The Gorgon

Through a mirror dimly

The Gorgon looms behind you, shifting in the corner of your eye, casting its shadow over the world. You catch glimpses through mirrors. Sometimes you see a forked tongue reflected in a thin boy begging at a crowded intersection, or the flash of a scale reflected in a little white mouse twitching in the jaws of an alleycat.

But the Gorgon is vast, and these little mirrors so low to the ground only show you glimpses of the tips of individual hairs upon its head. If you are going to slay the Gorgon, you must try to build new mirrors, wide and strangely curved, mounted high up and far away.

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You’re in the lunch line at a conference where you’re supposed to tempt the brightest minds to care more about doing research on improving the tools with which we can eventually slay the Gorgon. Lunch is chicken.

When you were young and skinny and self-righteous, you would have forced yourself to picture the crowds of overgrown birds limping along on broken limbs in a fetid warehouse and pecking at each other’s festering sores with stump breaks. Forced yourself to be Not Okay with it. You used to make a point of watching an undercover factory farm video every few months. You would rehearse the horror of it, indulge in it.

This did not seem to bring you any closer to slaying the Gorgon, so the habit shriveled like a vestigial organ. And it was never much fun either.

The brightest minds do not live always with the Gorgon looming over them, flickering in the corner of their eye, and they like their lean protein. You eat your cauliflower, unbothered, and make small talk.

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You’re finishing up a retro on communication challenges that came up in the process of getting feedback on a draft report informing policymakers that they should consider implementing transparency requirements to put themselves in a better position to address future risks that could derail the course of civilization enough to prevent us from maturing to the point where we can fully slay the Gorgon.

You have built an apparatus of mirrors upon mirrors that bend and scatter and bounce the light into a broad and fuzzy image. Rarely do you glimpse the sharp fork of a serpent’s tongue these days.

Even through all the mirrors, some people perceive the Gorgon’s form clearly enough to be petrified. You heard Brian Tomasik moved to the middle of nowhere because the water system there didn’t maim as many invertebrates. You think this is cowardly and self-indulgent. But you envy his eyesight.

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It’s noon on a Monday and you’re forty six messages deep in a Slack thread about the strategy for how conciliatory you should be in your draft response to an effortpost on the EA forum criticizing how your organization handled an HR issue. You think of the butterfly meme. Is this…saving the world? You go to lunch.

Around the lunch table, someone tells you about the game theory of when aliens would be incentivized to produce “optimized disvalue.” You do not shudder. He jokes about the odds that he could think a thought that gets him sent to Hell. You are distracted by lingering personnel issues on your ops team. The conversation drifts to the dolorium-to-hedonium ratio. You have to run to a meeting.