Cutie marks... Why don't we have them? · 12:58am Sep 30th, 2020
I’ve spent some time meditating on cutie marks as specifications, and I’ve learned… too much. My brain is still refactoring. The short version is that there’s a close relationship between sub-specifications and sub-systems. A lot of things follow from that simple statement. Too many things...
We’re all robots, on the inside.
While my brain recovers from being turned to goo, I can at least answer the question No Name 13 posed in my last post:
No Name 13: Ah.... Cutie marks..... Why don't we have them?
It’s because:
- People don’t know what cutie marks look like in our world.
- It’s not fashionable to look for a cutie mark.
- It’s really hard, and it gets harder as the world gets more complex.
- People don’t have a good sense for the things they do right or wrong in their search, and they don’t have good mentors to guide them.
I might try to resolve some of these points in future posts. For now, I just want to paint a picture of what’s going on.
What are cutie marks
Cutie marks symbolize a pony’s role in Equestria, but it’s up to the ponies to discover that role. What does it mean to have a role in the world?
The world is one giant, vague system. You can break that system down into a bunch of pieces that each do something for the world. Mayor Mare is one piece, and that piece helps coordinate a cluster of denizens, most of which happen to be in Ponyville. The Golden Oaks Library is another piece, and this one houses a pony, a baby dragon, and a bunch of books. Cloudsdale is a large piece, and it does many things for Equestria, like create rainbows and weather. Fluttershy is a piece that watches out for the animals around Ponyville.
These are all valuable roles for Equestria, though it’s not quite clear what it means for something to be valuable. Ultimately, the ponies have their own lore to guide them in deciding what’s valuable. Whatever that is, each pony eventually takes on a role to make themselves a valuable part of Equestria, however small.
While they’re searching for a role, foals don’t see themselves fully as a part of the whole. When they do find their role, they see themselves as extending the giant, vague system known as Equestria, and Equestria becomes larger by one more pony.
Finding your mark means taking on a role in the world. Taking on a role in the world means concretely extending the world system by one more person, namely yourself.
In our squishy human world, there’s no defining moment that separates people that have a role from people that interact with the world without quite participating. It’s usually a gradual transition, and not everyone feels like they go through it. There’s also no universally-recognized symbol representing the role someone decides to take on, so sometimes people dispute whether a role is actually a role or whether it’s valuable. Humans have it rough!
Looking for cutie marks
Ponies find their mark by exploring a bunch of things, finding what they’re good at, and letting themselves be guided by their sense of what’s worthwhile. They search whatever opportunities they run into, whatever talents they think they could possess, and wherever their sensibilities lead them. Eventually they find how some of these things come together as a pony-shaped gap in the world.
In our squishy human world, we take classes in school, pursue the directions indicated by our grades, and try to get a high-paying job. That’s… something, I guess. To be fair, the economy is a very large and important system in our world, grades are how large chunks of the economy decide what talents people possess, and high income is an indication that a job is valuable to the economy. The only real problem here is that the economy takes a lot of control in deciding what your “mark” is. That’s a bit of a shift from Equestria, where each pony takes it on themselves to figure out their own mark, hence why I wrote “mark” in quotes.
That’s a huge simplification. Even in our world, individuals can pursue their own opportunities independent of their grades, they can expand on the talents they see in themselves independent of the coursework they take, and they can follow their own senses rather than aiming for the highest-paying job they can get. If we’re trying to understand why we don’t have cutie marks in our world, I think it’s worth understanding why people often don’t do these things, since these are the things that would lead a small human to finding their mark.
I suspect this would lead to outcomes that are at least as good as letting the economy fully decide one’s fate, though I say that with little evidence. I also suspect schooling and social norms play a huge role. I would try to say more on this, but I don’t want to dredge through the data and papers necessary to form a coherent and well-grounded opinion on these topics.
The role of complexity
Ultimately, ponies need to develop some sense for how pieces of Equestria work before they can extend Equestria in any deliberate and useful way. Without that baseline understanding, there’s no way to know whether the role they decide to take on is actually valuable. Maybe a hundred other ponies are accomplishing the same thing in a non-obvious way. Maybe the thing actually does more harm than good. Maybe the thing solves an imaginary problem. They won’t know unless they investigate!
The same is true for humans that decide to look for their own mark rather than letting the economy decide their mark. There’s a small problem with this: our world is really complex, and we do a terrible job teaching students how it works. If people develop over-simplified views of how the world works, they’ll develop over-simplified (and unsatisfying) views of what roles they can play. In the common case, they’ll never get a chance to fill even those unsatisfying roles because they don’t exist. The few that do get to fill their “desired” roles would often find themselves stuck doing a thing they didn’t sign up for.
So understanding the world is important, but it’s too complicated! We have complex interconnections of people, tools, organizations, and algorithms, sub-sub-sub-specializations, institutions founded on centuries of nuanced decisions… And none of it quite follows any rules.
There’s an upshot to all this complexity: it means there are a lot more roles to fill. If you do manage to piece together how the world works, you have endless opportunities to pick from, and they all need you really badly right now.
Recognizing the signs
So it’s hard, you’re going to get pulled in the wrong directions, and people will disagree about whether you’re actually doing something worthwhile with your life. That’s okay because it gets better over time, provided you know when and whether the things you’re doing are right. How can you know that?
