From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Jul 05 2003 - 15:29:34 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Consider this passage from the article:
>
> When most children first arrive they find it difficult to believe that they have
> no alternative but to submit. In shock, frightened and angry, many simply refuse
> to obey. This is when they discover the alternative. Guards take them (if
> necessary by force) to a small bare room and make them (again by force if
> necessary) lie flat on their face, arms by their sides, on the tiled floor.
> Watched by a guard, they must remain lying face down, forbidden to speak or move
> a muscle except for 10 minutes every hour, when they may sit up and stretch
> before resuming the position. Modest meals are brought to them, and at night
> they sleep on the floor of the corridor outside under electric light and the
> gaze of a guard. At dawn they resume the position.
>
> This is known officially as being 'in OP' - Observation Placement - and more
> casually as 'lying on your face'. Any level student can be sent to OP, and it
> automatically demotes them to level 1 and zero points. Every 24 hours, students
> in OP are reviewed by staff, and only sincere and unconditional contrition will
> earn their release. If they are unrepentant? 'Well, they get another 24 hours.'
>
> One boy told me he'd spent six months in OP.
>
> I didn't think this could be true, but it transpired this was not even
> exceptional. 'Oh no,' says Kay. 'The record is actually held by a female.' On
> and off, she spent 18 months lying on her face.
>
> Now, ahem, I have always been of agreeable disposition---there is not,
> truth be told, much of the rebel in me, and I sincerely do admire those
> who are ready to stand up against the whole world whenever. But isn't
> *this* pathological? Doesn't it seem to indicate that there really is
> something deeply, deeply, serious wrong with this girl?
No. It makes her a hero. I would be proud to meet her.
> How in the hell could she lay there hour after hour, day after day,
> without saying, "Just how stupid could it be for me to have gotten
> myself into this situation? Exactly what was so important that this
> had to happen?"
>
> (This is not the same as a great martyr standing up for his God, or a
> political dissident refusing to divulge the names of other dissidents.)
It sounds just exactly the same to me.
Children are people. Their parents don't believe it, but it's true. For
her to stand up for her rights is just as heroic, just as meaningful, as
Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus. Inconvenient, yes,
painful, perhaps even breaking in the end, but heroic. Remember also that
children have learned to perceive much fewer options, and that in fact
children in this situation *have* fewer options. She can't fight to wipe
Tranquility off the face of the Earth, at least not yet. Large scale
actions are closed to her. Her soul is all she has to fight for; it is
the only outcome she controls. As such, it is worth just as much to her
as a bus seat to Rosa Parks or the Singularity to me. Whatever outcomes
you can influence, that is your world.
Consider also her alternatives. This is a school designed to break
children. Nothing more, nothing less. She cannot just "go along" with
the system. It is deliberately designed to reach into her soul, find her
independence, and break it, to take every inch she gives it, and demand
more. Remember also that these children are not adults and they do not
have adult resources to resist; the people trying to destroy their souls
are smarter and more experienced and have leisure to think and plan. No,
she was quite wise to resist every step of the way for as long as she
possibly could.
"Tranquility" sounds like a hell on Earth. Having been to the Holocaust
Museum in Washington, I think that calling it a kiddie concentration camp
would not be out of line. Forget Iraq; let's invade here.
Funny thing. Adults may be programmed to care for children, but
apparently if you're not a political power bloc, no one really cares about
what you think. You're not a game-theoretical agent; you're a piece of
valuta to be fought over and disposed of. "What is it like to be a
child?" is as far beyond most adult's reach as asking what it is like to
be a bat. People claim to be working on children's behalf in much the
same way that they claim to be working for a better environment or a lower
government budget.
No one thinks much, on this list or elsewhere, of proposing that parents
should have 24-hour surveillance capabilities over their children. Why
not? Children are valuable objects, aren't they? Why shouldn't we be
able to keep watch on them?
Have you forgotten what a living hell that would have made your life when
you were a child? Are those memories so painful that they have simply
been lost?
But I remember.
Did you, as part of your teenage efforts to convince yourself that you
were an adult, turn your back on all the unfairness because unfairness to
children sounds like a childlike thing to complain about?
But I don't care what things sound like.
Children are people, and across the world they are being put through hell.
So, of course, are many adults. But it is the children that no one
sympathizes with, no one writes about, no one is ever able to take their
viewpoint because the memories are too painful and the minds are too alien
and they don't dare respect children for fear that others will stop
respecting them. Everyone says they care, and perhaps they do, but no one
ever takes the children's side. The whites who marched for black civil
rights and the males who marched for female equality would never dream of
joining a march for less homework. Funny how millions of people can be
condemned to hell because it would sound funny instead of heroic to take
their side. Sometimes I wonder whether anyone ever really cares at all,
or whether it's all just people showing off how altruistic they are. No
one is willing to care if it looks silly instead of defiant.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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