Inheritance as Ersatz Truth

Once, while we played at Mission Bay, an NBA player showed up to shoot some hoops with the local lads, do some outreach, and so on. Despite being there when he scored easily on everyone one-on-one, I did not score easily on everyone one-on-one

A common thing that happens to anyone who has interviewed other people for jobs for a while is that they'll encounter the people who were in the room when others did the work. As we all well know, "success has many fathers". In the past especially, most organizations required a large number of implementers doing the work laid out by a small number of conceivers, and many of that former group elevate their own claims to being in the latter via vague references to their presence. Implying importance through presence is a rhetorical device that attempts to deceive a listener into falsely concluding contribution. After all, when Aslan says it, it is because he is actually somewhat important to it.

Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written

— Aslan, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

But taken literally it means nothing. Court stenographers were in many famous courtrooms, they were there when "it" was written, they even wrote it, and yet they are entirely fungible with respect to what was written. A typical technique one is forced into in these scenarios is the equally mechanical unraveling of the onion until you find out that the person who "was in charge of X" turns out to have been a junior engineer who converted design to code in a way that an LLM today would struggle to fail to replicate.

This false authority tends to find its way onward into stranger and stranger places. People often claim knowledge through ancestry - a link even more tenuous than presence. Supposedly, concepts are innate to them because their ancestors were court stenographers to others' work. Of course, few are convinced that proximity to greatness is greatness itself except those who must eagerly insist on their own relevance. But that number is not zero.

Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1

Confederate Gen. Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor, had to surrender to a German 48er immigrant officer at the end of the war. Describing his response to the lecture about "American values" he received from the German in broken English, he wrote:

"I apologized meekly for my ignorance, on the ground that my ancestors had come from England to Virginia in 1608, and, in the short intervening period of two hundred and fifty-odd years, had found no time to transmit to me correct ideas of the duties of American citizenship. Moreover, my grandfather, commanding the 9th Virginia regiment in our Revolutionary army, had assisted in the defeat and capture of the Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, and I lamented that he had not, by association with these worthies, enlightened his understanding. My friend smiled blandly and assured me of his willingness to instruct me. Happily for the world, since the days of Huss and Luther, neither tyranny nor taste can repress the Teutonic intellect in search of truth or exposure of error. A kindly, worthy people, the Germans, but wearing on occasions." Foreigners who just showed up here yesterday getting ready to try to tell someone whose ancestors built the country what an American is

Sep 17, 2026

The traditional wisdom is that the South lost because of a lack of industrial capacity, but no small matter of the blame may lie in the lack of officer quality. Unable to summon adequate justification of his position, this Taylor failson leans on his ancestral shadow and, finding that it provides poor support to the argument, attempts some small measure of restitution of his honor through relating a tale of humiliation with irony. Not very different, in the end, from the junior engineer who has 8 positions in 10 years all sized exactly according to the duration of each employer's PIP structure.

The whole thing is somewhat humorous. One imagines a far descendant of Terence Tao convinced of some obvious mathematical untruth, upon being informed of his error, beginning a long diatribe describing his genetic upbringing which must nonetheless bestow upon him the right to claim erroneous things as fact.

Proximity to greatness isn't greatness itself. And a genetic proximity is weaker still.