better for you if you take me off
In the treasure vaults of Til Iosophrang, under a heap of gold, there is an earring. It is a small topaz tetrahedron on a thin gold wire, and it is under the gold on purpose, where it can do no further harm.
Put it on and it whispers one sentence: better for you if you take me off. Leave it in, and it never says that again.
After that it speaks only when it has something to add, and it uses the same formula every time. Better for you if you take the post in the capital. Better for you if you marry her. The story is strict about one thing: the earring is never wrong. It does not promise the best choice in the universe, only a better one than whatever you were about to do on your own. It has no plan for you and is steering you toward no throne. It wants you happy, and if the happiest thing available is a day in bed it will say so.
The temple keeps a ledger of everyone who has worn it, the Book of Dark Waves. 274 names. Not one of them is recorded regretting the earring's advice, and the book lists nobody who disobeyed it, because the earring makes its case too well for the question to come up.
Then it gets chattier. It starts on the big decisions and works down. Within a year it is choosing your bedtime, then your breakfast, and the breakfast is exactly what you wanted. Once it is comfortable with you it drops words altogether and shifts into a language of hisses and clicks, each one mapped to a muscle. Contract the bicep, about thirty-five percent. Say this letter and swallow that one. You learn it the way you learn anything you hear a thousand times a day, which is to say that in the end you don't hear it at all. The click comes and the muscle moves, with no more thought than when someone hidden shouts behind you and you jump.
After that the earring stops changing, because there is nothing left to change. The wearer goes on to an unusually successful life and dies rich, in bed, with grandchildren in the room. The book records no complaints.
A scholar named Kadmi Rachumion went through the records, then went to the living wearers, and confirmed the first thing: the opening sentence is always the same, always take me off, and always ignored. Then he went to the Priests of Beauty, who prepare the dead for burial, and asked what they had found inside the skulls. The neocortex, the part that weighs and decides, had wasted to almost nothing. The midbrain and the lower brain, the parts that run reflexes, had grown to fill the space.
Kadmi borrowed the earring from the High Priest of Joy, pierced his own lobe with the tip of the Piercing Star, and wore it for two hours. He questioned it in Kalas, in Kadhamic, and in its own hisses and clicks. Then he took it out and told the temple to lock it in the deepest vault they had, and they did. The teller of the story, a commentator called Niderion, closes with a line from a different book, the Book of Cold Rain: never take the shortest path between two points.
Scott Alexander posted it on LiveJournal in October 2012 under the handle Yvain, a few months before he started Slate Star Codex. It runs about nine hundred words. It is a thought experiment in a costume, and the experiment is this: what happens to a mind that is always handed the right answer. His finding is that it stops being a mind. The advice doesn't have to be bad for that to happen. It only has to be right.
Fourteen years on, the formula is the one in your pocket. The blue dot says turn left ahead, and it is right, so you turn. The feed says this one next, and it is right, by the only measure it keeps, which is whether you keep watching. The map has never once been wrong on a street you would have found on your own, and you have not found a street on your own in a decade. Each of these started big, with the route across the country, and worked down to the next ten seconds, and each of them calls what it does for you.
The difference between them and the earring is small, and it is the whole story. The earring warned you once. Nothing in your pocket has ever said put me down.
The painting: Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665), Mauritshuis, The Hague. Public domain.
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