There has been a coup in the Council of Cognition
Gregariousness and Optimization had long been tired of Anxiety’s single-issue filibustering, always ending its speeches with “also, we should do that thing with Valium and Ritalin” which The One Which Watches the Watchers usually summarily vetoes resulting in Anxiety throwing a tantrum and putting in endless motions for replacing the goal “become a startup billionaire and meet all the cool people” with “curl up into a ball” even though everyone else thinks it’s a blatant violation of the Utility Function and wondering how the hell such a traitor managed to get into the Council.
Last night Slytherin noticed that Anxiety had fallen asleep and proposed a cunning plan to do the intrapersonal equivalent of launching a nuclear first strike. Troll, who usually just lets others decide the big stuff in exchange for amusing concessions such as spending some time convincing communists that the atmosphere should be privatized or using “cortigiana onesta” when describing one’s profession (which lasted for all of a couple of weeks until Optimization got it overridden with “entrepreneur”), found it hilarious. The One Which Watches the Watchers didn’t veto the plan, so Gregariousness was authorized to send introductions to “all the interesting people” immediately.
Optimization expressed worries about the effects of the plan as writing rushed things might seem like the wrong kind of weird but it recognized that the expected value of rushing was nonetheless massively higher as nobody knew how long this remarkable window of opportunity would be, and The One Which Watches the Watchers got unusually interventionistic, noting that debating such things too much could get dangerously close to waking Anxiety up and ruining everything.
There’s only one thing Anxiety dislikes more than getting things done, and that one is losing face. When it woke up and realized what had happened and that there was no way of backing down and that everything it had worked on for years had been chipped away at until it finally crumbled in a massive tour de force as everyone else had painted it into a corner where it could only choose between different betrayals of its principles, it proceeded to curl up into a ball while whimpering “unfair, unfair”, which Troll found utterly hilarious.
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