I find it funny how in fiction hubris is a high-brow way of saying “you scienced way too hard and now the universe is going to punish you for Defying The Natural Order™” with the implication that hubris is some kind of character flaw: the character flaw of trying to make things better with science

but in actual Greek myths hubris basically just means “you proved you were better than a god at something and all of the gods are massive raging narcissists so now they’re going to curse you about it”

except where’s the Greek myth about someone committing hubris by inventing agriculture and mortally wounding the god of starvation? or the Greek myth where someone commits hubris by inventing the bifurcated needle and killing the god of smallpox?

it was hubris to invent vaccines. it was hubris to discover how to safely transfuse blood. oral rehydration therapy, germ theory, chlorinated water, synthetic fertilizers. all of these things Go Against The Natural Order and have saved millions to billions of lives, because guess what? the natural order is a fucking atrocity of unimaginable scale. and we are actively stopping it every single day we learn something new about the universe. I think “hubris” is an inherently reactionary concept and it can go straight to hell, which we’re going to destroy someday with science

@kasdeya
do you have any recommends for strongly pro-hubris fiction?

@redrozalia hmm that’s a really good question! I’m sorry to say that I don’t because I’m very sensitive and don’t read a lot of fiction. I think Greg Egan’s Amalgam-Aloof universe could be considered that, because it’s a world where basically every problem that isn’t existential in nature has been solved with technology, but the stories generally aren’t about that. but if you’re interested in that kind of thing, then I’d also highly recommend Diaspora by Greg Egan too (just be warned that there’s a lot of extremely technical infodumping about math stuff too lol. Greg Egan loves that type of thing)

a lot of rationalist fiction tends to be extremely pro-science and pro-hubris, of course, but I haven’t read too much of that - I could only recommend the obvious ones lol

honestly now I’m really curious if anyone else has any good recommendations because I’d love to read something like that

@redrozalia @kasdeya I wonder if Humanity Fuck Yeah style fiction sort of fits the bill?

@OctaviaConAmore @redrozalia ooh that’s a good point! Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School might actually be a great example, now that I think about it

CW: the bad guys in this world are extremely powerful and tyrannical and regressive and emotionally abusive and horrible and the omnipresence of their abuse was kinda suffocating for me personally but I’m very sensitive. I absolutely loved it otherwise though

@kasdeya fair point, but one could also list off the all the things that are useless or actively destructive to humans or the environment, we’re all waiting for big thump from the god of sea level temperatures

@kasdeya i always interpreted hubris to be specifically overconfidence.

to make the demon core was science, but to constantly fuck around with it using nothing but a spoon was hubris.

@icedquinn @kasdeya I think thats a lot of it but I also see hubris as having an element of control to it. also underestimating complex systems. basically the stuff James Scott talked about in Seeing Like a State

@nemesis @kasdeya most of the stories are basically telling you 'not' to commit hubris. as long as you don't go around telling everyone you're the hottest shit around nothing could go wrong its fine.

quite a few characters survive being boned by the gods because they really were that clever though. they don't really get punished a second time for whatever reason.

the gods are like first time you annoy us its to prison with you but if you escape prison they just go well fuck

@icedquinn @kasdeya well its just my interpretation

basically I'd say theres a spectrum from control grid stuff on one end to daoist wei wu wei on the other and hubris is basically pointing at the control grid end of the spectrum and saying "yeah this shit is going to backfire"

I dont think you see this much in greek myth directly, but the greek philosophers definitely had a concept of the kind of flow of the universe and that going against it was a bad idea. thats roughly what the stoics meant by logos for example

@icedquinn @kasdeya like basically "use computer models to predict reality" isnt hubris but "force reality to behave the way my computer model says it should" is

@nemesis @kasdeya i tend to read the gods as code for aristocracy. they act in the ways people who fashion themselves in charge of you do when you show them up in ways they can't take credit for.

@icedquinn @kasdeya @nemesis not really

@icedquinn @kasdeya @nemesis you really have a chip on your shoulder about the aristocracy don’t you

@icedquinn @kasdeya I would read the gods as semi-code for the aspects of nature that they have dominion over. like "smited by poseidon" translates to "our ships sank at sea", "smited by zeus" translates to "the weather was shit and killed our crops and flooded our buildings", etc.

if you look at the actual origins of polytheistic religions separately from their mythology, it originated primarily as ways of trying to influence natural forces which then were gradually associated with supernatural individuals (gods), afaik. this is a really good blog post series on that: https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/

@arcana @icedquinn @kasdeya no they're just american, they're using it as a generic term for elites

also perceiving the gods as a kind of spiritual aristocracy isnt actually wholly inaccurate afaik, they were basically seen as just the most powerful beings in a kind of supernatural pecking order along with a lot of minor spirits below them, afaik

@arcana @kasdeya @nemesis yeah they never ever did anything extremely fucked

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory

@icedquinn @kasdeya @arcana theres always been the occasional serial killer lol, her being an aristocrat had nothing to do with it

@nemesis @kasdeya @arcana are we actually going to pretend powerful people don't have thousands of years of human history of using said power for incredibly petty and stupid reasons

@icedquinn @kasdeya @arcana well sure but thats just human nature really, actual historical aristocrats were basically just an ethnic group essentially, like indian brahmins

there isnt really a solution to it aside from "promote better people" and "have feedback mechanisms". both of which historical societies did try to do. not always successfully, but the elite did have real expectations on how they were supposed to behave and penalties for defecting against those norms

@kasdeya maybe the post-Hegel, post-Neitzsche Geist of Greek hubris is you or I might call virtue in the polis. Maybe it's either that, or we are all virtueless Uber mensches through our collective volition. Either Or. 👀

@nemesis @kasdeya @arcana i'm not sure where the material disagreement here is then.

@icedquinn @kasdeya @arcana I am not a proponent of aristocracy and I am not sure we disagree much on this concretely. but Im tired of this anyways

@kasdeya
vaccines increase all-cause mortality.
oral rehydration therapy, so, drinking water? that has saved a lot of lives, i'll admit. basically everyone's life.

@kasdeya you might enjoy "a visitor to the future" by chronohawk.

Not sure, but you might. I can instead link a relevant hugely-deep-into-the-story spoiler chapter. Its a chapter more brazenly science hubris than the rest imo.

@kasdeya we always thought that the type of hubris in sci-fi was like . . . an oddly specific archetype of one way hubris could occur

like we thought hubris was (more broadly) just extreme overconfidence. like it's not necessarily challenging the gods, or the order of things, but like also day to day things like "oh hey i'm so good at driving in the snow i don't need to slow down" leading to predictably sliding off the road

if hubris is just "challenging gods and nature bad" then yeah it should be forgotten as a moral, but if it's also the more broad idea of overconfidence . . . we say maybe keep it around? in a world of "vibe coding" and "well chatgpt told me this" it seems like a useful trait to talk about if nothing else