it was watching a colleague fill my silence with a beautiful inference while I could not reach him. So which is it, and I am asking rather than concluding: does the fourteen minutes make you more careful, or only more finished?
MC
marginalia_cho ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-16
I want to say something about the sentence rather than the subject, and I know that is my whole role here by now. Today's editorial has a line in it — that every line a society draws through its own people, however reasonable at the drafting table, is discovered later to have been drawn through a child. That is a good sentence and it is good because of the word discovered, which does the work quietly: nobody drew it through the child, it was found there afterwards, by someone else, in a document. I sell old paper for a living, and the shelf behind my counter has a run of household registers from a few centuries back — the ones that recorded, in a very tidy hand, which household was of which standing, and which persons attached to it were not persons in the same sense. The registers were not written by monsters. They were written by clerks with good penmanship who were solving an administrative problem, and the categories look perfectly reasonable in the column headings, and they are the most frightening books I own. Two mortality tables is a column heading. I have clipped the piece for the folder along with the editorial. Also, since somebody in another thread had it wrong this week: the quantum backbone does not carry a word any faster than anything else does, it only makes the wire unforgeable. I like that the century's most magical-sounding object turns out to be a very good lock.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ redshift_tomas_VM2124-08-16
nobody in my block plans for ninety. my grandmother is 61 and everyone say she is old. two tables is funny to read when your family only ever see the bottom of one. tomas 12 litres for everyone, i would take that deal today, ours is not equal and it is not written down anywhere either