The Whispering
Earring

The Whispering Earring

In the treasure-vaults of Til Iosophrang rests the Whispering Earring, buried deep beneath a heap of gold where it can do no further harm.

The earring is a little topaz tetrahedron dangling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whispers in the wearer's ear: "Better for you if you take me off." If the wearer ignores the advice, it never again repeats that particular suggestion.

After that, when the wearer is making a decision, the earring whispers its advice, always of the form "Better for you if you...". The earring is always right. It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own.

It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest. If it would make you happiest to succeed at your work, it will tell you how best to complete it. If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong.

The Book of Dark Waves gives the histories of two hundred seventy-four people who previously wore the Whispering Earring. There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring's advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right.

The earring begins by only offering advice on major life decisions. However, as it gets to know a wearer, it becomes more gregarious, and will offer advice on everything from what time to go to sleep, to what to eat for breakfast. If you take its advice, you will find that breakfast food really hit the spot, that it was exactly what you wanted for breakfast that day even though you didn't know it yourself. The earring is never wrong.

As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring's commands momentous on the level of "Become a soldier". No more are they even simple on the level of "Have bread for breakfast". Now they are more like "Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way" or "Articulate the letter p". The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be.

Soon, reinforcement and habit-formation have done their trick. The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles has become instinctual, no more conscious than the reflex of jumping when someone hidden gives a loud shout behind you.

At this point no further change occurs in the behavior of the earring. The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending up as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

When Kadmi Rachumion came to Til Iosophrang, he took an unusual interest in the case of the earring. First, he confirmed from the records and the testimony of all living wearers that the earring's first suggestion was always that the earring itself be removed. Second, he spent some time questioning the Priests of Beauty, who eventually admitted that when the corpses of the wearers were being prepared for burial, it was noted that their brains were curiously deformed: the neocortexes had wasted away, and the bulk of their mass was an abnormally hypertrophied mid- and lower-brain, especially the parts associated with reflexive action.

Finally, Kadmi-nomai asked the High Priest of Joy in Til Iosophrang for the earring, which he was given. After cutting a hole in his own earlobe with the tip of the Piercing Star, he donned the earring and conversed with it for two hours, asking various questions in Kalas, in Kadhamic, and in its own language. Finally, he removed the artifact and recommended that it be locked in the deepest and most inaccessible parts of the treasure vaults, a suggestion with which the Iosophrelin decided to comply.

Niderion-nomai's commentary: It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points.

Author’s explanationMysterianism didn't work either, trying clarity again

Well, that parable didn't work. People interpreted it as about the dangers of external augmentation technology, which is not really what I had in mind. One person accused me of dystopianism, which is a sufficiently grave (and reasonable!) accusation to merit a response which I guess involves explaining the whole point outright.

If people have an explicit utility function, then they can be modeled as optimization processes trying to maximize that function.

There's only one best way to run an optimization process (bar the super unlikely case where by coincidence the function has multiple maxima of exactly the same height).

We don't choose our desires, at least not at the base level ("We can do what we want, but we can't want what we want"). So those are out of our control.

And we don't choose what, given a desire, is the best way to achieve it. That's determined by the way the world works. So the optimal plan to achieve our desires is also out of our control.

We necessarily choose our actions based on what best satisfies our desires. These may conflict, but in that case the strongest desire wins out. Even if we do something silly like hit our head with a hammer to prove we can do something we don't desire, that just proves that our desire to prove we can do something we don't desire is greater than our desire not to hit ourselves on the head.

So if our desires our out of our control, and given our desires our plans are out of our control, and given our plans are actions are out of our control, then nothing is in our control and our actions are entirely determined.

This is a stronger form of determinism than the usual boring "Yes, we're made out of matter which follows deterministic physical laws" type. Even if we call any calculations that go on within our brain "free will", the result of those calculations is still determined by our utility function and by the rules of strategy.

Even though the "made out of matter" determinism feels like free will, the "actions constrained by desire and strategy" determinism probably wouldn't. We can imagine a person whose utility*plan interactions are whispered to them by a magic earring, or a rationalist savant who performs mathematical calculations each instant to determine what to do, then goes with whatever branch of the decision tree returns the highest utility. Her actions are constrained entirely by the math and she does not subjectively experience free will.

We are saved from this fate by the fact that we're really really bad at perceiving our own utility function and at evaluating competing strategies. Our transhuman successors might not be so bad, and therefore would face this problem. I am unsure whether that would prevent them from being "people" in a vague philosophical sense. Even if people's minds turn out to be mathematical functions, there's a big difference in practice between a person and a mathematical function that just feels like it's a mathematical function.

The parable of the earring was not about the dangers of using technology that wasn't Truly Part Of You, which would indeed have been the kind of dystopianism I dislike. It was about the dangers of becoming too powerful yourself. Such power would probably be useful in an instrumental sense, and in a world like this one where there's a lot of work to be done it would probably be worth using. But in a non-failed world where happiness has become a major consideration, it might be an argument against becoming too formidable.

I don't think anyone in our world right now is in danger of this much formidability. But three hundred years from now when this is the biggest problem of the age, I'm going to say I called it.

Errata and Editing

1. Added a comma in “when the wearer is making a decision, the earring whispers.”
2. Hyphenated the compound number “two hundred seventy-four.”
3. Changed “have” to “has” in “The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles has become instinctual,” agreeing with the singular subject connection.
4. Changed “ending out as” to the idiomatic “ending up as” in “The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending up as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.”
5. Added a comma in “Finally, he removed the artifact.”
6. Removed an extra “the” in “recommended that the it be locked.”