It comes down to grounding your desires in things that are justifiable. Why should we extend the world system with your role? What does that role actually accomplish, and how? You might not have the answers to begin with, but you should learn to recognize good answers to these questions. Good answers are robust against neighsayers, and they resonate with people, including yourself. Robust answers help you defend the role, and resonant answers help you get more people involved as needed. Maybe some of those people will find their mark because of the new roles that opens up.
In Equestria, it’s mentors that help ponies recognize the signs. Elder siblings, parents, friends, and the community all guide ponies towards pursuing things that are worthwhile. They let foals do silly things, but they also nudge them to keep pursuing things that are worthwhile. There’s also the magic of a cutie mark appearing at the right time, which prevents ponies from developing marks that don’t mesh well with Equestria.
For the most part, our world has family, teachers, and role models. Role models tend to be distant, so they don’t really provide feedback. Teachers tend to be ephemeral, so they can’t guide kids to the extent needed. I don’t know much about the efficacy of family, except that working parents seem to depend heavily on schools, which often can’t help students as individuals.
Overall, I would give our world an F- on being conducive to discovering cutie marks. If it merely presented difficult hurdles, I would have given it an F, but parts of it seem to actively pull people away from finding their own marks.
So, No Name 13, I hope that answers your question 
.
That said, I don’t think the situation is all that bad. These problems all seem fixable, and the effort required seems reasonable for the payoff it would entail. I actually feel hopeful that these problems can one day be solved. On a small scale, I think it’s reasonable to believe we can solve these problems for our pony community in relatively short order. I might elaborate on that in a future post.
Anyway. Thanks for reading.
Cheers.
In related news, I have a new favorite definition of love, in the generic sense. Love is the desire for someone or something to have a place in the world.
Here’s a proposed definition of friendship: voluntarily instantiated mutual love. This is different from familial love and infatuation, both of which are involuntary. From this, we can conclude that the voluntarily instantiated desire for mutual system integration is magic. I might do a follow-up post on the implications, especially on strategies for developing new friendships.
Make a world conducive to finding one's cutie mark...
I've heard worse revolutionary battle cries.
5367019
I want YOU for the Cutie Mark Crusaders!
This very well answers my question! Thanks!
5367023
No problem, and thanks for asking. I learned a lot from trying to answer it.
5367024
no prob!
This post was delightful!
I had one additional thought, which is that I think both humans are bad at dealing at things that aren't crises, and that society intentionally makes this problem worse.
The majority of society, as counted by *number of people,* is strongly pushed towards jobs that will enable subsistence, without regard for their emotional needs or even what they are necessarily the best at. Manual laborers, office temp workers, craftsman, etc.
And I think, because of the imposition of societal norms, even people with options fall into these same patterns. "Need to go to college to get the highest paying job," even though many people don't actually need the highest paying job to subsist.
Tl;dr, society tells you that instead of trying to find your cutie mark you should be struggling to survive, even when you are in circumstances where survival is not actually a struggle.
5367151
I agree, with all of those points.
Re: Crises. I've heard people summarize it tidily with a comment that humanity, as a whole, is not sapient. We can't form collective motivation, and we can't collectively act on things we know we should. If enough people are willing to champion the causes though, we shouldn't need humanity to be sapient. We just need to make those people more effective.
Re: Societal norms. We have to fill those experience bars and make the numbers go up, and emotional fulfillment isn't a number!
On a more serious note, it is weird to me that we're so obsessed with getting ever-higher paying jobs. Even when I know it's stupid, I still occasionally feel a pressure to make the numbers go up. I've heard that wasn't the case in the United States before the Industrial Revolution. I wonder what changed. It would be awkward if the school system were responsible for our obsession with making numbers go up.
Thanks for thinking and writing. :)
5367012
Oh, interesting too; thanks. :)
5367205
Thanks for reading and commenting!
5367483
Heh, you're welcome. :)
5367167
The populace switching from just price economics to free-market economics would be my assumption. Rather than there being a correct price for a loaf of bread, the price is whatever amount the baker can convince a customer to pay. Instead of being paid “a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work”, the price of labor was now free to float on the free market.
The industrial revolution also destabilized the CPI with new products necessary for any functional household as well as price reductions in the cost of production in standard goods from mass production. For a modern example, think of how the price of college tuition has spiked every bit as much as the price of a new TV has gone down. Without a stable CPI, what was “a fair day’s wage” may suddenly become inadequate.
Sarcastic tl;dr: Ted was right.
5621641
That's a good explanation for why income level is a thing that gets attention, but I think the pressure to make numbers go up is a lot more pervasive. If my project got X users last month, I would be a little bad if it got less than X users this month. If it had X contributors last year, I would feel bad if it didn't have more than X contributors this year. I would feel bad if I moved into an apartment smaller than my current one. I suspect that I subconsciously latch onto quantities as indicators of successes and failures, even when it doesn't quite make sense to do so.
Who is Ted?
Thanks for reading!
5622287
Ted = Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber). His most famous saying is “the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race”. There’s an alarming number of terminally-online people who worship him while forgetting to be ironic.
One thing that got me over the idea that bigger is always better is being a percussionist. No, the biggest drum doesn’t always sound the best. It’s more expensive because it uses more material and it has lower yields than the smaller drums due to having more surface area on which to make errors. For that matter, the smallest & lightest instrument you can find often has serious compromises. A marimba is not a better instrument than a vibraphone because it has an additional octave and a half, nor is a piano that much better than the extended-range marimba.
Still, I do like watching numbers go up in general.